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.

For a lot of my life, I have been the kind of person that stays up all night and sleeps during the day. For the past few months, I have been going to sleep early and waking up early. My job takes a lot out of me, so even though I don’t *have* to go to bed until ten or so, I find myself getting sleepy at about eight. Reminds me of a story that my dad told me when he went to Daily Franklin training in the ’90s. Guy says, “Every morning, I wake up the whole family at 4 am for a planning meeting.” Audience is baffled. One member says, “how do you get your kids to wake up that early?” Guy says, “I put them to bed at 8.” Audience member says, “How do you get your kids to go to bed at 8?” Guy says, “I GET THEM UP AT FOUR IN THE MORNING.” Point taken. It surely worked for me.

I finished work at 4 yesterday, and I don’t have to be back until Monday at 11:59 pm. In my infinite wisdom, I thought, “I’m going to go to bed for a few hours, then wake up and try to stay up all night as a trial run.” I fell asleep on the couch at about 8, and didn’t wake up until 4. So much for that little experiment. I’m going to try napping several times today and see if I can get my mojo going for tonight. It shouldn’t be that hard… I mean, it’s my natural schedule, right?

Well, maybe not so much anymore. I am an annoying morning person now… and by that, I mean that I come in to work and EXPLODE the place with laughter when other people are still wiping sleep out of their eyes and telling me to go the fuck away with their eyes. I’m naturally outwardly friendly anyway, but the difference is what I see in myself. My energy level actually is higher in the morning, and I never would have noticed if I hadn’t been forced to find out. I also don’t have a lot of the morning problems that plague most Houstonians. I live five miles from my office, and can get there by surface streets. I rarely, if ever, get caught in traffic. It is amazing how cutting out road rage keeps me happy.

When we were still house hunting, we looked at houses in old Sugar Land, off Hwy. 90, and I am blessed beyond all measure that we stopped thinking that was a good idea. My friends who commute look ragged when they get to work, much less at the end of the shift.

And Dana. Oh, my God. I could not have done this without Dana. Because we only have one car, she takes me every morning and picks me up every afternoon. Even if there *was* road rage involved, I wouldn’t have to deal with it. The most I have to do in the morning is play with my iPhone while she drives. We’ve gotten into the Raw Comedy station on Pandora, because we find that if our brains are engaged, it works better than music at distracting us from the annoyance of getting stuck behind a bus. There are also five, count ’em, FIVE school zones around my house, so we can only go 35 miles an hour for about a third of the trip.

Yeah. Comedy helps.

My new schedule will not have school zones on either end, because I won’t get out of work until 9 AM. However, I am paranoid about getting hit by a drunk driver. Besides the possibility of physical injury, it seems most of the people in my neighborhood go to the “Just Don’t Give a Fuck” insurance company.

So, not problem-less, just different problems than I would face during the day.

It reminds me of when Dana was working nights at the airport. I drove her at 2:30 every morning, and we’d stop at a 7-11 to get coffee and snacks on the way. The clerk was lovely, an indian woman that I still refer to as “She.” I am not sure that’s her name, but that’s what it sounded like when she gave it to me. I noticed that She marked time by when we would come in, because we arrived at the same time each day. Dana always wanted energy drinks and sandwiches, but I am the coffee junkie. She made sure that there was always fresh Brazilian Bold- literally, she would make it ten or fifteen minutes before we got there- and would make sure that the Splenda, marshmallows, and Stok coffee shots were full. In such a small way, she made my life easier, and I was so grateful. So grateful, in fact, that when I went to a soft skills training on customer service, I was asked to provide an example, and this is the one I gave.

It occurs to me that the thing that might make my transition to nights easier is finding a Houston version of “She.” But a “She” archetype does not exist. You create them. You become the person they want to take care of, and they do. I have to believe that by laughing, joking, making her smile, that I made a positive difference in her life, too.

It’s the comfort I have that I couldn’t express my gratitude properly in the middle of the night.

Trying to figure out where I should even start today. That’s the issue. I can talk for five pages if I have something to talk *about,* but when it’s just a regular rainy day in H-town, I think “maybe I should go watch TV.” I have no energy for writing when it’s rainy. I’m all like, “you mean I have to talk to people?”

