Category: Uncategorized

The Sunshine Blogger Award

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today I was nominated for the Sunshine Blogger Award by Julie. Thank you, Julie, for knowing I could use a little sunshine. I hope I’ve done “write” by you……the-sunshine-blogger-award-2018

Here are the award’s rules:

  1. Thank the blogger who nominated you and link back to their blog. (Really? There are people who wouldn’t say, “Thanks!” if it weren’t a rule?)
  2. Answer the 11 questions your nominator asked you.
  3. Nominate 8 to 11 blogs, and ask them 11 new questions.
  4. List the rules and display the Sunshine Blogger Award logo in your post and/or on your blog.

1.) To-MAY-to or To-MAH-to?

I’m from Texas, so it generally comes out as “tuhmayda.”

2.) What fictional character would you like to meet in real life, and why?

I have several, but it’s all the same theme. I want to meet Harry Potter the day after he first talked to a snake. I want to meet Peter Parker the day after he was bitten by a radioactive spider. I want to meet Carrie Mathison the day after she was approached by The Agency.

I want to meet these people before they became larger than life- would like to know how they’re coping in the midst of enormous change. Harry Potter didn’t know he had magical powers. He thought the whole world had taken crazy pills. Peter Parker wasn’t handspringing off the Empire State Building on day one- he barely knew how to use his new body. Carrie Mathison wasn’t station chief in Kabul/The Drone Queen the first time she drove up to Langley. I’d like to know how those huge personalities incubated…. like meeting the non-fictional Oprah as a high school freshman.

3.) What music do you listen to while writing, or do you prefer silence?

I go back and forth. It’s the 80/20 rule. 80% of the time, I listen to the rhythm of my fingers on the keys. 20% of the time, I’m listening to jazz, classical, or film scores…. nothing with words, and nothing unfamiliar. If it’s new to me, I’m not really paying attention to my writing.

4.) Sunrise or sunset, and why?

I prefer the wee hours of the morning, starting between 4:00-5:00. I used to stay up all night just to get that kind of quiet, and then I learned about this new thing called “going to bed earlier.”

5.) What aspect(s) of blogging do you find most rewarding?

The single most rewarding thing about blogging is being able to go back and read my thoughts… the ones from the people I used to be. They should have been on the list of fictional people I’d like to meet now. On the other hand, what I could say to them without spoilers is it’s going to get so, so very much worse before it gets better, and I’m not sure that the “it gets better” would be the take home message. I would also advise myself to buy a lot of Finnish flags, because I couldn’t tell me why, but I could tell me they’d come in handy.

6.) What food is your guilty pleasure?

Rice Krispies. I swear to Christ I could eat an entire box in one sitting, preferably with whole milk.

7.) What advice would you give to younger you?

I think I’ve sort of covered this already, but I was such an introverted kid who made people laugh to cover up huge flaws and insecurities… so I would say that I couldn’t give myself any advice because I wouldn’t have listened. The younger me was lost in my own little world, and even an older version of me wouldn’t have known how to interrupt it. Other people were frightened by what an intense kid I was- why wouldn’t I looking back? I wouldn’t have any advice, just comforting knowledge. Teenage me couldn’t have conceived of federal gay marriage, or even the majority of the country not thinking I was mentally ill (well, I am, but not because of THAT).

8.) What is something other people seem to find important that you just don’t see the point of?

This is going to sound completely judgmental, but it is a personal choice. I don’t see the point in the emphasis on how much people need alcohol to get through their day. It’s not the drinking itself that bothers me, it’s the craze around Facebook/Twitter/Insta/etc. memes that make alcoholism look adorable.

I don’t know if it’s that I’ve had friends in AA who made me look at the issue differently, or whether culture itself has shifted. What I do know is that people look at me weird when I order a cherry Diet Coke in a bar, and I used to say I was driving or that I was taking medication or whatever. And then it occurred to me that there haven’t been very many times in my life where people haven’t looked at me like I was weird for some reason or another and to just stop caring what other people thought. Now people look at me weird when I do want a beer. I’ll never win, and that’s ok.

9.) Do you have any famous (or infamous) people in your family tree?

I seem to remember my mother’s father tracing our genealogy back to Zachary Taylor and James Madison… but my grandfather died when I was in middle school and I am WAY too lazy to redo all that research. I wouldn’t be if I was actually interested in genealogy, but it’s just not my bag.

10.) Which of your blog posts has had the most surprising response? (Comments you didn’t see coming, traffic that was unusually heavy/light compared to your averages, etc.)

My article on marriage had the most surprising response, because it was shared literally all over the world, and landed in both Martina Navratilova and Margaret Cho’s Twitter feeds. It wasn’t like I sat down that day and thought I MUST WRITE SOMETHING POPULAR. I’d gotten my nose out of joint by straight people thinking that gay marriage was this alien concept, so I was typing like a madman and hit “Post” fifteen minutes later. It astounded me that something I spent so little time on was a “hit,” and other things have taken hours and hours with no response at all… which is honestly how I prefer it. I write better when I don’t realize there’s an audience. I kind of picture my blog as an open dress rehearsal.

11.) What do you do when you get writers’ block?

I write about nothing. Literally, I just narrate the smallest things until an idea catches and I think, “well, there’s something.” Writer’s block comes from thinking you have to wait for an inspiration to write when it’s the other way around. In the process of writing, you find inspiration. It’s like waiting for a good mood. It rarely happens on its own- you usually have to put on loud music, go for a walk, etc. Your mood didn’t just lift on its own accord- you lifted it.

Here are my list of nominees:

Last, but not least, are the things I want to know about you……

  1. What is the smallest situation in which you’re embarrassed? For instance, even when I am wearing high tops and long pants, I am embarrassed when my socks don’t match.
  2. What do you do really well besides write?
  3. What do you do badly, but participate anyway?
  4. What is your favorite creative swear?
  5. How long can you go off the grid without twitching?
  6. What do you do professionally if writing is not your day job?
  7. What’s the best picture you’ve ever taken? Describe the landscape.
  8. Are you from a big city or a small town?
  9. What is your idea of home?
  10. Do you like your current haircut?
  11. What is the absolute funniest thing that has ever happened to you?

The Omelet

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

Dear Mom,

Today my fountain pen runneth over, which is just a metaphor that sounds incredibly messy. These kinds of days are so hard, because I can only imagine your response instead of getting one for real. Though I’ve shed no tears, I am feeling the weight of grief in every muscle. It’s comforting to have an editor that would know exactly what my news means, but even though she’s a mother herself, she’s not mine. I am positive she’s proud of me, but she won’t have that over-the-top, lump in her throat excitement you would have especially for me.

You see, I got an e-mail yesterday that not only made me happy, it validated me. You’ve known I was a writer since grade 5, when I turned in an essay that Mrs. Wommack fawned over about adult illiteracy called I Forgot My Reading Glasses… In fact, I would venture to say that you’ve known I was a writer far longer than I have. Though I was made a professional writer long ago by my readers here, I’ve never had anything to add to my resumé. Now, I do. Here is the e-mail I got yesterday from the International Association of Professional Writers & Editors:

Dear Leslie,

Thank you for submitting your application. Upon further review, we have determined that your sample meets our quality standards and are pleased to inform you that your application has been accepted.

Name Redacted

The air changed in the room with one word.

Accepted.

It is an honor I share with everyone who believed in me before I did. I cleaned up my marriage article to make it more suitable for publication, and that’s what got me in… So bittersweet because it’s basically all the advice I didn’t take for myself. I figured that if it was retweeted by celebrities, it must have something going for it. As it turns out, I was right. Speaking more specifically to “bittersweet,” I share credit where credit is due; Dana is owed so much more from me than she got, one of the reasons I became successful in the first place. The sweet part is that even though I gave up nearly everything, I suppose it had to be done to find myself… finally, someone who has self-esteem and can be proud of her accomplishments… getting away from the tape Dana helped reinforce that said you’ll never amount to anything.

So, perhaps it’s a good thing I didn’t take my own advice about staying together, because it was a total deal-breaker of a conversation. Not believing in your partner is the death knell of a relationship. If I couldn’t achieve with her, I’m glad I achieved without her, even though it would have been nice to not only share credit with her to her face, but to prove her wrong… and not in an I told you so sort of way. It’s an I’m so glad you were wrong on this one, because it was really cramping my style because I believed you feeling.

Gone are the days where I feel like I torched my whole life, replaced by an overwhelming amount of emotion at breaking eggs to make an omelet.

Almost as overwhelming that I can’t see your face right now. Perhaps we can celebrate in my dreams.

Love,

Leslie

Shelanagans, etc.

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

As predicted, I’m going to miss Walk-Up Wednesday at the African American Museum of History and Culture. Time, again, has gotten away from me. I even set reminders and they didn’t help. I woke up later than I usually do (0700 as opposed to 0500), and for some reason have the urgency to nest rather than to people. Had I not waited until the last minute, I would have been excited to see the museum, but there was always another Wednesday until now. Perhaps I will wait until someone in my family comes to visit so that we have something touristy to do together that I haven’t done already.

