Now that I’ve had so many days posting in a row, I’ve missed a couple. One was due to two things. The first is that I was exhausted. The second is that it was Galentine’s Day, and I chose to spend my time focusing on my sister (that was 13 Feb). The second was yesterday, because the prompt was “what is your favorite drink?” Now, I could have written about Dr Pepper Zero YET AGAIN, but I include it in so many entries that I didn’t think it needed its own.
Except to say that if you go to Waco, Texas, you will find both the Dr Pepper Museum and The Fort House. My paternal grandmother is a Fort, and it’s the story of her family. I believe those two things are related, because I never saw my grandmother drink anything but Dr Pepper and occasionally, sweet tea. She was sure that it had medicinal properties, and who am I to disagree with my grandmother?
In terms of what bores me the rest of the time, it’s things like RTFM (reading the fucking manual) with software, because I’d rather just play around until I break something. I don’t like reading EULAs (end user license agreements) because I know for damn sure that Facebook, Windows, et al are going to do exactly what they said they wouldn’t do, they’ll just hide it in the background.
In terms of apps that are watching you for possible malice, I’d pick Tik Tok. It’s bad enough when my own government wants my information, much less China. I’m so terrified of the Chinese government that I don’t even want to go there. I know it’s beautiful, I know the people are nice, and I know I’d be thrown in jail with one blog entry or YouTube video, because I would use all my American freedoms to say whatever I liked, forgetting that I am not, in fact, in America.
I am sure that there are all sorts of tips and tricks for surviving a trip to China as an American, but I’m not interested. I’d rather go to a country where I’m already allowed to say what I want to say. So, basically, China bores me because I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything real about my trip until I was safely back home.
I’d rather go somewhere my writing is not threatening, which leaves out Russia, but I’d love to go to Ukraine when the war is over. I got a taste of it through watching “Servant of the People,” and so if it was possible, I’l like to meet President Zelenskyy as well. He’s such a great writer. I wouldn’t want to talk to him about politics, but about how he created his mom, dad, sister, and niece for the show, plus his cabinet. It’s such a funny sendup of all politicians, and you should watch it if you have Netflix. At least the first season is up (in Ukrainian with subtitles).
Foreign movies and TV used to bore me, but not now. I am one of those people that will sit there and scroll on my phone, losing the immersive experience of watching television- but you can’t do that with foreign movies and TV because you have to read the subtitles.
Speaking of foreign shows, I also love Mr. Brain from S. Korea and Osmosis from France. Mr. Brain is on Apple TV+, and Osmosis is also on Netflix.
Mr. Brain is a doctor that learns to transplant one person’s brain into another, but he starts with himself… building up….. so of course he eventually has human memories from other people. However, one of the funniest was when he crossed himself with a cat. I think that was because the cat saw something about a murder and he needed to see the cat’s view. There were….. side effects.
Osmosis is one of those classic sci-fi shows where someone has invented a scientific way for you to find your permanent love match. It just feels a little different from the French perspective- not so formulaic…… and boring. To be fair, I’ve watched all of Dr. Brain and all of Servant of the people, and I’m only on episode two of Osmosis. So, caveat emptor.
Finance bores me because I do not understand the first thing about money except “don’t spend it.” I could live on that principle for the rest of my life, because I say “bore,” but the reality is more complicated. Even reading a textbook or a web article on finance leads to autistic meltdown and burnout. So, I approach finance with the best of intentions and then slowly feel like my body is breaking down. The boring part is just looking up the articles that I need. Once I find what I’m looking for, the panic attack starts.
I do not think I could answer a question about a single thing regarding bank and finance because I get lost at simple terms like “amortization.” I have found that it is not a case of fear, necessarily. It is a case of my autism saying, “nope. We don’t do that.” Demand avoidance is real when your nerves feel like they’re catching on fire and you cannot function.
The fact that I ever thought I could be a good partner to anyone is frightening because I now realize that I had to lean on them far too much. I also don’t know what to do about that, except trying my best to get into a program for autistic people that helps me deal with meltdown and burnout appropriately. I am nowhere near the only person that shuts down when talking about complicated things. It’s just that for me, the complicated things are logical and the easy things are emotional.
I think that’s why I’m solidly on the polyamory train, because I do not want to be in the position of leaning on one person all the time. I am a lot. I know it. My partners/friends become bored/frustrated with me easily and need a break. The only person who doesn’t get a break from me is me, and I wish that was the case as much as they do.
It’s interesting being the only INFJ in my group of friends, because I come off as intense even when I don’t mean to be. To me, they are poignant questions that need to be asked….. but not necessarily questions to which I need answers. They do. I have started saying something important to Zac, because I do not want him to feel like I am prying into his life at all. I just want him to know that he’s loved and supported. So, I say things like, “rhetorical question that I don’t need you to answer, just chew on it.” I hope it’s working well, because I don’t want to ever put him on the spot, and if these were questions about me, then I would expect an answer. But they’re not. They’re things I’ve listened to that have happened at work, social functions, etc. Therefore, it’s okay to ask the question. It’s not okay to expect an answer when it’s not my bag.
I just want Zac to the best person he can be, and I know that in some ways I am helping. He was the one that told me that I inspired him to start writing every day. The cover picture on my author page is the chalkboard painted wall in his entry way, and his handwriting that says, “You Should Be Writing.”
He took it down, so I wrote “You Should Be Writing” the last time I was there. I would like to believe it stayed more than a day. 😛 TFW someone is calling you out…….. and that worked both ways, otherwise his handwriting wouldn’t be my cover photo.
I did experience a moment of success with demand avoidance. My dad told me he needed a file I’d created for him and when I checked my hard drive, it wasn’t there. So, I recreated it for him within the hour. This is all while I was battling a stomach bug, and it was no small thing to be able to transition from upchucking to sitting at my desktop with a trash can next to me. But I did it. A small victory.
When I think back on how bad I wanted to be Supergrover’s partner, it’s now embarrassing because I thought I was on top of the world in terms of being able to do the thing. As in, of course I could manage a partner, kids, a job, and the fast and furious pace of a suburban mom. To be fair, I would have gotten a lot more support from her kids than I would from her or Dana (in the past) and not because her kids are around. She may or may not be. But I would have supported her like Dana, and it wouldn’t have been enough. That’s because both of us were bad at ignoring things and not making lists. It’s not laziness, it’s a genuine disability if you’ve read any neurodivergent book ever.
I also think that I would have been stuck in the same repetitive pattern, because people who are cut off from their emotions aren’t generally cut off in one way. I can tell you the exact moment I realized it, seeing something posted on her social media. But I can’t be specific. I can only say that I’m so glad she’s straight…. JFC. I would have been in over my head from day one.
I think the difference is that she has worked with neurodivergent people in many different settings, so perhaps she would have caught my autism faster than I would have in person. And then it would have been off to the best doctors available because not only did I need help, so did she. When I want to be with a partner, I make the promise to keep myself strong for them. It is not their responsibility to “fix me.” She might have told me the doctors I needed, but after that, I’m on my own. I need to show whether I can fly under my own power.
The only reason she didn’t catch it in me first is that it’s hard to tell over e-mail. Basically, we couldn’t get to a place either of us liked because of the gap in communication.
I’m determined not to do that with Zac or anyone else in my future, because it has gotten me nothing in the past. It touches me to my core that he’s just as honest with me. He asked me if I would come and help clean his house because he was going through a thing I also go through. I got there and he was very apologetic, and I said, “Zac, if it was my house, would you be there?” Of course he would. I’ve just never asked.
So, not much bores me it seems. Humans are interesting, and an endless subject because there are so many of us.
And I hope that in laying out how I work, you see yourself here, too.
When my bipolar was flipping me out, I decided to check myself into the psych ward at Methodist Hospital because something just wasn’t right. My mood and behavior were all over the place. The first time I felt better was twofold. The first is that I discovered they had the good ice in the cafeteria, the kind you get at Sonic or Dairy Queen. There was no hour of any day that I didn’t have a 32 oz cup filled with that ice and whatever they were serving that day. Sometimes it was orange juice. If I was lucky, I could find a Diet Coke. Mostly, it was just water because the drink didn’t matter. The second is that once I had a drink in my hand, it was time to go find the best friend I had that week. He was a Viet Nam vet.
Our story starts when I walked up to him and said, “what are you in for?” He said, “murder.” I never left his side after that. 😛 I actually got mad at a nurse over his situation, because he said that the beds were too high for him to get into them (he was in a wheelchair). I talked to a nurse about it, and she said, “that’s not your problem to worry about. That’s ours.” I said, “well then, it looks like you need to do your job.” I give no fucks when it comes to nurses, because they do stupid shit all the time. I was a persona non grata after that, but I could give a shit. They were making my friend’s life harder…. and they are not gods. In fact, I got in really big trouble when he got let out a day before me and I hugged him goodbye. They screamed at me that there was no hugging.
What they didn’t know is that I’d been taking a shower with my roommate all week because she told me she was afraid she was going to cut herself in the shower. She and another person on my ward put everything in perspective for me because my roommate was trying to kill herself in the hospital and wanted support to not; one of the women in my cohort had a big red, angry X on each of her wrists. I did what I always did in that situation- started taking care of everyone else but me, because I was also halfway to “Spongebob Headstone,” but what pulled me out of it was realizing that I was trying to get better and they had a longer road than I did. It made me irrationally angry at the nurses and all they didn’t see. They’re not the sharpest knives in the drawer at times.
For instance, once my stepmother left her umbrella at the nurses’ station and said, “put my name on it so no one else takes it.” In what world does that not mean “put a note on it?” They wrote her name on her umbrella in Sharpie. I could go on, but I won’t. That example is enough to cover A LOT of ground.
The reason I felt so comfortable with the Viet Nam vet is that one of my best friends in Portland worked for the motor pool in the Army. He taught me everything I know about cars, and though I can do some things on my own, my favorite thing is for a mechanic to stand over me and tell me if I’m doing it right. For instance, much easier to bleed brakes with a buddy. When we got to Houston, we put power steering on Dana’s car because it came with rack and pinion. Our next door neighbor was a mechanic, and he said that he was really impressed that we managed to do it all in the driveway instead of in a shop.
My dad bought Dana’s car, and then her parents gave her some money, so he told her that she could be in charge of buying my car to pay him back. She never did, and I don’t remember why. I just remember that my friend and I did probably $2,000 worth of work on her car for free, and even that wasn’t enough to make her realize I needed a car as well.
It worked out okay because Dana didn’t have a job and could take me where I needed to go. But it wasn’t the same. My brother in law ended up giving me his old car instead. It was a Toyota Corolla, and I had more fun with it than the law should have allowed (but I never wrecked it, a miracle with my eye situation).
Now, by Dana buying me a car, my dad was not talking about a brand new one. He knew that I could work on cars, and our mechanic was still here. So, I could buy a beater and add everything I wanted aftermarket. I just don’t want you to think that she got the old car and I was supposed to get “the new one.” I wanted an old Saturn just like hers.
I believe that hearing this story was why my friend laid it out and said, “you need to get away from her, because she steps all over you and you don’t even notice.”
He was right. I let her get away with far too much because she’s a very strong personality and I am an introvert. At first, it was perfect because she could be the person that dragged me out of my house. Over time, her extroversion led her to easily be able to steamroll me because I wasn’t interested in arguing about something. Whatever she wanted to do was fine. I didn’t realize how much of myself I was losing in the process.
When I moved to DC, both in 2001 and in 2015, my number of military friends doubled just because of the neighborhood. For instance, on our street alone we have retired military, retired intelligence, and retired Secret Service.
To be retired from these things does not mean you are old. Zac is going to retire from the military next year. I think that will make him 36 or 37. I say this to prove that our neighborhood is not all old fogies like me. 😛
One of the first dates I had when I got here was with a spy who was on loan to us from MI-6, working on a human trafficking project. Now, I do not have any idea in the slightest why she told me she was MI-6, but I don’t think I was being catfished or anything. Maybe in England it’s not illegal to say you’re part of (at the time), her majesty’s secret service.
It was Thanksgiving night, and I was busy with my family. I was very late, and she rightfully left quickly. I was very happy about that, because I realized that I was about to get on the wrong train. For instance, if I dated her, it would have been harder to date Zac. He does not need me to have anyone on my contact list that works for a foreign intelligence agency….. and I can’t get away from his contact list because I’m one of his partners.
It kind of makes me worried that CIA or any of its derivatives would see my interest in intelligence as threatening, because I don’t want to know anything that’s classified. I’ve sought out retired spies because I want to know history before I start writing fiction. The operations don’t even matter. What does it take to do the job? What kind of personalities are in the room? Who are the people who Get Shit Done, and who are the people who would write your name on your umbrella with a Sharpie?
Though John le Carre has actually taught me more about this than my retired spy friends, because his whole schtick was showing MI-6 as it really is. There are lazy government wonks and amazingly good spies and they all inhabit the same building. I have no doubt that there is a real place like Slough House.
Speaking of which, I just realized why the show is called “Slow Horses.” It’s a play on words for “Slough Housers.” In the US, Langley is sort of “Slough House,” because if you make a mistake at CIA, you have to stay at the head shed and work a desk job. Or maybe you get sent to a country no one really wants as an assignment, and it’s not Chief of Station. It’s akin to starting off as a chaiwala (for my Indian friends).
It reminds me of my friend Stephen Johnson (now deceased) who thought he was going to be assigned to Viet Nam because it was that era (not a spy, a diplomat for State as far as I know). He said he ended up in the wilds of Montreal.
Dana always said that one of her great aunts was a spy. She was right. I went through a thousand interviews with case officers/diplomats, and I found her. I was looking for Stephen, and she also popped up. Very much a part of the whole Viet Nam clusterfuck Stephen wanted to avoid. She was there for some of the most horrific things each country did. I seem to remember that she was there when Dien Ben Phu fell. She was long dead by the time I married Dana, but she would have been one of the people that I would have wanted to hear everything.
One of the things that I hope The Agency gets if they ever come after my blog is that I’m trying to get enough facts to write a book, not to take down the agency itself. I find myself learning more through conversation/e-mail than I do reading books, though I do a lot of that, too. I just use both modes of learning because books are for plot, retired spies are for characters.
It also makes a difference if you’re talking to someone in a public facing job or a private one. Those are two different stories, always…. and both relevant.
But even if CIA was so interested in my writing that I got put in jail over it, at least I’d know what to say when they asked me what I was in for….. “murder.”
Today,, I hope you get the best of me. I am sick to my stomach and dragging ass. But I have to keep writing, because I have to be able to write in any mood. Today, I’m not going to write about just one, because they’re the best gifts according to category.
The two best gifts I’ve ever been given emotionally are Dana and Supergrover. This is because things went down hill at all our hands, but it didn’t start out negative, it just became that way…… mostly because I was just so……… meeeeeeeee.
Editor’s Note:
I hear that phrase, “I was just so…….. meeeeee,” in my friend Drew’s voice because one day Dana and I were in the kitchen at Biddy’s for brunch and Drew was doing dinner. He was late, and said, “I was going to throw my clothes on and run, but I said, “what’s that smell?” And then….. “oh. It’s meeeeeeee.” His lateness was instantaneously excused. Some of the other reasons he was late are absolutely unprintable, but make me love him more.
As you can imagine, the conflict with Supergrover was large and we were both angry at the poor choices we made in getting to know each other. They were numerous, and new relationship energy made us avoid all of it. Anything that would have said “this could be problematic down the road” went out the window. Just because someone is a platonic friend doesn’t deter the feelings of “oh my God I just met the most incredible person.” I honestly think this happens to women more than it does men, because I’ve noticed that men choose three friends in fifth grade and decide that’s enough. Plus, straight women bond easily. You could meet your new best friend online or in a bathroom at “Off the Record.”
So, I sent her a Christmas gift one year without knowing how she’d feel about it, and then I opened up about it. I said, “I’m sorry if I overstepped a boundary by sending you a present. To me, it doesn’t feel weird because I got all my other friends presents and you are one of them.” She thanked me and said it was thoughtful, so then I began to treat her just like my friends on the ground.
The next year, I got her two presents because like Jesus, “this is for Christmas AND your birthday.” I told her I was sending her a present. She said, “a real one?” I said, “as opposed to the fake presents I usually get you? Yes. A real present. Like with wrapping paper and shit.” They came in two different packages, but I didn’t clarify. So, she said that if she had known they were for two holidays, she would have waited. She said she’s very good at that, and I have no proof otherwise.
The gift that year was a bracelet with her favorite charity on it. She told me that it was totally something she would have bought for herself. I was so glad that I hit the nail on the head and she was pleased. She’s sent me a lot of presents over the years, though “not like with wrapping paper and shit.” She prefers digital because we’re both book junkies. None of them have ever stood up to the smile on my face when she sent me a picture of the bracelet I got her on her wrist.
That’s because I really sat there and thought about the jewelry that straight women give each other, because I wanted the present to be nice, but not romantic. I wanted to be genuine and sweet to her without upping her fear that we were always going to have to deal with feelings I couldn’t get rid of. It was too important to not.
I think at first she thought it was just a continuation of trying to change her, but over time she began to reciprocate when she realized that no, I was being genuine. I think that’s because I apologized for overstepping a boundary and I wouldn’t do it again if she didn’t approve. By being vulnerable and just asking rather than living in unease, I couldn’t spin out about it. These are exactly the kind of talks that we should have to go forwards and should have had if we don’t. When she gave me the information that she appreciated the gifts and it was very thoughtful, I believed her the first time and stopped worrying. I can take care of my anxiety on my own, but not when people don’t tell me how they’re feeling. I feel that some people are afraid of getting vulnerable with me because they’re afraid of my reaction. Some of it is that they don’t know how an autistic person is going to react to them. Some of it is that they don’t know how a bipolar patient is going to react to them. Every time they’ve replaced my disorders with my personality, and some people try to guess when I’m manic or depressed depending on how I write.
I can assure you that my mental state has nothing to do with the way I write. What has to do with the way I write is that I don’t go back and polish anything. I don’t go back and edit when WordPress screws me over by not publishing the last line of something. I want this blog to be entirely organic until someone else offers to clean all this up for me. This is because I know that I have often kept talking when I’ve run out of things to say….. and I should know better. I think it all the time while creating sermons. However, there are so few long form blogs anymore that I feel I should make use of it. Nowhere else on the internet do you have as much room to say as you can say on WordPress. Although I might test this by posting an entry in its entirety on Facebook just to test that theory. My opinion is that Facebook, X, Insta, etc. are for pithy soundbites, but I could be wrong. I do, however, love a good pithy comeback. “If you can’t say something nice, say something clever but devastating”- Father on the playground with his son in a New Yorker cartoon.
Editor’s Note:
Now that the Doctor Who Anniversary specials are over, I can tell you what bothers me about X. Twitter is so old that it’s like The Doctor went back and changed it. Because now X is a lot easier to remember now since it’s been around a while, adding to its mavitational pull. But, just like with X, I’m wondering how long it will take for Doctor Who to go back and change history so that its gravity again. At this point, it’s a running gag. I hope it was for the Americans, because nothing grabs you into that show like knowing an inside joke….. and after lots of episodes, knowing all of them.
The reason I think it was for the Americans is that it’s an inside joke that’s only a few months old. It wasn’t reaching into history with jokes like that because the Americans don’t have that institutional knowledge- more now since the series first hit Netflix, and I owe my love and devotion to that show to the company itself. I’d watched a few other sci-fi shows, and it was a suggestion. I watched one episode and was absolutely hooked. I wanted to watch the entire thing at once. However, since Dana is as big a sci-fi fan as me, I decided to wait until she got home to see if it grabbed her, too. That’s because if she did like it, I didn’t want to rewatch five episodes later. She loves it just as much as I do, so I suppose waiting could be considered a gift? I hope Zac appreciates my restraint with Slow Horses………..
To get back to being afraid of my reactions, what you imagine in your head is going to be a thousand times more amplified than the conversation is going to be if you show up open and ready to both hear and listen. We will not get anywhere if you only show up to think about your responses while I’m talking and not actually consider what I’m saying; it makes me feel unheard. It goes from trying to resolve a problem to trying to prove you’re right. Instead of leaning together, you dig in and conflict deepens.
It is not choices in life that make me spin out. It is uncertainty in relationships. For instance, Supergrover constantly telling me she was busy was perfectly acceptable, even over and over. But in the last eight years, she hasn’t written more than a few sentences in which I couldn’t glean anything. It wasn’t a problem in the moment, and the problem never would have popped up if after six weeks, there was a letter that actually had some thought put into it. Kicking the can down the road was so miserable that I decided to leave her behind. It does not mean that I take only bad memories away. I am fierce about all my feelings for her, for evil or for awesome (wow, that reference dates me).
That’s because my heart is all tangled up with her, because it made no sense. I wish there had been so much more “my mama wolverine instincts are kicking in, here” and so much less “you’re goading and provoking me.” We could have had something incredible, and we both let it go. One day I hope she’ll see that all of my letters are my mama wolverine kicking in, but also loving her like a Democrat instead of a Republican. 😉
I can’t love her like “everything mommy does is right and good and I’m a bad person if I want to change anything.” (You have to keep up with me to know what that means……). I have to love her like an adult who sees the good in everything, but isn’t shy about addressing conflict. That’s why you’ve seen my feelings in real time about this relationship, that they change depending on what I’m remembering that day. My biggest problem in life is that when I say she was a different person, she doesn’t believe me because she deleted everything and I didn’t. Maybe I should have done the same, because I’ve written every entry off the top of my head. I never have to go back and read them. I think the reason I didn’t delete any of them is that I need hard evidence that I am not responsible for everything that ever happened, and I need to forgive myself. That whether she is in my life or not, I got the gift of learning from her even for a time. It was useful, valuable.
And she scares me, but in a good way. I saw a video online of someone like her (not kidding, like when Dr. Wall said, “some other guy who looks just like me.” It was just someone who works for the same type industry and I thought they might know each other), and it made me realize that it was probably good our relationship was online; by the end of the video, my eyebrows were over my forehead and my hair was blown back. Her tone made me want to sit up a little straighter and behave myself, and I felt embarrassed I was in my pajamas. However, it was not a feeling that was unique to the woman in the video or Supergrover. I feel the same way standing next to my little big sister. I say that tongue-in-cheek because I’m older and a lot shorter.
