I actually can not get enough of the mirror. Please never stop. Help me see all of myself, especially the hideous, shitty parts that I have kept hidden from me for so long I didn’t even know they were there.

Sure it’s scary, the truth is scary, and once you know, you can’t un-know, but that’s the point. Why the hell else are we here: to be inadvertantly fucked up by the people who have the best intentions (our parents), take our experience based belief system into the world and continue the cycle…until we realize there’s a cycle, and then decide which parts of it work for us and which ones are garbage. There’s no way to do that without getting down and dirty in our own minds, by listening to the people we trust when they shine light on the dirt.

We just have to be sure it’s our decision to vacuum that shit up, or leave it there and be proud of it. Flitting between those decisions can only happen once we know it’s there.

Thank you for helping to shine the light on my dirt Leslie. XOXO

Bryn

I truly believe that this is the finest comment I’ve ever gotten from anyone, anywhere, I am quite biased because Bryn has been one of my best friends since Jesus was a boy, but at the same time, she shoots straight. So it isn’t all bias. As she would say, “it’s just true.” But I will say that based on our past conversations, I don’t write about Bryn’s dirt specifically. We are on this journey together, and when she sees herself in me, she takes it in like, “why are you in my brain?”

We have similar stories in terms of letting our emotions be controlled by how other people are feeling and trying to fix something that really can’t be fixed. She’s a lot further along in her journey than I am in mine, despite being a lot younger. That’s because she’s taken more steps to get away from the people who controlled her emotions than I have. I need her strength, especially right now, because it sustains me as I walk my own path toward the freedom of being self-directed. I find that I am fine on my own, but the minute I give my heart to someone else, I don’t depart from the dysfunction I’ve always known. Perhaps that means I am better off as a single person, because when I am partnered, I become the fixer/pleaser that eventually no one likes because they can’t make a decision to save their lives…. because they want to do what you want to do.

I dated Bryn’s brother for a short period of time, and we were both fixer/pleasers, and neither one of us wanted to disappoint the other, so our relationship never went anywhere. I saw this Tweet about marriage that made me think of him and our relationship, that marriage is “just a series of asking each other what you want for dinner until one of us dies.” Dana and I had a little bit of that, but at the same time, I always thought she was in charge because I was only allowed to be right so much of the time, and when I was, I made sure that it was duly noted because it happened so rarely. 🙂

I completely decompensated in that relationship because of it. When I cleaned something, Dana would come along behind me and do it “right.” Just an example, but a huge one as I felt more and more devalued. I went into my small place and couldn’t get out, which is why the lifeline to Argo was so important to me. There was someone in my life who thought that I was capable of more than, well, that.

By the end of our relationship, I thought I was a complete failure and Dana wondered why I’d stopped taking care of myself. Because when I don’t feel valued, I don’t take care of myself. Period. I try to take up as little space in the world as I possibly can. It was nice having someone do all my laundry and fold everything with military precision, but each little thing she took over because she thought I wasn’t doing a good enough job took a piece of my soul with it…. to the point where she came over after we’d broken up and looked at my kitchen and started tidying and I said, “no, this is my kitchen now. Get out.” For a cook, a kitchen is the same space as a sanctuary. There might as well be a cross on the wall. To Dana’s credit, being a chef in her own right, understood and immediately retreated.

We were both very different personalities that somehow made it work for a lot of years, but at heart, our years of communication styles were set in stone by our parents. For Dana, it was “wait until a little thing drops the Mento over the Diet Coke and explode about everything I’d ever done wrong all in the same fight.” For me, it was “get angry in the moment, and then it’s over and we don’t have to revisit it.” She felt like I was picking on her all the time. I felt like she was intentionally keeping things from me because she didn’t want me to get angry. But at the same time, I understood why. We fought differently, and always would. It felt like not being able to be the full emotional range of a human being, because if Dana was angry about something and didn’t bring it up, I couldn’t express anger and then the fight would be over and problem solved.

There was only one time that she got mad at me in the moment, and it was a doozy. I’d gotten a lot of parking tickets in PDX and it was going to wipe out our emergency fund to pay them. She yelled at me on the street in front of God and everybody, and instead of being embarrassed, I almost cried with joy. We were going to have this fight right here, right now, and then it would be over. She wasn’t going to save it up for later. Of course I was just as frustrated with myself for being such a right jackass, so it was a mixture of emotion. Shame and pride coursing through my body because eventually, Dana would cease to be mad and we could get shit handled. She finally got angry at me in a way that I desperately appreciated, and I told her so. She was utterly baffled at first when she finished screaming and I said, “I’M SO PROUD OF YOU!!!!!”

So, a few years later, when her car got towed and impounded for something or other, I didn’t even flinch. It was like, “I ain’t even mad.” Dana handled my issue with such grace that getting mad at her seemed unnecessary given the amount of shame she was putting on herself for it. We just got shit handled.

It was the same with her DUI. We’d been through so much together that this was just one more thing to add to the list of situations in which we needed to lean on each other to survive. She was embarrassed enough as is; I didn’t need to add anything on top of it. Even driving her to work at 2:30 in the morning became a ritual that has stayed with me all these years as something sacred. Driving through the night when all was quiet.

I don’t remember the exact moment that we turned against each other instead of taking care of each other, but I can think of several moments that added up in my memory. But the ultimate reason for us to be apart is that Dana and I would always fight differently, and there was no way around it. Our communication styles were too different, too entrenched, to go the long haul. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t want to. Reality hit me like a brick wall.

I loved Argo’s brain because it worked more like mine- we’d get angry and yell at each other, and then it was over. This latest go ’round is, to me, for the best, but not a case, as she puts it, of being “creepy AF.” Curiosity killed the cat. I thought that if I came her way and recognized how it must have felt to her, that she’d recognize that I was just being me, processing grief in the best way I knew how. But there was no compromise, but I feel good that I made the effort, anyway.

And then there was just more escalated language and more “I’m done.”

And that came from me. She was putting a lot on me that just wasn’t there, never would be, and escalating a fight far beyond what it needed to be, as we have done, again, since Jesus was a boy. She finally pushed me one too many times and I got tired enough to fight for myself instead of for her.

I wrote her a letter once that she said that she hoped one day she’d have enough courage to respond. I hope for that, too, because for all of our flaws, failures, and vulnerabilities, I would like to think that there is a modicum of affection left. I don’t know if when she throws her escalated words around if she actually means them, or is just mad in the moment and doesn’t know what to do except launch RPGs designed to hurt and regret, just like I do.

I don’t want to fight anymore, even if our fighting styles are more similar to each other than not. I also don’t want to crawl back on my stomach the way I have pretty much every month for the last two years…. because I’m not getting argo. I’m getting Argo.™ And I’m afraid that there is nothing that will bring argo back, and she’s the one I love.

Argo™ is tough as nails with armor to match, and once it’s up, you’re late.

I tried to love barbed-wire Argo™ to the best of my ability, but friendship requires a modicum of reciprocity, and I got tired of there not being any. That I could come her way all I wanted but she wouldn’t give an inch. Everything to her came across as an attack. Nothing was ever a conversation-starter or a way to bridge the past into the future. Once I realized that, I was out.

But I’m not very far out, and that’s where Bryn comes in. I look at her for strength when I just want to cry to Argo and beg to have her in my life at whatever level she can engage…. to stop going back into dysfunction and keep delving into myself to try and find the pieces of me that allowed all my triggers to be pulled at once. To look hard into the past and find out how I got here from there.

I think all the time about what would have happened had Dana consistently made room and argo calmed down. I think back to all the things I could have done and didn’t.

And then Bryn reminds me that I cannot change the past, and it is so very useless. But I am one of those people who has to look at all 85 sides of a problem before I can put it down. Right now, I’m at about 16.

Sometimes I really hate that aspect of my personality type, but that’s what INFJ does. There is no self-improvement without a Freudian amount of delving into the past.

Penis.

I haven’t written for a while because my stomach has been torn up for days, mostly brought upon by finding a Jamaican joint near my work and not thinking the sauce was hot enough and putting scotch bonnet sauce on it as well. I seriously could not stop eating. It was a high better than drugs…. until I woke up at 1:30 in the morning and couldn’t go back to sleep, thus wrecking my schedule for the day. Luckily, I had to go to the grocery store to get all the stuff for an ice cream social that I planned for all the employees, so I wasn’t the one that was late. I was the one that brought ice cream…. and sanctioned late at that.

Last night Scales and I went to Cava, and that didn’t sit well with me, either, but I only woke up for a few minutes in the middle of the night and was able to get back to sleep, but slept in until 7:30. Since it’s only a 20 minute drive, I can conceivably sleep later than that, because it only takes me about 20 minutes to get ready in the morning. The problem comes in when I don’t know Duncan’s schedule and he starts the shower at the exact moment I was trying to beat him to it.

I try not to get to the office too early, because when I get here early (as I’ve been doing for ages), there’s no one to unlock the door and I end up running to CVS or 7-Eleven or Walgreens or whatever just to pass the time. The best time to get here is 5 after, because at least I know I’ll be able to carry all my stuff in one pass, rather than putting it on the porch and waiting for someone with a key. Maybe one day I’ll have enough seniority to have my own key so that I won’t have to go to Starbucks. I can actually work in my own office. #dreams

I also opened a huge can of worms with Scales at dinner last night, one that I didn’t mean to. I am just on the “think it, say it” plan most of the time and she was showing me a picture of her current squeeze and I said, “it’s not beyond me that she looks a lot like me.” Why. Just why. I felt like a raging jackass because even though it was true, it was a can of worms that I didn’t know what quite so tall.