I have found that I am somewhat of an anomaly in D.C., because I’ve met few people around here that are willing to brave the crowds of tourists and would rather stay in their bubbles than constantly “staycation.” In fact, I’ve had roommates in the past that have never been to The Mall for the fireworks on Fourth of July even though they’ve lived here their whole lives. My excuse is that I just haven’t been here long enough to do everything, but it will happen.

One of the reasons I love D.C. so damn much is that it is a wonderland of free stuff to do… not that I’m opposed to paying for good entertainment, but why? The government has seen to it that I get a marvelous education in all sorts of subjects for the cost of a Metro ticket. The only museum that actually cost money that I’m desperate to see is the Newseum, which I saw in 2001 but has had a complete overhaul since. My greatest memory of the old building is standing in front of Helen Thomas’ press pass with tears in my eyes.

A few years before, I’d gotten to meet my hero when she came to University of Houston for a continuing legal education course at the law school, and I went as a reporter for our Information Technology newsletter. I asked her how being a reporter had changed in the age of the Internet, and she told me it was a great question and expounded on the 24-hour news cycle. My hero, badass reporter, told me I asked a great question. Touch me.

12068483_10153535115995272_1984648205932577198_o

My favorite story that she told involved a Halloween party at The White House, where a pilot tried to crash his plane intentionally on the grounds to kill President Clinton. Luckily, his plan failed miserably, but she said she’d never forget thinking that if he’d succeeded, Vice President Gore would have had to take the Oath of Office dressed as Frankenstein.

My second favorite story involved President Reagan. He invited Helen to take part in breaking ground for the Lebanese Culture Center (or something like it- can’t remember exactly). Then, after it was over, Reagan told her that as she dug the first hole, he could hear the ghosts of all the former presidents saying PUSH HER IN!!!

The first time I came to Washington (to visit), I was in second grade and eight years old. Though I loved The White House, I am infinitely grateful that I’ve come back as an adult so that I can better appreciate everything the city has to offer. For instance, I learned recently that Gore Vidal is buried here, so that’s my next cemetery trip. Perhaps writing advice will come to me by osmosis.

At this point, I’m willing to try anything.

It’s almost time to start writing the review for The 11:05 Murders, and I still owe Finn Bell an Amazon review for Dead Lemons (Finn, if you’re reading this, I haven’t forgotten). My morning coffee has turned into my afternoon coffee for this very reason. Trying to stay sharp despite the medication I’m taking is not effortless. I read somewhere that Lexapro has an effect on cognitive function and thought, great. Something else to make me dumber. I really don’t need help in that department. I also try to stay away from Klonopin unless I’m really distressed because it makes me sleepy. Perhaps that’s the point. It doesn’t solve anxiety so much as make you tired enough you don’t care you’re anxious.

Speaking of which, I need to read Dead Lemons again, and not because of the review. There’s a great therapist character in it with solid advice that I’d like to go back over. I’d tell you what it is, but I want you to buy the book.

Technically, I want you to buy all the books I mention, because then I’ll be able to discuss them with people who already know the end and I’m not responsible for spoiling the whole thing.

A great discussion about a book might make up for not going to the museum.

Right now, though, Brian O’Hare and Finn Bell are counting on me, so perhaps waiting is for the best. My sister and Pri Diddy are both coming to town soon, and who knows what “shelanagans” we’ll create. I would stay tuned if I were you.

I know I will.

Now That Some Time Has Passed…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m trying to take stock of the ways my life has changed since my mother died, because now that it’s been a little over two years, things look different than they did when it first happened. I have found a new version of normal, although I am emotionally bleeding out for my cousins because their father just died unexpectedly. Additionally, this is the second sibling my aunt and uncle have lost in a very short time (the uncle that died was the second of four children on my mother’s side). So, we are all trying to find a new version of normal, trying to wrap our brains around two people in our family that have died very young. My mother was only 65, and my uncle died the day before his 64th birthday.

This is crushing because as people in grief know, birthdays and anniversaries are the hardest to get through. I cannot imagine having those two days so close together, yet another thing that makes grief as individual as a fingerprint, because even though my cousins and I share the pain of losing a parent, no situation is the same. I would not presume that they’re feeling the same thing I am (or even did), particularly because I am further along in my process of finding Option B.

I do remember how terrible those first few days were, because I saw everything through a deep and penetrating fog. People would say things to me and I would forget one second later what they said, or not even reply because I would go deaf and dumb to the world around me. I completely fell apart. For months, I would forget where I was going, or even the way out of my own neighborhood. For even longer, I wouldn’t interact. For instance, one day I’d think getting together with friends or going to church would make me feel better, then not only regret that decision, but drop off the face of the earth and people would wonder where the hell I went. Ummm, I went home. And not only did I go home, I didn’t even take up space in the house. I confined myself to my room for far longer than anyone thought I could or should.

I would (and still do) bounce between zero and what seems like 50,000 calories in a day. Grief took away hunger and thirst until I couldn’t ignore it anymore. It also occurred to me that drinking alcohol is often a trap when someone close to you dies, so being completely sober was a good and bad thing. There was no social lubricant for anxiety at being around people, and when I felt my feelings, I really, really felt them.

I am normally a little bit socially anxious, for which I take medication. But social anxiety is different in deep grief. People notice when you look like crap, and will tell you, not knowing the bomb you’re about to drop on them. See, the reason I look like a hot mess is that my mother just died…. and that’s when you can literally hear the whistle with Doppler effect. You desperately don’t want it to, but the conversation goes from zero to weird in 2.5 seconds and you regret you said anything. The hardest part about telling people someone close to you died is that the air in the room changes, and people start treating you differently.

Some people know exactly what to do, which is either say they’re sorry and leave it at that, or say nothing and just give you a hug. With others, it is a litany of I know just how you feel, and then tell a story that legit has nothing to do with what you’re going through.

30704001_1986837498021611_1417297838002122399_nThis is the Facebook meme I found today that made me laugh and cringe, because for the grieving, it describes our experience perfectly. I really don’t fucking care how sad you were when your cat died and how it relates to my grief that I’ll never see my mother again. I also don’t care how you’ll feel when your mother dies, because first of all, you have no idea how you’ll feel when your mother/father/spouse dies, because thinking about it ahead of time is so much different than when reality punches you in the face. Secondly, my smart ass response is always going to be, well, it’s a good thing I’m going through it instead of you. However, that part generally seethes inside me because I know no one is trying to elicit that response. They just have no idea what to say, so what they think they’re saying is good and what they’re really saying hurts.

The other thing that happens is that your mother/father/spouse’s death becomes a subject no one wants to touch, so they stop bringing up the person altogether, as if remembrance is the worst thing ever. Say her name. Tell me funny stories about what you remember, especially if you knew her at a time when I didn’t.

I learned this lesson initially through divorce, that people thought bringing up Dana was somehow verboten, when it would have meant the world to me to laugh about the funny things that happened to us…. and at first, it really hurt that Dana and my mom have the same birthday, but now it feeds me because I think about celebrating Dana instead of being mired in grief…. mostly the old joke about how since she’s two years older than me, she’s just that much closer to death than I am. 😛

Yes, divorces are terrible. Yes, deaths are terrible. But it doesn’t render my great memories invalid. Just because it’s over doesn’t mean I don’t want to remember.

Speaking of “over,” I don’t view my relationship with my mother as such. I have a long history of writing letters to people or entities who are unlikely to respond. It doesn’t seem weird to me at all that we still “talk.” Maybe other people have trouble bringing up the topic of my mom, but I don’t. During the day, I basically narrate to her in my head, and in my dreams, she responds.

She thinks Dan and Pri Diddy are good for me. We agree on so much.

My Dog

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am not a gamer. I have been playing one game since it came out, and any questions about any other games are where I tap out immediately. You’ll have to ask someone else. The aforementioned game is Fallout 3, which came out in 2008. I did not beat it until a few months ago, so you see, I am obviously a video gaming wizard.

The reason this is the only game I play is that even though I’ve beaten it (finally), every single time I start over it’s brand new. There’s more stuff to find, different characters to build, and you don’t even need the story. If you have an add-on called Broken Steel, it will allow you to continue the game after the main storyline is finished, which, for me, has included going to each and every building just trying to find stuff…. My house looks like Sanford & Son. In fact, “cantankerous junk dealer” sums up my character quite nicely….. and even ten years later, things happen that are brand new, as if I’ve never played before. One of the coolest places I’ve discovered is a Montgomery County water reservoir (the county where I live), complete with a crab painted on the building and filled in with the Maryland flag. Apparently, this is one of the few buildings in the game that’s real. The developers did a good job on the Metro system, though, because it actually does look the same, albeit, well, bombed.

The game captured my attention because it takes place in Washington, DC after nuclear war…. renamed The Capital Wasteland. This is because I am terrible at using navigation and it was handy to know which way to go on my own…. keeping in mind that it is not an exact replica, but close enough for government work. I can find Farragut West, and I don’t get lost on The Mall.

