Jack is licking the t-shirt I left at the end of my bed, which is the one I wore to Cielo Rojo. I am certain it has lots of interesting smells. He gets to enjoy Rachel Bindel’s cooking as much as I did… in a manner of speaking.

Oh, wait. Now he’s moved to licking himself, and I find myself really laughing over whether I should tell you Jack is a dog at this moment. I don’t know any men who lick t-shirts, but I wouldn’t put it past any of them. You don’t even have to go on the dark web to know that.

Today’s writing prompt is about describing a significant moment. Sure, I can pick things out that have meant something to me, but I try to see the beauty and pain in all of life itself. All moments are significant depending on how you’re looking. It also depends on perspective. Are you looking for negative? Confirmation bias is real\

I didn’t tell you all the funny things that happened in church because that’s long enough to be a book. I think my favorite story about my mother was that she and Herschel Walker had the same birthday. It’s applicable because their birthday just passed- 11 June. So, my dad and probably the worship committee get together and make Herschel and my mom a cake. I don’t know whose idea it was, and I’m not casting blame, especially since the pastor is not in charge of preparing the cake before worship (not that he couldn’t. My dad is an accomplished cook and baker).

The cake had relighting candles.

So, my mother and Hershel kept trying to blow them out, at first not realizing that they kept relighting. Hershel got so frustrated he put them out right in the cake. No one saw that coming and we were all howling.

I don’t mean to portray my childhood as all negative or all anything. It’s just what I’m thinking about depending on the moment. What has come up for me that day? I’ve also written down all my church stories in other entries, and I feel like I’m running out of material given that those memories are from 0 to 17. “Childhood is the credit balance of a writer,” according to John le Carré. Not if you can’t remember it.

The hardest thing for me was packing up my house in Houston to move to Sugar Land. It was leaving HSPVA, it was leaving The Heights, it was leaving everything cool about living in Houston. There were big surprises coming, I just didn’t know that yet. I didn’t know what kind of high school Clements would be. I just knew it wasn’t a performing arts high school. There’s only one Robert “Doc” Morgan and he doesn’t live in Sugar Land.

Leaving him was the worst part of leaving HSPVA. He told me that he was going to miss seeing me do my senior tune. Then, I found myself trying to comfort him and saying that I’d already gotten it with “Come Rain or Come Shine.” It made me feel good that I wasn’t the only one that was sad I was leaving. Quite a few other people were, too.

There was a major drawback to going to another school, and that’s that I’d been out of the closet for almost two years, and I didn’t have to tell anyone. A frenemy took care of that. My mother told me I couldn’t come out at Clements and I told her I’d never come out to anyone except a girl I liked and look where that got me. And besides, at that point, I wasn’t looking to date anyone else. I missed Ryan, and he was there to catch me in a friend way if someone messed with me. I lost that, too.

Ryan, my eighth grade boyfriend, and I went to different middle schools, but both ended up at high school together after we broke up. It took a minute, but we were back into our rhythm of each other’s comic foils. We’re still each other’s comic foils, and it feels good to be friends with someone who’s known me since I was 14 and we’re 46 now. Our birthdays are only 20 days apart. I get excited for Ryan’s birthday like I get excited for my own, as if I have a second birthday to look forward to at the end of the month.

Tonight is a Zac night, and the only reason I’m writing about it is to remember to get my stuff together after I’m done writing. I’d like to do my laundry, including all my towels, once we’re done for today. If this entry ends up being a hundred pages long, it’s because in the back of my mind I am thinking “I do not have to do my laundry as long as I’m still writing.” You are very, very important. 🙂

Right now I am debating with myself over beverages. I know I want coffee and water, just not sparkling or still. Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you.

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I ended up getting a Gatorade and puttering around the house. I took a shower and put product in my hair. It’s on its last dregs, so I’m glad I have the same hair product at Zac’s. I like Gorilla Ear Wax I bought some for him to try it. I think he likes it, because occasionally I smell it on him. I am divided over whether I like the Ear Wax or the Snot. The difference is that Ear Wax is gel mixed with wax. Snot is just gel. If you’ve never tried either, they’re worth it, especially in the South. Gorilla Snot has a hard hold sport variety that will keep it from dripping in your eyes when it’s hot outside…. or at least you won’t burn the fuck out of your eyes if you’re outside…. like in marching band.

I use a two-in-one men’s shampoo and conditioner, which I would not recommend except I put leave-in conditioner in my hair before the product…. or afterwards if I’m using wax. A two-in-one is just not moisturizing enough.

I also do not know how I figured this out. I know I did not read it. I think I just picked it up from watching a guy on YouTube giving a talk on shaving because there was a shit ton of Bond memorabilia in his bathroom. Anyway, it occurred to me that a shaving brush would probably clear my pores better than a wash cloth, and I spend at least two or three minutes stimming in the shower by brushing my soap on like foundation. My skin looks really good. I have a Viking, but I found an even softer one in David’s guest bathroom that he said I could use.

You have to moisturize heavily if you’re going to use a shaving brush, because your skin has to rest between brushings. I use an all natural lotion bar that my former housemate, Magda, made for me. It is literally a bar of wax, or it feels like it. It smells like citronella, which keeps bugs off me and doesn’t smell weird with my cologne and deodorant. It’s summer. Who doesn’t smell like citronella?

Although in the summer, I tend to switch out the all natural wax for heavy duty sunscreen while my face is still wet. It needs about 20 minutes to soak into your skin fully, so it’s activated by the time I leave the house. I am terrible about remembering to reapply, but I’m rarely outside longer than an hour and a half. Jack is a small dog. He just kind of runs himself out, and that takes a quarter of a mile most days. If he’s feeling good, we’ll go a half or three quarters. He’s an older dog, and I have to be on his schedule. He’s my baby dog and my grandfather all in one package. I feel this on a deep and spiritual level, because I was always a child and 45 as well.

It makes sense why I scrub so much. I feel like I have to get off dog hair and the smell of dog, even for a little bit. That’s because I can’t help myself. He can walk all over me. But I get a little space to be dog free. I have to. He goes apeshit when I’m on my period. David and I are both waiting for menopause with bated breath, because we’ve picked up after his shit long enough.

Because when I put it in the trash can and close the lid, then he drags it all over the floor, it ceases to be my shit. It hurts that you really can’t fire these underperforming employees. The best you can do is put them on a performance improvement plan. They’re just too cute, and there’s too many pictures. Kind of how I felt about my sister at first, too. 😉

Yesterday, I showed David how to make Jack sit and wait for his leash to be put on, because it makes things so much easier. David showed me that Jack also knows the hand sign for sit, which opens up so many more conversations between Bryn and me because she trains her own dog in sign language.

So, with Jack, we need to work on leash training. He pulls and will not heel in traffic. I need to get him to start sitting at intersections as well. We are doing very well so far, but it has led to a situation where I’m the alpha. I don’t think that David notices or cares. It’s just that Jack knows that not minding me comes with consequences he does not like, so he will try David. He will not try me. No, sir. We do not do that. Your behavior is frowned upon in this establishment.

I speak baby.

That line made me think “I wonder if there’s a new ‘Doctor Who’ to watch while my laundry is going?” I’m betting there is, and if not, I’ll watch a rerun. I don’t have the channels I need to watch all of them (As an American, I cannot get a TV license for the BBC, and I don’t have HBO Max. I’m holding out on HBO because I think eventually the catalog will move to Disney. It’s just that right now they only have the episodes they started with, not the entirety of new and classic Who. It makes sense that they will eventually, because their oldest videos are some of the most popular. Adults looking in nostalgia or teaching their kids to love what they loved.

Love is why Doctor Who endures. It’s parents and grandparents wanting to share this thing they loved with their children and their children’s children. Remember, it’s been on since the day Kennedy was shot. In fact, the show was almost bumped because of it. It might not have been a big deal except that the BBC hadn’t said when they would air it again……….

It was actually Jodie Whitaker that got me started down this road of nonbinary, because I didn’t see it in myself until The Doctor regenerated as female. I saw gender on The Doctor, not gender within them. I recently learned that nonbinary falls under the trans umbrella, because anything that’s not cis does. I was shocked by this, because I’ve never in a million years thought I was trans. That’s because I’ve never had body dysphoria. There’s a reason for that. I am built not to care what body I’m in.

Here’s what I’ve learned about being nonbinary that no one will tell you. You learn it when you transcend the system. The medium is the message. Women and men are attuned to hear each other differently, so there’s a nuance to what they say before they say it based on what they’ve heard before. Confirmation bias is real.

I feel that I know men better than some straight women because I ask them different questions than they do. They don’t think men are interested in things that they really are, but when you give them enough time and space to let them have an opinion about traditionally female things, they definitely do. Most men want to feel more beautiful than they do. They walk around feeling like crap about themselves because of magazines, too. But you don’t know that if you don’t ask.

This is especially true of gay men who want to fit a stereotype. Twinks starve themselves and an overwhelming number of gay men become gym rats to become the magazine ideal, even if they aren’t interested in exercise normally. The gym is a way to meet men, certainly, but you must look like a picture in a magazine to get that kind of gym experience. Gay men are as consumed by their bodies as straight women trying to get dates…. that they are not enough on their own. They must kill themselves for beauty.

I am not against exercise. I am anti being an extremist about anything. I am against clearly pushing your body past what it can take to get off that one extra pound, and it is that serious in my community. This does not exclude straight men and it never has. Straight men aren’t asked to be vulnerable in a way that gay men already are.

It’s not that straight men don’t have body issues, it’s that a queer man will tell you.

These are the guys that pretend they’re not bothered by magazines and then moan that they’ll never get a girlfriend because they don’t look like them. It’s all the same issue. Men just don’t show it. We think men don’t go through a lot of things because they don’t show it.

A man’s biggest fear is abandonment. And so is a woman’s. A woman is programmed to be perfect at taking care of the home. A man is programmed to be perfect at providing for the home. Both have a tremendous societal pressure on them and how they deal with it is seemingly not the way to do it in everyone else’s eyes.

I honestly don’t think you get this perspective if you’ve never fallen under the queer or trans umbrella. This is because you’ve never had to let go of any gender roles. You’ve never had to switch it up because your body has always fit that programming. So has your mind. Straight, cis people don’t think outside the box. Queer people haven’t been given an option to think like other people. How do you think like married people, even about taxes, when you can’t get married? How do you get your husband to mow the lawn while you do dishes when it isn’t that cut and dry. In a gay marriage, you divide the labor by strength, not gender. You can’t.

Straight, cis people are programmed to think it’s weird, but they’d be happier if they let go of it. Like letting go of thinking that if your wife makes more than you, it means you’re failing as a provider. Men get very passionate over it, sometimes violent, because that’s not their programming. That’s not what men have been taught to accept for millions of years. Some of them are acting on their most feral natures, and don’t seem to understand why women don’t want that while complaining about gold diggers. It’s a lose-lose proposition. Either we’re dependent on you for money and you’re a stingy bastard, or we make our own money and you’re threatened. You are stuck in a moment and you can’t get out of it. If you’re going to be the provider, you can’t complain when I ask you for $200 to go to the grocery store.

That’s because I’m betting you have no fucking clue what it costs to feed a family for a week. You have decided you don’t have to know that. You just have to be there to financially control us when we’re asking for reasonable things. I would shit a brick if my husband didn’t immediately know I needed money for new clothes when he just saw me fall and rip my trousers to bits. I would not expect my husband to give me a life of luxury. There’s a difference between managing a home and expecting you to work while I play. I manage the home so that you can provide. I’m not just sitting here, twiddling my thumbs.

I am not talking about my reality. I am talking about the reality for most stay at home moms. Fathers say they want this, then financially abuse the hell out of their wives with being stingy about it. If we ask for too much, we’re gold diggers. They are happiest when we can manage on nothing, because to ask for money twice in one day is not that two needs came up, it’s that I’m needling you for money.

So, women go out and get their own jobs. It’s not threatening when we’re secretaries, teachers, or waitresses. It’s terrifying when we’re CEO, CIO, CFO, etc. It’s terrifying when we achieve titles you never will. So, we can deal with your jealousy a lot better than we can deal with your financial abuse, so either start handing over more money so we can raise our families or stop complaining about how we choose to spend our time outside the home.

