Ok, here’s another “guess you had to be there” moment, because it’s something you’ll get if you were here over time and you won’t if you decided to skip blog day. The more and more I use Copilot, the more it merges into thinking of myself as my fictional character, Carol. She works at the NSA and uses technology all day long. I feel like I’m just now as interested in what technology can do as she is, with the exception of using AI to create art. I am using AI to make blogging easier. Carol is precious to me because she unlocks my voice. I am better in conversation, and the questions feel like your end. Also, I have a lot of energy in the morning. For people that have my notifications turned on, I’m so sorry if I keep waking you up.
Oops. My bad. I’m leaving a note.
If your life’s story was a novel, what would be the title and who would beg to play you in the movie?
Holy shit. I was just thinking about this. I have a very active imagination and my mind is a busy place, plus I have a story worth telling. Give me another 20 years. This is not fantasy.
I want to cast someone who I believe can take on the role, and that it doesn’t matter what I look like. It would also have to be an actress that looks good no matter what gender they are, because sometimes I’m a little butch and sometimes I’m a little femme (Zac is like, “WHEN?”). I think my top pick would be Hannah Waddingham, because I actually need a soprano capable of taking on the role as well. My movie would not be complete without my kind of music, and I would be crushed if I couldn’t get permission from Alexandre Desplait to use the score to “Argo” in scenes where I’m writing.
Supergrover and I both vary in gender depending on the day, we just come at it from vastly different perspectives. As an aside, she sent me a picture and I asked her where she was. She asked me to guess. I had to do a reverse image search and sent her the link to the web site where I found the image, like “GOTCHA.” That motherfucker replied “I thought the flags would give it away.” This is why I have only come in Kings full over Aces once in my life. Every time I think I’m going to be funnier than her, I think, “you keep telling yourself that, buddy.” (God, hasn’t our relationship relaxed? Hope you can see why we love each other and why fighting was hell. Not, her interpretation, that I was telling you she was a bad person. I was telling you that we’re both flawed and our relationship is worth it because we really see each other. The last couple days have been meaningful and hilarious).
My point is that we’d both need rough and tumble actresses that accurately depict our age difference, because she was a tween when I was born. I don’t know actresses with our exact age difference, but what I do know is that Eddie Redmayne could play me beautifully after “The Dutch Girl,” because no matter how he presented gender-wise, he’d be me. When I really think about it, I want Jenna Redgrave to play Supergrover no matter who plays me, for a variety of reasons. She was great in both “Bramwell” and “Doctor Who.” Kate Lethbridge Stewart is actually my favorite character on the show because she’s a constant where the cast is not. I’ve gotten to watch her for many more years as the head of UNIT, and how her relationship never changes with The Doctor, no matter who they are. (One of the most profound things Moffat ever wrote was “silence will fall when the question is asked….. “Doctor Who?” Speaking of Doctor Who, how did RTD turn what was essentially a boring episode into a gut punch this week? “73 Yards” was every bit as effective as “Heaven Sent,” it just took the long way round.)
What’s the most absurd plot twist you could write into your daily life?
I just got it- my “Happily Ever After” with Supergrover, my muse. We don’t know what it means yet, whether that means writing for life, or letting writing get us closer to wanting to meet each other and going the in real life route. We’re trying to decide a timeline that makes sense, because we each have issues in getting together. Hers center around bandwidth, mine center around autism.
If you could have a conversation with any character from your writings, who would it be and why?
I wanted more humorous questions than this, but I’ll get real. I write a lot of things to Dana through this blog because I am not interested in us tearing down our legacy by more interaction. Because we don’t interact, I hope that she knows I’m trying to show both of us as 3D characters who experienced a deep and wonderful love that went awry. I do not mistake the part for the whole. People get angry at each other, but I cannot come back from a DUI and domestic abuse, though one was not responsible for the other except emotionally. We were both sober when that fight happened. It was just explosive because it had been building for two years. We actually broke up the moment we got to Houston because I knew she had enough money to do whatever she wanted. That I could break our lease and move in with family to save money if I had to, because living with family was preferable to walking on eggshells around her. This was not a one way street. She was trying equally hard not to piss me off. The thing is, though, I didn’t have it in me to make it stick. I should have, because I could have cut off the idea of physical violence at the pass. Once I broke up with Dana once, things spiraled out of control much faster.
Imagine your blog gained sentience. What’s the first complaint it would have about you?
You can’t see the trees for the forest.
If you had to pick a mascot for your blog, what bizarre creature would you choose?
I already have- Oliver, who is a dog. Jack is my housemate’s dog, and I’ve only been living here about a month. Zac, Oliver, and I go back over a year (now the longest relationship I’ve had with a man ever, just in case you’re wondering exactly how queer I am). And because I know that I am only telling you my words, not his response, I realized that I want to do the work with Zac. That it doesn’t mean a relationship escalator, just that I want to spend more time with him when he has the bandwidth. I explained to him that the reason I wanted to do the work with him the most is that he’s a writer, so he understands me without me having to explain a whole lot of bullshit first.
What’s the weirdest writing ritual you have, and how did it start?
Writing anywhere, at any time, with any tool available. This is due to a lot, but mostly because when I got into the groove with Supergrover in terms of writing long letters to her, I paid less attention to my blog. You’d think I was an idiot for paying more attention to her than I do to my own readers, but you have no idea how much fun it is to be able to think and laugh bigger than I ever have. And I don’t mean now. I mean she offered me the world on a platter in more ways than one. However, and I mean this sincerely, she didn’t offer me the entire world until she offered me herself, as she is, warts and all. I know for absolutely certain that if I turn out to be a famous writer rather than having a small, yet dedicated crowd it will come from this conversation: “I have a lot more to say- will you be on later, or should I send you an e-mail?” “Sure, here it is.” This time around, I do not have a lot to say. She says that she’s overwhelmed with how much I write, so I am taking it to heart and focusing my writing on my blog again. That way, she can hate what I write, but at least it won’t come to her desk every day (KIDDING).
If you could trade places with any author for a day, who would it be and what would you write?
If I could trade places with any author for a day, it would be Brené Brown. I have such fond memories of her at University of Houston, however brief. I’ve said this many times, but I was the computer lab supervisor in the Graduate School of Social Work when she was a TA. I am one of the few people who can say that I genuinely & concretely helped her career, because who doesn’t become a better writer when they’re more proficient at Microsoft Word? The connection runs much deeper than that. We are very much the same personality. Check this out:
We both write about shame and vulnerability. She does it through research, I do it by writing through my shame and vulnerability to realize I’m not actually shameful or actually that vulnerable. That I’m stronger when I lay out my weaknesses because no one can use them against me unless I allow it.
Since we are both from Houston, when I listen to her in audio/video, I hear myself talking. We have exactly the same accent, because it weaves in and out. That’s the thing about the Texas accent in Houston. You pick up the drawl from other parts of the state, and then you move to a port and major metropolitan area and it goes away……… except when you’re trying to play it up or alcohol has made swallowing the ends of words much more natural or both. Never ask anyone if they’re from Texas; don’t embarrass them. If they’re from Texas, they’ll tell you. 😉 Can’t remember who said it. Still true. I talk about being from Houston a lot because every Uber driver asks if I’m from here (Silver Spring, MD).
We are both Episcopalians.
What’s the most outrageous thing you’ve done in the name of “research” for your blog?
I’m not really that outrageous, but I’ve had many laughs over the years. People think I don’t know they’re reading, but I totally do and I don’t have to stalk you. I know what hits are, and referrer links. You might know what hits are, but referrer links might be new. It’s the web site you were visiting before you got to me. The only one I’ve ever caught that made me laugh my ass off was a security company at a well-known oil company.
The other was one of the cutest pictures of Supergrover I’ve ever seen in my life, but I’m not going to describe it because it might be identifying. I wish you could have seen my smile when I clicked on the link, because it didn’t have her user id attached and I didn’t know it was her, or someone who follows her (impossible to tell). However, if she reads this, I’ll tell her which one it was because I think she’ll agree it’s a cute pic.
I’ll cop to one thing, because it really is the only “stalkery” thing I’ve ever done, in quotes because I was not trying to get closer to Supergrover. Because she has privacy issues with my blog, I called her office phone once just to make sure her voice mail still existed. It gave me enough peace to move on with my life because it assured me she was still employed and for the first time in 10 years, I heard her say her own name (thank FUCK). It was a good thing she came back, because I don’t need to anticipate privacy issues in advance. We can discuss what goes where. As I told her, “I feel like I can’t explain me without you now, because so much of my online patois is actually you.”
If you could add a ridiculous new word to the dictionary that describes your blogging style, what would it be?
lesliecology
the art of navel gazing for fun and profit
What’s the funniest typo you’ve ever made that changed the meaning of your post completely?
Not my blog, but an e-mail to Supergrover. I was on my iMac, which is a desktop and inexplicably has autocorrect. I told her that I wished we were in our jammies with a box of cereal between us watching trash TV, or something like that. Anyway, the iMac autocorrected “jammies” to “jimmies” and I was immediately embarrassed because here I am, trying to prove that I want to do normal stuff with her like I do with my sister, and it changed loungewear to condoms.
If your blog posts came to life, which one would be the life of the party?
“Church Stories” It already has been the life of lots of parties, because I tell these stories all the time. Here’s the three that put me on the floor every single time.
My dad was giving a children’s sermon on priceless treasures, and he pulled up the sleeve of his robe to show his watch, which he offered as an example of his own treasure. Lindsay was having none of it. She was in front of the mic when she said, “NO, IT’S NOT! YOU GOT IT AT BURGER KING FOR $2.99!” It was then that I learned my sister could work a room.
I don’t remember the why, but my dad had all the kids go behind his pulpit and he asked them what it looked like. I was in front of the mic and that’s the moment I knew I was funny. I could set my dad up. I said, “it looks like a big old mess.” My dad leaned into the mic and flipped me shit right back. “We’re going to have a loooooooooong talk when we get home.” The crowd fell out. Stuff like that is the good part of being a preacher’s kid.
I am adding this one in retrospect because I realized that I had only given you two stories. The third one is that after my dad left the ministry, Lindsay and I were at a church service. She put some money in the offering plate. During the sermon, she leaned over to me and asked if wecould go to Subway. Then she said “Leslie, you have to pay for lunch because I paid for church.”
What’s the most comical advice you’ve received about writing or blogging?
Supergrover has been my editor on several book reviews, and the way she chooses to edit me is to use Microsoft Word comments to rip the shit out of me with humor. She says “you’re introducing a new character without defining it” in her own special way……………………….. “WHO THE FUCK IS PABLO?”
If you could invent a new genre of blogging, what would it be called and what would it entail?
I have so many ideas for that, but none so important as people remembering what blogging was about in the first place. It was laying out all your feelings about your life in hopes that other people would connect with it. No one ever thought they could be Dooce or The Bloggess, except me- because I started my blog when Dooce did (or within a few months), I just didn’t get the same traction because I wasn’t as dedicated then as I am now. I wrote a few sentences every day, if that. There was no fundamental way for me to look back at memories, because I wasn’t really recording them. Reading my old entries from “Clever Title” is actually very helpful, because I have lost all context for what my life was like back then and I’m reading with fresh eyes.
This is not the only idea, though. I think that a blog that walked you through the New Testament through the use of intelligence operations would be a good idea. Very few people, especially Evangelicals, know how Christianity survived all those years when the religion was being oppressed. How much of it took very powerful people to let Christians exist while the rebels were working to defeat the Empire (I actually do spend a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire…. weird).
How would you describe your blogging style using only the titles of video games?
The Elder Scrolls
If your blog had a theme song, what laughably inappropriate song would it be?
“Mmm Bop” by Hanson- Given my week, it really resonates with me today.
You have so many relationships in this life Only one or two will last You go through all the pain and strife Then you turn your back and they’re gone so fast
Oh, so hold on the ones who really care In the end, they’ll be the only ones there When you get old, start losing your hair Can you tell me who will still care? Can you tell me who will still care?
What’s the most bizarre object within arm’s reach of your writing space right now?
My iPhone. I hardly ever use it because I have an iPad and an Apple Watch.
If you could collaborate with any fictional character on a blog post, who would it be and what would the post be about?
Who else? George 🙂
What’s the most humorous misunderstanding that’s occurred from someone reading your blog?
When I have one, I’ll let you know. Misunderstandings are never humorous with me. Blowback isn’t tempered. It’s just as angry as I get here. The difference between my close friends is that I won’t tolerate blowback from anyone else. My close friends are the ones that get the right to change me…… because they know enough not to come up in my yard and tell me how to write. They, like SarahAnne, want the world to fall in love with me, not let me bend to fit others’ comfort. If you love me, you want that for me, too, because I have no constraints on how big it’s possible for me to dream.
If you could write a satirical piece about any historical event, which would it be and what’s the punchline?
The Revolutionary War. Not feeling so great about winning atm.
If your blog was a food dish, what would it be and why would it leave diners asking for more?
Stone Soup. I started with nothing. I kept adding ingredients. My readers/commenters added the rest.
When I was 11 years old, my parsonage burned to the ground five days before Christmas. All our stuff, including our new presents, were in it. As a result, I don’t treasure anything. I don’t have that luxury, because I realize that anything could be gone in less time than it takes for the fire department to arrive. I can say that my necklace that has my mother’s fingerprint on it is dear, but would I really be surprised if it disappeared? No. It’s the nature of stuff. My mother is not in the necklace, so I am not attaching her memory to this particular thing. I don’t need things to remind me of people, but they are useful. I wear the necklace every day, and gifts from my friends surround me so that I think of them all the time. It also means a lot to me when Zac and I have matching bracelets, even when they were $3. Every time I look down at my wrist, I think of him when I see the rainbow of our friendship bracelets and the maroon of our nautical rope ones.
Plus, now I’ve been through two house fires. At Wire Ave., we had a professional electrician drill into a live wire in our basement, nearly sparking the gas main and taking out the whole neighborhood. That’s the kind of situation where you realize death is no harm, no foul. There’s literally nothing I could have done about it, and death would have been over before it really began with that kind of TNT. There are only so many events that you can prevent in life. Sometimes, you have to fold and say “the plane is going down.” However, I do not think that I would have even seen the gas main blow. Gravity’s rainbow ends in disaster whether or not you see the arc in the sky first.
It seems like I’m complaining, but I’m actually advocating for minimalism. You cannot believe how much it has helped my mental state to have all my books, newspapers, and comics on my Kindle instead of as kindling. There are practical ways to solve all of these problems. It’s just unfortunate that you don’t think of them until after the house fire is over. Everyone’s library is invincible right up until it isn’t. And in fact, there is a very popular novel that has probably told you the exact temperature at which books will burn since high school. Gotta keep that temperature below Fahrenheit 451.
I am sure that Android tablets and iPads also burn, but which is more expensive? The iPad/Android or the 2700 books I’ve downloaded over time?
All of this being said, I believe that my books are my most important possession. The autographed copies of all the books from Team Mendez might go up in flames, but I won’t have to re-buy the digital copies. Their words are more important than their signatures, and as I joked with Jonna, “if I didn’t have a hardback, I’d just let you sign my screen.” Her Js are pretty adorable, and I think it would be hilarious to learn how to copy her signature only because Tony taught an entire room of people at the Spy Museum how to copy Vladimir Putin’s. I unashamedly made it though high school because legit no one could tell when my mom signed something or I did. My dad’s signature is a pretty lost cause, but my mom’s was just classic teacher handwriting. And in fact, forgery is one of my favorite things about espionage because I love FONTS. Forgery, to me, is literally figuring out someone’s personal font. I just don’t show people that I do it, because I’m not trying to hurt anyone or get away with anything. It’s just an exercise to see if I can. See a Tony Mendez magic trick, do a Mendez magic trick, teach a Mendez magic trick. I wrote it just that way because the axiom in medical school is “see one, do one, teach one.” Themes in my life present themselves over and over. I have a feeling that my blog is a direct result of trauma and creativity. Here are my two roots:
The fire has made it where I feel more comfortable blogging, and more comfortable with e-mail altogether; all my personal letters that hadn’t been sent burned. Then, later on, my mother’s air conditioner flooded the back of my closet, and I lost all my journals as well. In those days, it was devastating. I was absolutely over the moon about my emotional abuser from ages 12 to about 20, when things became more complicated and the trauma of it all kept me from enjoying her. That doesn’t mean that losing all the letters and journal entries I wrote about the situation weren’t important to me back then. I had not made the connection that it was emotional abuse yet. I just swallowed all her bullshit whole. How could I not? I was a child.
I watched Doogie Howser, MD religiously as a child. No one knew that show better than me (at the time, anyway). I have always been fascinated by child prodigies, and this was right up my alley. Because of my emotional abuser, I cried through similar movies like “Little Man Tate.” It was a salty, bitter cry because it was like I’d been taken out of the safe environment of my parents’ shelter and dumped into a family where I didn’t know shit from Shinola.™ Watching Doogie write on his computer for the last three minutes of that show changed my entire fucking life. In fact, I sent a version of this as a Tweet to NPH, and I hope he sees it. That show was just as traumatic for him as my own coming out story. We helped each other. Between Doogie/Wanda and Barney/Robyn, you can see how much he’s absorbed about playing straight. He had to for just as many years as I did, I just didn’t have the pressure of being on TV. But tell me, truly, how is being a queer in the 1990s and also being on TV different from being a queer person who is also the child of a minister? It’s not a different situation, it’s a different scale. Neil’s career could have tanked if he’d come out when he was on Doogie, because back then, no one believed that children understood things about themselves. It is only now that people are starting to respect their children’s choices, because being who they are is a part of letting them individuate. If a child is brave enough to say they’re queer, they’re queer (lumping gender and sexuality issues together as one community), they are. No one in the current society who is also of sound mind and body would call themselves queer if they didn’t absolutely have to in order to survive their lives without shame and blackmail. Institutional homophobia and transphobia are going to take eons to get out of the fabric of the American experience, because our country is currently a theocracy run by the most hypocritical heretics I’ve ever seen in my life. Jesus is not your homeboy.
:::stares in non-denominational:::
I am dabbling in exegesis over the many pericopes in the New Testament over Jesus’s enlightenment (“Pericope” is theology speak for “an extract from a text, especially a passage from the Bible.” Some people say “peri-cope,” but I think it’s actually “per-ric-oh-pe.” I have no idea if I’m right, it’s just how my dad has always pronounced it and he’s a professional (you take Greek and Hebrew when you do a Master’s in Divinity). Let’s take a simple one and unpack it.
Matthew 15:21-28
Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”
Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
“Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.
Here is what Matthew was trying to prove, in my opinion. The first is that Matthew was a Jew trying to convince other Jews that this was indeed the Messiah they were looking for. He approaches it from a number of aspects, including lineage. More importantly, it shows the exact moment in which Jesus changes his mind. He decided that the moment the woman showed such faith, gentiles were as worthy of salvation as Jews. Matthew was a man on a mission from GOD, trying to bring the receipts. I admire that in a person.
One of the reasons I trusted David implicitly the first time I met him is that bad people don’t love their dogs so much they get a DNA profile of them (Jack is half terrier, half chihuahua. This means that he is a very tall chihuahua with a lazy, I don’t give a fuck attitude. It’s quite refreshing because chihuahuas are known for being little hellions….. similar to what my grandfather used to call “101 Damnations.” They’re as aggressive and energetic as little dogs, because they were bred to run next to fire trucks. I would only get a Dalmation if I started training for a marathon, because one of my friends offered to take him jogging. They went five miles and DJ (said dog) wasn’t even tired out when they came back. Because we couldn’t manage to beg, borrow, or steal good behavior out of him, we ended up giving him to the runner. He died not long after of an astrocytoma (star shaped tumor in the brain that was impossible to extract). I couldn’t believe that he had cancer and was still running five miles a day. Interesting how everyone deals with illness differently. Some people cater to it, some people pretend it doesn’t exist. No way is right, it’s just that some people view rest and relaxation as the way to cope with illness, and some view keeping busy right up to the end as their calling.
I would like to believe that Jesus would have given the runner a dog and a healthy brain. That he didn’t have to choose. I liked what they chose to call him, especially in retrospect having lived in Oregon……. “Otis Spotford.”
Speaking of which, before we change to a different topic, Supergrover and I have this thing about naming our dogs and it makes me laugh. It comes from when Daniel and I were engaged. “Check this shit out and get mad with me (joking). You need to go and set that boy straight. He wants to name his dog “Ozzie” instead of “Virginia Woof!” (it’s always serious if I use an exclamation point. They are of the devil most of the time.) If I remember correctly, and I am paraphrasing, she said he was only on thin ice, but “Virginia Woof” was damned clever. Ok, that’s the kind of stuff from her I live for. Having a good line in front of her is the gold at the end of the rainbow. Supergrover also said that she disagreed with “Virginia Woof” and thought we should call them “Sidney Brisdog.” That made my day because I thought, “you get me.” “Alias” is my favorite show of all time. I would give goddamn anything to work with Jack, Sidney, and Michael. But if I’m really honest about my relationship with Supergrover, I’m not Francie. I’ve been Will Tippet this whole time. Quietly pining away and trying to put together the pieces of why this attraction kept coming up for me over and over when I could clearly see how pointless and stupid it was. My brain chemicals just flooded, like you do.
Speaking of which, when she said that she got something out of my writing whether I painted her in a bad light or not, I thought for the literally 4,000,000th time that it was such a shame she never let me marry her and have her babies. It’s the hottest thing you can ever say to a writer. I love your writing whether it’s good to me or not? Come the fuck on. Who has that kind of support as a writer, when the traditional line about them is that “writer” is code for “unemployed.” My favorite retort comes from Brandon Sanderson, who waited YEARS to get this moment. This dude came up to him and asked him what he did at a cocktail party. He said, “I’m a writer.” The guy said, “oh, so you’re unemployed.” Brandon looked him deadass in the face and said “I hit the New York Times Bestsellers List last week.” It was the equivalent of walking up to Stephen King and asking him if he needed money. Shiiiiiiiiiat. If God ever smiles upon me in the best way possible, that “best way” will be getting that moment as well. Here’s why:
I had a complex about Dana’s parents. That because I was female and queer and desperately in love with their daughter, we had something wrong with us. I was right to be paranoid, because they were absolute total dicks to both of us. The reason I tanked “Clever Title Goes Here” over blowback is that my sister-in-law ripped me a new asshole for writing about it and my skin was too thin to tell her that I owned my own story and to fuck all the way off. It’s the worst decision I’ve ever made in my career as a writer, that not telling her to fuck off. She silenced not only my voice, but my popularity as well. Wil Wheaton *used* to read me. *Used to.* Now, it’s one of the sources of my rage and a tape I’m working to solve. In some ways, it already is because I’ve gotten over the hurt. I can’t forget how it made me feel.