The main quest is to bring fresh water to the wasteland because people are sick and dying (or mutating) from not being able to get water without massive levels of radiation. There are also tons of side quests, with which I am not even closed to finishing. The game keeps drawing me back, though, because it is akin to a Choose Your Own Adventure.

dogmeatFor instance, this last time around, a dog started following me around that you could “adopt,” and will help find you food and ammunition. It is unusual because lots of people have reported said dog in the game, but I’d never seen him. His name is Dogmeat, and he is much smarter than I am. You can also heal him with stimpaks, the medication in the game, but if you don’t get to him quickly enough, he can die in battle.

And that is how I found myself sitting at my desk, completely squalling my eyeballs out, because I had inadvertently killed my own dog. It was worse than Old Yeller, worse than Where the Red Fern Grows, and it was much worse than losing any of my actual pets, because I’ve never lost any of them to death. It didn’t help that I’d recently read about the K-9 unit in the CIA that prepares bomb/drug sniffing dogs for The Agency and our local police departments, because I was all like, “I bet THEY never accidentally kill their own dogs…..” even if that can’t possibly be true.

I learned later on that there’s a perk in the game called Puppies! (you have to have Broken Steel, though), where if Dogmeat is killed, you can go and fetch one of his puppies from another location in the game. But that first time, when Dogmeat was really, truly gone, the floodgates opened and every grief-filled feeling I had just sprayed all over my shirt and pants. Because, as I quickly learned, it wasn’t about the dog. It was the surface thing that tapped into all the deep wounds. Sometimes, I have a hard time letting go enough to cry, and will begin crying at what I think is an unrelated thing, yet nothing ever is.

Staying Awake

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 8 Comments

I thought seriously about boycotting Starbucks until I realized that I still had money on my gift cards. I reasoned that my coffee had already been purchased, and if the boycott persisted beyond that, I wouldn’t spend my own money there.philadelphia_sbux Thanks to social media wisdom, though, I realized something important. There are thousands of black baristas, and this one shop in Philly was the problem, not Starbucks as a whole. If that sounds callous and racist, I am very sorry. But the truth is that I live in a neighborhood with lots of black people. Some are African-American. Others are immigrants, mostly from Cameroon, Nigeria, and Eritrea. Boycotting my local store might lead to cutting down on employees as they get less busy, and I am not about to contribute to it.

The plain truth is that this is not a Starbucks problem. It is the top-down system of oppression that has been in power for hundreds of years. For instance, why didn’t the police officers just laugh in the barista’s face? Why, after explaining the situation, were the men still cuffed?

There is blame to be had all the way around, and when the police were called, they had absolutely no reason to follow through. What about the barista’s story made any damn sense except the police being as racist as the barista? I don’t even have a jacket as nice as the one the man on the left is wearing, and I guarantee you I’ve looked worse in a hoodie and jeans stumbling into a coffee shop than the man on the right. This is not to say that every black person who walks into a Starbucks must be dressed a certain way. I am only making the observation that if the barista and the police were looking for people making trouble, these men weren’t it.

Memorize their faces. Memorize the man on the left looking down with his hands in his pockets. Memorize the man on the right making a pained face as if this is not the first time this bullshit has happened to him. I can’t think of any situation that makes me feel more helpless and angry…. but I have to think it through. I have to think about all the ways I, as a white woman, can use the platform I’ve been given, both here and out in the world. I am generally not assertive when things happen to me personally (like truly repulsive comments regarding watching lesbians by men, for instance), but it’s a whole other thing when my mother lion gets engaged.

I am one of those hopeful people who’s been crushed by the amount of racism in my area, because DC is overwhelmingly black (a little under 50% of the population). I mistakenly thought things like that couldn’t happen here, or at least, more rarely than they actually do. I’ve cut way down on the optimism lately, anxiety rising like bile in the back of my throat.

I am no expert on race relations in DC, but it seems as if racially mixed neighborhoods have existed forever, even before gentrification…. keeping in mind that this is not every neighborhood’s case, but more often than in, say, the rest of the South. Technically, DC and Maryland are still the South because they’re under the Mason-Dixon line, but God help you if you mention it. No one around here wants to be compared with Alabama. We’d like to think we’re more progressive than that. Racial makeup of the neighborhood ceases to matter when you’re just trying to find a place you can afford.

In some ways, we are that progressive. In others, we’re not any better; we’d like to think of ourselves as liberal and inclusive, sweeping the incidents where we’re not way, way, way under the rug. If it doesn’t fit with the image we have of ourselves, it didn’t happen, definitely not a two-way street. White people just can’t be afraid of black people in the same way. I will never be afraid that a black person is going to call the police on me for anything…. ever.

Moreover, people of color absolutely cannot be racist, because racism, again, is a top-down entrenched system of oppression. They can, however, be prejudiced, stereotyping white people because they have to. They don’t know ahead of time if a friend or foe is approaching. Prejudice exists for a reason, and for people of color, it is self-preservation…. a fear that, as white people, we are absolutely responsible for creating.

For the most part, though, when we’re all on the Metro together, the racism and prejudice is left at the station. For instance, once I was waiting for the Orange Line back to Metro Center from Landover, and one of the WMATA employees came up to me and asked me if he could give me a hug, because I had a Black Lives Matter button pinned to my jacket. We just stood there and held each other, healing energy running between both of us.

While I have trouble believing that racism will be solved in my lifetime, I definitely hope.  Interestingly enough, I think Marvel has taken it upon itself to help. Movies like Black Panther and Captain America: Civil War, and television shows like Luke Cage are challenging the status quo, because they portray black people in a way that few pieces of media do. Marvel can’t be responsible for solving every racial issue, but movies and TV shows that are popular can’t hurt. For instance, nothing did more to help the queer community be seen as regular people than Will & Grace, with Six Feet Under a close second. Progress is still slow, but it’s faster than it used to be with the help of visibility.

The difference is that I only have to be afraid for my life when I’m walking hand in hand with another woman. Alone, people can only guess that I’m a minority. There is no covering up every inch of your skin. However, I do empathize because I, too, look over my shoulder for unenlightened white people. We are definitely not in the same boat, but I often believe we’re in the same part of the ocean.

As I sip my coffee, I wonder if this entire essay is going to make me look like a basic bitch. I want my thoughts to go toward some good…. perhaps make some people think. I know it reaches me. I could spend an entire afternoon brainstorming about all the ways society needs to change and what I might be able to do in bringing it forward. The most concrete way I know for myself is challenging all the microaggressions I think I don’t have. Being white is just a series of privileges that run so far under your skin you don’t even realize you’re broadcasting it.

The one good thing I can say for myself right this moment is that I can say I have black friends without lip service. I have people to teach me when I’m being a jackass without any awareness. I am lucky that my friends are willing to attribute my flaws to idiocy and not malice, because I guarantee that in terms of staying woke, I need to pay more attention when I become “sleepy.” I am lucky to have friends that have no problem calling me out on the carpet about it, even when it’s hard…. because sometimes you want to fix the whole world, and are at a complete loss as to what would help.

Although I know that at least my infinitely small part of the world will change, as long as I’m paying attention.

Coffee helps in keeping my mind busy and my eyes open. However, I cannot stay awake forever. That’s where you come in, batting relief.

[_])

Refill?

Where the Weather Takes Us

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 11 Comments

The meetup with the pen pal went well. Let’s call her “Zoey,” because there’s a connection that goes beyond New Girl. Of course if she becomes a regular and doesn’t mind me using her real name, that’s fine. But I’m not going to “out” her on a first meeting. That’s just rude. She is just as cute and funny as me, so I think it will be a great thing to have another person to pal around with…. although perhaps not so much in the immediate future, because she’s vacationing to Peru (I think…. my memory is failing in my elder years). But I definitely see hiking in the hills and walking around town in our future. Talking makes walking so much easier, because I am not constantly enmeshed in thoughts like, “my feet hurt…. my legs are sore…. how much longer?” Talking shuts down the complaint department. Yesterday was just about spending some time together and seeing if we’d click on any level. We definitely did, starting out at Kramerbooks and when they were slammed, walking to Teaism, instead. I love tea at every moment of the day, but for Zoey, she was disappointed they didn’t have hot chocolate. So we toasted to new friends with cold water. My pot of Darjeeling went quickly, and then we walked to the Metro.

Two things about that.

I started talking about the weather with my seatmate, who said that it reminded her of Germany and Switzerland. In my head, I was thinking she must be military, because obviously Germany and Switzerland are known for their large black populations. My assumption was correct. So, I asked her what her job was in the military, and she said slyly, intel. She’d retired long ago, looking for all the world like a sweet grandmother, the type no one would look twice at while carrying sensitive documents. But perhaps she didn’t look like that, then. She was retired now, having scouted out secret documents during the Cold War. My mind was blown because this was an absolutely random encounter, exactly the kind of thing I live for in DC. I am certain that by now, there are tons of movies that talk frankly about the types of ops we pulled off during that time, most of them declassified by now. It was also very interesting that she wasn’t stapled to CIA, that smash-and-grabs for documents also happen with soldiers. I don’t know why I didn’t make that connection until last night, because I saw 12 Strong, and even though the soldiers had a CIA contact to lead them through Afghanistan to the warlord contact who was willing to team up with them to overthrow the Taliban, he left after that and the soldiers were on their own.

So, this woman and I are engrossed in conversation and before I even really had a chance to ask questions, it was her stop. I was so lost in thought that I got off at the “wrong one,” or perhaps the right one considering that I was only a couple of blocks from Busboys & Poets. I had a vegan salad and vegan mac-and-cheese, possibly the first time I’ve eaten actual nutrition that wasn’t all carbs this week. MMMM, bread.

I’m not vegan, or even vegetarian, but I truly do not eat enough plants. I have to remind myself that veggies exist.

While I was eating, though, I had a truly surreal experience, because there was a mentally ill person at the bar trying to score free fries from the restaurant. Two patrons offered to have his fries added to their tab. Then, when he got them, he would neither leave nor get a table. In Takoma Park, there are literally two governments, because part of it lies in Montgomery County and part of it is in the city of DC. I had no idea where I was in terms of that line. But what I do know is that there’s no real way to call someone regarding the mentally ill except the police, which brought up such a dilemma that I’m still thinking about it. He was definitely harassing other customers, because they didn’t offer to pay for his snacks without him strong-arming them. And yet, he was black, which said to me, no one call the police under any circumstances. This is because there was little to be done except take him to jail, because there’s no way they would have taken him to a psych ward. It’s just not in their purview. So, what to do? No restaurant wants a loiterer asking for money and, oh my God, emitting such a smell that it cleared out half the bar.

It’s hard to be compassionate when you really don’t know how. He needed more help than he could get in the restaurant, and the police couldn’t give it to him, either. I think because everyone was so sensitive to racial bias, that made it even harder. We didn’t know whether the police that showed up would show compassion or wrestle him to the ground. It’s not even equal odds at this point. None of the people in the bar were worried about racial bias on our end, because it was never about the color of his skin. It was about mental illness, full stop. But we couldn’t count on the police having an equal amount of compassion.

What he needed, in my opinion, was a few days in a psych ward to get balanced again, and then a truly safe place to stay. Neither of those things would happen unless he went to the county intake facility in Rockville, now closed for the night. Having to sleep in a jail cell might have only exacerbated the problem, contributing to putting someone in the system that can’t get back out, because he has no concrete concept of acceptable behavior.

All I could do was pray that someone would stick with him long enough to get the help he needed, because nothing was going to happen in the moment. We were all just on pins and needles waiting for him to leave, and not because we weren’t trying to help in the moment. It’s that no one could stay in the restaurant overnight, and it was kind of a scary situation because we did not know the extent of his mood and behavior quirks. For instance, when the fries were brought out to him, paid for by the other customers, he threw them on the floor and insisted that new fries be brought to him that he paid for himself, completely oblivious to the fact that he had no money.

My superpower was an out-of-body experience, where I left the situation and went back to Teaism, thinking about new adventures Zoey and I would have in the coming months (years?). There is just so much to do and see around here that it doesn’t take much to find a glorious afternoon, and great conversations that begin with the weather.

Crazy on a Cracker

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Tonight I am going to meet a new friend who I hope will one day become my old friend… a great pen pal becoming real. Religion major in college, writes, and reads more in a day than I do in a week… which is very hard.

Speaking of which, I am engrossed in a new novel for review called The 11:05 Murders, by Brian O’Hare. It’s another one I thought was deserving of more than a few words written about it, and again e-mailed it to my editor… and not even selfishly because reviews might be easier when she’s also read it. Just because the book was so great I wanted to share. It is a very, very cheap way to show someone you care- and are genuinely excited to be able to provide great entertainment through e-books even when the person lives thousands of miles away.

It’s also nice to get a book that I’m genuinely jazzed to review by a polished author. That doesn’t happen very often. I’m also glad that when I’m finished with this novel, there are two others.

It’s also a nice thing that when I shop at Amazon, a small percentage of my purchase goes to Doctors Without Borders, my charity through Smile. I try to donate to them personally when I have a chance, but it’s not always possible. It makes me feel good that I can get my needs met and contribute to theirs. So much is going on in the world today that’s negative… cheering on their efforts is just one way I hope to combat it.

Not only am I thinking globally about negativity, but personally. I am still messed up over the last four years, and in some ways, I think that loss will never get better. It will become a shallower well of injury, or something that hurts more and more sporadically, but nothing will ever be the same. This is because dealing with grief over the alive and well is different than grieving the dead. Each hurts in its own special way. I am struck by the fact that other people’s lives will go on without me, and brought to my knees that I will never see my mother again.

If in saying that Barbara Bush’s death wasn’t that sad, I didn’t mean to be callous. It’s just a whole other thing when someone dies naturally after living an incredible amount of time vs. the shock of losing someone in the blink of an eye when their lives were cut short by at least 15-20 years. Some days I actually forget time has passed and am just struck dumb with the immediacy of it all. A parent dying suddenly and younger than you thought is like being in a car accident repeatedly, with the same amount of haze-inducing shock. The worst part is that I didn’t agree to this (as if one would, but stay with me, Jimbo). It just happens unexpectedly, a truly unwanted side effect. I am just blindsided all the time. I go into a space where I can’t remember anything, I can’t move, I can’t think clearly. I am just walking through life trying to nail Jell-o to a tree.

What is truly heartbreaking is knowing that my mother would never have wanted this for me. She was always so self-sacrificing that she would have done anything not to die if she could help it, and not out of self-preservation. What keeps my heart from stitching is that for most of my adult life, I lived out of state… so there are days when I regret that fact and others where I completely forget she’s dead because I’m not used to talking to her every day, anyway. I’ll reach for the phone to call her and absolutely freak. Grief then becomes extremely loud and incredibly close. What helps is not thinking about my own situation, but the thousands of other people that have also had this experience and that even when I feel like it, I am never alone. Someone on earth has felt what I’m feeling at any given moment.

There’s also the two-sided coin of losing someone suddenly. It is the combined feeling of joy that they felt no pain and the anger that comes with not being able to say goodbye. Let me be clear, though. I am not angry at her. I am angry at the situation.

It is the same with divorce… more angry at the situation and myself than I ever will be at Dana. In fact, I would go so far as to say I’m not angry with Dana at all. Everything is forgiven on that end. It’s me that needs work. I got started praying for her health and happiness early and often. It gives me something to give to her, even when it’s just sending energy into the universe. Because we’re not in contact, the chord between us (as I’ve said before) becomes a loopback, feeding me. It gives me the feeling of peace and calm that I’m somehow contributing, I guess. At this point, guessing regarding the nature of karma and the universe is about as much control as I’m allowed to have. Surprisingly, it is more than enough.

I feel like I should get into that space quickly, the one of sending good thoughts into the universe, because I am more downcast today than usual. It’s grey and awful outside, which only contributes to the storm within. Everything is making me sad, and I just feel like a disappointing excuse for a human being. Now, logically I know this is not true. I just can’t seem to make it happen emotionally. I am sure that things will look different 30 minutes after I take my anxiety medication, for which I need to make a pharmacy run. I don’t want to show up to a first impression feeling like crazy on a cracker.

Because unfortunately, that’s what grief does. It causes anxiety about just damn everything, even the things you never thought about before said loved one died. There’s so many new depths to plumb. Even the fact that people die young is something you used to know and now smacks you in the face. It’s one thing to know it, quite another to feel.

As far as I know, besides Dan, I am the first of my friends to lose their mothers. It is a comfort you would not believe that although I am incredibly sad for her, I have a person who understands implicitly the hand that I’ve been dealt. I have someone who can tell with one look that I need a hug or an arm around my shoulder. Not only am I perpetually bereft in some respects, single people do not get nearly enough contact comfort. It is such a blessing to have someone in my life who gives really great hugs without a hint of romance, because it’s not about that and never will be. I just give friendship its full due, that chosen family is everything.

The reason I believe in chosen family so wholeheartedly is that I don’t think it’s fair to the person I would date to drag them into the sideshow that is my current life. I would much rather wait until things calm down, when I am much less angry at me for the way I treated Dana and much less overwhelmed at the state of my world. The one good thing I remember about being divorced is that not only did I behave badly then and am grateful I don’t now hurt her repeatedly, I never would have wanted to subject Dana to the person I’ve become in the aftermath of grief…. and not because I think she couldn’t have handled it. I just think that it’s a pain for which she would have no frame of reference, and therefore, would not have been impressed with my need to isolate, to the point that I would have isolated myself from her, too. I can’t imagine how short I would have become with her, snippy not because she did anything wrong but because her mother is still alive. It’s a helpless place when someone is mad at you for seemingly no reason, unable to take it in that you shouldn’t take it personally- that person is mad at the whole damn world. For me, it was a lucky thing to be on my own, so that when I was literally unable to function, no one had to deal with me. I’m so much better now, but it was a long row to hoe. My entire garden just died.

And though most of the plants are still dead, at least I see shoots of green.

The Leadership Breakfast

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Barbara Bush died, which really isn’t that sad if you think about it. She lived to the ripe old age of 92. I think that’s about as much as anyone should expect in terms of time on earth, and her kids were lucky to have her that long. I mean, when someone dies it’s always sad for their families in terms of not being able to communicate anymore, but 92 is close to immortal in today’s terms of longevity. No one is going to say, “dear God, they took her too soon.” As a fellow Texan, I would like to be able to regale you with a story about how we met, but unfortunately, that never happened. We did go to the same church when I was in college, so I have met her husband. That will have to do.

So, it’s Easter Sunday in about 1999 or 2000 (I am really bad with dates). The men’s group was serving breakfast before service, and the president was going around with a pitcher of coffee for warm-ups. The Secret Service guys were stationed strategically around the room, constantly talking into their wrists.

The president comes over to me and fills my cup, and when I realized exactly who I was talking to, I began gulping down my coffee as fast as I could so he would have to come to my table multiple times, early and often. I am sure he knew my game, but didn’t seem to mind. We had very good, very short talks. I wish my memory was flawless, because I’d love to tell you what they were about. I do remember telling him that I was a political science student at University of Houston, and he told me he used to be a professor at Rice (like I didn’t know that. Didn’t tell him, though……).

I don’t think I’ve disagreed politically with many presidents besides him, although I definitely have a list. I was too young to care what was going on with Reagan, and I love Clinton & Obama. It was just exciting to meet anyone who’d been leader of the free world, as well as being Director of Central Intelligence the year I was born (1977), although he left in January and I wasn’t born until September. Close enough for government work. I don’t know how you get to be DCI if you don’t have any experience with espionage, so my guess is that he was OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the modern CIA) during World War II, and as a cook, I pretend that anyone who was OSS during that time was Julia Child’s best friend.

I was a spazzbasket of excitement, information, and caffeine. At this point, I have conservatively had, like, five cups of coffee trying to talk to him. I debate going over to talk to the Secret Service as well. However, they are designed to look absolutely unapproachable. They definitely pull it off.

What I hope I didn’t pull off was being desperately impressed, because no one that well-known wants to be “on” all the time. He was just there to be part of the men’s group, and I hope I respected that. But so many of my questions just swirled in my head. Did he like Helen Thomas? What’s it like being a wartime pilot? Was he ever under cover? Did he actually know Julia Child, or is that just wishful thinking?

There are so many things I would ask him now that I didn’t think of then, like what was it like for your wife and kids while you were president? It can’t have been easy to be in the public eye, whether there were things you liked about it or not. Also, what was it like to be president when the wall in Berlin fell? Was Ronald Reagan just as funny in private life as he was on television? At the time, all that was swirling in my head was about treating him like a regular human being.

….just like he is right now, dealing with the death of his wife.

Get Off My Lawn

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

I am terribly cranky today.

Yesterday’s pardoning of Scooter Libby was the last straw. The guy committed treason. No punishment the USG could come up with would be good enough. When he outed Valerie Plame, it was damn lucky he didn’t get her killed. Do all intelligence employees under cover have to be afraid of their own employer now? If I was in their position, it would incense me that even people who commit crimes against national security can almost assuredly get away with murder, both literally and figuratively. Not only was Libby’s personal case a red flag, the precedent it sets is even more scary.

It’s probably against the Geneva Convention so this is absolutely a hypothetical situation, but say there was a black op to take out Assad so that citizens wouldn’t be harmed. You could absolutely argue that the ends justify the means, but someone leaks that information to the New York Times or the Washington Post while Special Ops is in country…. not only the op, but the names of the soldiers involved. How long would it take before their heads were on a spike in Damascus? If you said “10 minutes,” I would answer, just like James Comey, that it was nine minutes longer than I expected.

The most frustrating thing about this whole situation is that no one asked me what I thought (that was a joke).

No one asked me what I thought about confirming Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, either. If the confirmation goes through, we’ll have someone in charge of foreign relations that believes in the Bible more than the Constitution. His view of homosexuality is that it is a perversion, and that his belief is not wrong-headed, but a persecution of all Christians. This is not something I want broadcast all over the world, because the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatry Association disagree with that, and have since the 1980s. It is terrifying that only some people’s beliefs have progressed since then because a book that was meant to be a living document, changing over time as we understand more about medicine and science, in their view must remain literal and stagnant. It is generally believed by progressive theologians that the real abomination in the Bible concerning homosexuality was an ancient Canaanite practice of temple prostitution [by both adults and minors], tarnishing a place meant to be holy ground.

As theologian Jim Rigby once said, Jesus never mentioned homosexuality, so it cannot be essential to his teaching. Ancient desert people would never have known same sex orientation as an identity. The word homosexual was not even coined until the 1900s. It is an identity because even queer celibate people still consider themselves as such [using queer as a catch-all for the entire community and not as a derogatory term. I’m gay, so I can use it. Straight people can’t get away with it. Sorry.]. It is absolutely the last thing a follower of the Christ should embrace, because Jesus was constantly widening the net of acceptance, something that has been twisted since the New Testament, where Paul condemned homosexuality.

Paul had other beliefs that were equally toxic, like the prohibition of women speaking in church… something mainline Christians have moved past, so why is being gay different? Additionally, if you believe in one Talmudic law, you should believe all of them, so advocate for shutting down the NFL because players are consistently touching pigskin. You have to ask yourself whether someone who has an international platform should be able to hold these untranslated views, because even if you don’t support our community, do you really think it’s wise to bolster countries who still execute people for these “crimes?” Do you believe in ending lives and devastating families? The stakes are higher than you think.

In the United States, it means a disbelief of the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. If I am truly equal to everyone else, I am a citizen who should be protected by the law, not persecuted by it.

Everything gets messy when the law goes from national to personal, because people can wrap their heads around discrimination of a group, but not their own relatives…. where, often, they fall short in making the connection.

There are still some extremists in this country that are every bit as violent toward the queer community as Sharia law, validated by people who don’t believe in internment camps and execution but aren’t vocal in speaking out about it……….

This leads me to believe that were those things to happen, it would be swift. Ten minutes at most, nine minutes longer than I expect. World issues are literally making me ill.

I am terribly cranky today.

Beautiful Music

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am writing to extraordinarily beautiful music today, some of which is new and other pieces intensely familiar. It’s a playlist I created on Amazon Music called The Mozart Big Box. It’s the name of an album, but I also added all Mozart’s choral works. I am trying to stay focused when there’s a figure that astounds me, like a melisma. Mozart is not particularly known for them, so when they happen, I have to rewind. Handel and Bach are the masters. With both of them, it’s just Abs of Steel…. provided you are breathing down to your feet and only using your stomach muscles to sing. In order to do Bach and Handel correctly, you must study vocal technique, because the accompaniment is so sparing that it points out every flaw if you don’t. Mozart is much more forgiving, because as Emperor Joseph II says in the movie Amadeus, there are simply too many notes, that’s all. If you make a mistake, the accompaniment will catch you.

Melismas are the entire reason I muscled my way into Varsity Choir at Clements. My one claim to fame in high school is that my junior year, I was in the top choir and the top band at the same time, the first to do so. Originally, the choir director put me in Junior Varsity, and I said, are you sure? I’ve done lots of major choral works with my church choir. She pulled out a Messiah book and said, prove it, and flipped to (of course) the most difficult soprano passage in the whole friggin’ work, which I’d only done for the last five Christmases. Someone could wake me up in the middle of the night and I could sing it blind.

I flat nailed it, and the choir director said, I stand corrected. You’re in. I was lucky that I spent nearly an hour warming up, because my head voice (the top of my range) was incredible that day. I am not a diva by any means. I am quite humble about my abilities. But there are just certain days where I amaze myself, like I’ve never heard myself before. The reason I felt fantastic after that audition is that I’d never sung any soprano part in a choral work all by myself. I usually needed the other sopranos in my section to be able to sneak in breaths, which is what sectional sounds are for….. To me, nailing it was not only the notes being spot on, but being able to hold my own with breath control….. which does not come easily to the anxious.

The only time being in both bit me on the ass was that tryouts for All-Region Band and All-Region Choir were on the same day. I chose band, and I think in retrospect that I chose………. poorly. In soloing with my voice, I do not get the same stomach-churning stage fright that I do when playing my trumpet. Something I nail in an empty sanctuary is painful once it’s full. I did manage to get into High School for Performing and Visual Arts with instrumental music, but I’ve never been better than that. I peaked early.

