Trying to figure out what I look like without my abuser’s influence is a lost cause, in a lot of ways. The personality I have is the personality I have. The facial expressions I have are just the facial expressions I have. It can’t matter anymore where I got them, because I am not as moldable as I was back then. I can’t change me, but I can learn to live with me instead. Learning to live with me is a slow process, because I go through stages of anger where I want to slash and burn everything about me that reminds me of her, and there’s no way to do it without destroying myself as well. Because of this, being reminded of her every day is not the blessing it once was, but I’m trying to reach that place again.

I have to, because the more I remind myself of her, the more I hate me.

It used to make me so proud that I was so young when we met that we had some of the same mannerisms and speech patterns. Now, I’ll be talking to someone else and something will come out of my mouth so pitch perfect it’s like she’s standing behind me… usually at a time where it’s inconvenient to feel that level of pain.

Once I know that a thought has me in a tail spin, I know I can stop it. However, I do not get to choose when the initial thought appears, or how. I know how to mitigate damage, but not how to prevent it. It is in that way that my body plays tricks on me. I can tell myself all day that I don’t want to think about her, don’t want to be in grief, don’t want to dwell… and then in a conversation something that I always say that I picked up from her comes out of my mouth in the way that she would say it and I didn’t mean to but BAM!

It is a continual process- learning to trim branches without killing the trunk.

The hardest part about recovering from someone else’s emotional abuse is trying to rediscover who you are without it. Like, which parts are actually me, and which parts were instilled at such a young age that I don’t know if it’s me or not? It affects everything from my serious reactions to my outlandish humor. It affects my facial expressions and my speech patterns.

I was told by her partner that my relationship with this woman was just “this big bag of shit I’d been carrying around forever.” I am sure that truer words have never been spoken, but in order to get rid of it, I had to find out how it got there. I knew her partner’s answer wasn’t right… that I was trying to steal her life, her friends… as if I was just this bad Single White Female remake waiting to happen.

No, she promised me a family, and I was completely sucked in. A few years ago, I e-mailed her and said that I was tired of being called a family, when we really didn’t exist that way. So she called a meeting. We’ll get together, the four of us, and discuss what kind of family we want to be to each other.

Was this finally the conversation we’d been waiting to have for over a decade at that point? Dana and I brought our best bottle of wine, because we knew that this was a celebration… right up until it wasn’t.

“The kind of family we’re going to be to each other” didn’t exist. We showed up to cheese, crackers, and a large helping of “I don’t need anybody but my partner.” I had no words. At first, I felt like I couldn’t *really* breathe, I was in such fight or flight. I didn’t know what was happening. I could see her in my mind, in all her iterations, from 1990 on. “Ties closer than blood” couldn’t be nothing. I was sure of it.

I am also not sure whether she was coerced to tell me that. In fact, I am not sure how much her partner even knew about the seven years our relationship existed before theirs.

Any sweet or sentimental memory that I tried to dig up so that she might remember who we were to each other was cast in an oddly-hued light… an abandonment issue that no longer served me, or some equally disturbing response to something like “watching you leave Houston was literally the worst day of my life because I realized that I couldn’t protect you anymore.” I wasn’t bringing it up because I felt abandoned. I was trying to say, “how could we go from this to nothing without you telling me it was gone?”

And she didn’t.

Everything I thought I had was gone in an instant, but I held on because I didn’t know any better. It’s not like I got any notification that the series had been cancelled… so “held on” is a pretty strong term for someone who didn’t know they were doing it. I was just crazy because I couldn’t divine the cryptic messages I was getting and act accordingly. It’s funny, when someone needs me to know something, I generally require that they say them out loud, because my telepathy is pathetic.

I called her on it, and she didn’t want to meet with me, but said I could meet with her partner instead. That worked about as well as it sounds like it did. To add insult to injury, I said something about my abuser being too angry to meet with me, and her partner said, “no, she actually prayed with me this morning.”

Well, how nice for you.

I’m starting to see just how fucked up this story is, and how I’m so sad that I couldn’t see it until now. I could have saved myself a lot of heartache, and had so much more energy for the people in my life that would never think of playing such a large-scale game.

Now I just pray my hanging-onto-the-end-of-the-frayed-rope prayer…

Shit, God.

My hair looks nice today. I’m wearing a sweater that looks good on me. My jeans fit. Black cowboy boots change my step just enough that my body carriage feels good. I have nothing to complain about. I have taken care of my own needs.