Yes, yes you do. This blog does not write itself. But oh, how I wish it would.

This is the first week I’ve been in Houston where I haven’t constantly been thinking about “her.” I don’t use her real name to limit the damage to the people who already know the situation and both of us. I am trying to drop this story line completely, as if I can just move on to a different show or channel. However, there are days when I just feel guilt and pain, one of those shallower wells of emotional injury that I talked about in Death and Loss. The bruise is healing, but that doesn’t mean that when I accidentally hit it on a table, it doesn’t smart.

Usually, the table represents a church. It doesn’t matter which one. When I walk into a church, I can hear her voice as clearly as I could the first day I met her. It feels so strange to be without her that I will myself to concentrate on something else. She used to put her elbow on my shoulder and lean into her hand, and if I sit just right, I remember how it felt. I remember that she sang beautifully but could never remember the words to anything. If she didn’t know a hymn, she’d just make it up. Who would know the difference? Barely anybody, but I’d laugh to myself. I also knew that even if she didn’t hit the very top notes, she’d just say she did. No one noticed that, either, but it made me cackle. Focus on something else… focus on something else…

But in a church, there is no something else to focus on… just an ever-present reminder of how it began and how it came to an end. I had to start my own church just to reinvent and re-frame my beliefs. For me, church is in the middle of the backyard, with no music at all. It’s a Quaker Meeting and I’m the only attendee. Sometimes, I’m not there, and the squirrels just forgive me.

The squirrels have to forgive me for a lot, but they’re far less judgmental than a Vestry and I don’t have to attend any committee meetings. So, all in all, a plus.

I have stopped giving people advice unless they ask for it… and, in fact, when people come to me for that ear to listen, that’s exactly what I do. Before I respond, I actually say, “do you want my opinion, or do you just want to vent?” I do not get offended when people say “I just want to vent,” because sometimes the best advice comes from not saying anything at all. By saying nothing, you are just agreeing to be that sounding board for someone while they work out their problems on their own. It’s magnificent because they’ll still thank you for “helping them,” even though all you did was sit there.

The change has come from the extraordinary amount of time I’ve spent sitting by myself, letting the air around me support my deepest thoughts. If you sit long enough, the answers will come. It is excruciating at times, because you’ll get impatient and want an answer RIGHT NOW… but maybe a problem doesn’t need one hour of sitting there. Maybe it needs ten. Maybe it needs ten months. Only you can decide that, but if you let your impatience take away your serenity, you will still be in the same place you were when you started.

It’s like when I start a movie and I’m already tired. I fall asleep before the end, and then I feel like I have to watch it from the beginning so that I can actually understand it. Believe it or not, that movie for me is Return of the Jedi. I saw it in the theater when I was five, but the only thing I remember about it is the scene with the Ewok battle. As an adult, I fall asleep every time they come on the screen.

Dana didn’t know this about me, and about eight years ago we were hiking to Angel’s Rest (in the Columbia River Gorge) and talking when she said, “it’s like that scene where Yoda dies.” I said, “YODA DIES?!?!?!?!?!?!??!” and promptly fell into a bush. Seriously. No preparing for the fall, just outright ass over teakettle.

I didn’t sit until the end. I didn’t finish the story.

When you spend time alone, you are finishing your story. The things that happen to you are the rough draft. Thinking about it is crafting the edges, making the changes, taking the behaviors you wish you could retract and thinking of ways to correct them.

Giving someone advice is robbing them of the chance to finish their own stories. Not only that, if they try what worked for you and it doesn’t work for them, now you’re up for the shitty friend award without even knowing it.

Avoid winning the shitty friend award. I have come in first place a few times in my life, and it’s just not enjoyable.

However, there are those times when you wish you could give advice because you care so much about the person that needs it. Think those things in your head. In fact, think them all you want… but you’re better off giving pseudo-advice out loud. By pseudo-advice, I mean things like:

• If you just sit there long enough, the answers will come.
• Take care of yourself- you’d be surprised at how much a bubble bath helps.
• Do you ever just walk, with no particular destination?
• Have you read any good books lately?

These are the things that people remember as helpful without giving you the chance to be right or wrong… because the truth is, your story is your own.

You crafted it yourself.

