Last night I went over to Colin’s house to meet him in person for the first time, as well as his dog. I got along with both swimmingly, but it’s a huge house and a lot more than I want to pay. I don’t want to use half the house. I want to rent a bedroom. He’s fairly certain he only wants to share the house with one person, so if he gets what he’s asking from someone else, I’m cool with it. I made a friend regardless.
However, we like each other so much that he’s taking some time to see if he can make it work, like being open to renting to two people, or axing his dog walker because I’ll be able to do it. Again, this has been a godsend of a connection, because even if I don’t end up moving in with Colin, he’s a solid dude. I told him that he still has my number regardless of the move for things like taking care of his dog while he’s out of town. Boarding dogs around here is expensive, and being good with a potential roommate’s dog has never lost me any brownie points.
Colin’s dog is half Jack Russell terrier and half Chihuahua. Therefore, he’s very tall (for a terrier/chihuahua) with blonde, curly hair all over. Colin says that the Jack Russell terrier must have been wire-haired (he’s had his DNA tested, so he’s sure about the mix). I feel like you can trust a man so dedicated to his dog that be brought genealogical research into it.
I just feel better about the state of moving at all, because Hayat gave me a stunning recommendation letter, and she’s actually the one that introduced me to Colin, indirectly. She’s on NextDoor and I’m not, so she sent me a listing. The reason it was so much more than I wanted to pay is that the listing didn’t have a price. When I told him it was out of my price range, he wanted to talk to me, anyway, because I was the first person that had even responded.
Then, of course, we started texting each other because that’s how our people communicate (neurodivergent). So, we have become a little bit closer via iMessage, because I feel it’s important for us to feel comfortable if we’re going to be sharing a house.
When he told me that he needed to think about all the financial implications, because he really only wanted one housemate, I told him to take the time he needed, because I don’t have to be out of my current place until May 1st, I’m just looking to move earlier than that because I don’t want to live here while people are coming in and out for showings. I also told him that I didn’t want to move again in another few months, so let’s make sure it’s the right fit.
He agreed, so we’re just chatting about normal friend stuff because like I said, I want to get to know him regardless. He does have a girlfriend, but they’re about as involved as Zac and me. As in, they don’t live together, they don’t spend all their time together, etc. We’re both stunningly introverted, which I think will also work well.
If Colin agrees to take me on as a lodger, it will be very nice only living with one, possibly two people. I don’t think that neurotypical people get the need for sensory deprivation. I think that people who need to be alone a lot make extroverts uncomfortable.
So, now I have two solid leads, and I feel better about myself than I have in ages because I didn’t know how this would go. Now that I have a letter of recommendation from Hayat and not someone they can’t verify I lived with, it’s a different ball game. My landlord said that I was a warm and caring person, and that my rent had never been late in nine years.
That goes a long way with people, so hopefully if it doesn’t work out with Colin, it will work out somewhere in DC. I’m surprised at the amount of looking I’ve sone in Silver Spring, because I thought I’d want to take off for DC/Alexandria immediately.
I’ve found much better deals on this side of the river, and in DC, even if you get a refinished house, it will still have weird steps all over the place because there’s no way it’s level after 300 years. I have nearly killed myself in several DC row houses. I know it would be so much easier for Lindsay if I lived in the middle of the city, but I haven’t found any place that truly looks comfortable. Most of the DC houses I’ve seen are very, very cramped.
Colin works for the local government in DC, and has a band. But it’s interesting. They only rent a recording studio and play together like, once a year. The rest of the time, they record their parts separately and just e-mail them, then the mixer puts everything together.
If it seems like I’m putting all my eggs in one basket, I don’t feel that I am because I am continuing to interview with other people, I’m just the most excited about this probability because I won’t be going that far and it’s someone I already like.
Plus, it would be nice to be settled by the time Bryn and her boyfriend, Dave, get here in May. However, I did warn them that it may be they arrive and start picking up my boxes. 😉 I know them well enough to know they’d just do it, though. The way I move, it will take less than half a day.
Today it’s all about culling, because tomorrow they’re coming to take pictures for Zillow, Redfin, etc. This is not my forté. I am going to suffer through. I had a Five Hour Energy, and I might have a cup of coffee as well (out of Adderrall and don’t have time to go to the doctor before the photographers get here). I have nine years of crap to go through, because I don’t want to move it all.
Yesterday, I gave my housemate Magda two GIANT bags of bath salts, because I bought them without knowing that Hayat was planning on ripping up the bathtub and putting in a shower. So, I have had industrial size bags of bath salts sitting on top of my dresser for the last year and a half.
Not all of my clothes fit, or they’re not my style anymore, etc.
It’s Mari Kondo time, and I may put her on for inspiration.
But if I’m going to bring up Mari Kondo’s name, I should also tell you I have “The Life Changing Magic of Leaving Your Shit All Over the Place” on my Kindle.
Today or tomorrow I am meeting another potential roommate that lives in my neighborhood. My landlord referred me to him via NextDoor, so hopefully I’ll be able to secure something fairly quickly. As we told each other, it’s at least worth a meeting to see if we get along, and he has a dog.
The funniest thing he said was that he was saying he lived alone, and I said, “I’m autistic and ADHD. It would probably work out better for me because of less sensory input.” He said, and it was so cute…… “I am somewhat neurodivergent.” I told him I laughed out loud at that one. We’re both introverts. He works for a government agency and his house is cute as a button, plus updated on the inside. I looked at some pictures online, but it was from the sale of the house. I have no idea what it looks like furnished yet, but I’m eager to see.
He’s a little older than me, the same age as Supergrover. It’s how I know he’s young enough to vibe with me and not too old to think of me as a constant annoyance because our age difference is too great. My worst nightmare was getting stuck in a group house with five 20 year old interns on Capitol Hill. It wouldn’t have been bad. I would have connected with a lot of Washington elite that way, but it wouldn’t have been the right vibe. If it works out that I move in with (let’s call him) Colin, I feel that I could go the distance with him, because I moved my entire childhood. The only place I have lived longer than DC is Portland, and even that was broken up into two chunks. The first was going to see my family, and at that time, I really meant it.
The second time, I had to go see about a girl. I had it bad, but I didn’t realize it until we drove from Portland to Houston together. That woman helped me move into my apartment in fucking August (I repeat….. in HOUSTON, TEXAS) and I let her get on the plane back to Oregon. What in the actual fuck was wrong with me?
If I have any regrets in life, it’s not taking Dana seriously at six weeks when she told me she had a crush on me. It took me three or three and a half years to accept that I had a crush on her, too. That’s because I don’t know what possessed her to tell me she had a crush on me, except yes, I do.
Carol, Dana’s then-wife, was not threatened by Dana having a crush……… and oh my fucking God.
Oh my God.
I did to Dana what Dana did to Carol. It just so happened that my new relationship energy was never going to go anywhere, therefore my pie in the sky ideas for a romance with a straight woman were grounded until my mental health went off the rails. That’s what I mean about the hurt being unintentional. I take responsibility for my behavior, because it happened no matter what my mental health might have been at the time. It is more about forgiving myself for not having the right tools to deal with my feelings, my medication, or my mental state while my medication was, in a few words, completely fucked up.
Again, I learned I was poly because I never lost any love for Dana, I only gained it for SG! Dana and I went down the tubes of our own accord, but not exactly. There was no preconceived plan on Supergrover’s part to institute a divide and conquer move. As she says, our relationship happened organically despite a whole bunch of things (which meant more to me than platinum, beautiful girl).
I can’t tell you how Supergrover is feeling except hurt and tired, because that is what I know for sure, and it’s probably going to make me cry.
Whenever I feel anxious that she’s distancing herself from me, she surprises me with all the love that comes through in black & white. Every. Single. Time. As I have said, she doesn’t say “I love you” in words. She does it by showing up. Consistently. No matter how mad we are at each other. No matter how bad the fight is, there has been nothing in 10 years that has ever torn us apart. Somehow, we keep the yellow string going even when we’re out of pocket. When I get the most anxious is generally about the time that she swoops in and reminds me what’s up. The Mama Wolverine claws are coming out, she will go Alduin on their asses, etc. We have that part down.
Keeping out of each other’s lives has been a mixed bag, because having context and not creates two different sets of problems. There’s the problems we have with telling our story together, and the problems we have with telling our stories apart. Lancing the boil was getting back on the same page. Again, I don’t know what will happen, but she said that she didn’t want to get into a cat and mouse game. It’s not if she shows up. Not being honest about your true intentions is a cat and mouse game. I love her enough to struggle all the way until we’re ridiculously happy again, whether there’s a context to our relationship or not. I’m ready for a different kind of honeymoon phase because I’m tired of putting each other through the wringer for no good reason.
I have loved her so much for a decade, and I feel like she has returned those feelings to the best of her ability. That she couldn’t be a better friend than she is right now in terms of being the kind of person that sends birthday and Christmas presents because we have such a long history together, and it’s so intense.
I don’t want to put anyone above her ever again, which is why I say that I’m as settled as I want to be. I am never going to get in another fight over emotional affairs because never once when I got married did I think I was going to go blind. I thought Dana and I had enough strength in our relationship to get through it, but I underestimated the pull I felt toward SG! The wave went over my head, and I’ve never been the same. But it’s all for good- I love my life, and I wish I could convince my beautiful girl of that instead of always thinking I’m saying “this is all your fault.”
I’m not sure why she thinkgs this is all her fault, because she laid out all the times she’s been a dick and the times I have as well. That means “Things Fell Apart” at both our hands. It is both our faults and neither.
Despite not having enough context, I think this is the relationship that reflects me the most deeply because since I’m reading her, I pick up her words and phrases all the time.
Painting my feelings as fact
Pricks on my skin I just couldn’t close anymore
It’s not “very” anymore, it’s “to an enormous degree.”
“I love his takedowns of the orange gelatinous shitbag.”
Me: How’s your day going? Her: picture of dumpster fire…. this has been especially useful lately
“Pick up my toys and go home,” which she got from me and now says all the time- at least to me. I don’t know how much I affect her speech at work/home/etc. If so, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. 😉
When she edits me, she’s very rough. I like it. I’ll get notes like “WHO TF IS PANCHO?”
Her husband had a thing and I asked her if she needed help (med assistant- she travels). She said no, but how kind of me to ask. I said, “it seemed nicer than asking how you broke him.” Later that day, I got an e-mail that said, “I keep laughing at this.” I smiled at that for three weeks straight. I got her. ❤ Maybe grasshopper is not as far away from satori as I think. So, because it tickled me to get a note later in the day that I was still laughing at something she said, I send them to others.
It was a door I never should have opened, but I used to love flirting with her because she was so fucking quick. I got in over my head fast, and I couldn’t take it back. Again, I knew I was fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked. I won’t tell you what she said, but I told her that all she needed to do was realize that my feelings were valid and real, and to be sensitive to them. That there was no reason to act, just to know they’re there. It was not to encourage, but for her to have empathy because I knew it couldn’t go anywhere and I was flipping out anyway. I can’t believe how much it meant to me when I said, “surely you spent longer than you wanted getting over someone who turned your head when it was a bad idea?” She said, “yes, surely I have.” She really saw me, and I will remember it forever. She has also never once invalidated my feelings, and been moved at the things I’ve written about her. She makes me happy without even trying, makes me proud just by breathing. The fact that she’s not my romantic partner means both jack and shit. She’s just always the one at the back of my mind, the one I quote all the time while she doesn’t know it…….. and I am sure that is a two way street even if she doesn’t say it out loud, because over ten years of writing, we have a million word associations between us……. most notably, “influencer.”
It was her brain that made me absolutely crazy about her (this is the part where you don’t get her reply that was so perfect it made my desk chair sag, I was laughing so hard). I joked, “besides, can I really make a decision on whether I’m in love with you or not if I haven’t seen your rack? What kind of idiot do you take me for, woman?” That was the moment *she* came in Kings full over Aces and I thought, “Christ. This needs to last my whole life, no matter what it looks like. I will never find her anywhere else in a million zillion years.” In fact, I actually told her this. That I wanted to fix us because I couldn’t go to the Supergrover store and pick out a new one. She’s the Vera Wang you can’t afford.
