If you had to give up one word that you use regularly, what would it be?
I write exactly like I talk, so I tend to ramble the way I would in person without the need to feel aware of how long I’ve been talking because you’ll stop reading when you get bored or you’ll stay til I’m finished and either way it’s cool. No hard feelings. I know I’m a lot. đ
But I hate filler, so if there’s one word I wish I could take out in conversation, it’s “um,” and preferably all the other nonsense that comes with thinking before you speak because you cannot see implications and speak simultaneously without tripping over your words….. or at least, I can’t. I’ve tried to be slower about responding so that I can work through the complications of what I’m feeling on my own and decide what to say. The closer you are to me, the longer it takes for me to speak. That’s because I care about what some people think because I don’t want my words to make a problem worse. I am trying hard to keep our relationship healthy by not reverting to who I was when I was younger. When I was younger, I was programmed to be a preacher’s kid, so I have that Southern pastor vibe. I also have a crippling need to take care of everyone else first. If I had money, I’d go broke, so I go for broke emotionally. I love taking care of my friends that way, being the one they call to discuss issues because they know they’ll get an opinion that’s genuine.
I wanted to learn to be an eloquent speaker, and I think in these pages I am- in person I do not have a delete key to go back and take out anything. It is frustrating to an enormous degree. Conversation is like cooking at home and writing is cooking in a professional kitchen made to help me move faster.
This is entirely due to my generation. We’re the ones that didn’t have much technology in our lives as children and became obsessed with it when we were older. That means our first Internet relationships started in high school and we’ve been doing it a long time. We all have friends we’ve never met and are comfortable with it. Sometimes it crosses over and sometimes it doesn’t, because what people write isn’t all of them.
I isolate in person, but not online because it’s the medium with which I have the most dexterity in conversation. I can pull information and make connections at an alarming rate in this medium that doesn’t come through in the physical space. I have shown myself the best and ugliest parts of my personality, and because it is in writing, I have a very good idea of how not to go wrong again. You don’t get that with conversation, because your memories bend and blend. You can’t do that when you can go back and just look at what happened. You don’t have to rely on what you understand happened, because it may not be accurate at all.
People fight over memories too much because they don’t go back and read them. Everyone has a text history to a certain degree or another and it helps you to keep perspective, but not when you don’t have the energy to scroll up once in a while.
In a sense, now everything in life depends on knowing which people in your life will scroll up for you and who won’t. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s the extent to which someone wants to know the objective truth of what happened and who wants to live in the story they told themselves even when it’s false information.
It’s a lot easier to be humble in any relationship when you can go back and say, “I’m sorry. Dick move on my part.” You get stuck in a relationship faster when you think your memory is more accurate than someone else’s while also refusing to look it up. We made the choice to put more of ourselves into this medium, not being published but texting to our families and friends more and more. We need to act like it. There’s proof of everything you do, and you are not the main character in every story. It helps me to think of it this way. In every situation I encounter, I ask myself whether I am speaking Spanish in front of Karen or whether I am Karen. The revolution will be televised.
I hold myself accountable to my e-mails, text messages, and blog entries. It all matters. But because I am in touch with my emotions, I don’t go back and try to justify my behavior at all costs. I don’t have the black hole of need clawing at me that says I must be right or I’m not a good person.
I am definitely a good person, but it’s because I acknowledge that I have done bad things, but my actions weren’t the entirety of me. I just don’t want a relationship where anyone holds me to my worst mistake, and I’m not going to be the person that does it to someone else.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, is a glorious mess.
I want to be able to say that clearly, without hesitation or subtext. But in person, there would have been a lot of spaces and, um….
The immediate future is the most exciting. My sister and I are going through a thing (together, not fighting) and I asked her if I could write about it. She said âwrite whatever you wantâ and I said âyou never have to get me a present for anything ever again.â This is not that entry. Weâve decided to hold off for a little while because OTHER FACTORS AT PLAY. The point is that my next words were âbut if you were going to get me a present, it would be cool if you came up for my birthday this year or next year.â I go about my day thinking itâs a pie in the sky hope and in a few hours we have tickets for Charlotte Cardin on October 24th.
