On Sunday, I volunteered with the youth group for the first time. I’d met Rev. Susannah at worship that morning (yes, I made it, thanks for asking) and told her I’d be there that night.
It was amazing how self-conscious I was about the way I was dressed. I wore my “Jesus Loves You” t-shirt as a joke, not realizing they wouldn’t get it (too young to have seen “Say Anything”), and I was wearing sneakers, but about half the kids were wearing Chuck Taylors and I thought to myself, “DAMNIT! I knew I should have worn my Chucks.” I wanted to fit in, not because I was trying to recapture my youth, but because I wanted to be relatable to the kids. I was shy and awkward until I realized I was one of the adults in the room… but that came into play later, when I was in charge of the high-schoolers.
At 5:30, we all ate tacos together, and then broke up into small groups so that we could put things we wanted to go into the covenant for the CCC youth group as a whole. I went up to the Rev. and asked her which group she’d like me to take, and she said, “you can either take the senior high or the junior high girls.” Since I’d been a high school Sunday School teacher before, I chose them. They’re kind of my favorite, because even though I’m good with any age, I haven’t forgotten what it was like to be in high school myself. It’s also a little bit easier for me to relate to people who are on the cusp of adulthood. I make jokes they might actually get… except for my “Jesus Loves You” shirt, apparently. Plus, junior high was so large that they divided up into boys and girls, while senior high was small, so it was coed.
The covenant is basically the set of rules we agree to live by in youth group, and we all had to come up with ideas that would then be taken all together and compiled into one list. My kids were great, but I was also proud of myself. I kept them from wandering too far with the conversation, saying “come on guys, focus” when I needed to and offered helpful suggestions, like, “have we covered drugs and alcohol? Have we covered cell phones?” Later on, I heard one of the parents say to Rev. Susannah that she loved how the senior high had come up with a framework, and I smiled to myself.
I’d known I’d be a good youth director, and getting to work with the senior high and hearing that feedback reinforced my belief. I also knew that I’d made the right move by volunteering, because even though I’m not getting paid, I am still earning street cred, and at this point, that’s worth more than money. Rev. Susannah is also her own blessing. I love that when I told her that I wanted to spend some time with her, actually get to know her, that she agreed. We’re going to go for coffee soon, and I can’t wait.
It is right now that I am learning the things I need to be able to fly solo, and I couldn’t have chosen a better group of kids with which to spend that time. One of these days, I’ll have my own youth group, and my own covenant with them. Right now it is enough for me to help Rev. Susannah create the group she wants to lead. Right now it is enough to ask, “what do you want me to do?” Learning how I can best serve now is learning how I can best lead later.
Following the social upheaval of World War II, many people in the United States felt a fervent desire to “restore the prewar social order and hold off the forces of change,” according to historian Barry Adam.
Spurred by the national emphasis on anti-communism, Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted hearings searching for communists in the U.S. government, the U.S. Army, and other government-funded agencies and institutions, leading to a national paranoia.
Anarchists, communists, and other people deemed un-American and subversive were considered security risks. Homosexuals were included in this list by the U.S. State Department in 1950, on the theory that they were prone to blackmail. Under Secretary of State James E. Webb noted in a report, “It is generally believed that those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons.”
Up until the night of the police raid there was never any trouble there,” she said. “The homosexuals minded their own business and never bothered a soul. There were never any fights or hollering, or anything like that. They just wanted to be left alone. I don’t know what they did inside, but that’s their business. I was never in there myself. It was just awful when the police came. It was like a swarm of hornets attacking a bunch of butterflies.
-Shirley Evans, neighbor to the Stonewall Inn
Homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness which has reached epidemiological proportions.
-Charles Socarides, noted educator and author regarding “homosexual behavior.”
We really did it, but we were going to pay.
-bystander to Stonewall Riots
Sometimes, pride is hard. Gathering pride hurts. Gathering pride hurts because the pieces you’re trying to quilt are small and fraying. Sometimes, it seems like pride is gone. And that is when we come to you, O God. When our pride is broken, our spirits are weak, and our bodies are weighted with fatigue.
If you’ve been keeping up with me on Facebook, you know that last night at about 9:00 I posted a status update:
Why did I agree to preach Gay Pride Sunday? I don’t know anything about gay people!
Now, we all know that’s not true, but how in the world do you condense “Gay Pride” into one sermon? We’re headed for the parade as soon as church is over and this is like a three hour endeavor all by itself!
As I was telling Martina last night, preaching “Gay Pride Sunday” is kind of like being asked to do a sermon on The Bible. Are there any parameters here? Can I buy a vowel? It reminds me of the associate pastor who gets up in front of the congregation for his first sermon. It’s great! They laugh, they cry, they take up offering. Preacher is on top of the world because his first sermon is such a raging success. Monday morning, the associate preacher takes his Bible to the senior pastor and says, “that was great! Got any other books?”
Gay Pride is too big for one sermon.
I also joked with everyone that I was going to come out dressed as Boy George. I said Boy George specifically because my dad is straight as an arrow, and in the 80s, he told his MYF group (Kristan, what does it stand for?) that he had booked him.
So my dad goes on for weeks and weeks about how Boy George is going to come and visit the youth group at our church. It is at this point, ladies and gentlemen, that I began to completely fall apart laughing while I was writing this.
So, the night arrives, right? The kids are waiting. They’re out of their minds excited when BOY GEORGE starts coming down the stairs into the fellowship hall. My mother has done exquisite makeup. Flawless. My father’s face is completely powdered white. He has black liquid eyeliner perfectly drawn and dried so there are no lumps. His mascara is perfect.
My sister used to have this puffy doll face with long, long braids made out of yarn so she’d have a place to put all her barrettes, right? So, picture this.
My dad has taken the puffy doll face and laid it flat upon his head so that the yarn braids with all the multicolored plastic kiddie barrettes are falling to his shoulders. He puts on a Boy George style hat and wears one of our family quilts whose majority color is pink draped over his shoulder.
The kids are laughing so hard they can barely breathe because this is the associate pastor of the church in drag and they’ve rarely seen him in anything but a suit and tie, or in his robes during worship.
So if you’ve ever seen the movie …But I’m a Cheerleader, congregation, That. Is. My. Root.
I love that joke. I could only make it in front of a GLBT audience and have them start rolling on the floor. Thank you, thank you for feeding my ego. As a cook, I work with people younger than some pairs of my pants. It’s important to me that, on days like this, you all are here to remind me that I’m only 10 or 15 years older than your average line cook, and for me, pride is being able to tell these jokes without you reacting as if I am Methuselah. Because I’m not. Dana is.
No, seriously. All kidding aside, my dad is one of the first people to ever teach me about pride, even though he didn’t know I was gay at the time (or did he?). Pride, he taught me, is the systematic willingness to be yourself.
I think that’s worth a second look.
Pride is the systematic willingness to be yourself.
Pride is knowing that you have to be yourself whether the law wants you to be or not.
Pride is knowing that your mind and your heart bring something to the world that no one else ever can or ever will.
Pride is knowing that the Gospels of Christ are meant for you in the same way that they are meant for everyone else.
Pride is knowing that the Gospels of Christ are still meant for you even when someone else tells you they’re not.
It is interesting that today’s Epistle to the Galatians we talk about the law in just this respect. At issue in the new church is whether Gentile Christians must keep certain Jewish practices to remain Christian. It is a bit like what the Jews and Muslims of Spain experienced during the 15th century, as Muslim Spain gave way to Catholic Spain. Those who remained often “converted” to save their lives, but didn’t give up their original faith.
Paul says this isn’t right. He is a Jew, but righteousness doesn’t come by way of keeping the Law – for Jews or Gentiles. Instead, it comes by way of the faithfulness of Jesus, who lives with us and works through us. Before Christ freed us with his own covenant, there was no pride in spirituality. Spirituality was by the book. Spirituality was “27 8×10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence” (If you get that reference, you’re allowed to react like I’m Methuselah, because obviously we are professional colleagues).
It is here that we can do a little bit of rabbinical exegesis, which is a cool phrase for “we’re going to study this in-depth for a second.”
There’s this new Internet video going around that I will absolutely not show you in church because it’s filthy called “Samesies.” The premise for the skit is that it’s an early tribe of people (most probably Biblical, but not necessarily) who have no idea what sex is or really, what it does. What they have noticed, however, is that when they do “samesies,” no people come out.
It is an hilarious demonstration of Talmudic law. The leader of the tribe decides that they will do “opposites” so that they can grow the tribe, which is what binds Gay Pride with our Scripture for this morning… as absolutely freaking unlikely as that sounds.
Talmudic law prohibits every kind of sex that does not try to further the life of the tribe. Any sex that does not lead to procreation is forbidden. However, with Seven BILLION people on the planet, our need to “further the tribe” is not as dire as it once was. It is a law that is no longer useful to us as a society, but I do not base my response on science alone.
Paul tells the Galatians that this upholding of these type laws isn’t right. He is a Jew, but righteousness doesn’t come by way of keeping the Law – for Jews or Gentiles.
Instead, it comes by way of the faithfulness of Jesus.
The faithfulness of Jesus?
What does that mean?
How are those two things different, the laws and the faith of Jesus?
When you were a baby queer (and I apologize if that word offends you- I am only trying to be absolutely inclusive), were there rules?
Come on. Stay with me. You know what I mean- you have worn that place on your skin; there are rules to being gay. What are they?
You can’t be fat if you’re male
Magazines tell our men that they are not skinny enough, that the bodies they have are less than perfect even when the scale doesn’t lie and neither does the mirror. Everything is in the right place and nearly flawless but you believe the article that says you only need three or four hundred calories a day to function.
You can’t be too femme if you’re female
Well, technically, you can be as femme as you want if you’re in a relationship. I have never seen a woman successfully pull off the blonde cheerleader look with any success while single, though, because no one will actually think you’re a lesbian in that kind of outfit.
You can’t be poor
Gay culture tells us that spending money on toys, clothes, and cars is your ticket to being fabulous. Your house has to be a beautiful memory picture. You max out your credit trying to understand the rules of being up and coming, fashion forward, and whatever else the industry tells you to make raging debt look attractive.
You can’t be sober
We all know it and we cannot avoid this truth. Our culture started in bars. Going to the bars was a rule of being gay.
Lucky for us, this last one is changing as gay becomes mainstream and the need for utmost secrecy has dissipated. In very few places do we literally have to look over our shoulders for gay bashers. Never let us forget, though, that when we had no place to meet, no place to be ourselves in public, bar owners took us in and gave us shelter. Very few of them were even gay. Some of them were even run by the mafia. I don’t say this to scare you, just to impress upon you how awful a situation it must have been to be gay in the ’50s and ’60s if running to the mafia was the safest choice.
Even advancing in time, there are just so many rules.
As for myself, I carried a picture of the woman I loved in my math book, and I had a very strict schedule as to how I would look at it. I think I only allowed myself 2 peeks a day, and actually felt very angry with myself if I cheated. My rules were important to me because I thought they were helping me to hide the fact that I am gay. I have always been gay and it takes hindsight to see just how ridiculous it sounds. But I had rules, and I followed them.
We give our rules away when we realize we are carrying them around for the sake of “that’s how it’s always been done” and not because they are helping us to achieve any particular goal. It’s deciding when they aren’t useful anymore and getting rid of them that’s the hard part.
