When I was at my smallest, most insecure place about the future of the relationship and I couldn’t see my way through it, all the crying, all the avoidance, all the trying to let go and not…….
It lasted a grand total of eight months.
That’s because she never said anything like, “I have to prioritize other things over you, but I think about you all the time.” It would have gone such a long way in calming my anxiety, but I had to beg her for even that much, and it was in reminiscence. I couldn’t do anything about it, preventing a problem from happening. I could only watch it happen from the outside, because otherwise, I would have seemed entitled. I could only rage about my own feelings in abstentia of hers.
It’s what happens when we stop telling ourselves the same story. A lot of my blog is a coping mechanism, and she’s responsible for a lot of things over which I need to cope. However, they are not bad things. They’re good. I love them. But I can’t do it all by myself, and the thought of saying goodbye to all of it scares me, because after 10 years, it’s what I know.
I had to decide which was more scary. Living without Supergrover’s response or living without her, because I was living without her either way. I have never been sure I could cope on my own until now, because she said “if you write about me, I can’t stop you.” At first, even this was up for debate, entirely why I said I’d give up my career for hers. Not to own the fact that some of the reason I moved closer to her was valid. Some of it wasn’t. That’s because it was all based on my perception of what happened, and not what actually did.
It’s not that you’re not getting real feelings. It’s that when I don’t know someone else’s story, I’m writing out what could have possibly happened so I know what set that person off and why. I’m my own survival manual in terms of social masking.
Over time, I just got this image in my head of us taking over an office with desktops or bedroom with laptops. To be clear, this is the part where she says something like “my husband’s out of town and I actually have bandwidth to spend with friends,” or whatever. NOT “I think you should give me this and I won’t be happy if you don’t.” Talking about my best wishes doesn’t have anything to do with what happens. I can dream of it, but without a dream, there’s no goal. Without a vision, the people perish.
So, when I take a left turn at Albuquerque, it’s not because I’m trying to hurt her. It’s that she sees the story she’s telling herself and it’s one I didn’t know until recently. Neither one of us could come toward each other because we were constantly afraid of setting the other one off. The things that endeared us at first pulled us apart.
I just kept thinking more and more about how different we were, and that since I had done so much growth over the last two years, I had the right to dictate some terms in the relationship. Not all of them. But establish boundaries. Mostly, it was being consistent. I could not tell whether she was in or out at any time, because I didn’t feel enough safety and security. I felt the surface and the undertow every single day.
I am not sure that she did or didn’t. I can’t speak to that. But what I can say is that I didn’t know which person was going to show up, so I was constantly trying to predict her next move. If my words were being received as attacks, what am I doing that makes her think I want to attack her? All people get mad at each other and act like children.
At what point do you accept it and learn to move on?
I know our responses to each other are always going to be feral because there’s no filter. I’m prepared for that.
What I didn’t count up is all the ways I was unprepared, because she wouldn’t open up. It grew so tiresome that I thought, “I need to get out more.” I didn’t give up because I was so insistent on breaking her boundaries. I gave up because how do you talk to someone who doesn’t want it?
You’re a land of secrets; its only citizen. Though I paid my dues, I was never allowed in…..
-Hope Alone, Indigo Girls
Which is why our relationship is so beautiful and so fucked up……. the reason, beautiful girl, that I write beautiful and fucked up things.
It’s never been easy, and it won’t be now. It may not even exist now, because I do not understand what is going on in a fundamental way. What I do know is that my lack of understanding will, as far as I know, last about eight months.
My medical diagnosis is “alternating lateral isotropia.”
What it means is that my eyes do not track together. I do not have 3D vision, which means that I cannot place an object in its environment. I have no depth perception or angle of convergence. The way it is different from a strabismus is that neurologically, by brain switches “cameras,” thus fields of vision, depending on which eye it thinks can see the best…. leaving me with no peripheral vision and also no ability to predict what’s going to be outside my field of vision.
It also makes finding things I’ve just set down extraordinarily difficult, something I’ve struggled with forever…. again, rewarding neurotypical kids for things that are very hard for the neurodivergent. When a teacher notices you lose everything, you lose all respect with them. It affects grades where the letter is an abstract concept, like essays. I wish I excelled at math, because there would have been no fear of rejection with every paper and I could have felt better about myself without a teacher’s approval.
It doesn’t help that the real non-medical definition of my medical condition is “lazy eye.” That irritates me, too. I’m a writer. Why wouldn’t lazy be a trigger for me? Trust me, I may not “work” faster than you (universal) because I don’t know how neurotypicals do it, but I think faster. It’s not because I’m neurotypical. It’s that my entire job here is reacting to life, so I feel practiced at it and more comfortable in my skin. Lucky enough to be as old as I am because the good experiences only start happening after you’ve figured out how to avoid all the land mines first.
It’s good I’m still workin’ on that.
But back to this whole “lazy eye” thing. It makes me feel lesser than, and though I know that doctors use it, they should know that for some people it doesn’t feel particularly favorable…. like “MDT” in Appalachia.
If you’re not a doctor there, you’d never figure it out. It’s not really something you can google, only something they’ve seen a thousand times and you probably haven’t. My cousin got his DO in West Virginia. Because it’s local slang for something I feel is pejorative, I won’t say it here. I’ll let them keep it to themselves because it would seem really mean outside of an emergency setting. Mostly because I don’t want people to shoot the messenger, not that I’m not brave enough. I don’t have to live there, but they do.
That was all bullshit. Of course I won’t hold back on you. If they’re willing to use it in a public setting, I don’t care about their feelings.
MDT stands for “Mountain Dew Teeth.” It absolutely will rot everything in your head if you are completely addicted, and that kind of exposure to sugar can absolutely kill you when you wait until it’s an emergency and septic.
People have had this addiction since Mountain Dew was a home brew. Long, long before it developed into a nationwide phenomenon.
There are also lots of other things that doctors don’t want patients to know, but they have to have a black sense of humor to deal with the pressure. It’s not trying to be mean, it’s learning to breathe. Think line cook.
So, I don’t know what doctors say about me behind my back, but I know lots of things they would say when lives are on the line.
Doctors’ hardest jobs are the cleanup from not having universal health insurance. They are bound by the Hippocratic Oath, yet it’s not an easy job when you are starting with fucked up. The ER is full of complicated cases where people have gone to the Emergency Room at the height of their disease. The part where it gets harder and harder to tell people they’ll recover from this.
Death happens at random, but it’s more likely when the odds are stacked against you. You think something is wrong, and wait to go to the doctor until you’re in renal failure. Other countries don’t have this problem.
Having universal heath care would help a lot of doctors’ mental health…. because there’d be so many less emergencies. It helps when you have time to prepare a plan.
I know all of this through talking to doctors when they’re off work, not by being a patient. So, I’m not as bothered when medical professionals call it “lazy eye” because if I’m at the doctor I’m already thinking in clinical mode, anyway. The emotion is not going to affect me, at least not until it accumulates.
People ask me all the time if I’m looking at them, and I don’t fuckin’ know. Your guess is as good as mine, and I am not in the mood for your bullshit ever. It’s always said with this curiosity tinged with “that’s so weird.” That’s why Zac can get away with making fun of me and no one else can. His jabs don’t feel like he’s punching down when he is also disabled, something I’ve never had in a friend or partner.
Disability is a relative term in the military. I don’t mean to imply that he is also unemployed. He’s classified as disabled, but he’s physically strong enough to work. It”s going to make a good pension for him, and I think he’s going to be really happy no matter what he chooses to do after this. It’s cool to be able to stand next to an adult when I feel like I don’t have it together.
Plus, there’s lots of soda in his basement, which adds to his charm.
Today, I’m going home because even though Zac is of and about, I wanted to wake up with Oliver. I wished Zac could have come with me, but the stars didn’t align for that one. I’ll just have to wait for Jason Moran at The Kennedy Center.
Oh, but here’s the best thing I’ve heard in a million years:
Leslie (texting a link): I know you’re not a huge fan, but I thought you might want to read my impressions of last night.
What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.
I wrote this last night and hit the wrong button. You’ll get today’s writing prompt later. 😉
This evening I find myself caught between reading and writing, because I just got home from hearing Jonna Mendez talk about her new autobiography, “In True Face.” I think this is my new favorite story in life, thus why I wanted to write it down right away.
As I’ve said before, Jonna and I know each other a little bit, and she was bummed she didn’t get to invite me herself- glad I got the message because “you usually come to these things.” But we didn’t speak beforehand, I just gave her a nod; she smiled as I sat down.
She talked about living in Kansas, growing up in her sister’s shadow. Marrying two case officers and living in their shadows, somewhat. I don’t think she would think of herself as living in Tony’s shadow if he wasn’t known the world over as Ben Affleck on screen. a
It’s one thing to see your life, well, in real life. Quite another to see it reflected back to you in media. I have no idea who Tony really was, but here is what I do know.
In all the time that I’ve known her, she’s never called him “Tony” when we were in the same room. I noticed it right away. The telltale sign that she’s hiding something. There has to be something left for her, that only she gets. She has to talk about him publicly. Tony Mendez is as much as she can handle during speaking engagements. That’s because she’s not talking about her husband. She’s talking about his trademark and his tradecraft.
I can’t imagine how hard that is, but I can empathize with the idea of it. I haven’t lost a partner, but I have lost a mother. Talking about what my mother did professionally is indeed the easy part. I see and understand it deeply because I have been there so many times. It gets easier, and it looked to me that she was doing okay. You’re never the same, but it’s only been since 2019. Therefore, we could both feel his presence in the room…. because I moved to DC after Tony stopped doing public appearances (he got Parkinson’s Disease), but have been one of the Mendez’ biggest fans for years. The writer/reader connection is unbreakable, especially for writers like Jonna, Tony, and me. I write every day about my life and they saved theirs up for publication, but at the end of the day it’s all us spilling our guts and trying to make sense of a lot of shit that will never reconcile.
I wonder what was going on in her head when, during the Q&A, a man asked how she responded to (and I’m paraphrasing, here) all the horrible shit that CIA has done worldwide since 1947…. like MK Ultra (my first thought? “Look here, you little shit…”). She disposed of him as quickly as I’ve been taught by my dad. How to de-escalate? Tell the absolute truth.
She said, “you know, MK Ultra came out of my office and it went horribly, horribly wrong. We didn’t want to get caught with our pants down and we didn’t use anyone who didn’t sign up. But we didn’t know all the things about x, y, and z that we do now (I am only giving the gist, I don’t want to speak for her), and that she felt CIA had already owned up to it.
Then we moved on.
Another guy asked her how long there was between John and Tony or some other dumbfuckery. It was like there was a test with some sort of “gotcha” that wasn’t there. I’m guessing those people were from magazines or something, because if you were there tonight, you were a fan. Amanda (Education and Outreach) told us that we were the fan club, and I believe it. Want to know how I know that? I talked the guy’s ear off in front of me and by the time he got to the checkout he also bought “The Moscow Rules.”
Everywhere I go, Jonna Mendez sells books. I don’t know what it is about me. I have never been able to sell anyone on anything else, but my excitement about watching real spies vs. the hyped up bullshit normally on TV seems to resonate with people. The truth is that people believe CIA is associated with all that Bond hero shit, and that’s fine. I’m not here to take away their fantasy.
But I am here to tell you that through Jonna Mendez telling her own story, I know what it feels like to be eye to eye with Bin Laden… or at least, that high value a target. She wasn’t specific. Probably won’t be, because I don’t think those ops will be completely declassified for a long time.
I wondered what it had been like to carry that burden. What it had been like not to be able to talk about what she’d been through, because I’ve been interested in psychology since university. What does it do to the brain to carry information like that long term?
If we are not doing a very good job at taking care of the military when they come home, I doubt the government is pulling out all the stops for CIA. I am not saying that there aren’t as many resources for case officers as there are for the military. I just don’t know any people in the military that aren’t allowed to tell people they joined. Your husbands and wives absolutely are doing the dangerous shit you think they are if you have even the slightest hint that they’re C/DIA.
What if you had to be next to Putin in disguise so you could take a picture of the document he was about to sign? You have three seconds and it has to be perfect because this won’t ever happen again. Would your hands shake?
Jonna Mendez has never existed at CIA. Ever. I know that while she worked there, her first name was “Faith,” but she did not reveal her middle and last names. But even if she had, it wouldn’t have mattered. I’m sure “Faith” is just one of the many lives she led.
One of her fears was that she would die overseas under her CIA name and no one would ever hear from her again. I would think that someone has found a way to fix this fundamental issue electronically, but I do not know for sure. In the era of printed tickets?
There are many unnamed stars on the wall at Langley, and I wonder how many more there are you can’t count. Again, because I don’t want to worry the mothers or whatever, there’s no way this problem cannot be solved already. I felt it, though, because she talked me through it on the train home as she wrestled it out. How she got to “this is it. I’m going to die alone.” It was not an unreasonable assumption. The terrorist across from her had armed guards. They didn’t make her. The terrorist did. To be clear, he also made three or four others. This was not a mistake in tradecraft on her part. Everyone came prepared for that meeting, except their guys had AKs.
I’ve heard that story from her before, but in the books it is not made as clear as it was to me tonight that who she met was absolutely no joke. It was her reaction. The way she said pure evil. There was a bit of trying to demonstrate how powerful this person was while also trying to keep out a deeper response from surfacing. I know that her purpose is educating the audience, not scaring them so bad they won’t come back. She just described the look in his eyes so perfectly that I knew she was standing in that memory for a nanosecond and stepping out of the pool.
The nanosecond is scarier than anything she could say out loud. No contest. Her real face is the one you’ve wanted to see all along.
What I haven’t said is about my participation in the whole thing. At “The Moscow Rules,” the line for questions was really long. So, I stand up, and not only is there no line, I can’t even find the microphone at first. So, I pretend like this is absolutely nothing at all and not the most embarrassing thing I have done all day and just go stand by the mic and wait. I did not think that this would happen, however.
Someone said, “the first question…” and she finished “is from Leslie.” I get to the mic and she says, “hi Leslie.” I said, “hi, Jonna.” She said, “how ya been?” It was like this unplanned “bit.” So, I thought… a spy wants to bust my identity on YouTube? She’ll do it. I said, “to the extent that you are able, will you play ball with me for YouTube? She looked at me questioningly, yet cautiously optimistic. I said, “I have seen you in another video describing yourself as ‘a real hardass’ at CIA. You talk about things that were done to you (she says she doesn’t want it to seem like a feminist rant)…. but what’s the funniest thing you’ve ever done to your staff? She said, “the only thing I can think of is that I married Tony Mendez. They thought I was insane.” It was the perfect end to a perfect talk for me, and I got exactly what I wanted.
At the book signing, she told me she saw my dad’s stuff, but she didn’t see mine. I told her that I’d gotten a professional author’s page, so you might see her lurking around the Facebook version of Stories, you might not. She asked for it, but when you write it down on a Post-It note, you never know if the person is going to remember or not. The funniest thing about Jonna’s Facebook profile is that it lists her profession as “photographer,” which is, I think, drastically burying the lead.
Oh, and I have never felt a more sick burn. Like, Supergrover sick burn it was so good. I laughed so hard I died for a second, then almost made her spit out her water because she didn’t know I spoke “microaggression.” I told her that some day I’d write something as good as hers, and she said “it’s good you’re still workin’ on that.” I said, “I’m going to laugh about that for three years.” It was to lighten the moment.
I saw her. In true face, I saw her. I said, “congratulations on owning yourself.” I’ll remember that smile forever. When you own yourself, you see others doing the same. Themes repeat themselves in my life and it was the only thing I thought would be in any way eloquent enough for the occasion.
She knew what I meant. Her bottom lip twitched in recognition of what I’d said while the rest of her face didn’t say anything at all.
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?
When Supergrover emoted, she gave me two things. The first is closure. The second is the ability to work toward our goals now that all the cards are on the table. It has been a hard row to hoe when she’s only given me the flop, keeping the turn and the river in front of me, out of my reach. This is because all five cards had been revealed before, and they weren’t cards we could put back in the deck.
It reminds me of Plants vs. Zombies, if you’ve ever played that video game. The second time you go through the levels, Crazy Dave picks out three seed packets that are at random, but they’re locked and you can’t remove them- you have to hope that you win based on what you bring to the game.
We have nine seed packets, and three of them are locked. It’s an even better analogy, because Michaels is holding the flop, the turn, and the river because I fucked up. If there’s anything that made me fail, it was me. For Supergrover to say that this is all her fault is ridiculous. If I hadn’t been an asshole, none of this would have happened.
Full stop.
