I have to, but let’s be clear. I don’t want to move. Mike and Hayat are just getting older and can’t manage the stairs anymore. They want a smaller, one-level house. I get it. However, it doesn’t make me any less sad. I have so many memories here, but none so great as “The Homo and the Hijab.” It tells the story of Nasim, one of my first housemates, and her journey from not knowing what a homosexual was to being friends with me. I nearly knocked over two people trying to get to her when I heard she was from Iran. The one thing I didn’t do is tell her that “Argo” is my favorite movie, because Iranians are touchy about that. I know, because I’ve talked to many. They all think it’s a commercial for CIA, and it is. Full stop. That’s because CIA’s reputation was in the shitter and they needed a win. George Tenet asked Tony Mendez to do “Argo,” and he said, “I can’t. That’s all classified.” Then, Tenet waved his magic wand and all of the sudden they had a story.
However, I do think that the movie starts out with incredible empathy toward the Iranians. Maybe it was the right choice to ex-fil the Shah, maybe it wasn’t. I can’t pass judgment on that. But I do hear the outrage of the Iranian people, and judge it “NAH.” That’s from the r/AITA subreddit, where people post questions and you tell them whether they’re the asshole or not. YTA and NTA are easy. The others are “NAH,” or “no asshole here,” and ESH, “everyone sucks here.” CIA needed the Shah for whatever reason. I don’t know it, but I’m sure they had more intel than I did in the 70s. I wasn’t even born until ’77. So, when the houseguests were rescued, I wasn’t even out of diapers. I don’t have a horse in the race, so I feel that both countries have a legitimate point and I’m not sure CIA would have gone that direction, in retrospect, given that we haven’t had diplomatic relations with Iran since then.
And that’s all cover-up for the fact that I’m dying inside. Hayat was there for me when my mother died. Mike took me to church and loved it when I sang next to him. Samantha gave me a Dr Pepper the moment I moved in and said, “since you’re a Texan, I thought it was probably your blood type.” Every housemate has been unique, none more than Magda, who took me under her wing from day one. I’ve checked with Colin to see if we can both move in, because that way he would get all the money he wanted and we could stay together. Magda is going to meet Colin tonight, so I hope they hit it off. If not, it doesn’t matter. I can find another place for one or both of us. I just hope it has a backyard as big as Colin’s, because our garden here is so beautiful- and Magda did all of it.
So, the idea of finding a place with one of my current housemates seems like a good deal because it’s someone I wouldn’t mind sharing a bathroom with. That’s so important, after having to clean up after two people for nine years….. myself and my Indian housemate who will not touch anything I have touched, including bottles of all-purpose cleaner. So, she won’t clean the bathroom. Ever.
I will miss her, because we used to get along. Then, she wouldn’t talk to me about the bathroom issue and I said, “WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT THE BATHROOM.” I raised my voice because I left her several notes saying, “please clean up after yourself,” and absolutely nothing changed. Well, she was freaked out that I raised my voice and has never spoken to me again…… after leaving my notes on the sink and walking by them for several days until all the ink was faded…… and her hair and water were plugging up the sink. That’s been my life. Nine years. I’m done.
I am over half done in getting my room ready for pictures tomorrow, but I had to take a break because I thought I needed more caffeine than I actually do, and now I feel, um…. not good. I’m hoping that by sitting down for the length of time it takes to create this entry that the feeling in my stomach will go away. We can mark this under “not as good an idea as thought previously.” I’ve got a few more hours to go with finishing touches, but mostly what I had to do was get rid of stuff I don’t want to move.
Zac is coming over the week of the 13th to help me move, which is the earliest I can get out of here because no one else has offered. I’m sure I could put out an APB, but I’m not bothered. If I had a ton of stuff, I’d be panicking. But most of my stuff can fit in Zac’s car in one trip….. minus the furniture, and I don’t know if I can take all of it or not. I mean, I can, but my new space is also likely to be furnished. We’ll just have to see. I’ve already looked at the space at Colin’s, and I don’t know if even my futon will fit because there’s already a bed in the room. However, I might be able to back it up to the bed so I have somewhere to sit while I’m putting on my shoes, etc. Again, I have no idea, and I have other spaces to look at before I sign anything, as well as Colin wanting some time to make a decision. He’s not sure that he wants to rent out his space at all. I think he put out an ad and didn’t expect to get a response so fast.
I don’t know why. He and Jack, who is also a dog, are delightful.
I’m really glad that we cleared up the moving in and being friends being two different propositions, because I would think it was terrible if it didn’t work out and he thought that meant I didn’t want him in my life. The truth is that I don’t have that many neurodivergent friends in the area. It was nice to meet one. So, the bottom line is that I’m hoping, but not a lot. Colin has lived alone for a long time, and so have Magda and I in terms of how much time we each spend in our individual rooms.
I just hope I didn’t come across as too talkative because of course when I got to his house my social battery was full. I think it was fine. I was just impressed by a lot of stuff, especially the music studio in the attic, because I’m a music person, too.
And exactly none of that means “an easy transition.”
It’s been nine years. I would say that it’s time for a change, and also one I desperately don’t want to make. This time, though, I don’t have a choice. It’s heartbreaking, but necessary because I understand all the moving pieces.
Last night I went over to Colin’s house to meet him in person for the first time, as well as his dog. I got along with both swimmingly, but it’s a huge house and a lot more than I want to pay. I don’t want to use half the house. I want to rent a bedroom. He’s fairly certain he only wants to share the house with one person, so if he gets what he’s asking from someone else, I’m cool with it. I made a friend regardless.
However, we like each other so much that he’s taking some time to see if he can make it work, like being open to renting to two people, or axing his dog walker because I’ll be able to do it. Again, this has been a godsend of a connection, because even if I don’t end up moving in with Colin, he’s a solid dude. I told him that he still has my number regardless of the move for things like taking care of his dog while he’s out of town. Boarding dogs around here is expensive, and being good with a potential roommate’s dog has never lost me any brownie points.
Colin’s dog is half Jack Russell terrier and half Chihuahua. Therefore, he’s very tall (for a terrier/chihuahua) with blonde, curly hair all over. Colin says that the Jack Russell terrier must have been wire-haired (he’s had his DNA tested, so he’s sure about the mix). I feel like you can trust a man so dedicated to his dog that be brought genealogical research into it.
I just feel better about the state of moving at all, because Hayat gave me a stunning recommendation letter, and she’s actually the one that introduced me to Colin, indirectly. She’s on NextDoor and I’m not, so she sent me a listing. The reason it was so much more than I wanted to pay is that the listing didn’t have a price. When I told him it was out of my price range, he wanted to talk to me, anyway, because I was the first person that had even responded.
Then, of course, we started texting each other because that’s how our people communicate (neurodivergent). So, we have become a little bit closer via iMessage, because I feel it’s important for us to feel comfortable if we’re going to be sharing a house.
