I’m 46, so I’m not sure I could do much with my lottery money if I won it right this moment. I’d probably put it away for my elder years. However, it truly depends on how much I won. So, just for this entry (because saving it is boring), let’s say that I’m already independently wealthy and it doesn’t matter whether I win this money or not. Therefore, whatever I do with it is up to me. I don’t know how much I’d win, I’ll just tell you what I’d do and you can decide how much it was in retrospect. Because that’s what I’m going to do.
The first $15 million goes to Supergrover, because we’ve had this plan since 2013. That day, she was joking about what would happen if she won the lottery. I said, “will you do me a favor?” She said, “sure. What is it?” I said, “find the most conservative school you can find. Oral Roberts, whatever. Donate the money for a whole ass building, so that every kid in that school has to walk through ‘Lanagan Hall.’ Then, 10 years later, tell them I’m gay.” Actually, this is an open-ended source of money, because if Lanagan Hall is going to cost $20 million? STILL WORTH IT.
I got the idea from James Beard. He was “uninvited” from Reed College for being gay, so when he died he left them a lot of “fuck you” money. It stuck with me. I think you can watch the doc if you have PBS Passport, because it’s one of the old “American Masters” episodes.
If Zac, Supergrover, and Bryn still have mortgages, those are gone, as well as my parents’ and sisters.’ If any of them have student loans, those are gone as well (but I don’t think they do). I would go back to school full-time and I have no idea when I would leave. If I got the hang of it, I might want to stay for a Master’s and a Doctorate.
Most of the reason I was bad at school is that I didn’t have enough time to work, study, and go to class. The lottery would really help out with that, because all my living expenses would be covered without getting me in debt during retirement.
My thing about getting a Master’s and a PhD is that it has to be something I really enjoy. Obviously, the current job market does not care if you have a Master’s or a PhD given the salaries I’ve seen listed for both. What I have learned over time is that managers really don’t care if you have a degree in your field. They care that you made it through something. For instance, even if my Master’s was theology, I could still apply in IT because of my work experience plus education. I could still apply for lower-level jobs, and honestly, I think I would like that more.
I have never wanted to be the manager of anything, the reason I don’t want to be a chef (people think all line cooks are chefs. Incorrect. Chef is “boss,” like “el jefe” in Spanish.). I would like to invest in food, though. I’m really interested in Athletic beer (non-alcoholic), and David Chang is one of their investors as well, so I know I’m not the only one with a palate for it that I trust.
I’d make a donation to the culinary CIA in honor of Anthony Bourdain. Not much, just enough to say I did it. Something that wouldn’t mean anything to Anthony because he’s already gone, but would mean the world to me.
I would buy back HSPVA. #iykyk
I would like to buy property in this area, but I am confused as to where I want to live. This is because I could buy land and build a house, or I could buy a condo/apartment and both of those sound glorious on different days.
(Just not in the Watergate…. it’s literally falling apart.)
Honestly, I think I would get more bang for my buck if I moved to Baltimore for a downtown condo, but I doubt many of my friends would come visit me…. oh, wait…. yes they would. Every time they needed a place to crash in Baltimore…. and I really wish I was there today because I’m a Ravens fan (who doesn’t want Edgar Allen Poe to win the Superbowl?). I can’t remember where the game is being played, but it would be fun to be at Camden Yards, anyway. So many bars and restaurants where Ravens fans would be obnoxious…. like me.
I don’t really get caught up in sports, only the excitement of the other fans. For instance, I do not like very many sports, but if it’s someone’s special interest, I’ll learn all about it just through listening to them and retaining what they say. It pays off. I still owe someone a beer because I got one at trivia off her. Her special interest was golf, and because of her, I knew Jordan Spieth won the Master’s tournament in 2015. My ex-wife’s special interest was The Commanders, so I know more about WAS than I do about any other team, despite being a Maryland fan now.
The other thing is that if you retain what other people say about sports, you can look really impressive with your analysis while also not knowing shit from Shinola.™ Although, today I did recognize the name “Jim Harbaugh,” so I’m making progress. 😉
So, it might be fun to live over a Ravens bar, because then I could have noise around me without taking it in, plus be within walking distance of everything I’d actually want to see in Baltimore…. plus, their public transit is as good as ours. The MARC train even connects to Silver Spring station, so BWI is probably 30 minutes and West Baltimore another 30 after that. It’s handy to take the MARC to BWI when you’re flying Southwest, but it doesn’t run as often as The Metro runs to DCA and IAD (Dulles is now on the Silver Line, DCA has always been Yellow/Blue for visitors).
And now we’ve arrived at what I’d do if I won the lottery in terms of securing my own future. I really believe in my app, but I don’t do development. If I won the lottery, I could be my own venture capitalist. With the right government contracts, it would be a hit in Washington and possibly as famous as Uber if it works in more cities than just DC. I would want to start small, basically a “Pied Piper” sort of office, because I don’t want to spend all the money at once…. besides, with an app, less is more. I don’t want too many chefs, not enough line cooks. It’s my vision.
If nothing else, I am good at planting ideas in people’s heads. Money would just help me do that on a grander scale. So, I’d change everything……
Write about a few of your favorite family traditions.
Before I get started about first family traditions, I got invited to a Burns Nicht party at Zac’s in which we all sat around the table and read poetry by Robbie Burns. I said, “is it bad that almost every time I mention Robbie Burns, I accidentally say ‘Robbie Coltrane’ first?” Everyone laughed.
My new retired spook friends came, and I was going to ask them to review my fiction prompt, but it was lost in the merriment. I even found a scotch I liked with peat moss, and I have said for many years that I don’t like it. What I have learned is that I don’t like the peat turned up to the dominant flavor because to me it smells like Band-Aids when they used to come in a tin. Everyone broke up laughing, and one of the spooks said, “and now we know why she’s a writer.” I laughed until I cried.
I announced I was leaving at 11:00 so I didn’t miss the last train, but no one wanted me to leave so I crashed here. As a result, you are getting this from Zac’s room. He’s already left for work and I’m writing in the quiet, as I often do because I have housemates. Now, so does Zac. Sometimes it’s a problem because I get interrupted in the middle of a thought, but not as much as I do with five of them.
So, in this quiet, reflective moment, I’ll go back in time.
The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker’s old broken-down toolhouse.
Barbara Robinson
This is the first paragraph of “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” which is the thing I remember most about my childhood because during Advent, we read sections from it every night. The story is basically The Herdmans taking over the Christmas pageant and it being memorable because the Herdmans were as poor as Mary and Joseph.
We lit the Advent candles, ate the chocolate out of our Advent calendars, and enjoyed crying with laughter.
SHAZAM! UNTO YOU A CHILD IS BORN!
Dana and I continued the tradition of having devotionals for Advent, but we usually got the books put out by the UCC.
We also cut down our own Christmas tree every year and I put up with it because I loved the smell, but my allergies were miserable. It was a trade-off. One year we skipped it and drew a Christmas tree on our patio door. I ended up making the angel’s halo an Ubuntu logo, because of course I did.
Several times in my life have I done a Solstice Party, both in Oregon and Virginia. This year’s was very memorable because we all wrote something we wanted to let go of and threw it into the fire. Not only was it meaningful, it brought back a memory from my emotional abuser that genuinely made me laugh. My dad always set up a fire for people to do that on Ash Wednesday, and either used them after they were cool or used the ones from the previous year. I don’t remember.
Anyway, she said, “now I feel like I’m walking around with someone else’s problems on my forehead.” Now I know enough to know that my response should have been, “welcome to my world.”
Traditions at her house were huge parties for her birthday and Christmas. We only did Christmas morning together once, and it was great. We woke up to Jule Andrews, had mimosas, and opened gifts. I wish it had happened more, but over time it just didn’t and I have no idea why. Probably because she was telling her partner one thing and me another and had been for many years, so when I showed up in the flesh, she was caught between those two stories, so she invalidated mine by making me look crazier than I was.
Who wouldn’t be rabid about someone who practically raised them from the time they were 12?
Because we both moved to Portland as adults, no one saw us when she was in her twenties and I was in my teens. So, she could use my mental illness against me rather than admit that she had told everyone a different story.
She told me from the moment she moved to Portland that she wanted me to come and live with her- get out of the Bible Belt. I think she was just single and lonely in a new city and needed a friend, because according to her partner, she said that she thought I’d just go away when I was 18.
Those two stories are quite a bit different, eh?
She just didn’t tell me what she told her partner, so from the minute I arrived in Portland, to me I had my “mom” back and her partner must have thought I was some sort of stalker, because she treated me with a suspicion that just didn’t need to be there…… because of course she did. She didn’t know my story, and over time refused to believe it was true….. because by then, the emotional abuse was telling everyone about me “chasing her” so that I looked like I was competing for something when I felt like I’d been inverting the parent/child dynamic our entire relationship. She absolutely used me as her dumping ground and left me in a heap…… and no one saw it.
So, those traditions became less and less because I realized that her actions made her look like such a jackass to me. The spell was broken. Either claim me or let me go, because I don’t have to stand around while you make up everything and I try to be nice about it so you don’t drop me altogether.
She also didn’t like me as she got older, because she didn’t think of herself as “older and often not wiser” anymore. As I grew, she hated it when I called her out on the carpet because no one does that….. but I’ll speak truth to power because I don’t give a damn if you’re a trademark all on your own, you still have the emotional abilities of a human. How you execute that is your communication style, but whether you’re the president of the United States or a migrant worker, you have the same potential emotional range.
I don’t want to talk about how impressive you are, I want to talk about how to be in a relationship with you. How do I love you so that you know it? How do I know when I feel loved? How do I know to walk away when I am not getting my needs met and the other person isn’t taking my needs into consideration and thinking of them as important?
The longer I stayed in that relationship, the longer I knew I’d already stayed too long. It was 23 years, because you don’t lose hope on a parent figure until you realize how toxic it really was. I was so shellshocked that a friend likened it to battered wife syndrome, in a way, and worse because I was so young.
So, when I think of traditions, most of them have to do with the person I miss a lot at times when I’m thinking of good memories and also hate with a burning passion that exceeds even my expectations when I think of the bad. I get angry not only at myself, but at having watched the way she treated other women after I was discarded and seeing them go through the same range of emotions I did….. except they were adults.
They didn’t have the strict power imbalance that I did, but the lovebomb/discard cycle is real and I was only in Portland for 12 years and I watched her go through “best friends” way too much for that.
She tried to do it to me. After several years of discarding me at every chance she got, not even taking my calls, we were at a concert together and she called me her best friend. I stopped contact after that, because the story she was telling herself was all in her head.
In public, she praised herself for helping raise me and ignored me in private. It was a sick, sad world for many years, so I got out.
And that’s where the traditions stopped, because when I left that toxic relationship, I got rid of a lot of them.
I sent a poorly worded e-mail about it to Supergrover, so I want to word it differently here in case she sees it. In the letter, I said something about wanting her to be my first priority because of the hard out and also because her hard out affected my blog more than anything else in my life. She is also successful at everything she does, and really has her shit together. I have no doubt that her bosses think as highly of hers as the glowing reports Zac and I have gotten in the past. I wanted to learn how to be that sort of person from both of them, because Supergrover is neurotypical and Zac is neurodivergent……….
But the way I phrased it was “what could Dana have done for me that you could?” I meant that Dana was going down and I was going with her. I didn’t want that anymore. But it made it sound like our relationships were transactional, when they were anything but. She was rescuing me from an untenable situation because of Dana’s drinking and physical violence. I would not have had the strength to leave unless I’d met someone like that who knew she deserved me, when my self- esteem was so low I couldn’t say the same. I couldn’t believe in my belief in me, but I could believe in hers.
I struggled with those love feelings because of her belief in me. I just needed validation so much when I couldn’t give it to myself. I still struggle with platonic love feelings, because I wished for a healthy relationship that was sustainable and we just can’t seem to get there.
But we did have our own traditions in terms of sending books for Christmas that we thought each other would like……. and she had my number. I miss talking about the little things just as much as I miss talking about the big things.
Just like with Zac, I never wanted more than she could give me in terms of time. I began to hate that she told other people her feelings about me instead of addressing me directly, and not telling me that her boyfriend/husband was reading when she asked me to keep everything tight and “adults don’t have conversations about other adults.” Additionally, she’d tell me she didn’t have time to write for weeks on end, then finally, finally, what was really going on. It was guilt, frustration, whatever. Everything she wasn’t telling me that would have solved the problem immediately if she hadn’t held it in.
We’ve wasted so much time, because what I know for sure is that the closeness we had in the beginning is worth fighting for, but the toxic cycle is not. But in order to resurrect those feelings, I’d have to know what her boundaries were so I didn’t cross them and vice versa.I don’t do well on mind-reading and “gotcha” moments.
Now that? That became a tradition, one in which I’m glad is now over unless Supergrover gets over the anger she doesn’t have. I have more self-worth thanks to her, and I’m tired of trying to pay it back and it not working…… I wish the message every day had been “you’re the most beautiful person I know,” because I don’t think she tells herself often enough.
Name an attraction or town close to home that you still haven’t got around to visiting.
DC metro is much, much smaller than Houston. I cannot express this enough. That’s because even though there’s maybe half the space of the city from whence I came, if you don’t live in The District, you forget it’s there.
In other cities, where I live would not be a suburb. I live 11 miles from The White House, northwest of The District in a suburb called “Silver Spring,” In another city, a neighborhood. The District and The Potomac define the geographic lines of something that doesn’t exist and yet very much does. One of the first things you learn when you move to DC is that people who live in The District are territorial, because they have to be. If you don’t live in the The District, you forget it’s there…….. The reason it’s hard that they’re territorial because they’re unseen is that Marylanders and Virginians can’t vote to do anything to help them. It has very much been an offense to tell someone I’m from DC if they live in The District and I have lived in Maryland and Virginia, Therefore, to a local, I tell people my “suburb,” but on my blog I say “DC” because that’s the city people know.
For instance, I actually did live in Houston, but for some of the time I lived in Sugar Land, an actual suburb. International audiences shouldn’t have to care, but in person I’m more specific. No one from Houston would care if I wasn’t specific and said “Sugar Land,” but people in DC are particular about it. They are a tribe of their own, and you have to fit in. It’s a weird setup.
Most of the population doesn’t live there, and the income disparity is enormous. Gentrification is everywhere, and the heart of the city is being destroyed because our history is African American and again, gentrification. Plus, DC only has a city council and The Senate to govern them. DC residents’ needs shouldn’t have to depend on the Senate, because they get ignored by pork barreling something unacceptable into a bill on a different topic that also contains something for DC residents. It is a whole other world to Virginians.
I think for Marylanders a little less so geographically, but more so politically because being governed by a state looks so different. The Potomac makes DC seem very far away from Virginia, yet Portland, Oregon looks the same- there’s just not the same geographical feel because you’ve changed the name from a district to a state once you’ve crossed the river.
Because DC’s history is African American, historically Virginia was where the white people lived and 5:00 pm became known as “white flight,” and still is in some circles because the federal government is overwhelmingly white. Very, very few people who work in Washington want to have The District as an address. The only person I can think of is Barack Obama (Kalorama Park).
It’s like other government employees found something about DC that they just didn’t like, and couldn’t put their finger on it……… more recently. Historically, it’s always been very clear why white people don’t live in The District. The government employees who bought in Georgetown should have bought up more neighborhoods and made it affordable and invulnerable to creep because we need cheap housing for people on those salaries. We could have insulated it from the beginning, but it’s too late now. What is happening is that the few white people who lived here got rich and then it took about 30 years for gentrification to happen in other neighborhoods, and now it’s insane. Crack houses will still sell for way more than they’re worth because of the land.
In addition to Barack Obama, I also love that having Kamala Harris here feels like having her “home,” because she went to Howard. She thinks of it as one of her hometowns as well, so that love is returned.
Speaking of Howard, that reminds me of a thing I haven’t done yet in DC that I keep putting off. I’ve been to the African American History Museum, but not recently. Chadwick Boseman, also a Howard grad, has his original Black Panther costume there and I haven’t been to see it. I know it will be emotional because so far, Chadwick has been my favorite superhero in both the real and Marvel universes.
I do try to get to museums often, but don’t have the spoons. My favorite is The National Portrait Gallery, followed by Air & Space. Since my sister and I are planning a “staycation” over Galentine’s Day (must remind her we need to go for waffles), we are going there soon. I joked that I would be surprised if she did not bring at least $400 just for space ice cream (it’s been her favorite since childhood). I can’t remember if Lindsay has ever been to A&S on her own, but I know she wasn’t on my trip. She was a toddler and was being shuttled between my grandmothers at the time. 😉
I told her to think of some things she’d never done but wanted to in DC, and she definitely wants to go to the Zoo. I don’t know how many animals we’ll see in February, but I’m down. It’s a great park and I love walking through it when it’s not precipitating. Even in the cold, it’s wonderful because if you’re wearing layers, it’s a workout and you’ll generate enough heat to keep yourself warm.
I also haven’t done Mt. Vernon since I was eight, but I don’t know how much time Lindsay’s got. It takes a while, but it’s one of my favorite tours. I’m not sure Lindsay has been to Ford’s Theater and the house where they brought Lincoln after he was shot. The memory of seeing that gun does me in to this day…. as well as the fact that the blood stains are preserved on the pillow. I went to Ford’s Theater when I was eight, too, and it’s a core memory. So, in a lot of ways I feel like the attractions I’d want to see are around here, just not in DC. For instance, I’ve never gone to the Maryland coast. I’ve been to Annapolis, but that’s on the Chesapeake Bay and a different experience from Ocean City.
I also want to go to Great Falls, Virginia, because I hear there is hiking equivalent to the Columbia River Gorge. I need to walk with Zac and Oliver, who is a dog, before i make that commitment.
If you love being outdoors, this area really is for you. So much great hiking, biking, kayaking, sailing, waterskiing, and actual skiing within a few hours’ road trip. I love the idea of being a biker and no idea what to do with it once I get somewhere. However, I have found that I do love sailing. Lindsay and I have been sailing on the Chesapeake, and I’ve been in Galveston and Corpus as well (not sure about her). The difference between moving here and moving to Oregon is the weather. Having more sun in my life really does make a difference, but there are no less outdoor things to enjoy and it doesn’t irritate my depression.
DC was just a great choice all around, because everything I’ve ever wanted has been here the whole time. I’ve known it since childhood. It’s just that now, the “Local” section of The Post means more…… I mean, after Shane Harris at National Security. Let’s not get stupid.
You didn’t get an entry yesterday because, and I know this is lame, I forgot to charge my Bluetooth keyboard (I also completely burned out and needed some rest. I’ll still do the prompt at some point so I can do all of the “Bloguary” prompts, but I’ve moved on for now.
