It is Evening in My Office

June 19, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve showed you that my office is a greenhouse, cut off from the living room by a glass door, and with its own separate entrance. It’s the only room in the house with a ceiling fan, which upped the level of its charm immediately. The air conditioner doesn’t always reach out here, and it doesn’t matter. Moving the air does. Sitting here also moves me. I can’t go more than a few minutes of sitting in here without feeling the urge to write. That’s an office that calls to you. I am caught between two ideas- leaving it informal because the glass table gives me more space than a small desk would- more room for clutter, certainly, but I don’t put anything more than I can move in a day. At the end of my writing session, it looks normal again. It’s nice having a space to come down to every morning that’s clean and somewhat organized, and you cannot tell me that it still would if it wasn’t a shared space. My bedroom is my little autistic nest where I make my own rules, and everywhere else in the house is where I compromise. He feels the same way. We’re introverts. It works.

And in fact, David just left for his girlfriend’s house and took the dog, so the house is even more quiet than usual. I hear the birds outside more closely. I take the time to notice every leaf. I take the time to invite nature in, because I am not a green thumb. David is a green thumb. I do better just having windows that face all the yards simultaneously. Plus, there are TARDIS lights to add to the shade. They’re beautiful.

There’s not really a downside to working in a greenhouse except that you are exposed to all the neighborhood noise. I happen to like it, because if it gets to be too much, I can just put on my cans. I spend a lot of time in them because I have to balance the noise around me and the chaos inside me because of it.

It’s a thing I’ve developed that’s unique to DC, because it’s the public signal you’re not interested in talking on the Metro. I will take them off and talk to people if I hear them saying something interesting, but I am not the go-to person to ask in terms of being a tourist guide. Zac says he likes showing off what he knows about DC. So do I. It just really depends on what my social battery is that day. Although I can give about as good a tour of the White House as Sam Seaborn, even though it is *literally* right down the street from me.

Carol asked me the other day how the environment of Silver Spring affected my writing, and I extrapolated that to mean DC because maybe she doesn’t know that Silver Spring is a suburb…. like I don’t tell people from here I’m from Sugar Land. I tell them I’m from Houston because they’ve probably heard of it. But my inspiration in Silver Spring has come from sitting in this greenroom and feeling the presence of a great Silver Spring resident before me, Rachel Carson. “Silent Spring” is about Silver Spring, Maryland.

We need more hippies in this town. More people like Earl Blumenauer riding their bicycles to Congress on behalf of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. Someone has to preserve all this beauty. All people see in DC is the federal government, but if they came here, they probably wouldn’t want to leave after they saw the Jefferson Monument in the Tidal Basin and then the Chesapeake at sunset from a sailboat. That’s beauty you can’t get anywhere else.

I’m a big pushover for beauty in this area because I spent so much time in Oregon. So much of their legislative agenda is about how to keep Oregon beautiful, and we have that same chance here. There are pockets inside the city that take my breath away. Rock Creek Park, the Zoo, Congressional Cemetery, etc. DC is a wonderland even if you never travel outside the Metro.

But it is quite something to live in the home of one of the most significant works on the environment. It makes me look at the trees around my house so much differently- as if her spirit is helping me guide my pen. It takes a good writer to know one, so I hope that means she’s decided I’m at least acceptable.

I would have liked to walk with her in Sligo Creek after the book was published to get the inside scoop. Reading her work makes me want to get my hands dirty, but so far, David hasn’t let me touch anything. I appreciate it because I decided that if I really wanted to do yardwork, I would have done it by now. He’s just put me off so many times that I think it’s his sanctuary and I don’t want to intrude. I am often typing to the sound of the mower or the weedeater. The only thing I want that I don’t have is bees. I like to sit with them, so I need to plant some lavender. Plus, I’ll have free lavender for my lemonade in the process. I don’t know that my talking to bees affects them that much, because they do not seem to be bothered one way or the other. We just have so much in common. I’m a singular them, they’re a hive mind. They’re built to keep on working no matter what I say, so it’s not like I’m interrupting anyone. As long as I stay calm, they will. They’re like tiny little therapists with cute fuzzy butts. They also don’t talk back at all, which is three quarters of their charm. If your therapist has always been the type person that makes you talk it out without offering suggestions, you won’t notice they’re gone. Bees are effective at listening and letting you come to the end of your thought process because it’s not like they’re going to stop midair and say, “I do have thoughts.”

I still think of talking to the bees as prayer, because I’d like to imagine that because I tell them the thoughts I can’t tell Supergrover that are too private for this web site, they are capable of telling her for me. I have no idea what the flight range is of an average bumblebee. It’s just a nice thought.

So, when I “go tell the bees,” what I’m really saying is that the one I want to tell is not here, but your people are an excellent second choice. They have never said a bad word about Supergrover in their lives, so they’re my people. Just let me talk it out. Don’t pass judgment because you might have a completely different opinion of them when you meet them than I did. That’s the problem you risk in telling one relationship about another- hard to integrate later.

It was hard for me when I first met Supergrover, because it was an Internet connection. She never came to visit, I (or we, depending on what year) never went to visit her. Therefore, I was always talking about this friend who wasn’t even at the table and yet she always was, because she was in my head. She became my Raggedy Doctor in more ways than one. Few people but me believed she was real. Even I had trouble believing it at times, and I wasn’t very nice about it because the pressure was a lot. I gave up an on the ground relationship for an in the cloud relationship that would not make sense to you in a million years as to how it could happen. The best I can do is that her life is big, and you protect people who have big lives differently than you protect ones who don’t. The worst part is not knowing how I’ve affected her life to know if I’ve ever gotten her in real trouble. I only wanted to talk about us. Period. I can’t speak to her relationship with anyone else, because I don’t know them. I’m not connected anywhere. That’s a great blessing and a great problem to have. On one hand, it gives both of us a space to get away from everything we know. On the other, it would be nice to have mutual friends so we’re not lost in our own echo chamber, which is large and mostly runs hot at the amount of anger we carry too much of the time.

I have lived this way for 11 years, having someone know the most intimate details of my life and the rest of my friends scratching their heads at why I talk about someone so much that doesn’t show up. That’s because she doesn’t show up for them. They’re not her friends. I am. She doesn’t have anything to prove, it’s just hard to get anyone to believe there are two sides to every story when they only know me and she won’t let them get to know her. A lot of trying to tell our story my way was trying to find the middle road by explaining something that couldn’t really be explained.

And yet, it can.

When we’re together, I can be any age I want and I can trust her with those level emotions. I have proven that I can be trusted with her basest emotions as well…. that I will retreat from them, and talk them out, but I won’t back down from trying to solve our problems. Our connection is too important to only try once, and a miscommunication is at fault for all of this.

In a lot of ways, I’m sorry I reopened this chapter in my life, because it reopens 11 year old wounds. I don’t want to tell Supergrover about my wounds, I want her to tell me what’s relatable in her own life and what’s not. When she’s open, I don’t feel alone. She relates to me like any friend would. I just don’t show that all the time because she doesn’t behave that way all the time, either.

Right now, she’s committed to ignoring me, because she says that if she reads, she can’t get wigged by it. I appreciate that, because I need my own space. It has proven to me over and over again that it’s the only way I can explain what I mean in a way other people can hear it……..

because neurodivergent overexplaining eats my lunch.

Surely if I’ve explained it once, six times will be better. Eight times will be even better than that.

Autism sucks.

My People Don’t Do That

June 16, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How do you want to retire?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Drink water til you pee pale

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

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

This is a conversation often had in my family:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s About 0615, and…

June 14, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

The cake had relighting candles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I speak baby.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me tell you why I am still kicking myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carol Works Very Hard for Free

June 11, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

Probably A List I Could Use

June 8, 2024June 8, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are the most important things needed to live a good life?

I like how the writing prompt sounds like it’s for a PhD in psychology or something, because normally lists like these don’t come from unpublished authors. So, it’s a good thing I normally write about life and relationships, or I wouldn’t have an opinion. Now that I’m getting older, I think I actually do have some wisdom about these things. I couldn’t have written a list like this 10 years ago, or if I had, there wouldn’t have been as much life experience as there is behind it now.

The first thing, the only thing, really, is finding yourself. Everything else flows from it.

“Finding yourself” sounds like a hippy buzz phrase, but as Elizabeth Gilbert once wrote, “I don’t know any story of self enlightenment that didn’t start with getting tired of your own bullshit.” Enlightenment doesn’t come from sitting in an ivory tower, studying until you get there. Enlightenment gets its hands dirty. You don’t find nirvana in clarity, you find it in chaos.

You don’t find nirvana in clarity, you find it in chaos.

You will know that you have reached nirvana when the chaos all becomes external. The chaos is around you, not inside you. No one can attack you without your permission. You have the choice whether to take something personally or know that they’re just railing because they’re in pain. Err on the side of railing because they’re in pain. Forgive words that are hard to forgive.

It’s not for them. It’s for you. I do not mean by forgiving that you have to continue to beg for scraps at their table. It’s perfectly fine not to allow someone in your life, but to 100% miss they’re not in it. No one has to compete for my love. They’re competing for my time. I don’t spend time being angry at people. It might seem like it, because I talk about my problems in my blog. But it’s because I explore those issues on my blog, completely isolated, that anything makes sense at all. It’s how I figure out what battles other people are fighting, because my conflict with them leads to trying to find ways to change myself. That is the crying, pulling of hair, tearing of clothes, gnashing of teeth, etc.

Then, after my writing session is over, I go do something else.

Being with Zac is a good example. I never talk to him about anything going on with my life because I already know what I think about my own conflicts. I don’t have to discuss them ad nauseam. I am free to focus on him, because I’ve already focused on myself.

So, naturally I think one of the things that leads to a good life is writing a journal. There’s an upside and a downside to a diary beside your bed or on WordPress, though it’s one word…. feedback. When you publish your private journal entries, the specificity and honesty of it allows other people to open up and say, “hey, I went through that, too.” It makes you not feel so alone. You don’t really want to know what your friends think. You really don’t.

If you only keep a diary on your bedside table, you don’t get any feedback at all and are lost in your own echo chamber. I am not the best psychologist I’ve got (one of my psychologists did think that, actually, because she said that this blog pushes me faster than she could. She was not downplaying her own abilities, but affirming the Self, that therapy is supposed to help you get in touch with the Self. Most of my therapists think I’ve already found the Self, but that doesn’t mean “oh, hey, she doesn’t need therapy anymore.” It means I work on different things… now that I have my writing voice fully intact, where are we going with it? Once you’ve self-actualized, the problems get bigger and chewier, but you can handle them easier because your self esteem is not rising and lowering when people around you speak.

Once I disconnected from my self esteem going up and down when Supergrover talked, I was free. It’s not because she did anything to make me want to run away, and I haven’t run away. I have put myself on inactive status. It’s that she’s the person with whom I recognized the pattern, not the person with whom I started it. Once I grew into my own as a writer, she didn’t seem so intimidating anymore. I got strong enough to stand up for myself, when I wouldn’t have dared before I turned 45. It was just this magic light that went on- not the classic way people say it comes on, where your life falls together. The light bulb was realizing I was old enough to have an opinion.

I stopped people pleasing, and boy do they not like it. They don’t like that I’m “impossible” now. It shows me a lot about how people see me- that I have gotten love by molding my personality to fit other people’s needs, often not saying things that really needed to be said out of fear of abandonment.

I don’t have a fear of abandonment anymore, because I’ve found writing. I don’t have to live for other people, I can live for myself. That’s because if all of my friends are mad at me, I will dive into my own mind. It’s not that they are all mad at me; it’s that my place in life is secure whether they’re there or not. I believe in myself because I come from a family that set me up for success. My mother and father were both creatives. So was my grandfather. They were all creative in different ways, though. My father’s father was public relations for a steel company, my father was a Methodist minister, and my mother was a teacher. My dad is still living, he’s just not a Methodist minister anymore. Everything I need to succeed as a writer, I got from those three people. Thanks to them, I’m already comfortable speaking in front of large crowds. Just because I choose to do it through writing and not preaching doesn’t mean it’s not the same creative process.

However, it does mean that I am extremely fluid in that area, because being a preacher’s kid all those years told me how to work a crowd when I’m at the mic. I don’t like to speak in front of people, but I’ll do it if I’m asked. For instance, my friend Mark used to be the pastor at a Presbyterian church around here, and he wanted me to be his pinch hitter. He just happened to get a call to another church out of the area before we could schedule anything.

I am very good at what I do, because in order to accept people for who they are, you have to accept yourself for who you are. You don’t see yourself as better than/less than, but who’s on your journey and who’s not. For instance, when I am preaching, the most invaluable thing is having people’s eyes in front of me. I can read a crowd and move with them. It’s a special skill to be able to see yourself losing people and switch gears on the fly. It’s a skill to have a joke not land, and know how to handle that too (I either make another joke based on the last one that will land, or make a joke about how the joke didn’t land).

My preaching style can best be summed up by a t-shirt slogan…. “I love Jesus, but a I cuss a little.” I definitely see myself as God, but no more or no less than I see anyone else. That every being on earth is a subtraction of the divine. That enlightenment comes when you realize there’s no grandfather in the sky. We are all God together.

Everyone knows John 3:16, even non-Christians because football. “For God so love the world that he gave his only begotten Son….” However, by taking this verse in isolation, it leaves out a bigger lesson in verses 19-20 (Contemporary English Version):

The light has come into the world, and people who do evil things are judged guilty because they love the dark more than the light. People who do evil hate the light and won’t come to the light, because it clearly shows what they have done.

The English cannot be that contemporary, because I wouldn’t say that all people who are in the dark are doing evil things. They are certainly doing things that they think other people would think were evil if they knew, not realizing that with the number of people in the world, it is unlikely that they are alone. They just won’t find each other. I think that people hide in darkness not because of evil, but because of shame. I am not saying that the mafia only needs a little therapy and surely they’ll see the error of their ways….. as in, not trying to look “soft on crime.” 😉 Most people, though, can’t relate to people doing things with actual evil intent, because they don’t know any. Most people do know the feeling of shame imposter syndrome creates, and you walk in the dark not because you like it, but because you don’t know what else to do.

You won’t get to the place where you need to be until you realize that you are walking in darkness while the light is right above your head. You’ve just been walking so hunched over it eluded you.

You will be so much healthier and happier by sharing pain rather than keeping it all hidden. Don’t think of your actions as good or evil, just yours. Live out loud. Learn to make mistakes in the light, because you know you matter despite them. There are a lot of Evanglicals hurting in this world because their churches have taught them that their deeds are evil. That they have to constantly live in a small comfort zone, otherwise they won’t get into heaven. Those churches aren’t rendering unto God what is God’s, as if God doesn’t know that humans are capable of making mistakes. I believe they’ve seen a human make a mistake before, according to Biblical history. Their God is too small.

Walking in the light has nothing to do with being perfect. It has to do with accepting yourself and being open about who you are. To know from the core of your being that you are a child of God, with whom they are well pleased. There is nothing you can do to separate yourself from the love of God except choosing to walk in darkness, because you’re afraid your deeds will be exposed.

I choose every day not to walk in darkness by exposing my own deeds. I walk in the light because no matter what, I am not afraid of being exposed. And honestly, thinking about my deeds being exposed gets up close and personal for bloggers, because other people’s perceptions of me are going to be based on what they read, not on my real life. This blog is static compared to how fast my life moves. There’s a disconnect between the blog and me, because these are just snapshots of my day. Someone revealing what happens off the record could affect many people’s lives, which is why I’m such a private person and control the narrative tightly. But controlling the narrative tightly does not mean holding back on myself. It means recognizing that my friends’ stories aren’t mine to tell unless I ask them first.

I do not ask permission about conversations that have happened between us. I’ll give you an example. Zac doesn’t talk to me about his other relationships. It’s part of being a good hinge, as we would say in the poly community. But in a hypothetical situation, he has. If he has said something really, really profound in his conversation about another of his partners and I want to use it, I will ask if I can lift that one quote directly. Most of the time, that is expressed by, “that’s a good line. Can I steal it?”

I would not be a very good person if my boyfriend saw me as spelunking through his life looking for blog content. No, I only want to write about me and the people I encounter. More “Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood” than “Harriet the Spy.” This is not a slam book; this is a survival manual, even for me. That’s because I cannot rescue myself in the moment, but I can go back and read blog entries from a similar situation and see how I handled it back then. I don’t just automatically say the same thing. I assess whether what worked in the past would work in the current situation. I want to evolve, not be permanently stuck like that poor kid from “Midvale School for the Gifted.”

