We Will Come, Because We Love Our Girl

July 21, 2023July 23, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dear Michael,

I wish I’d thought to write this letter a long time ago, because I have things to say to you that should have come from me years ago. You know everything I didn’t. Just more than I can possibly take in. It was a shitty hand to be dealt for both of us, because here’s the thing…. the woman we love didn’t let us bond, so we couldn’t talk to each other about the ways we could support her. I wonder all the time what it would have been like had I been your wing man long ago, because I would have. I would have cheered you on from the beginning. All the things I never knew cost me, and you should know it. We both know how it feels.

She should have let us feel each other out and then claim our corners to regroup. It would never have come together in one hour. We both would have had to learn to manage the other’s feelings and not get frightened of them, because we both know they’re large.

We should have been allowed to make room for each other, and I was stuck in the bathroom. I hope we’re both sorry we never sat down at your table and just served every dish we’d created over ~~eight~~ 10 years. If you were me, you would have traded those two for a lifetime and you fucking know it.

We should have been allowed to bond because we didn’t have a full house and wouldn’t until all parties saw all the cards. I would have dealt you a hand if you’d been allowed.

What I know for sure is that that we all would have won and rotated hands. What I know to be even more certain is that you and I would remember every loss and celebrate every victory until we were dead.

If you’re the man I know she’d choose, I know you’d move heaven and earth just to stand next to her. If you didn’t turn out to be that man, God have mercy on your soul for this life and every lifetime after. My feelings are just as feral as hers and I will find you.

My only job in this whole equation would have been to allow you to be the best husband you knew how to be, because I wanted to be you and I’m just not capable for many reasons. Neither is she. That doesn’t mean that my protective nature went away when she said it should. She may be her daddy’s little girl, but not the fuck in my presence. I said that about her EA. But her EA was me.

It was my role to be “The Girl Whisperer,” and we never got that chance. So here is an itemized list of things you’ll do if you love her:

If you can’t cry when she does, you’re not paying attention. She doesn’t generally cry, so by the time you get to that point with her, she has no myelin on her nerves and she’s working practically blind.
She loves levity because of it. It preserves her armor for too long until she’s desperately needing help because she hasn’t asked for it. You are going to have to fight her on accepting love every day, and if your game isn’t sharp, her life will pass you by because you’re not really taking it in.
If men do not talk to her first, they will overfocus on her beauty and undermine her smarts. If you have never seen her with someone who has underestimated her and taken in its enormity, you are missing out on the best part of her. When you realize that you are missing out, course correct immediately. Your story is not more important. Her story is only more important right now.
If you give up, you will never see what delayed gratification looks like, and it is immense. You cannot take it in. She will see your sacrifice, I promise. She sees it too much and it weighs on her. I am walking away because I did not want to cause those swings of emotion in her. I didn’t need her to think about me while she was busy. Neither do you, but don’t go too long. One resentful feeling can be put away. Years of them can’t without resolution.
When she doesn’t have time, she doesn’t take time. Do everything you can to lower the volume on television channels in her mind. You can’t turn them all off, but you can make your signal more pure. I hear she likes well-written letters.
If you write something beautiful for her, she will keep it forever. Even if everything ever written between us has been put into the trash, she’ll be able to quote her favorite lines from memory. This is not a humblebrag. This is acknowledging sometimes a piece of notebook paper and a pen end up being more expensive in value than a day at a spa.
She is also a writer. If you can’t reach her through talking, switch mediums.
Dark begets dark. Make sure she knows she’s an absolute diamond every second of every day, and make sure she knows she’s of the purest color, cut, clarity, and brilliance. That’s because she won’t tell herself, and her inner monologue keeps her from seeing how beautiful she really is.
I will never get over this loss, and you won’t either if it happens. Make her your first priority because you can’t not. You will not be able to afford those consequences, and I assure you from the wisdom of my experience.
Everything I write has a thread of her running through it, and if you were me, they’d be mostly about her. It’s not because I’m not capable of doing my own thing. It’s because my story isn’t more important right now. It will be more important later. I had to choose which story was worth telling. Look at me and tell me it’s mine. I dare you.
Because she’s a boss, she’s going to remembered for her professional accomplishments. I hope you’ll come here to read about her emotional accomplishments, and know that they are much more important than anything anyone else will ever read, and only we know it. We’re the ones that love her for who she is. We will remember all the things other people never knew.
She uses ellipses to an enormous degree. It’s your job to find out where the trail goes.
Sometimes, that trail leads to me. Being apart is injuring all three of us.
It is not lost on me that I can move on, but if you ever do it’s going to be a straight up problem. I’m glad she knows you well enough to know that I am not projecting jack shit. You’re a rock and I fucking love you for it. You have no idea. Just none.
Make sure that you’re capable of telling when she’s in hell, especially when it’s your fault. Most of the time it will be. That’s the hand we’ve been dealt.
In moments when it gets difficult, remember that her love will overtake you with a forest fire’s intensity. Remember everything you love about her in order to keep the flame in your mind and not the ash.
She thinks she needs less help than she does. You’re going to be stuck in a fight to let her love you, so sharpen your weapons.

I have never wanted anything but Kings full over Aces for you. I would have reached out. I would have been a better person if she’d let me grow into that role. I would have trusted you to drive, and just slept in the car.

There are so many more bullet points, but I couldn’t go any longer without expressing all the things you never knew, either.

There are so many things we could have shared. I will leave it up to you to decide what I mean because that’s exactly why I need you…………………. on some days more than I need her. It’s just that you have the Google Calendar and I have a yellow string.

That yellow string is now yours if you want it. I just wanted to offer because that’s all I was ever trying to do. If our relationship was going to get healthy, it had to be the three of us, with a relationship that allowed for more as I accepted it from the universe.

You’re the coauthor of her story, I just wrote it down.

Always and as you wish,

Leslie

Let’s Think About Breakfast

July 21, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What foods would you like to make?

Because Dana and I had a brunch gig for years, we made a lot of breakfast at home. It’s the thing we knew how to cook the most quickly and efficiently. We were also auditioning recipes for the restaurant. The most fun I ever had off the clock was picking my own chesterberries, because it made me feel like a real chef. They weren’t even for the restaurant, but they were by the time we got back from our little “pick your own” road trip. I still have a cute picture from that day, but I don’t want to post it without asking and I don’t want to ask. So, know that chesterberries are a cross between a berry and a grape, and in some applications (I know this is Oregon heresy), better than marionberries. I look forward to your letters.

I started out with simple syrup (1:1 sugar to water) and added the berries. I let everything cook for a while so that it became a thick, smooth compote. I must have added at least a pinch of cinnamon, but I don’t remember putting in anything else because even cinnamon is too much for some berries. You literally have to know their personalities as well as you know your coworkers. The point was to make the chesterberries sweet without adding anything that would cover up their natural undertones.

I know I used it for stuffed French Toast. If I had it to do over, I would have made chesterberry Croque Monsieurs. That’s because I already know it’s traditionally served with raspberry jelly and making anything more “Oregonian” is a big hit.

If you cannot see how much I love food, I spent half a day picking berries for myself and donated them to the restaurant at the end. I didn’t even ask to be reimbursed for them, and it’s not even because it would have been a whole other thing. It’s because I was thinking about work when I wasn’t there to an ENORMOUS degree. What I found is that I could cook every dish a thousand times without blinking, which gave me the confidence to have an opinion. There was no executive chef. If I want to make hazelnut pancakes, go for it.

I think the most adventurous I ever got was pineapple thyme stuffed French toast, but not because that’s the most adventurous thing I can do. It’s that in a restaurant, you can try whatever you want. That doesn’t mean someone else is going to agree and pay money for it. The pineapple thyme worked, but I did not have the luxury of making just anything avant garde.

For instance, my chili in Oregon is never as hot as I make it here.

Also, anything can become breakfast if you put eggs on it:

The aforementioned chili
Cheese pizza
veggies and kale/spring mix/spinach/etc. sauted with sesame oil and hit with rice wine vinegar to finish.
Rice, beans, salsa, and cheese
Cheese pizza
- Tthere are more, but this one will blow your mind so I have to say it twice. It tastes the best putting them raw on a frozen pizza and letting them bake together. It just mellows the egg out because caramelization is key.)

Therefore, I do not go out of my way to make breakfast, because I don’t really do anything to make it special. I don’t separate out what I will and will not eat into times of day. What makes me a pro to everyone else is coming downstairs in the morning and seeing me flip my eggs like a boss. Everyone can tell the difference between a home cook and a pro by how much fear they have that veggies will go everywhere.

That’s partially because it will go everywhere when you miss and most people are too scared to make a mess. They’re too scared to suck until they don’t. If I miss, it’s a two minute cleanup job because I’ve done it so many times on the line and had my ass beaten for not working clean that I could give a shit who’s watching at home. I can do all the things I used to do in a pro kitchen and actually enjoy it because no one is telling me I’m terrible at it.

By the way, this is no indication of how good I am. Some people think I’m great. Some people think I’m terrible. It’s just that the people who think I’m great know nothing and the people who think I’m terrible were kind enough to make me as much better as I could handle. No one was trying to make me feel bad. It was like private lessons in voice or trumpet. It’s isolating to a sandbox so when you get on stage, everything is perfect.

