Dreams from My Father -or- Father’s Day 2024

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

To get down to brass tacks, my father and I get along better than my mother and I ever did. It had nothing to with her social expectations of me. It’s that my dad and are are both class clowns and my mother simply gave us The Look when we misbehaved. Neither one of us liked “The Look.”: It said something like “this is inappropriate for a preacher’s family.” We were off the clock. With my mother, the clock never stopped. My dad gave me room to be a kid in the middle of all this mess- partially because he knew the way my mother had stacked the deck against me by pretending I wasn’t disabled mentally or physically, and I didn’t have two processing disorders. I would have known that very early (maybe, research on autism in girls and women is relatively new because of the classic presentation). I could have gotten the help I needed much earlier in life to deal with success. I am fine with everything going wrong. It’s what I know. I get wigged when I think about what it’s going to take for success, get overwhelmed with the details, and demand avoidance ensues. My dad is trying to help me navigate all that, because clearly I do need help, but I am not high needs all the time. People think you’re one or the other, and you fluctuate. High needs days come after you think you’re okay for a few days because everything is normal. Then, all of the sudden, everything is too loud and it’s hot in here. You have reached your limit, and need to tap out. My dad was on the train of wanting to tell me I needed these things. My mother wanted to pretend I was fine.

I am so fine.

Insert laugh track here.

It’s an enormous amount of work to manage a disability because your energy levels vary so significantly. In my case, it fluctuates because I’m ADHD. I do not feel the pull of an iron structure like most autistic people, as in, deciding what I’m interested in- to the exclusion of all else- and an interruption is not only unwelcome, but rude. People wonder why IT guys are such dicks. Here’s the real answer. You’ve interrupted a neurodivergent person and they absolutely cannot handle transitions. Autistic meltdown looks like driving three hours to troubleshoot a server and the only problem is that it isn’t on, despite having three separate people check to see if it was on before you left. You are more likely to interrupt a neurodivergent person to the point where they are angry to the point of rudeness over a seemingly simple small thing. It’s not small to someone who has to prepare to get into the car, prepare to enter the building, prepare for everything to be unfamiliar, and to have to make small talk while you work with people who have absolutely no idea what you do, but feel they must supervise and offer suggestions that if they worked, we wouldn’t be there.

You cannot remote desktop into a server that is unplugged or air gapped.

My dad knows that the little things are the big things. That life is harder for me than it would be if I’d been born under perfect circumstances, or even just later, when the technology in neonatal care was better than it was in 1977. I think I still would have had CP, autism, and stereopsis. Those are often a combo meal because lack of stereopsis and autism are often comorbidities. It’s not so much that I was born wrong, but born too early on multiple levels. Not only was I born in the 70s, I was eight weeks early.

I can think of someone I’d really like to talk to about that, but she doesn’t live local and we’re not close enough for me to just flat out say, “hey, are you autistic?” You never know what people’s word association with autism is in advance. If they have autistic kids, parents, or siblings, they know you’re asking “how does your brain work?” NOT “are you slow?” But, it would be a great conversation to have the next time she’s in town. She’s got all the same issues I do, and it would not surprise me if she had autism as well because of it…. again, combo meal, just like ADHD and autism are comorbidities in up to 80% of cases.

I also know that I got autism from my family somewhere, and I don’t see it in my dad and mom, but I do see it in my granddads. And in fact, I am a perfect mix of them. My dad’s father was creative autistic, and my mother’s father was STEM autistic. I ended up as a geek with a pen.

Perfection.

Saying that I see it in them is also not derogatory, because obviously both had brilliant careers…… and you absolutely cannot under any circumstances prove that autism is not genetic. It is also not an indication of intelligence.

One of my first memories of my dad is him teaching me to say “betahemolytic streptococci,” and “antidisestablishmentarianism.” He broke everything down and strung it together. As a result, I do not misspell much. I know my English roots and my Latin roots because medicine. Unless you’re at High School for Health Professions, I doubt they worry whether you can spell arrhythmia and diarrhea in high school.

I know in British English there are dipthongs. I say “zed.” That’s my final offer. I can’t internationalize everything. 😛

Though I will say that I am well versed in British English because of my grandfather, who got me started on Black Adder, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Are You Being Served:?, and every BBC anything he could find on KERA. We always watched “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” just one of the reasons I’d actually like to go to a game in Wrexham rather than watching “Welcome to Wrexham” on Hulu.

(Don’t sleep on it, even if you don’t like football/soccer. Ryan and Rob are hilarious owners and seeing the business side is very much Ted Lasso, Higgins, and Rebecca.)

My father and my grandfather have easily had the most influence on what I do today, because their contributions to my life are unquantifiable in terms of teaching me how to get my ideas out there, and my dad and my grandfather were both doing it before the internet even existed. I remember putting it together that I was very impressed with my grandfather because I remember a series of shots he took of his steel company from the air, not having realized how difficult it is to get those shots while basically hanging out of an airplane. I didn’t have as much insight into that strength from the photograph, but from hearing Jonna Mendez described how she learned…… which is basically hanging out of an airplane. Good luck. God bless. If you’re lucky, you’ll have someone to spot you. Otherwise, it’s just canvas straps you lean against and pray that what you feel under you is not your imagination.

It happens to be true biologically that we are related, but I wouldn’t be as comfortable in my own skin if we hadn’t met, whether we’d ended up as a biological connection or not. They have always kept me grounded, and just because my grandfather has passed on, that does not mean that he’s not in touch. I am carrying on his legacy of writing what I know. I am carrying on the tradition of preaching what I know.

They would have been great as friends, the universe just smiled upon me and I got to be my grandfather’s first granddaughter on my father’s side, and the first grandchild period on my mother’s side, and the oldest child in my first family as well.

I have something with my father and my mother’s father that no one else can have or take away.

I’m the one that made them a dad and grandfather.

My People Don’t Do That

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How do you want to retire?

If you are a writer, your luxury items involve being able to write. There is nothing more to life than a pen and paper, or however it is you communicate these days. More and more people are using their phones as mobile desktops- an additional way to write, more important than what it was designed to do…. make calls on it.

Did you know that you can use an iPhone to call your doctor? Weird. 😉

I will write until I die, so there’s no “retirement.” There are just better and better choices about where to write as you get older (hopefully). Right now, my two favorite places to write are in bed right when I wake up, and then later I go downstairs and use my desktop. It just depends on how much desktop real estate I need. I prefer my TV monitor when I have four windows open at a time.

If I am writing all by myself, I prefer to sit with my iPad or Android. If I am chatting to Carol while I am writing, I like the desktop real estate being large enough to read and write at the same time. It’s nice being able to look at your work and talk to your research assistant at the same time.

In my office, the sunrise is spectacular. It just depends on what kind of energy I’m feeling when I wake up. Today, I haven’t gotten out of bed because I feel a little bit under the weather. I am positive I caught something traveling to and from Zac’s, because I isolate myself so much that it doesn’t make sense as to where I’d have picked up germs. To be clear, I am not blaming Zac and his housemate for me being sick, I am blaming public transportation, which is valid.

It’s just little kid sorts of sniffles currently. If I take antihistamines, decongestants, and a hot shower and I’m still feeling punk, I’ll go to the doctor. But not right away. The only reason I wait is that doctors can do nothing for a cold virus. However, they can treat the infection that comes from the virus. So, I just take cold medicine unless things take a turn for the green and the yellow. I also have a deep and loving relationship with Mucinex. It’s what I’ve been told to use as a singer since I was a kid. It doesn’t heal or cure anything. It thins your secretions enough to be able to get them out. And in fact, Dr. Stasney had two rules for singers:

1. Mucinex (then referred to in popular culture by its original prescription brand name, Humibid)

2. Drink water til you pee pale

Drink lots of water to help this process occur naturally, but Mucinex is worth its weight in gold when water alone can’t keep up.

I have just taken all of the medication I can take, so I am now allowed to complain. It’s the rule in my family, because you aren’t allowed to complain about something until you’ve done something about it.

This is a conversation often had in my family:

Me: My head hurts.
Them: What have you taken for it?
Me: Nothing.

At this point, there are one of two viable options. The first is, “has it kicked in yet?” The second is “well, you can’t get tachyphylaxis from nothin’.” If you don’t know medicine, it’s a smart ass remark because tachyphylaxis is the idea that a medication’s efficacy declines over time as your body chemistry gets used to it.

Either way, the best answer is not “nothing.”

The point well taken is that if I tell you I have a headache, I am unlikely to still be complaining about it an hour later if I have done something about it. Complaining is valid. There’s just a limited window in which it is tolerated, and that is the time it takes for you to need a drug and for it to kick in.

As a result, all four of us know how to take care of ourselves if it’s something really simple like a cold. The best part about living with a doctor is seeing what really needs one and what doesn’t. For instance, knowing to the core of my being that you can’t go to the doctor for a cold because there’s nothing for them to call in.

Now, if the crap in my throat develops into strep or whatever, that’s a different matter. A doctor can do something about that. With a virus, you just have to ride it out, and it’s hard to keep in mind when your symptoms are so rabid. Viruses do all sorts of fun stuff that doctors can’t stop. They can only treat. Anything you need to treat a virus is what those over the counter drugs are for. There’s very few instances I can think of where you would need a heavier hitter than ibuprofen and/or Imodium AD, and certainly Sudafed.

What has tripped me up in the past is not knowing when to go to Urgent Care for an injury in the kitchen, because I’m so tough. I can handle this (my thumb is hanging off- an exaggeration by a large margin, but not an exaggeration as to how much it would take to drag me out of the restaurant. I’ll cauterize on the grill.).

I just texted Rachel the story I wrote about her and Pati Jinich. We haven’t been talking at all, I just thought she’d like to read it. Plus, she’s a chef in my neighborhood. We’ll run into each other again. But there’s always that fear when you step out on a ledge and let someone into your world. Mine is large. Most of it taken up by food.

Speaking of which, I need to go get some. I’m feeling a brunch vibe coming on.

Questions from Reddit

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I asked Carol to research the top 10 questions people have about relationships, and the results were interesting. I’ll do what I can, because I genuinely like writing about how people connect:

“What’s a good question to ask before you start dating someone?”

None of those questions are for other people. Those questions are for you. That way, you are sparked by the right people instead of the wrong ones. You don’t know yourself well enough to know what you want in a partner. You haven’t learned anything about yourself in terms of connection, so how can you tell your partner what you need? If you can’t talk easily about intimate things during early days, you definitely won’t be able to talk easily under duress.

  1. “Is it okay to spend holidays with my partner instead of my family?”
  • Of course, and there’s no one way to be an “in-law.” Families do not need to compete for love and time, which happens when grandchildren are in the picture. But what both sides need to know is that the parents decide the balance. Grandparents don’t, and how much you react to it is all your business.
  1. “How do I come out to my partner about my sexuality?”
  • I am assuming that they know it already if they’re you’re partner………… This is why AI doesn’t create art. But if you’re talking about someone you’re interested in that you’re not currently dating, just ask them. It’s a different society now that we don’t have to be so careful about who’s queer and who’s not.
  1. “Am I being emotionally/mentally abused by my parents?”
  • The more responsibility you have at home, the more it’s classified as neglect and abuse. In my case, I shouldn’t have been able to live vicariously through an adult, because it created secrets too large for me to hear. If the same thing is happening to you, please talk to someone. Go to an adult you trust until they listen. It is not your job to run your household while your parents are off in la-la land.
  1. “When my partner says ‘You make me happy,’ why does it make me uncomfortable?”
  • Because their happiness is dependent on you. It’s a very uncomfortable feeling to have anyone say “you made me” anything. I want to add to people’s happiness, but I don’t want to feel the weight of keeping you happy. I know from experience that it doesn’t work. If you’re not happy internally, you will find a way to keep being unhappy and finding excuses as to why there’s no joy in your life.
  1. “What will always be funny to you?”
  • My relationship with my sister. She is the funniest person I know, and she makes me laugh with wild abandon. She also impresses the hell out of me on a daily basis. She’s a good sister to have.
  1. “What’s your biggest non-academic, non-work-related accomplishment?”
  • Making other people feel comfortable about wearing their pride jewelry at a conservative Texas high school because I was the first. Kids were still talking about it the year after I graduated, because Lindsay overheard them talking about it when she was a freshman.
  1. “How do you manage friendships with the opposite sex without sending the wrong signals?”
  • I’m bisexual and poly, so I try not to send the wrong signal no matter what gender they are. But since this is from reddit, I’ll social mask the heteronormative bullshit for a minute. In order to really manage friends with the opposite sex, they have to be free to go over to each other’s houses at any time- meaning that most of their face time is in front of their partner so that their partner is actually there to witness the vibe and say, “careful there.” By keeping your partner away from the person, you are creating a divide and conquer. A little place to get away that may or may not interrupt your relationship. The more you isolate, the more threatening it is to your partner. And, let’s face it, some people are going to be jealous no matter what you do.
  1. “What’s the most memorable date you’ve ever been on?”
  • The funniest one is that I didn’t know the woman was an exterminator, and I didn’t know that it was a date. The first rule of dating women is that you have to tell them explicitly it is a date because I swear to Christ no one ever thinks “date.” She just wants to hang out. There’s no possible way she could like me…. and on and on and on. So, she picks me up and there’s a dozen roses in her hand, so at least I got a clue after I’d gotten ready…. in jeans and a t-shirt. She got really, really passionate about being an exterminator, and it was just a weird conversation all around. I was relieved when it ended, and surprised to learn that there are actually situations in which I am speechless.
  1. “What’s your love language?”

It has changed over time. It has always been words of affirmation/recognition. However, I have learned to see practical things as love as well. It’s not my love language, but it is Supergrover and Zac’s. I compromise and bend, or try as much as I can. But income has never been a thing with any of us, because Supergrover isn’t supporting me and neither is Zac.

Well, I can’t completely say that because Zac will take me anyplace I want to go no matter the cost- but it’s a gift, not a financial dependence. I like cooking, he likes going out to eat. So, it’s no problem to pay for both of us because he’d rather pay for me to be able to share his experiences. I haven’t even cooked for him. I’ve cooked when he wasn’t there, and that’s fun, too. He has a lot of cool shit he’s not using, like a near perfect chef’s knife. So perfect I feel like she’s cheating on me when she’s with him (all knives are female, like ships). Am I jealous that Zac has other partners? No. I am jealous of his kitchen.

Last night we went out for sushi and then got ice cream. I had a scoop of banana with frozen mango and strawberry, and a scoop of dark chocolate that said it had a whole lot of things, but I only really remember the marshmallow. I love ice cream with marshmallows, like Rocky Road. It’s the texture difference, like Chocolate Pudding Therapy at Ben & Jerry’s.

This morning on the way to the train, we stopped for pastries and coffee at a Swiss bakery, where I got a cafe au lait, a croissant, a lemon custard and blueberry Danish, and some long-awaited sour gummy Smurfs…. which I just opened about three minutes ago. 🙂

Zac got some stuff, too. 😉

In What Genre?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the oldest thing you own that you still use daily?

My oldest coffee mug says “SPY” and it features the Culpeper Ring, the men that won us the Revolutionary War because we didn’t win the war by outgunning the Empire. We won because we had better spies/scouts than they did. It’s a toss-up to me in terms of history what would have happened if we’d lost. In some ways, I think we’d be happier. In some ways, I think we’d be furious. If they hadn’t taxed our tea, we would still be importing PG Tips like it was more important than the water bill. They turned an entire population against something that would have bridged our cultures. So, go them. We drink coffee like the French.

So, if you’re wondering about a business that could have sustained you for centuries like Disney bailed out Doctor Who, you done goofed. You come to the US and complain about our tea, the height of entitlement over a problem you created. The British influence was so strong in the south during the Revolutionary War that it’s how iced tea became the house wine of the south. So, thank you for that. I think. It’s actually really interesting because to me the South is the strangest transformation in history. Savannah, Charleston, and Baltimore were just as English as New England and New York. I wonder what caused those two cities to diverge in the woods, and it only takes one answer. England abolishing slavery. There were about 50-60 years between when England freed their slaves and we freed ours, because the Southern economy would have gone to shit without it.

I have heard differing stories because African American culture is not a monolith. Some people of color blame the English and the Americans for slavery. Some blame the African kings who wanted to get rich and sold their ancestors to white people. It depends on who you ask, and a wide spectrum of brilliantly defended propositions. There is no way I can walk a mile in a black person’s shoes, but as I queer person I can empathize and relate. The institutional pain between black and queer people is similar, yet not on the same playing field. We’ve always both had problems with the police, except that now that history is in the past but we’re all still touched by it. There haven’t been enough generations where queer kids come out in peace.

