Facebook Posting I Just Wrote:

I promise that in front of the kids I will be entirely age appropriate, but FUCK YEAH I got the interview at the church. I am so high I can barely stand it. I came to DC to do the work I’ve been saying I was going to do and I’ve taken a step down on HOLY GROUND. Thanks to Nadia Bolz Weber and Jay Bakker, I learned that I could be myself and still be a minister. I have tattoos. I have piercings. I am a little edgy for prime time on my web site and on Facebook. I am also a humble servant and I know my church needs me. Will you pray with me? My interview is on Thursday, August 13th at 8:15 PM. I know I’ve got the skills. Help me build the confidence I need to know that God is talking directly to me. I have run from this calling since 1995. It’s GO TIME. I cannot believe this is even happening. I am so excited to be the person I need to be.

It’s time I got a clue. I was born for this. I am an INFJ who’s been trained her whole life in “show mode.” I am the introvert writer who can hold you in the palm of her hand during worship. I can preach. I can write liturgy. I can sit through a finance meeting and not get bored. 😉 I know how to make the ask in terms of donations. I know every part of this job, down to the nuts and bolts. God has been calling me forever. I finally picked up the fucking phone.

I can’t help but think of Susan and my dad right now, because they are the ones that prepared me for this. Susan even more than my dad, really, because everything I learned from my dad, I learned by watching. Everything I learned from Susan was, “here it is. Do it.” It took a lot for me to have the confidence to fly solo, and even though I will be an unordained youth pastor if I get the job, it does not mean that I will not get to exhibit my other skills as well. Plus, it pays enough that all my expenses are covered and school won’t get in the way, and neither will writing.

Please, Fanagans. I’ve never needed you more in my life. Pray for me and the ministry I’m starting, because this is go big or go home time. I need to impress the search committee. I need this job as a stepping stone to having my own church someday. I need your prayers and your PRESENCE. I need to feel your love and your confidence in me.

In the words of my favorite hymn, won’t you let me be your servant, let me be as Christ to you? Pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant, too.

Believe it or not, the title of this blog entry is actually a URL. The one I use most frequently is steep.it/black, because my favorite is really, really caffeinated black tea with either CoffeeMate or whole milk. I just don’t think green tea suits me, because it doesn’t have that thick and rich mouth feel of which I’ve become so fond. It has literally replaced coffee for me. The only time I have coffee is when I’m in two places. The first is La Madeleine, because their French roast is not to be missed under any circumstances, and Einstein Bros. bagel shop, because they give free refills and their coffee is better than Starbucks. I mean, of course Starbucks has good espresso drinks, but when you’re talking about plain drip, most of the time Starbucks over-roasts their beans and you have to get it fresh to make it taste really good. If you want Starbucks drip, buy the beans and take them home to ensure you get a fresh cup every morning. When it sits, it is really, really shitty. Oh, and I forgot. I have a third place. The coffee at Panera bread is revolutionary, because they’re honest. They actually put signs on the coffee to tell you how long it’s been sitting there so you know which one is the freshest and which one they’re about to refill. Their refills are also free. It’s good to know where there are free refills, and which stores don’t mind writers using their stores for offices. Panera- not so fond. Einstein’s is usually empty, so they don’t care. And at Starbucks, I have Larry (remember Larry?).

I am trying so hard to get a real job. Yesterday, I applied for a cook’s position at a vegan restaurant because I want to learn to cook vegan food (it is revolutionary). Then, last night I applied for a job as a busboy at Busboys and Poets, because I would be in good company with Langston Hughes, the “busboy poet.” Plus, the no. 14 bus goes right to it and that’s the one I catch at the end of my street. It’s very close to the Takoma metro station, although I believe they have other locations.

Why am I applying to these low-end jobs? Because I’m a writer. I cannot have a job where I am on call, have homework, or have to spend half the week traveling. If I get one of those jobs, it will come with a ridiculous amount of money, so I will have to consider it. Like I’ve said before, I’ve applied everywhere from restaurants to Cisco. I am not ruling anything out. However, my standard of living is ridiculously low for the DC area. My house is all bills paid, and I am on Medicaid. ANY job will cover me.

I am hoping that I will find someone that will call me back, because the situation is getting dire. My parents help me out to the extent that they are able, but I am too old for this shit. I want to be on my own, so that I can be really proud of something. I am really proud of this web site, and I had a donor yesterday that said it was important for me to keep up my pro status. She’s a better writer than me. That one line says it all.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with the money yet, because this web site doesn’t need anything and I don’t need anything in terms of professional development since the last donation allowed me to buy all my Linux books and a membership to LinuxJobber. I think I will let it sit until the domain name needs to be re-upped, because I like my URL a lot, even though I didn’t come up with it, exactly. My friend Chason started calling himself “theantichason” online a million years ago, and I liked it so much that the moniker fit me as well, with the exception of my name not being Chason, kind of a pity because I like the name so much.