If yesterday was about feeling empty, today is about feeling full. There is so much in my life for which I am grateful, and I am leaning in to those things more and more as I realize just how much I’ve changed for the better. I am not walking around with a cloud above my head that threatens to storm when I least expect it. I have taken back my power, and doing so has given me some control over my thoughts that wasn’t there before.

I can choose to stop the spinning. I can choose to stop the negative thoughts. I can choose life. I always could, but I didn’t know it. I mean, I knew it, in that way that you know things logically but can’t put them into practice emotionally. Now everything is starting to snap together so that I don’t feel held hostage by grief and pain.

I can concentrate on Clarence (the toad that lives under our house) and Skippy (the squirrel in one of our backyard trees). I can concentrate on remembering to check Jake’s**** backpack for his school work (that little bastard didn’t tell me he had a Thanksgiving luncheon coming up). I am amazed by the wonder in the world, and the bright sun that seems to follow me whether or not it is raining.

****For the uninitiated, Jake is our fake child. It’s a long story, but basically an elementary school automated system kept calling me about a child being absent because they were trying to reach the owner of the phone before me.

I am sitting in the big leather chairs in the break room. There’s some horrible daytime TV on, but I’m listening to Spotify, so at least I can’t hear it. There are no words for how empty I feel. The e-mail I sent where I completely laid bare what it would take for me to forgive her took a chunk out of me, and so did posting it on my web site… but there’s several reasons for it.

First, I want this story to be bigger than just me. I want my recovery process out there in the world, because I might never know how many kids I might help that are in my old shoes right now. Abuse doesn’t have to be physical for it to be devastating, and I am just now starting to figure out all the reasons why and how. It’s taken me some distance and time to be able to look at the game from the outside, because I could not see its negative impact from the inside.

Even when I figured it out, it still took me several years to get angry about it.

Second, because I didn’t figure out that I was abused until I was an adult, the statute of limitations has run out in terms of going to mediation in a courtroom, so I’m trying her in the press. It sounds mean, but I don’t think it is… my story is not about revenge, it is about redemption. If it was about revenge, not only would you know her real name, it would be cut into topiary hedges in front of my house. NOT saying her name is simply a kindness, and the only one I will give her until I get what I want in resolution. If I never get what I want, so be it. I haven’t gotten it so far, so I’m not missing anything… and definitely not holding my breath. It is REALLY hard to apologize for something if you’ve convinced yourself you didn’t do it.

I hope that I am writing this story in such a way that you know it is mine. I have no need to know what she thinks, and I am way past caring about it. I have to take care of myself, whereas before, I didn’t think I was worthy of it.

There are so many people around me that have been waiting for this moment a long time. 24 years is a long time to hold in a secret this big, and my friends could see that it was stopping all kinds of other growth. I only ask that people have patience with me, because 24 years of programming can’t be undone overnight. It’s just going to take as long as it takes, and one way or another…

I

Will

Be

Free.

I cannot shake the picture you sent me. I have written so extensively about the ways in which you manipulate and abuse me that I thought the message was clear. We are no longer connected. You asked me not to contact you, said that we were beyond reconciliation, and I was satisfied that the end was really the end. Then, after absolutely laying all my cards on the table with my readers (because most aren’t connected to either one of us), you contacted me. I don’t know if you’ve read everything that I’ve written, and maybe you are blissfully unaware that I now think that the whole family thing was a ruse. You were attracted to me, and maybe even attraction isn’t the right word, because it wasn’t the type of love I could return. It had a malicious intent. It changed me in ways that I wouldn’t have chosen to be changed. The love I could return was just as pure as yours was tainted. That’s why a simple, sweet e-mail isn’t possible anymore. It’s too cryptic, because it doesn’t come across as genuine. It comes across as “you only get to love me when I say you can, bitch.” The message I get is that I will always be your bitch. I will always be that person, to you, that is lesser than and you can use me to prop up your ego.

I do not want to be that person anymore.

I do love you, deeply, but in such a pure way that I’m not sure you’re capable of it. If you were, there would not be such denial on your part about who you really were to me, and how you feel free to drop in and out of my life at will. You wouldn’t continually toy with me.

I don’t know that you’re listening, and honestly, it doesn’t matter. I’m going to do what I want regardless of your input, because I cannot live my life in reaction to you anymore. If you want solid steps toward reconciliation, I won’t lie to you. They are going to be steep.

