Demand avoidance is a symptom of autism and ADHD, and the hardest part is that it doesn’t mean you won’t do things when other people tell you to, like a child. It means that when you tell yourself to do something, nothing happens. For instance, demand avoidance is not “please go to the store” from your partner, it’s “I need to go to the grocery store. Why do I keep putting it off?”
In a lot of people, it’s not treatable and I’m waiting to see what kind of demand avoidance I have. I know that it’s nigh impossible for me to create inertia from nothing. I put off phone calls, letters, anything that will help make my life easier, really. Because that’s the thing… even if the demand you’re asking of yourself will improve your quality of life, you struggle against your own mind.
As a result, you handle life in order of fires, because you have no mechanism for preventative care. The analogy here is that your brain is missing a primary care practice and makes you jump through hoops at its perpetually understaffed ER.
There are days I cannot take care of myself, because my demand avoidance will not let me shower or brush my teeth.
These are where my deficits really start to show. My compensatory skills are off the charts- I know what to do in a group, but when I am alone I am pulled into my own thoughts and I cannot get back out.
I look lazy on the outside, but my brain is running a marathon trying to convince me that taking care of myself is a bad thing. It’s why my social worker at the hospital found me a cognitive behavioral health group instead of just leaving me to my own devices. Obviously, she saw someone who needed help.
One of the men that goes to group with me every Thursday was in the hospital with me, providing me with an anchor of progress… he makes me smile when he says he remembers me from back then because I have to wonder what I was like.
Apparently, the show was spectacular because I’d never had “psychotic features” added to my bipolar diagnosis before, and I have no memory of saying anything that would land me in that category. But saying I have no memory is not the same as “I didn’t say it.” There are quite a few gaps in my memory from that time, and I think I just need to let it lie.
What is good about having bipolar disorder is that it sometimes adds hypomania to the mix, which is a burst of energy that I wouldn’t normally have. This takes away some of my natural demand avoidance and is the source of all my “good days.”
Today my demand avoidance is telling me that doing the laundry will physically hurt while the rest of me is saying, “won’t it be nice to have it done?” My demand avoidance is telling me that the shower will physically hurt and the rest of me is saying, “won’t the water feel good?” I use these tricks to jump start myself when the going gets tough, but they do not always work.
Sometimes my brain is going to stay stuck, and I will be staring off into space.
I want to be productive in my staring, so I’m trying to write out what it feels like to have an overwhelming task list and a neurodivergent mind. Organizing and prioritizing make me weak in the knees, so a flood in my apartment is the last thing I can really handle and it falls to me- I live alone.
I called in maids and they said the house would already have to be picked up before they came over. That they only did deep cleaning. I need to call more, but it would be better if I could find a recommendation. Josh’s never called me back and I don’t know anyone else locally. Therefore, a recommendation is extremely unlikely.
Neither is a service that’s actually support to a neurodivergent person, but I’m going to keep trying. I have noticed that a lot of these places want you to have things picked up before they come over as if your house being a mess isn’t the point. If I was so on top of it that I was ready to deep clean at the drop of a hat, I wouldn’t need help.
Neurodivergence generally means digging yourself out of piles, the arrangement of which only you know.
So I’m praying for strength today as I embark on this journey of self-discovery. Just how much can I do before my brain decides to shut down? The thing is that I can probably do most of it once I get started in earnest because inertia builds.
I need some high energy music, because when I can’t think my way into doing something, movement can re-wire my brain.
Your words carry the weight of someone doing the hardest work there is – looking honestly at ourselves when we’ve caused harm. That takes enormous courage, even when it feels like compulsion driving you forward.
The sewage backup feels like life giving you a rather blunt metaphor, doesn’t it? Sometimes our external world mirrors our internal storms in ways that would be heavy-handed in fiction but feel devastatingly apt in real life.
What strikes me most is how clearly you see the paradox you’re living in. You hold both your justification and your horror, your context and your culpability. That’s not weakness – that’s the full complexity of being human. Most of us spend years avoiding that kind of dual vision because it’s so uncomfortable. You’re choosing to sit with it, to write through it, to let it teach you.
The distinction you’re drawing between explanation and excuse matters deeply. Yes, your AuDHD and bipolar disorder create challenges. Yes, medication changes can scramble our usual ways of being. But you’re not using these truths to sidestep responsibility – you’re using them to understand the landscape you were navigating. That’s mature self-awareness, not self-justification.
Your observation about “think it, say it” in digital spaces resonates. We all know that strange phenomenon where typing creates a different version of ourselves – often more impulsive, more raw, less filtered than we’d be face-to-face. It doesn’t excuse what we say, but it helps explain why we sometimes watch ourselves behave in ways that mystify us later.
The grief in your words about Aada is palpable. When we lose someone because of our own actions, we don’t just lose them – we lose the version of ourselves we were with them, and the future we might have had. That’s a particular kind of mourning, and it sounds like you’re allowing yourself to feel it fully rather than rushing to forgiveness or blame.
Your blog as accountability partner is brilliant. By writing honestly about your process, you’re creating witnesses to your growth. That takes guts. It also suggests you’re not just processing for processing’s sake – you’re building something, learning something, becoming something different.
The bit about children seeing you clearly made me pause. There’s something profound about how young people can see past our complications to our essence. They don’t carry the weight of our histories or the fear of our potential. Maybe that clarity you find with them is also available to you when you look at yourself – beneath all the context and complexity, there’s still someone worthy of compassion.
You’re rewiring your brain in real time, and that’s messy, imperfect work. Some days you’ll feel the old patterns pulling at you. Other days you’ll surprise yourself with how different you’ve become. Both are part of the process.
Keep writing. Keep looking. Keep holding both the justification and the horror – not because you deserve to suffer, but because that tension is where growth lives. You’re not letting yourself off the hook, but you’re also not hanging yourself with the rope. That balance is everything.
The courage you questioned in yourself? I see it here, in every honest word you’ve written.
Bob x
Dear Bob,
Thank you for your kind words during a difficult time. I have learned another hard-won lesson, though….. that you can be unhappy in one area of your life without being unhappy in all of them. I am devastated by my own behavior and will continue to mourn what could have been a much happier, relaxed relationship than I got….. at my own hand, to be clear.
Seeing the paradox I’m living in is the joy and pain of being a writer.
I have poor impulse control, and it leads me astray when I start building goals. Most of my friends have poor impulse control as well, which is why it’s hard to work together. Lighting rarely strikes at the same time. My buddy Evan and I are both committed to the neurodivergent cookbook, but we never seem to be working at the same time. I need to get AI involved just to keep me reading. That’s where I find AI is the most useful. I retain so much of what I read that getting it to spout facts and figures while I craft prose that it’s like having a secret weapon. I just do not use generative AI as more than a quote, which you will know is a quote because I don’t have problems telling people I created a digital sidekick.
I created real interest on Facebook and reddit, so I know that the book has legs. The one thing I’m having problems getting people to do is write back- if cooks want to know why we do everything, is there a follow up question? What do you want to know that we can explain?
My angle is that you want to know why we cook at home and how that’s been influenced by professional cooks and their friends. Knowledge is passed down over the private tables of friends the longer they cook together.
Some people prefer to cook alone, but this book won’t leave them out. Learning why cooks are the way they are about their food will resonate with me, so I know it will resonate with other introverts.
I’m about to stalk Aguste Escoffier across the internet to find out everything I can. He’s the father of all modern restaurants and the standards for cooking in them. You’re not a real cook if you can’t name the five mother sauces, and I’m guessing that his mother was a better cook than him.
Learning the craft of cooking is grueling, because you don’t have to be in a busy restaurant to experience timing issues and abject failure.
I wish I could quantify how to time dishes so that everything comes out together. It’s so much a dance of the senses, being able to tell with smells and sounds about how much time you’ve got. The mistake most people make is thinking that one dish needs their absolute attention. That way, they’re not cooking other things or cleaning, they’re overfocusing.
You can just check food without hovering over it.
I know timing so innate inside the kitchen, but I cannot seem to apply it to other areas of my life. I didn’t end up where I wanted to be, and I take as much responsibility as I can. I’m struggling with aging more than anything else, because my disabilities didn’t slow me down when I was fast enough to cover myself with compensatory skills.
Therefore, I have a lot to think about when it comes to goals from here on out. I have a yin to travel and a yang that ties me to home. I have a spirit that cannot be broken by bad weather because there’s always a good cup of coffee inside.
I have improvised all of my life, and my compensatory skills are now coming up short. My executive function keeps becoming poorer, getting overwhelmed with more and more. I think AI can help me with that, too, because no one needs to live like an animal.
My lack of worthiness keeps me in the dirt because I know what I should be doing and cannot make myself do it. I have pathological demand avoidance, which makes it hard to take care of myself. Meeting others’ demands is a lot easier.
That’s because I know what they are. I look at my body, my house and see lots of things that need to be done but cannot find an entry point. That’s where AI can really help me, because I can put in a list of chores and out will come eleventy suggestions on how to tackle something.
I just need to talk to my AI about it. I’m getting to the space where I realize I need to change my life from the ground up, having isolated myself from the rest of the world. Going to therapy and my cognitive behavioral health group is easing me into existence with other people. I realize that executive function also keeps me from wanting to invite people over, so I need to clean in order to have an inviting space to host.
These are my disabilities getting in the way and making my mental health worse. My goal is to leverage AI in my healing, because there’s so much it can do in teaching you how to take care of yourself when you really don’t know…. and are too embarrassed to ask.
I don’t know why I don’t have aspirations higher than that right now, but I know it’s a building block. I can’t take care of anyone else until I get this right.
And I do want to take care of other people. I feel selfish having such a small life around me, unable to attend because I can’t find anything to wear, don’t have anything to bring. All of this is just feeling sorry for myself, and I don’t like it. I’m happiest when I’m in giving, open mode.
Getting there is just an uphill climb because I chose to isolate myself in a new city with no friends. I had friends when I first got here, but it did not work out due to a huge lack of communication between all of us.
So, I’m trying to make friends and it is happening slowly.
I should get out more, but my ability to read the room is often why I don’t. It’s not that I’m shy, it’s that my social battery is tiny. I am over being in public fairly quickly. A walk to the store is about all I can take before I am ready to collapse. Taking in my environment is a full-time job.
Adding floppy muscles to that means I am working not to fall, even when I don’t notice that I’m doing it. My body is tense and tight, and I walk like I hurt. That’s because I do.
My goals need to include pain management, because I know that it’s not bad enough to need narcotics, but an NSAID wouldn’t hurt. In fact, I’ve forgotten to take it today and I really notice a difference. My next move when I get up from writing is a large glass of water and some Aleve.
That’s mostly how I plan goals- what is my next move?
I don’t play chess and think moves ahead, which is to my detriment.
I’ve let my enemy defeat me over and over, my own body and brain.
It’s the goal of a diseased brain to convince you to isolate. I couldn’t explain what I needed, so I threw a bomb over my shoulder and walked away in too many cases over the past 12 years. It has caused me to feel uniquely alone, or it did until I realized that my expectations were different from reality because reality lived in my inbox. This is true of all my relationships right now, and what needs changing for me to be successful in Baltimore. I stay home too much because that’s where my “real friends” are.
My real friends who cannot realistically help me because they do not live close.
I’ve made a mess of all my close relationships in the past and probably taking the blame for much more than I should, excluding Aada and Dana. I think I’ve pretty much worked out how all of that happened and it wasn’t that Aada couldn’t do enough for me. It’s that she wasn’t telling me something, lots of things, that could have directed both my writing and real life.
