I’ve been watching YouTube for the last few hours, and I have discovered some amazing things. The first was a show about drumming. They’d take a drummer from one genre and just throw them into another. My favorite was a professor of jazz percussion at Juilliard that got “Enter Sandman.” You get to listen to it one time without the drum track so you can think about what you want to do.
But I start watching YouTube and invariably I want to start creating for the web instead of watching other people do it. I was also thinking about “getting to tell Beyonce who I am,” and how arrogant that must sound. I went to The High School for Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, Texas and so did she. However, I left either one or two years before she got there. Had I graduated from HSPVA, I would have seen her every weekday for the maybe year and a half she was at PVA. She did not graduate there. Not graduating from HSPVA works out better for some than others.
So, by telling her who I am, I mean I could walk up to her right this minute and we’d have the best conversation because we know SO MANY people in common. For instance, one of the choir directors at HSPVA while we were there, Rob Seible, was my choir director at Bering UMC. That is just one example out of many. It would not be interesting to me to talk to Beyonce because of her fame, because I’ve done show choir. I was over it before it began. I am very happy to let her do her thing, and I honestly believe she would rather talk about HSPVA than how awesome she is for the thousandth time (not that she is not awesome).
I could walk up to Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) and tell him that I had Doc Morgan for Jazz II and he would instantly smile. I am not sure that Matt and I have any friends in common because I believe he’s a little too much younger for our paths to overlap. That being said, HSPVA becomes quite a fraternity because there’s only a handful of schools like it.
In thinking about that, it started me down the road of “if you could talk to other famous people, what would you ask them?” It started out as a thought exercise in my head because I think I ask good questions. And, God forbid I have an unexpressed thought……..
John Brennan, former director of CIA
What’s a story from University of Cairo that’s not in “Undaunted?” It can be off the record if there’s hashish in it. (That was the most entertaining part of the book…….. not sure why he decided to come back from Egypt, because the way he described his life sounded like perfection to me.)
Margaret Cho
Tell me about all the queer people that have come up to you and said that you helped them through their childhood.
Ellen Degeneres
What is wrong with you? Life is so unfair when you have 370 million dollars and lack personal responsibility. The next stage for you is not “old, mean, and gay” because I have practically cornered the market. The next stage for you is to reflect on why you’re surprised your career is ending this way. You have never taken responsibility when the buck stopped with you, and then you blamed it on Hollywood. Trying to compare it to getting fired for Ellen is atrocious. You were not responsible for being gay, but you were damn sure responsible for your staff. No one “threw you away again.” You fired yourself.
Bill Gates
I don’t really have a question so much as an observation. How is it possible to love and hate you so much simultaneously? Windows is getting worse, but the world needs more people with money like you. The Gates Foundation is terrific.
Jose Andres
When did you hear about Tony? Who called and what time was it? Do you remember where you were standing?
Who are your guys? What’s your last meal?
What’s your favorite station? Who’s the best chef you ever had? What did they sound like? Do you know how to do pastry or do you hate it like the rest of us?
What’s your favorite brand of gin? (I once had a housemate who worked for him and he said that was Jose’s favorite.)
Anderson Cooper
Can we cook sometime? I think I can help you with your sensory issues.
Harry Wales
How are you doing? Not in that fake, American way or that fake, British way. Seriously. Level with me. How are you?
Kamala Harris
Is Lindsay behaving herself? (Harris: wait. You’re Lindsay’s sister?!)
Eminem
You talk a lot about “blowin’ ’em off and keep goin.’ How does one actually do that? What gave you the self confidence to say that your voice was your own?
Rachel Maddow
Do you think if we got out our high school pictures, we’d be wearing the same clothes? (Having walked up to her wearing the same clothes she’s wearing currently because have you ever seen us in the same room? Kidding. People confuse me a lot with her because we’re both queer and have brown hair…….. Like they confused me with kd lang as well.)
Chris Hayes
Every time I think of you I say Chris Matthews first. Do you also have that problem? Yes, uh-huh. Rachel and I do look alike. Thank you.
There needs to be an overhaul of #dailyprompt on WordPress, because not being able to use it cuts you off from the WordPress community. I got more exposure from #dailyprompt and #dailyprompt-x than I have from tagging anything else. That’s because you’re more likely to appear in people’s feeds because they have it- people have to go looking for things like “friendships,” “relationships,” and “CIA.” And now I’m really laughing hard because to a new reader, this must look horribly confusing and I think it’s better to just leave it.
If you only have dailyprompt-x for so many days, and then you just start reusing them, eventually, you can’t answer them anymore. It doesn’t matter to me that it’s an old prompt. I am never starting from the same place on a different day, especially with 365 days in between. It also reinforces using the Jetpack app, which I have noticed they like reminding you to use it a lot…… So make it easier, Matt (Mullenweg, owner of Automattic). It creates a habit, and literally the only habit I have. Now, I’m feeling a bit weird at committing to write every day and I somehow have to think of it myself? Like I’m a creative writer? This is bullshit.
I hope I’m kidding…………..
I have gotten so used to rolling over, picking up my tablet, and seeing what the prompt is- then taking a few minutes to think about it while I get myself together- and writing everything in one shot.
One of the funniest things I’ve ever gotten is that the prompt came out at midnight and by 12:30 AM I had a fully functioning essay ripping Evangelicals a new one; a reader said, “whoa. You are good at this.” How did he know I was good at it? Daily prompt tag.
I write a lot faster when I feel passionately about something, and a writing prompt doesn’t have to be followed strictly. You receive the idea, and whatever comes up, comes up. If the prompt is about a time in my life when I felt embarrassed and it was on a fishing trip so my ADHD brain jumps to everything I know about fish, it’s still valid because I was still prompted.
Today’s is “topics I’d like to discuss.”
And I’m all like, “this web site is always about me. What about them?”
I will talk to anyone about anything, but I like listening to subject matter experts. That’s why living in Washington is so important to me. One of the best nights I’ve ever had socializing in Silver Spring was stopping into a restaurant on a whim (All Set for some Sriracha Cheddar biscuits. If Red Lobster closes, Silver Spring is going to be okay). I started talking to the man next to me and he was president of the National Black Journalism Association. So, I got to hear about what he does and how he does it. Those are the conversations I treasure because I am all about self-improvement and learning from people who are better than me at what they do. I think that people think I’m obsessed with fame, but they don’t see Tim Ferris that way.
There’s a difference between wanting fame and wanting success.
Not only that, I’m not impressed by anyone, ever. I find that if I get impressed, I won’t speak at all. The inverse is also true. The more that you treat people like you’re impressed, the less they want to get to know you because you’re somehow weirdly obsessed with them. I got my own taste of that when I realized that I did not want to date a fan. Since I have mentioned that Supergrover started as a fan, I feel like I have to specifically say I’m not referring to her.
I went on a date with a woman who’d read me and she grilled me over the coals. It felt like one would feel when they show up to a party and get served because of the bait and switch. I will give you a for-instance. If I said on my blog that I was married three years ago, then why am I not married now? Fair. But it just kept getting deeper and deeper, like she was trying to catch me in a lie and there was some kind of “gotcha” somewhere. She didn’t do anything specifically wrong, per se. I’ll just never forget the feeling of being on the witness stand and not being able to give any right answers. If they didn’t match up exactly to what I’d written months ago, then I was a liar……. When time had gone by and I was in a different mindset and god knows what I was thinking while I was writing that day…….. You get my drift.
Blog entries are just a snapshot of my day, and you can see it in my feelings between entries, because some entries are diametrically opposed. To me it is a way of saying to the world “yes, she can be taught.” I don’t feel like I am now lying, I feel like someone is holding me to the past. My blog is helpful to me because I can see where I need to grow and adjust. It is not useful to have people around me that do not see it as a living document. Everything is being amended to reflect progress.
It’s also about accountability. I can’t go back and cover up my past, but I can read it to change my future. It’s scary to go back and look at what you’ve said in light of what it did and didn’t do for you, and that’s what happens when I go back and read an entry from even last year or the year before. It doesn’t take five years for things to change. It doesn’t even take one. The blog changes every single day not because I’m making things up, but because I make it my business to think about how I can improve my relationships and get clarity on my life.
However, I made a decision to paint myself as an unreliable narrator because I am. I have given you everything you need to know about why I am an unreliable narrator, and that mostly has to do with the fact that narration is unreliable in and of itself. It’s harder to take seriously when that person is documented as having mental health issues.
I am not trying to be anything I’m not. Interesting, yes. But an expert? No. I’m also still laughing about “who peer reviews you?” Because if there was a peer review for bloggers back in the day, it was all of us commenting on each other’s posts. People don’t comment now. They acknowledge. It’s the difference between Facebook and Reddit. Both have ways of one-tap recognition, but redittors are not known for being terse. Reading people’s writing on Reddit is sometimes better than reading a novel…… As long as you don’t mind looking through a lot of spam and porn to find actual intelligence. Reddit is the best of us because it’s the worst of us….. Just like we loved “The Real World” when it stopped being polite, and started getting real.
For instance, I posted on r/washingtondc about the beauty of Washington and how you should stop and take a look because it’s worth it, etc. Basically using lines I’ve used with you guys about DC before. All of the sudden, I had almost 300 upvotes along with a cacophony of where’s hiking? Where’s biking? What are you talking about?” People came out of the woodwork saying “here’s where to rent a boat,” here’s where to hike/bike, here’s the good lakes, etc.
And when you’re in r/washingtondc, you do not dare mention Virginia or Maryland. There are places to do all of these things inside the city if you are not expecting the Columbia River Gorge dumped into a major metropolitan area, which is what most of the people from Seattle seemed to be so fucking mad about. Like “Rock Creek Park is not hiking…. When I was a hiker…. :::dramatic flare:::
Sit your jack ass down.
I realize that this is not The Gorge, but Rock Creek Park does have good hiking, and I think that Great Falls is just as beautiful as anything I’ve seen on the West Coast. Just because it’s a little different doesn’t make it less divine. Sailing on the Chesapeake is just as spiritually satisfying as driving out The Gorge.
I’m blessed that I’ve gotten to live on all three coasts in the US, because I’ve lived in Houston/Galveston as well. I also know that I am an Oregonian, not a Californian. I am not that kind of “West Coast.” Portland is full of old white lesbians that nine times out of ten look something like Paul McCartney. I fit right in.
Oregonians and Californians have a tense relationship, because basically when California started becoming expensive, Portland became the new hot place to live. Oregonians are gatekeepers, most of whom think should have closed when they came in. I am guilty of a little bit of that because it made rent skyrocket dramatically. I lived in Portland when it was the right time for someone my age to do that, but I’m glad I left. It’s not just that I’m a different person, it’s that Portland is a different city. If I moved back, Portland would remind me of DC and not the other way around in terms of the way the city is more focused on business and industry, less on being the place where “young people go to retire.”
Maryland’s suburbs do not remind me of Oregon, but Virginia’s do. There are lots of pockets that look like Lake Oswego, Beaverton, etc. On the Maryland side, the population is too dense to spread out like that. Zac’s neighborhood is a perfect example of what we don’t do here in MD, because it’s a townhome community backed up to a nature preserve. It looks very much like many of the houses I visited in Oregon. It’s not a beauty contest to me. Both cities have a lot to offer, I just think Washington has more because of the transit infrastructure (I would be broke trying to get around Portland or Houston). I don’t wake up every day and think, “God, The District is gorgeous, but it’s not Oregon.”
I’m not always on Reddit.
Here’s my favorite quote so far:
That morning was when I began to invent my own personal version of shorthand, which I would continue to use throughout my career. It was so secure and so covert that even I couldnโt make out its meaning sometimes.
I gravitated toward her style in some ways because it’s reminiscent of mine. Or mine is reminiscent of hers, but I started writing before I started reading her books. So, chicken and egg debate on who sounds like whom. I know I sound like her when I write about intelligence because she’s my touchstone on how to do that. But as a general rule, both she and Tony write like me because their books and my blog are both memoirs. Mine is just written paragraphs at a time.
Memoirs are one-sided, always. People get very angry about them. Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Harry Wales are the three recent memoirs that have caused the most scandal, but all memoirs are written with one person’s story in mind- the writer’s. I keep memoirists in my head all day long because I only have a few people giving me blowback at any given time, not a nation or a kingdom.
I don’t think I could cause an international incident with my blog, but give it time……. Eyeroll.
If I could pick a writer that I would like to spend a day with, learning their secrets, it would be Vladimir Zelenskyy. I’ve thought he was brilliant since I saw “Servant of the People” on Netflix, so I know that we are kindred spirits. This is because he’s also interested in writing, comedy, political affairs, satire, etc. I believe I would need a translator, but if I were to meet Zelenskyy at all, I would FIND a translator. There’s got to be a Yellow Pages in this house somewhere, damn.
The other thing I learned this week that I’m going to have to tease Jonna about the next time I see her is that I’ve already found a typo. She called it “Silver Springs.” I kidded her that one day I’d write something as good as hers and she said, “it’s good you’re still workin’ on that.” Every time I hear her say it in my head, I fall over laughing. It was the right way to tease a writer…. Because I like talking to subject matter experts. It means a lot to me that we can joke about craft, and more importantly, I know that Jonna has lived in my little town.
The funniest gag in the first episode of “SOTP” for me was the newly elected president saying he needed to stop by the mall for a CD for his niece on the way to work because it’s her birthday. His staff offers to do it for him so he can get to work. He agrees and the scene ends.
Later, the secret service show up with the band, because as they explained, they could not find the CD.
And on that note, it’s time to go and make coffee…….. Because I just heard the pipes.
What place in the world do you never want to visit? Why?
I’m really sorry, China. I just don’t want to control my mouth to that degree. I like the freedom to say what I want, and I cannot fathom a world in which I wouldn’t say something that pissed off the Chinese government. I am not saying that it is not beautiful, or that the people aren’t wonderful. I am saying that I have a habit of writing checks with my mouth that my ass can’t cash now, so why would I invite China to be able to imprison me?
It’s not that I don’t want to see the land, meet the people, eat the food, and experience the culture. There is nothing wrong with China in terms of any of these things. I do not ever want to put myself in the position of having to answer to a totalitarian government. I am dangerous when I am interested in international affairs, anyway. I talk so much shit about China that if there is a three letter agency watching me through my microwave, I should be fucking grateful. If China is in the room, I want my people in there, too. However, I draw the line at talking smack about China on my web site and then having to ask my government to come rescue my dumb ass, because how in the world did I not know my blog could get me in trouble? Come on, now.