1. You must admit to yourself that you abused me. You must admit that there was an element of pedophilia to it, because I did not need to read about your sex life the day I turned 14.

2. You must admit those flaws and failures to Dana and to me.

3. You must come to Houston to meet with me. Portland is your “turf.”

4. You must admit that you care about what has happened to me, what is happening to me, what will happen to me in regards to the abuse that I endured from you, and <name redacted> by extension.

5. You must come up with a cash settlement that you think is fair for the years and years of long distance phone bills and plane trips to go and see someone who I thought loved me and who was actively just playing with me. I don’t care if you think one dollar is fair. The amount of money isn’t the issue. It is honoring my sacrifice. I spent a lot of money to be caught up in your game, and that wasn’t when I was on my own and independent. That was money scrimped and saved from babysitting jobs and after school working at SuperCuts. A $300 phone bill is a lot of babysitting… and that was just one month. I got so far behind that I never babysat enough to pay it all back. Again, it’s not about the amount of money. It’s about what might go in the reference line.

6. I know I don’t have to give you a chance at all, but grace and mercy mean a lot to me.

I would not have come to Portland on my own. I was visiting some friends in 2002, and while I was there, one of them said, “you look really happy here. You should look for a job.” So I did. The disconnect was that those friends weren’t really my friends. They weren’t very good at communicating it in words, but they were great at calling me family and being the last ones to respond if I needed them in that way. The disillusionment set in almost immediately, and the family I thought I was going toward sent me emotionally backward… with just enough connection to confuse me. In fact, for me, the entire time I lived in Portland can be summed up in that one word- confusion. I didn’t know which way was true north, couldn’t get my bearings, lived in survival mode like a cat backed into a corner- claws extended- for way too long. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a life there; I met Dana and that made Portland worth every single sacrifice I ever made. Outside of that, though, I was an emotional wreck, and in a lot of cases, inflicted damage that way.

In many ways, coming home to Houston has made me remember who I was before living in Portland was a thing. I am a musician, and a damn good one. I listen to jazz. When I am listening to jazz, I am jazz. It is in me around me beating living sensing…  In Portland, I forgot that about me, and last night, I rediscovered it.

Every day, I discover a different part of myself that I left behind… as if it was being stored in my parents’ garage. Old and musty, but once you get the dust off, priceless.

This post is not really about church. It’s just that “What I Know for Sure” is already taken. With that in mind, here goes:

• Your life reflects your attitude, and not the other way around.
• Demons are internal.
• So are Angels.
• The smell of coffee wakes me up just as much as the caffeine in it.
• You really can do amazing things with vegan food; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
• You don’t have to be a vegan to enjoy vegan meals.
• Linux is what you make it. You can’t pigeonhole it as “too hard,” especially if you haven’t used it.
• You don’t have to be a devotee of any operating system. Firefox runs on everything. So does Chrome.
• You don’t have to spend a lot of money for a computer if you only want it to run Flash games, check your e-mail, and troll Facebook. People at box stores will try and get you to believe that you need the latest and greatest technology~ and you don’t, unless you are editing EXTREMELY large photo files (like RAW), editing HD video, or have a penchant for buying the latest games. Anyone who tries to sell you a multi-thousand dollar Facebook machine is snorting something.
• I would also recommend buying a netbook or a laptop, because if you want a big monitor, you can buy it externally. A computer that fits in your bag will be a lot more useful to you. If you’d rather have an iPad or a Nexus tablet, spring for the Bluetooth keyboard case if typing on the screen is annoying (I cannot stand touch screens. They are of the devil.).
• Even though Kurt Vonnegut didn’t say it, you really should wear sunscreen.
• If you feel depressed, the faster you admit it and get help, the better you’ll feel. Don’t lament over the number of years you didn’t know how bad you felt until you finally decided enough was enough.
• Spending time outside is more and more satisfying as you do it.
• If you have a desk job, you don’t need as many calories as you think you do. Humans were not designed to be stationery.
• My handwriting will never be the same now that I type almost exclusively. This is because I used to have nice penmanship until repetitive strain injury beat it out of me.
• Do not stay one minute longer in a relationship you know is failing. Your life is worth more than feeling miserable every day. Marriage is a blessing. So is divorce.
• Do not job hop with reckless abandon, but at the same time, nothing is accomplished if you feel worthless every day and it is hard work not to just get up and walk out. Eight hours a day is a long time to feel miserable at once.
• If your brain is feeling lazy, listen to jazz.
• My favorite proverb is “a man can do any amount of work, as long as it is not the work he is supposed to be doing at the time.”
• I do not think that mashups ruin my opinion of the original version of the song. They make your mind work in different ways.
• The same goes for new versions of old music, like the self-titled album by East Village Opera Company.
• Being angry is really overrated.
• So is avoiding being angry at all.
• Truth is relative, and I differentiate. Your story is truth. Universally true is Truth.