I realize that Lindsay is my sister, but sheâs such a badass that it kind of rattles me when she wants to spend time together because I am so insecure at times. Youâd just have to know how powerful she is to even begin to understand why I feel that way. She eats Republicans for breakfast and doesnât waste time on ketchup. I have problems with prioritizing two tasks at once. I constantly have to keep a picture of her as a teen in my mind, because Lindsayâs professional persona is intimidating, but the baby isnât.
I donât worry about the lobbyist, but Iâm the last woman alive that changed her diapers every damn day. The babyâs needs will always wake me up. The babyâs needs will always come before mine. Nothing in my life is more important than making sure her slap bracelet never comes off.
In December of 1990, the parsonage in Naples burned to the ground. My sister heard a fireman say that the fire started in the attic, and it was lucky that no one was sleeping in that bedroom (hers), because the attic rafters would have fallen on the bed and crushed whoever was sleeping. She internalized it, and things might have been different if weâd gotten another house in Naples. But no, we were moved to Houston before the committee even formed to rebuild. The stress of the fire and the culture shock affected us differently. I got sucked into band at school, choir at home, and âmy first marriage.â Lindsay developed a phobia around going to school (now does it make a little more sense why that relationship knocked me on my ass? I met her six months after the fire.).
My mother was a stay at home mom. I think Lindsay thought that if she wasnât home to protect my mother, that something would happen to her while she was gone. A trauma therapist told my dad to have a routine with her, and to get her a slap bracelet (I donât remember whether she said that specifically, or just something Lindsay could keep on her) so that she had something to keep the routine going in her mind.
Every day, my dad would drive Lindsay to school, and heâd say:
Lucky dayâŚ. Gonna get an E todayâŚ. Like I sayâŚ. Wave to meâŚ..
So, touching that slap bracelet made her remember what my dad said, and we were all with her when she touched her wrist. The therapist got an E that day, because it really was excellence on her part.
So, when I think of Lindsay walking into the Texas Legislature to protect queer kids, itâs me who needs the slap bracelet.
I canât breathe when I think of how hard her job must be and how much stress sheâs underâŚ. And how none of it is her fault. God is not making her life more difficult. People are. People who think The Bible is an authority in the lives of American politicians are trying to make the rest of the country believe it as well. Itâs maddening because we supposedly have separation of church and state, but Texas doesnât believe in it so they just live around it.
As my friend Rev. Chuck Currie has pointed out, âJesus said âlet all the little children come unto me.â He did not say âlet all the little children come unto meâŚ.. except trans kids.ââ My sister has to tell the Texas and federal government why trans kids need their medication. Their medication. Sheâs not fighting them on their wants and desires. Sheâs fighting conservatives for trans kidsâ basic needs.
Meanwhile, Lindsay and I are both the preacherâs kid from âSaved.â
When it comes to Texas Republicans, I want to crash a van into their Jesus, and my Jesus would let me.
Their Jesus is about power over, and is a reflection of white supremacy. The church universal has wasted too much time worshipping whiteness. Itâs not just an American problem. Desmond Tutu crashed a van into South African apartheid Jesus long ago.
It makes me laugh talking about my sister crashing her van into Jesus because over the years weâve both loved Mandy Moore.
Ok, Iâm going to take a second. Weâve got to talk about this. Mandy Moore didnât win nearly enough awards for âThis is Us.â Her craft was simply outstanding. OUTSTANDING. Every actor should watch her, because watching Rebecca Pearson is a master class, particularly when time jumps back and forth so that sheâs playing different ages in the same episode. Itâs a tour de force performance, and she kept it up for YEARS.
I needed to take a break and focus on Mandy Moore for a second, because I started flooding out at âslap bracelet.â There are tears and snot all up in here.
To keep it light for another moment while I collect myself, I think Coca Cola needs to start sending thank you cards to all the Diet Coke drinkers. This is because everyone likes soda, for the most part. Diet Coke drinkers are straight up addicts, and because of the world I inhabit, most of them are musicians. I have never met anyone who drinks Diet Coke that doesnât drink a hell of a lot of it.
Iâm not sure whether itâs the caffeine or the aspartame or whatever, but it does make you crave it with unusual intensity. I used to drink six a day, and I was a rookie. Every soprano I know carries it around like a water bottle. Diet Coke has even made it into a music joke.