I cannot sit at my desk for long periods of time because my desk chair is an antique and it’s so uncomfortable my back starts tweaking almost immediately. Another reason I’m not really a gamer, which leads to the first thing I do for fun. I like video games, both the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls series from Bethesda Game Studios (that means they’re here in Maryland, by the way…..). I’m branching out, though. I have downloaded a few older games because I only have a mid-range PC and I want to turn the graphics up to stupid ultimate settings. Anything that came out between 2015-2020 is perfect, so if you have any recommendations, I’d like to hear them. Right now I’m thinking about playing “Dark Souls Remastered,” but I love Skyrim like I love “The Office.”
This is the first time I’ve owned a copy in 64-bit, too, because “Oldrim” was a 32-bit application and you had to jump through hoops to get it to work on Windows 10. Now, it’s completely stable…. but I keep starting new games because there are so many mods that I want to install that will not load correctly in an already established save file. The most recent I downloaded to try is “Saints and Seducers, Extended Cut.” The Anniversary addition already comes with the Creation Club original mod, this is just basically adding back in “Cutting Room Floor,” which they also did in Skyrim and you can actually download that mod as well.
I spend a lot more time modding Skyrim than I do actually playing it. I just have to be careful with new textures for things like grass, trees, plants, etc. because that’s what really slows down your CPU and GPU…. dense forests that have to keep loading as you walk across them.
It is a known joke in the Skyrim community that the city of Riften is entirely responsible for why we spend thousands of dollars on graphics cards. It’s gorgeous, but even the leaves are animated in Riften, so it’s the most intense city on your computer and when it’s running at full load, you can tell where you are without a map. 😛
The best answer that I’ve found is to install a plugin that helps you take it easy on your VRAM. My graphics card is actually decent when you’re talking about a $200 computer (I think it was a bit more than that, but I think I ordered it on Black Friday). What happens is that you have 512 MB of dedicated VRAM, but your graphics card will share another eight gigs with your processor (no biggie, I have 16 GB of RAM and could upgrade if I felt the need. I don’t. The reason why is that most games now have settings that might not make it the best in the world, but playable if you don’t care about FPS. I don’t, because I can’t tell the difference. The jump from my old PC to my new one is not enough to make a difference, because even though I had an NVIDIA, it wasn’t the latest and greatest.
This leads me to the second thing I do for fun. I think about the computer I would buy if money were no object, because I know how to get the most bang for my buck. A media workstation that I would actually use for recording and editing would have the same graphics power I’d need to play Skyrim the way it was meant to be played. There are so many mods that bring Skyrim into the future as textures keep updating to be richer and more immersive. I’ve watched ESO play Skyrim Anniversary Edition VR, and it blew my mind.
So, if I get bored, I go to Apple or Dell’s web site and see what’s new. My problem with Apple runs thusly. They don’t use Intel chips anymore, so I have reached my limit on the number of things that would run well on Windows (dual booting my machine, because the command prompt on Macs is UNIX as well. Don’t need to waste hard drive space on Ubuntu.). It’s not that Windows wouldn’t work. It would just run on a translation layer from Mx to an Intel codebase rather than on bare metal. I don’t think games would do well on this kind of setup, so actually the last Intel Mac with the fastest processor would be better for my use case scenario. Macs come with decent graphics cards, but they’re the same as mine- AMD, just with more dedicated VRAM and less shared.
However, it wouldn’t be very long before the last Intel Mac became irrelevant in terms of the processor speed, although I could make it last quite a few more years by spending an enormous amount of money on a video card because editing is mostly dependent on VRAM, taking pressure off having the latest and greatest CPU.
What is true of editing video is true of gaming. You’ll get better results with an expensive video card than an expensive CPU. The only thing that’s stopping me from adding an external video card to my PC is that I don’t know how well it would work through USB-C. The reason I’d change form factors entirely for an editing workstation is that I’d like a tower. Graphics cards, the really expensive ones, are impressively large and draw a lot of power. In a modern workstation/gaming computer, you need at least a thousand watt power supply.
I’d also want the latest and greatest motherboard, because the ones that are current now will last a few more iterations on chips. Therefore, I’d pick out the best AMD I could find, my preference over Intel because I got into them when they were cheap and the products are so good that I’m still dedicated even though the price has gone up. I also want a brand new motherboard desperately because I love all the cool things you can do with them, and they even have graphical interfaces now. It’s insane. I know that a thousand watt power supply may be overkill in some cases, but if I have a tower, I’m also using it as a charging station for nearly everything I own. So, I need a little overkill because I want to be able to hook up things like a PCI card that adds more USB-C ports rather than having the cabling of external. The only hub I’ve ever really loved is my TARDIS, and I don’t have it anymore. Now, it’s out of date because it was USB-2. Therefore, it would be useful for things like a mouse, keyboard, remote, etc., you just wouldn’t want to do data transfer with it.
Ok, here’s my thing with peripherals that have proprietary USB dongles. You suck. I’m going to lose them. I now have a very strict policy that I will not buy anything that depends on a low profile USB piece of crap taking up space on my hub. Therefore, I only need the USB-2 slots my desktop has for the mouse and keyboard. Because most manufacturers know that’s what they’re for, they add something to them so that the drivers load first because you need those the fastest.
My computer absolutely did not come with enough hard drive space, because I knew I could add it cheaper aftermarket, and I already had as much drive space as a could use…………… sort of. I have a 6TB drive that I could use as USB-3, but it would not be fast enough, I don’t think, to run applications like games because of the data transfer rate. However, I bought the wrong cable on Amazon and I need to return it for something else. It will add a drive that can run under its own power, like an SSD. I need something that plugs in so it’s not drawing from my tiny little power supply, supposed to be a feature, not a bug, because it’s environmentally responsible. If I wanted USB-C speed data connections, I’d need a splitter (“SPLITTER!”), because my only USB-C connection is the power supply. I don’t know that the data connection would be faster or not, because I don’t know if the power cord would interfere with it somehow or not. I’ll have to do some research. I know that Raspberry Pis are also powered by USB, so I’ll have to see if they have transfer speed issues as well when they split.
Because I look at computers for fun, I have become obsessed with all the Raspberry Pi form factors, from the 5 all the way down to the Zero because they’re made for tinkering, and that’s been something I do for fun for YEARS.
I started when I was only 19, so I’ve been in the game a while. I’ve done my time, technologically speaking, and now I have a history I can tell for fun on my web site that not most people have, because I was a computer nerd before it was cool and now even computer nerds are interested in people like me because the scene is getting so much younger that they like stories about what it was like working on those old motherboards and operating systems… for instance, here is my favorite story about my mother in life.
Red Hat is free for community users, but if you paid for it at somewhere like Best Buy, you got a license for support. Since Joe and Luke, my mentors in all this weren’t available to the extent I wanted to learn from them, so I needed someone to call when and if I hosed my OS by being an idiot. So, my mom went to Best Buy and bought me a professional copy. It was a Christmas present, and she told the salesman she was looking for a copy of Red Hat for her daughter for Christmas. He said, “wow, that’s a big operating system for a little girl.” My mom said, “She’s 20.”
I needed the professional support because I couldn’t rely on the community. That’s because there used to be a linux hazing ritual, before we cared about getting the general public involved in our shit. If you asked for support, they would tell you that you needed to type “rm -rf /.” The revenge for asking for help is that means “erase everything on my system.” If you fell for it, you were in a world of gut-wrenching pain. So, I used the professionals for about six months, until I knew enough about linux that I could at least read a command string and tell what it did. Now, command strings are my favorite way to work in linux because I type so much faster than I can leaf through menus.
I was lucky enough that I don’t remember who told me about it, but because I already knew it was a hazing ritual “joke,” no one could rattle me like that. But idiot users, unless they were on a server, didn’t generally create user accounts because the server administrator did it for them.
They’re doing everything as root (Administrator in Windows, except even that has confirmation buttons), where when you type a command, the operating system does it instantly. Linux will absolutely let you point a gun at your feet and let you use it.
That’s because most of the time new users didn’t read documentation and didn’t know that once they were root, they had to create a user account that had admin privileges; you had to get them by using a specific command, not every single time you typed something. If you’re using your user account, there are all kinds of file restrictions that will keep you from not overwriting a system file or deleting it- fuck the Recycle Bin. We’re busy.
Modern linux has come a long way, but it’s because we finally got tired of coming across as assholes and wanted to reach out to the public and show people how cool open source software really is.
But let me tell you how the popularity of linux grew in the beginning. IT people, for the most part, spend 100% of the time working out Windows and Mac problems for other people. In the beginning, it was small community started in Finland and it was our space. Not wanting more people to join us was not born out of actively trying to be mean. It was more that it was the one place where we could talk amongst ourselves and not do anything like Microsoft or Apple. And in those days, Macs didn’t run on UNIX, they had a completely different system underneath the hood, just like DOS is completely different from either UNIX or linux (same operating system, a few different commands). No one wanted a UNIX codebase at Apple until Steve Jobs told them they did.
It worked out better for me because with dual-booting a Mac, I gained something instead of lost. That doesn’t take away the fact that since unix/linux was so incredibly different, we were the royalty of our own domains…. and we liked it that way.
I also know that there’s a truthbomb that’s not being acknowledged in our community, and that’s the fact that the unix/linux community became the computer community of STEM savant autistics and so we were demanding and rude even when we weren’t. That’s because neurotypicals were invading our space and that change was as hard to handle as having to help people bridge the gap from Windows to linux so they stopped being frightened of it.
If you actually have the latest and greatest AMD machine and a graphics card that would blow anyone’s mind, you can game on linux just as well as you can on Windows thanks to Steam. There are tweaks on some games, but even I’ve played Skyrim and Oblivion on Steam for Linux, and I was impressed…. but not that impressed because I didn’t have the latest and greatest hardware so my computer struggled managing both the game and the Windows emulator running underneath. That wouldn’t be a problem today.
If you go that route, you won’t save much money, but you’ll save at least $100 if you buy a computer piecemeal so that the price of Windows is not built into the price of the computer. You can start with Ubuntu installed rather than having to go through the kindergarten-fueleed nightmare that is a Windows first-run.
Plus, with the latest and greatest hardware, there won’t be a problem with the CPU power it takes to run applications that were meant to run on multiple operating systems and are naturally heavy because of the dependencies underneath.
It’s a double-edged sword, because doing individual packages for Debian and Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS works so much faster than the translation layer, but it’s easier and faster for the developers if they don’t have to code both. It’s a bug and a feature.
I can’t really put my finger on it, but I prefer flatpaks to snaps. It may be my imagination, but it seems that especially Firefox loads faster….. when the Debian package loaded as fast as it did on Windows and now that original deb file is not even available…. and I’m not sure that you can uninstall it, but I’ve never tried. I just hide it from my favorites and use Chrome (because it still comes in a cough .deb *cough.). If you download the latest binary from Firefox’s web site, then you just have to live with having two copies on your system, die mad about it. It’s why I’m so glad that even though the Waterfox project has merged with Firefox now that it’s 64-bit all on its own, there are still copies of the icon online so that I don’t get the two copies confused.
That’s because I use Chrome when I need to access something I’ve accessed a million times and Firefox is for when I want to be completely safe and secure by turning off all ads and scripts. There’s not a NoScript plugin for Chrome (or at least, I’m not aware). I don’t even install my password manager in Firefox, because I don’t even want it to show up in my extensions list if I want security.
Plus, it’s annoying when you have to set a tab to “Safe” because you’re on a web site where you need to run scripts to make the web site functional, like Facebook. So that’s why I use Chrome, when I’m not doing anything nefarious, it just cuts out all the crap and safety issues like pop-ups. They’re two completely different use case scenarios and why I’m glad HTML has progressed so much.
I remember the days when you had to include redirects in your code because it would look different in Internet Explorer than Netscape so you’d have to detect it first. They had different protocols underneath displaying web sites, so you had to code pages in both that looked the same and behaved differently. It was a right pain in the ass, to be honest.
I so love coding for fun, but WordPress doesn’t let you switch into code mode and add all the HTML/CSS that you want. First, it will break the paragraph “block,” and then it will say it can’t recover from it.
You can absolutely show code on WordPress, you just have to add a “code block” so it knows that you’re trying to show code on a web site, not add coding to the entry itself.
I like the code blocks because it shows off my linux ninja skills, starting with my idealistic Red Hat phase in college. I just realized that absolutely none of my college IT experiences are tied to educating people about computers. I do that because of my jobs in IT all having to do with translating “Geek to English.” What my most precious memories involve is finding autistic friends and not knowing I needed them so badly. Because I didn’t know, I didn’t know to talk to them about it. I just understood them on a deep and spiritual level.
I’ve spent way more nights on the desk when it was quiet shooting the shit about science fiction, so I know for sure that this is a community to which I belong. What I lose in that transaction is being fired, because I don’t want to be “Dooced,” and because of Dooce, companies are very aware when their employees have blogs and they check them, regularly.
Depending on how you spin your company, they will either love you or hate you. The problem is that when I point out problems, I also point out solutions that I think would be helpful and it is not taken by management well. It’s a double-edged sword, because just like my friends, they come for the things that adore them when we’re in new relationship energy, and then when you figure out problems, the top downs stop wanting to do conflict resolution real fast.
“If you treat your employees like kindergartners, they’ll act like it. If you treat your employees like you value their opinion, they’ll act like it.”
However, I have had one boss that saw all the good and the bad on my web site for months before he reached out to me, and that’s why I got the job. He knew I could dish it, and he could take it.
The man who hired me was the CEO of his own company, and I think he wanted me to be his sounding board because he knew I would be kind and not nice because he’d watched me do it.
He showed me absolutely that we were going to make it work because we were Sam Seaborn and Ainsley Hayes.
“Sam is getting his ass kicked by a girl.”
“Ginger, get the popcorn.”
The thing is, we never had a fight over it, ever, in terms of him pulling rank over me. In fact, in my first meeting at that job, where the whole company was gathered, the CEO said “I hired Leslie because she’s an incredible writer and I thought it was only fair that I let her take pot shots at me.” Can you fucking believe that?
I am great at beginning jobs, which is why I wish I was a STEM savant because they keep their jobs for two reasons. The first is that the company literally can’t function without them. The second is that they’re so “rude and demanding” that they’ve gotten everything they’ve asked for int terms of autistic accommodations, because they were the ones that were kind and not nice. I would have an incredible amount of job security if I was someone like Linus Torvalds (Finnish inventor of linux), not so much as someone who failed logic once and got a D when I took it over.
I’ve had the most success on CodeAcademy, because their interface makes it a “Facebook Game,” sort of like Duolingo for Python (or whatever). You get badges of achievement like you do in Steam/Xbox. Aaron, a coder and coworker back then, told me that I was a much better writer because I was dedicated and I had to choose, because it would take years for me to know enough to get a real job. I felt I couldn’t choose coding when the exercises on that web site got too hard, too fast.
It is interesting to note that Dana made it all the way to the end of the first lesson. What Aaron didn’t say is that “Dana has it. You don’t.” But I knew it, and her interest in coding was nonexistent after that. But, if you know her, don’t ever let her bullshit you that she can’t have a good career as a coder if she uses her hyperfocus to learn to speak Python, the language of the web. She’s already completed the first lesson. 😛
I had such high hopes for Dana and me because the reason we moved to Houston was so that Dana could teach, because all you needed was a Bachelor’s degree and a certificate to teach in Texas and you needed a Master’s in Oregon. So, when we first moved there, we were trying to become middle class.
What happened is that she didn’t get into the one program to which she applied, and never tried another one. It was too much rejection after her DUI, and I truly empathize with what it must have been like to be in that much pain with a partner who was incapable of recognizing it at the time. However, I did try, but not until I got overwhelmed and reached out to Dana’s mother. I told her that I was just as sick as Dana, and that I couldn’t handle her all by myself and I needed help.
It was another two-edged sword because in one conversation she said she would help and kissed me on the lips to show that she was dedicated. Then, in another conversation that Dana didn’t hear (she actually didn’t hear either of them. I wanted time with her parents alone), her mother said that she really didn’t know how to raise Dana and that she’d never be the mother that Dana needed and she should find someone else.
I’d never wanted to punch someone in the face before, but that came close because first of all, she wasn’t brave enough to say that to Dana, so she decided to wreck her wife instead. Fuck me running, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to hear, because I know that my mother felt the exact same way on some level.
Neither my mother nor Dana’s had any idea what the hell to do with me, but they tried so hard, and I accepted that effort for all it was worth. It became my widow’s mite. Their contributions to trying to understand my queerness seemed small, but they meant more because they were giving me everything I needed when they were equipped. So, they did understand me better than anyone else except my partner until they realized they were above their pay grade. So, I heard Dana’s mother’s voice and saw my mother in my head, because both of our mothers treated us the same way.
Dana laughed when she came home from college in a backwards baseball cap and her mother said, “ah, my son is home.” Both of us are still cis women, even when we wear hats. She laughed it off, I didn’t.
That’s because I’d had previous conversations with Dana’s ex (we get along well because we’re both IT nerds), so I know that her parents have always taken digs at her partners and it isn’t personal to me. One of the jokes she said to me that I’ll always remember because it blew off all my anger is that I’d told her that “at this rate, I’ll need to win a Pulitzer to be mildly acceptable.” She said, “don’t worry. They’ll find a way to have a problem about that, too.” You cannot imagine how good it felt to have an ally in my own struggle with my in-laws. I know I talked a little about it to Dana’s sister, but not everything because I didn’t want to make her “monkey in the middle.” It was excruciating watching Dana need approval from people who’d never give it.
It’s why I love Supergrover so incredibly deeply. I’ve always confided in her like the mother I didn’t have, in effect, reparenting myself to get everything I didn’t get by watching how a mother loved her own kids and realizing the lessons I would have learned had I had children of my own. It’s easy to talk about issues with a big sister/favorite aunt/whatever type relationship than with your bio mom, I think, because even though you’re getting female advice, it’s not tinted with the want to make you into them.
I have been searching for that mom my whole life, the one that could accept me for my whole self. I have gotten that from myself and the friends around me that are moms, because it’s a different energy. It’s a higher frequency when you can look at yourself as your own parent.
The difference in Dana’s relationship with her parents and mine is that I wouldn’t take any shit, and she would take it up to her eyeballs because that’s what she’s programmed to do. So, we had at least two blowouts because I was tired of not being able to take up any room in that family and watching you crush Dana is unacceptable. It often takes an outsider to see family dysfunction because they’ve been doing it so many years they can’t see it.
I wasn’t as harsh with her mom as I was with her dad, because he was the kind of person who always had to be right, and he would fight you to the death over it by trying to legally trap you. So, when he started bullying me, I started bullying him back. I do not think he expected this, but I’m an adult, and you don’t get to treat me and my wife this way. The one time they stayed with us, I threw them out.