This was driven home to me when one of my favorite YouTubers was ridden out of China on a rail. The next step was jail. He escaped to Hong Kong, then to the US. It was a nightmare. Just because I make videos in people’s minds doesn’t make me different from him. It makes me easy to document, because the document is right here. They could literally put me in jail with copy and paste.
I am not letting them CTRL-C and CTRL-V my life. And if there was no NSA, there would not be Americans also monitoring my criticism of them to make sure it falls under the first Amendment. I can be protected from here. I cannot be protected outside the United States if I have broken a law here, but I would certainly be rescued if I broke a law in China. That’s why CIA is allowed to do what they do. We don’t punish them for breaking laws in other countries. We punish them for breaking laws in ours. If you’re a CIA operative breaking American laws, you will be tried. The FBI will celebrate their victory with relish. There’s too much fire in the belly after people like Aldrich Aames and Robert Hanssen. They will go Chuck Norris on you in a heartbeat. Good luck. God bless.
Therefore, the same rule applies to Americans who break other countries laws without breaking any of ours. For instance, the kids who wandered over the border into North Korea. Clinton got them out through diplomacy, but there are many other stories that don’t make the news because in order to get them out of the country, there has to be an ex-fil and talking about it in the press would give the enemy too much information for the operation to be a success.
CIA gets a bad rap, and I am not here to tell you it is undeserved. But, I am here to tell you that if you’re fucked overseas, they’re the only friends you’ve got. Get on board or stay where you are. Your choice.
I bet in those situations, it’s pretty fucking easy, don’t you think?
So, if worse turned to worst, I’d be grateful. But, I feel like I should just be smart, and save the government taxpayer dollars and legwork.
So, I read my last entry and it was so full of typos that I thought I’d gone stupid for a secondโฆ. and then I realized, noโฆ. I am, in fact, blind as a bat. I had the font size on my tablet turned down too low in my editor, and I didn’t switch spell-checking on. So, obviously I am a genius and you need my mind.
I just got finished making supper. I didn’t know what I wanted, so I went for my go-to. Pancakes. This time, I didn’t stuff them with anything except milled flax, cinnamon, and Mexican vanilla. Normally, I add fruit and nuts, things like that. The fruit and nut ones make great peanut butter sandwiches. If you make them too thick, you can always cut them lengthwise. In fact, a couple of my pancakes look like they have bites taken out of them. This is untrue. I tore pieces off and ate them. I was already full, but I didn’t have any Tupperware, so I was trying to fit them into sandwich bags.
Which reminds me of the time I went to an Indian restaurant and ordered peshwari naan (I think that’s the one with raisins and other fruit.). It was to-go, and I was talking to the hostess. I said that peshwari naan was really good with peanut butter, and she looked at me like I was everything wrong with white people.
Fair.
However, now the house is steeped in a brown butter aroma that I haven’t smelled in a very long time. We used to make a brown butter vinaigrette at Tapalaya, and it’s a scent that takes me right back to that particular kitchen. Kinkaid says his recipe for bourbon maple syrup, which went on our fried chicken, dies with him. No the hell it won’t. I will stand over the stove for a week until I get it. I know what it tastes like ’cause I’ve made it. It’s just a matter of asking Zac for some bourbon to make it. ๐ (I should ask him for some scotch, too, because I’ve never made butterscotch from scratchโฆโฆ These are two things that would probably appeal to his appetite, so a shot or two is probably not out of line. ๐
Kinkaid was an awesome chef, and any memory that takes me back to him is a good one.
But I make big pancakes. The best. No one can make better pancakes than me. I’m here to make America plate again.
Yes, I am making fun of the former president, but for real tho. You don’t run a brunch program for years on end and get out of there unable to make anything breakfast-wiseโฆ.. except an omelette. It’s not because I don’t want to learn, it’s because I’ve never worked at a breakfast place that had them on the menu. A correct French omelette takes being in a restaurant because you don’t learn how to make them in a weekend. It’s different when you make a hundred a day. The closest I’ve ever gotten to an omelette was three eggs that looked like a broken waffle cone. But even that is progress.
It’s why if I could meet Anthony Bourdain, if it was a thing that were possible, the only thing I would ask him is “could you teach me how to make an omelette?” You don’t learn things about cooks by talking to them. You learn things by cooking with them. Everything about them comes out when they teach technique. Plus, it’s just the thing about doing an activity together makes you connect more.
When I miss him, I turn on the audiobook of “Kitchen Confidential.” I start to cry and turn it back off. It takes about 30 seconds.
To switch to another favorite chef, Gordon Ramsey, he had an interesting idea on his episode of Last Meal (YouTube, Mythical Kitchen). He said that the future of cooking is buying and trading chefs all over the world like professional footballers. The host asked him if there was anyone he’d want to slide tackle, and he said, “I did. David.” I laughed so hard I nearly fell off my bed, because the “Becks” is implied.
Gordon is who he is. He’s a rough, tough footballer who had his career taken from him at a young age due to an injury. But now those injuries are worth 17 Michelin stars. Not bad for a rookieโฆโฆโฆ. who could have played Roy Kent no notes.
Here’s the thing about being a cook. You have no friends and no family beyond the kitchen, because it takes over your whole life. This is because we work while other people play. We don’t fit in with the rest of the world who thinks there’s something really wrong with you if you don’t wake up before noon. You get lots of “it’s nice to see you finally showed up to something.” Bitch, I haven’t seen my mother for Christmas in eight years.
The thing about Bourdain, though, is that there’s so much hate for him in the cooking community because mental health isn’t valid. Someone in my line cook group actually said “shame on him.”
My reply was, “you know, Anthony Bourdain is never going to hear what you said, but your friends in this group will. And now they know exactly how you feel about depression and mental health, so they know not to come to you.”
This is why people die.
You’re fine with bipolar as long as we never seem depressed or manic.
You’re fine with ADHD until you can’t track with us, and then we’re stupid, because neurotypicals think, “that’s just the way it is.” ADHD has no reference and does not give a flying fuck about the way things are. You’ll struggle in school as much as you do at work, except no one at work likes you enough to learn your communication style and how to get what they want out of you. It is all on me, all the time, to know what is expected of me because “these are things all people know.”
You’re fine with autistic people until meltdown and burnout, because you don’t understand the inconsistency in our energy levels, or demand avoidance, or literally being confused about anything because the instructions are so clearโฆโฆ. to a neurotypical brain.
I am not saying that I am not responsible for anything. Just because my brain works differently than yours, that does not mean I get a free pass on doing stupid shit. However, it does mean that people will get frustrated with you very, very fast.
No one wants to work with Sheldon from “Big Bang Theory” or Sam from “Atypical.” We ask too many questions. We want logic to be able to buy in. It’s logic that not many coworkers have. So, you become flaky, stupid, and whatever else choice words the boss has for you when they’ve reached the end of their ability to communicate with you.
It’s schoolyard tactics. The best way to deal with the neurodivergent kids is to leave them alone, like Special Ed is catching. Neurotypicals think that neurodivergents are annoying af, but they also hate HR, so they might be nicer to you at work than they would be at home.
An autistic person is always going to have a fairly equal spread among good evaluations and bad ones, because our energy fluctuates so much. Everyone says, “why can’t you perform like this every single day?” There are a thousand reasons why, and none of them are valid to a neurotypical who sees you using your disability as an excuse.
Therefore, I like solitary work. Being with coworkers is often downright embarrassing because when they learn I’m neurodivergent, their voices take on a different tone. I’ve never told anyone at work that I was autistic, because I didn’t know I should. It’s only been within the last year or so that I’ve learned so muchโฆ.. mostly because my Adderrall only works half the time at keeping my ADHD symptoms managed, so it cannot be the whole answer.
In some ways, I think it is harder to be low needs autistic than high. People recognize autism when the person has no ability to social mask. They put up with meltdown and burnout because that’s what an autistic person does.
It is very hard to tell that autism does the same thing to people who are low needs. It’s not that we don’t have as big a problem, it’s that we’ve learned to cover it up because most people think we’re weird. You do what you have to get by.
I feel particularly discombobulated most of the time because it depends on which processing disorder is driving the bus and how much energy I have. I absolutely can be an ADHD hyperactive mess (talking, stimming), and at other times I struggle to get out of bed.
All autistic people are white knuckling it at work, which is why my favorite YouTube psychologist has three or four degrees and loses jobs all the time. Money and autism are not related. You can have the highest paying job in the world, but so much depends on your reputation.
My big thing is calling an impromptu meeting. I am the type person that cannot return to a thought. So, if I am interrupted, I basically have to start from scratch because I cannot go in the same direction anymore- it’s lost.
I don’t want to socialize at work, either, because I’ve learned over time that it gives your coworkers more ammunition against you if you tell them anything with which you struggle. Office politics determine job security, not necessarily performanceโฆโฆ and with an autistic person, performance is relative. With an allistic person, “it’s just how things are. You can’t hack it, and we know it.”
The bitch of it is that I have really high self-esteem, and a lot of confidence. I am not raking myself over the coals, this has been my job history and that of many, many others.
Are you patriotic? What does being patriotic mean to you?
I am extremely patriotic, but there’s a lot of this country who wouldn’t see it that way. Al Franken wrote about my kind of patriotism in “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right” (one of my favorite books since 2003, and if I were you I’d get the audiobook because he reads it). I’d thought something like this for a very long time, he just said it more eloquently than I could. I’ll paraphrase him because I don’t have a copy of the book anymore.
He said that Republicans seem to love America like children. To criticize anything means that you’re not a good American because everything America does is good and right. Democrats seem to love America like adults, that we’re calling out bad behavior that needs to be changed. We can think we live in a pretty great country and also admit there are problems. It’s costing us, because we argue like rabbis.
You can tell the difference by the types of media we watch. Both MSNBC and I will call out the president when they deserve it. Fox News viewers think that every Republican is perfectly perfect in every way, as evidenced by the fact that they’re still fuming about Hunter Biden, the 2016 election being stolen, and classified documents on a small scale.
Biden and Pence both had a few, both gave them back- no harm, no foul. At no time did they try to flush them down a toilet or hide them in the bathroom. Where the cult part comes in is that everyone else in the Republican Party has become a persona non grata because apparently Trump is the only one capable of running the country and they’re choosing to ignore 91 indictments (so far). I called him a bunch of names the other day, and I left out “rapist.” The E. Jean Caroll case is just one more thing that Republicans will sweep under the rug, because the party has one message. It’s simple, and that’s how they win.
Republicans are not interested in subtlety or nuance, which is why soundbites work on them, and why they’re in lockstep instead of working out issues amongst themselves. Seriously, when was the last time you ever saw a Republican in the media arguing about a plan for anything? When do they contribute to the discussion at all? Even if there was no bipartisanship, I would still expect ideas to originate on both sides. The plan for the last, I don’t know, 30 years? has been that the Republicans will say no to everything the Democrats put forth without ever putting anything on the table of their own. Their only job is to stonewall.
Republicans, you have to ask yourselves if this is really what you want from a political party. You have absolutely no voice in Congress, because the people you elect are just running out the clock. They don’t give a shit about you. If they did, your concerns would be on the floor of the House and Senate as well…… because Republicans would have actually come up with something on their own. You think you have elected “the best and the brightest,” when really it’s “the petulant and the indolent.”
Yes, part of it is laziness. Why wouldn’t it be if you’re only there to say “no?” You should wonder what they’re doing with all that free time instead of their own policies.
Name five Republicans you think are actually capable of running the country that are in the line of succession. “Designated Survivor” was a hyped up TV show, but the title absolutely is a real thing during the State of the Union. Name a Republican you’d want in that spot should disaster happen. I can think of one person, and that’s because the Republicans don’t like her, either. The Republicans are going to rue the day they kicked Mary Cheney out of their little cult.
I could also put up with Mitt Romney (keeping in mind that this is a fictional exercise), because he’s not as conservative as he had to be in order to get elected president. I really thought we were going to get universal health care back then, because it was such a raging success in Massachusetts, and he was the governor through all of it.
To be perfectly frank, the most surprising part of the rise of Trump is how many well-respected Republicans drank the Kool-Aid as fast as the ones who’s already earned my Molly Ivins death stare.
I have faith in two people out of a cast of hundreds, and neither of them will ever be elected again, unless Mary Cheney becomes a Democrat, and I’m serious because she can have a vote in Congress and that’s great. But Independents rarely win because they need the funding of the party. If nothing else, I hope she does it because she’s way, way more conservative than I am, but we need everyone who has had their blinders ripped off on our side, and I mean everyone. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” I think that was Abraham Lincoln, who could speak in complete sentences and managed to be a good Republican in spite of it.
The Democrats have a long history of racism, and I feel that now we’re the only ones who are struggling with it. Everyone else wants to sweep it under the rug because of course they do. No one wants to acknowledge that there’s an equal shot we’ll end up reflecting “The Handmaid’s Tale” as stumbling toward Panem….. and I am not Jennifer Lawrence.
This is because systemic racism and wanting to change it is a very, very violent proposition in this country, but luckily it’s a minority. It has just gotten more popular to be openly racist and violent because the Republicans have been quietly supporting the system until Trump came along and it wasn’t so quiet anymore.
I do not know what to think of this for my country, because on one hand, it’s terrible and I wish I had the power to turn off the neckbands that seem like jewelry until they make your head explode…. which is the problem entirely. Trump has his entire base by the short and curlies without a single shred of evidence he can actually do the fucking job.
Democrats are tasked with trying to keep the country together so that Trump doesn’t get a second shot at trying to become Hitler. Again, I do not believe that Trump is Adolf Hitler in his later years. I just believe that Trump has learned a lot about fascism from him (see also Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping). I don’t know if he’s actually read “Mein Kampf” or not, but he certainly loves politicians who’ve taken the same route that book laid out. Otherwise, how would a know-nothing idiot be able to get people to follow him?
By ignoring all the laws and congressional procedures and focusing on telling people that their problems were Mexicans and Arabs….. only the two cultures I’ve found to be the most welcoming. I would love to go to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria (particularly because Damascus is meaningful to me for Biblical reasons), and even Saudi Arabia (because I want to see where Franklin lived and worked, not that I’m interested in Saudi itself).
That’s because I know that for the average Arab, when I showed up at their house they would literally feed me until I exploded and then ask why I didn’t eat that much. Here, have some pie. I am not worried about what their government thinks of me, because I’m probably not going to meet them personally. If I’m going to Iran, I hope it’s to meet a Persian grandmother who will pass on her secrets because it won’t get back to her friends that I have her recipe and they don’t. ๐
I’m bad at transitions, and I would still move to Mexico in a heartbeat. My sister and brother-in-law feel the same way. Lindsay and I have both been to Enseรฑada, and she and Matt go to Mexico City all the time, one of their favorite cities in the world. It would actually be a good move for me to go to Mexico, because I think I could make more of my inheritance there than I could here. However, I would have to rent because only Mexicans by blood/birth have the right to purchase property. It’s similar to Hawaii, where you can only get a 99 year lease. What I know for sure is that I would freak out at the transition at first, but the pace of life is so different that I might adjust easier. Who knows? What I do know is that I already know enough Spanish to have simple conversations, and the more I spend in immersion, the more I remember from past trips and high school Spanish.
