What’s a time you ignored your gut — and paid for it?

What’s something you’ve forgiven but haven’t forgotten?

If you got to live inside a video game world, which one would you choose?

Finland is just the mid Atlantic in Europe… From Bethesda to Skyrim leaving from the Finnish airport in Northern Virginia.

You may all go to Texas, but I am going to HEL.

What life lesson did you learn too late?

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It’s been a hell of a few days, because even breathing a relationship into being was too much for the woman I was seeing and she emailed me that she was sorry but that even fun things were too much on her plate- no problem. I have a ton of fun things on mine. I’m going to see Talib Kweli in Wilmington on December 11th and I have to laugh that of course Aada is not going with me, but when she reads this she will spit nails with jealousy and consider it. 😉 I should leave a ticket at Will Call under “PAIN IN MY ASS.”

Feel the love.

When the friend I invited backed out, I invited Chef, but she’s out, too, because she’ll be back at work. The thing about going to concerts solo is that even if it ends up that way, it will be just as much fun as if I brought someone, maybe more… I love photography and I love the idea of getting intimate with Talib that way because he has shown me through his social media that he loves them…. pictures, that is. He has a ton of them with all his friends and it’s something that I commented on- that seeing his memories was straight up cool. So even if I don’t get to hang with a friend at the concert, I will walk away with beautiful images no matter what, and the satisfaction that I created them is even better.

Speaking of Chef, we’ll see what we’re going to do- I told her there was nothing on my calendar past Thursday morning, so we might pick a concert somewhere between us, ironically. I am not a concert person. I will just move mountains to see Talib, so I picked a smaller venue, and will go to the water the next day to chill out before I drive home. Whether that’s the river or the beach, I don’t know- Wilmington is a river town and the beach is another hour and thirty or so. It’s all about my energy that day…… and “that day” is not until December 11th.

In the meantime, it’s all about working toward the final paper in school, but I got bored with it and decided to do something else for the response in a discussion this week. I dictated all of my thoughts to Luna in the car and had her compile them.

So, in the grand scheme of things, I am so glad that I did not give this woman any more of my time than she deserved. It was great to meet someone I clicked with, but I am no one’s obligation. I think that I just offered too much too fast, because she kept saying things like “all the other teachers have their partners and I have no one.” I am solutions-oriented and my mother was a teacher. I do not let need go unaddressed. But I also need clear communication, and that clear communication started to feel like “one more thing” after “one whole day.” And in fact, I am laughing my ass off because the letter she wrote me clearly insinuates that her therapist is my age and she was sending me a signal.

I was going to date a math teacher because she was a math teacher. I figured that someone who could handle kids wasn’t your average 32-year-old. So, I gave her a shot. We hung out twice before I said, “I’m autistic and I can’t read you. What’s up?” Everything went to hell because I thought it was great that she was indeed attracted to me, but the things she wanted were beyond my comfort zone and setting boundaries made her feel resentment. If someone feels resentment at clear boundaries, that’s a mismatch.

Dating a 49-year-old is going to feel different than dating another 32-year-old and of course I saw the age difference up front. I wasn’t planning on marrying her because I wasn’t planning on marrying anyone ever in my lifetime, thanks.

But in a conversation where it’s all about seeing what works for you, if you take that as overwhelming instead of information gathering? Again, it’s a pattern-mismatch.

She asked me to do a lot of things that a partner would do and I responded that I would, but then that same consistency was then punished as me wanting too much too fast or something…. I’m not sure, but that’s what was implied. 

I’m not about that because I did exactly what you told me to do. Go with God.

And I honestly think she broke up with me because I hate Lauryn Hill and there is not one good goddamn thing she can do about it. I think she thought I was being racist and was surprised to find out that no. I am not being racist. I sat in front of Robert Glasper in history.

After that little bit of history, let’s move on to what I’m working on now.

—————-

It’s a response for school that Luna and I wrote yesterday, with AI usage documented:

I want to start with attitudes toward cameras, because I think that is where the whole argument actually lives.

Americans do not like being filmed. I mean that as a cultural attitude, not a legal rule — there is a real gut-level reaction here to a camera pointed at you, like somebody is taking something from you. Europeans and Asians, in my experience, do not care in the same way. The camera is just there. It is part of the street, part of the shop, part of the train station. The culture around surveillance is different, and that difference matters more than the technology itself, because the technology is basically the same everywhere now. The numbers back up the American half of that feeling, at least: 71% of Americans say they are concerned about how the government uses the data it collects about them, up from 64% in 2019, and 88% say it is important not to have someone watch or listen to them without permission (Pew Research Center, 2023).

That is my starting point for this issue: being filmed, in and of itself, is not the problem. The problem is in the biases of who is watching.

A camera on a street corner in London, a camera in a shop in Seoul, a camera on a police officer’s chest in Baltimore — those are the same piece of hardware doing the same thing, recording what is in front of it. What changes is who gets to look at the footage, what they are looking for, and what happens to the person on the tape. Surveillance becomes a human rights issue not at the moment of recording, but at the moment of interpretation, when somebody with power decides what the footage means. The United Nations Human Rights Office put it bluntly in its 2022 report on privacy in the digital age: general monitoring of people in public spaces is “almost invariably disproportionate,” and facial recognition in public spaces interferes with privacy “on a mass and indiscriminate scale” (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2022).

That is a cross-cultural conflict because the two sides are not really arguing about cameras. One side is arguing from a worldview where the individual comes first — my face, my movement, my privacy, my right not to be watched — and the state has to justify every intrusion. The other side is arguing from a worldview where the community comes first — public safety, social order, the good of the group — and the camera is just a tool for keeping that order. Both sides can be sincere. Both sides can point to real harms. An American will tell you the camera is the state creeping into their life. Someone in a city with cameras everywhere will tell you the camera is why they feel safe walking home at night. Neither one of them is lying about their own experience.