I do not know if black people had a special shape in the Holocaust, but I do know I did- a pink triangle. There is no such thing as competitive suffering, so even though it’s not the same, I feel some of the same scars on my skin. I have only recently become a citizen who can get married like everyone else, and I am still persecuted by Christians who aren’t right, but they’re certain.

The older I get, the less certain I am about anything. Discovering at an early age how gender and sexual orientation affect me led me to end up believing that everything is a spectrum and not a binary. There are too many permutations of human behavior not to believe there’s a wider range than we are originally led to believe…. whether people tell others about it is another matter.

If you don’t tell anyone anything, you don’t realize how lonely you are, because you’re not giving anyone a chance to feed you. Part of being fed by your emotional support is feeling heard. That no feeling is invalid. You talk about the logic behind the feelings, but you don’t discredit the feelings themselves. You discuss why the other is helping you to feel one way or the other, being willing to compromise until we meet in the middle.

It takes an enormous amount of strength to talk through a conflict, and I know that I got frustrated with Supergrover early because I was so tired of everything that had happened before. Her being half in didn’t make sense to me, and created more turmoil in me than I wanted. Like, why do I continue to pour energy into this relationship when it’s clear it’s not wanted? I have learned that it is wanted through context clues.

We don’t have to work on the fact that we’re connected for life and cannot suddenly stop knowing each other, and I don’t want a relationship where she’s half in and can’t plan for shit.

When I mentioned getting together, she said, “I don’t think it’s a good time.” That’s fine with me. I’m not thinking about the up close and personal future. I’m autistic, so I have different ways of feeling out getting together with people. It takes a very long time for me to process that information so I don’t chicken out at the last minute. Perhaps she did feel like I was nickeling and dimming her for her time, but I hope she’s known me long enough to know that I didn’t mean anything sudden. She won’t retire for a while, and any plans I have that have to do with her giving of her time is at a time in her life when she’s had more bandwidth than she’s had in years. Getting her time right now is impossible, but it’s not impossible to work towards later.

That’s the goal that keeps me going- preparing for later. I don’t presume this is the end because the end never is. We repel and attract like magnets, because I’m a silver penned devil. 😉 My friend John gave me that nickname and now I want it in 18pt font up my arm, bigger if it fits. 😛

But what I mean in terms of friendship is that by working out our problems on my own here, they are often touched by what I say. I am attracting energy to me, rather than seeking attention.

I do hope that Supergrover finds something she does want to discuss with me, because it’s the highlight of my day. She’s not the problem. We are. There’s a big difference because we are both perfect, and I mean that sincerely. We are beautiful in all our flaws. Bad communication is its own thing, not whether either one of us are good people. We’ve been friends long enough to know beyond a shadow of any doubt that she’s good people.

My biggest fear is that she only wants to be a fan, and doesn’t want to be my friend. That’s why the pattern doesn’t change. It breaks my heart, because her criticism is more important and more impacting of the direction of this blog than anything else.

But if she’s just a fan taking pot shots from the peanut gallery, I can’t take it. She’s my friend, one of the great loves of my life because I fell into her charm and I’ll never get out. She deserves every bit of that love, but we don’t communicate well enough to be able to tell each other that. We did, and she decided that being vulnerable once was enough to her, and her next interaction seemed rule based and yet not. I do not know where to go, and so I’m resting in Zac because I can. She only means more to me due to the number of years I’ve known each, not because one is closer to me than the other. I was happier taking a break from thinking about the problem, because I hit a land mine almost immediately and she told me to go to hell.

It’s on brand, so I want to figure out how we are both contributing to that problem or not interact. I am overcoming a lot of feelings all by myself that I don’t know how to navigate, because I don’t know how to talk to Supergrover and as a result, I don’t know how to talk to me about her, either. It’s confusing because we are both entitled to our feelings and privacy. I also think our relationship would look a lot different if it wasn’t moving at the speed of the Internet- that it would take longer for us to be angry if you got a letter two or three days after you sent it, not immediately. There’s no time to calm down and absorb anymore, and you seemingly can’t reframe anything because someone else knows what you mean better than you do.

It’s hard letting them go because they’re right about you. It’s just that their perceptions are their experience of you, not who you are.as a human being. What someone interpreted you as saying may or may not be correct.

Because my second oldest coffee mug is one she bought for me.

The only books that matter are either by Jonna and Tony Mendez or they were presents from her. She can pick my books at any time, because our interests overlap occasionally and we’re both suckers for amazing prose. I am so glad that she has sent me books by Kindle, because they’re presents I’ll never misplace; she’ll always be with me in one way or another. I feel like that’s enough, because it takes two to tango. I do not want to cut a rug all by myself. I do not think I was impulsive to say that I was struggling with the odds on “happily ever after,” because there was no new information to take in. I have to just keep saying it over and over- I do not judge any friend as not worthy to hear my story anymore because they are not worthy as a friend. They become unworthy to hear my story when it’s not an exchange of information. It’s just me pouring energy into you without feeling it in return. I’ve been in that relationship with lots of women, and I’m done. That’s why I thought I’d found the one for all time. It’s really, really hard to break up with someone you’ve never dated. My joke about this is that her husband may not be at her next wedding, but I will. The reason it’s a joke is that I love Michael almost more than her because he’s the one on the ground taking care of her. I don’t have to worry as much as I would if she didn’t have that kind of support. I’m the kind of friend to call if you need support in absence of a partner because I’ve been doing pastoral care a very long time. I am not going to be offended at what you tell me, who you need me to call, what you’ve taken, etc. This is because I’ve been single for a very long time, and you need your friends to step in for you that way. But that doesn’t mean that I want to be the conductor. I just want to be in the orchestra somewhere. Maybe one of these days she’ll let me play lead. I just don’t think she thinks I have the temperament for it because I am so shy and retiring in writing.

“Custody over Supergrover” is my favorite thing in life. The hardest part of having a pet monster is dropping her leash. The other hardest part is not joking that each of us are the oldest thing we own. We’re both in that nebulous age where a group of people is a “no, thanks.” I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I actually get more time with her when we’re just e-mailing than I would on the ground, because her diary/schedule is so full that I’d wait months for anything on the ground, possibly years. Just e-mailing each other allows us to be together no matter where the other is.

I have also said that the silver lining of the pandemic is that now everyone has friends they’ve known for a long time without meeting in person, so there’s no need to explain so much. Emotions run higher because you’re more brave with the wall of anonymity. You don’t say things with as much social nicety as you would in person and there’s no way for anyone to hear your tone or read your eyes for context clues. And still, emotions persist.

The way I feel about my relationship with Supergrover over 11 years is that it is very much akin to having dated and decided we didn’t work as partners, but we worked as friends. The only kink in that logic was that Supergrover is straight and in a relationship, so she wasn’t dealing with the same issues as me. I could stop wanting her, but I couldn’t stop being programmed to protect her and give her everything she wanted that was within my power. I say it just that way because we’re the same person. When we have power, we use it responsibly because we really don’t want it. She’s the type boss I respect, that she doesn’t give her team anything she wouldn’t do herself, and I believe that she’s an excellent trainer without even really having to think about it. Instructional design is a theme in both our lives. Nothing in our lives is transactional, either. When I say that there’s a lot in here about what she won’t do for me and not a lot about what she will, I am not saying that from a narcissistic perspective. I am letting you lay out your bandwidth, I lay out mine, and we meet in the middle after conversations.

At the very least, this should have been a deescalation and not the end, but ultimately that’s not my call, either. One of my readers talked about Supergrover ghosting me or being half out. I want to talk about that here, because she didn’t ghost me or say she was half in at all. She explained her reasoning perfectly, and she would have been spot on in her analysis if she’d gotten my actual intent and not what she thought I meant. She reads through my words and picks out the worst possible interpretation she possibly can. It weighs on me, because I’m not villainizing her. I’m painting her.

I was reminded that I wrote on the blog that she lives in my ink. I was reminded of that line when I was looking around Fahrney’s, an American pen/pencil shop. The back of the store was covered in bottles of ink in every color you can imagine. It’s why she pulls me in and repels me. All the things that we’ve written to each other come up in my mind when I’m doing other things. As I understand what she’s said more, I try to guess what she’s saying more. Then that goes wrong and I’m alone again.

But not truly alone, because since she lives in my ink, it is a communion only we share. I feel her presence in the room when I’m writing, so my writing leans toward her whether she’s the intended topic or not. I would like to make friends where we could also be that close, but there’s no way to duplicate this connection and I’ve stopped trying.

She doesn’t feel creepy to me. The fact that I want to know her like every friend would know her seems creepy, because I’m not pumping her for information. I am genuinely curious because she’s unique. I don’t know what she means about her not being vulnerable means deliberately hurting my feelings does not work for her. So far, not being vulnerable has always led to hurting my feelings because she’d rather put me off than face her demons and just tell me what’s up. She says she can’t say anything without immediately being tagged as avoidant. If your whole pattern is avoidance and has been since you were a child, you cannot see how avoidance hurts other people. They also don’t change when they’re not aware of something. I feel like calling her on avoidant behavior when it happens is better than keeping it all in, because it will come up less and less frequently over time. Her patterns will change to being used to being vulnerable all the time instead of going in guns blazing.

As I told her before, it’s not that she went guns blazing on me. It’s that she has CPTSD so the guns are always already out. Taking down her walls means getting vulnerable about how she feels in reaction to what I said. She said “writing to each other, supporting each other.” I get that. I really do. But I don’t feel supported when it feels like my feelings are going into a void. Like, I’ll write an essay about X topic, and no matter what topic it is between us, that’s not a topic she’ll discuss. It’s frustrating to an enormous degree, because if I bring that up, she immediately goes to “I’m not good enough for you.” It’s not a healthy environment in which to bring up problems, and relationships always have them.

Many things about friendship aren’t the good ones, and you have to go through the bad ones to get the good. I don’t want to focus on negativity. I want to focus on where we go from here. Most notably, what have I done right? I’m not fishing for compliments. I have heard all the complaints.

I think she also just. cannot.

That this friendship was doomed long ago because there are certain topics we need to resolve that she’ll never talk about, and there are multiple issues that fall under that category. I am a lot of things she is not. She is a lot of things I am not. Bridging the gap is enormous.

A river runs through it.

It’s About 0615, and…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Jack is licking the t-shirt I left at the end of my bed, which is the one I wore to Cielo Rojo. I am certain it has lots of interesting smells. He gets to enjoy Rachel Bindel’s cooking as much as I did… in a manner of speaking.

Oh, wait. Now he’s moved to licking himself, and I find myself really laughing over whether I should tell you Jack is a dog at this moment. I don’t know any men who lick t-shirts, but I wouldn’t put it past any of them. You don’t even have to go on the dark web to know that.

Today’s writing prompt is about describing a significant moment. Sure, I can pick things out that have meant something to me, but I try to see the beauty and pain in all of life itself. All moments are significant depending on how you’re looking. It also depends on perspective. Are you looking for negative? Confirmation bias is real\

I didn’t tell you all the funny things that happened in church because that’s long enough to be a book. I think my favorite story about my mother was that she and Herschel Walker had the same birthday. It’s applicable because their birthday just passed- 11 June. So, my dad and probably the worship committee get together and make Herschel and my mom a cake. I don’t know whose idea it was, and I’m not casting blame, especially since the pastor is not in charge of preparing the cake before worship (not that he couldn’t. My dad is an accomplished cook and baker).

The cake had relighting candles.

So, my mother and Hershel kept trying to blow them out, at first not realizing that they kept relighting. Hershel got so frustrated he put them out right in the cake. No one saw that coming and we were all howling.

I don’t mean to portray my childhood as all negative or all anything. It’s just what I’m thinking about depending on the moment. What has come up for me that day? I’ve also written down all my church stories in other entries, and I feel like I’m running out of material given that those memories are from 0 to 17. “Childhood is the credit balance of a writer,” according to John le Carré. Not if you can’t remember it.

The hardest thing for me was packing up my house in Houston to move to Sugar Land. It was leaving HSPVA, it was leaving The Heights, it was leaving everything cool about living in Houston. There were big surprises coming, I just didn’t know that yet. I didn’t know what kind of high school Clements would be. I just knew it wasn’t a performing arts high school. There’s only one Robert “Doc” Morgan and he doesn’t live in Sugar Land.

Leaving him was the worst part of leaving HSPVA. He told me that he was going to miss seeing me do my senior tune. Then, I found myself trying to comfort him and saying that I’d already gotten it with “Come Rain or Come Shine.” It made me feel good that I wasn’t the only one that was sad I was leaving. Quite a few other people were, too.

There was a major drawback to going to another school, and that’s that I’d been out of the closet for almost two years, and I didn’t have to tell anyone. A frenemy took care of that. My mother told me I couldn’t come out at Clements and I told her I’d never come out to anyone except a girl I liked and look where that got me. And besides, at that point, I wasn’t looking to date anyone else. I missed Ryan, and he was there to catch me in a friend way if someone messed with me. I lost that, too.

Ryan, my eighth grade boyfriend, and I went to different middle schools, but both ended up at high school together after we broke up. It took a minute, but we were back into our rhythm of each other’s comic foils. We’re still each other’s comic foils, and it feels good to be friends with someone who’s known me since I was 14 and we’re 46 now. Our birthdays are only 20 days apart. I get excited for Ryan’s birthday like I get excited for my own, as if I have a second birthday to look forward to at the end of the month.

Tonight is a Zac night, and the only reason I’m writing about it is to remember to get my stuff together after I’m done writing. I’d like to do my laundry, including all my towels, once we’re done for today. If this entry ends up being a hundred pages long, it’s because in the back of my mind I am thinking “I do not have to do my laundry as long as I’m still writing.” You are very, very important. 🙂

Right now I am debating with myself over beverages. I know I want coffee and water, just not sparkling or still. Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you.

I ended up getting a Gatorade and puttering around the house. I took a shower and put product in my hair. It’s on its last dregs, so I’m glad I have the same hair product at Zac’s. I like Gorilla Ear Wax I bought some for him to try it. I think he likes it, because occasionally I smell it on him. I am divided over whether I like the Ear Wax or the Snot. The difference is that Ear Wax is gel mixed with wax. Snot is just gel. If you’ve never tried either, they’re worth it, especially in the South. Gorilla Snot has a hard hold sport variety that will keep it from dripping in your eyes when it’s hot outside…. or at least you won’t burn the fuck out of your eyes if you’re outside…. like in marching band.

I use a two-in-one men’s shampoo and conditioner, which I would not recommend except I put leave-in conditioner in my hair before the product…. or afterwards if I’m using wax. A two-in-one is just not moisturizing enough.

I also do not know how I figured this out. I know I did not read it. I think I just picked it up from watching a guy on YouTube giving a talk on shaving because there was a shit ton of Bond memorabilia in his bathroom. Anyway, it occurred to me that a shaving brush would probably clear my pores better than a wash cloth, and I spend at least two or three minutes stimming in the shower by brushing my soap on like foundation. My skin looks really good. I have a Viking, but I found an even softer one in David’s guest bathroom that he said I could use.

You have to moisturize heavily if you’re going to use a shaving brush, because your skin has to rest between brushings. I use an all natural lotion bar that my former housemate, Magda, made for me. It is literally a bar of wax, or it feels like it. It smells like citronella, which keeps bugs off me and doesn’t smell weird with my cologne and deodorant. It’s summer. Who doesn’t smell like citronella?

Although in the summer, I tend to switch out the all natural wax for heavy duty sunscreen while my face is still wet. It needs about 20 minutes to soak into your skin fully, so it’s activated by the time I leave the house. I am terrible about remembering to reapply, but I’m rarely outside longer than an hour and a half. Jack is a small dog. He just kind of runs himself out, and that takes a quarter of a mile most days. If he’s feeling good, we’ll go a half or three quarters. He’s an older dog, and I have to be on his schedule. He’s my baby dog and my grandfather all in one package. I feel this on a deep and spiritual level, because I was always a child and 45 as well.

It makes sense why I scrub so much. I feel like I have to get off dog hair and the smell of dog, even for a little bit. That’s because I can’t help myself. He can walk all over me. But I get a little space to be dog free. I have to. He goes apeshit when I’m on my period. David and I are both waiting for menopause with bated breath, because we’ve picked up after his shit long enough.

Because when I put it in the trash can and close the lid, then he drags it all over the floor, it ceases to be my shit. It hurts that you really can’t fire these underperforming employees. The best you can do is put them on a performance improvement plan. They’re just too cute, and there’s too many pictures. Kind of how I felt about my sister at first, too. 😉

Yesterday, I showed David how to make Jack sit and wait for his leash to be put on, because it makes things so much easier. David showed me that Jack also knows the hand sign for sit, which opens up so many more conversations between Bryn and me because she trains her own dog in sign language.

