Are you here?

 "Are you here?"

The question came kind of out of the edges of the universe. I'm standing at the register at Trader Joe's. I handed my bag to the cashier, who started to sort through it and ring up my purchases. Canned tomatoes. Salad. Snacks. Ice Cream. I'm sorting through my wallet to find my credit card. It occurs to me that he's the one that asked.

"Am I here?"

I don't know, really. I am tense.  I take the question as a kind of accusation. Why is he asking me this? What am I doing to make him think otherwise? But I don't know if I'm here.

Work has been miserable. My supervisor is the absolute worst person I have had to work for in my life. That includes the defrocked minister who somehow was still a self-righteous piece of shit who still cheats on his wife and embezzles from his business. That includes the person I called the "Black Hole" because everything I put on her desk vanished, and I'm pretty sure she'd slide into oblivion during every one of our one-on-one conversations. That includes the alcoholic, bipolar stroke victim with heart issues. That includes the toxic positivity gaslighting cheerleader. That includes me.

I took a job in civil rights and I thought it was a way for me to really engage with the content in ways I just hadn't in the last decade of my government service. I certainly had some interesting challenges to tackle, but my heart was never in my last job. It was a video game, a science project, not a lot more. But civil rights! This was something I care about! I could really pull some levers and make some positive changes in the world if I could get into this rocket ship and GO!

But that was naive I think. Even if my supervisor wasn't the fucking worst, the way that civil rights policy works in the government isn't as free-flowing and dynamic as you might think in a Reading Rainbow sort of way. No one really wants to protect civil rights, not really. They think they HAVE to, so they do enough of the things to feel like they've met obligations, but almost always, when the civil rights office shows up, people start looking at their watches and complain that we talk too much. The policy work is fraught, but even in that environment we have done some good. Small things, little tweaks, gentle (or not so gentle) reminders of why we do the civil rights dance. Sometimes it pays off. Not often, but sometimes.

I find it funny how we celebrate our little successes like they're the Superbowl. It's... nice. My team is nice. Mostly.

But due to my supervisor being a goddamned nightmare person, I hate it here. I hate my job. I don't think anyone really cares much about the work. No one above me, anyway. I think they're preening and trying to engineer a world where they look successful and PRODUCTIVE without actually doing anything that matters. It's probably like that in a lot of places, both in the government and private sector, but I kind of long for the days when I had a stack of widgets I had to produce any given day and I could just chew through those. I don't think anyone in my office could describe a pile of widgets if they had to. I sigh.

My stress at work has bled into my personal life. I'm jumpy around friends. I am hesitant to reach out to people. I snap at my kids when they're acting up. I just want to be left alone at night. Thinking up meals is a trudge through quicksand. They won't eat it anyway. Some of this is just my nascent depression acting up, spurred on by all that cortisol. Some of it is my naturally sunny disposition, my inclination to the void. L'appel du vide. But I can absolutely draw the major lines back to the work thing. With an apparently meaningless job that requires I sit and stare at it eight plus hours per day, sucking the joy out of everything else I do, well... yeah, seems to be the cause.

Am I here?

The cashier is a bit odd for Trader Joes. He's an older guy, small in stature. Kind of a funny vibe, like he's being jovial. His movements are somewhat exaggerated, like he's got a pretty good muscle memory for moving things but he's nervous, overshooting the scanner just a bit. Nothing getting lost, but he has to recover. I think maybe he's a little new at this. Second career or third? He strikes me a little bit as an artist, a painter perhaps. I've known his type a lot. He's observant but not necessarily engaged exactly. A person used to being an observer, not always being observed himself. He doesn't mean me harm, that's clear.

My shirt. It's my shirt. It says "You Are Here" on the front, referencing a point on the island of Oahu. I got it at a brewery when we visited last year. It's this mustard yellow thing with blue and orange print. It's outside my normal color schemes. It's kind of a hippy, beach bum vibe. I bought it because it was different than my normal style. I wore it that day because I needed something other than that spinning dark maelstrom at the center of everything. I was buying little ice cream cones in a box.

"Oh, yeah, I guess... I mean, I WAS here. This little dot is a place on Oahu, the Hawaiian island."

