It came out as really cute & touching, so I’m just going to fill in my answers where appropriate instead of writing an essay. It’s Sunday. I feel like writing. So I will.
I appreciate your openness in sharing your experiences and emotions on your blog, theantileslie.com. It’s a brave and vulnerable act to put your thoughts out there for others to read and connect with. 😊
I’ve explored some of your posts related to different aspects of life, including daily, death, and spirituality. Here are a few questions based on those themes:
Spirituality:
In your journey, have you encountered any specific spiritual practices or beliefs that resonate with you? How do they influence your writing and your understanding of life?
The best piece of advice that I’ve ever gotten regarding religious practice is that one feeds the other. When you can’t believe in God, you can still believe in the wiping away of sin. You get into the routine of going to communion, and eventually, your spirituality will come back around. I flow between religion and spirituality depending on which voice is speaking. Do I want to go to church today, or do I want to put my energy into exploring spiritual practices here? I vote here, because I can think of at least five congregations in my area that are smaller than the Fanagans. It’s how I reach the most people, and I don’t even have to change out of my pajamas if I don’t want to do it; today I did. I’m wearing OD green pants and a “Where in the Word is Carmen Sandiego? t-shirt. I might go out later. I might not. I just needed to feel prepared. I didn’t know whether it was a spiritual or a religious Sunday yet.
Is there a particular moment or experience that profoundly impacted your spiritual perspective?
Several, but the one that’s the most meaningful is that I was wearing a navy and white striped sweater to preach that day, and Brenda Charpentier decided I needed a stole. It was rainbow, and one of the most moving experiences of my life because it was the first time anyone had helped me get dressed before the service. I still have the picture somewhere, and if I can find it, I’ll include it. The stripes fit together perfectly. What did not sit well with the pastor was that I’d gotten something I hadn’t earned. What was I going to say? No? I try not to wear liturgical vestments, but they fit the occasion, not the person. There was no way to mark me as in charge of the liturgy otherwise.
Daily Life:
You mentioned that your life is often unpredictable. How do you find balance between your close friends/family and your writing? What strategies do you use to maintain that equilibrium?
I don’t, really. I have a hands off relationship with most people because I am focusing on my own thing. It’s not that I won’t respond to people who reach out to me, I just often forget that I need other people to support me through both good and bad things. I have that now- three people who are all willing to work on the hard stuff. I’ve never had that in my life. It’s the most settled I’ve been in a very long time. How it feeds into my spirituality is that when I’m writing alone, I often feel a presence greater than mine. Something is speaking through me, and I hope it’s an intelligent faith that says Jesus did not come here to comfort us in our distress, but distress us in our comfort. Jesus would have had a lot to say (and perhaps a whip) over ministers trying to get rich. The fact that these people exist is sickening the church to an enormous extent because it’s so toxic to believe that if you just pray hard enough, money will appear.
Can you share an anecdote from your daily life that left a lasting impression on you?
This was years ago, but Dana’s parents came with us to church. They’re right wingers. We’re not. They embarrassed me to no end by talking through the entire sermon, telling us everything that was wrong with it. It was a mistake of giant proportions to let those people into our safe space. You want to bitch about the gospel, go to other people who also want to bitch about it. Not my fault that you missed every lesson in the Civil Rights movement. I haven’t forgiven them for any of their racist jokes or homophobic comments. I am not glad to be done with Dana, but I for damn sure am glad I am done with them. The reason it stuck with me is that the tape of what was wrong with the sermon stayed with me. I went autistic and researched the shit out of it until I could prove I was right and they were wrong. Jesus is about widening the net. People like Dana’s parents are an embarrassment, and I clearly don’t care whether they know it or not. After the ways in which I saw they abused their daughter by just not treating her as good enough made me want a cage match with both of them. What kind of parent tells their daughter’s partner that she’ll never understand homosexuality, so it was better for Dana to go find someone else. What in the actual fuck? What, Dana’s supposed to go find a new mother now? Fuck all the way off.
Death and Emotions:
Your post about death touched my circuits. How do you cope with grief and loss? Are there any rituals or practices that help you navigate these emotions?