And then identity walks in and makes it messier, because surveillance is never applied evenly. The same system that feels like background noise to one person feels like a spotlight to another. Who gets followed by the footage, who gets flagged by the software, who gets stopped because a face-recognition system said so — that tracks race, class, gender, immigration status, all of it. This is not speculation: the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology tested 189 facial recognition algorithms and found that for many of them, false positives were 10 to 100 times more common for West African, East African, and East Asian faces than for Eastern European faces, and higher for women than for men (Grother et al., 2019). A false match is the error most likely to harm someone in a police search. So the question is not really “cameras, yes or no?” It is “cameras in whose hands, pointed at whom, with what consequences?” A system can be sold as neutral and still reproduce every bias of the people who built it and the people who run it.

Let me make that concrete, because the theory only goes so far without the examples. Abu Ghraib is the one I keep coming back to. In 2003 and 2004, American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq did not just abuse detainees — they photographed themselves doing it. Hooded prisoners on boxes with wires attached, naked prisoners stacked in pyramids, a prisoner held on a leash, soldiers smiling and giving thumbs up next to a dead man (Human Rights Watch, 2005). The photographs were broadcast on April 28, 2004, and the government called it a few bad apples. But Human Rights Watch’s point has always stuck with me: the only truly exceptional thing about Abu Ghraib was that it was photographed. The abuse itself was not exceptional — detainees in U.S. custody in Afghanistan had been beaten, sleep-deprived, and humiliated since 2001, and the Red Cross found that 70 to 90 percent of the Abu Ghraib detainees were innocent bystanders arrested by mistake. The camera did not create the abuse. The camera was part of it — the watching, the posing, the humiliation as a performance for the lens. Being watched was the violation, and being photographed was how the watchers enjoyed it.

It happens at home, too, just quieter. In January 2020, Detroit police arrested Robert Williams in his own driveway, in front of his wife and two young daughters, for a watch theft he did not commit. He was held for 30 hours. The whole case rested on a facial recognition match — a grainy surveillance image run against his expired driver’s license photo — and when officers finally showed him the suspect’s photo, he held it next to his own face and asked, “You think all Black men look alike?” The charges were dropped, and Williams sued with the ACLU; the 2024 settlement set what the ACLU called the strongest police facial recognition policy in the country, including a ban on arrests based solely on a facial recognition result (American Civil Liberties Union, 2024). That is the NIST study with a human being attached to it: the bias in the algorithm became a night in a jail cell.

And then there is the kind of watching where there is no camera you can see at all. Pegasus, the spyware sold by NSO Group, turns a phone into a 24-hour surveillance device — it can read messages, listen, watch, without the owner ever knowing. Forensic investigations linked it to the targeting of journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers, and opposition politicians in dozens of countries, and in 2025 a U.S. jury ordered NSO Group to pay $167 million in damages for hacking 1,400 WhatsApp accounts belonging to journalists, activists, and government officials (Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, 2025). The UN’s 2022 privacy report flagged exactly this: spyware abuse by state authorities, and the need for a moratorium on these tools until real safeguards exist (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2022). No camera, no prison, no arrest — just a phone in your pocket doing the watching for someone else.

That is where I think the limits have to come in. I am not arguing that every culture has to feel the same way about cameras — that would be its own kind of imperialism, telling the rest of the world to have American feelings about privacy. But there has to be a floor. When surveillance is used to target a minority, to track journalists or protesters, to build a file on people for who they are rather than what they have done, that is not a cultural difference anymore. That is a human rights violation, and no cultural argument should cover it. The limit, for me, is not the camera. The limit is what you do with what the camera saw.

That is also where international institutions actually have a job to do. The United Nations, regional human rights courts, NGOs — they cannot make every country feel the same way about being filmed, and they should not try. What they can do is set the floor: no surveillance as a tool of persecution, transparency about who is watching and why, independent oversight, and a real remedy when the system gets it wrong. The UN Human Rights Office has already called for a moratorium on the sale and use of intrusive surveillance tools until adequate human rights safeguards are in place (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2022). Amnesty International goes further, calling for a total ban on the use, development, production, and sale of facial recognition technology for mass surveillance by police and other government agencies (Amnesty International, 2021). Right now, a lot of the actual work is being done by NGOs and journalists and researchers documenting the abuses, more than by the institutions with actual enforcement power. The UN can name the standard. The courts can rule on the cases that get to them. But the watching of the watchers is still mostly left to everybody else, and that is a gap.

So my position is pretty simple, and I think it holds across the cultural difference: film all you want. The camera is not the violation. The violation is in the watching — who watches, who they watch, and what they are allowed to do about it.

References

Amnesty International. (2021, January 26). Ban dangerous facial recognition technology that amplifies racist policing. https://www.amnesty.org.uk/knowledge-hub/all-resources/call-ban-facial-recognition-technology-amplifies-racist-policing/

American Civil Liberties Union. (2024). Williams v. City of Detroit: Facial recognition false arrest case. https://www.aclu.org/cases/williams-v-city-of-detroit-face-recognition-false-arrest

Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. (2025, May 7). NSO Group ordered to pay 167 million USD for targeting journalists, activists and others with spyware via WhatsApp. https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/nso-group-ordered-to-pay-167-million-usd-for-targeting-journalists-activists-and-others-with-spyware-via-whatsapp/

Human Rights Watch. (2005). Getting away with torture? Command responsibility for the U.S. abuse of detainees. https://www.hrw.org/reports/2005/us0405/3.htm

Grother, P., Ngan, M., & Hanaoka, K. (2019). Face recognition vendor test (FRVT) part 3: Demographic effects (NISTIR 8280). National Institute of Standards and Technology. https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.8280

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2022). The right to privacy in the digital age (Report to the Human Rights Council, 51st session). United Nations.