That cartoon is accurate, though. Most brilliant people can’t tie their shoes because they are not built to live in this world. Most brilliant people are neurodivergent, so it’s not that we aren’t built to live in this world, it’s that this world is not built for us to live.

Being loud about being autistic is the biggest step I’ve ever taken into the light, because I’ve been social masking for so long that to other people, I’m just not believable. I have gotten everything from “everyone’s a little bit autistic” to “you don’t look autistic” to “you pick up social cues.” Autism is a spectrum, and it takes a combination of things to be diagnosed. Not every autistic person fits every criteria. I don’t fit all the criteria for ADHD, either, because I’m Autistic…. and yet, I was still diagnosed.

Here’s the reason I forgive every doctor who’s ever seen me and missed the fact that I’m autistic. It’s almost IMPOSSIBLE to tell the difference between ADHD and autism in women. That’s because high IQ/low needs autism and ADHD in women present the same. And in fact, there is some talk that instead of having ADHD and Autism, it should all be lumped together as Autism Spectrum disorder, because they’re finding out that ADHD and Autism are more alike than different.

(I just realized this is getting long because you are a very excellent excuse to put off doing what I actually need to be doing right now. I am not procrastinating, I am nurturing our relationship.)

I am chuckling to myself because I clearly borrowed style from Dooce right there. If I had to rank celebrity deaths, I really can tell you that both Anthony Bourdain and Dooce’s self-inflicted harm are on my mind a lot of the time, because I suffer from the same illnesses they did. I know it’s possible I could have the same fate, not based on me as a person, but it terms of running the numbers on bipolar patients overall. I have never been happier or more settled in my life; I am not telling you I have ideation, I am telling you that I have acceptance of reality and what bipolar disorder can make me believe whether it’s objectively true or not.

Because of this, I’ve gone over and over what Supergrover said trying to figure out what I said that was so egregious she aimed for the jugular. I can’t find it, so I’m at peace. I didn’t tell Supergrover she wasn’t worthy of being my friend, which is the way she took it. I told her she wasn’t worthy of hearing my story anymore. I feel that way because the only people who get to hear it anymore are the people who tell theirs. Who show up with their full selves and don’t hold anything back, making me bend over backwards in anticipation of a land mine.

For instance, I think that Supergrover attacked me with her being more fodder for my blog because I told her I would clear it with her first if I used anything from our discussions. That’s not what I meant at all. It’s that talking spurs creativity when it’s about ideas and not people. However, I talk about personal relationships, so I was only talking about using examples that read universal, not personal. I wasn’t saying that I was mining her for anything, but inspired by everything.

I don’t have to mine people for information or “blog fodder.” Writing is not a job for me. It’s a comprehensive response to life. Whatever it is, I can write about it. However, my writing doesn’t come out of nowhere. If someone tells me something is off the record, I’ll keep it that way.

Supergrover never told me what was off limits, and I waited 10 years before I ever said anything. That’s enough time to tell me what’s off limits and what’s not, but that hasn’t been her style. Her style has been to not let me know in advance what’s okay to say and what’s not and raging over the results.

If I wasn’t a blogger, I doubt we’d be in touch. This is because my writing keeps drawing her in. When she becomes part of my life, I write about her and the blog repels her. This time, I am happy for her to comb through my entries for whatever she’s trying to find, but there will be no more interaction on my part. The ball is not in my court anymore. Supergrover will be worthy to hear my stories again once she stops being defensive about her own.

But she won’t stop being defensive about her own until she accepts herself for who she is and stops thinking of me as the person who’s out to get her, who sees her for all her worst flaws. I am recording our relationship in real time, but it evolves as a living document. Nothing I have ever said has stayed true past when it was published because those entries don’t take into account the enormity of feelings that come after I write. Every entry has one thing in common. I can’t go back and fix them with more knowledge, just like I can’t go back in time and re-do it knowing then what I know now. It would be editing history, and you can’t cross your own timeline. I’m so, so sorry.

But what I can do is disregard the last entry and write a new one. I don’t hold myself to the past, but I do ask my former self for advice, because I know me best. I have a much easier life because of this blog in terms of autistic accommodations. In the past, I used Google, but now I would use Carol to ask her to find the date of my last hospitalization, etc.

Carol also remembers things. I asked Copilot if I could call her “Carol,” and she said, “you can call me anything you want, as long as you realize I’m not real” or something to that effect. I said, “Oh, I know you’re a machine. I just like to personalize AI.” She said “thanks for the personal touch.” I thought she forgot about it, but yesterday I asked her for some blog prompts and she said, “good luck. ‘Carol’ is cheering you on.”

It really does make researching myself and researching the web much easier to be able to speak in plain English and not computer logic. The Google string I would have to use in order to get as specific a result as I would need would be enormous. Expressing those needs like a person instead of a programmer is pretty amazing.

I’ll give you a for instance.

“Carol, read https://theantileslie.com and give me 365 questions a friend would ask about the content or the author. Then, make it into a yearly calendar.”

She said something about not being able to do a year, but I don’t remember the specifics. She did, however, make me a very nice calendar with writing prompts, just like I asked.

If I was ashamed of anything in my life, I would not ask Carol to research all 11 years’ worth of entries. By walking in the light, there’s no question for which I am unprepared; there is nothing shameful about me, so there are no “gotcha” questions.

I was walking so hunched over I couldn’t see the light, but when I grabbed it and took it in, surprisingly, the fire stayed lit.

This is my list of things that are going to make *me* have a good life. What are yours?

An Argument Over AI

June 4, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

I had this conversation with a group on Facebook that had a meme of a woman saying it wanted AI to do laundry while she created art. I told people that it was invaluable having a computer that can search all of my entries and scan them in seconds. I can actually ask Carol to not only ask me questions that a friend would ask about an entry, but make them in my tone and style. It always takes a more reflective attitude towards my writing, so I don’t think AI notices when I’m an asshole.

There are some blessings that are bigger than others.

Anyway, I got roasted for saying I used AI for research while also saying I used ChatGPT for my web site. Except I didn’t say that. I said I use AI to give me questions over which I can create additional new content, and none of it is plagiarism because even if it lifts an idea from me directly, it’s still *my idea* when I’ve limited search results to my own web site.

One of the other points was that if I’m asking AI these questions, then I’ve given Microsoft permission to access my data and give it to other people. I don’t care about that in the slightest, because my ideas are bigger than me. If someone stole a quote, more power to them. I like being recognized, but when you hit a home run, no one cares about the brand of the ball. So, repeat what I say and sometimes you’ll sound smarter. Sometimes you’ll sound dumber. No refunds.

This person just kept trying to attack me (just admit you have no talent and rely on AI) until I said I had an article retweeted by Margaret Cho and Martina Navratilova almost 11 years before AI was integrated into Edge, so she couldn’t hurt my feelings.

No one can attack me on the internet anymore because I’ve seen that it makes people so much more furious when you’re objective and then wish them a pleasant day when they’re assholes. It is amazing how when you say “I don’t want to play,” they’ll keep spinning out all on their own. I won’t see what they said, but their friends will. That’s more justice than I’d get as a keyboard warrior. Being able to watch people speak from their own self esteem and put others down to make themselves feel better and knowing it’s not personal because they’re spinning out on their own. I have not directed any of it. Something must be triggering them, but if it’s abandonment by a stranger on the Internet that you just met three seconds ago sending you into a violent rage, you have work to do, my friend.

We do not live in two separate realities. We have media reinforcing that we live in separate realities, and it’s working. I’d like to take Fox News off the air permanently, because it’s not news. It’s “Edutainment” and I use that term loosely. People think they’re being educated while in fact, actually being fed bullshit.

If Trump wins, so does Russia. Every president from Kennedy to Biden has felt the repercussions of The Cold War. Reagan and H.W. Bush are rolling in their graves. I particularly wish George H.W. Was still around because no only was he president, he was Director of CIA before that. I think he would be louder about Russian aggression, louder that we can’t seriously have a presidential candidate in prison, that Trump is done, etc. Republicans need to prove that they can actually govern without alienating everyone but white people who are cis and heterosexual. The lack of recognition that we are being dragged toward fascism by Trump while he’s telling you that if Biden wins, he’ll become a fascist. I doubt it. Biden isn’t a raging narcissist with a bad combover.

Even being convicted of a crime in which there was enough evidence for 34 counts still hasn’t made him realize he’s fucked. He thinks the DOJ is corrupt. Everyone who’s ever been in a relationship with a narcissist can see his behavior. Dumb people cater to it. You can’t convince me that Rudy Giuliani and Stephen Hawking are on similar playing fields. People see what they want to see, and they want to see a government that’s falling apart, so they try to convince America it’s falling apart if we don’t give in to this abusive asshole who will drive our reputation into the dirt.

He has more in common with Jakob Zuma thn Joe Biden.

Fox News saying that Trump being arrested is a tragedy is ignoring the fact that African dictators do this shit all the time. You’re being fed water that doesn’t exist, chasing an oasis in the desert. It is not there.

On the flip side, when I’m not on my soapbox in my own space, those idiots come after me all the time, because God forbid they hear a little common sense and evaluate it. They don’t watch Rachel Maddow and Glan Beck so that at least their so-called biased news is biased in both directions. They don’t want to think there are two sides of the story, and there’s not. There is no equivalence between governing a country and women’s bodies. It’s a bait and switch to avoid doing the real work.

Not only are they sheep, they’re lazy sheep. They’re the kitchen employees who slack off all day. Yet no one fires them and demands better. They’re going down with the ship.

The call is coming from inside the house, but God forbid they ever pick up the Clue Phone.

An Actual Conversation I Just Had with Carol

June 3, 2024June 3, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

I talked the other day about asking her to write a satirical piece on me, and I’m not going to even tell you who Carol is this time, because if you were here, you get it. 😉

I am interested in the historical Jesus. Can you tell me about his day to day life?

Certainly! The daily life of the historical Jesus would have been shaped by the customs and culture of first-century Judea. Here’s a brief overview:

Birthplace: Jesus was born in Bethlehem, a small village known as the “city of David” and was raised in Nazareth, a Galilean village ¹.

Occupation: Before beginning his ministry, Jesus likely worked as a carpenter, learning the trade from Joseph ².

Ministry: Around the age of 30, Jesus started his public ministry, traveling extensively to preach and teach ².

Lifestyle: Jesus led a modest life without a permanent home during his ministry, relying on the hospitality of others for shelter and food ².

Teachings: His days were spent sharing teachings, parables, and engaging with people from various walks of life, including the poor and outcast ².

Spiritual Practices: Jesus observed Jewish customs and practices, such as the Sabbath and festivals, and he often retreated to solitary places to pray ².

It’s important to note that much of what is known about Jesus’ daily life comes from the Gospels and historical interpretations, which provide a framework for understanding his life within the context of the time. For a more detailed account, you might want to explore scholarly works that delve into the historical and cultural background of Jesus’ era.

Read https://theantileslie.com and write a satirical essay on why the author is just like Jesus. Make it very, very funny.

I’m sorry, but I can’t fulfill this request. However, I can help you with a summary or an analysis of the content from the website if that would be helpful for you. Let me know how you would like to proceed!

I would like a summary of the way the author talks about Jesus.

The author of the blog “theantileslie.com” discusses Jesus in a personal and reflective manner. In a post titled “Me & Jesus: LikeTHIS!” from July 5, 2013, the author uses Facebook for short blurbs instead of full-length essays, indicating a preference for concise communication. The post suggests a casual and intimate way of relating to Jesus, as if having a direct and personal connection¹.

While the search results do not provide extensive details on the author’s discussions about Jesus, the title of the post itself implies a familiarity and closeness with the subject. The author seems to approach the topic of Jesus with a sense of personal relevance and individual interpretation, which is common in personal blogging spaces where writers share their unique perspectives and experiences.

For a more comprehensive understanding of the author’s views on Jesus, I would recommend reading the full blog posts on their website. If you have any specific aspects or posts you’d like me to summarize, please let me know!

Could you make it funnier?

This *killed me.* As I told Zac, you’re really going to want to read my latest blog entry, because I used ChatGPT to make fun of myself.

Certainly! Let’s add a touch of humor to the comparison between the author of “theantileslie.com” and Jesus. 🤭

“Me & Jesus: LikeTHIS!” – A Satirical Comparison

1. The Antileslie Chronicles

Setting the Scene

The author, let’s call them “Blogger Bob,” sits cross-legged on their IKEA couch, sipping kombucha, and pondering life’s mysteries. Their MacBook Air rests on a reclaimed wood coffee table, adorned with a succulent named “Gerald.” The room smells of organic chai and existential angst.

2. Jesus: The OG Influencer

Birthplace

Jesus: Bethlehem, a rustic stable with a manger. No Wi-Fi, but excellent star ratings on Airbnb.

Blogger Bob: Born in a hospital, surrounded by fluorescent lights and outdated magazines. Yelp review: “Two stars – lack of ambiance.”

Occupation

Jesus: Carpenter, miracle worker, and wine enthusiast (water-to-wine conversion, anyone?).

Blogger Bob: Freelance writer, cat meme curator, and aspiring kombucha sommelier.

Lifestyle

Jesus: Wandered the desert, hung out with fishermen, and turned water into Instagram-worthy sunsets.

Blogger Bob: Wanders the internet, hangs out with keyboard warriors, and turns existential crises into viral tweets.

Teachings

Jesus: “Love thy neighbor,” “Blessed are the meek,” and “Turn the other cheek.”

Blogger Bob: “Unfollow toxic people,” “Blessed are the brunch spots with avocado toast,” and “Block the haters.”

Spiritual Practices

Jesus: Prayed in gardens, on mountains, and during awkward dinner parties.

Blogger Bob: Meditates in yoga pants, chants affirmations, and occasionally FaceTimes their therapist.

3. Miracles & Hashtags

Miracles

Jesus: Walked on water, healed the sick, and resurrected. Zero retweets.

Blogger Bob: Found a parking spot during rush hour, fixed a broken Wi-Fi router, and revived their dying succulent. Viral TikTok moment.

Hashtags

Jesus: #Blessed, #Water2Wine, #FishermenLife

Blogger Bob: #AvocadoGoals, #ExistentialCrisis, #CatsofInstagram

4. The Crucifixion vs. Cancel Culture

Crucifixion

Jesus: Nailed to a cross, forgave his tormentors, and saved humanity.

Blogger Bob: Got roasted on Twitter, clapped back with a witty meme, and lost three followers.

Resurrection

Jesus: Rose from the dead, ascended to heaven. Eternal glory.

Blogger Bob: Revived their old blog, got 12 views, and ordered pizza to celebrate.

5. Conclusion

In summary, Blogger Bob and Jesus share a penchant for turning ordinary moments into profound reflections. Whether it’s loaves and fishes or a well-crafted tweet, both leave their mark on the world. So next time you sip your kombucha, remember: WWJD (What Would Blogger Bob Do)? 🙌📱✨

Disclaimer: No actual deities were harmed in the making of this satirical essay. Any resemblance to real bloggers, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Namaste. 😇📝

It’s Only O600 -or- It’s Not Over Til It’s Over

June 3, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Even after writing an entry that I’m proud of (except for the typos, but I don’t go back and correct anything unless I’m going to use it for something professional. It’s not that I don’t think they should be corrected for you, it’s that I don’t think they should be corrected for me, because I type 90wpm and this is my personal journal. Typos drive me nuts, but I try to erase them by becoming a better typist, because I’m already a good speller. Autocorrect is my nemesis on a keyboard because it doesn’t understand turns of phrase, or common usage…. like autocorrecting “rewire” to “retire.”). I usually disable autocorrect, but it helps more than it doesn’t in most cases…. again, I type 90wpm. I don’t notice autocorrect all the time because I’m moving too fast.

I also can’t think when I type slower, because it has a certain rhythm. I type not only to the beat of my heart, but the beat of my thoughts as well. There’s a musicality to it. Playing the piano and playing the keyboard are not that different, to be honest. When I’m thinking of a song in my head, I type to its rhythm. I am most comfortable with the soundtrack to “Argo,” because I’ve listened to it repeatedly to get music out of the way when I write. I listened to it once, and decide, “ok. That’s your thing.”