I’m still getting over all of the grief of my past life, and she’s moving in four months. I’m not interested in anything casual, and having done long distance relationships before, I am quite gunshy. Meag had a girlfriend in Canada while I was in Texas and moved in with her and they’d lived together for a month before she told me that she was breaking up with me. It stung, so long-distance relationship is a fucking dirty word to me. But to be fair, it wasn’t the first time Meag had ever kicked me around, and I got used to trying to please her all the time, hoping she’d cut that shit out. But she didn’t.

She’s told me since that she wishes she’d treated me better. I take that for all its enormous worth, but it didn’t help then.

And again, I do not know where I am in my grief cycle, because there are times when the only person I want in the world is Dana, and there are times when I feel we were just living in this Never Never Land and it was time to grow up. When I met Argo, I began to dream bigger and want to do more with my time and just try to concentrate on giving back to the world as much as she does.

And because I wanted out of the relationship with Dana, I’m getting to the point where I can speak about her in the past tense. With Argo, I talk about her all the time because I cannot wrap my brain around past tense with her. Surely there’s something I could have said, something I could have done, something I could have achieved that would make this all go away, as if our fights and impasses were all some sort of crazy nightmare that will end when I wake up, and yet, this is reality.

I screwed myself out of time with her on the ground, and the thing I wanted most in the world was to tell her thank you for real. To say thank you for saving my life, because she did it in more ways than one. Even seeing stupid things like her Twitter handle is enough to make me sniffle, so I blocked her from both @ldlanagan and @lesliecology because I know she’s smart enough to type in the URL of this web site and I prefer not knowing if she’s reading or not. I don’t write for her, just about her, because these are the things that trouble me. So much I wish I could have done differently; so much that I wish she’d done differently, because it made us both terrified of each other.

My then-friend Notorious’ first words to me were, “I thought you’d be taller.” It was a big hit around our house for months, but to me it articulates how utterly small and non-threatening I am. But the right words at the right time bite, and I used enough of them to make my online persona completely different from the person I am on the ground. I realize that mistake, and now I don’t talk to people on the Internet at all, except for Tinder, because it’s the easiest way to meet people quickly for real. People who tell me it’s a sex app make me laugh and say, “not when you only add doctors, lawyers, diplomats, and soldiers.”

One of these days, it will click, the enormity of the desruction that I’ve caused, and how it’s better for Argo and me to be apart so that we can’t continue to fight like first children. We both have the power to fuck each other up royally, and I think those things are better left alone, because all the fight is out of me and I would give anything to have my sweet small-a argo by my side.

Like last night. I wrote her a long, long letter in my head. I hope she read it, but I don’t know if my brain waves reach all the way to Alexandria yet. I’ll have to ask Nate. 🙂

But I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and put it in our chord, because even if her end isn’t there, it becomes a loopback, feeding me. So what if I’m sending everything back through localhost (obscure joke, talk to your IT guy)? Did she really need to know what I was thinking for me to figure it out on my own? My thought process is that a real relationship with Scales would end in a huge mess because I wouldn’t have wanted to let her go…. and I also wasn’t ready to let go of that part of myself yet. Kisses like I really mean them, vulnerability enough to be naked in front of someone, and a libido that borders on non-existent. There are so many things I’m just not willing to let go of, and in order to have someone special in my life, I would have had to.

But then I started thinking about my enormous grief loop and wondering how over I needed it to be to move forward because nothing will ever be perfect. That I am limiting myself to my own head most of the time, and how healthy that may or may not be. Besides, Scales’ squeeze is a colonel in the Air Force. I’d pick her, too. Although I laughed my ass off when Scales told me that one of her Marine friends told her to tell said colonel, “Congratulations! That’s almost like being in the military!” Although, I can tell she’s tough shit if she works in a SCIF in the Pentagon. So beat that with a stick.

I also think that one of the reasons I’m so stuck on soldiers is the way they move in the world. They’re not afraid of anything because they don’t have to be. Anything they’ve seen is in no way comparable to the #firstworldproblem life we live here. Plus, there’s a part of me that feels so small inside that sometimes it would be nice to feel like I have my own protector, my own advocate. And then I get into the loop of “well, what if I spend my life attached to her pant leg because I think can’t make it on my own?” How much of it is rooted in the safety I’m trying to get away from?

For a time, my life was based on how Argo was feeling… and it came over time, not at the beginning, because originally she saw me as the brave one, the strong one…. and in true Leslie fashion, I incrementally pushed that relationship into the same dysfunction I’d always known because I never knew any different.

That’s the pitfall I want to avoid in my next relationship. I don’t need a parent or a child, but a partner. I’ve been in both of those relationships, and the power imbalance destroys everything. Just everything.

I didn’t want to make things weird with Scales, because I truly enjoy her friendship. It just fed my ego that this new squeeze looked like me, because she was the version of me I wish I was. I’ve said before that I wanted to be in the “Airmen of Note.” And there she was with her French Horn in one of the Air Force bands. Of course, being a trumpet player is far superior to being a French horn player, but I wouldn’t be a trumpet player if I didn’t say that.

It was something that came out of my mouth too fast, because there’s a solid reason I chose to be friends with Scales. She and I were both broken when we came into this friendship, and being friends has helped us to combat some of that. And I didn’t want eros and philia to cross wires, and so far, they haven’t. I don’t know what I would have done had Scales asked me out directly, but what I do know is that it’s better that she didn’t. I am a selfish jerk right now because I cannot afford to focus on anything except getting my own shit together. I didn’t want to put that aside for a new relationship dopamine rush.

Plus, it’s just not a good idea to break up with someone and not get tested for everything under the sun (I trust Dana to the ends of the earth, this is not about her) before you date someone else. I did it when I broke up with Kathleen, too, and even though everything came back clean it was the most I’ve ever sweated in a doctor’s office. Diane took me and I could tell she was jus as uncomfortable as I was, so I leaned up against her and just let the time pass. She usually got freaked out when I wanted that amount of affection, because affection is hers to give. But I didn’t care. I just took it.

Mostly like I’m taking all this time for myself, trying to figure out who I really am independently of what anyone else says about me… and the Truth being that what someone else thinks of me is none of my business.

I listened to an interview between Terri Gross and Marc Maron that made me cry as I was driving home yesterday. He said that in his personal life, the people who confide in him are tired of him confiding in others, like the people who listen to his podcast, because it’s that it’s only his voice out there… that they don’t have a way to answer. And then Terri says, “but we as your audience are also the people that want to be confided in.” Game. Over. Bawling on the freeway.

I liked Scales’ perspective that my writing didn’t have anything to do with our friendship, that it’s so different from our interactions in real life that it’s easy to compartmentalize as the other side of me, and not necessarily the one she sees. It was touching to an enormous degree, because it’s the piece that’s been missing in my relationships for a long time.

What invariably happens, and I will use Argo as an example because she’s the best one, is that people read my web site and fall in love with my words until they can see themselves in it…. and then once they can, they hate it. They don’t necessarily like the mirror I hold up, because sometimes the truth is too real and sometimes they don’t think I’ve gotten it “write” at all. But the truth is that there is a comments section, I have an e-mail address, and I’m easy to find on Facebook and Twitter. Disagree with me all you like, and don’t think you don’t have a voice because I am very good about calling myself out on my own bullshit…. and at the same time, I change my mind a lot, so if you read an entry from last week, it may or may not contain the same sentiments, and it’s not because I’m just trying to be an asshole…. it’s that NEW SHIT HAS COME TO LIGHT.

And secondly, I just don’t care about your feelings, and not because I’m trying to be an asshole about that, either. It’s that this space is not for you. It’s for me, and if you don’t like it, CHANGE THE CHANNEL. The things you say to me do cut me, deeply, but not enough to make your opinion more important than mine so that I stop writing altogether. Clever Title tanked, and it was even more popular than Stories. I had a few famous followers and I was getting big in my own right. If I’d stayed consistent, I wouldn’t have been Dooce-level by now, but I might be able to work part-time, because I got in when blogs were all the rage and now everyone and their dog has one and it’s harder to stand out. So I suppose it’s a double-edged sword. Your words get to me, and I take them in, but to care about them than I do more than I care about myself is defeating the purpose of writing altogether.

I will not let that happen again. If you see something negative written about you on this web site that you don’t like, remember that if I come knocking on your door, you’ve probably done something to get me there. But our relationship on the ground has nothing to do with this web site unless you let it. Me blowing off steam so that I can have different interactions in real life is because I’ve had time to think in longhand, and I would hope that is worth more to you than me just shooting my mouth off on the “think it, say it” plan.

Because it worked out so well for me last night.

Jill (Nin-Jill, Jill-o shot, Jillicious) was so funny when she said that based on the timestamp of my last post, I probably needed A LOT of coffee. She wasn’t wrong, but I’m not nearly as tired as I thought I would be. I did the exact same thing I did every night (Pinky), except for the fact that I took a Sudafed as well. Sudafed is one of those drugs that keeps me awake even if I’m on a morphine IV drip. In fact, I can take Sudafed and Benedryl at the same time, and THAT is saying something. Taking Benadryl all on its own is inviting the type hangover where your entire morning feels like trying to nail Jell-o to a wall.

So what did I do this morning? I took all my morning drugs, including some more Sudafed, and left for SBUX at 6:51. Sudafed and coffee are an excellent replacement for sleep, especially since I am normally asleep before 9:00 so that I can keep my early mornings sacred. So I might be a little sleep-deprived today, but I won’t be tomorrow.

For those of you that have a computer hooked up to your TV and use the Kodi app (cross-platform, although the most annoying is that Windows Media Center went out with Windows 7 and it was the one app from M$FT I actually *liked*), I was mostly playing  with the Jamendo add-on for Kodi music. Jamendo is a catalog of unsigned artists, and you can download anything as long as it’s not for commercial use…. Although you do not have to download anything. You can stream everything rather than saving it to your local hard drive, or in my case, “Goliath,” the nickname for my 3TB drive.