Dana was furious because she was happy continuing the pattern of being devastated and trying to fit in. I needed them to get there, faster. The reason I was so angry is that they ate our food, used our utilities, and still treated us like crap. Sometimes, the only way to get a bully to stop is to call them out on the carpet. They chose their church over their child, and I was tired of watching Dana be tortured by it, because it drove her to do all sorts of things that furthered this toxic relationship between all four of us.
I call out the toxicity, but I was the bad guy because I always am. If Dana wouldn’t protect herself, I’d protect her.
And the thing is, very few times in my life have I been in relationships where I had a relationship with their family that actually seemed like an in-law. Most of the time, their families have been deeply homophobic and dinner was always awkward.
So, what I do for fun is all tied to every one of these paragraphs. I write down my memories the way my AuDHD brain works and go through a million topics because everything feeds everything with no executive function.
Every thought comes with bonus content.
For instance, I’m also a huge reader, but I’ve forgotten to mention it. I’m not currently reading anything because I’m interested in other media right now, working on my own voice. I go through binge/purge phases because if I write while I’m reading, then I tend to pick up the voice of the last writer I just read rather than my own.
The book I’ve really enjoyed the most recently is “Mad Honey” by Jennifer Finney Boylan and Jodi Picoult.
I also sit and talk to the bees when it’s nice outside, because there’s lavender in the backyard.
I really need to start making outlines before I write, because gardening leads to great things in blogging and plot holes in fiction. The reason there are no plot holes in my blog is that I don’t care if you find them. Just because I didn’t tell you the whole story according to everyone in the room doesn’t make it less untrue. It is me crafting the narrative without taking anyone else’s feelings into consideration. It sounds harsh and cold, but I don’t mean it that way. The reason I only include my perceptions of people’s feelings rather than what they actually are is because I am not a mind reader.
If they were bloggers, their stories would be up to a hundred percent different from mine because we were watching something from different perspectives.
“What color was the light?”
This is why I don’t care what anyone says about me, either, because they’re just as entitled to their opinions as I am to mine. For instance, I know for sure that Supergrover’s story is completely different from mine because she stopped telling it; she could then easily blame me for being a dictator when I laid out my fears, hopes, and dreams. In fact, she actually said that I was not the only arbiter of our relationship, and that’s the message I’ve been trying to give her for 10 years. She doesn’t have as much power in the relationship because she’s not vulnerable. If she laid out her thoughts and feelings, mine would adjust. Because now I just feel like I’m intruding, I’ll write her a long letter every few months because I can’t be sure God is listening, but I can be sure she is. I’ve been saying that for 10 years as well.
I destroyed that relationship out of my own insecurities because she would not do anything to calm them. She’d waffle between feeling like my Mama Wolverine and wanting out of my life for good within weeks of each other. She has also said that no matter what, we have a past, a present, and a future….. because I’m part of her wild and crazy brain. When she said that, I told her she was part of my wild and crazy soul. It’s true. I’m yin and she’s yang, except with a lot more gray area in the middle. What I’ve always tried to stop is feeling worthless because the cycle ran thusly:
I would open up about something deep, and she wouldn’t respond at all because “she didn’t have time.” I didn’t get frustrated that she didn’t have time. I got frustrated that her letters were short and didn’t tell me anything. I know that’s half because she’s protecting herself and half because I’m a blogger. My blog is the bane of my existence because it brought us together and tore us apart all in one breath. She knows she’ll always have to be a reader because we know each other, and as I told her in my last letter, “none of this will mean shit to you until it’s been five or 10 years and you see yourself as a different person. Then, the 3D character you don’t see will emerge, because you’re looking for the good things now because you want to remember. I told her about the 614,000 words I’d written in 2023, so I said something like I’ve talked about our problems, but I’ve loved you up just as much…… in all six books.
I also think that if her life is cut short like my mother’s that other people who knew her will want to read my perceptions all the more, because they’re the ones that are going to want to “spend time with her” the most. I feel like I started writing more deeply about her after my mother died, because she wasn’t my mother, but she was someone’s. The worst time she never knew she hurt me (because I didn’t want to rock the boat) was when I told her that she had a “suburban mom vibe.” She said that was probably the meanest thing I’d ever said to her, and because she is who she is, I thought she was joking. She proceeded to rip me a new asshole, when in my mind that archetype was the one I needed the most desperately, the one I’d just lost.
I’ll never forget that because she was a fan first, she has read my story and accepted it as my reality, not hers…. but she’s found truth and beauty in it. When she hasn’t been angry, she’s been very kind about how brilliant a writer I am. But what I don’t know, and will never know at this point, is how she really feels about me.
I called her on it, and she noped out…. because she realized she was waffling and couldn’t give me a solid answer. But what I know for sure, like, Oprah-level sure, is that she’s worth it….. that the experience was worth it even if it’s over now.
I didn’t move to DC to be near her, because I already had my own thing going and my sister dropping in all the time (I actually see her more now). But what I didn’t expect is that we’d still be having the same fight 10 years later when it would have been so easy to solve everything in the length of one coffee/beer.
What I know is that I was too hard on her in my own insecurity, because if she didn’t want to make up her mind, I was out. I didn’t need to inflict fear of a phone call or get-together. I was furious that after 10 years she wouldn’t tell me the truth about anything.
She practically treated me like a stalker when I never was that…. at all. If I was, we wouldn’t have made up. But those feelings of fear remain, so I thought it was crazy when she said, “do you think I care if you look up public information about me?” Ummmm…. yes. Yes, I do. To the point where if I really thought about it, I might throw up. Going back to those days in my mind is torture, and I’ve been trying to forgive myself and can’t. I said some things that never should have been said on a wide variety of topics, and the fact that she hung in for the ride means more to me than she’ll ever know.
However, when I started doing actual conflict resolution and not letting her rattle me by escalating, I was dismissed. That leads me down two trains of thought. The first is that she likes the ups and downs because getting her anger out is a good thing. I don’t care if it’s at me. She’s got to emote sometime, and anger is an emotion. Her outbursts at me are the most emotion I’ve seen out of her in a long time. That’s because I know she’s going through the shit, so I pray for her. The second is that she’s simply avoidant because she doesn’t know how to open up, and that’s not personal to me at all. I can imagine that if she’s shut down with me, she’s shut down with more than just me.
The way you resolve conflict is learned in your first family, and it takes extensive therapy to make a relationship last because you’re constantly trying to merge two parenting styles. My family was all buttoned up for many years. We got over it. It was better to be mad in the moment and forgive quickly than it was to hold onto frustration for years and years. Therefore, it’s very hard for me to be in a relationship where people keep their anger, guilt, whatever bottled up. I can’t stop thinking about when the other shoe is going to drop. Neither does my beautiful girl, because her answer is to keep avoiding everything and my answer is “there’s no way back, only through.” I can’t do much to help the relationship heal, but like I said, I pray for her every night, and it’s been the same prayer every night for the last 10 years.
If there truly is a God, they can go places with her that I can’t. It comforts me to know that she’s not alone, because even if she doesn’t think God is listening, it’s a comforting image, anyway.
What I missed were all the ways we treated each other during new relationship energy. We lovebombed the absolute fuck out of each other. I have never found anyone like her, and I keep saying that, but some things are too unique. It’s not only that letting you know would be telling her story and not mine, it’s that there are some things about any relationship that I keep private so that there are some things only for me.
You absolutely can’t go back to lovebombing each other if you can’t do conflict resolution over and over. When I stood up, she did not rise to meet me. I didn’t so much let her go, but let her go back to the way she used to live.
I told her she was a phoenix, and I can’t wait to see her rise from the ash…… because she has, professionally. I’m not so sure about relationships, but I only have ours as an example.
I got that INFJ judgmental bastard urge to drag people into the light whether they want to go or not. However, I am not judgmental of people. I’ve wanted to be a lawyer most of my life and have done well in undergrad regarding the preparation for it. Therefore, I will lay out facts representing what I think about both sides of a situation. I am not saying “you’re a bad person.” I am basically reading my emotional docket and the case in front of me has as many complications as medicine. The diagnosis in medicine is the same as the verdict in law: it depends.
I am emotionally capable of being fair and balanced, but because I’m autistic, I’m often not thinking of how to phrase things so that they’ll come across as how I meant them to a neurotypical person. And here, on my blog, some of the literary devices I use don’t make sense unless you’re talking to me behind the scenes.
That’s always what brought Supergrover back around. She didn’t like reading the blog without the brochure, as I’ve said before. But if she talked to me, she’d see that I was being quite reasonable and had a good head on my shoulders. What she has not realized is the lengths I’ve gone to in order to protect her and harps on breadcrumbs I never would have seen……… unless we had talked about it.
In this way, I am my own main character (in the original writing prompt, the kid was a picky eater), because when I feel these emotional situations weighing themselves in my mind, I develop sensory issues because I need deprivation so badly to regulate my emotions. I don’t even listen to music when I write anymore. I just listen to my typing.
There are days when I can’t take exciting food, because I’ve already had it up to my eyeballs. A meltdown would be serving me something from a restaurant instead of a peanut butter and banana sandwich, because I was overstimulated before you brought home lobster.
I don’t have very good meltdowns. I have shutdowns. I am not very good at standing up for myself, nor being impolite or socially awkward in any way. Therefore, having a meltdown in front of someone would have to be major. I’d eat the lobster, I’d just hate that the food is one more thing I don’t have the bandwith with which to pay attention.
Meltdown often comes online, when I am overstimulated and itching for a fight. But I’m so dextrous with words that I’m not looking to destroy people (though some would say I am after a straight woman read an entire thread from me and a friend talking about how straight people could support queer people, and then asked me for ideas on making an ally flag. Now, in this instance, angry black woman and angry white lesbian are not dissimilar. I don’t want to do work for straight people. Look it up. Read the rest of the comments, at least.
She caught me on a very bad day and she was also uneducated as fuck, so I could have been nicer and I didn’t know how. I just had to be kind. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was heated…. where I took apart every one of her talking points in order to educate herself on being the parent of someone queer, because if you have a queer child, you can’t possibly have institutionalized homophobia, now can you? I also have mixed emotions about straight people wearing rainbow flags, because they have the option to take them off.
Most of the time, though, I go in and de-escalate a situation. I’ve whipped line cooks’ asses and it turned into an actually deep conversation. It was a Taylor Swift joke in poor taste and I took issue with that.
I am certain that I have responded like this to Supergrover, but because she didn’t see the meltdown, she didn’t see me as trying to be kind but not nice. I will agree that I was over the top, but I never said anything untrue about our anxious/avoidant attachment. I don’t expect her to treat my anxious attachment with kid gloves. I expect her not to withold information so that I know exactly what’s going on, because I can’t process situations on no information from the other person. I will send myself into a spiral. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem about which I couldn’t overthink.
So, the less information she gave me, the more I spiraled out trying to fix things, because I assumed that everything was all about me. It’s not because it actually was. It’s that I had absolutely no information to the contrary to put things into context/perspective.
We don’t have a context, and that’s a good thing most of the time because we can talk about things without it affecting everyone else in our physical lives. But over time, it began to be a hard row to hoe, because I wanted peace……
Can you share a positive example of where you’ve felt loved?
In order for this to count today, I have to have it in by midnight. It’s 11:09 PM. So, if there’s a Monty Python ending, it’s because I’ve realized it’s 12:59.
Love this week came in one screenshot:
First of all, I didn’t even know I was building suspense (in my fiction entry, “Words Are Hard, Part I“). The entry is called that because the box of writing prompts that Zac got me for Christmas are packaged as a game called “Words Are Hard,” and that’s the first prompt I picked up that really spoke to me.
Rebecca has been living in my head for ten years now, as have Gregory, Leila, and Kermit. I just wasn’t sure what direction to go with them, so I came up with what I hope was intelligent fiction, because it can’t be accurate enough to be fiction about intelligence.
JL Henry is a relatively new friend of mine, introduced to me by Tyler Moore. They’re both accomplished novelists, and they run a podcast called “The Quill Drivers;” they’ve both been amazing about teaching me tips and tricks to get readership….. and with readership comes the possibility of Facebook paying me. I’ve thought they should for years, but no one asked me.
The blessing of my life was when Tyler said, “join my writing group.” I said, “I’m not a fiction writer. Are there other bloggers?” He said there weren’t many, but writing is writing. And now I have a whole box of cards and a Facebook group called “The Writer’s Forum” that will beat me like a red headed stepchild when I need it.
It’s solid growth in the direction I need to go, and it meant leaving behind some beautiful things. I am in the position of finding the next beautiful, starting with Zac and his box of torture devices writing prompts.
For my readers that have already heard that story, you haven’t heard that I feel loved because my “date” for dinner with my sister got snowed out, so we planned a staycation over Valentine’s Day. So, this year the love I’ll give is the kind you want to give someone you’ve known and loved since before they were born.
Let me tell you. Methodist Hospital never knew what hit it.
I do not know how I could acquire one, because the going rates around here are quite expensive. That being said, there’s a method to my madness, though. Both people who are neurodivergent and/or suffer from mental illness have problems taking care of themselves regarding clutter and cleanliness. The things that neurotypical people find easy, like creating a routine for putting things away are anathema to the neurodivergent. That’s because we can create a system. We no not maintain them well, if at all. For instance, the perfect system for someone who’s ADHD or AuDHD means everything is right out in front of you, all the time……. because I’m suggesting object permanence is a problem………………..
No, seriously. I’ve read a ton of books on how to manage myself (they haven’t helped, but I’m trying). One of them is The Bible and it’s called “How to Keep House While Drowning.” That’s because it doesn’t offer you practical advice on cleaning like Kim and Aggie from “How Clean is Your House” (one of my favorite BBC shows, now archived on YouTube). No, it is a straight up workbook over why your emotions are getting the better of you when it comes to cleaning. Because first, it’s either demand avoidance or burnout. Then, it’s shame, guilt, and anxiety over the way you let your house get when you were literally incapable due to a straight up disability. Basically, “How to Keep House While Drowning” is a way to organize your life so that you don’t think the world is coming down around you every time you don’t organize something.
The second book is much more practical because women have different needs with ADHD than men. It’s called “The Queen of Distraction: How Women with ADHD Can Conquer Chaos, Find Focus, and Get Things Done.” It’s here where I learned that if you’re ADHD, get clear cabinets. Don’t give a damn about what other people think. If you can’t see your stuff, you won’t organize it. It will stay hidden from your mind forever…………….
Because I’m suggesting that object permanence is a problem………… The funniest thing is that the joke about object permanence was actually about me, not clutter. That Zac thinks of me living as much further away than I do. I should have told him to get me a clear cabinet……… For Houstonians, it’s about the distance from Lindsay’s house on the east side to my old house in Westbury. For Portlanders, it’s about the same distance as it is from Trendy Third St. SW to 181st and SE Stark.
This means that it takes 33 minutes at 0500 if you’re driving, but if we were both caught in morning or afternoon drive, I could probably beat him home on the Metro/bus. That’s the thing I love about the train/bus. Unless it’s snowing, the busses are reliable and I can pre-guess about what time I’m going to get somewhere. No freeway in DC can tell you that, and take that check to the bank and cash it… The longest I’ve ever been delayed on the Metro is 10 or 15 minutes, and that’s just because we were slow getting into the station by about five minutes at least twice because there was another red line train on our track. I wish I’d taken the first one….. obviously.
Until you read both books, you will literally not know how to handle your life, and of course there are a million books written on ADHD, but “Queen” is endorsed by the author(s) that wrote “Driven to Distraction,” the therapist and psychiatrist Bible on ADHD presentation. But what those authors were saying is that “Queen” does a better job of catering specifically to female ADHD. There’s just so much bullshit around female ADHD, because first of all, I believe that there are a lot more of us with hyperactivity that could use stimming to an enormous degree……. but it was beaten out of us by the expectations of the older women in our lives. Social masking has so much to do with how you’re raised. You learn that your natural behavior is unacceptable, and you do things that make you think you fit in, because you are only imitating their behavior, not understanding why things are done the way they’re done.
The first sign of ADHD in all people is making a diagnosis appointment and being late for it. Those things are universal. I believe that stimming, anger, etc. isn’t beaten out of boys because men are socialized to be angry, anyway, and because most women were enculturated by their mothers, they will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make their neurodivergent child into some version of them, because that’s how they were taught to behave. And perhaps it’s more than that…… because neurodivergence and mental illness are genetic, your mother might actually be neurodivergent and is trying to teach you her own coping mechanisms for feeling like an alien.
Read “How to Keep House While Drowning,” because until you work through your emotional issues with keeping tidy, then you’ll be ready for the content that “Queen” offers, because her system for organization actually works. I can’t remember if the author is ADHD or whether her organization skills came from designing systems for her ADHD children, but please hear me that the emotional work first is the best thing you can do for yourself, because it will put into perspective why you are not a bad person because you can’t do these things.
As we used to say in our church creed at Bridgeport, “be responsible and let go of guilt. Be mindful and carry no shame.” You will not be ready to address practical things until both of those ideas happen for you. Neurodivergent people will not make the commitment to organize until they don’t feel like shit about themselves 100% of the time.
It’s one of the reasons I hate “Hoarders,” to be honest. You get the neurodivergent/mentally ill wails of people who are nowhere near prepared to get rid of their stuff and are supposed to be grateful for the favor. I am sure that they will be after some therapy, but it would be like taking a baby bird out of a nest and saying, “fly, bitch! Fly!” There is no way that a television show can cover what needs to happen so that hoarding doesn’t recur. It takes years to get rid of those tendencies, and a television show coming in to clean your house once is not the answer. It will look the same way in a year. Also, I have seen a lot of autistic people (in retrospect) that have gone into complete meltdown and burnout…………… and it makes for good television. It’s one thing to code a fictional character as autistic. It is embarrassing as FUCK for people to film you and show your real unregulated emotions come out. All the social masking stops because they’re terrified. And to the producers, that’s entertainment. On this one issue, fuck them.
I can always find the silver lining, and that’s learning how professional organizers do what they do. I think I would be a much better housekeeper than I would at keeping my own systems going, because most neurodivergent people can clean someone else’s house, even if it’s a straight up hoarding nightmare, because they don’t have any emotional investment in the mess and how it got that bad. Perception is everything. “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” I will completely dissociate because I can.
Maybe we should offer an exchange or something. I am absolutely OCD about my own kitchen, the one thing I keep so clean you could eat off the floor that’s completely of my own volition because of “how I was raised.” (Shoutout to all of them….. Dana, my first chef, John Kinkaid, John Fot, Drew Collard, Damon Hersch, Anh Lu, Evan Henson, Ryan Victor (shoutout to the mixologist) and the thousands of hours I’ve spent on YouTube with top-tier chefs learning knife skills. I watch Bourdain and Ripert. It takes me about 30 seconds to go into the ugly cry).
