Tag: Blogging

Let’s Think About Breakfast

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What foods would you like to make?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just never got change.

We’re Trapped and We Should Lean on Each Other

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the Question

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dogs or cats?

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

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

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

Extrapolate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pet is not the issue here, Dude.

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

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

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

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

Proving I Know Jack, My Fictional Antihero

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s Try Fiction: Character Study

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

He sighs again.

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

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

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

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

But. There are complications.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus saves.

In the Right Context, All of Them

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Which activities make you lose track of time?

I have an extreme case of time blindness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It worked.

Your Blog Makes You Sound Like a Dick: Kitchen Edition

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 41 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Feels Like Getting Right with the Lord

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What bothers you and why?

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

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

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

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

Talking About Boundaries

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing gets easier, and yet we pretend it does.

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

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

Half a Line Bouncing Around

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

Truth According to Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.

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

Adventure Time

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Are you seeking security or adventure?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is yours.

Yes, Chef

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Two things have tickled me this week. The first was a meme talking about how people fawn over line cooks and somebody replied that line cook energy is Pete Davidson energy and she’d dated 15 of them. I wondered why if that was the case, why aren’t celebrities asking me out?

The other thing is that because of The Bear, people are starting to give line cooks/chefs Pedro Pascal energy. Yes, Chef is the new Daddy and I think it’s also hilarious. That’s because there is definitely something to watching us work. It’s mesmerizing. The mental and physical gymnastics on the brigade while it’s 110 degrees make us crazy and yet effective. Just know that it takes a lot to keep up that energy. Baby us when you can, because we hurt all over and our brains are fried. It’s not that the thinking is hard. It’s that it’s relentless. How do you time things to make sure everything is ready together? You work obsessively the whole time. We have more in common with athletes and ballet dancers than we don’t, because they don’t turn on the heaters and crank them up to hell at a basketball game.

I think that’s why Karens bother me so much.

It’s fine to complain about a restaurant’s food or service. However, Karens don’t seem to know how to get what they want without launching grenades. They will absolutely destroy someone’s self-esteem for a free soft drink…. and that’s not the scary part. The scary part is that they keep doing it over and over with absolutely no remorse. If I went on a date with someone like that, I would absolutely walk out in seconds. Even if I think you are God’s gift to the world, I will leave boot prints on your ass if you’re ever mean to waitstaff and cooks. That’s because there are some problems that can be worked out. There are some that can’t. Most of it depends on attitude. I have been a line cook for so long that I will not let it happen twice. Ever.

That’s because I’ve been hurt so badly that I’ve been taken to the ER twice in 25 years (I was waitstaff before I cooked), but I didn’t injure myself twice. I’ve worked a five hour shift after picking up a hot spoon where the plastic fused to my skin. I’ve still got a pink triangle on my arm from touching a convection oven, and I am proud of it on multiple levels.

Pink triangle on my sleeve…….

I have worked through the flu, migraines, shingles, you name it. In every restaurant where I’ve worked, if you needed help, you got it, but that shit takes a minute and a half, get back to work.

I could cut off a finger at some restaurants and they’d just put it in the walk in until we closed, because no one leaves til we’re done.

Yes, it is that bad, and I’m telling you that so the Karen shit stops.

I still have scars on my stomach from accidentally touching it with a fry basket because someone came toward me and I grabbed it reflexively.

If you’re wondering why so many of us are alcoholics and drug addicts, a small part of that is having no health insurance, so let that sink in. If no one is prescribing you actual medication, you have to get it from somewhere. However, we are all severely addicted to caffeine to the tune of several 300mg energy drinks a shift if we think we’re in the weeds.

And people wonder why I don’t watch “The Bear.” That shit is for waitstaff. For us, it’s just “trigger, trigger, trigger.” If I am ever in a coma, just play the sound of a ticket coming in and I will have my ass on grill IMMEDIATELY. I know that *some* cooks will watch it, but that’s not the majority. Most of us need Xanax after the first episode. You think that shit is easy? Chasing down a delivery before everything opens? That scene is where I went “nope.”

I went to bed thinking about my pars.

I went in on my days off because I needed to make sure everything was prepped because first rule is don’t trust anyone else. No one has your back in a meritocracy. It wasn’t a big deal to me, though, because sometimes it was just a matter of driving Dana when I was off. It wasn’t like I made a special trip. But still. Most blue collar workers don’t spend a second thinking about work off the clock and we dream ours.

If you quit a restaurant job, the sound of tickets coming in will haunt you for years.