Oh, so this is what it feels like to have a body again. I feel strong, stronger than I have in ten years, and I think it has a lot to do with forcing myself to sit outside. My Vitamin D level was so low in Portland that it made my bones go soft, and any depression that I felt ranged from “I’m a little under the weather” to “I just want the pain to stop.”

When I got to “I just want the pain to stop,” I knew it was time to come home. I had fallen too far to help myself up, and I did not expect my friends to shoulder the burden of being untrained therapists. Besides, it wasn’t my friends that gave me problems. It was the woman that abused me when I was a kid and refused to face the music when I grew up. I flat-out ignored her behavior until my dreams became so terrifying that I would wake myself up… a repeat of what happened when I was little, but something that I hadn’t thought of since then.

The mark of an excellent abuser is the absolute denial that they’ve ever done anything wrong. I screamed into a black hole of seeming indifference until I thought I would die from emotional laryngitis. I am bipolar and I take medication for it every day. When I take my medication every day, the chemical imbalance goes away and therefore, I have the diagnosis, but not the behavior.

Instead of taking that into account, my mental health provided her with a fountain of reasons why she couldn’t possibly be held accountable for my pain; I mean, obviously. I’m just a crazy woman.

A crazy woman whose crazy started when we met. I didn’t know how to handle what she was telling me, and I didn’t have anyone to tell about our conversations because they were a secret. She had the audacity to tell me that her life was an open book, and even then it was insincere. Even when I was young, I learned how to turn the pages. I learned how to evoke reactions, and how to keep her from reacting at all. It was a game. It always had been… and not only that, it was rigged so my only choice was to resign.

The analogy of “an open book” is apt, because for my fourteenth birthday, she gave me her college journal. I read about everything college kids do, including sexually.

Learning to break the cycle of emotional abuse was to entertain that she knew what she was doing when she gave it to me. I fell for it hook, line and sinker. Other people were so worried about me that they tried to get me away from her, but it didn’t help. Because she was a lesbian, I thought they were just prejudiced and I willingly drowned in quicksand. There was nothing on earth that could get me to walk away.

She had me, and she knew it. For the next quarter century, our relationship looked like a game of tug o’war. I would run toward her wholeheartedly, and then she would emotionally shut down. I would try to run away, and she would bring me back in. At no time were we ever equals, but there was a lot of lip service that I was. In fact, what broke me was her insistence that I couldn’t, wouldn’t grow up and act like her equal… but there was no set of instructions, and even if there had been, the rules would have been changed daily just to make me feel even more worthless than I already did.

…because if I felt worthless, I wouldn’t leave. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the strength, because I knew that her Siren call would be ever-present in my life unless I drove my own ship into the rocks. Getting out of this situation has been the best thing I’ve ever done, because what I had to realize is that I grew, but she didn’t grow with me. She tried to keep me in that one-down position, had to feel like she was in control, because when she wasn’t, she felt powerless and railed against it. It was all or nothing, with no happy medium.

I’ve done this before. I’ve walked away before. Like many, many abused women, I was foolish enough to think that if a little bit of time passed, that I could go back… in reality, it was just more of the same, except that it got worse and worse. Selective memory took over so that not only was I crazy, I had made the whole thing up.

Because that’s how you treat people when you’re running away from yourself. I know it because I’m so good at running away now. The blessing that has come out of running away this time (and hopefully, the last) is that I’ve finally hit the finish line. All that’s left is the victory celebration, but a very quiet one.

There are good memories, too, and I’m sorry that there won’t be new ones. So I grieve that part. I grieve the loss of a future that won’t happen…

As I sit in the backyard with strong bones and a healthy mind and a zeal for whatever is next. Dana and I are starting to ask the big questions, and it’s fun receiving the big answers. Before, they didn’t have a wide enough road to drive through. Now I’m installing a highway.

Buccee’s and I are in negotiation.

Today has been a relatively busy day, and it’s nice to have a chance to relax. It’s just you and me and a bottle makes three (of delicious Coke Zero). I’m sitting in a very expensive black chair that I wish came with a matching ottoman. But hey, you can’t have everything you want in life. I have a team lead and a boss that like me. Ottomans are optional.