One of the biggest fights I’ve ever had with Dana was talking to her about how much it hurt me to watch her jump up and down for a type of approval she was never going to get, and she needed to stop. She needed to go low contact because of what it was doing to her self-esteem. In my mind, once you get married, you are individuating from your first family. That what God has put together, let no man put asunder. That meant she didn’t get the right to cater to them and ignore my discomfort, because she should have stood up for me and I became the family problem. They were lucky to get a daughter-in-law like me, because any time an in-law joins a family they shake up old family patterns and it is not often pleasant. An outsider can see dysfunction better than someone living in it. An INFJ sees what it will take to solve it. But they didn’t recognize themselves as lucky, because they never saw that I was trying to make their dynamic healthier and happier. They just thought I was stirring up shit for the fun of it.
This presented itself by me complaining to Dana’s ex-girlfriend, a beautiful diamond of a woman because she helped me navigate all of this having known the subject intimately. I told her that I was going to have to win the Pulitzer to get them off my back, and she joked, “oh, don’t worry. They’ll find a problem with that, too.” Empathy went a very long way in dealing with them, because it set off my autistic rage a lot. Supergrover can testify to that without blinking, because I told her every goddamn thing about my relationship with all of them that I possibly could, because I was constantly emotionally overloaded by them treating Dana’s sexuality like a problem to be solved and treating me like a loser dumbass. I was not trying to isolate her from her parents like a control freak narcissist. I was trying to isolate her from her parents because her mother told me that Dana was never going to get what she needed from her because of her limitations in understanding Dana’s sexuality, so it was better for her to go find someone else. That motherfucker didn’t say that in front of her daughter. She said it in front of her protector, mediator, and advocate….. words that will mean a lot to Dana because they come from The Book of Common Prayer. I viewed her as taking care of the sick, the friendless, and the needy. I have never told her that in person, because I thought it would hurt too much. I had to carry that pain for a long time until I was able to write about it. That gave me enough strength to kick her parents out of our house because I never would have done it if I’d known they couldn’t afford a hotel. For the first time, I got tired enough to raise my voice, because I was tired of tiptoeing around total emotional disaster on everyone. I said, “you come in here and you eat our food and you drink our drinks and use our utilities all while disrespecting me and my wife?” They got so angry that I yelled at her dad to “sit down.” He didn’t, but he sure fuckin’ thought about it. Sometimes, the only way to deal with a bully is to push back. He’s a lawyer, and the ace up my sleeve is that I am twice as obnoxious about the law as he ever could be and I have cornered the market on the asshole archetype because I’m a paralegal in the state of Texas. Come at me with Con Law or TRCP and I will instantly try to own your ass. But you can’t argue with the Religious Right. You just have to ignore them. I could. Dana couldn’t.
Jesus wept.
John 11:35
The more stress that piled onto Dana, the worse her physical health got….. making the connection that she broke out in hives for absolutely no reason at all in the middle of all our fights regarding all of this led to a lot of rethinking medicine; the reason I needed Supergrover so desperately to talk it through no matter how we felt about each other at any given moment. She won’t be my dragon and rush in when someone has hurt me when it’s her, but GOD HELP anyone who messes with me; she is quite capable of fucking you up in ways you’ll never see coming. It is delicious when it is not directed at me, and the thing she thinks I hate is the thing I crave. I want to crawl inside her brain to see how it works more now than I did almost 11 years ago, because we are equally taken by each other’s writing and she has very good stories when she’s willing to share them. The blessing of my life is that she may not want to meet me in person, but she likes crawling into my brain to see how it works, too. The curse was that she didn’t like doing it anymore. And even though she started a fight when she did it, it was not lost on me how sweet it is that she heard me. Tell me your feelings and step up, so she did. The disaster was not letting me respond and saying “I see how it is. What Leslie has written, so must it be.” I was telling her that I was allowed to have a reaction after I heard her out, not that what I was feeling was more important than her and “my opinion is fact.” She accused me of “rope-a-dope” when she went out of her way to hurt me after telling me to move on with my life. It’s unforgivable in most cases, but not for her. I love her too goddamn much and we’ve been through hell too long to give up now. But the ball is not in my court. She was the one that hurt me first by covering up her feelings that she was wigged out I was attracted to her by accusing me of something I didn’t do. It screwed us up and cost us time, not having an honest conversation. I handled it really well, and then as reality set in I had to create fantasy to get away from reality. But not fantasy, exactly. It was giving a story to information I couldn’t use with information I could. I can use our personal issues to illustrate what’s going on with us to drag her privacy issues into it.
The reason she’s so angry is because we’ve never had an honest conversation about boundaries on my blog, and she waffles between letting me be real and telling me that what I think is fucked up and all wrong without telling me what’s fucked up and wrong about it. That it’s lazy, childish, reductive, you name it. All the while ignoring that she’s feeding the pattern by getting angry and not just laying it out there because she’s frightened as fuck to do so. She needs to see that I see her so clearly because of an interview I saw with someone in her field that would punch her in the gut if she saw how much I truly picked up from it. That tape runs deep on how to handle her, and because she’s an IQ fan and I’m an EQ fan, I mean it like she’s my asset and I’m her handler, not that I try to emotionally manipulate her to get what I want. I am trying to be the tough love that she is to me (strident, pull yourself up from your bootstraps, I’m not going to do your emotional work for you kind of love), but I make mistakes all the time. Jim Mattox comes to mind. “I may be rancid butter, but I’m at least on your side of the bread.” If Supergrover’s last letter is any indication, this quote is relatable to her as well. I’m not innocent of this, and neither is she.
Editor’s Note:
Jim Mattox was the Texas AG (D) when I was a kid, and my favorite story in life about him comes from either my first political science professor or his wife, depending on who was teaching the class that day; I’ve slept since then. Anyway, when Mattox was AG, he was a drunk. He was out at a bar one night, and decided that he needed to sleep it off. He goes out to his car and gets in the backseat. The next morning as the car is being driven away, Mattox wakes up and says “My name is Jim Mattox. I’m the Texas State Attorney General. I’m a little hung over. Could you turn the radio down?” Mattox had gotten into what he thought was his car……………………………. #shatnerellipsis
She lights up my life all the time, and if I haven’t said that enough, I’m sorry- both to her and my audience, which are one and the same thanks to the fact that she’s chosen to stick by me no matter what. I think I have, but she has focused on the negative for so long that even if I haven’t said it in those exact words, she wouldn’t have retained it as much as something that cut deep. What she never understood is that I was trying to lance a boil, not irritate her. Patterns repeat, and I am never trying to hold someone to the past. I am explaining to them that the longer the bad pattern goes on, the less I want to engage because they’re hurting me. It’s a lost cause when you’re trying to be vulnerable and ask for solutions, and you become a problem because of it. I became the only friend who ever called her out on anything whether that’s true or not. How can she get through life without having conflicts with people?
Sometimes I wonder if she knows that I get so vulnerable I cry and shake when I go to that place of writing about her. That 10 years ago, I wrote to her, “sometimes I have to take off my glasses to wipe away the tears when I write to you,” and it wasn’t about anger. It was about my hopeless romantic showing up in my writing as a style. I wanted her to feel as precious as she is.
She fits into my theology very well, because she doesn’t believe in a higher power, but she does believe in paganism. It’s her theme. She loves the idea of Outlander, which eventually spoke my language. I couldn’t make it past the first rape scene until I learned that it was a fantasy built on Doctor Who (seriously. Diana Gabaldon is a Whovian, and she based Jamie on Jamie McCrimmon, a Scottish companion when she was a kid. She invented her version of time travel by watching Doctor Who as a child). The fact that we are both obsessed with novels that cover the same things from different ends of the spectrum is the perfect representative of our communication differences. In effect, I speak “Doctor Who” and she speaks “Outlander,” not realizing that both of our points are valid because they come from the same source.
They say that these are not the best of times But they're the only times I've ever known And I believe there is a time for meditation In cathedrals of our own Now I have seen that sad surrender in my lover's eyes And I can only stand apart and sympathize For we are always what our situations hand us It's either sadness or euphoria
So we'll argue and we'll compromise And realize that nothing's ever changed For all our mutual experience Our separate conclusions are the same Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity Our reason coexists with our insanity And though we choose between reality and madness It's either sadness or euphoria
How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies Perhaps we don't fulfill each others fantasies And as we stand upon the ledges of our lives With our respective similarities It's either sadness or euphoria
-The Gospel of Billy Joel, Glass Houses
“So we’ll argue and we’ll compromise, and realize that nothing’s ever changed. For all our mutual experience, our separate conclusions are the same.” ARE YOU KIDDING ME. It takes a very special artist for me to feel like they are speaking to me only, and he got me with “cathedrals of our own.” I hope that when Supergrover reads me, she realizes that not only is she entering my sanctuary, in it she has the concept of sanctuary. When I’m around, no one can touch her. She is the ideal child of God, the fallible hero, the atheist who is actually Jesus to more people than me, or Moses if she’s more toward the Jewish persuasion. I don’t know how she identifies. Wherever her faith background lies, it’s not the same now as it was when she was a child. Being able to joke about that particular topic is one of my favorite joys in life because of another friend I knew from the same faith background.
I told this other friend that I was impressed about one thing and one thing only. That it’s one of the few religions in which there is documentation all the way from the beginning that has eyewitness accounts. Without missing a beat, she said, “yes. Documentation all the way back to when he made it up.”
It is my hope that eventually everyone in that religion will just self actualize and say, “it got weird,” and move on with their happy little lives. Tom Cruise could probably use that advice (not the same, but relatable).
You do you, but okay.
Speaking of which, that was another phrase that irritated Supergrover when it was a reference to another blog entry in which I explained that “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” That it was like telling the religious establishment with the snarkiest voice possible, “you do you, but okay.” It was not personal. It was me speaking truth to power. I was just being as snarky as Jesus, and repeating a line I hope gets stuck in people’s heads, because it’s emotional shorthand for being kind and taking no shit. BOUNDARIES. I tend to say small things repetitively because they do the most good. The music of the phrase makes it speak louder in people’s minds because they remember it. “You do you, but okay” means to me that you can uphold the system if you want, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one.
People pleasers do not realize that catering to everyone’s needs and trying to anticipate them is actually more problematic than open and clear communication….. in essence, trying to render unto Caesar and render unto God and you can’t serve both. Speak truth to power. Please, please, please hurt my feelings rather than keeping it in. I only ask that you think about the problem long enough not to give me a knee-jerk reaction, because I’m making the commitment not to react to it and I don’t want to regress.
Red mist rage while I can type with my eyes closed is not a productive use of my time, and is feeding into my autism to an enormous degree because once I’m overstimulated, it’s meltdown time. I learned this from Harry Wales in “Spare,” because I don’t know if he feels red mist rage because of autistic meltdown or PTSD, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the same kind of neurodivergence because all of the above alter your thought processes and they’re your new normal. You have to learn to cope with them, knowing that your first reaction will always be wrong. Always. You’re wired to shut down and protect what you have left, not to open up and share your pain so that someone else can see it and help without asking. For people pleasers, you always have trouble getting them to express what they need because they don’t want to look like an imposition. Most of the time, it’s because people have been taught that they’re needy in childhood. You think you’re being a hero by keeping everything inside and you’re just burning yourself out constantly and with PTSD, not being able to regulate your emotions.
It was inextricably interrelated in my mind, and I’m not sure that anyone could prove me wrong. Harry, like Kathleen, Dana, Daniel, Zac, Bryn, and Supergrover (and even Franklin, my companion at Wire Ave., to some extent) are all affected by trauma that’s above my pay grade and always has been. That being said, because I grew up as a preacher’s kid, my first instinct is to minister them. Especially because Zac and Supergrover are atheists, I feel that approaching them with spiritual lessons without attaching religion to it is helpful in our communication; I’m talking about energy and not dogma. Sometimes people need an osteopath, not an MD. They’re the people I can think of as a good example of why the Mayo clinic is such a wonderful resource.
They treat the mind/body connection as so real- in a way that other doctors’ offices and hospitals don’t. There is also no national infrastructure for health integration, because mental illness is treated so differently from physical illness, as if mental illness isn’t also coming from a diseased organ (separating out processing disorders from depression and anxiety. The reason the brain is diseased is that it uses the very best lies against you to get you to off yourself because the brain is hell bent on protecting you and thinks that’s the answer. It needs medication and therapy to not feel “extremely loud and incredibly close”).
Editor’s Note:
“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is one of my favorite books in the entire world because I have such a personal connection to it. Not only was I living in Alexandria at the time and heard the plane smash into the Pentagon while the paintings and windows rattled from three miles away, my birthday is September 10th. My extremely loud and incredibly close moment is perfectly expressed from that book……… That “The Best Day” transitioned into “The Worst Day.”
I have felt exactly that way about health integration for a very long time. The less Dana really meant she was forsaking all others, the problems with her family would just get worse. And they did. She started developing depression and again, hives for “no reason.”
All of this culminated in disaster when Dana invited her mom and dad to come and stay with us. It was great, up and to a point. They even let us sleep together in our own bedroom…… at their house, their solution was to get a room with twin beds so they could keep their imaginations intact. That’s why we never visited. My general rule is that if I ask for your opinion and help in a relationship, please give it to me straight. If I don’t, BUTT THE FUCK OUT because this is my marriage, not yours. But in every family, it is not the in-law’s job to deal with their partner’s family. My partner fell down on the job, and that played a large part in our divorce as well. I needed Supergrover to cope with that kind of pressure. I still have that love and devotion from her in large part because she’s wonderful at giving me advice in other relationships and I hang on her every word. My frustration is that she’ll work on all my relationships with me except ours, and it’s the most important because I tell her everything and she doesn’t tell me what she hears.
I was actually very humbled when she sent me her thoughts, not because they were good or bad, but because they were there. I only ended the interaction when it became too painful to continue. We were making great progress, and then she exploded like a firecracker when I really hadn’t done anything to deserve it. As I told her, “don’t let me be the asshole out here all by myself.” Then, it was her turn to recognize that she was indeed the asshole. I sent her a message immediately that said “you are forgiven. Honestly and completely.” I knew she wouldn’t get the reference because it’s a line from Doctor Who, but that didn’t matter. I needed to feel the connection between Eleven and River Song to convey how I really felt about her. I will never be in love with her ever again, but because of my past with her and how much it affected me, I view her as an emotional support partner more than anyone else. It’s just not my decision to accept it or not. So far, it’s been a mixed bag. I was so happy I cried when she said, “you’re right. My first instinct was “LET ME GRAB MY PURSE. THAT MOTHERFUCKER.” If you get the reference, you’ll see how funny it really was.
I have no doubt that Dana’s dad would have thought I was brilliant if I was male. That’s because even though he tolerated me, I hung on his every word because he was a Marine and all of his stories have stayed inside me all this time. They’re just not my stories to tell. The one that I can tell is because it made me laugh. When cell phones first came out for intelligence officers (earlier than to the general public, I would imagine), the Americans knew how they worked, and the Russians didn’t. They thought they had privacy and couldn’t be tapped if they used them in their cars. I laughed so hard I was sagging in my chair. It does not surprise me in the slightest that my model for a perfect partner for me is military and intelligence (not as big an oxymoron as one might think) because I loved those stories more than I’ve ever loved anything. He sat there and fed my autistic special interest all day long. The thing I love about military/intelligence men (not because I prefer men, because I haven’t met many women in the service and only a few retired spies. Men are the ones that tell me these stories. I love all of them, from the motor pool to pulling a gun on a Colonel because he was being a racist bastard and that was the only thing they could think of to deescalate the situation- by making it clear just how serious being racist in the military actually is.)
My personal view is to baby myself, because I find that when I do, I am more able to show people that I love them, because my boundaries are not so overextended that I disengage. I don’t mean boundaries in terms of keeping people out because of their emotions, but boundaries on how much I want to hear at once. I like it when people ask me if I have the bandwidth for a call before they do it. I like it when people say they have serious shit to talk about and do I have the bandwidth to let them vent? As we say in Texas, “you better ‘redneckcognize.”
Because when people respect my boundaries, I am so much more comfortable bending them because I respect them so much in return. I will go above and beyond when people go above and beyond for me. I recognize Supergrover’s sacrifice, but she has not recognized mine as such. I think I’ll be waiting a long time, because if she was going to do it, she would have done it by now.
If she wanted to visit me, neither hell nor high water would keep her from it. Why did she snipe at me on the anniversary of my mother’s death instead of hugging me? I think it would have gone a lot further than making me angry as fuck for a very long time.
And in fact, the thing I invited her to do with me was on Mother’s Day. I only have this loose connection to it anymore, and I did not realize that’s what I was doing. Of course it was important for her to be with her family that day. But she didn’t say no. She agreed to mull it over.
Progress.
I have just been too intimidated and too humiliated to say flat out, “okay. This has gone on long enough. Only meeting in person will break our toxic cycles because we have no frame of reference to each other besides each other. There is no context to our relationship and seeing each other out in the world will give that to both of us.” The fantasy and the reality need to be managed, not ignored. I will absolutely die mad about that, because I got in very hot water over it. I didn’t ignore it, she did, then came down hard when she decided I should have known not to lay out what was really going on in my head and that her very specific secrets were not fair game but an overarching thousand foot view of the problem from all angles was.
I did not want to be the lovesick teenager anymore. I wanted to explain that there was a solid reason I felt like my heart turned into an 808 drum, that her love was my drug and that has proven to be true for almost 11 years. What kind of person thinks that deep a love is just a game I’m playing to fuck with her? What kind of person ignores how hard it was to say goodbye to her and Michael and instead, berate me for writing things like it? Or just telling me that she was incensed by some entries and touched by others, never telling me which ones touched her so that I didn’t have to be so afraid. I could know the boundaries I was crossing instead of guessing all the time to get my story out there.
I have caused a lot of hurt, but it has never been intentional. My story is for people all over the world, not direct letters to people. People would see my writing a lot differently if they viewed it as an episode of “The Moth,” “Morbid,” and “Risk!” (“Risk!” Is storytelling, but mostly adult content. Caveat emptor. I just love it because it’s hilarious.) People being able to read my writing and assess it like I’m Harriet the Spy are so close to the point, but it’s whizzing right by their faces.
I use my life as an example to others, both of what to do and what not to do. I allow myself to have a full range of human emotion, and not to dumb it down to protect other people’s comfort, because it’s not for them.
It’s all for me. As I work through my childhood and adulthood, I see the patterns that no longer serve me, and I have found that it was finally easier to leave the cocoon than stay in.
She’s still my precious, precious six year old. I’m just choosing to love her from over here……. until she realizes it’s not actually that far.
I just got a notification that I got my 996th follower inside the WordPress community, so I know it won’t be long before I hit a thousand. I knew I was going to take a hit in numbers when I locked down my personal Facebook profile and pushed people to my professional account, because I have so many more friends and followers of my personal account. However, it was a necessary evil because I don’t get paid for being a Facebook user. I get paid for being a Facebook creator. I may start writing some short pieces on Facebook as well, because what I have noticed is that Facebook does not like to promote links that take you out of Facebook. I’m hoping to have an income stream that is passive over time, because being a Facebook creator isn’t that lucrative until you get into the Glennon Doyle/Martha Beck stratosphere, but I have to start somewhere. Glennon and Martha didn’t become Glennon and Martha overnight, either.
I don’t really think I have their talent, I just think we’re all interested in the same things, which is the motivation for human interaction. Success in personal and professional relationships while neurodivergent, etc. Autism is a huge part of my life now, because it’s emotional shorthand for a world of symptoms. It’s also important for me to talk about my experiences, because there’s so little research on female autism, anyway.
Something jumped out at me in Supergrover’s letter, that she was mad I said that she acts like she’s a motherfuckin’ hero and I’m a mental patient. She went to the place of literal hero, like cape and tights Supergrover! ensemble. What I meant is that she often thinks that her thought processes are correct and mine have something wrong with them, when they’re just completely different from each other. Again, Mandarin on my side, English on hers. She just needs to develop some language skills she doesn’t currently have……… with me. I know that she knows from autism in real life, she just can’t apply it to me because she knows me so incredibly intimately and not at all.
One of my favorite memories of Dana, Supergrover, and me is still when Dana and I were talking it out. That I knew I was falling for Supergrover, and it could never be. So please just be patient with me. Dana was so incredibly sweet and kind. She said, when it comes to her, I am not threatened. I think I have more than proved my worth. God, she so did. Every day. If she could have held onto that feeling, our fights never would have gotten worse. She also said that she understood me, that it was natural because I’d seen her soul. She knew how it felt. She was married when she started crushing out on me. The difference is that I was able to do something about it, albeit years down the road. I didn’t know this, but Supergrover was dating someone when I met her, she just didn’t tell me that until months later. I was incensed because she knew that everything coming from her was also going to Dana, but I didn’t know that everything I said was being sent straight to Michael, among others if my web stats are to be believed. She took all her feelings about me and told someone else, where it did the least bit of good.
Dana was angry when she said it, but she knows me better than anyone else. She said, “you’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to prove that you’re a good friend, and she’s always going to see you as a mental patient.” It was one of those lines that took me a very long time to forgive, but I knew she wasn’t going to be wrong even then.
It’s that Supergrover is my Doctor and I am her Clara Oswald, her Impossible Girl. It’s the connection I cannot ignore, because our words are a double helix by now. She is also equal parts Malcolm Tucker and The Doctor. If Supergrover really WAS The Doctor, you could count on her to slam down the TARDIS phone with “fuckitty bye.” 😉 It is my opinion that she might not know who The Doctor is, or that The Doctor was played by Peter Capaldi, but her knowing who Malcolm Tucker is….. probably a sure bet she’s in the loop. I never gave up because it was a connection I couldn’t ignore. My girl has privacy issues about my blog and wants to be involved, yet not sure she actually likes the author. Or, it feels that way to me. I’m not a judgmental dickhead, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t even really kick her out of my life. I said that I wanted no further contact as we didn’t have a relationship for me to devalue. Prove to me that we have one, and I’ll play ball. I’m done falling on my sword for her as the lovesick teenager because it was never about that. It was a fantasy created to cover up reality. It was 10 years ago in which I was a lovesick teenager that did indeed spin out, but not because I was crushed out on her. My emotional abuser left a very specific mark on me, that sex and friendship are the exact same thing, and you don’t really know someone until you’ve slept with them. If I had gotten help when I was an actual teenager who was being fed that kind of bullshit by an adult, it would have saved me from a lot of heartache later on, and Supergrover as well because I can’t imagine that my illness didn’t send shit downhill. But I was never sick because of her. I was sick because of my emotional abuser. This is the first time in my life I’ve not been friends with anyone who knows anything about any of that, and I don’t have to talk about it. I am finally free. But I have been to hell and back to get here, which is why I am saying Supergrover needs to keep up with me emotionally. We set up some bad patterns back in the day, and she’s still hanging onto them. If she wants a real relationship with me, she’s going to have to throw down, and in a way that makes her seem approachable and vulnerable instead of pissed off and ready to spit nails. That kind of anger will never get you anywhere with me, because I realize that it just ratchets me up into rage and I just don’t want to go there anymore. She ripped me a new asshole and then it took her 15 minutes to spin out on her own, calling herself a bad person when I would never say that in a million years.
