One More Sleep

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nine years is a long time.

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

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

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

Black and Tan

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you know she is a man?”

“SHE LOOKS LIKE ONE!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My name is Gilbert.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess you had to be there.

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Logical Conclusion

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first was to be seen and heard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Global and national are the same as local.

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

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

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

Please Allow Me a Bit of Procrastination

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one had to call me out like this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zed Axis…….. so we meet again……..

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

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

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

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

Christ on a cracker.

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

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

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

Exercise

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She is not a Hydrox. She is an Oreo.

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

A High School Reunion I Liked

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

We reminisced about things we’d played:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving Parts

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You don’t.

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

It could have all been bullshit.

But what if it wasn’t?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Postcard

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I just have to Rolls with it.

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

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

Editor’s Note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor’s Note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks Pea to God…. Raaa-men

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday I watched a YouTube video on interesting things you could do with ramen. If you have never tried ramen before, this is not for you. You need to go to a real shop, where they have the broth boiling 24/7, with the lime and the chili sauce and the plum sauce. It is not an experience that is repeatable at home, especially in white kitchens. Most white people do not have the things on hand to make authentic ramen broth even if they wanted to, and not nearly enough culinary expertise. So, if you are a “newbie” to ramen, this cannot be something you do the first time you try it. Don’t even think that prepackaged ramen is close, because even the noodles are a little bit different.

That being said, I, like David Chang, love ramen. It’s easy and quick, and the sky is the limit on what you can put into it. Most people do veggies and some form of egg. A handful of frozen peas and carrots in the pasta water is generally all that’s necessary. The stock spices are good enough, unless you get the water ratio off. But most people don’t think of all the sauces you could serve. Today, I did a white American cheese noodle dish, and the only thing wrong with it is that it’s a bit too salty. I added too much of the stock spice to the roux, which was flour and two packets of spice (I was making two servings). I am now betting you could get away with half a packet, but I didn’t want to under-season the cheese and noodles. Since the “spices” are mostly salt, I should have realized this. But I don’t have to sweat it. Being a professional cook is about being able to go in a different direction IMMEDIATELY. THE MOMENT you realize you need to go in a different direction, you know what to do. Acid neutralizes salt, but I need more volume as well……….

I fixed it once everything was done, with pasta water, mustard, and ghost pepper wing sauce. If I’d had it on hand, I think I would have gone with more herbs, spices, and pasta water rather than making the acids do the heavy lifting.

I think that’s the last of my ramen packets, but if I find another one, I’ll try to do a carbonara…. I should start buying the noodles pre-cooked because I like making the sauces so much more than watching noodles boil…..

Saucier is literally my calling.

Your best bet when making new ramen sauces/broths if you’re going to use the spices it comes with is to keep extra on hand. You can control the amount of salt more easily if you are able to add volume- noodles without any seasoning at all.

I just realized I made Mac and cheese and there’s both chili and sesame oil in my pantry. I should have done an oil sauce….. but I have more cheesy goodness for lunch tomorrow. I have designed it to be nuclear hot on purpose. It works so much better than over the counter nasal decongestants.

Seriously, if you’re willing to endure 20-30 minutes of discomfort, the effect on my sinuses lasts a couple hours at least. I also don’t go any hotter than normal grocery store hot sauce. Yes, they’re ghost pepper, but it’s not like I went to a specialty store and demanded a sauce that will absolutely rip my asshole out through my ear. The ghost peppers are tamed with quite a bit of garlic. It’s not about the amount of Scovilles. If you can’t eat 30,000 Scovilles’ worth of heat at a time, don’t. The hotness of the pepper is essentially the highest “dose” you can take at one time. Same effect eating a pepper with less heat, but eating more of them.

I’m pretty sure I just ate my weight in sodium, though, so that probably wasn’t the best move ever. It would have been healthier just to make my own Alfredo, but of course I wanted to see if this YouTuber was onto something.

I think I would have preferred oil and chili flakes to Mac and cheese, but I will definitely make it again. Especially when you have American cheese, it’s irresistible. I just want to grab some rosemary, thyme, and basil out of our garden first.

There’s only so many ghost peppers I can eat.

The Truth Is In the Slash

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What animals make the best/worst pets?

All pets make the best and the worst depending on the person, and that’s due to wanting one kind of pet because it’s cool and really being another pet’s kind of owner.

For instance, if you don’t like to walk every single day, don’t get a dog that’s barely under the weight limit at your apartment complex because it’s adorable and “you can’t help yourself.” A dog depends on you to be out in the weather no matter what several times a day. Shelters are full of that kind of regret.

