What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?
The reason I’m most scared to edit an entry is that it takes a lot of bravery to be vulnerable with people on this scale. If I sit with a piece, over time I start judging it. I lose courage and back out on publishing. I write very fast and hit “Post.” Then, I don’t own it anymore. I’m not the judge of whether it’s good or not.
Plus, getting into the routine of writing every day means that I don’t dwell over past entries unless I have said something that crosses over from personal to professional (for someone else). My perceptions of their feelings are fair game; their jobs are not. So, I’ll go back and change something if they’ll tell me what I need to alter.
For instance, I had to keep that story tight about Kamala Harris for a month so that by the time I told you my sister had a meeting with her, it had been old news for quite a while.
I think the other reason it’s hard to edit entries is that it would be easier after the fact, but I’ve moved on to a new thing…. because it’s easier than sitting in some of those feelings again.
I don’t ever want to go back and edit anything, because I’m a good editor….. for someone else. I need the same thrashing with a red pen I’d give someone else, but I write too fast and furious to put someone else on a deadline like that.
There is one funny thing from yesterday that I didn’t notice until I reread… “I seem to have two audiences locked up…” and proceeded to only describe one of them.
The other is the people interested in cooking and what goes on in a professional kitchen. It gives me a different writing voice, one I like. It’s more confident than I am, because I’m hearing Anthony Bourdain in my head and not me. I’m definitely borrowing style without trying to imitate him, because all line cooks and chefs sound the same.
I think that I have so many long time readers because people do become invested in my weird little life, one that I adore because I chose it.
I don’t think that I chose wisely a lot of the time over the last 10 years, but I’m hoping the next will be easier having literally edited my life. I’ve been broken in ways I never thought I would be, and I’ve survived. Not always happily, but what didn’t make for a great time did make a good story- good or bad, it’s what happened according to me.
I underestimated how much crying there is in writing, and perhaps this is unique to me in some ways because fiction writers are always crying over someone else’s feelings. When I’m writing, I’m pulling things out of me that I haven’t thought about in years. Not everything is happy.
Not everything is sad, either.
What I can say is that it would be miserable going back and editing everything I’ve said about Supergrover, because editing came at a cost….. but no, it didn’t. That’s because I should have realized a long time ago that she was never going to open up to me and I was wasting a lot of time and energy with hope.
However, there are several good options as to why she’s not talking right now, so I don’t want to be a dick and say we’ll never speak again because I’m sure we won’t. I’ve been sure several times before, and it hasn’t lasted that long. But what I don’t want her, or anyone else, to be able to say is that I was the only one who exhibited toxic behavior. That withholding information was just as bad as giving too much. That we were both hotheaded and angry. That we’re both first children, and not used to being wrong. We’ve got each other’s numbers. For every action, there’s been a reaction. Sometimes it’s mine that’s blown out of proportion. Sometimes it’s hers.
No one won anything here. We both participated, and it became toxic because of a cycle perpetuated by both of us. I want to show that more than anything because I don’t have the want or need to blame her for anything.
Writing is about what I’m going to do. Editing it is dragging up the past. It makes the ghosts rise from their graves, and I’m eager to avoid that part of it. With an editor, they’d be reading my words without having memories attached to them.
So, in order to get me to edit my own work, I’m not exactly sure what it would take. It would be cutting my brain off from my heart…. something that writing stream-of-consciousness never does.
To start, I’m complaining about Bluetooth because for some reason, my 10-in Fire has started randomly dropping my keyboard. Like, not just the connection. The entire device disappears and I have to re-add it. Complaining is relative. I have other devices if I can use if this one gets too annoying, it’s just my favorite. The reason I haven’t already wiped it is that this tablet has everything on it. My whole life. Every account, every everything. I haven’t spent that much time with my other devices. For instance, I don’t have all my e-mail accounts added to my iPad, or cloud drives.
The only thing I would do differently if I bought another Android tablet was to make sure the specs on the hardware were the same, but not an Amazon Fire. I hacked it to run all the Google Play apps that I want, but they don’t work exactly right in terms of notifications because both systems aren’t integrated. So, even though I have Gmail installed on my Fire tablet, that doesn’t mean I’ll get notified I got an e-mail from you, etc.
I need to beef up my iPad, because realistically I know that it’s better hardware than I can afford with an Android (it was a gift, a 10.5-in iPad Pro first gen). However, needing an Android tablet is not because I prefer it, even though I do. It’s that I’ve bought apps in every shopping center. Without a Fire tablet, I lose Amazon. With a stock Android, I lose the Apple App Store. With the iPad, I lose Amazon and Google Play.
The other thing is that there are apps made for one operating system that aren’t made for the others.
Android is particular about that because a lot of it is linux desktop software that has been ported over; it’s a different user interface, but the same code underneath. Google Services Framework is also huge in Android development, which is why you have to hack a Fire tablet to run it. The Amazon app store has less than half the apps that Google Play store does because most Android apps have Google Services Framework as a requirement to install. I can get by on Microsoft products, because Amazon has Edge and Outlook and a few other things. But very quickly I realize I’m going to have to install Google Play, anyway, because Amazon doesn’t have my password manager.
You can do all that relatively quickly and easily with “XDA Fire Toolbox,” but again, it’s not going to work exactly the same as a stock Android tablet. I wish they’d burn FireOS to the ground and just put stock Android and their own apps on a Fire, not reinvent the wheel. The apps that Amazon writes for Google Play and iOS are objectively better than the ones they write for FireOS…… because they don’t have Google Services Framework…….
I complain a lot about computers because they’re inanimate objects. They can take it. For instance, my Fire tablet doesn’t know I’m writing about her, but I don’t know if she’d be pissed or not. I have a feeling that because she’s a computer, she would agree with me, that Amazon is not using her hardware to the best of its ability. Although I will say that for such a cheap tablet in, I think, 2019, I’m amazed at how well it still handles split screen with only 3GB of RAM.
I do split screen a lot on 10-in tablets because I have a coding notepad (same as Notepad on Windows, just puts a different color font on HTML, special characters, etc.) and a browser open at the same time. That way, if I can’t remember something, I can look it up quickly.
I’m starting to complain that I have to Google myself, because the way I mean it is so funny. I do not give a rat’s ass what people think of me on the world stage, so I do not mean searching to see what other people think. I mean I literally go to Google and type:
That means it will only search my domain for my search terms. People, I am Googling myself like other people wish they could Google their brains.
I complain about laying mine on the table, but it’s been invaluable. For instance, that last “Googling myself” was in the doctor’s office when I needed the date of my last hospitalization. I don’t remember, but I know how to find out.
I complain a lot about technology, but the one thing I can’t complain is that it’s helping me lose my mind. In fact, it’s bringing it all together.
This is another one of those rambling entries because I realized very quickly I don’t know shit about sports. But most of you love my rambling, so I know it’s probably okay. 😉
When I was 17, my crush was the goalie of the women’s soccer team at school. We ended up dating for a few months, and then she moved back to Canada, where she was picked for a college team that could get her to the Olympics. There are at least 10 different reasons why she left soccer after that, and I’m not entirely sure I understand any of them. But that’s not my story. That’s hers, and she’s a great writer so I hope some day she’ll tell it.
Yes, I did write her senior English final paper, but she used to have a blog, so I’ve forgiven her.
Also, I got a C on my own English final paper, so it made me feel good I got an A on hers (extraordinarily put upon, but still….). It’s not that I couldn’t have gotten an A on both. She’s neurotypical. She had the best notes ever. All I had to do was craft everything she’d already written down.
On the other hand, when I “write a paper,” I write them just like blog entries…. except I edit. I remember everything I read, so I am putting together sentences on the fly. My interest in a subject is directly connected to how fast I can craft a sentence on it without having to look anything up, because I’ve already read six books or whatever.
That’s why when the subject matter is interesting to me, the writing is tighter. The reason I try to remember everything I read is that unlike my first girlfriend, I do not have enough executive function to be able to pick and choose what I’m supposed to remember.
I inhale it all.
I think that’s what makes my blog entries interesting. I take in most everything through sight, and then write it down. My first girlfriend being a soccer player gave me a love for watching the game, because even when I didn’t understand the rules, I understood watching movement. It’s a ballet where the main characters are grass and blood.
I also think of dance as a sport, particularly those high school cheerleaders with the complicated routines and defiance of physics. In retrospect, I gained respect for cheerleaders by being in the marching band. We were all physically exerting ourselves at football games, and then the cheerleaders upped the ante with their own competitions in the off-season.
I only remember one cheerleader from my high school, JR, and he was my favorite because he was the only guy. Every cheerleading team needs a guy to help with the throwing and the catching. Plus, JR is straight. I can’t imagine it was a bad gig.
Many, many boys in dance and choir do it for the girls, and we appreciate it as long as they’re not creepy about it. I swear to God a tenor could walk into any choir anywhere and they’d be grateful to have him.
To me, singing is a sport, and I think only other singers would agree with me. If you don’t spend time training your body to get a solo-quality voice out of yourself, you won’t. This is because so much depends on your physical strength. You basically have to be able to inhale down to your feet and control the air so that it doesn’t all come out at once. That takes tremendous pressure on your diaphragm and breath control. You have to tighten down some muscles while keeping others loose. It’s a long process, and I think while not as demanding as soccer or ballet, we all learn the same types of breath control for being able to dance, run, and sing.
Getting winded on the field or the stage is inadvisable.
When I lived in Portland, most of my friends were baseball fans. I’ve always been a baseball fan in terms of going to games, but I won’t watch them on TV like my friends will. Without hot dogs and sodas at the ballpark, it loses a lot (to me). I don’t know that the Os would do well, but I’d love to see them against the Astros eventually. Now that they’ve moved leagues, they don’t come to Washington anymore.
In Portland, most of us rooted for the San Francisco Baseball Giants. I can think of one Mariners fan from my whole time there. Also in Portland, I was much more into football because Dana was. She never gave up her loyalty to WAS, but I love Pete Carroll and she respected that. I also love Russell Wilson.
In terms of basketball, I will watch LeBron James do anything, because he walks the walk. He gives so much charity everywhere he goes that it’s inspiring. And the way Dwayne Wade is raising his trans daughter gives me hope for other families.
Oh, and even before I met my first girlfriend, Ryan played lacrosse. He said something to me that I’ll never forget, because I wanted it to be memorable and it was, apparently. He’d just gotten home from six weeks of lacrosse camp (or maybe it was shorter, but I don’t remember. It was enough to completely change his body.) I told him that I liked his new look a lot, but it made him hug different. It sent the intended message. No matter what you look like, I love you, not your body, because he told me that almost 25 years later.
Again, we were unusual for kids. We were both old AF emotionally, so we treated our parents like in-laws from the beginning, us both calling the other’s “Mom and Dad.” I don’t know how my father felt about it, but a man worth paying attention to was paying attention to her daughter…. and being sweet to both her and Lindsay. This carried a lot of weight, and I knew it because she never treated any of my girlfriends that way. It was blatantly obvious.
But in addition to Ryan being sweet to my mother and sister, Ryan had an older brother I completely adored, because he and Ryan were so funny together. Inside jokes all over the place that I could join once I heard them.
Plus, I’ve always been the oldest and it was funny watching him pull the same stunts on Ryan that I pulled on Lindsay….. both before and after.
The funniest conversation I remember between Ryan and his dad was that Ryan had fallen off his bike, and was bleeding with road rash. His dad took one look at him and said, “geez. Is the bike okay? I learned later that being in a doctor’s house shapes you so much. Those kinds of retorts are par for the course.
And Caitlin once got her butt stitched up on the kitchen counter. That was before my time, but a legendary story. I believe I heard it on the night I went to her house for dinner, and we all came to find out that Cait had been picking the crab claws out of the gumbo all afternoon.
Maybe that’s her root. She likes working in restaurants, too. For Anthony Bourdain, it was oysters fresh off the beach in France.
I remember Cait being athletic, but don’t remember her formal sports. But our whole family likes watching the big games, even though we don’t watch every one. I mean, some of them do. Some of them are die hard Cowboys fans, and when I mentioned that I was a Cowboys fan she said the only way she could respect that was she liked Tom Landry. I told her that my memories of the Cowboys were mostly rooted in the 90s and it was okay to move on.