I have been saying that ad nauseam on my blog, not going after her. The constant feedback that I get from my readers is that I am way too goddamn hard on myself. I have never once heard “you’re too hard on her.”
Not once, ever in my life.
But, if people had said that, I wouldn’t have deflected, either. I would have said that they didn’t know the whole story, and that they couldn’t know what went on behind closed doors, and they never would. So, they have to put a lot of faith in me that I am not being too hard on myself, that I own 50% of the problem. Don’t treat me as innocent here, because I’m not.
Meeting Supergrover changed the course of my life for all the right reasons, and we both feel guilty about rushing into this relationship because it wasn’t a problem we thought through together. If we had, we could have avoided a lot of turmoil later on.
I said, “do you think I write about you just for shits and giggles? No, this is my very real inner monologue.” What I didn’t remind her of yet again is how much it takes to be this vulnerable. That I shake and cry through some of these entries, that it’s hard to get my feelings out and yet absolutely essential.
And then I told her what I was really writing and why I was writing it that way. I hope she’s shocked out of her mind, because I think I won this hand.
I just hope she, like me, doesn’t move the goalposts and say my response should have been happier. Because we’ve both been doing it to each other for a very long time.
When we don’t open up to each other, we are no better than we were before. It’s just going to keep being a toxic mess. When we put up walls, we don’t fulfill our purpose in each other’s lives, why it’s always been just her and me. That sometimes it’s nice to have that “stranger on a train” feeling where you can just dump anything and let the other respond to it.
That feeling is exactly why it’s not incumbent upon her to give of herself and her time. I am not asking for more than she wants to give. I think we’d be great comic foils, and have a ton of fun no matter what our relationship looks like in the future.
For instance, I don’t like the lines in this blog where I flip her shit. I’m not as funny as she is, so basically it’s “I set ’em up, you knock ’em down.” I like the response better than I’ve ever liked anything I’ve said. I have gotten a touche once in the history of our relationship, and I cannot tell you what that line was, but I came in Kings full over Aces.
We set each other up to fail. Badly.
But now I can either start moving away from her comfortably, or moving toward her with peace and grace. No matter how she feels about me, I’ll always be hers.
It’s just up to her to see which way we’ll go, because I don’t know whether she’ll understand why I’m doing what I’m doing or not. But like it or not, the important part is that she heard my thu’um instead of my whisper.
And whispered back that I wasn’t on the wrong track.
She’s just hurt and tired….. with me waiting to kiss her boo-boos exactly the way she kissed all mine 10 years ago. I have Bactine, Band-Aids, lollipops, the whole works.
I wear my CIA baseball cap most days. Zac knows this. First of all, it was a present from him. Second of all, it’s my comfort item in his absence. It’s a great baseball cap, too, but also it reminds me of him. We don’t get together that often, but I think of him all the time and vice versa. I love that he sends me pictures of himself every morning, pictures of Oliver (who is a dog), and random memes (mostly regarding making fun of religion or linux or both). All of those things are important, and yet not a sensory thing like a piece of clothing.
I wrap up in my Outlander plaid at night. Bryn knows this. It’s not branded, it’s just what I call it because Bryn sent me a Scottish plaid when we were both in the middle of inhaling the book series (I like reading, she likes audiobooks). It’s green and meant to remind me I’m loved- it does, and it has for many years because it was in the box of the first things Bryn sent me when I got here.
I like iced coffee better than hot, so I brew the coffee at night and pour it into a cup with ice in the morning. I got the cup when Supergrover sent me a large gift certificate and told me to have some fun on her. That was long ago, and it’s an every day carry.
Supergrover does not know this.
I was thinking about “choosing to air all this” afterward, and all that really made sense to me is that she was okay with step one, but forgot about steps two through ten. As in, if she started being aggressive in step one, then why would I think she would want to know steps two through 10?
It’s a weird dichotomy, because I think she really did want/need to hear the things I said after we parted, but because every conversation between us made me think she wasn’t interested, I picked up my toys and went home. I tried to take up as little room as I possibly could, because if I tried to emote, I was met with either “I’m too busy” or “you’re too needy.”
She thinks that all of this is her fault, that I have said all of this is her fault. Then, she copped to everything I said she did and apologized for it, then reamed me out for telling the world I was unhappy about her doing exactly what she was doing.
wtf kind of bullshit is that? 😉
So, when her response to me was as angry as I’d ever seen her, I met her with joy. When you get the gift that you’ve been asking for for SEVEN YEARS, you don’t complain about the wrapping. She emoted. She broke down and told me what was really going on. That’s what I wanted. If I had responded with more anger, it would have been moving the goalposts and saying her response wasn’t happy enough. She doesn’t need to be happy with me. She needs to tell me the truth.
But I want her to be happy with me. I just don’t want to be the only arbiter of our relationship. I need her to take up space by telling me how she’s feeling and not covering it up, running away from her emotions, making me do a lot of emotional guesswork that makes me set off land mines I never knew were there.
She’s never opened up about the tender places in her that I couldn’t see, that I really wanted to….. for instance, she said that she has had the chance, countless times, to stop what she was doing and respond. She didn’t, and takes responsibility for that. I could have been an asshole and said “how dare she?,” but the take home message was “I think about you all the time.”
If she’s willing to show up like she did the other day, she’s welcome every day. I don’t want to hide anymore. I don’t want to feel like a secret anymore. It doesn’t feel like a secret anymore, because when she gave me a clear picture, I could see for miles.
I told her it felt like she owned herself, and I loved her. None of this is all her fault. There was no preconceived plan, just fools rushing in. I’m just not the only fool, for very different reasons.
So, she may not have known that “her” Starbucks cup is the one I every day carry…….. because it’s just one of the things I would have told her if I thought she’d wanted to hear it.
That’s what this has all been about. When did we both just stop taking up space and trying not to offend each other?
What experiences in life helped you grow the most?
Last night, I was rereading the long letter from Supergrover (having so much to read helps when she’s out of pocket because of course the second time I read something, a different aspect will jump out), and she was talking about one of her kids’ partners. She told me that the kid’s partner had told the kid that the turning point for them in their journey with alcohol was losing her kid. A tear came to my eye and I thought, “alcohol and bipolar present the same. I am this kid.” Apparently the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Her kid is her, and I have no doubt they have the same type affect on people. It wasn’t the point of the letter, but the things that affect me that she’s written are mostly the things that connect to something deep inside me.
I felt more relaxed than I’d felt in years. Supergrover didn’t understand our pattern, didn’t understand why I didn’t accept certain things about our relationship, me surprised at how conscientious and dedicated she really is at being a friend, and how because I didn’t believe her, I missed out on a lot of things. But the reason I didn’t believe her is that she wasn’t showing up. She wasn’t laying her true feelings on the table. When she got so angry she couldn’t see straight, finally she had the strength to say what she’d been hiding for a very long time. That’s what I mean by “breaking her open.” I don’t care that she was angry. Her tone wasn’t the point. Her offering was…. and that offering was “I’m hurt and tired.”
Now, it’s her job to decide whether she wants to ask me about what I’ve written, or if she’d like her pre-conceived notions as to why I’d write what I’d write stand. She thinks that I continually paint her as a villain and the times I paint her as my friend are somehow invalid. It does not make sense to her that I can love her and be angry at the same time, but yes it does. When she got into full swing, she sounded exactly like me, picking up style and structure, painting her feelings as fact (about other people, but same style)….. and I wondered what the difference was in her tone and mine. What is she reacting to that I’m not reacting to in her?
We often hate the things in others that we hate about ourselves. She learned that I’m sometimes just as private as she is because I don’t want to rock the boat, either…. and didn’t like that I chose to talk about it here because she thought I was attacking her. No, I was reflecting on a long and hard road, which looks different if you think it is at an end. In effect, she was offended by the grieving process, because I think I’ve done my fair share of denial, anger, and bargaining- to name a few. I have said a lot of things that weren’t favorable to her when she wasn’t being any more favorable to me. She called my blog a “Get Out of Jail Free” card to be shitty to her, and I didn’t know how to explain that if she really wanted me to let her go, it was going to be ugly inside myself. That I had a million different feelings to process and none of them had to do with the last 15 minutes.
I had to process 10 years, all without ever really having the input I needed. However, I’ve always gotten what I needed when we were tracking together, and I can’t hope for much, but I can hope that we’re at least back at the same starting gate. Or perhaps we’re on different sides of the concourse, but still both seeing the Nats…. and that’s something.
She said she was furious beyond belief at some entries, and moved by others. I would cut off any one of my limbs to know which entries moved her, because I have heard all about the ones that make her furious.
I had to process the time I wanted to be the partner, to when I knew she had a partner, and going from the friend who would have come to the wedding to the person that would have officiated if I’d been asked. But she didn’t give me the strength for that.
By the time Bryn got married, she was done with our church, so she asked me to marry her instead of her pastor. The wedding went off with a hitch. 😉
In fact, the thing that meant the most to me is that the groom, whom I had maybe all of two days with before the wedding, congratulated me on a job well done, and he said, “I had a lot of trepidation when Bryn said that she had this friend who wanted to do the wedding, because I wanted it to be perfect. And it was.” I don’t think he knew my back story- that I had prepared for this moment unintentionally by learning how to do weddings from the age of five. As I have said, the joke is that no one in my group of friends wanted to wait until I was done with grad school to perform a ceremony I had memorized by nine.
Although the wedding was taken directly out of the Book of Common Prayer; we just took all the religious references out because Bryn absolutely believes in the power of the universe, but I don’t know whether she would translate that to “relationship with God,” as many people do.
The thing my dad taught me that stuck with me is to go through the wedding at the rehearsal without saying the vows. Unless it was just the three of us, if they’d said the vows at the wedding rehearsal, they would have been married AT THE REHEARSAL because there were witnesses. This presented as funny only once. I got confused for a second as the vows started because I didn’t look down at my portfolio and said the groom’s name where the bride’s should have been. Bryn corrected me because she caught it and I didn’t- brain fart- and we laughed and moved on.
The thing that my dad also taught me is that brides and grooms get very nervous at their weddings, and you can coach them to the extent that you can with something like that. If someone gets tongue-tied, I say, “if so, your answer is ‘I do.'” I have never met a couple where if they hesitated during their vows, it meant they had cold feet. Most people are anxious at being in front of public.
In terms of the wedding itself, I missed Dana terribly for two reasons. The first is that I cannot imagine how much fun we would have had visiting our old haunts, and I know she would have loved being a preacher’s wife for a day. It was so fucking weird going to Burgerville without her. Yet, I did not call her and tell her to meet me there because I couldn’t. I never want to get back together with her, but I also really miss being her best friend, the part where we never, ever got angry enough to be physically violent. There was not that kind of emotion tension to create that kind of fight.
I know that this is still, in part, true for her as well because of what she said when my mother died. I hadn’t talked to her in months, maybe a year or a year and a half. The first thing I said was “thank you for picking up. I wouldn’t have called unless it was important.” She said that she would never not pick up because she figured that if I was calling her, it must be important. That is a long way of healing from standing me up at the bank, literally. So, even if she didn’t want to be a preacher’s wife in person, she definitely was the strength I chose to lean on that day. It was like she was my phantom limb the whole time, and I never felt alone, because we were every bit as much of a team as our then-pastor, as Dana, Bryn, and I all met at the same church, and we both folded into Bryn’s family…… even though because I had dated Matt, I could tell he was in a pissing match with Dana and she didn’t notice….. whether she was blind or not is debatable, because someone can present a game to you and you can say, “I’m better off pretending this doesn’t exist because it’s not worth my time to care.”
All of this is to say that Dana, Bryn, and I have a very long history, and it’s why I jumped on a plane to Portland and felt sick when I landed. I could feel my anxiety melting the further we went down 99W, because Bryn lives in Newberg, the 100% insurance I wouldn’t run into anyone I didn’t like. I don’t think we went into the city except karaoke night. I did my usual, “I Feel Lucky,” by Mary-Chapin Carpenter. It fits my voice and after I’ve had a beer my accent gets stronger. If that is true of another Southerner I know up here, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to hear that out of her, either. It’s a more rolling lilt than mine, because for some reason which I will certainly look up on YouTube (linguistics lectures are fire), the Southern accent gets softer during the drive from Texas to Mississippi.
And yes, when I spelled Mississippi, I did say in my head “M. I. SSI. SSI. Crooked letter Crooked letter i.” And I’m a music nerd, so my slowed so I could do the rhythm with my fingers as well. I love that language is music whether or not it comes with notes. It’s why I’m a hard core gangster rap fan, as well as lighter stuff like hip-hop. I am learning to write dialogue, just like I’m learning plot and character from Issa Rae on Netflix.
The reason that I want to learn dialogue like this is think about Amy Sherman-Palladino and Aaron Sorkin. They’ve both made their careers by speeding up dialogue to 33o bpm, and because the rhythm is faster, your brain contains it because you have to strain to keep up not to miss anything….. and the rhythm reinforces it.
For instance, who doesn’t remember the way Alan Arkin said, “How’d you cut your hand, Josh?” They may not remember the rhythm, but it will certainly bring up feelings…… because Yo-Yo Ma was also there.
I asked you to roll with me, and got off on a tangent as per my normal.
I have no doubt that said pastor was mad as FUCK, but I hope that she understood it wasn’t about trying to keep them out, but to keep us in. We are not saying fuck you to that world. We are making our peace with it so we can leave it behind. We are processing feelings that go back to 1997…. about our friendship, about who we are and always have been to each other, and how “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.”
I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Supergrover would love to meet Bryn, perhaps even more than she wanted to meet me, because Bryn has a story she needs to hear…………. because Bryn has been my friend since 1997, when she was a teenager (and so was I, but I was 19 and Bryn was maybe 14). I am not saying it would ever happen, but I know that Supergrover would roll her eyes at some of what Bryn had to say because it will just seem so very familiar to her, as if Bryn and I are speaking with one voice.
I can’t get them together, because Supergrover and I aren’t there yet. But what I can do is say on my blog that Bryn is coming to visit me in May, do with that information what you will.
One of the sweetest things about Supergrover’s letter was that she said my words felt like “pricks on her skin that grew into big holes she couldn’t close anymore.” What I thought was happening was happening. Instead of asking me why I’d write what I’d write, she saved it all up until she was so mad she couldn’t see straight, and tell me she was busy. I could tell, and I wasn’t angry that she wasn’t responding to me fast enough. She couldn’t see that what I wanted was for her to open up to me and tell me all the times I’d hurt her rather than kicking the can down the road. I’ve said so many heavy, scary things that I cannot count them. It is why I said that I’ve been naked in front of her so many more times than I have with a lover. It is a different voice for me, that my internal monologue was also, in fact, her external monologue. It is a weird feeling to know someone so intimately through reading their work and not giving that person a hug. It begins to feel like a rock concert, and I mean this on a deep and spiritual level.
Yesterday, I told you that she’s my tuba, or vocally the basso profundo in my life. Not the lead trumpet player, the top note. The base of the chord upon which everything is built. Who hasn’t gotten close to the woofers at Third Eye Blind. Who hasn’t felt the way your chest expands and your skin buzzes? That’s how it feels to have another person (especially one like her, the rock part) inside me, because she’s never been separate from me and we’ve never learned to pick up the other’s social cues. Incidentally, as an autistic person, if we did have a day to day relationship she’d be the perfect person to social mask when my sister wasn’t with me. She doesn’t have time for that, I’m just telling you that the way she has her shit together is what I want.
The worst part is that she thinks she doesn’t.
It’s understandable. She lives on no sleep. I’m not sure she’s had myelin on her nerves since the Reagan administration….. and I can’t tell you the line that told me that, but it was funny.
Again, reading her words, her true feelings, relaxes me and I read to the rhythm of Dave Grusin, because I like the theme to “Three Days of the Condor……. among many, many others. St. Elsewhere is probably at the top, followed by Doogie Howser, M.D. The reason I like the theme is that I’ve never seen the end of the movie. It got weird (like the misogyny in old Bond movies). I think this is fair play because the novel is called “Six Days of the Condor,” so it seems they only filmed half of it and gave up. The difference between our relationship now and our relationship at first was that in the first few weeks, the rhythm was “Your Love is My Drug,” because she’d said some very exciting things. New relationship energy ate my lunch. I have no compunction about confronting people on problems before they happen to establish boundaries, and neither does she. I warned her that this could turn into an emotional affair because of two things. Internet chat creates a sense of intimacy that may or may not be there in real life. That you become disconnected from your body, so sexuality and gender become irrelevant. This is what I meant about saying that I hoped she was going to be Cynthia Nixon, and self-deprecating that it’s because I’m not that good a writer. I was not saying that my writing is my way into her heart and therefore I thought I could change her like when we used to quote Ellen Degeneres about “winning a toaster.” I thought that reading me would change her, because women don’t fall in love with other people’s private parts all the time. This is because sexual relationships with women are built on emotional connection, just like they are with straight women. You can break up a marriage faster than you can break up two women who’ve flipped each other shit since high school.