In a way, I am steeping myself. I am using this time while I don’t have a job to read and write as much as I can, because the words of Will Hunting about the education you could get for $1.50 in late fees at the public library have stuck with me like a mantra. For God’s sake, I am reading Ulysses, greatly considered to be one of the most difficult novels to wrap your brain around in the history of the world. Some people say it is genius. Some people say it is madness. I think it is somewhere in the middle.

I am also still wrapped up in the Revolutionary War, because 1776 and John Adams are incredible. I love David McCullough like I love Happy Cola. After I finish those, I am planning on reading Ben Franklin by Walter Isaacson, because I loved Steve Jobs so much. After that, I’m planning on skipping to Edmund Morris, because I read his biography on Reagan, called Dutch, and it was outstanding. In fact, I don’t have it with me, but in my father’s library in Sugar Land I have an autographed copy of it. I do not agree with Reagan politically on nearly anything, but he is a very interesting man. Did you know he was a lifeguard when he was young? Betcha didn’t. 😛

As you can see, I love reading biographies of great people, because I want to be a great people. It seems logical that in order to be a great person yourself, you need to read how other great people did it. I mean, Walter Isaacson may never write Leslie Lanagan, but it’s not in my nature not to try. Some of my sermons have been very widely shared, and the reason I haven’t preached in a while is because of the Klonopin. I was taking one in the morning and one at night, and it made me so sleepy I couldn’t do anything but take a shower and get dressed. Seriously, it was like being the Indian in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I was dressed, but I couldn’t really talk. I was just this zombie, a walker trapped in a body that was still alive.

I stopped the Klonopin during the day and I came back into myself.

Yesterday I went to Macy’s because my mom gave me a gift card to that store, too, because I told her that I wanted to get my birthday wish in early, which was a gift card to Macy’s and nothing else. Just load that bitch up. She left an envelope on my dresser among my other mail and of course, I didn’t find it. She had to call me and tell me to look for it. When I opened the envelope, there were three gift cards- one to Starbucks and two to Macy’s. I have no idea how in the hell she got the Macy’s gift certificates. It was like magic.

So, anyway, I took the gift card to Macy’s and went to the little boys’ department. This is why I like Macy’s so much. They have men’s clothes in miniature that fit my small frame. I got three Tommy Hilfiger shirts (which Meag used to lovingly call Tommy H, so technically I got three “Tommy H” shirts). The first is a red and white pinstripe oxford, and the second and third are the same shirt in different colors because they were so damn comfortable. They’re both long-sleeved, which I need because I love t-shirts and yet, I’m always cold (my friend Matthew used to call me “Leslie No-Blood”). They’re both color-blocked in horizontal stripes. One is navy and grey, and the other is red and pink. Seriously, I have never had a more comfortable t-shirt in my life, which is why I couldn’t get away with only buying one. The red and pink is kind of loud, but I decided I liked it because it plays against type. Most of the time, I wear blue and navy. And that’s all. I have branched out lately with red, orange, and teal… but even that is pushing it. The thing that pushed me to buy the red and pink t-shirt is that I knew it would look incredible with either my navy hoodie or my black jacket. I’m trying to buy a Garanimals-type wardrobe, where everything is classic and I can pull just about anything out of my closet and it will match. I am succeeding mightily. The one piece of clothing that I want and do not have is a blue blazer. A size 16 in the boys’ department is only $99.50, which is a great price considering what I’m buying. All of them are name brand, such as Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. I’ve already got one, but it is black, and I don’t wear black that much because when I’m in black pants I feel like a waiter. The red pinstripe Oxford and black blazer may change that. I would kill in that outfit, especially since I have blue wire-frame glasses. God, that is so DC I can barely stand it. I’ll wear it the next time I hang out with Pri Diddy and Elena so they can tell me if I’m hot enough and that outfit is approved. I have a black leather belt and shoes, too. Are you impressed yet?

I still have some money on my Macy’s gift card. I may need a pair of black Chucks. I can get away with Chucks and Dockers just about anywhere. Speaking of which, I have brown leather Chucks with brick red laces that would make you kvell. They’re made of the same kind of leather as the helmets in Leatherheads, and the tongue is sewn in so that my feet never get wet if I step in a puddle. Now do you see why I have hipster tendencies? I have brown pants and brown Chucks. It’s a thing.

I was at church a couple weeks ago and met this couple that I’d like to hang out with socially. We had a great time talking about being hipster, because I told them I’d lived in Portland relatively recently and that I wasn’t hipster myself, but definitely had hipster tendencies, especially since I was wearing brown pants at the time. The husband said, “oh, don’t worry. Brown pants doesn’t mean you’re hipster. It just means you don’t work on The Hill.” I nearly spat out my tea.

It’s true. I am definitely more Takoma Park than Capitol Hill. For those not in the know, Takoma Park is the equivalent of what Montrose used to be in Houston and Hawthorne in Portland is now.

I think it’s time to get back to reading. I’ve caught you up on everything that’s going on in my world right now, especially since I am wearing the most comfortable t-shirt in the world. Seriously. Buy an expensive t-shirt. You won’t notice the difference between an expensive one and a cheap one until you do. You just want to luxuriate in it and never take it off.

