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The Medium is the Message

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How do you use social media?

I started with AOL Instant Messenger and chat rooms. The reason I touch type at 90 wpm is that I had to learn to type fast enough to keep up in a chat room. I have friends in nearly every country in the world after 20+ years, and I do not take that for granted because most are in the audience right now.

I see you, Finn Bell. I see you. 😉

I don’t know if Supergrover would remember Finn or not, but I reviewed two of his books and Supergrover was my editor on them. We got an A+, because of course we did. I am the kind of person that would have LOVED working with her in high school, and she would have fucking HATED me. We’re as different as Meredith Grey and Christina Yang. Also, just FYI, Christina is coded as autistic. When you go back, you can’t unsee it.

But in terms of group projects in high school, she would have seen me as getting her to do all the work, which I am betting that EVERYONE in high school thought of her that way. It’s not that I would have been lazy. It’s that her system of organization would seem like Greek, and her perception of my lack of a system would drive her batshit insane.

Or, at least, that’s the impression that I get from her e-mails. That she’s relaxed off the clock and seemingly also wrapped too tight at others. But that could have just been annoyance at me, which is usually completely deserved, I’m not going to lie. I’m annoying. I get it.

ADHD/Autism is annoying, even to me.

I think it would surprise neurotypical people at how much neurodivergent people don’t understand about their processing disorders. We can’t define burnout, meltdown, demand avoidance, hyperactivity, etc., but like obscenity, “we know it when we see it.” You can thank SCOTUS for that line, because it was used in the Larry Flynt case.

So, with no definition beforehand, we often go into these strange behaviors with absolutely no explanation for them. Demand avoidance is the worst. Even making coffee, which should be exciting. Once my brain hears “you need to make coffee,” I can’t do it. Once I hear “you need to take a shower,” I can’t do it. I have to trick myself into all of these things, which is why I’m so grateful to live in a smaller house. I can hear everything David (he has become important enough that he gets a real name instead of a fake one) does in the morning, so I just do it, too. I go to bed around 9:00 PM, because Jack, who is also a dog, wakes up around 5:30, and then we snuggle until about six. I hear David get into the shower because of the pipes, and I go downstairs to make coffee.

That’s because one morning I heard him in the shower and started my own, then I heard him turn his off and restart when I got out. So, note to self. Have coffee and just wait. It’s so funny to me that Jack has jumped into being “my dog.” It’s kind of sweet, and David is actually used to it because this is Jack’s room. He’s been sleeping in here long before I did. So, therefore, it doesn’t bother David that Jack sleeps with me because David isn’t used to Jack sleeping with him, anyway. This is his bed. I’m just renting it. 😉

Jack was recently taken to the groomer’s, and it really brings out his Chihuahua ears. He’s mostly Jack Russell terrier, but there’s Chihuahua in there somewhere. He’s a doll baby, and the way he crawls under my covers when he’s cold is simply adorable. I keep it cold in here just due to the windows being open. We haven’t turned on the air conditioner because we don’t need it. But some days it’s colder than others. I’m just used to having the windows open and wearing more clothes because Portland, Oregon (it needs no other explanation, really. The entire city lacks air conditioning. Don’t go to an old restaurant in the summer. Jesus.

Summer here is truly a temperature swing, just like in Houston. You carry a hoodie in your backpack because outside it’s 105 and inside it’s 68 or something…. Especially in the museums when they’re not full, because the air conditioning is based on full capacity. I also want to take Bryn and Dave to the zoo, because first of all it’s free, and second of all this is the right time to go. I do not like walking around outside and then going to the reptile house and the gift shop. The air conditioner always blows my hair back (literally) because I don’t have much body fat to begin with. It’s an issue, because I’m always cold. I’m glad when Zac and I are out and about that I can hold on to him, because it makes me less likely to shiver in the grocery store (not kidding).

I have learned that a LOT of autistic people hate swings in temperature that large. For instance, I hate both indoors and outdoors. I have just as much trouble with the temperature swing from air conditioning to a hot shower….. Yet another reason why demand avoidance eats my lunch….. And why social masking is so invaluable.

Because “my dog” wakes up at 0530.

To get back to the prompt, I use social media to say all of these things, whether it’s in a private conversation or what is basically a letter to all y’all here (the difference between “y’all” and all “y’all” is the size of the audience- for other countries, ‘y’all” is a contraction of “you all” and basically a product of my Texas upbringing.).

I still type 90wpm, because I’m still trying to keep up with the chat room…. Except I’m the only one in it. I am trying to teach Jack to type, but it is going poorly.

I haven’t had long enough. Give me time.

Here’s Jack after his haircut.

The Sight

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The sight of a blank page is intimidating, even in dark mode. There’s endless possibilities, and the longer you pause to construct your first sentence, the longer you’ll procrastinate writing anything at all. You cannot say you’ll start writing once the first sentence is perfect because guess how many years you can procrastinate off that one?

Sometimes I’ll go back and add a better sentence at the top if I think of one, because the slug on Facebook is important. Sometimes I don’t. It all depends on how much of a diarist and how much of a traditional writer I want to be that day. I do not compare myself to people like Ernest Hemingway (because he’s a novelist, not because I’m that talented); rather, I see myself more as a Dominick Dunne character from Vanity Fair. His only title was “Diarist.” His job was to go and sit in the back of famous court trials and write about them. I don’t write about trials, but some of my pieces (like the ones after the spy book talks) are reminiscent because I’m just taking in the whole room at once and writing it down. I would rather sit in the back and notice things.

Not that I can’t be a ham and make people laugh. I do that all the time because it’s how I know to relate to people. I often cover up how I’m feeling by trying to make the other person spit out their water. If they’re focusing on the fact that I’m funny, they won’t notice that…….. The list where that ellipsis lives is long. However, I think of that as The Leslie Lanagan Show, and being quiet in the back is my natural personality. For instance, when I was watching Jonna I was blogging the whole time. I just didn’t have my computer in front of me. When she’d say something I wanted to use, I’d make a note of it, etc.

I didn’t want it to be perfect, because I wouldn’t be brave enough to publish if I thought I had to aim that high. I just wanted to represent her accurately, always a challenge with people who are still alive, because you are not in their heads. You can only write your impressions of what they said, not what they were thinking at the time. I did not want to write something that made her wonder if I was even in the same room.

Twice, I have written things to be proud of, and I am. I think the biggest thing is that I wrote them like I write every other blog entry, as if Jonna and Tony aren’t my favorite writers in the universe and untouchable heroes, simply other characters in my weird little life. Because of The International Spy Museum, it’s kind of true. I met Jonna after Tony died, and we struck up a bit of a friendship.

The concept that she’s another character in my weird little life and not a deity is sort of alarming, frankly. I mean, who even am I?

Why do I keep saying things like this if someone like her knows my name?

It’s an issue.

I honestly think that the more known people are, the more they appreciate being treated like characters in my weird little life. That they want to be known as themselves, so they don’t have to be “on.” For instance, I would think it was way more interesting to meet Kamala Harris when it was just me, my sister, and some good music. That’s because I don’t care about the vice president as much as I care about her, if that makes sense.

Most Democrats have the capability to become characters in my weird little life because of my sister. She’s a lobbyist, so she lives in Houston (I’ve said this before, but new readers, etc.) and works in both Austin and DC on state and federal legislation. In her previous job, she had several states in her “territory,” and Maryland was one of them. We got to go to Annapolis and ended up in a regatta. We also found a great restaurant called “tsunami.” You really want the pork belly ramen.

I tend to eschew the spotlight, thus wanting to get to know the people Lindsay knows, just not in a place where everything is top volume and overwhelming. Cocktail parties are exhausting for me if it’s a lot of people I don’t know. I go into shutdown fast, selectively mute so that I couldn’t say anything even if I wanted to, because it would come out as stuttering while my brain lags like an Apple ][ e.

My thoughts come just as fast in person as they do when I’m writing. However, when I am writing, I can handle that volume of information coming at me because I can process it through my fingers at 90wpm. My brain cannot translate information into speech at half that rate. I get intimidated quickly and just stop trying. If it’s important, they’ll e-mail me….. Or, one can hope. Sometimes it backfires because it seems like I’m not interested in talking to people, and that’s not the case. I just like to take in my surroundings and read the room before I jump into it.

I’m not shy in the slightest. I have just made mistakes by not reading a room before, especially with my line cook loud mouth, that have made me reticent to talk first. In short, I’m trying to prevent problems before they come up rather than popping off and then having regrets. And by “popping off,” I don’t just mean anger. Sometimes it’s humor that makes people think “what the fuck is wrong with you?” The neurodivergent sense of humor is kind of dark, anyway. Then add line cook, where we’re all some kind of fucked up (I promise), and the differences between us and our neurotypical peers becomes even more stark, because we’re gathering in groups. You just don’t see it, because you don’t see that the kitchen is for misfits…

As Anthony Bourdain points out, it is a tribe that will have us…… And we know it. We are not built for office work or polite company. We are built to be aliens- because we are that different and also few people are educated enough about ADHD/Autism to really be able to understand it. One of the reasons that we seem like aliens is that none of our behavior makes sense to anyone neurotypical, and it’s always on us to adapt. There is a power imbalance that is unbreakable because neurotypical people have an air of superiority over “special kids.” We know it, so rates of anxiety and depression skyrocket when you also have ADHD/Autism. Not being able to navigate the world like a normal person takes its toll whether we’re talking about our personal or professional lives.

Autistic people have trouble in interpersonal relationships, even among each other because if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. It does not present in everyone the same way, and I often think after many hours of study that the kind of ADHD that presents in women and the kind of ADHD that presents in men is so different that women are probably at the autistic end of the spectrum and men aren’t so much. Their ADHD presents as aggressively hyperactive. It’s not that women don’t display these tendencies as well, because I was married to a woman like that. I just think that the “male” presentation of ADHD is more accurate, and that the kind of ADHD that only makes you stare out the window and get lost in your own little world is more likely to be autism. Therefore, the criteria is the same for all genders. It’s not that there’s more autistic women, it’s that more autism is being caught. There hasn’t been much research on autism in women, because there are so many women that are struggling and only hear “you don’t look autistic.” I get it.

But please know that because I am autistic, I can predict with 90% accuracy whether someone else is, according to science (really). Neurotypicals can’t, because they don’t have the pattern recognition. They aren’t looking for the same things, because people tend to equate autism with severe retardation. If you are high IQ, you fall through the cracks. People understand autistic people who rock, scream, etc. They do not know what autism looks like after years and years of social masking.

Here’s my pattern recognition and how it might differ from yours:

  • Your gait
  • The number of different foods that you eat
  • How many times you have to go to a private place during a party for some sensory deprivation
  • The way you talk, because there’s a specific patois to neurodivergence- conversations are spaghetti code
  • The speed at which you talk- if Aaron Sorkin and Amy Sherman-Palladino have nothing on you, you may be autistic/ADHD 😛
  • The look in your eyes when you’re overwhelmed
  • Seeing stimming that other people wouldn’t notice- for instance, adults condemn a fidget spinner, but not knitting your eyebrows……. and it’s the same exact idea for calming yourself
  • How often it seems like “you’re just not there”
  • When you are dialed into a special interest, and what happens when you’re facing drudgery
  • How clean people’s houses are, because all neurodivergent people suck at sticking to systems and live in piles- no judgment because if you came to my house you’d see the same exact shit you do
  • Living in piles and yet knowing where everything is- because we don’t fit into your systems, we make our own
  • The way you write an e-mail, because again, a specific patois- which may or may not match your voice in person
  • The way you talk about your task list when it’s clearly overwhelming, especially when it’s already overwhelming and it’s three things.
  • How well you can multitask
  • How well you remember what you’ve heard vs. what you’ve read- most autistic people take in things through sight
  • Whether you make eye contact, and whether it looks like you’ve been trained into making eye contact as opposed to it being completely natural
  • Perceiving social masking instead of genuine comfort…. If you have to appear at a party, you’re ready to go long before anyone else (it’s a universal “you,” but it’s me)
  • These are not all the criteria, but it’s a good start. This last one is just “et al.”

I am not the expert, I just have lots of education because I made time for it. I also have the lived experience so that when the MDs and PhDs were talking, I could understand my past behavior in a completely different way. It’s interesting that there are so many tie-ins.

A lot of people who are neurodivergent are INFJ as well. In order to be “The Counselor,” there’s so much that goes into it…. Mostly introversion unless you’re in front of a crowd. My examples for this are writers and ministers. With ministers, it’s easier to connect to a thousand people than it is to go to a cocktail party. With writers, they’d rather sit in their offices til Jesus comes than do a book talk. All of the publicity is a necessary evil, not what an author really, really wants to do.

Authors who seem arrogant are generally one of two things….. Trying to fake it until they make it, or they’re not really artists. They’re trying to sell books, and they know it’s not very good….. But it doesn’t matter because people will buy it anyway. For instance, all those non-fiction books on how to get rich without really trying. It’s not pulling pain out of you as a writer, which is what makes it art.

When you write crap, you’re never going to see the real point of being an author, which is to wrestle your demons- even in fiction. For instance, Mary Shelley poured her heart and soul into “Frankenstein” to talk about her relationship with Lord Byron. The book was never intended to start the sci-fi genre, and yet it did. Sometimes I wondered whether she identified more with Frankenstein or Jenny. Either is a hot take.

Jenny has never appeared on screen, but she’s someone who was raised with Victor as a brother and then somehow weirdly engaged to him. She was accused of something she didn’t do, and went to the gallows. The reason she didn’t do it is that the monster did.

It looks different when Lord Byron is the monster.

And now all the fright is over, because the page is no longer blank. On the other hand, to quote another marvelous author…… “Tomorrow, AND tomorrow, AND tomorrow AND tomorrow…..”

The sight is relentless, and turns pain into beauty…. But that’s only by going by and seeing the other days where the pages have not ended up empty. In order to understand my future, I have to understand the past.

It gives me the insight to make “The Sight” not so intimidating.

A little.

Sigh.

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe a random encounter with a stranger that stuck out positively to you.

Apparently, if I had just waited until today, the perfect story and the perfect prompt would have lined up. I wrote about a very meaningful encounter with an American Uber driver who was from Afghanistan originally. It always hurts when you can’t make them line up if you’ve published a story that would have been good for the prompt, like, less than 24 hours ago. That being said, I cannot answer all of the prompts because I’ve already answered them. This is either one in which I still have the post in my draft folder, or I took off that day. A large percentage of my readers come from the daily prompt, because people’s answers are highlighted and moved up. That’s how my audience grows every single day.

I am growing most rapidly in India, and honestly I think that’s because WordPress is more popular in India. There’s also not really a language barrier because my Indian housemate and her daughter were both taught English in school. Plus, Indians and I are the same tribe. We’ve been supporting Windows users since we were kids. 😉 I do not know what it is about my personality that attracts Indians, or people from any other country, really. I do consciously think about the fact that I’m writing for an international audience, though.

That’s why so many of my illustrations come from the Bible and Doctor Who. Jesus and The Doctor are two of the most recognizable figures in the world and not just to Americans. I am definitely a Christian and a Whovian, but it’s more than that. Both the Bible and Doctor Who give me an endless library of images with which to explain things to people who have also read/seen these things. There are not many things I can talk about to an audience that read global.