For me, the truth is in the slash with aquariums. They’re the best because they’re the most beautiful, especially salt. I also like the type of maintenance that aquariums need, so it doesn’t feel like work to me. However, they’re the worst in terms of startup costs and ongoing maintenance, because if something goes wrong with one fish, there’s a domino effect. I also fit the tank to the pet. I won’t put even one goldfish in a 10 gallon tank as a permanent solution. Goldfish grow, and if they’re in a container too small, their guts and bones will start to squish to adjust to the size. If you give goldfish the space and time they need to grow, you’ll never spend more than 15 cents for fish. It’s also really hard to tell a fancy goldfish from a feeder fish when they’re young, so I’ve had a black “feeder fish” with golden flecks grow into a bubble eye of some kind, and several goldens with dual fantails.

The care on goldfish, however, is relentless. They are nasty fish, and if you don’t have a live aquatic solution (and I can’t even think of plants that can keep up with goldfish shit), you’ll be cleaning the tank at least every six weeks, if not more often. Because other breeds of fish cause so much less waste, I’ve stopped keeping goldfish. But it’s a great hobby when you do find those very expensive fish among those meant to feed predatory fins.

If I ever start a new aquarium, I’d like to put live plants in it this time, because you can make an ecosystem that runs itself, you just trim the plants. The water stays clear on its own, and there are a ton of ways to do it.

Aquascaping videos on YouTube are why I know so much about construction now. My algorithms started leading to bigger and bigger landscapes…… from aquariums to tiny houses to Perkins Brothers, foureyesfurniture, and Bourbon Moth (my three absolute favorite content creators on YouTube). But liking these types of channels started with Paul Cuffaro, then an 18 year old kid who built ponds in his parents’ backyard. He’s a Florida YouTube legend now. I still watch Cuffaro, I just like furniture and house building more now.

So when I tell you that fish are a blessing and a curse, I know quite a bit about which I speak. But it adds so much to a room and the work is so tedious it’s zen, truly, especially snipping live plants like you’re Mr. Miyagi. But it’s a rhythm you have to get into, and a chore that’s not fun until you get into it. Hard to make yourself start, hard to make yourself quit because once you start, it must be perfect, because you need to feel the zen inside yourself before you can rest.

I often feel that working on an aquarium is in fact rearranging my own chi. A water change is a breath of fresh air, moving a cave, for a fish, is a brand new cave. I keep it in mind. Blog entries are often mental water changes, the zen of cleaning an autistic mind.

I am very much raking sand every day, here, with you. When you read, you pick up a rake and leave your own impressions. My thoughts mix with yours, so maybe your path is circular in reading just as mine is in writing. Yet we arrive at the same place.

You have reached the end by diving in. I have reached the end by coming back up.

Back to Normal

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Last night I got to talk on the phone with Zac for the first time in what seems like eons, because we have a date coming up on the 10th to go and see Jason Moran at The Kennedy Center. I was teasing him and said, “do you even like jazz?” He, very, very diplomatically, I might add, said, “I like you enough to buy you tickets and go with you to a jazz concert.” I fell over with laughter, but then he said that he wanted to catch up in person, so we didn’t talk long. But it was very good to hear his voice and I am glad that I don’t have to wait much longer to see Oliver, who is a dog. I have always teased Zac about this, that Oliver and I are in a relationship and he can come, too. He jokes back that Oliver is arguably one of his best features.

I don’t know whether it will happen any time soon with my move and all, but I can’t wait to have more couch time with Zac just watching Slow Horses, because it really is fun hearing the real stories behind how they do things in tradecraft (it doesn’t matter whether we’re watching CIA or MI-6, they use nearly identical techniques). I had to wait while Zac is out of town because that’s the one “couple show” I promised him, although I have gone back and watched “The Pigeon Tunnel” several times to fall asleep.

The first couple of times I watched it because it was exciting, and now it’s John le Carré seemingly rocking me to sleep. Have you heard his voice? It’s distinctive and posh, which he explains is an affectation because he grew up a trained thief whose family was always broke; his father was often working for/running from the Russian mafia.

When David’s father (Cornwell- I use it with John le Carré interchangeably) realized how successful his books were, his dad started running a game on him. Threw a shit fit because David wouldn’t give him any money, and he never heard from him again. But David wasn’t hard-nosed. His father asked him for money to invest in some pipe dream of a farm, and David said that if he wanted to work a farm, he would buy it for him outright and give him an allowance to run it. David’s father running off into the night clearly meant that David’s money was going to be used for completely legit purposes.

So, exploring old le Carré adaptations has been my jam recently. I think “The Little Drummer Girl” is actually better than “Tinker Tailor,” but perhaps I’m biased because it felt as adrenaline-fueled as Alias and Homeland.

I also found a really old adaptation of the Bourne series that was on TV in the 80s or early 90s. It’s so great, although quite dated and no one will ever be Matt Damon…. or Julia Stiles, for that matter.

I also got to talk to Bryn a little bit and we’re getting excited. May first is not all that far away. It’s going to be hard to believe she’s real, but I hope we have a blast. And I’m up for as much sightseeing as they want to do, or sitting around and catching up. Perhaps it will be really nice weather and we can sit outside. I can’t wait to see how Colin reacts to Bryn and Jack’s (also a dog) “Conversations.” Since Bryn is a dog trainer, dogs don’t move unless she allows it, and all dogs naturally do it around her because she just exudes alpha. How can you not, after working with primates all those years? And in terms of “screaming alpha,” it doesn’t have to do with anything but soft, quiet strength.