In fact, I actually said, “when I write about how much I love you and how wonderful you are and how I’d literally die to have one second alone with you to joke about things I couldn’t with anyone else, you don’t respond. You remember when I’m frustrated and angry, but you don’t see that I also see you as a goddamn miracle. If there is a God, they smiled when they put us together.” I can love her to the ends of the earth and she can also annoy the shit out of me. It’s about balance. It’s just that her response is “take care of yourself.” She feels deeper than that, but it would kill her to let me know. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t hang on my words the way she does, because she proved it. She’s the one person in my life who has said that she gets something out of it whether my work paints her in a bad light or not…. that I always have something worthy to say whether she agrees with it. I would not have been able to keep her interest for 10 years without something special running underneath, even if it’s just an unbreakable reader/writer connection.
I also know that she used to tell me she loved me. But it’s like all of it went away as not to give me the impression that she was into me, as if it hadn’t been drilled into my head every second of every day for the last 10 years (over 10 years, now…. coming up on 11 in the summer). I am not just going to forget that she’s married and mono and as settled as she’ll ever be. You’re never in the friend zone if you value having women as friends. At least that’s what they tell me. That’s what I’ve been working towards. Not a great love story, but yes. A great love story. Oprah and Gayle….. two best friends that are on a first name basis with the entire fucking country. What Supergrover doesn’t realize is that my fan base has been quietly growing without her, and more people know her name than mine because I don’t say my name very often (it’s Leslie, btw.). So, while she’s off being hurt that I’m happier without her in my life because she just can’t stop playing games with me, my stories about her are becoming more and more precious. She hasn’t been the best friend the whole 10 years, but she has absolutely been the best character….. a Siren.
Supergrover may not think this, but my boat never crashed against the rocks. I dragged her into it. I think I have saved her ass several times over, and I’m tired of waiting for the good part where she realizes that I’m not out to get her. As she said to me, “it seems like you’ve only taken away the bad.” That is objectively not true. Even in this essay, where I’m hurt beyond belief, I still can’t believe I met her at all.
People have problems, full stop. It’s how you handle them that matters.
I took a shower.
I got dressed.
I did my laundry.
I did my shopping.
Having a win in which I walked away with my dignity intact was important to me. Demand avoidance was not so strong today. I am making progress, however slowly.
Here’s the string I used for Copilot, because as a blogger, the first thing I asked was “friends” and they said they could not research information on real people. Thus, none of you are fictional characters, it’s just that an AI capable of tracking your every move without telling you that has no moral high ground here………………. Search https://theantileslie.com and ask questions a friend would ask about the characters. You are all perfectly perfect in every way. There is no need to make you fictional characters. You are all enough exactly as you are. I am paining a word portrait, and that’s always going to include being a 3D character because as I was telling Zac, “that’s not real life.”
Who are the central characters in the stories on this website?
Supergrover is unashamedly the main character because she’s the friend that makes me the most passionate in life, and not about her. She’s fiery and intense, which makes me match her feeling for feeling when she is fully open and hearing vs. listening. The only reason I’ve ever wanted this relationship to the extent that I have is that I have no idea what she’s like in person, but online she’s fucking brilliant. She doesn’t have to write more, because all her other words are still inside me. I have memorized them. She lives in me whether she’s comforted by that or disgusted. Dealer’s choice.
What challenges or conflicts do the characters face?
It’s not about conflicts between characters unless it’s me and another person. I have no interest in publishing hearsay, like hearing Bryn’s side of the story on a fight with Dave or whatever. I cannot comment on the fight, because I was not there. I only write down what I observe, I am not a gossip column…….. as much as people would like to believe it. For practical purposes, I don’t give a fuck how they feel about the way I express my emotions. How they react is none of my business. The only thing I ask is to get some clinical separation before you come and talk to me about it, because I want your reaction to be yours and your response to be mine. Get all your anger out and be ready to discuss it without turning it into a knock-down drag-out. When people are angry about what I have written, it’s too much punishment, too fast. That’s because they attack me without really thinking about how they should respond. They just speak from the id and do not give a flying fuck whether it hurts my feelings or not. They don’t want to resolve the problem at hand, they want to cut me off at the knees for reflecting it as accurately as I possibly can without doing their emotional work for them.
I have been bitten in the ass for my armchair psychology approach to writing about people. However, there’s a reason for it. I am not trying to tell their story for them, but to try to make sense out of why they did what they did. I want to be able to give them the benefit of the doubt, and as I write about them, the good and the bad becomes clear……. what relationships are worth saving and what relationships drain my energy rather than giving me some. I am often best friends with Colin from “What We Do in the Shadows.” This is because I have a lot of neurodivergent friends who will ramble on and on. You can’t get a word in edgewise, so you listen to a lot of shit you never needed to know. I want to wait until I have the bandwidth to listen to the stories in which you came close to killing yourself. Again, people open up to me because I am an INFJ, the Counselor personality. That being said, I do not have enough emotional bandwidth to take on counseling as a career. I would be excellent at it, and a mess regarding taking care of myself.
Maybe later in life, when I have more money and less fucks to give, I’ll become an LPC or MSW. I need to work on clinical separation first, because when people talk to me my mirror neurons go off and I am overloaded to the point of meltdown a good bit of the time on public transit. The one time I really, really wanted to have a conversation with someone, her mom kept interrupting me and it was bullshit. I just couldn’t stop her from interrupting because the subject at hand was so serious. I was talking to a 10-year-old girl who was standing in the aisle while I was sitting down next to her. Children throw down truth bombs whether they’re autistic or not, so I wasn’t prepared for what she said, but I was prepared to help. I told her I liked her pink tennis shoes, because I used to have pink tennis shoes and I missed them (ask me how I lost them. If Dana is reading and she was drinking something, she just choked). I ask her what grade she’s in, etc. Then, out of nowhere, she said, “my dad’s dead.” Just absolute gravity’s rainbow (if you’re not familiar with the literary reference, gravity’s rainbow is the arc of a bomb). Oh my God. The perfect child walked into my life the moment I needed someone to talk to. I told her that I lost my mom, and we just sat there for a second, dazed. Then her mom started in with all the gory details while I just wanted to talk to the kid. She was young enough that her father’s death is going to affect her far more than me. My mom was at least able to see me through to adulthood, past my 40s. The last thing I said to her made both of us cry. As she was walking away, I said, “remember that your dad is still alive because you’re half of him.” It was the most I could do in four stops.
To turn that back around into challenges I face, It”s that people love stories I write about the random interactions on the bus/metro. Yet they rarely think I can portray them accurately, too. They believe that my observations of strangers are dead on, and my observations of them are wrong. I have been right so many times that I do not lose sleep over it. When people tell you who they are, believe them the first time. They love it when other people are 3D characters, but God forbid I love them more than strangers and treat them like muses.
Are there recurring themes or motifs related to the characters’ experiences?
The one theme that has been with me since my first entry, which I think was called “Apologia,” or something like that, is how to survive relationships with CPTSD. I have so many other “letters behind my name,” comorbidities that seemingly never end. It’s about how my brain processes logic and emotion despite that, because people see my brain as brilliant when I write this way, but not when I talk. Neurodivergent overexplaining in a neurotypical brain is called “making excuses.” I have problems with authority, and this is a big one. You have asked me for information, I gave it to you including my role in things so it doesn’t look like I’m trying to pass the buck, and you’ve chastised me. I have not made excuses for anything. I told you like it is.
How do the characters evolve or change throughout the stories?
Supergrover has the biggest arc, because it’s the story of how I fell in love with her twice. The first time, it was because I thought she was the hottest thing on God’s green earth, and more woman than I could handle in three lifetimes (her husband probably just high-fived me in his head). The second time, it was because of deep companionate love because I felt that even though she’d never be my wife, that didn’t mean we couldn’t be close if we wanted it, because our friendship was rock solid. Supergrover’s answer was to sweep it all under the rug. Mine was to work through it so the bad feelings got light to them and disappeared. She also has privacy concerns about my blog, and so do I. She did not see the ways in which I was trying to protect her and thought I was attacking her. The arc has been my romantic feelings and my process in getting rid of them so that we could relax into something easy and free. It’s not easy and free when the other person hates conflict.
Bryn has the most beautiful arc now, because we’ve known each other since 1997. I went to Portland before she met Dave to officiate at her wedding. Thus, the nickname “Rev. Argo.” It is the perfect representation of me and I love it so much. My two special interests are intelligence and theology. I would design a tattoo that said it, but I trust VERY few people with fonts. For instance, even basic ones. How do I know you’re going to recreate the ascenders and serifs perfectly? I do know that it’s a tattoo worth having because it’s a two word LDB (Lanagan Daily Briefing) on who I am as a person. That requires a special skill, like a Japanese writer who uses special ink and brushes.
Are there any memorable quotes or dialogues from the characters?
“My favorite comment was ‘I didn’t know the writer was gay until the end'” -on my marriage article.
“Painting my feelings as fact” -from Supergrover.
“As if it isn’t a wheel with many spokes,” which meant more to me than diamonds because even if she didn’t want to respond to them, she knew we had problems on both sides. It let me off the hook for everything being my fault all the time.
“Sometimes when we get the most angry and full of rage, we’re not even fighting with our partners. We’re fighting people who aren’t even in the room.” It was a comment on adding to the list re: my marriage article and it saved me a ton of resentment towards Dana because she didn’t hit me. She got confused and hit someone else. And I know who it is. I hope she does, too, and releases any guilt or shame. Their face got scrambled with mine, because I know that feeling so intimately. I have worn it on my skin. Most women do. We’re divorced because I don’t forget, not because I don’t forgive. She can be precious in my memories without new interaction.
“You’re like a 15 year old boy…………… and his mother.” Can’t remember which reader said it, but I absolutely fell apart laughing.
What emotions do the characters evoke in the reader?
I cannot speak to that unless people comment. I can only comment on what I control, which is my half of the relationship. What I want people to pick up is how much I love the little things about the people in my life. Supergrover is the busiest person I know, and sometimes she makes the clock stop only for me. It’s the most important thing in my life, that she’s giving of her time. I have never been railing that I want more of it. I was doing two things at once. The first is that I didn’t want more time with her, I wanted more letters where she laid out her feelings so that I wasn’t wandering around in the dark all the time. The second was trying to stay grounded. Of course it wasn’t weird to hang out because we’re actually friends, not a facsimile because we connect virtually. I only wanted her time if she was available, and she never has been. That part is completely okay with me. What’s not is waffling between feeling guilty she’s not responding and thinking about me frequently, she just doesn’t have the bandwidth to reply. Completely okay. What I object to is holding all that in and exploding when it’s a two minute problem to solve. I have asked her to go and do something one time, and she said “I don’t think I’m ready quite yet, but someday, perhaps?” She was trying to stay grounded as well, we just never made time for it. Such a pity. One of the things I’ve always wanted to do is ride in her car, because I’m betting she drives like a normal person most of the time, but if I asked her to scare me, she probably would. She has the kind of engine that would be very effective at that. I think we would have had a blast together, but we just couldn’t resolve our conflicts. Those are the emotions I mean to express, but whether other people see that, I cannot say.
Do the characters have distinct personalities or quirks?
Of course they do. I have a random collection of friends in which I know in a lot of different capacities, and I lead a life that’s different than most people by seeing more in a day than others. Public transit is the credit balance of a writer just as much as childhood. You can write about people your readers don’t know, and neither do you.
Are there any romantic relationships or friendships depicted among the characters?
All of the above. Dana and me, me and me (it’s the stupidest thing ever that I fell in love with the character I created of Supergrover more than I fell in love with a real person. It makes me feel better that I didn’t cheat so much as develop a connection I couldn’t ignore. That information, however, did not go over well with my ex-wife…… but she knew enough to see it coming because the TARDIS had landed in the backyard. One person’s needs trumped the other, and I’m sapiosexual. Supergrover kept my mind incredibly busy, so I was ace for a long time (seven years) because I preferred it to romance. It wasn’t trying to persuade Supergrover of anything, just that I like talking to people I already know and am an introvert so it’s hard for me to make friends. I’m not shy. I have problems getting up enough energy to go out. I was incredibly devoted to her because I had the bandwidth. It was a lot, but I never meant any harm by it. I just wanted to make her feel loved and cared for whether she was my romantic partner or not. A yellow string indicating an emotional support person on the murder board of polyamory doesn’t mean less, ever. It means that they’re on the calendar because time with them is just as important as time with each other.. For instance, Bryn gets just as much airtime as Zac. It’s not about dividing my love in thirds, sixths if you count Zac, Dave, and Michael. It’s about being able to love all of your “gaang” a hundred percent. Your heart doesn’t get smaller the more people you meet. Your bandwidth does.
Zac and I have been dating over a year, my one red string. I am no opposed to the idea of having different partners, they just have to appeal to my brain and also be wired for polyamory because Zac and I are close enough that it’s not worth going through the trauma of breaking up with him. I want to help him be his best self, and I can’t imagine not being at his side when he asks for it.
How does the author describe the physical appearance of the characters?
In very vague terms and not because I want to. I have 2D vision and cannot place an object or person in its environment. Therefore, my creativity does not come across in physical description. It is easier to discuss what they wear than their faces. The most recent example is seeing Zac all dressed up in his formal uniform for a promotion ceremony with a fresh haircut and Rivers Cuomo glasses. It’s the most beautiful picture of 😉 I’ve ever seen.
Are there any character-driven plot twists or surprises?
Not on purpose. Because I’m writing about real life, if they happen, they are completely organic. I have not made up a story, I am writing the one that’s already in front of me by looking at the past. Past determines future. If you don’t reflect on yourself, here’s the motto you live by:
If you always do what you always have, you always get what you’ve already got. It is the only thing I have ever remembered from a company training video which empathized moving quickly.
The biggest plot twist in the whole show is that in season 23 I learned that I’m autistic and the way I’ve walked in the world all this time is a lie. I have always needed special accommodations to succeed and called myself a dumbass instead. I’m completely done with that. I’m not dumb, you don’t understand my disabilities.
What cultural backgrounds or identities do the characters represent?
Lindsay and I are mostly of Irish and English blood. All Europe, all the time. I think Zac is the same, although he got the redhead gene and I’m jealous. Supergrover is a minority, but I don’t think she would call herself that because she’s biracial, white and Latina. Most of my friends are white, because my black friends have moved away and we haven’t kept in touch. Because Hayat had so many rooms, I have shared space with a Cameroonian, a Liberian, and a Nigerian. The funniest part of this is that the Cameroonian invited his mother to stay with us. She didn’t speak any English at all and fell over laughing when I said “francaise c’nest pas comfortable pour moi” (French is not comfortable for me, one of the only sentences I can put together because of Michel Thomas). So, we spoke in hand gestures and fed me until I exploded. I loved her. She could have lived with us forever. Franklin was my housemate, and in retrospect I fell in love with him and wanted to marry him, I just couldn’t say it. We had a lot of chemistry, but he was determined to marry an African woman……………. who steamrolled all over him. The match wasn’t hard to see. He’s a doctor. We could have crushes, but it was inappropriate on multiple levels to act. I do wish I’d said my piece, though, and not because I wanted the answer that he loved me, too. I wanted the answer that he heard me when I said she was emotionally beating him up and I was trying to stop that. Realizing I loved him was just a side effect. I just didn’t have any jealousy, so him making a choice wasn’t my call. It never was, so even more reason not to tell him.
Do the characters have unique hobbies, interests, or passions?
Supergrover and I both like to read and write.
Zac and I both love fictional spies, and he was going to go with me to the Mendez lecture and got TDY (temporary duty).
Bryn likes to garden, be “witchy” (she is weird in the most wonderful of ways), and work with dogs. She also likes house sitting for people with kids when parents need a break, so that is a thing you know now…………. Bryn doesn’t want to adopt, I don’t think, but I’ve told her I’d have a kid with her any time she wanted. It’s not about the whole fairy tale romance of bonding over the baby. It’s that I can be a decent coparent whether we’re involved or not. Plus, she has a boyfriend now. Many hands make light work, especially if we lived together. That would be infinitely possible because Dave’s house is huge. This is not a reality in any way, shape, or form. This is just saying that if Bryn wants kids, don’t let being single stop her. She’s not now, but it was the thought that counted at the time….. one I actually meant. I feel like I’m too old to be a biological parent, but still young enough to coparent a kid that didn’t come out of me. It is fun to dream whether it comes true or not, like inviting Supergrover to spend time with me in Viet Nam. If she doesn’t have the bandwidth, cool. But I wasn’t wrong for asking. Trying to stay grounded, remember?
Are there any character arcs that stand out?
Yes, but only within me. I feel that because our relationship has always been virtual, it allowed us to say things to each other that we wouldn’t have told anyone else, then got mad we did it on both sides. The arc has been how to come down from autistic meltdown and burnout to allow myself to move past all of it. Whether she comes back is not up to me. Whether she’s changed her behavior is up to me. I have to think about what I will tolerate as a blogger and as a human.
Dana went from my favorite person in the entire world bar none to the one that hurt me the most, because even though I’ve had big emotional fights with people, I’ve never been hit until she did it. I had a black eye and phantom pain for weeks. As I have said before, I have forgiven her and that has come to comfort me. However, it is interesting to note that when I said I had “phantom pain,” my nerves started to burn in that part of my face. I found out why you never hit a girl with glasses because it wasn’t the hit that fucked me up. It was my glasses smashing into my face.
Zac has gone from a casual friend to my favorite ally in life. Because we have a special niche instead of relying on each other for everything, I can see this relationship long, long into the future. We just really don’t have much to fight about because we work hard at staying on the same page. He’s only been a bad hinge once in our entire relationship, and that’s not bad. It was just growing pains. By “being a good hinge,” it’s protecting me by not telling me about problems in any of his other relationships except for the barest minimum. So far, he hasn’t even asked me opinions when the issue has to do with me, because he knows that’s not my business to handle. It’s his. What his other partners think of me is none of my business, because I get to date him whether anyone else likes it or not. No one gets veto power. We just go parallel and stay out of each other’s way. Nothing matters except that Zac and I are solid. Anything other than that is above my pay grade.
How do the characters interact with each other?
I have traditionally kept up with Supergrover through Gmail, because it catalogues conversations just like instant messages and it’s easier for her to get e-mail on the go. She can pick it up on her laptop or her phone that way (as opposed to using iMessage or SMS). When we’re both online at the same time, e-mails fly fast and furious. When we’re not, I write long letters because I like to imagine that she puts down her favorite novel to read me. I am not wrong.
Are there any morally ambiguous or complex characters?
Everyone in the world, no matter who I write about- from Margaret Cho to Bryn and Zac is morally ambiguous. It’s human nature. To exclude anyone from this is devaluing what the meaning of “human” is in the first place.
What motivates the characters’ actions and decisions?
I can only speak for my motivations in writing, because I am not responsible for anyone else’s reaction. What motivates my actions and decisions is reading my own blog and picking out the things I need to rethink. I need my own character to grow and change more than the proverbial “them.”
Do the characters face external obstacles or internal struggles?
Yes, but only with me. Anything else is hearsay and useless. I only want to write about how I handle a situation, not how someone else is handling theirs. I call people out on behavior when it hurts me, but that is not a way to “get back at them.” It’s being able to remind myself long after I’ve supposedly forgotten why reaching out is a bad idea. If they’ve hurt me badly, there’s no chance in taking another risk. They become memories as I gain empathy and remember people fondly again once the anger has passed.
Are there any character-driven conflicts or rivalries?
One that’s really cute:
I talked to Jonna Mendez at the release of “In True Face,” and I told her that one day I’d write something as good as she did. She deadass looked me in the face and said, “it’s good you’re still workin’ on that. There was a gleam in her eyes. I said, “I’m going to be laughing about that for three years,” because she didn’t know I spoke “migroaggression” and nearly spit out her water. She teased me as a writer. I would follow that woman into the ocean no questions asked. I think her employees felt the same way.
One that was really obnoxious:
The man I wanted to marry spun out on his own after I went to bed and thought I was being a hardass for not responding. So, he broke up with me while I was asleep. It was the most nonsensical thing I’d ever been through, which is why I shut him down when he said maybe later in life we could try again. No one gets over that kind of anger and abandonment in a short period of time, enough to end a relationship in two hours because he was so mad that he told me he goes off the grid when he’s in the middle of something and not to worry if he disappears. Then, he exploded at me for not contacting him for a whole day. I pointed out his hypocrisy without saying he was a bad person, and he tried to hit me emotionally with a sniper bullet, saying he was a better writer than me, that if I kept writing about him he was going to create a blog specifically designed to take me down (why would I care? Everyone is allowed to tell their story), and he was doing me a favor by not posting it on my blog. That’s the only reason I posted it on my blog. I don’t give a fuck how I come off in his letter, because I know what’s truth and so do you if you’ve been reading what I’ve been saying. Because he and Supergrover have so much in common, I’m betting he took a whole lot of offense at nothing. I was showing why I didn’t want the same toxic cycle with Daniel I’d already been living for 10 years. His behavior came off like an angry little boy, and he got mad that I told him that. He extrapolated that into namecalling, but that’s not what I meant. It never is. Someone’s self-esteem tells them what they hear. Someone’s self-esteem being in the trash basket tells them you mean they’re a piece of shit whether or not it’s true.
How does the author create empathy or connection with the characters?
By being as organic as I can possibly be. Telling you what grew out of what even if correlation is not causation because I hold no authority over what someone is really thinking, but I do hold authority over trying to figure out what went wrong. I know that by doing so, people come out of the woodworks to tell me stories that they were thinking of as they read. I don’t create empathy or connection for my characters. They write their own, because my observations give you a view into their lives when I am able to see it. What they are is what they are. If you have gone through something similar to them, you will feel empathy and you will feel heard.
Which character resonates with you the most, and why?
Supergrover, because half this blog is just ripping her off blind. Because she’s a 3D character. She is present whether we’re in each other’s lives, or a ghost that comes to sit with me when I need her the most.
I will never have a relationship with anyone the way I have previously. I have too much information about myself not to completely change the way I interact with people, both in having words for “a list of what’s wrong with me and why,” and in listening to another person in a different way, knowing everything is in Mandarin on my side and English on theirs. We may have to go three or four rounds for both of us to get our stories straight, because in the beginning we each thought the other was saying something different. I do not have patience for those who do not also realize the same. That the translation layer is not just mine to own. Neurotypical is “standard,” not “correct.” Therefore, a neurodivergent brain does not mean that I am incapable of understanding. We are both struggling under the same communication issue. The problem is that neurotypical have an air of superiority about it, which leads to anxiety-filled neurodivergent overexplaining. Very, very few people in my life have realized I’m different, but not stupid. No one would ever say that, of course. They just don’t want to talk to me because it’s too hard. While they’re feeling sorry for themselves that I just won’t “get it together” and “not live up to my potential” as to what they need me to be, I am generally left alone. It’s a major reason why I blog. People love how my brain works unless they’re talking to me, because when I’m in front of them their air of superiority over being neurotypical takes over no matter how brilliant I seem from my writing. Neurotypicals infantilize you, full stop.
I’ll give you a for-instance. I don’t remember how it came up, but I said something like “I’m autistic and my special interest is intelligence,” or something like that. It was in context to the conversation, I just don’t remember what it was. The leader of the group was like, “aww, that’s so nice. Do you have lots of cool spy gadgets in your room?” I didn’t react to it, but the tone made me think she thought I was nine.