My rent includes cable, but because of Kodi, I don’t use it. I might if I get a TV card for my laptop, but it has all the channels I’d normally watch. Right now I’m hooked on “The Fosters” and “Switched at Birth” on ABC Family. My favorite video add-on is PBS ThinkTV, where I can catch up on everything from History Detectives to American Experience. Also, “Geek and Sundry” has a channel with shows like “The Guild” and “Tabletop.” The reason I want to get a TV card before I hook up my cable is that with streaming media, I don’t have to be home when the show airs… but I do miss things like live debates. The TV card would allow me to record in real time, like a free and open source Tivo.

I leave my laptop plugged in like a desktop all the time now, because my iPad mini and my Bluetooth keyboard have replaced it entirely. My mom and my aunt Nancy went in together and got me some Best Buy money for Christmas, and the Bluetooth keyboard is seriously the best thing I’ve ever bought for myself. It has what most nerds would call a “KVM switch,” and that means there is a dial on the left side that allows me to pair with three devices. My iPad is one, my phone is two, and my computer is 3. When I do bother to carry my computer, I carry a mouse and this keyboard so that my palm doesn’t accidentally hit the touchpad and erase everything I wrote (recoverable with CTRL-Z) or somehow changes the page from WordPress to something else (not recoverable, even with a lot of swearing in its general direction). The other cool thing is that the keyboard works on two AAA batteries, which means that even on the go, I can recharge it easily… and I haven’t changed the batteries in months.

And now that I’ve talked about the fabulousness of my keyboard, I want to talk about eventually getting a new phone. Right now I have a pretty sweet deal. I’m on my dad’s business plan, and I only pay $20.00 for voice and data. I don’t want to lose that price, and I don’t want to make my dad sign a contract for my new phone, either. I’m wondering if a 3G + wifi tablet will let me use navigation in the car, because those are relatively cheap and I want an Android, because most of them come with radios and an expansion slot, and 9/10ths of what I listen to is NPR… which is why back in the day I bought a Zune over the iPod. Additionally, Android has two things going for it that blow the iPhone out of the water. A) It’s compatible with Linux. II) It doesn’t encrypt your music so you can drag and drop from your music library to your phone and back again.

iPhones are perfect except for the fact that the storage space is so small and you can’t add more. I can fill up the entire thing in three days with podcasts (I download them over wifi so that I’m not using mobile data in the car- same with Amazon Music). I thought about getting an MP3 player that I could load up, which would have been perfect when I was taking the Metro everywhere, but I can only drive two or three places without navigation. Check this out! I can finally get to work without turning on my GPS! #smallblessings

Plus, even when I know where I’m going, the directions do two things for me. The first is to keep me concentrated on where I’m going and how fast I’m driving (Waze has a spedometer on the left-hand side). The second is that when my mind wanders off into space with all of my mind-worms, I don’t forget where I’m going, miss my exit, and show up late because I am directionally challenged…. VERY directionally challenged. I don’t even know how to read a map properly. If I was dropped off pretty much anywhere out of my comfort zone, you might as well just say, “I’ll miss you.”

Yesterday I discovered a gorgeous drive, from my house in Silver Spring to Nathan’s house in Alexandria. For the life of me, I can’t remember how I got there, because I don’t do street names. As the Facebook wisdom goes, “bitch, do I turn left or right at McDonald’s?) The other cool thing, besides it being drop dead gorgeous even in the pouring rain, was that I passed the CIA campus in Langley and it reminded me of every “Covert Affairs” episode ever. Annie Walker goes that way at least once an episode, and because everything past the exit is pretty much a restricted access road, that’s the only real part of the drive you see. For a split second, I imagined that someone was tailing me just because I could. That show is GOLDEN. You can watch it all on Amazon Prime, and even though there are situations that could only happen on TV, Valerie Plame is the technical consultant on the show, so I know at least some of it is real. For instance, I did not know that Langley has a food court, and when I found that out, I thought it was really interesting, so I Googled it and what came back was lots of employees complaining how bad the food is. You’d think that with all the tax money that goes into military/intelligence you’d at least be able to get fresh bread at Subway. But no one asked me.

Seriously, if you haven’t seen Covert Affairs, drop everything. It reminds me a lot of “Alias,” because have you ever seen Jennifer Garner and Piper Perabo in the same room? Check that shit out. Also, not sure that Victor Garber was actually on Alias. I think it was Merrick Garland… you basically have to save up if you want to work for the government….. One of the things that the show points out is that for all the danger that the agents are in, they’re still paid regular government salaries. Things like big, shiny cars and millions of dollars wired into accounts don’t make the agents themselves rich. It’s the government’s money. They just get to decide what to do with it and then go home and eat macaroni and cheese. I suppose that the money comes in when you are so busy you don’t have time to spend any of it.

Government salaries are so wacky. I hate it that most CEOs make more than the President, because it’s not like he’s not busy or anything. Plus, most beginning jobs in the military are only a few steps above peanuts and popcorn…. but again, the money comes in because you are entirely too busy to spend it.

It’s also fucked up that you can either work for the government for a pittance, or negotiate a contract as a private entity and make five times as much. I would much rather give that money to the boots on the ground, because even though we’re spending tons on weaponry, we don’t always make sure that the “boots” have enough shoes, clothing, etc. My friend Volfe actually had to *buy* extras. That is a special kind of incompetence…. military intelligence at its finest.

I waffle back and forth over whether I want to date a soldier. Because first of all, damn they’re hot. DAMN. Second of all, though, and this is the hard part, I’ve already belonged to a military family once (Dana’s dad was a Marine in the JAG) and every time the family got together, we’d get ten minutes into a conversation and I wouldn’t understand anything. Too many acronyms, too little time. I also don’t know how to read “fruit salad,” so I don’t know what rank to call people and/or how important they are.

But did I mention that DAMN, they’re hot? I would let them bench press me any day of the week. Samantha says that I need to date one of the women that just completed Ranger School, and I’m all like, “first of all, how would I meet them? Second of all, how in the hell would I broach the subject?” In DC, it is REALLY hard to tell the difference between soldier and lesbian. I should know. I get thanked for my service more frequently than one would think, and I am giving my camo t-shirt to Goodwill because of that very reason. At first, I thought it was cute. Now I just think it’s disrespectful. It would look cute on an eight-year-old where it’s clear the camo is just for fashion. On me, it looks like I just got out of basic.

No one is out of the realm of possibilities as to who I would and would not date. I’m just saying that with the military, there would be a steep learning curve, because I didn’t get it the first time around.

But did I mention they were hot?

This is an exercise that the kids went through at CYM (Cooperative Youth Ministry). It’s not my place to give answers there, but I can here:

• I find strength in…
  • Watching others’ success and knowing that if they are capable of great things, so am I.
• My heart goes out to…
  • As the Book of Common Prayer says, “the sick, the friendless, and the needy.”
• I put my faith in…
  • Two boxes. One is academic and wants to know everything there is to know about every story in the Bible… every piece of commentary, etc. The other is the hope  that the God piece in me recognizes the God piece in you, especially when we’re in conflict, because that’s when it needs recognition the most.
• So much calls out for my attention…
  • And most of it is ego-driven as opposed to societally placed.
• I find joy in…
  • Driving around DC, knowing that in terms of the United States, I live “where the history comes from.”
• I am overwhelmed when…
  • I am scared to ask for help.
• I am grateful for…
  • My divorce, because it is hard to find yourself and worry about someone else at the same time, because your energy is too divided to answer the really hard questions.
• I am frustrated by….
  • Christians who think the building is the church.
• What matters now is…
  • Erasing a lifetime of defining myself by how someone else is doing.
• I feel weary when…
  • I tell someone I want to be a writer/theologian/pastor, because those words are so loaded. Christianity has been boxed into a very narrow definition, and it’s a bad one…. and a long conversation has to follow about why I’m not representative of that idea. It’s not that I’m tired of people asking questions. I’m tired of the idea that “Christian” represents one type of person to the masses, and most people have no idea what a denomination is and how there is no polity between The Church of Christ and The United Church of Christ. It is like comparing donuts to Chevrolets, and yet, we are both called Christians.
• I hope to…
  • Influence people from afar… that things I say stay with them even when we don’t know each other.
  • Find a partner, when I am capable of handling that type relationship.
  • Find new friends who will one day become my old friends.
  • Resolve the “having a kid” issue one way or the other. It is a deep grey area, and not too much fun, because the physical and hormonal realities of a biological imperative are crazymaking even when you’re sure you don’t want a kid at all. Logic and brain chemicals are not the same thing.
  • Preach in front of hundreds of people, because I am much more fun in person than I could ever be on this web site.
• My own life is…
  • Perfect in all of its flaws, failures, and vulnerabilities.
• One thing I can do is…
  • Empathize to an enormous degree.
• I seek…
  • Not a higher calling, but the first couple of rungs at the bottom of the ladder. I seek how to get there from here.
• I will…
  • Write… perhaps not well… but with consistency and drive and passion and all of the things that define me as a writer. The definition is not given based on quality, but quantity…. kind of like you have to take a thousand pictures to get ten outstanding ones.
• I need…
  • To spend more time with my family. Seeing Nate, Emily, and the kids reminded me of the importance of their presence in my life, because oh, how we laughed.
• I join with….
  • My fellow UCC members in affirming that #blacklivesmatter.
• I am restored by…
  • Going to bed early or large cups of coffee. Usually with the former, I do not require the latter.
• May I …
  • Ask you to pray for me?

My alarm went off at 6:00 AM, and normally I am out the door by 7:00 so that I can get a cup of coffee and sit and write for a while. I know I’ve told you this is my schedule on weekdays, but I try to keep it up on weekends, too. This morning, I stayed in bed and listened to podcasts until 9:30. On Saturdays, I have nowhere to be at any certain time. On Sundays, church does not start until 10:30. Being at SBUX early in the morning is a constant, a need for an ADD person. It settles my mind and my body and just allows it to relax. I have said this before, but I need to do some research and go on a diet. Not to lose weight. I’m doing fine in that department. At the doctor’s office, I was 126 with my clothes and shoes on.

