Month: April 2013

The Trumpets Shall Sound

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

There is no place that I would rather be than here on my writing couch. That is because yesterday, I helped a friend move (I have a truck, so…), and now I am so sore that my muscles are in revolt. Right now, resting is good. I’m trying to make it where the only thing that moves is my fingers. When this article drifts into nothing, you’ll know that even they have seized.

–

I took up trumpet somewhere along my sixth grade year. This is because when I was in fifth grade, I had braces on my top front teeth, and my dad thought it would be too uncomfortable for me to play trumpet. I started on what, in some parts of the country, is called a baritone, in others is called a euphonium, and in both cases are made of metal and hatred.

Interestingly enough, I was pretty good. Living in a small East Texas town where the band took up the front row of three cafeteria tables, you wouldn’t think that there would be much chance for advancement. However, my band director was a trumpet player, and so was my dad. Even though I had to pick up the finer points on my own, I couldn’t have had a better foundation for brass.

Again, though, the euphonium wasn’t cool. The moment those braces were off, I dropped it.

My dad was right. Trumpet wasn’t as easy, but I was going to learn how to play it if it killed me. That is because the idea of playing trumpet and the camaraderie on the bus is different than the reality. I never got my embouchure right enough so that my lips didn’t hurt after about 45 minutes. I could often be the best trumpet player in my school for fifteen minutes at a clip. I could figure out the notes and the rhythms and learn how to wail on the high notes, but it never lasted very long because I was in so much pain.

For the trumpet players reading this, I know you could have fixed me. It’s ok. You all think you can, and you should, because not to think so is not to have the audacity of a trumpet player. It’s in your nature. Go back to your cages and mama will be around with bananas if you’re good.

I also had gut-wrenching stage fright. I have no idea where this came from, no idea where it started. But you could listen to me practice and listen to me perform and wonder if it was the same girl. I was so much better when no one was watching me, especially my teachers, because I was kind of afraid of them (in a healthy way, I think).

I would like to joke that I suffered through trumpet lessons, but I didn’t. My teachers were fabulous and I didn’t listen to them and that’s why it felt like suffering. See, the problem was the way I rested the trumpet on my lips while I was playing. In order to fix the problem, I would have to completely overhaul it. My teachers and I came to this conclusion when I tried every mouthpiece known to God and man and I still couldn’t play for more than an hour. I also tried Carmex, no Carmex, Vitamin E, lidocaine, everything. 45 minutes.

I still play, actually, but because I still haven’t fixed the original problem, you will get six minutes of loveliness.

Because the audition only lasted fifteen minutes, I got into High School for Performing and Visual Arts. It was here that I met my hero.

Wynton Marsalis came to HSPVA for a master class, and I WAS IN IT! He played it all, from classical to blues, and when it was over, I went up to him and stuck out my hand. “Wynton,” I said. “I have waited my whole life to meet you.” Keep in mind that I am probably 15 years old. I have been waiting a long, long, long, time.

He handed me his horn so that I could look at it up close, and said, “Awwwwwwwwwww…. thank you, baby.”

It is no coincidence that my favorite jazz track is “From the Plantation to the Penitentiary.”

 

It Gets Better (Letter to Myself)

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I started thinking about all the baby gays in the world, and the idea of this letter came to me. No, it’s not original. It’s a thing now, and I’m just following the crowd. Deal. You’ll have plenty of time to come back for jokes about your mother and how my wife can irritate the piss out of me without even trying.

–

Dear Leslie,

You are now 35 years old. I know this may come as a shock to you, given that right now, you are only 14. If you are actually reading this, then Doctor Who is real. I know you don’t really know about Doctor Who yet, but when you do, the reference will make you giggle.

Because I’m you, I know that you’ve just had a hell of a summer. You broke up with the best boyfriend in the entire world because you didn’t think you loved him the way you thought you should. The person you could talk to about that stuff is four hours away when you thought she’d be there for your freshman year of high school. You slept with your parents the night before your first day because you were so terrified of starting this new life. You think you are incredibly uncool, and in a sense, you are right. But you are also one of the most loved people in your grade, you just don’t know it.

Because you’re so sad, you miss out on a lot of stuff. It’s ok. Your 14-year-old mind works kind of like your 35-year-old mind, and I can tell you that you miss a lot of stuff your whole life. You’re an introvert. No one will tell you this. You will have a queen bee attitude in public because that’s what your life requires. But inside, you brood, and you think a lot, and sometimes you write it down.

That’s going to come in handy. You’re going to meet girls (I know that’s a load off your mind, since at this point you are still wearing a Luke Perry t-shirt and purple striped overall shorts). That “writing it down” will become instrumental in your girl-getting power. Use the force, with great power comes great responsibility, etc.

When you’re a little older, you’ll meet your first love. It will be terrible and wonderful like all first loves are. She’ll treat you like crap in public and you’ll take it for the sweet, stolen kisses when no one else is watching. You don’t even think about leaving because it’s not like there are girls wound up around the block.

When that girl finally disappears, you’ll spend three years processing everything that happened to you because it’s not just about processing the relationship, it’s learning that you are indeed REALLY, REALLY gay and you have to learn to live your life differently and just the same as everyone else.

You will still flirt with boys your entire life because it’s just too easy.

You learn to cope. You get out of the South, three times. You move to DC once and Portland twice. You get away from your first family and breathe, not because they’ve ever done anything negative to you, but because you’ve never been without them in a strange city and there’s so much to explore and you don’t know whether they’ll approve or not. You decide they’re not here and try to find yourself.

You do. As of right now, you are in a great marriage that you never expected would happen. Here’s a tip: when Dana invites you over for Easter lunch, GO.

Love,

Leslie

p.s. The President is black.

Poetry Slams

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t remember exactly how old I was- somewhere between 17 and 19- when my friend Scott started doing poetry slams. He had been a couple of times before I joined him, and the bar looked like the scary part in Pinnochio. Loud colors. Dark. Has an air of weird you just can’t place. Or at least, that’s what I thought when I walked in.

Scott was a little bit older than me, so he ordered me something to drink. He asked if I liked sweet or savory. I told him that it didn’t matter. I had never tried either one.

It was a perfect dirty martini with olives and ice chips and oh, God- I’ve never had anything like it. It’s salt dripping on my lips as if pickles could dance and I think to myself, “I have to remember to tell my friend Diane the name of this drink. She likes salt on everything!” I had no idea that the martini is basically the most famous drink in the ENTIRE WORLD. I can only imagine what that conversation would have looked like. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU’VE ALREADY TRIED ONE?!”

But I digress.

Scott wasn’t just good. Scott was amazing. He had gotten a following together, and they all met at this weird bar that in Portland, would look upscale. In Houston, it looked like it backed up to Crack Ho Estates.

After the poetry slam, the poets and our friends would all gather in the loft and shoot the breeze. A couple of times, they smoked pot. I say “they” very clearly because I was not cool. I thought the pipe looked like a weapon and I knew drugs were bad, mmmkay.

So it was just my job to turn up the music and make sure Scott got home ok. Because of this, I would only have one martini a week. I kept a very fastidious schedule because the talent was counting on me and that’s all we could afford between the two of us, anyway. I earned an allowance of my age per week. This usually consisted of one CD at Half Price Books, one cup of coffee at Crossroads, and cover to get into whatever club Scott was reading at that week. He bought the martini.

I’m writing about this because it is a memory fragment that needs preserving, but there’s not necessarily a beginning, middle, and end of the story. Scott is still a great writer, and I adore him, but there’s never going to be another first martini, there’s never going to be another first look at a pot pipe and thinking that it was probably going to kill Scott in his sleep.