I always think that other people assume I’m her nephew when my hair is cut short, but she’s always so welcoming no matter what I look like that I just try my best not to feel like a troll. Just proud a woman like that doesn’t mind being seen with a woman like me. If we’d met in college, I think we would have had as intense a relationship as we did when we were actually in college together. However, I think that as she drifted towards politics, then lobbying, I don’t know if it would have hung on or not. I would like to believe that we would have, because I cannot drill down on policy with her, but I can certainly advise her on how to treat people when you’re in front of a crowd. I can’t advise her on what to say, but I can advise her on how to say it.
The parts of me that live in her are queer. Not that she actually is. She’s married to a man and has been for a long time. However, she’s queer in the way she votes, where she works, what legislation she puts forth both in Austin and DC, and I’ll give you a for-instance.
She asked me if I thought it was okay to use the word “queer” on their web site because she knew it was a slur. I told her she was right, I wouldn’t do it……. but she was outvoted by her team. It’s fine, it’s their page. What I realized is that I’m the one that has issues with the word “queer” when straight people say it, because they’ve said it with sneers in their voices for so goddamn long. Because of Gen Z, who has no attachment as such, I am starting to feel like an old person…. Actually, that’s not true. The first time I felt old was when I saw a DVD in the grocery store that was ET: 25th Anniversary Edition. And if I felt old then, I’m probably still old.
I just realized I got off on a tangent and got away from talking about gifts and how they dropped into my lap. It’s what happens when you go back up and read a paragraph, think about something you meant to say, and all of the sudden the thing you were writing about isn’t even on the screen anymore………..
If Supergrover didn’t want to be a red string, she was off that list and onto the next. I think that my platonic relationships run just as deeply as my romantic ones, which is probably why at times I didn’t sound any different and at times I totally did. For instance, if I asked her a question that she thought was too personal, I wasn’t asking to goad or provoke her. I was genuinely interested in what she was going to say. On the flip side, my writing language is naturally flowery and romantic because that’s my style with friends, not because that’s how I’d act in person.
When I’m writing, I am not thinking about how to have a conversation with you. I am thinking about how to lay out my thoughts in a beautiful way so that you will take them in. To give you information to chew on without getting in your face.
More and more often, though, the gift was questionable, but hard to stop holding because the wrapping indeed was the gift that changed the me of then into the me of now. When she responded immediately with anger, I went into autistic meltdown. Then, she took her turn to gutter snipe and it went back and forth. We kicked each other out of our lives three or four times a year because she’d never met me in person to hear my tone of voice when I was talking about these things, not even a concept of how it might sound. She also never had to sit with me while I was in pain, rather than attacking me over e-mail. I realized I was done when there was more anger than empathy. She could get away with “judgmental dickhead” in the moment, but attacking me while I’m unarmed is frowned upon in this establishment.
The gift was the journey; we came a very long way, but it took years. That being said, she was always sitting in the guilt of thinking that she wasn’t responding as fast as I wanted- part of her “you’re a dictator” schtick- because I wasn’t angry that she wasn’t responding fast enough. She could take six months, five years, whatever as long as I received all the parts of our story that I’m missing…. on every topic, really, because there are so few things that she talks about, because hearing my story is threatening to her, and she thinks that it will help for her to shut down, because I’ll just forget and move on. No, I’ll think about it more, because I don’t want to nag anyone and I don’t want to be the person that doesn’t take up room in a relationship because I’m frightened of being abandoned. I realized that it was unfair that I had to mind read with her all the time, because it allowed me to step into it up to my ass. It’s how most emotionally unavailable people work. If they don’t tell you their feelings, you can’t take them into consideration. You have to hope you’re going to say/do the right thing rather than knowing how to act beforehand. It’s exhausting.
Learning all of this was hard won. Very hard won. But I think it has made me a better writer, and the gift I’ve given myself. Even if none of my blog is ever made into a book, it was the training that mattered.
The gift was the journey.
So here are more happy memories instead of sad ones.
The best gifts I’ve ever gotten was from asking her for two things. The first was a voice mail, because I’d never heard her voice before. The funniest thing is that she didn’t start with “Hi, Leslie. It’s Supergrover.” She just launched into talking and I laughed my ass off because I’ve been asking her for a recording of her saying her own name for 10 years. 😛
This was her big chance. 😛
The second was a picture. I would post it if I could, because she’s just one of those women that if she were a model, she’d be one of the people you’d remember and want to see back. At the very least, she’d be the generic picture that comes in a frame you bought off Amazon…….. and you can’t stop staring at her eyes. Now the picture has been in that frame for three years and you really don’t know why. There’s just something about her.
I also think that straight women love just as deeply as lesbians, because I am certain that there are a lot of marriages where that triad is strained. It’s actually threatening when someone has a best friend that will be there for all the partners (especially if they predate you by eons) and you have to measure up………. because again, she’ll be at the wedding, but you may or may not.
In fact, I love getting numbers from straight women because first of all, I’d like to have more friends in the area. Second of all, it shows me just how much progress has been made since I came out (to myself) in probably 1986? Thirdly, I hate dating. I’d rather hang out with friends to see if I like them enough to date them or not. That means it doesn’t matter what orientation the person I meet is, because it doesn’t matter. Either there will be mutual feelings or there won’t, but that doesn’t decrease the quality of the connection. So, I’m looking for people. Who they become to me later is unimportant at this time.
It’s how I know I’m pan. I would say that I was bi, but there’s more than two genders now. Please don’t hate me for wearing bi flags, anyway. It matches more of my outfits. That yellow, tho….. (from my brother-in-law’s X series, #shitlindsaysays: “He looks fast because he’s wearing yellow.” It was my first thought when I wrote the line about the yellow stripe. That at least I would look faster).
I had the gift of enlightenment about the bi flag. Originally, the pansexual movement started with a fight on reddit (no, I’m serious). Someone said that the bi flag wasn’t inclusive of trans people, when that has never been true. Back then, dating both genders meant cis or trans. But I realized that I had to switch teams in terms of identity because bisexual only represents male and female. So, now it’s not that it’s not inclusive of trans people. It’s not inclusive of nonbinary people. I’m not exactly happy with the colors they chose, but it’s not like I’m going to come up with something better…. and not because I’m not capable. It’s just not going to catch on the way it already has.
Maybe it’s just that I’m old and it looks kind of 80s beach to me. I think if the other colors were as dark as they are on the bi flag, I’d be a lot more prone to wear it. I don’t know. Sometimes it might be fun to look like you’re wearing three highlighters.
This year has been the most growth-filled in 10, the best gift I’ve been given- both the memories created and the space to reflect on them…… however, I would be remiss not to include my most popular entries on gifts, about my Scandinavian Snowball Ring. This is because it was in a television commercial in the 80s, so my blog comes up in searches for it because there’s so little information about them left.
It’s a gift I’m giving my Xennial readers, who probably remember the commercial but can’t find a clip.
I have never been good with money, which is why so many of my partners have had so much say in how I spend it. I let them, because generally I could trust their impulses better than my own. If you have ADHD, you just have to realize it and move on. There are going to be some times that you want to swing at every pitch, and if you have someone to bounce ideas off of, it’s much easier. I do not mean foisting my responsibility on someone else. I would ask for help in lots of practical tasks, because my EQ is so much higher than my IQ.
When I first came up with the idea for my alternate history, I had it vetted by the best of the best and it made me ride taller in the saddle. But even when Lindsay and I were kidding each other about me being on Oprah’s Book Club and making millions was STILL surrounded around “let’s make the biggest non-profit we possibly can and give it all away.” I don’t generally need money or things for myself. I generally want to help the world in a concrete way.
I have so many ideas for helping the world; very few surround taking care of myself. It’s difficult when you’re AuDHD and also live alone (for all practical intents and purposes). There’s no one to social mask, there’s no one to pick up my slack and let me pick up theirs when I’m the strong one. To a certain extent, I have this with Zac, but it would be a different ball game altogether if I was in a more serious relationship. I am trying to work out what I can handle and what I can’t.
I cannot handle the thought that autistic people naturally have trouble taking care of themselves in every aspect of their lives because sometimes demand avoidance is avoiding other people’s demands when they are put on you suddenly. Most of the time it’s that you cannot make demands of yourself. Take a shower. Comb your hair. Change your clothes.
People do not think about how much energy those things take because they don’t have to do so; autism is relentless and will always make you feel like lesser than, because what you know to be demand avoidance, meltdown, and burnout is seen as lazy, overemotional, and depressed.
Because I need to keep stimulation down to a minimum in order for my brain to function, that means I don’t spend much. Because I’m a writer, I don’t make much. My budget is tiny, and it makes me feel guilty that I cannot spoil my friends the way I want to…. however, I have never had job security in any job, either, so it’s good to know how to live on a little.
Autism and job security is a straight up problem, because something like 80% of autistic people are unemployed at any given time. There are a multitude of reason for this, but mostly it’s that you’re strange in a way no one else understands and therefore seems suspicious at best, or at worst, that you’re a child in an adult’s job.
Many, many adults are treated like a child in an adult’s job, because the things that traditional work rewards are the things that are the hardest for autistic people to manage. It’s the same with ADHD. Bosses and coworkers do not understand stimming. Fidget Spinners and the like were written off as toys, so autistic people that needed them were just “playing.” No one in the neurodivergent community has an easy time in office work because the system is not built for us.
The kitchen was a mess of neurodivergent and addict behavior, so of course I did better there in terms of happiness because everyone had something. I am happy in an office for a few months, because I can social mask my way through that. Over time, my disabilities begin to show and my performance swings wildly because first of all, I’m not the healthiest individual on the planet. Second of all, even a small mistake in an office can get you blackballed in terms of people being nice to you….. and even if you were the most perfect employee on earth, there would still be just something about you that seems “off.” A lot of your reputation at the office is built on perception.
Whether I am actually the best employee or the worst isn’t even at issue here; it’s that if you’re neurodivergent, there’s not a whole lot of acceptance of those quirks once you leave your house.
I am sure that I have mystified Zac at times. I still mystify my sister and I changed her diapers. I cannot say that my mother ever really understood me, and my dad is so interested in medicine that he’s really been my primary parent since I was born in terms of emotional connection. I think that’s because he didn’t agree that my mother should keep me in the dark, and was genuinely interested in my growth and development to the extent that I’d be able to grow and develop. It was very scary for a while, not knowing what I’d be capable of and what I wouldn’t. My mother refused to address it, and I cannot tell you how many factors went into believing she was right…. the biggest reason being that I didn’t need intellectual help, so I must be okay. And this is where I’m sitting now- if my mother was the one that was gaslighting me and my dad was telling me the truth, then where do I actually belong on the spectrum? What can be expected of someone like me?
My dad liked taking me to the neurologist, opthomologist, etc. Therefore, he understood a side of me that scared my mother and I knew it. Instinctively. It’s what happens when you’re the baby that laid around for an entire year….. when I wasn’t in physical therapy. I wasn’t any less interested in the world then. I took in so much more than I ever let on, because neurodivergent people take in more information through sight.
I know that I took in so much of the adult world There is no way that I talked when I knew words and sentences. I talked when I was good and ready. For instance, most kids say “mama” and “dada” first. My first word was “peaches.” My dad said that the next time I talked, I said “car keys.” I could read small books at 3-4, but was the weird kid later who’d check out a biography about Audie Murphy instead of the next VC Andrews. If you are that different from your peers, it doesn’t end at grade school. Autism is expensive when missteps get you fired. I have never found that if you point out the communication issue was actually from someone above you, it doesn’t help your case any. This is because if you don’t fit into the culture of the office, it will do more to shorten your time there than fraud (in most cases). If there isn’t a concrete reason to fire you, there will be a million petty grievances to get you off the island.
My dad taught me medical words at a very young age and I’m glad he did. I turned out to be an amazing speller whether it’s medical terminology or not, because so much of both scientific and general language in English is spelled close to its Latin roots….. that I learned when I was two. (Although I could not win a spelling bee, I don’t think, because every time I’ve gotten close and lost, it’s because I could visualize the word perfectly and mess up on the translation between thought and spoken word.
Because my brain takes in information through reading. Now, I’m an even faster typist without errors because remembering how to spell is reinforced with muscle memory. For instance, did you know that you can actually make a mistake more frequently in entering passwords, etc. just by standing up? You think it’s easier because you can actually see the letters……… but doesn’t feel the same.
I laughed when I saw Olivia Colman on The Graham Norton Show say that one of her most fabulous talents was being such a good typist she could stare off into space. I think the same of myself, and also that when you find the right keyboard, the one that fits your hands like gloves, you could wipe off all the letters. (I’d still need the numbers because I only remember a few of the special characters).
In fact, typing on someone else’s keyboard is a big sensory issue for me, and it does cause meltdown for a few seconds as I readjust my expectations as to how fast I can type at first.
It was my mother that taught me this. Not only was she a great typist, she’d be honored to know that I like typing because of something she said to me. That when you bought a piano, you were looking for only “the right touch.” Pianos come in as many different flavors as keyboards, which is why I take my keyboards seriously. Because I know what it looks like to play classical piano, I know that I run my fingers over the keys as easily as she does.
My mother seemed to want me to be a younger version of her, because being outside the norm didn’t sit well with her. However, I do think that just because there are more concertos written for piano than for the typewriter it only means I play the more unusual instrument.
Editor’s Note:
Link is to “The Typewriter,” by Leroy Anderson. I’ll try to remember to put it at the bottom for ease of use, but I didn’t want to forget and I didn’t want a big YouTube video in the middle of my blog entry. Whether you finish the entry or not is not my call. I’m a web designer. It just looks ugly, which is what I noticed when I tried it once.
My mother appealed to a much broader audience than I ever could, especially when someone at a party wanted her to put on an impromptu singalong (as a preacher’s wife, you just do it). We had a complicated relationship, but one of the things I loved about her was that she was warm and open to everyone except misbehaving kids. 😉 As a result, I am very much that spectrum in real life because I learned it over and over. What changed was when I realized that there were a lot of people in my life that could not change dynamics with me because I’d given each relationship a fair shot at getting better for quite a while.
I wanted people to grow with, not against. One of the things that happened in my marriage to Dana was that when I became a big shot at work, of course I became a different person. I was juggling more responsibility than I’d ever had in my life. Because I found someone I could write to that would understand every single pressure I was dealing with except mental health, she could identify with the person I was becoming while Dana was angry that things had to change. Living in Portland is a lot like living in Neverland. I mean, it’s not now, but it was back then. Even my friends with Masters’ degrees worked at grocery stores and coffee shops because if they could feed themselves, then they had time to spend on their art. They didn’t have to join a rat race they didn’t like to build a life they felt they had to escape.
Therefore, the cultural clash between my childhood and adulthood is complete. I knew that I wanted to write more and more because I knew I had something to say. Dana was an extrovert. She didn’t have any friends in Houston because she felt like they were all mutual (they were, but not to the extent that they’d choose one of us over the other. Chinese Wall.
What I want, though, isn’t the broad spectrum. It’s great if they come along, but I am of the opinion that I am physically disabled and emotionally fucked up. There is nothing I can do about the physically disabled part, but I am trying very, very hard with healthy boundaries in my new relationships because I found that it was easier to set that up from the beginning, because if you start trying to change a dynamic with someone and they don’t like it, trying to maintain positive change is an uphill battle.
He was also of the opinion that I should know I was disabled, and he tried to tell me….. but I never really got the message because my mother told me that he was overreacting, that things weren’t as bad as he thought, etc.
It wasn’t until she died that I saw my actual neurological workup from 18 mos, because Lindsay found it in her personal effects.
It’s exactly as bad as my dad said it was, but not more. I have absolutely no doubt that my mother gaslit me into believing I was fine because people didn’t do any better with disabled kids in the 70s than they do (for the most part) now….. and also she was very determined to have the perfect family.
Very. Determined.
I can take a very educated guess that part of the reason I wasn’t in special ed is that she didn’t want to have to tell people that. It’s a process of acceptance for parents, rearranging their expectations. What my mother never did was that whole “process of acceptance” bit. She wanted to sweep everything under the rug and she could because I have been told many times that I am brilliant (sometimes, I even let myself believe it because those fans aren’t liars).
People who meet me think that I am brilliant. They think that they’ve never met anyone like me. Sometimes, it’s admiration of me as a writer, sometimes a musician, always the ability to say what I think and be confident about it (in most cases).
The longer they think I’m brilliant and wonderful, the more I open up to them. Then, it becomes a weird game when they realize that I am 100% telling the truth, that I have disabilities, that I’m emotionally intense, that I can’t regulate well, etc. What I have said becomes concrete in their minds, and affects them in a totally different way.
Truth be told, I am way above most people’s pay grade. I just have to be aware of it, because there are things that I do have to take responsibility for, just like everyone else. What I cannot keep doing is constantly beating myself up; my life is supposed to look different than a neurotypical person’s.
I think I’m finally coming to a place of acceptance in terms of adjusting my own expectations of myself. I’m not trying to aim low, just in a direction the people like me are already going.
By “people like me,” I mean those with autism who are low needs/high intelligence. (In case you’re confused, low needs is what doctors used to call “high functioning.”)
High functioning for me comes in being able to craft sentences and synthesize ideas. It does not mean that I am also capable of understanding logical processes, because I struggle with details to an enormous degree.
My view on budgeting is just “try not to spend anything,” Even when I was making software company money in DC, I still lived on $150/week. That cushion bailed me out when my mother died, because like I said. I couldn’t get out of bed. That’s because I’d been let go from the software company on September 30, and my mother died October 2nd.
I was going to go on a road trip across the country with my friend Pri, but I backed out when I realized I would rather stay home. That it was too much change, too fast. It was also way above my pay grade to figure out budgeting for the trip.
I don’t really know what to do with more money, because keeping track of a budget with many categories sounds as difficult as learning Mandarin. That’s because it’s not just the money you’ve allocated. It’s the difference between what shows up on your account today, and what hasn’t cleared yet.
This is because I do most everything through PayPal because my Uber/Uber Eats account is connected to it (I would rather pay for grocery delivery than take an Uber to the store). Sometimes there’s a difference in the processing time on their end. It only happens once in a blue moon, but it happened twice last year….. as in, it’s happened twice close together, but I’ve had the account for almost 20 years.
I’m at the point in my life where I would like to learn, and demand avoidance kicks in when I feel abject fear, the kind that literally lights your nerves on fire. That’s one of the things that allistic people do not understand or tolerate- it’s not that big a deal, you’re just overreacting.
Well, for some people “sensory issues” means that they don’t eat or wear a lot of different things. Sensory issues in meltdown physically hurt because you can avoid the foods you don’t like. You cannot avoid your reactions. To neurotypicals, it’s talking about finance and that’s easy because it’s a logical process and I am trying not to dissociate from the conversation because as my discomfort goes up, so does my need for fight, freeze, or flight.
When I am faced with decisions I cannot understand, I freeze. Both my body and brain shut down when the information becomes overwhelming and the neurological reaction starts. For me, meltdown starts the most easily in conversations where I’m expected to know a 101 level and I’m not out of kindergarten on the subject. Generally, that means rage, but none of it is directed externally. I start to think about why I’m this old and still don’t understand X. My nerves begin to catch fire, upping my adrenaline. It’s truly an “Incredible Hulk” feeling, except you’ve painted yourself as the villain who needs to be smashed. Red mist rage is the least helpful when you direct it at yourself…. though in my eyes, preferable to blaming anything on anyone else.
Meltdown is not always loud. For people that social mask well, they can shield what’s going on in their bodies when they have to interact socially……. origin of the phrase, “you don’t look autistic.” But there are signs. If we’re at a house party or a restaurant, chances are that
I have said it before, and I will say it again…. people do not have empathy for demand avoidance, meltdown (and the sensory issues within), and burnout unless they can clearly see the person needs it. You think you know autistic when you see it, because you don’t see it until it’s painfully obvious, like Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory”
I love watching economists talk about world issues, because I have a much easier time with ideas and concepts rather than nuts and bolts.
I can explain anti disestablishmentariansm easier than I can explain things closer to home, like my weird autistic quirks. When I think about world issues, it’s honestly like my mind is taking me on a trip without drugs. I see patterns with enough information and I’ve been reading the news for at least 35 years.
I also see patterns in my own behavior while writing about my younger self, and I’ve realized that my head being in the clouds is the natural state for someone who’s creative autistic. That I am selectively mute in lots of situations because my brain isn’t keeping up with the conversation in front of me- I am sitting near people and entertaining myself. Bringing myself to enter a conversation is very difficult, both because I’m anxious when I meet new people and I don’t like talking, anyway.
I am sure part of it is that I don’t consciously social mask to the degree that I used to, so I don’t feel the need to add anything. If someone talks directly to me, I’ll be friendly. I’m not antisocial. What I mean is that because I think about big ideas, my worth is not dependent on being popular and engaging to a whole crowd, the way I was raised. I don’t mean that it was my job to become the life of the party, just extraordinarily funny so that everyone liked me, and also the one to leave last because I didn’t want the host to do the dishes.
Those were the values instilled in me, to be the kind of person that everyone liked at all costs, because I couldn’t do anything to alienate anyone from my church. When there were a couple of times my behavior had been used in meetings to score a political point, I shut down; my being queer and having someone to confide in was not going to become ammunition….. until I realized that there was no way I could hide a secret that big. It was a choir. A lot of people in a small room, an even smaller dressing room where everyone was all up in each other’s business.
She was not well-liked by a part of our congregation because they thought she was grooming me. She was, but not for sex. It was the ability to confide in someone that didn’t have anything to do with her adult life out there in the real world………. but she forgot something important because I let her. Who wouldn’t want someone like her to be your friend? We each thought each other was hilarious, and it cost me actually being able to do the “bit” where I showed up at school and actually cared about my friends’ problems, because I did not give a shit what happened in Algebra. I was already overwhelmed with a 25-year-old’s view of the world. One of the reasons I didn’t learn much in school is that I was there, but I wasn’t present.
Just because I’m the personality that’s a thousand years old doesn’t mean you should treat me like I’m that old in middle school. It was wrong of her to put secrets in me that were just too big to handle at that age, and now I know that it’s just what she does. She draws you into a special little bubble where you think you’re the most important person in the world. I do not think that she intentionally went after a 14 year-old girlfriend, I just showed up and became so through listening to her problems.