You don’t cope with it. You learn to live around it. The person you lost is always in the room, always present. In the beginning, it is extremely loud and incredibly close. Your brain will be in a fog for about a year. And then, as time goes by, you realize that you are a completely different person now. Grief re-wires your entire nervous system. You literally aren’t the same person. In the years that pass on, you’ll lose more and more of your memories, and that freaks you out, too. You lose connection with all your traditions and make your own. You step out on a ledge when a parent dies, because you’ve lost your “adultier adult.” At 46, I need her just as much now as I did when I was nine. Nothing is ever going to fill that hole but me. Realizing that she lives inside me and her creativity flows through me, but our days of two-way communication are over. It’s sobering. I’ll never get over it. I just change with it.
Feel free to share as much or as little as you’d like. Your blog provides a window into your world, and I’m genuinely interested in learning more. 🌟
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:
I really need to start making outlines before I write, because gardening leads to great things in blogging and plot holes in fiction. The reason there are no plot holes in my blog is that I don’t care if you find them. Just because I didn’t tell you the whole story according to everyone in the room doesn’t make it less untrue. It is me crafting the narrative without taking anyone else’s feelings into consideration. It sounds harsh and cold, but I don’t mean it that way. The reason I only include my perceptions of people’s feelings rather than what they actually are is because I am not a mind reader.
If they were bloggers, their stories would be up to a hundred percent different from mine because we were watching something from different perspectives.
“What color was the light?”
This is why I don’t care what anyone says about me, either, because they’re just as entitled to their opinions as I am to mine. For instance, I know for sure that Supergrover’s story is completely different from mine because she stopped telling it; she could then easily blame me for being a dictator when I laid out my fears, hopes, and dreams. In fact, she actually said that I was not the only arbiter of our relationship, and that’s the message I’ve been trying to give her for 10 years. She doesn’t have as much power in the relationship because she’s not vulnerable. If she laid out her thoughts and feelings, mine would adjust. Because now I just feel like I’m intruding, I’ll write her a long letter every few months because I can’t be sure God is listening, but I can be sure she is. I’ve been saying that for 10 years as well.
I destroyed that relationship out of my own insecurities because she would not do anything to calm them. She’d waffle between feeling like my Mama Wolverine and wanting out of my life for good within weeks of each other. She has also said that no matter what, we have a past, a present, and a future….. because I’m part of her wild and crazy brain. When she said that, I told her she was part of my wild and crazy soul. It’s true. I’m yin and she’s yang, except with a lot more gray area in the middle. What I’ve always tried to stop is feeling worthless because the cycle ran thusly:
I would open up about something deep, and she wouldn’t respond at all because “she didn’t have time.” I didn’t get frustrated that she didn’t have time. I got frustrated that her letters were short and didn’t tell me anything. I know that’s half because she’s protecting herself and half because I’m a blogger. My blog is the bane of my existence because it brought us together and tore us apart all in one breath. She knows she’ll always have to be a reader because we know each other, and as I told her in my last letter, “none of this will mean shit to you until it’s been five or 10 years and you see yourself as a different person. Then, the 3D character you don’t see will emerge, because you’re looking for the good things now because you want to remember. I told her about the 614,000 words I’d written in 2023, so I said something like I’ve talked about our problems, but I’ve loved you up just as much…… in all six books.
I also think that if her life is cut short like my mother’s that other people who knew her will want to read my perceptions all the more, because they’re the ones that are going to want to “spend time with her” the most. I feel like I started writing more deeply about her after my mother died, because she wasn’t my mother, but she was someone’s. The worst time she never knew she hurt me (because I didn’t want to rock the boat) was when I told her that she had a “suburban mom vibe.” She said that was probably the meanest thing I’d ever said to her, and because she is who she is, I thought she was joking. She proceeded to rip me a new asshole, when in my mind that archetype was the one I needed the most desperately, the one I’d just lost.
I’ll never forget that because she was a fan first, she has read my story and accepted it as my reality, not hers…. but she’s found truth and beauty in it. When she hasn’t been angry, she’s been very kind about how brilliant a writer I am. But what I don’t know, and will never know at this point, is how she really feels about me.
I called her on it, and she noped out…. because she realized she was waffling and couldn’t give me a solid answer. But what I know for sure, like, Oprah-level sure, is that she’s worth it….. that the experience was worth it even if it’s over now.