I feel as if I should have known I was a singer and not an instrumental musician, because I got into the adult choir at my church when I was in Grade 7. As an adult, the two times I’ve had the feeling of being wowed at myself were singing the Pie Jesu movement of the Rutter Requiem with full orchestra in Portland and The Lord is My Shepherd from the same work in Houston with incredible pipe organ and the first desk oboe player at The Houston Symphony. The second link is actually me. The recording of the Pie Jesu is lost to history. Despite a few flubs that only I would notice, it’s the best recording of me I have. I forgive myself completely because I was not in great voice that day. I woke up with complete laryngitis and had to sit in the shower for almost an hour before I could even talk. I was relying completely on my diaphragm to get me through, and it did not fail. Because I was so incredibly sick, as soon as the solo was over all my adrenaline ran out and I just wanted Dana to take me home and put me in bed with the remote, some orange juice, and enough Nyquil to plunge a horse into unconsciousness. It was at that moment I realized I was introducing the choir at the next service. There may or may not have been a lot of damn its and oh, fucks involved.

One of my deepest regrets is that my mother heard me sing a lot in high school because she was in choir with me at church and my accompanist everywhere else… but as an adult, either we were too far apart geographically or she had her own church job. My only hope was that she would come to DC when I was singing after she retired. The school year ended in May, and by October she was dead. I was completely dumbfounded because it happened so suddenly, and losing that particular dream knocked me down with force. We were both such serious musicians that I really can’t take it when thinking that my mother and I will never perform together again. She heard the recording in the link above, but she was never in the congregation after a year of intense private lessons, when my opera voice flipped on (link is to a clip of one of my voice lessons that still cracks me up to this day).

The memory is still precious, though, because even though my mom wasn’t there, Dana’s was. She grabbed me after the performance and gave me the biggest bear hug on record, exclaiming, that voice! Where did it come from?! My only answer was a hell of a lot of hard work, woodshedding every measure until it was perfect. My garage had amazing acoustics, and I shudder thinking that I never apologized to the neighbors, because I have a big damn voice.

Although my favorite compliment came from The Divine Mrs. B, who said I should have an oboe player follow me around wherever I go. Believe me, I could not afford that particular oboe player, and a beginner will clear your sinuses.

If there is anything negative about all this, it’s that soprano sections are very competitive, and I generally make friends with the basses because of it. Bass notes make me happy, and I would much rather ignore all the singers in my own section, just put my head down, and do the work. One of the first things that I asked my choir director in DC was, are the sopranos mean? He said he was the only one who was mean. I told him I was in.

Luckily, he turned out to be right. That being said, I haven’t sung a note in a year. Eventually, I’ll get back to it. Right now, everything about church choir brings my grief extremely loud and incredibly close. I can’t sing and panic at the same time. I know. I’ve tried it.

I do listen to great sopranos, though. Nothing makes me happier than the Kathleen Battle and Wynton Marsalis duet, Let the Bright Seraphim (Handel). I feel like it marries the best parts of me, an intensely personal piece. Once I was driving and singing along to the recording and forgot the windows were down. I stopped at a stop light and the cop next to me with his windows down said, very nice.

Which is probably the only interaction I’ve ever had with a cop that didn’t cost $200. There are just so many things that beautiful music can accomplish.

There’s a Crazy World of E-mails in This Crazy World

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have loved e-mail since I first used it in the mid-’90s. Typing was so much easier than handwriting, and to me it had the same heft. It allowed me to “think in longhand” because e-mails felt like actual letters as opposed to text messages. I was not particularly fond of my handwriting (still not, really), and because I was also on IRC, I had to learn to type very, very fast to keep up with the conversation. Hunt and peck was so slow that by the time I hit Enter, what I was responding to was already five minutes gone. DeletedI started touch typing by watching my friend Luke. It was basically osmosis. Now I’m so fast that I can literally type an entire paragraph with my eyes closed, as long as there aren’t too many numbers. My fastest typing test was 100wpm with six errors.

Now, I hover around 74 perfectly. It’s the entire reason I carry a Bluetooth keyboard around with me everywhere. I can’t text for shit. As I was telling my Facebook friends the other day, if I don’t have a keyboard with me, you’ll be watching those three little bubbles for a half hour (and you better not be surprised if you only get back “k,” because most likely I’ve typed a paragraph and then hit something with my hand and accidentally erased it, too enraged to do it again). So, of all ways to communicate, I love the blank screen in front of me. I use Gmail exclusively, with occasional ventures into Hotmail to retrieve ancient messages. 21st century archaeology at its finest….. Hotmail is old school, but I still feel infinitely superior to those who use AOL. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. There isn’t much in this world that makes me feel superior. Let me have this one. I do, however, like the Hotmail interface, because it reminds me of old-school Outlook (before the ribbon).

I switched to the Gmail suite when I learned that ads were few and function was overwhelmingly good, even with a basic web interface. Most of the time, though, I set it up in Evolution or Thunderbird with Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar so that it catches all of my appointments, as well. However, Thunderbird does not have pop-up notifications unless it’s running, so I don’t use it for anything, but I also plug my e-mail account into Mail for Windows 10 so that Gmail is integrated into system notifications. When they go off, I then open my client of choice.

This tiny dissertation on e-mail is brought to you by the movie Love, Simon. Basically, I spent most of it saying to myself, see! E-mail does create real emotion! It was fascinating to watch feelings evolve the longer the e-mails went back and forth.

It was horrifying to see that homophobia still exists… but it’s become nicer, I suppose. For instance, coming out is still a big damn deal. Straight people don’t have to come out. Straight just is. In an ideal world, gay would be the same. But parents cry. I have no doubt that some parents wonder where they went wrong, as if it’s somehow their fault for not being harder on their sons to gravitate toward boy things and their girls to gravitate toward girl things.

It doesn’t work that way. I have plenty of lesbian friends who played with dolls, still wear a face full of makeup, and spend an hour on their hair. I have plenty of gay friends who played football and joined the military.

As a sidenote, I also know straight girls that have turned out every bit as military jackass brotard and straight men who love Broadway and tote bags. In the end, we’re all just people, and the spectrum is large.

I think, though, that gay men have it harder than lesbians, and that’s because in this society, it’s not cool to be feminine, because you’re seen as a man submitting yourself to another man. We really have to examine that prejudice, as if seeming feminine is the worst thing in the world. I think that some people are homophobic because they’re misogynistic. I could be wrong, but it’s probably a fair assumption.

I also think that since more and more people are coming out every day, straight people have this idea that you can catch homosexuality like a cold. It’s not the number of gay people that’s changed. It’s the number of people that are willing to tell you they’re gay, because they’re not afraid of you turning them in to the police anymore.

It is also my opinion that gay and straight are subsets of bisexuality, and bisexuals are mostly invisible, even though they’re the majority. People tend to base their identity on what kind of couple they’re in, but wouldn’t seem gay or straight if you looked at their behavior over multiple years. Even I, someone who looks like a 15-year-old boy, would never be uncomfortable identifying as bisexual, because I never want to make it seem as if only the women in my life matter. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that I am still mother-lion fiercely protective of my first boyfriend, and that feeling will never go away. We were the cutest couple in the history of the world, and that is a stone cold fact.

I identify as lesbian because I want a woman to be my life partner, because I can’t imagine spending my life with a man. I gave up on heterosexuality when I realized how I could utterly destroy a man’s heart with my inability to look into the future and assure myself I could still feel an attraction. It wasn’t because I didn’t care about them as a person. I just didn’t want us both to be stuck in an unhappy relationship, which I can see much more easily.

All of this is to say that there’s really no difference between being gay and straight, because we all go through the same stages in life. All couples talk about the same issues behind closed doors, with the exception of procreation. That is a separate and expensive process. But then everything returns to being the same after the children arrive, because all parents speak the language of Cheerios and bath time.

Love, Simon bothered me…. that coming out still rattles people’s cages. Simon doesn’t want to at first and still views it as a secret. Once Simon does come out, his parents take it well, but still cry and feel like it’s A CONVERSATION. He’s still bullied at school. The movie is tempered with a lot of love and support for him as well, but the problems I experienced from 1992-1996 are all still there…. although I didn’t have a girlfriend willing to come out, so in a lot of ways, my experience was similar and different. I was this blabbermouth activist with a girlfriend who treated me….. Ummm, badly is not quite the right word, but I did feel hidden like a cheap mistress. I put up with it because it wasn’t like anyone else was out and proud. I was it.

That slowly changed once we graduated, but by then the relationship was mostly over, anyway…. like most high school relationships…. earth to straight people.

Just like Simon, though, I was outed to my entire school at once when someone taped a flyer to my locker talking about “scary lesbians” my freshman year. I was mortified because it was the only time my ex-boyfriend and I went to the same school, and I wish I’d been given the opportunity to talk about it privately with him before the rest of the world knew. I think we maybe had one conversation in which I told him I thought I could be in love with one woman, but it wasn’t THE TALK that said this is who I am now. I don’t have one isolated crush. I was embarrassed to talk to him because we’d just broken up about six months earlier, and he was embarrassed to talk to me for completely unrelated reasons. So this boy that I loved more than life was suddenly not my friend anymore. It took a few years, but now it’s on like Donkey Kong, and he only lives about three and a half hours away.