I’ve always rooted for the teams where I’ve lived except for the Nationals, because I don’t like the curly W on the hats. I do have one t-shirt that doesn’t have it on it, so it’s the only Nationals gear I own. I am much more partial to the Orioles, and when I lived here before, I was already a Giants fan. The Nationals are relatively new because we took a long break from The Senators (to our detriment, I think).
That also means that when I lived in Portland, I became a rabid Timbers fan, and even have a picture of me with their mascot somewhere. I didn’t really live in Houston when The Dynamo was established, and because Houston didn’t have an MLS team when I was in high school. I’ve always been a fan of DC United.
Everywhere my friends go that’s overseas, I ask them for a national jersey if they want to know what I want. I know there’s plenty of cheap knock-offs, so it’s not paying DC United prices.
Zac doesn’t follow sports at all, but he’s told me that he’d go to a minor league game if I wanted because he likes it better than MLB. So, we might do it, we might not because it’s a road trip to Hagersville to see the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs.
The first time I went, I saw them play The Sugar Land Skeeters, and I was just as excited to meet them as I was The Crabs. That’s the thing about minor league baseball. You can get into deep conversations with the players because they have more time to talk after the game and they’re trying to get their adrenaline to come down.
The reason I wanted a deep conversation is that I really wanted to know how Caleb was doing. He lives in Louisiana and commutes for The Skeeters, so they were in Maryland during the height of Hurricane Harvey and he’d already been through Katrina. Because I knew what was going on in Houston/Sugar Land, I wasn’t just talking to him; I was asking questions about his experience from the other side.
My sister was running the relief effort at the George R. Brown Convention Center. He said that because of the touring schedule, he hadn’t even had time to check it out- grateful he wasn’t there and desperate to see if his house and truck still were.
I wished him well, but what even he doesn’t know is that I got a fabulous picture of him right before he hit the ball out of the park, and I took a million to get that one shot from the time the ball was in the pitcher’s mitt. The ball is several inches in front of the bat and he’s in perfect form…. and even if he wasn’t, he still got a home run. I wouldn’t have known the difference.
I think one of the things I really like about Supergrover is that she’s successful at her job (I think) because she played so many team sports as a child/teen. She already had experience with collaboration and not lording it over people. Delegation when you’re the boss is key, because you cannot micromanage the work, you have to hire the right people- the ones that are self-starters and persnickety about details on their own. It’s not on your plate and doesn’t have to be because there’s a special bond between coworkers who are invested and those who aren’t, as in, how fast productivity goes down when the boss has left the office.
That will always happen in top-down situations because the boss is so exhausting. It’s not fun to be micromanaged, especially by a narcissist.
Narcissism leads to very problematic behavior, like blowing up your phone at 3 AM and being mad you’re not awake to serve them. No family thing is important enough not to miss work. Leave your family thing when I need you.
Because in the military and all the intelligence agencies around here, that is true and ironclad no matter how your boss communicates, which is why there has to be a lot of support from your family to do those jobs. There are going to be missed birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays whether anyone likes it or not. The chessboard is at stake, the one thing that really is more important than being with your family and you can’t argue with it in any place, at any time.
Support to all those people is doing enough work on yourself to be a complete person when they’re gone. For some people, that means moving back in with their parents when their spouse is deployed so that they still have a support system. Others rely on chosen family because they live on base, either here or overseas.
According to Jonna Mendez, you have a choice as to whether you tell your family that you’re CIA or not. That’s because you don’t know if your family/friends are going to find it easier to help you live your cover, or whether they’ll blow it. One thing that Jonna talked about in the event for “The Moscow Rules” is that she didn’t tell her best friend she was CIA for 35 years… and that’s because she told her dad and her dad was impressed, so he told all his friends….. the ones who had seen her face, already knew who she was, etc. The more people that can attach those things, the more “in trouble” you feel.
However, with the military and intelligence, you just have to accept that some things are above your pay grade and you can only know so much. Like, “I can call you on a sat phone, but I can’t tell you where I am.” It’s not that the soldier/case officer doesn’t want to help you understand, it’s that they can’t because it would reveal troop movements if the sat phone was hacked.
I do not think that we are preparing for war ourselves. I think that those secrets are being kept so that no one knows who’s watching and where.
I can connect all of this to “Argo,” because there’s an “Argo” illustration for every occasion. To have people know what your face looks like reminds me of that scene where the “face book” has been ripped to shreds, and they get at least 20 people to sit there and line up the strips so they can see the pictures again, trying to stop the houseguests from getting out of Iran. This is because the diplomats didn’t have enough time to burn all the classifieds before the Iranis rushed in.
Let me say for the record that I do not have a dog in this race. Both the Americans and the Iranis have done horrible things to each other. I can understand Iran’s frustration at us getting the Shah out before they could prosecute him. I understand that it put the United States at a distinct disadvantage because we cut off diplomatic relations, closing the embassy altogether at that point.
I believe that’s why people like Tony and Jonna are every bit as effective as sending “a fully armed battalion to remind them of our love.” That’s because we can prevent a lot of boots on the ground with the right intelligence, because then we can go after someone diplomatically/politically instead of starting a war.
It is so disheartening to have a president who’s blind to the plight of Palestine. It is so complex we need to withdraw support from both sides immediately. It’s not our fight. That’s one that’s been going on for too long for us to rescue anyone. The president needs to realize that in their case, the call is coming from inside the house. We can’t police this one. It will work out every bit as well as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and any other conflict we’ve entered where there hasn’t been a thousand years of fighting over that land.
I also don’t know what Biden’s faith is telling him about Israel, and that’s bothersome as well. It is a damn problem, because all the Abramic branches are at war with themselves over this. Christians and Jews want to protect their holy places, and don’t understand that all Muslim holy places are in the same vicinity.
I am not sure that is the message Christianity and Judaism want to spread…. that Muslim lives are worth less.
Because that’s what they’re doing…. like it’s a sport.
I’m 46, so I’m not sure I could do much with my lottery money if I won it right this moment. I’d probably put it away for my elder years. However, it truly depends on how much I won. So, just for this entry (because saving it is boring), let’s say that I’m already independently wealthy and it doesn’t matter whether I win this money or not. Therefore, whatever I do with it is up to me. I don’t know how much I’d win, I’ll just tell you what I’d do and you can decide how much it was in retrospect. Because that’s what I’m going to do.
The first $15 million goes to Supergrover, because we’ve had this plan since 2013. That day, she was joking about what would happen if she won the lottery. I said, “will you do me a favor?” She said, “sure. What is it?” I said, “find the most conservative school you can find. Oral Roberts, whatever. Donate the money for a whole ass building, so that every kid in that school has to walk through ‘Lanagan Hall.’ Then, 10 years later, tell them I’m gay.” Actually, this is an open-ended source of money, because if Lanagan Hall is going to cost $20 million? STILL WORTH IT.
I got the idea from James Beard. He was “uninvited” from Reed College for being gay, so when he died he left them a lot of “fuck you” money. It stuck with me. I think you can watch the doc if you have PBS Passport, because it’s one of the old “American Masters” episodes.
If Zac, Supergrover, and Bryn still have mortgages, those are gone, as well as my parents’ and sisters.’ If any of them have student loans, those are gone as well (but I don’t think they do). I would go back to school full-time and I have no idea when I would leave. If I got the hang of it, I might want to stay for a Master’s and a Doctorate.
Most of the reason I was bad at school is that I didn’t have enough time to work, study, and go to class. The lottery would really help out with that, because all my living expenses would be covered without getting me in debt during retirement.
My thing about getting a Master’s and a PhD is that it has to be something I really enjoy. Obviously, the current job market does not care if you have a Master’s or a PhD given the salaries I’ve seen listed for both. What I have learned over time is that managers really don’t care if you have a degree in your field. They care that you made it through something. For instance, even if my Master’s was theology, I could still apply in IT because of my work experience plus education. I could still apply for lower-level jobs, and honestly, I think I would like that more.
I have never wanted to be the manager of anything, the reason I don’t want to be a chef (people think all line cooks are chefs. Incorrect. Chef is “boss,” like “el jefe” in Spanish.). I would like to invest in food, though. I’m really interested in Athletic beer (non-alcoholic), and David Chang is one of their investors as well, so I know I’m not the only one with a palate for it that I trust.
I’d make a donation to the culinary CIA in honor of Anthony Bourdain. Not much, just enough to say I did it. Something that wouldn’t mean anything to Anthony because he’s already gone, but would mean the world to me.
I would buy back HSPVA. #iykyk
I would like to buy property in this area, but I am confused as to where I want to live. This is because I could buy land and build a house, or I could buy a condo/apartment and both of those sound glorious on different days.
(Just not in the Watergate…. it’s literally falling apart.)
Honestly, I think I would get more bang for my buck if I moved to Baltimore for a downtown condo, but I doubt many of my friends would come visit me…. oh, wait…. yes they would. Every time they needed a place to crash in Baltimore…. and I really wish I was there today because I’m a Ravens fan (who doesn’t want Edgar Allen Poe to win the Superbowl?). I can’t remember where the game is being played, but it would be fun to be at Camden Yards, anyway. So many bars and restaurants where Ravens fans would be obnoxious…. like me.
I don’t really get caught up in sports, only the excitement of the other fans. For instance, I do not like very many sports, but if it’s someone’s special interest, I’ll learn all about it just through listening to them and retaining what they say. It pays off. I still owe someone a beer because I got one at trivia off her. Her special interest was golf, and because of her, I knew Jordan Spieth won the Master’s tournament in 2015. My ex-wife’s special interest was The Commanders, so I know more about WAS than I do about any other team, despite being a Maryland fan now.
The other thing is that if you retain what other people say about sports, you can look really impressive with your analysis while also not knowing shit from Shinola.™ Although, today I did recognize the name “Jim Harbaugh,” so I’m making progress. 😉
So, it might be fun to live over a Ravens bar, because then I could have noise around me without taking it in, plus be within walking distance of everything I’d actually want to see in Baltimore…. plus, their public transit is as good as ours. The MARC train even connects to Silver Spring station, so BWI is probably 30 minutes and West Baltimore another 30 after that. It’s handy to take the MARC to BWI when you’re flying Southwest, but it doesn’t run as often as The Metro runs to DCA and IAD (Dulles is now on the Silver Line, DCA has always been Yellow/Blue for visitors).
And now we’ve arrived at what I’d do if I won the lottery in terms of securing my own future. I really believe in my app, but I don’t do development. If I won the lottery, I could be my own venture capitalist. With the right government contracts, it would be a hit in Washington and possibly as famous as Uber if it works in more cities than just DC. I would want to start small, basically a “Pied Piper” sort of office, because I don’t want to spend all the money at once…. besides, with an app, less is more. I don’t want too many chefs, not enough line cooks. It’s my vision.
If nothing else, I am good at planting ideas in people’s heads. Money would just help me do that on a grander scale. So, I’d change everything……
In 2012, when the movie “Argo” came out, Tony Mendez was asked to write a companion book to the movie. So many people wanted to know the real story, me being one of them. So, I read that book and then proceeded to inhale all Tony’s other’s….. which were co-written by his wife, Jonna. Tony passed away in 2019, so “In True Face” is Jonna’s first solo work.
My dad sent her a message asking her if she’d sign a book for me and give it to me at the talk, so now I know I will have something to read as I’m leaving. I am picturing a scene in which I cannot put it down and the museum guards are saying, “ma’am…. MA’AM! WE ARE CLOSED.” I hope I’ve managed to get some other people excited about it, too, because I’ve mentioned the book on reddit (over 500 upvotes) and at Zac’s parties (because that’s already an audience who’d be interested in going since they work in intelligence).
I could write about a hundred books I want to read in the future, but this one means more because I have such a personal connection to it. If you’ve read every single thing an author has ever written, it’s an unbreakable bond. Then, you meet the author and it’s a good experience and it adds to the excitement of reading what they do next.
I do for her what people do for me, essentially. I know I have some people that click on my links immediately, and it makes me feel incredible. So, I hope that promoting her makes her feel good, too. If you can’t be in the audience on Mar. 5th, again, at The International Spy Museum, it’s already on order at Amazon, but I don’t think it’s out already. I think you have to preorder. I’m not going to check because if I did, I’d have two copies.
