Happy Christmas to those of you who recognize such a holiday. If you don’t celebrate this holiday, I hope you have an easy time avoiding us annoying assholes who do. I’m sure it gets annoying year after year.

Today is going to be a day for thinking. I’m thinking about that article about dating losers that I posted yesterday. I’m thinking about it because… way too many of those points describe me. More than a couple feel kinda like Noah. We have some issues. But the big difference between us and that article is that we both feel that we fuck up. We talk about how we are behaving badly. We try to change. We have both changed a great deal in ten years. Some of those behaviors were a big problem early in our relationship and have mellowed a lot.

But I don’t have the spoons to get into it point by point. Which is feeling anxious-making. We really need to work on our relationship going forward. Which feels hard this minute.

I put primer on the wall in the play room yesterday. Today I will do the background/sky/earth colors in there so that tomorrow when folks show up to paint Minecraft… they can just go. It’ll be fun.

I finished the ceiling in autumn/winter. It’s gorgeous; it looks like storms chasing across the sky. I’m so in love.

I spent a lot of time talking to the construction worker yesterday. I’m down to just one now. Which means he may be here till February. I talked to the main boss guy yesterday. He’s not happy with my prediction for how long this will take. He says it has to go faster. The worker and I raise an eyebrow and shrug. No. It doesn’t have to go faster. It has to be done right. It might not be finished till February and that’s ok. The boss guy says I am the most patient client he has ever worked with to the point where it’s a little weird. He said, “We have already more than doubled the time I thought it would take and you are ok with tripling it. That’s never happened to me before.”

Well, the work that is being done is gorgeous and I’m not going to fuck with a good thing. I’ve been waiting two years. I’m not going to rush once we get to the beautiful tile I will have to look at every day. If the pace slows down to a crawl because hand setting each individual tile sucks… I will roll with that. I just want the playroom back. And vanities in the bathroom (which won’t get in the way of tile) so I can get all the shit out of the living room.

I can handle moving slowly with tile. I want it done right.

This is not a normal tiling job where you put on sheets of tile and rarely have to cut anything. This is a bitch.

He may get an assistant who is also mainly a tile guy. We’ll see.

Also: I got my wish to be humanized with the dude. We talked for hours and we have many more hours of talking in front of us. We talked about where he is from, his life path, his family, his children, his faith and his struggles with it, and lots of random little details about his life. I said, “I know y’all talked back and forth a lot about _____ and _____. Would you be interested in hearing why?”

He said yeah. When I was done telling him stories about myself and why I’m doing this art and no for pity’s sake my daddy is not paying for this… he said, “This is why I kept telling the other guy not to judge. You don’t know someone else’s story till they tell you. It makes sense that you are doing what you are doing after I hear all that.”

Holy crudmonkeys that is an intoxicating kind of validation.

Then I absolutely hate myself because I should not care what he thinks of me. It should be entirely irrelevant to my life. I’m so stupid.

It’s a big deal to me that I move through the world explaining why someone might be crazy. It makes sense. It is all internally consistent. I do it in large part because I cannot count the number of people who tell me they are more patient and understanding with lots of people in their lives because they understand what they may not know about them now that they understand me and my story better.

When I say I write about myself because I want to be a character in peoples heads… that’s a lot of what I mean. I mean, don’t mistake me for wanting to be holy but… a friend said she thinks, “What Would Krissy Do” sometimes and my heart exploded with a firebomb of joy.

Holy shit. People think of me.

That’s important. That matters. That’s a real thing.

Even if I can’t touch it, see it, or smell it. That’s a gift that people are giving me. They allow me to take up space in their brains. Oh thank you so much. I feel so very loved. You think of me the way I think of you. I try as hard as I can to create models of y’all in my head in the same way. I sit and go through different people in my head and try to figure out how they would react based on what I know about them.

Sometimes I even guess right. Often I don’t. But I’m trying.

I’m difficult and you still try to understand me. That is a gift. You know what? Even the folks who hate follow me… you are here to see a train wreck and you go off and mock me in other places. Ok. But guess what? I’m still a story in your head. I take up space in your brain. You still think about me because I am compelling.