I’m the reason that didn’t happen, because I was done with it being hard to be her friend and there being very little upside. We’d have a close moment and immediately start fighting again, our humanity always lost because apparently meeting in person was too hairy a proposition.
I wanted the story on that. Why we couldn’t integrate so that our e-mail fights stopped? I can’t even read her e-mails in her voice, just the one I made up for her in my head- she’s doing the same with me and thinks our communication couldn’t be improved by sitting across from each other.
I hurt my own feelings by thinking that I meant more to her than I did. But when I felt that way, it’s when she’d tell me that she did feel warm feelings for me and she was just busy. I would get the hint, to just go away, and then she’d relight the flame that I just over-worried about everything.
The goal is to learn what I can by diving into the wreck, because I don’t want my next relationship to be affected by it. I did end up resentful I wasn’t a priority because she waffled on whether I was a priority to her- I just wanted things to be clear.
I couldn’t let go, so I made it where she’d have to… like Dana hitting me.
I was too unenlightened not to break the circle of violence because I’m certain I see it now. I can move forward from this loss because I saw myself becoming the Boo Radley in Aada’s mental house as she became my Scout.
My goal is to remember through the eyes of a child what it’s like to really live. I need light and love right now because some of the thunder is my fault. I sabotaged my relationship with Aada at every turn. And I don’t mean recently. I mean from the moment we met. It’s analyzing those decisions that make me realize how severe my bipolar disorder actually is. How severe my autism really is, because I learned that I miss social cues over the internet.
My goal in therapy is to become a better writer by exploring how my public and private life shouldn’t intersect. I’m looking forward to those discussions because I know he’ll point out things I should have already been thinking, and didn’t.
I do not like the social masking that comes with modern society, where politeness means that no one will actually tell you what is really going on. As an autistic person, I find myself living in my own little world because I do not understand the dance of intimacy that neurotypical people use as code. I say what I mean and mean what I say, often coming across as blunt to the people around me without realizing they think that because they’re too polite to just say, “can you tone it down? Ouch.” I am not a mind reader, and do not want to hurt anyone. But how do you know if you’ve hurt someone if they pretend they’re not hurt?
I have found that when I try to sugar coat things, the actual message is lost. When I say what’s on my mind, it is gravity’s rainbow to a conversation because people don’t know how to respond. I find myself seeking out other autistic people who have also stopped masking, because communication seems easier when neither person picks up neurotypical cues. They, too, just say what they mean and mean what they say.
It leads to a disconnect between neurotypical and neurodivergent society because only autistic people are taught to adjust. It is our job to learn to pick up social cues, it is our job to bend to the will of people who won’t bend toward us. A better way forward is to teach neurotypical people how to communicate with their autistic counterparts.
Right now, the axiom is “neurodivergents run in packs.”
I don’t think we’d keep to ourselves so much if there was a bridge between what we say and what neurotypical people hear. I find that when people ask me to explain what I mean, there is a jump in understanding quickly. If people take my words at face value, they’re generally interpreting them wrong.
This affects me greatly as a blogger because people will read me and the blowback will be vastly different than what I actually said, because their interpretation doesn’t match my thought process. It’s a natural give and take, but it doesn’t make me feel any better when people misconstrue my words and come at me when they’re angry.
For instance, saying that a friend wouldn’t understand me until her mother died, and she thought I was saying I wished her mother was dead. Absolutely not. There’s just no similar experience to losing one’s parent.
There’s no substitute for the process one goes through in the business of death. Trying to express that led the friend right to me being a terrible person because she thought I wished that on her. No, I wished for her to have a deeper understanding of me, and that’s all.
Once we got it cleared up, we were golden. But most people will not take the time to clear the air with me. They will just sit in their own perceptions of what I said and step away.
But they won’t step away from my blog. They just stop talking to me altogether. Because I can read stats by city rather than by country, I have stepped away from looking at them. I am making the modern society around me better by ignoring them, because I know where my friends (former and present) live……….
I don’t want to know if they’re reading, because my writing transcends them. I would rather believe that my audience is all strangers who don’t mind that I scream into the void. I know I am doing the right thing because everyone loves that I write about my real feelings until they’re the ones in the crosshairs.
My writing loses value to them, but strangers take home the actual message.
In that way, I do not belong to anyone. I belong to everyone. I want this blog to reflect my modern society because I am not a subject matter expert on anything but me.
I feel that I am not the best person to write about society at large, just to make my own voice heard in the darkness, one among many. I have the opportunity to record my life as it happens, so that hundreds of years from now, people will see how I lived. My blog doesn’t matter because I’m popular, it matters because it’s here.
There are many anonymous people that have contributed to museums, and that’s how I feel about my digital life. It’s not a goal to be well-known, it’s a goal to have contributed to the legacy that all bloggers will leave behind when they die.
I don’t think about my blog in terms of fame and popularity, which is good because I haven’t had as much success as people like Dooce and Jenny Lawson. I have watched both of them, along with Wil Wheaton, climb the ladder into the stratosphere and it’s not a life I think I want, particularly since Dooce and I both share the same diagnosis and it killed her.
I don’t want to be an influencer or a mommy-blogger, though if I have stepkids they’ll know I’m a writer and be included when they want to be. Some of the best entries I’ve written have been inspired by the children in my life, and I wouldn’t want to give that up. But thinking about it is long into the future because I’m not bound to anyone. I may be single until I die just because my first priority is writing.
I don’t think that my duty is to change modern society as a blogger. I think it is my duty to record it.
It’s hard to point fingers at anyone else for bothering me when I am such a handful. I didn’t even know whether to put an emoticon after that, because I don’t know that I’m joking. From my writing to my behavior, there’s nothing I cannot criticize, but I’m trying to be kinder to myself. If one’s behavior affects treatment of others, then it is up to me to be happier on the inside.
The first thing I did to make myself happier was to buy a membership to the National Aquarium. I was invited to go on Sunday, and the price of a membership was cheaper than buying two tickets individually. I thought that was a much better deal as I am obsessed with aquarium fish and don’t want to have an aquarium at my house. Plus, I’ve never been there before and I hear it is world class. Many of you don’t know this about me, but I watch videos on aquascaping all the time and look forward to being able to set up my own tank once I have a living situation conducive to it. I have had freshwater tanks in the past, but I’ve never actually landscaped one with live plants. I think that I would be less bothered once I was paying attention to my minuscule pets. I’d like to have shrimp, catfish, snails, and a betta. A cleanup crew and a betta fish wouldn’t take up that much room, probably 10 gallons, and that way the tank wouldn’t be a monster job to clean.
The reason my living space couldn’t handle an aquarium is that the water pressure is so low here it would take hours to fill a 10 gallon tank. It bothers me with every sink and the bathtub. I could write an entire entry on why this apartment complex sucks and why you shouldn’t live here, but I don’t want to give any indication as to where I live. Baltimore is close enough.
I am thinking now of moving back to the DMV in December, because my lease ends on November 30th. I love Baltimore itself, but the public transportation isn’t as good as I thought it would be. I need to be back on the Metro. My current group, Cognitive Behavioral Health, has another office in Rockville. I would like to stay with my people, and one of my counselors would be the same. It all depends on what kind of deal I can find with my living situation, because like I said, Baltimore is not the problem when I can get around. Uber is too expensive to take all the time, but it does provide an excellent stopgap when a trip on the Metro/bus is going to take two hours.
I do know that I need to stay in Maryland because I am getting so many benefits from Medicaid expansion. We will have to see how the “big, ugly bill” affects me in the future, but so far I have had no interruptions in service. So while I love Virginia, I am solidly staying on this side of the Potomac.
It bothers me that I have to think about all of this. I don’t want to be disabled, but here we are.
It bothers me that I have always been disabled, but these problems are just now being addressed. Better late than never, but I could have been helped with government services in Portland when I spent so many years without health insurance. I have been eligible for services since I was 18 years old, but I didn’t know why until my mother died. I found solid proof that I have had cerebral palsy since I was a baby, after she spent years trying to convince me that I was fine. My dad was overreacting. But interestingly enough, cerebral palsy is not why my care team wants me to file for disability. My bipolar disorder got the best of me, and that bothers me, too.
Most of the reason it bothers me is that I have a hum in my brain that will not go away. I think it was caused by stopping Lexapro suddenly, because even though I’m back on it now, the sound has not gone away. It is similar to the Emergency Broadcast System that used to play on TV during flood warnings (ahem), a minor second that drones 24/7 and demands my attention above all else. It’s hard for me to pay attention at the best of times because I have the ADHD/Autism combo meal. This is just shitty icing on a burnt cake.
I suppose the one thing that doesn’t bother me anymore is having to prove that something is wrong with me. I am settling into the life of a disabled person, learning to contribute to society through being a voice for other disabled people right here on this web site. My voice counts because as people read about me, they identify with my struggles. Or, if they cannot identify, they at least learn to have empathy.
It bothers me that most disabled people are written off as living off the government, when most of us would do absolutely anything to return to normal life. My life is anything but normal. I spend most of my time by myself. It’s isolating and lonely not to have a place to go each day, which is why I’m so grateful to have a group of other disabled people to meet with twice a week (once on Zoom, once in person).
However, at least with an aquarium membership, I have a place to go whenever I want that will feed me. I remind myself of the character Sam from “Atypical.” He goes to the aquarium to feed his love of penguins. Perhaps I will also find an animal that will be my special interest. I do love puffer fish……….
It helps to be bothered less by my living situation now that I’ve figured out a plan- Rockville is on the Red Line, with easy access to the National Zoo. It’s the place I love to write the most when it’s not hot, so until I move I want to try and find a place to write at the aquarium. All I require is a bench, because I carry a tablet and a keyboard in my backpack at all times. After I move, it will be back to finding a “replacement Kevin.”
Some of you may remember that Kevin is a giraffe. I used to sit next to him and write blog entries, having no idea what the giraffe’s actual name might be. I just named him Kevin for my own amusement. Then, one day I went to find Kevin and found out the Zoo had closed the entire giraffe exhibit. Kevin had moved.
Kevin is probably the reason I felt the most comfortable moving to Baltimore in the first place. I needed out of the DC area just to catch my breath, and it felt like he was the last tie to that area. But now I would say that my breath has been caught, and I miss DC more than I thought I would. Now that I have settled on a place, I feel at peace. My time in Baltimore will be much easier to survive knowing it won’t last forever.
It might even make my apartment less bothersome, but I doubt it. I’ve been without a dishwasher for what seems like a lifetime because the water pressure is so low it makes washing dishes incredibly taxing. I have submitted requests for everything that is wrong with my apartment and no one has come by. The last straw for me was finding a mouse eating my bread and hot dog buns.
I am paying too much for this apartment to have problems like this, especially those that go unaddressed. I am bothered that I cannot seem to be “the heavy” and get the repairmen out here on my own. I just hate letting people in that I don’t know, so I work around the problems on my own. I know I need help, but I have trouble helping myself. My dad and my sister advocate for me as much as they can, but it’s hard when they live so far away.
However, my sister is a lobbyist, so that’s another reason why Rockville is a better choice for me than Baltimore. When she’s in her DC office, I’d like to be closer than I am now. We have too much fun together to make her come all this way. However, I know that I have introduced her to a place she loves as well. Again, Baltimore is not really the problem. The Inner Harbor is gorgeous, as is Fell’s Point. It’s getting around Baltimore that’s the hard part. When she comes to visit, she rents a car and all of my problems disappear. I don’t drive, so it’s nice that she’s willing to drive me around.