But I can tell you the exact moment her feelings stayed the same and mine went haywire. I was telling her that her story felt like a drug, and she said, “I’m sure I’ll drink your liquor, too.” Not meant to be a pass or a flirt, but so smooth af that my knees knocked. If you’re lesbian or bi, did I make you do the thing…….. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. Her gender and sexuality didn’t fly out the window, mine did. It didn’t matter what she looked like, I wanted more and I was in.
If I could describe our relationship in one sentence that would resonate with my generation, it would be that our relationship on the surface seems like it’s “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” It’s really “Bel-Air.” I feel that way all the time, every day. If you are not familiar with both shows, because “Bel-Air” is so new, let me catch you up.
“The Fresh Prince” is cute, and everyone knows the intro….. which is the scariest event that happens in the whole show (so far) portrayed as comedy. In “Bel-Air,” you find out what happened that day, how he really met Jazz, etc. It’s violent, and even in California you see the real problems in their family. Carlton is an addict because he’s a perfectionist and has anxiety. I identify with him on two levels, because I am both versions of Carlton on the shows, and the actor is from my neighborhood (I don’t know him, he was born after I left).
What I have noticed is that if you want to learn anything from powerful people, you don’t try to be a gladiator trying to impress them. You become the Olivia to their Cyrus, but not when they’re working. When they’re sitting on the couch drinking wine and eating popcorn after having fought gloves off all day. Because the fighting isn’t personal and those moments don’t matter as much as a conversation with a good friend about What Kind of Day Has It Been?
When that involved snuggling in my dreams, I knew I was fuccccccccccked, because I knew my dreams would go deeper than that while I found homeostasis. It was hell on earth, because she wasn’t going through those physical changes and I was. When you know your heart has barked up the wrong tree, you can’t tell your heart just to “snap out of it.”If I could write what really happened between us, you’d read it to the tune of a billion dollars, especially if she was my co-author. It would become a franchise series on Netflix, because our story has never been told before. It is an original idea, one that hasn’t been represented on screen much, if ever. It’s why I hope that those 10 seasons are all here. I don’t want to turn my blog into a Netflix series, I just hope that much story has been told.
That I am at least a good enough writer for that. I want our story to be quiet, yet enormous. There are so many differences between us that make us interesting, yet nothing can tear us apart for a moment of any day.
Let me tell you the day I knew what kind of situation my situation was in. How I fell in love with her the second time. First of all, Ifigured out how that woman who’s loved her friend for 10 years and nothing could tear them apart actually worked, so I was more capable than I was in the beginning. Secondly, it was something she said. She said that once marriage was marriage, it was for life. That it existed great sex, no sex, whatever. That’s how lesbian marriages work every single day. I finally had some words and context I really understood because it was written in my language. Everyone knows that couple that’s been together a hundred years, but they lost interest in each other during about year 12.
So, I know why she was angry I blocked her on Facebook, but I wasn’t. I needed to stop seeing her picture in my feed all day. She blocked me on instagram, and I was so grateful because I can’t see her profile unless I’m logged out. The only time I saw them is when they were referer stats on my blog, because I wasn’t logged in on all web broswers. It gave me some room to breathe, and our entire relationship was based on e-mail, not getting to know each other in person or in a group, which created different outcomes. Our relationship existed in text only between us, and it broke my personality in half. That’s why I couldn’t stay with Dana. I had grown past her and we were on separate paths no matter where in the world Supergrover and I were because Internet. She’s handfasted as my yellow string, and it runs between us. I used to call it a chord, because it worked in both our first languages.
The pleasure of my life was when we returned to them. It’s the life experience that helped me grow the most, by far…….
But what I need you to remember is that though it’s Three Days of the Condor visually, the other three days are in the book.
I just haven’t noticed all the ways not speaking each other’s love language has harmed us, because I could see what she was doing to show me love, but I couldn’t see that she was receiving what I was saying with love. She’s hurt beyond belief at some of the things I’ve written and painted it as fact that I’m out to get her when she doesn’t know the first thing about what I have to say, because I’m not talking about our real issues here. She thinks she’s the villain in the story when I’m saying that we tumble and roll. I am often the villain in this story, and have said as much. She sees how much I try to explain how her choices affect me and chooses to believe I’m being nefarious. I’m being INFJ autistic Doctor Who Malcolm Tucker.
Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.
First of all, :::checks notes::: WordPress, it’s “describe a phase in life in which it was difficult to say goodbye.” Just like it’s not “where’s the library at?” It’s “where’s the library at, asshole?” Never end a sentence with a preposition.
I do it a little bit.
Humor before I start diving deep this morning, because there have been many, many times in which it was Boyz II Men hard to say goodbye.
The first time it was a really hard transition was moving from Galveston to Naples the summer after first grade. I loved the beach (my sister did not- she used to run away from the waves saying “don’t. Don’t! Don’t!). I mean, she got over it…… she did get married in Galveston. The cultural difference between living on the island and living in small town Texas wasn’t hard because I didn’t like it. It was just a transition. I was especially close to my friends Asbury and Beulah Lennox, who kind of took over being my grandparents when my own grandparents were so far away. The bonus was moving about 12-15 miles from my biological grandparents, a complete change as well.
I do not do well with change, and I’m glad we moved in the summer so I could ease into it. Incidentally, since The War Daniel was not a member of our church, I didn’t meet him until September. I can’t remember when it was second or third grade when we made it official. 😉 I will say that it wasn’t until I met The War Daniel that I felt truly comfortable, the INFJ/INTJ people we have always been. We were the book nerds, the music nerds, and the ones who didn’t give a fuck if people thought we were weird. We both have this historical Jesus personality, we just come at it from different directions. He’s a thinker. I’m a feeler.
Editor’s Note:
Two things. The first is that “The War Daniel” is a play on words, because of John Hurt in Doctor Who- “The War Doctor.” Daniel was a Doc in the Navy, embedded with a team of Marines.
The second is that if I say that I or anyone else has a “Jesus” personality, or that “it’s as hard to be me as it was to be Jesus,” I’m talking about his day to day life, not that I or anyone else has a Savior complex. Jesus cannot be much different than any current pastor (especially those in clerical collars willing to be arrested at protests), because he was a rabbi, though they didn’t have that term back then.
Incidentally, there is also no evidence one way or the other that Jesus wasn’t married, and it’s been a debate for centuries; think Catholic vs. Protestant- Catholic priests are told they have to bear the burden of ministry alone, because they can’t love everyone if they love only one person that deeply…. takes away objectivity or something. The Protestants, like The Avatar, discovered that pastors could not do it without a support system. His partner could have been anyone from John, the Disciple marked as “whom Jesus loved,” and I have not looked at the original Greek or Hebrew to see if there’s more context, like philia or agape. But right now, I’m willing to say that there is no evidence Jesus was gay one way or the other, either, because there is also a debate on Mary Magdalene.
Supergrover actually sent me several novels about this, and it’s basically that Jesus and Mary were married and were writing their own Gospel, the Book of Love. It does make sense. After Jesus died, the story is that Joseph of Arimathia (rich merchant) helped Mary and the children escape to France. It is, of course, fiction….. but based on the little evidence we do know. It’s just been too long, there’s too many questions that will always be unanswered. So, Jesus is who you need him to be, not the other way around…… as long as you realize that Jesus did not come here only to comfort the distressed. He came here to also distress you out of your comfort. No power over. Power with. It’s why he was peaceful about it, but probably hated the Sanhedrin because they were the most vociferous Jews regarding law and very little around compassion, which has no bearing on the church today.………….
I think what The War Daniel misread as anger was actually fear. We should have video called more before he went to rehab, but we’re *both* writers, and lapsed into that personality way too easily…. which took away too much of our compassion. I also know that being in a relationship your first year out of rehab is absolutely not advisable, so when we got engaged, I kept dating Zac because it really didn’t bother him. Because Zac is poly, Daniel knew he was no threat. That if Zac and I are building a life together, it consists of exactly what is happening now. I have so much love for him because he’s a solid dude as a friend and as a boyfriend. How our relationship is supposed to go is unknown. I just know that we probably won’t get closer than we are now. Neither of us has the time.
It wasn’t that we were rushing into anything, we were just each other’s end game. Daniel didn’t offer to marry me because of anything but I needed it for the health care and benefits as a military dependent. And it was his idea not because I wanted it, but because he saw I needed it.
So, the hardest transitions I have to talk about today are the summer before I met Daniel, and the months after he left.
The reason I chose to write about this instead of the transition after my mother died is that I just can’t go there today. So, I will tell you what I was feeling in the moment, instead. It is so raw and real that if you are also in grief, it might help you as well.
The ones who have helped me through all these transitions just being kind enough to sit with me and listen.
My first thought was “Jesus *Christ*…” but not in a good way. I have no idea who I’d like to be, because I see pros and cons to everything.
I’m not even sure I’m that good at being myself….. but I’m laughing about it. The thing is, though, I could totally be Jesus. It’s like, the only thing I know how to do. I tell stories, people listen to me, and I can flat *assure* you that “nothing good comes out of Nazareth.” No stranger has ever come after me over my writing, because it’s *mine*. Why would they have an interest if they didn’t know me personally?
Here’s why it’s not any easier to be me than it was to be Jesus. The only difference is that I had a blog and he literally sat around and told stories and people wrote them down years later…. taking away all the facts, but none of the truth. Some of the things I write about are long in the past. Some of it is what’s painful “write this moment.”
Here’s why I talk about my blog the same way- facts are missing, but the types of truth I’m laying down *are only from my perspective.* In order for my blog to be factual, I would have to know what someone else was thinking. I am only telling you what I took away from my interactions with my friends and/or family. What you took away from my writing is none of my business.
I feel like that’s Christ on a cracker right there. He was absolutelyfuckingnot trying to impress anyone. In fact, he actually made quite a few people angry, wouldn’t you agree?
And yet, some ideas are worth dying for, because I don’t think that the story would have been remembered if he’d lived out all his days…. although he would have had the chance to fact check the Gospels a little more closely…. or at least, I would like to believe that Jesus would have been a different person at 60 or 70 than he was at 33.
I know his personality like the back of my hand because I’m an INFJ and he and Martin Luther King, Jr. are INFJ as well.
INFJs are guided by a deeply considered set of personal values. They are intensely idealistic, and can clearly imagine a happier and more perfect future. They can become discouraged by the harsh realities of the present, but they are typically motivated and persistent in taking positive action nonetheless. The INFJ feels an intrinsic drive to do what they can to make the world a better place.
INFJs want a meaningful life and deep connections with other people. They do not tend to share themselves freely but appreciate emotional intimacy with a select, committed few. Although their rich inner life can sometimes make them seem mysterious or private to others, they profoundly value authentic connections with people they trust.
As quintessential idealists, INFJs have many ideas about how to improve society and make the world a better place. INFJs believe a better world can only be attained if we concentrate on doing what is right, regardless of short-term consequences. However, harmonious relationships are also extremely important to the INFJ. They are skilled mediators who look for the root sources of conflict to find common ground with others. Because of this, they tend to prefer a diplomatic communication style and are careful to not unnecessarily ruffle feathers.
INFJs have a profound respect for human potential and a deep interest in understanding the mind. Because of this, they are motivated to pursue authentic self-development and strive to live up to their true potential, while encouraging and guiding others to do the same. According to idealistic INFJs, if we believe in our ability to accomplish the extraordinary, the extraordinary will instantly become a possibility — “dream it and you can achieve it,” as the saying goes. However, because of their integrity and empathy for others, it is uncommon for INFJs to cut corners or hurt others to achieve their desired future state.
Because of my processing disorders and mental illness, I have hurt people. But I’m also human. The old saying goes that “hurt people hurt people,” and I’m trying to clean myself up. But the way I do it is to lay out everything I’m thinking so that my ups and downs might be a survival manual for someone else. I am relentlessly driven to leading from the back, that people have shown me they won’t be vulnerable with me if I’m not vulnerable with them, first.
And, of course there were 14 disciples (I include Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany). But were all 14 of them best friends all the time? Have you met any group of 14 people that gets along all the time? I can just picture it now…. Jesus, could you stop being intense for like four minutes? Just four minutes, bro. We all need a beer after that one (and that one could be anything, like Jack Palance’s finger).
I don’t do shallow.
So, if people are, I back away slowly. Because to me, shallow means that you are not looking for a deeper, more meaningful connection with me. Our connection depends on communication and honesty, and if either of us doesn’t get it, how long are we going to stay in the time loop? I can count one that lasted 23 years, one that lasted 10. I didn’t have an exit strategy for either, just one day I was exhausted and I couldn’t take up any less room than I was already taking, because what tends to happen is that people think I’m a wonderful writer until we’re close enough that they say they don’t care what I say here….. I’m entitled to my stories.
In somewhere between six months to two years, they learn that somehow I can write beautifully about everyone except them. They’ve been caught up in the bubble of my personality, and then I do something stupid and I fall from a pedestal every single time, whether it’s singing or writing. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it recently, but I’m a classically trained solo-quality voice, and I have learned never to believe my own press. In both cases, I’m in a bubble of my own, and people are not so awed when they see the man behind the curtain.
I’m going to guess Jesus was like that. Most ministers are. In show mode in front of a crowd, solitary the rest of the week except for meetings. The people he led didn’t really know him, they knew his message….. and somehow, it’s been twisted to make him look like some kind of professional Christian superhero, when to me the historical Jesus is so much more interesting.
The link is to a book by Marcus Borg, one of the preeminent scholars on the historical Jesus, joined by Dominic Crossan.
It’s called “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith,” and it’s a book that’s been on my Kindle since I first met Marcus and Dom, and I’m allowed to call them that because Marcus’s wife was one of the rectors at Trinity Cathedral in Portland, Oregon…. so even though he’s not Episcopalian (he’s Lutheran), I’ve heard him preach a lot. Bill, the dean of the Cathedral (blanking on a last name, sorry), used to joke that whenever you had a theological problem, you should always go drink beer with a Lutheran.
I would have gone for a beer with Marcus, but I really want to go for a beer with Nadia Bolz-Weber.
I’d like to be her, but in so many ways, I already am.
Describe the most ambitious DIY project you’ve ever taken on.
Several times in my life I’ve helped friends and family members flip a house. I got to do the second one because apparently I did okay on the first.
Here’s the most important thing I learned the whole time.
….and my words are paper tigers, no match for the predator of pain inside her….
Love Will Come to You, The Indigo Girls
Before I flipped a house, I had no idea what a paper tiger was. They are of the devil, and I got the allusion immediately. A paper tiger is a device you put on top of wallpaper to rip it to shreds so you can scrape it off. It leaves everything in ribbons. Except there’s still the glue to deal with, so everything is ripped to shreds, yet still stuck to the wall. The paper tiger quickly becomes ineffective because you think you’re making progress and you’re actually filling the teeth with glue.
So, you can fight with the wallpaper all day long and make no progress whatsoever.
I can think of so many people that the Indigo Girls represent with this line, because there are so many people married to their glue, unwilling to open up- even when another person needs to hear what they have to say.
I also learned how to tackle raspberry brambles, also of the devil and paper tigers without glue. More than one has ripped me to shreds.
But wait- that wasn’t the first time I’d built a house, and I’d forgotten about it.
In the United Methodist Church, there’s a group called UMCOR (United Methodist Committee on Relief). They give lots of money for youth groups to go on mission trips, which mostly consisted of going out into poor towns and building houses or building accommodations for houses, like wheelchair ramps.
So, I also know how to lay shingles, put the flashing on a roof, and watch my dad absolutely freak out at seeing me doing it. Nobody likes to watch their baby putting flashing on the edge of a roof, because he knew I had balance issues. I didn’t. It was fine, but I can see his concern this many years later when I couldn’t in the moment.
I have also helped build the aforementioned wheelchair ramps. I let other people do the measuring and cutting, because I really wasn’t the best person to ask. My cuts would have come out diagonal just like with food…. or maybe not, because there are better tools to keep boards in place than there are for food….
I’m better at finish carpentry, like sanding, painting, shellac, etc. I also love to paint sheetrock with Killz and new colors. I generally do several coats of Killz on new sheetrock as well, just because I’m a perfectionist.
