Tag: dailyprompt

Let’s Pretend It’s Yesterday

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 6 Comments

What’s your #1 priority tomorrow?

Pretending it is yesterday is important because there is no tomorrow. There is only today and making it through. Every year I think it’s going to be different, but it’s not. The anniversary of my mother’s death hits me like a freight train. I don’t forget my mother is dead anymore. I don’t have the three second heartbreak every morning. It doesn’t stop body memory from throwing me for a loop, though.

I think that’s because I didn’t cry at her funeral. I worked it.

I didn’t fall apart until after I’d come back to DC, because I don’t do public grief. Being in show mode cost me, but it was less expensive than what I would have felt if I’d wept openly. No one would have made fun of me or anything like that. Me not emoting isn’t based on other people. It’s based on how I feel about being vulnerable, because my personality seems to believe that empathy only flows one direction at church. I’ve never been a member of a church in my life. Not really. I’ve never turned off that preacher’s kid mentality where it’s not my turn to grieve, it’s the congregation’s. So, at church (regardless of denomination because I haven’t been UMC since 17) I am always in show mode.

After my mother died, I lasted a few weeks at church. I eventually went back, then noped out a second time. I won’t go back unless I’m a paid ringer in a choir, because I can catch sermons on YouTube (or preach them myself by putting manuscripts here). I can find a lot of things at church, but God is not it. Doesn’t make me less spiritual, or make my belief in Jesus’ message less pure. It’s that church, for so long, has only meant “work” to me. Thus, getting paid to be a section leader instead of being an actual parishioner. I’m great at church as a choir member or lay preacher. I’m am absolute shit at sitting there and just taking it all in. Just being a member does nothing for me, because I’m a preacher’s kid. I can’t turn it off. I am not there to serve. I am there to lead, because that’s what i know to do. I got an F in church member. Periodt. Pastoral care is for other people, those that can look at a church without seeing the sausage being made. That tape starts running the first Sunday I attend, because I’ll overhear someone on the vestry or whatever at coffee hour. I can case the joint in 15 minutes and tell you whether the church is healthy or not, because you don’t have to have a degree to know that. You have to have thousands and thousands of hours of observation.

I have them.

My dad said something to me after he left the church that’s always stuck with me, and why National Cathedral is my church now (via YouTube) and why it’s pretty much the only place I want to audition. He said that after he left the church, he just wanted to be anonymous. We ended up at St. Martin’s because they had like, I don’t know, 10,000 members or something? I don’t know what it is, but it’s a lot. Everyone from me to James Baker and George Bush (who I was not that excited to meet……….. as a president. Meeting the former director of CIA was amazing.) Speaking of which, that reminds me of something Zac said. Just replace “church” with “government.”

When I walk into a church, it feels like when Zac says, “I’m a middle aged white man who works for the government. I’m here to help.”

I fall over laughing because it’s funny, AND I’m 10 years older than him and finding out HE’s middle aged was quite a trip. but the point stands. I feel like that on the first Sunday I visit every church. It was so freeing when I stopped doing that.

So, to anyone who thinks I’m an idiot for preaching about Jesus while also not going to church, you and me? We are not the same. You love it because you don’t feel the pull between “this is amazing” and “been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.” I will never fit into a congregation until I can submit and give up an authority I don’t have. That authority was the nature/nurture that raised me, so I’m never going to get there, never ever in my five dollar life, so I made change.

Preacher’s kids come in two flavors. “This is everything I want out of life” and “fuck this shit.” The latter is for second children, and gets stronger the more kids you have. i think the pull to follow in your parents’ footsteps is based on how old your younger siblings are in comparison, because what I’ve noticed is that the longer you spend as the only support staff, the more you feel bound to it. If you don’t become a minister, you’ll marry one because it’s what you know. Do not ever in your five dollar life think I’m bullshitting you about having been support staff, because even if you’re a “fuck this” preacher’s kid, your congregation will still see you as an employee. They can’t help it. The preacher’s kids are divine somehow, way better than their kids.

Having known two of them my whole life, I’m going to go with “that’s a no from me, dawg.” Sending your kids to the preacher’s house because you think we’ll rub off on them is valid………. but what you see is what you get. You just weren’t looking for truth. You were looking at me through the filter of my dad’s platform. I promise that if I’d been a pastor, I would have been every bit as good as he was, because you learn everything by osmosis and then you get a degree you don’t need. Ministry could come through work experience alone. That’s because you’ll learn a shit ton of new things, but old habits die hard. What was modeled is how you’ll be.

The reason I would have been great and not just good is that my father’s forte was going into churches that had been fractured and making them whole, and you can see it clear as day. I am so glad that I did not grow up with a toxic mess of a pastor………. the one who broke the church before him, which has absolutely no bearing at all on my 20s and 30s. Eyeroll (seriously. Biggest one on record).

Pastors, let me scare you a little bit because you need to be aware. If you have the type child that can case the joint like I am, we can tell what kind of pastor you are. If you are a toxic mess, we know it. You cannot hide it. Handle your shit and get help. Do you think we know this because we’re so smart? Fuck, no. It’s because when you’re a train wreck, our behavior makes us political pawns. I know that and I never did anything that as out of the realm of normal teenage girl behavior and I was still in this shit if the finance committee decided to revolt.

They’re mad at you, but they don’t get mad at you. They treat us completely differently as if we can’t read them blind. Their energy has changed. Just because my dad wasn’t toxic doesn’t mean he didn’t walk into a wall of bullshit first.

My mom walked me through that with all the strength she had, so when she died, church didn’t look the same. I didn’t realize how much association there was in it. That when my mother left the church building, God left with her.

I find God through music. Bach is like praying twice. If I have a God moment in church, it’s going to reside in a chord. The ultimate God moment for me is Easter morning at a church like National Cathedral, where they go all out with pipe organ, brass quintet, and full choir. Welcome to my definition of the trinity. Trumpet players act like they’re God, so it’s a shorter leap than you think. 😉

Maybe I’ll use great works in my plans for tomorrow. Listening to music like that heals grief, the only thing I really need.

To close, here is the best Mommy and me moment I own, made for me by my father’s father:

First and Second Chair

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

In what ways does hard work make you feel fulfilled?

The title is a music reference, because when you’re the lead trumpet player, depending on where you live it’s called “first chair” or “first desk.” Everyone has a chair, and they’re ranked. Yes, I have been as low as 7th chair. I wish I’d done better on that audition. But I was 7th in the city of Houston. Beat that with  stick.

I was also 13 years old.

I am not a prodigy. I make a lot of mistakes.  I’ve splatted wrong notes on the back walls of MOST Houston auditoriums, but a time I didn’t and it went really well, I was on a television show called “Black Voices.” I was a soloist during Summer Jazz Workshop. Didn’t make it less funny when I was on camera. I am just picturing all my black friends falling over with laughter right now. “You were on what now?” My favorite was the logo over my big ass glasses.

Another time it went really well was when I was in one of the jazz bands (I was in Jazz II. I told you I wasn’t a prodigy. But again, different playing field. You know who else was in Jazz II? Robert Glasper from “The Robert Glasper Experiment.” and Jon Durbin from “The Suffers.” If I’d stuck with it, maybe I’d have a Tiny Desk Concert of my own, but I sincerely, sincerely doubt it. I loved performance. I was unconvinced by hard work. It’s not because I didn’t want to do hard work. It’s that my embouchure was wrong (how you set your jaw and ilps), which made practicing for more than a half hour complete murder, and it’s good concerts don’t last that long because I’m not sure I would have made it through all of them, either. For that reason alone, symphony was wonderful for me because in general, trumpet parts in classical music alternate between resting for 200 measures and the most majestic clarion call you’ve ever heard. It feels like being a goalie when your team is superb.

Most of the time, everyone is on the other end of the pitch, but when it’s your turn, you come up BIG. You have to have enormous balls for classical music, because a random eighth note high A in the middle of nowhere and perplexingly alone is not uncommon. The other thing s that I could hit a high A out of nowhere, but it may wander a bit in pitch from left to right until I find dead center. In classical music, this is not an option. It must be crisp and clean, every note tapered. The hard work was never the notes, though. The hard work for me was in reading music the first time accurately, which takes thousands of hours to learn how to do.

I have never been so relieved in my life than when I went to a huge ass choir competition in high school. The sight reading portion was lifted straight out of the United Methodist Hymnal. It was the first time in my life I had “sight read” anything so perfectly. And no, I did not tell anyone…. no trumpet player (or soprano, for that matter) would tell you they had an edge at something. Trumpets are line cooks. Sopranos are line cooks with nail polish.

I got into choir the same way. I auditioned, and I got into the junior varsity choir. I asked the choir director, “are you sure? I’ve done major works at my church…. messiahs and requiems and all that stuff.” Believe me, questioning her was the hardest work I’ve ever done, but I came up big. She gives me this contemptuous look and throws a Handel at me. Hard. Then, she picks the most exposed, most difficult entrance she can find……………… FOR HER. Bitch, I earned this. She thought she was so clever, but I’d been in the adult choir for three or four years by this point. You know what you do EVERY SINGLE YEAR? The Messiah, or at least highlights. Few churches put on “the whole thing” (in quotes because even that is redacted most of the time by taking out optional sections. It’s long. It’s really, really long. And you do “The Hallelujah Chorus” occasionally at Easter as well. This was not a piece with which I was unfamiliar. I’d memorized the highlights by now…. and if I could explain my voice type, it would be “Charlotte Church as a teen.” My voice (and hers) has matured, but still what people at Bridgeport used to call my “high, high, fluty voice.” I drove that audition like I stole it, and I was the first person in the history of Clements to be in varsity band and choir at the same time.

I’ve just noticed I sound like an obnoxious dick. It goes with the territory, but I figure I can tell you I’m good at something when I’ve spent so much time telling you all the ways in which I need to get it together and how my life is an emotional dumpster fire of my own making a lot of the time.

Additionally, I gave up trumpet a long time ago. I’ve taken prescription meth for a very long time (Adderall or Concerta, depending on what release schedule we’re doing this month……… eyeroll……..), and it has been murder on my jaw and teeth, just like for junkies. Therefore, playing my horn is painful because of the sound vibrations. The fact that I don’t play anymore has not occurred to the rest of my personality, because I have turned ego up to eleven when I need it. The key words are “when I need it.” I don’t need to walk around DC feeling 10 feet tall and bulletproof all the time. I’m sure that if I dressed like a baller I could walk into any meeting anywhere and fake it. You cannot convince me for love or money that I do not have the smarts to be a Rep or a Senator. Not possible anymore. But I have the mental acuity to do the job. I am woefully unelectable, mostly because I would hate every minute of campaigning. I would frustrate the fuck out of my support staff because my answer to every problem would just be “let’s skip it. There will be people there. ” But if I was in Congress doing the job, I’d be as diligent as ADHD allows you to be, and on my worst day I would wipe the floor with Y’all Queda. I’d probably be censured by my own party for my language, but nothing I said would be untrue. Congress has issues and they scare me. The legislation doesn’t matter right now. The people are sub-par, and that’s okay now.

Because of all of these experiences (except working in Congress. I was a political science student, so I know about working in that part of Washington, I just don’t.), writing sets me on fire. I’m old enough now that I really have stories. It’s age that gives me credibility now, because I don’t have letters to fall back on. Graduating from college has been a shit show because I am barely capable of working a full-time job and going to school. I should have stayed the extra year in Houston to finish up, but I had a partner with a very lucrative job offer who said “go to George Mason. it’s right across the road.” I didn’t even get a chance to enroll and register for classes before that deal fell apart.

Besides, I got my money’s worth, anyway. I wasn’t one of Brene Brown’s kids at Graduate School of Social Work, but she was one of mine when I was the supervisor of their computer lab. I actually got into the Graduate School of Social Work contingent upon my BA. I’d just helped the Dean figure out a very complicated computer issue and she was very grateful. But I didn’t get into GSSW based on that issue. It was based on the conversation I had with her while trying to fix it. I always chat about nothing because people have no idea what I’m doing. All they hear is “blah, blah, blah, I’m done.” So, we engage in small talk and she’s the Dean of the GSSW and I’m an INFJ. I didn’t get in because of what I do. I got in because of who I am.

The thing is, though, I’d forgotten all about it because all I heard from Kathleen was “blah, blah, blah let’s go to DC.” And if I had thought about it, it wouldn’t have changed my mind because unless I’m at my family’s house and never leave to do anything, Houston feels like a toxic mess. The only exception to this is that Lindsay still lives there and introverts don’t make friends. An extrovert adopts you and drags you into public.

That’s the hard work right there. Being industrious enough to make my own friends and get my own dates. It took a lot of courage to lay it all out in front of Zac and say “this is what I’m dealing with, are you in?” In fact he was. ❤ The added bonus is that Zac told me that he was military intelligence the second time I met him, but not the first. So, I actually was brave enough to get my own date that time and manifested a really great partner, because my interest in intelligence doesn’t come from him. It just provides us with “intelligent” conversation.

He doesn’t emotionally overload me and I don’t do it to him. That’s because I process like a lesbian all day and by the time it’s evening I do not give a fuck about my feelings. (I just laughed so hard I would have made Oliver jump straight in to the air if he was here.) Zac doesn’t hear my bullshit, because I don’t need him for that. In fact, it’s great when he opens up to me about his problems, because I’ve spent enough time on myself.

Editor’s Note: Straight women are crazy. Absolutely insane. Why do you not date bi men when you’re all over gay men like white on rice? I would bet A LOT of money that my boyfriend smells better than yours and I’ve never even met him. Remember when we used to have a special term just for straight men who bathed? Straight women worry a whole, whole lot when his ex is male. They can save a lot of time and energy by not doing that.

Also, I’m a good enough writer that I could have gotten into a GSSW anywhere. You see all the stream of consciousness crap, but I clean up nice. 😉  I sometimes feel bad that you’re getting the B-sides and rough drafts, but at the same time, this is the hard work (said in Kristen Bell’s voice). Blogging is writing as a valid art form. It is a lesliecology of brain droppings in which I can cherry pick the best lines I’ve come up with and use them elsewhere. So much of my writing comes from e-mail and Facebook comments because I’m reflecting on something that someone else said, or something I’ve written previously works even better in another context. Making the commitment to write every day without fail. I got up to 63 days before I broke my streak for one. This is because writing is a muscle. I will not be a good writer until I can write in any mood, in any situation, in any anything. Creativity is a grind, and I will not be where I want to be without woodshedding, a music term that extrapolates nicely here.

When you’re practicing, some parts of a piece are really easy. The notes, that is. You still have to craft a narrative and that’s where the work comes in. That being said, you have to be technically accurate before you can craft the narrative, so you isolate the four measures in which you’re really going to be screwed during a concert if you miss. In a symphony, you have moments where if you miss a note, it won’t be noticeable because there are 150 people playing next to you. At others, there are three. When you’re out there all by yourself, it is frankly really fucking scary. You learn to manage, but it doesn’t go away.

Through voice lessons, I’ve become a phenomenon with singing comparatively.

It’s not how good of a singer I am, it’s what a train wreck of a trumpet player I was. I mean, obviously, there are high points to when I was living that life, but I feel so much more at home in my body as a singer because apparently the large amount of metal in front of my face was blocking my talent.But now that I’ve worked really hard in all things, given my whole heart to everything and everyone I’ve ever loved, I only have one thing left to say.

I am fulfilled.

Second chair no longer exists.

You Got Me Straight Trippin, Boo

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the trait you value most about yourself?

I’m not so good at talking about my “traits,” because it feels like all of them are somewhere in the middle in terms of value being good or bad. I’m tripping because none seem more important than the other.

For instance, being queer does not make me interesting in and of itself. Overcoming other people’s reactions to me being queer is what makes me brave, because it’s not something to which people have the right to react. It is what it is.

To me, it’s all like that. A trait’s beauty is dependent on its circumstances. If having brown eyes had been interpreted as wrong in the Bible, I would be overcoming fear and hatred of that instead. It’s the same amount of important.

Plus, my mind is an interesting combination of nothing right now, because I just woke up about 20 minutes ago (getting up at 0700 hasn’t taken. It’s 0520). I could go downstairs, get some coffee, read the paper. But that’s what normal people do. Creativity is a cruel mistress, even when it’s Internet word vomit.

[At this point I started joking with Cora (The War Daniel’s daughter who is now also mine)… Why was I not smart enough to have a child that lives with me? “The problem with using infants for waitstaff is that you get very poor service.” -Lemony Snickett She’s 25. Still funny.]

We’ve been chatting back and forth- she’s got some amazing artwork and I was telling her she should put it up on CafePress. All kinds of weird creatures with extensive back story- just more creative than I’ll ever be with visual art. She could make money easily because all she’d have to do is upload her art digitally. CafePress buys all the merchandise and you just pay for what you use- no up front cost because the costs to CafePress are billed to the customer.

I did a limited run of “Fanagans’ Wake” t-shirts, as well as one for line cooks that says “Keep Calm and Sell the Rail,” and they eventually did ok. But I’m not Cora. I enjoy working with fonts and spacing. She can design and decorate whole worlds.

An inborn trait for all INFJs is wanting others to be the best they can be. I thought of this because when Cora started sending me her artwork, I thought it might be useful for her to know about CafePress, and not because I’m trying to direct her into success. I genuinely would like to have a coffee mug with her artwork on it because I’m not saying that as “overbearing tiger queer mom.” I mean that her work wouldn’t look out of place at ComiCon, and I believe that the only reason she’s not making bank is that she’s an unknown. All unknowns start somewhere, and I’m getting in on the ground floor. I am also not here to make my dreams her reality.

INFJs think in visions of what might be. We start with an issue and spin it out. We throw everything on the table to see what it looks like and look before we leap to an enormous degree…….. except in my case, this is often derailed when I have stars in my eyes to an enormous degree. But everyone goes stupid at love. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t.

I saw kids with Auna.

I saw living with Theresa.

I saw being old with Sam.

I do see being old with Supergrover because life is long and it’s not over. I am terribly small, but would never sing that particular song.

None of these things have or have yet come true, and it doesn’t matter that they didn’t or haven’t. That’s because the visions in my head are only guidance. I think in some ways it’s my brain protecting me from fear. That if things do work out, here’s what it will look like. Here is a goal you can work towards.

It was particularly important for me to see a future with Sam because I was so terrified. I am glad she broke up with me in retrospect, but she’d have to know just how many walls she broke down in order for me to even go on a date with her, especially after she gave me so many red flags in the beginning that I just ignored because she was adorable and I felt safe. Even with the red flags, everybody’s got ’em, so I would have tried harder had she let me. I’m just glad I didn’t have to. It was too early to work hard. I’m sure I came with red flags, too, clearly. I’m just glad I didn’t have to mourn her, because Supergrover was there to catch and told me how much of an idiot Sam was. She has a history of telling the absolute truth, so it was easy to rest in my pet monster on a leash.

If you’re playing Skyrim, she’s very unapologetic that she is Alduin.

She’s not. She is Paarthurnax for everything he was, is, and will be.

I want the best in life for her, too. If she was a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbeder, I believe she would see some direct correlations to our relationship with Uncle Iroh and Zuko. It feels amazing that I’m in season three now.

If you never met Supergrover or she never sent you a photo, you’d think you were being e-mailed by a prize fighter, but one who seems like he spends his time at home painting his nails and wearing a tutu just to see his daughter smile. But then you look at her and realize that she’s a six year old girl with lots of complicated layers who also believes in adorably seductive and tasteful Halloween costumes, thanks be to God.

Just because we’re not a couple doesn’t mean I can’t be interested when Vogue magazine is on the coffee table. I, just like her, love pictures of beautiful people. I’d like to see pictures of her in different outfits and settings whether I knew her personally or not. I love photography. I do know her personally, though, so I pretend like settings and outfits matter when I’m really only looking for her microexpressions.

An inborn trait of INFJs is that we all know you can’t tell when someone is happy by looking at someone who’s smiling. It is not found there. It is found in their eyes, the way their muscles tense when pulled just so, whether crow’s feet go up or down (in my case). You can hide a drained soul from many people. I am just not one of them.

If you are my friend, though, I do have boundaries. If I can tell that you’re struggling, I will not intrude unless I feel there is clear and present danger. I need you to be capable of realizing that you’re struggling and asking for help. I also see when people are incapable of doing those things and probably won’t just step in, but I will be relentless about telling you to handle your shit with medication and therapy. It’s not my job to fix you, but it is my responsibility to tell you when your behavior is affecting me. I am not the be all and end all, but I know from depression and alcoholism. If I’m willing to say something, it’s already bad because I’m not judgmental about everything. I assume you’ve got it handled right up until you don’t. However, I’m not sure I would be insistent with someone who didn’t live with me. Their behavior just doesn’t affect me enough for it to be a burden on me otherwise, and criticism is always unwelcome no matter how constructive you’re trying to be. No one thinks you are trying to lance a boil. It’s always an attack.

I’ll give you a huge for-instance. I couldn’t, shouldn’t, and didn’t tell Dana to stop drinking or I’d leave. That’s because I was in the situation, not looking down on it. Is it surprising to anyone that I accidentally developed a wandering eye? I needed a catalyst for change, and Supergrover was it. The “accidentally” part is that I did not go into that relationship expecting anything close. I walked into a wall of bullshit I’m still not out of yet. Even she would agree that I stepped in it up to my ass, because she knows she’s a handful and calls her own life crazy because it is. Laying out the story exactly how it happened is like that scene from Men in Black II:

J: Okay. Straight to the point. [whispers in a serious voice] You are a former agent of a top-secret organization that monitors extraterrestrials on Earth. We’re the Men in Black. We have a situation, and we need your help.

K: There’s a free mental health clinic at the corner of Lilac and East Valley. Next!

No one gets this life by accident, and yet I did….. just through my inborn traits.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier (Spy)

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

List three jobs you’d consider pursuing if money didn’t matter.

There’s four. I’m giving you a bonus.

Or it would have been a bonus answer if it wasn’t a joke. I couldn’t think of three jobs at first so I just went with a movie title. I would be good at none of these things except spy, and even then I would be good at the people part, not the paying attention part. Prevailing wisdom says that’s a bad idea. You can’t have a disorganized priority list when people’s lives are counting on it. I am the god of chaos wherever I go.

Editor’s Note: At this point I got lost in a tangent when my mind flipped to “chaotic god.” Just roll with it. I’ll circle back eventually.

Supergrover is neurotypical, which makes me fall over with laughter that our bff name has always been “The Holy and The Moly.” The funniest part is that I didn’t come up with it. Dana knows us. We’ve met. Whether I am chaotic good, neutral, or bad depends on perspective. I will accept either. I would imagine Dana thinks of me as both depending on the hour. Supergrover would look at me with amusement and say, “hard same.” I wouldn’t notice anything except the playful nature of her eyes. I think of her as Aziraphale in the bathtub at the end of Good Omens Season one. I think of me as Crowley in the other bathtub. Those of you who know what I’m talking about will see what I mean immediately………………

Aziraphale and Crowley could have been the couple that best represented us right up until they kissed. At the time, I was hurt. Friendship is underrepresented and I felt a relationship where they were deep, open, and vulnerable without romance was something vastly underrepresented on TV. I wasn’t disappointed, necessarily. Just that what was a good analogy became a bad one for me, but that has nothing to do with Neil Gaiman’s talent as a writer.

I get enough of that type friendship on Doctor Who to last me a lifetime. You just have no idea how much I am Martha Jones, or would want to be. Remember how Martha went through shit with The Doctor and it made her attracted to him? Remember when she got over it and saved his ass on multiple occasions because she realized that there was something bigger than her at work? Hard same, said with the same amusement in my eyes. I liken it to Jodie Whitaker being cast during Martha’s storyline instead of David Tennant. (Random aside… who says “Martha” better than Matthew Rhys on “The Americans?”)

Back to me.

I probably could win at being the CIA trainee to recruit an asset first at The Farm (they put on scenarios like cocktail parties). If you were going to bet on me, bet on me for that. I am smooth enough that the plant would just tell me. I can get one of the best spies in the world to tell me what she knows with a wink and a smile. I had Jonna Mendez dead to rights, where she couldn’t say anything and absolutely did. If you’re wondering, it was whether she worked on a Cold War movie. Her redirect was “maybe we should hire you.” What I should have said was, “dear God, you can’t imagine what a bad idea that is.” What I actually sad was………… nothing.

After that, I developed an affinity for satchels.

Now that we’ve fully explored my dream life, because I couldn’t get away from the bipolar thing even if money were no object, let’s talk about real stuff.

If money were no object, I would do two things. I would become a TA and get a master’s in whatever I felt like, in perpetuity. Read law at Oxford if I wanted, what the hell? When I wasn’t working on school, I’d be writing. It would just be a lot harder to make time for it. I think I’d be a great TA in divinity, history, psychology, political science, sociology, and education, particularly music education. I couldn’t be a choir director now, but I could learn. I have also worked with kids long enough not to get rattled, which is harder than learning to conduct.

Although, the thing that grates on my ear most is sopranos who are out of tune, even me, and at that age, all kids have high voices. I would learn to be good at my job for the sake of saving my hearing. If I was a band director, beginning oboe will clear your sinuses.

I would be a wonderful musician if I wanted that life. I know that I’m good enough for an opera chorus, and could be trained for mainstage roles because I was offered one when I worked at Marylhurst and I turned it down (I don’t remember the role, but it was Penzance). At the time, I was terrified. I didn’t even show up for the audition even though I was wanted for the role already. It was more of a coaching session.

That’s because the role was for a lyric soprano, not a mezzo, and at the time, it was pre-voice lessons. I now know I’m a true lyric, but it would still take years not to Florence Foster Jenkins my way through “Queen of the Night.” I knew I had one aria in me. I didn’t think I had all of them in one night. The workout to do that is tremendous. You just don’t see that from the audience because it happens internally. It feels like circuit training trying to get your body do respond quickly. You can’t have air when you need it the most. You just have to deal and move on. Sometimes, that’s another soprano in your section bailing you out. As a soloist, you’re completely screwed if you haven’t inhaled down to your feet. The heavy lifting is being able to control that much air after you have it so that it doesn’t all come out all at once. I cry with laughter when I think of the flops I’ve had. Wrong notes are horrifying in the moment and hilarious later.

I just don’t want to live that life, because it’s piecemeal. I wouldn’t have a permanent place in a choir unless I was in the military. I’d have to get contracts all over the world and move frequently. The gig economy is not easy, so I just don’t want to do it. I will probably end up auditioning for Washington National Opera Chorus or National Cathedral’s choir eventually. The thought of hiking to Georgetown twice a week doesn’t thrill me, though.

The life I’d like to live is quiet. Even if something of mine goes viral, I will still want to take it in from a distance. I only trust those closest around me because they’ll keep my head on straight. I would rather keep being an introvert and able to produce because I’m not lost in noise vs. signal. The signal comes in purer the less there is to compete with it.

So, I suppose my ultimate job is ogre. Just get off my lawn, but know I’m okay because Fiona and Donkey are around somewhere.

Letting me control my chaos in peace.

This Kid Named Leslie

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What aspects of your cultural heritage are you most proud of or interested in?

I don’t want to write about my white cultural heritage. It’s not interesting, but I will give you the highlights. There are Irish and English immigrants in my family. The most direct was an indentured servant who ended up in Louisiana, where later descendents settled in northeast Texas. My mother, father, stepmother and me were all raised there (sort of, we moved a lot with my dad being a pastor). Lindsay was not born until we moved to Houston, but we returned to northeast Texas for five years shortly after that. It was a quiet life interrupted by bursts of show mode…………….. although I did have a great, great uncle somewhere tied to organized crime in, I think, Rhode Island. That seems to track. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my next career, but mafia seems to be a viable option given my personality on some days. Anxiety and depression feel like the mafia. You get irritated and want to whack an employee, but you’re self-employed.

Yes, Where were we?

I come from Irish and English people, but not with landed titles and Downton Abbey and all that crap. My family was basically owned by the English, not even close to American slavery though very close to Reconstruction. When the Civil War ended, enslaved people were sometimes hired back to their plantations, but weren’t paid enough to really leave. That was my family’s situation. The English would do shit like give us land to rent, but they could take it any time they wanted and you’d never be able to pay off the debt you owed on tools, etc. Many, many people escaped Ireland through work contracts, which is what my ancestor did. The contract paid for his passage, and was a seven-year logging thing in which he cut off a leg two years in. Answers to the name “Lucky.”

Even with that fun fact, there are billions of people who’ve come through the US since its inception by rich white people offloading their indentured servants, enslaved people, and criminals here. America was Australia before it was cool. Still white people history. So, again, not interesting.

It’s queer history that makes me interesting.

Being queer is to take on institutional pain, passed down from one generation to the next. We don’t grow up biologically together (most of the time), so it’s a process to seek out a family that understands….. for most of history, the family that took you in when your first family just couldn’t get over their vengeful God long enough to stop themselves from being terrible parents (and worse in-laws). Children are not capable of supporting themselves at 15 and 16. You’d be surprised at how many just have to figure it out….. and not because it’s surprising to queer people. It’s surprising to the people who generally don’t want to look it up. It’s so hard to be them.

Because I did have someone queer in my life at an early age, I was braver than most because I didn’t see being queer as abnormal anymore…. but this was after two years of torturing myself first. Bad things happen when people come out. It’s more rare today than it was in the ’80s, but it’s alive and kicking. Look up the rates for homeless queer youth. It’s not acceptable. Stop pretending it is.

If you think I’m being harsh, fuck your feelings. This has got to stop, and I know because I’m from the belly of the beast. If you think legislation about trans kids’ medication in Texas is bad, you’re just seeing the surface. Imagine what these kids go through at home when they’re born to people like this rather than to people fighting against them.  Trans people are taking the fire right now, but gay people were (and still are in some circles) called mentally ill pedophiles for centuries.

Gay people are not predators. Predators are predators. And straight people are like, 85-90% of the population. It’s not gay people that are the problem, because even though there are gay predators, too many kids are abused for those numbers to check out. Not many people are gay. Many people are power hungry and some are ill enough to take it from a child.

So, to straight people, the call is coming from inside the house.

I was never molested by a queer person, but certainly had my life interrupted by that kind of absolute power imbalance. But having my life interrupted wasn’t all bad because I came out earlier. I don’t think I would have had an easy time in school if I’d stayed in the closet all the way through. There were too many people that used it as leverage. I know this because it was very popular to tease me for being gay even though I never said I was. They just knew it got the desired painful reaction and liked it.

Once I started wearing rainbow shit to school, all that stopped. It wasn’t blackmail, so it wasn’t fun……… which is how I have a legacy at Clements and my girlfriend at the time doesn’t. She was with me, but she wasn’t out, Therefore, I know I did something that makes me happy because I had the courage to do what many people couldn’t. It’s not a slam on her, it’s saying that I didn’t realize how important the story would become to me now that it’s been so many years. That I’m happy I had the courage to stand up then, because it makes me feel strong now.

I don’t have to wonder if my life would have been better had I come out later, because it was hell on earth then. I was just surviving, doing what I had to do. In retrospect, it feels like a badge of honor.

My sister is almost six years younger than me, with our birthdays being June and September, respectively. So, she didn’t get to elementary school until I was in junior high and didn’t get to high school until I was in college (and I would have been gone if I’d taken four years). So, I was a junior at University of Houston before I heard what happened:

When my dad left the church, I really stopped giving a shit about who knew what. I wore Pride rings (fruit loops) and had a rainbow ring and a couple other things that I bought under the radar (we all think that. Give it to us. Let us believe we are oh-so-clever.). It got me two things. The first is that I stopped getting teased. The second is that I could advertise.

She was an athlete. I felt like a god.

So, in addition to getting the girl, it was the rainbow accessories that made me a legacy.

I was off doing my own thing, oblivious.

My sister told me that she saw a group of kids with rainbows on their backpacks. She thought it was really brave, so she asked them about it. They said, “oh, we all do it. That way no one knows who’s gay.” Lindsay said, “who started it?”

They said, “I think it was this kid named Leslie.”

I will never do anything in my life more important than this.

What’s On Brand for Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What brands do you associate with?

Sometimes I think about “if I were an influencer, what would I want to promote?” It’s just a fun thought exercise, but if I had enough power to get things done in the advertising industry, here’s the people I’d like to give me stuff for free because I’ve been singing their praises for years without them cutting me a check.

Bombas Socks

I got the recommendation from Pete Holmes and have never looked back. Just order 10 pairs and throw your other ones out. They’re just the best ever and I will buy them until I’m dead unless they do something lame like change them in any way at all ever. They are ADHD/Autism relief in a box.

American Giant Hoodies

The Original Hoodie is the only jacket you will ever need. It’s double weight, double stitched, and all the hardware is strong and comfortable. No rough edges and extraordinarily well made. If you have teenagers, you need to buy one for yourself and one for them or you’ll never see yours again. Can’t find it? Check your daughter’s closet.

Starbucks Coffee

I don’t like Starbucks because it’s the best. Far from it. I like Starbucks because I’m ADHD and it tastes the same all over the world. It tastes the same on Connecticut Ave. in downtown DC as it does at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. I checked. (CDG does have chocolate cereal milk lattes and I will die mad they don’t make them here.)

Nescafe

Talking about Paris reminded me that Starbucks was the best coffee I had while I was there. I think “French Roast” is a lie they tell little kids. My dad and I didn’t find a decent independent coffee shop or a Starbucks anywhere. The Starbucks was at the airport. So, I became absolutely reliant on the little packets of Nescafe the maids left for us at our hotel, which does not taste like American instant coffee at all. It was good. Therefore, I would pitch Nescafe all over the world because you can stuff packets in your suitcase in advance just in case you get somewhere and nothing is above Folgers with extra water. I know I will have a personal friend living in France or a French reader that will tell me I just went to the wrong coffee shop. Please, prove me wrong. That would be great. I need a place to go the next time I’m in Paris, and I want to live there for a few months so we can stretch out. I can already tell you that you can just show up at the Musee D’Orsay the first couple of days after I arrive. No worries I won’t be there. Vincent and I need some alone time. Maybe I can sneak some Nescafe into “our room.”

Chuy’s

No clothing brand represents me better when they’re on point. I think they have the best graphic designers in the business. I have several t-shirts and a hoodie that I wear constantly, except the one that says “Expecto Burrito.” I gave that one to Goodwill. Yes, I know Chuy’s is a restaurant, but their merchandise is very affordable and well made. I think my favorite Chuy’s shirt has the outline of the Chuy’s fish with Walter White hat and sunglasses. It says “Heisenchuy.” I also have a very cute kids’ t-shirt that’s a throwback to 80s Nintendo and says “Super Tex-Mex Brothers.” It’s perfect because I’ve worn it enough that now it actually looks retro instead of a current kids’ shirt. I also have one that’s still in production. It’s a Tattooine-type desert with a lone man and says something about “Juan Solo.”

Bourbon Moth

I love Jason Hibbs’ designs, and I would fill my whole house with his furniture if I could afford to commission Jason or buy the equipment to make it all. Having no idea how to construct anything, I think everything would turn out better if I just paid him. Jason is the kind of furniture maker that you want to entrust with your daughter’s first rocking chair when you find out she’s pregnant, or the crib she’s eventually going to need. You don’t just trust anyone with those projects, and he’s at the top of my list. Here’s how much I would trust Jason:

I would trust Jason’s vision if I lost a child, as well.

CIA/FBI/DNI/DIA/Pentagon/Branches of the Military,etc.

I’m putting the names of the agencies in here because I can’t find the name of the company that makes their swag. So, I know you can’t just walk into any of these gift shops, but you have options in terms of seeing if you know anyone. I say this because Zac has brought me several things from those shops and they’ve all been as well-made as my American Giant hoodie. None of the t-shirts have had tags, all the hardware is smooth, the workout clothes are double weight so you can run in he winter. I am sure that if I could find the name of the company, they make clothes without logos and I’d be there for those, too. It’s the difference between getting a jersey at Eastern Market (knockoff) and ordering it directly from the NFL. With my CIA baseball cap, I loved the logo, but I don’t wear it all the time to look like I’m pitching for USG. It’s so comfortable on my skin that I can’t take it off. ADHD Life, the struggle is real, etc I also walk a lot and “it’s beginning to look a lot like fuck this” becomes a refrain in my head when I don’t want to take the time to get fixed up; it won’t last. My baseball cap feels even more comfortable on those days. I don’t know how they would actually want me to support them, but I know I can’t not. My country is depending on me to want soft clothing, and who am I to stop them from providing it? Before CIA, I had a GAP hat that was just as comfortable and I wore it for 15 years straight. By the end it looked like I had old underwear on my head. I did not care. This hat has the same vibe and I’m looking forward.

Celestial Seasonings

When I say I switch to something innocuous like fruit punch when I’m not drinking caffeine, I really mean cold brew Red Zinger at obnoxious amounts. Obnoxious. I should buy stock.

Wendy’s

I don’t really care about their food. I want to work for them. I would have a riot in that writing room if I was on the social media team. Also, I have been repping their French fries and Frosties since I was a shorty (for the rest of the world, that’s American slang for a child. I am still short.). To me, theirs are the ones that taste best because they actually taste like they have real potato in them somewhere. They’re not as crispy, but they’re authentic. They’ll actually put a little more color on them for you if you ask nicely and wait patiently, just like at In-n-Out. I just think Wendy’s are better than In-n-Out because I prefer a thicker cut (more like they’d serve at a steakhouse).

McDonald’s

I want free smoothies and soft serve for life. I don’t know what I would do for such a favor, but I am willing to negotiate heavily. I know it won’t cost you much because the ice cream machine is always cleaning itself. Maybe not. I can drink the hell out of those smoothies. If you start making orange vanilla with the soft serve, you can just build me a house in the ball pit.

Chicago Cutlery

They’re some of my favorite knives because they fit my hand, whether it’s chef or santoku. They’re also cheap and hardly ever need sharpening. I choose to get mine sharpened over getting another one because even though it’s the same price or more expensive, your knife grows into your hand and vice versa. It’s like getting a fountain pen. Once you bend the nib to your handwriting, you cannot lend it out. That’s because the nib will bend to someone else, and it won’t go back to you. It’s the same in the kitchen, even for pastry chefs because their cuts need to be even more precise than the cooks who just throw things into a pan. Your knife becomes as close to you as a lover, why we often name our knives after women. It’s an extension of our bodies, where we cut to the beats of our hearts.

Staying Up

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What could you do more of?

I am slowly starting to stay up later and sleep in. Not by much. Just one or two hours. I’m starting this entry at 7:48, after I’ve done the things I need to do to get going. I have taken my medication, and gotten myself something to drink, and settled in. Therefore, I woke up at 0700 instead of 0500 for love.

That’s because the person that most represents safety to me and vice versa is in Portland, Oregon. That’s three hours into the past from here. I’ve done it with other friends, had this asynchronous life because I’ve had friends in Portland since 1996 or something like that and moved to DC in May of 2001. The events of September 11th did not drive me away. Kathleen did. It was the best mistake I’ve ever made. When I went to Portland, I found everything I have ever needed to know myself. It affects me every day, and I’m grateful to my time there for it, no matter how low my Vitamin D was when I got home (six).

I don’t stay up for me. I stay up for Bryn. I want her as a real part of my life rather than a fake one, and video calling is easier for both of us in the evening. It’s just that her evening is generally my bedtime when I’m getting up at 0500. When I get up at 0500, sometimes it’s so early for her that she hasn’t gone to bed yet. We make it work, and yet we don’t. It’s not a matter of how much we love and adore each other, just that our relationship isn’t as full of practical love as it would be if we lived in the same neighborhood. Maybe we will eventually, but I don’t want either of us to do the hard sell on each other. Our lives will unfold as they should. The difference between this relationship and most of my other virtual ones is that I don’t video call with them, ever. I barely even do audio. I can do that with Bryn because we’ve had so much face time over the years that we call each other no matter what we’re doing or how we look because the video call is more important than fixing up for it. Video calls are so much easier when you don’t give a shit how you look on camera. It’s not that we look bad, it’s that we’re going to love each other no matter how we look, so why waste time on something so frivolous?

I like our back and forth, the way we’re both on the “think it, say it” plan because we can be. It’s a trust that’s implicit and makes it easy to breathe. She’s made the commitment to learn my attachment style and love language, but she doesn’t really have to do research because they’re the same as mine. She understands something in me because she wears it on her skin, not because she’s lost in a book…. or if she is, it’s the one I’m writing for us.

You’ll just have to put up with romantic and flowery language from me about her because I am Anne Shirley crazy for her. She knows that she is my Diana Barry…. so much lighter than I am in some ways, darker in others. We complete, not compete. I am the friend that would get her drunk on purpose, though, and she wouldn’t complain because I’m an excellent bartender and it doesn’t take much for either of us. 😉

I am sort of in a relationship in terms of having a companion but not a possible husband, and she definitely is in a relationship with promise. It fits us to a T to have other partners, while also making space for each other; our history is too long for us not to put each other first in some ways. I might have to be around for the next boyfriend, and Dave will be excused for cause. I have no reason to believe this will be the case, it’s just a sitrep. We’re a package deal, get used to it. 😉

Being with our respective guys gives us more to talk about, not less. I don’t feel jealous and neither does she. It’s nice to have a place to unload about everything, because neither of us blink when the other has a problem. We’re on it like a team. Later I have to call Multnomah County on some business of my own, so I’m going to do hers as well. It’s no thing because if I have to do something over the phone, I know she’d be my proxy if something needed to be done in person. It’s a give and take now that I have someone on the ground that I can trust to have my back in a city where I used to live and still need to bat cleanup.

I’m not divorced yet, or at least, I have been unwilling to check. Dana told me she would take care of it, but I haven’t been sent anything to sign and I don’t think people have the capability to divorce someone without their knowledge. I could be wrong, but I can’t assume Dana is more likely than me to fill out paperwork, either, even though she said she would. I am not being catty. Paperwork causes anxiety for both of us sometimes because of the emotional attachment it represents. We’re both ADHD. If it fell off her radar, it won’t come back.

I can have empathy because in some ways, we’re the same person and that will never change.

Now my mother lion has kicked in, because I should have done it long ago for Dana and followed up on the paperwork myself, because I know it was difficult for two reasons. The first is that the way our relationship ended is shameful to both of us given the connection we threw away. We should have been able to deal with the Supergrover issue because I shouldn’t have gotten so high on her. Dana would know exactly how being married and being lost in new relationship energy would feel, because she was married during most of the time she was dealing with her feelings for me……………. yet another reason I didn’t want to get involved in the first place.

I struggled with the idea of having an affair because she was using her wife as a safety net if I said no and I knew it. That’s because her wife knew what Dana was doing, too, and was never blind to it. She saw how Dana reacted to me and thought her days were numbered, then stuck around watching Dana be lovesick over me for years and putting up with that shit. By the time she broke up with her wife, even our girlfriends were convinced we should be together instead of with them because we couldn’t stop talking about each other. Being friends was easy. Taking the leap was hard……………. right up until it wasn’t. By the time we were ready to leap, we had years of emotional closeness feeding our fire. We loved each other because of what we’d been to each other as friends, not because we each thought the other was perfect. We knew what contract we were signing, and we were better for it.

For a while.

She could not accept that the same thing was not happening to her. That my feelings were supposed to have been light and flirty wordplay to give me some dopamine after Dana and me going through a really rough time. Supergrover wasn’t threatened, and she was so cute about flirting with me one time that I knew I’d opened the door to something I could dish, but I could not take. I thought I was a silver-penned devil.

I was, in fact, mistaken.

I laid the golden fiddle at her feet because I had gone down to Georgia and knew that I’d been beat. It was a mistake. It called my bluff. I felt things I never had because it was attention from someone who really deserved mine.

It was all a mistake. It was not a happy compromise, It jumped me further into something she was rightfully afraid would happen. It jumped me into something the relationship couldn’t sustain, but it wasn’t her fault because I pretended to be so cool. it was the beginning of the end with both of them. It just will never be a new beginning with Dana because I can forgive her punching me, but it’s not worth a chance it would happen again and the statistics are against us.

I fucked up asking for more patience from both of them and then not actually doing anything to move myself forward. It was my own choice to feel heat for someone that would never feel that way about me, but that’s based on all the other relationships I’ve had, the mark my emotional abuser left on me. That I couldn’t really know someone until I’d slept with them. I know that because if someone opens me up emotionally, I tend to want all of them. I don’t tie people’s worth to it, though.

If they just want to be friends and I love them that much, I’ll sit in that pain until it goes away. I certainly have done enough of that to feel secure. It’ll never happen again, like women who do fall in love and realize later that it was never the sex that mattered and they’re better off as roommates and friends. But it’s because I’ve felt those feelings that I’m a real and genuine friend and also never less protective and possessive of her than her husband- and not because I want to “keep her safe from him” by acting like a jealous fool. It’s not him that matters. It’s the the rest of the world.

I’m not here to fight her battles for her, just with her. But I won’t if she acts like I don’t matter, gets angry when I tell her that, and treats me like an annoyance a good bit of the time. I’m not here for that, but I am for the relationship in which we do the work to be strong and comfortable at 20 years, like we predicted we would be in the beginning. I can live with boundaries, but not when I don’t know what they are. I will fuck up, and I have. I was out of control, then lost and finding my way back.

I can’t be lost anymore, because I’m tired of feeling insecure. I can’t make up fantasies to ignore the reality of the situation because they feed me. She avoids me in a way she shouldn’t, and that’s not my call. But because she says that she’s enormously impressed with me as a person, everything I’ve said tracks. There is room for all our feelings by now because nothing happens quickly anymore. There’s not an exhilarated rush of trying to know each other as fast as we can.

Our feelings are extreme on both ends. The lovebombing is absolutely genuine, and so is our conflict. The reality is that I would have left Dana no matter what because of two hard outs, not just one……… and now need Supergrover in my life despite her not needing me because of the first hard out’s upper limits, not because I am “trying to get her back.” I was damned if I did, damned if I didn’t at that time. Life was full of hard choices, and I did the best I could with the information I had. It didn’t matter what Supergrover thought. It matters what I thought would happen to me in the future. Supergrover didn’t think about that and I know she didn’t because I didn’t, either. We both got lost in new relationship energy and told each other things that would have consequences long into the future without knowing how stable we were or weren’t. Without knowing how stable I was with Dana, because even I didn’t recognize the toll her DUI would take on me and how that was more of a threat to me than anything Supergrover said that enticed me. I never want to have to bail anyone else out of jail, because it was traumatic. My friend Volfe drove me downtown to pick her up, and she had already left on the bus. I was racing to get to her only to have my hopes dashed. I did get to see her later, but she knew we were coming to get her and she left, anyway. It made me crazy to the point I couldn’t think, and then Dana lost her license. The entire legal process wore me down, and Supergrover was the gift I needed at a time when I was really open to receiving it.

I fucked up by loving her so completely I couldn’t see anything else, and not because it was wrong. Some of my actions were crazy, but I’m not. It was all painful and could have been avoided. But I’d already run from her several times, saying that I couldn’t be friends with a woman who excited me this much, and because we couldn’t separate, we didn’t. The swings just became bigger as my emotions grew. It was embarrassing to tell her I had to back off and why so she didn’t feel like I was dumping her because I wanted to. I had to. Dana could compete with romantic love, but platonic trumped it because it had to, not because I wanted it to, for two reasons. I felt like I couldn’t have reactions in front of Dana anymore, because it drove her crazy for me to have a woman in my life that was just as important as she was for very different reasons. She could not accept that Supergrover and I needed a relationship that was separate from her out of necessity, not malice. I knew that every one of my actions would be up for discussion with someone. As Sam Seaborn would say, “oh, this is bad on so many levels.”

Having a relationship with someone who runs hot and cold is not my jam when they’re as close to me as Supergrover is. If we hadn’t already been so close, running hot and cold wouldn’t be a thing because I wouldn’t notice or care.

I reached out for Bryn because our attachment is secure. I don’t have to worry because there are no swings too big. We know that the other’s style is anxious, so we take care of it up front rather than letting the other believe we’re pulling back, or let the other know when we need some space, but we’ll talk about what was said later; we need time to reflect. It is not time to choose what kind of life we want together, we just know it’s there if we want it. I cannot be on thin ice. I cannot run from her love because it’s just too big. I can’t jump into something the relationship can’t sustain. We are there for every regeneration, making it a good story in the end.

I could do, need to do more of staying up…………… to read the chapters she has written on her own.

It All Mixes Together

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

I remember things by the way people say them, because if it’s a good line, I will hear it in their voices for the rest of my life. Good lines often have a cadence to them. For instance, my pastor came up with “resurrection happens in the middle of the mess.” I came up with “messages I’ve missed in the middle of the mess.” I gravitated toward it because it had the same musicality. One line leads to the next, a call and answer. Resurrection happens by examining the emotional places you’ve never been.

I have memories playing in my head like movies a good bit of the time. My writing is what happens when I stick my head into a pensieve, and I’m giving you access to it. The messages I’ve missed are often in plain sight when I’m seeing me as a different person, rather than perpetually reliving things. I am not reliving anything, I am searching for what I can do better in the future, and that only happens when you can look at yourself and see both your inner Aziraphale and Crowley.

How do I know what will work in the future if I don’t know how I broke the past? I know how I’ve broken my past because I wrote it down, essentially giving myself a past because few people write about their lives to this degree. When they go back to reassess, their memories are faulty. You cannot say that yours is infallible, but if there’s a blog entry on what happened written that day, that memory is secure by the nature of the timestamp. I’m not just making shit up. I am also very musical with words by nature of crafting rhythmic phrases on my horn, music only I can hear because only I know the voices on who said what.

I retain information with rhythm, essentially becoming a mimic in my writing and in my thoughts; I don’t just go back to that one line. It feels like I’m standing in the same room again, even just for a few seconds.

I give myself a lot of good advice by going back and reading what I thought years ago and seeing if I’m doing okay comparatively. Except that I don’t think of it as listening to myself, but the people who inspired my writing that day. It’s like an actor watching their old films. They aren’t living in the story on screen, but the one about how the art was created.

I like having written intimate things about the people in my life, hoping that the musicality of my words will stick with them, because being my friend isn’t easy. They all have their favorites, I’m sure, and their favorites never match up to my favorite things I’ve written about them.

Bryn loves the mirror I hold up on our relationship because she says it teaches her new things about herself. She gets what I’m trying to be, which is so real that people identify. I don’t want to be famous, I want to be heard. That’s why I don’t have to be on Oprah to know I’m making a difference. My platform is smaller, sure, but a platform nonetheless. And on the Internet, where everything is protected by a wall of anonymity, I never know when I’m speaking to people like her or people like me.

In fact, now that I think about it, Oprah did give me the best advice ever. On the last episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, she talked about how everyone has a platform. Your family. Your church unit. Your work colleagues. All of those people add up, so no matter how small you think that platform is, it’s enormous. Use it.

Oprah’s not on at 4:00 PM anymore, so someone has to pick up the slack.

It’s the message I’ve missed in the middle of the mess.

A List, Physically and Mentally

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What things give you energy?

I am addicted to caffeine because I’m not on Adderrall currently. When I’m on Adderrall, I switch to something innocuous like fruit punch, or stick with diet soda rather than coffee/energy drinks. I still have to have a little to avoid withdrawal headaches. The problem becomes upper limits on dosage with caffeine, because in order for it to keep me awake, I need twice or three times as much as everyone else. The first few doses are just to keep my brain functioning normally. To stay awake, I need something like cold brew at regular intervals. Cold brew is high in caffeine on its own just due to how long it steeps, but also frequent re-upping to keep the bus from going under 50.

Caffeine will manage my symptoms up and to a point, but I’ll need the Adderrall back eventually. I can’t do a drug holiday forever. Sometimes I just have to suck it up and choose sick over crazy. The struggle is real.

Right now the thing that’s giving me energy is Pepsi Max, or Pepsi Zero Sugar, whatever they’re calling it this week. If my mother wasn’t dead, knowing I drink Pepsi now would have killed her. The fact that Pepsi gets any of my money at all is exclusively due to her untimely demise. You only think telling her I’m queer was hard. I didn’t even bother on this one. Too emotionally fraught.

I now know sugar gives me energy, or at least it does in other people’s eyes. My second day at Alert Logic, I asked one of my coworkers for a Sour Patch Kid and she said no. I asked her why and one of my other coworkers said, “you haven’t blinked since you got here.” I always thought it was them that gave me energy and not the candy. I remember Dana asking my supervisor why she didn’t keep me in line and she said, “I don’t hit children.” It was really funny because I must have been at least 10 years older than she was. Said supervisor also said I was “prehistoric” and I said, “why do you think I have so many dinosaurs on my t-shirts?”

Alert Logic fed all my addictions- coworkers where it actually felt good to be together after hours, the ambience of a room full of hackers when we weren’t on the phones (the sound of everyone typing at odd intervals is addicting to a writer), and a Starbucks machine that would fuck you up six ways to Sunday. You don’t leave Alert Logic when you separate from the company. You leave the Starbucks machine. Especially working overnight, those multiple free Americanos saved my ass. I got a Starbucks habit too expensive to maintain on my own.

In terms of my personal life, emotional intimacy turns me on. I want to know everything about a person down to the nth degree. This is because I don’t see people in 2D. I want to know all the things that make someone tick. It is not for malice, it is for curiosity. I am exploring the things that make up your character, what has affected you and what hasn’t. It gives me so much energy that I have to feed my inner sociopath once in a while. I do not mean giving in to any kind of dark side, I mean cutting off my emotions to protect myself from taking on everyone else’s. Clinical separation, not Dexter. 😉

I know quite a few people like that. People who cut off their emotions so they can even handle their shit at all. It’s the one thing that generally comes out of a reality break in childhood that’s useful. You’re not always cutting off your emotions to hide the secrets you protect when you’re being abused. You’re protecting your own energy so that you can put yourself first.

If you have been abused, you will never be first until you find out why that should be. Your abuser will be God in your life, the one on that you protect at all costs even though it would help you. After you get away from them, they’ll still be God, it’s just that now they’re the monkey on your back and the ghost out to get you.

My emotional abuser gave up her relationship with me when I put it together that she was God in my mind for all the wrong reasons instead of the right ones. The choir members who knew us both finally got through to me, but there was still doubt in my mind that it was abuse. We were just quiet, sweet music nerds and kindred spirits. You just couldn’t tell that we were quiet nerds because we both had huge show modes…… which honestly in retrospect I see why I was so attracted to Dana. I found someone who expressed love the same way my emotional abuser and I showed love, not good or bad but fact. We loved each other’s show modes and quiet moments equally. In fact, Dana had a crush on me six weeks after she met me. It took me three years to get on board because I needed her to let me in to the point where I could see if she had a mode besides show. I could not be with a show at home. Sometimes I was, but for the most part we were both introverted, preferring to spend time with each other more than anyone else.

The clash came in when I starting growing rapidly and she didn’t. She didn’t know me anymore, and vice versa. Supergrover was the first person I told my story to who didn’t have a dog in the fight. She could see what I refused to acknowledge, but couldn’t anymore when someone was reading the facts blind. Dana and I could have made it with more support, but I was sick and so was she. I have to believe that she was sick when she hit me because all people who abuse physically have some kind of screw loose. It makes it easier to move on than thinking of her in terms of good or bad. Thinking about our funny memories is vastly preferable to feeling phantom pain when I tap into those memories.

It stops me from dating other people, and I just happen to have another very good reason to avoid it. Someone else already has a piece of me that I can’t share and don’t want to because it’s just too painful. So I don’t. I don’t want to take the chance that I’ll have another relationship where I feel like I need to sneak around and hope it doesn’t get noticed. I’m not very good at it, so I don’t engage. I have to have Woodward and Bernstein ironclad boundaries with no capability with a girlfriend. They go through phones and are extremely entitled about it.

I’m not angry that I have to keep secrets. I signed up for this. I’m angry that I need things emotionally from someone who drains my energy because she can’t love me in a way I can hear it, and I drain her energy by being the least accessible person in her life due to the nature of where we live. From where she sits, Maryland is a different country. It is to all Virginians. Zac thanks me profusely for absolutely not going out of my way. It’s hilarious to me. I think that’s because I still have Houston geography in my mind. Everything takes a long time. On the train, I zone out. When we get there is when we get there. Going to Zac’s gives me energy, it doesn’t take it.

It’s not just Zac, it’s his house and starting to feel more at home there. It didn’t occur to me that Zac felt bad when I said coming to his house felt like a vacation to me, because it lifts me out of my real life for a while. I meant having the house to myself for a bit after he leaves for work without having to worry about my housemates making noise, especially when I’ve been recording. I also don’t have any other friends in intelligence, so those conversations always give me energy, too. Sometimes the vacation is just getting out of my head and into Oliver’s (Oliver is a dog).

Zac’s point I didn’t think of but value is that he is my real life. Thank God for that. I didn’t want to go any longer without a companion, because I learned from The Doctor that I can’t travel alone.

It zaps my energy.

I Don’t Have Favorite Children

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What’s your all-time favorite album?

The Eminem Show, Eminem

In order to know why it means so much to me, you’d have to know the circumstances in my life when it came out. Maybe six months before, my wife had slept with two of her coworkers in one weekend while I was out of town, and I know that because she called me while I was still away to tell me that and break up with me. I was not feeling particularly kind toward women at the time. I couldn’t get angry, but my music could. Eminem literally became the paramedic healing my emotional wounds, because his pain stood out to me. I am Stan yet I have wonderful boundaries and I don’t care he didn’t write me back. 😉 I hate to do this to all my other favorites, but this one takes the cake.

That anger went away quicker than it would have on its own because through someone else’s eyes I could see that my pain was valid in his artistic expression……. when to put out my own was worse because I protected her when I shouldn’t have on my blog and only told my closest friends how bad it got. I can look at either one of them and they know which person I mean when I say “Sgt. Fucktard” and both of them will fall out with laughter, because now I can laugh about it, too (such a pity that neither live in DC now).

I barely even remember her name is Kat anymore, and that’s for the better. Karma was good to me. If she knew what I knew about what happened to me, she’d be too jealous to be happy, and that would be true if I’d never published anything at all, especially blog entries. It’s a beautiful thing when you meet someone that is worth your career. It puts everything into perspective really, really fast. The love of my life isn’t out of romance, it’s that she has a space in my heart no one else can have or will ever duplicate because I have to lose the master.

Also, this part of “Cleaning Out My Closet” made me stronger: “have you ever been hated or discriminated against? I have. I’ve been protested and demonstrated against… picket signs for my wicked rhymes…” It felt a lot like blowback from my web site because I have never been protested against by more than one or two people at a time, but it felt like hell because my first reaction was always to pull the plug; I wanted to please them and my career said “people think you’re a good writer. If you want to be able to do this for money, you have to keep going. Dooce didn’t become Dooce overnight and you won’t become Leslie Lanagan that fast, either.” Eminem slowly gave me the confidence to push away people who don’t like being on this blog and gather the people who tolerate it, even if they don’t outright love it.

I felt like Supergrover felt like she was in some sort of hostage situation, that I was writing about her to provoke her so she’d have to be stuck with me, yet didn’t get that my feelings would naturally go away if I wasn’t focusing constantly on her. This is, in fact, not our situation at all. She’s acting blind when she shouldn’t or can’t.

She’s my first thought every day, nearly every moment because I accidentally went from a blogger to a journalist in 15 seconds flat. It’s not as cool as it sounds, but yes it is. Both extremes are enormous, and I cannot cope with the downside alone. I shouldn’t have to ever and it’s a gift she can’t or won’t give. I feel that by letting me into the little things, I have more material to protect her because I have a bigger library of analogies to protect her identity publicly, because she might not freak in my personal life (although she very well might, too), but there would be hell to pay if it leaked here, and she would be well within her rights and responsibilities to hate my guts. I don’t protect her like a lover. It’s so much deeper than that.

I’m neurodivergent. Rambling like this at parties just doesn’t happen. I am literally using my quirks for me rather than against thanks to having the strength to stand up for myself. It’s just that now, one of the friends I ramble about is the least likely to need or want it. So, I cut her loose off and on to see if these feelings will go away and they never do, because either I’ll apologize again or she’ll drop in and yet won’t. Three word e-mails most of the time aren’t going to cut it and she’s avoiding it and blaming it on time. It’s a conversation we desperately need to have in a situation where we can’t have it. Given the option, I’d choose her over writing every time, mostly because she’d never ask me to pull the plug unless this was a real problem and not a possible one. She thinks I’m entitled to my stories even when they’re all bullshit, but doesn’t realize they’re all bullshit because I’m doing the very thing I need to do. Even when I’m angry.

Especially when I’m angry. Right now I’m angry that she doesn’t see that she opened up herself to having a right hand ring out of necessity and by blowing up each other’s lives and not talking about it, the right hand ring burns us instead of tempers. She thinks I should get over it. I think I should think through it with her brain and my heart, because that’s how we show love. She does the thinking, I do the feeling. She would rather have a root canal than acknowledge what she’s done and move on from it, because it seems to me that I’m activating guilt where it doesn’t belong by needing something she doesn’t deal with in herself and also needs desperately. We could support each other, but we don’t. That ship, in some respects, has crashed against the rocks because of a Siren, and now she’s having a heart attack. Because she doesn’t have time to heal me and feels guilty, because she thinks I’m asking for so much more than I really am.

I don’t need to have chocolate and coffee with her every week, I need her to acknowledge that she’s the Earl Grey in the box, the one most people sleep on and I adore because she didn’t sleep on me. I am not the person that when she comes to work all this out, I heap guilt on her. I express needs and that’s what she reads, so she doesn’t respond like a mama wolverine when she’s the issue, but God help everyone else. There are a couple people in my life that if they became mutual friends, they’d regret it. I would have looked forward to seeing that in person. Something equivalent to “surely you do not believe that this person who is a mental bag of rocks is worthy of you?” Probably everything I would have felt about her husband until I realized that he was perfect for her and I was wrong. I have never been convinced that we would be even close to happy as partners, we’re just connected by chance. The enlightening that she found her person would have been a good day, too.

Lesbians totally have a straight guy side to them in terms of possession and jealousy because we’ve been taught to act that way by men. Not that they’ve straight up told us that, they’ve just modeled it for centuries. In my head I’m Anne Lister without the hairstyle. It’s unfortunate that Supergrover married a man on purpose and a gentleman jack by accident with loyalty, because now she has two guard dogs that probably wouldn’t always agree with each other (but I’m certainly willing to have that fight as it is so worth having).

The Eminem Show had the same effect on me that my mother’s cemetery has on me now. It gave me perspective on the fact that more people than me were in pain much worse than mine. It helps me now to release pain in the situation with Supergrover, because I will never be jealous, but always possessive where she’s concerned. She hasn’t made the connection that she needs me to be possessive. I see something she doesn’t. It sucks.

History repeats with music, because it also contains some of the tracks she likes. I’m naturally gravitating towards it. One of the things I remember from our first few years is listening to that album again because some of her favorites are ones I usually skipped, but became beautiful to me because she loved them. I am listening to this album because I have the right to that much anger and I feel same type pull that makes me crave her words, while she thinks I am telling her that I regret meeting her when I need her to open up. I am doing my best to curb my enthusiasm, but it cannot go away so it won’t. I am the Impossible Girl because I have to be wound into her whether I want to be or not, because it’s for life, even by accident.

It’s an album, a presentation. I haven’t bought any songs separately.

I bought the album, so I go to all the concerts, waiting for a Piccardy Third that might never come. We’re in the middle of the rap battle, not the delight of singing to Hailie. I look forward with hope because to not is not being me. When we resolve, so does the chord.

If and when it does, get ready for “the most feared duet since me and Elton played career Russian Roulette.”

The Smell of Failure

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.

Anthony Bourdain hit rock bottom, and afterward he got a gig as a brunch cook. Therefore, in “Kitchen Confidential,” one of my favorite lines was that “hollandaise was the smell of failure.”

I believe that for entirely different reasons.

I had to clean the egg pans with lemon dish soap for a while at my own brunch gig. It ruined the taste of Hollandaise for me permanently. Not enough Old Bay in the world. Jesus could come back, bless it himself and I’d still be all like, “nahhhhh, fam….. you go ahead.” But I would have made him the best Hollandaise he’d ever had even if it was just the first. I can cook the things I don’t like, too. I’ve never done liver and onions in my own house, though my dad and stepmom have served me fois gras at theirs. It’s not that I can’t put up with the taste so much as the smell of it while it’s cooking. Smell is primal with me. Bad ones make me throw up at their memory. I know that I would have eventually learn to cope if I’d been a doctor, but I would have thrown up at a lot of things first and second year.

I will try something even if I don’t like it, so the fois gras had its excellent points, especially the raspberry jam against the perfect crispness of the liver. I just can’t get over the taste and smell of iron no matter whether it’s Luby’s or Le Pigeon.

It would be great if my greatest epic fail was throwing up into a stock pot and having to start something over because of the smell. It’d really tie the room together. But no. I was talking about how cooking informs the rest of your life before I get down to the nitty gritty. Plus, I’m ADHD, and every thought comes with bonus content.

I want you to know that I know what I’m talking about even when I’ve come across as a dumbass to chefs. I can describe it better than I can do it, just like Bourdain. He was a journeyman in the kitchen, a chef in the New York Times. His logical mind was in the kitchen while his heart poured onto the page, just like me….. unique on the page and mundane in my technique. But my creativity in writing comes across in new ideas rather than how many covers I cook for that night. I read recipe books like novels because I am not going to follow them. I’m going to look at spice combinations and see if it works in some dishes, or reference how to braise something because I can look at what part of a recipe matters and what doesn’t. What concepts will translate and what has to be specific. For instance, the instructions in how to get a medium rare on a steak with a cast iron skillet is useful in braising, period. You cannot take a Japanese palate and mix it with a Russian’s without studying its components and adjusting. For instance, I think Russians/Finns/Ukrainians et al would love salted licorice mixed with fruit, but at what ratio? I would imagine it would be a lot of fruit and a tiny bit of Aquavit and a whole lot of fruit.

In cooking, you have to know which flavor is going to be dominant ahead of time to save it when you’re cooking. I already know that peach works with licorice because I had a frozen drink called a Greekarita that fulfilled my life’s dream, the apex of mixology. And for the Russians, it was vodka. I do it because I love you despite your dickhead of a ruler. I am sure that during the Trump years, you thought the same about us. That’s how cooks dressed as spies can change the world. People telling others to stories who can actually do something if they’ll open up vs. the fear of getting caught and tortured. Very few people in Russia are that courageous, and those Russians absolutely saved our lives. I think about that a lot. I have the same relationship with the Russian people that I do with my chef. I’m friends with the other people on the brigade because even my worst enemies wouldn’t let me fail on purpose. We are not united in brotherhood all the time, but we’re united in trying to be the best at our jobs. It’s good we compete. You get better food.

The thing about “even your worst enemy won’t let you fail” is bullshit when someone actively wants to get rid of you. The bond comes from how you treat each other outside work. If someone fucks up and you can’t get over it to the point we can all have a beer later, it takes a lot to get that trust back. Getting on another cook’s shit list isn’t good because it spirals. They take a negative inventory and it affects how  they talk to the people who actually can hire and fire you. They prove your incompetence out of revenge, because the kitchen is a meritocracy and you let someoone fail. It’s not out of malice. It’s that you let them down. In some cases, you’ll never be able to save their ass in a way they can see it. That shit happens, and it’s not personal. It’s how people survive chefs like Ramsey. Even when he’s as angry as he pretends to be on TV, I have no doubt that he’s beloved because he’s not angry when he’s not  under pressure.

This is what leads to my most epic fail. We were busy and I had to work with the person that sexually harassed me and the owner of the restaurant, who had no cooking experience at all. She didn’t pick up that I was nervous because of the sexual harassment, and criticized me at every chance she got because she didn’t know shit about timing and would blame me for being slow on a ticket that came in 30 seconds ago and needed 10 minutes to cook. The sexual harassment guy and I got into a rhythm where he’d drop things into the fryer and I’d pick them up. Because the owner thought I was lazy anyway, the one time he didn’t was the last straw for her, even though she was the least experienced at being a cook and the most at being a horrible boss. She couldn’t keep a chef more than 15 minutes, contracted out the food, and still managed to tank that before closing the food side altogether. She didn’t know me, didn’t see me when I was on my game. She judged me on the one night she had to pitch in after not firing the person who sexually harassed me because we didn’t communicate something we’d been doing like clockwork and dropped the ball once.

No one made allowances for me on dish, either. I was called slow because I couldn’t lug 80 pounds of water up three flights of stairs without it taking longer because all of my muscles aren’t as strong as everyone else’s.

But that wasn’t my most epic cooking fail, and it’s a miracle no one got hurt. The person who sexually harassed me left a hotel pan of raw chicken on top of the freezer, and when asked, told management it was me. This is after telling me I’d be running my own kitchen within six months and how I could always be counted on and I’d do great things.

I didn’t realize the lovebomb/discard pattern because I didn’t realize that he was slowly moving all our shits together so that when we were both closing, he’d leave early and I’d be stuck cleaning for both of us. He thought he had that right even though he wasn’t my boss. The only way you get respect in the kitchen is to earn it, and he had no authority. I just took it because the lovebombing was complete. By the time he sexually harassed me, the betrayal hurt me the most.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but never once have I put people’s safety in danger……. even when people say I did.

While it is true that I do not have the physical strength to be in a kitchen, it is also true that I have come into my own and wouldn’t think twice about ripping another cook a new asshole for focusing on me and not the mission. It’s not that women can’t be the best chefs in the world. We’ve been the chefs for all of history, yet unrecognized until men did it. Escoffier didn’t make anything at The Plaza that his mother didn’t teach him first. Le Guide Culinaire is based on personal experience. Your mother generally teachers you how to cook because your father’s not interested. This is slowly changing as society has made it cool to cook. We all love dad favorites like steak and French fries, we just do it in a cast iron skillet rather than grilling because steak tastes better from the crust that develops from confit, which means cooked in its own fat. When you grill, the fat drops into the coals. Steak tastes even better when you put a little bit of butter on that crust right before you serve it. Make sure the butter is melted because once the steak has had time to rest, it probably won’t make the butter melt naturally. I also like to add fresh herbs to the butter, like rosemary. If I only have dry, I don’t make it fancy. Salt, pepper, and garlic is all a steak really needs. Just make sure the salt and pepper are of good quality. I prefer Kosher salt and fresh ground pepper to the table version of either, though ground pepper is okay if it’s fresh.

If you accidentally oversalt the meat, you can fix it one of three ways. If it’s steak intended for fajitas, throw a margarita on it using fresh lime juice. The acid will neutralize the salt. With American, increase the herbs without more salt and add lemon juice. If lemon juice is not part of the palate, make a balsamic reduction by putting vinegar in a pan and letting it sit on low heat for like a year. No, seriously. Until it gets to “coat a spoon” stage. I put dried cherries and (also dried) mushrooms in mine and let them plump up. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour depending on volume. This is a sauce you can double and triple to save the syrup for later. Leaving out the mushrooms and making it really thick would be good on vanilla ice cream.

The day I reached for a spoon out of an egg pan and didn’t realize it was boiling hot wasn’t all that great, either. It fused to my hand and I had to just put some burn cream on it and keep going. My worst enemy wouldn’t have let me fail, and I didn’t have them in the kitchen. I had my wife. She could have empathy without coddling me and I knew we were both doing what we needed to cope. It led to some of my successes, including the biggest. I got my name on the menu for my chili.

Despite all my fails, if you like food you’re missing out on being my friend. It is your epic fail, not mine. 😉

Bold of You to Assume

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

What would your life be like without music?

Bold of you to assume that I would have the life I have without music at all. I accidentally got an arranged marriage out of it because we told each other we loved, admired, and trusted each other to a level that it’s been a disaster every time we’ve tried to separate. I got this “job,” not unwanted, just problematic and have had it for 10 years. Being together and separate creates a different set of consequences, so the music I listen to varies by what I have to say and how I know it’s going to affect me. For this entry, it will be “Nobody Knows,” by The Tony Rich Project. It expresses our problems greatly, and also explains why she’s the woman I think of when I hear “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” and “Love You Madly,” and that last one is to reclaim it from another face due to pain. She’s a 3D character. 😉

Additionally, I’m sure Mel is upset that I haven’t finished my food entries, because they cut deep (due to tapping into my work history) and I want her to think they’re good. It would help if she heard Beethoven’s ninth symphony instead of the blues (not that there’s anything wrong with the blues, but if you hear it after you cook, you’ve probably fucked up).

If I can impress both of us, then I’ve impressed the rest of our clan because I’m American and she’s Indonesian (living in the UK).

However, I need to process and I’ll tell you the music I listened to at the end and how it inspired this. I’ll say it first and then I’ll say it again. Sometimes you accidentally create a right-hand ring and resent it. I want to be her Lord John Grey and I’m totally her Frank. I want to describe what that’s like in detail for myself in another 10 years. I don’t write about what I do know, I write about what it’s like for me not to get it.

My food entries get more attention than everything else because it’s more universal, but everything else explains a relationship between adults where both are traumatized in different ways and how they act toward each other as adults- when the abuse happened in childhood. My friend Donna wrote a book called “Never the Same,” about kids who lose parents and siblings. It could be a title for abused kids as well. These pages are more important than anyone will ever know, because if I could be more specific, I could reach even more people in the shit with this kind of bond in a more specialized way. It’s a different thing to love someone with a power imbalance this big, because priorities are ironclad out of necessity. You will never be number one on the call sheet, and if you have different romantic partners, you won’t be number two, either.

Even more when the person who is more powerful pretends the imbalance isn’t there until she just can’t anymore because she can’t plan a future, either. Isn’t mindful that though she has a partner, kids, parents, and siblings, our situation is unique to theirs by a wide margin except her partner. Dana and I weren’t a team on this, and neither were they when I actually needed Michael more than her, because only he would know what was up. She has entrusted me and hung me out to dry. I deserved it, and we still can’t get around the facts. The only one that can help me is the one who least wants to do it, and not even because I was an asshole. She doesn’t make me a priority because she can’t.

She’s not a fixer/pleaser in her work life, but she is at home because she feels guilty and no one can lift it. Her power imbalance with herself is the same one she has with me, so when she digs deep, there’s no one to tell her to release them and find more small joys. I need her to have solid memories of everything good about her life so that when she gets hard on herself, she can see how much people love her.

Even me, the one that gets passed over. In part I think that’s because she can’t, because I’m not part of her inner circle and she’d have to figure out a reason she’d need to be in Washington at hours she doesn’t need to be there, because she’s not very good at it…. and now she can’t joke with her husband that she has to go see her sidepiece because she wouldn’t think that was funny, because it’s been long enough for me to resolve those issues and apparently not enough for her. I used to joke that we were having an affair under everyone’s noses, because you can’t imagine how much truth there is to that.

To Michael:

I was only using a euphemism for the adrenaline and dopamine rush and I have been the whole time.

She never did anything inappropriate in case you haven’t been reading over her shoulder. If you had been, I still would have been an absolute jackass because my brain chemicals still would have been turned up to 11, but when I came down you would have realized immediately that I was no threat. I was just high, like other people in your lives except the drugs were street legal. If it didn’t happen to you, too, I can’t imagine why. Seriously. We could write a book together that we couldn’t publish. I asked her if she needed a book like it, but didn’t take in that my part’s done. If you divorce her, no you didn’t and make that clear.

Don’t ever make anything blow up in her face and let her believe that you mean it, the lecture you would have given me that I should have thought of on day one. I said it in the heat of the moment. I never want either of you to think that because I’m a blogger, that means I’m a threat. And even then, I threatened to call for help. I am not trying to be threatened or threatening, I am trying to handle/fix it in myself without hurting her, and I don’t know when I’m leaving breadcrumbs, because I only need 15 minutes to establish what’s okay and what’s not; I’ve realized that my promises to her are bigger than yours by nature of what we do, not who we are to each other. I will promise to keep her even if she doesn’t promise to keep me.

God help your soul no matter how she and I play out, because if we stay apart and I find out you guys divorce, there will be dragon fire because mine is getting stronger every day. If we reconcile and you guys support me the way I support you, then you’re really fucked because then you have to deal with both of us simultaneously. I already know we’re a handful jointly and severally. But, according to the prevailing wisdom, she’s a handful on her own and you’re capable. Good luck and God bless. But know that I’ll love you in a very concrete way until I die, because she’ll let you know what her emotional needs are when she can’t let me for reasons.

The “honeymoon phase” doesn’t last long in most relationships, and we accidentally created a habit where we needed to lean on each other like we were using each other as furniture and both felt threatened enough to run at every chance it was available. I threatened to blow up her life because she blew mine to hell and wouldn’t deal with the fact that she affected my life’s course without accepting that it had played out with an anxious attachment style trauma bonded to an avoidant attachment style. It’s how most people who are abused cope. They don’t know their own attachment styles and love languages because to dive into that means you realize that you’ve been protecting yourself by dealing with everyone else’s bullshit while ignoring your own. It’s too hard and it hurts too much.

When you completely lose who you are, your reality break will dictate how you sway. When your reality breaks as a child because you’ve been sexually or emotionally abused, the abuser and the child form an anxious/avoidant attachment style because the power imbalance is absolute. You’ll search for it all the time, wanting the push pull of being abused and not learning to accept more. I had higher emotional standards for friendship, but not time together. Quality over quantity. When Supergrover got my letters, she read them as “you’re a bad person and that’s why I don’t like you.” I wasn’t judging her, I was making a case. I felt like I had to keep making it over and over because I saw our pattern for what it was and knew it would never break on its own. If you doo what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve allready got.

She couldn’t answer without anger because forgiveness was the story she was telling me while also holding in a lot of anger because she thought she couldn’t trust me anymore & I proved to her beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was the most important person in my life because of what I do, and it didn’t help because her presence doesn’t help her, because she doesn’t think I think she’s wonderful despite all her flaws and failures. The failures are just where we need to resolve conflict, not where we need to beat up on each other.

I opened up about her so we could resolve everything and move on. She thought I was lecturing her on what a bad person she was. Who would want to get close to someone like that? Love has to be built when you’ve both been thoughtless.

She doesn’t take in that my anxious attachment is causing me pain, I get angry at being ignored for years on end.

Because she can’t take in that I’m a Christian and she’s not, she doesn’t take in that I’m trying to be the peace that calms her by praying for her and she thinks I’m trying to make her life hell.

She ignores the fact that I use her face when I’m praying just to put a personal spin on what God is, the place in me where I can talk about my most epic fails and rise from the ash. Therefore, I am trying to find the place where the peace inside her is also her. I dig into myself to teach her how to love me, trying to lead from the back by laying out all my worst flaws first. One of my valleys of vulnerability is where she’s the choice woven into me like the Impossible Girl on Doctor Who, while also feeding The Master.

I sent her a whole ass essay on why this was, and she thought I was saying she was a bad person. That was the day I listened to Bolero on repeat to slow my heartbeat to a manageable level. I know without a shadow of a a doubt I am more important than her family in some ways, and I’m not knocking any of them. I’m playing on a unique field, and I feel like a goalie who doesn’t know which team she’s playing this week.

I saw a meme that made me laugh for this very reason….. a little kid who was jealous of the other team getting to change colors every week and his mom had to explain to him that they were, in fact, different teams.

(If you can’t handle me at my Supergrover, you don’t deserve me at my  Bourdain. I am laughing uproariously. I don’t care what stuff of mine you read, it’s just funny because I hold myself to the same standard. Unfortunately, I’m not that great a writer and I still have to read it.)

It happens more often than any other pattern. The person who holds everything back is attracted to the one who can emote, and the dance of intimacy is fighting with someone you’re completely addicted to in a literal sense. You can’t separate because the brain chemicals when you’re together. It’s not a sweet waltz. It’s the Habanera with emotional guns blazing because the swings are extreme. Those extremes don’t settle any if the relationship is platonic. You can fight with your siblings this way, too, because generally you shut down after abuse and your reactions are that way with everyone no matter how close you are.

I have broken my streak of 60-odd days just to listen to music, sleep, and relax. My body can’t lean towards insomnia forever, so I caught up. My body has a binge/purge relationship with sleeping, so I use music to help me stay awake AND asleep. They’re just different moods.

The alarms on my phone are NI**as in Paris (Kanye and Jay-Z) and Rap God (Eminem). I love both those songs, but the rhythm gets into my head and I can’t go back to sleep, especially when Em gets into 32nd and 64th note patterns while still being able to make out what he’s saying. It’s incredible. I couldn’t do it at gunpoint. I can’t do 64th note melismas while I’m singing without oxygen in the middle, and he did so well he published it and that song is famous across the world. Eminem is the modern-day Bach in that one album, because you cannot tell me that word-based melismas are easier than the ones in Mass in B Minor. Not possible.

If you have gotten to this point, thank you for reading. Each paragraph flowed into another as I was processing out loud the enormous difference between my ideal future and the one I’ve created. INFJs always search for the ideal and generally want relationships where the other person is also interested in it………….. yet will settle for being unhappy because so few people are like us and we don’t know enough to find them. I’m an INFJ. Daniel is an INTJ. Both our realities are broken for different reasons, neither more important than the other.

Daniel said that he had been in love with me for 36 years. I know why, but this is conjecture. He knew to want love from someone who’d give it to him in the way he could hear it, even when Supergrover has needs that trump his, because he knows what it’s like to desperately need help with stories you have to hold inside you while also popping smoke. He would understand when I joked that I was having an affair with Michael’s wife. That she and I share a more important bond so it is what it is whether he likes it or not.

We’re a handful, and he’s capable.

Editor’s Note:

This entry was inspired by Jason Moran’s complicated rhythms on “Ten,” because it helps me make connections faster than Tony Rich. I also listened to Wynton Marsalis’ “From the Plantation to the Penetentiary” and “Let the Bright Seraphim” with Kathleen Battle. It was like listening to a symphony in terms of odd numbers in movements vs. even. I enjoy making the playlist, and she enjoys running to Eminem and blasting Cake. Waking up to Rap God isn’t an accident, and I’ve set it for every morning.

Michael and I are toast (in a very funny way). We know it like the backs of our hands, because one of us forgot our real books because of ADHD and his is coded because he’s a normal person….. and even if I could read from it, I’d have to transpose.

Comfort

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 12 Comments

What are your favorite types of foods?

I want to tell you a secret.

When you become a professional cook, you stop cooking at home. You do not have the time or energy. There were nights when dinner was microwave popcorn over the sink, I was so tired. Just stuff a few handfuls in my mouth before I pass out. I also bought lots of junk food. We all do. Most cooks I know are absolutely obsessed with dino nuggets. Some of us even take the time to warm them up. 😉 My favorite is grocery store pizza, because it takes less time to put it in the oven than it does for delivery, and I can put whatever I want on it.

I want to tell you another secret.

Most, if not all professional cooks want you to invite them over for dinner just so they don’t have to cook it. We don’t care if it’s KD and ketchup. Just please, feed us without making us stand in front of the stove. We will help with dinner if you ask, but most cooks won’t go out of their way because they think it’s rude…. like we’re lording over a kitchen we don’t own. We’ve also been burned by people asking us to help out and then criticizing us as if we have no idea what we’re doing- or worse, something goes wrong and you’ll never live it down….. because professional cooks aren’t allowed to make mistakes, even among friends. We have to be arrogant on the line. There are too many people counting on us. But we cook the dishes in our restaurants over and over until they’re perfect.

You want something obscure, something that hasn’t been popular for 40 years, and we tell you that we’ll try. When it’s not impeccable, we can see the disappointment in your eyes, because you didn’t ask us to make something we’ve already made a thousand times and think it’s the same.

I liken it to handing someone a horn for the first time and asking them to play the third movement of the Hummel trumpet concerto four minutes later.

You’re expecting Carrnegie Hall when they don’t know a straight mute from a spit valve.

Let them have at least five more minutes……………..

Cooks rehearse like trumpet players, and are the same amount of obnoxious. I have been a trumpet player AND a cook, which means I have no problem being an absolute dick in the kitchen some of the time, because there are no seconds to spare. There aren’t even nanoseconds. Cooking is all about fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical devotion to the pope….. usually black, not cute red uniforms.

But make no mistake. The Spanish Inquisition is coming for you, and they generally look like waitstaff.

The thing is, though, you don’t go from read-through to full dress. You stage- pronounced stahj– which is basically “get your ass handed to you and if you survive, you might get the job.” These are all unpaid, though in most places they’ll either comp you a drink or make you something to eat (or both). In my stage at Denizen’s, the pub I worked for in Silver Spring, we did 300 covers that night. Just tickets on top of tickets and the entire kitchen was in full-tilt panic mode.

Rehearsal is actually during the performance, and if you fuck up anything, you just have to hope someone catches it before the food goes out. It’s your third day, not theirs.

It was a complete surprise to me that I got hired, but I did notice that I had improved considerably since my last gig. It really kept the imposter syndrome to a minimum. I had my share of shitty days, but I had to get this job. I wanted it more than anything else in the entire world. That’s because I had two reasons that gave me drive and passion for it.

The first is that I was married to a chef trained at a Cordon Bleu cooking school. she actually had her stripes. She paid $20,000 for her education, then gave me all of it for free. It is a gift I will never be able to repay, but the flip side of the coin is that I had to prove to myself that I was a cook, I wasn’t just riding her coattails.

The second is that my mother had just died, and I was a shell of a person. I was flat affect for months. I could barely take care of myself. Cooking brought me back to life. I had focus and drive on something besides earth-shattering grief. My mother was dead and yet the world kept turning as if nothing had happened, because if it did, I missed it. I was out of it during my own year of magical thinking. It took time, but I got my mojo back one hamburger at a time.

It is a gift I will never be able to repay.

In terms of the types of food I like to cook in the restaurant, I’ll tell you by station instead of dish. I like saute because it’s basically throwing prepped food into a pan, flipping it a few times, and pouring it onto a plate.

Editor’s Note: I like pantry the least because plating salads and desserts to look beautiful seems to require angle of convergence and depth perception, two things I was born without that make up 3D vision.

In terms of food I like to cook at home, I don’t. Home kitchens aren’t built like professional kitchens and when you get used to that much specialized equipment that cooking at home is a drag. I want a flat top and some scrapers, not whatever the fuck this is.

I want a gas stovetop, not electric. We can’t do that because the kitchen isn’t wired for it. I learned this because I asked Hayat for a gas stove after the fire, and I really like the electric one she bought. It’s just not the same because an electric range doesn’t let you refine the heat from the jump. I need to cook on an electric range a few times to learn the difference between three and four. On a gas range, I can just tell by how hi the flame is- consistent across brands.

If I am cooking at someone’s house for the first time, I sweat bullets because I am cooking on unfamiliar equipment with unfamiliar pans. You don’t think of this, but the thickness of pans varies, so you can’t always use the same amount of heat. At a restaurant, you don’t buy equipment piecemeal. All the saute pans are the same, all the rondeaus (wide thin pots) are the same, all the storage containers are the same. You don’t want anything to affect consistency.

The hardest part of getting an A team together in a restaurant is to make sure everyone makes everything to the same standard. If you’re on the B team (generally Sunday and Monday nights), you know why. You are not fit for Saturday night. You’re not even old enough to watch the show. Go sit in the corner.

If you start out on Mondays, when you get a Friday or a Saturday night it will feel like Ed McMahon showed up at your house with a big ass check.

The reason you need comfort food once you get off work is that all the food in the restaurant is so rich that sometimes you just want a sandwich.

In fact, it’s been 15 minutes since I wrote that last paragraph because I realized I hadn’t eaten dinner and it’s 0212. I had a cup of coffee way too late today, but it’s Sunday morning. I’m pretty sure I’ll still wake up at 0500, that’s automatic. But I’ll go back to sleep easily after I realize my entry is already done for today.

Instead of writing, I’ll roll out of bed and make my ultimate comfort food, breakfast. Yesterday I had scrambled eggs with pickled jalapenos, cheddar, and a dollop of plain yogurt. Nothing fancy except the difference between having made eggs every day of your life and making a hundred in three to five hours during every single brunch shift you’ve ever had.

That’s when dino nuggets taste best.

Every Day

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

How often do you walk or run?

I do not have a car, therefore I take the bus or the Metro everywhere. This leads to a good deal of walking, but I prefer it to driving. I didn’t think I’d like it at first, but I love all the guilt-free reading and writing time. I carry my Fire tablet and my Bluetooth keyboard everywhere, and it fits perfectly in my lap without making me take up more than my fair share of room. Plus, mobility is great for creation. My ideas come faster and more furious when I’m walking, and I’m grateful.

I never take walking for granted, although I will say up front I’m bad at it. I look untrained in the ways of walking sometimes because I have a mild case of cerebral palsy that affects my movement and balance. It is still preferable to what my life might be like if my CP was worse. I have empathy for everyone who struggles with physical issues, and there is no such thing as competitive suffering. I have perspective. I suffer much less than people with walkers or in wheelchairs, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t suffer at all.

I prefer walking when my friends are with me, because it’s ok for me to hold onto them when I need it. In fact, I think Zac prefers it. 😉 CP is not the only thing that makes me need to hold onto others. I don’t have depth perception, so sometimes I don’t lift my foot high enough for a step and trip. Sometimes I don’t judge the distance from the doorjamb to my shoulder correctly and hit it harder than one might think. I also have an alternating field of vision because my eyes don’t track together, so the worst I’ve ever been hurt is when I haven’t seen a step down. This is because my reflexes aren’t generally fast enough to save me. It is not unusual for me to have a scrape on my face because of it. I am generally covered in bruises, only some of which I can explain because it’s just too time consuming to walk back through my day and post-mortem.

When I’m exhausted, all of these issues get a hundred times worse.

My friends are helpful. Strangers are not. I have fallen and hurt myself to the point that my pants are ripped, my knee is skinned up, and there’s blood on my face…. yet no one has ever offered to help me up unless they already knew me. I do not expect strangers to help me, I’m just surprised because it’s hard for me to see other people in pain and not stop.

I would like to continue being surprised about this rather than jaded and bitter. No one is just like me, and few people are as empathetic, and I don’t mean this as “I’m all that and you’re trash.” I mean that my personality type, INFJ, is only present in 9-15% of the world’s population. We are the pastors, counselors, and social workers of the entire population. We are not all religious, but we are all spiritual. The reason we’re the empaths of the world is that we’re relentless in self discovery. We want to find us so we can find you.

People only understand each other to the level that they understand themselves, because when someone tells another their story, the listener is filtering it though all their life experiences. Whether the other person’s experience is good or bad is based on the listener’s first family, the partner they have with their family, and the way they have always operated.

I have been walking and thinking about this for 10 years now, because 10 years ago I had an experience for which very few people have filters. I didn’t know shit from Shinola™ and made a ton of mistakes. I grew from them, but I’ll never be the same person I was, either. It’s one of the reasons I love Doctor Who. We all have many lives, we just don’t change faces to do it. I never want to forget that story, nor the ones that proceeded from it. They are more beautiful to me as I age, because I never want to forget this version of me.

I am writing a story; I want it to be a good one in the end.

Right this moment, it is not good or bad. It is not time to choose. It is time to reflect, give myself distance, and pick up the pieces. My routine has changed greatly, and I am thankful for it…. most of the time. At others, the situation and people are so irreplaceable that it feels like I will never get over losing it. I set the ball in motion for all this happening, and that makes me even more prone to bouts of deep grief, because it’s harder to forgive yourself than anyone else.

If I do forgive myself, it will only be by putting one foot in front of the other, forging a new path…. without becoming so bitter and jaded that I’m unable to forgive and forget. Not only do I not want to close the door permanently, it would be incredibly unfair of me to do so considering how many times I’ve walked away and reneged. I just don’t want to go out of my way to fix things anymore. Eventually, you start noticing when a relationship has no return on investment, because we were not checking the story we were telling ourselves. It was off to an enormous degree. It hurt that my arguments were always shut down; that I was not allowed to need anything while she was allowed to ask for everything and receive it, no questions asked. The imbalance was okay for a while. Too long, actually. The last straw for me was the person who brought those circumstances into my life disagreed with me for many reasons, and wouldn’t tell me what they were.

We fought tooth and nail, when that wasn’t my goal at all. Depending on the day, we were each trying to hug a cactus. We would be able to complete each other and celebrate our differences if we were both willing to slow our roll. Our adrenaline ran too high, and we crashed. Neither one of us has it in us anymore.

But even when I’m angry, she’s still my favorite person. I call her Supergrover because even when I think she’s acting monstrous, she’s still cuddly, adorable, and blue. Ok, maybe not that last one. But she does have a double master’s in irreverence and profanity. We are so much alike that it’s easy to see how we got here. People generally hate things in other people that they hate about themselves.

We are sitting back to back, unable or unwilling to simply turn around…..

And walk back towards the other.

Absolutely, with Caveats -or- 1800 People

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do you see yourself as a leader?

I am not a traditional leader, and I never will be. I have had the best examples of leadership in the entire world, and my process was stopping feeling inferior to them. My way of leading is just different because when the Internet went large scale, into personal computers when it was military-only before, I was an early adopter. I disappeared into that world because I’m a better writer than conversationalist, and other people wouldn’t say that about me at all.

It has everything to do with how comfortable I am writing alone and in front of people. Other people do not perceive this about me, it’s my own observation about myself. I feel happier writing alone because focusing on social propriety gives me nausea. I don’t feel relaxed in a crowd.

I lead by seclusion because I don’t have to organize events and ask you to be here. Everyone just drops by and takes what they need. Sometimes they talk to me. Sometimes they stay silent. It all matters.

For instance, I know I have roughly 1800 people between Facebook and WordPress that choose to receive updates every single day. My web stats, meaning people who visit the site without a notification from me, are exponentially larger than that. I have an awareness that I’m not Elvis or anything, but if I say something, i need to know people are listening. I don’t think of my words as innocuous. I don’t have that luxury. I shouldn’t even have the luxury of leaving in typos, but I do. That’s because I don’t have the courage to write and edit. If I go back to fix something before a piece is published, I will get so bogged down in my own insecurities that I won’t publish at all. Nothing is ever good enough when there are 1800 people receiving your words the *moment* you hit “Post.”

I think of it as power for good and evil that all of these essays are written in one shot, don’t even look at it. Part of it is erasing imposter syndrome. I don’t “want to be a writer someday.” I am a writer now. My audience never has to get any bigger for me to feel validated, because I know that if I had been a pastor instead of a writer, I would be an even bigger deal in my community because people would see me getting up in front of 1800 people every Sunday morning. I “preach” every morning like it’s Sunday and I am ridiculously happy about that because I like the feel of leadership without having to attend any committee meetings. The other part of it is that if I hit post before I read something, I get to be a fan, too.

I like looking at myself as if I don’t know me. I love me like I love The Bloggess. I love me like I love Wil Wheaton. I love me like I love Dooce. No one can tell me I’m less talented than they are. it would have been amazing to have us all in one room. I’ve met Wil, but not Jenny and Heather (Dooce). It destroys me that I’ll never meet Heather, because we would have had the same witty banter I had with Wil. It’s a unique crowd, because we were the first wave of bloggers…. or at least, Wil, Heather, and I were.

Jenny started a little later than we did and I’m so happy for her success, because our content deals with the same stuff. Sometimes even the same mental health issues. In fact, she was just talking about how she made a coloring book for adults and I asked her a question I thought needed asking. “Have you thought of writing a children’s book about Beyonce?” For the uninitiated, Beyonce is Jenny’s giant metal rooster, though I think Jenny would do a bang up job on a children’s book about Queen Bey. Of course I do. We’re all Texans.

Because I am comfortable with the level of notoriety I have right now, I am not focused on driving engagement. Engagement has become self-sustaining. I don’t have to constantly advertise because other people will tell their friends to read me. I hate advertising myself. I’d rather keep my head down and let others do the talking.

I am not trying to fit into another person’s reality, shoving content into their faces. I am inviting you to mine. This is my weird little world. I own it. I wrote the charter. By thinking of my web site as me and one other person- all of you boiled down to a singular “you” in my mind), I don’t have to feel the anxiety of preaching, singing, or playing an instrument in front of a crowd. I have no social anxiety when I’m writing. A ton of anxieties, to be sure, but none of them having to do with being in public. My reactions are my own, tightly controlled. By that I mean I will cry and scream and beat the wall and tear my clothes and all of those things, it’s just in the privacy of my own home.

I tell you things I can’t tell anyone else, because I don’t force conversations to go my way, either. I don’t mean my desired outcome, I mean the path the conversation takes isn’t entirely dependent on me in public…. here, it would be a disaster area if I couldn’t hold up my end of the conversation while you’re not in the room…. and that’s how I think of our relationship. We are very close, even if you don’t know it.