Mine already smells.

I need another cup of tea before I start reading. Ulysses requires it. In fact, it makes me thirsty for tea because they drink tea in the book. Let me tell you my favorite line so far since I just finished the Outlander series. The setup is that one of the guys is an English whiny bitch:

The Sassenach requires his morning rashers.

I highlighted it just for fun.

Oh, and one more note. I really feel that Stephen Dedalus is Joyce himself, because the writing in Ulysses is so much more polished that it’s like Stephen grew as Joyce did.

It’s like he was steeping.

Outlander took a lot out of me because of everything that was going on when I read it. Even though Argo never participated in romantic feelings for me, it didn’t erase mine for her… and I was still deeply, madly, desperately in love with Dana. It was a different kind of love. They both dug deep down into my soul, but Dana had been there a lot longer. So the ties between Claire and me were apt. I didn’t want to leave “Frank” or “Jamie.” And then Amazon with its Dime Bag approach to book selling had me reading Dragonfly in Amber about 13 and a half seconds after I’d sworn I needed a break.

You know how I said that I skip around a lot in terms of authors so that my voice doesn’t start to sound like the last author I’ve just inhaled? Weeeelllllll, I came to the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and it just ends. It’s like the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. So OF COURSE I had to start Ulysses immediately to find out what happens to Stephen Dedalus. It does not disappoint. In Artist, Stephen says he’s going somewhere. In Ulysses, you find out where he went. It’s a brilliant ploy to sell books, but I remember sitting on the Metro earlier today and finishing Artist with no small amount of indignation. It reminded me of going to see the first Lord of the Rings movie with Kathleen at that big monstrous cineplex on King Street. I had not been a fan of the books as a child, so I was seeing the story cold. The credits roll and I turn to Kathleen and say, we just sat here for almost four fucking hours and they didn’t get anywhere? WHAT THE HELL. All of Gallery Place/Chinatown Metro stop heard me gasp in exasperation because surely if Stephen was going somewhere, Joyce would give some indication of where that might be. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but I thought Artist was a fine compilation of A Separate Peace by John Knowles and my own ruthless wandering into my own mind. In fact, toward the end, I started to think of it as Stephen’s blog.

I’d known that Ulysses was a modern retelling of The Odyssey since high school. Since I graduated in 1996, I’m hoping I’m not spoiling that for anyone (he was dead the whole movie, Luke is Darth Vader’s son, Beth dies, etc.). However, I did not know that it was such a massive work, or that it was so lauded. I just got very attached to Stephen Dedalus, as you might imagine I would if you know him (aren’t those characters you feel you know?) and me simultaneously. Stephen thinks of being a priest. His musings on God go on for pages, and he’s just lost in his own head trying to work out who he is and what he believes. We come out on either end of the spectrum, but his musings are interesting to one so theologically driven as myself. His dying mother asks him to pray for her, and he is so absolute in his agnosticism that he won’t even do that. I say agnosticism rather than atheism because when one of his friends asks him about it, he gives a “meh” kind of answer. I don’t believe in it, and I don’t NOT believe in it, either.

So we began this kinship, Stephen and me, and now I can’t quit him. I have to know why Joyce chose him to retell the tale of Odysseus, and what part he might play in the novel. I have read that he is an important character, but not which character he ties to directly in the Homerian epic. If he is Jason, I will fall dead on the floor. DEAD.

And on that note, I have to get to reading before my vitamin L kicks in. That’s because I was going to call Klonopin vitamin K, but realized that was potassium. Then, I couldn’t call clonazepam vitamin C, because obviously. I call it Vitamin L because it means “Vitamin Leslie is a nicer person.”

Fuckitty Bye.

I love my little town. It’s right on the line between DC and Maryland, the first stop on the Metro that’s an actual suburb. I live right between two Metro stops, one close enough I can walk if I am feeling industrious (it’s about a 30 minute walk). The other one is one is the first stop in DC, and the bus that takes me to it comes to my actual street, as close as the school bus stop when I was a child. Plus, there is a 7-Eleven at the Takoma stop that carries two things I desperately love- the gummy cola bottles for which I would walk 500 miles (I see what I did there), and tallboys of cherry Pepsi Max.

I do not understand why you cannot buy cherry Pepsi Max at the grocery store, but it’s probably better that I can’t. It has more caffeine than any other soda on the market, and I am the type person that drinks soda incessantly, although I am trying to cut down. Right now my soda obsession is diet grape. It is the soda with which dreams are made. This web site is fueled by diet grape soda and an insane amount of black tea.

My mother gave me a Starbucks gift certificate (for hosting her while she was here) so that I can further my tea addiction. There’s a Starbucks that literally sits at the bottom of the steps to the Silver Spring Metro station, so there are very few times that I can go to the Metro station without stopping in. You can’t take your drink on the Metro, so there have been plenty of times that I have ordered a double shot of espresso and drunk it like a Flaming Dr Pepper. The rest of the time, my order is iced black tea, no extra water, five Splenda, and half-n-half. It is delicious, and a cheap treat that makes me happy. It takes so little. I sit here for a long time when I have it to spare, and Larry, the manager (remember Larry?), only charges me 53 cents for a refill. I think he likes me. It’s good to have friends in high places. I mean, seriously. Who is a better friend for a writer than the manager at Starbucks?