It is also why I talk about intelligence so much. Intelligence feeds my writing because it shows that I am an American, but I am not American-centric. I believe that we are allowed to work in our best interests, but none of this over the top “America is right about everything and other countries are stupid” bullshit. We could learn so much. We just haven’t, and won’t. We’re not smart enough to be humble and admit when things aren’t working and say, “hey. France has a good idea on this. Maybe we should take a look at it.” Substitute any country in the world for France, because there can be good things found in any government right along with the bad.

In short, I want to show more people than just Americans that I hear them, that their stories do matter to me, that I am not an American imperialist but a seeker of knowledge. For instance, Argo is my favorite movie. But when I really get down to brass tacks, can I really say to myself that the US was right to do what they did? I do not want to exclude Iranians and their story by invalidating their feelings and their history. I love that the movie starts out by saying that the Iranians were angry, and the way the voiceover plays out, you hear the anguish in the struggle. I rooted for Tony and the houseguests. I did not judge whether the United States was wrong or right for putting themselves in that situation in the first place. It is too complicated for me to comprehend, because I was not an adult at the time. I was two.

I am a student of the chessboard without assuming that the United States will or should win every game.

For instance, people have thought I was crazy for saying I’d like to retire in Mexico (not likely, but an interesting thought) because of all the drug cartels. I said, “well, if I get hurt by one of the cartels, at least I won’t be in debt up to my eyeballs.” We would be happier with socialized medicine, but most people (even those on Medicare) don’t support it because they don’t understand it. Think about all the school shootings, all the public events that have been ruined by gunfire, and the tremendous amount of money those people had to pay to recover from the privilege of being shot.

People say “if you don’t like it, just leave.” If I leave, there will be no one to vote for these things. Telling me to get out is so much easier than working with me to find a solution, my problem with that mentality in its entirety, and most of what I hate about Republicans and have since the 90s.

Republicans don’t do solutions. They didn’t like The New Deal any better than they liked Obamacare. This has become a pattern. They’re fine with just sitting back and saying no to everything while problems persist- while also not coming up with anything and being angry that Democrats get credit for cool things and they don’t.

For instance, Mitt Romney could have taken on nationalized health care as easily as any Democrat, but he didn’t win the presidency, first of all, and if he’d told the Republican party he planned to overhaul national health care the way he did in Massachusetts, he never would have been the candidate in the first place. This is why they can’t have nice things.

Hillary Clinton started fighting the Republicans on health care in the 90s, when Bill took office…. and it took until Obama to get even the barest minimum. It’s not a complete overhaul, but it’s a start. I have no doubt that’s one of the reasons why Michelle Obama’s focus was on preventative care and not trying to take on legislation like the “Patient’s Bill of Rights.” She focused on diet and exercise, which is the best you can do without medical or legal intervention.

The Republicans aren’t the idea machine, but it’s not because they can’t be. It’s because they won’t. It’s their personality now. All they do is try to stop the Democrats, they don’t try to come up with ideas that will work better. They don’t collaborate with Democrats, so there’s no Republican buy-in to basically anything that represents moving forward.

We are not the same country that we were under Eisenhower, and Eisenhower would not understand the current Republican party any more than I do, because our thinking is very much the same. The GOP has gotten more and more conservative, which has made the Democrats more conservative in order to be electable. What people think of in America as “liberal” is very conservative in the rest of the world.

Very. Conservative.

That’s why it’s hard to see that Donald Trump is a fascist for some people. They do not realize that we were already so tilted to the right in the first place. That fascism wasn’t a huge leap because we’d been sliding toward it so long. It is astounding to me the number of Americans who think Trump is perfectly capable of being president from prison. I am not kidding. There have been polls.

Joe Biden isn’t as liberal as you think he is. He’s not even the most liberal person in our party. In terms of world leaders, he’s very conservative, because the other leaders in the world do have socialized medicine in their countries (the major players). It is impossible to say that conservatives in other countries are equal to our own….. A good for-instance would be comparing Republicans to Tories. When Tories get angry, they don’t try to defund the NHS and take away gay marriage.

I will say that the United States has a history of crazy in the political arena. It is only relatively recently that we stopped rolling our eyeballs at that level of insanity and electing it instead.

Now it’s time for me to go put together my desk chair, because now that I have a really comfortable one, I’m going to be in it all day long. That’s because I put my desk at the foot of my bed so that when I’m writing, I can turn my head to look out onto the greenery and the trees. So much of writing is turning your head to look at the trees.

It’s nice, because I’m normally looking at the whole forest.

The Asset

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I had one of the strangest, most moving experiences I’ve ever had with a person just because he was my Uber driver, and I was wearing a baseball cap. If you’re a fan, you already know what it says, and your heart is probably beating a little faster now that you’ve read the title.

I have told you that I am the kind of person that people get deep with, fast. I hear a lot of “I’ve never told anyone this before.” People spill information to me that they would never tell anyone else. And in fact, I’ve been sitting on this story for about a week because I had to feel it completely before I could describe it.

I was using Uber Share, so I ended up in the front seat. I got dropped off last, so we had plenty of time to talk. I asked the driver where he was from. He said, almost too quietly, “Afghanistan.” Because of his demeanor, I thought, “oh, Allah. Here we go.” I walked right into it, because when people say “Afghanistan” quietly, there’s a story there. I knew it was going to be large, and it was going to hurt. However, I did not know in advance that it wouldn’t hurt because I’ve wanted to meet someone like him for a very long time. It was a blessing from Allah for both of us, reciprocal in nature…… Like slicing over a wound until he touched my arm.

He was a cleaner in the Afghan government somewhere, and we asked him to work for us. Then, we got him out when shit hit the fan. He knew he wanted to come here, and that’s why he agreed to work for the letters stuck semi permanently on my head…… The OG have seen it coming.

C

I

A

They’re my three favorite letters in the whole world because of three people. The first and second are Jonna and Tony Mendez. The third is Anthony Bourdain, who is a double dipper because he loved spies with every fiber of his being, and he also went to Culinary Institute of America.

One of these days, one of Zac’s friends who is “recovering CIA” will cook with me….. And I will get my moment.

“Didn’t they teach you ANYTHING?”

So, this man (a boy in my eyes) weaves a tale that has me so mesmerized I don’t even notice when we arrive at my house, nor do I want to get out of the car. Not really.

He left everything just for the American dream. Happier than he was in Afghanistan, but devastatingly homesick and can’t go back. Family still there that he won’t see for years, if ever.

It’s a lot.

People who sacrifice for America aren’t just Americans.

He started to cry as he was telling me how much he missed the land, more so when he told me about his family.

The reason I didn’t want to get out of the car is that I was crying, too.

When you are voting on immigration, think of people like him and not the pictures of immigrants that politicians try to make without reading any actual data. There is no doubt that once he was recruited, he could have died for our country and not his own. That’s how badly people want to come here. It’s people who believe in us more than we believe in ourselves….. Because we’ve created a pyrite dream all over the world, where the riches promised are left to the imagination…. Harder when that reality really sets in.

I do think that ultimately it was worth it, because even he agrees. That’s what matters. And an Uber driver in the United States probably makes the same as a cleaner in Afghanistan due to the value of each currency. It is not like he had to come here and discover all of his certifications were worthless. However, I do understand the feeling of exile. I had so many rights in Oregon that I lost when I moved to Texas. That’s because gay marriage didn’t come along until 2008 federally. So, even though we were a married couple in Oregon, we weren’t in Texas. It is a different feeling when you don’t want to go back than when you can’t.

He healed more things in me than he’ll ever know, and I hope that unburdening himself made him feel lighter as well.

Now I can say quite literally that CIA has given me some of the best moments of my life- meeting the Chief of Disguise, and now the type of people we need to collect information in the first place.

We saved him, because he saved us first.

In Which I Just Wander Around, As Per My Normal

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I got a new haircut today. I’ll probably end up posting a photo because I’m not actually sure that many of you know what I look like. I was growing my hair out, and it looked great. However, it was a sensory nightmare on my ears and neck. I’ll probably not grow it out again, because I have learned absolutely the hard way that getting it shaped once in a while is not the answer. Like, not military short. You’ll see. Right now I’m writing on a coding notepad, so you’ll have to wait until I post this in the JetPack app and hope I’ve remembered. I’m not so good at the remembering, but I will certainly try.

I also ordered a few things for my room, like two prong to three prong adapters (the house is old), and some lamps because the space has great windows and lots of shade. Therefore, when I want it bright in here, I have to provide my own lights. One of them is a shelf where I can store “The Doggy Lama,” a small statue I’ve got of a dog in Buddha robes. I’ve also got a few other things I’d like to display, but I don’t know the measurements on the shelf. If it’s really small, I can display one of my autographed Henri Nouwen books. If it’s a little larger, I can display something by Team Mendez and “The Unexpected Spy” by Traci Walder. I have a ton more intelligence books on my Kindle, and I only keep hardbacks that are autographed. Everybody wants thirty bookshelves until moving day. Choose wisely. Normalize making the number of books in your Kindle library your status symbol instead of breaking your back trying to move a library. Trust me on this one. I do not have many paper books at all, and that’s by design.

I’ve been through two house fires so far, so it’s really important to me to be able to buy another electronic device and just re-download my books. I bought a copy of “Argo” on Amazon for the same reason. I also bought a copy of the miniseries “Hillary” off PBS……. right before they started offering it for free. I should also mention that this miniseries is not about Hillary Clinton. It’s about Edmund Hillary. It is very, very cool and if PBS got my money, no worries. I like them.

The last thing I bought was some drinks, because I’m trying to get out of the habit of drinking soda (and have been for years). I did get some mixins with caffeine, but also a ton without so that I don’t drink caffeine all day long. I’m kind of that way with caffeine, anyway. If I get enough sleep, I only need what my friend John calls a “maintenance dose.” For me, this is a cup of coffee or two cups of black tea with milk. Two cups of Stash English Breakfast is pushing it, but I don’t care. We all have our vices. 😉

So far, it’s really working out in my new house. Colin is endearing and so is Jack. He sleeps with me, even during the day. Like Oliver (who is a dog), he just likes to be near me when I’m writing. I’m also his official carer because I’m getting such a deep discount on rent. I figure walking a dog every day is worth $400/month. It’s very, very nice only sharing a house with one other person, because Colin is also an introvert. Therefore, I don’t hear him talking, listening to loud music, etc. It’s perfect, because neither do I. If I want to watch something, I have great headphones. Sensory deprivation has been wonderful for my mindset, because nothing was wrong with the other house, it was just louder than it is here.

I did get a fan, though. It’s not expensive, it’s just necessary because there’s no ceiling fan in this room and Zac said that if we tried to install one, it might open a hornet’s nest in terms of the ancient wiring. So, I improvised and got what is essentially a swamp cooler. It functions normally, but you can put water in it.

Zac’s housewarming gift was the beginning of a bar. There’s some Amaro, Wild Turkey, cocktail cherries, two kinds of bitters (because he knows I like them in soda water), and I think also some vermouth…. but that might just be something he left here. I can’t think of a reason to buy more alcohol than I already have, because I drink so rarely that it’s not like having the same cocktail over and over will be boring. The cocktail cherries are especially good.

In fact, I might just save it for drill weekends, because I’d like to have something on hand for Zac and I’m more interested in soda/water anyway. Oh, and Bryn and Dave will be here in May. Considering the size of the bottles Zac bought, I’ll definitely be able to give them some of whatever they want. 😉 Except the cocktail cherries. I’m betting those will go fast.

My dad’s housewarming gift was a sherpa blanket and a box of snacks which I am happily sharing with Colin. There’s all kinds of things, from Airheads and Laffy Taffy to Pirate’s Booty and Cheez-Its. That will be gone almost as quickly as the cherries.

Eventually, I’d like to get a small television to put above the layette closet. It just can’t be too big, because the wall curves up toward the ceiling. I just need a stud finder, and if I don’t say I’ve already found him, I have failed at the most standard dad joke of all time.

For those just joining us, he’s my boyfriend Zac. Zac is owner of Oliver, who is a dog. What’s really funny is that because I always say “Oliver, who is a dog” on my web site, it’s entered Zac’s lexicon as well…. whether he’s writing an e-mail or speaking.

It’s an antidote to the darker grey sides of life to be able to laugh together as hard as we do:

Leslie: I need to talk to a queer man about lighting.
Zac: I’m not that kind of queer man.
Leslie: I didn’t think you were, I just thought you might have access to one.
Zac: Well, I probably do. Besides, you’re the worst lesbian ever. You didn’t even get a U-haul.

Now do you see why it’s different when bisexual people date bisexual people instead of straight? Same cultural references. I have never been interested in a man who was also a “Friend of Dorothy,” and he’s probably even old enough to know what that means. 😉

He’s just become so dear to me in the smallest of ways, because he’s the type of person that likes to sit in his backyard with his dog and so am I. He says he’ll take me to do anything I want to do, he’s just not very good at planning. So, find a thing and we’ll go. Guess what I don’t do? Ever find a thing that’s worth leaving Oliver.

I was also very touched when Zac showed me a picture of the Easter eggs that one of his other partners had made. There were the names of all the partners on the eggs, and I was so touched she thought of me that I cried.

I’ve also cried a lot for Zac. He really opens up to me, and given what he’s been through, we don’t exactly have the lightest of conversations. It affects me, but in no universe do I want him to stop thinking of me as his safe space. I just don’t want him to think that his stories don’t matter, that I am not holding them in my heart and wishing the best for him. It’s not about trying to own him. I’ll never do that (or have the ability, as it should be). When I think of Zac, I don’t think of him like my fountain pen or any possession. I possess him the way I would say “my neighborhood” or “my coffee house.” I do not require or desire his complete and total attention. I do not need to be smother-mothered. I do not need to have a violently jealous partner. Too many people do.

I just tend to explain because there’s so much wreckage around the way society talks about polyamory…. as if it’s different than people who are in affairs having multiple partners and their partner doesn’t know it. It is different, because it’s totally open and honest.

But let’s be clear:

A lot of the people who condemn polyamory in public are devastating their husbands and wives with their affairs, possibly multiple. It doesn’t show that they care about their partner’s emotional well-being or sexual health. You will absolutely bring about devastation and think you’re better than me (or any other poly person). You’re not superior. You’re just an asshole who hopefully is only temporarily not being caught, because you are wasting your partner’s time if they’re mono.

I would never have suggested to a partner that we have an open relationship. It was easy to start an open relationship because I wasn’t seeing anyone. I never would have explored dating more than one person at a time if it meant saying to someone that I wasn’t happy with monogamy and we should change our relationship to reflect that. The relationship hardly ever survives, because the partner who didn’t say they wanted poly either feels pressure to say yes or devastated that they have to say no, because once a person decides that they’re poly, it’s not likely that they’ll ever agree to monogamy again. So, announcing that you’re poly generally destroys everything. So many people use it as a stop gap measure to try and stay together before completely giving up. In my experience, that has never worked.

And besides, I don’t have more than one partner, and I’m not looking. I just think that I’m wired for poly not because I have to date more than one person to be happy, but because it doesn’t bother me to let my partner be whomever he wants to be because why do I get to control what he does? He was up front and honest with me about what I could expect from hom, and it was completely acceptable to me….. because not only do I not care, I don’t have time to start. My life does not need to be taken over by worrying where Zac is every moment of every day.

There’s a joke in the poly community that I’ve been laughing about for like a year. It’s “polyamory is just three introverts passing around their extrovert so they can read their books in peace.” The other truism in marriages is that men ask for open relationships and the marriage falls apart when they see that they are not marketable……. but their wives are. All of the sudden things don’t look so hot when you’re the one that wanted new experiences, and so far that experience has been watching your wife come home from something fabulous while you’re always left on read.

That’s rough, buddy.

Honestly, it’s reclaiming the matriarchy, and it’s fucking beautiful. Then, you watch them try to crawl back on their knees to shut the relationship back down because they didn’t know Cindy Crawford didn’t want their dumb ass.

Then, the joke’s on them, because all of the sudden these women are having fun and they don’t want to go back to feeling unappreciated and undervalued. After all, it was their husbands who said they weren’t enough, right?

Or, the husband begs the wife to shut things down. She does. He doesn’t. It is always a double standard, like men saying their wives can only date other women because that’s not threatening. It happens so often it’s called the “one dick policy.” If your male partner does this to you, that’s not what poly even is. You love who you love…. within reason. One partner can veto another before they start dating, but for this to be healthy, it’s not saying a person is off limits, but a group like mutual friends or the other’s work colleagues, etc. Just common sense not to make your partners’ lives more difficult than it already is.

The one reason I say I’m poly even though I don’t have any other romantic partners is that Zac is friends with me on Facebook. Therefore, my friends see pictures of him with other people and it looks like he’s clearly on a date. That’s because he is, and I do not want anyone’s guff about what a shitty boyfriend Zac is because he’s running around on me. You know, if he was running around on me and we were also friends on Facebook, you’d think I would have broken up with him by now. 😉

I would be more upset if Zac watched an episode of “Slow Horses” without me. That is clearly “sleep on the couch” behavior. We’ve both been good, though. I joked with him that it was easier to wait than it was to pretend I hadn’t watched it. 😉 If you have Apple TV+, don’t sleep on it.

Speaking of Apple TV+, I also really love “For All Mankind” and “Acapulco.”

Anyway, the point is quality over quantity. When we’re together, we block out the rest of the world. We just don’t spend all day, every day together and I think that’s healthy. It’s basically the only way I haven’t gotten myself into a relationship that got too serious, too fast. It’s nice to stay in the dating stage permanently, because I’m finding out that I have less time to spend with partners than I want, anyway. This is not to say that Zac’s opinion doesn’t matter. If he wants more tme with me, it’s not like we can’t discuss it. I’m just saying that I am not on a relationship escalator and I like it. I don’t have to say things like “what are we?” Well, I do, but only in terms of prioritizing time together, not whether or not we’re solid. Not my words, but important…. a relationship elevator, not an escalator.

However, if I do meet someone else, I also want them to be wired for poly because Zac and I have been together long enough that I don’t want another person to try and control my time, either. This is because I do not want one person to be completely dependent on me for all their emotional needs and vice versa. Even if you are monogamous, you will never get everything you need from your partner only.

But don’t worry. If you don’t make time for your friends, they’ll go away. Cocooning destroys relationships, because when they end, you look up and you don’t actually have any friends you’ve talked to recently. Your entire world walks out the door and you have to rebuild your emotional support system from scratch.

It’s not that I’m against monogamy. Obviously. I’m monogamous right now. It’s that I like the fact that Zac can’t and won’t ever tell me who to date, what to do, what to think, what to wear, etc. If he doesn’t like any of these things, he doesn’t have to. If I have multiple relationships, my job to be a good hinge and recognize everyone’s discomfort, because in those instances, it’s 100% because I wasn’t a good communicator.

When you start learning about polyamory, you start learning about communication. Being partners with multiple people isn’t for sissies. In order to open up to multiple people, you have to be stronger at communication than you do when you’re monogamous. You have to be proactive so that problems don’t come up in the future. Because you’re learning about communication, you improve all your relationships overall. Your friends & family reap the benefits of you learning how to be open, because if you don’t, you’re going to wreck more relationships than just the one.

I would also never interrupt a date with one partner to go and rescue another unless it was an emergency, and even then we both would rush in, because I’m not dropping you at home if it’s an emergency. None of Zac’s partners would have a problem with this, and I need it to be the same way with mine. I do not need perfect harmony. I need basic respect and kindness. Even now, it’s not perfect. We all have our limits and Zac manages them well. However, because everyone knows when Zac is available to them, it’s not like there’s any bad blood. We’re just not mutual friends. We do get together for all call parties at Zac’s house, but laughitng together at a party a few times a year does not a mutual friend make.

You also don’t stop feeling jealous. It’s just that now, it’s your responsibility to find out why you’re jealous and be able to pinpoint what would fix it. If you can’t articulate those things, boundaries are unclear and everything falls like a house of cards. We have so many checks and balances, though, because Zac’s house is neutral ground. None of his partners live with him, which solves a lot in and of itself.

There’s a lot of checking the story you’re telling yourself and making sure it lines up with what your partner’s story is as well. Silence is every bit as detrimental as fighting, because if you don’t know what someone is thinking, you’re probably thinking the worst. And, the longer the silence goes on, the more the stories you’re telling yourselves differ.

I love that Zac is part of my story now, and that he’s the type of partner that doesn’t ask for the whole book.

Here’s another bright spot. I remembered the picture.

China

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What place in the world do you never want to visit? Why?

I’m really sorry, China. I just don’t want to control my mouth to that degree. I like the freedom to say what I want, and I cannot fathom a world in which I wouldn’t say something that pissed off the Chinese government. I am not saying that it is not beautiful, or that the people aren’t wonderful. I am saying that I have a habit of writing checks with my mouth that my ass can’t cash now, so why would I invite China to be able to imprison me?

It’s not that I don’t want to see the land, meet the people, eat the food, and experience the culture. There is nothing wrong with China in terms of any of these things. I do not ever want to put myself in the position of having to answer to a totalitarian government. I am dangerous when I am interested in international affairs, anyway. I talk so much shit about China that if there is a three letter agency watching me through my microwave, I should be fucking grateful. If China is in the room, I want my people in there, too. However, I draw the line at talking smack about China on my web site and then having to ask my government to come rescue my dumb ass, because how in the world did I not know my blog could get me in trouble? Come on, now.

This was driven home to me when one of my favorite YouTubers was ridden out of China on a rail. The next step was jail. He escaped to Hong Kong, then to the US. It was a nightmare. Just because I make videos in people’s minds doesn’t make me different from him. It makes me easy to document, because the document is right here. They could literally put me in jail with copy and paste.

I am not letting them CTRL-C and CTRL-V my life. And if there was no NSA, there would not be Americans also monitoring my criticism of them to make sure it falls under the first Amendment. I can be protected from here. I cannot be protected outside the United States if I have broken a law here, but I would certainly be rescued if I broke a law in China. That’s why CIA is allowed to do what they do. We don’t punish them for breaking laws in other countries. We punish them for breaking laws in ours. If you’re a CIA operative breaking American laws, you will be tried. The FBI will celebrate their victory with relish. There’s too much fire in the belly after people like Aldrich Aames and Robert Hanssen. They will go Chuck Norris on you in a heartbeat. Good luck. God bless.

Therefore, the same rule applies to Americans who break other countries laws without breaking any of ours. For instance, the kids who wandered over the border into North Korea. Clinton got them out through diplomacy, but there are many other stories that don’t make the news because in order to get them out of the country, there has to be an ex-fil and talking about it in the press would give the enemy too much information for the operation to be a success.

CIA gets a bad rap, and I am not here to tell you it is undeserved. But, I am here to tell you that if you’re fucked overseas, they’re the only friends you’ve got. Get on board or stay where you are. Your choice.

I bet in those situations, it’s pretty fucking easy, don’t you think?

So, if worse turned to worst, I’d be grateful. But, I feel like I should just be smart, and save the government taxpayer dollars and legwork.

The Importance of Being Earnest

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, I started an entry about the whole move. I didn’t finish it before midnight, so I was going to finish today. Then, I decided I just wanted to start fresh this morning. I got an amazing night’s sleep, something I desperately needed. I will also be taking a bath in eucalyptus at some point. I’m not miserable, I’m just not young enough not to hurt after a move.

Although technically, I did all the packing. Zac moved. By the time he got to my house, I was completely toast because I’d stayed up all night trying to get everything ready. By the time Zac arrived, all we had to do was throw the totes in the back of the car. However, they were a bit too heavy for me while I was exhausted. So, Zac wins the award for being such a thoughtful person and taking over so I didn’t have to bust ass again.

What happened is that I was trying to fold my futon into a couch, and the mattress was upside down and backwards to be able to do that. There’s a special hinging system in the mattress so that one part of it has to be on the seat panel. When I flipped it over to the mattress side, I wrestled it all by myself and didn’t see the “this side down” tag to avoid this problem. So, on Friday night I turned my legs and arms black and blue trying to make more space in the room for sweeping, etc.

The futon and I fought. It’s not easy to admit when you lose to an inanimate object. However, in the end, I did get it done. It was a victory after all the sweat and bruises. So, again, I was glad that Zac could see I was wrecked from lack of sleep and exertion. I honestly believe that the pain is not all due to age. I really fucked myself up, but what other choice to you have in those moments? Where the only answer is “figure it out,” and the problem brings you to tears. So you cry and do it, anyway.

When we were finished with moving, we decided to watch Slow Horses and order pizza. Then, after we’d eaten, Zac pulled out a small box of cannoli, a delightful surprise. He’s been my rock through all of this, and I know for certain that if he’d had the bandwidth, I wouldn’t have been packing alone, either. That’s because it’s a huge give and take. We both get demand avoidance, meltdown, and need to call each other because neurodivergence, what the fuck?

It is a misnomer that autistic people know exponentially more about our disorders than neurotypical people, because we have the lived experience. This ain’t necessarily so, because data is not lived experience. We are as confused and mystified by our behavior as anyone else around us. That’s because I’m self aware enough to know when I’ve hit a wall, leaving my my mind divided in half, doing odd things and trying to figure out why.

Is it that I’m an INFJ and naturally introverted? Is it meltdown, burnout, demand avoidance, anxiety, depression, hypomania, CPTSD, etc.? Those are a lot of heuristics to consider, so managing myself in terms of patient care doesn’t always go so well.

As I was telling Bryn the other day, “when you treat yourself as if you’re the best doctor you’ve got, you probably need a second opinion.”

I need more psychological support than I’m getting, because I need an autism specialist- both for working out problems and the process of creating values and visions.

I am always about “values and visioning,” because that’s language from the church in terms of creating a mission statement. It works personally as well as it does in groups. Therapists aren’t just there to help you overcome your problems. They also help you when you’re stuck career-wise and don’t know where to go from here. Mostly, that involves talking to yourself until you figure out that you have always had your own answers, you just need to be guided to them.

If it helps, I think of my monologue here as therapy, so maybe you can think of your therapist as your raw blog entries. You’re just saying them out loud to the one person who actually knows what to do to help you emotionally suit up for a healthier future.

“Half this game is 90% mental.” -Yogi Berra

In terms of finding that for myself, what I have learned is that being on my own for so long has made it where the bare minimum effort on Zac’s part looks enormous to me. Just the fact that he does things like pick up income due to our income disparity is huge. This is because it says “I want to do this thing with you and I enjoy your company so much that I would rather pay for you to be there with me than worry you’re not going to be able to swing it on your own.” It doesn’t feel like chivalry, but…. not going to lie…… yes, it does. He just only sometimes feels that way. Most of the time, it’s just that he recognizes his own white male privilege. It’s one of the best conversations I’ve ever had in my life, because it was so comforting to see that he wants his only goal in life to make his world better. This doesn’t just extend to me. It extends globally.

Zac’s small kindnesses are so endearing, because it’s not about all the chivalry. It’s remembering things I say and respecting my words as equal to his own. I have not known many men like this, because most of the men I’ve known who date women think their opinion is superior because they’re the provider (generally). When women become the provider, men often get jealous enough to derail their careers. I remember one instance on reddit in which a woman was making bank in her field because it was so incredibly niche and had a lot of sensitive information. He interviewed for a job at one of her competitors and she had to divorce him immediately because he forced her hand. It looked too bad in her niche field to even date a competitor, and this woman had been married a long time. She told him all of this before the interview, and he did it anyway.

I know intimately that I will never have any of those issues.

I have also learned, and I think I’ve written about this before at some point, that it surprised me how little difference there is between dating a man and a woman when both parties are queer. Dating a straight person generally leads to keeping them insecure and anxious that you’re going to leave them for the same sex. There’s still such a cultural stigma on homosexuality that two things are running concurrently. Jealousy and homophobia are best friends when you want the worst possible outcome. On the flip side, gay people think of you dating the opposite sex as betrayal. Frankly, I understand and respect this outlook, because it seems like we’re watching you embrace the thing that oppresses us. There is also no world in which gay people don’t treat bi people like they’re “not queer enough.”

I will give you an example. I surf dating apps just to see who’s out there, and I am astounded by the number of lesbians who have on their profiles “no men, no bisexuals.” This basically comes across to me as “Irish need not apply.” No one ever thinks of bisexual couples who are in the system have the best ability to change it. Since we’re more accepted, we have a bigger platform. I think it’s shitty to use heterosexuality as a shield, but I don’t think it’s wrong for me to date men, or treat other women like trash because they have. It’s really hard for me, because that attitude is friendly fire. I need gay people to hear that in 7.1 Surround Sound, and the bisexual community is over it a “fuck you” amount. Straight people who have this constant insecurity that we’re going to leave them for gay people, gay people have this constant insecurity that we’re going to leave them for the enemy.

🎶🎶 One of these things is not like the other.……… 🎶🎶

I get it. I really do. I don’t have to agree with you, because that’s not my problem to solve for you. Bisexuality has nothing to do with cheating. Cheating is cheating. Bisexuality has nothing to do with polyamory. You’re either wired for multiple partners or you aren’t. They are two separate mindsets/skills. Therefore, that does not have anything to do with sexual orientation, like we’ll die if we don’t have both.

All bisexual people are saying is that their partner’s equipment is a non-issue, it’s not a barrier to a romantic relationship. They are NOT saying “I’m incapable of marriage.” Whether they are or they aren’t is a separate conclusion from attraction.

However, with Zac I don’t feel invisible, and that’s what happens to bisexual people in heterosexual relationships. We both look queer as a three dollar bill, so we don’t exactly exude heterosexual privilege when we’re out and about. I realized that dating a bisexual man was not losing my connection to the queer community with my partner. That it’s important to share whether you’re in a heterosexual relationship or not, because we’re on equal footing when it comes to being oppressed by the system. It’s amazing how often queer cancels out white in a racist theocracy, theocracy being the key word here.

I am tired of the Bible being confused with the Constitution. It’s gone on long enough. I’m tired of atheist hate of Christians because we deserve their hate so much….. In America, Christ’s actual messages have been mangled into a religion he could not support.

If you dare to judge me, you are a Roman, not a Jew. Period.

That’s because Jesus was on the side of the oppressed. American Christianity would make him vomit. It’s tinged with racism because slave masters would use Bible verses to keep their slaves in line and justify their monstrous behavior………..

Not counting on the fact that the slaves would empathize more with the minority who was beaten and killed just like them. That it was religion that gave them enough courage to stand up and fight for freedom. If you are straight, white, male, and cisgender, you don’t see with striking clarity the horror of the situation……….

That Jesus was under the exact same constraints that Americans are now. It’s just that the conservatives weren’t Republicans and Democrats, but Pharisees and Sadducees. Same software, different case. Therefore, white supremacists do not see the irony in being the people who oppress others in his name, repeating the cycle for 2,000 years. Conservative evangelical faith does not see the liberation in the story….. sometimes through thoughtlessness, sometimes through malice. The thoughtlessness is because people who aren’t oppressed don’t need liberation theology. They don’t need to feel inspiration from the fact that a minority was murdered by the state.

Not only that, he wasn’t murdered for actions, he was murdered for ideas. He was murdered by a government who didn’t want the people to think.

“It’s people like you what cause unrest.”

So, when you think about it that way, if you are a Christian policeman with racist beliefs, you’re not actually being a Christian. You’re being a Roman.

You’re not the people for whom your sins were forgiven lightly. That’s because I’m betting it’s easier to forgive the whole world as an abstract concept than it is to forgive the people who are actively in the process of murdering you when you did it.

You are as worthy of redemption as everyone else, because grace and mercy are free of charge. But the more you exclude people, the more you separate yourself from the Jew you claim to adore while mangling his words into everything he didn’t say.

Where in the Bible do you find that Jesus would have accepted the behavior of people like Donald Trump? That is the real mystery of your faith, because your blinders keep you from seeing it. Your words and Jesus’s actions don’t line up, so how dare you think writing your own headcanon and retconning everything to support the crazy idea that Jesus would support war and greed, things like that is everything wrong with white church.

You don’t see the hypocrisy. You don’t see the discomfort you create, even in your regular followers because your services are so fear-based. Why do people have to say they’re a “recovering Christian” at all? Do you think that Jesus would ever want people to go through recovering from trauma given to them in his name?

It is the weirdest transformation in history.

However, a lie can get around the world six times before truth can put on pants.

I am trying to find the truth in it all….. wading through the bullshit of exclusionary Christianity that harms people all over the world and trying to decide what’s worth keeping. My biggest gripe is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so when most Americans think of Christians, they think of Evangelicals. My reputation proceeds me in the absolute worst of ways.

This is problematic because atheists think that all Christians go to some sort of fucked up Bible college and are fed all these bullshit ideas. They don’t think of Harvard, Yale, or Oxford Divinity School first. To them, The Archbishop of Canterbury and Joel Osteen have the same amount of education.

I know most of you know this, but for the record, I’m going to bet the Archbishop has more.

Most people don’t know this, but the former Archbishop, Rowan Williams, was really good friends with Christopher Hitchens. They have some marvelous debates on YouTube if you’re interested.

I think this is a good point because people like Williams are being left out of the conversation. That Christians are intelligent, but there is a war between people who interpret the Bible and people who take it literally. Unfortunately, the people who take it literally, as if the pen was actually in God’s hand, have entwined themselves with the Republican Party and are the loudest idiots in the room.

When people think of Christians, their brains don’t jump to Martin Luther King Jr. and Raphael Warnock. They don’t think of William Barber and Bernice King.

They don’t see liberation theology because they don’t need it.

Zac is an atheist, and he’s the kindest Christian I ever met in terms of showing actual Christlike behavior.

If an Atheist is a better Christian than you, that’s the point at which you need to decide which God you actually serve. Are you tapping into the universe, or trying to control it?

Are you a believer, or are you Pilate, washing your hands of the whole thing because hey.

He’s just a Jew.

And that is the importance of being earnest with ourselves about the Republican Party. We need to decide when we’re going to stop following the Sanhedrin and state that murdered him, or admit it’s been a good run..

The choice is yours.

One More Sleep

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s my last night in this room, as Zac is coming over tomorrow after drill to help me move my stuff, and if we don’t have time to do it all, we’ll finish it up Sunday after 5:00. I don’t think it will take very long, but that depends on our energy levels and the stairs at both places. I’m lucky in that Zac is very handy, so he has tools already that would be helpful and yet, I wouldn’t have thought of them on my own, like a drill and a hand truck, etc.

So, as I close out this chapter in my life, I have a million thoughts in my head, pictures going by too fast to get one to stick. The people who’ve lived here with me, the things that have happened, etc. It’s a lot. But my entire DC story minus the 18 months I lived here in my early 20s has been created in this one house, mostly this one room.

I hope I’m as comfortable at the new house as I have been here, and I’m grateful that we’ve been able to cohabit so long without incident. It is one of the longest stretches at an address I’ve ever had.

Everything is, big picture, going to be the same. When you get into the details, my route around town changes. I “have a dog now,” because the house I live in now has five dogs, but none of them live on my side of the house. I don’t see them for months at a time, but I’ll hear them.

Jack will have free run of the house, and may sleep with me some nights. I can walk him whenever I wish. I think it will be good for me, because I always notice I’m calmer when I’m writing and Oliver, who is a dog, is in the room. His presence is everything, so I hope Jack and I will have the same vibe.

I need to get to work, but I thought it was too important a date to go without writing just because I was busy with other things. I am very, very busy with other things and absolutely could not afford to tell you all this, but I thought, “will it matter in five years if you didn’t blog today?” That’s the moment I stopped. This is a milestone.

Nine years is a long time.

When I landed at DCA, it was midday. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to go right home or to Kramerbooks, but ultimately tiredness won out; I took the Metro to Silver Spring, where Hayat picked me up.

Hayat drove me to BWI when Lindsay called and said that my mother had died and I needed to come home.

Hayat gave me a Lebanese jewelry box that is one of my favorite things, because I designed my room around the color scheme of the tiling. The curtains are teal, and are thick enough to use as blackout. I never have to worry about working a graveyard shift ever again, because she said I could take them as well. 😉 And on that note, I have to go- for some reason my Android has decided it does not like the “Enter” key today, so I cannot make new paragraphs. I’m not sure my brain is capable of new paragraphs, either.

Black and Tan

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

As I’ve said incessantly, Zac took me to see Jason Moran. I didn’t have time to write until now, so you are seeing my responses in real time, because my thoughts were occupied with other things.

Everything on the program was by Duke Ellington and/or Billy Strayhorn.

Jason was the person I’ve known since I was 14. Too hip for the room in some places and instantly accessible in others. He is an artist that pushes me to the wall, and always has, because I love his dissonance. When I hear Jason, I hear Langston Hughes in my head at all times, the “I, Too, Sing America” of it all. The tension in America is apparent, and expressing it in music the way Jason does is transcendent. Sometimes, his playing is romantic and sensual. Sometimes, it’s Charles Ives’ America. And that’s all in one chart. No piece he played elicited one emotion. It elicited all of them.

The first thing I noticed is that the tickets Zac got for us were the place I usually sat in the Denney Theater to watch him. So, even the angle of his face was the same. In the dark, it was hard to keep straight who was actually at the piano, because my mind was constantly switching back and forth from both of us as teenagers and both of us in our late 40s. The only difference is that in concert when he was a kid, Jason seemed more shy/introverted than he does now.

If he was playing with his combo, he rarely said a word. His music stood for itself……. and far apart from the rest of us. Jason is one of the few people I met at HSPVA that I considered a prodigy even then, though it has grown stronger in retrospect. That’s because he understood music theory to a level that seemed unprecedented for a kid his age.

I would say that he hasn’t grown as an artist so much as he has refined his technique. His ideas have always been extraordinarily forward-thinking. For instance, I’ve always found it funny that he quotes Björk as an influence. 😉

The great “I Too, Sing America” moment for me was a chart called “Black & Tan.” It was a conversation between the bass and the treble, a terrible storm. In my own mind, I was trying to figure out the war Ellington and Strayhorn were trying to portray. I feel guilty that I am describing a concept that should be black voices first, but I also can’t describe jazz without describing the black experience because not only is life pain, so is music.

In my head, I wondered if it was a tribal war in Arica, a race-based war in the United States, or colorism. I wonder if it was really about a thunderstorm. Also, Jason didn’t stop between every piece, so I’m sorry if I’ve put the wrong name on the right storm. It was incredible. The anger was so deep and frightening at one point I thought he was playing directly on the strings. Even if it was a literal storm, and not lashing out at the white establishment, those are the feelings that came up for me because…..

I, Too, Sing America. I am raging at the same system because my queerness, physical disability, and neurodiversity make me a minority, too. I have not found that white people like any minority, really, because different is scary. Different is the bass line raging, because it’s always on the minority to change…. fit in. I think the queer community lost white cishet people in some respects with nonbinary, because people naturally put things in boxes and recognize things by pattern.

“How do you know she is a man?”

“SHE LOOKS LIKE ONE!”

Joke’s on them because it’s not my job to be their “witch.” It’s not my job to be a scapegoat for anything. “Riots are the language of the unheard” (MLK, Jr.), but no riot has ever gotten big enough to change white behavior. Wasn’t it Will Smith who said, “racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed?” It’s the same with homophobia and transphobia. Those slights haven’t ever stopped happening because Karen’s screaming on YouTube again.

When you want to go back to “the good old days,” remember that all of us do not view history kindly. In the 50s and 60s, the idealistic Pleasantville that never existed excepted in cishet white minds:

  • Women had no access to legal, safe abortions. Women didn’t have their own money to escape a bad situation because they didn’t have credit cards or bank accounts in their own names before 1974.
  • Gay men were routinely arrested for “homosexual activity,” and not even quietly. If you were arrested for the crime of sodomy, the police would print your name in the newspaper so that by the time you got out of jail, your life was absolutely ruined.
    • It was not as bad for lesbians, because men aren’t threatened by them….. again, we had no agency and sex between women was not real. So, we were definitely punished, but not in the same ways. Until 1974, we were forced into marriage, sometimes violently, but in reality there was no other choice. If we wanted to be monogamous and dedicated to each other, we couldn’t have bank accounts or credit cards. We are forced into sex violently because so many men are threatened by us. Either we need to be taken down a peg because we shouldn’t be so confident, or they’re convinced that it’s not men. It’s the other men……. you would be frightened at the total if I had a nickel for every man who has ever told me that I’d change my mind if I had his dick in particular. This is the standard joke that men make with lesbians when they don’t know what else to say……. but sometimes those words are extremely sinister. Straight women aren’t the only ones that have to walk with their car keys in their knuckles. Men are threatened by women who aren’t dependent on them, full stop. If I am also dating women, that means I could get a woman you didn’t, and that is unacceptable.
  • Trans women, when they were allowed to exist at all, were limited to sex work a LOT of the time. It’s how you had to support yourself, not how you wanted your life to be.
  • We did not have words or descriptions of what nonbinary might be, as language hadn’t evolved that far. But, because there is such a focus on gender roles in America, lots of parents were and still are terrible because they start getting wigged at child’s play. In that day and age, the punishment for playing with dolls while male and playing war while female was steep. There was not enough research on homosexuality to see that it was naturally occurring, so the moment their son wanted an EZ Bake or their daughter wanted to play baseball (NOT softball), it was game on. We are going to reprogram the shit out of you.
  • Many people think that Civil War monuments in the South were put up at the time. They weren’t. Most, if not all remnants of the Confederacy were put up during Jim Crow, to do exactly what white people have insisted they don’t do ever since………. reinforce a black person’s place. The white savior trope speaks to a lot of people, but it’s a type of gaslighting to change history and look back on Jim Crow as a time when blacks were struggling and there were so many white people that helped along the way……. making the white savior the hero of the movie and not about the black people who are living that experience, painfully, every day.

I have never walked a mile in a black or trans person’s shoes, but I can tell where they pinch.

My genderqueerness gets me stares in the women’s bathroom all the time because conservatives women have been taught to fear trans women in the bathroom……… and of course, they wouldn’t blink twice at a trans man, but I’m nonbinary so they have no idea which direction I’m going, because their gut reaction is to pick one.

But, sometimes, just like symbolism an author never meant, rain is just rain.

“My name is Gilbert.”

(You’re welcome, three people who will get that joke. My dad will fall on the floor if he remembers what I’m talking about………………… it’s a major throwback.)

Black and Tan created this essay for me, as Jason has done for me for many years. As I told him last year, I wrote to “Ten” for a year. And then Matt Mullenweg (another PVA grad) was on Tim Ferris and he said that he listens to one track over and over so that he can concentrate on coding instead of on music (he was a sax player).

The Moran track I use is “RFK in the Land of Apartheid.” It”s the bass line that moves my fingers. I’ll put a video at the end, because I’m not sure whether the concert was recorded or not.

Go into it with an open mind. Some of you may have never heard music like this before. If you are any kind of artist, when you listen close your eyes for a moment and drown everything else out. Some pieces take more attention to understand than others.

Like whether Black & Tan was a race war or a rain storm.

I would also be remiss not to mention “Melancholia,” which he dedicated to his mother, who passed…. and “all your mothers.” No one could have played a piece for me like that who hadn’t lost a parent. There’s too much pain, too much turmoil, too many things left unsaid, too many dreams dashed for the future. One of the reasons it took me so long to open up to a relationship with a romantic partner is feeling like it wasn’t worth it if my mother didn’t get to meet them.

She would have loved Zac, and I could tell you exactly why and how, but I’d have to check with him to see if I can use that conversation or not. I do know that she would be very impressed with his dreams for the future, and because of it, his dreams made me take a breath to keep tears from falling.

I felt my mother the whole evening, looking down. Jason, I’m sorry, but she thought Alejandro Vela hung the moon, for all I tried to convince her. This is because my mother was also a pianist, and she was sitting at an angle where she could see Vela’s hands.

The next Wednesday, she was in charge of the devotional after choir, and she told the story of coming with me to see Vela and that she’d always had trouble with “Rhapsody in Blue,” and that the God moment was seeing him move hand over hand….. or something like that. I’ve slept since then.

I guess you had to be there.

So, I teased her that I thought Jason could probably play Gershwin in his sleep….. she could have Alejandro all to herself.

I was just impressed that me and my weird little group of friends actually impressed her. 😉 I wasn’t in the Wind Ensemble that did Rhapsody, but I’m not worried. I’ve played some of the greatest jazz charts ever written, and soloed on a few.

Last night, I got to remember who that kid was, and in retrospect, they were pretty great…………….

Thanks in large part to all the Jason Moran concerts I’ve seen over the last 32 years. To watch an artist grow is one of the most pleasurable things on earth. Jason is never afraid to try anything- and if I see which direction he’s going, I’ll go with him.

JaMo, thank you for everything……. from the minor seconds all the way to C major.

The Next Logical Conclusion

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Now that I know I’m autistic, what do I do?

It’s quite daunting having to reparent yourself with the skills needed to deal with an autistic kid, only you’re 46. It takes so much energy to be you and parent you at the same time, and I’m sure this resonates with a lot of people. The best part of being an adult is that there’s no one to tell you to go to sleep. The worst part of being an adult is there’s no one to tell you to go to sleep.

There’s no one to tell you to pack your lunch. And there sure isn’t someone to tell you to take a shower. Because parenting yourself is something that “you should already know how to do by now,” and is squarely in the wheelhouse of demand avoidance and a desperate need to fake themselves out of it with social masking. It seems unhealthy and codependent, but having someone to social mask is literally combatting meltdown and burnout. It keeps our routines stable so that we don’t spin out mentally/behaviorally. I believe that exactly all of my problems with Supergrover stemmed from meltdown and burnout, it’s just at the time, I didn’t know how to voice that. I could not tell her “this is too much, I’m overwhelmed.” I would not back down. Meanwhile, my disability is working overtime to prove that I can help her, support her, all that. She has different friendship needs than most people, and I was trying hard to show that I knew why and respected it. In fact, most things she thought of as “crazy” were about respect, but you can’t help a little old lady across the street if she doesn’t want to go. She’ll bang her purse on your head.

There’s already a perfect end to her story in my head, and it’s more than I would ever hope for in this lifetime, but not impossible. It’s a phone call. She and Michael are telling me that we have an important event to attend. Or maybe it’s just the two of us- who knows whether said event would be as important to him as it is to us. That’s because the event in question would be honoring someone who thinks the world of both of us.

But right now, I need to disconnect. I remembered that I had some tags on Supergrover’s public page, and I untagged myself so that they weren’t public anymore- not even I can see them. I’m not worried though, because our relationship has never lived on Facebook. It’s been in the quiet moments of the night, where a blank page starts off as intimidating, and then feels like a blanket.

As I’ve said, I write about Supergrover to calm myself. Echologia to bring me down when I feel shortness of breath, heart, and brain race. That’s why everything swirling around me is creating shutdown in terms of not knowing where to start. I defeated it last night, but I’m not sure I have the energy to do as much today as I did yesterday. I’m what you would call “indoorsy,” so when I suddenly have to exert as much will and energy as possible when I don’t have it, the wind gets knocked out of me pretty fast. Going to the gym would make my body stronger, but it would not stop me from getting lost in my own little world and falling off the elliptical. I have done it thrice.

With my kind of autism, I take most information in through sight. I can observe and note human behavior, but my processing differences make it feel like a double standard. How do I know how other people act when I am nothing like them? Learning to social mask. “I think I can remember how to act like someone else I know.” I do not pick up the morals in a situation if they are opposite to my finely tuned sense of justice. I pick up how someone else has dealt with a situation. And because I’m imitating someone else, it feels like the only time I use my real voice is here.

But the reason you can’t claim you know me based on my writing is that you cannot see my third dimension, all the thoughts that don’t end up here. There’s a lot more I can’t say than I can, and the things I can’t say are harder than the things I can, and with the little knowledge I do have, that makes me cry and shake enough.

It’s not because I’m a naturally depressed person. It’s that digging down into yourself and looking at your worst flaws is the worst job on earth. I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t constantly rewarding. More people identify with my writing than don’t, and for the people who don’t identify with it, or have a problem with something I’ve said, they’re free to bring it up with me…….. or not. But I already know that if you’re covering up a feeling, you’re going to treat me differently and have the audacity to say my perception isn’t real.

For instance, I could never tell where I stood with Supergrover because sometimes she was like a loving aunt/big sister character in my life, and at others, she said really hurtful things like “you only know random factoids about my life.” I knew this was bullshit, just a dart.

I know this because all of the sudden, when it was my story to tell, did she start having a problem with the things she has told me. So, which is it? Am I the person that only knows random factoids about your life and you aren’t worried about anything I’ve told you, or is that the brave face you put on when you know I’m entitled to my own stories? I know this because she told me I was entitled to all of my feelings, while also raging that I’d let go of information she would have liked to keep quiet and it was incredibly hurtful.

I don’t just know random factoids about her life, because if that were true, she wouldn’t spend time analyzing my work to make sure she’s still unidentified. She’s said many times that her story ceased to be mine and long time ago, so I thought nothing of writing about our mutual trauma because it is indeed what handfasted us. I couldn’t explain anything without explaining it first. Otherwise, I just look like a lovesick teenager chasing after someone who doesn’t want me. This is not correct, and it never will be. We’ve both loved each other to the best of our ability, and love isn’t enough when you both need to stop treating each other as if they’re trying to trying to fight you all the time.

It was gaslighting, and a lot of it, but not because she was a narcissist. She was afraid, and there’s a big difference. The gaslighting was pretending for years that we were fine.

Morgan Freeman: They were not, in fact, fine.

If I take everything literally, that you have no worries about what you’ve told me and you haven’t, that your stories aren’t mine anymore, etc., do I actually deserve her ire in this case?

It would be helpful to know so many things. How many people know she’s Supergrover, for one. How much detail do I need to hide because more people than just me know that identity? Who is my audience that directly affects you? Why are you waffling on whether I am a straight up problem or not? If I’ve caused someone pain, I want to know the specifics. Otherwise, I will spiral out for days and days trying to figure out what it is that I’ve said that they’re mad about.

She comes by it honestly, because for us to really engage, we’d need some time to ourselves, even if it was asynchronous. She doesn’t often have time to write letters that are anywhere near the length of mine, so I think that she thinks I always expect that of her, too. I don’t. But if I’ve had a specific need go unaddressed for years, I only want the problem to be resolved, not assurance that you have read every single thing I’ve ever written. Ignore the rest, it’s all chatter. But it really got to me when she said that I was so demanding of her time and ability to give of herself, when I have been saying for 10 years that I do not deserve her and I will take what I can get.

Anything above that is off limits, but when you don’t give me any limits, I’m going to dream that way. I wasn’t “being demanding,” I was dreaming of a time where she naturally had more bandwidth- retirement. But, you’re going to think that I’m demanding of your time if you never tell me what your boundaries are. She said that three words were all she could manage until I called her on her bullshit for months. That she had to stop not giving me information and blaming me for what writing came out of it.

A lot of this is wrong and misguided because we didn’t have any boundaries. A lot of this is wrong and misguided because I was using one concept for another. A lot of this is wrong and misguided because I said I could read facial expressions and body language. But not when I constantly get “all is well, you’re worried about nothing……..” right up until she’s so angry that being apart is better than being together.

I don’t think I was wrong for bringing up a problem so we could solve it. I did think it was a problem that I couldn’t make heads or tails of her feelings until she said enough words that I knew my anxiety was for naught. But how could I know that without any information at all? It was so confusing, and why I resigned the game. I was tired of constantly being confused. For instance, “you have absolutely NO idea what I’m dealing with,” scaring me away from writing at all…… and “I have had the choice, countless times, to stop what I was doing and didn’t.” Telling me you’re that busy while also running from me is unacceptable. It’s a coverup, and very conditional love. If I don’t walk on eggshells because you’re mad and won’t tell me that, then I can just fuck right off. Is that in any way a fair and balanced relationship?

How do I make you happy if you don’t seem happy with anything?

And by making her happy, I don’t mean that I have the capability to change people from within (although I have been told I do help). She has to find those changes within herself, because I’m not here to suss them out for her. Why she can’t be open and honest and has to stick to the people-pleasing schtick is on her, and I finally saw her get out of that rut……..

She stroked my ego mightily, and my chest puffed up. When she told me that she couldn’t control anyone’s reactions, she quoted me directly without realizing it. Or she did and she was trying to hurt me by throwing my own words in my face……….. and I turned out to be teary-eyed and impressed. I’ve always had the motto “help her, anyway.”

So, when I saw the same behavior in Daniel- get angry at someone for bringing up a problem instead of acknowledging there is one- I was out and quickly. The relationship with Supergrover destroyed me, and I didn’t want another 10 years of fighting a battle that someone needs to fight on their own. It’s not my job to tiptoe around anyone. When I told Supergrover that I had issues I wanted to talk about, she said that I should find friends who didn’t bring issues into my life. There is no such thing. It was Daniel’s first answer as well. If we can’t solve this in five minutes, our relationship isn’t worth jack or shit. It’s too much. If there is a battle inside someone, even two minutes of vulnerability is too hard and it hurts too much. They won’t let go because they’re afraid of losing control, but life doesn’t make sense until you realize you never had any control in the first place.

If I could tell Daniel what I know about my story, the most private parts, he would shit himself for saying I that “just because I wrote in bulk doesn’t mean I write anything of substance.” This is because I’ve never met anyone who could play “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” quite like SG. And she thought I wrote something of substance. I will take that ego boost over anything else that happens in my career. My ability to write could be taken away tomorrow and I’ll know that I accomplished every single one of my goals.

The first was to be seen and heard.

The second was to have people who identified with me that would tell me when they liked something and when I was an asshole with a God complex. That’s because I don’t have to take a single piece of your advice, but that doesn’t mean I won’t hear it. I will be angry and defensive at first, so I usually pop off and regret, another thing I’m learning to manage, because my response is always different than a knee-jerk reaction. But sometimes I write down my knee-jerk reactions because they’re important to prove to me later where I need to grow.

I also think that Supergrover and I should have a conversation about “painting my feelings as fact,” because I could write the way she wanted me to if I understood what she meant. And the reason I’d defer to her is that she was a writing major…….. and yet somehow still thinks of me as “the talent.” I do not know how to write in a way that doesn’t make anything look like a fact, because I am narrating a plot as well. She’s whipped my ass into shape as a writer before, so I have no doubt she could help me with this, too. However, I will do some research on autobiographical writing and see if anything resonates with what she said that gives me a little more context than wondering how and when I’ve been an asshole.

I play AITA all day long with myself, because it’s the fight within me of “say nice things” and “no one forced you to come here.” As I’ve said, the people in my real life knowing what I think of them is their choice.. If they want to be here, welcome. If you always have a problem with what I say, I encourage you to change the channel….. because seriously. Who even am I? Who cares about my opinion?

The only person that really should is me, because it informs how I feel about myself.

How I feel about myself this minute is that I’m proud I handled my move all by myself so that it is free to me- as in, I’m just going to hand my deposit and leftover rent directly to Colin on day one, and my rent hasn’t gone up, so I don’t have to make up the difference.

With Silver Spring, I have gotten two miracles in a row. Hayat and Colin were both the first people I called, and they both turned out to be right for me. Towards the end of April, I’ll have been here a full nine years, and I’m only missing it by a week.

I know from experience that we still might get one more light snowstorm, because when I arrived here in late April of 2015, there was snow on the ground. It was melting, but still. It had snowed on like, April 20th or something. I think I arrived on the 23rd.

Hayat texted me that it feels like it was just yesterday she picked me up at the Metro. I understand the sentiment, because in some ways, it really feels like I just got here. In others, this has been the longest 10 years of my life…… but so necessary in terms of growth and development that I cannot trade them. If I hadn’t become a blogger, I would not have seen autism coming. I would not have seen being nonbinary coming. I would not have seen how any of my friends affect my life, from besties to the smallest interaction.

It’s small interactions that get me the most, because I’m the worst at casual conversation. If I did something weird in front of you in 1993, don’t worry. I’m still thinking about it.

While I pack my “going to Zac’s” bag and try not to flip out that we’re seeing Jason Moran tonight. If I’d had time, I would have ordered a Senators baseball cap for the event, because Duke Ellington’s first job was selling peanuts at games, where he got to know Teddy Roosevelt peripherally because every once in a while Roosevelt would ride his horse down to the field.

So, if you ever doubt the power of living in Washington, remember that a middle class black kid from DC became friends with the President of the United States…………………. long before integration was even a thing.

In fact, that’s the perfect analogy for my life. I have the brain that’s capable of seeing patterns in world conflict like a president, but I have only managed to convince the people around me that I’m selling peanuts.

What I have learned through living in Washington is that people prefer to be treated like they’re all alike on a human level, and revel in friends who aren’t obsessed with who they are and what they can do for me, a classic Washington stereotype. Republicans sniff each other’s butts by asking how much they make.

People do that to me sometimes. Someone asked me how much my sister made, and it was so fucking rude. But, we were at one of Lindsay’s work events, so I didn’t want to go apeshit. I just said, “she’s a Democrat. Aim low.” The truth is that I only know she makes more than me. That’s it, because I don’t ask those questions, and she usually doesn’t volunteer that information except when she’s telling me what a job potentially will pay her if she gets it. I always tell her to aim for the stars, because not only does she travel, she eventually wants to live in a different state where the cost of living is a lot higher than Texas. She doesn’t know how she’d do it, it’s a pipe dream because she doesn’t often think about moving. But, every little bit helps when you are trying to save up for a dream.

I will use DC as an example because she doesn’t want to come here, so it’s not giving away where she’d look if she was actually interested in leaving Texas.

In DC, MD, and VA, buying a house here is ridiculously expensive, and the closer you want to “inside the Beltway” or “downtown living,” the price skyrockets exponentially. An apartment in the city is going to run you about $2500/month. Even in Silver Spring, you won’t find an apartment for less than $1,000…… maybe, maybe if it’s an efficiency. However, management companies are ridiculously relentless in raising rent, so you’ll be paying over 1k/mo in no time if they advertised cheap rent to get you in the door.

And, for $2500/mo in DC, you still only get a white box, especially in neighborhoods that aren’t riddled with crime. If you are in an area with violent crime, depending on where it is, you’ll still pay $2500 because it’s walking distance to the Metro or something like that. Housing does not go down when DC is only 60 sq miles.

Buying a house might be a little cheaper if you have the funds to renovate. You can get a good deal if it’s just a lot with a barely standing building. The land is the expensive part, not the construction.

But then you have to live in DC, and some of their laws are just plain strange. It’s weird that things come through the Senate, because DC’s needs are thrown under the bus by pork barreling.

Like, the bill will be something like “$15/minimum wage” or whatever it is that will do the city good, and someone will put a total ban on abortion in the bill. So, the bill gets struck down and the Republicans say “they wanted this minimum wage so bad, and then they didn’t even want to compromise.”

Make someone else look like that bad guy, because nothing you’ve done has ever elicited a reaction.

Global and national are the same as local.

Generally, if a person will react in a certain way, a country will also act like that. It’s a chessboard, and I see patterns all the time.

The important part is to just keep stitching. The quilt will come together eventually.

Or, with autism, maybe it never will. But I am not interested in turning myself into a person I was never meant to be.

Please Allow Me a Bit of Procrastination

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My little AuDHD brain is overwhelmed and I need to shut down, refocus. So, I’m sitting on my bed and writing an entry… soothing myself back from burnout/demand avoidance because I have so much to do. Or, I think I have so much to do because my brain is consistently arranged like “The Persistence of Memory.” Everything is clear and logical, with solid lines….. except for the dripping clock. I have no ability to estimate how long a job will take, and my room isn’t honestly that big. I do not have the ability, however, to say “I have X number of days…. how much do I need to devote to packing so that I’m absolutely ready by the time Zac gets here? I have already packed a few boxes, and I have plenty left because they’re so large. It’s helpful that they’re canvas, because they’re just as heavy as cardboard, but they have nicer handles. So far, I like the orange ones best.

It’s kind of interesting that my moving boxes are a stunning array of colors.

I’ve been moving hard, but I cannot sustain concentration and effort on packing right now. My muscles need a break and I’m desperate for some water. But even when I sit down, I’m still searching for something. My mind gets busy when my body is weak.

On the autism subreddit there are tests to get you started in terms of gauging whether you have autism or not. It’s confusing, especially when you have ADHD….. although the most insightful test for me was called “the Aspie test,” and I’m sure they mean “Asperger’s,” but apparently that is a dirty word because Asperger was a Nazi. Anyway, there are different ways of asking the questions, and it clarified something that I could not explain, but I know is true.

It asked me when I read books if I could imagine/picture the characters. The Aspie test was the only one that allowed me to choose “imagination and visualization are two different things.” I am moved by prose, I am not seeing a movie in my head. I know a picture is worth a thousand words, but I generally write quite a bit more than that. What a focus on in a novel is empathy with the characters; I like reading how they think and feel. However, when I read descriptions of people’s physical attributes, it means nothing.

I will tell you that when I got to see an actual picture of the real Supergrover recently, I thought, “I will never in my lifetime do her justice, and there’s absolutely no one they could cast that would look anything like her.” It made me sad, because I realized if I didn’t read that way, I wouldn’t write that way, either…. it’s not my wheelhouse.

I swear to God, if I publish a book and you have no idea what any of the characters look like, it’s only because I have no idea, either.

So far, I’ve taken all of the quizzes. I 100% have traits of autism according to one because they took more information from me than anyone else. It was rad. They asked my gender at birth and gender now, my age, and whether I was self-diagnosed or professionally diagnosed. Then, they asked if I was professionally or self diagnosed with ADHD. The answer is that I am self diagnosed/suspected ASD and professionally diagnosed ADHD. THEN I started the questionnaire. That means it’s a weighted score, because the test already knows that if you’re diagnosed with one, there’s an 80% chance you have the other.

The thing that really freaked me out was that they asked if I had a specific gait, if I’d been accused of staring at anyone, if I had depth perception issues…… I mean WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK?

No one had to call me out like this.

At the same time, now that I’ve taken all of these quizzes that back up my gut feeling (I’ve taken the monotropism questionnaire and got a very high score, but nothing like the ones above), I don’t have imposter syndrome anymore. I finally have answers to miscommunications lasting back decades.

The worst was “I often say things that other people think come across as mean, and I don’t understand why.”

However, it is to Supergrover’s credit that I started down this road, because of course ADHD Facebook groups often have Autistic memes as well because we’re both neurodivergent. I saw a few too many autism posts that skewered me, and I started doing the research. The reason the credit goes to her is that she may never have thought of me as a narcissist, but her words made me feel like one when I was trying to reach out to her. I had to find what was missing in me. How could I improve my communication skills so I didn’t come off that way anymore? When I figure it all out, I’ll let you know. But at the same time, I have made progress. It’s just hard to make progress when there are several differences in the way I communicate with most of the world:

  • I am a big picture person. Always. My mind is not built to handle detail. This leads to professional and personal problems, because detail at work is required and detail at home depends on your partner. Are you always forgetting details that are important to them, having the most insensitive reaction possible, having them tell you that “you knew what you were doing?” There are a million cues built into the system that lead people to the most obvious answer. So, if I was neurotypical, I have no doubt that those people would be right. I’m not. I’m autistic. Therefore, my brain processes information differently and because it’s so out of sync with the rest of the world, it is aggressively annoying. I will do everything I can to help you navigate being in a relationship with me except read your mind. I will not pick up on the fact that you’re mad about something just because we haven’t spoken.
  • I see patterns in everything, all the time, when it comes to human behavior. I am not a STEM genius that can do magic with data strings. When I was a kid, I was the one that knew everyone’s phone number off the top of my head. Now, without my iPhone, I could 100% call my dad. Everyone else I might get wrong. One out of hundreds of contacts is not that great.
    • I know this because I do know my sister’s phone number, but when I had to dial it recently I put in the wrong area code and had to start over. So, I suppose I know two numbers.
    • I remember e-mail addresses easier than I remember phone numbers because I’m driven by letters. I still have a friend on AOL. It’s adorable. I have thought many times “what if I had the money to send her a GIANT BOX of AOL disks and a copy of Windows 95?”
  • I get lost in tasks to the exclusion of all else, and this shows most adamantly in working on computers. If something is wrong with my computer, I will take it down to the studs, because I prefer doing everything the same way every time. I am also not a detail person. I am a “keep everything on a cloud drive so that I don’t have to deal with details” kind of person.
  • It doesn’t take me very long to get frustrated with a task, and my fuse is more short with Windows, because I can use Google or ChatGPT to find the snippets of code I need to fix my Linux system. I should look on a DOS subreddit, but I won’t. The only DOS command I need is wsl –install (Install Windows Subsystem for Linux and the default distribution, Ubuntu). I will not put up with any system foolishness. If a hard drive disagrees with me, they seem to STFU when I drop the partition table. Troubleshooting a problem in either operating system can take hours. When things start getting difficult, I would rather start over. Metaphor for neurodivergent life, probably because we’re all relentless perfectionists so that we don’t get labeled lazy.
  • I do not like being interrupted, and while I am not grumpy about it, I am frustrated that nothing ever goes back to the way it was. It takes me a long time to transition in and out of “the zone,” no matter the task. But I’m not the type to say “you interrupted me,” because it’s not my job to enforce strict rules on who can talk to me when. I do, however, miss the many ideas that have floated off into thin air, and thankful I’m fast enough to have another idea to replace it.
  • I don’t process things verbally very well, because I think a lot faster than I speak. I’m literally having buffer overflow issues, and trying not to stutter when I’m in conversation. That’s because I generally have one thought building on another and I have to take all those strands and braid them before I speak. And even then, I often realize that I might have said something truthful, but I had no idea of the impact, because I have no idea how my words are going to be received.

Not knowing how my words were being received was instrumental in making me wonder why Supergrover called me a judgmental dickhead all the time, when I was sending her so much love and attention…… but I didn’t change for her. I noticed that I was struggling with relationships in every area of my life and couldn’t explain why in those cases, either. It was a long journey, because I didn’t want to be flippant. I wanted to be Maude Lebowski “thorough” before I said anything, because there’s a lot of hate in the autism community for people who don’t do the homework and just decide on two Tik-Toks that this is totally them.

Therefore, not only did I seek out autistic YouTubers, I also sought out lectures by M.D.s and Ph.Ds describing the symptoms of the disorders on the spectrum overall. That lots of people are creative and not visual. Because the autism test asked if I had depth perception issues, I assume that there are lots of people who can’t see movies in their heads because they don’t have the ability to put things correctly into their environment. Someone with 2D vision cannot have immersive experiences, for the most part. For instance, trees aren’t blobs because I don’t have glasses. They’re blobs because they’re all 2D. I can’t place individual branches on their x, y, and z axes…… particularly zed. I call it the zed axis because even though I’m an American, “Zed” sounds like more of a villain name……..

Zed Axis…….. so we meet again……..

So, because I cannot place things in their environment, can’t process thoughts and emotions the same way as a neurotypical person, and look like I’m from the Ministry of Silly Walks, I am a long way from normal before I ever really start talking about “my issues.” But they all combine to give me a hilarious sense of humor if you are also neurodivergent, because one of the things that the tests point out is that neurodivergent and neurotypical humor is different, too. We generally have no sense of propriety, and are always on the “think it, say it” plan regardless of the consequences, because it’s a disability, not a personal failing (I do not mean that one can or should blame their behavior on a disability. It’s the disabled person’s job to fix it because someone’s poor impulse control, demand avoidance, etc. isn’t a partner/coworker/boss’s responsibility except to give us everything we are entitled to through our places of work….. or, in the case of a partner, taking our needs seriously. A good example is that I basically like three brands of clothes because of the way they feel on my skin. Say my partner finds socks two dollars cheaper at Costco?

They might say “what’s the difference?” And I will be absolutely devastated, both because I don’t want to disappoint the person that brought the wrong thing, so I’ll use them until they wear out, annoyed they aren’t what I want. Socks last a long time and there’s no real need to replace them except for my autism making it where I can’t concentrate on anything else because the tag is three centimeters off from where it normally is. I feel all of these things. I hear sounds other people don’t notice. I pick up on behaviors other people don’t notice.

One of the questions and answers was interesting, because it told me a lot without saying a word:

The question was “can you easily pick up social cues?” One of the choices is “I think I can remember how to act like someone else I know.”

Christ on a cracker.

There’s also the matter of your abilities as a conversationalist………… Because you take everything literally, there’s probably no White Elephant in the room. If there’s something that needs to be said, if you’re autistic you probably just blurted it out like it was nothing, because to you it wasn’t, and you don’t understand the emotion coming at you. It gets overwhelming fast if you’re with more than one person, which is why I try to be with only one person at a time. I cannot process two people talking while also thinking of something to say. I end up missing the jumping in point, because they’re supercomputers and I’m a raspberry pi. I am much quicker than other people in text, but it’s a different kind of comprehension. I’m the supercomputer when they’re at a disadvantage.

Because I don’t process voices well, I do like talking on the phone, but only to the people who are very, very close to me. That’s because I don’t want it to be too long in between hearing each other’s voices. With literally anyone else, I tend to talk with my hands. I talk with my hands in person, too, but that’s just because I’m a Texan.

A Texan who has just realized that procrastination time is up. Have fun with the quizzes if you decide to take them. And by “fun,” I mean “I didn’t actually know you could feel this devastated and elated simultaneously.”

Exercise

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today’s prompt, which I answered last year, was about what kind of exercise I liked….. or something like that. Well, I can assure you that it is not carting laundry up and down from the basement and packing boxes. It’s all a necessary evil, though, because for as much as I love my house, I’m getting really excited about moving into a new space. I can’t say that it’s bigger, because I haven’t really spent a whole lot of time there. But it’s at least as big, and it’s still a whole house over a tiny white box apartment. In my area, I would pay twice or three times as much for the privilege of living alone in a tiny white box. I realize you have to take a chance on housemates, but I truly prefer it to living alone.

I am a solitary person. If I didn’t have housemates, I wouldn’t talk to people at all. I go days without conversation now. Therefore, having someone around is not the worst thing in the world, and having it be someone I genuinely get along with is exciting. I’m bummed that Magda pulled out, but I see why. She just has too much stuff to fit in the space. I don’t know if she’s found another place or not. I’m just glad that my moving in was not dependent on me bringing someone else with me. He absolutely had the right to say no, that he only wanted one roommate and he was going to look for someone who could pay him more. And yet, he didn’t. It was very gracious of him, and I’m glad neither of us has to interview more people. We’re both neurodivergent and the thought of living with someone else is frightening. You find someone you get on with, you don’t lose them.

I mean, at the end of the day Colin only needs someone who cleans up after themselves, and is a normal human being. One out of two ain’t bad. And as I’ve kidded him, I have no problem moving in with a stranger because I’ve never met anyone stranger than me. This is undeniably true on many levels, and people tend to find this out over time, not immediately. But at least we’re the same sort of weird. Neurodivergent people feel like aliens, so it’s like two aliens decided to share a house instead of interacting with so many humans.

Yes, it really does feel that isolating sometimes, but it’s hard to notice when I’m actually lonely, if that makes sense. For instance, sometimes I mistake boredom for loneliness, or a hundred other emotions that are actually feeling lonely but written off as other things so they just fly right past me. I am not consciously saying to myself “stay lonely,” but “the world out there is scary.” “Out there,” I have to manage my AuDHD, and it’s sometimes an impossible task. Often a disability does not mean you cannot do something- it means that you have difficulty. Autism criteria tells me that I will suffer with problems in my interpersonal relationships my whole life. Apparently, my reaction to that is not to have that many of them.

But this isn’t unusual, either. Most people hang out with their partners and kids, and they don’t have a ton of friends, either. I believe that why this bothers me is that for them, cocooning with their people is perfectly normal. Not being a social butterfly because I’m not very good at it is problematic. Thankfully, I’m starting to feel this type of judgment less and less as family configurations come forward in all types of ways, and by my age those family configurations are completely convoluted, because by now we’ve all had multiple relationships….. and sometimes the people in your family are the ones that decided to stand by you when those relationships ended, so the family you thought you had is not where you ended up.

It’s the beauty of life, that we don’t know where we’re going to end up. But what I do know is that at this point in my life there’s no replacements. There’s no getting rid of Zac or Bryn to make room for someone else, because there is plenty of room already…… and yet, it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like my life is bursting with good things. I am not waiting for something to happen; it is happening while we speak.

I have changed so much. I just wanted to go out and have a good time with Zac, kidding him that I liked to be “wined and dined.” It’s funny because we love Trader Joe’s and so far we have shared one bottle of wine in the year that we’ve been dating- or at least, I know it’s over a year, but I don’t know how much. I haven’t counted it up, and I need to. Zac says I need to pick an anniversary and that was immediately overwhelming. I wouldn’t know where to start, and that line of thinking immediately made me fall over with laughter….. the part where I think about what might constitute an anniversary. In any case, I wouldn’t have said that I’d rather find someone else who can fit into that rather than someone who would make me give that up, which is how most of society works. I have found that neurodivergence is basically a Chinese Wall. When Zac isn’t with me, my time is completely dedicated to something else. Therefore, I know I have the capacity to manage multiple partners because I’m not spending time with one thinking about the other, ever.

You live and learn. I had a hierarchy with Supergrover and Dana, but I never want that again, and I don’t have to unless I seek it out. The important part of learning is knowing where and when to stop looking. The hierarchy was in Supergrover’s favor, and she can feel guilty and hurt about that all she wants, but it doesn’t make my story any less valid, because there were things in her life I couldn’t see that I needed to see; and things in my life she needed to see and ran away from for years. I know she’s hurt, angry, tired, etc. Still can’t undo it or help it. She could have helped me with clarity, but she attacked me when I asked for it. There are so many really good conversations we needed to have that would have been hard, but enriching. It wasn’t easy to be dressed down by someone I love that much, but I survived.

Now that she’s out of my life, the power structure is still there, but it’s not so extremely loud and incredibly close. Having a power structure like ours made me feel comfort, because her love is a weighted blanket. But sometimes in the middle of the night, I got too hot and couldn’t take the blankets off. I saw visions and took off in that direction, and it was the right one. I just also made a shit ton of mistakes in the process. There’s nothing to regret or blame, just put to sleep.

What I have realized is that when it comes to Supergrover, echolagia is how I stim. Having her around me feels comforting, therefore I write about her when I’m trying to calm myself. It has worked for 10 years now. After all, her name is a waltz that plays for me and me alone.

I hope she knows that; I want her to know that thinking about her is the easiest way for me to calm myself, because I think she thinks I want to come after her with heat….. and in reality, I’ve just read her for so many years that it feels like I somehow have this other personality inside me. I don’t mean I impersonate her in any way, I mean that when I’m about to do something, a relevant line from one of her e-mails will come back to me and then I decide if I’m still going to do the thing.

When I’m talking to other people, relevant lines come up from her e-mails, too, and I don’t bother to quote her. I just make myself sound smarter by ripping her off blind. I’m not sure that she’s offended by this, as I am sure a lot of her friends know “her” opinions as well. 😉 Not that I’m as clever or funny, it’s just that I know if I have a good line and it stuck with her, it probably came up somewhere. I have fun thinking about where those things might have come up.

But once trust was broken, we stopped acting like we like each other and turned on each other instead. It melted into an easy peace, and I’m good with it and not. I have the character I’ve created in my mind, but I wish I had the real thing.

She is not a Hydrox. She is an Oreo.

However, over time I have learned to like Hydrox better and better. It’s a sweet treat, after all this mental exercise.

A High School Reunion I Liked

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Recently it was my friend Norman and his wife’s anniversary, and I know she’s a lucky, lucky woman. That’s because when I said on Facebook that I couldn’t find Dr Pepper Zero, and two days later there were like 40 on my porch. It was then that I realized I’d made a horrible mistake. Ryan never bought me any Dr Pepper Zero. 😛 😛 😛 Kidding, of course, it was just a sweet gesture that I’ve always remembered it because it made me smile at a time I really needed it. So, when I heard it was his anniversary, I commented and told them both what a beautiful picture it was of them, happy anniversary, all that good stuff.

Later that night, Norman messaged me and we spent a long time catching up. Norman’s memory is all fucked up, because he thinks I wasn’t that bad compared to him. He’s actually one of the few people I knew in symphony that I thought actually would go pro. But he, like my dad, didn’t want to do the gig economy and ended up in tech (my dad went into ministry, but same deal- salary vs. contract).

My freshman year, Norman and I were the only trumpet players in the symphony. The next year, two others joined us, one every bit as talented as Norman, the other person I’m surprised didn’t end up in a symphony somewhere. Symphony playing is extremely refined, and they both had a sound like Maurice Andre, Wynton Marsalis when he’s playing baroque, and exactly none of the other trumpet players I’ve ever studied in my life except Wynton, because he’s a crossover between jazz and classical. Norman and I were from different backgrounds, but we had one thing in common. He liked to win at chess, and I liked to play. I don’t mean that he was ever mean about it, I mean that I’ve never won against him, and I don’t want to even try to beat him. What I have learned is that life is stressful and you should keep your chess engine on level one.

We reminisced about things we’d played:

  • Sleigh Ride (Norman was the horse)
  • Beethoven 7
  • Danse Macabre (Saint-Saenz)
  • Dvorak Cello Concerto (with Anthony Wheeler)
  • Blue Danube
  • Empire Waltz
  • Rodeo and Fanfare for the Common Man, Copland
  • Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet

There were a ton more that I don’t remember, because we sight read every Friday. Norman made me bust out laughing because he said I remember one day when we were transposing a minor third while in a fast tempo and we both just blew it and fell over with laughter.

Our biggest night was my sophomore year, Danny and Norman’s junior, and Laura’s freshman. We were GLADIATORS. The Dvorak Cello Concerto opens with a sectional fanfare in the fourth movement, and it was perfect. The trumpets had entered the motherfucking chat.

I would not be a very good trumpet player if I didn’t say it like that. I am a soprano, line cook, and trumpet player. I joke that with all that ego, I must be completely insufferable….. I mean, I joke about it, but it’s true.

It was just good to again, stretch out. Remember who Norman and I were then, at 15 and 14. Since he was a year older, we didn’t really hang out together, and I’d never thought he’d want to-

Until last night, when music made it seem as if no time had ever passed at all. When I hear his voice in my head, they still have the childhood lilt of his parents’ country. I’m not telling you where he’s from, but I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen that he had a Mercedes-Benz in high school (pronouncing it correctly), because in his country that is a perfectly normal, serviceable car for a brand new driver because I’m not sure that in their country they have other brands. 😉

Former Texans buy Blue Bell and Whataburger when they can get it. Former Marylanders always have Old Bay in the cabinet. When you immigrate from overseas, I doubt there are many parents trusting of American cars for them or their kids, even if they are better (how would I know? I don’t drive. 😉 ).

I thought I was so clever and sophisticated for figuring that out as a freshman. I also liked it because it was fire engine red, and then his younger brother started driving it as well…… his younger brother being an equally talented musician and someone I worked with in Jazz II.

Speaking of Jazz II, I told you that Robert Glasper and Jon Durbin (The Suffers) were in my class, but I forgot to mention Eric Harland, who is one of the most talented drummers I’ve ever met in my life. He is every bit the drummer that Jason Moran is a pianist, and I know this because they’ve been playing together since HSPVA.

This is what I mean about Doc Morgan birthing so much talent….. and also birthing me. 😉 Because I was in Jazz II with these guys, for me it’s enough to know that if I’d continued in college or if I’d been able to get into the Airmen of Note, I would have done all right. I would have had time to fix all my embouchure issues and be able to practice as long as I wanted without pain. I could go six hours at a clip no sweat in terms of hyperfocus on the music, but my lips gave out constantly. Just overworked to the point of tears because I had that high C out of nowhere five seconds ago, and now I’m fucking toast.

Sometimes what saved my ass was adrenaline. When I was frightened, my muscle memory kicked into place and I didn’t feel the pain as bad. It’s just good that marching contests and concerts weren’t even five minutes longer.

We did Rodeo with The Houston Symphony, and Norman told me that he still tells his kids he played with the Houston Symphony. I told him I use it as a non-sequitur all the time at parties. No one here knows me as a musician. So, if there’s a lull in the conversation, I’ll say, “I played with the Houston Symphony, you know.” Then I explain to them that my whole high school orchestra got to play with them for a concert and I wasn’t a soloist or anything. It is done with comedic effect, because I can claim being good at a lot of things. Trumpet playing is not one of them (at least not now). I will not say that I wasn’t good for my age back then, though. I think that’s because there’s nothing that can take getting into a school like HSPVA from me. I wouldn’t have gotten in if I wasn’t at least good enough to nail the audition, and the audition is the hardest part. It was also 14 minutes long. Not enough to fail to impress anyone. I waited until after the wedding to reveal my deficiencies, although it does make me feel quite a bit better about the fact that Norman and I both acknowledged my limitations and he really made me a lot better just by sitting next to me. It was one of the reasons I was ready to spit nails when I found out we were getting two more trumpet players in the orchestra. I mean, it ended up being fun, but I seriously needed that hour with Norman to myself.

As he got better, I did, and it’s because he was available to pay that much attention to me. Since I was the only person that could really talk to him, we spent long rehearsals playing chess in between invaluable trumpet lessons.

But, with Danny being just as good as Norman, I now had two people of elite caliber to teach me to be better. I think that’s because we all had a little bit of an ego that wasn’t easily hurt, it was just fun to lightly tease each other. The rest of the time, the ego was put away. We had shit to do. We were a section, and that only comes from talking to each other.

Just like I got to do last night with Norman…… the first high school reunion I’ve been to in a long time that I actually thought, “we should do this again.” We don’t get many high school friends like that, do we? Seriously, what a gift…….. grateful.

Moving Parts

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Leaving my home is starting to get daunting, but not in a way that’s leading to shutdown. I’m packing up all my stuff just fine. It’s more the change emotionally, which it always is with an INFJ. I often feel like I am just one giant walking nerve in society. My work is to direct the positive energy coming toward me, because I pick up on all the things people are going through and it weighs me down. That is not said to guilt anyone, just to say that some people are built to soak up emotions like a sponge and some people are built to be afraid of that. My empathy leads me to a dark view of the world, because I’m the person that’s safe to use as a stranger on a train.

So, people will think nothing of a five minute conversation in which I learn they’ve been raped, kidnapped, beaten by their parents, they’ve just lost a spouse/parent, or whatever the biggest secret they have might be. I hear “I’ve never said this to anyone” a lot. It is mine to manage, because since these are random interactions, it’s not like we’re going to work this out in therapy. I assure you that the people of the DC Metro lead amazing lives for all they’ve been through in childhood….. and this is limited to no particular line. Though I will say that I am on the Red and Blue most often.

I have that face that says “tell me anything,” which I often think of as the jackass magnet on my forehead. I used to think it was their responsibility to know that their story has power and what it would do to me to hear it.

Now I realize most people don’t even know they have a story.

So, it’s my responsibility to wash the negative energy off of me. I do that in many ways, mostly cooking. I try not to cook without listening to something, because I don’t want to feel someone else’s emotions while I’m trying to concentrate. I feel other people’s emotions all the time, because in public, I pick up on the energy around me. At home, I read the news.

The world is suffering. How much more or less today is of no consequence. I just mean that the stories of the people on the ground in Palestine, Lebanon, and Israel are just as important to me as the couples I hear arguing in the grocery store. As an INFJ, I am often thinking about other people’s marriages in the checkout line. I would never, ever talk to anyone about this, like “hi! I have some excellent points to make!” It’s just the personality of an INFJ to try and solve everyone’s problems all the time because we want everyone to live in a utopia that we think we can drag into being all by ourselves.

We are a deluded people by nature, because our eyes aren’t on the present, but on the what could be…… that “what could be” is often more idealistic than most people can process, and because of my autism, never in a way that makes sense to a neurotypical mind. Being a writer is the only way I know where I can lay my thought processes out as they are, without filtering. Because what happens then is that people become interested in the way I think, and it seems cool/foreign/brilliant to them. When I am trying to fit into every day society, I do not get the chance to lay out my thoughts the way I need for clarity and let other people judge for themselves what’s important and what’s not.

People who don’t know me as a writer have never seen me at full strength, because it takes so much more energy for me to fit into someone else’s order than it does for me to create my own. My alone-ness doesn’t translate to loneliness, because I think of my audience as the other half of a conversation. If I run out of things to think about that are rolling around in my own brain, I have a shit ton of fiction prompts and I’m not afraid to use them. I am not using my strength as a writer to avoid people, I communicate easier in writing than I do in person. I feel like more of my real self when I’m at my keyboard, because it takes away all my shyness and hesitation at having a conversation. Because of catfishing, I know there’s an equal chance that you’re giving me the real picture of who you are, or you could literally be anyone. I have to trust that you are who you say you are, therefore I treat everyone the same. The Internet is the great equalizer.

For instance, it would not be unusual for someone to pretend that they were the president of the United States online. I’m sure people do it every day. So how do you know when you’re talking to the real Joseph R. Biden?

You don’t.

In the beginning, none of us were smart enough to catfish. I mean, I’m sure there was some of that, but we were all so excited to be on the Internet that it wouldn’t have occurred to us to have elaborate schemes for it yet. I cannot tell you how many heads of Fortune 500 companies I’ve met, how many famous musicians, etc.

It could have all been bullshit.

But what if it wasn’t?

Do you know what I mean? I completely suspend disbelief when I talk to people online and just join their reality, because I have absolutely no way of verifying whether what they’re saying is true or not. I just have to accept it. I know that I have met some very powerful people, but I couldn’t tell you who was telling me the truth or not.

So, the answer is to treat all people who tell me they’re powerful that they’re not lying…. it would make me a shitty friend to assume they were lying, and an asshole if I was later proved wrong. There are examples all over the Internet of people being the kind of idiot I don’t want to be, like people who criticize Stephen King’s analysis of his own books.

It is only when I think our lives are going to cross over that I start requiring any proof of any kind. If you’re just some rando who wants to shoot the shit with a friend at the end of the night, that’s one thing. If you want to start coming to my house, that is a completely different relationship and I am vetting you a different way. For instance, taking an interest in their field so that I have a detailed story of what they do (the more they drop details a propos of nothing, the more they’re telling the truth…… and truth doesn’t come on the Internet by asking for it, but by talking about other things. For instance, if someone has told me they work for a government agency, I won’t look it up. I’ll just listen to how they talk about it over the years.

It also matters who they are at home, whether I think I’d get along with them in a social setting, and how fluid they are with inviting me into their lives after they’ve already told me so much about themselves. Sometimes, the reason that people don’t want to get together in real life is that they can’t remember everything they’ve told you and they haven’t, so they’re afraid to burst your bubble. I won’t let it get that far off if the end goal is in-person.

I start asking for pictures right away, asking for a meetup quickly as well. It’s too easy to go too far down the wrong road with writing, and different when there’s absolutely no chance of you meeting on the ground because of the distance. It would take an astronomical sum of money for me to visit my friends, because most of them don’t even live in the US. Having friendships with other people who like to chat on the Internet isn’t time-based. All of our chat rooms were filled with “good mornings” and “good evenings” at every hour of the day.

You know intimately that you’re probably not going to meet anyone in Australia because that would require time and money, etc. So, the fantasy stays intact, no matter what it is. Most people don’t completely cover up their lives, they just massage it so that it looks better. I have never truly been catfished in which nothing was what it seemed, and I feel sorry for the people who have, particularly the women for whom it was dangerous.

Supergrover is by far the longest internet-only friendship I’ve had in terms of people who are integrated into my daily life. In the beginning, I’m not sure that either one of us went an hour without talking, and I’m not sure I ever really slowed down. 😉 Over time, it became as if I hadn’t felt something until I’d written about it to her, first.

That’s the most painful part of this whole process, to be honest. I am slowly making other things my touchstone, so that it doesn’t feel like something in me is missing if I haven’t talked to her. If you’ve had a relationship in plain text, it often feels as if the person is constantly talking inside of you.

I hate that she stopped. I’m allowed to hate it, and I do, with a driving passion. What I can’t do is reengage. That has to come from her, because we’ve reached our peace. She says that she does not want to get into a cat and mouse game with me, but I cannot see for her that this is not a cat and mouse game. I also cannot get her to see that she was the one playing games, because when she came clean with me, I celebrated it. Even though she was angrier at me than she’d ever been in her life, I celebrated the fact that she finally told me the words I needed to hear after straight up avoiding them and hoping I’d just figure it out on my own. The games stopped when she stopped hiding, and now I won’t accept anything else. Letting a relationship limp along under its own weight instead of putting it out of its misery is not my style. So, in essence, I resigned from her cat and mouse game, not the other way around. Not putting any more on her plate for her to be angry about was of the utmost importance to me, why I always felt so small around her. She didn’t tell me to take up less room, I just did and resented it because she got used to me taking up very little room and liked it that way. When I emoted, I was not allowed to take up any more room……. but nothing was wrong. All of that is now over, but I don’t hope for a future.

Next steps would be actually working toward something new, and I don’t think either of us is there…. maybe not now, maybe not ever. But what I do know is that like I’ve said before, it’s a strange feeling when your inner monologue is also someone else’s external monologue. That’s not guilting her, that’s not wishing for anything she doesn’t want to give. Those are just my feelings about the situation- that it would be hard to reconcile, but when it balanced we’d be rich.

Again, though, my way is to talk through everything. Her way is to avoid things and tell me I’m demanding, along with telling me that I’m the only one of her friends who ever has a problem with her. And I’m thinking, “how fake are your other friends, then? No one ever has a problem? Ever?” Meanwhile, she has plenty of problems with me, she just doesn’t want to talk about them and doesn’t want to let me go, either, because she knows she’d hurt my feelings either way.

I’m the one whose feelings she’s allowed to hurt, because I care that I hurt hers. She’s not just screaming into a void. For as many problems as I have with her, there is an equal annotated list on the other side, and if she’s talked to Michael or her other friends about me, I am sure there are several PowerPoint presentations on her desk entitled, “Why Leslie’s an Asshole, Part One.” Relationships are hard, and we’ve proven to the other that we don’t run. We hide, but we don’t run.

Otherwise, she would have stopped answering my Thu’um long ago.

The Postcard

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Twice now Zac has traveled and sent me postcards from wherever he is. I am pleased by this, because he often writes messages that I’m embarrassed the whole house can see, but it’s all in good fun. At this point, I think it’s more for shock value…. or he doesn’t know that he’s sending a postcard to six people.

However, it’s always touching that he remembers me when he travels. He asked me what I wanted, and I told him a football jersey or a scarf from wherever. It’s my standard answer, because even if I don’t wear all my scarves at one time, I hang them up as decoration. I also asked him to bring me a specific brand of candy that I had the last time I was in Paris, which is not where Zac was, but in Europe you can find them quite easily. They’re sour gummy Smurfs. My dad and I had a couple of hours to wait where we were just sitting in a French hotel lobby. There are gummy Smurfs on the table. By the end of the wait, there were gummy Smurfs on the table. Anywho, if Zac forgot, it’s no sweat off my nose. I can find nearly everything I want off Amazon, and with American prices, getting things imported is really not that much more expensive.

For instance, red bush or honey bush caffeine free tea is one of my favorites. Locally grown is about $9.00. Imported directly from South Africa? $11.00. Locally grown and sourced is great unless you are changing the fundamental nature of how something is supposed to taste. Red tea grown in American soil just doesn’t taste right.

It’s the same with licorice allsorts. I’ll eat any brand because it’s available, but Bassett’s is the gold standard and again, maybe a dollar more than Gustav’s. I also like British hard candy, because Americans don’t like currants as much as I do (delicious in pancakes, btw, and they’re on the raisin/Craisin/nuts/salad toppers aisle at the grocery store (in little Sunmaid boxes).

I’m not really in the mood for fall food right now, but I might experiment because fall pancakes are so delightful. I make mine with pumpkin spice or apple pie spice, cranberries, pumpkin seeds, and lots of salted butter. I don’t need syrup. I eat them as soon as they’re ready. I stand over the stove when I eat most of the time, because that’s how cooks do it. I don’t need to save up pancakes to serve to other people, so I just make a few and start cleaning up the kitchen. They don’t have to stay hot to be delicious with that much butter.

Last night, Joshua Weissman taught me how to make popcorn properly, and it’s not something I would have thought of. Fry your popcorn seeds in ghee, because the water in the butter will turn the popcorn soggy. You can make your own or buy it, but the outcome is the same.

When I’m not looking specifically for movie corn, I bring it down a notch. I put popcorn seeds in a paper bag and pop them in a microwave (you don’t need to buy the pre-made packets. Popcorn seeds and a kids’ lunch bag are sufficient). Then, I just spray Pam or butter-flavored Pam on it to get my spices to stick. So far, I like Old Bay and Tony Chachere’s best.

Slap Ya Mama is even better, but you have to be careful with it because heat builds, and if you don’t specifically make a choice to miss you lips, the pain of capsaicin on your face will remind you not to do it again.

Speaking of which, this is why when I’m making a very hot marininara, more of a Diablo sauce, I use penne. Less chance for the chili flake to drag on your lips, like with spaghetti.

You also have to be careful and wash the oil off your hands with Dawn before you go to the bathroom. At least one of Dana’s culinary school mates did it to himself.

The only time I like capsaicin on my skin is when my arthritis is acting up. It relieves the pain in my hands quite nicely.

Cooking is therapy, particularly marinades or dry rubs with lots of cayenne and no gloves. I would stick my hand into a vat of Carolina Reaper sauce if I could. It was the easiest and cheapest way to stay sane on the line, because your hands effectively “get high” and you can function again, because the pain and strain feels like it’s much further away.

It feels like the pain is floating on your skin, rather than of it.

My rheumatoid factor is normal, so I think I can blame the kitchen for this much pain. But it’s not narcotics bad. It’s Aleve bad. Nothing sharp, just persistent. I have found that I’d rather take ibuprofen because a fresh dose more often is a lot better than your pain medication running out and you’ve hit the limit.

Take the limit on Tylenol seriously. It would not be approved today due to liver function issues. So, I’m careful, but I’m always on something for pain.

My official diagnosis, and I’ll have to get a second opinion on this….. but I’m damned clever…. is that I’m 46 and YMMV (your mileage may vary for those who haven’t been on the net since ’99). In my very humble opinion, no more diagnosis is needed, because by this age, some things work. Some don’t. I have not broken down, I have merely failed to proceed.

And I just have to Rolls with it.

Ok, so speaking of Rolls Royce, the reason they’re so unreliable is that they were never meant to be driven the way Americans drive them. England is tiny. They don’t put clicks on their cars the way we put on miles. OF COURSE a car is going to last longer the fewer miles you put on it.

I feel like I have lived my life putting more clicks on me than I can handle at any one time, and I’m at a crossroads as to how to accomplish that. It was important to me to be a military dependent so that my family could travel together, not that a relationship is made valid by a stupid piece of paper I couldn’t have til 2001, and even that was only in Vermont.

Editor’s Note:

When Kathleen and I got married, we planned a whole trip around it. We went from DC to Woodstock to the first town over the Vermont border we could find. Why did we have to drive all the way from DC to Woodstock, you might ask? We had tickets for Rent on September 14th, 2001. By the time we left DC, there were no hotels for MILES AND MILES. We were driven by 9/11 to take the trip anyway, and just circumvent NYC because we needed our benefits so bad. We knew everything would be booked. We did not realize that Woodstock would be the first town we’d even find a room. It was 0400. People keep saying “never forget,” but living in Alexandria and hearing the plane hit the Pentagon, knowing that we had Broadway tickets in New York that would take years to redeem…. it was all too much, and yet, we kept going. It’s one of the true “nevertheless, she persisted” moments of my life.

To say that Kathleen and I didn’t want to marry each other and did, anyway is not accurate, I don’t think. I think September 11th scared us enough that we realized we couldn’t be without legal documentation now that it was available. We didn’t rush into it as much as 9/11 forced our hands. In that respect, neither of us did anything wrong. We were not fools rushing in (by and large). We were fucking terrified and we earned that right. We couldn’t even talk to our parents for three days, and when I asked my dad if he thought we’d be safer coming home, he said, “no. Stay where the fighter jets are. They could hit Houston next.” It doesn’t seem like a logical target until you start thinking about crippling the “all bidness.” If Pasadena and Deer Park were bombed, it would take years and years to recover.

It’s fun to shit on those areas because it’s full of rednecks that fit the white male Texas archetype to a T. Unless they’re being really offensive, I enjoy good ol’ boys because it is exactly like standing out by the fence with Hank Hill. I’m such a writer that it’s not about cars or construction or whatever traditionally male topic is being discussed. It’s learning about those things while watching how men interact. I can honestly say that the reason I am so proficient with Linux today is not because I enjoyed Linux. I mean, I did, but that was secondary to sitting and talking with Luke and Joe while they worked. Joe was the system administrator. Luke and I were the content creators.

That’s how this blog started, in a roundabout way. I learned about web design and blogging in those early days- “Clever Title Goes Here” premiered in 2001 or 2, now that I think of it.

When I thought of the reason I’d put my blog start in 2003, it’s because I blocked out 2001-2002. It’s not because Kathleen and I were a train wreck. It’s that I gave my coworkers my URL, and this one guy at XOM decided he was the authority on homosexuality because he goes to church and all that, and would be passive-aggressively irritating at work, then leave comments on my web site that I should have reported to HR, but what the fuck would they have done in that day and time?

It really fucked with my head, which is why I don’t talk about writing at work anymore unless I know the person really well. And even then, just the barest minimum to introduce my audience to them. For instance, I doubt that Jaz from Alert Logic cares that you know she called me “prehistoric,” and I said, “why do you think there are so many dinosaurs on my t-shirts?”

“T-Rex Hates Pull-Ups” is my favorite.

I also don’t think that my coworker Jesse told me I couldn’t have any more candy because “you haven’t blinked since you got here.”

I hope that Aaron and Michael realize what soft spots I have for them, how we’ll always be connected because of our time together. Interestingly enough, Michael was Navy cryptography, so apparently personal and professional intelligence is a recurring theme in my life. 😉

It’s good to have a constant that’s so interesting, because people that write really good spy fiction have often been spies themselves. It’s not just John le Carré. There are lots of spies who choose to make their livings as a writer after they get out. For instance, Jonna Mendez and Tracy Walder write non-fiction. Alma Katsu and Ian Fleming are the general go-to in popular fiction. le Carré is not for beginners.

Again, reading le Carré is about actively wanting to know a TOM CLANCY AMOUNT about intelligence. I’ve said that before, and it makes Tom Clancy fans laugh. They know he’s going to be accurate down to a right and left wing nut. He’s like the Tolkien of DoD, and I have found that applies to le Carré as well. However, to me that’s adrenaline. For some people, it’s tangents that stop the story from progressing.

I like it when authors I genuinely enjoy do things that make the page count longer. Doesn’t mean it’s on purpose, as if longer means better. I just mean that if I find a world I like, I tend to want to stay in it for a long time.

For instance, I really like this world we’ve got going on between us. It’s not just fun for me to write, it’s fun for me to read. I lose the sense that I’m me once time has passed. The more I start to see the person I was rather than the person I am, patterns emerge and I can see them more clearly. It’s what made me see that I was better off with raising friends to partners rather than spending all my time looking for that one perfect person who completes me. I honestly got tired of waiting, because every time I’ve tried to have that fairy tale with someone, it has been busted for one reason or another. Whether it was their fault or mine is irrelevant. I didn’t try to understand all this to place blame. I’ve changed over the last decade because I saw that the perfect dream was unattainable because of my neurodivergent mind, and “you’ve got to dance with them what brung you” (title of a Molly Ivins book).

I adjusted my life to fit me, rather than trying to fit into others’ expectations of me, because they were built on a lie. It is not a lie that I have been consciously telling to myself so much as the impression I give to others and gets reflected back to me. It’s that my disabilities are not real. I am perfectly able, physically, mentally, spiritually, ecumenically……… grammatically.

Editor’s Note:

I often think of this meme in my head…. “you’re a terrible writer.” “Ahhhh…. but you have heard of me.”

I think what I’ve learned through my relationship with Supergrover is twofold now. The first is that if you are moved by some entries and infuriated by others, I am doing my job correctly. I am recording real life as it is, not trying to curate anything so that we all look like people that should be admired.

I stab the knife into my own chest harder than anyone else’s, because I will tell you all day how flawed I am, how I’m subject to red mist rage, how that kind of meltdown leads me into burnout, etc. I am not putting myself over as a paragon of anything, and that’s one of the things I asked Bryn, FLAT OUT. “Am I painting other people more harshly than I paint myself?” I check with her on this a lot because I don’t want it to seem like I just “go after people.” She said, “no. If anything, I think you go overboard in telling everyone every way in which this could possibly be your fault.” I laughed, because it’s always funny when it’s true.

I will analyze a problem six ways from Sunday, trying to figure out what it is that drove both our motivations in an interaction, because when I am interested in someone, I am interested in not only their problems, but keeping our relationship healthy as well. So, I love those friends that come to me with their problems, but also acknowledge that they are capable of being a problem, because they’re not always convinced they’re right, and they know them. They’ve met.

And even if I don’t like the person that they’re talking about, I will give objective advice, because you know what divides a friendship? Telling someone they shouldn’t love someone else. For instance, if Dave is being a twat to Bryn, I wouldn’t tell her to leave him because that’s not my call…. if I did, she might get defensive and that would be counterproductive to my PowerPoint presentation on why she should break up with him.

I’m only using Bryn as an example. Replace Dave with Michael and it’s how I feel about Supergrover as well. It’s not my job to make their calls for them, just to support them in whatever they do. And in fact, in the 10 years that I’ve loved Supergrover, I’ve realized that the most devastating news I could hear is if Michael didn’t want to be married anymore. I think they’re rock solid, I’m just saying that even though I was sorry I couldn’t be her everything, that didn’t make me stop wanting her to find him.

That’s the thing you learn about polyamory that you don’t know until it happens to you. When your definition of love stretches to include red and yellow strings, all the jealousy stops and you begin to enjoy hearing your partner’s stories with their other partners. One of the things that I did with both Kathleen and Dana that stopped us from really growing as a couple is that I both lived and worked with them. I am not making a case for poly here. I am making the case that when we spent that much time together, we didn’t really have any differing experiences with which to converse. A lot of conversations were repetitive because so were our days.

There are ways to fix it if you’re mono, the repetitiveness, but I find that I’m happier when Zac says something like “let me tell you about this cool thing I did.” I want him to be happy in his other relationships, and to console him if they end. It’s the same with Bryn. They both have the capacity to be whomever they want to be, because I’m not going anywhere.

All I ask them to respect is that this is my slice of life, and they do- graciously I might add, because the three of us do manage it. They don’t have editorial control over anything, but I do discuss boundaries on what I can and can’t publish. My rule with every relationship is not to report hearsay. So, conversations between Zac and I are valid. Conversations between Zac and his partners are private, because I wasn’t there.

I only want to write about the ways in which our lives overlap, and hope that everyone knows that when a relationship is painful to me, I’ll say so. But I also won’t let that stand as we progress back together. I am not attacking anyone if you take everything as a tapestry, all the weaving of my own opinions as to how life is treating me….. and how I’m treating it. It’s how I make people come alive- I chart day to day and then everything looks different. My entries from five years ago are not the entries I write now. Not even close.

That’s because in real life, everyone contracts and expands depending on their self-esteem. Mixing your self-esteem and someone else’s opinion is a toxic mess. It deregulates your emotions to an enormous degree. I’ve made that mistake several times in my life, and I think that’s what’s different about me now. My self-esteem doesn’t go up and down every time someone talks to me. If someone doesn’t care what I think, I definitely don’t return the favor. But I’ll remember everything about the interactions between us that I both loved and hated.

That’s how you fall in love with a writer. They don’t remember dates, but they remember how the air smelled the first time they met you. How a picture struck them just right. How a smile becomes a lifetime. They can portray you as you; they can make you laugh, scream, and cry in a way that no other person can because they’re not just your lover or your friend, but your favorite book as well.

It is said that the two worst days in a person’s life are when someone starts writing about them…………. and the moment one realizes they’ve stopped. I know this is true because people will be angry as SHIT at me, and because they only want me to paint them as angels, swear they’ll never speak to me again. Then, a few years later, they’ll be mad that I used to write so beautifully about them, and why don’t I write about them anymore? This comes with absolutely no recognition of the fact that they emotionally destroyed me the last time I did, so why would I be eager to repeat the experience?

I wouldn’t be so connected with Supergrover if the relationship hadn’t been necessary to both our mental health. That there’s a reason I didn’t just block her and move on my merry way as if nothing had happened. But her refusal to talk about any of that is not my problem, because I’ve offered. That’s all I can do.

She doesn’t come off in my blog entries like a villain, or at least, I hope that’s not what you pick up. The truth is that people have problems, and I only own half. I am constantly trying to figure out how much I am responsible for a problem, not trying to cast blame on someone else. I am deciding what is mine and what is yours, and it comes across as judgmental because it is. First of all, I think like a judge. I am trying to balance everything, not trying to guilt people. I am trying to find out the facts to be able to make a decision, and yet it comes across as an attack even though I am extraordinarily precise with language.

My pet peeve is “you made me.” I have never made anyone do anything in the history of their lives. Therefore, I make a conscious effort to say “this is how your words made me feel,” because that is casting judgment on how they’re treating me in the moment, not who they are as a human being. Weighing facts, not people’s worth.

I’m a line cook. Therefore, lots of my friends have been mentally ill or substance addicted, and/or have been to jail. I’ve found more in common with them than I’ve ever had in common with someone who does everything right. A person’s value is not kept in holding them to the worst mistake they’ve ever made.

I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. The sinners are much more fun.