The Fluffbucket Diaries

I have really tried to love Kids in the Hall over the years, but “Doomsday DJ” is the first KITH sketch that has really clicked with me.

I have spent a lifetime trying to fit in wherever I am, and I have never felt as if I succeeded. A lifetime of feeling like an outsider, from my birth family onward, has been a lonely one.

This could be why I am so consumed with the hope that F can find her tribe in high school. Watching her navigate the painful middle school years has dredged up an awful lot of PTSD for me; reading about autistic people’s childhood experiences — many of which have echoed my own early years — has just compounded that.

I sort of transcended social groups back in my day, floating among different ones with some degree of acceptance but never really becoming that entrenched in any one. I was proud of myself for that somehow, as if it proved I was above cliquishness and the need for deep friendships. (I was brought up to believe that I could never trust anyone outside my immediate family, which I have learned the hard way is such a damaging — not to mention warped — mentality.) So why was I so deeply lonely, even despairing at times?

(This experience is echoed throughout the audiobook of Unmasking Autism that I’m working through, which has helped get me thinking so much about all this.)

College was better, I guess, where I became firmly entrenched at the student newspaper. It helped that most of us were working toward a common goal of a news career. But I still couldn’t avoid that outsider feeling there and in other contexts, like the evangelical Christian college dorm where I lived for almost 2 years and felt like the odd one out as a fat, brown, nominally Catholic person.

I never fully shook that outsider feeling through my single years, or even in my married ones. Even and especially now, in a White suburban town outside Chicago — when I once got disdainful looks from the Caucasian stay-at-home moms at F’s kindergarten playground outings as if I was merely a nanny — I get that vibe. And I am very much an outlier, politically speaking at least, at our traditional and orthodox Roman Catholic parish, where some folks will ask the priest how to get out of a COVID vaccination requirement and tell me about all the killings of January 6 rioters by Capitol Police that “the news won’t tell you about.”

I’ve reluctantly accepted my perennial sense of separateness in this world. It helps a bit that I ended up marrying someone who has experienced that same sense of never quite belonging (and admits that he, too, is likely on the spectrum), so it’s kind of a blessing that we belong to one another.

My greatest longing right now is that F has that same sense of belonging with us, too, as her loving weirdo parents. But I also yearn to have her find that beyond us in the wider world.

Wordle 357 4/6

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Expecting emotional intelligence from people who have demonstrated a lack of it since my childhood is a lost, painful cause. I have to keep reminding myself of this.

Wordle 356 4/6

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Random thoughts at the end of a long, exhausting work week:

• I can’t function on 3 hours of sleep without burning out and melting down. So, I go to bed these days before midnight and, if I have work to do — and often these days, this is the case — I get up early, praying it doesn’t get in the way for the opportunity to go to weekday Mass in the morning. Thus far, no major meltdowns, and I’m grateful for that.
• The more I read about autism, the more I honestly think I’m on the spectrum (as are several undiagnosed people close to me). The woke rhetoric of a lot of the reading materials and social media is hard to stomach, but maybe I have something to learn from it.
• I honestly don’t know why I bother posting anything on Facebook anymore. At this point, I’m fine with posting F-related things there (and on its Meta sister site Instagram) and leaving it at that. Nobody online cares about my baseball thoughts or other uninvited opinions, which is part of the reason I have this space. Here, I can post purely for my own enjoyment, and I don’t have to be reminded by the visible lack of response that it’s being ignored.
• In some respects, I have become less empathetic as I grow older. I have slowly learned to be less thoughtful, less caring than I was in my youth. Some of it is laziness, I admit. Much of it is a defense mechanism after years of feeling overlooked and finding my own kindnesses — particularly toward those for whom I cared the most — unrecognized. Thoughtfulness eventually had become pointless to me. I’ve edited a lot of my friend circles for this reason.
• Caring hurts. That said, I also understand that I am still called to be charitable and kind. So, this is how I try to move forward, despite my unfortunate tendencies in recent years.

As always, onward.

Wordle 355 6/6

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Forgot yesterday. Again. Streak back at 1.

Wordle 353 4/6

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Wordle 352 4/6

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Wordle 351 5/6

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F actually did this one while we were waiting in the Portillo’s drive-thru line after Mass. I may start outsourcing my Wordle more often.

Frannie broke in her I-escaped-middle-school gift from her Auntie Eleanor—a stand mixer—this afternoon with buttery pretzel bites.

Wordle 350 4/6

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The Wordle is about as much as I can do half the time these days.

Only the second time I’ve done this in two.

Wordle 349 2/6

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Wordle 347 5/6

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Wordle 346 4/6

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Wordle 345 4/6

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Our Memorial Day weekend baking experiment: Zimtsterne, a German/Swiss cinnamon cookie made with almond meal, powdered sugar, and egg white, baked in a 250-degree oven on a hot day. Only 4 grams of carbs per 3-cookie serving!

I know the frosting is traditional, but thinking these might be better coated with powdered sugar (see the star in the lower right). F proposed the frosting might work better as a dip for the cookies.

Wordle 344 6/6

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Excellent girls’ day out with F: splurged on new manga and a new D&D book; had breakfast and lunch out with lots of good talks; and binge-watched a lot of anime. Grateful.

Hope this bodes well for a summer of recalibrating after a rough end to middle school.

Wordle 343 4/6

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My kid is learning the hard way how much teenage girls can really suck toward one another.

Starting to experience PTSD all over again from my junior high and high school years. My goal is to make sure my kid has more support through these years than I ever did.

Wordle 341 6/6

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F is now a high school freshman. She wore Grandma Garcia’s diamond pendant, exactly a year and a day after her passing. Onward.

NPR reminds us:

There are a couple of inevitable responses to a mass shooting in America: funerals and fundraisers, prayers from politicians and the resurfacing of one particular article from satirical site The Onion.

”’No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" has been republished 21 times in almost exactly eight years.”

I just saw a Uvalde shooting victim’s First Communion photo, and I am officially broken. Retiring from news and social media for a while.