And let the people say, “Amen.”

My friend Scott gave me the idea of writing about culture shock and moving from Portland, Oregon to Houston, Texas. It was so much harder the other way around. I had no idea about bottle deposits, recycling, holier-than-thou vegans, or how much the lack of sun would simply suck the soul right out of my body. Over time, I got used to it (well, except for the condescension). Coming back to Texas has been an enlightenment of a different kind. Living in Houston is so much better than I expected, because it’s not the same city that it was when I left.

First of all, Houston has a lesbian mayor. I do not say this because that fact in and of itself is significant. It’s not. To me, it’s like saying we have a green-eyed mayor. To a lot of people, though, it’s a lot more complicated than that… and they voted for her, anyway. That says a lot about any Texas city, or any Southern city in general. Gay teachers coexist in even traditionally religiously conservative areas. My city has changed. My state has changed. It is more welcoming and warm than I thought possible. I am so elated that we have seemed to stop fighting over gay and straight and started fighting about something else. Gay and straight just isn’t that interesting anymore, and to me, that is the best thing that could have happened while I was away.

There are still parents around me that think it’s a bad idea to let their kids watch SpongeBob, but thankfully, those people are known to the rest of us as “idiots.” In fact, there have been several moments in my time here where I just couldn’t process all that stupid at once, but thankfully, they are isolated moments and not the norm.

The norm is that my next door neighbors on one side are Hispanic- a straight couple with a little boy and possibly an abuela (I can’t tell whether she lives there or just comes over so often that it seems like it). My neighbors on the other side are Matt and Robert, anglo straight boys sharing a house who adore us and have since the day we moved in. My neighborhood is majority Hispanic (I think), and so I speak a lot more Spanish and a lot less English than I thought I would. It is clear that Dana and I are a couple no matter where we go, and even in traditionally heavily Roman Catholic neighborhoods, we are welcomed without incident.

But maybe it’s not really Houston or my neighbors or my neighborhood. I have learned that it’s possible to create your own reality by ignoring what you think people are going to say and just putting them in the position where they don’t want to be an asshole back to you. As prejudiced as some people are against lesbians, the easiest way to shut that shit down is to be welcoming to them so that the friendly or not response is on them. ESPECIALLY with business owners. They may fucking hate gay people, but know it’s ridiculous to lose a sale over it. They, above all things, know that there’s no such thing as “gay money.” They just wipe it off when we leave so they can’t catch it.

The funniest moments have come in terms of race. I have no problem with just waltzing in and being the only whitey in the place. This morning, Jose Garcia, behind me in line at the mercado, said that he’d never seen a white lady in that store before. That is because even though my Spanish is bad, I want a damn pineapple empanada in the morning. Although there is one lady that I have decided is dumb in any language. Every time we’ve gone there, I’ve given our order perfectly. Two tacos with eggs and salchichas. Two tacos with eggs and potatoes. On some days, I get nopales. She gets confused and I have to say our order three more times and she still doesn’t get it. The man behind me says EXACTLY THE SAME SHIT and all of the sudden, our order appears. I would think she was fucking with us if she didn’t seem so disoriented.

White’ll do that to ya.

If your love were taken from me
Every color would be black and white
It would be as flat as the world before Columbus
That’s the day that I lose half my sight

-Suzanne Vega, World Before Columbus

Whether I had anything to do with it or not, I am glad that the e-mails stopped. I didn’t say “go fuck yourself” because I never wanted to talk to her again. I specifically said “we haven’t talked since June and this is the first thing you want to say?” Before we talked last summer, we hadn’t talked for two years. This is because I had to learn that my indoctrination was false. It was never my fault. I couldn’t be held responsible. It was 6 years after we met that I was even old enough to vote. I had to learn to let myself off the hook, and I’m still learning, because one of the hard parts of being abused (no matter how) is that it teaches you that you’ve done something to deserve it.