I didn’t move to DC to be near her, because I already had my own thing going and my sister dropping in all the time (I actually see her more now). But what I didn’t expect is that we’d still be having the same fight 10 years later when it would have been so easy to solve everything in the length of one coffee/beer.
What I know is that I was too hard on her in my own insecurity, because if she didn’t want to make up her mind, I was out. I didn’t need to inflict fear of a phone call or get-together. I was furious that after 10 years she wouldn’t tell me the truth about anything.
She practically treated me like a stalker when I never was that…. at all. If I was, we wouldn’t have made up. But those feelings of fear remain, so I thought it was crazy when she said, “do you think I care if you look up public information about me?” Ummmm…. yes. Yes, I do. To the point where if I really thought about it, I might throw up. Going back to those days in my mind is torture, and I’ve been trying to forgive myself and can’t. I said some things that never should have been said on a wide variety of topics, and the fact that she hung in for the ride means more to me than she’ll ever know.
However, when I started doing actual conflict resolution and not letting her rattle me by escalating, I was dismissed. That leads me down two trains of thought. The first is that she likes the ups and downs because getting her anger out is a good thing. I don’t care if it’s at me. She’s got to emote sometime, and anger is an emotion. Her outbursts at me are the most emotion I’ve seen out of her in a long time. That’s because I know she’s going through the shit, so I pray for her. The second is that she’s simply avoidant because she doesn’t know how to open up, and that’s not personal to me at all. I can imagine that if she’s shut down with me, she’s shut down with more than just me.
The way you resolve conflict is learned in your first family, and it takes extensive therapy to make a relationship last because you’re constantly trying to merge two parenting styles. My family was all buttoned up for many years. We got over it. It was better to be mad in the moment and forgive quickly than it was to hold onto frustration for years and years. Therefore, it’s very hard for me to be in a relationship where people keep their anger, guilt, whatever bottled up. I can’t stop thinking about when the other shoe is going to drop. Neither does my beautiful girl, because her answer is to keep avoiding everything and my answer is “there’s no way back, only through.” I can’t do much to help the relationship heal, but like I said, I pray for her every night, and it’s been the same prayer every night for the last 10 years.
If there truly is a God, they can go places with her that I can’t. It comforts me to know that she’s not alone, because even if she doesn’t think God is listening, it’s a comforting image, anyway.
What I missed were all the ways we treated each other during new relationship energy. We lovebombed the absolute fuck out of each other. I have never found anyone like her, and I keep saying that, but some things are too unique. It’s not only that letting you know would be telling her story and not mine, it’s that there are some things about any relationship that I keep private so that there are some things only for me.
You absolutely can’t go back to lovebombing each other if you can’t do conflict resolution over and over. When I stood up, she did not rise to meet me. I didn’t so much let her go, but let her go back to the way she used to live.
I told her she was a phoenix, and I can’t wait to see her rise from the ash…… because she has, professionally. I’m not so sure about relationships, but I only have ours as an example.
I got that INFJ judgmental bastard urge to drag people into the light whether they want to go or not. However, I am not judgmental of people. I’ve wanted to be a lawyer most of my life and have done well in undergrad regarding the preparation for it. Therefore, I will lay out facts representing what I think about both sides of a situation. I am not saying “you’re a bad person.” I am basically reading my emotional docket and the case in front of me has as many complications as medicine. The diagnosis in medicine is the same as the verdict in law: it depends.
I am emotionally capable of being fair and balanced, but because I’m autistic, I’m often not thinking of how to phrase things so that they’ll come across as how I meant them to a neurotypical person. And here, on my blog, some of the literary devices I use don’t make sense unless you’re talking to me behind the scenes.
That’s always what brought Supergrover back around. She didn’t like reading the blog without the brochure, as I’ve said before. But if she talked to me, she’d see that I was being quite reasonable and had a good head on my shoulders. What she has not realized is the lengths I’ve gone to in order to protect her and harps on breadcrumbs I never would have seen……… unless we had talked about it.
In this way, I am my own main character (in the original writing prompt, the kid was a picky eater), because when I feel these emotional situations weighing themselves in my mind, I develop sensory issues because I need deprivation so badly to regulate my emotions. I don’t even listen to music when I write anymore. I just listen to my typing.
There are days when I can’t take exciting food, because I’ve already had it up to my eyeballs. A meltdown would be serving me something from a restaurant instead of a peanut butter and banana sandwich, because I was overstimulated before you brought home lobster.