As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5, the old is passed away, the new has come. It is a call for reconciliation so that Jews and Gentiles might live together as one body, both reconciled through Christ. Ultimately, this is a call to participate in Christ’s own faithfulness, by allowing him to live in and through us. It is also an invitation to throw out the rules, and live in the love- apart from sexuality or any other constraint that takes the focus off our humanness.
As Carolynne Hitter Brown puts it:
All work toward social justice, then, is based on the principle that Christ lives in us. As we strive for reform, we do so in a manner that loves and respects others, believing all people are called to covenant with God through God’s grace. So throw out the rules.
We’ve all heard of those churches where there’s no dancing, there’s no music, there’s no laughter… no pride. We’ve all heard of those churches where hiding your light under a bushel was the safest option at the time… even if the church itself is completely safe and it’s your own mind stirring up trouble.
When I was 12 years old, I saw someone for the first time… at my church. If you’ve ever had a romantic feeling ever in your life, you know what I mean. She was the one for whom time stood still, the only one in color in a room full of gray. She was so stunningly gorgeous that, at first, I forgot to notice that she was female. In fact, I forgot to notice she was female until I realized that I wanted my lips to touch hers… and that girls didn’t do that with other girls.
It was a trap. I knew that my lips were supposed to kiss girl lips. I also knew that since I was female, this might be considered, well, a problem. For starters, this girl was on my radar. There wasn’t a way that we wouldn’t run into each other. I had to find a way to ration out feelings, because to leak out too much was to “show.”
I didn’t want to love my girl because I thought I would “show.”
No pride that day.
When I was fourteen years old, I told a girl in my class that I liked her. She took me into a practice room in the instrumental music department and yelled at me until her voice was hoarse. Then, her friend came up to me and said that the girl I liked was now throwing up in the bathroom because I’d told her I liked her and she was straight.
No pride that day.
When I was fourteen years old, the girl I liked in the instrumental music department told everyone in my entire grade that I was gay. When the bell rang at lunch, several people with Bibles marched over to my table at lunch and started a dramatic reading of all the Scripture that would damn me to hell.
No pride that day.
When I was 18 years old, my girlfriend and I kissed in the dark, arms around each other, windows steaming… until she had to go and meet the boy her parents thought she was dating.
No pride that day.
We all have these moments. We all have these flaws and insecurities that pop up all day, every day, and we listen to them. We listen to the moments in which our minds tell us that it’s ok not to be proud of ourselves. It’s ok to treat ourselves like crap, because hey! Everybody else is doing it.
If we wait long enough, the domino reaction is that everyone’s brokenness collides. Pain meets pain and pride meets pride so that pieces of both are inextricably interrelated, scattered on the floor in no particular order… just as are we,
gentle souls, flung to the corners of the earth, complete pictures of pride and pain walking upright on solid ground. You are the complete picture of pride and pain, flung to the four corners of the earth. You are the reconciliation of the laws of the old testament and the loving Christ of the new. You are what God holds in God’s own hand and calls you perfect by name. Rejection of the law and acceptance of Christ to heal all the ills of the world.
My sister introduced me to a web site called “Thumbtack,” where you can basically hang out your shingle and get into business quickly. Mine is computer instruction, because there are plenty of little old ladies that have no idea how to use an iPhone in my zip code. I also put that I can lock down routers, because in my neighborhood, there are an alarming amount of homes with no security at all. I’ve got a profile up, and paid the money for a background check. However, what I did not know going in is that if you get a text message regarding a job, you have to buy credits in order to be able to answer them. For instance, if someone says, “I need an admin assistant,” to reply is 3 credits. 30 credits is $35.00, but I didn’t pay it (at least not yet), because the admin assistant position has gone off on my phone four different times, all from different people, and talks about package delivery in Vermont that can be done via e-mail. I believe it is spam, because never in my lifetime have I been able to lift a 50-lb box using only the power of my typing skills.
I also never have to worry about a background check. I once worked in an airport as a line cook in a pub. If I can pass that one, I can pass any of them. As you can imagine, airports are quite strict about who can be there every day.
The other thing I’m working on is tremendously difficult, but not because it’s beyond my capabilities. It’s just methodical and time-consuming, a mountain of work for what hopefully is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I signed up with a web site called Udemy, which is similar to Blackboard or WebCT, and making a basic linux class. The copy for it flows naturally. The hard part is recording my desktop. The David Attenborough part comes later (is there, in fact, any nature video not narrated by David Attenborough?). “So you see the cursor in its natural habitat, about to strike the submit button…”
It’s going to be a series of at least ten videos, because I don’t just want to demo linux. I want to be able to show people that you can get an operating system and a full set of software for free dollars. It’s not just about having a linux desktop and knowing shell commands, although that’s part of it. It’s being able to tell people that you don’t have to pay exorbitant sums of money for Microsoft Office, PhotoShop, Norton AntiVirus, etc… and you especially do not have to go to Best Buy just to get software to backup DVDs and Blu-Rays.
When I walk into a software aisle, it literally makes me sick, because manufacturers are releasing products that have a pretty box and it costs money so it must be better… and in fact, the more money it costs, the better quality it must be.
I will probably create a separate course for LibreOffice all on its own, because the ways to create formulas in Calc and format paragraphs in Writer are just enough different to make an inexperienced user’s eyebrows go over their foreheads. I am surprised at the number of people who cannot wrap their brains around software just because it looks different, but has the same functionality.
But then again, I wouldn’t make any money if people actually read manuals and tried to learn software on their own. It’s just little things that surprise me, like the upgrade from Office 2003 to Office 2007. The ribbon wasn’t introduced until later, so the products looked basically identical and people were still frozen in fear.
In fact, one of the reasons that LibreOffice is so popular is that it looks a lot like Office 2007 and people who still can’t use the ribbon have a word processor again. Because I’m not mean, I’ll also tell people how to install Microsoft Office on their linux machines. This is because sometimes documents do not translate from one suite to another as easily as LibreOffice says they do… but I do not view this as a drawback because Microsoft Office documents won’t stay together formatting-wise in different versions of *itself.*
In terms of my personal preferences, if no one else has to edit the document, I print to PDF. That’s because I’m a font nerd, and I want my resume (or whatever) to look the way it did on my screen. If I don’t, it will end up as Arial and Times New Roman (most likely). I like to branch out a little, and if the font isn’t installed on the receiver’s computer, it will be replaced with something else.
Did you know that? If you didn’t, here’s a free sample of what I can teach you if you hire me.
My sister was into Girls for a while, and when she’s into something, I generally check it out because she’s cooler than me. I binged a little bit of it when I split my tooth down the middle and had some time on my hands due to the Tylenol 3. I watched a little more last night because I went to get a new temporary crown (the first one broke, so they gave me a stronger one), and the benzocaine topical anesthetic made me a little loopy. I think they may have given me a little too much, because I was, as my family calls it, “duh-headed,” for several hours afterward… but not duh-headed enough not to realize that I’m not afraid of much of anything except Hannah Horvath.
I am old enough now that I would not make the conversational faux pas of asking her editor’s widow if she knew the name of a new editor because her book had been shelved, but I did see myself in her egocentric world and her complete downward spiral… although, for me, it was a warning and not shared experience. Yes, I thought about killing myself, and got down far enough that I realized something must be done about it or I would succeed.
And to tell the truth, I didn’t notice. Argo did. She just put it succinctly (as she does, and I love her for it) that I needed to help myself, and it was good advice. I don’t think I would have responded as easily to people trying to hospitalize me as I did to someone just saying “figure it out.” No one would have tried to hospitalize me, because I never would have let anyone know how much I was suffering. It was something I had to do on my own, because I had to prove to myself that I was worthy of getting better.
I say that it was not a shared experience because Hannah’s mental illness manifested itself differently than mine, but it was no less traumatic watching it on TV. It was a warning to watch myself as I continue writing, because I believe that there is a correlation between telling your own story and how it affects one’s brain. You, in a sense, spend part of your day living in the memories that cause you pain and trying to turn them into something if not beautiful, at least thought-provoking.
It also hurts that when people I know accuse me of revisionist history, they’re not remembering that I’m going to have different memories than they do. OF COURSE they’re going to have different stories than me, because their stories are their own, as well. Using Diane, Dana, Argo, and Aaron as examples because I talk about them the most, if you read what they thought about me, some things would line up perfectly and some would seem like stories from a different planet. There are so many levels to communication and memory which come into play during stories.
I also think that when they hold the mirror up to my face in the same way I do with them, sometimes I don’t like what I see, either. But it’s not my story to tell. It’s theirs. They have as much emotional room as I do, and I take nothing away from it, although I have not been as gracious about it in the past as I am now. I needed to calm the fuck down, first. Because of my PTSD, I was living my life as this big ball of id, my ego and superego underdeveloped because of the trauma I experienced as a teen.
Sarah (my therapist) and Leighton (my nurse practitioner) are helping me in a way that I’ve never experienced, because I’ve never had enough money to have both kinds of therapy at the same time on a consistent basis. Medicaid is slowly and clearly saving my life, not that it is still in danger, but because I have been failing to thrive. Every day was a battle of will to put on the mask and let go of my emotional background so that I could think logically through practical things.
It has been a job all on its own to adult. My old tapes rendered me into a puddle on the floor, my mind struggling to accept that I didn’t have time to think about them, because it was indeed a skill. In dealing with trauma, it’s a fight to keep moving on.
Watching Hannah deal with her own insecurities in some ways gave me tools. In others, it gave me nightmares. I don’t want to be so insular that I don’t notice the world around me… and yet, it’s my job. If I want to keep writing, I need to notice the world to have something to write about. If I want to keep having friends and loved ones, I cannot be so wrapped up in myself that it seems like I don’t care, when in reality there are times that I take on their problems more than my own. I do care, deeply, but sometimes showing it is hard when I am driven and focused to the point that I can’t see anything around me but what’s on my computer screen, staring back at me.
My biggest fear is a blank page, and I combat it daily. I attack it with gusto, because in healing, there is no way you’re going to come to this web site and get platitudes. You’re never going to hear me say “just snap out of it.” You’re never going to hear me say, “God has a plan for your life if you’ll only tap into it.” God doesn’t have a plan for shit. Divinity is reaching up for the mystical, but I do not believe that it works the other way around. Many people think that doing good works is what gets you into heaven. No, doing good works is what brings heaven to you. I do not believe in fear-based theology, that if you stray one little bit from what the Bible tells you, it means that you are going to burn in hell.
I believe that if you stray from the things that the mystical and divine are trying to tell you, you bring hell to you. God doesn’t happen to you. God just is. What you do with it is up to you.
It works the same way for Atheists. It doesn’t take belief in God to realize that if you are making bad decisions for your life, you are creating your own hell. It doesn’t take belief in a deity to know that when you put good into the world, it comes back to you.
The bottom line is that Christianity needs to stop focusing on the afterlife, because it does not take death to go to heaven or hell. We have heaven and hell right here. Why wait? Why “store up your treasures in heaven” hoping that the next life will be fruitful when you have the ability to make this one powerful?
I hold myself to higher standards than you can possibly imagine, which is why it’s so hard to watch myself fail. For a long time, I didn’t realize why I couldn’t get it right, especially in relationship with myself. Finding out that trauma wires the brain differently helped to an enormous degree, not to have an excuse, but an explanation.