However, I also do not mean that she thought of me as her girlfriend in that strict a sense. You’d just have to know her as well as I do to know that the way she gets that supportive, platonic relationship with women crosses the line all the time. She has broken more hearts than anyone I’ve ever known. I don’t think she thinks that way of herself, but there are stories out there. BELIEVE THEM. Her way of going for that deep, yellow-string connection like I have to Bryn is being seductive enough to make you think it’s a red string in touches and hugs, but absolutely empty words…. she just wanted you to feel like it was important for you to be in her inner circle until she didn’t need anything from you anymore.
It worked on me, and I know for sure it has worked on others. However, it’s been 10 years since we’ve even been in the same room, probably longer. I’m guessing her body count is higher now. As I have said before, I’m not the only one. I’m just the youngest.
Editor’s Note:
I wonder how much of my view on money was also tied to the fact that I wasn’t raised to be queer. I was raised to be the perfect wife. My mother was born in 1951 to parents that had extraordinarily stringent gender roles. Fairly certain that my dad did all the budgeting at home because he had to do it at the church, anyway. I don’t think that for my dad it was a “traditional male” thing so much as “I’m genuinely better suited for this task because I do it a lot more often.” If my mother had showed up to the table with any financial skills from her first family, my dad would have let her do it…… but why would her mother or father teach her those things? So, I believe that because my grandfather and my father did all the “money stuff,” she almost assuredly thought I wouldn’t need to know.
Even though I couldn’t have known at the time that the relationship with this older woman would have disastrous effects, I did know the dopamine made me feel good. It was the last thing I wanted up for discussion. trying to keep it on the downlow because we both needed privacy (for good reason had I not been a teen). I used to put notes in her choir folder before she got to church so that no one saw me do it. I was rebelling against the status quo by being authentically myself. I liked the dopamine of being an older woman’s friend because everyone around me just seemed like, well, children. That should have been a clue, but I didn’t know anything to look for- that isolation was a thing.
That last sentence is carrying a lot of weight for me right now, because it’s a double entendre. Isolation is a thing that abusers do (no matter the delivery), and isolation in which my sensory issues are at a minimum is more comfortable for me, anyway. In short, easy target. It was also quite easy for another lesbian to tell I was one, so I’m sure that part of me being so young was getting to rescue this lost little sheep. In some ways, she did. But what stays with me today is just how much she didn’t want me until someone else did.
This was a running theme over my entire time in Portland, because we had lots of friends through church where all of a sudden it seemed like a competition. From her friends, it was the pissing contest of “we know her better than you.” From her, it was jealousy because she thought they did like me better than her. Neither of those things were ever true. So, eventually I made friends with people she had no connection to, and I was lucky if I got an “all call” party invite. When I wasn’t in her inner circle, I wasn’t part of the drama, and I liked it that way. It made life easier to regulate emotionally when I wasn’t letting her pull my strings.
There were so many good reasons for our privacy in the beginning that it overshadowed all the bad ones. I don’t know how many queer friends she had, but she’s the only one I’d met up unto that point.
So, my first model of an adult lesbian relationship was someone who wanted to have her cake and eat it, too. Someone to love and adore her at home, and a person that partner at home absolutely should be worried about, because if there’s a problem in your relationship, she won’t tell you. She’ll find a woman like me, one that absolutely loves to show their friends they love them by listening to them…… and start overwhelming them with dopamine immediately so that she has a shoulder to cry on when she needs you, but you don’t. What you will get is a lot of empty words and promises until she’s in the shit again and doesn’t currently have that person. You are not her first choice and you know it, but you have to pretend it doesn’t matter.
I’ve known her twice as long as her wife, and I could have taught her a lot if my emotional abuser hadn’t programmed her to think of me as causing trouble in her life. That’s because when she left Houston, she didn’t need me anymore and the story she told me never matched up. That of course I should move to Portland. Get out of Texas. It would be good for you. Just a million and one reasons telling me I should go out there, including visiting several times before I actually moved so that I knew more people than just her by the time I got there.
If we had only written letters about this, I would say simply that “love letters are the campaign promises of the soul.” But this was over the phone and in person. I have a feeling that she actually wasn’t really uncomfortable until I did move, because she couldn’t keep telling her partner and I a different story every day…… but she could if I was only an occasional letter or a call. For instance, her partner actually said to me, “you need to get over your issues with her because it’s like you’re just carrying all that shit in a bag.” She said this a propos of nothing, so I don’t even know what she was saying I needed to get over. All I know is that it wasn’t accurate, whatever it was.
Her partner is older than my dad, therefore I was never right in the history of our relationship. That’s because when I was 14 and she was 25, she was still basically a kid as well. It was easier to see herself as equal to me. In the years we didn’t live in the same city, the power dynamic changed twice over, because part of realizing that she was so much older was realizing she was almost equidistant in age between us. So, I said something she disagreed with, she would turn to the “adultier adult” and they’d both take me down. Meanwhile, she was playing both sides. Her partner was responding out of the information she knew about me secondhand, not anything said between her wife and me when she wasn’t in the room. If I got close, the conversation was engineered away.
I seriously don’t know anything about budgeting. Not my forte. For me, that entire relationship was about learning to conserve my energy. That every time she said “jump,” I didn’t have to. I should have been allowed to take up room. I was abandoned in the same city the way I felt abandoned when she left Houston. At least when she left Houston there was a reason for it.
It all seemed nonsensical as to why this was happening when we both lived in the same town until I realized that if I had a conference with 10 other doctors regarding her medical history and my experiences, not one of them would walk out thinking I hadn’t been taken in by a narcissist.
Now, I am exploring all of the things that make me attracted to emotional unavailability because I’ve realized how detrimental it can be. I want emotional honesty or I want to move on. I have had too much of being used and abused by people who can’t talk about their feelings. That’s not what made me say “narcissistic personally disorder,” though. It’s the round-the-clock schedule she’s got going of lovebomb/discard.
It’s scary how quickly you can go from “you’re my best friend” to “do I know you?” That’s because you won’t be in a relationship with her for very long. You just think you will. That’s why we don’t have any mutual friends left. Her castoffs generally gave me their story, but not because they wanted me to know it. They wanted me to be an intercessory of sorts, as if I had the power to help anything. I just listened and sympathized, but the “maybe you could talk to her” was implied. I get it. If you’re a nobody, having a powerful person who also has a solo-quality voice that wows you is a lot to lose.
It just took them all a long time to learn that they didn’t lose anything. They regained their sanity. Their “friendships” weren’t this murky blur of of moments were you thought it was kind of seductive, but you could have been wrong…. maybe it’s just your mind playing tricks on you.
That was my school experience from 7th grade on- trying to learn and in a monotropic thought process, stuck a moment and couldn’t get out of it.
So, as a result, now I’m learning a lot of the finer points of money when I’ve never thought about it at all. I didn’t have room.
Are you patriotic? What does being patriotic mean to you?
I am extremely patriotic, but there’s a lot of this country who wouldn’t see it that way. Al Franken wrote about my kind of patriotism in “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right” (one of my favorite books since 2003, and if I were you I’d get the audiobook because he reads it). I’d thought something like this for a very long time, he just said it more eloquently than I could. I’ll paraphrase him because I don’t have a copy of the book anymore.
He said that Republicans seem to love America like children. To criticize anything means that you’re not a good American because everything America does is good and right. Democrats seem to love America like adults, that we’re calling out bad behavior that needs to be changed. We can think we live in a pretty great country and also admit there are problems. It’s costing us, because we argue like rabbis.
You can tell the difference by the types of media we watch. Both MSNBC and I will call out the president when they deserve it. Fox News viewers think that every Republican is perfectly perfect in every way, as evidenced by the fact that they’re still fuming about Hunter Biden, the 2016 election being stolen, and classified documents on a small scale.
Biden and Pence both had a few, both gave them back- no harm, no foul. At no time did they try to flush them down a toilet or hide them in the bathroom. Where the cult part comes in is that everyone else in the Republican Party has become a persona non grata because apparently Trump is the only one capable of running the country and they’re choosing to ignore 91 indictments (so far). I called him a bunch of names the other day, and I left out “rapist.” The E. Jean Caroll case is just one more thing that Republicans will sweep under the rug, because the party has one message. It’s simple, and that’s how they win.
Republicans are not interested in subtlety or nuance, which is why soundbites work on them, and why they’re in lockstep instead of working out issues amongst themselves. Seriously, when was the last time you ever saw a Republican in the media arguing about a plan for anything? When do they contribute to the discussion at all? Even if there was no bipartisanship, I would still expect ideas to originate on both sides. The plan for the last, I don’t know, 30 years? has been that the Republicans will say no to everything the Democrats put forth without ever putting anything on the table of their own. Their only job is to stonewall.
Republicans, you have to ask yourselves if this is really what you want from a political party. You have absolutely no voice in Congress, because the people you elect are just running out the clock. They don’t give a shit about you. If they did, your concerns would be on the floor of the House and Senate as well…… because Republicans would have actually come up with something on their own. You think you have elected “the best and the brightest,” when really it’s “the petulant and the indolent.”
Yes, part of it is laziness. Why wouldn’t it be if you’re only there to say “no?” You should wonder what they’re doing with all that free time instead of their own policies.
Name five Republicans you think are actually capable of running the country that are in the line of succession. “Designated Survivor” was a hyped up TV show, but the title absolutely is a real thing during the State of the Union. Name a Republican you’d want in that spot should disaster happen. I can think of one person, and that’s because the Republicans don’t like her, either. The Republicans are going to rue the day they kicked Mary Cheney out of their little cult.
I could also put up with Mitt Romney (keeping in mind that this is a fictional exercise), because he’s not as conservative as he had to be in order to get elected president. I really thought we were going to get universal health care back then, because it was such a raging success in Massachusetts, and he was the governor through all of it.
To be perfectly frank, the most surprising part of the rise of Trump is how many well-respected Republicans drank the Kool-Aid as fast as the ones who’s already earned my Molly Ivins death stare.
I have faith in two people out of a cast of hundreds, and neither of them will ever be elected again, unless Mary Cheney becomes a Democrat, and I’m serious because she can have a vote in Congress and that’s great. But Independents rarely win because they need the funding of the party. If nothing else, I hope she does it because she’s way, way more conservative than I am, but we need everyone who has had their blinders ripped off on our side, and I mean everyone. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” I think that was Abraham Lincoln, who could speak in complete sentences and managed to be a good Republican in spite of it.
The Democrats have a long history of racism, and I feel that now we’re the only ones who are struggling with it. Everyone else wants to sweep it under the rug because of course they do. No one wants to acknowledge that there’s an equal shot we’ll end up reflecting “The Handmaid’s Tale” as stumbling toward Panem….. and I am not Jennifer Lawrence.
This is because systemic racism and wanting to change it is a very, very violent proposition in this country, but luckily it’s a minority. It has just gotten more popular to be openly racist and violent because the Republicans have been quietly supporting the system until Trump came along and it wasn’t so quiet anymore.
I do not know what to think of this for my country, because on one hand, it’s terrible and I wish I had the power to turn off the neckbands that seem like jewelry until they make your head explode…. which is the problem entirely. Trump has his entire base by the short and curlies without a single shred of evidence he can actually do the fucking job.
Democrats are tasked with trying to keep the country together so that Trump doesn’t get a second shot at trying to become Hitler. Again, I do not believe that Trump is Adolf Hitler in his later years. I just believe that Trump has learned a lot about fascism from him (see also Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping). I don’t know if he’s actually read “Mein Kampf” or not, but he certainly loves politicians who’ve taken the same route that book laid out. Otherwise, how would a know-nothing idiot be able to get people to follow him?
By ignoring all the laws and congressional procedures and focusing on telling people that their problems were Mexicans and Arabs….. only the two cultures I’ve found to be the most welcoming. I would love to go to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria (particularly because Damascus is meaningful to me for Biblical reasons), and even Saudi Arabia (because I want to see where Franklin lived and worked, not that I’m interested in Saudi itself).
That’s because I know that for the average Arab, when I showed up at their house they would literally feed me until I exploded and then ask why I didn’t eat that much. Here, have some pie. I am not worried about what their government thinks of me, because I’m probably not going to meet them personally. If I’m going to Iran, I hope it’s to meet a Persian grandmother who will pass on her secrets because it won’t get back to her friends that I have her recipe and they don’t. 😉
I’m bad at transitions, and I would still move to Mexico in a heartbeat. My sister and brother-in-law feel the same way. Lindsay and I have both been to Enseñada, and she and Matt go to Mexico City all the time, one of their favorite cities in the world. It would actually be a good move for me to go to Mexico, because I think I could make more of my inheritance there than I could here. However, I would have to rent because only Mexicans by blood/birth have the right to purchase property. It’s similar to Hawaii, where you can only get a 99 year lease. What I know for sure is that I would freak out at the transition at first, but the pace of life is so different that I might adjust easier. Who knows? What I do know is that I already know enough Spanish to have simple conversations, and the more I spend in immersion, the more I remember from past trips and high school Spanish.
I am so grateful to my church in Sugar Land when I was a teenager, because if we hadn’t moved there, I wouldn’t speak Spanish nearly as well as I do (which even that much makes me feel like a toddler, but it’ll get better). This is because I took my first year of Spanish at HSPVA, and my second year at Clements. Loved one teacher, hated the other. I won’t say which was which. Then, in the summer between PVA and Clements, I went on a mission trip to Reynosa (our hotel was in McAllen). Because I’d just come out of first year Spanish, being immersed reminded me of Matthew and Bryn, who were and/or are lifeguards (and siblings, so that’s why it sounds the same coming from both of them). This is because it was a very short leap from a swim coach saying “do your bubbles… do your bubbles” to “hope you don’t drown.”
By the time I came back from Mexico, I was sold. I could do this whole Spanish thing. Interestingly enough, I don’t have conversation issues in Mexico because I know that there’s no reason to write anything down. I have to dance with them what brung me. I can’t disappear into my writing personality with them.
Then I got to my second year of Spanish, where my teacher and I both hated each other. That’s because she was so frustrated by my performance, and why it went up and down. In retrospect, it’s because only half the grades given were over conversations in person. The rest was writing. I had to study Spanish for a little while to learn that what she was looking for was more formal than I’d learned in Reynosa and Progreso.
My sentence structure was all wrong, and I’m sure to some degree it still is. However, our job that week in Mexico during the summer before the first semester at Clements was to put on what we in the States would call “vacation Bible school.” Just fun activities for the kids who are so poor they don’t get much play time.
Also, I’m not an ordained minister in a major denomination who preaches every week… though I can do some stuff; I got ordained in the Church of the Latter Day Dude to do Bryn’s wedding, which ended up being very Methodist/Episcopalian while also taking out the religion aspect and tailoring it to the couple.
It absolutely worked, because it was formal enough to feel like you’d been married by someone who did their homework, when in reality the most embarrassing thing about it was having to pay for ordination instead of earn it.
This is an aside, but I think one of the reasons my church plant wasn’t a success was because of a really old tape that I didn’t think to work out in therapy when I was young. That tape is “the Methodists kicked me out, so why would anyone else want me?” It wasn’t logical because I was 15, and I did meet other Christian lesbians who were ordained. By then, I had imposter syndrome.
The only reason I had the courage to come up with an idea for a homeless ministry in Silver Spring is that I got over my fear by preaching at my church in Oregon. I have never in my life asked to preach a sermon, but I was not the same preacher at 16 that I was at 24 or 5. It all ties together, my friends. The people on the trip told me that even though I wasn’t ordained, I had to do the sermon at the closing worship service because no one else knew enough Spanish. So, the second semester at Clements was harder than the first because my teacher was so frustrated and angry that I got Cs all semester and then a 95 on the final. She called my dad in so fast.
Now, my dad wasn’t a bully to my teachers, ever, because he actually knew I was fallible……….. but at the same time, he held them accountable and never lost a thing any of them said because he’d write in his notebook throughout the meeting and have the teacher sign it if it was accurate. I really liked that because it made both my teacher and me live up to a bargain instead of a lose-lose situation…. which Spanish was, because since I’d only studied hard with a tutor who unlocked writing for me (people who know her, Nancy Wells saved my ass) it didn’t seem possible that I was capable of an A and there was no way to prove it except to give me a second exam, and for some reason she didn’t think of that. She just fumed like she knew I’d gotten away with something and I was glad there was only a couple of weeks of school left, and no more required Spanish.
I won’t let you go, I just wait to see whether I’m a priority in your life because I don’t always want to be the one that initiates contact. I don’t want to be around you if I always feel like I’m nagging to get a simple answer out of you, or afraid to contact you because I feel like I’m bothering you rather than showing care. I wait to see if you show interest when I put something out there, just receiving you if you show up. I am able to do that so easily because I’m a writer. All artists have an easier time turning their attention away from obsessing over a problem when they can get it out.
My blog is ridiculously personal because what I have learned over my entire life is that no one will be honest with you if you’re not honest with them first. It’s what art is supposed to do- it’s supposed to make you feel something. However, I do not think of your reaction as my responsibility. It is your right to state your opinion and decide whether you’re owed an apology or not, because I do believe in freedom of speech, I just have limits.
For instance, I will never get any more specific about Zac’s other partners than I have been now. The one I was talking about in a previous entry likes coffee mugs and Diet Dr Pepper, like most of America. However, they do not get to be “characters” here except in the most vague of terms because I don’t directly talk to them and I don’t write hearsay. I talk to Zac, and our relationship is completely separate and apart from anything else in his life. I feel like that’s a small reason it’s easy for us to open up to each other.
He absolutely can tell me things in confidence (about our personal relationship- I keep saying that because he’s civilian intelligence M-F and Navy Reserves intelligence in his copious amounts of spare time). I just stand next to him with a “dumb yet excited” look on my face. The thing about government agencies, no matter which one, is that they look impressive and intimidating all at once. My favorite is the black and white seal on the floor at Langley, and for a long time my desktop wallpaper was a hi-def shot of the custodian mopping it. It was a reminder to me that even though people like George Lazenby, Martin Freeman, Daniel Craig, Melissa McCarthy, Piper Perabo, and Jennifer Garner make it look exciting, at the end of the day it’s still just a regular floor.
People accuse me of being a drooling fangirl (:::stares in Lindsay and Zachary:::), but that’s impossible if you really study the history of the agency. My favorite era so far is the space race, which shows up in everything from “For All Mankind” to “The Queen’s Gambit.”
“What part of the State Department did you say you were from?”
I have no doubt that CIA is trying to stop nuclear war right now. Whether the bombs are small or large, either Russia or The Middle East will have absolutely no problem with pushing the big red button. Also, it just occurred to me. You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel. You know who doesn’t? Palestine. Listen to me when I say that Benjamin Netanyahu does not give even half a shit how many Israelis die as long as it means “beating Palestine.” Palestine might be able to handle rocket launchers, rocks, etc. It remains to be seen whether nuclear threat is on the table, I’m just saying I wouldn’t be surprised.
If nothing else, I think there’s going to be sort of a second movie like “13 Days,” where when the op is declassified the movie will show just how close Russia came to nuking the Ukraine or just how close Israel came to nuking Palestine- or just how close Iran got to figuring out how to make them on their own.
The other thing that makes the space race really interesting to me is that it wasn’t about discovery or hope or any of that Camelot bullshit. CIA was receiving legitimate chatter that the Russians’ plan after winning the space race was to put nuclear weapons on the moon. That’s why we were relentless in getting it done, why the “computers” saved our asses, why Houston is so dear to me, and Star City as well. Star City has been treating my Houstonians like warm friends for years now.
There were many, many Russians who became our assets in country, and many of them died for us, especially when Aldrich Ames gave the Russians all their names.
That did not stop private Russian citizens from helping us, because they ultimately thought they were helping Russia by stopping the Cuban Missile Crisis as well. It came down to some people who gave us Russian intelligence, and one very brave man, and no doubt the person on which “Crimson Tide” is based. The Russians were locked and loaded, and this man saved all our lives:
Thankfully, the captain didn’t have sole discretion over the launch. All three senior officers had to agree, and Vasili Arkhipov, the 36-year-old second captain and brigade chief of staff, refused to give his assent. He convinced the sub’s top officers that the depth charges were indeed meant to signal B-59 to surface — there was no other way for the US ships to communicate with the Soviet sub — and that launching the nuclear torpedo would be a fatal mistake. The sub returned to the surface, headed away from Cuba, and steamed back toward the Soviet Union.
Thank you, Russia. We really owe you an apology for thinking you were Gene Hackman instead of Denzel Washington.
Depending on the operation (because you can’t and shouldn’t agree with all of them), it’s an apt metaphor for The Company. For instance, there have been many times that CIA has gone into a situation and rescued people exactly like the houseguests, as huge a mop job yet completely unnoticed. Case officers don’t win awards in public. On the other hand, CIA has had misstep after misstep since 1947. Trying to overthrow governments, trying to kill Castro, the government giving the torture program to CIA when it never should have happened in the first place, etc.
I don’t love CIA like the Republicans, where everything mommy and daddy says is correct
That summer was when my dad decided to leave professional ministry and just become a member at his own church, somewhere he could be anonymous. We ended up at St. Martin’s Episcopalian, which is how I got to meet George H.W. Bush and James Baker III. Because the story of how Jonna Mendez “masked up” to show Bush how their new technologies worked, I kidded her in person that we had mutual friends. And in fact, the first time I saw James Baker, it was because he was taking up way too much damn room on a pew and my stepmom told him to move over like four times. She didn’t know who he was, but it doesn’t matter. It’s church. There’s no hierarchy as much as your admin board might think there is. I have noticed from some pastors that money tends to grease the wheel. It’s not politics, it’s gratitude. It takes some real hustle when you work in a cathedral, because generally those buildings are old as shit. Renovating the pipe organ at National Cathedral is literally going to be 14 million dollars, because I looked it up on their web site. And that’s just ONE of the multimillion dollar projects they have to have going to conserve the building.
Since we’ve been talking about politics, let me make something clear. Calling it “National Cathedral” is not because it’s supported by taxpayers. It’s because so many state funerals have happened there, as well as memorial services. When it is acting in its formal capacity as the ministers who carry out those services, it ceases to be an Episcopalian congregation and turns ecumenical quickly.
In reality, what I’ve noticed over time is that it’s a bunch of social justice warriors who show up every Sunday, and they generally only have to use one part of the sanctuary for that because of course they don’t fill up the whole thing each week. It seems to have two modes, and it’s every bit as drastic a change as being a Transformer™ and being a trans person. 😉 This is because every Sunday of its life, “National Cathedral” is actually a smallish congregation named “St. Alban’s.” It’s just that sometimes thousands and thousands of people show up, like Easter comes more than once a year. My dad was particularly good at that on a smaller scale. Making an event at church that people didn’t want to miss and it didn’t matter what you believed or which church you attended. It was community building, not evangelism.
