Describe the most ambitious DIY project you’ve ever taken on.
Several times in my life I’ve helped friends and family members flip a house. I got to do the second one because apparently I did okay on the first.
Here’s the most important thing I learned the whole time.
….and my words are paper tigers, no match for the predator of pain inside her….
Love Will Come to You, The Indigo Girls
Before I flipped a house, I had no idea what a paper tiger was. They are of the devil, and I got the allusion immediately. A paper tiger is a device you put on top of wallpaper to rip it to shreds so you can scrape it off. It leaves everything in ribbons. Except there’s still the glue to deal with, so everything is ripped to shreds, yet still stuck to the wall. The paper tiger quickly becomes ineffective because you think you’re making progress and you’re actually filling the teeth with glue.
So, you can fight with the wallpaper all day long and make no progress whatsoever.
I can think of so many people that the Indigo Girls represent with this line, because there are so many people married to their glue, unwilling to open up- even when another person needs to hear what they have to say.
I also learned how to tackle raspberry brambles, also of the devil and paper tigers without glue. More than one has ripped me to shreds.
But wait- that wasn’t the first time I’d built a house, and I’d forgotten about it.
In the United Methodist Church, there’s a group called UMCOR (United Methodist Committee on Relief). They give lots of money for youth groups to go on mission trips, which mostly consisted of going out into poor towns and building houses or building accommodations for houses, like wheelchair ramps.
So, I also know how to lay shingles, put the flashing on a roof, and watch my dad absolutely freak out at seeing me doing it. Nobody likes to watch their baby putting flashing on the edge of a roof, because he knew I had balance issues. I didn’t. It was fine, but I can see his concern this many years later when I couldn’t in the moment.
I have also helped build the aforementioned wheelchair ramps. I let other people do the measuring and cutting, because I really wasn’t the best person to ask. My cuts would have come out diagonal just like with food…. or maybe not, because there are better tools to keep boards in place than there are for food….
I’m better at finish carpentry, like sanding, painting, shellac, etc. I also love to paint sheetrock with Killz and new colors. I generally do several coats of Killz on new sheetrock as well, just because I’m a perfectionist.
I am really great at helping do things. I am not so great at doing things on my own. I think it’s because I have enough limitations that I need an extra set of eyes. For instance, it would be fun to work on Zac’s car or motorcycle, but I wouldn’t unless he asked me to help, which in my mind means “stand there and hold stuff.” This is a more important job to mechanics than you might think, especially lights. Holding lights is like hazing in the operating room. Stand there, holding this in a very awkward way, for at least half an hour. At least if I drop the light a few inches, no one dies.
DIY is soothing to me, but as Zac says, “I *could* work on my car, but I make enough money to get someone else to do that.” So, I doubt that we’ll ever go out in the front yard for “guy stuff.” Mostly because I’ve never ridden a donorcycle, because my dad and stepmom wouldn’t be nearly as angry if I got hurt as having to deal with Dr. Anthony, because if I lived from the accident, she would beat my ass with a hairbrush. Tiffany is a liver and kidney transplant specialist. She knows from donorcycles.
If you believe nothing else I say, believe that. Transplant surgeons get *a lot* of their organs to transplant from motorcycle riders, thus the name….. which is universal across all hospitals in the US, don’t know about worldwide.
So, while it doesn’t bother me that Zac has a motorcycle, or that Lindsay and Matt have both ridden them as well, I’m not sure that I would ever be tempted because all I see is Dr. Anthony’s “mad face.” Besides, I have a solid reason for keeping my organs *intact,* mostly living.
I have a feeling I would not be very good at holding lights for her, but that’s okay because she’d never ask me. I would argue that I’m “smarter than a gas man,” but that has more to do with the way anesthesiologists get made fun of in the hospital, not that I am actually as smart as a person who can get into medical school (and by that, I mean smart in STEM. I’m plenty smart in other ways.).
I find that I am as smart in medicine as I am in computers. I do not program, and I do not weld things to the motherboard when a capacitor is out or anything like that, but I know my way around most software and what to do when it breaks. I can run commands in a terminal with my eyes closed, literally because I made myself try it.
Here’s the funniest command. To list what’s in the working directory, the command is ls. If you install sl, when you make that typo, an ASCII choo choo will roll across the screen.
I think linux is why I don’t use DOS anymore. The commands are so different that I type a linux command first, every time, and then have to think about what it is in DOS.
For instance, listing a directory in DOS is “dir,” and there is no ASCII choo choo if you make a mistake, a flaw in its character.
But it’s worse than that. I have been WAY further into linux commands than necessary before I realized I was in PowerShell (DOS terminal):
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade -y
In linux, that stands for “update my software catalog, install the updates, and don’t ask me whether I want to install the packages after I’ve downloaded them. Just do it.
In DOS, this means *absolutely nothing.*
Windows does not make for good DIY, because they want to control every part of the user experience the way Apple does. Windows is not really for business anymore, because even Windows Pro comes with a thousand “lane bumpers” to stop you from doing what you want to do. You have to turn on developer mode to be able to install any piece of software you want, otherwise it will ask “are you sure?” every single time. This is especially prevalent with software from GitHub, and I think that’s because Windows does not like open source.
It’s easier to turn on developer mode than it is to go through and change all the settings, like “show hidden folders” and “show file extensions.” It’s a lot of DIY just to set up a Windows box, and linux is so much easier. Plus, no one has ever tried to sell me anything unless I’ve downloaded a program that’s not open source. If I do that, the developers should be paid.
For some reason, my computer won’t dual boot, and it makes me sad….. but it’s better now that you can install a linux virtual machine inside Windows so that I still have access to linux command line programs. I usually keep btop running in the background because in linux I use a program called conky to list my processes, memory usage, CPU and GPU usage, etc. btop will do all of it, and is light on CPU usage. If you’ve used htop before, it’s the same, just a better user interface.
But here’s the worst trick the devil ever pulled. In Windows, you can divide the terminal into as many blocks as you want, but if you don’t change the settings yourself, when it divides it brings up PowerShell instead of another linux terminal. Just more Windows trying to push itself on you. I do not know anyone who uses DOS command line anymore, except for system administrators, and they’re more likely to have Macs these days, because the government gets a good deal on them and they come complete with unix out of the box. There are linux laptops and desktops out there, but none that have the reach of Apple to be able to get those government and education deals.
So, where their need begins, so does my DIY. I can fix one computer or 50 at once.
My life didn’t get interesting until I was 30, and just got more interesting from there. I wouldn’t want to give my teenage self any advice that would alter the events that led me to DC, to Zac, and to Oliver, who is a dog.
That’s because in order to get here, I had to go through some really rough stuff- and yet none of it is anything I would give away or trade. I found my place, even at 23, but I had to go and come back. I don’t know why. I really liked it here. I just didn’t think I could make it on my own. I do not have that capability, to take on the 1,001 things it takes to move in 30 days and also find a roommate. To be fair, though, I didn’t know about Craig’s List back then. Perhaps if I had, I wouldn’t have met the people I needed to meet, and that’s the one thing I wouldn’t want to change for the kid inside me.
So, in order not to change anything:
I’m sorry mom doesn’t understand. Don’t spend your life worrying about it because there’s nothing you can do to make her change. There will be small steps, but no giant leaps. Stay as close to her as you can, but admit to yourself when spending time with her makes you feel unloved.
Lindsay is going to be big one day. I just won’t tell you how. You could learn a thing or two from her if you’d let yourself.
You’re ADHD, Autistic, and Bipolar. That’s something I will tell you right now, because when you get older it’s going to be harder to get tested for autism, and you need to get on meds stat. You’re struggling in school and you don’t know why. Your doctors might not, either, because there’s not a lot of research in the year you live on women and autism. But give yourself at least that head start on life. I know hearing those things is intimidating. Go to a psychiatrist, anyway.
You need to practice gratitude and mindfulness because when I was your age I took some kind of Scantron quiz that inventoried my personality. My psychiatrist said that I had the lowest self-esteem of anyone who’d ever taken the test. Write every day. Go back and look to see if what you wrote is still true. Give yourself a chance to see yourself as you are, not how you feel in the moment.
In every relationship, you need to ask yourself what the other person is bringing to the table, and when you feel ignored or sad or hurt or whatever your emotions might be, listen to how people respond. If it feels like they can’t hear you, they probably can’t…… and there’s a lot of don’t want to in “can’t.” Find people who can hear you.
There is no such thing as a 50/50 relationship. It will often look like 60/40 or even 70/30 because of confirmation bias. But notice when you feel like you can’t get a break, can’t do anything right. You’re not stupid. I won’t tell you what they are, either, but stupid isn’t on the list.
Because of the autism, you’re going to meltdown a lot. Find appropriate outlets for your rage. There are going to be many inappropriate outlets, and I will tell you that you find most of them. But not all. Because you have all of these disorders, you are going to have to learn to be more patient, thinking longer before you speak, because there are so many words that can’t be taken back which you realize just after you’ve already said them. Even when you’re on fire, you can’t take that out on someone else. And yes, I know that your nerves are on fire, that you go into a red mist rage with every physical symptom imaginable. It’s going to hurt you if you don’t take care of it.
The nerve endings on your thumb that you sliced into while trying to cut a lime will never grow back. I’m 46, so I will update you if the situation changes (not a chance, we’re stuck).
You will love soda your whole life because that’s one of the things you and mom will talk about on the phone. There’s not a lot you can do to keep her talking if you talk about your own life, but she’ll tell you all about her job, her friends, her husband, etc. It’s annoying that she never has any questions for you about your life, because she really doesn’t want to know. Do it, anyway. Find things you can talk about. Find a lot of them.
Mothers don’t generally last as long as you want them to; Lindsay and I will never be the same. I figured it might give you some perspective to know how few years you have left with her. Find different ways to bridge the gap. But don’t miss a chance to leave Houston, ever. You’ll get along better with her when you don’t live in the same city and a visit is special.
You’ll want a passport very soon. Might want to start on that. She’s cute.
Now that I’ve had so many days posting in a row, I’ve missed a couple. One was due to two things. The first is that I was exhausted. The second is that it was Galentine’s Day, and I chose to spend my time focusing on my sister (that was 13 Feb). The second was yesterday, because the prompt was “what is your favorite drink?” Now, I could have written about Dr Pepper Zero YET AGAIN, but I include it in so many entries that I didn’t think it needed its own.
Except to say that if you go to Waco, Texas, you will find both the Dr Pepper Museum and The Fort House. My paternal grandmother is a Fort, and it’s the story of her family. I believe those two things are related, because I never saw my grandmother drink anything but Dr Pepper and occasionally, sweet tea. She was sure that it had medicinal properties, and who am I to disagree with my grandmother?
In terms of what bores me the rest of the time, it’s things like RTFM (reading the fucking manual) with software, because I’d rather just play around until I break something. I don’t like reading EULAs (end user license agreements) because I know for damn sure that Facebook, Windows, et al are going to do exactly what they said they wouldn’t do, they’ll just hide it in the background.
In terms of apps that are watching you for possible malice, I’d pick Tik Tok. It’s bad enough when my own government wants my information, much less China. I’m so terrified of the Chinese government that I don’t even want to go there. I know it’s beautiful, I know the people are nice, and I know I’d be thrown in jail with one blog entry or YouTube video, because I would use all my American freedoms to say whatever I liked, forgetting that I am not, in fact, in America.
I am sure that there are all sorts of tips and tricks for surviving a trip to China as an American, but I’m not interested. I’d rather go to a country where I’m already allowed to say what I want to say. So, basically, China bores me because I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything real about my trip until I was safely back home.
I’d rather go somewhere my writing is not threatening, which leaves out Russia, but I’d love to go to Ukraine when the war is over. I got a taste of it through watching “Servant of the People,” and so if it was possible, I’l like to meet President Zelenskyy as well. He’s such a great writer. I wouldn’t want to talk to him about politics, but about how he created his mom, dad, sister, and niece for the show, plus his cabinet. It’s such a funny sendup of all politicians, and you should watch it if you have Netflix. At least the first season is up (in Ukrainian with subtitles).
Foreign movies and TV used to bore me, but not now. I am one of those people that will sit there and scroll on my phone, losing the immersive experience of watching television- but you can’t do that with foreign movies and TV because you have to read the subtitles.
Speaking of foreign shows, I also love Mr. Brain from S. Korea and Osmosis from France. Mr. Brain is on Apple TV+, and Osmosis is also on Netflix.
Mr. Brain is a doctor that learns to transplant one person’s brain into another, but he starts with himself… building up….. so of course he eventually has human memories from other people. However, one of the funniest was when he crossed himself with a cat. I think that was because the cat saw something about a murder and he needed to see the cat’s view. There were….. side effects.
Osmosis is one of those classic sci-fi shows where someone has invented a scientific way for you to find your permanent love match. It just feels a little different from the French perspective- not so formulaic…… and boring. To be fair, I’ve watched all of Dr. Brain and all of Servant of the people, and I’m only on episode two of Osmosis. So, caveat emptor.
Finance bores me because I do not understand the first thing about money except “don’t spend it.” I could live on that principle for the rest of my life, because I say “bore,” but the reality is more complicated. Even reading a textbook or a web article on finance leads to autistic meltdown and burnout. So, I approach finance with the best of intentions and then slowly feel like my body is breaking down. The boring part is just looking up the articles that I need. Once I find what I’m looking for, the panic attack starts.
I do not think I could answer a question about a single thing regarding bank and finance because I get lost at simple terms like “amortization.” I have found that it is not a case of fear, necessarily. It is a case of my autism saying, “nope. We don’t do that.” Demand avoidance is real when your nerves feel like they’re catching on fire and you cannot function.
The fact that I ever thought I could be a good partner to anyone is frightening because I now realize that I had to lean on them far too much. I also don’t know what to do about that, except trying my best to get into a program for autistic people that helps me deal with meltdown and burnout appropriately. I am nowhere near the only person that shuts down when talking about complicated things. It’s just that for me, the complicated things are logical and the easy things are emotional.
I think that’s why I’m solidly on the polyamory train, because I do not want to be in the position of leaning on one person all the time. I am a lot. I know it. My partners/friends become bored/frustrated with me easily and need a break. The only person who doesn’t get a break from me is me, and I wish that was the case as much as they do.
It’s interesting being the only INFJ in my group of friends, because I come off as intense even when I don’t mean to be. To me, they are poignant questions that need to be asked….. but not necessarily questions to which I need answers. They do. I have started saying something important to Zac, because I do not want him to feel like I am prying into his life at all. I just want him to know that he’s loved and supported. So, I say things like, “rhetorical question that I don’t need you to answer, just chew on it.” I hope it’s working well, because I don’t want to ever put him on the spot, and if these were questions about me, then I would expect an answer. But they’re not. They’re things I’ve listened to that have happened at work, social functions, etc. Therefore, it’s okay to ask the question. It’s not okay to expect an answer when it’s not my bag.
I just want Zac to the best person he can be, and I know that in some ways I am helping. He was the one that told me that I inspired him to start writing every day. The cover picture on my author page is the chalkboard painted wall in his entry way, and his handwriting that says, “You Should Be Writing.”
He took it down, so I wrote “You Should Be Writing” the last time I was there. I would like to believe it stayed more than a day. 😛 TFW someone is calling you out…….. and that worked both ways, otherwise his handwriting wouldn’t be my cover photo.
I did experience a moment of success with demand avoidance. My dad told me he needed a file I’d created for him and when I checked my hard drive, it wasn’t there. So, I recreated it for him within the hour. This is all while I was battling a stomach bug, and it was no small thing to be able to transition from upchucking to sitting at my desktop with a trash can next to me. But I did it. A small victory.
When I think back on how bad I wanted to be Supergrover’s partner, it’s now embarrassing because I thought I was on top of the world in terms of being able to do the thing. As in, of course I could manage a partner, kids, a job, and the fast and furious pace of a suburban mom. To be fair, I would have gotten a lot more support from her kids than I would from her or Dana (in the past) and not because her kids are around. She may or may not be. But I would have supported her like Dana, and it wouldn’t have been enough. That’s because both of us were bad at ignoring things and not making lists. It’s not laziness, it’s a genuine disability if you’ve read any neurodivergent book ever.
I also think that I would have been stuck in the same repetitive pattern, because people who are cut off from their emotions aren’t generally cut off in one way. I can tell you the exact moment I realized it, seeing something posted on her social media. But I can’t be specific. I can only say that I’m so glad she’s straight…. JFC. I would have been in over my head from day one.
I think the difference is that she has worked with neurodivergent people in many different settings, so perhaps she would have caught my autism faster than I would have in person. And then it would have been off to the best doctors available because not only did I need help, so did she. When I want to be with a partner, I make the promise to keep myself strong for them. It is not their responsibility to “fix me.” She might have told me the doctors I needed, but after that, I’m on my own. I need to show whether I can fly under my own power.
The only reason she didn’t catch it in me first is that it’s hard to tell over e-mail. Basically, we couldn’t get to a place either of us liked because of the gap in communication.
I’m determined not to do that with Zac or anyone else in my future, because it has gotten me nothing in the past. It touches me to my core that he’s just as honest with me. He asked me if I would come and help clean his house because he was going through a thing I also go through. I got there and he was very apologetic, and I said, “Zac, if it was my house, would you be there?” Of course he would. I’ve just never asked.
So, not much bores me it seems. Humans are interesting, and an endless subject because there are so many of us.
And I hope that in laying out how I work, you see yourself here, too.
Today,, I hope you get the best of me. I am sick to my stomach and dragging ass. But I have to keep writing, because I have to be able to write in any mood. Today, I’m not going to write about just one, because they’re the best gifts according to category.
The two best gifts I’ve ever been given emotionally are Dana and Supergrover. This is because things went down hill at all our hands, but it didn’t start out negative, it just became that way…… mostly because I was just so……… meeeeeeeee.
Editor’s Note:
I hear that phrase, “I was just so…….. meeeeee,” in my friend Drew’s voice because one day Dana and I were in the kitchen at Biddy’s for brunch and Drew was doing dinner. He was late, and said, “I was going to throw my clothes on and run, but I said, “what’s that smell?” And then….. “oh. It’s meeeeeeee.” His lateness was instantaneously excused. Some of the other reasons he was late are absolutely unprintable, but make me love him more.