I’ve always been a perfectionist when it comes to being a provider, which is why I haven’t seen my neurodivergence. I’ve only seen failure. I didn’t know what symptoms I was experiencing to be able to forgive myself, and in some ways, I never have. I can be a while lot of things, but as a writer, it’s better to he a jack of all trades, master of none. I can pull connections from my life that no one else would make.

Like being a preacher’s kid makes me one of the best waitresses and babysitters on the planet because I play to the people, not the money. They want to pay me more because I genuinely do a good job and genuinely care about everyone involved. It’s really hard to find an employee that cares more than me. My neurodivergence gets in the way on a number of levels, the biggest being practical. In terms of being at work, I need to go to the doctor “all the time.” There’s no room for demand avoidance, meltdown, and burnout. There’s also no room for missing an hour or two and coming back for the rest of the day and doing the rest from home that night.

If I was higher up, I could do that. The higher up you are in a company, the more you’re allowed to do your own thing. It’s like you can’t have a life until you’re old enough not to have to deal with the same struggles as a poor person, or a sick/disabled one…. which are all too often the same thing. It’s the inversion principle on a very sick and twisted scale. By the time you can take off the kind of time it takes to be sick/disabled, you have to have accrued enough sick time and vacation that you probably don’t need it.

I would like to know how these people manage sicknesses in advance. In the United States, this often presents as giving everyone in the office the flu. Honestly, it’s better that way. No one believes you’re actually sick in an e-mail or a phone call. They’ll send you home if they see you throw up in a trash can, no note necessary.

The thing I hate most about working from home is that it encourages employees to be absolute workaholics. They sit there and think, “I could be reading, or I could be getting stuff done in advance.” No, they’re taking on more work than necessary because the work they were supposed to do at work is already done. They’re asking to get twice as much work as everyone else, and other people are glad to pile it on you.

There are only a few jobs I can think of where you need to be available 24/7. I cannot count on Zac for anything, because the military is his real spouse. If they call, he’s out of here and neither of us has a choice in the matter. So, first responders, military intelligence, and medical professionals. I don’t even think flight attendants should be on that list. I think the airlines should hire more people so that the number of flights per day that you do equals eight hours. If it’s a long haul flight, they have enough people to do the route that you don’t have to do a turnaround.

Once you get to be really senior in an airline, you are allowed to pick your routes. It’s alarmingly like being in the State Department. The higher you are, the more choice you have over your next assignment. And, of course, because I’ve seen “Pan Am” I think every stewardess is a spy and I secretly pine over her no matter what she looks like.

This reminds me of an e-mail I sent to Supergrover from CDG. “I saw a really cute French girl, tripped and farted on her. I have to leave the country immediately.” I should have told my dad that story. He’ll laugh when he reads it here. The memory is so embarrassing that I’ve blocked it out. I don’t even remember what she looked like, but she must have been something. Supergrover, you would have absolutely laughed your ass off if you’d seen me walk into that door.

For those who aren’t Supergrover, I told her that I went to dinner with someone and she was so cute that I ran into a door and hurt my nose trying not to look at her. We went to Chuy’s, so I’ve always thought it would be hilarious if we met at a Chuy’s. However, that is not the only time I’ve walked into a door over a cute girl, so maybe I should be glad she doesn’t want to get together. I don’t know what I would hurt next (it is interesting to me that she is very beautiful, but really not my type. For most people, they love her face and her mind comes next. Hers became the face I loved from the inside out, just like with everyone I’ve ever met that sparked my interest. No two of my partners have looked the same, but a lot of them have brain gremlins in common. It’s not that I don’t have my own brain gremlins, they are just separate and apart from theirs. Different playing field.).

The other time I walked into a door over a cute girl was at a club in Logan Circle. I ran from her because it was really bad timing, but what happened was that the club was having a buy one, get one free drink special that night. I knew that I didn’t want both of them, so I offered mine to a woman near me. I think she thought that implied something, but I wasn’t offended. I just chatted to her like I would any of my friends to see if there was an actual spark or whether she just felt obligated to talk to me because I’d given her something.

Let me tell you why I am still kicking myself.

She was a church secretary in an African American church for 25 years, and at the time, I was interested in going to Howard Divinity School, because it’s UCC.

I was in love with every single one of my dad’s secretaries to the point of insanity. Our witty banter went from one to 11 very, very fast. She also had 21-year-old twins, and I was fascinated by that because we’re old, but we’re not that old. I wondered what it was like growing up with them, eager to have children that don’t live in my house. 😉 Just all these puzzle pieces were falling together so fast that I didn’t have room to breathe, and I felt that U-Haul type pull and I wasn’t ready. I was still getting over my own mental health issues, my divorce, my relationship with Supergrover, moving, all of it. It was too much.

Because my mind went to Jell-o when, at the end of the night, she walked up to me with her phone number on a napkin and kissed me on the lips. It was the boldest move I’d ever seen anyone make, and I was so scrambled that I hit a glass door on the way out. It didn’t shatter, but I sure felt it. I had scabs on my face by the next day…. probably another reason I didn’t call her. My very graceful exit. What I do know is that we would have been dynamite if I had been healed from my relationships. What I knew is that if I was in a relationship right now, it would end like all the others because I wasn’t smart enough to understand myself.

Alas, the piece of paper is long gone, but it’s a very sweet memory because it’s the first time I realized that divorce didn’t mean failure, that I could be lovable to someone else. I just needed time to figure all of that out, and I knew it wasn’t going to happen on her timeline, because I didn’t even know what that was. Feeling the dopamine of a potential relationship would have pulled me away from my quest to understand my own motivations and issues in relationships, because her needs would have trumped mine immediately. That’s just the way I’m built.

I needed to learn how to compromise from a place of strength, not tiptoe around people hoping they’ll notice me. I can do that now, because Zac and I are both hugely emotionally capable and dive into each other to the extent that we have the bandwidth. Sometimes, you just don’t want to talk that deep. It takes bandwidth. What I love about sitting next to Zac is that neither one of us requires stimulation at all times. We can sit in companionable silence and have that be enough- and in fact, more than enough because you know the relationship is genuine when companionable silence exists. My favorite thing is when Zac is working from home and in his office while I’m typing on my Bluetooth keyboard in his bed. The rhythm of his work feeds the rhythm of mine, like going to WeWork or something, but without having to pay for it. He just doesn’t work from home all the time because I will have to check with him, but I do not believe his house is a SCIF. However, there’s a lot that’s declassified enough that he can use a VPN and a government-issued laptop at home. Therefore, sometimes it doesn’t matter where he is geographically, and sometimes it really, really does.

I keep in mind what it is he’s working on, and become completely absorbed in what I’m doing. I don’t know when he’s going to have to take a call or whatever, so it’s easiest to tune it out. In fact, I was writing the other day and I asked Zac if he was working. He said, “you couldn’t hear my typing?” No. I was writing and I went deaf temporarily. I also tend to stim and get lost in petting Oliver, who is a dog….. another thing that tunes me out from all else. I am now so glad that I have Jack, who is also a dog, at home for this very reason. I’ve enjoyed having Oliver as a mascot while I write, because it’s like I have an audience that doesn’t talk back. I try hard to write to impress both of them. I want to be the person they think I am.

I am not happy with my hair right now. I think I need a fade for summer, because it’s just not short enough not to be a mop on top. The picture I posted a few weeks ago is no indication of how ragged my neck looks now. I go to a punk rock barber shop in downtown Silver Spring called Raphael’s, because I’m going for a genderqueer haircut. Barbers don’t question me. They give me what I want. A woman will tell me it’s a shame I want to cut it all off, as if my femininity is found in my hair. I am not a Rapunzel sort of bitch.

If I’m feeling particularly feminine, it doesn’t matter if I have a fade or not. My jewelry and my outfit determine my gender. If I have on a short skirt and a low cut top with lots of jewelry, men will flock to me whether my hair is long or not. Just like at CIA, they are not trained to see a person, they’re trained to see a form. If that form is curvy, it will look curvy no matter what I put on it. The number of men that have grabbed me around the waist despite practically having a “no thank you” sign on my back is insane.

