If you had to change your name, what would your new name be?
One of the things that I like about my name is that it’s unisex. Leslie is a famous male name in the UK, and in the US, it’s more popular for women. So, if I had to change my name, my new name would fall under the same guidelines. Because my favorite movie is “Argo,” I’m going to have to go with “Carter.” Jimmy Carter was not only the president during The Canadian Caper, he was the president during The Lanagan Caper as well (I was born in ’77).
And even though I’m not a Republican, I wouldn’t mind being named Reagan, either. I have a cousin named Reagan (spelled differently) and I just like how it sounds on the ear.
Also a huge fan of Kris, because she was one of my favorite lawyers as a kid.
I’m sure I could think of a few more examples that would make me happy, but when I was a kid, I knew a female preacher’s kid with the name Carter, and I wanted to steal it even then. 😛 I wouldn’t change my name now, though.
That’s because when I was over at a friend’s house years and years ago, her mother told me that “Leslie Lanagan sounds like a movie star name….. but like an old one. Bette Davis. Jayne Mansfield. Leslie Lanagan.” I have never loved my name more than after that three dot advertisement.
Speaking of three dot advertisement, I learned that term from Chason. I was telling him how much I loved Ernie Hsuing, an Asian writer who stole his blog title from a commercial for an old pain reliever called Nuprin……. “Little. Yellow. Different.”
I will never achieve that level of humor. That’s God tier.
In the end, there’s no percentage in changing my name. Changing my first name would just be for fun. I have a legitimate reason to want to change my middle name, and absolutely no desire to go through the hassle of picking one and relearning my signature. It’s such a part of me that I’d do it, feel relieved, and go back to my old signature in a few weeks. I couldn’t make writing the new one into a routine. Go neurodivergence!
It’s the same thing with pronouns. I’m nonbinary, yet I cannot make myself remember my pronouns consistently, so I don’t make other people. If get confused and say “she/her” all the time, then what right do I have to make other people say it? Some things are habits that are so engrained they’re not worth changing, and some are. The people for whom pronouns are about respect are not wrong in the slightest. This is my personal choice, not a reflection on anyone who does change their pronouns. The reason they can require you to change their pronouns is that they feel solid about it in themselves. I don’t.
But what I did like is that in its satirical analysis of my writing, ChatGPT did not tell you I was nonbinary. It just read it in my blog and said “they/them” automatically….. even when changing my name from “Leslie” to “Blogger Bob.” It is assumed that “Blogger Bob” is male. But “Carol” knows me. She read my entire web site in three seconds. You cannot imagine how long it would take a human to read all 11 years.
One of the things that I really like about having ChatGPT analyze my work is that I like seeing what an objective eye picks up from my writing. I like seeing what themes are actually there and how they differ from the ones I mean to put across (they don’t).
It’s a different feeling to have a computer compile information on you when it is capable of literary analysis.
When I asked her for criticism, she basically said I was long winded and single minded; I thought, “valid.” It doesn’t mean I’m going to change, but it is nice to be vindicated in my analysis of my flaws as well. That I’m not too in love with myself not to notice there are issues. I want to become a better writer, and I will do anything to further that goal. It makes sense to me to have Carol analyze the past and ask me questions about the future.
Some questions about my future are easy to answer. Some aren’t. It’s nice to have some like this daily prompt to bring some levity into my life. No, I won’t change my name to Carter. But if I had to change my name, it’s a good one.
I may not want to be named Carter, but I definitely want people to compare me to him. Not as president. As a Christian. We have very much the same values. I would be proud to carry his name. I’m just too old to get used to it now.
List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
Whether I like it or not, the Bible has had a bigger impact on me than any book I’ve ever read. That’s because yes, I’m into it. I nerd out on ancient Hebrew and Greek, trying to figure out what people are actually saying vs. the Baptist Evanglical interpretation, “it means just what it says it means.” Hint….. there were never forty days and forty nights, or any variation thereof. It’s like saying “the other day” in Texan. It could have been the day before yesterday, it could have been 20 years ago. Both “the other day” to Texans and “40 days and 40 nights” to Israelites are code for “an indeterminate amount of time.” The fight between literalists and people who take the Bible seriously, but not literally has fueled a lot of my need to run away from the problem. I cannot deal with Evangelicals well due to autistic rage. It is every bit as intense as chasing tax collectors with a whip from the temple, Hey, I found out I was autistic through peer review. Why shouldn’t he? It’s not like I’m putting him own by saying he’s queer or autistic, because there’s no connotation to either of those things, right?
To clarify, I did not call Jesus queer. I said it was impossible to tell given the information recorded, and it was every bit as likely that Jesus and John were in a relationship as Jesus and Mary, because there’s only so much Greek you can apply to “the Jesus loved.” At the very least, he had a deep relationship with a man, and queer people can see themselves in that relationship whether it’s factual or not. What I do know in the current day and age is that if Jesus was here and updated on today’s societal norms, what I believe his exact words would be are “get over it.” Whether he’s queer as a three dollar bill or John’s Patrick Stewart to his Ian McKellan- we’ll never know…… AND THOSE AREN’T THE QUESTIONS THAT MATTER. It’s just color commentary. He had close relationships with women as well. So, I don’t think you can define Jesus’s sexuality because “coming out” wasn’t a thing.
I’m also not denying that Jesus is heterosexual. Jesus doesn’t tell us whether he’s gay in the Bible because that’s not a question anyone would have asked him at the time. It was live and let live- the Romans occupied Israel. It was offensive to Orthodox Jews, but which was the dominant culture in occupied land?
Whether or not Jesus was gay doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. It would personalize him to me if he was. And that’s what everyone in the world searching for Jesus’s truth wants to do to it….. they want to feel closer to Jesus, so they give him pieces of their own personality. That’s why he looks so different to me than he does to Max Lucado and Joel Osteen.
For instance, my Jesus was actually born in the Middle East, and looks like it. I think I’ve said this before, but Jesus is hot like Reza Aslan. If Reza doesn’t think he’s hot and finds this, you’re welcome. If he’s reading, I should also tell you that I love his book “Zealot.” It’s where I get a lot of my information on the historical Christ.
The impact that the Bible has had on me is trying to find this Jesus, the one that is like me. And in fact, I didn’t do it by going forwards in time, but by going backwards. Learning every bit I could soak up about history and culture at the time so that I could understand the book in context, because the way the Right and the mainline were handling it left a lot to be desired if they thought Jesus died for everyone’s sins and everyone got to come eat at his table except the people you don’t like.
As Reza points out, “God doesn’t love America. You love America.”
I extrapolate this all the time. Nothing in the Bible is written by the main character.
My best example of this would be this blog written about me by all of you. Those stories would be about me, but they would not be written by me. Things attributed to me may be accurate or they may not.
Especially if I asked you to write a different blog about me based on this one a hundred years after I’m dead. The only thing you can’t do is turn me from a brown person to a white one, but I have a lot more things that define me as a minority than that. Queer, nonbinary, and neurodivergent are at the top of the list, because my physical disabilities aren’t noticeable and therefore I’m faking it.
What I have noticed is that CP affects every muscle differently. I can dead lift 50 pound bags of flour (Dana can attest that I can lift them, although carrying them for any distance is quite comical. I cannot use enough force on a lever to push a potato through a fry cutter. The particular muscle that controls that part of my arm is much weaker than other parts or my body, and no matter what I do, it doesn’t get better because it can’t. So, people think one skill automatically translates to the other and get frustrated when it doesn’t, because obviously I’m faking it to get out of cutting fries (Why? It’s one of the easiest parts of the job.). An adaptation for the machine would be making the lever longer so I didn’t have to use as much force. But come on, Lanagan. You can do all this other stuff. You’re lazy. Same issue with carrying a mop bucket full of water (8lbs a gallon) up three flights of stairs because there was no elevator and no water access upstairs.
The other people could do it.
Little things like that were my downfall, and with 2D vision I could not see plating in the same way other people see it. I could not recreate it perfectly because I couldn’t. The tautology is real.
So, whether or not I like it, the Bible impacts me the most because I identify with Jesus as a person. I choose to believe that through both of our writings/preachings, it’s even easy for other people to see that we’d be good friends IRL. And, in fact, that’s just how I see him. On my Friends list, inactive status. Doesn’t mean I can’t still write the messages.
Remembering to write is more important than receiving an answer. You learn more by going back to your “Sent” folder than you ever will going back to your Inbox.