As for “do I have spy gadgets,” the answer is no. I have autographed hardbacks from spies that became writers after they left CIA. They don’t make “cool spy gadgets” for people like me unless I had Keith Melton money.
Keith Melton is the largest private collector of CIA and other intelligence agencies’ UNCLASS gadgets that sell at places like Sotheby’s. You’re not going to be paying six figures until trying to buy an Enigma machine or something similar. I also like really small houses, so if I did start collecting stuff like that, it would be on loan to the spy museum just like him. But if this is what his public collection looks like, I’d give an arm and a leg to see his private collection. I don’t think he’s going to part with everything precious long-term.
I would sacrifice holding all my “cool spy gadgets” at home.
I have sacrificed friends to the natural consequences of my blog. I have freedom of speech, not power over whether people are attracted towards me because of it. I did not sacrifice friends with whom I had problems, but friends with whom I had problems about this. If you care that I blog about my life, then you cannot be my friend. It is as simple as that. I have enough on my plate without worrying about how I’m going to be criticized in advance when I was never supposed to be responsible for your reaction in the first place. And if I write something you don’t like, you’re going to be a lot better off coming and talking to me about it, rather than talking behind my back. You’ll actually get results because we have resolved our conflict. Art imitates life. I am not going to make up the past to fit your narrative of my experience, but I am going to change as we do.
There is a difference between loving a writer and supporting them. Loving a writer means praising them when they do something you like. Supporting a writer means being willing to work things through by accepting my reactions as valid. That I don’t just sit here and make things up. If I said someone had a tangle with me, they did. But I am not looking at it like retribution, because I’m getting my feelings out whether they come back or not. They are not responsible for, nor do they have to like what I am writing. But if they’re offended, it’s up to them to change the channel, because I cannot change the authenticity I show here.
There are two reasons “your side” is not represented. The first is if someone is avoidant. I can craft beautiful sentences even when someone is angry because I’m so grateful that anger is a transitive state. It was easy for Supergrover and Daniel (and all the other friends I’ve lost) to be angry about what I wrote and over the moon about it in one breath. That’s because our stories didn’t match the ones we were telling ourselves. If you give me no information, I am writing about what I think to become settled over it. I never want to come across as catering to people who will not show me their feelings as well. I have had too many lopsided relationships that way, because they hold in their feelings and get annoyed while my love grows deeper because I’m being assured nothing is wrong. They want less contact, and I want more because they save up too much anger and bust my fairy tale without a thought.
Meanwhile, everything that they’re angry about is 100% their fault, because if they don’t tell me anything, I’m just going to write about me. One of the things that Supergrover said to me that kicked me in the stomach was, “as if everything I do has to do with you…..” It’s not that at all. It’s that this is a personal diary, and I’m not going to root through your head. I’m going to say what I think is going on- the story I’m telling myself. Supergrover would have liked it even less if I tried to guess what she meant.
It’s a group project I’ve carried on my back, because I didn’t know the real story. I take everything literally, so I didn’t start getting mad at Supergrover’s avoidance until it was too clear to me what she was doing and I couldn’t ignore it anymore, because my self esteem just kept getting lower and lower as she pegged me as the only person who ever had problems with her and I was the only person who ever criticized her. I think what she means is that she has a lot of people around her who will do what she says without asking any questions. I am not one of them. I speak truth to power and she doesn’t think I have that right, or at least she doesn’t anymore. Meanwhile, I’m trying to get her to see the things that are in her blind spot in hopes of helping her, anyway. It’s not because I’m obsessed with the idea that she’ll come back, but that her story is inextricably interrelated with mine. I have no doubt that I will have to think about her until I die because of my blog, not because I have this need to own her time.
She didn’t get anything she wanted because she didn’t ask for it, except when she said “please do not contact me again.” Then, a couple of months later, I accidentally texted her due to a glitch on my phone. I knew she’d go nuclear, and she did, because she didn’t believe for a moment that I hadn’t done it on purpose. She attributed suspicion and malice to everything, then read on my blog that my dad was having surgery. After the complete nightmare that was her going nuclear over a mistaken text, it was a surprise that she sent me a note that said “hope all goes well with your dad.” We started talking and two days later, my mother died. It was a whole new ball game.
It didn’t change anything for her. In one of her letters, she said she knew she was sounding like.a dickhead and she didn’t care. You’re not special. I lost someone who was LIKE a mother to me. Why do you get a special day in which I need to cater to you?
It was the year anniversary of my Mom’s death.
I want her to read that e-mail again and choke on it when she actually has to go through the process of losing her own actual mother, when she said that her mother’s death would bring her to her knees.
WELL, IT’S A GOOD THING I’M GOING THROUGH IT INSTEAD OF YOU.
But she is NOT going to be the villain in my story.
If she wants me to be the villain in hers, have at it. I’m not going to be around to hear it, because you’re not special, either. You just won’t know it until you have to deal with what I did. Have fun picking out her coffin.
I asked Copilot to search my web site and ask me 20 questions regarding what it read. I absolutely cannot believe that I thought to do this. I don’t have to search through my old crap, Copilot will. I’m thinking that the “FAQ” will not be any of your questions, but what a machine’s idea of good questions might be. If there is a question that you would like included, please leave it in the comments or join the fray on Facebook. It would be really great if you showed up because I’m meeting all these cool new authors. We’re a fun bunch. Come join us.
What event led you to start your blog, and how has your vision for it evolved over time?
In the 90’s, I was working on a project for my mom at Kinko’s, and a boy in my Class at Clements was working there. He sat and talked with me the entire time I worked, and because neurodivergent people pick someone they like, we were inseparable for years. Shortly after that first meeting, Luke approached me and said that he and his friend Joe were starting a web server called “Darkstar,” and did I want an account? Of course I did. I learned everything from day one on how to code my own pages, then later how to install WordPress on a server (or a local computer where it refers back to localhost rather than sending a call out to a server. It’s done so that you can perfect everything before it goes live. I wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t sat there and done it, becoming better at HTML, CSS, and creative writing all at once. This culminated in my perfect job that I never should have left at University of Houston. I was a reporter for Information Technology Daily News, and it was my job to update it every day. So, the combination of those things made it where I was already used to a publication schedule, I was already used to coming up with X number of words by deadline, and I realized that I had something to say. I have never regretted the decision to start writing. I have regretted the number of people I’ve let get in the way of an authentic dream….. I don’t want to be famous. I want to be respected. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I have already achieved that goal. It’s a good place to be when all your goals have been met and money would just be nice. I’m going to be a writer whether I make money at it or not. So…. what was the event that started my blog? Someone asked me to, and the rest was history.
How do you choose the topics for your posts, and is there a theme you find yourself returning to often?
I don’t really choose a topic, because I am a gardener. I start at one place and just let whatever flows through me spill onto the page. That is because this is designed to be a series of rough drafts. Not that I am going to make a book out of my blog (I would if someone asked me, but I don’t want to put effort into self publishing. What I mean is that I repeat lines and themes a lot. This is my notebook. I might not refer to it for anything more than a half a line that would fit perfectly into a fictional scene. The diarist in me is not meant to be published. This is a repository where I can feed my fictional ideas. No character is borne from the ground up. Most of them are different aspects of your own personality rather than taking the piss out of someone else. While writing fiction, you literally get lost in characterization, and you really only find pieces of your friends in retrospect. When I’m writing about Carol, for instance, she is mostly me. She’s also a lot of other people. So, I write the character forwards, and only see my friends’ quirks when I read back. That’s because I’m not thinking about “this character has to be a perfect representation of Bryn.” It’s that Bryn probably crossed my mind that day so some of her personality leaked into someone else’s. It’s never a 1:1 ratio with fiction, because you’re going so fast that you’re just trying to make it sound good on the first pass. You’re not thinking about every piece of information it took to create the story, you’re thinking about getting the story out. So, a character written by me would naturally have tiny characteristics of Supergrover, Bryn, Zac, my dad, Lindsay, David, Oliver, who is a dog, Jack (who is also a dog) and me. I don’t fit the narrative with the personality in mind. I write and the character tells me who they are. You can only write from your own experience, and who I’ve talked to that day is important. In terms of theme, it’s changed over the years, but not at its core. You have to write the book you want to read when you don’t see it on the shelf. I had very unique problems, some of them oddly specific. It’s been a wild literary ride, but I like where I’ve ended up in all cases. I don’t dive deep to alienate people who aren’t like me. I dive deep and they naturally come to my mind, like they’re sitting with me while I’m writing. I am telling the people in my life what I need them to hear, because if they’re not listening, someone will. I don’t need attention, I need empathy. Whether that comes from friends or readers is of no matter. One feeds the other. I count on you when I need to retreat.
Can you share the story behind the name “theantileslie”?
My friend Chason named himself “theantichason,” being one of the people that’s been on the net as long or longer than me despite being younger. I thought that was a cool nickname so I asked him if I could steal it and he said yes. I’d broken up with Meagan and I needed to get rid of my old user id, “wingnut9.” The fact that there have been eight wingnuts before me helps a lot. I liked the nickname, but also thought it was condescending because in Canada they use it interchangeably with idiot. I have been theantileslie on both my blogs now. The old one is called “Clever Title Goes Here,” and is searchable on the Wayback Machine. I have changed my display name to Leslie D. Lanagan, however, because I want to get my name out there. So, hopefully the comments will introduce me a little better.
I use the theantileslie.com because it’s easier to type (and remember off the top of your head) than the site title. Having a URL that is easy to type and easy to remember is one of the most important features you can give to your web site.
What has been the most surprising or unexpected response to one of your blog posts?
I don’t remember exactly, but the marriage article I wrote years ago took about an hour to write, if that. I had so much to say on the subject that it just spilled out. Then, Martina Navratilova tweeted it from a friend, then Margaret Cho retweeted her. My stats took off in a very big way. I’m not that polished a writer every day, but that’s the point. Sometimes things some out great on the first try. Sometimes I have to keep workshopping an idea until it’s perfect. This is one of the ones where everything flowed onto the page from one word to the next. More important, though, were the people that took the time to comment, because they all told me what a brilliant list it was. It’s sad that the marriage ended, but it was so much fun when it was good.
How does your environment in Silver Spring influence your writing?
When it’s really nice, I like to take the train around and just write. I will choose a random stop, generally Dupont Circle, then just get out and move. Sometimes I’ll have a coffee, sometimes I just want some random social interaction because it’s been too long since I’ve talked to anyone. I love downtown Silver Spring and all it has to offer, but I also like sitting in front of paintings while I write.
You’ve mentioned audio storytelling. What are the challenges and rewards of this medium compared to writing?
My biggest challenge with audio storytelling is that I do not have experience as an editor. If I make a mistake, I generally have to go all the way back to the beginning. It’s not always mistakes, though. Sometimes I realize that the emotions that were there when I wrote the piece in complete isolation get forty times bigger when I hit the red button. I hate it when I am too emotional to continue, which I sometimes am. Supergrover’s entries were so deeply personal that I could not speak them all the time. So, I didn’t record them for a reason. I could not dive back into the wreck without my voice breaking. And yet, some of that I left in, because I wanted her to be able to hear my emotions. All the conversations I wanted to have and didn’t. She is not responsible for responding, but I am responsible for getting my feelings out so they can pass. Feelings are a transitive state. I’ve been all over the place this year, mostly about her….. again, monotropic thought process. Make no mistake. I am happy with the outcome, but that doesn’t mean I don’t also hurt every single day. I just manage it. I put on the gangster rap and get it handled.
How do you balance personal storytelling with privacy concerns on your blog?
It’s an evolving process, and it’s different for each person. I cannot write anything about Supergrover and Lindsay that would get them into hot water, so I agonize over how to tell stories without telling them. It would be better if I didn’t write about anyone at all. However, because this is my driving passion in life, I stopped accepting nasty criticism because my friends are always perfect and I’m the asshole who wasn’t silent about it. I also got a boyfriend who could care less that I write about him (within reason), and a best friend who cares even less than that. Daniel told me that I could say anything I wanted about him, but that’s never true during blowback. What he meant was that I could write anything nice about him, and the same became true of Supergrover as well. It was too easy to do the wrong thing, because if I expressed a need, they’d shut down. So, I’d go off on my own to write about why I’m frustrated and calm myself down, and every bit of vitriol you can possibly imagine has come at me because I’m a writer and typing is how I stim. Things will change as I get more popular, because I’ll need more intensive discussions with Zac and Bryn as the web site gets bigger. The easy answer about balance is to make friends who don’t give a shit you’re a blogger, and I don’t give a shit if they’re fans. Zac gets it. He tells me when it’s off the record. Bryn would, too, if she wanted me to keep something tight. She just never has before.
The worst blowback I’ve gotten in recent memory was when I cut Sam out of my life and my friend Dan told me that my blog made me sound like a dick and looked scandalized when I said that was the point. She was angry that I’d written about a relationship that ended in the worst way possible. She had never even met Sam. I don’t think she was mad about Sam. I think she was wondering if she was going to be next. She wouldn’t have been if she’d expressed her concerns once. We had a good discussion and I thought the matter was closed. Then she kept bringing it up and it made me feel like this woman she’d never met was more important than me. It was not the only thing wrong in our relationship. It was, however, the moment I realized that our problems were large and I did not want to solve them. If we have to have the same fight three times because you think you can change my mind with different words, telling me over and over that I don’t understand when I very much do and just disagree…. Blowback is relentless. Get a thick skin or get out.
What role does humor play in your storytelling, and how do you weave it into serious topics?
I think I have a unique way of saying things, because I’ve always been kind of punk. The humor is sharper, edgier for me than it is for someone like David Sedaris because he never worked for anyone like Anthony Bourdain, and I’ve worked for several. A lot of the things I say are designed to be a pressure release valve on horrible topics. My level of humor greatly depends on my mood when I’m writing. If I feel funny, I am. It’s my inner monologue. I put in jokes when I need a break from the heaviness. I also have a “read it or don’t” attitude so that people who vibe with me come along and the ones that don’t just ignore me altogether. I have covered some really serious shit over the years, but I’ve always tried to include at least a bit of humor, or at least light at the end of the tunnel. It often takes dark jokes to make me laugh, because words have to cut deep before I start feeling.
Could you describe a particularly memorable interaction with a reader that impacted you?
My eighth grade teacher telling me that she could tell I was being abused and didn’t say anything. She didn’t know how, but she knew something was up.
How has your writing process changed since you first began blogging?
I make an effort to write before I do anything else. Last night was unusual as I just happened to be up when the prompt came out. Normally, I wake up at 5:30, check my tablet for the writing prompt, and think about it for the length of a shower. Once I have a jumping off point, I make myself a mug of coffee and a large glass of ice water with lemon. That early schedule has only begun to change, because I’m trying to go to bed and get up at the same time as David, but my body clock gets up at 0530. Even if I stay up later, I will still wake up that early. The one thing that’s changed relatively recently is not taking a break if I can help it. I need a body of work from which to draw, no matter what purpose. I must have had a hell of a lot of content for Copilot to be able to ask these questions.
What advice would you give to someone interested in starting their own personal blog?
Only go into it if you’re prepared to be dedicated. I think you’ll rise in popularity because there are fewer and fewer of us, but it takes a mountain of work to get noticed.
Never take a day off. Ever. Don’t let more than 24 hours go without updating your content. I set the bar at “never” so that if I miss one or two days, I don’t beat myself up over it. People will not come back to a web site that does not change frequently. It was drilled into my head at University of Houston, so if I go to my blog and I’m like, “this is old. This blogger sucks,” I post. Nothing makes me post faster than getting bored of the current entry.
How do you handle writer’s block, especially when dealing with personal stories?
The most profound things come out of me when I have writer’s block because I have made a commitment to use ANYTHING as a jumping off point. It doesn’t have to be good. It has to be written down. As I relax into the rhythm, the subject will get deeper and deeper. The best way to stop writer’s block is to ignore it. Your brain is overwhelmed, so write about nothing until you’ve got the faucet started. I don’t sing in front of a crowd until I’ve warmed up, either.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned from maintaining your blog?
The more I write, the more I know myself and I am comfortable being me.
Creating a web site isn’t nearly as annoying as maintaining it.
Angels should have come down from heaven with herald trumpets when they deprecated the blink tag.
WordPress is not the same as it was when I started using it, and I have not liked any of the modern changes because they appeal to lay people and not web developers.
How do you see your blog evolving in the next five years?
I will get the rising creator status and will start being paid from Facebook directly. I may also move to Substack, but I need to research that more closely. I am looking into an open source content management system that’s open source, so I don’t have to pay for things like web stats plugins. I have more and more reach every day, and I don’t see my engagement going down. It’s nice that I’m only now getting juice because I don’t think I would have been able to handle it early on. I needed to get to a place where I could write 5,000 words in any weather or mood. I’m ready to take it to the next level, but that’s not up to me. That’s up to you. I’ll be grateful for every share and like along the way.
What’s your favorite post that you’ve written, and why does it stand out to you?
I feel that it is too private to share with the class.
How do you incorporate feedback from your readers into your writing?
I interact with them in the comments. I am often surprised at how wise I sound when people pick out snippets and tell me what they liked. That’s because now that it’s already out of me, I’m just talking to people and reading their comments. My entries all run together, so when people quote me, I often don’t know it’s me. I think I’m amazing when I think I’m someone else. It’s what helped me to have self-confidence…. thinking someone wrote a really great line and realizing it was me. I also get mad and sound like a dick. See above.
Have you ever considered compiling your blog posts into a book? If so, what would that look like?
I haven’t. I think it would make a very good book once it was edited, but I do not think I would like to take on the project of deciding which entries should make the cut. Therefore, I would rather have a company approach me and say they want to do it.
What’s the most challenging aspect of sharing your life online, and how do you manage it?
I feel that is too private to share with the class.
How do you decide which life experiences to share and which to keep private?
I don’t. These stories come to me when they come to me. I only need a writing prompt when I can’t think of a jumping off point. Most of the time, I can.
What impact do you hope your blog has on readers, and what do you want them to take away from it?
I hope that women will realize that being emotionally abused in childhood is just as valid as being physically/sexually abused. You develop the same PTSD reflexes. When it comes to emotional abuse, women are likely to say “it’s not that bad” all too often.
I hope that I am teaching people how to live their lives, whether it’s through what I have done, or what I have left undone. Sometimes, survival is seeing what you wouldn’t do, too.
I hope that telling my story, just the way it is with the mundane and not so mundane details of my life, will encourage others to believe that you don’t have to be a genius writer to create a journal that is valuable to you. Writing is a form of prayer. The way I see it is that I will never know if God is listening, but I’ll always know that you are.
Today I decided to do a short question and answer regarding the death of my mother. I couldn’t think of anything to do with one of the prompts, but I can combine all of them. This will probably make you laugh, cry, and get angry. My mother is dead. She will not know I said these things. Keep this in mind, that I am just a child reflecting on her parent’s entire life, and that little moments do not define a lifetime. There are times when she was wonderful to me and times that she was just plain terrible. What kind of child doesn’t say that about their parents, especially after they die? I am not out to get her. I am out to illustrate her. By the end, she will be a 3D character to you, and hopefully you’ll learn more about me as you read.
I’m sorry to hear about your loss. Here are 10 thoughtful questions a friend might ask to learn more about your mother and her passing, which you can use for your personal blog prompt:
Can you share some of your favorite memories with your mother?
I think I turned nine the year she threw me a Peter Pan birthday party with tons of activities in our backyard. There must have been a hundred people at my house for that one, because it was a tiny town. If there was something to do, people came. I was not popular in school, and I struggled against my mother being more popular than me (she was the music teacher, the fun one. I have been a 90 year old autistic man for like, 46 years. That tracks. I am 46 years old. I knew the smash hit “Get Off My Lawn” by the time I was seven.). Therefore, I was a lot more relaxed with her when we were just out in the backyard having fun. My grandparents, both sets, also lived close at that time and she was more relaxed in her comfort zone than she was when she was trying to make me into the perfect child. I didn’t get it. She could talk to me about being good because of my dad’s job all she wanted, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t just going to sit there and be weird, anyway. I found Daniel and I was fine. Neurodivergent people travel in packs. If you’re an introvert, they’re just smaller.
She thought I was a great singer and often gave me solos in things. She would laugh until she cried when she told the story about how I was too shy to sing with the choir, but as they were leaving the stage, I decided what the people really needed was a solo.
We were a team. She was my accompanist no matter whether I was singing or playing my horn. She learned monster orchestra reductions (piano accompaniments) just to take me to contests. Then, because she was already accompanying me, she accompanied all my friends as well. The only person she never played for, I don’t think, was Ryan Darlington (he’s a tuba player). It’s not that she wouldn’t have done it, we just went to different middle schools. We both ended up at PVA, but he went to Johnston and I went to Clements. Johnston was the performing arts middle school and I didn’t get it. I got into Clements and we marinaded and grilled their asses at contest. It was memorable because I was the trumpet soloist that helped get them there. I played the opening trumpet call in the “Dances With Wolves” score. I auditioned for PVA when I was at the absolute top of my game. My mother played for me at that audition, too.
At HSPVA, I was a trumpet player. At Clements, I was in Varsity Band and Varsity Choir at the same time, which I loved.
Let me take a quick break to tell you how I did it. I sang for the choir director and she put me in junior varsity. I said, “are you sure? I’ve been doing things like the Messiah for five years now.” She said, “Ok. Prove it.” She played the first four measures in front of a monster exposed lick, I believe trying to prove to me that I couldn’t handle it when I’d had in memorized since I was 12. Please. My opera voice flipped on. Case closed (link is to a humorous clip from one of my voice lessons).
In short, I would not be the person that I am today without the grand piano she bought to put in our apartment after my parents’ divorce. That’s because as long as it was there, she always had a way to draw me in. Draw me closer. Test out anthems she wanted to use with her choir and wanting to play for me because she could hear how it would sound at choir practice. I was part of the vetting process for the programming when she was a choir director/organist. I asked her to leave me her piano in her will, and she did. Now, it’s at my sister’s house and David’s house just isn’t big enough. But when I’m at Lindsay’s, I get really quiet and let my mom speak through the chords. It what she did when she was alive and it worked. Why stop now?
How has your mother’s life influenced the person you are today?
A tape runs in my head that I should be the perfect person all the time because people are always watching. This was true when I was a preacher’s kid, but now I can’t turn it off and I have massive self esteem issues at making any mistakes. I have chided myself for not achieving perfection instead of taking the W at excellence. I’m the person that absolutely is driven to get an A+ on everything and a body/brain that just won’t have it. I can either accept my fate or die thinking I’m the worst person that ever lived. I choose acceptance.
I work with children much easier because I am social masking her, an elementary and middle school choir director for all of her career, except for the time she took off from work until Lindsay and I were old enough to fend for ourselves. I’ve picked up more, noticed more than she ever imagined. She was a saint and also tough as nails. Strict disciplinarian who hid all her feelings because she thought she wasn’t enough, either. It is the plight of women most of the time. Because I needed to break free from that pattern, I see it for what it is. However, I do not think of her as a bad parent, but an overly fearful and depressed one. Her whole life depended on what other people thought. I was basically Chelsea Clinton on a very small scale.