The opportunity to come out to my parents was also taken away by my high school counselor, and I didn’t learn this until I sat down to have THE CONVERSATION with them and they told me they already knew. I can’t decide whether it was a relief or not, and it’s over 20 years later…. Additionally, this same counselor did nothing to punish the kids who bullied me or prevent it from happening again by saying, well, what did you do to provoke them? Ummm, I just exist?

I was bullied way more at HSPVA than I was at Clements, which was also a shock to my system because HSPVA is located in the most liberal part of Houston and Clements one of the most conservative. Maybe there was a lot more going on behind my back in which I just wasn’t aware, but for the most part, I was just seen as eccentric, which is definitely not an untrue statement regardless of orientation. My favorite conversation of the whole year was, do you wear that rainbow necklace because you’re gay or because you’re an idiot? Being outed at HSPVA and the homophobic kids being merciless in their hatred of me was much, much worse. I wrote about my experiences at HSPVA in Creative Writing at Clements (see last link), and my teacher said that it was too private to share with the class…. which also made me feel different, even though I wasn’t.

E-mail was a way for me to connect in the air with people who weren’t out on the ground. In recent years, it’s been a safe place to be who I am with people I truly adore, even though e-mail is the only chord that runs between us… because now, being who I am does not include sexual orientation as this wholly other thing. Straight or gay, we all just love writing letters, and that’s the thing. It’s a stranger on a train, often easier than talking to people in real life. Letters to people who don’t know the people in my life mean much because they’re not trying to be friends with my friends, so they’re solidly on my side. It creates real emotion because of that very fact. They see everything through my lens, because they’re only getting my side of the story. Therefore, they’re rooting for me even when I’m clearly wrong.

The best part is having a long-term pen pal. I’ve been writing to some of them since my college years.

I would have liked to see Simon and his pen pal remain anonymous, or maybe a different movie altogether that is only about writing to people you don’t know. There’s a ton out there on catfishing, but few pieces of media that focus on real relationships created “in the air.” I am certain that movies and books on catfishing are more popular because they’re dark. News and art tend to run that way…. whereas lots of relationships created on the Internet are deep and lasting. They’re cherished friendships precisely because they’re not on the ground and not in spite of it.

For instance, it’s great to be able to talk to someone who doesn’t know your high school bullies, but has a lot of ideas on how to get back at them.

Love,
Leslie

Thanks, Y’all

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Lately I’ve noticed that my stats and followers are going way, way up. The Board of Directors (donors that set me up years ago) is going to be pleased. Not that I’m counting on you to give them stock dividends or anything, but it’s good to be able to say to them that their contributions didn’t go to waste. No one has been more surprised than me to learn that my writing is actually worth something, that people are willing to pay when they come to a site they can read in the bathroom at work with no ads (don’t think I don’t know that last part is fo’real). I’m starting to feel more comfortable with telling you how I feel about issues as opposed to just running commentary on my life, going from personal to global. Not every entry will be about politics and the weather, but it’s nice to know it’s possible. You’ve just made a lot of my friends more comfortable, that’s for damn sure…. well, except the ones that are genuinely excited when they appear and search for their names.  ::squinting at James::

Hopefully in the running commentary department, you’ll get to hear more about “my babies,” the three new characters I’ll be adding to Stories in the coming year. The twins (boys) were born a few days ago, and the little girl whose face I already love will be born in the next few months. Rooting for her to be a not-too-early preemie so one of my best friends doesn’t have to be gigantic pregnant in the South in the dead of summer. I’ll never give up writing about my life, because this site will first and foremost be the repository where my memories go so that a hundred years from now, genealogy on me won’t be hard. Here’s everything you never wanted to know about me, kids. Sometimes it’s comforting that writing on the Internet is as permanent as a tattoo on the face, because even if WordPress doesn’t exist, Wayback Machines that archive everything on the net certainly will. I know because I can still access Clever Title Goes Here, the popular blog I impulsively tanked because I had a much thinner skin then.

It was a #dumbass attack, because I was in on the ground floor, when Heather Armstrong, Anil Dash, Wil Wheaton, Jason Kottke, Eden Kennedy, Ernie Hsuing, et al were also coming up. It felt amazing to be part of such rareified air, especially w/ Wil, because I met him at a reading at Powell’s and he knew exactly who I was, signing a copy of Just a Geek with:

Dear Leslie,

Clever Inscription Goes Here…

Love,
Wil

Writing has never been about money, but respect. I’ve never gotten rich off it, but it was nice to walk in those circles. The difference now is that my entries are generally much longer, with more to chew on. Hopefully you’ve picked up nuggets of wisdom along the way by me laying out all that I’ve done wrong AND right, rather than thinking I pimp out my friends.

Believe me when I say that they notice, all alert to the fact that they never know when an entry will pop up about them, and within limits, I will not give them the luxury of taking things down, because it’s not about them. It’s about my reaction to them, however untrue they think my statements are… there’s a reason for this. I am aware that I have huge flaws and get things wrong a lot. I change my mind on a weekly, if not daily basis. I am not waffling, it’s that every entry is full of my revelations to myself and what I think about what happens. I can only hope that when I write about my life, it is the good and the bad, so that you see a full picture instead of only amazing and horrible with no grey area. Something that was true for me on Monday is not true by Thursday. Evolution of thought happens, as does cognitive dissonance with relationships. Sometimes, disparate ends of the spectrum are both true.

For instance, I will never give up loving my friends and myself, even in those moments where I’m not altogether pleased with them/me. Just like you, I love them even when I can’t like their actions whole lot. But fortunately, not being happy about what they do in reaction to me is extremely infrequent, and I have no problem with not excusing how I behave, because I don’t often come away from a situation looking like a hero…. more often than not, I’m the antagonist and the protagonist in my own story. Through this web site, I have learned not to always be the one that throws the first match. I see up close in black and white how I could have done something differently, and I do. I look back and say to myself, well, that could have gone better.

Stories is basically a chronicle of learning to get out of my own way. I try to gather intel on how not to sabotage the good things that come my way. Also, I am a person in 3D. You don’t get to know everything, and often when people meet me in real life that have only known my writing, they comment on how different I seem (I thought you’d be taller. #dead).

The weirdest and most fulfilling is hearing people quote me to me, because it just feeds my self-esteem that there are indeed lines that stick with people.

On the flip side, it’s excruciating to meet readers who try and prove to me that they know me better than me because of the silly thoughts I write down, not allowing for the fact that my thoughts evolve. This has happened on several occasions because I put my URL in my OKCupid profile. I don’t use it for much except finding local friends, but I will never be friends with a fan who’s impressed and/or throws things I’ve written back in my face because it holds me to my past instead of allowing for the future. If they knew me well, throwing things I’ve written back in my face wouldn’t matter, because I know that they’re not trying to hurt me, just showing me old patterns of behavior and wondering if I might be repeating them. A first meeting is not that emotional place.

I will not take my URL off my profile, though, because it’s a separating the women from the girls sort of thing. If someone can’t deal with the fact that I write so publicly, the relationship won’t last for more than about five minutes.

I feel like I should buy five or 10 t-shirts with the words I’m blogging this and just wear them daily. This is because I’ve had several non-romantic relationships end over not knowing and caring a little too much when the mirror I hold up to the world points toward them. Often these are the same people that say I have great insights regarding everyone else, and those insights don’t translate to them. I can write about everyone in the world amazingly well except for them.

I get it. It’s not a big deal until it’s personal.

My heart is heavy thinking about the lives I’ve interrupted out of idiocy and not malice, often presenting as headaches or stomachaches. It’s the entire reason CTGH doesn’t exist. I got tired of this whole idea, forsaking the thousands of people who genuinely loved my writing and my excoriation of myself in the quest to make me a better person. No one should ever think that being a personal blogger is easy, because it comes with…….. consequences.

With Stories, I constantly adjust the limits to which my writing matters more than my friends, because in some ways, my on the ground relationships take precedence. In others, I have to look at what matters more, my ideas or theirs. It’s an inner landscape, and I should be allowed to have it. I often choose between being self and other-aware.

….because a lot of my inner landscape is me emotionally bleeding out to find others who’ve had similar experiences and say, I know how that feels. I have worn that scar on my skin…. because maybe someone in my real life has never had my experience, but someone in China has… and can look at my situation more objectively than I can because they’re not in it or of it.

I need people that disagree with me, call me on my bullshit… to gently argue with me to get me to see something they do.

Personal blogging is a mixed bag, just like me.

When You Have to Take a Step Back

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am so tired of 2018.

I’m tired of people saying they’re SO liberal on LGBTQIA issues and then saying things like (paraphrasing), I don’t think this woman should have mentioned her wife in class because it’s a conversation I would like to have privately with my children at home…. but I belong to a liberal open and affirming church so I can’t2018-04-08 13_27_52-tired - Google Search possibly be construed as a bigot. In 2018, why is homosexuality something that has to be explained privately as if children don’t have enough agency to understand basic family constructs on their own? They’ve probably had classmates with same-sex parents since they were in kindergarten. By the time the asshat father I paraphrased got to his kids, they were probably eye-rolling because OMG. Gay people. I have to be prepared to see them out in the world. It’s not as if when queer people move into your neighborhood that spaceships land and little burritos walk out. For the love of Christ, literally.