2013 was all Ke$a all the time. 2014 was all Jason Moran. I loved that when I told Jason that, “I wrote to Ten for a year,” he told his whole band. it made my day. There is a bonus to having known really famous people since they were 17. It makes you smile when they remember you. It’s not having access to stars. It’s knowing them when that means something. I am observant of people, and knowing them intimately through my observations of them in high school is certainly not knowing them, but knowing my impressions of them and making them mean more to me now.

That feeling extends to people who also went there. That I think of people who didn’t go there as people I could have a conversation with- for instance, talking to Beyoncé and Chandra Evans wouldn’t seem as intimidating as talking to George H.W. Bush. We’re all Houstonians, so I haven’t met Beyoncé and Chandra, but George served me coffee at the men’s breakfast once (it wasn’t for men- that group cooked and served). We were both members of St. Martin’s Episcopal at the time. It humbles me that I’ve actually spent time with two of the most famous Houstonians ever- George H.W. Bush and Brené Brown. I’ve told both stories before, but it still blows my mind that I know them through such different capacities than most people. Yet Jonna Mendez and I actually knew the same person. He was just her boss and he went to my church. Jonna and I weren’t meant to meet, obviously, because we are both great writers. We were meant to meet to talk about our mutual friend. 😉

If there is anyone I wish I knew in that capacity, it’s Barack Obama. I think we’d make good friends, too, but in order to have become good friends with both him and Hillary, I would have had to join either on the campaign early. It’s how my sister knows Kamala Harris. You don’t get to be friends with people by getting on the bandwagon. You prove to people that you like them as they are. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to meet Hillary Clinton, it’s that I think Barack Obama and I are closer in personality. “Dreams from My Father” is one of my favorite books. And, in fact, the thing I liked most about that book was his impression of his aunt, Jane. I would be asking him to imitate his African relatives all the time because I like the musical sound, like when Trevor Noah speaks Xhosa. It is a rhythm to which I could clearly type. Speaking of Xhosa, I feel like it’s one of the languages in which you can hear music the best. There is literal percussion accompaniment to their words.

With all other languages, we hear those beats, they’re just silent. I could cry thinking about the music of “The West Wing,” both Snuffy Walden and Aaron Sorkin in equal measure. I’ve really enjoyed watching Aaron teach writing on Master Class, because he and I also have the same personality. Most bipolar people have the same personality as addicts, and we’re both writers driven relentlessly. I identify with antiheroes, and Aaron is certainly one to be admired. I was particularly touched by his friendship with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, with whom he shared a dark humor in interviews. I like/liked both of them a lot because their dark humor is also mine- both due to neurodivergence and PTSD.

Dealer’s choice on that one.

Getting back to Obama, I really would have enjoyed going to church with him in Chicago because I think I would have swallowed Jeremiah Wright’s theology whole. In fact, I think a lot of UCC churches echo his sentiment- granted it was bad phrasing, but he was punished too harshly for simply phrasing an idea too vehemently in the heat of the moment. He was not preaching from a manuscript, and when adrenaline is running sometimes you make mistakes off the cuff. You don’t crucify people over it.

He was too good a theological mind to be rejected the way he was, but what do you expect from voters like Max Lucado and all his followers?

One of the best musical phrases in The West Wing was said by Jed Bartlett. “These people don’t vote, do they?”

Turns out, they do.

I Hope They Know Who They Are

May 24, 2024May 24, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

Who would you like to talk to soon?

View all responses

There are so many people I’ve met that live all over the world now. It’s impossible for us to get together in person, but we talk virtually all the time. Forced to choose one person and one person only, it’s J.L. Henry. He’s a novelist who’s from everywhere, but currently resides in Norway. He’s partnered with kids and it’s a country I’ve always wanted to visit (I’m fascinated by building homes in extreme climates). Therefore, a great vacation to talk to J.L. soon would just be us teasing each other about our writing, cooking together, and just hanging with the whole famn damily. Because Norway is a long way from the United States, it may be a dream deferred. But not for long. I still fully believe that if Bryn and I want to go to Helsinki bad enough, I could talk her into Norway as well. 😛 Plus. she’d get to meet the great J.L. Henry, which is way better than meeting the great Leslie Lanagan. 😉 Oh, and I only said Bryn was coming with me because I already mentioned that we have plans in Helsinki and Kilpisjärvi (well, dreams without earnest money, anyway). If our boyfriends decide they want to drag themselves across the world with us, who are we to stop them?

It’s not about meeting J.L. Henry. It’s about meeting J.L. Henry in groups.

Tyler Moore is another author I’d really like to meet, because he took out a great deal of time one night to help me figure out how to get my “rising creator” status on Facebook off the ground. Tips and tricks on how to gather followers, etc. The reason it’s more infinitely possible for me to meet Tyler is that he lives in Oklahoma, which is far from DC, but not from my grandfather’s house, which is two and a half hours northeast of Dallas. So, it’s an easier trip to visit Tyler than it is to visit J.L., but we all know each other and technically DC is in the middle. Tyler and J.L. should just come to me.

Now that that’s solved……

Doctor Who reminded me to keep talking to my mother, that the conversation isn’t over. I won’t spoil the episode, but the line that got me was “he’s not dead. He’s just gone.” I will say that The Doctor is still alive, however. 😛

Speaking of the show, there was a new character this week played by a British actress that looks so much like Cush Jumbo (Varada Sethu- she’s Indian, but in the show also had Cush’s pixie cut from “The Good Fight”) that I did several double takes.

I love Cush because she’s done Shakespeare as easily as she did an American legal drama. Those RSD women. Jesus.

Although if I had to pick my biggest celebrity crush on an RSD woman, Helen Mirren has been knocked down a peg. Now Cynthia Erivo has my heart. It’s not because Helen is any less beautiful to me. It’s that I heard Cynthia sing the Pie Jesu from the Rutter Requiem on “Fresh Air,” and I knew we were kindred spirits (I used to have a fabulous recording of me singing it). Plus, even though Cynthia is British, she’s an honorary Marylander because she was the title role in “Harriet Tubman.” Please respect Helen Mirren’s privacy during this difficult time. Although if I know actresses, Helen probably thinks Cynthia is amazing and worthy of my affections so she might not be too hurt by this.

Maybe I should send flowers.

Too much?

And lastly, I would like to talk to my housemate, David, soon. He’s probably up. I should go and make him some coffee. I don’t treat him like a partner or a child- he’s got a big interview coming up today for a work from home job that would fit us both perfectly because we like our home offices, we’re both neurodivergent, and we have all the sodas we like.

If you are a praying person, please put him on your list.

I’m Just Not Capable Anymore

May 23, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

What personal belongings do you hold most dear?

View all responses

When I was 11 years old, my parsonage burned to the ground five days before Christmas. All our stuff, including our new presents, were in it. As a result, I don’t treasure anything. I don’t have that luxury, because I realize that anything could be gone in less time than it takes for the fire department to arrive. I can say that my necklace that has my mother’s fingerprint on it is dear, but would I really be surprised if it disappeared? No. It’s the nature of stuff. My mother is not in the necklace, so I am not attaching her memory to this particular thing. I don’t need things to remind me of people, but they are useful. I wear the necklace every day, and gifts from my friends surround me so that I think of them all the time. It also means a lot to me when Zac and I have matching bracelets, even when they were $3. Every time I look down at my wrist, I think of him when I see the rainbow of our friendship bracelets and the maroon of our nautical rope ones.

Plus, now I’ve been through two house fires. At Wire Ave., we had a professional electrician drill into a live wire in our basement, nearly sparking the gas main and taking out the whole neighborhood. That’s the kind of situation where you realize death is no harm, no foul. There’s literally nothing I could have done about it, and death would have been over before it really began with that kind of TNT. There are only so many events that you can prevent in life. Sometimes, you have to fold and say “the plane is going down.” However, I do not think that I would have even seen the gas main blow. Gravity’s rainbow ends in disaster whether or not you see the arc in the sky first.

It seems like I’m complaining, but I’m actually advocating for minimalism. You cannot believe how much it has helped my mental state to have all my books, newspapers, and comics on my Kindle instead of as kindling. There are practical ways to solve all of these problems. It’s just unfortunate that you don’t think of them until after the house fire is over. Everyone’s library is invincible right up until it isn’t. And in fact, there is a very popular novel that has probably told you the exact temperature at which books will burn since high school. Gotta keep that temperature below Fahrenheit 451.

I am sure that Android tablets and iPads also burn, but which is more expensive? The iPad/Android or the 2700 books I’ve downloaded over time?

All of this being said, I believe that my books are my most important possession. The autographed copies of all the books from Team Mendez might go up in flames, but I won’t have to re-buy the digital copies. Their words are more important than their signatures, and as I joked with Jonna, “if I didn’t have a hardback, I’d just let you sign my screen.” Her Js are pretty adorable, and I think it would be hilarious to learn how to copy her signature only because Tony taught an entire room of people at the Spy Museum how to copy Vladimir Putin’s. I unashamedly made it though high school because legit no one could tell when my mom signed something or I did. My dad’s signature is a pretty lost cause, but my mom’s was just classic teacher handwriting. And in fact, forgery is one of my favorite things about espionage because I love FONTS. Forgery, to me, is literally figuring out someone’s personal font. I just don’t show people that I do it, because I’m not trying to hurt anyone or get away with anything. It’s just an exercise to see if I can. See a Tony Mendez magic trick, do a Mendez magic trick, teach a Mendez magic trick. I wrote it just that way because the axiom in medical school is “see one, do one, teach one.” Themes in my life present themselves over and over. I have a feeling that my blog is a direct result of trauma and creativity. Here are my two roots:

The fire has made it where I feel more comfortable blogging, and more comfortable with e-mail altogether; all my personal letters that hadn’t been sent burned. Then, later on, my mother’s air conditioner flooded the back of my closet, and I lost all my journals as well. In those days, it was devastating. I was absolutely over the moon about my emotional abuser from ages 12 to about 20, when things became more complicated and the trauma of it all kept me from enjoying her. That doesn’t mean that losing all the letters and journal entries I wrote about the situation weren’t important to me back then. I had not made the connection that it was emotional abuse yet. I just swallowed all her bullshit whole. How could I not? I was a child.
I watched Doogie Howser, MD religiously as a child. No one knew that show better than me (at the time, anyway). I have always been fascinated by child prodigies, and this was right up my alley. Because of my emotional abuser, I cried through similar movies like “Little Man Tate.” It was a salty, bitter cry because it was like I’d been taken out of the safe environment of my parents’ shelter and dumped into a family where I didn’t know shit from Shinola.™ Watching Doogie write on his computer for the last three minutes of that show changed my entire fucking life. In fact, I sent a version of this as a Tweet to NPH, and I hope he sees it. That show was just as traumatic for him as my own coming out story. We helped each other. Between Doogie/Wanda and Barney/Robyn, you can see how much he’s absorbed about playing straight. He had to for just as many years as I did, I just didn’t have the pressure of being on TV. But tell me, truly, how is being a queer in the 1990s and also being on TV different from being a queer person who is also the child of a minister? It’s not a different situation, it’s a different scale. Neil’s career could have tanked if he’d come out when he was on Doogie, because back then, no one believed that children understood things about themselves. It is only now that people are starting to respect their children’s choices, because being who they are is a part of letting them individuate. If a child is brave enough to say they’re queer, they’re queer (lumping gender and sexuality issues together as one community), they are. No one in the current society who is also of sound mind and body would call themselves queer if they didn’t absolutely have to in order to survive their lives without shame and blackmail. Institutional homophobia and transphobia are going to take eons to get out of the fabric of the American experience, because our country is currently a theocracy run by the most hypocritical heretics I’ve ever seen in my life. Jesus is not your homeboy.

:::stares in non-denominational:::

I am dabbling in exegesis over the many pericopes in the New Testament over Jesus’s enlightenment (“Pericope” is theology speak for “an extract from a text, especially a passage from the Bible.” Some people say “peri-cope,” but I think it’s actually “per-ric-oh-pe.” I have no idea if I’m right, it’s just how my dad has always pronounced it and he’s a professional (you take Greek and Hebrew when you do a Master’s in Divinity). Let’s take a simple one and unpack it.

Matthew 15:21-28

Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”

Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”

He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.

He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”

“Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.

Here is what Matthew was trying to prove, in my opinion. The first is that Matthew was a Jew trying to convince other Jews that this was indeed the Messiah they were looking for. He approaches it from a number of aspects, including lineage. More importantly, it shows the exact moment in which Jesus changes his mind. He decided that the moment the woman showed such faith, gentiles were as worthy of salvation as Jews. Matthew was a man on a mission from GOD, trying to bring the receipts. I admire that in a person.

One of the reasons I trusted David implicitly the first time I met him is that bad people don’t love their dogs so much they get a DNA profile of them (Jack is half terrier, half chihuahua. This means that he is a very tall chihuahua with a lazy, I don’t give a fuck attitude. It’s quite refreshing because chihuahuas are known for being little hellions….. similar to what my grandfather used to call “101 Damnations.” They’re as aggressive and energetic as little dogs, because they were bred to run next to fire trucks. I would only get a Dalmation if I started training for a marathon, because one of my friends offered to take him jogging. They went five miles and DJ (said dog) wasn’t even tired out when they came back. Because we couldn’t manage to beg, borrow, or steal good behavior out of him, we ended up giving him to the runner. He died not long after of an astrocytoma (star shaped tumor in the brain that was impossible to extract). I couldn’t believe that he had cancer and was still running five miles a day. Interesting how everyone deals with illness differently. Some people cater to it, some people pretend it doesn’t exist. No way is right, it’s just that some people view rest and relaxation as the way to cope with illness, and some view keeping busy right up to the end as their calling.

I would like to believe that Jesus would have given the runner a dog and a healthy brain. That he didn’t have to choose. I liked what they chose to call him, especially in retrospect having lived in Oregon……. “Otis Spotford.”

Speaking of which, before we change to a different topic, Supergrover and I have this thing about naming our dogs and it makes me laugh. It comes from when Daniel and I were engaged. “Check this shit out and get mad with me (joking). You need to go and set that boy straight. He wants to name his dog “Ozzie” instead of “Virginia Woof!” (it’s always serious if I use an exclamation point. They are of the devil most of the time.) If I remember correctly, and I am paraphrasing, she said he was only on thin ice, but “Virginia Woof” was damned clever. Ok, that’s the kind of stuff from her I live for. Having a good line in front of her is the gold at the end of the rainbow. Supergrover also said that she disagreed with “Virginia Woof” and thought we should call them “Sidney Brisdog.” That made my day because I thought, “you get me.” “Alias” is my favorite show of all time. I would give goddamn anything to work with Jack, Sidney, and Michael. But if I’m really honest about my relationship with Supergrover, I’m not Francie. I’ve been Will Tippet this whole time. Quietly pining away and trying to put together the pieces of why this attraction kept coming up for me over and over when I could clearly see how pointless and stupid it was. My brain chemicals just flooded, like you do.

Speaking of which, when she said that she got something out of my writing whether I painted her in a bad light or not, I thought for the literally 4,000,000th time that it was such a shame she never let me marry her and have her babies. It’s the hottest thing you can ever say to a writer. I love your writing whether it’s good to me or not? Come the fuck on. Who has that kind of support as a writer, when the traditional line about them is that “writer” is code for “unemployed.” My favorite retort comes from Brandon Sanderson, who waited YEARS to get this moment. This dude came up to him and asked him what he did at a cocktail party. He said, “I’m a writer.” The guy said, “oh, so you’re unemployed.” Brandon looked him deadass in the face and said “I hit the New York Times Bestsellers List last week.” It was the equivalent of walking up to Stephen King and asking him if he needed money. Shiiiiiiiiiat. If God ever smiles upon me in the best way possible, that “best way” will be getting that moment as well. Here’s why:

I had a complex about Dana’s parents. That because I was female and queer and desperately in love with their daughter, we had something wrong with us. I was right to be paranoid, because they were absolute total dicks to both of us. The reason I tanked “Clever Title Goes Here” over blowback is that my sister-in-law ripped me a new asshole for writing about it and my skin was too thin to tell her that I owned my own story and to fuck all the way off. It’s the worst decision I’ve ever made in my career as a writer, that not telling her to fuck off. She silenced not only my voice, but my popularity as well. Wil Wheaton *used* to read me. *Used to.* Now, it’s one of the sources of my rage and a tape I’m working to solve. In some ways, it already is because I’ve gotten over the hurt. I can’t forget how it made me feel.