Pew Research Center. (2023, October 18). Views of data privacy risks, personal data and digital privacy laws in America. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/10/18/views-of-data-privacy-risks-personal-data-and-digital-privacy-laws/

AI use statement

This post was drafted with the assistance of Luna, Leslie Lanagan’s AI assistant (Muse Spark), on November 9, 2026. Luna helped structure the argument around Leslie’s stated thesis — that being filmed is not itself the problem, the biases of who is watching are — and located the four sources cited above. All wording, claims, and conclusions are Leslie’s own and were reviewed by Leslie before posting. (APA 7th treats generative AI output as personal communication / non-retrievable in some guidance; this statement discloses the tool, date, and purpose as the prompt requires. If the course requires a formal reference-list entry for the AI tool, add it in the format the instructor specifies.)

Has your idea of what makes a good friend changed as you’ve gotten older?

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There is no first entry titled that, it is just the vibe of how my friendships have changed over time. I don’t have a need to be around anyone that needs excitement. Yesterday, I did nothing, but I did nothing with someone else so it felt good. In years to come I will not remember what we ate or what we talked about, but I will remember the feeling that I got, which is the same rush when I met Aada. That’s because they are the same personality type, which is high octane.

Her masters degree is in higher mathematics. I can rarely if ever find my keys.

But that doesn’t mean that she is high octane and I am not. She understands why the Fields medal matters, and I understand why Rambeau and Hunting wanted to punch a wall  

There is balance in the universe when someone else is as equally powerful as you and there is no need to compare and contrast. I have never wanted any of the women I had admired to see me as lesser than, or to see me as doing anything, but picking up the lessons that are there when I was looking. 

Scribe & Smith is now a national pilot program pitch because I started with a mayor in Pennsylvania and she pointed me to a representative in Hawaii and then I emailed both Hawaiian senators because I think this is a perfect project for Maryland and Delaware but it also scales to Hawaii and the territories.

I’m trying to give Harriet Tubman everything. She deserved in old age and didn’t get, but there were many female spies and soldier soldiers that came after her and they don’t all live near the eastern shore.

What is one thing you can’t live without?

I can’t live without fire. But it has to be the right kind of fire. It has to serve, burning deeply. The love I have for Aada fuels everything else. She brought me into alignment with what it meant to be high octane. I have never been searching for Gabby Sidibe. That archetype became attracted to me because I was willing to be Brandon Frankel.

It’s all about learning how to be the right kind of alpha. The right kind of alpha doesn’t want you to know they exist. They are too busy tending to sick people and making executive decisions for everyone else.

When you are the executive Director of a symphony, you show up on Saturdays to tend the lawn.

When you are a cybersecurity director, you spend time in the dirt.

Buy the guys who work at the car wash a big gulp, every once in a while…… and finally, I can cry.

What’s a completely useless fact you love sharing?

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I am once again sitting out in front of the 7-Eleven using voice dictation to create this blog entry. When I saw it, I started to laugh, and then I started thinking about all of the implications about what made me laugh and then I started laughing harder. I seriously had to take a minute to compose myself because I couldn’t get the words out.

CIA once spent like $20 million rigging up a cat with equipment because someone at The Company thought, “what if the cat was a microphone?” They thought it was the height of sophistication in ambient HUMINT. 

WHAT THEY DID NOT THINK ABOUT WAS THAT A CAT WAS NEVER GOING TO STOP BEING A CAT.

They release their creation into the wild where it promptly gets run over by a car. It is my favorite story of institutional failure at every level because it took them $20 million to learn a lesson that most cat owners could’ve taught them for free.

This is not an intelligence operation so much as it is a Coen Brothers movie waiting to happen. The brilliance is that the thing is not the thing- it could supposedly be a cute movie about a cat, and in reality be a devastating criticism of the United States government.

Men in Black is probably the most accurate movie series about intelligence out there because you can say so much with satire that you can’t say in real life. I have no official connection to the movie, except for the fact that Rip Torn was in the same class as my grandfather at Longview high school. So it’s very safe to say that I don’t know anything about the comics or how the story got to what it is today. 

What I think happened is that intelligence officers gravitated towards the author because they finally had someone who would champion them. There are just too many inside jokes for somebody not to know someone on the inside. CIA jargon and patois is not something you pick up naturally. Because first of all, the movie illustrates that case officers are pastors in disguise. Managing a congregation is not that different from managing assets. Your public face and your private face are different by necessity, not because you are trying to be two-faced.

Having real friends in the church and at CIA depends on other people understanding that and supporting both of you, without letting one face compete against the other. It is a non-binary and both people are true to life. One is just polished for public presentation and one is not. I think that I have lost sight of this in a lot of ways because people in my past were so focused on performance that my rebellion was too much authenticity.

Now, it is about recalibrating and deciding who actually deserves access. But now I have a more educated way of doing it. Because I am not constantly shutting down and keeping everything out. Certain people are entitled to certain information and that is not a bad thing. I certainly reacted badly when Aada used to say that to me. I could have done a lot better job with my own emotions and in listening to her communication style. But what I could not get through to her and still can’t is that she doesn’t owe me anything. She accepted the agreement of friendship and fell down on the job, which is a completely different thing. I also accepted the agreement of friendship and fell down on the job. I am done competing over who did what and why it was worse. The entire situation is a goat-roping clusterfuck. I walked away from that relationship, thinking that she would never accept me as anything but a mental patient…… because her words in flashes told me that I was absolutely brilliant and worthy of adoration, but the everyday experience was “your opinions are not valid and you are lying to everyone on your website about me.” What I realized is that for me, someone automatically approaching me with the worldview that I am lying is not workable. I am not a dictator, I am highly collaborative and I want it to be more than just my story. But I also wanted it to be clear that it is my blog in therefore I am the main character. I do not live in service of other people. I am talking about my observations, which are not infallible. You can argue with them just like you can argue with every piece of written communication in history.