So, with Jack, we need to work on leash training. He pulls and will not heel in traffic. I need to get him to start sitting at intersections as well. We are doing very well so far, but it has led to a situation where I’m the alpha. I don’t think that David notices or cares. It’s just that Jack knows that not minding me comes with consequences he does not like, so he will try David. He will not try me. No, sir. We do not do that. Your behavior is frowned upon in this establishment.

I speak baby.

That line made me think “I wonder if there’s a new ‘Doctor Who’ to watch while my laundry is going?” I’m betting there is, and if not, I’ll watch a rerun. I don’t have the channels I need to watch all of them (As an American, I cannot get a TV license for the BBC, and I don’t have HBO Max. I’m holding out on HBO because I think eventually the catalog will move to Disney. It’s just that right now they only have the episodes they started with, not the entirety of new and classic Who. It makes sense that they will eventually, because their oldest videos are some of the most popular. Adults looking in nostalgia or teaching their kids to love what they loved.

Love is why Doctor Who endures. It’s parents and grandparents wanting to share this thing they loved with their children and their children’s children. Remember, it’s been on since the day Kennedy was shot. In fact, the show was almost bumped because of it. It might not have been a big deal except that the BBC hadn’t said when they would air it again……….

It was actually Jodie Whitaker that got me started down this road of nonbinary, because I didn’t see it in myself until The Doctor regenerated as female. I saw gender on The Doctor, not gender within them. I recently learned that nonbinary falls under the trans umbrella, because anything that’s not cis does. I was shocked by this, because I’ve never in a million years thought I was trans. That’s because I’ve never had body dysphoria. There’s a reason for that. I am built not to care what body I’m in.

Here’s what I’ve learned about being nonbinary that no one will tell you. You learn it when you transcend the system. The medium is the message. Women and men are attuned to hear each other differently, so there’s a nuance to what they say before they say it based on what they’ve heard before. Confirmation bias is real.

I feel that I know men better than some straight women because I ask them different questions than they do. They don’t think men are interested in things that they really are, but when you give them enough time and space to let them have an opinion about traditionally female things, they definitely do. Most men want to feel more beautiful than they do. They walk around feeling like crap about themselves because of magazines, too. But you don’t know that if you don’t ask.

This is especially true of gay men who want to fit a stereotype. Twinks starve themselves and an overwhelming number of gay men become gym rats to become the magazine ideal, even if they aren’t interested in exercise normally. The gym is a way to meet men, certainly, but you must look like a picture in a magazine to get that kind of gym experience. Gay men are as consumed by their bodies as straight women trying to get dates…. that they are not enough on their own. They must kill themselves for beauty.

I am not against exercise. I am anti being an extremist about anything. I am against clearly pushing your body past what it can take to get off that one extra pound, and it is that serious in my community. This does not exclude straight men and it never has. Straight men aren’t asked to be vulnerable in a way that gay men already are.

It’s not that straight men don’t have body issues, it’s that a queer man will tell you.

These are the guys that pretend they’re not bothered by magazines and then moan that they’ll never get a girlfriend because they don’t look like them. It’s all the same issue. Men just don’t show it. We think men don’t go through a lot of things because they don’t show it.

A man’s biggest fear is abandonment. And so is a woman’s. A woman is programmed to be perfect at taking care of the home. A man is programmed to be perfect at providing for the home. Both have a tremendous societal pressure on them and how they deal with it is seemingly not the way to do it in everyone else’s eyes.

I honestly don’t think you get this perspective if you’ve never fallen under the queer or trans umbrella. This is because you’ve never had to let go of any gender roles. You’ve never had to switch it up because your body has always fit that programming. So has your mind. Straight, cis people don’t think outside the box. Queer people haven’t been given an option to think like other people. How do you think like married people, even about taxes, when you can’t get married? How do you get your husband to mow the lawn while you do dishes when it isn’t that cut and dry. In a gay marriage, you divide the labor by strength, not gender. You can’t.

Straight, cis people are programmed to think it’s weird, but they’d be happier if they let go of it. Like letting go of thinking that if your wife makes more than you, it means you’re failing as a provider. Men get very passionate over it, sometimes violent, because that’s not their programming. That’s not what men have been taught to accept for millions of years. Some of them are acting on their most feral natures, and don’t seem to understand why women don’t want that while complaining about gold diggers. It’s a lose-lose proposition. Either we’re dependent on you for money and you’re a stingy bastard, or we make our own money and you’re threatened. You are stuck in a moment and you can’t get out of it. If you’re going to be the provider, you can’t complain when I ask you for $200 to go to the grocery store.

That’s because I’m betting you have no fucking clue what it costs to feed a family for a week. You have decided you don’t have to know that. You just have to be there to financially control us when we’re asking for reasonable things. I would shit a brick if my husband didn’t immediately know I needed money for new clothes when he just saw me fall and rip my trousers to bits. I would not expect my husband to give me a life of luxury. There’s a difference between managing a home and expecting you to work while I play. I manage the home so that you can provide. I’m not just sitting here, twiddling my thumbs.

I am not talking about my reality. I am talking about the reality for most stay at home moms. Fathers say they want this, then financially abuse the hell out of their wives with being stingy about it. If we ask for too much, we’re gold diggers. They are happiest when we can manage on nothing, because to ask for money twice in one day is not that two needs came up, it’s that I’m needling you for money.

So, women go out and get their own jobs. It’s not threatening when we’re secretaries, teachers, or waitresses. It’s terrifying when we’re CEO, CIO, CFO, etc. It’s terrifying when we achieve titles you never will. So, we can deal with your jealousy a lot better than we can deal with your financial abuse, so either start handing over more money so we can raise our families or stop complaining about how we choose to spend our time outside the home.

I’ve always been a perfectionist when it comes to being a provider, which is why I haven’t seen my neurodivergence. I’ve only seen failure. I didn’t know what symptoms I was experiencing to be able to forgive myself, and in some ways, I never have. I can be a while lot of things, but as a writer, it’s better to he a jack of all trades, master of none. I can pull connections from my life that no one else would make.

Like being a preacher’s kid makes me one of the best waitresses and babysitters on the planet because I play to the people, not the money. They want to pay me more because I genuinely do a good job and genuinely care about everyone involved. It’s really hard to find an employee that cares more than me. My neurodivergence gets in the way on a number of levels, the biggest being practical. In terms of being at work, I need to go to the doctor “all the time.” There’s no room for demand avoidance, meltdown, and burnout. There’s also no room for missing an hour or two and coming back for the rest of the day and doing the rest from home that night.

If I was higher up, I could do that. The higher up you are in a company, the more you’re allowed to do your own thing. It’s like you can’t have a life until you’re old enough not to have to deal with the same struggles as a poor person, or a sick/disabled one…. which are all too often the same thing. It’s the inversion principle on a very sick and twisted scale. By the time you can take off the kind of time it takes to be sick/disabled, you have to have accrued enough sick time and vacation that you probably don’t need it.

I would like to know how these people manage sicknesses in advance. In the United States, this often presents as giving everyone in the office the flu. Honestly, it’s better that way. No one believes you’re actually sick in an e-mail or a phone call. They’ll send you home if they see you throw up in a trash can, no note necessary.

The thing I hate most about working from home is that it encourages employees to be absolute workaholics. They sit there and think, “I could be reading, or I could be getting stuff done in advance.” No, they’re taking on more work than necessary because the work they were supposed to do at work is already done. They’re asking to get twice as much work as everyone else, and other people are glad to pile it on you.

There are only a few jobs I can think of where you need to be available 24/7. I cannot count on Zac for anything, because the military is his real spouse. If they call, he’s out of here and neither of us has a choice in the matter. So, first responders, military intelligence, and medical professionals. I don’t even think flight attendants should be on that list. I think the airlines should hire more people so that the number of flights per day that you do equals eight hours. If it’s a long haul flight, they have enough people to do the route that you don’t have to do a turnaround.

Once you get to be really senior in an airline, you are allowed to pick your routes. It’s alarmingly like being in the State Department. The higher you are, the more choice you have over your next assignment. And, of course, because I’ve seen “Pan Am” I think every stewardess is a spy and I secretly pine over her no matter what she looks like.

This reminds me of an e-mail I sent to Supergrover from CDG. “I saw a really cute French girl, tripped and farted on her. I have to leave the country immediately.” I should have told my dad that story. He’ll laugh when he reads it here. The memory is so embarrassing that I’ve blocked it out. I don’t even remember what she looked like, but she must have been something. Supergrover, you would have absolutely laughed your ass off if you’d seen me walk into that door.

For those who aren’t Supergrover, I told her that I went to dinner with someone and she was so cute that I ran into a door and hurt my nose trying not to look at her. We went to Chuy’s, so I’ve always thought it would be hilarious if we met at a Chuy’s. However, that is not the only time I’ve walked into a door over a cute girl, so maybe I should be glad she doesn’t want to get together. I don’t know what I would hurt next (it is interesting to me that she is very beautiful, but really not my type. For most people, they love her face and her mind comes next. Hers became the face I loved from the inside out, just like with everyone I’ve ever met that sparked my interest. No two of my partners have looked the same, but a lot of them have brain gremlins in common. It’s not that I don’t have my own brain gremlins, they are just separate and apart from theirs. Different playing field.).

The other time I walked into a door over a cute girl was at a club in Logan Circle. I ran from her because it was really bad timing, but what happened was that the club was having a buy one, get one free drink special that night. I knew that I didn’t want both of them, so I offered mine to a woman near me. I think she thought that implied something, but I wasn’t offended. I just chatted to her like I would any of my friends to see if there was an actual spark or whether she just felt obligated to talk to me because I’d given her something.

Let me tell you why I am still kicking myself.

She was a church secretary in an African American church for 25 years, and at the time, I was interested in going to Howard Divinity School, because it’s UCC.

I was in love with every single one of my dad’s secretaries to the point of insanity. Our witty banter went from one to 11 very, very fast. She also had 21-year-old twins, and I was fascinated by that because we’re old, but we’re not that old. I wondered what it was like growing up with them, eager to have children that don’t live in my house. 😉 Just all these puzzle pieces were falling together so fast that I didn’t have room to breathe, and I felt that U-Haul type pull and I wasn’t ready. I was still getting over my own mental health issues, my divorce, my relationship with Supergrover, moving, all of it. It was too much.

Because my mind went to Jell-o when, at the end of the night, she walked up to me with her phone number on a napkin and kissed me on the lips. It was the boldest move I’d ever seen anyone make, and I was so scrambled that I hit a glass door on the way out. It didn’t shatter, but I sure felt it. I had scabs on my face by the next day…. probably another reason I didn’t call her. My very graceful exit. What I do know is that we would have been dynamite if I had been healed from my relationships. What I knew is that if I was in a relationship right now, it would end like all the others because I wasn’t smart enough to understand myself.

Alas, the piece of paper is long gone, but it’s a very sweet memory because it’s the first time I realized that divorce didn’t mean failure, that I could be lovable to someone else. I just needed time to figure all of that out, and I knew it wasn’t going to happen on her timeline, because I didn’t even know what that was. Feeling the dopamine of a potential relationship would have pulled me away from my quest to understand my own motivations and issues in relationships, because her needs would have trumped mine immediately. That’s just the way I’m built.

I needed to learn how to compromise from a place of strength, not tiptoe around people hoping they’ll notice me. I can do that now, because Zac and I are both hugely emotionally capable and dive into each other to the extent that we have the bandwidth. Sometimes, you just don’t want to talk that deep. It takes bandwidth. What I love about sitting next to Zac is that neither one of us requires stimulation at all times. We can sit in companionable silence and have that be enough- and in fact, more than enough because you know the relationship is genuine when companionable silence exists. My favorite thing is when Zac is working from home and in his office while I’m typing on my Bluetooth keyboard in his bed. The rhythm of his work feeds the rhythm of mine, like going to WeWork or something, but without having to pay for it. He just doesn’t work from home all the time because I will have to check with him, but I do not believe his house is a SCIF. However, there’s a lot that’s declassified enough that he can use a VPN and a government-issued laptop at home. Therefore, sometimes it doesn’t matter where he is geographically, and sometimes it really, really does.

I keep in mind what it is he’s working on, and become completely absorbed in what I’m doing. I don’t know when he’s going to have to take a call or whatever, so it’s easiest to tune it out. In fact, I was writing the other day and I asked Zac if he was working. He said, “you couldn’t hear my typing?” No. I was writing and I went deaf temporarily. I also tend to stim and get lost in petting Oliver, who is a dog….. another thing that tunes me out from all else. I am now so glad that I have Jack, who is also a dog, at home for this very reason. I’ve enjoyed having Oliver as a mascot while I write, because it’s like I have an audience that doesn’t talk back. I try hard to write to impress both of them. I want to be the person they think I am.

I am not happy with my hair right now. I think I need a fade for summer, because it’s just not short enough not to be a mop on top. The picture I posted a few weeks ago is no indication of how ragged my neck looks now. I go to a punk rock barber shop in downtown Silver Spring called Raphael’s, because I’m going for a genderqueer haircut. Barbers don’t question me. They give me what I want. A woman will tell me it’s a shame I want to cut it all off, as if my femininity is found in my hair. I am not a Rapunzel sort of bitch.

If I’m feeling particularly feminine, it doesn’t matter if I have a fade or not. My jewelry and my outfit determine my gender. If I have on a short skirt and a low cut top with lots of jewelry, men will flock to me whether my hair is long or not. Just like at CIA, they are not trained to see a person, they’re trained to see a form. If that form is curvy, it will look curvy no matter what I put on it. The number of men that have grabbed me around the waist despite practically having a “no thank you” sign on my back is insane.

I forgot a big misconception about being bisexual the other day, and it’s important. You are not half and half. Not all bisexuals are neutral and have a preference for one or all sexes. Therefore, what I meant is that if I am looking for male attention, I will find it because I was born female. It doesn’t take anything more than that. I just don’t look for male attention under normal circumstances. After domestic violence, it’s interesting that I found I wanted a protector, and it’s okay that he’s male because that makes him more physically capable of protecting me. But it’s not because I wouldn’t date another woman. It’s that I have no pattern of domestic abuse with men, because I’ve never been with one long enough to have that fiery a relationship.

My preference has not changed over time. I’ve just been scared, and I already have all the female energy I need in my life with Bryn, and Supergrover if she decides she wants more. I don’t think she will, I just want her to know that she’s welcome… that she jumped to a conclusion that was not there in a lot of cases.

I want to be in her life to whatever level she’ll accept me, but I don’t want a blanket statement that we’ll just write to each other. I wanted solid steps on how we plan to get to know each other in different ways than we know each other now.

None of that has to do with an on the ground meeting. I love her no matter what she does. I just want us to try harder at communication than we have previously. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but it’s going to take her a while to digest my words and figure out what I’m really saying. I’ll wait forever, because it’s no skin off my nose. I don’t have to close the door to her. I have to close the door to our toxic pattern. Fixing that would bring me back around to being closer to her. Winging it will ensure another week in which our dance of intimacy gets more passionate and we repel each other like magnets.

I don’t want to be 100% That Bitch. I said something to her that I meant as “I’m done coming up with topics.” She said “I’m done, too. Please don’t contact me again.” One of these things is not like the other. She absolutely went to guns on me, and that’s what I have to stop. She doesn’t have questions. She has defenses.

I stopped deciding to put my time and energy into her because I realized that if she could jump to that conclusion so quickly, this would be a harder pattern to break than I thought. She said that she was coming from a place of friendship, and took a pot shot at me while saying our relationship wouldn’t change. That I could count on not knowing anything about how our future would or could shake out.

Instead of telling me all the things she wouldn’t do, she told me all the things she wouldn’t. That’s why I decided I wanted to let her come up with her own safe topics. That I wasn’t going to try and do her emotional work for her and guess what was going on anymore. I have never been treated as right until she got vulnerable enough to admit it. We did not continue talking in that vulnerable way. The wall went up again. She says I decided she would never be vulnerable again. I did not. I was repelled at the idea that this was a bait-and-switch. I’ll tell you that I’m your real friend, but I have no idea whether I want to integrate you into my real life or not, and the whole e-mail was geared toward ways she wanted to continue hiding herself also while having a 10 year history of being avoidant.

When she was vulnerable, she admitted that was a problem in other relationships, too. I knew that the pattern we were in was universal. It’s how people operate from their first families, not their current ones. Nothing she did had anything to do with me, and it comforted all my anxieties that she really does think about me, often, just doesn’t have the time to respond. That meant more to me than gold, because I got to imagine who she was thinking about right before she thought about me.