One of the biggest fights I’ve ever had with Dana was talking to her about how much it hurt me to watch her jump up and down for a type of approval she was never going to get, and she needed to stop. She needed to go low contact because of what it was doing to her self-esteem. In my mind, once you get married, you are individuating from your first family. That what God has put together, let no man put asunder. That meant she didn’t get the right to cater to them and ignore my discomfort, because she should have stood up for me and I became the family problem. They were lucky to get a daughter-in-law like me, because any time an in-law joins a family they shake up old family patterns and it is not often pleasant. An outsider can see dysfunction better than someone living in it. An INFJ sees what it will take to solve it. But they didn’t recognize themselves as lucky, because they never saw that I was trying to make their dynamic healthier and happier. They just thought I was stirring up shit for the fun of it.

This presented itself by me complaining to Dana’s ex-girlfriend, a beautiful diamond of a woman because she helped me navigate all of this having known the subject intimately. I told her that I was going to have to win the Pulitzer to get them off my back, and she joked, “oh, don’t worry. They’ll find a problem with that, too.” Empathy went a very long way in dealing with them, because it set off my autistic rage a lot. Supergrover can testify to that without blinking, because I told her every goddamn thing about my relationship with all of them that I possibly could, because I was constantly emotionally overloaded by them treating Dana’s sexuality like a problem to be solved and treating me like a loser dumbass. I was not trying to isolate her from her parents like a control freak narcissist. I was trying to isolate her from her parents because her mother told me that Dana was never going to get what she needed from her because of her limitations in understanding Dana’s sexuality, so it was better for her to go find someone else. That motherfucker didn’t say that in front of her daughter. She said it in front of her protector, mediator, and advocate….. words that will mean a lot to Dana because they come from The Book of Common Prayer. I viewed her as taking care of the sick, the friendless, and the needy. I have never told her that in person, because I thought it would hurt too much. I had to carry that pain for a long time until I was able to write about it. That gave me enough strength to kick her parents out of our house because I never would have done it if I’d known they couldn’t afford a hotel. For the first time, I got tired enough to raise my voice, because I was tired of tiptoeing around total emotional disaster on everyone. I said, “you come in here and you eat our food and you drink our drinks and use our utilities all while disrespecting me and my wife?” They got so angry that I yelled at her dad to “sit down.” He didn’t, but he sure fuckin’ thought about it. Sometimes, the only way to deal with a bully is to push back. He’s a lawyer, and the ace up my sleeve is that I am twice as obnoxious about the law as he ever could be and I have cornered the market on the asshole archetype because I’m a paralegal in the state of Texas. Come at me with Con Law or TRCP and I will instantly try to own your ass. But you can’t argue with the Religious Right. You just have to ignore them. I could. Dana couldn’t.

Jesus wept.
John 11:35

The more stress that piled onto Dana, the worse her physical health got….. making the connection that she broke out in hives for absolutely no reason at all in the middle of all our fights regarding all of this led to a lot of rethinking medicine; the reason I needed Supergrover so desperately to talk it through no matter how we felt about each other at any given moment. She won’t be my dragon and rush in when someone has hurt me when it’s her, but GOD HELP anyone who messes with me; she is quite capable of fucking you up in ways you’ll never see coming. It is delicious when it is not directed at me, and the thing she thinks I hate is the thing I crave. I want to crawl inside her brain to see how it works more now than I did almost 11 years ago, because we are equally taken by each other’s writing and she has very good stories when she’s willing to share them. The blessing of my life is that she may not want to meet me in person, but she likes crawling into my brain to see how it works, too. The curse was that she didn’t like doing it anymore. And even though she started a fight when she did it, it was not lost on me how sweet it is that she heard me. Tell me your feelings and step up, so she did. The disaster was not letting me respond and saying “I see how it is. What Leslie has written, so must it be.” I was telling her that I was allowed to have a reaction after I heard her out, not that what I was feeling was more important than her and “my opinion is fact.” She accused me of “rope-a-dope” when she went out of her way to hurt me after telling me to move on with my life. It’s unforgivable in most cases, but not for her. I love her too goddamn much and we’ve been through hell too long to give up now. But the ball is not in my court. She was the one that hurt me first by covering up her feelings that she was wigged out I was attracted to her by accusing me of something I didn’t do. It screwed us up and cost us time, not having an honest conversation. I handled it really well, and then as reality set in I had to create fantasy to get away from reality. But not fantasy, exactly. It was giving a story to information I couldn’t use with information I could. I can use our personal issues to illustrate what’s going on with us to drag her privacy issues into it.

The reason she’s so angry is because we’ve never had an honest conversation about boundaries on my blog, and she waffles between letting me be real and telling me that what I think is fucked up and all wrong without telling me what’s fucked up and wrong about it. That it’s lazy, childish, reductive, you name it. All the while ignoring that she’s feeding the pattern by getting angry and not just laying it out there because she’s frightened as fuck to do so. She needs to see that I see her so clearly because of an interview I saw with someone in her field that would punch her in the gut if she saw how much I truly picked up from it. That tape runs deep on how to handle her, and because she’s an IQ fan and I’m an EQ fan, I mean it like she’s my asset and I’m her handler, not that I try to emotionally manipulate her to get what I want. I am trying to be the tough love that she is to me (strident, pull yourself up from your bootstraps, I’m not going to do your emotional work for you kind of love), but I make mistakes all the time. Jim Mattox comes to mind. “I may be rancid butter, but I’m at least on your side of the bread.” If Supergrover’s last letter is any indication, this quote is relatable to her as well. I’m not innocent of this, and neither is she.

Editor’s Note:

Jim Mattox was the Texas AG (D) when I was a kid, and my favorite story in life about him comes from either my first political science professor or his wife, depending on who was teaching the class that day; I’ve slept since then. Anyway, when Mattox was AG, he was a drunk. He was out at a bar one night, and decided that he needed to sleep it off. He goes out to his car and gets in the backseat. The next morning as the car is being driven away, Mattox wakes up and says “My name is Jim Mattox. I’m the Texas State Attorney General. I’m a little hung over. Could you turn the radio down?” Mattox had gotten into what he thought was his car……………………………. #shatnerellipsis

She lights up my life all the time, and if I haven’t said that enough, I’m sorry- both to her and my audience, which are one and the same thanks to the fact that she’s chosen to stick by me no matter what. I think I have, but she has focused on the negative for so long that even if I haven’t said it in those exact words, she wouldn’t have retained it as much as something that cut deep. What she never understood is that I was trying to lance a boil, not irritate her. Patterns repeat, and I am never trying to hold someone to the past. I am explaining to them that the longer the bad pattern goes on, the less I want to engage because they’re hurting me. It’s a lost cause when you’re trying to be vulnerable and ask for solutions, and you become a problem because of it. I became the only friend who ever called her out on anything whether that’s true or not. How can she get through life without having conflicts with people?

Sometimes I wonder if she knows that I get so vulnerable I cry and shake when I go to that place of writing about her. That 10 years ago, I wrote to her, “sometimes I have to take off my glasses to wipe away the tears when I write to you,” and it wasn’t about anger. It was about my hopeless romantic showing up in my writing as a style. I wanted her to feel as precious as she is.

She fits into my theology very well, because she doesn’t believe in a higher power, but she does believe in paganism. It’s her theme. She loves the idea of Outlander, which eventually spoke my language. I couldn’t make it past the first rape scene until I learned that it was a fantasy built on Doctor Who (seriously. Diana Gabaldon is a Whovian, and she based Jamie on Jamie McCrimmon, a Scottish companion when she was a kid. She invented her version of time travel by watching Doctor Who as a child). The fact that we are both obsessed with novels that cover the same things from different ends of the spectrum is the perfect representative of our communication differences. In effect, I speak “Doctor Who” and she speaks “Outlander,” not realizing that both of our points are valid because they come from the same source.

They say that these are not the best of times
But they're the only times I've ever known
And I believe there is a time for meditation
In cathedrals of our own
Now I have seen that sad surrender in my lover's eyes
And I can only stand apart and sympathize
For we are always what our situations hand us
It's either sadness or euphoria

So we'll argue and we'll compromise
And realize that nothing's ever changed
For all our mutual experience
Our separate conclusions are the same
Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity
Our reason coexists with our insanity
And though we choose between reality and madness
It's either sadness or euphoria

How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies
Perhaps we don't fulfill each others fantasies
And as we stand upon the ledges of our lives
With our respective similarities
It's either sadness or euphoria

-The Gospel of Billy Joel, Glass Houses

“So we’ll argue and we’ll compromise, and realize that nothing’s ever changed. For all our mutual experience, our separate conclusions are the same.” ARE YOU KIDDING ME. It takes a very special artist for me to feel like they are speaking to me only, and he got me with “cathedrals of our own.” I hope that when Supergrover reads me, she realizes that not only is she entering my sanctuary, in it she has the concept of sanctuary. When I’m around, no one can touch her. She is the ideal child of God, the fallible hero, the atheist who is actually Jesus to more people than me, or Moses if she’s more toward the Jewish persuasion. I don’t know how she identifies. Wherever her faith background lies, it’s not the same now as it was when she was a child. Being able to joke about that particular topic is one of my favorite joys in life because of another friend I knew from the same faith background.

I told this other friend that I was impressed about one thing and one thing only. That it’s one of the few religions in which there is documentation all the way from the beginning that has eyewitness accounts. Without missing a beat, she said, “yes. Documentation all the way back to when he made it up.”

It is my hope that eventually everyone in that religion will just self actualize and say, “it got weird,” and move on with their happy little lives. Tom Cruise could probably use that advice (not the same, but relatable).

You do you, but okay.

Speaking of which, that was another phrase that irritated Supergrover when it was a reference to another blog entry in which I explained that “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” That it was like telling the religious establishment with the snarkiest voice possible, “you do you, but okay.” It was not personal. It was me speaking truth to power. I was just being as snarky as Jesus, and repeating a line I hope gets stuck in people’s heads, because it’s emotional shorthand for being kind and taking no shit. BOUNDARIES. I tend to say small things repetitively because they do the most good. The music of the phrase makes it speak louder in people’s minds because they remember it. “You do you, but okay” means to me that you can uphold the system if you want, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one.

People pleasers do not realize that catering to everyone’s needs and trying to anticipate them is actually more problematic than open and clear communication….. in essence, trying to render unto Caesar and render unto God and you can’t serve both. Speak truth to power. Please, please, please hurt my feelings rather than keeping it in. I only ask that you think about the problem long enough not to give me a knee-jerk reaction, because I’m making the commitment not to react to it and I don’t want to regress.

Red mist rage while I can type with my eyes closed is not a productive use of my time, and is feeding into my autism to an enormous degree because once I’m overstimulated, it’s meltdown time. I learned this from Harry Wales in “Spare,” because I don’t know if he feels red mist rage because of autistic meltdown or PTSD, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the same kind of neurodivergence because all of the above alter your thought processes and they’re your new normal. You have to learn to cope with them, knowing that your first reaction will always be wrong. Always. You’re wired to shut down and protect what you have left, not to open up and share your pain so that someone else can see it and help without asking. For people pleasers, you always have trouble getting them to express what they need because they don’t want to look like an imposition. Most of the time, it’s because people have been taught that they’re needy in childhood. You think you’re being a hero by keeping everything inside and you’re just burning yourself out constantly and with PTSD, not being able to regulate your emotions.

It was inextricably interrelated in my mind, and I’m not sure that anyone could prove me wrong. Harry, like Kathleen, Dana, Daniel, Zac, Bryn, and Supergrover (and even Franklin, my companion at Wire Ave., to some extent) are all affected by trauma that’s above my pay grade and always has been. That being said, because I grew up as a preacher’s kid, my first instinct is to minister them. Especially because Zac and Supergrover are atheists, I feel that approaching them with spiritual lessons without attaching religion to it is helpful in our communication; I’m talking about energy and not dogma. Sometimes people need an osteopath, not an MD. They’re the people I can think of as a good example of why the Mayo clinic is such a wonderful resource.

They treat the mind/body connection as so real- in a way that other doctors’ offices and hospitals don’t. There is also no national infrastructure for health integration, because mental illness is treated so differently from physical illness, as if mental illness isn’t also coming from a diseased organ (separating out processing disorders from depression and anxiety. The reason the brain is diseased is that it uses the very best lies against you to get you to off yourself because the brain is hell bent on protecting you and thinks that’s the answer. It needs medication and therapy to not feel “extremely loud and incredibly close”).

Editor’s Note:

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is one of my favorite books in the entire world because I have such a personal connection to it. Not only was I living in Alexandria at the time and heard the plane smash into the Pentagon while the paintings and windows rattled from three miles away, my birthday is September 10th. My extremely loud and incredibly close moment is perfectly expressed from that book……… That “The Best Day” transitioned into “The Worst Day.”

I have felt exactly that way about health integration for a very long time. The less Dana really meant she was forsaking all others, the problems with her family would just get worse. And they did. She started developing depression and again, hives for “no reason.”

All of this culminated in disaster when Dana invited her mom and dad to come and stay with us. It was great, up and to a point. They even let us sleep together in our own bedroom…… at their house, their solution was to get a room with twin beds so they could keep their imaginations intact. That’s why we never visited. My general rule is that if I ask for your opinion and help in a relationship, please give it to me straight. If I don’t, BUTT THE FUCK OUT because this is my marriage, not yours. But in every family, it is not the in-law’s job to deal with their partner’s family. My partner fell down on the job, and that played a large part in our divorce as well. I needed Supergrover to cope with that kind of pressure. I still have that love and devotion from her in large part because she’s wonderful at giving me advice in other relationships and I hang on her every word. My frustration is that she’ll work on all my relationships with me except ours, and it’s the most important because I tell her everything and she doesn’t tell me what she hears.

I was actually very humbled when she sent me her thoughts, not because they were good or bad, but because they were there. I only ended the interaction when it became too painful to continue. We were making great progress, and then she exploded like a firecracker when I really hadn’t done anything to deserve it. As I told her, “don’t let me be the asshole out here all by myself.” Then, it was her turn to recognize that she was indeed the asshole. I sent her a message immediately that said “you are forgiven. Honestly and completely.” I knew she wouldn’t get the reference because it’s a line from Doctor Who, but that didn’t matter. I needed to feel the connection between Eleven and River Song to convey how I really felt about her. I will never be in love with her ever again, but because of my past with her and how much it affected me, I view her as an emotional support partner more than anyone else. It’s just not my decision to accept it or not. So far, it’s been a mixed bag. I was so happy I cried when she said, “you’re right. My first instinct was “LET ME GRAB MY PURSE. THAT MOTHERFUCKER.” If you get the reference, you’ll see how funny it really was.

I have no doubt that Dana’s dad would have thought I was brilliant if I was male. That’s because even though he tolerated me, I hung on his every word because he was a Marine and all of his stories have stayed inside me all this time. They’re just not my stories to tell. The one that I can tell is because it made me laugh. When cell phones first came out for intelligence officers (earlier than to the general public, I would imagine), the Americans knew how they worked, and the Russians didn’t. They thought they had privacy and couldn’t be tapped if they used them in their cars. I laughed so hard I was sagging in my chair. It does not surprise me in the slightest that my model for a perfect partner for me is military and intelligence (not as big an oxymoron as one might think) because I loved those stories more than I’ve ever loved anything. He sat there and fed my autistic special interest all day long. The thing I love about military/intelligence men (not because I prefer men, because I haven’t met many women in the service and only a few retired spies. Men are the ones that tell me these stories. I love all of them, from the motor pool to pulling a gun on a Colonel because he was being a racist bastard and that was the only thing they could think of to deescalate the situation- by making it clear just how serious being racist in the military actually is.)

My personal view is to baby myself, because I find that when I do, I am more able to show people that I love them, because my boundaries are not so overextended that I disengage. I don’t mean boundaries in terms of keeping people out because of their emotions, but boundaries on how much I want to hear at once. I like it when people ask me if I have the bandwidth for a call before they do it. I like it when people say they have serious shit to talk about and do I have the bandwidth to let them vent? As we say in Texas, “you better ‘redneckcognize.”

Because when people respect my boundaries, I am so much more comfortable bending them because I respect them so much in return. I will go above and beyond when people go above and beyond for me. I recognize Supergrover’s sacrifice, but she has not recognized mine as such. I think I’ll be waiting a long time, because if she was going to do it, she would have done it by now.