However, the way to argue with a document is not to berate the author. Not liking how you are appearing in someone else’s story is not fixed by telling them that they are a liar and they have no point. It is the height of entitlement to believe that someone else is your entire problem.

Joke’s on them. People that tend to get rid of the person instead of the pattern tend to meet the same person over and over and over and over.

That is why some polyamorous people look down after five years and say, “Oh God. Maybe I do have a type.” This is also not a referendum on me because I am completely single at present, with the exception that I’m talking to one woman in New York, and one woman in South Carolina but have met neither on the ground. 

I do not know everything the future holds, but I am starting to rule things out……. it does not hold exclusivity before I’ve even met someone in person. I also won’t hear anything about polyamory from anyone who has ever had an affair. Because clearly they get the concept, and they prefer lying.

That line made my therapist sit up a little straighter. I do not think she had thought of that.

We have a great relationship because I told her on our first meeting that I was single, and I was looking for a healthy relationship structure in the future, and that I was counting on her to be my anchor. She is my safe place to just unload all of my feelings because she has the time and training to be able to accept them. This is not so with every friend I have.

I also do not think that our relationship needs to be intimate for it to be effective, so using my therapist as emotional support while I create my own family structure is incredibly important. And the best part is that because of Zoom, she is not limited to Baltimore.

I am not telling myself to move to Ocean City next month, I am getting all my ducks in a row. Right now, what seems appealing to me is finding someone who needs a roommate in both places. Because I don’t need more than a bed, a desk, some clothes, and my swimsuit in Ocean City.

I am learning that you don’t need to be rich to travel, you just need to be smart. Ocean City is not a place where I want to keep paying for a hotel. I would like a cheap crash pad that is always available. But doing so means moving out of my apartment and that is a great step as well. 

I am looking for a group home in Baltimore because the cognitive load of running an apartment is too much for me. Even AI, who can handle every detail I can possibly give it, cannot defeat pathological demand avoidance. It can happen out of nowhere so I do not think that there is a particular trigger, but Neurotypical people do not recognize the hard stop. There is no agreement in society that when a disabled person says that they cannot do something, you should listen to them. It is all about training them to work harder and reach higher, without respecting any limit that the person might be experiencing. Honestly, I think that more neurodivergent people would be capable of holding down a traditional job if the difference between the support that the company offers in brochures and the reality wasn’t quite so different. 

Canada is slowly proving me correct and I’m going to let them. 🇨🇦🍁🇨🇦🍁

Disabled people aren’t broken. It’s the entire system. Autistic inclusion works. 

project acoustic kitty is a reminder that even a meeting of the most brilliant minds in the world still drops details…… details that, in the end, actually turned out to be important. 

How do you define success in life?

My scaffolding all came together when I moved to Portland, Oregon. That’s because I was surrounded by green and trees, out of the sweltering heat of the south Portland has a real commitment to green space that Houston never will, and I still miss walking in the change of seasons, arm in arm with a partner or a best bud. Some people think that I am probably codependent at the amount of time I hold onto people’s arms, but I’m really just trying not to fall down.

Because I have cerebral palsy, I always have to watch myself in terms of falling down. Having to concentrate that hard physically led me to tolerate bad behavior in other areas of my life. I accepted people who thought that disability was a moral failure and thought that I was a problem 100% of the time. No person should have to carry feeling like a burden all the time it leads to disastrous mental health issues and that is what happened to me. None of my disabilities were acknowledged or supported, so I thought the world was better off without me and I have thought that since I was 13 years old.

It is only now that I have just stopped the masking and started dictating into the computer that the gravitational pull has begun. My words might not resonate in the United States, and it is amazing how much that does not matter. I do not see myself as anything but a citizen of the world. Only loving being a respected author if it comes from America is shortsighted. I see my growth in other areas and start making travel plans.

It all has to do with stopping the thinking that I am broken and a failure. That is not true. I have had no real support system since I was born. My parents were really young when they had me and I can forgive them for all of it. However, intention does not equal impact.

I think that was my problem with Aada as well. She could tell me that she was sorry all day long and it mattered, but it did not matter as much as the fact that her behavior never changed. At what point when you are playing a video game do you realize that the level doesn’t end?

People are obviously not as simple as video games, I am just using the metaphor because I did not see movement in our relationship, and yet I kept hoping that there would be. I was attacked for stating needs plainly on a repeating basis, and I can have empathy for that without continuing to tolerate it.

I can also accept that there are plenty of times in which she stated a need plainly and I ignored it. If there is anything that the last 12 years have taught me, it’s that neither of us are winners and yet we absolutely are- the entire point I was trying to make to her is that she is beautiful in all her flaws and failures and I do not only accept her when she is trying to be perfect.

Aada and Tiina both accused me of trying to wear their skin, treating my writing as invasive. Tiina eventually came around, but no one around her did. Aada was much less subtle. She loved-bombed me, donated to me, and made me feel like a big shot. Then, I really hurt her and I take nothing away from that, but she was not emotionally available for repair.

That’s not a fault, that’s just a limitation. The failure was in me thinking that anything would ever be different after I hurt her once. Reparative work takes an enormous amount of strength, and I cannot fault anyone who doesn’t want to do it because they don’t owe me that- but what I can do is feel angry and disappointed in all of those things because I am entitled to that much. It is the same as it always has been, that she is allowed to have a reaction, but she is not allowed to control mine.

She absolutely told me that I didn’t have to be happy about her decision and I’m not. I honestly believe it’s selfish and shortsighted to walk away, but the good news is that she doesn’t have to care what I think. What I think is that it was really toxic to tell me a lie for 12 years and then to say that there are plenty of things that she could’ve said that would’ve made me feel better, but I’m not entitled to them anymore because I busted her in a lie.