I’m tired of Assad and his chemical attacks and his bombing of the people he’s supposed to serve. I’m sure he doesn’t see it that way, but the best rulers lead from the back. I’m tired of wondering if our military, our diplomats, and our intel operatives and their friendlies are safe or fighting for their lives as equally hard as Syrian citizens. I’m tired of American attitudes that our people’s lives are worth more than theirs.

I’m tired of Donald Trump and his Twitter foreign and domestic policy, but I’ll bet I’m way less tired than the people trying to reign him in.

I’m tired of journalists, bloggers, and media influencers being put on a list, not knowing what the information is for, but know that nothing good can come of this. I’m tired that every single story President Trump reads is deemed fake, as if “The Fourth Estate” isn’t supposed to do their damn jobs. I’m exhausted thinking that both Helen Thomas and Molly Ivins are dead and there’s no one being as loud as they would be if they knew what was happening. I am happiest picturing Helen Thomas flipping the bird.

I am tired of black people dying for absolutely no reason, and the chutzpah cops have in shooting someone eight times in the back, because they know there’s no penalty. Not all cops are bad, but the ones that are aren’t being punished nearly enough.

I am tired of children having to ask for help with gun control and it being this huge debate, as if adults aren’t the ones in charge of keeping them safe. I am sure that for gun freedom advocates, it will take their own child being shot in math class to change those hearts and minds. It is not, however, something I would wish on them. No parent should ever have to bury a child. It is only an observation that it takes a truly earth-shattering realization to change someone vehemently entrenched in the position that all people should be able to own firearms in which the Founding Brothers never could have conceived.

I’m tired of angry rants on Facebook that come up in my feed whether I’m looking for negativity or not…. that even discourse that starts off as civil ends up being monstrous. I will engage in politics, but at the first sign of an ad hominem attack, I’m out. This is both because I don’t need that temperature in my life, and second because when I play “Let’s Be an Asshole,” I am in it to win it. I am just not interested in seeing that version of myself, because it’s egocentric and therefore, absolutely toxic. There is no exhaustion worse than being tired of listening to yourself.

I am tired of having to be this version of me, the one that has to stand up for all the little people, because the majority doesn’t understand that they don’t get to dictate to the minority what hurts and what doesn’t.

I am tired of thinking that it will be this way my entire life, because society won’t progress far enough to accept everyone by the time I die…. but, I hope so.

2045: Martians are so eloquent…… I want to touch their skin just to see what it feels like….

I wish we could all step back and take a breath, but it seems as if when we do, it’s not a matter of learning to listen to each other, but thinking about what we’re going to say next. I am certainly not immune to this…. but in a lot of ways, I can’t breathe under the best of circumstances. One of my tribe was just fired for simply showing a photograph of her family. It’s just not possible for me to contain rage over it, although I try to put a smile on my face even when I want to scream, as I often do when I wake up to news that transgendered people have been shot, most of them to death.

And some of the time, it’s by people who claim they live and let live.

I’m tired of the marijuana debate, and not because I’m all excited about smoking it. I don’t. I’m tired of violence at the border and inequality in sentencing when minorities get caught smoking and/or selling. White boys will be boys, but scary black men are going to prison for life.

I’m tired of the immigration debate, the back and forth between enjoying cheap tomatoes and the gate should have closed after I came in. You don’t want to give minimum wage and health care benefits to full-time farm workers, but you don’t want to welcome people that will do the job for peanuts, either…. surprised that after immigrants have been deported that fruits and vegetables are withering on the vine.

I’m tired of people still harping on Hillary Clinton as if she’s been elected to anything or even has a public life anymore. I mean, she’ll always be well-known, but she’s not influencing public policy. She doesn’t even have an advice column. Have a Coke™ and a smile and shut it.

I’m tired of people going bankrupt over medical bills, especially when they’re shot or otherwise injured through no fault of their own. I am sure there are people who were gunned down at the Pulse night club (and lots of schools) who now have to pay for the “privilege.” We are one of the richest nations in the world, yet most of us tied to jobs with golden handcuffs as not to lose insurance. Other countries have so much more freedom than we do because their people are allowed to move freely and take any job they want because insurance is not dictated privately or state-by-state.

Most of all, I’m tired that we claim all people are created equally, but some are just a little more equal than others.

Send Help

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

I saw a picture on Facebook that resonated with me. Something like, my diet ranges between supermodel and unsupervised child in a convenience store. I haven’t eaten very much this week, overwhelmed with writing to the point I couldn’t even finish a rough draft, like I said I would. This is not because I didn’t work hard on it. It just, in my opinion, wasn’t good enough. I needed more time to think before I put it in front of an extraordinary mind who would see through paragraphs of bullshit in a New York minute. This is because the book I’m reviewing is terrible. The story is solid, but there are so many grammatical errors and therefore, punctuation missteps that the entire novel was just a slog. All of the mistakes took me away from the story and I had to reread pages just to figure out what the sentences actually said. It’s never a good thing when I stop concentrating on what I’m reading and get lost in my own head, trying to figure out how I would have phrased something instead (as if I’m the authority on such matters….. geesh).

And then my anxiety went to 11 because I had to e-mail my editor and say, it’s not ready. When is the next best day I could send it? It’s the first time I’ve ever had to do it, which is probably the only reason I was anxious, because I wasn’t sure of her reaction. I told her that the book didn’t even have to be marked as “read” until Monday, and the review didn’t need to be turned in until the next one. I gave myself padding in case something like this happened, because I knew when I started reading it that it was going to be an uphill climb. I was afraid of turning my lack of preparedness into a kink in her day.

So, my appetite went haywire. Most of the week I ate a large bowl of oatmeal for one meal a day. Last night I made up for it by eating (almost an entire) pizza, wings, and a very large chocolate chip cookie. According to bumper sticker wisdom, every pizza is a personal pizza if you believe in yourself. I also drank a two liter of Diet Pepsi, something for which my mother would have chastised me greatly- not because of the amount, but because I was drinking that Pepsi mess, as she called it. I didn’t feel bad about it because most people drink that much wine on a Friday night… and besides, diet soda is my favorite form of caffeine because it’s not extreme highs and lows, it just keeps the bus from going under 50 (wow, that reference ages me).

The shame of it is that it wasn’t even Monterey’s or Red Rocks, just plain delivery…. but it was free. Free covers up a lot of pizza sins.

Now the only question remains is how do I not do this? I can’t decide whether it’s okay or not. Some nutrition experts would say it’s fine as long as I’m getting the calories I need over the course of the week instead of every day. Some nutritionists would beat me like a red-headed stepchild. It’s not about weight control. I am extremely healthy in that department. It’s more the binge and crash of it all, as opposed to an even keel.

Being so small is sometimes as equally body-shaming as being overweight. I know this because I have been both at different points in my life. The worst story in recent memory is that I bought six different kinds of chips at 7-Eleven, joking with the cashier that they weren’t all for that night. He said, well, your skinny ass sure needs ’em. I was definitely thinking about responding with physical violence, but, alas, I am too much of a peacenik for that sort of thing.

Setting body issues aside, the reason I took off so much weight is that I’m short. When I am heavy, I bear a strong resemblance to a teapot…. which reminds me of a great story. I met one of my readers a few years ago, and one of the first things she said to me was, I thought you’d be taller. My then-wife and I got mileage out of that one for months (years?). One of the reasons I thought it was funny is that I wanted to impress her so bad…. which reminds me of another funny story. Dana and I both love eye candy, so we both fell on the floor laughing after a few moments of talking with her when I ran into a door and clocked my nose, I thought she was so cute.

The fact that both of these things happened within a few minutes of each other is something that could only happen to me…. as well as overdoing it in the flirting department to the point where she didn’t want to talk to me anymore…. a moment when I truly wanted the earth to swallow me up, I was so embarrassed. Since we were both old and married, it didn’t occur to me that I was over the line, Smokey….. a dumbass attack of gigantic proportions. I’m sure I am not alone in having moments I’d give a limb to take back, and the entire reason I rarely (if ever) have a second cocktail as to avoid my lips being too loose, creating more of them. On the positive side, I make a cheap date. 😛

However, I am absolutely 100% certain I am not the first or last woman to lament what a shame it was she didn’t bat for our team…. just one in a long line of broken hearts all over the world. I so want to tell you what it was that flipped my shit, but I would be even more embarrassed if I somehow outed her real name by a description. Enough people know that story already, including those who didn’t think it was as funny as Dana and I did. By the grace of God, the one person I didn’t manage to offend was my real-life wife, who just laughed through my stupidity. Note to self– wear sunglasses.

I think that’s about enough reminiscence for today. I need to get back to work…. just know that I really, really don’t want to.

Send help.