I realize by writing all of this down, it just seems like I’m begging her to come back. It’s just not true. That’s because if she does come back, it will be a great day in my life….. because she knows that I don’t want the surface level of her. I want the brain that made me crazy about her in the first place. I feel that if she lets me into that space, the way I let her into mine, what used to be a “cat and mouse game” will once again be stable, because in a lot of ways, we’ll be discovering each other again for the first time. Just because we’ve had a weird and hard road in the past 10 years doesn’t mean it always has to be as difficult as it has been. I’m just tired of covering up feelings with gifts, because I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel when I get them. What emotions are behind them when her e-mails say so little? No, these entries are not begging. They are the precious things I will want to read 10 and 20 and 30 years from now…… because she’s the best thing that ever happened to me and thinks she isn’t. I can’t fix that for her, but it’s not for lack of trying.
I will always love her with this much depth, because she gave me too much over the last 10 years to hold any bitterness or anger anymore. She has said that some of the things I’ve said are incredibly hurtful, and I’d like to talk about them. But again, I do not know whether she needs to separate from me, or whether she’ll be back after some time, space, peace, and grace. She has it coming from me in spades, because “surely grace and mercy will carry me all the days of my life” (Don’t call me Shirley!). As I have said before, it is not my job to talk now. I have talked enough. She knows how I feel, and she does not need to hear me again.
No, all of these memories are for me…. the ones that Oliver, who is a dog, has already heard.
I gave my Facebook subscribers the inside story, before the video came out. Now, the video is up and I was right…. so you get to hear the real story, too. I am not sure why the Q&A was cut off, but I have two very good guesses….. Jonna & Leslie.
So, I feel like I started it by saying that in another video, I’d heard she was “a real hardass” at CIA. It’s like I broke the surface tension on top of a glass of cool water…… because later on, she talked about a young female colleague who got tired of her boss’s bullshit and said, “Bill, fuck off.”
I laughed a lot harder than I needed to at that joke.
Anyway, we reverted into line cook and spy, which both speak profanity and irreverence as a first language. The black humor on “Homeland” is very real. Lives are on the line, and you sure as shit want to know who’s on your six. If you’re going to step in front of a bus for them, you have to know they’d do the same for you. People think of the military as being rough and tumble, but I’ve been around enough spies by now to know that they mostly run on coffee and hatred. Hearing Zac’s friends’ old war stories was great, because you learn quickly that it’s like being a goalie. You have those Bond moments, but you’re still a government wonk that does paperwork, mostly getting your raw data to the analysts.
Though CIA does not normally carry guns when they’re on intelligence missions, they do when they’re embedded in the armed services. I mean, they’d probably normally carry guns if they were DIA, but people like Jonna usually didn’t, though she’s trained on just about everything. So- note to self. That’s why spies can pick up most guns and know how to use them instantly. They don’t have to carry, they can pick up someone else’s if they’re in trouble.
So, the movies aren’t all bad. Except for this one….. where I got Jonna Mendez censored at her own museum……..
Even though this event was all about Jonna, I can’t think of anything to say except “Argo fuck yourself.” Because what do you say when you notice the other museum employees about to swallow their teeth because they’re so shocked that someone like Jonna would throw an f-bomb. What does she have to prove anymore?
For $5.00, I can get lost for years. This is because $5.00 is about how much it takes to by “Droid Edit,” a full-featured coding notepad for Android. The free version of “Koder” on iOS seems to fit the bill nicely, but I would get the pro version if it was more like Notepad++ and Microsoft Visual Studio Code (my personal favorite because now it runs bare metal on all operating systems, even Fedora and Ubuntu. It should also be able to run on Android with those specs. Get your shit together, Microsoft. Do you think I like coding without the Dracula Official Theme? Monokai is not going to cut it, my friend.).
I use the term coding loosely, because really the only things I do in my HTML files are add italics and special characters, maybe a link. For some reason, if I do more than that, WordPress will scrub out the HTML and tell me it can’t recover the block. I need a real solution that’s completely open source, but I like WordPress. I made the decision 20 years ago to stop coding and only be known as a writer…. why my setup is simple and hopefully easy to read.
I end up using the WordPress reader included in the Jetpack app because it’s in dark mode. I rarely read my own work on my blog itself. I like dark mode. My fans don’t. They’re older and they have more insurance.
And in fact, the most sweet and vulnerable moments between Supergrover and me are when I need my Jessica Tandy, and Supergrover is absolutely as beautiful as she always was. It is not lost on me that I’m a preacher’s kid and she’s a Bee Charmer. In effect, we are “Fried Green Tomatoes,” because that movie showed deep companionate love without showing romance because of the time. Because they held down the madness with the romance, it actually fits Supergrover and me better than if they had. Of course Idgie and Ruth were best friends who ran a business together and not this torrid love affair that lasted a million years, which it absolutely was in “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café.” Just devoted and never stopped loving each other until they died.
But female friendship is absolutely that strong and resilient, so both the book and the movie are priceless to me. In short, I felt like Idgie when she was young, with Supergrover being every bit the power,grace, and style of a young, married Southern woman. I was absolutely just a lovesick puppy dog for a couple of years, and then I realized my place in the world. “Love her anyway. Help her anyway. She may not accept you in person, but she’ll always come back here.” I am not writing for her. I am not writing to her. These are all the memories I want to be able to read when I am 70 and nothing more. I want her with me, helping to craft the narrative, but it is not necessary. It is the process of letting go and letting God, my words for going into deep discernment. My personality divides and I argue it out with my rabbi, essentially. However, I know that it is me talking back. I do not think of a relationship with God as external, but the omnipotent third eye present in so many Eastern religions.
It’s why I don’t care about semantics, I just want the protein.
I feel like in a way, all of this has been me trying to explain to her why we need to open the Whistle Stop and move on, rather than her always feeling guilty. Just start working together and having fun rather than both of us being up shit creek all the time.
Without a paddle, obvs.
So many messages that didn’t get through. Me thinking about the future and throwing ideas out there to remind myself that this was grounded and real came across as being unwilling to accept the demands on her time. This is categorically untrue. I have dealt with the boundaries on her time since day one, and our relationship has lasted over 10 years now. If I really had problems with her priorities, I wouldn’t have stuck around this long. I also don’t think that I’m all that and a bag of chips, but 10 years is a long time to feel like this relationship is fake with her insisting that it’s not.
Now, I really believe it wasn’t. It was as real as a heart attack. But that’s because I’m not going to get that message through placation. I’m going to get that message through truth. The longer you put off telling the truth, the angrier I get. I don’t want to handle someone else’s avoidance, I want them to realize they’re being avoidant because I’m not an entitled prick who wants to tell you how to run your life until you’ve stomped on my feelings so hard that we’re going to have to have it out. Go drive someone else up the wall because I am struggling.
It’s one thing to be on the bottom of the totem pole for a year- two or three. But after 10 wouldn’t you be furious that you never got airtime? Especially when we have this strong pull towards each other that also has its limits? It’s a dramatic tension that could be solved in an afternoon. I don’t understand keeping that weirdness in place all these years. I think I could solve a lot of her problems with me in one beer….. most notably that our relationship might not translate.
We are not guaranteed to bond just because we like the same Instagram influencer. But thinking we are both sides of Fried Green tomatoes, the Idgie and Ruth and the Idgie and Evelyn is the journey we’ve taken. I don’t know what compelled her to come, but I think it was my thu’um. When a dragon hears its name, it is not bound to respond, but always will out of curiosity and competition. I should give her a word of power, but Snow Wing Hunter is better than anything I could come up with on my own, and she has definitely carried me to Skuldafn many times to meet my Alduins.
I get lost in the flight.
I only get lost in the fight when the adrenaline comes down. It’s not her responsibility to keep it up. I would like it if she’d take on the responsibility of telling me up front the timeframe with which I’m dealing so it calms my anxiety that she’s not always mad at me. It’s hard to feel secure on three words.
What I loved about her letter the other day was twofold. I fell in love with her prose about her family, the everyday life she leads while also being powerful, the dynamic that Lindsay and I have so I could relate on a spiritual level. What it takes to be superhuman at staying awake, because she’s on call a lot of the time (as is Lindsay- news breaks). What it takes to be a big sister in her family. Or, what she wants it to take and I can feel her emotions regarding it from a million miles away. I know the particular pain of losing a mother and finding yourself as the new matriarch suddenly….. especially not being prepared in any way to do so because I feel like it’s my responsibility to be providing for her. She’s the little sister that could. She’s just so sweet about giving me experiences I never would have had otherwise while totally cheering me on as a writer.
That’s been Supergrover’s role in my life as well. I think one of the pricks on my skin that won’t heal is saying that I portray her as a villain as often as I do a friend and rages about it……. while also raging that I paint her as a “Flat Stanley.” I feel that the ups and downs make her a 3D character. Everything she sends me that shows me a real feeling, I include it, because since it’s her real feeling, it’s my real feeling, too. I have said this line before, but I will remember it forever. I didn’t know who “Flat Stanley” was, but I told her that “Flat Stanley has a history of amazing topography.” She is a 3D character, but she isn’t if you take every entry individually instead of reading me like a book. Start in January of last year and read forwards and a 3D character will emerge no matter who it is in my life.
Most people trade the forest for the trees. As I have told her, I feel like my years are so much more important than my days. No one has ever loved her the way I have, and not in terms of depth. In the way that love is executed every day. I became a journalist from the day we met, tasked with telling my own story while not revealing my source. Any misstep on my part feels like a little betrayal, and Supergrover doesn’t talk to me about my writing, so I have no idea how close to the line I am or how I can protect her more in the future. She said that I mentioned something she wanted to keep quiet, but I have no idea what it was that she wanted to keep private, for instance, so I couldn’t go back and fix it.
I want to know what touches her, because everything I write about her is something I’ve gotten lost in, because it was kind of like meeting The Oracle and finding out I’m Neo. My mind went into hyperdrive, and I began to think differently, and on as big a scale as possible because all of the sudden I knew I was capable of it. I’ve realized that I would be happy in a think tank if that were a thing that could happen, mostly because I’m a “plant,” the employee who comes up with great ideas by synthesizing information in the room and building off what other people have said until there’s a consensus.
But I never would have believed that I belonged at that particular table until Supergrover told me I was too smart for my own good.
I get that a lot, but I didn’t believe it until 2013 (a typo when I said that the Argo message came in 2003, I remember). She’s not the president, nor elected to anything, nor can I tell you whether she’s private or public industry (except that she and Zac both speak “acronym.”). What I can tell you is that her compliment had a lot of power behind it. Her CV makes me constantly wonder who she’s met all over the world, especially movie stars.
I miss her pithy comments on my entries, because when she was an e-mail subscriber, instead of commenting here, she’d just forward me the e-mail and flip me shit. She can say so much in so few words, even better when they’re teasing directed at me or our favorite Instagram influencer. Speaking of which, we need to talk about that, too, beautiful girl. It’s probably nothing, but it’s a “how dead am I?” sort of question. Another thing that whether this makes her land on my desk to my thu’um is up for grabs. What is important is that I will remember exactly what this means for a hundred years because all of these feelings are burned into my brain.
The rhythm has calmed, but we still have to dance. I’m not trying to be her partner, I’m trying to be her co-author unless her husband also writes. Maybe she’d rather collaborate with him if that’s the case, and I don’t have any ill will toward that. And it’s not that I have this desperate need to write about her because she’s a powerful person. It’s not. It’s that she became a big part of my story personally, and not of her big shot mess ever mattered.
I love the absolute smallest part of her, because that’s the part I love about everyone. I like vulnerability because I can make accurate decisions on how to behave next. The only reason I spiraled out with her is that I was medically falling apart and I want to throw up every time I think of that time in my life because it cost us so much trust and time. To think that she thinks all of this is her fault is horrible because I’ve been trying to make amends for so many years and it has come across as accusation.
She did indeed throw a bomb over her shoulder and walk away. The truth hurts. But it wasn’t the bomb that hurt. It was walking away and not dealing with the fallout. It showed the ultimate disrespect to me because it was like “I get to tell you whatever I want and then not care how it makes you feel.” She says she’s not responsible for my reactions. No, she’s not, but if she wants to stay my friend she better well be willing to clean up her own mess, because I didn’t ask for it. I’m not guilting you (universal), I am holding you to the standard of being a good friend. How is it anyone’s right to leave the other person so much worse than they found them by listening so closely at first that we were breathing in the right direction……… then holding a wrong over my head for so long that we never moved back into safe space for her? She lost the ability to be a decent friend, her words, not mine.