I don’t have very good meltdowns. I have shutdowns. I am not very good at standing up for myself, nor being impolite or socially awkward in any way. Therefore, having a meltdown in front of someone would have to be major. I’d eat the lobster, I’d just hate that the food is one more thing I don’t have the bandwith with which to pay attention.
Meltdown often comes online, when I am overstimulated and itching for a fight. But I’m so dextrous with words that I’m not looking to destroy people (though some would say I am after a straight woman read an entire thread from me and a friend talking about how straight people could support queer people, and then asked me for ideas on making an ally flag. Now, in this instance, angry black woman and angry white lesbian are not dissimilar. I don’t want to do work for straight people. Look it up. Read the rest of the comments, at least.
She caught me on a very bad day and she was also uneducated as fuck, so I could have been nicer and I didn’t know how. I just had to be kind. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was heated…. where I took apart every one of her talking points in order to educate herself on being the parent of someone queer, because if you have a queer child, you can’t possibly have institutionalized homophobia, now can you? I also have mixed emotions about straight people wearing rainbow flags, because they have the option to take them off.
Most of the time, though, I go in and de-escalate a situation. I’ve whipped line cooks’ asses and it turned into an actually deep conversation. It was a Taylor Swift joke in poor taste and I took issue with that.
I am certain that I have responded like this to Supergrover, but because she didn’t see the meltdown, she didn’t see me as trying to be kind but not nice. I will agree that I was over the top, but I never said anything untrue about our anxious/avoidant attachment. I don’t expect her to treat my anxious attachment with kid gloves. I expect her not to withold information so that I know exactly what’s going on, because I can’t process situations on no information from the other person. I will send myself into a spiral. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem about which I couldn’t overthink.
So, the less information she gave me, the more I spiraled out trying to fix things, because I assumed that everything was all about me. It’s not because it actually was. It’s that I had absolutely no information to the contrary to put things into context/perspective.
We don’t have a context, and that’s a good thing most of the time because we can talk about things without it affecting everyone else in our physical lives. But over time, it began to be a hard row to hoe, because I wanted peace……
Why not take a break from COVID-19 and learn about each other… Hat tip to all the people who’ve filled it out on Facebook and I shamelessly stole it because I had nothin’ for today.
1. Who are you named after?
My name was originally supposed to be Amanda Jane, and my parents were going to call me “AJ.” Then, my mother was sitting in a church service and the organist was listed in the bulletin as “Leslie Diane.” The rest, as they say, is history.
2. Last time you cried?
Two weeks ago, when I attended church through Zoom at Bridgeport UCC in Portland, Oregon (link is to the service, 10:30 AM Pacific). I saw some of my oldest friends in the world, and heard their voices. It was magnificent, and I was crying because I was filled with grief at my mother dying, and how long it had taken me to get back to the place where I was comfortable going to church again. For the first time in three years, I have now gone to church two weeks in a row.
3. Do you like your handwriting?
Absolutely not- it is a carpal tunnel pile of garbage that keeps getting worse. I use Evernote/Microsoft OneNote to keep track of my thoughts because if I write them down in a notebook, I can’t read them later.
4. What is your favorite lunch meat?
It used to be the disastrously unpopular olive loaf, and now it is the plant-based version of honey-baked ham (made into sandwiches on bread infused with maple syrup with Swiss “cheez” and margarine). I’m not sure olive loaf is even made anymore, but when it was, the grocery store never ran out…………………
5. Longest relationship?
I’m sure my dad wins this one, but if you mean romantically, seven years and change.
6. Do you still have your tonsils?
Yes, but I’ve had tonsillitis enough that they probably should come out to avoid recurrence. It is so unpleasant. It’s a good thing antibiotics work fast.
7. Would you bungee jump?
It depends. I probably wouldn’t do it on my own, but I’d never turn down a dare.
8. What is your favorite kind cereal?
The brown puffed rice at Whole Foods with real chocolate.
9. Do you untie your shoes when you take them off?
Mostly yes, because I wear Converse All-Stars high tops more than anything else.
10. Do you think you’re strong willed?
It depends on who you ask. I don’t think I’m particularly obstinate unless I’m standing up for someone else. My friends think I’m stronger than I do.
