Chapter fourteen of Colliding Worlds is on the sidebar and in a page. Chapter fifteen will be up on Wednesday with or without the words.

It’s been a long time since we have had a talk with ourselves. We have been eating too many forbidden foods like pasta made from regular flour. We have been encamped at Lucia’s.

Yes and we were the perfect guest. When we asked Lucia if we snored as we had a headache and felt sinusy she said:
No, of course not. You farted all night.

No we snored. But just a bit. We made Lucia snore like us.

Lucia lives just off Broadway and we kind of live on Riverside, but we slept much better than we do here as it’s quieter. Hard to believe but Lucia can turn her heat off so the windows don’t have to be opened and closed all night. We get steam pipe bursts. And we live across from a school, a little private school where all the kids are well behaved unlike the largest middle school in the city we lived across from in Riverdale. We have to make sure that we don’t live near a school.

Uh, you’re saying something negative about your street and you never know who is going to read this. You don’t want to say anything bad about your apartment.

It’s yours also. And we’ve been saying bad things for over three years. But we have the nicest neighbors who we really should have taken the time to know before.

It takes from five to ten years to get to know the neighbors in Manhattan unless you have kids or a dog. We decided not to have either just to be friendly with people

But we’re just getting to know our neighbor who is a doctor and works with people with HIV. Our kind of person. And she’s so friendly, and we like each other so much. She gets our humor. Actually most people do in person, we just put it on hiatus. We went through a long spell of working with old people who complained and would compare them to our mommy. She never complained to the general public, doctors, nurses etc, just me and Elka. The etc. were usually social workers. OK she would tell social workers that her daughter was one and much more knowledgeable and brilliant. Really endeared them to us. But we miss our mommy and for some reason our father. Not that we didn’t love him much. Father’s died. Mommy’s lived.

We, all of us, want them to tell us we’re doing the right thing. Though mommy refused to believe that Greenpoint was cool. She grew up there and it was the last place she wanted to believe people really wanted to live in. Our father grew up in East Harlem and always thought it was cool. Back in his day. Please never let me grow into a person who can’t think a neighborhood can go up or down.

This isn’t the post to get all teary and miss dead parents in.
Why not? We have always wrote multi tasked posts.
The new generation of bloggers don’t get them
So?
We just said we didn’t want to get set in our ways.
But we don’t want to please. That’s not why we write.
Maybe you. I’m a recovering link whore.
You’ve been many kind of whores. Link whore was the tamest.
No it wasn’t. Oh let’s stop this. It’s almost Christmas Eve day where we get to listen to Christmas music all day and night.
We used to never say such things publicly. Back to the post….

Our apartment’s becoming beautiful again. But the floor guys forgot to put the cable back on–and did something so that the microwave and stove can’t be used though the circuit breaker looks fine.

We can live with disorder in the house now that we realized our mind is like jumbled knotted frayed wires. And we don’t know how to unjumble, unknot, unfray. That’s why we hire people. That’s why we’re leaving our really good life. So we’ll always have money to hire people.

Though our first day back in North Myrtle the TV and stereo didn’t work. First thing we checked as we have our priorities. Love to watch Horry County TV stations. Love living in a place called Horry County. It’s got that great Ho in the name. It wasn’t the circuit breakers, so we ran out and ran into Jerry in his pick up truck with “licensed” this that and everything. We offered to pay him. He wouldn’t take our money.

We don’t drive for the sake of humanity and refused to take cabs most places as we like to walk even in 90+ degrees. Especially in very hot weather. But we would have to take cabs sometimes, when we were dodging Jerry. Each time they would lower their prices. Not that we don’t like Jerry, we just didn’t want to be dependent on him or….

We think this is going to be a good move but we’re so obsessed and yesterday in the disorder thought we lost our passport and checkbook. We were crazed basically because we’ve been eating white food and things with sugar. Too much socialization. People keep telling us we’re going to be bored as we’re such social animals. OK, animal. We like solitude also and really miss it. We need solitude to refuel and rejuvenate. We’re not ashamed of that.

We feel strange. We wish we had allowed ourselves to be really happy before. Happiness is a choice. We figured that out last year or the year before and now we’re reading a book What Happy People Know that’s the first self help book we have ever loved. Though we have to say we have come to most of our thoughts on our own.

Ho Ho Ho–know how cheap that is but couldn’t resist. And a Merry Christmas to all.

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I have no idea where these pingbacks are coming from–they all seem to really be one blog, and a new form of comment spam. Some even have the same IP address. This is a post that is hard for me to post. I was thinking of turning comments and pings off as I often do, but was curious to see the types of comments I might get. I closed pings but not comments.

Once again I put a post into draft as it was poorly written and I don’t feel like redoing it. I can’t write a post I like.
I’m having a total anxiety attack. There is something I reach for when I do, but I try so hard not to.
Nobody thinks of me as a smoker. I’m not sure what a smoker is supposed to look like–not educated, not well dressed, not clean, not a good person, smells of cigarettes in body, mouth, hair and clothes. There are “closet smokers” who dress well in clothes that don’t smell of cigarettes, with bodies etc that don’t smell of cigarettes. Actually I couldn’t even go into bars and restaurants where smoking was allowed as I can’t stand the smell. They’re not allowed in New York basically anywhere and I don’t lament that. Continue Reading »

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I put my adoption/Google rant on the sidebar. Now it’s gone to a Courting page
I don’t know why I was picked up by a Wall Street Journal blog on balancing being a mother with a career. I have never been a mother.

Being a single parent, of either sex, has to be the hardest job in the world. Unless you have the most incredible support network that never fails.

Little Luce is going to be a Senior in high school in the fall, and it’s harder for Lucia than ever. Little Luce is a great almost woman. Her Mom just wants to make sure she gets the best college education she can, at a school not in New York City.

Their bond is strong. It’s time not to sever it, but to expand both of their worlds. In a couple of weeks they’re going to the condo in North Myrtle, and I’m demanding pictures of Lucia asleep in the bedroom. They live in a one bedroom and when Lucia and George first separated she gave Little Luce the bedroom.

Given my closest friend’s situation, it’s hard for me to complain about my life, but I do it so well….

Last night at dinner I felt, once again, Little Luce, has two moms as I told her stories about her childhood. But Lucia deserves solo credit for raising an incredible girl. Many years she used all her vacation days for Little Luce. I don’t think I could ever be that selfless. Not that Lucia is perfect….

Seven years ago I decided that I wanted to give my lifetime dream a real chance. I had no idea how to go about so I took some courses. When I was offered a job as a reporter five years ago, my teacher then stopped speaking to me as she thought I was selling out by working for an alt paper rather than going the lit journal route.

Maybe it was, but i was able to use skills I had become expert in during my three prior careers. They all entailed interviewing and assessing individuals, and researching and critiquing in many subjects.

Because I didn’t have the worlds greatest imagination, was the opposite of assertive (when it comes to things for me), and didn’t think the world was clamoring for a book or magazine articles by me, I thought this was a good way to break in to publishing–given my advanced age.

“Offered” was the key word. Somebody believed in me. That we have both believed in each other and have driven each other crazy since our late teens was, truthfully, comforting. While it was comforting, it was also awkward for basically the same reason. If those two sentences appear as if written in code, they almost are.

I couldn’t advance any further than I did. That said I wrote a damn good cover story for any reporter, including one in her first year.

I didn’t look for other reporting jobs because i really didn’t want to be a reporter. I would say it gave me the confidence needed to pursue other venues but I began a blog, and vowed to complete complicated dental work in two years, some months. My long time readers know more about teeth than anybody wants to know.

I was so goal oriented I completed the dental work in 21 months. My amazing healing ability had more than a little to do with that as did my true want to get this over with.

And, duh, I’m obsessive. I have to complete what I begin–hence staying in social work school after I knew it was the wrong career for me. I wish I had gone to school for something I really love such as sociology or urban anthropology. I purposely didn’t say writing.

I have come to the conclusion that one can really learn to write from doing. So I wrote in this blog. Wrote chapters for books, edited them, revised them, edited, and threw out. Hence the 1783 posts–two thirds in draft, the endless word documents, and my gmail capacity being up to 26% because sometimes I write in gmail. If I know I’m going away, I save to an external modem and write in gmail as a back up. I have to have something saved to the Internet to feel secure. Possibly falsely, but…..

The story I’m now telling comes easily to me at times. At other times, there’s a huge concrete wall between me and the material.

Actually, just when I need to rev up, I have hit the wall. Hence my apartment is incredibly organized, I’m planning my move, and accept three out of five invitations.

In a few weeks I’m going to do something I would have laid bets just a few months ago I never would do. Have dinner with three girls–always to me, I went to Jr/Sr High with. Then we’re having drinks with at the pre-reunion of the class ahead of ours.

I was so intent on being miserable, I never gave the girls in my class a chance. Two of the girls were in almost every class with me from Seventh through Twelfth Grades. Our school rotated teachers not students. The other girl, I just knew, because our community was so small everybody knew each other. Almost. There are a few people in our yearbook I don’t remember at all. I might have stood out more than other girls as I had the hippie thing going before it was fashionable in our Long Island community.

Or maybe, my parents asserted less control over my clothes and life. In the end, of course, this gave them more control as I listened to them, very occasionally because I liked and respected them. Though my father did attempt to run my life I never let him.

My Friday Flashback will be on Thursday. It’s a letter my father wrote, but never gave to me, on my 16th birthday.

Reconnecting with people who knew me, even if slightly, in those pivotal growing up years has caused me to reexamine my life. Fortunately I had already written much of a first draft about Senior year, can bring up the feelings at will, and the story takes place outside our community.

Even more fortunately the only people I bad mouth are me, doctors and teachers. I’m not about to change this book, and I want it to reflect my truth.

My parents come off as much more permissive than they were. When my mother called Shelby’s Mom, she had no idea Shelby’s mom would lie for me.

It’s hard for me to remain mired in the past. I have developed a big want and need to make new great memories and to just do.

When I wrote that i was busy, I meant assimilating recent events, writing, organizing my apartment in preparation to sell it, and a few other things necessary to making a living and/or career.

I have spent so much time prepping that I forgot there are more steps. No I didn’t forget but began to feel entitled. Something only pop princesses should ever feel.

This road I’m traveling is a hard one. It feels good to have people from all junctions of my life aboard.

I do believe that we can make our own destiny. Yet obsessive as I am, I feel that I might give up before I have even really begun to try.

Sometimes I stare at the same piece of paper for hours, and play games with the words. I have never had such organized files, dressers, closet, and kitchen. Had I known that the secret to organizing myself was to become close to the end of a first draft, I would have done this years ago. I have come close to the ends of first drafts; they weren’t organized. I wasn’t ready to be organized.

I only look like an organized person and have an organized apartment. Inside I’m still as disorganized as ever.

I saved my final grad school evaluation. Nowhere does it say that I’m disorganized, quite the contrary actually. The person it presents couldn’t have Aspergers; my only “four” out of “five” was relating, and caring, too much. To do that job effectively you have to almost create a Plexiglas wall between you and the residents, and I could only do that with one schizophrenic who drove me crazy, but less crazy than she drove the rest of the staff. Yes, I was staff as well as a student. The Newt cuts had taken affect.

I’m still assimilating the realization I was right all along and my problems are borne out of spatial relations. The knowledge made me feel empowered immediately but I kept waiting to be prove wrong.

Instead I have taken charge of my life in ways I could only dream of before. I don’t think that this time next year I will say “I was wrong, it is___”

So much is going on in my head, it’s hard to feel the passion needed to complete a book about the teenage me. I think I recognize that this is one of the times I have to both be gentle to me, and to just do it.

While I don’t belong in a mommy and work blog and apologize to anybody who has come here looking for one, I do belong in a person, work, and shaking up your life one.

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A life long friend told me recently that if I ever learned to drive he wouldn’t just hand in his license, he would do PSC’s warning people that danger is lurking.

Actually it was funny. I have long believed that laughing at or with myself is the best offense. I encourage my friends to laugh with me at my ineptness.