Then she opened up and told me that my guesses about her behavior were right on target and also that it was too late while also saying “story for another day” while also writing me something so beautiful I’m still chewing on it days later. I don’t know what to think, but I know what I see, and it is a spectrum. We’re better writers as a team than we are alone.
It just depends on whether writing means as much to her as it does to me. It doesn’t have to be blog entries because I’m an audience of one, and the same goes for me- the safe space where I sandbox.
She’s not the love of my life where I get lost in her beauty, wishing like a lovesick puppy for just one hug or what the fuck ever. She’s the love of my life due to writing being the only real partner I have. And she’s the brain that comes with that package, because I feel like she whipped my ass into shape by editing me and giving me feedback on letters as well. I miss that relationship, because it exists outside of time and space. I’d be happy if it always did, but my mind sees so many futures that it’s hard to decide and I’m grateful to also have enough closure to let go. Just because she let her walls down once doesn’t mean she has the strength to do it all the time, and that’s what I need from her if she doesn’t want to meet me in person. I will never be able to pick up subtext if I don’t because I won’t be able to read it in her voice.
I take everything literally, and I’m a “get off my lawn” personality. I rarely apologize for it, but it’s an important flaw in my character in this relationship. But I’m not “get off my lawn” years old on purpose. I’m autistic and lecture as such. I become an overexplainer to avoid awkward silence, of which there has been a lot.
It’s not awkward silence anymore, because she told me she loved me in two different ways. The first was “if I hear your call, I will always come…. because I love my girl.” It was the ending of my letter to Michael writ large. I was right on the money, dear reader. I cannot believe it. Seriously. She swooped in with all the big sister badass no bullshit love I’ve come to know. She doesn’t have to say a word. She said that she was constantly overwhelmed because I was demanding, when I was dreaming. The second was letting me know she things about me all the time, the thing that would have calmed me the most.
I don’t want to be around anyone who doesn’t want to be around me, and I got my answer. Maybe. As it has been for 10 years…… and where I get lost.
Which animal would you compare yourself to and why?
I have decided that I am a moose. This is because I have spent a lot of time thinking I was a squirrel. Yes, “Rocky and Bullwinkle” has fed my love of intelligence for many, many years….. as has “Inspector Gadget,” “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (I even have a retro t-shirt), and strangely, Jeopardy!. A lot of the time, the answers will contain intelligence operations that I’m interested to look up, because those questions come in lots of areas. Geopolitical, CIA’s affect on the United States’ reputation, etc.
You could have heard a pin drop in my mind when Jonna Mendez said MK Ultra came out of her office, and she walked past those drugs every day for 30 years because the refrigerator was from the 1970s, meaning it will outlive all of us. I’m sure that eventually, the science officer was made to destroy them, or the rest of the department was able to wrestle it away from him at some point. But, it was the first time in a long time that all the blood drained out of my face.
The truth is stranger than fiction, especially when it comes across in news spin and not data.
For instance, is it fortunate timing that we are now sending Palestine more aid, or did Biden specifically keep that little chestnut for the State of the Union address? I was telling a friend the other day that I think this whole thing revolves around having not to hate what Israel has done. That we really can’t stand what they’re doing, and also can’t afford to cut off intelligence from Mossad. It’s trickier than you think. Intel from Mossad is valid. Info from Palestine may or may not be valid because they don’t have government checks and balances. They don’t have a government because they’re not a state. It doesn’t have anything to do with “we don’t like the Palestinians.” It’s that they don’t have people in the room.
The answer is getting the Palestinians in the room. Most Israelis want this, too, because the neighborhoods are so integrated. Palestine comes across as a terrorist group because “they don’t have a flag.” It’s not that it’s not there. It’s that it can’t be recognized anywhere in the world as a sovereign nation because the Israelis absolute do not want that….. coming from the top. This is not a bottom up resolution, but top down. I swear to you, Netanyahu wouldn’t think twice about killing his grandmother if she was Palestinian. He also doesn’t care how many Israelis die because they’re just collateral damage.
And people think this is about Judaism and claim anti-Semitism when I don’t give a fuck what religion you practice, and neither does he. If he’s bombing integrated neighborhoods, he doesn’t care what religion you practice, either. Notice there aren’t many surgical strikes. It’s kill everyone.
They aren’t fighting over religion like they did in ancient times, they’re fighting to keep Palestine from getting an equal shake in things like NATO, or anyone else who could help them.
If you sided with the rebellion in Star Wars and you aren’t standing up for Palestine, you are not admitting what’s really going on here. Netanyahu and Putin are both trying to keep countries from recognition by taking them over.
Except Putin doesn’t care how many people he kills, either. So, whether you’re a Ukrainian fighting for your country or on the Russian side of things, you have an equal chance of dying, because Russia will just send in more cannon fodder.
It’s not about people’s lives, it’s about winning.
And now we want that kind of totalitarianism to come to the US by electing Donald Trump again, or at least, a huge minority that’s threatening to provide undertow to the fall off Rome. A good bit of the military is conservative as shit. What happens after the next election? We all of the sudden have two armies. January 6th will look like child’s play, because apparently the right to be a bigot is a huge ass deal here. Just like it is in Ukraine, and just like it is in Israel.
The only thing is that the Russian and Ukrainian people probably got along before Putin shook them up like ants. Finland is worried now, and it’s opening a very old wound. Sweden just joined NATO, so there’s something. We at least have one country over there in the general vicinity of Finland until they join themselves.
It’s all a mess. It’s all protecting the world from fascism. I don’t think we want it here, but if the Republicans win, it will be ushered in…. ballet service for pablum. Keep us occupied and we won’t revolt.
Reminds me of the old Apple commercial for the Macintosh (clever). Something about buying the computer is not making “1984” into 1984. And then they invented the iPhone, so clearly they didn’t mean it.
How much Facebook absolute shit do you have to wade through to see the few things you actually wanted to see? Who doesn’t respond immediately to their notifications unless they can disconnect long enough to put on “Do Not Disturb?”
“You can’t do that. We live here!”
Et cetera.
Suzy Izzard has the answer to everything.
I’m sure that relationships with countries evolve like relationships between adults. After all, it’s actually individual personalities and patterns move the same way as specifics. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but as a preacher’s kid I constantly noticed little things writ large.
Again, I grew up as a preacher’s kid and I’ve had lots of pastors as an adult. I have been to many, many committee meetings as an adult, just armed with a lot of back channels to be able to understand the bullshit games running in the room. I didn’t even have to call my dad, and most of the time, didn’t. I called friends who were either theological giants in their own right, or students who’d been taken under care by our church (what it means to be in discernment/seminary because you need a home church to be able to support you in some ways….. why it’s called “being taken under care.”
The Methodists do it differently than the Congregationals. In a Congregational church, like a Presbyterian or an Episcopal church, you are called by the individual church. With the Methodists, you basically function independently from step one, which is how my dad ended up pastoring two churches (called a “Circuit Rider,” a term created where ministers traveled by horse). Here’s the rest of the story. He was 19. I am sure some days went better than others, and he’s got more class than I do, so I’m not sure that he said “fuck” every day, but it wouldn’t have been a bad idea.
My dad could deal with enormous tragedies as he got older because he saw them all as a pastor.
My personal moment of pastoring was when we had a couple give birth to a baby who was only at 24, 25 weeks at most. She survived, and I became her babysitter. We bonded because I was eight weeks early. I was 14 or 15, and I wanted the parents to always ask me to come back because I’d imprinted on her. They called me often. I still remember her name was “Peyton.” Being up in front of people and preaching is 10% of the job at most. The rest of the time, it’s dealing with parents who have lost children, children who have lost parents, spouses who have lost spouses, and all the intimate conversations you have with a pastor leading up to it. If someone was going through a thing and at our house or church a lot, I got used to seeing them and took on all their pain by osmosis, because I don’t go looking for other people’s feelings. They come to me quite naturally, as if by a magnetic pull. I can open up to people, which gives them license to open up to me.
So, I feel like I don’t have the ability to stop caring about anyone, because those feelings flow through me all the time. I remember people’s stories from 40 years ago. That’s the two things that stopped me from starting a church. The first is that I burned out on pastoral care already. The second thing is that my mother died and two things happened. The first is that I needed her as my music director and she died. I didn’t want to work with anyone else at first. We were building a church. We weren’t to the stage where we can invite major musicians to play, and I assure you, my mother has sounded amazing with the best of the best. Google “Sylvia Danburg,” my concertmaster at HSPVA. They did a duet at my church when she was 14 that still lives in my memory…. not the melody, but the way it made me feel.
Being that empathetic and that neurodivergent cost me, because I’ve always been too intense for everyone. It’s why I spend so much time alone. I don’t have to hear it. If people think I’m too much, I am not threatened. I got shit to do.
I think bigger than most people because my personality type is very rare….. and all the comorbidities with my mental health make me astoundingly curious.
It’s a lot.
For instance, now I’m thinking about looking up the history of the moose. Because I am no longer a squirrel. I admit that I still have a “deer in headlights” look on my face a lot of the time, but at least I’m not tiny. I’m taller than I thought. More muscle mass. I can protect my brain from a lot of things, even rejection, because everything comes from me. I needed to develop a thicker skin, which I have now. I didn’t so much in the early days of my relationship with Supergrover. I believe she thought that she was more hurt than I was. We both overestimated our own pain and underestimated the other’s.
So, I hope that if Supergrover knows nothing else, she knows that this is not a cat and mouse game. We have both stopped playing, and it remains to be seen whether she agrees with me that getting real was a good thing.
I found it interesting that she said I knew nothing about her life, when everything I said about her attachment style turned out to be a double bullseye. I cannot speak to how she treats her family or her friends, but our particular dynamic was toxic at times, merely inauthenic at others. We’d reached the “merely inauthentic” phase long ago, and I could feel it on my skin.
I saw the writing on that particular wall, and wrote this weird letter in which I know I invalidated her feelings and I’ve apologized for it, because that’s not what I meant to do. What I meant to do was call her out on her bullshit so we could move on. Yet again, taken as an attack and swept under the rug so that my feelings were always invalidated and she thought that me telling her once or twice was a problem? How am I supposed to react when I open up to you and you say nothing, yet you have a shit ton of feelings about me and you’re telling someone else. I have never been wrong about that, either, until I sent her an e-mail on a related topic and she finally yelled at me……. and owned her shit like a boss.
I don’t want a relationship with someone who will string me along for years at a time. I want a relationship with someone who’s fiery and not afraid to stand up to me. I had that, and over time, I didn’t.
She said something about painting things as fact that I didn’t have the right to do. Yet, I have no idea what she’s talking about. It’s confusing, and not something we should avoid. The clearest way out is through. I just couldn’t convince her of that because she thought I was playing a cat and mouse game, or she was. Unclear.
What was clear is that we have such an incredible friendship when we’re not putting up walls that it was worth fighting for, even if I lost. That’s because the message I sent her was that I needed her anger at me. That her anger is so pure because she hasn’t been telling me what she really needs from me for a long time. Now, what she needs from me is grace and peace to think. Or, at least, I hope that’s what she wants from me. However, I did ask her if there was anything she wanted from me, including talking about our real issues now that we’re on the same page. It didn’t seem like playing games anymore.
And now I’ve explained the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Palestine has an anxious attachment to the world because they’ve never been given the safety and security of a two-state solution. Israel is avoidant because Netanyahu is not going to give up anything he’s not willing to give. It’s an impasse, and one that probably won’t get solved in my lifetime just like it didn’t get done in my mother’s. The conflict is too large, and the Americans shouldn’t do anything but send humanitarian aid to both people. Food. Medicine. Blankets. Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Those are the teams we should be sending, not military aid to a leader that will certainly unleash hell on everyone if it means he’s going home with a trophy.