I am really great at helping do things. I am not so great at doing things on my own. I think it’s because I have enough limitations that I need an extra set of eyes. For instance, it would be fun to work on Zac’s car or motorcycle, but I wouldn’t unless he asked me to help, which in my mind means “stand there and hold stuff.” This is a more important job to mechanics than you might think, especially lights. Holding lights is like hazing in the operating room. Stand there, holding this in a very awkward way, for at least half an hour. At least if I drop the light a few inches, no one dies.
DIY is soothing to me, but as Zac says, “I *could* work on my car, but I make enough money to get someone else to do that.” So, I doubt that we’ll ever go out in the front yard for “guy stuff.” Mostly because I’ve never ridden a donorcycle, because my dad and stepmom wouldn’t be nearly as angry if I got hurt as having to deal with Dr. Anthony, because if I lived from the accident, she would beat my ass with a hairbrush. Tiffany is a liver and kidney transplant specialist. She knows from donorcycles.
If you believe nothing else I say, believe that. Transplant surgeons get *a lot* of their organs to transplant from motorcycle riders, thus the name….. which is universal across all hospitals in the US, don’t know about worldwide.
So, while it doesn’t bother me that Zac has a motorcycle, or that Lindsay and Matt have both ridden them as well, I’m not sure that I would ever be tempted because all I see is Dr. Anthony’s “mad face.” Besides, I have a solid reason for keeping my organs *intact,* mostly living.
I have a feeling I would not be very good at holding lights for her, but that’s okay because she’d never ask me. I would argue that I’m “smarter than a gas man,” but that has more to do with the way anesthesiologists get made fun of in the hospital, not that I am actually as smart as a person who can get into medical school (and by that, I mean smart in STEM. I’m plenty smart in other ways.).
I find that I am as smart in medicine as I am in computers. I do not program, and I do not weld things to the motherboard when a capacitor is out or anything like that, but I know my way around most software and what to do when it breaks. I can run commands in a terminal with my eyes closed, literally because I made myself try it.
Here’s the funniest command. To list what’s in the working directory, the command is ls. If you install sl, when you make that typo, an ASCII choo choo will roll across the screen.
I think linux is why I don’t use DOS anymore. The commands are so different that I type a linux command first, every time, and then have to think about what it is in DOS.
For instance, listing a directory in DOS is “dir,” and there is no ASCII choo choo if you make a mistake, a flaw in its character.
But it’s worse than that. I have been WAY further into linux commands than necessary before I realized I was in PowerShell (DOS terminal):
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade -y
In linux, that stands for “update my software catalog, install the updates, and don’t ask me whether I want to install the packages after I’ve downloaded them. Just do it.
In DOS, this means *absolutely nothing.*
Windows does not make for good DIY, because they want to control every part of the user experience the way Apple does. Windows is not really for business anymore, because even Windows Pro comes with a thousand “lane bumpers” to stop you from doing what you want to do. You have to turn on developer mode to be able to install any piece of software you want, otherwise it will ask “are you sure?” every single time. This is especially prevalent with software from GitHub, and I think that’s because Windows does not like open source.
It’s easier to turn on developer mode than it is to go through and change all the settings, like “show hidden folders” and “show file extensions.” It’s a lot of DIY just to set up a Windows box, and linux is so much easier. Plus, no one has ever tried to sell me anything unless I’ve downloaded a program that’s not open source. If I do that, the developers should be paid.
For some reason, my computer won’t dual boot, and it makes me sad….. but it’s better now that you can install a linux virtual machine inside Windows so that I still have access to linux command line programs. I usually keep btop running in the background because in linux I use a program called conky to list my processes, memory usage, CPU and GPU usage, etc. btop will do all of it, and is light on CPU usage. If you’ve used htop before, it’s the same, just a better user interface.
But here’s the worst trick the devil ever pulled. In Windows, you can divide the terminal into as many blocks as you want, but if you don’t change the settings yourself, when it divides it brings up PowerShell instead of another linux terminal. Just more Windows trying to push itself on you. I do not know anyone who uses DOS command line anymore, except for system administrators, and they’re more likely to have Macs these days, because the government gets a good deal on them and they come complete with unix out of the box. There are linux laptops and desktops out there, but none that have the reach of Apple to be able to get those government and education deals.
So, where their need begins, so does my DIY. I can fix one computer or 50 at once.
My life didn’t get interesting until I was 30, and just got more interesting from there. I wouldn’t want to give my teenage self any advice that would alter the events that led me to DC, to Zac, and to Oliver, who is a dog.
That’s because in order to get here, I had to go through some really rough stuff- and yet none of it is anything I would give away or trade. I found my place, even at 23, but I had to go and come back. I don’t know why. I really liked it here. I just didn’t think I could make it on my own. I do not have that capability, to take on the 1,001 things it takes to move in 30 days and also find a roommate. To be fair, though, I didn’t know about Craig’s List back then. Perhaps if I had, I wouldn’t have met the people I needed to meet, and that’s the one thing I wouldn’t want to change for the kid inside me.
So, in order not to change anything:
I’m sorry mom doesn’t understand. Don’t spend your life worrying about it because there’s nothing you can do to make her change. There will be small steps, but no giant leaps. Stay as close to her as you can, but admit to yourself when spending time with her makes you feel unloved.
Lindsay is going to be big one day. I just won’t tell you how. You could learn a thing or two from her if you’d let yourself.
You’re ADHD, Autistic, and Bipolar. That’s something I will tell you right now, because when you get older it’s going to be harder to get tested for autism, and you need to get on meds stat. You’re struggling in school and you don’t know why. Your doctors might not, either, because there’s not a lot of research in the year you live on women and autism. But give yourself at least that head start on life. I know hearing those things is intimidating. Go to a psychiatrist, anyway.
You need to practice gratitude and mindfulness because when I was your age I took some kind of Scantron quiz that inventoried my personality. My psychiatrist said that I had the lowest self-esteem of anyone who’d ever taken the test. Write every day. Go back and look to see if what you wrote is still true. Give yourself a chance to see yourself as you are, not how you feel in the moment.
In every relationship, you need to ask yourself what the other person is bringing to the table, and when you feel ignored or sad or hurt or whatever your emotions might be, listen to how people respond. If it feels like they can’t hear you, they probably can’t…… and there’s a lot of don’t want to in “can’t.” Find people who can hear you.
There is no such thing as a 50/50 relationship. It will often look like 60/40 or even 70/30 because of confirmation bias. But notice when you feel like you can’t get a break, can’t do anything right. You’re not stupid. I won’t tell you what they are, either, but stupid isn’t on the list.
Because of the autism, you’re going to meltdown a lot. Find appropriate outlets for your rage. There are going to be many inappropriate outlets, and I will tell you that you find most of them. But not all. Because you have all of these disorders, you are going to have to learn to be more patient, thinking longer before you speak, because there are so many words that can’t be taken back which you realize just after you’ve already said them. Even when you’re on fire, you can’t take that out on someone else. And yes, I know that your nerves are on fire, that you go into a red mist rage with every physical symptom imaginable. It’s going to hurt you if you don’t take care of it.
The nerve endings on your thumb that you sliced into while trying to cut a lime will never grow back. I’m 46, so I will update you if the situation changes (not a chance, we’re stuck).
You will love soda your whole life because that’s one of the things you and mom will talk about on the phone. There’s not a lot you can do to keep her talking if you talk about your own life, but she’ll tell you all about her job, her friends, her husband, etc. It’s annoying that she never has any questions for you about your life, because she really doesn’t want to know. Do it, anyway. Find things you can talk about. Find a lot of them.
Mothers don’t generally last as long as you want them to; Lindsay and I will never be the same. I figured it might give you some perspective to know how few years you have left with her. Find different ways to bridge the gap. But don’t miss a chance to leave Houston, ever. You’ll get along better with her when you don’t live in the same city and a visit is special.
You’ll want a passport very soon. Might want to start on that. She’s cute.
Now that I’ve had so many days posting in a row, I’ve missed a couple. One was due to two things. The first is that I was exhausted. The second is that it was Galentine’s Day, and I chose to spend my time focusing on my sister (that was 13 Feb). The second was yesterday, because the prompt was “what is your favorite drink?” Now, I could have written about Dr Pepper Zero YET AGAIN, but I include it in so many entries that I didn’t think it needed its own.
Except to say that if you go to Waco, Texas, you will find both the Dr Pepper Museum and The Fort House. My paternal grandmother is a Fort, and it’s the story of her family. I believe those two things are related, because I never saw my grandmother drink anything but Dr Pepper and occasionally, sweet tea. She was sure that it had medicinal properties, and who am I to disagree with my grandmother?
In terms of what bores me the rest of the time, it’s things like RTFM (reading the fucking manual) with software, because I’d rather just play around until I break something. I don’t like reading EULAs (end user license agreements) because I know for damn sure that Facebook, Windows, et al are going to do exactly what they said they wouldn’t do, they’ll just hide it in the background.
In terms of apps that are watching you for possible malice, I’d pick Tik Tok. It’s bad enough when my own government wants my information, much less China. I’m so terrified of the Chinese government that I don’t even want to go there. I know it’s beautiful, I know the people are nice, and I know I’d be thrown in jail with one blog entry or YouTube video, because I would use all my American freedoms to say whatever I liked, forgetting that I am not, in fact, in America.
I am sure that there are all sorts of tips and tricks for surviving a trip to China as an American, but I’m not interested. I’d rather go to a country where I’m already allowed to say what I want to say. So, basically, China bores me because I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything real about my trip until I was safely back home.
I’d rather go somewhere my writing is not threatening, which leaves out Russia, but I’d love to go to Ukraine when the war is over. I got a taste of it through watching “Servant of the People,” and so if it was possible, I’l like to meet President Zelenskyy as well. He’s such a great writer. I wouldn’t want to talk to him about politics, but about how he created his mom, dad, sister, and niece for the show, plus his cabinet. It’s such a funny sendup of all politicians, and you should watch it if you have Netflix. At least the first season is up (in Ukrainian with subtitles).
Foreign movies and TV used to bore me, but not now. I am one of those people that will sit there and scroll on my phone, losing the immersive experience of watching television- but you can’t do that with foreign movies and TV because you have to read the subtitles.
Speaking of foreign shows, I also love Mr. Brain from S. Korea and Osmosis from France. Mr. Brain is on Apple TV+, and Osmosis is also on Netflix.
Mr. Brain is a doctor that learns to transplant one person’s brain into another, but he starts with himself… building up….. so of course he eventually has human memories from other people. However, one of the funniest was when he crossed himself with a cat. I think that was because the cat saw something about a murder and he needed to see the cat’s view. There were….. side effects.
Osmosis is one of those classic sci-fi shows where someone has invented a scientific way for you to find your permanent love match. It just feels a little different from the French perspective- not so formulaic…… and boring. To be fair, I’ve watched all of Dr. Brain and all of Servant of the people, and I’m only on episode two of Osmosis. So, caveat emptor.
Finance bores me because I do not understand the first thing about money except “don’t spend it.” I could live on that principle for the rest of my life, because I say “bore,” but the reality is more complicated. Even reading a textbook or a web article on finance leads to autistic meltdown and burnout. So, I approach finance with the best of intentions and then slowly feel like my body is breaking down. The boring part is just looking up the articles that I need. Once I find what I’m looking for, the panic attack starts.
I do not think I could answer a question about a single thing regarding bank and finance because I get lost at simple terms like “amortization.” I have found that it is not a case of fear, necessarily. It is a case of my autism saying, “nope. We don’t do that.” Demand avoidance is real when your nerves feel like they’re catching on fire and you cannot function.
The fact that I ever thought I could be a good partner to anyone is frightening because I now realize that I had to lean on them far too much. I also don’t know what to do about that, except trying my best to get into a program for autistic people that helps me deal with meltdown and burnout appropriately. I am nowhere near the only person that shuts down when talking about complicated things. It’s just that for me, the complicated things are logical and the easy things are emotional.
I think that’s why I’m solidly on the polyamory train, because I do not want to be in the position of leaning on one person all the time. I am a lot. I know it. My partners/friends become bored/frustrated with me easily and need a break. The only person who doesn’t get a break from me is me, and I wish that was the case as much as they do.
It’s interesting being the only INFJ in my group of friends, because I come off as intense even when I don’t mean to be. To me, they are poignant questions that need to be asked….. but not necessarily questions to which I need answers. They do. I have started saying something important to Zac, because I do not want him to feel like I am prying into his life at all. I just want him to know that he’s loved and supported. So, I say things like, “rhetorical question that I don’t need you to answer, just chew on it.” I hope it’s working well, because I don’t want to ever put him on the spot, and if these were questions about me, then I would expect an answer. But they’re not. They’re things I’ve listened to that have happened at work, social functions, etc. Therefore, it’s okay to ask the question. It’s not okay to expect an answer when it’s not my bag.
I just want Zac to the best person he can be, and I know that in some ways I am helping. He was the one that told me that I inspired him to start writing every day. The cover picture on my author page is the chalkboard painted wall in his entry way, and his handwriting that says, “You Should Be Writing.”
He took it down, so I wrote “You Should Be Writing” the last time I was there. I would like to believe it stayed more than a day. 😛 TFW someone is calling you out…….. and that worked both ways, otherwise his handwriting wouldn’t be my cover photo.
I did experience a moment of success with demand avoidance. My dad told me he needed a file I’d created for him and when I checked my hard drive, it wasn’t there. So, I recreated it for him within the hour. This is all while I was battling a stomach bug, and it was no small thing to be able to transition from upchucking to sitting at my desktop with a trash can next to me. But I did it. A small victory.
When I think back on how bad I wanted to be Supergrover’s partner, it’s now embarrassing because I thought I was on top of the world in terms of being able to do the thing. As in, of course I could manage a partner, kids, a job, and the fast and furious pace of a suburban mom. To be fair, I would have gotten a lot more support from her kids than I would from her or Dana (in the past) and not because her kids are around. She may or may not be. But I would have supported her like Dana, and it wouldn’t have been enough. That’s because both of us were bad at ignoring things and not making lists. It’s not laziness, it’s a genuine disability if you’ve read any neurodivergent book ever.
I also think that I would have been stuck in the same repetitive pattern, because people who are cut off from their emotions aren’t generally cut off in one way. I can tell you the exact moment I realized it, seeing something posted on her social media. But I can’t be specific. I can only say that I’m so glad she’s straight…. JFC. I would have been in over my head from day one.
I think the difference is that she has worked with neurodivergent people in many different settings, so perhaps she would have caught my autism faster than I would have in person. And then it would have been off to the best doctors available because not only did I need help, so did she. When I want to be with a partner, I make the promise to keep myself strong for them. It is not their responsibility to “fix me.” She might have told me the doctors I needed, but after that, I’m on my own. I need to show whether I can fly under my own power.
The only reason she didn’t catch it in me first is that it’s hard to tell over e-mail. Basically, we couldn’t get to a place either of us liked because of the gap in communication.
I’m determined not to do that with Zac or anyone else in my future, because it has gotten me nothing in the past. It touches me to my core that he’s just as honest with me. He asked me if I would come and help clean his house because he was going through a thing I also go through. I got there and he was very apologetic, and I said, “Zac, if it was my house, would you be there?” Of course he would. I’ve just never asked.
So, not much bores me it seems. Humans are interesting, and an endless subject because there are so many of us.
And I hope that in laying out how I work, you see yourself here, too.
Today,, I hope you get the best of me. I am sick to my stomach and dragging ass. But I have to keep writing, because I have to be able to write in any mood. Today, I’m not going to write about just one, because they’re the best gifts according to category.
The two best gifts I’ve ever been given emotionally are Dana and Supergrover. This is because things went down hill at all our hands, but it didn’t start out negative, it just became that way…… mostly because I was just so……… meeeeeeeee.
Editor’s Note:
I hear that phrase, “I was just so…….. meeeeee,” in my friend Drew’s voice because one day Dana and I were in the kitchen at Biddy’s for brunch and Drew was doing dinner. He was late, and said, “I was going to throw my clothes on and run, but I said, “what’s that smell?” And then….. “oh. It’s meeeeeeee.” His lateness was instantaneously excused. Some of the other reasons he was late are absolutely unprintable, but make me love him more.
As you can imagine, the conflict with Supergrover was large and we were both angry at the poor choices we made in getting to know each other. They were numerous, and new relationship energy made us avoid all of it. Anything that would have said “this could be problematic down the road” went out the window. Just because someone is a platonic friend doesn’t deter the feelings of “oh my God I just met the most incredible person.” I honestly think this happens to women more than it does men, because I’ve noticed that men choose three friends in fifth grade and decide that’s enough. Plus, straight women bond easily. You could meet your new best friend online or in a bathroom at “Off the Record.”