Deep down, there is a well of shame because if you’d only…

I’ve had to relax and realize that there’s nothing at the end of that ellipsis. There’s nothing I could have done that would have made me less attractive to her personal brand of emotional violence. There’s nothing I could have done to prevent her from inwardly manipulating me into coming toward her and outwardly wondering why I wouldn’t leave her alone. That was the disconnect, and apparently, the reason *I* was crazy. I wasn’t abused~ she never even touched me. I just got it in my head that there was more to what she was saying and completely overreacting. It was all such a big misunderstanding.

I have lived with that lie since I was 14 years old, because I couldn’t bring myself to show anyone the sexually charged material she had given me. I thought I was being groomed for something- I watched Oprah- and instead of being disgusted, this was someone I really loved. It was exciting. You know it’s wrong, but you’re too curious and excited to think about that part of it. At 14, you’re young enough to be molded into whatever someone else wants you to be, and at the same time, just coming into your own sexually and starting to wonder what it might be like.

Our relationship was never the same after that, because she could see my reaction to the journal and the door that seemed open was slammed shut. She held me responsible for my reaction, but I couldn’t be, because I hadn’t started thinking about other girls my own age like that. She shook me awake, and for the longest time, she was the only one in my life that was in color.

I was held at arm’s length because I was obsessed with her, or at least that’s her story and she’s sticking to it. She has no culpability, won’t *allow* herself to take responsibility, because it is so much easier to tell herself that I happened *to* her.

So easy, in fact, that she even convinced me of it. I have thought that I was sick since I was a teenager with these horrible mental health issues that just caused me to freak out on her. It wasn’t that she’d emotionally abused me, it was that there was something wrong with me that made me chase after her.

I was immediately put into what I now recognize as “the friend zone,” and told that I was her family… that our ties were closer than blood… while at the same time, continually told with actions that it wasn’t true. My phone calls were screened. My e-mails went unanswered. Her partner sat me down and said, “when she meant that you were her family, that’s not what she meant.” This was after singing and being told that it was “like watching my little girl grow up.”

The princess of mixed signals had managed to engineer an entirely false reality, and raged that I was out of touch with it. Now I know why I am glad that the contact has stopped. It means that I value my own reality more than I value the one created *for* me.

I sound like a broken record when I talk about this because it does circle back around like that. There have been too many years where I have just been coerced into believing that I’m the sick one. In fact, I had a friend with a 12-year-old that when I age-appropriately befriended her, my abuser sent her an e-mail and told her that she thought I was being predatory with her daughter. PREDATORY. My abuser went behind my back and accused me of being a child molester. Where would she even get that idea? Why would it even occur to her? Was I going to repeat the cycle she instilled in me?

It never even crossed my mind, but it crossed hers enough to reach out to the teen’s mother a propos of nothing. She didn’t even ask me what happened. If she had, I would have told her a scintillating story about helping with homework.

I was humiliated, and in front of a very good friend, no less, because she didn’t know my abuser as well as I did. She had to paint me as the villain, because she couldn’t look in the mirror.

My mom’s side of the family had early Thanksgiving this weekend, because my cousin, his wife, and their son came to visit from Virginia. I had never met his wife, and none of my family save the immediate ones had met Dana. We had a great time meeting, greeting, and eating… and eating…. and eating… and then we got full, so we had to give up eating entrees and switch to dessert. And then second dessert. And then coffee, and third dessert. Then we took some dessert home.

It was beautiful.

I seriously could have eaten three more slices of apple pie. And then, when I started to get full from that, I could have just started eating the apples out of the crust with a spoon. I don’t normally eat like that, which is what made it special. I’m usually very health conscious- in some ways, anyway. I don’t care how many fat grams or carbs something has. I just try and make sure that my outgo exceeds my input. This was much easier when I was a cook. I ate like CRAP, but no one noticed because I was running up and down stairs to get staples from storage and doing the inevitable shift-long dance that occurs when you’re ten tickets deep. It was hard to keep calories on back then.

I haven’t gained much weight since I’ve been home, but the little that I’ve gained has been good for me. I look like I’m the size I’m supposed to be, and not like I’m about to be diagnosed with a horrible disease. Therefore, I still eat what I want, within reason. When my clothes start getting tight, I eat less and burn more. I know it sounds incredibly simple, but it’s not. Willpower is difficult, and it doesn’t help when people are convinced that because you’re small, that means you need to eat a lot more.

