Dear Roger: Nerdy As Hell, Loyal To The Bone or Stuck In A Rut?

My job requires me to judge people. I talk to them, take their applications for a home, listen to their stories if their history is less than stellar and I make a decision if I want to let them be my neighbor. I have laws I have to obey, and once I follow those laws, then I am allowed to rely on my gut instinct to make my decisions and some of the people I have chosen to be my neighbors were not people most would expect. I've chosen a woman who came from very similar circumstances as my own, and she had been rejected time and time again and she was at the end of her rope when she walked through my door. I could have rejected her as well, but my gut told me to give her a chance, because I looked at her and saw myself nearly 3 years ago. She is a great resident almost 6 months later. There are plenty of other cases where I have gone with my gut and rented to people, or advocated for them, and they have proven me right time and time again in spite of where they came from or what they looked like. I am a person who puts great stock in the impression I get from meeting a person, talking to them, looking them in the eyes, seeing how they behave around children and others. There are people who have walked in and screened fine but I did not want to rent to them because my gut told me they were going to be trouble, and to the person they have been. If the laws allowed me more power to depend on my gut, I would have a lot less drama and hassle in my life. I interviewed, then gave a tour to and ultimately rented an apartment to, a stripper the other day. My gut tells me she is going to be a great neighbor and when she was embarrassed about telling me her job, I was quick to tell her there was no shame in working for a living.

When I have met a person, shook their hand, spoken to them, observed them up close and watched the body language and micro-gestures they use in their communication with the people around them, seen the subtle cues that give me indications of their personality quirks, whether or not they use drugs or have health issues, or even obsessive tics, I get a feel for that person that remains with me and I decide right then and there where that person ranks in my realm of importance or if they are even worthy of me remembering their name for more than a day or two. I do not change that opinion lightly and once I decide that person is worthy of consideration, they are included in my little pack of those I tend to stay loyal to and hold up for consideration. 

Im loyal to a few things. I've worn the same style of clothing for most of my life, I used Works for my writing until I had to change to a computer last year and could no longer get it. I had a qwerty slide out keyboard phone until a little over a year ago when it unfortunately went swimming in a bad, bad place. I still love the same little band of broken and frayed and largely missing; musicians. I have loved the same damn man for over 15 years to no avail. I don't know so much if I am a creature of habit or just stuck in a rut, but I do tend to be understanding of people for the most part and when one of my friends was angrily,(and rightfully so), complaining, that she felt unappreciated as a fangirl who had put forth a huge amount of effort to garner support for some of our favorite fellas, I found myself being an apologist for them. I don't know what the hell is going on with them either, but I tend to be forgiving. I've had very fucked up things going on in my life from time to time when I just chose to withdraw from the world and not talk to anyone,(no matter what damage it did), and yes, my book sales have suffered for it, but when you just don't have it in you to give, you don't and cant and yes, sometimes even a tweet is a lot. Depression, anger, family heartbreak, all kinds of things just can crash in or sometimes life just changes and you find another path and wander it for awhile. I've been doing that and my latest novel has sat on my desktop for the last 3 months, completed, ready to go and im not ready to send it because I have lost the voice for the time being. I've been writing something else and until it figures itself out, im going to wander. I hope my friend gets over her upset at them, its been a long, crazy trip and our band of miscreants has shrunk far to much by those who obviously never shook those hands and said,"Hello", face to face. 

Dear Roger: Monkey Says, "Boys Are Weird!" and That Makes Me Happy

I'm trying to start planning for Stevie's 9th birthday. No matter what happens, I want it to be better than last years and I want it to erase the sadness and loss she felt when her favorite band broke up right before her birthday last year. She already has plans with our boys to go out to Karaoke for an epic day of singing at the Voicebox, followed by Sushi and then shopping in the Alphabet District and the Pearl. I had considered trying to contact her favorite boys management folk and seeing if I could buy her an autographed picture or something, but I have no idea who to contact anymore. I'm going to buy her the music I can find from what are left of the band boys, and the movies I can track down, and then the big event of the day is that the boys and I will be taking her to finally getting her ears pierced.
She asked them to go with her and hold her hands while she gets it done and she really looks up to them. I may tell her then that we are driving to Madison, Wisconsin in June for the Spencer Bell Legacy concert and that she is actually going to get to go. We had been planning on flying in and just attending the concert and flying back home, but now we will be driving the high Northern route, doing the tourist thing on the way there and coming back the Southern route and doing the same so in order to expose her to the maximum amount of states and cool things.
The boys have brought so much fun and happiness to our lives. The humor and laughter that flows around our home is a daily occurrence and we all seem to be doing better for the experience. We have dinner together every night and Stevie has a tutor for her penmanship and other homework who takes the time to challenge her intellect. My sons have found kindred spirits for their video gaming geekiness and I have found friends who share my love of Zombies and comic books and who enjoy teasing my eldest son about his stick up the butt personality so he is actually starting to relax and joke back. They tease me about my lack of girl skills and then actually help me sort of figure out how not to be so butch. They are male companionship and friendship that we all needed and they are expanding our world in new and exciting ways and I like to think we are doing the same for them.
We are going to Comic Con together this next week, something I would not have normally done with the kids before I met them, and that is a sign of just how far we have come. They brought it up yesterday right after they walked through the door and handed me my belated Valentines present, a stuffie that is a sperm cell. Stevie looked up from where she was saw the stuffie, rolled her eyes and said,"You guys are weird, just WEIRD!" Causing all of us to turn and stare at her asking how in the hell she knew what it was, to which she replied, "Science, DUH!"
Our lives have become a very strange and joyful tangle and among the chaos we have found our routines and rhythms that work quite well for us and my kids are the happiest they have been in years.
Going to SBL has always been a pipedream of ours, something I promised my little girl we would do,"Some day" and I had never in my life thought it would be in such an amazing manner, in fact I had even despaired making it while my health held out or it was even still going on. The planning and saving up for it is on-going and with the hotel room already paid for, the account for travel set up and slowly gaining meager funds, I am feeling lighter and more hopeful that life has finally stopped being about plodding from one mission to the next and has finally become about finding the joy, in fact, they told me that our next goal is to start saving up for the British Isles after SBL, I may actually get to leave the country while still alive?! How freaking amazing is that??!

Dear Roger: Who's The One Monkey Loves? Don't You Dare Ask!

My little girl is at that age where she is developing her sense of self and what people mean to her. She has had her first little girl crush on a celebrity and that started very young when she began looking up to Jackson Rathbone as her hero. I don't think she saw him as someone she saw as a cute/romantic type crush at first. He was someone she looked up to as her big brother/replacement male role model since she really didn't have a male role model when she was a little girl. That all changed this past year as she has started to have some hormones kick in and she has been around older girls who have influenced her to see men differently. It was very shocking to me when she first looked at a picture of him and said,"Whoa...hes CUTE!" I actually didn't like hearing her say that. I much preferred her seeing him as someone she looked at as a bit of a hero, that is until he pretty much just dropped out of sight.
That has been rough on her. She has had men do that to her for her entire life. Her big brother was gone for over a year when he went to Texas to live with family. Her father left in 2007 when she was just barely four  for prison due to domestic violence and child abuse. I haven't brought men around or dated because I didn't want that constant daddy of the week experience for her or my boys and she has not had any grandparents around in her life, so her male role models have been a flighty, erstwhile rockstar/actor, her abusive father, and her older brother who has issues of his own, that is until very recently.
Just over a year ago we had a couple move into our apartment complex that I just had a gut feeling about. I knew they were decent, good people and I was determined to become friends with them. Its been a slow progression, but over the last few months we have become very close and good friends and I count them as cherished and needed parts of our family now.
My daughter adores them, in fact all my kids do. We have family game nights with them, dinner together almost every night, and we do things together on an almost daily basis. If they aren't over, they are missed.
My little girl has a crush on them and its cute to watch her light up when they show up at the door. She used to shyly watch them when they would walk their little dog, always careful to stay out of sight, never actually speaking to them but racing to tell me the moment they appeared,"MOM!! THEY ARE OUT THERE IN THEIR PENGUIN JAMMIES TODAY!!"  each and every time they would show up with the dog in the early hours for its morning constitutional.
When they first started coming over for dinner, she sat at the table and didn't speak, she just side-eyed them and blushed, rushing away to go lurk in her room, creeping into the kitchen to get herself a drink and pretend like she wasn't watching them. When she did finally start talking to them, she lit up like a 1000 watt bulb. She joked and teases them, and even flips their gay humor back at them. Its quite cute to see, and they graciously include her in our outings and involve her in many fun things that she has really wanted to do. When they invited her to karaoke, I thought she was going to burst with joy. She has a little girl crush on at least one of them, and he is very aware of it, and he is very careful not to encourage it nor to totally crush her heart. She knows he is gay, she knows what that means, but it still doesn't mean she doesn't absolutely adore him and his partner with all her little girl heart. What is really amazing and wonderful is that he takes time each and every evening to help her with her homework and he is tutoring her in her spelling and penmanship, in other words, spending important time, teaching her important things, and he is a guy who doesn't yell, who doesn't cuss at her, who doesn't cruelly make fun of her, and who most important of all, treats her like an important human being. He gently teases her, and sometimes she gets annoyed and stomps off in an annoyed little hissy fit, and he lets her, because as he reminded me, she doesn't get her way every time.
She jealously guards her time with them and when her brothers come around and want to hang out with the guys or try to horn in on planned outings, she gets angry, and often says,'HEY! Its girl time!', though Stubby is not easily dissuaded because he is very fond of the guys as well and the battles sometimes get pretty dramatic and require intervention.  The guys are gamers and they enjoy talking video gaming with  my eldest and youngest sons, (something my daughter doesn't much care for), and the nights the gaming talk gets prolonged she gets testy and tends to inflict payback on her brothers later, but for the most part, they manage to share the company without much bloodshed and  inflict only psychological harm via payback via Munchkin and hopefully I can keep her convinced to limit the harm to that arena.
I commented to her the other night that she seems to not being paying attention to Jackson so much anymore. I asked her if she replacing him with the guys? That was apparently the WRONG thing to ask. I upset her. I was informed in no uncertain terms that she is not like that, that she does not see people as replaceable or disposable and that she did not find my question to be funny or fair. She informed me that much like I had told her a year ago when the great band schism occurred that I was to quote a lame movie line,"Switzerland" and refusing to choose sides because I loved everyone and could never pick sides in a fight I knew nothing about, she could not simply stop loving or caring for someone simply because they chose to disappear from her life. "I miss him and Ben and Jerad and all of them soo very, very much and if it would do any good I would be on twitter and Facebook every day begging them to come back, but they don't talk to me anymore, they ignore me. Ben is even gone now and Jerad only does weird quotes I don't understand and Jackson said he was going to tour , but then he hasn't  and Ben said he was going to tour but then he quit talking. I just don't know who to believe or listen to anymore. I know that Joel and Chris are here, they talk to me, they tell me they are going to come over and they do. They tell me we are going to go do karaoke and we go. They tell me my birthday isn't going to suck this year and I believe them. I know I am glad I have friends I can trust to talk to me and to tell me the truth and keep their word, they give me hope." Knowing they give my little girl hope makes me love them all the more and makes them among the best men I know.

Dear Roger: Is 17 The Edge of The End Of Sanity?

What the hell is it about the age 17 and boys that causes all of them to seemingly lose their ever loving minds? My eldest son turned 17 in December and it has been nothing but drama and lunacy ever since. He is brilliant and gifted and can play just about any damn musical instrument he cares to pick up, teaches himself advanced computer programming and even fixes and rebuilds computers for the hell of it, can discuss and argue politics and religion with adults to the point that he is now a moderator on several posting sites because of his alleged maturity, yet, he freaking dropped out of high school.
Hes a good looking, intelligent, and when it comes to others; kind, young man, but he will torture his baby sister to tears for no apparent reason other than he for some reason thinks she is the favorite child and he has to balance the equation by being hateful to her.  He will be snide and mean and damn right cruel to her for days and then out of the blue tell her that her favorite boy is going to be on some tv show and set up the scheduler on tv so she wont miss it.  He curses my dog and makes dire threats towards his very life, but then he will sit and cuddle him for hours when Benny isn't feeling well after getting a shot. I would suspect him of being bi-polar, but hes been tested and talked to and evaluated and other than some issues related to what we all went through back in Arizona, he is perfectly,"Normal".
If that is normal, I am terrified because I have 2 more boys about to enter fully into their teen years and it is not a barrel of laughs, especially for a small, scrawny, single mom. Things have been better with my two friends around because they have become mentors of sorts to the boys and with a couple of male role models around everyone seems to be enjoying things a lot more. They tease my son about his,"Stick up the butt" mentality and make him actually participate in things like game night, and they make him socialize, and they tease him about all kinds of things that he needed teasing about. I know he has blown off time with his girlfriend to hang out with them and to spend game night around, and though I didn't realize it at the time, he really did want to go to Karaoke with us even though he never committed. Hes been kinder to my daughter as well, at least when they are around.
They are why I kind of have hope that my son will hopefully turn into a sort of sane human being once he navigates his teen years. Though I have seen examples of young men who just wallow in one disaster  after another, these guys seem to have their shit together and they are successful and fairly well adjusted and my son looks up to at least one of them, all my kids do.
We have adopted them into our rather odd family and they are here every night for dinner, we spend time together every day and they are going to the Spencer Bell Legacy concert with me in June. Its been great for us, and hopefully good for them. Having friends that I can socialize with and that my kids look up to and enjoy being around is an amazing thing, and if they can help my wayward son figure out his life, then all the better.  I have hopes that the influence of the two seemingly sane and normal men around will have a calming and stabilizing influence on my sons, especially my eldest, but I really don't know. I do know that when they are around his fits of temper and his bullying of all of us are stifled, and he gets called on his bullshit, but there are days I despair him ever turning into any kind of tolerable human being. Tonight is a perfect example, he is ensconced in his room, playing Assassins Creed on a flat screen tv that I pay for, on internet pay for, utilizing a set of sound dampening head phones that cut off all contact with the outside world, and woe be unto him who dares to interrupt him in his battles. He rages and screams at the little kids or even me, slamming things around and slamming doors to the point that the walls shake throwing a fit like a toddler denied a toy just because he was asked to tell me where he put my Iphone cord. There are times I want to just tell him to take the things he actually has bought himself and leave, that would be less than a backpacks full of things, yet he acts like he is the most put upon waif to ever walk the earth. He is not in school, he is not working, and getting him to do even the basic of household chores involves major cajoling. I don't know where I went wrong with him, other than to say I spoiled him like many Texas mothers tend to do their first born sons, and now I am paying the piper for it. I hate to say it but I am just counting down the months to him turning 18 and hoping with age comes wisdom, sanity, or maybe a realization that hes got it a lot better than he realized.