This has nothing to do with Judaism. I’ve been to temple on Friday nights before, and it’s always been one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had. When my grandmother died, I actually read The Kaddish through transliteration, because even though I’ve studied Hebrew, it’s in the context of dictionaries, not conversation. I’ve sung Hebrew before. Judaism is one of the cornerstones of my faite because just like “Little Mosque on the Prairie” (my favorite Canadian TV show), we had a church and a synagogue sharing space. The best part is the Episcopalian minister and the young Imam, because they do a kind of Denny Crane, Alan Shore thing by talking about their lives in pastoral care and they both have ALL the same problems. I could have walked onto the show and made people laugh just as much as they did, I assure you.
Here’s my favorite story in life. I will not tell you the name of the minister, because he has gone on to local television (and is a genuinely good guy). I don’t know if this story would make him laugh or make him mortified. My dad will know who I mean instantly, and that’s all that matters.
So, ministers, imams, and rabbis all have ways of marking someone as a child of God. For Christians, it’s baptism. In the Methodist church, this is not as extreme as a dunking in the river.
We just use a bowl of water and sprinkle it on the baby’s head…. what probably prompted me to wet all over the bishop, in retrospect. Sometimes it’s not easy to hear or feel rain when you’re about to burst. This is universal…… or at least, that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
So, the senior minister asked the associate if he would go and get the Holy water in the baptismal font. He was not specific. What he meant was, “get the bowl and bring it to me.” It was in a 3,000 lb granite sacristy, and he tried to drag it across the floor. In the middle of the service. Which may or may not have been recorded.
I’ve told this story before, I think, but one time my dad did the wedding for a retired New England Patriot and his fianceé. The boys got a little too drunk the night before the wedding, and all of the sudden my dad feels who is basically Refrigerator Perry to him start leaning forward. I’m going to leave you with that image because the imagination is even better. He was woozy a long time….. but frankly, I only remember that someone ended up throwing up at at the wedding, but I’m not sure it was the groom.
Life as a minister is, as you can see, so glamorous.
The funniest stories are about the things that went wrong, not right. For instance, this little old lady we all adored because she gave absolutely no fucks stood up in the middle of worship and said, “David, have you lost your mic?” That is because it sincerely made my dad wonder how to respond and the room went still. Finally he figured it out and said, “I thought you asked if I had lost my mind.” That joke never would have been as good had it not been the “no fucks given” woman. Plus, it wouldn’t have bothered any of the four of us to be accused of losing our minds every day….. with no idea how they ever participated in the crazy because it would have been inappropriate to tell them. You’re as buttoned down as any therapist. You cannot say what you know. You cannot say at 11 years old that you know why they’re mad, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It’s your whatever relationship that’s getting you in trouble because my bedroom was next to my dad’s office. Yet I’m as much of a lockbox as he is, or I was until I became a blogger. Other people’s secrets were weighing me down, because I stopped putting my own opinions out there. Pleasing other people was not a choice for me, because Show Mode™ is relentless when your parent is a public figure.
You don’t have the choice whether to emote or not, because you cannot trust anyone. Is this a safe adult to talk to, or is this a way for them to get information on my dad to create a “gotcha” question in a board meeting?
My dad and John Grisham told me the most about life early on. The first, from my dad, is that people who don’t have power anywhere else will unload their frustration with this in church meetings. Their ego comes out quick, and they perhaps get more aggressive than normal. From John Grisham, “the hardest part about being a lawyer is having to convince 12 K-mart clerks you’re right.” Being a mediator becomes an impossible task at some church meetings because tempers are all flying high and you have to be the one that sits back and takes it because you’re the pastor. It’s your job to mediate them through the middle of the mess. You don’t get to have feelings, because you’re impartial- even though those decisions affect your parent the most.
It’s honestly why I believe that a church cannot be run by committee all the time, and I’m glad that even the congregational churches have denominational support. There are reinforcements to bring in so that there are more neutral parties; the pastor can have feelings, too. They don’t have to be the strong one anymore because there’s someone above them to take on the objective role and mediate.
When pastors tell you how they feel about something and try to sway a vote one way or the other, that’s picking favorites and trying to get them to vote the way you want. It’s rule 101 of being a pastor as something that will not work out well for you. The people on the outside are going to notice they’re on the outside.
You become your own nuclear bomb in which the congregation schisms because you can’t find your way to objectivity with a map and a flashlight……. which is exactly why my church fell apart and the new pastor sweated through every stitch to put us back together. I’m not sure that she knows I think that, but she’s entirely responsible for the congregation being healthy because it’s welcoming of all and not your inner circle.
This also says a lot about world politics while describing very small things. It’s applicable all over the world to different conflicts. It also depends on how you react to the pressure. Are you going to compromise or double down?
Maybe I’m a moose and a squirrel. A moose’s personality in a squirrel’s body, at least. Between Bullwinkle’s ineptitude and Rocky’s smarts, it feels a lot like the spectrum I inhabit. But part of being a moose in a squirrel’s body is learning to walk a little taller.
We may not beat Russia today, but I do hope we prevail. They need our help the most in terms of world balance, because the longer the rift goes between the US and Russia, the closer they get to China. They decide to hedge their bets and go with the other guy. Then, we keep ourselves wide open to Russia bombing the oilfields in Alaska…… because we’ve never had to face Russia and China at the same time, but I’m not thinking we’d like it. Sounds like a crazy idea, but I’m not trying to invent a conspiracy theory. I’m trying to present that the United States is up against a superpower and a former superpower banding together against us. That’s because we’re not the sun, as much as we’d like to think we are.
It takes us so much to be able to stop those kinds of things before they happen, because even if I’m not right on the money, I know I am describing a situation that could potentially happen in the wide realm of possibilities. If we got intel that Russia was about to blow up our oilfields, we’d probably burn them down before they could get to them. You don’t like us? Ok. Here goes all your oil, all the projects in Sakhalin to bring you fuel, the Alyeska pipeline, all of it. Just try us. If we can’t use it, neither can you.
But that’s why conflicts move as slow as they do. No one wants to interrupt American industry….. even in China, for the most part. Another delicate balance until China discovers they don’t need us anymore.
They’ll realize it a lot faster if we put a Russian “useful idiot” (UI) in The White House.
And then team up.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
And that describes relationships between two people as well as it does war. Do you react more when you’re hurt, or whether your friend is hurt? When you hurt someone, they’re likely going to confide in someone else about it, possibly someone who didn’t like you, anyway. Then, the original person has two enemies.
Russia and China are talking behind our backs like bitchy little mean girls, while inviting Kim Jong WTF for tea. I know most Americans don’t see this, because they don’t work in systems like I do. They don’t create scenarios that are fictional, yet just real enough. I wouldn’t have included details that sounded a bit scary if I didn’t genuinely care how this election went. It is a disaster for CIA to re-elect Trump. Neither White House nor intelligence officials will be allowed to tell you anything real. We will continue living in a fractured society with two different realities for far longer than necessary.
No one needs your version of the Bible, where the line between heaven and hell is only a hair’s breadth, making your people live in fear. No one believes Jesus, that the message is power with, not power over. No one likes a God of promise at either end of the spectrum because one has poisoned the other. When atheists meet me, it’s at first like I’m some sort of mythical creature that I can interpret scriptures for them off the top of my head that doesn’t sound like an absolute lunatic story because I know everything in the Bible is figurative and not literal. It can’t be literal. It wasn’t written down until long after it happened. Mistakes were made.
Most atheists haven’t heard of feminine or queer theology, that takes the message they’ve heard their whole lives and flips it on its ear. I don’t evangelize, I just talk like I talk. I’m not trying to change them and they know it. I allow them to take off their armor because I’m a resource if they want to know something but not an entitled dickhead who thinks they ought to know it whether they want to or not.
Even Jesus didn’t evangelize that way. It was, “I have something people want. Follow me if you want it, too.” The modern interpretation of this is somewhat alarming. Basically, you just say what you want to say and if they don’t want to hear it, you move on. That’s why they traveled. They didn’t take anyone who didn’t want to hear the rest.
We of the United States have not had that policy very often. That’s due to Evangelical Republicans twisting the meaning of Christian so badly that I cannot stand saying I am one, because it instantly brings up all the wrong images. Everything I stand for is concentrated into venom towards the limitations that that sect has put on me. I am a very flawed individual. The teachings of Jesus help me deal with that. What they don’t do is tell me to bother my friends when they’ve already stated their beliefs, and the most I’ve ever said is “if you’re looking for a church, come with me.” She did come, but wasn’t ready for membership.
Now she’s the accompanist, and I told her that if I could play inside baseball, I’d tell her to do a jazz arrangement of “Joyful, Joyful” as the postlude. I once watched her play Janis Joplin on stage, and her band (Twisted Whistle) used to play at my pub all the time.
I think she can handle it.
My purpose is helping people to be stronger in themselves by laying out my fears and dreams first. It makes it easier to come clean with yourself when you’re already in a vulnerable place from reading. I lay out my fears. You lay out yours, to yourself. And we both allow ourselves to feel nourished. The writer/reader connection is as unbreakable as hearing Bullwinke say, “hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!”
I love cartoons, especially when they remind me of me.
When I was at my smallest, most insecure place about the future of the relationship and I couldn’t see my way through it, all the crying, all the avoidance, all the trying to let go and not…….
It lasted a grand total of eight months.
That’s because she never said anything like, “I have to prioritize other things over you, but I think about you all the time.” It would have gone such a long way in calming my anxiety, but I had to beg her for even that much, and it was in reminiscence. I couldn’t do anything about it, preventing a problem from happening. I could only watch it happen from the outside, because otherwise, I would have seemed entitled. I could only rage about my own feelings in abstentia of hers.
It’s what happens when we stop telling ourselves the same story. A lot of my blog is a coping mechanism, and she’s responsible for a lot of things over which I need to cope. However, they are not bad things. They’re good. I love them. But I can’t do it all by myself, and the thought of saying goodbye to all of it scares me, because after 10 years, it’s what I know.
I had to decide which was more scary. Living without Supergrover’s response or living without her, because I was living without her either way. I have never been sure I could cope on my own until now, because she said “if you write about me, I can’t stop you.” At first, even this was up for debate, entirely why I said I’d give up my career for hers. Not to own the fact that some of the reason I moved closer to her was valid. Some of it wasn’t. That’s because it was all based on my perception of what happened, and not what actually did.
It’s not that you’re not getting real feelings. It’s that when I don’t know someone else’s story, I’m writing out what could have possibly happened so I know what set that person off and why. I’m my own survival manual in terms of social masking.
Over time, I just got this image in my head of us taking over an office with desktops or bedroom with laptops. To be clear, this is the part where she says something like “my husband’s out of town and I actually have bandwidth to spend with friends,” or whatever. NOT “I think you should give me this and I won’t be happy if you don’t.” Talking about my best wishes doesn’t have anything to do with what happens. I can dream of it, but without a dream, there’s no goal. Without a vision, the people perish.
So, when I take a left turn at Albuquerque, it’s not because I’m trying to hurt her. It’s that she sees the story she’s telling herself and it’s one I didn’t know until recently. Neither one of us could come toward each other because we were constantly afraid of setting the other one off. The things that endeared us at first pulled us apart.
I just kept thinking more and more about how different we were, and that since I had done so much growth over the last two years, I had the right to dictate some terms in the relationship. Not all of them. But establish boundaries. Mostly, it was being consistent. I could not tell whether she was in or out at any time, because I didn’t feel enough safety and security. I felt the surface and the undertow every single day.
I am not sure that she did or didn’t. I can’t speak to that. But what I can say is that I didn’t know which person was going to show up, so I was constantly trying to predict her next move. If my words were being received as attacks, what am I doing that makes her think I want to attack her? All people get mad at each other and act like children.
At what point do you accept it and learn to move on?
I know our responses to each other are always going to be feral because there’s no filter. I’m prepared for that.
What I didn’t count up is all the ways I was unprepared, because she wouldn’t open up. It grew so tiresome that I thought, “I need to get out more.” I didn’t give up because I was so insistent on breaking her boundaries. I gave up because how do you talk to someone who doesn’t want it?
You’re a land of secrets; its only citizen. Though I paid my dues, I was never allowed in…..
-Hope Alone, Indigo Girls
Which is why our relationship is so beautiful and so fucked up……. the reason, beautiful girl, that I write beautiful and fucked up things.
It’s never been easy, and it won’t be now. It may not even exist now, because I do not understand what is going on in a fundamental way. What I do know is that my lack of understanding will, as far as I know, last about eight months.