I write so much because I believe in the power of context. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Not only do I have to own my role in relationships, I am a product of my own circumstances as well. I do not see cognitive dissonance in believing both. There are things I can control, and there are things I can’t. The journey of this life, the creation of heaven and hell for myself, is realizing what those things are and how to tell the difference.
I can’t control everything, and I cannot give in to the temptation that comes with not controlling anything. When I try to control everything, life bites me. When I control nothing, life owns me instead of being able to create my own reality. Control of nothing is a central theme of abuse, as is trying to control everything, and each path is its own hell because there is no balance. No give and take.
Watching Hannah try to navigate life by focusing only on herself was watching the consequences of taking without any give, because she wasn’t attuned to it. The best she could do was mutual weirdness.
I tried to control my life in a major way this weekend, and it failed. There was no balance between preaching on this web site and being responsible for showing up at CCC. I worked on my sermon until 6:00 AM, and told myself that I could watch TV until it was time to go to church, because I can ususally do that. Because I didn’t feel good anyway (this cold is hanging on), I fell asleep and didn’t wake up in time for choir or church. I worked on this web site for St. James and let a whole bunch of people down, because we were singing something high and difficult and I could do it in a way that the other sopranos couldn’t, not because they’re not good singers, but because I am more practiced at it than they are. It takes an amazing amount of work to keep a sectional high B flat in tune, and we had it when I was there on Thursday.
I don’t know what happened on Sunday, and it weighs on me because I wasn’t there to know. I was so driven in working on me that I dropped out of being a team player. It was a secondary injury, because the primary injury was thinking I could control not sleeping until I got home from church the next day.
And in terms of my sermon, I Monday-morning quarterbacked and realized that I could have said a million different things that could have had more impact, and then I realized that the scriptures I was working on would come around again in three years, so that sermon is done. 🙂
Small comfort for a big mistake, though. I lost control of myself at a time when I really didn’t want to. Because I was so sleep-deprived, there was no amount of caffeine that helped, because I took a caffeine pill and had a cup of tea while I was watching TV and didn’t go to church, anyway.
I created my own hell when I could have created my own heaven- getting enough sleep to wake up early before church and finish my own sermon before I went to choir. I thought I was being selfless in trying to get out my sermon before Matt’s, which I always try to do so that if anyone from my church reads this web site, they know that my ideas are my own and not something I picked up and decided to use it.
In the end, though, selfless became selfish. Watching “Girls” showed me in HD the ways I was capable of it. I didn’t show up… and showing up is how both heaven and hell happen in an instant…… whether you’re trying to control it or not.
My instinct as an abused person is that the more I let them down, the less they will want or need me and I become more insular. The battle is to keep breathing, and find ways to create the balance that Hannah could not. But at least she scared me into keeping up the trying and not so much with the isolating.
It’s wrong to think of hell as a place to go when you die. Hell is isolation into your own head, because you can drive yourself crazy better than anyone else.
Though Bethany is listed in the Gospel as the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, note that it was a place of healing long before Jesus got there. The Temple Scroll from Qumran, the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, gives the number and exact measurements from Jerusalem in terms of places where the sick should be………… relocated. There should be three separate colonies, one exclusively for lepers. None of them could be within a three thousand cubit radius (about 1400 yards), and according to John, Bethany was 15 stadia (1.72 miles) southeast… out of view of the Temple Mount. Thus, it was the perfect location to hide away the ritually unclean, for two reasons. The first is medical; it prevented the spread of disease and infection. The second is social. No one had to look at the sick and dying, either.
Because the book of Matthew tells the story of Jesus dining with Simon the Leper in Bethany, it’s safe to assume that Bethany was the leper colony mentioned in the Temple Scroll.
Leprosy, today known as Hansen’s Disease, is a bacterial infection. It spread like wildfire because getting it was as easy as coming into contact with an infected person’s cough or phlegm, depending on how much of the bacteria was in the person’s system. Additionally, when you first come into contact with the bacteria, you don’t show any symptoms. If you looked bad enough to be sent to the leper colony, you could have already had the disease for years without knowing it, making it even easier for leprosy to become the “gift that keeps on giving.”
Today, it can be cured by a six or 12 month treatment of multiple antibiotics (depending on severity), now freely provided by the World Health Organization in case any of you Texans decide eating armadillo meat (yes, really) is a good idea.
Of course, back then there was no treatment, because not only had antibiotics not been invented, the idea of something called an “infection” or even a “germ” wouldn’t be introduced for hundreds of years. The only answer was complete isolation. Plus, lepers are not attractive people, which contributed to the temple’s need to stash them away.
Patients present with inflammation of the nerves, respiratory tract, skin, and eyes. As it progresses, lepers develop an inability to feel pain, so not only are their bodies and faces oddly shaped from the inflammation, they tend to have inexplicable wounds all over them because they’ve been hurt without even knowing it. In Bethany, the terrain is hilly, with a lot of brush and short trees… in other words, plenty of opportunities to trip and fall. If you can’t feel an injury, and you can’t see it, you won’t treat it, either. It’s a great recipe for secondary infection.
The classic image of leprosy is that it makes your fingers and toes fall off. This is untrue, although the people of the time thought so. What they thought of as fingers and toes “falling off” was actually secondary injuries causing tissue damage enough to make cartilage absorb into the body and bones to shorten.
If there’s nerve damage in the face, you lose the ability to blink, which can lead to blindness and even more chance for serious secondary injury and/or infection.
Leprosy rates are higher in places of poverty. This makes sense, because in the Aramaic, Bethany (or Beth Anya) means “house of misery” or “poor house.” Painting a picture of Bethany is not a beautiful one in terms of population. If you lived there, you were probably poor, sick, or both. It didn’t matter to Jesus, though. It was just the last stop before journeying into Jerusalem. While he was there, he found friends close enough to make it feel like home.
Jesus met Mary, Martha and Lazarus when he and the Disciples were passing through Bethany (although the village isn’t named in the Gospel of Luke) and the sisters opened their home to them. When Martha complained to Jesus that Mary was not helping her in the kitchen while he taught the Disciples, he said, Martha, Martha… you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her. After that, they remained close.
When their brother got sick, Mary and Martha naturally wanted their friend. Not only did they need him for emotional support, they thought that Jesus might be able to heal Lazarus altogether. They sent Jesus a message saying simply, the one you love is ill. Notice that they did not ask Jesus to come to Bethany at all. They did not send a message of expectation. They knew that their friendship bond was strong enough for the message to stand on its own. St. Augustine was the first person to point this out, saying it was sufficient that Jesus should know; for it is not possible that any man should at one and the same time love a friend and desert him.
When he heard the message, Jesus said, this illness is not going to prove fatal; rather it has happened for the sake of the glory of God, so that God’s Son should be glorified by means of it. Political tensions were growing surrounding Jesus’ healing ability. I do not believe that Jesus knew he would raise Lazarus from the dead, although there are many theologians who do. At that point, I think he believed in his ability to deal with the situation no matter what it was, but that when he healed Lazarus, it would give the Sanhedrin enough evidence to convict him. Jesus did not mean that he was going to Bethany to show off by bringing a dead man to life. He meant that if he healed Lazarus, he was the one that was going to die.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Clare Booth Luce, The Book of Laws
There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
John 15:13
Looking at this scripture in this light, it makes more sense that Jesus waited two days before beginning the journey to Bethany. The gospel does not record why those two extra days were needed, but venturing into fiction, when you know you’re going to die, there are things you have to take care of, first. Perhaps he had to take care of his own panic before he could lead his disciples back into fire.
In John 11:6-10, the disciples are terrified, and they show it:
Now, when Jesus had received the news that Lazarus was ill, he continued to stay where he was for two days. But after that he said to his disciples: “Let us go to Judaea again.” His disciples said to him: “Rabbi, things had got to a stage when the Jews were trying to find a way to stone you, and do you propose to go back there?” Jesus answered: “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If a man walks in the day-time, he does not stumble because he has the light of this world. But if a man walks in the night-time, he does stumble because the light is not in him.”
I believe that those two days were needed for Jesus’ presence of mind and clear vision. He had to pray for discernment, and ask the hard questions, like “am I really ready for this? If I perform another miracle, that’s it. My days are numbered because I already have a mark on my head and this will just send the Sanhedrin over the edge… and if they take me, they’re going to take me in broad daylight, because I will not run.”
When they reach Bethany, Mary is understandably upset, and so is Jesus:
When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
I depart from most theologians on this scripture. Most of the commentary I’ve read says that Jesus intentionally waited until Lazarus was indisputably dead just to make the miracle that much more…. well… miraculous. But the words “greatly disturbed in spirit” and “deeply moved” do not point to that conclusion.
To me, it is a moment of undeniable humanness. Jesus, in his need for clarity and discernment, is late. When the crowd reaches the tomb, John says again that Jesus is “deeply disturbed.” I believe he has heard the Jews in the crowd who said could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying? After all, it’s going to be the Jews who scoffed at him who ignore the miracle entirely and rat him out to the Sanhedrin, anyway…. and he knows it.
He prays in supplication to show holy authority. The power to raise Lazarus from the dead does not come from him, but from God… and when he yells Lazarus, come out!, inexplicably, he does. Jesus then says to unbind him, and let him go.
This story is quite problematic because it is so great a miracle surely the other gospel writers would have heard about it. It’s also a problem because John says that this miracle was Jesus’ undoing, while in the other three gospels it is the cleansing of the temple… the story that beget the saying, “when asking ‘what would Jesus do,’ remember that getting angry and flipping over tables is a viable option.” To me, the cleansing of the temple seems like a much more punishable offense, but at the same time, if Jesus hadn’t cured Lazarus, would he have received such a spectacle of a welcome in Jerusalem (celebrated on Palm Sunday)?
I believe he would’ve. Jesus did something that none of the other Jews had the chutzpah to achieve- making the temple sacred once more. This story comes across as a parable mimicking Luke 16:19-31, which talks about a rich man and a poor man in the afterlife. The poor man, coincidentally (or not), is also named Lazarus. In it, the rich man begs Abraham to let Lazarus put some water on him because he is in agony. When Abraham denies his request, he asks him to send Lazarus to his house to warn his family of their fate if they keep treating poor people the way he did. Then, this conversation takes place:
Abraham: They have Moses and the Prophets to tell them the score. Let them listen to them.
Unnamed Rich Man: I know, Father Abraham, but they’re not listening. If someone came back to them from the dead, they would change their ways.
Abraham: If they won’t listen to Moses and the Prophets, they’re not going to be convinced by someone who rises from the dead.
The Jews absolutely wailing at Lazarus’ death did not believe in a God who could change their lives even though a person rose from the dead right in front of them. We cannot possibly know what actually happened that day, but we cannot ignore the truth in the story altogether. It doesn’t matter whether Jesus raised Lazarus corporeally, but it does matter that if you feel dead inside, there is a way out.
Think about all the secrets that burn you up… the ones in which you’d rather be dead than tell. Everyone has them, because we are all human. What would it take to resurrect you and free you from that pain? Jesus is talking about walking in more than literal sunlight. The darkness is where we hide the things we’d rather not share, and in keeping them pent up, we limit ourselves from resurrection into a new life, one in which we can be our flawed human selves and have people love us, anyway.