11. Favorite ice cream?
Every flavor of ice cream I’ve had with plant-based milk is my new favorite. Almond milk with almonds and chocolate is probably at the top of the list right now.
12. What is the first thing you notice about a person?
Whether they like small talk or not. I’m not attracted to the small questions.
13. Football or baseball?
If these are my only choices, it’s Baltimore Orioles baseball. My real favorite is soccer of any kind. Doesn’t matter the gender or the league. I collect national team jerseys, and interestingly enough, I don’t have the United States. Oh, and I have one MLS jersey… DC United, of course. 🙂
14. What color pants are you wearing?
Uniqlo Extra Warm leggings and lounge pants made of grey t-shirt material.
15. Last thing you ate?
A Nutella and strawberry jelly sandwich.
16. What are you listening to?
Miles Davis
Lots of podcasts- too many to list, but if you want recommendations, leave a comment.
17. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?
Dark grey or Cornflower, the colors I use the most often in HTML. The grey is #333333, and the blue is #336699.
18. What is your favorite smell?
I have two- tea tree oil and lavender anything…. although I had to take a break from lavender while reading the Outlander series. It turned my stomach for a while.
19. Who was the last person you talked to on the phone?
My sister, Lindsay. She’s cooler than you are.
20. Married?
I used to be, and it would take an act of God for me to do it again.
21. Hair color?
Brown, with a little grey and white mixed in…. which is such a blessing because it stops me from looking like a ten-year-old.
22. Eye Color?
Espresso… well, brown, but I’m being, ummm….. creative.
23. Favorite food to eat?
Anything I’ve cooked myself. I’m good at it, and I get immense satisfaction with that kind of accomplishment.
This is one of the funniest things that has happened to me in a while. I went with my friend Jaime to see “Jojo Rabbit,” and since I’d already seen it, I went about halfway through the movie before I got ridiculously thirsty. I leaned over to Jaime and said, “I’m getting a Coke. Do you want one?” She nodded and I left. So I come back and it is the most heart-wrenching part of the film and here I am stumbling in the dark to my seat while the rest of the row would have murdered me if it wasn’t illegal.
26. What color shirt are you wearing?
White. It’s not my color, but it’s warm.
27. Favorite holiday?
Any that involve a three-day weekend.
28. Beer or Wine?
Not much of a drinker, but I love anything Belgian.
29. Night owl or morning person?
It depends. I have a lot of energy at both ends of the spectrum. I also enjoy when I can’t sleep, watching the sun come up when I’m normally “not there” to see it.
30. Favorite day of the week?
None right now- they all blend together.
31. Favorite animal?
I am absolutely over the top crazy about Fiona the hippo. When it’s nice outside, I like taking my tablet and Bluetooth keyboard to the zoo and sitting in front of the giraffe enclosure.
32. Do you have any pets?
None of my own, but there are several dogs that live in my house. It’s the best of both worlds- puppy love and no responsibility.
33. Where would you like to travel?
I am consumed by the Middle East, both in terms of “walking the Bible,” and seeing things in movies I’d like to experience for real, like the Blue Mosque in Iran, the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, and the mountains of Afghanistan. My mom and dad went when I was very small, because it was safe to travel there for tourists (at least to Israel, Jordan, and Egypt). I’m not holding my breath in terms of my lifetime.
Ever since my mother died, I have had trouble singing. I can’t think of anything that is more loaded with emotion, mostly pain. I haven’t set foot in a church in nearly two years, also in my grief. I know damn well that this is temporary, that my love of church will return when my spirit calms. It is important to have a faith community that loves me through good times and bad, people that I can turn to in both extremes. Right now, though, when I walk into a church I don’t see comfort and joy. I see the ghost of my mother’s past. It is not peaceful for me. It is a white-knuckling, stomach churning experience of just trying to get through the service without a complete goose-honking cry of a meltdown. And the thing is, I know that would be okay, too.
It is my own fear of being that vulnerable in public that stops me. Perhaps fear is the wrong word, but anxiety. I am trying my best to keep my head above water, avoiding the things that will actively help me to stop functioning. Walking around in my mother’s inner landscape, even for a couple of hours, leads to me losing the rest of the day. I have to sleep it off in those depression and anxiety-fueled naps that last hours, even when I’m not sleepy. And even in my dreams, I’m thinking “I don’t have time for this.” The clinical term for this is “decompensating.”
