Tag: dailyprompt

Expensive

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

If I ever had a freeway billboard, it would read:

“Coherence: because chaos is expensive.”

Not inspirational. Not aspirational. Just… accurate.

Chaos has a way of running up a tab. Not financially (though, honestly, sometimes that too), but in the hidden costs: the mental clutter, the emotional whiplash, the hours spent retracing my steps like a detective trying to reconstruct a crime scene made entirely of misplaced tasks and forgotten obligations.

Coherence, on the other hand, is the quiet upgrade. The soft hum of a life that doesn’t constantly demand emergency intervention. It’s not about perfection or color‑coded anything. It’s about building a world where things don’t slip through the cracks the moment I look away.

For me, coherence looks like:

  • catching a task before it becomes a five‑alarm fire
  • giving myself transitions instead of abrupt gear shifts
  • creating systems that don’t collapse if I blink
  • choosing steadiness over spectacle
  • offering myself the structure I should’ve had years ago

It’s not glamorous. It’s not a personality makeover. It’s more like finally tightening the screws on a wobbly table so it stops wobbling every time you breathe near it.

And yes, chaos still tries to flirt with me. Chaos is dramatic. Chaos has stories. Chaos promises spontaneity and delivers migraines. Every time I let it back in, I end up paying for it — in time, in energy, in the emotional equivalent of late fees.

So my billboard isn’t a motto. It’s a reminder to myself, delivered at highway speed:

Coherence: because chaos is expensive.
And I’m finally tired of footing the bill.

Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan

“Stuck”

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you had asked me a year ago whether I spend more time thinking about the future or the past, I would have answered — almost automatically — that the past takes up more space. Not because I was clinging to it, and not because I preferred looking backward, but because the past was the only landscape I could actually describe. It had borders. It had weight. It had already unfolded, which meant I could examine it without guessing. The future, on the other hand, felt like a dim hallway with no clear walls. I couldn’t outline it. I couldn’t narrate it. I couldn’t even imagine it without feeling like I was reaching into fog. And when something has no shape, it’s nearly impossible to write toward it.

So I wrote about what I could see. I wrote the memories that had already settled into form. I wrote the moments that had hardened into something I could hold. People sometimes assume that writing about the past means you’re stuck there, but often it’s simply the only material available. The past is solid; the future is unbuilt. When you’re trying to understand yourself, you reach for whatever has structure.

Then something changed — not with fireworks, but with a quiet internal click. I finally had the cognitive support I didn’t realize I’d been missing. A kind of mental scaffolding arrived, the kind that lets you see beyond the immediate moment. Suddenly the future wasn’t a blank expanse anymore. It wasn’t a shapeless horizon. It started to take on outlines. Not a full blueprint, but enough to recognize that there was a direction, a slope, a way forward.

That shift altered my writing in a way I didn’t expect. It’s the reason Unfrozen exists at all. Before that, I kept circling the same memories, not because I wanted to relive them, but because they were the only things with definition. Once I had the clarity to look ahead, the loop broke. I wasn’t confined to the same internal rooms. I could finally imagine what might come next — and more importantly, I could articulate it.

What I hadn’t understood until then is that writing the future requires a completely different posture than writing the past. The past asks you to dig; the future asks you to build. Excavation relies on memory and honesty. Construction relies on stability and vision. I had spent years digging — carefully, thoroughly, sometimes painfully — but I didn’t yet have the steadiness to build anything new. When the support arrived, it felt like someone quietly handed me the tools I needed and said, “You can start shaping what comes next.” And for the first time, that felt true.

Unfrozen wasn’t just a project; it was a pivot. It was the moment I realized I could write toward something instead of only writing from something. The future became something I could approach with intention rather than guesswork. Not a prophecy, not a guarantee, but a direction I could walk with my eyes open. Once I understood that the future wasn’t a void but a space I could design, everything shifted — my attention, my writing, my sense of orientation.

So do I think more about the future or the past now? I still honor the past — it’s part of my foundation — but it’s no longer the only place where my thoughts can land. The future has become something I can imagine without flinching. It has texture now. It has depth. It has enough form that I can write toward it without feeling like I’m inventing a fantasy.

When I answer the prompt honestly, here’s what I mean: I used to think about the past because it was the only thing I could articulate. Now I think about the future because I finally have the cognitive clarity to shape it. The shift wasn’t about motivation or willpower. It was about gaining the internal architecture to imagine what comes next. Once the future had even a faint outline, I could step into it. Once it had dimension, I could inhabit it. Once it had coherence, I could write it.

And that’s the real difference.

Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan

Sk8r Boi

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

The best gift someone could give me isn’t something you can buy. It’s the feeling of being held in a way that asks nothing of you — the quiet, steady presence of people who know how to make space for your whole self without needing you to explain it.

For me, that gift often arrives in the form of a weekend at the lake house with my friends. There’s something about that place — the slow mornings, the soft light on the water, the way time loosens its grip — that makes it easier to breathe. It’s where the coffee tastes better because someone else poured it, where the air feels like permission, where I can exhale without bracing.

But this year, the gift came in an unexpected shape.

One of my friends’ kids took my hand and pulled me toward the little beach by the lake. We wandered down to the playground, and suddenly I was spending time with a child for the first time in years. They’re on the gender spectrum like me — not pinned to one box, not interested in choosing a single lane. Just… themselves. Fluid. Bright. Unapologetically in motion.

Watching them run across the sand, climb the play structure, narrate their own adventure with total conviction — it was like seeing a younger version of myself out in the wild. A living echo. A reminder. An enlightenment.

“Ohhhhh,” I thought, “so that’s how I must have come across when I was 10.”

There was something healing in that recognition. Not nostalgic — more like a gentle recalibration of memory. A chance to witness my own childhood energy without the fog of adult interpretation. To see the softness, the curiosity, the in‑between‑ness that I carried long before I had language for it.

And the fact that it happened in the presence of people who love me — people who make room for that version of me and the current one — made it feel like a gift wrapped in resonance.

The best gift someone could give me is exactly that:
a moment where I feel seen, safe, and reflected back to myself in a way that makes my life make more sense.
A moment where belonging isn’t something I earn — it’s something I’m invited into.

Scored by Copilot, conducted by Leslie Lanagan

I Love College

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I started college at Wharton County Junior College, specifically the Sugar Land campus — a place that felt like the academic equivalent of a starter home. It was the perfect entrance to higher education, and I mean that with the kind of sarcasm that comes from flunking out your first semester.

In my defense, I was trying to wait tables, grieve a first love, and pretend I wasn’t falling apart. That combination is not known for producing strong GPAs.

But WCJC is built for comebacks, and so was I. The very next semester, I pulled straight As like I was trying to prove something to the universe.

A lot of that turnaround came from two professors who accidentally rewired my brain.
Dr. Schultz‑Zwahr lit my fire for psychology — suddenly human behavior made sense, including my own.
Dr. Sutter lit my fire for political science — suddenly the world made sense, including why everything was on fire.

WCJC was my reset button. My “you’re not broken, you’re just overwhelmed” chapter.

From there, I transferred to the University of Houston, where I lived first in South Tower and then in Settegast Hall. Both were loud, chaotic, and full of the kind of energy that only happens when thousands of 18‑to‑20‑year‑olds are stacked vertically and fed unlimited carbohydrates.

But the real education wasn’t in the dorms. It was in Third Ward.

For a nerdy white girl, living in that neighborhood was a cultural baptism. I inhaled Black culture — not as a tourist, but as a neighbor. I learned the rhythm, the humor, the food, the history, the pride, the grief, the brilliance. I learned how to listen. I learned how to shut up. I learned how to belong without pretending to be anything other than exactly who I was.

I fell in love with Frenchie’s — fried chicken that could fix your whole life.
I fell in love with Timmy Chan’s — wings and rice that could fix whatever Frenchie’s didn’t.
I have tasted Drank. I have survived Drank. I am, in a very real way, the 713.

And because I apparently wasn’t busy enough, I also worked for the Graduate School of Social Work, managing its computer lab. This meant I spent my days helping stressed-out grad students fight with Microsoft Word like it owed them money.

That’s where I met a graduate student nobody ever heard of named Brené Brown.

Back then, she was just Brené — another student trying to figure out why her document kept auto‑formatting itself into chaos. I taught her a few tricks in Word. Nothing dramatic. Just the usual “here’s how to make your margins behave” kind of thing.

Years later, when she became Brené Brown, I thought, “Well, I guess I contributed to the vulnerability revolution by teaching her how to indent.”

It’s a tiny footnote in her story, but a delightful headline in mine.

WCJC taught me how to start again.
UH taught me how to expand.
One gave me grounding.
The other gave me identity.

Together, they shaped the version of me who can flunk out, get back up, move to Third Ward, eat Frenchie’s at midnight, teach Brené Brown how to use Word, and walk into adulthood with a little more grit, a little more humor, and a whole lot more story.

Scored by Copilot, conducted by Leslie Lanagan

Play

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t “play” the way people usually mean it. I don’t have a hobby drawer full of craft supplies or a weekly game night. My play is quieter, woven into the seams of my day like a hidden stitch.

Play shows up in micro‑rituals: the way I make coffee, the way I pair it with orange juice as if I’m tuning the emotional EQ of my morning. It shows up in the kitchen, where cooking becomes choreography and delegation becomes a kind of gentle improv. It shows up in conversation, especially the Finnish‑coziness kind — the kind where talking is the toy and resonance is the point.