Today as we celebrate the sainthood of those who have gone before us, I ask that you remember we call everyone who has passed on “saints,” but that doesn’t mean they were perfect when they were alive. They had the experience of loving and living just as we do right now, in the same “heavenly hell.” Talk about them as they were, and tell their stories of the death and resurrection that happened over and over in their lifetimes…. every time they had enough of the life they were living and decided to reach up for something more. Every time they resolved a problem they thought would never end. Every time they tried for perfection and reality got in the way but they bounced back, full and alive again. Talk about their Good Fridays, and every Easter afterward.
I met Brian O’Leary at GLOBAL (which I think stands for Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual Alliance; it’s been too many years for me to really retain that kind of information.) He and his partner, George, had moved from Boston after George graduated from Harvard with his MBA. He was traveling the world because at the time, he was a consultant for McKinzie & Co. While he was gone, we partied at their house, thus the picture for George to enjoy while we drank at his house without him. It is one of my fondest memories of college, because not only was I crazy in love with the girl holding the small G, I’d been chatting online with the guy holding the capital G, who’d just moved from Ohio after attending Oberlin conservatory and wanted to know more about GLOBAL before he attended his first meeting. It was love at first e-mail, since my high school girlfriend was Canadian and Giles is from Nova Scotia. He was also a vocal performance major, and that also won him accolades in the new friend department. It is interesting to note that all three of us are now living in the DC area, although Kathleen and I are still estranged.
Whether that’s good or bad, I really don’t know. But what I do know is that when Brian posted this picture on Facebook, I saw it this morning and was filled with gratitude at the reminiscence of it all.
Giles and I are both much smaller than we were in this picture. We’ve both lost a lot of weight, and now Giles looks like a model while I look like a 7th grader (except for the wrinkles around my eyes, which is the BEST part about getting glasses). Case in point: my roommate, Samantha, smokes Marlboro Lights, and I agreed to buy her a pack if she would just drive me around for a day because it was much cheaper than Uber. I got carded and the clerk nearly fell on the floor when he saw my birth date. It’s the little things in life. It really is.
But back to the party at hand. I was in a happy-go-lucky mood, and I really enjoyed hanging out with the GLOBAL crew, as well as getting to meet some of Brian and George’s other friends. Additionally, the house was gorgeous, with sumptuous chairs and what looked like a professional decorator had their way with them. Turns out, it was all Brian all the time. He did a wonderful job of making the house look modern and comfortable all at the same time. It made me jealous that even as a college student, Brian knew how to adult LIKE A BOSS. He also knew (knows) how to be a gracious host and a fine mixologist, meaning that he put everything out on the table and let us experiment.
The thing I remember most about that party is it was the time before social anxiety, one where I could just relax and start up conversations with everyone without feeling all self-conscious and like it was time to go home 15 minutes after I got there. Shortly afterward was when Kathleen and I moved, which was really the start of my downward decline into Friday and Saturday night Netflix and pajamas, or books and cookies with hot tea. Now I throw parties with me as my own guest, the kind where I only have to put on pants if I want to……. the exception being if you’re coming over to have Netflix and kettle corn or read with me in companionable silence. 😛
And, of course, if you come on Friday, it’s pizza night. That is beauty in and of itself, because I know my way around pizza. If you don’t like what I pick, we’ll order two.
My new alarm clock is the bomb diggity. I love how the sound fills the room, and the fact that I can use it as a speaker phone as long as I have my iPhone or iPad attached by Bluetooth. In fact, as long as my iPad is connected to Wi-Fi, everything that goes to my phone goes to it automatically. For some people, this would be a dealbreaker. For me, it makes it where if I leave one or the other upstairs, I do not have to make a mad dash from the porch to my room trying to catch the phone before it stops ringing. The only thing that I need to change about it is how it wakes me up. I have it set to FM radio, because I used to like to wake up to NPR. Now I realize that with the amount of sleeping medication I take, NPR doesn’t cut through my dreams easily enough to actually wake up when it goes off. Sometimes, I am alert enough to catch it on the first try. Some days, I’m just not. The soothing voices of the commentators are more likely to make me sleep deeper. 🙂
I should change my alarm clock to Bluetooth and set it to the same ring my phone makes. There is no snooze button on that. With my ringtone, I tend to shake awake immediately (another gift from my father passed on genetically) because I don’t know who’s on the other end of the line. It’s a gift because pastors often get very serious calls in the middle of the night, and the last thing my father wanted in a parishioner’s time of need was for people to think that they woke him up. They had enough to worry about, you know?
I feel the same way. I do not want any of my parishioners to apologize for waking me up as if it’s inconvenience to take their call in the middle of the night when their son has just died. I come from a long line of jobs where I’ve said, “this is Leslie Lanagan, how may I help you?” Being a pastor is not really that different, except the calls you take are rarely scheduling an appointment at 3:00 AM. If someone calls in the middle of the night, it’s never something good.
Someone has died, someone has been rushed to the emergency room, someone has been arrested, someone needs to go to the bedside and administer last prayers. In the Methodist church, there are no true “last rites,” but in the hours of someone passing away, they need their pastor more than ever…. or perhaps the family is Methodist now, but they come from a church where there *are* last rites and want them to be administered anyway. When that happens, you don’t want the chaplain on duty. You want the person that has been the everpresentlovingkindness that you’ve been every Sunday since they started attending.
The phrase “there’s no present like the time” comes from a jeweler’s commercial whose name I now forget, but it sticks with me all the time. There are other commercials that stick out almost as clearly, like when PBS came up with “the channel that changes you.” That first one, tho……
What better present could you give anyone but your time? I am at the space in my life where I do not need more material things. I have pared down to the basic essentials. If you want to give me a gift, the best thing you could offer is cooking for me or taking me out to dinner just to look at you, face to face… perhaps reaching across the table to touch my hand or afterward, giving me a sincere hug and kiss on the cheek. Pri-Diddy had to reschedule from Tuesday to Friday, so my anticipation of seeing her has had a chance to build. She is not giving me anything but her presence, but it is worth more than anything she could give. I hope she feels the same way about me, because Prianka is one of the people who has crossed over into that friend in which I can confide anything without judgment. Like Bryn and Argo, we’ve not been afraid to delve into the deepest parts of ourselves in order to move forward. Though Pri-Diddy is younger, she has this way about her that makes me think she was an Indigo child, wise beyond her years. My guru in a tiny body, born in the same hospital where Mother Theresa worked in Calcutta. She shows me YouTube videos of the gurus she likes, and is impressed that I worked at the Graduate School of Social Work at the same time Brene Brown attended. But, of course, then she was not Brene Brown, Trademark. She was just one of the students in which I had to help with her computer problems, just like everyone else running to complete a paper.
I take pride in her success, not because I was the one that got her through grad school, but because I take pride in all of “my students” that have gone on to do great things. Also, because I helped the administration as well, the director said that I had an open invitation to attend. WOW it was a big mistake to leave for Alexandria, but I learned lessons that couldn’t have been learned any other way. I was young and STUPID in love with my girlfriend, and there was no way I wanted her to move without me. Although looking back at my life, I should have let her. I got really sick with depression being A) far from home and missing school and 2) not having the right medicines so that I went from a little bit depressed to completely batshit crazy in no time at all. Although, truth be told, I did not miss class as much as I missed working at UH. My bosses were kind and supportive in a way that I haven’t had since… except for Randy, who tried to take me under his wing and I couldn’t lean into that pure, white, professional love because of the hurricane swirling at home.
I did find a church, though, and that helped mightily. Kathleen and I both loved it, and invested to the point that we helped install the tile labyrinth in the floor and Kathleen joined Brian’s “Make Your Own Stained Glass” class. It turned out beautifully, and it hung in our bathroom window so it could get the most sun.
In the end, though, it did not help my depression enough, and after 18 months in Alexandria, we’d both had enough of each other. We stopped giving each other the present of time. Kathleen joined a softball team and when I went to support her, she made a point of touching men intimately, like brushing their hair out of their faces a little too slowly right in front of me so she could make it clear that her intentions with me were over. We broke up in August or September, and by October she’d met the man she was going to marry.
It gutted me like a fish, and my dad came to our townhouse when Kathleen wasn’t home and just said, “leave all the furniture, get the small things you want to take, and let’s go home.” He did all the driving as we pushed through from DC to Houston, drinking coffee and listening to Tony Robbins, whom I’ve come to love.
I don’t care what you think of him. In my need, what he gave me was priceless, which is the ability to build myself up. The thing he said that gave me the most pause is that sometimes we are frozen with the paralysis of analysis, and that sums me up to a great degree. Although, there was another truly great line that I carry with me as well, which is that we learn more when we’re pondering rather than partying.
That has been true for me in the breakup with Dana as well. We did a lot of partying when we should have been pondering, and that was a theme we carried through our relationship a lot. It was so much easier to get along on a best friend/partying/sex level than it ever was to truly connect with each other down to our souls. When I started to peel back my own layers, and this is solely my opinion, she wasn’t ready to peel back hers. It may not be her story, but it is mine. The deeper I delved into myself, the more I wanted to know about her. We were handfasted in a truly shitty club in terms of our childhood, and I wanted to know every detail, some of which she could talk about, and some she couldn’t because she didn’t know the answers herself.
It was at that time we began to pull away from each other, because I didn’t act the same. In fact, she made the point of telling me that my eyes didn’t look like home anymore, and even though I excused myself to go to bed not to up the ante, it was a direct shot into my soul, an arrow I have not extracted and won’t for a long time. I didn’t want to know why she felt that way. I just went to bed and cried myself to sleep, trying to self-soothe and tell myself I was worthy of love, even if it wasn’t hers.
I gave thanks for our separate bedrooms, because even though we were still married and dedicated to each other, we had different processes in terms of trying to fall asleep. Many people thought that was the beginning of the end, and told me so. I told them to shut that down, because it actually made our relationship better. We liked having our own huge amounts of space in the house, and room for our electronics on the other side of the bed. It seems crazy, but it worked. Having the space to spread out made us sleep better and because of it, fights didn’t seem so important the next day. Besides, at the end of the day we were too tired for sex, anyway, so the naughty neighbor complex was probably the best thing ever, in my opinion, anyway. For us, there was something intimate about looking at each other, holding each other, falling in love and connecting in sunlight and energy rather than the part of the day where we just needed rest. We gave each other the present of our time when we were the most jazzed to see each other, and not when we were out of it with exhaustion.
One of the other reasons we liked separate bedrooms is that I tended to write to you at night, and I didn’t want to interrupt her sleep with the sound of my fingers clacking on the keys. At the time, I had a 17-inch Mac desktop in my room, and it was “my place” to wind down. On the other hand, it gave me too much privacy with Argo, where Dana wouldn’t read what I’d sent until the next day and couldn’t do anything about the fact that I was “over the line, Smokey. Mark it zero…….” I’d give anything to take that back, the ways in which I sent Argo things I shouldn’t, thinking I was brave and crazy and trying to push her away all in one breath. I loved her mind, AND I wanted to continue being married. Those two things battled in my brain to such an enormous degree that I told Argo it was getting harder and harder to look at myself in the mirror anymore. In love on the ground and “in love” in the cloud made it where I truly felt shame, deep and abiding. I could no longer give myself the gift of my own time, because if Dana didn’t want to be with me, it was nothing compared to how bad I didn’t want to be with me, either.
The difference is that Dana had a choice to leave me, and I didn’t. I had to sit with my pain and confusion and work it the fuck out. I had to dig myself out of the hole I’d dug, and it was deep enough to compare it to burying a body.