If you want to get good at flipping eggs, you’ll need way more butter than you think. Flipping eggs is not for people who think butter is the devil. Even margarine doesn’t have the same properties. Hell, even olive oil sucks at this particular application.

If you want to get really good, take out your egg pan and try to flip a piece of bread. Getting really good sometimes requires buying multiple pounds of veggies you won’t use, either. You cannot learn how to cut a carrot in a day. In a pro kitchen, you can’t learn to cut any veggie in a day. It’s not that it’s hard, it’s just that it won’t look natural until you can make an entire pan of something and it all looks the same.

Carrots and apples are my favorite, because as Chef taught me, always find an edge. Turn the vegetable so that the most mass is always touching the cutting board. It makes julienne and batonet so much easier. If you’re wondering, learning to julienne/batonet an apple and carrot were for spicy cole slaw. It was a particularly unsweet Granny Smith. I had to practice that shit for weeks, because of my lack of 3D vision. It affects the way my knife comes down.

Therefore, I’m a speed demon at home because I don’t have to perfect anything. It’s only me. I still treat myself like I’m in the kitchen, just not like I’m constantly going to get fired, because I’m the boss and fuck her, she’s a bitch.

By the way, when I stopped thinking all my opinions were like that, my life got better *FAST.*

I am well and truly fucked in terms of technique, and if I married another chef/pro cook, that’ll be why. Together, we have a complete education and I’ll miss that part of being married to Dana forever.

It’s something I’ll seek out in a partner, because if I don’t have it, I know enough to teach it. I don’t care if someone’s interest is cooking or not. They’ll know how to feed us by themselves if it kills me, because my worst nightmare is feeding someone until I die because “I’m the pro.”

I don’t care if my husband has made his past wives eat shit because they thought they were so important. Remember who I am in the kitchen and submit, or you will not last very long. If being with me is important to you, you will learn to cook. It’s that simple.

You can treat me like a know-nothing asshole or you can treat it as lessons from a truly great chef who taught me every day, and that isn’t limited to one person. Dana is not more important than the Johns, Drew, or Knives. It’s just that Dana was with me for the most meals both served at at home. We started making brunch based on the very idea that because we worked well at home, we’d work well at work. This was absolutely true except when Mommy and Daddy were fighting, and you can take a guess as to who was whom on those days, because it was never a one way street. However, if the conversation was only about the food and didn’t move goalposts, I was wrong. Period. End of story. I didn’t spend time and money at culinary school. She did. She earned those fucking blue stripes and I heard about it to the point that I cannot watch Julie & Julia anymore without sobbing through the scene where Julia is cutting onions.

When we’re talking about “Mommy and Daddy fighting,” we’re talking about less than 4% of the time. And who cares about the other 97%….. 😉

And if Dana had been honest with herself, she would have realized that we needed to pack up and move to DC for all sorts of reasons, because she didn’t think about who I am and what I do, either. She thought working and playing on the Internet was invalid, and I’m a fucking blogger. She was never going to see me as valid, and she was never going to truly see what I’d gotten myself into, or she did and didn’t want to play. Either way, she knows and it’s just as bad as she thought it would play out because the Internet relationship didn’t listen to me and what I do.

I hope she feels relief that I actually said, “Dana wasn’t right, but she wasn’t wrong, either.” I hope for two things. The first is eventually feeling peace that I did the right thing. The second is that my beautiful girl didn’t get screwed over by me (for that particular issue) and I wish I could take away that pain. Not being able to is a massive regret, and now I am either so far down the list that I’m not worth addressing, or I fell off. I won’t know it for years, and I might not know it, ever. She has truly gone into the wind at my own invitation, which was warranted. She cannot come back until she gets herself together, because she couldn’t learn to sous. She’s a boss. She couldn’t generate her own light to compensate for the lack of light from above (God, Ani is brilliant). She couldn’t learn how to bend and sway like all same-sex relationships no matter who they are to each other. She flat out learned to love me, worried for me, protected me, all the things. What she could not do is let me do those things for her and didn’t see that as a problem. It showed me exactly who she thought I was.

I also, if I could have a third thing, I wish she would realize that it’s not just me that gave up someone fantastic. She truly fucked up, because we could have had something. It wasn’t what I thought it could or would be, but it’s so solid you could build a house on it. I watch videos on DIY, and I know what it takes to make a foundation. The concrete is now cured.

Now I’m overexplaining why I don’t have private lessons anymore and why I feel bad about it. DC might have changed both our lives in concrete ways, but we’ll never know that, either.

I didn’t choose the wrong relationship, we chose to move to the wrong ass city.

And that’s why I started doubting all my decisions. I lost True North and I paid for it.

I just never got change.

We’re Trapped and We Should Lean on Each Other

July 20, 2023July 20, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking about relationships with men a lot lately, because the one I have with Zac is the gold standard now. This is because in terms of men who know how to be emotionally available to women without losing masculinity, watching him a master class. I am picturing him having a very busy day and hoping this makes him smile and relax for a minute.

This is because Zac is everything I want to be, and I’m not sure he even knows it. I am quietly learning to accept that I’m nonbinary and pansexual not because of anything but wanting to make sure the horsepower thrills me before I buy the whole car. Alternatively, I want someone I can grow with, so that the shell stays pristine in my mind because I was there when they started looking at cherry pickers.

I’m not going to change my pronouns, because gender expression means nothing to me. People say all kinds of things to get my attention and it’s always the tone of voice that matters. What I mean is that I see such a difference in gender with the way my mind presents in stream-of-conscious thought. I was raised to be a preacher’s kid, and that is an acting job. What other people do not know is that if you are born into a family with a public facing parent, you have been accepted to a company to which you never applied. People deal with this in different ways. I deal with it by being a wallflower in person and Anthony Bourdain here.

When I say I’m trying to be Anthony Bourdain, I mean it. I have taken on his writing style because it’s useful, and I do that with every writing voice I need. When I write about the kitchen, I need his authority, because we are roughly the same level. I am not treating him as Anthony Bourdain, star of Food Network, Travel Channel, and CNN. I am treating him as my boss who is like every boss I’ve ever had. I know him. We’ve met. Here’s what Anthony would tell you if he was here.

I am so proud of Leslie I can’t breathe because she had the balls to dress down a chef when he put knives in her sink.

That’s because he knows that he is fallible, possibly more than everyone else the way that doctors who acknowledge their humanity will tell you that you actually don’t want a shot from them, they’re terrible at it because they don’t do it all day. You want an ER nurse.

Bourdain was not a great chef, and I don’t know that because I’ve judged him on his food and talent. I know that because he told me that in Kitchen Confidential. He told me that he was a journeyman line cook who rose through the ranks to become chef, and that resonated with me because it said to me that Anthony didn’t have anything I didn’t.

I am awed by his humanity, and that is what makes him divine.

The relationship I have with Anthony in my head is very much like any of my Internet relationships except the possibility of meeting on the ground was cut short by an enormous amount of time. What I do know is that we would instantly bond. It wouldn’t take a drink. That’s because I’m already in Anthony’s tribe….. a tribe that would have both of us.

Relating to guys on that level is just what I do. If we’re in the same tribe, we bond and it’s on like a house on fire. When I bond with men who are in relationships, I become “The Girl Whisperer,” and I don’t do anything but let them talk it out. They know what they want. They just don’t have the clarity to see it.

Alternatively, here’s something hilarious. Lesbians act like men and they fucking hate it. They write it off as us being militant and angry, but never at the fact that we are matching style and structure. Some of thinking that lesbians are angry means they can dish but they can’t take it. They’ll start to feel things they can’t handle because no one has ever taught them to feel anything because of our childhood socializations. When they start to feel things they can’t handle, that’s when the rage starts.

When your protector mode runs up against mine, everyone else is going to see some shit.

Nowhere is this more evident than a lesbian and her father in law. Her father doesn’t think I can take care of shit, and he will tell me that daily in thought, word, and deed even after 25 years. The best I’ve ever gotten from any girlfriend’s parents is mild annoyance at my existence. Whenever I tried to change that pattern, it ranged from “you’re the girl that made my daughter gay” to “you don’t have the right to an opinion here because I’m her father and I don’t understand lesbians so I’m just going to have to assume that I’m responsible for her until she dies.” Fathers don’t even assume daughters can take care of themselves, so why would they think I am capable of doing something his daughter isn’t? The truth is that we do have trouble taking care of ourselves because the system isn’t built for us. Even if laws have changed, attitudes haven’t…… and if we act mean about it, that’s our problem. We should have just laid there and thought of England.

So, as a writer, I never believed that I could take care of anyone until I got some kind of deal going, and I was realistic enough to believe that I needed to support myself if I wanted to be a blogger. It has just taken an enormous amount of time to be able to figure out how I can do that, because eating and writing are equally important as much as I might think they’re not. My ire does not lie with writers who are kidding themselves. Sometimes people do go off on a pipe dream. My problem is that when creatives say they’re willing to work for peanuts so they have time to do something else, that’s not seen as valid because I’m supposed to be accumulating wealth every second of every day.

