How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?
When Supergrover emoted, she gave me two things. The first is closure. The second is the ability to work toward our goals now that all the cards are on the table. It has been a hard row to hoe when she’s only given me the flop, keeping the turn and the river in front of me, out of my reach. This is because all five cards had been revealed before, and they weren’t cards we could put back in the deck.
It reminds me of Plants vs. Zombies, if you’ve ever played that video game. The second time you go through the levels, Crazy Dave picks out three seed packets that are at random, but they’re locked and you can’t remove them- you have to hope that you win based on what you bring to the game.
We have nine seed packets, and three of them are locked. It’s an even better analogy, because Michaels is holding the flop, the turn, and the river because I fucked up. If there’s anything that made me fail, it was me. For Supergrover to say that this is all her fault is ridiculous. If I hadn’t been an asshole, none of this would have happened.
Full stop.
I have been saying that ad nauseam on my blog, not going after her. The constant feedback that I get from my readers is that I am way too goddamn hard on myself. I have never once heard “you’re too hard on her.”
Not once, ever in my life.
But, if people had said that, I wouldn’t have deflected, either. I would have said that they didn’t know the whole story, and that they couldn’t know what went on behind closed doors, and they never would. So, they have to put a lot of faith in me that I am not being too hard on myself, that I own 50% of the problem. Don’t treat me as innocent here, because I’m not.
Meeting Supergrover changed the course of my life for all the right reasons, and we both feel guilty about rushing into this relationship because it wasn’t a problem we thought through together. If we had, we could have avoided a lot of turmoil later on.
I said, “do you think I write about you just for shits and giggles? No, this is my very real inner monologue.” What I didn’t remind her of yet again is how much it takes to be this vulnerable. That I shake and cry through some of these entries, that it’s hard to get my feelings out and yet absolutely essential.
And then I told her what I was really writing and why I was writing it that way. I hope she’s shocked out of her mind, because I think I won this hand.
I just hope she, like me, doesn’t move the goalposts and say my response should have been happier. Because we’ve both been doing it to each other for a very long time.
When we don’t open up to each other, we are no better than we were before. It’s just going to keep being a toxic mess. When we put up walls, we don’t fulfill our purpose in each other’s lives, why it’s always been just her and me. That sometimes it’s nice to have that “stranger on a train” feeling where you can just dump anything and let the other respond to it.
That feeling is exactly why it’s not incumbent upon her to give of herself and her time. I am not asking for more than she wants to give. I think we’d be great comic foils, and have a ton of fun no matter what our relationship looks like in the future.
For instance, I don’t like the lines in this blog where I flip her shit. I’m not as funny as she is, so basically it’s “I set ’em up, you knock ’em down.” I like the response better than I’ve ever liked anything I’ve said. I have gotten a touche once in the history of our relationship, and I cannot tell you what that line was, but I came in Kings full over Aces.
We set each other up to fail. Badly.
But now I can either start moving away from her comfortably, or moving toward her with peace and grace. No matter how she feels about me, I’ll always be hers.
It’s just up to her to see which way we’ll go, because I don’t know whether she’ll understand why I’m doing what I’m doing or not. But like it or not, the important part is that she heard my thu’um instead of my whisper.
And whispered back that I wasn’t on the wrong track.
She’s just hurt and tired….. with me waiting to kiss her boo-boos exactly the way she kissed all mine 10 years ago. I have Bactine, Band-Aids, lollipops, the whole works.
I wear my CIA baseball cap most days. Zac knows this. First of all, it was a present from him. Second of all, it’s my comfort item in his absence. It’s a great baseball cap, too, but also it reminds me of him. We don’t get together that often, but I think of him all the time and vice versa. I love that he sends me pictures of himself every morning, pictures of Oliver (who is a dog), and random memes (mostly regarding making fun of religion or linux or both). All of those things are important, and yet not a sensory thing like a piece of clothing.
I wrap up in my Outlander plaid at night. Bryn knows this. It’s not branded, it’s just what I call it because Bryn sent me a Scottish plaid when we were both in the middle of inhaling the book series (I like reading, she likes audiobooks). It’s green and meant to remind me I’m loved- it does, and it has for many years because it was in the box of the first things Bryn sent me when I got here.
I like iced coffee better than hot, so I brew the coffee at night and pour it into a cup with ice in the morning. I got the cup when Supergrover sent me a large gift certificate and told me to have some fun on her. That was long ago, and it’s an every day carry.
Supergrover does not know this.
I was thinking about “choosing to air all this” afterward, and all that really made sense to me is that she was okay with step one, but forgot about steps two through ten. As in, if she started being aggressive in step one, then why would I think she would want to know steps two through 10?
It’s a weird dichotomy, because I think she really did want/need to hear the things I said after we parted, but because every conversation between us made me think she wasn’t interested, I picked up my toys and went home. I tried to take up as little room as I possibly could, because if I tried to emote, I was met with either “I’m too busy” or “you’re too needy.”
She thinks that all of this is her fault, that I have said all of this is her fault. Then, she copped to everything I said she did and apologized for it, then reamed me out for telling the world I was unhappy about her doing exactly what she was doing.
wtf kind of bullshit is that? 😉
So, when her response to me was as angry as I’d ever seen her, I met her with joy. When you get the gift that you’ve been asking for for SEVEN YEARS, you don’t complain about the wrapping. She emoted. She broke down and told me what was really going on. That’s what I wanted. If I had responded with more anger, it would have been moving the goalposts and saying her response wasn’t happy enough. She doesn’t need to be happy with me. She needs to tell me the truth.
But I want her to be happy with me. I just don’t want to be the only arbiter of our relationship. I need her to take up space by telling me how she’s feeling and not covering it up, running away from her emotions, making me do a lot of emotional guesswork that makes me set off land mines I never knew were there.
She’s never opened up about the tender places in her that I couldn’t see, that I really wanted to….. for instance, she said that she has had the chance, countless times, to stop what she was doing and respond. She didn’t, and takes responsibility for that. I could have been an asshole and said “how dare she?,” but the take home message was “I think about you all the time.”
If she’s willing to show up like she did the other day, she’s welcome every day. I don’t want to hide anymore. I don’t want to feel like a secret anymore. It doesn’t feel like a secret anymore, because when she gave me a clear picture, I could see for miles.
I told her it felt like she owned herself, and I loved her. None of this is all her fault. There was no preconceived plan, just fools rushing in. I’m just not the only fool, for very different reasons.
So, she may not have known that “her” Starbucks cup is the one I every day carry…….. because it’s just one of the things I would have told her if I thought she’d wanted to hear it.
That’s what this has all been about. When did we both just stop taking up space and trying not to offend each other?
What experiences in life helped you grow the most?
Last night, I was rereading the long letter from Supergrover (having so much to read helps when she’s out of pocket because of course the second time I read something, a different aspect will jump out), and she was talking about one of her kids’ partners. She told me that the kid’s partner had told the kid that the turning point for them in their journey with alcohol was losing her kid. A tear came to my eye and I thought, “alcohol and bipolar present the same. I am this kid.” Apparently the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Her kid is her, and I have no doubt they have the same type affect on people. It wasn’t the point of the letter, but the things that affect me that she’s written are mostly the things that connect to something deep inside me.
I felt more relaxed than I’d felt in years. Supergrover didn’t understand our pattern, didn’t understand why I didn’t accept certain things about our relationship, me surprised at how conscientious and dedicated she really is at being a friend, and how because I didn’t believe her, I missed out on a lot of things. But the reason I didn’t believe her is that she wasn’t showing up. She wasn’t laying her true feelings on the table. When she got so angry she couldn’t see straight, finally she had the strength to say what she’d been hiding for a very long time. That’s what I mean by “breaking her open.” I don’t care that she was angry. Her tone wasn’t the point. Her offering was…. and that offering was “I’m hurt and tired.”
Now, it’s her job to decide whether she wants to ask me about what I’ve written, or if she’d like her pre-conceived notions as to why I’d write what I’d write stand. She thinks that I continually paint her as a villain and the times I paint her as my friend are somehow invalid. It does not make sense to her that I can love her and be angry at the same time, but yes it does. When she got into full swing, she sounded exactly like me, picking up style and structure, painting her feelings as fact (about other people, but same style)….. and I wondered what the difference was in her tone and mine. What is she reacting to that I’m not reacting to in her?
We often hate the things in others that we hate about ourselves. She learned that I’m sometimes just as private as she is because I don’t want to rock the boat, either…. and didn’t like that I chose to talk about it here because she thought I was attacking her. No, I was reflecting on a long and hard road, which looks different if you think it is at an end. In effect, she was offended by the grieving process, because I think I’ve done my fair share of denial, anger, and bargaining- to name a few. I have said a lot of things that weren’t favorable to her when she wasn’t being any more favorable to me. She called my blog a “Get Out of Jail Free” card to be shitty to her, and I didn’t know how to explain that if she really wanted me to let her go, it was going to be ugly inside myself. That I had a million different feelings to process and none of them had to do with the last 15 minutes.
I had to process 10 years, all without ever really having the input I needed. However, I’ve always gotten what I needed when we were tracking together, and I can’t hope for much, but I can hope that we’re at least back at the same starting gate. Or perhaps we’re on different sides of the concourse, but still both seeing the Nats…. and that’s something.
She said she was furious beyond belief at some entries, and moved by others. I would cut off any one of my limbs to know which entries moved her, because I have heard all about the ones that make her furious.