So, I sent her a Christmas gift one year without knowing how she’d feel about it, and then I opened up about it. I said, “I’m sorry if I overstepped a boundary by sending you a present. To me, it doesn’t feel weird because I got all my other friends presents and you are one of them.” She thanked me and said it was thoughtful, so then I began to treat her just like my friends on the ground.
The next year, I got her two presents because like Jesus, “this is for Christmas AND your birthday.” I told her I was sending her a present. She said, “a real one?” I said, “as opposed to the fake presents I usually get you? Yes. A real present. Like with wrapping paper and shit.” They came in two different packages, but I didn’t clarify. So, she said that if she had known they were for two holidays, she would have waited. She said she’s very good at that, and I have no proof otherwise.
The gift that year was a bracelet with her favorite charity on it. She told me that it was totally something she would have bought for herself. I was so glad that I hit the nail on the head and she was pleased. She’s sent me a lot of presents over the years, though “not like with wrapping paper and shit.” She prefers digital because we’re both book junkies. None of them have ever stood up to the smile on my face when she sent me a picture of the bracelet I got her on her wrist.
That’s because I really sat there and thought about the jewelry that straight women give each other, because I wanted the present to be nice, but not romantic. I wanted to be genuine and sweet to her without upping her fear that we were always going to have to deal with feelings I couldn’t get rid of. It was too important to not.
I think at first she thought it was just a continuation of trying to change her, but over time she began to reciprocate when she realized that no, I was being genuine. I think that’s because I apologized for overstepping a boundary and I wouldn’t do it again if she didn’t approve. By being vulnerable and just asking rather than living in unease, I couldn’t spin out about it. These are exactly the kind of talks that we should have to go forwards and should have had if we don’t. When she gave me the information that she appreciated the gifts and it was very thoughtful, I believed her the first time and stopped worrying. I can take care of my anxiety on my own, but not when people don’t tell me how they’re feeling. I feel that some people are afraid of getting vulnerable with me because they’re afraid of my reaction. Some of it is that they don’t know how an autistic person is going to react to them. Some of it is that they don’t know how a bipolar patient is going to react to them. Every time they’ve replaced my disorders with my personality, and some people try to guess when I’m manic or depressed depending on how I write.
I can assure you that my mental state has nothing to do with the way I write. What has to do with the way I write is that I don’t go back and polish anything. I don’t go back and edit when WordPress screws me over by not publishing the last line of something. I want this blog to be entirely organic until someone else offers to clean all this up for me. This is because I know that I have often kept talking when I’ve run out of things to say….. and I should know better. I think it all the time while creating sermons. However, there are so few long form blogs anymore that I feel I should make use of it. Nowhere else on the internet do you have as much room to say as you can say on WordPress. Although I might test this by posting an entry in its entirety on Facebook just to test that theory. My opinion is that Facebook, X, Insta, etc. are for pithy soundbites, but I could be wrong. I do, however, love a good pithy comeback. “If you can’t say something nice, say something clever but devastating”- Father on the playground with his son in a New Yorker cartoon.
Editor’s Note:
Now that the Doctor Who Anniversary specials are over, I can tell you what bothers me about X. Twitter is so old that it’s like The Doctor went back and changed it. Because now X is a lot easier to remember now since it’s been around a while, adding to its mavitational pull. But, just like with X, I’m wondering how long it will take for Doctor Who to go back and change history so that its gravity again. At this point, it’s a running gag. I hope it was for the Americans, because nothing grabs you into that show like knowing an inside joke….. and after lots of episodes, knowing all of them.
The reason I think it was for the Americans is that it’s an inside joke that’s only a few months old. It wasn’t reaching into history with jokes like that because the Americans don’t have that institutional knowledge- more now since the series first hit Netflix, and I owe my love and devotion to that show to the company itself. I’d watched a few other sci-fi shows, and it was a suggestion. I watched one episode and was absolutely hooked. I wanted to watch the entire thing at once. However, since Dana is as big a sci-fi fan as me, I decided to wait until she got home to see if it grabbed her, too. That’s because if she did like it, I didn’t want to rewatch five episodes later. She loves it just as much as I do, so I suppose waiting could be considered a gift? I hope Zac appreciates my restraint with Slow Horses………..
To get back to being afraid of my reactions, what you imagine in your head is going to be a thousand times more amplified than the conversation is going to be if you show up open and ready to both hear and listen. We will not get anywhere if you only show up to think about your responses while I’m talking and not actually consider what I’m saying; it makes me feel unheard. It goes from trying to resolve a problem to trying to prove you’re right. Instead of leaning together, you dig in and conflict deepens.
It is not choices in life that make me spin out. It is uncertainty in relationships. For instance, Supergrover constantly telling me she was busy was perfectly acceptable, even over and over. But in the last eight years, she hasn’t written more than a few sentences in which I couldn’t glean anything. It wasn’t a problem in the moment, and the problem never would have popped up if after six weeks, there was a letter that actually had some thought put into it. Kicking the can down the road was so miserable that I decided to leave her behind. It does not mean that I take only bad memories away. I am fierce about all my feelings for her, for evil or for awesome (wow, that reference dates me).
That’s because my heart is all tangled up with her, because it made no sense. I wish there had been so much more “my mama wolverine instincts are kicking in, here” and so much less “you’re goading and provoking me.” We could have had something incredible, and we both let it go. One day I hope she’ll see that all of my letters are my mama wolverine kicking in, but also loving her like a Democrat instead of a Republican. 😉
I can’t love her like “everything mommy does is right and good and I’m a bad person if I want to change anything.” (You have to keep up with me to know what that means……). I have to love her like an adult who sees the good in everything, but isn’t shy about addressing conflict. That’s why you’ve seen my feelings in real time about this relationship, that they change depending on what I’m remembering that day. My biggest problem in life is that when I say she was a different person, she doesn’t believe me because she deleted everything and I didn’t. Maybe I should have done the same, because I’ve written every entry off the top of my head. I never have to go back and read them. I think the reason I didn’t delete any of them is that I need hard evidence that I am not responsible for everything that ever happened, and I need to forgive myself. That whether she is in my life or not, I got the gift of learning from her even for a time. It was useful, valuable.
And she scares me, but in a good way. I saw a video online of someone like her (not kidding, like when Dr. Wall said, “some other guy who looks just like me.” It was just someone who works for the same type industry and I thought they might know each other), and it made me realize that it was probably good our relationship was online; by the end of the video, my eyebrows were over my forehead and my hair was blown back. Her tone made me want to sit up a little straighter and behave myself, and I felt embarrassed I was in my pajamas. However, it was not a feeling that was unique to the woman in the video or Supergrover. I feel the same way standing next to my little big sister. I say that tongue-in-cheek because I’m older and a lot shorter.
I always think that other people assume I’m her nephew when my hair is cut short, but she’s always so welcoming no matter what I look like that I just try my best not to feel like a troll. Just proud a woman like that doesn’t mind being seen with a woman like me. If we’d met in college, I think we would have had as intense a relationship as we did when we were actually in college together. However, I think that as she drifted towards politics, then lobbying, I don’t know if it would have hung on or not. I would like to believe that we would have, because I cannot drill down on policy with her, but I can certainly advise her on how to treat people when you’re in front of a crowd. I can’t advise her on what to say, but I can advise her on how to say it.
The parts of me that live in her are queer. Not that she actually is. She’s married to a man and has been for a long time. However, she’s queer in the way she votes, where she works, what legislation she puts forth both in Austin and DC, and I’ll give you a for-instance.
She asked me if I thought it was okay to use the word “queer” on their web site because she knew it was a slur. I told her she was right, I wouldn’t do it……. but she was outvoted by her team. It’s fine, it’s their page. What I realized is that I’m the one that has issues with the word “queer” when straight people say it, because they’ve said it with sneers in their voices for so goddamn long. Because of Gen Z, who has no attachment as such, I am starting to feel like an old person…. Actually, that’s not true. The first time I felt old was when I saw a DVD in the grocery store that was ET: 25th Anniversary Edition. And if I felt old then, I’m probably still old.
I just realized I got off on a tangent and got away from talking about gifts and how they dropped into my lap. It’s what happens when you go back up and read a paragraph, think about something you meant to say, and all of the sudden the thing you were writing about isn’t even on the screen anymore………..
If Supergrover didn’t want to be a red string, she was off that list and onto the next. I think that my platonic relationships run just as deeply as my romantic ones, which is probably why at times I didn’t sound any different and at times I totally did. For instance, if I asked her a question that she thought was too personal, I wasn’t asking to goad or provoke her. I was genuinely interested in what she was going to say. On the flip side, my writing language is naturally flowery and romantic because that’s my style with friends, not because that’s how I’d act in person.
When I’m writing, I am not thinking about how to have a conversation with you. I am thinking about how to lay out my thoughts in a beautiful way so that you will take them in. To give you information to chew on without getting in your face.
More and more often, though, the gift was questionable, but hard to stop holding because the wrapping indeed was the gift that changed the me of then into the me of now. When she responded immediately with anger, I went into autistic meltdown. Then, she took her turn to gutter snipe and it went back and forth. We kicked each other out of our lives three or four times a year because she’d never met me in person to hear my tone of voice when I was talking about these things, not even a concept of how it might sound. She also never had to sit with me while I was in pain, rather than attacking me over e-mail. I realized I was done when there was more anger than empathy. She could get away with “judgmental dickhead” in the moment, but attacking me while I’m unarmed is frowned upon in this establishment.
The gift was the journey; we came a very long way, but it took years. That being said, she was always sitting in the guilt of thinking that she wasn’t responding as fast as I wanted- part of her “you’re a dictator” schtick- because I wasn’t angry that she wasn’t responding fast enough. She could take six months, five years, whatever as long as I received all the parts of our story that I’m missing…. on every topic, really, because there are so few things that she talks about, because hearing my story is threatening to her, and she thinks that it will help for her to shut down, because I’ll just forget and move on. No, I’ll think about it more, because I don’t want to nag anyone and I don’t want to be the person that doesn’t take up room in a relationship because I’m frightened of being abandoned. I realized that it was unfair that I had to mind read with her all the time, because it allowed me to step into it up to my ass. It’s how most emotionally unavailable people work. If they don’t tell you their feelings, you can’t take them into consideration. You have to hope you’re going to say/do the right thing rather than knowing how to act beforehand. It’s exhausting.
Learning all of this was hard won. Very hard won. But I think it has made me a better writer, and the gift I’ve given myself. Even if none of my blog is ever made into a book, it was the training that mattered.
The gift was the journey.
So here are more happy memories instead of sad ones.
The best gifts I’ve ever gotten was from asking her for two things. The first was a voice mail, because I’d never heard her voice before. The funniest thing is that she didn’t start with “Hi, Leslie. It’s Supergrover.” She just launched into talking and I laughed my ass off because I’ve been asking her for a recording of her saying her own name for 10 years. 😛
This was her big chance. 😛
The second was a picture. I would post it if I could, because she’s just one of those women that if she were a model, she’d be one of the people you’d remember and want to see back. At the very least, she’d be the generic picture that comes in a frame you bought off Amazon…….. and you can’t stop staring at her eyes. Now the picture has been in that frame for three years and you really don’t know why. There’s just something about her.
I also think that straight women love just as deeply as lesbians, because I am certain that there are a lot of marriages where that triad is strained. It’s actually threatening when someone has a best friend that will be there for all the partners (especially if they predate you by eons) and you have to measure up………. because again, she’ll be at the wedding, but you may or may not.
In fact, I love getting numbers from straight women because first of all, I’d like to have more friends in the area. Second of all, it shows me just how much progress has been made since I came out (to myself) in probably 1986? Thirdly, I hate dating. I’d rather hang out with friends to see if I like them enough to date them or not. That means it doesn’t matter what orientation the person I meet is, because it doesn’t matter. Either there will be mutual feelings or there won’t, but that doesn’t decrease the quality of the connection. So, I’m looking for people. Who they become to me later is unimportant at this time.
It’s how I know I’m pan. I would say that I was bi, but there’s more than two genders now. Please don’t hate me for wearing bi flags, anyway. It matches more of my outfits. That yellow, tho….. (from my brother-in-law’s X series, #shitlindsaysays: “He looks fast because he’s wearing yellow.” It was my first thought when I wrote the line about the yellow stripe. That at least I would look faster).
I had the gift of enlightenment about the bi flag. Originally, the pansexual movement started with a fight on reddit (no, I’m serious). Someone said that the bi flag wasn’t inclusive of trans people, when that has never been true. Back then, dating both genders meant cis or trans. But I realized that I had to switch teams in terms of identity because bisexual only represents male and female. So, now it’s not that it’s not inclusive of trans people. It’s not inclusive of nonbinary people. I’m not exactly happy with the colors they chose, but it’s not like I’m going to come up with something better…. and not because I’m not capable. It’s just not going to catch on the way it already has.
Maybe it’s just that I’m old and it looks kind of 80s beach to me. I think if the other colors were as dark as they are on the bi flag, I’d be a lot more prone to wear it. I don’t know. Sometimes it might be fun to look like you’re wearing three highlighters.
This year has been the most growth-filled in 10, the best gift I’ve been given- both the memories created and the space to reflect on them…… however, I would be remiss not to include my most popular entries on gifts, about my Scandinavian Snowball Ring. This is because it was in a television commercial in the 80s, so my blog comes up in searches for it because there’s so little information about them left.
It’s a gift I’m giving my Xennial readers, who probably remember the commercial but can’t find a clip.
Are you patriotic? What does being patriotic mean to you?
I am extremely patriotic, but there’s a lot of this country who wouldn’t see it that way. Al Franken wrote about my kind of patriotism in “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right” (one of my favorite books since 2003, and if I were you I’d get the audiobook because he reads it). I’d thought something like this for a very long time, he just said it more eloquently than I could. I’ll paraphrase him because I don’t have a copy of the book anymore.
He said that Republicans seem to love America like children. To criticize anything means that you’re not a good American because everything America does is good and right. Democrats seem to love America like adults, that we’re calling out bad behavior that needs to be changed. We can think we live in a pretty great country and also admit there are problems. It’s costing us, because we argue like rabbis.
You can tell the difference by the types of media we watch. Both MSNBC and I will call out the president when they deserve it. Fox News viewers think that every Republican is perfectly perfect in every way, as evidenced by the fact that they’re still fuming about Hunter Biden, the 2016 election being stolen, and classified documents on a small scale.
Biden and Pence both had a few, both gave them back- no harm, no foul. At no time did they try to flush them down a toilet or hide them in the bathroom. Where the cult part comes in is that everyone else in the Republican Party has become a persona non grata because apparently Trump is the only one capable of running the country and they’re choosing to ignore 91 indictments (so far). I called him a bunch of names the other day, and I left out “rapist.” The E. Jean Caroll case is just one more thing that Republicans will sweep under the rug, because the party has one message. It’s simple, and that’s how they win.
Republicans are not interested in subtlety or nuance, which is why soundbites work on them, and why they’re in lockstep instead of working out issues amongst themselves. Seriously, when was the last time you ever saw a Republican in the media arguing about a plan for anything? When do they contribute to the discussion at all? Even if there was no bipartisanship, I would still expect ideas to originate on both sides. The plan for the last, I don’t know, 30 years? has been that the Republicans will say no to everything the Democrats put forth without ever putting anything on the table of their own. Their only job is to stonewall.
Republicans, you have to ask yourselves if this is really what you want from a political party. You have absolutely no voice in Congress, because the people you elect are just running out the clock. They don’t give a shit about you. If they did, your concerns would be on the floor of the House and Senate as well…… because Republicans would have actually come up with something on their own. You think you have elected “the best and the brightest,” when really it’s “the petulant and the indolent.”
Yes, part of it is laziness. Why wouldn’t it be if you’re only there to say “no?” You should wonder what they’re doing with all that free time instead of their own policies.
Name five Republicans you think are actually capable of running the country that are in the line of succession. “Designated Survivor” was a hyped up TV show, but the title absolutely is a real thing during the State of the Union. Name a Republican you’d want in that spot should disaster happen. I can think of one person, and that’s because the Republicans don’t like her, either. The Republicans are going to rue the day they kicked Mary Cheney out of their little cult.
I could also put up with Mitt Romney (keeping in mind that this is a fictional exercise), because he’s not as conservative as he had to be in order to get elected president. I really thought we were going to get universal health care back then, because it was such a raging success in Massachusetts, and he was the governor through all of it.
