I liked any subject that required more writing than “y = mx + b.” I’m not even sure if THAT formula is right for slope, but I think it is… I am not smarter than a fifth grader when it comes to simple arithmetic and basic algebraic functions.
Where I excel is in the social sciences. I liked writing, but English papers were not as exciting to me as history and social studies. When I got into college, that added psychology and political science to the mix. I got a good foundation in English, but the real value was learning how to write about everything else.
I know that I blog here, that none of my work is cleaned up. That it won’t show you how capable I am after sitting with an editor for a few days, or even me hammering the same piece for a few days rather than blowing ’em off and keep going. That was a process that started in high school, and I haven’t needed with blogging because it’s all what Brene Brown would call “shitty first drafts.”
None of my SFDs are anything I would submit to publication without serious reworking. I learned that from having to whittle academic papers and then lost the ability somewhere along the way. I could be better than I am right now, and the goal over the next few years is to find out how. Maybe it’s going to conferences. Maybe it’s going back to university. Whatever it is, I need my writing to change as I do.
Maybe that means hitting the big red button on posting here, but I doubt it. Taking down this web site is more trouble than it’s worth. I might not ever get back meaningful pieces without having to comb the way back machine for days. But there’s nothing wrong with turning my attention to academia when it needs it. My blog will survive the lack of updates because you people are strangely attached to me for some reason. 🙂
Whatever I do, it will be built on the shoulders of my grade school teachers, who taught me how to craft sentences and build them into paragraphs. Most of the ones I’ve really loved are gone now, but to the ones that are still with us, thank you.
There was a point at which I got old enough in school that I realized writing would help me anywhere. This is where my English teachers became even more invaluable. They were setting me up for all kinds of ways to work with bosses. I still struggled in math, but I was assured that I wouldn’t have to use it.
That has remained true, but I have a different outlook on math classes than I used to. I can get AI to tutor me and it’s always available. So making it through college math classes looks different now, because I didn’t have someone to ask. No one in my family is good at higher math, except for my mother’s father, and he died in the 90s. Having AI takes a lot of anxiety off me because I cannot farm out beautiful sentences. Those have to come from me.
But AI will always be available when I forget the formula for slope.
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.
In elementary school, I had two classes. One was called “English” and one was called “Language Arts.” It has been at least 40 years since I started school, and I still can’t tell you the difference. I am 100% certain that it would only take a quick Google Search to make the distinction, but I enjoy being a writer and not knowing. It’s just funny. However, if I had to guess, it would be that “English” = Grammar and “Language Arts” = content. I’m guessing because I always got grades like 97/95 in English and I think those were the two criteria. I then, like now, wrote in stream-of-consciousness mode so my grammar wasn’t infallible, but even before I learned to type it was typo-adjacent. I only spelled things wrong when I wasn’t thinking about it. Also, in high school I wasn’t a very good typist. I caught more mistakes that way because I was going slower.
Learning how to chat online made me a better writer, because now I can touch type. In fact, I can keep up with my thoughts to the tune of only being a couple of words behind what I’m thinking. Most businesspeople can do this, but it’s a specialized group that didn’t know anything about typing and learned it because conversation moved too fast for them to keep up. My first real foray into language arts was with meeting girls (of course it was). Then, just like now, big emotional connections, but not outright flirting because I was 15 and they lived far, far away.
I will tell you about them (mostly because if they Google themselves, they’ll re-find me), but I have to tell you that I might not be in any way correct because catfishing was a thing even in the 90s. But whether these women were real or not, they were my friends and there was no sexual content to anything, leading me to believe that they were legit. Yes, I was young, but I found other young people, or at the very least, adults who did not hurt me.
The first was Rainey McMillan from Swansea, Wales. It was 31 years ago and she’s still fresh in my memory. I didn’t have a personality with her because we’d never met. In her, I found my real self- the autistic person who went non-verbal for very, very, very long periods of time because writing took away my barriers to conversation. I believe wholeheartedly that Dana didn’t see it because she couldn’t. I used to be a lot more okay with forced extroversion than I am now, which was bad. Very, very bad. I was overwhelmed a hundred percent of the time and lived in burnout often. If I can narrow down my demand avoidance to the most essential of needs, I can feel my body’s rhythm and flow. It gets lost in an overloaded schedule. I notice when my demand avoidance gets so debilitated I cannot move. My biggest job right now is to learn how to deal with these disabilities, because I cannot even ask for ADA accommodations if I don’t know what will actually help.