I had to process the time I wanted to be the partner, to when I knew she had a partner, and going from the friend who would have come to the wedding to the person that would have officiated if I’d been asked. But she didn’t give me the strength for that.
By the time Bryn got married, she was done with our church, so she asked me to marry her instead of her pastor. The wedding went off with a hitch. 😉
In fact, the thing that meant the most to me is that the groom, whom I had maybe all of two days with before the wedding, congratulated me on a job well done, and he said, “I had a lot of trepidation when Bryn said that she had this friend who wanted to do the wedding, because I wanted it to be perfect. And it was.” I don’t think he knew my back story- that I had prepared for this moment unintentionally by learning how to do weddings from the age of five. As I have said, the joke is that no one in my group of friends wanted to wait until I was done with grad school to perform a ceremony I had memorized by nine.
Although the wedding was taken directly out of the Book of Common Prayer; we just took all the religious references out because Bryn absolutely believes in the power of the universe, but I don’t know whether she would translate that to “relationship with God,” as many people do.
The thing my dad taught me that stuck with me is to go through the wedding at the rehearsal without saying the vows. Unless it was just the three of us, if they’d said the vows at the wedding rehearsal, they would have been married AT THE REHEARSAL because there were witnesses. This presented as funny only once. I got confused for a second as the vows started because I didn’t look down at my portfolio and said the groom’s name where the bride’s should have been. Bryn corrected me because she caught it and I didn’t- brain fart- and we laughed and moved on.
The thing that my dad also taught me is that brides and grooms get very nervous at their weddings, and you can coach them to the extent that you can with something like that. If someone gets tongue-tied, I say, “if so, your answer is ‘I do.'” I have never met a couple where if they hesitated during their vows, it meant they had cold feet. Most people are anxious at being in front of public.
In terms of the wedding itself, I missed Dana terribly for two reasons. The first is that I cannot imagine how much fun we would have had visiting our old haunts, and I know she would have loved being a preacher’s wife for a day. It was so fucking weird going to Burgerville without her. Yet, I did not call her and tell her to meet me there because I couldn’t. I never want to get back together with her, but I also really miss being her best friend, the part where we never, ever got angry enough to be physically violent. There was not that kind of emotion tension to create that kind of fight.
I know that this is still, in part, true for her as well because of what she said when my mother died. I hadn’t talked to her in months, maybe a year or a year and a half. The first thing I said was “thank you for picking up. I wouldn’t have called unless it was important.” She said that she would never not pick up because she figured that if I was calling her, it must be important. That is a long way of healing from standing me up at the bank, literally. So, even if she didn’t want to be a preacher’s wife in person, she definitely was the strength I chose to lean on that day. It was like she was my phantom limb the whole time, and I never felt alone, because we were every bit as much of a team as our then-pastor, as Dana, Bryn, and I all met at the same church, and we both folded into Bryn’s family…… even though because I had dated Matt, I could tell he was in a pissing match with Dana and she didn’t notice….. whether she was blind or not is debatable, because someone can present a game to you and you can say, “I’m better off pretending this doesn’t exist because it’s not worth my time to care.”
All of this is to say that Dana, Bryn, and I have a very long history, and it’s why I jumped on a plane to Portland and felt sick when I landed. I could feel my anxiety melting the further we went down 99W, because Bryn lives in Newberg, the 100% insurance I wouldn’t run into anyone I didn’t like. I don’t think we went into the city except karaoke night. I did my usual, “I Feel Lucky,” by Mary-Chapin Carpenter. It fits my voice and after I’ve had a beer my accent gets stronger. If that is true of another Southerner I know up here, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to hear that out of her, either. It’s a more rolling lilt than mine, because for some reason which I will certainly look up on YouTube (linguistics lectures are fire), the Southern accent gets softer during the drive from Texas to Mississippi.
And yes, when I spelled Mississippi, I did say in my head “M. I. SSI. SSI. Crooked letter Crooked letter i.” And I’m a music nerd, so my slowed so I could do the rhythm with my fingers as well. I love that language is music whether or not it comes with notes. It’s why I’m a hard core gangster rap fan, as well as lighter stuff like hip-hop. I am learning to write dialogue, just like I’m learning plot and character from Issa Rae on Netflix.
The reason that I want to learn dialogue like this is think about Amy Sherman-Palladino and Aaron Sorkin. They’ve both made their careers by speeding up dialogue to 33o bpm, and because the rhythm is faster, your brain contains it because you have to strain to keep up not to miss anything….. and the rhythm reinforces it.
For instance, who doesn’t remember the way Alan Arkin said, “How’d you cut your hand, Josh?” They may not remember the rhythm, but it will certainly bring up feelings…… because Yo-Yo Ma was also there.
I asked you to roll with me, and got off on a tangent as per my normal.
I have no doubt that said pastor was mad as FUCK, but I hope that she understood it wasn’t about trying to keep them out, but to keep us in. We are not saying fuck you to that world. We are making our peace with it so we can leave it behind. We are processing feelings that go back to 1997…. about our friendship, about who we are and always have been to each other, and how “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.”
I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Supergrover would love to meet Bryn, perhaps even more than she wanted to meet me, because Bryn has a story she needs to hear…………. because Bryn has been my friend since 1997, when she was a teenager (and so was I, but I was 19 and Bryn was maybe 14). I am not saying it would ever happen, but I know that Supergrover would roll her eyes at some of what Bryn had to say because it will just seem so very familiar to her, as if Bryn and I are speaking with one voice.
I can’t get them together, because Supergrover and I aren’t there yet. But what I can do is say on my blog that Bryn is coming to visit me in May, do with that information what you will.
One of the sweetest things about Supergrover’s letter was that she said my words felt like “pricks on her skin that grew into big holes she couldn’t close anymore.” What I thought was happening was happening. Instead of asking me why I’d write what I’d write, she saved it all up until she was so mad she couldn’t see straight, and tell me she was busy. I could tell, and I wasn’t angry that she wasn’t responding to me fast enough. She couldn’t see that what I wanted was for her to open up to me and tell me all the times I’d hurt her rather than kicking the can down the road. I’ve said so many heavy, scary things that I cannot count them. It is why I said that I’ve been naked in front of her so many more times than I have with a lover. It is a different voice for me, that my internal monologue was also, in fact, her external monologue. It is a weird feeling to know someone so intimately through reading their work and not giving that person a hug. It begins to feel like a rock concert, and I mean this on a deep and spiritual level.
Yesterday, I told you that she’s my tuba, or vocally the basso profundo in my life. Not the lead trumpet player, the top note. The base of the chord upon which everything is built. Who hasn’t gotten close to the woofers at Third Eye Blind. Who hasn’t felt the way your chest expands and your skin buzzes? That’s how it feels to have another person (especially one like her, the rock part) inside me, because she’s never been separate from me and we’ve never learned to pick up the other’s social cues. Incidentally, as an autistic person, if we did have a day to day relationship she’d be the perfect person to social mask when my sister wasn’t with me. She doesn’t have time for that, I’m just telling you that the way she has her shit together is what I want.
The worst part is that she thinks she doesn’t.
It’s understandable. She lives on no sleep. I’m not sure she’s had myelin on her nerves since the Reagan administration….. and I can’t tell you the line that told me that, but it was funny.
Again, reading her words, her true feelings, relaxes me and I read to the rhythm of Dave Grusin, because I like the theme to “Three Days of the Condor……. among many, many others. St. Elsewhere is probably at the top, followed by Doogie Howser, M.D. The reason I like the theme is that I’ve never seen the end of the movie. It got weird (like the misogyny in old Bond movies). I think this is fair play because the novel is called “Six Days of the Condor,” so it seems they only filmed half of it and gave up. The difference between our relationship now and our relationship at first was that in the first few weeks, the rhythm was “Your Love is My Drug,” because she’d said some very exciting things. New relationship energy ate my lunch. I have no compunction about confronting people on problems before they happen to establish boundaries, and neither does she. I warned her that this could turn into an emotional affair because of two things. Internet chat creates a sense of intimacy that may or may not be there in real life. That you become disconnected from your body, so sexuality and gender become irrelevant. This is what I meant about saying that I hoped she was going to be Cynthia Nixon, and self-deprecating that it’s because I’m not that good a writer. I was not saying that my writing is my way into her heart and therefore I thought I could change her like when we used to quote Ellen Degeneres about “winning a toaster.” I thought that reading me would change her, because women don’t fall in love with other people’s private parts all the time. This is because sexual relationships with women are built on emotional connection, just like they are with straight women. You can break up a marriage faster than you can break up two women who’ve flipped each other shit since high school.
But I can tell you the exact moment her feelings stayed the same and mine went haywire. I was telling her that her story felt like a drug, and she said, “I’m sure I’ll drink your liquor, too.” Not meant to be a pass or a flirt, but so smooth af that my knees knocked. If you’re lesbian or bi, did I make you do the thing…….. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. Her gender and sexuality didn’t fly out the window, mine did. It didn’t matter what she looked like, I wanted more and I was in.
If I could describe our relationship in one sentence that would resonate with my generation, it would be that our relationship on the surface seems like it’s “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” It’s really “Bel-Air.” I feel that way all the time, every day. If you are not familiar with both shows, because “Bel-Air” is so new, let me catch you up.
“The Fresh Prince” is cute, and everyone knows the intro….. which is the scariest event that happens in the whole show (so far) portrayed as comedy. In “Bel-Air,” you find out what happened that day, how he really met Jazz, etc. It’s violent, and even in California you see the real problems in their family. Carlton is an addict because he’s a perfectionist and has anxiety. I identify with him on two levels, because I am both versions of Carlton on the shows, and the actor is from my neighborhood (I don’t know him, he was born after I left).
