Samsung – Stories That Are All True

I realized that I’d told you I have sensory issues, and that I do my best to mute them while they’re not my focus. Here are the things that make me feel the most comfortable:

Professional-grade Crocs, the kind you wear in a kitchen or hospital. They keep my feet on the ground, whereaas Danskos have a heel and it makes my foot rock side to side. That is a disaster for someone with floppy muscles. I don’t care what people think of me when I wear Crocs, but I for damn sure notice what they think of me when I fall. There are very few Good Samaritans in this world and I’ve found that to be true everywhere. I can be walking around with blood on my face and pants and no one says jack shit.
American Giant’s “The Original Hoodie” is the only jacket you’ll ever need in your entire life. The only reason you’ll ever need another one is to change colors, because it gets better the more you wear it. Yes, they’re over a hundred bucks, but they get cheaper than nearly anything else when I look at price per wear. Same with the Crocs. It turns into less than pennies.
Unchallenging food, like white bread, pasta, yogurt, etc. I will get wild with yogurt because I don’t like sweets. I leave it as is and just add fresh fruit. Not many people like it that tart, and my favorite flavor at all yogurt shops is plain. If you mix it with dark chocolate yogurt, it will taste like the best sour cream donut you’ve ever had in your life.
Bombas socks are the tightest elastic that holds over time. My whole thing is about making my body feel secure, so anything I can do to stabilize is critically important. I need to feel balanced, and I am irritated when one foot feels more bound than the other, etc.
Button downs, but only the ones that have buttons on the collar as well. I also like it better when they’re 20 years old and white or blue having been laundered a thousand times and still look classic. I joke that it’s the “Visiting Professor” collection at Macy’s, and I also love sports coats and Nehru jackets that fit like a glove because of it. I also want everything to have a place and look put together. It’s almost impossible to get a collar correct when you iron and have it stay that way. What looks good on the board has fallen flat by the time you put it on.
I like Dockers because they’re just as comfortable as American Giant and Crocs. They just don’t last very long and they’re confusing to buy because every fit is a little bit different. You have to get the name of the make and model, and sure as shit by the time you look it up to order more it’s not there.
Big boys’ dress shirts are always welcome because I prefer men’s clothing because of the way they feel and have a teenage frame…. with the exception that I’m just between a size 16 in boys’ pants and a size 30 in men’s length. It’s mix and match, but nothing too crazy. I’m a visiting professor.
I will do anything to get my hair out of my way, and wear my CIA baseball cap almost everywhere. I cover my head a Muslim amount because it makes me feel safe. I can hide behind it, both because people aren’t staring into my eyes and for some reason CIA is more intimidating than other agencies. I can’t figure that out. The FBI was built on slave catchers, but CIA is the problem. Ok. Whatever blows your dress up. I am genuinely using it like I would use a yarmulke or a hijab. I am hiding in plain sight, because I have trouble believing that people want to notice me. I make people jump too high sometimes, and it’s all my own shit. These sensory inputs being dulled helps me to keep from swinging at every pitch. If I don’t work on my reactions, I’m not keeping up my end of the bargain in relationships and cleaning my own house before I clean someone else’s.
I pay close attention to bar soap because I like to use it to shave. You actually use up body wash and shaving cream much more quickly. The bare minimum is Dove, but I have a housemate who cold presses her own soap and lotion bars that don’t have any scent to them (or are lightly scented). My favorite is charcoal, but I have to have a serious cleanup afterward. All the shower walls are dark gray when I want to turn off the water. It’s nice having the cleanest products available in a quantity that makes me think my housemate likes making soap faster than she can give it away. I’ll have to gift some to Zac if and when I remember it. If I write it here, there’s a solid chance.
I enjoy soap designed for men from high end shops because they always have both cologne and shaving in mind. Basic men’s soap is wax stripper with no conditioners. High end men’s soap is designed to make it harder to cut yourself. Soap and a brush is so much better than anything else I’ve tried, and I’ve had to remember all the best stuff because my skin will freak out at anything less. The best part is that Dove really works on my face and in shaving my legs. It doesn’t have to be expensive. It’s just something I value- continued safety is not nothing, and that’s what grocery store soap offers. It will never change.
Things never changing is why I love futbol jerseys so much. I can ask Lindsay to bring me one from any country in the world and it will feel the same. If I ask her to bring me a scarf, it will feel the same. Right now she’s in Barcelona and I’m wearing a Messi jersey.
I will start a new game of Skyrim like people rewatch The Office. There is comfort in hearing dialogue you’ve already heard, like a famous comedy routine. There is also camaraderie. We used to be adventurers like you, but we took an arrow to the knee (got married).
I go through phases with media. It’s “binge/purge.” I have to see it, then I need to retreat and write my own content. Lather, rinse, repeat. The hardest part is coming back and looking at my own writing, because it’s twofold. Both the WTF? of what I’m saying and the “WTF?” of how I wrote it. How did I miss that twice?
If I was wealthy, I would put a lot of money into peripherals that I don’t now. My Fire tablet is not great on its own. It’s great with a keyboard that makes me feel comfortable. It’s long lasting because Office and Chrome don’t require many system resources and the Fire can handle a browser and a text editor in split screen. Therefore, even with my sub-$200 throwdown laptop, I am just as productive as I would be on a $4,000 laptop. It’s not because I wouldn’t use that expensive a computer if I had it, it’s just that I don’t have a need for it. I will save up for an M1 or a Ryzen when I start seriously thinking about video rendering. If everything can be done using Audacity, Google Photos, and JetPack, I have no need to put together a monster gaming rig.
Because of what my current tablet will do, I think if I bought a new computer it would be a top of the line Samsung or M1 iPad, because there is no need to carry something heavy when you just don’t have to. I don’t even need an M1 iPad to do what I currently do. I have an old iPad Pro first gen that will edit the videos on my phone quite handily. I would get a gaming-rig level processor if I bought a camera that required it or it would take an hour and a half to render everything. I can’t have my computer incapacitated that much of the time. If I was shooting/working in RAW with a Nikon or a professional studio camera, that’s a whole other thing. If I needed that kind of editor, it would be easier to let a professional do it than it would to save up enough money to buy that kind of workstation.
Touch and feel above everything else. So much of the world is uncertain that it helps to have things you can count on. Clothes are one of the easiest ways to make yourself feel safe, because when you feel good, you act completely differently than when you’re threatened. It also helps to look at why you feel threatened so that clothes don’t become a permanent trap to hold in all your feelings.
It works as a relationship analogy as well. If you’re going to wear a suit, remember to occasionally change to sneakers and a zipper cardigan. If you learn nothing else from Mr. Rogers, learn that. No relationship will ever progress until you learn to be as vulnerable as you were the first time you saw his face, and you will not feel any differently after learning that he was also a very flawed human and treat your relationships like that as well. You cannot cancel everyone, and you will not know what’s up until you can look at the situation from a third person perspective. That’s much easier for me than it is for most because I can go back and read myself with a dispassionate eye. I am clothed in the softest material to allow myself to feel words more deeply.
If I can’t distract myself, I won’t. So if I dress weird to you, I don’t care. If I eat weird to you, I don’t care. If people believe I’m in the wrong relationships or saying weird things about people, I don’t care. That’s because all the people I do care about have laid out their boundaries and so have I. Other people are free to look at me from the very, very outside and make their own judgments, because their opinions can’t matter. I have to write what I saw because I have to remember things accurately according to what I was thinking in the moment. Otherwise, this is not even self help to me, much less others going through something similar.
So. Crocs? You have to give me this one. Especially if you later admit you also own them. I will notice. 😉