"Oh! That's interesting!" says the artist cashier. His nervousness subsides. Mostly. I recommend that he go if he can. I mention that the airfare was a lot less than I expected, considering it was March and whatever. He was clearly thinking about it. Receipt pours out of the printer. I have to be on my way.

Now, I'm not there. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here.

She doesn't whisper 'fuck' in church, but she might yell it.

 My mother died last week. She had been living with lung/brain/bone cancer for about 6 years, and ultimately died due to shit related to the lung cancer part. 

I edited her obituary:

Debra Lee Diroll (69) of Ravenna passed away Monday, December 26, 2022 at her home surrounded by her family. She was born July 16, 1953 in Cleveland, Ohio to Thomas and Patricia (Hall) Ebner. Debra was a U.S. Army veteran and worked as an executive secretary for various companies and in the produce department of Giant Eagle. 

Debra loved her pets, loud music, NASCAR, wildlife, gardening, baking, and video games. She will be remembered for her remarkable cookie recipes, irreverent humor, expansive kindness, and deep care for her loved ones and people she had barely met. 

She is survived by her husband of nearly 50 years Thomas A. Diroll, children Rachel Anne Diroll-Zack and Andrew Thomas Diroll-Black, stepdaughter Stephanie Common-Diroll; grandchildren Sydney, Damian, Nicholas, Zachary, Jillian, Jackson, and Minerva; mother Patricia Ebner; and siblings Judy Shuster, Robin Nolan, Patricia Ebner-Grubb, Charlotte Ebner, James Ebner and John W. Ebner. She was preceded in death by her siblings Terry Anne Kirkpatrick and Thomas Ebner, Jr. 

The family would like to thank all of the doctors and staff at University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center, and all the players around the world Debra met and played with over her 17 years playing World of Warcraft. 

Debra requested that there be no calling hours or services–cremation has taken place. In lieu of flowers, memorials should be made to the Portage County APL, P.O. Box 927, Ravenna, Ohio 44266. 

The things I didn't say included how she really enjoyed cannabis, hated bullshit, and was a massive hypocrite about almost everything. In a really funny way.

The truth is that this world was cruel to my mother. She had to deal with the things that too often daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers have to endure, for her entire life. The challenges she faced made her cautious about things that she really wanted to do. She would hide candy everywhere because she was afraid people would make fun of her childish eating habits or worse--eat  her candy. She made fun of me  for being a picky eater my whole life but then refused to even try something that was a clear combination of things she loved (Thai food, lady... THAI FOOD. It's all the things you like, together in a bowl). Her professional and home lives made her vulnerable and shameful for making mistakes. She'd get  yelled at or gaslighted for missing a payment or not getting an invoice right. She was always put upon by men who were probably making more missteps than she ever did.

She had to hide purchases from my father because she didn't want to have to explain that she just wanted things. She wasn't buying gold toilet seats, just candy and sweaters and things she liked... but she didn't want to endure the criticism or the questions. She called me up a couple of times to help her pay off her credit cards for this purpose, and I was happy to do so.

Despite all of this, she was so kind. She would put up with almost anyone's shit to a point, tell them it would be OK, that things will be better. She found ways to help people by giving them clothes or buying them a drink or putting them in touch wither lawyer-kid. She would listen to everyone's garbage and moderate Facebook beefs. Oh grodd, the facebook profile my mother left behind is a leftist propaganda wonderland. It's a Daily Kos bumper sticker. So much. SO MUCH.

She was friends with some kid from Brazil in World of Warcraft. She'd give life advice to orcs and night elves and all kinds of weirdos. Some of her WoW friends were people I played with in 2004. It's really odd to see those names in my mom's friends list when I quit playing the game a dozen years ago or more.

So when she died, she didn't leave a massive hole in the world like some celebrity. People will not burn candles and sing in her honor (well, maybe some). She had a small little island that she occupied but it was covered in a kaleidoscope of shiny things. It was a comfortable place despite the sharp edges here and there. It was a reminder that despite the bullshit of the universe, you can still chill out and have fun getting stoned and playing video games.

Pull My Reins

 I feel like I should get back into some routines. I hate routines, but I understand they're good for people of a certain age. So blogging might be a thing.