It was at about that time I saw a link to an article on Facebook that I read about a woman who saw an empty grave at a cemetery and jumped into it, laying down on the bare earth. She talked about feeling death, feeling where she would go when she died, and how it made her less afraid of dealing with her own problems because she dug herself out of the earth physically, which changed her mindset completely. She’d laid there long enough to really see what was important and what was not, and arose a different person than the one she was when she’d just lay there, alone in her own thoughts and shortcomings.
In that article, she gave me the present of her time, which allowed me to look at things much more deeply than I ever had before. I started to forgive myself. I started to feel my own worth. I started to realize what was important to me and what wasn’t.
The most important thing, to me, became mending my relationship with Argo because I’d intentionally caused her to run away, treated her like crap so she would. I made my narrative so angry, when in reality it would have meant more to me than anything in the world to have the present of her time, if only for a few minutes.
In her last missive, she used words like probably and maybe rather than always and never, tears running down my face in astonishment because Good Friday had become Easter once again. Even if nothing ever happens in the future, because we both want peace without and within, I stood speechless in front of her, laid bare by her grace. It took her time to write that e-mail, a present of time so great that it is the e-mail I keep in my Kindle case and lean on it when I feel unworthy and unloved.
I walk taller with our resolution and the future doesn’t matter. What matters is that in my need for peace, she gave it to me with her whole heart. In the moment, it felt like a sacrAMENt, a blessing to move forward with grace and mercy for others. There is nothing so sacred to me than passing those presents along.
My invitation to you is to think about this: there’s no time like the present to make the present your time. What are you going to do with it? What relationships are you going to heal? What present of time are you going to give yourself?
Thanks to Humibid, Pseudophed, and ibuprofen, my cold has not gotten any worse… but I’m not better yet, either. To top it all off, today is the first day of my period. I just feel like crap all over. Seriously, body. Thanks for that…. although it does explain why, two days ago, I ate half a pan pizza all by myself. Then, the next day, I ate the rest of it. During PMS, it’s the only time I am truly hungry. My body just says, “EAT ALL THE THINGS.” The rest of the time, I am content with very small meals and a granola bar every now and again.
I need to go to the grocery store (still), because I am running out of things to eat AND I still don’t have any cough medicine. It’s time to up my game. When I truly have a cough, I skip right from Robitussin to Delsym, which I believe is actually the better choice. It also comes in my two favorite flavors, orange and grape. When I’m on Delsym, it really does work as well as codeine, except that sometimes codeine works better at night. We’ll see how it goes. My GP wants to see me back in two weeks, but if my cough gets any worse, I may go back earlier and get a prescription for the codeine version of cough syrup. It makes me sick to my stomach, but it’s worth it when I’m asleep and can’t feel the nausea, anyway.
Speaking of nausea, and I’ve had a lot of it over my lifetime, my favorite remedy in the world is ginger Altoids or Gosling’s ginger beer. Gosling’s is the best ginger beer on the planet, because it gets real. It’s hot and spicy, amazing straight out of the fridge as not to water it down with ice. I’ve been on Lamictal for almost ten years now, and one of the manufacturers of the generic included an ingredient that made me feel pregnant all the time. I called it the “blue diamond of death.” I also carried ginger Altoids in my bag to avoid throwing it back up, thus my nausea recommendation above. Haribo also makes an amazing lemon-ginger gummy that works just as well if you can find them- they’re pretty rare as children don’t like them much (they burn with the hotness).
Now that my pharmacy has a different manufacturer, I don’t get that ever-present nausea anymore, because the “blue diamond of death” has been replaced by a white, round pill with no side effects at all. I am a simple woman. It doesn’t take much to impress me, but this certainly did. It improved my quality of life by quite a bit.
As of right now, I am sitting in bed with my iPad and Bluetooth keyboard, with a roll of toilet paper (I don’t have any Kleenex, either.) and a trash bag next to my bed so I don’t have wads of toilet paper all over my room. Yesterday, I was in full-on nesting mode, what Dana and I used to call “lose the egg” day. My room is spotless except for the full laundry baskets filled with clothes I need to wash and put away. In order to motivate myself, I am listening to a channel I created on Spotify called “The Real Slim Lady.” It’s everything that Eminem has ever put out.
Don’t judge me. The Slim Shady albums (both I and II) are AMAZING. “Headlights” on SSII brings me to tears every time, especially if you’ve seen “8 Mile.” I have therapy at 4:00, plus some worksheets I need to finish before then. There are certain “homework assignments” that my Medicaid requires to make sure I’m progressing in the right direction. It’s the “gangsta rap and handle it” approach this AM… although I don’ think Em is really gangsta because there’s so much pop mixed in. I may need to switch to Mike Jones later in the afternoon to make sure I’ve got it “all sewed up.” Sarah will be so glad to hear about my job interview, even though I didn’t get the job. I can’t wait to tell her all about it. Afterward, I think I will go to the liquor store and treat myself to a six-pack of Gosling’s. It makes me feel wird to go to a liquor store just to buy soda, but I haven’t found a grocery store that carries it.
The last time I went to buy it, one of the other customers asked me what it was good for. I told her there were two excellent cocktails she could make- Kraken and ginger or Old Overholt and ginger. Rye and ginger carries so much weight in my heart, because I’d never heard of it before I went to Ottawa and hung out with Meag. Apparently it is not popular in the U.S., but one of the best cocktails I have ever put in my mouth. It was another Canadian that introduced me to Old Overholt, a friend invited to “orphan Thanksgiving” at Susan & Diane’s. It has a great price point, about $17 a bottle and tastes much better (to me, anyway) than anything much more expensive… the exception that I don’t have any because I don’t drink much anymore. I’m just over it. My taste buds have changed, with the exception that I was so nervous during a date I drank more than I should’ve and suffered the consequences.
Being two years away from 40 makes hangovers not even worth it, especially since I don’t enjoy alcohol much anymore. For instance, Dom gave me a 12-pack of Tecate left over from one of his parties, and that was in June. There are still six left. It doesn’t matter- I am so up for fun and shenanigans that people think I must be drunk, anyway.
There are two things that began changing my taste buds. The first is that I do not enjoy drinking in front of people in recovery, and I have a lot of friends who have suffered with addiction. The second thing is that I would rather make caffeine my drug of choice, because it makes the evening last longer. I remember going to clubs and karaoke with recovering friends in Portland. The first time I came home wired for sound because the bar gave free refills to designated drivers, and I must have had, like, seven Diet Cokes. The second time, the bar sold Monster.
Mission accomplished.
My favorite energy drink is Rock Star Recovery. I am sure it is supposed to be for the seriously hung over, because it has B vitamins in it. But it is delicious beyond belief. Most convenience stores carry the lemonade, but the orangeade seems to come straight from heaven. The grapeade is good, too, and so is the coconut water.
When I worked at the airport as a line cook, though, I depended on Monster 2x. These are not for the faint of heart, but work beautifully if you are on the brunch shift.
Speaking of the brunch shift, one of the funniest lines that Anthony Bourdain wrote in “Kitchen Confidential” is that he’d gotten fired from some kind of fancy restaurant, and the only job he could get was brunch cook. He wrote that “the smell of failure is Hollandaise.” At the time, I was a brunch cook as well, and I laughed so hard there were tears and snot running down my face, especially since I HATE THE SMELL OF HOLLANDAISE… although one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten from Dana is that my Hollandaise is better than hers (she’s Cordon Bleu certified), and she was REALLY impressed that I never used a blender. I would just add the eggs and the vinegar or lemon juice and whisk like a motherfucker until I reached sabayon and began to add the butter.
Luckily, at Biddy’s we didn’t use Hollandaise, but Bearnaise. It smells so much better that I actually do like it a lot. Even though the smell of Hollandaise makes me nauseous all on my own, there was another tipping point. The dishwashing liquid we used at Biddy’s smelled strongly of lemon, and washing the egg pans at the end of our shift (Dana and I worked together at brunch) made it a hundred times worse. No, I take that back. It made it a THOUSAND times worse.
Sometimes I wish I could go back to that time in my life, because Dana and I were so good together in the kitchen. We had the dance down perfectly. Not only did we have “the dance” perfected, we also had such a strong connection to each other that we could save tons of time on tickets by being able to have entire conversations with our eyes. There was only one time that I made a true mistake. I had a migraine and thought I could handle cooking on my own, anyway. I cut Dana and she went to the bar for her shift drink. I got so sick I just wanted to curl up on the floor, but according to Oregon law, if you’ve had an alcoholic drink, you CANNOT come back into the kitchen. That was a pump up the gangsta rap and get it HANDLED moment as well.
There’s nothing like cooking in a pub when you’d literally rather be dead than feel the migraine coursing through your capillaries. I can’t remember who walked to the convenience store for me, but one of the cooks did and got me a Monster and I took some ibuprofen. I “Kept Calm and Sold the Rail,” but it was literally the worst day of my life in terms of professional cooking. You cannot imagine my relief when the kitchen closed for the night.
It makes me go to my happy place when I think of working at Biddy’s, especially since I feel so bad right now.
As predicted, the recruiter called and said that I was not smart enough for a basic computer support position. She didn’t use those words, of course, but that was the gist of it. I get it. I am not a math person. But never in the history of my career have I had to figure out equations in order to say, “Thank you for calling, my name is Leslie. How can I help you?” Even when the computer support job involved knowing command line linux. As I told her in the interview, those things are different skills altogether. It’s back to the drawing board, but I know something will come up. I saw a Hulu commercial that made me laugh- something about getting a job in McClean and “what can silver do for you?” For those not in the know, the silver line is basically the train to the tech corridor.
Apparently, I interview well. One of the things that the recruiter said was that I was great to work with, and I think that if the decision was up to her, I probably would have gotten the job. This is the second interview in which I have done well, but other people have done more weller than me. It’s ok. I will find the right fit, even if it’s flipping burgers. I’m actually really good at that, by the way.
I think it’s funny that I’ve called Argo a burger-flippin’ ho as a joke many times, and now I might get that chance to be my own. 😛
I can’t remember whether I’ve told you this or not (too lazy to look it up), but despite all of our strife, I got the sweetest letter from Argo that I’ve gotten in months, so I printed it out and I keep it in the pocket of my Kindle case so I can look at it when I feel sad or nervous. She has this way of building me up that no one else ever has, so it is wonderful to be able to read that e-mail when I’m about to go into a stress-filled situation. It’s one of her superpowers as I wander trying to find my own.
One of them, apparently, is interviewing. I’m not taking the rejections with me. I am taking the sweet words that the people rejecting me have said, because I know that they are sincere… especially the ones from Christ Church, because I know for sure that it was a hard decision for them. I look forward to earning my superpower as youth volunteer, because I need it for my resume in case I find another youth director position that doesn’t require being ordained. I can’t wait to meet Rev. Susannah and work with her to accomplish her goals. If she wants me to, I can also help with visioning, but that is her call and not mine. Perhaps she is a visionary as well, and I will help her carry her mission forward whether I agree with her or not. As a volunteer, it is not my job to work against her, but to help her as much as I can.
I read a post on Facebook that resonated with me to the point that it hurt. It said to be careful of destination addiction, that what you’re seeking is somewhere else. I have fallen prey to that many times, and I am committing to settling in DC forever. If something goes terribly wrong, that doesn’t mean I need to run. It means that I need to take my Klonopin and Neurontin, pump up some gangsta rap, and get it HANDLED. DC is my home now, and I am putting down some serious roots. My choir director is overjoyed that I will be here over Christmas, because we are doing some serious work together.