What I have noticed is that if you want to learn anything from powerful people, you don’t try to be a gladiator trying to impress them. You become the Olivia to their Cyrus, but not when they’re working. When they’re sitting on the couch drinking wine and eating popcorn after having fought gloves off all day. Because the fighting isn’t personal and those moments don’t matter as much as a conversation with a good friend about What Kind of Day Has It Been?
When that involved snuggling in my dreams, I knew I was fuccccccccccked, because I knew my dreams would go deeper than that while I found homeostasis. It was hell on earth, because she wasn’t going through those physical changes and I was. When you know your heart has barked up the wrong tree, you can’t tell your heart just to “snap out of it.”If I could write what really happened between us, you’d read it to the tune of a billion dollars, especially if she was my co-author. It would become a franchise series on Netflix, because our story has never been told before. It is an original idea, one that hasn’t been represented on screen much, if ever. It’s why I hope that those 10 seasons are all here. I don’t want to turn my blog into a Netflix series, I just hope that much story has been told.
That I am at least a good enough writer for that. I want our story to be quiet, yet enormous. There are so many differences between us that make us interesting, yet nothing can tear us apart for a moment of any day.
Let me tell you the day I knew what kind of situation my situation was in. How I fell in love with her the second time. First of all, Ifigured out how that woman who’s loved her friend for 10 years and nothing could tear them apart actually worked, so I was more capable than I was in the beginning. Secondly, it was something she said. She said that once marriage was marriage, it was for life. That it existed great sex, no sex, whatever. That’s how lesbian marriages work every single day. I finally had some words and context I really understood because it was written in my language. Everyone knows that couple that’s been together a hundred years, but they lost interest in each other during about year 12.
So, I know why she was angry I blocked her on Facebook, but I wasn’t. I needed to stop seeing her picture in my feed all day. She blocked me on instagram, and I was so grateful because I can’t see her profile unless I’m logged out. The only time I saw them is when they were referer stats on my blog, because I wasn’t logged in on all web broswers. It gave me some room to breathe, and our entire relationship was based on e-mail, not getting to know each other in person or in a group, which created different outcomes. Our relationship existed in text only between us, and it broke my personality in half. That’s why I couldn’t stay with Dana. I had grown past her and we were on separate paths no matter where in the world Supergrover and I were because Internet. She’s handfasted as my yellow string, and it runs between us. I used to call it a chord, because it worked in both our first languages.
The pleasure of my life was when we returned to them. It’s the life experience that helped me grow the most, by far…….
But what I need you to remember is that though it’s Three Days of the Condor visually, the other three days are in the book.
I just haven’t noticed all the ways not speaking each other’s love language has harmed us, because I could see what she was doing to show me love, but I couldn’t see that she was receiving what I was saying with love. She’s hurt beyond belief at some of the things I’ve written and painted it as fact that I’m out to get her when she doesn’t know the first thing about what I have to say, because I’m not talking about our real issues here. She thinks she’s the villain in the story when I’m saying that we tumble and roll. I am often the villain in this story, and have said as much. She sees how much I try to explain how her choices affect me and chooses to believe I’m being nefarious. I’m being INFJ autistic Doctor Who Malcolm Tucker.
What does deep and abiding joy feel like to you? I want you to feel mine, because yesterday a broken heart was sewn.
I sent Supergrover a message because I literally couldn’t think of anyone else because I was going through a thing she’d also gone through. I needed strength to go through this thing with another friend, and I’m sorry I can’t be specific. It’s just complicated and not my story to tell or own, which is why I’m not writing about it. Just my reaction to it.
For whatever reason, I broke her open like a coconut, and not only did she help me with my problems, she opened up about our relationship and told me what was really going on………….. which broke me open like a coconut.
She was exactly the velvet hammer I needed when I needed her the most. She’s the biggest badass I’ve ever known, and the most pragmatic. And then she gave me the sweet side of her, the one that’s open and vulnerable and has the same little girl reactions that I do. She was running because she was hurt. I couldn’t help her because I didn’t know she was hurt.
Because I never knew how much I meant to her. I only knew how much she meant to me. Our relationship will hopefully be strong and comfortable in 20 years, just as she said hopefully we’d be 10 years ago.
I am falling over with laughter…….
We’re halfway therrrrrrrrreeeee. WWWWWoooooooaaaah! Livin’ on a prayer………..
Even though she was fucking furious, she was honest to a fault, and as I told her, all I’ve ever really wanted from anyone- the truth, why and how.
She said that she predicted that my response would be angry, and my response was “this is the healthiest e-mail I’ve gotten from you in 10 years. You couldn’t make my day any better, because this morning was a shitshow and now I’m grinning like an idiot.” The reason I was so goddamn happy is that she opened up to me. She told me her side of the story, and hopefully she’ll realize she’s been as wrong as I have and we’ll move on from it.
I was so overwhelmed I shut down completely, because it’s not every day that you get everything you want handed to you on a silver platter….. and I’m bad at transitions. The reason I was in shutdown mode is that it was too much joy to take in all at once, and this is the first time in 10 years that I’ve felt this safe and secure with her. I hope that I can assure her of my feeling of safety and security so that she receives it as well.
Because we both knew it was our fate. Months ago, she said “no matter what happens, we’ll always have a past, present, and future.” We got to a place where it wasn’t good for either of us, but yesterday instead of attacking she joined me in cleaning up our toxic mess. It was glorious. Her letter made me cry so hard I couldn’t move, because I was so moved. It was the longest, most beautiful, most insightful thing she’s written in a very long time.
Even in her anger at me, the way she phrased it was so well-crafted that it made me feel like I can’t keep up with her. Sometimes I stare at her in wonder (her e-mail or her pic, occasionally), thinking “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. Is there anything in the world I’m better at than you?” I know it’s true, and that’s what makes me crave her e-mails. Talking to her feels exactly like I felt the first day of 8th grade band…….. which I got into in 7th grade. When you meet better musicians than you, you tend to stick with them because they up your game.
Supergrover is the brain that ups my game instead of the low brass under me……. and yet, she’s my tuba, and I don’t mean that as a joke. Vocally, she’s the basso profundo of my life. Not the top of the chord, the note on which everything else is built.
I hope she at least knows that, both because of the love and work we share. Being able to say “we share” is the most amazing phrase I’ve ever been able to write on this blog. It’s a more important occasion in my life than the time Margaret Cho and Martina Navratilova retweeted me (they liked the marriage article, btw). Supergrover doesn’t say “I love you” in words. She does it by despite everything, still showing up. It may even be begrudgingly at times, but she’s fucking THERE.
She heard the distress in my voice, and she came right to me, just like I knew she would. What I did not expect is for her to explain her radio silence, essentially writing me a blog entry back.
It’s not that hard to imagine why I’d want to marry that, is it? Someone that opened up to me the way I open up here? Getting all the feelings back into our relationship is what turned the tide, because I told her that “my way is to work through things, and your way is to avoid or lightly move past things. The reason we’re joined at the spine is because our trauma is similar, but we have different reactions to it. We’ll deal with it the rest of our lives, and I’ll do it happily because I accepted her warts and all 15 minutes into our relationship. Or it seemed that way, anyway. That she could have however much of me she wanted, because I trusted her more than I’ve ever trusted anyone. She called me on some bullshit lies I was telling myself back in the day, that I was blaming myself for something that wasn’t my fault and I needed to stop seeing it that way.
It was all transference. I fell in love with my therapist because I’m queer and Will Hunting isn’t. The reason I trust her with my very life is that I’ve never had Robin Williams as a doctor.
Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.
First of all, :::checks notes::: WordPress, it’s “describe a phase in life in which it was difficult to say goodbye.” Just like it’s not “where’s the library at?” It’s “where’s the library at, asshole?” Never end a sentence with a preposition.
I do it a little bit.
Humor before I start diving deep this morning, because there have been many, many times in which it was Boyz II Men hard to say goodbye.
The first time it was a really hard transition was moving from Galveston to Naples the summer after first grade. I loved the beach (my sister did not- she used to run away from the waves saying “don’t. Don’t! Don’t!). I mean, she got over it…… she did get married in Galveston. The cultural difference between living on the island and living in small town Texas wasn’t hard because I didn’t like it. It was just a transition. I was especially close to my friends Asbury and Beulah Lennox, who kind of took over being my grandparents when my own grandparents were so far away. The bonus was moving about 12-15 miles from my biological grandparents, a complete change as well.
I do not do well with change, and I’m glad we moved in the summer so I could ease into it. Incidentally, since The War Daniel was not a member of our church, I didn’t meet him until September. I can’t remember when it was second or third grade when we made it official. 😉 I will say that it wasn’t until I met The War Daniel that I felt truly comfortable, the INFJ/INTJ people we have always been. We were the book nerds, the music nerds, and the ones who didn’t give a fuck if people thought we were weird. We both have this historical Jesus personality, we just come at it from different directions. He’s a thinker. I’m a feeler.
Editor’s Note:
Two things. The first is that “The War Daniel” is a play on words, because of John Hurt in Doctor Who- “The War Doctor.” Daniel was a Doc in the Navy, embedded with a team of Marines.
The second is that if I say that I or anyone else has a “Jesus” personality, or that “it’s as hard to be me as it was to be Jesus,” I’m talking about his day to day life, not that I or anyone else has a Savior complex. Jesus cannot be much different than any current pastor (especially those in clerical collars willing to be arrested at protests), because he was a rabbi, though they didn’t have that term back then.
Incidentally, there is also no evidence one way or the other that Jesus wasn’t married, and it’s been a debate for centuries; think Catholic vs. Protestant- Catholic priests are told they have to bear the burden of ministry alone, because they can’t love everyone if they love only one person that deeply…. takes away objectivity or something. The Protestants, like The Avatar, discovered that pastors could not do it without a support system. His partner could have been anyone from John, the Disciple marked as “whom Jesus loved,” and I have not looked at the original Greek or Hebrew to see if there’s more context, like philia or agape. But right now, I’m willing to say that there is no evidence Jesus was gay one way or the other, either, because there is also a debate on Mary Magdalene.
Supergrover actually sent me several novels about this, and it’s basically that Jesus and Mary were married and were writing their own Gospel, the Book of Love. It does make sense. After Jesus died, the story is that Joseph of Arimathia (rich merchant) helped Mary and the children escape to France. It is, of course, fiction….. but based on the little evidence we do know. It’s just been too long, there’s too many questions that will always be unanswered. So, Jesus is who you need him to be, not the other way around…… as long as you realize that Jesus did not come here only to comfort the distressed. He came here to also distress you out of your comfort. No power over. Power with. It’s why he was peaceful about it, but probably hated the Sanhedrin because they were the most vociferous Jews regarding law and very little around compassion, which has no bearing on the church today.………….
I think what The War Daniel misread as anger was actually fear. We should have video called more before he went to rehab, but we’re *both* writers, and lapsed into that personality way too easily…. which took away too much of our compassion. I also know that being in a relationship your first year out of rehab is absolutely not advisable, so when we got engaged, I kept dating Zac because it really didn’t bother him. Because Zac is poly, Daniel knew he was no threat. That if Zac and I are building a life together, it consists of exactly what is happening now. I have so much love for him because he’s a solid dude as a friend and as a boyfriend. How our relationship is supposed to go is unknown. I just know that we probably won’t get closer than we are now. Neither of us has the time.
It wasn’t that we were rushing into anything, we were just each other’s end game. Daniel didn’t offer to marry me because of anything but I needed it for the health care and benefits as a military dependent. And it was his idea not because I wanted it, but because he saw I needed it.
So, the hardest transitions I have to talk about today are the summer before I met Daniel, and the months after he left.
The reason I chose to write about this instead of the transition after my mother died is that I just can’t go there today. So, I will tell you what I was feeling in the moment, instead. It is so raw and real that if you are also in grief, it might help you as well.
The ones who have helped me through all these transitions just being kind enough to sit with me and listen.
My first thought was “Jesus *Christ*…” but not in a good way. I have no idea who I’d like to be, because I see pros and cons to everything.
I’m not even sure I’m that good at being myself….. but I’m laughing about it. The thing is, though, I could totally be Jesus. It’s like, the only thing I know how to do. I tell stories, people listen to me, and I can flat *assure* you that “nothing good comes out of Nazareth.” No stranger has ever come after me over my writing, because it’s *mine*. Why would they have an interest if they didn’t know me personally?
Here’s why it’s not any easier to be me than it was to be Jesus. The only difference is that I had a blog and he literally sat around and told stories and people wrote them down years later…. taking away all the facts, but none of the truth. Some of the things I write about are long in the past. Some of it is what’s painful “write this moment.”
Here’s why I talk about my blog the same way- facts are missing, but the types of truth I’m laying down *are only from my perspective.* In order for my blog to be factual, I would have to know what someone else was thinking. I am only telling you what I took away from my interactions with my friends and/or family. What you took away from my writing is none of my business.
I feel like that’s Christ on a cracker right there. He was absolutelyfuckingnot trying to impress anyone. In fact, he actually made quite a few people angry, wouldn’t you agree?
And yet, some ideas are worth dying for, because I don’t think that the story would have been remembered if he’d lived out all his days…. although he would have had the chance to fact check the Gospels a little more closely…. or at least, I would like to believe that Jesus would have been a different person at 60 or 70 than he was at 33.
I know his personality like the back of my hand because I’m an INFJ and he and Martin Luther King, Jr. are INFJ as well.
INFJs are guided by a deeply considered set of personal values. They are intensely idealistic, and can clearly imagine a happier and more perfect future. They can become discouraged by the harsh realities of the present, but they are typically motivated and persistent in taking positive action nonetheless. The INFJ feels an intrinsic drive to do what they can to make the world a better place.
INFJs want a meaningful life and deep connections with other people. They do not tend to share themselves freely but appreciate emotional intimacy with a select, committed few. Although their rich inner life can sometimes make them seem mysterious or private to others, they profoundly value authentic connections with people they trust.
As quintessential idealists, INFJs have many ideas about how to improve society and make the world a better place. INFJs believe a better world can only be attained if we concentrate on doing what is right, regardless of short-term consequences. However, harmonious relationships are also extremely important to the INFJ. They are skilled mediators who look for the root sources of conflict to find common ground with others. Because of this, they tend to prefer a diplomatic communication style and are careful to not unnecessarily ruffle feathers.
INFJs have a profound respect for human potential and a deep interest in understanding the mind. Because of this, they are motivated to pursue authentic self-development and strive to live up to their true potential, while encouraging and guiding others to do the same. According to idealistic INFJs, if we believe in our ability to accomplish the extraordinary, the extraordinary will instantly become a possibility — “dream it and you can achieve it,” as the saying goes. However, because of their integrity and empathy for others, it is uncommon for INFJs to cut corners or hurt others to achieve their desired future state.
Because of my processing disorders and mental illness, I have hurt people. But I’m also human. The old saying goes that “hurt people hurt people,” and I’m trying to clean myself up. But the way I do it is to lay out everything I’m thinking so that my ups and downs might be a survival manual for someone else. I am relentlessly driven to leading from the back, that people have shown me they won’t be vulnerable with me if I’m not vulnerable with them, first.
And, of course there were 14 disciples (I include Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany). But were all 14 of them best friends all the time? Have you met any group of 14 people that gets along all the time? I can just picture it now…. Jesus, could you stop being intense for like four minutes? Just four minutes, bro. We all need a beer after that one (and that one could be anything, like Jack Palance’s finger).
I don’t do shallow.
So, if people are, I back away slowly. Because to me, shallow means that you are not looking for a deeper, more meaningful connection with me. Our connection depends on communication and honesty, and if either of us doesn’t get it, how long are we going to stay in the time loop? I can count one that lasted 23 years, one that lasted 10. I didn’t have an exit strategy for either, just one day I was exhausted and I couldn’t take up any less room than I was already taking, because what tends to happen is that people think I’m a wonderful writer until we’re close enough that they say they don’t care what I say here….. I’m entitled to my stories.
In somewhere between six months to two years, they learn that somehow I can write beautifully about everyone except them. They’ve been caught up in the bubble of my personality, and then I do something stupid and I fall from a pedestal every single time, whether it’s singing or writing. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it recently, but I’m a classically trained solo-quality voice, and I have learned never to believe my own press. In both cases, I’m in a bubble of my own, and people are not so awed when they see the man behind the curtain.
I’m going to guess Jesus was like that. Most ministers are. In show mode in front of a crowd, solitary the rest of the week except for meetings. The people he led didn’t really know him, they knew his message….. and somehow, it’s been twisted to make him look like some kind of professional Christian superhero, when to me the historical Jesus is so much more interesting.
The link is to a book by Marcus Borg, one of the preeminent scholars on the historical Jesus, joined by Dominic Crossan.
It’s called “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith,” and it’s a book that’s been on my Kindle since I first met Marcus and Dom, and I’m allowed to call them that because Marcus’s wife was one of the rectors at Trinity Cathedral in Portland, Oregon…. so even though he’s not Episcopalian (he’s Lutheran), I’ve heard him preach a lot. Bill, the dean of the Cathedral (blanking on a last name, sorry), used to joke that whenever you had a theological problem, you should always go drink beer with a Lutheran.
I would have gone for a beer with Marcus, but I really want to go for a beer with Nadia Bolz-Weber.
I’d like to be her, but in so many ways, I already am.
Describe the most ambitious DIY project you’ve ever taken on.
Several times in my life I’ve helped friends and family members flip a house. I got to do the second one because apparently I did okay on the first.
Here’s the most important thing I learned the whole time.
….and my words are paper tigers, no match for the predator of pain inside her….
Love Will Come to You, The Indigo Girls
Before I flipped a house, I had no idea what a paper tiger was. They are of the devil, and I got the allusion immediately. A paper tiger is a device you put on top of wallpaper to rip it to shreds so you can scrape it off. It leaves everything in ribbons. Except there’s still the glue to deal with, so everything is ripped to shreds, yet still stuck to the wall. The paper tiger quickly becomes ineffective because you think you’re making progress and you’re actually filling the teeth with glue.
So, you can fight with the wallpaper all day long and make no progress whatsoever.
I can think of so many people that the Indigo Girls represent with this line, because there are so many people married to their glue, unwilling to open up- even when another person needs to hear what they have to say.
I also learned how to tackle raspberry brambles, also of the devil and paper tigers without glue. More than one has ripped me to shreds.
But wait- that wasn’t the first time I’d built a house, and I’d forgotten about it.
In the United Methodist Church, there’s a group called UMCOR (United Methodist Committee on Relief). They give lots of money for youth groups to go on mission trips, which mostly consisted of going out into poor towns and building houses or building accommodations for houses, like wheelchair ramps.