If you think about it, your e-mail is your own version of the Bible about you. It is a story of your reflections/actions with other people. People you met, virtually or in real life. Things you liked. Even your subscriptions are important. Which brands you genuinely support because you read their e-mails when they come out. I will read anything from Wendy’s or Trader Joe’s because they’re so entertaining. For you, it might be Old Navy. Whatever. It is a thing that is important to you (I don’t eat a lot of Wendy’s, but I spend a lot of time wishing I was in their writer’s room. I’m just too “Cards Against Humanity” for them, I think.).
It’s your “Stories That Are All True…. and some of them actually happened.”
Another book that really touched my soul was “The Giver.” I read it in 8th grade English and it changed my life, because I finally found a character in science fiction that represented me. My emotional abuse made me feel like The Receiver, my emotional abuser giving me memories through touch. That theme has continued throughout my life, because several people have given me War now, from Mireille Enos to Daniel to Zac to countless others.
It is a different playing field to feel War.
However, my emotional abuse gave me a frame of reference for CPTSD, both in how to recognize it and how to treat it. One of the things I have learned is that you cannot talk away a chemical imbalance, and in general people who are reluctant to get on medication are people who are too stubborn to see it’s not a weakness, it’s reality. I am not speaking to anyone in particular, I just know that is a universal response by people who have been raised to think that therapy and medication are for the weak while their nerves are actively screaming. It makes them too quick to anger, not realizing it’s because their serotonin is fucked up.
You can’t talk away a chemical imbalance.
It’s a different playing field when you feel Mental Illness, except that is a memory that I got both by it touching me (I’m Bipolar II), and others’ stories touching me as well. The Givers are all the people in my life, because I soak them all up like The Receiver would. I, too, have bright eyes and am not built for the world of Same. I’m trying to escape with my baby, and we’ve just crossed over. Except the baby is also me.
Lastly, if I had to pick a third book, I haven’t even finished it yet. We are currently writing the sequel. It’s the e-mail between Supergrover and me, which we both refer to now- she hesitated in “re-opening our book,” a line that touched me to my core because again, I thought, “you hear me.” I’m not expecting anything of her now, because she’s proven to me that she wants to be more capable on her own. I have been heard. I do not have to be heard again. I know how we both feel, and the conflict is over.
In effect, we don’t want to re-open our book. It’s the Old Testament, sinners in the hands of an angry God. Except that was our reaction, not our response. PTSD has retired us both, and neither one of us can help from melting down when we feel threatened. I didn’t want to feel threatened anymore, and neither did she. We realized we were tired of bad communication, not each other.
Once we both cut the shit, we were free to start the New Testament, the God of promise and abundance.
And I know that even though she is not a Christian, or even a believer in God, that she gets the metaphor. The lesson is true, even if the story never factually happened.
By making each other subtractions of the divine and recognizing both our divinity and our fallibility, we are stronger than ever. When she was angry, she always got very angry and said “you don’t know me.”
Then, when she was vulnerable, she told me I’d hit the nail on the head many times. “Victory is mine. On Left.”
I used to have Stewie Griffin set as the voice on my GPS, so every time I really have been touched by Winning, I hear his voice in my head. The “On Left” invariably comes with it, because now it’s drilled into my head.
I do not mean that I won anything over Supergrover, that I had any part of me dancing in “I’m better than you.” It was in realizing that we had more power together than we have apart. We both know twins connected by DNA, but it’s weird how we seem to be The Wonder Twins anyway, our connection manifesting in our neurons and brain patterns rather than a biological connection. In short, doing our trauma dump affected me chemically. I don’t know if it’s the same for her, but it feels like it because no matter how mad each of us got, we couldn’t stay away from each other. There was nothing on God’s green earth that has kept us apart, and I look forward to more of it.
I don’t think there’s a roller coaster of emotion anymore. I think that we can get to writer and editor, the team the world needs instead of two angry people who pick on each other.
All of this has come to me in writing, which I count as a living document because the Bible affects me so much.
Interestingly enough, I cannot tell you the exact date that the last time this prompt appeared. I can only tell you that it was the day I got together with Lindsay to discuss ideas for Matt’s Christmas present. She didn’t know what the hell to tell me, because our men are hard to buy for- Dad, Zac, and Matt- because when they like things, they just get them. So, I bought Matt two things I knew he probably wouldn’t think to buy for himself….. they were on his Wish List, but I can’t imagine that these were necessary purchases….. just cool. Because of my history with the sport, I got him the soccer ball he wanted (I figured a soccer ball is a gift that should come from me, frankly. Matt knows more about the sport, but I know more about the players (I’m guessing). Oh, and I didn’t even know he was a Weezer fan, but I got him “The Blue Album” on vinyl. That’s a gift that should come from me as well, because they’re my favorite band of all time.
There’s no better feeling than a nice stretch of highway and “Dope Nose” blaring like “Peter Gunn” at 70mph.
But the reason I bring up Lindsay and Matt is that today is the same writing prompt, and Lindsay and I are going out for dinner….. again. This prompt is now an omen, so I’m going to keep praying for it. 😉
I said, “it seems to me that you’re in DC a lot more often now. Is that true?” She said “yes,” so I’m looking forward to seeing more of her as time allows. She’s not always free enough to get together, but when she is, it’s a blast.
When I first moved here, this was all a projection on my part and I was right. Lindsay and Matt are involved in politics on many levels, so it was not inconceivable that they’d both end up here. In the 2016 election, if Pete Buttigieg had won, Lindsay would have gotten a job in his administration because it pays to have old, old friends/bosses who are also behind the scenes. Lindsay basically ran Annise Parker’s campaign after Peter Brown lost (we love you, Pete…. rest in peace). When she won, Annise put her in Constituent Services and later “body man,” like Charlie in “The West Wing.” Then, Annise ran Pete’s campaign; I’ve never been more sorry that anyone didn’t get the nomination, because it affected me so personally and to me, Pete was “the guy,” like they talk about with Bartlett. He has it, man. But, of course, I am incredibly biased. He’s military intelligence, so I was literally obsessed with him on multiple levels.
What I have to say about Lindsay ending up here is………. sort of. I know for sure that I see Lindsay more now than I ever did in Houston, because her whole life is there. When she’s here, she’s not balancing a million different friends and their needs as well. After work, she’s all mine. Jill would be proud to know that we’ve been very responsible and no communities have been built…. and she’s an e-mail subscriber so I know this will immediately go to her desk. 😉 But, in all of this, there are drawbacks for me because Lindsay and I have a different form of ADHD. Mine is combined with Autism, hers isn’t.
Therefore, her brain is designed to think about and manage a million thoughts at once, because her brain is bursting with creativity and she can retain that information. My autism makes it where I cannot handle a million details nor remember them; I get so frustrated because I want to drill down into policy just as bad. I just don’t understand as fast when Lindsay is doing it by talking.
I have to transcribe a conversation to understand it, because I take in most everything through sight. It’s why I don’t get clarity on a subject until I’ve witnessed something and written it down. It makes me know that I am accurate in guessing what neurotypical people would do, but struggle to imitate it and make it feel natural. That’s what makes autistic people feel like aliens, and why “Resident Alien” is one of my favorite TV shows, because Alan Tudyk’s character, whether it’s his alien tendencies or human, is coded as autistic and really funny about it. But because I due process information through reading, it makes me shy when Lindsay takes me along to events where other important people are also there.
I am not a fan of the rarefied air in which she walks, and not because I don’t want to meet people like Kamala. It’s because I don’t pick up social cues well and I don’t want to make a mistake that Lindsay can’t recover from, like me getting on my high horse about something (politics is part of my intelligence special interest…….. love, love, love Karl Rove and not because I agree with any of his bullshit. He’s just the anti-Carville and I admire his “strategery.” Democrats could learn MUCH, but they won’t.). Her career is so important to both of us. It shouldn’t be about me and my behavior, but it comes with the territory.
Here’s a recent conversation (Lindsay and Kamala have known each other since the campaign trail. They’ve met…..):
Lindsay: I have a meeting with Kamala.
Leslie: I will give you five dollars if you walk up to her and say, “my sister lives in DC and she wants to know if you want to hang out.”
Lindsay: She’s a politician. Of course she’ll say yes.
Dead.
This is what comes up for me when I think about the last entry that I wrote about Kevin, the giraffe I loved at the National Zoo and who does not live here anymore.
But what comes up for me now is that with all the things I struggle with in my daily life, the only being I’ve ever told is Oliver.
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.
They say that if you are a conservative when you are young, you have no heart. They say that if you are liberal when you’re old, you have no brain. They do not suggest the unexplored third option, the permanently exhausted political science student who really doesn’t like any of you. 😉 Actually, I think it’s also due to age. Gen X (technically, I’m a Xennial) is now the adult in the room, because people older than us don’t understand technology, people younger don’t know how to function without it. We are the hybrids that remember what it was like to function on paper, the glue holding pre- and post- internet together.