I am starting to believe, really believe, that singing is one of my superpowers. When I warm up, I use different muscles than I do in my daily life, and it makes me walk taller with much more confidence than usual. I am going to commit to asking Nae if he needs a wedding singer, because that would help bring in money, even if it’s a small honorarium. I have thought about looking for a job as a ringer in another church, but I can’t. CCC is my home, and it is helping me mentally as I get my shit together. I also, under no circumstances, want to stop working with Nae.
I will also commit to asking Giles if he will work with me as well, because he was my first voice teacher and carries so much weight in my heart because of it. He’s so busy during the school year that it may not work out, but all he can say is no, and he will definitely say no if I never ask the question. Giles and I met through GLOBAL, the gay/straight alliance at University of Houston. He became my voice teacher when he was taking a pedagogy class and needed a student. He listened to my recording at Epiphany, and he made me feel so good about it. He told me how much stronger my voice has gotten since we last worked together, which of course brought tears to my eyes.
I also wouldn’t mind working with Zach again, because he gave me some pointers that really, really helped, like massaging my trachea before warming up.
Speaking of which, I need to see if deep-tissue massage and chiropractic appointments are covered by my insurance. I think it would really help in terms of the problems with my back. My friends Susie and Cynthia told me that I look like I walk around in constant pain, and they’re not wrong. When I think about my back, though, it connects to the day I sent Meag a picture of it and she said she couldn’t wait to get her hands on me (no flirt intended). She is one of the best LMTs in Canada, evidenced by the fact that the Canadian board that certifies LMTs has asked her to be on the panels more than once.
In other news, my dad is coming to visit soon. I can’t wait to have a few days with him all to myself. His superpower is that when he called, he told me he was coming over a weekend so he could go to church with me. If that’s not the sweetest music I’ve heard in a long time, I don’t know what is. Our love is a superpower that runs so deep I’m not sure I even have words for it.
I feel like a putz for not showing up at church today, but in my own head, I have a very good excuse…. literally. I have a head cold that started out as allergies and is now complete with cough. Not something that requires more than a little Robitussin, just one of those dry coughs that requires Humibid and a Nalgene full of water every time I finish the bottle. My mask is full, and my throat is dry. I thought that would make a very poor singing experience, and from past church services, I know this to be true. Plus, just in case it is a true common cold and not waking up with the traditional dryness from allergies, I didn’t want to give my choir the gift that keeps on giving. They will thank me for this when I get there on Thursday night.
I promise.
Having a cold is also a slightly different warm-up than when I am well. It requires blowing my nose approximately 58 times, taking Pseudophed to try and clear the mask, and as I mentioned above, Humibid to keep the snot flowing and to keep my nasal passages from completely drying out. You can’t just take Humibid, though, because it doesn’t thin secretions all on its own. It’s the water that helps the Humibid activate, which is wonderful until you have to go to the bathroom every 10-15 minutes…. so much fun during worship.
But back to the warm-up. I start with breathing exercises. I put a hymnal or a Bible or both on my abdomen and try to lift them as I breathe in, then switch to glissandos and portomentos designed to go to the highest and lowest depths of my range. Then, I put my tongue into my hard palate and make these loud, nasal sounds in the middle of my range, and then drop my tongue down toward my soft palate to open up the sound. A few downward scales like this, and my throat relaxes enough to do the rest of my scales and arpeggios. It takes me about a half hour to be truly ready to sing. I cannot go into rehearsal cold, because I find that getting into the zone helps both my tone and my sight-reading equally. In fact, towards the end of my warm-up, I take out a hymnal and turn to a page randomly. If it’s something I already know, I flip to another random page.
You have to be ready for music, and it has to be ready for you. I am new to this choir, so nearly everything that my conductor pulls out is new to me. While everyone else is singing something they know, I’m singing it fresh, and I don’t want to stick out like a sore thumb. Luckily, most of my music is marked up from years past, which helps to a tremendous degree. When I’m really having trouble with a rhythm (even as a trumpet player, I am not the best reader in the world), I cheat. I look up a Youtube video or try to find the piece on Spotify. Between those two resources, I tend to find every piece I’m looking for, especially John Rutter.
My conductor is fond of Rutter just as I am, but DAMN. Some of the things he throws at choirs are gorgeous and rhythmically difficult at the same time. As I said yesterday, I am not that great of a math person, and subdivision eats my lunch most days. Life would be so much easier if I could just change notes when the Spirit moves me. 😛
I spend a lot of time wishing everything was in Common time.
I do have a great ear, though, so most of the time listening to a piece once or twice gets the sheet music to make sense. One of these days, I’ll get a solo with a cadenza, which is code for “do whatever you want as long as it’s in the right key.” I can’t remember which conductor it was, probably Strauss, because he’s one of the funniest….. Anyway, there’s a soloist doing a cadenza that basically goes through every every key ever written during her cadenza and finally finds her way back to the one written. Strauss leans over and whispers, “welcome home.”
My other favorite story regarding Strauss is that he was conducting a piece with a lot of brass. He stops the rehearsal and says, “first trombone! You’re playing too loud!” Second trombone replies that he isn’t here yet. Without missing a beat, Strauss says, “well, when he gets here, tell him he’s playing too loud.”
Which goes back to my own orchestra days at HSPVA. I was in one of Doc Morgan’s jazz ensembles (unfortunately, the one that DIDN’T have Eric Harland and Jason Moran, but I did sit next to Jon Durbin, now in a famous band called “The Suffers.”), and at least once a week, the conductor would stop the entire orchestra and yell, “LESLIE LANAGAN! GET RID OF THAT JAZZ SOUND!” It wasn’t like I was swinging notes in William Tell or anything, but apparently I wasn’t tapering notes or something like that. Whatever it was, he could tell.
The best day in orchestra ever for me was when first chair (Norman) was absent during preparing for Christmas, and I got to be the horse in “Sleigh Ride.” It was a magnificent moment, and I’m so glad I remembered to put it in the pensieve. Apparently, it prepared me to be a splendid jackass. 😛
The other funniest conversation in my recent memory happened at Second Baptist, when I went with my dad and played in the orchestra. All the trumpet players were sitting outside having coffee during the break between rehearsal and worship, just breaking each other’s balls as trumpet players do. It’s kind of our thing.
Mike said, “haven’t you played with us before?”
My dad said, “notice we haven’t asked her back.”
Mike said, “you can replace your father at any time.”
No, I couldn’t, but it was so funny that the entire table laughed, and we continued to flip each other shit like we’d been playing together our whole lives. Trumpet players at heart, even me, are seriously fifteen-year-old boys.
No, seriously.
Believe it or don’t, but I had a hard time choosing between playing at Second Baptist as a ringer and singing at Epiphany. I think I made the right choice, though, because by that time, I was trying to become a more serious singer, and I did. Joseph Painter made me into the singer I am, the one where my opera voice flips on. In fact, he got “my opera voice” where I could control it rather than it just flipping on randomly. When my conductor at CCC did a voice placement with me, I sang higher and easily than I ever have before, including a high D and E flat that amazed even me. I didn’t know I had those notes inside me, much less in tune.
He asked me what kind of rep I wanted to work on in terms of solos, and I told him that it didn’t matter. I could do classical to Sandi Patty. And then we had a good laugh about that, because not only is Sandi Patty’s music a source of humor with church musicians, so is the fact that she has become a Botticelli painting all her own.
I also played him a bit of Cynthia Clawson’s Immortal, Invisible– one of my favorites not because of the solo, but because of the accompaniment.
For now, though, we’re going to stick with classical, most notably the Mozart Alleluia. I also want another shot at Rutter’s The Lord is My Shepherd, because when I listened to the recording, I noticed some things that were not as clean as I wanted them to be, because when I woke up that morning, I was so sick that I had to sit in the shower for almost an hour to get my voice to some semblance of normal. I didn’t have as much control over my voice as I wanted. I sang the entire solo at the 9:00 service, and I collapsed afterward because all the pressure was off and I couldn’t wait to get home because I was hurting all over. It was then that I remembered that I was still introducing the choir at the 11:00 service and I almost cried. What do you do in that situation? You take ibuprofen and move the fuck on. It wasn’t terrible by any means, but if you’re a singer, you’d be able to pick out the vocal fatigue in a hot second…. and don’t think the other choir members didn’t notice in both services.
However, I couldn’t have asked for a better recording under the circumstances. I am so proud of it that sometimes I cry when I listen to it, not because I am so impressed with myself, but because I know how much work it took to make it happen under disastrous circumstances. The flaws that I hear would only be obvious to another singer, and it was one of the joys of my life when Dana’s mom grabbed me after the 9:00 service and said, “THAT VOICE! Where did it come from!” Luckily, it came from inside me, despite all the obstacles in my way.
Which reminds me that I probably could have muscled through this morning, but it was not a morning in which I thought that would go well. My throat hurts despite all the water, Humibid, ibuprofen, and Pseudophed. There’s nothing harder than leaving the house when you feel like complete and total crap. I will probably go to the grocery store at some point, though, because I don’t actually have any Robitussin, and I might spring for some of those lozenges that deaden your throat since I’m not singing until Thursday. Those lozenges are never to be taken before singing, because as my childhood church conductor said many times, “it’s like singing with white gloves on, and you can really hurt yourself.” Because your throat is deadened, you can’t feel the pain you’re inflicting. However, they are SO nice when you just want a break from, again, feeling like complete and total crap.
No one is home, so I am putting myself on nearly complete vocal rest so that I am all better by the time Prianka and I have dinner on Tuesday. I don’t want to possibly give her the gift that keeps on giving, either. However, since her wife is a teacher, I am sure that she has a better immunity system than most. If she does get my cold, “forgive me Father, for I have sinned.”
Yesterday I interviewed with a company called “Frontpoint Security.” I mention them by name because there are several reviews of the interview on Glassdoor, with replies from the company themselves, so I don’t think it’s unfair to name them here. It started as a wonderful day- cold and full of sunshine. I was excited that the train ride took almost an hour and 20, because I was reading a great novel (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry). I arrived full of hope and the enjoyment of reading. That lasted right up until the interview began. Without any questions about my customer service experience, they handed me a five or six page logic test with math SAT questions. I had two problems there. The first is that I’ve gotten a D in logic twice, because I could not get the hang of taking verbal questions and turning them into equations. For instance, I am still not sure whether Jill is taller than Kelly, shorter than Kelly, or that Jill and Kelly are the same height just because Anne is taller than Jill. I am also not sure how many days it took for a water lily to become covered with water in the middle of a pond. The second is that I’ve never been through SAT prep, because I never had to take it. I went to a junior college for my first two years, and because they had their own entrance exams, I took them instead. I was placed in remedial math, and the very least I can say about that is I passed. I still have a ways to go in getting my Bachelor’s, mostly because I did not have time for a full-time job and advanced trig.