My medical diagnosis is “alternating lateral isotropia.”
What it means is that my eyes do not track together. I do not have 3D vision, which means that I cannot place an object in its environment. I have no depth perception or angle of convergence. The way it is different from a strabismus is that neurologically, by brain switches “cameras,” thus fields of vision, depending on which eye it thinks can see the best…. leaving me with no peripheral vision and also no ability to predict what’s going to be outside my field of vision.
It also makes finding things I’ve just set down extraordinarily difficult, something I’ve struggled with forever…. again, rewarding neurotypical kids for things that are very hard for the neurodivergent. When a teacher notices you lose everything, you lose all respect with them. It affects grades where the letter is an abstract concept, like essays. I wish I excelled at math, because there would have been no fear of rejection with every paper and I could have felt better about myself without a teacher’s approval.
It doesn’t help that the real non-medical definition of my medical condition is “lazy eye.” That irritates me, too. I’m a writer. Why wouldn’t lazy be a trigger for me? Trust me, I may not “work” faster than you (universal) because I don’t know how neurotypicals do it, but I think faster. It’s not because I’m neurotypical. It’s that my entire job here is reacting to life, so I feel practiced at it and more comfortable in my skin. Lucky enough to be as old as I am because the good experiences only start happening after you’ve figured out how to avoid all the land mines first.
It’s good I’m still workin’ on that.
But back to this whole “lazy eye” thing. It makes me feel lesser than, and though I know that doctors use it, they should know that for some people it doesn’t feel particularly favorable…. like “MDT” in Appalachia.
If you’re not a doctor there, you’d never figure it out. It’s not really something you can google, only something they’ve seen a thousand times and you probably haven’t. My cousin got his DO in West Virginia. Because it’s local slang for something I feel is pejorative, I won’t say it here. I’ll let them keep it to themselves because it would seem really mean outside of an emergency setting. Mostly because I don’t want people to shoot the messenger, not that I’m not brave enough. I don’t have to live there, but they do.
That was all bullshit. Of course I won’t hold back on you. If they’re willing to use it in a public setting, I don’t care about their feelings.
MDT stands for “Mountain Dew Teeth.” It absolutely will rot everything in your head if you are completely addicted, and that kind of exposure to sugar can absolutely kill you when you wait until it’s an emergency and septic.
People have had this addiction since Mountain Dew was a home brew. Long, long before it developed into a nationwide phenomenon.
There are also lots of other things that doctors don’t want patients to know, but they have to have a black sense of humor to deal with the pressure. It’s not trying to be mean, it’s learning to breathe. Think line cook.
So, I don’t know what doctors say about me behind my back, but I know lots of things they would say when lives are on the line.
Doctors’ hardest jobs are the cleanup from not having universal health insurance. They are bound by the Hippocratic Oath, yet it’s not an easy job when you are starting with fucked up. The ER is full of complicated cases where people have gone to the Emergency Room at the height of their disease. The part where it gets harder and harder to tell people they’ll recover from this.
Death happens at random, but it’s more likely when the odds are stacked against you. You think something is wrong, and wait to go to the doctor until you’re in renal failure. Other countries don’t have this problem.
Having universal heath care would help a lot of doctors’ mental health…. because there’d be so many less emergencies. It helps when you have time to prepare a plan.
I know all of this through talking to doctors when they’re off work, not by being a patient. So, I’m not as bothered when medical professionals call it “lazy eye” because if I’m at the doctor I’m already thinking in clinical mode, anyway. The emotion is not going to affect me, at least not until it accumulates.
People ask me all the time if I’m looking at them, and I don’t fuckin’ know. Your guess is as good as mine, and I am not in the mood for your bullshit ever. It’s always said with this curiosity tinged with “that’s so weird.” That’s why Zac can get away with making fun of me and no one else can. His jabs don’t feel like he’s punching down when he is also disabled, something I’ve never had in a friend or partner.
Disability is a relative term in the military. I don’t mean to imply that he is also unemployed. He’s classified as disabled, but he’s physically strong enough to work. It”s going to make a good pension for him, and I think he’s going to be really happy no matter what he chooses to do after this. It’s cool to be able to stand next to an adult when I feel like I don’t have it together.
Plus, there’s lots of soda in his basement, which adds to his charm.
Today, I’m going home because even though Zac is of and about, I wanted to wake up with Oliver. I wished Zac could have come with me, but the stars didn’t align for that one. I’ll just have to wait for Jason Moran at The Kennedy Center.
Oh, but here’s the best thing I’ve heard in a million years:
Leslie (texting a link): I know you’re not a huge fan, but I thought you might want to read my impressions of last night.
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?
When Supergrover emoted, she gave me two things. The first is closure. The second is the ability to work toward our goals now that all the cards are on the table. It has been a hard row to hoe when she’s only given me the flop, keeping the turn and the river in front of me, out of my reach. This is because all five cards had been revealed before, and they weren’t cards we could put back in the deck.
It reminds me of Plants vs. Zombies, if you’ve ever played that video game. The second time you go through the levels, Crazy Dave picks out three seed packets that are at random, but they’re locked and you can’t remove them- you have to hope that you win based on what you bring to the game.
We have nine seed packets, and three of them are locked. It’s an even better analogy, because Michaels is holding the flop, the turn, and the river because I fucked up. If there’s anything that made me fail, it was me. For Supergrover to say that this is all her fault is ridiculous. If I hadn’t been an asshole, none of this would have happened.
Full stop.
I have been saying that ad nauseam on my blog, not going after her. The constant feedback that I get from my readers is that I am way too goddamn hard on myself. I have never once heard “you’re too hard on her.”
Not once, ever in my life.
But, if people had said that, I wouldn’t have deflected, either. I would have said that they didn’t know the whole story, and that they couldn’t know what went on behind closed doors, and they never would. So, they have to put a lot of faith in me that I am not being too hard on myself, that I own 50% of the problem. Don’t treat me as innocent here, because I’m not.
Meeting Supergrover changed the course of my life for all the right reasons, and we both feel guilty about rushing into this relationship because it wasn’t a problem we thought through together. If we had, we could have avoided a lot of turmoil later on.
I said, “do you think I write about you just for shits and giggles? No, this is my very real inner monologue.” What I didn’t remind her of yet again is how much it takes to be this vulnerable. That I shake and cry through some of these entries, that it’s hard to get my feelings out and yet absolutely essential.
And then I told her what I was really writing and why I was writing it that way. I hope she’s shocked out of her mind, because I think I won this hand.
I just hope she, like me, doesn’t move the goalposts and say my response should have been happier. Because we’ve both been doing it to each other for a very long time.
When we don’t open up to each other, we are no better than we were before. It’s just going to keep being a toxic mess. When we put up walls, we don’t fulfill our purpose in each other’s lives, why it’s always been just her and me. That sometimes it’s nice to have that “stranger on a train” feeling where you can just dump anything and let the other respond to it.
That feeling is exactly why it’s not incumbent upon her to give of herself and her time. I am not asking for more than she wants to give. I think we’d be great comic foils, and have a ton of fun no matter what our relationship looks like in the future.
For instance, I don’t like the lines in this blog where I flip her shit. I’m not as funny as she is, so basically it’s “I set ’em up, you knock ’em down.” I like the response better than I’ve ever liked anything I’ve said. I have gotten a touche once in the history of our relationship, and I cannot tell you what that line was, but I came in Kings full over Aces.
We set each other up to fail. Badly.
But now I can either start moving away from her comfortably, or moving toward her with peace and grace. No matter how she feels about me, I’ll always be hers.
It’s just up to her to see which way we’ll go, because I don’t know whether she’ll understand why I’m doing what I’m doing or not. But like it or not, the important part is that she heard my thu’um instead of my whisper.
And whispered back that I wasn’t on the wrong track.
She’s just hurt and tired….. with me waiting to kiss her boo-boos exactly the way she kissed all mine 10 years ago. I have Bactine, Band-Aids, lollipops, the whole works.
I wear my CIA baseball cap most days. Zac knows this. First of all, it was a present from him. Second of all, it’s my comfort item in his absence. It’s a great baseball cap, too, but also it reminds me of him. We don’t get together that often, but I think of him all the time and vice versa. I love that he sends me pictures of himself every morning, pictures of Oliver (who is a dog), and random memes (mostly regarding making fun of religion or linux or both). All of those things are important, and yet not a sensory thing like a piece of clothing.
I wrap up in my Outlander plaid at night. Bryn knows this. It’s not branded, it’s just what I call it because Bryn sent me a Scottish plaid when we were both in the middle of inhaling the book series (I like reading, she likes audiobooks). It’s green and meant to remind me I’m loved- it does, and it has for many years because it was in the box of the first things Bryn sent me when I got here.
I like iced coffee better than hot, so I brew the coffee at night and pour it into a cup with ice in the morning. I got the cup when Supergrover sent me a large gift certificate and told me to have some fun on her. That was long ago, and it’s an every day carry.
Supergrover does not know this.
I was thinking about “choosing to air all this” afterward, and all that really made sense to me is that she was okay with step one, but forgot about steps two through ten. As in, if she started being aggressive in step one, then why would I think she would want to know steps two through 10?
It’s a weird dichotomy, because I think she really did want/need to hear the things I said after we parted, but because every conversation between us made me think she wasn’t interested, I picked up my toys and went home. I tried to take up as little room as I possibly could, because if I tried to emote, I was met with either “I’m too busy” or “you’re too needy.”
She thinks that all of this is her fault, that I have said all of this is her fault. Then, she copped to everything I said she did and apologized for it, then reamed me out for telling the world I was unhappy about her doing exactly what she was doing.
wtf kind of bullshit is that? 😉
So, when her response to me was as angry as I’d ever seen her, I met her with joy. When you get the gift that you’ve been asking for for SEVEN YEARS, you don’t complain about the wrapping. She emoted. She broke down and told me what was really going on. That’s what I wanted. If I had responded with more anger, it would have been moving the goalposts and saying her response wasn’t happy enough. She doesn’t need to be happy with me. She needs to tell me the truth.
But I want her to be happy with me. I just don’t want to be the only arbiter of our relationship. I need her to take up space by telling me how she’s feeling and not covering it up, running away from her emotions, making me do a lot of emotional guesswork that makes me set off land mines I never knew were there.
She’s never opened up about the tender places in her that I couldn’t see, that I really wanted to….. for instance, she said that she has had the chance, countless times, to stop what she was doing and respond. She didn’t, and takes responsibility for that. I could have been an asshole and said “how dare she?,” but the take home message was “I think about you all the time.”
If she’s willing to show up like she did the other day, she’s welcome every day. I don’t want to hide anymore. I don’t want to feel like a secret anymore. It doesn’t feel like a secret anymore, because when she gave me a clear picture, I could see for miles.
I told her it felt like she owned herself, and I loved her. None of this is all her fault. There was no preconceived plan, just fools rushing in. I’m just not the only fool, for very different reasons.
So, she may not have known that “her” Starbucks cup is the one I every day carry…….. because it’s just one of the things I would have told her if I thought she’d wanted to hear it.
That’s what this has all been about. When did we both just stop taking up space and trying not to offend each other?
What experiences in life helped you grow the most?
Last night, I was rereading the long letter from Supergrover (having so much to read helps when she’s out of pocket because of course the second time I read something, a different aspect will jump out), and she was talking about one of her kids’ partners. She told me that the kid’s partner had told the kid that the turning point for them in their journey with alcohol was losing her kid. A tear came to my eye and I thought, “alcohol and bipolar present the same. I am this kid.” Apparently the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Her kid is her, and I have no doubt they have the same type affect on people. It wasn’t the point of the letter, but the things that affect me that she’s written are mostly the things that connect to something deep inside me.
I felt more relaxed than I’d felt in years. Supergrover didn’t understand our pattern, didn’t understand why I didn’t accept certain things about our relationship, me surprised at how conscientious and dedicated she really is at being a friend, and how because I didn’t believe her, I missed out on a lot of things. But the reason I didn’t believe her is that she wasn’t showing up. She wasn’t laying her true feelings on the table. When she got so angry she couldn’t see straight, finally she had the strength to say what she’d been hiding for a very long time. That’s what I mean by “breaking her open.” I don’t care that she was angry. Her tone wasn’t the point. Her offering was…. and that offering was “I’m hurt and tired.”