It’s funny, I’ve evangelized more to atheists than I have to anyone else, and not because I’m trying to change them. I’m trying to change their perception of me. Do you know how hard it is to get an atheist to believe you’re not part of the “What Would Jesus Bomb?” shitshow? I don’t give a shit what others believe, because as Pete Rollins so beautifully said, “A/Theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash.” (I heard Pete on “The Robcast.”)
I loved the four episodes called “Pete Rollins on God” that they’re the only four podcast episodes on my cloud drive………………….. and absolutely nothing about my rabid love for that podcast miniseries comes from the fact that when Rollins said that quote, it was one of the sexiest things I’d ever heard; he has an absolutely gorgeous Irish lilt. I could listen to him read the phone book. If you subscribe to The Robcast, all four parts are still in the archives.
I feel I have to explain something. By saying that a/theism is the greatest love story ever told, I do not mean to endorse The Crusades, colonialism, white supremacy, etc. I am saying that the question has always intrigued and eluded philosophers and therefore the argument was the only one we studied all semester in Logic I. However, it wasn’t pushing a religious agenda like you’d think in a Texas school. The first half was spent proving God exists. The second half was proving that they don’t.
It is not logically possible either way in the language with which logic is encoded. P and Q statements, all that. Basically, you believe or you don’t. To what degree is malleable, because I believe agnostic is just as valid as atheism, probably because most things in my life are a spectrum. We are not all programmed to see in black and white like Fox News.
Therefore, I cannot offend anyone with my views on God because I am giving the most pious and the most godless freedom to be them. It’s all valid, because I didn’t say that God does or does not exist, because I can’t remember how to do it now, but I used to be able to write it out like math. If my friend Jesse sees this, I’m sure he could tell me, because his dad taught in the same department as my professor. I’m betting Jesse picked up a thing or two about philosophy and the symbols to express it.
Atheists also cannot argue with gathering together for community. To have someone to lean on when you’re in a crisis or whether you’re protesting the Iraq war…. which I did. Many times. If I had been in Portland during those marches, I certainly would have been gassed. That’s because protesting in Portland is, a lot of the time, how we socialize as a church. We have to have breaks between the chants, catching our breaths because we are also walking. That’s when discussion turns to things like Angela’s mom, Grant’s child, Amy’s granddaughter. I don’t know that it helps God to know that I’m praying for them, but it certainly makes me spend time empathizing with what they’re going through. If I can analyze what the problem is while I’m praying, I can help support people through it…….. because that’s how prayer works.
I learned all this when a friend checked herself into rehab and I went apeshit because we were so close. I wanted to be there at every family day, every open meeting, etc. At first it was because I was worried about her. Then, it was “this is better than church.” On the serious. It’s sort of like being at a Quaker meeting, it seems, because there are lots of “sermonettes” and an unshakable commitment to God.
AA is not religious at all. If you don’t have a God, find one. What you need is a higher power, not evangelism, especially if you weren’t religious before. No, what you need is something to get your ego out of the way. You might not be able to believe in a god or gods, but you can believe in your child being your higher power. Your spouse. Your parents and siblings, your co-workers, basically everyone in your life who is trying to tell you that the common denominator is you. If you can’t believe in those things because you’re single, I don’t care if your God is Dr Pepper and donuts.
“Look, I don’t want to get into a semantic argument, I just want the protein.”
That’s because when you acknowledge that you are not the center of the universe and just a piece of it, you become startlingly aware of just how much you’ve touched other people’s lives and how makes you sick to your stomach.
Flat out AA does a better job of healing people than church. FLAT OUT. There is no way for a church to dig that deep with you unless they’re really committed to it. I know you see AA meetings at churches all the time, but that’s because they rent the room in the church so people who aren’t members don’t feel uncomfortable. The only time I’ve really dug deep with other parishioners is when we did a six week grief course together. No one had died, I was just in grief because I’d broken up with Kathleen and moved, trauma jointly and severally. And in fact, most of us were there for divorce support.
It’s where politics fades away, and how we’d solve a lot of problems in this country. If we stopped training ourselves to only show our pretty parts on social media, it will cut down on the amount of time people spend doing it in real life. I honestly think that life has imitated art, because we don’t make time for care and connection in groups. We make time to sit on the couch and look at our friends without checking in. Time goes by and you haven’t responded to anything they’ve sent, because you’re neurodivergent or just busy or whatever the case may be. And then it becomes the guilt of not responding rather than just saying “you haven’t fallen off my priority list. I just don’t have time right now because for as much as I adore you, my X has to take precedence.”
I do not object to those words in the slightest, but I’ll run pretty fast if you don’t get back to me for months, because I want to ascertain whether you’re contacting me because you enjoy me or whether you’ve decided that you needed something from me; you had to reach out in a pinch. If you have contacted me because you only needed something from me and aren’t interested in true friendship, I don’t want to repeat a pattern I’ve had since childhood. I will not let myself fall into a campaign to prove my worth when I’m getting a trickle’s worth of love when I deserve a fire hose, and because of community, to be able to return that love just as “bigly.” It’s always been my “strategery.”
I would bet a great many people in my life wish I was a painter. Do they not know that a picture is worth a thousand words? A gallery of my art might give me more blowback, not less. 🙄 😅
I get out my pain onto canvas just the same. I use whatever language I want because this is not Facebook. This is church. This is AA. This is a real account of what’s happening in my life, what has happened. These entries are as intimate as anything I’ve ever share in a meeting.
I won’t let you go, I’m just waiting to see whether I’m a priority in your life because I don’t always want to be the one that initiates contact. I don’t want to be around you if I always feel like I’m nagging to get a simple answer out of you, receiving you when you show up.
I remember when I wanted that life, because as an INFJ, you know you have a lock on it because you’ve read everything you can find about that personality type and they all end up as social workers, teachers, writers, ministers, and anything else that needs the wisdom of people who have been a thousand years old since the nurse laid their baby in their arms.
However, I am not kidding when I say that the dream died with my mother for two reasons. The first is that I am a completely different person than I was before she died.
I am not willing to go back into “show mode” in order not to get my crazy spatter on other people for the rest of my life. “Show mode” has done nothing for me except to convince people I am perfectly normal….. “you don’t look autistic.”
I don’t often publish anything without running it through Google Translate, because even if I can’t read every word, I know enough to know when Google is being too formal, but I did get the idea right. When I went on that first mission trip, I still knew more Spanish than everyone else, so I was asked to give the closing message. It was terrible, according to my friend Mikal who understood me, but my mother cried, as she always did during my sermons….. however, this time it was just watching my face because she didn’t understand a thing….. except me.
The reason the second semester was harder than the first is that I also went to Reynosa/Progreso for Christmas break, again being immersed, so then my performance was really up and down because I could understand some conversations better than others because I’d had to use those words before. I honestly don’t think she did a very good job of asking me about my trip. I could have told her all about the fact that Hector and Fabiola were getting married soon, that they had been sweethearts for a number of years. Did I want a lemonade?” Etc. I think if she’d ever offered to spend some time with me after school (she flat out told us she couldn’t do that), she would have seen that I was doing fine in her class, but I wasn’t, because I was ACTUALLY speaking Spanish for days at a time with no problem at all. I love and fear Spanish all at once. It’s a much easier language than English, much harder to put yourself out there when you know you suck. However, in Mexico, I’d just gently be corrected and told the right words. I never got a C.
I have also never experienced prejudice against white people in Mexico, especially if you show that you’re making an effort to speak their language and fit into their culture rather than the typical American who expects everything to be the same. It’s the attitude of an Imperialist dictator who loves his country the way people love their mommy and daddy. It can do no wrong because I say it can’t.
Meanwhile, the smart people are talking less and less. The people of color get arrested more…….. and not just because of prejudice. Felons can’t vote, and black people aren’t a monolith but tend to lean Democratic. This is not about locking up black people in its entirety. This is about a more complex, disgusting way to limit voters at the polls. It’s not the whole issue, but it doesn’t hurt. People who are racist are generally Republican, but they weren’t the party that was always known for it. The realignment of the parties started in the ’70s because back then the Democrats were the party of the Deep South. Slowly, the parties started crossing over until the Deep South was solidly blue. Then, in the 80s, the white supremacy Jesus apologizers took over the Republican party, though they were warned. They just didn’t care. They turned their whole party into supposedly loving the Bible and screwing poor people every chance they got.
I would say that this is the thing that should be in the United Methodist Discipline under “incompatible with Christian teaching” instead of homosexuality.
So let’s bring it back around:
I love my country like an adult, because it gives me enough access to history that I can actually have an informed grasp of how this all works. In short, we are all but Citizens of Locker C, yet half of us are begging for Trump’s watch….. old and busted. The Republicans’ biggest problem is that they all know he’s a nutjob and can’t figure out how to get elected without him, so they just clench their teeth and do nothing. They couldn’t find “the new hotness” with both hands.
It’s time to tell them they’re fired because they can’t even manage to finish a coloring book, much less a bill. I honestly think that the reason Trump did everything through executive order is that he didn’t know how to introduce legislation. People have lost touch with the reality of what this job takes, and how it’s not about them. They can go off and have their little cult in the woods, because a man got elected who didn’t know the first thing about government. I doubt he’s been past sixth grade social studies/civics.
This entire essay is all connected, because it’s all about how my faith has influenced my politics for many years. How my young life has shaped me as an adult. How the Trump era was when I finally realized that I was old enough to have an opinion and as long as it stayed in my space, where I owned it and wasn’t hogging a conversation, why not? I don’t want there to be a chance there’s a criminal in The White House, and I am mystified as to why anyone would.
Why were so many people willing to gloss over Trump’s role in convicting The Central Park Five? Why wasn’t making fun of the neurodivergent kid not the end of it? Pretty sure “grab them by the pussy” on tape during a campaign if there wasn’t something about Obama that was off-putting and they just couldn’t put their fingers on it. Racism and sexism won Trump the election, because people have hated Hilary Clinton for some unfathomable reason since the 80s. She started the ball rolling on universal health care with the Patients’ Bill of Rights, so instead of seeing that she started it and Obama finished it, they’re mad at better health care and mad that a woman dared run for office, especially one that was already very unpopular and shouldn’t she know it?
I am going to bet that for 99.99999% of you, you’ll never meet the head of state in another country. A lot of you, if you look up how many passports are active, will never even leave the US to be able to compare it to anything else.
Which leads to things like thinking Obama is not American because most people don’t actively think of Hawaii as a state. It was easy to convince lots and lots of people that either Hawaii wasn’t a state, Obama’s birth certificate was forged on the date so that Hawaii wasn’t a state yet, or forged in the “Place of Birth” field because he was actually born in Kenya.
Trump’s biggest scandal is that he committed high crimes and misdemeanors and blackmailed Ukraine. Obama’s big scandal was wearing a tan suit (I’m being facetious, but still….. Obama’s biggest scandal was blinking on Syria, but he’s the kind of person that knew it and apologized. I can’t imagine Trump knowing himself well enough to know when he owes an apology to anyone. If you’re a narcissist, everyone owes an apology to you.
I also hate broken campaign promises…. just one.
The only campaign promise I’m really pissed about is that there aren’t taco trucks on every corner.
And because I’m not a complete monster, I’m not going to make you sit through all my political opinions without a reward.
It’s a picture of Oliver, who is a dog. He’s dressed up for Valentine’s Day and I asked Zac if I could post it.
If there was a biography about you, what would the title be?
I think this is kind of a weird prompt for me now, because since WordPress actually gave me the statistic that I wrote 614,000 words in 2023, there are six autobiographies about me already. And that’s just one year.
I did start an autobiography once, but I didn’t take it seriously enough. My own doctors, dad, and stepmom told me that using the work of Susan Barry to induce stereopsis on myself wouldn’t work. I tried for a few weeks, and the only thing I noticed the whole time that was actually in 3D was that I could see both sides of my nose at once. I called the book “Staring at Myself.”
That being said, I might go after it again because I don’t see how it’s impossible yet. That’s because there’s been a couple of movies with 3D effects that did work on me. One at EPCOT Center (Muppets 4D) and one at Wizarding World of Harry Potter, but I don’t remember what ride. That means I can’t see red/blue stereopsis, but if it comes in a different form, then it’s open to me.
In both instances I saw a 3D movie, I cried. I was a freshman or sophomore in high school at EPCOT, and I can’t remember the year for WWHP, but not so long ago. Within the last 10 years, at least.
What I do know is that it was before JK Rowling burned down her legacy by bullying trans kids over the Internet. Trans kids know horrible people all the time, but not generally people who’ve written a book about full acceptance first.
Otherwise, Lindsay and I might not have been so keen to go there. We loved the rest of the park, too, because we got to go on rides with themes like “ET,” “Jurassic Park,” and “The Simpsons.” I also got my picture taken in SpongeBob’s pineapple house.
“Why don’t you just buy a ticket to see the places you love on TV?”
“How’m I gonna get a ticket to Bikini Bottom?”
We did the MGM thing because we’d already done Disney before- just not together. I’d been on a high school trip with my orchestra, and I don’t remember when Lindsay went, but both of us have been to Disney World. I don’t believe anyone in our family has been to Disneyland. I hear good things, though.
I’m a daredevil and I love roller coasters. Therefore, going to a different Disney park sounds great. At some point, I hope to make it to Six Flags here. Kathleen and Dana have both planned trips with me to King’s Dominion, and neither panned out.
But there’s so much hope because at least now I live in the general area again. My trip with Dana was based on her parents living in the general area as well. I remember the first time I saw a picture of her here after we broke up was hilarious because I was so fake indignant that she was wearing my “Regular Show” belt. She loved that belt, so there was no actual ire. She stole it from me almost as soon as I bought it.
Because there are no pictures of me actually wearing it, I will tell you it looked better on me and you cannot prove otherwise. 😛
These are all the funny things that should go in my book about myself, and I’m trying to drag those things out of myself as well. Because this can’t be therapy all the time. It will sound like I’m a morose person, when I’m not. I use this space to work out what makes me happy and what doesn’t, so I can surround myself with those things.
I am sharp and funny in person, because I know myself so well. Again, I wrote six books about myself last year. If I didn’t learn anything about myself, I wasn’t paying attention. But so many entries are built on analyzing what I’ve said before to work it out in my own head makes me feel secure in my connections. They can’t rattle me the way they used to, because I might not know what to do in a conflict, but I do know where my heart/conscience lie. There are so many unknowns working with other people, but there’s a benefit to knowing what you’ll tolerate and what you won’t.
The moment I realized it was over with Supergrover was the moment she said that she wanted me to find people who brought good things into my life and didn’t give me issues. To me, that said that she was never going to resolve any conflicts with me and this would be our life. Her avoidance and my need to clear things up ad nauseam until we died.
While we actually needed to lean on each other because every time I’ve stepped over the line, she’s had to contact me to tell me to back it up. I finally got it through her head not to do that anymore, because she couldn’t have it both ways. She couldn’t push me away and then critique me. It made me think that she was interested in resolving things every single time. My heart would be full of hope, and it was dashed every single time.
I take responsibility for being angry about that, and not using the appropriate words for nearly anything. Doesn’t make my side of the story untrue. They were my experiences of her, not her experiences of me. She fucked me up. Just slaughtered me emotionally, then threw a bomb over her shoulder and walked away.
She has the right to do that; she doesn’t have the right to say I should be happy about that.
My crush on her gave her a good excuse to walk away when she absolutely couldn’t, because she needed a clear connection to me in order to say the things she needed to say without me jumping to any conclusions that weren’t there.
But she wouldn’t talk about that.
Too scary.
Go find other friends.
I hate her for it. Just fucking hate her. But not all day, every day. She’s not worth the energy anymore, because there’s no percentage in it. She doesn’t get the right to rattle me out of my skin because I’m bad at transitions. She can’t drop in and out like a Disneyland dad.
And that’s because of her side of the story, not mine. She can blame everything she wants on me. To her, I can be the biggest judgmental dickhead on earth and I don’t give a flying fuck. This is because if she’s angry and bitter and all of those things, she’s sitting in them because she won’t resolve it, not because not talking about it leads to anything good.
So, she can go be bitter and angry all on her own, because she’s the type person that would rather be bitter and angry about something until she died rather than be open about her feelings. If we’d had even one knock-down drag-out in person that could have lasted long enough to put all our issues on the table and come to resolution in the end, we’d both be a lot happier, jointly and severally.
But, she went on the attack in order not to be vulnerable, and then she told me that she never would. It was a message I couldn’t ignore, because over time the dropping in and out became a cat and mouse game that she insisted wasn’t there. That’s because her dopamine doesn’t go up and down when she talks to me, so she doesn’t feel like a Disneyland dad, and can’t imagine feeling that way in empathy towards me, so she thinks nothing of dropping in when to me, it’s everything. And that’s as much as I’ll ever be able to say about it.
She absolutely took her turn in fucking up my life to a degree I’ll never get back. So, to blame everything that went wrong in our relationship on me is ridiculously unfair, but it is what it is.
I looked absolutely insane to the whole goddamn world because people could only understand my side of the story. I wasn’t allowed to tell absolutely any of hers. Therefore, I just had to look crazy and not give a shit that I did, all the while dying inside because of the perception of me, because it didn’t matter what the perception of me was. It couldn’t.
So, she’s sitting with the guilt of fucking up my life while also unwilling to open up about it. Telling me to go find new friends was just the shitty icing on top of an already shitty cake because her side of the story is not something I can share. So, I can’t talk to her and I can’t talk to anyone else.
Fuck her and the horse she rode in on, and I can only say that now, after having had 10 years to think about it. I owned my shit in front of her and in front of an audience of thousands (legitimately), and a lot of those people were close to me. Still couldn’t talk about it. She pushed me into a corner and just left me there.
Both sides of our story are problematic to each other, yet being in love with someone when it is absolutely inconvenient doesn’t happen logically…. however, it is universal. I could talk about that because it transcended race, culture, creed, everything. Some people may not understand divorce or polyamory, but everyone can understand having feelings that they need to get rid of because they’re threatening or dangerous to your relationship. I do not believe that when you get married, you also become blind.
I also didn’t bullshit Dana in the slightest. I didn’t say things like, “she’s really pretty,” because if I had to list the 10 things about our relationship that make it amazing, it wouldn’t be on the list. It wouldn’t even be in the top twenty.
But it’s still on the list. 😉
I feel like a troll most of the time, so it doesn’t suck that if she stood next to me, it would make me look better by 150%, easily. She also makes beautiful babies, so standing next to them wouldn’t suck, either. I would say the same about her husband, except I don’t know what he looks like.
However, because I do know her, I bet he’s a god- because through her, I’ve found that it’s possible to be both brilliant and the best looking person in the room (just trust me, we’re all trolls next to her). I’ve always imagined that they thought each other was the greatest thing since sliced bread for a long time, and I am overjoyed that she found her person.
I’m just bad at transitions.
Who isn’t when you’re talking about something that is “highly illogical?” I told my heart every day how fucking ridiculous it was and to stop feeling 18 all the time. But if you knew her like I did, it would have been just as impossible for you as it was for me.
What I laid out in front of Dana was not the whole “she’s gorgeous” bit, and Dana knew it. She said that because our relationship was writing, it was more serious because we’d seen each other’s souls.
Her soul and inner world is the first time I’ve ever met anyone who could match me feeling for feeling in terms of not being able to share things, and needing a place to vent where we were both anonymous.
Except she chose the wrong person to open up to for logical reasons, not emotional. The reason I needed her was more important than the reason I needed Dana, but that didn’t become clear to me until Dana smashed my glasses into my face.
Otherwise, I would still be dealing with Dana’s jealousy for Supergrover and me to need ironclad privacy. What wife wouldn’t be jealous of that in a lesbian relationship, especially when I irrationally caught feelings over it. Just because Supergrover didn’t return my feelings didn’t make it less problematic. It made it more, because Dana realized that Supergrover would always be more important than her, and she had to let me go…. but not until we’d had a knock-down drag-out about it.
Supergrover bears no responsibility in why I got hit. Dana and I were not fighting about her, but the amount of time I was willing to devote to both of them and it was so off in the beginning. We hadn’t learned a middle ground, and so she was this specter in our lives, there when she wasn’t there.
I didn’t give up my relationship with Dana for her, but realistically, yes I did. I didn’t want anyone to be able to tell me how I should spend my time, and Supergrover made it where it was impossible for it not to be her as first priority ever again.
And I do mean ever.
So, in a lot of ways, Dana made my decision for me very clear. At that point, I needed Supergrover because I was in so much pain from the fight, both physically and emotionally.
So, she was my first priority for the next 10 years with her participating in the relationship, and for the rest of my life without….. without being able to talk about it with anyone else, either. It’s too private, too us.
The “too us” is what I miss the most.
The closest I can come to describing what happened is “accidental polyamory, but ok……” And even that’s a euphemism for everything I can’t say.
What I’m actually married to and not her personally. Why I wish I could be in the inner circle that her husband is, because of course there are certain times when you want your partner to know something that your friends don’t, and that’s ok. It’s not my place to go through the same emotional experience as him.
However, in her absence, we both love her so much that I wish we could lean on each other. And by now, we’ve both loved her that much for a long time without ever meeting each other. It’s weird, and it’s not. Supergrover has the right to keep as much private as she wants, but that doesn’t mean it helps our relationship.
She does not want to help our relationship, and she hasn’t made the connection that it’s not possible. That we have to have something sustainable and drama-free…. which is exactly what she wants, just without the discomfort of actually addressing anything, ever.
It’s not the right relationship for me, but it has to be. So, fuck all of it, because I don’t know what to do now. I can’t think about it because it’s too painful. I can’t write about it at all, I just have to sit in it…. and you cannot imagine how much I mean I can’t write about it. It’s killing me every day. She has listened to my story over and over, calling me a dictator when I am standing up for myself and just telling her my feelings straight out in hopes of her doing the same.
It worked in the beginning. It doesn’t work now. That’s because she thinks that our only problem is that I’m in love with her. First of all, no I’m not. Second of all, the other problem is not mine. Not mine to carry, not mine to handle, not mine to own. But, she can run from her impressions all she wants. Doesn’t make them accurate.