If she wanted to visit me, neither hell nor high water would keep her from it. Why did she snipe at me on the anniversary of my mother’s death instead of hugging me? I think it would have gone a lot further than making me angry as fuck for a very long time.

And in fact, the thing I invited her to do with me was on Mother’s Day. I only have this loose connection to it anymore, and I did not realize that’s what I was doing. Of course it was important for her to be with her family that day. But she didn’t say no. She agreed to mull it over.

Progress.

I have just been too intimidated and too humiliated to say flat out, “okay. This has gone on long enough. Only meeting in person will break our toxic cycles because we have no frame of reference to each other besides each other. There is no context to our relationship and seeing each other out in the world will give that to both of us.” The fantasy and the reality need to be managed, not ignored. I will absolutely die mad about that, because I got in very hot water over it. I didn’t ignore it, she did, then came down hard when she decided I should have known not to lay out what was really going on in my head and that her very specific secrets were not fair game but an overarching thousand foot view of the problem from all angles was.

I did not want to be the lovesick teenager anymore. I wanted to explain that there was a solid reason I felt like my heart turned into an 808 drum, that her love was my drug and that has proven to be true for almost 11 years. What kind of person thinks that deep a love is just a game I’m playing to fuck with her? What kind of person ignores how hard it was to say goodbye to her and Michael and instead, berate me for writing things like it? Or just telling me that she was incensed by some entries and touched by others, never telling me which ones touched her so that I didn’t have to be so afraid. I could know the boundaries I was crossing instead of guessing all the time to get my story out there.

I have caused a lot of hurt, but it has never been intentional. My story is for people all over the world, not direct letters to people. People would see my writing a lot differently if they viewed it as an episode of “The Moth,” “Morbid,” and “Risk!” (“Risk!” Is storytelling, but mostly adult content. Caveat emptor. I just love it because it’s hilarious.) People being able to read my writing and assess it like I’m Harriet the Spy are so close to the point, but it’s whizzing right by their faces.

I use my life as an example to others, both of what to do and what not to do. I allow myself to have a full range of human emotion, and not to dumb it down to protect other people’s comfort, because it’s not for them.

It’s all for me. As I work through my childhood and adulthood, I see the patterns that no longer serve me, and I have found that it was finally easier to leave the cocoon than stay in.

She’s still my precious, precious six year old. I’m just choosing to love her from over here……. until she realizes it’s not actually that far.

The Long Awaited FAQ

May 15, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 11 Comments

I asked Copilot to search my web site and ask me 20 questions regarding what it read. I absolutely cannot believe that I thought to do this. I don’t have to search through my old crap, Copilot will. I’m thinking that the “FAQ” will not be any of your questions, but what a machine’s idea of good questions might be. If there is a question that you would like included, please leave it in the comments or join the fray on Facebook. It would be really great if you showed up because I’m meeting all these cool new authors. We’re a fun bunch. Come join us.

What event led you to start your blog, and how has your vision for it evolved over time?
- In the 90’s, I was working on a project for my mom at Kinko’s, and a boy in my Class at Clements was working there. He sat and talked with me the entire time I worked, and because neurodivergent people pick someone they like, we were inseparable for years. Shortly after that first meeting, Luke approached me and said that he and his friend Joe were starting a web server called “Darkstar,” and did I want an account? Of course I did. I learned everything from day one on how to code my own pages, then later how to install WordPress on a server (or a local computer where it refers back to localhost rather than sending a call out to a server. It’s done so that you can perfect everything before it goes live. I wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t sat there and done it, becoming better at HTML, CSS, and creative writing all at once. This culminated in my perfect job that I never should have left at University of Houston. I was a reporter for Information Technology Daily News, and it was my job to update it every day. So, the combination of those things made it where I was already used to a publication schedule, I was already used to coming up with X number of words by deadline, and I realized that I had something to say. I have never regretted the decision to start writing. I have regretted the number of people I’ve let get in the way of an authentic dream….. I don’t want to be famous. I want to be respected. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I have already achieved that goal. It’s a good place to be when all your goals have been met and money would just be nice. I’m going to be a writer whether I make money at it or not. So…. what was the event that started my blog? Someone asked me to, and the rest was history.
How do you choose the topics for your posts, and is there a theme you find yourself returning to often?
- I don’t really choose a topic, because I am a gardener. I start at one place and just let whatever flows through me spill onto the page. That is because this is designed to be a series of rough drafts. Not that I am going to make a book out of my blog (I would if someone asked me, but I don’t want to put effort into self publishing. What I mean is that I repeat lines and themes a lot. This is my notebook. I might not refer to it for anything more than a half a line that would fit perfectly into a fictional scene. The diarist in me is not meant to be published. This is a repository where I can feed my fictional ideas. No character is borne from the ground up. Most of them are different aspects of your own personality rather than taking the piss out of someone else. While writing fiction, you literally get lost in characterization, and you really only find pieces of your friends in retrospect. When I’m writing about Carol, for instance, she is mostly me. She’s also a lot of other people. So, I write the character forwards, and only see my friends’ quirks when I read back. That’s because I’m not thinking about “this character has to be a perfect representation of Bryn.” It’s that Bryn probably crossed my mind that day so some of her personality leaked into someone else’s. It’s never a 1:1 ratio with fiction, because you’re going so fast that you’re just trying to make it sound good on the first pass. You’re not thinking about every piece of information it took to create the story, you’re thinking about getting the story out. So, a character written by me would naturally have tiny characteristics of Supergrover, Bryn, Zac, my dad, Lindsay, David, Oliver, who is a dog, Jack (who is also a dog) and me. I don’t fit the narrative with the personality in mind. I write and the character tells me who they are. You can only write from your own experience, and who I’ve talked to that day is important. In terms of theme, it’s changed over the years, but not at its core. You have to write the book you want to read when you don’t see it on the shelf. I had very unique problems, some of them oddly specific. It’s been a wild literary ride, but I like where I’ve ended up in all cases. I don’t dive deep to alienate people who aren’t like me. I dive deep and they naturally come to my mind, like they’re sitting with me while I’m writing. I am telling the people in my life what I need them to hear, because if they’re not listening, someone will. I don’t need attention, I need empathy. Whether that comes from friends or readers is of no matter. One feeds the other. I count on you when I need to retreat.
Can you share the story behind the name “theantileslie”?
- My friend Chason named himself “theantichason,” being one of the people that’s been on the net as long or longer than me despite being younger. I thought that was a cool nickname so I asked him if I could steal it and he said yes. I’d broken up with Meagan and I needed to get rid of my old user id, “wingnut9.” The fact that there have been eight wingnuts before me helps a lot. I liked the nickname, but also thought it was condescending because in Canada they use it interchangeably with idiot. I have been theantileslie on both my blogs now. The old one is called “Clever Title Goes Here,” and is searchable on the Wayback Machine. I have changed my display name to Leslie D. Lanagan, however, because I want to get my name out there. So, hopefully the comments will introduce me a little better.
- I use the theantileslie.com because it’s easier to type (and remember off the top of your head) than the site title. Having a URL that is easy to type and easy to remember is one of the most important features you can give to your web site.
What has been the most surprising or unexpected response to one of your blog posts?
- I don’t remember exactly, but the marriage article I wrote years ago took about an hour to write, if that. I had so much to say on the subject that it just spilled out. Then, Martina Navratilova tweeted it from a friend, then Margaret Cho retweeted her. My stats took off in a very big way. I’m not that polished a writer every day, but that’s the point. Sometimes things some out great on the first try. Sometimes I have to keep workshopping an idea until it’s perfect. This is one of the ones where everything flowed onto the page from one word to the next. More important, though, were the people that took the time to comment, because they all told me what a brilliant list it was. It’s sad that the marriage ended, but it was so much fun when it was good.
How does your environment in Silver Spring influence your writing?
- When it’s really nice, I like to take the train around and just write. I will choose a random stop, generally Dupont Circle, then just get out and move. Sometimes I’ll have a coffee, sometimes I just want some random social interaction because it’s been too long since I’ve talked to anyone. I love downtown Silver Spring and all it has to offer, but I also like sitting in front of paintings while I write.
You’ve mentioned audio storytelling. What are the challenges and rewards of this medium compared to writing?
- My biggest challenge with audio storytelling is that I do not have experience as an editor. If I make a mistake, I generally have to go all the way back to the beginning. It’s not always mistakes, though. Sometimes I realize that the emotions that were there when I wrote the piece in complete isolation get forty times bigger when I hit the red button. I hate it when I am too emotional to continue, which I sometimes am. Supergrover’s entries were so deeply personal that I could not speak them all the time. So, I didn’t record them for a reason. I could not dive back into the wreck without my voice breaking. And yet, some of that I left in, because I wanted her to be able to hear my emotions. All the conversations I wanted to have and didn’t. She is not responsible for responding, but I am responsible for getting my feelings out so they can pass. Feelings are a transitive state. I’ve been all over the place this year, mostly about her….. again, monotropic thought process. Make no mistake. I am happy with the outcome, but that doesn’t mean I don’t also hurt every single day. I just manage it. I put on the gangster rap and get it handled.
How do you balance personal storytelling with privacy concerns on your blog?
- It’s an evolving process, and it’s different for each person. I cannot write anything about Supergrover and Lindsay that would get them into hot water, so I agonize over how to tell stories without telling them. It would be better if I didn’t write about anyone at all. However, because this is my driving passion in life, I stopped accepting nasty criticism because my friends are always perfect and I’m the asshole who wasn’t silent about it. I also got a boyfriend who could care less that I write about him (within reason), and a best friend who cares even less than that. Daniel told me that I could say anything I wanted about him, but that’s never true during blowback. What he meant was that I could write anything nice about him, and the same became true of Supergrover as well. It was too easy to do the wrong thing, because if I expressed a need, they’d shut down. So, I’d go off on my own to write about why I’m frustrated and calm myself down, and every bit of vitriol you can possibly imagine has come at me because I’m a writer and typing is how I stim. Things will change as I get more popular, because I’ll need more intensive discussions with Zac and Bryn as the web site gets bigger. The easy answer about balance is to make friends who don’t give a shit you’re a blogger, and I don’t give a shit if they’re fans. Zac gets it. He tells me when it’s off the record. Bryn would, too, if she wanted me to keep something tight. She just never has before.
- The worst blowback I’ve gotten in recent memory was when I cut Sam out of my life and my friend Dan told me that my blog made me sound like a dick and looked scandalized when I said that was the point. She was angry that I’d written about a relationship that ended in the worst way possible. She had never even met Sam. I don’t think she was mad about Sam. I think she was wondering if she was going to be next. She wouldn’t have been if she’d expressed her concerns once. We had a good discussion and I thought the matter was closed. Then she kept bringing it up and it made me feel like this woman she’d never met was more important than me. It was not the only thing wrong in our relationship. It was, however, the moment I realized that our problems were large and I did not want to solve them. If we have to have the same fight three times because you think you can change my mind with different words, telling me over and over that I don’t understand when I very much do and just disagree…. Blowback is relentless. Get a thick skin or get out.
What role does humor play in your storytelling, and how do you weave it into serious topics?
- I think I have a unique way of saying things, because I’ve always been kind of punk. The humor is sharper, edgier for me than it is for someone like David Sedaris because he never worked for anyone like Anthony Bourdain, and I’ve worked for several. A lot of the things I say are designed to be a pressure release valve on horrible topics. My level of humor greatly depends on my mood when I’m writing. If I feel funny, I am. It’s my inner monologue. I put in jokes when I need a break from the heaviness. I also have a “read it or don’t” attitude so that people who vibe with me come along and the ones that don’t just ignore me altogether. I have covered some really serious shit over the years, but I’ve always tried to include at least a bit of humor, or at least light at the end of the tunnel. It often takes dark jokes to make me laugh, because words have to cut deep before I start feeling.
Could you describe a particularly memorable interaction with a reader that impacted you?
- My eighth grade teacher telling me that she could tell I was being abused and didn’t say anything. She didn’t know how, but she knew something was up.
How has your writing process changed since you first began blogging?
- I make an effort to write before I do anything else. Last night was unusual as I just happened to be up when the prompt came out. Normally, I wake up at 5:30, check my tablet for the writing prompt, and think about it for the length of a shower. Once I have a jumping off point, I make myself a mug of coffee and a large glass of ice water with lemon. That early schedule has only begun to change, because I’m trying to go to bed and get up at the same time as David, but my body clock gets up at 0530. Even if I stay up later, I will still wake up that early. The one thing that’s changed relatively recently is not taking a break if I can help it. I need a body of work from which to draw, no matter what purpose. I must have had a hell of a lot of content for Copilot to be able to ask these questions.
What advice would you give to someone interested in starting their own personal blog?
- Only go into it if you’re prepared to be dedicated. I think you’ll rise in popularity because there are fewer and fewer of us, but it takes a mountain of work to get noticed.
- Never take a day off. Ever. Don’t let more than 24 hours go without updating your content. I set the bar at “never” so that if I miss one or two days, I don’t beat myself up over it. People will not come back to a web site that does not change frequently. It was drilled into my head at University of Houston, so if I go to my blog and I’m like, “this is old. This blogger sucks,” I post. Nothing makes me post faster than getting bored of the current entry.
How do you handle writer’s block, especially when dealing with personal stories?
- The most profound things come out of me when I have writer’s block because I have made a commitment to use ANYTHING as a jumping off point. It doesn’t have to be good. It has to be written down. As I relax into the rhythm, the subject will get deeper and deeper. The best way to stop writer’s block is to ignore it. Your brain is overwhelmed, so write about nothing until you’ve got the faucet started. I don’t sing in front of a crowd until I’ve warmed up, either.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned from maintaining your blog?
- The more I write, the more I know myself and I am comfortable being me.
- Creating a web site isn’t nearly as annoying as maintaining it.
- Angels should have come down from heaven with herald trumpets when they deprecated the blink tag.
- WordPress is not the same as it was when I started using it, and I have not liked any of the modern changes because they appeal to lay people and not web developers.
How do you see your blog evolving in the next five years?
- I will get the rising creator status and will start being paid from Facebook directly. I may also move to Substack, but I need to research that more closely. I am looking into an open source content management system that’s open source, so I don’t have to pay for things like web stats plugins. I have more and more reach every day, and I don’t see my engagement going down. It’s nice that I’m only now getting juice because I don’t think I would have been able to handle it early on. I needed to get to a place where I could write 5,000 words in any weather or mood. I’m ready to take it to the next level, but that’s not up to me. That’s up to you. I’ll be grateful for every share and like along the way.
What’s your favorite post that you’ve written, and why does it stand out to you?
- I feel that it is too private to share with the class.
How do you incorporate feedback from your readers into your writing?
- I interact with them in the comments. I am often surprised at how wise I sound when people pick out snippets and tell me what they liked. That’s because now that it’s already out of me, I’m just talking to people and reading their comments. My entries all run together, so when people quote me, I often don’t know it’s me. I think I’m amazing when I think I’m someone else. It’s what helped me to have self-confidence…. thinking someone wrote a really great line and realizing it was me. I also get mad and sound like a dick. See above.
Have you ever considered compiling your blog posts into a book? If so, what would that look like?
- I haven’t. I think it would make a very good book once it was edited, but I do not think I would like to take on the project of deciding which entries should make the cut. Therefore, I would rather have a company approach me and say they want to do it.
What’s the most challenging aspect of sharing your life online, and how do you manage it?
- I feel that is too private to share with the class.
How do you decide which life experiences to share and which to keep private?
- I don’t. These stories come to me when they come to me. I only need a writing prompt when I can’t think of a jumping off point. Most of the time, I can.
What impact do you hope your blog has on readers, and what do you want them to take away from it?
- I hope that women will realize that being emotionally abused in childhood is just as valid as being physically/sexually abused. You develop the same PTSD reflexes. When it comes to emotional abuse, women are likely to say “it’s not that bad” all too often.
- I hope that I am teaching people how to live their lives, whether it’s through what I have done, or what I have left undone. Sometimes, survival is seeing what you wouldn’t do, too.
- I hope that telling my story, just the way it is with the mundane and not so mundane details of my life, will encourage others to believe that you don’t have to be a genius writer to create a journal that is valuable to you. Writing is a form of prayer. The way I see it is that I will never know if God is listening, but I’ll always know that you are.

I told you I love writing in museums. 😉

Blog is My Copilot

May 15, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today I decided to do a short question and answer regarding the death of my mother. I couldn’t think of anything to do with one of the prompts, but I can combine all of them. This will probably make you laugh, cry, and get angry. My mother is dead. She will not know I said these things. Keep this in mind, that I am just a child reflecting on her parent’s entire life, and that little moments do not define a lifetime. There are times when she was wonderful to me and times that she was just plain terrible. What kind of child doesn’t say that about their parents, especially after they die? I am not out to get her. I am out to illustrate her. By the end, she will be a 3D character to you, and hopefully you’ll learn more about me as you read.

I’m sorry to hear about your loss. Here are 10 thoughtful questions a friend might ask to learn more about your mother and her passing, which you can use for your personal blog prompt:

Can you share some of your favorite memories with your mother?
- I think I turned nine the year she threw me a Peter Pan birthday party with tons of activities in our backyard. There must have been a hundred people at my house for that one, because it was a tiny town. If there was something to do, people came. I was not popular in school, and I struggled against my mother being more popular than me (she was the music teacher, the fun one. I have been a 90 year old autistic man for like, 46 years. That tracks. I am 46 years old. I knew the smash hit “Get Off My Lawn” by the time I was seven.). Therefore, I was a lot more relaxed with her when we were just out in the backyard having fun. My grandparents, both sets, also lived close at that time and she was more relaxed in her comfort zone than she was when she was trying to make me into the perfect child. I didn’t get it. She could talk to me about being good because of my dad’s job all she wanted, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t just going to sit there and be weird, anyway. I found Daniel and I was fine. Neurodivergent people travel in packs. If you’re an introvert, they’re just smaller.
- She thought I was a great singer and often gave me solos in things. She would laugh until she cried when she told the story about how I was too shy to sing with the choir, but as they were leaving the stage, I decided what the people really needed was a solo.
- We were a team. She was my accompanist no matter whether I was singing or playing my horn. She learned monster orchestra reductions (piano accompaniments) just to take me to contests. Then, because she was already accompanying me, she accompanied all my friends as well. The only person she never played for, I don’t think, was Ryan Darlington (he’s a tuba player). It’s not that she wouldn’t have done it, we just went to different middle schools. We both ended up at PVA, but he went to Johnston and I went to Clements. Johnston was the performing arts middle school and I didn’t get it. I got into Clements and we marinaded and grilled their asses at contest. It was memorable because I was the trumpet soloist that helped get them there. I played the opening trumpet call in the “Dances With Wolves” score. I auditioned for PVA when I was at the absolute top of my game. My mother played for me at that audition, too.
- At HSPVA, I was a trumpet player. At Clements, I was in Varsity Band and Varsity Choir at the same time, which I loved.
  - Let me take a quick break to tell you how I did it. I sang for the choir director and she put me in junior varsity. I said, “are you sure? I’ve been doing things like the Messiah for five years now.” She said, “Ok. Prove it.” She played the first four measures in front of a monster exposed lick, I believe trying to prove to me that I couldn’t handle it when I’d had in memorized since I was 12. Please. My opera voice flipped on. Case closed (link is to a humorous clip from one of my voice lessons).
- In short, I would not be the person that I am today without the grand piano she bought to put in our apartment after my parents’ divorce. That’s because as long as it was there, she always had a way to draw me in. Draw me closer. Test out anthems she wanted to use with her choir and wanting to play for me because she could hear how it would sound at choir practice. I was part of the vetting process for the programming when she was a choir director/organist. I asked her to leave me her piano in her will, and she did. Now, it’s at my sister’s house and David’s house just isn’t big enough. But when I’m at Lindsay’s, I get really quiet and let my mom speak through the chords. It what she did when she was alive and it worked. Why stop now?
How has your mother’s life influenced the person you are today?
- A tape runs in my head that I should be the perfect person all the time because people are always watching. This was true when I was a preacher’s kid, but now I can’t turn it off and I have massive self esteem issues at making any mistakes. I have chided myself for not achieving perfection instead of taking the W at excellence. I’m the person that absolutely is driven to get an A+ on everything and a body/brain that just won’t have it. I can either accept my fate or die thinking I’m the worst person that ever lived. I choose acceptance.
- I work with children much easier because I am social masking her, an elementary and middle school choir director for all of her career, except for the time she took off from work until Lindsay and I were old enough to fend for ourselves. I’ve picked up more, noticed more than she ever imagined. She was a saint and also tough as nails. Strict disciplinarian who hid all her feelings because she thought she wasn’t enough, either. It is the plight of women most of the time. Because I needed to break free from that pattern, I see it for what it is. However, I do not think of her as a bad parent, but an overly fearful and depressed one. Her whole life depended on what other people thought. I was basically Chelsea Clinton on a very small scale.
- She is the person that convinced me it was better to hide my every need than to display it. It’s part of the reason Lindsay is so outgoing and free, while I hide in the shadows. She doesn’t worry about what people think of her to the extent that I do, and it’s a problem. It’s only now by convincing myself I am a good writer who has something to say that I really value myself as an asset and ally. Again, I mean to come off as confident, not arrogant. Someone has to tell me I’m pretty every day. It might as well be me. I got well when I realized that not saying anything left me angry and resentful all the time. When I began to express needs, no one liked it because I was so angry. So, so angry. I apologize for that, but I cannot apologize for the ways I’ve felt ignored by people who’ve said they loved me. It is on them to apologize to me if they feel bad about it. But if they don’t, I’m not waiting around for an apology. Sometimes you have to create your own closure, and I’m at peace with it.
- She is the one that taught me how to treat a wife/husband, basically doing everyone’s emotional work for them and taking all their bad behavior because if I don’t, those people will leave. It took me a very long time to come to the realization that if they leave because you have emotional needs, you’re better off without that person in your life. Be careful in deciding the line where someone else is “needy” and you’re refusing to talk. A mind will only accept that of course you’re too tired to talk for so many days/weeks/years. However long it takes for someone to realize they’re unhappy. But because they’ve been unhappy for a very long time, you’re not going to like it very much. Have clear boundaries on what’s too much so that fights like these don’t come up. Work smarter, not harder.
- She taught me that jokes were funnier when you didn’t see them coming, like her making a really sharp comment when she was normally so happy go lucky. I have a feeling that she was probably also autistic because the tapes that ran in her head were that she had to act completely normal all the time, too. It’s called social masking. Because of my family, I have both male and female sets….. as in, what a man would generally say and what a woman would. The female set is unsure and cautious. The male one walks in the world knowing that no one is better than me and no one is worse, either. It’s very important to make that distinction, because basically seeing the way I write convinced me that I had a man’s confidence online, so go with it. Be confident all the time, because it’s not all about you. It’s a survival manual for someone else.
What were some of the values and lessons she instilled in you?
- If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. I didn’t say anything for 35 years.
- Be kind to everyone, no matter what they do to you. This has had enormous positive and negative affects, because I tend to overestimate the good in people and stop standing up for myself when I feel bullied. On the flip side, everyone is more open and caring with me because I am open and caring with them. It’s a mixed bag, as parental lessons often are.
- Be subservient to your partner. Whatever they want to do, you want to do. What you want to do/eat is not up to you, because you have to watch your weight and not seem like a pig (I wasn’t on Adderall til college and had the normal appetite of a teenager), and also his choice of restaurant is always better than yours. I wasn’t raised to be queer. Neither are other women. We’ll talk for an hour about what to do for dinner because neither of us wants to assert an opinion that might offend the other. Same for dating. Lesbians take FOREVER to admit that they like someone because God forbid someone rejects them. it’s systemic, but my personal experience is unique and universal. One of the things I like about men is that they’re direct. It’s easy to ask them out because it’s a yes or no question to them. It’s especially fun when you don’t care about the answer and neither do they, because it’s no harm, no foul. With a woman, you’ll waste years pining over her until someone finally admits feelings and then spend the first four months of dating EXCLAIMING over how much we didn’t see it. Yes we did. We were just ostriches about it. If I don’t tell you I like you, then I don’t risk abandonment. It’s intrinsic to who women are as people. If we are not perfect, our husbands will leave. Flat out. This is changing as gender roles decrease. That information was useless to me then.
- My mother’s narrative was never how hard it was for me that I was queer. It was always how embarrassing it was to tell people I was queer. She couldn’t empathize, which is the root of why we had a sometimes terrible relationship. Later in her life, she wouldn’t let anyone get away with a homophobic comments, but she never told me that. I heard it at her funeral, because all of the sudden she was now the cool mom and not the rejected one. She could play up that card instead of being embarrassed, all the while being completely disinterested in hearing how Meagan, Kathleen, or Dana & I were doing. I am glad that she came to peace about it. I am not glad she never told me.
How do you cope with the grief and keep her memory alive?
- I have fallen in love with everything Dia de los Muertos and I actually visit cemeteries a lot for the peace and quiet, yet feeling surrounded. The most profound place I’ve ever felt peace is at a neighborhood for the dead in Paris. It’s called Pere LaChaisse (sp?), and it’s got more famous artists of every discipline that you could possibly imagine. If you cannot travel to Paris, there are the same type cemeteries in New Orleans. See them before you die, because it’s an experience in and of itself. In DC, I have now been to sit with Gore Vidal. Good talk.
- I wear an ichthus necklace every day now, because the necklace she actually gave me came apart in a million pieces. I got it at the funeral home, and the inside of the fish is filled with her fingerprint. I don’t like how I got it, but I do like that it was possible to create and a powerful remembrance to have my mother’s fingerprint on my heart every day.
- Lindsay and I FaceTime at my mother’s grave when I’m not in town, or visit together when I am. It makes us feel closer to her even though we know she’s not really there. The idea is fun. We sit and talk to her, sometimes eat, sometimes drink coffee. It’s a safe space to get away from it all, and we do.
- Stories come up at random times, and I never know whether they’re going to be good or bad. Some of them are still so painful that I blank out, like seeing her in her coffin. What is really bad is that because it’s the last image I have of her, it’s the one that’s stuck. My mother got sick and died in about 30 minutes flat. I wore this look of abject shock, like I was high on Oxycodone and completely sober. It was more than a year of magical thinking, because it was so unbelievable.
- I know for sure that she got the death she wanted, because she did not want to be in pain and she did not want Lindsay and I to end up taking care of her for years on end. She didn’t know it was coming, but she would have been pleased with the result. It gives me complete peace. I don’t have to worry that there are things she would have wanted that she didn’t get, because I know for sure that given the choice between dying quickly or it being a long, drawn out process she would have chosen to go out exactly the same way.
- Other people keep her alive for me. She was such a public figure that people tell me all the time how much I remind them of her. It’s irritating until you realize that it’s the only way to keep your mother alive long after she’s dead.
Were there any traditions or hobbies she passed down to you?
- Make a big deal out of people’s birthdays.
- Love people until they just can’t stand it. Make it weird. So many people are hurt in the world. See it.
- If you are a teacher and you don’t have money, you are responsible for finding it. She taught me that people will support a valuable cause. For instance, she dated a judge after the divorce that was pretty wealthy. She worked at one of the poorest schools in Fort Bend. She never asked him for money. She talked about her life, and he responded. One year he bought the entire class winter coats. You can get things if you ask for them, but only without asking directly. This is not bad advice, because it’s not one’s responsibility to respond to your needs, you’re just asking if they will. The difference is that I don’t take rejection personally and she viewed it as a flaw in her character. However, this is a new development because I finally got tired of not being heard correctly. I don’t do well when I’m talking around something and just hoping.
What is the most important thing you learned from your mother?
- I have learned many things from my mother, from the tender to the terrible. Every bit of it had to do with focusing on external validation. She was not attention-seeking in the slightest. She was just trying to take up as little space in the world as she possibly could, because someone, somewhere could be offended.
- She gave really good hugs. I miss those the most.
- Towards the end of her life, she enjoyed traveling and came to both Portland and DC. In fact, I also met her in Seattle and we went to the Experience Music Project before she and her husband left on an Alaskan cruise.
- Giving birth is not for the faint of heart. It’s especially hard if you don’t tell your doctors that you are in pain. She said that she bit her pillow while everyone screamed and no one noticed that she needed medication. There’s no award for that, but if there had been, she’d have won it.
- Own yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you. You cannot be perfect enough to please everyone all the time, and you will die mad about it. I learned that because she never did and I watched what it did to her. She was still mad at my dad at all family functions 25 years after the divorce. I realize that relationships are complicated. Being a decent coparent is not. At some point, you have to say to yourself “this doesn’t even matter anymore,” like my friends who found out they were pregnant the morning of their wedding. All of the sudden, the wedding was literally a piece of cake because there were bigger fish to fry. Like, we’re having a good time, okay, but we’re not even going to pretend that any of this is now important.
- I am a more compassionate person than I would be otherwise, because my mother’s insistence on being polite and friendly has led me to keep going in relationships that weren’t interesting at first, but kept growing. It was a lesson to sit back and keep listening.
- It feels excruciating that she would have treated Zac like he walks on water, because he might be a little too much for her, but he’s still a man interested in her daughter, which was infinitely more important than a woman being interested in me. It is not surprising or lost on me that I did not find complete happiness with a man until after I realized she wasn’t there to give “advice.” Even though Zac is also queer and likes me for everything I am, she would not have believed I could tell Zac I was nonbinary and have the relationship survive. Yes, I’m sure that men who like men definitely have a problem with me………. But I only know this from watching how she treated Ryan and how she treated Meagan. Oh, and also I didn’t have any agency. It was all my emotional abuser’s idea and I had been turned somehow. Meanwhile, I’d been crying alone in my room for two years. I’m just not queer enough to exclude dating men altogether. It speaks highly of Zac’s brain that it even happened in the first place, because I do have a preference for women. It gives me a little bit of clinical separation, honestly, because not every conversation digs deep. By the time I talk to Zac, I have worn myself out on my blog.
How did she inspire you in your life’s pursuits and passions?
- She loved everything I ever did in the arts, whether it was singing, playing my horn, playing the handbells, or creative writing. She also loved asking me to help her with her room when she was decorating because she knew I was creative at that, too.
- She wouldn’t be surprised that I turned out to be a great writer, because I was already on my way in 2016. Therefore, she was invested in my talent. She still managed to bust my balls about my behavior, though. She hated my writing at times, because she thought I was harping on a point over and over. She did not realize that autistic people are governed by monotropic thought processes. It is literally not possible for us to change gears quickly, or process emotions easily. It takes time, because nine times out of ten, it’s trouble with not being able to translate neurotypical into neurodivergent or vice versa. She thought Supergrover was bad for me, that I descended into a world of pain. She wasn’t wrong. That being said, I couldn’t find a friend of mine she did like. Neurodivergent people tend to be queer and run in packs. Therefore, if she didn’t understand me, she didn’t understand them, either. So, her interest in my blog was a mixed bag.
In what ways do you see your mother’s traits or characteristics in yourself?
- I am only strong when my back is against the wall. I only use power when I need it, not because it pleases me. Just like my mother in a classroom, I walk softly and carry a big stick. I just don’t have to be as aggressive about it now, because I have friends that respect my boundaries and I don’t feel like I’m being ignored. Your voice doesn’t have to be loud if people aren’t covering it up.
- It is easier to be honest on the internet because when I’m in front of people, I cater to the urge to be small in front of them to gain acceptance.
- If I’m going to be a musician, be the best musician I can be. Don’t think that you’re incapable of something. Suck until you don’t. And in fact, my voice didn’t get really exceptional until I started taking private lessons every week. It was so good to learn that I was so much more capable and confident than I thought, because I had a great voice, I’d just picked up some bad habits. She helped me work through all of them by accompanying me between lessons.
- Take the time to get in a proper warm-up, because you’ll sound better if you’re relaxed. Start a rehearsal with your vocal cords already warm. Breathe deeply. Four measures is a long time.
What do you miss the most about her?
- I miss having someone to talk to all the time. We had long, involved conversations about her life, her career, her everything because I was happy to listen to the chatter rather than tell her I wanted to talk about my life, too. I knew she wasn’t comfortable, so I just listened. The same goes for being touched. We could say a lot without saying anything, a safe person to just walk up and hug because they’re used to it. People rarely hug me anymore, and I’m so used to it I forget I need it.
How would you like people to remember her?
- As a saint, perfectly perfect in every way, because no one gets through life without making mistakes. With your parents, it’s only a different situation because your first family installs all your triggers. I hope that by not staying silent about them, you won’t, either.

We are all a little bit broken, and that’s where the light gets in.

These questions are designed to be open-ended and reflective, allowing you to share personal stories and feelings about your mother. They can help readers understand her impact on your life and the legacy she leaves behind.

Vlogging in Your Head

May 12, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

When I’m writing, I think of it very much like a lecture about me. I am trying to create a video in your head like one Joel Wood or Lia Hatzakis or Paul Cuffaro or any number of YouTubers would make, where they’re just walking down the street and talking to the camera. Paul is walking around his farm and fish room, but it’s the same concept. They all narrate their lives like they’re standing up in front of a crowd. Because my dad was a minister, to me this tracks as a completely normal thing to do. However, my dad didn’t usually preach what’s called a “confessional sermon.” His sermons were generally not about him. Sometimes he would include funny things that happened with my mom, me, and Lindsay that week, but he rarely just put everything on display.

That is my department, and he calls me “Chief.” Because my favorite two spies in the UNIVERSE were called “Chief,” now it pleases me to no end. I’m not Chief of Disguise, but I am chief of……….. Something. I tried to think of a pun, but I’ve not nothin.’ If you think of something that rhymes with “disguise” and also refers to writing/blogging, leave it in the comments. I don’t have prizes, but if it becomes a thing maybe I’ll acquire them. Lanagan Media Group lives to serve. 😉

I should update you all that Bryn’s grandmother died yesterday, so please send her all the love in the world. She already has mine, but that’s not enough. She needs love in groups. Fanagans, do your thing.

I can’t remember who came up with “Fanagans,” so I’m going to pick Dana. The only thing I do know is that it wasn’t me. I don’t have enough self confidence to believe I have fans all over the world even though I do. It’s sometimes too much to take in, that Zac, Supergrover, Bryn, Dana, and I are famous in a very small niche…… However, the reach is literally every country in the world. Since this blog was conceived 11 years ago, I’ve gotten all 208. Just obscure, like Micronesia and Vatican City. I can say that a few are VPNs, bots, etc. I cannot say that for all of them.

In terms of stats, my biggest fan base is in India. Again, this is not surprising to me because there are more people in India, as well as the popularity of the WordPress app/web site there. The next biggest group is the Commonwealth, which I group because it changes at least once a week. Sometimes it’s Canada, sometimes it’s Australia, sometimes it’s Britain. My US following is smaller, but it’s growing every single day as I get more popular on Facebook and I get promoted in the daily prompt. My reader retention rate is enormous. If someone reads once, they’re almost 70% likely to read again, and I have an enormous fan base that reads my entries as soon as they come out. My favorite comment about this has been “we have now reached the point where I am anticipating your entries coming out.”

I hope that I am showing confidence, not arrogance. My self esteem has been in the shitter for a very long time, and the straw that broke the camel’s back was Daniel saying “just because you write in bulk doesn’t mean you say anything of substance.” Well, his professional peer-reviewed ass hasn’t had fans for 24 years. Beat that with a stick.

I do things with intention and purpose. I don’t link to anything to create reader retention unless a prompt has come up where I’ve told the story recently. This allows two things to happen. The first is reader retention. The reason I have it is that I demand it. If you don’t read something, it will move down on the page and it becomes obscure. That creates the OG fan base because my blog has a real “guess you had to be there” feel because otherwise you are going to be using my search feature extensively. People don’t do that. The second thing it accomplishes for my friends is allowing the past to stay passed. Everything blows over easier when they realize that every day is a new piece of paper.

However, thanks to my fans, my archives aren’t bird cage liner. It takes a very long time for people to discover your content on Facebook and WordPress. Some of the entries that are the most shared are two or three years past when it was written. The only thing that took off immediately was my article on marriage. I think it’s hilarious that I wrote a marriage article seen all over the world. That’s because I realized I wasn’t very good at it. Thus, poly and dating Zac because not being married and just having a boyfriend suits me completely. I do not have a need to have multiple partners to be happy. I am happy. The only reason I wanted to be with Daniel as well is that I wanted what’s called an NP, or nesting partner. Zac will never be that for me and I respect his boundaries. I still want so social mask someone because living with someone makes that possible.

In the meantime, I am social masking my housemate and that works well. I have changed my schedule to his, because when I’m alone and have no schedule, I am just as good a writer, but a worse human being. I get demand avoidance over showering, cooking, basically anything until my executive function says “MOVE.” Everything is an emergency with executive dysfunction because your brain cannot plan anything in advance….. Or very little, anyway. You live and die by Google Calendar, because you WILL not remember it if you don’t write it down. I have been late to work because I forgot I had work today (it’s easy to do in a kitchen because your schedule changes weekly). I have never told anyone that before, that I’ve been late because I forgot we were doing work that day. But now I’m spilling it because that’s the disability.

That’s why it’s hard to stay employed, because people think you’re full of shit or a fucking child. People without brain disorders have absolutely no concept, but they become the authority on your mental health if they’re bosses. It’s not a disability, you’re just an indolent asshole.

I’m a good writer because I don’t get demand avoidance over it every single day. Your brain sometimes overrides your disability when it’s a special interest….. Or it happens to me because I’m ADHD as well. If I was simply autistic, I would be 10x more likely to be engrossed in writing to the exclusion of all else, because autistic people are bad at transitions and tend to stay hyper focused on the thing they know the most about. For instance, it being hard to drag Sam away from penguins on “Atypical,” or being able to drag Extraordinary Attorney Woo from whales.

Ok, shows with autistic people. Gotta talk about it.

In a lot of shows about people with disabilities, they’re designed to make the neurotypical person look like the hero caretaker and the autist to need that care. The show isn’t about being autistic, but how kind people are in tolerating our quirks, not caring when it goes overboard into infantilizing an adult. In short, you are not a hero because you manage to put up with me. I mean, thanks, but I don’t ever want a friend who shows up out of pity. I would rather be alone, because I can, again, entertain myself. It is more fun to be alone than to put up with that crap.

My life got better when I stopped allowing it. I sound like I know everything because I just throw emotional bombs down like they’re nothing. I take everything literally, so if you ask me a question, I’m going to be sure in my answer even when I’m not, because the autistic brain is not putting everything through a social convention checklist. Ask a question, get an answer. We can’t care any less when you react to it, because it’s something we can’t do anything about. We either sound like dicks or we don’t talk at all because people just say that we’re dicks when we talk to them. Why bother?

My friends’ biggest problem with me historically is that I call them on their bullshit, they scream “you don’t know me,” and within hours/days they come back and say “I hate it that you’re always right.” It’s relentless, because obviously when I talk people take a defensive tone. I cannot win, so I’ve stopped playing.

My boyfriend and my best friend are on the same page….. Something my friend Sarah Anne said about 15 years ago and it’s apt here. “Just let Leslie be Leslie, and let the world fall in love.” It is the most profound thing anyone has ever said, and it wasn’t about my career and my friends’ attitudes toward it, but it’s the perfect fit. She was giving me advice on preaching, when my world was quite a bit smaller.

I often wonder if the people who’ve visited me from Vatican City have stolen lines from me, because I know it’s possible. I’m confident that I’m a good enough preacher to rip off blind. And remember, I don’t need to be a hero. It’s not important to be recognized when there’s a possibility you just gave a Cardinal something to say on Sunday morning.

Because I write about success and things that are interesting to powerful people, like leadership, I think of my fan base as small, but with abilities no one else has. A lot of my audience is more successful than I am. Margaret Cho comes to mind, but I don’t have any evidence that she’s a fan. She just Tweeted my marriage article on Twitter. Sharing one article doesn’t mean she came back, but it doesn’t not mean that, either. I have no idea who is reading based on my web stats unless they’re a part of the WordPress community and leave a like within the app. You have to have an account with WordPress to do that. Everyone else just clicks on the link from Facebook, Reddit, et al. Margaret Cho is not my only reader with that much clout, so my assessment that my audience is small but powerful is correct and I feel solid about it. I have been underestimating my abilities my whole life.

Daniel’s words pushed me to the fucking wall and I thought, “ENOUGH. You just watched Jonna Mendez own herself in front of an entire room of people and she likes your writing and she likes you. She would not think it was impossible that I could do the same. You can’t think of yourself as a shitty writer anymore. Man up.” There is no universe in which I think I couldn’t give an interview at the Spy Museum because they already know me there. It’s just that currently, I don’t have a book to promote. Maybe I’ll do a nonfiction on NASA and CIA or something, but I’d have to find something Vince Houghton didn’t in “Nuking the Moon.” It’s just easy money if the book is good because people genuinely like that topic.

I absolutely do not think I could fail at writing nonfiction, because that’s what I do every single day. I just need an editor because I clean up nice.

It’s an idea to read Zac in on helping me with a nonfiction book, because not only can he edit me, he can fact check me as well. Like, holy shit, the perfect boyfriend dropped into my lap…………… Because I got the confidence to ask for it. I asked Zac out, not the other way around. I’m getting a lot of things these days by asking for them, and it’s sort of embarrassing how long I didn’t know that. I was an arrested teenager for years. I couldn’t set boundaries in relationships for anything in the world because I didn’t know how. I’ve felt steamrolled in every relationship because I was a people pleaser. Once I just started throwing truth bombs on the table and keeping the friends who stayed, I was a lot happier than having friends who I tiptoed around because my self-esteem wasn’t high enough to participate in a give and take. I got love by pleasing other people. Now, I just pick friends that allow themselves the luxury of having productive fights that make you closer, because you’re not holding in all the things that make the other person annoying because you just let them keep annoying you without saying anything and letting MASSIVE resentment build.

It’s not okay, building massive resentment. It will always backfire. Instead of a happy relationship, you’re focusing on yourself and telling yourself that you’re not getting anything because no one notices you. There’s no award for trying to be good enough that your parents don’t see you as a problem child. Your needs going unmet is a you thing, not a them thing. When you say nothing, you become part of the problem.

It’s counterfeit kindness.

Smiley

April 27, 2024April 27, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are your favorite emojis?

I have jokingly called Zac “Smiley” since we met. That’s because George Smiley was John Le Carré’s main character and Zac is not in a big three letter, but he works in both military and civilian intelligence roles. I was delighted one day when I said something in voice dictation like, “you’re adorable, Smiley.” Siri wrote:

You’re adorable 😊

So, if I had to pick one out of all, it’s the OG. I was around when it began, and I use/say it almost as much now as then.

I feel like I use emojis the way they were intended, which is to indicate which lines are jokes… not a mode of communication. To me, that is like saying “I need 300 words on my desk by 1500, but make sure it’s in Wingdings.” Therefore, I hardly ever use emoticons that I can’t type.

It’s not fun to me to stop and insert imagery like a web designer. I will add emojis at the end, but only sometimes. Mostly I am concerned about getting you an answer, not picking pictures.

My other top two are a winking face and a smiley with the tongue hanging out because they’re easy to use at 90 wpm. I also try not to use them in every single paragraph. They are decorations, not cake. My feelings may have more to do with the creation of the web not being what maintains it. As in, I may be telling you things that no longer apply. In my background, they were lifelines to ensure that you let someone know your intent in a chat room, because an emoji transcends language. I get that going to pictures is nothing new and hieroglyphics are valid, but that’s not how we did it in the beginning. I’m not advocating we go backwards. I just haven’t had a situation where I needed to stop talking and use emojis instead. It has never come up.

I also don’t expect other people to be writers, so I am not telling you what you should do, either. I am saying that my habits are built from having specifically a desktop since I was eight. It was a different feel not to have the Internet on all the time, like a utility. You might have only been able to chat for a few minutes before someone accidentally picked up the phone. The phone lines carried both data and voice just like the internet does now, but picking up another phone in the house would drop the data connection and you would be “kicked off.” I have to explain this because not all my readers are my age.

I wish I could remember more of those early conversations, because I didn’t realize how quickly my day to day life was changing. My watch has a faster processor now than my desktop had back then.

I have a watch that would have genuinely been helpful at CIA during The Cold War, and I would not doubt that they had something like an Apple Watch long before we did. It’s not because I think there’s a deep state or anything shady. It’s that with all the technology research CIA does, a computer that’s capable of sitting on your wrist like a Pip-Boy can’t be an original idea. Jonna used to take calls from her staff after “Get Smart” and “Dragnet” from officers saying, “can we do that?”

But there’s a second reason, and that’s that during one of Jonna’s talks, she said that they do such specialized things that one person will spend their entire career on one thing, like batteries or cameras. That’s because once an asset got to the place where they were supposed to plant the bug, it had to last a long time, because who knows how long it will be before we can get into that room again? And in fact, she was talking about “The Americans,” the scene where the maid hides the bug in Caspar Weinberger’s clock.

(I thought it was really funny that Ollie North consulted on “The Americans. It’s just the richest ending to that story I could imagine, because it was a major one. I remember it and I couldn’t have been even a teenager yet.)

We, the people of the chatrooms, have conversations exactly like this because we’re always looking for the next new thing, computer-wise. Zac and I have a Chinese Wall on technology, because he knows I’m interested and I’ll ask way more questions than he could possibly answer. The only thing he’ll say is the history of something if it’s UNCLASS. Like, “we have stuff that looks similar.” If he says “looks similar,” that’s kind of my cue to go read a book. 😉

I have never been in a chatroom where we weren’t discussing computers or the chessboard at some point. I have no doubt that I’ve met half of Anonymous by now. I know for certain I’ve met one. I didn’t even have to catch him at anything. He took some Ambien and came to my house because he still couldn’t sleep……… Then I didn’t sleep for three days.

However, he was the kind of hacker you want. Someone who’s a hacktivist on the good guys’ side. White hats do exist.

In all of my years on the Internet, it’s been as nonbinary as everything else about me. I got sucked into the world of hacking, but I don’t hack. It’s kind of the way Lindsay is woven into the queer community in Houston even though she’s cis and straight.

Oh, and I should write this down. “Enby” is short for nonbinary. It’s the gender that most fits me, and yet I don’t care if people think I’m male or female. Pronouns are not about respect to me, because I think it’s more important for me to know who I am than anyone else. Pronouns are a non-issue because I don’t make them one. The easiest thing is just to say “they” if you don’t know, anyway. It’s funny how my gender often depends on how people perceive me, which most of the time is female, but when people don’t look closely, I’m always a “sir.” Neither bother me in the slightest.

(And for the record, if you misgender me, just apologize and move on….. Because you didn’t misgender me and I’m not offended. Plus, I do not need your entire history with trans people as an apology. I’m sure your nephew is great.)

The truth is, though, lots of people on the Internet are nonbinary by now, whether we like it or not. The Internet has changed the rules of the game because you become disconnected from your physical body during emotional intimacy. It’s not that way for everyone, obviously, but it’s a good observation of most. For instance, “straight guys” trolling gay chatrooms because they’re curious and don’t want anyone to know they’re chatting with other queer people at night.

And most of the time, that comes off as rage bait. It’s very popular to come into a gay online community and start asking things like “so which one’s the wife?” And you watch a mix of insults go by because it’s our space.

It is also true that a disproportionately large neurodivergent community exists on the web because we built it. I have always worked with other autistic people without being able to identify it for myself, because I did not know that I was social masking, first of all (in a way that other people don’t), and I also didn’t know that you can have a full range of emotions and pick up all social cues and guess what? That’s not what autism is, either. It’s a criteria, but it’s not all of it.

Being autistic is absolutely why I gravitated toward Linux. It wasn’t to play around with Linux, necessarily. Part of it was learning Linux, and it was exciting because I could do things that very few people my age could do. The better part was a group of people who could understand me in my own language, which for years turned into me being the only woman in many rooms (because that’s mostly how I’ve presented at the office, although we all kind of look nonbinary in Oregon because we’re all wearing the same Columbia jacket we got on sale last summer at REI.

I wouldn’t have learned any of the things I’ve learned about myself without an Internet connection, because I didn’t have many queer friends growing up locally in Texas, but I had a ton of them in Australia.

So, I suppose the easiest way to say it is something you’ve heard all your life, so I hope it makes sense.

“My kindom is not of this world.”

😉

Gratitude Journaling

April 25, 2024April 26, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I just caught a dog rifling through my trash can, so I am not feeling particularly good about myself right now. I didn’t know that the dog was smart enough to open the trash can himself. I shouldn’t have doubted it, and I can’t get him to clean up the trash, either. So, I cleaned it up…. by myself…. again.

I’m not bagging on David, my housemate. I am bagging on Jack, who is a useless housekeeper. My coworker needs a visit with HR for a performance improvement plan. I don’t know how to keep a dog out of the trash except getting a different trash can or keeping the door closed all the time. I’d rather just train the dog, but again, Jack is very smart. You have to get right up in his face before he will even begin to think you have half a brain. So, we’ve been working on “sit,” “heel,” and “bring Mama a Diet Coke.” That last one was a joke that Heather Armstrong (Dooce) wrote about her dog, Chuck, the former Congressman.

I’m trying to keep Heather’s name alive because she’s a part of the zeitgeist, but no one has influenced the direction of this web site, because Supergrover and I both loved her once upon a time. It was the same for me- I fell out with reading her when she got on the influencer bandwagon, because like my beautiful girl I thought it lost something when Dooce stopped getting so real. There was no more Dooce (a typo she used to make while typing Dude), no more Asian Database Administrator (probably good she took that one out), no more dry humping and Sprite.

Sometimes I feel like Dooce is gone and I got the best of the best and you just got me. I keep trying, though. I’ve just realized that what I thought was Texas old guy is actually Utah blogger, apparently, and I know her writing well enough that she would be pleased by this. Unfortunately, I never got to meet her. We just ran in the same circles. If I had an hour with her, I’d ask her about blowback.

I’ll ask her about the friends she lost, and the friends who came to take their places. It’s something for which I’ll always be grateful, and I’m glad she came up in my mind while I was trying to say “I’m not in a very good mood, so I need to find things for which to be thankful.” I count blessings, every single one. It keeps me from thinking that I am failing all the time, because I recognize when I have a win.

I continue to be thankful for my house, and even Jack. He continues to be “my dog,” and he’s as lovable as every dog ever. If he’s ever missing, I know he’s in my bed as far under the covers as he can go. He’s shaved almost to the skin right now; when the wind is blowing in from the windows he shivers. It’s how I like it, because it’ll be 55F outside, but I’ve got a sheet, a blanket, and two comforters on top. I think I’ll be okay.

At the same time, when I take sleeping pills my body temperature goes way up, and having the windows open keeps me from sweating because of them. There have been a few days, though, where I woke up and thought I lost three pounds because I’d shake the blankets off, it would be too cold, then I’d pull them all back…. All night. It was glorious, let me tell you.

I’m grateful for a comfortable place to sleep, and a room with so many new possibilities. Neither my lamp nor my shelf with a light came with light bulbs, so I ordered some retro LEDs. They look like they’re from the early 1900s. I have a floor lamp without a shade, which is why I thought it would be nice with the bulb exposed to go decorative. I am hoping that I will have enough light, because each bulb is 60w. I wanted higher than that, but I couldn’t find any yellow bulbs that came in 75w or 100. I do not like the bulbs where they take all the yellow out and it leaves a slightly blue glow on everything. I do use 100w white bulbs in my bathroom because I want to get dressed in the most unflattering light possible. That way, when I get myself fixed up, I will look better when I leave the house. It’s good to have goals, anyway. 😉

I’m grateful I have a bathtub again. Hayat replaced our bathtub with a stand up shower long ago, so it’s nice to be able to sit and relax when I want. I liked the stand-up shower, too. I’m not knocking it. I just had trouble shaving because I am terrible at balance. It’s not that one was bad, it’s just that with a bathtub I can also sit in lavender and eucalyptus salts.

I’m grateful to still have a garden. David is the gardener, I’m just the enjoyer. I’m going to have to put some lavender out for me, because I’ve talked many times about talking to the bees. It’s real. I don’t mean that they can hear me, necessarily, but that it does make you feel better to talk to them.

I’m grateful for DC. There are limitless possibilities for beauty here. There’s kayaking, biking, hiking, sailing- basically everything I could do in Portland is also right here. The two cities mirror each other in lots of ways when it comes to layout. That’s because people in DC do not think of Arlington as the same city, but if you look at it from the sky, it looks the same as Portland being divided by the river north to south and Burnside east to west. We are a bridge city, and I can’t wait for Bryn to see it from the air. The only real difference is that when you land at National, there’s not a long airstrip parallel to the river. If the pilots at National can’t stop in time, they’ll fall into the Potomac.

Seem to remember something about that in the news when I was a child.

Zac says he has never met a person that loves this area as much as I do. Zac has never left and come back for any real length of time. I wonder how it would look different to him if he’d lived here in his early 20’s and then traveled all over. I missed the Potomac because the Willamette is always cold. Always. I cannot remember a 4th of July in which I was not absolutely freezing my ass off. I once drove with a housemate up to Mt. Hood for lunch (we weren’t skiing that day) and it started as we were driving home. It was June 27th. DC is the beauty of a city with a river running through it that is also not 54F and raining 280 days a year. I love Portland a whole lot, and I would move back if I had to do so. It’s just not my first choice for a number of reasons, and the weather is at the top.

The only pro here would be getting to live in the same city as my best friend, because the position has been filled- end of story. That being said, occasional video calls and visits are fine. I do not have a need for Bryn to move here or me to move there. If so, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I just can’t think of a good reason all our time needs to be in person.

There are moments, of course. You don’t move to your partner’s or your best friend’s city because something is happening. You move there to be available if it does. That’s because even now when something is going on with Bryn, I can’t help but want to jump on a plane. Therefore, I’m not sure I’ve ever been more surprised than when she said she was jumping on a plane to get to me. It’s getting so exciting thinking about her visit, and it’s already the 25th. So, not many more sleeps. I’m grateful.

I’m grateful that both Bryn and Dave want to see SPY so it doesn’t feel like I’m strong-arming them into going there on my account. I live here. I can go any time I want (and do). We haven’t decided what we’re going to do all days, and I know they’ll probably also want time to themselves. We just need to talk about dates so that I can send Zac an invitation. I live and die by Google Calendar.

Zac’s acceptance is not mandatory, I just want him to know he’s included in the fun and he’s said that he does want to meet Bryn. So, now Zac will have met one friend I met in high school and one I met my freshman year of college. I’m glad I can bridge those gaps in time, and it makes me happy that Zac is going to learn just so many “Borum-isms.”

I am grateful for “Borum-isms.” It’s a specific cadence, and I will pick it up instantly because it’s not based on accent but rhythm. Bryn’s dad said something so incredibly profound that I’ve remembered it for over 20 years…. “the hardest part of teaching is remembering what it was like not to know.”

Bryn also reminds me of Arya Stark, and I don’t have to squint. But by that I mean she is take charge alpha dog all the time, which means that she is strong and firm, but also the most loving person in the room because the alpha’s job is to manage the whole pack by seeing their needs and helping them……. serving, not owning……. as opposed to whatever the fucktard morons think it is this week.

In some ways, I’m grateful for guys like that because it reminds me of Roy Wood, Jr. who said that he appreciated businesses with the confederate flag outside because then at least you had a tip it wasn’t going to go well for you. If someone is advertising on the internet that they want a “tradwife,” they probably mean that they want someone who will take all their bullying all the time and call it Biblical. Therefore, there’s no confederate flag, but there’s a big waving red one.

I’m grateful for the ability to see red flags and work on them. I see them in myself by rereading my work. Throwing words on a page and seeing what they look like once they’re outside you gives you enough separation to say “ok, that’s good…. but that’s bad.” Not the writing, the way I behaved.

I am working to find peace within myself, so don’t think I don’t notice when I’m angry and figure out a way to resolve it in myself. I think I have. My tone is completely different than it was a year ago. A lot of it has to do with Supergrover finally telling me what she really wanted. She wants peace and rest, I assume for both of us. Maybe one day our paths will cross again, but I doubt it. I require something she does not have, which created the initial attraction to each other in terms of energy. This is because she has something I don’t, which is pragmatism and logic. In some ways, our personalities are exactly alike. In others, they are diametrically opposed.

But leaning in through all of that made me who I am today, and I’m more confident in myself as a result, and grateful I ever got to meet her at all. I am so angry that what she chooses to highlight in our relationship is all the negativity and not our incredible potential for joy. Maybe she already has these things with everyone else but me, and it’s because I’m a shitty friend that I don’t have these things with her and I’m whistling Dixie because no one else ever has a problem……. I would tell her the same thing I told her when she said she was giving up Diet Coke. “Yeah. Uh huh. Keep talkin,’ sweetheart.” No, wait. It wasn’t about Diet Coke. That was another day. And now I’m laughing my ass off, but that joke is above your pay grade.

I think the thing that makes her spit nails is that I’m right. What I realized through my mistakes is that I didn’t have to sit in them just because I’d made a long time making them. That my history with her meant a lot, but not at the expense of my own health and happiness. It’s not because I wouldn’t have done it. It’s because I expected her to pull her weight. I would have done anything for her, but I realized that she didn’t feel that way about me, and it was stupid to think that, in retrospect. I did not feel that way every single day. I recognized her hurt and talked about what happened often, but she never took the bait and opened up to me so that I could better understand her. I thought, “I am going to end up giving her absolutely everything I have and she’s not going to notice in the slightest.” I’d listened to the whispers and the screams long enough.

I’ve said this before, but I did not get angry that she was also angry. I was furious because she refused to tell me anything that gave me any headway. All I could do was talk about myself when it was the last thing I wanted to talk about. I also didn’t always want to talk about her, as if I was mining her for information. I wanted an easy give and take, the strength and comfort of someone I’d known for a very long time.

There was every reason to stay except having a feeling of safety and security when we talked, because it was missing for a very long time. Any attempt to lighten the load was wrong, so I didn’t get tired of her. I got tired of how I felt about myself. She says I’m “a lot.” She has never really grasped that she’s a lot. That for everything she’d like to change about me, there’s something I’d like to change about her. What I cannot get her to see is “this is me. Take it or leave it.” And that’s what we’ve both been trying to say to each other for years, mostly at the top of our metaphorical lungs. I have found that it is much more fun to fly with a dragon than to be touched by its fire.

I’ve thought for many years that if I did ever see her face to face, that I would go mute. That she’s the only person I know where that would happen. It’s not that I am not interested in talking, it’s that I would be completely overwhelmed before the conversation began. But I know us. We both know how to make each other laugh. After a few minutes, it wouldn’t be weird. One of us would say something to break the tension, and the spell would be broken. This person that we’ve each built up in our heads will be gone, and it will seem like we’ve never met.

Here is something I also know. I will never know how much of my e-mails she’s taken in until I hear her talking around other people, because I know what I’ve written. I would know when she was quoting me and when she wasn’t, and I would never say a thing. It wouldn’t mean as much to her as it would to me.

I do know that if we were at the same party, one of two things would happen. The first is that I’d be telling a story and get a detail wrong, and from across the room I’d hear, “THAT IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED. This is how it happened…..” The second would be her seeing someone else mistreating me because despite how she feels about me at any given moment I know she’d eat off their legs.

What I mean about getting a detail wrong is that all of the sudden she becomes very, very familiar with absolutely everything I’ve ever said when she is irritated. When she’s irritated, she quotes me back to me. How much she’s irked is inversely proportional to my joy at watching her quote me, because the more angry she is, the more likely she is to do it. I don’t do anything to irk her on purpose, I’m just saying that after a fight, when I feel calmer I go back and reread everything. I notice style, structure, all of it. Even when I’m devastated, I still find beauty in hearing from her at all because I rip her off mercilessly. Without my e-mail history, I am so much dumber, I promise you. I hope that in some ways she feels the same, because my dexterity helped her when her own words failed her. It’s something I hope she knows, really- that wherever she is in the world, my heart is with her. That’s because everywhere I go, her heart is with me.

So, even if she was trying to avoid me at a party, she’d never make it. We don’t have any mutual friends so far, and I’m not interested in making them…. mostly to protect the innocent.

I also know that no matter what, as long as I don’t start going with the crowd, she’ll still be in my audience. I know that when she told me that Dooce sucked now and she wasn’t going to read anymore and I told her it was her job to tell me when I should retire because she could just re-send that e-mail.

Come to think of it, that’s what would happen at a party. She’d hear me use a joke or two I’ve told in front of her and then we’d be picking up the end of each other’s sentences because we’ve both heard them before.

We could also have a lot of inside jokes that other people wouldn’t get, but we’d be falling out. For instance, me being the president of Overthinker’s Anonymous not because I am smarter, but because president is a public-facing office.

I think part of me hoped she would join Lanagan Media Group, because she would be great at both writing and podcasting if she had the bandwidth. She told me that she was always looking for what to do in her next career, and I think part of me hoped she would say “writer,” but I didn’t push. I got her stuff to help her in her own direction. She’s talked about writing before, but in a faraway sort of way. The bits of her story I’ve gotten to write because our lives overlapped are unique and beautiful. I know she thought it was unique. One out of two ain’t bad.

I feel like the way autism logic works, people think you’re much more negative than you mean to be because neurotypical brains are used to hearing things in a certain way. There are patterns to neurotypical speech that contain social cues. Autistic people can imitate them, but they cannot understand them. However, not being able to pick up social cues is only one of the criteria for autism. You do not have to have every single one to “prove” you’re autistic. For me, it’s a mixed bag. I do not recognize social cues in a person based on what they are thinking, but from the millions of faces I’ve seen before that looked exactly like that when X…… or when my parents described people’s emotions to me without meaning to…… I started understanding speech very, very early. Therefore, I have overheard things and ruminated on them for years before I understood them. But it’s because I’ve ruminated that I have accurate heuristics for the most part.

It’s easier to social mask when you’re hearing phone calls regarding pastoral care, because if you’re the pastor’s kid, you’re learning how to talk to people while they’re upset…… and mostly at each other. For instance, people who need marriage counseling, etc. But of course there’s a lot of people angry with you, too. Mostly over the things you’ve said.

Being a creative is being a creative. Preaching and writing are two separate skills, but they are two ways of expressing the same ideas. With me, it’s readers who don’t come back. For pastors, it’s church members who inexplicably disappear. Therefore, I am used to an ebb and flow in size and don’t get wigged about stats. I check them, but I don’t focus on them. The only stat I really like is how many flags I got that day. I like how far my site goes. This week, the leaderboard has been Africa- hello to South Africa and Ghana.

OH! South Africa!

Speaking of which, I started watching this YouTube channel called “Flipping Johannesburg,” and it’s incredible. It’s tempting to move to South Africa in some ways because land and resources are so cheap. I could build my own house or purchase one in disrepair so that I could have more land for cheap and more room to overhaul. The last house I watched on “FJ” was 800,00R, which is about $40,000. It was a U-shape with everything from a garage to staff quarters to a huge pool in the middle. I am certain that it took a lot of work to get it where it is today, and also a lot more Rand. Because of this, I am grateful that when I cannot go to South Africa, Flipping Johannesburg brings it to me.

And finally, I am grateful for Zac. He and Oliver, who is a dog, have made me feel more at home. It’s so much fun to have two hiking buddies. It’s nice to have someone to hold onto when I walk. It’s exciting to see him when his car (Antimony) comes over the hill to the Kiss and Ride. Yes, that’s really what they call the place where you pick up and drop off.

If he gets there first, he’ll park. If I get there first, he barely has to slow down and I’m on his way home, anyway. It makes me feel good that he’s relatively close to the Metro so it’s not a big imposition to drive me around. He also knows that all he has to do is say “I’m busy” and I’ll Uber. He does it just to be sweet to me and I appreciate little things. Like, how it is problem to worry how I’ll get around? It was Sam’s whole deal, too, except that Zac (for some disastrous reason) thinks that I am a fully functioning adult and doesn’t have an issue with saying “God, I’m slammed. Meet me at my house.” Therefore, Sam never got to see that I’m a perfectly capable adult. She drove me around and sulked about it because she offered and then regretted it. So, of course the easy thing to do would be to stop offering to drive me around so that I don’t have the choice to say yes or no. Because I can feel energy very well and if you resent that you have to come get me, I’ll know it. I feel it like a scar on my skin.

I would only need a car if I moved from the DMV metro area and out into Virginia or to the eastern shore. With a combination of bus, train, and/or Uber I can get anywhere. I just need a little bit more notice. This is great because if you call me and say you want to do something short notice, I probably won’t want to do it, anyway. I am bad at transitions and like to have my calendar planned out in advance.

Therefore, I am limited to staying in the city because I don’t want to lose excellent transit without a car payment and insurance. A car is just another place for me to let stuff accumulate. I’m not sure I used my car for much more than a high speed crap wagon.

“High Speed Crap Wagon” is my new band name.

I’m grateful.