How many sopranos does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to hold the Diet Coke and one to go get her accompanist to do it.
Itâs a riff on âhow many SMU sorority sisters does it take to change a light bulb?â âTwo. One to mix drinks and one to call daddy.â Iâm betting that the capitalization of daddy varies by age.
Quitting Diet Coke is relentless, and part of it is the carbonation. Itâs hard to give up fizzy water altogether when youâre not used to still. Now add caffeine on top and quitting becomes even more useless.
The only thing that helped me was thinking that even if I was rich, $10 for 12 cans would still seem ridiculous.
Now Iâm addicted to drink mix. It doesnât even have to have caffeine in it because Iâve found that the reason I needed so much of it is that I wasnât sleeping. Now, I take medication for that because especially during hypomania, I wonât sleep for several nights in a row. That doesnât happen very often, but my sister is a lobbyist trying to get health care for trans kids and if I was going to stay up thinking about a problem, this is a good one.
My daughter is trans. I hate qualifying it, but I did not birth her. It was better than that. I told her dad in not so many words that he was being an absolute dick to her and to get his shit together. She respondedâŚâŚâŚâŚâŚ. Positively. When we met, she was going to be my stepdaughter. Her dad is out of the picture, but weâre still going strong. So, whether The War Daniel and I get married or not, I have a child adopted through the rainbow flag. Iâm here for it, and itâs a lot. But to be clear, Cora is not the problem. Cora is the recipient of the problem.
I still want to marry Daniel, but I have reservations that will never go away, and he hasnât talked reconciliation. To me, thatâs that. But you leave a relationship with an *adult.* Cora is now an adult, but the power dynamic is the same. I donât talk to her about my feelings for Daniel and she wouldnât know anything if I wasnât a writer. I feel that itâs okay for her to read my thoughts, because they arenât directed at her. In writing, I can make it more clear than I could in person that sheâs not the monkey in the middle. Daniel doesnât think of her that way, either.
To my beautiful girl, I have only found out that the dog is named after a heavy metal star. So, I just have the names Virginia Woof and Sidney Brisdog in my back pocket, as well as a name I picked up for a cat on âWill and Grace.â Jackâs cat was named âChairman Meowâ and Iâm still not over it.
Thatâs because Cora is free to talk about her dad, but I do not have an opinion on him. I canât. He is making his own choices, and I donât have to like them. I just have to respect them. Also, whether itâs my own echo chamber telling me this or whether itâs my intuition, I think Daniel got tired of my patois reading as male and started competing with me to see who was the bigger asshole. Unsurprisingly, I âwon.â
You canât win against someone who was raised in NE Texas and has bought in to Republican fodder. He thought I was trying to reprogram him and I was trying to impress the seriousness of what his idiocy has caused because he didnât bother to get educated when Cora came out.
Itâs not inexcusable to be uneducated. Itâs inexcusable not to believe your child when they come out. Disbelief is relative. Daniel thought of himself as having to put up with us, and not because heâs a bad person. Itâs that heâs a self centered alcoholic, but I repeat myself.
Self-centered alcoholic is almost tautology.
If someone is trying to tell you that youâre hurting them and you react as if itâs all about you, itâs best to walk away. Do whatever it is you need to get yourself together, because the world is not going to think of you as the protagonist in every damn story. If you have been raised male, you think a lot about this.
Thatâs kind of the debate between cis and trans womenâŚ. That trans women tend to step all over cis womenâs asses because they were socialized as men when they were young. This is the hashtag ânot all trans women,â and yet it is not untrue, either. Their voices are loud because theyâve been told they deserve it. Cis women have been property for hundreds of years. Chaos ensues.
I would also say that cis women generally donât stand up for themselves and trans women donât realize thereâs a problem. There is a big damn problem, but it is not one that will last forever. The bitch of it is that cis women need trans women because they donât assume other men deserve shit and act as such. Cis women, not so much.
Itâs especially the debate between cis lesbians and trans women, because they have even less political power. Trans women donât always see cis womenâs complaints as real. That theyâre being misogynistic and their ire is invalid.