Now, it’s her job to decide whether she wants to ask me about what I’ve written, or if she’d like her pre-conceived notions as to why I’d write what I’d write stand. She thinks that I continually paint her as a villain and the times I paint her as my friend are somehow invalid. It does not make sense to her that I can love her and be angry at the same time, but yes it does. When she got into full swing, she sounded exactly like me, picking up style and structure, painting her feelings as fact (about other people, but same style)….. and I wondered what the difference was in her tone and mine. What is she reacting to that I’m not reacting to in her?
We often hate the things in others that we hate about ourselves. She learned that I’m sometimes just as private as she is because I don’t want to rock the boat, either…. and didn’t like that I chose to talk about it here because she thought I was attacking her. No, I was reflecting on a long and hard road, which looks different if you think it is at an end. In effect, she was offended by the grieving process, because I think I’ve done my fair share of denial, anger, and bargaining- to name a few. I have said a lot of things that weren’t favorable to her when she wasn’t being any more favorable to me. She called my blog a “Get Out of Jail Free” card to be shitty to her, and I didn’t know how to explain that if she really wanted me to let her go, it was going to be ugly inside myself. That I had a million different feelings to process and none of them had to do with the last 15 minutes.
I had to process 10 years, all without ever really having the input I needed. However, I’ve always gotten what I needed when we were tracking together, and I can’t hope for much, but I can hope that we’re at least back at the same starting gate. Or perhaps we’re on different sides of the concourse, but still both seeing the Nats…. and that’s something.
She said she was furious beyond belief at some entries, and moved by others. I would cut off any one of my limbs to know which entries moved her, because I have heard all about the ones that make her furious.
I had to process the time I wanted to be the partner, to when I knew she had a partner, and going from the friend who would have come to the wedding to the person that would have officiated if I’d been asked. But she didn’t give me the strength for that.
By the time Bryn got married, she was done with our church, so she asked me to marry her instead of her pastor. The wedding went off with a hitch. 😉
In fact, the thing that meant the most to me is that the groom, whom I had maybe all of two days with before the wedding, congratulated me on a job well done, and he said, “I had a lot of trepidation when Bryn said that she had this friend who wanted to do the wedding, because I wanted it to be perfect. And it was.” I don’t think he knew my back story- that I had prepared for this moment unintentionally by learning how to do weddings from the age of five. As I have said, the joke is that no one in my group of friends wanted to wait until I was done with grad school to perform a ceremony I had memorized by nine.
Although the wedding was taken directly out of the Book of Common Prayer; we just took all the religious references out because Bryn absolutely believes in the power of the universe, but I don’t know whether she would translate that to “relationship with God,” as many people do.
The thing my dad taught me that stuck with me is to go through the wedding at the rehearsal without saying the vows. Unless it was just the three of us, if they’d said the vows at the wedding rehearsal, they would have been married AT THE REHEARSAL because there were witnesses. This presented as funny only once. I got confused for a second as the vows started because I didn’t look down at my portfolio and said the groom’s name where the bride’s should have been. Bryn corrected me because she caught it and I didn’t- brain fart- and we laughed and moved on.
The thing that my dad also taught me is that brides and grooms get very nervous at their weddings, and you can coach them to the extent that you can with something like that. If someone gets tongue-tied, I say, “if so, your answer is ‘I do.'” I have never met a couple where if they hesitated during their vows, it meant they had cold feet. Most people are anxious at being in front of public.
In terms of the wedding itself, I missed Dana terribly for two reasons. The first is that I cannot imagine how much fun we would have had visiting our old haunts, and I know she would have loved being a preacher’s wife for a day. It was so fucking weird going to Burgerville without her. Yet, I did not call her and tell her to meet me there because I couldn’t. I never want to get back together with her, but I also really miss being her best friend, the part where we never, ever got angry enough to be physically violent. There was not that kind of emotion tension to create that kind of fight.
I know that this is still, in part, true for her as well because of what she said when my mother died. I hadn’t talked to her in months, maybe a year or a year and a half. The first thing I said was “thank you for picking up. I wouldn’t have called unless it was important.” She said that she would never not pick up because she figured that if I was calling her, it must be important. That is a long way of healing from standing me up at the bank, literally. So, even if she didn’t want to be a preacher’s wife in person, she definitely was the strength I chose to lean on that day. It was like she was my phantom limb the whole time, and I never felt alone, because we were every bit as much of a team as our then-pastor, as Dana, Bryn, and I all met at the same church, and we both folded into Bryn’s family…… even though because I had dated Matt, I could tell he was in a pissing match with Dana and she didn’t notice….. whether she was blind or not is debatable, because someone can present a game to you and you can say, “I’m better off pretending this doesn’t exist because it’s not worth my time to care.”
All of this is to say that Dana, Bryn, and I have a very long history, and it’s why I jumped on a plane to Portland and felt sick when I landed. I could feel my anxiety melting the further we went down 99W, because Bryn lives in Newberg, the 100% insurance I wouldn’t run into anyone I didn’t like. I don’t think we went into the city except karaoke night. I did my usual, “I Feel Lucky,” by Mary-Chapin Carpenter. It fits my voice and after I’ve had a beer my accent gets stronger. If that is true of another Southerner I know up here, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to hear that out of her, either. It’s a more rolling lilt than mine, because for some reason which I will certainly look up on YouTube (linguistics lectures are fire), the Southern accent gets softer during the drive from Texas to Mississippi.
And yes, when I spelled Mississippi, I did say in my head “M. I. SSI. SSI. Crooked letter Crooked letter i.” And I’m a music nerd, so my slowed so I could do the rhythm with my fingers as well. I love that language is music whether or not it comes with notes. It’s why I’m a hard core gangster rap fan, as well as lighter stuff like hip-hop. I am learning to write dialogue, just like I’m learning plot and character from Issa Rae on Netflix.
The reason that I want to learn dialogue like this is think about Amy Sherman-Palladino and Aaron Sorkin. They’ve both made their careers by speeding up dialogue to 33o bpm, and because the rhythm is faster, your brain contains it because you have to strain to keep up not to miss anything….. and the rhythm reinforces it.
For instance, who doesn’t remember the way Alan Arkin said, “How’d you cut your hand, Josh?” They may not remember the rhythm, but it will certainly bring up feelings…… because Yo-Yo Ma was also there.
I asked you to roll with me, and got off on a tangent as per my normal.
I have no doubt that said pastor was mad as FUCK, but I hope that she understood it wasn’t about trying to keep them out, but to keep us in. We are not saying fuck you to that world. We are making our peace with it so we can leave it behind. We are processing feelings that go back to 1997…. about our friendship, about who we are and always have been to each other, and how “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.”
I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Supergrover would love to meet Bryn, perhaps even more than she wanted to meet me, because Bryn has a story she needs to hear…………. because Bryn has been my friend since 1997, when she was a teenager (and so was I, but I was 19 and Bryn was maybe 14). I am not saying it would ever happen, but I know that Supergrover would roll her eyes at some of what Bryn had to say because it will just seem so very familiar to her, as if Bryn and I are speaking with one voice.
I can’t get them together, because Supergrover and I aren’t there yet. But what I can do is say on my blog that Bryn is coming to visit me in May, do with that information what you will.
One of the sweetest things about Supergrover’s letter was that she said my words felt like “pricks on her skin that grew into big holes she couldn’t close anymore.” What I thought was happening was happening. Instead of asking me why I’d write what I’d write, she saved it all up until she was so mad she couldn’t see straight, and tell me she was busy. I could tell, and I wasn’t angry that she wasn’t responding to me fast enough. She couldn’t see that what I wanted was for her to open up to me and tell me all the times I’d hurt her rather than kicking the can down the road. I’ve said so many heavy, scary things that I cannot count them. It is why I said that I’ve been naked in front of her so many more times than I have with a lover. It is a different voice for me, that my internal monologue was also, in fact, her external monologue. It is a weird feeling to know someone so intimately through reading their work and not giving that person a hug. It begins to feel like a rock concert, and I mean this on a deep and spiritual level.
Yesterday, I told you that she’s my tuba, or vocally the basso profundo in my life. Not the lead trumpet player, the top note. The base of the chord upon which everything is built. Who hasn’t gotten close to the woofers at Third Eye Blind. Who hasn’t felt the way your chest expands and your skin buzzes? That’s how it feels to have another person (especially one like her, the rock part) inside me, because she’s never been separate from me and we’ve never learned to pick up the other’s social cues. Incidentally, as an autistic person, if we did have a day to day relationship she’d be the perfect person to social mask when my sister wasn’t with me. She doesn’t have time for that, I’m just telling you that the way she has her shit together is what I want.
The worst part is that she thinks she doesn’t.
It’s understandable. She lives on no sleep. I’m not sure she’s had myelin on her nerves since the Reagan administration….. and I can’t tell you the line that told me that, but it was funny.
Again, reading her words, her true feelings, relaxes me and I read to the rhythm of Dave Grusin, because I like the theme to “Three Days of the Condor……. among many, many others. St. Elsewhere is probably at the top, followed by Doogie Howser, M.D. The reason I like the theme is that I’ve never seen the end of the movie. It got weird (like the misogyny in old Bond movies). I think this is fair play because the novel is called “Six Days of the Condor,” so it seems they only filmed half of it and gave up. The difference between our relationship now and our relationship at first was that in the first few weeks, the rhythm was “Your Love is My Drug,” because she’d said some very exciting things. New relationship energy ate my lunch. I have no compunction about confronting people on problems before they happen to establish boundaries, and neither does she. I warned her that this could turn into an emotional affair because of two things. Internet chat creates a sense of intimacy that may or may not be there in real life. That you become disconnected from your body, so sexuality and gender become irrelevant. This is what I meant about saying that I hoped she was going to be Cynthia Nixon, and self-deprecating that it’s because I’m not that good a writer. I was not saying that my writing is my way into her heart and therefore I thought I could change her like when we used to quote Ellen Degeneres about “winning a toaster.” I thought that reading me would change her, because women don’t fall in love with other people’s private parts all the time. This is because sexual relationships with women are built on emotional connection, just like they are with straight women. You can break up a marriage faster than you can break up two women who’ve flipped each other shit since high school.
But I can tell you the exact moment her feelings stayed the same and mine went haywire. I was telling her that her story felt like a drug, and she said, “I’m sure I’ll drink your liquor, too.” Not meant to be a pass or a flirt, but so smooth af that my knees knocked. If you’re lesbian or bi, did I make you do the thing…….. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. Her gender and sexuality didn’t fly out the window, mine did. It didn’t matter what she looked like, I wanted more and I was in.
If I could describe our relationship in one sentence that would resonate with my generation, it would be that our relationship on the surface seems like it’s “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” It’s really “Bel-Air.” I feel that way all the time, every day. If you are not familiar with both shows, because “Bel-Air” is so new, let me catch you up.
“The Fresh Prince” is cute, and everyone knows the intro….. which is the scariest event that happens in the whole show (so far) portrayed as comedy. In “Bel-Air,” you find out what happened that day, how he really met Jazz, etc. It’s violent, and even in California you see the real problems in their family. Carlton is an addict because he’s a perfectionist and has anxiety. I identify with him on two levels, because I am both versions of Carlton on the shows, and the actor is from my neighborhood (I don’t know him, he was born after I left).
What I have noticed is that if you want to learn anything from powerful people, you don’t try to be a gladiator trying to impress them. You become the Olivia to their Cyrus, but not when they’re working. When they’re sitting on the couch drinking wine and eating popcorn after having fought gloves off all day. Because the fighting isn’t personal and those moments don’t matter as much as a conversation with a good friend about What Kind of Day Has It Been?
When that involved snuggling in my dreams, I knew I was fuccccccccccked, because I knew my dreams would go deeper than that while I found homeostasis. It was hell on earth, because she wasn’t going through those physical changes and I was. When you know your heart has barked up the wrong tree, you can’t tell your heart just to “snap out of it.”If I could write what really happened between us, you’d read it to the tune of a billion dollars, especially if she was my co-author. It would become a franchise series on Netflix, because our story has never been told before. It is an original idea, one that hasn’t been represented on screen much, if ever. It’s why I hope that those 10 seasons are all here. I don’t want to turn my blog into a Netflix series, I just hope that much story has been told.