Let me tell you a bit about music. I don't know that I can live without it. I remember when I was in college, and my girlfriend at the time was trying to take her Catholic faith very seriously and gave up music for Lent one year. I ... I should have known that that wasn't going to work out. But alas. She left the church and I still have music.

This week I went to a live show in DC at the 930 club. It appeared to be a full-capacity show, with approximately 1100-1200 people if my group size estimation powers are still good. That's the same capacity as pre-COVID. It was a bit much for my companion, who had to go outside to get some air at one point. The band was IDLES.

In the 90s, when I was growing up, if a band was really openly anti-war, anti-hate, it would have fallen into a weird little sub-genre of acts that were kind of a joke.  "positive punk" or some shit. But now, in this world, a band like IDLES can just blast into a tune with the intro of "this is an anti-fascist song" and it flies. Every single song they played felt like the final song. They played the crowd like another instrument. It was glorious, and it was very much about goodness and love. Fucking amazing band. Life changing show.

What's in a name?

 When I got married in 2007, I decided to hyphenate my last name. My wife planned to do so, so I figured it would be fair and fine for me to do so as well. In Ohio, there is no provision for men to change their names upon marriage, but women are given the freedom to change their names pretty much any way they choose. I had to go through a separate name-change action in civil court, which I completed maybe a year and a half after the wedding.

By that time, I had started my career in federal service. All of my records and credentials included only my original last name, not my hyphenated one. Over the course of years I got my records updated, got new credentials, and in most cases, had to explain why I changed my name in addition to providing the proof of name change from the court.

One thing that has persisted in my federal records is my email address. While my name shows as the hyphenated version, my actual address is still just the original name. This is left over from the mission support guy in NYC who did the change to my Outlook profile--he changed my visible name without changing my email address. He said something at the time like "well, if you decide you want to change it back, this is easier." There was a sense that maybe my wife had put me up to it, or that maybe I'd reassert my masculinity and go back to my proper name. 

These kinds of biases have not gone away. Men, however, have always kind of looked at me quizzically when I explain it. My neighbor, who is a pretty liberal dude but about 18 years my senior still calls me by my original last name, even though he's only known me with the hyphen. He even said something like, "yeah, but that's not your real last name." I usually just shrug off the intimations, as most of the men making these comments are either older or from a more masculine cultural background. But it has bothered me.

It occurred to me that this is a form of discrimination. Me choosing to  hyphenate my name is a little queer. It's not in line with the regular gender roles of men keeping their names and women maybe hyphenating (with the suggestion that a woman who hyphenates isn't properly subservient to her man anyway). So there's a nuance that I'm not as male as I should be, and therefore, a bit queer. I'm not the poster child for queerness or being discriminated against for who I am and how I've chosen my name. I have not had to deal with any of the shit my gay or trans friends have dealt with, or even the kinds of discrimination that any woman deals with on an average day in America. 

But it is discrimination. Women in my organization who have been married have had their credentials and email addresses updated within days of submitting the request. There shouldn't be any reason mine has been held back.

So I'm pushing to get my stupid email updated in part because I want to normalize this kind of change and name use for men (CIS WHITE AMERICAN-BORN MEN, YES) in my organization and just chip away at that dividing line. Me, 5% queer, doing my part.

UPDATE: My organization does one thing efficiently, and that's update people's names in the IT directory. They then deleted my old profile, so ... I was unable to log into my computer all day. I had to dig around and find the actual PHONE number to call our help desk and talk to a PERSON to get it resolved. But eventually we did and it's all good now.

Got COVID. Nothing else to do but sit around and write

 Well. After a year of being safe and teaching my kids to wear masks and everything, I go out and get my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and find out that I actually HAVE COVID.

I got my first shot last week and the usual symptoms started up right away--light headache, body aches, fatigue, etc. Within two days, I had a sore throat that progressed to a severe sore throat. My doctor recommended I go get a COVID test just to be sure and BAM. Got COVID. So did the wife, but neither of the kids, strangely.

Fun part, this was supposed to be Spring Break. We were set to go see my kids' grandparents on Monday, but by then we were all confirmed to be in quarantine. The last time we planned such a visit was in November. En route to that meeting, a deer t-boned our Toyota Prius and totaled it. At least this time, we don't have to worry about picking glass out of our hair. (The deer died, btw. Six shots to the skull thanks to the local deputies).