If there’s anything I credit with my political views changing, it’s being in college before the Internet was really a thing. I was still fascinated by T1 connections at that point- you mean it’s always on? I don’t have to dial into anything? Plus, when I got to university, I was studying poli sci in school and my boss in IT was also a lawyer.
A lawyer who had a t-shirt that said, “Charter Member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.” Today, this would be ominous. It was 2000, so I still laughed. I’m not sure anyone knew back then how this whole thing would turn out, but I didn’t have Donald Trump on my Bingo card, I’ll tell you that much.
I will say that I think younger people than me are coming up with the best ideas on the liberal end of the spectrum, and I think what being conservative in your elder years means to me is deciding which of these ideas are too wild to fund and which ones are worth pursuing. At its heart, universal basic income is a good idea. Other countries have implemented it and it works. But how do we scale up something like that without breaking the funds available for such a thing?
When it comes to money, I want everyone at the table in terms of ideology. I want James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on every single issue, not what passes for dialogue now. It’s not a good idea if you can’t explain a liberal idea to a conservative or vice versa. That’s because 99% of the time people don’t get what they want because they don”t actually know the question.
The liberals don’t have worse ideas, they just can’t sell them. I think it was Aaron Sorkin who wrote that originally, but it has stuck with me. The Republicans demand complete buy-in and loyalty, the Democrats don’t because we like free thinkers. While not a bad thing, this has cost Democrats DEARLY and they have no idea how to fix it.
I’m including me in that statement, because I’d like to see the party embrace bigger and better ideas, but also to have a concrete idea of how to fund them. There is no sense of polity in the Democratic Party, because both Bill Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are Democrats, but their platforms were/are worlds apart. Hillary Clinton’s is closer, but that’s only because she stayed in presidential politics longer.
I am definitely a Clinton Democrat, because it’s the lens through which I take in information. I voted for Bill in 1996, my first election….. although I also went to the Republican convention in 1992 and was thrilled about it, because back then it was just a chance to go to a major convention, because first of all I was a child and couldn’t vote. Second of all, George H.W. Bush grew to love both Clintons, so I think he’d forgive me for voting for them.
In terms of the way I was raised, I didn’t really know anything about my parents or grandparents’ political leanings until I was older, because they didn’t wear hats like they were pitching for either party. The only thing I remember from being a young kid is that my grandfather did not like LBJ, because of the Viet Nam war.
Fair.
But if you do a little digging, you find that it’s not the whole story. The thing that people are most known for isn’t necessarily what is going to do the most good or the most damage from a historical perspective. I agree with my grandfather that LBJ made some terrible calls during Viet Nam, but we also wouldn’t have gotten Great Society passed without him.
It is controversial to the general public, but not in political science circles to say that Lyndon Johnson was objectively a better president than John Kennedy. That when you take away the mythology of Camelot, Kennedy was wonderful for the American image and Johnson was more effective legislatively because he knew how to whip. I do think that John Kennedy deserved to be president, and that he was good at it- most political science students agree that it would be easier and more fair to compare both of them at full term, but we’ll never get that chance.
What I do not think is that we’ve managed to capture the fever behind one idea like “Great Society” that will get us elected….. and The New Deal before it. We need people on the extreme fringe of the party to come up with the new and better ideas, so that the more conservative members of the party can red team them. It’s not “shooting everything down,” but it seems that way because a red team’s job is to take you to the mat before you’re in front of the Republicans.
When I think about red teaming now, I think about Molly Ivins, who was not afraid to call out hypocrisy or bullshit on either side of the aisle, and was in fact more mystified by Texas politics than anything else. She thought it was wilder and weirder, and proved it every day in her columns.
I am not standing outside looking in, I am definitely a Democrat. But at the same time, I do not discount conservative ideas. I discount bigotry, and that has become 99% of the Republican platform. How we got here is not really a mystery. If you’ve studied the rise of Hitler, you know that what is happening now is what happened in Germany- the people were starving for a leader, and they chose the most racist asshole they could find because he parroted all their shitty beliefs.
Trump is not Hitler in his later years, but we’re ignoring the signs of fascism nonetheless. Here are two things that you really need to take in about this, and they’re important:
Trump discredited CIA on day one. He went into their house and told them point blank that he trusted the Russians more than them. So, the message from day one was “don’t believe the intelligence experts that have historically been the best in the world, and only pay attention to me.”
Trump discredited the journalists. So, not only should you not believe the raw data coming out of CIA (filtered for publication through State and the committees on intelligence in Congress), you should not believe any stories written about it.
Trump has the same outlook on domestic policy. Don’t read any stories about me, only look at me. Meanwhile, he’s not really running the country because he doesn’t know fuck all. Getting his whole family security clearances was downright offensive to the spies I’ve met, because that is not a community you join easily or lightly. You have to be trusted beyond a reasonable doubt to carry that kind of information, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Jared Kushner is not one of those people, and neither is Donald Trump.
The president of the United States WAS NOT QUALIFIED to see the documents he saw, and managed to show other world leaders things that he should have had in his possession because he’s the president and should have had enough sense he was actively harming American interests.
But that doesn’t matter, because he’s a Russian UI.
Putin’s revenge for Khrushchev’s treatment by Kennedy was to make us implode, and I believe it worked. There are people who still believe with a passion that the election was stolen due to Russian interference that Trump welcomed. Trump didn’t want to be president. He wanted to have been president. I believe that he sincerely thought he was going to lose, and 2016 was a bid to get more people into his DC hotel, not a legitimate presidential campaign. Hillary and Donald have known each other too damn long for either one of them not to see through the other’s bullshit, and I don’t think that Trump really thought he had a chance, which is why he was such a total asshole the entire campaign. I honestly think he was wondering “what do I have to do to lose?” By the end.
But we elected him anyway, and the rank and file judges and State employee jobs stayed open for months because there was no one to direct presidential appointments.
People, the damn president of the United States didn’t know he was president of Puerto Rico, and that’s just okay because people in the US don’t know that, either. Do you think that the president is less the president to our territories?
The president also commands lots of people overseas being Commander in Chief and American representative in global affairs. Honestly, the fact that Trump got to be that for us is alarming, and other heads of state noticed. Do you really think that Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, Jacinda Barrett, and especially Sauli Niinistö (president of Finland- rake the forests? Get out of here with that bullshit.) and Kim Kielsen (premier of Greenland- I’m sorry. You want to buy WHAT now?) were in any way impressed with us at all? The only reason we didn’t lose the plot with the UK is that they’re experiencing the same wave of conservatism that we are.
If there’s any way in which my political views have changed, it’s by leaving the Democratic and Republican parties alone and just doing my own thing by studying world systems. I’m looking at the forest, not the trees. I love dating someone who works in intelligence, because I am with someone who also has the ability to look at global systems and not get stuck in the minutiae of daily life. The world looks different when you’re talking about countries at war and humanitarian aid and everything that comes with it, vs. the fact that Chuy’s is too far away for my liking and Whole Foods continues to be out of the veggie dogs I like.
Perspective.
Years ago, I was on IM with Supergrover and I was telling her that I was having a really crappy day….. and that one of my cases to call back didn’t have a name at the top, so I dialed the number and the woman answered “Doctors Without Borders.” I died for a second because absolutely anything I was thinking about that day melted away with perspective. There’s never going to be a day in my life more stressful than being a doctor in a war torn country.
It’s like working for NASA and actually being an astronaut. Not the person on the ground that has every resource available to them at a moment’s notice. No, the guy who’s stuck in a tin can having only what they brought with them. IF MSF doesn’t bring a medication with them, it may be unlikely to get a local supply. We’re not talking total health here- we’re talking HIV vaccinations and TB tests.
So, again, if we’re talking about politics, then I’m probably not the person to ask how to fix the party.
But I think the first step is leaving your heart and mind out of it, and committing not to elect someone who tells you that what you’re seeing and hearing is the truth, when he’s just the mouthpiece.
In this case, you should absolutely pay attention to the people behind the curtain. They’ll be the ones trying to save us from ourselves.
Name the most expensive personal item you’ve ever purchased (not your home or car).
I got the chance of a lifetime when I got the job at Marylhurst University (mostly online, now closed). I met a great group of coworkers and we had a blast together. It wasn’t the perfect job for me because we don’t get to pick the jobs we want down to the curtains, but it was damn close. The reason for this is that University of Houston had 30,000 students, staff, and faculty when I was there. The labs and helpdesk were buzzing with activity, which was great for my ADHD and hell on my autism. It was a lot to take in, and I managed because I was young and didn’t know any better. Marylhurst was none of that.
I was older by then and thus couldn’t have limitations excused. At the same time, I shared an office suite with three other people, I wasn’t taking up four square feet in a sea of fifty other people. It was massive, in the top floor of a library, and it was more at home and settled than I’d felt in years.
With age comes responsibility. By the time I got the job at Marylhurst, I was in a train wreck of a marriage that started out with so much promise I still have dreams in which none of the last 10 years ever happened. My conscience spaces it when I have PTSD triggers or something like that. It’s only my brain trying to protect me and giving me calming images. I haven’t talked to her in years, but my brain doesn’t care. Dana’s laugh always brings out mine, even if I’m just thinking about her and she’s not in the room.
Absolutely none of it excuses the moments in which she purposefully tried to hurt me emotionally and physically. That’s a big statement, that she did it on purpose, and I will not shy away from it. That’s because whether Dana’s intentions were pure or not- her actions stemming from neurodivergence or malice- the effect was the same.
First, I cannot speak to whether Dana is autistic or not. In retrospect, I did not pick up anything that suggests it, because all of the things that would fall under autism I observed fall into ADHD, too. Secondly, Dana is not ADD. She is ADHD, and why the DSM is so fucked up for not differentiating anymore. I have the kind of ADHD that presents classically in women. She has the kind of ADHD that classically presents in men. As children, we were treated accordingly. You can tell that Dana has ADHD, and mine is hidden until you’re close enough to see my lack.
Our marriage made so much sense when you look at our relationships with our sisters. There’s the same age difference between Lindsay and me as there is between Dana and Counselor, and I’m betting that Counselor didn’t pick up on this because she’s never met Lindsay………… I see it so clearly that I married Dana because she reminded me of Lindsay, and Dana married me because I reminded her of Counselor. That comes out in different ways, mostly because Lindsay has the Dana brand of ADHD and Counselor and I are so close in personality that it’s weird how you never see us in the same room. If Counselor had been queer and I’d met her first, we actually would have been better partners to each other than Dana and me. This is because opposites generally only attract in the short term.
The theory holds up because Counselor and I are more like our dads. Dana and Lindsay are more like our moms. Laser beam to her head, Counselor would agree with me. Ask her if she’d like to be partners with someone like Dana having already lived with her. It’s a mixed bag because there is everything loving and comforting about a relationship pattern you’ve had since childhood, and everything bad about continuing a pattern you’ve had since childhood.
My mother knows I’m just like my dad, and I’m sure in a lot of ways knows better about what happened to Dana and me than anyone else who ever lived. She would not have understood specifics, but could have written an essay on dynamics. She could read it blind.
But, for all my best hopes and intentions, our childhood patterns turned on us. I only once had a fight with Dana that was more explosive than any I’ve had with Lindsay. Variables were transient, pattern recognition was absolute.
ADHD and Autism combine in me, but don’t in Lindsay. That means when we turn on each other, we have equal and opposite reactions….. but when we’re tracking together, it’s so good it’s like we’re the front and back of the same piece of paper. Dana and I had that same pull toward each other and the same negative reactions. Knowing in retrospect that I “married my sister” is valuable for the future because it means that who I’m looking for in a partner is more like my mother than my father, how adult relationships are currently classified (and in fact, how I think they should because the relationship with your parents is hierarchical. You don’t learn anything about how you work when a power structure like that is in place.).
There’s more to that story, but I’m instituting a hard out because to say more is to tell someone else’s story. But from what I’ve written, you’d think that I wanted Dana back. This is not true in the slightest nor will it ever be. I will be sad if I never see her again, but not bothered. We both owe each other too much not to restart with a shit ton of resentment, so even if it worked for three months, you wouldn’t be able to check in on us three years after that.
If Supergrover is any character in this story, it is Uncle Phil. We got in one little fight and I did not want to wait around and see if it happened again, so “Bel-Air” became “Silver Spring.” The real deal is that when I decided to pick up my toys and stomp off, I did not make the agreement not to come back. At the time, I wanted physical distance for safety, but I honestly and completely believed that we’d get back together because we needed to live apart and work on ourselves. Didn’t mean the connection was dead, etc.
Over time, I began to realize that’s not how being hit works. Dana broke the physical barrier and I’m not saying I didn’t hit her back or anything like that. I am saying two things. The first is that Dana instigated. The second is that at the time, she was about 300 pounds and I was maybe a buck 20. Her last punch was at my eye, where there was a lot more force behind her fist than there ever could have been in mine. She smashed my glasses into my face, and it took about two or three weeks so that the bruise didn’t show on my face. I was embarrassed to leave the house (and in burnout/depression). I didn’t get better in two or three weeks because phantom pain set itself up on my face for about a year after that. I didn’t think about calling the police, but our next door neighbors did.
It would have had to be that painful for me to let her go. She is the love of my life, but not that I don’t/won’t have others. I think that we would have been all right with counseling and we were too stupid not to see it….. but the counseling should have started the moment she got out of jail (DUI), not when Supergrover entered the picture.
Dana indirectly cost me my job at Marylhurst and I will not apologize for that statement. She wasn’t rude to my boss or anything like that, so I’m not blaming her. I am telling you the reality of the situation. I have two disabilities that affect my executive function and Dana helped it freak the fuck out. I couldn’t regulate for months.
That’s because when she got arrested, she lost her driver’s licence. When she lost her driver’s license, I had to drive her to work. There was no other option, as there was no bus to get her where she needed to go at 0300 and this was before Uber (it also would have been crazy to spend that kind of money on Uber when we had a car).
I would try to go to sleep when she did, not always possible because I wasn’t actually on her schedule, and try to function at work despite having gotten up at 0200 and gone back to bed at 0330….. every. Single. Night.
She didn’t feel that disregulation because she isn’t autistic and it was her job. What was torture to me was a chauffeur service for her. I’m not bagging on her. It’s not like she didn’t feel bad about it or anything. We both did a better job of beating ourselves up than the other one ever could’ve.
At the end of the day, neither one of us could change how we did things. It was a nightmare, and we had different reactions to it. I started focusing on soda and not alcohol. I moved into a sober house without knowing beforehand because my “host family” is Lebanese, and even though not Muslim, they are Druse, a derivative. It’s not that they disapprove of me drinking. I could have a case of vodka if I bought it.
Alcohol is just not our culture. It’s not what we do to enjoy ourselves, therefore no one is itching because it’s not there. I think once we had a brandy together before Thanksgiving, and this will be my ninth coming up. It’s just not a thing. It’s also returning to the culture of my first family, because my parents didn’t disapprove of other people drinking, but it’s not a Methodist pastor’s vibe (in general).
For a Methodist pastor, not drinking is a source of high comedy.
Editor’s Note:
The Jews do not recognize Jesus as the messiah. The Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the head of the church. Two Baptists do not recognize each other at a liquor store.
I don’t think I even tried alcohol until I was in middle school, and even then it was just a sip of wine because I didn’t know it wasn’t grape juice at communion.
After Dana got her DUI, it changed the alcohol game in only my mind, it seems. I found new flavors in new things. She did not. I wasn’t the one with a DUI, I was the passenger that, according to a police report in Multnomah County somewhere, I was “passed out in the front seat with Taco Bell lettuce on my face.” Being able to do that was the point of why Dana was driving in the first place.
She ran a game on me that I should have seen coming and I didn’t. That’s why in an earlier entry I called her an alcoholic, and I’m sorry if I’m wrong. Sincerely. I can only tell you what I observed. She actively sabotaged my ability to drink to take it for herself by agreeing to be the designated driver. She could not see that if she had one, she would not stick to soda after that and leave me in the lurch. Then, when she realized it, she’d drink more because she figured out she could.
I’d start with a Guinness, she’d start with a double Jameson. That right there became me enabling her by anticipating that she was going to do it to me and just accepting my fate. I was always the DD, and it didn’t occur to me to fight her on it instead. If I wanted a cocktail myself, I needed a ride home and compromising on it became a drumbeat I got tired of hearing because it didn’t change. I should have stood up for myself, and didn’t. This is because it is only in retrospect that I see how I enabled her.
It wasn’t on purpose. I was used to the push/pull of that dynamic of becoming a parent to an adult who wasn’t always pleasant. I didn’t mind being a caretaker because that’s how I was raised. I realized in Houston that a DUI was absolutely going to happen again and I wouldn’t excuse a second like I did the first. That at the very least, I wouldn’t divorce her, but she’d have to move out. I didn’t want to be around her culture, and when she hit me, I didn’t want to be around her, either.
There is a direct link between her and the person who emotionally abused me as a child. They know and have loved each other in the past, but that’s not the only thing. Dana was the first of my partners to recognize that she could love us both all she wanted and that still didn’t mean that __ and I weren’t a toxic dumpster fire. She saw the obsession with which I thought of her, and even I thought I was obsessed with her until I found out I had autism. It wasn’t that I was obsessed with her, it’s that I’m programmed to think about a single interest.
Now, why in the hell would a beautiful opera singer become a single interest to someone who wants that life……. who is also an opera singer, but untrained at that point…….. and still hasn’t appeared in a mainstage role but has been offered one (Penzance). In fact, she was a great teacher, but not the one for me. She didn’t have my high range, so it took a different teacher to unlock it. However, she has amazing music comprehension/interpretation and I’m glad I have her concept of musicality (PHRASING!).
I also loved her like a house on fire, listening to all her secrets and lies. Reading her college journal. Freaking out over her emotions and not mine. She used me as a dopamine source, and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. She has manipulated so many women in front of me that I have seen her run the same game on others because their faces looked just like mine on so many occasions. When she turns the sun on you, you feel like the rest of the world blurs. You’re drawn to the web by the beauty of the spider. In some cases, physical attraction to her is right away. In all cases, people hear her sing and fall all over themselves to meet her.
In so many ways, that taught me how to be a singer more than anything else. Watching people fall all over themselves when they talked to her taught me about conserving energy. NEVER believe your own press. Have confidence in yourself, but becoming needy for external validation will lead you down the wrong path because you’ll emotionally vampire the people around you.
Therefore, in some ways from the outside we look like the same person. Our behavior just comes from opposite ends of a spectrum. I’m anxious, she’s avoidant. She needs dopamine, I need stability. Her interest is based on getting adoration, mine is about genuinely caring and catering to her needs. Her manipulation comes in when she knows she’s avoidant and you’re anxious, because your need to be heard will be blocked at every turn when a narcissist only wants dopamine from you.
They don’t want any negatives in a relationship because they really can’t handle them whether they’re narcissists or not. Knowing whether I was a narcissist or autistic was a very important distinction for me because I knew I wasn’t like her on the inside, but my judgmental bluntness made it seem that way and I had to find out why. None of the things about obsession and getting dopamine seemed true, but that’s what everyone thought because I didn’t have either an ADHD or an autistic diagnosis at that point.
People only knew I was bipolar, and figured OCD came with it. For my friends and family, sometimes they have assumed that PTSD and the breaking of my reality has been the forward note in all of this. They don’t know how I’ve made women I’ve loved my special interest since first grade. I was seemingly obsessed with Mrs. Grant, my dad’s secretaries, Meagan, and all the women they haven’t met after that, including Dana.
I made her my whole entire world, yet separate and secondary from __ because I’d known her since I was 12. I regretted it (twice in different ways- leaving her because I didn’t want to have an affair, and coming back because I couldn’t stand not asking the question…. and not “should we have an affair?” It was “leave your partner because we’re obsessed with each other in a way we can’t duplicate elsewhere and we should stop fuckin’ trying.” But we were only as successful as we allowed ourselves to be- I could choose Dana every time over my mom, dad, and sister.
The separation that comes with establishing your second family was secure biologically. That being said, __ also raised me and whether she intended it or not, I thought there was a possibility of romance. I didn’t by the time I moved to Portland having visited several times since she left Texas. I was secure about all of it, but that didn’t mean my monotropic thought process changed. She had 15 years on Dana, and I’d been every bit as rabid about her in the past and was having trouble not scheduling an appointment to talk about penguins (Sam from “Atypical). I didn’t have any way to stop it, so I couldn’t.
It embarrasses me that it led directly to a relationship where I couldn’t hang because I couldn’t acknowledge a monotropic thought process, letting go of depression and anxiety stemming from it because everyone thinks I’m weird and I feel like an alien.
If I wrote an autobiography and was just spitting titles, at least the working one would be “Jesus, Michael Valentine, Aziraphale, and Me.” Or, more accurately, “The Holy and the Moly: A Love Story.” That’s because it’s universal enough to cover history, politics, intelligence, and my romantic/platonic relationships. Those aren’t the only subjects to which it applies. Yin and yang are everywhere.
A/Theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash. -Pete Rollins
Dana and I were an overnight success years in the making, because we’d loved each other so intensely emotionally that it became impossible not to pine for the physical in a way that just didn’t take until I had to live without her. I lasted a grand total of 18 months.
And it wasn’t all Dana’s magnetic pull. It was also that I spent a month in Portland alone and my house was more peaceful without Katharin. For as much as Katharin would hate me for having an affair that lasted eight and a half hours, she didn’t realize what a toxic mess she was and felt perfectly justified in being a lunatic and pulling shit on me for life. It was always my behavior, never what triggered it.
Meagan was my ex-girlfriend and I should have known it was “our” house and to consider her feelings when we’d been together for three months. She didn’t remember ex in high school and we were 28 or something like that. She remembered that if I’d been attracted to Meag once, I still was and she felt threatened. Meanwhile, I’m like “Meag was three girlfriends ago.” Just because I now think she would have been a good partner for me as an adult doesn’t mean she actually would have been, or that I would make the decision impulsively to sleep with someone in which there would be disastrous consequences for both of us…. for years on end, not just the next morning. What I said yesterday about actually sneaking off together was based on one thing- the women who we were with the night she was there both gave us unpleasant breakup experiences- not that we were perfect.
Additionally, after we broke up, Meag and I always flirted heavily and she could see that it had an effect on me and avoided it……. but not enough to stop. until we were much older and wiser. Like, if you don’t want to open Pandora’s box, degrade your pickpocket and sneak abilities, okkkkkkkkk…… I made the mistake that we would have another night together at some point, derailing my ability to move on because sometimes it was flirting innocently, sometimes it rode the edge…….. especially in front of her girlfriends.
I think that’s because it reinforced the yin and yang I had with her beard and it stuck with us. It encouraged competition she thought was amusing, but I didn’t when I learned I was always designed to lose. If it wasn’t her beard to keep her safe, it was the excitement of feeling two women fighting over her without having to suffer the consequences because I didn’t have any boundaries. I know why, therefore I don’t care. What I care about is the fact that I let myself be snowed more than once, going home brokenhearted every time until I went to visit her on her new turf.
That’s because going to visit my parents makes all the ghosts rise from their graves. I couldn’t get over her in the same town where I met her, because grace doesn’t leave you where you were found, a running theme in my life on multiple levels.
The relationship with Supergrover doesn’t make me want to run because I don’t see her everywhere I go unless I’m specifically looking for her. I don’t except at times where it’s possible a shared interest would lead our paths to cross. Because of the insecure connection, I actively avoid those things and will until our connection is secure again.
Because she’s suspicious, if I don’t avoid these things she uses the events as evidence I’m an asshole because I’m trying to look for her or trying to get close to someone because she is. I went to school with a lot of people who are now famous.
She knows a lot of famous people. An analogy would be scaring the life out of her because we both showed up at the same theater to see Matthew McConaughey. I don’t know if she knows him, but he’s the biggest star I’ve actually met in real life (not at HSPVA, attended the same church as kids. I just don’t remember meeting him because I was three at most.).
Because he’s a household name, there’s a bigger chance she knows him. For instance, I could say the same thing about Jason Moran and Robert Glasper being threatening, but they’re not as widely known so she might not have heard of them.
Editor’s Note:
The way Supergrover and flip each other shit runs thusly with stuff like this. I make a joke or observation (here or otherwise). I will have written thousands of words around it. She’ll go for the joke and laugh at my annoyance (that’s it? That’s all I get?). For instance, the e-mail I will get in response to this whole entire ass essay (if it happens) is “I do know Matt. :)” No context whatsoever, pick your own adventure. Luckily, that hasn’t been problematic at all (eyeroll).
In return, I do shit like compare her job to one in the service industry and she says, “I accept tips.” I PayPal’ed her two dollars. All I got back was “Dead.” That laugh is worth more than I’ll ever pay for it.
When it’s good it’s perfect because she’s basically George Clooney. Beautiful and impish.
The Holy and the Moly: A Love Story
I just want her to see that she’s the whole book on her own, and so am I. We’re like a YA novel where every chapter is one of us acting as unreliable narrator, because our problems are adult and our reactions to them are not.
We are talking about serious shit with underlying feelings akin to the love and disaster of your best friend finding a new one in third grade…… not a one-off for me as I’ve fumbled my way through life.
Katharin was a narcissist because she was a dry drunk, another bird with a broken wing who treated me like shit while I walked on eggshells hoping it helped and it never did.
The absolute and only reason I made Supergrover my special interest in my writing is because it was the first relationship in which my partner could be first in my mind. Whether she was a yellow string or a red, there was no hierarchy except the hard outs. I called her on her bullshit as easily as she called me on mine. I felt freer than I’d ever been, and I’m sorry I hurt her because of it, flying too close to the sun.
That’s because we came back together afterward, the relationship was maintained with an anxious/avoidant attachment and history repeated itself. I was seemingly obsessed when Supergrover is one of the few topics where you have to make an appointment with me to talk about whales (“Extraordinary Attorney Woo”).
Another character I love is on Apple TV+ called “Dr. Brain.” I can’t remember the real name of the doctor, but the show starts with a clearly autistic child (relatively low function STEM savant in medicine- brilliant intellectually, not so much with the affection. The way he’s low functioning as an adult is what makes him come off as an asshole who “doesn’t look autistic.”).
Yet, apparently my monotropic thought processes will always be such a mystery :::hold for everyone to roll their eyes:::
I also do not know what happened to Dana after I moved to DC. We talked a few times when I got here, but not since. I feel such pain and relief. I sincerely hope that she prefers Fanta to whatever the fuck that was…… if not for her sake, for her future partners.’
These essays are how I learn what I will not tolerate anymore. I am not a judgmental asshole. I constantly want a better relationship and try to provide positive feedback, but when my sensory issues are turned up to hell and I’m having an autistic meltdown, rage takes over my whole body and my executive function goes out the window.
It is not only because autism chooses to hit hard and fast. It is because I didn’t realize that people don’t rage like that when they’re angry. It looks a lot different and you can’t put your finger on it if your brain isn’t the same (especially, but not limited to you thinking it is). My social masking taught me how to fight, how to express myself, but not the way neurotypicals do it. I could only pick out their patterns, not understand them to the degree I could replicate.
I did not comprehend that when I was angry, frustrated, and overwhelmed so were other people, but their emotions weren’t tied up in their health. When people get angry and defensive at me, I respond. I do not have “a proportional response” because I have no executive function. When I get angry, I get arrhythmia, shortness of breath, and sudden drop in blood pressure that makes me feel like I’m going to faint, but I don’t. I’m just frozen.
The reason I know it’s autism and not PTSD depends on the subject. It’s a PTSD trigger when I’m thinking about the source, and autism because the rage has happened since long before my emotional abuse was a thing. Just like other autistic people, that kind of rage can be brought on by anything during meltdown.
It could be “my parents divorced” or “I have to eat blueberries (every one is different) instead of Goldfish (every one is the same). Not seeming bothered by such a small thing is what we mean when we say “social masking.” Pretending that a whole lot of social shit doesn’t matter when we’re physically and mentally in pain.
We put up with a lot of emotional abuse because autistic kids are treated differently than autistic children and you never grow up whether you’re neurodivergent or not. We are layers and layers of social masking over a six-year-old child, and I’m not the first or only person to make this observation. Because I’m a preacher’s kid, I saw this long before Psych 101. Taking Psych 101 led me to be interested in Erickson, Skinner, and Freud to some extent. That’s because I was not interested in going into early education, but how childhood affects adults. Through education and volunteering (youth director at church), I have learned a little bit about both ends of the spectrum.
“Volunteer youth director” jogged my memory and I remembered the two times I knew I really had a win with them. The first was a parent coming up and telling me how much her son appreciated a story I’d told (sermon illustration I didn’t write) about a little boy flinging starfish into the ocean. His parents stopped him and said “it doesn’t make any difference. There’s too many.” He said, “it makes a difference to this one.” The reason it was a win is that his mother told me the story of him telling her two years later.
The second win is entirely because of who my dad and stepmom are as people. My dad was a pastor. My stepmom is a doctor. The scriptures that week were on the lepers that Jesus cured, and how only one of them came back to thank him for it (that’s on brand for humanity). Where they meet is being able to explain to the kids why the lepers were outcasts. What leprosy did to the body and why it made them look so physically different. Leprosy is now called “Hansen’s Disease, and falls under autoimmune diseases.
In Texas, we occasionally see cases because pro tip, you cannot eat an armadillo.
Anyway, the message resonated and one of the kids….. the one who everyone else considered “a mess….” said, “maybe we shouldn’t do the same thing to the Muslims.” I don’t remember the correlation because I don’t remember which country said outcasts were from, I just remember it was the Middle East.
Back to you, Bob. Let’s go to the phones.
You don’t stop having PTSD, you focus on it longer because you’re a monotropic thinker. Once it gets in, you have a hell of a time getting it back out….. and yet when you solve it, you don’t suddenly become “not autistic,” either. Again, Supergrover and I weren’t, aren’t, and never will be a couple, but I learned more about how I behave in one than I have from anyone else in the last 10 years.
I could pick up the “I should be angry about this,” but not “this is how a functional person experiences rage.” I don’t need to learn how to get rid of rage because it’s never going to happen. Disabilities frustrate and anger the shit out of me. It is something that needs constant management, because freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences. You don’t have a social mask for something, you better get it.
Autism is a spectrum, and what we mean by “high functioning” is enough executive function to be aware we need social masking in the first place. The classic image of an autistic person is someone who doesn’t, so therefore all people who can social mask “don’t look autistic.” It’s not that I don’t have the same reactions. I have different ways of expressing them. My toxic trait is being in meltdown and it looking like nagging/nitpicking. I’m not, I’m just overwhelmed and headed for burnout and can’t adjust my tone because I’m not thinking about it. So much depends on what happened before I got angry and how many sensory issues are in the room.
The way I manage it is to walk away from a conflict, but reassure the person that I am not walking away because I am angry at them. I just need to process meldown and burnout before I can discuss an issue calmly. That it’s better for me to process on my own so I don’t take out my anger on them.
The added bonus is that while we’re not interacting, they’re still seeing how I’m processing my emotions because I don’t lock them out. Anyone can read here, and I’m sure “anyone” does. 😉 (This applies to many, many people…. like Allison in Galveston, etc.). Whether someone else wants to work with me or not, they get closure if they want it. I’m doing it for myself, but that doesn’t mean they don’t benefit from it.
In fact, sometimes I’m so good at writing about things here that people don’t tell me things because they feel like they’ve already talked to me because I’ve written about them. In their minds, I’ve already “texted them.” It’s not a slam on their reputations because I don’t have much to talk about outside of what I publish to make conversations different.
People don’t have to ask me how I am because they already know. The difference is that I don’t have the same relationship with them because I’m isolated by nature of what I do. Sometimes I’m distant whether I want to be or not because it takes being completely off the grid for me to write. This is problematic when people think of my phone as a leash.
I don’t even carry it most of the time because I have an Apple Watch that will switch hit between Wifi and my cell plan. I turn off the notifications so I have it if I need to call out or if I fall, but my wrist isn’t constantly dinging or buzzing (if you have an Apple Watch, you know the hell of being trapped in a group text). I prefer buzzing to the sound, btw. The reason I don’t carry my phone is that I only need to be able to call and SMS because I use an Android tablet that does everything my phone would with more desktop real estate.
Neither an iPhone or an Apple Watch has a 3.5mm headphone jack, so I don’t get any benefit from better audio when the Bluetooth cards are basically identical. I just don’t have a use case for a phone anymore. The only reason I use my iPad is to watch Apple TV+. My iPad is more powerful in terms of hardware, more irritating in terms of software. If I could buy an iPad and install Android on it, I would. In fact, because I use both tablets as a laptop, adding a keyboard and sometimes a mouse, I could put the entire desktop version of Ubuntu and all its applications with hardware that good.
It’s not that I prefer desktop linux to Android. I can do anything on an Android that I could do on a linux box because it’s the same OS in terms of command line. But there are more applications written for desktop Ubuntu that haven’t been ported to a mobile app (damned inconvenient).
Android has been around for a long time, but really started competing with iOS when Samsung started releasing features that were years ahead of iPhones (and Apple always thinks their improvements are their ideas). I learned the most about Android when I was working for Marylhurst.
It was the storm before the TARDIS landed on my lawn, and the sweet relief of finding my own bedroom.
It’s all connected. The way I acted. Why. How I got to different locations and conclusions with multiple people who all had the same characteristics and wildly different in other ways, leading to me to believe there were no repeats, etc.
That’s why it is such a long essay over a $500 leather satchel (tablet case) I bought when I got the job. It was handmade in Ecuador. I don’t care if I paid too much, the quality makes in an heirloom. It needs conditioning now, and it needs to be worn in even still. But it is the most valuable personal item I have, because there’s way more than $500 worth of joy, laughter, and pain in it.
Even my autism turns up in a joke about it…. that my Satchel is a TARDIS in and of itself. The reason that it connects to my autism is that in bringing up “Satchel,” we have just made an appointment to talk about intelligence.
I wonder a lot about the future, which is why I was so glad I got to write out my thoughts about it. I’m not a scientific genius, but I do have enough smarts to predict what’s going to happen if we can’t live above ground, or the ground is ruined by radiation. Unlike Fallout 3, there is a brighter future underground, because we don’t have to live socially any different than we do now. It’s our physical limitations as humans that bind us to a huge problem, a lot of whom don’t see there being one and won’t do what’s necessary until their house explodes or there’s a food shortage because our farmland has been nuked.
A lot has been written about our dystopian futures, but it’s all fiction. We’ve never stopped to think about what would happen if we were faced with nuclear war or natural devastation. If the United States is attacked with a nuclear bomb, it would take the ground around it a hundred years to be fertile again. Nuclear treaties keep the world safe for a number of reasons, mostly because world leaders are not able to starve their own people or others if NATO is any threat at all. The immediacy of nuclear war would kill people right away. No one thinks about the fact that their grandchildren and great grandchildren may not get enough to eat because there’s not enough soil unaffected by radiation.
It’s not just bombs. Nuclear power is a wonderful thing right up until it’s not. Things go wrong at plants with the best laid plans. We can’t ignore these things, we have to find a way to successfully live around it. Leaders who wrestle with nuclear war are only thinking in the moment, and I cannot fathom what that discussion was like during WWII, particularly among the Japanese after they didn’t know what hit them.
By the same token, they’re responsible for their own radiation leaks with plants like Fukushima. That’s not to say that nuclear plants are bad and we should get rid of them. Just that for now the technology and chemistry is not capable of defeating human error.
People aren’t capable of acting as smart as they are under the best of circumstances, and the level of intelligence in the room goes down the more people are in it. Groupthink is a powerful drug, as evidenced by the former president’s lovely mugshot. We cannot defeat global warming with anti-vaxxers. It cannot be done if they can’t be convinced that science is real, vaccines are real, and global warming is not a hoax just to fuck with them.
Scientists are not saying that the globe is heating up and will get warmer consistently. They are saying that as the planet heats up, the swings in temperature, air currents, and water level will create chaos. We are not slowly getting warmer at a rate where everything happens concurrently. We are adjusting to a new reality…….. poorly.
The worst part is feeling the politics of all this. Other countries are so much more aware than we are, and so much money goes into making sure we’re as environmentally disastrous as we can possibly be for way longer than we can afford. The oil and gas industry own the United States and we cannot pretend it doesn’t. All climate change policy has to pass based on interest, and they buy out all the votes they want. If you want to grease the wheel, you will. who cares whether it’s legal or not?
We are not the only ones in the world that have a corrupt government, but we’re one of the countries that can do something about it because we aren’t beholden to a monarchy or a despot (anymore). We are also not the only country leaning toward the fascist right, which generally leads to deregulation of all sorts of things. We cannot afford to move backwards, and currently not enough of us are voting forwards. It’s not just the presidency. It’s the congress and local politicians down to the school board. The entire country is centered around who believes facts and who doesn’t. We found out who would justify civil war and who wouldn’t….. and what we found is “more than you might think.” Are we really going to wait until there’s a section of the military that’s on board with a coup? Because this is how you get a coup de etat. It’s not the difference between supporters and non-supporters of the orange gelatinous shitbag, it’s between the people who pick a side and who don’t. If we don’t vote out fascism, we’re going to get it.
I cannot live under that regime. No person of color or queer can. So far, we have no way in some states to advance representation to the smallest degree. The state of Arkansas just passed a ban that high school students cannot take African American history in high school to count for college credit because it might be some sort of indoctrination. “Heather Has Two Mommies” is not welcome in any Florida classroom. I would suggest, before people ban books about persons of color or minority sexual orientation/gender, that they go back to Emett Till. This covers both bases. People can still be killed for whistling at a woman for being black or same sex. Violence against lesbians is very real, although men are more likely to rape us than hit us.
Emett’s story encapsulates everything that’s wrong with our society, as well as what is right in terms of what his legacy has created. I just think it needs to create more by white people recognizing that this country is very much not what they think it is. That’s because all communication in telling the majority they’re wrong is being banned as well. Voting rights in Georgia come to mind.
Perhaps it would be easier to work together on future problems if we weren’t so busy actively trying to destroy each other. The environment is not just physical. Safety doesn’t always correspond to the physical structure you’re in. Sometimes, it’s a feeling. Safety in our society is falling by the wayside. Even the cops are in on it.
Those who study history are desperate for those who don’t to get a clue, but politicians have no idea how to get ahead in the system while also changing it. The government is not built for quick change, and I think that’s mostly good because too much change with this large a population would break most people trying to keep up. That being said, it’s time for more than what we’ve been getting. The planet is getting sicker and only one party cares. Other countries care so much more than we do that we’re an embarrassment.
That’s probably because we don’t have Eisenhower taxes coming in anymore. Government research is not being funded to the level it could be thanks to people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. Yes, Bill Gates has a foundation, but it’s not exclusively working on American infrastructure like the country would be able to if the same money came to us in the form of tax. We could spend more on climate change because we have money. But, of course, going to space on a vacation is much more important than funding grants for science and technology research.
We don’t even have government-funded health care, and even with our population we have the money to get it done…. we just won’t. Yet prescription drugs are lower in cost everywhere in the world because buying in bulk for the whole nation makes it where drug companies are only getting a set amount of money for them and not jacking up the price in different areas. There is a marked difference between drug prices even doing the research at home on your own. If you call three different pharmacies, you’re going to get three different answers…. except on over the counter meds. They seem to be about the same price no matter where you go because there’s only so much you can charge for paracetamol.
The question becomes which problem to work on first? It’s people. Nothing happens without buy-in, and we are lost to figure out how to create it.
Meanwhile, we make movies to highlight all the hypocrisy. The reason it’s not getting through is that people either think it doesn’t apply to them or the message is being written off as leftist propaganda.
We had a good thing going in the 50s in terms of the space race and figuring out how to adapt society to move forward. The thing that didn’t is the people. All the racism is still here. All the homophobia is still here. Everything that needs to be weeded out never left, it just went dormant.
You can fix the technology, but you can’t defeat stupid.
As the National Park Service says, “it’s hard to make containers to keep bears out. There is considerable overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest tourist.”
I think that’s a lesson from which we can all learn.
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 “write whatever you want” and I said “you never have to get me a present for anything ever again.” This is not that entry. We’ve decided to hold off for a little while because OTHER FACTORS AT PLAY. The point is that my next words were “but 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.” I go about my day thinking it’s 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 she’s such a badass that it kind of rattles me when she wants to spend time together because I am so insecure at times. You’d just have to know how powerful she is to even begin to understand why I feel that way. She eats Republicans for breakfast and doesn’t 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 Lindsay’s professional persona is intimidating, but the baby isn’t.
I don’t worry about the lobbyist, but I’m the last woman alive that changed her diapers every damn day. The baby’s needs will always wake me up. The baby’s 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 we’d 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 “my first marriage.” 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 wasn’t 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 don’t 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 he’d say:
Lucky day…. Gonna get an E today…. Like I say…. Wave to me…..
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, it’s me who needs the slap bracelet.
I can’t breathe when I think of how hard her job must be and how much stress she’s under…. 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. It’s maddening because we supposedly have separation of church and state, but Texas doesn’t believe in it so they just live around it.
As my friend Rev. Chuck Currie has pointed out, “Jesus said ‘let all the little children come unto me.’ He did not say ‘let all the little children come unto me….. except trans kids.’” My sister has to tell the Texas and federal government why trans kids need their medication. Their medication. She’s not fighting them on their wants and desires. She’s fighting conservatives for trans kids’ basic needs.
Meanwhile, Lindsay and I are both the preacher’s kid from “Saved.”
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. It’s 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 we’ve both loved Mandy Moore.
Ok, I’m going to take a second. We’ve got to talk about this. Mandy Moore didn’t win nearly enough awards for “This is Us.” 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 she’s playing different ages in the same episode. It’s 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 “slap bracelet.” 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 doesn’t drink a hell of a lot of it.
I’m not sure whether it’s 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.
It’s a riff on “how many SMU sorority sisters does it take to change a light bulb?” “Two. One to mix drinks and one to call daddy.” I’m betting that the capitalization of daddy varies by age.
Quitting Diet Coke is relentless, and part of it is the carbonation. It’s hard to give up fizzy water altogether when you’re 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 I’m addicted to drink mix. It doesn’t even have to have caffeine in it because I’ve found that the reason I needed so much of it is that I wasn’t sleeping. Now, I take medication for that because especially during hypomania, I won’t sleep for several nights in a row. That doesn’t 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 responded……………. Positively. When we met, she was going to be my stepdaughter. Her dad is out of the picture, but we’re still going strong. So, whether The War Daniel and I get married or not, I have a child adopted through the rainbow flag. I’m here for it, and it’s 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 hasn’t talked reconciliation. To me, that’s that. But you leave a relationship with an *adult.* Cora is now an adult, but the power dynamic is the same. I don’t talk to her about my feelings for Daniel and she wouldn’t know anything if I wasn’t a writer. I feel that it’s okay for her to read my thoughts, because they aren’t directed at her. In writing, I can make it more clear than I could in person that she’s not the monkey in the middle. Daniel doesn’t 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 “Will and Grace.” Jack’s cat was named “Chairman Meow” and I’m still not over it.
That’s because Cora is free to talk about her dad, but I do not have an opinion on him. I can’t. He is making his own choices, and I don’t have to like them. I just have to respect them. Also, whether it’s my own echo chamber telling me this or whether it’s 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 “won.”
You can’t 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 didn’t bother to get educated when Cora came out.
It’s not inexcusable to be uneducated. It’s 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 he’s a bad person. It’s that he’s a self centered alcoholic, but I repeat myself.
Self-centered alcoholic is almost tautology.
If someone is trying to tell you that you’re hurting them and you react as if it’s all about you, it’s 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.
That’s kind of the debate between cis and trans women…. That trans women tend to step all over cis women’s asses because they were socialized as men when they were young. This is the hashtag “not all trans women,” and yet it is not untrue, either. Their voices are loud because they’ve been told they deserve it. Cis women have been property for hundreds of years. Chaos ensues.
I would also say that cis women generally don’t stand up for themselves and trans women don’t realize there’s 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 don’t assume other men deserve shit and act as such. Cis women, not so much.
It’s especially the debate between cis lesbians and trans women, because they have even less political power. Trans women don’t always see cis women’s complaints as real. That they’re being misogynistic and their ire is invalid.
Cis women don’t give a rat’s ass most of the time. We only react to being ignored. I am of the mind that trans women are women. Period. I also don’t 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 men’s asses the way trans women do.
My only gripe is with trans women who think it’s all about them. They don’t 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 they’re 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 didn’t say stop bitching all the time. Just recognize that you’re 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 that’s feeding you.
I’m not sure I’ve earned the right to have an opinion here, but I’m 45 years old and people have been all over my ass since 1990. I couldn’t 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 wasn’t that long ago. The queer community as a whole is being thrown under the bus, and I realize that trans women’s plights are bad, but I don’t think they’re worse than they were for me 25 years ago. NONE of this is getting better.
I also don’t think there’s 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 they’ve passed the savings on to you. But don’t think it’s worse for you. You just aren’t looking at the problem from the same perspective, because you’re 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 doesn’t know, and asked her to have empathy. She took the note and made me cry so hard I couldn’t breathe.
When I said that my middle name bothered me she said, “I have a name I’m not using. Would you like to have it?”
And that’s 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’m tired of people saying they’re SO liberal on LGBTQIA issues and then saying things like (paraphrasing), I don’t think this woman should have mentioned her wife in class because it’s a conversation I would like to have privately with my children at home…. but I belong to a liberal open and affirming church so I can’t possibly be construed as a bigot. In 2018, why is homosexuality something that has to be explained privately as if children don’t have enough agency to understand basic family constructs on their own? They’ve probably had classmates with same-sex parents since they were in kindergarten. By the time the asshat father I paraphrased got to his kids, they were probably eye-rolling because OMG. Gay people. I have to be prepared to see them out in the world. It’s not as if when queer people move into your neighborhood that spaceships land and little burritos walk out. For the love of Christ, literally.
I’m tired of Assad and his chemical attacks and his bombing of the people he’s supposed to serve. I’m sure he doesn’t see it that way, but the best rulers lead from the back. I’m tired of wondering if our military, our diplomats, and our intel operatives and their friendlies are safe or fighting for their lives as equally hard as Syrian citizens. I’m tired of American attitudes that our people’s lives are worth more than theirs.
I’m tired of Donald Trump and his Twitter foreign and domestic policy, but I’ll bet I’m way less tired than the people trying to reign him in.
I’m tired of journalists, bloggers, and media influencers being put on a list, not knowing what the information is for, but know that nothing good can come of this. I’m tired that every single story President Trump reads is deemed fake, as if “The Fourth Estate” isn’t supposed to do their damn jobs. I’m exhausted thinking that both Helen Thomas and Molly Ivins are dead and there’s no one being as loud as they would be if they knew what was happening. I am happiest picturing Helen Thomas flipping the bird.
I am tired of black people dying for absolutely no reason, and the chutzpah cops have in shooting someone eight times in the back, because they know there’s no penalty. Not all cops are bad, but the ones that are aren’t being punished nearly enough.
I am tired of children having to ask for help with gun control and it being this huge debate, as if adults aren’t the ones in charge of keeping them safe. I am sure that for gun freedom advocates, it will take their own child being shot in math class to change those hearts and minds. It is not, however, something I would wish on them. No parent should ever have to bury a child. It is only an observation that it takes a truly earth-shattering realization to change someone vehemently entrenched in the position that all people should be able to own firearms in which the Founding Brothers never could have conceived.
I’m tired of angry rants on Facebook that come up in my feed whether I’m looking for negativity or not…. that even discourse that starts off as civil ends up being monstrous. I will engage in politics, but at the first sign of an ad hominem attack, I’m out. This is both because I don’t need that temperature in my life, and second because when I play “Let’s Be an Asshole,” I am in it to win it. I am just not interested in seeing that version of myself, because it’s egocentric and therefore, absolutely toxic. There is no exhaustion worse than being tired of listening to yourself.
I am tired of having to be this version of me, the one that has to stand up for all the little people, because the majority doesn’t understand that they don’t get to dictate to the minority what hurts and what doesn’t.
I am tired of thinking that it will be this way my entire life, because society won’t progress far enough to accept everyone by the time I die…. but, I hope so.
2045: Martians are so eloquent…… I want to touch their skin just to see what it feels like….
I wish we could all step back and take a breath, but it seems as if when we do, it’s not a matter of learning to listen to each other, but thinking about what we’re going to say next. I am certainly not immune to this…. but in a lot of ways, I can’t breathe under the best of circumstances. One of my tribe was just fired for simply showing a photograph of her family. It’s just not possible for me to contain rage over it, although I try to put a smile on my face even when I want to scream, as I often do when I wake up to news that transgendered people have been shot, most of them to death.
And some of the time, it’s by people who claim they live and let live.
I’m tired of the marijuana debate, and not because I’m all excited about smoking it. I don’t. I’m tired of violence at the border and inequality in sentencing when minorities get caught smoking and/or selling. White boys will be boys, but scary black men are going to prison for life.
I’m tired of the immigration debate, the back and forth between enjoying cheap tomatoes and the gate should have closed after I came in. You don’t want to give minimum wage and health care benefits to full-time farm workers, but you don’t want to welcome people that will do the job for peanuts, either…. surprised that after immigrants have been deported that fruits and vegetables are withering on the vine.
I’m tired of people still harping on Hillary Clinton as if she’s been elected to anything or even has a public life anymore. I mean, she’ll always be well-known, but she’s not influencing public policy. She doesn’t even have an advice column. Have a Coke™ and a smile and shut it.
I’m tired of people going bankrupt over medical bills, especially when they’re shot or otherwise injured through no fault of their own. I am sure there are people who were gunned down at the Pulse night club (and lots of schools) who now have to pay for the “privilege.” We are one of the richest nations in the world, yet most of us tied to jobs with golden handcuffs as not to lose insurance. Other countries have so much more freedom than we do because their people are allowed to move freely and take any job they want because insurance is not dictated privately or state-by-state.
Most of all, I’m tired that we claim all people are created equally, but some are just a little more equal than others.
possibly be construed as a bigot. In 2018, why is homosexuality something that has to be explained privately as if children don’t have enough agency to understand basic family constructs on their own? They’ve probably had classmates with same-sex parents since they were in kindergarten. By the time the asshat father I paraphrased got to his kids, they were probably eye-rolling because OMG. Gay people. I have to be prepared to see them out in the world. It’s not as if when queer people move into your neighborhood that spaceships land and little burritos walk out. For the love of Christ, literally.
Stories That Are All True 