So, I also know how to lay shingles, put the flashing on a roof, and watch my dad absolutely freak out at seeing me doing it. Nobody likes to watch their baby putting flashing on the edge of a roof, because he knew I had balance issues. I didn’t. It was fine, but I can see his concern this many years later when I couldn’t in the moment.
I have also helped build the aforementioned wheelchair ramps. I let other people do the measuring and cutting, because I really wasn’t the best person to ask. My cuts would have come out diagonal just like with food…. or maybe not, because there are better tools to keep boards in place than there are for food….
I’m better at finish carpentry, like sanding, painting, shellac, etc. I also love to paint sheetrock with Killz and new colors. I generally do several coats of Killz on new sheetrock as well, just because I’m a perfectionist.
I am really great at helping do things. I am not so great at doing things on my own. I think it’s because I have enough limitations that I need an extra set of eyes. For instance, it would be fun to work on Zac’s car or motorcycle, but I wouldn’t unless he asked me to help, which in my mind means “stand there and hold stuff.” This is a more important job to mechanics than you might think, especially lights. Holding lights is like hazing in the operating room. Stand there, holding this in a very awkward way, for at least half an hour. At least if I drop the light a few inches, no one dies.
DIY is soothing to me, but as Zac says, “I *could* work on my car, but I make enough money to get someone else to do that.” So, I doubt that we’ll ever go out in the front yard for “guy stuff.” Mostly because I’ve never ridden a donorcycle, because my dad and stepmom wouldn’t be nearly as angry if I got hurt as having to deal with Dr. Anthony, because if I lived from the accident, she would beat my ass with a hairbrush. Tiffany is a liver and kidney transplant specialist. She knows from donorcycles.
If you believe nothing else I say, believe that. Transplant surgeons get *a lot* of their organs to transplant from motorcycle riders, thus the name….. which is universal across all hospitals in the US, don’t know about worldwide.
So, while it doesn’t bother me that Zac has a motorcycle, or that Lindsay and Matt have both ridden them as well, I’m not sure that I would ever be tempted because all I see is Dr. Anthony’s “mad face.” Besides, I have a solid reason for keeping my organs *intact,* mostly living.
I have a feeling I would not be very good at holding lights for her, but that’s okay because she’d never ask me. I would argue that I’m “smarter than a gas man,” but that has more to do with the way anesthesiologists get made fun of in the hospital, not that I am actually as smart as a person who can get into medical school (and by that, I mean smart in STEM. I’m plenty smart in other ways.).
I find that I am as smart in medicine as I am in computers. I do not program, and I do not weld things to the motherboard when a capacitor is out or anything like that, but I know my way around most software and what to do when it breaks. I can run commands in a terminal with my eyes closed, literally because I made myself try it.
Here’s the funniest command. To list what’s in the working directory, the command is ls. If you install sl, when you make that typo, an ASCII choo choo will roll across the screen.
I think linux is why I don’t use DOS anymore. The commands are so different that I type a linux command first, every time, and then have to think about what it is in DOS.
For instance, listing a directory in DOS is “dir,” and there is no ASCII choo choo if you make a mistake, a flaw in its character.
But it’s worse than that. I have been WAY further into linux commands than necessary before I realized I was in PowerShell (DOS terminal):
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade -y
In linux, that stands for “update my software catalog, install the updates, and don’t ask me whether I want to install the packages after I’ve downloaded them. Just do it.
In DOS, this means *absolutely nothing.*
Windows does not make for good DIY, because they want to control every part of the user experience the way Apple does. Windows is not really for business anymore, because even Windows Pro comes with a thousand “lane bumpers” to stop you from doing what you want to do. You have to turn on developer mode to be able to install any piece of software you want, otherwise it will ask “are you sure?” every single time. This is especially prevalent with software from GitHub, and I think that’s because Windows does not like open source.
It’s easier to turn on developer mode than it is to go through and change all the settings, like “show hidden folders” and “show file extensions.” It’s a lot of DIY just to set up a Windows box, and linux is so much easier. Plus, no one has ever tried to sell me anything unless I’ve downloaded a program that’s not open source. If I do that, the developers should be paid.
For some reason, my computer won’t dual boot, and it makes me sad….. but it’s better now that you can install a linux virtual machine inside Windows so that I still have access to linux command line programs. I usually keep btop running in the background because in linux I use a program called conky to list my processes, memory usage, CPU and GPU usage, etc. btop will do all of it, and is light on CPU usage. If you’ve used htop before, it’s the same, just a better user interface.
But here’s the worst trick the devil ever pulled. In Windows, you can divide the terminal into as many blocks as you want, but if you don’t change the settings yourself, when it divides it brings up PowerShell instead of another linux terminal. Just more Windows trying to push itself on you. I do not know anyone who uses DOS command line anymore, except for system administrators, and they’re more likely to have Macs these days, because the government gets a good deal on them and they come complete with unix out of the box. There are linux laptops and desktops out there, but none that have the reach of Apple to be able to get those government and education deals.
So, where their need begins, so does my DIY. I can fix one computer or 50 at once.
If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?
I did not mean to miss yet another day of writing, but what had happened was…. No, seriously. I put a draft on one of my computers. I could not find it again, because WordPress *supposedly* uploads drafts to the server. But it didn’t, so everything I was working on yesterday is gone. If I find it, you’ll get that entry, too. I feel bad, but not too bad after 140 days of posting in a row before Bloguary even started. I’m hard on myself because blogging is the training it takes for me to be able to write novels. I’ve said this before, but until I know my own voice, I do not know when my characters are speaking. Even in blogging, I know that Zac, Supergrover, Bryn, Lindsay, et al have their own voices, because they are definitely not me, either. Although Bryn and I have spent the most time together in person and Supergrover and I have spent the most time writing to each other. Zac could be the person I spend the most time with in the future, but Bryn has like a hundred years on him, so good luck, my beautiful boy. 🙂
In my novel(s), I have characters that range from a middle school girl to a professional chef to several spies, politicians, diplomats, etc. and they all have to have unique voices, too. I have a feeling that I am writing Rebecca and Carol the best so far, but that’s because they’ve been with me for 10 years, and I’ve had time to gather information on them for that amount of time.
Therefore, there aren’t many words I wish I could take out of their vocabulary as well as mine, because I do it all the time. I use “like” as a filler word (mostly in conversation to stall for time). I think that most of my conversations in person start to sound like a valley girl because I am literally trying not to stutter. That’s because I can think as fast as I can type, but much faster than I can speak. Therefore, words that come out eloquently in a blog entry/letter would come out as a garbled mess in person unless I’m speaking more slowly, which I now take the time to do. I spend so much time alone typing that I tend to forget that when I’m not typing, those several streams of thought upon which I’m gathering are still going, and they become confused while trying to converse.
And, of course, most of my friends would disagree with this statement because they only see my output, not what’s going on in my head. I social mask very well, and have for a long time. That doesn’t make living in my head easier, just easier for other people to relate to me.
Like, for real.
Yesterday’s prompt was about things that I’m going to have to overcome in the next few months, and I solved my problem yesterday with ease. The first time I went to The Spy Museum’s web site, Jonna’s event was not listed. The second time, they were sold out. So, I e-mailed and instant messaged the museum and told them that they were sold out and Jonna had invited me so now I was panicking. Amanda, the head of education and outreach (who I also know from many events) got back to me yesterday and said she’d put me on the guest list and it was nice of me to offer to stand if they only had standing room tickets left (they’re free, you just have to register). She put me on the guest list, and if she’s free, Lindsay is going to be my plus one.
It’s been since “The Moscow Rules” book talk since I’ve seen her in person, so I know it’ll be special because not only is she one of my favorite writers (tied with her late husband, Tony, and their research assistant, Matt Baglio…. although I did ask if Jonna needed another one and she said that she knew I’d do a bang-up job, but she didn’t have room for anyone else on her team.
So, even though I’m not her research assistant, she’s seen enough of my writing that I got the compliment of a lifetime. It’s probably good I’m not one of her research assistants, because if I was on it and the book tanked, I would certainly think it was my fault entirely. I’m better at promoting her…… like, a spy called *me* perceptive. I think that’s my favorite part, because who would know “perceptive” better than a spy?
Some woman was looking for a book written by a woman about intelligence because her dad said that he wouldn’t read a book written by a woman in intelligence. My reply on reddit got 488 upvotes as of today. Here’s what I said, without a “like” in sight:
And on that note, it’s time for me to go look for yesterday’s entry.
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.
When my bipolar was flipping me out, I decided to check myself into the psych ward at Methodist Hospital because something just wasn’t right. My mood and behavior were all over the place. The first time I felt better was twofold. The first is that I discovered they had the good ice in the cafeteria, the kind you get at Sonic or Dairy Queen. There was no hour of any day that I didn’t have a 32 oz cup filled with that ice and whatever they were serving that day. Sometimes it was orange juice. If I was lucky, I could find a Diet Coke. Mostly, it was just water because the drink didn’t matter. The second is that once I had a drink in my hand, it was time to go find the best friend I had that week. He was a Viet Nam vet.
Our story starts when I walked up to him and said, “what are you in for?” He said, “murder.” I never left his side after that. 😛 I actually got mad at a nurse over his situation, because he said that the beds were too high for him to get into them (he was in a wheelchair). I talked to a nurse about it, and she said, “that’s not your problem to worry about. That’s ours.” I said, “well then, it looks like you need to do your job.” I give no fucks when it comes to nurses, because they do stupid shit all the time. I was a persona non grata after that, but I could give a shit. They were making my friend’s life harder…. and they are not gods. In fact, I got in really big trouble when he got let out a day before me and I hugged him goodbye. They screamed at me that there was no hugging.