Then there are days like today. It’s the third day of rain. The first two were good. I got a lot of work done. I was forced to dig deep into myself which isn’t my favorite thing, but is necessary if I’m going to write a truthful book.

Yesterday I took a walk as it was just misting. My Cannon is large and bulky. I wanted a small cheap camera I can keep in my pocket, and I did forget the installation disc so that I can put pictures in my laptop.

I bought a cheapish camera. I couldn’t put in the memory disc properly. If that happened to you, you would probably laugh it off, return the camera or have them put it in.

But i didn’t want to walk two miles each way in the rain, today, as it was pouring most of the day. Nor did I want to take a cab though the cab company owner keeps lowering the price. Frequent keep this girl off the street discount as she can cause an accident just attempting to cross a street

I hate feeling the way I do today. I don’t find my ineptness funny. I realize, once again, the Asperger like symptoms stem from a lifetime of not being able to do things correctly.

They stem from people either thinking that I was an idiot or that I just didn’t try hard enough when I tried enough for ten people.

I go into panic attack mode when I’m like this. I lose perspective and think that I’m just not good enough in any sense.

It would be so easy to cast blame. But who? My Dad was hard on me, but he had no understanding of this problem. Though I think he did in the beginning, but so many doctors put the blame back onto me. I can’t blame them. Who knew about spatial retardation?

I have nobody to blame so I blame myself. And that’s the part that I really hate.

The ground’s drying, and I know the sun will be out all day or at least most of the day tomorrow.

Always thought my middle name should have been Annie though that’s not one of my top thousand plays.

Posts like this make me very very nervous as my disability is so hidden most people are never aware of it. Except when I can’t judge which car is coming how fast from what lane and just kinda stand there.

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I have struggled with a problem for a long while now. I have blogged about how the parts of my brain that perceive space are wired differently, or maybe not wired at all.

I’m never sure if I have said too much or not enough.

How many people really discuss problems? If they don’t isn’t there a good reason for that? My problems are atypical. They aren’t easily defined or put into categories.

Hell, the biggie, the mother ship for all the rest doesn’t even have a name.

If I have been defensive in my fearlessness, it’s solely because my life has been one of many uncertainties. When I was 36, I felt as if I were breaking down.

I wasn’t hypomanic. I never went on wild spending sprees or thought I could do impossible things. Quite the opposite. I was hyper and walked the streets constantly so I wouldn’t think about all my bad qualities.

When I was diagnosed with massive learning disorders, I fought the psychologist.

He told me that I shouldn’t have been able to accomplish everything I had done. I had. I should have trusted in that. But how do you find trust in your own accomplishments when you now feel that you used smoke and mirrors to fool people into thinking that you were smart?

And you had always felt like a fraud?

I exist; therefore I’m defensive.

I’m also fearless in some areas. It’s a weird combination. A defensive fearless person.

I wish that I had never had that testing. It only served to make me question everything good about myself.

Nothing I did to combat the feeling that I must really be inferior helped. Finish grad school with a 3.84 cum and outstanding field placement evaluation. Not good enough. It should have been a 4.0. I don’t know what to think about the “outstanding” as there’s nothing higher. I did get a few “5″s. They all should have been “6″s. Each attribute and skill was ranked “0″ to “6.”

In college I had been ecstatic to get “B”s in anything but my major. I held myself to much less lofty standards. Just because I had managed some huge projects, and did two years at SSI so I could tell stories about the bad old Bronx, was older, and was still out to prove the psychologist wrong, I screwed myself.

I didn’t realize why I was doing what I was doing. I knew I had something to prove but couldn’t figure out what as everybody I knew thought me smart, successful, funny, and the like.

I felt like even more of a fraud when I finished grad school because I could have gone on to become a full fledged therapist but therapy had always made things worse for me.

It wasn’t that I was resistant. I desperately wanted to understand. My problems are outside the scope of therapy today. I was seeing two other therapists when I got the learning disabilities diagnosis. Neither therapist could help with what he didn’t understand.

Nobody could point me on the royal road to help, because nobody knew who could help.

i forgot about the Asperger’s diagnosis because I didn’t want to search for help that wasn’t there, and because there were so many buts:
“You’re atypical because you have excellent social skills, know boundaries, have excellent judgment, are intuitive, love people not animals….” I do have the clumsiness, motor skill problems and awkwardness, but I long ago learned how to make most of that work for me. Not the motor skill problems. I bless the inventors of digital cameras.

Searching has been a theme of my life. I have searched for my birth mother, am thinking of searching for my birth father’s family and am searching for the answers to problems.

I’m tired of searching. It feels that as long as I keep searching I won’t feel settled. I want to. I deserve to. It does amaze me that I continued having a life during all this.

When I began to blog I made the mistake of writing about not being a linear thinker before I knew many people. Fortunately many people came to my defense when I was bombarded with personal nasty comments.

I found it unbelievable that people would say such rude things. Yet didn’t I deserve it? That’s not a conscious feeling nor is it one that I want to feel.

Yes I was defensive. It would have been impossible for me not to be given my history.

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My blog makeover will be in a bit more than a month. When I comment on Blogger blogs, it doesn’t let my URL link. First noticed this on Bone’s blog. Thought it was revenge of the roast, but uh….Three Word Wednesday will be sometime later this week

In November I handed my first submission into a writing workshop. I had been working on that story, on and off, for a year. It meant a lot to me. I had several people read it, including some media pros. One actually edited it, a bit.

My workshop panned it. I won’t go into specifics as I would have to tell the story and it is not in here.

Wow did that bring me down to earth and a bit below it.

It precipitated a gigantic crisis of confidence in every area of my life, because words and story telling, are so important to me, and I thought that I had solved many problems.

But the truth, the real truth is that I perceive space differently than most people.

What am I saying?

Nobody has the exact spatial problems that I do. I don’t say this proudly.

It’s a neurobiological problem, and difficult to explain. I don’t see physical space the way you do. People have never understood that so I add that I see dead people too, to further confuse them, or lighten the mood.

It has both played havoc in my life and worked to my advantage. If I didn’t have many learning disabilities along with it, I probably would have spent my life laughing at my inability to cross a street properly. Love Santa Monica, in part, because major intersections have street lights that speak the number of seconds left.

Somehow many people have found my problems endearing. He-Who-Has-Known-Me-Forever said that I was the prettiest and most popular girl at our college. No way. But I could give that impression. People like girls who can laugh at themselves while tripping over something everybody else saw.

It’s not fun to have an amazing Imac, and know that I’m only using one millimeter of its potential. We have that in common.

I began handing in chapters that I knew were good, but really I wanted constructive feedback that could help me rework the ones that i was having trouble with. I had actually thought the chapter I handed in was decent but could have benefited from some more feedback.

Somehow when I have problems with a story, a computer, or life in general, nobody can help me. My set of problems are so rare that they’re just beginning to be studied.

It’s not frigging fair. If you subscribe to the two door theory of life, had I been able to walk through the other door, the one were was I exactly me but without the problems, I probably would have had the perfect life.

Nobodies life is perfect and I probably would have been the biggest bitch in America. Or I could have been a totally wonderful person who became a rock star. OK, that’s three doors and rearing into dangerous fantasy territory. Not that I ever day dream about being a rock star. Mine are and always have been about writing.

Except for my yearly Academy Award speech for Best Actress because I like writing the speech and thanking people. In the 80’s, my father was going to get thanked twice because everybody was thanking their accountant. I should have given the speech to him anyway

My father was hyper-critical, especially to me, because he couldn’t stand me not being perfect. I forgave him many years before he apologized as I knew how much he loved me, and I knew his mother. Compared to her….

Thing is I always liked myself, and basically felt a certain comfort level in life. In November I felt as if I were becoming paralyzed by phobias. Interesting because I had just finished seven oral surgeries and two years of every several weeks at the dentist. I do smile a lot.

When I talk about organizational problems I don’t mean organizing materials. While I’m horrible at that, I can compensate. And I can overlook. Wow can I overlook. I literally only see the space right in front of me. Yet I have peripheral vision.

People have always told me that if I just paid attention…I do too much. I pay so much attention to detail, that I become totally frazzled. When I pay less attention I tend to do better.

In the maze that is my life, I have had to be my own guide. That doesn’t make me happy. The whole, Electric Haired thing came because in college a psychologist who was treating many people I knew called me “space cadet with the electric hair.” Anybody who knows me at all knows me I’m far from spacey. He-Who is especially insulted by that label.

Obviously it hurt to be labeled but i didn’t let it rule my life. It’s just that I’m not eighteen anymore, or 20, or 35 and I wonder when seeming spacey at times stops being cute or acceptable and begins to be very eccentric. I could live with eccentric. I do already. But there are degrees.

I had always been very sociable but in the past decade found myself becoming less sociable. My Mom was becoming old and demanding, not of physical time, but of mental energy. Her anxiety was overwhelming. Then she died and I felt so guilty, as if I could have stopped her fall if I had only done certain things.

This year I have been emotionally exhausted but scared that my not wanting to be sociable would become a permanent exhibit at the Savage Museum for The Weirdly Neurological. I finally realized that the fear was its own answer.

Still working on a few big phobias. Obviously I have conquered dental phobias, big time.

Today I was trying to plug numbers onto a non computer form and couldn’t do it. I have done that my whole life, but now I need a computer, not paper. My Dad was a CPA. Pre-computers we all had to help him. There were no extensions then, and my sister and I would sometimes have to stay home from school. Then we graduated elementary school….

Once when I was doing volunteer work at a First Amendment org, all the people who said they could do data entry inputting couldn’t do it. I looked at the computer and said, “ha, that’s what data entry is?” I could do it in my sleep. Though only for forty minutes at a time.

So why can’t I do the fun Imac things? Lucia was watching a slide show of my photographs yesterday, and I told her that I’m happy I can upload photo’s and press the slide show arrow. Lucia’s new phone also has an MP3 player. Her sixteen year old daughter does everything. But if Lucia focused she could learn it, I on the other hand…someday.

The door I would have wanted to open was my generation being born with all these technological advances. Gmail is the most incredible personal organizer/assistant. It makes me feel organized and that is almost impossible.

Last week I decided to let go of need to see space the way you do since I can’t. The first couple of days were easy. Let me explain that while the problem hadn’t become worse, my perception of it did. I began to be scared for my old age. I’m too darn young to be so scared.

Our society is scaring people my age. No matter how many resources we have they’re never enough. I saw the worst of old age in the nursing home, and I saw people who had been beaten down by life and this was the best of it.

I could almost understand their want and need to be in a nursing home, but the people I related to were the people who would do anything to go home. Even if home was a fifth floor roach encrusted walk up.

Well, I relate to their need to be home without with what my mother called “keepers” more commonly known as aides. Though I don’t want my mother’s anxiety, I do want her independent streak, and don’t really think that I have to worry about that.

I am so tired of thinking about problems, future problems, phobias, money and the like. I needed to come out of mourning and guilt for my mother and the easiest way was this blog. Then came November, and I stopped feeling special and as if I had anything interesting to say. I also thought that I had never been coherent.

I’m beginning to believe in me again. I don’t have to put roadblocks in my way. They are almost literally there. Understanding that helps. It’s the first damn thing to help. I can finally say “I see space differently,” and really not care what people think. Someday, maybe not in my lifetime, but someday, people will understand.

I actually might see dead people, too.

I will be updating the photoblog soon, now that the thought of taking off gloves isn’t abhorrent. I will also get into how my spatial relation problems might be perceived as Aspergers but so aren’t, or maybe do cause a degree of it. For a quick example. To make up for my lack of perceiving exactly how far people stand from each other, I stand too far back so I won’t intrude on a person’s personal space. I have done this virtually all of my life naturally.

I am overwhelmed by crowds as I can’t measure the space. I do bump into people. But they bump into me also. Lucia always makes sure to point that out.

My impulse is to apologize for this post, but it’s important to me as I’m just coming to a real understanding and wow is it empowering. People always talk about their diagnosis explaining things to them, and how good they feel. I never understood that; I’m beginning to.

I wrote this between midnight and three AM which are good writing hours for me, but I really need to proof in the morning.

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