I am so grateful to my church in Sugar Land when I was a teenager, because if we hadn’t moved there, I wouldn’t speak Spanish nearly as well as I do (which even that much makes me feel like a toddler, but it’ll get better). This is because I took my first year of Spanish at HSPVA, and my second year at Clements. Loved one teacher, hated the other. I won’t say which was which. Then, in the summer between PVA and Clements, I went on a mission trip to Reynosa (our hotel was in McAllen). Because I’d just come out of first year Spanish, being immersed reminded me of Matthew and Bryn, who were and/or are lifeguards (and siblings, so that’s why it sounds the same coming from both of them). This is because it was a very short leap from a swim coach saying “do your bubbles… do your bubbles” to “hope you don’t drown.”
By the time I came back from Mexico, I was sold. I could do this whole Spanish thing. Interestingly enough, I don’t have conversation issues in Mexico because I know that there’s no reason to write anything down. I have to dance with them what brung me. I can’t disappear into my writing personality with them.
Then I got to my second year of Spanish, where my teacher and I both hated each other. That’s because she was so frustrated by my performance, and why it went up and down. In retrospect, it’s because only half the grades given were over conversations in person. The rest was writing. I had to study Spanish for a little while to learn that what she was looking for was more formal than I’d learned in Reynosa and Progreso.
My sentence structure was all wrong, and I’m sure to some degree it still is. However, our job that week in Mexico during the summer before the first semester at Clements was to put on what we in the States would call “vacation Bible school.” Just fun activities for the kids who are so poor they don’t get much play time.
Also, I’m not an ordained minister in a major denomination who preaches every week… though I can do some stuff; I got ordained in the Church of the Latter Day Dude to do Bryn’s wedding, which ended up being very Methodist/Episcopalian while also taking out the religion aspect and tailoring it to the couple.
It absolutely worked, because it was formal enough to feel like you’d been married by someone who did their homework, when in reality the most embarrassing thing about it was having to pay for ordination instead of earn it.
This is an aside, but I think one of the reasons my church plant wasn’t a success was because of a really old tape that I didn’t think to work out in therapy when I was young. That tape is “the Methodists kicked me out, so why would anyone else want me?” It wasn’t logical because I was 15, and I did meet other Christian lesbians who were ordained. By then, I had imposter syndrome.
The only reason I had the courage to come up with an idea for a homeless ministry in Silver Spring is that I got over my fear by preaching at my church in Oregon. I have never in my life asked to preach a sermon, but I was not the same preacher at 16 that I was at 24 or 5. It all ties together, my friends. The people on the trip told me that even though I wasn’t ordained, I had to do the sermon at the closing worship service because no one else knew enough Spanish. So, the second semester at Clements was harder than the first because my teacher was so frustrated and angry that I got Cs all semester and then a 95 on the final. She called my dad in so fast.
Now, my dad wasn’t a bully to my teachers, ever, because he actually knew I was fallible……….. but at the same time, he held them accountable and never lost a thing any of them said because he’d write in his notebook throughout the meeting and have the teacher sign it if it was accurate. I really liked that because it made both my teacher and me live up to a bargain instead of a lose-lose situation…. which Spanish was, because since I’d only studied hard with a tutor who unlocked writing for me (people who know her, Nancy Wells saved my ass) it didn’t seem possible that I was capable of an A and there was no way to prove it except to give me a second exam, and for some reason she didn’t think of that. She just fumed like she knew I’d gotten away with something and I was glad there was only a couple of weeks of school left, and no more required Spanish.
I won’t let you go, I just wait to see whether I’m a priority in your life because I don’t always want to be the one that initiates contact. I don’t want to be around you if I always feel like I’m nagging to get a simple answer out of you, or afraid to contact you because I feel like I’m bothering you rather than showing care. I wait to see if you show interest when I put something out there, just receiving you if you show up. I am able to do that so easily because I’m a writer. All artists have an easier time turning their attention away from obsessing over a problem when they can get it out.
My blog is ridiculously personal because what I have learned over my entire life is that no one will be honest with you if you’re not honest with them first. It’s what art is supposed to do- it’s supposed to make you feel something. However, I do not think of your reaction as my responsibility. It is your right to state your opinion and decide whether you’re owed an apology or not, because I do believe in freedom of speech, I just have limits.
For instance, I will never get any more specific about Zac’s other partners than I have been now. The one I was talking about in a previous entry likes coffee mugs and Diet Dr Pepper, like most of America. However, they do not get to be “characters” here except in the most vague of terms because I don’t directly talk to them and I don’t write hearsay. I talk to Zac, and our relationship is completely separate and apart from anything else in his life. I feel like that’s a small reason it’s easy for us to open up to each other.
He absolutely can tell me things in confidence (about our personal relationship- I keep saying that because he’s civilian intelligence M-F and Navy Reserves intelligence in his copious amounts of spare time). I just stand next to him with a “dumb yet excited” look on my face. The thing about government agencies, no matter which one, is that they look impressive and intimidating all at once. My favorite is the black and white seal on the floor at Langley, and for a long time my desktop wallpaper was a hi-def shot of the custodian mopping it. It was a reminder to me that even though people like George Lazenby, Martin Freeman, Daniel Craig, Melissa McCarthy, Piper Perabo, and Jennifer Garner make it look exciting, at the end of the day it’s still just a regular floor.
People accuse me of being a drooling fangirl (:::stares in Lindsay and Zachary:::), but that’s impossible if you really study the history of the agency. My favorite era so far is the space race, which shows up in everything from “For All Mankind” to “The Queen’s Gambit.”
“What part of the State Department did you say you were from?”
I have no doubt that CIA is trying to stop nuclear war right now. Whether the bombs are small or large, either Russia or The Middle East will have absolutely no problem with pushing the big red button. Also, it just occurred to me. You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel. You know who doesn’t? Palestine. Listen to me when I say that Benjamin Netanyahu does not give even half a shit how many Israelis die as long as it means “beating Palestine.” Palestine might be able to handle rocket launchers, rocks, etc. It remains to be seen whether nuclear threat is on the table, I’m just saying I wouldn’t be surprised.
If nothing else, I think there’s going to be sort of a second movie like “13 Days,” where when the op is declassified the movie will show just how close Russia came to nuking the Ukraine or just how close Israel came to nuking Palestine- or just how close Iran got to figuring out how to make them on their own.
The other thing that makes the space race really interesting to me is that it wasn’t about discovery or hope or any of that Camelot bullshit. CIA was receiving legitimate chatter that the Russians’ plan after winning the space race was to put nuclear weapons on the moon. That’s why we were relentless in getting it done, why the “computers” saved our asses, why Houston is so dear to me, and Star City as well. Star City has been treating my Houstonians like warm friends for years now.
There were many, many Russians who became our assets in country, and many of them died for us, especially when Aldrich Ames gave the Russians all their names.
That did not stop private Russian citizens from helping us, because they ultimately thought they were helping Russia by stopping the Cuban Missile Crisis as well. It came down to some people who gave us Russian intelligence, and one very brave man, and no doubt the person on which “Crimson Tide” is based. The Russians were locked and loaded, and this man saved all our lives:
Thankfully, the captain didnโt have sole discretion over the launch. All three senior officers had to agree, and Vasili Arkhipov, the 36-year-old second captain and brigade chief of staff, refused to give his assent. He convinced the subโs top officers that the depth charges were indeed meant to signal B-59 to surface โ there was no other way for the US ships to communicate with the Soviet sub โ and that launching the nuclear torpedo would be a fatal mistake. The sub returned to the surface, headed away from Cuba, and steamed back toward the Soviet Union.
Thank you, Russia. We really owe you an apology for thinking you were Gene Hackman instead of Denzel Washington.
Depending on the operation (because you can’t and shouldn’t agree with all of them), it’s an apt metaphor for The Company. For instance, there have been many times that CIA has gone into a situation and rescued people exactly like the houseguests, as huge a mop job yet completely unnoticed. Case officers don’t win awards in public. On the other hand, CIA has had misstep after misstep since 1947. Trying to overthrow governments, trying to kill Castro, the government giving the torture program to CIA when it never should have happened in the first place, etc.
I don’t love CIA like the Republicans, where everything mommy and daddy says is correct
That summer was when my dad decided to leave professional ministry and just become a member at his own church, somewhere he could be anonymous. We ended up at St. Martin’s Episcopalian, which is how I got to meet George H.W. Bush and James Baker III. Because the story of how Jonna Mendez “masked up” to show Bush how their new technologies worked, I kidded her in person that we had mutual friends. And in fact, the first time I saw James Baker, it was because he was taking up way too much damn room on a pew and my stepmom told him to move over like four times. She didn’t know who he was, but it doesn’t matter. It’s church. There’s no hierarchy as much as your admin board might think there is. I have noticed from some pastors that money tends to grease the wheel. It’s not politics, it’s gratitude. It takes some real hustle when you work in a cathedral, because generally those buildings are old as shit. Renovating the pipe organ at National Cathedral is literally going to be 14 million dollars, because I looked it up on their web site. And that’s just ONE of the multimillion dollar projects they have to have going to conserve the building.
Since we’ve been talking about politics, let me make something clear. Calling it “National Cathedral” is not because it’s supported by taxpayers. It’s because so many state funerals have happened there, as well as memorial services. When it is acting in its formal capacity as the ministers who carry out those services, it ceases to be an Episcopalian congregation and turns ecumenical quickly.
In reality, what I’ve noticed over time is that it’s a bunch of social justice warriors who show up every Sunday, and they generally only have to use one part of the sanctuary for that because of course they don’t fill up the whole thing each week. It seems to have two modes, and it’s every bit as drastic a change as being a Transformerโข and being a trans person. ๐ This is because every Sunday of its life, “National Cathedral” is actually a smallish congregation named “St. Alban’s.” It’s just that sometimes thousands and thousands of people show up, like Easter comes more than once a year. My dad was particularly good at that on a smaller scale. Making an event at church that people didn’t want to miss and it didn’t matter what you believed or which church you attended. It was community building, not evangelism.
It’s funny, I’ve evangelized more to atheists than I have to anyone else, and not because I’m trying to change them. I’m trying to change their perception of me. Do you know how hard it is to get an atheist to believe you’re not part of the “What Would Jesus Bomb?” shitshow? I don’t give a shit what others believe, because as Pete Rollins so beautifully said, “A/Theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash.” (I heard Pete on “The Robcast.”)
I loved the four episodes called “Pete Rollins on God” that they’re the only four podcast episodes on my cloud drive………………….. and absolutely nothing about my rabid love for that podcast miniseries comes from the fact that when Rollins said that quote, it was one of the sexiest things I’d ever heard; he has an absolutely gorgeous Irish lilt. I could listen to him read the phone book. If you subscribe to The Robcast, all four parts are still in the archives.
I feel I have to explain something. By saying that a/theism is the greatest love story ever told, I do not mean to endorse The Crusades, colonialism, white supremacy, etc. I am saying that the question has always intrigued and eluded philosophers and therefore the argument was the only one we studied all semester in Logic I. However, it wasn’t pushing a religious agenda like you’d think in a Texas school. The first half was spent proving God exists. The second half was proving that they don’t.
It is not logically possible either way in the language with which logic is encoded. P and Q statements, all that. Basically, you believe or you don’t. To what degree is malleable, because I believe agnostic is just as valid as atheism, probably because most things in my life are a spectrum. We are not all programmed to see in black and white like Fox News.
Therefore, I cannot offend anyone with my views on God because I am giving the most pious and the most godless freedom to be them. It’s all valid, because I didn’t say that God does or does not exist, because I can’t remember how to do it now, but I used to be able to write it out like math. If my friend Jesse sees this, I’m sure he could tell me, because his dad taught in the same department as my professor. I’m betting Jesse picked up a thing or two about philosophy and the symbols to express it.
Atheists also cannot argue with gathering together for community. To have someone to lean on when you’re in a crisis or whether you’re protesting the Iraq war…. which I did. Many times. If I had been in Portland during those marches, I certainly would have been gassed. That’s because protesting in Portland is, a lot of the time, how we socialize as a church. We have to have breaks between the chants, catching our breaths because we are also walking. That’s when discussion turns to things like Angela’s mom, Grant’s child, Amy’s granddaughter. I don’t know that it helps God to know that I’m praying for them, but it certainly makes me spend time empathizing with what they’re going through. If I can analyze what the problem is while I’m praying, I can help support people through it…….. because that’s how prayer works.
I learned all this when a friend checked herself into rehab and I went apeshit because we were so close. I wanted to be there at every family day, every open meeting, etc. At first it was because I was worried about her. Then, it was “this is better than church.” On the serious. It’s sort of like being at a Quaker meeting, it seems, because there are lots of “sermonettes” and an unshakable commitment to God.
AA is not religious at all. If you don’t have a God, find one. What you need is a higher power, not evangelism, especially if you weren’t religious before. No, what you need is something to get your ego out of the way. You might not be able to believe in a god or gods, but you can believe in your child being your higher power. Your spouse. Your parents and siblings, your co-workers, basically everyone in your life who is trying to tell you that the common denominator is you. If you can’t believe in those things because you’re single, I don’t care if your God is Dr Pepper and donuts.
“Look, I don’t want to get into a semantic argument, I just want the protein.”
That’s because when you acknowledge that you are not the center of the universe and just a piece of it, you become startlingly aware of just how much you’ve touched other people’s lives and how makes you sick to your stomach.
Flat out AA does a better job of healing people than church. FLAT OUT. There is no way for a church to dig that deep with you unless they’re really committed to it. I know you see AA meetings at churches all the time, but that’s because they rent the room in the church so people who aren’t members don’t feel uncomfortable. The only time I’ve really dug deep with other parishioners is when we did a six week grief course together. No one had died, I was just in grief because I’d broken up with Kathleen and moved, trauma jointly and severally. And in fact, most of us were there for divorce support.
It’s where politics fades away, and how we’d solve a lot of problems in this country. If we stopped training ourselves to only show our pretty parts on social media, it will cut down on the amount of time people spend doing it in real life. I honestly think that life has imitated art, because we don’t make time for care and connection in groups. We make time to sit on the couch and look at our friends without checking in. Time goes by and you haven’t responded to anything they’ve sent, because you’re neurodivergent or just busy or whatever the case may be. And then it becomes the guilt of not responding rather than just saying “you haven’t fallen off my priority list. I just don’t have time right now because for as much as I adore you, my X has to take precedence.”
I do not object to those words in the slightest, but I’ll run pretty fast if you don’t get back to me for months, because I want to ascertain whether you’re contacting me because you enjoy me or whether you’ve decided that you needed something from me; you had to reach out in a pinch. If you have contacted me because you only needed something from me and aren’t interested in true friendship, I don’t want to repeat a pattern I’ve had since childhood. I will not let myself fall into a campaign to prove my worth when I’m getting a trickle’s worth of love when I deserve a fire hose, and because of community, to be able to return that love just as “bigly.” It’s always been my “strategery.”
I would bet a great many people in my life wish I was a painter. Do they not know that a picture is worth a thousand words? A gallery of my art might give me more blowback, not less. ๐ ๐
I get out my pain onto canvas just the same. I use whatever language I want because this is not Facebook. This is church. This is AA. This is a real account of what’s happening in my life, what has happened. These entries are as intimate as anything I’ve ever share in a meeting.
I won’t let you go, I’m just waiting to see whether I’m a priority in your life because I don’t always want to be the one that initiates contact. I don’t want to be around you if I always feel like I’m nagging to get a simple answer out of you, receiving you when you show up.
I remember when I wanted that life, because as an INFJ, you know you have a lock on it because you’ve read everything you can find about that personality type and they all end up as social workers, teachers, writers, ministers, and anything else that needs the wisdom of people who have been a thousand years old since the nurse laid their baby in their arms.
However, I am not kidding when I say that the dream died with my mother for two reasons. The first is that I am a completely different person than I was before she died.
I am not willing to go back into “show mode” in order not to get my crazy spatter on other people for the rest of my life. “Show mode” has done nothing for me except to convince people I am perfectly normal….. “you don’t look autistic.”
I don’t often publish anything without running it through Google Translate, because even if I can’t read every word, I know enough to know when Google is being too formal, but I did get the idea right. When I went on that first mission trip, I still knew more Spanish than everyone else, so I was asked to give the closing message. It was terrible, according to my friend Mikal who understood me, but my mother cried, as she always did during my sermons….. however, this time it was just watching my face because she didn’t understand a thing….. except me.
The reason the second semester was harder than the first is that I also went to Reynosa/Progreso for Christmas break, again being immersed, so then my performance was really up and down because I could understand some conversations better than others because I’d had to use those words before. I honestly don’t think she did a very good job of asking me about my trip. I could have told her all about the fact that Hector and Fabiola were getting married soon, that they had been sweethearts for a number of years. Did I want a lemonade?” Etc. I think if she’d ever offered to spend some time with me after school (she flat out told us she couldn’t do that), she would have seen that I was doing fine in her class, but I wasn’t, because I was ACTUALLY speaking Spanish for days at a time with no problem at all. I love and fear Spanish all at once. It’s a much easier language than English, much harder to put yourself out there when you know you suck. However, in Mexico, I’d just gently be corrected and told the right words. I never got a C.
I have also never experienced prejudice against white people in Mexico, especially if you show that you’re making an effort to speak their language and fit into their culture rather than the typical American who expects everything to be the same. It’s the attitude of an Imperialist dictator who loves his country the way people love their mommy and daddy. It can do no wrong because I say it can’t.
Meanwhile, the smart people are talking less and less. The people of color get arrested more…….. and not just because of prejudice. Felons can’t vote, and black people aren’t a monolith but tend to lean Democratic. This is not about locking up black people in its entirety. This is about a more complex, disgusting way to limit voters at the polls. It’s not the whole issue, but it doesn’t hurt. People who are racist are generally Republican, but they weren’t the party that was always known for it. The realignment of the parties started in the ’70s because back then the Democrats were the party of the Deep South. Slowly, the parties started crossing over until the Deep South was solidly blue. Then, in the 80s, the white supremacy Jesus apologizers took over the Republican party, though they were warned. They just didn’t care. They turned their whole party into supposedly loving the Bible and screwing poor people every chance they got.
I would say that this is the thing that should be in the United Methodist Discipline under “incompatible with Christian teaching” instead of homosexuality.
So let’s bring it back around:
I love my country like an adult, because it gives me enough access to history that I can actually have an informed grasp of how this all works. In short, we are all but Citizens of Locker C, yet half of us are begging for Trump’s watch….. old and busted. The Republicans’ biggest problem is that they all know he’s a nutjob and can’t figure out how to get elected without him, so they just clench their teeth and do nothing. They couldn’t find “the new hotness” with both hands.
It’s time to tell them they’re fired because they can’t even manage to finish a coloring book, much less a bill. I honestly think that the reason Trump did everything through executive order is that he didn’t know how to introduce legislation. People have lost touch with the reality of what this job takes, and how it’s not about them. They can go off and have their little cult in the woods, because a man got elected who didn’t know the first thing about government. I doubt he’s been past sixth grade social studies/civics.
This entire essay is all connected, because it’s all about how my faith has influenced my politics for many years. How my young life has shaped me as an adult. How the Trump era was when I finally realized that I was old enough to have an opinion and as long as it stayed in my space, where I owned it and wasn’t hogging a conversation, why not? I don’t want there to be a chance there’s a criminal in The White House, and I am mystified as to why anyone would.
Why were so many people willing to gloss over Trump’s role in convicting The Central Park Five? Why wasn’t making fun of the neurodivergent kid not the end of it? Pretty sure “grab them by the pussy” on tape during a campaign if there wasn’t something about Obama that was off-putting and they just couldn’t put their fingers on it. Racism and sexism won Trump the election, because people have hated Hilary Clinton for some unfathomable reason since the 80s. She started the ball rolling on universal health care with the Patients’ Bill of Rights, so instead of seeing that she started it and Obama finished it,ย they’re mad at better health care and mad that a woman dared run for office, especially one that was already very unpopular and shouldn’t she know it?
I am going to bet that for 99.99999% of you, you’ll never meet the head of state in another country. A lot of you, if you look up how many passports are active, will never even leave the US to be able to compare it to anything else.
Which leads to things like thinking Obama is not American because most people don’t actively think of Hawaii as a state. It was easy to convince lots and lots of people that either Hawaii wasn’t a state, Obama’s birth certificate was forged on the date so that Hawaii wasn’t a state yet, or forged in the “Place of Birth” field because he was actually born in Kenya.
Trump’s biggest scandal is that he committed high crimes and misdemeanors and blackmailed Ukraine. Obama’s big scandal was wearing a tan suit (I’m being facetious, but still….. Obama’s biggest scandal was blinking on Syria, but he’s the kind of person that knew it and apologized. I can’t imagine Trump knowing himself well enough to know when he owes an apology to anyone. If you’re a narcissist, everyone owes an apology to you.
I also hate broken campaign promises…. just one.
The only campaign promise I’m really pissed about is that there aren’t taco trucks on every corner.
And because I’m not a complete monster, I’m not going to make you sit through all my political opinions without a reward.
It’s a picture of Oliver, who is a dog. He’s dressed up for Valentine’s Day and I asked Zac if I could post it.
If you had the power to change one law, what would it be and why?
That’s a quote from a movie I’ve never seen, “They Live,” but the boys I went to HSPVA with had seen it a million times and that’s the only line I know. But Arnold Schwartzenegger plays some kind of badass (as per his usual except my favorite, Kindergarten Cop). So, basically it means nothing to me in the context of the movie, but the frustration I feel with the American government so much of the time. Because I love intelligence, that annoyance runs the gamut from local to global.
I don’t like what we’re doing in Israel because I think no good can come of it. I think that every state not having Medicaid expansion is a crime. I think the way we treat soldiers when they come home from war is atrocious. I am starting to feel the burn in terms of groceries, because of course I spend most of my money on food. I know that in time, this will become the new normal because of course things can’t cost the same as they did when I was 25. I probably just sound like an old person, but it is the price of progress.
“Progress.”
It’s hard to choose what one law I could use to really make a difference, because there are so many playing fields. So, I think I’ll go local on this one. I would make it illegal anywhere in the United States to deny a trans child their medication.
People are making this a bigger problem than it is by a large margin. The debate is that these parents are either making their children do this to themselves for attention, or they’re monsters for believing their child and taking them to get evaluated.
I have come out as queer.
I have come out as nonbinary (but don’t care about pronouns, call me how the spirit moves you, I guess….).
I have told everyone that I have cerebral palsy, autism, and bipolar…… and that they’re all connected.
I have told the world that I’m poly to make it easier for other poly people to say something, because I didn’t plan it out. Zac just told me he had other partners and I thought, “can you really imagine giving a shit about that? You’re a writer. You don’t even notice when you’re home, much less someone else.”
In short, I have told people a lot of scary things, just throwing it out there and expecting them to keep up. I learned that from Aaron Sorkin. Never talk down to an audience, they’re smarter than you think they are. My dad was the same way as a pastor, and I started preaching as a layperson about the time The West Wing was in its second or third season.ย I learned a lot about how to say things like Aaron Sorkin, that the music of the dialogue matters. That the reason he doesn’t let actors change even a comma is because he’s not listening to the words. He’s listening to the beat. To him, it looks as bad as coming in half a measure early on a rap track.
Therefore, I know how to say something loud and clear. Your entire body shakes in fear if you are not secure in that connection, and sometimes even still. Because I’ve had to say these things, I know how scary it is to tell someone you’re trans in a global sort of way. Everyone’s coming out experience is different, and it feels like trans kids are being treated now like gay kids were 30 years ago.
Your behavior didn’t change, you just found new kids to hate.
Meanwhile, the AMA and the APA opinions are entirely left out of the equation. Think about it. Really think.
Why would you ever come out as trans if you didn’t really need it? If a doctor prescribes medication, why is it your right to take it away? This is not about them. This is about you. We as a whole ass community are tired of straight people making our existence dependent on their comfort level. I will no longer kowtow to “that’s just how he is.” To me, it’s “I lived through the entire Civil Rights movement and I didn’t learn a damn thing.”
Statistics show that we have a hard enough time keeping trans kids alive in this country, and there’s a whole lot of people complicit in that problem.
I particularly hate the shot of Max Klinger on M*A*S*H* as proof that there’s always been trans women in the military. I get the joke, but it’s not funny. Being female was not part of Klinger’s identity. He was trying to get a Section 8……. because obviously acting like a woman is so crazy. Plus, he went back to his gender appropriate clothes when he realized he actually wanted to stay.
No trans person has ever gotten back into their old gender’s clothes and thought, “yeah. I could do this.” Body dysmorphia is real and it’s deep. It’s why trans kids kill themselves in large part, because their family keeps making them be who they’re not so that the trans kid can’t take up any room in the house, judged on every action that looks too feminine or too masculine.
Especially in conservative households, this is early and often. Kids don’t see an escape.
Because it a lot of households, their support system is the doctor that to them hung the moon because they didn’t say “you’re fucked up.” They said, “there’s lots of words to describe what you’re feeling. Let’s make you feel better.” Puberty blockers are temporary so that surgery is a long way away off. They’ve had years of living as their real gender before that’s even on the table.
What puberty blockers do is keep their sexuality from changing their bodies even more into the gender they don’t want, making surgery harder, like for an enlarged Adam’s Apple. As a singer, having it shaved feels really fucking dangerous.
So, it’s a lot. A lot they need to talk about with the doctor they’re not allowed to see.
We can do better than this. We are better people than this.
:::stares in Texan:::
Somewhere you got lost along the way with the queer community. You’ve got the “y’all are welcome” down. “All y’all?” Gonna need some work….. and you know EXACTLY WHAT I MEAN.
The clue phone is ringing, because the call is coming from inside the house.
Name an attraction or town close to home that you still haven’t got around to visiting.
DC metro is much, much smaller than Houston. I cannot express this enough. That’s because even though there’s maybe half the space of the city from whence I came, if you don’t live in The District, you forget it’s there.
In other cities, where I live would not be a suburb. I live 11 miles from The White House, northwest of The District in a suburb called “Silver Spring,” In another city, a neighborhood. The District and The Potomac define the geographic lines of something that doesn’t exist and yet very much does. One of the first things you learn when you move to DC is that people who live in The District are territorial, because they have to be. If you don’t live in the The District, you forget it’s there…….. The reason it’s hard that they’re territorial because they’re unseen is that Marylanders and Virginians can’t vote to do anything to help them. It has very much been an offense to tell someone I’m from DC if they live in The District and I have lived in Maryland and Virginia, Therefore, to a local, I tell people my “suburb,” but on my blog I say “DC” because that’s the city people know.
For instance, I actually did live in Houston, but for some of the time I lived in Sugar Land, an actual suburb. International audiences shouldn’t have to care, but in person I’m more specific. No one from Houston would care if I wasn’t specific and said “Sugar Land,” but people in DC are particular about it. They are a tribe of their own, and you have to fit in. It’s a weird setup.
Most of the population doesn’t live there, and the income disparity is enormous. Gentrification is everywhere, and the heart of the city is being destroyed because our history is African American and again, gentrification. Plus, DC only has a city council and The Senate to govern them. DC residents’ needs shouldn’t have to depend on the Senate, because they get ignored by pork barreling something unacceptable into a bill on a different topic that also contains something for DC residents. It is a whole other world to Virginians.
I think for Marylanders a little less so geographically, but more so politically because being governed by a state looks so different. The Potomac makes DC seem very far away from Virginia, yet Portland, Oregon looks the same- there’s just not the same geographical feel because you’ve changed the name from a district to a state once you’ve crossed the river.
Because DC’s history is African American, historically Virginia was where the white people lived and 5:00 pm became known as “white flight,” and still is in some circles because the federal government is overwhelmingly white. Very, very few people who work in Washington want to have The District as an address. The only person I can think of is Barack Obama (Kalorama Park).
It’s like other government employees found something about DC that they just didn’t like, and couldn’t put their finger on it……… more recently. Historically, it’s always been very clear why white people don’t live in The District. The government employees who bought in Georgetown should have bought up more neighborhoods and made it affordable and invulnerable to creep because we need cheap housing for people on those salaries. We could have insulated it from the beginning, but it’s too late now. What is happening is that the few white people who lived here got rich and then it took about 30 years for gentrification to happen in other neighborhoods, and now it’s insane. Crack houses will still sell for way more than they’re worth because of the land.
In addition to Barack Obama, I also love that having Kamala Harris here feels like having her “home,” because she went to Howard. She thinks of it as one of her hometowns as well, so that love is returned.
Speaking of Howard, that reminds me of a thing I haven’t done yet in DC that I keep putting off. I’ve been to the African American History Museum, but not recently. Chadwick Boseman, also a Howard grad, has his original Black Panther costume there and I haven’t been to see it. I know it will be emotional because so far, Chadwick has been my favorite superhero in both the real and Marvel universes.
I do try to get to museums often, but don’t have the spoons. My favorite is The National Portrait Gallery, followed by Air & Space. Since my sister and I are planning a “staycation” over Galentine’s Day (must remind her we need to go for waffles), we are going there soon. I joked that I would be surprised if she did not bring at least $400 just for space ice cream (it’s been her favorite since childhood). I can’t remember if Lindsay has ever been to A&S on her own, but I know she wasn’t on my trip. She was a toddler and was being shuttled between my grandmothers at the time. ๐
I told her to think of some things she’d never done but wanted to in DC, and she definitely wants to go to the Zoo. I don’t know how many animals we’ll see in February, but I’m down. It’s a great park and I love walking through it when it’s not precipitating. Even in the cold, it’s wonderful because if you’re wearing layers, it’s a workout and you’ll generate enough heat to keep yourself warm.
I also haven’t done Mt. Vernon since I was eight, but I don’t know how much time Lindsay’s got. It takes a while, but it’s one of my favorite tours. I’m not sure Lindsay has been to Ford’s Theater and the house where they brought Lincoln after he was shot. The memory of seeing that gun does me in to this day…. as well as the fact that the blood stains are preserved on the pillow. I went to Ford’s Theater when I was eight, too, and it’s a core memory. So, in a lot of ways I feel like the attractions I’d want to see are around here, just not in DC. For instance, I’ve never gone to the Maryland coast. I’ve been to Annapolis, but that’s on the Chesapeake Bay and a different experience from Ocean City.
I also want to go to Great Falls, Virginia, because I hear there is hiking equivalent to the Columbia River Gorge. I need to walk with Zac and Oliver, who is a dog, before i make that commitment.
If you love being outdoors, this area really is for you. So much great hiking, biking, kayaking, sailing, waterskiing, and actual skiing within a few hours’ road trip. I love the idea of being a biker and no idea what to do with it once I get somewhere. However, I have found that I do love sailing. Lindsay and I have been sailing on the Chesapeake, and I’ve been in Galveston and Corpus as well (not sure about her). The difference between moving here and moving to Oregon is the weather. Having more sun in my life really does make a difference, but there are no less outdoor things to enjoy and it doesn’t irritate my depression.
DC was just a great choice all around, because everything I’ve ever wanted has been here the whole time. I’ve known it since childhood. It’s just that now, the “Local” section of The Post means more…… I mean, after Shane Harris at National Security. Let’s not get stupid.
If you could un-invent something, what would it be?
During the Viet Nam war, David Halberstam and Sam Donaldson were on the ground. They were taking sitreps and sending them back to the AP Wire or to whichever newspaper for which they worked.
There was a publication time, and if you missed it, either your story was scrapped or it went in a different issue. If I could un-invent something, it’s the 24-hour news cycle. It is a breakneck pace, and it is unsustainable; our population has proven to be uneducated, in larger measure than we thought possible before 2016, and then it got worse. Few people trusted government advice on what to do about COVID.
Without a publication time and leaving things for the next day, you get sound bites. By instituting a hard out, you give a reporter more time to actually understand a story, and it’s something that the US has gotten away from over so many years; I believe scrapping The Fairness Doctrine was our first mistake. I got this from The Reagan Library web site:
The Fairness Doctrine, enforced by the Federal Communications Council, was rooted in the media world of 1949. Lawmakers became concerned that the monopoly audience control of the three main networks, NBC, ABC and CBS, could misuse their broadcast licenses to set a biased public agenda.
So, if you think about the fact that now Trump has beat out DeSantis and Haley in Iowa despite high crimes and misdemeanors (and shitty business deals, and tax evasion, not to mention racist as FUCK), I think we can point to the dismantling of this law as patient zero.
It’s certainly a disease. We cannot solve this by being quick. We have to solve it by being thorough….. which is something a 24 hour news cycle doesn’t allow you to do. Networks would rather repeat the same four minutes eighty times than give reporters time to research before they’re on the air. You want someone who can orate like Edward R. Murrow (“Good Night and Good Luck” is in my Top 10 List), but now there’s no time for it.
You get the news as quickly as it gets to the wire, and if you have the AP Wire app installed on your phone, I feel your pain…… I put my phone on “Do Not Disturb” in large part because of this…… and yet, I don’t want to not read the wire every day, either.
I’m a conundrum.
There’s no one like Will McAvoy that has the latitude to do in-depth pieces that explore both sides of the issue, except when you’re on a biased cable channel. Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes are the people I turn to the most often, because they lay out history and the present just like I do, acknowledging patterns. They will also actually tell you when Democrats have been wrong, and don’t have the infallibility complex of a Republican. If you can’t look at what you need to do differently, you won’t. With a Republican, it doesn’t matter what the facts are. They’re going to be louder than you, and in their minds, that counts as power.
If Fox News was what it said it was, a news channel, they would have anchors that are capable of admitting that Trump is a disaster, because many, many, many books have already been written about how the party internally combusted because they had absolutely no idea what to do with Trump and wondered why they ever thought he could be president in the first place…… the thing the Democrats asked themselves, constantly.
The right has gotten too far right, but I don’t mind people like Mitt Romney, Will Hurd, Mary Cheney (I can’t wait to see what she does next.), etc. I start to have a problem with their “family values.” If we could leave it to talking about money without making it dependent on my rights as a woman or a queer, that would be great.
There are no sound bites here, but I wish more people would dig deep and find out the truth from reputable sources. It is a cult-like status to believe everything Trump says despite all facts to the contrary, because to those people facts aren’t real. They are the same as opinions, because when we said, “that’s just, like, your opinion, man…” they came up with the phrase “alternative facts.”
We are falling deeper and deeper into a sinkhole because the longer we look unstable to the rest of the world, the more we lose any favors we’ve acquired. We’ve done a lot of favors for other countries, but it’s very hard getting those countries to pay you back when they’re broke.
We do not want this man representing our interests overseas. I don’t believe he thinks Greenland is the only country up for sale. He’s a billionaire. If he throws money around, he gets what he wants. This makes him volatile, narcissistic, and unreliable (because he might go into a meltdown if he feels disrespected). That may be the choice for the majority of the American people again, but it is not the wish of any world leader at all, except for the ones we don’t like.
Remember The Cold War?
Do you really think that every president from Kennedy to George H.W. Bush would love seeing all their hard work undone? And what about CIA? H.W. Bush was Director of CIA before he was president. I would give an arm and a leg to know what he thought of Trump telling CIA employees that he trusted Russian intelligence more than them in front of the wall with all the stars commemorating lives lost. He didn’t die that long ago, so I know he was furious even if I didn’t get to see it.
We are going to elect a puppet and run our country into the ground. Trump has the potential to change the new world order by slipping money to Russia instead of Ukraine. Trump also likes to cozy up to China and North Korea, which in my estimation, is a bad thing.
Opinion pieces like mine come out on the web A LOT, because even if they’re writing for The Washington Post, they’re not stating anything but what they believe. But by stopping the 24 hour news cycle, we could have researchers and fact checkers on basic television again….. someone who could speak from an intelligent perspective on local and global issues. Give reporters more time….. not because they need it. We do.
This is too complicated for a one minute story. Hopefully, if anything does change, it will be to get someone like Will McAvoy on ABC, CBS, and NBC.
The problem right now is that half the country wouldn’t trust that archetype anymore, because The Fairness Doctrine has been gone so long……. and it has deteriorated our attention span for thorough understanding. We need to get in-depth issues on television, because few people have access to a top tier news source (not because they can’t, most of the time). Never let it escape your attention that really conservative “news outlets” don’t have a paywall, and both the New York Times and The Washington Post do.
If you would like to read the newspaper every day, you can do it for absolutely free. My public library gives me access. For people that have the means, most of the time it’s that paywalls are annoying and you can probably find something similar for free.
Sure you can. The Post and The Times have the best stable of journalists in the entire world, but YouTube is easier, right?
I also think that few people like to read as much as I do, so that’s another reason why YouTube clips are so popular and yet don’t actually get the point across because there’s no nuance. People are swallowing what Trump’s America looks like left and right, without even asking themselves if they like the food. If we do this again, we’re going to find out just how much we lack; Putin and Trump have designed an American Trojan Horse. Russia interfered with our election because they were invited.….. and everyone else stood around and said, “maybe if we built a big wooden badger?” There are too many of us standing around. If we all banded together, we’d be able to say this as well:
Will: America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.
Mackenzie: (holding up a sign in marker) But it could be.
Interestingly enough, I cannot tell you the exact date that the last time this prompt appeared. I can only tell you that it was the day I got together with Lindsay to discuss ideas for Matt’s Christmas present. She didn’t know what the hell to tell me, because our men are hard to buy for- Dad, Zac, and Matt- because when they like things, they just get them. So, I bought Matt two things I knew he probably wouldn’t think to buy for himself….. they were on his Wish List, but I can’t imagine that these were necessary purchases….. just cool. Because of my history with the sport, I got him the soccer ball he wanted (I figured a soccer ball is a gift that should come from me, frankly. Matt knows more about the sport, but I know more about the players (I’m guessing). Oh, and I didn’t even know he was a Weezer fan, but I got him “The Blue Album” on vinyl. That’s a gift that should come from me as well, because they’re my favorite band of all time.
There’s no better feeling than a nice stretch of highway and “Dope Nose” blaring like “Peter Gunn” at 70mph.
But the reason I bring up Lindsay and Matt is that today is the same writing prompt, and Lindsay and I are going out for dinner….. again. This prompt is now an omen, so I’m going to keep praying for it. ๐
I said, “it seems to me that you’re in DC a lot more often now. Is that true?” She said “yes,” so I’m looking forward to seeing more of her as time allows. She’s not always free enough to get together, but when she is, it’s a blast.
When I first moved here, this was all a projection on my part and I was right. Lindsay and Matt are involved in politics on many levels, so it was not inconceivable that they’d both end up here. In the 2016 election, if Pete Buttigieg had won, Lindsay would have gotten a job in his administration because it pays to have old, old friends/bosses who are also behind the scenes. Lindsay basically ran Annise Parker’s campaign after Peter Brown lost (we love you, Pete…. rest in peace). When she won, Annise put her in Constituent Services and later “body man,” like Charlie in “The West Wing.” Then, Annise ran Pete’s campaign; I’ve never been more sorry that anyone didn’t get the nomination, because it affected me so personally and to me, Pete was “the guy,” like they talk about with Bartlett. He has it, man. But, of course, I am incredibly biased. He’s military intelligence, so I was literally obsessed with him on multiple levels.
What I have to say about Lindsay ending up here is………. sort of. I know for sure that I see Lindsay more now than I ever did in Houston, because her whole life is there. When she’s here, she’s not balancing a million different friends and their needs as well. After work, she’s all mine. Jill would be proud to know that we’ve been very responsible and no communities have been built…. and she’s an e-mail subscriber so I know this will immediately go to her desk. ๐ But, in all of this, there are drawbacks for me because Lindsay and I have a different form of ADHD. Mine is combined with Autism, hers isn’t.
Therefore, her brain is designed to think about and manage a million thoughts at once, because her brain is bursting with creativity and she can retain that information. My autism makes it where I cannot handle a million details nor remember them; I get so frustrated because I want to drill down into policy just as bad. I just don’t understand as fast when Lindsay is doing it by talking.
I have to transcribe a conversation to understand it, because I take in most everything through sight. It’s why I don’t get clarity on a subject until I’ve witnessed something and written it down. It makes me know that I am accurate in guessing what neurotypical people would do, but struggle to imitate it and make it feel natural. That’s what makes autistic people feel like aliens, and why “Resident Alien” is one of my favorite TV shows, because Alan Tudyk’s character, whether it’s his alien tendencies or human, is coded as autistic and really funny about it. But because I due process information through reading, it makes me shy when Lindsay takes me along to events where other important people are also there.
I am not a fan of the rarefied air in which she walks, and not because I don’t want to meet people like Kamala. It’s because I don’t pick up social cues well and I don’t want to make a mistake that Lindsay can’t recover from, like me getting on my high horse about something (politics is part of my intelligence special interest…….. love, love, love Karl Rove and not because I agree with any of his bullshit. He’s just the anti-Carville and I admire his “strategery.” Democrats could learn MUCH, but they won’t.). Her career is so important to both of us. It shouldn’t be about me and my behavior, but it comes with the territory.
Here’s a recent conversation (Lindsay and Kamala have known each other since the campaign trail. They’ve met…..):
Lindsay: I have a meeting with Kamala.
Leslie: I will give you five dollars if you walk up to her and say, “my sister lives in DC and she wants to know if you want to hang out.”
Lindsay: She’s a politician. Of course she’ll say yes.
Dead.
This is what comes up for me when I think about the last entry that I wrote about Kevin, the giraffe I loved at the National Zoo and who does not live here anymore.
But what comes up for me now is that with all the things I struggle with in my daily life, the only being I’ve ever told is Oliver.
They say that if you are a conservative when you are young, you have no heart. They say that if you are liberal when you’re old, you have no brain. They do not suggest the unexplored third option, the permanently exhausted political science student who really doesn’t like any of you. ๐ Actually, I think it’s also due to age. Gen X (technically, I’m a Xennial) is now the adult in the room, because people older than us don’t understand technology, people younger don’t know how to function without it. We are the hybrids that remember what it was like to function on paper, the glue holding pre- and post- internet together.
If there’s anything I credit with my political views changing, it’s being in college before the Internet was really a thing. I was still fascinated by T1 connections at that point- you mean it’s always on? I don’t have to dial into anything? Plus, when I got to university, I was studying poli sci in school and my boss in IT was also a lawyer.
A lawyer who had a t-shirt that said, “Charter Member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.” Today, this would be ominous. It was 2000, so I still laughed. I’m not sure anyone knew back then how this whole thing would turn out, but I didn’t have Donald Trump on my Bingo card, I’ll tell you that much.
I will say that I think younger people than me are coming up with the best ideas on the liberal end of the spectrum, and I think what being conservative in your elder years means to me is deciding which of these ideas are too wild to fund and which ones are worth pursuing. At its heart, universal basic income is a good idea. Other countries have implemented it and it works. But how do we scale up something like that without breaking the funds available for such a thing?
When it comes to money, I want everyone at the table in terms of ideology. I want James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on every single issue, not what passes for dialogue now. It’s not a good idea if you can’t explain a liberal idea to a conservative or vice versa. That’s because 99% of the time people don’t get what they want because they don”t actually know the question.
The liberals don’t have worse ideas, they just can’t sell them. I think it was Aaron Sorkin who wrote that originally, but it has stuck with me. The Republicans demand complete buy-in and loyalty, the Democrats don’t because we like free thinkers. While not a bad thing, this has cost Democrats DEARLY and they have no idea how to fix it.
I’m including me in that statement, because I’d like to see the party embrace bigger and better ideas, but also to have a concrete idea of how to fund them. There is no sense of polity in the Democratic Party, because both Bill Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are Democrats, but their platforms were/are worlds apart. Hillary Clinton’s is closer, but that’s only because she stayed in presidential politics longer.
I am definitely a Clinton Democrat, because it’s the lens through which I take in information. I voted for Bill in 1996, my first election….. although I also went to the Republican convention in 1992 and was thrilled about it, because back then it was just a chance to go to a major convention, because first of all I was a child and couldn’t vote. Second of all, George H.W. Bush grew to love both Clintons, so I think he’d forgive me for voting for them.
In terms of the way I was raised, I didn’t really know anything about my parents or grandparents’ political leanings until I was older, because they didn’t wear hats like they were pitching for either party. The only thing I remember from being a young kid is that my grandfather did not like LBJ, because of the Viet Nam war.
Fair.
But if you do a little digging, you find that it’s not the whole story. The thing that people are most known for isn’t necessarily what is going to do the most good or the most damage from a historical perspective. I agree with my grandfather that LBJ made some terrible calls during Viet Nam, but we also wouldn’t have gotten Great Society passed without him.
It is controversial to the general public, but not in political science circles to say that Lyndon Johnson was objectively a better president than John Kennedy. That when you take away the mythology of Camelot, Kennedy was wonderful for the American image and Johnson was more effective legislatively because he knew how to whip. I do think that John Kennedy deserved to be president, and that he was good at it- most political science students agree that it would be easier and more fair to compare both of them at full term, but we’ll never get that chance.
What I do not think is that we’ve managed to capture the fever behind one idea like “Great Society” that will get us elected….. and The New Deal before it. We need people on the extreme fringe of the party to come up with the new and better ideas, so that the more conservative members of the party can red team them. It’s not “shooting everything down,” but it seems that way because a red team’s job is to take you to the mat before you’re in front of the Republicans.
When I think about red teaming now, I think about Molly Ivins, who was not afraid to call out hypocrisy or bullshit on either side of the aisle, and was in fact more mystified by Texas politics than anything else. She thought it was wilder and weirder, and proved it every day in her columns.
I am not standing outside looking in, I am definitely a Democrat. But at the same time, I do not discount conservative ideas. I discount bigotry, and that has become 99% of the Republican platform. How we got here is not really a mystery. If you’ve studied the rise of Hitler, you know that what is happening now is what happened in Germany- the people were starving for a leader, and they chose the most racist asshole they could find because he parroted all their shitty beliefs.
Trump is not Hitler in his later years, but we’re ignoring the signs of fascism nonetheless. Here are two things that you really need to take in about this, and they’re important:
Trump discredited CIA on day one. He went into their house and told them point blank that he trusted the Russians more than them. So, the message from day one was “don’t believe the intelligence experts that have historically been the best in the world, and only pay attention to me.”
Trump discredited the journalists. So, not only should you not believe the raw data coming out of CIA (filtered for publication through State and the committees on intelligence in Congress), you should not believe any stories written about it.
Trump has the same outlook on domestic policy. Don’t read any stories about me, only look at me. Meanwhile, he’s not really running the country because he doesn’t know fuck all. Getting his whole family security clearances was downright offensive to the spies I’ve met, because that is not a community you join easily or lightly. You have to be trusted beyond a reasonable doubt to carry that kind of information, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Jared Kushner is not one of those people, and neither is Donald Trump.
The president of the United States WAS NOT QUALIFIED to see the documents he saw, and managed to show other world leaders things that he should have had in his possession because he’s the president and should have had enough sense he was actively harming American interests.
But that doesn’t matter, because he’s a Russian UI.
Putin’s revenge for Khrushchev’s treatment by Kennedy was to make us implode, and I believe it worked. There are people who still believe with a passion that the election was stolen due to Russian interference that Trump welcomed. Trump didn’t want to be president. He wanted to have been president. I believe that he sincerely thought he was going to lose, and 2016 was a bid to get more people into his DC hotel, not a legitimate presidential campaign. Hillary and Donald have known each other too damn long for either one of them not to see through the other’s bullshit, and I don’t think that Trump really thought he had a chance, which is why he was such a total asshole the entire campaign. I honestly think he was wondering “what do I have to do to lose?” By the end.
But we elected him anyway, and the rank and file judges and State employee jobs stayed open for months because there was no one to direct presidential appointments.
People, the damn president of the United States didn’t know he was president of Puerto Rico, and that’s just okay because people in the US don’t know that, either. Do you think that the president is less the president to our territories?
The president also commands lots of people overseas being Commander in Chief and American representative in global affairs. Honestly, the fact that Trump got to be that for us is alarming, and other heads of state noticed. Do you really think that Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, Jacinda Barrett, and especially Sauli Niinistรถ (president of Finland- rake the forests? Get out of here with that bullshit.) and Kim Kielsen (premier of Greenland- I’m sorry. You want to buy WHAT now?) were in any way impressed with us at all? The only reason we didn’t lose the plot with the UK is that they’re experiencing the same wave of conservatism that we are.
If there’s any way in which my political views have changed, it’s by leaving the Democratic and Republican parties alone and just doing my own thing by studying world systems. I’m looking at the forest, not the trees. I love dating someone who works in intelligence, because I am with someone who also has the ability to look at global systems and not get stuck in the minutiae of daily life. The world looks different when you’re talking about countries at war and humanitarian aid and everything that comes with it, vs. the fact that Chuy’s is too far away for my liking and Whole Foods continues to be out of the veggie dogs I like.
Perspective.
Years ago, I was on IM with Supergrover and I was telling her that I was having a really crappy day….. and that one of my cases to call back didn’t have a name at the top, so I dialed the number and the woman answered “Doctors Without Borders.” I died for a second because absolutely anything I was thinking about that day melted away with perspective. There’s never going to be a day in my life more stressful than being a doctor in a war torn country.
It’s like working for NASA and actually being an astronaut. Not the person on the ground that has every resource available to them at a moment’s notice. No, the guy who’s stuck in a tin can having only what they brought with them. IF MSF doesn’t bring a medication with them, it may be unlikely to get a local supply. We’re not talking total health here- we’re talking HIV vaccinations and TB tests.
So, again, if we’re talking about politics, then I’m probably not the person to ask how to fix the party.
But I think the first step is leaving your heart and mind out of it, and committing not to elect someone who tells you that what you’re seeing and hearing is the truth, when he’s just the mouthpiece.
In this case, you should absolutely pay attention to the people behind the curtain. They’ll be the ones trying to save us from ourselves.
The number one hit by The Brothers Johnson in the title was at the top of the charts the day I was born. When the funk bass starts, and you move; if you have heard Louis start that vamp it’s still going on in your head right now……. so addictive that you might have to find another earworm to get rid of this one.
(Small aside- if you are a Louis Johnson fan (bassist), Thundercat is his heir apparent.)
I was delivered on September 10th, 1977, so for most of what happened during that year I was only marginally present. Jimmy Carter had just been inaugurated as president the previous January (election in ’76, the first presidential election since Richard Nixon resigned). As far as I can gather, it was not one of those years that had a huge historical event. It was a year in which we were recovering from being led by a criminal, which has no bearing on today.
There were smaller accomplishments.
The first official flight of the Concorde took off from JFK after having had several successful test flights. It cut travel time to London in half. Interestingly enough, cutting the flight time in half wasn’t the end goal. As I grew, the Concorde got better. Its fastest speed run from the US to the UK was 2:52:59, and then it was discontinued (thank God, for environmental reasons, yet still sad…… I don’t know why. I wasn’t buying tickets).
That wasn’t the only advance in business, though, because 1977 was one of the years in which personal computer companies were popping up everywhere. Instead of a mainframe and dumb terminals (like at the office), you could get a fully functioning machine that fit on your desk.
Kids, I’m taking a moment out to say that because things have changed so much, I am not sure that you’ll have a reference for this, so I’ll explain.
Before the personal computer, at an office you’d have what was called the “server room,” and every desktop monitor was reflecting what was going on in the server room. None of the desktop terminals functioned independently, similar to today, when it is impossible to use some apps without being connected to the Internet and for the very same reason- the processing is done on the web servers, not on your local device….. which is why a solid network connection is every bit as vital as the CPU/RAM/graphics card/etc. But back then, there was no “internet,” there was the intranet. The server you were connected to was physically located near you, because everything was a wired connection.
I do not think that the Internet would be what it is today if we hadn’t learned how to pipe data through a wireless connection. I believe this was possible because our drive to be wireless all the time came from internet connectivity through your cell. Having a basic web browser on a dumb phone led to everyone being connected, all the time, for better or for worse. But in 1977, we couldn’t see it coming yet. We were satisfied with creating documents and saving them to a floppy disk for easy carrying….. until you bent it…… and then, cell phones only supported calling. Short Messaging System (SMS) had not been invented.
We could not see the future, but how computers operate in 2023 is merely an evolution, it is not wildly different from anything we did back then. What we learned at networking an office turned out to be instrumental in how we network the whole world at once.
In terms of the world at the time, things were tense with the USSR, but in different ways than they are today…. the biggest reason is that the Soviet Republic fell apart, and now there’s only Russia. Any dreams they had of world dominance went with the republic’s collapse. They didn’t have the money to be big players anymore, and honestly, I don’t know that they have it now. As with American leaders, they make it look good….. but who knows what cards Putin is really holding?
(The answer is Hilary Clinton, btw. When the former Secretary of State to the most powerful nation in the world says Putin is masterminding our demise by having a Russian UI in the White House, you believe her. I’m sure your next question is “what’s a UI?” Useful Idiot- the stooge planted in a country who doesn’t do anything outright evil to show they’re being traitorous, just makes mistakes that are bad for American interests because they’re being manipulated by a foreign state. When we elected Trump, we learned that Russia thought they were getting a UI, then even they were surprised with 45 because there was so much emphasis on the “I,” not so much with the “U.” You get what you pay for……… I’m sure Putin thought it was marvelous when 45 went into CIA’s house and ripped them a new asshole. I didn’t. “Say that to Martin Freeman’s FACE.”)
Speaking of Hillary, I don’t know what she was doing in 1977, but I do know that it was near the beginning of of Hillary becoming a one-person monolithic idea of who a president’s partner should be; as such, it was the beginning of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” But the 70s would have been the beginning of social justice awareness, because back then was when the emphasis on social justice really took hold with white people. It’s not that there weren’t white people interested in social justice before, it’s that American Christianity divided in half, and the horseshoe of extremities divided into Evangelical white supremacy apologists and “the woke.” If white supremacy was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for everyone.
Except there is no way for Jesus to be a white supremacy apologist because the image painted of him in every white church in America looks like Jesus was the only French baby born in the Middle East, and at that time, it would have been a severe anomaly because people didn’t generally travel that far, first of all, and second it’s impossible for him to be white as as a descendent of Jesse and David. It was part of Matthew’s whole schtick. He was the captain in charge of “see? I told you he’s the Messiah. I’ve followed quite a few.” Kidding, but not inaccurate. Matthew focused on proof…. not of Jesus’ divinity as the actual son of God, but proving to Jews that he (waves hand) was the Messiah they were looking for.
But in the end, it wasn’t proof that mattered. It was “how do we appropriate Jesus’ culture and religion to fit our justified racism and inequality?” Thus, the Democrats eschewed religion and the cancer of racism spread into the Republican Party at an alarming rate, because they didn’t have to believe racism was wrong.
That’s not limited to the US, by the way. In the 1970s, they were also struggling with this very idea in South Africa. As Trevor Noah has pointed out, when South Africa came up with apartheid, they researched all the ways you could be racist, and took the worst of each system and applied it. Guess what? Most of the really evil stuff came from us.
If you remember nothing else about South Africa, it’s that Jim Crow laws are directly responsible for apartheid being implemented and maintained, because we built the system that had the largest impact on apartheid policies. So, the cancer that is Evangelical white supremacy spread and made South Africa malignant, too.
Even Thai people applaud Ho=Ho great job.
It was Barry Goldwater who warned us, and we didn’t like AuH2O, so we didn’t listen and now we’re fucked:
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.
Want to hear something really interesting? Goldwater was a progressive Republican, the people most lonely at parties. You cannot convince me otherwise if he also said, “you don’t have to be straight to be in the military. You have to be able to shoot straight.” Millions of gay men have said, “I can do that.” Despite it, “those preachers” became the voice of Christianity and people like Jimmy Carter, Barry Goldwater, and me are left out of the conversation.
I was telling a Facebook group who was, at the time, coming down hard on Evangelical colonialism through mission trips. I said, “I am a Jimmy Carter Democrat. I know that mission trips on the whole are problematic, but I’m a Jimmy Carter Democrat. I didn’t talk about faith, I helped build them a house.” I got emotionally pummeled into the ground. Par for the course. American Christianity as a whole does not like Jimmy Carter’s version of Christianity unless it’s a meme of him and not the rest of us.
Stephen Colbert said it better than the rest of us, the question we should have asked ourselves before we let the Republican Party become a theocracy:
If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.
So, if there’s anything good that came out of 1977, it’s that I got the liberal version of Christianity in the Methodist church…………….
Leslie: Could you call me? Lindsay: Do you just want to do dinner tomorrow night? Leslie: This is great. I didn’t even know you were in town, but even for a call, you’re in the right time zone. Lindsay: My dinner got moved to tomorrow night. Zaytinya at 6:00?
Wait, wait, wait…… you mean I don’t even have to wait six hours to see you? This is the best part of ADHD ever. I live for this. Of course I can drop everything. Please. Anything else on my radar is now completely unimportant. As of right now, I’m just sitting here chewing my fingernails and keeping busy until the alarm goes off to get on the bus. Zaytinya is also one of my favorite places to go because it only takes 40 minutes and is located three minutes’ worth of walking from the Gallery Place/Chinatown Metro stop.
My sister works in DC, but she doesn’t live here. Therefore, sometimes if I time it right, I get these text messages full of joy because it’s an outing I didn’t expect, and it’s at “our Spanish Flower.” If I dwell on it, I’ll get misty-eyed. Spanish Flower(s- no one called it Spanish Flowers because Eli, the owner, told us that he named it after Mary, his wife, THE Spanish Flower.) It then spread to eating there three or four times a week. Since Lindsay and I both like finding a thing and exploring it intimately, we go to Zaytinya nearly every time she’s here. We have branched out a few times, like going to Union Stage to see Charlotte Cardin (which lets me know exactly what I should wear tonight…. Lindsay bought me a football jersey with Charlotte’s “number” on it- her album 99 Nights….. I love how she just rolls with my eclectic choice in clothing….. She also got me a hoodie with matching sneakers….. FANCY.). We have also been to that restaurant on the end of the pier where Union Stage is, which Lindsay had been to before and vetted.
It’s what’s nice about Lindsay working here- she has been to nearly every place we try with other lobbyists or Congresspeople. If I had to describe Lindsay’s life in one sentence, it’s taking people out to eat. She sits around, listens to people, and talks about stuff….. so that when she’s older, she can “sit around, smoke cigars, and own stuff.” That is an old, old joke because we used to live in a very tony suburb, and Lindsay went to a friend’s house that happened to have an elevator. My dad asked her what the friend’s parents did to have an elevator, and Lindsay said, “I don’t know. I think they sit around, smoke cigars, and own stuff.” We have repeated that phrase as the ultimate profession since then- probably 25 years.
It’s an unusual day for me, because I spent yesterday panicking about how I was going to get my Lamictal today, because I was completely out. I thought I was going to have to go to urgent care if I couldn’t get a doctor’s appointment today, because at urgent care I could have explained that I can’t get ahold of my doctor and they would have given me a month’s refill. But this morning, I woke up to a text message saying my medication was ready. I do not know how that happened, because on CVS’s web site it said that it was going to have to contact my doctor for a new prescription, and that can take days.
If you are completely out of a medication that affects your brain, you cannot skip a day. The effects are different on each person, but when I go without my medication, my brain starts making sounds akin to the Emergency Broadcast System, a minor second blaring in my head and I just want to stop the pain at any, and I mean any cost. Doesn’t have a thing to do with how I’m feeling. It’s that the pain is that bad. So, I’m vigilant about getting all my meds refilled as fast as possible, and prefer the Amazon pharmacy because they’ll give me three months’ worth of maintenance medication at a time, and I only need to go to the doctor for controlled prescriptions like Klonopin and Adderrall. I need the Klonopin, but I do not need the Adderrall all the time. I take drug holidays from it because even though it works on my mind, my body feels strung out and weak from all that stimulation….. Again, trading physical health for mental. Your body is keyed up and exhausted while your mind is quiet………. and you can’t really tell that your body is keyed up because your mind is quiet.
You quickly get a benefit, and after about two weeks of your body screaming, you want off of it again. I am also starting to feel that because my autism wasn’t caught, I am only treating my ADHD…. and that doesn’t work on autism. So, I’m taking ADHD medication and still feeling like crap because the same symptoms overlap with autism and therefore, don’t go away with ADHD medication. At this point, I am doing well on Sudafed and caffeine, so I might want to keep it that way. If I can get the same effect just by keeping my nose clear and having a cup of coffee or a 100mg energy drink in the morning, then another dose and small energy drink/cup of coffee at noon, it controls my symptoms for the whole day….. and I’m only on the smallest dose of workable stimulants and not beating myself to death with them.
As I have said before, there is a LARGE jump between coffee/Sudafed and Adderrall. I do not suggest using Adderrall long-term. It just affects my muscles, bones, and teeth too much. However, I do not recommend never going on Adderrall at all. You need to know what controlled symptoms feel like so you can replicate it….. but of course, I’m not talking to everyone. I’m talking to everyone who thinks “Driven to Distraction” is really about them….. and them only, because everyone feels that their problems are unique. Like, if you read “Driven to Distraction” and it doesn’t come across as a personal attack, you don’t need Adderrall. ๐
“Driven to Distraction” is the seminal work on ADHD, the Bible for therapists and psychiatrists on ADHD….. every bit as important a work as “One L” for law students and “Intern” by Doctor X is for med students. Speaking of med students, “Intern” is out of print, but you need to get a copy pronto. See also “Five Patients” by Michael Chrichton. Nothing will prepare you better for life in the hospital than reading about someone who went to, I think, Harvard in the 70s….. because nothing about hospital politics has changed in a hundred years……….. see also “Scrubs,” which my stepmother has said is the only accurate show about medicine ever on TV. She noped out of ER during the pilot because there was an X-ray upside down and backwards.
Because I know how the sausage is made in medicine, I do not suffer fools gladly and yet I do because I do not want to exhibit “drug seeking behavior.” It is a balance of knowing my shit and not seeming “demanding.” I swear to Christ, you will not meet anyone as self-aware as me. If I tell you I’m panicking and absolutely need more Klonopin than normal, you can take that check to the bank and cash it. But what you can’t do is get a doctor to stand in your body and feel it. Feel the panic that you do. Feel the nausea that’s going to make you throw up if your brain chemicals don’t “get right with God.” What you cannot do is convince a doctor you have ADHD if your symptoms are under control that day.
Please take it with a grain of salt if you’re in that position. These people see genuine DSB all day long and twice on Sundays. I had a patient back in my MA days who, before they started tracking controlled medications nationally, would go to six different doctors in a day for Valium, and she was one patient of many who had the same idea. So, I don’t push my doctors hard on anything, ever, because that’s the shortest way to cut yourself out of getting narcotics, benzos, and methamphetamines when you’re actually hard up. For instance, knowing what I need ahead of time and being able to explain, “okay…. here’s what I’m dealing with. You make the call, but here’s what I suggest based on what my previous doctors have done and it worked.”
You do not, for instance, ask for a prescription for those drugs and then come in halfway through the month and say you need more, or that you need your dose upped because either you’ve already run through the first prescription, or the doctor doesn’t believe that you actually need your dose upped, you’re just saying that because you’ve run out. There is no chance that a doctor is going to believe that you still have all the pills at home unless you bring them to the appointment.
I had another patient in my MA days that bought a safe for his house, because he noticed that when he didn’t keep his meds locked up, for some unknown reason they went missing. You have to watch for other people in your house exhibiting drug seeking behavior as well as watching it in yourself. I’ll give you a for-instance. If I have Adderrall and I’m going to Zac’s, I keep maybe two pills on me. That way, if my bag gets stolen or the pills do, I have only lost two pills, not my entire prescription. Same with Klonopin. Also, it’s harder to tell that they’re controlled substances when they’re not in a labeled bottle.
You have to know the difference between “I’m doing better” and “I’m fried all day” as well. Because the point of those drugs is to make you feel better, not to numb you out all the time. There are just certain situations that make me more anxious than others. For instance, going with my sister to a familiar restaurant would not cause me as much anxiety as going to a party in which I knew absolutely no one. I’m always afraid that I will find one person and hang onto them like a sloth because I’m intimidated. Luckily, I seem to hang with people who also do this…. because we’re the kind of people who seek out “the introverts’ recharging station” at any large gathering, anyway.
This is generally the kitchen, btw. If you’re looking for the introverts, they’ve either gone to the bathroom or to the room where the least people are gathered so they can hear themselves think. Introverts do not do well in situations where they can’t hear themselves think, because they’re more drawn to their inner monologues than they are anyone else’s. But at the same time, I’m an empath and can feel others’ emotions, and can’t seem to stay out of the heavy conversations because I’m built to hear them.
As I have said before, I do not have the ability to protect my mind, so I carry a lot of pain that’s not mine. I have clinical separation when someone is bleeding, but not when they’re crying. My dad said something to me that’s stuck with me since he said it- which was at least 30 years ago. He said that one of the reasons he left being a pastor is that he was exhausted at only being able to pray for people and not help them concretely. It’s exactly why I would have ended up in medical school if the fates had thrown me the kind of autism that understands STEM completely. Like, that’s a whole thing with me. If I could be mad at a deity for the roll of the dice, it would be having the kind of autism that makes me lost to the rest of the world, inside my head and protective of my environment. If my parents hadn’t both been dedicated to helping me physically and pulling me out of my own thought processes, I would have sat in my room forever, and I know this about myself.
I discovered my ability to take on others’ pain to an enormous degree when I was a toddler, and because I’m an INFJ, I have a deep inner landscape where I can get lost- easier than feeling every emotion in the room and bleeding out until I am full of rage at my sensory environment. When I am in meltdown, it is not pretty……. and you only learn who your real friends are when you stop social masking and start working without a net….. when you are so overwhelmed with your own symptoms that any change in your environment sends you into a place where you cannot take in any more. Rage is about putting up boundaries, a cry for help when it doesn’t sound like it.
Everything about autistic rage is a cry for help because we don’t have the words to express something clearly when social masks fail. We say things wrong and others focus on how we’ve said something vs. what we’ve said. If we could have just gotten the words right, our problems would be valid. We learn over time that there is no tone we can take that will make you see that our problems are valid, because we adjust and the answer is still no, because you’re still rightfully hurt over what we’ve said previously and you’re focusing on it. We are not narcissists or borderline. We are in hell, and we are sorry.
The hard truth is that many people are diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder because they’re female and “hysterical.” Many people aren’t because they’re male and their opinion is expected to sound sort of arrogant all the time. Non-binary people get the worst of it, because sometimes it is missed for either or both reasons. I also think ASD is under-diagnosed and ADHD is over-diagnosed in both sexes because of “bad behavior” in boys and introverted behavior in women…. not that ADHD isn’t valid. It’s that sometimes ADHD medication doesn’t work and that’s because the symptoms overlap just enough for doctors to be allowed to miss it, frankly. I am not angry that my psychiatrist in college missed it, because I have watched hours and hours of video on YouTube where psychologists talk about the neurodivergent brain, and ADHD is always lumped together with Autism Spectrum Disorder because it’s a comorbidity in something like 80% of ASD cases….. also why there is argument in combining ADHD and Autism as one diagnosis, that ADHD is part of the autism spectrum, not outside it.
Where ADHD and Autism differ is that there is not such a pull to get lost inside yourself because you need so much stimulation, and the need changes frequently. ADHD makes you a daredevil, autism makes you need quiet and a lot of it. I vacillate between those two things, but autism wins 99% of the time. That means actively avoiding relationships because I get tired of trying to communicate and it just not working the way I thought it would. I develop selective mutism and agoraphobia because I am trying to create a secure environment again….. and once I find it, it’s hard to pull myself out. I feel like the more I explain that this is part of my disability, the less my people will take it personally. Selective mutism and unwillingness to change my environment doesn’t necessarily come from conflict with people close to me. If I go out to, say, pick up a prescription and the experience is taxing, I will retreat for days to fill my social battery………
Again getting lost in my own world because it’s not as scary there.
Tonight, though, I’m going to a great restaurant with the world’s greatest person.
I have talked about the unconventional arrangement accidentally made between me and a friend, that we are bound out of loyalty and not romance. That at first, it was impossible for me to remain cool when she was so hot (and boy does that not have anything to do with her looks). She’s married, I’m as settled as I want to be. But just because it’s not romantic doesn’t mean there aren’t a huge set of problems between two people some days.
That relationship led me to thinking about politics, when one of my friends was talking about how the Republicans are the dad.
Republicans are the dad.
Republicans are the dad.
It has become a toxic relationship not because Republicans are the dad, but because they see being kind as soft……………..
They’re treating all Democrats like they treat women.
Toxic masculinity has reared it’s ugly head. I don’t know that people really grasp what happened on 1/6 in terms of intelligence. Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran all saw us shit ourselves on international tellevision.
Get your shit together, Congress.
Toxic men and vegan lesbians are going to have to put away their egos for a second and work together. I think they’re the ones with the biggest egos in the room here, let’s face it.
It is not lost on me that vegan lesbians are a very effective weapon against toxic masculinity- because we aren’t dependent on men for sex. We see right through what you’re doing (before you do) because we had to learn we didn’t want it when we were nine…. and not even the creepy touches. Touching at all. Thinking you’re entitled to hugs and kisses from me.Thinking that my wife nd I exist for your pleasure. I assure you we exist for ours. If that makes you feel bad, it must be so hard to be you. I have empathy for a man. Men do get close to me. Obviously. That being said, as a collective you’re so fucked up I don’t think you could find a clue with both hands and a flashlight.
My favorite fact in life is that the picturesque farm where Langley is built was owned by a lesbian couple before they bought it. So, to me that just says that we have the world’s most sophisticated intelligence agency and lesbians sold them their whole look. You are welcome. Thanks for eventually hiring us. That was rude. I’m sorry. You have made up for it many times with the way you’ve embraced trans people, women in particular. But even though I was a bitch to you, it leads to my next point. Please forgive me, I was on a roll…………. and I know you guys hate when I do that. ๐
It’s not your Alexa that’s dangerous. It’s your microwave. Don’t tell them I told you Pop Secret information. They’ll put me over the stove in a Jiffy.
I think it’s hilarious that men are so bitter that we’re so angry, because what is it in society we could possibly dislike? I mean, we got our own credit cards in the 70s. Straight women will take your crap because they want you and also you have in large part done jack shit to make women less financially dependent on you when it comes to needing money and love. It seems like we have to choose between those two things quite a lot when we need groceries.
It matters when we’re pregnant and vulnerable and we have to nickel and dime you for everything because you aren’t doing the planning for the household and think everything costs a fortune and absolutely go apeshit even when numbers don’t lie. You’ll go off like a bomb and if we’re lucky, we’ll get the money after you’ve come back to reality. If we’re strong enough, we’ll beat your ass (verbally and physically). Not all of us fight the same way, but we’re all furious. We will absolutely go balls to the wall with you and steal your wives while we’re at it (KIDDING, Jesus. Calm it down.).
Traditional marriage is killing this country, because the only people that ever talk about it are the people who are still trying to hold up a system that doesn’t and shouldn’t exist. They hate queers and all the other expletives. In fact, their view of women informs their view of queer men. Queer men are soft. Democrats are soft. Transitive properties that all add up to a disorienting set of problems because they’re tangled as tight as that necklace you left in your underwear drawer when you were nine. There’s no clear path, and we’re trying. It would be helpful to be able to cull laws like old e-mail. To have one set of people working to maintain this system while another tries to create something better. I don’t know what that looks like in total, but I don’t mean switching from capitalism to communism. I want a system more like Canada, which is a capitalist society with a free market that also has a better safety net than we do because they aren’t nickel and diming vulnerable people who have to choose between love and money.
They don’t have it all figured out yet, either.
But they’re in mediation and we’ve literally got guns on the table.
Republicans are trying to be the husband that slaps his wife around. The party of no. Led by a naked, soulless, incompetent, greedy imbecile that those people think is an Emperor.
Democrats cannot stop violence by being passive all the time because we’re getting asses handed to us on most things. That’s because we don’t want to respond with violence and peace doesn’t work. It’s a gridlock.
We need a restraining order, because there comes a time in every abused person’s life when they’re just done. That’s where I am now. Just done. It’s not that I won’t vote and volunteer and all that stuff. It’s that I have burnout because I’m not moving the needle, and really no one is on a grand scale. Realistically, how long do you think it will take white supremacy to fade if we start working on right now? My guess is at least a century or perhaps two. I do not mean working on it legislatively. Legislatively does a quarter of nothing for me. That’s because Congress reflects culture, it doesn’t create it. If there is no culture for something irregular, we will not legislate it into being.
We are stuck in this, from the global to the personal. This is just unsustainable, and I am shocked at how many people think it is.
Because all of us, women and minorities, have to ask daddy for everything.
List three jobs you’d consider pursuing if money didn’t matter.
There’s four. I’m giving you a bonus.
Or it would have been a bonus answer if it wasn’t a joke. I couldn’t think of three jobs at first so I just went with a movie title. I would be good at none of these things except spy, and even then I would be good at the people part, not the paying attention part. Prevailing wisdom says that’s a bad idea. You can’t have a disorganized priority list when people’s lives are counting on it. I am the god of chaos wherever I go.
Editor’s Note: At this point I got lost in a tangent when my mind flipped to “chaotic god.” Just roll with it. I’ll circle back eventually.
Supergrover is neurotypical, which makes me fall over with laughter that our bff name has always been “The Holy and The Moly.” The funniest part is that I didn’t come up with it. Dana knows us. We’ve met. Whether I am chaotic good, neutral, or bad depends on perspective. I will accept either. I would imagine Dana thinks of me as both depending on the hour. Supergrover would look at me with amusement and say, “hard same.” I wouldn’t notice anything except the playful nature of her eyes. I think of her as Aziraphale in the bathtub at the end of Good Omens Season one. I think of me as Crowley in the other bathtub. Those of you who know what I’m talking about will see what I mean immediately………………
Aziraphale and Crowley could have been the couple that best represented us right up until they kissed. At the time, I was hurt. Friendship is underrepresented and I felt a relationship where they were deep, open, and vulnerable without romance was something vastly underrepresented on TV. I wasn’t disappointed, necessarily. Just that what was a good analogy became a bad one for me, but that has nothing to do with Neil Gaiman’s talent as a writer.
I get enough of that type friendship on Doctor Who to last me a lifetime. You just have no idea how much I am Martha Jones, or would want to be. Remember how Martha went through shit with The Doctor and it made her attracted to him? Remember when she got over it and saved his ass on multiple occasions because she realized that there was something bigger than her at work? Hard same, said with the same amusement in my eyes. I liken it to Jodie Whitaker being cast during Martha’s storyline instead of David Tennant. (Random aside… who says “Martha” better than Matthew Rhys on “The Americans?”)
Back to me.
I probably could win at being the CIA trainee to recruit an asset first at The Farm (they put on scenarios like cocktail parties). If you were going to bet on me, bet on me for that. I am smooth enough that the plant would just tell me. I can get one of the best spies in the world to tell me what she knows with a wink and a smile. I had Jonna Mendez dead to rights, where she couldn’t say anything and absolutely did. If you’re wondering, it was whether she worked on a Cold War movie. Her redirect was “maybe we should hire you.” What I should have said was, “dear God, you can’t imagine what a bad idea that is.” What I actually sad was………… nothing.
After that, I developed an affinity for satchels.
Now that we’ve fully explored my dream life, because I couldn’t get away from the bipolar thing even if money were no object, let’s talk about real stuff.
If money were no object, I would do two things. I would become a TA and get a master’s in whatever I felt like, in perpetuity. Read law at Oxford if I wanted, what the hell? When I wasn’t working on school, I’d be writing. It would just be a lot harder to make time for it. I think I’d be a great TA in divinity, history, psychology, political science, sociology, and education, particularly music education. I couldn’t be a choir director now, but I could learn. I have also worked with kids long enough not to get rattled, which is harder than learning to conduct.
Although, the thing that grates on my ear most is sopranos who are out of tune, even me, and at that age, all kids have high voices. I would learn to be good at my job for the sake of saving my hearing. If I was a band director, beginning oboe will clear your sinuses.
I would be a wonderful musician if I wanted that life. I know that I’m good enough for an opera chorus, and could be trained for mainstage roles because I was offered one when I worked at Marylhurst and I turned it down (I don’t remember the role, but it was Penzance). At the time, I was terrified. I didn’t even show up for the audition even though I was wanted for the role already. It was more of a coaching session.
That’s because the role was for a lyric soprano, not a mezzo, and at the time, it was pre-voice lessons. I now know I’m a true lyric, but it would still take years not to Florence Foster Jenkins my way through “Queen of the Night.” I knew I had one aria in me. I didn’t think I had all of them in one night. The workout to do that is tremendous. You just don’t see that from the audience because it happens internally. It feels like circuit training trying to get your body do respond quickly. You can’t have air when you need it the most. You just have to deal and move on. Sometimes, that’s another soprano in your section bailing you out. As a soloist, you’re completely screwed if you haven’t inhaled down to your feet. The heavy lifting is being able to control that much air after you have it so that it doesn’t all come out all at once. I cry with laughter when I think of the flops I’ve had. Wrong notes are horrifying in the moment and hilarious later.
I just don’t want to live that life, because it’s piecemeal. I wouldn’t have a permanent place in a choir unless I was in the military. I’d have to get contracts all over the world and move frequently. The gig economy is not easy, so I just don’t want to do it. I will probably end up auditioning for Washington National Opera Chorus or National Cathedral’s choir eventually. The thought of hiking to Georgetown twice a week doesn’t thrill me, though.
The life I’d like to live is quiet. Even if something of mine goes viral, I will still want to take it in from a distance. I only trust those closest around me because they’ll keep my head on straight. I would rather keep being an introvert and able to produce because I’m not lost in noise vs. signal. The signal comes in purer the less there is to compete with it.
So, I suppose my ultimate job is ogre. Just get off my lawn, but know I’m okay because Fiona and Donkey are around somewhere.
Name the professional athletes you respect the most and why.
Before we get started, today is my birthday and tomorrow Lindsay is taking me out for dinner because she had a meeting and was able to swing it. I love that we manage living in different cities so easily because she works here. I’m not the only reason she fits in. She knows the city better than I do. Also, I did write yesterday. It was just so bad and rambled off into nothing that I thought, “I don’t even like what I think today. This blogger sucks.” It helps to focus on elite athletes and people who think like them.
In a lot of ways, this city knows Lindsay better than I do, because I do not walk in her circles, often rarified air. She and I are perfect for each other the way Supergrover and I are in that we can be objective about what’s going on in the other’s life because it doesn’t affect our friendships at all. I have no official Washington power and wouldn’t use it if I did. Therefore, either one of them could say anything to me and it wouldn’t be boring. Lindsay drills down into policy all the time, and I’m neurodivergent and a paralegal in the state of Texas. I can hang, and I can nerd out just as far as she can. I just don’t get paid to do it. I can advise without being involved. I would be very happy working for Lindsay’s organization in DC, but I wouldn’t have the relationship that I have with her if I took the job. Same with Supergrover. Better to listen to her than to think I can do a thing. Since they both suit up to play, it’s fun being the opposite side of them. That reminds them taking a minute to enjoy a nice meal and an expertly made cocktail is a good thing.
Lindsay and I have this great relationship where her interests and mine line up, so we get along like we’d just met yesterday. At the same time, when I look at her I see every iteration. I see her inner child and try to remind her of it when she’s stressed out from all the things it takes to be her. We have a very West Wing relationship in that she used to be Charlie, the body man, for Annise Parker and I would be great at being hers…… or I think I would. I would probably end up getting fired. I’m good at being the Charlie she only talks to over the phone. ๐
Explaining how I feel about Lindsay explains how I feel about Supergrover in a nutshell, and not because I mean my loving words less toward Lindsay. It’s that Lindsay and I don’t have a hard out, so I can use Lindsay’s concepts for feelings that are very much the same with both women. I already have three sisters, so it’s no hard leap to feel love that intense for Supergrover as well. I honestly don’t remember how my mind worked before she unlocked all my doors. It was like a scene from The Matrix. If I’m Neo, she’s The Oracle.
Those who think they know everything are annoying to those of us who do, which seems to be a mantra for all three of us depending on the situation. We are all in agreement that this applies to the orange gelatinous shitbag. We could all out-think and out-maneuver him easily.
I don’t really know anything about sports, and they do. They’d be better at answering this question than I am, but I do look to them for inspiration. I just don’t watch games that much. I absolutely love two things. The first is looking them up on YouTube to see what makes them great. I don’t want to be a bandwagon fan, I want to see them defy physics and decide on my own. The reason I have to look them up on YouTube is that I love the story of what it takes to be an elite athlete, so I’ll watch a documentary on ESPN about them and fall in love with their public character rather than their play. I can tell you about David Beckham’s early life and family ties better than I can tell you how he played.
I can tell you why it’s exciting and induces tears for me to watch Trinity Rodman play because since I’ve seen what a powerhouse her dad is, I imagine what a proud father he must be and it’s like a long distance commercial up in here.
Everyone loves Michael Jordan, but the “character” that resonated with me most in “The Last Dance” was Scottie Pippen. He was truly the unsung hero of the operation, its Ginger Rogers to Jordan’s Fred Astaire. They both made each other better, and I don’t think Jordan is appreciative. He comes off like a narcissist whether other people agree with me or not. Scottie has the heart of a journeyman cook who will occasionally blow your mind. Experimental, brave, crazy, also knows and copes with the fact that he’ll never be chef. So he’ll be the best damn sous this restaurant has ever seen.
We don’t have to talk about it. Just eat it. Scottie should have gotten loud in salary negotiations, and I’m not berating him. I’m just agreeing with him. His relationship with Michael was very much Aaron Rogers and Jordy Nelson. I’ll pick ’em up if you put ’em down. Shake……. and BAKE!
The trick is learning to be respected instead of famous. If you focus on the attention the star is getting instead of you, then you miss out on the best part of getting to be an elite athlete. The people who know the game will see you differently. It’s not the same as having millions of bandwagon fans.
It resonates with me because I’m a Scottie. I’d rather be a speechwriter on a campaign than a candidate. I’m Leo in that if I worked for a candidate, I would hope for the friendships that Lindsay got with Annise Parker, Nick Lampson, and Peter Brown (the Houston candidates Lindsay worked for before she started lobbying).
It takes an elite athlete’s courage to be Lindsay and Supergrover. Supergrover actually is an elite athlete, which I’m sure goes a lot into what she does because she’s been mentally preparing to the level she does now since she was all-State three years running in high school. Six letters and she even stopped to wonder why I wanted to wear that jacket. ๐ Now, our relationship feels the same as mine with Lindsay because I only want to drill down into policy.
I had to grow into that role with both women because I didn’t want to seem like a dumbass when they talked about their lives, because to them the things they say are completely normal and mundane. I stand there and feel like I didn’t get the assigned reading.
I do everything I can to combat that. I know for sure Lindsay is going to be in the newspaper no matter what job she has from here on out. She’s responsible for introducing a lot of legislation that makes people mad af and they pay her the big bucks not to back down. The Texas legislature is going insane regarding trans healthcare and its lack of support for it. And Supergrover would never be in the news on purpose. She’s the most private person I know, which is why it’s so unfortunate that our careers rub up against each other. It’s a constant source of ire to the point that she is the only person that could get me to tear it down and almost did to take care of the problem because she was worth it in a way no one else was. If she reamed me out for saying something sensitive, I wasn’t going to be the blogger that didn’t hear her. It was too important.
What was too important on my end was being able to use this space to process our relationship when I felt I couldn’t go directly to her…… but I could. It wouldn’t take long for her to get over what I said that she thought was negative because she loved the lines that were specifically crafted to adore her in public. To let her see how I talk about her behind her back. How every story is true to my limited knowledge and ability as a writer, but it is my superpower the way her work is to her. I just don’t think she realized that she was setting herself up to be a character when she befriended me and how her world would bleed over into mine.
In these pages is a magnificent story of two people who met by chance, one much more powerful than the other, which attracted us in a stranger on a train sort of way because nothing we said would get back to any of her friends or colleagues. This became the lie we told ourselves very quickly, because I could be honest with both her and Dana and say “this is a lot to manage and I need to work it out on my own.” The hard out made my decision for me in all kinds of ways, ranging from her not thinking about the consequences to me actively trying to destroy what we had built because she flipped me out mentally with her story and hasn’t really taken responsibility for hearing what it’s like to be me and adjusting to it, because she created a new reality for me. The disconnect between my real life and the one I present here is enormous, but it’s because I’m good at using small things to represent the big things. It’s just too much to handle for me if I slip up. I could accidentally ruin her life by accident, and the consequences would be dire no matter what happened as a result.
I don’t want to be that writer for her. I feel like I’ve done what Tony Mendez calls “falling in love with your asset” in “The Moscow Rules.” It’s an emotional shorthand for being so close to the subject that it takes away any impartiality, something we crafted by not normalizing everything by picking up the phone. Two sides to that coin. The first is that we would have stopped being as emotionally intimate with each other and that was the drug that kept us taking hits all those years. The second is that it really would have taken talking in real time, because I don’t know about her, but a few voicemails doesn’t convey everything that could have been avoided by hearing each other’s tones of voice.
Platonic love hit me harder than I’ve ever been hit in my life, and I’m sapiosexual and bipolar. One line bled into the other, and the butterflies in my stomach hit harder as well. Getting rid of them was enormous and had to be done to save our friendship, because I didn’t want to live without her unless I absolutely had to…. it just mixed me up so much inside because I’d lay out all these thoughts and feelings thinking she’s sitting there thinking I’m a judgmental dickhead when she’s just busy and needs more time. Then, at others, she really does treat me like a judgmental dickhead so there’s no way to know which person is going to show up. Is our situation dire enough to stay together at all costs, or do I only know random factoids about your life today? The highs and lows were too big because of the medium, and yet they were exciting. It was a thrill ride.
Because she’s Michael Jordan. She needs a Scottie Pippen. So, she got into my head and made me believe I could be that for her. If nothing else, because she was in my head, she taught me to think like an elite athlete as well. That if I was going to be Scottie Pippen, I was more than capable. I grew to be wildly impressed with me. To love me like I love her. It’s wild and wonderful because I am.
Stories That Are All True 