What they didn’t know is that I’d been taking a shower with my roommate all week because she told me she was afraid she was going to cut herself in the shower. She and another person on my ward put everything in perspective for me because my roommate was trying to kill herself in the hospital and wanted support to not; one of the women in my cohort had a big red, angry X on each of her wrists. I did what I always did in that situation- started taking care of everyone else but me, because I was also halfway to “Spongebob Headstone,” but what pulled me out of it was realizing that I was trying to get better and they had a longer road than I did. It made me irrationally angry at the nurses and all they didn’t see. They’re not the sharpest knives in the drawer at times.
For instance, once my stepmother left her umbrella at the nurses’ station and said, “put my name on it so no one else takes it.” In what world does that not mean “put a note on it?” They wrote her name on her umbrella in Sharpie. I could go on, but I won’t. That example is enough to cover A LOT of ground.
The reason I felt so comfortable with the Viet Nam vet is that one of my best friends in Portland worked for the motor pool in the Army. He taught me everything I know about cars, and though I can do some things on my own, my favorite thing is for a mechanic to stand over me and tell me if I’m doing it right. For instance, much easier to bleed brakes with a buddy. When we got to Houston, we put power steering on Dana’s car because it came with rack and pinion. Our next door neighbor was a mechanic, and he said that he was really impressed that we managed to do it all in the driveway instead of in a shop.
My dad bought Dana’s car, and then her parents gave her some money, so he told her that she could be in charge of buying my car to pay him back. She never did, and I don’t remember why. I just remember that my friend and I did probably $2,000 worth of work on her car for free, and even that wasn’t enough to make her realize I needed a car as well.
It worked out okay because Dana didn’t have a job and could take me where I needed to go. But it wasn’t the same. My brother in law ended up giving me his old car instead. It was a Toyota Corolla, and I had more fun with it than the law should have allowed (but I never wrecked it, a miracle with my eye situation).
Now, by Dana buying me a car, my dad was not talking about a brand new one. He knew that I could work on cars, and our mechanic was still here. So, I could buy a beater and add everything I wanted aftermarket. I just don’t want you to think that she got the old car and I was supposed to get “the new one.” I wanted an old Saturn just like hers.
I believe that hearing this story was why my friend laid it out and said, “you need to get away from her, because she steps all over you and you don’t even notice.”
He was right. I let her get away with far too much because she’s a very strong personality and I am an introvert. At first, it was perfect because she could be the person that dragged me out of my house. Over time, her extroversion led her to easily be able to steamroll me because I wasn’t interested in arguing about something. Whatever she wanted to do was fine. I didn’t realize how much of myself I was losing in the process.
When I moved to DC, both in 2001 and in 2015, my number of military friends doubled just because of the neighborhood. For instance, on our street alone we have retired military, retired intelligence, and retired Secret Service.
To be retired from these things does not mean you are old. Zac is going to retire from the military next year. I think that will make him 36 or 37. I say this to prove that our neighborhood is not all old fogies like me. 😛
One of the first dates I had when I got here was with a spy who was on loan to us from MI-6, working on a human trafficking project. Now, I do not have any idea in the slightest why she told me she was MI-6, but I don’t think I was being catfished or anything. Maybe in England it’s not illegal to say you’re part of (at the time), her majesty’s secret service.
It was Thanksgiving night, and I was busy with my family. I was very late, and she rightfully left quickly. I was very happy about that, because I realized that I was about to get on the wrong train. For instance, if I dated her, it would have been harder to date Zac. He does not need me to have anyone on my contact list that works for a foreign intelligence agency….. and I can’t get away from his contact list because I’m one of his partners.
It kind of makes me worried that CIA or any of its derivatives would see my interest in intelligence as threatening, because I don’t want to know anything that’s classified. I’ve sought out retired spies because I want to know history before I start writing fiction. The operations don’t even matter. What does it take to do the job? What kind of personalities are in the room? Who are the people who Get Shit Done, and who are the people who would write your name on your umbrella with a Sharpie?
Though John le Carre has actually taught me more about this than my retired spy friends, because his whole schtick was showing MI-6 as it really is. There are lazy government wonks and amazingly good spies and they all inhabit the same building. I have no doubt that there is a real place like Slough House.
Speaking of which, I just realized why the show is called “Slow Horses.” It’s a play on words for “Slough Housers.” In the US, Langley is sort of “Slough House,” because if you make a mistake at CIA, you have to stay at the head shed and work a desk job. Or maybe you get sent to a country no one really wants as an assignment, and it’s not Chief of Station. It’s akin to starting off as a chaiwala (for my Indian friends).
It reminds me of my friend Stephen Johnson (now deceased) who thought he was going to be assigned to Viet Nam because it was that era (not a spy, a diplomat for State as far as I know). He said he ended up in the wilds of Montreal.
Dana always said that one of her great aunts was a spy. She was right. I went through a thousand interviews with case officers/diplomats, and I found her. I was looking for Stephen, and she also popped up. Very much a part of the whole Viet Nam clusterfuck Stephen wanted to avoid. She was there for some of the most horrific things each country did. I seem to remember that she was there when Dien Ben Phu fell. She was long dead by the time I married Dana, but she would have been one of the people that I would have wanted to hear everything.
One of the things that I hope The Agency gets if they ever come after my blog is that I’m trying to get enough facts to write a book, not to take down the agency itself. I find myself learning more through conversation/e-mail than I do reading books, though I do a lot of that, too. I just use both modes of learning because books are for plot, retired spies are for characters.
It also makes a difference if you’re talking to someone in a public facing job or a private one. Those are two different stories, always…. and both relevant.
But even if CIA was so interested in my writing that I got put in jail over it, at least I’d know what to say when they asked me what I was in for….. “murder.”
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.
I have never been good with money, which is why so many of my partners have had so much say in how I spend it. I let them, because generally I could trust their impulses better than my own. If you have ADHD, you just have to realize it and move on. There are going to be some times that you want to swing at every pitch, and if you have someone to bounce ideas off of, it’s much easier. I do not mean foisting my responsibility on someone else. I would ask for help in lots of practical tasks, because my EQ is so much higher than my IQ.
When I first came up with the idea for my alternate history, I had it vetted by the best of the best and it made me ride taller in the saddle. But even when Lindsay and I were kidding each other about me being on Oprah’s Book Club and making millions was STILL surrounded around “let’s make the biggest non-profit we possibly can and give it all away.” I don’t generally need money or things for myself. I generally want to help the world in a concrete way.
I have so many ideas for helping the world; very few surround taking care of myself. It’s difficult when you’re AuDHD and also live alone (for all practical intents and purposes). There’s no one to social mask, there’s no one to pick up my slack and let me pick up theirs when I’m the strong one. To a certain extent, I have this with Zac, but it would be a different ball game altogether if I was in a more serious relationship. I am trying to work out what I can handle and what I can’t.
I cannot handle the thought that autistic people naturally have trouble taking care of themselves in every aspect of their lives because sometimes demand avoidance is avoiding other people’s demands when they are put on you suddenly. Most of the time it’s that you cannot make demands of yourself. Take a shower. Comb your hair. Change your clothes.
People do not think about how much energy those things take because they don’t have to do so; autism is relentless and will always make you feel like lesser than, because what you know to be demand avoidance, meltdown, and burnout is seen as lazy, overemotional, and depressed.
Because I need to keep stimulation down to a minimum in order for my brain to function, that means I don’t spend much. Because I’m a writer, I don’t make much. My budget is tiny, and it makes me feel guilty that I cannot spoil my friends the way I want to…. however, I have never had job security in any job, either, so it’s good to know how to live on a little.
Autism and job security is a straight up problem, because something like 80% of autistic people are unemployed at any given time. There are a multitude of reason for this, but mostly it’s that you’re strange in a way no one else understands and therefore seems suspicious at best, or at worst, that you’re a child in an adult’s job.
Many, many adults are treated like a child in an adult’s job, because the things that traditional work rewards are the things that are the hardest for autistic people to manage. It’s the same with ADHD. Bosses and coworkers do not understand stimming. Fidget Spinners and the like were written off as toys, so autistic people that needed them were just “playing.” No one in the neurodivergent community has an easy time in office work because the system is not built for us.
The kitchen was a mess of neurodivergent and addict behavior, so of course I did better there in terms of happiness because everyone had something. I am happy in an office for a few months, because I can social mask my way through that. Over time, my disabilities begin to show and my performance swings wildly because first of all, I’m not the healthiest individual on the planet. Second of all, even a small mistake in an office can get you blackballed in terms of people being nice to you….. and even if you were the most perfect employee on earth, there would still be just something about you that seems “off.” A lot of your reputation at the office is built on perception.
Whether I am actually the best employee or the worst isn’t even at issue here; it’s that if you’re neurodivergent, there’s not a whole lot of acceptance of those quirks once you leave your house.
I am sure that I have mystified Zac at times. I still mystify my sister and I changed her diapers. I cannot say that my mother ever really understood me, and my dad is so interested in medicine that he’s really been my primary parent since I was born in terms of emotional connection. I think that’s because he didn’t agree that my mother should keep me in the dark, and was genuinely interested in my growth and development to the extent that I’d be able to grow and develop. It was very scary for a while, not knowing what I’d be capable of and what I wouldn’t. My mother refused to address it, and I cannot tell you how many factors went into believing she was right…. the biggest reason being that I didn’t need intellectual help, so I must be okay. And this is where I’m sitting now- if my mother was the one that was gaslighting me and my dad was telling me the truth, then where do I actually belong on the spectrum? What can be expected of someone like me?