The reason that I skipped the SAT is that I was in the hospital with a migraine that wouldn’t quit, and I stayed there for longer than I’ve ever stayed in a hospital, except for the time I got meningismus, irritation of the meninges rather than full-on meningitis, and still no less painful. The migraine and the meningismus required the same battery of tests, including repeated spinal taps (I went to eleven). Plus, one of the medications I was given made me go from fine to batshit crazy in less than five minutes. A nurse got the order wrong, and instead of giving me a shot in the arm or hip of Stadol, pushed it into my IV. Meagan and Lindsay were standing there when it happened, and their eyes became larger and larger until my dad walked in and told Meagan to take Lindsay home. They were both in panic mode, because the effect of the drug was that I couldn’t stop talking, and at a pace so rapid that it was downright scary. I just kept saying over and over, “I’llbefineoncemydadgetshere. Iwantmydadbecausehe’llknowwhattodo….” along with a litany of orders to the nurses to get my dad the fuck here. When he arrived, he was in scrubs and I had never been more glad to see anyone in my life. I don’t remember what happened next, but I do remember that it calmed me down the slightest bit. Something was ordered for me- I think it was Haldol- but what the nurse did was inexcusable because she’d seen the order and didn’t read the whole thing. I think I missed three weeks of school, and when I was let go from the hospital, I still had to go for another spinal tap because the migraine hadn’t lifted. He told me to drive myself and lent me his van. I drove there, but they gave me a spinal tap and driving home was one of the scariest things I’d ever been through because I could barely lift my head over the steering wheel.
So, these questions are put in front of me and I realize how unprepared I am for this and begin to freak the fuck out. I asked the recruiter how much these questions counted, and did she want to know anything about my experience and career so far? She said, “of course. It’s just that the manager came up with these questions to see how you’d get through training.” So, I told her everything I could possibly think of that would tilt my chances, including the Rock Star award I won at Alert Logic where a senior vice president had listened to my call and sent all the senior managers a note that if everyone else was like me, our Net Promoter Score was ensured. He talked about how I was cheerful at 3:00 AM, and thought it was brilliant that I chatted him up about football and Doctor Who since he was calling from the UK. The funniest thing that happened was that after I’d validated him by asking his security question, I said, “this is a question I ask all my British customers. Who is your Doctor?” He answered with the name of his GP. When I explained what I meant, he laughed heartily.
I also told her about the other Rock Star award I’d won because I was on the phone with a customer with another AL employee at the same time, and how he’d nominated me for it because of the great customer service I’d given while we were on the phone together. I was sitting there trying not to shake, but the memories of those two awards were something I focused on because it meant more to me than anything to prove that I was worthy of the job itself….. and worthy as a person. I was trying to self-soothe, because I knew I’d blown that test because I couldn’t even finish it and external validation was worthless.
She said I would hear something by Monday or Tuesday, so I am spending my weekend wound tight as a tick. I want a job where I can read all the way to work, and finish several chapters at once. I want a job that starts with great pay and ticks up with quality assurance. I want a job that has metrics out the ass because I like checking my performance every morning. It’s quite soothing not to go weeks without knowing how you’re doing…. like only getting a report card in school every six weeks.
It sounds like a great challenge, one for which I feel ready.
At Alert Logic, so much was going on with me emotionally that I crumpled with anxiety and threw up before meetings. I am not sure that I was healthy enough to take that job in the first place, having just come from Portland because I was so far down that I needed to come home and lean into my family for support. Now, I am free of all of it, and working with Sarah has gotten me on track for a wonderful life instead of one that’s merely mediocre. I came home because I was so depressed that I thought I might kill myself, but the only thing that stopped me was the dream of becoming a famous writer. In essence, I needed to stay alive for you, and I do not say that lightly.
Those feelings resurfaced when Dana and I had our ugly blowout, and I realized that I needed more help than my family and friends could provide. That was when I decided that being in a psych ward was better than leaning on people so unprepared to handle depression this overwhelming. As my romance with Dana and my friendship with Argo ended, I realized that the support system I had was slipping through my fingers, and I didn’t have anyone else that knew the ins and outs of the situation like they did. The suicidal thoughts and plans didn’t come from wanting to cause anyone pain, but to cause them relief that they didn’t have to worry about me anymore. Those thoughts are never reality, which is why Argo’s words gave me the strength I needed to take my life into my own hands and pull myself up enough not to ask my friends for help, but to submit to the fact that I was ill and needed to take my own steps to get better, rather than expecting everyone else to “fix me.”
My nature made it harder to get better in the hospital than I wanted to, because my empath mirror neurons went off and I began to believe that everyone else had it worse than me and they needed my support more than I needed theirs… another belief that probably cost me because I couldn’t recognize that we were all in the same boat. We were all broken in our own ways, and yes, I was just as sick as they were, but I took their stories on as my own, as I have done my whole life. The Lanagan Search & Rescue system became acute as my roommate told me she was a cutter and could I watch over her to make sure she didn’t cut herself in our room?
Luckily, she was not in my cohort, so I had meetings/classes all day without her. We all spilled our pasts and what brought us to this situation, this last-ditch effort to keep ourselves stable. The story that got me the most verklempt was a guy that wanted to kill himself over his job. God, no job is worth that, but his ego was tied to it and a project failure threw him into a downward spiral. Another reached hers by walking in on her husband committing adultery in their bed. Another arrived with scars on her wrists. It was terrifying and uplifting all at the same time, because sharing brought us close together and gave us hope that despite all our problems, we’d make it if we just stuck to the program not unlike AA, but similar in terms of sharing our stories and keeping it up during outpatient.
There were so many people I just wanted to take into my arms and not let go, because I am not the type person that can see suffering and walk away from it. However, the entire point of the program was learning how to soothe ourselves, and hugging was strictly forbidden. In some ways, I felt alone. I was the only lesbian, so there were few people that could really identify with me. I was also angry, because my social worker was a lesbian and absolutely lost her clinical separation and started to cry. Why would I be angry about that? Because it was my job to cry, and I didn’t want to sense weakness in the people around me that were supposed to help me because I didn’t want to take on their emotions about me. It was pity. Just straight out where I could see it, and the last thing I wanted or needed.
What I did learn in all of this was that I was right. Diane had been a problem, and not a solution. She knew I would need her as I started coming out, but didn’t realize that my young ears weren’t the appropriate place for her to talk about her life. She was right and wrong all at the same time, and would have been a wonderful resource had she kept her clinical separation intact as well. But she didn’t, and I ached for her in more ways than one.
If you click on both links, you will see the change in my tone in talking about her. The first is idealistic and wonderful, painful and real. The second is after all of the talks I’d had with friends who didn’t think my story was what I thought it was, and proved it to me.
Now, I am alone with my books and tea, wanting to reach up for something more than just sitting by myself, fictional characters often replacing real interaction. I’m having dinner with Pri-Diddy next Tuesday, where I know that she will enfold me in one of those hugs designed to heal pain…. because I am exhausted.
Sometimes my medication gives me very intense, lucid dreams. Last night, my high school love visited me for the first time in years. We talked for hours, just catching up on our lives. When I woke up, I realized how much I missed her, and had some interesting insights on my current life (as dreams are wont to do). I remembered the days in which I was tortured that she was married to someone else, not because I was in love with her still, but because being an ex caused certain……… issues.
They aren’t married anymore, haven’t been for a long time. But I drew so many correlations between her ex-wife and mine that it was illuminating to an amazing and frightening degree. Her ex-wife ran hot and cold with me, because in some instances, she handled the closeness between Meag and me, and sometimes she didn’t. Does that sound familiar in any way to some of you long-term readers? The hot was just as intense as the cold. I want to talk about the hot first.
It all started with Tim Horton’s, as many Canadian stories do. Here is an excerpt from an entry I wrote about an anniversary with Kathleen. The setup is that we were staying at an inn in Vermont, and it wasn’t far to Ottawa from there:
I’d forgotten that Quebec is the only province in Canada where they don’t have to put signs in both French and English. The entire menu is in French. Not only do I not know what a TimBit is, I don’t know how to ask for one. I am standing there in a puddle of self pity. ALL I WANT IS A DONUT AND SOME COFFEE AND NOW I’M IN A FUCKING FOREIGN COUNTRY AND I CAN’T READ!
I go up to the counter. I ask for a TimBit and a large coffee in English. The woman points to the menu overhead. You can’t get one TimBit. The quantities and prices are scattered as if put there by someone with a killer hangover. I point to the one I want. I pay. It’s like ten dollars. I don’t care.
My order comes up, and all I see is this HUGE BOX. I have ordered ENOUGH FUCKING TIMBITS TO FEED THE ENTIRE CANADIAN ARMY, AND ALL THEIR SQUIRRELS.
We’re walking out of the restaurant, and I’m going to kill Meagan. All she had to say was, “it’s kind of like a donut hole, eh.” So I call her up. And she’s laughing hysterically. “Oh man,” she says. “I never should have done that to ya in Quebec.”
Years later, Deah hatched a plan.
She wanted me to come to the house without Meag knowing, and knock on the door with a box of TimBits. It was brilliant, especially because their daughter is named Tym, so they’re not TimBits anymore. They’re TymBits. So, Deah shows up at the airport with the box, and we drive straight back to the house. Deah stands back, and there are butterflies in my stomach as I knock on the door.
The look on her face was priceless… so full of love and absolute shock that I’m glad there’s not a picture. That look was just for me. She grabbed me and hugged me for what seemed like an hour. It wasn’t, of course, but in my memory it stays that way. Deah is smiling like the cat that swallowed the canary, because she’s managed to pull this off. It was #winning in massive proportions. We had a great time just BEING. We didn’t do anything, and that’s when Meag introduced me to The Joel Plasket Emergency, because “our song” became Nowhere with You:
Our thing was Starbucks, so we went for a coffee and sat there just as we did when we were 18. It was our “date place” in Sugar Land, there being few places for 18-year-olds to party in our quiet suburb. Her poison was a hazelnut latte, and mine was raspberry because I liked getting a “pink drink.” She told me that she was sorry we missed truly being partners, because she thought it was something we’d probably have done well. It was a compliment I’d been waiting to hear for a very long time, because we were secure in our places in life. It wasn’t a flirt, just a recognition that the way things went down was full of regret for both of us. She thought that she’d treated me so poorly that she didn’t even have a right to ask. My inner rage went to eleven internally, because I didn’t know what I would have said, but she’d taken away my choice. Then, rage melted away as I realized that we were exactly where we needed to be at that time in our lives, and to be angry about it was pointless. We’d made our choices, the right ones… at least then, anyway.
At other times, Deah treated the intimacy between Meag and me as a threat, when I really, really wasn’t. All I wanted was to be a part of Meagan’s life in a real way, and it wasn’t that far to Ottawa from DC, so I could really be present in a way that I couldn’t when we’d only see each other sporadically. At the time, her parents were living in Sugar Land, so visits home were always a path back to me and letting the ghosts of our past rise as we went by our old high school and “our” Starbucks (which, incidentally, isn’t there anymore… and don’t think I’m not sad about that fact). I remember clearly the time when we had to run an errand, and she leaned over and said, “want to be 18 again?” I said, “hell, yeah.” She rolled down all the windows, opened the sun roof, and turned up the stereo as we raced down Palm Royale.
I can understand Deah’s hot and cold in a whole new way, because it was not dissimilar to the way Dana treated Argo. She was never a threat, but Dana treated her that way, anyway. I think that was the point of the dream- to get me to understand in a way that I couldn’t until this morning. I am so thankful to whatever brought on the dream, but I would like to believe it was my God place, the one that whispers to me in pieces of wisdom that I, in the words of Mary, “ponder in my heart.”