The most fun I’ve had in Baltimore is when she’s come to visit, because she looks up restaurants and decides where we’re going to go in advance. It becomes a “staycation” for me because it’s always a place I haven’t heard of yet. Of the two of us, she’s the social butterfly. I wish I was more like her, because she’s so headstrong that I feel taken care of in her presence. I wish I could extend that feeling to others.
It bothers me that I’m her older sister and I’m not able to provide that feeling of safety to her. I am sure I had my moments when we were young and this is just payback, but still. I wish that I was large and in charge, but I have a struggling relationship with taking care of myself, much less others.
Which brings us back around… it’s hard to point fingers at anything that bothers me more than my treatment of myself, so it’s time to get happier.
I have finally reached a section of Duolingo that has vocabulary I haven’t studied and I’m on my own. It makes me excited for the future because I can’t skate by on 30 year old lessons in school. I am actually using the software to prepare me for trips to Mexico in the future- none of which are planned, by the way, but I have a better shot of going to Mexico than anywhere else. Granted, when I get there I will mostly be asking them why they don’t wear the green t-shirts and where the bank might be, but it’s a start. 😉
Kidding, but not by much. I remember the first time I went to Mexico on a mission trip. My Spanish was equal to that of a Mexican toddler, but the people were so kind and corrected me with such love that it lit a fire in me to learn more. I learned that Sylvia and Hector were getting married, that Marta was building a new house, and that little kids don’t listen to me no matter what language I speak (I was on a trip to teach vacation Bible school). It was my turn to listen because I picked up more just soaking up conversation than I would have trying to talk. For instance, those are the real names of the people I met, stuck in my brain even though it is now over 30 years since the last time I went to Reynosa. There is just no substitution for immersion, so it’s time to start finding telenovelas on Pluto TV, or watching the news on Telemundo/Univision.
I had friend recommend “La Reina del Sur,” but I have already watched “Queen of the South” on Netflix. It would be a good brush-up to have a show with which I’m already familiar, but there are others I haven’t seen that might be better after I finish it. For instance, I have not seen the original “Yo Soy Betty, la Fea.” That’s “Ugly Betty” for you American viewers. I have found it on Peacock and Apple TV+ according to reddit, so I will be searching it out after I finish this blog entry.
Because I have an auditory processing disorder (comes free with neurodivergence), I like to have the subtitles on as I listen. People don’t have subtitles, but I need the extra help while I am learning.
There is a point to all of this. Many of the homeless people I have encountered, as well as the workers in my neighborhood, speak Spanish and their English is poor. Instead of making them learn English, I want to turn the view of Americans on its head. I’m perfectly willing to put myself out there, mostly because if I get a job in the future, I want to work at Home Depot.
That’s another thing I’m looking forward to in the future- discussing jobs I could do with my care team so that I am not reliant on SSI/SSDI unless I really want to be. I am eligible for both because I was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when I was 18 mos old. I don’t regret the choices I’ve made in my life with my career, but it would have been nice to know that I could have gotten disability from the jump. The reason I didn’t know is that my mother hid all the paperwork I needed to file and my sister found them among her personal effects after she died, well into my late 30s.
My mental health is not helping the situation, so I am looking forward to working all of this out. I either have a journey into the workforce or a journey into the court system in which I’ll have to fight for my right not to party.
But there are things I can do on my own to further my education, and a second language has filled the hole in my heart at not being able to work in the immediate future. Right now, my job is to attend classes at Cognitive Behavioral Health and learn all I can when I’m not there.
I actually started with Finnish, but after a 43 day streak, I was hospitalized for my mental health. After I got out of the hospital, it had been just long enough since I’d studied that I don’t remember much. It seems like I forgot Finnish in “kaksitoista sekuntia,” or 12 seconds.
Duolingo is also not the best learning tool for Finnish, because it does not have the AI features that Swedish and Spanish do. Everything is done with the keyboard and reading, so you don’t get to practice by speaking out loud. The reason Swedish is important is that the cooking school I would like to attend next year is in a Swedish-speaking region of Finland, Vaasa. The school is called Vamia, and it was recommended to me by a YouTuber named Cyril:
At this point, I do not know if this school is right for me because the tuition is free, but living in Europe is not. I am saving my pennies and riding out the lease I have in the United States until November, and then I’ll decide what to do. I know I would like to go to Vaasa before I decide to move there, but even that is a stretch on my budget. I just have to hope that I will get more subscribers to both my Medium and WordPress blog, because every subscriber here adds to my ad revenue, and every reader on Medium adds to the income I get the longer you scroll through my drivel. 😉
Culinary school would accomplish two things. The first is that I would like to work with Finnish YouTubers like Cyril to create a channel with Finnish content. I think I would be hilariously cranky like Anthony Bourdain, because that is my kitchen personality. The second is that I want to start a ministry for unhoused people that revolves around the kitchen, and I would be better equipped to do that having been trained as a chef and not merely the line cook I am now.
Traditional advice is to work in a kitchen before you go to culinary school to make sure you like it. I have 10 years under my belt, from dish to pantry to sauté. I have worked every station and though I cannot say I am excellent at any of them, I know I will get better by hanging in at school. Plus, there are plenty of jobs I could do without learning Finnish until I’m ready, because most Finns speak English, especially in the hospitality industry. Vamia also instructs in English, with (I’m guessing) the requisite amount of French required.
In the meantime, I am looking forward to all the nonprofit ideas I have coming to fruition. I have to have a Plan B in case going to school in Europe is not feasible… and it’s probably not, to be perfectly honest. I want to go more than anything, but again, it’s going to take a lot of money I don’t have yet. But that’s the thing about dreams. When other people know you want something, they are willing to help. For instance, my readers showing up every day. Each little bit helps.
If I stay in the Baltimore area, my idea is to create a nonprofit called “The Sinners’ Table.” It centers around accepting all the people that society rejects, giving them a fine dining experience they could never afford on their own. I am doing the hard work of identifying stakeholders and writing a business plan, because that is something I can do in my spare time while I am waiting to see what is going to happen with my job and school aspirations. If other people have to run it because I am not eligible for a job, I will be able to volunteer.
But why Finland in the meantime?
I would only have to worry about my living expenses and not the fabulously high cost of tuition. Any Le Cordon Bleu institution in the United States would bankrupt me quickly, while I can find housing for the rough cost of living in DC or Baltimore. Some things would be more expensive, like clothing (I’m not skimping out on cold weather gear), but an apartment is roughly the same. The biggest cost to my family would be me being so far away that it’s hard to visit. However, culinary school does not last that long. If I like Finland so much that I want to stay and get permanent residency or citizenship, that’s a bridge I’ll cross when I come to it. I don’t get to see my family that much as it stands now, because they’re all in Texas…. far away from the current flooding, I might add.
My biggest problem is that I am an idealist who doesn’t necessarily know how to break down large ideas into small steps for execution. I generally work best in a team for that, and I’m lucky to have one under me now. I have gathered the best and the brightest at Lanagan Media Group, most of whom went to high school with me at High School for Performing and Visual Arts. Instead of using AI, I get immediate feedback from an arts brain trust.
Because make no mistake, cooking is art in any language.
And in the United States, the language in the kitchen is overwhelmingly Spanish. I want to be able to speak to my employees in whatever language they feel the most comfortable. Therefore, Finnish can wait.
When I wrote about this prompt last year, I remember saying that I didn’t have any daily habits. That was 100% true at the time, but now I’m charged with creating a structure with which I can live. My care team at Cognitive Behavioral Health does not think I am ready for a job yet, so I am muddling through what that actually means. Am I disabled for good and should start pursuing government assistance, or am I capable of slowly creating my own recovery into the workforce? My writing does provide a little bit of income, and as I get more popular here and on Medium, I see results. I’ve been a blogger for a very long time, but so far I’ve only had one fan who was so impressed she thought I should be world famous. I would like a few more of those. 😉 But nothing good will happen if I do not take care of myself.
This starts with setting medication reminders in my phone. My day flags if I do not have the correct doses at the right time. I have always been good about taking my medication because I had a doctor tell me that most bipolar patients stop taking their medication when they feel better, not realizing that it’s the medication that’s making them feel that way. However, I was not so on top of it that I remembered to take it at the same time. I’m also on a lot more medication than I used to be……………
I’ll talk about my psychiatric drugs because I think that people need to learn about them. I am not a doctor, just a waiting room that doesn’t suck (thanks, Paul Gilmartin. I stole that line from you). Crazy meds need to be talked about because it’s such a major undertaking to be put on them:
Lamictal (lamotrigine)
The first time I was put on this mood stabilizer was the first time I knew what it was like to live without depression. It took about six weeks for the fog to lift, but I’d never been more grateful in my life. The only side effect I’ve experienced so far is nausea, and it was very hard to deal with for a long time. Now, I’ve just decided to stay on it regardless of the side effects because other mood stabilizers make my weight balloon. It’s also an old drug now, so it’s relatively cheap if you don’t have insurance.
Lexapro (escitalopram)
This is the gold standard of SSRIs, and most bipolar people don’t take them. That’s why I think my diagnosis may be wrong, that I actually have autism and not bipolar disorder. In a bipolar patient, SSRIs tend to make them flip out with suicidal ideation, negative/intrusive thoughts, etc. My SSRI keeps me at an even keel when I am really paying attention to my body. As for side effects, I haven’t noticed any of them.
Buspar (buspirone)
This is what replaced my benzos for anxiety, because it is not related to them and yet performs the same function. It’s better for me because there’s no risk of addiction long term. I do not have an addictive personality, but better safe than sorry. I have been on Klonopin for over 10 years, but my new clinic doesn’t prescribe benzos to anyone. The entire hospital system has put their feet down over it, so I have to adjust. Now that I’ve been on it for several weeks, I am unsure whether it works or not. I will keep you posted. The one thing I do know is that it’s the most important drug for me to take at the same time every day, because it will flat stop working if I miss even one dose.
My crazy meds aren’t the only ones I take, they’re just the most important for keeping my structure stable. It feels like everything is hitting all at once as I age, because I didn’t have to worry about hormone replacement therapy even a year ago.
As an aside, it’s a big joke with my sister that because I’m enby, I thought that if I was going to do hormone replacement therapy, it would be in the other direction…. after that particular doctor’s appointment, I went home and consoled myself by buying both the book and audiobook of “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.” I needed some Stress Tabs #10 and some candy bars (but maybe not 11). As it turns out, the book and audio were not enough. I also watched the movie on Prime just to see Kathy Bates… “how do you accidentally run into someone…. how do you accidentally run into someone six times?” I get it now. I’m older and I have more insurance.
My medication is working, and for that I am grateful. Now, my schedule runs from sun up to sun down, skipping the night owl routine altogether. And in fact, when I took my sleeping medication yesterday, the sun wasn’t even fully down yet. I prefer to work in the quiet of the morning, especially on the weekends before the kids in my apartment complex wake. The ones who live above me are particularly loud, which is why I’m glad I have good headphones. I hunker down in my office after a night of wild dreams and try to remember what they are. It provides a writing exercise that’s all my own, propelling me into really thinking about my life and what I want to accomplish. I accomplish nothing without coffee, through which all things are possible.