My dad liked taking me to the neurologist, opthomologist, etc. Therefore, he understood a side of me that scared my mother and I knew it. Instinctively. It’s what happens when you’re the baby that laid around for an entire year….. when I wasn’t in physical therapy. I wasn’t any less interested in the world then. I took in so much more than I ever let on, because neurodivergent people take in more information through sight.
I know that I took in so much of the adult world There is no way that I talked when I knew words and sentences. I talked when I was good and ready. For instance, most kids say “mama” and “dada” first. My first word was “peaches.” My dad said that the next time I talked, I said “car keys.” I could read small books at 3-4, but was the weird kid later who’d check out a biography about Audie Murphy instead of the next VC Andrews. If you are that different from your peers, it doesn’t end at grade school. Autism is expensive when missteps get you fired. I have never found that if you point out the communication issue was actually from someone above you, it doesn’t help your case any. This is because if you don’t fit into the culture of the office, it will do more to shorten your time there than fraud (in most cases). If there isn’t a concrete reason to fire you, there will be a million petty grievances to get you off the island.
My dad taught me medical words at a very young age and I’m glad he did. I turned out to be an amazing speller whether it’s medical terminology or not, because so much of both scientific and general language in English is spelled close to its Latin roots….. that I learned when I was two. (Although I could not win a spelling bee, I don’t think, because every time I’ve gotten close and lost, it’s because I could visualize the word perfectly and mess up on the translation between thought and spoken word.
Because my brain takes in information through reading. Now, I’m an even faster typist without errors because remembering how to spell is reinforced with muscle memory. For instance, did you know that you can actually make a mistake more frequently in entering passwords, etc. just by standing up? You think it’s easier because you can actually see the letters……… but doesn’t feel the same.
I laughed when I saw Olivia Colman on The Graham Norton Show say that one of her most fabulous talents was being such a good typist she could stare off into space. I think the same of myself, and also that when you find the right keyboard, the one that fits your hands like gloves, you could wipe off all the letters. (I’d still need the numbers because I only remember a few of the special characters).
In fact, typing on someone else’s keyboard is a big sensory issue for me, and it does cause meltdown for a few seconds as I readjust my expectations as to how fast I can type at first.
It was my mother that taught me this. Not only was she a great typist, she’d be honored to know that I like typing because of something she said to me. That when you bought a piano, you were looking for only “the right touch.” Pianos come in as many different flavors as keyboards, which is why I take my keyboards seriously. Because I know what it looks like to play classical piano, I know that I run my fingers over the keys as easily as she does.
My mother seemed to want me to be a younger version of her, because being outside the norm didn’t sit well with her. However, I do think that just because there are more concertos written for piano than for the typewriter it only means I play the more unusual instrument.
Editor’s Note:
Link is to “The Typewriter,” by Leroy Anderson. I’ll try to remember to put it at the bottom for ease of use, but I didn’t want to forget and I didn’t want a big YouTube video in the middle of my blog entry. Whether you finish the entry or not is not my call. I’m a web designer. It just looks ugly, which is what I noticed when I tried it once.
My mother appealed to a much broader audience than I ever could, especially when someone at a party wanted her to put on an impromptu singalong (as a preacher’s wife, you just do it). We had a complicated relationship, but one of the things I loved about her was that she was warm and open to everyone except misbehaving kids. 😉 As a result, I am very much that spectrum in real life because I learned it over and over. What changed was when I realized that there were a lot of people in my life that could not change dynamics with me because I’d given each relationship a fair shot at getting better for quite a while.
I wanted people to grow with, not against. One of the things that happened in my marriage to Dana was that when I became a big shot at work, of course I became a different person. I was juggling more responsibility than I’d ever had in my life. Because I found someone I could write to that would understand every single pressure I was dealing with except mental health, she could identify with the person I was becoming while Dana was angry that things had to change. Living in Portland is a lot like living in Neverland. I mean, it’s not now, but it was back then. Even my friends with Masters’ degrees worked at grocery stores and coffee shops because if they could feed themselves, then they had time to spend on their art. They didn’t have to join a rat race they didn’t like to build a life they felt they had to escape.
Therefore, the cultural clash between my childhood and adulthood is complete. I knew that I wanted to write more and more because I knew I had something to say. Dana was an extrovert. She didn’t have any friends in Houston because she felt like they were all mutual (they were, but not to the extent that they’d choose one of us over the other. Chinese Wall.
What I want, though, isn’t the broad spectrum. It’s great if they come along, but I am of the opinion that I am physically disabled and emotionally fucked up. There is nothing I can do about the physically disabled part, but I am trying very, very hard with healthy boundaries in my new relationships because I found that it was easier to set that up from the beginning, because if you start trying to change a dynamic with someone and they don’t like it, trying to maintain positive change is an uphill battle.
He was also of the opinion that I should know I was disabled, and he tried to tell me….. but I never really got the message because my mother told me that he was overreacting, that things weren’t as bad as he thought, etc.
It wasn’t until she died that I saw my actual neurological workup from 18 mos, because Lindsay found it in her personal effects.
It’s exactly as bad as my dad said it was, but not more. I have absolutely no doubt that my mother gaslit me into believing I was fine because people didn’t do any better with disabled kids in the 70s than they do (for the most part) now….. and also she was very determined to have the perfect family.
Very. Determined.
I can take a very educated guess that part of the reason I wasn’t in special ed is that she didn’t want to have to tell people that. It’s a process of acceptance for parents, rearranging their expectations. What my mother never did was that whole “process of acceptance” bit. She wanted to sweep everything under the rug and she could because I have been told many times that I am brilliant (sometimes, I even let myself believe it because those fans aren’t liars).
People who meet me think that I am brilliant. They think that they’ve never met anyone like me. Sometimes, it’s admiration of me as a writer, sometimes a musician, always the ability to say what I think and be confident about it (in most cases).
The longer they think I’m brilliant and wonderful, the more I open up to them. Then, it becomes a weird game when they realize that I am 100% telling the truth, that I have disabilities, that I’m emotionally intense, that I can’t regulate well, etc. What I have said becomes concrete in their minds, and affects them in a totally different way.
Truth be told, I am way above most people’s pay grade. I just have to be aware of it, because there are things that I do have to take responsibility for, just like everyone else. What I cannot keep doing is constantly beating myself up; my life is supposed to look different than a neurotypical person’s.
I think I’m finally coming to a place of acceptance in terms of adjusting my own expectations of myself. I’m not trying to aim low, just in a direction the people like me are already going.
By “people like me,” I mean those with autism who are low needs/high intelligence. (In case you’re confused, low needs is what doctors used to call “high functioning.”)
High functioning for me comes in being able to craft sentences and synthesize ideas. It does not mean that I am also capable of understanding logical processes, because I struggle with details to an enormous degree.
My view on budgeting is just “try not to spend anything,” Even when I was making software company money in DC, I still lived on $150/week. That cushion bailed me out when my mother died, because like I said. I couldn’t get out of bed. That’s because I’d been let go from the software company on September 30, and my mother died October 2nd.
I was going to go on a road trip across the country with my friend Pri, but I backed out when I realized I would rather stay home. That it was too much change, too fast. It was also way above my pay grade to figure out budgeting for the trip.
I don’t really know what to do with more money, because keeping track of a budget with many categories sounds as difficult as learning Mandarin. That’s because it’s not just the money you’ve allocated. It’s the difference between what shows up on your account today, and what hasn’t cleared yet.
This is because I do most everything through PayPal because my Uber/Uber Eats account is connected to it (I would rather pay for grocery delivery than take an Uber to the store). Sometimes there’s a difference in the processing time on their end. It only happens once in a blue moon, but it happened twice last year….. as in, it’s happened twice close together, but I’ve had the account for almost 20 years.
I’m at the point in my life where I would like to learn, and demand avoidance kicks in when I feel abject fear, the kind that literally lights your nerves on fire. That’s one of the things that allistic people do not understand or tolerate- it’s not that big a deal, you’re just overreacting.
Well, for some people “sensory issues” means that they don’t eat or wear a lot of different things. Sensory issues in meltdown physically hurt because you can avoid the foods you don’t like. You cannot avoid your reactions. To neurotypicals, it’s talking about finance and that’s easy because it’s a logical process and I am trying not to dissociate from the conversation because as my discomfort goes up, so does my need for fight, freeze, or flight.
When I am faced with decisions I cannot understand, I freeze. Both my body and brain shut down when the information becomes overwhelming and the neurological reaction starts. For me, meltdown starts the most easily in conversations where I’m expected to know a 101 level and I’m not out of kindergarten on the subject. Generally, that means rage, but none of it is directed externally. I start to think about why I’m this old and still don’t understand X. My nerves begin to catch fire, upping my adrenaline. It’s truly an “Incredible Hulk” feeling, except you’ve painted yourself as the villain who needs to be smashed. Red mist rage is the least helpful when you direct it at yourself…. though in my eyes, preferable to blaming anything on anyone else.
Meltdown is not always loud. For people that social mask well, they can shield what’s going on in their bodies when they have to interact socially……. origin of the phrase, “you don’t look autistic.” But there are signs. If we’re at a house party or a restaurant, chances are that
I have said it before, and I will say it again…. people do not have empathy for demand avoidance, meltdown (and the sensory issues within), and burnout unless they can clearly see the person needs it. You think you know autistic when you see it, because you don’t see it until it’s painfully obvious, like Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory”
I love watching economists talk about world issues, because I have a much easier time with ideas and concepts rather than nuts and bolts.
I can explain anti disestablishmentariansm easier than I can explain things closer to home, like my weird autistic quirks. When I think about world issues, it’s honestly like my mind is taking me on a trip without drugs. I see patterns with enough information and I’ve been reading the news for at least 35 years.
I also see patterns in my own behavior while writing about my younger self, and I’ve realized that my head being in the clouds is the natural state for someone who’s creative autistic. That I am selectively mute in lots of situations because my brain isn’t keeping up with the conversation in front of me- I am sitting near people and entertaining myself. Bringing myself to enter a conversation is very difficult, both because I’m anxious when I meet new people and I don’t like talking, anyway.
I am sure part of it is that I don’t consciously social mask to the degree that I used to, so I don’t feel the need to add anything. If someone talks directly to me, I’ll be friendly. I’m not antisocial. What I mean is that because I think about big ideas, my worth is not dependent on being popular and engaging to a whole crowd, the way I was raised. I don’t mean that it was my job to become the life of the party, just extraordinarily funny so that everyone liked me, and also the one to leave last because I didn’t want the host to do the dishes.
Those were the values instilled in me, to be the kind of person that everyone liked at all costs, because I couldn’t do anything to alienate anyone from my church. When there were a couple of times my behavior had been used in meetings to score a political point, I shut down; my being queer and having someone to confide in was not going to become ammunition….. until I realized that there was no way I could hide a secret that big. It was a choir. A lot of people in a small room, an even smaller dressing room where everyone was all up in each other’s business.
She was not well-liked by a part of our congregation because they thought she was grooming me. She was, but not for sex. It was the ability to confide in someone that didn’t have anything to do with her adult life out there in the real world………. but she forgot something important because I let her. Who wouldn’t want someone like her to be your friend? We each thought each other was hilarious, and it cost me actually being able to do the “bit” where I showed up at school and actually cared about my friends’ problems, because I did not give a shit what happened in Algebra. I was already overwhelmed with a 25-year-old’s view of the world. One of the reasons I didn’t learn much in school is that I was there, but I wasn’t present.
Just because I’m the personality that’s a thousand years old doesn’t mean you should treat me like I’m that old in middle school. It was wrong of her to put secrets in me that were just too big to handle at that age, and now I know that it’s just what she does. She draws you into a special little bubble where you think you’re the most important person in the world. I do not think that she intentionally went after a 14 year-old girlfriend, I just showed up and became so through listening to her problems.
However, I also do not mean that she thought of me as her girlfriend in that strict a sense. You’d just have to know her as well as I do to know that the way she gets that supportive, platonic relationship with women crosses the line all the time. She has broken more hearts than anyone I’ve ever known. I don’t think she thinks that way of herself, but there are stories out there. BELIEVE THEM. Her way of going for that deep, yellow-string connection like I have to Bryn is being seductive enough to make you think it’s a red string in touches and hugs, but absolutely empty words…. she just wanted you to feel like it was important for you to be in her inner circle until she didn’t need anything from you anymore.
It worked on me, and I know for sure it has worked on others. However, it’s been 10 years since we’ve even been in the same room, probably longer. I’m guessing her body count is higher now. As I have said before, I’m not the only one. I’m just the youngest.
Editor’s Note:
I wonder how much of my view on money was also tied to the fact that I wasn’t raised to be queer. I was raised to be the perfect wife. My mother was born in 1951 to parents that had extraordinarily stringent gender roles. Fairly certain that my dad did all the budgeting at home because he had to do it at the church, anyway. I don’t think that for my dad it was a “traditional male” thing so much as “I’m genuinely better suited for this task because I do it a lot more often.” If my mother had showed up to the table with any financial skills from her first family, my dad would have let her do it…… but why would her mother or father teach her those things? So, I believe that because my grandfather and my father did all the “money stuff,” she almost assuredly thought I wouldn’t need to know.
Even though I couldn’t have known at the time that the relationship with this older woman would have disastrous effects, I did know the dopamine made me feel good. It was the last thing I wanted up for discussion. trying to keep it on the downlow because we both needed privacy (for good reason had I not been a teen). I used to put notes in her choir folder before she got to church so that no one saw me do it. I was rebelling against the status quo by being authentically myself. I liked the dopamine of being an older woman’s friend because everyone around me just seemed like, well, children. That should have been a clue, but I didn’t know anything to look for- that isolation was a thing.
That last sentence is carrying a lot of weight for me right now, because it’s a double entendre. Isolation is a thing that abusers do (no matter the delivery), and isolation in which my sensory issues are at a minimum is more comfortable for me, anyway. In short, easy target. It was also quite easy for another lesbian to tell I was one, so I’m sure that part of me being so young was getting to rescue this lost little sheep. In some ways, she did. But what stays with me today is just how much she didn’t want me until someone else did.
This was a running theme over my entire time in Portland, because we had lots of friends through church where all of a sudden it seemed like a competition. From her friends, it was the pissing contest of “we know her better than you.” From her, it was jealousy because she thought they did like me better than her. Neither of those things were ever true. So, eventually I made friends with people she had no connection to, and I was lucky if I got an “all call” party invite. When I wasn’t in her inner circle, I wasn’t part of the drama, and I liked it that way. It made life easier to regulate emotionally when I wasn’t letting her pull my strings.
There were so many good reasons for our privacy in the beginning that it overshadowed all the bad ones. I don’t know how many queer friends she had, but she’s the only one I’d met up unto that point.
So, my first model of an adult lesbian relationship was someone who wanted to have her cake and eat it, too. Someone to love and adore her at home, and a person that partner at home absolutely should be worried about, because if there’s a problem in your relationship, she won’t tell you. She’ll find a woman like me, one that absolutely loves to show their friends they love them by listening to them…… and start overwhelming them with dopamine immediately so that she has a shoulder to cry on when she needs you, but you don’t. What you will get is a lot of empty words and promises until she’s in the shit again and doesn’t currently have that person. You are not her first choice and you know it, but you have to pretend it doesn’t matter.
I’ve known her twice as long as her wife, and I could have taught her a lot if my emotional abuser hadn’t programmed her to think of me as causing trouble in her life. That’s because when she left Houston, she didn’t need me anymore and the story she told me never matched up. That of course I should move to Portland. Get out of Texas. It would be good for you. Just a million and one reasons telling me I should go out there, including visiting several times before I actually moved so that I knew more people than just her by the time I got there.
If we had only written letters about this, I would say simply that “love letters are the campaign promises of the soul.” But this was over the phone and in person. I have a feeling that she actually wasn’t really uncomfortable until I did move, because she couldn’t keep telling her partner and I a different story every day…… but she could if I was only an occasional letter or a call. For instance, her partner actually said to me, “you need to get over your issues with her because it’s like you’re just carrying all that shit in a bag.” She said this a propos of nothing, so I don’t even know what she was saying I needed to get over. All I know is that it wasn’t accurate, whatever it was.
Her partner is older than my dad, therefore I was never right in the history of our relationship. That’s because when I was 14 and she was 25, she was still basically a kid as well. It was easier to see herself as equal to me. In the years we didn’t live in the same city, the power dynamic changed twice over, because part of realizing that she was so much older was realizing she was almost equidistant in age between us. So, I said something she disagreed with, she would turn to the “adultier adult” and they’d both take me down. Meanwhile, she was playing both sides. Her partner was responding out of the information she knew about me secondhand, not anything said between her wife and me when she wasn’t in the room. If I got close, the conversation was engineered away.
I seriously don’t know anything about budgeting. Not my forte. For me, that entire relationship was about learning to conserve my energy. That every time she said “jump,” I didn’t have to. I should have been allowed to take up room. I was abandoned in the same city the way I felt abandoned when she left Houston. At least when she left Houston there was a reason for it.
It all seemed nonsensical as to why this was happening when we both lived in the same town until I realized that if I had a conference with 10 other doctors regarding her medical history and my experiences, not one of them would walk out thinking I hadn’t been taken in by a narcissist.
Now, I am exploring all of the things that make me attracted to emotional unavailability because I’ve realized how detrimental it can be. I want emotional honesty or I want to move on. I have had too much of being used and abused by people who can’t talk about their feelings. That’s not what made me say “narcissistic personally disorder,” though. It’s the round-the-clock schedule she’s got going of lovebomb/discard.
It’s scary how quickly you can go from “you’re my best friend” to “do I know you?” That’s because you won’t be in a relationship with her for very long. You just think you will. That’s why we don’t have any mutual friends left. Her castoffs generally gave me their story, but not because they wanted me to know it. They wanted me to be an intercessory of sorts, as if I had the power to help anything. I just listened and sympathized, but the “maybe you could talk to her” was implied. I get it. If you’re a nobody, having a powerful person who also has a solo-quality voice that wows you is a lot to lose.
It just took them all a long time to learn that they didn’t lose anything. They regained their sanity. Their “friendships” weren’t this murky blur of of moments were you thought it was kind of seductive, but you could have been wrong…. maybe it’s just your mind playing tricks on you.
That was my school experience from 7th grade on- trying to learn and in a monotropic thought process, stuck a moment and couldn’t get out of it.
So, as a result, now I’m learning a lot of the finer points of money when I’ve never thought about it at all. I didn’t have room.
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…….
Stories That Are All True 