To me, it’s important to remember the little things, because they serve you later, especially as a writer. My stories would not have half the depth and breadth that they do if I didn’t listen with a tape recorder in my head. If there is a writer that I would like to emulate, the one that runs across my head the most is Dominick Dunne. I have little interest in the trials of the rich and the very rich, but I still want his title. Simple, Clean, Efficient.

Diarist.

 

High School Stories We Still Tell

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

Here, for remembrance sake, are the stories that my friends and I still tell when we get together.

Alberto’s parents are out of town. He invites us over to watch movies, but says I can’t come because his mom doesn’t want girls in the house and his parents have spies watching the house (you can say that shit in Sugar Land and it might be true). The time comes for James, Michael, Alberto, and David to leave for Alberto’s. Michael says “I got a carpet pad roll in the back of my truck. Let’s go scare the shit out of him.” So the boys ROLL ME UP IN THE CARPET PAD and show up at Alberto’s door with them standing at the door like contractors. They bring in the carpet pad and set it down. When they unrolled me, Alberto’s eyes almost turned inside out. He said, and I quote, “WHAT THE FUCK, you guys!”

–

James, Michael, Alberto, and I used to go out on the golf course at the country club and play in the sand. I’m sure we wrote some unprintable things. We were leaving the golf course after raking it over, and Alberto said that he had night vision. Just then, he stepped into a puddle up to his knee and we all rolled on the ground.

–

James is a famous prankster, so he got on one phone line in the house and got his mother on the other. Allison, his sister, is listening in. In this memory, James is recounting the story, and I am asphyxiating with laughter. It didn’t matter that I didn’t see it firsthand.

James (talking like a deaf person): Hi! I’m calling from the American Society of Deaf Individuals. Are you, or anyone you know, a deaf individual?

Mom: N-

James: THAT’S GREAT!

This goes on for another few minutes, including a donation ask, before Mom hangs up the phone.

Allison, FTW, walks past her mom and says, absolutely deadpan, “Geez, Mom. I can’t believe you hung up on a deaf guy.”

–

I hated Mr. Skomski, my senior chemistry teacher. To this day, I think it was because he was Asperger’s and I didn’t recognize the signs… because he could do complicated algebraic equations in his head without notes, and at the same time, told a bunch of high school seniors that he was a bouncer at a club in New Orleans for a time. We thought he was weird and uncool, and I’m sad to say I took advantage of him. But I tried to exasperate him in the most clever of ways, because when he told us that he had been a bouncer, for me it was like, “you know we can see you, right?”

The first day of the class, we were in the lab. I think we were doing an experiment with water or playing cards or something like that. Completely non-toxic and extremely un-dangerous. Mr. Skomski is getting up in my face about putting on my safety glasses. He has come over to my table three times to politely ask me to put on my safety glasses. He is getting so pissed that his eyebrows are coming over his forehead, and I’m thinking, “it’s water and playing cards… LET. IT. GO.

But he won’t leave me alone, so I put them on my arm. Defeated, he turned on his heel and walked off. It’s children like me what cause unrest; I regret it, but come on. You have to admit. It’s funny.

–

Like when I decided I had a crush on Meagan Atkinson. She had office work every day during my chemistry class (bringin’ it back around), and would come to pick up the attendance every morning. Every damn morning of my senior year, I interrupted his class by, no matter what he was doing, yelling out “hiiii Meagan!” when she arrived. Skomski gave up after about three weeks, and I got the girl. Funny how life works out like that.

–

Here is the story of how Meag decided she had a crush on me.

We only had one class together, and that was English with Hudel Steed. Steed and I had a healthy relationship in that I had a healthy fear of her. She was a lawyer and proved to be incredibly clever (and evil). For instance, on the first day of class, she said, “You’ll have to excuse me if I’m a few minutes late every day. In their infinite wisdom, the administration has decided that teachers with the most seniority are the ones that have to watch the bathrooms and check for cigarettes. If this is what the administration thinks of seniority, they can shove it.”

Hudel Steed also has my undying respect for two things- a) making me a writer b) introducing me to my first girlfriend (remember that?). Let’s take one thing at a time. We’ll do the girlfriend first since that’s more interesting.

The first day of class, Dr. Steed said that her class was so fucking hard (and I’m paraphrasing) that we could not leave without getting someone’s phone number. CHECKMATE. Meag sat kitty-korner to me and I lunged for her desk.

I walk in the door to my mother’s apartment and the phone is ringing. I had given her every phone number I owned, like you do.

I pick up the phone, and without even saying hello, she said “I’m just curious. Why do you wear those rainbow rings to school every day?”

I said, “because I’m a lesbian. Do you have a problem with that?”

She said, “Noooo! I’m a Melissa Etheridge fan.

“I’m not, but thank you for giving money to my people,” I replied.

From then on, we were inseparable, and all it took was English.

–

In my haste to get things posted, I realized that I forgot a story from HSPVA… my 15th birthday. For starters, I wasn’t always the kind of kid that wanted to go to school when she was sick. I didn’t just have the sniffles, either. I was full-on miserable. However, it was my birthday, and I wanted to go. So my parents let me, against their better judgment.

Some time before, my friend the Judge had gotten our entire family into the Republican National Convention. I KNOW!, RIGHT?! While I was there, I bought a shirt made of an American flag. It was a button-down, and it was made of real flag canvas. I was so proud of it until…

I walked into Honors Band, which was first period. Everyone in the entire band was getting ready for warm-up. Those assholes stood up, saluted me, and then sang The Star-Spangled Banner in four-part harmony. With a cymbal crash at the end.

I was mortified. And psyched. For one solid moment, I felt cool.

Myths About Gay People

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
  • We can change our orientations at will.
    • If you believe the traditional evangelical line of thought, we gays are just not working hard enough at trying to be straight. If we really wanted to, we could change. We’re just rebellious and obnoxious. The truth is way more complicated than that. People have sex with each other for all sorts of reasons, including straight people just wondering what it’s like and vice versa. However, that does not translate into what kind of person you’re going to be attracted to and want to communicate with when you find a serious relationship. Relationships are so much more complicated than sex, because sex is so superficial to who you really are. Orientation is not decided by great sex with either gender. I’ve had more than one man say to me that I could cure being a lesbian with one good fuck (almost always from him). Good luck with that.
  • We have an agenda for the United States.
    • Why do you say that like you aren’t doing the same thing? Everyone has an agenda for the country, especially the evangelicals that harp on this point. If there is anything that gays want, it’s freedom from your hypocrisy. You’re wagging the dog, and we hate you for it. Gay rights are all about expanding the tax benefits you get when you get married in this country, because marriage is not tied to religion. God is. You and your kin will have the same opportunity to make us feel unwelcome in your churches all on your own.
  • We make bad parents because a child doesn’t get both a Mom and a Dad.
    • This is just cruel, and you know it. You’re scoring cheap political votes by stepping on the heads of others. Targeting gays like this isn’t the real issue, but it’s a great way to take the focus off N. Korea and to the moral bankruptcy of America. If you really had a problem with gay parents because they don’t give the kid both a mom and a dad, then you are also damning every family that doesn’t have a mom and a dad. Good luck getting the single parent vote, you egocentric bastards. Never mind that there are studies that gay people make better parents all around, because there are so fucking few unwanted pregnancies. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it. I will say it out loud that there is a special place in hell for those closeted bastards in Congress that by day, support laws that hurt them, and by night, suck cock like it’s going out of style.
  • Gay Marriage Isn’t Real Marriage
    • This is another myth that drives me completely batshit crazy. Look at my life. I am a computer nerd to the highest degree, and I always will be. Dana is as big a nerd as me, just in different areas of her life. Do we really seem like our marriage would be so damn different than yours? We take out the trash, we do our laundry, we fight over sex, money, Jeopardy!, and what’s going to happen on Doctor Who. If we had kids, we would both become a taxi service. If we had grandkids, we’re the grandparents that would think it’s funny to give them a drum set. We think our in-laws would like each other, but we can’t think of a place for them to meet. Does that sound all that different from you? Talk me through your day and tell me where you think our marriages might be different. I dare you. And if you say one thing about it being different when we go to bed, because we’re doing unspeakable things to each other, first of all, you’re right. Second of all, your straight friends don’t want to think about you having sex, either, Stud.
  • You can instantly tell someone is gay by their mannerisms.
    • The truth is that, yeah, sometimes you can. But I guarantee that for every gay person you know that’s “fabulous” or “wears comfortable shoes,” there are even more where you’d never know unless they told you. That’s what’s intrinsically wrong with offensive jokes about gay people. Say one in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you’re likely to find out that your boss is gay and you don’t have a job.
    • A corollary…
      • We can tell you’re straight. Especially those of you that shop at Sears for clothes.

What I Think About at Lunch

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Originally posted Mar. 7th

For some reason, I start out with the premise that I can learn Arabic just by hanging out with the Saudi boys on campus. It’s not that hard- they say everything with their hands and their eyebrows. Or at least, it’s not that hard until I realize that several minutes have gone by and I haven’t understood anything. Ali can switch between Arabic and English pretty handily. Yossef cannot. I often say things slower and louder, as if I am visiting Saudi Arabia as a tourist.

Do not let Yossef fool you, though. He knows more English than he lets on. Apparently, English words make a lot more sense when there’s a lot of Arabic around it. For instance, Yossef does not know the words “dog” or “sandwich.” But get him on the phone and all of the sudden, he knows things like “double major.”

I kidded him today that we should just switch to Arabic. I said, “salaam alaikum.” He said “Akbar.” I said, “you have now reached the end of my Arabic.” Everyone laughed except Yossef, who looked on quizzically. When it was translated for him, he nearly fell off a park bench.

These boys are one of the best parts of my day. The fact that they accept me for who I am and just let me hang out with them is a miracle. I don’t know that they realize I am a gay person (hell, I’m not even sure if they know I’m female), and I’m not going to tell them. It might ruin what we have… and what we have is a dorky white female trying to learn about their culture because I’ve watched “Little Mosque on the Prairie.”

Yossef and I have more in common than the rest of the boys, which is sad because I don’t know how to talk to him. In Saudi, he works in the king’s palace as tech support, which Ali told me because Yossef wanted to know where I worked as well. These friendships are easy and unencumbered, because I’m not really part of the crew. I’m the lady that knows English. Yossef says that it’s fun to practice. It will be more fun for me when I don’t have to have Ali translate because Yossef’s verb agreement is upside down and backwards.

I call them “boys” even though they are married or betrothed. This is because there is a school on campus called “Pacific International Academy,” which is a preparatory school before college to give them a leg up on language. They’re young, almost painfully so to be so encumbered with life- the balance between their lives in Saudi and their lives in Portland is difficult. Salim’s mother doesn’t drive, and he takes her everywhere. More than once I have heard Salim talking her off the ceiling because she is losing her mind over her baby being so far away and unable to take her to the market. I told him to watch the video “Why Saudi Women Shouldn’t Drive” to make him feel better. He responded by pulling out his phone, looking up the video, and snorting Mountain Dew through his nose and across the room.

They are also mischievous in their own right. The first time I met Yossef, I told him that I liked his shoes. Ali translated that into “she likes the way your wife dresses you.” Then it was my turn for soda to come out of my nose.

Being with them is a mind worm. I wonder what will happen to them when they leave PIA. I wonder if they will stay here long enough to finish a degree. I wonder if Salim’s mother will chill out long enough to let her baby fly, because he is so attached to her that there is no way he won’t go back *eventually.* I worry that they’re getting enough out of school to really make a difference in their English… not because *I* want them to learn it, but because it’s so important to them.

So that’s what goes through my mind as the lunch sun beats down on us and Yossef is leaning in the grass, singing ancient Arabic tunes to a drum beat no one else hears.

 

Platform

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday was red letter for “Stories,” and I couldn’t have done it without help from my friends. Kristie Berthelotte shared my piece on marriage, and within one day, 47 people had read it. For someone who just started a blog, that’s incredible. It’s more attention than I deserve, and I am grateful.

But part of the reason I’m grateful is that those 47 people gave me a platform to say what I wanted to say, and took it all in.

In her last episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, Oprah said something poignant that I will share here:

When I started, not even I imagined that this show would have the depth and the reach that you all have given it. It has been a privilege for me to speak to you here in this studio, in this country and in 150 countries around the world on this platform that is The Oprah Winfrey Show. You let me into your homes to talk to you every day. This is what you allowed me to do, and I thank you for that. But what I want you to know as this show ends: Each one of you has your own platform. Do not let the trappings here fool you. Mine is a stage in a studio, yours is wherever you are with your own reach, however small or however large that reach is. Maybe it’s 20 people, maybe it’s 30 people, 40 people, your family, your friends, your neighbors, your classmates, your classroom, your co-workers. Wherever you are, that is your platform, your stage, your circle of influence. That is your talk show, and that is where your power lies.

That one paragraph encompasses everything I want to do with this web site. I want to use my platform to share goofy stories and bad jokes and awful colloquialisms in the hopes that I can change minds and hearts. I never forget that I have the chance to change someone’s opinion about something, and to do it in the absolutely best way I know how- writing for people to read.

Why would I say that?

Because I am just presenting my side of the story. You’ll take it away, mull it over, and decide whether I’m right or not. There’s no being put “on the spot,” no need for a reply. It’s just a way to put things out there.

You decide what you’re going to do with it.

The very beauty of a blog. If you get offended, you can click somewhere else. If you don’t, maybe something will resonate and you’ll pass it on. Either way, I am grateful for the chance to be heard.

Welcome to my platform.

Seventeen Cents

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

On Dec. 20, 1990, I was the only one home when our house started burning. These are my recollections, originally written for my web site in 2005.

———–

My hair was in curlers. I was wearing black pumps, black pantyhose, and a Snoopy nightgown. I was watching The New Mickey Mouse Club on television because it was keeping my mind off of the dance I was preparing for later in the evening. My mother and sister had left the house to go shopping. My dad was delivering communion to little old ladies who couldn’t make it to church. It was a typical Friday afternoon… everyone was busy, including me, even though I didn’t look like it on the outside.

There was so much to think about! Who would I dance with? I wanted it to be Topper Caraway, even though I mostly hated him. It just seemed to me that of all the sixth grade boys in the world, Topper was the least repulsive. There was always the possibility that I would meet someone from another church. What would he look like? Would he be taller than me? Wear glasses? Know all the words to a Poison song? Like Guns and Roses as much as I did?

I was jarred from my thoughts by a strong smell that I couldn’t quite place. It was sort of like something was cooking, but I knew my mom wouldn’t leave something in the oven for me to take care of without telling me first. I decided to investigate. I opened the door that separated the living room from the hallway and shrunk back in horror. Black smoke was pouring into the hallway from the ceiling.

The television was still blaring (…”cause Fred and Mowava and the Mousketeers say, ‘We gonna rock right here!’”). Time seemed to speed up so fast it was as if it was tangible, heading for a brick wall where it would shatter and define everything from that moment on. I thought about what to do next. I was only twelve. I didn’t have much life experience to draw on.

I decided to leave everything as it was. There was no mad dash to save one last thing, a question so popular in games of Scruples. Because those things are very easy to think about when you are sitting around your dining room table in pursuit of academic discussion. When the moment hits you, the moment you truly realize that your house is burning down and there is not one damn thing you can do to stop it, waves of utter and complete helplessness wash over you. There is no time to save anything. If you are lucky, you will be dressed at the time, and physically able to get out.

I ran next door to the Brabhams, hoping that someone would be home. If they thought it was unusual that I was on their doorstep in my pajamas and curlers, they didn’t say so. I asked if I could call the Fire Department. I dialed the numbers with shaking hands and gave the dispatcher my address.

It seemed like ages before a fire truck pulled up in front of the house. Perhaps it was, or perhaps it would have seemed like ages no matter what. It was all so surreal. Here I was, in my nightgown and hair curlers, watching every possession that I had ever owned disappear in clumps. I worried about my computer. I worried about the pair of British Knights that my mom had gotten for me the Christmas before. My teeth clenched. The dress that I had bought to wear that night was hanging on a curtain rod in my bedroom. I’d never get it out in time. That’s when it hit me.

I didn’t have any clothes.

It was just about then that my mom and sister drove up, terrified to see a fire truck in front of the house. My mom would recount for many years to come how she drove up into the cacophonic scene, wondering if I’d been able to escape and wailing on the inside for she could not immediately find me.

There was palpable relief in my mother’s face when she went to the neighbors’ and saw me sitting on the couch. I was glad to see them for I was tired of being alone, feeling like this fire was my responsibility to take care of, aching for a grown-up to come along and take the weight off my shoulders. The firemen were doing the real work. But I wanted to be saved of being the only person in the family with the knowing- the stomach churning, bile inducing knot of fear that says, “everything is gone.”

I could rest now. My mother was here. My mother could be the one in charge. I gave myself over to the shock, in such a trance that I don’t remember my father coming home, discussion of what we would do next, or in fact, what actually did happen next. I “woke up” a few hours later at my maternal grandparents’ house. The only thing I remember about those missing few hours was going to a store in Daingerfield called Gibson’s and buying enough clothes for the next few days… and the only reason I remember that is because I hated the clothes at Gibson’s. Wearing clothes like that, with no designer label, would get me murdered in sixth grade. I was uncool enough. In retrospect, I know that it was wonderful to have clothes at all. But that was no use to me then.

Over the next few days, once the fire had subsided, we were able to go back into the house and grab anything that didn’t look totally and completely ruined. What we didn’t know was that once something has been through a fire, even if it hasn’t actually been touched by flame, is ruined.

There is nothing that I have left from that period in my life that doesn’t still reek of smoke… a different kind of smoke. Not the comforting kind. Not Paw-paw’s pipe smoke. Not hickory flavored meat cooking smoke. It’s a dense, acrid kind of smell. One that conjurs images of pain- forest fires in which animals are overtaken… crematoriums… hell.

It was some time later that we learned, through a report, that the fire had been caused when a wire that hadn’t been capped started smoldering in the attic.

Total cost of the cap?

Seventeen cents.

Things I’ve Learned About Marriage (Even if You Don’t Want to Call it That)

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 37 Comments

Originally Posted May 2012

I was married way too young the first time around. I was 23 years old. However, I was too smart and mature to realize that I was being really, really dumb. For instance, I was in the wrong relationship, and trying desperately to make it fit. I’m not even sure that by the time we got married, my partner thought it would last, but I did, and to her credit, she put a lot of faith in my belief. I also needed immediate medical attention for my mental health, because I didn’t have insurance on my own. I think that we both thought that as I improved, so would the relationship. As Soren Kierkegaard once said, “we live life forwards, but we understand it backward.” Ultimately, the relationship did not succeed, but it was a wonderful teaching tool.

But I didn’t learn everything I needed to know, because I was in a second relationship that lived on hope for quite a bit longer than it should have. We announced that we were getting married, we found a minister to marry us, and then the things that were going wrong in our relationship went from bad to so much worse that I realized that I was committing to a lifetime of desperately trying to make it work, rather than it being the right fit. Again, the relationship ended, and again, I learned lessons that couldn’t have been learned any other way.

I didn’t like Dana when I met her. She was so loud and obnoxious that I said to my friend Diane, “WHO. IS. THAT. WOMAN. THAT. ACCENTS. EVERY. WORD?” We saw each other at church now and again, but she really didn’t appear on my radar until Easter of 2004. A few weeks earlier, I had gone through the worst breakup of my entire life, and it was still weighing on me heavily. Dana came up to me and said, “Would you like to come to my house for Easter dinner? We’re having rack of lamb.” She said later that she’d often thought of trying to get to know me, but that Easter was kind of a pity invite because I looked so horribly sad.

We didn’t become best friends overnight, but by July, we were spending almost every waking moment together outside of our jobs. That is because we were both living alone~ me because I was single, and Dana because her partner was a construction worker who left town for weeks at a time. People assumed that we were having an affair~ we weren’t. I was way too broken for that. What did happen, though, is that Dana became the person that knows me better than anyone on earth. We can have entire conversations with our eyes. By the time we kissed, we each had enough blackmail material on the other for two lifetimes, and that’s what made me see stars. She saw me for everything I am- huge flaws and all- and loved me anyway.

This list is a compilation of everything I’ve learned from the time I was 23 until now. It is my best wish that everything I’ve gone through will connect to something in your own life… particularly if you are a conservative/evangelical Christian who does not believe in gay marriage. My only goal is to share some common ground.

  1.  Be willing to say you’re wrong even when you don’t think you are, because it is far better to be happy and together than right and alone.
  2. Fighting isn’t a sign of trouble. It’s a sign that you’ve needed to talk way before it got to the fight point. Fighting isn’t a way to end the relationship, it’s a way to both be passionate about your beliefs and both get a resolution in the end. I know my voice gets louder when I think things are unfair, and so does everyone else’s. Seeing anger as a mark of passion and interest instead of feeling threatened goes a long way toward resolving a fight quickly.
  3. You and your partner are both going to have trigger words left over from childhood that make you crazy. Try not to say them. In fact, try not to intentionally push any emotional buttons. Be an adult. Use your words. Triggers are just cheap shots, which can seem like an easy victory… until it’s three days later and the wound you left hasn’t healed.
  4. If you don’t use those cheap shot triggers, and you are fairly emotionally smart about fighting, ignore the traditional advice of not going to bed angry. That’s because if the argument has been handled with care, and neither of you are wounded, it will often look better (or non-existent) after a good night’s sleep. Additionally, if the argument means a lot to you, it might appear in your dreams and work out a solution in your sub-conscience that you can present the next time you talk about the issue. Adding fatigue to fighting is just a red flag that things are about to get much, much worse.
  5. You don’t really care about the brand of toothpaste. You don’t really care whether the toilet paper goes over the top or hangs under the roll. In fact, you don’t really care about anything superficial- the real problem is something deeper, and you don’t know how to get vulnerable enough to bring it up. Quirky things about your partner are just that- quirks. If you’re *really* fighting about toothpaste, it’s time to let it go, because people don’t change. They just don’t. Trying to change someone else’s behavior is an uphill battle, and there will always be something about your partner that you don’t like. Deal. They have a list of things they don’t like about you, too.
  6. Make sure you actually have a friendship with your partner. Romantic love doesn’t seem to be ever-present. It’s a forest fire that comes in waves. Do not lose your connection altogether, because nothing is harder than starting from scratch. Plus, nothing says lovin’ like witty banter that turns into deep conversation that turns into OH MY GOD! We’ve been talking ALL NIGHT! That probably happened when you were dating- make sure it happens more than that.
  7. Before I got married, I never knew there was a right and a wrong way to fold a t-shirt. If your partner feels strongly about something, let them do it. But don’t be a jackass if they’re picky about everything and use it as an excuse not to do anything around the house. Be proactive. Say, “is it more important for you to have it done your way, or for you to release the responsibility of having to do it?”
  8. Talking about money and sex is hard, and there will never be a time when talking about either of these topics isn’t emotionally charged. Do whatever you can to strengthen your connection to each other before talking about either. Take a walk together, sit in the shower, just something that makes you want to open up to each other. If you can’t be vulnerable during a conversation about sex or money, then neither one of you is going to get anywhere, because neither of you wants to say anything that is beyond the protective walls you’ve put up around each subject.
  9. The corollary to #6 is that after you’ve opened up and have been extraordinarily vulnerable with each other, you might intentionally pick a fight. Be as aware of this as you can, because it’s not a signal that your relationship is in trouble. It’s a signal that says, “hey, I’m really emotionally crunchy after all this togetherness and I just need some time to myself.” Being aware of the natural dance of intimacy may cut off a fight at the pass. Know that after a fight, it’s probably better to retreat into separate rooms, or go out with your buddies. If they’re up for it, talk to your friends about the fight and blow off steam.
  10. A FEW WORDS ABOUT ALCOHOL If, after the fight, you want a drink, have one. But wait until the processing/blowing off steam is over. Why? Because having a beer to calm your nerves is one thing. Using alcohol to mask what’s really bothering you is another. P.S. Drinking during a fight is absolutely unacceptable. Alcohol changes your judgment, and often, your compassion. Take away those two things, and you are inevitably going to say something that you can never take back. Your partner may forgive you (or vice versa), but they’re never going to forget you said it, and it will hurt for a long time afterward. You may compound hurt without even knowing it.
  11. Do not keep score, but have a general sense of whether you feel appreciated, or you feel your partner is taking advantage of you. It is important to know these things for yourself, because while I am not an advocate of divorce, I am also not an advocate of constantly feeling like crap because you know you’re giving all you can and still not getting anything in return. When the tables are that imbalanced, seek professional help. If that doesn’t work, get the hell out. Life is too short to be that miserable for that long. Also, if it surprises you how much of the time you don’t like your partner, you’re in the wrong relationship. Why do I say that? Because even though marriage is a lot of work, it shouldn’t be like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole EVERY. DAMN. DAY.
  12. Know the person long enough to know if you’re going to spend years of frustration or not before you get married. In my own case, I threw caution to the wind. I asked Dana to marry me on our first date. BUT I NEVER WOULD HAVE DONE THAT had she not been my best friend in the world for the three and a half years before that. In being best friends, we had each paid our dues at getting to know each other. We each helped each other through some really rough stuff. I advocate that all couples do this before making any sort of official committment- because as Dana and I always say, we’re going to be together forever because there’s no way we didn’t know what contract we were signing.
  13. Know to the very core of your being that logic and emotion are two different things. Your partner may be saying something to you that is “highly illogical,” but he/she isn’t thinking that way. Thinking with your heart vs. your mind lead to different conclusions. The heart is irrational, AND THAT’S OK. Even if the lack of logic makes no damn sense, let him/her make it all the way to the end of what they have to say. All emotions are valid. If you try to put emotions into logical boxes, you’ve lost the entire point of having an argument, which is to really hear what each other needs emotionally.
  14. Don’t get too comfortable. You know you’re settling in for the long haul, so it’s easy to s l o w it down. Take heed: you’re not going to be together forever if you don’t communicate, early and often. You’re not going to stay attracted to each other if you become homebodies without new experiences to share. When those two things go, so does your attention… The end of a relationship doesn’t happen overnight. It happens slowly, over a great deal of time. The big bang is when you wake up one day and realize that you don’t really even know your partner anymore.
  15. Pay close attention to the difference between your “public persona” and the way you treat each other behind closed doors. The more closely those two things mirror each other, the more it means that the connection is genuine. NOTICE if when you’re in public, you act like the perfect couple that all your couple friends say they wish they were, and when you’re at home, no one would ever guess how bad it is. NOTICE if you are acting like everything is fine, when inside, it is CLEARLY not.
  16. THIS IS REALLY, REALLY IMPORTANT: When you get married, you are saying to the entire world that, forsaking all others, your partner is the most important person in the world to you. That you are changing your ties to your first family to create this new family with your partner. Mean it. Do not ever let your partner get hung out to dry with your family, because you will never endure a more silent car ride home… and this has nothing to do with either one of your families. It’s because “you broke the cardinal rule of marriage, and put someone else before me.”
  17. Give them their moments. There’s such an urge to compete with each other. When you realize you’re doing it, bow out gracefully. Amusingly, this gets easier as I get older. Nurturing my more natural introverted personality is slowly turning me into one of those guys who yell at the damn kids to get off his lawn.

——

I am sure that there are at least fifty more, and feel free to talk about them in the comments. I just thought it was important to show that gay marriage is marriage, because I haven’t said a single thing that you wouldn’t find in a heterosexual marriage self-help book. I don’t think that there is anything unique to gay marriage, because we all struggle with the same day-to-day scheduling haggles and the same left over emotional “stuff” from childhood. We all need to make our marriages stronger, because divorce is so much harder and less rewarding than having a relationship capable enough to survive big storms.

Sermon for Lent 4B

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 10 Comments

Originally posted on Mar 18, 2012

—

Syrian rebels ignited a new front Friday outside the capital, Damascus, in the first significant fighting there since regime forces swept over the suburbs weeks ago. The clashes highlight the shifting nature of Syria’s conflict, with rebels lying in wait to rise up when the regime turns its guns elsewhere.

-San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 16, 2012

West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress chairperson Mamata Banerjee today accused the Congress of engineering the ‘revolt’ by Union Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi and asked her party MLAs to go back to their constituencies and tell people that the Trinamool did not endorse the budget presented by the minister.

-The Indian Express, Mar. 16, 2012

With al-Shabab on the retreat in the face of gains by African Union (AU) forces in Somalia, the militant group is looking for new avenues to exert control both in and outside of Somalia.  The group is focused on recruiting Kenyan Muslims to revolt against, what they term, state-sponsored oppression directed against them.

-Voice of America, Mar. 14, 2012

Political revolutions leave chaos in their wake. Republicans cannot shut down their presidential nominating contest because the party is in the midst of an upheaval wrought by the growing dominance of its right wing, its unresolved attitudes toward George W. Bush’s presidency and the terror the GOP rank-and-file has stirred among the more moderately conservative politicians who once ran things.

-E.J. Dionne, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Mar. 15, 2012

From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”

-Our Numbers passage, written roughly 3500 years ago

Charles Darwin proved that evolution takes place over millions and millions of years, and nowhere in the Bible is it more apparent than in our Old Testament passage today. When people are unhappy, they do their dead-level best to let their leaders know about it. That hasn’t changed in centuries. In a lot of cases, people rise up against leaders with whom they used to be very happy, and such is the case with Moses. Everything was going great- the Israelites had been delivered out of slavery, and they were headed to the Promised Land. As time went on, though, there were certain… problems.

First of all, the desert known in the Bible as Kadesh is the current-day Negev. It is one of the driest, hottest places on earth due to its location east of the Sahara. They were no doubt suffering from sunburn, heat rash, heat stroke… to the point that “survival of the fittest” was taking its toll.

Second, the same people that rejoiced when God sent manna from heaven now thought it tasted terrible, and to top it all off, there was little to no water to wash it down. Whether it was actually terrible is a moot point- they’d been eating it day in and day out for YEARS. In short, their complaints were valid. It was miserable. They may have been slaves in Egypt, but at the end of the day, they could drown their sorrows in the farmer’s market with melons… and olives… perhaps a nice bottle of Claret. They had no idea where they were going or how much longer their current reality was going to be one of hard struggle just to stay alive.

That is when things go from bad to much, much worse. God is angry that the people have lost faith, and the hot, starvation and heat-crazed Israelites are now the hot, starvation and heat-crazed SNAKE BITTEN Israelites.

All of the sudden, Moses doesn’t look quite so bad. The Israelites beg Moses to go and intervene on their behalf with God.

Here is where things get interesting. God tells Moses to make a bronze snake and wrap it around a rod, so that when people were bitten by the snakes, they could look up at this makeshift, portable statue and be healed. My first question when I started researching for this sermon was, “WHY?” Why didn’t God just destroy the snakes? That’s when it hit me. God didn’t change the snake bites. God changed the Israelites. In order to be healed, the Israelites had to look straight at the thing they feared. God didn’t take away the pain of being bitten, God gave them something to take the pain away AFTER THEY ALREADY HAD IT.

In modern-day Portland, God is doing the same thing for us… even though the snake bites are almost always metaphorical. The economy is sinking businesses left and right. There are millions of homeless people. There is gang violence, addiction, mental illness, physical illness, communities and individuals that are aching for a cure.

But God doesn’t offer that. God offers a refuge to heal pain as it is happening, when we are willing to look straight at what scares us the most.

Because a cure would have been destroying all the snakes that bite us in the first place.

The difference between a cure and being healed is in the details. As we read in the meditation, taking blood pressure medication cures high blood pressure… but it doesn’t relieve stress. Anti-inflammatories ease the pain in my wrists, but they don’t get me to stop typing all the time.

So often we reach for a cure, when what we need is healing, and that is the message that runs through our Gospel lesson, as well. I am sure that for those of you who grew up in the church- no matter what the denomination- I could wake you up in the middle of the night and ask you to recite John 3:16, and you could do it. However, I sincerely believe that when that verse is taken in isolation, it leaves out the most potent part of the story.

In the same way that God asked Moses to make a bronze serpent to heal the physical pain of a snake bite, God sent Jesus to heal the emotional and spiritual snake bites of the whole world. I use the phrase “whole world” intentionally, because Moses creating the bronze snake was specifically to heal God’s own people- Israelites, and specifically, Jews in covenant with God. The crucifixion was not only meant for Jews, but for Gentiles as well. The gift of a place to look for healing was extended to everyone, whether they were currently in covenant with God or not… John writes, “Jesus said to Nicodemus, ‘just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.’” Whoever. Believes.

That is the good news of the Gospel, but the next verses are the crux of our relationship with God. “Those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

THAT IS AN INVITATION.

There are so many people that think Jesus’ message is grace, meaning that there is nothing you can do to get God to love you any more… or any less… and they’re right. However, those people are seeing the light of Christ for a moment, when what God is really offering is the light of Christ for a lifetime. It is a covenant that starts out with the initial promise of forgiveness no matter what… but in order to have a sustaining relationship with God, we have to do the work.

So, if God offers healing for all of the snake bites the world has to offer, why do some people prefer to, as Jesus says, “live in darkness?” Most of the time, it is not a matter of malicious intent, but a lack of understanding how to get there from here.

In preparing for my sermon this week, I called a friend of mine who is a transplant surgeon at the Liver Institute at Methodist Hospital in Dallas. Let’s call her “Dr. Anthony” (mostly because that’s her name). We were talking about the differences between curing and healing, illness and disease. One of the things that really struck me was when Dr. Anthony said, “some patients are overwhelmed with being well.” At BEING WELL??? WHY???

For people that have dealt with long-term illness, they have gotten comfortable with the role of Sick Person.™ Faced with the prospect of getting well, they’re having to cope with things that they haven’t had to deal with for a long time. Bills, housework, kid taxiing, you name it- all of these things are frightening to contemplate when it seems like there is a rushing river of activity AROUND them with no concrete entrance. Trying to jump in with both feet often leads to depression for people who are used to other people managing their lives- their only job has been wrapped up in the cure of their physical disease. The process of healing emotionally and spiritually is daunting.

Dr. Anthony also said that people who receive transplants are often guilty and angry after surgery, and she has to give what everyone on her service calls “The Tiffany Talk.” Intrigued, I asked her to give it to me. Instead, she responded with a story.

“I had this patient who was ordering the nurses around, being unpleasant to everyone around him- to the point that the nurses called me about his behavior. When I got to his room, I said ‘you have been given the ultimate gift of life, and you are being horrible to everyone that has rushed around trying to save you. Your actions are a DISGRACE to your donor’s family.’ By the time I left the room, he was in tears.”

I said, “because they feel guilty that the gift is so huge that they can never repay it.”

Often when we fall short in our covenant with God, there are elements of both these ideas. Doing the hard emotional work to become whole and healthy in the spiritual sense is just that: hard work. So often we rely on the grace of God because it is easier than staring straight at the things that frighten us… and the gift of refuge that God has given us through Christ is so big that we don’t have the first clue of how to repay it.

Dr. Anthony’s response to her patients goes something like this… “you do not realize how big a gift you have given to donors and their families. For the rest of their lives, they will be able to say that they saved someone else’s.” When you do the healing work required in your relationship with God, living in light takes on new meaning. You are more able to let light shine through you to others. God’s gift in sending Christ as healer for the world is God’s gift to us. How you use it is your gift to God.

Amen.

Sermon for Proper 29, Year B

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The following is a re-post of the sermon I did on November 25th, 2012.

Christ the King Sunday was invented by the Roman Catholic church in 1925 as a celebration of Christ’s lordship. It is the very last Sunday in the liturgical year- we start fresh next week with the first Sunday of Advent. In the new paradigm of power with instead of power over, when you ask most preachers what they’re doing for Christ the King Sunday, they immediately tell you how they’re going to preach about Thanksgiving.

Christ the King Sunday is not an easy topic for preachers because a lot has changed since 1925. Congregations all over the world are put off by the topic of Christ as a King… Ruler of all our hearts… dominion over the entire world… a living, breathing, professional Christian superhero who knows all things and leads our lives in the direction he chooses fit.

Additionally, the phrase “reign of Christ” gives a lot of people the heebie jeebies. It brings up images from the past that don’t sync with our modern view of Jesus… like when the Bible was used to advocate slavery, anti-semitism, misogyny, violence against gays, and anything else that could possibly be justified having a Lord over all would imply. Because a Lord over all means that basically, we can pick one side of the story, and that side of the story is good enough for everybody.

Has the practice of anything that I just mentioned completely gone away? Especially in the United States of America in 2012, ask yourself: “Is there still slavery? Well, maybe not in the US, but certainly across the world.” “Is there still misogyny? Well, it’s all over the place, but at least in the United States, you can make the argument that it’s more polite.” “Is there still discrimination against same-sex couples? Yes, some people are fighting for their lives as we worship.”

It’s STILL. ALL. HERE.

That side of the story hasn’t changed much in 2,000 years. People are still struggling every day with fear and loss and pain and all the other emotions that encourage them to grab power where they can. In some parts of the world, the Bible is used to browbeat people into believing that the Bible provides religious leaders with a power they don’t have… the power to change what God believes into what sounds suspiciously like their side of the story. Moreover, since that story is “God’s” story, it cannot be challenged or changed in any way.

You could also make the argument that liberal Christians are also creating their side of the story. Jesus as anti-hero. Jesus serves instead of reigns. Jesus couldn’t possibly agree with the story that’s been created for him by fundamentalists, because the conservative evangelical story sounds so, at best, old fashioned, and at worst, mean spirited and petty. Liberal Christianity sounds suspiciously like our side of the story.

What about people of other religions? Whether Christians choose to persecute or welcome them is decided on a case-by-case basis. Coexist has become a convenient catch phrase for a lot of Christians, but how well we practice inclusion of other faiths is, to the people of those religions, their side of the story.

And then there are the people standing outside of Christianity, looking at all Christians as one group and lumping us all together as one body, one belief, one set of customs. What they believe about us is just as important as what we actually do. In a lot of cases, perception is reality. How we come across to the world outside of Bridgeport to people who are either unchurched or have made a conscious decision not to attend is their side of the story.

With so many sides of this one story, our human story, the question begs to be asked: whose side of the story is Jesus on, anyway?

For you, does it get more personal than that? I know it does for me. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve been in a situation where I’ve made poor decisions based on only knowing one side of the story. I, as everyone does, have a singular lens through which I see problems bigger than me. I find out later that there was a crucial piece of information I missed, and I crumble. I argue with myself that I did the best I could with the information I had, but if you’ve ever really stuck your foot in it, you know that saying is useless.

I rage like Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer, in the famous scene the day after he’s been left at the altar. His ex-fiancee is listing off everything she hates about their relationship, and Robbie, Sandler’s character, says, “Once again, things that could’ve been brought to my attention YESTERDAY!”

It is exactly that point at which we find Pontius Pilate. Theologians have argued and will argue which side he was on for millenia to come. I choose to believe this one: Pilate didn’t know the other sides of the story.

As a non-Jew, I’m not even sure that Pilate knew what was going on. He was a prefect of Judea, which meant that he had jurisdiction, but very little is known beyond that. Who knows how much he’d taken in about the Jewish faith, the laws that governed it, or the power players involved. Before Jesus was brought before Pilate, he was tried in a Jewish court by the Sanhedrin~ basically the governing body of Judaism in the region. Who knows what Pilate understood about that process, or why Jesus was in front of him in the first place. For starters, Pilate couldn’t even see a crime… at least not in the traditional sense.

Jesus was no help. Was he the King of the Jews, or wasn’t he? Did he blaspheme or didn’t he? And if he had, why would the Sanhedrin care so much about it that they were willing to put Jesus through what turned out to be a very public execution? Pilate made the only decision he could with the information he had. And then, venturing into fiction, I think he probably vomited into an urn. Because that’s what happens when you know you don’t know something, and you don’t even know how to put your finger on what it is… and very real consequences are riding on your mistake. Your stomach hurts. You get dizzy. You want to roll back time and do things differently… especially in Pilate’s case, where there was a very permanent solution to what seemed to him like a temporary problem. Jesus was probably just a nut job. But that didn’t mean he needed to die over it, did he?

The other side of the story that will never be known is what would have happened had Pilate really understood the concept of Jesus’ kingship. For all of Jesus’ incredible works and amazing way with words, he often did not help himself by speaking where other people could understand him. If you asked a simple question of Jesus, you were often on the receiving end of a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

Pilate says, “what have you done?” and Jesus replies, “my kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”

I’m sorry. What?

I can feel Pilate’s frustration. I can imagine him desperately trying to think of something to say that won’t upset the crazy man in front of him. “Ok, Pilate… speak softly, no sudden moves… when am I going to learn that when they say ‘take a vacation,’ I really should go…”

Pilate just didn’t get the concept of living in two worlds. I mean, what would happen in the modern day if I said I was Queen of somewhere, but you couldn’t find it on a map and I couldn’t really take you there unless you died?

Pilate didn’t get it, but Cecille Bechard did. I found this while looking for research on my sermon, and it illustrates the concept of living in two worlds perfectly:

Cecille Bechard is a Canadian who visits the United States several dozen times a day- when she goes to the refrigerator, or the back door, or to make tea, for instance. To read and sleep she stays in Canada, and she eats there too if she sits at the north end of the kitchen table. Mrs. Bechard’s home sits on the United States-Canada border. The frontier cuts through the kitchen wall and across the sink, splits the salt and pepper shakers, just misses the stove and passes through the other wall to sever the Nadeau family’s clothes line and cut off the candy counter in Alfred Sirois’s general store. Almost anywhere else in the world, Mrs. Bechard might need a passport to take a bath.

Cecille Bechard lived in two worlds without even thinking about it. Jesus lived in two worlds the entire time he was on earth, intentionally and with great care. For Cecille Bechard, the boundaries between the two were clearly drawn out on a map. For Jesus, each world weaved in and out, one from the other, to the point where his two worlds were one in his mind.

The problem came in when his two worlds clashed with everyone else’s. People were just beginning to understand his side of the story, and they didn’t always agree with him. Most of the time, understanding of Jesus’ story was through small groups of people, not large crowds. I have to believe that this was intentional as well. When I am teaching a small group of people, I find that they listen more intently. They ask better questions. I am more assured that the information I have tried to give them has actually stuck. I have heard their frustrations, and I have given them answers. I am comfortable with what I teach because computers do not have an emotional story. Logic dictates that in every if, then statement, there is a right and a wrong answer.

And yet, the condition of being human diverges sharply into several thousand right and wrong answers, all based on different answers to the same story. How can we ever get it right?

The Good News of the gospel is that no one ever does. In just about every verse in scripture, we are faced with someone making a decision without knowing the full measure of the situation.

So if there is no perfect answer, is there at least a good one?

I choose to believe that the answer comes in stopping everything you are doing. Stop making it worse! Stop making it better! Sit down. Make a pot of tea. Go to the store and get some of those little cookies you like while your Earl Grey is steeping. Take your tea and your cookies and find a big comfy chair. Don’t even think about moving until those cookies are gone and you are attempting to read your tea leaves. Spend some time alone, in the quiet, and slowly enter the river that is divine consciousness. Create a space for God to speak, because when God is speaking to you, you are listening to the one voice that has heard every side of every story. Ancient wisdom to modern slang. Every thing and every one that has ever come into being is in that divine space.

It will take time for the answers to come. It will be minutes, hours, before your mind is still enough to take in wisdom that is of you and in you and divine all at the same time.

When wisdom comes, sit in the center. Let it wash over you in only the way that peace can. This time, you have received wisdom. Next time, you might give it.

The reign of Christ is at hand, right here in our world, but it not of our world. It is every side to every story that has ever been written, or ever will be. It is a unifying thread that runs through every being on earth. All you have to do is sit still enough to find it.

The question that’s begging to be asked, “whose side of the story is Jesus on?” has a simple answer: “mine.” With that belonging, though, comes the responsibility to say- out loud- “but he’s also on everyone else’s.”

Amen.

Hits

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Good God. I’ve become the blogger I didn’t want to become… again. I suppose it’s a natural thing, like going back to what you know, but I didn’t expect it to take hold this fast. I am literally a slave to my post views, as if I’m expecting to explode overnight. I’m like one of those people who constantly watches their stock portfolio, instead of concentrating on the overall picture.

I’m also constantly thinking of new things to write. I make mistakes because I’m trying to get content together. The true Catch-22 of blogging is that if you don’t pay attention to your hits, you will wind up in obscurity. That’s because every time you post, you give the Google bots a chance to find you. Other people come in and leave their contact information. You visit their web site and leave your URL. More hits.

If things go right, you’ll end up like Dooce. Dooce has been my hero since she first started blogging. The blog starts with writing about struggles with her Mormonism, her job, and her life in general. The blog started to explode nationally to the point where she was able to support a family just by posting, taking great pictures, and talking about herself.

Man that seems rude, talking about yourself.

Until you realize that you can’t write about anything else, because writing something else would never satisfy the need to communicate with your soul. It’s the need to express the things going on in your life so that your friends and readers can come along and say, “Oh my God! I felt exactly like that when…” The trick is to write well, and to open yourself up to both criticism and praise. If you don’t, then you’ll get down when the trolls attack you and your hits are exclusively created by bots and not readers.

Writing well is about taking an experience and making it universal. With some things, I just can’t do that because the situation is so weird that you can’t equate it to anything else. But with almost everything else, you end the post with an invitation to action, even if that action is as small as a smile of remembrance.

Because smiles of remembrance lead to sharing, building more than a web site. Building an online space where people can come to commiserate, laugh (often in spite of themselves), and leave comments that will interact with me, but more importantly, allow my readers to interact with each other.

If your blog can’t run independently of you, you’re not doing it right. Because these are the same people that will read you over and over again, not because you’re that great a writer, but your web site is where all their friends are.

At first, I thought Facebook was the way to go. I have a built-in audience of over 600 people there. However, with Facebook, you really don’t have the design control that you do with a real blog. At this point, it is more crucial than ever to create hits, because unless I’m missing my mark, most people get their “friend news” on Facebook and rarely venture out into other areas of the web.

That’s why Dooce is so special. She was before Facebook, and she grew this web site into such a juggernaut that she’s been a Jeopardy! question.

I can only hope that I can create that kind of safe space on my own web site, where we can get together and start talking. We’ll share and share and get through life together. Thank you for making me part of your life.

I need the hits. :P~

entropy

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

In a space where life is disheveled, you have to create your own structure. For someone who is ADD, this is not all that easy. I cope with it by having a writing schedule. Without fail, I am at my computer by 9:00, and I am writing… whether it’s crap or not.

Sorry you have to suffer through these posts. I know they’re kind of scattershot, and so do you, but you’re willing to read me anyway until I get this whole posting schedule thing down. Because right now, I don’t have the luxury of a back stock of entries. I can’t just tell the web site to post something incredible on a schedule, because I’m starting from scratch (and by that, I mean cron jobs, not that the computer can post for me. My computer is a moron).

It’s as if my body is saying that it doesn’t care whether I’m tired or not. There is new content to be delivered and t-shirt graphics to be fixed and the house is a mess and nothing will get done if I think of everything I have to do as one large mass.

I get overwhelmed and panicky, as if the nuclear bomb is already set and I’m just the guy standing next to it. I’m not even quick enough on my feet to be MacGruber.

My one saving grace is Google. I’m not kidding.

If you let it, Google will save your life. Their calendar app alone is worth signing up.

For truly heartfelt instructions on how to set up an .ical feed, leave a comment. I’m not typing up all that stuff for my non-nerds. 🙂

Forgiveness

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Forgiveness is hard.

Forgiveness is so, so hard.

Forgiveness is hard because it has its own therapied vocabulary that, in the end, does work. But it doesn’t erase the questions around why you had to forgive in the first place. Those are the tabs that stay open in the Firefox of my mind.

Some of forgiving and being forgiven is about learning new words for it. There are three outcomes to a conflict, and they rarely change:

  1. Both people are happy
  2. Both people are miserable
  3. One person gets what they want, and the other person doesn’t

The first two are easy. The last one will keep you up at night. Both people being miserable might seem hard, but you can go to sleep knowing that both parties are in equal pain. Only one person getting what they want is damned unsatisfying.

However, if you’re the person that got what you wanted, there’s really no reason to go over and re-negotiate. Why should you? You got what you wanted! The other person may still have unanswered questions, but it’s ok. Your part is over. Go drink a margarita and celebrate your victory. Good job! You’re done.

If you are the one who didn’t get what you wanted, no margarita for you. Because you have more important things to do. You lost. You’re covered in loss soup with loss croutons on top. You have been beaten, and it hurts.

Time to pick a therapist. Mine is a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia Frozen Yogurt (Today is Free Cone Day), but do what works best for you. Preferably both. Get a therapist to think about your grief, and get the ice cream to forget so that you can put down an impossibly large mind worm.

If you’re on the right track, though, the impossibly large mind worm is going to start with yourself. Taking credit for what you did wrong seems counter-intuitive, but it’s not. By admitting your side of the story, you are releasing yourself from a situation “that happened to you,” into a situation in which you have some control. You may think that someone is withholding information from you, but really, you’ve just missed the signs that have been cropping up all along. In our humanness, we have a tendency to just stop communicating because we have no idea how to say what we need to say. Often, when the truth is what’s necessary, it’s avoided and covered up to save someone’s feelings.

It’s a human trait to try not to hurt people (or, at least, I hope it is). It is also possible for passive aggression to lead to thermonuclear war. The longer you lead people on, the harder it gets to extract yourself. Waiting to tell someone the truth morphs with the lie until you believe it, too. But the other person doesn’t know that. Doesn’t see the way you pull away because they aren’t aware of the possibility… aren’t prepared for the possibility.

If there’s anything we as humans hate, it’s to be caught off guard. It makes people angry because it’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing to think of how much time you’d been doing something wrong and been denied a chance to make it better. It’s embarrassing thinking about how long this person must have been “putting up with you,” because no human wants to be an obligation. When you call someone on something they’ve been doing for a very long time, they tend to respond like a wounded animal because they didn’t know there was a problem in the first place. It’s injustice. It’s more painful than the explosion that would have happened when you were angry, because it would be over.

Carrying around a grudge against someone is like accepting their resume and never calling them back. They’re hanging on to the hope that they still might get an interview, and you’re concentrating on your anger so much that every day that resume sits on your desk, you’re adding more wood to the fire.

Passive aggression is kindling for emotional destruction. Send a response, even if that response is “I hired someone else.”

Dark

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I always get those memes that ask questions like, “tell me something that I don’t know about you.” Sometimes, answering those questions are hard, like, “I have to pick just one?” Today, that answer is easy.

Because I grew up as a preacher’s kid with very specific instructions on what I could and could not say (self-imposed, being the oldest child), I am an avid fan of cringe comedy. My heroes are Jim Norton, Bill Burr, Bob Saget, Lisa Lampanelli, and the list goes on. Before you go through my list of comics to hear them, let me warn you that Bob Saget is the dirtiest motherfucker you will ever hear in your entire life. He’s not the “safe one of the bunch” just because he played Danny Tanner on Full House.

Actually, come to think of it, I think Bob Saget is as dirty as he is for the same reason I’m as dirty as I am. It’s a rebellious phase. It’s lasted a while. Maybe we should see a doctor.

This has caused no end of hilarity and confusion as people realize that I am funny, perky, innocent, child-like, etc, and at the same time, when playing Cards Against Humanity, the black card was “How did you lose your virginity?” The white card I put down was “African children.”

I’ll wait while you gather yourself. Yes, I am that dirty.

I only have three or four friends who can go down that rabbit hole with me who I know for sure won’t disown me, because they know that I’m just going for the cringe and I don’t mean anything harmful by it at all.

It’s just the one time that the mask comes off, and I’m not pretending to be anything other than who I am… a middle-aged white woman who is tired of being a middle-aged white woman and all the implications that come with it.

Cringe comedy is a way not to be invisible.