I generally end up buying two copies, anyway, because my keepsakes are pristine (except for “The Moscow Rules.” I was on a plane, so there are pencil marks in the margins on that one. But for the rest, all my notes are digital and kept in my Kindle app and synced to Goodreads….. despite perfectly good hardbacks in my top dresser drawer (in which I don’t want pencil marks). “The Moscow Rules” autograph is too personalized to ever give away. Earlier in the evening, she said something about “maybe we should hire you” when I joked at her about having a sneaking suspicion she worked on “Atomic Blonde.” I said, “that part about ‘maybe we should hire you will live in my memory for the rest of my life.”
So, the book says, “Leslie….. Maybe we should hire you.”
When Jonna talks about an autobiography called “In True Face,” one of the special memories I have of her is that she showed it to me a long time ago.
She’s the real deal. You should go. We can sit together….. because I’m getting a book. 😉
Write about a few of your favorite family traditions.
Before I get started about first family traditions, I got invited to a Burns Nicht party at Zac’s in which we all sat around the table and read poetry by Robbie Burns. I said, “is it bad that almost every time I mention Robbie Burns, I accidentally say ‘Robbie Coltrane’ first?” Everyone laughed.
My new retired spook friends came, and I was going to ask them to review my fiction prompt, but it was lost in the merriment. I even found a scotch I liked with peat moss, and I have said for many years that I don’t like it. What I have learned is that I don’t like the peat turned up to the dominant flavor because to me it smells like Band-Aids when they used to come in a tin. Everyone broke up laughing, and one of the spooks said, “and now we know why she’s a writer.” I laughed until I cried.
I announced I was leaving at 11:00 so I didn’t miss the last train, but no one wanted me to leave so I crashed here. As a result, you are getting this from Zac’s room. He’s already left for work and I’m writing in the quiet, as I often do because I have housemates. Now, so does Zac. Sometimes it’s a problem because I get interrupted in the middle of a thought, but not as much as I do with five of them.
So, in this quiet, reflective moment, I’ll go back in time.
The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker’s old broken-down toolhouse.
Barbara Robinson
This is the first paragraph of “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” which is the thing I remember most about my childhood because during Advent, we read sections from it every night. The story is basically The Herdmans taking over the Christmas pageant and it being memorable because the Herdmans were as poor as Mary and Joseph.
We lit the Advent candles, ate the chocolate out of our Advent calendars, and enjoyed crying with laughter.
SHAZAM! UNTO YOU A CHILD IS BORN!
Dana and I continued the tradition of having devotionals for Advent, but we usually got the books put out by the UCC.
We also cut down our own Christmas tree every year and I put up with it because I loved the smell, but my allergies were miserable. It was a trade-off. One year we skipped it and drew a Christmas tree on our patio door. I ended up making the angel’s halo an Ubuntu logo, because of course I did.
Several times in my life have I done a Solstice Party, both in Oregon and Virginia. This year’s was very memorable because we all wrote something we wanted to let go of and threw it into the fire. Not only was it meaningful, it brought back a memory from my emotional abuser that genuinely made me laugh. My dad always set up a fire for people to do that on Ash Wednesday, and either used them after they were cool or used the ones from the previous year. I don’t remember.
Anyway, she said, “now I feel like I’m walking around with someone else’s problems on my forehead.” Now I know enough to know that my response should have been, “welcome to my world.”
Traditions at her house were huge parties for her birthday and Christmas. We only did Christmas morning together once, and it was great. We woke up to Jule Andrews, had mimosas, and opened gifts. I wish it had happened more, but over time it just didn’t and I have no idea why. Probably because she was telling her partner one thing and me another and had been for many years, so when I showed up in the flesh, she was caught between those two stories, so she invalidated mine by making me look crazier than I was.
Who wouldn’t be rabid about someone who practically raised them from the time they were 12?
Because we both moved to Portland as adults, no one saw us when she was in her twenties and I was in my teens. So, she could use my mental illness against me rather than admit that she had told everyone a different story.
She told me from the moment she moved to Portland that she wanted me to come and live with her- get out of the Bible Belt. I think she was just single and lonely in a new city and needed a friend, because according to her partner, she said that she thought I’d just go away when I was 18.
Those two stories are quite a bit different, eh?
She just didn’t tell me what she told her partner, so from the minute I arrived in Portland, to me I had my “mom” back and her partner must have thought I was some sort of stalker, because she treated me with a suspicion that just didn’t need to be there…… because of course she did. She didn’t know my story, and over time refused to believe it was true….. because by then, the emotional abuse was telling everyone about me “chasing her” so that I looked like I was competing for something when I felt like I’d been inverting the parent/child dynamic our entire relationship. She absolutely used me as her dumping ground and left me in a heap…… and no one saw it.
So, those traditions became less and less because I realized that her actions made her look like such a jackass to me. The spell was broken. Either claim me or let me go, because I don’t have to stand around while you make up everything and I try to be nice about it so you don’t drop me altogether.
She also didn’t like me as she got older, because she didn’t think of herself as “older and often not wiser” anymore. As I grew, she hated it when I called her out on the carpet because no one does that….. but I’ll speak truth to power because I don’t give a damn if you’re a trademark all on your own, you still have the emotional abilities of a human. How you execute that is your communication style, but whether you’re the president of the United States or a migrant worker, you have the same potential emotional range.
I don’t want to talk about how impressive you are, I want to talk about how to be in a relationship with you. How do I love you so that you know it? How do I know when I feel loved? How do I know to walk away when I am not getting my needs met and the other person isn’t taking my needs into consideration and thinking of them as important?
The longer I stayed in that relationship, the longer I knew I’d already stayed too long. It was 23 years, because you don’t lose hope on a parent figure until you realize how toxic it really was. I was so shellshocked that a friend likened it to battered wife syndrome, in a way, and worse because I was so young.
So, when I think of traditions, most of them have to do with the person I miss a lot at times when I’m thinking of good memories and also hate with a burning passion that exceeds even my expectations when I think of the bad. I get angry not only at myself, but at having watched the way she treated other women after I was discarded and seeing them go through the same range of emotions I did….. except they were adults.
They didn’t have the strict power imbalance that I did, but the lovebomb/discard cycle is real and I was only in Portland for 12 years and I watched her go through “best friends” way too much for that.
She tried to do it to me. After several years of discarding me at every chance she got, not even taking my calls, we were at a concert together and she called me her best friend. I stopped contact after that, because the story she was telling herself was all in her head.
In public, she praised herself for helping raise me and ignored me in private. It was a sick, sad world for many years, so I got out.
And that’s where the traditions stopped, because when I left that toxic relationship, I got rid of a lot of them.
I sent a poorly worded e-mail about it to Supergrover, so I want to word it differently here in case she sees it. In the letter, I said something about wanting her to be my first priority because of the hard out and also because her hard out affected my blog more than anything else in my life. She is also successful at everything she does, and really has her shit together. I have no doubt that her bosses think as highly of hers as the glowing reports Zac and I have gotten in the past. I wanted to learn how to be that sort of person from both of them, because Supergrover is neurotypical and Zac is neurodivergent……….
But the way I phrased it was “what could Dana have done for me that you could?” I meant that Dana was going down and I was going with her. I didn’t want that anymore. But it made it sound like our relationships were transactional, when they were anything but. She was rescuing me from an untenable situation because of Dana’s drinking and physical violence. I would not have had the strength to leave unless I’d met someone like that who knew she deserved me, when my self- esteem was so low I couldn’t say the same. I couldn’t believe in my belief in me, but I could believe in hers.
I struggled with those love feelings because of her belief in me. I just needed validation so much when I couldn’t give it to myself. I still struggle with platonic love feelings, because I wished for a healthy relationship that was sustainable and we just can’t seem to get there.
But we did have our own traditions in terms of sending books for Christmas that we thought each other would like……. and she had my number. I miss talking about the little things just as much as I miss talking about the big things.
Just like with Zac, I never wanted more than she could give me in terms of time. I began to hate that she told other people her feelings about me instead of addressing me directly, and not telling me that her boyfriend/husband was reading when she asked me to keep everything tight and “adults don’t have conversations about other adults.” Additionally, she’d tell me she didn’t have time to write for weeks on end, then finally, finally, what was really going on. It was guilt, frustration, whatever. Everything she wasn’t telling me that would have solved the problem immediately if she hadn’t held it in.
We’ve wasted so much time, because what I know for sure is that the closeness we had in the beginning is worth fighting for, but the toxic cycle is not. But in order to resurrect those feelings, I’d have to know what her boundaries were so I didn’t cross them and vice versa.I don’t do well on mind-reading and “gotcha” moments.
Now that? That became a tradition, one in which I’m glad is now over unless Supergrover gets over the anger she doesn’t have. I have more self-worth thanks to her, and I’m tired of trying to pay it back and it not working…… I wish the message every day had been “you’re the most beautiful person I know,” because I don’t think she tells herself often enough.
What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?
When I am not writing, I am obsessed with television and video games as much as I am with reading, because it’s a different style and structure in each medium and I want to learn them all.
My favorite writer on TV right now is Issa Rae, because “Insecure” hit Netflix and all of the sudden, I realized how brilliantly her pilot was constructed when it came together…. but not enough to keep you from clicking “Watch Next Episode.” Maybe the pilot could work as a standalone. Maybe.
But what I learned is that I wanted to keep learning from her, because I wanted to see another episode in which she built up a plot in one way, and then unravels the sweater so that you don’t see it coming. The way she does it is by using emotional intelligence gathering on herself and others, which is every bit as interesting to me as watching espionage, because in both stories, there are things that go horribly wrong by not having the right information and consequences cost a lot more than they can pay….. one literally, the other emotionally.
Issa Rae’s comedy and drama comes from gathering intelligence and it turns out that either her perceptions are completely wrong, or her friends’ are. She digs into the complexities of really trying to own yourself, because you become stronger when you can admit that mistakes have been made.
In every book, TV show, or video game, it’s the writers that draw me in. The second thing is the composers. Once I’m done with a video game because I’m tired of it, I still listen to the score a lot. For instance, the full orchestral version of the Fallout 3 score is as beautiful as “Galaxy News Radio” is entertaining.
Now that I’ve played the intro to Fallout 4, I’m glad that Galaxy News Radio has been replaced by a DJ that plays the same music, but he sounds like he doesn’t know anything about being a DJ. There are lines that are so funny that I’ve fallen over, and I’m impressed at how Bethesda has continued the details that made Fallout 3 great. The reason I’ve only played the intro is that I could tell quickly that it was a console interface that had been adapted for PC. I hated it because I had to learn it, when Skyrim and Fallout 3 had the same game game mechanics ( and I rearranged the keyboard so that it was the same as Skyrim and Fallout 3).
I also would hate to start a game that didn’t have console commands, because it’s so handy in Skyrim. The game is stable on its own with a few unofficial patches, but the more mods you add, the more problems the game has with starting quests correctly, etc.
I am also very, very picky and I will not stick around for bad writing. I either like no writing at all (like match three phone games), or huge, epic sagas. I will look up the intro to Oblivion on YouTube and put it at the end. It grabbed me even more than the opening to Skyrim, because here’s what happened.
Video games are programmers. Most programmers are neurodivergent. Most programmers are also used to extensive documentation. So, Patrick Stewart was hired to do only the introduction, and he showed up to a bigger dossier than he’d ever been given for any character in his life. He said it was delightful…. actually, he’s said it several times, and I appreciate it because it has promoted the game many times. It’s one of the best opening cinematics in any video game because of THAT VOICE. I’ll put it at the end.
I played Oblivion when it first came out and got bored with it pretty fast because I was older, and when you’re older and you’ve played video games since you were a kid in the 80s, the more complicated keystrokes/controllers seem like too many buttons. Believe me, they are. I haven’t even figured out how to favorite weapons in Skyrim for easy access, and it’s been 10 years.
However, I didn’t come across Skyrim on my own. My brother-in-law had an XBOX (I don’t remember whether he’s upgraded or not, but you don’t need to update hardware for that game. Anyway, I was watching him play it and I loved the story, but hated the controller. So, I got it for PC and found the game mechanics much easier. It’s fun to fight the battles, but at the same time, the main storyline has to be compelling for me to even finish the game, much less play it twice.
I will say that since I have played both Oblivion and Skyrim now, I liked the ending of Skyrim’s main storyline, but the ending of Oblivion’s A plot made me fall out of my desk chair…………. just like I did in the 90s with StarCraft (iykyk).