I could do lots of jobs in a quiet room. Very few offices have them anymore because it’s all about cubicle farms and conference rooms. People have asked me how I worked in a busy kitchen. It was a process. First, my relationship with Dana was strong and a lot of it was just us alone in the kitchen. She was a sensory experience in and of herself and my eyebrows are going over my forehead and that was meant to make her laugh because she knows her. They’ve met.
Dana becomes very excited about things. Very excited. I was irritated by a lot of it, but she also became very excited about me. It wasn’t all bad. The negative aspects of my sensory experiences paled in comparison to the positive. 😉
However, this shouldn’t be taken as a slam on Sam, either. A positive of waiting is forgetting enough about the experience to make it new, which is what 90s gays in Houston called “Baptist virginity” (because they get re-baptized all the time and we have no idea why. The first one didn’t take?).
I’ve always thought sex was hilarious, since I was a kid. One of my favorite comedy routines is the one about Jeff Foxworthy trying to make the room all romantic for his wife. He puts candles on their headboard and halfway through they realize wax is dripping on their faces. I would like to believe that I am also hilarious with stuff like that. There’s no point in getting too worked up over it. One day it’ll make a cute story between us, what doesn’t kill you makes good writing, etc.
I also think being queer had to cure me of Protestant beliefs about sex because I had to talk about it so often. The glossary of my community alone, JFC. Learning it takes years and I’m behind the eight ball. If I’m talking to someone under 30, they’re going to have to use flash cards. :::pause for laughter::: On the other hand, new terms come to me easily because I want to learn the language even if I never use it. I picked up “new relationship energy” or NRE from polyamory because it describes how I feel at the beginning of every relationship. I’m what’s called “demisexual” or “sapiosexual.” That means I am not attracted to people by the way they look, but how much they excite my brain. That’s why it doesn’t matter what kind of relationship it is, I’m going to get lost in a fog. I feel the same energy with Supergrover that I do with Lindsay- because since Lindsay only works here and hasn’t actually relocated, every time I see her it’s the brain fog of it feeling new and heightened. Strong, comfortable, and exhilarating because she’s such a big shot. What I have learned from both of them is that I am worthy of being married to someone like them. That they weren’t more powerful because they were smarter. They were more powerful because their brains were built for the system and you couldn’t find more beautiful women in a catalogue selling fuckin’ anything.
Thus the first, Rainey, eventually became Supergrover…. and not because I tried to replace her. It’s that by the time I met Supergrover, I’d had 30 years of relationships entirely in text. My relationship on the ground with my sister helps me to understand Supergrover’s life by being able to see what a powerful woman is like and how they became so without it actually being her.
When they walk into a room, it’s not only their employees that snap to attention. It’s all the men above them, too. It comes in handy because their beauty makes people trust them before they talk to them, and they’re wonderful people so being magnetically attracted to them is easy. They’re also the type of people that are infinitely kind…. the type people who other women don’t see as a threat because they go a little stupid when they see them, too. If Supergrover has had one real crush, she’s had a million “girl crushes” on her since birth. She’s the kind of person that’s gorgeous enough to have power like a mean girl, but she gets it through attraction and not malice. I know all of this because I grew up with her personality type. Every man wants to be her boyfriend, every woman wants to be her bestie.
That’s because they both have the power to make you feel like you’re the most important person in the room when you’re with them, and it not coming off as manipulation because it isn’t. They genuinely like their small moments with people that are quality, true connections. A connection is worth something even if it only lasts a few minutes, because networking is more important than mental/physical labor. Networking makes any job easier while being at work is more specific.
For instance, Lindsay has worked in both private sector and non-profit lobbying, plus campaigning and body man for the mayor of Houston and did constituent services for a while. Knowing Annise Parker was her connection to the White House because she ran Mayor Pete’s campaign. Pete losing was hard on me because even though I never realistically thought he would win, I thought “now she’ll have to move to Washington and I won’t have to make it my idea.” It’s not a priority to me because it would be so nice to have her here all the time, but I wouldn’t see her any more than I do now. She just doesn’t have time. I don’t even see her every time she comes here. I text her 99% of the time for the same reason I e-mail Supergrover, and why I say that if we had a relationship on the ground, it would look a lot like the one I have with my sister. That being close meant “I can give you 15 minutes in March.” And that’s only if I ask in December and am willing to be picked up and driven somewhere, find your own way home because I got shit going on here, man. But you know what? Those would be the most valuable 15 minutes in my entire life. I would walk differently after that. I get the impression that time with her is valuable because she makes time, never actually has it. We’d play by the rules and improvise on them as necessary. I’m ADHD and don’t give a fuck. That means spur of the moment get together or cancel and I’m great either way.
That’s what I mean about being in Washington at a time she wasn’t supposed to be and joking about having an affair with Michael’s wife. That it wouldn’t do to hide anything because it’s more trouble than it’s worth…. what I feel is happening when she doesn’t claim me outright, and feel secure when she does. It had gotten to the point where I thought that Michael didn’t even know about me because she seemed so secretive with me, I assumed she was secretive with him as well. It was a surprise to me that she wasn’t, and I had to be furious, overwhelmed, and forgiving all at the same time because her whole shtick is that adults don’t discuss their conversations with other adults and that she didn’t want any of what she said to go to Dana, or have to worry about it so she wasn’t going to say anything more when what she told me was the source of my anxiety. She destroyed me in a second, and because my environment was threatened, I completely rearranged my life in order to get peace I so desperately needed. She took all her feelings about me and told someone else, where it would do the least good.
So, in short, I felt like I kept my word and she screwed me to the wall.
That’s because now it’s 10 years later and I’m still a nervous wreck. She won’t listen when I say that because she’s programmed herself to only think of me as a threat. It helps her ignore my reality, because I know she feels guilty. She tells me that all the time without ever resolving the problem. I keep hoping, and keep being disappointed.
I decided that was all her own shit, that I didn’t think of her as a threat until she acted like one. That I didn’t paint her as a villain in every story, just the one where she was. I also painted me as the villain first. It’s not only that I hurt her. It’s that she had the high ground first, and relationships tumble and roll. She cannot win every fight, all the time, and she won’t give on anything. It’s like working with a Republican congress, but not one where we can’t get anything done. When they used to collaborate to the bare minimum.
It’s so sad because we could have been Obama and Biden.
I bet she’d look good in aviators. I don’t know for sure, but she has the personality of a flyboy…. the equivalent of Finn Hudson, the quarterback popular kid and the choir nerd (she doesn’t sing, I just mean she has a soft side). It’s more fun looking back than it has been the last eight years, because I felt so constrained by what I could say to her. Since she took everything as a negative, I was constantly searching for the right thing to say and landing on the wrong one.
One of the songs on the playlist I made to move my mind forward was a Ludacris duet that I hear in my head all the time… “can’t live with you, can’t live without you.” I only wanted to solve the swings, not kill the relationship altogether. But like I said, we both get defensive immediately, which lead to not listening on both sides. That’s because she’d only answer when she was angry. She wouldn’t feed the positive, so my reactions to her were angry as well.
I own a lot. I just don’t own everything. I am not the only person that needs to learn and grow in a relationship, and this is what happens when only one person makes the commitment. And I don’t care if it’s because of apathy or not. Whether I made the mistake of wanting her to work on something when she didn’t and not walking away, or whether she really does love me with Mama Wolverine intensity and I’ve underestimated her feelings, I couldn’t get her to say how she felt either way.
I told her I thought that and no response. I have no idea whether she’s licking her wounds or happy I finally got the message. If she’s happy I finally got the message, then I deserve more than her, no matter what I think of her. I will eventually find someone else and hopefully she’ll see she made a mistake. But by then I’ll be gone and I’ve told her that if she comes back, she has work to do with me. Nice is not going to cut it. It’s not that she can’t come back in and of itself. It’s that I will no longer tolerate this crack-smoking foolishness. I watch Doctor Who. I have standards.
She doesn’t see her hypocrisy. I’m the only one who ever ruins anything. But I didn’t ruin us. I ruined me trying to find her.
For Susan Hoefer and Sue Protheroe, my English and Language Arts teachers. If they hadn’t taught me how to express my feelings clearly then (7th grade), I wouldn’t be able to express myself to the degree that I do now. They are precious to me because of it.
List three jobs you’d consider pursuing if money didn’t matter.
There’s four. I’m giving you a bonus.
Or it would have been a bonus answer if it wasn’t a joke. I couldn’t think of three jobs at first so I just went with a movie title. I would be good at none of these things except spy, and even then I would be good at the people part, not the paying attention part. Prevailing wisdom says that’s a bad idea. You can’t have a disorganized priority list when people’s lives are counting on it. I am the god of chaos wherever I go.
Editor’s Note: At this point I got lost in a tangent when my mind flipped to “chaotic god.” Just roll with it. I’ll circle back eventually.
Supergrover is neurotypical, which makes me fall over with laughter that our bff name has always been “The Holy and The Moly.” The funniest part is that I didn’t come up with it. Dana knows us. We’ve met. Whether I am chaotic good, neutral, or bad depends on perspective. I will accept either. I would imagine Dana thinks of me as both depending on the hour. Supergrover would look at me with amusement and say, “hard same.” I wouldn’t notice anything except the playful nature of her eyes. I think of her as Aziraphale in the bathtub at the end of Good Omens Season one. I think of me as Crowley in the other bathtub. Those of you who know what I’m talking about will see what I mean immediately………………
Aziraphale and Crowley could have been the couple that best represented us right up until they kissed. At the time, I was hurt. Friendship is underrepresented and I felt a relationship where they were deep, open, and vulnerable without romance was something vastly underrepresented on TV. I wasn’t disappointed, necessarily. Just that what was a good analogy became a bad one for me, but that has nothing to do with Neil Gaiman’s talent as a writer.
I get enough of that type friendship on Doctor Who to last me a lifetime. You just have no idea how much I am Martha Jones, or would want to be. Remember how Martha went through shit with The Doctor and it made her attracted to him? Remember when she got over it and saved his ass on multiple occasions because she realized that there was something bigger than her at work? Hard same, said with the same amusement in my eyes. I liken it to Jodie Whitaker being cast during Martha’s storyline instead of David Tennant. (Random aside… who says “Martha” better than Matthew Rhys on “The Americans?”)
Back to me.
I probably could win at being the CIA trainee to recruit an asset first at The Farm (they put on scenarios like cocktail parties). If you were going to bet on me, bet on me for that. I am smooth enough that the plant would just tell me. I can get one of the best spies in the world to tell me what she knows with a wink and a smile. I had Jonna Mendez dead to rights, where she couldn’t say anything and absolutely did. If you’re wondering, it was whether she worked on a Cold War movie. Her redirect was “maybe we should hire you.” What I should have said was, “dear God, you can’t imagine what a bad idea that is.” What I actually sad was………… nothing.
After that, I developed an affinity for satchels.
Now that we’ve fully explored my dream life, because I couldn’t get away from the bipolar thing even if money were no object, let’s talk about real stuff.
If money were no object, I would do two things. I would become a TA and get a master’s in whatever I felt like, in perpetuity. Read law at Oxford if I wanted, what the hell? When I wasn’t working on school, I’d be writing. It would just be a lot harder to make time for it. I think I’d be a great TA in divinity, history, psychology, political science, sociology, and education, particularly music education. I couldn’t be a choir director now, but I could learn. I have also worked with kids long enough not to get rattled, which is harder than learning to conduct.
Although, the thing that grates on my ear most is sopranos who are out of tune, even me, and at that age, all kids have high voices. I would learn to be good at my job for the sake of saving my hearing. If I was a band director, beginning oboe will clear your sinuses.
I would be a wonderful musician if I wanted that life. I know that I’m good enough for an opera chorus, and could be trained for mainstage roles because I was offered one when I worked at Marylhurst and I turned it down (I don’t remember the role, but it was Penzance). At the time, I was terrified. I didn’t even show up for the audition even though I was wanted for the role already. It was more of a coaching session.
That’s because the role was for a lyric soprano, not a mezzo, and at the time, it was pre-voice lessons. I now know I’m a true lyric, but it would still take years not to Florence Foster Jenkins my way through “Queen of the Night.” I knew I had one aria in me. I didn’t think I had all of them in one night. The workout to do that is tremendous. You just don’t see that from the audience because it happens internally. It feels like circuit training trying to get your body do respond quickly. You can’t have air when you need it the most. You just have to deal and move on. Sometimes, that’s another soprano in your section bailing you out. As a soloist, you’re completely screwed if you haven’t inhaled down to your feet. The heavy lifting is being able to control that much air after you have it so that it doesn’t all come out all at once. I cry with laughter when I think of the flops I’ve had. Wrong notes are horrifying in the moment and hilarious later.
I just don’t want to live that life, because it’s piecemeal. I wouldn’t have a permanent place in a choir unless I was in the military. I’d have to get contracts all over the world and move frequently. The gig economy is not easy, so I just don’t want to do it. I will probably end up auditioning for Washington National Opera Chorus or National Cathedral’s choir eventually. The thought of hiking to Georgetown twice a week doesn’t thrill me, though.
The life I’d like to live is quiet. Even if something of mine goes viral, I will still want to take it in from a distance. I only trust those closest around me because they’ll keep my head on straight. I would rather keep being an introvert and able to produce because I’m not lost in noise vs. signal. The signal comes in purer the less there is to compete with it.
So, I suppose my ultimate job is ogre. Just get off my lawn, but know I’m okay because Fiona and Donkey are around somewhere.
I’ve been close to Bryn’s mom and dad since I was 19, as well. Here’s the most important thing her dad has ever taught me, because it has influenced a lot of what I write and preach. The hardest part of teaching is remembering what it was like not to know.
It’s a very difficult thing to be enlightened and also remember the dark. If you can record that transition, you might be able to explain it. You can help others by acknowledging their fear, and being their Moses.
The phrase “being Moses” means something to me, because Tony Mendez has taught me a thing or two about being a writer/teacher. In “Argo,” he tells State that the only way out of Tehran is through the airport…. That State should “send in a Moses” to bring them home. Because the meeting was speculative- so State could say they ran their ideas past CIA’s best ex-fil guy- I am not sure that Tony Mendez meant to say “it’s me. I’m Moses.”
The next scene in my mind is Tony preparing The Six for their trip to the grand bazaar in the middle of the city. Moses is sweating bullets for two reasons. The first is that if he is caught, The Agency cannot claim him. He’s working without a net. The second is that it’s not just his ass on the line. He and The Six get caught, as Jack points out, they die badly. The entire world will be watching.
That is an extreme example of having to teach someone, but it illustrates frustration on both sides of the equation. If Tony doesn’t prepare The Six, one if not all of them will be pulled in by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for questioning. Alternatively, The Six are just basic policy wonk diplomats with no training in deception and Tony has to teach them to walk their covers in a day.
It’s not the same as remembering what it was like not to know multiplication and division, but it’s the same concept. The difference is an age-appropriate level of fear. It clutches your chest whenever you leave your comfort zone, which is not the same when you’re five and when you’re fifty. It’s a proportional response.
Remembering what it was like not to know is often a failing of mine, because things that are so patently obvious to me are hiding in plain sight for others. I am going to be able to feel you before you even say anything. I can tell what kind of mood you’re in simply by watching body language. I can feel the frustration, anger, etc. steaming off you and the moment when that energy changes. I don’t have to learn someone’s mannerisms, habits, mood, and behavior to do this. It happens automatically. I will not be able to tell that there is a problem, but I know what it looks like to move in the world showing different emotions. The more people claim there isn’t one, the more I know whether they’re telling the truth or not, because there is an energy behind truth and white lies. I can feel that shift, and can feel you bullshitting me. Your next words don’t even matter, because the way you stiffened up before you answered betrayed you.
I feel like I can tell the most about people’s personalities and group dynamics without saying a word. I stand there and soak up everything in the room. I’m not just feeling how we are interacting, but how everyone is. I can tell not just how your behavior affected me personality, but also how well you know how to read a room…………
I am not bragging on myself, because others have this gift. Bryn is better at it than I am. Having her is like having a bloodhound. She can sniff out when I’m upset, and sometimes I think she does it by reading how the phone rings. 😛
Speaking of Bryn, she told me that she feels like a celebrity when I write about her on my blog. I told her that she is not the first person to tell me this. My friend James nearly made me die of laughter when he said, “I really just go to your page and search ‘James.’ Yes, I am that fucking shallow.” She told me that my entries were the perfect length for a morning constitutional, and I told her that she was nowhere near the first person to tell me that.
I missed my calling. My blog should be called “The Shit Show.”
Stories That Are All True 