That’s because she has never once asked me any questions about anything I’ve ever written. She’s never responded with her own story when I’ve laid out mine, because it was easier to get mad and say “you’re just throwing emotional bombs and waiting for the shitstorm to begin, aren’t you?”
No, I’m trying to explain the process of letting go of the wrong things while keeping the right ones. I explain an exhausting, autistic amount for a neurotypical, and she’s a jock and a childhood trauma victim, having learned to cut off her emotions from a very young age to protect herself first and then to accomplish a goal.
I love her the way I love Zac, just platonically and not romantically. That’s because I can’t be specific, but they both have a hard shell and a vulnerable place just for me.
In fact, this weekend Zac and I had all the conversations that are just as uncomfortable as the ones I would or could have with Supergrover on different issues…. but not all of them, because they both have a hard shell and a vulnerability that comes out because I ask for it.
A few weeks ago, one of Zac’s young friends (I think she’s a tween, or about to be) overheard an adult conversation and asked him what a safe word was. I can’t imagine how much of the table died inside except Zac. He is the ultimate person to ask any question about anything, because he’s neurodivergent so he’s good at conversations that need explanations, and we’re kind of kids ourselves so we both can explain very adult things in kids’ terms.
He told her that a safe word was something that was only between people who really trusted each other, and it was either the word to stop or shorthand for “tell me the truth.” The friend said, “I think we should have a safe word, then.” He said, “okay. What do you want it to be?” She said, “lemons.”
He’s also seen Ted Lasso, but is not familiar with it so I didn’t know if he’d remember “Oklahoma.” So, in several discussions this weekend, I said, “Oklahoma. Lemons.” We got more done in becoming closer in 24 hours than I have in years with other people. I’m not poking at Supergrover. I know a lot of people with a hard shell and won’t get vulnerable I make it clear that you being emotionally unavailable is a dealbreaker for me.
I am sorry that seems threatening at first to either Supergrover or Zac, and yet it will never not be true. The difference is that Zac is emotionally mature enough to recognize that his emotional availability is feeding our relationship, and we’re comfortable with it because from the first moment we started talking, we sort of made this “no bullshit” pact.
You have to when you realize that you’ve actually asked out one of your friend’s boyfriends…. or, more accurately, who is a mutual friend with Zac, me, and another person that’s not important enough to mention except that I didn’t want her to know anything about my life anymore, and I didn’t want the mutual friend to say anything.
I should have just contacted the friend and said, “keep it tight,” but I didn’t because I don’t know shit about polyamory. But first, I didn’t know how important it is for everyone in a polycule to know each other, even if they don’t get along because a few times a year, it’s important for us all to support Zac and not have it be about us. We don’t have to get along, we just have to treat each other with respect.
I asked Zac to keep it tight when I shouldn’t have. I hope for my sake he didn’t, because he knew I didn’t know shit- and he would have been smart enough to tell his partner the reason I didn’t want them to know at first. But now, I do want everyone to know me because I’m here to support Zac, just like them.
On the other hand, I didn’t know if it was appropriate to contact the friend, either, because I don’t know how Zac operates with his other partners, just how he operates with me. I didn’t know if it would be breaking a rule somehow.
Although I did call “lemons” with him on some of that stuff because I don’t need to know about his partners. I need to know how he’s feeling. For instance, if he’s feeling low about another relationship, I don’t want to suggest we do anything intense. He can suggest it, but I won’t. By intense I mean going out and doing the thing after we’re already tired.
Our commitment is drill weekends so he’s worked seven days in a row. I know that by the time he gets home from drill, he’s usually into an introvert night. Since I only have housemates and not other partners, I don’t get a lot of affection. I want a kind of night where he’s tired and only wants to hold me. I sleep with him even though I’ve said that I wouldn’t sleep with a partner again because it’s harder for me to go deep enough to sleep well.
But again, it’s about wanting more contact comfort and it’s not every single night. I have decided that I need to start taking sleeping pills at his house, though, because he moves and snores A LOT. If I don’t fall asleep first, I won’t. It’s kind of funny. He dreams like Oliver, who is a dog. When he’s in REM, he kicks like he’s chasing rabbits.
This is uncomfortable because he’s also an octopus. But everything that’s uncomfortable is also everything I love about being with him…. which is why I tease him lovingly.
I hope he doesn’t mind me poking a little fun at him, because our relationship feels so free and easy when it’s back and forth like that. He teases me in person rather than in writing, though. I don’t know why that is. Maybe he’s just not thinking about teasing when he’s writing, but I always am. He’s never let me know that something has cut too deep, but I hope he knows it’s not like I’m afraid of him telling me that. I want to take care of him.
If your partner is really your partner, they want to know the things that bother you…… especially when we see you trying so hard for us. Someone who doesn’t see that isn’t your partner, and staying together becomes harder and harder the longer someone feels unheard. And I am totally talking about my history in relationships here. It’s universally relatable, and luckily, something I don’t struggle with now.
I think part of feeling unheard went into my relationship with Supergrover as well, because basically as soon as we got to Houston one of my mutual friends with Dana who’d known us for a long time in Portland told me to my face that Dana was stepping all over me.
Supergrover treated me like I was important when she’s the one with the big-shot schedule. That dopamine will stay with me for the rest of my life, because for as uncomfortable as I made her by falling in love with her and being open about that, it freed me from a relationship in which my needs went unmet because Dana thought she had a lock on being right. She comes by it honestly…
For as much as it hurt Supergrover to hear that I didn’t just love her, I was in love with her, I needed it to change me. I was never looking to change her. She told me in the beginning that she was stunned and amazed at my emotional bravery. She didn’t like it when I was emotionally brave with her, because it was something she lacked- yet wanted it from me. She wanted to be friends with someone who had what she lacked, but didn’t do much to bridge the gap so that both of us could feel safe and secure in our connection.
Absolutely all of the times she contacted me to resolve something on my blog, the conversation continued long enough for me to need things from her again, and to ask for them. But the moment I did, everything she said came across as “only I am allowed to need things.” She was like, “we can’t just be people out here who respond to your work?”
Of course they can.
But she can’t.
That’s because she thinks she can get friendly with me again without me ever being able to bring up the dark side of our relationship so I’m not carrying that shit in a bag all day. I’m not so much angry as lost, confused, and sitting in accurate memories of my own stories while not knowing hers to be able to know how I feel about it.
I told her directly that I thought she was hiding something, and that something was “we’re not really friends.” That’s because I loved the hell out of her thoughtful gifts and encouraging words as long as we never talked about our relationship.
That being said, if you have a real conflict, you’re just covering it up. You’re not actively making each other feel more trusting/trusted. I don’t want someone who can only do the surface-level things after they’ve emotionally vampired me because then they’ve made it clear that they’re not interested in my inner landscape, but I better be ready for theirs.
Saying Supergrover and I weren’t really friends probably stung because she was never tracking with me. Our love languages are not the same (she’s action, I’m words), and I do not lightly move past any problem in order to gloss over it. I do not have many relationships because I want to be able to go deep with very few people than have shallow relationships with a whole bunch. When we stopped exploring each other, that should have been the end of it right there. But it wasn’t because she didn’t give me a choice.
I could make her submit, but it wouldn’t make me any happier, it would just show that I was an asshole on a bigger scale. It also wouldn’t change things between us for the better, it would kill anything there is left. If I have hope for anything, it’s that she really is busy right now and that she will eventually stop licking her wounds long enough to resolve things rather than her feeling trapped because I do.
I have always been a White Hat at heart, and I’ll never give that up. She will always be my brave, crazy and wild friend whether she returns that affection or not.
I just know that our conflict has to be resolved to go forwards because otherwise, I will not be happy in a relationship with her. It’s a detente we’ve got going, because I’m never going to be happy with Christmas and Easter friendship and she’s never going to open up.
All I can do is try to move on when I can’t.
I open myself up to it by being vulnerable and letting a power imbalance stand whether it’s me who caused it or them; even when I can read clearly that I’m not doing the right thing in not walking away. In this case, I was absolutely doing the wrong thing because I didn’t have any other choice. And she knew it.
I want to have accurate memories of my perceptions, but how can my perceptions be accurate when all I can talk about is how emotionally avoidant someone is and not how we solved a conflict?
She’s seen Ted Lasso, but she would have made something up around “Oklahoma,” too. And by “make it up,” I mean words that don’t mean anything except kicking the can down the road. Synergize, logistics, etc. rather than “I am so mad at you right now because you said X and it made me feel Y.” And then I could explain why I said it and she could tell me whether she agreed with her assumption or not.
She could correct me when I was wrong, and I could figure out how I felt about it on my own. This is so much about my output and her lack of input so that she always knew what was up with me and I had to guess what was up with her; God help me if I was wrong.
My curiosity became a problem because it wasn’t curiosity anymore.
And that’s a summary of the autobiography I wrote last year.
Maybe it’s not “Stories That Are All True,” because I only meant that the lessons were universal and not the facts, just like the Bible.
And that was offensive to Supergrover, too, because she assumed that the title was all about “this is my story and I’m always right. The facts are all accurate and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong.”
I am not a dictator. She’s not brave enough, and saying I’m emotionally bombing her is her only move. If you only have one move, I will learn the diagonals, the Ls, the rank and the file.
For me, I feel like I’ve reached the end of the game.
Checkmate.
Maybe that should have been the title last year. It would have worked.
You also won’t get anywhere by telling me my memory is fallible, which Dana constantly did.
My blog is all about my memories, and I go back and look at what happened when because I’m my favorite author. I have to believe in myself when no one else does. Therefore, it used to irritate the shit out of me when I could see every goddamn day that my memory is pretty fucking great. She accused me of not remembering things right all the time, and would start telling my story “correctly.” Who treats a blogger like that? Not only did I write in the moment so the story was accurate, the experience of writing the piece does just as much to reinforce my memory as going back and reading it.
However, not one of my partners has ever asked me to look up what happened or thought about the fact that my memory can’t be that bad. That it wasn’t just having written the piece, but going back and reading it over and over and over to see what I can learn from that experience to write the next day.
More and more often, especially because she was drunk more and more often, she’d interrupt me constantly when I was telling a story to “tell it right” for, in her mind, comedic effect. She was The Dana Lanagan Show™ more and more often because alcohol limited her ability to see she was hurting/embarrassing me and also the ability to control THE VOLUME OF HER VOICE.
So, that’s why I say that falling in love with Supergrover was the best thing that could have happened to me and not the worst. Everything happens for a reason, and that cloud had a larger silver lining than I ever saw coming. It was not continuing down the road of life with an alcoholic because I’d learned to people please in childhood and I would have stayed with her and justified her drinking for far too long. I don’t give up on relationships, which is why I’ve loved Supergrover so long and excused her emotional unavailability for 10 whole ass years.
You get some great, amazingly fantastic news. What’s the first thing you do?
I have problems with transitions, and even if something is good, it takes me a while to adjust. I seem like that’s not true, like getting a while hair to move to DC. I hated leaving DC from the moment I left. It was not a bad move to come back, it just took me about three years to really settle down and feel like I had roots.
Living here has been a lot longer than I ever lived anywhere as a preacher’s kid. In the Methodist church, they’re “rated.” You don’t get more money from the same church, you move on to a different one that pays more….. which generally means bigger problems, but that’s neither here nor there. I could write an entire blog entry on the way I’ve seen parishioners behave with all religious piety- the letter of the law and not the spirit.
So, I could see those things on a small scale until we got to Houston and Sugar Land. It got bigger. More people to minister to, too many people who weren’t sure about us because we were new and the last pastor, no matter what, walks on water. Because of this, we all got the hell out of Dodge the moment it was time to move, because you never wanted to seem like a threat to the pastor that took over for you in what’s called “move day.” I only remember the exact date for Houston, because it was the day before I met my emotional abuser (we moved on a Saturday).
In order for their to be continuity across churches in the conference, everyone moves at the same time. There are exceptions to this, like when my dad received an emergency appointment because of the previous pastor’s death. But on the whole, it’s in the summer when things aren’t as busy, anyway, and it’s amazing how efficient the system is. I never had a parsonage that was full of things that were left behind.
They’re furnished because with parsonages, you really only carry your personal effects when you move. It’s a huge cost savings, especially for very small churches who can’t afford to pay their pastor much. Not everything has been my style or color because generally people furnish it with their old stuff, the “Dear Aunt Sally” collection at Goodwill. Naples was the first house that was perfect from the beginning, and Sugar Land made it perfect because they asked me what I wanted.
I wonder if the walls are still pale yellow (I accented everything with sunflower paintings, pillows, etc. I was inspired by the Elizabeth Arden perfume bottle. Of course I was in 1994).
I was lucky in that my father took me along for many meetings, visiting “the sick, the friendless, and the needy,” and consoling people whose relatives had died. I wasn’t around for this one, but I only remember one instance where we lost a child. It is felt by the whole community, particularly an empath.
She wasn’t even a member of our congregation, but in small towns, you’re everybody’s pastor when they’re talking to you. One person who talked to my dad a lot was the principal of the elementary school. They liked each other, I wasn’t a “problem child” all the time. In fact, the worst time I ever had in school was when a boy tried to kiss me and I punched him in the face.
That same principle walked through the reception area saying, “Leslie, I don’t condone fighting and this is not acceptable.” I’m sweating bullets as he closes the door. Then, he says, “I keep pencils in my desk for people I think have shown courage…. and they are some very special pencils.” He was bluffing, and also he knew what was up. Of course you hit a guy that tries to kiss you without your consent. It is the way they receive information the fastest because since men are angry that’s what they do. The principal knew that, which is why the loss of “our child” was so devastating for the entire area, not just the people that were closest to him.
Melanie Allen was a fifth grade student who was invited on a class trip to the principal’s house. He lived on a lake, and had a barge. Everything was going perfectly until Melanie realized that swimming looked so easy everyone could do it, and jumped off the barge. She started struggling quickly. The principal jumped into the water to save her, and had to let her go when he realized that unless he changed tacks, they were both going to drown. I don’t know what happened, but what I do know is that the principal survived and Melanie didn’t. The principal was absolutely blameless, because I’ve heard lifeguards on This American Life that not every one is a good save.
I can’t imagine the grief that comes with surviving something like that, but he learned to deal with his demons and was very good about boundaries so that we were as protected as we could be.
I tell that story because to me it illustrates how much pain I’ve taken in since I was a child that didn’t belong to me, and now I’m trying to shed it to be my own person….. and I feel more me than I’ve ever been because Zac and I are stable, Lindsay’s dropping in a lot of the time now, and my house situation is going to get resolved one way or the other because today I cleaned up hair dye. If I’d gotten a chance to talk to Bryn, that’s what I would have told her. Maybe there’s a light at the end of the tunnel because I am finally getting someone to notice that I’m doing all the work when it comes to taking care of common spaces.
I had to finally get tired of not being heard, and finding people who will listen is the thing that makes me the happiest. I do not need people to agree. I just need them to hear me out. I will always hear you out, because hearing and listening are sometimes very separate things. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder…….. what if I know that this amazing, wonderful thing will only be good for me and not my partners/friends/family/etc? I want the shiny thing, but I’ll brood for hours over any benefit to only me because I don’t want to come across as demanding or undeserving of anything.
I am way too hard on myself, but that’s probably because I know that there’s got to be a combination of words that will unlock my mind. I will find the secret to life, the universe, and everything. Because I’m neurodivergent, I’ve had a lot of emotional moments where I thought I was saying something new and exciting, but the way I said it made it seem like a bad thing…… when in reality, that’s my own social anxiety talking and unfortunately I am passing the savings onto you.
I have so many stories that have sad elements to them, because everyone is fighting a battle you don’t know anything about. I just tend to hear a lot of them, often, because I have that vibe that says, “tell me anything.” And people do. Sometimes it turns out great. Sometimes not so much.
Part of it is me; I am not always the same person in terms of where I am in terms of depressed or manic, meltdown or burnout, etc. I have so few moments of feeling well that here’s the good part about seeing pain on other people’s faces. I am grateful for what I have, and those I love….. and even when I don’t have two nickels to rub together, I have people who love me. Even when I’m not of sound mind and body, I still have people who love me.
It doesn’t make me feel better about transitions, though. I need time, and then you’ll know that I’m truly content. For instance, of course I want to go to San Diego with you, but I’d like some notice. If I got the news that I was going to San Diego, that would be one of those things where I’d call Bryn, the thing I do when I get the most excited about something.
The flip side of being able to deal with so much hurt is being able to take in joy as well. I will try not to panic in the moment, but I have a different perspective than I did when I was young. The first is that given enough time and space, I can make it through anything. That includes things that are supposed to blow my mind and make me happy- I will be, just give me a chance to take it all in.
I do not live for the bad moments, I live for the good. I try to find it, but my stories don’t always go down the road where there’s gold at the end. Happiness always writes white, as if the ink isn’t dark enough to make an impression. I have a tendency to delve into the dark so I can get a lantern in there. I also need to be reminded to look up, because my mind is a very busy place.
Going to see Charlotte Cardin was a great experience and I loved it. However, a live concert would not be my first choice to go out because of the noise, lights, etc. Therefore, it was wonderful news we were going, I was excited for weeks, then wanted to back out because of social anxiety until I put on my “honey badger don’t care” face and got my happy ass to the train. Sometimes I have to straight up say out loud, “you’re being ridiculous.”
It was Lindsay. It was my city. It was my kind of music. Charlotte is Canadian and it was her first American concert ever.
Still almost missed it because I didn’t have enough spoons. Luckily, I generally get a second wind. But if I get home, I do not have enough energy to go back out because generally, again, transition time.
The hardest part of this growing up is that my mother had a very specific idea about the way I should look and it took time in the morning. My dad would be like, “I have a wedding/funeral/visitation to do this afternoon. Want to come?” Of course I did. Free food. “What time are you leaving?” “Oh, I think we’ve got about 15 minutes.”
15 minutes to do my hair, pick out a dress, and hope I left with the shoes on the right feet. I wanted to go to the wedding (or whatever, this happened at least two or three times a month), but not having any transition time made my anxiety go through the roof. But then I’d get to where we were going and be okay again……. after I’d had some time to get used to my new environment.
The second thing I do is pour myself a drink. I need to relax, because we are celebrating. I don’t think I’ve ever done a toast with Sugar Free Tang before, but that’s what I’ve got.
Tomorrow is an exciting day- Air & Space with Lindsay and then it’s date night for Zac and me. There’s also a possibility that I’ll get to see her more than once because she’s staying in the NoMA area (which I always pronounce with a HUGE Boston accent like when Garciaparra played for the Red Sox).
And the first thing I did was tell you, so maybe that’s the real lesson in all this. What’s the first thing I do when I get good news? Share it with the community who has come to love me and my weird little life over the years.
But again, transition time. I haven’t had a boyfriend all that long. It’s taken a year for me to even get used to the idea that this is a real thing. He’s so unfailingly kind that I know he has my back, and I feel the same way about him.
I like the pack of Twizzlers that comes in “rainbow” because I like the lemon ones best……. and who doesn’t like calling them “homosexual Twizzlers?”
I can’t make a whole journal entry out of liking lemon Twizzlers best, but I can tell you some of my other favorites.
I like to mix a pack of Tropical Mike and Ike’s with a box of Good and Plenty because tropical fruit and licorice is a good flavor combination. I sent a picture of this to, I believe, The War Daniel, and he said, “WHAT ARE YOU ON?!” My bad, maybe the pic was too close. It did look like a pile of uppers and downers, just to be fair.
I like chocolate covered pretzels, both alone or chopped up in ice cream. I like the ones from the bakery at the grocery store better than anything premade, because these have to be five times the size of the pretzels you get in a bag of Flipp’d. If Safeway is out of pretzels in the bakery, I’ll get a tub of them at Whole Foods. They’re smaller, but also come in yogurt, my other favorite. Best buy two tubs because you have to mix them together………….. and now I’ve just spent $20 on pretzels.
I make responsible decisions because I’m an adult and I use my money wisely.
I’ve mentioned before that I like Zero candy bars. Most of this is because that was my mother’s favorite. I like Three Musketeers because it was her father’s favorite. I still like all the weird Brach’s flavors- spice drops, maple creams, etc.- because my father’s grandmother fed them to me when I was a little girl.
And though it is not a candy, my maternal grandfather is entirely responsible for my love of Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew. When I was a child, he hadn’t retired yet. My grandmother kept these 8oz glass bottles of each in the refrigerator for his lunch, and would give me one if she had extra.
Now, it’s Dr Pepper Zero, but that’s because of my mother. She raised Lindsay and me on diet soda, so now regular just tastes too syrupy and feels like it’s clinging to my teeth. Probably because it is.
In terms of candy I’ve had overseas, I think my favorite is the Aero bar. I did like the whipped texture, and some of the flavors. Ultimately, I’m a purist…. especially since by the third or fourth mint Aero I thought they tasted like toothpaste (not in a row).
I learned disappointment in candy early. When I went to England at eight years old, I found jawbreakers I liked called “cola balls.” Apparently, the silver they put on the outside of them was found to be food-unsafe and they were discontinued shortly after I got home. Therefore, my relatives couldn’t mail me any, either. I am not sure I will ever find a replacement, because cola does not seem to be a popular flavor for things….. even though it’s divine. Ginger, orange, lemon, spices….. what’s not to like?
For instance, I would be so happy if they made cola bottle hard candy like they make root beer barrels. It would be better if they came in sugar free, though, because I’d eat more. I like Coke Zero better. 😛
They have incredible ginger candy at both Trader Joe’s and Costco that Zac buys in bulk. He doesn’t do it for me, but it helps because my medication makes me so nauseous. They work instantaneously…. and the only reason I thought of them is that I was already thinking about cola, for which I believe ginger makes an ultimate life sacrifice. Will they end up in a craft home brew or in Atlanta? May the odds be ever in their favor.
If we are talking strictly about candy you can make at home, I love marshmallows. I’ve never tried flavoring them with anything but vanilla, but both vegan and not are incredible. The texture is just enough you can tell it’s different, but it’s not bothersome to me. It’s also not quite as firm, so vegan marshmallow fluff you can use on sandwiches is a much more realistic expectation…….
Zac’s roommate made marshmallows flavored with raspberry, and they were delicious. So I know it is possible for me to make my favorite candy at home and now I’m hoping I do not go the way of “Marshmallow Girl,” the way my housemates noticed I made pancakes several times a week.