This is the best move I have ever made. Ever. Finally, I made a life decision all on my own that’s paid off in spades. Sometimes I get lonely for my family, but when I lived in Houston, they were so busy that I hardly saw them, anyway. The best part about living in DC is that I might get to see my sister more often. She’s taken a job that has her traveling all over the place, and DC is one of the cities on her list. I am hoping that if she comes here, she can extend her trip to have a day off, because she wants to run on the Mall and I want to take her to my favorite spots, like Kramerbooks/Afterwords and Teaism. I am sure that she’ll want to do some touristy shit as well, but I want to show her MY DC, because she came to visit me the last time I lived here, but we only got one night to do things here. She flew into DCA because my mom was performing with her choir in Carnegie Hall, and Lindsay wanted to road trip with Kathleen & me from DC to NYC. That road trip was one of the most fun things I did when I was here last time, and believe it or not, I drove the whole time. The one that hates driving with a passion because she’s scared she’ll run into something drove in New York City. There’s a reason for that. Kathleen is one of those people that freaks out in unfamiliar situations, and I’m the type person that gets more calm and quiet the worse things get (I can break down later). So I drove in all the traffic and the beauty of cruising down the West Side Highway. It was heaven on earth, except for the cost of parking. Lindsay also left us a parting gift. Half a sandwich in the back seat of my car that took me six weeks to find because it was buried under the driver’s seat.

Which leads me to tell the story of Lanagan Lunchmeat Syndrome. We all have it, even Dana. She may not be a Lanagan anymore, but I assure you she still has Lanagan tendencies. It’s hard to get them back out once they’re ingrained. Sorry about that, D-money.

So, the first instance of LLS was that I needed to get out from under a car payment on my Saturn, so I shipped it to my stepsister, Caitlin. My dad felt sorry for me and sent me an old Mercedes (my favorite car ever and I still weep for it. I had to give it up when the repairs cost more than the car.). Kathleen and I rode around in it all the time, and we noticed a smell that seemed like something had died. We searched the car for at least two weeks before we found a pound of sliced turkey under the carpet in the trunk.

When I moved back to Houston in 2002, I got my Saturn back and drove it to Oregon. It took me forever to find a job, so again, I sent my Saturn back to Texas and rode the bus everywhere. Again, my dad felt sorry for me and sent me a cute little Ford Focus. When it arrived, there was half a hot dog in the center console.

I drove that car until the wheels fell off. It was so comfortable and zippy. Even Dana loved it. Long before we were dating, I made her drive me everywhere. It was easier than thinking I was going to crash her into something. Hey, she had 3-D vision. I had a nice car. It worked out well. I would drive up to Dana’s apartment complex, call her to come down, and I’d be sitting in the passenger seat. It would just make her crack up. I know my place in the car. It is running the radio and playing with my phone. Besides, I think I have said this before… when I drive, Dana becomes the football coach driving instructor you never wanted. It was a LONG three months when she got her DUI. Looooooooooong.

I traded in my Ford Focus for a Jeep Grand Cherokee, just absolutely loaded out. It was used, so I got the most beautiful Jeep in the whole world for a mere $297 a month. How did I do this? I threatened to walk away from the sale until I made the finance manager swear and call me a bitch. However, he wanted the sale so bad that he gave me what I wanted.

And then Dana left a Subway sandwich in the center of my console and she, too, made me a victim of LLS. As you can see, it has become a thing- but at least it was still wrapped. I was not that lucky with Lindsay.

It’s hard for me to think about Dana and the funny things that have happened over the years, because I just miss her so much that I cannot even. She’s my heart. She’s part of my soul. She’s the million dollar package that you only get once in a lifetime if you’re lucky, but at the same time, our relationship had run its course and I just couldn’t deal anymore. I didn’t have the right emotional tools to deal with both of our depressions at once. I would be lying if I said I didn’t hope that we found each other again later in life, but it is probably a dream dried up. I can’t imagine with all I put her through that she can see hugging and kissing me like she means it. Our time apart has just reinforced how much I need to be single and focus on myself so that I am worthy of any million dollar package, much less her.

And thinking of all I put Dana through inevitably leads to Argo and the enormous love I feel for her in a friend sort of way, because I let go of the part of myself that thought I needed to be with her to enjoy her for all of who she is. Friendship can and does that, but in my past, nothing told me that was true. I have given up the one person in my life who makes me greater than I could ever be on my own, because when I do dumb shit, she’s the one person in my life that will actually say, “Leslie, you’re doing some dumb shit.” When I told her I was starting a church, she said she didn’t do church or organized religion. I said, “I don’t need you for that. I need you to be the one that when I start talking to God, I don’t start to believe I am one.” She said, “I can do that.”