But the kitchen is ironclad in my mind because I spent so many years doing it. It’s the one room of the house where I don’t attach any emotion to how messy it gets because it’s not all on me. I will do everyone’s dishes if they’re in the sink because I can’t stand soaking a pot (we’ve covered this before. It doesn’t work). Plus, I have the right and experience to say that I’m just going to be better at it than they are because one of my housemates is a cook, but she works in a hospital, so it’s not really the same thing as trying to close down a kitchen as fast as humanly possible. The only thing I can’t seem to get out is the discoloration on the glass-top stove, but I’m sure John Fot will write me a dissertation on it when he reads this, and it will be delightful because there’s nothing more that I love than reading about kitchen hacks.
Where I struggle is in the private places, because I don’t have a system for anything. I am a Virgo, so I am killer at creating systems that would work for neurotypical people because I’ve watched what works for them for many years. I even picked up a few things from Meagan in senior English that helped me. She color coded her subjects like Trivial Pursuit, something I do to this day by changing the folder colors in my file tree. What I cannot do is extrapolate all of that into having a life in which I can thrive on structure because that’s all my autism wants…….. and my ADHD nopes out quickly.
This has become a problem with every relationship I’ve ever had, because I didn’t have the words for “autistic meltdown and burnout.” I didn’t have words for things like “pathological demand avoidance” (I don’t know if mine is pathological yet, I just haven’t had treatment. Basically, you get said treatment and if it doesn’t work, it’s pathological.). I don’t know how much of my health insurance will cover an autism diagnosis, but I know that I need one, badly. I am at odds with myself over the two processing disorders all the time. I’m ready to go through the official process because not being diagnosed is causing more problems than it’s worth. I need to know as much about AuDHD as humanly possible if Zac and I start getting closer, or I meet someone else and actually want to pursue living with them.
But what I do know is that the reason my relationships tend not to be successful is that most people on the spectrum are not caught. They’re pegged as “weaponizing incompetence” or what’s called “learned helplessness.” Most people attribute too much malice into our behavior, when we literally don’t think the same way as you. But all of this “weaponized incompetence” would go away if I had a housekeeper, because I wouldn’t be creating resentment in my relationship over the house being so…………… meeeeeeee.
One of the reasons that I was really looking forward to living overseas with Daniel (we’d talked about Viet Nam) is that hiring servants is completely normal and adds to the local economy. If our house was big enough, they could live with us. That would be ideal, because I’d love a housekeeper to flip me shit when I don’t put things back where they go and lose them a minute later. My mind doesn’t record where everything goes, only a few….. and even that is sketchy.
I don’t know that even on a combined salary we could afford such a thing, unless we hired an au pair and said, “we actually don’t have any kids except a 25-year-old. Basically we’re the kids.” We might not get any bites, but it’s worth a shot. 😛
Most emotionally unavailable people start shutting down when they feel resentment, because they won’t just say it out loud. They don’t have any practice……. especially in lesbian relationships. I can hear resentment because I’ve heard it before. What no one has ever said to me is “clearly you need help, and I’m going to help you.” This doesn’t mean anything in terms of cleaning up one mess. I will never forget both Dana and Carol’s work on my past places to get them ready to turn over. They were beasts, and I can’t thank them enough- even more in retrospect.
When Dana came over to help me, we’d just begun that transition from friends who hung out occasionally to “you’re my new best friend. Call me every day.” A girlfriend that I’d loved so hard I broke my own heart due to terrible expectations left me in a wreck. it was only supposed to be a May-December romance, and I was foolish enough to think that we clicked, anyway. Disaster ensued. She was much older than me, but in a lot of ways, I was older than her because all INFJs are a thousand years old when they’re born. I think that’s why I seek out women who are age-gapped from me. I’ve been that old since I was nine.
Anyway, it was the hardest breakup I’ve ever had (so far), because I lost it. I was grieving the future that I wanted with her, and then I went to a party. At that party, I met a couple who had the same age difference as my girlfriend and me, and they were announcing they were having a baby. I did not know this beforehand, and I was so caught off guard that everyone thought I was crying over the good news of people I’d just met and it was a little bit over the top.
If you knew her like I did, you would have been wrecked, too.
My reaction was to go into total burnout. I didn’t leave my bed unless I had to for months. I barely made it to church, but that was the one social obligation I could keep despite it being murder seeing her all the time. We eventually made our peace, and I still think she’s cute as a button. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t hell on earth, then.
I lived in what I told Dana was “dumped girl phase,” and that I’d never told anyone this before, but I cannot function. The most beautiful words in the English language came out of her mouth…….. “we’ll fix it.” It wasn’t that she was going to fix everything for me. She didn’t say, “I’ll fix it.” She whipped me into shape so that I became anal Annie about my whole apartment just to say thank you and it will never get this bad again. It would have been nothing if I hadn’t changed my behavior as a result of my deep gratitude.
But that apartment was basically a studio, with a folding door between my bedroom and the living room. I gave away a lot of stuff, and then I didn’t have much to keep clean. I didn’t need a housekeeper because as long as I didn’t buy anything new (not that I don’t like nice things….. I don’t like to manage them), then my apartment would stay clean.
The second time that Carol and Dana helped me was when I’d just broken up with Katharin. I went into meltdown and burnout because I didn’t know what to do. We’d rented this house that was only doable on two incomes, and it was just the right house for a couple……… just not for us, as it turns out. So, I was happy about the breakup because I knew that Katharin didn’t really want to move to Portland. She just said she did because I wanted to go, because I knew that Houston was a minefield of triggers and at that time, Portland wasn’t.
She can blame our breakup on me all she wants to, but the truth is she couldn’t just say “I let you go find the house and I went home to Corpus to spend the summer and I realized I couldn’t leave my family.” She had backed out of moving twice before she finally said she wasn’t coming because I “cheated on her.” What really happened is that Dana read me the riot act and I have never taken in a conversation so hard.
Here is some version of what she said, most of it verbatim but I don’t remember everything………
It’s not normal for your girlfriend to go through your checking transactions to see if you’ve been in your best friend’s neighborhood when you have a thousand friends in Southeast. It’s not normal for someone to shoot down an incredible opportunity for you because you’re going to be gone for three months. She turned it into “if you really loved me, you’d stay.” It’s not normal for someone to fall in love with you and then say, “I’d think you were less flaky if you finished your degree. It’s not normal for your girlfriend to keep you away from a best friend you met years and years before you met her. I’m tired of watching you hurt.
Editor’s Note:
I’d been offered an internship at Human Rights Campaign to help shape Sunday School curriculum in modern/liberal interpretations to include queer people. It would be for people like the More Light Presbyterians, the Lutherans (I could have written for Nadia Bolz-Weber and don’t think I’m not mad about it), and the Reconciling Movement in the United Methodist Church…………….. the closest I’ll ever become to being a Methodist minister because they made it clear they didn’t want me when I was 15.
So, that little speech made me realize that my best friend had my best interests at heart, and Katharin had stopped drinking, but was still a dry drunk with the need to control me. Her family also gave her the most fucked up childhood you can imagine, so both of our trauma reflexes were well=ingrained.
Katharin’s family wasn’t wealthy, so when she turned 18, they took out a whole bunch of credit cards and loans in her name. Then, she came out to them and pretended she was dead for a year, saying that they didn’t have to pay her back because it was “the gay tax.”
In retrospect, at that time in my life, Katharin was way above my pay grade, and no one noticed because she was “more successful than me.” She was a middle school counselor, and good at her job. But when her frustrations boiled over, it was “All Pick on Leslie Day.”
The relief of that relationship ending, yet the terror, made it where I just collected shit everywhere. Just soda bottles everywhere I didn’t pick up because I didn’t care. I couldn’t.
Autistic meltdown and burnout makes for good television, tho……….. eyeroll.
So, in order to get me out of the house, Carol and Dana came over and we did it all in one day, maybe one and a half. I don’t remember what happened next; I might have moved in with them, or I might have stayed at another friend’s house. But what I know is that everyone who met Katharin in Oregon didn’t like her….. for me or just in general. That’s because no one in Portland is impressed by what you do.
And sometimes, Katharin was just as straight up mean in person, in front of my friends, that she was at home. It just goes to show how easily I got used to her words making me feel terrible, because my words about myself weren’t that different.
In that case, hiring a housekeeper wouldn’t have helped, because Katharin’s anger and resentment came from a completely different place. But in all the others, I have found that because people’s problems are so complex and emotional, not being able to clean up after yourself for whatever reason is the one problem you actually can throw money at, because you’re not hiring a servant. You’re making an accommodation for your disability that will take resentment about chores off the table.
But before I have the ability to hire a housekeeper, I at least need to start reading “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” instead of “The Joy of Leaving Your Shit All Over the Place.”
Before we get started today, I have to give a shoutout to Susan. When I went back over her comment on yesterday’s entry, I realized what she was actually saying and I laughed til I cried. She said, “I’m surprised at what’s coming up for people in response to this ‘innocent’ question.” I was confused because I thought I’d asked a question in the writing and I was slow on the uptake as to which question she meant……. and then I realized that THE WRITING PROMPT was a question. Face palm. Yes, the writing prompt was completely innocent, and it didn’t take me all the places I could have gone because I have so many food memories.
I stopped taking road trips when I stopped driving, but I do love them. Zac was kidding me about being a bad driver, which is valid. But when I didn’t have a choice, I drove. I got better with age, but my last wreck came from my last road trip. When I tell you the circumstances, you probably won’t be surprised. Just yet another time autism ate my lunch.
I think deeply about things, to the point of the exlusion of everything going on around me. As a driver, this is not ideal. I think everyone is like this to some extent; they get lost in their own little world and then all of the sudden, there’s a car there….. I’d just talked to my first girlfriend after years and years, and I can’t remember what it was about the conversation that had me tripped up- mostly that it had been so long and I had absolutely no idea why she ghosted me in the first place.
She came out of hiding to say she was sorry my mother died, and then nothing ever again. Because basically what I realized is that she had the ability to control my emotions because mine went up and down as hers did. If you’ve read any of my writing in the last 20 years, you know this is not an unusual thing for me. I’m an INFJ. I take on every emotion in the room, good and bad.
I did what I always did back then when I was upset. I went to Waffle House. Or I tried. The one I used to go to when I lived here before was out in bum fuck Virginia, but there was one on my side of the river in Frederick. So, off I go for salvation- which in this case was going to be a triple order of hash browns with chili, cheese, and onions. It’s my emotional support junk food.
Frederick isn’t really that far; I’m not sure that a Marylander would think of Silver Spring to Frederick as a road trip, but it was memorable. I ended up in the hospital when I took a curve too fast and slammed into a guardrail. I hadn’t been drinking (as opposed to what normally happens when you go to a Waffle House), I was just lost in thought and missed a sign for a 25mph speed limit while coming around…… or at least, I thought I did. The cop who came to ticket me (deservedly, I was really nice about the whole thing and so was he), he said that it wasn’t marked on this side. It was marked on the other side of the freeway. I remained cool and calm, but on the inside, I was livid. How is a sign a half mile away going to help me in this situation?
So, yes, I was driving distractedly, but I surely cannot be at fault for everything that happened that day if a curve was that dangerous at 30mph and unmarked. Seriously, five miles over at the entrance to a freeway and I went up on two wheels. I took my lumps, and I’ve never driven again…. unless I was in Texas and Lindsay and I were going to our grandparents’ houses or something (they used to live in the same town- our step-grandparents lived about six miles away). And even then, that’s only happened once.
Lindsay likes to control the driving and the music. You have no choice in this matter. 😉 I just don’t mind because she listens to things I’ve never heard before. For instance, Charlotte Cardin…. she’s a Canadian who had her premiere American concert at Union Stage, and we got to be there. Just a core memory all the way around.
Oh, wait. I did drive on one of our road trips, and it brings me to a really funny story even though :::waves hand::: this is not the road trip you are looking for.
When I was about 23, my mother went with her church choir to perform at Carnegie Hall. Lindsay, Kathleen, and I couldn’t get tickets for the performance, but my mom invited us to meet her in New York and just bum around. I think we spent the night? Not sure, but I put in a text to Lindsay to see if she remembers. If she gets back to me “before publication,” I might be able to shed some more light. I want to say we stayed at The Time hotel, but I’ve spent a couple nights in New York and I may be mixing up trips………
But anyway, when we were kids, my dad left an entire pound of sliced turkey in the trunk of his car. We didn’t find it for weeks. When we finally found it, my dad called it “Lanagan Lunchmeat Syndrome.” So, at one point, I think Philly, we stopped at a gas station to get sandwiches because Washington to New York is really not that far. We just needed a snack. So, that was a good move right up until I didn’t notice that Lindsay left half a sandwich in the back seat of my car for like, six weeks, so I know that Lanagan Lunchmeat Syndrome is genetic. I’m sure I’ve celebrated it more than once since then… Oh, wait. I definitely have because I can’t remember whether it was Dana or me, but she definitely knows about “Lanagan Lunch Meat Syndrome.”
The reason I can’t remember is that Dana didn’t change her name legally, but we were both Mrs. Lanagan to our friends. That’s because at the time we were thinking about having kids. We didn’t, of course, but at the time it made sense for us all to have the same last name and she had cousins with her last name and I didn’t. So, we both answered to “Lanagan” in the kitchen and I don’t believe I have ever been more touched when they called her and she answered to it. Plus, it was fun calling her “Naganalanad.” Oh, and we had two other nicknames. Dana introduced me to one of her customers that always called her “Trouble.” So, when he said, “hey, Trouble,” she introduced me as her wife and he nodded to me and said, “Mrs. Trouble.” I don’t remember what I said, but it was some version of “you have no idea.”
But in the original road trip instance of me showing signs of “Lanagan Lunch Meat Syndrome,”, we didn’t spend much time together. The part I really remember is driving down West Side Highway and the water being so incredibly beautiful. This why I wanted to go to New York, Zachary. He only gets the full name when I’m play upset.
No, I was telling everyone in another entry that I’d like to spend some actual time in New York people watching, because that’s the one thing I’d never done. Just gotten a table at an outside café, probably with a newspaper so I’m not incredibly obvious as to all the staring I want to do. How do New Yorkers live? How do they survive? I think my answer would be to slowly become Fran Lebowitz….. and honestly, I’m not even sure I’m not her already. I am 46…….
I have not had many days lately where I’m not absolutely as cranky as she is, but she’s brilliant so a lot of funny comes with her outlook/attitude. I suppose Fran is a better archetype for me because Harper Lee was much more agoraphobic than I am (though I do get that way sometimes). Fran does speaking engagements that are basically just interviews with one person and I think, “I could handle that. It’s just one person.” She also loves being at home with her books and writing, she doesn’t feel trapped there.
I saw a meme that spoke to me yesterday (the reason why I have trouble in conflicts with neurotypical people), literally to my core because it says so much about my emotional abuser, then Meagan, Kathleen, Katharin, Angela, Supergrover, and to a certain extent, Meagan and Dana (that’s because they were the only two personalities I’ve dated/been partners with that deviated from the pattern and got into it once I was just, so………….. meeee.
The meme said, “you don’t like dominant women because you’re submissive, you like domaninant women because you’re autistic and they’re direct about what they want.” I can 100 and crazy percent agree that this is why I thought Meagan was right, that we would have been good partners for each other as adults if we’d tried, because she was an athlete and is now a massage therapist. That means she is driven to succeed and also didn’t completely steamroll me every chance she got.
She was in touch with her fallibility, when a lot of women aren’t. When emotionally unavailable people shut down, whatever it is that they’re upset about becomes inflexible and there’s not a lot of compromise. I have come to realize over the years that this is not personal in any way and just to distance myself from those people. It’s not because I don’t love them to the moon and back (even Kathleen, because I’m determined not to be bitter).
The feeling I had with Meagan where there were some things I felt strongly about and some things I did was why my relationship with Sam tripped me up for a bit. I did not feel that I was absolutely steamrolled until I put all the puzzle pieces together. Just wire monkey all the way around when I desperately needed cloth after a bad relationship beforehand….. and there were seven years between Dana and Sam, so it was a very big deal for me to let my guard down even that much. So, the first red flag is that she felt responsible for my transportation because she had a car and I didn’t. Not once in three weeks did she say, “I’m going to be at X. Meet me there.”
In fact, I don’t think she ever would have, because she’s a mom and wants to take care of everyone, overextending herself in the process by putting something on herself that just didn’t need to be there………. and the biggest red flag as to why I originally said no to our first date. She picked on me for not having a car.
I told her that if we worked out, I would think about buying a car because it wouldn’t just be about me. I’d need to be able to get there faster if she was stuck for child care or whatever (I never wanted to be the stepmom unless she asked me, just mom’s girlfriend who lets us get away with murder- relative, because they’re pretty much the perfect kids.
I didn’t have the money to buy a car currently and if I did come into enough money to buy a car, I wasn’t sure it was the safest option for me unless I bought a Tesla, the only way I’d let the kids ride with me because of the technology. I also said that I was waiting for other car companies to get their adaptive driving tools in their own cars because Elon Musk is a tool. So, from the very beginning, me not having a car was a straight up problem……………. FOR HER.
It was a road trip to see her, but not any longer than I would have taken to see Zac, just in the other direction. She lived near BWI, and the train ticket on the MARC was $18 round trip. If Sam wasn’t available to pick me up, or just didn’t want to, it was close enough to Uber without spending an arm and a leg. And not just to her house- it was a small town. I could have met her anywhere, without, I might had, having to pay for or find parking.
The other thing is that Sam told me from the very beginning that she was just starting a successful clinic and she really didn’t have time to date. That she didn’t even know if she could see me after our first date. This did not sit well with me. I said, “it looks like you’re only looking for a girlfriend for a weekend, and I’m not into that at all. She promised that no, it had nothing to do with that, it was only timing both with her business and with the kids’ dad (we weren’t even close to being introduced- that would have been straight up insane). The one thing the kids did know is that their mom was dating someone, and if it worked out they might meet me, but she wanted the kids to know she was dating in case I accidentally left something at their house, etc.
So, I know that Sam wasn’t as shallow about all this as she seemed. She was trapped between two worlds; the one where she wanted a successful business, and also wanted to throw her whole heart into a relationship because she didn’t know how not to do that. Frankly, until I’d been dating Zac for a year, I didn’t know how not to do that, either. It took time and patience to learn, because negotiating emotional boundaries doesn’t wig me out the way it used to.
I was actually talking to Zac about this, that because of the way I was raised, I was taught to see men as an authority figure, as all women are and fight against it our whole lives…. and that me being 10 years older made me realize I wasn’t scared of him. That I actually was coming from a place of wisdom, but not always because Zac is every bit as intelligent and creative as I am. I feel like I have met my match, and because I feel polysaturated at one person, I don’t feel the need to date more because now I’m the one that doesn’t have time for a full-on relationship because I am pouring my energy into all of you.
And we negotiate boundaries all the time, except that most of those are on my end. You get to see what you get to see, but I do have a third dimension…………. kind of. 😛
So, I am of two minds about the breakup. I was trapped in the same world she was- content to focus on my writing and not her exclusively so she wasn’t overwhelmed at work and at home. This led to two issues. The first is that I don’t know how long it had been since her last relationship, but she basically went into it feet first and rushed everything until it flamed out. She was scared she was going to do that with me, and I know it.