Alpha males in the human population are picking up lessons from animals that they never meant to give. Alphas lead from the back, they take care of everyone else. They’re the ones you go to in a problem. They are not parading around telling people they’re they alpha because no one has to ask. It just shows.

I think we’re both getting used to each other’s strengths, and picking up where the other feels weak. I can’t divine things over text all the time, so I would say that I talk to Bryn on the phone and Video Messenger most frequently than I do anyone else. What I’ve discovered is that having female energy around me is enough- that if I don’t meet a life partner, I’m happy as I am. It’s fine for Zac to have other partners, because I set up our relationship that way. I knew he already had partners, and I was prepared to be fairly low on the totem pole because I didn’t want to be a partner in the capital p sense of the word. I’m too busy a writer…. just because I write in volume doesn’t mean I’m not saying anything of substance…..

All of the comments I’ve gotten in the last few years have proven to me that’s not true, so that’s not a dart that can hurt. My readers have been with me through everything, the good and the bad. They don’t act like the universe has punished me for a decision because it hasn’t. I go on to a new thing depending on the options in front of me, knowing that how it worked out is how it’s supposed to be. I said something yesterday that I didn’t clarify in the moment. I have before, but not just then. When I said that it wasn’t my destiny to belong to one person, but to many, I didn’t mean my partners. I meant all of you. That this is not a joke or a hobby, it’s been a portfolio I’ve built over 20 years.

Who has peer reviewed me?

  • Martina Navratilova
  • Margaret Cho
  • Wil Wheaton
  • Eden Kennedy
  • Ernie Hsuing
  • Anil Dash
  • Jonna Mendez
  • Mary Karr

Therefore, I don’t need external validation to know that I do help people more than me. I say things of substance all the time, and there is nothing on God’s green earth that will ever convince me otherwise. That’s because not only have I looked at my own writing and thought, “I like that line.” It was one Supergrover liked, too. There’s no more substance to my writing than that. I’ve already made it. I’m done. My career will never get any better, and I swear on a stack of Bibles.

That’s because I will never in my lifetime be seen the way I am right now, the way I have been for 10 years.

If SuperGrover saw Daniel’s “I will skewer you” letter, I bet you anything her reaction was “Fuuuuuuuuck. Let me get my purse. :::::sigh::::” Even if she never reads this entry, that image made me fall over with laughter, because it was like the beginning of “The Incredibles.” “Can’t you just stay clean for one minute?! I just cleaned up!” Like, the newsreel is playing in my head and I’m cackling. I need laughter right now, and it feels good.

You know, even when you’re no longer speaking, if you don’t dissolve a company, it still exists. Therefore, I choose to believe that Leslie Lanagan & Pet Monsters on a Fraying Leash™ is still intact. In fact, I have added new members. It’s just a longer flight for Bryn….. but that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t do it.

We’re big enough to face our feelings head on, and it’s so hard to fool a dog trainer that I stopped trying long ago because I figured out quickly I couldn’t keep up with her. Because of this, I have an innate interest in seeing her on the floor of Congress. 😉 She wouldn’t do it, I’d just like to see what happens when I just light the firecracker and she goes.

She also doesn’t care that my blog makes me sound like a dick.

I’m so blessed that I have friends who support me no matter what, no matter when. Even Supergrover. How do I know? She told me.

So, she may be far from my heart, but not from my soul. It’s only now that I realize because our communication was so poor, I was never receiving any of the messages she was trying to send and vice versa. I don’t know that we can ever be trusted to create new patterns again. But I know us. If we knew the other was in trouble, we’d have to sit on our hands to keep from moving and even that wouldn’t last long.

She gave me the confidence to believe that I am the one who knocks, and not in a scary way. It’s just an illustration that I am old enough to have boundaries and limits. I am old enough to decide what I want to invite in and keep out of my life. I don’t have to accept the status quo, as in trying to fit in where I wasn’t wanted. What I found was that Daniel loved the idea of being married, but didn’t seem to like me much. He only had two problems with me- everything I did and everything I said…. because it was always a blame game instead of working together.

I decided that it wasn’t going to get any worse because I wasn’t playing another game. He’s still playing games, but all of his e-mails are going to Spam, because I’m not interested in reopening the discussion or reengaging. He’s right- I can’t block him from my blog. But I can limit my exposure to him. I have to trust my instincts on this one, and my instincts say he’s not the right change for me now….. when people tell you who they are, believe them. I could forgive Daniel being totally avoidant last time around, because we were both under pressure. I did not see enough change in him to warrant continuing the relationship because I’d say things like “I want to work with you,” and I never got more than “I’m tired of being yelled at every day.” First of all, I never even turned on a caps key.

Second of all, I was talking about how we could integrate both Cora and Daniel into a house with me- there wasn’t anything about which to yell. I didn’t ask for heat, but I got a lot of it.