No, it’s the opposite. I’m small because I watch what I eat… but I don’t obsess over it. For me, it’s just simple math. People go by my desk at work and look at my candy bowl and won’t touch it, because it’s sugar free LifeSavers, Jolly Ranchers, and Caramel Apple Werther’s. People ask me why I need sugar free candy, and I tell them the truth. I’m on the phone a lot, and it hurts my throat. I don’t want to rot my teeth out and swallow a bunch of empty calories trying to protect my voice.

Apparently, that is not as important as the fact that sugar substitute will kill me… and it will, if I inject it like heroin. But sugar free LifeSavers aren’t making track marks on my arms quite yet.

I am also a big fan of eating A LOT. The way I do this is to fill my fridge and pantry with stuff that is meant to be eaten in large quantities, such as grapes and plain popcorn. I have been heavy before, and I didn’t feel good about myself. Part of the reason I didn’t feel good about myself was being heavy; the other reason I didn’t feel good about myself is that I worried over every calorie.

Worrying about every calorie will kill you, either in mind or in body. Life got so much better when I started looking at what I ate over a week or two, rather than every meal. I felt more secure in myself when I realized that of course I could have a cheeseburger when I wanted- I just needed to balance it out.

I sit in the break room at lunch with women that are taller and thinner than me as they talk about the “monstrous” portions that they eat. One of them even had, *gasp* a third slice of pizza. The worst is sitting next to someone and eating a slice of cake (or whatever) and hearing, “well, I guess you can have that because you don’t have to worry about your weight.” It’s a backhanded compliment because women want to have an excuse for beating themselves up over what they eat. It’s ok for me, but it’s not ok for them, because I don’t worry about my weight.

And they’re right. I don’t. I just count the calories. There’s no emotion in it at all.

The woman known simply as “my abuser” to this web site sent me an e-mail last night. It said nothing about the abuse, as if it never happened. I don’t know why I was surprised. Her absolute denial is the crux of my problem, because the more she glosses over it, the more I feel the shame, fear, disgust… you name it, and I’ve gone through it.

The e-mail was simple. A picture of her at a soccer game with the note “I would not be here without your influence.” It would have been sweet if we were friends. But I can’t think of anything as sweet anymore. It literally makes me sick to my stomach when I see her name in my inbox, because I want a mea culpa and what I get are things to lure me back into conversation.

I realize that with a major break, one in which you say the Kaddish and tear your clothes, finding a resurrection has to start somewhere (I see what I did there)… but this is not it. This is the emotional equivalent of being offered candy from a van.

I’ve been through this before, and I know I am right, because in the past, those overtures have been checks to see if her claws are still wrapped around my heart; she checks because if I express any emotion, the overtures get larger. Time goes by, and the same claws clamp down and I start to bleed.

That’s because in the past, I haven’t been able to stop myself from returning her affections, and the moment I do, she disappears.

Do you see the game? Do you see it? I am not allowed to need her. I am not allowed to love her. I am not allowed to be me unless it fits into the perfect container where I live… have lived… will probably continue to live even if we’re not in contact.

The double standard is that she’s been allowed to love me. She’s been allowed to need me. She’s been allowed a sacred space in my soul to which no one else has access. No matter how inappropriate, she was my first love. No one can ever take that place.

But that doesn’t mean that I have to forgive her for offering a lure and trying to see if I’ll take the bait.

I’m stronger than that. I went through hell to find out that I was a victim, and how to recover from it. I will not go back to that place ever again, because it robbed me of having my own personality. I was so emotionally laden that I couldn’t focus on anything else.

My purpose in writing this down is not for you. It’s to have something in writing that I can look to when I feel that what she did to me couldn’t possibly be as bad as I think.

I accept who I am, and who I am says to tell her to go fuck herself.

So I did.

Tomorrow (well, technically later today) I start working the graveyard shift at work. I’ve been staying up at night and sleeping during the day this weekend as a trial run. It has gone ok for the past two nights, but tonight is brutal. My head hurts, my stomach hurts, and my muscles ache with fatigue. Sleeping during the day is not as restful, and even when I do manage to sleep for more than five or six hours at a clip, everything in my body is telling me to go to bed when it gets dark, anyway.