Yes. Yes, she can. I told her I didn’t think it would be a problem in the slightest. Everyone needs that friend who can knock your ego down a peg or two when you clearly need it. When I think of losing that part of our friendship, I go back to kicking myself mightily for the way I handled the end of our relationship. I was so naive. I was such a teenager. But inside, that’s what I am. My development was arrested into a fourteen year old girl in a 37 year old’s body. It is only now that I am “aging up,” in no small measure because of her. When I opened up to her, my stranger on a train, she helped me kill the monster under my bed. She didn’t do anything but listen and point out the flaws in my reasoning. The best thing she ever could have done was to keep repeating, “it wasn’t your fault.” It was a Matt Damon/Robin Williams moment. Do you see how stupid I was? I will beat myself up over the end of this relationship for all time, because I made a great big miscalculation. She said in the beginning that there was nothing I could do that would make her love me any less, and I thought that if I got my act together, we could fix this. That she wouldn’t leave for good because she could see that I wouldn’t always be the asshole I was being at the time. I was strung out for a number of reasons, and getting my act together, unfortunately, needed to be leaving everything I knew and starting over in a place where I could thrive instead of just survive.

Houston makes me go into the smallest version of myself, and I think that’s why Dana was so successful there and I just wasn’t. Houston is the place where all of my abuse took place. I have talked about this before, but for Dana, it was moving to a new city and starting over. For me, it was really fucking creepy. I have tried to move back to Houston several times since my abuse, and every time, it’s lasted two years. Apparently, that’s how long I can stay before all my old memories start to eat me alive. And now that Argo and I have had all of our talks, the memories I have of Diane are even creepier and it hurts me even more, because I don’t have all the love attached I used to. I only have the memory of an adult using a child.

Perhaps she doesn’t believe that her abuse was sexual, but at the same time, you don’t use a child to deal with adult situations. I believe it was sexual because of the journal she handed me with poetry about her sex life at college. Maybe she thought she was just giving me a glimpse of who I’d become as an adult. But let’s skip that. I was 14 when she told me her roommate was an alcoholic. I was 14 when she told me her roommate was a drug dealer. I was 15 when she told me that her roommate was actually her partner, and my heart dropped into my stomach because I thought we were going to become a thing. I wanted to protect her beyond all measure, and I couldn’t think of other women without believing that I was cheating on her. Our boundaries were not clear until after she gave me her journal, and perhaps this was because our relationship was starting to show to everyone at her job (she was a scholarship singer at my church) that it was getting serious and inappropriate. Who knows what would have happened if our relationship had managed to be on the downlow the whole time? But I can’t what-if. What happened was what happened, and what happened was enough. There were so many layers of lies that I couldn’t keep track of them all, and I should never have had to participate in them in the first place. But that’s what happens with emotional abuse. You get hooked, and there’s nothing that can separate you after that. It’s seductive, even if it isn’t sexual. I wanted that relationship, because it made me feel older than I was.

It didn’t show until everyone else was older than me.

This is why I miss Argo like I miss no one else. She showed me that I was capable of handling so much more than I was. She showed me that I had an incredible wealth of emotional tools that I just wasn’t using. She was also one of the first people that believed in this web site, and if you know me at all, you know that the sweetest thing Argo has ever said to me is, “you must have custom fonts.”

It would be the joy of my life to thank her for these things in person, but I feel that thanking her for them here will at least put them in the pensieve so that if she’s curious down the road, she can see for herself what I really think of her and just how much she means to me. It’s also for me- I never want to forget this time in my life, no matter how painful it has been on all three of us.

But if I had the chance, I’d share my gummy cola bottles with her. I’d also be careful not to leave lunchmeat in her car.

I am so tired of the way my face is breaking out. It does this in Houston, too, but thankfully the hot weather in MD doesn’t last as long. Plus, I have all these cute hoodies and sweaters and a blazer that I can’t wear yet, which make me look so much smarter than I actually am. 🙂 This heat, tho. It’s killing me because I can’t tell if it’s all acne or if some of it is heat rash because I walk so much. I am the classic Beezus “Pizza Face” Cleary right now, so I am doing my best to stay indoors for the time being. That way, I *can* wear all my cute hoodies and sweaters because Samantha keeps the A/C somewhere between lowboy and walk-in.

Speaking of Samantha, she and Dom left for Jamaica yesterday, and I miss her already. Last week I was feeling particularly down and she said, “Leslie, you are one of the nicest people I know.” It was a propos of nothing, which almost made me tear up in the parking lot at Target. It’s been a while since someone said something like that to me, and I needed to hear it as much as I needed air. This craziness with Dana and Argo made me forget who I was. I really am nice. I really am fun. I really am the person I thought I was, but I have made some mistakes that made me forget it. I think slowing down has helped. Because I don’t have a set schedule, I am not one of those people that gets rattled by much. I have time to help when I see people in need. I have time to stop veterans on the street and simply say, “thank you for your service.” I have time to be the person that I want to be, instead of the characterizations that have been made for me.