When he told me that he needed to think about all the financial implications, because he really only wanted one housemate, I told him to take the time he needed, because I don’t have to be out of my current place until May 1st, I’m just looking to move earlier than that because I don’t want to live here while people are coming in and out for showings. I also told him that I didn’t want to move again in another few months, so let’s make sure it’s the right fit.
He agreed, so we’re just chatting about normal friend stuff because like I said, I want to get to know him regardless. He does have a girlfriend, but they’re about as involved as Zac and me. As in, they don’t live together, they don’t spend all their time together, etc. We’re both stunningly introverted, which I think will also work well.
If Colin agrees to take me on as a lodger, it will be very nice only living with one, possibly two people. I don’t think that neurotypical people get the need for sensory deprivation. I think that people who need to be alone a lot make extroverts uncomfortable.
So, now I have two solid leads, and I feel better about myself than I have in ages because I didn’t know how this would go. Now that I have a letter of recommendation from Hayat and not someone they can’t verify I lived with, it’s a different ball game. My landlord said that I was a warm and caring person, and that my rent had never been late in nine years.
That goes a long way with people, so hopefully if it doesn’t work out with Colin, it will work out somewhere in DC. I’m surprised at the amount of looking I’ve sone in Silver Spring, because I thought I’d want to take off for DC/Alexandria immediately.
I’ve found much better deals on this side of the river, and in DC, even if you get a refinished house, it will still have weird steps all over the place because there’s no way it’s level after 300 years. I have nearly killed myself in several DC row houses. I know it would be so much easier for Lindsay if I lived in the middle of the city, but I haven’t found any place that truly looks comfortable. Most of the DC houses I’ve seen are very, very cramped.
Colin works for the local government in DC, and has a band. But it’s interesting. They only rent a recording studio and play together like, once a year. The rest of the time, they record their parts separately and just e-mail them, then the mixer puts everything together.
If it seems like I’m putting all my eggs in one basket, I don’t feel that I am because I am continuing to interview with other people, I’m just the most excited about this probability because I won’t be going that far and it’s someone I already like.
Plus, it would be nice to be settled by the time Bryn and her boyfriend, Dave, get here in May. However, I did warn them that it may be they arrive and start picking up my boxes. 😉 I know them well enough to know they’d just do it, though. The way I move, it will take less than half a day.
Today it’s all about culling, because tomorrow they’re coming to take pictures for Zillow, Redfin, etc. This is not my forté. I am going to suffer through. I had a Five Hour Energy, and I might have a cup of coffee as well (out of Adderrall and don’t have time to go to the doctor before the photographers get here). I have nine years of crap to go through, because I don’t want to move it all.
Yesterday, I gave my housemate Magda two GIANT bags of bath salts, because I bought them without knowing that Hayat was planning on ripping up the bathtub and putting in a shower. So, I have had industrial size bags of bath salts sitting on top of my dresser for the last year and a half.
Not all of my clothes fit, or they’re not my style anymore, etc.
It’s Mari Kondo time, and I may put her on for inspiration.
But if I’m going to bring up Mari Kondo’s name, I should also tell you I have “The Life Changing Magic of Leaving Your Shit All Over the Place” on my Kindle.
Today or tomorrow I am meeting another potential roommate that lives in my neighborhood. My landlord referred me to him via NextDoor, so hopefully I’ll be able to secure something fairly quickly. As we told each other, it’s at least worth a meeting to see if we get along, and he has a dog.
The funniest thing he said was that he was saying he lived alone, and I said, “I’m autistic and ADHD. It would probably work out better for me because of less sensory input.” He said, and it was so cute…… “I am somewhat neurodivergent.” I told him I laughed out loud at that one. We’re both introverts. He works for a government agency and his house is cute as a button, plus updated on the inside. I looked at some pictures online, but it was from the sale of the house. I have no idea what it looks like furnished yet, but I’m eager to see.
He’s a little older than me, the same age as Supergrover. It’s how I know he’s young enough to vibe with me and not too old to think of me as a constant annoyance because our age difference is too great. My worst nightmare was getting stuck in a group house with five 20 year old interns on Capitol Hill. It wouldn’t have been bad. I would have connected with a lot of Washington elite that way, but it wouldn’t have been the right vibe. If it works out that I move in with (let’s call him) Colin, I feel that I could go the distance with him, because I moved my entire childhood. The only place I have lived longer than DC is Portland, and even that was broken up into two chunks. The first was going to see my family, and at that time, I really meant it.
The second time, I had to go see about a girl. I had it bad, but I didn’t realize it until we drove from Portland to Houston together. That woman helped me move into my apartment in fucking August (I repeat….. in HOUSTON, TEXAS) and I let her get on the plane back to Oregon. What in the actual fuck was wrong with me?
If I have any regrets in life, it’s not taking Dana seriously at six weeks when she told me she had a crush on me. It took me three or three and a half years to accept that I had a crush on her, too. That’s because I don’t know what possessed her to tell me she had a crush on me, except yes, I do.
Carol, Dana’s then-wife, was not threatened by Dana having a crush……… and oh my fucking God.
Oh my God.
I did to Dana what Dana did to Carol. It just so happened that my new relationship energy was never going to go anywhere, therefore my pie in the sky ideas for a romance with a straight woman were grounded until my mental health went off the rails. That’s what I mean about the hurt being unintentional. I take responsibility for my behavior, because it happened no matter what my mental health might have been at the time. It is more about forgiving myself for not having the right tools to deal with my feelings, my medication, or my mental state while my medication was, in a few words, completely fucked up.
Again, I learned I was poly because I never lost any love for Dana, I only gained it for SG! Dana and I went down the tubes of our own accord, but not exactly. There was no preconceived plan on Supergrover’s part to institute a divide and conquer move. As she says, our relationship happened organically despite a whole bunch of things (which meant more to me than platinum, beautiful girl).
I can’t tell you how Supergrover is feeling except hurt and tired, because that is what I know for sure, and it’s probably going to make me cry.
Whenever I feel anxious that she’s distancing herself from me, she surprises me with all the love that comes through in black & white. Every. Single. Time. As I have said, she doesn’t say “I love you” in words. She does it by showing up. Consistently. No matter how mad we are at each other. No matter how bad the fight is, there has been nothing in 10 years that has ever torn us apart. Somehow, we keep the yellow string going even when we’re out of pocket. When I get the most anxious is generally about the time that she swoops in and reminds me what’s up. The Mama Wolverine claws are coming out, she will go Alduin on their asses, etc. We have that part down.
Keeping out of each other’s lives has been a mixed bag, because having context and not creates two different sets of problems. There’s the problems we have with telling our story together, and the problems we have with telling our stories apart. Lancing the boil was getting back on the same page. Again, I don’t know what will happen, but she said that she didn’t want to get into a cat and mouse game. It’s not if she shows up. Not being honest about your true intentions is a cat and mouse game. I love her enough to struggle all the way until we’re ridiculously happy again, whether there’s a context to our relationship or not. I’m ready for a different kind of honeymoon phase because I’m tired of putting each other through the wringer for no good reason.