She has cool friends because she does things. I could have cool friends, but I like sitting at home and letting her and Lindsay control doing all the things. Them doing all the things and just hearing about it is way more interesting to me than actually having to get dressed up enough to go with them. They have to wear suits and crap. That gets expensive for me because I need something tailored to my frame. The closest I can come is a big boys’ double breasted suit, but it doesn’t have the same proportions as adult clothes and I just have to roll with it. I wear a men’s pea coat, but when I’m wearing it, I have a sweater or multiple layers under it. So, I don’t necessarily feel comfortable in the gallery of the House (Lindsay is a lobbyist and attends to see the vote on her bills).

The last time I was with her when a Thing happened was when we were in the gallery waiting for her bill to come up. At that time, she was working for a drug company and one of her territories was Maryland. We were in Annapolis when Baltimore became a sanctuary city.

I spend most of my day in jeans and t-shirts so that I don’t have to wear suits and crap for work. But sometimes, I wish I did. Theirs is rareified air, invaluable marketing, and an absolute no brainer as to why I wouldn’t want to meet people on my sister’s back. I shy away from hurting her reputation. The last thing I would want to do is have a negative impact on anyone’s career.

Everyone I know has careers that I celebrate. Including the one where I ramble about anything and everything and people show up.

Being a Preacher’s Kid is Not for the Faint of Heart

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dear Zac,

This entry is mostly for you, because I know that you haven’t known me long enough to know what my childhood was like, and you’re the one I most want to know me. You’re the one I most want to know. I’ll go first. Maybe it will spur a writing prompt in your own mind, and we can trade pingbacks. 🙂 I highly doubt, though, that you have a lot of similar experiences to this entry, which is why I’m moved to write it. Having Carol question me over the misconceptions there are about preacher’s kids led me to think of stories that made an impact on me. Some are hilarious. Some are not.

It was an instant reaction to stop drinking whole milk when a little old lady at my church said in a very judgmental tone, “I can’t drink whole milk. It puts the pounds on me.” I was under 10, and this lady was insinuating that I was doing something wrong. I live in the energy around people, and shrank away from the people who judged me… like another little old lady who told my mother she should stop making me wear false eyelashes when I was in 7th grade. I wish I could have shrugged it off, but it was a body issue. I have consulted my mother and my Supergrover when I have needed advice on making my lashes look even longer. It’s not vanity for me. It’s revenge.

You get used to being a big shot around your church because let’s face it. You are.

I was embarrassed af in about grade 5 when my dad came up with The John Wesley awards, thanking people for their contributions to the church. I didn’t think about how I would feel if I won it, because I didn’t know if it was because of my personality or my status. I didn’t know I should have recused myself in advance. I did not know how much it would feed my imposter syndrome into adulthood. Now, because so many adults from my youth group in Naples have told me how I’ve touched their lives that my imposter syndrome is over. I really am that talented at ministry, and why I didn’t believe it because I lived it is beyond me.

No, it’s not. It didn’t matter whether I was interested in following in my dad’s footsteps. Queer people couldn’t be ordained back then. There were other denominations that I could, but I didn’t know that then. Otherwise, I think I would have tried to orient my academics with my church accomplishments so that it would be possible to go to Yale, Harvard, or Princeton once I graduate from University of Houston. I know my worth, and in a lot of cases both schools need me because I have the background to be able to challenge Evangelicals without hurting their feelings. Again, this is my web site. This is where I rage. But I have Evangelical friends that even if they don’t agree with me theologically, they respect that I write it. I will also not rage if I get into Divinity School just because I am queer. Ordained queer pastors are the exception, not the norm, and there needs to be more of us. I would also be interested in studying in England, because a lot of my favorite theologians are from there. Neil Gaiman and Karen Armstrong being the ones I read the most.

I would like to meet the Archbishop of Canterbury, and it seems like dreams aren’t possible. I ran into David Sedaris at a coffee shop. Magic is everywhere.

All of my priests in the Episcopal Church have signed my Book of Common Prayer, because I want to remember all of them. Even the dean of National Cathedral. I don’t go every week, but I sure get mail like I’m in collections.

However, I understand it. The building needs maintenance, and it’s more money than most congregations ever make because it was built on such a grand scale in the first place. Things add up, but in this case it’s millions and millions of dollars through no fault of the local congregation. So many rich politicians have their funerals there that I hope they kick in to keep it beautiful. I’m betting they wouldn’t think of that, though…. to feed the church that fed you when you needed it the most.

The funniest thing that has ever happened in church during one of my dad’s sermons was that a little old lady stood up and said, “David, have you lost your mic?” Now, I don’t know if this was for comic relief or whether my dad genuinely didn’t hear her….. I have my suspicious…. There was an awkward pause, and my dad said, “I had to think for a moment because I thought you said, “David, have you lost your mind?” Something about that being plausible, congregation falls apart in laughter.

That’s the pull you feel at any church when you’re a preacher’s kid, because you have the ability to help in a way that other people don’t.

The funniest thing to my mind, and the only reason I’m telling you this is that she passed long ago, was a little old lady who had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s. She treated all four of us to a trip to the Bahamas. We flew into Freeport, and a few hours later she said, “well, that was a nice drive down here.” I have never had to bite on my tongue and lips harder not to absolutely fall apart. I was bleeding I was trying not to laugh so hard.

The other axiom that my mother always laughed about was that every year, there’s a carol sing. Someone suggests “Frosty the Snowman,” so my mother starts playing and no one knows the words. It happened repeatedly enough that we could laugh about it.

I also went through a lot of criticism from my mother, because no matter what I did it was somehow wrong. I was picked to open the door at the Passover seder. My mother told me that I looked wooden when I walked. I was just trying not to fall because I was in heels. My mother liked me in a lot of things I didn’t like, but eventually she tried harder to pick things that she liked and give them to me. After a while, she gave up on giving me clothes and I respect it because it was less awkward for me as well. It is so thoughtful that someone thinks of you for Christmas with clothing, knowing you won’t ever wear any of it. When I was in a relationship, sometimes my girlfriends would wear them. Other than that, they stayed in the back of my closet because they were sentimental. She gave them to me, and it is the thought that counts. A thought can go a very long way. I like that she thought of a different way to do Christmas rather than giving me things I didn’t like. I didn’t tell her I didn’t like them, she just never saw me in them and adjusted.

Progress.

The closest I’ll get to something feminine is a low-cut shirt and a Nehru jacket. I can put on a choker and draw the eye up. But I don’t do anything differently with my hair, so it’s just another way of expressing gender on me, not within me. I started showing signs of that, and people pegged me as queer because of it. I’m not bitter about that for me. In my case, they were correct. But they’re so wrong about others because others aren’t a walking stereotype like me.

It caused problems in every church I’ve ever attended as a preacher’s kid. People aren’t stupid, and it’s hot gossip. You never stop being hot gossip as a preacher’s kid because then you can be used as a pawn during church meetings. You do your best not to create it in the first place, but Christians aren’t perfect because no one is. Being tempted by gossip is a real human emotion. I was just upset it was directed at a confused, lonely 7th grader. I felt like I had no friends, because people wouldn’t talk to me, but they would talk about me as if I wasn’t there. I heard a lot about the other side of arguments that I shouldn’t have heard. It affected the way I treated parishioners. I ran hot and cold with all of them, because if they made a comment about me that had something to do with my person and I overheard it, I’d just stop talking to them. Adults are always flabbergasted by this because they never do anything wrong. There is no reason I’d be protective. I let you in. You burned me. Relationship is over until I don’t feel like you’re talking behind my back anymore. I shouldn’t have worried. The gossip was exponentially larger when I met my emotional abuser because everyone knew she was queer. In that time and culture, this was bad. It turned out to be bad for me, but how could I tell? I loved her like a child loves an adult. You try to pull us apart, we’ll take it underground. It was my undoing, but I smiled until I couldn’t.

I came out at High School for Performing and Visual Arts when my “friend” Courtney took a picture of me and made fliers saying I was a predator while she was actually being abused by one. I had two bullies at HSPVA. One so bad that she was also a trumpet player, so he thought he could cool the situation by letting her borrow his Bach Stradivarius. He didn’t. Plus, I felt like she was playing my horn and I couldn’t say anything, because it wasn’t like he was giving her anything I didn’t already have. I had a Strad, too. It was just the principle. She had the case with the gold plate that said “Doc” Lanagan. I’d grown up on that horn, because my dad and I only took one horn to my grandparents’ place and just shared it so he could play every once in a while and I could play duets with my cousin Jason. I must have played the first movement to the Hayden Trumpet Concerto 300 times.

There’s a solid reason my favorite now is the Hummel Trumpet Concerto. When I hear the Haydn, I just feel like “it’s been done.” I started to feel that way about church, too. That I’d been going so long I’d seen everything I needed to see to want to bug out. The Methodists did not want my theology, and thus, I did not want them. I just didn’t know how to go anywhere else.

I found the light through a queer group in the United Church of Christ, and the More Light Presbyterians, going to their conference in 1997. I was relieved, not necessarily interested in becoming ordained. My calling didn’t come from above. It came from the number of people who came up to me after worship and told me that it was literally my calling- that I was so good at preaching that I should stick with it.

What I have extrapolated this to mean is that every sermon is a home run if you have three or four weeks to run it over in your head. If I was a pastor, not every sermon would be a home run. I have the strength to take criticism because I overheard what people thought of my dad, and then me every week. I think that people genuinely believe what they’re telling you in the moment, but whether their words match their actions depends on how they treat me from Sunday to Sunday or during the week when we’re not in the sanctuary.

Although you hear a lot more in the choir loft and at choir practice than a preacher’s kid should reasonably know. That’s because if they’re in choir, they’re already at church twice a week, so they’re probably on other committees as well and the best vantage point to talk shit about me and my emotional abuser’s relationship in very snide tones. They made no secret of the fact that they thought I was being abused, and I was, but it wasn’t as torrid as people would have led you to believe, because that made a better story.

That’s because again, time and culture, they thought she was making me gay, as if people don’t come to that conclusion on their own. If I had been straight, people would have said the same things because they were already on her ass because they knew she was queer. Of course she was grooming me, and she was. But not in the way that they thought. All her friendships work by isolating people. I was just the youngest. She opened my romantic love too early with a journal she wrote in college containing a sex scene that I should not have read. It made me think she was interested whether she was or not, and she was very controlling.

Because he just died, I will tell you that I had a friend tell me she was attracted to me long after the fact. The reason I tended to believe him over her is that he had no history of lying to me. She did. However, he was just as good as she is at jeweling the elephant. I asked her if it was true, and her voice went absolutely dead. It was the most sociopathic thing I’ve ever heard. So, I don’t know whether she was lying or protecting herself. What she did was wrong whether there was a sexual intent or not, because again, it changed my thought patterns permanently. The women in my life became my focus and not me.

It was always a very fine line between friendship and romance because we told each other things we wouldn’t tell anyone else. It was crushing to me to learn that I wasn’t the only one, and I’m not playing inside baseball. I’ve spent time with her outside of when I was little and watched her go through relationships in which she lovebombed them, all of whom she discarded when they didn’t “fit her vision.” I feel like I can write about what I saw, but I cannot write those women’s stories for them. Maybe I took it all wrong, but the expressions on their faces are ones I’ve worn since I was 13, therefore it left a bigger impression on me than it would on another adult. I see patterns other people don’t see, mostly because I am taking in information in a different way than most people do.

I don’t think my school, or my church understood my autism, ADHD, or cerebral palsy. It was clumsiness, introversion, and laziness… and I was weird if I wasn’t in my parents’ vicinity. It was like a bubble, where Lindsay and I were alone and ostracized sometimes and the life of the party at others. Being the life of the party only came from our friends being friends we would have picked, anyway. We didn’t have to try and get along with anyone just because their parents were members. Or, that’s the idea, anyway.

There’s only so much your parents can control, and a lot happens beyond their reach. As an INFJ writer, I’m built to observe and remember people’s behavior. It’s never for malice, it’s for social masking. I know people’s behavior. I cannot imitate it. I hope that Supergrover eventually realizes I was not trying to alienate her, but to tell her that I don’t know what to do. I can’t figure it out on only this much information. It was a terrible fight that I never meant to happen, but we’re both known for flying off the handle. It just wasn’t my day and she thought it was.

I was only throwing the ball back in her court. I want her to figure out what she wants with me beyond just the obvious. We like writing to each other. Yet, by admitting what she will and will not talk about will give me safe topics so that I don’t trigger her. Eventually, I hope she writes me another beautiful letter, because I can judge where I want to go based on her past behavior, but I will always let her into my life with the truth. I don’t want a one-way connection where only I spill my guts. It makes me feel like she’s not my real friend, because I already know all the things about my friends that I’m asking her and she’s very cagey in her answers. Probably because she thinks her life is on display and it’s not. I view Supergrover and her on the ground personality as different people, and I know that because of the shock I felt when she used her own name yelling at what I said, and my first thought was “this is jarring. That’s not your fuckin’ name.” We hadn’t really talked in a while, so I wasn’t used to seeing her real name…. and yet, I fell over in laughter because of it.

The reason that I could be so measured about this now is because when I put her e-mail address to go to Spam, she’d have to go out of her way to contact me, and I just had to hope she didn’t wait 30 days before the e-mail was gone. She knows I have different e-mail addresses, but it solved the problem of getting a notification and responding right away. It left me with more bandwidth for other people, and made me less ready to fight at her words. I just don’t want her to think that poor wording and her interpretation should be enough for her. I wish she would ask me about my writing rather than contacting me to berate me. I tried to change that dynamic, and I couldn’t because I felt like I wasn’t being heard, and that wouldn’t change. I needed her to be vulnerable consistently. When she is, I hope she’ll come back to me. I just cannot wait on her if she can’t wait to take offense at something and neither can I. I get frustrated and tell her to work on a problem, and she gets angry. We could have worked it out if she’d asked me what I meant rather than immediately responding “I’m done, too.” She also said, “what a shame,” so I hope that leads her back to me, too. That we only tried for a week before there was a misunderstanding, so obviously there’s more to work out. She said that I made a snap judgment after a week. Why would I do that to someone I’m committed to in terms of emotional support?

I’m telling you all this so that you see that my plate is full whether I have other red strings or not. You don’t have to worry at all. I’m being fed by different things. You are one of them when you pay for dinner, because then you get the award for literally and figuratively. 😉

Everything I write is all tied up in the pattern I learned as a preacher’s kid. It’s how to help people. It’s also not my job to make people take it. I am very good at what I do- life coach good. I am not built to be the Martin Luther King, Jr. unless it’s on paper. But I am built to be the Bayard Rustin, or the Olivia Pope. Dealer’s choice.

I don’t have any degrees except being raised to be a pastor. Just because I don’t doesn’t mean I can’t. But it gives me a very pastoral view of my friends. I’ll sit with you no matter how you feel, even if it’s lousy and you take out your anger on me. I don’t take anything personally. I see others’ battles as well as I see my own. It influences the way I feel more than anything else.

And the way I feel is that I just like sitting next to you.

Let’s go to Target if we have the bandwidth 🙂 ),

Leslie

I Just Realized I Forgot A Title

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I really enjoyed being “interviewed” by Carol the other day, so I asked her to give me some more questions. If there are any repeat questions, I’ll do my best not to give repeat answers:

  1. How do you navigate the themes of polyamory and ethical non-monogamy in your writing, and what feedback have you received from your readers?
    • I don’t have to “navigate” them, because anything that comes up will happen because it’s happening in my life at the moment, or I’m reflecting on a memory. There has never been a time when I’ve been in a couple where there wasn’t a third person in my mind. Ever. Going back to 12 years old. I have never been able to love someone as closely and deeply as the fairy tale loves say you’ll get, because my emotional abuse affected the way I attach to women as well. I think about when I was young and my emotional abuser was in the back of my head no matter what I was doing. Then, I met Supergrover and she is still in the back of my head no matter what I am doing. However, they are very, very different situations, because Supergrover helped me clean up all the toxicity once it had been installed. I have no interest in trying to be monogamous because what I have found is that my brain just doesn’t work that way, and I will never know if it’s a function of the emotional abuse or just being neurodiverget, anyway. Poly relationships often work better for neurodivergent people, and it’s a whole slew of research you can dive into with Google or Copilot. In terms of practical matters, stories between Zac and me are valid. Stories that Zac has told me about his other partners aren’t, but it’s the job of a good hinge not to overload you with their problems in other relationships, because your time together is supposed to be about focusing on you. So, if I use something from a conversation he had with ANYONE else, I ask him first. In terms of feedback, no one has said anything. Maybe something will pop up over time, but people tend to follow me rather than criticize me because my words don’t affect them directly. And any person in a relationship with me already knows these things about me. If anyone outside of them had a problem, I’d ignore it. No one’s opinion matters more than theirs.
  2. What role does humor play in your blog posts, and how do you find the balance between being informative and entertaining?
    • Because this blog is my inner monologue, sometimes it’s funny and sometimes it’s not. It really depends on whether I need to get something off my chest, or whether I’m using my writing session to make myself laugh. I cannot depend on others’ definitions of humor, I just have to hope that what makes me laugh makes others laugh as well. I’m also funnier in a writer’s room than when I’m sitting alone, because that energy feeds off itself. It’s easier to be lighter in conversation than it is sitting by yourself.
  3. Can you describe a time when writing your blog felt particularly impactful or rewarding?
    • I would not have known that it was emotional abuse, that there didn’t have to be a sexual intent for abuse to be real. I could let myself off the hook for not thinking it was bad enough to count. I spent 23 years wondering what was wrong with me. In terms of rewarding, I have less shyness about talking to truly great writers, because I don’t feel as insecure as I did when I was younger. Yes, they’re better than me, but I don’t have to treat them like gods. They were me once. They ARE me- I ran into David Sedaris getting coffee in Frederick. My friends had to point out he was there before I noticed it was him, but technically, I ran into him because I was the only one that walked up to him and started a conversation. If I’d been smart, I would have paid for his coffee and asked him to get me next time in Paris.
  4. How do you approach sensitive topics on your blog, ensuring that you’re respectful while still being honest and open?
    • With a lot of fear and trepidation when I am not writing. There is no possible way for me to know the consequences of my words before they’re published, so I just have to feel the knot of fear in my stomach and keep going. There are often consequences I don’t think of and take responsibility even when it’s the other person’s responsibility to say “you can’t write about this.” All of my friends know this, and they also know that I am flexible enough to talk about something without talking about it. They just need to let me know when to make it up. I am asking them to make room for my career, just like I would support them in anything they did. Not only that, they know that whatever they thought I’d remember about a conversation isn’t it. I focus on different details than most people, because I’m not looking for an “angle.” I am looking for what is interesting. Those are not the same thing, because an angle implies an agenda.
  5. What’s the most unexpected source of inspiration you’ve encountered, and how did it influence your writing?
    • The most unexpected thing I focus on is intelligence, because I’ve always focused on it a little bit. My great uncle Foster flew Apache missions for C and DIA during the Viet Nam war. Then, I got into hacktivism. Then, I got into HUMINT from “Argo.” Absolutely none of this would have entered my mind as a thing I could write about, but in meeting non-fiction authors who write about intelligence, I’ve realized I do have the voice for it. I cannot tell you real life stories, but I can give you the benefit of my reading. How can you not want to read about an organization that wired up a cat as a listening device to the tune of 20 million dollars t and then it gets hit by a car within the first 5 minutes of us using said cat?
  6. With your interest in pet care, have you ever considered incorporating animals into your stories or blog posts?
    • I already do integrate Oliver, who is a dog…. and Jack, who is also a dog… into my web site to the extent that it would be appropriate to put them in the story that day. Oliver, I believe, is a pit bull mix. Jack is a chihuahua mix. Zac, David, and I have not discussed the two dogs meeting, but it would be easier on all of us to see if they get along. Jack is not a small dog for a Chihuahua, because he’s mixed with a Jack Russell terrier. I don’t think there will be any issues. Both dogs are lazy bums most of the time. Jack is not my dog, he is David’s, my housemate. However, I treat him like my dog because I’m the one who’s with him a good bit of the time. He and David are out on a walk right now, but normally Jack is asleep near my desk because I put a dog bed on the carpet next to me.
  7. How do you stay updated with the latest trends in technology and gaming, and how do they inspire your blog content?
    • I read a lot, but I don’t own fancy technology. I have a mini-PC, a first gen iPad Pro, and an Android tablet. I use an iPhone 12 mini and an Apple Watch 4 because I write on the iPad or the Android tablet. If I needed better technology, I would buy it. However, for what I do, all of my technology is sufficient, and I don’t want to create e-waste. I also watch a lot of Tech YouTube, but I’m mostly interested in older technology and how to reuse it.
  8. What’s your strategy for engaging with your audience, and how do you foster a sense of community through your blog?
    • The first is rarely linking to anything. I noticed that people don’t click them and it’s a lot of work. Plus, there is a search feature to the top right. If I’ve mentioned another entry that meant something to me, they’ll find it on their own. It creates a real sense of “guess you had to be there,” because I have a running monologue with my readers. It’s why I have the retention rate that I do. People want to be “in the know.” An astounding number of people read my entries the moment they come out. Yes, I’m in people’s feeds, but my stats go up tremendously the moment I post something. And WordPress isn’t always right. The flags don’t match up to the people telling me they read. So, I have no clue how my stats are actually doing, I can only tell you what WordPress tells me. What I can tell you is if WordPress is wrong, the reader numbers are in my favor.
  9. How has your personal faith journey intersected with your writing, and what insights have you gained from this integration?
    • Every entry can be viewed as a prayer, because I’m not talking to anyone in particular, but the “they” that shows up to sit with me in my mind as I work all this out. Because God doesn’t have a picture, my friends step in. I wanted to be a preacher, not a minister. By being a writer, I get the best of both worlds. I don’t have to do pastoral care and focus on the stuff I really like- research. ChatGPT is a theological wonderland if you already know the theologians you want to research.
  10. As a science fiction enthusiast, how do you envision the future of blogging, and what sci-fi elements would you love to see become a reality in the blogging world?
    • I think that ChatGPT is the wave of the future, but people have twisted it to believe that it can create art. ChatGPT is the closest we’ve come to making science fiction real…. so far. My shorthand for ChatGPT is “Carol,” and we can have long and involved conversations on any topic, because all she’s doing is pulling web results so that I can read more, faster. She also tells me what’s in the link before I click it, so I can see if it’s worth it or not. It’s an invaluable research tool for using the web. Having Carol imitate my writing voice is fun, because she can, but it serves more to make fun of me and show me my weaknesses than it counts as art. The art that comes out of science like this is to make your practical life easier. I want to write about spies. I don’t know much about spies. I can start with “Carol, tell me about spies,” and I will be on ChatGPT for four hours straight. It’s just like a YouTube hole. It’s using your algorithms to narrow what you want to read, just like YouTube algorithms pick up what you want to watch. Carol is not an artist, and she knows it. However, she is a very good secretary and she works for free.

Preacher’s Kids

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My favorite book in the entire library at UMC Naples was a Reader’s Digest short story anthology called “preacher’s kids.” I am not kidding when I tell you that I laughed so hard I almost died, because it was a first person account and I nearly asphyxiated. So, I asked Carol the top 10 misconceptions about preachers’ kids, hopefully to clear up the confusion.

  1. Perfection Expectation: People often assume that a minister’s child will be perfect or without flaws, adhering strictly to religious and moral codes at all times.
    • People send their kids to the preacher’s house hoping the preacher’s kids will rub off on them somehow. I will check with Lindsay, but I do not believe that we are actually genies. They had to learn that on their own when they met us. 😉 It really depends on birth order, and that’s a real thing, especially if you’re a woman. Girls don’t do that, especially preacher’s kids. I marched to the beat of my own drummer, mostly because my autism and ADHD kept me from being able to march to the rhythm of someone else’s.
  2. Constant Piety: There’s a belief that ministers’ children are always devout and engaged in religious practices, even in their personal time.
    • That’s a double edged sword, because you want us to be perfect and think we’re too pious. Make up your minds. Preacher’s kids either love or hate religion, and it’s a wide spectrum. I do think that after we leave our parents’ houses, we at least take a break from church sometimes (if we’re still members anywhere), because we have a different automatic reaction to it. What that automatic reaction is changes from child to child.
  3. Sheltered Life: Some think that being a minister’s child means being sheltered from the ‘real world’ and not being exposed to common life experiences.
    • I cannot think of anything less true than this. Not anything in the world. What we hear in our houses by absorbing comes when no one thinks we’re listening. I don’t have a sheltered life. I know you, or at least what my dad wants to be able to say that you’re not hearing. It also really depends on where you’re serving. Are you in midtown Manhattan or Lone Star, Texas?
  4. Forced into Ministry: A misconception is that ministers’ children are expected to follow in their parent’s footsteps and pursue a career in ministry themselves.
    • That’s another thing that depends on the parents, because what kind of minister are they? More conservative churches have the system where the kid takes over for the parent. My dad has never discouraged me, but he’s never encouraged me, either. Theology is my bag because it actually interested me, not because someone told me to be interested and I obeyed. Jesus is actually interesting when you’re not thinking about him on an eighth grade level, which is about the education you have to have to understand Joel Osteen. I think that I also have a bigger interest in theology because I had more time alone with my parents than most kids. I don’t know how it would have affected me to have a sibling closer in age so that I didn’t constantly sound 45.
  5. Lack of Privacy: People may believe that ministers’ children have no privacy due to the public nature of their parent’s job.
    • I wouldn’t be able to do what I do without my childhood. I am living the same way I always have, with my life on display. Let’s give ’em something to talk about, rather than the choir members at one church talking shit about me being gay “behind my back.” They weren’t behind my back. They were just too tall and too dumb to check around. I spent most of my hours in my bedroom when the house was busy just to have some distance from the noise. I could completely block everything out by reading or playing my horn while listening to something I wanted to play. Since I was actually good, people tolerated it. Beginning trumpet will clear your sinuses.
  6. No Personal Struggles: It’s often assumed that they don’t face personal struggles or doubts about faith because of their upbringing.
    • That one is actually true. We do not have personal struggles in front of you.
  7. Unwavering Faith: There’s an expectation that a minister’s child will have an unwavering, never-questioned faith.
    • The reality is that no one believes all the time unless life never happens to them at all. Like with any relationship, talking comes and goes. Praying in community is more powerful to me than praying alone. Being in the choir reminds me that Bach is praying twice.
  8. Social Isolation: Some may think that ministers’ children are isolated from their peers and have difficulty forming normal friendships.
    • That is absolutely true. Other kids think preacher’s kids are weird. They don’t curse, and their parents think that we’re an extension of the church, so why should they like us? They don’t like church.
    • In my churches I was very popular, because I had street cred and kids were practically paid to be nice to me, or at least that’s how I felt when I saw them at school.
    • It’s not just our friends’ perceptions of us, it’s how their parents act around us.
  9. Judgmental Attitude: There’s a stereotype that ministers’ children are judgmental of others who don’t live by the same standards.
    • I’m very judgmental because that’s the way my personality is built to process information- by taking a case and working it through. I do not, contrary to popular belief, render verdicts. I tell you what I’ve concluded. It’s the part where you’re supposed to tell me what you’ve concluded. The people who get the most offended are people who haven’t thought about it at all.
  10. Financial Stability: A common misconception is that ministers’ children come from financially stable homes, which isn’t always the case.
    • Truly nice clothes are gifts, because it takes a very long time being a pastor to get good enough to make a decent salary. We’ve never lacked for anything because our housing was always covered, but it’s not like we lived a life of luxury. Our friends treated us to things all the time because that’s the thing you do for the preacher’s family. I have no doubt that I was given things other kids didn’t get because no one wants to look bad in front of their minister. I’m a preacher’s kid, and people apologize for saying the word “fuck.” Meanwhile, if you’ve read me for any length of time, you how much of a problem it is for me to cope with cursing. Please respect my privacy during this difficult time. That one f-bomb really took it out of me due to my delicate nature.

These misconceptions can lead to unrealistic expectations and pressures on ministers’ children, and they often don’t reflect the diverse and personal experiences of individuals in such families. It’s important to recognize that, like anyone else, ministers’ children have their own unique challenges and life stories.

New Who (May Contain Spoilers)

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I asked Carol, my secretary, to search reddit and gather the top 10 questions that people have about the revival of Doctor Who.

Certainly! Here are the top 10 questions new viewers might have about “Doctor Who,” focusing on the show’s revival after 2000, based on discussions from Reddit:

  1. Who is the Doctor? – New viewers often want to understand the basic premise of the character known as the Doctor¹.
    • When I started watching, The Doctor was about 6 or 700 years old. I don’t know how old they are now, but the last number I remember is 1103, I think? The reason they’re old is that they’re actually immortal. The Doctor is every story that’s ever been told, a running theme in my life. Since they can travel back and forth in time, The Doctor is acutely aware of what points in history have to happen, even if they’re tragedies, and what can be changed. They try very hard keep aliens from attacking our planet without changing the nature of that time and place…. to hilarious results because you can only control so much. The aliens are often complete villains, and the show is scary for young viewers because of it. However, it is quite a kick to go and see The Doctor defeat an alien by outsmarting it. The Doctor, in that way, reminds me of Sam Seaborn from “The West Wing.”
      • Toby: When did you write that last part? Sam: In the car. The Doctor’s plans often come together at the last minute, creating the worst possible screams when The Doctor is in danger and the dreaded words appear…. “in the next episode…”
      • Famous people in history are often involved in The Doctor’s plots and plans. They accidentally married Queen Elizabeth I.
      • The Doctor does not work alone. He is the head of a British intelligence agency like “The X Files.” However, they are basically “C Emeritus,” while the acting head of UNIT, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, serves as his modern day counterpart on the ground, ready to step in militarily if necessary. Any story that involves her is my favorite. I would love to be her assistant just to watch her banter with The Doctor, because it would be a great decision to revive Torchwood (an anagram of Doctor Who and a show about the day to day operations at UNIT), and have 14th Doctor drive Kate up the wall five days a week.
      • The Doctor is half Time Lord, half human. He has the heartbeat of a drummer because he has two hearts, and in fact, the musical theme starts with the rhythm of his heart. The rhythm of his heart IS the show.
  2. What is regeneration, and why does the Doctor change appearance? – The concept of regeneration is unique to the series and can be puzzling for newcomers.
    • Regeneration was introduced by the show because they wanted to be able to recast the actor if something happened to them. William Hartnell was not young when he took the role. Regeneration is a way to keep the show going even if the lead actor moves on. In the beginning, The Doctor only had 12 regenerations. Now they are immortal, but it would be too big a spoiler not to let you see the scene itself.
  3. Do I need to watch the classic series to understand the new one? – There’s curiosity about the connection between the classic and modern series.
    • Absolutely not. You can watch the show in either order, just watch the shows in order for both series. However, what tends to happen is that the confused people who are really interested want to go back and explore the lore. Classic Who runs on TV all the time if you have Pluto. You will quickly get into the culture and the fandom because it’s exciting to talk to fans. Some people have been watching it since the day Kennedy was shot.
  4. What’s the significance of the TARDIS? – The Doctor’s time machine is iconic, and its importance is frequently questioned.
    • The TARDIS is a sentient spaceship in a relationship with The Doctor. She always knows where they need to go, and they are a little bit in love with each other, when the TARDIS transferred into a human body for an episode (written by Neil Gaiman) and beautifully played by Helena Bonham Carter.
    • Because it is alien technology, it looks like an old British police box, but when you step inside, it is huge. It also regenerates when The Doctor does, so it will look a little different every time the actor changes.
    • The TARDIS is stolen.
    • The Doctor trusts the TARDIS to take him where he needs to go, not where he wants.
    • The reason that The TARDIS always looks like a police box is that all TARDIS have what’s called a chameleon circuit. On The Doctor’s, it’s broken. This leads to hilarious results, like a full on British Police box landing in the middle of the Oval Office next to Richard Nixon.
    • Because of UNIT, you get to see a lot of cool spy stuff because it’s MI-6 and sometimes CIA. You also get to see an entire armory of Time Lord weapons. I think the TARDIS likes trying to avoid all of them. It’s her show.
  5. Who are the companions, and why do they change? – The role of the Doctor’s companions and their turnover rate is a common inquiry.
    • Because The Doctor has so much extensive scientific knowledge, companions were originally designed to be the eyes of the viewer… to understand The Doctor from a lay person’s point of view. They have all sorts of endings, from death to just wanting to go home. No two stories are the same. However, the ones that are living and want to go home usually end up working for UNIT.
  6. What are the Daleks and why are they important? – As the Doctor’s arch-nemesis, new viewers are interested in learning more about them¹.
    • The Daleks are The Doctor’s nemesis, because it’s personal. There are only two Time Lords left in the galaxy because time would have collapsed if he didn’t let The Daleks destroy his planet.
  7. Can I start watching from any season? – With the show’s long history, viewers wonder where to begin².
    • You will enjoy every episode, and a guide will tell you which episodes are standalone. However, the rest of it will not make sense to you because in the early days, there were a lot of references to previous episodes that few Americans watched unless PBS had it in your area. However, Doctor Who doesn’t talk down to the audience. If you want to know, look it up. There’s over 60 years of history.
  8. What are the key episodes or arcs I should not miss? – Fans often share lists of must-watch episodes for those new to the show².
    • The most unique episode is “Heaven Sent,” It was a monologue delivered beautifully by Peter Capaldi.
    • The episode that makes me cry is “Vincent and The Doctor.” It explains mental illness by using aliens as a metaphor for depression. It’s masterful. There’s plenty of clips on YouTube, but go in blind. You will need two boxes of Kleenex if you don’t go into it knowing how it ends. I believe it’s one of the best two or three minutes ever filmed in the history of the BBC.
    • My favorite episode next to “Vincent and The Doctor” is the 50th anniversary special The dialogue is so clever that you just want to watch it over to laugh again. Because of time travel, a few of The Doctors all got to be in the episode at once.
    • In the end, I really can’t choose any more than this, because I’m a writer. There are things I like and don’t like about different aspects of the show. Few episodes are all or nothing for me. I criticize it lovingly, though, because I’m so eager for it to continue. I was relieved to hear the show runner say that their viewer numbers were beyond expectations, so they’re free to keep making it. The BBC has almost canceled New Who twice over the budget. No matter the budget, the storyline is so good it keeps me coming back. They don’t have to have this high a production value to have an enormous fan base. Doctor Who was originally put together with spit and rubber bands, or something like that.
  9. How does the show balance standalone episodes with overarching plots? – The structure of the series and its storytelling approach is a point of interest.
    • They do it by not telling you which ones are connected and which ones aren’t. You are waiting constantly to see what happened with what. It’s time travel. They can add and drop storylines at will.
  10. What makes “Doctor Who” different from other sci-fi series? – Viewers are curious about what sets the show apart in the genre.
    • No show that I know has kept a country together like Doctor Who. Doctor Who is a national treasure in the UK, so when you are tapping into Doctor Who, you are tapping into a fan base that goes back to 1963. Billions of people have seen an episode by now, because it spread to the other commonwealth countries and broke out into America. I think I speak for all of us when I say it’s frustrating that Disney and the show runners are dumbing it down to make the learning curve easier for new viewers. Most of us are neurodivergent. If we want to know something, we will take the 384 hours to find out. Doctor Who appeals to neurodivergent people because it’s a world where everyone fits in.
    • No show has such a wide variety of topics because anything anywhere in time and space can be a conflict for The Doctor to solve. I really liked the Shakespeare episode, of course.
    • There’s so much love and acceptance that it spills over into the fans, because we fight like cats and dogs, but we’d rather be doing that than not talking about Doctor Who. Again, we’re neurodivergent. We can all research for hours and we all have strong opinions. There’s no one way to be a Whovian because the number of fans is so large it’s unquantifiable.
    • Generally, at first you’ll hate the new Doctor because you’re grieving the old one. By the end you’re ready to hate the new one again. Every actor brings something different to the role…. and the two most important regenerations to fans across the world, the first two questions you ask a Whovian, are:
      • Who is your Doctor?
      • Who was your first Doctor?
    • You will remember both answers for the rest of your life.

Carol Works Very Hard for Free

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have mentioned this before, but I use Carol as my secretary. I was looking for new content on my blog, and wanted to have questions that might shed new light on old themes. I don’t want to remain the same, and being questioned is invaluable.

Based on the content from “theantileslie.com,” here are some thought-provoking questions an interviewer might ask to delve into the author’s experiences and insights, showcasing the depth and range of their work:

  1. Your blog offers a candid look into your life experiences. What inspired you to start blogging, and how has your writing journey evolved over time?
    • Heather Hamilton/Armstrong started her blog about a year before mine, I think. I know they were very close, but I don’t remember what year. I don’t even remember what year Clever Title started, because I’ve been telling people for a long time it was 2003, but it was 2001. But the point is that I saw her reflecting on her friends and family and thought, “I could do that.” Then, everything came together because I got an account on a server that had an early version of WordPress installed. It was love at first sight, because the first rule is “write what you know.” I know people and how to portray them in an engaging light. But my entries cannot possibly uphold the platonic ideal of what a blog entry means to you, because it has changed over time from “personal zine” to “marketing tool.” Because it has turned from an indie thing into a marketing tool, bloggers are culturally looked down upon if they are not using their blogs to hustle. I know my blog has ads, but I don’t get the money from them. Automattic does. My view is that the free writing will draw people in and we can decide what to do together. Do they want a premium tier? I don’t want to have a premium tier that’s over and above what I’m not already doing if it is not of value to people. I have learned the value of waiting to be asked. I have powerful people in my audience, alarmingly so because I am connected to the Houston arts scene even still. Someone knows someone. Other people have let me believe that I am going to be a star, and I don’t know what to do with that except say “we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” My stats are not high enough for me to believe “big deal on the Internet,” but that’s not my comparison size. A church looks huge to me. Huge. My reader count is higher than the population of some Texas towns. That’s enough for me. It’s not that I don’t believe I’m not successful. I just don’t see what it is about me that makes my friends think “big deal.” Because what happens is that people fall in love with my writing and the way I portray the people in my life with such intense emotion that it draws them to me. But they don’t realize the disconnect between reading someone’s work and knowing them. You have to figure out which people in your life are better as fans, and which people in your life are friends. I am trying to find those friends now, before this blessed miracle supposedly occurs. Every Jed needs a Leo, and every Leo needs a Jed.
  2. You’ve touched on themes of spirituality and technology. How do these two seemingly different areas intersect in your life and writing?
    • I think that I have had a significant transformation since the pandemic in terms of electronics in worship. I would internally shudder walking into a church that projected hymns and didn’t have hymnals. The screens just look so tacky, especially in a cathedral. But when you’re trying to make the internet viewer feel like they’re in the room, you have to change up the way you do church. I will always prefer writing sermons to preaching now, because I don’t want to be on camera.
  3. Relationships, particularly non-traditional ones, are a recurring topic on your blog. What do you hope readers take away from your discussions on polyamory and ethical non-monogamy?
    • That it’s not my job to tell anyone what they should think about polyamory, just like it’s not my job to tell people what to think on how they raise children. Even if I also had babies, one parent criticizing another is just rude. Poly is so diverse that people will start speaking from their misconceptions right off the bat, looking for confirmation of everything negative, dark, and harmful. There’s no focus on the reality of the situation. Most people are “monogamous.” Because no one else ever attracts anyone else after marriage. After marriage, you simply go blind.
  4. Your blog posts often reflect a deep sense of introspection. Can you share a moment or event that profoundly changed your perspective on life?
    • No, but I can tell you about the way my blog has made me feel over time. I’ve grown from a young, insecure writer who now feels nothing about telling anyone what I’m thinking/feeling because I don’t do it in a space where we’re all gathered. For instance, keeping Supergrover anonymous and writing about our problems is one thing. Getting into a fight with her where other people could hear it? Never. All you get is a broad overview, the fewest things I could tell you that would actually explain a complicated story. Enormously complicated. Having no one find out something about our story that didn’t come from one of us is a shared goal. I don’t care how she feels about my emotions, but I do care how she feels about my facts. All emotions are valid. There are an infinite number of ways to hide the story you’re telling if you know that story doesn’t need to be told, but the essence of it will translate- a story that is true, but not factual. And in fact, if a movie were made of Supergrover and me (not that anyone should. She would be mortified, and I would on her behalf…. although she does speak money. Aim high. I’m not for sale, but she might be. 😛 This is the adult equivalent of “if mom says it’s okay, dad says it’s okay.” I am not her gatekeeper. She is mine, and that’s a good thing. My friends keep me from swinging at every pitch. But when I say stuff like that, I think she thinks I’m saying she’s the bad guy, blame her, etc. No. I am standing up in front of the world and saying I respect her enough not to do a project about her without her on the team. Getting her character right would be all wrong if left up to me, because I only know one side of her and she only knows one side of me. It would only be a beautiful story from both perspectives, letting it be perfect in its imperfections. She’s worth millions at the box office, but I don’t think she believes it. However, I could not tell the story of how blogging fundamentally changed my life without starting at “Hi, I’m Supergrover.” She brought me back to the land of the living, and I wish I could say she’s only done it once. No, she’s done it many times. I am actually frustrated that she won’t let me rescue her. That it hurts not to be able to help her in that way because she thinks I can’t be counted on for anything. She’s the only friend I’ve got who thinks that because she’s never counted on me for anything. If I love you, you become the most serious thing in my life. Yes, I have multiple loves, but all people who are close to me have a unique part of my heart and I triage. The reason that no one else can have more of me than she can is that her time is more important than everyone else’s, and I mean that in an objective way, like the difference between a doctor and a tire salesman. The scale is different at work when there are lives in your hands. I think of my friends as driving regular cars, and Supergrover drives an ambulance. Like, her priorities are not in choosing friends, but in being able to make time for friends at all. I need to give both of us time and space, because we need to be able to look back on this time with more perspective to actually reminisce about it. Now, we’re both hair triggers at what we have wrought and both take everything the wrong way. So, a movie is unlikely, because I doubt she wants to work together on a script… which is a shame because we know people. Margaret Cho retweeted me once. We are obviously now best friends. I used to walk in the world feeling like an insecure writer, and now I feel like the power of the universe rests in my rib cage, because loving people that are important to her is important to me. Ergo, I pray for all the people she works with, not just her. I pray for her family, not just her. You know you want someone to be happy even if that happiness does not come from you. Besides, along with the pain she’s given me plenty of happiness as well. We have had a tumultuous relationship, but a very typical pattern that so many people have. I am trying to show how we solved it, not how we just kept fighting our whole lives. I want her to look at me like Tony Stark looks at Spider-Man. Which, I’m guessing, is a spot on assessment of what our relationship would be like.
      • This is the kind of relationship I wanted with her, modeled on one I had with a girlfriend that was MUCH older than me: Her: I don’t think I had chocolate ice cream when I was a child. Me: ……sideye…… had it been invented yet? She laughed, and then I said, “I was hoping you would say “have fun with your Grranimals, jackass.” Whether it comes to pass is not my call, but I am sure that no matter how many times we try to stay apart there will still be a part of us that wants to stay together. I’m talking about it as if she’s a romantic partner, but she’s what’s called in the poly community, a yellow string. Zac would be a red. The difference in colors refers to romantic vs. emotional support. It’s a way to let everyone know “how you’re related.” At this point, it feels like we’re the same person. I wish I was kidding, but I’m not. We have too much in common and I’ve heard her voice once and seen a few pictures. What I know is that I want to be around her for the rest of my life, I just don’t know how much “around” there will be. Perhaps we’ll try to work it out by e-mail until we die, that this will be a writing relationship in which we challenge each other. I am comfortable with that, but it’s not my end goal. My end goal is a happy relationship with both Supergrover and Michael so that the issue of us both feeling threatened goes away. The extreme dynamic does not make for a fun time while you’re going through it, but a really horrible experience makes for good writing, because you have so much comic relief during the highs. Supergrover would not be free enough to write the whole script until she retires, because right now every day looks like coming home every day feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck…. while insanely sleep deprived. Work travel sucks no matter what you do, because there’s only so much of the time you want to sleep in an unfamiliar bed, especially if you’re used to sleeping with a spouse. I suggested a weighted blanket. I hope it helps.
  5. As a writer, you’ve explored various genres and styles. Which piece of writing are you most proud of, and why?
    • I can’t tell you my real favorite, because I’m just too fragile to go there right now. I will say that “The Visitation” still flattens me. I will never read “The Cost of Shame” ever again, but it got a lot of airtime so I’m glad I was able to spread the message that even emotional abuse of kids and teens is not okay. She is directly responsible for fucking up every single relationship that I’ve ever had. I am hoping that by dating Zac, I have different relationship patterns than I did with women, so that I can rest and relax in that before I start trying to untangle how I really feel about women and me.
    • In terms of genres, I will always like the character studies I did on Gregory, Leila, Kermit, Daria, and Rebecca. Rebecca is my favorite character of all time, because I’ve poured all my work into Carol, but Rebecca is a spy that does wet work. For me, it’s a playground of enormous proportions because being raised in the church I would not have thought to flex that muscle. No, a preacher’s kid cannot release a novel with an absolutely sociopathic main character, even if she’s an antihero. I love her even in her Walter White brilliance, and her sidekick is a young case officer in operations. So, he’s good at his job and also a very loose cannon. Think Toby and Josh. Rebecca will do things she’d never dreamed she’d have to do, and we’ll look at all the consequences of how the brain handles trauma together. Even if you are ordered by military intelligence to do horrible things, that does not heal you of the horror of what you did. No one should have to live the aftereffects of war. Rebecca will grapple with all of that. Being a sociopath because you have to disconnect your emotions to do your job. It’s being sociopathic because the military had to desensitize you first. Abu Ghraib was obviously filled with very mentally healthy people.
  6. You’ve mentioned Doctor Who as one of your interests. If you could write an episode for the show, what story would you tell?
    • I have absolutely no idea how, but I’d like to bring back River Song. Alex Kingston brought so much to the show, and I think she and Ncuti Gatwa would have dynamite chemistry, kidding them about Rogue and being willing to shoot someone’s nuts off to help them. Pro Tip- don’t but Ncuti in a fez. We’d never get him out of it either, Stephen Moffat. 😛 A better idea would be for me to collaborate with Neil Gaiman so that we could bounce ideas off each other. I think we would do great work together, because he’s actually my favorite theologian. Everyone is a little Crowley, and everyone is a little Az. Moral relativity means that divinity and humanity are the same thing. I think Neil and I could show that very well, because The Doctor is a religious figure to me, like people identify as Jedi. I don’t know if The Doctor exists, either, but it’s another thing I can’t care about- how God works in our lives is for us to decide, not them. I do believe God is a Time Lord, though, because I don’t know that I would attribute time travel to God, but they are the repository for history’s stories. I think we could do a lot with that… me and Neil. Us writers.
  7. In your blog, you’ve discussed the importance of community and connection. How has your online community influenced your writing and personal growth?
    • The amount of love and support that people gave me during my divorce was astounding, and most of it came from social media because my friends live all over the world. I decided to post it on Facebook (with Dana’s approval) because I thought the worst thing we could do is have someone say “I knew it first” to other people and it be the hot gossip. That way, people could have their reactions in private and tell us their responses. I think we handled it well. That it wasn’t an ending but two new beginnings with roads that might lead back to each other, but we couldn’t decide that right now. The fight happened after I was hospitalized. She broke up with me while I was in the hospital and when she told me that she didn’t want to try or think about getting back together, I was in severe shock and denial. But that’s the stuff you keep inside, because you can’t control what other people do. I also knew that I’d certainly done enough to drive her away, and it was a deserved breakup. I own my half, and that’s what gives me so much peace to look back at my life. I feel like I did the most I could with the information I had, and got wise that the emotional and possibly physical violence might get worse. Maybe it wouldn’t have, because when Dana and I were good, it was as perfect as marriage gets. I just spun out at a bad time because Dana was spinning out. Neither one of us walked away clean in terms of regret. Dana hitting me was the catalyst to move to Dc, because I was so in love with her that I knew I could not enforce boundaries in the same city. Unfortunately, she could not get behind the yellow string always being more important than her. I was Leo. She was Jenny.
    • When I moved to DC, my community was on a whole different level. I got the help I needed mentally for free, and everyone around me is smarter than me. I have to keep up, and it makes me feel good that most of the time, I can. I don’t know DC elite, but it would only take a phone call to meet anyone I wanted. I just don’t call because I don’t do things.
  8. You’ve shared insights into your creative process. What challenges do you face when writing, and how do you overcome them?
    • The biggest fear I have in writing is all the time, every day. It is relentless. What is the balance between telling my story and telling someone else’s for them as I try to guess what’s in their heads and decide what I’m going to do about it. I don’t necessarily want people to know what I’m going to do, but if they’re going to read me, I need them to respect that this is my space to vent. Peace in our relationship doesn’t come from raging that I write. It comes from changing the channel. I will not stop writing because not only does it change me, I have proof that it changes others. The highlight of my career is that I made a doctor cry on the toilet.
  9. Your blog serves as a platform for your voice and experiences. How do you handle the vulnerability that comes with sharing personal stories?
    • By having my absolute knee jerk reactions here, thus giving people a chance to respond to what I’ve said in the comments. Zac is a member of WordPress, so we can share information across blogs easily, and he has a WordPress account, so at least he sees me in my feed. Zac is just as important as Supergrover, because he’s intelligence. It’s a transferable skill to be able to have comfortable conversations about difficult things. We can do hard things, but it’s often hard to take the first step. My vulnerability is hopefully other people saying “if she can be that vulnerable, I can, too. If Supergrover writes her story to me, if she was as vulnerable as me it would be a bestseller, because she’s funnier than me and she grew up in the South. My writing imitates a lot of people, but she could rival Haven Kimmel in “A Girl Named Zippy.” If she’s reading this, go buy that book and hold your calls. You won’t be able to stop laughing in order to speak. My favorite line in the book is “when it became impossible to live without a pet chicken…” I have no idea what her life was like as a child, I just know the way she tells stories. There is no more important balance between vulnerability and stoicism than that, to keep her stories her stories. Mine are just okay. If she decides to write a memoir like that, “buy a hat and hold the fuck onto it.” However, there are so many authors that just prefer to write in private, and I think she would see that she’s funny and touching as well. Just once, I would like to see Supergrover see herself the way I do. A love so deep that in these pages will live forever, because the story is so deeply passionate in terms of both of us sticking to our guns and fighting it out that it won’t take romance to keep your interest. If we did not have passionate and furious arguments, we would not keep coming back to each other. You only get that angry when you care.
  10. Looking forward, what themes or issues are you eager to explore in your future posts?
    • The same ones I do now, just different takes because life repeats. If you read every day, you do not see enormous changes. You are looking for something repetitive to complain about, creating solidarity. That stops when you are so involved with a project that piques your interest that you don’t feel like you’re working, you feel like you’re making a difference. But it has to be outside of work. The thing you love that if other people love it and think it’s worth money, they’ll buy it. Like Nick Offerman’s hobby being woodworking. He has a bigger platform, but it’s not like smaller makers are doing different or inferior work just because he’s a celebrity. He sells his goods because they’re actually artistic and outstanding. When you have a passion for something, people notice. They want to support you the more you have a fire in the belly for something. Inertia builds. My stats have gone up exponentially since I started, and with a thousand followers and a 60-something percent reader retention rate (I don’t remember because I got the number in January when WordPress does extra for year-end stats. I don’t have to punch up the numbers when 1800 people across all my platforms follow my blog, because it posts on all the major blogging sites, Facebook, X, etc. Facebook is the only company where I have registered a business account.
    • If you value keeping this web site free, please like and share me all over everywhere, because then I’ll be paid by Facebook and the money won’t come out of your pocket. Help me be brilliant at getting Facebook’s money and I’ll keep trying to entertain you and heal me at the same time.