Speaking of which, when it came out (I don’t remember what year, but not recently), StarCraft Remastered was $10 on Blizzard.net, and it was the best $10 I’d spent for the last several years. It’s a great storyline, and it’s so damn quotable. I remembered the interplay between Jim and Sarah like it was yesterday. Sometimes I’ll still start up a campaign just for old time’s sake, like keeping an old NES.
In terms of being able to study structure in writing from books, I find that I get the most and the least out of Stephen King. That’s because we write in exactly the same style. We don’t start with a plot, we find it. His “On Writing” is one of the best books in the world, but I still can’t figure out how to let go and get the story out without thinking too much about it. That’s because I’m not the kind of writer that can think all the way to the end of a story, because I don’t know which direction I’m supposed to go after a while and it all becomes character study.
I want help, and I don’t. That’s because if someone helps me with the plot, then it’s not my story anymore. I want to be able to tell it the way I want to tell it. I’m talking about things like craft and research to have enough information about a subject to know which way it would go in a real situation.
For instance, I’ve been trying to figure out a sermon that makes sense comparing Jesus’s escape to Egypt as a toddler to a modern ex-fil op since “Argo” came out. It came to me during the scene when Tony explains to the higher ups at State that “the only way out of Tehran is through the airport. We send in a Moses…………….” If I hadn’t already been sitting in the theater I would have needed a chair, it hit me so hard. That being said, I’ve put it off and put it off because when I write spy jargon, it doesn’t sound real. I need to read enough declassified operations that would fit my theme, and the most interesting part is that I need recent ones the most because they’ve taken place in the Middle East. It can’t happen, though, so I’m combing through a lot from WWII to The Cold War, both through newspaper articles from the time and non-fiction books.
Here’s why I want to learn what really happens during an ex-fil and how it would go down in The Middle East. My father told me about 35 years ago (and he got it from Harry Emerson Fosdick, then pastor of Riverside Church in Manhattan) that “every good sermon begins in Jerusalem and ends in New York, or begins in New York and ends in Jerusalem.” It’s a code for being relevant. Start with the past and connect it to the present, or start with the present and tie it to the past. I have found that the latter works better, because when I start with the news or history, it is interesting, but the people are sitting there thinking, “how in the hell is she going to tie this all together?”
Then, when the light bulbs go off in their heads as to what dog you’re walking, you’re going to get one of three reactions. The first are smiles and excitement like they’ve gotten to the part in a novel where they can see the plot twist at the end. People have known these stories for years, just not necessarily new ideas on them unless their pastors are really digging into different interpretations/criticisms.
The second is tears, because sometimes the message really drives home something powerful going on in their own lives What I know for SureTM is that if you touch a nerve, people will say “it’s like you were only speaking to me.” “How did you know that’s exactly the message I needed to hear today?” In today’s lingo, I have no doubt that as I was shaking hands at the back, at least one person would say, “you didn’t have to attack me like that.”
It’s the point of church to begin with- to have community when those things come up for you…… which is why we had several atheist members at bridgeport and as far as I know, we still do. They don’t have to believe in God to believe in social justice.
The third reaction is raucous laughter, because I have to make sure everyone is still awake. If nothing else, I do two things to make sure even those people get something out of it……. the ones who are weaving in and out, lost in their own thoughts and then paying more attention because they didn’t know why everyone else was laughing….. I also make sure there’s a soundbite. I don’t leave it there, though. I don’t sum up scripture in, what is it for Sorkin? 11 words?
No, I find a way to have several illustrations that all tie back to that one line, so even if people can’t remember the entire sermon, they’ll definitely remember the tl;dr.
However, I haven’t been asked to preach in a very long time, so now my foray into an intelligence operation of Biblical proportions, it would just be a theological essay- as I am wont to do even while telling you about a million other things. I’m just not there enough to really tie a point together like I really want to, because the best way to knit a sweater in a story is detail, the immersive experience of playing a video game, reading a novel, or watching TV. The difference is that it’s all self-help based in reality, not “grandfather in the sky.” Divinity is too close for that.
I hope that, as in past entries, I’m making it clear that theology is one of my special interests, not that it has to be yours. I’ve said it before, but I accept everyone. I don’t care if you’re an atheist or not. I’m trying to impart lessons to an international audience, and Biblical references are something that connects a lot of the world. However, I don’t use Biblical illustrations for everything because it’s not the only way to use a world language as the world gets closer through the same cultural media. The internet and VPNs have changed the way we watch media, both here and abroad. I love setting my VPN to Canada or Australia when my browser will allow me to do that. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It depends. It always works on my desktop, it sometimes works in the app.
And sometimes, those illustrations work better than Biblical ones because the Bible is ancient and pop culture is happening right now. There are so many sci-fi TV shows/movies that I think represent the same self-improvement I use in Christianity by quoting nearly anything. I wasn’t kidding when I said I quoted Snoop Dogg in a sermon. My friend Kina was going to be there, and she was in a band called “Twisted Whistle” that did an acoustic version of “Gin and Juice,” like The Gourds except in four part harmony.
So, I knew I could make her smile if I worked it into my sermon, and it just so happened that the lectionary couldn’t have been more perfect. The Psalm that day was particularly beautiful, so, I started with telling everyone that the Psalms were written like poetry, and, like all Biblical stories, have had music set to them for centuries because setting a tune to the words is what helped people remember them before they could write. Then, I said that I knew it worked, because I knew all the words to “Gin and Juice” because Kina had finally slowed it down enough I could understand the lyrics. I got a little closer to the mic, and I sang Kina’s bluegrass version of the very first line, which is the only one I *could* sing in church……..
Then, I told my mother’s favorite memory of her mother. In the end, she had very bad dementia. She could hardly remember a thing, but tears rolled down my mother’s face when a music therapist got her to sing “Jesus Loves Me.” My mother had never heard her mother sing before, but showing again that theology is imparted through music.
Then, I sang the first line of the Psalm from the Episcopal setting I’d learned years ago……. from memory.
So, after establishing how it was finally written down, I explained the context around why it was written the way it was written. No one will remember that part of it because it was just color commentary However, I’m going to bet that if you know any of the songs I’ve mentioned, you started singing them, too. I sang the first line of the Episcopal setting to close as well, because you can get people to remember things if you set them to music….. or so I’ve been told. 😉
The quadratic equation is “Pop Goes the Weasel.”
I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.
What “Plotting by Notting” means is that I am taking in a fire hose amount of information when I look at other stories, no matter what form they’re in. Even when it looks like I’m not wiring and I’m just sitting there or gaming, I am still lost in my own head, trying to figure out how this or that plot device will work for me in the future. I have so much energy for writing, though, that the “notting” part takes me a while to det to because it’s so far down on the list of priorities.
The last author that really got me hooked in a way that I couldn’t let go until I’d finished the last in the series (at the time) was Diana Gabaldon. It took me three or four tries to get into Outlander, but by Dragonfly in Amber I was reading a thousand pages in two days. It was insane how fast I inhaled it.”Go Tell the Bees” is my least favorite because Gabaldon told us we’d get answers to questions we’d had since book one, and we didn’t……. and this is supposedly the last book. In a lot of ways, it was a “choose your own adventure” ending…. or, “Monty Python and Quest for the Holy Grail,” I think there’s more story to be told, but no one asked me. I’m sure that there’s fan fiction that addresses a lot of my questions, but I don’t want to wade through the D papers to find an A. I don’t have that kind of time.
What I’ve found with my “Words are Hard” fiction prompts is that I’m pretty good at short story ideas, but there comes a point quickly where I say, “this is as good as it gets.” I think this comes from my father’s preaching advice……. “when you run out of things to say, stop talking.”
I don’t spend time fleshing anything out more than that, because these are training exercises…. or at least, that’s how I see them. I am walking before I run….. this is “couch to 5K.”
Oh, and I almost forgot. Here’s the intro to Oblivion, with Patrick Stewart. As soon as he stops speaking, one of my favorite brass intros in any orchestral starts, called “Reign of the Septims.” This is the kind of music that makes me glad game soundtracks are available so I don’t have to play to enjoy the symphony and/or choir. Even if you don’t play video games, you’ll enjoy this:
When this prompt came out on Monday, my rhythm was off. Zac picked me up at my house on his way home from drill, so I had all my electronics with me, I just forgot to charge my keyboard. Therefore, I should have been writing on the train, and couldn’t. Then, when I got home, I started doing other things and still forgot to charge my keyboard. I remembered at about 6:00 PM that I still hadn’t written anything, then again, got busy doing something else. I didn’t look at the clock again until 1:15 AM, and there went my perfect “Bloguary” streak.
I feel bad about it, but not too bad. This is because the whole point of “Bloguary” is to get you used to posting every single day. The streak before this was something like 63 days, and I think this was 88. Therefore, I think I already have the rhythm of posting every day down. I don’t have to beat myself up because I missed one day due to complete burnout, because that’s what was driving all my demand avoidance. Plus, the prompt just isn’t perfect for me because I don’t have a pet.
I asked Zac if I could write about Oliver, who is a dog. Oliver is the only dog I really spend any time with…. but again, not my dog. So, because I’ve written about Oliver before, I’m going to write about some things I wish all of the dogs I’ve had in my life could have understood.
The biggest fuck up I’ve ever had with a pet, I wish I could have apologized to him for the rest of his life…. and believe me, I tried. In my 20s, I had a blind dog named Geoffrey, and I lived on the second floor of an apartment building. Geoff was a beagle, and he was just small enough to fit through the bars on the deck and didn’t wait for me to guide him to the stairs. Therefore, he hung himself on his leash and I had no idea what the fuck to do. I couldn’t drop him, and I couldn’t run around and get him, either, because in order to do that, I’d have to drop him.
I also couldn’t get a frightened blind dog to let me guide him back through the bars because it was a tight fit on the way out. I have no idea what possessed Geoffrey to have a wild streak like that, but I wish I could have made him understood my panic. That I was not trying to hurt him, and I didn’t mean to let him hang there one second longer than he had to so I could rescue him.
I tried to lower him down to the sidewalk, but the leash wasn’t long enough. I just had to attach his leash to something on the porch and run as fast as I could to get him, at which he deservedly shat all over me. Because Geoff was so docile, him going through the railing upstairs was something we did not anticipate. We’d already had him for years (this is when I was with Kathleen).
For 20-odd years I’ve carried around the guilt of watching my dog suffer and being absolutely helpless for enough seconds that both mine and my dog’s life flashed before my eyes.
I would have liked to be able to say to each other that we were both terrified, and I’m so glad he’s okay, and I’ll watch more carefully. I couldn’t apologize in words, but I was a much better owner after that. Geoffrey was special needs, and I only took my eye off the ball for less than a second.
If I’m having a nightmare, though, I still see my dog hanging by his leash off the second story.
Before Kathleen and I got Geoffrey, we had a little Dachshund/Rat Terrier cross that came with the name “Betty Boop.” We didn’t like the “Boop” so much, but Betty fit her perfectly. She was noble, nose pointed in the air, the Dame Maggie Smith in our house. She was also loved and adored by all our friends, mostly because she was small and well-behaved.
My mother was not a big fan of pets. We didn’t really have them growing up, and she never got any of her own after we moved out. However, Betty won her over when I was having some problems with my car and both my mother and Betty were with me in the mechanic’s shop. Betty quietly sat in my arms like a baby the entire time, and my mother was amazed. She thought I was a magnificent dog trainer. I think Betty was just as bored as I was and it was better to have a place to fall asleep than not.
Dana and I had a dog together once, but it was a snow job from our friend Daniel, who had to leave for the UK immediately and needed a place for his dog to live until he got back. He gave us money for her care, and then never came back. The money ran out, and we couldn’t afford to keep her. We returned her to Daniel’s ex, and told him we were sorry, but he wasn’t here. The money that he gave us was supposed to last a few months, but we had her a year and Daniel had no plans of moving back.
So, he reneged on a deal and got angry at us, despite a very long time of no contact while we were telling him we couldn’t afford his dog and he either needed to pay up or we’d need to rehome her…… no contact right up until “what the fuck? My ex just called me and says she has the dog?” Maybe you should have opened your messages three or four months ago, Daniel.
We were line cooks making eight bucks an hour. He was a producer at the BBC. It wasn’t like we were trying to shake him down for money, and he knew it. He was just irresponsible all the way around with his dog, why he got the “fuck around and find out” tax, not because we didn’t love the dog. We’d have kept her on our own, but we didn’t have German Shepard money. Even if you feed them crap food (which I wouldn’t do, just saying) you have to buy so much of it for that size dog that it’s unsustainable, like trying to pay for child care on that type salary.
So, I wish I could have gotten Willow to understand that we loved her, we just couldn’t keep her. That we both have great memories of her. My two are that for some reason, she loved Tootsie Pops. I found this out because so do I, and I used to buy them several bags at a time at Dollar Tree, because they always had the banana ones and no one else did…. oh, and the vanilla ones on Fourth of July. I came home one day to a bag and like, 30 sticks.
We took her to the vet immediately, but the vet said she’d be fine because the chocolate content wasn’t high enough to poison her. However, I did learn that my vice was her vice, and it was a spiritual bond. My other favorite story is regarding Dana and Willow. We were both talking about how nice it was to have a dog, because when we didn’t have each other to run errands, we didn’t feel alone if she was in the car. Then Dana says, “plus, it’s fun to play ‘punch Buggy’ with her because she never hits back.” I said, “Dana… :::blink, sigh::: have you been beating our dog?” We both laughed until we were in tears.
I’ve had some great dog experiences in my life, but if I had a chance to get Asher, my soul cat, to understand something, it’s that I’m sorry I didn’t understand the signs of her illness and didn’t take her to the doctor until it was too late. She only lived 10 years because she went into liver failure and I couldn’t tell. By the time we got to the vet, the vet said that there was nothing we could do but keep her comfortable, so I chose to put her down. It was either that, or watch her slowly deteriorate and never recover. I did not want that for either of us.
Asher and I had a special bond because I’d just gotten my own apartment and I really didn’t have many friends (I normally don’t, I’m kind of a homebody). Basically, Asher moved in when I needed someone to be home the most. She had a great personality, and everyone I’ve ever loved has loved her, too.
None more than my ex Angela, who once stuck her finger up my nose at 5:30 AM to wake me up, supposedly as a joke. It would have been hilarious if Asher hadn’t learned that it worked so well; she stuck one claw up my nose at 5:30 in the morning for the rest of our relationship. She wanted breakfast, and let me assure you there is no snooze button on that particular alarm.
The reason I call Asher my soul cat is that she seemed to understand me in a way that my other pets didn’t. Maybe it’s because we spent so much time alone together, maybe just her natural rhythm… but she became very territorial over me and would pee on the guest bed (while the guests were in it) to ensure they didn’t come back. That was her room, not theirs.
I was mortified at having to change the sheets in the middle of the night, etc., and I was mystified because she had never misbehaved before. What I did learn is that 91% alcohol will destroy the smell and that Nature’s Miracle is a lie they tell little kids. I mean, it works when you’re shampooing your carpet, but you’ll never destroy enough biologicals with it to keep your pet from marking again…. and even alcohol doesn’t work every time. It’s just the only way I’ve found to rescue clothes, sheets, etc. You can’t really spot treat carpet for cat pee because it gets into the pad.
When I’ve had pets, I’ve also had the $300 steam cleaner because not being able to get down to the pad underneath the carpet is what causes most of the smell.
And in fact, I could have a cat in my room if I wanted it, but I don’t. I can’t think of anything worse than having to share one room with a cat. They would be perfectly happy, but I wouldn’t because of the smell of the litter box. I throw up enough due to my psych meds.
I could get another dog on my own, because picking up poop from the backyard after it’s dry is a whole other thing from cleaning a litter box, as is carrying bags on a walk. There is something about cat pee that triggers my vomit reflex immediately, probably the ammonia.
I want to wait until I have a nesting partner to get another cat, because I cannot handle cleaning litter boxes and I will do a shit ton of other chores to pay someone back for doing that one. With Dana, it was relatively easy. I complained to her that I couldn’t clean the cat box because it made me nauseous. She didn’t believe me, so once I did it in front of her and she relented when I vomited all over everywhere.
When it was just me and Asher, I got her stacks of disposable pans that were foil so they were cheap, and threw them away every day. I never once scooped anything, because I’m incapable. I found a way to work around it.
I do want another cat eventually, and I have said for a number of years (since I got Asher, actually) that it will be a ginger Maine Coon boy named “Pentecost” so his nickname can be “Flamer.” That’s because Asher’s full name was “Ash Wednesday.”
Even though she made me understand that she was Jewish, but only after I had her blessed at an Episcopal church. Her timing was always off, because after a while, pets begin to take after their owners. In some ways, their owners begin to take after their pets.
This morning, I woke up at 0530 all on my own.
All the pets that I’ve owned are now dead, so perhaps maybe the energy I’ve put out into the world about them can be received because our languages are no longer different- they’re both energy. So, to the dogs I wish I could make understand, and the cats as well, it’s how big a role they had in shaping the way I love, and how grateful I am for that gift.
Name an attraction or town close to home that you still haven’t got around to visiting.
DC metro is much, much smaller than Houston. I cannot express this enough. That’s because even though there’s maybe half the space of the city from whence I came, if you don’t live in The District, you forget it’s there.
In other cities, where I live would not be a suburb. I live 11 miles from The White House, northwest of The District in a suburb called “Silver Spring,” In another city, a neighborhood. The District and The Potomac define the geographic lines of something that doesn’t exist and yet very much does. One of the first things you learn when you move to DC is that people who live in The District are territorial, because they have to be. If you don’t live in the The District, you forget it’s there…….. The reason it’s hard that they’re territorial because they’re unseen is that Marylanders and Virginians can’t vote to do anything to help them. It has very much been an offense to tell someone I’m from DC if they live in The District and I have lived in Maryland and Virginia, Therefore, to a local, I tell people my “suburb,” but on my blog I say “DC” because that’s the city people know.
For instance, I actually did live in Houston, but for some of the time I lived in Sugar Land, an actual suburb. International audiences shouldn’t have to care, but in person I’m more specific. No one from Houston would care if I wasn’t specific and said “Sugar Land,” but people in DC are particular about it. They are a tribe of their own, and you have to fit in. It’s a weird setup.
Most of the population doesn’t live there, and the income disparity is enormous. Gentrification is everywhere, and the heart of the city is being destroyed because our history is African American and again, gentrification. Plus, DC only has a city council and The Senate to govern them. DC residents’ needs shouldn’t have to depend on the Senate, because they get ignored by pork barreling something unacceptable into a bill on a different topic that also contains something for DC residents. It is a whole other world to Virginians.
I think for Marylanders a little less so geographically, but more so politically because being governed by a state looks so different. The Potomac makes DC seem very far away from Virginia, yet Portland, Oregon looks the same- there’s just not the same geographical feel because you’ve changed the name from a district to a state once you’ve crossed the river.
Because DC’s history is African American, historically Virginia was where the white people lived and 5:00 pm became known as “white flight,” and still is in some circles because the federal government is overwhelmingly white. Very, very few people who work in Washington want to have The District as an address. The only person I can think of is Barack Obama (Kalorama Park).
It’s like other government employees found something about DC that they just didn’t like, and couldn’t put their finger on it……… more recently. Historically, it’s always been very clear why white people don’t live in The District. The government employees who bought in Georgetown should have bought up more neighborhoods and made it affordable and invulnerable to creep because we need cheap housing for people on those salaries. We could have insulated it from the beginning, but it’s too late now. What is happening is that the few white people who lived here got rich and then it took about 30 years for gentrification to happen in other neighborhoods, and now it’s insane. Crack houses will still sell for way more than they’re worth because of the land.
In addition to Barack Obama, I also love that having Kamala Harris here feels like having her “home,” because she went to Howard. She thinks of it as one of her hometowns as well, so that love is returned.
Speaking of Howard, that reminds me of a thing I haven’t done yet in DC that I keep putting off. I’ve been to the African American History Museum, but not recently. Chadwick Boseman, also a Howard grad, has his original Black Panther costume there and I haven’t been to see it. I know it will be emotional because so far, Chadwick has been my favorite superhero in both the real and Marvel universes.
I do try to get to museums often, but don’t have the spoons. My favorite is The National Portrait Gallery, followed by Air & Space. Since my sister and I are planning a “staycation” over Galentine’s Day (must remind her we need to go for waffles), we are going there soon. I joked that I would be surprised if she did not bring at least $400 just for space ice cream (it’s been her favorite since childhood). I can’t remember if Lindsay has ever been to A&S on her own, but I know she wasn’t on my trip. She was a toddler and was being shuttled between my grandmothers at the time. 😉
I told her to think of some things she’d never done but wanted to in DC, and she definitely wants to go to the Zoo. I don’t know how many animals we’ll see in February, but I’m down. It’s a great park and I love walking through it when it’s not precipitating. Even in the cold, it’s wonderful because if you’re wearing layers, it’s a workout and you’ll generate enough heat to keep yourself warm.
I also haven’t done Mt. Vernon since I was eight, but I don’t know how much time Lindsay’s got. It takes a while, but it’s one of my favorite tours. I’m not sure Lindsay has been to Ford’s Theater and the house where they brought Lincoln after he was shot. The memory of seeing that gun does me in to this day…. as well as the fact that the blood stains are preserved on the pillow. I went to Ford’s Theater when I was eight, too, and it’s a core memory. So, in a lot of ways I feel like the attractions I’d want to see are around here, just not in DC. For instance, I’ve never gone to the Maryland coast. I’ve been to Annapolis, but that’s on the Chesapeake Bay and a different experience from Ocean City.
I also want to go to Great Falls, Virginia, because I hear there is hiking equivalent to the Columbia River Gorge. I need to walk with Zac and Oliver, who is a dog, before i make that commitment.
If you love being outdoors, this area really is for you. So much great hiking, biking, kayaking, sailing, waterskiing, and actual skiing within a few hours’ road trip. I love the idea of being a biker and no idea what to do with it once I get somewhere. However, I have found that I do love sailing. Lindsay and I have been sailing on the Chesapeake, and I’ve been in Galveston and Corpus as well (not sure about her). The difference between moving here and moving to Oregon is the weather. Having more sun in my life really does make a difference, but there are no less outdoor things to enjoy and it doesn’t irritate my depression.
DC was just a great choice all around, because everything I’ve ever wanted has been here the whole time. I’ve known it since childhood. It’s just that now, the “Local” section of The Post means more…… I mean, after Shane Harris at National Security. Let’s not get stupid.
You didn’t get an entry yesterday because, and I know this is lame, I forgot to charge my Bluetooth keyboard (I also completely burned out and needed some rest. I’ll still do the prompt at some point so I can do all of the “Bloguary” prompts, but I’ve moved on for now.
I cannot sit at my desk for long periods of time because my desk chair is an antique and it’s so uncomfortable my back starts tweaking almost immediately. Another reason I’m not really a gamer, which leads to the first thing I do for fun. I like video games, both the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls series from Bethesda Game Studios (that means they’re here in Maryland, by the way…..). I’m branching out, though. I have downloaded a few older games because I only have a mid-range PC and I want to turn the graphics up to stupid ultimate settings. Anything that came out between 2015-2020 is perfect, so if you have any recommendations, I’d like to hear them. Right now I’m thinking about playing “Dark Souls Remastered,” but I love Skyrim like I love “The Office.”
This is the first time I’ve owned a copy in 64-bit, too, because “Oldrim” was a 32-bit application and you had to jump through hoops to get it to work on Windows 10. Now, it’s completely stable…. but I keep starting new games because there are so many mods that I want to install that will not load correctly in an already established save file. The most recent I downloaded to try is “Saints and Seducers, Extended Cut.” The Anniversary addition already comes with the Creation Club original mod, this is just basically adding back in “Cutting Room Floor,” which they also did in Skyrim and you can actually download that mod as well.
I spend a lot more time modding Skyrim than I do actually playing it. I just have to be careful with new textures for things like grass, trees, plants, etc. because that’s what really slows down your CPU and GPU…. dense forests that have to keep loading as you walk across them.
It is a known joke in the Skyrim community that the city of Riften is entirely responsible for why we spend thousands of dollars on graphics cards. It’s gorgeous, but even the leaves are animated in Riften, so it’s the most intense city on your computer and when it’s running at full load, you can tell where you are without a map. 😛
The best answer that I’ve found is to install a plugin that helps you take it easy on your VRAM. My graphics card is actually decent when you’re talking about a $200 computer (I think it was a bit more than that, but I think I ordered it on Black Friday). What happens is that you have 512 MB of dedicated VRAM, but your graphics card will share another eight gigs with your processor (no biggie, I have 16 GB of RAM and could upgrade if I felt the need. I don’t. The reason why is that most games now have settings that might not make it the best in the world, but playable if you don’t care about FPS. I don’t, because I can’t tell the difference. The jump from my old PC to my new one is not enough to make a difference, because even though I had an NVIDIA, it wasn’t the latest and greatest.
This leads me to the second thing I do for fun. I think about the computer I would buy if money were no object, because I know how to get the most bang for my buck. A media workstation that I would actually use for recording and editing would have the same graphics power I’d need to play Skyrim the way it was meant to be played. There are so many mods that bring Skyrim into the future as textures keep updating to be richer and more immersive. I’ve watched ESO play Skyrim Anniversary Edition VR, and it blew my mind.
So, if I get bored, I go to Apple or Dell’s web site and see what’s new. My problem with Apple runs thusly. They don’t use Intel chips anymore, so I have reached my limit on the number of things that would run well on Windows (dual booting my machine, because the command prompt on Macs is UNIX as well. Don’t need to waste hard drive space on Ubuntu.). It’s not that Windows wouldn’t work. It would just run on a translation layer from Mx to an Intel codebase rather than on bare metal. I don’t think games would do well on this kind of setup, so actually the last Intel Mac with the fastest processor would be better for my use case scenario. Macs come with decent graphics cards, but they’re the same as mine- AMD, just with more dedicated VRAM and less shared.
However, it wouldn’t be very long before the last Intel Mac became irrelevant in terms of the processor speed, although I could make it last quite a few more years by spending an enormous amount of money on a video card because editing is mostly dependent on VRAM, taking pressure off having the latest and greatest CPU.
What is true of editing video is true of gaming. You’ll get better results with an expensive video card than an expensive CPU. The only thing that’s stopping me from adding an external video card to my PC is that I don’t know how well it would work through USB-C. The reason I’d change form factors entirely for an editing workstation is that I’d like a tower. Graphics cards, the really expensive ones, are impressively large and draw a lot of power. In a modern workstation/gaming computer, you need at least a thousand watt power supply.
I’d also want the latest and greatest motherboard, because the ones that are current now will last a few more iterations on chips. Therefore, I’d pick out the best AMD I could find, my preference over Intel because I got into them when they were cheap and the products are so good that I’m still dedicated even though the price has gone up. I also want a brand new motherboard desperately because I love all the cool things you can do with them, and they even have graphical interfaces now. It’s insane. I know that a thousand watt power supply may be overkill in some cases, but if I have a tower, I’m also using it as a charging station for nearly everything I own. So, I need a little overkill because I want to be able to hook up things like a PCI card that adds more USB-C ports rather than having the cabling of external. The only hub I’ve ever really loved is my TARDIS, and I don’t have it anymore. Now, it’s out of date because it was USB-2. Therefore, it would be useful for things like a mouse, keyboard, remote, etc., you just wouldn’t want to do data transfer with it.
Ok, here’s my thing with peripherals that have proprietary USB dongles. You suck. I’m going to lose them. I now have a very strict policy that I will not buy anything that depends on a low profile USB piece of crap taking up space on my hub. Therefore, I only need the USB-2 slots my desktop has for the mouse and keyboard. Because most manufacturers know that’s what they’re for, they add something to them so that the drivers load first because you need those the fastest.
My computer absolutely did not come with enough hard drive space, because I knew I could add it cheaper aftermarket, and I already had as much drive space as a could use…………… sort of. I have a 6TB drive that I could use as USB-3, but it would not be fast enough, I don’t think, to run applications like games because of the data transfer rate. However, I bought the wrong cable on Amazon and I need to return it for something else. It will add a drive that can run under its own power, like an SSD. I need something that plugs in so it’s not drawing from my tiny little power supply, supposed to be a feature, not a bug, because it’s environmentally responsible. If I wanted USB-C speed data connections, I’d need a splitter (“SPLITTER!”), because my only USB-C connection is the power supply. I don’t know that the data connection would be faster or not, because I don’t know if the power cord would interfere with it somehow or not. I’ll have to do some research. I know that Raspberry Pis are also powered by USB, so I’ll have to see if they have transfer speed issues as well when they split.
Because I look at computers for fun, I have become obsessed with all the Raspberry Pi form factors, from the 5 all the way down to the Zero because they’re made for tinkering, and that’s been something I do for fun for YEARS.
I started when I was only 19, so I’ve been in the game a while. I’ve done my time, technologically speaking, and now I have a history I can tell for fun on my web site that not most people have, because I was a computer nerd before it was cool and now even computer nerds are interested in people like me because the scene is getting so much younger that they like stories about what it was like working on those old motherboards and operating systems… for instance, here is my favorite story about my mother in life.
Red Hat is free for community users, but if you paid for it at somewhere like Best Buy, you got a license for support. Since Joe and Luke, my mentors in all this weren’t available to the extent I wanted to learn from them, so I needed someone to call when and if I hosed my OS by being an idiot. So, my mom went to Best Buy and bought me a professional copy. It was a Christmas present, and she told the salesman she was looking for a copy of Red Hat for her daughter for Christmas. He said, “wow, that’s a big operating system for a little girl.” My mom said, “She’s 20.”
I needed the professional support because I couldn’t rely on the community. That’s because there used to be a linux hazing ritual, before we cared about getting the general public involved in our shit. If you asked for support, they would tell you that you needed to type “rm -rf /.” The revenge for asking for help is that means “erase everything on my system.” If you fell for it, you were in a world of gut-wrenching pain. So, I used the professionals for about six months, until I knew enough about linux that I could at least read a command string and tell what it did. Now, command strings are my favorite way to work in linux because I type so much faster than I can leaf through menus.
I was lucky enough that I don’t remember who told me about it, but because I already knew it was a hazing ritual “joke,” no one could rattle me like that. But idiot users, unless they were on a server, didn’t generally create user accounts because the server administrator did it for them.
They’re doing everything as root (Administrator in Windows, except even that has confirmation buttons), where when you type a command, the operating system does it instantly. Linux will absolutely let you point a gun at your feet and let you use it.
That’s because most of the time new users didn’t read documentation and didn’t know that once they were root, they had to create a user account that had admin privileges; you had to get them by using a specific command, not every single time you typed something. If you’re using your user account, there are all kinds of file restrictions that will keep you from not overwriting a system file or deleting it- fuck the Recycle Bin. We’re busy.
Modern linux has come a long way, but it’s because we finally got tired of coming across as assholes and wanted to reach out to the public and show people how cool open source software really is.
But let me tell you how the popularity of linux grew in the beginning. IT people, for the most part, spend 100% of the time working out Windows and Mac problems for other people. In the beginning, it was small community started in Finland and it was our space. Not wanting more people to join us was not born out of actively trying to be mean. It was more that it was the one place where we could talk amongst ourselves and not do anything like Microsoft or Apple. And in those days, Macs didn’t run on UNIX, they had a completely different system underneath the hood, just like DOS is completely different from either UNIX or linux (same operating system, a few different commands). No one wanted a UNIX codebase at Apple until Steve Jobs told them they did.
It worked out better for me because with dual-booting a Mac, I gained something instead of lost. That doesn’t take away the fact that since unix/linux was so incredibly different, we were the royalty of our own domains…. and we liked it that way.
I also know that there’s a truthbomb that’s not being acknowledged in our community, and that’s the fact that the unix/linux community became the computer community of STEM savant autistics and so we were demanding and rude even when we weren’t. That’s because neurotypicals were invading our space and that change was as hard to handle as having to help people bridge the gap from Windows to linux so they stopped being frightened of it.
If you actually have the latest and greatest AMD machine and a graphics card that would blow anyone’s mind, you can game on linux just as well as you can on Windows thanks to Steam. There are tweaks on some games, but even I’ve played Skyrim and Oblivion on Steam for Linux, and I was impressed…. but not that impressed because I didn’t have the latest and greatest hardware so my computer struggled managing both the game and the Windows emulator running underneath. That wouldn’t be a problem today.
If you go that route, you won’t save much money, but you’ll save at least $100 if you buy a computer piecemeal so that the price of Windows is not built into the price of the computer. You can start with Ubuntu installed rather than having to go through the kindergarten-fueleed nightmare that is a Windows first-run.
Plus, with the latest and greatest hardware, there won’t be a problem with the CPU power it takes to run applications that were meant to run on multiple operating systems and are naturally heavy because of the dependencies underneath.
It’s a double-edged sword, because doing individual packages for Debian and Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS works so much faster than the translation layer, but it’s easier and faster for the developers if they don’t have to code both. It’s a bug and a feature.
I can’t really put my finger on it, but I prefer flatpaks to snaps. It may be my imagination, but it seems that especially Firefox loads faster….. when the Debian package loaded as fast as it did on Windows and now that original deb file is not even available…. and I’m not sure that you can uninstall it, but I’ve never tried. I just hide it from my favorites and use Chrome (because it still comes in a cough .deb *cough.). If you download the latest binary from Firefox’s web site, then you just have to live with having two copies on your system, die mad about it. It’s why I’m so glad that even though the Waterfox project has merged with Firefox now that it’s 64-bit all on its own, there are still copies of the icon online so that I don’t get the two copies confused.
That’s because I use Chrome when I need to access something I’ve accessed a million times and Firefox is for when I want to be completely safe and secure by turning off all ads and scripts. There’s not a NoScript plugin for Chrome (or at least, I’m not aware). I don’t even install my password manager in Firefox, because I don’t even want it to show up in my extensions list if I want security.
Plus, it’s annoying when you have to set a tab to “Safe” because you’re on a web site where you need to run scripts to make the web site functional, like Facebook. So that’s why I use Chrome, when I’m not doing anything nefarious, it just cuts out all the crap and safety issues like pop-ups. They’re two completely different use case scenarios and why I’m glad HTML has progressed so much.
I remember the days when you had to include redirects in your code because it would look different in Internet Explorer than Netscape so you’d have to detect it first. They had different protocols underneath displaying web sites, so you had to code pages in both that looked the same and behaved differently. It was a right pain in the ass, to be honest.
I so love coding for fun, but WordPress doesn’t let you switch into code mode and add all the HTML/CSS that you want. First, it will break the paragraph “block,” and then it will say it can’t recover from it.
You can absolutely show code on WordPress, you just have to add a “code block” so it knows that you’re trying to show code on a web site, not add coding to the entry itself.
I like the code blocks because it shows off my linux ninja skills, starting with my idealistic Red Hat phase in college. I just realized that absolutely none of my college IT experiences are tied to educating people about computers. I do that because of my jobs in IT all having to do with translating “Geek to English.” What my most precious memories involve is finding autistic friends and not knowing I needed them so badly. Because I didn’t know, I didn’t know to talk to them about it. I just understood them on a deep and spiritual level.
I’ve spent way more nights on the desk when it was quiet shooting the shit about science fiction, so I know for sure that this is a community to which I belong. What I lose in that transaction is being fired, because I don’t want to be “Dooced,” and because of Dooce, companies are very aware when their employees have blogs and they check them, regularly.
Depending on how you spin your company, they will either love you or hate you. The problem is that when I point out problems, I also point out solutions that I think would be helpful and it is not taken by management well. It’s a double-edged sword, because just like my friends, they come for the things that adore them when we’re in new relationship energy, and then when you figure out problems, the top downs stop wanting to do conflict resolution real fast.
“If you treat your employees like kindergartners, they’ll act like it. If you treat your employees like you value their opinion, they’ll act like it.”
However, I have had one boss that saw all the good and the bad on my web site for months before he reached out to me, and that’s why I got the job. He knew I could dish it, and he could take it.
The man who hired me was the CEO of his own company, and I think he wanted me to be his sounding board because he knew I would be kind and not nice because he’d watched me do it.
He showed me absolutely that we were going to make it work because we were Sam Seaborn and Ainsley Hayes.
“Sam is getting his ass kicked by a girl.”
“Ginger, get the popcorn.”
The thing is, we never had a fight over it, ever, in terms of him pulling rank over me. In fact, in my first meeting at that job, where the whole company was gathered, the CEO said “I hired Leslie because she’s an incredible writer and I thought it was only fair that I let her take pot shots at me.” Can you fucking believe that?
I am great at beginning jobs, which is why I wish I was a STEM savant because they keep their jobs for two reasons. The first is that the company literally can’t function without them. The second is that they’re so “rude and demanding” that they’ve gotten everything they’ve asked for int terms of autistic accommodations, because they were the ones that were kind and not nice. I would have an incredible amount of job security if I was someone like Linus Torvalds (Finnish inventor of linux), not so much as someone who failed logic once and got a D when I took it over.
I’ve had the most success on CodeAcademy, because their interface makes it a “Facebook Game,” sort of like Duolingo for Python (or whatever). You get badges of achievement like you do in Steam/Xbox. Aaron, a coder and coworker back then, told me that I was a much better writer because I was dedicated and I had to choose, because it would take years for me to know enough to get a real job. I felt I couldn’t choose coding when the exercises on that web site got too hard, too fast.
It is interesting to note that Dana made it all the way to the end of the first lesson. What Aaron didn’t say is that “Dana has it. You don’t.” But I knew it, and her interest in coding was nonexistent after that. But, if you know her, don’t ever let her bullshit you that she can’t have a good career as a coder if she uses her hyperfocus to learn to speak Python, the language of the web. She’s already completed the first lesson. 😛
I had such high hopes for Dana and me because the reason we moved to Houston was so that Dana could teach, because all you needed was a Bachelor’s degree and a certificate to teach in Texas and you needed a Master’s in Oregon. So, when we first moved there, we were trying to become middle class.
What happened is that she didn’t get into the one program to which she applied, and never tried another one. It was too much rejection after her DUI, and I truly empathize with what it must have been like to be in that much pain with a partner who was incapable of recognizing it at the time. However, I did try, but not until I got overwhelmed and reached out to Dana’s mother. I told her that I was just as sick as Dana, and that I couldn’t handle her all by myself and I needed help.
It was another two-edged sword because in one conversation she said she would help and kissed me on the lips to show that she was dedicated. Then, in another conversation that Dana didn’t hear (she actually didn’t hear either of them. I wanted time with her parents alone), her mother said that she really didn’t know how to raise Dana and that she’d never be the mother that Dana needed and she should find someone else.
I’d never wanted to punch someone in the face before, but that came close because first of all, she wasn’t brave enough to say that to Dana, so she decided to wreck her wife instead. Fuck me running, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to hear, because I know that my mother felt the exact same way on some level.
Neither my mother nor Dana’s had any idea what the hell to do with me, but they tried so hard, and I accepted that effort for all it was worth. It became my widow’s mite. Their contributions to trying to understand my queerness seemed small, but they meant more because they were giving me everything I needed when they were equipped. So, they did understand me better than anyone else except my partner until they realized they were above their pay grade. So, I heard Dana’s mother’s voice and saw my mother in my head, because both of our mothers treated us the same way.
Dana laughed when she came home from college in a backwards baseball cap and her mother said, “ah, my son is home.” Both of us are still cis women, even when we wear hats. She laughed it off, I didn’t.
That’s because I’d had previous conversations with Dana’s ex (we get along well because we’re both IT nerds), so I know that her parents have always taken digs at her partners and it isn’t personal to me. One of the jokes she said to me that I’ll always remember because it blew off all my anger is that I’d told her that “at this rate, I’ll need to win a Pulitzer to be mildly acceptable.” She said, “don’t worry. They’ll find a way to have a problem about that, too.” You cannot imagine how good it felt to have an ally in my own struggle with my in-laws. I know I talked a little about it to Dana’s sister, but not everything because I didn’t want to make her “monkey in the middle.” It was excruciating watching Dana need approval from people who’d never give it.
It’s why I love Supergrover so incredibly deeply. I’ve always confided in her like the mother I didn’t have, in effect, reparenting myself to get everything I didn’t get by watching how a mother loved her own kids and realizing the lessons I would have learned had I had children of my own. It’s easy to talk about issues with a big sister/favorite aunt/whatever type relationship than with your bio mom, I think, because even though you’re getting female advice, it’s not tinted with the want to make you into them.
I have been searching for that mom my whole life, the one that could accept me for my whole self. I have gotten that from myself and the friends around me that are moms, because it’s a different energy. It’s a higher frequency when you can look at yourself as your own parent.
The difference in Dana’s relationship with her parents and mine is that I wouldn’t take any shit, and she would take it up to her eyeballs because that’s what she’s programmed to do. So, we had at least two blowouts because I was tired of not being able to take up any room in that family and watching you crush Dana is unacceptable. It often takes an outsider to see family dysfunction because they’ve been doing it so many years they can’t see it.
I wasn’t as harsh with her mom as I was with her dad, because he was the kind of person who always had to be right, and he would fight you to the death over it by trying to legally trap you. So, when he started bullying me, I started bullying him back. I do not think he expected this, but I’m an adult, and you don’t get to treat me and my wife this way. The one time they stayed with us, I threw them out.
Dana was furious because she was happy continuing the pattern of being devastated and trying to fit in. I needed them to get there, faster. The reason I was so angry is that they ate our food, used our utilities, and still treated us like crap. Sometimes, the only way to get a bully to stop is to call them out on the carpet. They chose their church over their child, and I was tired of watching Dana be tortured by it, because it drove her to do all sorts of things that furthered this toxic relationship between all four of us.
I call out the toxicity, but I was the bad guy because I always am. If Dana wouldn’t protect herself, I’d protect her.
And the thing is, very few times in my life have I been in relationships where I had a relationship with their family that actually seemed like an in-law. Most of the time, their families have been deeply homophobic and dinner was always awkward.
So, what I do for fun is all tied to every one of these paragraphs. I write down my memories the way my AuDHD brain works and go through a million topics because everything feeds everything with no executive function.
Every thought comes with bonus content.
For instance, I’m also a huge reader, but I’ve forgotten to mention it. I’m not currently reading anything because I’m interested in other media right now, working on my own voice. I go through binge/purge phases because if I write while I’m reading, then I tend to pick up the voice of the last writer I just read rather than my own.
The book I’ve really enjoyed the most recently is “Mad Honey” by Jennifer Finney Boylan and Jodi Picoult.
I also sit and talk to the bees when it’s nice outside, because there’s lavender in the backyard.
Write about your first name: its meaning, significance, etymology, etc.
My name has different meanings all over the UK. In England, it is a unisex name (which I love, because it fits my nonbinary nature). According to Google, the name Leslie means joy…. from Lece, a medieval form of Letitia.
In Scotland, the name derives from a place name in Aberdeenshire, perhaps an anglicisation of an originally Scottish Gaelic leas celynj, in English, “holly-garden.”
In both Irish Gaelic/Celtic, my name means “one who dwells at the grey fortress.” I can only assume that the grey fortress was named after me, not the other way around.
An interesting fact about me is that Leslie is a Scottish plaid and Lanagan is an Irish one, so I could wear two….. technically, except that I am not of the Leslie Clan. My cousin’s family is, though. I always thought it would be funny to be born into that family, because then my name would be “Leslie Leslie.” A kid so nice, they named me twice.
Oh, wait. They’re not my cousins. They’re one of my younger cousin’s cousins from their other side of the family. But I am still Clan Leslie adjacent.
Lanagan isn’t too shabby in Ireland….. we have a family crest and a clan and all that. Where it’s not clear is where we’re actually from. My grandfather thought it was County Meigh-o (sp?), but I talked to another Irish woman who said that most of the Lanagans are in County Wexford. So, I don’t know who is right, because I haven’t done the deep dive into genealogy myself. It’s just not my thing. Perhaps if I took my Adderrall and went into hyperfocus mode I could do that kind of research, but it’s not on the list.
What I do have is a present I got for my dad one year for Christmas. It’s a digital copy of the Lanagan Crest, and the original file size was so huge he could have printed it on a wall with no degradation. 😛 I kept a copy on my Google drive when I got it, and it’s been there for at least 15 years. So, I’ll include it at the end.
And honestly, this is probably the end, because that’s the only thing I know about my name, except where my parents got the idea that it actually meant “quiet spirit,” because that’s the basis on which I was named. Just because they believed it doesn’t mean it’s not true. I just can’t find record of it anywhere.
I do like that my name means “joy.” As a depressed person, it gives me a goal. Live up to my name.
If we are going on true fantasy here, my perfect job would be “psychiatrist.” This is because I don’t want to talk to you about your problems. I want to manage your meds and let you verbally vomit all over someone else. 😉 However, I don’t think I would have done very well in medical school since I had trouble in high school chemistry. So, if I really wanted to, I could get an MSW or an LPC and indeed let you verbally vomit all over me, but I can’t think of a job I would dislike more. It’s not because people have problems.
It’s that I tend to take on everyone else’s problems as my own, and I think I would burn out easily. This wouldn’t be the case if I was a psychiatrist, because those are 15 minute appointments just like every other specialty. I like talking about diagnoses, protocols, etc. because I recognize patterns. I know the different classes of crazy meds and what they do, generally because I’ve been on it at one time or another.
Even if I went back to school to become a pychiatrist, I know that in some ways, I wouldn’t be happy because there are drawbacks to every job. I wouldn’t like working for Kaiser or any other managed care group. I wouldn’t like fighting insurance companies because generic makes my patient throw up all over the floor and brand doesn’t.
I also wouldn’t like that in today’s climate, my advice would mean as much as the ingredients on a cereal box. People go to the doctor differently now. I think that drug commercials being on TV has led to this. You spend years in medical school, internship, and residency only to find that Karen who looks at WebMD all day has “more answers than you.” I am all for being an advocate for your own health. I draw the line at telling my doctors what they should prescribe for me. I feel like you need a degree for that?
No, Karen sees something on TV that she just has to try and if she throws a fit in the exam room, there are too many doctors who can’t be arsed to listen to it and think, “well, it probably won’t kill her.” I think what I really mean is that I would have liked to be a psychiatrist in the 80s and 90s, before everyone with the IQ of bean dip decided they needed to be on the Internet.
I do not know what it would be like to go to medical school in today’s climate, either, because they don’t do much to prepare you for running your own practice. I’d probably end up working for a hospital just so I didn’t have to make ends meet all on my own. I think that med students are better able to advocate for themselves when they get tired, but that’s relatively new. Many, many interns and residents think you should learn like they did, and they are not fond of “the new rules.”
The thing is, the doctors aren’t happy, either. It’s like working in a kitchen- you don’t leave when the restaurant closes, you leave when everything is done for the night… you can’t leave anything in process. While the hospital doesn’t close, there’s lots of both up and downtime. For a doctor, all this translates into the limit of hours you can work…….. being on shift for 11.5 hours and having someone code. Are you going to take your break or take care of your patient?
Hospitals in large part haven’t changed since the 70s. Michael Chrichton wrote a great non-fiction book about it called “Five Patients,” in which he explains the ideas I’m talking to you about now in detail…. it’s a short book, though. If you’re interested or if you know someone going to med school, I’d recommend it to you or as a gift. It’s gritty and real, and though I don’t remember the other four, Peter Luchesi stayed with me.
But if I jump out of fantasyland, I think I already have the skillset I need to launch me into a more well-respected writer. I don’t know that I want to put energy into a different basket than that.
But whatever job I write about, perfect or not, that’s the point. The real job is not the doing, but the remembering…. and I have that covered no matter the subject.
I have never respected a boss that wasn’t exactly like me in terms of leadership. If you make everything top-down, then what the higher-ups are saying is that other jobs are beneath them. I will never give anyone something else that I wouldn’t do, and I learned this from all the important leaders in my life….. first, my dad. Then my emotional abuser, who despite being a dick to me is one of the most successful people I know, then my sister, who rose above being a basic campaign staffer to successful lobbyist for a federally funded queer health clinic in Texas. They’re under fire, as you can imagine. Then, there was Supergrover, who actually changed me the most because I take in information through writing best. So, when she said something about leadership, I could take it in much easier.
I only remember my dad being an associate pastor twice in my entire childhood. Therefore, he was the visionary for anywhere from 300-1600 people my whole entire childhood. I don’t remember how long he was an associate pastor the first time, but the second time it was only a year because the pastor who was at Naples before us died and they needed a senior pastor in an emergency. My dad knew that his senior pastor was a legend and he could have learned so much more, but at the same time he thought he was ready to take on his own thing- so we moved.