I have loved her so much for a decade, and I feel like she has returned those feelings to the best of her ability. That she couldn’t be a better friend than she is right now in terms of being the kind of person that sends birthday and Christmas presents because we have such a long history together, and it’s so intense.
I don’t want to put anyone above her ever again, which is why I say that I’m as settled as I want to be. I am never going to get in another fight over emotional affairs because never once when I got married did I think I was going to go blind. I thought Dana and I had enough strength in our relationship to get through it, but I underestimated the pull I felt toward SG! The wave went over my head, and I’ve never been the same. But it’s all for good- I love my life, and I wish I could convince my beautiful girl of that instead of always thinking I’m saying “this is all your fault.”
I’m not sure why she thinkgs this is all her fault, because she laid out all the times she’s been a dick and the times I have as well. That means “Things Fell Apart” at both our hands. It is both our faults and neither.
Despite not having enough context, I think this is the relationship that reflects me the most deeply because since I’m reading her, I pick up her words and phrases all the time.
Painting my feelings as fact
Pricks on my skin I just couldn’t close anymore
It’s not “very” anymore, it’s “to an enormous degree.”
“I love his takedowns of the orange gelatinous shitbag.”
Me: How’s your day going? Her: picture of dumpster fire…. this has been especially useful lately
“Pick up my toys and go home,” which she got from me and now says all the time- at least to me. I don’t know how much I affect her speech at work/home/etc. If so, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. 😉
When she edits me, she’s very rough. I like it. I’ll get notes like “WHO TF IS PANCHO?”
Her husband had a thing and I asked her if she needed help (med assistant- she travels). She said no, but how kind of me to ask. I said, “it seemed nicer than asking how you broke him.” Later that day, I got an e-mail that said, “I keep laughing at this.” I smiled at that for three weeks straight. I got her. ❤ Maybe grasshopper is not as far away from satori as I think. So, because it tickled me to get a note later in the day that I was still laughing at something she said, I send them to others.
It was a door I never should have opened, but I used to love flirting with her because she was so fucking quick. I got in over my head fast, and I couldn’t take it back. Again, I knew I was fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked. I won’t tell you what she said, but I told her that all she needed to do was realize that my feelings were valid and real, and to be sensitive to them. That there was no reason to act, just to know they’re there. It was not to encourage, but for her to have empathy because I knew it couldn’t go anywhere and I was flipping out anyway. I can’t believe how much it meant to me when I said, “surely you spent longer than you wanted getting over someone who turned your head when it was a bad idea?” She said, “yes, surely I have.” She really saw me, and I will remember it forever. She has also never once invalidated my feelings, and been moved at the things I’ve written about her. She makes me happy without even trying, makes me proud just by breathing. The fact that she’s not my romantic partner means both jack and shit. She’s just always the one at the back of my mind, the one I quote all the time while she doesn’t know it…….. and I am sure that is a two way street even if she doesn’t say it out loud, because over ten years of writing, we have a million word associations between us……. most notably, “influencer.”
It was her brain that made me absolutely crazy about her (this is the part where you don’t get her reply that was so perfect it made my desk chair sag, I was laughing so hard). I joked, “besides, can I really make a decision on whether I’m in love with you or not if I haven’t seen your rack? What kind of idiot do you take me for, woman?” That was the moment *she* came in Kings full over Aces and I thought, “Christ. This needs to last my whole life, no matter what it looks like. I will never find her anywhere else in a million zillion years.” In fact, I actually told her this. That I wanted to fix us because I couldn’t go to the Supergrover store and pick out a new one. She’s the Vera Wang you can’t afford.
I realize by writing all of this down, it just seems like I’m begging her to come back. It’s just not true. That’s because if she does come back, it will be a great day in my life….. because she knows that I don’t want the surface level of her. I want the brain that made me crazy about her in the first place. I feel that if she lets me into that space, the way I let her into mine, what used to be a “cat and mouse game” will once again be stable, because in a lot of ways, we’ll be discovering each other again for the first time. Just because we’ve had a weird and hard road in the past 10 years doesn’t mean it always has to be as difficult as it has been. I’m just tired of covering up feelings with gifts, because I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel when I get them. What emotions are behind them when her e-mails say so little? No, these entries are not begging. They are the precious things I will want to read 10 and 20 and 30 years from now…… because she’s the best thing that ever happened to me and thinks she isn’t. I can’t fix that for her, but it’s not for lack of trying.
I will always love her with this much depth, because she gave me too much over the last 10 years to hold any bitterness or anger anymore. She has said that some of the things I’ve said are incredibly hurtful, and I’d like to talk about them. But again, I do not know whether she needs to separate from me, or whether she’ll be back after some time, space, peace, and grace. She has it coming from me in spades, because “surely grace and mercy will carry me all the days of my life” (Don’t call me Shirley!). As I have said before, it is not my job to talk now. I have talked enough. She knows how I feel, and she does not need to hear me again.
No, all of these memories are for me…. the ones that Oliver, who is a dog, has already heard.
I gave my Facebook subscribers the inside story, before the video came out. Now, the video is up and I was right…. so you get to hear the real story, too. I am not sure why the Q&A was cut off, but I have two very good guesses….. Jonna & Leslie.
So, I feel like I started it by saying that in another video, I’d heard she was “a real hardass” at CIA. It’s like I broke the surface tension on top of a glass of cool water…… because later on, she talked about a young female colleague who got tired of her boss’s bullshit and said, “Bill, fuck off.”
I laughed a lot harder than I needed to at that joke.
Anyway, we reverted into line cook and spy, which both speak profanity and irreverence as a first language. The black humor on “Homeland” is very real. Lives are on the line, and you sure as shit want to know who’s on your six. If you’re going to step in front of a bus for them, you have to know they’d do the same for you. People think of the military as being rough and tumble, but I’ve been around enough spies by now to know that they mostly run on coffee and hatred. Hearing Zac’s friends’ old war stories was great, because you learn quickly that it’s like being a goalie. You have those Bond moments, but you’re still a government wonk that does paperwork, mostly getting your raw data to the analysts.
Though CIA does not normally carry guns when they’re on intelligence missions, they do when they’re embedded in the armed services. I mean, they’d probably normally carry guns if they were DIA, but people like Jonna usually didn’t, though she’s trained on just about everything. So- note to self. That’s why spies can pick up most guns and know how to use them instantly. They don’t have to carry, they can pick up someone else’s if they’re in trouble.
So, the movies aren’t all bad. Except for this one….. where I got Jonna Mendez censored at her own museum……..
Even though this event was all about Jonna, I can’t think of anything to say except “Argo fuck yourself.” Because what do you say when you notice the other museum employees about to swallow their teeth because they’re so shocked that someone like Jonna would throw an f-bomb. What does she have to prove anymore?
For $5.00, I can get lost for years. This is because $5.00 is about how much it takes to by “Droid Edit,” a full-featured coding notepad for Android. The free version of “Koder” on iOS seems to fit the bill nicely, but I would get the pro version if it was more like Notepad++ and Microsoft Visual Studio Code (my personal favorite because now it runs bare metal on all operating systems, even Fedora and Ubuntu. It should also be able to run on Android with those specs. Get your shit together, Microsoft. Do you think I like coding without the Dracula Official Theme? Monokai is not going to cut it, my friend.).
I use the term coding loosely, because really the only things I do in my HTML files are add italics and special characters, maybe a link. For some reason, if I do more than that, WordPress will scrub out the HTML and tell me it can’t recover the block. I need a real solution that’s completely open source, but I like WordPress. I made the decision 20 years ago to stop coding and only be known as a writer…. why my setup is simple and hopefully easy to read.
I end up using the WordPress reader included in the Jetpack app because it’s in dark mode. I rarely read my own work on my blog itself. I like dark mode. My fans don’t. They’re older and they have more insurance.
And in fact, the most sweet and vulnerable moments between Supergrover and me are when I need my Jessica Tandy, and Supergrover is absolutely as beautiful as she always was. It is not lost on me that I’m a preacher’s kid and she’s a Bee Charmer. In effect, we are “Fried Green Tomatoes,” because that movie showed deep companionate love without showing romance because of the time. Because they held down the madness with the romance, it actually fits Supergrover and me better than if they had. Of course Idgie and Ruth were best friends who ran a business together and not this torrid love affair that lasted a million years, which it absolutely was in “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café.” Just devoted and never stopped loving each other until they died.
But female friendship is absolutely that strong and resilient, so both the book and the movie are priceless to me. In short, I felt like Idgie when she was young, with Supergrover being every bit the power,grace, and style of a young, married Southern woman. I was absolutely just a lovesick puppy dog for a couple of years, and then I realized my place in the world. “Love her anyway. Help her anyway. She may not accept you in person, but she’ll always come back here.” I am not writing for her. I am not writing to her. These are all the memories I want to be able to read when I am 70 and nothing more. I want her with me, helping to craft the narrative, but it is not necessary. It is the process of letting go and letting God, my words for going into deep discernment. My personality divides and I argue it out with my rabbi, essentially. However, I know that it is me talking back. I do not think of a relationship with God as external, but the omnipotent third eye present in so many Eastern religions.
It’s why I don’t care about semantics, I just want the protein.
I feel like in a way, all of this has been me trying to explain to her why we need to open the Whistle Stop and move on, rather than her always feeling guilty. Just start working together and having fun rather than both of us being up shit creek all the time.
Without a paddle, obvs.
So many messages that didn’t get through. Me thinking about the future and throwing ideas out there to remind myself that this was grounded and real came across as being unwilling to accept the demands on her time. This is categorically untrue. I have dealt with the boundaries on her time since day one, and our relationship has lasted over 10 years now. If I really had problems with her priorities, I wouldn’t have stuck around this long. I also don’t think that I’m all that and a bag of chips, but 10 years is a long time to feel like this relationship is fake with her insisting that it’s not.
Now, I really believe it wasn’t. It was as real as a heart attack. But that’s because I’m not going to get that message through placation. I’m going to get that message through truth. The longer you put off telling the truth, the angrier I get. I don’t want to handle someone else’s avoidance, I want them to realize they’re being avoidant because I’m not an entitled prick who wants to tell you how to run your life until you’ve stomped on my feelings so hard that we’re going to have to have it out. Go drive someone else up the wall because I am struggling.
It’s one thing to be on the bottom of the totem pole for a year- two or three. But after 10 wouldn’t you be furious that you never got airtime? Especially when we have this strong pull towards each other that also has its limits? It’s a dramatic tension that could be solved in an afternoon. I don’t understand keeping that weirdness in place all these years. I think I could solve a lot of her problems with me in one beer….. most notably that our relationship might not translate.
We are not guaranteed to bond just because we like the same Instagram influencer. But thinking we are both sides of Fried Green tomatoes, the Idgie and Ruth and the Idgie and Evelyn is the journey we’ve taken. I don’t know what compelled her to come, but I think it was my thu’um. When a dragon hears its name, it is not bound to respond, but always will out of curiosity and competition. I should give her a word of power, but Snow Wing Hunter is better than anything I could come up with on my own, and she has definitely carried me to Skuldafn many times to meet my Alduins.
I get lost in the flight.
I only get lost in the fight when the adrenaline comes down. It’s not her responsibility to keep it up. I would like it if she’d take on the responsibility of telling me up front the timeframe with which I’m dealing so it calms my anxiety that she’s not always mad at me. It’s hard to feel secure on three words.
What I loved about her letter the other day was twofold. I fell in love with her prose about her family, the everyday life she leads while also being powerful, the dynamic that Lindsay and I have so I could relate on a spiritual level. What it takes to be superhuman at staying awake, because she’s on call a lot of the time (as is Lindsay- news breaks). What it takes to be a big sister in her family. Or, what she wants it to take and I can feel her emotions regarding it from a million miles away. I know the particular pain of losing a mother and finding yourself as the new matriarch suddenly….. especially not being prepared in any way to do so because I feel like it’s my responsibility to be providing for her. She’s the little sister that could. She’s just so sweet about giving me experiences I never would have had otherwise while totally cheering me on as a writer.
That’s been Supergrover’s role in my life as well. I think one of the pricks on my skin that won’t heal is saying that I portray her as a villain as often as I do a friend and rages about it……. while also raging that I paint her as a “Flat Stanley.” I feel that the ups and downs make her a 3D character. Everything she sends me that shows me a real feeling, I include it, because since it’s her real feeling, it’s my real feeling, too. I have said this line before, but I will remember it forever. I didn’t know who “Flat Stanley” was, but I told her that “Flat Stanley has a history of amazing topography.” She is a 3D character, but she isn’t if you take every entry individually instead of reading me like a book. Start in January of last year and read forwards and a 3D character will emerge no matter who it is in my life.
Most people trade the forest for the trees. As I have told her, I feel like my years are so much more important than my days. No one has ever loved her the way I have, and not in terms of depth. In the way that love is executed every day. I became a journalist from the day we met, tasked with telling my own story while not revealing my source. Any misstep on my part feels like a little betrayal, and Supergrover doesn’t talk to me about my writing, so I have no idea how close to the line I am or how I can protect her more in the future. She said that I mentioned something she wanted to keep quiet, but I have no idea what it was that she wanted to keep private, for instance, so I couldn’t go back and fix it.
I want to know what touches her, because everything I write about her is something I’ve gotten lost in, because it was kind of like meeting The Oracle and finding out I’m Neo. My mind went into hyperdrive, and I began to think differently, and on as big a scale as possible because all of the sudden I knew I was capable of it. I’ve realized that I would be happy in a think tank if that were a thing that could happen, mostly because I’m a “plant,” the employee who comes up with great ideas by synthesizing information in the room and building off what other people have said until there’s a consensus.
But I never would have believed that I belonged at that particular table until Supergrover told me I was too smart for my own good.
I get that a lot, but I didn’t believe it until 2013 (a typo when I said that the Argo message came in 2003, I remember). She’s not the president, nor elected to anything, nor can I tell you whether she’s private or public industry (except that she and Zac both speak “acronym.”). What I can tell you is that her compliment had a lot of power behind it. Her CV makes me constantly wonder who she’s met all over the world, especially movie stars.
I miss her pithy comments on my entries, because when she was an e-mail subscriber, instead of commenting here, she’d just forward me the e-mail and flip me shit. She can say so much in so few words, even better when they’re teasing directed at me or our favorite Instagram influencer. Speaking of which, we need to talk about that, too, beautiful girl. It’s probably nothing, but it’s a “how dead am I?” sort of question. Another thing that whether this makes her land on my desk to my thu’um is up for grabs. What is important is that I will remember exactly what this means for a hundred years because all of these feelings are burned into my brain.
The rhythm has calmed, but we still have to dance. I’m not trying to be her partner, I’m trying to be her co-author unless her husband also writes. Maybe she’d rather collaborate with him if that’s the case, and I don’t have any ill will toward that. And it’s not that I have this desperate need to write about her because she’s a powerful person. It’s not. It’s that she became a big part of my story personally, and not of her big shot mess ever mattered.
I love the absolute smallest part of her, because that’s the part I love about everyone. I like vulnerability because I can make accurate decisions on how to behave next. The only reason I spiraled out with her is that I was medically falling apart and I want to throw up every time I think of that time in my life because it cost us so much trust and time. To think that she thinks all of this is her fault is horrible because I’ve been trying to make amends for so many years and it has come across as accusation.
She did indeed throw a bomb over her shoulder and walk away. The truth hurts. But it wasn’t the bomb that hurt. It was walking away and not dealing with the fallout. It showed the ultimate disrespect to me because it was like “I get to tell you whatever I want and then not care how it makes you feel.” She says she’s not responsible for my reactions. No, she’s not, but if she wants to stay my friend she better well be willing to clean up her own mess, because I didn’t ask for it. I’m not guilting you (universal), I am holding you to the standard of being a good friend. How is it anyone’s right to leave the other person so much worse than they found them by listening so closely at first that we were breathing in the right direction……… then holding a wrong over my head for so long that we never moved back into safe space for her? She lost the ability to be a decent friend, her words, not mine.
Then she opened up and told me that my guesses about her behavior were right on target and also that it was too late while also saying “story for another day” while also writing me something so beautiful I’m still chewing on it days later. I don’t know what to think, but I know what I see, and it is a spectrum. We’re better writers as a team than we are alone.
It just depends on whether writing means as much to her as it does to me. It doesn’t have to be blog entries because I’m an audience of one, and the same goes for me- the safe space where I sandbox.
She’s not the love of my life where I get lost in her beauty, wishing like a lovesick puppy for just one hug or what the fuck ever. She’s the love of my life due to writing being the only real partner I have. And she’s the brain that comes with that package, because I feel like she whipped my ass into shape by editing me and giving me feedback on letters as well. I miss that relationship, because it exists outside of time and space. I’d be happy if it always did, but my mind sees so many futures that it’s hard to decide and I’m grateful to also have enough closure to let go. Just because she let her walls down once doesn’t mean she has the strength to do it all the time, and that’s what I need from her if she doesn’t want to meet me in person. I will never be able to pick up subtext if I don’t because I won’t be able to read it in her voice.
I take everything literally, and I’m a “get off my lawn” personality. I rarely apologize for it, but it’s an important flaw in my character in this relationship. But I’m not “get off my lawn” years old on purpose. I’m autistic and lecture as such. I become an overexplainer to avoid awkward silence, of which there has been a lot.
It’s not awkward silence anymore, because she told me she loved me in two different ways. The first was “if I hear your call, I will always come…. because I love my girl.” It was the ending of my letter to Michael writ large. I was right on the money, dear reader. I cannot believe it. Seriously. She swooped in with all the big sister badass no bullshit love I’ve come to know. She doesn’t have to say a word. She said that she was constantly overwhelmed because I was demanding, when I was dreaming. The second was letting me know she things about me all the time, the thing that would have calmed me the most.
I don’t want to be around anyone who doesn’t want to be around me, and I got my answer. Maybe. As it has been for 10 years…… and where I get lost.
What movies or TV series have you watched more than 5 times?
I have seen “Space Camp” at least 25 times since it came out. I was in love with both the camp itself AND Leah Thompson/Kate Capshaw. I don’t want to be an astronaut anymore, but I do still love women. Therefore, at least one lesson took. It is important to learn everything you do not want in adulthood as it is what you do.
Two or three years after “Space Camp” came out, I went to a science and math magnet in Houston called “Clifton Middle School.” I’ve actually spent time at NASA on more than a field trip. I was intimidated by science, fascinated by the way people have to teamwork up there. It’s all creativity whether or not you started with creativity in your wheelhouse or not.
Music gets under my skin faster than television, so I have not watched all of “Westworld” or “The Good Fight,” but I’ve listened to the themes on YouTube for days at a time. I feel that way about a lot of television themes. I have never seen Peter Gunn, but I have blasted the music at top volume screaming down 95. It’s especially fun hearing the vamp and inserting your own rendition of “Dope Nose” by Weezer.
I have seen “Argo” more than 25 times, but the difference between it and “Space Camp” is that by now, “Argo” lives in my brain and I can quote from it at will. The only lines I don’t know are in Farsi, but I still do the sounds and the hand motions. 😉 If someone starts a line from the dialogue, I can finish it. There aren’t any YouTube videos or articles I can stomach called “Things Even Real Fans Don’t Know About Argo,” because I could have made a better one and I know it. If that sounds too confident/arrogant of me, Jonna Mendez knows who I am, and Tony would have had I met him before he stopped doing public appearances (he once taught an entire room of people at The International Spy Museum how to forge Putin’s signature). It’s not Jonna’s story, but she did help write the book with Tony after the movie came out because there was such a demand for it. I knew that she was an uncredited writer on it, so I think she was surprised/pleased that I asked her to autograph my copy. So, my copy of “Argo” is unique, because it has both their signatures on it….. if I can track down Matt Baglio, I’ll have him sign it, too, because he’s the person that’s helped both of them on all their books. I think we’re friends on Twitter? I don’t know. Jonna hasn’t said where he lives, so I don’t know if he’s local or if they work together electronically.
For instance, I’ll bet you didn’t know that if you watch the busy airport scenes in Argo, Jonna and the kids are in it.
I told you I could make a better video. 😉
In terms of TV series(es), I do not have HBO. But if I did, my two comfort shows there are “Six Feet Under” and “Homeland.”
I was so shocked by the end of Homeland that I felt like someone shot me. My nerve endings just all went to shit. Now that the show is so old, I’ll just spoil it so I can tell you what I didn’t like about it.
Carrie was a bipolar mastermind working on the side of the United States. THEY FUCKED WITH THE FORMULA. She could always pull it out in the end. She could always make things go her way. And then all of the sudden she started working for Russia? GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. Yes, I realized she replaced our Russian asset there, but that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. You don’t get to betray the US and then get a “get out of jail free” card after you’ve already screwed us to the wall. Saul’s face looked like he was pleased at the end. Why he didn’t burn that bridge is beyond me.
She self-destructed and shouldn’t have had any friends at the agency left. The great part about the show was seeing a bipolar person doing the work of five case officers because she could think outside the box. The ending was a shitshow and I will hate it forever because it just shows that CIA was right all along not to trust her, and it adds to the exact stigma that the show was trying to erase.
“Six Feet Under” still resonates with me because my family worked a little bit like a family who runs a funeral home (I was a United Methodist preacher’s kid). I remember talking with my friend Meg about this, because she grew up in a house with a funeral home like the Fishers and our lives were not dissimilar. It’s also my “Lindsay” show, the one thing that both of us are always in the mood to watch.
As she says, “Leslie, you’re David. I’m Claire……. and there’s a little bit of Nate in everybody.”
I have found over time that I’m actually more like Keith, uptight like a cop and also rushing in to take care of everyone. It’s an accurate description of INFJ/Autistic, physically reacting at people breaking the rules and holding taking care of people above all of them.
Wait. I have to say that to myself again. I think it’s one of the biggest truth bombs I’ve ever uncovered about myself:
I’m physically reacting to people breaking the rules, and holding taking care of people above all of them.
In order for me to love people the way they need to be loved, I have to keep my autism at bay. I have to keep physically reacting to other people’s problems the way I do my own. I physically reacted to one of Supergrover’s issues so hard that she thinks I’m out to get her, when I’m actually empathizing with her. I don’t know what I did to give her the message that what she told me was bad. She’s been having a fight with me that is in her own head, really, because she thinks I want to make her feel guilty when I am telling her the reality of how her behavior affects me….. and that we should talk about it.
She starts from the position that I’m out to get her, which means she won’t open up. That causes me physical pain, because I know that what she thinks is not true, and I cannot fix her problem for her. She accused me of wanting to rush in and fix everything in someone else’s life, when that is exactly what we both want to do to our friends because we’re both big sisters. She just does not like being the younger one. At all. In any way. That means she’s blind to the fact that I’m doing the same thing to her all the time that she does for everyone else. She thinks I’m out to get her while I’m trying to do the same thing for her that I do for all the people I consider brothers and sisters. It’s a fundamental breakdown in communication, the can we’ve been kicking.
Media helps me to understand all of this, but I learn about emotions through intelligence movies and TV better than anything else because they’re procedural, even if the procedure is completely made up. I can also tell you the exact moment I switched procedurals in college. I used to like detective shows, and then there was “Alias.”
I’ve watched “Alias” many, many times. I still return to it when I want to be with those characters- something about it won’t let go of you. Jennifer Garner is so cute, the perfect balance of sweet and “I can kill you in 57 different ways, none of them pleasant.”
I’ve been trying to find a new character like hers to love for years, so I have gravitated toward intelligence shows ever since. I know they’re fake as FUCK because the CIA cannot tell everyone their current methods and sources. I don’t care. Emotionally, they’re all written the same way.
The way you get an accurate depiction of intelligence is to write about it in a time period where those operations are declassified. Those documents will tell you exactly how they did what they did without sugar coating anything. Dialogue can be accurate because there’s no reason for smoke and mirrors 40 years later…. or however long it takes for your interest to declassify, which may be a lot longer.
It is why I like the founding years of CIA the most, their origin story. OSS/early CIA operations are declassified, essential for an author if I want anything to sound real. The easiest stories to make true to life are now science fiction, I believe, because there is so much more information on how those intelligence operations actually ran between Russia and the US in the 50s and 60s. The way we got to the moon first was largely due to a war between CIA and KGB, because we had real chatter they were going to put nukes on the moon.
Speaking of which, I got to see Vince Houghton at Jonna’s talk the other night. So good to see him. Vince was the host of “SpyChat” before Dr. Andrew Hammond took over. His non-fiction book about intelligence is called “Nuking the Moon,” which is what made me think of him. 😉 I don’t think Dr. Hammond was in the audience, because I would have known his Scottish brogue anywhere. And yes, it is like James Alexander Malcom McKenzie Fraser does Spycast.
I will be taking no further questions. 😉
Vince was actually on a PBS documentary about intelligence at Bletchley Park, and it focused on women. Of course Alan Turing is important, but he wasn’t the only operative there, either.
I find now that people’s true stories matter more to me than television and movies. I reference old media because I watch YouTube most of the time. That gets me Frontline and all the other PBS shows, plus videos about people making things. Live bootlegs are also exciting because they come in video now.
I just can’t think of channels that I subscribe to that would be that well known, and I’m always trying to use universal illustrations because my audience is all over the world.
I should start looking for an intelligence show to watch while Zac is busy, because I love “Slow Horses” and I could never cheat on him. That way, I will at least have some updated references and shows that aren’t 20 years old that still appeal to me.
I started one on Hulu that has so far been outstanding called “The Lazarus Project.” Go into it blind. It’s a rabbit hole with a great payoff.
I can already tell you that “Slow Horses” is going to be one of my new comfort shows. I’ll give you the basics.
River Cartwright blew up a bunch of people by not stopping a terrorist…… in a simulation at MI-6. It is taken every bit as seriously as if it had really happened, but they can’t fire him; his grandfather used to be “C” or something…. unclear, but a higher up (my prediction is that this is going to be Tinker Tailor and that the grandfather is a puppet master. I have only seen season one. Please don’t spoil).
Anyway, since they can’t fire River, they place him at “Slough House,” which is where all washed up MI-6 go. Then, it becomes a story about a team who everyone thinks is shit flipping the script. If I had to compare it to an American movie, it’s “Moneyball,” and the writers are just as good as Aaron Sorkin. They take everyone’s imperfections and they blend…… because River is every bit as smart as his grandfather and he is able to lead others. He made a mistake in a simulation, and Mi-6 isn’t prepared to accept the fact that River is the real deal, or they know exactly who he is and have to keep him out of the way. Unclear, and a brilliant plot device. Is his boss disgusted with him or proud of him? The audience knows. River doesn’t.
I love Gary Oldman, who plays River’s boss. If I had a picture in my mind when I watched the video of Jonna calling herself “a real hardass at CIA,” it was Lamb.
I also love Jack Lowden, as well. I’ve gotten to know him through watching Graham Norton. It was great because I knew who Jack was before I got into “Slow Horses” at all.
“Killing Eve” is another one of those shows I’ve watched over and over, but I haven’t seen the end. I just keep rewatching the first few seasons, thinking I’m going to rewatch the whole thing and giving up. The pilot is the best episode of them all, anyway. It is a fight within me over whether Carolyn or Eve is my favorite character. Oh, wait. No. There’s not. I love Carolyn. It’s my mother’s name, as well as her character being an archetype I happen to love.
She kind of reminds me of Jack Bristow in “Alias,” except Jack had a bigger heart. Eve Pulaski is a lot like River Cartwright.
I used to love the show “Whiskey Cavalier,” because it was a very lighthearted look at CIA that didn’t suck up all the air in the room with drama. It was often ridiculous and therefore, well, fun.
I don’t always want as much realism as possible. Sometimes, I just want to be able to let go and laugh.
I got my review on our interactions at the book talk. Jonna Mendez told my dad that I’m a “spitfire,” and she won’t have any idea how much that means to me, because everyone has called my ex-wife that since she was a toddler and it felt like at the lecture, I brought my own shoes. So, not only was it an enormous compliment, it was sentimental in word choice for me. I loved it.
She’s kind of my inspiration as for what life will be like for all retired spies. That they’re having fun in their retirement when they’ve had such thankless jobs all their lives. The military gets plenty of recognition, but at CIA, you don’t want anyone to know you’ve literally moved heaven and earth that day. You can’t let anyone know. So, you’ve basically got a vet with PTSD living in your house and you may never know why. That doesn’t seem fun to me….. not the doing cool shit part. That seems great. Not being able to tell people what you do leaves out an entire piece of who you are. No one thinks of government wonks as having PTSD, and let’s face it. Most people at CIA are, in fact, government wonks with a desk job because the directorate of operations is not the entire Agency.
You just have to assume that every employee is Jonna Mendez, because if they were, they couldn’t tell you. It’s how you have empathy for intelligence officers in operations without asking any questions at all. Most people tell their partners that they’re CIA because of the logistics involved with why mom or dad has to be gone so often and at a moment’s notice.
No one tells their friends, their parents, their kids anything until they’re at least able to understand the seriousness of keeping quiet. It varies. Marti Peterson’s son figured it out on his own, I think, at about 15 (Marti Peterson was Trigon’s handler, the one that kept us far ahead in the Cold War.). Some people, like taking the vows to become a priest, decide that having a family is too much to handle and they live their entire lives under green glass.
The road to Oz is paved with good intentions.
I think I have found why I’m in love with intelligence. It’s the only profession I’ve found in the government where the research makes me wonder about their lives at home. I’m a very emotional, highly sensitive person. When I read things where Jonna is in danger, my heart still beats fast though nothing physically happened to her, BUT IT COULD HAVE. I’m such a tender heart hear that I want to hug her for surviving something that happened 30 years ago, so she’s probably okay, and I’m still like, “do you need Kleenex?”
I treat her like the cool grandmother, the one that makes Halloween exciting because who would know more about disguise? Ok, so Jonna and Tony Mendez Halloweens. Gotta talk about it. I wonder what it was actually like vs. what I think happened. They’re retired disguise artists and Tony was a magician. I’m not saying it was epic, but it being boring doesn’t add up in that particular household.
I’m buried in her book right now, and I’m debating getting a Kindle copy because it’s not large print. My eyes are glazing over even though I’m desperately interested because I don’t have a bright enough light to be able to see the text.
I know I’ll get a copy at some point, anyway, because I would like to have it in my digital library in case the house catches fire (now that I’ve been through two house fires, I’m practical). All of my signed Mendez books are kept in the top drawer of a very tall dresser- no mirror, just extra storage. There’s probably a very fancy French name for it, but I’m in the groove and I don’t want to break it to look it up. I have them all now. All of them autographed, and all but the newest on my Kindle as well.
So, that’s why it’s cool that Jonna thinks I’m a spitfire.
Who gets to meet their favorite author, and it turns out they like each other? It’s insane.
As I joked many years ago, “I have now met all of my favorite authors- Anne Lamott, David Sedaris, and Jonna Mendez. It was an absolute pleasure for Jonna to meet me.” I think she said something like, “charmed,” but it was funny. She is so fast.
When she’s in front of me, I just see graphics of “The Flash,” because that’s what happens in my head when I think about all the layers of complexity there are to the things she says in public. I actually do get more of that in my daily life thanks to Zac working in intelligence, which just reinforces my strict boundaries on what I will and won’t ask her. I wasn’t trying to throw her a fast one in the YouTube video. I was giving her a true moment of authenticity because when she was talking about a practical joke or whatever, of course it wouldn’t be classified. She could just be herself, with all her real emotions.
I am not a journalist, and I am not pretending that having a blog is equal to having a newspaper. Therefore, I just wanted a “slice of life” kind of story. What happens when I get involved with discussions on intelligence is that I am often quicker in my questions than they are in their answers; they begin to struggle against it because I am so smart that I am definitely on the right track but we can’t go there anymore. Zac can tell me with one look when the Chinese Wall needs to go up, and he doesn’t even have to look at me. I can tell by the way he reacts physically, even when I’m behind him.
I do not want to know the rest of the story. I want to know how much I’ve gotten right in the reading I’ve done. I am really the Autistic State Department all by myself, or so it has seemed some days. I am also every bit as uptight as Leo calling The New York Times to tell them they misspelled Qaddafi in the crossword.
Lindsay once called me David from “Six Feet Under,” and in retrospect I know it’s not because we’re queer……….. Lindsay and I are David and Claire to an enormous degree depending on when you meet us. I’m reminded of this because earlier I was talking to someone about how I loved the ads in the pilot.
I would like to think I’m more David Rose (Schitt’s Creek) than David Fisher, but you get what you get. Honestly, it being surprising Jonna called me a “spitfire” is precisely because I think of myself as David Fisher. I’m completely buttoned down except to one person. A spitfire seems exciting. David Fisher is boring.
But maybe my inner David Rose comes out more when she’s around, like flipping each other shit after the book talk. If I had been drinking something, you would not be getting this entry. I would have choked and died right there.
I told Oliver, who is a dog, all about it. He is now apprised of all my current operations, covert and public-facing. The thing I love about Oliver is that he loves being around me whether I’ve been a jackass that day or not. And I have very few days in which I don’t look like a jackass at one point or another. He’s the one I go to when I’m at the end of my rope, because what he lacks in conversational skills he makes up for in presence.
But sometimes, I do like feedback.
I need to talk to someone who knows geopolitical affairs and yet has no access to classified documents so that whatever they say won’t get me into hot water when I talk about things here. That’s why it’s easier to run my relationship with Zac through the New York Times. If it hasn’t been published there, he doesn’t tell me. We are not keeping each other out. We are protecting me as a writer and him as a civilian employee in intelligence, as well as Navy Reserves. It’s just better all the way around if we pretend the world isn’t going to hell in a handbasket and just enjoy “Slow Horses” together.
You know what’s better than watching Slow Horses? Watching it with someone who is really in intelligence and pauses it to point out sloppy tradecraft and/or plot. I like pausing it because it is literally the VH1 Pop Up Video of MI-6.
That’s the best thing about seeing spies talk about their memoirs when they retire, actually, because depending on when they left, you can learn about the operations that went on during your childhood….. for instance, one of the things I loved about Argo is that the real events happened when I was two. It was not ancient history to me, it was within my lifetime.
I feel the same way about operations in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, etc. All the things that informed who I was as a person back then. Getting to see behind the press is the most fun part of studying intelligence. Getting to beat the press? I’m not that important, nor do I want to be.
I can say so much more in describing people than I can in describing what is going on politically, because people can relate to a conversation in the room. They can’t relate to countries talking in a room. It’s like most people not having a relationship with a million dollars, so they have no concept of how small or large that is. However, they know exactly how much $25 is and how it would affect them if they lost it.
I know this because one of my friends from one of our churches told me that after we left (by many years), they were in a huge budget discussion over a multimillion dollar restoration project that resolved quickly and fought over buying the kids’ Easter baskets.
People don’t have a concept when it comes to scale.
I am happy being but a citizen of Locker C, because I’ve found the right balance of how to know without knowing. How to judge by sensory perception and not words. Ultimately, what happens in the world doesn’t matter as much as what’s happening inside my boyfriend’s head. I see the difference, because he can say “the world’s a mess and I’m tired,” but he’ll be taking no further questions. I just try and hug the tension out of him, because I know that he’s carrying information he can’t talk about, but our mirror neurons can. They’ve had extensive conversations at this point.
Because I’m starting to think that Zac agrees with Jonna. I’m a spitfire, and other people know it better than I do. Honestly, what gives me the balls to write what I write is being a preacher’s kid. I have seen/met so many, many people over my lifetime and I’m only now starting the process I saw as a child. Seeing someone transition from being afraid of having an opinion to knowing it’s not right to let someone steamroll all over you and if you don’t say anything, you’re part of the problem. I was part of the problem in a lot of cases because I wouldn’t talk about my feelings. I have a barbed wire fence in my heart, and I gave SG! my access code. That way, her area was compartmentalized- what made it feel so much like a secret.
Seeing each other in a different context so that we weren’t constantly at each other’s throats has only been on the table once, and it was a long time ago. She wasn’t ready, but she told me that there was a possibility in the future and she’s told me over and over that she doesn’t lie about anything. It wasn’t a put-on, we’ve just changed over the years.
I wasn’t so much creating a dream, in retrospect (from yesterday 🙄). It was constant reassurance that we could do such a thing. That I wasn’t weirded out by the idea when it was frightening we might not vibe in person the way we do through writing. It might have broken what we have rather than supporting it. I don’t think I’ll ever know. But what I do know is that I was reassuring myself that this was real, keeping myself grounded, and hoping she’d help. She didn’t until recently, because the longer we didn’t talk about things, the worse I felt. It was dehumanizing to an enormous degree, because she doesn’t see me as hurt. She sees me as angry, so she’s hurt. I am angry. I am hurt. But it doesn’t turn off the emotions I have regarding things that have felt like love but somehow aren’t?
I felt that tension, and she confirmed it. She was hiding how she felt because she was afraid of my reaction, which has now happened three or four times in our relationship, and the first crack in the facade that this was not going to be good for me is that she accused me of something I didn’t do and held it over my head until I explained to her what actually happened. She admitted she’d been deflecting from another issue. It’s a pattern that has repeated for ten years, except her avoidance of problems scares me. I’m used to being able to talk it out. She’s used to sweeping things under the rug. It’s a fundamental difference in what makes us achieve equilibrium.
So, the more I opened up, the more she felt guilty. The more she felt guilty, she tried to placate me. She thought that I was demanding of her time, when I was demanding that she tell the truth. That’s all. Stop leaving me in the dark about everything so that I know how to plan for any kind of future. It’s exhausting thinking about all of them.
I don’t know what changed, but something did. I couldn’t anticipate her needs. She couldn’t anticipate mine. But we could have fixed it a lot earlier than we did…. because at present I feel like it’s fixed. I didn’t deny anything, and I didn’t apologize for it, either, because I refuse to know you’re hurt in advance. You’re the one derailing my story at that point, because I don’t make shit up. I think about what I know, because that’s how much control I have.
If I have enough chutzpah to talk about my problems every day, I expect that other people are also that emotionally capable. I’m not always right, but I know I’m giving everyone the benefit of the doubt and not “talking down to the audience.” I tire quickly of people who can’t emote, because I refuse to live in the traditional culture of women….. doing most things by inference while men just say what they want and if other people agree with them, they say so. If they think another man is an idiot, they’ll say that, too. What they won’t do is stand there and say nothing….. at least in my experience. A Texan will not let themselves be wrong with grace and style. They won’t let other people “be wrong,” either, because all men are convinced that if they explain something, it’s correct. When men are together, everyone decides how correct they are in percentages.
It seems dumb, but it allows everyone to take up room and have their own opinions while also allowing everyone to save face….. the idiots gaining at least a point for comic relief.
That’s what I need in my relationships. For the other person to realize that I know I own 50% of the problem, but if your way of resolving it is to put distance between us, you’ll only feel more resentful the next time we get together. You think you’re saving my feelings. but it hurts more when the fight resolves a year or two later by taking 20 minutes to talk/cry it out. Now we’ve traded 20 minutes for a year in which we could have been happier, because the energy it takes to dislike someone is heavy and dark. I don’t want to carry it longer than necessary.
If that’s how my feelings are about someone, I’ve learned to find closure in myself and move on. I don’t have time to waste on people who find deflection easier than conflict resolution. I have found those people over and over in my life, because lots of people tiptoe around me. I want to know why to change me, but also why other people stop taking up space when they’re perfectly entitled to it. It’s so much easier to be giants together than unable to express ourselves because we’re afraid.
However, it’s easy to see how this pattern begins. You think you’re compatible because the connection is explosive. You think differently, so you’re feeding separate parts of each other’s brain. Over time it becomes toxic because one person gets so tired of the other emoting………. which makes the other person scared of emotions and avoidant as well. Then, neither of the people in the relationship are helping to resolve conflict and move on.
The trap is manhole cover in size, as has been with all of the women I’ve been with. Even with polyamory sometimes it’s about difference and sometimes it’s not realizing that the people’s unique experiences make them seem different. You just don’t realize it until the new wears off….. my fear of ever getting married again. That I will get stuck with someone who can’t talk about their emotions, but I won’t find out until I’m completely invested like I was with Sam, et al, I assure you.
For me, getting married again would be paperwork, because I don’t want a partner to be able to touch my inheritance, for instance. It’s too precious, not that I wouldn’t share it should I choose to when I’m as ancient as you’re going to be. I’m the type person that if I have it and my people need it, it’s theirs. But I’ve never had enough money to test my limits, which so far have been using me up first.
It was worth it for a moment of being a spitfire, because I know it takes one to notice another.
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.
Stories That Are All True 