No, this diet needs to be researched to see what the superfoods are for brain health and the things I need to stop eating. I’m guessing McDonald’s is at the top of the list. “Forgive me, Father. I know not what I do.” It’s just that with All-Day breakfasts and those little Fillet-O-Fishes with their Old Bay tartar sauce, sometimes the mind is strong and the heart is weak.

It reminds me of when Dana and I were thinking of conceiving, and the way she was so cute at designing my pregnancy diet, and a diet for the baby (babies?) once he/she/they were born. It is just one of the many things I miss about my beloved Dana, and I choose to remember the things that make me smile about her.

For instance, because our OB/GYN told us that since I was 35, it would be considered a geriatric pregnancy, I was convinced that I’d have to use Clomid and thus end up with multiples. I didn’t think I was going to be the “OctoMom” or anything, just that the percentage of having twins or triplets was higher with my age because of what needed to be done to get me pregnant in the first place. Dana was officially Not. Impressed. She didn’t think I was going to have twins, and I didn’t want it to be a complete shock to both of us. With Clomid, twins happen.

Although the way Clomid works, it releases more than one egg at a time for fertilization in hopes that at least one of them implants. They would have been fraternal, as different as night and day, but they looked real in my dreams until Dana and I realized that since our jobs had changed, so had our money situation, and even if we’d managed to get sperm absolutely free, it was unfair to bring a baby into the world in poverty. We could barely manage ourselves, much less another person along for the ride.

I’m thinking about that journey today because Samantha and I were talking about babies and I told her that at this point in my life, if I wanted to have more than one kid, I wanted to have twins. Let’s just get all the diapers, bottles, etc. out of the way all at the same time. Twins don’t work that way. You can’t just magically ask for them without spending lots of money, but one geriatric pregnancy is all I really want to handle. After that, I want to drink my Ensure, take my Centrum Silver, and buy a TV without a remote, because hey, I have twins.

We had names picked out, we read all the books, and we watched and waited. It’s a good thing that we waited, because the last thing I ever would have wanted in this divorce is a custody battle.

But that whole going through a pregnancy thing is slipping through my fingers, and I’m not sure that it matters anymore. I think it will depend on how bad my next partner wants children, and how old we are when we get together.

And oh, how I dream about her. I don’t know what she looks like, but I know that of all the Washington jobs, she has an exciting one. Maybe she’s in Iraq or Syria or Egypt and that’s why we haven’t found each other yet. Maybe neither of us have been invited to the same party where we have a chance to see each other across a crowded room. And finally, maybe it’s because I’m not looking. You can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.

My marriage to Dana lasted almost eight years, and she was my best friend long before that. It’s not something you get over easily or quickly, and I fear that meeting someone new is just dragging them into the morass of my own grief, because when that person comes along, I want to be able to dream into the future without looking at anything in my past, because it’s already been dealt with, blessed and released so that it doesn’t keep coming back to haunt me.

In short, in order to get what I want, I have to do my own work, first. I have to know that I can stand on my own two feet, that I have a network of friends that are as important to me as any significant other, and money to my name so that there is not a class imbalance, either. This is because if the relationship doesn’t work out, I need my friends. And being stuck in that loop where one person has to pay all the time creates resentment, quick, even if it’s polite.

So I save all my pennies for the future, and I keep exploring myself for all my flaws and failures in all of my relationships, not just the most recent one. The only way for it to be different is for me to be different.

And at the same time, letting go of Dana is absolutely the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, but as necessary to my own sanity as getting the hell out of Houston. I wasn’t trying to run away from my problems, but in a sense, go back to the scene of the crime. Kathleen embarrassed the hell out of me by sleeping with coworkers at ExxonMobil, so not only did I know, so did *everyone else.* But as I got further along in my recovery from that garbage dump of a relationship, I began to look at all the things I did wrong in that relationship so I wouldn’t feel so much like a victim. It’s like when a football game comes down to one field goal and the kicker misses. The losing team didn’t lose because of that one missed kick. That was just the last thing that happened.

The adultery trump card for Kathleen was not the be-all and end-all of our divorce. It was just the last thing that happened. I was seriously mentally ill because at the time, I did not have health insurance and didn’t want to go to the doctor for fear of cost. This is just conjecture on my part, but I think that Kathleen was finding out her bisexuality only extended so far, and she wanted to be married to a man. She is, now, with two kids and I hope that life makes her more happy than I ever could.

I have a lot to work through just being in this city; my memories are not all happy ones. But slowly, I am chipping away at the person I have been in the past, and trying hard to change the things I don’t like.

For instance, I don’t like it when I get angry, especially at people I love… because I’m never sure if I’m lashing out at the right person. I have the emotional right to be angry, and to express it, but not if the underlying issue is with one person and I’m taking it out on someone else.

And this is the road that leads me back to my precious Argo, always, because she was the person that got the most misdirected anger, probably because I couldn’t see her, therefore, she was not real. It’s a fucked up perspective, that’s for damned sure, but I know that our conversations would have gone differently face-to-face. That I could have told her how funny and amazing she was in person, and if we had something serious to talk about, I would have been able to see her emotions and respond to them. We talked about Skyping once, the three of us as not to leave Dana out, and for some reason or another it did not happen. I think it would have made all the difference to be able to see the facial expressions and the laughter that made her real, instead of “The Velveteen Argo.”

It also would have made a difference if she’d become friends with both Dana and me, because on the surface, she was. But underneath, I was her frien. It’s not unusual for one person to be closer to one half of a couple than the other, but Dana was threatened that someone else was impinging on her territory. She was my best friend. The way I saw it, when Dana married me, she got a promotion and the friend slot was left vacant. Dana couldn’t be everything to me all the time, and neither could Argo. They fed different parts of my brain without ever crossing over, because the things Dana and I talked about were *way* different than any conversation I had with Argo. It was at that point that I began to understand polyamory, not for myself, but as an idea. That it really was a thing, whereas before I’d dismissed it outright. Polyamory, like alcohol, is wonderful….. for other people.

I’d never had a close friend that confided in me to that degree, and so it took me a long time to realize two things:

• Any philia/eros wires that got crossed in my brain about Argo’s friendship with me were due to the fact that my very first “my parents didn’t pick you” friend crossed those same wires.
• I had a chord running from me to Argo (I used to joke that I put Red Bull in it when she was tired), and just because her philia/eros wires weren’t crossed in the same way mine were, that didn’t mean that I didn’t mean a whole hell of a lot to her and it would have been devastating to pick up my toys and leave.

My fucked up wiring didn’t allow for adult women friendship, because it had never been modeled for me in the right way. So, I did what any self-respecting nerd would do. I bought a lot of books on the subject. I knew that our relationship was faltering under an enormous weight (Dana’s jealousy, my crossed wires and inexplicably intense anger), but it was my hope that I could learn to be a good friend and that 20 years from now, we’d be sitting on a porch somewhere with coffee or Jack Daniels or both while Dana rocked the babies in transition from sleeping to wakefulness and brought them out to the porch so that Argo could coo over them and talk about how big they’d gotten since the last time she was there.

It’s a dream that’s hard to give up, because it was never my intention to rip things apart permanently, and now that I have, it is breathing through pain as if it is labor. Trauma lamaze, if you will.

In my smallest, most still voice, what I wanted was for Argo to be family. For the jealousy to go away. For me to be healthy and able to navigate my issues so that years from now, we could laugh about how silly it was not to meet in person right away. A 3D future would have changed the narrative, but there is no going back.

I just need to be whole and secure in myself before I take on a dream this big again.

After I got finished at the doctor’s office, I got my prescriptions and went back to work. I didn’t really want to, but there was just too much to do to stay home. Besides, I’ll likely have to take off some time next week so I can get a new patient appointment with my PCP. The best part is that the PA gave me some Ultram, so I am not bothered by my abdomen as I am working away. I just hope it’s not something serious, because that would put my coworkers in a bind, and that’s the last thing I want to do at this early stage in the game.

I am sticking to the clear liquid diet, because I got the herbal Oprah Chai instead of the black. I’m going to load it up with Splenda and just pretend there’s milk in it. I’m also going to stop by 7-Eleven, because I’ve found a couple of great flavors, although the salty green is still my favorite after all these years. My second favorite is cucumber limon, which makes the best N/A margarita on earth. For $1.50, I can feel like I’m sitting on a beach somewhere. It reminds me of the margaritas at Tapalaya, where Ryan always made cucumber-infused tequila for the margaritas, a little bit of heaven on earth.

I’ve found that my mission in life is to find all the gorgeous mocktails, because now my taste buds have changed and there are very few drinks I actually like. Scales made me an Aperol Spritzer the other night, and it was delicious. But alcohol is not something I generally seek out, having worked in a bar and a restaurant and having enough alcohol to last my whole life. And then Dana started working at a liquor store and there was temptation all around that I just wasn’t into anymore.

It all started with Aaron, who doesn’t drink at all, and I didn’t want to be the douche that drank in front of him because I Wanted him to be comfortable at our house. And then I found that I liked not drinking A LOT. And if it is doing anything to my health, I’m not sure it has anything to do with this issue particularly, but I do feel 100% better when my psych meds and my cocktails aren’t duking it out for attention.

I was in a bad way, not in the alcoholic sense, because I never drunk enough to flip that switch in my brain. But I was drinking enough that taking psych meds was a placebo at best. I also didn’t want to be Dana’s drinking buddy anymore. She has other friends for that, and part of moving was quitting cold turkey. Although quitting has its parameters. I can count on both hands the number of times I’ve gone for drinks with people since I’ve been here, and can count on one finger the number of times I had a bit too much. I was on a date and nervous and drinking too fast without counting and timing. She must have thought I was always like that, because there was never a third date, and I think that was healthy. Most adults drink a lot more than I do, and it’s hard to explain. Of course I’ll have a beer with you, but I’m not going to have four. People get weird about people drinking in front of people who don’t drink, and I could frankly give a shit. Drinking is wonderful….. for other people.