That I am at least a good enough writer for that. I want our story to be quiet, yet enormous. There are so many differences between us that make us interesting, yet nothing can tear us apart for a moment of any day.
Let me tell you the day I knew what kind of situation my situation was in. How I fell in love with her the second time. First of all, Ifigured out how that woman who’s loved her friend for 10 years and nothing could tear them apart actually worked, so I was more capable than I was in the beginning. Secondly, it was something she said. She said that once marriage was marriage, it was for life. That it existed great sex, no sex, whatever. That’s how lesbian marriages work every single day. I finally had some words and context I really understood because it was written in my language. Everyone knows that couple that’s been together a hundred years, but they lost interest in each other during about year 12.
So, I know why she was angry I blocked her on Facebook, but I wasn’t. I needed to stop seeing her picture in my feed all day. She blocked me on instagram, and I was so grateful because I can’t see her profile unless I’m logged out. The only time I saw them is when they were referer stats on my blog, because I wasn’t logged in on all web broswers. It gave me some room to breathe, and our entire relationship was based on e-mail, not getting to know each other in person or in a group, which created different outcomes. Our relationship existed in text only between us, and it broke my personality in half. That’s why I couldn’t stay with Dana. I had grown past her and we were on separate paths no matter where in the world Supergrover and I were because Internet. She’s handfasted as my yellow string, and it runs between us. I used to call it a chord, because it worked in both our first languages.
The pleasure of my life was when we returned to them. It’s the life experience that helped me grow the most, by far…….
But what I need you to remember is that though it’s Three Days of the Condor visually, the other three days are in the book.
I just haven’t noticed all the ways not speaking each other’s love language has harmed us, because I could see what she was doing to show me love, but I couldn’t see that she was receiving what I was saying with love. She’s hurt beyond belief at some of the things I’ve written and painted it as fact that I’m out to get her when she doesn’t know the first thing about what I have to say, because I’m not talking about our real issues here. She thinks she’s the villain in the story when I’m saying that we tumble and roll. I am often the villain in this story, and have said as much. She sees how much I try to explain how her choices affect me and chooses to believe I’m being nefarious. I’m being INFJ autistic Doctor Who Malcolm Tucker.
What does deep and abiding joy feel like to you? I want you to feel mine, because yesterday a broken heart was sewn.
I sent Supergrover a message because I literally couldn’t think of anyone else because I was going through a thing she’d also gone through. I needed strength to go through this thing with another friend, and I’m sorry I can’t be specific. It’s just complicated and not my story to tell or own, which is why I’m not writing about it. Just my reaction to it.
For whatever reason, I broke her open like a coconut, and not only did she help me with my problems, she opened up about our relationship and told me what was really going on………….. which broke me open like a coconut.
She was exactly the velvet hammer I needed when I needed her the most. She’s the biggest badass I’ve ever known, and the most pragmatic. And then she gave me the sweet side of her, the one that’s open and vulnerable and has the same little girl reactions that I do. She was running because she was hurt. I couldn’t help her because I didn’t know she was hurt.
Because I never knew how much I meant to her. I only knew how much she meant to me. Our relationship will hopefully be strong and comfortable in 20 years, just as she said hopefully we’d be 10 years ago.
I am falling over with laughter…….
We’re halfway therrrrrrrrreeeee. WWWWWoooooooaaaah! Livin’ on a prayer………..
Even though she was fucking furious, she was honest to a fault, and as I told her, all I’ve ever really wanted from anyone- the truth, why and how.
She said that she predicted that my response would be angry, and my response was “this is the healthiest e-mail I’ve gotten from you in 10 years. You couldn’t make my day any better, because this morning was a shitshow and now I’m grinning like an idiot.” The reason I was so goddamn happy is that she opened up to me. She told me her side of the story, and hopefully she’ll realize she’s been as wrong as I have and we’ll move on from it.
I was so overwhelmed I shut down completely, because it’s not every day that you get everything you want handed to you on a silver platter….. and I’m bad at transitions. The reason I was in shutdown mode is that it was too much joy to take in all at once, and this is the first time in 10 years that I’ve felt this safe and secure with her. I hope that I can assure her of my feeling of safety and security so that she receives it as well.
Because we both knew it was our fate. Months ago, she said “no matter what happens, we’ll always have a past, present, and future.” We got to a place where it wasn’t good for either of us, but yesterday instead of attacking she joined me in cleaning up our toxic mess. It was glorious. Her letter made me cry so hard I couldn’t move, because I was so moved. It was the longest, most beautiful, most insightful thing she’s written in a very long time.
Even in her anger at me, the way she phrased it was so well-crafted that it made me feel like I can’t keep up with her. Sometimes I stare at her in wonder (her e-mail or her pic, occasionally), thinking “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. Is there anything in the world I’m better at than you?” I know it’s true, and that’s what makes me crave her e-mails. Talking to her feels exactly like I felt the first day of 8th grade band…….. which I got into in 7th grade. When you meet better musicians than you, you tend to stick with them because they up your game.
Supergrover is the brain that ups my game instead of the low brass under me……. and yet, she’s my tuba, and I don’t mean that as a joke. Vocally, she’s the basso profundo of my life. Not the top of the chord, the note on which everything else is built.
I hope she at least knows that, both because of the love and work we share. Being able to say “we share” is the most amazing phrase I’ve ever been able to write on this blog. It’s a more important occasion in my life than the time Margaret Cho and Martina Navratilova retweeted me (they liked the marriage article, btw). Supergrover doesn’t say “I love you” in words. She does it by despite everything, still showing up. It may even be begrudgingly at times, but she’s fucking THERE.
She heard the distress in my voice, and she came right to me, just like I knew she would. What I did not expect is for her to explain her radio silence, essentially writing me a blog entry back.
It’s not that hard to imagine why I’d want to marry that, is it? Someone that opened up to me the way I open up here? Getting all the feelings back into our relationship is what turned the tide, because I told her that “my way is to work through things, and your way is to avoid or lightly move past things. The reason we’re joined at the spine is because our trauma is similar, but we have different reactions to it. We’ll deal with it the rest of our lives, and I’ll do it happily because I accepted her warts and all 15 minutes into our relationship. Or it seemed that way, anyway. That she could have however much of me she wanted, because I trusted her more than I’ve ever trusted anyone. She called me on some bullshit lies I was telling myself back in the day, that I was blaming myself for something that wasn’t my fault and I needed to stop seeing it that way.
It was all transference. I fell in love with my therapist because I’m queer and Will Hunting isn’t. The reason I trust her with my very life is that I’ve never had Robin Williams as a doctor.
Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.
First of all, :::checks notes::: WordPress, it’s “describe a phase in life in which it was difficult to say goodbye.” Just like it’s not “where’s the library at?” It’s “where’s the library at, asshole?” Never end a sentence with a preposition.
I do it a little bit.
Humor before I start diving deep this morning, because there have been many, many times in which it was Boyz II Men hard to say goodbye.
The first time it was a really hard transition was moving from Galveston to Naples the summer after first grade. I loved the beach (my sister did not- she used to run away from the waves saying “don’t. Don’t! Don’t!). I mean, she got over it…… she did get married in Galveston. The cultural difference between living on the island and living in small town Texas wasn’t hard because I didn’t like it. It was just a transition. I was especially close to my friends Asbury and Beulah Lennox, who kind of took over being my grandparents when my own grandparents were so far away. The bonus was moving about 12-15 miles from my biological grandparents, a complete change as well.
I do not do well with change, and I’m glad we moved in the summer so I could ease into it. Incidentally, since The War Daniel was not a member of our church, I didn’t meet him until September. I can’t remember when it was second or third grade when we made it official. 😉 I will say that it wasn’t until I met The War Daniel that I felt truly comfortable, the INFJ/INTJ people we have always been. We were the book nerds, the music nerds, and the ones who didn’t give a fuck if people thought we were weird. We both have this historical Jesus personality, we just come at it from different directions. He’s a thinker. I’m a feeler.
Editor’s Note:
Two things. The first is that “The War Daniel” is a play on words, because of John Hurt in Doctor Who- “The War Doctor.” Daniel was a Doc in the Navy, embedded with a team of Marines.
The second is that if I say that I or anyone else has a “Jesus” personality, or that “it’s as hard to be me as it was to be Jesus,” I’m talking about his day to day life, not that I or anyone else has a Savior complex. Jesus cannot be much different than any current pastor (especially those in clerical collars willing to be arrested at protests), because he was a rabbi, though they didn’t have that term back then.
Incidentally, there is also no evidence one way or the other that Jesus wasn’t married, and it’s been a debate for centuries; think Catholic vs. Protestant- Catholic priests are told they have to bear the burden of ministry alone, because they can’t love everyone if they love only one person that deeply…. takes away objectivity or something. The Protestants, like The Avatar, discovered that pastors could not do it without a support system. His partner could have been anyone from John, the Disciple marked as “whom Jesus loved,” and I have not looked at the original Greek or Hebrew to see if there’s more context, like philia or agape. But right now, I’m willing to say that there is no evidence Jesus was gay one way or the other, either, because there is also a debate on Mary Magdalene.
Supergrover actually sent me several novels about this, and it’s basically that Jesus and Mary were married and were writing their own Gospel, the Book of Love. It does make sense. After Jesus died, the story is that Joseph of Arimathia (rich merchant) helped Mary and the children escape to France. It is, of course, fiction….. but based on the little evidence we do know. It’s just been too long, there’s too many questions that will always be unanswered. So, Jesus is who you need him to be, not the other way around…… as long as you realize that Jesus did not come here only to comfort the distressed. He came here to also distress you out of your comfort. No power over. Power with. It’s why he was peaceful about it, but probably hated the Sanhedrin because they were the most vociferous Jews regarding law and very little around compassion, which has no bearing on the church today.………….
I think what The War Daniel misread as anger was actually fear. We should have video called more before he went to rehab, but we’re *both* writers, and lapsed into that personality way too easily…. which took away too much of our compassion. I also know that being in a relationship your first year out of rehab is absolutely not advisable, so when we got engaged, I kept dating Zac because it really didn’t bother him. Because Zac is poly, Daniel knew he was no threat. That if Zac and I are building a life together, it consists of exactly what is happening now. I have so much love for him because he’s a solid dude as a friend and as a boyfriend. How our relationship is supposed to go is unknown. I just know that we probably won’t get closer than we are now. Neither of us has the time.
It wasn’t that we were rushing into anything, we were just each other’s end game. Daniel didn’t offer to marry me because of anything but I needed it for the health care and benefits as a military dependent. And it was his idea not because I wanted it, but because he saw I needed it.
So, the hardest transitions I have to talk about today are the summer before I met Daniel, and the months after he left.
The reason I chose to write about this instead of the transition after my mother died is that I just can’t go there today. So, I will tell you what I was feeling in the moment, instead. It is so raw and real that if you are also in grief, it might help you as well.
The ones who have helped me through all these transitions just being kind enough to sit with me and listen.
Describe the most ambitious DIY project you’ve ever taken on.
Several times in my life I’ve helped friends and family members flip a house. I got to do the second one because apparently I did okay on the first.
Here’s the most important thing I learned the whole time.
….and my words are paper tigers, no match for the predator of pain inside her….
Love Will Come to You, The Indigo Girls
Before I flipped a house, I had no idea what a paper tiger was. They are of the devil, and I got the allusion immediately. A paper tiger is a device you put on top of wallpaper to rip it to shreds so you can scrape it off. It leaves everything in ribbons. Except there’s still the glue to deal with, so everything is ripped to shreds, yet still stuck to the wall. The paper tiger quickly becomes ineffective because you think you’re making progress and you’re actually filling the teeth with glue.
So, you can fight with the wallpaper all day long and make no progress whatsoever.
I can think of so many people that the Indigo Girls represent with this line, because there are so many people married to their glue, unwilling to open up- even when another person needs to hear what they have to say.
I also learned how to tackle raspberry brambles, also of the devil and paper tigers without glue. More than one has ripped me to shreds.
But wait- that wasn’t the first time I’d built a house, and I’d forgotten about it.
In the United Methodist Church, there’s a group called UMCOR (United Methodist Committee on Relief). They give lots of money for youth groups to go on mission trips, which mostly consisted of going out into poor towns and building houses or building accommodations for houses, like wheelchair ramps.
So, I also know how to lay shingles, put the flashing on a roof, and watch my dad absolutely freak out at seeing me doing it. Nobody likes to watch their baby putting flashing on the edge of a roof, because he knew I had balance issues. I didn’t. It was fine, but I can see his concern this many years later when I couldn’t in the moment.
I have also helped build the aforementioned wheelchair ramps. I let other people do the measuring and cutting, because I really wasn’t the best person to ask. My cuts would have come out diagonal just like with food…. or maybe not, because there are better tools to keep boards in place than there are for food….
I’m better at finish carpentry, like sanding, painting, shellac, etc. I also love to paint sheetrock with Killz and new colors. I generally do several coats of Killz on new sheetrock as well, just because I’m a perfectionist.
I am really great at helping do things. I am not so great at doing things on my own. I think it’s because I have enough limitations that I need an extra set of eyes. For instance, it would be fun to work on Zac’s car or motorcycle, but I wouldn’t unless he asked me to help, which in my mind means “stand there and hold stuff.” This is a more important job to mechanics than you might think, especially lights. Holding lights is like hazing in the operating room. Stand there, holding this in a very awkward way, for at least half an hour. At least if I drop the light a few inches, no one dies.
DIY is soothing to me, but as Zac says, “I *could* work on my car, but I make enough money to get someone else to do that.” So, I doubt that we’ll ever go out in the front yard for “guy stuff.” Mostly because I’ve never ridden a donorcycle, because my dad and stepmom wouldn’t be nearly as angry if I got hurt as having to deal with Dr. Anthony, because if I lived from the accident, she would beat my ass with a hairbrush. Tiffany is a liver and kidney transplant specialist. She knows from donorcycles.
If you believe nothing else I say, believe that. Transplant surgeons get *a lot* of their organs to transplant from motorcycle riders, thus the name….. which is universal across all hospitals in the US, don’t know about worldwide.
So, while it doesn’t bother me that Zac has a motorcycle, or that Lindsay and Matt have both ridden them as well, I’m not sure that I would ever be tempted because all I see is Dr. Anthony’s “mad face.” Besides, I have a solid reason for keeping my organs *intact,* mostly living.
I have a feeling I would not be very good at holding lights for her, but that’s okay because she’d never ask me. I would argue that I’m “smarter than a gas man,” but that has more to do with the way anesthesiologists get made fun of in the hospital, not that I am actually as smart as a person who can get into medical school (and by that, I mean smart in STEM. I’m plenty smart in other ways.).
I find that I am as smart in medicine as I am in computers. I do not program, and I do not weld things to the motherboard when a capacitor is out or anything like that, but I know my way around most software and what to do when it breaks. I can run commands in a terminal with my eyes closed, literally because I made myself try it.
Here’s the funniest command. To list what’s in the working directory, the command is ls. If you install sl, when you make that typo, an ASCII choo choo will roll across the screen.
I think linux is why I don’t use DOS anymore. The commands are so different that I type a linux command first, every time, and then have to think about what it is in DOS.
For instance, listing a directory in DOS is “dir,” and there is no ASCII choo choo if you make a mistake, a flaw in its character.
But it’s worse than that. I have been WAY further into linux commands than necessary before I realized I was in PowerShell (DOS terminal):
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade -y
In linux, that stands for “update my software catalog, install the updates, and don’t ask me whether I want to install the packages after I’ve downloaded them. Just do it.
In DOS, this means *absolutely nothing.*
Windows does not make for good DIY, because they want to control every part of the user experience the way Apple does. Windows is not really for business anymore, because even Windows Pro comes with a thousand “lane bumpers” to stop you from doing what you want to do. You have to turn on developer mode to be able to install any piece of software you want, otherwise it will ask “are you sure?” every single time. This is especially prevalent with software from GitHub, and I think that’s because Windows does not like open source.
It’s easier to turn on developer mode than it is to go through and change all the settings, like “show hidden folders” and “show file extensions.” It’s a lot of DIY just to set up a Windows box, and linux is so much easier. Plus, no one has ever tried to sell me anything unless I’ve downloaded a program that’s not open source. If I do that, the developers should be paid.
For some reason, my computer won’t dual boot, and it makes me sad….. but it’s better now that you can install a linux virtual machine inside Windows so that I still have access to linux command line programs. I usually keep btop running in the background because in linux I use a program called conky to list my processes, memory usage, CPU and GPU usage, etc. btop will do all of it, and is light on CPU usage. If you’ve used htop before, it’s the same, just a better user interface.
But here’s the worst trick the devil ever pulled. In Windows, you can divide the terminal into as many blocks as you want, but if you don’t change the settings yourself, when it divides it brings up PowerShell instead of another linux terminal. Just more Windows trying to push itself on you. I do not know anyone who uses DOS command line anymore, except for system administrators, and they’re more likely to have Macs these days, because the government gets a good deal on them and they come complete with unix out of the box. There are linux laptops and desktops out there, but none that have the reach of Apple to be able to get those government and education deals.
So, where their need begins, so does my DIY. I can fix one computer or 50 at once.
If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?
I did not mean to miss yet another day of writing, but what had happened was…. No, seriously. I put a draft on one of my computers. I could not find it again, because WordPress *supposedly* uploads drafts to the server. But it didn’t, so everything I was working on yesterday is gone. If I find it, you’ll get that entry, too. I feel bad, but not too bad after 140 days of posting in a row before Bloguary even started. I’m hard on myself because blogging is the training it takes for me to be able to write novels. I’ve said this before, but until I know my own voice, I do not know when my characters are speaking. Even in blogging, I know that Zac, Supergrover, Bryn, Lindsay, et al have their own voices, because they are definitely not me, either. Although Bryn and I have spent the most time together in person and Supergrover and I have spent the most time writing to each other. Zac could be the person I spend the most time with in the future, but Bryn has like a hundred years on him, so good luck, my beautiful boy. 🙂
In my novel(s), I have characters that range from a middle school girl to a professional chef to several spies, politicians, diplomats, etc. and they all have to have unique voices, too. I have a feeling that I am writing Rebecca and Carol the best so far, but that’s because they’ve been with me for 10 years, and I’ve had time to gather information on them for that amount of time.
Therefore, there aren’t many words I wish I could take out of their vocabulary as well as mine, because I do it all the time. I use “like” as a filler word (mostly in conversation to stall for time). I think that most of my conversations in person start to sound like a valley girl because I am literally trying not to stutter. That’s because I can think as fast as I can type, but much faster than I can speak. Therefore, words that come out eloquently in a blog entry/letter would come out as a garbled mess in person unless I’m speaking more slowly, which I now take the time to do. I spend so much time alone typing that I tend to forget that when I’m not typing, those several streams of thought upon which I’m gathering are still going, and they become confused while trying to converse.
And, of course, most of my friends would disagree with this statement because they only see my output, not what’s going on in my head. I social mask very well, and have for a long time. That doesn’t make living in my head easier, just easier for other people to relate to me.
Like, for real.
Yesterday’s prompt was about things that I’m going to have to overcome in the next few months, and I solved my problem yesterday with ease. The first time I went to The Spy Museum’s web site, Jonna’s event was not listed. The second time, they were sold out. So, I e-mailed and instant messaged the museum and told them that they were sold out and Jonna had invited me so now I was panicking. Amanda, the head of education and outreach (who I also know from many events) got back to me yesterday and said she’d put me on the guest list and it was nice of me to offer to stand if they only had standing room tickets left (they’re free, you just have to register). She put me on the guest list, and if she’s free, Lindsay is going to be my plus one.
It’s been since “The Moscow Rules” book talk since I’ve seen her in person, so I know it’ll be special because not only is she one of my favorite writers (tied with her late husband, Tony, and their research assistant, Matt Baglio…. although I did ask if Jonna needed another one and she said that she knew I’d do a bang-up job, but she didn’t have room for anyone else on her team.
So, even though I’m not her research assistant, she’s seen enough of my writing that I got the compliment of a lifetime. It’s probably good I’m not one of her research assistants, because if I was on it and the book tanked, I would certainly think it was my fault entirely. I’m better at promoting her…… like, a spy called *me* perceptive. I think that’s my favorite part, because who would know “perceptive” better than a spy?
Some woman was looking for a book written by a woman about intelligence because her dad said that he wouldn’t read a book written by a woman in intelligence. My reply on reddit got 488 upvotes as of today. Here’s what I said, without a “like” in sight:
And on that note, it’s time for me to go look for yesterday’s entry.
My life didn’t get interesting until I was 30, and just got more interesting from there. I wouldn’t want to give my teenage self any advice that would alter the events that led me to DC, to Zac, and to Oliver, who is a dog.
That’s because in order to get here, I had to go through some really rough stuff- and yet none of it is anything I would give away or trade. I found my place, even at 23, but I had to go and come back. I don’t know why. I really liked it here. I just didn’t think I could make it on my own. I do not have that capability, to take on the 1,001 things it takes to move in 30 days and also find a roommate. To be fair, though, I didn’t know about Craig’s List back then. Perhaps if I had, I wouldn’t have met the people I needed to meet, and that’s the one thing I wouldn’t want to change for the kid inside me.
So, in order not to change anything:
I’m sorry mom doesn’t understand. Don’t spend your life worrying about it because there’s nothing you can do to make her change. There will be small steps, but no giant leaps. Stay as close to her as you can, but admit to yourself when spending time with her makes you feel unloved.
Lindsay is going to be big one day. I just won’t tell you how. You could learn a thing or two from her if you’d let yourself.
You’re ADHD, Autistic, and Bipolar. That’s something I will tell you right now, because when you get older it’s going to be harder to get tested for autism, and you need to get on meds stat. You’re struggling in school and you don’t know why. Your doctors might not, either, because there’s not a lot of research in the year you live on women and autism. But give yourself at least that head start on life. I know hearing those things is intimidating. Go to a psychiatrist, anyway.
You need to practice gratitude and mindfulness because when I was your age I took some kind of Scantron quiz that inventoried my personality. My psychiatrist said that I had the lowest self-esteem of anyone who’d ever taken the test. Write every day. Go back and look to see if what you wrote is still true. Give yourself a chance to see yourself as you are, not how you feel in the moment.
In every relationship, you need to ask yourself what the other person is bringing to the table, and when you feel ignored or sad or hurt or whatever your emotions might be, listen to how people respond. If it feels like they can’t hear you, they probably can’t…… and there’s a lot of don’t want to in “can’t.” Find people who can hear you.
There is no such thing as a 50/50 relationship. It will often look like 60/40 or even 70/30 because of confirmation bias. But notice when you feel like you can’t get a break, can’t do anything right. You’re not stupid. I won’t tell you what they are, either, but stupid isn’t on the list.
Because of the autism, you’re going to meltdown a lot. Find appropriate outlets for your rage. There are going to be many inappropriate outlets, and I will tell you that you find most of them. But not all. Because you have all of these disorders, you are going to have to learn to be more patient, thinking longer before you speak, because there are so many words that can’t be taken back which you realize just after you’ve already said them. Even when you’re on fire, you can’t take that out on someone else. And yes, I know that your nerves are on fire, that you go into a red mist rage with every physical symptom imaginable. It’s going to hurt you if you don’t take care of it.
The nerve endings on your thumb that you sliced into while trying to cut a lime will never grow back. I’m 46, so I will update you if the situation changes (not a chance, we’re stuck).
You will love soda your whole life because that’s one of the things you and mom will talk about on the phone. There’s not a lot you can do to keep her talking if you talk about your own life, but she’ll tell you all about her job, her friends, her husband, etc. It’s annoying that she never has any questions for you about your life, because she really doesn’t want to know. Do it, anyway. Find things you can talk about. Find a lot of them.
Mothers don’t generally last as long as you want them to; Lindsay and I will never be the same. I figured it might give you some perspective to know how few years you have left with her. Find different ways to bridge the gap. But don’t miss a chance to leave Houston, ever. You’ll get along better with her when you don’t live in the same city and a visit is special.
You’ll want a passport very soon. Might want to start on that. She’s cute.
Stories That Are All True 