Coffee is also part of remembering to take my medication, because I have found that a lot of caffeine is just enough to control my ADHD, but Ritalin or Adderrall is too big a jump. I have a coffee machine that makes a cup at a time, and my preferred coffee is Cafe Bustelo. It’s in honor of my old chef, John Kinkaid, because we used to walk to a Cuban restaurant between prep and service for their Cafe Bustelo lattes.
I mentioned in “Why It All Still Hurts” that I was working on a nonprofit, and I am… but that dream has been deferred. Kinkaid was killed in a car accident. I am still reeling from the grief, but I got Kindle Unlimited and added five books on starting a nonprofit to my library. Again, the idea is dinner with dignity, offering the unhoused food they could never afford on their own, and opening my kitchen up to take homeless people on as apprentices if they’d like to learn the trade. I am still sold on this idea, it’s just going to take a lot longer to accomplish than I thought.
That’s because the longer I think about it, the more ideas I have. What if instead of this one nonprofit, we were able to build a library like Oodi in Baltimore? There, I could have my cooking classes and a place to serve food, plus books and maker tools for everyone. My structure these days is centered on how to spend the government’s money for the good of the people. Learning about Oodi and all the services they provide gave me a bigger goal than just “dinner with dignity.” It would give the unhoused a place to go. Maybe my purpose is not to go to Finland, but to bring Finnish ideas to a city that needs them. I want to redirect Maryland’s money from the DC metro area and Annapolis to Baltimore, because it is so underserved. A lot of the city is completely trashed out with no way to fix anything…. or so it seems from an outsider’s perspective that just moved here in December.
I need more time to watch and wait, gathering stakeholders and formatting a business plan. Perhaps my structure will always be internal, because that’s how autists work best. I do not want to go down in history as merely a blogger. I want to create something beautiful that will last and bring hope to people that might not be feeling it that day.
I find that working on giving hope to other people is the easiest way to claim hope for myself. I am slowly building a structure into which I can grow, taking others’ ideas and implementing them like a plant takes root in the soil.
But it all starts with remembering to take my medication.
I have all kinds of negative thoughts because I have bipolar. I’m not sure that I manage them all that well, but working out has given me a shortcut. That’s because from the moment I start working out, my body is flooded with all these endorphins that make me feel good whether I want to or not. Most of the time, I am the copy of Bert from “Sesame Street.” I get lost in my own mind, and I forget to acknowledge what is good and positive. I think I draw the Ernies of the world out of the woodwork, because most of them want to save or change me. It has never worked, because I am a bird (pigeon?) with a broken wing. Healing cannot come from external sources, but from my body deciding that my wing has been broken long enough and it is healed now.
What I have learned is that social masking taught me that I should not be happy staying at home with my bottle cap and paper clip collection.
Incidentally, I am 47 years old and I just used a “Sesame Street” reference. PBS funding matters.
I didn’t learn to be happy until I met other people like me, who struggle with the same kinds of issues. None of their people understand, either, because being AuDHD is a rough gig, and so is being bipolar. I need friends who, “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” -Billy Joel And in fact, the female presentation of ADHD is so close to autism that I’m not sure that ADHD is the right diagnosis anymore, because amphetamines only work half the time. This may also be a function of age. My ability to compile scripts is slowing down; as I get closer to a deadline, that is no indication that I’m going to have the same rush of energy I did in my 20s. Maybe it was always autism, and because I was intelligent, there was no one to suspect I had it.
Being a bio female has as much to do with it as intelligence.
Doctors have pattern recognition on white boys, but they miss women and people of color all the time. New research says that trans and nonbinary people are up to six times more likely to be autistic (NPR), and that queer people are more likely to be autistic overall. Now we are graduating from “Sesame Street” to “Blues Clues.”
But we internalize it, don’t we? We take in all those messages of hate from the Religious Right (who is neither) that there is some kind of moral failing instead of solid science and reason. We are told every day of our lives that there is something wrong with us and that just has to be okay, because there are too many people in this country whose answer is for us to adjust and be cool with all the relatives who pray for you to change. That their prayers are as good as your science.
I should say for the record that I’m a very liberal Christian. I am not knocking Christianity, but unaccepting denominations. My prayers are as good as my science, because they are on equal footing. I did not give up my brain to be spiritual. I need both. Science tells me the “what.” Religion tells me the “why.” Too many people confuse the two and throw the baby out with the bathwater. But what I have found is that it helps me to get my ego out of the way. I cannot change people, I can only change me. I can only lead by people wanting what I have, because it comes from a light that is perpetual except when I put it out.
The way my light goes out the most often is through negative thinking. Imposter syndrome gets me a lot, as does the thought that the world would be better off without me. This message is reinforced everywhere I look because the world is not kind to nonbinary people; the world is never kind to people they don’t understand. What they don’t know is that it took me several years to understand. I get it. But if my brain can expand to a new way of thinking, so can everyone else’s…. because I did not coin the term. The reason it’s new and different is that the word was coined by people much younger than me. People my age and older are dismissive, and that’s fine. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but me as long as people respect my right to exist.
It also does not work with my current attitude, which is Southern preacher’s kid who does everything not to offend. I am getting stronger. Misgendering and mislabeling me is not okay. I prefer they/them. If someone defaults to a binary out of habit, I try to correct them because the sound of “she” grates on my nerves. As you and I go through this process (my audience is very much the keeper of my secrets), “he” feels more and more like home because there are too many web sites where there is no option. Changes are coming for me that I need desperately, like shopping for clothes that make me feel comfortable in my own skin. I asked my brother in law just to send me his closet in a “small.” Hey, it might work.
The problem is that androgynous people have been a joke for so long that it’s only now we’re recognizing validity. I remember not liking the SNL character “Pat” from the beginning, my first taste of realizing “ohhhh….. that’s what I look like in my head.” I remember seeing Tig Notaro after her double mastectomy and thinking, “that’s who I want to look like because she’s female but her shirts hang right.” And then I immediately felt shame and doubt about my body because I thought, “Tig got her body through cancer. Is this something that anyone should do voluntarily?” Body modification is also nothing new, but that didn’t stop me from a whole host of negative thoughts.
I get lost in my head about relationships because being autistic makes my thought processes different than the rest of the world, even other autistic people. They don’t understand, they get upset, and I get upset because I don’t understand what I have done. I am trying to slow down…. and speed up. The more I run, the more the endorphins make the bad feelings not so “extremely loud and incredibly close.” Well, technically, I just walk really fast. Me running on a treadmill is my balance at its shakiest. I control my heartrate through incline, not speed.
Making friends with the gym as a lifelong nerd has come with the perk of not concentrating on anything but what’s right in front of me…. namely, the imaginary hill I’m climbing. My headphones drown out everything but Maury Povitch, Steve Wilkos, or whatever trash TV the gym has streaming.
It makes me happy to know that I will never be the father.
But it does lead me to think about the life I’ve come from, and the kind I want in the future. No more partners where I enable their drinking because I go into it bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, believing everything an alcoholic has to say. This is not a slam against Dana, because it has happened over and over. I think it is my personality. Drunks are charismatic people, and so am I. Drunks are loose-lipped, and so am I. Drunks make their signals toward you overwhelmingly obvious, and I don’t notice smaller ones because that’s what an autist tends to do. We miss social cues until they’re unfailingly large, the realm of drunks and narcissists.
I know what I want, and it isn’t that. Love needs to be quieter.
I’m much quieter, that’s for sure.
I go into the valley of vulnerability when it’s just me and salt and sweat…. but I don’t think about meeting people at the gym because of Aaron Sorkin. Every time someone cute walks by, I think about C.J. Cregg from “The West Wing” saying that she’d like to go to the gym to meet an interesting man and then falling off the treadmill in front of him.
Something happened today that was very different and out of the ordinary. I was walking home, and I saw my reflection for the first time in weeks. The running is already making a difference because I’ve gone every day. I thought I looked good.
Managing you was like having a golden retriever work for you. Excellent at fetching dead birds but ….squirrel. -Randy, my actual former boss- it’s the most accurate thing I’ve ever read about my career.
There are so many things I haven’t tried, and one day is about the stamina I have for 110% effort. It’s also not enough time for me to develop compensatory skills, so me doing a job for one day would not reveal my weaknesses. It would not reveal my strengths, either. The one possible job I could think of that might fit me is field officer at CIA. With only one day, I’d have enough time to talk to people, but not enough time to do all the paperwork that ends up out of order and on the wrong desk…. either late or with coffee stains on the top because I never left the office to prevent something being late.
Staying at the office until something is done might be the one quality I could contribute.
I’m reading The Hunt for Red October currently, and what I love about it is the anachronism and the advanced technology. For instance, the new computer for the submarine fleet is “the size of a small desk” and also 64-bit architecture. That did not become available to businesses until the 1990s and consumers outside of the business realm until 2003. The hardback was published in 1984. It has allowed me to dream bigger as to what is now possible in computers just based on that information alone.
I’d like to be a submarine commander for a day because I would like to see whether my predictions have come true… that tech on a boat now is wilder than anything I could dream. That’s because “most enlisted men don’t know how to steer the ship.” One day is enough to know I’d be both great and terrible at my job…… mostly because I’m great and terrible at my job no matter what it is.
Autism sucks.
So do ADHD and CP, but autism is the driving force behind meltdown and burnout to the degree that I have it. Most people with ADHD alone have the same issues as me, but the mark of autism is severity for a lot of symptoms. This is not true in all cases, but for the majority of them, the canary in the coal mine is the degree of the deficit. Executive dysfunction makes it hard to regulate yourself, and coworkers do not have time to help you. I know that I can be trained with occupational therapy, but the only advice I’ve ever been given in my career is to grovel………. until now.
I had to figure out this meme:
This does not mean that autistic people cannot work. It means that if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. Autism has never stopped me from working, but ableism sure has. There was no way for me to perform as efficiently or as fast in the kitchen as an able-bodied person, and no allowances were ever made for it. Dana and Kinkaid constantly covered my lack, but I didn’t figure that out until I was on my own. They both taught me how to cook, but neither one were there to trade me jobs I could do. It was sink or swim. I couldn’t carry a full bucket of mop water up three flights of stairs, nor did I have enough strength in my upper body to work a potato press. Therefore, making French fries was a large part of being a dishwasher when there were no dishes to wash. This gave everyone ample opportunity to see me struggle and call me lazy.
You get called lazy a lot when most of your energy goes toward keeping yourself alive. You cannot see it today, but you can clearly see my deficits in this video announcing my birth. It was made by my grandfather while I was in the NICU and in the days afterward, but the phone call is not real. My mother went into labor five weeks early according to my grandfather and eight weeks early according to her. There was no time.
John-Michael Kinkaid called me a lot of things, but lazy was never one of them. I know that I am capable of working with a chef to find the jobs I can do, but I am not capable of changing myself so that I don’t have cerebral palsy anymore. This lying there, looking at everything and soaking it in, is the classic picture of an autistic kid with CP.
A few years ago, I attended a party at my sister’s house. We were reviewing the drone footage in which I didn’t know I was being filmed and was shocked to find out that I did not move a muscle for three hours. I am not a different person than I was in this video. I have never changed. My entire strength as a human is sitting there and soaking up what other people say…. and in fact, I am frustrated with my medication protocol because drugs for mental health are known for seemingly lowering your IQ points. It goes away once you get off the medication, but I did not have this problem with the last set of drugs.
What makes me think I’m AuDHD and not bipolar is that I was stable on Lexapro for 20+ years. Bipolar and SSRIs do not mix. I also have a strange hum in my brain from lack of serotonin now, and there’s nothing to be done for it except grit my teeth until 11:00 AM, my first psych appointment in years. I haven’t needed it because being stable meant my GP could refill my drugs.
How is today different from all other days?
Today is the day that hopefully determines more of my future than my current hand. At this point, I only have the hole cards. By noon, I should at least have the flop. Thinking about the turn and the river is getting ahead of myself, because right now it feels like fourth street and fifth street are perpendicular. My strategy in poker has always been to fold early and often, because letting a good hand go is better than losing my bankroll.
Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career.
I could sit at any poker table in the world and have a good shot and not because I know a lot about poker. That can be trained. So, perhaps a job I’d love for a day is “card shark.” What I mean is that someone can teach me the rules. You don’t play poker by knowing the rules, though. You have enough soft skills, as Michael McDermott accurately points out in “Rounders,” and you can read the whole room blind. You don’t play the cards, you play the man.
In this way, being a poker player is not that different from being a field officer or a cook…. and in fact, in most countries “field officers,” “waitstaff,” and “cooks” are the same job, because front of house and back of house employees at a restaurant are the least likely to get “made.” There is no reason to notice any of us, and all intelligence agencies exploit that fact.
In a perfect world, culinary school in Vaasa would lead to a job at Supo, the Finnish intelligence agency. I know I have the skills to make it because I have it on good authority that I am excellent at fact-finding. This is because I do get social cues, but I do not get fake ones. I pick up on the way you carry yourself, your “I’m fine” ringing hollow. I become confused and dig deeper, and that’s when I become rude and intrusive according to other people. It’s not because I’m actively trying to be obstinate. It’s that I am not participating in the lie that you’re fine.
HOW DARE YOU LET ME HELP YOU?
For instance, I wouldn’t like to be a therapist or a psychiatrist for a day… but I would like to help people understand why social masking isn’t helpful. Wait… that was a lie. I would love to be a psychiatrist because then I could nerd out on crazy med pharmacology without digging deep into other people’s problems. It’s not that I wouldn’t. It’s that in order to be a good therapist, I would need to resolve all my own issues first. Otherwise, I would be capable of letting someone else get their crazy spatter all over me without being able to walk it off, and my boundaries would not be as firm as they need to be in order to keep crazy spatter from getting on my clients.
I just don’t think I have the stomach for medical school, and I mean that literally. One of the things that autism does for me is heightens my awareness of bad smells. I vomit early and often. I wouldn’t last 15 minutes at The Body Farm. However, I am assuming that if I can only have the job for the day, it’s like The Matrix. I would absorb every skill I needed as if by magic… including the secrets held by dead bodies without the inconvenience of having to work on them.
The problem with having a job for more than one day is all the ableism I’d have to endure. I mentioned what it looked like in the kitchen. In an IT help desk, it looks like winning two awards for customer service and then being fired because you “can’t remember to write things down.” This has never been true. The autistic brain does not have the ability to process someone’s voice, compile the scripts needed for an appropriate response, and write down what the person is saying at the same time. And in fact, most of the problem is that I don’t process people’s voices well. I seem to do fine with Internet chat and e-mail, but conversations are land mines. I will not remember because my retention and recall with people’s voices is so poor… unless there is a musical quality to their voices that sets what they’re saying to a beat.
I just don’t remember whole pieces of text. For instance, I do not retain lyrics to an entire opera, just the bits and pieces that resonated with my soul. I cannot tell you everything Chandler Bing and Joe Quincy ever said, but fragments remain. It is the same with Lorelai Gilmore. It is most acute with CJ Cregg and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. It’s not always what they say, but the way they say it.
What’s with the quite?
Aaron Sorkin single-handedly changed the language we use around the government by not using articles in the script. For instance, you do not work at the CIA, you are “at CIA.” You do not work at the State Department, you are “at State.” Or, at least, this is the answer that Michael came up with, because he moved here before I did and saw the change in vernacular up front.
But it’s amazing how the change in speech pattern allowed me to retain so much more, because when something is written in neurodivergent patois, I am more likely to recall it.
Just like I’ll remember Randy saying that I was his first neurodivergent employee and he would have handled everything differently, and I will remember saying that at the time, I didn’t know I was neurodivergent and would have handled everything differently, too.
So maybe the job I really want for a day is just being his admin assistant again. Except now he’s retired.
We’re going to switch gears a little bit and go back to the late 1990s and early 2000s for an entry. I do not think that anyone has exactly my history on the internet, but it will resonate with you that are the same age. I am 47, which is just the right age to have seen the change from analog to digital. My first technological device was a beeper, and I did not have a cell phone until college.
With a beeper, the best you could do early on was type in your telephone number. You couldn’t even add your name until alphanumeric pagers came out, and those were mostly used in business. For instance, I had one at University of Houston, but I carried a Nokia personal phone.
My first Finnish present was from my dad.
In 2000, I found out that you could buy Red Hat at Best Buy because you could download it for free, but if you bought it you got access to all kinds of support and I was a new learner to Linux. So, I tell my mother this and off she goes to the store. This conversation ensues:
Mom: I need a copy of Red Hat for my daughter for Christmas. Clerk: Wow, that’s a big operating system for a little girl. Mom: She’s 20.
My second Finnish present was from my mom.
Through my phone and Linux, I learned what’s called “Netiquette.” This is etiquette for the Internet, and though I have lapsed and been a jackass many times, I’ve somewhat returned to being even keel. But it’s important to talk about because the rules are changing from “when I was a kid.” For instance, when I need a heart emoji, I just type it. < 3 without the space renders as a red heart. Now, that means I’m actively interested in people. I have a few people in my life who I hope don’t “figure out the code,” because I didn’t know it. Awkward. It’s just good that my friends are the same age as me so it’s unlikely that any of them are going to think I’m interested because they type red hearts, too.
I am confused by young people, but I am learning…. except about that. Typing is easy on my computer. I don’t get the addiction to your phone, because typing on it is so inefficient for me. I hated typing on the screen from the moment that “feature” was introduced, and wish I had an old Blackberry with a thumb board. That’s the last time I really thought I had the hang of texting. Lanagan Media Group will tell you that I am also terrible with voice dictation because I don’t see the errors as fast as they do. Nothing is bad, it’s just word salad when Siri is driving the bus. Google Assistant and Alexa aren’t better, but I have had the most luck with Alexa. It’s just too bad that Amazon tried making a phone and it flopped.
Interestingly enough, I have the most luck typing with Amazon, too, because my Kindle is the perfect width. I have no idea how one would approach this, but my perfect machine would be Amazon’s 7-in tablet with the hardware specs on the Max. That’s because I have a Max and a basic Kindle, and typing on the basic Kindle is better than my phone and tablet combined. And yes, I do put emojis in my notes. Tom Clancy has gotten a lot of them lately, because I’m knee-deep in “The Hunt for Red October.” The latest thing that got a smile was “a non-descript building, government layer cake.”
America, we in danger, girl. The Soviets can indeed reach the president from the ocean because Washington is a mere 100 miles from the Atlantic. I assure you that President Trump has been given this information, but Putin would never lie to him, right? They’re friends. So, this book I’m reading has emojis on every note, most of them surprise except that Clancy is so funny that he catches me off guard. He died in 2013, but if he were alive I would certainly have sent him lots of hearts by now….. JUST NOT RED.
So know that all things being equal, I would give up everything except the basic Kindle with e-ink and my laptop. Of course I would need a phone, but many years ago Dana and I had Cricket dumb phones and it was great. No Facebook notifications unless I was sitting at my computer. The Apple trappings are beautiful gifts from my family, but if I hadn’t gotten them, I would not be hurting. I would be strategizing the same way I do now. “How do I fit the technology to work with me rather than having to work with it?”
For instance, I bought a new laptop because I haven’t had one in 10 years, plus an optical drive so I can buy movies at Goodwill and rip them to my computer. Streaming is great until days like yesterday, when a thunderstorm knocked out the power in the middle of my movie (Wizard of Oz…. I jumped 10 feet). I own three movies total:
Argo
Mrs. Miniver (great recommendation from my grandfather, Mayo Lanagan)
The Wizard of Oz
The rest, I pay for all the streaming services and got a DRM notice for downloading Wicked, anyway. So, now I joke that every time I even think about downloading a movie, Tony Mendez cries. I deleted it before I even watched it. Why did I download it in the first place? To see if I’d get a DRM notice. I wanted to see if they could still track you while you were using a VPN, and they can.
Whomever they are.
I finished “whomever they are” and a pop-up came up on my laptop to activate the VPN offer. That’s not creepy at all. I pay for IPVanish, so they might want to know I got one using their service. That was an emoji day where all of them looked like this:
😦
Again, searching through menus looking for the right picture to express my words is a lost cause. It’s why I use Linux, frankly. I get on the console and type one command and the app I want pops up. It’s not dissimilar to the Windows search feature where it narrows down apps as you type, but it’s not as clean. And in fact, I’ve tried using a Windows terminal as well, but there is a flaw in my plan. I have forgotten DOS and mix up commands all the time. My favorite feature in Windows Powershell is that so many people have mistaken ls for DIR that you can use ls in Windows now.
DIR in DOS means to list everything in a directory. This is everything in my user folder. ls does the same thing in Linux, so perhaps Windows Subsystem for Linux has brought about good trouble.
I haven’t installed WSL on my laptop, because there is no unified memory manager. You just have to see how much RAM Windows is using, see how much RAM Linux is using, and do the math. I don’t do math. I bought a separate Linux box instead…. technically the third Finnish present being to myself. I bought a Raspberry Pi for the same reason you’d buy an Android tablet and an iPad…. you have software in both universes because it’s been long enough that you’ve used both. WSL gets in the way when you’re gaming, so I’d want to absolutely max out my computer with RAM before trying to use them concurrently.
I don’t know why I said “gaming.” I’ve played Skyrim for three minutes. I made it out of Helgen alive and exited the program because I just needed to ensure that it would run. It does, and very well. To be fair, I have not installed the 500 mods I normally have, but a 4GB discrete graphics card on a laptop will handle most of them. When I need a few mindless minutes, I generally play on my iPad.
And in fact, my iPad is toast. I either need to get a new to me one, or get this one fixed. It will not charge at all. This is problematic, because now I need two older iPads (I want a headphone jack). Aaron Nemoyer, my graphic designer, deserves to have my iPad more than I do. So, I’ve been shopping for months to get the best deal for both of us and it hasn’t happened yet. What I can do is pack up my old Windows system and mail it to him if it’s not too expensive, because I’ve been very impressed at how he does all of our graphics on a smart phone that also has issues.
My favorite is classified. 😉
He’s going to think I meant something dirty, but it’s dear.
He gets the red hearts for real. Everyone else, I meant yellow until further notice.
But hearts mean the most coming from my friend Michael, who has been a solid source of support while also kicking my ass as a writer. I had to grow into Michael, because he’s not Supergrover and he’s not Janie. He’s Tommy Lee Jones. I imagine that I have told him the equivalent of “I want to go to unicycle college” many times. I have plans with him and I hope he’s down- to transfer from blogging to dialoguing. I’m trying to learn to write scripts, but I don’t have a knack for the way people speak all the time. But I did figure out something.
I told him that Tom Clancy drove me crazy because he sounded like an outsider to the Beltway using articles. You do not work at The State Department, you are “at State, at DoD, at CIA, etc.” So, when Jack says “the CIA” it seriously bothered me at first. Michael said that articles seem to have been dropped around the time The West Wing came out, because when he lived in NoVA as a kid, articles were still in place. I said, “so Washington was changed by neurodivergent patois.” Sorkin hasn’t been officially diagnosed as AuDHD, but he does have ADHD.