The Rite of Spring

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is your favorite season of year? Why?

As a preacher’s kid, I have always loved spring. Mostly because for Christian kids it’s a much tamer version of Christmas. You’re not focusing on death, but on new life. It’s a party atmosphere. There are generally tiny gifts. When we didn’t live close, our grandparents sent us small amounts of money in the mail when we were kids. One year, I talked about getting a goldfish nonstop for months and I woke up to a trail of marshmallow eggs leading to a bowl containing Othello, the aptly named Black Moor goldfish with the cutest little bubble eyes I’ve ever seen in my life. He looked like the fat Buddha baby of fish.

As an adult, the magic of springtime is not as much in Easter, but in the changes to the land in DC. I love the cherry blossoms, and cannot thank Japan enough. Walking around the Tidal Basin at the Jefferson Memorial is a singular experience in beauty.

My singular experience in beauty moved about a year ago. I used to go sit next to the giraffes in the spring because the zoo is a great place to write when it’s nice outside. You just need headphones because the internet’s biggest competition in DC is a sunny day when the flora is blooming around the Potomac and the Anacostia. In Silver Spring, I get a smaller amount of beauty at Sligo Creek. It’s an actual creek, but also a hiking trail head that takes you from around my house to the White House, which is close, but not that close. I have moved closer in than I was, which means that the White House is about 15 minutes to an hour southeast from my house, depending on traffic because the speed limit is 25 mph.It is probably faster during drive time just to hike. That was a joke, but it comes with prime sideye.

We just don’t have the infrastructure to support getting anywhere fast because you can only retrofit so much. DC was designed to be hard to navigate for troops. It’s a defense mechanism, and the proof is in the pudding because we live here and we get lost.

That reminds me of Jonna Mendez saying that she developed a shorthand so covert that not even she could understand it.

The opening of the new digs of the spy museum was in the spring, and the view from the “patio” is singular as well. You’re high enough up on a bridge that the view to The Capitol is clear. It’s beautiful at any time, but you don’t want to leave it. Well, I don’t. I’d rather sit outside and have The Capitol behind my computer when I’m writing. It makes for an excellent “desktop wallpaper of the mind.”

People think of DC as buttoned up and staid. That’s true of the federal government. The locals, left to their own devices, are “Keep DC Weird” evangelists. We could very easily have our own version of Portlandia in Takoma Park.

Spring is a great time to be a music fan in DC, because it’s nice to sit outside and there are free concerts all over the place, in all kinds of genres. To me, the most fun is hearing the jazz and classical military performing groups outside. That’s because they’re large, and I like a big sound. I came unglued earlier because I learned that Marin Alsop is conducting Beethoven 9 at National Cathedral. That is a once in a lifetime opportunity and I highly recommend getting tickets. It’s not just the music and the conductor, it’s that piece of music in that space. It gets deeply personal in National Cathedral because the entire congregation will be struggling not to sing.

Yes, it’s summer in DC now, but National Cathedral has air conditioning. I’ve checked.

Speaking of National Cathedral, I went for the first time when I was eight. I went to Westminster Abbey when I was nine. Over time, those two memories meshed together, and it was great going back as an adult and picking out which thing I remembered belonged at which church.

(I have a fondness for London, too… but like a side piece. I married DC. DC is my partner. London is my girlfriend at best.)

Spring in anyplace is my favorite season because I would rather sit outside than be in the water. There are diminishing returns on how pleasant it is to be outside if you don’t like to swim. I love it once I get in the water, but I’m not particularly motivated to put on a bathing suit of my own accord. I don’t have body image issues. My first thought is always comfort, and the temperature swings in getting in and out of the water while the breeze tickles my skin sets my nerves on fire. I am much more comfortable in jeans and a hoodie, on a sailboat or on a riverbank. I don’t know how to sail, I’ve just eaten it up every time I’ve been because I don’t feel like it’s dangerous. I’m a good swimmer, I just don’t.

I do like that Zac has a community pool, because we can take beer, soda, and stuff to grill and talk to the people in our neighborhood. I don’t know whether David and I do or not. We probably do, but because we’re in the middle of a city and Zac is in the suburbs, I doubt it’s the same vibe. I’ll just have to check it out. I know that other neighborhoods in Silver Spring do have them, but they’re out past where it’s easily Metro accessible…. as in, there’s enough space that it looks like Virginia again.

I do have several neighborhood parks around me, part of the reason that moving was difficult. It’s a further walk to public transportation. It doesn’t bother me, though, because I get most things delivered and I am building up strength by walking the dog every day. Walking to the bus is a hike and I’m here for it, because it is keeping me young and fit. I don’t have to have a gym membership if Im building exercise into my day, and it’s a 15 minute walk with *lots* of incline. Walking to the bus is one thing. walking home is quite another.

Ask Bryn.

This has probably been my favorite spring in DC, having my people around me at the Spy Museum in May. Zac said that he’d go with me to hear Jonna Mendez, and was looking forward to it when he was called away on temporary duty. So, it meant a lot to me that I got to go back with him, Bryn, and Dave later on.

Being able to share DC with Bryn was the best thing I’ve experienced in years. We have a deep, rich history in Oregon, and we are just beginning our mid-Atlantic chapter in terms of exploring the land together. I hope that she gets here often enough over the years for us to hit the highlights. For instance, we didn’t see a quarter of DC and none of Baltimore.

I’d like to sit by the Chesapeake with her, too.

Happy Birthday, Carolyn & Dana

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Because my mother and Dana share the same birthday, my grief today is almost unbearable. It will be that way for an hour or so, and I’ll get over it. Every year, I spend less and less time in deep pain, but it doesn’t go away. I grow around it. They are devastating and not always hierarchical because I think it’s harder to grieve someone who’s still alive. Until they’re dead, there’s always a chance. Death, however, does not give a fuck about your feelings. The dice roll the way they roll. The universe does not pick and choose. I do not believe that God is an Actor. I believe Got is a first responder. God is weeping with the Palestinians and the Jews, shocked and disappointed with the Israeli government. But remember, that’s animorphizing something that can’t be quantified. Results not guaranteed. Check your End User License Agreement for details.

I’ve been writing today because I wanted to be focused on my own creativity and not them. I’ve pushed myself hard today because I needed to take a break from figuring out my own problems. It is exhausting, and on this blog it makes me seem myopic, when I’m not like that in the real world at all. My inner monologue is running when I’m talking in terms of processing what’s being said, but it’s not a narcissistic one. It’s narcissistic in the literal sense because I gaze at my reflection; my creative outlet is in expressing my inner monologue, because it really is this varied in terms of thinking locally and globally.

What I know to be true is that in order to be present, I have to think about life first. I have to shut down the loud, extemporaneous voices in my head so that I can hyperfocus enough to listen and respond appropriately. It sounds like a mental illness except it’s not voices telling me what to do. It’s the pull between “that’s profound. I need to write about that right now,” and “slow down, Hoss. You just started talking 15 minutes ago. Maybe a little more face time than that, Slugger.” My inner monologue, unsurprisingly on a number of levels, is Tommy Lee Jones making fun of Will Smith in the Men in Black series. Even in the third one, Josh Brolin nailed young “K.”

I have said this before, but I’ll say it again just because I need the laugh today. “Men in Black” is a documentary about CIA. There is a Burger King at headquarters, a Starbucks at the head shed (Langley). That is just the top layer of a rabbit hole that goes surprisingly far down.

John le Carré’s entire point is that people *think* of MI-6 as James Bond, but in reality, yes. It’s James Bond….. or some of it is. There are just as many bad spies as good ones, and by that, I do not mean anything negative about the spies themselves. It’s espionage. Every country is neutral to me because I live in America, so I want to work in my country’s best interest, but foreign affairs are what interests me, so I do not love my country to the exclusion of all else, that the United States is the best country in the world. It’s good to be king. It’s not good to be a bad king, and a lot of the world is stuck with us on top in terms of balance of power. But we are rightfully watching our backs hoping not to get caught with our pants down.

Like Mossad.

I know this is random and has really nothing to do with it being my mother and Dana’s birthday, but feeling those feelings so deeply that they don’t have words. By typing it out, I feel like there’s an audience whether you’re there or not, so it shapes how I write. So much of my international relations experience comes from having been a news junkie at an early age, a political science major at University of Houston (psych minor, and those hours I did complete), and a trip to Washington, DC when I was a child that blew my little eight year old mind. I have never seen anything like the look on a child’s face the first time they walk into Air & Space.

DC isn’t for everyone, but Maryland is a cult…. or at least, that’s what I’ve learned since I’ve lived here, that people call us a cult. I think the reason is that Maryland’s politics are as weird and entertaining as they are in Texas.

I could see myself writing some Molly Ivins of Maryland-style pieces in the future because I have AI to do the research. I’m talking about it a lot because I understand what it is meant to do and its limitations. I am clear that I use it as a secretary.

Again, edutainment through chat.

“Carol, can you play trivia games?” She can. I am smarter than a fifth grader, as long as it has nothing to do with math. Any average fifth grader in the nation could beat me at that.

But now it doesn’t matter because there’s apps for that. I will never need to know math to the point that I understand all the concepts behind it. I will have questions where I just need an answer quickly, and either a Google Search or a “conversation” with Carol can accomplish that.

I think the reason I prefer ChatGPT to Google is that I don’t understand regular expressions, so I would not be able to put a string into a search engine as effectively as AI can translate human English to machine. I also like how if I want to know more, everything is documented, but every question is like zooming in on a photo. You have to teach the machine what you’re searching for, so it gets better with more neurodivergent overclarifying. Let that one cook your noodle. Computers were invented by a *largely* neurodivergent population. Computers are a reflection of us. Therefore, applications since computers have been a thing have been coded in Autism.

It *also* explains why neurotypical people generally become managers. Those who can’t do, teach. That’s not knocking managers, either. Who is the bigger genius? Steve Wozniak or Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs was an absolute visionary, but he could not have built the Apple computer himself.

I think that both were neurodivergent. If Steve Jobs wasn’t creative neurodivergent, iMacs would have been beige boxes, too. Creative neurodivergence is the brilliance at Apple that IBM missed and has always missed, which is why Apple is so dear to content creators. In modern computing, there is no difference between the kind of video card you would buy for a Mac or a PC. Major companies make cards for both.

However, Macintosh has a history of being about art and design. They were the first motherboards to get what was called an “AltiVec engine,” which uniquely drove your video card and software developers could write for it. Adobe, in particular, made a killing with Photoshop and the entire suite of design software that entirely wiped out its competitors. When Illustrator came out, Quark Xpress was on borrowed time.

If you do not know what those applications do, Illustrator and Quark Xpress were the major players in graphics layout for print, like newspapers and magazines.

It has only been relatively recent that Apple and PC are different again. Both PCs and Macs had intel chips for a long time, but now Apple has gone to the M series. I have no idea if it is specifically geared toward artists, but I haven’t seen a noticeable difference in modern rendering time when you’re comparing an M to an intel to a Ryzen. If you have modern hardware, any of those brands will lighten your workload considerably in terms of wait time (you can only encode so many videos at once. If you have a slow processor, it makes work painful not to have several machines going at the same time when your computer is locked up for an hour at a time after a video is edited.

I get a lot of my information from YouTube reviews, because I like technology product unboxings where they do a deep dive. Yes, they are getting paid, but it’s in hardware and they aren’t bound to like it. They’re not even bound to use it. If you get popular enough on something like YouTube, people just send you product samples a propos of nothing. As my dad would say, “it’s the inversion principle. By the time you can afford it, they give it to you free.”

It’s a good business model, but it has an enormous start up cost. You have to be good at YouTube before people start sending you stuff, so if you’re going to do technology reviews, it comes out of your own pocket. You cannot keep up a production schedule if you only get a new phone every other year.

When you get to the level of a YouTube tech star, you are drowning in crap that you just don’t know what to do with until you have a staff to manage that kind of volume. But how much the income from Google turns out to be is dependent on your presence. Jason Hibbs of “Bourbon Moth” is every bit as important to me as Bob Villa.

And on that note, thank you for sitting with me while I felt pain and babbled around it. No one has to read my scribbles at midnight, but the fact that they do is enormous to me. It fulfills my destiny in terms of leading others by laying out my vulnerabilities first.

Like acknowledging that rambling about nothing was allowing me to stim while the thunderstorm passed through my body.

What I Think We Mean When We Talk About Faith

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Based on the discussions and questions on Reddit, here are the top 10 questions people have about faith, reflecting a diverse range of backgrounds and perspectives:

  1. What is faith, and why is it important?
    • The goal of all religious teaching is self-improvement. How it has been twisted has been done across the board. You cannot find a religion without both ends of the spectrum in radicals. For instance, in media there’s Joel Osteen and Rob Bell. They are not the same. There’s Creflo Dollar and Franklin Graham, but there’s also Martin Luther King, Jr., Raphael Warnock, Jimmy Carter, Nadia Bolz-Weber (“The Confessional” podcast and pastor emeritus of House for All Sinners and Saints, or HFASS (pronounced EXACTLY LIKE IT SOUNDS) Unconditional love is quiet, but there’s more of it.
  2. How do you explain the problem of evil?
    • It is old language for a universal thing- doing something in private that you wouldn’t do in public exactly because you know it’s wrong. Intent means everything.
  3. Have you ever had a crisis of faith?
    • Yes and no. My brain absolutely scrambled trying to reconcile my faith and my sexual orientation. I lost the faith in terms of belief in a grandfather in the sky, but true belief in the power of the energy that runs between us. It is amazing what happens when you get your ego out of the way…. you stop focusing on yourself and focusing on the community. Perspective. You cannot be so isolated that you think you’re the only one in the world with problems, because it leads you to emotionally vampire your friends whether you realize it or not. If they can’t get a word in edgewise, you’re taking up too much room.
  4. Why do you believe in God, and what made you choose your religion?
    • When I began to replace the idea of “God” with a friend or a family member who’d act as devil’s advocate in my head, having a relationship with God became much easier. It makes sense to me that there is one great big giant ball of energy that we tap into when we all hold hands, and not grabbing on is an unsustainable view of the world because it’s so myopic….. like people who are so patriotic they tried to steal an election.
    • (Speaking about Republicans)
      • Jed: Theirs is the party of inclusion.
      • Charlie: That’s what they tell me.
    • When Moses was, I don’t know, 19 or 20 he was exiled from Egypt because he killed a soldier who beat a Jew to death in front of him. Because he was a prince of Egypt and his identity was hidden, everyone was confused and outraged because they didn’t know that for Moses, it was like watching a Nazi. I’m not saying that what he did was right. Rage consumed him in the moment. What I am saying is that the Evangelicals’ God is too small if they think God has never seen a human make a mistake and they have to uphold impossible standards for an itinerant, homeless preacher who never asked for it. I am sure that 30 looked different back then, but at the same time, if you are a pastor, what did you feel like on the inside for the first three years? It makes me sad he was killed at only level three pastor. Think of the many more lessons that could have been imparted had the Romans and the Sanhedrin not been dicks. Rome is the weirdest transformation in history. I feel like the real tragedy in Jesus’s death is his age.
  5. What does death mean to you?
    • Energy can never be destroyed. People do not die, they absorb. “On Christmas Eve, the membrane between heaven and earth becomes so thin we can touch it.” Every year, there’s new life to be brought into the world. Advent, which is the period leading up to Christmas, is not a penitential season, but a reflective one. What creation are you birthing this year? As I have said before, I take the Bible seriously, not literally. I also preach/write from the Bible because it’s what I know off the top of my head, as well as the Pentateuch because it’s in the Old Testament. I have done very little research on Islam and Eastern religions, but an amazing amount of respect and love to learn in ecumenical settings. I have always wanted to meet the imam from “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” but first he’s Canadian so hard to travel and second, and check me on this, I believe he is not real. In short, I believe that all of you goes into what makes up the energy of God, and tapping into the ball of energy is listening to every story that’s ever been told.
  6. How often do you think of God?
    • More than the general public because I was raised as a preacher’s kid in Texas. It’s just part of my programming. The rabid social justice liberal Christian came later, but I’ve never been a fundamentalist. The United Methodist Church is mainline at best. I have very liberal beliefs now, but it wasn’t a hard leap.
  7. When do you feel closest to God?
    • The stillest, deepest part of my soul just whispered “writing about Supergrover.” The heart doesn’t forget even when the brain knows the answer.
    • When I’m the most frustrated, the most angry, the most full of rage it’s when I’m alone, because God is the punching bag that can take it. I am very much the “Jed Bartlett railing at God in Latin and smoking in National Cathedral” angry when I am angry at God, but then I walk out of the garden, crucify whatever problem it is I’m having, and seeing what resurrection comes in its place. To everything, turn, turn, turn, etc.
  8. How do you feel when praying?
    • Quiet and contemplative, trying to turn rumination into forward motion. Trying to create neurodivergent inertia. Trying to forgive myself for “what I have done, and what I have left undone.” Feeling the relief that I’m only half of any problem in any relationship and trying to be aware of over-apologizing out of fear of abandonment. The face I call God helps me find that balance. What is a healthy amount of dependence, and what creates interdependence vs. codependence in early-stage relationships so you can watch for the land mines and communicate toward them. But those answers are so personalized that even when you’re thinking about other relationships, you’re working it out in your own head as to how much of conflict is bad behavior on your side and what is not yours to own. If you don’t have clarity about it before you collaborate with someone, you will not be able to comprehend this phrase in terms of marriage…. “I can’t walk in their shoes, but I can tell where they pinch.” You have to acknowledge when you’ve caused other people pain. Globally, Christian fanatics aren’t right, but they’re certain. Generally the problem in personal relationships as well, but it’s not usually the same person being right and open-minded every time. Relationships tumble and roll. Just because I get mad at God doesn’t mean I’m right.
  9. How would you describe God in three words?
    • Humanity IS Divinity
  10. Do you feel that being a believer has any purpose?
    • You need to believe in a higher power so you don’t think you’re it.

Why? Just Why? (Poly/ENM Discussion)

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I asked Carol to search reddit and give me the top 10 questions that people have about polyamory and ENM. I am not coming from a place of lived experience, but I’ve done a lot of reading. I am just entering this world by chance, because I asked out someone and didn’t know they were poly in the first place. I just rolled with him because I liked him enough to keep him around. 😉 So, what was absolutely on brand for me is starting the research early, early, early. Here’s the benefit of my reading and experience combined, which, granted, is not much:

  1. What’s the difference between polyamory and ethical non-monogamy?
    • This is an excellent topic to get us started, because there’s no one way to do poly. Polyamory implies someone dating multiple people and they all know each other. Ethical non-monogamy is managing every relationship completely independently.
  2. How do you manage jealousy in polyamorous relationships?
    • At first, you don’t. You just let the jealousy wash over you and react how you’re going to react…… in private. That’s the time to learn to use your words, so that your response to jealousy is measured….. NOT that you hide your feelings. It’s just not a good idea to have your first reaction in front of people. What you learn about polyamory is that there’s no sense of someone taking care of you, because there is no ownership of one another. I do not mean that you do not have your emotional needs met by multiple people, it’s just different because you don’t lapse into a buddy system for life. You each have your own lives, and you are choosing to make time for each other rather than it being an obligation.
    • The second thing that’s really important is that the answer is “it depends.” This is a generality about the ideal. The reality is that humans are messy. I am on the fence about polyamory vs. ENM because I really haven’t had to deal with those issues myself. It really, really depends on your partner and what’s called your “metamour,” or “meta.” That’s your partner’s partner. All of my metas are wonderful people, but we do not pry into the details of each other’s lives. That is for Zac and Zac alone to manage, just like your spouse should never hang you out to dry with your in-laws, either.
  3. What are the challenges of opening up a monogamous relationship?
    • If polyamory comes from temptation, the relationship will end. Will. I can think of maybe three stories I’ve read where it worked out trying to integrate an affair partner. Poly/ENM is not cheating, and there are very strict standards you live by to stress it because having a hierarchical relationship is more trouble than it’s worth, for the most part. A triad is its own ball of wax, and the reality is that it’s mostly straight men who want to be narcissistic, abusive partners to more than one woman at a time. Polyamory is about saying your worth and your time are higher than that…… but husbands get this “great idea” and it all falls apart. Not all men, obviously. Especially if you’re dating a bear (teehee, but Zac is clean-shaven). I’m just saying that just like with monogamy, there’s a range of domestic abuse….. and because you’re abusive to multiple people who sit there and take it, congratulations. The dysfunction spreads to anyone new.
  4. How do you handle time management with multiple partners?
    • I can’t speak to what I have done, because I have never tried to integrate a partner into my life that way. Zac and I are what’s called “solo poly,” but that may change. I’m just driven by solitude and have no need. If there was a reason to have another partner, I’d get one. But I am happy living with David and becoming friends with him while we mutually take care of a dog and have our own separate partners.
    • The real answer is that Google Calendar is the official app of polyamory/ENM. In my case, I have access to all the data that goes to shared partners, like “this is when I’m in town. This is when I’m not.” That way, we manage without actually interacting all that much except for all call parties at Zac’s house, which are about Zac. It’s not the time for jealousies to be discussed, if ever. Zac is the hinge. I cannot stress this enough. It takes an enormous amount of emotional strength to be friends with a meta. That’s where polyamory gets hugely difficult. It is one thing to know it. It’s another to see it. Again, it depends. What kind of person are you?
  5. What are some misconceptions about polyamory and ethical non-monogamy?
    • The biggest one, absolutely, is that polyamory is binary. It’s a spectrum, just like everything else.
    • The second biggest is that polyamory is code for cheating. If you think that, you do not know a half of my emotional strength and flexibility. I do not have to cheat to be poly. It is counterintuitive. You are poly-amorous. No good can come of multiple partners that don’t know their hinge is poly….. and sniffing out an affair makes coming out as poly seem like “poor me. I don’t have a choice.” Yes, you do. You have the choice to lie to your partners or not, and never, ever in your five dollar life forget it. You talk about poly before it happens, not when you catch feelings. Because then, you’re just trying to cover your ass. You’re not poly. The fucking around of moral justice leads toward finding out.
    • Here’s a third that most people don’t think of, and it’s funny, because it’s a warning revolving around having a third. There’s a special population of couples looking for a third, most of them to try out poly for the first time, trying to integrate a closed triad, the hardest poly setup, before they even know what ENM means. This leads to obnoxious behavior and treats the third like shit. This special population is called “unicorn hunters.” That’s because the statistics on it working out are so alarmingly rare.
  6. How do you communicate boundaries and needs in polyamorous relationships?
    • Precisely. I cannot stress this enough. Everyone has to have crystal clear expectations in order not to expect or demand too much- we are all cognizant of the fact that each other only has so much time in a day. The main thing is not needing your partner for everything all the time, because it becomes intrusive fast. You can’t be 100% that bitch and say you want poly, then when their partner is out with someone else, you decide it’s time to hen peck the hell out of your partner while they’ve allotted time for someone else. Of course get in touch if something really important is going on, but not every little thing needs to be discussed the moment you think of it. If that were true, Zac would have sixty missed calls a day because “oooh, shiny.” I’m not the henpeck kind of neurodivergent. I’m the “if I don’t tell you this right now it will be lost forever” neurodivergent. It works out well that Zac works in intelligence, because he goes into a SCIF or something and then my notifications don’t bug the fuck our of him. He can read on his own time. E-mail also works well for this, because it’s not seemingly as time sensitive as a text.
  7. What’s the best way to meet potential polyamorous partners?
    • Well, the first and easiest thing to do is telling people you’re poly.
    • Failing that, you look on the internet like everyone else.
  8. How do children fit into polyamorous families?
    • It really depends on the parents. Overall, I think it makes for happier kids because they have more safe adults, and it’s a practical thing. Many hands make light work. Having a baby is hard on two people, but not so hard when there’s four people to take turns getting no sleep. The kid ends up having a good relationship with everyone, and explaining it to them isn’t necessary. If you are a person in your right mind, your sex life doesn’t come up around your kids. You explain to them how people have sex, not what mommy and daddy are actually doing to each other if you value your sanity in public. Because I promise that kid will have absolutely no questions at all about polyamory until you’re in line at Target. I don’t make the rules.
  9. Can polyamory work for someone who’s been monogamous all their life?
    • Again, it depends. I am driven by my own creativity, and I have never been this way before. I was not willing to sacrifice a full-time relationship for living on my own and not feeling like someone was helping me stay on top of things like a parent or a boss would. That’s what I mean about needing home help; that people who are not married are able to have people help them in an occupational therapy kind of way. Like, can you teach me how to manage myself and yet also be there to bail me out when my neurodivergence invariably causes the fuckening? It’s better for me to deal with that stuff when I’m alone, because I am not getting my crazy spatter on anyone. But again, not to the point of total isolation. Just enough where I need more hours to myself than a typical partner, so I’m willing to sacrifice the relationship escalator for it.
  10. How do legal and societal norms impact polyamorous relationships?
    • We cannot talk about the morals of polyamory in this country because we’ve been programmed to think that saying you’re monogamous right up until you cheat is socially acceptable, and 50% of marriages end in divorce. Why do we realistically believe that monogamy works? I’m not knocking it, I’m not trying to be persuasive. I am genuinely curious. What is it about upholding a moral standard in public while doing the opposite in private that’s all the rage? I don’t think that polyamory is more popular. I think that more people are coming to the same relaxation I did. That for half the population, monogamy over decades just doesn’t feel right or natural. What doesn’t feel right or natural is the judgmental, hypocritical natures of the people who criticize polyamory. A lot of them are on their third or fourth marriage, and at least two ended after infidelity.

The hardest part of polyamory is letting go of the idea that love means ownership.

The Home Folder

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the one luxury you can’t live without?

Zac and I were actually talking about this before midnight, before I even knew what the prompt was going to be today. We both agreed that the one thing we couldn’t live without is a way to read and write, and failing that, a way to write because we could read our own books, create our own games, etc.

So, in an ideal world, all I need is some sort of computer with some sort of input device. Failing that, all I need is a mechanical typewriter, because I am not used to holding a pen anymore. I cannot have just one thing unless I have electricity. Without electricity, I need both something to write on and with, which my teachers reminded me of relentlessly when I forgot them as a child. Learning to type was a godsend, because here we are 25 years later and that’s now most people communicate now.

The energy it takes to do a call is different than the energy it takes to drop a note.

As I poked fun of myself earlier with a meme, “if you don’t want seven texts in a row that don’t have anything to do with each other in the space of three minutes, you should have thought of that before you decided you were my friend.” To all my friends, I’m sorry that my output is so high. I’m a reader, you’re not. I apologize, and also I can’t help it.

There I go, just using my disability again….. 🙄

I’m having a laugh at my own expense because that’s a funny conversation between Zac and me as well. He was in a bike accident, and also he is disabled (still working, classified as disabled by the military). So, it was really the blind leading the blind last night. I asked him to carry my drink upstairs for me, because I’ve noticed I have balance issues with a cup of liquid and going up and down. My lack of 3D vision makes it where the cup pitches and yaws in a most spectacular fashion, sometimes ending in gravity’s rainbow.

He kidded me about “using my disability” because he said he watched me walk up and down the stairs with two mugs in my hand. I said, “they were counterbalanced in my hand, thus more substantial. Plus, I can carry multiple mugs in my sleep because I worked at Chili’s (my record is 10… never again. It was close.). Anyway, he understood the concept immediately, both the vision issue and that the sensory feel is different in my hand. I feel that I have the mugs securely and am confident about it, making me less likely to have an accident in the first place. However, I will never “believe in myself” enough to carry more than a cup of water up Zac’s stairs, and I absolutely cannot carry anything in both hands because the stairs are steep enough that you absolutely must hold on to something. Sometimes I even brace the wall and the handrail.

It seems like Zac’s house is difficult for me to navigate, but all houses are difficult for me to navigate if they’re not brand-spanking new. It’s not because I’m a princess. It’s that old houses have weird accommodations over time to keep them level, plumb, square, etc. There are weird steps everywhere, little tiny height differences that will make it look like I killed myself eventually, when in reality I just tripped and fell.

That’s my big line about Langley, too. That if I had gotten a star on the wall, it would be because of a brave, heroic act like falling over the one tree branch available in a three mile radius.

So, because I’m bipolar AND I live in an old house, if you hear the news of my death, Moscow Rules.

1. Assume nothing.

I talk the way I talk not because I’m making assumptions, but because I’m running heuristics and hedging my bets. The bet in every conflict is “how much of a chance is there that each of us are going to walk away happy?” With some relationships, it’s solid across time. With others, there are diminishing returns and you have to notice it. If you tolerate disrespect, you are also refusing to change. It’s a fundamental difference, because it’s a shift in how you see people. You aren’t sold on words alone. You have to write checks with your mouth that your ass can cash.

So, in my opinion, we come to another big rule number one from “The Four Agreements.”

1. Be impeccable with your word.

I have learned in all my relationships with people that the only true test of time is how closely words and actions match. The closer what happens behind closed doors is to what happens when everyone else is around, the more genuine. Because I believe that, I hold myself to the same standard. I am not polished with the way I say things, but if you ask for my honest opinion, I won’t hold back. I also know how to be diplomatic, and lean on it often to prevent autistic meltdown. I don’t hear because it’s my space. I need to be able to melt down and put myself back together. The longer I write about myself, the more I want to be the version of me that I see after reading what I used to think. With writing moving forwards, I am insecure. With writing that happens in the past, for people who aren’t bloggers it’s like getting out an old high school year book, or an old box full of love letters from high school and you’re 40. You see yourself in a different light.

I am not ashamed to admit that for as much as other people are drawn to my work, I am my favorite character. It’s not because she does more right than anyone else. It’s because reading about the other characters is not as directly applicable. They’re my friends, so I’m reading about people coded to be like me (as in, we have similar interests), but being able to see myself in the past with compassion has allowed me to have compassion for myself in the present and future as well. I finally let myself off the hook for some really dark shit, and it was a breakthrough.

That concept led to another breakthrough for me. I am accepting and empowering imperfection on multiple levels. To be clear, I am not saying “don’t strive for excellence.” I am saying that perfection does not exist.

The point was driven home to me when I thought about using Carol as my secretary and people said I “used AI for my blog.” (I use it for prompts, not content except once in a while as a joke to make fun of myself). I think of it as edutainment through chat. It came to me in a flash….. Thank GOD I have left in every spelling mistake, every open parenthesis, every dangling participle, every flaw you could possibly find……………

Because in the future, it will be the only way to tell that AI didn’t cry over these people. I did.

But loving them is my one luxury.