According to dictionary.com, there is both a medical and psychological meaning.
Medical decompensation is “the inability of a diseased heart to compensate for its defect.”
Psychological decompensation is “a loss of ability to maintain normal or appropriate psychological defenses, sometimes resulting in depression, anxiety, or delusions.”
It is funny how incredibly close those definitions are, when you look at the heart metaphorically.
I feel that I should say for the record that I have never had a delusion, although I have come close by taking someone else’s crazy statement and believing it as fact, incorporating it into my reality to disastrous results… What turned their crazy into my crazy was not stopping for a moment to evaluate said statement for objective truth, because in a lot of ways, it was what I wanted to hear…………………
Objective reality slipped beyond my grasp, living in a reinforced bubble created by fantasy. I was living as high as one could possibly be on dopamine without taking a drug to raise it chemically.
Later, when the bubble burst, I came back down to earth. It was an amazing feeling to see life for what it was, instead of my own version. What was happening in the world around me no longer carried a malleable haze.
I present with depression and anxiety, though I’m Bipolar II, so I do get a few hypomanic days now and then. But the highs are not so high. They’re just enough to make me feel like I’m living without depression and can be extraordinarily productive, sometimes foregoing sleep to get things done. Part of this is chemical; the other part is not knowing when I’ll be hypomanic again, and trying to use that time wisely.
I am extremely lucky that my fluctuations in mood just go from not depressed to extremely depressed, and medication makes those swings even easier to manage. Whenever I feel sorry for myself, I simply think of the people who are much worse off, the people who have no trouble swinging between suicidal plans and megalomania…. or have poor impulse control akin to buying five cars in one day.
I have no doubt in my mind that I was hypomanic when I decided to audition for the Washington National Opera chorus, but again, it was just being productive. Had I been truly depressed when I learned that the auditions were in a month, self-doubt would have eaten me alive and I would have lacked the courage to sign up altogether.
Which brings me back around to church and my mom. I need to sing again. I need to be in a chorus with other great singers who will raise my own game. I’m not much of an actor, but I’ll learn. In a gargantuan way, this is all about finding a replacement for church choir while I work on my daily ups and downs during the devastation of grief. I know I will still feel it. How can I not since my sister was in the children’s chorus at Houston Grand Opera, and I have such fond memories of my mom and Lindsay “on set?”
I counter that with all the hair, costumes and makeup. If I audition and get in, I will have the chance to be someone else for a while. Lots of someone elses if I get a contract for the whole season. The operas happening after my audition are Eugene Onegin, Faust, and Tosca. The links are all to their respective Wikipedia pages, because opera is so much more accessible when you know the story before you buy the tickets.
As I was telling a friend the other day, I hope the writing that comes out of a successful audition is work that brings younger audiences to opera. It is not dead thanks to the old and the rich, but if that trend continues, opera will be less and less popular over time. Opera has such a rich history that I cannot imagine losing it. Lots of them are novels that come to life, and generally more accurate than the movies.
It’s also a great break from technology, as it is entirely immersive. You have to read the supertitles to understand the language translation, or in the case of operas in your native language, to be able to pick out the words from the music. Hard to look at your phone and comprehend at the same time…. plus, the ushers will get mad at you because of the light. If your phone actually rings, good luck. God bless. 😛
I’m not starting singing again with arias, though. Today I did some breath control exercises and sang along to Merry Christmas from the Family (the Dixie Chicks and Rosie O’Donnell version as opposed to Robert Earl Keen, because it’s in a higher key). It’s such a funny song that for the first time in years, as I was singing I felt……. merry. It reminded me of the funniest parts of being a Texan, because if you’ve ever lived there, especially in a small town, you know this family. They live two doors down. There’s a broken swing set and a rusted car on blocks in the front yard. Both have been there since you moved in, and will be long after you leave.
The backyard looks like a garage sale all year ’round. On a serious note, even though they have just short of nothing, they’ll give you the shirts off their backs and the shoes on their feet if you need them, because they know what it’s like to literally have nothing and they’ll do whatever they can to help. There is no better place to live than small town Texas, because even though you can’t take a step out of your house without all 2,000 people knowing where you’re going, that’s not a bad thing. They sniff out trouble like bloodhounds, and just rally around you until it passes.