Pattern recognition tells me that we are more alike than different, but I’m not an expert. I just look at the lines on people’s faces. ADHD and Autism create different wrinkles due to social masking. That’s why I am not very good at telling if children are neurodivergent or neurotypical, but it gets easier when people are 40 and above.
I told one of my friends that I thought her daughter was autistic, and she thought I did it from a picture alone. No, it’s that she sent me a picture of her daughter when she was 17, and I saw a picture of her currently, which is much older than that. The difference was striking and the wrinkles for autism were beginning to emerge, but that wasn’t the only factor. You don’t go off pictures alone (though I can guess with 75-80% accuracy like all autistic people). My favorite example is this conversation:
Rando on Twitter: So, Neil…. how long have you been diagnosed as autistic? Neil Gaiman: About seven years.
Neurotypical people are shocked we can do this. For neurodivergents, that’s just Tuesday.
Maybe neurotypical people would have taken it better if he’d put a heart on it.
Everyone says that I’m out to get them. I’ve been out to get me the whole time. Here’s how I moved myself out of the way so you can, too.
I social mask. Full stop. I do not know anything. I remember it. Everything from the largest picture to the smallest tree. The difference is that being INFJ, I am prone to melancholy and rumination when I am injured. I am injured to the point that I cannot reach out. It has been two or three days since I have talked to anyone at all, including an Uber driver that turned out to be hot so I agreed to have dinner with him and then ghosted (I will get back to him. I’m just injured).
During the change in paragraphs I reached out and said:
I’m really sorry and need to apologize. I got emotionally overwhelmed and couldn’t reach out. Would you be interested in going to dinner tonight or tomorrow so I can relax with a friend?
Unless he becomes a fan after dinner, he won’t know the problems I was facing with my fake girlfriend.
The reason you get so many messages is that I think I’m being abandoned when you go silent and just try everything to get you to come back. It’s like an SOS level call every goddamn time and my body is physically worn out. Yet when we’re not together I feel you moving in the universe and you feel me. We protect each other constantly without saying so. I would bet that you’ve kept it hidden from the bombshells that you’re so close to me that you don’t have a problem with talking about sex and intimacy because that’s not personal. Emotions are.
You can talk about anything and everything with detachment but the party girl act has to stop. You need to admit to everyone that you’re a trainwreck right now and you need Moomin dolls and blankets because you’re sick and need time to heal. We’ve both left 3rd degree burns on each other. I bet not drinking has made you sleep deeper, at least.
Editor’s Note:
She’s not an addict, just decided alcohol was tired like I did.
But say to the psychiatrist, “Leslie thinks I have some kind of mood disorder and the same drugs work for all of them, so put me on Lamictal, Lexapro, and Klonopin and I’ll tell you how I feel in two months.
I am trying to lift your depression for good. Stop mistrusting drugs and doctors and get on board. You are sick, and we need time to figure out what’s wrong with you because the root of the problem is rape. Not you.
Because you remind me of someone else who needed to be loved, and he’s not doing well.
I chose Aaron because he’s Supergrover’s mirror image. The Supergrover I can love with fire.
I loved her so much I asked for another one from the universe, and she needed to be someone else to be cool.
The clinical observation is how attracted to that I am and why. That’s going to be another six months of entries.
Joy.
I’m so bitter, but glad that my pain can be someone else’s success.
Because I’m too broken to not need time to get well, too.
It’s a double entendre because on the Internet, I cannot shut up. In real life, I try to escape talking any way that I can. It’s almost as if I social masked for so many years that I decided I was over it. The turning point for me was establishing that I do not like the phone and I do not care if you think I’m weird. I will adjust to the fact that you think it’s weird I don’t like to talk if you will give me a heads up that I need to talk to you…. and even then, I cannot always respond. I get demand avoidance over speaking because I need to choose my words carefully. I need to pore over every one as if they are precious pearls of wisdom…. because they are.
But only to me.
This web site is not useful for fawning all over myself, and if you’ll notice, I have noticed. That there’s no guts or glory without “writing about what hurts.” It is not because I will get a bigger audience that way; it is not that I will be adored any more or paid any more if I capitulate to the demands of my audience. It’s that I will have written a mountain of work that does not teach me anything about myself when I go back and read it.
I don’t want to know what I had for lunch today, and I can bore the everliving shit out of myself when I go on about Linux. I do it anyway because that is what is interesting to me that day. I just don’t go back and read it. That is for other people who have not stood where I was standing when I wrote it.
I am not immune to the fact that a lot of my stats are bots and are therefore inflated. But over a thousand of you get my words delivered to your desk or phone most days- today three times because I’m agitated about the whole world. That’s actually a thing about being neurodivergent. Our sense of injustice is fine-tuned, which is why I beat myself up badly for every mistake I make and also apply that feeling of anger towards the world when it is burning.
Make no mistake, I am an internal dumpster fire looking for ice because I am overloaded with the needs of my friends both spoken and not. Just because I am not in contact with my friends doesn’t mean my mirror neurons don’t feel them moving in the world. My heart walks out of my chest on a daily basis because I actually know people in Finland and Ukraine who feel threatened. I know Finnish immigrants who are scared for their relatives, and same for people in the US with relatives in China.
It scares me to the point that I will never visit, because my favorite Chinese blogger was threatened by the CCP. He escaped to Hong Kong and is now being actively blacklisted from the YouTube algorithm because apparently the CCP has some influence there.
I do not go where I am not wanted, and China sure the hell does not want me. I would bust them up when I got home. That’s because I notice everything that other people don’t.
I won’t remember your name.
But I’ll remember the way you smiled and what shoes you wore if they were cute.
I’ll remember little things forever, like if I offer you a Diet Coke and you say, “make sure it’s loaded with Jack,” I’ll remember you like Jack until I die.
But your name will not be important.
Your face is.
I memorize lines in faces and go carefully over them, like Mary “pondering them in my heart.” In a lot of ways I am breaking open over the mistakes I’ve made because they’re final and I have to grieve them even though they were necessary to let go of the person I was and become something new.
My whole fight with Supergrover revolved around us both slinking away because we thought we didn’t deserve each other, over and over in a loop that didn’t end until I finally called an end to it. I was rude and rough because I was wet cat claws out. It wasn’t necessary for her, but it was necessary for me.
I didn’t have enough strength to leave without being angry, because hers is the only picture in my mind that’s in color and never desaturates with time. It never will, because the chemicals she left on my palm metaphysically do not lift and won’t.
You do not accept grief, you learn to live around it. I fully believe that there’s a part of each of us that believes the other is not real and are too scared to face our demons. It was easier for her to run than it was to put on her big girl panties and talk it out. Over and over it was this way until she finally told me my narrative was tired.
Easy to pigeonhole a narrative as tired when you’ve never actually addressed anything and I have. Like, I still have questions that now I have to care won’t get answered, and I feel that she has a fuck ton of responsibility that she just decided wasn’t there.
She used my crush as an excuse for years not to get close to me after already dumping everything about her into me that made her interesting in the first place. So I just carry it, and it sits while I wrestle with her all night, walking away with my hip disfigured. It’s just better this way because now I’m only getting the responses I want because I made them up. She turned into a wire monkey long ago, ignoring my cries for affection and closeness as she twisted in a net of her own making.
We alienated each other because we got too close, too fast. Then we pushed each other way….. until the trauma bond started to itch and we’d come together closer than ever….. for a little while.
Kuuma.
Kylma.
Caliente.
Frio.
Hot.
Cold.
Over and over through the years, which is why my pattern recognition says that even though she’s not talking, she’s always listening. A pen pal relationship lives inside you, always. It’s funny that her words come out of my mouth constantly and yet I cannot imitate her properly in person.
But I’ve got her patois down.
What you are seeing is the product of someone completely different than me also being me through social masking what I thought she was. All autistic people need models for social masks, and in retrospect it’s a mixed bag that I chose her. That’s because in some sense, she’s taken on my personality as well. I have turned her into a cook, she’s turned me into a boss.
I couldn’t have made it here without her, and yet I’m good. Thanks.
She broke me down and built me up because her way of thinking was so different than mine. I don’t mean that she emotionally manipulated me in the slightest. I mean that she grew up in a military family and it provided her a lot of structure that I never had. I was social masking perfection and trying to be interesting to someone I view as the brightest mind in the natural world.
I wish I were being hyperbolic.
You just have to understand why my brain is on steroids, why I no longer struggle with suicidal ideation or really depression and anxiety. It’s all autism. All of it. When I can manage my emotions, I do better. Managing my emotions comes from writing it out and not bringing my voice into it. I’m too emotional on the page- in person I’m overwhelming and I know it.
The thing I liked most about her is that if I’m complicated, she’s The TARDIS.
She’s popped off at me too often now. When I try to defend myself, it’s manipulation. All her darts are fair game. Her narrative is tired. Write all you want and I’ll respond.
That turned into “I’m frightened by your output even though I logically know you’re a writer and I’m not so I will completely shut down and hope you don’t notice.” I noticed.
I’m there when she’s all snuggles and light, but I realized that was her social mask. That in all honesty, if I was getting the bitch on wheels, I was actually getting her inner monologue instead of the bullshit that everyone else gets. What made her invincible made me realize she loved me because she realized she didn’t have to front. She could just say, “Lanagan, fuck off.”
Sometimes I wrote it at the end of my letters just to save her some typing.
I feel bad that only my side of the story will ever get told, because she’s more wonderful than I am.
We are both perfect in our flaws, and I want our relationship to rest in peace. She’s back where she belongs, because she decided that traveling with me wasn’t worth it about the time I decided I was done. It was a natural conclusion because I know what I don’t want and it’s someone that completely shuts down and expects me to guess what they’re thinking and what mood they’re in. I don’t pick up social cues.
I have to focus on local so it calms me enough to talk about global. I am over focusing on problems. I am focusing on solutions. The plan to expatriate is real unless the people revolt. There’s probably not a chance of that because Kamala flat out lost. She lost both the popular vote and the electoral college. America has spoken and Project 2025 is everything they wanted and so much more that people regret their votes after being told over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over that all of this would spell destruction and it just wasn’t worth the time to pay attention or to vote. When people get overwhelmed they tune out.
Pod did not, in fact, save America.
I am not bitching about one election loss. I am saying that out and out fascism is already here and enough people aren’t alarmed enough to care about me and my issues, so why not go to a place where they already do? If Democrats continue to capitulate, it will not take one election to restore my passport rights, it will take eight of them alternating. My rights will always be up for grabs and my passport always at risk of being invalidated.
There is a possibility gay marriage will become this way again, and abortion already is. I’m not old enough to be able to relax on body autonomy because I cannot think of a worse idea than pregnancy at 47
I’ve thought about it for almost a minute now. Still can’t come up with an idea worse than that.
I am not cut out to be a mom. I am cut out to be a babysitter. I have never had the energy for other children, even when I was a child. I love them more now than I did then. Back then I was just a third grader who’d swallowed tweed.
It wasn’t until I realized that I had picked my lane early and social masked my way out of it that I became strong again. I’ve always been one of those autistic people that cannot survive in the real world because they live in a world of their own making- you have to literally pull them out of it. It’s just that no one recognized they had to pull, and I couldn’t tell them. I didn’t know the symptoms of autism, and I was not allowed to isolate.