I am sure that I would make marshmallows constantly and then my ADHD brain would move onto something else.
And when we’re together, my favorite candy is whatever you’re having, because I like knowing those things about my friends. Simple things I store away so that later on, you say, “how did you remember?”
If you’re tracking with me, I feel that The Firm is in a crisis right now, because King Charles hasn’t been King for all that long and he’s been diagnosed with cancer. I’ve already posted about this on Facebook, but I have way more international fans here than I do there. I want input from English fans, and I know I have at least one. She’s not impressed with the royals, so I don’t know if she’d comment or not. I’m not impressed with The Firm because they’re important people. I’m interested in their family dynamics because I read the ghostwritten autobiography that Harry wrote in collaboration with whomever (sorry, not going to look that up) was an intimate portrait that is every bit as important as anything Richard the Lionhearted ever said…. not that it was so good (it was) but records of the royal family have proven to be eternal so far.
Plus, I loved where I could pick out the parts in which I sounded like him, as if it’d borrowed style from me without ever surfing here. It was great. Even if I don’t have everything about Harry’s personal style (I do believe he wrote parts of it because the ghostwriter had to know what Harry wanted to say, I have the style of one of the most famous ghostwriters in the world.
But there’s just something so universal and so specific about this particular situation.
Losing one parent is devastating. Losing both is losing your anchor to the world. For a moment, you don’t even know who you are in both cases. Actually, not a moment. About three years. The first year, you walk around in a fog of grief, finding your diary in the freezer and constantly forgetting said parent is dead and it shocks you all over again.
Nora Ephron gives the example of not being able to throw away her husband’s shoes, because she thought he might need them.
The fog of grief is universal. One of the things that Bryn pointed out is that there’s a possibility that both boys could lose their dad almost as quickly as they lost their mother, because unless you catch it early, there’s only a 20% chance you’ll survive it, anyway.
So, while William is grieving, he’s going to have to constantly reassure the public that the monarchy is stable… even though it’s not. But I’m not saying they’re hiding anything. I am saying that grief is so consuming that William is going to constantly have to stuff down his emotions just to get through the day. But the monarchy still won’t be unstable by the nature of anything that William would do, just by the nature of the quick change.
It remains to be seen whether Harry and William will end up needing each other or not. There may be too much bad blood…. that sometimes gets worse when both parents die. Sometimes it doesn’t. Most of the time tragedy drives people apart, and both boys have PTSD. How could they not? The trauma for Harry was twofold. Grieving because he’d lost is mother privately, and in front of an audience so big you cannot take it in. His trigger is the flash of a camera.
And that was before he went to war.
They’ve both been to war after the tragedy of losing their mother in a horrific accident. Both boys have had more days now with trauma than without, because it stays with you your whole life whether you open up about it or not.
Losing a parent fundamentally changes you, because there are parts of you that belonged to them. In my experience, this presents in two ways. The first is how much they’ve changed you. The second is how much time you were spending with them. What are you going to do to fill it? In the beginning, there is nothing that will fill that space because there’s nothing interesting enough to stop you from dwelling on it constantly, especially in the first few months. It is shocking whether you’ve known long in advance or lost them in a moment.
Especially when people get old enough where you realize it was just time, you’re still shocked because it’s the loss of not being able to drop by or call. You try because you forget, dialing or driving by, and remember on the way or right before you’re about to hit the icon for “call.” You might have a lot of car accidents during this time because your brain will blip out at inconvenient moments….. very much like they tell you not to drive under the influence. Your attention is every bit as scrambled as the rest of you.
Because again, you’re rewiring your nerves to the point where you will no longer recognize who you used to be before. Both in the liberation of not needing their approval because you can’t have it anyway, and the absolute abyss-deep process to get back up to the new normal.
People who seem functional are the ones hiding it well. They’re not getting over it any faster than anyone else. As time goes by, there is an expectation that you’ll get back to your old self, and it’s much too fast for my liking. First of all, there is no old self. I am not software you can roll back after a traumatic event.
No one is. Whether you know it or not is whether they want to open up to you, because most of being in public is just armor. They’re dying inside, trying to compartmentalize while their brains are spinning out like a tornado with memories. You spend a lot of time trying to hold back tears- even more pretending that you’re not crying all the time when you’re not with people.
Just because people don’t see grief doesn’t mean it isn’t happening to all of us. Losing a parent is in some ways universal, in some ways as individual as a fingerprint. What is universal is that it takes a long ass time, not just when the casseroles stop. People don’t check in after about six months, in my experience. This is not malice, it’s because they think you’re okay again now.
But the reality is just like the moment when Elizabeth realized that she was going to be queen. It’s just as jarring for the monarchy as it is in everyone else.
But most people don’t see their own grief writ as large as a change in the monarchy, and don’t take it seriously. They begin to act as if, rather than really focusing on what matters- their mental health. They feel fine, of course. They’re not being snappish because they’re overwhelmed with grief, they’re stressed at work (when before it was nothing). They’re doing things they wouldn’t normally do, like my own example (finding my journal in the freezer). Even that is written off as forgetfulness, even when they haven’t been like that in their whole lives.
You absolutely lose your mind for a little bit, no matter what your relationship with your parents was like. This is because it’s losing your tether, your protectors. You’re your own parent now, and therefore an “adultier adult” just by the nature of hierarchy. You’re the new generation, the changing monarchy in which you have to resurrect yourself, whether you use the analogy of the Christ or the phoenix.
You will definitely feel mocked in some cases.
One woman compared my grief over my mother to her grief over her cat. I was offended, but I’m sure she meant well. I don’t know what her relationship with her cat was like. I’m just not the kind of pet owner that would compare losing a mother to losing a pet. The worst part about you feeling mocked is that you know everyone means well, so you just have to let it roll off when those comments are impossible to forget……
I showed someone my ichthus necklace that has my mother’s fingerprint pattern in the middle. He asked where I got it and I said “the funeral home.” He said, “well… that’s really creepy.” Where else would I get something like that if I couldn’t ask her for it and the funeral home thought to do it when I didn’t?
That was a comment I’m still not over, and it affected my life in a big way because I never talked to him again.
I couldn’t look at him anymore, because I was so hurt every single time and it wasn’t worth working through it because he’d never been the most respectful person I’d ever met. It was just the last in a string of one-liners that were “jokes.”
It was not something I liked tolerating at the best of times, and this was when I couldn’t even see straight. Grief that deep is heavy and exhausting. You don’t learn to live with it all at once because you can’t. You’re basically in a shock blanket at first.
It comes over time, when there are fewer and fewer moments where you deny yourself happiness because of what they won’t get or what you promised that didn’t come true. You don’t heal from grief so much as sit with it until it doesn’t hurt anymore.
By thinking about it, over time you remember more and more good memories. It makes thinking about their death less draining and more about the things that make you smile. At first, I could only picture the open casket at her funeral, and it’s still the first picture that comes to my mind when I think of her because it’s etched in a way that my other pictures aren’t.
(I don’t mean I literally took a picture. Gross.)
If there is an open casket at King Charles’ funeral, there will be billions of pictures of it. In the newspaper. Can’t hide from it.
I spent a lot of time walking around the grocery store this afternoon. I ended up walking out with a lemon parfait and a Diet Pepsi after almost 45 minutes of trying to decide what I would actually *eat.* That’s what happens when you’re on Adderrall and you go to a grocery store. You intend to buy groceries, and nothing looks good. Plus, I was absolutely lost in thought. I couldn’t have shopped at gunpoint because I was so knocked for a loop emotionally. The reason I walked out with so little is that the longer I spent lost in thought, the more demand avoidant I got. It happens to me frequently, a sign of the neurodivergent brain. If I can’t think about anything else, I can’t do anything else. That’s because autism is famous for monotropic thought processes.
I could not pick out food I would like to eat in the future when my appetite is so suppressed that I honestly can’t remember the last time I ate. This is also because I get demand avoidance around cooking, because I don’t like going downstairs. One of my roommates and I are tight. One of my roommates and I are now in a war because she expects me to clean up after her in the bathroom, to the point where she won’t even change the toilet roll.
I can’t remember the date, but the time I got together with Zac before Burns Nicht, I was at his house for two nights. Since I knew I was going to be gone, I didn’t change it just to see if she would.
She didn’t.
We have cameras in all the public areas, so people would notice if this was happening in the kitchen (it does). I have been her maid for nine years, except for the day the maid comes. It won’t take three hours before there’s hair all over the vanity because she has washed her hair in the sink.
The shower is a mess of her hair, because I don’t shower that often in the winter. It’s too big a swing in terms of sensory environment and if I was going somewhere, of course I’d pull out all the stops. Mostly, I just want to avoid cleaning up after someone else.
She will not talk to me about this issue at all, because she thinks I’m unclean (she’s a Trumper, a Modi fan, and has so far made me aware of all the cultural stigmas that come with being queer in India. It has never happened to me before. One of my previous housemates was a Nigerian. No issue whatsoever, and their taboos are probably worse than India.
Said Nigerian was a doctor who went to medical school in Crimea, so he’s the only black person I know who is also fluent in Russian. Oh, and Arabic because he worked in Saudi for years. I don’t remember whether he was a GP for the populace or whether he was working in a palace taking care of the royals.
My hatred of the Saudi monarchy knows no bounds, but I am not insulting the people of Saudi Arabia. The people have nothing to do with how they’re governed. What I know for sure (because my landlady is Lebanese) is that families in the Middle East are all about hospitality and being welcoming. For instance, if I could get into Iran, there are a lot of people who’d want to welcome me because they have no beef with the American government. A minority would be trying to peg me as intelligence, shouting “death to America. Death to CIA.”
Actually, I can’t remember if they said that last part in “Parts Unknown” or whether I’m mixing up the Iran episode and the first few minutes of “Argo.”
Incidentally, there is an “Argo” quote for every occasion… but if I had to pick a favorite, it would be when Jack and Tony go to present their idea for the film crew. Right before Jack opens the door to what is presumably a 7th floor kind of office, he says, “careful. It’s like talking to those two old fucks from The Muppets.”
Iran’s continuing ire at us is a real thing if they’re still protesting us exfiltrating the Shah. He lived out his days in Great Falls, VA, working for us (presumably) because one of the reasons we exfiltrated him was that he had cancer that he knew would kill him with the medical treatment in Iran. So, we got him to the US and that was the end of that.
I understand that the Iranis have the right to hate our guts for it, too. I don’t have to have a dog in this fight, because it’s been going on since I was two. No one, especially me, is going to figure it out. The best outcome would be coming to an agreement at least good enough to reopen the embassy. But that’s a pipe dream, like asking Israel to stop bombing the hell out of Jerusalem, because Netanyahu doesn’t seem to care who dies. If he has to kill his own people to make the Palestinians pay, he doesn’t lose sleep over it.
They came to a sort-of deal in the 70s, in which the Palestinians were given land. Good to go. But then Israelis were encouraged to move into those neighborhoods so that they could push the Palestinians out.
“You can’t do that. We live here.”
“Do you have a flag?”
-Eddie Izzard
We could solve a lot of this by cooking together, as Anthony Bourdain showed us for many years. We are more alike than we are different. Even the Israelis and Palestinians have learned this. There are many, many integrated neighborhoods where Israelis and Palestinians live side by side and never spout that Zionist shit, because they live in the real world… the one where Muslims lives are not worth less to Jews because they know them… not like the Israeli government.
Israel is a recognized state. Palestine isn’t. Therefore, Israel has all the military power they could ever want. Both Palestinians and the Israelis who support them are the Resistence. Zionism has been used to great effect, both in Israel and in the United States, to not only try and push out the Palestinians, but have the world’s full support to do it.
In America, this leads to Evangelical Christian money being pumped into Israel because they think that since Christianity came from Judaism, that means we are like, the same.
I don’t have time for that bullshit. This is not our fight, and we are clearly picking sides. There has to be a reason, I’ll tell you that. I just don’t know what it is. Because that’s what generally happens to me. I criticize based on what’s public, and find out later what really happened, through either the news or an op being declassified so you can look it up online.
So, maybe I’m telling you all the wrong things because there’s more to the chessboard than I can see at present. But this is what I think based on what I know *right now.*
And as I’ve said before, I dive up and down in my writing because I’m using a technique that Louis L’Amour taught me. He said to just start writing and let the faucet drip. Say whatever comes to your mind, because eventually you’ll hit on something worth exploring. For me, that shows itself in having random connections with stories in my brain, and some of them are not pleasant.
Therefore, I start feeling anxious about what I’m writing, and I come back up. Then, as I’m sitting with my negative feelings enough to breathe, I can dive back down again.
Because if I take the blog prompt from this morning literally, my favorite foods to cook are the ones I learned from Dana. She was my first chef, and I wouldn’t know anything about cooking on a professional level without her. So, I take time with breakfast.
My housemates called me “Pancake Girl” for a year.
Before we get started, I just wanted to tell you that I am willingly using my iPad today because oh my God. I refuse to code in anything but a monotype font. It has been 15 years since I’ve used anything but “Droid Sans Mono.” On my Android, I still do. That being said, when I dug into the app iOS app “Koder,” one of the recommended fonts was……. wait for it……… Helvetica. I’ll take a screenshot of the app so that you can see its ultimate superiority over Arial, the font that was so good Microsoft made a knock-off of their own…….. instead of buying the font from the actual artist. Seriously, fuck them. They did what people do to artists all the time. Although perhaps Steve Jobs had a non-compete with the artist so that Microsoft had to rip off Arial. I will be finding a documentary on YouTube shortly.
I absolutely loved the doc “Helvetica,” because it shows the artist, and just how many street signs are made with it in how many countries (it’s a lot). But, even still I had to justify switching from monospace. I had to sit there and justify it for a little bit. In the end, it was “you’re a writer…. you don’t code that much, anyway….. bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. I just love fonts an autistic amount. And now I’m sitting here looking at the way I’ve loved Macs since I was 18. I had a Mac SE in my room in high school, and it was my favorite computer ever because it’s the last one I had that didn’t connect to the Internet. I want a computer from 1990, Zac just bought a word processor and called it a day.
Word processors don’t have Helvetica. But maybe e-Bay has a Mac that old. On second thought, I’d rather have one of those old as shit Mac laptops, because even though they’re much heavier than a normal laptop, I’d rather write with the computer in my lap as opposed to my desk. My desk chair is crap and I don’t want to change it because nothing modern would match. In the end, I might give in because I really do like sitting at my desktop, I’ve just gotten used to lying in bed with my tablet and keyboard in my lap, because I’m 10 times more productive that way and both my tablets have everything I need to work and play.
One of my readers said that she felt anxious I responded to her in a blog entry. I did it so she wouldn’t be intimidated by the length of the reply, because it wasn’t personal at all. She said something that stuck with me, that she’d been married for decades and we had completely different outlooks on relationships. I thought that was so universal that it was a blog entry all on its own. That yes, people do have different outlooks on relationships because there are so many permutations of human behavior that nothing in this life is a binary.
She’s not wrong, and neither am I. And I’m pointing it out because of the stigma that comes with ethical non-monogamy. I like what Jada Pinkett said on the matter. “Will is his own man. He has to make choices that make it ok for him to look himself in the mirror.” She made the point that she doesn’t control his time, and that’s how I feel about Zac. I do not get to dictate what he does while he’s not with me. I’m just here to receive him, because he offers me so much solace even when we can’t be together all that often. He’s cooked for me, and of course it’s always fabulous. That’s my boyfriend cooking for me. I’ve talked to him many times about cooking for/with him, but he says that he’s just always had this outlook that you could for guests. I am so thankful he’s not impressed I’ve cooked professionally.
“Food is hospitality. When you reject someone’s food, you reject them.” -Anthony Bourdain
Which is why my favorite meal to cook is never about the food. The food doesn’t taste gorgeous because of something I did as a professional cook. It tastes better depending on who’s at the table. I don’t celebrate the people who aren’t here, I value the ones that show up. It’s taken a lifetime to learn, this not yearning for someone who isn’t here, because again, that goes back to 14 years old. I made people priorities when I was only an option, and could even see it and not give up.
I have deep and abiding abandonment issues from my emotional abuser, probably why I lived in Portland for so many years. I had to prove to myself that she wouldn’t abandon me, and found out when I got there that was not the case.
With Supergrover, I don’t know what would have happened if I’d kept my big mouth shut a lot of the time, but I do know that her hotheaded anger fed mine. My dopamine and adrenaline went through the roof when she snapped at me. I don’t react well to that, and neither does she. But I can count on one hand the number of times she’s apologized for her own words, because it’s so much more convenient to believe that I am the sole cause of everything. I have no doubt that she’s telling people that I’m the most toxic person she’s ever met, because she couldn’t take accountability for shit when it was emotional. I know she’d send a fully armed battalion to remind people of her love if she thought someone was hurting me. What she cannot do is take in that I feel the same way about her. We just don’t have the same love language, and I became fluent in hers- acts of service. Over time, she became less and less interested in mine, words of affirmation. I would tell her that I felt bad she called me a dickhead all the time, and then all of a sudden I was enormously impressive.
So, in a lot of ways, I feel that we could have fixed a lot with one night where she was my sous chef. She’s a very good chef. Horrible line cook….. which means that what I wanted was being able to tumble and roll in those roles.
This wouldn’t be appropriate for us because we’re not a couple, but it illustrates a point.
One of the things that therapists do in age gap relationships, because they often become a big damn problem, is to ask the older partner if they ever lay in the younger one’s lap. If the couple says no, then generally they’ll make them do it in the office. Over time, the older one views themselves as wiser because of course they are, but not about everything. The problem becomes the older half parenting the younger, making their relationship a strict power dynamic rather than one that’s fluid.
She couldn’t lay in my lap. That’s all on me, but that’s what we lost that made me push her away. I didn’t like feeling that my letters were making her feel guilty and not knowing it for weeks on end. I hated that she always relied on her own instincts to figure out what I was saying, and she was often wrong. I have no doubt that telling me she’s “read through many lines” means that she’s read through the wrong ones because she had no context and didn’t ask for clarity so that I could reassure her that I wasn’t attacking her. She assumed I was attacking her, so we never got back what we lost.
Here’s why it’s such a shame. I told her that I was French-trained, but that I’d had friends who were Japanese-trained and either works well. She said she didn’t know the difference, so I sent her two pictures of me holding a knife over a cutting board and wrote “French” and “Japanese” on them. She said she kind of uses a mix of the two, and one of the things I would have told her if we’d cooked together is “there is no such thing. You’re holding your knife wrong. Here, let me show you. “Spider on a mirror, Supergrover. Spider ona mirror.”
I think there has only been one time in my life that I shared a computer with someone. My dad and I had a desktop in our apartment after my parents’ divorced, but it was easy because we were never using it at the same time. Here’s the one thing that was really funny…. I was running late on a paper for English, and I knew I could bang it out easily and be on time for class. So, I ran out of school at like, 11:00 AM and flew home (it seemed).
Then, my dad walked in for lunch and was genuinely surprised to see me not at school. The cool thing was that he saw I was working and just left me to it. He knows me. We’ve met. We only work exactly the same way. The adrenaline of the moment makes us write better. I do not remember a time when either of us finished a sermon before 0200 on Sunday morning. He just said, “are you skipping a day?” I said, “no, I’m late on a paper. I’ll be back by 1:00.” And that was the end of that.
The reason I remember it so clearly is that I was under a lot of pressure. I wasn’t doing well in school except for Microcomputer Applications, English, and Creative Writing (where’s the lie?). Math and science have always eluded me except in seventh grade, when we had a “group project” and I turned all autistic on it, writing down everything the teacher said so that my notes and lab calculations were correct.
He took me aside and said, “I gave you a higher grade than everyone else because it was so obvious that you carried everyone else on your back.” For instance, I would say that Lindsay did marginally better than me in Con Law thanks to me, because she had a transcription of every class. And yet, those are the only two classes in which I was any good (Con Law and Life Science).
I went to the city-wide science fair twice, and I don’t remember who came up with the ideas, me or my dad, but it wasn’t like he did the work for me. I just took his idea and expanded it.
In seventh grade, it had something to do with how dyes are carcinogens. It takes a very, very, very, very long time, but both blue and red are toxic, making grape Kool-Aid one of the worst things you can drink all day, every day (I do it a little bit now that it’s sugar free).
In eighth grade, it was all about car safety, but I don’t remember exactly what it was about…. maybe seatbelts? I don’t know. By then, science was the bane of my existence and my dad helped drag the project out of me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in doing work. I wasn’t interested as much in the subject, so my mind wasn’t completely taken over with facts…..
It wasn’t grape Kool-Aid. Let’s not get stupid.
It wasn’t until I was in 11th grade that there was even a class called “Microcomputer Applications.” Because I already had techie friends, I figured out that we were networked with the middle school Lindsay attended. So, my first order of business was to “hack into” Lindsay’s user account at her school and leave a letter for her in her home directory. “Hack into” is in quotes because you had to know the person’s Social Security number. Yes, they were that stupid in the 90s. It was all new. This would have been 95-96, and I didn’t even have an e-mail address until the second half of my senior year (I gave up music altogether because I couldn’t graduate with an “Advanced Diploma” without moving my schedule around to accommodate MA and study hall.
Since my dad was at work, I had my own computer for the hour I was supposed to be in study hall, so basically I was the original “WFH.” I’d do homework a little bit at night, but mostly rushed it in study hall so I didn’t have to stay up until past midnight AND do a full load the next day.
The thing about my high school, and many others, is that teachers in your grade do not collaborate at all. They do not give a shit if they’re giving a high school kid six hours of homework a night while also expecting them to function during the day. Even if I started my homework after “Jeopardy!” at 1600 and “Animaniacs” at 1630, that still left me doing homework until midnight because I had to take breaks to eat, spend time with my family, and if I remembered, pee.
I also didn’t really have time for friends until late, because with my parents being divorced, I needed my own spending money. So, in addition to all that studying, I was a receptionist at SuperCuts. Sometimes Meagan (or Meagan and Tony) would come and pick me up from work and we’d go to Starbucks or Chili’s.
Back then, SBUX was new and basically the only bar for high schoolers. My first date ever with Meagan was that she picked me up for school and we went for a coffee run on the way. I am amused at myself in retrospect because I had never heard of a “Frappucino,” and I love being marketed to, so that’s what I wanted.