As you can imagine, the conflict with Supergrover was large and we were both angry at the poor choices we made in getting to know each other. They were numerous, and new relationship energy made us avoid all of it. Anything that would have said “this could be problematic down the road” went out the window. Just because someone is a platonic friend doesn’t deter the feelings of “oh my God I just met the most incredible person.” I honestly think this happens to women more than it does men, because I’ve noticed that men choose three friends in fifth grade and decide that’s enough. Plus, straight women bond easily. You could meet your new best friend online or in a bathroom at “Off the Record.”
So, I sent her a Christmas gift one year without knowing how she’d feel about it, and then I opened up about it. I said, “I’m sorry if I overstepped a boundary by sending you a present. To me, it doesn’t feel weird because I got all my other friends presents and you are one of them.” She thanked me and said it was thoughtful, so then I began to treat her just like my friends on the ground.
The next year, I got her two presents because like Jesus, “this is for Christmas AND your birthday.” I told her I was sending her a present. She said, “a real one?” I said, “as opposed to the fake presents I usually get you? Yes. A real present. Like with wrapping paper and shit.” They came in two different packages, but I didn’t clarify. So, she said that if she had known they were for two holidays, she would have waited. She said she’s very good at that, and I have no proof otherwise.
The gift that year was a bracelet with her favorite charity on it. She told me that it was totally something she would have bought for herself. I was so glad that I hit the nail on the head and she was pleased. She’s sent me a lot of presents over the years, though “not like with wrapping paper and shit.” She prefers digital because we’re both book junkies. None of them have ever stood up to the smile on my face when she sent me a picture of the bracelet I got her on her wrist.
That’s because I really sat there and thought about the jewelry that straight women give each other, because I wanted the present to be nice, but not romantic. I wanted to be genuine and sweet to her without upping her fear that we were always going to have to deal with feelings I couldn’t get rid of. It was too important to not.
I think at first she thought it was just a continuation of trying to change her, but over time she began to reciprocate when she realized that no, I was being genuine. I think that’s because I apologized for overstepping a boundary and I wouldn’t do it again if she didn’t approve. By being vulnerable and just asking rather than living in unease, I couldn’t spin out about it. These are exactly the kind of talks that we should have to go forwards and should have had if we don’t. When she gave me the information that she appreciated the gifts and it was very thoughtful, I believed her the first time and stopped worrying. I can take care of my anxiety on my own, but not when people don’t tell me how they’re feeling. I feel that some people are afraid of getting vulnerable with me because they’re afraid of my reaction. Some of it is that they don’t know how an autistic person is going to react to them. Some of it is that they don’t know how a bipolar patient is going to react to them. Every time they’ve replaced my disorders with my personality, and some people try to guess when I’m manic or depressed depending on how I write.
I can assure you that my mental state has nothing to do with the way I write. What has to do with the way I write is that I don’t go back and polish anything. I don’t go back and edit when WordPress screws me over by not publishing the last line of something. I want this blog to be entirely organic until someone else offers to clean all this up for me. This is because I know that I have often kept talking when I’ve run out of things to say….. and I should know better. I think it all the time while creating sermons. However, there are so few long form blogs anymore that I feel I should make use of it. Nowhere else on the internet do you have as much room to say as you can say on WordPress. Although I might test this by posting an entry in its entirety on Facebook just to test that theory. My opinion is that Facebook, X, Insta, etc. are for pithy soundbites, but I could be wrong. I do, however, love a good pithy comeback. “If you can’t say something nice, say something clever but devastating”- Father on the playground with his son in a New Yorker cartoon.
Editor’s Note:
Now that the Doctor Who Anniversary specials are over, I can tell you what bothers me about X. Twitter is so old that it’s like The Doctor went back and changed it. Because now X is a lot easier to remember now since it’s been around a while, adding to its mavitational pull. But, just like with X, I’m wondering how long it will take for Doctor Who to go back and change history so that its gravity again. At this point, it’s a running gag. I hope it was for the Americans, because nothing grabs you into that show like knowing an inside joke….. and after lots of episodes, knowing all of them.
The reason I think it was for the Americans is that it’s an inside joke that’s only a few months old. It wasn’t reaching into history with jokes like that because the Americans don’t have that institutional knowledge- more now since the series first hit Netflix, and I owe my love and devotion to that show to the company itself. I’d watched a few other sci-fi shows, and it was a suggestion. I watched one episode and was absolutely hooked. I wanted to watch the entire thing at once. However, since Dana is as big a sci-fi fan as me, I decided to wait until she got home to see if it grabbed her, too. That’s because if she did like it, I didn’t want to rewatch five episodes later. She loves it just as much as I do, so I suppose waiting could be considered a gift? I hope Zac appreciates my restraint with Slow Horses………..
To get back to being afraid of my reactions, what you imagine in your head is going to be a thousand times more amplified than the conversation is going to be if you show up open and ready to both hear and listen. We will not get anywhere if you only show up to think about your responses while I’m talking and not actually consider what I’m saying; it makes me feel unheard. It goes from trying to resolve a problem to trying to prove you’re right. Instead of leaning together, you dig in and conflict deepens.
It is not choices in life that make me spin out. It is uncertainty in relationships. For instance, Supergrover constantly telling me she was busy was perfectly acceptable, even over and over. But in the last eight years, she hasn’t written more than a few sentences in which I couldn’t glean anything. It wasn’t a problem in the moment, and the problem never would have popped up if after six weeks, there was a letter that actually had some thought put into it. Kicking the can down the road was so miserable that I decided to leave her behind. It does not mean that I take only bad memories away. I am fierce about all my feelings for her, for evil or for awesome (wow, that reference dates me).
That’s because my heart is all tangled up with her, because it made no sense. I wish there had been so much more “my mama wolverine instincts are kicking in, here” and so much less “you’re goading and provoking me.” We could have had something incredible, and we both let it go. One day I hope she’ll see that all of my letters are my mama wolverine kicking in, but also loving her like a Democrat instead of a Republican. 😉
I can’t love her like “everything mommy does is right and good and I’m a bad person if I want to change anything.” (You have to keep up with me to know what that means……). I have to love her like an adult who sees the good in everything, but isn’t shy about addressing conflict. That’s why you’ve seen my feelings in real time about this relationship, that they change depending on what I’m remembering that day. My biggest problem in life is that when I say she was a different person, she doesn’t believe me because she deleted everything and I didn’t. Maybe I should have done the same, because I’ve written every entry off the top of my head. I never have to go back and read them. I think the reason I didn’t delete any of them is that I need hard evidence that I am not responsible for everything that ever happened, and I need to forgive myself. That whether she is in my life or not, I got the gift of learning from her even for a time. It was useful, valuable.
And she scares me, but in a good way. I saw a video online of someone like her (not kidding, like when Dr. Wall said, “some other guy who looks just like me.” It was just someone who works for the same type industry and I thought they might know each other), and it made me realize that it was probably good our relationship was online; by the end of the video, my eyebrows were over my forehead and my hair was blown back. Her tone made me want to sit up a little straighter and behave myself, and I felt embarrassed I was in my pajamas. However, it was not a feeling that was unique to the woman in the video or Supergrover. I feel the same way standing next to my little big sister. I say that tongue-in-cheek because I’m older and a lot shorter.
I always think that other people assume I’m her nephew when my hair is cut short, but she’s always so welcoming no matter what I look like that I just try my best not to feel like a troll. Just proud a woman like that doesn’t mind being seen with a woman like me. If we’d met in college, I think we would have had as intense a relationship as we did when we were actually in college together. However, I think that as she drifted towards politics, then lobbying, I don’t know if it would have hung on or not. I would like to believe that we would have, because I cannot drill down on policy with her, but I can certainly advise her on how to treat people when you’re in front of a crowd. I can’t advise her on what to say, but I can advise her on how to say it.
The parts of me that live in her are queer. Not that she actually is. She’s married to a man and has been for a long time. However, she’s queer in the way she votes, where she works, what legislation she puts forth both in Austin and DC, and I’ll give you a for-instance.
She asked me if I thought it was okay to use the word “queer” on their web site because she knew it was a slur. I told her she was right, I wouldn’t do it……. but she was outvoted by her team. It’s fine, it’s their page. What I realized is that I’m the one that has issues with the word “queer” when straight people say it, because they’ve said it with sneers in their voices for so goddamn long. Because of Gen Z, who has no attachment as such, I am starting to feel like an old person…. Actually, that’s not true. The first time I felt old was when I saw a DVD in the grocery store that was ET: 25th Anniversary Edition. And if I felt old then, I’m probably still old.
I just realized I got off on a tangent and got away from talking about gifts and how they dropped into my lap. It’s what happens when you go back up and read a paragraph, think about something you meant to say, and all of the sudden the thing you were writing about isn’t even on the screen anymore………..
If Supergrover didn’t want to be a red string, she was off that list and onto the next. I think that my platonic relationships run just as deeply as my romantic ones, which is probably why at times I didn’t sound any different and at times I totally did. For instance, if I asked her a question that she thought was too personal, I wasn’t asking to goad or provoke her. I was genuinely interested in what she was going to say. On the flip side, my writing language is naturally flowery and romantic because that’s my style with friends, not because that’s how I’d act in person.
When I’m writing, I am not thinking about how to have a conversation with you. I am thinking about how to lay out my thoughts in a beautiful way so that you will take them in. To give you information to chew on without getting in your face.
More and more often, though, the gift was questionable, but hard to stop holding because the wrapping indeed was the gift that changed the me of then into the me of now. When she responded immediately with anger, I went into autistic meltdown. Then, she took her turn to gutter snipe and it went back and forth. We kicked each other out of our lives three or four times a year because she’d never met me in person to hear my tone of voice when I was talking about these things, not even a concept of how it might sound. She also never had to sit with me while I was in pain, rather than attacking me over e-mail. I realized I was done when there was more anger than empathy. She could get away with “judgmental dickhead” in the moment, but attacking me while I’m unarmed is frowned upon in this establishment.
The gift was the journey; we came a very long way, but it took years. That being said, she was always sitting in the guilt of thinking that she wasn’t responding as fast as I wanted- part of her “you’re a dictator” schtick- because I wasn’t angry that she wasn’t responding fast enough. She could take six months, five years, whatever as long as I received all the parts of our story that I’m missing…. on every topic, really, because there are so few things that she talks about, because hearing my story is threatening to her, and she thinks that it will help for her to shut down, because I’ll just forget and move on. No, I’ll think about it more, because I don’t want to nag anyone and I don’t want to be the person that doesn’t take up room in a relationship because I’m frightened of being abandoned. I realized that it was unfair that I had to mind read with her all the time, because it allowed me to step into it up to my ass. It’s how most emotionally unavailable people work. If they don’t tell you their feelings, you can’t take them into consideration. You have to hope you’re going to say/do the right thing rather than knowing how to act beforehand. It’s exhausting.
Learning all of this was hard won. Very hard won. But I think it has made me a better writer, and the gift I’ve given myself. Even if none of my blog is ever made into a book, it was the training that mattered.
The gift was the journey.
So here are more happy memories instead of sad ones.
The best gifts I’ve ever gotten was from asking her for two things. The first was a voice mail, because I’d never heard her voice before. The funniest thing is that she didn’t start with “Hi, Leslie. It’s Supergrover.” She just launched into talking and I laughed my ass off because I’ve been asking her for a recording of her saying her own name for 10 years. 😛
This was her big chance. 😛
The second was a picture. I would post it if I could, because she’s just one of those women that if she were a model, she’d be one of the people you’d remember and want to see back. At the very least, she’d be the generic picture that comes in a frame you bought off Amazon…….. and you can’t stop staring at her eyes. Now the picture has been in that frame for three years and you really don’t know why. There’s just something about her.
I also think that straight women love just as deeply as lesbians, because I am certain that there are a lot of marriages where that triad is strained. It’s actually threatening when someone has a best friend that will be there for all the partners (especially if they predate you by eons) and you have to measure up………. because again, she’ll be at the wedding, but you may or may not.
In fact, I love getting numbers from straight women because first of all, I’d like to have more friends in the area. Second of all, it shows me just how much progress has been made since I came out (to myself) in probably 1986? Thirdly, I hate dating. I’d rather hang out with friends to see if I like them enough to date them or not. That means it doesn’t matter what orientation the person I meet is, because it doesn’t matter. Either there will be mutual feelings or there won’t, but that doesn’t decrease the quality of the connection. So, I’m looking for people. Who they become to me later is unimportant at this time.
It’s how I know I’m pan. I would say that I was bi, but there’s more than two genders now. Please don’t hate me for wearing bi flags, anyway. It matches more of my outfits. That yellow, tho….. (from my brother-in-law’s X series, #shitlindsaysays: “He looks fast because he’s wearing yellow.” It was my first thought when I wrote the line about the yellow stripe. That at least I would look faster).
I had the gift of enlightenment about the bi flag. Originally, the pansexual movement started with a fight on reddit (no, I’m serious). Someone said that the bi flag wasn’t inclusive of trans people, when that has never been true. Back then, dating both genders meant cis or trans. But I realized that I had to switch teams in terms of identity because bisexual only represents male and female. So, now it’s not that it’s not inclusive of trans people. It’s not inclusive of nonbinary people. I’m not exactly happy with the colors they chose, but it’s not like I’m going to come up with something better…. and not because I’m not capable. It’s just not going to catch on the way it already has.
Maybe it’s just that I’m old and it looks kind of 80s beach to me. I think if the other colors were as dark as they are on the bi flag, I’d be a lot more prone to wear it. I don’t know. Sometimes it might be fun to look like you’re wearing three highlighters.
This year has been the most growth-filled in 10, the best gift I’ve been given- both the memories created and the space to reflect on them…… however, I would be remiss not to include my most popular entries on gifts, about my Scandinavian Snowball Ring. This is because it was in a television commercial in the 80s, so my blog comes up in searches for it because there’s so little information about them left.
It’s a gift I’m giving my Xennial readers, who probably remember the commercial but can’t find a clip.
Are you patriotic? What does being patriotic mean to you?
I am extremely patriotic, but there’s a lot of this country who wouldn’t see it that way. Al Franken wrote about my kind of patriotism in “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right” (one of my favorite books since 2003, and if I were you I’d get the audiobook because he reads it). I’d thought something like this for a very long time, he just said it more eloquently than I could. I’ll paraphrase him because I don’t have a copy of the book anymore.
He said that Republicans seem to love America like children. To criticize anything means that you’re not a good American because everything America does is good and right. Democrats seem to love America like adults, that we’re calling out bad behavior that needs to be changed. We can think we live in a pretty great country and also admit there are problems. It’s costing us, because we argue like rabbis.
You can tell the difference by the types of media we watch. Both MSNBC and I will call out the president when they deserve it. Fox News viewers think that every Republican is perfectly perfect in every way, as evidenced by the fact that they’re still fuming about Hunter Biden, the 2016 election being stolen, and classified documents on a small scale.
Biden and Pence both had a few, both gave them back- no harm, no foul. At no time did they try to flush them down a toilet or hide them in the bathroom. Where the cult part comes in is that everyone else in the Republican Party has become a persona non grata because apparently Trump is the only one capable of running the country and they’re choosing to ignore 91 indictments (so far). I called him a bunch of names the other day, and I left out “rapist.” The E. Jean Caroll case is just one more thing that Republicans will sweep under the rug, because the party has one message. It’s simple, and that’s how they win.
Republicans are not interested in subtlety or nuance, which is why soundbites work on them, and why they’re in lockstep instead of working out issues amongst themselves. Seriously, when was the last time you ever saw a Republican in the media arguing about a plan for anything? When do they contribute to the discussion at all? Even if there was no bipartisanship, I would still expect ideas to originate on both sides. The plan for the last, I don’t know, 30 years? has been that the Republicans will say no to everything the Democrats put forth without ever putting anything on the table of their own. Their only job is to stonewall.
Republicans, you have to ask yourselves if this is really what you want from a political party. You have absolutely no voice in Congress, because the people you elect are just running out the clock. They don’t give a shit about you. If they did, your concerns would be on the floor of the House and Senate as well…… because Republicans would have actually come up with something on their own. You think you have elected “the best and the brightest,” when really it’s “the petulant and the indolent.”
Yes, part of it is laziness. Why wouldn’t it be if you’re only there to say “no?” You should wonder what they’re doing with all that free time instead of their own policies.
Name five Republicans you think are actually capable of running the country that are in the line of succession. “Designated Survivor” was a hyped up TV show, but the title absolutely is a real thing during the State of the Union. Name a Republican you’d want in that spot should disaster happen. I can think of one person, and that’s because the Republicans don’t like her, either. The Republicans are going to rue the day they kicked Mary Cheney out of their little cult.
I could also put up with Mitt Romney (keeping in mind that this is a fictional exercise), because he’s not as conservative as he had to be in order to get elected president. I really thought we were going to get universal health care back then, because it was such a raging success in Massachusetts, and he was the governor through all of it.
To be perfectly frank, the most surprising part of the rise of Trump is how many well-respected Republicans drank the Kool-Aid as fast as the ones who’s already earned my Molly Ivins death stare.
I have faith in two people out of a cast of hundreds, and neither of them will ever be elected again, unless Mary Cheney becomes a Democrat, and I’m serious because she can have a vote in Congress and that’s great. But Independents rarely win because they need the funding of the party. If nothing else, I hope she does it because she’s way, way more conservative than I am, but we need everyone who has had their blinders ripped off on our side, and I mean everyone. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” I think that was Abraham Lincoln, who could speak in complete sentences and managed to be a good Republican in spite of it.
The Democrats have a long history of racism, and I feel that now we’re the only ones who are struggling with it. Everyone else wants to sweep it under the rug because of course they do. No one wants to acknowledge that there’s an equal shot we’ll end up reflecting “The Handmaid’s Tale” as stumbling toward Panem….. and I am not Jennifer Lawrence.
This is because systemic racism and wanting to change it is a very, very violent proposition in this country, but luckily it’s a minority. It has just gotten more popular to be openly racist and violent because the Republicans have been quietly supporting the system until Trump came along and it wasn’t so quiet anymore.
I do not know what to think of this for my country, because on one hand, it’s terrible and I wish I had the power to turn off the neckbands that seem like jewelry until they make your head explode…. which is the problem entirely. Trump has his entire base by the short and curlies without a single shred of evidence he can actually do the fucking job.
Democrats are tasked with trying to keep the country together so that Trump doesn’t get a second shot at trying to become Hitler. Again, I do not believe that Trump is Adolf Hitler in his later years. I just believe that Trump has learned a lot about fascism from him (see also Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping). I don’t know if he’s actually read “Mein Kampf” or not, but he certainly loves politicians who’ve taken the same route that book laid out. Otherwise, how would a know-nothing idiot be able to get people to follow him?
By ignoring all the laws and congressional procedures and focusing on telling people that their problems were Mexicans and Arabs….. only the two cultures I’ve found to be the most welcoming. I would love to go to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria (particularly because Damascus is meaningful to me for Biblical reasons), and even Saudi Arabia (because I want to see where Franklin lived and worked, not that I’m interested in Saudi itself).
That’s because I know that for the average Arab, when I showed up at their house they would literally feed me until I exploded and then ask why I didn’t eat that much. Here, have some pie. I am not worried about what their government thinks of me, because I’m probably not going to meet them personally. If I’m going to Iran, I hope it’s to meet a Persian grandmother who will pass on her secrets because it won’t get back to her friends that I have her recipe and they don’t. 😉
I’m bad at transitions, and I would still move to Mexico in a heartbeat. My sister and brother-in-law feel the same way. Lindsay and I have both been to Enseñada, and she and Matt go to Mexico City all the time, one of their favorite cities in the world. It would actually be a good move for me to go to Mexico, because I think I could make more of my inheritance there than I could here. However, I would have to rent because only Mexicans by blood/birth have the right to purchase property. It’s similar to Hawaii, where you can only get a 99 year lease. What I know for sure is that I would freak out at the transition at first, but the pace of life is so different that I might adjust easier. Who knows? What I do know is that I already know enough Spanish to have simple conversations, and the more I spend in immersion, the more I remember from past trips and high school Spanish.
I am so grateful to my church in Sugar Land when I was a teenager, because if we hadn’t moved there, I wouldn’t speak Spanish nearly as well as I do (which even that much makes me feel like a toddler, but it’ll get better). This is because I took my first year of Spanish at HSPVA, and my second year at Clements. Loved one teacher, hated the other. I won’t say which was which. Then, in the summer between PVA and Clements, I went on a mission trip to Reynosa (our hotel was in McAllen). Because I’d just come out of first year Spanish, being immersed reminded me of Matthew and Bryn, who were and/or are lifeguards (and siblings, so that’s why it sounds the same coming from both of them). This is because it was a very short leap from a swim coach saying “do your bubbles… do your bubbles” to “hope you don’t drown.”
By the time I came back from Mexico, I was sold. I could do this whole Spanish thing. Interestingly enough, I don’t have conversation issues in Mexico because I know that there’s no reason to write anything down. I have to dance with them what brung me. I can’t disappear into my writing personality with them.
Then I got to my second year of Spanish, where my teacher and I both hated each other. That’s because she was so frustrated by my performance, and why it went up and down. In retrospect, it’s because only half the grades given were over conversations in person. The rest was writing. I had to study Spanish for a little while to learn that what she was looking for was more formal than I’d learned in Reynosa and Progreso.
My sentence structure was all wrong, and I’m sure to some degree it still is. However, our job that week in Mexico during the summer before the first semester at Clements was to put on what we in the States would call “vacation Bible school.” Just fun activities for the kids who are so poor they don’t get much play time.
Also, I’m not an ordained minister in a major denomination who preaches every week… though I can do some stuff; I got ordained in the Church of the Latter Day Dude to do Bryn’s wedding, which ended up being very Methodist/Episcopalian while also taking out the religion aspect and tailoring it to the couple.
It absolutely worked, because it was formal enough to feel like you’d been married by someone who did their homework, when in reality the most embarrassing thing about it was having to pay for ordination instead of earn it.
This is an aside, but I think one of the reasons my church plant wasn’t a success was because of a really old tape that I didn’t think to work out in therapy when I was young. That tape is “the Methodists kicked me out, so why would anyone else want me?” It wasn’t logical because I was 15, and I did meet other Christian lesbians who were ordained. By then, I had imposter syndrome.
The only reason I had the courage to come up with an idea for a homeless ministry in Silver Spring is that I got over my fear by preaching at my church in Oregon. I have never in my life asked to preach a sermon, but I was not the same preacher at 16 that I was at 24 or 5. It all ties together, my friends. The people on the trip told me that even though I wasn’t ordained, I had to do the sermon at the closing worship service because no one else knew enough Spanish. So, the second semester at Clements was harder than the first because my teacher was so frustrated and angry that I got Cs all semester and then a 95 on the final. She called my dad in so fast.
Now, my dad wasn’t a bully to my teachers, ever, because he actually knew I was fallible……….. but at the same time, he held them accountable and never lost a thing any of them said because he’d write in his notebook throughout the meeting and have the teacher sign it if it was accurate. I really liked that because it made both my teacher and me live up to a bargain instead of a lose-lose situation…. which Spanish was, because since I’d only studied hard with a tutor who unlocked writing for me (people who know her, Nancy Wells saved my ass) it didn’t seem possible that I was capable of an A and there was no way to prove it except to give me a second exam, and for some reason she didn’t think of that. She just fumed like she knew I’d gotten away with something and I was glad there was only a couple of weeks of school left, and no more required Spanish.
I won’t let you go, I just wait to see whether I’m a priority in your life because I don’t always want to be the one that initiates contact. I don’t want to be around you if I always feel like I’m nagging to get a simple answer out of you, or afraid to contact you because I feel like I’m bothering you rather than showing care. I wait to see if you show interest when I put something out there, just receiving you if you show up. I am able to do that so easily because I’m a writer. All artists have an easier time turning their attention away from obsessing over a problem when they can get it out.
My blog is ridiculously personal because what I have learned over my entire life is that no one will be honest with you if you’re not honest with them first. It’s what art is supposed to do- it’s supposed to make you feel something. However, I do not think of your reaction as my responsibility. It is your right to state your opinion and decide whether you’re owed an apology or not, because I do believe in freedom of speech, I just have limits.
For instance, I will never get any more specific about Zac’s other partners than I have been now. The one I was talking about in a previous entry likes coffee mugs and Diet Dr Pepper, like most of America. However, they do not get to be “characters” here except in the most vague of terms because I don’t directly talk to them and I don’t write hearsay. I talk to Zac, and our relationship is completely separate and apart from anything else in his life. I feel like that’s a small reason it’s easy for us to open up to each other.
He absolutely can tell me things in confidence (about our personal relationship- I keep saying that because he’s civilian intelligence M-F and Navy Reserves intelligence in his copious amounts of spare time). I just stand next to him with a “dumb yet excited” look on my face. The thing about government agencies, no matter which one, is that they look impressive and intimidating all at once. My favorite is the black and white seal on the floor at Langley, and for a long time my desktop wallpaper was a hi-def shot of the custodian mopping it. It was a reminder to me that even though people like George Lazenby, Martin Freeman, Daniel Craig, Melissa McCarthy, Piper Perabo, and Jennifer Garner make it look exciting, at the end of the day it’s still just a regular floor.
People accuse me of being a drooling fangirl (:::stares in Lindsay and Zachary:::), but that’s impossible if you really study the history of the agency. My favorite era so far is the space race, which shows up in everything from “For All Mankind” to “The Queen’s Gambit.”
“What part of the State Department did you say you were from?”
I have no doubt that CIA is trying to stop nuclear war right now. Whether the bombs are small or large, either Russia or The Middle East will have absolutely no problem with pushing the big red button. Also, it just occurred to me. You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel. You know who doesn’t? Palestine. Listen to me when I say that Benjamin Netanyahu does not give even half a shit how many Israelis die as long as it means “beating Palestine.” Palestine might be able to handle rocket launchers, rocks, etc. It remains to be seen whether nuclear threat is on the table, I’m just saying I wouldn’t be surprised.
If nothing else, I think there’s going to be sort of a second movie like “13 Days,” where when the op is declassified the movie will show just how close Russia came to nuking the Ukraine or just how close Israel came to nuking Palestine- or just how close Iran got to figuring out how to make them on their own.
The other thing that makes the space race really interesting to me is that it wasn’t about discovery or hope or any of that Camelot bullshit. CIA was receiving legitimate chatter that the Russians’ plan after winning the space race was to put nuclear weapons on the moon. That’s why we were relentless in getting it done, why the “computers” saved our asses, why Houston is so dear to me, and Star City as well. Star City has been treating my Houstonians like warm friends for years now.
There were many, many Russians who became our assets in country, and many of them died for us, especially when Aldrich Ames gave the Russians all their names.
That did not stop private Russian citizens from helping us, because they ultimately thought they were helping Russia by stopping the Cuban Missile Crisis as well. It came down to some people who gave us Russian intelligence, and one very brave man, and no doubt the person on which “Crimson Tide” is based. The Russians were locked and loaded, and this man saved all our lives:
Thankfully, the captain didn’t have sole discretion over the launch. All three senior officers had to agree, and Vasili Arkhipov, the 36-year-old second captain and brigade chief of staff, refused to give his assent. He convinced the sub’s top officers that the depth charges were indeed meant to signal B-59 to surface — there was no other way for the US ships to communicate with the Soviet sub — and that launching the nuclear torpedo would be a fatal mistake. The sub returned to the surface, headed away from Cuba, and steamed back toward the Soviet Union.
Thank you, Russia. We really owe you an apology for thinking you were Gene Hackman instead of Denzel Washington.
Depending on the operation (because you can’t and shouldn’t agree with all of them), it’s an apt metaphor for The Company. For instance, there have been many times that CIA has gone into a situation and rescued people exactly like the houseguests, as huge a mop job yet completely unnoticed. Case officers don’t win awards in public. On the other hand, CIA has had misstep after misstep since 1947. Trying to overthrow governments, trying to kill Castro, the government giving the torture program to CIA when it never should have happened in the first place, etc.
I don’t love CIA like the Republicans, where everything mommy and daddy says is correct
That summer was when my dad decided to leave professional ministry and just become a member at his own church, somewhere he could be anonymous. We ended up at St. Martin’s Episcopalian, which is how I got to meet George H.W. Bush and James Baker III. Because the story of how Jonna Mendez “masked up” to show Bush how their new technologies worked, I kidded her in person that we had mutual friends. And in fact, the first time I saw James Baker, it was because he was taking up way too much damn room on a pew and my stepmom told him to move over like four times. She didn’t know who he was, but it doesn’t matter. It’s church. There’s no hierarchy as much as your admin board might think there is. I have noticed from some pastors that money tends to grease the wheel. It’s not politics, it’s gratitude. It takes some real hustle when you work in a cathedral, because generally those buildings are old as shit. Renovating the pipe organ at National Cathedral is literally going to be 14 million dollars, because I looked it up on their web site. And that’s just ONE of the multimillion dollar projects they have to have going to conserve the building.
Since we’ve been talking about politics, let me make something clear. Calling it “National Cathedral” is not because it’s supported by taxpayers. It’s because so many state funerals have happened there, as well as memorial services. When it is acting in its formal capacity as the ministers who carry out those services, it ceases to be an Episcopalian congregation and turns ecumenical quickly.
In reality, what I’ve noticed over time is that it’s a bunch of social justice warriors who show up every Sunday, and they generally only have to use one part of the sanctuary for that because of course they don’t fill up the whole thing each week. It seems to have two modes, and it’s every bit as drastic a change as being a Transformer™ and being a trans person. 😉 This is because every Sunday of its life, “National Cathedral” is actually a smallish congregation named “St. Alban’s.” It’s just that sometimes thousands and thousands of people show up, like Easter comes more than once a year. My dad was particularly good at that on a smaller scale. Making an event at church that people didn’t want to miss and it didn’t matter what you believed or which church you attended. It was community building, not evangelism.
It’s funny, I’ve evangelized more to atheists than I have to anyone else, and not because I’m trying to change them. I’m trying to change their perception of me. Do you know how hard it is to get an atheist to believe you’re not part of the “What Would Jesus Bomb?” shitshow? I don’t give a shit what others believe, because as Pete Rollins so beautifully said, “A/Theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash.” (I heard Pete on “The Robcast.”)
I loved the four episodes called “Pete Rollins on God” that they’re the only four podcast episodes on my cloud drive………………….. and absolutely nothing about my rabid love for that podcast miniseries comes from the fact that when Rollins said that quote, it was one of the sexiest things I’d ever heard; he has an absolutely gorgeous Irish lilt. I could listen to him read the phone book. If you subscribe to The Robcast, all four parts are still in the archives.
I feel I have to explain something. By saying that a/theism is the greatest love story ever told, I do not mean to endorse The Crusades, colonialism, white supremacy, etc. I am saying that the question has always intrigued and eluded philosophers and therefore the argument was the only one we studied all semester in Logic I. However, it wasn’t pushing a religious agenda like you’d think in a Texas school. The first half was spent proving God exists. The second half was proving that they don’t.
It is not logically possible either way in the language with which logic is encoded. P and Q statements, all that. Basically, you believe or you don’t. To what degree is malleable, because I believe agnostic is just as valid as atheism, probably because most things in my life are a spectrum. We are not all programmed to see in black and white like Fox News.
Therefore, I cannot offend anyone with my views on God because I am giving the most pious and the most godless freedom to be them. It’s all valid, because I didn’t say that God does or does not exist, because I can’t remember how to do it now, but I used to be able to write it out like math. If my friend Jesse sees this, I’m sure he could tell me, because his dad taught in the same department as my professor. I’m betting Jesse picked up a thing or two about philosophy and the symbols to express it.
Atheists also cannot argue with gathering together for community. To have someone to lean on when you’re in a crisis or whether you’re protesting the Iraq war…. which I did. Many times. If I had been in Portland during those marches, I certainly would have been gassed. That’s because protesting in Portland is, a lot of the time, how we socialize as a church. We have to have breaks between the chants, catching our breaths because we are also walking. That’s when discussion turns to things like Angela’s mom, Grant’s child, Amy’s granddaughter. I don’t know that it helps God to know that I’m praying for them, but it certainly makes me spend time empathizing with what they’re going through. If I can analyze what the problem is while I’m praying, I can help support people through it…….. because that’s how prayer works.
I learned all this when a friend checked herself into rehab and I went apeshit because we were so close. I wanted to be there at every family day, every open meeting, etc. At first it was because I was worried about her. Then, it was “this is better than church.” On the serious. It’s sort of like being at a Quaker meeting, it seems, because there are lots of “sermonettes” and an unshakable commitment to God.
AA is not religious at all. If you don’t have a God, find one. What you need is a higher power, not evangelism, especially if you weren’t religious before. No, what you need is something to get your ego out of the way. You might not be able to believe in a god or gods, but you can believe in your child being your higher power. Your spouse. Your parents and siblings, your co-workers, basically everyone in your life who is trying to tell you that the common denominator is you. If you can’t believe in those things because you’re single, I don’t care if your God is Dr Pepper and donuts.
“Look, I don’t want to get into a semantic argument, I just want the protein.”
That’s because when you acknowledge that you are not the center of the universe and just a piece of it, you become startlingly aware of just how much you’ve touched other people’s lives and how makes you sick to your stomach.
Flat out AA does a better job of healing people than church. FLAT OUT. There is no way for a church to dig that deep with you unless they’re really committed to it. I know you see AA meetings at churches all the time, but that’s because they rent the room in the church so people who aren’t members don’t feel uncomfortable. The only time I’ve really dug deep with other parishioners is when we did a six week grief course together. No one had died, I was just in grief because I’d broken up with Kathleen and moved, trauma jointly and severally. And in fact, most of us were there for divorce support.
It’s where politics fades away, and how we’d solve a lot of problems in this country. If we stopped training ourselves to only show our pretty parts on social media, it will cut down on the amount of time people spend doing it in real life. I honestly think that life has imitated art, because we don’t make time for care and connection in groups. We make time to sit on the couch and look at our friends without checking in. Time goes by and you haven’t responded to anything they’ve sent, because you’re neurodivergent or just busy or whatever the case may be. And then it becomes the guilt of not responding rather than just saying “you haven’t fallen off my priority list. I just don’t have time right now because for as much as I adore you, my X has to take precedence.”
I do not object to those words in the slightest, but I’ll run pretty fast if you don’t get back to me for months, because I want to ascertain whether you’re contacting me because you enjoy me or whether you’ve decided that you needed something from me; you had to reach out in a pinch. If you have contacted me because you only needed something from me and aren’t interested in true friendship, I don’t want to repeat a pattern I’ve had since childhood. I will not let myself fall into a campaign to prove my worth when I’m getting a trickle’s worth of love when I deserve a fire hose, and because of community, to be able to return that love just as “bigly.” It’s always been my “strategery.”
I would bet a great many people in my life wish I was a painter. Do they not know that a picture is worth a thousand words? A gallery of my art might give me more blowback, not less. 🙄 😅
I get out my pain onto canvas just the same. I use whatever language I want because this is not Facebook. This is church. This is AA. This is a real account of what’s happening in my life, what has happened. These entries are as intimate as anything I’ve ever share in a meeting.
I won’t let you go, I’m just waiting to see whether I’m a priority in your life because I don’t always want to be the one that initiates contact. I don’t want to be around you if I always feel like I’m nagging to get a simple answer out of you, receiving you when you show up.
I remember when I wanted that life, because as an INFJ, you know you have a lock on it because you’ve read everything you can find about that personality type and they all end up as social workers, teachers, writers, ministers, and anything else that needs the wisdom of people who have been a thousand years old since the nurse laid their baby in their arms.
However, I am not kidding when I say that the dream died with my mother for two reasons. The first is that I am a completely different person than I was before she died.
I am not willing to go back into “show mode” in order not to get my crazy spatter on other people for the rest of my life. “Show mode” has done nothing for me except to convince people I am perfectly normal….. “you don’t look autistic.”
I don’t often publish anything without running it through Google Translate, because even if I can’t read every word, I know enough to know when Google is being too formal, but I did get the idea right. When I went on that first mission trip, I still knew more Spanish than everyone else, so I was asked to give the closing message. It was terrible, according to my friend Mikal who understood me, but my mother cried, as she always did during my sermons….. however, this time it was just watching my face because she didn’t understand a thing….. except me.
The reason the second semester was harder than the first is that I also went to Reynosa/Progreso for Christmas break, again being immersed, so then my performance was really up and down because I could understand some conversations better than others because I’d had to use those words before. I honestly don’t think she did a very good job of asking me about my trip. I could have told her all about the fact that Hector and Fabiola were getting married soon, that they had been sweethearts for a number of years. Did I want a lemonade?” Etc. I think if she’d ever offered to spend some time with me after school (she flat out told us she couldn’t do that), she would have seen that I was doing fine in her class, but I wasn’t, because I was ACTUALLY speaking Spanish for days at a time with no problem at all. I love and fear Spanish all at once. It’s a much easier language than English, much harder to put yourself out there when you know you suck. However, in Mexico, I’d just gently be corrected and told the right words. I never got a C.
I have also never experienced prejudice against white people in Mexico, especially if you show that you’re making an effort to speak their language and fit into their culture rather than the typical American who expects everything to be the same. It’s the attitude of an Imperialist dictator who loves his country the way people love their mommy and daddy. It can do no wrong because I say it can’t.
Meanwhile, the smart people are talking less and less. The people of color get arrested more…….. and not just because of prejudice. Felons can’t vote, and black people aren’t a monolith but tend to lean Democratic. This is not about locking up black people in its entirety. This is about a more complex, disgusting way to limit voters at the polls. It’s not the whole issue, but it doesn’t hurt. People who are racist are generally Republican, but they weren’t the party that was always known for it. The realignment of the parties started in the ’70s because back then the Democrats were the party of the Deep South. Slowly, the parties started crossing over until the Deep South was solidly blue. Then, in the 80s, the white supremacy Jesus apologizers took over the Republican party, though they were warned. They just didn’t care. They turned their whole party into supposedly loving the Bible and screwing poor people every chance they got.
I would say that this is the thing that should be in the United Methodist Discipline under “incompatible with Christian teaching” instead of homosexuality.
So let’s bring it back around:
I love my country like an adult, because it gives me enough access to history that I can actually have an informed grasp of how this all works. In short, we are all but Citizens of Locker C, yet half of us are begging for Trump’s watch….. old and busted. The Republicans’ biggest problem is that they all know he’s a nutjob and can’t figure out how to get elected without him, so they just clench their teeth and do nothing. They couldn’t find “the new hotness” with both hands.
It’s time to tell them they’re fired because they can’t even manage to finish a coloring book, much less a bill. I honestly think that the reason Trump did everything through executive order is that he didn’t know how to introduce legislation. People have lost touch with the reality of what this job takes, and how it’s not about them. They can go off and have their little cult in the woods, because a man got elected who didn’t know the first thing about government. I doubt he’s been past sixth grade social studies/civics.
This entire essay is all connected, because it’s all about how my faith has influenced my politics for many years. How my young life has shaped me as an adult. How the Trump era was when I finally realized that I was old enough to have an opinion and as long as it stayed in my space, where I owned it and wasn’t hogging a conversation, why not? I don’t want there to be a chance there’s a criminal in The White House, and I am mystified as to why anyone would.
Why were so many people willing to gloss over Trump’s role in convicting The Central Park Five? Why wasn’t making fun of the neurodivergent kid not the end of it? Pretty sure “grab them by the pussy” on tape during a campaign if there wasn’t something about Obama that was off-putting and they just couldn’t put their fingers on it. Racism and sexism won Trump the election, because people have hated Hilary Clinton for some unfathomable reason since the 80s. She started the ball rolling on universal health care with the Patients’ Bill of Rights, so instead of seeing that she started it and Obama finished it, they’re mad at better health care and mad that a woman dared run for office, especially one that was already very unpopular and shouldn’t she know it?
I am going to bet that for 99.99999% of you, you’ll never meet the head of state in another country. A lot of you, if you look up how many passports are active, will never even leave the US to be able to compare it to anything else.
Which leads to things like thinking Obama is not American because most people don’t actively think of Hawaii as a state. It was easy to convince lots and lots of people that either Hawaii wasn’t a state, Obama’s birth certificate was forged on the date so that Hawaii wasn’t a state yet, or forged in the “Place of Birth” field because he was actually born in Kenya.
Trump’s biggest scandal is that he committed high crimes and misdemeanors and blackmailed Ukraine. Obama’s big scandal was wearing a tan suit (I’m being facetious, but still….. Obama’s biggest scandal was blinking on Syria, but he’s the kind of person that knew it and apologized. I can’t imagine Trump knowing himself well enough to know when he owes an apology to anyone. If you’re a narcissist, everyone owes an apology to you.
I also hate broken campaign promises…. just one.
The only campaign promise I’m really pissed about is that there aren’t taco trucks on every corner.
And because I’m not a complete monster, I’m not going to make you sit through all my political opinions without a reward.
It’s a picture of Oliver, who is a dog. He’s dressed up for Valentine’s Day and I asked Zac if I could post it.
I just can’t with today. I got up early and started writing, and it was going pretty well. Then, the Jetpack (WordPress) app got put in the background. When I went back to it, nothing would render (no text appeared). My entry disappeared into thin air.
So I’ll start over, and it will be nothing like what I was thinking earlier because I’m not thinking about that now…. whatever it was. I had a better idea to introduce you to my life of crime, unintentionally, of course.
When you are in a choir, it is frowned upon and also common practice to copy things. It’s very illegal. But I have aided and abetted many times. I struggle with copiers, because I think they sense my fear.
The next time I unintentionally broke the law was when my friends were putting a giant amount of music on their servers and giving me access. “It wasn’t illegal” because my friends said it wasn’t. What they meant was that copying off their server was legal. I later found out that was not the case, but luckily, not because I was caught. The safest way to share music was to borrow CDs and transcode them yourself, which is where the term “sneaker pimping” originated. It was underground, like “Winds of Change” during the Cold War…. yet less inspirational and more sitting there waiting for the CD-ROM that copied at 4x speed and generally wrote two bad discs before a right one. That got better over time, but in the beginning, it was atrocious. The CDs were expensive and then half of them failed.
I unintentionally broke the law the other day when I installed Windows 11 in a Virtual Box. My key wouldn’t activate anywhere but my original machine, even though I wasn’t using it for that. So, it’s off to find another solution, because the longer I spend with Windows, the more I’m irritated by it. You mean I can’t change my own time zone, I have to connect to location services? No matter what I do, I can’t make it where you don’t get to access my location and the rest of my information, and who knows how deep they’re digging? I don’t have anything to hide, it’s just the principle of the thing.
Facebook and everything else is built on stealing your information, why they’re free. We’re just dependent on it now, because we’ve been on it since you could get an account. That’s probably 15 years for me by now.
So, it’s a little intimidating when it’s not apps you can choose to install. If I really thought that gathering my ad information was important, I could delete Facebook off my phone/tablet and clear my browser history. What do you do when the data mining is the operating system itself?
They’re not even breaking the law unintentionally….. because what they’re doing might be legal, but it’s nowhere near moral. And the bitch of it is that we could have open source and secure social media, but it would never take off to the degree that Facebook did…. so you either install Facebook or you’re cut off from most, if not all of your friends.
That’s because free software has two problems. The first is that few businesses will buy in because they have to have someone to sue if things go wrong. The second is that if you put it out there for free, people assume it has no value. It’s the opposite. It’s millions of coders giving their time to create something that doesn’t depend on reporting to any kind of mothership and doesn’t cater ads right in your taskbar. Well, not ads, but sensationalized news to get you to click when it’s just nonsense. And you can’t turn it off if you just want the weather icon. If you close the obnoxious news banner trying to keep you up to date, everything goes with it. If you leave it on, every time you hit that hot corner when you’re trying to do something productive will make you want to punch your monitor.
Last week I was in “game mode,” where there are no distractions. I thought I had a complete crash when Windows put the game on the taskbar to ask me how likely I was to recommend Windows 11 to a friend. Luckily, I have enough VRAM that I could go back to it, but not every piece of software is that stable. Windows is becoming cancer, and I don’t want to deal with it anymore. I just don’t have a choice.
If Windows games could run on Linux perfectly, I wouldn’t need it at all. Steam is making headway, but I don’t have a Steam library. I chose GOG because then you own the game outright. I did not know that it would be different in every way from the Steam version and new releases make it crash…. frequently.
Sometimes you make choices in life. They lead you down a bad road….. and in a church choir, no less…….
If there was a biography about you, what would the title be?
I think this is kind of a weird prompt for me now, because since WordPress actually gave me the statistic that I wrote 614,000 words in 2023, there are six autobiographies about me already. And that’s just one year.
I did start an autobiography once, but I didn’t take it seriously enough. My own doctors, dad, and stepmom told me that using the work of Susan Barry to induce stereopsis on myself wouldn’t work. I tried for a few weeks, and the only thing I noticed the whole time that was actually in 3D was that I could see both sides of my nose at once. I called the book “Staring at Myself.”
That being said, I might go after it again because I don’t see how it’s impossible yet. That’s because there’s been a couple of movies with 3D effects that did work on me. One at EPCOT Center (Muppets 4D) and one at Wizarding World of Harry Potter, but I don’t remember what ride. That means I can’t see red/blue stereopsis, but if it comes in a different form, then it’s open to me.
In both instances I saw a 3D movie, I cried. I was a freshman or sophomore in high school at EPCOT, and I can’t remember the year for WWHP, but not so long ago. Within the last 10 years, at least.
What I do know is that it was before JK Rowling burned down her legacy by bullying trans kids over the Internet. Trans kids know horrible people all the time, but not generally people who’ve written a book about full acceptance first.
Otherwise, Lindsay and I might not have been so keen to go there. We loved the rest of the park, too, because we got to go on rides with themes like “ET,” “Jurassic Park,” and “The Simpsons.” I also got my picture taken in SpongeBob’s pineapple house.
“Why don’t you just buy a ticket to see the places you love on TV?”
“How’m I gonna get a ticket to Bikini Bottom?”
We did the MGM thing because we’d already done Disney before- just not together. I’d been on a high school trip with my orchestra, and I don’t remember when Lindsay went, but both of us have been to Disney World. I don’t believe anyone in our family has been to Disneyland. I hear good things, though.
I’m a daredevil and I love roller coasters. Therefore, going to a different Disney park sounds great. At some point, I hope to make it to Six Flags here. Kathleen and Dana have both planned trips with me to King’s Dominion, and neither panned out.
But there’s so much hope because at least now I live in the general area again. My trip with Dana was based on her parents living in the general area as well. I remember the first time I saw a picture of her here after we broke up was hilarious because I was so fake indignant that she was wearing my “Regular Show” belt. She loved that belt, so there was no actual ire. She stole it from me almost as soon as I bought it.
Because there are no pictures of me actually wearing it, I will tell you it looked better on me and you cannot prove otherwise. 😛
These are all the funny things that should go in my book about myself, and I’m trying to drag those things out of myself as well. Because this can’t be therapy all the time. It will sound like I’m a morose person, when I’m not. I use this space to work out what makes me happy and what doesn’t, so I can surround myself with those things.
I am sharp and funny in person, because I know myself so well. Again, I wrote six books about myself last year. If I didn’t learn anything about myself, I wasn’t paying attention. But so many entries are built on analyzing what I’ve said before to work it out in my own head makes me feel secure in my connections. They can’t rattle me the way they used to, because I might not know what to do in a conflict, but I do know where my heart/conscience lie. There are so many unknowns working with other people, but there’s a benefit to knowing what you’ll tolerate and what you won’t.
The moment I realized it was over with Supergrover was the moment she said that she wanted me to find people who brought good things into my life and didn’t give me issues. To me, that said that she was never going to resolve any conflicts with me and this would be our life. Her avoidance and my need to clear things up ad nauseam until we died.
While we actually needed to lean on each other because every time I’ve stepped over the line, she’s had to contact me to tell me to back it up. I finally got it through her head not to do that anymore, because she couldn’t have it both ways. She couldn’t push me away and then critique me. It made me think that she was interested in resolving things every single time. My heart would be full of hope, and it was dashed every single time.
I take responsibility for being angry about that, and not using the appropriate words for nearly anything. Doesn’t make my side of the story untrue. They were my experiences of her, not her experiences of me. She fucked me up. Just slaughtered me emotionally, then threw a bomb over her shoulder and walked away.
She has the right to do that; she doesn’t have the right to say I should be happy about that.
My crush on her gave her a good excuse to walk away when she absolutely couldn’t, because she needed a clear connection to me in order to say the things she needed to say without me jumping to any conclusions that weren’t there.
But she wouldn’t talk about that.
Too scary.
Go find other friends.
I hate her for it. Just fucking hate her. But not all day, every day. She’s not worth the energy anymore, because there’s no percentage in it. She doesn’t get the right to rattle me out of my skin because I’m bad at transitions. She can’t drop in and out like a Disneyland dad.
And that’s because of her side of the story, not mine. She can blame everything she wants on me. To her, I can be the biggest judgmental dickhead on earth and I don’t give a flying fuck. This is because if she’s angry and bitter and all of those things, she’s sitting in them because she won’t resolve it, not because not talking about it leads to anything good.
So, she can go be bitter and angry all on her own, because she’s the type person that would rather be bitter and angry about something until she died rather than be open about her feelings. If we’d had even one knock-down drag-out in person that could have lasted long enough to put all our issues on the table and come to resolution in the end, we’d both be a lot happier, jointly and severally.
But, she went on the attack in order not to be vulnerable, and then she told me that she never would. It was a message I couldn’t ignore, because over time the dropping in and out became a cat and mouse game that she insisted wasn’t there. That’s because her dopamine doesn’t go up and down when she talks to me, so she doesn’t feel like a Disneyland dad, and can’t imagine feeling that way in empathy towards me, so she thinks nothing of dropping in when to me, it’s everything. And that’s as much as I’ll ever be able to say about it.
She absolutely took her turn in fucking up my life to a degree I’ll never get back. So, to blame everything that went wrong in our relationship on me is ridiculously unfair, but it is what it is.
I looked absolutely insane to the whole goddamn world because people could only understand my side of the story. I wasn’t allowed to tell absolutely any of hers. Therefore, I just had to look crazy and not give a shit that I did, all the while dying inside because of the perception of me, because it didn’t matter what the perception of me was. It couldn’t.
So, she’s sitting with the guilt of fucking up my life while also unwilling to open up about it. Telling me to go find new friends was just the shitty icing on top of an already shitty cake because her side of the story is not something I can share. So, I can’t talk to her and I can’t talk to anyone else.
Fuck her and the horse she rode in on, and I can only say that now, after having had 10 years to think about it. I owned my shit in front of her and in front of an audience of thousands (legitimately), and a lot of those people were close to me. Still couldn’t talk about it. She pushed me into a corner and just left me there.
Both sides of our story are problematic to each other, yet being in love with someone when it is absolutely inconvenient doesn’t happen logically…. however, it is universal. I could talk about that because it transcended race, culture, creed, everything. Some people may not understand divorce or polyamory, but everyone can understand having feelings that they need to get rid of because they’re threatening or dangerous to your relationship. I do not believe that when you get married, you also become blind.
I also didn’t bullshit Dana in the slightest. I didn’t say things like, “she’s really pretty,” because if I had to list the 10 things about our relationship that make it amazing, it wouldn’t be on the list. It wouldn’t even be in the top twenty.
But it’s still on the list. 😉
I feel like a troll most of the time, so it doesn’t suck that if she stood next to me, it would make me look better by 150%, easily. She also makes beautiful babies, so standing next to them wouldn’t suck, either. I would say the same about her husband, except I don’t know what he looks like.
However, because I do know her, I bet he’s a god- because through her, I’ve found that it’s possible to be both brilliant and the best looking person in the room (just trust me, we’re all trolls next to her). I’ve always imagined that they thought each other was the greatest thing since sliced bread for a long time, and I am overjoyed that she found her person.
I’m just bad at transitions.
Who isn’t when you’re talking about something that is “highly illogical?” I told my heart every day how fucking ridiculous it was and to stop feeling 18 all the time. But if you knew her like I did, it would have been just as impossible for you as it was for me.
What I laid out in front of Dana was not the whole “she’s gorgeous” bit, and Dana knew it. She said that because our relationship was writing, it was more serious because we’d seen each other’s souls.
Her soul and inner world is the first time I’ve ever met anyone who could match me feeling for feeling in terms of not being able to share things, and needing a place to vent where we were both anonymous.
Except she chose the wrong person to open up to for logical reasons, not emotional. The reason I needed her was more important than the reason I needed Dana, but that didn’t become clear to me until Dana smashed my glasses into my face.
Otherwise, I would still be dealing with Dana’s jealousy for Supergrover and me to need ironclad privacy. What wife wouldn’t be jealous of that in a lesbian relationship, especially when I irrationally caught feelings over it. Just because Supergrover didn’t return my feelings didn’t make it less problematic. It made it more, because Dana realized that Supergrover would always be more important than her, and she had to let me go…. but not until we’d had a knock-down drag-out about it.
Supergrover bears no responsibility in why I got hit. Dana and I were not fighting about her, but the amount of time I was willing to devote to both of them and it was so off in the beginning. We hadn’t learned a middle ground, and so she was this specter in our lives, there when she wasn’t there.
I didn’t give up my relationship with Dana for her, but realistically, yes I did. I didn’t want anyone to be able to tell me how I should spend my time, and Supergrover made it where it was impossible for it not to be her as first priority ever again.
And I do mean ever.
So, in a lot of ways, Dana made my decision for me very clear. At that point, I needed Supergrover because I was in so much pain from the fight, both physically and emotionally.
So, she was my first priority for the next 10 years with her participating in the relationship, and for the rest of my life without….. without being able to talk about it with anyone else, either. It’s too private, too us.
The “too us” is what I miss the most.
The closest I can come to describing what happened is “accidental polyamory, but ok……” And even that’s a euphemism for everything I can’t say.
What I’m actually married to and not her personally. Why I wish I could be in the inner circle that her husband is, because of course there are certain times when you want your partner to know something that your friends don’t, and that’s ok. It’s not my place to go through the same emotional experience as him.
However, in her absence, we both love her so much that I wish we could lean on each other. And by now, we’ve both loved her that much for a long time without ever meeting each other. It’s weird, and it’s not. Supergrover has the right to keep as much private as she wants, but that doesn’t mean it helps our relationship.
She does not want to help our relationship, and she hasn’t made the connection that it’s not possible. That we have to have something sustainable and drama-free…. which is exactly what she wants, just without the discomfort of actually addressing anything, ever.
It’s not the right relationship for me, but it has to be. So, fuck all of it, because I don’t know what to do now. I can’t think about it because it’s too painful. I can’t write about it at all, I just have to sit in it…. and you cannot imagine how much I mean I can’t write about it. It’s killing me every day. She has listened to my story over and over, calling me a dictator when I am standing up for myself and just telling her my feelings straight out in hopes of her doing the same.
It worked in the beginning. It doesn’t work now. That’s because she thinks that our only problem is that I’m in love with her. First of all, no I’m not. Second of all, the other problem is not mine. Not mine to carry, not mine to handle, not mine to own. But, she can run from her impressions all she wants. Doesn’t make them accurate.
That’s because she has never once asked me any questions about anything I’ve ever written. She’s never responded with her own story when I’ve laid out mine, because it was easier to get mad and say “you’re just throwing emotional bombs and waiting for the shitstorm to begin, aren’t you?”
No, I’m trying to explain the process of letting go of the wrong things while keeping the right ones. I explain an exhausting, autistic amount for a neurotypical, and she’s a jock and a childhood trauma victim, having learned to cut off her emotions from a very young age to protect herself first and then to accomplish a goal.
I love her the way I love Zac, just platonically and not romantically. That’s because I can’t be specific, but they both have a hard shell and a vulnerable place just for me.
In fact, this weekend Zac and I had all the conversations that are just as uncomfortable as the ones I would or could have with Supergrover on different issues…. but not all of them, because they both have a hard shell and a vulnerability that comes out because I ask for it.
A few weeks ago, one of Zac’s young friends (I think she’s a tween, or about to be) overheard an adult conversation and asked him what a safe word was. I can’t imagine how much of the table died inside except Zac. He is the ultimate person to ask any question about anything, because he’s neurodivergent so he’s good at conversations that need explanations, and we’re kind of kids ourselves so we both can explain very adult things in kids’ terms.
He told her that a safe word was something that was only between people who really trusted each other, and it was either the word to stop or shorthand for “tell me the truth.” The friend said, “I think we should have a safe word, then.” He said, “okay. What do you want it to be?” She said, “lemons.”
He’s also seen Ted Lasso, but is not familiar with it so I didn’t know if he’d remember “Oklahoma.” So, in several discussions this weekend, I said, “Oklahoma. Lemons.” We got more done in becoming closer in 24 hours than I have in years with other people. I’m not poking at Supergrover. I know a lot of people with a hard shell and won’t get vulnerable I make it clear that you being emotionally unavailable is a dealbreaker for me.
I am sorry that seems threatening at first to either Supergrover or Zac, and yet it will never not be true. The difference is that Zac is emotionally mature enough to recognize that his emotional availability is feeding our relationship, and we’re comfortable with it because from the first moment we started talking, we sort of made this “no bullshit” pact.
You have to when you realize that you’ve actually asked out one of your friend’s boyfriends…. or, more accurately, who is a mutual friend with Zac, me, and another person that’s not important enough to mention except that I didn’t want her to know anything about my life anymore, and I didn’t want the mutual friend to say anything.
I should have just contacted the friend and said, “keep it tight,” but I didn’t because I don’t know shit about polyamory. But first, I didn’t know how important it is for everyone in a polycule to know each other, even if they don’t get along because a few times a year, it’s important for us all to support Zac and not have it be about us. We don’t have to get along, we just have to treat each other with respect.
I asked Zac to keep it tight when I shouldn’t have. I hope for my sake he didn’t, because he knew I didn’t know shit- and he would have been smart enough to tell his partner the reason I didn’t want them to know at first. But now, I do want everyone to know me because I’m here to support Zac, just like them.
On the other hand, I didn’t know if it was appropriate to contact the friend, either, because I don’t know how Zac operates with his other partners, just how he operates with me. I didn’t know if it would be breaking a rule somehow.
Although I did call “lemons” with him on some of that stuff because I don’t need to know about his partners. I need to know how he’s feeling. For instance, if he’s feeling low about another relationship, I don’t want to suggest we do anything intense. He can suggest it, but I won’t. By intense I mean going out and doing the thing after we’re already tired.
Our commitment is drill weekends so he’s worked seven days in a row. I know that by the time he gets home from drill, he’s usually into an introvert night. Since I only have housemates and not other partners, I don’t get a lot of affection. I want a kind of night where he’s tired and only wants to hold me. I sleep with him even though I’ve said that I wouldn’t sleep with a partner again because it’s harder for me to go deep enough to sleep well.
But again, it’s about wanting more contact comfort and it’s not every single night. I have decided that I need to start taking sleeping pills at his house, though, because he moves and snores A LOT. If I don’t fall asleep first, I won’t. It’s kind of funny. He dreams like Oliver, who is a dog. When he’s in REM, he kicks like he’s chasing rabbits.
This is uncomfortable because he’s also an octopus. But everything that’s uncomfortable is also everything I love about being with him…. which is why I tease him lovingly.
I hope he doesn’t mind me poking a little fun at him, because our relationship feels so free and easy when it’s back and forth like that. He teases me in person rather than in writing, though. I don’t know why that is. Maybe he’s just not thinking about teasing when he’s writing, but I always am. He’s never let me know that something has cut too deep, but I hope he knows it’s not like I’m afraid of him telling me that. I want to take care of him.
If your partner is really your partner, they want to know the things that bother you…… especially when we see you trying so hard for us. Someone who doesn’t see that isn’t your partner, and staying together becomes harder and harder the longer someone feels unheard. And I am totally talking about my history in relationships here. It’s universally relatable, and luckily, something I don’t struggle with now.
I think part of feeling unheard went into my relationship with Supergrover as well, because basically as soon as we got to Houston one of my mutual friends with Dana who’d known us for a long time in Portland told me to my face that Dana was stepping all over me.
Supergrover treated me like I was important when she’s the one with the big-shot schedule. That dopamine will stay with me for the rest of my life, because for as uncomfortable as I made her by falling in love with her and being open about that, it freed me from a relationship in which my needs went unmet because Dana thought she had a lock on being right. She comes by it honestly…
For as much as it hurt Supergrover to hear that I didn’t just love her, I was in love with her, I needed it to change me. I was never looking to change her. She told me in the beginning that she was stunned and amazed at my emotional bravery. She didn’t like it when I was emotionally brave with her, because it was something she lacked- yet wanted it from me. She wanted to be friends with someone who had what she lacked, but didn’t do much to bridge the gap so that both of us could feel safe and secure in our connection.
Absolutely all of the times she contacted me to resolve something on my blog, the conversation continued long enough for me to need things from her again, and to ask for them. But the moment I did, everything she said came across as “only I am allowed to need things.” She was like, “we can’t just be people out here who respond to your work?”
Of course they can.
But she can’t.
That’s because she thinks she can get friendly with me again without me ever being able to bring up the dark side of our relationship so I’m not carrying that shit in a bag all day. I’m not so much angry as lost, confused, and sitting in accurate memories of my own stories while not knowing hers to be able to know how I feel about it.
I told her directly that I thought she was hiding something, and that something was “we’re not really friends.” That’s because I loved the hell out of her thoughtful gifts and encouraging words as long as we never talked about our relationship.
That being said, if you have a real conflict, you’re just covering it up. You’re not actively making each other feel more trusting/trusted. I don’t want someone who can only do the surface-level things after they’ve emotionally vampired me because then they’ve made it clear that they’re not interested in my inner landscape, but I better be ready for theirs.
Saying Supergrover and I weren’t really friends probably stung because she was never tracking with me. Our love languages are not the same (she’s action, I’m words), and I do not lightly move past any problem in order to gloss over it. I do not have many relationships because I want to be able to go deep with very few people than have shallow relationships with a whole bunch. When we stopped exploring each other, that should have been the end of it right there. But it wasn’t because she didn’t give me a choice.
I could make her submit, but it wouldn’t make me any happier, it would just show that I was an asshole on a bigger scale. It also wouldn’t change things between us for the better, it would kill anything there is left. If I have hope for anything, it’s that she really is busy right now and that she will eventually stop licking her wounds long enough to resolve things rather than her feeling trapped because I do.
I have always been a White Hat at heart, and I’ll never give that up. She will always be my brave, crazy and wild friend whether she returns that affection or not.
I just know that our conflict has to be resolved to go forwards because otherwise, I will not be happy in a relationship with her. It’s a detente we’ve got going, because I’m never going to be happy with Christmas and Easter friendship and she’s never going to open up.
All I can do is try to move on when I can’t.
I open myself up to it by being vulnerable and letting a power imbalance stand whether it’s me who caused it or them; even when I can read clearly that I’m not doing the right thing in not walking away. In this case, I was absolutely doing the wrong thing because I didn’t have any other choice. And she knew it.
I want to have accurate memories of my perceptions, but how can my perceptions be accurate when all I can talk about is how emotionally avoidant someone is and not how we solved a conflict?
She’s seen Ted Lasso, but she would have made something up around “Oklahoma,” too. And by “make it up,” I mean words that don’t mean anything except kicking the can down the road. Synergize, logistics, etc. rather than “I am so mad at you right now because you said X and it made me feel Y.” And then I could explain why I said it and she could tell me whether she agreed with her assumption or not.
She could correct me when I was wrong, and I could figure out how I felt about it on my own. This is so much about my output and her lack of input so that she always knew what was up with me and I had to guess what was up with her; God help me if I was wrong.
My curiosity became a problem because it wasn’t curiosity anymore.
And that’s a summary of the autobiography I wrote last year.
Maybe it’s not “Stories That Are All True,” because I only meant that the lessons were universal and not the facts, just like the Bible.
And that was offensive to Supergrover, too, because she assumed that the title was all about “this is my story and I’m always right. The facts are all accurate and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong.”
I am not a dictator. She’s not brave enough, and saying I’m emotionally bombing her is her only move. If you only have one move, I will learn the diagonals, the Ls, the rank and the file.
For me, I feel like I’ve reached the end of the game.
Checkmate.
Maybe that should have been the title last year. It would have worked.
You also won’t get anywhere by telling me my memory is fallible, which Dana constantly did.
My blog is all about my memories, and I go back and look at what happened when because I’m my favorite author. I have to believe in myself when no one else does. Therefore, it used to irritate the shit out of me when I could see every goddamn day that my memory is pretty fucking great. She accused me of not remembering things right all the time, and would start telling my story “correctly.” Who treats a blogger like that? Not only did I write in the moment so the story was accurate, the experience of writing the piece does just as much to reinforce my memory as going back and reading it.
However, not one of my partners has ever asked me to look up what happened or thought about the fact that my memory can’t be that bad. That it wasn’t just having written the piece, but going back and reading it over and over and over to see what I can learn from that experience to write the next day.
More and more often, especially because she was drunk more and more often, she’d interrupt me constantly when I was telling a story to “tell it right” for, in her mind, comedic effect. She was The Dana Lanagan Show™ more and more often because alcohol limited her ability to see she was hurting/embarrassing me and also the ability to control THE VOLUME OF HER VOICE.
So, that’s why I say that falling in love with Supergrover was the best thing that could have happened to me and not the worst. Everything happens for a reason, and that cloud had a larger silver lining than I ever saw coming. It was not continuing down the road of life with an alcoholic because I’d learned to people please in childhood and I would have stayed with her and justified her drinking for far too long. I don’t give up on relationships, which is why I’ve loved Supergrover so long and excused her emotional unavailability for 10 whole ass years.
I had a breakthrough in accepting myself on Sunday. Forgiving myself for everything I didn’t know before my mother died (my mother didn’t want me to know I was disabled because she thought that I was too smart for what was then called “the special classes.” I don’t know. Maybe I would have been happier. My teachers would have seen how smart I was and I probably could have taught myself better than they could. Special Education is actually more about room to stretch out than it is the curriculum being different. Special Ed understands meltdown, burnout, demand avoidance, lack of executive function, going selectively mute when you’re overwhelmed, and everything my other teachers wouldn’t have understood because they didn’t study being neurodivergent for a living.
I have trouble with transitions. I absolutely hated school after first grade, and it’s not that there weren’t genuinely good moments. It’s that in every school I attended, there were only five minutes between each bell. That’s not enough time for an AuDHD person to adjust to the next thing. It is EXACTLY like being at a party and needing to go to the bathroom just to recharge.
Also, five minutes is not enough time for a person with floppy muscles and depth perception issues to be able to run fast enough to be on time. I have been punished for my disability many times, which is how I found myself in the nurse’s office because a teacher was pissed at me for being a couple of minutes late every day and I knew it……. so I was hauling ass and I fell down two flights of steps.
Because I am low needs, I am trying to speak for the ones who can’t. You can’t imagine how brilliant most autistic people are if you take the time to get to know their brains rather than focusing on what they cannot do. It bothers me that people treat those with autism in which they can’t social mask like children. It’s one thing to have a childlike brain. It is starting how many people think all high needs people have problems with intelligence and not communication. It’s what bothered me so much about the “Autism Speaks” ad where a mother talks about one night in which she thought about putting her daughter in the back seat and killing them both. If her problem is limited to communication and not intelligence, what do you think it does to a person to sit with that knowledge for years on end? People think they’re talking behind our backs because in their minds “autistic” is shorthand for “stupid” and not different.
I would bet there are many more AuDHD people than me out there, but would never want to get tested because of how autistic people are treated.
Because Autism Spectrum Disorder means that your brain processes information differently, people at the lower needs end are told things like “you don’t look autistic.” “Everyone’s a little bit autistic.”
I am going to bet that those people have never experienced demand avoidance down to not being able to make demands of *themselves,* much less being able to communicate when other people make demands of them. If someone makes a demand of me, I have to white knuckle my way through it if I’m on a deadline, because I have problems with, again, transitions. I like to know what people need from me plenty in advance, because I know at first my body will say, “no. Not doing it.” Autism makes it where when someone makes a demand of you, you go into fight or flight (meltdown). It’s not because we don’t want to do things for other people AT ALL. It’s transitioning from one thing to another. We all wish that part of it would go away, because it’s the biggest reason even low needs people have trouble taking care of themselves. It’s not laziness, it’s not an unwillingness to do anything. It’s that our brains are shutting down because we cannot handle overload.
I realize that I have anxiety and I go through cycles. Sometimes, I want to stay home and chill because I’d rather spend time with myself, either writing or reading/watching something to spark my own creativity. This is problematic in two ways, and neither one of them have anything to do with me.
Sometimes, I’m on a down and I’d rather isolate than interact because I’m more likely to go into a meltdown from feeling overwhelmed. Recharging also means getting away from my own writing, navel gazing. I have learned that many, many autistic people are like this (the isolating part, not the blogging part) because too much activity in a room is overwhelming to an enormous degree. If you are low needs, that seems incredibly odd and they’re weirded out by it. People can clearly see that in high needs autism, but they cannot see that low needs does not mean less distress. We are just capable of social masking because we can recognize when we’re making you uncomfortable and adjust constantly, knowing you won’t adjust toward us. I am sure that you cannot say this about an autistic kid’s parents or siblings most of the time, but I’ll say it again….. NO ONE KNOWS what to do with autistic kids after they graduate from high school.
There has never been an apology to me by a boss when they have miscommunicated with me. It’s “how can you be so stupid/airheaded/flaky?” Why are you “not living up to your full potential?” Because you don’t have the skills to communicate with a neurodivergent person nor any empathy for those disabilities. It is always on the neurodivergent person to pick up what a neurotypical person is putting down when they literally can’t. Especially in an office, where everyone and their dog has a PhD in bullshit. If you don’t, you’re a problem child quickly….. mostly because since most bosses don’t know how to work with neurodivergent people, they don’t know how to get their message across in the way that they meant it because the chasm is *wide.* Bosses do not like to hear the truth most of the time. Very few will let you speak truth to power. Therefore, if I acknowledge a problem in their logic during a meeting, it doesn’t matter that I didn’t pick up on the social cue. I wasn’t focusing on them at all, but the matter at hand. I also want to contribute to the discussion in a major way because I’ve had bosses talk to me privately and steal my ideas.
It really, really matters whether your boss can hear criticism or not when you’re autistic, because you are literally trying to help with your different pattern recognition and it is seen as threatening, particularly to men. The first boss I ever thought really had my back was at Marylhurst, when in a meeting with Google I laid a truthbomb on the table and he saw what dog I was walking immediately. I was so touched when he said, “I think we should get back to what Leslie was saying, because I’m going to need an answer on that.”
I’d spent so many years thinking my words and opinions didn’t matter, so it made my year.
He actually did that twice. Dana thanked him for hiring me and he said, “Leslie is worth every penny.”
These are the things I remember when it all goes to shit later because literally no one understands me after a while.
I am one of those people who needs iron structure every single day like clockwork, and also angry when I feel micromanaged. There has to be a middle ground, and there is. But it’s more work than it would be for a neurotypical employee because what you say is not what we hear and vice versa. It’s why when I need to relax, I watch cartoons.
If you react to us realizing the pendulum has swung too far with negative attention….. “oh, look who FINALLY decided to show up FOR ONCE,” we’ll never show up to anything ever again. It’s easier to watch family friendly and kids’ shows so that you can study shows that present big ideas to little kids. Avatar: The Last Airbender comes to mind………… It’s almost as if it’s a hidden layer that’s gold when you find it.
Here’s what I mean about good writing where you least expect to find it…… Rigby says “tonight, let’s do something REALLY scary.” Pops says, “we could go to bed early and be alone with our thoughts.” It was at that moment I realized Pops had given me nightmares. 😉 It was a truth I, and most people with mental heath issues/processing disorders need to be able to voice. That’s part of the problem. Not being able to completely take care of ourselves makes us bad at communicating our needs as well. That makes society doubly difficult.
There is nothing scarier than being alone with your thoughts when you’re disabled. The system is not built for you, especially when you’re low needs and “seem normal,” You walk around all day, every day, feeling worthless and useless because we cannot accept that we have disabilities. It’s easier to believe everyone else….. you’re either slow on the uptake or a judgmental dickhead.
When you think of us as “stupid,” it comes across in a sugary sweet voice that no one needs. That voice is the shortest and quickest path to driving me up the wall. If I have to ask for information again because I didn’t catch it the first time, it’s downhill from there. That’s why I prefer working through e-mail. I do not like conversations at all regarding work because I do not want there to be anything missing in the conversation that I can’t go back and read. It’s what keeps me from having to ask “stupid questions.”
We don’t need your pity, but we do need your advocacy. Thank God the neurodivergent community found programming, because starting when I was a senior in high school, being a programmer meant getting rich. Not necessarily working at a company, but joining a small company that has venture capitalist money on a project in which you really know to the core of your being that it will succeed.
But that has backfired in a lot of ways because when programmers are sitting around together, they’re all tracking the same way and they get shit done faster than you can imagine. Therefore, the perception is that you’re either a savant at something, or you belong in special ed. There is no middle ground, because we’ve made it that way. Social masking has made it where we’re choosing not to take up room not to rock the boat.
Has it worked yet?
And now I realize I haven’t explained the title. In accepting my disability, I could laugh about it. In accepting his disability, Zac could laugh about it. He said “if you think I’m adorable, it probably has something to do with your depth perception issues.” I said, “I’m wondering if I should give you the finger you don’t have.” He said that was VERY well played. Because I realized something. That I can joke about it with Zac in a way I won’t let anyone else in the world get away with. EVER.
That’s because he’s not punching down, and neither am I.
Are there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?
When I was a child, I had eight Cabbage Patch dolls, a “Kid Sister,” and an ALF plush (that was probably the worst thing I’ve ever given away). I didn’t like playing with dolls, but I liked having them around me as comfort objects. For instance, I did not make up elaborate stories about them. I enjoyed that they took up space in the bed. The last doll I loved was SpongeBob, probably the second biggest thing I’ve regretted giving it away because it wasn’t really a doll. It was more like a structured pillow, and I shouldn’t have cared that pillow was yellow and absorbent.
The last time I remember holding it clearly, I was in the hospital at Inova Fairfax, where I was being evaluated for appendicitis. There were too many people in the ER, so I got put out in the hallway and given something for the pain. It was very scary, because they got pretty close to prepping me for surgery (or it seemed to me, because they kept waffling). Then, they realized that I have a birth defect in my intestines (or something, I can’t remember…..) where there’s a hole that can get infected. It presents like appendicitis.
I don’t know why I stopped loving dolls as comfort items. Probably because I didn’t want anyone to look down on me and I feel everyone’s eyes everywhere… and I did.
I would be remiss to mention that Dana went to Build-a-Bear and built me a stuffed cat in her clothes with a voice recording in the paws and it still took me two years to figure out I should marry her. God, I’m such an idiot….. or at least, slow on the uptake.
But that was when I was older, maybe 27? At that point, it became a display piece to keep on my shelf, and it was a very cool one. I think I would have been happier using it as a comfort item, but “I was too old for that.”
I gave up dolls as comfort items until I moved to DC. My dad sent me a stuffed “Postman Pat” that I got in London when I was nine. It’s the only thing I own that I kept after the fire. I do not know what got him clean, only that he could use a little more stuffing but otherwise he’s perfect. Now, when I’m anxious, I do have something to self-soothe and I’m not denying myself anything. That Postman Pat doll is so rare that I’ll never find anything like it. It’s not a plush, it’s a fully knitted postman. I could not afford it in 2024.
But other than Postman Pat, I have given up the need to surround myself with comfort items when I sleep….. unless you count my tablet and phone.
I used to love science as a kid, watching Mr. Wizard on Nickelodeon. Then, science became too complicated when they added math. It sucked all the joy out of learning, which I have re-found with documentaries, professional and on YouTube. It is fun to learn facts about science. It is not so fun to sweat over a chemistry exam. Therefore, my interest in science tapped out at about 8th grade, and I didn’t think it would return.
I think that’s why so many people are interested in podcasts like “Science Friday” and “Hidden Brain.” They both unlock science in the way that a layperson could take it in, and the TED and TEDx stages are very good at this as well.
Speaking of which, the first time I learned of “TED” was during Kathy Griffin’s “Life on the D List,” where she pressured Steve Wozniak in to taking her. Dating the Wizard of Woz was planned for TV, and I think Woz already had a girlfriend, he was just willing to play along. I love how she was surprised that Woz’s favorite restaurant is “Bob’s Big Boy.” Apple fame didn’t turn him into a completely different person. I bet he still plays with technology in his garage.
As would I, if I had a garage. I’m great at fixing desktops and laptops (and could learn to take apart phones, I’m just scared of both the glass and the glue currently). I’d also like to learn how to bend acrylic to install water cooling in a PC. I don’t advise it, I just want to do it because it looks cool.
I know this is getting off-topic (but what’s new?), but I don’t advise water cooling your PC unless you are dedicated to maintaining it like an aquarium. The distilled water/liquid coolant needs to be serviced, as well as making sure the seals keeping your PC water tight are still intact while the loop is empty. I air cool because I don’t want a pet.
Although I assume that if I had the money to buy such a gaming rig, I’d have enough to pay someone else to do it.
Besides, the air is always chilly in the house because either it’s already cold outside or we’ve got the air conditioner cranked down to Santa’s Workshop. My PC is mostly passively cooled. You can hear the whoosh when it boots up, but most of the time it doesn’t run because the air it takes in is already chilled. It’s why server rooms are kept so cold.
Computers are an interest I’ve never given up, and not because I can get down into the details about how they work in terms of capacitors on the motherboard, or how to program anything. I like figuring out problems, especially other people’s. It’s an ego stroke to walk into a room, spend a few minutes talking, and at the end the other person thinks you’re a genius. I’ve done that at many jobs, and that’s the fun part.
The not so fun part is that sometimes the problem is that the computer is not on, and someone ends up driving because they access the server remotely. They have been assured that the computer is fine, nothing’s wrong with it, of course they’ve checked to see if it’s on. How dare we not think of something so simple? You’ll just have to figure it out on your own. If you walk into that situation, the magic of seeing you hit one button is the same, it just doesn’t match up to the agony of driving for sometimes hours without really being given adequate compensation or a real thank you, because a lot of the time shit rolls downhill when they realize what idiots uninformed users they are. It’s not fair, but it is what it is.
It’s the same on a college campus, particularly miserable when it’s in Houston because nine times out of 10 when you arrive at a building after walking between a half and two miles, you’re dripping with sweat at the walk, the heat, and the 99% humidity. I’ve been in a bad mood over a printer that wasn’t on and getting a huge sunburn for my effort.
But sometimes, people are really grateful and if I didn’t love that part of it, I wouldn’t have stayed in IT so long. Over time, it just became draining when cooking gave me energy. I began to put more and more energy toward it because I actually loved it and I didn’t care that I only made pennies. It was worth it to be able to live Anthony Bourdain’s life for a while. I’d never understand him to the level that I do if I hadn’t worked in several kitchens where the lingo is all the same.
I left behind the professional part, but still enjoy impressing my friends. I don’t do much in the way of impressing myself because I prefer to keep my sensory issues down. However, I am definitely making myself a pesto and tomato pizza later. I took my Adderrall yesterday and the appetite suppression hasn’t worn off yet.
I’ve lost interest in food, and that love is so big it took over my whole life, and I do not regret it now. Maybe one day I’ll write a non-fiction piece that will revolutionize the culinary world. Well, “revolutionize” might be a step too far, because that depends on whether it resonates with the public and not just the service industry. But Bourdain has proven to me how he crafted his narrative, and how mine crosses over in a big way.
In “Road Runner,” I realized that we lived the same life. Wake up at noon or one, then prepare for the day and get to the restaurant early because “the mise” sucks when you’re under pressure to get it done. Then, you are balls to the wall until almost midnight, and then it’s time to go home and write. “Kitchen Confidential” was originally a short piece in The New Yorker. He was writing detective and spy novels then, most of them becoming actual books on the shelf. The adrenaline of writing all night is unparalleled, like Mike McD in “Rounders.” You buy in at 8:30 PM and all of the sudden it’s morning.
I showed up to work dragging ass a lot of the time because I was in a moment that I know I’d lose if I went to bed right at that moment. ADHD doesn’t lend itself to remembering an idea.
It’s a lot easier to write about the kitchen in retrospect than it was in the moment, because I was already exhausted. Exhaustion is why it takes my chef friends to jog my memory.
I didn’t so much stop loving it as I stopped participating. I genuinely wasn’t strong or fast enough. When I was cooking alone, it was the most hell I’ve ever experienced. I can do it because I’ve had to do it; it’s not my favorite.
Now, I do the thing that I’ve loved since I had a computer in my room since I was nine. I figure things out. I write text files. I play games, they’ve just gotten more complicated over the years….. so much so that I only understand two of them (Fallout 3 and Skyrim, respectively). Now, I’ve played them both so many times that I’m tired of it and wanted to install Ubuntu as a dual boot. I crashed my system because for some reason it crashes a lot of systems like my mini-PC. I don’t know how to fix it, because for some reason, my NVME is not set as “Drive 0.” That belongs to my SSD. So, if I want to install Windows on my NVME, it installs system files on my SSD so I can’t use it for anything. When you add a Linux partition, it will screw up both your Windows and Linux boot.
And that’s what I’m dealing with right now as I pull out my hair. The cable I bought for my 6 TB mechanical drive is not working, even though the hub is powered from the wall. Linux can see the drive, Windows can’t.
It’s so maddening. I’m going to go drink flavored water about it.
Because I’ve given up many interests due to lack of it feeding me. Computers are the one thing that make me feel powerful.
I like the pack of Twizzlers that comes in “rainbow” because I like the lemon ones best……. and who doesn’t like calling them “homosexual Twizzlers?”
I can’t make a whole journal entry out of liking lemon Twizzlers best, but I can tell you some of my other favorites.
I like to mix a pack of Tropical Mike and Ike’s with a box of Good and Plenty because tropical fruit and licorice is a good flavor combination. I sent a picture of this to, I believe, The War Daniel, and he said, “WHAT ARE YOU ON?!” My bad, maybe the pic was too close. It did look like a pile of uppers and downers, just to be fair.
I like chocolate covered pretzels, both alone or chopped up in ice cream. I like the ones from the bakery at the grocery store better than anything premade, because these have to be five times the size of the pretzels you get in a bag of Flipp’d. If Safeway is out of pretzels in the bakery, I’ll get a tub of them at Whole Foods. They’re smaller, but also come in yogurt, my other favorite. Best buy two tubs because you have to mix them together………….. and now I’ve just spent $20 on pretzels.
I make responsible decisions because I’m an adult and I use my money wisely.
I’ve mentioned before that I like Zero candy bars. Most of this is because that was my mother’s favorite. I like Three Musketeers because it was her father’s favorite. I still like all the weird Brach’s flavors- spice drops, maple creams, etc.- because my father’s grandmother fed them to me when I was a little girl.
And though it is not a candy, my maternal grandfather is entirely responsible for my love of Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew. When I was a child, he hadn’t retired yet. My grandmother kept these 8oz glass bottles of each in the refrigerator for his lunch, and would give me one if she had extra.
Now, it’s Dr Pepper Zero, but that’s because of my mother. She raised Lindsay and me on diet soda, so now regular just tastes too syrupy and feels like it’s clinging to my teeth. Probably because it is.
In terms of candy I’ve had overseas, I think my favorite is the Aero bar. I did like the whipped texture, and some of the flavors. Ultimately, I’m a purist…. especially since by the third or fourth mint Aero I thought they tasted like toothpaste (not in a row).
I learned disappointment in candy early. When I went to England at eight years old, I found jawbreakers I liked called “cola balls.” Apparently, the silver they put on the outside of them was found to be food-unsafe and they were discontinued shortly after I got home. Therefore, my relatives couldn’t mail me any, either. I am not sure I will ever find a replacement, because cola does not seem to be a popular flavor for things….. even though it’s divine. Ginger, orange, lemon, spices….. what’s not to like?
For instance, I would be so happy if they made cola bottle hard candy like they make root beer barrels. It would be better if they came in sugar free, though, because I’d eat more. I like Coke Zero better. 😛
They have incredible ginger candy at both Trader Joe’s and Costco that Zac buys in bulk. He doesn’t do it for me, but it helps because my medication makes me so nauseous. They work instantaneously…. and the only reason I thought of them is that I was already thinking about cola, for which I believe ginger makes an ultimate life sacrifice. Will they end up in a craft home brew or in Atlanta? May the odds be ever in their favor.
If we are talking strictly about candy you can make at home, I love marshmallows. I’ve never tried flavoring them with anything but vanilla, but both vegan and not are incredible. The texture is just enough you can tell it’s different, but it’s not bothersome to me. It’s also not quite as firm, so vegan marshmallow fluff you can use on sandwiches is a much more realistic expectation…….
Zac’s roommate made marshmallows flavored with raspberry, and they were delicious. So I know it is possible for me to make my favorite candy at home and now I’m hoping I do not go the way of “Marshmallow Girl,” the way my housemates noticed I made pancakes several times a week.
I am sure that I would make marshmallows constantly and then my ADHD brain would move onto something else.
And when we’re together, my favorite candy is whatever you’re having, because I like knowing those things about my friends. Simple things I store away so that later on, you say, “how did you remember?”
I like feeling other people’s feelings if I’m close to them. When I’m in the grocery store or a crowd, it’s too much. I tend to put on my “doctor hat” in public because it allows me to act as if I have clinical separation because no one actually wants to know when you’re upset. If you have my URL, you know when I’ve been upset. But again, I don’t talk about this stuff anywhere else, because the things I talk about would just be bombs in the middle of a conversation, and I have found that people don’t like it when I’m speaking to them directly.
Sometimes I’m in so much pain that I don’t phrase things correctly and it comes off as if I feel worse than I actually do (by being snappish, etc.); I don’t have the time to craft a sentence in person that would convey it. I don’t do as well with conversation and get flustered. I’m overwhelmed, up to my eyeballs, and I’m always sorry when I cannot remain calm and sugar coat my way through everything.
But that’s with my friends. That’s where I need to dig deep and try to remain calm because those relationships are very important to me (whether they believe it for not). I am trying to develop coping mechanisms for having hard conversations so that I don’t get rattled. Most of the time, I feel meek and mild-mannered. Then, I’ll get angry about something and not know how to handle it. That’s when my fuse gets lit like a firecracker- this confusion- and I cannot even think straight. I am lost to the rest of the world until I can regulate my emotions again. I have talked while I was in that state. It doesn’t end well.
Which is typical of an autistic meltdown and I’ve had too many in front of other people that ended in disaster; they didn’t know I was autistic and neither did I. However, if they did know I was autistic, that’s still not an excuse for my words being uncontrolled. It’s just context.
It’s a way to bridge the communication gap so that I might be able to give someone empathy, not to try and excuse away my behavior. No one should stay with anyone no matter how bad it gets. I explain what was going on and that might give the other person empathy. It will help us both move on from this problem and solve the next of the same kind from ever beginning. But that is dependent on whether the other person sees me as making excuses. I know a lot of other people do, but it’s the kind of information I’d want from them in order to move forward. I’d want to know why they did what they did. Without that context, I will not be able to see why you’re struggling in the future. I will not know what to notice.
But because people don’t think like me, they think of me as justifying something when it can’t be justified. Not everything I do makes sense, both from a processing disorder and a mental illness standpoint. Therefore, they’re missing what I’m saying and I’m not getting what I need. When I don’t know what you’re thinking and what you expect from me, I will spin out trying to find it. I also spin out trying to find out how people’s brains work in general, because if I know how they take in information, I will give it to them that way. However, people rarely give me the information I give them because they think of it as making excuses…….. when the context heals the situation. God is in the details for me, that my light bulb moment is realizing why you did what you did and having empathy for it. Most people cannot open themselves up to me the way I can with them. They do not want to dwell on their own details, food for thought as we sit together and try to work out a conflict.
But until I learned I was autistic, I couldn’t put my finger on why I was so angry that this miscommunication happened all the time. Why did people think I bugged them for details because I was trying to hurt them? I found out later that this is pretty typical of autistic kids, and in retrospect, I definitely was one.
I couldn’t explain why I felt the way I felt. I didn’t have words for things like “demand avoidance.” I didn’t have words for things like “meltdown” and “burnout.” I didn’t have coping mechanisms to remain calm and be nice through all of that happening in my body when someone was frustrated with me because I was either asking them a ton of questions they didn’t want to answer or giving them so many details it was overwhelming.
In a lot of cases, they were just campaigns to convince someone of my worth, and it took learning that to go on this journey of self-acceptance. Once I started talking to autistic people and reading their stories, I realized that I wasn’t actually an alien. My sensory issue is other people’s emotions. It overloads my brain and I am constantly trying to give the people I love the room I want to give them because I feel the same amount of emotion bleed out in the mall as I do being alone with Zac.
I don’t need a break from feeling open and vulnerable to him, and people who are just as close to me. It’s the having to defend myself from being everyone’s fixer/pleaser because the ills of the world bother me just as much as the problems I have at home.
If you’ve ever had a fight with your partner in public and I saw it, I took it in. Probably tried to fix it until I checked out. If the store isn’t busy, I’ll ask the worker how their day is going and really listen to their answer. I can tell when they’re bullshitting me. It all matters.
It all contributes to the amount of spoons I have for going out. I really do have to make sure I sleep deeply, because my body cannot repair itself from that kind of psychological toll without it.
It is also my job to learn to handle my relationships with care, but because I didn’t know I was autistic before, I know that I have to do it differently than most people. I have to learn to regulate my emotions better than I have in the past, and that has to come through my own therapy/writing. However, I also have to learn how to translate better to people who aren’t like me. That I am not asking invasive questions because I mean them to be invasive. I am analyzing what you said because I was really listening to you and took it in.
I’m sure that eventually, I’ll learn to handle it all.
I was born in 1977. That means computers were everywhere, you just couldn’t see them. Most computers were taller than you were and twice or three times as wide. If you had to have a computer at your desk, it was a “dumb terminal.” That’s a monitor, keyboard, and mouse that seemed independent on your end, but were actually mirroring the server…. and even that came later. At first, you had to physically be at the machine to use it, because there was no networking.
The 80s were a true cultural revolution, because IBM and Apple both sold millions of units that were as powerful as the computers that took up an entire room, but could fit on your desk. I just don’t think that people thought of getting a computer as a “cultural revolution.”
We went from it being a big deal to get a computer at all to everyone being connected to the Internet in about 40 years.
We have gained and lost much in those adjustments, but it is not an understatement to say that the personal computer changed the world.
I didn’t choose the geek life. The geek life chose me.
If you’re tracking with me, I feel that The Firm is in a crisis right now, because King Charles hasn’t been King for all that long and he’s been diagnosed with cancer. I’ve already posted about this on Facebook, but I have way more international fans here than I do there. I want input from English fans, and I know I have at least one. She’s not impressed with the royals, so I don’t know if she’d comment or not. I’m not impressed with The Firm because they’re important people. I’m interested in their family dynamics because I read the ghostwritten autobiography that Harry wrote in collaboration with whomever (sorry, not going to look that up) was an intimate portrait that is every bit as important as anything Richard the Lionhearted ever said…. not that it was so good (it was) but records of the royal family have proven to be eternal so far.
Plus, I loved where I could pick out the parts in which I sounded like him, as if it’d borrowed style from me without ever surfing here. It was great. Even if I don’t have everything about Harry’s personal style (I do believe he wrote parts of it because the ghostwriter had to know what Harry wanted to say, I have the style of one of the most famous ghostwriters in the world.
But there’s just something so universal and so specific about this particular situation.
Losing one parent is devastating. Losing both is losing your anchor to the world. For a moment, you don’t even know who you are in both cases. Actually, not a moment. About three years. The first year, you walk around in a fog of grief, finding your diary in the freezer and constantly forgetting said parent is dead and it shocks you all over again.
Nora Ephron gives the example of not being able to throw away her husband’s shoes, because she thought he might need them.
The fog of grief is universal. One of the things that Bryn pointed out is that there’s a possibility that both boys could lose their dad almost as quickly as they lost their mother, because unless you catch it early, there’s only a 20% chance you’ll survive it, anyway.
So, while William is grieving, he’s going to have to constantly reassure the public that the monarchy is stable… even though it’s not. But I’m not saying they’re hiding anything. I am saying that grief is so consuming that William is going to constantly have to stuff down his emotions just to get through the day. But the monarchy still won’t be unstable by the nature of anything that William would do, just by the nature of the quick change.
It remains to be seen whether Harry and William will end up needing each other or not. There may be too much bad blood…. that sometimes gets worse when both parents die. Sometimes it doesn’t. Most of the time tragedy drives people apart, and both boys have PTSD. How could they not? The trauma for Harry was twofold. Grieving because he’d lost is mother privately, and in front of an audience so big you cannot take it in. His trigger is the flash of a camera.
And that was before he went to war.
They’ve both been to war after the tragedy of losing their mother in a horrific accident. Both boys have had more days now with trauma than without, because it stays with you your whole life whether you open up about it or not.
Losing a parent fundamentally changes you, because there are parts of you that belonged to them. In my experience, this presents in two ways. The first is how much they’ve changed you. The second is how much time you were spending with them. What are you going to do to fill it? In the beginning, there is nothing that will fill that space because there’s nothing interesting enough to stop you from dwelling on it constantly, especially in the first few months. It is shocking whether you’ve known long in advance or lost them in a moment.
Especially when people get old enough where you realize it was just time, you’re still shocked because it’s the loss of not being able to drop by or call. You try because you forget, dialing or driving by, and remember on the way or right before you’re about to hit the icon for “call.” You might have a lot of car accidents during this time because your brain will blip out at inconvenient moments….. very much like they tell you not to drive under the influence. Your attention is every bit as scrambled as the rest of you.
Because again, you’re rewiring your nerves to the point where you will no longer recognize who you used to be before. Both in the liberation of not needing their approval because you can’t have it anyway, and the absolute abyss-deep process to get back up to the new normal.
People who seem functional are the ones hiding it well. They’re not getting over it any faster than anyone else. As time goes by, there is an expectation that you’ll get back to your old self, and it’s much too fast for my liking. First of all, there is no old self. I am not software you can roll back after a traumatic event.
No one is. Whether you know it or not is whether they want to open up to you, because most of being in public is just armor. They’re dying inside, trying to compartmentalize while their brains are spinning out like a tornado with memories. You spend a lot of time trying to hold back tears- even more pretending that you’re not crying all the time when you’re not with people.
Just because people don’t see grief doesn’t mean it isn’t happening to all of us. Losing a parent is in some ways universal, in some ways as individual as a fingerprint. What is universal is that it takes a long ass time, not just when the casseroles stop. People don’t check in after about six months, in my experience. This is not malice, it’s because they think you’re okay again now.
But the reality is just like the moment when Elizabeth realized that she was going to be queen. It’s just as jarring for the monarchy as it is in everyone else.
But most people don’t see their own grief writ as large as a change in the monarchy, and don’t take it seriously. They begin to act as if, rather than really focusing on what matters- their mental health. They feel fine, of course. They’re not being snappish because they’re overwhelmed with grief, they’re stressed at work (when before it was nothing). They’re doing things they wouldn’t normally do, like my own example (finding my journal in the freezer). Even that is written off as forgetfulness, even when they haven’t been like that in their whole lives.
You absolutely lose your mind for a little bit, no matter what your relationship with your parents was like. This is because it’s losing your tether, your protectors. You’re your own parent now, and therefore an “adultier adult” just by the nature of hierarchy. You’re the new generation, the changing monarchy in which you have to resurrect yourself, whether you use the analogy of the Christ or the phoenix.
You will definitely feel mocked in some cases.
One woman compared my grief over my mother to her grief over her cat. I was offended, but I’m sure she meant well. I don’t know what her relationship with her cat was like. I’m just not the kind of pet owner that would compare losing a mother to losing a pet. The worst part about you feeling mocked is that you know everyone means well, so you just have to let it roll off when those comments are impossible to forget……
I showed someone my ichthus necklace that has my mother’s fingerprint pattern in the middle. He asked where I got it and I said “the funeral home.” He said, “well… that’s really creepy.” Where else would I get something like that if I couldn’t ask her for it and the funeral home thought to do it when I didn’t?
That was a comment I’m still not over, and it affected my life in a big way because I never talked to him again.
I couldn’t look at him anymore, because I was so hurt every single time and it wasn’t worth working through it because he’d never been the most respectful person I’d ever met. It was just the last in a string of one-liners that were “jokes.”
It was not something I liked tolerating at the best of times, and this was when I couldn’t even see straight. Grief that deep is heavy and exhausting. You don’t learn to live with it all at once because you can’t. You’re basically in a shock blanket at first.
It comes over time, when there are fewer and fewer moments where you deny yourself happiness because of what they won’t get or what you promised that didn’t come true. You don’t heal from grief so much as sit with it until it doesn’t hurt anymore.
By thinking about it, over time you remember more and more good memories. It makes thinking about their death less draining and more about the things that make you smile. At first, I could only picture the open casket at her funeral, and it’s still the first picture that comes to my mind when I think of her because it’s etched in a way that my other pictures aren’t.
(I don’t mean I literally took a picture. Gross.)
If there is an open casket at King Charles’ funeral, there will be billions of pictures of it. In the newspaper. Can’t hide from it.
Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.
I woke up this morning, took a shower, and got to the doctor. Turns out, I was within the range to refill my medication, and I freaked out for nothing. I was worried because my insurance doesn’t cover my meds if I try to refill them before a certain time. I do not know how or why, but my count was off by a few days and I was panicking…. until I saw my doctor.
She’s so great. I think she’s actually a PA, but I wouldn’t see an MD as an upgrade. She really listens to me. What’s really funny is that I always call her “Doc,” because she’s a PA. The MD’s name is on everything. She never says her name when she comes into the room. Therefore, I have an excellent doctor, but I couldn’t tell you her name if my life depended on it…. Now I’m laughing to myself, the greatest part of an ideal day.
I’m getting a full work-up because when I came in last month, my UA was off; I was on my cycle (I hadn’t realized it yet, but the test did). Then, I remembered several years ago that I’d done a UA for rheumatoid arthritis years ago, and that had been off for the same reason. So, not only am I getting my hands x-rayed, I’m getting my theumatoid factor checked- which I would not have known to do if I hadn’t been a rheumatology MA for a number of years.
I remembered today because my knuckles are particularly sensitive/swollen today and my doctor agreed with me that we should rule it out. I realize that osteoarthritis is just as painful, but if I have an autoimmune disease, I want to catch it early.
It’s funny that if the test comes back positive, I’ll be using all the same lingo for myself that I’ve learned for everyone else. That being said, again, osteo is no joke and I’ve been taking ibuprofen a lot lately. I am also of the opinion that we’re just ruling it out, because I’ve had osteo in my back and knees for years. Cooking is not for the faint of heart.
My spine is just as weird as I am. It objects to that.
I also got neurology and psychology referrals so that I can do the thing with both those specialties. I need the neurology workup because I haven’t had one since I was 18 months old and I’m still just as physically weak as I was then.
You’ll also be delighted to know that since I’ve moved to Washington and left Portland behind, I’ve made impressive strides in my quest for a higher Vitamin D level. The last time I had it checked, it was 6 (it’s been a long time). After all these years, I am proud to say that I have worked my way up to 6.4.
Progress.
I said, “Doc, I have a funny story about that. When my stepmom read my lab report the last time I got my Vitamin D level checked, she called and congratulated me for having the lowest Vitamin D level in the history of her 30 year practice.” She said, “I’ve seen ‘4,’ but you’re top two.” We both laughed that that one. But to my stepmom, I was living in Portland and visiting, so I said, “I’d like to thank ‘location, location, location.'” Now I know that’s not true.
Perspective.
What I didn’t know is that there’s a once a week medication for that, and I’m on it now. The regular Vitamin D pills do not work for me. They never have (obviously). A normal level begins at 30, and I hope that this medication works. Vitamin D affects your mood and behavior so much, and I think I’ll be grateful to feel so much better in a few months.
I just had a Dooce moment. She once joked about writing like a Southerner and she said “I AM SPARING YOU THE DETAILS OF EARL’S ANGINA.” This is absolutely hilarious to me because basically, I’m not. I’m a Southerner who loves medicine, so I’m going to blog about it.
I have so many stories about the hospital/office living vicariously through my dad and stepmom. I wasn’t in the patient rooms, but definitely in the lobby when we were there for a consult. I wasn’t really joking when I said I went to medical school in the back seat of a Lexus. I overhear a lot. I pay attention to a lot.
I can still tell you about the patient whose son hit her in the head with a frying pan (she didn’t die, but she was never the same). I can still tell you who my favorite patient was to mimic, because her voice was so damn funny. Absolutely not a slam, I just love the way people speak and I pick it up over time.
I’ve picked up “valid” from Zac. It’s a great answer to everything.
I’ve picked up the occasional Canadian “eh” from Meagan, but I use it infrequently because there are certain times when a Canadian would say it and when they wouldn’t. I can tell where it would fit into a sentence just by the lilt of Meag’s accent, and when I know I want to use an “eh,” she reads the sentence back to me in my head so I can double check.
I can pick out a million things that have shaped me from all my friends, but those are my biggest examples. The current and the first. 😉
I decided to stop talking about medicine because when Franklin and I lived together, no one wanted to sit with us because we’d go off into the way doctors talk when they’re amongst themselves and no one could even enter the conversation because there was no concrete way to jump in. If I didn’t understand something, he’d explain it because he knew I was perfectly capable of picking up what he was putting down. As a result, part of my ideal day is spending time with doctors, because I can relate and am genuinely interested.
I think I would have been a good doctor in terms of patient care, but I would have struggled mightily before I got to that point. I didn’t even make it to calculus in high school.
I never saw anyone do calculus, you just have to make it through it…. plus organic chemistry, a different kind of math. However, most of what I’ve learned in a medical practice vs. a hospital is that there’s time. You pick up so much more through social engineering than you pick up through facts. That’s because you have to prescribe for them and hope to God they’re telling the truth about what they’re really on.
A great example would be not telling an anesthesiologist you’re high. The gas man doesn’t need as much, and has to hope they don’t kill you by putting you so far down.
A great example would be not telling your GP that you’re taking Sudafed and Adderrall at the same time.
A great example would be telling your doctor that you’re depressed, but neglecting to tell them that you’ve been taking St. John’s wort for months. Most SSRI’s react poorly to it.
This is basically a public service announcement to tell your doctors everything. They’re not going to judge you, they’re not going to call the police because you do drugs (unless you threaten to hurt someone else, yourself, or you’ve hurt your child). They’re not going to try and get you deported. They’re the ones you tell. Always.
I have now had my X-rays, and I took off a ring I’ve been wearing since 2005. It was very, very hard- again, swollen knuckles. I should stop wearing it, but it’s such a part of me. But eventually, it’ll get harder to remove it for X-rays. I just like having a silver ring on my thumb, and have since I stole it from Katharine. She knew I did. I doubt she’d know I still wear it. But, that’s how it came to be on my thumb. Her hands were bigger. 😉 It’s basically a fidget spinner, and I use it to stim. There was no way I was ever going to let go of it.
Then, I finally had enough to drink that I could do the UA, because of course the moment Doc wants it I’d just been to the bathroom. I went down and got my pills, then shotgunned a bottle of water and a Diet Pepsi. I was worried that my teeth would be floating by the time I got back to the doctor’s office, but no. I just hope I don’t have to do this again next month because it was too watered down to see anything.
But, as Matthew McConaughey says about beer, “I like to dehydrate while I rehydrate.” I know I couldn’t drink him under the table unless it was Dr Pepper, and even then I have my doubts.
But I’m constantly rehydrating like a Graves Disease patient, but there’s apparently nothing wrong with my liver and kidneys. Seriously, I can think of very few times in my day when I don’t have something to drink in my hand. I prefer cold cans and bottles so it’s not watered down. Unless it’s Coke from McDonald’s. Let’s not get stupid.
It’s good to know that my weight is under control and I haven’t dropped too much with the re-addition of the Adderall.
I have more in common with my Skyrim character than anything else, because I also look like an elf at this point.
However, I am getting to be a better elf.
This is the perfect day. I had such a significant increase in my Vitamin D level that it really boggles the mind.
How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?
As a blogger, I have a perspective on life that is more accurate than most, because I cannot tell myself in the moment how something happened 10 years ago unchecked. I will go back and look. I do not have any moral superiority, because I can only go back to what I was thinking at the time, not another person’s thoughts. Therefore, it’s not “I’m right on the principle.” It’s “I’m right in that this is what I told you, and this is what you said at the time.” People confuse the two, because it’s “throwing things back in their faces.” To me, it is Brené Brown 101. I am checking the story you are telling yourself, because my blog made me check the one I was telling me.”
People think that I am pointing out that they’re lying. No, it’s “now you’ve told me two different stories and I need you to explain why your thinking has evolved.” I don’t care why there are two stories. I’m autistic and I want to know how everything works in your mind. I do not need judgment and I haven’t given any. I am asking for information, and people do not like that (as a general rule).
I complain about bosses who say “explain to me how this happened,” and then when I proceed to explain an autistic amount (which is, granted, neurotypically exhausting), they’ll reply, “I don’t need your fucking excuses.” I complain because I do not understand asking for information and refusing it. In short, I do need your fucking excuses. I just don’t call it that because I’m not going to judge you on your answers. I just want the whole story when you think I should pick it up on my own. That’s because there are social expectations everywhere that I cannot pick up, and you are setting me up for failure by “knowing” what I’m going to do next because of them.
My perspective also changes because I take in information through reading and writing, so I retain a lot of what I write, and what I go back and read here later…. which I often do because nothing spurs something I’m going to say like taking an old thing I said and turning it upside down and backwards because new shit has come to light.
If I didn’t, I would sit in anger and bitterness all the time. In short, this blog is my “Let It Go.” I’m not going to do it in a moment, but you’ll see the process as I make my peace. There’s very little that’s truly important in life, and you’ll begin to see what I think is and isn’t. And mostly that I am vulnerable enough to admit when I’m wrong, both when I see it in myself and when I yield to another person.
But I will never appreciate the phrase “throwing it back in my face,” because that’s an autistic trait, to see pattern recognition in everything, including behavior. When I am pointing out pattern recognition in relationships, I am actually trying to make us stronger by saying, “this problem has come up six times now- why does it always come up in the same way? It always hurts me. How can we make it stop?” The other person always makes it about them, because me noticing pattern recognition is more offensive to them than fixing the problem. The “how dare you” aspect is strong in a lot of my friends.
I notice my own patterns of behavior accurately and I love it when other people can do it for me. You also have to be strong enough to deal with criticism because I know what I will tolerate and what I won’t; it’s not because I’m trying to hurt you. I know me. What will make me feel better and what won’t. If you cannot hear me on those things, I do not want a relationship with you.
This is the standard by which we should all run our relationships. “How do I feel when I am with you?” If I constantly feel invalidated, I am not going to stay. You cannot hear me, and when my problems fall on deaf ears and yours never do, then I’m out. For instance, if you are vulnerable with me and tell me about a problem going on in your life, I will listen until you are ready to stop talking. Just vent for hours if you need it. I expect the same of my friends, because I do not want to be someone’s emotional dumping ground when they’re upset and too busy to take my calls.
I get that I’m a lot. What I don’t get is how many people refuse to acknowledge that they’re the same. All people are a lot. To love someone is huge, because you have to accept a whole lot of good and bad behavior without blinking. That’s why I do not believe in love at first sight. Infatuation and sexual attraction? Surely.