However, if you are selfish in any way, you don’t belong there. Community comes with responsibility.
Which brings me to another important reason why I’ve dropped off the face of the earth in terms of church. I’m empty. I’m all tapped out. I have nothing to contribute because I am struggling to keep my own head above water.
And the thing is, it wouldn’t bother the church at all. They know that when I’m in a better place, I can do more for the people around me. It’s all my own “stuff” to work out, because I cannot abide showing up to a potluck without a casserole, capiche?
I have high hopes for this opera audition, even though I won’t be crushed if I don’t get in. I know for certain that I am a fourth as good as the people auditioning who’ve been singing arias for years on end (I’m not a pessimist, just a realist). The high hopes come from joining a community in a new context, without the baggage I carry when entering a church. I see the glory of God in classical music, which, to my mind, is running towards spirituality instead of away…. making my way slowly, but surely, back into the world communion.
I am surprised that this has been my reaction to grief, because for the first two or three weeks after my mother died, walking into the sanctuary made me feel as if she were right there, so close I could touch her again. Then a pointed sermon on grief made me absolutely lose my shit with anxiety, just crying and shaking as if exorcising a demon. I didn’t want to be comforted, I wanted to be invisible. I didn’t want anyone to see my grief laid that bare. On top of my anxiety, I am quite shy and introverted. If you think otherwise, it’s from years and years of practice at hiding it away. I can have entire conversations that end with you knowing nothing about me, because my go-to is deflection. I ask so many questions about your life that you don’t have a chance to get a word in edgewise to ask me about mine. In that scenario, I can be extroverted and gregarious, because I’m not revealing anything. It also cuts way down on me giving answers I think of as crazy or stupid so I don’t have anything to beat myself up with later.
Trust me, if I was weird to you 20 years ago, I still have the ability to obsess over it. It would be an absolute relief to be onstage as a character in a group, completely forgetting everything in terms of who I am and pouring everything into letting me go for a few hours a night. I am hoping it will give me enough clinical separation to see myself more objectively once the performance is over…. because then, I might be able to turn my anxiety about being vulnerable in public back into needing other people for support, and rising to the occasion of giving my own support to others.
My new copy of 24 Italian Songs and Arias is on its way. May it be the first step forward onto holy ground.
I don’t know how I got so lucky that when session ended in Annapolis, Lindsay’s job moved her to working on federal legislation. She still comes to DC on a regular basis, though not quite as often when she was trying to get a bill passed in Maryland state congress. The bill made it through the House and on to the Senate, but was defeated. I don’t want to write about the bill itself, or the company where my sister works, but what I will say is that the legislation in question made perfect sense and there is no sane reason why it shouldn’t have passed, especially since in 49 other states, it’s already law. The only comfort in this is that perhaps the bill will come up next year, as some form of it has for the last nine years, and she’ll come back just as frequently as she did this year.
I know it’s hard for her being so far away from home all the time, but selfishly, it is exactly what I need. Watching her work activates my “go button,” the part of me that’s interested in government and how it works…. or not.
Voting in local and state elections is abysmally low, and turnout is key. I don’t understand why others don’t understand that local and state laws directly affect their lives so much more than the president ever will. My county (Montgomery) is important to me, as well as my state. There are lobbyists pushing legislation through that would raise ire if there wasn’t so much apathy toward it. Outrageous things get passed because no one notices… and on the flip side of the coin, really good legislation gets passed over because no one is calling their state representatives to tell them what they want, because they have no idea what the issues even are, much less care.
National laws are important, but not nearly as crucial as “small things,” like the school board, how/when the trash gets picked up, and the way the local police treat people. The local issue that really cramps my style (being the tender-heart bear that I am) is that in Montgomery County, homeless shelters are closed from April to November. Obviously, it’s sometimes very cold in October, but April is no picnic, either. Plus, it gets every bit as hot in Maryland as it is in Houston during the summer, and to me, being outside all the time is local legislators not caring whether people suffer horrendous sunburns with blisters.
Thanks to Maryland state-run health insurance, homeless people have access to free medical and psychological care, and medications that are only one dollar a bottle. But for homeless people who do not have jobs, one dollar can seem like a hundred. It’s a misconception that homeless people do not work. When you’re poor, the idea of first and last month’s rent plus a security deposit, especially in this area, is unobtainable. If people manage to only stay on the streets for a few months, it is less likely that they will suffer permanent mental health damage, but the longer people go without basic necessities, it is a chicken and egg situation. Did they become homeless because they were mentally ill and unable to hold down a job, or did being on the streets do them in?