Neurotypical people know better. The room should be loud and interactive. This is true for neurotypical people while I have to Perform Happiness.™️ I don’t have the energy anymore. I want to be authentic so that when I have a bad day, I’m surrounded by people who love me and are not dependent on that mask staying in place.
I am stronger and more capable at my computer than I am in conversation because I do not process voices well.
I come across as demanding while I’m passionate and easygoing when I’m not. You have to know me for a long time before you get into that rhythm and stop taking everything personally. That I am passionate about an idea, I am not “on the attack.” That I cannot perform happiness while talking about devastating things.
Devastating things like money, financial planning, business costs, etc. They are not devastating in and of themselves. It’s that I begin to burn and itch with discomfort because I know my logical function is poor ahead of time and being taught these things is not easy for either party.
I have to learn them cold, because I’m not about problems like these…. I am about solutions that allow me to dance above the clouds when the weather is poor.
A Fourth Reich is coming, because people didn’t believe it was possible.
I have an enormous task in front of me, and that’s supporting myself in another country. I have a cushion, but not really. It will go fast without either an American job to pay me overseas or a job in another country. I am looking at every single way to do that and school in Finland is probably the last thing anyone would recommend, but it’s not the United States. I know everyone thinks I’m panicking for how good I have it, but if I want something to happen I need to direct the flow. The United States does not deserve my talent and I’m not being precious about my writing. They don’t need my cooking labor. They don’t need my tax dollars. They don’t need me. I am trapped here until the end of November because I do not want to break my lease. That means I am being loud enough about my intentions to make a move like this happen. Because when I’m loud on the Internet, people take notice.
I’ve already had people offer support in helping me get out of the country and I know it will still be there later on. Repatriation takes forever and no one believes it’s real until all of the sudden they actually don’t realize you’ve been living overseas for six months due to the nature of how Facebook works.
For instance, I would bet that some of you still think I live in DC. I don’t. I live in Baltimore. I moved a few months ago and it has been mediocre. I am not completely happy, and I am not sad. I think that a lot would be fixed by moving into a different apartment on the property, so I’m not even necessarily looking to move at the end of this lease, either. That’s because the next application period for Vami isn’t until September. Until then, I’m sending out resumes all over the world while also trying to build my writing into something viable.
I’ve made a lot of dumb choices in my life and am trying to rectify them now, but some of those things will never reconcile. Dana and I had a solid, nuclear, family and we both blew it all to hell. The fallout affected us differently. As I reflect back over all of those choices, I alienated people I need now and it’s too late.
The regret of those choices cannot eat me now, but it has tried for many years. I have treated myself like absolute shit because of those regrets and I feel like I’ve paid all I want to pay for them. It would be a blessing to be able to mend fences, and because I know that is not possible I do know that scar tissue makes you stronger. “Til I Collapse” is running through my head because the Finnish, Mexican, and English languages are duking it out in my head. Wait. Mexican is a murre, not a kieli. Puhun espanajassaa y tengo preguntas con sandias/juevos/whatever your country uses for “balls.”
“Wait. Mexican is a dialect, not a language. I speak Spanish and I have questions with watermelons/eggs/slang for balls here.”
“Questions with Balls” is the best way I could think of to describe asking hard hitting questions. Why do they let me write here? Oh. Wait. I pay them. I am starting to wonder about your taste, but don’t worry. The fact that you read me speaks highly in some circles. Just not in all of them.
But that’s starting to change as well. I make a habit of meeting people all over the world. People in Europe and Canada are objectively more frightened for America than we are for ourselves because so many more of us still believe in the cult than outside our borders. We are taking harsh, harsh criticism and by that I mean that I have been wounded many times with anti-immigrant rhetoric in both directions.
If I bring up a problem, a Republican will say, “you don’t like it? Get out.” I say, “I can’t even change my gender on my passport because you decided I wasn’t a person. I’m trying to get out as fast as I can.” Then I’m a coward, a traitor, and a Nazi. But Elon Musk and Donald Trump are not.
If I bring up a problem, a foreigner will cry with me and say “don’t come here.” If I say I want to immigrate to Finland, I become part of their immigration rhetoric, because they only have one idea what “immigrant” looks like and they are picturing a brown man that possibly wants to live off the government.
When people find out that I’m an American and want to start a media company, it all of the sudden becomes, “well, I don’t count that. You’re not one of them.” I am absolutely one of them, because I’m NOT LIKE US.
Only once have I ever gotten back up on something like this… not this. One woman made a complaint about immigrants drinking all day, and I said, “geez… I hope no one would care if they saw me having a drink in the middle of the day because I work odd hours. What they don’t know is it’s been six weeks since the last one, not last night.” This woman says, “I don’t count that.” Then, this guy says, “well, maybe you shouldn’t make such sweeping generalizations, then.” Sweeping generalizations are how countries function now, especially because of the Internet. What they know about American culture comes in soundbites.
I am taking everything I have ever learned from my time in DC and building it into something new. It’s a miracle what you can do when you don’t have a choice. I know that I will look back on this time in my life and realize that it was the most productive, the part where I really found my true voice and people who read me 10 years ago wouldn’t always recognize me now.
I have limits. I have boundaries. I have tolerated far too much because the only advice I’ve ever gotten in life is to grovel. That eventually someone would be able to put up with me…. as an employee, as a partner, as an anything.
Now, I do not care if I am any of these things, I deserve a voice and I use it. I wish other people would. I wish other people were willing to scream as loud as me and they are out there but not in my apartment. They’re in the UK and Canada and Europe and Africa. One local friend tells me that her kids are AuDHD and queer and there’s no life for them here. I am hoping that she does not notice I’m standing there on moving day…………. She has six children. I’m pretty sure I’m golden.
She is also Finnish, and sees WWIII landing on our doorstep. I do not disagree. I am just too far down the road in planning a Finnish move in the fall to know anything about immigration policies in any other country (except Canada, because I exhausted that research for months when I was 18). Canadian vitriol has convinced me I don’t want to go there. Meag has made it clear that she does not want contact and I don’t know anyone else. I have made it clear with myself that I do not want contact because she was a shitty friend to me from the beginning and doesn’t deny that. I just put up with a lot. So, whatever it is that she’s mad about can rest in peace, because I feel like our entire relationship has been both of us caring about her.
This is not “All Pick on Meag Day.” All the women I have ever loved become my special interest to a degree that they do not want. So, I went the other direction. I decided not to invest in any one person ever again. That, however, has been recent. All of the women in my life are still on this blog in tribute as I age because as much as I might like a mind eraser, there is no such thing. Passing over trauma has never worked, so working through it has become a mantra. Once I really started examining my hangups in fine detail, I could resolve it and move on to bigger and bigger things. My purpose feels enormous, because I know that I not only have the power to communicate, but to facilitate others’ success.
My heartbreak was worth writing down so that I could see later what was really important and what was just filler.
I have watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind several times to remind myself that love is always worth it. Sometimes it even works.
I have a friend who’s an immigrant from Finland (actually, I cannot remember whether she is an immigrant or whether she was born here- whatever, the connection is close) who says that we should not move to Europe anymore, that we should build a queer future in New Zealand. As a fan of Finn Bell, I agree with her. However, I still have concerns about moving anywhere other than Finland despite Russian aggression. This is because I have found a way to move there for cheap. Of course my living expenses would not be covered, but my school tuition is. I don’t have to work very hard to get into culinary school, because I already know I’m a talented cook. I am not the best, and I do not have to be. I could make a bazillion dollars….. if I had it…. by bringing authentic Mexican food to the ski lifts of Levi, and don’t think I haven’t thought of it. I just know that running a restaurant is literally the most expensive thing I could choose to do.
Learning to cook is not.
I know that I do not want to run a restaurant. I know that I want to live the life of a student so that I actually have time to create content for the web. I am slowly networking in Finland, reaching out to Dave, Aleksi, and Cyril (other content creators in the area… Aleksi is actually Finnish, Dave is from the UK and married to another content creator, also Finnish, and Cyril is a student at the culinary school where I want to go, but he’s Indian). Because I want to work with Cyril, it is possible we could open a restaurant once we start making money from our media. It is not “using” the Finnish government for school if you decide that food costs are too high after you graduate. A culinary degree is good for anything, particularly intelligence. I know where I want to go, and that’s not CIA. That’s a quiet agency in the ass end of nowhere.
New Zealand is not “nowhere,” but it’s less exposed than the US. I have been making very inflammatory statements online because they deserve to be heard, but I am not immune to the fact that those are the people the president singles out first. I have loved the US my whole life. I do not want to work for foreign intel because I have any information to contribute; I would only work for US allies, anyway. What I do know is that real life intelligence gets me out of bed in the morning, but in ways you wouldn’t think of when you think of espionage. Like, how does it all work? I don’t have a particular allegiance in mind and generally don’t care that there are foreign spies in the US because don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Here’s where I draw the line.
The line was drawn in the sand when Donald Trump went into CIA’s house and told them that he trusted Russian intelligence more than theirs. It deserves a “Meet the Grahams” level diss track, because the president is a Russian asset. He’s not even bothering to hide it anymore, and Reagan knows all Republicans are going to hell for ushering Russia in the front door…. Hell, let’s just give Putin keys. And if that is not what you, Republican voters, were saying in the last election, then you need to take accountability for the fact that perception is reality. All republicans are traitors. All of them.
There was a mountain of evidence that a felon was not capable of being president, nor was there a mountain of evidence that Trump would change his behavior to the straight and narrow if he got the job. He didn’t even promise to quit drinking like Pete Hegseth. Speaking of which, I wonder how that’s going?
All Republicans are traitors, and the horrifying aspect of it is that you have to have sympathy. They were genuinely taken in by a cult. You cannot be mad at Mitch McConnell telling Kentucky voters that something is bad for them when he should have been doing it for the last 10 years, but here we are.
All Republicans are traitors because the party was lost and you stuck to the message. You stuck to the message that it was ok to be a convicted felon and to be president at the same time. What kind of future have you set up for your children?
All republicans are traitors because they didn’t know they were voting to have the AP press wire barred from the gaggle.
That’s because when AP calls it “Gulf of Mexico,” they’re the ones spreading disinformation. The first echoes of fascism started coming long before now. It wasn’t until I put it together that no one was actually holding you accountable that I decided to get loud. News anchors aren’t allowed to yell “WHAT IN THE ACTUAL EVERLIVING FUCK HAVE YOU DONE TO THIS COUNTRY, YOU BOTTOM FEEDING LOW LIFES?” It was bad when they wanted to kill Mike Pence. It was bad when they wanted to kill Anthony Fauci.
But then you came after Marianne Budde and I realized that I’m not a violent person, but I will slice your throat on paper.
The problem with American Evangelicals is that they are drawn to power like a moth to a flame. They do not care that Jesus was a poor itinerant preacher who loved his friends deeply and valued teaching and praying quietly. If you want to be Jimmy Carter and not Joel Osteen, you’re going to have “Christians” yelling that you’re not good enough because you just don’t hate enough people.
That’s the thing about Evangelicals. Their God hates everyone they do.
When you advocate for that “old time religion,” do you ever stop to think about what it is you’re really cheering?
White straight people had a good time back then, but fuck everyone else up the ass no K-Y.
You are advocating for Jim Crow, for women with no bank accounts and possibly no vote, queer people in the closet and all erasure of gender/sexuality rainbow excluded….. which shuts our country down in education behind the rest of the world. I do not know what everyone else is doing, but I am not going to sit around and watch everyone get dumber. Christian Evangelicals have ruined my life since it began, and you can all go to hell.