My birthday has gotten started a bit early. My dad asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I said, “a new phone.” So I picked one out on Amazon, and I am ridiculously happy with it. It’s a Samsung Galaxy, my go-to in terms of new phone purchases (I’ve had three in various versions). This is because I download a LOT, and iPhones fill up fast with no way to add extra space. My current phone is, I think, 32 GB, but I added a 128 GB expansion card. I haven’t added my music to it, but my library of podcasts is extensive. I download them all because most Metro stations are underground and reception is spotty at best. Pro Tip: buy a refurbished phone and pay outright so that you are not on the hook with your cell phone company in terms of paying it off. There are also different variations of the same phone… for instance, you cannot root into mine (nerd alert- no need to carry the nerdiness further by explaining why), but I didn’t want to, anyway. Not my bag, baby.

Back to the cool stuff about extra space. Both Netflix and Amazon Prime will let you download movies and TV shows, which can take up plenty of room, especially if you are downloading a whole season at once. Prime has a limit on the number of downloads in terms of things that are temporarily licensed to them, but you can download anything and everything they produce themselves… For instance, on my last phone I had every episode of One Mississippi and The Man in the High Castle. Invaluable waiting in the ER, the DMV, the Metro during outages, etc.

The only thing is that it is such a powerful computer that you must have a battery saving app to go with it. My former go-to was Juice Defender, but for some reason, the link to the professional version is still live, but it says you need the free version to get it to work, and when I clicked on the link to grab it, I got a 404 error. I got Google to refund my money and bought a subscription to Kaspersky Battery Life: Saver & Booster instead. So far, it’s been magnificent. I highly recommend buying the professional version, because even though the free one works, it is inundated with annoying ads, and it’s not that expensive.