To be perfectly frank, the most surprising part of the rise of Trump is how many well-respected Republicans drank the Kool-Aid as fast as the ones who’s already earned my Molly Ivins death stare.
I have faith in two people out of a cast of hundreds, and neither of them will ever be elected again, unless Mary Cheney becomes a Democrat, and I’m serious because she can have a vote in Congress and that’s great. But Independents rarely win because they need the funding of the party. If nothing else, I hope she does it because she’s way, way more conservative than I am, but we need everyone who has had their blinders ripped off on our side, and I mean everyone. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” I think that was Abraham Lincoln, who could speak in complete sentences and managed to be a good Republican in spite of it.
The Democrats have a long history of racism, and I feel that now we’re the only ones who are struggling with it. Everyone else wants to sweep it under the rug because of course they do. No one wants to acknowledge that there’s an equal shot we’ll end up reflecting “The Handmaid’s Tale” as stumbling toward Panem….. and I am not Jennifer Lawrence.
This is because systemic racism and wanting to change it is a very, very violent proposition in this country, but luckily it’s a minority. It has just gotten more popular to be openly racist and violent because the Republicans have been quietly supporting the system until Trump came along and it wasn’t so quiet anymore.
I do not know what to think of this for my country, because on one hand, it’s terrible and I wish I had the power to turn off the neckbands that seem like jewelry until they make your head explode…. which is the problem entirely. Trump has his entire base by the short and curlies without a single shred of evidence he can actually do the fucking job.
Democrats are tasked with trying to keep the country together so that Trump doesn’t get a second shot at trying to become Hitler. Again, I do not believe that Trump is Adolf Hitler in his later years. I just believe that Trump has learned a lot about fascism from him (see also Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping). I don’t know if he’s actually read “Mein Kampf” or not, but he certainly loves politicians who’ve taken the same route that book laid out. Otherwise, how would a know-nothing idiot be able to get people to follow him?
By ignoring all the laws and congressional procedures and focusing on telling people that their problems were Mexicans and Arabs….. only the two cultures I’ve found to be the most welcoming. I would love to go to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria (particularly because Damascus is meaningful to me for Biblical reasons), and even Saudi Arabia (because I want to see where Franklin lived and worked, not that I’m interested in Saudi itself).
That’s because I know that for the average Arab, when I showed up at their house they would literally feed me until I exploded and then ask why I didn’t eat that much. Here, have some pie. I am not worried about what their government thinks of me, because I’m probably not going to meet them personally. If I’m going to Iran, I hope it’s to meet a Persian grandmother who will pass on her secrets because it won’t get back to her friends that I have her recipe and they don’t. 😉
I’m bad at transitions, and I would still move to Mexico in a heartbeat. My sister and brother-in-law feel the same way. Lindsay and I have both been to Enseñada, and she and Matt go to Mexico City all the time, one of their favorite cities in the world. It would actually be a good move for me to go to Mexico, because I think I could make more of my inheritance there than I could here. However, I would have to rent because only Mexicans by blood/birth have the right to purchase property. It’s similar to Hawaii, where you can only get a 99 year lease. What I know for sure is that I would freak out at the transition at first, but the pace of life is so different that I might adjust easier. Who knows? What I do know is that I already know enough Spanish to have simple conversations, and the more I spend in immersion, the more I remember from past trips and high school Spanish.
I am so grateful to my church in Sugar Land when I was a teenager, because if we hadn’t moved there, I wouldn’t speak Spanish nearly as well as I do (which even that much makes me feel like a toddler, but it’ll get better). This is because I took my first year of Spanish at HSPVA, and my second year at Clements. Loved one teacher, hated the other. I won’t say which was which. Then, in the summer between PVA and Clements, I went on a mission trip to Reynosa (our hotel was in McAllen). Because I’d just come out of first year Spanish, being immersed reminded me of Matthew and Bryn, who were and/or are lifeguards (and siblings, so that’s why it sounds the same coming from both of them). This is because it was a very short leap from a swim coach saying “do your bubbles… do your bubbles” to “hope you don’t drown.”
By the time I came back from Mexico, I was sold. I could do this whole Spanish thing. Interestingly enough, I don’t have conversation issues in Mexico because I know that there’s no reason to write anything down. I have to dance with them what brung me. I can’t disappear into my writing personality with them.
Then I got to my second year of Spanish, where my teacher and I both hated each other. That’s because she was so frustrated by my performance, and why it went up and down. In retrospect, it’s because only half the grades given were over conversations in person. The rest was writing. I had to study Spanish for a little while to learn that what she was looking for was more formal than I’d learned in Reynosa and Progreso.
My sentence structure was all wrong, and I’m sure to some degree it still is. However, our job that week in Mexico during the summer before the first semester at Clements was to put on what we in the States would call “vacation Bible school.” Just fun activities for the kids who are so poor they don’t get much play time.
Also, I’m not an ordained minister in a major denomination who preaches every week… though I can do some stuff; I got ordained in the Church of the Latter Day Dude to do Bryn’s wedding, which ended up being very Methodist/Episcopalian while also taking out the religion aspect and tailoring it to the couple.
It absolutely worked, because it was formal enough to feel like you’d been married by someone who did their homework, when in reality the most embarrassing thing about it was having to pay for ordination instead of earn it.
This is an aside, but I think one of the reasons my church plant wasn’t a success was because of a really old tape that I didn’t think to work out in therapy when I was young. That tape is “the Methodists kicked me out, so why would anyone else want me?” It wasn’t logical because I was 15, and I did meet other Christian lesbians who were ordained. By then, I had imposter syndrome.
The only reason I had the courage to come up with an idea for a homeless ministry in Silver Spring is that I got over my fear by preaching at my church in Oregon. I have never in my life asked to preach a sermon, but I was not the same preacher at 16 that I was at 24 or 5. It all ties together, my friends. The people on the trip told me that even though I wasn’t ordained, I had to do the sermon at the closing worship service because no one else knew enough Spanish. So, the second semester at Clements was harder than the first because my teacher was so frustrated and angry that I got Cs all semester and then a 95 on the final. She called my dad in so fast.
Now, my dad wasn’t a bully to my teachers, ever, because he actually knew I was fallible……….. but at the same time, he held them accountable and never lost a thing any of them said because he’d write in his notebook throughout the meeting and have the teacher sign it if it was accurate. I really liked that because it made both my teacher and me live up to a bargain instead of a lose-lose situation…. which Spanish was, because since I’d only studied hard with a tutor who unlocked writing for me (people who know her, Nancy Wells saved my ass) it didn’t seem possible that I was capable of an A and there was no way to prove it except to give me a second exam, and for some reason she didn’t think of that. She just fumed like she knew I’d gotten away with something and I was glad there was only a couple of weeks of school left, and no more required Spanish.
I won’t let you go, I just wait to see whether I’m a priority in your life because I don’t always want to be the one that initiates contact. I don’t want to be around you if I always feel like I’m nagging to get a simple answer out of you, or afraid to contact you because I feel like I’m bothering you rather than showing care. I wait to see if you show interest when I put something out there, just receiving you if you show up. I am able to do that so easily because I’m a writer. All artists have an easier time turning their attention away from obsessing over a problem when they can get it out.
My blog is ridiculously personal because what I have learned over my entire life is that no one will be honest with you if you’re not honest with them first. It’s what art is supposed to do- it’s supposed to make you feel something. However, I do not think of your reaction as my responsibility. It is your right to state your opinion and decide whether you’re owed an apology or not, because I do believe in freedom of speech, I just have limits.
For instance, I will never get any more specific about Zac’s other partners than I have been now. The one I was talking about in a previous entry likes coffee mugs and Diet Dr Pepper, like most of America. However, they do not get to be “characters” here except in the most vague of terms because I don’t directly talk to them and I don’t write hearsay. I talk to Zac, and our relationship is completely separate and apart from anything else in his life. I feel like that’s a small reason it’s easy for us to open up to each other.
He absolutely can tell me things in confidence (about our personal relationship- I keep saying that because he’s civilian intelligence M-F and Navy Reserves intelligence in his copious amounts of spare time). I just stand next to him with a “dumb yet excited” look on my face. The thing about government agencies, no matter which one, is that they look impressive and intimidating all at once. My favorite is the black and white seal on the floor at Langley, and for a long time my desktop wallpaper was a hi-def shot of the custodian mopping it. It was a reminder to me that even though people like George Lazenby, Martin Freeman, Daniel Craig, Melissa McCarthy, Piper Perabo, and Jennifer Garner make it look exciting, at the end of the day it’s still just a regular floor.
People accuse me of being a drooling fangirl (:::stares in Lindsay and Zachary:::), but that’s impossible if you really study the history of the agency. My favorite era so far is the space race, which shows up in everything from “For All Mankind” to “The Queen’s Gambit.”
“What part of the State Department did you say you were from?”
I have no doubt that CIA is trying to stop nuclear war right now. Whether the bombs are small or large, either Russia or The Middle East will have absolutely no problem with pushing the big red button. Also, it just occurred to me. You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel. You know who doesn’t? Palestine. Listen to me when I say that Benjamin Netanyahu does not give even half a shit how many Israelis die as long as it means “beating Palestine.” Palestine might be able to handle rocket launchers, rocks, etc. It remains to be seen whether nuclear threat is on the table, I’m just saying I wouldn’t be surprised.
If nothing else, I think there’s going to be sort of a second movie like “13 Days,” where when the op is declassified the movie will show just how close Russia came to nuking the Ukraine or just how close Israel came to nuking Palestine- or just how close Iran got to figuring out how to make them on their own.
The other thing that makes the space race really interesting to me is that it wasn’t about discovery or hope or any of that Camelot bullshit. CIA was receiving legitimate chatter that the Russians’ plan after winning the space race was to put nuclear weapons on the moon. That’s why we were relentless in getting it done, why the “computers” saved our asses, why Houston is so dear to me, and Star City as well. Star City has been treating my Houstonians like warm friends for years now.
There were many, many Russians who became our assets in country, and many of them died for us, especially when Aldrich Ames gave the Russians all their names.
That did not stop private Russian citizens from helping us, because they ultimately thought they were helping Russia by stopping the Cuban Missile Crisis as well. It came down to some people who gave us Russian intelligence, and one very brave man, and no doubt the person on which “Crimson Tide” is based. The Russians were locked and loaded, and this man saved all our lives:
Thankfully, the captain didn’t have sole discretion over the launch. All three senior officers had to agree, and Vasili Arkhipov, the 36-year-old second captain and brigade chief of staff, refused to give his assent. He convinced the sub’s top officers that the depth charges were indeed meant to signal B-59 to surface — there was no other way for the US ships to communicate with the Soviet sub — and that launching the nuclear torpedo would be a fatal mistake. The sub returned to the surface, headed away from Cuba, and steamed back toward the Soviet Union.
Thank you, Russia. We really owe you an apology for thinking you were Gene Hackman instead of Denzel Washington.
Depending on the operation (because you can’t and shouldn’t agree with all of them), it’s an apt metaphor for The Company. For instance, there have been many times that CIA has gone into a situation and rescued people exactly like the houseguests, as huge a mop job yet completely unnoticed. Case officers don’t win awards in public. On the other hand, CIA has had misstep after misstep since 1947. Trying to overthrow governments, trying to kill Castro, the government giving the torture program to CIA when it never should have happened in the first place, etc.
I don’t love CIA like the Republicans, where everything mommy and daddy says is correct
That summer was when my dad decided to leave professional ministry and just become a member at his own church, somewhere he could be anonymous. We ended up at St. Martin’s Episcopalian, which is how I got to meet George H.W. Bush and James Baker III. Because the story of how Jonna Mendez “masked up” to show Bush how their new technologies worked, I kidded her in person that we had mutual friends. And in fact, the first time I saw James Baker, it was because he was taking up way too much damn room on a pew and my stepmom told him to move over like four times. She didn’t know who he was, but it doesn’t matter. It’s church. There’s no hierarchy as much as your admin board might think there is. I have noticed from some pastors that money tends to grease the wheel. It’s not politics, it’s gratitude. It takes some real hustle when you work in a cathedral, because generally those buildings are old as shit. Renovating the pipe organ at National Cathedral is literally going to be 14 million dollars, because I looked it up on their web site. And that’s just ONE of the multimillion dollar projects they have to have going to conserve the building.
Since we’ve been talking about politics, let me make something clear. Calling it “National Cathedral” is not because it’s supported by taxpayers. It’s because so many state funerals have happened there, as well as memorial services. When it is acting in its formal capacity as the ministers who carry out those services, it ceases to be an Episcopalian congregation and turns ecumenical quickly.
In reality, what I’ve noticed over time is that it’s a bunch of social justice warriors who show up every Sunday, and they generally only have to use one part of the sanctuary for that because of course they don’t fill up the whole thing each week. It seems to have two modes, and it’s every bit as drastic a change as being a Transformer™ and being a trans person. 😉 This is because every Sunday of its life, “National Cathedral” is actually a smallish congregation named “St. Alban’s.” It’s just that sometimes thousands and thousands of people show up, like Easter comes more than once a year. My dad was particularly good at that on a smaller scale. Making an event at church that people didn’t want to miss and it didn’t matter what you believed or which church you attended. It was community building, not evangelism.
It’s funny, I’ve evangelized more to atheists than I have to anyone else, and not because I’m trying to change them. I’m trying to change their perception of me. Do you know how hard it is to get an atheist to believe you’re not part of the “What Would Jesus Bomb?” shitshow? I don’t give a shit what others believe, because as Pete Rollins so beautifully said, “A/Theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash.” (I heard Pete on “The Robcast.”)
I loved the four episodes called “Pete Rollins on God” that they’re the only four podcast episodes on my cloud drive………………….. and absolutely nothing about my rabid love for that podcast miniseries comes from the fact that when Rollins said that quote, it was one of the sexiest things I’d ever heard; he has an absolutely gorgeous Irish lilt. I could listen to him read the phone book. If you subscribe to The Robcast, all four parts are still in the archives.
I feel I have to explain something. By saying that a/theism is the greatest love story ever told, I do not mean to endorse The Crusades, colonialism, white supremacy, etc. I am saying that the question has always intrigued and eluded philosophers and therefore the argument was the only one we studied all semester in Logic I. However, it wasn’t pushing a religious agenda like you’d think in a Texas school. The first half was spent proving God exists. The second half was proving that they don’t.
It is not logically possible either way in the language with which logic is encoded. P and Q statements, all that. Basically, you believe or you don’t. To what degree is malleable, because I believe agnostic is just as valid as atheism, probably because most things in my life are a spectrum. We are not all programmed to see in black and white like Fox News.
Therefore, I cannot offend anyone with my views on God because I am giving the most pious and the most godless freedom to be them. It’s all valid, because I didn’t say that God does or does not exist, because I can’t remember how to do it now, but I used to be able to write it out like math. If my friend Jesse sees this, I’m sure he could tell me, because his dad taught in the same department as my professor. I’m betting Jesse picked up a thing or two about philosophy and the symbols to express it.
Atheists also cannot argue with gathering together for community. To have someone to lean on when you’re in a crisis or whether you’re protesting the Iraq war…. which I did. Many times. If I had been in Portland during those marches, I certainly would have been gassed. That’s because protesting in Portland is, a lot of the time, how we socialize as a church. We have to have breaks between the chants, catching our breaths because we are also walking. That’s when discussion turns to things like Angela’s mom, Grant’s child, Amy’s granddaughter. I don’t know that it helps God to know that I’m praying for them, but it certainly makes me spend time empathizing with what they’re going through. If I can analyze what the problem is while I’m praying, I can help support people through it…….. because that’s how prayer works.
I learned all this when a friend checked herself into rehab and I went apeshit because we were so close. I wanted to be there at every family day, every open meeting, etc. At first it was because I was worried about her. Then, it was “this is better than church.” On the serious. It’s sort of like being at a Quaker meeting, it seems, because there are lots of “sermonettes” and an unshakable commitment to God.
AA is not religious at all. If you don’t have a God, find one. What you need is a higher power, not evangelism, especially if you weren’t religious before. No, what you need is something to get your ego out of the way. You might not be able to believe in a god or gods, but you can believe in your child being your higher power. Your spouse. Your parents and siblings, your co-workers, basically everyone in your life who is trying to tell you that the common denominator is you. If you can’t believe in those things because you’re single, I don’t care if your God is Dr Pepper and donuts.
“Look, I don’t want to get into a semantic argument, I just want the protein.”