Nyah nyah nyah nyah.

The maturity, I have all of it.

Recently I noticed that the main place I knew about where people sat around and talked shit about me evaporated. *phew* Bye fuckers. Apparently the forum went away because folks were so nasty to one another that it just couldn’t be sustained. Well done, y’all.

Traumatized means: subject to lasting shock as a result of an emotionally disturbing experience or physical injury.

It is fair to say that I have traumatized people. I leave a lasting impression on people. It is fair to say that people have traumatized me. I will think about them forever.

How much of traumatizing other people do we need to process, forgive, acknowledge, work on… I’m not sure. I leave a lasting god damn impression on people. Sometimes in a bad way. I don’t really know that I have it in me to become a smaller person so that I leave less of an impression. That’s what it would take. It would take me trying to squash big parts of my personality.

What do I owe other people? If your culture says that people like me are a serious problem… maybe avoid me? I’m unlikely to adapt myself so that I fit in with a culture I don’t live in/with/around. That’s kinda like suicide. For better or worse I live in the cultural context in which I live. I mean…

I try to change the cultural context in which I live. I exert active pressure on it in a variety of ways. But I see a lot of factors outside of my control.

I have to deal with the sexist, racist white assholes in the world. Sometimes I kinda need to have all the force of personality of a bazooka in order to absolutely assert with great force I WILL NOT HAVE THAT SHIT HERE. NOT IN MY PRESENCE.

If you can turn that kind of thing all the way off entirely and pull it out when you need it then I’d love to hear how you pull off that trick. I turn it down to like 1 or 2. That’s as far down as I know how to turn down that force of personality. It is always measurably there… but barely….

I don’t know why I have this kind of force of personality to enforce a reality distortion bubble. It’s not really about the factors that currently exist in my life. I did this shit when I was a small, helpless, destitute, homeless child. I’d still turn to someone and go off like a bottle rocket if they did shit that I thought wasn’t ok.

This has gotten me in trouble all my life. I got beat so much for sassing teachers in Texas and Oklahoma partially because I called them on being assholes to me and the other students. I have memories of pointing out that they were picking on people so they turned to me instead. I’ve always kind of liked being a lightning rod. I think my attitude is that I am tough and I can take it.

I’ve jumped into fist fights and gotten them to stop hitting each other.

I’m not shy about asserting my presence in the world. No. This will not happen on my watch. Whatever that means.

Noah thinks it is funny that in junior high I was pulled out of class to go through training on how to be a conflict mediator. The school saw me interfering in everyone else’s business and wanted to harness that. I was pulled out of class constantly because I did really well at being fair. I wasn’t biased. I hate everyone the same and I was not big on favoritism.

If you are my best friend and you fuck up… I’m kinda throwing you under the bus.

You do the crime, you do the time buddy. In this case it normally meant apology letters, but whatever. I’m big on the idea that everyone should have to apologize for fucking up and I always have been.

I didn’t mean to traumatize you but I also can’t let someone sit at my table and tell me they will threaten me whenever they want. Nope, nope, nope. All the nope in the entire nope-universe. If it traumatizes you to find out that I won’t accept that…

I will just have to live with that.

I’m a bully. Because when someone says flat out that they will threaten me whenever they want I respond and respond and respond and respond and respond until they leave, saying I am traumatizing.

Ok.

And I have even less control over how strong I come on when I’m tired.

Goodness I need to figure out sleep in this lifetime. And when I pull all nighters I need to not talk to people for two or three days later. I’m such a bitch. I have no volume regulation and my tone of voice goes straight to shit.

Hey, it’s like I have less control over my body when I’m exhausted. Weird.

Or entirely predictable. Take your pick.

And I’m having another baby. I will cuddle my exhaustion to me like a warm blanket.

I’m freezing. I’m going to move to the heater and I can’t bring my computer with me because it is a brick when unplugged. Whine fuss moan. And the dishwasher is still broken and now the repair guy is dodging calls.

Cheers.