I have only bought two apps in the entirety of my smart phone-owning life. The second is Alarm Clock for Me. It looks like an old school digital clock radio, but it has some amazing features when you unlock the professional version, like waking up to your own music, a gentle lead-in feature where the alarm starts out soft and gets louder over time, weather report in the top corner, and something new- perfect bedtime, which tells you what time to go to sleep in order to wake up refreshed for said alarm. If you hate waking up, might I suggest a military grade phone cover for when you feel like throwing it against the wall? 😛

You would think the birthday surprises would end there, but wait! There’s more!

I think I genuinely frightened Dan with all my burns. They do look pretty gross, to be honest. So, she pulls out a package from Amazon and says, “open it.” Inside are Kevlar cuffs that prevent burns and cuts. I was told specifically to take a picture in the kitchen with me wearing them.

Yes, ma’am.

I didn’t have time tonight, but I will before the week is out. They were actually Autumn’s idea, because she’s worked in a kitchen before. Apparently, they also come in gloves, but I definitely wouldn’t wear those. I would be mortified if my grip on pots and pans was even more loose than it is right now…………… I’m sure they’re helpful for both chopping and taking things out of the oven, but they picked well. They’re yellow, so I look like Wonder Woman.

I was half hoping that I would make a mistake cleaning the griddle tonight and accidentally slam my wrist down like I’ve done a thousand times before (the griddle brick has a mind of its own) just to see my cuffs in action. Alas, tonight went perfectly, so no dice. I am sure I will have other dumbass attacks in the future where they will save my bacon, though.

On Sunday, we had our end-of-summer company party, where the flyer said that significant others and children were welcome. I decided to ask Dan if she wanted to come, because we’re good friends, and therefore, she’s significant to me. No one gave me any grief about it, but if they had I was fully prepared to say that I’d just adopted her.

She got to meet my whole crew, who said some extraordinarily nice things about me, and not just because Dan was there. My lead line cook says every shift that he’s not going to turn me into the chef he wants me to be, but the chef I want me to be…. that inside of a month, I’d be ready to run this kitchen, and inside of two, I’d be ready to run my own. I am growing to accept this praise at my ability, because there were so many awkward and embarrassing moments in my past cooking jobs that I still see myself as a n00b, hanging desperately onto Dana’s coattails. Now it’s time to get on board with the fact that I don’t need to fill her shoes. I brought my own.

In fact, one of my managers brought his girlfriend to the party, and he introduced me as their most dependable employee, and that it was embarrassing how many times I’d bailed them out of a jam. Let me assure you that you don’t even have to be that great a cook for a compliment like that to carry you very, very far in this industry. You can be the best line cook in the entire world, but showing up is even more important. This is not an industry known for emotionally stable, responsible workers. Egos clash. Brown bottle flu happens, as does “I didn’t know I was working today.” But the team I’ve got now has none of those problems. We love working together, and it shows. I am being rewarded beyond my wildest imagination. People have started to call my lead line cook, me, and our most experienced expo “The A-Team.”

It really is amazing how even though I’ve been working on internal validation for years, I’ve grown exponentially with some external praise. It’s not required, but it is definitely changing the way I see myself. I am not sure that I ever want to be a chef, but that’s not the point. The point is that someone believes in me enough to say that I’m capable of it.

Quick aside for people not in the know….. I get called a chef all the time, because people who don’t work in kitchens tend to call all cooks “chef.” But chef literally means “boss,” and there can be only one. For most of us, it feels disrespectful to be called a chef when we haven’t earned it, but we also don’t expect everyone on earth to understand the inner workings of the culinary world. So, we might be a little internally irritated, but we won’t say anything. However, if I do earn the title, you’ll be able to hear me scream from coast to coast. Fair warning.

Because of jumping back into the kitchen, my 40th trip around the sun has been an incredible year of self-discovery, reaching heights I never thought possible. It has allowed me to become less self-deprecating, which you do when you believe in yourself. I mean, I still tell jokes at my own expense, but they aren’t deep jabs. They’re actually funny.

Which has been another hallmark of my 40th year…. giving myself permission to be funny again, after years of grief and loss. Though losing my mother has reworked my version of normal, I am glad to see that with the passage of time normal hasn’t been stolen from me altogether. The only time that I really feel punched in the stomach is when I can’t do things like call her up and say, “you won’t believe how amazing I’m doing at work. I’m even having trouble.” Through our long relationship, though, I know exactly what she would say…. “I certainly can believe it. You can do anything. Just remember to wear your Kevlar cuffs, because those burns look like they hurt.”

Yes, ma’am.