And it’s not about him. It’s about me not wanting to take a gamble that my next ten years are going to be exactly like my last. I’d like to make new mistakes now, because I have people in my life who allow me to do that, because they know they’ll always make new mistakes, too.

I know this is all over the place, but what’s different about that? I just wanted some room to stretch out, process the last week or so, and enjoy some time with solo packing and getting ready for my new house. I really am excited. It’s time for a change all around.

The funniest thing that’s happened is that there are two Colins in my phone. I was telling one that we should overhaul a few old iPods and see how much we can get for them- Bluetooth, USB-C, etc. Colin responded that he might have an old one I could play with, and I said, “oh, that wasn’t meant for you, but I love that you just responded like this was a perfectly normal thing to ask a housemate.” He laughed. I like that we’re doing all the good witty banter so that it’s not awkward when I get there.

David has already told me that he has a girlfriend, but I haven’t met her yet, and don’t know if/when I will. But it will be cool to know her and to have Colin meet Zac and Bryn. Bryn won’t be around all the time, but it’s good that they’ll know who each other are nonetheless.

It would also be perfect if Lindsay was here that week, but I’m not going to hope too high on that one. Lindsay is a mythical figure, both here and not here. I think she is secretly a mythical creature, and no one has ever bothered to prove me wrong. You wouldn’t either if you met her. She’s pretty invincible.

So, if Lindsay’s in town, now I have two fierce dragon women saying, “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck……… let me get my purse.”

And now things are back to normal.

Here’s the Thing

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If I recorded the beginning of a relationship, I’m going to record it all the way to the end. What struck me is when he said “admit it or not, I’m a better writer than you,” as if I haven’t said that before. I have said that I thought he should be teaching War Fiction at Columbia University. I have given him compliments that I have never given anyone else. So, again, my writing only matters to the people I love when I don’t portray them in a flattering light. I don’t portray anyone in a flattering light, even me. I am writing life as it happens, and life itself is a train wreck. Why should my little piece be any different?

Also, when you break up, telling your own story is what you do. You don’t go and threaten another writer for telling theirs. You create a blog dedicated to taking them down while they don’t bother to look you up because they just don’t care enough to read anymore. I’ve had enough. He doesn’t get the right to dictate how I move forward from this, and I don’t think I’ve shit on him nearly as much as he says I did…. as he said, he hates himself, so he goes through and picks out all the negative things I have to say and it outweighs all the good. The egg shells that he walks on are because he sees my questions as attacks, so instead of assurance, I get anger. I don’t have time for that, which is why his hate mail means nothing in the grand scheme of things. I don’t want this to be ugly. I was moving on with my life, and I don’t write for or to him, especially since he painted me in the worst possible light and I just let it stand, because that’s how he felt.

In truth, I did not say that he would end up alone. I said he would “end up alone in this.” I also said nothing about marrying a “crack whore,” I said that I thought he should settle down with someone who doesn’t challenge him, because my experience is that when you challenge him, he gets upset.

That is not what I ever want from a partner- someone who views me as attacking them when they just don’t want to give me information, and treating me like I’m an asshole when they’re avoidant. This problem isn’t limited to Daniel. When SuperGrover admitted she was doing it, she apologized (:::hug:::). Daniel can double down and respond all he wants to, but at the end of the day he also loved being praised and hated the part where I write about both the good and the bad. After having put up with that same pattern for 10 years, I cut him off at the pass. It is never going to work out, because I cannot have a husband that doesn’t listen to me and thinks that he’s a better writer than me. Whether he is or he isn’t, the fact that he wants to compete with me at all is problematic. I wasn’t aware there was some sort of competition, and I happily fold.

I wasn’t going to go through that journey with Daniel for 10 years, where I cower in fear of not rocking the boat, getting called a judgmental dickhead every time I brought up a problem to avoid actually talking about the issue. I did not want to be emotionally attached to someone who was avoidant from the jump. I’d been there already. I’d seen the signs. It’s not for me.

I’m not wrong for seeing if Daniel was right for me, and right in deciding that we’re not right for each other. I have the right to end a relationship for any reason, and I don’t feel like my entry was “shitting all over him.” He’d just broken up with me in my sleep, the most ludicrous thing I’d ever heard in my life, and I still managed to keep my shit together, as well as not being Ms. Petty 9000 and correcting his letter grammatically in red HTML. It’s a funny thought, but it’s not worth it. I just thought it was hilarious that he was so focused on proving what an accomplished writer he was and there were mistakes.

All I know is that he doesn’t have the right to threaten me away from writing my own story, just like I don’t have the right to threaten him away from writing his. There’s room in the world for more than one opinion, especially when your fans are people who don’t know you. People I know reading my blog is a side effect of how the Internet works. People I know read whether I want them to or not, and they form their own opinions about me by reading my writing instead of through conversation most of the time.