I found out that we have all the study materials available for the GCIA in our Security Center wiki, which is nice because I hear they’re very expensive to buy. It’s my first certification, so I am very excited about it. I’m not degreed in anything. I’ve never done anything academically with computers. I’m completely self-taught. My philosophy is that if you’re going to go into computers, just do it. Skip college. This is not because I hate college or anything. If you go, study something you’re just interested in, as opposed to it being a ticket to somewhere else. The reason a computer degree will not help you with jack or shit is that by the time the textbook is printed, your course material is already out of date. Things change too fast to wait for a textbook cycle.

However, this is not to say that my life has been easy being trained on the job. In a lot of ways, you’re on your own, kid. Go to college if you need to be taught something, because on the job, you’re the teacher. You have to be self-driven and completely willing to pore through thousands of pages of documentation… that’s usually hastily written and most likely incorrect because what’s in there is two versions ago. You’ll have to dig down into applications trying to break them, because it’s better for you to break them than to release something that’s customer-facing and just can’t hang (as is so prevalent in our news media right now…).

Learn as much as you can, as fast as you can, because the money’s not in desktop support. The money is in being able to build things, and alternatively, learning to tear them down. Threat analysis will start with me learning to crack my little ass off, because if I know enough to hack into a mainframe, I know enough to learn how to block it.

It brings morality into the light, but thankfully, I’ve already answered that question. When I lived in Portland, one of my neighbors was a high-level Black Hat, the kind where the FBI knows who you are. If I’d ever wanted to destroy anyone, anywhere, all it would have taken is a cold beer for bribery. And by destroy, I mean obliterate. Wouldn’t be able to walk across the street without getting picked up by the police and bank accounts suddenly on empty.

I learned what kind of person I am.

I am the kind of person that is capable of learning how to destroy so that safety and security can rise from the ash.

Which is interesting, because that’s exactly the path I’m walking in my personal life as well.

Amen.

I am sitting at lunch with my trusty laptop, earphones in and classical music blaring. First, it was O, Silver Moon by Antonin Dvorak. Now, it’s Petite Piece Concertante, by Guillaume Balay. Next, perhaps a little Bach Goldberg Variations or Handel’s Let the Bright Seraphim. I love anything that connects me to my past, or makes me dream of the future. For that, I count on Hindemith, Ives, Cage, and Glass. I also (obviously) have a tremendous crush on trumpet virtuoso Alison Balsom. I listen to her, and I think, “if I’d only practiced a little more.” And then i think, “I will never be a leggy blonde.”

I was wrong. The next one is Procession of the Nobles by Rimsky-Korsakov. This is one of my favorite pieces of all time, because from the time I was little, my grandfather would play me the record of it in which my father was the star. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this or not, but my dad made all-state band three years running, and his senior year, he was the best trumpet player in the entire state of Texas. He got 26 scholarships, including one to tour Russia with Frederick Fennell.

I can’t even find my car when I park at the mall.

And now we’ve arrived at the first movement of the Hummel Trumpet Concerto, one of my favorite pieces to play of all time. It’s not that hard, and sounds so much more impressive than it is. I’ll have to dig out my copy and see if my mom will help me make a video. Did I mention that my mom is an accompanist?

Boy, did I get lucky.

My mom is not a pianist. She’s an accompanist, and it takes a musician to know the difference. You know, the kind of piano player that will catch your ass when you’ve accidentally skipped a measure? She’s worth her weight in platinum.

And on that note, I have to go back to work.

Oh, wait! One more thing! I had my first review today and I’m doing great. They asked me what career track I wanted to take, so I said that I wanted to do threat analysis so that I can make Linux Ninja my official job title. They said yes. I have to start studying for the GCIA immediately, which is good because in three weeks, I’m moving to nights. I can spend literally nine hours studying at a clip.

It’s a great day to be me, y’all. You just don’t even know.

Dana and I have a huge back yard. It is so lovely that I rarely want to come inside. Living in Portland, Oregon for so long has made me realize that the thing Houston has going for it is that I can be outside, most of the time in short sleeves, in October… so that’s what I do. I sit on the back porch, drink beer, and reflect on how lucky I am that when I said I wanted to rent a house, it turned out to be this one.