Meagan said, “are you sure? It’s December.” I didn’t pick up what she was saying because I didn’t know the word “frappe,” either. I’d never been north of the Mason-Dixon line (then), and she’s Canadian, not fluent in French but enough to have had a secret language from her kids until they started school….. why I’d be so happy in a Mexican-American family where Mom speaks English and the kids are all Big Macs and Coca-Cola, Spanish is lame.
Wait, Coca-cola is a bad American example…. Mexicans are Coke addicts and it’s a big damn problem. Fabulous documentary on YouTube. Even “beisball” is a bad example because Mexicans love it, too. Maybe our differences lie in apple pie and apple empanñadas. This paragraph is really making me miss Houston. If you look at the demographics, we don’t have an overwhelmingly Mexican population. I meet people from Central and South America all the time, but I haven’t met any Mexicans (yet).
If I find a pocket, that’s where I’d like to live. I’d get to practice my Spanish, if they needed it they could practice their English, and because I’ve been to Mexico so many times, we have some of the same cultural references…. especially since both Mexicans and I have had kitchen jobs. I’ve never worked in a kitchen in Texas, so I’ve never worked with Mexicans (Portland is so white the best representation is our hip-hop station. Another good reason I got out.). I have never worked in a kitchen where I didn’t have to speak Spanish, or learn words for things in Spanish on the fly because cooking moves fast.
It’s just again, Salvadorans, Hondurans, etc. I think what I’m missing is that the Mexicans I have met have such a strong connection to Texas. Therefore, more cultural references than I have with South America because even though the kitchen is common, our upbringings aren’t.
The worst time I’ve ever felt in the kitchen was because I broke a cultural taboo that I didn’t know was there. I couldn’t tell whether the dishwasher thought I was being a white entitled bitch or truly being horrible to him, but either way he couldn’t and wouldn’t explain what I’d said was wrong. We were practically besties before and never talked again, and because of the language barrier (I’m nowhere near fluent, especially if it’s not “Texican.”), he got pissed about giving me information at all- why I’d hurt him- and I got hurt because even if he opened up to me, I could only understand part of it.
It was a bad situation all the way around, because what I did know is that I said something about his mother. I know I deserved what I got, I just didn’t know that he wouldn’t take it the way an American would. “Yo Mama” jokes have been famous since the 80s. That’s why I think he was genuinely hurt- he had a cultural norm I didn’t.
I tortured myself over that for months, because I couldn’t explain and he didn’t want it. I did the best I could….. a very sincere, loving, “I am so sorry. I didn’t know.” And in fact, I still don’t know what I said that irked him, and it’s years later……… and still painful.
But other people don’t have to forgive you, and that’s okay. It’s on you to let go of guilt and move on. It’s how you get more resilient over time, because people walking away hurts less when you realize that first, you don’t get to decide how hurt someone else might be. You don’t get to decide how much apology is enough. You have to know when progress is being made and when you’re banging your head against the wall. Because getting to the point where you’re banging your heads against a wall means that you’re actually both hitting your heads against the wall and something’s got to give.
If you know what makes you happy inside yourself, your intuition will tell you which relationship you’re getting…. are you getting the one in which progress is being made, or are you getting the one where you’re spending time and energy on a relationship where the other person is “just not that into you.”
Speaking of which, I saw a meme that made me laugh. Someone had set up two books in a bookstore and snapped a picture…….
“God is Not Mad at You” -Joyce Meyer “He’s Just Not That Into You” -Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo
Aside from the fact that I use the singular they for God, I couldn’t help myself. I needed that laugh. I’ve also loved Joyce Meyer for years, because I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Plus, she has the same way of preaching that I do…. a female voice who projects with authority because so many men complain about hearing The Gospels and the sermon in a woman’s voice.
I feel like Joyce Meyer and I are Erik and T’Challah. It’s not that she doesn’t have a point. I’m not trying to take anything away from her audience. I’m only saying that in this case, she’s smart and also The AntiLeslie.
And, to be honest, I’m pretty sure she’s been married to a man for a long time, but she reminds me of “Suze Orman” on SNL…… “it’s ALL. ABOUT. THE. Jackets.”
The reason I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater is that my dad was more conservative theologically than me, but not Joyce Meyer. His line about this was some dumbass came up to him in the “God Quad” at SMU and said, “I was a Methodist until I got saved.” My dad said, “I was a Baptist until I learned to read.” My dad has never been a Baptist, but Texans don’t let facts get in the way of a good story.
What I also mean is that I grew up listening to all this stuff because my dad didn’t generally use headphones. I got used to the sounds of the men’s voices, Fred Craddock’s in particular because he’s just about one of the most soft-spoken preachers you’ll ever meet…… who can also punch you in the gut emotionally with half a line (he was liberal for the time as well, taking care of the population of Appalachia).
Here’s the highest compliment I can give him, because it will make sense to the people that hate Christianity. He was a Jimmy Carter Christian. The kind that prays for you and then builds you a house…… because that’s how “thoughts and prayers” are supposed to work.
I also learned to love criticism of The Bible, because I was interested in studying it even when I didn’t feel all that moved spiritually.
It’s something I learned from Gordon Atkinson, a Texas preacher who became such an amazing blogger that he left the church to write full time. I think he’s doing books now, but here’s a link to his archive. I don’t normally put hyperlinks in my work so the past can stay past, but these essays run back to 2002.
Because the essays aren’t organized by date, I’ll just have to tell you what I learned from him rather than linking to that entry specifically. I was already in a mood, and I found a minister who was struggling with the same thing I was…. how called he felt, his imposter syndrome…. how sometimes he loses his faith when he’s doing hospital rounds and has to rescue himself, etc. I wasn’t doing a hospital rotation, but it’s something that I knew I would struggle with as well if I went the pastoral route.
Incidentally, the reason I didn’t go into ministry is the same reason I didn’t become a therapist. I can’t manage my own problems. That gives me two disadvantages. The first is that I will be constantly overwhelmed by other people’s problems and continue to not work on my own…… because it’s a monotropic thought process to think of other people first, because you like it. What says avoiding your own emotional work by pretending that other people’s problems are more important than yours?
When you start taking up room in the universe, you realize just how much you’re not getting by not asking for it. This is because once you start working on yourself, you know when you’re kowtowing to someone and afraid to take up room, or whether you’re trying to make progress. When the other person is receptive, that’s truly healthy. When your issues cause anger and frustration in them, that’s when the toxic cycle begins.
It actively says to the one who brings up problems that theirs are unimportant. Only the person who is completely shut down is allowed to need things. That’s because the person who expresses emotional needs and gets ignored tries even harder not to make the other person angry, because the last time they brought up an issue, all hell broke loose.
This cycle can go on for decades, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s with your first family or your partner and kids. Plus, there’s a lot of resentment and anger that boils under the surface when one person lays out their issues, and the other person seems receptive…. but “seeming” and “actually” are two different things.
Here is What I Know For Sure.™ In my relationship with Kathleen, if I brought up a minor problem, like housekeeping, she’d step all over my ass. When Dana started doing things like that, we spiraled out… mostly because at the time I was in it up to my ass and I didn’t have much patience. But what I learned is that when someone starts shutting down, that’s the end whether you like it or not.
Now, I have a lot of patience and if I expressed unhappiness about anything in my relationship with Zac, he wouldn’t just say “we’ll talk about it” and forget. He’d either remember on his own or send me a calendar invite to talk, either an audio/video call or in person.
That’s what I mean about it being the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had. I don’t have a partner who tries to kick the can down the road on hard conversations.
Speaking of hard conversations, I made a mistake because I was typing too fast. I am not Zac’s newest partner, but because I’m not around much, people think I am. We are also not cutesy in front of our friends, we are cutesy when we’re out on the town, which mostly means making people want to throw up in the grocery store.
The conversation was surrounding how, since we aren’t cutesy and aren’t together all that often, how do I fit into your life and what’s your bandwidth? That’s a hard conversation to have, because I was terrified that he’d say he was overwhelmed and we needed to break up because I live so far.
My logic was 100% upside down and backwards. We’re good for life as long as we stay where we are, with which I am completely comfortable. He’s just as dedicated to me as an orange string as I am to him. I need his friendship as much as his romance, at which he is very good.
He might not think so, but what really sticks in my mind as romance is remembering things I say. When I said I liked Bullet Coffee, he got me an immersion blender just because.
Editor’s Note:
In case you’re not familiar, Bullet Coffee is a tablespoon of grass-fed butter, a tablespoon of coconut oil, and very, very hot coffee in the blender. The official recipe is the tablespoons of oil and butter with 80z of coffee. I like Cafe Bustelo best. The reason I like it so much is that it provides all my morning calories and brain food at the same time, so 8oz of coffee is enough to start my day.
He sees when I’m struggling and likes helping out, and I don’t mean monetarily…. although he is sweet about telling me to put whatever I want in the cart at the grocery store and Trader Joe’s because he knows that I’ll want to have food and drinks at his house that I’d buy at mine.
The latest was kidding him about me being fake irritated that he was out of Dr Pepper Zero and he actually stopped by the store on the way home and bought a 12-pack. He had a million other drinks I could have chosen, just nothing sugar free.
Well, that’s not true. He has a Soda Stream and I love putting in a bottle of still water and turning the carbonation up to hell.
I also like soda with hard alcohol, fresh fruit, juice, etc. and it’s so great that it tastes fresh from our water. But juice, I think, is one of the worst things for you on the planet if you’re not drinking the kind sweetened with Splenda. You can ask your doctor if they think Splenda is bad for your child, but what you cannot ignore is that all juice is mostly sugar.
Just like restaurant food is mostly animal fat and butter. You get to choose whether you want that rich a meal, and also if way more fat is worse than way more sugar.
I would also rather eat my daily allowance of calories than drink it. So, that’s why I drink diet soda or the drink mixes you add to water bottles. When I drink alcoholic drinks, I tend to use seltzer as a mixer, and even with non-alcoholic beer, you have to be careful. They’re sometimes less calories than a real beer…. sometimes not.
My current favorite drink mixes are an import from Mexico and it’s only, like 10 bucks for 44 drinks…. take that, SODA. They’re sugar free aguafrescas. Both the lime and the piña colada flavors blow me away, because they’re not really sweet. The lime tastes like the real limonada you’d buy on the street in Enseñada…. and yet, not as good as Sunkist Lime, tbh. The piña colada tastes like real coconut water and a little bit of pineapple. It feels like being in Mexico 16 oz at a time. I have such fond memories.
Plus, other countries have laws around dyes that we do not. What I have noticed is that Mexican drink colors are not loud. Given my 7th grade science project, I believe this is for the best.
And through all of this, you may be wondering why I’m changing topics a lot. It’s that in my entries, I’m a gardener. I don’t pick and choose what’s important to say and what’s not. The plot reveals itself, I cannot predict what it will be because in order for the writing to change, I do. I start at a subject that’s not too deep and dig down until I feel comfortable enough to let go.
And now we’ve arrived at that moment, what I’ve avoided saying for almost a hundred paragraphs now. One of the biggest roots of my trauma, my first case of PTSD, was walking into my room and seeing my precious first computer melted and mangled into my desk. I’m autistic, always have been, and computers are one of my special interests.
Given the way that I use the internet for writing now, you can only imagine how much I lost in terms of text documents….. and I saved everything on hard drives and floppies, but of course I didn’t have any on me. They couldn’t have been, because I had to rush out of the house too quickly to grab anything, because my room/office was already full of smoke.
The bad thing from that time was twofold. The first is that scanners hadn’t been invented yet, nor e-mail (outside of the military), so there were no pictures to save that way. The second is that I didn’t think of my files as important back then. Apparently, I didn’t think pictures were important, either, which happens when it’s the choice between saving memories and black smoke chasing you down the hallway. I did not see anything burn.
The fire started in the attic, so of course I smelled the smoke, but luckily I do not have any trauma of actual flame.
I think that’s why the image of my first computer is burned into my brain. In the moment, I did not have time to take in the horror, and I was all alone. My mom and Lindsay were shopping. My dad was delivering communion to the shut-ins. I called the fire department from my next door neighbor’s house dressed in Snoopy pajamas, black pantyhose, and heels. This is because I was getting ready for my first church dance. I was wearing the nightgown until my hair and makeup were done, so I was also sporting hot curlers.
I got to make up for that missed dance later, and even met someone I really liked… but it was just a sweet crush on both ends because he was a little bit older. It was the type relationship where we realized we would have been good together, but the timing was off.
That was an excellent night because it took me a while to get over being the only one who knew our house was burning down for a while. In fact, my mother drove up to the house surrounded by police, fire, ambulance, the whole bit and thought I was dead.
It was a very good moment when she realized I was standing right there in the neighbor’s yard, still having nothing to change into, but she knew why. She was the one that was going to help me with my hair. The worst part is that it was December and I didn’t have a hoodie. The best part is that it was NE Texas, so it was still 50-55 degrees. Uncomfortable, but not unbearable.
That fire was so memorable that it literally appeared in the Naples paper for 30 years under “On This Day” (Dec. 20th). I believe that’s because it affected the church just as much as it did us.
In those days, less so now, you moved from parsonage to parsonage instead of buying your own house. Because of the housing market and ministers retiring without many assets (nor a place to live), the UMC started giving people living allowances separately from their salaries so they could work their own way up in real estate and have a place to retire.
I am sure that it was difficult for the church in that moment, realizing that they needed to rebuild an entire house. I never got to see it. We rented until we moved to Houston. My friends John and Linda have told me it’s beautiful. I believe it. It was the most majestic house on its street before.
From what I have heard, they just took it down to the studs, because the outside was fine. It relieves me because my favorite thing about the house were the Greek columns out front. It was the best house ever, and looked above a minister’s station in life even before it burned. But we drove old cars. There were no BMWs to match the vibe.
I do believe that it was easier to buy a parsonage that large and beautiful because it was bought in Naples, Texas. In DC, that house would be worth a quarter of a million dollars, especially because of our big front and back yards.
In DC, you’re lucky if your yard is bigger than a postage stamp.
I can say now that living in Galveston and Naples were some of the best years of my life, because I was young enough that things weren’t complicated….. except for being physically weak and mentally strong. The kind of thoughts that you’re hearing stream-of-consciousness now are the same way I processed emotions as a child.
Which is “try to take up the least amount of space possible and maybe no one will notice how weird you really are.” Here’s a for-instance, and it does have to do with computers.
I went on an interview in Portland once where I was going to be a contractor, not a full-time employee. The representative from the agency who got me the contract was trying to give me a “pep talk” before the interview and said, “I think when you walk in, you should announce the problem you have with your eyes because it’s noticeable enough to be distracting and you could make everyone uncomfortable.” When I told Lindsay about this yesterday, she wanted names and numbers.
She was going to sue the pants off this guy until I told her that it wasn’t recent enough, so I don’t remember the name, nor the agency.
Funny enough, I walked in and owned the room. I got the job in 25 minutes. However, the employment agency would not let up on me about my disabilities and “making other people uncomfortable,” so I fired myself and moved on to a better fit at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU).
We lost our funding for that project, so that’s when I moved to cooking. Dana was having a blast and I couldn’t stand being in an office anymore. I wasn’t the best cook, but I’m not the best office employee, either. In fact, I’m a much worse office employee.
I understand chefs because I’m autistic and they’re direct. I don’t understand bosses and HR-speak, and I don’t mean it like I don’t understand telling an employee to fuck off in the middle of a meeting will probably land me in hot water.
I mean that I don’t understand the things that go on behind closed doors, the way the bosses talk about me, and how I interact with coworkers because they’re trained to bullshit around everything.
I know that a lot of people don’t know what it means to “synergize,” but I don’t understand the difference between overperforming and underperforming because so much of it is calculated on your behavior and attitude whether your bosses/coworkers’ impressions of you are correct.
I understood it better at ExxonMobil and Alert Logic, because ExxonMobil ranked you and you got “grades.” Alert Logic displayed metrics in front of all of us so we knew how we were doing. It was uncomplicated because it was based on numbers and achievement, not (always) nebulous office politics.
At Alert Logic, though, I found my people. Other linux geeks like me. At ExxonMobil, I was stuck with a very large amount of STEM autistic geniuses, and because I’m creative autistic, let’s just say *our quirks didn’t line up.” That’s because not everyone was autistic, but everyone treated me like their personal secretary when I was actually IT support.
Why yes, I have printed out e-mails for people because they wouldn’t read them on the screen. Thanks for asking.
The one time I genuinely offended someone was when I told her what a simple fix it was for her audio problem. I meant it as “no big deal,” she took it as “you’re stupid.” What happened was that she was trying to play something from her iPhone, and she couldn’t get the aux cable to connect. She thought it was an IT problem, so she called us and I responded.
When I got there, the audio was fine. The case was preventing the audio cable from going all the way into the phone. So, I told her that all she had to do was remove the case and she’d be good to go. It embarrassed me in front of everyone when she said, “you didn’t have to say that part so loud….” and looked butt hurt.
I don’t like my job when people think I’m actively trying to make them look stupid. I save all that for when the day is over and I’m blowing off steam.
It was a lot of fun sitting around with my linux homies to set us apart from users, and regale each other over the calls we’d gotten that day.
In those days, we got a lot of calls about floppy disks, and we had to tell them, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Your work is gone. You didn’t save it on a hard drive as well.”
Two reasons for this. The first is that floppies were not that stable to begin with. It’s what happens when you have a tiny drive with magnets in it and only a thin layer of plastic to protect it.
The second is that people discovered that the side of the computer was the same material as the side of a refrigerator, and hard drives worked the same way, except metal surrounding the drive instead of plastic. So, they’d stick the floppy onto the side of their computer and it would erase the floppy so hard you couldn’t even retrieve the file structure, much less “final_final_final_paper.doc.”
If you put the floppy close to the hard drive, then the magnet would interfere with it as well. Remember I worked as the lab supervisor at the largest computer lab on campus, then the next year was promoted to supervising the smaller lab in the Graduate School of Social work all by myself. Therefore, I cannot tell you how many students I’ve had where I felt like I had to stop them from not contemplating suicide over it.
As an aside, USB flash drives are more stable than floppies, but I only think of them as “transport media.” As in, I work on my desktop and transfer files over that I’m taking to someone else. I don’t use it as permanent storage except for on laptops and tablets that have microSD slots.
If I had to sum up my love of Android tablets in two words, it’s “MicroSD slots.” The Ten Commandments stone tablets will have an expansion card slot before the iPhone, and even the newest Samsung phones don’t have them for the same reason. If you need more storage, they’re going to charge you an arm and a leg for it by having the storage soldered onto the motherboard. You can’t get a 32GB phone and add a one terabyte card anymore. Apparently that is now reserved for tablets only.
The best thing is that Android .mp3 players are the same way. My little Sansa Clip can hold a 512 GB card, and what that means is that I can either have every album ever made, or a smaller library in lossless quality….. for instance, copying the .wav file on a CD directly to your SD card is going to take up way more space than even the highest quality .mp3. But on a large expansion card, you can do that.
Because Apple did the same thing with iPods that it does with phones now. No expansion slot. If you wanted more storage, it was more expensive. I think the plan was to go to phones in the first place. The iPods were the equivalent of Microsoft Solitaire and Minesweeper.
Those games were not included with Windows as fun. I mean, they were, but that’s not the point. The games were included so that you’d be interested enough to learn how to use the mouse.
You learned the interface on an iPod Touch that would connect to wi-fi, so that when SIM cards were added, it wouldn’t feel different. Everything that used to be in iPod Touch is on the iPhone now, and again, no actual room for your music collection unless you’re willing to pay premium dollars. Even on the iPhone Mini 12, which I still carry because of its size (the form factor was not popular and they don’t make them anymore), the cost difference depending on disk space was enormous.
Meanwhile, you can add an expansion card to a tablet in two different ways. The first is that it will be formatted in a way that other computers can read, so you can take the card out and plug it into your desktop, etc. The second is that it will format as a virtual hard drive which doesn’t leave that tablet. The difference is that with the card integrated into your tablet, it doesn’t see the difference between one drive and the other, so you can install apps easier, because if you run out of space on your tablet, it will start installing apps to the card flawlessly without you having to move things over manually…. and honestly, only some apps can run disks formatted to be portable storage because they’re integrated into the operating system. I think the last time I did it, I used App2SD or something like that, and it would tell you which apps could be moved and which couldn’t.
Now you can skip the middle man.
I have a 128 GB expansion card on my HD Fire because I don’t have to want to be dependent on my internet connection. I will always download movies from Netflix, Amazon, etc. rather than streaming them because I might start them at home and finish on the train.
Again, wandering off into nowhere because it’s easier than wandering into everywhere pain lives.
Like seeing my very first computer melted into my desk.
What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?
The reason I’m most scared to edit an entry is that it takes a lot of bravery to be vulnerable with people on this scale. If I sit with a piece, over time I start judging it. I lose courage and back out on publishing. I write very fast and hit “Post.” Then, I don’t own it anymore. I’m not the judge of whether it’s good or not.
Plus, getting into the routine of writing every day means that I don’t dwell over past entries unless I have said something that crosses over from personal to professional (for someone else). My perceptions of their feelings are fair game; their jobs are not. So, I’ll go back and change something if they’ll tell me what I need to alter.
For instance, I had to keep that story tight about Kamala Harris for a month so that by the time I told you my sister had a meeting with her, it had been old news for quite a while.
I think the other reason it’s hard to edit entries is that it would be easier after the fact, but I’ve moved on to a new thing…. because it’s easier than sitting in some of those feelings again.
I don’t ever want to go back and edit anything, because I’m a good editor….. for someone else. I need the same thrashing with a red pen I’d give someone else, but I write too fast and furious to put someone else on a deadline like that.
There is one funny thing from yesterday that I didn’t notice until I reread… “I seem to have two audiences locked up…” and proceeded to only describe one of them.
The other is the people interested in cooking and what goes on in a professional kitchen. It gives me a different writing voice, one I like. It’s more confident than I am, because I’m hearing Anthony Bourdain in my head and not me. I’m definitely borrowing style without trying to imitate him, because all line cooks and chefs sound the same.
I think that I have so many long time readers because people do become invested in my weird little life, one that I adore because I chose it.
I don’t think that I chose wisely a lot of the time over the last 10 years, but I’m hoping the next will be easier having literally edited my life. I’ve been broken in ways I never thought I would be, and I’ve survived. Not always happily, but what didn’t make for a great time did make a good story- good or bad, it’s what happened according to me.
I underestimated how much crying there is in writing, and perhaps this is unique to me in some ways because fiction writers are always crying over someone else’s feelings. When I’m writing, I’m pulling things out of me that I haven’t thought about in years. Not everything is happy.
Not everything is sad, either.
What I can say is that it would be miserable going back and editing everything I’ve said about Supergrover, because editing came at a cost….. but no, it didn’t. That’s because I should have realized a long time ago that she was never going to open up to me and I was wasting a lot of time and energy with hope.
However, there are several good options as to why she’s not talking right now, so I don’t want to be a dick and say we’ll never speak again because I’m sure we won’t. I’ve been sure several times before, and it hasn’t lasted that long. But what I don’t want her, or anyone else, to be able to say is that I was the only one who exhibited toxic behavior. That withholding information was just as bad as giving too much. That we were both hotheaded and angry. That we’re both first children, and not used to being wrong. We’ve got each other’s numbers. For every action, there’s been a reaction. Sometimes it’s mine that’s blown out of proportion. Sometimes it’s hers.
No one won anything here. We both participated, and it became toxic because of a cycle perpetuated by both of us. I want to show that more than anything because I don’t have the want or need to blame her for anything.
Writing is about what I’m going to do. Editing it is dragging up the past. It makes the ghosts rise from their graves, and I’m eager to avoid that part of it. With an editor, they’d be reading my words without having memories attached to them.
So, in order to get me to edit my own work, I’m not exactly sure what it would take. It would be cutting my brain off from my heart…. something that writing stream-of-consciousness never does.
One of my readers, Susan, really got to me in one of my latest entries. In saying this, I mean that it made me think, not that it wounded me in any way. I turned it over and over in my head, because in order to understand why I’m okay with Zac having multiple relationships and me being unsure about whether I will in turn is not because I am scared of managing multiple relationships in person.
I am AuDHD. When I am with someone, I am truly present and in the moment. What I am not good at is getting back to people and being responsible about the feeding and upkeep of a relationship. But Zac being poly takes the pressure off me because he has a lot of the same thought processes as me. He hasn’t defined “neurodivergent,” but in my case……
As Zac’s roommate would say, “the ’tism is real.”
I do not know that when I am not with that person, I would remember to keep them in the loop. This is something that Zac and I have in common, because we understand each other on a truly deep level. We say “how dare you attack me like this?” a lot.
But the point is that neither Zac nor I feel possessive of each other in a way that would impede on our other relationships, because we’re both the kind of people with no executive function.
But in order to understand how I got here, you’d have to understand a journey that started when I was very, very young.
In my childhood, I was told that someday a man would come and he’d be everything I’d ever want. As it turns out, this was true. Even though we broke up, I wouldn’t trade my relationship with Ryan for anything in the world. We took a break for a while to give each other space, but that lasted all of a few years. Now, the chord that runs between us is major in terms of music and close in terms of geometry.
Our schedules haven’t lined up to see each other, but that hasn’t stopped us from chatting online or on the phone when he’s on his way to work. It’s been a while, but it doesn’t matter. We pick up right where we left off, because we both have such tender feelings about each other when we tap into our memories.
I do think that we were both really going through something and needed the experiences of being with the other people in our lives, especially because now Ryan is a father, his son in on the jokes in which I share. What I do not think for a moment is that I didn’t get that fantasy while it lasted.
At the same time I was dating Ryan, I was dealing with all the problems that my emotional abuser put in my head, because I’m autistic and turning those problems into solutions becomes a full-time job. I drifted from Ryan because even if she didn’t mean to do it, she still opened the door to my sexuality by giving me her college journal. It doesn’t matter whether she just didn’t proof it or whether it was on purpose because the effect was the same.
She became a monotropic thought process because I realized that for as many red flags as this woman had, I was on board.
This is not what I think now, but at the time I realized that I was good at active listening, good at pattern recognition on things she didn’t see, and genuinely made her feel better about herself. Nothing about her opening up to me physically was threatening because my excuse was that for a lot of history, our age difference wouldn’t have mattered a damn.
I did not realize it was emotional abuse until I was 36 years old.
Therefore, one of the reasons my relationship with Ryan was so incredibly perfect is that because we met at summer camp, I was away from this woman long enough to connect with someone else in a major way.
Therefore, I spent a lot of time with Ryan before the emotionally abusive relationship overshadowed everything else. If I use the same murder board as Zac’s friends, where my yellow strings are just as important as my red, I’ve been poly since I was 14 years old.
I never had a relationship after Ryan where I could make someone else my first priority, because even though I wasn’t with this person all the time, the monotropic thought processes didn’t go away in her absence. I have a feeling I’m giving a lot of clarity to a lot of people right now……….
So, when I dated my first girlfriend, she was there in the shadows. I’ve never had a relationship where someone isn’t lurking in the shadows, affecting my thought processes to the point where I’m taking my eye off the ball.
I lost being married to it, because when the emotional abuser went away, what I missed most about her were the years we were separated and writing letters to each other. It did a lot to heal the fact that she wasn’t in love with me, but definitely did want me as a yellow string (when it was convenient).
That’s because when we were only writing letters to each other, I had a secret world, an inner landscape to whom I’ve given very few people access. I don’t judge people by how well we get along in bed, but by how well we get along out of it. That’s why my platonic relationships are so important to me. I do not need the safety and security of a full-time boyfriend because I’m trying to be my own person. However, I do know that there is someone in my corner that I could call in any kind of jam. He might not be able to do anything about it, but he would to the best of his ability; I know that because of how I’ve seen him treat his friends over the last year.
Editor’s Note:
To Zac-
I see you. I take in a lot. They’re confused. We are not.…….. xoxo
Here’s where I also stopped believing in monogamy. So many women advertised it on their dating profiles that when I was looking for a partner, I didn’t know what any of the hell all that meant….. then, as I was doing the reading on polyamory, I started learning about AuDHD. Through the combination of all those subreddits, I could listen to other people’s experiences without replying.
I have found so many people that have been on my same pipeline, which runs thusly:
INFJ
ADHD
Coming out as queer
Autism (as a comorbidity)
Nonbinary
Polyamorous
There is a huge crossover between being queer (either through sexual orientation or gender) and neurodivergent. It’s not a circle, but the Venn Diagram is solid.
There is a huge crossover between being autistic and being INFJ, the personality that’s already a thousand years old when they’re born.
There’s a huge crossover between the number of autistic and queer people who have decided gender is not a thing.
And we all recognize that getting our neurodivergent brain is never going to happen, so we adjust our expectations on what can be expected of us in a relationship.
It hasn’t been my outlook on relationships for my whole life. I was single for five years when I met Zac, single for seven before I actually asked him out, and after a year am finally comfortable with how polyamory works and I’m a fan.
However, I would never have thought about it if I was hurting another relationship to do so. For instance, I wouldn’t have asked Dana to open our relationship because it would have hurt both of us…… we both would have felt like we were losing something with each other, not gaining…….. and when we were with other partners, they didn’t like us at all because we really only talked to each other, like we were the main characters instead of our girlfriends.
Part of this is true, part of it is that for a lot of our relationship, we weren’t in the same city; it was a big deal when she called, which added to our partners’ ire. I don’t blame them. But Dana and I would have been better off as friends from the beginning, because we were great at that. Once we dragged our whole family into it, things began to get messy.
I would have given anything at one point for that relationship to last the rest of my life. Just so many things went wrong so fast that staying monogamous was the least of my worries. I had to get out for my safety, and even if we’d had counseling, when you get hit by someone, you don’t take the chance it happens twice.
I’m never going to be one of those people who likes putting all their eggs in one basket anymore, because what I’ve learned is that it’s better for you to have more than one person to fall on. Your entire world doesn’t walk out the door at once. I still feel this way about Supergrover, because the way I wrote to her was so regimented that it feels like a bit of a loss….. not so much because of her, but because I’m having to reroute a lot of impulses. In some ways, I’ll never give those up,because I see things that remind me of her all the time.
Polyamory is a system adjusted to me, rather than me having to fit into yet another system in which I have to social mask my way through it. It’s easier not to social mask in front of Zac because since we’re both neurodivergent, he’ll always have empathy even if he can’t have sympathy.
He said something to me that meant a lot, which is that our relationship is not “cutesy.” I don’t want that type of relationship because it leads to “acting as if.” I’d rather have emotional bravery and he’s shown me he has it.
So, in short, it’s not that I never wanted a marriage that lasted decades. I could have pictured it with Ryan, Meagan, and Dana. It just didn’t work out that way. I think it ultimately turned out better than I could have imagined. In no world would I have gotten the space to write what I needed to write out of someone jealous, because they simply would have tried to sabotage my writing time because spending time together is obviously the most important thing in my life, and any time away from each other means that I need room to cheat.
That leads to the millions upon millions of partners justifying why it was right to go through someone’s phone. I feel like if you can’t trust your partner to the point where you feel you need to go through their phone, your intuition has already given you an answer…… and doesn’t make you judge, jury, and executioner when you have no moral leg to stand on invading someone’s privacy.
You don’t have to confirm how someone else feels. You have to confirm how you feel in therapy, because you’re not going to change someone else.
I have done too much trying to change people in the past by writing about them, and not because changing people works. People have to want to change from the inside out, and sometimes hearing how I really feel about something puts new light on what their behavior is doing to me, and it creates an understanding that wasn’t there before.
In a relationship, I find it’s more helpful to lead from the back. That if I lay out my insecurities first, you’re more likely to open up to me in return because I’ve made it look not so scary.
Here’s where things get tricky, though. The first is that I make it look easy. In order to lay out my vulnerabilities first, I had to learn how to do that over years. It is not something I learned on the fly, it is something I’ve learned over my whole life.
I’ve always been an observer to human behavior, and I remind myself of Dominick Dunne when he used to write columns for Vanity Fair, covering the trials of the “rich, and the very, very rich.” In some ways, I feel like I’m trying to be Rachel Maddow, weaving my experiences in and out so that my emotional connections and how they come together are as researched as my intelligence special interest turned up an autistic amount.
This is because it’s one thing to get a soundbite from someone, and rare to get an essay, particularly one that goes through an entire range of emotions about one person. Understanding that range of emotion in a person is very important to communication with them, because it gives them more context on me than I will ever have on them.
However, just like with my readers, I have a bubble with them, too. Just like I invite my readers to be vulnerable in the comments, I invite my friends to be vulnerable by opening up to them in person (as well as I can without stumbling over my words because it’s verbal). People tell me things and both love and hate it. I do not stop writing about someone when I’ve said something that they haven’t liked. I’ve stopped writing about them altogether because they’ve proven that they aren’t supportive of me as a writer, because doing that doesn’t look like only being adored. You’ll get your moments, I promise you. But you won’t get all of them, because no one can.
We are divine in our messiness, not in our ability to keep things under control.
All of my thought processes combine to make me “messy,” and honestly one of the things I started wondering when I started exploring poly was whether it was actually fair to be this intense all the time around one person. No one can be my everything because they’ve all burned out under that plan.
But again, I believed the fairy tale. In some ways, I got it.
But there came a point when the dream just changed.
This is another one of those rambling entries because I realized very quickly I don’t know shit about sports. But most of you love my rambling, so I know it’s probably okay. 😉
When I was 17, my crush was the goalie of the women’s soccer team at school. We ended up dating for a few months, and then she moved back to Canada, where she was picked for a college team that could get her to the Olympics. There are at least 10 different reasons why she left soccer after that, and I’m not entirely sure I understand any of them. But that’s not my story. That’s hers, and she’s a great writer so I hope some day she’ll tell it.
Yes, I did write her senior English final paper, but she used to have a blog, so I’ve forgiven her.
Also, I got a C on my own English final paper, so it made me feel good I got an A on hers (extraordinarily put upon, but still….). It’s not that I couldn’t have gotten an A on both. She’s neurotypical. She had the best notes ever. All I had to do was craft everything she’d already written down.
On the other hand, when I “write a paper,” I write them just like blog entries…. except I edit. I remember everything I read, so I am putting together sentences on the fly. My interest in a subject is directly connected to how fast I can craft a sentence on it without having to look anything up, because I’ve already read six books or whatever.
That’s why when the subject matter is interesting to me, the writing is tighter. The reason I try to remember everything I read is that unlike my first girlfriend, I do not have enough executive function to be able to pick and choose what I’m supposed to remember.
I inhale it all.
I think that’s what makes my blog entries interesting. I take in most everything through sight, and then write it down. My first girlfriend being a soccer player gave me a love for watching the game, because even when I didn’t understand the rules, I understood watching movement. It’s a ballet where the main characters are grass and blood.
I also think of dance as a sport, particularly those high school cheerleaders with the complicated routines and defiance of physics. In retrospect, I gained respect for cheerleaders by being in the marching band. We were all physically exerting ourselves at football games, and then the cheerleaders upped the ante with their own competitions in the off-season.
I only remember one cheerleader from my high school, JR, and he was my favorite because he was the only guy. Every cheerleading team needs a guy to help with the throwing and the catching. Plus, JR is straight. I can’t imagine it was a bad gig.
Many, many boys in dance and choir do it for the girls, and we appreciate it as long as they’re not creepy about it. I swear to God a tenor could walk into any choir anywhere and they’d be grateful to have him.
To me, singing is a sport, and I think only other singers would agree with me. If you don’t spend time training your body to get a solo-quality voice out of yourself, you won’t. This is because so much depends on your physical strength. You basically have to be able to inhale down to your feet and control the air so that it doesn’t all come out at once. That takes tremendous pressure on your diaphragm and breath control. You have to tighten down some muscles while keeping others loose. It’s a long process, and I think while not as demanding as soccer or ballet, we all learn the same types of breath control for being able to dance, run, and sing.
Getting winded on the field or the stage is inadvisable.
When I lived in Portland, most of my friends were baseball fans. I’ve always been a baseball fan in terms of going to games, but I won’t watch them on TV like my friends will. Without hot dogs and sodas at the ballpark, it loses a lot (to me). I don’t know that the Os would do well, but I’d love to see them against the Astros eventually. Now that they’ve moved leagues, they don’t come to Washington anymore.
In Portland, most of us rooted for the San Francisco Baseball Giants. I can think of one Mariners fan from my whole time there. Also in Portland, I was much more into football because Dana was. She never gave up her loyalty to WAS, but I love Pete Carroll and she respected that. I also love Russell Wilson.
In terms of basketball, I will watch LeBron James do anything, because he walks the walk. He gives so much charity everywhere he goes that it’s inspiring. And the way Dwayne Wade is raising his trans daughter gives me hope for other families.
Oh, and even before I met my first girlfriend, Ryan played lacrosse. He said something to me that I’ll never forget, because I wanted it to be memorable and it was, apparently. He’d just gotten home from six weeks of lacrosse camp (or maybe it was shorter, but I don’t remember. It was enough to completely change his body.) I told him that I liked his new look a lot, but it made him hug different. It sent the intended message. No matter what you look like, I love you, not your body, because he told me that almost 25 years later.
Again, we were unusual for kids. We were both old AF emotionally, so we treated our parents like in-laws from the beginning, us both calling the other’s “Mom and Dad.” I don’t know how my father felt about it, but a man worth paying attention to was paying attention to her daughter…. and being sweet to both her and Lindsay. This carried a lot of weight, and I knew it because she never treated any of my girlfriends that way. It was blatantly obvious.
But in addition to Ryan being sweet to my mother and sister, Ryan had an older brother I completely adored, because he and Ryan were so funny together. Inside jokes all over the place that I could join once I heard them.
Plus, I’ve always been the oldest and it was funny watching him pull the same stunts on Ryan that I pulled on Lindsay….. both before and after.
The funniest conversation I remember between Ryan and his dad was that Ryan had fallen off his bike, and was bleeding with road rash. His dad took one look at him and said, “geez. Is the bike okay? I learned later that being in a doctor’s house shapes you so much. Those kinds of retorts are par for the course.
And Caitlin once got her butt stitched up on the kitchen counter. That was before my time, but a legendary story. I believe I heard it on the night I went to her house for dinner, and we all came to find out that Cait had been picking the crab claws out of the gumbo all afternoon.
Maybe that’s her root. She likes working in restaurants, too. For Anthony Bourdain, it was oysters fresh off the beach in France.
I remember Cait being athletic, but don’t remember her formal sports. But our whole family likes watching the big games, even though we don’t watch every one. I mean, some of them do. Some of them are die hard Cowboys fans, and when I mentioned that I was a Cowboys fan she said the only way she could respect that was she liked Tom Landry. I told her that my memories of the Cowboys were mostly rooted in the 90s and it was okay to move on.
I’ve always rooted for the teams where I’ve lived except for the Nationals, because I don’t like the curly W on the hats. I do have one t-shirt that doesn’t have it on it, so it’s the only Nationals gear I own. I am much more partial to the Orioles, and when I lived here before, I was already a Giants fan. The Nationals are relatively new because we took a long break from The Senators (to our detriment, I think).
That also means that when I lived in Portland, I became a rabid Timbers fan, and even have a picture of me with their mascot somewhere. I didn’t really live in Houston when The Dynamo was established, and because Houston didn’t have an MLS team when I was in high school. I’ve always been a fan of DC United.
Everywhere my friends go that’s overseas, I ask them for a national jersey if they want to know what I want. I know there’s plenty of cheap knock-offs, so it’s not paying DC United prices.
Zac doesn’t follow sports at all, but he’s told me that he’d go to a minor league game if I wanted because he likes it better than MLB. So, we might do it, we might not because it’s a road trip to Hagersville to see the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs.
The first time I went, I saw them play The Sugar Land Skeeters, and I was just as excited to meet them as I was The Crabs. That’s the thing about minor league baseball. You can get into deep conversations with the players because they have more time to talk after the game and they’re trying to get their adrenaline to come down.
The reason I wanted a deep conversation is that I really wanted to know how Caleb was doing. He lives in Louisiana and commutes for The Skeeters, so they were in Maryland during the height of Hurricane Harvey and he’d already been through Katrina. Because I knew what was going on in Houston/Sugar Land, I wasn’t just talking to him; I was asking questions about his experience from the other side.
My sister was running the relief effort at the George R. Brown Convention Center. He said that because of the touring schedule, he hadn’t even had time to check it out- grateful he wasn’t there and desperate to see if his house and truck still were.
I wished him well, but what even he doesn’t know is that I got a fabulous picture of him right before he hit the ball out of the park, and I took a million to get that one shot from the time the ball was in the pitcher’s mitt. The ball is several inches in front of the bat and he’s in perfect form…. and even if he wasn’t, he still got a home run. I wouldn’t have known the difference.
I think one of the things I really like about Supergrover is that she’s successful at her job (I think) because she played so many team sports as a child/teen. She already had experience with collaboration and not lording it over people. Delegation when you’re the boss is key, because you cannot micromanage the work, you have to hire the right people- the ones that are self-starters and persnickety about details on their own. It’s not on your plate and doesn’t have to be because there’s a special bond between coworkers who are invested and those who aren’t, as in, how fast productivity goes down when the boss has left the office.
That will always happen in top-down situations because the boss is so exhausting. It’s not fun to be micromanaged, especially by a narcissist.
Narcissism leads to very problematic behavior, like blowing up your phone at 3 AM and being mad you’re not awake to serve them. No family thing is important enough not to miss work. Leave your family thing when I need you.
Because in the military and all the intelligence agencies around here, that is true and ironclad no matter how your boss communicates, which is why there has to be a lot of support from your family to do those jobs. There are going to be missed birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays whether anyone likes it or not. The chessboard is at stake, the one thing that really is more important than being with your family and you can’t argue with it in any place, at any time.
Support to all those people is doing enough work on yourself to be a complete person when they’re gone. For some people, that means moving back in with their parents when their spouse is deployed so that they still have a support system. Others rely on chosen family because they live on base, either here or overseas.
According to Jonna Mendez, you have a choice as to whether you tell your family that you’re CIA or not. That’s because you don’t know if your family/friends are going to find it easier to help you live your cover, or whether they’ll blow it. One thing that Jonna talked about in the event for “The Moscow Rules” is that she didn’t tell her best friend she was CIA for 35 years… and that’s because she told her dad and her dad was impressed, so he told all his friends….. the ones who had seen her face, already knew who she was, etc. The more people that can attach those things, the more “in trouble” you feel.
However, with the military and intelligence, you just have to accept that some things are above your pay grade and you can only know so much. Like, “I can call you on a sat phone, but I can’t tell you where I am.” It’s not that the soldier/case officer doesn’t want to help you understand, it’s that they can’t because it would reveal troop movements if the sat phone was hacked.
I do not think that we are preparing for war ourselves. I think that those secrets are being kept so that no one knows who’s watching and where.
I can connect all of this to “Argo,” because there’s an “Argo” illustration for every occasion. To have people know what your face looks like reminds me of that scene where the “face book” has been ripped to shreds, and they get at least 20 people to sit there and line up the strips so they can see the pictures again, trying to stop the houseguests from getting out of Iran. This is because the diplomats didn’t have enough time to burn all the classifieds before the Iranis rushed in.
Let me say for the record that I do not have a dog in this race. Both the Americans and the Iranis have done horrible things to each other. I can understand Iran’s frustration at us getting the Shah out before they could prosecute him. I understand that it put the United States at a distinct disadvantage because we cut off diplomatic relations, closing the embassy altogether at that point.
I believe that’s why people like Tony and Jonna are every bit as effective as sending “a fully armed battalion to remind them of our love.” That’s because we can prevent a lot of boots on the ground with the right intelligence, because then we can go after someone diplomatically/politically instead of starting a war.
It is so disheartening to have a president who’s blind to the plight of Palestine. It is so complex we need to withdraw support from both sides immediately. It’s not our fight. That’s one that’s been going on for too long for us to rescue anyone. The president needs to realize that in their case, the call is coming from inside the house. We can’t police this one. It will work out every bit as well as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and any other conflict we’ve entered where there hasn’t been a thousand years of fighting over that land.
I also don’t know what Biden’s faith is telling him about Israel, and that’s bothersome as well. It is a damn problem, because all the Abramic branches are at war with themselves over this. Christians and Jews want to protect their holy places, and don’t understand that all Muslim holy places are in the same vicinity.
I am not sure that is the message Christianity and Judaism want to spread…. that Muslim lives are worth less.
Because that’s what they’re doing…. like it’s a sport.
Stories That Are All True 