There’s got to be medication for this. There’s medication for everything. I’ve been taking Tylenol PM, but it only works for so long and then I’m awake AND “hung over.” As I have said many times before, when I wake up after a night of diphenhydramine-induced sleep, I just feel like I spend my entire morning walking in Jell-o. Not as much fun as it sounds, I assure you. My motions are exaggerated, my thoughts move slower, my reactions are not instantaneous, and I generally look like hell until I’ve finished three or four cups of coffee.

Even though there are a ton of sleep aids out there, I need to talk to a doctor. Sleep aids generally come in two forms: the kind you take to fall asleep, and the kind you take to *stay* asleep. Surely there is something in the middle, because during the day, I will not sleep long enough if I only take a medication that induces drowsiness and wears off. I know that ahead of time, because even with diphenhydramine, it wears off after about four hours during the day, and then I’m still tired and groggy. I can’t go back to sleep because the sun is out, and because taking another dose of diphenhydramine does not make me go back to sleep. My body adjusts to it and instead of going back to bed, I just look like a zombie that cannot move.

The one thing that work will have that my house does not is other people who are also awake. Conversation is stimulating, and will help keep me up. I’m thinking that I am just not getting tired enough at night to want to sleep during the day. I mean, seriously. How much energy can I possibly be expending when I’m just watching TV? Even blogging is relatively low on the energy scale. The only thing I really have to move is my fingers.

Jesus, it’s only 5:30 and I have to stay up until at least 9:00. I haven’t eaten anything tonight, so maybe that’s my next move. I just need to make sure it’s relatively healthy, because I’ve gained enough weight to make me happy. I ate a lot of cheeseburgers to get here, so now my body is saying “you’re not 24 anymore. Lay off it.” I’m like, “OK… you don’t have to be so pushy about it! GEEZ!” I need more vegan meals, less candy, and less beer.

Beer is my downfall when I need to cut back on calories. It has less than a regular soda, but not much. If I have more than one, I feel incredibly guilty because I’m screwing up my numbers. There are very few things in life that can add pounds on you faster than beer. That is because once you’ve had one, you tend to forget how many calories they are… and even with unfiltered beer, the health benefits will never outweigh the caloric cost.

I have tried most of the Skinny Girl series, the Miller 64, the Budweiser 55, etc. and if that’s the best that alcohol companies have to offer in the way of low calorie beverages, they can keep them. I would much rather have a diet soda that I really like than an alcoholic drink I have to force down.

Speaking of which, my current favorite is Big Red Zero. It is embarrassing how much I’ve drunk just in the last four hours. If you add it to vodka, it tastes like college.

And on that note, I think I’m going to take a walk. If I don’t, I might pass out right here on the couch.

Today’s blog post title comes from what the Rector said this morning about the service today, because All Saints Day is one of the fixed date feasts of the entire calendar. Since the expression is either “pulling out all the stops” or “putting on bells and whistles,” I got inappropriately tickled at the wrong moment and had to pull myself together. I tend to do that a lot. I start laughing at something, and because I’m laughing at an inappropriate time, I’m laughing at how inappropriate I am and how I should know better. Take, for instance, the time I was ten years old and discovered in the middle of quiet, contemplative evening worship that in the United Methodist Hymnal, Philip Bliss is listed as “P.P. Bliss.” Hilarity ensued.

I could tell you a hundred stories just like that one, and there are lots more people who could tell them *about* me. But today I just want to focus on this morning’s worship, and how it affected me.

In my life, music and prayer are the same thing. Whether it’s an intricate Bach piece or just Gregorian chant, I find God there. I have a harder time with more modern music. Praise choruses make me a little nauseous, especially when it becomes an ostinato with no end. The exception to that is Taize, because there are so many different variations, descants, etc. that it doesn’t sound monotonous to sing it more than once. To say that I am a classical music fan is an understatement. I lived and breathed it for a number of years, both in the church and in school, where I played trumpet and sang in a number of ensembles.

All of that came together this morning when I realized that my church had recently hired one of the most incredible musicians in the city to be organist/choirmaster, and if we started coming to this church, I would get to work with him.

It was important for me to find the right church, and even more important for me to find the right conductor. Finding a great conductor is the equivalent to looking up the best literary criticism you can find. Often, reading the critique gives you more insight and appreciation for the original work, and with music, it is no different. A conductor looks at the background of the piece, and truly tries to present what it is that the composer would have wanted… and a truly great conductor is on the level of an e.e. cummings. Once you know all the rules, you are free to break them.