The other thing you have to realize is that most waitstaff aren’t required to tip out the cooks, so the income disparity is enormous. They’re getting the pay while we’re doing all the work. It’s not your job to remember to tip out kitchen staff. People hardly ever do. But it is your job to recognize that you’re only seeing the top layer of a submarine…. just Denzel and Gene smoking cigars that cost more than drugs.

……and we’re all little ducks.

To handle that kind of pressure, we’re all assholes. Every single one. There has to be a relief valve somewhere. It is not unlike being a world class surgeon. You have to have the arrogance to believe you can save a life just like you have to have enough arrogance to believe that feeding 500 people is child’s play.

When it gets bad, people drink themselves to sleep. They drink on the line when it gets worse.

The kitchen itself is a drug from the moment you walk in. Even if you’re stone cold sober, you’ll feel adrenaline coursing through you. When I worked at a local brewpub, I drank Mexican Cokes after work and it still took several hours to calm down. I’m not an alcoholic/addict, but I don’t drink often now because I didn’t want to fall into the trap. Besides, their beer was barely below room temperature and all I wanted was ICE. The sugar replacement didn’t suck, either.

When I was working in the kitchen, I stayed up all night and slept most of the day. That’s because since it took so long to come down, I’d write until the wee hours. My favorite schedule was writing midnight to 0400, because I didn’t have to go to work until at least 1500, sometimes later. I fell easily into waking up at noon or one, and I had Bourdain’s perfect life, complete with anxiety and bipolar depression. It’s why he’s St. Anthony to all of us, really.

Dooce is not the only manic rambling spiral I aspire to be. I wanted to be Tony first. I didn’t want to do the whole TV thing, I just wanted to cook and write so that I didn’t have to do IT. I couldn’t write when I was in IT. I was tethered to my phone and laptop 24/7. I loved being able to be off.

The hardest part of cooking is that very little is open all night, and even though we *can* do our business before noon, dollars to donuts we won’t. We are too tired to do anything but sleep right up until service. I can be totally sober and still look like a tweaked out addict because there’s no one who doesn’t using caffeine at that level. It is straight up abuse.

So, when you come into our houses and treat us as lesser than, we get a bit………… testy.

If you want to know the power of the high, ask your coworkers whether they’ve ever been cooks. Most people who tell you they were will tell you they got out because of the stress and pain, and tell you it was one of the happiest times in their lives without taking another breath.

We don’t do it because it’s easy, we do it because it is hard…………. and chicks dig scars.

“Back of House”

Ryan Reynolds and Company

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you could host a dinner and anyone you invite was sure to come, who would you invite?

I want to meet Ryan Reynolds so much, because I love the Deadpool script. Based on that one thing, I think we’d have a great time. We’re writers who both struggle with anxiety, and if we are talented alone, we’d be hysterical together. If it was cool, I’d like to go to his house, because he has a brick pizza oven and I don’t. I know this because he invited Dave Letterman and that’s the only thing I remember. Ryan can make pizza. So, my perfect picture of a dinner party with Ryan is a large conference table decked out with food we made so that Blake Lively can eat with us before we throw down. My anxiety doesn’t help me write jokes that often, and being with other people helps tamp it down enough to get over myself. I’m really quite tired of me some days, and Ryan would relate. I know it. I can see it, feel it. There is a silent connection because he is my brother in arms, because it’s a huge fucking war.

We’d start with an MiB script because I love documentaries. 😉 If you don’t get that joke, it’s because I think MiB is a satirical look at CIA and MI-6. The Starbucks in the middle of Langley is my space port Burger King. Hot Sheets are PDBs. They’re arranged in a British hierarchy where Z = C, etc. Even K is a thing, although the rank above M hasn’t been in use since WWII. Since spycraft is built on deception, the rest of the world….. the ones that DON’T work for Mossad, we are all but citizens of Locker C (ADULT ENTERTAINMENT IN THE BACK). It’s all a send up, but if you’re looking for it, everything is there. Everything.

There’s also a *little bit* of FBI in there, because as Ken Taylor (Canadian Iranian Ambassador) points out in Argo, “I was expecting more of a G-man look.” Speaking of which, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are invited as well, because it would be the most idiotic move ever not to invite them. Matt Damon is one of my favorite writers, and Ben Affleck drove Argo like he stole it. Just holy shit. It’s fantastic. Remember yesterday I was talking about meeting creatives? Matt has been on my mind since Good Will Hunting, because he’s the one with serious chops. Good Will Hunting didn’t start out as a movie script. It was a play Matt wrote for a college class. A COLLEGE CLASS. In college, I had some home training, but not as famous as Marshall (or Kendrick, for that matter).