I don’t think you can say you love someone until you’ve wanted to smother them in their sleep with a pillow AND ALSO would give them an organ AND ALSO take care of them if they were sick, travel with them, and smile through family functions even if you didn’t want to go because even if they don’t, you feel like half of them hate your guts. You don’t love someone until you’re willing to clean up their vomit….. because you partied too hard OR you’re going through chemo.
If you don’t know how I learned that, you don’t know my writing. I cannot be in love with Supergrover because she is not capable of loving me that way. I cannot love Supergrover because she won’t let me. And by that I mean that she will listen to my problems about other people all day long, she’ll read my adoration and love with that intensity, but she will not address problems in our relationship.
It makes me feel like she’s here for the dopamine and not for the long haul. That can’t be me anymore. I want reciprocity, and I was tired of not getting it in the slightest. It doesn’t matter how I feel about her, that I would do all of these things as a yellow string and not a red, that who she is as a person was never dependent on her ability to switch hit. That I could have been a support person for both her and her husband, because I’m interested in keeping them together, not being a wedge.
I am not a jealous ex. If you’ve read “Outlander,” I’m Lord John Grey. John could learn not to want Jamie sexually, but he could not learn how to let go and not love him anymore.
We have a lot in common, me and Grey.
It took me six or seven tries to get into “Outlander,” because I wanted to read it. I always read my favorite people’s books, the ones that shaped them. However, I couldn’t get past the rape scene in the first few chapters. I had to read it, get distance, and try again. Once I made it over that hump, I inhaled the whole series up to that point in like, 11 or 12 days. I held all my calls and “Buy Next” is dangerous if you’ve ever been to the Kindle Store.
That’s because representation matters. If you want to read my two recommendations in stories for understanding who I am, they are, it’s “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, first of all. Great series, but you only need to read the first one for representation of me. There is no more important character to me in the world than that because I think both The Giver and The Receiver are INFJ. The way that The Giver explains information is very much the way an INFJ would, and the way The Receiver takes in information is very much an INFJ on the flip side. I use their titles and not their names because I think that tradition has continued in the world of Same for a hundred or two hundred years. They are The Keepers of the Memories.
The only ones in their community who are allowed to feel.
The only ones in their community whose brains work differently than everyone else’s because of it.
Not understanding anyone else when they can’t feel, can’t explain how they feel.
When they do feel, their emotions run as deep as the scene where The Giver gives The Receiver the concept of war.
You cannot imagine what happened in my heart and brain when The War Daniel had his hands on my back. Honesty about war is too much for everyone who hasn’t been there and is hearing what it is like for the first time. Daniel had a particularly rough emotional time of it because he had an experience where he won a piece of fruit salad that most people win posthumously, coming through unscathed, but a near miss by a fraction of a second. Daniel was in the Navy, a medic embedded in a team of Marines. The Marines’ mission, and therefore Daniel’s as well, was to make sure there was no violence at an event where they were giving out vaccinations. About a hundred people were gathered that day (in my memory- it might have been a little more or less).
A terrorist had rigged up a five year old child with explosives and had a remote detonator so he could throw the child in the middle of the crowd and blow it up. Daniel caught it out of the corner of his eye and shot the terrorist before the child exploded, saving the entire crowd. If the child was already wired and no one had caught it already, it was a near miss by seconds. Daniel also, presumably, was not the one in charge of watching for terrorists, just had his eye out because he did have responsibility. Yet he was a medic, one of the people who was giving vaccinations at the time. I think that makes his actions even more amazing, because there’s two things at work. Being able to notice both the people he was vaccinating and his complete environment, and being able to react before anyone else in both directions.
It was a memory that cost me a lot of spoons, but with perspective it helped me grow more than anything in the last, I don’t know, decade? It deepened my love for all people who have been to war, down to a Starbucks clerk I noticed was a Navy Corpsman. It’s the reason Daniel was embedded with the Marines in the first place. They don’t do medicine or travel. It’s amazing how much crossover there is, and rivalry because of it. People think the Marines are the toughest, and they do absolutely nothing to dispel this.
I had to bring in a little humor to the situation, because I realized that as I was getting deep into the combat aspect of my story (not being in it but feeling my partner’s emotions about it so viscerally), that when I tell The War Daniel’s story it doesn’t lose power. It feels like he’s touching my back every time I hear it in my head. The War Daniel was (is?) one of the loves of my life. The timing was just off. That being said, I have no idea how he feels about me now having broken off our engagement, but he hasn’t cut off contact. We’ve e-mailed each other once, but unfortunately I didn’t get it until a month after he’d sent it. I think it led him to believe I was uninterested in him. But, if he hasn’t been reading, he wouldn’t know that. I prefer it that way, to be honest. That if he doesn’t want to know how I feel, then I have my answer because in order to know me, you have to know my writing as well. I am a range of people depending on our experience.
Being online friends and in real life friends is totally different, because I understand things differently in person than I do in writing , and therefore present myself differently because of it. I am just not going to waste time on a man who doesn’t care how I feel……… because I’m not shut down. And neither was he, in the beginning, when it was all the rush of having known each other as children and him saying “I’ve been in love with you for 36 years.” I do believe that he meant it. I really do.
That’s because in the beginning, he could lay it out for me. That’s because he was on medication to control his alcoholism and drinking one beer to avoid the shakes so he could come down naturally and at home before he admitted himself to rehab. Therefore, his emotions were stable. When he started rehab, he was a different person and we started nitpicking each other. Because he was in rehab, there was no way to have an in person relationship for a while, and our engagement fell apart.
But here’s what I know. If he was serious that he’s been in love with me for 36 years, then it’s always been me and he’ll get off his ass or he won’t. But it’s not a matter of love, it’s a matter of pride.
Does he think he deserves the love of his life or not?
What he could lay out for me is that he knew he was fucked up, and therefore encouraged me to keep seeing where my relationship with Zac went, because he couldn’t be there for me in person and he needed someone “on the ground.” It helped that he found Zac charming and wouldn’t have been threatened if we wanted to stay together when he got home. That he did want the life we envisioned, which was living overseas if we were able and having our daughter, Cora, join us if she wanted. We even wanted to live in a country with protections for trans women, like Thailand, because she currently lives in northeast Texas and doesn’t know what a life without that persecution is like.
Our job was to be there for Cora, and when our relationship fell apart, we lost that ability to tag team as co-parents, which we absolutely were. Cora and I still have a relationship on our own, but I don’t tell her how I feel about Daniel because she’s not the monkey in the middle. I am happy to talk to her about cats, her fictional worlds that would be famous if she puts them out there, us both being queer and having that experience, etc. It is enough, that she can always reach out to me because I’m her “queer mom.” We are emotionally available to each other even when The War Daniel and I are not. Again, our relationship reminds me so much of The Giver, because The War Daniel was the first person to touch me with the memory of war the way Lois Lowry set up imparting all memories by The Giver putting their hands on the backs of The Receiver. However, I know that I was the right Receiver for him because I’d had the experience of listening to so many other people with complex problems that I was ready for it. And before he touched my back with war, he touched it with love.
It’s the perspective that made me believe I’d done a lot of things right in my life. The War Daniel was the first person that made me turn my attention from Supergrover, because he showed me everything I wasn’t getting from her that I needed to function in our relationship. She went too long between touching my back with good memories instead of bad. I deserved a lot of criticism and anger in the moment, but being forgiven made me think there was a future that wasn’t really there.
In my world, forgiveness meant something opposite from what it meant in hers. That loving someone meant forgiving them honestly and completely so that we can talk about our issues again, because we can both be vulnerable without fear of the other’s emotions. I feel that Supergrover was scared of my emotions because she wasn’t used to dealing with them on her own. Therefore, she could not give me what she didn’t have, and could not admit it. It was an unbreakable power imbalance, because we could not move past anything by actually resolving it. We just kicked the can down the road. There were two reasons I had to love her as a whole person, and love her husband that way as well. We all needed each other, and we all turned on each other as well (I mean, I assume that they’re a team on this one- that he probably wouldn’t want to go for beers).
It would have been a better situation all the way around if we’d sat around a table in a relaxed manner and actually talked about what was happening. That I couldn’t undo what had happened, she was it for me on multiple levels, and her husband would know why better than anyone else. That I didn’t liken it to polyamory because I thought I could weasel my way into some sort of weird unicorn hunting them. I likened it to polyamory because in the poly community, close emotional relationships matter just as much as romantic ones because we’re all talking about priority and time, not whether we’re banging during said established date. It’s not the kind of love, but the kind of attention.
I have not given her that place in my life, my first priority, because I am who I am. I have given it to her because I’m a writer and she’s a muse- in her world, problematic. I am not calling her out on being a bad person, just bad at not having realized this before. She’s not a bad person, it’s a bad situation. Therefore, what I have always been trying to get across is not “I am scolding you.” It is “this is a real problem for me and we need to talk about it. Here’s what I think.” If you don’t reply with what you think, not my problem. I’m not going to encourage relationships with people that go on the defensive every time I try to express an emotion. But because Supergrover is my muse, the one who puts me in the mood to write, not encouraging a relationship with her was never going to happen. If we didn’t submit to each other, we were fucked. I began to pontificate on how she felt, but she wouldn’t pontificate on how she felt in response. She’d blame me for telling my story when it was off from hers, but didn’t correct any of my assumptions. Our relationship became perfunctory, the way I learned in “The Giver.” My feelings were evident and hers were not. She said “you’re not the only arbiter of our relationship” and once called me a dictator. She didn’t realize that I’d be telling a different story if I knew what hers was. I wasn’t the arbiter of our relationship, I was waiting on her input………… that never came.
In Lois Lowry’s world of Same, their communities not being able to feel, down to being given shots to repress their sexualities, is mandated by the government and everyone is used to it.
In the real world, people have a choice to be locked down or not, and most people do because it’s so much goddamn easier.
And less worth it, which I think the book makes an excellent example in showing it.
I don’t think you notice those messages until you go back and read YA in adulthood. I think that’s why books like The Giver and all other science fiction stories that have Christ figures are such hits. Everyone wants to know how being able to feel changes the world, and they see that bravery in media, but not in them. They’re drawn to the media that does it because they cannot find it in themselves, yet are inspired by it. It is admirable, just not for them.
For instance, if Supergrover already had all the people in her life that she wanted to do those things for her, that was fine. I would be in her life to whatever level she would accept. Even if she never wanted to meet me in person, that was also acceptable because I can say just as much in writing as I can through other senses, if not more. But, as I told her 10 years ago, “a hug would be a nice goddamn thing.” It was great when she agreed with me, and I promise you there was a time, even if there’s not now.
It is the most important I’ve ever felt in my life.
The fact that she gave me that gift, even once, is more than I can take in. I just had to give myself The Tiffany Talk before I could be vulnerable with her again, because I needed space to get over my crush and get on board. Because I was so in love with her, I got resentful and bitter that I needed to separate myself from her for two reasons. The first is that I was married and feeling like total ass about myself because I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. The second is that there’s a reason I was so in love with her. No one had ever put my mind in hyperdrive like that- made me care about the world and not just my little piece of it.
I just realized something, and now I’m making me cry. When we began, she was my Jamie Frasier, and Dana was my Frank. Thankfully, it was a totally different situation, but those are the only literary characters I can think of that accurately represent what it was like to be married to two people at the same time. The difference is that Dana and I loved each other deeply and fiercely. I didn’t find out that I needed Supergrover because Dana was capable of being toxic until much, much later. I learned that I was poly by going back and reading what I’d written about both women 10 years ago, how it was possible to love two people with such rabid attention and not have boundaries on either. We did have boundaries that helped me be safe, I just ignored them all because I was under every kind of stress you can possibly imagine and I became more mentally ill than I’ve ever been in my life.
Now, I realize that I have been The Receiver the whole time……….. with perspective.
All of it spiraled into me checking myself into Methodist Hospital, because I believed that neither my psychological nor psychiatric reactions were correct, and that my behavior was driven by both not having the emotional tools to deal with that amount of enormous emotion at once as well as not the right protocol.
Dana, Supergrover, and I all have massive life stories. It wasn’t the romance of it all that put me in the hospital. By then, I was already in it for the long haul with both of them. Hearing both of their stories bonded me to them in a way I’ve never felt about anyone else, and why I’ve made the decision not to enter a monogamous relationship ever again. It’s not that I cannot be monogamous, it’s that if it happened once, it could happen again. I am not going to bet against the house and end up wrecking my life at 46 the way I did at 36.
I lost a stable life with both of them because I spiraled out, but because of the already established long haul relationship, I never stopped hoping that Supergrover and I could, in a sense, start over once I got better. She’s not vulnerable enough for that, because it would require talking about a lot of uncomfortable things. If we’d ended up as partners, those uncomfortable conversations would have been different, but no less important. In a lot of ways, I am glad that I did not end up married to her, because what I learned from spiraling out is that if it hadn’t been my crush on her, it would have been something else.
Those intimate conversations wouldn’t have happened no matter how our situation turned out. I learned this by going back and reading my own work, because her emotional reaction to everything is to lightly move past it if it’s not all that serious and full on attack when she feels threatened.
It’s why “She’s So Mean,” “Your Love is My Drug,” and “I Believe in Love” (Matchbox Twenty, Ke-Dollar Sign-Ha, and Indigo Girls, respectively) have been my favorite songs since their release. “Your Love is My Drug” is particularly sentimental for me in two ways. The first is my connection to Supergrover, because our adrenaline was that hyped on many levels, and the second is that Dana and I danced to it at Lindsay’s wedding.
Accidental polyamory, but ok……………
Incidentally, my favorite meme from that Facebook group is when a guy texts another guy who is dating his girlfriend and he gets pissed about it. He says, “relax, bro. She is dating both of us. You are my boyfriend-in-law.”
Relatable. It’s how I think of Zac’s partners. That I’d hope they’d never react poorly if I reached out to them, because I don’t think of them as threats in the slightest. I get irritated with Zac about our relationship, which is different. The conversation we had about his newest partner was about me being jealous because he treated her completely differently than he did me, and it was particularly egregious for a number of factors.
My jealousy had absolutely nothing to do with his partner. It had everything to do with how Zac behaved, which, in the poly community, is called “being a bad hinge.” I was calling him out in love, because I want the best for him. I was also standing up for myself, because I am an older partner who can absolutely lay in his lap….. I also refuse to be a doormat on the other end of the equation. Zac prevented me from doing that from the beginning, because this is the first time he’s ever been a bad hinge and I had to call him on it. He established that the partner who never called him on anything was the worst because he couldn’t respond to their needs if he didn’t know them, he was bad at communication/getting back to people, etc. Therefore, the person who never called him on anything never got their needs met because they weren’t taking up room.
His honesty floored me because he’s the first partner who’s ever laid that out for me before we ever got intimate. Generally, that’s something I figure out after being with them long enough to pick up those things on my own. How much I care is dependent on how much I love you. If I don’t love you, I won’t call you on anything. That’s because I don’t want to do anything to make the relationship worse.
I have abandonment issues, and it’s something I’ve known since I was 14, because I knew even then that it was a core memory.
My emotional abuser was always as honest with me as I am with everyone else (about most things). I appreciated it at the time because as I found out through a Facebook meme, “you don’t like powerful women because they’re powerful. You like powerful women because you’re autistic and they’re direct about what they want.” It’s a terrible match, because they’re direct about everything except their emotions.
I have a feeling there are a lot of ASD/ADHD people trapped in that cycle, because we’re programmed to throw truth bombs whether you like it or not, and emotionally avoidant people HATE THAT. They would rather follow social convention and get mad when you ignore it. Social convention is nice, but it’s not kind.
What is kinder? Zac laying out everything for me beforehand, or surprising me later? What if he’d led me on for months before telling me that he had other partners? He could have, because telling someone that you’re dating other people is not required when you haven’t had the talk about whether you’re exclusive in the first place. I don’t feel like it’s a conversation you have on the first date, necessarily, because you haven’t even found out if you like the person well enough that you want to sleep with them.
Although if you do know on the first date, then that definitely is a first date conversation. You will wreck both parties, otherwise. One is disappointed because they found a great connection, the other is furious that they thought they might get a love story and they were actually one of many…… because most women are programmed to believe that when someone shows interest in you, that means that means We Are Really Starting Something™ from the moment we start texting.
The reason I say women are programmed to think that is that I was programmed to think that from a very young age, so I can relate. I also have found that if you express that you’re not interested in being exclusive from the first day forward, they’ll stop talking to you because they want that fairy tale so bad.
I was single for seven years, happily so, because I was more interested in Supergrover’s emotional support than I was interested in finding a red string. That’s because Dana’s trump card was punching me in the face, and I needed those seven years to recover. There was no way in hell that I would trust anyone that much, because I didn’t trust myself. I participated in us spiraling out to that degree, and by writing it all down I got perspective on the way I behaved and why.
That’s because I could go back and read it later without having the emotional attachment to my words because I was still struggling with the same problem. Looking at your own behavior with an omnipotent third eye is invaluable, whether you’re writing it for publication or secretly at night.
I choose to publish how I feel because I find that as I’m learning myself, other people learn themselves in turn. It’s what my personality is designed to do.
I’m an INFJ.
Like The Giver.
I love whole people, not just superficial attraction.
Like Lord John Grey.
Perspective on my life comes from other writers. Maybe yours will come from what you read here.
Here are my two favorite quotes about writing.
The first is a teacher asking a little girl who her favorite writer is, and she says, “me.” After writing since grade school and being 46 now, I cannot say that I am a great writer. I can say I’m my favorite author. It is one thing to love your characters when you see them in fiction. It is quite another to love your friends in real life so much more when you can see how you’ve both changed each other over the years. The second is “one day you’ll be someone’s favorite author.”
I hope that my friends realize that as I pass down memories like The Giver, they’re the reason I can do it, my reason for living because my experiences make my writing so much richer and deeper. I have been compared to Dooce, The Bloggess, David Sedaris, and a lot of other comedic writers. I can express things comically because perspective means I can laugh later, while having felt like Sylvia Plath in the heat of the moment.
I just realized that I told you that I had to give myself “The Tiffany Talk,” and I didn’t explain what that was. I then realized I couldn’t describe it better than I did the first time, so here’s a link to a sermon I preached at Bridgeport that I believe is the best I’ve ever done- and not because I’m that great.
Stories That Are All True 