It is also comforting that years after the conversation we had in the past, we are still in the places we need to be to grow in the right direction. Maybe one day we’ll have another moment in which we can just be 18 again, the ghosts rising from our past…
It’s been a trip around the sun of gargantuan proportions. So many ups, so many downs, and through it all we’ve maintained our senses of humor. Well, most of the time, anyway. Some shit has just been sad. We’ve walked this path together, forged when we were infants in emotional growth and are starting to feel ten feet tall and bulletproof because when we talk, we realize that we aren’t alone. Have never been alone. We’ve had each other.
I miss the days of sitting on your back porch, watching the dogs play as we delve deeper and deeper into conversation. I miss hugs that were designed to last one second longer, because we’d just emptied our souls and needed to lean in and hold on. I love that we’ve been able to keep up our long friend-love affair by having text. I thought I was an intense personality that would never find someone with whom to roam the earth, because as I get deeper in conversation, people tend to say, “whoa. I’m out.” It was a relief to meet my match… someone not afraid of introspection and hearing others process theirs.
In my personality type profile (INFJ, sometimes P when I’m not feeling like a “judgmental dickhead“), it mentions that in my life, I will cultivate deep relationships with very few people, and hold on to them… rather than having a bunch of friends I know to varying degrees. Thank you for being one of those people. I look forward to the day when I can walk with you around the streets of DC, pointing out cool stuff and saying, “ok, this is fantastic, but let me show you THIS!” Most notably, I want to take you to the zoo. It’s amazing how much inspiration I get from sitting with my laptop or my tablet and just writing in front of the giraffes. Plus, the zoo is within a park, so make sure to point out beautiful joggers. 😛
It would also be fun to go dancing again. That was one of the best nights I’ve ever had in Portland, even though that’s usually not my scene. Let’s hit up somewhere cool (I’d have to ask around, because again, usually not my scene) and take shots of Red Bull. Wired for sound to make the evening last as long as possible.
I just wanted to tell you how much you mean to me, because I figure it’s the best birthday present I have to offer. I figure that in my writing, what I can offer you is my heart. Thank you for taking such good care of it.
Happy birthday, love. I hope you get lots of presents.
I had to walk to the 7-Eleven because I’d run out of necessities like hot dog buns. While I was walking, I was listening to an episode of The Diane Rehm Show that featured Sherry Turkle, an expert on digital education and how technology is changing the population in general. I know for sure it changed my relationship with Dana, Argo, and Aaron… all in different ways.
With Dana, there was the obvious “we both check out on our phones when we’re doing nearly anything.” In fact, I would say that our entire relationship changed when Dana got an iPhone, because then both of us were using our phones as our computers, and therefore, it changed our interactions with each other. There were times when we’d instant message in the same house, and that’s not weird. Studies show that it happens to families all over the world, not just ours. When she had a “dumb phone,” she pulled me away from my electronics. It wasn’t her responsibility to do so, but she did… and I did not know how grateful to be for that until tonight. When we both took time out to look things up, something else would grab our attention, and whatever we’d been talking about would be lost. It also made it much easier for us to be wrong or right in an argument about a fact, because instead of just talking about it, we’d Google the answer. We are both trivia nerds, so it was not unusual for us to get in minor scrapes over when the elevator was invented, or whether Cezanne or Gougin painted a particular painting, or what the fuck ever. Even if I knew the answer cold, even based on past conversations I’d had with her, Dana would still take out her phone and look it up. When I was right, she was never as happy as when I was wrong. I’m not the best loser, but I always tried to pretend it didn’t matter to me as not to up the ante….
But it did. Technology changed our relationship for both better and worse, because there were times when I genuinely wanted to look things up as well… we’d sit next to each other and share the screen, both interested in reading the Wikipedia article. That was when technology was an amazing help. Other times, I wanted to talk to connect with her, and stopping to look something up provided what I now believe was an unnecessary distraction.
I will say for the record that she comes by it honestly. I got in a scrape with her dad over whether you could check in at an airline with an iPhone, and I said you could. When he verbally wrestled me to the ground, I printed out an article showing him you could. He still said I was wrong because you couldn’t check in the entire party on one phone. Bambergers do not like to be wrong, so perhaps that was a piece of wisdom I missed in all of Dana’s fact-checking. It’s in her DNA.
Yet another place where I could have been more giving and just let things slide. The thing is, though, because we could see each other, there was also a lot of hugging, kissing, jokes, and laughter.
With Argo, I learned from this podcast that only 20% of communication is verbal, and some studies push it down to 7%. So to say that we knew each other was relative. I know I made the mistake of thinking I knew her better than I did, and I would say the same of her. Our ideas of each other’s personalities were skewed by quite a bit because we never saw each other in the context of facial expressions, tones in our voices, etc. I realized that in a lot of our e-mails, I was inferring her tone rather than knowing it, and that piece made all the difference. Maybe if I could have heard her tone of voice in her writing, I would have said a lot of things differently, gave a lot more when I saw she was upset, etc. I also know that it’s a lot easier to reveal things about yourself that you wouldn’t say if someone was sitting right in front of you, so there’s that.
Actions and reactions on paper are totally different than in person… and totally different than on the phone. There are so many levels to communication that it was a mistake to limit ourselves to only one. My words hurt her, and I couldn’t see it. Her words hurt me, and she couldn’t see it. There was no way to just chill. There was no way to see tears and respond to them. There was no way to know whether we were joking or serious without a fuckton of emoticons. In a way, it was a great release to be able to send my words out into the ether, but when my words didn’t engender the response I thought they would, there was no way for us to look at each other and come to complete resolution. The part that I *do* know about Argo is that she is the most hilarious person I’ve ever met in my life, but it’s a hard road back to hilarity when talking about something serious in only black and white. She entered my life as a “Fanagan,” so in effect, the thing that drew her to me became something she despised.
But it’s ok. She only knew 20% of me, and I only knew 20% of her. Who knows what would have happened had we known the other 80%? I don’t know whether it would be better or worse, but I do know that it would be different.
With Aaron, it’s an interesting dichotomy. We have known each other in a friend-intimate way. He knows he can have whatever he wants out of my fridge, and I know that both of us feel a real loss in terms of “going nowhere with you.” We called it “running Aarons.” However, now that we’re in different cities, I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve talked on the phone. Now our relationship is much more like the one I had with Argo, checking in with each other online all the time… the difference being that I’ve been around him long enough that most of the time, when I infer his tone, it’s correct, because I’ve been there day in and day out to know how he would say something and sometimes, why he would say it. At the same time, though, I don’t know how he has grown in the time that I’ve left, and I have to make room for it. So maybe I know 40% of him. 60% on a good day. 😛
As for me, I have gotten the strange telephobia that’s sweeping the nation. With me, I want to see you in person, or I want to write to you. That middle ground, for some reason, has become lost to me. When I was younger, I could spend hours on the phone. Now, a phone call makes me sweat. It’s common knowledge that getting over a fear is tackling it head-on, so perhaps being single right now is better for me because I don’t get to bargain with Dana over whether she’ll call for me or not. I don’t have a choice whether to face my fear. I just have to muscle through it, along with a lot of other people.
And in all of this, my only question is whether we are creating new forms of dialogue, or destroying something that can’t be replaced. Sometimes people need to hear my voice. Sometimes people need to be able to hug me. Sometimes, there need to be conversations that cannot be interrupted because someone liked my status.
I’d continue this entry, but my phone just went off. I hope it’s a letter, but it’s probably just spam. It doesn’t matter. You know I’m going to look anyway.
I’ve never lived with a real guy before. With Grant, he was a metrosexual, so his beauty products were equal to mine. He cleaned up after himself, and never let the bathroom get real. You know what I mean. He might have left the kitchen a wreck most days, but the bathroom was his sanctuary just as much as mine.
Duncan is one of those men that has never heard of Comet, leaves his dirty shorts hanging in the bathroom to dry on the back of the door, and tends to make yellow stains on the toilet that I clean up, not because he’s lazy, but because it would never occur to him that was a problem. He just doesn’t notice.
Because a) we’re not married and 2) I believe in equality, I don’t care whether the toilet seat is up or down. I figure that he shouldn’t have to remember to put the toilet seat down for me because I don’t have to remember to leave the seat up for him. Where it is is just where it is, you know? However, it would be nice that whether the seat is up or down, it’s clean.
My room looks somewhat akin to the CIA or the FBI thinking that I have papers hidden somewhere that they have to find by turning everything upside down. It’s not necessarily unclean, just unkempt. If I had a guest coming over, I could get it spotless in less than 15 minutes. I need to put the clothes in the hamper and take down the recycling, but other than that, I’m golden. I’m trying to keep everything in some semblence of order because my therapist says it will help, and I’m willing to try anything. I wish I could get back the “anal Annie” attitude I developed in my Portland apartment, but apparently that OCD was short-lived, probably because it was tied to that time in my life, and that time in my life is never coming back, either.
My point is this. As long as I take my dishes downstairs so that I don’t get bugs or mold, I could give a shit what my room looks like. Sometimes my crazy spatter is heavier than others. But I would never in a million gazillion years let that spill over into a common area of the house. My space is my space. Our space is our space, and never the twain shall meet.
I have always had this attitude in group houses, and it has served me well. Duncan is thisclose to getting a reprimand from Hayat, because I’m not going to confront Duncan. Hayat can be “the heavy” a lot better than I can. She is a ball-breaking tornado in a tiny body, and I just love watching her do it.
It’s kind of a spectator sport.
When she’s on the telephone, I pretend not to listen so that I get to hear her order people around at work. She is very, very good at what she does, although privately I call her “Chandler,” because I’ve lived here since April and I still don’t know what that is exactly. It has to do with spreadsheets.
I should have taken a picture of the bathroom before I cleaned it. Hindsight is 20/20. All I’ll really have to say is “yellow stains” and she’ll get the picture. Duncan is an attorney who is trying to get into the CIA (really) and always studying for some kind of exam. I’m not sure what that exam entails, because I thought that if intelligence wanted you, you’d know it.
I have a CIA baseball cap that my dad bought for me at a tourist shop, and it gives me no small amount of pleasure to fuck with people about it. I mean, come on. If you’re actually in the CIA, why in the everliving hell would you advertise that fact? Apparently, some people don’t know that.
This one lady said, “are you really in the CIA?” I said, “yes. In fact, it was really easy. I just took a Blockbuster Video application and crossed out ‘Blockbuster Video’ and wrote in ‘CIA’ at the top in crayon, dropped it in the mail, and ‘voila!’ I can’t take credit for that Blockbuster Video line. James came up with it in high school when one of our friends wanted to be in the FBI. But it’s a good joke, so I lifted it for my own amusement.
The woman looked at me wide-eyed, like she couldn’t tell whether I was kidding or not and just walked off. I just thought to myself, “…aaaaaaand, my work here is done.”
My next touristy purchase is going to be the t-shirt that says, “NSA: The Only Agency That Cares Enough to Listen.”
In case you’re wondering, the crayon was “Burnt Sienna.” I don’t think they would have taken me if it had been “Cerulean.” Although, you are totally screwed if you want to join the CIA, because Blockbuster Video closed all their stores, and Best Buy just won’t cut it.
Good luck, Duncan. Maybe I’ll lend you my hat if you’ll clean the fucking bathroom.
Stories That Are All True 