I’m fine with that, because they can choose to know one side of me, or they can choose to know all of me. People who choose to keep up with me based on my writing don’t know me. But it’s startling how they think they do.

I’m sorry Daniel is hurt about what I wrote, but most people don’t check with their ex to see if a blog post is okay with them. But I’m not sorry enough to take it down, and I’m not sorry enough to take it back. Especially since I don’t have to prove anything to anyone. I just let Daniel be Daniel………

………by doing myself a favor, and putting it on my web site.

Solidifying My Decision

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I just got my first piece of hate mail, so I thought you guys might want to read it:

I am going to do you a favor and not put this on your blog. Stop. Fucking. Writing. About. Me. This is not a threat; it’s a spoiler. If you keep burying me on your stupid blog, then I’m going to start one of my own with the expressed purpose of defending myself. I have 13 academic publications that are peer reviewed and scrutinized–which is to say my work is at the highest level. Who is peer editing you? That isn’t opinion. It’s fact. I am a better writer than you, and you don’t want me to prove it.

Here are some things that I find preposterous. You said I was going to either A) end up alone with my dog, my cats and my snake. Well, actually, that’s pretty awesome. I would love that life. It means I could play music, do art, and watch wrestling, football and baseball without reproach. B) I would end up marrying some crack whore that would just regale me with praise. The dynamic there is actually pretty equitable. When someone is kind to you and celebrates you, it’s really easy to show them love back.

You put yourself over as being this warm-hearted paragon of a person. You called me so many defaming names. My favorite was “little boy” or some derivation thereof. 

I could have lived with you being autistic. What I’m not going to deal with is the egg shells. So do me a favor–write about something else. I don’t care what. Bee-keeping. 18th century women’s literature. Queer literary theory. Gender identity politics. Parasocial behavior. Whatever pricks your fancy that ISNT talking shit about me. 

I hate myself right now. But I’m not going to be the villain in your story. Keep writing negatively about me, and I will do something about it that you don’t like. 

Admit it or not, I’m a better writer than you are. I will skewer you. Just because you write in bulk doesn’t mean you’re actually saying anything of substance.

The next time you blog about me–im commenting with all the vitriol I can muster. And there isn’t a God Damned thing you can do about it. Don’t make me do it.

You can absolutely believe that I said any or all of these things, because it doesn’t matter to me whether he believes my story or not, nor do I care whether the audience believes me. This is because these are the memories I’m going to be carrying forward as I age, and my words will be here for me when my audience is long gone.

If you’re interested, my reply was that he told me that I could say whatever I wanted about him, and if he doubts that, I wrote it down in several places. And since now he’s mad, I told him that he only wants me to write about him when I praise him, so it makes him a shitty character. And then I blocked him, because this isn’t a flame war. This is the best insurance I have that I absolutely dodged a bullet.

Resigning from the Game

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I should have known that this is exactly how things were going to turn out with Daniel, but I felt like it was important to keep the promise to myself- to see whether rehab had indeed cleared his mind and whether we could make the plans we made fit a future now. I did not want to be the person that abandoned their partner while they were in the worst part of their lives. I couldn’t be that person to my partner, and I wasn’t. I can be proud of that.

But in retrospect, there was a red flag on day one that I couldn’t ignore, and I ran from it, because I knew that I had made a horrible, horrible mistake unless Daniel was telling the absolute truth, and there was no way of knowing whether he was telling the absolute truth from this many miles away. He said that he was still drinking, but it was night and day now. It’s not the thing you want to hear from someone that’s been to inpatient if you know even a couple of things about alcohol and the brain. It’s not that they’re not telling the truth. It’s “are you willing to gamble?” Because maybe they are. Maybe one or two beers every once in a while is their new normal. But I’m not willing to gamble.

I was for a few days. Seriously. I wanted to know how Daniel thought, whether any of his thought processes had changed over the year we were apart, how he treated me now vs. how he treated me then, etc. Absolutely nothing has changed. At no time did he consider my feelings before he went right back to saying that we were starting over while also treating me like a fiancée, so which is it? Do you want to pretend that we don’t know each other or do you want the intimacy that comes with being a partner? I don’t share all my thoughts and feelings with just anyone, and I found out that he cannot handle them.

Even after having a talk about the way I process emotions and the difference in the autistic brain, it was still all about how I’m just so mean to him and “putting all this stuff on him.” Meanwhile, he does not have any answers for my questions and no indication as to what “putting all this stuff on him” even means.

I told him that no person worthy of me would ever spend a minute trying to make me think that my feelings don’t matter, and then I blocked him and walked away, while also telling him that I wouldn’t be back. I already have two people in my life that are willing to open up to me and share with me. I don’t need to fight through to be heard, and I have discovered I won’t.

I wanted a partner to build a life with, because Bryn and Zac already have life partners, and that’s unlikely to change. And by that, I do mean that Bryn is also my life partner, but with best friends, it’s a little different. I mean that she’s my off site document repository, because she knows my files better than I do.