I would also invite Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, and Snoop Dogg. This is because people don’t think of this when it comes to rap, but it’s my next favorite genre behind classical…. because they tell stories just. like. me.

There is no justice in this world because I can’t invite Tupac Shakur. If you had anything to do with ANY OF THAT, I think I can say for all of us that we will never forgive you. Ever. There will never be another “Brenda Had a Baby.”

Oh my God. I just realized it’s hilarious that Ryan Reynolds’ first break was “Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place.” It makes me fall over with laughter thinking that he has a pizza oven now because he was a method actor back then.

I would be remiss not to invite my PVA friends, like Justin Furstenfeld, Mireille Enos, Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, et al. This is because I’d only want to invite the people I’d already met, because I am the type person that needs to have at least one person there that already knows me because I will stick to them like glue in order to feel safe.

Bryn is invited because we don’t have a relationship in which I wouldn’t, and not because she’s my friend. She deserves a seat at that particular table, because sometimes she’s funnier than me. I’m not being a jackass, it’s that we’re a tennis match. We trade laughs like stock.

I also have someone in mind that would go apeshit to be in that room, but she is not invited just so that I can watch her spiral out. It’s mean and it’s really fucking funny. I have a reader that will just die when they get to this part, and it’s not her. The only thing better would be popping popcorn and watching that level of crazy for free.

If I were to branch out on PVA alone, Justin Simian is also invited. I’m not sure there’s a funnier show on Netflix than Dear White People. His takedown of Scandal was just brilliant. I’m inviting writers and directors to get Mireille in something because watching her on screen is one of my great joys in life. I’m not hot for her, though I should be. It’s more than that. I love her to bits because she smiled at me on the first day of ninth grade, and I’ve never forgotten it because she was a senior when I was a freshman. That’s just not done, and she broke protocol.

I am glad that we’ve never taken a picture together, because that look? It’s just for me.

My friend Karen is also invited, because before she retired she was a kindergarten teacher and someone needs to keep me in line. I feel her professional skills would help her in that respect.

It would be a mix of people, but the writers are the most important. I don’t want to know them because they’re famous and I’m not. They don’t have anything I don’t, they’ve just hit big and I haven’t. I know because I went to High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. I am capable of being as good as they are now, because even they weren’t that good when they started.

It’s not the fame I’m after. It’s being able to workshop ideas.

It’s a working lunch….. with pizza.

I Think We’re Going to Need a Bigger Blog

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

According to WordPress, my stats are booming. It feels so validating and I’m impressed with all of you. You obviously have such good taste…… I don’t understand how the web works because I chose to stop thinking about it a long time ago. Therefore, I cannot crack the Facebook algorithm for love or money and right now I hate them.

However, what is clear to me is that of course I’m going to be successful on WordPress. It’s full of old timers like me. We’re the last people standing, which was actually my point about “taking over for Dooce.” Because we started within a year of each other, I want to carry on her institutional memory by being the manic rambling spiral she set out to be.

I know my beautiful girl finds this terrifying, and not because she’s afraid of more readers. She said that Dooce didn’t used to be a shitty writer, but she is now (referencing that she didn’t like the influencer/ad thing). I told her that it was her job to tell me when to retire and she could just resend that e-mail.

Meanwhile, I accept donations and I might monetize some stuff later on, but I really don’t have that level of trust capital yet. As I told Bryn, the web site itself will always be free. There just might be more stuff on top of it that you can access through other means. It may be as simple as just saving some entries for people who subscribe, because I don’t necessarily need this as a full time job, but I’d like it. Right now I’m building an audience and trying new things. I feel like it’s bold enough right now to say that you can give me money if you want to, because I am not living Comfort Eagle.

Although my hat IS on backwards and I’ll show you my tattoos.

Today is tomorrow and tomorrow is today…. yesterday is weaving in and out.

LOVE LOVE CAKE.

I love cake by the ocean, too. And apparently you guys noticed………… Source? Biggest day for likes in the history of this blog. Yesterday.

It reminds me of Weeds….. “you don’t sell shit. Drugs sell themselves.”

Extrapolate.

In any case, I just came to say how grateful I am to all of you, because my life looks bigger than it did on Wednesday.

Leveling up has been obtained through time blindness and tumbling into rumination. Playing to my strengths. That’s fucking weird because it seems like things are going well.