After Dana got her DUI, it opened my eyes in a way that I don’t think they’d been opened before. I learned so much from all the medical professionals that did her classes that I didn’t think I had any more brain cells to lose. I didn’t want to be that person anymore. I wanted to be whole and healthy within myself, and though I don’t think I need AA, I do wish there was a group called “people who don’t drink but still can’t get their shit together.” I think it would take off like gangbusters. My time in Al-Anon was productive, and I want to go back to it if I can find a meeting relatively close to me. It’s amazing how well I was wired and gaslit to think that my childhood was normal and I could handle it, no problem. Daddy can do dis, all day, every day. And yet, I couldn’t.

My teenage years roiled inside me until I hit a breaking point, and the only thing I found that helped was sharing stories with other people who’d stood in my shoes, or at least could tell where they pinched. I am not the person I want to be quite yet, but I am making amazing headway. They say that physical moves do not work, because wherever you go, there you are. You’re still you, and you have the capability to create the same problems in different places. In this case, I think I’ve bucked tradition. I’ve been to hell and back with the Argo situation, because her ego was so enormous that she made this move all about her and in no way thought I was reaching for something better, something different, running back instead of forward to a place I never should have left…. and in that case, we probably wouldn’t have met each other, anyway, and it wouldn’t be a deal for me to be here because how would she know to care?

She couches ego in being “proactive,” and I couch ego in “leave me the fuck alone, because this is not about you.” It’s about building myself up so that I have an ego again. One that sustains me instead of disappearing when I need it the most. One that makes me feel like I have a real shot at accomplishing my dreams, instead of a hermit who feels like she can never leave her house. One that assures me that I am in the right place, at the right time, and just because this friendship went wrong, that doesn’t mean all of them will. Scales said that I was just so easy to be around, and I said, “that’s the first time I’ve heard that one in a while. Thank you so much. Sincerely.”

One of these days, I will meet someone who will sweep me off my feet, and by then, I hope to have the resources to return their affections wholeheartedly. I’m not there yet. But I will be. I just don’t want anything casual. I’d rather hold out for Princess Charming, and in DC that could mean everything from being a politician’s wife to a diplomat’s wife to a Bond girl…. although if I was a Bond girl, I wouldn’t be allowed to know it. So perhaps I need someone in DC who can actually tell me what they do…. not that anyone does…. or if they do, your eyes glaze over. But my identity is not wrapped up in these people, only my willingness to give and be interdependent so that both of our careers matter.

Because my ego allows me to have my own life, my own friends, my own.

And that’s all I’ve ever wanted DC to be.

I got myself to work this morning just in time to have hair-raising diarrhea, then go back to my desk, and ten minutes later run for another round. By this time, I asked my boss if I could work from home, because if this was going to keep up, I could work just fine, but I wanted my own bed and my own bathroom. He said that I could take some leave, but he couldn’t authorize work from home. So I knew I had some stuff in production this afternoon, and told him I would try to be back later. I went directly to CVS and bought some Immodium and took two. The plan was to go home and get some rest, letting the meds have some time to kick in and maybe fit in another dose if the first one didn’t do the job.

Over the past two nights, I’ve had pain on the left side of my abdomen, and it wasn’t that bad. I got in the car to drive home and had to stop on the side of the road, I was in so much pain. I decided to skip the trip home and went back to Urgent Care, after calling my primary care doctor and them telling me they wouldn’t see me until I’d had a new patient appointment, even though I was telling them I was in distress. I didn’t have much time to be angry about it. I was crying the pain was so bad, and that is unusual because I don’t cry. I just don’t. Especially since I take medication for anxiety, there’s nothing that rattles me much anymore. So, I took that as a sign to just get to any doctor as fast as I could.

The last time I had this pain, I was lying on a bed in the hallway at Inova Fairfax, where upon pelvic exam they thought it could be appendicitis and gave me enough morphine to tranquilize an elephant. I’m fairly certain that part of giving me such a large dose was to make me utterly uncaring that they had no beds and I was just right out there, hanging in the hallway……

But then the doctor said that it was what they call a urachal remnant, a medical condition that occurs in a lot of babies where the urachus doesn’t close all the way after disconnecting from the umbilical cord. Most people don’t notice unless it gets infected, which is why I was just right out there, hanging in the hallway…

So, it feels like the same kind of pain, but the PA said that it was probably diverticulitis. This does not feel right to me, as I have not eaten anything that would irritate my colon like that in weeks (salads, popcorn, etc.). It also doesn’t make sense that in the last month, I’ve had a Z-Pack and Augmentin and started Bactrim today, so if the diagnosis of “urachal remnant” was correct, how could it have gotten infected in the first place? Between the pain in my gut and the pneumonia that will not take its fries and drive the fuck thru, I am feeling pretty punk.

When the nurse palpated my abdomen, she said, “well, you could be pregnant!” I said, “I know I’m not.” She said, “well….. you never know!” Like she was trying to cheer me up. Seriously. Inside my head I’m thinking, “she can SEE ME, right?” I posted this on Facebook and Auna said, “spit don’t make no babies.” I said, “neither does abstinence.”

I still practiced my “Mom, I’ve had an Immaculate Conception” speech just in case. When the PA came into the room, he palpated my abdomen to the point I was crying again and told me my UA was clean, another surprise because I thought it might be a bladder infection of some sort.

He put me on a clear liquid diet for today and tomorrow, then some toast if I felt up to it on Saturday.

And just in case you’re wondering, this post makes me feel a thousand years old.

This morning, the dark roast at Starbucks is the French roast. Apparently, they have stopped calling it “The Bold Pick,” because the last few times I have ordered as such, they’ve looked at me like I was from the moon until the manager told them what it was. It’s awesome that with my gold status, I can get a large cup of coffee for less than three dollars, and fill it up as much as I want. Although with 20 oz, I normally get a cup on the way in and a cup for the drive to DSI, about 20 minutes away. Even without free refills, though, sometimes I go to 7-Eleven, because they have finally made the Slurpee of my dreams- Diet Cherry Coke. It’s not calorie free, but 50 calories for a 24 oz is not bad. I’m sure they do it to cover up the aspartame aftertaste, and it works well… except I like the aspartame aftertaste. I’m not a real soprano without it.

How many sopranos does it take to change a lightbulb?

Two. One to hold the Diet Coke and one to get the accompanist to do it.

Last night I went straight home and got in bed. This pneumonia is hanging on for all it’s worth, and I am only now starting to notice a difference since I’ve been on the Augmentin for six days. The cough, however, is not budging. As you walk to the back corner of DSI, it starts to sound like a TB ward… although it’s nice that my office mate has officially, officially moved out and all her crap is gone, so now I really have my own office. I’m not bothering anyone with my sickness unless someone comes in to talk to me, and right now, they know better. Maybe I should make a recording of myself coughing for those days when I don’t want to deal with people. 🙂

I am really starting to learn what it means to move on without Argo in my life, and it’s scary and wonderful all at the same time. I miss her, but not at the cost of my own sanity. I am still the sweet, lovable nerd she met in the beginning, but apparently there is no way to show it. It’s all so fucking sad, because I truly didn’t mean any harm, and I was hoping that she’d continue to buck the mainstream and we’d keep talking, keep building each other up, keep working towards wholeness in a world that is continually broken.

I was talking to Scales about it the other night, and she said something about me “still being in it.” That perhaps I’m still in love with Argo and don’t realize it consciously. I don’t think she’s right, and I said so. I said, “there’s a difference between losing someone you love, and someone you’re in love with. Losing Dana and Argo at basically the same time was taking both my right and left hands away simultaneously.”

I know within myself that the Eros feelings I had given the enormous amount of truth we shared are over. I don’t have these dreams that haunt me anymore, and I don’t spend my days wishing that things could have been different. They just are the way they are, you know? Whatever was supposed to happen did. I will find other friends, and have, but I won’t forget her, just like I’ll never forget the other important turns my life has taken, both away from myself and back inward. Just like with Dana, I had to spend my time in the desert figuring all this shit out. And like I said before, leaving Dana was easier because there were things roiling under the surface of our perfectness that created a storm within both of us that we could not talk about… would not talk about. Dana and I both wanted out, and with Argo, that was never the case. I’d get mad at her escalated language and fire right back, when the right thing to do was respond with more love, more care, more thoughtfulness. But at the same time, when I did remember to do those things, even being nice to her was frought with being wrong. I couldn’t win, and not for lack of trying. She told me she had friends that would rage if we were still in contact, and first of all, I didn’t realize that I was up for discussion. And second of all, she said that she was not interested in following “mainstream anything,” two words that I carried in my heart until I realized that she was playing me. Being my friend was not a way to be my friend, but to keep an eye on me to make sure I didn’t get any closer than she wanted me to be. I didn’t want to be that person. I wanted to be that person she could come to with anything, but that time in our lives was over.

I never got the chance to be free and easygoing with her, like in the beginning when she said that she was much more fun and funny in person, and I couldn’t wait to see what she meant by that. Girl giggling and meeting each other’s eventual significant others and eating bacon in our pajamas.

But I couldn’t be seen in that way anymore, and for that, I regret, but I don’t choose to focus on it all the time, because I have plenty of people to eat bacon with, except for Pri-Diddy, because she is a vegan…. although I do like the vegan bacon at Sticky Fingers Bakery, so there’s something.