It is not as if I didn’t do anything to deserve them; I just didn’t know how to overcome them, either. I realized that I couldn’t fix what had been broken with either Argo or Dana, and it destroyed me into thinking I was a bad person that didn’t deserve anything because I couldn’t see how to get there from here. Argo said long ago that she couldn’t believe she’d allowed me to know some of her deepest secrets. It gutted me like a fish, partly because I haven’t told any of hers, and partly because she’s told all of mine, as if the line of communication only went one way. I didn’t realize that I was up for discussion, and when I found out, I was livid, especially because I believed she’d gone to the one person who couldn’t trust me as far as she could throw me, anyway, so how could it have ever been a case of “maybe you’re looking at this the wrong way.” I was rebelling hardcore against her secrets because they were separating me from Dana at a high rate of speed. I firebombed the relationship on purpose, and now that I am single, I wish like hell I could take it all back. Every single mean thing I said, every time I sent her unwanted advances because it was the one thing that I knew would push her away the easiest. If I had been in my right mind, I would have ended the relationship with Dana sooner so that Argo and I could have had that bubble unto ourselves without it being this toxic triangle of enormous proportions. It wasn’t choosing Argo over Dana- I broke up with Dana the moment we got to Houston because I felt like I couldn’t trust her. I’d put up with her “accidentally” forgetting I’d told her not to tell people things long enough. I also made a mistake in telling someone Argo’s real name. It never should have happened, and I own that sin wholeheartedly. No one should have known, but it was before I knew the direction our relationship was going to take and honestly, I’d forgotten until it blew up in my face. Otherwise, I would have changed her pseudonym yet again. Someone suggested “Cheerios” since she’s a mom. I liked that. ‘Sup Cheerios had a ring to it…. a synecdoche like calling a car “wheels.”

I also didn’t like that she loved reading my blog when it was about someone else, and not so much when it was about her. Did she think that she was supposed to disconnect from the fact that I was a writer? That I could be trusted to write around our privacy? I told her in no uncertain terms that I would take the entire site down if it made her uncomfortable, and she didn’t even recognize that I’d made that sacrifice in the first place. To even whisper it was more than I’d done for anyone, ever. She means more to me than my silly blog ever will, and before you say that I’d be giving up a lifeline, no. I wouldn’t. I’d be gaining the world of anonymity. I would have found a way to write using my plenty of pseudonyms in a galaxy far far away. But this iteration could burn and I wouldn’t even watch it go for one more letter.

Samantha is right. I am a different person now. Dana and I used to end our evenings with cocktails. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but I didn’t realize how much it was affecting my medication and its efficacy. The last cocktail I had was at the Meetup, and I think I had a beer when my mom was here. That is quite a bit different than cocktails every single night. What drove that home was having my Dana-normal amount when my dad was here and sleeping all the way home in the car. I realized I had become quite the cheap date, and I’ve stuck to it. My tolerance has gone back to zero, and I just can’t hang.

I have developed an unnatural addiction to Haribo Happy Cola instead. Seriously, if I could mainline them, I would. Not every store has them, so I have been known to wander the streets of DC, stopping into every drug store and grocery store along the way. When in a pinch, 7-Eleven sells a knockoff that’s pretty tasty, but it’s not the same. They are, however, more tolerable than no gummy cola bottles at all. Last time Samantha had to make a cigarette run, I went with her so I could get some gummy cola bottles. That particular 7-Eleven didn’t carry them, and I was furious until I went to pick out a soda and they had both regular and diet Cheerwine in 20 oz bottles in the cold case. I only bought one, and then I went to a couple of different 7-Elevens and they didn’t have it.

Why God. WHY? Why didn’t I realize that I should have bought more?!

It takes so little to make me happy these days. I should stop focusing on my lack of Happy Cola and Cheerwine and start focusing on the tea that I bought. I wish I could remember the name of the store, but it’s in Rockville down the street from Noodles & Company. They carry more flavors of Republic of Tea than Whole Foods, so I bought a hi-caf breakfast black. I thought to myself, “I have to go to Whole Foods, anyway. I should just wait.” I bought it anyway because I knew I would kick myself if I got to Whole Foods and they didn’t have it. I did go to Whole Foods. They did not. I smiled with being right.

I am also waiting somewhat impatiently for Girl Scout cookies, because as a tea fan, there is nothing better than a box of Trefoils. I should get some sticks of Walker’s to hold me over. In Portland, we had a Scottish shop that had lots of imported food, and one of the things I found was Walker’s with butterscotch chips. I don’t think I’ve had a better cookie in my life, especially after dipping it into a particularly strong cuppa of PG Tips. Tea is just another reason I’m waiting for it to get cold again. It’s kind of weird to be sitting out on the porch in 90 degree weather with hot tea and biscuits, but I do it anyway. You can fix most things with a cup of tea.

Even a broken heart.

See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you’re gonna start doin’ some thinkin’ on your own and you’re going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don’t do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin’ education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!

-Will Hunting, Good Will Hunting

I’ve got some eggs in my basket on leads for a job. They all pay well, they all come with benefits, and I’m sitting here waiting to see what’s going to happen. In the meantime, I’m taking Will up on his advice. I loaded up my Kindle with almost 1900 books, and I’m working my way through them. So far, I’ve loved every one. Right now I’m struggling with James Joyce, but as the book goes on, I’m falling in love with Stephen Dedalus. So much so that I may need to read Ulysses next, because when I went to Stephen’s Wikipedia page, I learned that he’s also an important character in that book as well. Stephen is interesting to me because he struggles with his faith and being human at the same time. He doesn’t want to sin, and beats himself up regularly for doing so. It’s not my theology, but it’s interesting watching him evolve into his own. I can’t decide whether I want to break my rule, though. My rule is that I read a different author with each book that I start so that I don’t pick up their style. I want my voice to be unique, and I can’t decide whether I’ve been writing long enough that it won’t happen. I went through quite a Dooce phase, but I didn’t steal anything. I just started to imitate her style in a way that it showed in a transparent kind of way. Next was my love of Ernie Hsuing of little. yellow. different. Those were the people I emulated the most when I first started blogging at Clever Title Goes Here. It’s still around on the Wayback Machine, but I let it go when the lease ran out and I was too scared to continue writing. That’s because I have to have an inordinate amount of bravery to keep writing, as Dooce has said over and over. It’s hard when your friends don’t like you because they can see themselves in your mirror. But that doesn’t mean you should shut down. It means that you have to know within yourself that you are not trying to slam anyone, but to tell your own story. Sometimes people do negative things, and of course, they don’t want to read about them. But what I have to get across is that even when people do negative things, I am not shining the light on them. I am shining the light on my reactions to them, whether positive or negative.

I have written extensively about the ways I manipulate people because it is what was modeled for me as a child and it is something I need to work on with a therapist so I can stop it cold. I do not want to be underhanded. I want to be as pure as snow, the way Argo lives her life and tried to model for me, but because so much damage had already been done to me, I could not hear her over the sound of my own rebellious voice. I kicked her ass into next week…. and for it, I got the exact opposite of what I wanted and needed, which was a friend to kick my ass into next week so that I could stop being such a jerk. I pushed her away because I knew it would work, because in some sense, I thought it would bring Dana and I back into equilibrium.

I chose……………………………. poorly.

Dana and I had developed patterns over time that were going to destroy us, anyway. I will not tell her story, because it is not mine to tell. But what I will say is that when she said I would never amount to anything, I felt she was pushing her own lack of self-worth onto me… that she was telling me what she felt about herself. I could be Hector Projectering onto her, but I never got the sense that she was doing so much better than me that she had the right to hand down that judgement.

I feel that the difference between us is that my friendship with Argo proved to me that something was desperately wrong with me and I needed to fix it. She was right, and I listened. I will remember forever when she said, “why do you think it’s everyone else’s job to fix you?” It provided me the much-needed ass kicking to get myself into gear. It was that moment, that very day, that I checked myself into the psych ward at Methodist hospital to try and deal with the emotional issues I should have taken care of at 15, but didn’t know enough to even see what questions to ask. It astounded me when I went to occupational therapy and everything I thought was Attention Deficit Disorder was actually 20 out of the 30 signs of emotional trauma. I wasn’t ADD. I was reliving my abuse over and over, every single day.

For instance, my grades were terrible in school because I just could not keep it together. All of the staring at pictures of Diane in my notebooks, all of the signing her signature all over my book covers, all of the staring out the window and ruminating about what was happening to me were not signs of inattention. They were signs that other things were more important than my own life, and I let it go.

I am also not sure that I wasn’t raped as a child, because the same trauma reflexes that I exhibited as a teenager were present in elementary school. Perhaps I genuinely do have signs of ADD, but at the same time, I had a great uncle come on to me sexually as a teenager that I am not sure didn’t get away with something in my childhood that made him come back for more when I was 17. It’s a wild stretch, but at the same time, it is not something that I can ignore altogether. When I was two or three, I was terrified of men with moustaches. I would scream and cry every time someone with a moustache wanted to touch me. My mother says that I was never alone with said great uncle, but this is untrue. My body clock was off when we went to London and stayed with this great uncle, and I came downstairs in the middle of the night. I remember being creeped out because something was happening under the blanket where he lay next to his wife. I tried to go back upstairs, but my feet were planted with fear. I finally went back upstairs and back to sleep between my mother and father, but the feeling in the pit of my stomach never went away. I do not remember being abused, but I do remember seeing something I thought was not supposed to happen in my presence. However, these two memories together lead me to believe that Diane was not the first to cross a line with me. When my mother confronted Diane about ending our relationship, she asked my mother if I’d been abused. I remember thinking what in the hell made her ask it. I wonder what she saw that would lead her to believe it. I cannot say for sure, and I never asked her. But in retrospect, I should’ve. As a music teacher that worked with hundreds of middle schoolers, I cannot believe that she didn’t see something.

The only thing that saved me from that time in my life were the teachers that encouraged me to read. I could get lost in a story, and I had three particular favorites at that age. The first was The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. The second was Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. The third was The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi. Incidentally, the last one was not recommended by one of my own teachers, but given to my sister, Lindsay, by one of hers.

When I was a junior in high school, one of the books assigned to me was The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Junior year was my first at Clements High School, and after having been out at HSPVA and going back into the closet at Clements, it was a lifeline of epic proportions. It was the one time at Clements that I could be myself in some small way, because I found someone with my own sexuality at a time when I wasn’t allowed to talk about it. I am sure my book report gave it away. Every lesbian in the world knows what happens on page 52 (yes, I did type that from memory, thank you). I was so thankful to my teacher that we became friends of sorts. I used to help her out in her room after school, helping with bulletin boards and the like. Then, on my birthday, Diane sent me flowers. They were innocuous. She was dating someone at the time, and the card said, “Love from the Moms, Diane & Jeri.” My teacher transferred me out of her class so fast my head spun. She put two and two together and her insidious prejudice just couldn’t take me anymore.

I seriously hated my new teacher, because I didn’t think she was as smart as my other one. She also ripped off ideas from my other teacher, and all of the sudden, my old teacher was interested in me again as a spy. She wasn’t prejudiced as long as I was useful to her. I got my peace years later, when said teacher became a patient in my stepmom’s practice. My dad thought she was a total bitch, and said he was sorry for the way she treated me if the way she treated him was any indication.

Again, it was books that saved me. My senior year, I was completely enthralled by Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It immersed me in an environment so far away from my real life that I was ensconced in escapism. It was also about that time I became interested in The Bible… but not in the way that teenagers studied it. Because my dad had been to seminary and had been a minister for 23 years, most of his criticism books were still in the house. My particular favorites, and still are, the works of William Barclay. They opened up a world that I’d never seen, because it gave new breath and life into something that I thought I’d have to have a brain transplant to understand. I also read one of the best criticism novels of my life… so called because it takes all the facts there are to be had about Jesus’ life and death and ventures into fiction to fill in what might have happened. It is called The Day Christ Died, by Jim Bishop. What makes it different is that it is written from a journalist’s perspective, so the chapters are divided into hours. The tone is very Woodward & Bernstein, and it changed the way I viewed Jesus’ life immensely. It was that book that changed my focus from the way Christ died to the way he lived. While some Christianity is focused on being washed in the blood of Christ (ew), I am focused on the political structures Christ managed to dismember, a humble shepherd murdered by the state. The most interesting character in the whole book is Pontius Pilate, because he bent to peer pressure and at the same time, really doesn’t understand why. His internal struggle is, to me, the apex of the conflict which begins the denouement. It is one of the saddest moments in history, but I choose to “always look on the bright side of life.”

High school was also where I discovered James Baldwin and Richard Wright. Go Tell it on the Mountain, Native Son, and Black Boy got me through the roughest patches of high school. I was bullied, but nothing compared to the down and dirty shit they went through just to stay alive. They got me out of bed in the morning, because if they could do what they did, the least I could do was show up for high school regardless of who I needed to fight. I think I told this story before, but it is apt here. In my freshman English class, a group of people showed up on the lawn of the school where I was eating lunch and screamed Bible verses at me. One boy kicked my side as I was drinking Dr Pepper and it went everywhere. My sophomore year, my English class ganged up on me and said they were a family, and I was the dog, making me bark every day until I got tired of it. The class was on the second floor, and the railing was on top of a large checkerboard linoleum floor. I picked her up by her jacket and threw her against the second floor railing and told her I was going to throw her over if that shit didn’t stop immediately. I don’t think I was actually strong enough to have thrown her over, but my eyes clearly went to my nothing box and she knew I meant business. If it didn’t stop, I was going to do something. She at least knew that much.

It stopped. Immediately. The bitch of it is that my dad thought it was best to treat bullies with kindness, and this girl didn’t have a horn. It was stolen or something, so he let her use his trumpet the entire school year. She still treated me like crap, maybe because she didn’t know how to accept such a large gift. But at least the barking stopped. That was the important thing. I could deal with everything else. Just because she was a total bitch the rest of the year didn’t mean much to me. I was too busy to care.

In English we started reading Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, and I was again lost in a world miles away from my current reality.

And that is where I sit right now. Trying to be miles away from my current reality, because I have been through the shit once again and am trying to bring myself into wholeness by becoming more educated by the things I choose to read. I haven’t chosen anything easy. Even Outlander, with its wild ride through history, was heavy in places… many of them, actually. The words of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and all of the people who founded our country are giving me words of peace to ponder. Stephen Dedalus is a conscience builder if ever I saw one. I also need to finish Argo as Tony Mendez reaches the end of his life, because it would be nice to send him a piece of fan mail whether he responds or not. It is the same with Oliver Sacks. I truly loved The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

All of my books are helping me to release my own Argo, the great ship in which I sleep deeply in the belly, for which I know my passage is safe. I wrote that line years ago, and even though she has taken the life raft of apart, that doesn’t mean that I do not travel the seas in my dreams.

All I can say to that is amen, may it be so.

No late fees included.