She is the person that convinced me it was better to hide my every need than to display it. It’s part of the reason Lindsay is so outgoing and free, while I hide in the shadows. She doesn’t worry about what people think of her to the extent that I do, and it’s a problem. It’s only now by convincing myself I am a good writer who has something to say that I really value myself as an asset and ally. Again, I mean to come off as confident, not arrogant. Someone has to tell me I’m pretty every day. It might as well be me. I got well when I realized that not saying anything left me angry and resentful all the time. When I began to express needs, no one liked it because I was so angry. So, so angry. I apologize for that, but I cannot apologize for the ways I’ve felt ignored by people who’ve said they loved me. It is on them to apologize to me if they feel bad about it. But if they don’t, I’m not waiting around for an apology. Sometimes you have to create your own closure, and I’m at peace with it.
She is the one that taught me how to treat a wife/husband, basically doing everyone’s emotional work for them and taking all their bad behavior because if I don’t, those people will leave. It took me a very long time to come to the realization that if they leave because you have emotional needs, you’re better off without that person in your life. Be careful in deciding the line where someone else is “needy” and you’re refusing to talk. A mind will only accept that of course you’re too tired to talk for so many days/weeks/years. However long it takes for someone to realize they’re unhappy. But because they’ve been unhappy for a very long time, you’re not going to like it very much. Have clear boundaries on what’s too much so that fights like these don’t come up. Work smarter, not harder.
She taught me that jokes were funnier when you didn’t see them coming, like her making a really sharp comment when she was normally so happy go lucky. I have a feeling that she was probably also autistic because the tapes that ran in her head were that she had to act completely normal all the time, too. It’s called social masking. Because of my family, I have both male and female sets….. as in, what a man would generally say and what a woman would. The female set is unsure and cautious. The male one walks in the world knowing that no one is better than me and no one is worse, either. It’s very important to make that distinction, because basically seeing the way I write convinced me that I had a man’s confidence online, so go with it. Be confident all the time, because it’s not all about you. It’s a survival manual for someone else.
What were some of the values and lessons she instilled in you?
If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. I didn’t say anything for 35 years.
Be kind to everyone, no matter what they do to you. This has had enormous positive and negative affects, because I tend to overestimate the good in people and stop standing up for myself when I feel bullied. On the flip side, everyone is more open and caring with me because I am open and caring with them. It’s a mixed bag, as parental lessons often are.
Be subservient to your partner. Whatever they want to do, you want to do. What you want to do/eat is not up to you, because you have to watch your weight and not seem like a pig (I wasn’t on Adderall til college and had the normal appetite of a teenager), and also his choice of restaurant is always better than yours. I wasn’t raised to be queer. Neither are other women. We’ll talk for an hour about what to do for dinner because neither of us wants to assert an opinion that might offend the other. Same for dating. Lesbians take FOREVER to admit that they like someone because God forbid someone rejects them. it’s systemic, but my personal experience is unique and universal. One of the things I like about men is that they’re direct. It’s easy to ask them out because it’s a yes or no question to them. It’s especially fun when you don’t care about the answer and neither do they, because it’s no harm, no foul. With a woman, you’ll waste years pining over her until someone finally admits feelings and then spend the first four months of dating EXCLAIMING over how much we didn’t see it. Yes we did. We were just ostriches about it. If I don’t tell you I like you, then I don’t risk abandonment. It’s intrinsic to who women are as people. If we are not perfect, our husbands will leave. Flat out. This is changing as gender roles decrease. That information was useless to me then.
My mother’s narrative was never how hard it was for me that I was queer. It was always how embarrassing it was to tell people I was queer. She couldn’t empathize, which is the root of why we had a sometimes terrible relationship. Later in her life, she wouldn’t let anyone get away with a homophobic comments, but she never told me that. I heard it at her funeral, because all of the sudden she was now the cool mom and not the rejected one. She could play up that card instead of being embarrassed, all the while being completely disinterested in hearing how Meagan, Kathleen, or Dana & I were doing. I am glad that she came to peace about it. I am not glad she never told me.
How do you cope with the grief and keep her memory alive?
I have fallen in love with everything Dia de los Muertos and I actually visit cemeteries a lot for the peace and quiet, yet feeling surrounded. The most profound place I’ve ever felt peace is at a neighborhood for the dead in Paris. It’s called Pere LaChaisse (sp?), and it’s got more famous artists of every discipline that you could possibly imagine. If you cannot travel to Paris, there are the same type cemeteries in New Orleans. See them before you die, because it’s an experience in and of itself. In DC, I have now been to sit with Gore Vidal. Good talk.
I wear an ichthus necklace every day now, because the necklace she actually gave me came apart in a million pieces. I got it at the funeral home, and the inside of the fish is filled with her fingerprint. I don’t like how I got it, but I do like that it was possible to create and a powerful remembrance to have my mother’s fingerprint on my heart every day.
Lindsay and I FaceTime at my mother’s grave when I’m not in town, or visit together when I am. It makes us feel closer to her even though we know she’s not really there. The idea is fun. We sit and talk to her, sometimes eat, sometimes drink coffee. It’s a safe space to get away from it all, and we do.
Stories come up at random times, and I never know whether they’re going to be good or bad. Some of them are still so painful that I blank out, like seeing her in her coffin. What is really bad is that because it’s the last image I have of her, it’s the one that’s stuck. My mother got sick and died in about 30 minutes flat. I wore this look of abject shock, like I was high on Oxycodone and completely sober. It was more than a year of magical thinking, because it was so unbelievable.
I know for sure that she got the death she wanted, because she did not want to be in pain and she did not want Lindsay and I to end up taking care of her for years on end. She didn’t know it was coming, but she would have been pleased with the result. It gives me complete peace. I don’t have to worry that there are things she would have wanted that she didn’t get, because I know for sure that given the choice between dying quickly or it being a long, drawn out process she would have chosen to go out exactly the same way.
Other people keep her alive for me. She was such a public figure that people tell me all the time how much I remind them of her. It’s irritating until you realize that it’s the only way to keep your mother alive long after she’s dead.
Were there any traditions or hobbies she passed down to you?
Make a big deal out of people’s birthdays.
Love people until they just can’t stand it. Make it weird. So many people are hurt in the world. See it.
If you are a teacher and you don’t have money, you are responsible for finding it. She taught me that people will support a valuable cause. For instance, she dated a judge after the divorce that was pretty wealthy. She worked at one of the poorest schools in Fort Bend. She never asked him for money. She talked about her life, and he responded. One year he bought the entire class winter coats. You can get things if you ask for them, but only without asking directly. This is not bad advice, because it’s not one’s responsibility to respond to your needs, you’re just asking if they will. The difference is that I don’t take rejection personally and she viewed it as a flaw in her character. However, this is a new development because I finally got tired of not being heard correctly. I don’t do well when I’m talking around something and just hoping.
What is the most important thing you learned from your mother?
I have learned many things from my mother, from the tender to the terrible. Every bit of it had to do with focusing on external validation. She was not attention-seeking in the slightest. She was just trying to take up as little space in the world as she possibly could, because someone, somewhere could be offended.
She gave really good hugs. I miss those the most.
Towards the end of her life, she enjoyed traveling and came to both Portland and DC. In fact, I also met her in Seattle and we went to the Experience Music Project before she and her husband left on an Alaskan cruise.
Giving birth is not for the faint of heart. It’s especially hard if you don’t tell your doctors that you are in pain. She said that she bit her pillow while everyone screamed and no one noticed that she needed medication. There’s no award for that, but if there had been, she’d have won it.
Own yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you. You cannot be perfect enough to please everyone all the time, and you will die mad about it. I learned that because she never did and I watched what it did to her. She was still mad at my dad at all family functions 25 years after the divorce. I realize that relationships are complicated. Being a decent coparent is not. At some point, you have to say to yourself “this doesn’t even matter anymore,” like my friends who found out they were pregnant the morning of their wedding. All of the sudden, the wedding was literally a piece of cake because there were bigger fish to fry. Like, we’re having a good time, okay, but we’re not even going to pretend that any of this is now important.
I am a more compassionate person than I would be otherwise, because my mother’s insistence on being polite and friendly has led me to keep going in relationships that weren’t interesting at first, but kept growing. It was a lesson to sit back and keep listening.
It feels excruciating that she would have treated Zac like he walks on water, because he might be a little too much for her, but he’s still a man interested in her daughter, which was infinitely more important than a woman being interested in me. It is not surprising or lost on me that I did not find complete happiness with a man until after I realized she wasn’t there to give “advice.” Even though Zac is also queer and likes me for everything I am, she would not have believed I could tell Zac I was nonbinary and have the relationship survive. Yes, I’m sure that men who like men definitely have a problem with me………. But I only know this from watching how she treated Ryan and how she treated Meagan. Oh, and also I didn’t have any agency. It was all my emotional abuser’s idea and I had been turned somehow. Meanwhile, I’d been crying alone in my room for two years. I’m just not queer enough to exclude dating men altogether. It speaks highly of Zac’s brain that it even happened in the first place, because I do have a preference for women. It gives me a little bit of clinical separation, honestly, because not every conversation digs deep. By the time I talk to Zac, I have worn myself out on my blog.
How did she inspire you in your life’s pursuits and passions?
She loved everything I ever did in the arts, whether it was singing, playing my horn, playing the handbells, or creative writing. She also loved asking me to help her with her room when she was decorating because she knew I was creative at that, too.
She wouldn’t be surprised that I turned out to be a great writer, because I was already on my way in 2016. Therefore, she was invested in my talent. She still managed to bust my balls about my behavior, though. She hated my writing at times, because she thought I was harping on a point over and over. She did not realize that autistic people are governed by monotropic thought processes. It is literally not possible for us to change gears quickly, or process emotions easily. It takes time, because nine times out of ten, it’s trouble with not being able to translate neurotypical into neurodivergent or vice versa. She thought Supergrover was bad for me, that I descended into a world of pain. She wasn’t wrong. That being said, I couldn’t find a friend of mine she did like. Neurodivergent people tend to be queer and run in packs. Therefore, if she didn’t understand me, she didn’t understand them, either. So, her interest in my blog was a mixed bag.
In what ways do you see your mother’s traits or characteristics in yourself?
I am only strong when my back is against the wall. I only use power when I need it, not because it pleases me. Just like my mother in a classroom, I walk softly and carry a big stick. I just don’t have to be as aggressive about it now, because I have friends that respect my boundaries and I don’t feel like I’m being ignored. Your voice doesn’t have to be loud if people aren’t covering it up.
It is easier to be honest on the internet because when I’m in front of people, I cater to the urge to be small in front of them to gain acceptance.
If I’m going to be a musician, be the best musician I can be. Don’t think that you’re incapable of something. Suck until you don’t. And in fact, my voice didn’t get really exceptional until I started taking private lessons every week. It was so good to learn that I was so much more capable and confident than I thought, because I had a great voice, I’d just picked up some bad habits. She helped me work through all of them by accompanying me between lessons.
Take the time to get in a proper warm-up, because you’ll sound better if you’re relaxed. Start a rehearsal with your vocal cords already warm. Breathe deeply. Four measures is a long time.
What do you miss the most about her?
I miss having someone to talk to all the time. We had long, involved conversations about her life, her career, her everything because I was happy to listen to the chatter rather than tell her I wanted to talk about my life, too. I knew she wasn’t comfortable, so I just listened. The same goes for being touched. We could say a lot without saying anything, a safe person to just walk up and hug because they’re used to it. People rarely hug me anymore, and I’m so used to it I forget I need it.
How would you like people to remember her?
As a saint, perfectly perfect in every way, because no one gets through life without making mistakes. With your parents, it’s only a different situation because your first family installs all your triggers. I hope that by not staying silent about them, you won’t, either.
We are all a little bit broken, and that’s where the light gets in.
These questions are designed to be open-ended and reflective, allowing you to share personal stories and feelings about your mother. They can help readers understand her impact on your life and the legacy she leaves behind.
When I’m writing, I think of it very much like a lecture about me. I am trying to create a video in your head like one Joel Wood or Lia Hatzakis or Paul Cuffaro or any number of YouTubers would make, where they’re just walking down the street and talking to the camera. Paul is walking around his farm and fish room, but it’s the same concept. They all narrate their lives like they’re standing up in front of a crowd. Because my dad was a minister, to me this tracks as a completely normal thing to do. However, my dad didn’t usually preach what’s called a “confessional sermon.” His sermons were generally not about him. Sometimes he would include funny things that happened with my mom, me, and Lindsay that week, but he rarely just put everything on display.
That is my department, and he calls me “Chief.” Because my favorite two spies in the UNIVERSE were called “Chief,” now it pleases me to no end. I’m not Chief of Disguise, but I am chief of……….. Something. I tried to think of a pun, but I’ve not nothin.’ If you think of something that rhymes with “disguise” and also refers to writing/blogging, leave it in the comments. I don’t have prizes, but if it becomes a thing maybe I’ll acquire them. Lanagan Media Group lives to serve. 😉
I should update you all that Bryn’s grandmother died yesterday, so please send her all the love in the world. She already has mine, but that’s not enough. She needs love in groups. Fanagans, do your thing.
I can’t remember who came up with “Fanagans,” so I’m going to pick Dana. The only thing I do know is that it wasn’t me. I don’t have enough self confidence to believe I have fans all over the world even though I do. It’s sometimes too much to take in, that Zac, Supergrover, Bryn, Dana, and I are famous in a very small niche…… However, the reach is literally every country in the world. Since this blog was conceived 11 years ago, I’ve gotten all 208. Just obscure, like Micronesia and Vatican City. I can say that a few are VPNs, bots, etc. I cannot say that for all of them.
In terms of stats, my biggest fan base is in India. Again, this is not surprising to me because there are more people in India, as well as the popularity of the WordPress app/web site there. The next biggest group is the Commonwealth, which I group because it changes at least once a week. Sometimes it’s Canada, sometimes it’s Australia, sometimes it’s Britain. My US following is smaller, but it’s growing every single day as I get more popular on Facebook and I get promoted in the daily prompt. My reader retention rate is enormous. If someone reads once, they’re almost 70% likely to read again, and I have an enormous fan base that reads my entries as soon as they come out. My favorite comment about this has been “we have now reached the point where I am anticipating your entries coming out.”
I hope that I am showing confidence, not arrogance. My self esteem has been in the shitter for a very long time, and the straw that broke the camel’s back was Daniel saying “just because you write in bulk doesn’t mean you say anything of substance.” Well, his professional peer-reviewed ass hasn’t had fans for 24 years. Beat that with a stick.
I do things with intention and purpose. I don’t link to anything to create reader retention unless a prompt has come up where I’ve told the story recently. This allows two things to happen. The first is reader retention. The reason I have it is that I demand it. If you don’t read something, it will move down on the page and it becomes obscure. That creates the OG fan base because my blog has a real “guess you had to be there” feel because otherwise you are going to be using my search feature extensively. People don’t do that. The second thing it accomplishes for my friends is allowing the past to stay passed. Everything blows over easier when they realize that every day is a new piece of paper.
However, thanks to my fans, my archives aren’t bird cage liner. It takes a very long time for people to discover your content on Facebook and WordPress. Some of the entries that are the most shared are two or three years past when it was written. The only thing that took off immediately was my article on marriage. I think it’s hilarious that I wrote a marriage article seen all over the world. That’s because I realized I wasn’t very good at it. Thus, poly and dating Zac because not being married and just having a boyfriend suits me completely. I do not have a need to have multiple partners to be happy. I am happy. The only reason I wanted to be with Daniel as well is that I wanted what’s called an NP, or nesting partner. Zac will never be that for me and I respect his boundaries. I still want so social mask someone because living with someone makes that possible.
In the meantime, I am social masking my housemate and that works well. I have changed my schedule to his, because when I’m alone and have no schedule, I am just as good a writer, but a worse human being. I get demand avoidance over showering, cooking, basically anything until my executive function says “MOVE.” Everything is an emergency with executive dysfunction because your brain cannot plan anything in advance….. Or very little, anyway. You live and die by Google Calendar, because you WILL not remember it if you don’t write it down. I have been late to work because I forgot I had work today (it’s easy to do in a kitchen because your schedule changes weekly). I have never told anyone that before, that I’ve been late because I forgot we were doing work that day. But now I’m spilling it because that’s the disability.
That’s why it’s hard to stay employed, because people think you’re full of shit or a fucking child. People without brain disorders have absolutely no concept, but they become the authority on your mental health if they’re bosses. It’s not a disability, you’re just an indolent asshole.
I’m a good writer because I don’t get demand avoidance over it every single day. Your brain sometimes overrides your disability when it’s a special interest….. Or it happens to me because I’m ADHD as well. If I was simply autistic, I would be 10x more likely to be engrossed in writing to the exclusion of all else, because autistic people are bad at transitions and tend to stay hyper focused on the thing they know the most about. For instance, it being hard to drag Sam away from penguins on “Atypical,” or being able to drag Extraordinary Attorney Woo from whales.
Ok, shows with autistic people. Gotta talk about it.
In a lot of shows about people with disabilities, they’re designed to make the neurotypical person look like the hero caretaker and the autist to need that care. The show isn’t about being autistic, but how kind people are in tolerating our quirks, not caring when it goes overboard into infantilizing an adult. In short, you are not a hero because you manage to put up with me. I mean, thanks, but I don’t ever want a friend who shows up out of pity. I would rather be alone, because I can, again, entertain myself. It is more fun to be alone than to put up with that crap.
My life got better when I stopped allowing it. I sound like I know everything because I just throw emotional bombs down like they’re nothing. I take everything literally, so if you ask me a question, I’m going to be sure in my answer even when I’m not, because the autistic brain is not putting everything through a social convention checklist. Ask a question, get an answer. We can’t care any less when you react to it, because it’s something we can’t do anything about. We either sound like dicks or we don’t talk at all because people just say that we’re dicks when we talk to them. Why bother?
My friends’ biggest problem with me historically is that I call them on their bullshit, they scream “you don’t know me,” and within hours/days they come back and say “I hate it that you’re always right.” It’s relentless, because obviously when I talk people take a defensive tone. I cannot win, so I’ve stopped playing.
My boyfriend and my best friend are on the same page….. Something my friend Sarah Anne said about 15 years ago and it’s apt here. “Just let Leslie be Leslie, and let the world fall in love.” It is the most profound thing anyone has ever said, and it wasn’t about my career and my friends’ attitudes toward it, but it’s the perfect fit. She was giving me advice on preaching, when my world was quite a bit smaller.
I often wonder if the people who’ve visited me from Vatican City have stolen lines from me, because I know it’s possible. I’m confident that I’m a good enough preacher to rip off blind. And remember, I don’t need to be a hero. It’s not important to be recognized when there’s a possibility you just gave a Cardinal something to say on Sunday morning.
Because I write about success and things that are interesting to powerful people, like leadership, I think of my fan base as small, but with abilities no one else has. A lot of my audience is more successful than I am. Margaret Cho comes to mind, but I don’t have any evidence that she’s a fan. She just Tweeted my marriage article on Twitter. Sharing one article doesn’t mean she came back, but it doesn’t not mean that, either. I have no idea who is reading based on my web stats unless they’re a part of the WordPress community and leave a like within the app. You have to have an account with WordPress to do that. Everyone else just clicks on the link from Facebook, Reddit, et al. Margaret Cho is not my only reader with that much clout, so my assessment that my audience is small but powerful is correct and I feel solid about it. I have been underestimating my abilities my whole life.
Daniel’s words pushed me to the fucking wall and I thought, “ENOUGH. You just watched Jonna Mendez own herself in front of an entire room of people and she likes your writing and she likes you. She would not think it was impossible that I could do the same. You can’t think of yourself as a shitty writer anymore. Man up.” There is no universe in which I think I couldn’t give an interview at the Spy Museum because they already know me there. It’s just that currently, I don’t have a book to promote. Maybe I’ll do a nonfiction on NASA and CIA or something, but I’d have to find something Vince Houghton didn’t in “Nuking the Moon.” It’s just easy money if the book is good because people genuinely like that topic.
I absolutely do not think I could fail at writing nonfiction, because that’s what I do every single day. I just need an editor because I clean up nice.
It’s an idea to read Zac in on helping me with a nonfiction book, because not only can he edit me, he can fact check me as well. Like, holy shit, the perfect boyfriend dropped into my lap…………… Because I got the confidence to ask for it. I asked Zac out, not the other way around. I’m getting a lot of things these days by asking for them, and it’s sort of embarrassing how long I didn’t know that. I was an arrested teenager for years. I couldn’t set boundaries in relationships for anything in the world because I didn’t know how. I’ve felt steamrolled in every relationship because I was a people pleaser. Once I just started throwing truth bombs on the table and keeping the friends who stayed, I was a lot happier than having friends who I tiptoed around because my self-esteem wasn’t high enough to participate in a give and take. I got love by pleasing other people. Now, I just pick friends that allow themselves the luxury of having productive fights that make you closer, because you’re not holding in all the things that make the other person annoying because you just let them keep annoying you without saying anything and letting MASSIVE resentment build.
It’s not okay, building massive resentment. It will always backfire. Instead of a happy relationship, you’re focusing on yourself and telling yourself that you’re not getting anything because no one notices you. There’s no award for trying to be good enough that your parents don’t see you as a problem child. Your needs going unmet is a you thing, not a them thing. When you say nothing, you become part of the problem.
Today’s daily prompt is about times in my life that I’ve felt productive, and this is a great time to ask me about it because I don’t think I’ve ever been more productive writing-wise, and I don’t want to be known for anything else.
It’s been a transformation of enormous proportions. I have been pulling myself inwards, thinking about my directions and distractions. What and where are they? Why do I fail when I am so motivated by hearing other people talk about success? It’s all about dealing with the gap between knowledge, emotion, and communication. I do hear people, and I do take in emotions. However, I don’t do it at the same rate or speed because my pattern recognition is different. There are literally different pathways to your conclusions than to mine. I am not a sociopath, cut off from all my emotions. I show all of them very well in writing. I show them very well in person, although I am much less likely to tell people what I think in person because it’s hard for me to verbalize it. If something feels like a threat, I go mute. I do not stop taking everything in. My mind decides “we’re not going to do speech today.” And we don’t.
Part of being so much into chatting online vs. getting together is because I don’t experience those gaps in between trying to say what I think and trying to verbalize it. It is why I now think that Supergrover is my puzzle piece by now, because she’s had unfiltered access to my brain for 10 years without once hearing a stutter as I figured out how to put words in my mouth. I solve the problem of stuttering by taking time to think before I speak, because most of my stutter is just lag. Damn lag.
Therefore, people who know me would probably say “you don’t stutter.” I don’t when I’m not choking on buffer overload (and as you get older, the amount of RAM decreases). When people are talking to me, the thing that you are reading right now has not stopped. It is running underneath my speech. Therefore, I have multiple trains of thought running at all times, and picking one of them in order to speak slows me down by quite a large margin.