I have had so many conductors like this over the years, both in Portland and in Houston. I know a good conductor from a bad one because I’ve worked with both ends of the spectrum. This conductor (we’ll call him Joseph, mostly because that’s his name) is artistic and articulate. When he sits at the organ, Virgil Fox gets jealous… even though he’s dead (Hey, I had to work in a saint somewhere, ok?). I sat there through the entire service and thought, “I want to work with him.”

The first time I met him, he asked me to join the choir. I told him that we’d just moved to Houston and that I needed to settle in. That was three weeks ago. Today, after the service, I went up to him and said, “Joseph, if it’s ok, I’m in.”

I start rehearsal on Thursday. You have no idea how good it feels knowing that I’m putting on the last cassock I’ll ever wear…

Again.

I woke up around 1:00 AM, even though I set my alarm for midnight. The reason for that is my alarm didn’t go off. I was baffled until i realized that I set my alarm for weekdays only, and just edited THAT alarm. See, that’s why they pay me the big money. Clearly, I am brilliant. The clock just flipped 15 minutes ago, and so it is again about 1:00 AM. Maybe it’s a good thing that I woke up naturally. I’m not *too* far off anymore. I’m trying to decide if I’m hungry or not, and if so, what I should eat. I’m not normally hungry this time of night, but now that everyone else’s night is my day, I’m trying to get a rhythm established.

My goal is to stay awake until at least 9 AM, because even though I don’t start my new schedule until Monday, I feel like I need some transition time. At the moment, I am sitting on the back porch with my laptop to write this. The yard is quiet, the sounds of the animals noticeably absent. Not even Clarence (the toad that lives under the house) is stirring. I can hear a little bit of traffic, and even that is muted, as if the cars are trying to muffle themselves more than normal because they know it’s late and people are sleeping. If Dana doesn’t mind, I may have her run me up to the office real quick. I’ve forgotten my charger, and my laptop battery is only half full… which reminds me that I still haven’t gotten my security badge, so even if I did run up to the office, the chance that there would be someone on the first floor to let me in is unlikely. Really must remember to ask about my badge on Monday. Luckily, Andrew will be with me, so at least I won’t have to wait outside the door for someone to come by and take pity on me.

Maybe I should call him. If he’s awake, maybe we could go do something. That’s the part of working nights that I love. There are only a limited number of people that have the stomach for it, and generally, those are people I adore. Anthony Bourdain wrote a monster of a kitchen tell-all a few years ago called Kitchen Confidential. In it, he called cooks “the tribe that would have me.” It is how I feel about all people that work overnight. We’re a different breed entirely from the day crew. Well, technically, I’m not sure what it’s like to work in an office overnight, but I imagine it is the same. Night people are night people, whether they are born or made.

Night conversations are different than day conversations. In the night, there seems to be more time and less consequence. Notice that I say that there seems to be. Being off one’s circadian rhythm, at least to me, is akin to taking mind-altering drugs. I am sure that there have been a number of studies on this, and I should look them up… because if it feels like you’re on drugs, there must be a brain chemical that freaks out and says, “danger, Will Robinson.” Whatever it is, my body must dig it, because I have never had a problem with staying up late.

What feels different this time around is that I’ve never had to start work at midnight and finish at 9:00 AM. As a cook, I began work between 2:00 and 5:00, and would finish up between 10:00 and 2:00. Then, I would either go out with my other cook friends, or head home and binge on Netflix. I’d fall asleep somewhere around 4:00 or 5:00 AM. Because I know I’m good to go until 4:00, it’s really only the 5:00-9:00 that gives me pause. I’m reticent to say that I can nap on my lunch hour, because I don’t know if that would make me feel better or worse. My guess is “worse,” so I’m thinking maybe I should go running. We have a parking garage that’s open on the top, and would make a perfect track-like space. I am lucky that my building is in the richest neighborhood in town (Tanglewood)… Not that bad things don’t happen in good neighborhoods, but it skews the odds in my favor.

Actually, an even better idea would be to see if there’s anyone that wants to run with me. Andrew and I are the only Service Desk Agents overnight, but there are plenty of people on other teams. I don’t need to lose weight, but I desperately need to bulk up. My muscle tone has gone to hell in a hand basket since I stopped cooking.

But cooking is another story entirely.