I am sure you will get there, because you profess the faith of the master and not of the slave.
I’m not black, but I’m not like us, either.
I’m autistic and depressed, so you think you can control my medications better than my doctor?
I’m nonbinary, and you think you can have that discussion with me as the USG than my doctor as well?
I’m AFAB, and you think you have the right to access to my body that I don’t have? Go fuck yourself.
It’s also amazing that we still have a problem with gun violence in this country considering we haven’t tried anything.
If you get sick, you can just go die.
Love, “Christians”
I am done with all of this and I’m not an emcee on a mic but I definitely feel the energy of a halftime show where America is concerned.
“God bless America? God damn America.”
The black UCC pastor had it down in 2008.
You’re 200 Late.
If I am lucky, fascism will die out quickly. Pattern recognition says I’m screwed for life and I’m dealing with it.
Today’s lesson in Finnish (Suomi in that language, Day 26) started with learning how to negate something. I’ve been able to say what I am for a long time. It is a relief to be able to say both that I am not an adjective… and I do not have a noun.
The worst sentence (lause) in every language is “Meillä ei ole kahvia.” Finns, calm yourselves. I am actually okay. I have enough. I have to say that out loud because this sentence would send shivers down any Finn’s spine…. “We do not have any coffee.” However, I am not opposed to getting Finnish coffee in the mail. I have resources.
It’s good to have a friend on the ground who said she’d let me mail things to her house when I buy my tickets to Finland. That’s because it’s actually difficult to buy Finnish products over the internet. I am having a hell of a time finding Moomin books in Suomi, so please advise in the comments. I do not want a new boxed set. I want one that has been colored in, dog-eared, and annotated in Suomi because a child loved it so much. Moomin is the new picture I carry in my wallet… er… phone.
This is not an official, licensed picture. I asked the WordPress AI to do a line drawing of Moomin for me, if that is a thing you needed to know you could do, @one4paws. I needed to make that clear because it doesn’t exactly look like Moomin to me, either. However, I do think that if she were alive Tove Jannson would think it was inferior yet clever. I would have gotten one of my artists to draw it for me, but they are currently sleeping. I am often left to my own devices because my body clock is set differently than most people. I move with the sun, going to bed and getting up early.
My favorite fact in life is that when I told Katya that I thought Tove Jansson was a smoke show, she made sure to tell me she was a lesbian. I said, “sounds like a woman I would have liked to have flirted with.” She said, “Well….may be…. she was loved by all….” 😁
Janie the Canadian Editor says that I make her spit out her tea; this line made kahvi stream out of my nose.
The Finns are an interesting case study to me sociologically because so much is counterintuitive to some American cultures, not all. For instance, Finland is like Texas in that people are brave and daring and do lots of outdoor shit comparable to “hey Bubba…. watch this!” They just aren’t conservative socially. Finnish culture is Oregonian. It is no surprise to me that Linus Torvalds moved from Helsinki to Hillsboro or wherever it is he’s living now. My love of Linus/Linux is legendary, and it doesn’t surprise me that I would want to make the reverse move, either. I just may not end up in somewhere as warm as Helsinki because culinary school in Vaasa is free.
The average temperature in the winter is 22 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not colder than Baltimore- it’s just colder more consistently. The average temperature in Helsinki during the winter warms up dramatically…. it is 24 degrees.
Therefore, I will not have a problem when it’s sunny out. Being layered and in the sun is great. It’s the rain, snow, and wind that becomes a problem. However, you have these problems everywhere. In Oklahoma, “it’s not that the wind is blowin….’ it’s what the wind is blowin'” (Ron White). Those are the days you say inside and celebrate your sauna.
Again, I work on the internet. I don’t have to go outside unless I just want to do so…. and I do. I love cold weather, feeling bundled up and secure in all my gear. I am not a prude of any sort. I just have sensory issues with a tremendous amount of heat and there it is. That’s why they do it…. and why they don’t care that they’re naked. It’s just about being comfortable in said heat.
I have said this before, but in case it’s behind a paywall on Medium, Finland has the highest rate of neurodivergence in the world that has been diagnosed. I believe that there are quite a few more undiagnosed people due to the amount of coffee they drink. Caffeine is my go-to choice in managing neurodivergence. Apparently, they already thought of that.
Portland is the same way in terms of volume. I never really had a cup of coffee until I went there on vacation. That’s because Texans don’t drink their coffee as bitter and dark as Oregonians, coupled with the fat of half and half, no sugar. I like Texas coffee just fine, my palate leans toward bold. Therefore, I want something French roast and cream thick enough to stand up to it. It’s hard to please me in vegan, but soy milk does nicely. It’s the thickest and all coffee shops have hazelnut syrup to make the nuttiness of the plant milk make sense in your brain.
I would argue that one of the best drinks in coffee shops is a soy hazelnut latte, because soy milk is not better than cream. Soy beans and hazelnuts bond together in your mind and it just tastes better. Use cream for something else. Everything has the right application.
These are the things that keep me going, because I have found that coffee is cheaper and more efficient than energy drinks. Energy drinks aren’t bad if you buy them by the case, but coffee is still cheaper overall. Plus, I like it when my coffee every morning tastes the same and it’s plain. I haven’t found an energy drink that just tastes like Coke, Pepsi, or Sprite. Therefore, I drink energy drinks as often as most adults who liked Fanta as a kid would drink it…. occasionally to remember, not an every day beverage. The same goes for grape, cherry, and fruit punch. They make me feel like a kid so sometimes I’ll indulge, but my energy and money goes toward fine coffee at the grocery store and cutting out leaving the house.
As I told Katya, “I like working in my own office because no one makes my coffee for me. Therefore, it’s always right and I do not have to share.” I do not mind sharing my coffee, to be clear. I mind other people beating me to the coffeemaker and I have to suffer through it until it runs out and I can make the next one.
Just level a tablespoon when you’re measuring. One level tablespoon per cup. Being exacting is what makes it taste good. And if you do not have a tablespoon that is capable of being leveled, then err on the side of too much rather than too little. You can add hot water later. You cannot fix it when there is not enough coffee flavor and too much hot water.
12 tablespoons is a cup, so I do the shortcut of keeping my coffee in a large enough container to accommodate a one cup scoop. I do not make a cup at a time because coffee (especially mine) is so acidic that I don’t mind drinking left over in the morning.
I do not reheat coffee, though. I prefer it over ice once it’s already cool. If it’s cold outside and I just must reheat, it’s over the stove. Some people cannot tell a difference, but when I microwave my coffee, it seems to change the properties of the drink itself. I can’t name it. It’s just weird.
I also alternate between putting a cup of coffee into a coffee maker and putting a cup of coffee into a Mason jar with a chinois (fine-mesh sieve). The percolating process and cold brew yield different results, and I like the change. It doesn’t matter what temperature it is outside, I like iced coffee when I’m inside. We have heat here.
The point is that I have taken an enormous amount of crap over the years for drinking energy drinks because it makes me look younger than I really am. Meanwhile, caffeine is one of the most effective ADHD medications on earth. I do not need to feel ashamed of “being addicted.” I need to manage how much I drink in accordance with the laundry list of what’s wrong with me and why. For instance, one of the huge reasons that I order cases of energy drinks from Amazon (when I do) is that coffee irritates my stomach and I still need the caffeine. Soda is not as acidic, and it is also sugar free (in my case- all the flavors I really like are either zero or 10 calories). Therefore, it’s another case of application. When my stomach feels better, I go back to cold brew.
Cold brew actually saves my stomach as well, which is why I haven’t used my coffeemaker in a few weeks. It is naturally less acidic when the water is cold, and I brew in the fridge or (when there’s not a danger of it freezing) outside. Sun coffee is just as beautiful.
“Sun coffee” is apt, as I am energized by the sun and need to be outside. My neighborhood isn’t the greatest place to walk around (it’s not dangerous, it’s just not touristy with parks and community, either. My readers might not agree that it’s safe, but one break-in in the DMV over the last 11 years is probably some kind of record- and he was so high that if the patio door had been locked, he would have moved on. He did not look like the type of guy that would break glass. He wasn’t even moving that fast. I just decided not to chase him over cheap ass shit.).
I need to find a place in the city that fits the bill. Right now it’s Panera because I have a gift card, but where is up to me. I’m glad I have a gift card to something familiar while I am looking for something permanent. I support local coffee shops, I just haven’t been here long enough to explore Baltimore. Wherever my mythical perfect coffee shop is, it does not exist in my neighborhood. I’m going to have to search farther.
For Portlanders, I’m looking for Rimsky’s Korsakoffee. For Houstonians, I’m looking for Notsuoh. For The District, I’m looking for Tryst. I am sure that there are many great coffee shops in Baltimore, I just haven’t found them yet.
Luckily, I have help here. My friend Ernest is a young college kid willing to help me get settled because I’m willing to help him get settled. I told him he could hang out at my place if his room was too loud. I have plenty of space and wouldn’t mind someone working with me during the day. His being African helps me out because the way he cooks, I haven’t learned yet. The way I cook, he hasn’t learned yet.
So, I definitely need to meet up with him soon. It’s a great story. We met on an Uber Share. I was looking at apartments and was planning to move to Baltimore. It was his second week in America from Liberia.
Silver Spring to Baltimore isn’t much of a change in demographics, only that there are more African Americans here, as opposed to African immigrants who have come over recently to study and work. Silver Spring has an enormous African immigrant population, one of the reasons I’m interested in learning languages.
However, I did tell my housemate Valentin (Cameroonian) that “francais c’nest pas comfortable pour moi.” His mother, who didn’t know a lick of English, fell on the floor laughing. Because of course when I’m on the spot, I say the first thing that comes to my mind…. “French is not comfortable for me,” a line from an old Michel Tomas recording rather than thinking out how to say “I don’t speak French.”
Puhun suomaista.
However, I am not advanced enough to know why the name changes from Suomi/suomea to suomalista. I just have to roll with it at this point, thus the flaw of being at the top of the ruby league by rote. I need more grammar study because parroting back (see what I did there?) words isn’t helping me to understand systems.
I see everything through systems, and Finnish is called a pyramid…. but it’s a garden. You pick up yksi sana, ja yhdestä sanasta tulee kaksi sanaa. You pick up one word, and one word becomes two words.
Minulla on norjalainen ystävä kuka kirjoittaa. Norjalainen kissat on viikinki. J.L. Henry on viikinki. Tämä vaustaus on oikein koska kirjoittajat ovat kuin kissat.
This is what the Ruby League has gotten me. The paragraph reads “I have a Norwegian friend who writes. Norwegian cats are Vikings. J.L. Henry is a Viking. This answer is correct because writers are like cats.”
One of the sentences that comes up in Duolingo the most frequently is “Norjalainen kissa on viikinki.” It means “the Norwegian cat is a Viking.” I have extrapolated this to mean all Norwegian cats are Vikings because I have owned one and I know that that means….
Life is about breathing steadily right now, turning panic into progress. Slowing down and making plans to breathe next week.
I’m overwhelmed with the amount of support you’ve given me over the years, so I’m paying it forward.
Duolingo is a vocabulary builder that will allow me to become C3PO. The spiritual arc is gravity’s rainbow. The bomb inside you goes off in every language.
Your life’s purpose is to figure out what kind of shrapnel there will be in advance, because you’re the one directing it.
Stories That Are All True 