Cis women donât give a ratâs ass most of the time. We only react to being ignored. I am of the mind that trans women are women. Period. I also donât think trans women acknowledge how being socialized as a man as a child affects how they walk in the world as adults. That there ARE differences even though with puberty blockers, trans kids are being socialized at a very young age in their true gender.
Cis women also need to deal with their imposter syndrome and learn to kick menâs asses the way trans women do.
My only gripe is with trans women who think itâs all about them. They donât think that, but I see the dark side. I see the devastation it causes when trans women tell the people who care about them that theyâre not doing enough. How fast do you think things are going to change in the South? What is your deal? Instead of bitching all the time, send flowers.
Notice I didnât say stop bitching all the time. Just recognize that youâre putting a lot of your injury on the same people who are trying to solve the problem. In other words, take out your anger on someone who deserves it and stop biting the hand thatâs feeding you.
Iâm not sure Iâve earned the right to have an opinion here, but Iâm 45 years old and people have been all over my ass since 1990. I couldnât be my authentic self, either, and in some parts of the country my internalized homophobia still kicks in hardcore. I cannot walk into just any bar, either. I wish trans women, especially young ones, would read up on Matthew Shepard. It wasnât that long ago. The queer community as a whole is being thrown under the bus, and I realize that trans womenâs plights are bad, but I donât think theyâre worse than they were for me 25 years ago. NONE of this is getting better.
I also donât think thereâs too much difference between coming out as a trans child now and coming out as a gay kid then. Back then, gays were the last acceptable minority to hate, and theyâve passed the savings on to you. But donât think itâs worse for you. You just arenât looking at the problem from the same perspective, because youâre in hell and no one knows it better than me.
Cora and I have actually had this conversation, and it led to one of the biggest moments in my life. I explained some of the queer history she doesnât know, and asked her to have empathy. She took the note and made me cry so hard I couldnât breathe.
When I said that my middle name bothered me she said, âI have a name Iâm not using. Would you like to have it?â
And thatâs when I knew that there would never be another Cora, and there would never be another Lindsay, either.
I am just glad that I have them in my future. I wish everyone could.
I don’t know how I got so lucky that when session ended in Annapolis, Lindsay’s job moved her to working on federal legislation. She still comes to DC on a regular basis, though not quite as often when she was trying to get a bill passed in Maryland state congress. The bill made it through the House and on to the Senate, but was defeated. I don’t want to write about the bill itself, or the company where my sister works, but what I will say is that the legislation in question made perfect sense and there is no sane reason why it shouldn’t have passed, especially since in 49 other states, it’s already law. The only comfort in this is that perhaps the bill will come up next year, as some form of it has for the last nine years, and she’ll come back just as frequently as she did this year.
I know it’s hard for her being so far away from home all the time, but selfishly, it is exactly what I need. Watching her work activates my “go button,” the part of me that’s interested in government and how it works…. or not.
Voting in local and state elections is abysmally low, and turnout is key. I don’t understand why others don’t understand that local and state laws directly affect their lives so much more than the president ever will. My county (Montgomery) is important to me, as well as my state. There are lobbyists pushing legislation through that would raise ire if there wasn’t so much apathy toward it. Outrageous things get passed because no one notices… and on the flip side of the coin, really good legislation gets passed over because no one is calling their state representatives to tell them what they want, because they have no idea what the issues even are, much less care.
National laws are important, but not nearly as crucial as “small things,” like the school board, how/when the trash gets picked up, and the way the local police treat people. The local issue that really cramps my style (being the tender-heart bear that I am) is that in Montgomery County, homeless shelters are closed from April to November. Obviously, it’s sometimes very cold in October, but April is no picnic, either. Plus, it gets every bit as hot in Maryland as it is in Houston during the summer, and to me, being outside all the time is local legislators not caring whether people suffer horrendous sunburns with blisters.
Thanks to Maryland state-run health insurance, homeless people have access to free medical and psychological care, and medications that are only one dollar a bottle. But for homeless people who do not have jobs, one dollar can seem like a hundred. It’s a misconception that homeless people do not work. When you’re poor, the idea of first and last month’s rent plus a security deposit, especially in this area, is unobtainable. If people manage to only stay on the streets for a few months, it is less likely that they will suffer permanent mental health damage, but the longer people go without basic necessities, it is a chicken and egg situation. Did they become homeless because they were mentally ill and unable to hold down a job, or did being on the streets do them in?
I would say that it’s different in every case, but I can see how being reduced to absolute survival mode can do so much damage in so little time…. especially if said homeless person is arrested and thrown in jail. Jail is not a happy place, especially when you’re put there due to circumstances beyond your control. People get arrested for all kinds of inanity, such as loitering, because where are you supposed to go when you don’t have an address?
Add that to the inequality in both hiring and sentencing leads minorities down a pipeline of enormous proportions. The first is that a resumĂŠ with the name Michael Smith is so much more likely to get an interview than one with the name Tyrone Washington. The second is that minorities are more likely to get harsher sentences than whites, so something that should have been a misdemeanor is adjudicated as a felony, and that always looks good to hiring managers.
Nothing makes my blood boil faster, because even if the minority is guilty, that does not mean that he/she deserves to be treated more harshly than anyone else. It’s white privilege at its finest.
My pastor, Matt, said something interesting regarding this very thing. Minorities are allowed to be prejudiced against whites, but there is no such thing as “reverse racism.” That is because prejudice in minority communities is relatively harmless, a way of dealing with earned scorn toward whites for the systematic oppression of minorities that they’ve endured for centuries now. There is no comparison whatsoever, and to do so is to willfully ignore the difference. Prejudice is personal bias. Racism is institutionalized from the top down, with no end in sight. No matter how much we march and protest against it, President Trump isn’t going anywhere, and neither are his goons satisfied with the status quo.
That does not mean that protesting is useless, however. With enough people in the crowd, it’s hard to be ignored by Congress or the media. There is also the community that comes together with a common goal, the creation of safe space…. the seeking out of like-minded people that is a lifeline when there is such a feeling of hopelessness.
Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that Sunday morning at 11:00 is the most segregated hour in America. In a lot of ways, this has not changed, but it has changed for me. I am blessed to have a community in which whites and minorities worship together under both a #blacklivesmatter and a rainbow flag. I am blessed to have a community that shows up for marches demanding equality for all people, despite the violence that has occurred as a result. The scariest was when our #blacklivesmatter sign was vandalized and pictures of the reporters shot in Roanoke on live TV were taped to the side doors.
It led to one of the biggest turnouts on Sunday morning that I’ve ever seen in any church anywhere, because we were there to say we were not afraid. Looking for succor, yes, but there was power in showing up. Jeffrey Thames preached that day, a sermon I’ll never forget called The Certain Samaritan. It was built to comfort us in our distress and distress us out of our comfort.
We will not back down from attending church because of this threat. We will continue to do the work of peace and justice that we always have, because it defines who we are as a congregation………………….
We will continue to let people rest and recuperate as they need. We will continue to clothe the naked. We will continue to feed the hungry. We will continue to make people of all faiths and origins our friends. We will continue to fight without a fight. It doesnât take violence to respond. It takes certainty.
It was a beautiful illustration regarding now that this has happened, what are we to do? Applause is for a performance, not a worship service, and yet he deserved a standing ovation. He pointed the way from pain to promise in a way that people will not soon forget.
Whenever you think local politics don’t matter, remember that law & order starts in your neighborhood and branches out. When the leaves are turning brown, remember that it is your right and responsibility to turn on the sprinklers.
Dana and I were just having the most interesting conversation about Doctor Who and the Bible, because the canons are strikingly similar. The conversation started when we remembered The Master.
I said:
I hope they show The Master as a little boy, looking into the schism for the first time. You know who it reminds me of? Moses and the story of the burning bush. God actually tells Moses not to look at him because the sight is too overwhelming. When The Master looks into the time vortex, it’s like getting an answer to the question “what would have happened?” Keep in mind that since I am not a fundamentalist, I am not talking literally. There’s just a lot of wisdom in looking at them together.
And Dana said:
The Doctor is a Christ allegory because in dying for our sins, he’s still protecting us to this day. For years, the story has been that the doctor is atoning for the sins of killing all of his people and the canon has changed to now having locked them in a slice of time so that he can rescue them one day. And he’s over 2,000 years old now.
Stories That Are All True 