Also, I know this sounds crazy, but the idea of marrying your best friend is starting to seem so much more sane than marrying your romantic partner. Like, why would you place something as important as marriage on a relationship that’s dependent on sexual attraction? It doesn’t make sense to me, but that’s how it’s done….. for most people.

Daniel told me that he wanted to be my favorite person, and I told him that he was…. because I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the position had been filled in 1997 and 2013, when my heart expanded to give huge palaces in my head to three women, not shoving Bryn and Dana away in favor of anyone else. When my definition of love got bigger, I did.

There are so many follow up questions that Daniel never asked, just treated me like the classic sitcom nagging wife. I have never been in a relationship with gender roles before, so I made no attempt to understand any of that. If he wants to marry a nonbinary mind, he’s got to understand that I am his equal. He can’t just dismiss my concerns; I will walk and I did, because I will not learn gender roles for anyone.

It was easy for the world to revolve around him, because only I had to respect his time. We had one conversation where we were actually focused on each other, and that was on the phone. The rest of the time, I sat and waited because he said he had time to talk and then everything that could possibly get in the way made it where our responses were 10 minutes apart. I couldn’t focus on anything because I was caught between thinking that we were having a conversation and not knowing whether I should wait for a reply or not. When I said this was irritating, he jumped all over me about that, too, when what I wanted was “sure- I’ll tell you when I’m doing something else because I also value your time.” If I have someone’s divided attention, I’d rather you finish what you were doing and come focus on me. Because it means that you won’t really focus on me. My words won’t resonate because you’re too lost in something else, like having a conversation with someone who is listening to a podcast with the TV on in the background.

I told him that I was excited about the future, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t things to talk about. That throwing problems out on the table and seeing what they look like in the light wasn’t a bad thing. He said, “you’re right, of course.” Then he proceeded to berate me for acknowledging our problems.

In the past, this would have made me start trying to learn all the ways I can move in a relationship that won’t piss someone off, giving up the parts of myself that make me unique to please someone else. I’ve been there so many times, and it doesn’t help anyone. I’d rather keep finding other people who have also gone through that transformation. It says “I am not threatened by another person having feelings.”

One of the things that really got me was the incredible double standard. Daniel told me that he gets so busy with his writing that he disappears for days, so I thought nothing of it when I was in shutdown/burnout mode; I didn’t contact anyone. I can’t think of a single person who has ever chastised me for that except Daniel, as if I should have somehow divined that he was not okay with going a day without contact from me. Although I probably would have said something to the effect of “what I hear you saying is that it’s ok for you to dissociate, but when I do it I’m a bad partner.” What’s good for the gander has to be good for the goose, because again, I am not into being the classic definition of a wife.

He said something about “trying our best,” and I thought, “that’s not what I’m going to remember about you. So far, you’ve taken every problem we need to work out in order to be together and shut down like a steel trap when I wanted to talk about it. You see me as blaming you…. so until you see me as a partner that wants to work with you instead of someone who’s ‘laying all of this on you,’ I can’t help you.” I cannot live with someone who’s in Fantasyland right now, and it seems like he’s changed his mind about moving to Maryland, because originally, we were all going to find a place somewhere between DC and Baltimore, because Daniel is overqualified to work at Johns Hopkins. It’s fine that he doesn’t want to move anymore, but he could have said that instead of just invalidating my feelings. I was talking about Avery moving in with us or something like that…. I can’t remember what. But I said something about DC and Baltimore and he said, “or Dallas or Austin.” I never want to have that conversation again, because it was like he was doorknobbing me. I would never seriously think about moving back to Texas unless the circumstances were dire.

Plus, I don’t like Austin. I just don’t. It looks like Portland, because they wanted to be all weird and stole all their slogans, then just like Portland, big industry moved in and it wasn’t the same place to live anymore. But in the end, to me it just feels like a city full of bumper stickers that say Keep Portland Austin Weird, and The People’s Republic of Portland Austin.

They were also the first Texas city to get a Voodoo Donut, but you will never in your life know how weird it really was. The FDA shut them down for making doughnuts with NyQuil and Pepto Bismol in them, as well as caffeine. You aren’t OG Voodoo Donut unless you’ve been drunk at 3AM on Burnside….. before the second location, before the hype, before the notoriety.

That’s how I feel about Portland and Austin. The donuts will never taste the same, but Austin can imitate the feeling of those donuts………. poorly.

There are better donuts out there that have taken the place of Voodoo in PDX, but for a while Voodoo was this enigma.

I also don’t like moving at all. It was great when Daniel was headed up here already, that we’d talked about him moving here about this time last year. I realized that his PhD put us in the way of that, but I wasn’t daunted. However, I did think that it was very unfair of him to change plans without me and not let me know up front that in order for us to be together, he’d also like me to “come home.” I could have saved him a lot of trouble. That’s not a doorknob conversation. That’s a conversation you have to be up front about, and that’s my whole problem with Daniel and the many other emotionally unavailable people in my life. They call me demanding when I lay my feelings on the table and expect them to do the same so that I know what problems I need to work on in our relationship, too. But, if you think that the problem is always me, it’s not a relationship anymore.