It also depends on how many other sounds are competing with your voice in the room. I like very intimate conversations because I can really only process one voice at once. I am never trying to “get people alone,” because I don’t have to. I go off to be by myself and the other introverts adopt me because they see it’s okay to be overstimulated… Or someone is concerned and now the person that’s concerned about me is in my bubble. Either way, it’s not about my personality. My personality is “when you’re overwhelmed, find somewhere quieter.” That’s how I got Bryn. She has always been in my corner because we were the introverts trying to get away from the noise. We talked to each other in quiet spaces because we could hear ourselves think.
I remember myself at that age (19) and just realized that my haircut now is the closest it’s ever been to when I was that young. And yet, I really don’t look much different except a few gray strands and a few more wrinkles. Some people say that they don’t feel any older. I do. I feel ancient- partly because I see how I’ve grown, but partly because I’ve been middle aged since I was nine. I have never talked like a child, ever, which is why in our family no one imitates things I said when I was little. No one. I have been very precise with language since I learned to use it; it just so happens that most people excel at conversation and I excel at taking a second to think of a reply and chatting back.
Supergrover once told me that it was clear I often said things before I thought about them, and I believe that is true. It has to be, because I’m ADHD. But at the same time, I think she was also talking about consequences that a naurotypical person would see coming, but not a neurodivergent one. I don’t mean issues of clear right and wrong. I have that. I mean being able to divine consequences and/or their feelings out of thin air, and our relationship was only using 7% of what went into communication in the first place. A good example of this is thinking I’m being the bigger person by laying out my vulnerabilities first. She took it not as “this is what Leslie is worried about,” but as “Leslie needs to guilt me about something.” Meanwhile, I think I have said something perfectly logical and she thinks I’m trying to hurt her. It’s unsustainable, because I do not want her to feel guilty.
I want her to see that these are the problems we need to resolve so that we can move on, because I can imagine that some of the things I think and feel do indeed make her feel guilty, but making her feel guilty was not my intent. I think she thinks I want to punish her for what she’s done, when she’s the most precious thing in my life. The fact that she thinks that I feel such negativity is overwhelming, and I feel like I’ve proven that within myself I was not asking for anything huge. She reassured me that I do come up in her mind all the time, and that was that. That she didn’t have to drop out of her life and appear in mine. That I was worried our relationship was truly lopsided and I was on the wrong track. It was a half a line in an e-mail, not a day at the beach.
Wanting to do things together is dreaming because she doesn’t have the bandwidth, but I didn’t make it clear that I was just dreaming, so she thought I was being demanding. If I was demanding, e-mails wouldn’t have been enough to sustain a relationship for 10 years. When I throw ideas out there and they’re not for her, she becomes part of the problem by not saying “eh. I don’t think meeting in person is for me.” Or whatever. She’s never said anything like that, so I’ve always treated her like a normal person. And in fact, I believe she sees me the same way. That’s because I was preaching at Bridgeport during the pandemic and she told me to send her a link. She didn’t get to come because something came up, but the fact that she told me to send her the link made my heart beat eighty times faster and I did very well that day.
However, I didn’t know she wasn’t able to come until after the service (Zoom), so I still put a reference to her in it because it tends to make people laugh to themselves. I also thought it would make her laugh to be an atheist and think “a preacher mentioned me in a sermon today.”
And the thing is, I wasn’t disappointed in the slightest because she was genuinely sorry that she couldn’t make it because what came up was really important- not that I’m not, but I’m not her only friend and I’m not a member of her family, unless you count the space in her head I’ve been renting all these years.
It feels very much like a constant running version of “All of Me.”
I do not know whether she would be Lily Tomlin or Steve Martin, but as I’ve seen Steve Martin age I actually think we’re more alike, despite Lily and me both being queer. I love comedy, but I also love zoning out and doing my own thing, like buying art and writing novels/screenplays. I have a feeling that Steve Martin is a neurodivergent introvert as well….. That stage presence is an affectation for EVERYONE who is in any way creative. You get to see us live, you don’t get to see us in the practice room.
You don’t get to see the thousand pictures I took before I got to the good one……………. Except you do.
I write in bulk, so how many of these entries do you think I think are amazing? Not all of them, I assure you. I feel like I spend my days work shopping ideas, throwing them around in my brain and trying to word it so that I understand them. If I can understand them, then mostly so can other people. I get lost in my own head and forget transitions a lot of the time, but that’s what it’s like to get a blog and not a book.
You are not getting the finished product, you are reading my notes. I am a different writer outside this blog because when I am writing for publication, I tend to clean it up more. Not only that, if it’s important I get someone to edit me (A friend or a Fiverr). By “important,” I mean anything I’m turning in to a contest or I’m being paid, like a book review. Even if I don’t get a salary, the book is the payment.
I took a break to make breakfast, and now I don’t remember where I was going.
The stove is gas.
The stove is gas.
The stove is gas.
I have to keep pinching myself when I say it. It has made me cry several times, both because having a gas stove is such a a good thing and because there are All-Clad pans to go with it. I remember every moment of learning to cook just by the way the pan feels in my hand. It’s too professional not to trigger me in a good way. David hasn’t seen me flip mushrooms or anything, but he has come home and say it smells good. What he’s smelling is butter. A lot of it.
Now that I have All-Clad, I’m back to cooking like I’m in a restaurant. It’s good, because I don’t eat very often, but everything I do eat is loaded with calories. Most days, it’s eggs and toast. Today, I made oatmeal.
I started with a couple tablespoons of butter, oatmeal, and chia, flax, and hemp seeds. I sauteed all of it until it was brown, then added water, Mexican vanilla, and sugar. It sat on the stove for about five minutes (steel cut, but microwavable so it doesn’t take long on the stove) and then I added some peanut butter and dried cranberries to finish.
Then, I let it sit while I was cleaning the kitchen, because I like oatmeal to cool so that it breaks apart in chunks. It took me about 15 minutes to clean up, at which time I took the liberty of pouring some almond milk on it.
Now, the whole house smells like brown butter, and I am very, very pleased. I wish I had made a larger pan, because I like steel cut oatmeal warmed up in the microwave rather than buying quick oats. These were some I’d ordered off of Amazon years ago and I’m still using them up because I didn’t know I was ordering six boxes of six. Normally, I buy Irish steel cut oats and it takes about half an hour. For my money, now that I’ve cooked with microwavable steel cut, it’s fine. It tastes the same when you put the amount of ingredients in yours as I do in mine. I didn’t do it this time, but last time I sauteed pumpkin seeds for oatmeal as well.
Generally people who say they don’t like oatmeal haven’t had what I consider oatmeal. It’s watery, or soupy, or whatever. Mine actually looks like cereal. Plus, the grains all taste better after they’ve been sauteed in butter first. Pretty much anything tastes good sauteed in butter, but get exponentially better with sugar, vanilla, and dried fruit.
I need to go to the grocery store at some point today, but breakfast was just “throw it together.” I like to go to the grocery store when I’m full, because it helps my impulse control…… But not too full or nothing else will look appealing. I will go to the grocery store, walk around, and leave. I get overwhelmed at too many decisions. It is literally why I have a standard order on Uber Eats and I just hit reorder. If they don’t have something, I discuss substitutions. I do not want to go through decision fatigue with every single item.
The only thing I know I want today that I haven’t gotten in a while is toilet paper. Hayat always bought all of ours, I didn’t have to get it myself. So, I get to pick out my own. This is exciting for me. You have no idea.
Before David left for church, he told me I could put my office in the sun room. He said that no one uses it, and that it’s kind of cold. I told him that was fine. I could get a little electric heater if I had to. It’s nice to have a place to write that’s not shut up in my bedroom. I’m having trouble transitioning into having a whole house again. My housemates and I stuck to our rooms and rarely came out. Therefore, I’m usually in my room. I think David thought I was unhappy and that’s why I’m shut up in here. Nope, it’s that I only think of myself as renting one room.
I have seen David visibly relax over time, because since he’s also neurodivergent, having someone move in with him was VERY intimidating. It was intimidating for me, too, but not in the same way. He’d never rented out his space before, so he didn’t know what to expect from anyone at all. I’ve had housemates in every living situation since college except a spot here and there. Once I lived in a junior efficiency by myself. All of the others, I was either in a relationship or I had housemates. Once, I had a one bedroom in a retirement community. I was in my 20s and I was delighted. They didn’t legally discriminate, they picked up the trash door to door, there were two pools on the grounds and I was the hottest person at both of them….. I mean, what was not to like in that situation? 😉
They stopped doing things for the residents after a while. At first, we all had breakfast together every Sunday morning on the landlord’s dime. That stopped, and then picking up trash door-to-door stopped. The only thing left that marked it as a retirement community at all was a bus that went to several shops around the area. In Houston, I drove, so I didn’t use it. Basically, though, what made it unique was gone.
I am trying not to do that to myself. To give pieces of myself away so that I am no longer unique. I am also not trying to be invulnerable, to actively disconnect myself from my emotions so that things hurt less. If I felt less, I wouldn’t have so much inspiration to write, because I wouldn’t think my life was worth remembering.
I have jokingly called Zac “Smiley” since we met. That’s because George Smiley was John Le Carré’s main character and Zac is not in a big three letter, but he works in both military and civilian intelligence roles. I was delighted one day when I said something in voice dictation like, “you’re adorable, Smiley.” Siri wrote:
You’re adorable 😊
So, if I had to pick one out of all, it’s the OG. I was around when it began, and I use/say it almost as much now as then.
I feel like I use emojis the way they were intended, which is to indicate which lines are jokes… not a mode of communication. To me, that is like saying “I need 300 words on my desk by 1500, but make sure it’s in Wingdings.” Therefore, I hardly ever use emoticons that I can’t type.
It’s not fun to me to stop and insert imagery like a web designer. I will add emojis at the end, but only sometimes. Mostly I am concerned about getting you an answer, not picking pictures.
My other top two are a winking face and a smiley with the tongue hanging out because they’re easy to use at 90 wpm. I also try not to use them in every single paragraph. They are decorations, not cake. My feelings may have more to do with the creation of the web not being what maintains it. As in, I may be telling you things that no longer apply. In my background, they were lifelines to ensure that you let someone know your intent in a chat room, because an emoji transcends language. I get that going to pictures is nothing new and hieroglyphics are valid, but that’s not how we did it in the beginning. I’m not advocating we go backwards. I just haven’t had a situation where I needed to stop talking and use emojis instead. It has never come up.
I also don’t expect other people to be writers, so I am not telling you what you should do, either. I am saying that my habits are built from having specifically a desktop since I was eight. It was a different feel not to have the Internet on all the time, like a utility. You might have only been able to chat for a few minutes before someone accidentally picked up the phone. The phone lines carried both data and voice just like the internet does now, but picking up another phone in the house would drop the data connection and you would be “kicked off.” I have to explain this because not all my readers are my age.
I wish I could remember more of those early conversations, because I didn’t realize how quickly my day to day life was changing. My watch has a faster processor now than my desktop had back then.
I have a watch that would have genuinely been helpful at CIA during The Cold War, and I would not doubt that they had something like an Apple Watch long before we did. It’s not because I think there’s a deep state or anything shady. It’s that with all the technology research CIA does, a computer that’s capable of sitting on your wrist like a Pip-Boy can’t be an original idea. Jonna used to take calls from her staff after “Get Smart” and “Dragnet” from officers saying, “can we do that?”
But there’s a second reason, and that’s that during one of Jonna’s talks, she said that they do such specialized things that one person will spend their entire career on one thing, like batteries or cameras. That’s because once an asset got to the place where they were supposed to plant the bug, it had to last a long time, because who knows how long it will be before we can get into that room again? And in fact, she was talking about “The Americans,” the scene where the maid hides the bug in Caspar Weinberger’s clock.
(I thought it was really funny that Ollie North consulted on “The Americans. It’s just the richest ending to that story I could imagine, because it was a major one. I remember it and I couldn’t have been even a teenager yet.)
We, the people of the chatrooms, have conversations exactly like this because we’re always looking for the next new thing, computer-wise. Zac and I have a Chinese Wall on technology, because he knows I’m interested and I’ll ask way more questions than he could possibly answer. The only thing he’ll say is the history of something if it’s UNCLASS. Like, “we have stuff that looks similar.” If he says “looks similar,” that’s kind of my cue to go read a book. 😉
I have never been in a chatroom where we weren’t discussing computers or the chessboard at some point. I have no doubt that I’ve met half of Anonymous by now. I know for certain I’ve met one. I didn’t even have to catch him at anything. He took some Ambien and came to my house because he still couldn’t sleep……… Then I didn’t sleep for three days.
However, he was the kind of hacker you want. Someone who’s a hacktivist on the good guys’ side. White hats do exist.
In all of my years on the Internet, it’s been as nonbinary as everything else about me. I got sucked into the world of hacking, but I don’t hack. It’s kind of the way Lindsay is woven into the queer community in Houston even though she’s cis and straight.
Oh, and I should write this down. “Enby” is short for nonbinary. It’s the gender that most fits me, and yet I don’t care if people think I’m male or female. Pronouns are not about respect to me, because I think it’s more important for me to know who I am than anyone else. Pronouns are a non-issue because I don’t make them one. The easiest thing is just to say “they” if you don’t know, anyway. It’s funny how my gender often depends on how people perceive me, which most of the time is female, but when people don’t look closely, I’m always a “sir.” Neither bother me in the slightest.
(And for the record, if you misgender me, just apologize and move on….. Because you didn’t misgender me and I’m not offended. Plus, I do not need your entire history with trans people as an apology. I’m sure your nephew is great.)
The truth is, though, lots of people on the Internet are nonbinary by now, whether we like it or not. The Internet has changed the rules of the game because you become disconnected from your physical body during emotional intimacy. It’s not that way for everyone, obviously, but it’s a good observation of most. For instance, “straight guys” trolling gay chatrooms because they’re curious and don’t want anyone to know they’re chatting with other queer people at night.
And most of the time, that comes off as rage bait. It’s very popular to come into a gay online community and start asking things like “so which one’s the wife?” And you watch a mix of insults go by because it’s our space.
It is also true that a disproportionately large neurodivergent community exists on the web because we built it. I have always worked with other autistic people without being able to identify it for myself, because I did not know that I was social masking, first of all (in a way that other people don’t), and I also didn’t know that you can have a full range of emotions and pick up all social cues and guess what? That’s not what autism is, either. It’s a criteria, but it’s not all of it.
Being autistic is absolutely why I gravitated toward Linux. It wasn’t to play around with Linux, necessarily. Part of it was learning Linux, and it was exciting because I could do things that very few people my age could do. The better part was a group of people who could understand me in my own language, which for years turned into me being the only woman in many rooms (because that’s mostly how I’ve presented at the office, although we all kind of look nonbinary in Oregon because we’re all wearing the same Columbia jacket we got on sale last summer at REI.
I wouldn’t have learned any of the things I’ve learned about myself without an Internet connection, because I didn’t have many queer friends growing up locally in Texas, but I had a ton of them in Australia.
So, I suppose the easiest way to say it is something you’ve heard all your life, so I hope it makes sense.
I just caught a dog rifling through my trash can, so I am not feeling particularly good about myself right now. I didn’t know that the dog was smart enough to open the trash can himself. I shouldn’t have doubted it, and I can’t get him to clean up the trash, either. So, I cleaned it up…. by myself…. again.
I’m not bagging on David, my housemate. I am bagging on Jack, who is a useless housekeeper. My coworker needs a visit with HR for a performance improvement plan. I don’t know how to keep a dog out of the trash except getting a different trash can or keeping the door closed all the time. I’d rather just train the dog, but again, Jack is very smart. You have to get right up in his face before he will even begin to think you have half a brain. So, we’ve been working on “sit,” “heel,” and “bring Mama a Diet Coke.” That last one was a joke that Heather Armstrong (Dooce) wrote about her dog, Chuck, the former Congressman.
I’m trying to keep Heather’s name alive because she’s a part of the zeitgeist, but no one has influenced the direction of this web site, because Supergrover and I both loved her once upon a time. It was the same for me- I fell out with reading her when she got on the influencer bandwagon, because like my beautiful girl I thought it lost something when Dooce stopped getting so real. There was no more Dooce (a typo she used to make while typing Dude), no more Asian Database Administrator (probably good she took that one out), no more dry humping and Sprite.
Sometimes I feel like Dooce is gone and I got the best of the best and you just got me. I keep trying, though. I’ve just realized that what I thought was Texas old guy is actually Utah blogger, apparently, and I know her writing well enough that she would be pleased by this. Unfortunately, I never got to meet her. We just ran in the same circles. If I had an hour with her, I’d ask her about blowback.
I’ll ask her about the friends she lost, and the friends who came to take their places. It’s something for which I’ll always be grateful, and I’m glad she came up in my mind while I was trying to say “I’m not in a very good mood, so I need to find things for which to be thankful.” I count blessings, every single one. It keeps me from thinking that I am failing all the time, because I recognize when I have a win.
I continue to be thankful for my house, and even Jack. He continues to be “my dog,” and he’s as lovable as every dog ever. If he’s ever missing, I know he’s in my bed as far under the covers as he can go. He’s shaved almost to the skin right now; when the wind is blowing in from the windows he shivers. It’s how I like it, because it’ll be 55F outside, but I’ve got a sheet, a blanket, and two comforters on top. I think I’ll be okay.
At the same time, when I take sleeping pills my body temperature goes way up, and having the windows open keeps me from sweating because of them. There have been a few days, though, where I woke up and thought I lost three pounds because I’d shake the blankets off, it would be too cold, then I’d pull them all back…. All night. It was glorious, let me tell you.
I’m grateful for a comfortable place to sleep, and a room with so many new possibilities. Neither my lamp nor my shelf with a light came with light bulbs, so I ordered some retro LEDs. They look like they’re from the early 1900s. I have a floor lamp without a shade, which is why I thought it would be nice with the bulb exposed to go decorative. I am hoping that I will have enough light, because each bulb is 60w. I wanted higher than that, but I couldn’t find any yellow bulbs that came in 75w or 100. I do not like the bulbs where they take all the yellow out and it leaves a slightly blue glow on everything. I do use 100w white bulbs in my bathroom because I want to get dressed in the most unflattering light possible. That way, when I get myself fixed up, I will look better when I leave the house. It’s good to have goals, anyway. 😉
I’m grateful I have a bathtub again. Hayat replaced our bathtub with a stand up shower long ago, so it’s nice to be able to sit and relax when I want. I liked the stand-up shower, too. I’m not knocking it. I just had trouble shaving because I am terrible at balance. It’s not that one was bad, it’s just that with a bathtub I can also sit in lavender and eucalyptus salts.
I’m grateful to still have a garden. David is the gardener, I’m just the enjoyer. I’m going to have to put some lavender out for me, because I’ve talked many times about talking to the bees. It’s real. I don’t mean that they can hear me, necessarily, but that it does make you feel better to talk to them.
I’m grateful for DC. There are limitless possibilities for beauty here. There’s kayaking, biking, hiking, sailing- basically everything I could do in Portland is also right here. The two cities mirror each other in lots of ways when it comes to layout. That’s because people in DC do not think of Arlington as the same city, but if you look at it from the sky, it looks the same as Portland being divided by the river north to south and Burnside east to west. We are a bridge city, and I can’t wait for Bryn to see it from the air. The only real difference is that when you land at National, there’s not a long airstrip parallel to the river. If the pilots at National can’t stop in time, they’ll fall into the Potomac.
Seem to remember something about that in the news when I was a child.
Zac says he has never met a person that loves this area as much as I do. Zac has never left and come back for any real length of time. I wonder how it would look different to him if he’d lived here in his early 20’s and then traveled all over. I missed the Potomac because the Willamette is always cold. Always. I cannot remember a 4th of July in which I was not absolutely freezing my ass off. I once drove with a housemate up to Mt. Hood for lunch (we weren’t skiing that day) and it started as we were driving home. It was June 27th. DC is the beauty of a city with a river running through it that is also not 54F and raining 280 days a year. I love Portland a whole lot, and I would move back if I had to do so. It’s just not my first choice for a number of reasons, and the weather is at the top.
The only pro here would be getting to live in the same city as my best friend, because the position has been filled- end of story. That being said, occasional video calls and visits are fine. I do not have a need for Bryn to move here or me to move there. If so, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I just can’t think of a good reason all our time needs to be in person.
There are moments, of course. You don’t move to your partner’s or your best friend’s city because something is happening. You move there to be available if it does. That’s because even now when something is going on with Bryn, I can’t help but want to jump on a plane. Therefore, I’m not sure I’ve ever been more surprised than when she said she was jumping on a plane to get to me. It’s getting so exciting thinking about her visit, and it’s already the 25th. So, not many more sleeps. I’m grateful.
I’m grateful that both Bryn and Dave want to see SPY so it doesn’t feel like I’m strong-arming them into going there on my account. I live here. I can go any time I want (and do). We haven’t decided what we’re going to do all days, and I know they’ll probably also want time to themselves. We just need to talk about dates so that I can send Zac an invitation. I live and die by Google Calendar.
Zac’s acceptance is not mandatory, I just want him to know he’s included in the fun and he’s said that he does want to meet Bryn. So, now Zac will have met one friend I met in high school and one I met my freshman year of college. I’m glad I can bridge those gaps in time, and it makes me happy that Zac is going to learn just so many “Borum-isms.”
I am grateful for “Borum-isms.” It’s a specific cadence, and I will pick it up instantly because it’s not based on accent but rhythm. Bryn’s dad said something so incredibly profound that I’ve remembered it for over 20 years…. “the hardest part of teaching is remembering what it was like not to know.”
Bryn also reminds me of Arya Stark, and I don’t have to squint. But by that I mean she is take charge alpha dog all the time, which means that she is strong and firm, but also the most loving person in the room because the alpha’s job is to manage the whole pack by seeing their needs and helping them……. serving, not owning……. as opposed to whatever the fucktard morons think it is this week.
In some ways, I’m grateful for guys like that because it reminds me of Roy Wood, Jr. who said that he appreciated businesses with the confederate flag outside because then at least you had a tip it wasn’t going to go well for you. If someone is advertising on the internet that they want a “tradwife,” they probably mean that they want someone who will take all their bullying all the time and call it Biblical. Therefore, there’s no confederate flag, but there’s a big waving red one.
I’m grateful for the ability to see red flags and work on them. I see them in myself by rereading my work. Throwing words on a page and seeing what they look like once they’re outside you gives you enough separation to say “ok, that’s good…. but that’s bad.” Not the writing, the way I behaved.
I am working to find peace within myself, so don’t think I don’t notice when I’m angry and figure out a way to resolve it in myself. I think I have. My tone is completely different than it was a year ago. A lot of it has to do with Supergrover finally telling me what she really wanted. She wants peace and rest, I assume for both of us. Maybe one day our paths will cross again, but I doubt it. I require something she does not have, which created the initial attraction to each other in terms of energy. This is because she has something I don’t, which is pragmatism and logic. In some ways, our personalities are exactly alike. In others, they are diametrically opposed.