I have an idea big enough to attract comic book artists, movie directors, and other writers. In the right hands, it’s worth millions and I know what I have. If I take my focus off of it, I need to sell the idea. But then I face having my idea executed badly. I want to be free to be there for the whole process. To write the book and see if readers like it. To accept a movie deal if it is offered. To make my friends last forever as their fictional versions. They don’t think of that when it’s just a blog. But they’ll damn sure know if they were in something like Black Panther.

My job is to believe they could be….. and it affects my relationship with men to an enormous degree. I’m not the dog they need to kick, so I teach them pretty quick not to come up in my yard unless they’re willing to let me hold the leash.

With Zac, I just get to be myself, and we both trade off holding Oliver’s leash when we’re on the same hike.

That is the Question

July 20, 2023July 24, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dogs or cats?

It’s an eternal debate over whether dogs or cats are the best pets. Bryn and I would say that dogs rule because we both know how to handle them, she’s just a professional and I’m picking up what she’s putting down. Here’s the difference between us. Bryn has enough space to get a dog and I don’t. Bryn has the time and money for a dog that I don’t. I would get a cat not based because that’s the pet I like most, but because that’s a pet I could easily take care of and maintain their well being. In order to get a pet, you have to know what kind of owner you are, and not bet against it.

The dog is not a catalyst for change, necessarily. If you aren’t prepared to care for a dog, you won’t. If you don’t want to walk them, you’ll let them out in the backyard. A dog’s life is not being holed up in your house for weeks or days with fifteen minute increments on the yard.

Don’t treat your dog like a gym membership hoping to get motivated. There are entire empty clubs downtown based on people maintaining them financially without ever walking in.

Extrapolate.

You don’t have to know who a dog is and what they represent. They have to know that about you. They have to see consistency, and that’s the biggest reason you don’t get a dog trying to start a new habit. The dog will not change you, but you’ll change it.

Zac reminded me that if I ever get another dog, it can’t be big. That’s because I like to hike, and I need to be able to carry my dog if they get hurt. I think it would be wise for me at 125 pounds not to pick a Great Dane. I also do not want something too small, because they generally can’t handle hiking.

So, picking out a dog for me would be a careful, careful decision. Definitely a mutt to avoid injury in the first place through the cunning use of shitty genetics. The dog I’m picturing in my mind is somewhere between an Italian Greyhound/Miniature Doberman Pinscher and a Boston Terrier. I’m thinking IG/minpin for height, Boston Terrier for weight limit. I would still need to lift weights consistently before I could carry that size dog a half mile, but it probably wouldn’t take long considering if my dog was hurt I’d be freaking out too bad to work on anything but full on adrenaline.

The problem runs out when the car is a half mile away and your adrenaline has run out six trees ago.

At home, you cannot let your dog get away with anything even once. They are not you. They do not reason the same way. There is no higher functioning. People get frustrated with training dogs to an enormous degree because it doesn’t work…. and it doesn’t work because the owners just will not get with the program.

With the little dogs, it just gets worse. Whether I own a Great Dane or a Yorkie, I’m going to train them exactly the same way. Little dogs are allowed to be crass and unrefined because they generally aren’t threatened with three cups of terror. Doesn’t mean the dog is happy and knows its place.

Knowing your place is a big damn deal in dog training. Owners get into the trap of making their dog protect them all the time because they don’t see that’s what the dog is doing. If you cater to your dog’s needs, it will go apeshit when it realizes it is alpha dog because the people who said they’d take care of them are actually puppies and they’re responsible for everything. They’ll do anything to get your attention, and this behavior comes out in different ways.

It’s never the dog’s fault. The question should always be “why would a pet choose me?” If you love dogs, but you have the capacity to take care of a goldfish, don’t lie to yourself and think it’ll change.

The pet is not the issue here, Dude.

Dog owners are also insufferable people sometimes, and this plays out on walks. You’ll see dogs unleashed because entitled dog owners are so goddamn sure that their dog isn’t the problem. You are asking for trouble. You don’t know what’s going to happen when your dog meets mine, and you’re not strong enough emotionally to handle a situation when our dogs fight. I can tell by the tone of someone’s voice when they speak commands. If I don’t feel a need to snap to attention, they sure as hell won’t.

I’m tired of going to people’s houses where they’re unfamiliar and so are their pets. Entry is an assault on my senses, and it would have been made so much easier if the dogs knew to chill out when the doorbell rang. People know that a Mastiff jumping on you isn’t cool. They could give a shit whether their purse dog likes you or not. If a purse dog shows aggression, it’s written off as little and cute. Meanwhile, dogs are generally aggressive when they’re scared and don’t know what’s going on.

When you don’t train your small dog, you are not helping it. Full stop. If it does not have a big dog’s sense of hierarchy in the pack, it will become a problem fast. That’s because the dogs aren’t the problem children here. You haven’t established enough dominance that your dog can relax in your presence. Your dog is a train wreck because you are.

There’s no deviation of this pattern ever. If something is wrong with your dog’s behavior, 100% you’re the problem. Dogs are the best in the world at teaching you how to be a better human, but you have to learn their language in order to hear.

TMI?

July 19, 2023 ~ one4paws ~ 2 Comments

Hi, this is Bryn. I know, I just jumped in here and started writing without introducing myself. As a person who struggles mightily with self-worth, you may have to ask pointed questions to learn more, but if you ask, and I feel like you care, I’ll tell you anything. I’m an open book if you’ve earned it.

I used to just be an open book. Unfortunately for me though, that meant that I spent all my time living other people’s lives and versions of myself, instead of living my own life. Now that I’m a grown ass woman (don’t tell the others!) and have had many conversations with Leslie, I’m beginning to believe that I’m allowed to have my own opinion and if people don’t like it, they are welcome to come have an adult conversation about it, or they are welcome to fuck right off. I don’t have a lot of in-between on that anymore. Too many people have tricked me into believe their lies, but again, I must out myself on culpability. That’s tricky though because I feel strongly that the believer isn’t the culprit the liar is. However, when “I love you” begins to feel and sound like a lie and I don’t say anything about it, that’s where I become part of the problem. When I teach you how to treat me, and I am in a season of self-hatred, then chances are, the ways I am teaching you to love me aren’t going to be healthy or sustainable. I am (finally) beginning to believe that I am allowed to take up space, to make noise in the presence of others, that the ability to meld into any crowd is as much a trauma response as walking so quietly in my own house that I frighten people because they didn’t hear me coming down the hall.

It’s still such a process though, because so much of my trauma lives physiologically inside my body. Here’s an example; You know how when a bird flies away in fright, it often evacuates its bowel? Well, one of the fun ways my trauma shows up in my body is that whenever I need to take a shit and have that feeling, then my stomach butterflies go crazy and my heart starts to race, because my body, it thinks that because we have to shit, we’re probably also being hunted by a lion…in my fenced in yard, in my quiet little Christian town, with my 120lb guard dog next to me. It doesn’t matter what is happening outside my body, if inside my body it thinks that the entire cast of Jungle book is on it’s way and humans are a valid food source. So, in order to a)not shit myself on the spot and b)stave off the imminent panic attack, this leads to conversations (often out loud) I have with my body, saying things like, “Yes body, we need to shit, that’s what happens when we feed ourselves appropriately. I feel you body and I will look for danger, but when I don’t find it, maybe we can let the heart go back to normal?” This fun body byplay happens in reverse too! Say I’m needing to run to the store for one thing, I know exactly where it is in the store and everything. Just contemplating going to the store is enough to make my belly rumble and my butthole twitch. I’ll go try to get in the car, and my body will say “Mmmm maybe we should shit first, so that we can run faster when we’re being pursued by the grocery store hunters.” So I’ll go to the restroom and take a whatever my body wants to evacuate. Then I get back in the car and get to the store, and sometimes my body hits me again, before I even park, and sometimes she waits until I’m inside and on the other side of the store from the restroom, but inevitably I’m going to the toilet at the store, despite having just done so 10 minutes before at my own house. If I’m having a really bad time, and my anxiety is in full swing, it could be 2-6 more trips to the toilet. This is only one reason that I hate going to the store.

I’ve pulled into parking lots and just noped right back out again because just looking at the number of people and cars almost made me shit myself in my car.

Don’t even get me started on food. I’ve had some complicated relationships, but my relationship with food is still the most complex one in my life. When I start to go to therapy again, I’ll definitely be having that conversation tout sweet. What I do know, is that I love food. I love cooking it, preparing it for other people and having the opportunity to be creative in such a fulfilling way. Did you see what I did there? I’m hilarious, watch out.

So it turns out I may just ramble about myself when given the opportunity. This is new to me since I have been so used to taking up as little space and being as perfect as possible to be sure I earn love. What I hear about this site though, is that I can just be me and love me for me and write whatever I want (with my own cavate that it’s true, since the title of the site matters to me) and I don’t need to worry about whether you love me or not.

Facts are, if I don’t love me, I will never believe anyone else can either. Trust me, I checked, it’s true.

Whose time is it anyway?

July 19, 2023 ~ one4paws ~ 3 Comments

Daily writing prompt

Which activities make you lose track of time?

View all responses

Sometimes my time sensing mind is like a goldfish and every 10 seconds something new has my attention. Other times it’s on hyper focus mode and nothing can drag me from whatever is captivating me. Sometimes my brain is just too loud to know that time even exists, and I need a nap and maybe I’ll be human when I wake up.

In general, though, having done so much work where each task takes approximately 5-10-15 etc minutes, I can usually set an internal timer and am generally spot on as to how much time has passed.

Now, I have noticed that, for me, there are places that have their own time fields. Like the barn or the river. When I am in those places, the timing of the outside world no longer matters, minutes no longer denote the passing of our lives, but gentle calm breaths and slow deliberate movements take over. I can be absorbed into the peace of my activity. Places that have their own times are places that call you to become fully present. When you’re working with horses for example. Your plan is to just go on a simple trail ride, from your own barn on your own property. Even if you know how long your trail is and how long it may take you to walk that trail on your own feet, you cannot assume that doing that trail on horseback will have the same yields. Horses, well they’re wild animals with their own minds. So planning that trip with your best equine pal is gonna add some time cause first you have to get them ready. You gotta brush them and check their feet and get all their tack on. Sometimes this is a straightforward endeavor and sometimes Ol’ Ginger has a rock stuck in her hoof and is having a real bad day and tries to smash you against the wall of her stall each time you pick up any of her feet (of which there are 4). So now you were fixin to go on a relaxing trail ride and you’re making progress towards your goal but you’re also sweating and swearing and bruised from your friend trying to crush you with her whole body. It’s not my fault you can’t stay out of the gravel Ginger! Now all the rest of her clothes have to go on and you also know that in order to get that cinch tight enough that ol’ Ging can’t slide you off on a tree on the first corner, you’re gonna have to walk her around the pasture for 15 minutes, and gradually tightening that cinch up. Ging is all dressed up, you’ve got your lunch and beverages in your saddle bags and are now ready to head out. Going from the barn to the trail head is easy as pie but then there’s the creek to cross. You and Ginger both know she is able to cross the creek but each time she sees it she has to remember her abilities and you’re the one who has to remind her. She decides today she isn’t afraid of the creek but she is afraid of the bridge so as long as you go around the bridge instead of over, you’re both in good shape. And thus your ride begins, and knowing you’ve set aside the whole day to go on this adventure you and Ginger ride off into the woods to relax and deepen your bond with eachother and Mother Nature.

Similarly with the river or the ocean, the destination is known, but the journey and experience are what really matter and if existing in nature isn’t a time we should let our existence be timeless then I don’t know when it should.

People have told me so many times in my life how patient I am. When I have been working with children or monkeys, or dogs or horses, the list goes on.. For me, in those moments, it didn’t feel like patience, it felt like pressance.

The time I am spending with my dog, me standing calmly still and making soothing noises while she is overly excitedly trying to engage that other dog walking by some of that is patience, the patience to relase any judgement I have of myself or am percieving in others because my dogs is making ‘a scene’. But most of it for me is presence, because if I am there with her, while she’s too excited about that other dog, I can sense the moment when her brain has space to listen to me again and I can call her back and reward her. Then our bond and trust is that much stronger because I was patient with myself and present with her. It’s the same with other animals, including human primates. If we can have patience and empathy with ourselves, we don’t project our terrifying stories onto others. And that leaves space for understanding and growth.

Time doesn’t really exist anyway, so I may as well focus mine on things that do make me lose track of it, because then, I will know I am present and doing something I enjoy so much that I don’t even remember the rest of the world has a clock.

Proving I Know Jack, My Fictional Antihero

July 19, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a hard truth. I didn’t say that Jack’s dad wasn’t Clark. In the real world, it very much could have been. To ignore that is heinous. I was pursued by my great uncle, and I know he did harm to others. It was not Foster, to be clear. If Foster had known, there wouldn’t be the other uncle. He would have protected me, and I know it like I know the back of my hand.

If you descend into madness enough to hurt a child, neither one of you will ever come back. Hurting children creates the same reaction in any degree. The spectrum is large. However, adults are fallible. They often don’t see what the adult is doing to their child, and fuck any training, they’ve memorized how to beat it.

They have also taught said child how to beat it, thus introducing the possibility that when they’re grown, they’ll have the power to do it to someone else because life is so unfair. This is not true of people who walk in light, but no one tells you how hard it is. How hard you’ll have to dig deep to pull a trigger out. Again, recovery doesn’t look like sunshine and rainbows. It means crying in the shower for 45 minutes while you decide what to do. It means isolating so you have room to breathe, feeling cut off and relieved all at the same time. It looks like thinking about very difficult things, and it takes stamina to get through a fourth of it.

You are learning to carry your own emotional weight so that you can filter everything through your trauma reflexes without reacting. You will know that you have made progress when you feel that trigger and it no longer hurts.

But feeling it until you don’t isn’t for pussies.

If you’re an empath fixer/pleaser, that looks like work. We feel all emotions physically. All of them. If you are distressed, we are. If you are sad, we are. If you are on top of the moon, we just want to go with you. This is because INFJ friends are relentless about healing other people. We all do it. We are pastors, social workers, and freeloading lazy assholes until we’re Brandon Sanderson.

My trauma reflexes often dam that up, but it also doesn’t invalidate what I said about me. It just takes me longer to get there because I have to recover from bodily shock. When someone wants to go toe to toe with me, I’m for it. But not until we’ve both gotten some distance from the problem. If I tell you I’m out for now, I mean it. It doesn’t mean I hate you and we’re done. It means that I need some space because I don’t want my rage to go off. I do not want to take my illness out on you. To ignore that is unwise, because I’m a wordsmith and make it pretty impossible not to remember your favorite lines. Alternatively, when I manage to avoid reacting, I am great at discussing boundaries. If my friends think that I’m pushing, they need to take a hard look at what I actually said and believe it. I’m not playing games, I don’t have the time or the want. I don’t make shit up. Especially if you want to know why I think something, I’ll go back to what you said and cite it.

It’s not to “throw something in your face,” it’s to say “here’s the reference.” All abused kids have some form of this, because they’ve probably been told they’re lying. Therefore, everything after that becomes “I’m telling the truth” and also being human and lying to put a protective arm over your face until you can stand up for your truth.

Jack and I are the same person, and we don’t even know each other yet. Again, it’s not because I’m like him in terms of what happened to him, but how all children react. If this is you, get help immediately. You don’t know what you’re doing around you, because either you’re the abuser or the enabler in every relationship in your life because you were too goddamned little to know the difference between that cycle and something clean.

If you don’t learn to recognize it, being the abuser or the enabler will be your only story, and yours is the story that sticks.

Let’s Try Fiction: Character Study

July 19, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m just going to let my mind wander. None of the people or situations are real. SVU Rules.

Jack sits up in the middle of the night, and realizes his bed is wet. He is too old to be doing this, and he knows it. He’s been out of training pants for a long time, and his eyes betray his years. He heaves a pregnant sigh and gathers up his bedclothes. It’s happening again, and he knows why. It’s the monster in his head and the ghost out to get him. It’s the memory of having been told secrets too hard for him, even with an ancient soul. He knows that monsters aren’t fictional, even if he can’t admit it.

Jack walks downstairs to the laundry and dumps in everything. He looks at the clock. It’s 5:00 AM. He might as well start the coffee. He knows it will keep his mother from complaining if she wakes up to the smell. Keeping his mother under wraps has been his job since he was born. He knows the cycle will never end. Coffee and gin for the rest of his life.

He sighs again.

Since no one else drinks coffee, he only makes four cups. He takes care to level his tablespoons and measure the water. Jack thinks to himself that he should probably learn to cook because then he could be a TV star, and then dismisses that idea because he knows you have to like girls to do that.

This is the level at which Jack’s mind operates at nine years old. He knows who he is, he knows he is male, and he knows he is queer. He also knows that if he treats his mother with love and never displeases her, his life gets better. His dad is in jail. Has been for a long time. He lives in the shadows, and not because he wants to be there.

This is also the way he thinks all day about everything. It never stops. Sometimes he talks to himself about himself. The rest of the time he talks to himself about how to make things better for everyone else. He can do that because people leave him alone to an enormous degree. He is not being raised, he is raising himself….. and he is self aware.

Everything in his life is a nebulous gray, because it hinges on someone else’s schedule and desires. He notices when people don’t want to be near him, and doesn’t care. He’s his own best company.

But. There are complications.

Jack knows he cannot let his secret out, and you will not even know it by the end of this story. This story is about physical and emotional reactions to trauma, and how they play out. Jack is an amalgamation of the process it takes for humans to become monsters from the victim’s point of view. He thought it was healthy until the first wet dream. He’s nine. He’ll cling to men who aren’t him for decades hoping to recreate that experience, turning healthy relationships into trash until they step out of the situation and do the work. But you can’t accept your fate, and will actively self-sabotage if it looks too clean. You’ll doubt yourself forever, unable to recognize beauty for what it is………… because there’s always a catch, and sometimes it’s an obstacle you put there yourself.

To an extent, abusers don’t know what they’re doing. They know they’re fucking you up in the moment, but they never in a million years guess how long recovery takes. Jack will face therapy every week of his life and take medication chronically because his reality broke a few years ago.

But what about when you can’t take medication because your family has forbidden it? Jack longs to be bigger and stronger. His parents won’t let him be that, but his abuser still does. Clark has a stranglehold on Jack, and will until he gets bored. Then, he’ll conveniently move.

Jack’s behaviors are set. They’re completely different than they were, and no one has noticed, he doesn’t feel appreciated unless Clark is there. Clark is Jack’s person. He won’t betray him for anything in the world. It doesn’t take much to betray Clark, so Jack’s days are numbered. At this point, he doesn’t know what hell awaits him as he’s expected to move on from this as if nothing happened. He tries to be invisible because if he talks Clark will go away. He can’t stand him, and he’s trapped with him. He won’t realize until much later that getting his body to react was planned. He won’t realize how much weight he was carrying. He won’t realize the enormous work it will take to shed it and will not be able to function until it’s resolved. Even then, things that Clark did or said will trigger Jack in an instant.

No one noticed when his night terrors started. No one noticed when his grades dropped. No one noticed whether he gained or lost weight. No one looked at the stoned, frightened look he gave everyone else.

His parents are suspect, and need to stay uninformed or the fun stuff will stop. He hates himself that he loves it.

As he sits, he broods and gets frustrated. Being frustrated always leads to a white hot rage as if one is fainting.

Being able to let out his demons appropriately is going to be a battle. If he turns out to be a regular person, he’ll have wins and losses like everyone else. Even as a regular person, he’ll be a sociopath to one degree or another. That’s because you don’t have to be born with psychopathic tendencies. The reality break will do it for you quite efficiently. Jack will become a criminal or the greatest American who ever lived, and he’ll decide in the car.

Life is what happens when Jack is supposed to be doing something else.

He’s supposed to be doing his homework. He’s supposed to be doing his chores. He’s supposed to be watching his sister. He’s supposed to be a lot of things. But he doesn’t live on the ground anymore.

When someone has complete control, it’s an adrenaline-filled high that fuels thoughts of them while they’re not there. It increases their control while not having to do a damn thing.

Clark perpetuated a cycle, and so will Jack. But he doesn’t know those implications, and it’s not even because I’m the author and he isn’t. It’s that all abused children are The Timeless Child. None of them have all of these symptoms, but if you’ve read up, they’re accurate for someone.

Jack doesn’t know what story he’s going to tell, because someone took control of the pen, violently at first. Then, it was love. He said he was sorry. If he trashes this relationship, he’ll have no one else. So even though he was a dickhead, he’s forgiven over and over because Jack can’t even breathe when he thinks of Clark. A child thinks that it will get better for far longer than they should because they have absolutely no experience with relationships. They don’t even know many adults besides their parents….. the people Clark told not to tell.

In every adult conflict in his life, there will be echoes of this. If he can keep one secret, he’ll keep them all.

That’s what will make him a world leader or a white nationalist. Just because you have to cut off your emotions to protect yourself doesn’t mean that you can’t learn to deal. It means that your first reaction will always be wrong. Your programming before your reality. Until you change the disk, you’ll react the same way.

Jesus saves.

In the Right Context, All of Them

July 19, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Which activities make you lose track of time?

I have an extreme case of time blindness.

Some of it’s little, like letting my characters play while I’m cooking so that movements are in quick bursts as I react to how things sound/smell.

Some of it’s big, like not having the fight I needed to have with Supergrover eight years ago and knowing when to give up. She knew she couldn’t give up then, and so did I. I am more sorry than she’ll ever know that I decided she was worth keeping around. This is because her words lifted me up, and also dropped me from maximum height for the most damage.

That’s because my mind doesn’t track like hers, and she invalidated it. I was so in “don’t displease her” mode that I couldn’t look at her and say, “look. You forgave me, but nothing has changed since we declared we were forgiven. I still feel exactly the same way, and you’re deaf.” She’ll take responsibility for making a mistake, but if there are consequences for me from her decisions, she’s proven time and again that she’s not capable of hearing me and how dare I even have the audacity to ask her questions? She cut off her nose to spite her face, and I am enjoying thinking about how that’s not working out for her the way she might have thought, and not for malice. It’s that nothing on this web site would have been published if I was talking to her and didn’t have to talk about her because conversation was a viable option.

But because she understands exactly none of that now (big fan and patron until I started doing the same thing to her that I do to everyone in my life, no exceptions unless they make shitty characters), she feels free to write me off with no regrets. However, she’s fully capable of passing regret onto me.

She couldn’t hear a problem and not have it echo deeply as if she was doing something irredeemable. I reacted the same way to her at times. It grew unhealthy, and when I tried to change the pattern, she let me have it.

We are both too goddamn arrogant in our daily lives, and that played into it, too. I was just willing to take off my armor with her, even though she’d gotten dressed a long time ago.

So, every day I walked bare skin through a mine field, praying they didn’t go off.

This repeated every day for eight years. Even when I was arrogant, I was an inch tall trying to make up for that fact. She’s such a part of me that she had no idea what it would do to me later in life if we bonded, because she wasn’t thinking about me and what I do.

Thinking about me and what I do is my entire problem with her. She thinks that she’s protecting me by not telling me anything, ever, and it leaves me in a fucking state of panic.

That’s due to the trauma bond screaming, I guess.

She is every bit as responsible for our story as I am, but it’s convenient to step around that. She stopped owning it years ago, and by that I mean she’d say one thing and do another. That’s fine unless you also don’t express why you’re doing something. Helping me to understand was never her priority, and she didn’t want to help me.

I didn’t notice when signal became noise, and by that I don’t like being noise for her when I was a huge signal. We both have responsibilities to each other and we just stopped negotiating them.

When I was sick, she knew I was going to be sick forever, and though I’d told her I had mental health issues in the beginning, she didn’t know how they’d present. I didn’t either. My problem lies not with what I did, because I know I made a mistake and I own it. Have apologized for it every single day since even if it wasn’t written down. My problem is that she forgave me, and I was so focused on forgiveness that I allowed for some very bad behavior because I thought I deserved it.

I didn’t hold her accountable to the words “I forgive you,” and treated myself as if I was the sole cause of all her issues from 2013 til a few months ago. The worst part is that I spent an enormous amount of time on self-discovery, self-reflection, healing, all that. It has made a difference to everyone but her. It’s just another way for her to say one thing and do another. If I’m angry, she’ll yell at me. If I quietly express displeasure, she’ll tell me she doesn’t have time for it and to go find new friends. I wish she’d known what kind of person she was before she put all her shit on me. I got well, and she acted the same. She thought she was such a big shot for keeping our relationship going because I was such a train wreck, as if I should have been so grateful.

I was, because I couldn’t see what she was doing. She kept me on a hook, and is now enjoying watching me twist in the wind as I struggle with questions we both should have had to answer. Her failure to show up probably comes from fear, and mine comes from having done it so often I’m bleeding emotionally without any support from her.

I can’t rely on her, because she’s just as much of a train wreck as all the other people I’m trying to attract as readers, because she doesn’t accept being human and fallible as valid. The only thing she understands is her own process, and everyone else is fucked up.

It’s not malicious. She’s the product of her experience. But I don’t have to live with it, either.

This friendship was an activity that made me lose way too much time, but I do not regret it. What I mean is that I wish I had realized that in her mind, I’d always be sick. There’d never come a time when my mental health was managed enough that I was capable of being her friend. But she couldn’t say that, so she engineered a relationship in which I’d feel so bad I’d quit.

It worked.

Your Blog Makes You Sound Like a Dick: Kitchen Edition

July 18, 2023July 18, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 41 Comments

Here’s how to run a kitchen, even at home. It’s what I would have taught my friends if they’d ever asked me to cook with them. Maybe Zac and Bryn are all I need in that arena, because they both actually like it.

Start with the basics. Those aren’t sugar, salt, acid, fat. It’s never stopping movement. Wash a dish while something else is cooking. Never wait for one thing to finish when you could be doing something else. Don’t lean when you can clean, and you’ll enjoy cooking much more. People who don’t enjoy cooking don’t have time to think about it, so they don’t think about ways to make it easier, either.

If you have time to lean, you have time to clean. Everything else is procrastination, and the dread of having to do dishes after dinner is miserable. Do all the kitchen dishes while you’re working so you only have to load plates into the dishwasher. You cannot soak a pan. Period. You can leave the stuff soft until you get back, but it will still be as hard to clean it later as it would have been had you not let it soak. If stuff sticks all the time, you’re not using enough oil and/or butter. The reason food is so caloric at a restaurant is that we don’t have time to cook and clean if we don’t have enough pans. If a sponge doesn’t work, get some steel wool. If you say you have nonstick pans, that’s on you. The problem with non-stick is that there’s no real way to get everything off without sucking the life out of the pan. I also need pans built for my height and weight. I am not going to flip a full paella, but I’ve done it and that’s why I don’t do it anymore.

You cannot replace the undertones of anything. Butter flavored Pam will not taste like putting butter in something, and not because the melody isn’t there. You’ve taken out all the chords. With beverages, sometimes you need to let them heat up or cool down, because the extreme temperature makes it where you can’t taste the full measure of the dish.

When you taste something, ask the dish what it needs. If you have added too much salt, add vinegar. If you have added too much salt, add starch. If you have added too much of anything, you can fix it by adding more volume. If I oversalt my mac and cheese, I’ll add veggies that have no seasoning at all. If a dish is too hot, add sugar and fat. If I want to eat hot peppers because my nose is stuffed up, I make the base with tomatoes, avocados, purple onions, and honey. That works with mango and pineapple, the most likely culprits in a habanero salsa. That’s because even different peppers are for different applications.

You might as well be interested, because you’re not going to feed yourself any other way without destroying your cost of living. Not paying attention to food matters. You know how we know you’re not paying attention? You are blind to what goes on in a professional kitchen and don’t have any compunction about telling us that. It’s never you, the customer, that has ever done anything wrong in the history of any dining experience. We are stupid, lazy, angry bastards who have no right to feel what we feel. Who the fuck are you to tell us that?

If you don’t acknowledge your humanity, you have made it known that you think you’re a deity. And we’ve noticed.

I can make all the mother sauces, but only two matter at home. You won’t really touch the rest (Yes, chef. I’ve made all of them.)

Bechamel is the base for all cheese sauces. You can make it any way you like, because it all starts the same. Heat up butter in the pan, and add your vegetables. For mac and cheese, I’ll use anything. Onions, garlic, celery, spring mix, etc. After the veggies are cooked, add some flour. I think it’s a one to one ratio, but it doesn’t matter. You’ll be able to tell when the food is getting more thick and you need to add milk. DO NOT add too much at once. Making the mother sauces the way I do it is like driving a stick shift car. Everything in balance. The sauce should thin out slightly. As it thickens, add more. You can substitute boxed cheese mix for flour if you need to, just add extra butter and keep the heat low so the cheese doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. Here’s also where you add your spices. Montreal Chicken Seasoning is good, so are Old Bay and Tony Chachere’s.

Once you’ve gotten the sauce to coat a spoon, add your cheese and stir. You don’t want to add the cheese until last because when it melts, it will make everything stick. Take it on and off the heat if you need to, because you want it to be hot enough to melt, but not hot enough to stick.

When in doubt, finish every dish with butter. Sauce will redeem anything. In short, relax.

Hollandaise and mayonnaise are exactly the same. Put three egg yolks in a bowl or blender and whisk. Add a tablespoon of acid. For Hollandaise, it’s always lemon. For mayonnaise, I’ll use anything just to try it, but I like olive oil and plain white vinegar (I would use apple cider vinegar if I was making a dressing for something sweet, and sesame oil for anything Asian. You can take any of these combinations and emulsify them. Plain, oil and vinegar is mayonnaise, lemon and butter are Hollandaise. If you say that you can’t do it, you haven’t done it 30 times while so hung over you couldn’t breathe. Anthony Bourdain and I have a deeply intimate relationship with Hollandaise being the smell of failure.

Bechamel is the white sauce used in Alfredo. Alfredo is just butter, flour, milk (whatever kind you want- I can make vegan bechamel just as easily). Just add parmesan. A good bechamel requires excellent ingredients. If your parm doesn’t cost $8-10, you’re going to think it’s kiddie food. See Olive Garden for details.

Most people get frustrated with cooking because they don’t have a professional palate and don’t know how to catch a mistake and correct it before service. That doesn’t come through anything but time. The way we get better so fast is making every dish a thousand times so that our ability to tweak is incredibly refined. It also allows us to understand what we haven’t tasted.

Really developing palate came through my sense of smell. I was a dishwasher. I smelled all the food once it was already mixed together. Ideas came to me that didn’t come to other people. I can taste food without having to eat it because I can analyze it like sheet music, no lie.

Nothing makes a cook boil like being at a party and someone saying the food is so good someone could cook professionally. I do not want to see their bullshit on my line fucking ever. Get out of my house unless you’re willing to do the work.

You absolutely do not want to start as a dishwasher. You absolutely do not know what it feels like on the brigade. You don’t want to know what it feels like to have to carry out the trash after your adrenaline has come down. You don’t see how fast we clean because we’re racing against our energy.

So, you cook at home and disrespect us. We could teach home cooks a thing or two, but there’s two good reasons why we don’t, and there’s a great big fuck you behind it because you’re making us walk a fine line.

When we offer to help, you say no. When you say yes, you criticize us because being a home cook and being a professional is like, the same. Bitch I earned this.

I earned it with blood, sweat, tears, and searing flesh and I don’t give a flying fuck if you think I’m a dick for saying so.

In terms of caring whether you respect me or not, I wrote this all in one shot and it took 15 minutes. Bite me. There’s your fucking resume and recipes.

This Feels Like Getting Right with the Lord

July 18, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What bothers you and why?

This is another entry that will just jump around, because a lot bothers me. I just talk about all that here so my friends don’t have to hear it. You’re the place I go when I’ve overfocused and they’re exhausted. 😉

My being bothered encompasses a range. It bothers me that I can’t work on my computer unless I built it from scratch, and it bothers me that Russia is trying to make Ukraine fold.

What bothers me about mental health issues is that I have to be vigilant about taking care of myself, because my brain chemicals will take an issue like the former and make it as big as the latter due to my own echo chamber. So, really it’s me that bothers me, most days. Here is an itemized list:

It bothers me as a writer that if I write about someone’s behavior, they will constantly overfocus on what I said and not how they behaved. If they’re mad I wrote something, they don’t think “Leslie’s hurt” and come running. Ever. They think I’m out to get them, when in reality I am explaining them to me. How do I know how to change gears if I don’t know how I acted? The not focusing on the part where I wrote down my behavior is where it gets tricky, because I stab the knife further into my own chest than I do others.’ They just don’t talk about it because it’s easier to believe that I am a monster. That’s why I’ve gotten rid of a team of people in my life. I realized that if they were going to treat my blog as a threat, they couldn’t have me as a friend anymore. Mostly to protect them, because obviously my writing is too much for them and I don’t have time to cater to everyone. I have tried, and it has failed.
It bothers me as a writer that people think we are lazy freeloading assholes until we’re Brandon Sanderson. You’re not a real writer until money is on the table. You don’t write movie scripts until a studio has paid you for one. You’re not a novelist until you’re on the Bestsellers List. It becomes clear very, very quickly that we are a no-value add if you don’t understand the creative process and devalue us in every conversation. You think you’re being helpful and you’re actually destroying our self esteem.
It bothers me that I don’t always know when my favorite foods are going to be discontinued and like anyone on the ADHD/Autism spectrum I’d like to be able to buy six cases of whatever before it happens. Sensory issues are real, and I try to avoid them in order not to be distracted. When I am not “in the zone,” I’ll eat anything you put in front of me because the food is my focus. In writer mode, I will tell you that it’s been six months and I’ve eaten a vegan ham and cheese sandwich, chips, and a banana for lunch every day. Before that, it was veggie hot dogs with vegan cream cheese and hot sauce designed to wake the dead. If you think this is weird, it’s not. Mark Zuckerberg and I are just the same archetype. He wears the same thing, so I bet he eats the same thing. Source? I also have three hoodies and good luck getting me out.
It bothers me that people should look at me like Mark, but they should also acknowledge that I am hugely emotionally intelligent because I am self aware. If you treat me like a problem child, you’ve missed out on the best part of what I can do. The way I think rubs off. You’ll learn to love yourself, mostly because in my writing I’ll remind you of it all the time. I don’t write about people’s shitty behavior because I’m out to get them. I’m writing it because that is what happened the way I perceived it.
It bothers me in any conflict when people expect me to behave the way a normal person would and hold me to those standards because I have never met a normal person……. and my personality type is only found in 9-15% of the population before the trauma and mental health issues start making me complicated. I have had it confirmed by people in all tones of voice that they have never met anyone like me. I am deep and frightening and intense in every way imaginable. Mostly because other people have so much armor that they’ve forgotten how it feels to emote deeply.
It bothers me that I may never find a partner because of it. I couldn’t even make a close and loving friendship work on that level. So now I think I belong more to the world, as writers often do. If I make my focus all of you, I am not focusing on my lack. I am focusing on an upward direction that will hopefully cast a wider net on making friends.
It bothers me that people don’t understand my Internet relationships. Most of it is that my personality is so rare that I don’t find many people like me to connect with locally and I process better when I’m typing. I get together in person a good majority of the time because other people aren’t writers and I’m good with it. It’s not that I don’t need conversation, I am just unlikely to remember that I need it.
It bothers me that being a writer and getting your work read are two different skills and I really only have the first. I don’t want to have to tell you to engage, and I want to earn enough money to eat. The struggle is real.
It bothers me that the world isn’t built for me. People say, “you weren’t born to fit in, you were born to stand out.” They think it’s a compliment when I feel disconnected and lonely most of the time.
It bothers me that I don’t have emotional fortitude in person because I am frustrated at my lack of being able to craft sentences on the fly, because people say they don’t like my writing and get frustrated with talking to me as well, because then I’m stammering and can’t get words out……. but I seem so self assured…… the medium is the message.
It bothers me that there’s so much noise and so little signal, and fighting through it is immense. What I have found is that the way I fight through it is not seen as valid to many people, because it’s not the way they would do it.
It bothers me that Supergrover and I have a concrete need to be in each other’s lives, that we should have collaborated the whole time because we can’t not….. and then we proceeded to destroy each other. It is devastating that it’s easy to love her from afar, and terrifying to be close because I cannot feel lost and confused that much of the time…. and when I express that, to have it ignored. I get it. She’s a big shot, and I’m not. Alternatively, there hasn’t been a problem smaller than me for eight years, and there never will be. I’m not a priority because I’m not on the list. We created a trauma bond, jacked it up to eleven, and then when I had a genuine need, she treated me as if I was just trying to cause trouble for her. That’s unacceptable. From the outside, it looks like I decided she was the one and moved here to be with her. That is frighteningly incorrect, but I cannot lay out my feelings about that except “other factors at play.” To let go of those reasons would cause hurt, and not even to her. When I said that I did move here because she was here, you don’t know what idea that was based on, either, and that didn’t have anything to do with me at all. I misspoke when I said that I did move here for her and I was tired of covering it up, that’s what I meant. I didn’t show up because I thought she’d change her mind, or I’d sit and wait. No, it was much, much more than that. I’m sure where her ire lies is that for her, my valid reasons felt like a game I was playing, because she invalidated my feelings. It will always bother me that we never took a time out and just called each other.
It bothers me that people are fine with internet communication right up until they aren’t and don’t change mediums. What sounds creepy in an e-mail sounds fine in a phone call because more of what goes into communication comes out. If you start with 7%, you’re going to spiral downward into much less than that.
I was a product of my illness, and she forgot my personality, even after the fight was over. It made me think that she thought my illness was bigger than my personality by saying the opposite and never opening back up.
It bothers me that I understand why people pull back, but if I write about it hurting, that’s an attempt to provoke someone and not a genuine need to communicate with other people because I can’t rely on them. This is an all call issue. I don’t write about you because you’re you. I write about you to understand how I interacted with you. Sometimes, that encompasses our behavior. Only when you haven’t stepped all over my boundaries will I allow for reconciliation. Provoking people is the last thing on my mind, because my ruminations about them aren’t directed. I have a bigger fanbase in India than I do in the United States.
It bothers me that I cannot thank India enough. I did not expect to be more popular overseas, and if I was going to pick one, I don’t think it would have been Asia due to cultural slang. It’s mind blowing. Thank you.

Talking About Boundaries

July 17, 2023July 17, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My friendship needs are different than most people. I’m bipolar and have chronic PTSD. I also have ADHD. It means that I get frustrated when things aren’t clear, so when people aren’t, I overfocus and they’re exhausted. I am not trying to hurt them, I am asking for more information. If you do not understand that, then I am going to be a straight up problem for you and I do not want to be fixed. I don’t have some stereotype to fill, because I’ve never been that for anything except maybe Arthur. Most people don’t know that ADHD presents like Asperger’s sometimes. Mine doesn’t come across verbally, but it does when I allow myself to write into and out of a problem. If no one will tell me how to understand, I will find out on my own. Whether it is right or wrong is of no consequence, because no one else is responsible for what I understand. It just helps if they’re willing to do the little bit of extra work it takes to communicate. Exhaustion leaves me in the same state of dread as he is here:

This is the first time I’ve ever gotten my own Arthur meme. It’s not that someone made it just or me, it’s that I’ve never related to anything so much.

Because I process online, I’ve noticed a beautiful symbiosis between David Sedaris and me. My style and structor is borrowed from him, and his style and structure seems borrowed from me in his new book, “Happy Go Lucky.” He takes a hard, hard, look at himself and his family and every word resonated.

He also talked craft in a way that I felt he was in the room with me. He said that when you’re writing these essays, you’re not writing about your friends. They’re the characters. You’re writing about their characters and not them.

He talked about my frustration with blowback, because it happens more than you think. “I don’t want you to write about me at all.” “Ok.” “It seems like you don’t like me because you don’t write about me.” This can go ad nauseam for years. This is especially true of people who also struggle with mental health issues because they don’t like being criticized and love being praised.

It comes across as that you don’t care you’re teaching us how to love ourselves, and in turn, how to love you. It is the mystery of faith, to be able to hold in your mind that you are capable of great decisions even after you’ve cratered your life over and over because of the very conflict I’ve mentioned. People don’t want to do that kind of work, especially bosses. We’re not aware of our interactions with you because we’re focused on other things.

We want to know how the world works, and stifling that is very difficult. No system is built for it. We just have to feel anxious or stop buying in. A lot of people lose their lives because the system for dealing with mental health is so poor in this part of the world, specifically our country (and thank God not my state).

Being ADHD means that through hyperfocus and medication, depending on whether it’s natural or drug induced, you lose your appetite until your body screams.

Nothing gets easier, and yet we pretend it does.

Edited to add that the prompt for all this was someone breaking a boundary. “Michael,” the guy I was chatting with, deactivated his Facebook account and started flirting with me. I said, “what I need you to realize is that when you deactivate your account, I don’t think about you at all.” It’s not because I’m an asshole, it’s that he’s already done it once, then when he came back, he called me “baby girl.” Those are trigger words for me because they do not belong to him. I told him that if he called me baby girl again, I would block him. So, when it happened a second time, I blocked him. If I tell you that’s a sore spot, believe it. I am made of nails right now and I need to be because I am not settling for fine.

If lightning can’t strike again, it doesn’t even matter.

Half a Line Bouncing Around

July 17, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to do another list because the dot reminds me to change topics.
What I have learned about emotionally unavailable people is that so much gets left unsaid, because they won’t address the issue and talk about it so that there is resolution of the conflict and/or dissolution of the relationship. Relationships rarely end peacefully, which is why I try so hard to be vulnerable. It’s not so that my pain matters more than someone else’s. It’s that if I explain fully how I feel, conflict won’t pop up. You understand intimately where I’m coming from, but you might not agree. The hard part is how to handle disagreement. It’s like learning to bench press. That’s because negative emotions feel like weight. You cannot be a wimp to carry it. The analogy would be that it’s not easy to carry an infant, either. You may not be a jock, but it helps if you can consistently lift 50 pounds.
Develop emotional strength to avoid anger, because what happens with cortisol is that it rushes in so fast you think you can’t breathe. Anger is powerful. There is no need for it, but conflict is also avoidable and people are fallible. Think long and hard about starting a conflict, because you never know what’s in anyone’s past and when you feel about them deeply, both your love and your anger are enormous.
Anger 100% leads to regret. Always. If you want to spend your life regretting what you said, go for it, but if you’re going to be that way, don’t expect people to stay no matter how bad it gets. Think to yourself “who am I to tell someone how they feel?” If you love them, you say “I gave you the right to have an opinion because I love you.” Your job is to believe whatever comes next. Actions tell a different story than words a lot of the time and exactly none of it depends on what you understand. You can’t have empathy for a story that’s never been told.
You will always come across as a selfish jackass to someone who can’t listen to your needs and respond. Notice when that happens early in a relationship no matter what kind it is. Even when you are a child, you are entitled to certain boundaries. It drives me up the wall when parents ask their kids to hug people, because sure as shit if they’re being abused they won’t want to and too many parents are way too fucking blind.
If you are going to have a child, before you do it you need to ask a very important question. How capable am I of being emotionally available to a child? Maybe if you’re an addict or have trouble expressing how you feel, use more birth control. When you know that about yourself and acknowledge it, you can make the decision to heal yourself before you start trying………. or not. But you won’t hold your injury over your child’s head, either way. Your child is not equipped to hear all your shit, and they will if it’s all about you.
Here’s a tip for working with teenagers (source? volunteer youth pastor): treat them as if they’re all grumpy old men- especially the popular kids, because that’s a mask they’re using to cover their anxiety. They are not the role models, they’re struggling like everyone else and they don’t know it, because they won’t talk about it to anyone, much less each other. They are not trying to fight with you, they are isolating to protect their energy. Recognize that it is the most emotionally vulnerable they’re ever going to be in their lives because too much comes at them way too fast. Treat them as such. Respect the process, even if you don’t understand it. Know when to be a helicopter and when to leave them the fuck alone.
“The hardest part of teaching is remembering what it was like not to know.” -Wayne Borum
We are all but broken children who need each other, trying to pretend that we don’t. This doesn’t show itself in just one way. We don’t allow ourselves to believe that others’ thoughts and feelings are as valid as they are. Like not thinking a monster level of neighborhood improvement came out of pain and anguish.
I think I just wrote another line I’m going to ponder for a while.
Maybe lists don’t remind me to change topics. Respect the process, even if you don’t understand it.

Truth According to Me

July 17, 2023July 17, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.

The button you need is not where you can see it (ever). I can’t find the button for “ordered list,” so I will not notice if there are nine or a hundred. Good luck. God bless.
Conservative churches and kitchens are exactly the same. Men are allowed to be great, while the women take care of everyone. Churchs love Marthas. They are not so sure about Mary. That is because Mary doesn’t fit the mold of a cis woman, so no one really understands why she wants to be taught by the men……… except Jesus.
When you’re growing up, you’re taught that adults are making it up as they go along. Yet, not many of us internalize that and have crippling fear of not being enough. Yes, you are.
Android is better than iOS and I will die on that hill.
I have never been so satisfied with being single. I think I finally taught me that I’m enough just by breathing, and I’ve had so many moments of thinking I’m not that it’s a welcome relief.
I figured out today that because Supergrover loves fairy tales, I wanted to give her one of her own. I realized that I could indeed make it up, but that would require more emotional strength than I will ever have in three lifetimes, and it wouldn’t be a fairy tale to her. I know for certain it would sell, and it would be important work if I could do us justice. I just can’t see that happy ending and be happy with it, knowing it’s false. She also doesn’t realize the fairy tale she gave me. It will last for eternity, and it’s all right here. If it is important to me, I am dead certain it will be important to others. When I think about our story, I’m not thinking of this century. I’m thinking, “what would I want people to remember about us from my perspective?” What I want people to remember is that I know for sure we are perfect in our imperfections, and to write the story we have. It is enough. I am not foolish enough to believe it will matter to her within a year or two. But what about 20? Even our story begins with “once upon a time.” Just because the happily ever after didn’t turn out to be mutual doesn’t mean it was time wasted. I am not mistaking the part for the whole and I’m sorry if it looks that way from the outside. One day I hope she’ll smile and remember that I think she’s the most amazing person in the entire universe, because she means the universe to me.
The fact that I’m no longer struggling with what to do in any of my relationships is definitely making me feel lighter. If I am not networking, I am prone to the pain Olympics of trying to exorcise demons. Writing comes out angry in the moment, but when I’ve cooled down I can see where I went wrong and correct. But when your only feedback is you, it gets problematic fast.
If you are white, you need a black friend. Stop with the “my black friend” bullshit, though. You don’t need someone you can CALL a friend while you congratulate yourself. Get in the shit. Listen hard. Take on some of their emotional burdens FOR ONCE, JFC. This is not about going up to a black person and saying, “I see that I have caused you pain. What can I do to help?” No. You make the commitment to be friends. It’s work, and it’s important. Probably the most important work you’ll ever do, because until you can see the United States from a minority’s perspective, you cannot see the United States.
I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before, but one of the most embarrassing conversations I’ve ever had was with a black friend who said she suffered from internalized racism. The reason it was embarrassing is that I’ve hated myself for being queer since I was nine. So relatable. But my dumb ass wasn’t thinking of enculturation, just “why would you hate yourself for your skin color?” OMG. Idiocy. The shitty tapes white people instilled in gay people were there long before they changed race to sexual orientation, because as one group becomes more acceptable, there are people who insist on replacing it with hating somebody else. By internalized racism, read “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison.
My favorite classic is Frankenstein, mostly because that’s the one I’ve most recently read. What I know to be true is that there’s never been a movie done well enough that I thought it was true to the book. That’s because there are so many more characters in the original work. If I had a second favorite, it would have to be Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because I felt like it was a blog. Stephen Daedulus and I are the same person. Where’s the lie? (I tried Ulysses and I made it to “the Sassenach requires his morning rashers.” That’s on like page 10. Can’t win ’em all, Joyce.)
There will never be a successful movie adaptation of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. We could get into it, but it’s impossible. However, I am far enough into it that the library of images it has given me is enormous. Even knowing what gravity’s rainbow is has helped me…. it’s the arc a bomb makes.
I know it to be true that I am a better typist than I thought I was, because I went into my settings on my iPad and turned off everything except predictive text. It doesn’t correct shit, because when Apple thinks it knows how to use English better than me, I get violently angry.
If Internet Relay Chat hadn’t been invented, I would not be a blogger today. Learning to touch type was the fastest way to make it where I could get my thoughts out, and I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t need to type fast to keep up in a conversation. Many, many, many A/S/L requests have gone into this blog. I am definitely sure what that says about me and glad that era is over so that only people who are my age even know what that means.
There is absolutely nothing a cracker cannot steal with enough time and dedication…. and I’ll be delighted if you think that’s a joke about white people. No, it’s that hackers are ethical, deconstructing code to improve it. Crackers are the ones that do injections into databases and try to take down firewalls. Oh, and by that definition, Anonymous is a group of hackers, because they’re not trying to break something. They’re trying to fix it, civil disobedience style. Generally how you view them is akin to how you view politics. If you’re a conservative, you hate them. If you’re a liberal, you love them.
Every day I tell myself that I’m going to write something beautiful, and every day I do. But it’s not the entry I’ll find glorious. It will be half a line that is still bouncing around in my head months later.
One of the purposes of my blog is to remind people of Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message. Therefore, use the Internet carefully. If you think I am scolding you, I am coming from a place of having ignored it and these few months is how it worked out.
Cheese pizza is superior to toast in the mornings because either you can crack some eggs on top before you put it in the oven or heat it up in the microwave and cook the egg separately. I look forward to your letters.
In my opinion, Craig Ferguson is the best late night talk show host that has ever been given the job, because I would watch it every night like a religion even if he never had any guests. I can’t believe I didn’t think of him for my dinner party because I was obsessed with the show for years. YEARS. Proud member of the Robot Skeleton Army.
I know that my work gets better when people say, “hey, thanks for introducing me to your blog. I really enjoyed it.” That’s because for a moment, the tapes in my head that tell me no one’s going to like an entry stop.
I hit post as soon as I’m done so I can be a fan, too.

Adventure Time

July 16, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Are you seeking security or adventure?

I talk a lot of shit for someone who gets their groceries delivered so they can maintain isolation.

It’s stopping, though, because I feel stronger than I have in years. A lot of the last few months has been diving into the wreck so that now, I no longer feel those injuries. I haven’t made up with everyone, and that’s okay. I have tried my best, and all the other stuff isn’t my call.

I am thinking bigger these days because I’m exhausted. I have been told for years that I’m too much, so I’m going big or going home. I am sure that some people think it’s a mask to social climb, but what I have found is that if you want to be spectacular, stop hanging around people who don’t challenge you. I need to constantly up my game, and if there’s any justice in the world, karma will come to those who’ve wronged me and say to them that they lost something really spectacular. Whether that produces results or not is inconsequential. I’ve just noticed that more people will fawn over others when they’re popular than they will when they’re not. I wouldn’t be able to convince anyone I was a good writer if I didn’t believe it, and I shed a tear for Brandon Sanderson the first time I watched him on camera. That’s because he told me to keep going at a time when I was done. All the inspiration had leaked out.

A student asked him how he dealt with years of rejection and people saying he should get a real job. He said “I waited and got my moment. I was at a party and this guy asked me what I did. I told him I was a writer and he said, “oh, so you’re unemployed.” He said, “I hit the New York Times Bestsellers List last week.”

If you don’t start like me, you don’t turn into him.

Writing is a muscle. The longer you do it, the more your sentences are crafted. The only problem is that we don’t often see ourselves getting better and don’t recognize it. In my own opinion, I have made astounding progress because I’ve been in a writer’s room for 10 years. I am, therefore because of it.

Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

I am ready to go big or go home, not because I’m taking a shot. I have been quietly plugging away for 20 years, and the Internet has changed around me. Most people don’t like reading stuff that’s this long, which is why I think I’m more popular on WordPress than I am anywhere else. First of all, WP was designed by my brother in arms, Matt Mullenweg. We both went to PVA (he’s younger), we were both in the jazz department, both taught by the same person, and both still count those years as some of the best in our lives. There will never be another Doc, and I am humbled beyond belief that he entered my life when he did.

WordPress is also where writers hang out. Writers like to read. My blog is slowly but surely gaining a bigger audience through the subreddit, the Threads, the comments on Wil Wheaton’s page, etc. Every tiny bit helps, because the hardest part of being a writer is having to talk to people and get them interested in what you have to say. A writer wants to share their stories as long as nobody asks them about it….. while at the same time suffering the weight of crippling anxiety that our friends make worse. Daily.

Our imposter syndrome makes it impossible not to want positive feedback, but bound and determined not to receive it. When I told Supergrover that I thought she had more to say on a topic, she thought I was telling her she was a shitty writer. There are entries I have memorized.

We internalize all the shit people say to us and constantly battle not to say it to each other.

I’m starting to make writer friends by the dozen, and it’s making me happy that we can mutually stitch & bitch. I think it’s better that I’m a blogger and they’re novelists, because if they want to pick up blogging tricks, that’s a different style than fiction and I can pick things up from them. However, they don’t know what I’m working on. That’s just for The Six. I added one of my family members at my grandfather’s funeral. She offered me a place to stay and an office. That’s what I mean about friends who see where you’re going and want to help.

The best part is that she’s another person I can ask questions about Foster, because I have to get his personality down. We are going to be that character. He was a C/DIA helicopter pilot in ‘Nam, one of the settings for my alternate history. By “we,” because he’s my great uncle, I want him to be both of us. I make characters of my friends so that they’ll have something autographed on their shelf that reminds them how much I love them.

It would be a plus if it was such a good idea that it made money. The money doesn’t really matter, though. The fact that someone bought it sure does. You should see how apeshit authors go when they have even four purchases. It is another profession that is absolutely relentless.

Absolutely all of it is to prove the people in our lives who said we were lazy that we actually are worth something. Because no one respects a writer until they’re Brandon Sanderson.

You just have to hold on to the thought that this is not just an adventure…..

It is yours.