I have always been the unseen child. I do not have to be the unseen adult, unless I just want that. I thought I did. Turns out, I had to let go of a lot of things to make me realize who I was. My destiny is not to belong to one person, but to belong to many so that I never have to put all my eggs in one basket ever again. I don’t want my husband or any of my partners to feel less important than the others, because they’re all a part of my family.

It is cooking, where we all make each other’s lives more interesting. For instance, I love hearing about Bryn’s journey through all her relationships. I love opening up to Zac and knowing that he’s capable of going toe to toe with me. I didn’t reach out to Daniel in a time of need, but abundance.

Daniel had been in a poly relationship before, so it wasn’t like I was springing anything new on him. But he didn’t want to talk about his own boundaries, only that he never wanted me to pit him against anyone else. There’s no way I would or could do that. It would be comparing bananas and oranges and giving up one rather than realizing that they’re both great in different recipes.

I didn’t want a relationship where Daniel lived in Fantasyland, thinking I’d wait around for him all the time while he did whatever he wanted while also wanting to be married while also not wanting to compromise on anything while also saving things up and exploding.

You have been reading about that relationship with someone else on this web site, which made me especially gunshy when I saw that shit coming towards me again. Blame the person for bringing up a problem, find a way to turn it back around on them, and be extremely stubborn about being vulnerable so now I always feel bad about bringing up this problem because I know this is how you’ll react every single time.

So many women learn the land mines because they feel they need a partner worse than they need to stand on their own two feet. I’m not that person, and I never will be.

I know you have your shit. I know I have mine. The difference between us is that I’m willing to tell people the truth as I see it. As in, “this is how your words are making me feel.” Then, they choose how they respond. When it is immediately defensive, I know they’re not ready to compromise on shit. They can’t even be open and honest with themselves, so why would they be with you?

When you know yourself really well, you don’t feel the need to get defensive all the time, because you know that you’re just as fallible as the other person. It’s always a matter of working out compromises with other people if you want a relationship with them. But if your reaction to another person telling you what they need from you is “there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me; how dare you,” then you’re in for a world of hurt. That kind of defensiveness takes years to work through in therapy, and you’re not a hospital for broken people. It’s too much to take on, because you’re either walking on eggshells or “starting fights,” with absolutely no in between.

Again, it took two hours for Daniel to go from “I’m having a bad day” to “you know what? This isn’t worth it.” It took him two hours to blame everything on me in my sleep because I just wasn’t attentive enough. I wasn’t attentive because neither was he. He showed me how to act. I wasn’t going to give him anything he wasn’t willing to give me.

Also, Zac and Bryn and I don’t talk every day, so it wouldn’t occur to me to treat Daniel differently unless he asked me to, and even then, I’d feel like a fuckup when I didn’t want to engage because my autism was struggling that day.

For all Daniel’s talk about understanding autism, it didn’t translate to actually improving communication, because I told him how I don’t social mask and he continued to treat me exactly the same…….. while also saying he got it.

In short, it was too much of a roller coaster, and it was easier to cut him loose and move on, knowing that I am the person I said I would be, and I will never have to play these childish games again.

It’s Too Easy to Do the Wrong Thing

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have a lot of people tell me this when they’re in relationships with me, and I have found that it is a fighting tactic of which I’m not very fond. They say “you’re demanding,” but what they mean is “I’m overwhelmed.” That’s because it is not on one person to divine the other’s needs, and there is no way that the problem is always me. However, it is a very effective cheap political shot, as if nothing in their behavior ever elicits my response. I’m just “mean.” When that happens, I disengage. I don’t want to play games. And, I’m hearing Supergrover’s voice in my head as I type this, “I do not have room for that temperature in my life.”

Last night Daniel invalidated my feelings, so I disengaged and went to bed. I didn’t want either of us to say anything they regretted, because he sighed in exasperation, which came across as passive-aggressive in the first place, and I knew it was time to go. It was enough for one day, because I was tired enough that I knew I’d go nuclear on him and I was heading a fight off at the pass. I said, “I don’t want to play your games,” took my sleeping pills, and went to bed.

I wake up, and he’s mad about all these slights, real and perceived, that he has not expressed before, so one of two things is happening. Either he’s actually concerned/angry about these things and has been covering them up, or he’s just making up things to throw in my face so that I’m “forced” to feel bad about the fact that I withdrew.

What I have learned over time is to go to bed angry. Let that shit work itself out in my dreams, rather than taking it out on the person I love because we’re fighting while we’re exhausted. So, I got some sleep, and while I was asleep, he went from “I’m having a bad day” to “you know what, this isn’t worth it” in two hours.