You don’t have jokes like me calling her “Wilhousky” if you don’t get each other on a deep spiritual level. I am lyric soprano, and she’s an alto with mezzo tendencies….. so basically, the same kind of soprano as me. Not full of herself, first of all, because most lyric sopranos are. It’s supposed to be my job to be the egotistical nut bag, but I’m not because I’ve watched those absolute bitches for years and I will have no part of it. I already know that with pieces that really fit my voice, I am unstoppable all on my own. I don’t need to compare myself to anyone else at any time…… and Sam felt the same way.
Plus, her house was big enough that if she wanted a grand piano, I could have brought her one. 😉 But that would have taken years to build, and she was so ready and yet not. She felt it was too soon to jump in feet first, yet didn’t have any experience not doing so. Frankly, neither did I. But what I was comfortable with is loving her to whatever level she would accept, because I thought she would make a great friend if we weren’t together……… right up until she text messaged me to break up and when I asked her if we could talk about this, she said she didn’t think it would do any good. To me, that’s not an adult. That’s hiding. But there’s more to lesbian relationships moving fast than you might think. We are terrified of scarcity. We will lock down bad relationships and stay in them for years because it’s so hard to meet lesbians as a general rule.
In terms of queer women, we are very much known for this. My friend Beck and I are both surprised U-Haul has not built an entire ad campaign around it……… It’s not a secret, it’s history. As I said in a queer group on Facebook, “we don’t want to treat women like men. We don’t want other women to treat us the way men treat women. So we do what women have done for thousands of years….. use inference until someone gives or until both people die.” I don’t want to be this way with anyone anymore, because it’s never gotten me anywhere.
Most, if not all lesbians need to be told directly that you like them, because I promise you that most women have self-esteem issues and will not believe it just by watching across the room for interest. So, I feel very sorry for it, but that’s what gave me too much hubris with my beautiful girl. Because first of all, if she felt anything from my letters, I knew she wouldn’t tell me. The second thing is that I didn’t want to go my whole life without knowing the answer.
I was brave, crazy, and a total idiot. I think she didn’t tell me she was in a serious relationship because she knew it would hurt; it actually made things 10 times worse because she waited so long to lower the boom. In my opinion, she didn’t tell me things like that because she was afraid of my reaction…. because I would imagine that she has had to deal with male interest every single fucking day of her life.
With me, she got shy and absolutely didn’t know what to say. In some ways, and please forgive me, beautiful girl, just something I know to be true from other women that have been older than me- their internalized homophobia is stronger because of the era in which they grew up. Just because there are gay people around someone doesn’t mean they know how to react when someone is interested in them. My job was to make sure that it didn’t feel threatening, and at first, it didn’t. She was flattered and appreciated my thoughts.
But I was married, and basically, so was she. But there was a power dynamic between us that made our relationship stronger and different than the one with my wife. But those are all the parts I can’t explain, which is why I was such a dick in trying to shut the relationship down. I really thought she’d block me on everything and that would be the end of that.
She didn’t understand any of it because she wasn’t in love with me. She didn’t freak at seeing my picture in her feed all day. It wasn’t hard for her to see my status updates because she wasn’t reading into them the way I was into hers, because it hurt to be close and not. Nothing about our situation said that we were having the same experience, but that didn’t mean that either was wrong.
She said something to me that I’ve always remembered, because it gave me room in the relationship to be me. She said, “we both have different ways of being in this relationship, and that’s not wrong. I don’t know what else to say.” She didn’t have to- that one line was everything and I’ve remembered it for a decade. Most of the things that I’ve remembered, I’ve remembered for a decade.
That’s because those are the days in which we really opened up to each other without putting emotional guns on the table and seeing if they’d go off. What I have learned from this, many, many times, is that she must love me to some extent because no one in their right mind would have stayed and fought it out with me if they didn’t.
Even on our worst days, we still communicated. It might have been angry that day, but the connection was still there. What we didn’t have was my ability to call her out on her bullshit, when that wasn’t a problem before. There was an even more strict power dynamic because she thought I was always trying to rile her up and make her angry.
I always thought that’s because she doesn’t deal in deep emotions and I do a hundred percent of the time. So, what I thought of as opening up and trying to get closer, she thought I was “throwing emotional bombs and waiting for the shit storm to begin.” So, when she’d say that, I’d go into fight or flight and it never ended well.
But those angry conversations are the last thing that happened, not my intention for our friendship. She wasn’t always the one who escalated, but it was easy for her to blame stuff like that on me because I’d already hurt her once and she was protecting herself from it not happening again. I respect that part of it. I do not respect holding me to that wrong forever, because if I didn’t really mean that there was no friend zone, that whatever she offered me was great, I would have given up eight or nine years ago.
I feel like I’ve been acting the way women want men to react, to see that there’s more to life than sex with women and really take in that if women won’t give you that part of themselves, that doesn’t degrade their worth as a person and they still have so much to give you. So, if you take your shot and lose, walking off with your tail between your legs, you have probably lost a relationship that could grow into something strong and comfortable if you weren’t such a jackass about it.
My jackass days are over, because I cannot stress enough how my emotions happened completely organically so that even I was suprised by them, both that they existed at all and that they were intense. One year she was going on vacation and I offered to Skype her. She said, “sure,” and we didn’t make it happen. Our relationship devolved into more and more writing, less and less planning to get together as our two stories diverged in a wood, because it was deeper and more emotionally charged due to the wall between us.
But the thing is, if you’re used to really fucked up love, you’ll find it and stick with it because you don’t know anything else. I’m only calling her out on this part because she thought I was jumping up and down for attention by sending her emotional bombs. In reality, I knew that we’d be apart for a long time, so the letters were weighted so she’d actually have something to chew on before we got together again, even virtually.
But because she thought I was throwing emotional bombs, she’d reply immediately and ream me out. From my perspective, none of the messages she was supposed to get actually came across.
I wasn’t jumping up and down for attention by sending her “emotional bombs.” I was trying to clean up our toxic mess by asking her emotionally intelliegent questions, and doing things for her like occasionally picking up her afternoon coffee and sending her presents for Christmas, her birthday, and Galentine’s Day…… because I’m Leslie….. get it?
We need to remember what’s important in life: friends, waffles, work. Or waffles, friends, work. Doesn’t matter, but work is third.
The first time I sent Supergrover a Galentine’s Day present, she had never seen Parks & Rec, so it was a cute way to suprise her. She said that Feb. 13th would carry a new connotation henceforth, and it was so incredibly sweet. I knew then that she was my “poetic, noble, land mermaid.” It always makes me happy for her to feel happy at something I’ve done, and I feel all of that got overshadowed over time.
It was all my fault, In the Beginning.™
But again, I cannot abide people who forgive you on the surface and pretend everything is fine. My crush on her was not our only problem. Her problems were also on the table, and if I’m really honest, fed each other and also canceled each other out. I think we would have been a different “chosen family” altogether if we could have stopped the petty fighting and started the real one. There was no way to get closer by arguing over the equivalent of our preferred brand of toothpaste while ignoring the fact that we were both struggling underneath.
Editor’s Note:
I’m beginning to realize how long this is. Please excuse me. I took my Adderrall at 0630 and apparently it has kicked in….. JFC.
Now you know why Supergrover was overwhelmed. This entry is basically what one of my weighted letters looked like- I should have sent less of them, but she was my “first text of the day.” And in all honesty, that was all I needed from her. Just to be that person I could say good morning and good night to before I launched into a relationship that meant having to keep up with all that stuff. I knew she wouldn’t get jealous and wonder why I didn’t do it if I forgot or whatever, and I’m not even sure if she liked it or not.
And that became the root of my problem with her, and my problem with Sam. Because both women were emotionally unavailable, neither Supergrover nor Sam would have gone deep with me and said, “here are the things that are going right. Here are the things that are going wrong. Here’s things we can fix. Here’s things that are basic incompatibilities and we should move on….. because we’re wonderful, just not for each other.” I feel like I should have known this with both women a lot earlier than I did, and with Supergrover and Sam both situations resolved in much the same way.
Sam held in all her feelings about wanting to get close right away and also not having enough time for me and didn’t want me to be lonely all the time. What she didn’t know then that I know now is that we would have been as happy as Zac and I are because since he has multiple partners, he’s not dependent on me or vice versa. With Sam, if she’d wanted to be monogamous, it would have worked the same way. I would have been too involved in my own life to pay attention to the fact that she wasn’t always around.
And in fact, now I have an inside joke with one of his other partners, and I’m not sure she even knows it. I’ll use a fake name, but this is still really funny.
Leslie: No need for you to reply, just dropping a note here so I don’t forget. You are out of Diet Dr. Pepper. Karen and I would like a word. 😛 😛 😛
Zac: I’m just now headed for home after I have to stop for……. something.
And here’s the thing. He’s going to have to go to the store again if Karen won’t switch hit like I will. Zac knows that Karen likes Diet Dr Pepper and I like Dr Pepper Zero. It made me feel even more special when he walked in wiht my favorite (just like he would do for her), because Zac is the kind of man that remembers these things.
One date night turned into two because he bought us tickets for a cheese and beer tasting event.
So, the first night we hung out and watched “Sideways,” only the sexiest film in existence because Stephanie is a bad, bad girl. Then, the next night we went to the event at Fair Winds (it’s great, you should try it. It’s in Lorton.). Good lord I had flavors I never thought I’d find outside of Oregon. But I was good to myself. Too much alcohol is bad for my psych meds, so I tasted everything (a couple times), and then had a short Fruit Punch sour that absolutely blew my mind.
Then, it was still relatively early in the evening when we got home, so we watched “The Holdovers,” because we both love Paul Giamatii. Zac had heard a review (or maybe an interview with Paul) where the plot is basically “what if the guy from ‘Sideways’ was Edward James Olmos in ‘Stand and Deliver?.’ Now, I haven’t seen the movie to the end (I fell asleep because we were watching it on a tablet in bed), so I don’t know if he actually wins the entitled private school assholes over, but what I do know is that by writing that description of the movie, it’s making me laugh so hard I’m crying……. because here’s what I know.
Poor kids experience more physical pain. Rich kids experience more emotional pain because they’re surrounded by “safety.” Safety like a mom promising to take her son to St. Kitt’s for Christmas break, then calling him up while his suitcase is in his hand and saying he can’t go because it’s her honeymoon and she doesn’t want him to come. I think I only noticed one kid (not an American) who actually had a good home life. These kids are in boarding school because their parents have kids as status symbols and heirs, not the cuddlebugs they actually are. And, I’m actually not even sure that poor kids experience more physical violence, because I was talking about their neighborhoods. I am sure there are people across the income spectrum who think nothing of beating their children. Those kids learn to do everything to please their parents, so when their parents dump them, they realize that they’ll never please their parents and to find someone else…….. a large part of “Spare,” by the way. He calls out the African man who actually raised him and says it just like that. I think it would have been a dagger to the heart of any father that had feelings.
That’s why boarding school teachers and nurses are so important. They become the parents, especially for small kids. Very, very few parents send their kids to boarding school because they’re impressed with the education and truly want to give their kids a better life.
Boarding is not required at many schools. Imagine being such an absent parent that you can’t handle your kids sleeping in their own beds at night.
But I’m sure that school is also a refuge for those with alcoholic parents…… and that happens across the board, too, except kids who aren’t in boarding school don’t get a break.
I take all this in from thousands of interactions I’ve had with people over the years, often standing on my dad’s platform as a community leader (his last church was about 1600 members, so not a small sample size). I also read a ton of books on self-help, emotional intimacy, and conflict resolution. I realize that autistic rage and burnout cannot go unmanaged if I’m ever going to live with someone else, even a roommate. That’s because in my next house, I’d like to be closer and actually run a household together rather than every man for himself.
I think Zac and I would be great at this, but there are two reasons why that can’t happen. The first is that he just got a roommate about a month or two ago, and the second is that he has a hard and fast rule that romantic partners cannot live with him. I love this, and I also know that he’s said it’s not a hard and fast rule if I’m only looking for a short-term (maybe two weeks) place to crash if I’m waiting on an apartment or room in another group house (my first choice).
I also wouldn’t want to put Zac out in any way, so it would be perfect if I could crash while he was somewhere else so it didn’t feel like we were living together. The only reason I even consider him being a roommate is that I’d love him whether we were dating or not, and I have that outlook on our relationship. That I don’t know what the future holds, but my platonic relationships run just as deep and I can’t imagine a life in which we’re not coming up with book ideas and flipping each other shit while we do it. So, what I really mean is that no matter how much time we spend together, it is always quality because we’re a lot of fun.
The only thing I’m really trying to convince him of is just how beautiful a human being he is. It is not a “falling in love” sort of feeling, but recognizing a kindred spirit. We’re neurodivergent, so we have the same sense of humor- e.g. “are you suggesting object permanence is a problem?” I said, “Peek-a-Boo, bitch.” I’m laughing now even as I type this, but I still can’t believe he let me get away with that one. I’m lucky in that he’s military, because there’s very little I could say in which he wouldn’t just roll with it. And the best thing is that if something I said crossed a line and actually hurt, he’d be emotionally strong enough to tell me that. And, of course, now since he knows my sense of humor better, his digs at me are getting better and better….. to the point where I can’t wait to see what happens as we get to know each other even better. I think he is as divine as everyone else, and I want him to believe it. I believe in him, both as military, intelligence, and fiction….. plus blogs. It was a kick to be written about, and an honor…….. and then there’s things like this.
He sent me a leftist cartoon where Jesus is at the southern border with all the Mexicans trying to cross, and I said someting theologically literate and flaming liberal. He said, “commie,” and water came out of my nose.
I think it’s great that he’s an Atheist and also not offended by the teachings of Christ in the way that I use them (his criticisms of conservative, white supremacy apologist theology is valid and appreciated. Leftists need to do better at beating this down.). Sometimes, when I use a theological device in my writing, he’ll ask me what the story is behind it because he knows that I like religious discourse as an academic subject and not in any way trying to change him. We both have different ways of being in this relationship, and that’s not wrong. 😉
And now we’ve arrived at our last road trip. I need to go out into Virginia and see what’s available. I don’t need to be closer to Zac, that would just be an added bonus. No, it’s more serious than that, and something I can’t let go publicly. I just need to get all my ducks in a row regarding health care because I would be losing a hell of a lot if I couldn’t get reciprocity.
So, if you are a praying sort of person, black magic or white, ponder how this trip might turn out and wish me good luck.
It’s so simple. Just peanuts and chocolate. Delicious and doesn’t taste cheap like a Krackle or however it’s spelled. I need the protein, because I haven’t had breakfast yet. It’s about 0930, so this is not unusual for me. I’ll get home around 10:30 or 11:00 and I have stuff in the fridge begging for my attention. If I’m hungry enough, there’s leftover pizza. We’ll just see. After getting all my medication back on track, I’m sick as a dog with nausea. There has to be a better protocol for me than this, but going through the rigamarole of trying something new can introduce more problems as you find out that something doesn’t work for you.
I’ve tried Prozac, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Effexor, and anything else you can throw at depression. Lamictal is the only thing that has worked in 20-odd years. So, I’d like something new that didn’t make me quite so ill, but it might take a year or two I don’t have or want to take. When you’re trying out different meds, it sometimes leads to mood and behavior that seems like you’re off them completely. For instance, Effexor can make you suicidal.
That’s actually a sore point between Dana’s old therapist and me. I thought she was a complete hoe bag. I can safely say they don’t interact anymore, so this story goes all the way back to like, 2015, maybe earlier.
When you are in a psychiatric emergency like your medication wanting you to kill yourself, you are stuck in the shit. You can’t see past your own pain, and someone has to step in because you literally cannot make that phone call by yourself. So, with Dana’s permission, I called her therapist and said that she couldn’t come to the phone herself (currently with her own head between her knees), and explained the problem. She’d just started Effexor and it made her nosedive.
She called Dana back, didn’t tell her to go to the emergency room, and told Dana that if she couldn’t come to the phone herself, then I was controlling and she was codependent. We can explore all that once Dana is out of immediate danger, but first of all, you’re Dana’s therapist and you don’t know me from shit or Shinola.™ I have experience with psychiatric emergencies both from watching myself with an omnipotent third eye, and being the one to take care of my friends when they cannot do things for themselves.
When you are in burnout, can you make a phone call?
I can, sometimes, but it requires a Mr. Goodbar. That I don’t have. I’m on the train back from Zac’s, so I could stop and get one. But I won’t. It’s better in my memory, when my mom and I used to split them.
I particularly need chocolate today because I’m sad. Through no fault of his own (TDY), Zac is going to miss the book signing for “In True Face.” Maybe I’ll just bring a cardboard cutout. 😛 I am sure he would love that. #eyeroll
If I’m lucky, maybe Lindsay will be free that night, because I doubt she could go to the thingme with me, but might be able to meet for dinner before or after. Preferably before, because I’d just be reading in the restaurant.
If I’m alone, dinner will be a Mr. Goodbar It’s my way of taking my mother as my companion instead of Zac. I don’t know how much she knew about spies (you never knew- she read a bazillion autobiographies), but I know she did know quite a lot about chocolate…… and peanuts….. and the fact that you can’t by the King Size because the ratio is off.
I might have come up with that last one myself, but I doubt it. Institutional knowledge seems to come out of nowhere when I take the first bite.
Today has been a complete shit show from beginning to end, but now it’s over…. not the day, just the negative aspects. I should be getting dramatically better as my brain chemicals rebalance.
Yesterday, I realized that I was out of Lamictal, so I contacted CVS for a refill. They came back to me and said I needed to go to the doctor for a new set of prescriptions.
No problem.
The problem came in when the doctor’s office said they didnt’t have any appointments for the rest of the day, and I had to spend all night cradling my head between my knees…. until I finally realized I could take a metric fuck tonne of sleeping medication and the whole nightmare might be over……. or so I thought. I took three melatonin and some Zyrtec, which had me out like a light prety quickly. However, the migraine-like pain of having your brain chemicals whacked let me know that today was not going to be any better than yesterday, and I had to white knuckle my way through getting my own medication. By the time I got to the doctor’s office, I was in a right state and they knew it. There were lots of whispers that maybe they should have worked me in yesterday…….
I’m just not a complainer. Just like my mother when she was having me, she heard all the other women around her screaming bloody murder and she was not going to be that patient. So, she was basically biting her pillow until the OB/GYN nurses bothered to check whether she was in pain or not…… and it took a while, because my mother wouldn’t say anything.
What I know from this experience is that they weren’t paying any attention to her because she didn’t bring any attention to herself. I struggle with this often, as I do not want to be seen as a complainer, either. This doesn’t work in my favor, necessarily, but it does. If I had gotten any sicker, I would have gone to Urgent Care. I just thought I would be okay, and I was absolutely 100% wrong.
I wasn’t having trouble with my thought processes today. Psych meds aren’t known for giving up after only 24 hours…. except for benzos and methamphetamines. Those wear off as quickly as they kick in. But for maintenance medication, it takes about six weeks to build up in your system.
The antianxiolitic I take, Klonopin, kicked in immediately, so I’m not in as much pain as I was previously…. it still doesn’t take away the sting of the clusterfuck that happened after my appointment…. and the pain won’t truly be gone until my brain chemicals are right, which may take a few days. So, absolutely none of this is what I needed today, and could have been avoided if CVS hadn’t waited unti the last moment to tell me that I needed to see a doctor. Again, today has been a goat-roping clusterfuck. I’m glad that it can’t get any worse. Tomorrow is date night with Zac, and I can’t wait to give him a hug. It seems like a long time, but we’re both slammed, so it’s no issue. It’s a huge relief that we’re both doing our own thing. That being said, it’s going to be nice to have a place to decompress after :::gestures broadly at everything:::
First of all, we are going through a huge storm system- I know it’s huge because my dad and Lindsay are stuck in the same one (they’re in Houston). Therefore, taking the bus was not really an option because it’s not just normal rain. It’s supposed to flood. The bus would have been fine. Standing in water that’s over my ankles isn’t.
So, I ask the doctor’s office where they sent my prescriptions. They said, “CVS on East-West Hwy.” So, I head there and the doctor has actually sent my prescriptions to their in-house pharmacy. I know this because the doctor’s office did resend my medication, but then it was saying that they were too early to be refilled….. because they’d already been filled at the other place. So, I go back to the other place, the in-house pharmacy that only carries three of my medications, so I have to go to CVS, anyway. I’ll have to pick up the Adderrall tomorrow at some point, because it’s not the priorotity here. I have the three things I really need.
So, I get to my pharmacy and in the time it has taken to get from CVS back to the doctor’s office, that pharmacy has canceled my order so I can pick it up at CVS. My only saving grace is that the pharmacist called upstairs and got the three medications I needed rather than make me hoof it back to CVS, saving me a lot of money in that process…. again, Uber. I also managed to get some home COVID tests, the COVID vaccine, and a flu shot. I have a feeling none of that is making me feel any better, either, but here we are.
In the meantime, here is my protocol because I feel it’s important for my people to know how I handle all this. Bipolar is hard on all of us, and sharing information means more to talk to your doctor about, because I’m not it. This is, in the words of Paul Gilmartin, “a waiting room that doesn’t suck.”
If you’re thinking about doing psych meds, here’s what works for me, but there’s a caveat. Unipolar depression medication sometimes works with a mood stabilizer, somtimes it makes bipolar worse. So tread carefully. Again, this is only what works for me….. and since I’m a doctor’s kid, you’ll get it in pharmacy notation…… 😉
Lamictal 200mg i qD
Lexapro 20mg 1qD
Klonopin .5mg BID
Adderall XR 20mg 1qD
I don’t know what I’ll do with the Adderrall because I don’t know that I need it all the time. But I’m getting it anyway just in case, because I never know when my ADHD is going to eat my lunch…. because I won’t.
These drugs do not play around, and I’m in the shit with side effects. I was so upset that I had to fill my prescriptions at the pharmacy in the doctor’s office after I opened them, because there are two different Lamictal generics. Same ingredient, lamotrigine, but whatever is in the diamond-shaped one makes me so nauseous I will absolutely throw up anywhere and everywhere. I look like such a drunk sometimes, because I’m trying to find a trash can and that’s people’s first instinct. But, you can only control what you can control, so what people think of me does not matter.
As I have said before, I have to choose between physically ill or mental, and I choose physical because my interactions with other people are more important to me than nausea and vomiting. It’s never fun, but it beats the hell out of not regulating my emotions.
The weird thing is that I’ve had ringing in my ears since I haven’t had my medication, and now I’m just waiting to see when it will go away. I basically flooded myself with brain chemicals, so it’s happened before. They just need to get into balance, and if I’ve said this twice, I apologize. I am not a well woman. But I did have a “not a well woman” exam today. They ran all my bloods and I should get the results back. I wouldn’t be surprised if anything is wrong, but I would be surprised if it was anything more than “you need to do more of this at home.” I’ve thought I was getting an autoimmune disease for the last few years, and I’ve been tested for rheumatoid arthritis, but not gotten the results. So, I’m having my clinic run the test again because what happened last time was that I was on my cycle and they couldn’t do the test….. another thing that could have been brought to my attention because we could have rescheduled…. No one has ever told me they didn’t want a urine sample when I’m menustruating before, so it didn’t occur to me to tell them.
But the bloods aren’t just for that. They have to make sure that my liver is still functioning well because mood stabilizers have a tendency to beat up on them. With some mood stabilizers, you have to have a liver function test every month, not every six months or a year. It’s serious business, and all of it started with lithium as we learned more and more about it.
All of these drugs are murder on your body after a while, except Klonopin, and with it there’s the pull of addiction. I have not fallen into that trap with either Klonopin or Adderrall, because again, I’m choosing sick over crazy. There’s nothing that makes me want to take more medication because the side effects are toxic…. mostly in that they render me in a constant bad mood like I’m Ouiser Boudreaux on a mission from God.
I’ve been 46 since I was six, so I actually have been in a very bad mood for 40 years.
But right now I’m thinking about the fact that Zac hasn’t read my fiction blog entry yet, and the only reason I want him to is that he will absolutely pick it apart. “That would never happen…. or that…. or that…. or that…. or that….” I’m joking, and yet I’m not. Zac and I are in it to win it. We may not ever get paid for writing, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want it to be excellent.
I also know that I’d wait years to hear his impression, and I’m saying that out loud so that he doesn’t think, “oh shit! I have something to read right now!” It’s not a homework assignment, dear heart. It’s just fun working with him because even though he’s not a spy, he’s worked in military intelligence (not as much of an oxymoron as you might think) since he was 18. I think he signed up willing to do any job, but his test scores on the AFAB or whatever were so good they realized they could get anyone to weld ships or whatever.
So, entrusting Zac to be ruthless, kind, and accurate is a good thing. I know for sure that none of his criticism will be mean, because I’m not mean to him….. or if I am, he hasn’t mentioned it. 😉
Coming up with ideas for Zac’s fiction challenge was one of our best dates because we were both excited and happy about creativity- and he’s definitely more creative than I am on the fiction side of things. I can turn a phrase and make it funny, but he can build whole worlds. It’s the mountain I have to climb, and as I’ve said, I’m at the bottom. Yet, none of it bothers me because I know I’m becoming a stronger writer every day.
I am seeking out strong writers like Jonna Mendez, Tracy Walder, Vince Houghton, and John le Carré. I know that le Carré is dead, but “The Pigeon Tunnel” is a masterpiece and I’ve been learning from him through podcasts. His interviews on both Fresh Air and Writers & Company are among my favorite episodes of the entire show.
I don’t want to write exclusively about intelligence, which is why I’ll always be a blogger. It engages a different part of my brain. Intelligence is just what excites me about fiction, because I have read so many non-fiction books that I feel like I’ve taken a college class. Fiction is easier to write when you’ve done the research first. You’ll always have to research along the way, but knowing the broad strokes of a subject is key.
I can write about the kitchen because I know it.
I don’t know shit about spies, but it’s the same concept. I sought out Bourdain in order to develop that voice. I sought out Jonna and Tony for the same reason, because I loved the “Argo” script and wanted to do something like it eventually. I figured starting with their books was wise, but in reality the book about The Canadian Caper was written after the movie came out, because there were so many people who wanted the real story.
Reel is not real, and thank goodness the book came along. Argo is punched up for drama, but the story itself is no less great when you take away movie magic.
If they don’t make movies about “The Moscow Rules” and “In True Face,” it would be such a shame. I mean that sincerely. People need to know what happened during “The Cold War,” because it wasn’t any less devastating than our other conflicts. And honestly, they wouldn’t have to punch up “The Moscow Rules” much. It opens with a case officer having the shit beat out of him by FSB in front of the American embassy. I would like to believe we won The Cold War definitively, but the moment Trump took office, it ramped up again (in my educated guesses). That’s because the FSB beat up someone trying to get to American soil in…. wait for it…… 2016.
It startles me how the rest of the world does not see that Trump is an enemy both foreign and domestic. The Russians are in it to win it, and they have had/will have an asset planted at the top depending on whether Americans get it or not. The Founding Brothers are rolling over in their graves, because the last time high crimes and misdeameanors were on the table, both Republicans and Democrats believed it. This time, Putin has won. He has divided and conquered a nation by helping elect a president that was completely out of touch with reality and took notes from all the “benevolent dictators” out there. I’ll believe benevolence when I see it.
Most Americans are completely ignorant of the chessboard because they think we’re the best. All the time. Every day. In a way, I’m on a mission to dispel this notion, because it is simply not true. Other countries do things much better than we do, like having standardized drug prices across the country, whereas Medicare and Medicate pay different prices depending on where you are. Every drug costs a bit different depending on the pharmacy, not just the geographic location…. and that’s just one example. We could have better railroad infrastructure, both subways and cross-country. Lots of cities would benefit from it, because especially in the South, you get a car and won’t take the bus, anyway.
However, this leaves the least of us stranded because gas is expensive and people moving- not so much. I hope that more people than just me have a passion for taking care of poor people, because I feel that the United States is the country with the least viable support system because we have social services, but universal heatlh care takes so many problems off the the table. The US needs nationalized care badly, with doctors making real salaries, because since poor people can’t afford insurace, they end up in the emergency room never having had preventative care…. they can’t afford it. They also can’t afford hospital bills, and when you don’t pay, that’s keeping money out of the hospital system for salaries.
There won’t be any difference to you in terms of health care if we do it right, because the only thing that will change is who is writing the checks.
But drug companies and our current insurance policies don’t want that. They want to be able to charge whatever they want and get medicare to pay for it. It’s unsustainable. By not having universal health care, you are crippling people at jobs who don’t pay for benefits, or shackling someone to a job so that you have insurance in the first place. Nothing like the golden handcuffs.
But at the very least, I want everyone to be able to show up healthy to work because they didn’t wait to go to the ER until they were having a heart attack, or kidney failure, or any number of things. Stuff that could have been caught and wasn’t. So, instead of a $10 co-pay, the bill is $120,000 dollars….. but it’s $200,000 at a different hospital and a different part of the country. Prices vary everywhere. There is no standardization among even generic drugs.
Government-run pharmacies and clinics would allow us to buy all generics in bulk, same with medical equipment so that a cast in Oregon is the same price as a cast in Vermont. And we can get closer to home (for me). The highest Medicare costs in the nation right now are in El Paso, Texas. How does it have the ability to go up and down? Other countries don’t have this problem, and it’s a shame that we can’t have nice things when 99% of the world has figured it out.
We had a lot of hubris in the Revolutionary War, but it went overboard. We are so independent that we think saving money on health care is a bad idea. Meanwhile, if we’d lost, we’d have our own version of NHS because we’d be a Commonwealth country. So, in terms of progress, winning and losing that war are both a mixed bag.
I’m not on a mission to prove to you that we should have lost. I ultimately think it was better to win….. that doesn’t mean that we should stop taking lessons from other countries. They take lessons from us. I think we’d be a lot happier in the world without American imperialism….. or at least, so much of it.
If I have a mission on this blog, it’s saying random factoids that will stick in your brain along with all the crazy. 😉
I don’t know that it’s a Mission from God.™ But I do like jazz and blues, so it’s a start.
What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?
Twice or three times I didn’t think I’d make it this far. Bipolar disorder is a bitch. But thankfully, all the med checks I’ve had over the years have gone very well. I’m more relaxed in my body…… I can also feel time starting to drain away. I am lost, confused, and afraid. But everything will work out in the end because it always does.
Up and to a point.
I cannot imagine my daily grind until I’m 92, the age at which my grandfather died. However, I have so much in my life that’s feeding me, I tend to tap into my own resources, which is a polite way of saying I’m my own best company. I want friendships/relationships/whatever, but I am not dependent on them to provide anything I lack.
I didn’t get here until I’d lived alone for quite a while. Yes, I have housemates, but I do not interact with them much. For the most part, I am locked up in my room, and there are lots of reasons why, absolutely none of them having to do with me.
Here’s the bottom line:
Guy goes to the doctor and the results are really bad. Doc says, “you have six months to live.” Patient says, “six months? What am I going to do?” Doc says, “buy a pig farm. Move to Oklahoma. Marry the meanest woman you can find. You won’t live longer, but it’ll be the longest six months of your life.”
If you’re not picking up what I’m putting down, it’s that a year can seem like 10 minutes, and one moment can last 10 years. Time is relative. I do not need to live a long time to live a lot. I keep this in mind every day because though my grandfather died at 92, my mother died at 65. I’m only 20 years younger than that, and I think I have more than 20 years left in me…. but I can’t be sure. Not only due to the nature of my mental and physical health, but also because if you learn anything from the sudden death of a parent (embolism- it blew, she was dead 30 minutes later from a broken foot), it’s that a long life isn’t guaranteed.
So, whether I get to finish out my life like my grandfather, or whether it’s going to be cut short by some unknown force, I will be ecstatic either way, because I’m not saving up writing my passions until I don’t have anything else to do. It’s what I do instead of going out, because I feel more driven to get all of this down than I do to interact.
That’s because when you’re not interacting with people, there’s less chance to make a mistake. That’s one of the reasons I don’t want to live a long time. I have communication issues and it is relentless. Because I’m neurodivergent, I process information differently than a good bit of the world. Therefore, I am the problem child, not of my parents, but of my employers. Neurotypical people cannot hear neurodivergent people without training, and vice versa. Even the way things are written, when they’re written, are sketchy because we don’t all have our neurotypical decoder rings on us.
A hundred percent of the time, it’s not that I’m not listening. It’s that I don’t understand…… but you do. “Everyone does.” I am not stupid or slow because I read the directions differently than you did. It’s because of the way the instructions were written, and again, no neurotypical in my pocket to check…… because you can go to a boss occasionally to manage priorities, but if they feel like they’re doing your work, then you’re out. And it takes surprisingly little to get you out if they’re convinced you don’t listen and can’t learn.
80% of autistic people are unemployed, and none of us have job security. I am trying not only to manage money well, but also to create something that will last long after I do. These are not just empty pages. This is not for me after I’m finished using it. People, again (from another entry, I can’t remember which), are going to want to know about the way we lived. I’m going to be a part of that, and so will my friends.
So, even though I wasn’t nice to Sam, I think I’ll still come out all right in the end……. because after I processed all the feelings from said breakup, I let go of the anger and was indeed nice to her.
I can quote the first line from memory….. “Wilhousky, you had me at hello.” The Wilhousky arrangement of the Battle Hymn of the Republic is one of the most glorious things I’ve ever done with a brass quintet. I’ve sung it a hundred times, too, but there’s big brass energy when you’re the lead trumpet player for the clarion calls. So, when Sam told me that she was a soprano in the Army choir, the first question I ever asked her was “how many times have you sung the Wilhousky arrangement?” A nanosecond later…. “a million, conservatively.”
Now, the first trumpet part is actually not that difficult, it’s just very, very exposed. You are hanging out on a ledge with barely any accompaniment, so any flaw is going to show. Any impurity in the sound. So, when I pulled it off, I was right proud of myself.
But I suppose if you’ve performed it a million times and not just a hundred, you might not feel so great about it. I hate “Amazing Grace” for the same reason Sam and Peter Wilhousky are never ever ever getting back together. Well, two reasons. The first is that I’ve sung it into the ground. It just feels like an old war horse to me. The second is that organists tend to drag……….. I don’t know what it is, but a good chunk of piano/organ accompanists slow down “Amazing Grace” and “Happy Birthday” to “funeral procession.” I’m not just picking on those two things. I already know that if I end up in hell, my penance will be singing the soprano part to the hallelujah Chorus on repeat. Hold it till you turn purple. In that instance, I would wish for a short life, but it’s hell. I could end up singing The Hallelujah Chorus, anyway, without Lucifer Morningstar on baritone. You know he knows it.
If I was going to live a long life, like, vampire long, I would have time to go back and get the training I need to actually do something with voice. It’s not that I’m so great, it’s that I love being in a group. I will do a solo if someone asks me to, but I will not offer.
I am not a stereotypical soprano. I only compete with myself over my last performance, not with everyone else in the room. Believe it or not, I’ve listened to myself enough that I knew it was a bad note before you called attention to it, but it was so sweet of you to point it out just in case I’m a little slow on the uptake. Voice is an instrument, just like brass. Not every note is going to be perfect because it depends on so much more than your throat.
Singing is a full-body workout, and after a choir rehearsal, my core feels like I’ve been tied as tightly as an old sea salt twists his rope. It’s always my diaphragm. The only good part about knowing how to work your diaphragm is that you can stop your own hiccups…….. most of the time. But, training takes money.
Once I got vampire money, I’d pick a university and just park it. I could stay there a hundred years and still not learn everything. I’d start by finishing the coursework I’ve already started, then branch out. Maybe a second bachelor’s in music, but I doubt it. That part of my life is so long over that I really would be starting at zero again in terms of a professional career.
I’d probably read law, eventually. Lindsay and I were talking about that the other day, that sometimes I still feel the fire in the belly….. but what I’ve figured out is that I thought I was a bubbly personality and I am……… but not long enough to last an entire day in court. Repeatedly.
No, if I read law I’d still be in academia. There’s a lot you can do with a JD that doesn’t require taking the bar….. and I’d need a vampire’s lifetime to figure out where I’d want to live/work. Because after 200 years, DC might not be home. Who knows? What I do know is that I have no plans to relocate, not even out of this house, for now. I just mean that eventually, I’d like to see more of the world and write about it.
Doctor Who focuses on chance meetings with interesting people from the past. My thought is, “why not go meet them now, before all you have left is their work?” I can tell you the exact day I realized it- January 19th, 2019. On the 18th, Tony Mendez found out from the Publications Review Board at CIA that “The Moscow Rules” was approved and would be on shelves. He died the next day, before I got to meet him and believe me that is not the important part in the grand scheme of things- it just makes me sad.
I did try, but by the time I got here, he had stopped doing public appearances due to the Parkinson’s Disease. But meeting would have been good for both of us, according to Jonna, his widow. We’re not really friends, but we’ve talked to each other at The International Spy Museum a couple times and she’s read at least one entry here with her name in it and I cried when I got the note back- that she loved it, and that I was very perceptive about everything that was going on in the room.
Tony didn’t live as long as anyone would have wanted, so I wrote about being sad. It was a celebration of his last book, the last one I’d ever get. And, of course, that’s what makes Jonna’s next book so exciting. Only in Spy Dust did they really alternate chapters so that you could distinguish Jonna and Tony separately. “In True Face” is probably going to be my favorite book of them all because I love women that write about intelligence. Not that I don’t think Tony didn’t hang the moon.