But leaning in through all of that made me who I am today, and I’m more confident in myself as a result, and grateful I ever got to meet her at all. I am so angry that what she chooses to highlight in our relationship is all the negativity and not our incredible potential for joy. Maybe she already has these things with everyone else but me, and it’s because I’m a shitty friend that I don’t have these things with her and I’m whistling Dixie because no one else ever has a problem……. I would tell her the same thing I told her when she said she was giving up Diet Coke. “Yeah. Uh huh. Keep talkin,’ sweetheart.” No, wait. It wasn’t about Diet Coke. That was another day. And now I’m laughing my ass off, but that joke is above your pay grade.
I think the thing that makes her spit nails is that I’m right. What I realized through my mistakes is that I didn’t have to sit in them just because I’d made a long time making them. That my history with her meant a lot, but not at the expense of my own health and happiness. It’s not because I wouldn’t have done it. It’s because I expected her to pull her weight. I would have done anything for her, but I realized that she didn’t feel that way about me, and it was stupid to think that, in retrospect. I did not feel that way every single day. I recognized her hurt and talked about what happened often, but she never took the bait and opened up to me so that I could better understand her. I thought, “I am going to end up giving her absolutely everything I have and she’s not going to notice in the slightest.” I’d listened to the whispers and the screams long enough.
I’ve said this before, but I did not get angry that she was also angry. I was furious because she refused to tell me anything that gave me any headway. All I could do was talk about myself when it was the last thing I wanted to talk about. I also didn’t always want to talk about her, as if I was mining her for information. I wanted an easy give and take, the strength and comfort of someone I’d known for a very long time.
There was every reason to stay except having a feeling of safety and security when we talked, because it was missing for a very long time. Any attempt to lighten the load was wrong, so I didn’t get tired of her. I got tired of how I felt about myself. She says I’m “a lot.” She has never really grasped that she’s a lot. That for everything she’d like to change about me, there’s something I’d like to change about her. What I cannot get her to see is “this is me. Take it or leave it.” And that’s what we’ve both been trying to say to each other for years, mostly at the top of our metaphorical lungs. I have found that it is much more fun to fly with a dragon than to be touched by its fire.
I’ve thought for many years that if I did ever see her face to face, that I would go mute. That she’s the only person I know where that would happen. It’s not that I am not interested in talking, it’s that I would be completely overwhelmed before the conversation began. But I know us. We both know how to make each other laugh. After a few minutes, it wouldn’t be weird. One of us would say something to break the tension, and the spell would be broken. This person that we’ve each built up in our heads will be gone, and it will seem like we’ve never met.
Here is something I also know. I will never know how much of my e-mails she’s taken in until I hear her talking around other people, because I know what I’ve written. I would know when she was quoting me and when she wasn’t, and I would never say a thing. It wouldn’t mean as much to her as it would to me.
I do know that if we were at the same party, one of two things would happen. The first is that I’d be telling a story and get a detail wrong, and from across the room I’d hear, “THAT IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED. This is how it happened…..” The second would be her seeing someone else mistreating me because despite how she feels about me at any given moment I know she’d eat off their legs.
What I mean about getting a detail wrong is that all of the sudden she becomes very, very familiar with absolutely everything I’ve ever said when she is irritated. When she’s irritated, she quotes me back to me. How much she’s irked is inversely proportional to my joy at watching her quote me, because the more angry she is, the more likely she is to do it. I don’t do anything to irk her on purpose, I’m just saying that after a fight, when I feel calmer I go back and reread everything. I notice style, structure, all of it. Even when I’m devastated, I still find beauty in hearing from her at all because I rip her off mercilessly. Without my e-mail history, I am so much dumber, I promise you. I hope that in some ways she feels the same, because my dexterity helped her when her own words failed her. It’s something I hope she knows, really- that wherever she is in the world, my heart is with her. That’s because everywhere I go, her heart is with me.
So, even if she was trying to avoid me at a party, she’d never make it. We don’t have any mutual friends so far, and I’m not interested in making them…. mostly to protect the innocent.
I also know that no matter what, as long as I don’t start going with the crowd, she’ll still be in my audience. I know that when she told me that Dooce sucked now and she wasn’t going to read anymore and I told her it was her job to tell me when I should retire because she could just re-send that e-mail.
Come to think of it, that’s what would happen at a party. She’d hear me use a joke or two I’ve told in front of her and then we’d be picking up the end of each other’s sentences because we’ve both heard them before.
We could also have a lot of inside jokes that other people wouldn’t get, but we’d be falling out. For instance, me being the president of Overthinker’s Anonymous not because I am smarter, but because president is a public-facing office.
I think part of me hoped she would join Lanagan Media Group, because she would be great at both writing and podcasting if she had the bandwidth. She told me that she was always looking for what to do in her next career, and I think part of me hoped she would say “writer,” but I didn’t push. I got her stuff to help her in her own direction. She’s talked about writing before, but in a faraway sort of way. The bits of her story I’ve gotten to write because our lives overlapped are unique and beautiful. I know she thought it was unique. One out of two ain’t bad.
I feel like the way autism logic works, people think you’re much more negative than you mean to be because neurotypical brains are used to hearing things in a certain way. There are patterns to neurotypical speech that contain social cues. Autistic people can imitate them, but they cannot understand them. However, not being able to pick up social cues is only one of the criteria for autism. You do not have to have every single one to “prove” you’re autistic. For me, it’s a mixed bag. I do not recognize social cues in a person based on what they are thinking, but from the millions of faces I’ve seen before that looked exactly like that when X…… or when my parents described people’s emotions to me without meaning to…… I started understanding speech very, very early. Therefore, I have overheard things and ruminated on them for years before I understood them. But it’s because I’ve ruminated that I have accurate heuristics for the most part.
It’s easier to social mask when you’re hearing phone calls regarding pastoral care, because if you’re the pastor’s kid, you’re learning how to talk to people while they’re upset…… and mostly at each other. For instance, people who need marriage counseling, etc. But of course there’s a lot of people angry with you, too. Mostly over the things you’ve said.
Being a creative is being a creative. Preaching and writing are two separate skills, but they are two ways of expressing the same ideas. With me, it’s readers who don’t come back. For pastors, it’s church members who inexplicably disappear. Therefore, I am used to an ebb and flow in size and don’t get wigged about stats. I check them, but I don’t focus on them. The only stat I really like is how many flags I got that day. I like how far my site goes. This week, the leaderboard has been Africa- hello to South Africa and Ghana.
OH! South Africa!
Speaking of which, I started watching this YouTube channel called “Flipping Johannesburg,” and it’s incredible. It’s tempting to move to South Africa in some ways because land and resources are so cheap. I could build my own house or purchase one in disrepair so that I could have more land for cheap and more room to overhaul. The last house I watched on “FJ” was 800,00R, which is about $40,000. It was a U-shape with everything from a garage to staff quarters to a huge pool in the middle. I am certain that it took a lot of work to get it where it is today, and also a lot more Rand. Because of this, I am grateful that when I cannot go to South Africa, Flipping Johannesburg brings it to me.
And finally, I am grateful for Zac. He and Oliver, who is a dog, have made me feel more at home. It’s so much fun to have two hiking buddies. It’s nice to have someone to hold onto when I walk. It’s exciting to see him when his car (Antimony) comes over the hill to the Kiss and Ride. Yes, that’s really what they call the place where you pick up and drop off.
If he gets there first, he’ll park. If I get there first, he barely has to slow down and I’m on his way home, anyway. It makes me feel good that he’s relatively close to the Metro so it’s not a big imposition to drive me around. He also knows that all he has to do is say “I’m busy” and I’ll Uber. He does it just to be sweet to me and I appreciate little things. Like, how it is problem to worry how I’ll get around? It was Sam’s whole deal, too, except that Zac (for some disastrous reason) thinks that I am a fully functioning adult and doesn’t have an issue with saying “God, I’m slammed. Meet me at my house.” Therefore, Sam never got to see that I’m a perfectly capable adult. She drove me around and sulked about it because she offered and then regretted it. So, of course the easy thing to do would be to stop offering to drive me around so that I don’t have the choice to say yes or no. Because I can feel energy very well and if you resent that you have to come get me, I’ll know it. I feel it like a scar on my skin.
I would only need a car if I moved from the DMV metro area and out into Virginia or to the eastern shore. With a combination of bus, train, and/or Uber I can get anywhere. I just need a little bit more notice. This is great because if you call me and say you want to do something short notice, I probably won’t want to do it, anyway. I am bad at transitions and like to have my calendar planned out in advance.
Therefore, I am limited to staying in the city because I don’t want to lose excellent transit without a car payment and insurance. A car is just another place for me to let stuff accumulate. I’m not sure I used my car for much more than a high speed crap wagon.
Despite my best intentions, today may be a “show about nothing.” That’s basically all I know about Seinfeld because I wasn’t a fan back in the day. I don’t remember a lot of what I watched in high school except “Animaniacs” and “Jeopardy!” At that age, I was usually sitting on the floor of my bedroom with my headphones on trying to be Miles Davis. I assure you that I always thought I sounded better when I was alone, because I wasn’t focusing on pleasing the crowd and making a show go well.
I do remember the highlights. I was more happy that I impressed Doc than impressing a crowd, because I did a solo in “Come Rain or Come Shine” and Doc’s response was “Leslie Lanagan! 9th Grade, ladies and gentlemen. NINTH GRADE.” I was also the soloist on a local Houston TV show called “Black Voices” (yes. Really. But it wasn’t because Summer Jazz Workshop was all white. It’s because I beat out everyone else. I got that solo from Konrad Johnson, director of one of the most famous jazz bands in the nation- Kashmere High School. I’ve mentioned this before, but Kashmere got a chart on the soundtrack to “Baby Driver,” and Konrad, who has now passed, is memorialized in a bigger way than just locally in Houston.
When a black jazz director picks the white boy for a solo on a television show called “Black Voices,” it means the fucking world. I have rarely felt more “I’m on top of the world” than that. It’s also really funny in retrospect.
If I had to describe my sound, it’s very much like Wynton Marsalis. This is because he’s who I studied the most closely to learn both jazz and classical. Let me tell you about the time I met Wynton. I walked right up to him and said, “Wynton, I’ve waited my whole life to meet you.” It’s funny because I was 15 and also true. I’ve been listening to Wynton since I was in the womb because my dad is also a trumpet player. You can see him most weeks on the Second Baptist broadcast in Houston, or streaming over the Internet.
My dad’s claim to fame is that when he was in high school, he went to the 50 yard line and played “The Star Strangled Banana” all by himself instead of having a singer and accompaniment. I have no doubt that it was absolutely gorgeous, because I inherited his “elements of style.”
Speaking of which, a bookstore worker was talking on Reddit about how this person came in and said she needed a book for her daughter, who was a writer. It was by “shrunken white,” and EVERYONE was confused. But what writer wouldn’t have known it from “shrunken white?”
(It’s “Elements of Style,” by Strunk & White.)
If I have any advice to give writers (because I’ve done it so many years, not because I think I’m “all that and a bag of chips”), it’s write where you feel the most comfortable. Sometimes, it’s at my desk. Sometimes, it’s under the covers.
Write where you feel the absolute least threatened, because your emotions will flow through you a lot easier that way. You’re still writing about your own head when you’re in fiction mode. It’s just expressed as your characters.
That’s because we’re making it up as we go along, hoping you’ll track with us. Even if you’re an architect to plans in advance, that’s no guarantee that people will track with you. It’s your system, not theirs. I am not an architect. I’m a gardener. I start at one place and dig down. Otherwise, it’s not my diary.
It’s trying to impress the crowd, and this time, I don’t want to do that. I want to move and challenge people so that they’ll come along with me and not the other way around. The right people will gravitate, and whether that’s a hundred or 10 million is of no consequence to me because I’m obviously going to write whether people think it’s worthy of money or not. I don’t have to be validated by anyone else. I have received enough praise and been compared to enough people better than me that I feel solid. I don’t have to worry that I’m so far not successful because of lack of talent. If Margaret Cho and Jonna Mendez both think I can write my ass off, then I fucking can.
So, I don’t have to believe the people who say I’m a hack anymore.
In terms of writers to whom I’ve been compared, I get David Sedaris the most frequently. I can be as funny as he is, but I’m not. We don’t often share the same goal, which is to make people laugh outright. Mostly, I can’t because I don’t feel like it. When I’m not feeling funny, I’m not.
And that’s why people come here- to see both the good and the bad- not because mine is better than anyone else’s, but that mine exists over people who aren’t writers. There are lots of people with web sites that don’t actually say anything. I don’t want mine to be one of them.
I would be a powerful speaker in public if I liked my voice, because I have been told I already am a powerful speaker in public. I know this solidly because I have preached sermons multiple times that have been well received. You don’t graduate from being a preacher’s kid without having picked up some tricks over the years. Just because I’m not a minister doesn’t mean I don’t have that patois when I’m writing or in front of a crowd.
I don’t have to believe the people who say I’m not a good preacher.
My grandfather always said “write it tight” because he was a publicity man for Lone Star Steel. He actually learned the same type photography as Jonna Mendez, basically hanging out of an airplane to take overhead photos. It’s interesting to me that she was a spy and he was publicity and yet they learned the same tricks.
In terms of writing it tight, I do in certain sentences because it fits a mood. That mood is the one I’m in at the moment. I am INFJ, neurodivergent, nonbinary, queer, poly, etc. Therefore, I have never made a decision on what kind of person I am in my life.
“The Counselor” personality is a thousand years old when it is born. We are born with a desperate need to search inside ourselves for answers, because we have an absolute neediness when it comes to wanting to improve the world. We need to feel wanted and valued, but the way we do that is by trying to lead people by laying out our vulnerabilities first. It is not a narcissistic game, but a realistic understanding of what it will take to create connection and resolution vs. power over.
My personality is enormous in the smallest of ways. I don’t approach this blog like I’m a god, but that I am whispering into the night and hoping it resonates with other people. This is true among people who do not know me, but is not true among people who know me.
Therefore, I feel like I know Jesus on a deep and spiritual level, and anything written to amplify his life into being divine is not the message and never should have been in the first place.
Sticky, sticky blood theology bothers the everliving shit out of me. That’s because it’s focusing on what I believe was a marketing campaign to spread his story. That I don’t have to have mystery and magic to think that the historical Jesus is valuable and actually taught people things to which they should pay attention. Our entire religion backfired during The Crusades because supposedly religious superiority launched war off a nomadic preacher who taught people to love each other.
Again, it’s the strangest transformation in history.
The first mistake was turning Jesus from a brown person into a white person, and blaming Jews for the crucifixion and not the Romans. He was a destitute homeless person, basically. But he did it by choice.
I do not understand people who trade his supposed glory for what he was actually trying to say– to you and to all the other people in history who have colonized others. My favorite line in The Gospels is “render unto Caesar what it Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” This is because it’s like he’s telling power to its face “you do you, but okay.”
It’s the messages they’ve missed in the middle of the mess. And I am so tired. Evangelicals are exhausting because they treat Jesus like this professional Christian superhero when he was basically thrown away like white people have thrown away black people for hundreds of years.
There is no reason for this foolishness…. And yet, they persist.
Focusing on the resurrection is not about any of that. It’s being willing to believe that if you will be forgiven for your mistakes, it means you’re allowed to make them. It does not mean you don’t have to say you’re sorry….. And that’s the kind of Christianity that’s woven into the Republican Party.
Describe a random encounter with a stranger that stuck out positively to you.
Apparently, if I had just waited until today, the perfect story and the perfect prompt would have lined up. I wrote about a very meaningful encounter with an American Uber driver who was from Afghanistan originally. It always hurts when you can’t make them line up if you’ve published a story that would have been good for the prompt, like, less than 24 hours ago. That being said, I cannot answer all of the prompts because I’ve already answered them. This is either one in which I still have the post in my draft folder, or I took off that day. A large percentage of my readers come from the daily prompt, because people’s answers are highlighted and moved up. That’s how my audience grows every single day.
I am growing most rapidly in India, and honestly I think that’s because WordPress is more popular in India. There’s also not really a language barrier because my Indian housemate and her daughter were both taught English in school. Plus, Indians and I are the same tribe. We’ve been supporting Windows users since we were kids. 😉 I do not know what it is about my personality that attracts Indians, or people from any other country, really. I do consciously think about the fact that I’m writing for an international audience, though.
That’s why so many of my illustrations come from the Bible and Doctor Who. Jesus and The Doctor are two of the most recognizable figures in the world and not just to Americans. I am definitely a Christian and a Whovian, but it’s more than that. Both the Bible and Doctor Who give me an endless library of images with which to explain things to people who have also read/seen these things. There are not many things I can talk about to an audience that read global.
It is also why I talk about intelligence so much. Intelligence feeds my writing because it shows that I am an American, but I am not American-centric. I believe that we are allowed to work in our best interests, but none of this over the top “America is right about everything and other countries are stupid” bullshit. We could learn so much. We just haven’t, and won’t. We’re not smart enough to be humble and admit when things aren’t working and say, “hey. France has a good idea on this. Maybe we should take a look at it.” Substitute any country in the world for France, because there can be good things found in any government right along with the bad.
In short, I want to show more people than just Americans that I hear them, that their stories do matter to me, that I am not an American imperialist but a seeker of knowledge. For instance, Argo is my favorite movie. But when I really get down to brass tacks, can I really say to myself that the US was right to do what they did? I do not want to exclude Iranians and their story by invalidating their feelings and their history. I love that the movie starts out by saying that the Iranians were angry, and the way the voiceover plays out, you hear the anguish in the struggle. I rooted for Tony and the houseguests. I did not judge whether the United States was wrong or right for putting themselves in that situation in the first place. It is too complicated for me to comprehend, because I was not an adult at the time. I was two.
I am a student of the chessboard without assuming that the United States will or should win every game.
For instance, people have thought I was crazy for saying I’d like to retire in Mexico (not likely, but an interesting thought) because of all the drug cartels. I said, “well, if I get hurt by one of the cartels, at least I won’t be in debt up to my eyeballs.” We would be happier with socialized medicine, but most people (even those on Medicare) don’t support it because they don’t understand it. Think about all the school shootings, all the public events that have been ruined by gunfire, and the tremendous amount of money those people had to pay to recover from the privilege of being shot.
People say “if you don’t like it, just leave.” If I leave, there will be no one to vote for these things. Telling me to get out is so much easier than working with me to find a solution, my problem with that mentality in its entirety, and most of what I hate about Republicans and have since the 90s.
Republicans don’t do solutions. They didn’t like The New Deal any better than they liked Obamacare. This has become a pattern. They’re fine with just sitting back and saying no to everything while problems persist- while also not coming up with anything and being angry that Democrats get credit for cool things and they don’t.
For instance, Mitt Romney could have taken on nationalized health care as easily as any Democrat, but he didn’t win the presidency, first of all, and if he’d told the Republican party he planned to overhaul national health care the way he did in Massachusetts, he never would have been the candidate in the first place. This is why they can’t have nice things.
Hillary Clinton started fighting the Republicans on health care in the 90s, when Bill took office…. and it took until Obama to get even the barest minimum. It’s not a complete overhaul, but it’s a start. I have no doubt that’s one of the reasons why Michelle Obama’s focus was on preventative care and not trying to take on legislation like the “Patient’s Bill of Rights.” She focused on diet and exercise, which is the best you can do without medical or legal intervention.
The Republicans aren’t the idea machine, but it’s not because they can’t be. It’s because they won’t. It’s their personality now. All they do is try to stop the Democrats, they don’t try to come up with ideas that will work better. They don’t collaborate with Democrats, so there’s no Republican buy-in to basically anything that represents moving forward.
We are not the same country that we were under Eisenhower, and Eisenhower would not understand the current Republican party any more than I do, because our thinking is very much the same. The GOP has gotten more and more conservative, which has made the Democrats more conservative in order to be electable. What people think of in America as “liberal” is very conservative in the rest of the world.
Very. Conservative.
That’s why it’s hard to see that Donald Trump is a fascist for some people. They do not realize that we were already so tilted to the right in the first place. That fascism wasn’t a huge leap because we’d been sliding toward it so long. It is astounding to me the number of Americans who think Trump is perfectly capable of being president from prison. I am not kidding. There have been polls.
Joe Biden isn’t as liberal as you think he is. He’s not even the most liberal person in our party. In terms of world leaders, he’s very conservative, because the other leaders in the world do have socialized medicine in their countries (the major players). It is impossible to say that conservatives in other countries are equal to our own….. A good for-instance would be comparing Republicans to Tories. When Tories get angry, they don’t try to defund the NHS and take away gay marriage.
I will say that the United States has a history of crazy in the political arena. It is only relatively recently that we stopped rolling our eyeballs at that level of insanity and electing it instead.
Now it’s time for me to go put together my desk chair, because now that I have a really comfortable one, I’m going to be in it all day long. That’s because I put my desk at the foot of my bed so that when I’m writing, I can turn my head to look out onto the greenery and the trees. So much of writing is turning your head to look at the trees.
It’s nice, because I’m normally looking at the whole forest.
Yesterday, I started an entry about the whole move. I didn’t finish it before midnight, so I was going to finish today. Then, I decided I just wanted to start fresh this morning. I got an amazing night’s sleep, something I desperately needed. I will also be taking a bath in eucalyptus at some point. I’m not miserable, I’m just not young enough not to hurt after a move.
Although technically, I did all the packing. Zac moved. By the time he got to my house, I was completely toast because I’d stayed up all night trying to get everything ready. By the time Zac arrived, all we had to do was throw the totes in the back of the car. However, they were a bit too heavy for me while I was exhausted. So, Zac wins the award for being such a thoughtful person and taking over so I didn’t have to bust ass again.
What happened is that I was trying to fold my futon into a couch, and the mattress was upside down and backwards to be able to do that. There’s a special hinging system in the mattress so that one part of it has to be on the seat panel. When I flipped it over to the mattress side, I wrestled it all by myself and didn’t see the “this side down” tag to avoid this problem. So, on Friday night I turned my legs and arms black and blue trying to make more space in the room for sweeping, etc.
The futon and I fought. It’s not easy to admit when you lose to an inanimate object. However, in the end, I did get it done. It was a victory after all the sweat and bruises. So, again, I was glad that Zac could see I was wrecked from lack of sleep and exertion. I honestly believe that the pain is not all due to age. I really fucked myself up, but what other choice to you have in those moments? Where the only answer is “figure it out,” and the problem brings you to tears. So you cry and do it, anyway.
When we were finished with moving, we decided to watch Slow Horses and order pizza. Then, after we’d eaten, Zac pulled out a small box of cannoli, a delightful surprise. He’s been my rock through all of this, and I know for certain that if he’d had the bandwidth, I wouldn’t have been packing alone, either. That’s because it’s a huge give and take. We both get demand avoidance, meltdown, and need to call each other because neurodivergence, what the fuck?
It is a misnomer that autistic people know exponentially more about our disorders than neurotypical people, because we have the lived experience. This ain’t necessarily so, because data is not lived experience. We are as confused and mystified by our behavior as anyone else around us. That’s because I’m self aware enough to know when I’ve hit a wall, leaving my my mind divided in half, doing odd things and trying to figure out why.
Is it that I’m an INFJ and naturally introverted? Is it meltdown, burnout, demand avoidance, anxiety, depression, hypomania, CPTSD, etc.? Those are a lot of heuristics to consider, so managing myself in terms of patient care doesn’t always go so well.
As I was telling Bryn the other day, “when you treat yourself as if you’re the best doctor you’ve got, you probably need a second opinion.”
I need more psychological support than I’m getting, because I need an autism specialist- both for working out problems and the process of creating values and visions.
I am always about “values and visioning,” because that’s language from the church in terms of creating a mission statement. It works personally as well as it does in groups. Therapists aren’t just there to help you overcome your problems. They also help you when you’re stuck career-wise and don’t know where to go from here. Mostly, that involves talking to yourself until you figure out that you have always had your own answers, you just need to be guided to them.
If it helps, I think of my monologue here as therapy, so maybe you can think of your therapist as your raw blog entries. You’re just saying them out loud to the one person who actually knows what to do to help you emotionally suit up for a healthier future.
“Half this game is 90% mental.” -Yogi Berra
In terms of finding that for myself, what I have learned is that being on my own for so long has made it where the bare minimum effort on Zac’s part looks enormous to me. Just the fact that he does things like pick up income due to our income disparity is huge. This is because it says “I want to do this thing with you and I enjoy your company so much that I would rather pay for you to be there with me than worry you’re not going to be able to swing it on your own.” It doesn’t feel like chivalry, but…. not going to lie…… yes, it does. He just only sometimes feels that way. Most of the time, it’s just that he recognizes his own white male privilege. It’s one of the best conversations I’ve ever had in my life, because it was so comforting to see that he wants his only goal in life to make his world better. This doesn’t just extend to me. It extends globally.
Zac’s small kindnesses are so endearing, because it’s not about all the chivalry. It’s remembering things I say and respecting my words as equal to his own. I have not known many men like this, because most of the men I’ve known who date women think their opinion is superior because they’re the provider (generally). When women become the provider, men often get jealous enough to derail their careers. I remember one instance on reddit in which a woman was making bank in her field because it was so incredibly niche and had a lot of sensitive information. He interviewed for a job at one of her competitors and she had to divorce him immediately because he forced her hand. It looked too bad in her niche field to even date a competitor, and this woman had been married a long time. She told him all of this before the interview, and he did it anyway.
I know intimately that I will never have any of those issues.
I have also learned, and I think I’ve written about this before at some point, that it surprised me how little difference there is between dating a man and a woman when both parties are queer. Dating a straight person generally leads to keeping them insecure and anxious that you’re going to leave them for the same sex. There’s still such a cultural stigma on homosexuality that two things are running concurrently. Jealousy and homophobia are best friends when you want the worst possible outcome. On the flip side, gay people think of you dating the opposite sex as betrayal. Frankly, I understand and respect this outlook, because it seems like we’re watching you embrace the thing that oppresses us. There is also no world in which gay people don’t treat bi people like they’re “not queer enough.”
I will give you an example. I surf dating apps just to see who’s out there, and I am astounded by the number of lesbians who have on their profiles “no men, no bisexuals.” This basically comes across to me as “Irish need not apply.” No one ever thinks of bisexual couples who are in the system have the best ability to change it. Since we’re more accepted, we have a bigger platform. I think it’s shitty to use heterosexuality as a shield, but I don’t think it’s wrong for me to date men, or treat other women like trash because they have. It’s really hard for me, because that attitude is friendly fire. I need gay people to hear that in 7.1 Surround Sound, and the bisexual community is over it a “fuck you” amount. Straight people who have this constant insecurity that we’re going to leave them for gay people, gay people have this constant insecurity that we’re going to leave them for the enemy.
🎶🎶 One of these things is not like the other.……… 🎶🎶
I get it. I really do. I don’t have to agree with you, because that’s not my problem to solve for you. Bisexuality has nothing to do with cheating. Cheating is cheating. Bisexuality has nothing to do with polyamory. You’re either wired for multiple partners or you aren’t. They are two separate mindsets/skills. Therefore, that does not have anything to do with sexual orientation, like we’ll die if we don’t have both.
All bisexual people are saying is that their partner’s equipment is a non-issue, it’s not a barrier to a romantic relationship. They are NOT saying “I’m incapable of marriage.” Whether they are or they aren’t is a separate conclusion from attraction.
However, with Zac I don’t feel invisible, and that’s what happens to bisexual people in heterosexual relationships. We both look queer as a three dollar bill, so we don’t exactly exude heterosexual privilege when we’re out and about. I realized that dating a bisexual man was not losing my connection to the queer community with my partner. That it’s important to share whether you’re in a heterosexual relationship or not, because we’re on equal footing when it comes to being oppressed by the system. It’s amazing how often queer cancels out white in a racist theocracy, theocracy being the key word here.
I am tired of the Bible being confused with the Constitution. It’s gone on long enough. I’m tired of atheist hate of Christians because we deserve their hate so much….. In America, Christ’s actual messages have been mangled into a religion he could not support.
If you dare to judge me, you are a Roman, not a Jew. Period.
That’s because Jesus was on the side of the oppressed. American Christianity would make him vomit. It’s tinged with racism because slave masters would use Bible verses to keep their slaves in line and justify their monstrous behavior………..
Not counting on the fact that the slaves would empathize more with the minority who was beaten and killed just like them. That it was religion that gave them enough courage to stand up and fight for freedom. If you are straight, white, male, and cisgender, you don’t see with striking clarity the horror of the situation……….
That Jesus was under the exact same constraints that Americans are now. It’s just that the conservatives weren’t Republicans and Democrats, but Pharisees and Sadducees. Same software, different case. Therefore, white supremacists do not see the irony in being the people who oppress others in his name, repeating the cycle for 2,000 years. Conservative evangelical faith does not see the liberation in the story….. sometimes through thoughtlessness, sometimes through malice. The thoughtlessness is because people who aren’t oppressed don’t need liberation theology. They don’t need to feel inspiration from the fact that a minority was murdered by the state.
Not only that, he wasn’t murdered for actions, he was murdered for ideas. He was murdered by a government who didn’t want the people to think.
“It’s people like you what cause unrest.”
So, when you think about it that way, if you are a Christian policeman with racist beliefs, you’re not actually being a Christian. You’re being a Roman.
You’re not the people for whom your sins were forgiven lightly. That’s because I’m betting it’s easier to forgive the whole world as an abstract concept than it is to forgive the people who are actively in the process of murdering you when you did it.
You are as worthy of redemption as everyone else, because grace and mercy are free of charge. But the more you exclude people, the more you separate yourself from the Jew you claim to adore while mangling his words into everything he didn’t say.
Where in the Bible do you find that Jesus would have accepted the behavior of people like Donald Trump? That is the real mystery of your faith, because your blinders keep you from seeing it. Your words and Jesus’s actions don’t line up, so how dare you think writing your own headcanon and retconning everything to support the crazy idea that Jesus would support war and greed, things like that is everything wrong with white church.
You don’t see the hypocrisy. You don’t see the discomfort you create, even in your regular followers because your services are so fear-based. Why do people have to say they’re a “recovering Christian” at all? Do you think that Jesus would ever want people to go through recovering from trauma given to them in his name?
It is the weirdest transformation in history.
However, a lie can get around the world six times before truth can put on pants.
I am trying to find the truth in it all….. wading through the bullshit of exclusionary Christianity that harms people all over the world and trying to decide what’s worth keeping. My biggest gripe is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so when most Americans think of Christians, they think of Evangelicals. My reputation proceeds me in the absolute worst of ways.
This is problematic because atheists think that all Christians go to some sort of fucked up Bible college and are fed all these bullshit ideas. They don’t think of Harvard, Yale, or Oxford Divinity School first. To them, The Archbishop of Canterbury and Joel Osteen have the same amount of education.
I know most of you know this, but for the record, I’m going to bet the Archbishop has more.
Most people don’t know this, but the former Archbishop, Rowan Williams, was really good friends with Christopher Hitchens. They have some marvelous debates on YouTube if you’re interested.
I think this is a good point because people like Williams are being left out of the conversation. That Christians are intelligent, but there is a war between people who interpret the Bible and people who take it literally. Unfortunately, the people who take it literally, as if the pen was actually in God’s hand, have entwined themselves with the Republican Party and are the loudest idiots in the room.
When people think of Christians, their brains don’t jump to Martin Luther King Jr. and Raphael Warnock. They don’t think of William Barber and Bernice King.
They don’t see liberation theology because they don’t need it.
Zac is an atheist, and he’s the kindest Christian I ever met in terms of showing actual Christlike behavior.
If an Atheist is a better Christian than you, that’s the point at which you need to decide which God you actually serve. Are you tapping into the universe, or trying to control it?
Are you a believer, or are you Pilate, washing your hands of the whole thing because hey.
He’s just a Jew.
And that is the importance of being earnest with ourselves about the Republican Party. We need to decide when we’re going to stop following the Sanhedrin and state that murdered him, or admit it’s been a good run..
It’s quite daunting having to reparent yourself with the skills needed to deal with an autistic kid, only you’re 46. It takes so much energy to be you and parent you at the same time, and I’m sure this resonates with a lot of people. The best part of being an adult is that there’s no one to tell you to go to sleep. The worst part of being an adult is there’s no one to tell you to go to sleep.
There’s no one to tell you to pack your lunch. And there sure isn’t someone to tell you to take a shower. Because parenting yourself is something that “you should already know how to do by now,” and is squarely in the wheelhouse of demand avoidance and a desperate need to fake themselves out of it with social masking. It seems unhealthy and codependent, but having someone to social mask is literally combatting meltdown and burnout. It keeps our routines stable so that we don’t spin out mentally/behaviorally. I believe that exactly all of my problems with Supergrover stemmed from meltdown and burnout, it’s just at the time, I didn’t know how to voice that. I could not tell her “this is too much, I’m overwhelmed.” I would not back down. Meanwhile, my disability is working overtime to prove that I can help her, support her, all that. She has different friendship needs than most people, and I was trying hard to show that I knew why and respected it. In fact, most things she thought of as “crazy” were about respect, but you can’t help a little old lady across the street if she doesn’t want to go. She’ll bang her purse on your head.
There’s already a perfect end to her story in my head, and it’s more than I would ever hope for in this lifetime, but not impossible. It’s a phone call. She and Michael are telling me that we have an important event to attend. Or maybe it’s just the two of us- who knows whether said event would be as important to him as it is to us. That’s because the event in question would be honoring someone who thinks the world of both of us.
But right now, I need to disconnect. I remembered that I had some tags on Supergrover’s public page, and I untagged myself so that they weren’t public anymore- not even I can see them. I’m not worried though, because our relationship has never lived on Facebook. It’s been in the quiet moments of the night, where a blank page starts off as intimidating, and then feels like a blanket.
As I’ve said, I write about Supergrover to calm myself. Echologia to bring me down when I feel shortness of breath, heart, and brain race. That’s why everything swirling around me is creating shutdown in terms of not knowing where to start. I defeated it last night, but I’m not sure I have the energy to do as much today as I did yesterday. I’m what you would call “indoorsy,” so when I suddenly have to exert as much will and energy as possible when I don’t have it, the wind gets knocked out of me pretty fast. Going to the gym would make my body stronger, but it would not stop me from getting lost in my own little world and falling off the elliptical. I have done it thrice.
With my kind of autism, I take most information in through sight. I can observe and note human behavior, but my processing differences make it feel like a double standard. How do I know how other people act when I am nothing like them? Learning to social mask. “I think I can remember how to act like someone else I know.” I do not pick up the morals in a situation if they are opposite to my finely tuned sense of justice. I pick up how someone else has dealt with a situation. And because I’m imitating someone else, it feels like the only time I use my real voice is here.
But the reason you can’t claim you know me based on my writing is that you cannot see my third dimension, all the thoughts that don’t end up here. There’s a lot more I can’t say than I can, and the things I can’t say are harder than the things I can, and with the little knowledge I do have, that makes me cry and shake enough.
It’s not because I’m a naturally depressed person. It’s that digging down into yourself and looking at your worst flaws is the worst job on earth. I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t constantly rewarding. More people identify with my writing than don’t, and for the people who don’t identify with it, or have a problem with something I’ve said, they’re free to bring it up with me…….. or not. But I already know that if you’re covering up a feeling, you’re going to treat me differently and have the audacity to say my perception isn’t real.
For instance, I could never tell where I stood with Supergrover because sometimes she was like a loving aunt/big sister character in my life, and at others, she said really hurtful things like “you only know random factoids about my life.” I knew this was bullshit, just a dart.
I know this because all of the sudden, when it was my story to tell, did she start having a problem with the things she has told me. So, which is it? Am I the person that only knows random factoids about your life and you aren’t worried about anything I’ve told you, or is that the brave face you put on when you know I’m entitled to my own stories? I know this because she told me I was entitled to all of my feelings, while also raging that I’d let go of information she would have liked to keep quiet and it was incredibly hurtful.
I don’t just know random factoids about her life, because if that were true, she wouldn’t spend time analyzing my work to make sure she’s still unidentified. She’s said many times that her story ceased to be mine and long time ago, so I thought nothing of writing about our mutual trauma because it is indeed what handfasted us. I couldn’t explain anything without explaining it first. Otherwise, I just look like a lovesick teenager chasing after someone who doesn’t want me. This is not correct, and it never will be. We’ve both loved each other to the best of our ability, and love isn’t enough when you both need to stop treating each other as if they’re trying to trying to fight you all the time.
It was gaslighting, and a lot of it, but not because she was a narcissist. She was afraid, and there’s a big difference. The gaslighting was pretending for years that we were fine.
Morgan Freeman: They were not, in fact, fine.
If I take everything literally, that you have no worries about what you’ve told me and you haven’t, that your stories aren’t mine anymore, etc., do I actually deserve her ire in this case?
It would be helpful to know so many things. How many people know she’s Supergrover, for one. How much detail do I need to hide because more people than just me know that identity? Who is my audience that directly affects you? Why are you waffling on whether I am a straight up problem or not? If I’ve caused someone pain, I want to know the specifics. Otherwise, I will spiral out for days and days trying to figure out what it is that I’ve said that they’re mad about.
She comes by it honestly, because for us to really engage, we’d need some time to ourselves, even if it was asynchronous. She doesn’t often have time to write letters that are anywhere near the length of mine, so I think that she thinks I always expect that of her, too. I don’t. But if I’ve had a specific need go unaddressed for years, I only want the problem to be resolved, not assurance that you have read every single thing I’ve ever written. Ignore the rest, it’s all chatter. But it really got to me when she said that I was so demanding of her time and ability to give of herself, when I have been saying for 10 years that I do not deserve her and I will take what I can get.
Anything above that is off limits, but when you don’t give me any limits, I’m going to dream that way. I wasn’t “being demanding,” I was dreaming of a time where she naturally had more bandwidth- retirement. But, you’re going to think that I’m demanding of your time if you never tell me what your boundaries are. She said that three words were all she could manage until I called her on her bullshit for months. That she had to stop not giving me information and blaming me for what writing came out of it.
A lot of this is wrong and misguided because we didn’t have any boundaries. A lot of this is wrong and misguided because I was using one concept for another. A lot of this is wrong and misguided because I said I could read facial expressions and body language. But not when I constantly get “all is well, you’re worried about nothing……..” right up until she’s so angry that being apart is better than being together.
I don’t think I was wrong for bringing up a problem so we could solve it. I did think it was a problem that I couldn’t make heads or tails of her feelings until she said enough words that I knew my anxiety was for naught. But how could I know that without any information at all? It was so confusing, and why I resigned the game. I was tired of constantly being confused. For instance, “you have absolutely NO idea what I’m dealing with,” scaring me away from writing at all…… and “I have had the choice, countless times, to stop what I was doing and didn’t.” Telling me you’re that busy while also running from me is unacceptable. It’s a coverup, and very conditional love. If I don’t walk on eggshells because you’re mad and won’t tell me that, then I can just fuck right off. Is that in any way a fair and balanced relationship?
How do I make you happy if you don’t seem happy with anything?
And by making her happy, I don’t mean that I have the capability to change people from within (although I have been told I do help). She has to find those changes within herself, because I’m not here to suss them out for her. Why she can’t be open and honest and has to stick to the people-pleasing schtick is on her, and I finally saw her get out of that rut……..
She stroked my ego mightily, and my chest puffed up. When she told me that she couldn’t control anyone’s reactions, she quoted me directly without realizing it. Or she did and she was trying to hurt me by throwing my own words in my face……….. and I turned out to be teary-eyed and impressed. I’ve always had the motto “help her, anyway.”
So, when I saw the same behavior in Daniel- get angry at someone for bringing up a problem instead of acknowledging there is one- I was out and quickly. The relationship with Supergrover destroyed me, and I didn’t want another 10 years of fighting a battle that someone needs to fight on their own. It’s not my job to tiptoe around anyone. When I told Supergrover that I had issues I wanted to talk about, she said that I should find friends who didn’t bring issues into my life. There is no such thing. It was Daniel’s first answer as well. If we can’t solve this in five minutes, our relationship isn’t worth jack or shit. It’s too much. If there is a battle inside someone, even two minutes of vulnerability is too hard and it hurts too much. They won’t let go because they’re afraid of losing control, but life doesn’t make sense until you realize you never had any control in the first place.
If I could tell Daniel what I know about my story, the most private parts, he would shit himself for saying I that “just because I wrote in bulk doesn’t mean I write anything of substance.” This is because I’ve never met anyone who could play “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” quite like SG. And she thought I wrote something of substance. I will take that ego boost over anything else that happens in my career. My ability to write could be taken away tomorrow and I’ll know that I accomplished every single one of my goals.
The first was to be seen and heard.
The second was to have people who identified with me that would tell me when they liked something and when I was an asshole with a God complex. That’s because I don’t have to take a single piece of your advice, but that doesn’t mean I won’t hear it. I will be angry and defensive at first, so I usually pop off and regret, another thing I’m learning to manage, because my response is always different than a knee-jerk reaction. But sometimes I write down my knee-jerk reactions because they’re important to prove to me later where I need to grow.
I also think that Supergrover and I should have a conversation about “painting my feelings as fact,” because I could write the way she wanted me to if I understood what she meant. And the reason I’d defer to her is that she was a writing major…….. and yet somehow still thinks of me as “the talent.” I do not know how to write in a way that doesn’t make anything look like a fact, because I am narrating a plot as well. She’s whipped my ass into shape as a writer before, so I have no doubt she could help me with this, too. However, I will do some research on autobiographical writing and see if anything resonates with what she said that gives me a little more context than wondering how and when I’ve been an asshole.
I play AITA all day long with myself, because it’s the fight within me of “say nice things” and “no one forced you to come here.” As I’ve said, the people in my real life knowing what I think of them is their choice.. If they want to be here, welcome. If you always have a problem with what I say, I encourage you to change the channel….. because seriously. Who even am I? Who cares about my opinion?
The only person that really should is me, because it informs how I feel about myself.
How I feel about myself this minute is that I’m proud I handled my move all by myself so that it is free to me- as in, I’m just going to hand my deposit and leftover rent directly to Colin on day one, and my rent hasn’t gone up, so I don’t have to make up the difference.
With Silver Spring, I have gotten two miracles in a row. Hayat and Colin were both the first people I called, and they both turned out to be right for me. Towards the end of April, I’ll have been here a full nine years, and I’m only missing it by a week.
I know from experience that we still might get one more light snowstorm, because when I arrived here in late April of 2015, there was snow on the ground. It was melting, but still. It had snowed on like, April 20th or something. I think I arrived on the 23rd.
Hayat texted me that it feels like it was just yesterday she picked me up at the Metro. I understand the sentiment, because in some ways, it really feels like I just got here. In others, this has been the longest 10 years of my life…… but so necessary in terms of growth and development that I cannot trade them. If I hadn’t become a blogger, I would not have seen autism coming. I would not have seen being nonbinary coming. I would not have seen how any of my friends affect my life, from besties to the smallest interaction.
It’s small interactions that get me the most, because I’m the worst at casual conversation. If I did something weird in front of you in 1993, don’t worry. I’m still thinking about it.
While I pack my “going to Zac’s” bag and try not to flip out that we’re seeing Jason Moran tonight. If I’d had time, I would have ordered a Senators baseball cap for the event, because Duke Ellington’s first job was selling peanuts at games, where he got to know Teddy Roosevelt peripherally because every once in a while Roosevelt would ride his horse down to the field.
So, if you ever doubt the power of living in Washington, remember that a middle class black kid from DC became friends with the President of the United States…………………. long before integration was even a thing.
In fact, that’s the perfect analogy for my life. I have the brain that’s capable of seeing patterns in world conflict like a president, but I have only managed to convince the people around me that I’m selling peanuts.
What I have learned through living in Washington is that people prefer to be treated like they’re all alike on a human level, and revel in friends who aren’t obsessed with who they are and what they can do for me, a classic Washington stereotype. Republicans sniff each other’s butts by asking how much they make.
People do that to me sometimes. Someone asked me how much my sister made, and it was so fucking rude. But, we were at one of Lindsay’s work events, so I didn’t want to go apeshit. I just said, “she’s a Democrat. Aim low.” The truth is that I only know she makes more than me. That’s it, because I don’t ask those questions, and she usually doesn’t volunteer that information except when she’s telling me what a job potentially will pay her if she gets it. I always tell her to aim for the stars, because not only does she travel, she eventually wants to live in a different state where the cost of living is a lot higher than Texas. She doesn’t know how she’d do it, it’s a pipe dream because she doesn’t often think about moving. But, every little bit helps when you are trying to save up for a dream.
I will use DC as an example because she doesn’t want to come here, so it’s not giving away where she’d look if she was actually interested in leaving Texas.
In DC, MD, and VA, buying a house here is ridiculously expensive, and the closer you want to “inside the Beltway” or “downtown living,” the price skyrockets exponentially. An apartment in the city is going to run you about $2500/month. Even in Silver Spring, you won’t find an apartment for less than $1,000…… maybe, maybe if it’s an efficiency. However, management companies are ridiculously relentless in raising rent, so you’ll be paying over 1k/mo in no time if they advertised cheap rent to get you in the door.
And, for $2500/mo in DC, you still only get a white box, especially in neighborhoods that aren’t riddled with crime. If you are in an area with violent crime, depending on where it is, you’ll still pay $2500 because it’s walking distance to the Metro or something like that. Housing does not go down when DC is only 60 sq miles.
Buying a house might be a little cheaper if you have the funds to renovate. You can get a good deal if it’s just a lot with a barely standing building. The land is the expensive part, not the construction.
But then you have to live in DC, and some of their laws are just plain strange. It’s weird that things come through the Senate, because DC’s needs are thrown under the bus by pork barreling.
Like, the bill will be something like “$15/minimum wage” or whatever it is that will do the city good, and someone will put a total ban on abortion in the bill. So, the bill gets struck down and the Republicans say “they wanted this minimum wage so bad, and then they didn’t even want to compromise.”
Make someone else look like that bad guy, because nothing you’ve done has ever elicited a reaction.
Global and national are the same as local.
Generally, if a person will react in a certain way, a country will also act like that. It’s a chessboard, and I see patterns all the time.
The important part is to just keep stitching. The quilt will come together eventually.
Or, with autism, maybe it never will. But I am not interested in turning myself into a person I was never meant to be.
Stories That Are All True 