He absolutely spun out on his own because he was anxious, so it wasn’t a real breakup. He doesn’t know what the right thing to do is right now, because he thinks I’m demanding due to old tapes. If everyone tells you that your feelings don’t matter, then you’re going to believe they don’t. If you don’t believe your words have power, then you’ll say anything because no one is listening, anyway. I understand this innately- it’s a trait of all neurodivergent people. But it is not my responsibility to fill that hole inside him and make him secure enough within himself that he doesn’t think I’m abandoning him every time I go to bed.

He asked me to stop bombarding him with messages because it was too much- he, like Supergrover, assumed that I needed answers to everything rightthefucknow, when I was making a list and checking it twice over things that were important to talk about as we plan the next few years. However, because it had been a problem with Supergrover, I was prepared for it. I could never convince her that I wanted an answer eventually, that I wasn’t on a time constraint because I was looking so far into the future that the moment didn’t matter. She could be as busy as she needed to be, as long as she was willing to lay her guts on the table and tell me what was wrong. I cannot divine it over text.

But I would if I could, and often tried.

So, I stopped writing so much to Daniel at a time and started recording my thoughts either here or in a notebook (because I doubt you care about the dull details that create dreams, you care about the dreams themselves). I want to get married to Daniel because the piece of paper has a function beyond just saying to the world that we’re in love and want to be together. We could do that in front of our friends and family without ever filing government paperwork and it would be every bit as meaningful.

But there’s a huge difference in marrying a civilian vs. marrying a veteran. Dependents are entitled to so much more if they’re married to or a child of a service member, even in Daniel’s retirement. There are perks that are thank you for your service all over the place, like not having to pay tax on things when you buy at the PX, getting to fly standby on military planes when Daniel, Cora, and I are all traveling together, and a health care system in which I’d never fall through the cracks. It’s a lot, and it’s a big decision, but Daniel has already offered. I don’t think we’re there yet, obviously, if our communication needs this much work.

But here’s why it does………. God help me. I am marrying myself, and it’s not so easy to be married to you. I do not mean that I’m a selfish bastard, I’m saying that we are so much alike that it’s akin to having a child and thinking, “I wanted you to look like me, not act like me.”

This time, it’s on Daniel to figure out why he spiraled out so fast, and learn how not to do that. Not my circus, not my monkeys. If he’s as serious about this relationship as he says he is, he’ll have to learn to own his half, because I am not here to suss it out for him.

I am in no way a psychologist. I just “speak” psychologist and this is the best way I know how to explain what’s going on without putting blame on either one of us. Medicine and how the brain works over huge population samples gives me perspective that I am not trying to analyze them, but to explain to an audience what I think is going on and how I feel, because that kind of empathy helps me move forward in a positive way. The empathy part is going out of my way to try and prove that I’m wrong. To give people the benefit of the doubt because I can analyze behavior with an omnipotent third eye, calling myself out on my own bullshit in the process.

There is just no room in my life for people who don’t want to know what part they played, because relationships don’t last that way. If one person expresses needs and one person hides, it’s a hard pattern to break……… but I have to, or Daniel, et al, will make me afraid to emote at all.

That is not what I want in a partner. We’re going to be giants together, with room for all our feelings…… no one ever has to hide in fear and spiral out alone.

Daniel seems to waffle on conversations about the future, but it’s for good reason. I’m not saying that he’s avoidant because he wants to be, only that he has to be right now…. but not forever. He’s in the middle of his disability case that could make his pension even more attractive, so he can’t predict things like cash flow and his ability to “move about the country.” At the same time, without any kind of vision, I flounder. And if me wanting some sort of working boundaries is taken as a problem because I am telling you what I want/need and feel like you need to keep everything close to the vest.

I have a huge capacity to love, but also a huge capacity to feel needed. The lovebomb/discard cycle will not happen with me, because I won’t allow it. It’s harder with an addict or a patient with mental health issues like PTSD, but not impossible. It’s not because the person is a narcissist, it’s that their first reaction is trained to be fear and protection of themselves. If you bring up a problem, their first reaction is to try and make their environment safe, and that includes the steel shutdown with the automatic locks, sometimes with the cocking of weapons to show you shouldn’t get any closer. That’s the point at which I know our conversation has come to an end, because I am not going to fight through all that. You’re going to explore why you felt you had to “suit up” and come tell me what you were really feeling that made you react that way. You are not responsible for my reactions, but I am allowed to have them.

I’m allowed to feel pissed off that Daniel once again broke up with me, but he fired himself out of anxiety and abandonment, just like I did with Supergrover. I felt abandoned even though she didn’t feel that way. I didn’t need any more safety and security than that. That way, I’m not counting on a response, but it’s welcome if I get one. I would have treated her like I treat Bryn for her whole life if she had been as honest with me in all of her e-mails as she was in her last one.

Here’s the line that got me. “I could write all night, but I won’t.” In that moment, I knew I hadn’t been lovebombed just to be discarded. That’s because the letter was already pages long, and then after she said she didn’t want to type anymore, she typed for several more paragraphs. It made it feel so much more personal and intimate, because it was like she was saying, “I could write to you all night.” The only thing I worry about with both Daniel and Supergrover is that I have done this thing: