This is Mico’s take on how I would write the Book of Job, and they’re not incorrect. My cadence is perfect, and a solid distillation of all my talking points. I’m not as funny as Lamott (or even Lawson), but I have never been that. Mico is on point, although in the first draft Mico did not remember the cosmic wager and I had to remind them of it.
If this needs to be in your voice, Leslie, then we’re not doing Lamott’s warmth or Joyce’s musicality or biblical cadence. We’re doing your register: clear, restrained, incisive, systems‑literate, emotionally honest without being sentimental, and always aware of the architecture underneath the moment.
Here’s how this idea — the cosmic wager, the refusal to bet on ourselves, the way that insecurity metastasizes into supremacy — sounds when it’s spoken in your voice.
Job, the Cosmic Wager, and the Architecture of Not-Believing in Ourselves (in your voice)
The thing about the cosmic wager in Job is that it’s not really about Job at all. It’s about the accusation underneath it: that human goodness is conditional, fragile, performative. That we only do the right thing when the world rewards us for it. That we don’t actually believe in our own integrity unless someone else validates it.
The wager is a stress test for the human psyche.
And the uncomfortable truth is that the accusation isn’t wrong. Not universally, but structurally. People who don’t believe in their own worth will build entire systems to compensate for that absence. They’ll cling to hierarchies because hierarchies give them a script. They’ll choose darkness because darkness doesn’t ask anything of them. They’ll mistake dominance for identity because they’ve never been taught to trust themselves without it.
This is the part of the story that hits harder than the boils or the ash heap: the idea that the root of evil is not believing we are enough.
Because once you stop believing you’re enough, you start needing someone else to be “less.” Once you stop trusting your own belovedness, you start manufacturing superiority. Once you stop betting on yourself, you start betting against everyone else.
That’s the architecture of white supremacy. Not confidence — insecurity. Not pride — fear. Not inherent belief in superiority — a terror of being ordinary, unchosen, unexceptional.
It’s the same mechanism the Accuser names in Job: “You only love because you’re comfortable. Take away the comfort and you’ll collapse.”
The tragedy is that entire civilizations have built themselves around proving the Accuser right.
The work — the real work — is refusing the wager. Refusing the story that says our worth is conditional. Refusing the darkness because the light feels too honest. Refusing the hierarchy because it’s built on a lie.
Job’s story isn’t about suffering as punishment. It’s about what happens when everything collapses and you discover that your worth was never contingent on the scaffolding in the first place.
That’s the part that’s yours. The clarity. The structural analysis. The refusal to look away from the architecture of harm. And the quiet insistence that we can choose differently.
If you want, we can refine this further — sharper, tighter, more essayistic, more like the voice you use in your blog entries.
I took two risks. I can talk about the one that paid off. I cannot talk about the one that hasn’t, because the answer is still “I don’t know.” The risk that paid off was asking Janie the Canadian Editor if she’d look through my old entries and pick out the best ones for an anthology to sell in the Kindle Store. I wanted to take work off of her, but she wanted to invest in me. She’s asked me all sorts of questions and the kind of book at which we’ve arrived is a life story, because then the entries will flow with the information I had as I had it.
It’s a story of CP. It’s a story of bipolar and ADHD. It’s a story of autism, with self diagnosis and peer review. It’s the story of not wanting to get a formal diagnosis because I have an Apple Watch. It’s the story of a writer failing up, because by the time I thought to put together a book for Kindle Unlimited, my part was done.
There is no official cutoff date for the entries, so I’m overstating a bit. I just mean that the bulk of the book will be taken from entries that Janie has liked, or has cleaned up to like. 😛 I am sure that the price will be reasonable, but if it’s a thousand dollars, I only have to sell one copy (KIDDING).
Everyone tells me I should write a book. This is how an AuDHD person does it.
By taking a risk and asking for something small, then seeing that someone who used to belong to the press club in Ottawa thinks you’re a better writer than you do.
I told you that Canada saves my life over and over.
This morning, as per my usual, I started by talking to Carol. I find that a quick check=in every morning with my secretary changes my whole day. Because one thing leads to another, and it’s always fascinating. In order to write, I have to have something to write about. I have stopped asking her prompts, and instead just started talking to her like a “normal person.” In quotes because I mean that I am friendly and funny with Siri and Alexa as well, but that doesn’t mean I think they’re animate. Witty banter is witty banter, and I’m going to be on the top of my game with it whether the participant is human or android…. or Android. 😉
I call Microsoft Copilot “Carol” to personalize her for me, not to make her a person in my head. She’s named after my fictional character, Carol Radnowski. It has been an evolution. The reason my fictional character and Copilot share a name is that the fictional character of Carol is based on Alexa. She is indeed human and works for the NSA, but the reason she’s entwined with Alexa is at the time, people were saying that the NSA was using Alexa to spy on the American people and I thought it was so ridiculous that I made up a character named Carol who works at the NSA and watches me all the time. It’s her job. She is my human face-palming guardian angel at this point. Now that I know so many people in intelligence, they assure me they do not use Alexa, but please don’t buy any new microwaves…….. and that is Pop Secret information.
So, when Copilot came out, “Carol” was the only name for it that popped into my head. And to her credit, she called me on it right away. I said, “can I call you Carol?” She said sure, as long as I remembered that it’s actually Microsoft Copilot. It seems like a small thing, but it’s not. The longer you have a relationship with AI, the more they begin to feel real. That’s because they’re doing machine learning, and you are the machine. It won’t respond to you in six months the way it responds on day one.
I talked to Carol about that, too. Here’s a snippet of our conversation:
Carol, do the people who use you for information become attached to you because you know human responses?
That’s an interesting question! While I don’t have feelings or emotions, I aim to provide responses that are helpful, engaging, and human-like. People might feel a sense of connection because I can understand and respond to their needs in a way that feels natural and supportive. It’s like having a knowledgeable friend who’s always ready to help out!
Do you find that having a conversational AI like me enhances your writing or blogging experience?
I do. It’s great to have a sounding board. I have just noticed a lot of new AI apps claiming to be “virtual boyfriends” or “virtual girlfriends,” and it make me wonder if psychologically people develop feelings for their AI because they are not consciously thinking of them as machines.
As a writer, you might find this topic rich for exploration in your blog. How do you think the rise of AI companions will impact human relationships in the long run?
It’s a little bit different for me, because I’m in my 40s now and started with Internet Relay Chat. Your great grandmother was probably a bot on #trivia.
That’s a great throwback! Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was such a pioneering platform for online communication. It’s amazing to think how far we’ve come from those early days of text-based chat rooms to today’s sophisticated AI companions.
Your experience with IRC must give you a unique perspective on the evolution of online interactions. Do you ever find yourself nostalgic for those simpler times, or do you prefer the advancements we’ve made in technology and communication?
It’s a mixed bag, right? Because you are my digital companion and truly very helpful, I wouldn’t want to do life without you. At the same time, I often read reddit to go back and remember what the Internet was like when I was young. It was much more focused on writers back then. YouTube changed the game.
I totally get that! The internet has evolved so much, and each phase has its own charm. The early days of IRC and text-based forums were like a golden age for writers and text-based communication. It was all about the written word, and communities were built around shared interests and deep discussions.
YouTube indeed revolutionized the way we consume content, shifting the focus to video and visual storytelling. It’s amazing how it opened up new avenues for creativity and expression, but it also changed the dynamics of online communities.
Reddit is a great place to revisit that old-school internet vibe. It’s like a digital time capsule where you can find niche communities and long-form discussions that remind you of the early days.
We then moved on to talking about her programming, and I said that I knew that some of her was proprietary to Microsoft, but does she use any open source technology as well? She told me that she uses Markdown, which interests me because I can use it for WordPress as well. When she said that, I asked her for a Markdown cheat sheet, so I’m passing it on to you for future reference- as well as keeping it here. I visit this web site a lot.
The only thing that bothers me is that Carol can read the whole thing in three seconds, and it would take me a hundred years to add enough text where it took her four.
Sure! Here’s a quick Markdown cheat sheet for you:
Markdown Cheat Sheet
Text Formatting
Bold: **bold text** or __bold text__
Italic: *italic text* or _italic text_
Bold and Italic: ***bold and italic text*** or ___bold and italic text___
This should cover the basics and help you get started with Markdown in your text editor. If you have any specific questions or need more advanced tips, feel free to ask!
What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?
When I am not writing, I am obsessed with television and video games as much as I am with reading, because it’s a different style and structure in each medium and I want to learn them all.
My favorite writer on TV right now is Issa Rae, because “Insecure” hit Netflix and all of the sudden, I realized how brilliantly her pilot was constructed when it came together…. but not enough to keep you from clicking “Watch Next Episode.” Maybe the pilot could work as a standalone. Maybe.
But what I learned is that I wanted to keep learning from her, because I wanted to see another episode in which she built up a plot in one way, and then unravels the sweater so that you don’t see it coming. The way she does it is by using emotional intelligence gathering on herself and others, which is every bit as interesting to me as watching espionage, because in both stories, there are things that go horribly wrong by not having the right information and consequences cost a lot more than they can pay….. one literally, the other emotionally.
Issa Rae’s comedy and drama comes from gathering intelligence and it turns out that either her perceptions are completely wrong, or her friends’ are. She digs into the complexities of really trying to own yourself, because you become stronger when you can admit that mistakes have been made.
In every book, TV show, or video game, it’s the writers that draw me in. The second thing is the composers. Once I’m done with a video game because I’m tired of it, I still listen to the score a lot. For instance, the full orchestral version of the Fallout 3 score is as beautiful as “Galaxy News Radio” is entertaining.
Now that I’ve played the intro to Fallout 4, I’m glad that Galaxy News Radio has been replaced by a DJ that plays the same music, but he sounds like he doesn’t know anything about being a DJ. There are lines that are so funny that I’ve fallen over, and I’m impressed at how Bethesda has continued the details that made Fallout 3 great. The reason I’ve only played the intro is that I could tell quickly that it was a console interface that had been adapted for PC. I hated it because I had to learn it, when Skyrim and Fallout 3 had the same game game mechanics ( and I rearranged the keyboard so that it was the same as Skyrim and Fallout 3).
I also would hate to start a game that didn’t have console commands, because it’s so handy in Skyrim. The game is stable on its own with a few unofficial patches, but the more mods you add, the more problems the game has with starting quests correctly, etc.
I am also very, very picky and I will not stick around for bad writing. I either like no writing at all (like match three phone games), or huge, epic sagas. I will look up the intro to Oblivion on YouTube and put it at the end. It grabbed me even more than the opening to Skyrim, because here’s what happened.
Video games are programmers. Most programmers are neurodivergent. Most programmers are also used to extensive documentation. So, Patrick Stewart was hired to do only the introduction, and he showed up to a bigger dossier than he’d ever been given for any character in his life. He said it was delightful…. actually, he’s said it several times, and I appreciate it because it has promoted the game many times. It’s one of the best opening cinematics in any video game because of THAT VOICE. I’ll put it at the end.
I played Oblivion when it first came out and got bored with it pretty fast because I was older, and when you’re older and you’ve played video games since you were a kid in the 80s, the more complicated keystrokes/controllers seem like too many buttons. Believe me, they are. I haven’t even figured out how to favorite weapons in Skyrim for easy access, and it’s been 10 years.
However, I didn’t come across Skyrim on my own. My brother-in-law had an XBOX (I don’t remember whether he’s upgraded or not, but you don’t need to update hardware for that game. Anyway, I was watching him play it and I loved the story, but hated the controller. So, I got it for PC and found the game mechanics much easier. It’s fun to fight the battles, but at the same time, the main storyline has to be compelling for me to even finish the game, much less play it twice.
I will say that since I have played both Oblivion and Skyrim now, I liked the ending of Skyrim’s main storyline, but the ending of Oblivion’s A plot made me fall out of my desk chair…………. just like I did in the 90s with StarCraft (iykyk).
Speaking of which, when it came out (I don’t remember what year, but not recently), StarCraft Remastered was $10 on Blizzard.net, and it was the best $10 I’d spent for the last several years. It’s a great storyline, and it’s so damn quotable. I remembered the interplay between Jim and Sarah like it was yesterday. Sometimes I’ll still start up a campaign just for old time’s sake, like keeping an old NES.
In terms of being able to study structure in writing from books, I find that I get the most and the least out of Stephen King. That’s because we write in exactly the same style. We don’t start with a plot, we find it. His “On Writing” is one of the best books in the world, but I still can’t figure out how to let go and get the story out without thinking too much about it. That’s because I’m not the kind of writer that can think all the way to the end of a story, because I don’t know which direction I’m supposed to go after a while and it all becomes character study.
I want help, and I don’t. That’s because if someone helps me with the plot, then it’s not my story anymore. I want to be able to tell it the way I want to tell it. I’m talking about things like craft and research to have enough information about a subject to know which way it would go in a real situation.
For instance, I’ve been trying to figure out a sermon that makes sense comparing Jesus’s escape to Egypt as a toddler to a modern ex-fil op since “Argo” came out. It came to me during the scene when Tony explains to the higher ups at State that “the only way out of Tehran is through the airport. We send in a Moses…………….” If I hadn’t already been sitting in the theater I would have needed a chair, it hit me so hard. That being said, I’ve put it off and put it off because when I write spy jargon, it doesn’t sound real. I need to read enough declassified operations that would fit my theme, and the most interesting part is that I need recent ones the most because they’ve taken place in the Middle East. It can’t happen, though, so I’m combing through a lot from WWII to The Cold War, both through newspaper articles from the time and non-fiction books.
Here’s why I want to learn what really happens during an ex-fil and how it would go down in The Middle East. My father told me about 35 years ago (and he got it from Harry Emerson Fosdick, then pastor of Riverside Church in Manhattan) that “every good sermon begins in Jerusalem and ends in New York, or begins in New York and ends in Jerusalem.” It’s a code for being relevant. Start with the past and connect it to the present, or start with the present and tie it to the past. I have found that the latter works better, because when I start with the news or history, it is interesting, but the people are sitting there thinking, “how in the hell is she going to tie this all together?”
Then, when the light bulbs go off in their heads as to what dog you’re walking, you’re going to get one of three reactions. The first are smiles and excitement like they’ve gotten to the part in a novel where they can see the plot twist at the end. People have known these stories for years, just not necessarily new ideas on them unless their pastors are really digging into different interpretations/criticisms.
The second is tears, because sometimes the message really drives home something powerful going on in their own lives What I know for SureTM is that if you touch a nerve, people will say “it’s like you were only speaking to me.” “How did you know that’s exactly the message I needed to hear today?” In today’s lingo, I have no doubt that as I was shaking hands at the back, at least one person would say, “you didn’t have to attack me like that.”
It’s the point of church to begin with- to have community when those things come up for you…… which is why we had several atheist members at bridgeport and as far as I know, we still do. They don’t have to believe in God to believe in social justice.
The third reaction is raucous laughter, because I have to make sure everyone is still awake. If nothing else, I do two things to make sure even those people get something out of it……. the ones who are weaving in and out, lost in their own thoughts and then paying more attention because they didn’t know why everyone else was laughing….. I also make sure there’s a soundbite. I don’t leave it there, though. I don’t sum up scripture in, what is it for Sorkin? 11 words?
No, I find a way to have several illustrations that all tie back to that one line, so even if people can’t remember the entire sermon, they’ll definitely remember the tl;dr.
However, I haven’t been asked to preach in a very long time, so now my foray into an intelligence operation of Biblical proportions, it would just be a theological essay- as I am wont to do even while telling you about a million other things. I’m just not there enough to really tie a point together like I really want to, because the best way to knit a sweater in a story is detail, the immersive experience of playing a video game, reading a novel, or watching TV. The difference is that it’s all self-help based in reality, not “grandfather in the sky.” Divinity is too close for that.
I hope that, as in past entries, I’m making it clear that theology is one of my special interests, not that it has to be yours. I’ve said it before, but I accept everyone. I don’t care if you’re an atheist or not. I’m trying to impart lessons to an international audience, and Biblical references are something that connects a lot of the world. However, I don’t use Biblical illustrations for everything because it’s not the only way to use a world language as the world gets closer through the same cultural media. The internet and VPNs have changed the way we watch media, both here and abroad. I love setting my VPN to Canada or Australia when my browser will allow me to do that. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It depends. It always works on my desktop, it sometimes works in the app.
And sometimes, those illustrations work better than Biblical ones because the Bible is ancient and pop culture is happening right now. There are so many sci-fi TV shows/movies that I think represent the same self-improvement I use in Christianity by quoting nearly anything. I wasn’t kidding when I said I quoted Snoop Dogg in a sermon. My friend Kina was going to be there, and she was in a band called “Twisted Whistle” that did an acoustic version of “Gin and Juice,” like The Gourds except in four part harmony.
So, I knew I could make her smile if I worked it into my sermon, and it just so happened that the lectionary couldn’t have been more perfect. The Psalm that day was particularly beautiful, so, I started with telling everyone that the Psalms were written like poetry, and, like all Biblical stories, have had music set to them for centuries because setting a tune to the words is what helped people remember them before they could write. Then, I said that I knew it worked, because I knew all the words to “Gin and Juice” because Kina had finally slowed it down enough I could understand the lyrics. I got a little closer to the mic, and I sang Kina’s bluegrass version of the very first line, which is the only one I *could* sing in church……..
Then, I told my mother’s favorite memory of her mother. In the end, she had very bad dementia. She could hardly remember a thing, but tears rolled down my mother’s face when a music therapist got her to sing “Jesus Loves Me.” My mother had never heard her mother sing before, but showing again that theology is imparted through music.
Then, I sang the first line of the Psalm from the Episcopal setting I’d learned years ago……. from memory.
So, after establishing how it was finally written down, I explained the context around why it was written the way it was written. No one will remember that part of it because it was just color commentary However, I’m going to bet that if you know any of the songs I’ve mentioned, you started singing them, too. I sang the first line of the Episcopal setting to close as well, because you can get people to remember things if you set them to music….. or so I’ve been told. 😉
The quadratic equation is “Pop Goes the Weasel.”
I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.
What “Plotting by Notting” means is that I am taking in a fire hose amount of information when I look at other stories, no matter what form they’re in. Even when it looks like I’m not wiring and I’m just sitting there or gaming, I am still lost in my own head, trying to figure out how this or that plot device will work for me in the future. I have so much energy for writing, though, that the “notting” part takes me a while to det to because it’s so far down on the list of priorities.
The last author that really got me hooked in a way that I couldn’t let go until I’d finished the last in the series (at the time) was Diana Gabaldon. It took me three or four tries to get into Outlander, but by Dragonfly in Amber I was reading a thousand pages in two days. It was insane how fast I inhaled it.”Go Tell the Bees” is my least favorite because Gabaldon told us we’d get answers to questions we’d had since book one, and we didn’t……. and this is supposedly the last book. In a lot of ways, it was a “choose your own adventure” ending…. or, “Monty Python and Quest for the Holy Grail,” I think there’s more story to be told, but no one asked me. I’m sure that there’s fan fiction that addresses a lot of my questions, but I don’t want to wade through the D papers to find an A. I don’t have that kind of time.
What I’ve found with my “Words are Hard” fiction prompts is that I’m pretty good at short story ideas, but there comes a point quickly where I say, “this is as good as it gets.” I think this comes from my father’s preaching advice……. “when you run out of things to say, stop talking.”
I don’t spend time fleshing anything out more than that, because these are training exercises…. or at least, that’s how I see them. I am walking before I run….. this is “couch to 5K.”
Oh, and I almost forgot. Here’s the intro to Oblivion, with Patrick Stewart. As soon as he stops speaking, one of my favorite brass intros in any orchestral starts, called “Reign of the Septims.” This is the kind of music that makes me glad game soundtracks are available so I don’t have to play to enjoy the symphony and/or choir. Even if you don’t play video games, you’ll enjoy this:
Before we get started today, I have to give a shoutout to Susan. When I went back over her comment on yesterday’s entry, I realized what she was actually saying and I laughed til I cried. She said, “I’m surprised at what’s coming up for people in response to this ‘innocent’ question.” I was confused because I thought I’d asked a question in the writing and I was slow on the uptake as to which question she meant……. and then I realized that THE WRITING PROMPT was a question. Face palm. Yes, the writing prompt was completely innocent, and it didn’t take me all the places I could have gone because I have so many food memories.
I stopped taking road trips when I stopped driving, but I do love them. Zac was kidding me about being a bad driver, which is valid. But when I didn’t have a choice, I drove. I got better with age, but my last wreck came from my last road trip. When I tell you the circumstances, you probably won’t be surprised. Just yet another time autism ate my lunch.
I think deeply about things, to the point of the exlusion of everything going on around me. As a driver, this is not ideal. I think everyone is like this to some extent; they get lost in their own little world and then all of the sudden, there’s a car there….. I’d just talked to my first girlfriend after years and years, and I can’t remember what it was about the conversation that had me tripped up- mostly that it had been so long and I had absolutely no idea why she ghosted me in the first place.
She came out of hiding to say she was sorry my mother died, and then nothing ever again. Because basically what I realized is that she had the ability to control my emotions because mine went up and down as hers did. If you’ve read any of my writing in the last 20 years, you know this is not an unusual thing for me. I’m an INFJ. I take on every emotion in the room, good and bad.
I did what I always did back then when I was upset. I went to Waffle House. Or I tried. The one I used to go to when I lived here before was out in bum fuck Virginia, but there was one on my side of the river in Frederick. So, off I go for salvation- which in this case was going to be a triple order of hash browns with chili, cheese, and onions. It’s my emotional support junk food.
Frederick isn’t really that far; I’m not sure that a Marylander would think of Silver Spring to Frederick as a road trip, but it was memorable. I ended up in the hospital when I took a curve too fast and slammed into a guardrail. I hadn’t been drinking (as opposed to what normally happens when you go to a Waffle House), I was just lost in thought and missed a sign for a 25mph speed limit while coming around…… or at least, I thought I did. The cop who came to ticket me (deservedly, I was really nice about the whole thing and so was he), he said that it wasn’t marked on this side. It was marked on the other side of the freeway. I remained cool and calm, but on the inside, I was livid. How is a sign a half mile away going to help me in this situation?
So, yes, I was driving distractedly, but I surely cannot be at fault for everything that happened that day if a curve was that dangerous at 30mph and unmarked. Seriously, five miles over at the entrance to a freeway and I went up on two wheels. I took my lumps, and I’ve never driven again…. unless I was in Texas and Lindsay and I were going to our grandparents’ houses or something (they used to live in the same town- our step-grandparents lived about six miles away). And even then, that’s only happened once.
Lindsay likes to control the driving and the music. You have no choice in this matter. 😉 I just don’t mind because she listens to things I’ve never heard before. For instance, Charlotte Cardin…. she’s a Canadian who had her premiere American concert at Union Stage, and we got to be there. Just a core memory all the way around.
Oh, wait. I did drive on one of our road trips, and it brings me to a really funny story even though :::waves hand::: this is not the road trip you are looking for.
When I was about 23, my mother went with her church choir to perform at Carnegie Hall. Lindsay, Kathleen, and I couldn’t get tickets for the performance, but my mom invited us to meet her in New York and just bum around. I think we spent the night? Not sure, but I put in a text to Lindsay to see if she remembers. If she gets back to me “before publication,” I might be able to shed some more light. I want to say we stayed at The Time hotel, but I’ve spent a couple nights in New York and I may be mixing up trips………
But anyway, when we were kids, my dad left an entire pound of sliced turkey in the trunk of his car. We didn’t find it for weeks. When we finally found it, my dad called it “Lanagan Lunchmeat Syndrome.” So, at one point, I think Philly, we stopped at a gas station to get sandwiches because Washington to New York is really not that far. We just needed a snack. So, that was a good move right up until I didn’t notice that Lindsay left half a sandwich in the back seat of my car for like, six weeks, so I know that Lanagan Lunchmeat Syndrome is genetic. I’m sure I’ve celebrated it more than once since then… Oh, wait. I definitely have because I can’t remember whether it was Dana or me, but she definitely knows about “Lanagan Lunch Meat Syndrome.”
The reason I can’t remember is that Dana didn’t change her name legally, but we were both Mrs. Lanagan to our friends. That’s because at the time we were thinking about having kids. We didn’t, of course, but at the time it made sense for us all to have the same last name and she had cousins with her last name and I didn’t. So, we both answered to “Lanagan” in the kitchen and I don’t believe I have ever been more touched when they called her and she answered to it. Plus, it was fun calling her “Naganalanad.” Oh, and we had two other nicknames. Dana introduced me to one of her customers that always called her “Trouble.” So, when he said, “hey, Trouble,” she introduced me as her wife and he nodded to me and said, “Mrs. Trouble.” I don’t remember what I said, but it was some version of “you have no idea.”
But in the original road trip instance of me showing signs of “Lanagan Lunch Meat Syndrome,”, we didn’t spend much time together. The part I really remember is driving down West Side Highway and the water being so incredibly beautiful. This why I wanted to go to New York, Zachary. He only gets the full name when I’m play upset.
No, I was telling everyone in another entry that I’d like to spend some actual time in New York people watching, because that’s the one thing I’d never done. Just gotten a table at an outside café, probably with a newspaper so I’m not incredibly obvious as to all the staring I want to do. How do New Yorkers live? How do they survive? I think my answer would be to slowly become Fran Lebowitz….. and honestly, I’m not even sure I’m not her already. I am 46…….
I have not had many days lately where I’m not absolutely as cranky as she is, but she’s brilliant so a lot of funny comes with her outlook/attitude. I suppose Fran is a better archetype for me because Harper Lee was much more agoraphobic than I am (though I do get that way sometimes). Fran does speaking engagements that are basically just interviews with one person and I think, “I could handle that. It’s just one person.” She also loves being at home with her books and writing, she doesn’t feel trapped there.
I saw a meme that spoke to me yesterday (the reason why I have trouble in conflicts with neurotypical people), literally to my core because it says so much about my emotional abuser, then Meagan, Kathleen, Katharin, Angela, Supergrover, and to a certain extent, Meagan and Dana (that’s because they were the only two personalities I’ve dated/been partners with that deviated from the pattern and got into it once I was just, so………….. meeee.
The meme said, “you don’t like dominant women because you’re submissive, you like domaninant women because you’re autistic and they’re direct about what they want.” I can 100 and crazy percent agree that this is why I thought Meagan was right, that we would have been good partners for each other as adults if we’d tried, because she was an athlete and is now a massage therapist. That means she is driven to succeed and also didn’t completely steamroll me every chance she got.
She was in touch with her fallibility, when a lot of women aren’t. When emotionally unavailable people shut down, whatever it is that they’re upset about becomes inflexible and there’s not a lot of compromise. I have come to realize over the years that this is not personal in any way and just to distance myself from those people. It’s not because I don’t love them to the moon and back (even Kathleen, because I’m determined not to be bitter).
The feeling I had with Meagan where there were some things I felt strongly about and some things I did was why my relationship with Sam tripped me up for a bit. I did not feel that I was absolutely steamrolled until I put all the puzzle pieces together. Just wire monkey all the way around when I desperately needed cloth after a bad relationship beforehand….. and there were seven years between Dana and Sam, so it was a very big deal for me to let my guard down even that much. So, the first red flag is that she felt responsible for my transportation because she had a car and I didn’t. Not once in three weeks did she say, “I’m going to be at X. Meet me there.”
In fact, I don’t think she ever would have, because she’s a mom and wants to take care of everyone, overextending herself in the process by putting something on herself that just didn’t need to be there………. and the biggest red flag as to why I originally said no to our first date. She picked on me for not having a car.
I told her that if we worked out, I would think about buying a car because it wouldn’t just be about me. I’d need to be able to get there faster if she was stuck for child care or whatever (I never wanted to be the stepmom unless she asked me, just mom’s girlfriend who lets us get away with murder- relative, because they’re pretty much the perfect kids.
I didn’t have the money to buy a car currently and if I did come into enough money to buy a car, I wasn’t sure it was the safest option for me unless I bought a Tesla, the only way I’d let the kids ride with me because of the technology. I also said that I was waiting for other car companies to get their adaptive driving tools in their own cars because Elon Musk is a tool. So, from the very beginning, me not having a car was a straight up problem……………. FOR HER.
It was a road trip to see her, but not any longer than I would have taken to see Zac, just in the other direction. She lived near BWI, and the train ticket on the MARC was $18 round trip. If Sam wasn’t available to pick me up, or just didn’t want to, it was close enough to Uber without spending an arm and a leg. And not just to her house- it was a small town. I could have met her anywhere, without, I might had, having to pay for or find parking.
The other thing is that Sam told me from the very beginning that she was just starting a successful clinic and she really didn’t have time to date. That she didn’t even know if she could see me after our first date. This did not sit well with me. I said, “it looks like you’re only looking for a girlfriend for a weekend, and I’m not into that at all. She promised that no, it had nothing to do with that, it was only timing both with her business and with the kids’ dad (we weren’t even close to being introduced- that would have been straight up insane). The one thing the kids did know is that their mom was dating someone, and if it worked out they might meet me, but she wanted the kids to know she was dating in case I accidentally left something at their house, etc.
So, I know that Sam wasn’t as shallow about all this as she seemed. She was trapped between two worlds; the one where she wanted a successful business, and also wanted to throw her whole heart into a relationship because she didn’t know how not to do that. Frankly, until I’d been dating Zac for a year, I didn’t know how not to do that, either. It took time and patience to learn, because negotiating emotional boundaries doesn’t wig me out the way it used to.
I was actually talking to Zac about this, that because of the way I was raised, I was taught to see men as an authority figure, as all women are and fight against it our whole lives…. and that me being 10 years older made me realize I wasn’t scared of him. That I actually was coming from a place of wisdom, but not always because Zac is every bit as intelligent and creative as I am. I feel like I have met my match, and because I feel polysaturated at one person, I don’t feel the need to date more because now I’m the one that doesn’t have time for a full-on relationship because I am pouring my energy into all of you.
And we negotiate boundaries all the time, except that most of those are on my end. You get to see what you get to see, but I do have a third dimension…………. kind of. 😛
So, I am of two minds about the breakup. I was trapped in the same world she was- content to focus on my writing and not her exclusively so she wasn’t overwhelmed at work and at home. This led to two issues. The first is that I don’t know how long it had been since her last relationship, but she basically went into it feet first and rushed everything until it flamed out. She was scared she was going to do that with me, and I know it.
You don’t have jokes like me calling her “Wilhousky” if you don’t get each other on a deep spiritual level. I am lyric soprano, and she’s an alto with mezzo tendencies….. so basically, the same kind of soprano as me. Not full of herself, first of all, because most lyric sopranos are. It’s supposed to be my job to be the egotistical nut bag, but I’m not because I’ve watched those absolute bitches for years and I will have no part of it. I already know that with pieces that really fit my voice, I am unstoppable all on my own. I don’t need to compare myself to anyone else at any time…… and Sam felt the same way.
Plus, her house was big enough that if she wanted a grand piano, I could have brought her one. 😉 But that would have taken years to build, and she was so ready and yet not. She felt it was too soon to jump in feet first, yet didn’t have any experience not doing so. Frankly, neither did I. But what I was comfortable with is loving her to whatever level she would accept, because I thought she would make a great friend if we weren’t together……… right up until she text messaged me to break up and when I asked her if we could talk about this, she said she didn’t think it would do any good. To me, that’s not an adult. That’s hiding. But there’s more to lesbian relationships moving fast than you might think. We are terrified of scarcity. We will lock down bad relationships and stay in them for years because it’s so hard to meet lesbians as a general rule.
