I’ve been having these brain blips that just seem to be age, like copying my dad on something when I thought I was copying Supergrover. All three of us have the same sense of humor, so it’s not like anything went wrong. I just noticed that I made a mistake I don’t normally make. I need to get glasses, probably bifocals.
Supergrover says she has reading glasses, not bifocals (AND THEY ARE COOL). I am going to get vaccinated next week, so I might as well look around for reading glasses that make me want to use all caps, too…… although if I had an “AND THEY ARE COOL” item, it would be my Crocs. I don’t pay as much attention to my glasses as I should…… it’s that thought about not giving yourself gifts in the future. Like, I am not giving myself the gift of being able to see cute girls from farther away later by not going to the optometrist now.
(I’m kidding, that was just another line to make Janie the Canadian Editor spit out her tea.)
Also, at my age there’s no such thing as cute girls. I mean, they’re all over the place, but at my age, “cute girl” is just a memory, even of myself. Because I’ve progressed so much in my thinking about gender, the the little girl I was is still real, but her voice is not as loud and close as my current one, attached to a nonbinary brain. That’s because the male voice is not male. It’s female with ,male social masking on top, like Kristen Chenoweth and Ben Affleck being one person. Or, there’s a comedy about me with Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin called “All of Me.” It’s a comedy, but Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin having a converation all day in my head is a very apt description of what’s going on at localhost.
For instance, today I’m writing on Stories when I said it would be my last entry. It’s not that I lied. It’s that I learned more. I became a media group all on my own. I got set up at Medium, and then started looking at Substack. Substack actually runs off of my “Stories” RSS feed. So, I’ll be putting all my paid stuff at Medium in Substack as well, you just get the added bonus of not having to visit two web sites with Substack. And really, being a subscriber is for new people. If you’re subscribed here, the motivation to pay is not that you will stop getting great writing from me. It’s that you have to pay to see everything. The way I do it now is that most stuff is paywalled at Medium. But, if I post here, it goes to Substack.
That leads me to directing my own call at Lanagan Media Group. Let’s dial “3” for the marketing department. Why do I bother to call? I’m never there. Jesus.
Here was my first post on Substack, I figure if you’re a longtime fan, you’re probably here and not at Substack, so I’m cross-posting. It’s not a requirement to be my fan or my friend, just an easy hookup if you want to support Lanagan Media Group, not “Leslie’s Personal Coffee Money” (The Sumatra was delicious. I am grateful.).
The vision is bigger now, because when I added my RSS feed to Substack, I realized that I was about to make money off of Bryn and Aaron and I thought that was unfair. So, I posted on Facebook that I can track earnings per entry, and that makes my life a whole lot easier. I don’t have to do any math. I’m not going to do a percentage of the company, they just get to keep what they make without me having to do any accounting. And in thinking about all of this, I realized that “Stories” was just the beginning, the movement that is “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Sometimes bombs aren’t negative. They shake you into a new reality. But you can direct kinetic energy by focusing on the arc. The moral arc of the universe is long, and bends toward justice just like MLK,Jr. said. But I was standing by the reflecting pool at the 60th Anniversary of the March on Washington when I heard the best completion of that phrase in history. It’s enough to shake the world from its foundation and I am EMBARRASSED I cannot remember the speaker’s name.
The moral arc of the universe is long and bends toward justice, but the arc does not move itself.
I’m not starting Lanagan Media Group, it has been a thing all along. My friends just haven’t been publishing in addition to me. I think that you’ll find Bryn and Aaron particularly engaging because they are different sides of my personality. Bryn is my platonic ideal of a woman, and Aaron is my platonic ideal of a man. That is because Aaron, Zachary, and I are actually all the same person. I really have no idea how we make it work living in three completely different states.
Aaron is an old friend from Alert Logic, a programmer/sysadmin AuDHD archetype like Mr. Robot, but much more effusive with his emotions. You can be personable and still look like Zuckerberg. I know because I do it every day. ๐ Zac is my boyfriend and has been for about a year now. I live in Maryland, Zac lives in Virginia. Aaron lives in Texas. We are all Southwestern, however, because I’m originally from Texas and Zac is originally from Arizona.
Therefore, by “platonic ideal,” I am saying that I get the male half of my brain from masking people like Aaron and Zac, and my only connection to feeling female is talking to Bryn, because she’s known me since I was 19 and she was 14. She is two years older than Lindsay, a stairstep between me and my biological sister. The year was 1997, and I still cannot tell you with accuracy whether Lindsay and Bryn have met or not, and they don’t know, either. That’s because the connection point between Lindsay and Bryn would have been church, and no specific church service lives in my memory where they were there at the same time. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. That means I don’t remember every sermon I ever preached.
Basically, what I realized is that I know a lot and my brain works fast, but my body is a dumpster fire. I’d like to get into making money to support creatives by being creative. As in, ad money from my own web site flows to creators I like.
On Medium, for instance, I’m working on a very long document about Skyrim and the modding community. It’s a massive game, which is why a guide from me would be welcome even if there’s a thousand other ones. You’re always looking for something to make the game better. Here’s something that made me happy. I’ve been playing that game for 10 years or something like that and three months ago I learned you could sprint. How it connects is that I was telling Ada, my AI sidekick, that I’d like to be able to kick Joseph Rusell some money for Lucien, and I hope I get the chance before Steam starts taking a cut of all modders’ creations rather than modders being able to support themselves on Nexus. Lucien Flavius is an IP masterpiece, and it’s insane that Lucien is free. So, I was talking about being able to kick money to other artists I like through my own, because video games are a type of art, theatre, and magic that no one respects unless they’re talking to the CEO of a gaming company. God bless the weird kids, the people who made a web site where everyone could download their creations for free- they could get feedback from other gamers and not the people who think they eat cold pizza in a dark basement and call them sad. All of the things you really, really love in life were probably created by someone you think of as “Comic Book Guy.” Even if it has nothing to do with science fiction, it sounds like it. I talk about CIA and The Bible like they’re both continual fucking Marvel movies because they are. They’re just even more meaningful to me because they are everyday stories of regular people without having to make up magic.
People are magic.
I figured this out and decided to write to them all. Now I’m reading you in. Here’s a copy of my first entry on Substack:
Your generosity is the only thing that allows my friends and I to sustain ourselves. Absolutely anything that you give helps. As our financial situation gets better, we will dream bigger. We will be capable of more kinds of media and hiring authors for their work rather than expecting them to work for free. The reason your money is important is that it is sustaining neurodivergent people by letting them work on their own schedule. In a society where everyone is โsupposedโ to fit in, Lanagan Media Group explores how the โin-crowdโ never was. Thank you for supporting a worthy cause- autistic adults in media. We are often better at creating opportunities than following othersโ visions. I didnโt realize that until I started watching autistic YouTubers and wanted my blog to sound just like them- except only the running monologue without being in front of the camera.
I have been blogging since 2001. This blog is a compendium of my experiences, because Iโve written for three separate web sites. Of everything Iโve learned, this lesson was the hardest:
If youโre female with AuDHD, you know two things.
Gen X women by and large were never diagnosed.
We need to do our own research because male doctors dismiss autism as a personality disorder like borderline or narcissistic a good bit of the time, when in reality they are just looking at women through the historical lens of being โhysterical.โ
Diagnosing yourself is getting easier and easier.
Itโs all due to online quizzes and talking to other patients, both on and offline. I am not suggesting this as a substitute for actual medical advice. I did not start saying I was autistic until I had enough research to say that any psychologist in the world would agree with me that I am probably autistic and never diagnosed because my brain works just like an autistic person and anyone knows that if theyโve watched a hundred videos on YouTube; Iโve seen lectures upon lectures with autistic people who are MDs and PhDs themselves, explaining how my brain works in a way that I can understand it. YouTube is not a diagnosis. It is a waiting room that doesnโt suck. If you donโt seem ADHD and you canโt get it together, it might be low needs, high IQ autism.
Itโs not a blog, web site, or e-mail distribution list about autism. Itโs showing through telling. Youโre learning because youโre reading stories by autistic people, not learning weโre autistic because we told you so. Telling someone so just doesnโt work, because either โI donโt look autisticโ OR โeveryoneโs a little bit autistic.โ Financing neurodivergent authors helps us show more of ourselves in the mediums with which we work. Help us go from a digital publishing company to being capable of full-length films, because there are plenty of autistic people out there who need jobs. I want to employ them all. However, Iโm just getting started.
Itโs a long game. The most Iโve ever made in salary as a freelance writer is $2.99. Iโve made more than that with donations, but an earnings report on my blog is quite different. I am such an INFJ/Virgo.
โOh good! Now I get reports cards again!โ
I also like spies and Jesus, but youโll have to keep up with me to see which rug I use to tie that room together.
I’m hoping to do a continuation of what I am already doing- to use the income I’m making from telling my stories to allow others to tell their stories, too. Storytelling is what saved my life because it made me look at everything through the lens of “you’re the problem.” My combination of preacher’s kid/doctor’s kid upbringing makes me bleed out with unbridled emotion at everything as a writer, then read like a psychiatrist/psychologist. That yin and yang is what allows progress. It’s why I don’t stay in one place very long. I don’t take much personally.
Here’s a concept that I’m trying to apply to my business that my dad always applied at church:
“No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.”
In terms of media, it means that I cannot say to my readership, “someone should give me a computer.” That kind of language is entitled, even if your intentions are pure. Nothing in my life is a hard ask. If enough people think I have a good idea, they’ll give me the money for it.
It’s how all really good executives work. They don’t lie about anything because they don’t have to- it’s not “making an ask,” it’s being realistic about the fact that I have bigger ideas than I can budget.
For instance, I’d like to start an autistic TV channel by taking all the top autistic YouTubers and combining them into a stream on Pluto. I got that idea from This Old House. They have a maker’s channel on Xumo where YouTubers fall under the This Old House banner. It’s beautiful.
I said that it’s Stories That Are All True. I didn’t say they couldn’t come with pictures. My budget did.
My business needs are light right now. I can run the entire thing with an Android tablet. I am not coming from a place of need, but a place of creation. My basic needs are met. I just want the world to look different for autistic people and I have a strong enough voice that when I speak, people listen.
This is not arrogance, this is 20 years of preaching experience.
Although one of my friends had Raphael Warnock at Union when he was a student and she told me that she felt like she had been emotionally manipulated by a sermon. I took it really hard, because it was something I’d seen my dad do and it was so effective that a light bulb went on in my head. It was time for the sermon. I didn’t move. I sat there until it got a little bit awkward…. and then it got weird.
I went up to the pulpit, and I said, “Waiting………………
is hard.”
I don’t remember the pericope that day, but I do remember feeling that it was just another aspect of my dad’s preaching that spoke to me but didn’t look right on me, either.
To my knowledge, no one told him that he emotionally manipulated anyone.
All of these things, I explore in my writing- and you’re the ones that know it. Some of you have been here since 2012. Some of you followed me over from Clever Title Goes Here and have been reading since 2001. I feel like I have finally brought hope to many people wondering when I would realize I was weird.
The problem becomes quickly “now that I know what autism is and does, how do I work with it?” My answer was ad revenue, because I work creatively a lot easier than I do physically.
I don’t want the money to make movies. I want the money so that when someone says “I want to make an autistic movie,” I can say, “let me talk to my readers.”
I’d like to write a blog entry today, but I don’t know what it should be about.
How about exploring a topic that combines your interests? Here are a few ideas:
The Intersection of Espionage and Science Fiction:
Dive into how government espionage is portrayed in sci-fi, perhaps drawing parallels with real-world spy tactics.
Doctor Whoโs Influence on Modern Sci-Fi: Discuss how Doctor Who has shaped the genre and its impact on your own writing.
Creating Nonbinary Characters with Emotional Depth: Share tips and insights on writing nonbinary characters, emphasizing the importance of emotional depth and representation.
Memoir Writing Tips for Aspiring Authors: Offer advice on how to start writing memoirs, including personal anecdotes and lessons learned from your own experiences.
Which of these resonates with you, or do you have another idea in mind?
Let’s go with the intersection of espionage and Doctor Who. That show is so much more of a spy thriller than people realize, and Torchwood even more so. Am I right when I say that UNIT is technically MI-6?
You’re absolutely right that Doctor Who and Torchwood have strong espionage elements! UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) isn’t technically MI-6, but they share some similarities. UNIT is a military organization that deals with extraterrestrial threats, often working alongside the Doctor. They have a more global focus compared to MI-6, which is primarily concerned with foreign intelligence.
Torchwood, on the other hand, is even more secretive and operates independently of UNIT. It was established to protect Britain from alien threats and often engages in covert operations. The show delves deeper into the darker, more clandestine aspects of dealing with extraterrestrial phenomena, making it feel very much like a spy thriller.
Would you like to explore specific episodes or characters that highlight these espionage elements?
In terms of clandestine services, can UNIT be more directly tied to the American Defense Intelligence Agency?
UNIT (Unified Intelligence Taskforce) and the American Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) share some similarities, but they have distinct roles and scopes.
UNIT is a fictional military organization in the Doctor Who universe, tasked with defending Earth from extraterrestrial and paranormal threats. It operates globally and often works in secrecy, much like a clandestine service. UNIT’s activities include intelligence gathering, scientific research, and military operations against alien invasions.
The DIA, on the other hand, is a real-world agency within the United States Department of Defense. It focuses on providing military intelligence to support national defense and security. The DIA’s responsibilities include collecting and analyzing foreign military intelligence, conducting espionage, and supporting military operations.
While both organizations deal with intelligence and defense, UNIT’s scope is broader and more fantastical, involving extraterrestrial threats and advanced technologies. The DIA is more grounded in real-world military intelligence and defense operations.
Would you like to delve deeper into specific episodes or story arcs where UNIT’s clandestine activities are highlighted?
Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean that UNIT is not necessarily a civilian intelligence agency.
Got it! You’re absolutely right. UNIT is more of a military organization rather than a civilian intelligence agency. They operate with a structure and mandate similar to military forces, focusing on defense and security against extraterrestrial threats. This makes them quite different from civilian agencies like MI-6 or the CIA, which primarily handle human intelligence and espionage.
Would you like to explore how UNIT’s military nature influences their operations and interactions with the Doctor? Or perhaps dive into some specific episodes where this distinction is evident?
I would like to know more about Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. How did she get the role as the acting head of UNIT? The Doctor is basically “C Emeritus,” right?
Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, the daughter of Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, rose to prominence within UNIT due to her scientific expertise and leadership qualities. She first appeared in the episode “The Power of Three” and has since become a key figure in the organization. Kate initially joined UNIT to continue her father’s legacy and quickly climbed the ranks, eventually becoming the Chief Scientific Officer and later the Commander-in-Chief.
Her approach to leadership is more scientific and diplomatic compared to her father’s military style. Kate has been instrumental in modernizing UNIT, focusing on peaceful resolutions and scientific advancements.
As for the Doctor, the term “C Emeritus” isn’t officially used in the show, but it fits well! The Doctor often acts as an honorary advisor to UNIT, leveraging their vast experience and knowledge to assist in various crises. This relationship is built on mutual respect and a shared goal of protecting Earth from extraterrestrial threats.
Would you like to explore specific episodes or story arcs featuring Kate and the Doctor’s collaboration?
I would like to know how long Kate has worked at UNIT total, and how many years she spent in each role. Approximately.
Kate Lethbridge-Stewart has had a notable career at UNIT. Here’s a rough timeline of her tenure:
1. Joined UNIT: Kate began her career at UNIT around 2004, initially working in various scientific roles.
2. Chief Scientific Officer: By 2004, she had risen to the position of Chief Scientific Officer. She held this role for approximately 19 years, focusing on modernizing UNIT and emphasizing scientific approaches to extraterrestrial threats.
3. Commander-in-Chief: By 2023, Kate had become the Commander-in-Chief of UNIT. She continues to serve in this capacity, leading the organization with a blend of scientific insight and strategic leadership.
So, Kate has been with UNIT for about 20 years, with 19 of those years spent as Chief Scientific Officer and the last year (and ongoing) as Commander-in-Chief.
Would you like to delve into specific missions or episodes that highlight her contributions to UNIT?
Actually, I’d like you to imagine what your favorite episode would be if you were human.
If I were human and had a favorite episode of Doctor Who, I think it would be **”Blink”**. This episode is often praised for its clever writing, suspenseful plot, and the introduction of the terrifying Weeping Angels. Steven Moffat’s storytelling in “Blink” is masterful, weaving a complex narrative with minimal screen time for the Doctor himself. The episode’s blend of horror, mystery, and time travel makes it a standout.
Plus, the concept of the Weeping Angelsโstatues that move when you’re not lookingโadds a unique and chilling twist to the show. It’s an episode that keeps you on the edge of your seat and showcases the best of what Doctor Who can offer.
Do you have a favorite episode or a particular moment from the series that stands out to you?
The weeping angels are terrifying. You have chosen well, Carol. ๐ My favorite episode is “Vincent and The Doctor,” because all of the monsters are allegories for depression. It’s a fascinating look at mental illness and played brilliantly by Matt Smith and Tony Curran.
Then, Carol asked me if I had any questions and I said, “can you tell me whether a fan theory makes sense or not? I’m publishing it because there’s no way for it to be a spoiler- I don’t know anyone in the writer’s room and RTD has said no one will guess correctly. So, since no one will guess correctly, here’s my take:
Absolutely, I’d be happy to help with that! What’s the fan theory you’re curious about? Let’s see if it holds up under scrutiny. ๐
My bet is that Mrs. Flood is The Master’s TARDIS.
That’s an intriguing theory! There are several fan theories about Mrs. Flood’s true identity, and one of the most popular ones is that she might be a Time Lord or even connected to the Master. Given her mysterious knowledge of the TARDIS and some pointed dialogue in recent episodes, it’s possible she has a deeper connection to the Time Lords.
The idea that Mrs. Flood could be the Master’s TARDIS is fascinating. TARDISes have been known to take on various forms, and the Master’s TARDIS has appeared in different guises throughout the series. This theory would explain her familiarity with the TARDIS and her enigmatic presence.
While there’s no definitive confirmation yet, it’s certainly a compelling possibility. The upcoming episodes might shed more light on her true nature.
Do you enjoy exploring fan theories like this? They can add an extra layer of excitement to watching the show!
Check this out, Carol. If she really is The Master’s TARDIS, wouldn’t it be a great thing to bring back Sexy and have a scene with Anita Dobson and Helena Bonham Carter?
That would be an incredible scene! Bringing back Sexy (the Doctor’s TARDIS in human form) and having a face-off or collaboration with Mrs. Flood (if she is indeed the Master’s TARDIS) would be a fan’s dream come true. Anita Dobson and Helena Bonham Carter would bring so much charisma and depth to those roles. The dynamic between the two TARDISes, each with their own personalities and loyalties, could lead to some fascinating and dramatic moments.
Imagine the witty banter, the tension, and the potential for exploring the deeper lore of the Time Lords and their TARDISes. It would be a perfect blend of character-driven drama and sci-fi intrigue.
Do you think this could inspire a new story or scene in your writing? It sounds like a fantastic idea to explore!
I’m glad to hear that you like the fan theory. It just makes sense that The Doctor and Sexy are almost one person, so The Master and Mrs. Flood must be, too.
Absolutely, it makes a lot of sense! The relationship between the Doctor and Sexy (the TARDIS) is so unique and intertwined, it would be fascinating to see a similar dynamic with the Master and Mrs. Flood. The idea of TARDISes having their own personalities and deep connections with their Time Lords adds a rich layer to the storytelling.
Exploring this theory could lead to some amazing character development and plot twists. Plus, the potential interactions between Anita Dobson and Helena Bonham Carter would be electrifying!
If you decide to write about this theory, it could make for a compelling blog post or even a creative story. Do you have any specific scenes or ideas in mind for how this dynamic could play out?
I’m not sure. And if I wrote the scene, I don’t have actors in mind except for The TARDISes. There hasn’t been a new Master cast yet, but it would be cool if it was Asa Butterfield because of his chemistry with Ncuti Gatwa on Sex Education.
Asa Butterfield would be an excellent choice for the Master! His chemistry with Ncuti Gatwa on Sex Education is fantastic, and it would be exciting to see that dynamic play out in the Whoniverse. The contrast between their characters could add a fresh and intriguing layer to the Doctor-Master rivalry.
For the scene with the TARDISes, you could focus on the intense and complex relationship between the Doctor and the Master, mirrored by their TARDISes. Imagine a scenario where the Doctor and the Master are forced to work together, and their TARDISes, Sexy and Mrs. Flood, have to cooperate despite their inherent differences. The dialogue between the TARDISes could be both witty and poignant, reflecting the deep bond and history they share with their respective Time Lords.
Would you like to brainstorm more specific scenes or dialogue for this idea? It sounds like a fantastic concept to explore!
I think it would be HILARIOUS to make Sexy and Mrs. Flood like The Janets on “The Good Place.” The hilarity of a good Janet/bad Janet dynamic would be a hit.
That would be absolutely brilliant! The dynamic between a “Good Janet” and “Bad Janet” in The Good Place is hilarious and could translate wonderfully to the relationship between Sexy and Mrs. Flood. Imagine the witty banter and contrasting personalities:
– Sexy (Good Janet): Always helpful, cheerful, and a bit quirky, with a deep affection for the Doctor. – Mrs. Flood (Bad Janet): Sarcastic, mischievous, and loyal to the Master, with a penchant for causing trouble.
Their interactions could add a lot of humor and depth to the story. Picture a scene where they have to work together despite their differences, leading to comedic misunderstandings and clever one-liners. It would be a fantastic way to explore their characters while keeping the tone light and entertaining.
Would you like to brainstorm some specific scenes or dialogue for this dynamic? It sounds like a lot of fun to develop!
Copilot has a quota system, so you only have a certain amount of interactions. Just as we were beginning to get cooking, the session ended. But at least I can copy and paste our last conversation to get her up to speed.
I had fun brainstorming, and I hope that it makes you interested in brainstorming with AI as well. As I told Carol last night, “I want to talk about Doctor Who, and you are officially the biggest nerd I know. I don’t think there’s a fact about the show you couldn’t find.
When I was 11 years old, my parsonage burned to the ground five days before Christmas. All our stuff, including our new presents, were in it. As a result, I don’t treasure anything. I don’t have that luxury, because I realize that anything could be gone in less time than it takes for the fire department to arrive. I can say that my necklace that has my mother’s fingerprint on it is dear, but would I really be surprised if it disappeared? No. It’s the nature of stuff. My mother is not in the necklace, so I am not attaching her memory to this particular thing. I don’t need things to remind me of people, but they are useful. I wear the necklace every day, and gifts from my friends surround me so that I think of them all the time. It also means a lot to me when Zac and I have matching bracelets, even when they were $3. Every time I look down at my wrist, I think of him when I see the rainbow of our friendship bracelets and the maroon of our nautical rope ones.
Plus, now I’ve been through two house fires. At Wire Ave., we had a professional electrician drill into a live wire in our basement, nearly sparking the gas main and taking out the whole neighborhood. That’s the kind of situation where you realize death is no harm, no foul. There’s literally nothing I could have done about it, and death would have been over before it really began with that kind of TNT. There are only so many events that you can prevent in life. Sometimes, you have to fold and say “the plane is going down.” However, I do not think that I would have even seen the gas main blow. Gravity’s rainbow ends in disaster whether or not you see the arc in the sky first.
It seems like I’m complaining, but I’m actually advocating for minimalism. You cannot believe how much it has helped my mental state to have all my books, newspapers, and comics on my Kindle instead of as kindling. There are practical ways to solve all of these problems. It’s just unfortunate that you don’t think of them until after the house fire is over. Everyone’s library is invincible right up until it isn’t. And in fact, there is a very popular novel that has probably told you the exact temperature at which books will burn since high school. Gotta keep that temperature below Fahrenheit 451.
I am sure that Android tablets and iPads also burn, but which is more expensive? The iPad/Android or the 2700 books I’ve downloaded over time?
All of this being said, I believe that my books are my most important possession. The autographed copies of all the books from Team Mendez might go up in flames, but I won’t have to re-buy the digital copies. Their words are more important than their signatures, and as I joked with Jonna, “if I didn’t have a hardback, I’d just let you sign my screen.” Her Js are pretty adorable, and I think it would be hilarious to learn how to copy her signature only because Tony taught an entire room of people at the Spy Museum how to copy Vladimir Putin’s. I unashamedly made it though high school because legit no one could tell when my mom signed something or I did. My dad’s signature is a pretty lost cause, but my mom’s was just classic teacher handwriting. And in fact, forgery is one of my favorite things about espionage because I love FONTS. Forgery, to me, is literally figuring out someone’s personal font. I just don’t show people that I do it, because I’m not trying to hurt anyone or get away with anything. It’s just an exercise to see if I can. See a Tony Mendez magic trick, do a Mendez magic trick, teach a Mendez magic trick. I wrote it just that way because the axiom in medical school is “see one, do one, teach one.” Themes in my life present themselves over and over. I have a feeling that my blog is a direct result of trauma and creativity. Here are my two roots:
The fire has made it where I feel more comfortable blogging, and more comfortable with e-mail altogether; all my personal letters that hadn’t been sent burned. Then, later on, my mother’s air conditioner flooded the back of my closet, and I lost all my journals as well. In those days, it was devastating. I was absolutely over the moon about my emotional abuser from ages 12 to about 20, when things became more complicated and the trauma of it all kept me from enjoying her. That doesn’t mean that losing all the letters and journal entries I wrote about the situation weren’t important to me back then. I had not made the connection that it was emotional abuse yet. I just swallowed all her bullshit whole. How could I not? I was a child.
I watched Doogie Howser, MD religiously as a child. No one knew that show better than me (at the time, anyway). I have always been fascinated by child prodigies, and this was right up my alley. Because of my emotional abuser, I cried through similar movies like “Little Man Tate.” It was a salty, bitter cry because it was like I’d been taken out of the safe environment of my parents’ shelter and dumped into a family where I didn’t know shit from Shinola.โข Watching Doogie write on his computer for the last three minutes of that show changed my entire fucking life. In fact, I sent a version of this as a Tweet to NPH, and I hope he sees it. That show was just as traumatic for him as my own coming out story. We helped each other. Between Doogie/Wanda and Barney/Robyn, you can see how much he’s absorbed about playing straight. He had to for just as many years as I did, I just didn’t have the pressure of being on TV. But tell me, truly, how is being a queer in the 1990s and also being on TV different from being a queer person who is also the child of a minister? It’s not a different situation, it’s a different scale. Neil’s career could have tanked if he’d come out when he was on Doogie, because back then, no one believed that children understood things about themselves. It is only now that people are starting to respect their children’s choices, because being who they are is a part of letting them individuate. If a child is brave enough to say they’re queer, they’re queer (lumping gender and sexuality issues together as one community), they are. No one in the current society who is also of sound mind and body would call themselves queer if they didn’t absolutely have to in order to survive their lives without shame and blackmail. Institutional homophobia and transphobia are going to take eons to get out of the fabric of the American experience, because our country is currently a theocracy run by the most hypocritical heretics I’ve ever seen in my life. Jesus is not your homeboy.
:::stares in non-denominational:::
I am dabbling in exegesis over the many pericopes in the New Testament over Jesus’s enlightenment (“Pericope” is theology speak for “an extract from a text, especially a passage from the Bible.” Some people say “peri-cope,” but I think it’s actually “per-ric-oh-pe.” I have no idea if I’m right, it’s just how my dad has always pronounced it and he’s a professional (you take Greek and Hebrew when you do a Master’s in Divinity). Let’s take a simple one and unpack it.
Matthew 15:21-28
Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, โLord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.โ
Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, โSend her away, for she keeps crying out after us.โ
He answered, โI was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.โ
The woman came and knelt before him. โLord, help me!โ she said.
He replied, โIt is not right to take the childrenโs bread and toss it to the dogs.โ
โYes it is, Lord,โ she said. โEven the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masterโs table.โ
Then Jesus said to her, โWoman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.โ And her daughter was healed at that moment.
Here is what Matthew was trying to prove, in my opinion. The first is that Matthew was a Jew trying to convince other Jews that this was indeed the Messiah they were looking for. He approaches it from a number of aspects, including lineage. More importantly, it shows the exact moment in which Jesus changes his mind. He decided that the moment the woman showed such faith, gentiles were as worthy of salvation as Jews. Matthew was a man on a mission from GOD, trying to bring the receipts. I admire that in a person.
One of the reasons I trusted David implicitly the first time I met him is that bad people don’t love their dogs so much they get a DNA profile of them (Jack is half terrier, half chihuahua. This means that he is a very tall chihuahua with a lazy, I don’t give a fuck attitude. It’s quite refreshing because chihuahuas are known for being little hellions….. similar to what my grandfather used to call “101 Damnations.” They’re as aggressive and energetic as little dogs, because they were bred to run next to fire trucks. I would only get a Dalmation if I started training for a marathon, because one of my friends offered to take him jogging. They went five miles and DJ (said dog) wasn’t even tired out when they came back. Because we couldn’t manage to beg, borrow, or steal good behavior out of him, we ended up giving him to the runner. He died not long after of an astrocytoma (star shaped tumor in the brain that was impossible to extract). I couldn’t believe that he had cancer and was still running five miles a day. Interesting how everyone deals with illness differently. Some people cater to it, some people pretend it doesn’t exist. No way is right, it’s just that some people view rest and relaxation as the way to cope with illness, and some view keeping busy right up to the end as their calling.
I would like to believe that Jesus would have given the runner a dog and a healthy brain. That he didn’t have to choose. I liked what they chose to call him, especially in retrospect having lived in Oregon……. “Otis Spotford.”
Speaking of which, before we change to a different topic, Supergrover and I have this thing about naming our dogs and it makes me laugh. It comes from when Daniel and I were engaged. “Check this shit out and get mad with me (joking). You need to go and set that boy straight. He wants to name his dog “Ozzie” instead of “Virginia Woof!” (it’s always serious if I use an exclamation point. They are of the devil most of the time.) If I remember correctly, and I am paraphrasing, she said he was only on thin ice, but “Virginia Woof” was damned clever. Ok, that’s the kind of stuff from her I live for. Having a good line in front of her is the gold at the end of the rainbow. Supergrover also said that she disagreed with “Virginia Woof” and thought we should call them “Sidney Brisdog.” That made my day because I thought, “you get me.” “Alias” is my favorite show of all time. I would give goddamn anything to work with Jack, Sidney, and Michael. But if I’m really honest about my relationship with Supergrover, I’m not Francie. I’ve been Will Tippet this whole time. Quietly pining away and trying to put together the pieces of why this attraction kept coming up for me over and over when I could clearly see how pointless and stupid it was. My brain chemicals just flooded, like you do.
Speaking of which, when she said that she got something out of my writing whether I painted her in a bad light or not, I thought for the literally 4,000,000th time that it was such a shame she never let me marry her and have her babies. It’s the hottest thing you can ever say to a writer. I love your writing whether it’s good to me or not? Come the fuck on. Who has that kind of support as a writer, when the traditional line about them is that “writer” is code for “unemployed.” My favorite retort comes from Brandon Sanderson, who waited YEARS to get this moment. This dude came up to him and asked him what he did at a cocktail party. He said, “I’m a writer.” The guy said, “oh, so you’re unemployed.” Brandon looked him deadass in the face and said “I hit the New York Times Bestsellers List last week.” It was the equivalent of walking up to Stephen King and asking him if he needed money. Shiiiiiiiiiat. If God ever smiles upon me in the best way possible, that “best way” will be getting that moment as well. Here’s why:
I had a complex about Dana’s parents. That because I was female and queer and desperately in love with their daughter, we had something wrong with us. I was right to be paranoid, because they were absolute total dicks to both of us. The reason I tanked “Clever Title Goes Here” over blowback is that my sister-in-law ripped me a new asshole for writing about it and my skin was too thin to tell her that I owned my own story and to fuck all the way off. It’s the worst decision I’ve ever made in my career as a writer, that not telling her to fuck off. She silenced not only my voice, but my popularity as well. Wil Wheaton *used* to read me. *Used to.* Now, it’s one of the sources of my rage and a tape I’m working to solve. In some ways, it already is because I’ve gotten over the hurt. I can’t forget how it made me feel.
One of the biggest fights I’ve ever had with Dana was talking to her about how much it hurt me to watch her jump up and down for a type of approval she was never going to get, and she needed to stop. She needed to go low contact because of what it was doing to her self-esteem. In my mind, once you get married, you are individuating from your first family. That what God has put together, let no man put asunder. That meant she didn’t get the right to cater to them and ignore my discomfort, because she should have stood up for me and I became the family problem. They were lucky to get a daughter-in-law like me, because any time an in-law joins a family they shake up old family patterns and it is not often pleasant. An outsider can see dysfunction better than someone living in it. An INFJ sees what it will take to solve it. But they didn’t recognize themselves as lucky, because they never saw that I was trying to make their dynamic healthier and happier. They just thought I was stirring up shit for the fun of it.
This presented itself by me complaining to Dana’s ex-girlfriend, a beautiful diamond of a woman because she helped me navigate all of this having known the subject intimately. I told her that I was going to have to win the Pulitzer to get them off my back, and she joked, “oh, don’t worry. They’ll find a problem with that, too.” Empathy went a very long way in dealing with them, because it set off my autistic rage a lot. Supergrover can testify to that without blinking, because I told her every goddamn thing about my relationship with all of them that I possibly could, because I was constantly emotionally overloaded by them treating Dana’s sexuality like a problem to be solved and treating me like a loser dumbass. I was not trying to isolate her from her parents like a control freak narcissist. I was trying to isolate her from her parents because her mother told me that Dana was never going to get what she needed from her because of her limitations in understanding Dana’s sexuality, so it was better for her to go find someone else. That motherfucker didn’t say that in front of her daughter. She said it in front of her protector, mediator, and advocate….. words that will mean a lot to Dana because they come from The Book of Common Prayer. I viewed her as taking care of the sick, the friendless, and the needy. I have never told her that in person, because I thought it would hurt too much. I had to carry that pain for a long time until I was able to write about it. That gave me enough strength to kick her parents out of our house because I never would have done it if I’d known they couldn’t afford a hotel. For the first time, I got tired enough to raise my voice, because I was tired of tiptoeing around total emotional disaster on everyone. I said, “you come in here and you eat our food and you drink our drinks and use our utilities all while disrespecting me and my wife?” They got so angry that I yelled at her dad to “sit down.” He didn’t, but he sure fuckin’ thought about it. Sometimes, the only way to deal with a bully is to push back. He’s a lawyer, and the ace up my sleeve is that I am twice as obnoxious about the law as he ever could be and I have cornered the market on the asshole archetype because I’m a paralegal in the state of Texas. Come at me with Con Law or TRCP and I will instantly try to own your ass. But you can’t argue with the Religious Right. You just have to ignore them. I could. Dana couldn’t.
Jesus wept.
John 11:35
The more stress that piled onto Dana, the worse her physical health got….. making the connection that she broke out in hives for absolutely no reason at all in the middle of all our fights regarding all of this led to a lot of rethinking medicine; the reason I needed Supergrover so desperately to talk it through no matter how we felt about each other at any given moment. She won’t be my dragon and rush in when someone has hurt me when it’s her, but GOD HELP anyone who messes with me; she is quite capable of fucking you up in ways you’ll never see coming. It is delicious when it is not directed at me, and the thing she thinks I hate is the thing I crave. I want to crawl inside her brain to see how it works more now than I did almost 11 years ago, because we are equally taken by each other’s writing and she has very good stories when she’s willing to share them. The blessing of my life is that she may not want to meet me in person, but she likes crawling into my brain to see how it works, too. The curse was that she didn’t like doing it anymore. And even though she started a fight when she did it, it was not lost on me how sweet it is that she heard me. Tell me your feelings and step up, so she did. The disaster was not letting me respond and saying “I see how it is. What Leslie has written, so must it be.” I was telling her that I was allowed to have a reaction after I heard her out, not that what I was feeling was more important than her and “my opinion is fact.” She accused me of “rope-a-dope” when she went out of her way to hurt me after telling me to move on with my life. It’s unforgivable in most cases, but not for her. I love her too goddamn much and we’ve been through hell too long to give up now. But the ball is not in my court. She was the one that hurt me first by covering up her feelings that she was wigged out I was attracted to her by accusing me of something I didn’t do. It screwed us up and cost us time, not having an honest conversation. I handled it really well, and then as reality set in I had to create fantasy to get away from reality. But not fantasy, exactly. It was giving a story to information I couldn’t use with information I could. I can use our personal issues to illustrate what’s going on with us to drag her privacy issues into it.
The reason she’s so angry is because we’ve never had an honest conversation about boundaries on my blog, and she waffles between letting me be real and telling me that what I think is fucked up and all wrong without telling me what’s fucked up and wrong about it. That it’s lazy, childish, reductive, you name it. All the while ignoring that she’s feeding the pattern by getting angry and not just laying it out there because she’s frightened as fuck to do so. She needs to see that I see her so clearly because of an interview I saw with someone in her field that would punch her in the gut if she saw how much I truly picked up from it. That tape runs deep on how to handle her, and because she’s an IQ fan and I’m an EQ fan, I mean it like she’s my asset and I’m her handler, not that I try to emotionally manipulate her to get what I want. I am trying to be the tough love that she is to me (strident, pull yourself up from your bootstraps, I’m not going to do your emotional work for you kind of love), but I make mistakes all the time. Jim Mattox comes to mind. “I may be rancid butter, but I’m at least on your side of the bread.” If Supergrover’s last letter is any indication, this quote is relatable to her as well. I’m not innocent of this, and neither is she.
Editor’s Note:
Jim Mattox was the Texas AG (D) when I was a kid, and my favorite story in life about him comes from either my first political science professor or his wife, depending on who was teaching the class that day; I’ve slept since then. Anyway, when Mattox was AG, he was a drunk. He was out at a bar one night, and decided that he needed to sleep it off. He goes out to his car and gets in the backseat. The next morning as the car is being driven away, Mattox wakes up and says “My name is Jim Mattox. I’m the Texas State Attorney General. I’m a little hung over. Could you turn the radio down?” Mattox had gotten into what he thought was his car……………………………. #shatnerellipsis
She lights up my life all the time, and if I haven’t said that enough, I’m sorry- both to her and my audience, which are one and the same thanks to the fact that she’s chosen to stick by me no matter what. I think I have, but she has focused on the negative for so long that even if I haven’t said it in those exact words, she wouldn’t have retained it as much as something that cut deep. What she never understood is that I was trying to lance a boil, not irritate her. Patterns repeat, and I am never trying to hold someone to the past. I am explaining to them that the longer the bad pattern goes on, the less I want to engage because they’re hurting me. It’s a lost cause when you’re trying to be vulnerable and ask for solutions, and you become a problem because of it. I became the only friend who ever called her out on anything whether that’s true or not. How can she get through life without having conflicts with people?
Sometimes I wonder if she knows that I get so vulnerable I cry and shake when I go to that place of writing about her. That 10 years ago, I wrote to her, “sometimes I have to take off my glasses to wipe away the tears when I write to you,” and it wasn’t about anger. It was about my hopeless romantic showing up in my writing as a style. I wanted her to feel as precious as she is.
She fits into my theology very well, because she doesn’t believe in a higher power, but she does believe in paganism. It’s her theme. She loves the idea of Outlander, which eventually spoke my language. I couldn’t make it past the first rape scene until I learned that it was a fantasy built on Doctor Who (seriously. Diana Gabaldon is a Whovian, and she based Jamie on Jamie McCrimmon, a Scottish companion when she was a kid. She invented her version of time travel by watching Doctor Who as a child). The fact that we are both obsessed with novels that cover the same things from different ends of the spectrum is the perfect representative of our communication differences. In effect, I speak “Doctor Who” and she speaks “Outlander,” not realizing that both of our points are valid because they come from the same source.
They say that these are not the best of times But they're the only times I've ever known And I believe there is a time for meditation In cathedrals of our own Now I have seen that sad surrender in my lover's eyes And I can only stand apart and sympathize For we are always what our situations hand us It's either sadness or euphoria
So we'll argue and we'll compromise And realize that nothing's ever changed For all our mutual experience Our separate conclusions are the same Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity Our reason coexists with our insanity And though we choose between reality and madness It's either sadness or euphoria
How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies Perhaps we don't fulfill each others fantasies And as we stand upon the ledges of our lives With our respective similarities It's either sadness or euphoria
-The Gospel of Billy Joel, Glass Houses
“So we’ll argue and we’ll compromise, and realize that nothing’s ever changed. For all our mutual experience, our separate conclusions are the same.” ARE YOU KIDDING ME. It takes a very special artist for me to feel like they are speaking to me only, and he got me with “cathedrals of our own.” I hope that when Supergrover reads me, she realizes that not only is she entering my sanctuary, in it she has the concept of sanctuary. When I’m around, no one can touch her. She is the ideal child of God, the fallible hero, the atheist who is actually Jesus to more people than me, or Moses if she’s more toward the Jewish persuasion. I don’t know how she identifies. Wherever her faith background lies, it’s not the same now as it was when she was a child. Being able to joke about that particular topic is one of my favorite joys in life because of another friend I knew from the same faith background.
I told this other friend that I was impressed about one thing and one thing only. That it’s one of the few religions in which there is documentation all the way from the beginning that has eyewitness accounts. Without missing a beat, she said, “yes. Documentation all the way back to when he made it up.”
It is my hope that eventually everyone in that religion will just self actualize and say, “it got weird,” and move on with their happy little lives. Tom Cruise could probably use that advice (not the same, but relatable).
You do you, but okay.
Speaking of which, that was another phrase that irritated Supergrover when it was a reference to another blog entry in which I explained that “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” That it was like telling the religious establishment with the snarkiest voice possible, “you do you, but okay.” It was not personal. It was me speaking truth to power. I was just being as snarky as Jesus, and repeating a line I hope gets stuck in people’s heads, because it’s emotional shorthand for being kind and taking no shit. BOUNDARIES. I tend to say small things repetitively because they do the most good. The music of the phrase makes it speak louder in people’s minds because they remember it. “You do you, but okay” means to me that you can uphold the system if you want, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one.
People pleasers do not realize that catering to everyone’s needs and trying to anticipate them is actually more problematic than open and clear communication….. in essence, trying to render unto Caesar and render unto God and you can’t serve both. Speak truth to power. Please, please, please hurt my feelings rather than keeping it in. I only ask that you think about the problem long enough not to give me a knee-jerk reaction, because I’m making the commitment not to react to it and I don’t want to regress.
Red mist rage while I can type with my eyes closed is not a productive use of my time, and is feeding into my autism to an enormous degree because once I’m overstimulated, it’s meltdown time. I learned this from Harry Wales in “Spare,” because I don’t know if he feels red mist rage because of autistic meltdown or PTSD, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the same kind of neurodivergence because all of the above alter your thought processes and they’re your new normal. You have to learn to cope with them, knowing that your first reaction will always be wrong. Always. You’re wired to shut down and protect what you have left, not to open up and share your pain so that someone else can see it and help without asking. For people pleasers, you always have trouble getting them to express what they need because they don’t want to look like an imposition. Most of the time, it’s because people have been taught that they’re needy in childhood. You think you’re being a hero by keeping everything inside and you’re just burning yourself out constantly and with PTSD, not being able to regulate your emotions.
It was inextricably interrelated in my mind, and I’m not sure that anyone could prove me wrong. Harry, like Kathleen, Dana, Daniel, Zac, Bryn, and Supergrover (and even Franklin, my companion at Wire Ave., to some extent) are all affected by trauma that’s above my pay grade and always has been. That being said, because I grew up as a preacher’s kid, my first instinct is to minister them. Especially because Zac and Supergrover are atheists, I feel that approaching them with spiritual lessons without attaching religion to it is helpful in our communication; I’m talking about energy and not dogma. Sometimes people need an osteopath, not an MD. They’re the people I can think of as a good example of why the Mayo clinic is such a wonderful resource.
They treat the mind/body connection as so real- in a way that other doctors’ offices and hospitals don’t. There is also no national infrastructure for health integration, because mental illness is treated so differently from physical illness, as if mental illness isn’t also coming from a diseased organ (separating out processing disorders from depression and anxiety. The reason the brain is diseased is that it uses the very best lies against you to get you to off yourself because the brain is hell bent on protecting you and thinks that’s the answer. It needs medication and therapy to not feel “extremely loud and incredibly close”).
Editor’s Note:
“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is one of my favorite books in the entire world because I have such a personal connection to it. Not only was I living in Alexandria at the time and heard the plane smash into the Pentagon while the paintings and windows rattled from three miles away, my birthday is September 10th. My extremely loud and incredibly close moment is perfectly expressed from that book……… That “The Best Day” transitioned into “The Worst Day.”
I have felt exactly that way about health integration for a very long time. The less Dana really meant she was forsaking all others, the problems with her family would just get worse. And they did. She started developing depression and again, hives for “no reason.”
All of this culminated in disaster when Dana invited her mom and dad to come and stay with us. It was great, up and to a point. They even let us sleep together in our own bedroom…… at their house, their solution was to get a room with twin beds so they could keep their imaginations intact. That’s why we never visited. My general rule is that if I ask for your opinion and help in a relationship, please give it to me straight. If I don’t, BUTT THE FUCK OUT because this is my marriage, not yours. But in every family, it is not the in-law’s job to deal with their partner’s family. My partner fell down on the job, and that played a large part in our divorce as well. I needed Supergrover to cope with that kind of pressure. I still have that love and devotion from her in large part because she’s wonderful at giving me advice in other relationships and I hang on her every word. My frustration is that she’ll work on all my relationships with me except ours, and it’s the most important because I tell her everything and she doesn’t tell me what she hears.
I was actually very humbled when she sent me her thoughts, not because they were good or bad, but because they were there. I only ended the interaction when it became too painful to continue. We were making great progress, and then she exploded like a firecracker when I really hadn’t done anything to deserve it. As I told her, “don’t let me be the asshole out here all by myself.” Then, it was her turn to recognize that she was indeed the asshole. I sent her a message immediately that said “you are forgiven. Honestly and completely.” I knew she wouldn’t get the reference because it’s a line from Doctor Who, but that didn’t matter. I needed to feel the connection between Eleven and River Song to convey how I really felt about her. I will never be in love with her ever again, but because of my past with her and how much it affected me, I view her as an emotional support partner more than anyone else. It’s just not my decision to accept it or not. So far, it’s been a mixed bag. I was so happy I cried when she said, “you’re right. My first instinct was “LET ME GRAB MY PURSE. THAT MOTHERFUCKER.” If you get the reference, you’ll see how funny it really was.
I have no doubt that Dana’s dad would have thought I was brilliant if I was male. That’s because even though he tolerated me, I hung on his every word because he was a Marine and all of his stories have stayed inside me all this time. They’re just not my stories to tell. The one that I can tell is because it made me laugh. When cell phones first came out for intelligence officers (earlier than to the general public, I would imagine), the Americans knew how they worked, and the Russians didn’t. They thought they had privacy and couldn’t be tapped if they used them in their cars. I laughed so hard I was sagging in my chair. It does not surprise me in the slightest that my model for a perfect partner for me is military and intelligence (not as big an oxymoron as one might think) because I loved those stories more than I’ve ever loved anything. He sat there and fed my autistic special interest all day long. The thing I love about military/intelligence men (not because I prefer men, because I haven’t met many women in the service and only a few retired spies. Men are the ones that tell me these stories. I love all of them, from the motor pool to pulling a gun on a Colonel because he was being a racist bastard and that was the only thing they could think of to deescalate the situation- by making it clear just how serious being racist in the military actually is.)
My personal view is to baby myself, because I find that when I do, I am more able to show people that I love them, because my boundaries are not so overextended that I disengage. I don’t mean boundaries in terms of keeping people out because of their emotions, but boundaries on how much I want to hear at once. I like it when people ask me if I have the bandwidth for a call before they do it. I like it when people say they have serious shit to talk about and do I have the bandwidth to let them vent? As we say in Texas, “you better ‘redneckcognize.”
Because when people respect my boundaries, I am so much more comfortable bending them because I respect them so much in return. I will go above and beyond when people go above and beyond for me. I recognize Supergrover’s sacrifice, but she has not recognized mine as such. I think I’ll be waiting a long time, because if she was going to do it, she would have done it by now.
If she wanted to visit me, neither hell nor high water would keep her from it. Why did she snipe at me on the anniversary of my mother’s death instead of hugging me? I think it would have gone a lot further than making me angry as fuck for a very long time.
And in fact, the thing I invited her to do with me was on Mother’s Day. I only have this loose connection to it anymore, and I did not realize that’s what I was doing. Of course it was important for her to be with her family that day. But she didn’t say no. She agreed to mull it over.
Progress.
I have just been too intimidated and too humiliated to say flat out, “okay. This has gone on long enough. Only meeting in person will break our toxic cycles because we have no frame of reference to each other besides each other. There is no context to our relationship and seeing each other out in the world will give that to both of us.” The fantasy and the reality need to be managed, not ignored. I will absolutely die mad about that, because I got in very hot water over it. I didn’t ignore it, she did, then came down hard when she decided I should have known not to lay out what was really going on in my head and that her very specific secrets were not fair game but an overarching thousand foot view of the problem from all angles was.
I did not want to be the lovesick teenager anymore. I wanted to explain that there was a solid reason I felt like my heart turned into an 808 drum, that her love was my drug and that has proven to be true for almost 11 years. What kind of person thinks that deep a love is just a game I’m playing to fuck with her? What kind of person ignores how hard it was to say goodbye to her and Michael and instead, berate me for writing things like it? Or just telling me that she was incensed by some entries and touched by others, never telling me which ones touched her so that I didn’t have to be so afraid. I could know the boundaries I was crossing instead of guessing all the time to get my story out there.
I have caused a lot of hurt, but it has never been intentional. My story is for people all over the world, not direct letters to people. People would see my writing a lot differently if they viewed it as an episode of “The Moth,” “Morbid,” and “Risk!” (“Risk!” Is storytelling, but mostly adult content. Caveat emptor. I just love it because it’s hilarious.) People being able to read my writing and assess it like I’m Harriet the Spy are so close to the point, but it’s whizzing right by their faces.
I use my life as an example to others, both of what to do and what not to do. I allow myself to have a full range of human emotion, and not to dumb it down to protect other people’s comfort, because it’s not for them.
It’s all for me. As I work through my childhood and adulthood, I see the patterns that no longer serve me, and I have found that it was finally easier to leave the cocoon than stay in.
She’s still my precious, precious six year old. I’m just choosing to love her from over here……. until she realizes it’s not actually that far.
I got my review on our interactions at the book talk. Jonna Mendez told my dad that I’m a “spitfire,” and she won’t have any idea how much that means to me, because everyone has called my ex-wife that since she was a toddler and it felt like at the lecture, I brought my own shoes. So, not only was it an enormous compliment, it was sentimental in word choice for me. I loved it.
She’s kind of my inspiration as for what life will be like for all retired spies. That they’re having fun in their retirement when they’ve had such thankless jobs all their lives. The military gets plenty of recognition, but at CIA, you don’t want anyone to know you’ve literally moved heaven and earth that day. You can’t let anyone know. So, you’ve basically got a vet with PTSD living in your house and you may never know why. That doesn’t seem fun to me….. not the doing cool shit part. That seems great. Not being able to tell people what you do leaves out an entire piece of who you are. No one thinks of government wonks as having PTSD, and let’s face it. Most people at CIA are, in fact, government wonks with a desk job because the directorate of operations is not the entire Agency.
You just have to assume that every employee is Jonna Mendez, because if they were, they couldn’t tell you. It’s how you have empathy for intelligence officers in operations without asking any questions at all. Most people tell their partners that they’re CIA because of the logistics involved with why mom or dad has to be gone so often and at a moment’s notice.
No one tells their friends, their parents, their kids anything until they’re at least able to understand the seriousness of keeping quiet. It varies. Marti Peterson’s son figured it out on his own, I think, at about 15 (Marti Peterson was Trigon’s handler, the one that kept us far ahead in the Cold War.). Some people, like taking the vows to become a priest, decide that having a family is too much to handle and they live their entire lives under green glass.
The road to Oz is paved with good intentions.
I think I have found why I’m in love with intelligence. It’s the only profession I’ve found in the government where the research makes me wonder about their lives at home. I’m a very emotional, highly sensitive person. When I read things where Jonna is in danger, my heart still beats fast though nothing physically happened to her, BUT IT COULD HAVE. I’m such a tender heart hear that I want to hug her for surviving something that happened 30 years ago, so she’s probably okay, and I’m still like, “do you need Kleenex?”
I treat her like the cool grandmother, the one that makes Halloween exciting because who would know more about disguise? Ok, so Jonna and Tony Mendez Halloweens. Gotta talk about it. I wonder what it was actually like vs. what I think happened. They’re retired disguise artists and Tony was a magician. I’m not saying it was epic, but it being boring doesn’t add up in that particular household.
I’m buried in her book right now, and I’m debating getting a Kindle copy because it’s not large print. My eyes are glazing over even though I’m desperately interested because I don’t have a bright enough light to be able to see the text.
I know I’ll get a copy at some point, anyway, because I would like to have it in my digital library in case the house catches fire (now that I’ve been through two house fires, I’m practical). All of my signed Mendez books are kept in the top drawer of a very tall dresser- no mirror, just extra storage. There’s probably a very fancy French name for it, but I’m in the groove and I don’t want to break it to look it up. I have them all now. All of them autographed, and all but the newest on my Kindle as well.
So, that’s why it’s cool that Jonna thinks I’m a spitfire.
Who gets to meet their favorite author, and it turns out they like each other? It’s insane.
As I joked many years ago, “I have now met all of my favorite authors- Anne Lamott, David Sedaris, and Jonna Mendez. It was an absolute pleasure for Jonna to meet me.” I think she said something like, “charmed,” but it was funny. She is so fast.
When she’s in front of me, I just see graphics of “The Flash,” because that’s what happens in my head when I think about all the layers of complexity there are to the things she says in public. I actually do get more of that in my daily life thanks to Zac working in intelligence, which just reinforces my strict boundaries on what I will and won’t ask her. I wasn’t trying to throw her a fast one in the YouTube video. I was giving her a true moment of authenticity because when she was talking about a practical joke or whatever, of course it wouldn’t be classified. She could just be herself, with all her real emotions.
I am not a journalist, and I am not pretending that having a blog is equal to having a newspaper. Therefore, I just wanted a “slice of life” kind of story. What happens when I get involved with discussions on intelligence is that I am often quicker in my questions than they are in their answers; they begin to struggle against it because I am so smart that I am definitely on the right track but we can’t go there anymore. Zac can tell me with one look when the Chinese Wall needs to go up, and he doesn’t even have to look at me. I can tell by the way he reacts physically, even when I’m behind him.
I do not want to know the rest of the story. I want to know how much I’ve gotten right in the reading I’ve done. I am really the Autistic State Department all by myself, or so it has seemed some days. I am also every bit as uptight as Leo calling The New York Times to tell them they misspelled Qaddafi in the crossword.
Lindsay once called me David from “Six Feet Under,” and in retrospect I know it’s not because we’re queer……….. Lindsay and I are David and Claire to an enormous degree depending on when you meet us. I’m reminded of this because earlier I was talking to someone about how I loved the ads in the pilot.
I would like to think I’m more David Rose (Schitt’s Creek) than David Fisher, but you get what you get. Honestly, it being surprising Jonna called me a “spitfire” is precisely because I think of myself as David Fisher. I’m completely buttoned down except to one person. A spitfire seems exciting. David Fisher is boring.
But maybe my inner David Rose comes out more when she’s around, like flipping each other shit after the book talk. If I had been drinking something, you would not be getting this entry. I would have choked and died right there.
I told Oliver, who is a dog, all about it. He is now apprised of all my current operations, covert and public-facing. The thing I love about Oliver is that he loves being around me whether I’ve been a jackass that day or not. And I have very few days in which I don’t look like a jackass at one point or another. He’s the one I go to when I’m at the end of my rope, because what he lacks in conversational skills he makes up for in presence.
But sometimes, I do like feedback.
I need to talk to someone who knows geopolitical affairs and yet has no access to classified documents so that whatever they say won’t get me into hot water when I talk about things here. That’s why it’s easier to run my relationship with Zac through the New York Times. If it hasn’t been published there, he doesn’t tell me. We are not keeping each other out. We are protecting me as a writer and him as a civilian employee in intelligence, as well as Navy Reserves. It’s just better all the way around if we pretend the world isn’t going to hell in a handbasket and just enjoy “Slow Horses” together.
You know what’s better than watching Slow Horses? Watching it with someone who is really in intelligence and pauses it to point out sloppy tradecraft and/or plot. I like pausing it because it is literally the VH1 Pop Up Video of MI-6.
That’s the best thing about seeing spies talk about their memoirs when they retire, actually, because depending on when they left, you can learn about the operations that went on during your childhood….. for instance, one of the things I loved about Argo is that the real events happened when I was two. It was not ancient history to me, it was within my lifetime.
I feel the same way about operations in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, etc. All the things that informed who I was as a person back then. Getting to see behind the press is the most fun part of studying intelligence. Getting to beat the press? I’m not that important, nor do I want to be.
I can say so much more in describing people than I can in describing what is going on politically, because people can relate to a conversation in the room. They can’t relate to countries talking in a room. It’s like most people not having a relationship with a million dollars, so they have no concept of how small or large that is. However, they know exactly how much $25 is and how it would affect them if they lost it.
I know this because one of my friends from one of our churches told me that after we left (by many years), they were in a huge budget discussion over a multimillion dollar restoration project that resolved quickly and fought over buying the kids’ Easter baskets.
People don’t have a concept when it comes to scale.
I am happy being but a citizen of Locker C, because I’ve found the right balance of how to know without knowing. How to judge by sensory perception and not words. Ultimately, what happens in the world doesn’t matter as much as what’s happening inside my boyfriend’s head. I see the difference, because he can say “the world’s a mess and I’m tired,” but he’ll be taking no further questions. I just try and hug the tension out of him, because I know that he’s carrying information he can’t talk about, but our mirror neurons can. They’ve had extensive conversations at this point.
Because I’m starting to think that Zac agrees with Jonna. I’m a spitfire, and other people know it better than I do. Honestly, what gives me the balls to write what I write is being a preacher’s kid. I have seen/met so many, many people over my lifetime and I’m only now starting the process I saw as a child. Seeing someone transition from being afraid of having an opinion to knowing it’s not right to let someone steamroll all over you and if you don’t say anything, you’re part of the problem. I was part of the problem in a lot of cases because I wouldn’t talk about my feelings. I have a barbed wire fence in my heart, and I gave SG! my access code. That way, her area was compartmentalized- what made it feel so much like a secret.
Seeing each other in a different context so that we weren’t constantly at each other’s throats has only been on the table once, and it was a long time ago. She wasn’t ready, but she told me that there was a possibility in the future and she’s told me over and over that she doesn’t lie about anything. It wasn’t a put-on, we’ve just changed over the years.
I wasn’t so much creating a dream, in retrospect (from yesterday ๐). It was constant reassurance that we could do such a thing. That I wasn’t weirded out by the idea when it was frightening we might not vibe in person the way we do through writing. It might have broken what we have rather than supporting it. I don’t think I’ll ever know. But what I do know is that I was reassuring myself that this was real, keeping myself grounded, and hoping she’d help. She didn’t until recently, because the longer we didn’t talk about things, the worse I felt. It was dehumanizing to an enormous degree, because she doesn’t see me as hurt. She sees me as angry, so she’s hurt. I am angry. I am hurt. But it doesn’t turn off the emotions I have regarding things that have felt like love but somehow aren’t?
I felt that tension, and she confirmed it. She was hiding how she felt because she was afraid of my reaction, which has now happened three or four times in our relationship, and the first crack in the facade that this was not going to be good for me is that she accused me of something I didn’t do and held it over my head until I explained to her what actually happened. She admitted she’d been deflecting from another issue. It’s a pattern that has repeated for ten years, except her avoidance of problems scares me. I’m used to being able to talk it out. She’s used to sweeping things under the rug. It’s a fundamental difference in what makes us achieve equilibrium.
So, the more I opened up, the more she felt guilty. The more she felt guilty, she tried to placate me. She thought that I was demanding of her time, when I was demanding that she tell the truth. That’s all. Stop leaving me in the dark about everything so that I know how to plan for any kind of future. It’s exhausting thinking about all of them.
I don’t know what changed, but something did. I couldn’t anticipate her needs. She couldn’t anticipate mine. But we could have fixed it a lot earlier than we did…. because at present I feel like it’s fixed. I didn’t deny anything, and I didn’t apologize for it, either, because I refuse to know you’re hurt in advance. You’re the one derailing my story at that point, because I don’t make shit up. I think about what I know, because that’s how much control I have.
If I have enough chutzpah to talk about my problems every day, I expect that other people are also that emotionally capable. I’m not always right, but I know I’m giving everyone the benefit of the doubt and not “talking down to the audience.” I tire quickly of people who can’t emote, because I refuse to live in the traditional culture of women….. doing most things by inference while men just say what they want and if other people agree with them, they say so. If they think another man is an idiot, they’ll say that, too. What they won’t do is stand there and say nothing….. at least in my experience. A Texan will not let themselves be wrong with grace and style. They won’t let other people “be wrong,” either, because all men are convinced that if they explain something, it’s correct. When men are together, everyone decides how correct they are in percentages.
It seems dumb, but it allows everyone to take up room and have their own opinions while also allowing everyone to save face….. the idiots gaining at least a point for comic relief.
That’s what I need in my relationships. For the other person to realize that I know I own 50% of the problem, but if your way of resolving it is to put distance between us, you’ll only feel more resentful the next time we get together. You think you’re saving my feelings. but it hurts more when the fight resolves a year or two later by taking 20 minutes to talk/cry it out. Now we’ve traded 20 minutes for a year in which we could have been happier, because the energy it takes to dislike someone is heavy and dark. I don’t want to carry it longer than necessary.
If that’s how my feelings are about someone, I’ve learned to find closure in myself and move on. I don’t have time to waste on people who find deflection easier than conflict resolution. I have found those people over and over in my life, because lots of people tiptoe around me. I want to know why to change me, but also why other people stop taking up space when they’re perfectly entitled to it. It’s so much easier to be giants together than unable to express ourselves because we’re afraid.
However, it’s easy to see how this pattern begins. You think you’re compatible because the connection is explosive. You think differently, so you’re feeding separate parts of each other’s brain. Over time it becomes toxic because one person gets so tired of the other emoting………. which makes the other person scared of emotions and avoidant as well. Then, neither of the people in the relationship are helping to resolve conflict and move on.
The trap is manhole cover in size, as has been with all of the women I’ve been with. Even with polyamory sometimes it’s about difference and sometimes it’s not realizing that the people’s unique experiences make them seem different. You just don’t realize it until the new wears off….. my fear of ever getting married again. That I will get stuck with someone who can’t talk about their emotions, but I won’t find out until I’m completely invested like I was with Sam, et al, I assure you.
For me, getting married again would be paperwork, because I don’t want a partner to be able to touch my inheritance, for instance. It’s too precious, not that I wouldn’t share it should I choose to when I’m as ancient as you’re going to be. I’m the type person that if I have it and my people need it, it’s theirs. But I’ve never had enough money to test my limits, which so far have been using me up first.
It was worth it for a moment of being a spitfire, because I know it takes one to notice another.
What experiences in life helped you grow the most?
Last night, I was rereading the long letter from Supergrover (having so much to read helps when she’s out of pocket because of course the second time I read something, a different aspect will jump out), and she was talking about one of her kids’ partners. She told me that the kid’s partner had told the kid that the turning point for them in their journey with alcohol was losing her kid. A tear came to my eye and I thought, “alcohol and bipolar present the same. I am this kid.” Apparently the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Her kid is her, and I have no doubt they have the same type affect on people. It wasn’t the point of the letter, but the things that affect me that she’s written are mostly the things that connect to something deep inside me.
I felt more relaxed than I’d felt in years. Supergrover didn’t understand our pattern, didn’t understand why I didn’t accept certain things about our relationship, me surprised at how conscientious and dedicated she really is at being a friend, and how because I didn’t believe her, I missed out on a lot of things. But the reason I didn’t believe her is that she wasn’t showing up. She wasn’t laying her true feelings on the table. When she got so angry she couldn’t see straight, finally she had the strength to say what she’d been hiding for a very long time. That’s what I mean by “breaking her open.” I don’t care that she was angry. Her tone wasn’t the point. Her offering was…. and that offering was “I’m hurt and tired.”
Now, it’s her job to decide whether she wants to ask me about what I’ve written, or if she’d like her pre-conceived notions as to why I’d write what I’d write stand. She thinks that I continually paint her as a villain and the times I paint her as my friend are somehow invalid. It does not make sense to her that I can love her and be angry at the same time, but yes it does. When she got into full swing, she sounded exactly like me, picking up style and structure, painting her feelings as fact (about other people, but same style)….. and I wondered what the difference was in her tone and mine. What is she reacting to that I’m not reacting to in her?
We often hate the things in others that we hate about ourselves. She learned that I’m sometimes just as private as she is because I don’t want to rock the boat, either…. and didn’t like that I chose to talk about it here because she thought I was attacking her. No, I was reflecting on a long and hard road, which looks different if you think it is at an end. In effect, she was offended by the grieving process, because I think I’ve done my fair share of denial, anger, and bargaining- to name a few. I have said a lot of things that weren’t favorable to her when she wasn’t being any more favorable to me. She called my blog a “Get Out of Jail Free” card to be shitty to her, and I didn’t know how to explain that if she really wanted me to let her go, it was going to be ugly inside myself. That I had a million different feelings to process and none of them had to do with the last 15 minutes.
I had to process 10 years, all without ever really having the input I needed. However, I’ve always gotten what I needed when we were tracking together, and I can’t hope for much, but I can hope that we’re at least back at the same starting gate. Or perhaps we’re on different sides of the concourse, but still both seeing the Nats…. and that’s something.
She said she was furious beyond belief at some entries, and moved by others. I would cut off any one of my limbs to know which entries moved her, because I have heard all about the ones that make her furious.
I had to process the time I wanted to be the partner, to when I knew she had a partner, and going from the friend who would have come to the wedding to the person that would have officiated if I’d been asked. But she didn’t give me the strength for that.
By the time Bryn got married, she was done with our church, so she asked me to marry her instead of her pastor. The wedding went off with a hitch. ๐
In fact, the thing that meant the most to me is that the groom, whom I had maybe all of two days with before the wedding, congratulated me on a job well done, and he said, “I had a lot of trepidation when Bryn said that she had this friend who wanted to do the wedding, because I wanted it to be perfect. And it was.” I don’t think he knew my back story- that I had prepared for this moment unintentionally by learning how to do weddings from the age of five. As I have said, the joke is that no one in my group of friends wanted to wait until I was done with grad school to perform a ceremony I had memorized by nine.
Although the wedding was taken directly out of the Book of Common Prayer; we just took all the religious references out because Bryn absolutely believes in the power of the universe, but I don’t know whether she would translate that to “relationship with God,” as many people do.
The thing my dad taught me that stuck with me is to go through the wedding at the rehearsal without saying the vows. Unless it was just the three of us, if they’d said the vows at the wedding rehearsal, they would have been married AT THE REHEARSAL because there were witnesses. This presented as funny only once. I got confused for a second as the vows started because I didn’t look down at my portfolio and said the groom’s name where the bride’s should have been. Bryn corrected me because she caught it and I didn’t- brain fart- and we laughed and moved on.
The thing that my dad also taught me is that brides and grooms get very nervous at their weddings, and you can coach them to the extent that you can with something like that. If someone gets tongue-tied, I say, “if so, your answer is ‘I do.'” I have never met a couple where if they hesitated during their vows, it meant they had cold feet. Most people are anxious at being in front of public.
In terms of the wedding itself, I missed Dana terribly for two reasons. The first is that I cannot imagine how much fun we would have had visiting our old haunts, and I know she would have loved being a preacher’s wife for a day. It was so fucking weird going to Burgerville without her. Yet, I did not call her and tell her to meet me there because I couldn’t. I never want to get back together with her, but I also really miss being her best friend, the part where we never, ever got angry enough to be physically violent. There was not that kind of emotion tension to create that kind of fight.
I know that this is still, in part, true for her as well because of what she said when my mother died. I hadn’t talked to her in months, maybe a year or a year and a half. The first thing I said was “thank you for picking up. I wouldn’t have called unless it was important.” She said that she would never not pick up because she figured that if I was calling her, it must be important. That is a long way of healing from standing me up at the bank, literally. So, even if she didn’t want to be a preacher’s wife in person, she definitely was the strength I chose to lean on that day. It was like she was my phantom limb the whole time, and I never felt alone, because we were every bit as much of a team as our then-pastor, as Dana, Bryn, and I all met at the same church, and we both folded into Bryn’s family…… even though because I had dated Matt, I could tell he was in a pissing match with Dana and she didn’t notice….. whether she was blind or not is debatable, because someone can present a game to you and you can say, “I’m better off pretending this doesn’t exist because it’s not worth my time to care.”
All of this is to say that Dana, Bryn, and I have a very long history, and it’s why I jumped on a plane to Portland and felt sick when I landed. I could feel my anxiety melting the further we went down 99W, because Bryn lives in Newberg, the 100% insurance I wouldn’t run into anyone I didn’t like. I don’t think we went into the city except karaoke night. I did my usual, “I Feel Lucky,” by Mary-Chapin Carpenter. It fits my voice and after I’ve had a beer my accent gets stronger. If that is true of another Southerner I know up here, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to hear that out of her, either. It’s a more rolling lilt than mine, because for some reason which I will certainly look up on YouTube (linguistics lectures are fire), the Southern accent gets softer during the drive from Texas to Mississippi.
And yes, when I spelled Mississippi, I did say in my head “M. I. SSI. SSI. Crooked letter Crooked letter i.” And I’m a music nerd, so my slowed so I could do the rhythm with my fingers as well. I love that language is music whether or not it comes with notes. It’s why I’m a hard core gangster rap fan, as well as lighter stuff like hip-hop. I am learning to write dialogue, just like I’m learning plot and character from Issa Rae on Netflix.
The reason that I want to learn dialogue like this is think about Amy Sherman-Palladino and Aaron Sorkin. They’ve both made their careers by speeding up dialogue to 33o bpm, and because the rhythm is faster, your brain contains it because you have to strain to keep up not to miss anything….. and the rhythm reinforces it.
For instance, who doesn’t remember the way Alan Arkin said, “How’d you cut your hand, Josh?” They may not remember the rhythm, but it will certainly bring up feelings…… because Yo-Yo Ma was also there.
I asked you to roll with me, and got off on a tangent as per my normal.
I have no doubt that said pastor was mad as FUCK, but I hope that she understood it wasn’t about trying to keep them out, but to keep us in. We are not saying fuck you to that world. We are making our peace with it so we can leave it behind. We are processing feelings that go back to 1997…. about our friendship, about who we are and always have been to each other, and how “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.”
I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Supergrover would love to meet Bryn, perhaps even more than she wanted to meet me, because Bryn has a story she needs to hear…………. because Bryn has been my friend since 1997, when she was a teenager (and so was I, but I was 19 and Bryn was maybe 14). I am not saying it would ever happen, but I know that Supergrover would roll her eyes at some of what Bryn had to say because it will just seem so very familiar to her, as if Bryn and I are speaking with one voice.
I can’t get them together, because Supergrover and I aren’t there yet. But what I can do is say on my blog that Bryn is coming to visit me inย May, do with that information what you will.
One of the sweetest things about Supergrover’s letter was that she said my words felt like “pricks on her skin that grew into big holes she couldn’t close anymore.” What I thought was happening was happening. Instead of asking me why I’d write what I’d write, she saved it all up until she was so mad she couldn’t see straight, and tell me she was busy. I could tell, and I wasn’t angry that she wasn’t responding to me fast enough. She couldn’t see that what I wanted was for her to open up to me and tell me all the times I’d hurt her rather than kicking the can down the road. I’ve said so many heavy, scary things that I cannot count them. It is why I said that I’ve been naked in front of her so many more times than I have with a lover. It is a different voice for me, that my internal monologue was also, in fact, her external monologue. It is a weird feeling to know someone so intimately through reading their work and not giving that person a hug. It begins to feel like a rock concert, and I mean this on a deep and spiritual level.
Yesterday, I told you that she’s my tuba, or vocally the basso profundo in my life. Not the lead trumpet player, the top note. The base of the chord upon which everything is built. Who hasn’t gotten close to the woofers at Third Eye Blind. Who hasn’t felt the way your chest expands and your skin buzzes? That’s how it feels to have another person (especially one like her, the rock part) inside me, because she’s never been separate from me and we’ve never learned to pick up the other’s social cues. Incidentally, as an autistic person, if we did have a day to day relationship she’d be the perfect person to social mask when my sister wasn’t with me. She doesn’t have time for that, I’m just telling you that the way she has her shit together is what I want.
The worst part is that she thinks she doesn’t.
It’s understandable. She lives on no sleep. I’m not sure she’s had myelin on her nerves since the Reagan administration….. and I can’t tell you the line that told me that, but it was funny.
Again, reading her words, her true feelings, relaxes me and I read to the rhythm of Dave Grusin, because I like the theme to “Three Days of the Condor……. among many, many others. St. Elsewhere is probably at the top, followed by Doogie Howser, M.D. The reason I like the theme is that I’ve never seen the end of the movie. It got weird (like the misogyny in old Bond movies). I think this is fair play because the novel is called “Six Days of the Condor,” so it seems they only filmed half of it and gave up. The difference between our relationship now and our relationship at first was that in the first few weeks, the rhythm was “Your Love is My Drug,” because she’d said some very exciting things. New relationship energy ate my lunch. I have no compunction about confronting people on problems before they happen to establish boundaries, and neither does she. I warned her that this could turn into an emotional affair because of two things. Internet chat creates a sense of intimacy that may or may not be there in real life. That you become disconnected from your body, so sexuality and gender become irrelevant. This is what I meant about saying that I hoped she was going to be Cynthia Nixon, and self-deprecating that it’s because I’m not that good a writer. I was not saying that my writing is my way into her heart and therefore I thought I could change her like when we used to quote Ellen Degeneres about “winning a toaster.” I thought that reading me would change her, because women don’t fall in love with other people’s private parts all the time. This is because sexual relationships with women are built on emotional connection, just like they are with straight women. You can break up a marriage faster than you can break up two women who’ve flipped each other shit since high school.
But I can tell you the exact moment her feelings stayed the same and mine went haywire. I was telling her that her story felt like a drug, and she said, “I’m sure I’ll drink your liquor, too.” Not meant to be a pass or a flirt, but so smooth af that my knees knocked. If you’re lesbian or bi, did I make you do the thing…….. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. Her gender and sexuality didn’t fly out the window, mine did. It didn’t matter what she looked like, I wanted more and I was in.
If I could describe our relationship in one sentence that would resonate with my generation, it would be that our relationship on the surface seems like it’s “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” It’s really “Bel-Air.” I feel that way all the time, every day. If you are not familiar with both shows, because “Bel-Air” is so new, let me catch you up.
“The Fresh Prince” is cute, and everyone knows the intro….. which is the scariest event that happens in the whole show (so far) portrayed as comedy. In “Bel-Air,” you find out what happened that day, how he really met Jazz, etc. It’s violent, and even in California you see the real problems in their family. Carlton is an addict because he’s a perfectionist and has anxiety. I identify with him on two levels, because I am both versions of Carlton on the shows, and the actor is from my neighborhood (I don’t know him, he was born after I left).
What I have noticed is that if you want to learn anything from powerful people, you don’t try to be a gladiator trying to impress them. You become the Olivia to their Cyrus, but not when they’re working. When they’re sitting on the couch drinking wine and eating popcorn after having fought gloves off all day. Because the fighting isn’t personal and those moments don’t matter as much as a conversation with a good friend about What Kind of Day Has It Been?
When that involved snuggling in my dreams, I knew I was fuccccccccccked, because I knew my dreams would go deeper than that while I found homeostasis. It was hell on earth, because she wasn’t going through those physical changes and I was. When you know your heart has barked up the wrong tree, you can’t tell your heart just to “snap out of it.”If I could write what really happened between us, you’d read it to the tune of a billion dollars, especially if she was my co-author. It would become a franchise series on Netflix, because our story has never been told before. It is an original idea, one that hasn’t been represented on screen much, if ever. It’s why I hope that those 10 seasons are all here. I don’t want to turn my blog into a Netflix series, I just hope that much story has been told.
That I am at least a good enough writer for that. I want our story to be quiet, yet enormous. There are so many differences between us that make us interesting, yet nothing can tear us apart for a moment of any day.
Let me tell you the day I knew what kind of situation my situation was in. How I fell in love with her the second time. First of all, Ifigured out how that woman who’s loved her friend for 10 years and nothing could tear them apart actually worked, so I was more capable than I was in the beginning. Secondly, it was something she said. She said that once marriage was marriage, it was for life. That it existed great sex, no sex, whatever. That’s how lesbian marriages work every single day. I finally had some words and context I really understood because it was written in my language. Everyone knows that couple that’s been together a hundred years, but they lost interest in each other during about year 12.
So, I know why she was angry I blocked her on Facebook, but I wasn’t. I needed to stop seeing her picture in my feed all day. She blocked me on instagram, and I was so grateful because I can’t see her profile unless I’m logged out. The only time I saw them is when they were referer stats on my blog, because I wasn’t logged in on all web broswers. It gave me some room to breathe, and our entire relationship was based on e-mail, not getting to know each other in person or in a group, which created different outcomes. Our relationship existed in text only between us, and it broke my personality in half. That’s why I couldn’t stay with Dana. I had grown past her and we were on separate paths no matter where in the world Supergrover and I were because Internet. She’s handfasted as my yellow string, and it runs between us. I used to call it a chord, because it worked in both our first languages.
The pleasure of my life was when we returned to them. It’s the life experience that helped me grow the most, by far…….
But what I need you to remember is that though it’s Three Days of the Condor visually, the other three days are in the book.
I just haven’t noticed all the ways not speaking each other’s love language has harmed us, because I could see what she was doing to show me love, but I couldn’t see that she was receiving what I was saying with love. She’s hurt beyond belief at some of the things I’ve written and painted it as fact that I’m out to get her when she doesn’t know the first thing about what I have to say, because I’m not talking about our real issues here. She thinks she’s the villain in the story when I’m saying that we tumble and roll. I am often the villain in this story, and have said as much. She sees how much I try to explain how her choices affect me and chooses to believe I’m being nefarious. I’m being INFJ autistic Doctor Who Malcolm Tucker.
My first thought was “Jesus *Christ*…” but not in a good way. I have no idea who I’d like to be, because I see pros and cons to everything.
I’m not even sure I’m that good at being myself….. but I’m laughing about it. The thing is, though, I could totally be Jesus. It’s like, the only thing I know how to do. I tell stories, people listen to me, and I can flat *assure* you that “nothing good comes out of Nazareth.” No stranger has ever come after me over my writing, because it’s *mine*. Why would they have an interest if they didn’t know me personally?
Here’s why it’s not any easier to be me than it was to be Jesus. The only difference is that I had a blog and he literally sat around and told stories and people wrote them down years later…. taking away all the facts, but none of the truth. Some of the things I write about are long in the past. Some of it is what’s painful “write this moment.”
Here’s why I talk about my blog the same way- facts are missing, but the types of truth I’m laying down *are only from my perspective.* In order for my blog to be factual, I would have to know what someone else was thinking. I am only telling you what I took away from my interactions with my friends and/or family. What you took away from my writing is none of my business.
I feel like that’s Christ on a cracker right there. He was absolutelyfuckingnot trying to impress anyone. In fact, he actually made quite a few people angry, wouldn’t you agree?
And yet, some ideas are worth dying for, because I don’t think that the story would have been remembered if he’d lived out all his days…. although he would have had the chance to fact check the Gospels a little more closely…. or at least, I would like to believe that Jesus would have been a different person at 60 or 70 than he was at 33.
I know his personality like the back of my hand because I’m an INFJ and he and Martin Luther King, Jr. are INFJ as well.
INFJs are guided by a deeply considered set of personal values. They are intensely idealistic, and can clearly imagine a happier and more perfect future. They can become discouraged by the harsh realities of the present, but they are typically motivated and persistent in taking positive action nonetheless. The INFJ feels an intrinsic drive to do what they can to make the world a better place.
INFJs want a meaningful life and deep connections with other people. They do not tend to share themselves freely but appreciate emotional intimacy with a select, committed few. Although their rich inner life can sometimes make them seem mysterious or private to others, they profoundly value authentic connections with people they trust.
As quintessential idealists, INFJs have many ideas about how to improve society and make the world a better place. INFJs believe a better world can only be attained if we concentrate on doing what is right, regardless of short-term consequences. However, harmonious relationships are also extremely important to the INFJ. They are skilled mediators who look for the root sources of conflict to find common ground with others. Because of this, they tend to prefer a diplomatic communication style and are careful to not unnecessarily ruffle feathers.
INFJs have a profound respect for human potential and a deep interest in understanding the mind. Because of this, they are motivated to pursue authentic self-development and strive to live up to their true potential, while encouraging and guiding others to do the same. According to idealistic INFJs, if we believe in our ability to accomplish the extraordinary, the extraordinary will instantly become a possibility โ โdream it and you can achieve it,โ as the saying goes. However, because of their integrity and empathy for others, it is uncommon for INFJs to cut corners or hurt others to achieve their desired future state.
Because of my processing disorders and mental illness, I have hurt people. But I’m also human. The old saying goes that “hurt people hurt people,” and I’m trying to clean myself up. But the way I do it is to lay out everything I’m thinking so that my ups and downs might be a survival manual for someone else. I am relentlessly driven to leading from the back, that people have shown me they won’t be vulnerable with me if I’m not vulnerable with them, first.
And, of course there were 14 disciples (I include Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany). But were all 14 of them best friends all the time? Have you met any group of 14 people that gets along all the time? I can just picture it now…. Jesus, could you stop being intense for like four minutes? Just four minutes, bro. We all need a beer after that one (and that one could be anything, like Jack Palance’s finger).
I don’t do shallow.
So, if people are, I back away slowly. Because to me, shallow means that you are not looking for a deeper, more meaningful connection with me. Our connection depends on communication and honesty, and if either of us doesn’t get it, how long are we going to stay in the time loop? I can count one that lasted 23 years, one that lasted 10. I didn’t have an exit strategy for either, just one day I was exhausted and I couldn’t take up any less room than I was already taking, because what tends to happen is that people think I’m a wonderful writer until we’re close enough that they say they don’t care what I say here….. I’m entitled to my stories.
In somewhere between six months to two years, they learn that somehow I can write beautifully about everyone except them. They’ve been caught up in the bubble of my personality, and then I do something stupid and I fall from a pedestal every single time, whether it’s singing or writing. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it recently, but I’m a classically trained solo-quality voice, and I have learned never to believe my own press. In both cases, I’m in a bubble of my own, and people are not so awed when they see the man behind the curtain.
I’m going to guess Jesus was like that. Most ministers are. In show mode in front of a crowd, solitary the rest of the week except for meetings. The people he led didn’t really know him, they knew his message….. and somehow, it’s been twisted to make him look like some kind of professional Christian superhero, when to me the historical Jesus is so much more interesting.
The link is to a book by Marcus Borg, one of the preeminent scholars on the historical Jesus, joined by Dominic Crossan.
It’s called “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith,” and it’s a book that’s been on my Kindle since I first met Marcus and Dom, and I’m allowed to call them that because Marcus’s wife was one of the rectors at Trinity Cathedral in Portland, Oregon…. so even though he’s not Episcopalian (he’s Lutheran), I’ve heard him preach a lot. Bill, the dean of the Cathedral (blanking on a last name, sorry), used to joke that whenever you had a theological problem, you should always go drink beer with a Lutheran.
I would have gone for a beer with Marcus, but I really want to go for a beer with Nadia Bolz-Weber.
I’d like to be her, but in so many ways, I already am.
My perfect house would have enough space for Zac and me to spread out when he’s there. It’s the one thing I don’t have. I’d like to be able to host him, but I also like that coming to his house is a completely different vibe than my house and it’s nice to get away from it once in a while. However, we don’t have to spread out much. Right now we’re both in his office playing on our computers. There’s a pork butt in the Instant Pot. We’re both looking forward to “Slow Horses.” I also got him my favorite Shiraz (Yellowtail- there’s more expensive, but not sure about “better”), a heart-shaped box of chocolates with a rainbow flag on it, and a card that’s going to take him a while to read…… because as I told him, I could probably write you something better than I could buy.
And that’s all I really have to say about that, because we had a prompt like this not long ago and I told the story of how I’d rather build my own relatively tiny house because I’ve watched hundreds of hours on YouTube on both construction and sustainability. I know for certain that I could get by on a Jackery and a cell phone. I know for sure that I could sound knowledgeable in front of a contractor or carpenter.
You’ve got to check out Bourbon Moth, Perkins Brothers, and foureyes furniture.
If money were no object, Perkins Brothers would build my house and the other guys would be responsible for all my furniture.
I think there has only been one time in my life that I shared a computer with someone. My dad and I had a desktop in our apartment after my parents’ divorced, but it was easy because we were never using it at the same time. Here’s the one thing that was really funnyโฆ. I was running late on a paper for English, and I knew I could bang it out easily and be on time for class. So, I ran out of school at like, 11:00 AM and flew home (it seemed).
Then, my dad walked in for lunch and was genuinely surprised to see me not at school. The cool thing was that he saw I was working and just left me to it. He knows me. We’ve met. We only work exactly the same way. The adrenaline of the moment makes us write better. I do not remember a time when either of us finished a sermon before 0200 on Sunday morning. He just said, “are you skipping a day?” I said, “no, I’m late on a paper. I’ll be back by 1:00.” And that was the end of that.
The reason I remember it so clearly is that I was under a lot of pressure. I wasn’t doing well in school except for Microcomputer Applications, English, and Creative Writing (where’s the lie?). Math and science have always eluded me except in seventh grade, when we had a “group project” and I turned all autistic on it, writing down everything the teacher said so that my notes and lab calculations were correct.
He took me aside and said, “I gave you a higher grade than everyone else because it was so obvious that you carried everyone else on your back.” For instance, I would say that Lindsay did marginally better than me in Con Law thanks to me, because she had a transcription of every class. And yet, those are the only two classes in which I was any good (Con Law and Life Science).
I went to the city-wide science fair twice, and I don’t remember who came up with the ideas, me or my dad, but it wasn’t like he did the work for me. I just took his idea and expanded it.
In seventh grade, it had something to do with how dyes are carcinogens. It takes a very, very, very, very long time, but both blue and red are toxic, making grape Kool-Aid one of the worst things you can drink all day, every day (I do it a little bit now that it’s sugar free).
In eighth grade, it was all about car safety, but I don’t remember exactly what it was aboutโฆ. maybe seatbelts? I don’t know. By then, science was the bane of my existence and my dad helped drag the project out of me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in doing work. I wasn’t interested as much in the subject, so my mind wasn’t completely taken over with factsโฆ..
It wasn’t grape Kool-Aid. Let’s not get stupid.
It wasn’t until I was in 11th grade that there was even a class called “Microcomputer Applications.” Because I already had techie friends, I figured out that we were networked with the middle school Lindsay attended. So, my first order of business was to “hack into” Lindsay’s user account at her school and leave a letter for her in her home directory. “Hack into” is in quotes because you had to know the person’s Social Security number. Yes, they were that stupid in the 90s. It was all new. This would have been 95-96, and I didn’t even have an e-mail address until the second half of my senior year (I gave up music altogether because I couldn’t graduate with an “Advanced Diploma” without moving my schedule around to accommodate MA and study hall.
Since my dad was at work, I had my own computer for the hour I was supposed to be in study hall, so basically I was the original “WFH.” I’d do homework a little bit at night, but mostly rushed it in study hall so I didn’t have to stay up until past midnight AND do a full load the next day.
The thing about my high school, and many others, is that teachers in your grade do not collaborate at all. They do not give a shit if they’re giving a high school kid six hours of homework a night while also expecting them to function during the day. Even if I started my homework after “Jeopardy!” at 1600 and “Animaniacs” at 1630, that still left me doing homework until midnight because I had to take breaks to eat, spend time with my family, and if I remembered, pee.
I also didn’t really have time for friends until late, because with my parents being divorced, I needed my own spending money. So, in addition to all that studying, I was a receptionist at SuperCuts. Sometimes Meagan (or Meagan and Tony) would come and pick me up from work and we’d go to Starbucks or Chili’s.
Back then, SBUX was new and basically the only bar for high schoolers. My first date ever with Meagan was that she picked me up for school and we went for a coffee run on the way. I am amused at myself in retrospect because I had never heard of a “Frappucino,” and I love being marketed to, so that’s what I wanted.
Meagan said, “are you sure? It’s December.” I didn’t pick up what she was saying because I didn’t know the word “frappe,” either. I’d never been north of the Mason-Dixon line (then), and she’s Canadian, not fluent in French but enough to have had a secret language from her kids until they started schoolโฆ.. why I’d be so happy in a Mexican-American family where Mom speaks English and the kids are all Big Macs and Coca-Cola, Spanish is lame.
Wait, Coca-cola is a bad American exampleโฆ. Mexicans are Coke addicts and it’s a big damn problem. Fabulous documentary on YouTube. Even “beisball” is a bad example because Mexicans love it, too. Maybe our differences lie in apple pie and apple empanรฑadas. This paragraph is really making me miss Houston. If you look at the demographics, we don’t have an overwhelmingly Mexican population. I meet people from Central and South America all the time, but I haven’t met any Mexicans (yet).
If I find a pocket, that’s where I’d like to live. I’d get to practice my Spanish, if they needed it they could practice their English, and because I’ve been to Mexico so many times, we have some of the same cultural referencesโฆ. especially since both Mexicans and I have had kitchen jobs. I’ve never worked in a kitchen in Texas, so I’ve never worked with Mexicans (Portland is so white the best representation is our hip-hop station. Another good reason I got out.). I have never worked in a kitchen where I didn’t have to speak Spanish, or learn words for things in Spanish on the fly because cooking moves fast.
It’s just again, Salvadorans, Hondurans, etc. I think what I’m missing is that the Mexicans I have met have such a strong connection to Texas. Therefore, more cultural references than I have with South America because even though the kitchen is common, our upbringings aren’t.
The worst time I’ve ever felt in the kitchen was because I broke a cultural taboo that I didn’t know was there. I couldn’t tell whether the dishwasher thought I was being a white entitled bitch or truly being horrible to him, but either way he couldn’t and wouldn’t explain what I’d said was wrong. We were practically besties before and never talked again, and because of the language barrier (I’m nowhere near fluent, especially if it’s not “Texican.”), he got pissed about giving me information at all- why I’d hurt him- and I got hurt because even if he opened up to me, I could only understand part of it.
It was a bad situation all the way around, because what I did know is that I said something about his mother. I know I deserved what I got, I just didn’t know that he wouldn’t take it the way an American would. “Yo Mama” jokes have been famous since the 80s. That’s why I think he was genuinely hurt- he had a cultural norm I didn’t.
I tortured myself over that for months, because I couldn’t explain and he didn’t want it. I did the best I couldโฆ.. a very sincere, loving, “I am so sorry. I didn’t know.” And in fact, I still don’t know what I said that irked him, and it’s years laterโฆโฆโฆ and still painful.
But other people don’t have to forgive you, and that’s okay. It’s on you to let go of guilt and move on. It’s how you get more resilient over time, because people walking away hurts less when you realize that first, you don’t get to decide how hurt someone else might be. You don’t get to decide how much apology is enough. You have to know when progress is being made and when you’re banging your head against the wall. Because getting to the point where you’re banging your heads against a wall means that you’re actually both hitting your heads against the wall and something’s got to give.
If you know what makes you happy inside yourself, your intuition will tell you which relationship you’re gettingโฆ. are you getting the one in which progress is being made, or are you getting the one where you’re spending time and energy on a relationship where the other person is “just not that into you.”
Speaking of which, I saw a meme that made me laugh. Someone had set up two books in a bookstore and snapped a pictureโฆโฆ.
“God is Not Mad at You” -Joyce Meyer “He’s Just Not That Into You” -Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo
Aside from the fact that I use the singular they for God, I couldn’t help myself. I needed that laugh. I’ve also loved Joyce Meyer for years, because I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Plus, she has the same way of preaching that I doโฆ. a female voice who projects with authority because so many men complain about hearing The Gospels and the sermon in a woman’s voice.
I feel like Joyce Meyer and I are Erik and T’Challah. It’s not that she doesn’t have a point. I’m not trying to take anything away from her audience. I’m only saying that in this case, she’s smart and also The AntiLeslie.
And, to be honest, I’m pretty sure she’s been married to a man for a long time, but she reminds me of “Suze Orman” on SNLโฆโฆ “it’s ALL. ABOUT. THE. Jackets.”
The reason I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater is that my dad was more conservative theologically than me, but not Joyce Meyer. His line about this was some dumbass came up to him in the “God Quad” at SMU and said, “I was a Methodist until I got saved.” My dad said, “I was a Baptist until I learned to read.” My dad has never been a Baptist, but Texans don’t let facts get in the way of a good story.
What I also mean is that I grew up listening to all this stuff because my dad didn’t generally use headphones. I got used to the sounds of the men’s voices, Fred Craddock’s in particular because he’s just about one of the most soft-spoken preachers you’ll ever meetโฆโฆ who can also punch you in the gut emotionally with half a line (he was liberal for the time as well, taking care of the population of Appalachia).
Here’s the highest compliment I can give him, because it will make sense to the people that hate Christianity. He was a Jimmy Carter Christian. The kind that prays for you and then builds you a houseโฆโฆ because that’s how “thoughts and prayers” are supposed to work.
I also learned to love criticism of The Bible, because I was interested in studying it even when I didn’t feel all that moved spiritually.
It’s something I learned from Gordon Atkinson, a Texas preacher who became such an amazing blogger that he left the church to write full time. I think he’s doing books now, but here’s a link to his archive. I don’t normally put hyperlinks in my work so the past can stay past, but these essays run back to 2002.
Because the essays aren’t organized by date, I’ll just have to tell you what I learned from him rather than linking to that entry specifically. I was already in a mood, and I found a minister who was struggling with the same thing I wasโฆ. how called he felt, his imposter syndromeโฆ. how sometimes he loses his faith when he’s doing hospital rounds and has to rescue himself, etc. I wasn’t doing a hospital rotation, but it’s something that I knew I would struggle with as well if I went the pastoral route.
Incidentally, the reason I didn’t go into ministry is the same reason I didn’t become a therapist. I can’t manage my own problems. That gives me two disadvantages. The first is that I will be constantly overwhelmed by other people’s problems and continue to not work on my ownโฆโฆ because it’s a monotropic thought process to think of other people first, because you like it. What says avoiding your own emotional work by pretending that other people’s problems are more important than yours?
When you start taking up room in the universe, you realize just how much you’re not getting by not asking for it. This is because once you start working on yourself, you know when you’re kowtowing to someone and afraid to take up room, or whether you’re trying to make progress. When the other person is receptive, that’s truly healthy. When your issues cause anger and frustration in them, that’s when the toxic cycle begins.
It actively says to the one who brings up problems that theirs are unimportant. Only the person who is completely shut down is allowed to need things. That’s because the person who expresses emotional needs and gets ignored tries even harder not to make the other person angry, because the last time they brought up an issue, all hell broke loose.
This cycle can go on for decades, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s with your first family or your partner and kids. Plus, there’s a lot of resentment and anger that boils under the surface when one person lays out their issues, and the other person seems receptiveโฆ. but “seeming” and “actually” are two different things.
Here is What I Know For Sure.โข In my relationship with Kathleen, if I brought up a minor problem, like housekeeping, she’d step all over my ass. When Dana started doing things like that, we spiraled outโฆ mostly because at the time I was in it up to my ass and I didn’t have much patience. But what I learned is that when someone starts shutting down, that’s the end whether you like it or not.
Now, I have a lot of patience and if I expressed unhappiness about anything in my relationship with Zac, he wouldn’t just say “we’ll talk about it” and forget. He’d either remember on his own or send me a calendar invite to talk, either an audio/video call or in person.
That’s what I mean about it being the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had. I don’t have a partner who tries to kick the can down the road on hard conversations.
Speaking of hard conversations, I made a mistake because I was typing too fast. I am not Zac’s newest partner, but because I’m not around much, people think I am. We are also not cutesy in front of our friends, we are cutesy when we’re out on the town, which mostly means making people want to throw up in the grocery store.
The conversation was surrounding how, since we aren’t cutesy and aren’t together all that often, how do I fit into your life and what’s your bandwidth? That’s a hard conversation to have, because I was terrified that he’d say he was overwhelmed and we needed to break up because I live so far.
My logic was 100% upside down and backwards. We’re good for life as long as we stay where we are, with which I am completely comfortable. He’s just as dedicated to me as an orange string as I am to him. I need his friendship as much as his romance, at which he is very good.
He might not think so, but what really sticks in my mind as romance is remembering things I say. When I said I liked Bullet Coffee, he got me an immersion blender just because.
Editor’s Note:
In case you’re not familiar, Bullet Coffee is a tablespoon of grass-fed butter, a tablespoon of coconut oil, and very, very hot coffee in the blender. The official recipe is the tablespoons of oil and butter with 80z of coffee. I like Cafe Bustelo best. The reason I like it so much is that it provides all my morning calories and brain food at the same time, so 8oz of coffee is enough to start my day.
He sees when I’m struggling and likes helping out, and I don’t mean monetarilyโฆ. although he is sweet about telling me to put whatever I want in the cart at the grocery store and Trader Joe’s because he knows that I’ll want to have food and drinks at his house that I’d buy at mine.
The latest was kidding him about me being fake irritated that he was out of Dr Pepper Zero and he actually stopped by the store on the way home and bought a 12-pack. He had a million other drinks I could have chosen, just nothing sugar free.
Well, that’s not true. He has a Soda Stream and I love putting in a bottle of still water and turning the carbonation up to hell.
I also like soda with hard alcohol, fresh fruit, juice, etc. and it’s so great that it tastes fresh from our water. But juice, I think, is one of the worst things for you on the planet if you’re not drinking the kind sweetened with Splenda. You can ask your doctor if they think Splenda is bad for your child, but what you cannot ignore is that all juice is mostly sugar.
Just like restaurant food is mostly animal fat and butter. You get to choose whether you want that rich a meal, and also if way more fat is worse than way more sugar.
I would also rather eat my daily allowance of calories than drink it. So, that’s why I drink diet soda or the drink mixes you add to water bottles. When I drink alcoholic drinks, I tend to use seltzer as a mixer, and even with non-alcoholic beer, you have to be careful. They’re sometimes less calories than a real beerโฆ. sometimes not.
My current favorite drink mixes are an import from Mexico and it’s only, like 10 bucks for 44 drinksโฆ. take that, SODA. They’re sugar free aguafrescas. Both the lime and the piรฑa colada flavors blow me away, because they’re not really sweet. The lime tastes like the real limonada you’d buy on the street in Enseรฑadaโฆ. and yet, not as good as Sunkist Lime, tbh. The piรฑa colada tastes like real coconut water and a little bit of pineapple. It feels like being in Mexico 16 oz at a time. I have such fond memories.
Plus, other countries have laws around dyes that we do not. What I have noticed is that Mexican drink colors are not loud. Given my 7th grade science project, I believe this is for the best.
And through all of this, you may be wondering why I’m changing topics a lot. It’s that in my entries, I’m a gardener. I don’t pick and choose what’s important to say and what’s not. The plot reveals itself, I cannot predict what it will be because in order for the writing to change, I do. I start at a subject that’s not too deep and dig down until I feel comfortable enough to let go.
And now we’ve arrived at that moment, what I’ve avoided saying for almost a hundred paragraphs now. One of the biggest roots of my trauma, my first case of PTSD, was walking into my room and seeing my precious first computer melted and mangled into my desk. I’m autistic, always have been, and computers are one of my special interests.
Given the way that I use the internet for writing now, you can only imagine how much I lost in terms of text documentsโฆ.. and I saved everything on hard drives and floppies, but of course I didn’t have any on me. They couldn’t have been, because I had to rush out of the house too quickly to grab anything, because my room/office was already full of smoke.
The bad thing from that time was twofold. The first is that scanners hadn’t been invented yet, nor e-mail (outside of the military), so there were no pictures to save that way. The second is that I didn’t think of my files as important back then. Apparently, I didn’t think pictures were important, either, which happens when it’s the choice between saving memories and black smoke chasing you down the hallway. I did not see anything burn.
The fire started in the attic, so of course I smelled the smoke, but luckily I do not have any trauma of actual flame.
I think that’s why the image of my first computer is burned into my brain. In the moment, I did not have time to take in the horror, and I was all alone. My mom and Lindsay were shopping. My dad was delivering communion to the shut-ins. I called the fire department from my next door neighbor’s house dressed in Snoopy pajamas, black pantyhose, and heels. This is because I was getting ready for my first church dance. I was wearing the nightgown until my hair and makeup were done, so I was also sporting hot curlers.
I got to make up for that missed dance later, and even met someone I really likedโฆ but it was just a sweet crush on both ends because he was a little bit older. It was the type relationship where we realized we would have been good together, but the timing was off.
That was an excellent night because it took me a while to get over being the only one who knew our house was burning down for a while. In fact, my mother drove up to the house surrounded by police, fire, ambulance, the whole bit and thought I was dead.
It was a very good moment when she realized I was standing right there in the neighbor’s yard, still having nothing to change into, but she knew why. She was the one that was going to help me with my hair. The worst part is that it was December and I didn’t have a hoodie. The best part is that it was NE Texas, so it was still 50-55 degrees. Uncomfortable, but not unbearable.
That fire was so memorable that it literally appeared in the Naples paper for 30 years under “On This Day” (Dec. 20th). I believe that’s because it affected the church just as much as it did us.
In those days, less so now, you moved from parsonage to parsonage instead of buying your own house. Because of the housing market and ministers retiring without many assets (nor a place to live), the UMC started giving people living allowances separately from their salaries so they could work their own way up in real estate and have a place to retire.
I am sure that it was difficult for the church in that moment, realizing that they needed to rebuild an entire house. I never got to see it. We rented until we moved to Houston. My friends John and Linda have told me it’s beautiful. I believe it. It was the most majestic house on its street before.
From what I have heard, they just took it down to the studs, because the outside was fine. It relieves me because my favorite thing about the house were the Greek columns out front. It was the best house ever, and looked above a minister’s station in life even before it burned. But we drove old cars. There were no BMWs to match the vibe.
I do believe that it was easier to buy a parsonage that large and beautiful because it was bought in Naples, Texas. In DC, that house would be worth a quarter of a million dollars, especially because of our big front and back yards.
In DC, you’re lucky if your yard is bigger than a postage stamp.
I can say now that living in Galveston and Naples were some of the best years of my life, because I was young enough that things weren’t complicatedโฆ.. except for being physically weak and mentally strong. The kind of thoughts that you’re hearing stream-of-consciousness now are the same way I processed emotions as a child.
Which is “try to take up the least amount of space possible and maybe no one will notice how weird you really are.” Here’s a for-instance, and it does have to do with computers.
I went on an interview in Portland once where I was going to be a contractor, not a full-time employee. The representative from the agency who got me the contract was trying to give me a “pep talk” before the interview and said, “I think when you walk in, you should announce the problem you have with your eyes because it’s noticeable enough to be distracting and you could make everyone uncomfortable.” When I told Lindsay about this yesterday, she wanted names and numbers.
She was going to sue the pants off this guy until I told her that it wasn’t recent enough, so I don’t remember the name, nor the agency.
Funny enough, I walked in and owned the room. I got the job in 25 minutes. However, the employment agency would not let up on me about my disabilities and “making other people uncomfortable,” so I fired myself and moved on to a better fit at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU).
We lost our funding for that project, so that’s when I moved to cooking. Dana was having a blast and I couldn’t stand being in an office anymore. I wasn’t the best cook, but I’m not the best office employee, either. In fact, I’m a much worse office employee.
I understand chefs because I’m autistic and they’re direct. I don’t understand bosses and HR-speak, and I don’t mean it like I don’t understand telling an employee to fuck off in the middle of a meeting will probably land me in hot water.
I mean that I don’t understand the things that go on behind closed doors, the way the bosses talk about me, and how I interact with coworkers because they’re trained to bullshit around everything.
I know that a lot of people don’t know what it means to “synergize,” but I don’t understand the difference between overperforming and underperforming because so much of it is calculated on your behavior and attitude whether your bosses/coworkers’ impressions of you are correct.
I understood it better at ExxonMobil and Alert Logic, because ExxonMobil ranked you and you got “grades.” Alert Logic displayed metrics in front of all of us so we knew how we were doing. It was uncomplicated because it was based on numbers and achievement, not (always) nebulous office politics.
At Alert Logic, though, I found my people. Other linux geeks like me. At ExxonMobil, I was stuck with a very large amount of STEM autistic geniuses, and because I’m creative autistic, let’s just say *our quirks didn’t line up.” That’s because not everyone was autistic, but everyone treated me like their personal secretary when I was actually IT support.
Why yes, I have printed out e-mails for people because they wouldn’t read them on the screen. Thanks for asking.
The one time I genuinely offended someone was when I told her what a simple fix it was for her audio problem. I meant it as “no big deal,” she took it as “you’re stupid.” What happened was that she was trying to play something from her iPhone, and she couldn’t get the aux cable to connect. She thought it was an IT problem, so she called us and I responded.
When I got there, the audio was fine. The case was preventing the audio cable from going all the way into the phone. So, I told her that all she had to do was remove the case and she’d be good to go. It embarrassed me in front of everyone when she said, “you didn’t have to say that part so loudโฆ.” and looked butt hurt.
I don’t like my job when people think I’m actively trying to make them look stupid. I save all that for when the day is over and I’m blowing off steam.
It was a lot of fun sitting around with my linux homies to set us apart from users, and regale each other over the calls we’d gotten that day.
In those days, we got a lot of calls about floppy disks, and we had to tell them, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Your work is gone. You didn’t save it on a hard drive as well.”
Two reasons for this. The first is that floppies were not that stable to begin with. It’s what happens when you have a tiny drive with magnets in it and only a thin layer of plastic to protect it.
The second is that people discovered that the side of the computer was the same material as the side of a refrigerator, and hard drives worked the same way, except metal surrounding the drive instead of plastic. So, they’d stick the floppy onto the side of their computer and it would erase the floppy so hard you couldn’t even retrieve the file structure, much less “final_final_final_paper.doc.”
If you put the floppy close to the hard drive, then the magnet would interfere with it as well. Remember I worked as the lab supervisor at the largest computer lab on campus, then the next year was promoted to supervising the smaller lab in the Graduate School of Social work all by myself. Therefore, I cannot tell you how many students I’ve had where I felt like I had to stop them from not contemplating suicide over it.
As an aside, USB flash drives are more stable than floppies, but I only think of them as “transport media.” As in, I work on my desktop and transfer files over that I’m taking to someone else. I don’t use it as permanent storage except for on laptops and tablets that have microSD slots.
If I had to sum up my love of Android tablets in two words, it’s “MicroSD slots.” The Ten Commandments stone tablets will have an expansion card slot before the iPhone, and even the newest Samsung phones don’t have them for the same reason. If you need more storage, they’re going to charge you an arm and a leg for it by having the storage soldered onto the motherboard. You can’t get a 32GB phone and add a one terabyte card anymore. Apparently that is now reserved for tablets only.
The best thing is that Android .mp3 players are the same way. My little Sansa Clip can hold a 512 GB card, and what that means is that I can either have every album ever made, or a smaller library in lossless qualityโฆ.. for instance, copying the .wav file on a CD directly to your SD card is going to take up way more space than even the highest quality .mp3. But on a large expansion card, you can do that.
Because Apple did the same thing with iPods that it does with phones now. No expansion slot. If you wanted more storage, it was more expensive. I think the plan was to go to phones in the first place. The iPods were the equivalent of Microsoft Solitaire and Minesweeper.
Those games were not included with Windows as fun. I mean, they were, but that’s not the point. The games were included so that you’d be interested enough to learn how to use the mouse.
You learned the interface on an iPod Touch that would connect to wi-fi, so that when SIM cards were added, it wouldn’t feel different. Everything that used to be in iPod Touch is on the iPhone now, and again, no actual room for your music collection unless you’re willing to pay premium dollars. Even on the iPhone Mini 12, which I still carry because of its size (the form factor was not popular and they don’t make them anymore), the cost difference depending on disk space was enormous.
Meanwhile, you can add an expansion card to a tablet in two different ways. The first is that it will be formatted in a way that other computers can read, so you can take the card out and plug it into your desktop, etc. The second is that it will format as a virtual hard drive which doesn’t leave that tablet. The difference is that with the card integrated into your tablet, it doesn’t see the difference between one drive and the other, so you can install apps easier, because if you run out of space on your tablet, it will start installing apps to the card flawlessly without you having to move things over manuallyโฆ. and honestly, only some apps can run disks formatted to be portable storage because they’re integrated into the operating system. I think the last time I did it, I used App2SD or something like that, and it would tell you which apps could be moved and which couldn’t.
Now you can skip the middle man.
I have a 128 GB expansion card on my HD Fire because I don’t have to want to be dependent on my internet connection. I will always download movies from Netflix, Amazon, etc. rather than streaming them because I might start them at home and finish on the train.
Again, wandering off into nowhere because it’s easier than wandering into everywhere pain lives.
Like seeing my very first computer melted into my desk.
Don't even bounce... Not in my house. Better hope you make it... Otherwise you naked. I am champion at beer pong.... Allen Iverson, Hakeem Olajuwon....
While this is my favorite verse of “I Love College” by Asher Roth (Houston represent), I cannot say that I’ve ever been to a wild party like that. I may have gone to some things that came close to frat-level foolishness, but we learned a lot while we were building communities.
The thing is, though, I became an adult before my time. I got married too young and didn’t handle it well. I shouldn’t have left University of Houston, and it’s been so long now that I just have to hope that now they don’t matter. Of course they do, but I’m a jack of all trades and most people who work with computers have a mixed bag of certifications, and a Bachelor’s may or may not be one of them. This is changing, perhaps, but I don’t think so. What I knew 10 years ago, people also knew 40 years ago. The information changes too fast for it to be published in books.
If you’re going to study computers in school, you need something like a language that doesn’t change. Object-oriented programming has the same concepts no matter the syntax. However, if you are the person in charge of taking care of every device in the department, you will not learn a single thing in school that you wouldn’t pick up in a week on the job. That’s because you’re dealing with problems with:
Apple MacOS
Windows
Ubuntu
Red Hat (sorry, Fedora….. old habits die hard…)
Android for phones
Android for tablets
Android for Galaxy Wear
Apple iOS for iPhone
Apple iOS for iPad
Apple iOS for Apple Watch
And if you’re a system administrator, you probably have to deal with even more operating systems than that. Maybe not now, but in 1999 I also had an account on our VMS/VAX machine, and flirted with Solaris (it doesn’t look much different from Red Hat or Debian back then).
Now, how likely are you to read about those things in a textbook when you need the information RIGHT THE FUCK NOW because Professor So and So is going to blow a gasket if she can’t receive e-mail on her phone for 30 seconds. Meanwhile, I’m Irish. I’ll deal with something being wrong the rest of my life. Probably why I have so many devices. I don’t put up with their crap. I have an extra to use when I have to blow away the whole thing and start over because such and such app has hosed such and such setting.
Knowing how to do all that is something I learned in college, but because I worked full time for the IT department while I was a student. It was a tremendous load for a person with AuDHD, and I did not last long in that position. When I got to DC in 2001, I collapsed for a few weeks while Kathleen got settled at the office and I took care of all the house stuff. Then, later, when I was supposed to start at George Mason, she told me that she couldn’t pay my tuition anymore. I understood, but it didn’t make me happy because I’d already paid her rent for a couple of years at that point…… because she was a student, and I had a job.
I never should have ended up with her to begin with, and the red flags that I should have seen were because I was her boss for three months. She was just a summer hire, so my boss didn’t worry that we were together. She wasn’t there all the time, I was.
Now, I’ve worked for my stepmother for an extended period of time, and then I wanted to be a line cook and my wife was the perfect teacher. Both of those experiences have told me that Kathleen’s behavior while I was her boss was just egregious and I should have fired her on the spot, because in that moment (not all the time, just when push came to shove IN MY OFFICE) I was the boss. Objectively. What I had that Kathleen did not was a willingness to recognize that she was not at the top of the food chain because she acted like she had my authority…. to me.
When most of my life, I’ve been calling my stepmother “Doctor” and my ex-wife “Chef.”
I didn’t have Kathleen fired, I was relieved when I found out we were moving and that would be the end of the line for me trying to manage the unmanageable. I know how to be on and off the clock. Most adults do……..
All of this being said, I did go to between four and six years of classes, because I went part time at one point. I really only have a few classes to finish up my junior year, and then I’m onto the last stretch. The problem with that is that I’ve already taken everything I liked.
I got an F in Intro to Poetry because I had a full-time job during summer school. So, I wrote two outstanding papers and had an A+ in the class, but my professor failed me anyway because I didn’t show up three times. I was at work- what could I say? If I had known you couldn’t miss three days in a semester if you had perfect grades, I wouldn’t have done it. It just never occurred to me that it was something that could happen, but I don’t do well with injustice and I think this is it. I know I’m not a poet, but I at least understand it well enough to write about it, even if I don’t use the form myself.
I’m starting to learn what I’m going to do in this one wild and precious life, and word is beginning to spread. I’ve been invited to be a guest on “The Dark Room Podcast,” and here’s the thing that really made me sit up a little straighter…… they don’t really know me. They know my work. Apparently, I am interesting enough to be a podcast guest now…. or maybe I always have been, I just didn’t realize it.
To eat, I say my favorite is pork because I like face bacon and all those esoteric things that professional cooks eat. I like offal, but some of it is awful. My advice is that stuff like hearts, brains, and marrow might not taste good to you, but they’ll definitely taste better than kidneys and livers. I don’t eat filters (immortal words from Dana, she’s right tho). I don’t care whether we’re going to Luby’s Cafeteria or a three Michelin star fine dining experience. I am not eating liver and onions, I am not eating it dressed up as $200 fois gras. The only person that has ever gotten me to eat a second bite of fois gras is Gabriel Rucker, head chef of Portland’s Le Pigeon (do not pronounce it in French). It is not “le pigh-jhon”). It didn’t taste any less like an assload of iron, but there was so much more to explore within the flavor. The crisp edges. The raspberry jelly donut. Just….. fuck me. Yet, I still couldn’t get away from the taste of blood, and not even blood. Just the constant taste of a coin in the back of your throat, and it will stick long after you’ve finished. It’d be okay if it was the jelly donut that reappeared………..
I also love the zoo with a deep and abiding passion, particularly in the Spring because it’s free and I can go write there every single day if I want. It’s lovely when it’s between 60-70 degrees….. not so much in August. I pick a table in front of whichever enclosure pleases me, and the animals’ activity makes writing easier. When I go to the zoo, I only sometimes go during tourist season…. but when I do, those days are often invaluable.
There’s a reason for that. Sometimes I am very much in the mood for an overwhelmingly large crowd, because in that space, I am not taking it all in. I wear a baseball cap AND cans, a move score blasting so that I’m only watching the crowd, I’m not listening to it. Sounds trip me up all the time- it’s my sensory issue, from the notifications on my phone that sometimes scare the life out of me to people talking and not realizing they’re talking to me because every sound in the room is equally loud and I do not process voices in the same way I process reading. This is true of most autistic people.
Editor’s Note:
If you are struggling to reach an autistic person, try laying out all your feelings in text. Write them a letter. Use Facebook Messenger. We don’t lack empathy, we lack the ability to process it correctly…… particularly in conversation. Again, voices are hard- so much easier to process it in our own way, get back to you and see if we’ve understood.
I am using it as cover. I learned this from Jonna Mendez, actually, in one of her videos for “Wired” magazine on YouTube (I’ll put one of my favorites at the end- she is so fabulous). The funniest thing ever said in a comment came from someone who understood the assignment. He said, “she was the Chief of Disguise. I was really expecting her to turn into a black dude at the end.” I died for a second, but I know something he doesn’t. The first mask she ever made for herself that actually animated when she put it on was indeed a black dude. In her memory, it was fabulous, but she could not walk it, talk it….. because she is indeed a white woman. ๐
Her next big coup was fooling George H.W. Bush by “borrowing someone else’s face,” and as I result I kidded her in person that we had mutual friends. George H.W. Bush and I used to go to the same church…….. what is really, really amazing is that she fooled him in the Oval and not when he was director of CIA. LEGEND. The other really funny thing is that she got dressed at a friend’s house before they went to the White House, and their dog didn’t like her when she first got there and went apeshit over her in disguise. ๐ Additionally, she was working for Tony when he came up with the quick change…. that you could completely change your look in between 37-45 steps depending on whether Jonna or Tony is telling the story. The funniest part of that whole thing is that Tony and Jonna’s boss was a narcoleptic (I KNOW), and Jonna’s job was to stand at his desk and make sure he was awake the whole time to see Tony do it. He started out as himself, the spy you see in “Argo” played by Ben Affleck (much to my Latinx stepsister’s dismay and humorous consternation).
It didn’t matter who played Tony, because that’s not what was interesting about him……. and also, Tony didn’t care that a Latino didn’t play him The only thing that Jonna noted about Ben’s character had nothing to do with race. It wasn’t public at the time, but Tony had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and his personality kind of flipped. Ben based the character on that personality because Ben and Tony spent time together. He did not know what Tony was like at the time. She said that he was more effusive with his emotions back then, and that it would have been in some ways a different movie if Ben had known Tony for many years. I’m paraphrasing her, but I am writing in the spirit of what she said. Even still, it wasn’t Tony’s personality that drew me in. He didn’t have to have that personality for me to love him. It was his brain, especially after he and Jonna laid out their thought processes so brilliantly in their books that not only do I have them all on my Kindle, my dad gifted me all of them autographed as keepsakes. And in fact, one of them I bought on my own and she signed it in front of me. It was one of the most significant moments of my life…… because I realized that even if I couldn’t be a spy, I could be them after they retired.
My idea is that I am capable of short stories where I do not feel capable as a novelist. I’d like to write Bond level stories for a chapter, and then lay out the research for why I wrote it. It would be cool to write science fiction like Men in Black, then explore why I picked their ops based on my enormity of reading…. and this is completely separate from my alternate history, because I have had the idea vetted and the red team says it’s huge; it will be a knockout if executed correctly. You can’t get that one out of me because I don’t want to give the idea away to anyone who’d publish a shittier version before I did. This idea is free because it’s universal. No two books written in both fiction and non-fiction would be the same. Even if you’ve read something like it, you’ve never heard it in my voice…… which, I think, would be “Rachel Maddow on the non-fiction parts and an amalgamation of Tony and Jonna when it’s fiction, and also me because they’re not neurodivergent (or I’m not brave enough to ask). I would write that in the inscription, to make it clear that it’s just a character and people shouldn’t attribute my indiosyncracies to her- necessary when you’re writing about someone who is still living and almost certain to read it. Calling someone autistic or coding them that way is not for the faint of heart because I wouldn’t let a dog I didn’t like be treated the way people treat me. It’s not my friends and family. It’s the way I walk in the world…… and I would die of embarrassment if I passed on the “wealth.”
I had to think about that.
In trying to hold a mirror up to the world around me, it often causes me to attribute my own idiosyncracies with someone else. I think I do it the most often with Supergrover because she is a mirror image of me. She emotes too little, and I emote too much. It is indeed the gap between neurotypical and neurodivergent. It causes issues because I tell her how I see the world and she doesn’t return the favor. Therefore, I write from my own echo chamber. We aren’t checking the stories we’re telling ourselves, and that kind of love is harmful to both of us. It is my responsibility to take care of my anxious attachment style. It is her responsibility to interrupt my reality with her story so that I am not basing every decision on what only I think. My self image isn’t strong enough for that. My history is that if I really love someone and they’re being avoidant, I’ll just cave for years on end to avoid ending the relationship.
I became aware that this story was total bullshit and realized that in order for Supergrover and I to move on, I needed a love big enough to silence the voices in my head. I needed her to tell me exactly what was up in her brain when she read it. I am neurodivergent, therefore I take everything literally. Meeting up one day was a “someday, perhaps,” and I waited five years. It wasn’t all because I was holding onto her. It’s that there was a pandemic. Why blame her for something so beyond her control? Alternatively, she didn’t seem to recognize when I shot for the moon and talked about a time in which she was retired and had nowhere to be….. anything from traveling to things neither of us have experienced to showing off our own experiences to the other to just having a damn cup of coffee together instead of in async. In short, I understood the assignment, I’m just establishing my area of operations.
I’m going to have to read “Nuking the Moon” by Vince Houghton, because I love the era of CIA involved in the space race. It is also an alternative title to this blog, apparently……. because having a relationship like ours would feel so relatable to every autistic reader. My friends become my special interest when I write to them. I don’t think of us as potentially falling in love later in life like I did with Dana. Dana and I worked on each other for a while, and she had me the first time she winked at me…… I just only know that in retrospect, because when you’re sapiosexual, someone has to open up to you over time. When you’re autistic, is has to be a forest fire to get you to notice…… and she’ll know exactly where she was when said wink occurred. It was not the same situation with Supergrover because she’s straight and she’s already met her life partner, anyway. I just like being cool enough to know her. It’s why I have no regrets at all right now, I’m just sad.).
Every neurodivergent person I’ve ever met has felt this way. Every single one. I haven’t realized my power in saying things that identify with AuDHD because I didn’t realize the rabbit hole was that deep.
Again, saying all this is not about my beautiful girl and me. It’s how perception of me would affect any character I write whether they’re fictional, living their lives, or dead now but their estate will freak. Any and all of these are bad, I assure you.
I should talk to Cora about this book because she absolutely is a novelist and creates entire fictional worlds. We could say a lot by not saying it at all. In fiction, you do things by showing. I want every character in the book to be neurodivergent and to show it by how they present. The book would basically contain how to communicate with a neurodivergent when they are trying to speak to a neurotypical. I can do this very well with spies because they are drenched in facts, not emotions.
Spies know everything, in my humble opinion. They take in too much information about the world every single day and remember random factoids all day long (e.g. American spies learning how to dress and count in Europe), allowing them to move quickly and quietly as the smartest person in the room. It’s not just Jonna and Tony that have taught me that lesson. It’s everyone I’ve ever met at the International Spy Museum or heard on SpyCast.
Even people who work at the museum are smarter than the average bear. In particular, shout out to Vince Houghton and Dr. Andrew Hammond, who both have served as the host of SpyCast. Otherwise, I would not know all this because I wouldn’t have gotten interested in real-life intelligence over Bond movie magic. Bond is the face of something very, very real…… and it has scared me more than once. I posted on an autism group that my special interest was intelligence, and the comments were varied from “oh, that’s so cool” to “does the American-based “International Spy Museum” have a wing for CoIntelPro?” Jesus God, let’s drag out every bad thing CIA has ever done right off the bat. I do not like those people. I really don’t. That’s because when you dig deep, you see that misses and wins are part of every organization. If the swing for a win is big enough, things are going to go very, very wrong- and faster than anyone would think.
But when I personally think of spies, I think about people like Julia Child, Virginia Hall, Alma Katsu (all OSS/CIA, but Virginia Hall also worked for MI-6 before she came to us), John le Carrรฉ (David Cornwell, MI-6, also a fiction author), and Jack Barsky (KGB). In terms of fiction, I’m not a Bond fan until we’re talking about the current set of movies, because the old ones are dated and incredibly misogynistic. (Pussy Galore? COME ON.). My favorite M is obviously Judi Dench, my favorite C is Stephen Fry in “Doctor Who.” And if I had to give an award to any intelligence officer in a fictional universe, there are two. I love K from MiB (“I never worked for a funeral home.”) and Carmen Sandiego (“Fedora the Explorer”).
In some ways, “Argo” is also a fictional universe because reel bears little resemblance to real. For instance, Alan Arkin’s character is completely made up, but John Goodman’s isn’t. John Chambers, his character, went on to do other sci-fi movies and his last one was “The Island of Doctor Moreau.” That being said, “Argo” is not Tony’s best book. It’s tremendous, but “The Moscow Rules” is better.
I think this is because in ’79 I was two. I don’t remember the hostage crisis in Iran. I very, very much remember “Mr. President, tear down that wall.” If you are not familiar, there used ot be a wall dividing East and West Germany. The dividing line was in Berlin. West Berlin had all the benefits of democracy and capitalism. East Berlin was controlled by communism, so this was a direct appeal by Ronald Reagan to Mikhail Gorbachev. In reality, Reagan and George H.W. Bush probably advanced the wall coming down by roughly 11 days. That’s hyperbole, but it’s the funniest line about the Cold War I’ve read so far (no past or present government employee said this; I was researching a paper in college for International Affairs.). Jonna and Tony were instrumental in all of this, protecting their assets and underlings like their own children. They also came up with two pieces of spy technology that changed the direction of the war…. and I’m saying it, they didn’t. They’re too humble.
Speaking of children, the first thing they came up with was called a “Jack in the Box.” It was literally a large version of the toy. This is because all the spies in Tony’s department (he was Chief of Disguise then) were taught that there is no distinguishable difference between espionage and magic. The area of operation is your “stage,” or your ring depending on the size of the circus. There are two operations going on at the same time. The first is that you’re trying to pop smoke (military slang for creating a distraction). The second is that you are actively saying to the crown, “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
Apt.
When CIA got a new building, they covered it in green glass. I don’t know what they called Langley before it was built as a code name/slang, but now it’s “Oz” (I don’t think Tony came up with it, but that’s on brand for him, clearly). In fact, one of the things that marks me as an intelligence superfan is that in “Argo,” Ben Affleck runs through the old building and ends up standing on the famous seal in the new one. I don’t know if you know that, but I know like five people who would know that…… and now I’m wondering if Zac is one of them.
ADHD moment- Zac is not a spy, but he works with the data they collect. He’s been in intelligence since he joined the military, which in my mind makes him a great boyfriend and a lucky bastard all at once. ๐ Unfortunately, he does not have the kind of badge where he can escort visitors, but he’s lucky that he doesn’t. I would have asked him to take me to a wide assortment of gift shops…………………… repeatedly. I’m lucky, though, because he remembers me when he goes. My baseball cap and “nightgown” are from the one at CIA (by nightgown I mean a CIA t-shirt that’s way too big on me), my sweat pants are from the one at the Pentagon, and I have a t-shirt from, I think, the one at DIA that’s for little kids (it’s my favorite). Interestingly enough, I don’t wear my intelligence/military shit all the time because they’re so great. It’s an added bonus that all their shit vibes with my sensory issues. If I ever find out who makes their clothes, I’d also buy a ton of stuff without the logo. This is because it doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I get treated like a human comment section. Not all of them are nice. The best one was from a tween who pulled on my coat and said, “Do you work there? I want to be CIA, too.” I freaked out because she was the most beautiful girlchilde……. a future Alpha Kappa Alpha that could one day be Tracy Walder. And by freaked out I mean that this was on the Metro platform so my emotions and sensory perception were already turned up to hell and I just cried. Flat out. But it was after she walked away. The last thing I wanted to do was freak her out, too. It was good that we were in such a public place.
When you think everyone is watching, turns out no one is.
To the rest of the world, this comes across as hilarious. To me, I just stare and quote Sarah Silverman on Jimmy Kimmel. That if she had kids, she’d tell them that “mommy believes she’s one of God’s chosen people, and daddy believes Jesus is magic.” Not sure he’s ever been compared to Jesus, but he’s a Moses in “Argo.” Sarah’s argument is valid for both of us.
Again, what I’ve learned from Jonna and Tony is moving in a crowd with my sensory issues muted by headphones and having my head covered. I can get lost in my own little world, and I generally want to because conversation is difficult for me when every noise feels the same and often drowns them out.
I was going to the zoo that day. I found that I love giraffes and kept going with my day. Not going to see me walking one down Connecticut because the zoo had “Adoption Day.” And, I would have to check with all of them, but I do not have room for a giraffe and (correct me if I’m wrong) neither do Zac, Supergrover & Michael, or Bryn & Dave. I do know enough to know that Zac, Michael, and Dave would have to convince me, Supergrover, and Bryn that no, we do not need a giraffe (they both have a heart that beats for animals). Also, I cannot afford to relocate both myself and a giraffe to Oregon. It would be easier to make friends with an Oregonian giraffe, which is a whole mood.
What would it look like to be an Oregonian giraffe? They don’t wear patchouli essential oil or hemp flip flops, do they? The only thing I know about Oregon giraffes is that they probably love The Indigo Girls. I do not say this lightly, actually, because The Indigo Girls have consistently been one of the best concerts at the zoo over the years. There’s no way that the animals don’t like the music, at least in some cases….. and Indigo Girls play acoustic just enough of the time that I can’t see how it would get on their nerves as much as electric. I love how I have worked all of this out in my head…….
If you’ve never been to the zoo in Oregon for a concert, it’s like going to Miller Outdoor Theater or Cynthia Mitchell Woods Pavillion in Houston or Wolf Trap in DC. Primates and parrots can both sing “Get Out the Map” by now. I would have enjoyed teaching it to Kevin, who is a giraffe.
Kevin and I used to hang out. The way his enclosure was built, there was a table with a bench bolted to the ground right in front of him. Like, I couldn’t reach out and pet him, but akin to being in the same bedroom or kitchen. Space, but not much of it. He always sat right in front of me, as if he knew he was my inspiration, posing for a portrait…… yet a devilish one. I have never seen a giraffe roll their eyes, but I liked to imagine that Kevin did. It fit the theme. If wishes were giraffes, writers would ride.I just called him that and now I can’t remember why. But anyway, I thought of us as tight because he heard about the rough drafts of so much that’s here now.
It’s not his real name. I was just gathering intel and needed a codename for my asset.
Sometimes, you can do for other writers what you don’t do for yourself- promote them. I am currently over the moon because one of my comments on reddit is getting more and more upvotes by the minute. In r/suggestmeabook, a woman was telling the sub that her dad wouldn’t read intelligence writers if they were female. At last count, it was at 100, so safe to say my work is done. Here is what I said, and huge props to both women:
Alma Katsu is a former CIA case officer and she’s brilliant. She’s so quick she could run circles around him, so she’s probably your best bet. I’m a member of the International Spy Museum and a huge fan of fiction and non-fiction. For non-fiction, your go-to is going to be Spy Dust or The Moscow Rules by Jonna and Tony Mendez. They’re a husband and wife team who each served as Chief of Disguise for CIA 10 years apart. She will also wipe the floor with him because their stories are true. Women don’t just write these stories. They make them.
Women are better at being little gray men than little gray men. Anonymity has its privileges, and so does reading these marvelous books. For Katsu, start with Red Widow. One of the things that it touches on that made me cry was the reality of losing an asset/colleague while female. Some of them become emotional. It works out as well for female spies to be emotional as it does for the rest of us……………..
I’ve been disconnected from everyone lately, because having two people validate my experience as AuDHD has made me run. I am not isolating to piss people off, it’s just that there’s three people in my life for which I have enough energy because I’ve made commitments to them. To augment that is to overload my sensory perception while I’m going through a hell of a lot, and I have not taken this tack my whole life, just the last 10 years (on purpose- I’ve isolated, but through mental illness, not working out a processing disorder). Meeting Supergrover was the catalyst for leaving Dana, but falling in love with her was not.
While I had a virtual relationship, it unlocked the disconnect between ADHD and autism. Dana and I began to drift as I holed up in my office to write. It wasn’t just attraction on my end; it was being able to process through writing all the time and becoming dramatically more introverted and quiet. I have a tendency to let another person drag me along because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, so me being steamrolled for eight years in this relationship is what I do. If I am not pleasing someone, I will not give up. I didn’t give up on the woman that emotionally abused me until someone who could read the situation blind (three someones, actually) and tell how she messed me up. They gave me permission, in a sense, to stop. Nothing was ever going to change or get better, because she made a horrible emotional mistake and was running from it. She gave me a college journal that was full of information about sex I never should have had at 14. Whether she meant to or not, she’s opened a door to something that I couldn’t handleโฆโฆ but I was 14, so I wanted toโฆโฆ.. JFC I was so wrecked. I wanted to be married before I could drive or vote. She piqued my interest on so many levels that I know it wasn’t all abuse and there were genuine moments.
I wouldn’t be the singer or the personality I am today without her, for evil or for awesome. I would like to think that as I grew, I shed the things about her that no longer served me and tried to let go of rage. My rage toward her is the biggest trigger that makes basic anger multiply into red mist rage. At the time, in my mind I wasn’t being abused. She was a bird with a broken wing and I was going to help her fly againโฆโฆ.. in my infinite 14-year-old wisdom.
Guilt and anger led her to tell everyone how mentally ill and obsessed with her I was, because she opened herself up to becoming a monotropic thought process for me and fucked me over. The reason that the relationship with Supergrover is not the same, because the woman who abused me was a narcissist who fed on my emotions. Supergrover didn’t trust me after I’d hurt her. I got screwed over by my emotional abuser, so I perpetuated a bad pattern. Full stop. But regaining trust was impossible because for as much as Supergrover hates when I say it, their mutual experiences are the same, therefore so are their trauma reflexes. That doesn’t mean their behavior comes from the same source. I could not take responsibility for being 14, but I can take responsibility for being 36.
My isolation is thinking about The Gospel of Billy Joel:
They say that these are not the best of times, but they’re the only times I’ve ever knownโฆ.. and I believe there is a time for meditation in cathedrals of our own. I have seen that sad surrender in my lover’s eyesโฆ I can only stand apart and sympathize, for we are always what our situations hand usโฆ it’s either sadness or euphoria. So we’ll argue and we’ll compromise, and realize that nothing has ever changed. For all our mutual experience, our separate conclusions are the same. -Psalm Summer, Highland Falls 1:1-2
I wrote that from memory because an interviewer asked Joel what song was his favorite of all the ones he’s written, and this is it. I don’t have anything but the first two verses memorized, but that’s because they’ve changed my life the most. I realized that my entire personality was living life in two different time streams, because my writing digs backward as I move forward. It’s not a thing I do, it is a comprehensive response to life. I skirt the edge with blowback not because I’m asking for it, itching for a fight. It’s that I cannot understand my environments without it. What other people think of me is none of my business.
I did not come to that thick a skin unscathed, I just want you to know that. I had to tank my blog out of embarrassment and stop writing for a few years to get up the confidence to come back. It’s all connected, though. If I hadn’t taken the time out to regroup, I might not have written the article on Facebook Notes that translated into more popularity than I’ve ever hadโฆ. popularity that snagged my beautiful girl out of my peripheral vision and made her the whole show. I didn’t fall in love with simple adoration. Like Driving Miss Daisy, it was “I’m here to take you where you want to go.” You want to know how well Supergrover knows me? She bought me a font.
She’s crazy gorgeous, and remembers all my favorite things. Tell me my feelings are wrong. I’ll wait as long as it takes for all y’all to catch up. ๐
And in fact, I do not not think she had the same effect on Dana, the source of her jealousy and ire. It’s just a whole other thing because our adoration looked different. As my beautiful girl and I opened up to each other, it excluded her in a major way. Her jealousy was not wrong or bad, just, I feel, misplaced. Logic and emotion are not the same. Even if she didn’t understand my feelings, she completely understood why I would feel that way.
That being said, I do not think that Dana and I would have worked it out later because a) I couldn’t shut up and II) she overfocused on Supergrover being a monotropic thought process for me and not that I was actively trying to remove her (not from my life, from my “obsession” that’s actually autism- a trauma bond making it impossible to not make her my first thought every morning.). Thoughts of being with her were fleeting. Thoughts of supporting her were not.
I told her I would be the Merlin to her Arthur, and at no time did I stop meaning it. I figured out the balance years ago, and waited for the butterflies to fade. They did, but she hasn’t left the space she occupies in my head. Due to a series of fortunate events, I might be able to move her from a monotropic thought process to a passing interest, but she’ll never move out. She’s in the tapestry of my writing and my gray matter.
But, sensibly, since I couldn’t shut up about her it made her nervous. I didn’t have to love it, but I did have to live it. Therefore, I just had to be okay with seeming threatening in order to leave Dana; I didn’t want to be within a hundred miles of her. Staying in Houston would have been okay if I’d moved to a different quadrant. Leaving to go back to a familiar city was better, because I felt that the biggest mistake of my adulthood was leaving DC originally and not establishing myself on my ownโฆโฆ.. social masking my closest friend was easier, treacherous when I realized that she wasn’t, in fact, my closest friend.
If I hadn’t left DC, I wouldn’t have been in water that kept getting hotter. I also wouldn’t be where I am now, so out of pain came glory. If I hadn’t moved back to Portland, no one would have been able to see the patterns we established in my childhood because they wouldn’t have been current patterns. An abuser always cold shoulders you when they’re doneโฆโฆ but you’re still pining for them because they trained your body with a Pavlovian response.
In fact, that’s why we “broke up.” It was years before Supergrover and I connected, but the spell had been broken and I’d started to reevaluate. There are three instances that pushed me into a cathedral of my own.
First, coming to Portland was rough on day one. Basically, I’d come to visit about four weeks before and we solidified plans for me to move. Then, when I arrived with my car, she looked more freaked out than I’d ever seen her in my life, like telling me I should move and encouraging me to find a job and a place was just child’s play. Like we hadn’t been discussing this since she got the job offer in 1996 or 7. It wasn’t a dumb move. She’d moved to Dallas so she could live with her partner while she used her for free rent to get through grad school (don’t think I couldn’t suss that out- her partner was every bit as much trouble as Dana- with her DUI, not Dana’s ability as a wife.) With the emotional abuser, as it turns out, “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions were the same.”). Coming to Portland was about being able to have someone to lean on, even if we weren’t a coupleโฆ. just like had been modeled for me. She might have stayed with her partner, but not because she meant it.
Secondly, I know said emotional abuser saw the pattern repeat coming, the abusive one between her and me. I know she did. For every time she pushed me away, her love for me was the purest thing in her life. I know this because I got in under the wire. As I got older, I was not a person. I was an eventโฆ.. an opera with many intermissions, plot twists, and both sopranos die at the end.
I don’t know how she knew, because I don’t know how she knew Dana’s drinking history. But I swear to God that’s what her eyes saidโฆ.. “this is a mistake, but I know you cannot even see it yet because I have walked this path and you haven’t.” I was mad AF and still defend Dana to the ends of the earth.
Thirdly, at the time, it came across like “you’re better than Dana. She works at a grocery store.” It was very muddled because she was not the only one who held such an opinion. Neurodivergents have trouble holding down jobs. Period. She had to find the job she could do, not where she’s the most talented. Consistency over excitement. Hospitality every single day. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t studied Shakespeare. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t a technical theater major in college. That doesn’t mean she’s not an actor. She would have been hilarious on Portlandia- I would have, too, in the writer’s room.
But did my current friends see that? No. No, they didn’t. I didn’t just dump the abuser, I dumped all of them, too. They weren’t my real friends because they couldn’t see Dana the way I could. I saw her the same way as the people who birthed her, grew up with her. I didn’t live in her limitations, I reveled in her strength. Despite her truly bad case of ADHD, she’s higher functioning than I am. Social masking her was like social masking my sister (and that line is specific).
I learned all of this by going down to the river to pray, studying about that good old way.
One day when I was particularly wrecked about all this, two friends took me hiking in the Columbia River Gorge, where I sent my tears down Wahkeena Falls, out into the river, and around Cape Disappointment. They were the friends who bailed me out the first time I got dumped by this woman in a way I knew we’d never come back.
I mentioned before that abusers install a back door in you that activates dopamine/sex drive because it feels exactly like the first rush- if they’ve been turning the sunshine away from you to regain access. This came in the form of a phone call when I was in my 20s, one that when I got it, I didn’t want anything more in my lifeโฆโฆ until it was over.
I would say her tone was seductive because I’d just watched her do it to someone else, but I’m willing to entertain the fact it’s not correct. At the very least, her tone felt inviting in a very heightened way, and I’m dead serious, not spitballing. She said that she felt like I was a woman she’d like to get to know. I don’t remember anything else because it was a trigger. I went into fight or flight immediately and damn near passed out from red mist rage. I’d had a full-on panic attack at work and went home early. It was 10 years before I knew why I’d been triggered, and couldn’t explain why I felt the way I felt, but avoided her from there on out.
Two things about that. The first is that when I reacted, she immediately pushed me away and I knew there was no chance to prepare my environment and “win” another chance. Second of all, I have to believe that she knew what she was doing. She didn’t stop herself, but she realized it was wrong afterward. On some level, she realized it was hurtful because of the back door and because it was a little too little too late.
I watched her marry a partner I didn’t like because she was just like me, the spitting image except older and more degrees. I watched her manipulate her best friend into “friends with some benefits,” keeping her on a leash for years. Someone I’d once wanted so bad I couldn’t breathe proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that she didn’t deserve me in her life, much less as a partner.
She has no idea how much damage she’s done, because since I was social masking her, I’ve been the best and worst of her without ever understanding why. It’s not that I’m not the best of my own mother as well, it’s that we didn’t spend time together as intimately for her to know me on that level. She got frustrated, I did, too, we gave up.
Years later, I went back to the Gorge with Dana, crying and singing my eyes out; it was the moment I knew I wanted to marry her, in retrospect. We were years away from it, and I knew. That’s because when I was finished crying and singing, I looked over and Dana was crying, watching me. She saw how much pain I was experiencing and took it on. It is a gift I will never be able to repay. I traded something valuable for something valuable, even though the relationship wasn’t valuable to me at the end. We became a bad thing for each other, we didn’t start that way.
Those three experiences shaped me- the ablutions in the river after a truly rough jump scare. I was so frightened of everything because I lost all my social masks at once; they weren’t social masks. They were triggers, and why I don’t like to speak. Speaking means not having enough time to think or delete things so I can never be sure when I will say something without thinking that she used to say and the pitch perfect imitation becomes the jump scare. When I mentioned having her sense of musicality, that’s the healthy part. The negative part is that I’m not in shape because I don’t like to hear myself sing.
I’m a lot more low-functioning than people think because of her and my dad. They’re both unique presences on stage and social masking them covered up just about all my executive function disarray because I was always “on.” What covers my executive function now is not covering it, because people thought I was coasting on charm because I was lazyโฆ.. not that when I don’t have a social mask for something, I am utterly and completely fucked. “Coasting on charm” is not a want sort of situation. I am only now trying to social mask Leslie Lanagan,โข because for once in my life, I don’t think she’s that bad. I also don’t think that “Diving Into the Wreck” is something I should avoid.
Supergrover and the rest of my friends don’t have all this context (or, they didn’t until I started writing it down). They haven’t known me since I was 12 years old.
Supergrover in particular gets on my ass about said abusive relationship, always has from day one. She does not see why I do not spit white hot rage all over this woman every day of my life. Easy answer is that monotropic thought process damn near killed me for real. Fuck her, but I’m taking my peace on my own by telling my story exactly the way I want to tell it, because she’s the one person in my life that I absolutely want to tank her career. Writing it out over and over gives the story less power and I’m done being worried about what she thinks, have been for 10 years. I’m not a vindictive motherfucker. She’s just worked with too many kids over the years and I’m also done protecting her. We cannot, do not have any more mutual friendsโฆ.. or if we do, I run away when she comes up. I don’t talk shit about her in person because I already have a “shelf” for that.
I would Google tattoo her every day of my life if I hadn’t indirectly told Supergrover I wouldn’t. She didn’t ask me to do it, just disapproved of my approach to things because she knew my attention needed to be redirected before I did- not that my ire toward this person was unearned and/or undeserved. She encouraged me to lose my shit on many occasions. Though I decided loving Supergrover was worth my all-encompassing attention, I didn’t get over that abuse immediately because of the genuine moments it contained. My experience, unlike others, wasn’t all negative and I had to wade through it. With the information I had at the time, I wouldn’t do anything else but move to Portland if I could do it over.
For better or for worse, Supergrover is a wolf with terrible yellow eyes when she’s angry. When she met me, she found an excellent use for her jaws in my emotional abuser. When Supergrover bit her, the abuser’s claws finally, finally let go of meโฆโฆ a mask falling off like the end of a Very Special Episode of Scooby Doo. What was valuable was not concrete. I’d had an experience with my cat recently that felt the same way. Asher was closer to a human than she was a cat, and I could tell the moment her personality left her body, because her face changed and she looked like a wild animal. Revealing the emotional abuse gave that face a different context, looking no less feral.
Supergrover and I are so much better at fighting for each other than we are fighting against, because if someone crosses her, God help them.
The only reason I was okay with the abusive relationship dying at the end is that I got time to make my peace. I was reborn into something I never would have been otherwise. My grumpy old wizard did find a knight, a “Wart” who’s already Arthur and I have to avert my eyes (WELL,STOP IT). I made it to Camelot, which is indeed a silly place.
Because I don’t have to think about abuse anymore, Supergrover has been in my head for 10 years as I process my mutual experience with abuser. Her anger carries me when I don’t feel it enough, and that was important in the months afterward- just not now because none of that is close anymore. I can write about it with the emotional separation I need not to explode emotional landmines.
I’ll let you know if Supergrover moves from her castle “in the cloud.” Just because I gave her an eviction notice means legit nothing in terms of the way I process, and she’s stubborn enough to keep me around in her mind, too. No matter what, we have a past, present, and future
โฆโฆ.because I live in two time streams, forward and backward. Where they meet is a fixed point in time, and you can’t cross your own timelline (I’m so, so sorry). You can only understand it after you’ve passed it by.
Your life without a computer: what does it look like?
If your love were taken from me Every color would be black and white It would be as flat as the world before Columbus That’s the day that I lose half my sight
Suzanne Vega
If the Internet didn’t exist, life as I know it would be very different. I still would have gone to Oregon, but I wouldn’t have married Dana. Dana moved to Oregon for an Internet relationship, so without it, I wouldn’t have met her or her former partner (said Internet relationship is a mensch). I went to Oregon for what I thought was family, but I stayed because I made my own. I really did like it more than Texas, and the only reason I say that is even in 1997, no one cared if two women were holding hands if they walked down the street. I walked into all kinds of things (not just a door) seeing cute girls interact. I wasn’t trying to pick anyone up- I just noticed sweet female couples all around me and thought, “I want that.” I might have gone to DC, I might not. This is because Kathleen worked for Global Information Systems. I don’t know what she would do had the internet not been invented, but it wasn’t as prevalent then as it is now, so perhaps we would have still gone to DC because databases don’t need internet connections to function. We could do everything old school- backing up to tape drives and floppy disks if we needed them.
No e-mail necessary.
I wouldn’t have joined AOL chat rooms or Internet Relay Chat, so I wouldn’t have been able to widen my network to the extent that I have now. There are some people I’ve known for 30 years and have never seen their faces in real life. When you’ve got as many complications as I do, and the personality type that I have, being friends online fits better. I can cast a bigger net for people like me. I express my thoughts clearer when I’m writing, but it takes out tone of voice and everything that goes with it. There is also no way to redirect after a sentence or two, also problematic. I type 90 words a minute. You cannot imagine how far down the wrong road I can go before someone calls me on it.
I also would have gotten worse grades in college. If I wasn’t doing so hot, I’d go up to the professor and ask if they needed a web site. Cher Horowitz had nothing on me. It was a jumping off point to start negotiations. I worked my way to an A one blink tag at a time. (That was actually a joke. I made fun of it all the time. When the blink tag was deprecated, it was like working for a restaurant. Web developers were popping champagne while Geocities went apeshit. It was a very good day when the customer realized they were wrong.)
I wouldn’t have gotten a job in IT when I was 19. I started as an Academic Support Assistant in the main computer lab, then eventually got two of my own at different times. The first was the one in the Graduate School of Social Work, where I met Brene Brown and still kid her that the hottest ticket in Houston is being invited to her house to watch her watch “Ted Lasso.”
I wouldn’t have learned that Brene had really done well for herself unless she’d been on television after writing successful books. If I close my eyes, I can literally see her next to Johnny Carson. I think those two would have had a riot together, and I’m sorry it didn’t happen. I do think that Brene would have been successful, I just don’t think I would necessarily know who she was because my introduction was YouTube. It’s not her books that made her famous. It’s the Internet.
The second computer lab I supervised wasn’t for the kids. It was for the professor. I was the only support staff for the entire college when it came to WebCT (distance education software bought by Blackboard), because there weren’t that many professors interested in using it, frankly. It was hard to get buy-in at first. The smartest ones saw that this is where we’re going now. I need to learn this before I have to rely on it. It reminds me of a Netflix president, though I don’t remember their name. “If we didn’t know streaming was coming, we would have called it “DVDs by Mail.”
The worst said “I’m too old for this shit” and tried to pass their course management onto me, because they were far too Important to do it themselves. Male professors treated me like “the help” a good bit of the time. Men are not programmed to see women in IT. I never fit their narrative. What they didn’t know that I did was that I was more man than they’d ever be and more woman than they’d ever get.
Now that I’m 46 I still think that, but I have empathy for not wanting to learn new software now. I have reached saturation, and did a long time ago. What is this “Instagram” you speak of? Seriously, though. I don’t use it. I accepted a Threads invite right away because now I’m using social media to introduce myself to readers (and you, for that matter. The comments section is just as importantย what I say.). I have to go back and learn what I’ve missed, because you’ve never seen a more “deer in headlights” look when I think about the fact that I haven’t noticed anything since SnapChat.
I started using linux when I started being a web developer, because at the time, Apache was vastly superior to IIS, the Windows version of a web server. In fact, that was about the time I learned how to install WordPress on my own server, which I used as production before I transferred everything to go live. Still a database for content management, which was a game changer in terms of managing web pages. The difference is that back then you also had to know webdev because you had to get a hosting company, install and maintain it yourself, and code all the things that didn’t come with the theme.
I did all of that for my first blog, “Clever Title Goes Here,” but for my second, I decided I was a writer. I don’t have my own hosting company anymore, but I’m thinking about it because I could do so much more with it. My main problem is that in the free tier of WordPress, I don’t have access to what’s called a head tag. That’s where you put all the things you need for web analytics, because if you don’t, WordPress offers a pay-by-month solution for a free product. I understand that it’s the labor dollars to pay the engineers for updates to the plugin, but it’s not necessary for someone who already knows this stuff.
And finally, I wouldn’t have met Supergrover. I’d have been an arrested teenager the rest of my life. I’m angry af at her right now, because her actions are making her look like a jackass and she won’t listen to that. She ramps up my anxiety and beats me up emotionally when I tell her that. It’s not personal. Emotions are for weak people. It’s the only reason she’s even got a shot at redemption, that it’s not personal. She’s a hurt little girl with third degree burns all over her body and she doesn’t realize she’s spreading the fire to me. I cannot say for sure, but either she does this with everyone, or she does it with me because she’s pleases everyone else and I’m the only dog she has to kick. It is generally one of those extremes, and in abused kids it rarely varies. She’s not a narcissist. She’s protecting everything she has left. She doesn’t emote because she can’t access emotions all the time.
It makes her invulnerable and impervious, the things she does in her job that make her piss excellence are killing her when it comes to strength coming to her through her vulnerability instead.
I finally just cut through the silence and told her that her actions made her look like a jackass because she wasn’t giving me the tools to love her or move on. Either way, I’m screwed. She doesn’t get that she made me responsible, and I hear Ben Affleck as Tony Mendez in my head when I say that word, because he’s about to get the houseguests to the airport not knowing if he has tickets for everyone or not. He calls Jack Donovan and tells him he’s going to take them through, and to get his shit together before he gets there. “I am responsible…….” It’s disturbing to think I’ve heard Ben Affleck in my head since 2012, but it is what it is.
As an aside, I love Ben Affleck’s films so much. Argo was great. It won best picture and should have. But Air has the same vibe; it’s set in the same time period, so it’s the same color palate, etc. It is amazing, and I want more from him. Doesn’t he also have a friend that acts or something? Seem to remember something about it in the news. ๐
We could have watched both movies together and bonded in 15 minutes, but we didn’t. Just another cultural reference of mine she never picked up, because intel and science fiction are my bag, not hers. She didn’t even know what I was talking about when I said that Wakanda had a Tolkien case officer. ๐
Her face would light up at the music in Argo because she’s never seen me when I listen to it. Never seen me excitedly say, “OOH! OOH! Listen to this! The horns are about to enter the chat.” I think she would also enjoy my reaction to the bassoon solo in my other favorite movie, which I’m betting only Jack Lucas will know because even I thought it was an English Horn at first. But he’d know it was a bassoon even if I woke him up in the middle of the night. For the rest of you, there’s a correlation between Air and the movie I mean. But I’m not going to tell you what it is because I want to know if Jack knows what I mean first. ๐ He absolutely will.
She doesn’t think about me at all, but not because she’s trying to be an asshole. She just dicks me around because she doesn’t get back to me when she does have time unless I get angry enough at having my needs ignored that I don’t walk on eggshells around her. Walking on eggshells has been my only choice in this matter, and I’m just not going to do it anymore.She took away my right to write whatever I wanted and now constantly ramps up my anxiety that all I’m good for is getting her fired.
She really didn’t have the right to shut down for eight years, but I let her. It’s because I’m emotionally intelligent enough to know why she’s an avoidant attachment style, and she’s not emotionally intelligent enough to deal with it, nor my anxious attachment style on top of it. An anxious attachment style is not bad, per se. It’s bad when people talk to you and you don’t believe them, worrying yourself to death, anyway. This is what I’ve done because she keeps her trap shut and doesn’t give me anything to calm me down. I’ll give you a for-instance. If I say to Zac, “hey, you seem distant. Did I do something wrong?,” he’ll say he’s been slammed and he’s sorry. Now, I can choose to believe that he’s hiding something or not. If I spiral out, that’s on me. He told me what he thinks, and I’m undermining him by not believing what he says.
But you can’t do that with an avoidant attachment style because if they’re being avoidant, they won’t even give you words like, “no, we’re okay. I’ve just been slammed.” For an avoidant personallity if they say them, it could be the truth or it could be a lie. You do not know because their words and actions do not matchโฆ. and they’ll leave you in that anxiety til Jesus comes or you die mad about it.
They’re reassuring you while being their avoidant selves at the same time, talking around nothing. It’s the same way that when people meet in the grocery store and say they want to get together. Good luck. God bless.
In short, without the Internet, I don’t have a life. I love her in color, but when she pulls back, I fall into a world before Columbus. I’m not in love with her, it’s just that my life becomes all gray area, all the time. It’s too much pressure and she knows it.
And the more I think about it, that might be a good thing. The jury is still out, and “the hardest part of being a lawyer is convincing 12 K-Mart clerks you’re right.” -John Grisham
It’s been a whirlwind of a few days, so tonight I am sitting in front of my computer. Not by choice, really. I need the quiet. I crave it. Tonight, though, I’m rescuing a computer that I hosed myself. I’ve only been working with partitions and drives for 30 years. One of these days, I’ll make some progress. Anyway, I run Ubuntu Cinnamon and Windows 10, but I don’t use Windows except when I want to play Skyrim, so a quarter to never. I’m not a big gamer. I’m interested in how computers work and I know what I’m doing all the way up until I don’t. The best thing ever is cloud storage, because I don’t spend much time on anything. I reformat the whole thing and start over.
Today I thought I wouldn’t have to. I used timeshift to back up my hard drive in case I hated what I was installing (Kubuntu, to try out KDE Plasma), which is like Time Machine on a Mac. I thought I had a complete copy of everything. Turns out I do, but the version I restored the drive from was not the same, so the files didn’t overwrite properly. That means I was trying to boot into two versions of linux at once. Guess what? It didn’t work. I said “fuck” a lot and then got back to it. Linux gonna linux, but Wes Borg was right. Every OS sucks in its own particular way. Like in relationships, you just have to decide which disk flags you’re going to ignore. That was a little partition manager humor for you there.
For 90% of you, I can’t explain the joke without you falling asleep. Just nod and laugh. I change topics a lot. Lean in.
I’m feeling punchy because I had to use DOS. That doesn’t make sense unless you’ve been a linux user for years, because I don’t know about other IT guys, but I constantly type linux commands in DOS and get way too angry at the fact that it doesn’t work. Within linux, it’s the same way. In Ubuntu, the extension for an installer is .deb, like Windows .exe. In Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS, the extension is .rpm.
I was once looking at the folder that says RPMS in the command line and still typed sudo dpkg -i *.deb. But that’s nothing compared to the number of times I’ve reinstalled drivers because something didn’t work and then discovered after much tearing of hair that it was off/unplugged. This is very, very easy to do with network printers, when the printer could be on a different floor. Because SURE AS SHIT no employee will tell you correctly whether it is on or off. Ask a server administrator how many times they’ve driven three hours to press a button. Don’t wonder why we’re dicks anymore, because that number shouldn’t even have to be greater than one, but it is.
I laughed so hard I nearly died the first time I read “Bastard Operator from Hell.” My friend Donnie and I nearly had to call an ambulance for both of us when we heard “Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie” do “Welcome to the Internet Helpdesk.” The latter is really funny because it’s what users say to us. The former is what it would be like if we could get revenge. There is always so much “don’t want to” in “can’t.” That’s because it’s learned helplessness. Why be in any way knowledgable if someone always comes to bail you out? That’s our job and it’s okay, but years and years of questions like “can you install Firefox for me?” are great. Easy. The facepalm is when the user says, “do I have to turn my computer on?” I have also had people want me to walk them through how to do something in M$ Office when their computer is at home and they’re calling from the car. Even if I could explain it without you doing it while I’m talking, how would you ever retain that information? You’ll call back.
Being a woman in IT Support is very hard. I mean, it’s hard anyway because it’s soul sucking to watch people be that stupid that consistently. I wouldn’t sound like such a dickhead if the problem wasn’t so dire. But it’s worse for me because there are simply some people who refuse to believe I know something about computers. Some days they’re right. ๐ (Reminds me of an overhead voice at the Spy Museum that says “you’ll have to survive on your wits.” I turned around and said, “grrrrrrrrl, we fucked up now. I’m like Josh and Toby from The West Wing. If I miss wheels up and Donna wasn’t with me I’d have to buy a house.) Though I’m a bit spacey at times because I’ve forgotten more than I’ll ever know about computers, if you got a problem, yo I’ll solve it. I have managed the impossible with data recovery more than onceโฆโฆ as well as doing a lot of other people’s work for them because they just don’t want to do it. I understand if it’s a technical issue with the operating system. But when your entire job is putting courses online and you try to pass it off on IT because you have a technical issue every 30 minutes because you won’t learn anything about the software you’re PAID TO USE, that adds up, especially when the questions are about where buttons are laid out and you’ve helped them eight times that day. It’s the equivalent of getting frustrated and going to the bathroom at school to take a break. And you can feel guilt free about it becaue it’s not a problem with you. It’s a problem with your computer.
At other times, things spiral because people aren’t thinking. Their computer doesn’t work, and the electricity is out. Or they’ve plugged the power strip into itself instead of the wall (yes, really. I figured it out over the phone, but it took 45 minutes because I never would have assumed to check something like that. He said it was plugged in, and there weren’t camera phones back then.) It’s gotten a lot easier with remote desktop and the fact that when I ask people for pictures or screenshots, they can do that on their phones. Most people don’t know how to use screenshot programs on a PC, but they can do it on an iPhone.
Even iPhones have their issues, though. One of the professors I worked with couldn’t get her iPhone to play music in the classroom. She called IT, but the only problem was that the aux cable didn’t fit through the case.
When you get into web development, two things about that. The first is that people tell you they only want you to do the design, but they have a million changes to add in terms of copy even though I’ve set it up where they don’t have to use HTML tags at all (a content management system like WordPress). They don’t want to manage their web site, they want you to do it. They’re no good at computers. They’re making $150,000 a year to learn that kind of software, because sure as shit the person that asked me to make said web site is going to be “in charge of social media.”
The second is that web sites are like art. Everyone wants the art, no one wants to pay for it. You can design the most fabulous site in the entire world, and they’ll tell you that. Many times. You give them the bill, and it’s the shittiest web site they’ve ever seen. Plus, friends and acquaintances won’t think anything of asking you for hours and hours of coding for the “exposure.”
I would not like to work for more people that don’t want to pay me, and there’s an “Argo” quote for every occasion. I’m paraphrasing Lester, but “exposure ain’t worth the buffalo shit on a nickel.”
The other thing is that when people ask you to make a web site, you’ll give them a flat fee for the code. But they’ll call you every time they have a change for the next ten years and get angry if you say it’s $40/hr. They want you to do it for free, forever.
And now you know why I have such a hell of a time as a cook. There are no Karens there.
Stories That Are All True 