I really do love Dana with everything that is within me, but there’s another relationship that I’ll never get back, because she doesn’t trust me as far as she can throw me and I feel exactly the same way. There were only a few things that I felt I could confide in her, Argo being one of them, and everything else was fair game. Anything and everything I said was likely to pop out at one time or another. And perhaps it was a mistake to let Dana into the Argo part of my life, but it seemed utterly wrong not to. Married couples that hide their crushes destroy their relationships from the inside out, whereas naming it helps it to go away, helps it to refocus on the relationship with each other. But it is my belief that by the time I’d started confiding that stuff in her, she wanted out, and Argo was the easiest shortcut to get me to go ballistic in a hot second. I knew I had enough love within me to love both of them, as long as I took care of my problems appropriately, and I did…. it was just that time ran out with both of them to prove it.

Dana was part of my heartbeat, whereas Argo was just my beautiful, rule-breaking moth. My poetic and noble land mermaid. The person who, to me, was brilliant and kind and stupid hot. These are all taken from Leslie Knope Galentine’s Day cards, and in no way meant to indicate romance. Although my favorite was when we were discussing boundaries and I said, jokingly, “I don’t like it that you’re funnier than me. Could you tone it down? Noooooooooo…….

We had a lot of fights that were just redirection that cost us time because we were talking about surface issues instead of what’s really wrong. For instance, I have been doing this Internet thing a long time. Gender and sexuality fly out the window for me, because my sexuality is in no way binary. She needed me to have a better boundary there, and I tried so hard…. until I realized that the shortest and easiest path to getting her to go away was to say all these things I didn’t mean in order to push her away from sharing her truth, because every time she did, my heart would squeeze into a vice and I couldn’t think about anything else. My relationships all suffered, because I didn’t belong to a community anymore. I isolated as far as I could so that I could wait for the familiar ding of my phone.

Argo never would have wished that on me, but I couldn’t help it. Her life was a series of crazy with crazy sauce, and I worried like a mother hen, when I should have been worrying about Dana and Aaron in the same way… the ones who were dealing with my own crazy with crazy sauce.

I just burned on re-entry. Dana didn’t want to talk to me anymore, to the point where we were having a ocmpletely calm conversation where she was asking me questions. I was sitting on the floor facing her bedroom, not getting any closer, because I knew the questions she was asking me were hard and required me to dig deep. But she didn’t want to listen to the answers, and when I gave them, called my dad and said that I was having a “psychotic episode.” My dad told me to hand the phone over, and when he realized that I was calm and collected, he told me to go to bed, that nothing was going to get done, and to stop trying.

So I did.

I locked myself in my office with enough sleeping pills to knock me out for a day and a half, and I must say it was the right thing to do. Everything looked better with a truly good night’s sleep. But Dana still didn’t want to talk to me, to address our issues, without leaving them as our issues. Argo made me feel like a million dollars when she said, “surely you realize that one of the reasons I backed away from you was so that I wouldn’t be Dana’s excuse anymore.” And no, I didn’t realize that at all. I thanked her for picking up something that I didn’t, and said, “good call.” I told Dana what she said, and she surprised me. She said she was sorry that my friend pulled away because of something she did. It made me feel like a million dollars, and I sent Argo another thank-you note that she’d helped me make even more progress with Dana because she GOT IT, and that part had been missing for a long time…. because it wasn’t just about me anymore. I can’t imagine what it was like for Argo to give her heart to me in hopes that we could make a friendship that was strong and comfortable, and then to step into dysfunction up to her ass.

But she didn’t. Dana was ready to go, and didn’t know how to say it, so Argo was so convenient as an excuse not to talk to me about our own issues. Argo’s sexuality is binary, always has been, and there was nothing I could do that would change it, and I didn’t even want to. Anything that I sent her along those lines was predicated by, “I know this is not your reality, but these are the feelings that are troubling me, not something for which I expect a response.” And besides, any romantic relationship with Argo would have gone about as well as a dumpster fire. In a way, Dana, Argo, and I were all raised by the same dad. And I’m going to let that sentence hang right there, because the three of us all know what that means, and needs no explanation to anyone else.

Plus, I didn’t want to fuck each other up any worse than we already had. I only wanted goodness, sweetness, and light to win out, but it couldn’t, because instead of letting our rabbit hole sustain us, we became cut from the same cloth, defenses in place so that neither one could let down the protective walls that didn’t start out with bullet-proof vests under our t-shirts, just devolved into it over time.

I wish I could go back to the time in my life where I was so excited to meet her, so excited to invite her into my life for real so that the 3D version of me was what she knew instead of an Internet troll with a God complex. I became this narcissistic bully with no ability to fold, and so did she. So there was no going back, as much as I loved her, prayed for her, wished her well.

And now I talk to her in my head all the time, because when I do that, I get the responses I want, rather than taking the chance that she’s going to come back at me with escalated language, or that I will send her any. We are at peace, for the first time in years, because according to the Argo in my head, my glasses are cute, I will find the woman of my dreams, and she is the angel cheerleader that sits on my shoulder as I find my way through life.

Scales said that she felt bad about the comment where she said she didn’t think that this was the end, that we seem to wax and wane, because she didn’t mean to cause me grief. And I told her that grief was always a double-edged sword… that even though I felt pain, I also felt like a million dollars remembering my Argo-given nickname and for one second, I felt complete and whole within myself, because the ability to remember with happiness outweighed the ability to look back in anger.

And on that note, it’s time for my re freefill and get to work.

See you on the flip side.

I have a friend that I keep up with through Facebook named Karen, and I found out that her son just graduated at college. Years ago, we were pretty tight, when her son was ten. My favorite memory of him is that his older sister had something to do, and Karen had to bring her home, so I offered to take M___ so he didn’t have to wait around. When we got to his house, I tucked him into bed, read him a story, kissed the top of his head, and turned out the light. It was a turning point in my life, one in which I knew that whether I had kids or not, I’d be good at it, when the tape running through my head said that I wouldn’t. For instance, I also made him a mix CD (that ages me) called “M___’s Mega Mix,” with stuff like The White Stripes, Cake, etc. He gave me a thank-you note written in purple marker, just one of the many things I’ve lost in moves over the years that is precious to me and I wish I’d taken better care of it. I lamented to Karen that the kids were growing up so fast, and she said, “that’s the problem with children….. they grow.”

Seeing M’s grad pictures reminded me of all the funny things that happened between Karen and me, like going to Starbucks. I ordered some foofy drink with chocolate and mint, and she ordered a soy latte with classic syrup, saying, “flavored coffee is for young people.” I still laugh about that one, and because that’s what I’m thinking about, that’s exactly what I’m drinking this morning as I write.

Possibly the best story involving Karen’s kids is her youngest. At the time, she was six, and Karen was making brownies. Karen said, “adults are allowed to have their brownies in the living room, and kids have to stay in the kitchen.” Six-year-old E looked at the plate of brownies, me, and back to the plate of brownies before she said, “ARE YOU A KID OR A GROWN-UP?” Jesus, kid. Your guess is as good as mine.

Karen was such a good friend because even though there was a large age-gap between us, we were going through similar life experiences- hers a little more complicated because she was getting a divorce with children involved, and Kat and I had no assets… still traumatic, but at least no custody issues except for a duvet cover and a life-size Yoda (which she pawned for $20 just for spite… I don’t blame her. I scared the life out of her with that thing). But the point is that even though our ages didn’t match up, our mutual experiences were the same (or mostly).

They say that these are not the best of times,
but they’re the only times we’ve ever known…
And I believe there is a time for meditation
in cathedrals of our own…

Billy Joel- Summer, Highland Falls

It was a time where we both needed to breathe and stay in the same place, mourning the losses we’d just each experienced and leaning on each other for support.

It completely redirected the course of my own life, because I grew up a lot just being near someone who’d already accomplished great things and believed in me to the degree that she could. Portland was depressing and got even more so as the family I thought I knew disintegrated into nothing. At that point, I was truly inconsolable, and it took years to figure out why.

But that wasn’t until seven or 10 years later.

I had to sit in cathedrals of my own, working it out in the best way I knew how. At that time, John Strege, former choirmaster at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, rescued me by helping me direct myself back into faith. I’d lost it somewhat, and the ritual of the Episcopal church and the beauty of Bach turned me back around. When I doubt that God exists, I listen to Bach’s Mass in H mol (The Kick My Mass in B Minor), because there is nothing like Et Resurrexit to prove to me that God works through music. There is nothing better than singing with people you love, feeling that God chord running through you at a heart-racing speed.

I dropped out of my own choir at CCC, because this woman came up to me and said, “you sing so loud that I cannot even hear my own part. Could you tone it down?” In the moment, I was furious, because she wasn’t coming to me from any place of authority. Balance is handled by the conductor, not some pissant alto…. but I’m not bitter. It was then that I remembered what Zach said to me, that sometimes voices are simply too large for choral singing, because being able to pull back enough to create balance physically hurts. My piano is louder than everyone else’s, not because I’m not singing more softly, but because my forte is louder than everyone else’s, too. I would be great in an opera chorus where *everyone* has the same vocal qualities I do, and perhaps I will see about joining a company if it fits into my schedule. But a relatively small church choir is not the place for me.

As for now, I sit in the congregation about halfway back, so that the congregation has a singing leader as well. I have noticed that this is not a singing church, and I’m trying to change that. Someone to help non-music readers in the pews helps immensely, because even if they don’t get it the first time around, they’ll get it the second or third. Plus, since there are no others around me, I am not competing for balance.

It also really helps with my want to work with the youth, because I am not at the church ALL DAMN DAY. And I would much rather spend time with them than the choir, because the first thing I asked Nae, the choir director, was if anyone was mean. He said no, and he was wrong about that. I wasn’t angry at taking correction, necessarily. I was angry that this person was speaking with no authority whatsoever, and if the balance was really that off, the conductor would have said something. I have had enough of choir to last my whole life, unless I can find one that has enough ringers that the balance fits me well enough that I don’t have to physically strain every week to fit in with singers who just cannot produce the volume I can, because I’m not trying to be annoying. It’s just the way I’m built, and I cannot help it any more than I can make my eyes blue.

I have Joseph Painter to thank for that. He took me through an incredible amount of breathing work so that I could find my “opera voice.” At the same time, not breathing correctly from my diaphragm was what allowed me to blend in in the first place. I didn’t have enough air support to be able to carry notes to the back of the sanctuary… and this sanctuary is twice or three times the size of Epiphany and I can still fill it with sound.

I am looking forward to working on solo music again, because the recording I did of the Pie Jesu from The Rutter Requiem was not as perfect as I wished it could have been. I mean, it was absolutely decent, but I was not in top form. When I woke up that morning, I had total and complete laryngitis and had to work myself up to being able to sing at all. Given that level of vocal distress, it is the most perfect recording in the history of recordings. But I want another recording where I literally am at the top of my game, and whether that’s Sandy Patti or Mozart, it doesn’t matter. I just want it to be mine.

Just like the moment I tucked M____ into bed. That memory was just for me.

Yesterday Scales and I met up early. We were going to just go for dinner, but we both had things we wanted to accomplish that day, so we did nothing together. It’s nice to have that friend again. With Aaron, I called it “running Aarons.” I don’t know what it’s called when Scales and I are together, except for complete and utter girl-giggling. We went to Cost Plus World Market because she wanted to pick out a Christmas gift- trying to buy early in case she really does have to move.

As an aside, I do not understand shopping except for smile.amazon.com, where a portion of my money goes to Doctors Without Borders. I don’t even try on shoes anymore.

While she checked out, I looked at the candy aisle, which for me is Christmas. I found Jelly Bellies in “draft beer.” I did not buy them, because I have enough candy to last me for a while. When I was at Dollar Tree, I found soda bottles in Dr Pepper and Orange/Grape Crush. I bought lots because it looked like overstock, and when that happens, you never know when you’re going to see that product again.

After we finished at the mall, Scales looked up a tattoo studio for me so I could go and get my earrings. Each month, I set a little money away to blow so I don’t feel poor, and this was it. I was buying these cheap studs that were starting to turn my ears green, and I was tired of it. So I asked for silver rings with red ball enclosures. As it turns out, the only color that they couldn’t anodize was red, so I settled for, you guessed it, blue balls.

At a lot of other studios, the balls are plastic beads, but at this shop, they wouldn’t do it. They don’t use plastic at all. The blue is not as dark as I would like, so perhaps I will go back to get a blue titanium ball enclosure to match the other four.

My punk hairdo also makes me look like a soldier, and the piercer said, “well, I don’tknow if you were looking for it, but you look great in your Air Force blue and silver.

Oh boy.

Air Force. Air Force?

At first, I was livid because the two soldiers I love the best are in the Army and the Marines…. or so I thought. And then I remembered what branch Ron was in, and I amended my statement quickly.

So, Air Force it is.

I need to go see if Duncan is out of the bathroom yet. I need a good fifteen or twenty minutes to wash my face and punk my hair. I can’t believe I spend money to look like I just rolled out of bed… but when I actually roll out of bed, the spot on my head where there’s no hair shows. It’s been there since I was a baby due to an EKG contact. So, looking like I just rolled out of bed is relative.

In other news, I feel 70% better today. After coffee or tea, that’ll probably add another 5%.

Because I have blue balls. I make this look good.

For my Fanagans who aren’t linked up with me on Facebook, here is a new picture so that you can see what I actually look like as opposed to the character in your head….. and Good Lord have mercy as to what that might be. The next thing I want to do is put titanium ball enclosures in all of the piercings on my earlobes, because they are hypoallergenic and I haven’t changed the ones I’m wearing since I got here… and they, to put it mildly, are not.

All I have to do now is pick what color my balls are.

Get your mind out of the gutter!

I have found that regardless of how hard I try, I always look like a hipster. My favorite outfits are preppy, but when you combine them with Converse All-Stars, a punk haircut, and specs that look like you went shopping with Ira Glass, it’s kind of unavoidable. In fact, I’m donating most of my shoes to Goodwill, because I have both brown and black All-Stars, and I hardly ever wear anything else (except for my Dr Marten’s, which don’t help my hipster case in the slightest). But perhaps it’s just that I’m on the wrong side of the tracks (or the country). I would look completely in place if I lived in Takoma Park, or in Portland, Oregon. For those of you who are unfamiliar with either, the slogan for both should be, “welcome. Here’s your brown hoodie.”

This morning, I worked for a little bit at the Dupont Starbucks, and then on impulse, texted Scales and said I was there if she wanted to meet up. We had a quick coffee and then I got back to work. I should have been blogging, but I wasn’t. I was making a shopping and a to-do list, both of which are several pages long due to all the things I have not done lately. Here’s a tip. Pneumonia sucks. Plus, the antibiotics gave me the runs and that was the one day I decided to stay home from work. Because first of all, I got maybe an hour of sleep in between all the trips to the bathroom. And secondly, pretty sure the acceptable age for shitting yourself in public ends at two. So, after four doses of atropine, I was back in my office (because my officemate moved out and I could hack up a lung in private) with *just* pneumonia.

I have too much to do to either take time off or work from home. If I take time off, no one does the things I do. If I work from home, I am distracted by every damn thing you can possibly imagine, and I leave my laptop at work not to entice me to want to work from here. I can write for 45 minutes at a clip, but eight hours chained to my own desk is far more torturous than being chained to the one at DSI. Mostly because I have three monitors, a tea kettle, way faster Internet, and company when I want it.

Speaking of company, I am trying to spend as much time as humanly possible with Scales because she may be leaving DC as well. We shall see what we shall see, but in the meantime, we weren’t supposed to get together until tomorrow for dinner and “Exploding Kittens” (I don’t know what that is… Sounds messy.). But, I thought, I was in the neighborhood anyway, so I decided to see if she was free. It was the perfect amount of time- 20 minutes. She told me what was going on in her life and I told her what was going on in mine. I told her that I’d only really had enough energy to watch TV, and even that was pushing it.

And then she surprised me. She said, “do you think this is the end of you and Argo or are you calling it?” I said, “I’m not so much calling it as saying that the next contact MUST be from her because I’m tired of the feeling that I’m just imposing on her life.” She said, “I don’t think it’s the end. You two seem to wax and wane.” I was standing up when she said it, and it was a good thing that I’d just had two Venti espresso roasts… otherwise, I would have slumped onto the floor in grief. I call Argo that because she is the ship that carried me through the worst part of my life. Her nickname for me is moon-based…. or was. The first time she named me, I wasn’t familiar with the term, and when I Googled it, I cried and cried, I was so touched.

There have been so many people for me that have hung the moon, and for the first time in my life, I got to be the moon for someone else… and no, she didn’t call me “Green Cheese,” although that is apt as well. I am very green in a lot of ways, and very cheesy in others.

Grief is so weird. It’s not linear and it’s disorienting and it goes up and down in strange ways… sometimes over months and sometimes all in the same day. There are so many adventures I wanted to have with her, to be able to share ourselves AS WE ARE as opposed to how we presented ourselves, but after this last go-round, when I thought I was being transparent about how I got lost on the way to Auto Zone and decided to turn it into a sight-seeing trip and to her it seemed like I’d planned this whole crazy stalker ruse was just too much for me. I didn’t agree that it was my reality, but I did agree with how it might have come across to her, and apologized profusely, which led to yet another fight in which we cut each other to the quick. Those we love the most know our softest spots, and we used them to disastrous effect. Everything I’d worked for in terms of Argo seeing me for who I really am instead of her preconceived notions was slashed in less than a second.

It was at that point I realized I needed some self-preservation. If all it took was one innocent mistake to return her to that dark and twisty version of me that doesn’t exist unless we are just trying to out eight-year-old each other, then I didn’t want her in my life. There’s only so many times I can hear that she regrets ever letting me into her life and taking every opportunity to remind her of it when I have worked my ass off at trying to get her to see me in the light that I want to be seen. When I remember birthdays, Christmases, holidays. When I take the time to lift her up so that she feels like a badass every morning. When I take the time to write hand-written notes instead of just e-mailing. When I take the time to CARE.

I wish that we could go back in time so that I could have gotten the help I needed not to be such an asshole to her to begin with. But if making amends over a year won’t help, then perhaps nothing will.

But there have been so many times by now that “never ever” has lasted maybe ten days at most that I don’t know what to think anymore. It’s been a month and some change, and the weight lifted off my shoulders when we “wane” is enormous.

Back in Michelangelo’s day, imperfect statues were filled in with wax to hide impurities in the cut. If the stone was carved perfectly the first time, it was called “sin cera,” or “without wax.” It is the etymology of the word “sincere.” Though neither Argo nor I was carved “sin cera,” it is my sincere hope that this is not the end of our movie. But perhaps the end of the movie is making better friends by being the friend to others that I wanted to be to her, but couldn’t get right. Maybe all this friend-grief is about making room for friendship, honest, painful, and real, without all the filled in wax of my fucked up past.

I have friends here.

I have made friends since I got here.

Painful, honest, and real.

Sin cera, hipster glasses included.

I am sitting at the Woodmoor Starbucks right off of The Beltway and Colesville Rd. so that I can get some writing done before I have to get to work in an hour. I was going to write at home, but today is my second day on antibiotics and I am sitting in the corner, away from everyone like a leper ought to be. I couldn’t do without my caffeine this morning, and I am out of coffee filters and caffeinated tea, so writing at home was just not in the cards. I am going to stop by Whole Foods on the way home, because there are certain products I can only buy there, and what I need is tea with extra buzz by Republic of Tea.™; There are several different flavors in both black and green, but my favorite is coconut black, because I don’t have to add anything to it on my way out the door. It’s already sweet enough. I thought I would get tired of it after 50 bags of coconut every day, but the coconut is just a whisper, not all-day cloying. The coffee filters are for the Christmas blend still sitting in my cabinet, because I don’t drink it that often, but it’s nice for a change.

So you might wonder why I’m on antibiotics yet again since I just had a Z-pack the last time I got a sinus infection. I didn’t think it was the best Tx either, but this time it’s pneumonia, and I’m not messing around. It got so bad that I went to urgent care and when they could hear me wheezing, I was willing to do whatever they said. This time, it’s a ten-day course of Augmentin, which I carry in my backpack so that I can take it on the way to work and on the way home without forgetting. I also have a nifty inhaler, which cost an arm and a leg, but seems to be helping and infinitely superior to steroids by mouth. They tend to make one agressive… the last time my father and my sister were on po (per oral) steroids, I thought one of them was going to move out. 😛 Of course, my sister was a teenager at the time, so it’s hard to tell between 17 and steroids… just like ADD and seven.

When I went to the pharmacy to pick up my medications, they didn’t have a 240ml bottle to put my cough syrup in, they only had one twice that size and filled it up halfway, so I look like a member of the fucking Chopped and Screwed group as I make my way through my week. It’s a good look, and remember ladies, I’m single.

I took a very strong sleeping pill last night around 7:30, knowing that the best thing I could do was get some rest, and I slept peacefully, my eyes popping open fifteen minutes before my alarm. It was another funny Dana quote kind of day, but I am too low-energy to switch back and forth between WordPress and Facebook to look them up again. But sufficed to say, laughter energized me enough to get me into a very hot shower and sit in the steam until I could talk again.

In case you’re wondering, Bryn, I haven’t returned your phone call not because I don’t love you to the moon and back, just because I can’t talk at all. Maybe a chat would be better until my voice returns?

Also, to add insult to injury, when I was sitting in the doctor’s office, I felt that very familiar pain in my abdomen of my uterus trying to fall out and I just could not even. I have pneumonia and the hassle of being both emotionally and physically laden with Aunt Flo? It’s amazing I am upright and dressed. Both of those things take energy out of me like a Dyson vacuum with the proper amount of suction. It reminds me of the night Dana and I were over at our friends Laura and Philip’s house, watching Grey’s Anatomy, and I don’t know how the subject came up, but I said, “do you notice that all of the problems with, and the solution to your vagina all involve yogurt? The entire room just broke up, and as I fight my way through my period and my augmentin it wouldn’t hurt to get some Activia to avoid the Diflucan train. Bad things happen in threes. Bank on it.

Boy, this Komodo Dragon cofee is really hitting the spot, like that commercial for White Castle in “Harold and Kumar” where the boys are staring at the television when the announcer says, “do you want the perfect food?” The boys are just staring at the TV in awe and wonder, and I am staring at my coffee in the same way. It may be the cold medication (sans codeine- it’s daytime), but I look just like them.

As an aside, Kal Penn has joined the cast of “Deadbeat” on Hulu, and it is the greatest casting ever, because basically it’s another Kumar-type role. Kal Penn is just one of those guys that I’d love to be my friend, but unfortunately, I think he’s already moved from DC, so the chance of us running into each other is fairly slim unless he comes back to work for Indian Affairs for Clinton.

I doubt there will be a department of Indian Affairs under Trump. I was livid when the news came out yesterday that the mayor of London might be “the one exception to the not letting Muslims into the country” rule. Trump is such a sack of shit in an expensive suit with a bad haircut. The only thing he’s ever done well is make fun of himself on Saturday Night Live, and that is not a qualification to be president in the slightest. Although I will say that even though I do not agree with conservatives politically, I do like it when they can let go and laugh at themselves. Mike Huckabee’s appearance on Weekend Update stands up to multiple viewings.

When I was sick this weekend, I stayed in bed and watched the Hulu original “East Los High,” which I thought was going to be like “Stand and Deliver,” and it’s not. It’s a hard, hard look at what really goes on in predominantly Hispanic high schools in LA- teen pregnancy, priest abuse (high rates of Roman Catholicism in those neighborhoods), drug deals and territories. It is everything. Just everything. I wanted to get lost in a world that is not my own, and the story is gripping. The story changes from season to season because the class they’re talking about is the seniors, and as the cast graduates, new actors take the prime roles and the ones from the original cast move into the background. I highly recommend it, but it is unfiltered and raw. If I had a high schooler, I doubt I’d let them watch it unless they were 17 or 18 as well.

It just goes to show how much school districts are part of the problem, because they don’t have the resources to help. These kids have no sex education and think pulling out solves everything. There’s no PTA, because there are no parents with enough time off work to attend. There’s no way to keep these kids safe. They’re on their own, in completely dangerous situations that you’d never want to face with your own child.

And on that note, it’s time for a refill on my coffee and a trip to work. I have my own office, so I am willing to go there and hole up. I can be more productive, and if I’m going to feel like shit, why not feel like shit at work than feel like shit at home? It’s nice to know that even though I’m sick, I’m still making money.

love you miss you mean it. Bryn, if you see this before your lunch break, call me then. I can move stuff around.

I am not well. I think it’s because I put my Zyrtec in a different location than my other pills, thus accidentally taking it out of the rotation… which basically means that Spring is a walking nightmare for me. I need to get back on the bandwagon, because snot continually runs down the back of my throat (ew) and eventually turns into the cough/cold combo that I am currently experiencing. I am also somewhat screwed because I left most of my cold medication in my desk drawer at work. If worst comes to worst, I’ll go back to Walgreen’s and buy some more. Right now, the Sudafed, nose spray, and Throat Coat tea with brandy are doing its job. The recipe is just a splash of brandy (maybe a a shot) for four 12 oz cups of tea. I also brew the Throat Coat incredibly strong… four teabags to a pot and steeped for fifteen minutes. Except for using brandy instead of whiskey, it tastes just like the hot toddies Dana used to make me, and it makes me feel good that I can replicate her recipe, because they work.

The only difference is that I put Splenda in mine. It is so, so good. Sweet licorice and, well, I don’t have the box in front of me, so I can’t tell you what else is in it, because the sweet licorice is the overwhelming flavor. Maybe I should try ouzo next time just to punch it up.

I am a huge herbal liqueur fan. Fernet, Campari, ouzo, doesn’t matter. I am more about the savory than the sweet, unless you can mix them together, like pretzels and M&Ms. I have decided that I like the flavor of alcohol, but not the effects, so most of the time, when I mix a drink, it is mostly non-alcoholic with a splash.. like taking one sip out of a Barq’s can and putting a tiny bit of vanilla vodka over the top. However, that is hard for me to do because I cannot justify spending money on alcohol. I will in a restaurant, but spending money on an entire bottle that will just sit there is not for me. I don’t have room to store it, anyway.

I know that a drink out is more expensive, but then again, there are no leftovers.

The only reason I have brandy now is that I asked the Nassers for some whiskey and they didn’t have any, and free brandy was infinitely superior to dragging my ass to a liquor store.

It’s not as much of a chore as it once was, having a car now, but when I feel this crappy all I want to do is stay in bed.

Speaking of which, I think it’s time for a nap. I’m sorry there is no brilliance to be had in this entry. Come back later, when I feel like a normal human being again.

Pri-Diddy is coming back sooner than I thought, and she’s not actually moving to Seattle that long. It’s more like a sabbatical. She’s going to spend a few months in Seattle, then Eugene, then San Francisco, then Colombia (where Elena is from). She’s keeping her job, doing some work remotely and if the money runs out, can come home and pick up where she left off. It’s one of the coolest, craziest plans I’ve ever heard, and I’m really excited for her. She said, “I even get to stay in a yurt.” I said, “in Eugene?,” barely containing my laughter. Because of course if you’re going to Eugene, you’re going to stay in a yurt. I also came up with a new nickname for her, because she wants to run on the track at U of Oregon……… wait for it…….

Pri-fontaine.

So my little guru is headed for an entire tour of the Pacific Northwest, including the hippiest place on earth.™ Although you really can’t say you’ve been on a complete tour of the Pacific Northwest until you’ve been to Saturday Market in Eugene, complete with potheads singing anti-war songs that look like they’ve been sitting in that exact spot since 1975.

I just told her to be really careful on the trip from Eugene to San Francisco, to make sure she had chains for her car, and to call ahead and make sure the mountain pass is open that day. The first time I drove to Portland from Houston, it was November and the pass was open, but it was in complete whiteout conditions and I couldn’t even see the end of my car. The hood just floated into nowhere. I went 15 miles an hour for what seemed like an entire day… and then when I looked down at the clock after white knuckling the steering wheel, it had been five hours.

Prianka showed me a video of driving in the Himalayas on the Indian side, and I said, “oh, it’s just like that… except with a guardrail… but it doesn’t matter because you can’t see it anyway.” And as I thought about it, it’s not exactly the same. Mt. Shasta’s passages are much, much steeper. So much so that I never had to use gas while driving back down.

The next time I drove the passes, I was astounded at how beautiful they were… like, enough to just want to pull over and build a house. It was summer, so the flora was in its fullest form, and it was finding where God lives (in a yurt, probably).

After that, I became all about the pagan celebrations as well as the Christian ones. I’ve done Solstice and Beltane and all the rest, for thou art the same God…… and if you can finish that sentence, you’re probably an Episcopalian.

Prianka is also going to do some running. Hood to Coast was already full, but there are plenty more, and her trainer is wanting to get her out on steeper terrain to prepare. Good luck, God bless. Come get me when you’re ready to eat chocolate.

All the anxiety and panic I had that Pri was never coming back melted in an instance, because I knew it logically, but I had to sit with her and hear all about her adventures before I knew it emotionally. Pri and Elena eventually want to have children, and they want to be with their families when they do. It’s not forever. It just may seem like it. 😛