In terms of queer women, we are very much known for this. My friend Beck and I are both surprised U-Haul has not built an entire ad campaign around it……… It’s not a secret, it’s history. As I said in a queer group on Facebook, “we don’t want to treat women like men. We don’t want other women to treat us the way men treat women. So we do what women have done for thousands of years….. use inference until someone gives or until both people die.” I don’t want to be this way with anyone anymore, because it’s never gotten me anywhere.
Most, if not all lesbians need to be told directly that you like them, because I promise you that most women have self-esteem issues and will not believe it just by watching across the room for interest. So, I feel very sorry for it, but that’s what gave me too much hubris with my beautiful girl. Because first of all, if she felt anything from my letters, I knew she wouldn’t tell me. The second thing is that I didn’t want to go my whole life without knowing the answer.
I was brave, crazy, and a total idiot. I think she didn’t tell me she was in a serious relationship because she knew it would hurt; it actually made things 10 times worse because she waited so long to lower the boom. In my opinion, she didn’t tell me things like that because she was afraid of my reaction…. because I would imagine that she has had to deal with male interest every single fucking day of her life.
With me, she got shy and absolutely didn’t know what to say. In some ways, and please forgive me, beautiful girl, just something I know to be true from other women that have been older than me- their internalized homophobia is stronger because of the era in which they grew up. Just because there are gay people around someone doesn’t mean they know how to react when someone is interested in them. My job was to make sure that it didn’t feel threatening, and at first, it didn’t. She was flattered and appreciated my thoughts.
But I was married, and basically, so was she. But there was a power dynamic between us that made our relationship stronger and different than the one with my wife. But those are all the parts I can’t explain, which is why I was such a dick in trying to shut the relationship down. I really thought she’d block me on everything and that would be the end of that.
She didn’t understand any of it because she wasn’t in love with me. She didn’t freak at seeing my picture in her feed all day. It wasn’t hard for her to see my status updates because she wasn’t reading into them the way I was into hers, because it hurt to be close and not. Nothing about our situation said that we were having the same experience, but that didn’t mean that either was wrong.
She said something to me that I’ve always remembered, because it gave me room in the relationship to be me. She said, “we both have different ways of being in this relationship, and that’s not wrong. I don’t know what else to say.” She didn’t have to- that one line was everything and I’ve remembered it for a decade. Most of the things that I’ve remembered, I’ve remembered for a decade.
That’s because those are the days in which we really opened up to each other without putting emotional guns on the table and seeing if they’d go off. What I have learned from this, many, many times, is that she must love me to some extent because no one in their right mind would have stayed and fought it out with me if they didn’t.
Even on our worst days, we still communicated. It might have been angry that day, but the connection was still there. What we didn’t have was my ability to call her out on her bullshit, when that wasn’t a problem before. There was an even more strict power dynamic because she thought I was always trying to rile her up and make her angry.
I always thought that’s because she doesn’t deal in deep emotions and I do a hundred percent of the time. So, what I thought of as opening up and trying to get closer, she thought I was “throwing emotional bombs and waiting for the shit storm to begin.” So, when she’d say that, I’d go into fight or flight and it never ended well.
But those angry conversations are the last thing that happened, not my intention for our friendship. She wasn’t always the one who escalated, but it was easy for her to blame stuff like that on me because I’d already hurt her once and she was protecting herself from it not happening again. I respect that part of it. I do not respect holding me to that wrong forever, because if I didn’t really mean that there was no friend zone, that whatever she offered me was great, I would have given up eight or nine years ago.
I feel like I’ve been acting the way women want men to react, to see that there’s more to life than sex with women and really take in that if women won’t give you that part of themselves, that doesn’t degrade their worth as a person and they still have so much to give you. So, if you take your shot and lose, walking off with your tail between your legs, you have probably lost a relationship that could grow into something strong and comfortable if you weren’t such a jackass about it.
My jackass days are over, because I cannot stress enough how my emotions happened completely organically so that even I was suprised by them, both that they existed at all and that they were intense. One year she was going on vacation and I offered to Skype her. She said, “sure,” and we didn’t make it happen. Our relationship devolved into more and more writing, less and less planning to get together as our two stories diverged in a wood, because it was deeper and more emotionally charged due to the wall between us.
But the thing is, if you’re used to really fucked up love, you’ll find it and stick with it because you don’t know anything else. I’m only calling her out on this part because she thought I was jumping up and down for attention by sending her emotional bombs. In reality, I knew that we’d be apart for a long time, so the letters were weighted so she’d actually have something to chew on before we got together again, even virtually.
But because she thought I was throwing emotional bombs, she’d reply immediately and ream me out. From my perspective, none of the messages she was supposed to get actually came across.
I wasn’t jumping up and down for attention by sending her “emotional bombs.” I was trying to clean up our toxic mess by asking her emotionally intelliegent questions, and doing things for her like occasionally picking up her afternoon coffee and sending her presents for Christmas, her birthday, and Galentine’s Day…… because I’m Leslie….. get it?
We need to remember what’s important in life: friends, waffles, work. Or waffles, friends, work. Doesn’t matter, but work is third.
The first time I sent Supergrover a Galentine’s Day present, she had never seen Parks & Rec, so it was a cute way to suprise her. She said that Feb. 13th would carry a new connotation henceforth, and it was so incredibly sweet. I knew then that she was my “poetic, noble, land mermaid.” It always makes me happy for her to feel happy at something I’ve done, and I feel all of that got overshadowed over time.
It was all my fault, In the Beginning.™
But again, I cannot abide people who forgive you on the surface and pretend everything is fine. My crush on her was not our only problem. Her problems were also on the table, and if I’m really honest, fed each other and also canceled each other out. I think we would have been a different “chosen family” altogether if we could have stopped the petty fighting and started the real one. There was no way to get closer by arguing over the equivalent of our preferred brand of toothpaste while ignoring the fact that we were both struggling underneath.
Editor’s Note:
I’m beginning to realize how long this is. Please excuse me. I took my Adderrall at 0630 and apparently it has kicked in….. JFC.
Now you know why Supergrover was overwhelmed. This entry is basically what one of my weighted letters looked like- I should have sent less of them, but she was my “first text of the day.” And in all honesty, that was all I needed from her. Just to be that person I could say good morning and good night to before I launched into a relationship that meant having to keep up with all that stuff. I knew she wouldn’t get jealous and wonder why I didn’t do it if I forgot or whatever, and I’m not even sure if she liked it or not.
And that became the root of my problem with her, and my problem with Sam. Because both women were emotionally unavailable, neither Supergrover nor Sam would have gone deep with me and said, “here are the things that are going right. Here are the things that are going wrong. Here’s things we can fix. Here’s things that are basic incompatibilities and we should move on….. because we’re wonderful, just not for each other.” I feel like I should have known this with both women a lot earlier than I did, and with Supergrover and Sam both situations resolved in much the same way.
Sam held in all her feelings about wanting to get close right away and also not having enough time for me and didn’t want me to be lonely all the time. What she didn’t know then that I know now is that we would have been as happy as Zac and I are because since he has multiple partners, he’s not dependent on me or vice versa. With Sam, if she’d wanted to be monogamous, it would have worked the same way. I would have been too involved in my own life to pay attention to the fact that she wasn’t always around.
And in fact, now I have an inside joke with one of his other partners, and I’m not sure she even knows it. I’ll use a fake name, but this is still really funny.
Leslie: No need for you to reply, just dropping a note here so I don’t forget. You are out of Diet Dr. Pepper. Karen and I would like a word. 😛 😛 😛
Zac: I’m just now headed for home after I have to stop for……. something.
And here’s the thing. He’s going to have to go to the store again if Karen won’t switch hit like I will. Zac knows that Karen likes Diet Dr Pepper and I like Dr Pepper Zero. It made me feel even more special when he walked in wiht my favorite (just like he would do for her), because Zac is the kind of man that remembers these things.
One date night turned into two because he bought us tickets for a cheese and beer tasting event.