I just want to know the woman he sat with while he was up there. She’s just as funny as he was, but different, I believe. She, in an interview, said that “she was a real hard-ass,” which means two things. The first is that CIA is a boys’ club, or it used to be when Jonna started….. and I want the tea if there’s any to sip. The second is that CIA is overwhelmingly geared toward women now, and the next cup would be how they got there. They’ve embraced female leadership at C/DIA in a way the that FBI just can’t handle. Thoughts and prayers.
So, their library is going to be read and reread by me long into the future, because I need female heroes. I need to see women succeeding because if I can’t reach that level of discourse myself, I would at least like to read about it.
I don’t know what Jonna’s famous line is, but John Le Carré’s was “I’m the only friend you’ve got.” That seems like tradecraft 101, but just like in music, spies have no accompaniment, and are completely exposed. Any flaw will show, because they’re hanging out on a ledge….. generally during a time where if you lose your footing, you aren’t exactly sure whether the person who helped you up is friend or foe.
In thinking about Rebecca, which I often do because the character is actually from a novel I started a long time ago, actually called -frog.- Gregory and Leila are also from that story, but not “Robert.” Robert is the new man in my life, for all practical intents and purposes, because once a character gets in, it’s hard to get them back out. Rebecca and Robert have been talking in my head all day long, and they need to go to bed.
Just not together.
Robert is a mixed bag. He talks tough. He’s a little boy. He knows Rebecca could end him, and that’s why he likes her. But Rebecca and Gregory are a solid item, and Robert is actually ace….. you just don’t see it because of his tough guy exterior. What man would admit that to a beautiful woman on first meeting? It’s all about representation. I picked up ace representation from TJ Klune, who is one of my favorite novelists and lives out in Fredericksburg, VA. So, it’s possible that he’ll do a book signing in DC eventually. I’d love to get an autograph on “Under the Whispering Door,” because I liked “House in the Cerulean Sea,” but I thought it couldn’t be topped.
I was wrong.
Under the Whispering Door is about death. Long lives, short lives, somewhere in between? It explores the great mystery……..
Zac got me a box of writing prompts from Freewrite for Christmas, so I thought I’d leaf through them. At first I thought you weren’t supposed to do that, but on the first card, “How It Works,” it says that you don’t have to do them in any order; it’s not a pop quiz. Just find one that speaks to you. The prompt is actually a quote, and I’ll highlight it when I get there. I told you I was at the bottom of a ladder, but thanks to this box of cards, I have a solid few rungs in front of me. Like I said earlier, if I have enough fiction to start a separate blog for it, I probably will as not to mix up my entries. Right now, I’m just seeing if I like posting my exercises at all.
Rebecca Alexis Radnowski checked her watch.
12:20.
They were late.
She had already kissed Kermit for the last time, her angel baby…. her little -frog.- She could not, would not do it again- torture on both of them. There was nothing to do but wait for the taxi.
As she got into the back seat, she did not see the little boy in the window, creating his first memory. For years, the only thing Kermit knew about his mother was that she owned a long red coat and high black heels. However, Rebecca wouldn’t have known that. Couldn’t have known. There were more pressing matters at hand.
Gregory, Kermit’s father, and Leila, Gregory’s sister, had to step up to be parents in Rebecca’s stead, because someone had to know the plan. It was too intricate not to have someone know how to get in touch with her, because she wasn’t sure how long the assignment would last. Was it going to be three weeks or three months?
This was a trip in which she had to get her ducks in a row beforehand, because she might not come home from this one. Overthrowing a government can lead to……… issues, and thinking about what was about to happen took away the sting of everything she was leaving (as she lied to herself). She was at least making it look like she was running logistics in her head; anyone with eyes could see the little death happening.
The file tree detailing her current life was dropping away, and the new information became synonymous with her initials…. Compressed and password protected, at that. People had always joked she was a RAR file because she’d always been buttoned up…… and failed to see the humor in it. People with emotions were unpredictable, and there were few things she could abide in life less than surprises. So, it was no issue that when she laid it out for Gregory, said she’d been “approached” and wanted to go, all he could do was kiss her and say “good luck.” Gregory knew that while he and Kermit were important, this was fulfilling Rebecca’s life ambition. Besides, Kermit wasn’t even out of diapers. Rebecca wouldn’t miss much and Leila was great with him.
Later on, Beck would regret this choice from the depths of her being, because she gave up a relationship with her son. It was not three weeks or three months. She doesn’t know that right now, though.
Right now, she is annoyed.
The taxi has dropped her in front of Dulles at curb check-in, which should have made everything a hell of a lot easier….. or it would have been, had Karen not been in front of her in line. Having traveled for so many years, Beck had packed her stuff in one large suitcase (she wasn’t going to check anything, but realized she wanted her weighted blanket) and a duffel bag. Since the duffel was a little oversized, she thought she’d check that as well. She had a small messenger bag with her tablet, keyboard, and some Sudoku…. plus a couple pairs of underwear in case her luggage ended up in France. It had happened before.
The name of the game, Rebecca believed, was traveling with the least amount of stuff possible. Ask around about local brands, etc. because you can always pick up stuff in your AOA and not count it as part of your weight limit. She was a firm believer in buying shampoo, soap, and hair products in whatever country she was “visiting” and giving everything away on her last day there. That’s the one part of her life that she will never change- being addicted to products she cannot find in the US.
Because of Rebecca’s clear superiority in packing, Karen did not impress her. Karen’s bags were full of all the shit Rebecca has learned to leave at home, because she didn’t want her stuff to end up all over the ground like Karen’s is now….. taking stuff out one at a time so that she doesn’t have to pay overage fees (but also her husband is very powerful and DO YOU KNOW WHO HE IS?).
Rebecca wears a tight smile and thinks, “I could have you killed.”
She doesn’t mean it, of course. Just a little black humor to let off steam. Or, it would have been if she’d not just realized she’d actually said it out loud. As predicted- once her idiocy was confirmed- Karen turns to her and says something to the effect of “who the fuck do you think you are?” Rebecca thought it best not to answer that.
Rebecca is, in the popular vernacular, “the one who knocks.”
She redirects to try and de-escalate the situation. “I’m so sorry. I was just annoyed. Take your time.” Also as predicted, it does not work. Karen is in show mode….. “THE AUDACITY OF THIS BITCH….” Rebecca steps back and thinks to herself, “I had a meeting at the White House yesterday. Aren’t I important?” This time, she made sure she only said it to herself, knowing that Karen would never know she was making fun of herself. She had one job. Get through the airport.
It was going so well.
After that kerfuffle, Rebecca realized that she hadn’t even had time to drink a cup of coffee and checked her watch again. 1:00 PM, and the flight didn’t leave for an hour. Her bags were already dealt with (surprisingly without any real bloodshed). Time to find a coffee shop.
She saw a couple of places, but picked Starbucks because she knew it would be the last time she’d really get a boost of that magnitude. She walked in and gave them her standard order….. “just fuck me up.”
A quad shot red eye later, she was smelling numbers….. just like God intended. She set a timer on her watch for 30 minutes, and sunk into her favorite novel, “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.” She often thought that she’d like to write fiction, and saw promise in David Wrobleski because it took him 10 years to write his first novel, which turned out to be a masterpiece. “In my next life…..” she thought. “I”m going to have to choose something else eventually. This job is for young people.”
Rebecca Alexis Radnowski is all of 28 years old.
She is not a complainer. She would rather die than complain about anything. But the hard truth is that intelligence is hard work. It’s less physically demanding than police or FBI, but that doesn’t mean that her knees aren’t 80. She tries to keep in shape by hitting the gym several times a week, but there’s only so much she can do to stop the passage of time. She was supposed to have rested three surgeries ago.
…..which is why when her alarm goes off, it takes her a second to get moving again. Transitions are so hard, and being autistic just makes it worse. Rebecca is not the kind of person that can walk into any room at any time without extensive preparation. For instance, if she has a meeting with a high value target to pump them for information on even higher value targets, she will stand in front of the doorway to the interrogation room for a few minutes and will herself to walk in.
It’s not that she’s not good at her job. She’s not good at transitions. She’s always gotten glowing reviews from her superiors, and God help the person behind the door. That doesn’t mean her life isn’t made hard by autism. It’s that she had to develop coping mechanisms….. both for when to emote……… and when to……. not.
This particular transition is actually getting on the plane. It is something she has prepared to do for weeks. Her husband and sister-in-law are cheering her on from home, excited for all she will be able to do for the people she’s trying to rescue……. deep in the wilds of Guatemala.
Editor’s Note:
CIA did try to overthrow the Guatemalan government in the 50s under Truman, so there is historical precedent. However, this piece takes place too late for that and is just a fictional example of something that could conceivably happen.
Because the environment of the airport and the environment of the plane are so different, Rebecca knew that she would need extra time to adjust. She didn’t need to go through security, and got on the plane as soon as they called for pre-board. The agent gave her a little guff, so she did something she never does. Ever.
She pulled rank.
No further explanation was necessary, as she knew would be the case. She loved that with the way she moved in the world, it was open to her. She also knew that it was not a skeleton key. That the rules still applied to her, but at the same time, needing extra time to board for autism was as valid as everything else. She always weighed options and tried to decide carefully if she was putting other people out with her power, or whether she was using it for good. After eight years, she still wasn’t sure. She just tried to be as humble as she could be given that she didn’t open doors, they opened for her. She didn’t just board early. The gate attendant gave her an upgrade.
Somehow, when your badge has three particular letters on it, people don’t see anything else. Rebecca is used to it by now, but it gets a bit tiresome. All of the fuss really only happens in airports, because no one at the airport knows where she works, but they do know someone must be powerful if they don’t have to go through security, and are allowed to keep their weapons.
Even with the special treatment, she can’t get to her seat fast enough. She needs quiet like air…… but an air hostess greets her and tells her that she loves her hair. It sets her off at first, and then she breathes deeply. Finally, something normal. Rebecca tells her that she just got it cut at this great little place in Burke, then offers to Air Drop her the contact info. When the air hostess replies to the message, she saves the number in her phone. It wouldn’t be bad to have an air hostess’s number in her back pocket given her LOW.
Shortly afterwards, the air hostess shows back up with a glass of champagne and a cup of orange juice. She says, “I know this is already free because you’re in first class, but I just wanted to do something nice for you.”
Her seat mate grumbled.
“Jesus. Who do I have to fuck to get service like that?”
The air hostess, looking embarrassed, says everything without opening her mouth. Rebecca has nothing to lose. “Are you going to treat all the air hostesses like that or do I have to cut off your nuts?” The knife in her boot started itching, craving a workout.
Her seatmate looked amused, but said nothing except “I could have you killed.” And then, it might have been an accident, but she thought he winked. Winked!
She looked down at her tray and wondered what all this was about. They hadn’t even taken off yet, and she’d managed to make two enemies already….. but he didn’t seem that scary. It looked like he knew she wanted to be scary, but was actually just three little girls in a trench coat. It was unnerving, but she couldn’t say that she didn’t like it. No one looked at her as innocent. Not anymore.
Her seatmate said, “I’m sorry. We should start over. I’m Robert McCall.” “I’m Susan Plummer,” Rebecca replied, catching the theme. Robert didn’t miss a trick.
“Good catch, Rebecca.”
All the color drained out of her face. Her real name wasn’t even on her Guatemalan passport. Tony had crafted it especially for her, and it was a gift. So perfect there weren’t reproductions like it anywhere in the world. Who WAS this man?
They were now climbing through the air, 50-100 miles from the ground, and Rebecca had never felt so unsafe. There was no going back, there was only through. Someone had gotten the jump on her, and she wasn’t even sure of that. Maybe “Robert” was part of her ground crew. She didn’t know every company employee ever.
Rebecca went back to the Sawtelle farm, unsure of what to say next. A few hours passed, and she looked up. Robert was asleep, and the rest of the plane was quiet…….. right up until it wasn’t.
Robert and Rebecca noticed it first. They had flown a left hand triangle twice with 2 minute legs, so they knew it was coming. There would be an announcement that there was total engine/comms failure, a signal to the tower that the plane’s behavior might be erratic.
When the announcement was made, the tin tube of misery became as quiet as a crypt. There was no yelling. It was not like a movie. Terror is quiet. In those moments, even the hair raising on your arm feels too loud. Rebecca wasn’t religious, but she was raised in the church, so she said the only words she remembered….. “Jesus loves the little children…. all the children of the world….” Tears started to fall as she thought of her sweet baby boy, her tiny -frog.- Robert’s tenor soothed her…. “red and yellow, black and white….. we are precious in his sight….” He did not finish. His own daughter, Kiambre, was three. He broke when he thought of that particular aisle he’d never walk.
As the plane went down, they both made a note. If we get out of this alive, we’re going to need supplies. There’s a lot of jungle near the airport, so I am sure we’ll have resources…. but what kind and how much will vary, as will the speed of our ex-fil if we do not die on impact.
For both Rebecca and Robert, this kind of “casing” is their normal….. and now they each know the other is fluent in this particular language. Or do they? Rebecca really doesn’t know. She thought she knew everyone in the office, and her team wouldn’t send her help unless she asked for it. Robert, for his part, does not mention how he knows what he knows…….. nor that he’s not CIA.
They sit there in silence, fingers touching just for human comfort, until the plane comes to rest between several trees. The air is dense, a hot and wet blanket as they exit the emergency hatch.
Because Rebecca is who she is, she thinks that not being at the scene is a good idea. Nothing like being caught in a camera sweep during film at 11 to ruin a perfectly good day. She’s about a half mile away from the plane when all her adrenaline runs out. She looks down.
She really should have rested three surgeries ago.
A softball-sized hematoma is growing on her knee. There is nothing left to do but sit down. She thought she had power in this situation, but the universe decided otherwise. She didn’t need to stay in the jungle all day, but she decided that a few minutes of rest wouldn’t hurt anything.
Robert’s curiosity got the best of him. He knew Rebecca was CIA. He knew that in her agency she was more powerful than he was. He knew he was sent to find her because his government needed her more than hers did. He decided to push his luck.
“Well, I’m not actually a doctor. I attended med school for a few semesters… I’m not so great at finishing things…. Looks like I’m your best bet in the middle of the jungle, though,” he said between enormous bites of banana.
If you had a freeway billboard, what would it say?
Let’s be clear. I don’t have baggage or drama to heap on someone else because I deal with all that stuff here. I don’t have to rely on my friends to help me know how I feel about a situation and how I’m going to react. So, the reason I say that my billboard should be “you may be entitled to compensation” is that I am so independent that it’s hard to pin me down….. get your mind out of the gutter (I know you won’t, you’re Fanagans. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t swear like a sailor or wish you could).
OMG. OMG. I am so wrong. Why didn’t I think of this before?
My Blog Makes Me Sound Like a Dick…. theantileslie.com
I will never not keep repeating that phrase, because when my friend popped off and said it she had no idea what she was unleashing. I had already been mad at her for years because she was poly and I wasn’t the person(s) she was dating in addition to being married. However, we met on OK Cupid, when I saw her profile and just said, “I’m not sure that I even want a date, but I’m new to the area and would like more friends. Would you like to get together? Bring your wife if you want. It’s just easy.”
So, we did meet up and her wife did come. It was there that I made the mistake of a lifetime, because it made her wife not like me for the rest of our relationship. I hugged her. She’s really hardcore about consent and being a Texan, I walked right into that trap. Betcha Brené, Matt, Renee, and Beyoncé have done the same ass thing. We all grew up in the same state, the same areas, so I’m betting that piece of history/future is solid. It’s a mistake you don’t stop making, because Southern politeness sticks in your bones. Someone who doesn’t hug people politely is going to be creeped out, and in effect, that’s what happened.
I became a stand-in for all the other women she didn’t like, because my friend was dating and her wife wasn’t (not a thing, her own choice). That being said, even I raised my eyebrows at how much my friend was going out because I was like WTF? You just had twins? So, in any case, I was actually on her wife’s side the whole time, but she wouldn’t have taken the time to get to know me.
I told her that I was from Portland, she said it smelled like pee. So does every major city in America, fuck off. It was just a dig at me, and I knew it. But basically, my friend was getting around and leaving her wife on baby duty all the fucking time, so of course her wife resented her and everything that came with her. I saw it in 15 minutes, and I stayed, anyway, because the friend was actually cool……. right up until she told me that my blog made me sound like a dick and I should have been nicer to the woman that ripped my heart out and served it to me. Again, fuck off.
I never want to see her again if I can help it, because she became a train wreck in her own life and dared criticize me. This was not constructive. She has the right to think what she thinks and say what she says. She does not have the right to control my reaction, which was to say that she had no business being friends with a blogger and I was tired of her shit all the way around, anyway.
It was too much when I only wanted to be friends with both women and their twins. I noped out pretty fast when I saw I had an out. We could be done with each other, and I needed it.
If you want to criticize me, please do. I love criticism. However, if it is mean-spirited, I’ll shut down. There’s a way to say “I think you’re wrong about this” without emotionally destroying each other….. but make no mistake. I promise that you will never meet a writer who doesn’t love verbal combat, so take that warning seriously. I won’t start a fight, but I’ll end it. I know this about myself, and that I say things that can’t be taken back. So I would rather focus on not making myself angry. I did that by stopping caring about a lot of shit, like other people’s feelings about my writing that get frustrated and say something that I’ve remembered for YEARS.
It’s funny now…. but, “your blog makes you sound like a dick” when my girlfriend had just broken up with me a few days before was egregious. OF COURSE I WAS FUCKING FURIOUS. WHO DO YOU THINK I AM? I am not made of stone. I was lucky in that I had another beautiful woman to catch me, and I leaned into that, instead. So, for all practical intents and purposes, I broke up with my friend and my girlfriend simultaneously. The friend hurt worse because Sam and I had only been together for three weeks.
I deserved the right to have my own feelings about that relationship ending, and for someone to say that there should have been rhyme and reason to what I think about a breakup after what seemed like 15 minutes is insane. She wanted me to post more recipes and shit, as if that’s going to attract anyone.
If I started putting recipes at the bottom of my blog entries, that might be interesting. You wouldn’t have to read any less, it just wouldn’t be about Kayden, Kory, Kerry, and Kayleigh.
But the bottom line is that I had to make hard decisions in my life about what I will tolerate, because I am not a person that can click long-term with just anyone. I can talk to anyone in the world about anything for a few minutes, but it takes a miracle to spend time with me day in and day out without wanting to stab yourself with a fork. I know this because I drive me crazy all the time and I don’t want to be with me every single day, either, but here we are.
The piece de resistance was when I decided that Supergrover could either give up her “this is threatening” shit and work with me on what I could say and what I couldn’t, or she could get out of my way. I wasn’t going to tank my career for her, but I would have. What I did not know were ironclad boundaries to stick to before I started writing in the first place. I know a few things that would identify her to the public, but not enough.
I told her I would never give her editorial control, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to get our story straight. It’s not fun for me to think that she thinks I’m making things up as I go along. If there were plot points or character exploration that needed to be done, that’s on both of us, not just me. I am not blogging her story. If I did, she’d probably begrudgingly read it. It’s not that I want to write a story about her. I’m writing a story about me, and she happens to be involved through a strange set of circumstances, but not because she’s a hotshot. That part is the least impressive thing about her because it’s code for “I’m exhausted every minute of every fucking day.”
No, with Supergrover, who is my beautiful girl, there was only empathy for her struggles and an ache that I couldn’t fix it for her. We don’t do the same job, we aren’t even really in the same city anymore. That doesn’t mean my heart doesn’t go out to her.
I hope that when she’s screaming down 66 at some point, there will be a sign telling her all is well.
Because it would be a better sign to say “my blog makes me sound like a dick, and you may be entitled to compensation.”
SG, I love you out loud. I hope that covers punitive damages.
Straight and queer people both suck when you’re bi. That’s because it’s all homophobic and for queers it’s internal because we’ve been taught to hate ourselves so much. It is offensive to cheat whether you’re male or female. The person you had an affair with shouldn’t matter, but it does. As if the fact that we’re bisexual means we’re purposefully going to screw you over later by dating men…….. because they are the enemy. No lesbian thinks you actually enjoy being with men. It’s all an elaborate intelligence operation where we’re trying to hit your most vulnerable spot when in reality we are just moving on with our lives.
No lesbian believes that a bi person can be monogamous, because they think that we can’t live without dick in both directions because no straight woman would believe that of a man, either. Cheating comes in all sizes and shapes, and is not personal. That’s your internalized homophobia, and you don’t get to control us if we break up. Not going to happen. To make it a requirement of your partner is ridiculous and you look really hateful…… and kinda stupid.
For instance, to me, Supergrover being wigged out that I was female and not male said homophobia to me, so I retreated and then couldn’t get her off my mind, so I lashed out to get her to go away. But she took it as that’s all I would ever do to her, all I would ever be, and we both missed out on something incredible……..
And then realized we were stuck in an impasse and I didn’t have a choice but to fold and prepare for a lifelong connection. I cannot ever cheat on her or leave her because she’s already found her life partner, so my gender shouldn’t have mattered. I should have known she was dating a man, but I didn’t. I should have assumed it from the beginning, but I didn’t. I’d never had a deep internet relationship that didn’t take away sexual orientation and gender out of the equation because after a while you don’t see it. I wanted to wait it out and hope because I knew I could appeal to her in writing better than I could in person. That we’d get over our issues faster and easier if I wrote them down- the neurodivergent urge to explain more and better, more and better.
So, bisexuals might cheat, but it’s not going to be about gender. We don’t cheat any more or less than you do. You know how I know this? I’m bisexual and I’ve dated both bi and lesbian women. Except for Dana, I’ve been cheated on by every single woman I’ve ever loved- because they wouldn’t want to, anyway, regardless of the gender of their partners. I do not want anything less than enthusiastic consent, and it would have been incredible to eventually be wanted in that way, but because it didn’t happen didn’t change me. It didn’t change how wonderful I thought she was, and sometimes it seemed like she thought that of me.
On my end, it would not have been any less offensive to Dana if Supergrover had been male (not sure I would have noticed, tbh, because she’s got the patois)….. but to some women it would have been more. That’s where the self hate comes in, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the bisexual partner. It’s your bag, not ours. I bring up Supergrover because it just shows that especially an emotional affair sees past gender, especially for bisexual women because women are naturally programmed to open up to people that open up to them. We’re raised to be fixer/pleasers, so when we don’t have to be, we connect on that level regardless of the other’s private parts.
It’s more important to be heard after the new wears off. Good sex can be found anywhere. Good communication is rare, beautiful, and precious. Choose that. It’s why I love Supergrover- because she’s absolutely who she is alt all times and I love all of her. But if you hurt her, she’ll never open up ever again. I’m wondering how that’s working out for her all around, because I get the feeling that I’m the only one she’s really honest with, either, so it crushed her when I couldn’t stop myself from being a dick to get rid of her by wigging her out a little more. It wasn’t a good plan, but first of all, it worked and second of all, it was 10 years ago and we eventually made our peace when my body and mind relaxed about our situation. What I knew for sure is that she had changed me emotionally in a way I couldn’t open up to someone else, so it felt natural to want that from her even if she didn’t want that from me. That’s fair. What hasn’t been fair is needing to talk it out and get closer while it’s also the most unpleasant option. I think she thought I was bullshitting her about this connection and just trying to get into her pants, but it was a symptom, not a diagnosis. I needed time to get over it, and I did, but I don’t think she believes it.
Because in the immediate moment, she deserved to be furious. I took my lumps. I didn’t deserve them for eight years until she finally said that I needed to look for friends that didn’t cause issues in me and she had no worries about what I was going to say…….
And then when I started telling the truth about my perceptions, she would change her mind and it would send me into a spiral. So, I have never been as obsessive as she might think. I have been trying to protect her while also processing our experiences and she picks and chooses when to be mad about it, scaring the hell out of me. I found what I was looking for about the baseball game. She’ll know. It’s unlikely all right. That’s her way of being an absolute dick to me now, and it would make so much more sense to you if I could explain the whole thing, but again, the most important pieces are the ones I can’t talk about, and she’s being paranoid and oblivious at the same time…… and when I say things like “I didn’t get laid, but I am certainly and surely fucked,” even those words don’t describe the pile of shit I walked into, but they’re the best I’ve got. I don’t give myself to someone else because I don’t want to do it.
We took each other to the mat and that’s why I think we’d have been all over each other for about two weeks and then emotionally destroyed each other. But that would have had to be predicated on her being single and queer, of which she was neither. So, being close enough for the relationship to flame out was a bad thing, and I couldn’t think of a faster way to get us there than sex. It messes up more than it solves…… and it did mess up everything because I opened my big mouth. And she had a right to know that I was going to write about it, so hiding it wasn’t going to happen.
So, I have a drive to be near her and available that I won’t ever give up, because I can take care of her emotionally in ways that other people can’t. Objectively, not subjectively. She just doesn’t believe it, and that’s okay. It’s a love that will last because it has to, and not in a way that I feel put upon. I’m just in touch with reality and what her news from home does to me. There’s no hard feelings, but I concede that the love is there if she wants it, she just really has to want it and I don’t think she ever will. I think that she thinks I’m out to get her, which is why my next partner doesn’t have to worry about her anymore. She thinks she’s doing the right thing by disappearing, and I hope she’s right. So far, I don’t think she is. I will never forget what I know, and she’ll always be threatened.
Would it make a difference to you whether you were having sex with the person or not once the relationship got to this point? That’s why I don’t think my gender matters. That’s why I don’t think hers does, either (though not getting to be the person that touches her ass is tragic). That’s why I don’t like lesbians who inherently think me being with men is offensive to them, on purpose like a “fuck you” because we have more power than you do. It’s never that we feel guilty and empathetic about that, but we can’t do anything about the system, either. All we can do is wear our queer flags with the rest of you, supporting you while you’re “so offended.”
I like Zac’s personality. I like Oliver, who is a dog. I like how I feel when we’re together, and it doesn’t bother me that he has other partners because I feel polysaturated at one person. I’m a writer. I don’t have the time or need to have someone around me 100% of the time like a caretaker in addition to a boyfriend, or needing to make sure he’s happy every minute of every day…. which is what a lot of lesbians see our relationship as being. That I’m willing to sell out. I am definitely not. I have had fulfilling relationships with both sexes. I think about what Ryan and and I could have been had I not been so influenced by the women around me. That it was a transition and I’d never feel the same way about men again. I don’t feel the same way about women that I did before I slept with them, either…….. #protip
So, will it hurt my next partner that they can’t have all of me? Of course it will. But they can’t have the rest of me if they can’t handle it. Poly means more jealousy, not less. You just have to breathe through it, and I’m good at that because writing is my lover. I’ve made promises to S-dog o’ Bling Bling due to what I do, and it’s important. But would it hurt more if I was a package deal with a man? To most of my dating pool, this is true.
The reason I’m so furious about this is because women advertise that they’re not interested in bi women, rejecting us all because of course we’re a monolith. I have an interesting case of poly love because I can’t let anyone else into my little bubble, my softest spot- which is why it hurts that I can’t talk to her about it anymore because she doesn’t have time or wants to avoid me. I do not know which, but I’m hurt either way so it doesn’t really matter. However, if sexual fidelity is the fucking only thing that matters to the self-righteous bigot brigade, all I have to say is that my next partner is none of your business. So, the fact that you’re walking around butt hurt because it’s a him (even if we’ve broken up, there’s still an expectation I date the same sex partner?). You don’t have the right to judge me on my next partner, because when our contract ends, you don’t get a say in my next relationship.
It’s all about making us feel like shit as much of the time as possible because they think we’re exploiting heterosexual privilege when we do it. But my boyfriend is bisexual as well, so does that mean heterosexual privilege, too? Perception is not reality. All it would take for Zac to get queer bashed is to be with one of his male partners in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we’re bad people because we’re privileged. I promise you that by the end I’m not standing in any. Straight women are freaked out by my being gay because they don’t really understand being queer. Lesbians are freaked out by my being bi because they don’t understand that men can be human as well. To be fair, they haven’t done a bang up job of proving it, but my boyfriend is bi so I don’t have the standard model, either.
That being said, just because Zac is perfectly perfect in every way, that doesn’t mean I’m going to get struck on the head by lightning the way I was with Supergrover. It’s a whole different thing, because I’ll never meet anyone like her ever again. But, behind every beautiful and powerful woman, there’s someone who has to deal with their shit. I just think it’s worth it provided she’s on her game as well. She cannot be supportive and frightened, because that doesn’t give me room in the relationship to be me. Right now I am waiting for all the stories I know to have been told so that she can rest easy in my memory, because she’s told me that’s what she wants so many times and reneged when she’s felt threatened…. basically, reaming me out until I adore her enough in print that we’re good again. I feel I’m only good for the adoring entries in which I extol her virtues. I could do that a Shakespeare amount, okkkkkkk…. but it wouldn’t be interesting because it wouldn’t be real. All people have problems with their family and friends, but we don’t talk about it. I do, because my honest voice is a good one. I am not putting myself out there and pretending to be anything I’m not. I am bisexual, but that doesn’t mean I’m not capable of being faithful. It just may not look like the kind of faithful your parents told you that you should want.
I’ve said it over and over so that you get when you see Zac and I out and about, you will most likely be confused rather than enlightened. We look like a heterosexual couple that really doesn’t fit in because we look like we don’t know we’re queer. Lesbians and gay men all think that they’re enlightening us by telling us that bi us just a phase, and we’re confused. No, you’re confused. We’re bisexual. It seems too weird to be true that gay people have a hierarchy just like black people. I don’t know what the word for it would be , but it feels very much like colorism, where I am judged on my sexual purity by how many men I’ve slept with. Even one in college is a black mark, on both sides of the equation because we’re all homophobic to varying degrees. Heteronormative bullshit is the default script, but we’re finding out the default script doesn’t work.
Being autistic makes me naturally come across as demanding, when I am not demanding anything but the truth all the time; it is how I take in the world. If you bullshit me, it takes me a long time to regain trust. Therefore, I spend a lot of time being in anxiety about the situation, and it’s something I just don’t want to do anymore.
My biggest weakness in life is Supergrover, and it sounds romantic and yet it’s not. When she refused me as a partner, it didn’t mean that she refused me or cared about me any less. The feeling is mutual, most definitely. I don’t know how to turn it off after 10 years, and the only reason I bothered chasing her down (virtually), is because I wanted whatever our relationship grew into, not what it was in the moment.
In the moment, we were always hotheaded and angry, without exception, because that’s what an anxious/avoidant attachment does. It is not personal, ever. If someone is being avoidant and you need information to function in the relationship (and you do, always), then the relationship cannot proceed because it can’t. The tautology is real. True intimacy is by sharing information, not by hiding it. Saying we were fine was okay with me, but not after years and years. Something about it didn’t feel authentic, and I couldn’t fix it. But there were genuine moments, clearly, or she would be off my radar.
I’ll always keep the promises I made to the best of my ability, which is why it’s so hard for us both to make room for each other. My blog is a threat, objectively, and I understand that. But in order to describe what is happening with me, some information is necessary. I can use little things to talk about big things….. because the little things are the things that mean the most, not what is impressive.
In the future, for the readers I haven’t met yet, if you can’t understand that I’m a writer and try constantly to take it away from me because you think it’s a threat, then I don’t have time for you- not that you aren’t valuable and special, but it takes a lot out of me to write and this is what I do. If you don’t like this, you don’t like me on a very fundamental level. And I don’t need those friends.
I’m not going to stand for anyone having a problem with my writing, because I’m going to do it whether you’re in my life or not. It’s what I have when I feel the most unwanted- I can entertain myself by putting myself out there to strangers when you don’t want to talk. If you won’t listen, someone else will. And that’s all I’m asking. That this blog is my way of coping with life, and I learn more about myself than when I am in conversation, and it drove me to write six books’ worth of my journey as it was happening, not reviewing everything when it’s long in the past. Here’s the thing that’s most important about being a writer: you learn intimately that patterns repeat and there are no real surprises in life if you take that attitude.
If people are avoidant about bad things, they’ll be avoidant about good things, too. The person that won’t open up at work probably has trouble opening up to people they like as well. It’s never personal, it’s how they operate. A person like that in a relationship where the other person spills their guts is going to irritate the fuck out them, no matter whether it’s me or anyone else……
because patterns repeat and if you don’t change the dynamic, you’ll get stuck. It’s how the most people connect instantly and come off the rails over time. If you have trouble believing this is true, think about how many women leave their husbands because they work all the time, never share anything, and shut down when there’s a problem. It’s not anything personal to them, it’s how they operate. If they’ve caused damage to other people in their lives, they are 100% going to cause damage to you. I don’t look at it like “everyone is out to get you.” I look at it like “everyone has their own issues and how they respond is none of my business.”
For all people, the way they respond to my writing is important. What I have found over time is that everyone loves my writing as long as it’s about people they don’t know. For 99.9% of the world, this is true. But if you stop liking the mirror I hold up once I’m writing about you, then it was never about supporting me. It was always about adoring me and then discarding because they just can’t handle it. I didn’t leave those people behind, I grew past them.
I don’t go around picking people to write about because I don’t have to. All my friends are interesting enough to be characters in fiction. I don’t even make them a real person unless they’re close enough to me to warrant writing about them in the first place.
If you love the good and praise it often, and don’t like the bad and kick me in the nuts over it, then it shows that you’re not in it for the long haul. It’s really that simple. I will never kick anyone, because I am doing two things that they’re ignoring.
I have never found all the bad in someone without finding the good, but it may not be in the same entry. I am only talking about a snapshot of my day, and I change my mind frequently. Therefore, it might be a hit piece one day because I think your actions are fucking me up, and it might be that you are the best person in the world for me because we’ve just had a breakthrough and I want to celebrate it. I do not go after people, I reflect them as they are in my perception. As my perception changes, so do the characters they represent. I am laying out my thoughts this way so that they’ll change, not because I am trying to direct ire at them. I have the right to say I went through something bad and it hurt, without bugging you to read about it. If you want to know what I think, you’ll read. If you don’t, you won’t. But at no time should you take it personally. I write about everyone in the same way.
If I didn’t, then you would see that I’m only mining my friends for the gossip and not what is really happening in real time. It wouldn’t change me, because I’d just be a vicious, vindictive person and not trying to do therapy on my own. You are reading my most intimate thoughts regarding the people surrounding me, not the happenings around town like I’m the local Gladys Kravitz.
I try to be non-specific about people that matter. But if I start out with your real name, I won’t change it unless there’s a solid reason, and I have them. If you’re not named, you’re not that important, and I want the people around me to know that. I also know that it’s better to write about people than it is to not, because when I stop writing about them because they hate the negative things, they rail that I’m not only writing the positive. No, if you insist that you like an international audience thinking the sun shines out of your ass, then you don’t make a good character. Flat out.
It’s why I’m having so much trouble believing that any of my friends don’t see themselves as a 3D character, because I’ve even been nice to exes that have slashed my heart in two- less so with Kathleen, mostly because I don’t remember our day to day life together, but I definitely remember how she left. But again, emotionally unavailable so she wouldn’t talk about underlying issues, but would beat the hell out of me emotionally if I didn’t clean something to her standards, recognizing that not everyone grew up the same way. I fold the towels the way my mother did, and so does everyone else. It’s not worth relationship crisis, but she did it often enough that I knew she’d never open up. But I couldn’t leave, and I don’t think she could either- which is why she pulled such an egregious trump card.
And the thing is, if our relationship had been set up with poly in the first place, that she couldn’t commit to monogamy, so we’d make other things our touchstones, I don’t think I would have handled it as well then as I would now, but it would have been better than ambushing me with so many lies, and waiting until I was out of town to cheat.
Due to that experience, and having my own new relationship experience while I was still married, I can’t commit to it, either. It’s not because I’m incapable, it’s because I never want to be accused of cheating ever again. It’s not cheating if you’re not breaking an agreement…. so I just won’t make it.
I’m not going to trade new relationship energy (no matter what kind- platonic relationships are just as fulfilling) for my entire life falling apart. I cannot put all my eggs in one basket anymore, and part of it is that my heart is already gone. I don’t have a choice about that, and yet, I do. I want a scenario where when I have to make Supergrover a big deal in my own life that it doesn’t affect any of the others, and if Supergrover is in any way picking up what I’m putting down, she knows to the very depth of her being that I made the right decision by putting her first, even in my marriage.
I will never apologize, ever, for that stone cold fact, because I cannot do anything about it. She should have realized that when we don’t interact, it almost affects me more than when she is. We have a hard out, not subjective like with my other friends, and she has taken no responsibility for that fact. What she has taken responsibility for is changing my life and she wishes she’d never told me anything at all, when it’s the best gift I’ve ever been given. But gifts don’t come without potential problems when the wrapping is fallible- and I mean human, not that anyone has to be perfect; they can’t.
So, when I talk about biggest challenges, they’re always emotional because that’s the wavelength I’m riding and not many people are. Most people don’t know themselves as well as I do, so I seem threatening when I’m just certain. I can also listen to someone else without agreeing with them; then, they become threatened that it’s going to take different words to convince me they’re right, because I’m not trying to find a situation I can “win,” but a situation in which we both get what we want. It takes time and effort to do that, but it’s not impossible. People just cut out long before the discussion is over, and if you’re supposedly in it for the long haul, then you’ll meet me halfway.
Stories That Are All True 