So here we are. My symptoms have mostly abated. I'm just really tired and run out of energy every 4 hours or so. And I'm cranky--every little thing the kids do, I just want to throw them out the window. I haven't, not yet, anyway. It's just  the worst, longest, stay-at-home weekend ever.

Neighbors and friends have been supportive, though. People volunteering to go to the store for us, dropping off snacks and presents for the kids. It's nice. It would be nicer if we could all just be vaccinated and safe and hang out like normal, but oh well.

How did we get COVID,  you ask? Oh, fun story. So maybe it was because our kids are in school and one of them brought it home. Possible. But it could also be because we broke down about two weeks ago and went to a restaurant with the kids. We wore masks and did our best to distance, but we did dine indoors and there were some people around, so maybe that. Yeah, assholes, I know.

We were probably asymptomatic and the vaccine blew it up. We could have been walking around for weeks, contagious, and not known about it. We could have gone to visit the grandparents and gotten them sick. Maybe it's a good thing that we caught it after all. Ugh. Back to sleep with me. I'm not making sense.

Twitching, chewing, humming, whistling

Over the last few months, we had been getting signals from our kid's kindergarten teacher that he was having trouble at school. First it was just questions about how to get him to pay attention and focus on lessons (a common problem for kindergarteners, boys in particular). Then it was provoking other kids because he was annoying them. Finally, it was inappropriate touching--he touched someone's butt when they were at the drinking fountain.

We all noticed that he was "self stimulating" in various ways: fingers in his mouth, working spit around his his cheeks, scratching his arms, whistling, humming, and sometimes hands down his pants fiddling with his junk.

When we raised issues like this to our Battlestar Galactica-style pediatrician (sans smoking), he said, "I could send him to a child psychologist who will prescribe whatever you want... or, you could wait and see if he'll grow out of it. He's a five-year-old boy, after all." That seemed reasonable, so we just said, yeah, let's wait and see. We'll work on ways for him to cope with whatever is making him anxious.

"Take a deep breath."

"Fingers!"

"HAND CHECK!"

These things worked, for a time. But they were symptom-specific, and as soon as he'd master one urge, another would crop up. If he was particularly tuned-up, he'd do all the things ALL AT ONCE. One Friday evening, during dinner, he couldn't sit still to eat his food, and as I talked him through eating he was compulsively scratching my elbow, chewing his other hand while whistling, spitting, and humming at the same time all while tapping his feet and rolling his eyes ("googly eyes").

It was clear what was happening: the Wolf wasn't growing out of his nervous behaviors. He was growing INTO them.

We scheduled him for an ADHD assessment in the fall. There are apparently enough nervous parents out there that getting a kid vetted for ADHD takes some waiting.

We also had a 504 conversation with the school--that is, we invoked the kid's rights under the law for equal education. If he was assessed as having a condition that affected his academic performance, then the school was obligated to provide him whatever accommodations he needed to be successful. After that meeting, it was clear that he had some issues, but not so bad that he needs specialized help from the school.

The hard part of getting here was the stigma. Nearly everyone in this process has said "Yeah, but he's a boy." As if boys are supposed to be fidgety. I think they are, but maybe I just believe in the stigma? Anyhow, accepting that the kid might be ADHD has changed how we deal with his more frustrating behaviors.

The Wolf sometimes won't go to bed when he's supposed to. Sometimes being almost all the time. He comes out of his room for about an hour almost every night to TELL YOU SOMETHING or to GET A DRINK or because his ROOM IS SPOOKY. It's just because he doesn't know how to turn off his brain and get some sleep. I can relate. I have been an insomniac most of my life and it's usually because I have some SHIT TO DO or I might need to WORRY ABOUT THIS THING or maybe REPLAY AN ENTIRE MOVIE IN MY HEAD.

So, knowing this, instead of GET TO BED RIGHT NOW it's "tell me about it on the way back." We indulge his weirdness, let it play out, let him unwind the coiled up thing in his skull so he can sleep, maybe.

With food, it's all about bargaining. EAT THIS AND YOU CAN PLAY OVERWATCH.

With mornings it's all routine. Have breakfast and then get dressed.

Some of these tendencies may have been a part of why the Montessori experiment went so poorly, but that doesn't relieve them from my rage. Rather, I feel that they should have recognized this and tried different tactics beyond the exclusion and disappointment they worked on him.