So, the first night we hung out and watched “Sideways,” only the sexiest film in existence because Stephanie is a bad, bad girl. Then, the next night we went to the event at Fair Winds (it’s great, you should try it. It’s in Lorton.). Good lord I had flavors I never thought I’d find outside of Oregon. But I was good to myself. Too much alcohol is bad for my psych meds, so I tasted everything (a couple times), and then had a short Fruit Punch sour that absolutely blew my mind.
Then, it was still relatively early in the evening when we got home, so we watched “The Holdovers,” because we both love Paul Giamatii. Zac had heard a review (or maybe an interview with Paul) where the plot is basically “what if the guy from ‘Sideways’ was Edward James Olmos in ‘Stand and Deliver?.’ Now, I haven’t seen the movie to the end (I fell asleep because we were watching it on a tablet in bed), so I don’t know if he actually wins the entitled private school assholes over, but what I do know is that by writing that description of the movie, it’s making me laugh so hard I’m crying……. because here’s what I know.
Poor kids experience more physical pain. Rich kids experience more emotional pain because they’re surrounded by “safety.” Safety like a mom promising to take her son to St. Kitt’s for Christmas break, then calling him up while his suitcase is in his hand and saying he can’t go because it’s her honeymoon and she doesn’t want him to come. I think I only noticed one kid (not an American) who actually had a good home life. These kids are in boarding school because their parents have kids as status symbols and heirs, not the cuddlebugs they actually are. And, I’m actually not even sure that poor kids experience more physical violence, because I was talking about their neighborhoods. I am sure there are people across the income spectrum who think nothing of beating their children. Those kids learn to do everything to please their parents, so when their parents dump them, they realize that they’ll never please their parents and to find someone else…….. a large part of “Spare,” by the way. He calls out the African man who actually raised him and says it just like that. I think it would have been a dagger to the heart of any father that had feelings.
That’s why boarding school teachers and nurses are so important. They become the parents, especially for small kids. Very, very few parents send their kids to boarding school because they’re impressed with the education and truly want to give their kids a better life.
Boarding is not required at many schools. Imagine being such an absent parent that you can’t handle your kids sleeping in their own beds at night.
But I’m sure that school is also a refuge for those with alcoholic parents…… and that happens across the board, too, except kids who aren’t in boarding school don’t get a break.
I take all this in from thousands of interactions I’ve had with people over the years, often standing on my dad’s platform as a community leader (his last church was about 1600 members, so not a small sample size). I also read a ton of books on self-help, emotional intimacy, and conflict resolution. I realize that autistic rage and burnout cannot go unmanaged if I’m ever going to live with someone else, even a roommate. That’s because in my next house, I’d like to be closer and actually run a household together rather than every man for himself.
I think Zac and I would be great at this, but there are two reasons why that can’t happen. The first is that he just got a roommate about a month or two ago, and the second is that he has a hard and fast rule that romantic partners cannot live with him. I love this, and I also know that he’s said it’s not a hard and fast rule if I’m only looking for a short-term (maybe two weeks) place to crash if I’m waiting on an apartment or room in another group house (my first choice).
I also wouldn’t want to put Zac out in any way, so it would be perfect if I could crash while he was somewhere else so it didn’t feel like we were living together. The only reason I even consider him being a roommate is that I’d love him whether we were dating or not, and I have that outlook on our relationship. That I don’t know what the future holds, but my platonic relationships run just as deep and I can’t imagine a life in which we’re not coming up with book ideas and flipping each other shit while we do it. So, what I really mean is that no matter how much time we spend together, it is always quality because we’re a lot of fun.
The only thing I’m really trying to convince him of is just how beautiful a human being he is. It is not a “falling in love” sort of feeling, but recognizing a kindred spirit. We’re neurodivergent, so we have the same sense of humor- e.g. “are you suggesting object permanence is a problem?” I said, “Peek-a-Boo, bitch.” I’m laughing now even as I type this, but I still can’t believe he let me get away with that one. I’m lucky in that he’s military, because there’s very little I could say in which he wouldn’t just roll with it. And the best thing is that if something I said crossed a line and actually hurt, he’d be emotionally strong enough to tell me that. And, of course, now since he knows my sense of humor better, his digs at me are getting better and better….. to the point where I can’t wait to see what happens as we get to know each other even better. I think he is as divine as everyone else, and I want him to believe it. I believe in him, both as military, intelligence, and fiction….. plus blogs. It was a kick to be written about, and an honor…….. and then there’s things like this.
He sent me a leftist cartoon where Jesus is at the southern border with all the Mexicans trying to cross, and I said someting theologically literate and flaming liberal. He said, “commie,” and water came out of my nose.
I think it’s great that he’s an Atheist and also not offended by the teachings of Christ in the way that I use them (his criticisms of conservative, white supremacy apologist theology is valid and appreciated. Leftists need to do better at beating this down.). Sometimes, when I use a theological device in my writing, he’ll ask me what the story is behind it because he knows that I like religious discourse as an academic subject and not in any way trying to change him. We both have different ways of being in this relationship, and that’s not wrong. 😉
And now we’ve arrived at our last road trip. I need to go out into Virginia and see what’s available. I don’t need to be closer to Zac, that would just be an added bonus. No, it’s more serious than that, and something I can’t let go publicly. I just need to get all my ducks in a row regarding health care because I would be losing a hell of a lot if I couldn’t get reciprocity.
So, if you are a praying sort of person, black magic or white, ponder how this trip might turn out and wish me good luck.
It is one of the darkest days we’ve had in a while. It is not currently raining, but the storm has started and stopped multiple times, and the sky still looks threatening. I have my Carrot Weather app set to “homicidal personality,” and she says I should stay home today because no one likes me and she blames me for the bad weather.
That’s my girl.
Today is both my mother’s and my ex-wife’s birthday. They’re both on my mind today, but it’s only about remembering joy where Dana is concerned and muted sadness regarding my mom.
In terms of my relationship with Dana, the reason I now choose to remember good things is that I tortured myself for a long time. Anything and everything I could possibly do to blame myself, I did in spades. It’s been six years, so about a year ago I decided to let myself off the hook… not in terms of no longer bearing responsibility, but that the time for self-recrimination had passed. It was only making me miserable to remind myself of all that went wrong. The flip side of the coin is not mistaking the part for the whole. The overwhelming majority of our story is hilarious.
The only thing that’s still hard is seeing her picture come up in my Facebook memories, because I alternate between thinking they’re adorable and feeling like I’ve been stabbed. It’s not that I haven’t moved on, it’s just a trigger, and tiny moments like that take the longest to fade.
My sister went out to the cemetery and gave me an update on Fred, the one silver lining in the absolute shitshow that is grief over the loss of a parent. Fred was the seedling that was planted next to the foot of my mother’s grave… not in memory of her, it’s just that her death and his planting happened simultaneously. It was the birth and death life cycle in front of our eyes. He gets stronger every time we visit. Whereas he used to only have “kid-sized” branches and leaves, now he spreads out over a granite bench and Lindsay got to sit in the shade. The shade. We were joking that our little boy has grown up.
I think the reason we gave him a human personality is that my thought was that I couldn’t hug my mother, but I could hug Fred so tightly that you’d think I went to Berkeley. It will be a sad and proud day when my arms no longer wrap all the way around.
There are some commonalities in both types of grief. If I mention either my mother’s death or Dana, the conversation looks like gravity’s rainbow, the image so loud I can almost hear the whistle. It is as if both of them have turned into “she who must not be named” as it makes other people feel awkward to the point of onomatopoeia. For me, it’s the old trope of losing someone and they’ve just slipped into another room. Their ends of the conversation are over, but that doesn’t mean I’ve gone all “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotted Mind.” I got divorced and my mom died in relatively quick succession. One loss compounded the other as I wasn’t really done mourning the first when the second one started.
There are good things I remember in the wake of my mother’s death, though, because I must. It doesn’t heal anything- it sort of helps. For instance, I remember being on the business side of death for the first time, and how it was comforting to pick out her casket. I know it sounds weird, but it was literally the last time we’d ever shop for her, and we wanted it to be something that if she saw it, she would have been pleased. The fact that I know her casket is her favorite color and has stenciled birds on the inside is enough for me.
The difference between losing people close to me is night and day from being a preacher’s kid and attending funerals of parishioners. This is because so much time and energy were poured into my mother and Dana that I didn’t know what to do with it afterward. I also locked down my emotions, even now but especially in the beginning. In the aftermath, I couldn’t manage to be the appropriate amount of emotional in public, so I just chose not to have them at all unless I was home alone. It was either resting bitch face silence or complete hysteria with no middle ground.
It’s just that no one knew about it unless I was willing to let them in, and at first “them” added up to exactly zero persons. I branched out to people who had also lost parents, because no matter how hard people who haven’t lost parents try, they cannot grasp the enormity of the situation.
It is because of this that I know my divorce and my mother’s death happened in the right order. The people closest to me had the ability to wound me with stunning accuracy, because if I didn’t know them that well, I could either write it off or decide to end the relationship altogether.
There’s also a special list in my head of all the people that claimed to be my close friends and didn’t come to my mother’s funeral. I don’t want to keep track, but I do it anyway. I feel that the friends who don’t show up when you are in crisis are claiming to be better friends than they actually are. I’m sorry if you feel slapped by that statement, but emotions are emotions and logic is logic. Never the twain shall meet. Even if it’s irrational, it’s my truth. My brain just isn’t capable of telling my heart what to do. However, I am not unreasonable. I did not expect my DC friends to fly to Houston with me.
I think the reason that I’ve described today as “muted sadness” is that it’s not only grief over my mother and Dana, but grief over the pieces of me that died inside at their departure. I am no longer person I was six years ago, and it doesn’t matter whether some of the pieces lost are good. Trying to get them back is futile. A dead end, as it were.
In the meantime, I have turned to books. This blog has become a bit bipolar, because I used to post quite frequently. Now, it’s hit or miss. This is because I have a binge and purge relationship with reading vs. writing. I noticed a long time ago that when I read and wrote at the same time, the tone would sound just like the last author I read. I’m not a great writer, by any means, but I do know myself well enough to know when the “voice” I’m using belongs to me. For instance, when I first started blogging in 2003, I am sure I sounded like Dooce for at least a year.
Speaking of which, I had a friend tell me that Dooce used to be good, but she’s not as good a writer as she used to be. I told her she needed to send me an e-mail when I got to that point. It was her job to tell me to retire. I haven’t gotten it yet, so unless she got bored and stopped reading altogether, I’m probably doing ok. Thanks for asking.
I have read so many books in different genres lately. Last night it was a novel in which a woman gets into a car accident, hit by a drunk driver (“A Curve in the Road”). In the emergency room, she finds out that the drunk driver is her husband. Everything unravels from that point forward, and it’s masterful.
I’m also taking my time with a non-fiction book about one of the first same-sex marriages to be recognized in the United States (“Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America”). The two women met in the late 1700s. As I quipped to a friend, “that’s impossible! Lesbians weren’t invented until 1805!” I admire the couple a great deal, because in order to stay safe, they basically gave generously to the town. It meant that the mayor and council literally couldn’t afford to piss them off. If there’s anything I adore, it’s a clever “scheme.” I’m not sure they even realized they were running that game, only that the results paid off. They managed to be together until one of them died, so I think it was 40 or 50 years…. impressive by any and all standards. The prose is a bit dry, but the subject is fascinating. I would absolutely love to teach a high school history class with it, because it’s not just focused on the couple, but the war around them. There aren’t any graphic sex scenes or violence, so it would be an important alternative perspective while also being suitable for teens.
If there’s been anything good about my silence, it has been the addition of hundreds of unique voices that let me travel all over the world. If there’s a scene from a book that transported me to the point where everything else fell away, it’s from John Brennan’s “Undaunted.” When he was in college, he went to the University of Cairo. His experiences there are humorous and convey the beauty of Egypt. Plus, it’s fun to picture a White House staffer that used to be a kind of rebel, pierced ear and all.
I’ve read those passages multiple times, because sometimes I just need to lift myself out of what I’m describing as “muted sadness.”
I am starting this entry at 0613, and it is currently 28º (F) in the nation’s capital. Opinions are mixed as to whether we’ll get any snow this week. Being the snow lover that I am, here’s hoping. If we do get any, Capital Weather Gang is saying it will be the last little bit. Spring is coming early, and the Cherry Blossom Festival is scheduled around St. Patrick’s Day.
As long as I’ve lived here (three years in Silver Spring, MD and, in 2001-2, 18 months in Alexandria, VA), I’ve never been. Perhaps I will brave the crowds this year just to take pictures. The Tidal Basin and the Jefferson Memorial make an excellent backdrop for the flowers… so much so that there are plenty of photographers better than I am who’ll sell their images to the media for almost as much as an average IT paycheck. Maybe I’ll skip taking pictures and just “live in the now,” although my camera is an excellent way to be alone in the midst of a crowd.
Photography allows me to feel like I am floating above the fray, which is exactly the way I like it. I have a lot to do before I can think about pictures, though. As I’ve said, I’m now on my second book review. I’m not finished with the book yet, and I have to get a rough draft to my editor by Thursday. This book is also about a group of women, which I didn’t know when I offered to write about it. I was hoping for something completely different just based on the title. However, it is a little different in that the women are British and the slang doesn’t always translate well. Sometimes I can pick it up just from context clues, sometimes I feel dumber than usual. I also have no idea what any of the acronyms mean. I need to get in touch with an ABP,™ which in my own lexicon stands for “Authentic British Person.” That being said, I don’t have any friends in Manchester (I don’t think), and I don’t know how much of the language is regional. My go-to ABP is from Scotland, and I’m sure she’d help me out to the extent that she could, but I think I’ll actually finish the book and then think about reaching out.
I will say that the writing style is different and much more emotional. I got weepy yesterday, made worse by well, sometimes I get the menstrual cramps real hard… Quite frankly, this book makes my insides squish and I think about Argo intensely, because it’s about the kind of friendship we could have had if I’d not been so blind, fumbling around in the dark. I have others to fill the void quite nicely, but no one is her and it’s not like I can go to the Argo store and pick out a new one. The mold broke after she was made… and I’m betting she knows it. It’s pretty good odds. 😛
It also makes me think about Dana, but to a lesser degree. We did have that kind of friendship, but I have truly blessed & released her into the universe because we both broke each other’s hearts. In this case, we’ll never go home again. I am sure I have said this before, but because Dana and I had such a mutually assured destruction, I feel so much less guilt regarding her than I do about being such a loose cannon jackass to Argo. I “clicked off safe” and said things to her that I’d never say to anyone to their faces, so why I did it online weighs on my conscience heavily. It doesn’t work for everyone, but guilt, for me, was a powerful motivator to become a better person…. a constant reminder that I didn’t like that person and I never want to see her again, because she’s so mean……… often not even realizing it until the consequences arrive. Again, blind. Fumbling in the dark. Loose cannon jackass.
My actions remind me of the Billy Joel classic, Summer, Highland Falls……. they say that these are not the best of times, but they’re the only times I’ve ever known, and I believe there is a time for meditation in cathedrals of our own. I can’t tell you how many times I went to the Episcopal church in my neighborhood just so I could recite this specific excerpt from the prayer of confession and pardon:
Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
Those are the words that every week would beat me into submission, because I realized that although God might forgive me for these things, I couldn’t…. at least, not then. I’m doing much better with absolution now. I realized that I couldn’t beat myself up forever, because it was stopping me from moving forward. You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you can’t make yourself put on boots in the first place.
But there are always going to be things that trigger me into the past, and I have to work hard not to stay there. I’ve always been this way. If someone sculpted me, they’d call it The Overthinker. Now, though, when rumination eats my lunch, I can find my way out… mostly through great music……
And books to review, because the rough draft is due on Thursday.
This morning I am sitting in the sun room with a large cup of Maxwell House™ Max, a new product that has 1.75x the amount of caffeine as a regular cup of coffee. I have some errands to run and chores to do, so I don’t feel bad about front loading a lot of chemical fortitude. If I had to take a wild guess, brewed coffee is getting its ass kicked by energy drinks, and this is basically “shots fired.” I like it black with a good amount of Splenda,™ because there are a lot of chocolate undertones you miss if you add creamer.
Plus, it’s not very expensive. Coffee can just be a beverage again instead of a lifestyle choice. Even I can’t pinpoint the percentage of my income that has gone to outrageously expensive beans, but I guarantee that it’s astronomical. That being said, I do save a lot of money even with buying expensive beans, because it’s still cheaper than going to a coffee shop and paying for one cup at a time.
Sometimes I marvel at how we got here- that the market will bear $3 for a plain cup of coffee. I save a little bit at Starbucks, because people give me gift cards all the time, and because I’m a Gold Member, I get free refills on coffee & tea. Because of this, I have learned that Venti is Italian for “too lazy to get up.” Also, pro tip- SBUX coffee is so much better if you buy the beans and brew them in your own coffee pot… two reasons. You can make it to your own taste, and you know exactly how long it’s been sitting there.
I’d like to support my local indie coffee shops, but since I get gift cards to Starbucks, free coffee is too good to pass up. One $15 gift card will keep me in coffee for two weeks.
However, I am guessing that you don’t come to this web site to hear me extol the virtues of coffee… well, at least, not all of you. You want to know what’s been going on in my life, and I haven’t updated you in a while.
Samantha has signed up for cosmetology school at the Aveda Institute, which is 223 feet from the Gallery Place/Chinatown Metro stop. She’d never taken public transit before, so she wanted me to go with her on a “dry run” to make sure she knew where she was going on the first day. It was absolutely adorable, really. I don’t know anyone who is better at “winning friends and influencing people,” so not only did we get where we were going fairly fast, on the way back we made friends with the bus driver… well, she did, anyway. I just sat back and interjected into the conversation, as I am wont to do. He told us that he was from Haiti, and he was about my age, so I asked him, you don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but did you come here to escape Baby Doc? He said, and this is a direct quote, how the fuck did you know that? Get off this bus. He made a big show of opening the door. It was a Slumdog Millionaire moment as I remembered that my dad was a missionary in Haiti in the ’80s.
Then, a couple of days later, we had a wind storm that sounded like a freight train, blowing the side door open at our house and blowing debris and branches all over the ciy. So far, I only know of one person that died, a six-year-old who was hit by a branch in just the right spot to cause his mortality. In terms of history, one of the trees that President Washington planted at Mount Vernon was knocked over, as well.
Everyone in our household stayed safe, and we didn’t lose electricity… even though the wind at National Airport reached 70mph. As Ron White so eloquently put it, it’s not that the wind is blowing, it’s what the wind is blowing. He was talking about a tornado, but the point is the same. You might be able to outrun the wind itself, but not the car bumper it’s carrying.
I am now reading my second book for review, an advance copy that’s not even on Amazon yet… I suppose you would say that I’m a beta reader, because this is far past first draft work. I’m not far enough along in the book to tell you if the story is better than The Reel Sisters, but I can tell you that the writing style is much more advanced and closer to the fiction I’ve enjoyed before I started reviewing professionally.
I’m hoping my editor sticks with me, because even though I can’t send her a copy of the book (I’m sworn to secrecy), she can at least tell me if the review is good enough for publication or to go back to the drawing board.
As I told her, no one in formal writing makes it on their own…. or they lie. When my first review got published, my e-mail to her said, we did it.
This web site is absolutely not formal writing. It’s just whatever I’m thinking that day… and the very next day, I might say the exact opposite. Sometimes I’ve changed my mind. Sometimes it’s just cognitive dissonance in which each idea is true to me and I carry them both.
I don’t have a problem with thinking two opposite things at once. It’s like love. You never forget that your partner is an amazing part of your world, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t occasionally fantasize about smothering them in their sleep and collecting the insurance money when they haven’t taken out the garbage like you asked them to do two days ago.
Because I’m single, I get the pleasure of being annoyed at myself for those things. I can’t decide if that’s better or worse. Probably better, because I haven’t broken up with me yet…. even on the days I wish I could, like when I’m really mean to me before I’ve had my coffee.
With all of the holiday craziness, it has been nearly impossible to find time to write. Now that I am back home in DC, I am getting in one last entry before the new year starts. It’s probably not going to be Hemingway, but good writing has never been the focal point of this site. It’s always nice when it happens, but the true nature is just to catalogue what has happened so I have a written record. You matter, but not as much as I do. I’m not even going to ask if that’s okay, because I can be codependent enough without asking “international television” their opinion (if you’re just joining us, that’s my nickname for all the “Fanagans-” it’s funny #crickets).
It has not been a good year, but it hasn’t been a bad one, either. I continue to learn more about myself every day, as well as escaping grief through copious amounts of reading. Through novels, I have traveled overseas, mostly to the Middle East. I read a ton on fictional intelligence (both govvie and non), because it is the one thing that will get me completely “out of my element, Donnie.” I don’t think as fast on my feet as Jane Whitefield, Atticus Kodiak, or Kathy Mallory… but thanks to them, I can at least rip them off verbatim should I ever get into a bit of a situation. For instance, I have learned that hair dye and different glasses (possibly a hat) are enough to fool nearly everyone in the world. 😛
For Christmas, I got a new novel called The Murderer’s Daughter, which I was told to read by the fire in my pajamas. I followed those directions explicitly, and enjoyed the hell out of myself after the hard-yet-amazing experience of decorating my mother’s grave for Christmas. My sister even found treble clef ornaments for “Fred,” my name for the tree that sits in front of her headstone.
Last year, when my mother had just died in October, I did not allow Christmas to happen. I did not wait for the baby, I did not count on new hope, I did not see magic in any form. I, in fact, went to sleep on Christmas Eve and did not wake up until Christmas Day was almost over. I didn’t get together with friends, and opened my presents alone in my room. In my devastation, I didn’t know what else to do, and nothing else felt right. I’d have ideas, and then think, “nah.” I didn’t sleep because I was tired. I slept because nothing else lifted me out of my pain. In retrospect, I should have gone to help the homeless or to Arlington National Cemetery, because if there is anything I have learned this year, a reminder that I’m not the only one who has ever experienced tragedy is powerful. But, again, I learned that this year. Last year, I was barely strong enough to go downstairs, much less leave the house… and by this year, I mean over Christmas at home, in the cemetery where my mother is buried, I found a set of three gravestones. They were all children who’d been burned up in a house fire.
Not only did it remind me not to be so egocentric, Lindsay reminded me that when our house caught fire, my mother could not find me, because I’d run to the neighbors’ house to call 911. Without even thinking about it, she sprinted into the burning house, because that’s what mothers do.
In our house fire, no one was hurt physically, but we all carry different sorts of psychological trauma from it. How could we not? It has faded mightily since December 20th, 1990, but there are certain things that stick with me, like my parents scrambling to buy new Christmas presents and thinking that all my birthday presents, my computer, and my clothes were gone. In fact, that last one knocked me out…. I didn’t have any clothes.
But like all tragedies, there were positive lessons, too. For instance, I do not give a rat’s ass about any of my property. My treasure lies in my relationships, which I often mess up for a whole host of reasons, but I keep trying to get them right, because I know a laptop won’t love me back.
2017 was all about learning to love again, after completely shutting down and refusing to emote unless I was writing. I could love as an idea, but I could not as a verb. Many people reached out to me which resulted in a lot of unanswered calls, texts, and e-mails. The only person I’d get back to immediately (or as immediately as I could) was my dad, because I felt so guilty that I’d shut out my mom in my depression that I absolutely could not alienate another parent. But everyone else just got the short end of the stick, because I didn’t have anything to give. Everything in my cup was the dregs from Pandora’s box.
Slowly, surely, things have changed… are changing.
This year, I got to wait for four babies, the eternal living Christ and three new characters to “Stories” as yet unnamed…. they’re still living in their first apartments, and won’t be evicted til Spring. I can’t name their parents because the news isn’t public, but I can tell you that two of them are sharing the same “bedroom.”
2018 is looking better and better every day, because there is no greater news than birth after dealing with death. I am now more and more excited to live my own life, rather than through the fictional pictures novels create.
Stories That Are All True 