In this back yard, I sit and try to understand my grief. I watch birds, squirrels, bats, and toads… wondering if I sit here long enough, will the pain ever go away? My instinct is no. It will ebb and flow, but never disappear. She will never disappear. It is losing a parent, a sibling, a limb. It will be a lifetime of phantom pain. My saving grace is that every time it aches, it aches a little less than it did the day before.

But it still hurts every day.

Every. Day.

Yesterday, a dragonfly landed on the arm of my patio chair, and I sat and talked with it, as if it could take my messages of love and care with it and land on your patio chair, too…

They’re messages of love and care that no one else wants me to send, because they know, looking from the outside, that I am only hurting myself because even if they showed up, they would go unanswered. To me, your reaction is not the point. I am saving myself one day at a time because if I can send you messages of love and care, I am not bothering to be angry anymore. I am not wasting this one “wild and precious life” by dealing in rage to which I am certainly entitled but do not care to entertain.

This space I have to write and reflect and hear others’ opinions is enough. People that comment rarely have any idea who I am, who you are, who we were to each other… as if even we know. I wonder what it feels like to look at us from the outside, wonder about the pain I’ve put Dana through and hope that I am not hurting her by letting her share in our stories. The cruel truth is that our stories hurt. Of course I’ve hurt Dana. Of course I have. You cannot listen to me tell them without seeing my vibrations of pain. I am enormously lucky that Dana agreed to take it on when she married me, and to this day listens even when I know that the story is getting repetitive.

Now I’m getting to the place where I wish I could tell myself to snap out of it. I want to be over it. I want to be out of it. I work hard every day to focus my attention away from my grief and it works but only so much. I have to force myself into distraction, because when I don’t, I end up like this. Sitting in the back yard on a beautiful day engrossed in how much I hurt instead of how much awe there is in the glistening piece of spider web next to me.

I have a stack of pickle salt envelopes in my car. I’ve meant to send them since July. 

Wortham Center has to be one of my favorite places on earth. The first summer that I lived in Houston, I had a friend who was in the adult chorus, and my sister was in the children’s chorus a summer or so later. I spent those years as a brooding Salieri, because I wanted to sing opera and they were the ones actually doing it.

So when the opera season last night opened with The Star Spangled Banner, I couldn’t help myself. Even though I was in the audience, people for three rows were turning around to look because they thought that I was a plant and that somehow the show was supposed to start in Orchestra C. Dana just looked at me like, “stop this right now or I may be forced to kill you.” The music stops and I look over at her… “I’m not a whore. I didn’t take the high B flat. Besides, when am I going to get these kind of acoustics again? Besides, I have to let Theresa know I’m here.”
Dana rubbed her ear. “I think she does!”The only thing I didn’t do, and I now see this as a flaw in my character, is yell “PLAY BALL!” at the end.

And in an instant, I am done being funny and the overture starts and I am right back in that place. The emotional place where all of this is so familiar. The seats that scratched my butt 25 years ago still do today. After about half an hour, my lower back went completely numb and I thought to myself, “some things just never change.”

The curtain goes up and the sets are kind of weird. Cool, but weird. There’s a certain whimsy to it all, as if the backdrop has been illustrated by the same guy that did “Oh, the Places You’ll Go.” The magic of opera has begun. I am completely enchanted.Of everyone, I am most impressed with the guy that played Aida’s father. I do not think that he necessarily had the most difficult role, but his voice was outstanding.

The role of Amneris was filled by an appropriately bitter mezzo, complete with claw hand gestures, and by far a better voice than the woman who played the title role.It wasn’t like she missed any notes or anything, and in fact, had some beautifully lyric lines. It was just that the mezzo had more depth and breadth to her voice… so many more colors and emotions that she managed to paint violently across the canvas. I watch Scandal on ABC, and I had to blink to remind myself that I was not watching First Lady Mellie Grant. The languages were different, but the context was the same. “I have to scream at the top of my lungs that I am in love with a man who does not love me and I am very very upset about it! In fact, I am so upset about it that I have to manufacture a scenario in which I can rub my competitor’s face in the dirt for the fulfillment of my own dark and twisted fantasies! And as a bonus, all of the people here tonight can watch!”

In the opera world, that never works. True love will end with two people declaring their undying love for each other by singing and lighting candles in a tomb with no air.