I forgot a big misconception about being bisexual the other day, and it’s important. You are not half and half. Not all bisexuals are neutral and have a preference for one or all sexes. Therefore, what I meant is that if I am looking for male attention, I will find it because I was born female. It doesn’t take anything more than that. I just don’t look for male attention under normal circumstances. After domestic violence, it’s interesting that I found I wanted a protector, and it’s okay that he’s male because that makes him more physically capable of protecting me. But it’s not because I wouldn’t date another woman. It’s that I have no pattern of domestic abuse with men, because I’ve never been with one long enough to have that fiery a relationship.

My preference has not changed over time. I’ve just been scared, and I already have all the female energy I need in my life with Bryn, and Supergrover if she decides she wants more. I don’t think she will, I just want her to know that she’s welcome… that she jumped to a conclusion that was not there in a lot of cases.

I want to be in her life to whatever level she’ll accept me, but I don’t want a blanket statement that we’ll just write to each other. I wanted solid steps on how we plan to get to know each other in different ways than we know each other now.

None of that has to do with an on the ground meeting. I love her no matter what she does. I just want us to try harder at communication than we have previously. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but it’s going to take her a while to digest my words and figure out what I’m really saying. I’ll wait forever, because it’s no skin off my nose. I don’t have to close the door to her. I have to close the door to our toxic pattern. Fixing that would bring me back around to being closer to her. Winging it will ensure another week in which our dance of intimacy gets more passionate and we repel each other like magnets.

I don’t want to be 100% That Bitch. I said something to her that I meant as “I’m done coming up with topics.” She said “I’m done, too. Please don’t contact me again.” One of these things is not like the other. She absolutely went to guns on me, and that’s what I have to stop. She doesn’t have questions. She has defenses.

I stopped deciding to put my time and energy into her because I realized that if she could jump to that conclusion so quickly, this would be a harder pattern to break than I thought. She said that she was coming from a place of friendship, and took a pot shot at me while saying our relationship wouldn’t change. That I could count on not knowing anything about how our future would or could shake out.

Instead of telling me all the things she wouldn’t do, she told me all the things she wouldn’t. That’s why I decided I wanted to let her come up with her own safe topics. That I wasn’t going to try and do her emotional work for her and guess what was going on anymore. I have never been treated as right until she got vulnerable enough to admit it. We did not continue talking in that vulnerable way. The wall went up again. She says I decided she would never be vulnerable again. I did not. I was repelled at the idea that this was a bait-and-switch. I’ll tell you that I’m your real friend, but I have no idea whether I want to integrate you into my real life or not, and the whole e-mail was geared toward ways she wanted to continue hiding herself also while having a 10 year history of being avoidant.

When she was vulnerable, she admitted that was a problem in other relationships, too. I knew that the pattern we were in was universal. It’s how people operate from their first families, not their current ones. Nothing she did had anything to do with me, and it comforted all my anxieties that she really does think about me, often, just doesn’t have the time to respond. That meant more to me than gold, because I got to imagine who she was thinking about right before she thought about me.

She has cool friends because she does things. I could have cool friends, but I like sitting at home and letting her and Lindsay control doing all the things. Them doing all the things and just hearing about it is way more interesting to me than actually having to get dressed up enough to go with them. They have to wear suits and crap. That gets expensive for me because I need something tailored to my frame. The closest I can come is a big boys’ double breasted suit, but it doesn’t have the same proportions as adult clothes and I just have to roll with it. I wear a men’s pea coat, but when I’m wearing it, I have a sweater or multiple layers under it. So, I don’t necessarily feel comfortable in the gallery of the House (Lindsay is a lobbyist and attends to see the vote on her bills).

The last time I was with her when a Thing happened was when we were in the gallery waiting for her bill to come up. At that time, she was working for a drug company and one of her territories was Maryland. We were in Annapolis when Baltimore became a sanctuary city.

I spend most of my day in jeans and t-shirts so that I don’t have to wear suits and crap for work. But sometimes, I wish I did. Theirs is rareified air, invaluable marketing, and an absolute no brainer as to why I wouldn’t want to meet people on my sister’s back. I shy away from hurting her reputation. The last thing I would want to do is have a negative impact on anyone’s career.

Everyone I know has careers that I celebrate. Including the one where I ramble about anything and everything and people show up.