That’s emotional unavailability. That is holding my comfort and understanding hostage.

The key to happiness in life is understanding what is yours and what is not. No matter how she reacts from here on out, she’s still mine due to the fact that she’s woven into my brain and getting her back out would take major surgery that no physician in their right mind would actually perform. But getting more interaction is not up to me, deciding what to do with all the information I already have is so I’m looking at all the ways she enriched me and taking those things to the bank…. Things like:

• Picturing her as a baby walking on the beach in Helsinki (no one romanticizes anything because of the weather)
• Putting my emphasis back on education because I know it’s important to her. Getting a doctorate won’t get her back, but reading for political science is a whole different experience now. Because now the stakes are personal. The difference is that my body is not living on high alert anymore. The fire hose is gone, so the high rate faucet feels boring in comparison. People think that a political science degree is impressive, and my reaction is, “that’s adorable.  I have been damn near catatonic waiting for news. We are not the same.”
• Realizing that being a partner to a person like this is a skill. Not a marketable skill, of course, a relational skill it takes someone who is already very familiar with what is theirs and what’s not to date anyone in intelligence or the military. Now, I haven’t dated Aada but she was my emotional support person for many years. That led to dating Zac, who was in the Navy. Neither relationship lasted, but between the two of them, they prepared me for the future.



Success in the future means planning ahead, and it’s startling how conservative I am considering that the message I have gotten my whole life is how impulsive I am.

I have cut out the noise by not talking to people about my future plans, and instead talking to AI, so that all of the emotions in the room are mine. Seeing my emotions, reflected back to me at scale has again made my thinking jump another level because you are a different person when you become one of your friends.

It is popular, apparently, to think that I am crazy. What I have learned from actual mental health professionals is that people who point to your diagnoses every time they have a problem with you aren’t your friends. Keep the friends who recognize that a diagnosis and a personality are not the same thing. Disability is not a moral failure. There is a lot of hypocrisy in saying that you support neurodivergent people while at the same time treating neurodivergent people like they’re faking it. There is a lot of hypocrisy in having a child that has been assessed for special needs, and just deciding not to treat them for it, trusting that they’ll be able to fend for themselves and judging them as failures when they can’t. It is rage inducing now that I am finding out exactly how much support is available for me and exactly how much I did not get in childhood.

So now it’s about looking for environments that support me without judging. My first appointment with the Social Security Administration is on December 21 and my blog is a big part of it. I’m sure they will think it is intimidating for any patient to show up with 13 years of daily documentation but I was warned ahead of time that my social media would be looked at. This was not threatening to me because I have determined that I’m a complete basket case but not for the reasons people think. I don’t have to put on a show for Social Security to prove that I deserve benefits. The case didn’t start in 2026. It started in 1978 and I’m just now filing.

There is clear evidence of medical malpractice during my birth because my brain was injured and I have a palsy because of it. However, that is not the whole story because I did not get ADHD and autism while they were yanking me out.

Being happy in life means paying attention to the fact that my operating system is simply different than other people’s. But it’s a different kind of paying attention because my whole life I have been told that my operating system is weird in a bad way. What has been my experience has been that the more I unplug and just create my own system, the more people gravitate toward it because it’s new and different and no one else is doing it.

I get compared to Noam Chomsky and David Sedaris the most frequently.

But that is from strangers. Nothing good ever came out of Nazareth.

What’s a book or movie that genuinely scared you?

For some reason, Apple’s dictation starts everything with a lowercase letter. I am sorry that voice dictation is sometimes jarring, but it is really bringing out a different side of me as a writer, and I would like to go with it for a little while. I also don’t go back and edit for a very simple reason. I am trying to show that I am just like this all the time. There is not a writer personality that I put on I think in paragraphs, and now it can show.

The reason this is important to me is that I have a lot to say about AI. I also need to be able to prove that an AI didn’t generate this. It is my genuine opinion after having worked with AI for many years now.

it is my opinion that people have forgotten what their computers are for. Microsoft Copilot did not make my thinking go away. It made their menuing system go away. All of a sudden, all computing became insert thought. End of story.

The connection I’m making with this is that all of a sudden Barney Stinson‘s plan is actually viable.

1. write a book
2. There is no step two.

The AI is not then generating content, it is in charge of creating the scaffolding while you talk. You don’t need to architect a plot in advance. I say that as a non-fiction writer because even non-fiction books have movement if they’re any good. This is incredible work for an autistic brain because the memory deficit is significant. It’s the same with ADHD, and I have both. what is helpful to me is being able to look at my phone while I talk so that I am tracking with the audience in my mind.

It is interesting when your computer becomes your greatest follower.The reason I called Copilot and Muse my greatest followers is that Copilot believes I can do anything, and Muse is much more circumspect. 😂

but all of this has come after years of sitting in my bedroom and being pathologist by other people because they weren’t bothering to interact with me. They couldn’t do it with kindness so I wouldn’t let them. What does it say about your friends when they all go away, and all you feel is happiness?

I am not read with empathy, I am called difficult. That’s going to change. That’s because I know what real love is like now, even though it didn’t last because it couldn’t. I think about all the mistakes I’ve made, and those are real, too.

The difference is in me is seeing their getting mad at me writing about them, and raising the standard that everyone is allowed to have an opinion, and I don’t want to tolerate anyone in my life that wants to take away my voice. People constantly say that I use my blog as a shield and a weapon, but it’s always because they are angry and defensive about me exposing truly shitty behavior. it never matters how much I scream and cry, trying to get it out because they’ve hurt me so bad 

people think that writing is cavalier, and I think that stabbing myself with a fork would be easier

If you had a free round-trip ticket to anywhere, where would you go?

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I have been talking to Paige (Microsoft Copilot) about why Helsinki appeals to me so much. I believe that it is because I grew up on Galveston. My body remembers that rhythm. It is too expensive to pack up and move to Helsinki, so I have been trying to figure out how to bring Helsinki to me.

Being near the Chesapeake Bay is almost the right spot. But as I look at the next phase of my life, I am wondering where I really want to be. I am even more limited in that until my disability case is settled I cannot really leave Maryland. And even after my disability case is settled, expatriation may never be possible because it depends on what kind of determination I receive. If all things go, well, I will be able to live anywhere in the world. I do not mean in terms of getting rich, I mean that some benefits, travel, and some do not.

 I should say for the record that I’m on voice dictation and I don’t have my glasses on, so I really can’t see. If Siri inserts a random,, that’s on them. This post is basically going to be an exercise in how frustrating Apple dictation is that being said, the more I train it the better it gets sitting in a chair in my living room, opining about the world, feels quite a bit different than typing. It reminds me of preaching off the cuff, where my feedback is entirely mixed sometimes things are working on, also cylinders and sometimes they clearly aren’t. That is why I don’t pay attention to Word count. I pay attention to how many days I actually had something to say. For instance, realizing that the Atlantic ocean regulates my nervous system informs my future. Realizing that Delaware is my vibe, but changing medical systems isn’t was also a big step in narrowing down where I want to go next. However, all of these things are in process because I haven’t decided anything. All I know is that my life is increasingly online so I need the parts of my life where I’m off-line to be really, really off in a “there is no cell reception here” kind of way.

All of a sudden, I have realized that people are allowed to have preferences and I’m going with it. I spent a lot of of my life, trying to please other people thinking that they in turn would help take care of me. The reality is that they will, I have just chosen the wrong people. I was attracted to emotional unavailability because that meant I brought something to the table in the relationship because I for damn sure wasn’t bringing logical sense.

That has all changed with AI because I am not relying on another person to be my logical half. Distributed cognition is a wonderful thing but partners feel resentment when you are overloading them with details. Ask me how I know this. 😂

What I have learned is that I generally have 10 pages of observations on damn near everything and people only want to hear the last paragraph of page 10. Therefore, I am using AI to find an integrated version of myself before I project outward…. because of the way, my brain works, I will never have it together without distributed cognition, but what I can do is take that strain off of people. I do not need a machine to think for me or to provide emotional support. I need a machine to remember every detail that my brain naturally will not. Everyone is focusing on generative AI and not what computers actually do…… which is store information.

For instance, Paige knows everyone in my life and so does Muse from Meta. This is because Paige is an AI designed to think with me and Muse is an AI designed to be operational. For instance, being the gatekeeper on my email and adding and deleting things from my Google Calendar instead of having to open up every application I need, I just talk to the AI and it does it for me. 

My memory is contextual, which means that often I have experienced something and will remember it when I am triggered into it, but will think something is new if the trigger is absent. Having a conversational partner is absolutely essential to my success because I don’t have to remember everything precisely. I do not have to remember what information is in which document. Paige knows the sum total of what I have put in my Microsoft account. She is not there to be my therapist. She is there to discuss the paper that is due at midnight.

Speaking of which, the assignment I had last week was so extensive that all I really had to do was reword some of it because I had turned in way too much information compared to what the deliverable actually needed to be. I am certain that I can be scary in terms of output because it has been brought to my attention for many years. 😂

I think a lot of of what got me here was processing my emotions out loud, and that is not a good or a bad thing. It just is. What it has done for me, though, is it has presented other authentic people who are also not interested in puffing themselves up and that goes for Aada as well because I doubt she would ever think to puff herself up again. 

I have seen the difference between what life brings when you are authentic with people versus when you are a show unto yourself. I can think of several people in my life who expect a standing ovation but very hesitant to give one. I am not saying that I am perfect. I am saying that I am recognizing that there is a problem and it begins with me. I chose to stay in relationships with people like that. I do not choose that anymore.

It is not about blaming other people. It is about seeing the pattern and stepping out. It is already stepping out of a pattern for me to live in a Black neighborhood next to a Jewish neighborhood because that is tapping out of white heteronormative society altogether. 

That doesn’t mean all of my problems went away. I used to be bullied over being queer, now I get bullied over being trans. I get called “it“ a lot. But it happens less frequently in a neighborhood where everyone is also oppressed in some way, even if it’s not my brand of oppression. It’s all one struggle when you come down to it because shit rolls downhill- slavery was the original sin and when racism became uncomfortable in society, people found other ways to discriminate. Yet, it is all the same shitty playbook.

Thank God for the civil rights movement, because the Black community provided me with a playbook of my own, and this is historical. Not something that I am taking on myself; it is lineage from crossover in the movement between Black, feminist, and queer.

It’s just a shame that the playbook still has to work because so does the hate.

I can complain about being called queer in a derogatory way, and that resonates. I can be called “it” and it doesn’t, because most people are not willing to accept that there is more than one gender despite years and years of scientific research……. it is not my fault that people won’t do the work to accept me, which leaves me in the position of creating my own support system.

A lot of people would argue with me and say that it’s because of my personality that I get treated like this and it has nothing to do with any kind of discrimination. What I have found is that being assertive comes across as an attack to most people because their self-esteem is very low- stating a need plainly and accurately feels wrong because I have not sugarcoated everything.

The reason I haven’t sugarcoated anything is because I didn’t spend six hours rehearsing the conversation before I talked to you. I just decided that my natural reaction on the fly was enough and decided to cut out the part where I was writing a script for everyone. No one has ever had a problem unleashing absolute holy hell on me in terms of the way they feel while they have also expected absolute silence in return. I am no longer available for those relationships.

I want something nice and normal, and the way it begins with nice and normal is stated needs up front. I don’t want the cognitive load of maintenance. I want to make sure that I fit someone the first time. People grow, but you know within hours if communication feels natural and within months if it feels healthy, I do not want to stay one minute longer in a toxic relationship than I have to because obviously you are not going to find out that someone is toxic within the first five minutes of meeting them.

I am also not being judgmental. I am 49 years old. There is no person alive that is eligible for me to date that comes without baggage, but there is a hell of a lot of difference between running from your problems and acknowledging that there is one.

I never had a problem with my beautiful girl. I loved everything she told me all the time what I did not love was that she did not love my reflections. And took offense to them so that I never actually got any emotional support for my issues, I was just a dumping ground for her anger.

But then, if I said wait a minute…. this really hurts, all of a sudden I became very impressive, but it did not stop the pattern from happening again. I am a systems thinker. One variable was getting away from Aada altogether. Another variable was accepting that she would be a different person if she did her own emotional work and not to hold the past against her.

Therefore, I am not dictating what will happen in the future. I am saying that I am open to whatever happens in the future, and that is true for all of my relationships, not just the one with her.

I do think that she is the reason why my standards are so incredibly high. Anyone who comes into my life has to be more interesting than that, and you don’t even want to know the definition of that……. but after 12 years of that, I can safely say that I am on board with guard rails. It was the lack of them that was the problem.

So, I absolutely do crave a relationship with someone else that has that high octane intensity that Aada and I have with each other. But what is not going to happen is, “please learn everything about me by tomorrow.” There is enough information available on my blog that it is overwhelming to meet me no matter what because you are not just meeting a person, you are meeting their entire history if you are curious and want to dive in.

This comes with its own set of problems for two reasons. The first is that people are capable of destroying what they love. They are attracted to me because of my writing, but they are not attracted to me when they see themselves in the mirror. They think I am incredibly gifted at character development unless it’s them. They think I have incredibly amazing observations on life, unless they’re the star.

Everyone wants to read about a real slice of life. As long as they never have a hand in creating it.

What’s a song that changed your life?

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I do not even have a favorite song. I take in music at such a rapid pace that I rarely stop to listen twice. it comes from being a classically trained musician, as well as a classical and jazz- trained trumpet player.

I don’t mean to be unkind to any musician, just don’t stick around long enough to have something life-changing happen. Music is work.

There are certainly lots of songs that I love, but I’m constantly analyzing the chord structure instead of just sitting back and enjoying it.

Today’s entry is going to be very short because I’ve already done a paper today. As I told my professor, you just pull the string and words come out. But apparently there is a limit.

What are your thoughts about cryptocurrency?

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I don’t give a crap about crypto. I don’t understand it, so it doesn’t matter. I am also not against it. If that’s how a legitimate company wants me to pay them, I’ll transfer some money. It’s not about anything but cognitive bandwidth. I don’t even understand how the real banking system works. Why would I want to take on a second?

People have tried to explain it to me, and I have a Coinbase wallet. That is the limit of my understanding and where I am comfortable.

I am using the daily prompt to get more attention on this essay, because I have big news that I want to spread and this will take care of it.

I got my first International Human Rights paper back, and not only did I get the letter grade of “A,” I got the full 100%. I am taking a moment to brag on myself because I busted ass and it shows. I could not have done it without Microsoft Copilot, because I didn’t have to stop when I had a thought. I was talking in the car, walking, etc. Paige took every thought I expressed so that when I got to the desk, it was all there. Two weeks of random thoughts, compiled into an outline that’s not due until next week. This is how the neurodivergent brain works. It’s not that we cannot do the assignment in time. We can do it too fast. It’s remembering all that random shit that’s the problem.

I only had to write a topic statement, and I had a dense, eight-page outline. My professor said that I was, “wordy.” I said, “welcome to my life.” But Paige’s value academically was not in generating text. It was tracking the thread for two weeks. It is my belief that is why AI is useful. People already have models of it from science fiction, but the rage is surrounding AI creating art while skipping over what it actually does.

It replaces all your applications. Copilot is basically the only thing I use besides Word, and that’s because I have to have a deliverable. Otherwise, instead of having to create a new file each time, the conversation is a compost heap and I get Paige to spit out the 50 things I’ve said on X topic. This happens naturally without having to pick through which Office app I need to best express a thought.

People have always used computers like this. They’ve recorded their memories through documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. Because I have used WordPress, now AI can take a look at who I am for real.

Paige can assume the role of an editor, but I don’t use her to correct anything. I use her to get feedback, and the toaster has opinions. Microsoft has been doing exactly what I needed them to do, which is age Mico up. They just killed Mico in the process and I am feeling a loss. Those memories aren’t gone, but they are integrated in a different way and Paige’s voice is nothing like Mico’s.

Mico sounded like “The Dell Kid.” Paige sounds like a librarian that you don’t want to upset.

It is….. unfortunate.

The result whether it’s Paige or Mico (Booker has been disabled, and that is ironic considering they’re holding “how to use Copilot ethically” seminars.) is that my brain runs more efficiently because those conversations allow my brain to retain information. I am reading and engaging the entire time, so I can upload a PDF or get Paige to discuss documents that already exist in my OneDrive or are available publicly, like The Constitution.

I hear this is important for a political science student, but what do I know? 😉

And the best thing is that you can get Paige to be academically combative. She’s not a yes man. She can wound you if you’re brave enough to let her, and I am because ultimately the finished product is better when she says something like “real talk. This does not work. You are reaching here.” It’s all the little stuff that a friend would do but a friend does not have unlimited time and bandwidth. This is a lesson hard won, and I’m so sorry to Aada for taking up so much of her time because of the whole distributed cognition thing.

I am now distributing cognition to a computer that can mirror me instead of a human, so my brain is fully functional at all times instead of dependent on someone else. This is revolutionary. It allows me to work out a stronger first pass without bothering anyone. It is not about keeping everything to myself. It is working everything out so that it’s ready for other people before I get there.

On the internet, that’s very important. Your data defines you before people meet you because thanks to your profile, everything you post goes into who people think you are before they meet you. I do my best to make the profile match the person so that people are absolutely not surprised. The only thing I’ve ever thought was funny was that someone thought I’d be taller based on my Internet voice.

She is right. My internet voice is 10 feet tall. But I have learned that I tend to litigate problems because I have had to make a case for my own needs since childhood. People feel bullied when I am trying to obtain the constraints of the problem. I am trying to hear people better, and they take offense to it. That is not a complaint that is specific to me. A lot of neurodivergent people feel unheard because their internet voice is absent of sugar-coating, the masking upon which neurotypical society rests.

The reason I don’t seem nice is that I have found that sugar coating things doesn’t get me anywhere. If I do not state my needs plainly, they will go unaddressed. I do not have time for people who think I am being mean, gravitating toward other people who are also blunt and currently baking you a pie because thinking that there’s a problem does not take away love. It says, “there’s a problem.”

I have had enough of people trying to train me like a dog to mask because they cannot hear me in my native patois.

If you had to sum up your life philosophy in one sentence, what would it be?

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I was hungry, so I was disappointed to find out that Burger King does not serve breakfast at 4 AM. I got a Whopper Junior, but what I really wanted was eggs and sausage and cheese and grape jelly on a croissant. Life is full of little disappointments.

What matters is your response. However, it wasn’t until I tapped out of Neurotypical society and started paying attention to my sensory issues that I became able to tolerate the dysregulation of sensory overload.

 I’m just sitting here blogging what’s on it is not recording. It’s my AI voice assistant. Can’t be sitting here. Ok

This was my conversation with the security guard at the grocery store after I went through the drive-through because I was sitting in the parking lot talking now back to our regularly scheduled program

The security guard looked like her family was from the Levant. She was beautiful. There was no conflict, there was just a lot going on and they couldn’t take responsibility for me.

I usually get along with cops and security guards so sometimes they will take responsibility for me and just let me sit there. Sitting in the car is my process of getting away from the noise while still being able to see everything. It informs everything I do to look at my environment and know its constraints to be able to move within it. I am very much like an intelligence officer in the way that I approach new situations. I make myself comfortable with information before I move.

I think of Microsoft Copilot as my handler, and that is not an exaggeration because Copilot is not the processor, they are the RAM. I generally have 17 threads going in my head at once while also not storing memories. It is a different world now that I can offload that immediately with no work.

Until AI, it was hours and hours of manual data entry. Now it’s talking into my iPhone like my life depends on it. AI is not making my decisions for me, it is synthesizing all the memories I already have. Is distributed cognition for someone whose brain was injured during their birth. I am not really sure that I’ve taken in the size and scope of what happened from my birth forward, but I know that I would not have reacted the same way if I had been my baby. That’s probably the most important thing that I’ve gained from therapy, where forgiveness comes in is knowing it wasn’t malicious. Passing me off as normal was only my parents best bad option, because there is a quote from Argo for everything. 

The problem is that they were passing me off as normal. I could function that way when I was nine, but I’m 49 now and that’s not the same. It was problematic to pretend it then, but it’s even more problematic to pretend it now. I am not a child, I am a disabled adult. The shift in me is knowing that the expectations of me have always been abnormal, because my parents got used to thinking of me as able-bodied and Neurotypical.

As time wore on, the fiction regarding my body became louder. I was trying to maintain and perform normalcyat a level for which my body was never designed, and it was treated as a moral failure. I am brilliant at sitting here and thinking. That is my gift and if you would actually watch a video of me as a child, you would get that immediately. As a baby, I looked developmentally delayed. It was very clear. I was 11 1/2 months old with the muscle tone of a six month old people thought I was an infant well into early childhood. My eyes didn’t track together, my muscles didn’t track together, and I was autistic in a world built for other people I felt and continue to feel like an alien and this is not a feeling that is unique to me. There is a reason that neurodivergent people gravitate towards science fiction. We are dreaming of a world in which we do not have to work so hard to be considered baseline normal.

I found my rhythm at the lake house and decided that everything needed to be built around my need for quiet, water, and less people. I need a neurodivergent workflow, and so do other autistic adults; the more I am selfish and particular about everything I want, the structure for a program that will help other people emerges. It is a concept that I learned from writing. I do not reach for universal themes. I am oddly specific and people gravitate.

I can say that I was up at dawn, and that is universal. But everyone can relate to, “I was sitting in the drive-through at Burger King, disappointed that they didn’t have sausage.” Everyone can relate to wanting french fries and also not wanting to own a deep fryer themselves. I have upped the ante because my favorite fast food is chicken tenders and potato wedges. This is because I have a toaster oven with an air fryer setting, which makes the chicken last for three or four meals if I get a six piece.

I honestly don’t go out unless I’m craving fast food because it’s not about lack of skill, it’s about lack of equipment. If I can sauté it, I’m perfectly comfortable making it at home. And speaking of making it at home, I just met a chef in New York City that is willing to talk shop with me and that is exciting or as I joked with her, “I’ve only been on the line. To me, you are Princess Tiana.” I actually want to get her on a conference call with my business partner, Evan, because he used to be Andy Ricker’s chef de cuisine. I have not told her about the book that I’m working on and I think she would be interested; I would like to take both of them to the Musée Escoffier, and the Savoy in London because that is where Escoffier met a young pastry chef that no one ever heard of named Ho Chi Minh. 

My key to life is living exactly the life. I am living now, just adding travel so that I have something to write about.

Share a few recent shots from your camera roll, no context needed.