I would say that it’s different in every case, but I can see how being reduced to absolute survival mode can do so much damage in so little time…. especially if said homeless person is arrested and thrown in jail. Jail is not a happy place, especially when you’re put there due to circumstances beyond your control. People get arrested for all kinds of inanity, such as loitering, because where are you supposed to go when you don’t have an address?
Add that to the inequality in both hiring and sentencing leads minorities down a pipeline of enormous proportions. The first is that a resumé with the name Michael Smith is so much more likely to get an interview than one with the name Tyrone Washington. The second is that minorities are more likely to get harsher sentences than whites, so something that should have been a misdemeanor is adjudicated as a felony, and that always looks good to hiring managers.
Nothing makes my blood boil faster, because even if the minority is guilty, that does not mean that he/she deserves to be treated more harshly than anyone else. It’s white privilege at its finest.
My pastor, Matt, said something interesting regarding this very thing. Minorities are allowed to be prejudiced against whites, but there is no such thing as “reverse racism.” That is because prejudice in minority communities is relatively harmless, a way of dealing with earned scorn toward whites for the systematic oppression of minorities that they’ve endured for centuries now. There is no comparison whatsoever, and to do so is to willfully ignore the difference. Prejudice is personal bias. Racism is institutionalized from the top down, with no end in sight. No matter how much we march and protest against it, President Trump isn’t going anywhere, and neither are his goons satisfied with the status quo.
That does not mean that protesting is useless, however. With enough people in the crowd, it’s hard to be ignored by Congress or the media. There is also the community that comes together with a common goal, the creation of safe space…. the seeking out of like-minded people that is a lifeline when there is such a feeling of hopelessness.
Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that Sunday morning at 11:00 is the most segregated hour in America. In a lot of ways, this has not changed, but it has changed for me. I am blessed to have a community in which whites and minorities worship together under both a #blacklivesmatter and a rainbow flag. I am blessed to have a community that shows up for marches demanding equality for all people, despite the violence that has occurred as a result. The scariest was when our #blacklivesmatter sign was vandalized and pictures of the reporters shot in Roanoke on live TV were taped to the side doors.
It led to one of the biggest turnouts on Sunday morning that I’ve ever seen in any church anywhere, because we were there to say we were not afraid. Looking for succor, yes, but there was power in showing up. Jeffrey Thames preached that day, a sermon I’ll never forget called The Certain Samaritan. It was built to comfort us in our distress and distress us out of our comfort.
We will not back down from attending church because of this threat. We will continue to do the work of peace and justice that we always have, because it defines who we are as a congregation………………….
We will continue to let people rest and recuperate as they need. We will continue to clothe the naked. We will continue to feed the hungry. We will continue to make people of all faiths and origins our friends. We will continue to fight without a fight. It doesn’t take violence to respond. It takes certainty.
It was a beautiful illustration regarding now that this has happened, what are we to do? Applause is for a performance, not a worship service, and yet he deserved a standing ovation. He pointed the way from pain to promise in a way that people will not soon forget.
Whenever you think local politics don’t matter, remember that law & order starts in your neighborhood and branches out. When the leaves are turning brown, remember that it is your right and responsibility to turn on the sprinklers.
Dana and I were just having the most interesting conversation about Doctor Who and the Bible, because the canons are strikingly similar. The conversation started when we remembered The Master.
I said:
I hope they show The Master as a little boy, looking into the schism for the first time. You know who it reminds me of? Moses and the story of the burning bush. God actually tells Moses not to look at him because the sight is too overwhelming. When The Master looks into the time vortex, it’s like getting an answer to the question “what would have happened?” Keep in mind that since I am not a fundamentalist, I am not talking literally. There’s just a lot of wisdom in looking at them together.
And Dana said:
The Doctor is a Christ allegory because in dying for our sins, he’s still protecting us to this day. For years, the story has been that the doctor is atoning for the sins of killing all of his people and the canon has changed to now having locked them in a slice of time so that he can rescue them one day. And he’s over 2,000 years old now.
Stories That Are All True 