I was going into the second grade when we got to Naples, one of the most formative years of my childhood because for whatever reason, one of my teachers TRULY didn’t like me. I don’t know what it was before my parents took me to London (the school decided I couldn’t graduate to third grade if I missed eight days, so my dad just unenrolled me and re–enrolled me when we got back). That made me an entitled little shit, because people in Naples don’t do that.
So, I suppose she gave me fair grades, but she made my life a living hell and I can assure you I was not alone in this. Talk to anyone who was in second grade with me now and they’ll still remember how terrified they were of her.
In opposition to her, my dad was trying to make our church the center of the community, ecumenical because some people would come to a church if they were holding a special thing when they wouldn’t normally, or we were the only game in town. For instance, MYF was more popular than any of the other youth groups in town because we were a fun bunch. Kids came from other churches, as well as kids who hated church and wouldn’t go to Sunday worship, but they would come to MYF because it’s where everyone else was hanging out.
I continue to be glad that of all the pastors I could have been born to in Northeast Texas, I got the one I got. I could have ended up in a much worse situation, especially when I came out. I could have lost everything I knew, and lots of friends my age did. My dad is open-minded, and brought people together. He didn’t promote anything politically, he just talked around both sides of an issue so that Republicans and Democrats would both get something out of it.
When we moved to Houston, it was a big jump in congregation size, but they were actively in crisis. The minister before us had been caught having affairs with several women in the congregation. One of the women’s husbands shot a bullet hole through one of our front windows (before we got there) and we never changed the glass….. alternately creepy and cool as we began to mark progress away from it. By the time we left that church, it had grown from 150 active members to over 300, and closer to 400 on things like Christmas Eve and Easter morning.
That’s because there’s a religion section on the news in Houston- it doesn’t push any particular thing, just will put your event in a crawl. Not only were we on the crawl, one of the news stations came and filmed a spot. It was beautiful.
We also started a Christmas Pageant that is so known it’s still going on in the same way it did from the beginning….. except I’m not Gabriel, in the choir, and playing handbells. I needed roller skates.
“Can I ROLLER SKATE?”
Also, don’t let anyone at Bridgeport think that the idea for the flowered cross came from her. She stole it from my dad. It’s fine, but credit where credit is due. She also stole my mango salsa recipe and then wouldn’t even let me help prepare it. It was just control. After a while, “I didn’t fit her vision,” and she’s always working on the next transactional relationship…… which is the thing I learned about how *not* to do leadership. She would show up when the garden needed tending, so that showed me she wasn’t all transactional. She’d work just as hard as the gardeners. But at the same time, no one close to her got anything for free.
I’ve learned that the best people in power are the ones who don’t want it. That’s because they only use it when they have to, not because it pleases them. I believe it’s the difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Joe Biden wants to be the president. Trump wants to be a king. His money has made him think that’s how the world works, and so far no court case has managed to sway him that he’s ever made any bad choices in life.
I’ve learned that good leadership admits mistakes. That sometimes things are an emergency because we’ve fucked up and we don’t have time to react the way we normally would because that takes time. I do not like the attitude that “you guys fucked up, so I’m going to go home while you code all night.” The best example I can think of is at Apple. Steve Jobs absolutely drove the coders like a team of mules when they didn’t get their usual deal on chips from Motorola, and the entire codebase of OS X had to be changed to support Intel in six weeks.
But as the visionary, he didn’t drill into the details of how long it would realistically take not to release an unstable operating system. Although most companies do it. I never worry about upgrading Windows until there’s at least a service pack. So, I don’t know how they did it by Jobs saying “get it done” all the time instead of moving deadlines is crazy. No one slept.
And this, dear children, is what I know about leadership. A top-down executive would tell you to buy the best Mac available. A true leader would tell you that now since the processors are identical to PCs, you’re paying five times as much for a Mac as a PC, thinking it’s hugely different. The operating system is different, and I wish that was sold separately. I could build a Hackintosh, but I like Ubuntu just as well.
I am a leader because I have learned that it takes more strength to be vulnerable than it does to yell at them and make them feel bad……. but I always get better results.
What makes a good leader is being able to tell the truth, all the time. Keep your employees apprised of the situation with your company, and you’ll get more people emotionally involved. Once they’re emotionally invested, productivity goes up. If you treat people like kindergartners, they’ll act like it. If you value their opinion, they’ll act like it.
The hardest part is getting leaders to believe that’s really true.
If you could un-invent something, what would it be?
During the Viet Nam war, David Halberstam and Sam Donaldson were on the ground. They were taking sitreps and sending them back to the AP Wire or to whichever newspaper for which they worked.
There was a publication time, and if you missed it, either your story was scrapped or it went in a different issue. If I could un-invent something, it’s the 24-hour news cycle. It is a breakneck pace, and it is unsustainable; our population has proven to be uneducated, in larger measure than we thought possible before 2016, and then it got worse. Few people trusted government advice on what to do about COVID.
Without a publication time and leaving things for the next day, you get sound bites. By instituting a hard out, you give a reporter more time to actually understand a story, and it’s something that the US has gotten away from over so many years; I believe scrapping The Fairness Doctrine was our first mistake. I got this from The Reagan Library web site:
The Fairness Doctrine, enforced by the Federal Communications Council, was rooted in the media world of 1949. Lawmakers became concerned that the monopoly audience control of the three main networks, NBC, ABC and CBS, could misuse their broadcast licenses to set a biased public agenda.
So, if you think about the fact that now Trump has beat out DeSantis and Haley in Iowa despite high crimes and misdemeanors (and shitty business deals, and tax evasion, not to mention racist as FUCK), I think we can point to the dismantling of this law as patient zero.
It’s certainly a disease. We cannot solve this by being quick. We have to solve it by being thorough….. which is something a 24 hour news cycle doesn’t allow you to do. Networks would rather repeat the same four minutes eighty times than give reporters time to research before they’re on the air. You want someone who can orate like Edward R. Murrow (“Good Night and Good Luck” is in my Top 10 List), but now there’s no time for it.
You get the news as quickly as it gets to the wire, and if you have the AP Wire app installed on your phone, I feel your pain…… I put my phone on “Do Not Disturb” in large part because of this…… and yet, I don’t want to not read the wire every day, either.
I’m a conundrum.
There’s no one like Will McAvoy that has the latitude to do in-depth pieces that explore both sides of the issue, except when you’re on a biased cable channel. Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes are the people I turn to the most often, because they lay out history and the present just like I do, acknowledging patterns. They will also actually tell you when Democrats have been wrong, and don’t have the infallibility complex of a Republican. If you can’t look at what you need to do differently, you won’t. With a Republican, it doesn’t matter what the facts are. They’re going to be louder than you, and in their minds, that counts as power.
If Fox News was what it said it was, a news channel, they would have anchors that are capable of admitting that Trump is a disaster, because many, many, many books have already been written about how the party internally combusted because they had absolutely no idea what to do with Trump and wondered why they ever thought he could be president in the first place…… the thing the Democrats asked themselves, constantly.
The right has gotten too far right, but I don’t mind people like Mitt Romney, Will Hurd, Mary Cheney (I can’t wait to see what she does next.), etc. I start to have a problem with their “family values.” If we could leave it to talking about money without making it dependent on my rights as a woman or a queer, that would be great.
There are no sound bites here, but I wish more people would dig deep and find out the truth from reputable sources. It is a cult-like status to believe everything Trump says despite all facts to the contrary, because to those people facts aren’t real. They are the same as opinions, because when we said, “that’s just, like, your opinion, man…” they came up with the phrase “alternative facts.”
We are falling deeper and deeper into a sinkhole because the longer we look unstable to the rest of the world, the more we lose any favors we’ve acquired. We’ve done a lot of favors for other countries, but it’s very hard getting those countries to pay you back when they’re broke.
We do not want this man representing our interests overseas. I don’t believe he thinks Greenland is the only country up for sale. He’s a billionaire. If he throws money around, he gets what he wants. This makes him volatile, narcissistic, and unreliable (because he might go into a meltdown if he feels disrespected). That may be the choice for the majority of the American people again, but it is not the wish of any world leader at all, except for the ones we don’t like.
Remember The Cold War?
Do you really think that every president from Kennedy to George H.W. Bush would love seeing all their hard work undone? And what about CIA? H.W. Bush was Director of CIA before he was president. I would give an arm and a leg to know what he thought of Trump telling CIA employees that he trusted Russian intelligence more than them in front of the wall with all the stars commemorating lives lost. He didn’t die that long ago, so I know he was furious even if I didn’t get to see it.
We are going to elect a puppet and run our country into the ground. Trump has the potential to change the new world order by slipping money to Russia instead of Ukraine. Trump also likes to cozy up to China and North Korea, which in my estimation, is a bad thing.
Opinion pieces like mine come out on the web A LOT, because even if they’re writing for The Washington Post, they’re not stating anything but what they believe. But by stopping the 24 hour news cycle, we could have researchers and fact checkers on basic television again….. someone who could speak from an intelligent perspective on local and global issues. Give reporters more time….. not because they need it. We do.
This is too complicated for a one minute story. Hopefully, if anything does change, it will be to get someone like Will McAvoy on ABC, CBS, and NBC.
The problem right now is that half the country wouldn’t trust that archetype anymore, because The Fairness Doctrine has been gone so long……. and it has deteriorated our attention span for thorough understanding. We need to get in-depth issues on television, because few people have access to a top tier news source (not because they can’t, most of the time). Never let it escape your attention that really conservative “news outlets” don’t have a paywall, and both the New York Times and The Washington Post do.
If you would like to read the newspaper every day, you can do it for absolutely free. My public library gives me access. For people that have the means, most of the time it’s that paywalls are annoying and you can probably find something similar for free.
Sure you can. The Post and The Times have the best stable of journalists in the entire world, but YouTube is easier, right?
I also think that few people like to read as much as I do, so that’s another reason why YouTube clips are so popular and yet don’t actually get the point across because there’s no nuance. People are swallowing what Trump’s America looks like left and right, without even asking themselves if they like the food. If we do this again, we’re going to find out just how much we lack; Putin and Trump have designed an American Trojan Horse. Russia interfered with our election because they were invited.….. and everyone else stood around and said, “maybe if we built a big wooden badger?” There are too many of us standing around. If we all banded together, we’d be able to say this as well:
Will: America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.
Mackenzie: (holding up a sign in marker) But it could be.
Can you share a positive example of where you’ve felt loved?
In order for this to count today, I have to have it in by midnight. It’s 11:09 PM. So, if there’s a Monty Python ending, it’s because I’ve realized it’s 12:59.
Love this week came in one screenshot:
First of all, I didn’t even know I was building suspense (in my fiction entry, “Words Are Hard, Part I“). The entry is called that because the box of writing prompts that Zac got me for Christmas are packaged as a game called “Words Are Hard,” and that’s the first prompt I picked up that really spoke to me.
Rebecca has been living in my head for ten years now, as have Gregory, Leila, and Kermit. I just wasn’t sure what direction to go with them, so I came up with what I hope was intelligent fiction, because it can’t be accurate enough to be fiction about intelligence.
JL Henry is a relatively new friend of mine, introduced to me by Tyler Moore. They’re both accomplished novelists, and they run a podcast called “The Quill Drivers;” they’ve both been amazing about teaching me tips and tricks to get readership….. and with readership comes the possibility of Facebook paying me. I’ve thought they should for years, but no one asked me.
The blessing of my life was when Tyler said, “join my writing group.” I said, “I’m not a fiction writer. Are there other bloggers?” He said there weren’t many, but writing is writing. And now I have a whole box of cards and a Facebook group called “The Writer’s Forum” that will beat me like a red headed stepchild when I need it.
It’s solid growth in the direction I need to go, and it meant leaving behind some beautiful things. I am in the position of finding the next beautiful, starting with Zac and his box of torture devices writing prompts.
For my readers that have already heard that story, you haven’t heard that I feel loved because my “date” for dinner with my sister got snowed out, so we planned a staycation over Valentine’s Day. So, this year the love I’ll give is the kind you want to give someone you’ve known and loved since before they were born.
Let me tell you. Methodist Hospital never knew what hit it.
Stories That Are All True 