We'll see how the assessment goes this fall. Hopefully he's in a range where therapy or medication will be unnecessary or very limited, and we can just get into a new routine.

The best part of these conversations so far has been when the kindergarten teacher (kind of an anxiety bundle in her own right) explained, she thinks he's doing okay as is, but she thinks he could be above and beyond. Let's just take away this obstacle and imagine what he can do.

So that's good.

A Year

Over the last year, a lot has changed. After enduring the bullshit of the Montessori school, we put our son into the daycare that took care of him up to the age of four. The ladies who run the place told us, "that's not our Jackson, but don't worry, we'll take care of him." Within a few weeks his tantrums and night terrors ended, and he was turning into the kid we knew from before.

Last summer, just as he was getting ready to turn five, we put him in the local summer day camp, run by a company called Kids After Hours (KAH). The stupid, yellow and black clock face mascot is a common enough sight, plastered across many a minivan or sedan throughout Montgomery County. Apparently, they have a thing where if they spot your car with the KAH magnet, they'll post on their Facebook and give your kid a free week of daycare or something. I was skeptical at first, because I am always skeptical of organized... anything... but it turned out to be wonderful.

We would drop the Wolf off at an elementary school gym (that was otherwise unused during the summer) and he would just play all day. Play with toys, with other kids, with the big, inflatable waterslides they rented, whatever he wanted. He came home excited and exhausted. He made friends, he got picked on by budding bullies, and became a favorite of some of the camp counselor people. The Wolf has a way with people.

Something we noticed over the spring and summer was that the Wolf had some mental scars from the Montessori school. He became much more eager to please everyone around him. He just wanted whoever it was to like him and... I don't know. Reassure him somehow? No, that's not it. This manifested whenever he thought he had disappointed you somehow. Any perceived failure turned into fearful eyes, tears, and choking apologies for whatever he thought he had failed at. He would throw himself into your belly and his knees would give out and he'd sob that he was sorry, saying "I'm a good boy" in such a miserable croak. It was clear that whatever happened, he was given a pretty heavy dose of disappointment-shaming at that school, and the effect is that he just wants whoever is criticising him to stop and tell him its okay.

We reassure him and tell him whatever the problem was isn't that big of a deal. We aren't disappointed or mad, we just want to know if HE is okay. We just want him to know it's okay to make a mistake now and then, and we use that as a chance to learn or help in some way. If there's something that's broken, we try to fix it or replace it, that's all. And take a deep breath. That's it. Another one. Okay, now can you help me clean this up?

It got better after he started kindergarten. The Wolf got into a summer program to fast-track kids into regular public school. He basically got an extra six weeks of kindergarten for free, with regular teachers. After a week or so of adjustment, he was flying. When he went into the Montessori school, the Wolf could write his name and spell all kinds of things. When he got out of it, he couldn't read but he could set a table (WTF???). After a few weeks of kindergarten, he was singing songs about multiplication.

The Wolf's confidence grew every week. He started getting the best marks you can get, and was identified as a "role model" for other students. He was excited to talk about what he learned and it was clear he was in good hands. Our local public school is staffed by some of the best-meaning people I've ever met in education, and I've known a bunch.

He started regular kindergarten in September and, while not perfect, has had an excellent time. The Wolf can read at about a second grade level already, and he's pretty good at math and science. He has friends who draw pictures for him. He writes notes to people. He looks forward to going to school every day.

A year later, there are still shadows of the damage. He doesn't plead and hope that he's a "good boy" anymore, I think because he knows we love him and have no doubts that he's a good boy, but sometimes he gets overwhelmed. A few weeks ago, he knocked over a cup of chocolate milk and was so embarrassed he started crying and dry heaving, even though we were calmly asking him to go get some paper towels. He got through it, but it was rough for a few minutes.

Now, he's sitting next to me while I write, learning to play our favorite game, Overwatch, in the training mode. His hands aren't quite big enough to work all the keys at once, but he's moving around the practice area and blowing up robots with a lot of excitement. He wants so desperately to participate in this game that I play, and he keeps telling me "I taught you to play this, right? I'm good at this, I'm good at all the characters!" And so on.

And now, this: