Being funny is so relative. There are just as many ways to be funny as there are to grieve; the possibilities are infinite. I can only talk about my life, and what being funny means to me.

When I was a little girl, I found that humor was my first reaction toward anything negative. The first time I remember this happening, I had gone with my parents to the movies in Daingerfield, Texas. In our group alone, there was a row of adults and a row of kids/teens. My dad came back from the concession stand and was trying to get into his place on “adult row.” In the process, he dropped an entire tub of movie popcorn with butter on my head. Without missing a beat, I turned around and grabbed all the popcorn that had fallen down my back and stuck it in my mouth. Everyone dissolved into laughter, and no one made fun of me.

Not too long after that, humor became my go-to mantra because I didn’t like the feeling of being threatened and feeling like I was going to cry all the time. See, I came out as gay when I was barely 14 years old, and I have always been extremely shy unless I’m playing the clown. I don’t want you to see the ways you’ve torn me down. I want to save that shit for home and I want you to see that you can’t fuck with me. Ever. Because you try, and all I’ll do is laugh. Keep going down the path of fuckupedness, and I will laugh twice as hard. I don’t want you to see me flinch, and I will do everything in my power to make that happen.

In those moments, I am incredibly funny, because I am going straight for the jugular laugh that makes you forget you were trying to make fun of me in the first place. Sometimes it works, and sometimes the people around you don’t share your sense of humor and instead of seeing your defense mechanisms, they see your inanity. They don’t know why they don’t want to get close, but they don’t. They don’t trust you. Something about you is fake.

OF COURSE IT IS! YOU’RE TRYING TO BE FUNNY!

I find that the moments in which I’m funny are often a cover-up for real emotion, and I haven’t figured out the balance in public for which Leslie they need me to be. How do I know that I can turn off the funny and trust that you will listen to me? This isn’t funny. It’s got real emotions in it. Are you going to run away because this story doesn’t have a punch line? The problem with being the joker is that sometimes people forget that you need them. To look six feet tall and bulletproof in the public eye is to give off signs that say “Do Not Feed.”

And they won’t.

So you turn inward, because you make yourself laugh. You make yourself think. And then you realize that you can only be so introspective before you decide you don’t like you anymore. Trust me on this one.

IT. WILL. HAPPEN.

The only thing you can do is keep vigil. When you make a horrendous joke that you thought would land, analyze why it didn’t work. Was it the timing or the subject matter? Did you say something inappropriate?

Because you’re going to keep needing to be funny, you just have to control it instead of letting it control you. Like I said earlier, I haven’t found that balance. But I’m watching me, just like you’re watching you.

Let’s compare notes. I’m pretty sure that I’m The Velveteen Asshole, instead of a real one. I can try and emote, but I’d rather not. I care more about what’s happening to you than I do about me because if I care that much about you, I don’t have to worry about me. I can just be funny.

See, it’s hilarious.

I worry about money a lot, but rightfully so. I don’t have much of it. However, I’m trying to take steps to address my worry so that I can have a little bit of clinical separation. I tend to get flooded out easily with my own finances, while I would happily work all day on someone else’s. It’s simple; I don’t have any emotional connection to other people’s money so I can be far less judgmental. I feel the same way about cleaning other people’s houses- I don’t have any emotional attachment to how the house got messy in the first place, so I can process it quicker.

Suze Orman advocates that your financial situation is dictated by the way you look at it, and I agree. But if you’re one of those people like me who get very anxious when looking at balance sheets, it helps to separate yourself from your emotions so that you can see your financial issues with clarity, and hopefully have enough courage to keep going. The end product is the relief of knowing where you are. Do you ever get that way? The stress of money causes you to skip looking at your balance because you know whatever’s in there is probably scary? I have enough life experience to tell you that knowing you have nothing and need to build your finances is much better than just wandering around in a flood of emotion that may or may not have anything to do with reality. Worry accrues so much faster than interest, doesn’t it?

Releasing the worry of not knowing where you are financially will allow you to build a relationship with your money. Do it, especially if you haven’t before. I bless my bank account that Dana and I will always have enough, that our needs will be met, and that someday, somehow, black will never become red again.

The blessings are hope, to build Dana and me into the people we want to become as our own financial stewards. I know where my priorities lie. I want to be in a position to be a philanthropist, because there are so many causes and too little money going toward them. I feel particularly strong about giving back to organizations that protect gay youth from violence. It is a goal to be able to think about blessing other people with money instead of worrying about my own.

Thinking about my financial dreams is free courage for whatever I want to do with my money. I hope it works the same way for you. That’s the thing about blessing your bank account. It frees you up to look for blessings from wherever they appear. Sometimes money is hell. Know that you are not alone, and it won’t always be this bad. You know. You saw it.

If you are really serious about comedy, I suggest starting with writing. Write exactly the way you talk, down to the inflection, because it will help you track timing. Timing is the difference between a good joke and a disaster. It is also the difference between a pretty good joke and causing someone to asphyxiate with laughter.

You know better than I do what kind of person you are. The reason I suggest that you start with comedic writing is that being on stage is so freaking difficult. I’ve never done five minutes at The Improv, but I’m an accomplished lay preacher, and it feels much the same. Even if you feel like your words are a gift to the masses and you are confident that what you’re about to say will ring true for your congregation, sometimes you get a little stage fright, anyway. If you’ve never had any experience being in front of a classroom or any kind of audience, you’re not ready to jump just yet. Being funny on stage doesn’t come from the jokes themselves, it comes from the way you work the crowd. If you know you don’t have those skills and you decide you want to do standup, practice on paper first.

That way, you have a chance to craft a joke out of something funny you said, because every joke tells a story regardless of length. You can’t just repeat what you said verbatim. You have to verbally set the scene so that the audience can not only hear what you’re saying, they can see it.

Spending time crafting your own jokes will also drive you away from the temptation to steal other comics’ work. You won’t have time, and it will seriously ice you from every comedian you’re trying to impress if they hear something another comic said before you. Too many people spend too much time trying to get noticed to have someone else get famous on their sweat. Listen to other people tell stories for styles that work, not the words themselves.

This leads to the most important thing about any kind of public speaking, but especially comedy. Find your rhythm. It has been proven that people remember words better if they’re set to a beat. Your voice is your music, so make it a song to go with your lyrics. Learn about dynamics, which words to accent and which ones to swallow as you move to the next. Standup comedy and storytelling are as mesmerizing as beats and hooks in rap if you can get the mood and tone just right.

Jim Gaffigan is a great example of this- he’s got a style and patois all his own. You remember his bits because his voice gets lodged in your brain. How many of you can’t hear him in your head singing the “Hot Pockets” jingle?

Another great example is Sam Kinison, who came up in Houston after being an evangelical pastor. He brought the dynamics of Southern gospel to comedy, and it worked for him. One of the funniest jokes he ever wrote, in my opinion, went something like this: “I don’t feel sorry for people starving in the desert. You’d think they’d be smart enough TO GO WHERE THE FOOD IS!” Memorable not because of what he said, but the way he said it.

Find your voice. No one wants to hear you doing your best Jim Gaffigan/Sam Kinison impression.

And finally, if you do nothing else, try to stick the landing.

 

I was tagged to do a blog meme on Stories! How exciting- my first one on this network.

1. Post these rules.
2. Post a photo of yourself and eleven random facts about you.
3. Answer the questions given to you in the tagger’s post.
4. Create eleven new questions and tag new people to answer them.
5. Go to their blog and/or Twitter and let them know they’ve been tagged.

Eleven Random Facts About Me

1. I was born at Mother Frances hospital in Tyler, Texas. Its claim to fame is an outstretched arms statue of Jesus that looks like he’s directing the traffic circle out front.
2. There are other people from Ireland whose last name is Lanagan, but they probably aren’t related to me. I forget the exact relation, but my ancestor was a sea captain during the cholera epidemic in Ireland and missed the whole thing. Just one of the lucky breaks that’s gotten me where I am today, I suppose. 🙂
3. I was a trumpet player all through junior high and high school. I can still play, but I’m nice, so I won’t.
4. There’s nothing I won’t eat once, and very few things I won’t eat twice. This is because I am gregarious about learning how to cook peasant food and elevate it to an art.
5. I am unemployed, but I have a donation box on my WordPress site and somehow I think that’s comparable.
6. My favorite t-shirt design in my CafePress store is “F*CK COMIC SANS!” in Comic Sans.
7. Years ago, I had a blog called “Clever Title Goes Here.” My one claim to fame is that Wil Wheaton left me a comment. My one claim to shame is that I don’t have it anymore.
8. I am married with cats, but no kids yet. As Rita Rudner once said, “we can’t decide whether we want to ruin our carpets, or our lives.” My wife is named Dana and someone needs to give her an award simply for agreeing to be married to me. I am a handful.
9. My favorite music is hip-hop, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s mainstream or underground. I live for the hook and the story. Easily the best story in hip-hop (in my humble opinion) is Eminem’s stark raving mad fan, Stan. I saw Talib Kweli a few months ago and I thought I was going to stop breathing. My love for hip-hop is real and it’s deep.
10. I love men’s fashion, and if I made enough money, I would spend hours upon hours shopping for clothes. They don’t even have to be for me, I love men’s fashion so much. If you ever need a present for your husband or boyfriend and you want it to be clothes, I’m the one you want with you. I have read every issue of GQ and Esquire for the last two years. People are weirded out sometimes that I like men’s clothes, but to me, the reason is obvious. Not all women look good in the colors that people want women to wear, and everyone looks good in colors like black, navy, grey, etc.
11. I have a goldfish tank. They’re all named Eric. It saves time.
    1. As a random bonus fact, Matt Smith is my Doctor. He is Eleven.

Questions from my Tagger:

1. Which out of the following two seasons do you prefer: Spring or Fall?
   1. I was born on September 10th, which may have something to do with it, but I prefer fall. I’m a Virgo, a natural busybee organizer that must have new pencils to start school even though she hasn’t started school in years.
2. If you could improve something about yourself, what would it be?
   1. I wish that I could just lighten up. I miss a lot of social cues because the ideas in my head are bigger than smalltalk and if I get lost in my head, it’s hard to find my way back.
3. What is your favorite movie of all time? (Yes, you have to pick just one.)
   1. Love Actually. If you can make it through Jamie’s wedding proposal without tears, you are a stronger person than me. I cry just about every time.
4. Who do you admire?
   1. I admire the millions and millions of people that get up every morning and make our world work. People that have pride in their jobs, especially garbage collectors and construction workers who are thanked very little but absolutely tantamount to our country’s success. No, I’m not running for anything. You’re welcome.
5. Do you have a best friend? If so, explain what you have in common and why this person is your best friend.
   1. I don’t have a best friend. Well, I did, but she’s my wife now, so the position has been vacant for some time.
6. Do you fear death?
   1. I do not fear corporeal death. I fear dying in obscurity without ever knowing what it feels like to get a million hits.
7. Are you in love?
   1. Desperately so. My wife is the love of my life, and I could not be who I am if she wasn’t who she is, either. Don’t make me talk about Dana too long, because I will choke up and cry all over my laptop. Sometimes people give you emotional gifts that are so big, you just can’t put them into words. Dana does stuff like that for me every single day.
8. If you were/are an actor, with whom would you most want to work with?
   1. I am not an actor, save for a few school and community plays. However, I enjoy the craft of writing scenes and acting very much. I think I would be best in a sketch comedy troupe, so I would most like to work with Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Lisa Kudrow, Margaret Cho, Kathy Griffin, etc. My absolute fall-over-and-die dream would be working in the writer’s room at either Saturday Night Live or South Park.
9. What is your ultimate goal in life?
   1. To be such a famous writer that people will know my name like they know Deepak Chopra or Wally Lamb or Toni Morrison- yes, those are all authors that have appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Coincidence? I think not. I want to be the one Oprah calls when she can’t think of a new book for the show. We’ll eat bonbons in our housecoats.
10. Has a movie ever made you cry? If so, list which one and why.
    1. It would be easier to list movies that don’t make me cry, like, I don’t know… I can’t think of a movie that wouldn’t make me cry in the right circumstances. Sometimes, things are just so sweet, even if it’s peeling someone’s eyelids with a knife to save someone you love. I’m deep like that.
11. Has a particular post on here WordPress ever touched you so deeply you felt the need to reach out to the author?
    1. I definitely want to share some blogger love, but to be honest, I’m just now starting up in the WP community. I have read little bits of a lot of things and very few all the way to the end. What I will say is that I’m grateful for all the bloggers that are willing to shed light on their dark places, because everyone knows they have them. Bloggers will talk about it.

Questions for the Tagees

1. Tell the story of how you got your name.
2. What is the most important relationship in your life?
3. I’m interested in food. Tell me about a food you didn’t like until you tried it X.
4. Do you have a favorite band that you’ve loved for a long time?
5. What was the first computer game you ever played?
6. Are you a geek? Are you Team Doctor Who, Team Star Trek, or Team Star Wars? Why? It’s ok to be all three, too.
7. Do you have favorite fonts for blog writing?
8. When you sit down to write, what’s around you? I’ll give you a for instance. I have a glass of water, a pack of gum, and several Jolly Ranchers. Do you prefer a desk, or do you sit anywhere with your laptop?
9. What do you do? I don’t mean for money. Your job doesn’t define you. Say you’re a financial analyst. If you want to talk about it, great, but I’m more interested in the financial analyst with an amazing green thumb.
10. If you have them, how did you make the decision to have children? If you don’t, do you plan to one day? Is it important to you?
11. I’ve often though I could be very comfortable as an expat in Baja. Do you have similar fantasies? Where would you live if you didn’t live in your home country?

Tag, you’re it!

1. Pete Armetta <http://petearmetta.com/>
2. Derek Maul <http://derekmaul.wordpress.com/>
3. Oh God, My Wife is German <http://ohgodmywifeisgerman.com/>
4. s. asher sund <http://sashersund.com/>
5. Confederacy of Spinsters <http://confederacyofspinsters.com/>

Last night, Dana and I were watching Doctor Who with our friend Matt, and all of the sudden, I knew I had a writing prompt. Everyone has those things for which they hold themselves responsible that damage them emotionally… You can release the anger and shame if you stop blaming yourself and start blaming the futures that never happened. Open yourself to the possibility that the path you took was just the one you chose at the time, and in that time and place, it made the most sense. It isn’t exactly that you made a mistake, it’s that you didn’t know what you didn’t know.

Sounds different, doesn’t it? The connotation of guilt lifts in a way that it hadn’t for me before. I could stop blaming myself for things that didn’t happen because I closed the door on them. I didn’t intentionally do anything to hurt anyone. I just made the best choice with the knowledge I had at the time.

Surely it is impossible to make the right decision without all the facts. But we in all of our beautiful humanness have a way of attaching ourselves to the things that never occurred in the first place and massaging them with worry. Understand that the things that could happen are infinite; there is no way that the mind is even capable of processing that much information in a moment’s notice. Additionally, processing outcomes is even harder when you stop to consider even one emotion, much less many.

The reaction I had to this realization freed me to look at my memories with stunning clarity. Mistakes aren’t mistakes when you look at them through the lens of being a fallible human being who closed the door on an infinite possibility because a decision was made, and not in a malicious way.

But it’s the malicious memories that haunt us the most, right? Those moments when our base selves coerce us into trouble because the dark side of ourselves demands to be fed. Our lizard brains tell us to make decisions that affect people negatively… maybe it’s because we’re trying to avoid pain… and in our darkest moments, hurting people just because we can- it feels so good sometimes, doesn’t it?

Do yourself a favor. When the urge to do something wrong hits you and you decide to go through with it (because we all have our dark sides whether we’ll talk about them or not), wait a few years until your perspective has changed and watch the scene over in your mind. Give yourself love and compassion because now you have a chance to look at what drove you to make that decision in the first place. Know that this in and of itself is healthy, and figuring out your own role in your own memories will give you the power to forgive.

You can, in a sense, be in a better place to acknowledge that something made you react poorly, and you can see all the futures that could have been had you not let your dark side come out. You can see that you were a total jerk in the moment, and you can tell yourself why. Knowing why you did what you did will encourage you to treat yourself with kindness, because you know you would forgive anyone else if they came to you with the same story, because it’s not that bad.

The sooner you can process your “dark side moments” and forgive yourself, the sooner you will be able to live in the moment, instead of berating yourself for the past.

There are so many things that I’ve picked up over the years that I wish had come to me years earlier. It would have saved me so much heartache, but at the same time, if I hadn’t gone through my experiences, I wouldn’t now be able to voice them unaccompanied. It is my hope that you’ll identify with this piece, and add your own pieces at the end. What do people need to know to get through life?

I wish someone had told me “not to surrender my loneliness so quickly” as I read by Hafiz as I turned 34. What a concept this would have been to me as a young person! So many people surrender their loneliness by always being in relationships, living alone but refusing to spend time at home, etc. Alone isn’t comfortable unless you make it so. Make space to be alone with your thoughts, not because it is easy but because it is hard. I hear President Kennedy’s booming voice in my head when I think it because it is so motivational. Of course the things that are most precious are also the things most hard-won. The pain of childbirth without medication is so horrendous (from what I’ve heard) that it’s got to be the main reason there are second children.

When you first start learning to be alone, it might feel like demons are slowly trying to eat their way out of your head… and by demons, I mean the things in your life that you regret. Every mistake, every malapropism, every time you’ve ever missed a social cue… it’s all there. Being alone is not about sitting with your demons, it’s about releasing them. Time by yourself is so unique, so precious, that you are squandering Mary Oliver’s “one wild and precious life” not to try it.

Remind yourself that you’ve been friends with yourself for as long as you’ve known you. You’ve built up more trust in your inner monologue than you have with anyone else. You should see what your running monologue has to say, and “talk back at it.” Everyone has those old tapes of horrible memories that run in their heads ad nauseum. Has it ever occurred to you that you can hit pause and examine what those videos are saying to you? Do you ever wonder if there’s anything that plays in your head that has nothing to do with your current reality? That if you stopped the tape and argued with it, you could, in a sense, put toothpaste back in a tube? If it helps you, get clinical. Think of yourself as the healer and your inner monologue as the patient. That way, you can look at your experiences without “flooding out.” I don’t know if this is really a thing, because I don’t have any letters behind my name, but I use it to mean emotions so overwhelming that you feel you have to run away from them… and then, you do. You become afraid of ever going to that dark place again. Dividing yourself in half and seeing yourself from the outside is the first step into the deep. Feel it out. If you can sustain looking at your memories long enough to watch them and pick one, you are well on your way to your first argument with yourself.

Fighting with yourself needs to be handled as lovingly as fighting with your partner. Just like fighting with your partner is a natural part of life, so is fighting with yourself. There are so many memories that happened while you were alone. Only you can solve that mystery. The miracle is that it doesn’t have to all be done at once. The important part is to keep trying to understand yourself, because if you don’t, you won’t understand anyone else, either.

Understanding yourself is a great way to walk in the world. It’s less difficult for other people to hurt you because you have an understanding of your lines in the movie. You know your motivations, and when you think about how people interact with you, you might start to see their motivations as well.

Because I’m a Texan, I’m sure there’s a fancier way to say all of this, but I won’t. All I’ll say is that knowing yourself is the best and most reliable bullshit detector you can possibly imagine.

 

Because I’m a nice person, I find myself in the middle of other people’s running monologues a lot. I was raised in the South, and I have not found a way to extricate myself politely while the logorrhea sprays itself on my shirt and pants. In the South, we don’t do much impolitely.

So here, without further ado, are the funniest things I’ve ever been told, as well as some that were uttered by strangers in malls.

1. Fight between women at Burger King over a man… of course, and it got very heated. It ended with, “No pickles, ya burger-flippin ho!”
2. Computer support call:

   “I just heard there was something going on with the network and my monitor is blinking on and off. Are those two things related?”

   “Ma’am, I hope not.

3. “I just have this problem where I roll in my wheelchair and I start orgasming and I just can’t stop.”
4. Computer support call: “Sir, I think you’ve plugged the power strip into itself instead of into the wall.”
5. Computer Support Call to classroom with students: “You’ve plugged the speakers into your microphone jack and that’s all that was wrong.” “Did you have to say that out loud?”
6. “I didn’t know anybody with cool hair like that would want this job.”
7. “No, no, honey… you have a picture of Angelina Jolie’s memorial titties.”
8. After getting David Sedaris’ attention: “oh… we do not yell” (cue fade to black)
9. I call communion wafers “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Jesus.”
10. After watching Star Trek: “We’re called ‘fooders’ now. We hate the name foodies.”

I filed for unemployment for the first time about a month ago. It’s hard for me to say that out loud because of how desperately I do not want to be unemployed. The reason I am not employed is no-fault. I’m not here to rag on myself or on my former employer. I’m just saying that there’s nothing that really makes you feel poorer than the unemployment web site. The good news is that it’s stupid simple to navigate and takes about three minutes a week.

I use the money for two specific purposes; the obvious one being that Dana and I need the money for bills, food, etc. The not-so-obvious is that it gives me a tiny little cushion to get my writing career off the ground. Do not write this off as a pipe dream. It will hurt me beyond belief.

I do not believe that this web site can support me, but what I do know is that I cannot be at an interview every moment of every day, so why not lay the groundwork while I’m at home? What could be a better example of trying to prove self-sufficiency than trying to make your talent work for you? It is so much easier to make a career on your own terms than having to work for someone else, and having a little part of that is better than nothing at all.

Dana and I had the most interesting conversation last night. The rundown is that basically she didn’t think I knew how to work for someone else, and not because I don’t have that skill set. It’s just that trying to fit MY brain into other people’s boxes doesn’t work very well, because the moment they try to define me, I’m a new iteration.

She basically told me to stop working for other people and lead them, because that’s where my talent lies. My talent is not in carrying out other people’s visions, it’s implementing my own. It was a way of saying, not so subtly, “stop hiding your light.” My wife gives me the courage to be myself, because if it weren’t for her, I would still be trying to fit whatever clothes society wants to put on me, and they are ill-fitting.

At the same time, though, I can’t live my whole life in the clouds (or as an IT person, in the cloud, I suppose). I have to put shoe leather into something. Whether it’s cooking, cleaning houses, bartending, whatever, I have to have something that feeds my talent. Writers that live in glass towers see experiences and rarely have them.

Those two ideas are constantly struggling within me, and in a way, it feels perfectly balanced. I have the opportunity to get my needs met in the short-term, and the ability to get my wants met later.

But while I’m working all of this out, would you mind going to Safeway and picking me up some COLA and a box of Hydrox?

You’re a peach.

Yesterday, I literally worked on my web site until I was damn near blind. This is because I am starting to get popular, and I need to have the framework in place before even more people start arriving. I did some UI (User Interface) corrections, as well as adding a PayPal donate button and a Facebook page that is my hope for the Fanagan Forum. I’d like to use it for discussion groups, sharing links, and just generally causing mayhem. That’s the one part of this web site that is completely yours. Impress me. Gross me out (well, try). Make it where on this web site, you make me laugh. I cannot uphold all this awesome by myself.

The Paypal donate button is not necessarily for huge donations- I know that some bloggers use Paypal to offer subscriptions for a year and stuff like that. I don’t want there to be a set amount that you have to pay in order to get access to content, but if you find something you really like, a buck or two would be great.

See, a lot of people don’t know this, but I’ve never made any money off my writing. None. So to put a dollar in this donation box is to turn me from an amateur writer into a professional one.

In short, give me a job. It doesn’t have to be fancy. I will adapt to the title of Communications Director or Organ-Grinding Monkey.

In any case, enjoy it here. This is your house. Turn off the light if you’re the last one out.

I wake up at 8:00 AM, because that’s when Dana has to get ready for work. I have made a commitment to start around 9:00. I have kept that up the entire time I’ve had my blog, and it’s made a world of difference. Not only do I have the capacity to think overnight while I’m dreaming, I have the ability to remember it long enough to write down.

I don’t intentionally write blog posts. Most of the time, they are letters or journal entries which I’ve adapted for publication. I don’t leave anything out about myself, but I camouflage my friends because I had a blog years ago that was extraordinarily popular with strangers and my friends were on the warpath. For that reason, I try to write about memories so old that the statute of limitations has run out, but even that isn’t truly safe.

I focus a lot on my childhood because it’s where I began learning how to be an adult, and there are few people where I live now that lived near me at the time. It seems relatively safe to spill secrets that would rile up my family while I’m 1800 miles away, because they do not know that this blog is so much bigger than they are now. I’m not writing for myself and my pen pals. I’m writing for the world. I’ll give you an example. Today alone, my web site has had visitors from the United States, Canada, Malaysia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Peru.

I’m not making me laugh, I’m making the world laugh. It took a while to get used to the idea, because I have a tiny ego, and the idea that I could be making people all over the world roll on the floor is simply beyond me.

So I go back to the practice of writing with a name in my mind. Sometimes it’s Dana, sometimes it’s you. I write personal essays that reach out to you individually because I can’t think of you as a global audience yet. My head would explode.

Boom.

I wrote this song a few years ago, and I’ve wondered if it was publishable. There’s no music yet… I’m just the velveteen librettist. This goes out to all the women in my life that have defined time, and they all know who they are.

When you turn your eyes toward me
it gets harder to control
the longing to belong to you
to kiss from soul to soul

If only you could see
what lies beyond my eyes
to see your life unfolding
to watch you grow toward endless skies

Your passion lights my fire
a drive from deep within
to be a better woman
than I was when we began

But I don’t wanna cross your path
Until we finally agree
I bring out the best in you
’cause you bring it out in me

It’s been hard for me to Wander,
Lonely as a Cloud…
Wondering what I’d say to you
if my voice was strong and loud

Enough to cut through metal
The barbed fence around your heart
You’re so afraid to take it down
When I try, I’m ripped apart.

Miles will give us courage
to get through this Kind of Blue…
our hearts meander thoughtfully
down a path we hope is true.

One we hope releases us
from this cycle we’ve begun
The one where you say you love me
as you rev up for the run

But I don’t wanna cross your path
Until we finally agree
I bring out the best in you
’cause you bring it out in me

Originally written in Aug. of 2006. I couldn’t bring myself to post it until now, and you’ll see why as you read. Now it’s been long enough that I don’t really care about the consequences. I’m old now, and this was in my 20’s. That should be self-explanatory enough. I also need to say for the record that I was not drinking at the concert, and I did this of my own free will. I whored myself to meet Jimmy Norton.

Even though I find the Opie & Anthony show to be crude, crass, repugnant, and all of those things, I cannot help but be in love with it. Their show is so entertaining that I’ll even listen to reruns. There are actually three “characters,” Greg “Opie” Hughes, Anthony Cumia, and Jim Norton. I have been listening to the three of them since 2001, when they were broadcasting out of New York and one of the stations in DC picked it up… and it’s all Randy’s fault that I have been falling all over myself to find them in the other various places I’ve lived. Now that they’re on XM, I’ll never have that problem again- as long as they don’t get fired. They were released from their contract in Boston because for April Fool’s Day, they told everyone that the mayor was dead and it caused Mass Panic. In New York, they were let go because they broadcast a couple having sex on the air in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on some kind of high holy day (I don’t remember which one). For years they’ve had this bumper sticker promotion called WOW, which basically means “Whip ’em Out Wednesday.” That means if you see the bumper sticker, you’re supposed to pull up to the car and flash them. The show is completely insane, and I don’t know what I’d do without it.

Jim Norton, or Lil’ Jimmy, as he is sometimes called, is extremely funny and I adore him. He’s got such a little boy quality to him, because even though he’s just as crude and crass as the rest of the boys, he eats oatmeal for breakfast. He worries about his looks and his weight. He thinks he’ll never get a good relationship. Etc. Etc. Etc. He seems a little bit more human, I suppose.

I have wanted to meet him SO BAD for the longest time, and when I found out that he was coming to The Improv, I bought tickets immediately for both my friend James and myself. Now, James is quite a character. His sense of humor is so dark/blue that sometimes I need a shower afterward. Consider this joke he wrote:

I was baptized Catholic and my wife is a Baptist… so we compromise. Now we go to the Methodist Church, but the minister is a pedophile.

The first time I heard him tell it, I laughed so hard I thought my appendix was going to fall out on the floor. So I just knew that James would appreciate Jim Norton as much as I did. I was not disappointed. He laughed like a hyena the whole time.

One of Jimmy’s hobbies is getting photos with celebrities, and he always tells the stories of obtaining them with particular gusto. My favorite was when he was at a party and met Mike Tyson. He asked him for a picture and Tyson said no. Jimmy looked at him with near-tears in his eyes and said, “but you’re the champ!’ He said he’d never felt more like a yuppie douchebag. That’s my Lil’ Jimmy. 🙂

So Jimmy comes to the point in his act where he’s talking about the celebrity photos, and at one point it got kind of quiet. Now keep in mind that I wanted to meet him really, *really* bad. I took the few seconds of silence to yell as loud as I could, “JIMMY!!! YOU’RE GOING TO WANT A PHOTO WITH ME!!!!” He looked totally and completely shocked for a second and then he said, “Why? Are you nice looking? Come into the light and let me take a look at you.” As I was walking toward the stage, he said, “Are you gonna WOW the audience?” I thought for a second. My internal monologue was running thusly:

What have I got to lose? Is my mother going to find out? Do I have any hickeys? Would it matter if I did?

In the end, I decided that if it got me any closer to Jim Norton, then I would do it. So I unbuttoned my shirt halfway down, and my boobs WOULD NOT COME OUT OF MY BRA! I practically had to break it in order to WOW the audience, but luckily, the crowd went wild with applause that fed my ego mightily.

After the show was over, a reporter from The Pulse grabbed me and told me that she was a friend of Jim’s and that what I did was funny as shit. She took down my information and asked if she could interview me for the magazine. I said, “of course,” and then she grabbed me again. “I’m going to take you to go meet him.” I grabbed James’ hand so we wouldn’t get separated and we sped through the crowd and up to the table where Club Soda Kenny was selling Jimmy’s merchandise. I bought a t-shirt that says “you stink and I don’t like you,” which is a paraphrase of Jimmy’s *one* line in Spiderman. Then, the reporter hands me a thong for Jimmy to autograph, and it is priceless. You turn it over and on the part that goes up your butt it says “PU, Jimmy Norton.” The openers signed it, too, but I don’t remember their names.

Finally, Jimmy said that he wanted a picture of me, and Club Soda Kenny got out a camera. Now I have a picture on my mantle of Jimmy and I hugging each other, and we’ve e-mailed back and forth a little bit. This all went down last Friday night, and I still haven’t recovered.

***Just a note about why Kenny is called “Club Soda Kenny.” Kenny used to be a roadie/bodyguard for Andrew Dice Clay, and whenever Dice wanted something to drink, he’d yell “Club soda, Kenny!” After a while, everyone on Dice’s tour started calling him Club Soda Kenny, and the name has carried over to O&A.

After reading this article on baptism, I realized that I have a ton of stories in the same vein. They are a mixture of things that happened to my family, as well as things that happened to my dad and mom while they were in ministry before I was born. Because I was not there for all of these stories, I will preface this piece by saying that it is as factually accurate as my memories allow.

1. My dad thought it would be a good idea to let kids bring in their own objects  for children’s time. He got a little red felt bag and gave it out on Sundays. If you got the bag, it was your job to bring it back full. After a while, my dad had to start saying things like, “nothing alive… or dead.” Afterwards, he’d make a children’s sermon out of whatever was in the bag. The only one that I remember from my own childhood is that a kid brought his mother’s pantyhose. The congregation howled, and I wish I could remember what he said. That part has faded, much to my dismay.
2. June is both my mother’s birthday and one of the church members at Naples UMC. He was known for being an absolute cutup, so when we celebrated their birthdays during the service, some joker put relighting candles on their cake. This ol boy didn’t miss a beat. He blew on them a couple of times and then put them out in the cake.
3. At St. Mark’s, a little old lady brought the entire congregation to a screeching halt when, in the middle of my dad’s sermon, she stood up and said, “David?! Have you lost your mic?!” You could have heard a pin drop, and my dad paused for a couple of seconds. Thinking fast on his feet, he said, “Oh my God! I thought you said MIND!” The congregation was in FITS.
4. When I was in second or third grade, I was cast as Mary in the First Methodist Naples nativity play. Joseph was a classmate in which we had a love-hate relationship. I wanted him for my boyfriend all my own, but this was in jeopardy as we were sitting in the manger. I want to say FOR THE RECORD that he started it. He thumped the baby Jesus (my Cabbage Patch doll) on the head and I was extremely offended. We started elbowing each other, hard. I will leave you with that image because as that scene unfolds, whatever you’re thinking, it was worse.
5. My dad was giving communion one day, and he noticed that everyone was walking away, their faces scrunched up in the pain of having eaten something so horrible that you can’t control your facial expressions. We’d started to run out of grape juice for the chalice, so one of the little old ladies mistakenly filled it up with Hawaiian Punch Concentrate.
6. An associate pastor that my dad knew told this story on himself. The senior pastor asked him to grab the baptismal font and bring it over to the other side of the sanctuary. What he meant was, “there’s a little bowl of holy water inside the baptismal font. Could you bring it to me?” Cut to associate pastor trying to drag a 3,500 lb granite baptismal font along the floor. Hilarity ensues.
7. The ushers at our church in Naples were relentless. If the Cowboys were playing at noon, they would start throwing the football in the narthex around 11:45. During the Olympics, they held up score cards for my dad’s sermons.
8. The back row of the choir at Naples was equally incorrigible, to the point that my dad had a rear-view mirror installed on the microphone of his pulpit.
9. During a memorable children’s sermon, my dad invited all of the kids to take a look behind the pulpit. He told us to describe what we saw. I, absolutely without thinking, said, “it’s a big mess.” My dad leaned into the microphone and said, “we’re going to have a looooong talk when we get home.” It was in this moment that I realized I knew how to work a crowd. 😉
10. During an even more memorable children’s sermon, my dad talked about priceless treasures and took up the arm of his robe to show us kids his watch, his own priceless treasure. My sister wasn’t buying it. She looked straight at him and said, “NO IT’S NOT! You got it at Burger King for $2.99.” It was in this moment that I realized my sister knew how to work a crowd.
11. During our time at Naples, a chapel was built in the education building, and the nursery was right above it. I was watching Lindsay and she was being a holy terror at that particular moment. My eyebrows were going over my forehead when Lindsay opened the door and started running. My dad was in the middle of the pastoral prayer (one of the quietest moments in a Methodist service) when he heard my booming voice. “LINDSAY!” I was livid. “GET YOUR BUTT UPSTAIRS!”
12. When I was 16, my job became bringing Lindsay to church, because my dad usually finished up a few things before the service (*cough* sermon *cough*), and my mom was in the adult choir.That meant that Lindsay and I could do what we wanted, because we had wheels. I think she was 11, maybe just turned 12, when the offering plate came around and she put in all the money she had. Afterward, she leaned into me and said, very quietly, “can we go to Subway when this is over?” I nodded yes and she leaned even closer… “Leslie!” she said “You have to pay for lunch because I paid for church.”
13. I hope my mom doesn’t mind me telling this story, but it is literally one of the reasons she is my freaking hero. At St. Mark’s, our organist fell down the stairs to the choir loft during choir practice, and had to be rushed to the emergency room. My mom is a pianist, so she was on deck to accompany us. But as any pianist knows, the piano and the pipe organ have very little in common. To add insult to injury, our friend David was turning the pages for her and when she modulated from one of the hymns to the Doxology, David turned the page and it was in a different key. Instead of panicking, my mom TRANSPOSED THE CHORDS IN HER HEAD. It’s not the funniest story, but it shows that my mom is literally grace under pressure.
14. In the summer between 7th and 8th grades, I had the best boyfriend in the world. How did I know this? I met him at band camp. The first time he ever approached me was less than 10 minutes after the first time I shaved my legs, and I was bleeding. This beautiful boy looks at me and says, “Hi, my name is Ryan Darlington. You look like you could use a band-aid.” What does this have to do with church? It was a sermon illustration. Glad to be helpful, dad. 🙂
15. My dad and I had this game we played when I was younger. I would say two words and if my dad could incorporate those two words into his sermon, then I owed him a quarter. Best win? Aluminum siding. Like a boss, dad.LIKE A BOSS!

I originally wrote this on September 11th, 2007. I’m re-posting it here because it says more about me than my About page… as well as tying directly into my posts about sex and marriage.

I’ve gotten the second interview at Planned Parenthood, and therefore, I’m pretty certain I’ve got a shot at the job. Dana and I were a tiny bit baby crazy before we started talking about Planned Parenthood on a daily basis, and now that we have, we are biological clock explosion hazards. It’s ridiculous, but in a completely serious kind of way. Like, in the moment, we are so focused on each other and these little lives that we want to create that it seems just as real as say, the cat who lives on our stereo. When the ether has cleared from our brains, we realize that we have a bit to do before we can start inseminating. We may be dreaming, but some of the most tender moments between Dana and I have come with us curled up on our bed, reading about what we need to do to get ready.

If I were you, I’d be sitting there thinking, “what the fuck are they doing? They’re not even married. They haven’t even been dating that long. Seriously, are they INSANE?” Yes. Yes we are. My drive to have a baby isn’t rooted in reality anymore. It is rooted in the same baby-crazed feeling that I went through when I was 24. There was no rhyme or reason, just this drive to procreate that outweighed anything else going on in my life. The reason I know that we have crossed over from merely talking about one day having a child to that special part of my brain turning me into a stark raving lunatic is that physically, I am TICKIN! TICKIN! TICKIN! I am sexually insatiable- my body has no idea that Dana’s sperm count is so low. It feels similar to that hormonal rush of “QUICK, I’M GOING TO LOSE THE EGG!” that every woman has the night or two before her period… except this has lasted much, much longer.

And while that sounds wild and crazy and fabulous, I suppose the sex part is. The biological clock shit is rough stuff. My body does not realize what’s going on in my head, and it doesn’t really care. What my girly parts see is that This. Is. It. Dana is the fulfillment of whatever it is that uteruses need to just go batshit crazy. I sort of get it emotionally from the standpoint that relationships all go through three distinct phases. First, there’s romantic love. It’s giggly, sexy, and fun. Then, when you’ve been giggly and sexy for as long as you can take it, you develop companionate love- that part of you that doesn’t feel complete unless the other person is around. It’s not particularly sexy because discovery is over. Then, after a while, sex comes back into the picture and it’s soulful. You’ve got history together, you see so many more reasons to love each other than just the shallow initial attraction. You know what turns each other on and instead of it being a grind, it feels good to KNOW what’s going to get you a standing O… and when Dana and I got together, we skipped over phase one and two. We’d been friends for so long that we already had a companionate love that was putting our other friends and even our then-partners on the back burner.

So I see very clearly that my uterus has a different timeline than Dana and I do because my uterus doesn’t realize that for as long as I’ve loved and trusted Dana, being in love and having a kid is a different kind of love and trust.

Or is it?

Maybe my inability to differentiate is helping to feed the baby craziness. Sometimes my head and my heart are confused- have Dana and I been together almost three months or almost three years? Just because we weren’t having sex hasn’t meant that we weren’t having intimacy (which Harville Hendrix rightly called “into-me-see”). So where do I draw the boundary in that kind of knot to untangle? Ultimately, it’s our call, which will probably mean that we get married and have kids a lot sooner than anyone else thinks we should- not because we’re trying to be stark raving mad, although we’ll never stop being that. It’s because visually, we’ve only been a couple for a few months. The kind of intimacy that we share goes way, way, WAY beyond that.

There is one picture of Dana that I have in my head that I look back on and think, “how did I not know? How did I not know it would be this good? How did I not know that Dana didn’t love me, that she was in love with me and there was more of me in love with her than I would ever admit? How did I manage to keep our boundaries so strictly in place when if I’d just opened my eyes, I would have seen that we were falling for each other? How did I let everyone else know before I did?”

The picture is of Dana crying simply because someone else hurt me. It hurt her to see me cry, to see me upset, to not be able to magically take my pain away. And it’s more than that, even- because the person who hurt me was a piece of me. Dana knew that. She knew what I was trying to get away from in my hurt and it hurt her. She took on my pain and I let her, because I got the feeling that she understood the magnitude and wasn’t trying to tell me to calm down or even how to grieve. She was just this calming presence and I leaned into her. I can only hope that I am that calming presence when she needs it.

So it’s no wonder that my uterus is calling out to her. It’s no wonder that Dana is the fulfillment of all my little uterus nesting dreams. It feels like no matter what we decide or when we decide it, the love we have for each other will carry us through. So cliche, and yet, for the first time, it’s a cliche I can truly support.

So back to the interview.

Because I knew that I was signing up to be a database administrator in the same complex as the clinic, I asked if it had ever gotten scary around there. They told me they’d had a few bomb threats, but nothing serious (meaning actual bombs, I’m sure). They also had to be careful who they hire- they had one lady that came in for the interview before me and asked if that was where they killed the babies. She didn’t think she could do it.

Database administration is hard.

Future generations will look back on this one and think that we are all batshit crazy… the way we think it’s crazy that people used to be beaten and killed for being left-handed. There are even other similarities. For older left-handed folks, how many of you were forced to learn to write with your right hand even though your left hand was what felt natural? How many of you who were forced to learn to write right-handed stayed with it past high school? For every person who has ever said, “I don’t really hate gay people, I just disagree with their lifestyle. I love the sinner, and hate the sin…” put your goddamned rhetoric behind you and stop KILLING CHILDREN. Fuck your feelings. I’ll clean up my language when every last gay kid is safe. I’m sure that your argument isn’t that these kids were bullied into killing themselves, they chose to. You’re wrong, and you know it. Juries acquit women for killing their husbands due to Battered Wife Syndrome. Military families take months to regroup when a soldier comes home shocked and disoriented from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Is it so unimaginable that a child, with his/her brain not fully developed, would take those messages of hate and internalize them so that they think killing themselves is their only option?

This kid was 14 years old. FOURTEEN. He never got to drive a car, sip a beer with buddies, vote for the President. He’ll never take someone to the prom. He’ll never meet a man with cute glasses who wants to buy matching towels and small dogs.

This is absolutely insane, and if you think I’m mad about it, you’re right. There is no reason why bullying should lead to post traumatic stress disorder. There is no reason for a child to become a statistic. And if you’ve ever said anything about Christianity and homosexuality not being compatible, you have HELPED. You have spread the message to your own sons and daughters that being gay is wrong or bad- you have shades of gray… your children don’t. They take your messages of self-righteous but mild-in-tone segregation of good and evil and turn it into kids being shoved into lockers, beaten to a bloody pulp, and in a lot of cases, rape.

I was bullied myself all through school. I was lucky in that I had a woman I could trust- my own personal “It Gets Better” campaign. But these kids didn’t, and they’ll never know that for every day of absolute hell that is high school, there’s a joyous day of celebration with the one you love when you find them.

I’ve been rough in this essay, and I know it. But for the Evangelicals in my Friends list, you’ve got to know what you’re setting your children up to do to other children when they’re in school. You’ve got to teach them about the love and compassion of Christ, and stop dwelling on the jealous and angry God of the Old Testament. The more you do, the more you give your children ammunition to beat the crap out of someone else. And someday, someone’s going to put it together that bullying causes post traumatic stress disorder and it will cause a prima facie landmark decision that will legally find you responsible if your kid murders another one.

It will happen, and until then, I will be as rough as I need to be, because there is no excuse for a dead child. None.

Good night, sweet James. I want to send you home with the song that carried me through high school.