That’s because when you acknowledge that you are not the center of the universe and just a piece of it, you become startlingly aware of just how much you’ve touched other people’s lives and how makes you sick to your stomach.
Flat out AA does a better job of healing people than church. FLAT OUT. There is no way for a church to dig that deep with you unless they’re really committed to it. I know you see AA meetings at churches all the time, but that’s because they rent the room in the church so people who aren’t members don’t feel uncomfortable. The only time I’ve really dug deep with other parishioners is when we did a six week grief course together. No one had died, I was just in grief because I’d broken up with Kathleen and moved, trauma jointly and severally. And in fact, most of us were there for divorce support.
It’s where politics fades away, and how we’d solve a lot of problems in this country. If we stopped training ourselves to only show our pretty parts on social media, it will cut down on the amount of time people spend doing it in real life. I honestly think that life has imitated art, because we don’t make time for care and connection in groups. We make time to sit on the couch and look at our friends without checking in. Time goes by and you haven’t responded to anything they’ve sent, because you’re neurodivergent or just busy or whatever the case may be. And then it becomes the guilt of not responding rather than just saying “you haven’t fallen off my priority list. I just don’t have time right now because for as much as I adore you, my X has to take precedence.”
I do not object to those words in the slightest, but I’ll run pretty fast if you don’t get back to me for months, because I want to ascertain whether you’re contacting me because you enjoy me or whether you’ve decided that you needed something from me; you had to reach out in a pinch. If you have contacted me because you only needed something from me and aren’t interested in true friendship, I don’t want to repeat a pattern I’ve had since childhood. I will not let myself fall into a campaign to prove my worth when I’m getting a trickle’s worth of love when I deserve a fire hose, and because of community, to be able to return that love just as “bigly.” It’s always been my “strategery.”
I would bet a great many people in my life wish I was a painter. Do they not know that a picture is worth a thousand words? A gallery of my art might give me more blowback, not less. 🙄 😅
I get out my pain onto canvas just the same. I use whatever language I want because this is not Facebook. This is church. This is AA. This is a real account of what’s happening in my life, what has happened. These entries are as intimate as anything I’ve ever share in a meeting.
I won’t let you go, I’m just waiting to see whether I’m a priority in your life because I don’t always want to be the one that initiates contact. I don’t want to be around you if I always feel like I’m nagging to get a simple answer out of you, receiving you when you show up.
I remember when I wanted that life, because as an INFJ, you know you have a lock on it because you’ve read everything you can find about that personality type and they all end up as social workers, teachers, writers, ministers, and anything else that needs the wisdom of people who have been a thousand years old since the nurse laid their baby in their arms.
However, I am not kidding when I say that the dream died with my mother for two reasons. The first is that I am a completely different person than I was before she died.
I am not willing to go back into “show mode” in order not to get my crazy spatter on other people for the rest of my life. “Show mode” has done nothing for me except to convince people I am perfectly normal….. “you don’t look autistic.”
I don’t often publish anything without running it through Google Translate, because even if I can’t read every word, I know enough to know when Google is being too formal, but I did get the idea right. When I went on that first mission trip, I still knew more Spanish than everyone else, so I was asked to give the closing message. It was terrible, according to my friend Mikal who understood me, but my mother cried, as she always did during my sermons….. however, this time it was just watching my face because she didn’t understand a thing….. except me.
The reason the second semester was harder than the first is that I also went to Reynosa/Progreso for Christmas break, again being immersed, so then my performance was really up and down because I could understand some conversations better than others because I’d had to use those words before. I honestly don’t think she did a very good job of asking me about my trip. I could have told her all about the fact that Hector and Fabiola were getting married soon, that they had been sweethearts for a number of years. Did I want a lemonade?” Etc. I think if she’d ever offered to spend some time with me after school (she flat out told us she couldn’t do that), she would have seen that I was doing fine in her class, but I wasn’t, because I was ACTUALLY speaking Spanish for days at a time with no problem at all. I love and fear Spanish all at once. It’s a much easier language than English, much harder to put yourself out there when you know you suck. However, in Mexico, I’d just gently be corrected and told the right words. I never got a C.
I have also never experienced prejudice against white people in Mexico, especially if you show that you’re making an effort to speak their language and fit into their culture rather than the typical American who expects everything to be the same. It’s the attitude of an Imperialist dictator who loves his country the way people love their mommy and daddy. It can do no wrong because I say it can’t.
Meanwhile, the smart people are talking less and less. The people of color get arrested more…….. and not just because of prejudice. Felons can’t vote, and black people aren’t a monolith but tend to lean Democratic. This is not about locking up black people in its entirety. This is about a more complex, disgusting way to limit voters at the polls. It’s not the whole issue, but it doesn’t hurt. People who are racist are generally Republican, but they weren’t the party that was always known for it. The realignment of the parties started in the ’70s because back then the Democrats were the party of the Deep South. Slowly, the parties started crossing over until the Deep South was solidly blue. Then, in the 80s, the white supremacy Jesus apologizers took over the Republican party, though they were warned. They just didn’t care. They turned their whole party into supposedly loving the Bible and screwing poor people every chance they got.
I would say that this is the thing that should be in the United Methodist Discipline under “incompatible with Christian teaching” instead of homosexuality.
So let’s bring it back around:
I love my country like an adult, because it gives me enough access to history that I can actually have an informed grasp of how this all works. In short, we are all but Citizens of Locker C, yet half of us are begging for Trump’s watch….. old and busted. The Republicans’ biggest problem is that they all know he’s a nutjob and can’t figure out how to get elected without him, so they just clench their teeth and do nothing. They couldn’t find “the new hotness” with both hands.
It’s time to tell them they’re fired because they can’t even manage to finish a coloring book, much less a bill. I honestly think that the reason Trump did everything through executive order is that he didn’t know how to introduce legislation. People have lost touch with the reality of what this job takes, and how it’s not about them. They can go off and have their little cult in the woods, because a man got elected who didn’t know the first thing about government. I doubt he’s been past sixth grade social studies/civics.
This entire essay is all connected, because it’s all about how my faith has influenced my politics for many years. How my young life has shaped me as an adult. How the Trump era was when I finally realized that I was old enough to have an opinion and as long as it stayed in my space, where I owned it and wasn’t hogging a conversation, why not? I don’t want there to be a chance there’s a criminal in The White House, and I am mystified as to why anyone would.
Why were so many people willing to gloss over Trump’s role in convicting The Central Park Five? Why wasn’t making fun of the neurodivergent kid not the end of it? Pretty sure “grab them by the pussy” on tape during a campaign if there wasn’t something about Obama that was off-putting and they just couldn’t put their fingers on it. Racism and sexism won Trump the election, because people have hated Hilary Clinton for some unfathomable reason since the 80s. She started the ball rolling on universal health care with the Patients’ Bill of Rights, so instead of seeing that she started it and Obama finished it, they’re mad at better health care and mad that a woman dared run for office, especially one that was already very unpopular and shouldn’t she know it?
I am going to bet that for 99.99999% of you, you’ll never meet the head of state in another country. A lot of you, if you look up how many passports are active, will never even leave the US to be able to compare it to anything else.
Which leads to things like thinking Obama is not American because most people don’t actively think of Hawaii as a state. It was easy to convince lots and lots of people that either Hawaii wasn’t a state, Obama’s birth certificate was forged on the date so that Hawaii wasn’t a state yet, or forged in the “Place of Birth” field because he was actually born in Kenya.
Trump’s biggest scandal is that he committed high crimes and misdemeanors and blackmailed Ukraine. Obama’s big scandal was wearing a tan suit (I’m being facetious, but still….. Obama’s biggest scandal was blinking on Syria, but he’s the kind of person that knew it and apologized. I can’t imagine Trump knowing himself well enough to know when he owes an apology to anyone. If you’re a narcissist, everyone owes an apology to you.
I also hate broken campaign promises…. just one.
The only campaign promise I’m really pissed about is that there aren’t taco trucks on every corner.
And because I’m not a complete monster, I’m not going to make you sit through all my political opinions without a reward.
It’s a picture of Oliver, who is a dog. He’s dressed up for Valentine’s Day and I asked Zac if I could post it.
I just can’t with today. I got up early and started writing, and it was going pretty well. Then, the Jetpack (WordPress) app got put in the background. When I went back to it, nothing would render (no text appeared). My entry disappeared into thin air.
So I’ll start over, and it will be nothing like what I was thinking earlier because I’m not thinking about that now…. whatever it was. I had a better idea to introduce you to my life of crime, unintentionally, of course.
When you are in a choir, it is frowned upon and also common practice to copy things. It’s very illegal. But I have aided and abetted many times. I struggle with copiers, because I think they sense my fear.
The next time I unintentionally broke the law was when my friends were putting a giant amount of music on their servers and giving me access. “It wasn’t illegal” because my friends said it wasn’t. What they meant was that copying off their server was legal. I later found out that was not the case, but luckily, not because I was caught. The safest way to share music was to borrow CDs and transcode them yourself, which is where the term “sneaker pimping” originated. It was underground, like “Winds of Change” during the Cold War…. yet less inspirational and more sitting there waiting for the CD-ROM that copied at 4x speed and generally wrote two bad discs before a right one. That got better over time, but in the beginning, it was atrocious. The CDs were expensive and then half of them failed.
I unintentionally broke the law the other day when I installed Windows 11 in a Virtual Box. My key wouldn’t activate anywhere but my original machine, even though I wasn’t using it for that. So, it’s off to find another solution, because the longer I spend with Windows, the more I’m irritated by it. You mean I can’t change my own time zone, I have to connect to location services? No matter what I do, I can’t make it where you don’t get to access my location and the rest of my information, and who knows how deep they’re digging? I don’t have anything to hide, it’s just the principle of the thing.
Facebook and everything else is built on stealing your information, why they’re free. We’re just dependent on it now, because we’ve been on it since you could get an account. That’s probably 15 years for me by now.
So, it’s a little intimidating when it’s not apps you can choose to install. If I really thought that gathering my ad information was important, I could delete Facebook off my phone/tablet and clear my browser history. What do you do when the data mining is the operating system itself?
They’re not even breaking the law unintentionally….. because what they’re doing might be legal, but it’s nowhere near moral. And the bitch of it is that we could have open source and secure social media, but it would never take off to the degree that Facebook did…. so you either install Facebook or you’re cut off from most, if not all of your friends.
That’s because free software has two problems. The first is that few businesses will buy in because they have to have someone to sue if things go wrong. The second is that if you put it out there for free, people assume it has no value. It’s the opposite. It’s millions of coders giving their time to create something that doesn’t depend on reporting to any kind of mothership and doesn’t cater ads right in your taskbar. Well, not ads, but sensationalized news to get you to click when it’s just nonsense. And you can’t turn it off if you just want the weather icon. If you close the obnoxious news banner trying to keep you up to date, everything goes with it. If you leave it on, every time you hit that hot corner when you’re trying to do something productive will make you want to punch your monitor.
Last week I was in “game mode,” where there are no distractions. I thought I had a complete crash when Windows put the game on the taskbar to ask me how likely I was to recommend Windows 11 to a friend. Luckily, I have enough VRAM that I could go back to it, but not every piece of software is that stable. Windows is becoming cancer, and I don’t want to deal with it anymore. I just don’t have a choice.
If Windows games could run on Linux perfectly, I wouldn’t need it at all. Steam is making headway, but I don’t have a Steam library. I chose GOG because then you own the game outright. I did not know that it would be different in every way from the Steam version and new releases make it crash…. frequently.
Sometimes you make choices in life. They lead you down a bad road….. and in a church choir, no less…….
If there was a biography about you, what would the title be?
I think this is kind of a weird prompt for me now, because since WordPress actually gave me the statistic that I wrote 614,000 words in 2023, there are six autobiographies about me already. And that’s just one year.
I did start an autobiography once, but I didn’t take it seriously enough. My own doctors, dad, and stepmom told me that using the work of Susan Barry to induce stereopsis on myself wouldn’t work. I tried for a few weeks, and the only thing I noticed the whole time that was actually in 3D was that I could see both sides of my nose at once. I called the book “Staring at Myself.”
That being said, I might go after it again because I don’t see how it’s impossible yet. That’s because there’s been a couple of movies with 3D effects that did work on me. One at EPCOT Center (Muppets 4D) and one at Wizarding World of Harry Potter, but I don’t remember what ride. That means I can’t see red/blue stereopsis, but if it comes in a different form, then it’s open to me.
In both instances I saw a 3D movie, I cried. I was a freshman or sophomore in high school at EPCOT, and I can’t remember the year for WWHP, but not so long ago. Within the last 10 years, at least.
What I do know is that it was before JK Rowling burned down her legacy by bullying trans kids over the Internet. Trans kids know horrible people all the time, but not generally people who’ve written a book about full acceptance first.
Otherwise, Lindsay and I might not have been so keen to go there. We loved the rest of the park, too, because we got to go on rides with themes like “ET,” “Jurassic Park,” and “The Simpsons.” I also got my picture taken in SpongeBob’s pineapple house.
“Why don’t you just buy a ticket to see the places you love on TV?”
“How’m I gonna get a ticket to Bikini Bottom?”
We did the MGM thing because we’d already done Disney before- just not together. I’d been on a high school trip with my orchestra, and I don’t remember when Lindsay went, but both of us have been to Disney World. I don’t believe anyone in our family has been to Disneyland. I hear good things, though.
I’m a daredevil and I love roller coasters. Therefore, going to a different Disney park sounds great. At some point, I hope to make it to Six Flags here. Kathleen and Dana have both planned trips with me to King’s Dominion, and neither panned out.
But there’s so much hope because at least now I live in the general area again. My trip with Dana was based on her parents living in the general area as well. I remember the first time I saw a picture of her here after we broke up was hilarious because I was so fake indignant that she was wearing my “Regular Show” belt. She loved that belt, so there was no actual ire. She stole it from me almost as soon as I bought it.
Because there are no pictures of me actually wearing it, I will tell you it looked better on me and you cannot prove otherwise. 😛
These are all the funny things that should go in my book about myself, and I’m trying to drag those things out of myself as well. Because this can’t be therapy all the time. It will sound like I’m a morose person, when I’m not. I use this space to work out what makes me happy and what doesn’t, so I can surround myself with those things.
I am sharp and funny in person, because I know myself so well. Again, I wrote six books about myself last year. If I didn’t learn anything about myself, I wasn’t paying attention. But so many entries are built on analyzing what I’ve said before to work it out in my own head makes me feel secure in my connections. They can’t rattle me the way they used to, because I might not know what to do in a conflict, but I do know where my heart/conscience lie. There are so many unknowns working with other people, but there’s a benefit to knowing what you’ll tolerate and what you won’t.
The moment I realized it was over with Supergrover was the moment she said that she wanted me to find people who brought good things into my life and didn’t give me issues. To me, that said that she was never going to resolve any conflicts with me and this would be our life. Her avoidance and my need to clear things up ad nauseam until we died.
While we actually needed to lean on each other because every time I’ve stepped over the line, she’s had to contact me to tell me to back it up. I finally got it through her head not to do that anymore, because she couldn’t have it both ways. She couldn’t push me away and then critique me. It made me think that she was interested in resolving things every single time. My heart would be full of hope, and it was dashed every single time.
I take responsibility for being angry about that, and not using the appropriate words for nearly anything. Doesn’t make my side of the story untrue. They were my experiences of her, not her experiences of me. She fucked me up. Just slaughtered me emotionally, then threw a bomb over her shoulder and walked away.
She has the right to do that; she doesn’t have the right to say I should be happy about that.
My crush on her gave her a good excuse to walk away when she absolutely couldn’t, because she needed a clear connection to me in order to say the things she needed to say without me jumping to any conclusions that weren’t there.
But she wouldn’t talk about that.
Too scary.
Go find other friends.
I hate her for it. Just fucking hate her. But not all day, every day. She’s not worth the energy anymore, because there’s no percentage in it. She doesn’t get the right to rattle me out of my skin because I’m bad at transitions. She can’t drop in and out like a Disneyland dad.
And that’s because of her side of the story, not mine. She can blame everything she wants on me. To her, I can be the biggest judgmental dickhead on earth and I don’t give a flying fuck. This is because if she’s angry and bitter and all of those things, she’s sitting in them because she won’t resolve it, not because not talking about it leads to anything good.
So, she can go be bitter and angry all on her own, because she’s the type person that would rather be bitter and angry about something until she died rather than be open about her feelings. If we’d had even one knock-down drag-out in person that could have lasted long enough to put all our issues on the table and come to resolution in the end, we’d both be a lot happier, jointly and severally.
But, she went on the attack in order not to be vulnerable, and then she told me that she never would. It was a message I couldn’t ignore, because over time the dropping in and out became a cat and mouse game that she insisted wasn’t there. That’s because her dopamine doesn’t go up and down when she talks to me, so she doesn’t feel like a Disneyland dad, and can’t imagine feeling that way in empathy towards me, so she thinks nothing of dropping in when to me, it’s everything. And that’s as much as I’ll ever be able to say about it.
She absolutely took her turn in fucking up my life to a degree I’ll never get back. So, to blame everything that went wrong in our relationship on me is ridiculously unfair, but it is what it is.
I looked absolutely insane to the whole goddamn world because people could only understand my side of the story. I wasn’t allowed to tell absolutely any of hers. Therefore, I just had to look crazy and not give a shit that I did, all the while dying inside because of the perception of me, because it didn’t matter what the perception of me was. It couldn’t.
So, she’s sitting with the guilt of fucking up my life while also unwilling to open up about it. Telling me to go find new friends was just the shitty icing on top of an already shitty cake because her side of the story is not something I can share. So, I can’t talk to her and I can’t talk to anyone else.
Fuck her and the horse she rode in on, and I can only say that now, after having had 10 years to think about it. I owned my shit in front of her and in front of an audience of thousands (legitimately), and a lot of those people were close to me. Still couldn’t talk about it. She pushed me into a corner and just left me there.
Both sides of our story are problematic to each other, yet being in love with someone when it is absolutely inconvenient doesn’t happen logically…. however, it is universal. I could talk about that because it transcended race, culture, creed, everything. Some people may not understand divorce or polyamory, but everyone can understand having feelings that they need to get rid of because they’re threatening or dangerous to your relationship. I do not believe that when you get married, you also become blind.
I also didn’t bullshit Dana in the slightest. I didn’t say things like, “she’s really pretty,” because if I had to list the 10 things about our relationship that make it amazing, it wouldn’t be on the list. It wouldn’t even be in the top twenty.
But it’s still on the list. 😉
I feel like a troll most of the time, so it doesn’t suck that if she stood next to me, it would make me look better by 150%, easily. She also makes beautiful babies, so standing next to them wouldn’t suck, either. I would say the same about her husband, except I don’t know what he looks like.
However, because I do know her, I bet he’s a god- because through her, I’ve found that it’s possible to be both brilliant and the best looking person in the room (just trust me, we’re all trolls next to her). I’ve always imagined that they thought each other was the greatest thing since sliced bread for a long time, and I am overjoyed that she found her person.
I’m just bad at transitions.
Who isn’t when you’re talking about something that is “highly illogical?” I told my heart every day how fucking ridiculous it was and to stop feeling 18 all the time. But if you knew her like I did, it would have been just as impossible for you as it was for me.
What I laid out in front of Dana was not the whole “she’s gorgeous” bit, and Dana knew it. She said that because our relationship was writing, it was more serious because we’d seen each other’s souls.
Her soul and inner world is the first time I’ve ever met anyone who could match me feeling for feeling in terms of not being able to share things, and needing a place to vent where we were both anonymous.
Except she chose the wrong person to open up to for logical reasons, not emotional. The reason I needed her was more important than the reason I needed Dana, but that didn’t become clear to me until Dana smashed my glasses into my face.
Otherwise, I would still be dealing with Dana’s jealousy for Supergrover and me to need ironclad privacy. What wife wouldn’t be jealous of that in a lesbian relationship, especially when I irrationally caught feelings over it. Just because Supergrover didn’t return my feelings didn’t make it less problematic. It made it more, because Dana realized that Supergrover would always be more important than her, and she had to let me go…. but not until we’d had a knock-down drag-out about it.
Supergrover bears no responsibility in why I got hit. Dana and I were not fighting about her, but the amount of time I was willing to devote to both of them and it was so off in the beginning. We hadn’t learned a middle ground, and so she was this specter in our lives, there when she wasn’t there.
I didn’t give up my relationship with Dana for her, but realistically, yes I did. I didn’t want anyone to be able to tell me how I should spend my time, and Supergrover made it where it was impossible for it not to be her as first priority ever again.
And I do mean ever.
So, in a lot of ways, Dana made my decision for me very clear. At that point, I needed Supergrover because I was in so much pain from the fight, both physically and emotionally.
So, she was my first priority for the next 10 years with her participating in the relationship, and for the rest of my life without….. without being able to talk about it with anyone else, either. It’s too private, too us.
The “too us” is what I miss the most.
The closest I can come to describing what happened is “accidental polyamory, but ok……” And even that’s a euphemism for everything I can’t say.
What I’m actually married to and not her personally. Why I wish I could be in the inner circle that her husband is, because of course there are certain times when you want your partner to know something that your friends don’t, and that’s ok. It’s not my place to go through the same emotional experience as him.
However, in her absence, we both love her so much that I wish we could lean on each other. And by now, we’ve both loved her that much for a long time without ever meeting each other. It’s weird, and it’s not. Supergrover has the right to keep as much private as she wants, but that doesn’t mean it helps our relationship.
She does not want to help our relationship, and she hasn’t made the connection that it’s not possible. That we have to have something sustainable and drama-free…. which is exactly what she wants, just without the discomfort of actually addressing anything, ever.
It’s not the right relationship for me, but it has to be. So, fuck all of it, because I don’t know what to do now. I can’t think about it because it’s too painful. I can’t write about it at all, I just have to sit in it…. and you cannot imagine how much I mean I can’t write about it. It’s killing me every day. She has listened to my story over and over, calling me a dictator when I am standing up for myself and just telling her my feelings straight out in hopes of her doing the same.
It worked in the beginning. It doesn’t work now. That’s because she thinks that our only problem is that I’m in love with her. First of all, no I’m not. Second of all, the other problem is not mine. Not mine to carry, not mine to handle, not mine to own. But, she can run from her impressions all she wants. Doesn’t make them accurate.
That’s because she has never once asked me any questions about anything I’ve ever written. She’s never responded with her own story when I’ve laid out mine, because it was easier to get mad and say “you’re just throwing emotional bombs and waiting for the shitstorm to begin, aren’t you?”
No, I’m trying to explain the process of letting go of the wrong things while keeping the right ones. I explain an exhausting, autistic amount for a neurotypical, and she’s a jock and a childhood trauma victim, having learned to cut off her emotions from a very young age to protect herself first and then to accomplish a goal.
I love her the way I love Zac, just platonically and not romantically. That’s because I can’t be specific, but they both have a hard shell and a vulnerable place just for me.
In fact, this weekend Zac and I had all the conversations that are just as uncomfortable as the ones I would or could have with Supergrover on different issues…. but not all of them, because they both have a hard shell and a vulnerability that comes out because I ask for it.
A few weeks ago, one of Zac’s young friends (I think she’s a tween, or about to be) overheard an adult conversation and asked him what a safe word was. I can’t imagine how much of the table died inside except Zac. He is the ultimate person to ask any question about anything, because he’s neurodivergent so he’s good at conversations that need explanations, and we’re kind of kids ourselves so we both can explain very adult things in kids’ terms.
He told her that a safe word was something that was only between people who really trusted each other, and it was either the word to stop or shorthand for “tell me the truth.” The friend said, “I think we should have a safe word, then.” He said, “okay. What do you want it to be?” She said, “lemons.”
He’s also seen Ted Lasso, but is not familiar with it so I didn’t know if he’d remember “Oklahoma.” So, in several discussions this weekend, I said, “Oklahoma. Lemons.” We got more done in becoming closer in 24 hours than I have in years with other people. I’m not poking at Supergrover. I know a lot of people with a hard shell and won’t get vulnerable I make it clear that you being emotionally unavailable is a dealbreaker for me.
I am sorry that seems threatening at first to either Supergrover or Zac, and yet it will never not be true. The difference is that Zac is emotionally mature enough to recognize that his emotional availability is feeding our relationship, and we’re comfortable with it because from the first moment we started talking, we sort of made this “no bullshit” pact.
You have to when you realize that you’ve actually asked out one of your friend’s boyfriends…. or, more accurately, who is a mutual friend with Zac, me, and another person that’s not important enough to mention except that I didn’t want her to know anything about my life anymore, and I didn’t want the mutual friend to say anything.
I should have just contacted the friend and said, “keep it tight,” but I didn’t because I don’t know shit about polyamory. But first, I didn’t know how important it is for everyone in a polycule to know each other, even if they don’t get along because a few times a year, it’s important for us all to support Zac and not have it be about us. We don’t have to get along, we just have to treat each other with respect.
I asked Zac to keep it tight when I shouldn’t have. I hope for my sake he didn’t, because he knew I didn’t know shit- and he would have been smart enough to tell his partner the reason I didn’t want them to know at first. But now, I do want everyone to know me because I’m here to support Zac, just like them.
On the other hand, I didn’t know if it was appropriate to contact the friend, either, because I don’t know how Zac operates with his other partners, just how he operates with me. I didn’t know if it would be breaking a rule somehow.
Although I did call “lemons” with him on some of that stuff because I don’t need to know about his partners. I need to know how he’s feeling. For instance, if he’s feeling low about another relationship, I don’t want to suggest we do anything intense. He can suggest it, but I won’t. By intense I mean going out and doing the thing after we’re already tired.
Our commitment is drill weekends so he’s worked seven days in a row. I know that by the time he gets home from drill, he’s usually into an introvert night. Since I only have housemates and not other partners, I don’t get a lot of affection. I want a kind of night where he’s tired and only wants to hold me. I sleep with him even though I’ve said that I wouldn’t sleep with a partner again because it’s harder for me to go deep enough to sleep well.
But again, it’s about wanting more contact comfort and it’s not every single night. I have decided that I need to start taking sleeping pills at his house, though, because he moves and snores A LOT. If I don’t fall asleep first, I won’t. It’s kind of funny. He dreams like Oliver, who is a dog. When he’s in REM, he kicks like he’s chasing rabbits.
This is uncomfortable because he’s also an octopus. But everything that’s uncomfortable is also everything I love about being with him…. which is why I tease him lovingly.
I hope he doesn’t mind me poking a little fun at him, because our relationship feels so free and easy when it’s back and forth like that. He teases me in person rather than in writing, though. I don’t know why that is. Maybe he’s just not thinking about teasing when he’s writing, but I always am. He’s never let me know that something has cut too deep, but I hope he knows it’s not like I’m afraid of him telling me that. I want to take care of him.
If your partner is really your partner, they want to know the things that bother you…… especially when we see you trying so hard for us. Someone who doesn’t see that isn’t your partner, and staying together becomes harder and harder the longer someone feels unheard. And I am totally talking about my history in relationships here. It’s universally relatable, and luckily, something I don’t struggle with now.
I think part of feeling unheard went into my relationship with Supergrover as well, because basically as soon as we got to Houston one of my mutual friends with Dana who’d known us for a long time in Portland told me to my face that Dana was stepping all over me.
Supergrover treated me like I was important when she’s the one with the big-shot schedule. That dopamine will stay with me for the rest of my life, because for as uncomfortable as I made her by falling in love with her and being open about that, it freed me from a relationship in which my needs went unmet because Dana thought she had a lock on being right. She comes by it honestly…
For as much as it hurt Supergrover to hear that I didn’t just love her, I was in love with her, I needed it to change me. I was never looking to change her. She told me in the beginning that she was stunned and amazed at my emotional bravery. She didn’t like it when I was emotionally brave with her, because it was something she lacked- yet wanted it from me. She wanted to be friends with someone who had what she lacked, but didn’t do much to bridge the gap so that both of us could feel safe and secure in our connection.
Absolutely all of the times she contacted me to resolve something on my blog, the conversation continued long enough for me to need things from her again, and to ask for them. But the moment I did, everything she said came across as “only I am allowed to need things.” She was like, “we can’t just be people out here who respond to your work?”
Of course they can.
But she can’t.
That’s because she thinks she can get friendly with me again without me ever being able to bring up the dark side of our relationship so I’m not carrying that shit in a bag all day. I’m not so much angry as lost, confused, and sitting in accurate memories of my own stories while not knowing hers to be able to know how I feel about it.
I told her directly that I thought she was hiding something, and that something was “we’re not really friends.” That’s because I loved the hell out of her thoughtful gifts and encouraging words as long as we never talked about our relationship.
That being said, if you have a real conflict, you’re just covering it up. You’re not actively making each other feel more trusting/trusted. I don’t want someone who can only do the surface-level things after they’ve emotionally vampired me because then they’ve made it clear that they’re not interested in my inner landscape, but I better be ready for theirs.
Saying Supergrover and I weren’t really friends probably stung because she was never tracking with me. Our love languages are not the same (she’s action, I’m words), and I do not lightly move past any problem in order to gloss over it. I do not have many relationships because I want to be able to go deep with very few people than have shallow relationships with a whole bunch. When we stopped exploring each other, that should have been the end of it right there. But it wasn’t because she didn’t give me a choice.
I could make her submit, but it wouldn’t make me any happier, it would just show that I was an asshole on a bigger scale. It also wouldn’t change things between us for the better, it would kill anything there is left. If I have hope for anything, it’s that she really is busy right now and that she will eventually stop licking her wounds long enough to resolve things rather than her feeling trapped because I do.
I have always been a White Hat at heart, and I’ll never give that up. She will always be my brave, crazy and wild friend whether she returns that affection or not.
I just know that our conflict has to be resolved to go forwards because otherwise, I will not be happy in a relationship with her. It’s a detente we’ve got going, because I’m never going to be happy with Christmas and Easter friendship and she’s never going to open up.
All I can do is try to move on when I can’t.
I open myself up to it by being vulnerable and letting a power imbalance stand whether it’s me who caused it or them; even when I can read clearly that I’m not doing the right thing in not walking away. In this case, I was absolutely doing the wrong thing because I didn’t have any other choice. And she knew it.
I want to have accurate memories of my perceptions, but how can my perceptions be accurate when all I can talk about is how emotionally avoidant someone is and not how we solved a conflict?
She’s seen Ted Lasso, but she would have made something up around “Oklahoma,” too. And by “make it up,” I mean words that don’t mean anything except kicking the can down the road. Synergize, logistics, etc. rather than “I am so mad at you right now because you said X and it made me feel Y.” And then I could explain why I said it and she could tell me whether she agreed with her assumption or not.
She could correct me when I was wrong, and I could figure out how I felt about it on my own. This is so much about my output and her lack of input so that she always knew what was up with me and I had to guess what was up with her; God help me if I was wrong.
My curiosity became a problem because it wasn’t curiosity anymore.
And that’s a summary of the autobiography I wrote last year.
Maybe it’s not “Stories That Are All True,” because I only meant that the lessons were universal and not the facts, just like the Bible.
And that was offensive to Supergrover, too, because she assumed that the title was all about “this is my story and I’m always right. The facts are all accurate and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong.”
I am not a dictator. She’s not brave enough, and saying I’m emotionally bombing her is her only move. If you only have one move, I will learn the diagonals, the Ls, the rank and the file.
For me, I feel like I’ve reached the end of the game.
Checkmate.
Maybe that should have been the title last year. It would have worked.
You also won’t get anywhere by telling me my memory is fallible, which Dana constantly did.
My blog is all about my memories, and I go back and look at what happened when because I’m my favorite author. I have to believe in myself when no one else does. Therefore, it used to irritate the shit out of me when I could see every goddamn day that my memory is pretty fucking great. She accused me of not remembering things right all the time, and would start telling my story “correctly.” Who treats a blogger like that? Not only did I write in the moment so the story was accurate, the experience of writing the piece does just as much to reinforce my memory as going back and reading it.
However, not one of my partners has ever asked me to look up what happened or thought about the fact that my memory can’t be that bad. That it wasn’t just having written the piece, but going back and reading it over and over and over to see what I can learn from that experience to write the next day.
More and more often, especially because she was drunk more and more often, she’d interrupt me constantly when I was telling a story to “tell it right” for, in her mind, comedic effect. She was The Dana Lanagan Show™ more and more often because alcohol limited her ability to see she was hurting/embarrassing me and also the ability to control THE VOLUME OF HER VOICE.
So, that’s why I say that falling in love with Supergrover was the best thing that could have happened to me and not the worst. Everything happens for a reason, and that cloud had a larger silver lining than I ever saw coming. It was not continuing down the road of life with an alcoholic because I’d learned to people please in childhood and I would have stayed with her and justified her drinking for far too long. I don’t give up on relationships, which is why I’ve loved Supergrover so long and excused her emotional unavailability for 10 whole ass years.
Stories That Are All True 