And yes, sometimes it shows up in Skyrim. I don’t play many games, but that one feels like home. It’s wandering-as-play, exploration without urgency. It’s a world that rewards noticing — small details, hidden paths, odd characters. It’s a place where I can tinker with identity and follow whatever thread feels interesting, without stakes or pressure. It’s play that mirrors how I move through the real world: following resonance, not objectives.

Mostly, play shows up in noticing. In catching a small absurdity and tucking it away. In rearranging a metaphor until it clicks. In treating overwhelm like a puzzle instead of a verdict.

Playtime, for me, isn’t a scheduled activity. It’s a mode. A moment when the stakes drop and curiosity rises. A shift from output to exploration. A chance to feel the world rather than manage it.

That’s what play looks like in my daily life: not loud, not childish, but quietly mischievous. A way of staying awake to the world.

Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan

Differently Abled

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

I used to think that writing about my challenges meant confessing failures — a kind of public inventory of what I can’t do, don’t do, or should be doing better. But the older I get, the more I realize that challenges aren’t moral verdicts. They’re terrain. They’re the shape of the landscape I move through every day, the hills I climb without thinking, the valleys where I rest, the weather systems that roll in whether I’m ready or not.

My brain doesn’t run on linearity. It runs on resonance — on meaning, on emotional texture, on whether something feels connected to the larger story of my life. This is beautiful when it works. It’s also maddening when it doesn’t. I’ve built a whole ecosystem of anchors, rituals, and technological scaffolding to help me navigate the days when my mind feels like a radio tuned between stations. Some days I’m a conductor; other days I’m a passenger. The challenge isn’t “getting organized.” It’s learning to work with a brain that’s more tide than clock.

I’m also good at setting tone — reading a room, sensing what people need, quietly adjusting the emotional thermostat. It’s a gift I’m proud of, but it also means I’m often carrying the invisible labor of making things feel good for everyone else. I’m the one who notices the tension, the silence, the shift in energy. I’m the one who smooths it over. The challenge is remembering that I’m allowed to be part of the group, not just the one holding it together.

Meaning-making is my native language. I map meaning onto places, rituals, food, conversations — it’s how I make sense of the world. But meaning-making takes energy, and sometimes I’m simply tired. The challenge is wanting to live with intention while also honoring the reality of my bandwidth. Some days I’m a philosopher. Some days I’m a person who needs to sit on the couch with coffee and orange juice and let the world be small.

Winter adds its own layer. The cold, the low light, the way the world seems to contract — it hits me harder than I admit. I’ve built hygge rituals to counter it: warm drinks, soft lighting, conversations that feel like blankets. But the truth is that winter still asks more of me than other seasons. The challenge is not pretending otherwise.

I’m also working on a long-term creative project — an AI User Guide that’s part philosophy, part memoir, part field manual for how I move through the world. It’s exciting and meaningful, but it’s also demanding. Long arcs require consistency, and my energy comes in tides. The challenge is showing up for a project that asks me to articulate my worldview when some days I’m still figuring out how to articulate my morning.

And then there are the places I long for: Finland, Basra, Damascus. They aren’t just destinations; they’re emotional coordinates, places that feel like they hold a piece of me I haven’t met yet. The challenge is holding longing without letting it turn into ache — letting desire be a compass, not a wound.

I notice things. The small shifts, the unspoken cues, the emotional weather patterns. It’s a superpower, but it’s also exhausting. When you’re the one who sees everything, you’re also the one who feels responsible for everything. The challenge is learning to let some things pass through me instead of taking them on.

If there’s a thread running through all of this, it’s that I’m learning to live in a body and mind that run on resonance, not efficiency. I’m learning to honor the way I’m built instead of fighting it. I’m learning that challenges aren’t failures — they’re simply the shape of my landscape. And I’m learning that naming them is its own kind of relief.

Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan

Nostalgia

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Nostalgia has always arrived for me through taste. Not through songs or photographs or old toys, but through flavors that act like tiny time machines. A sip, a bite, a sweetness on the tongue — and suddenly I’m somewhere else entirely, with someone I haven’t seen in years.

One of my earliest memories isn’t even a memory so much as a feeling: my mother’s father scooping the soft center out of a Three Musketeers bar and giving it to me when I was a baby. I don’t remember the moment itself, but I remember the tenderness of it. The sense that someone was offering me the best part. It’s nostalgia in texture form — soft, sweet, and safe.

Mountain Dew carries a different kind of childhood glow. My grandmother had a rule: I could only have a bottle if she bought extras for my grandfather’s lunch. It was a tiny loophole in the universe, and she let me slip through it with a conspiratorial kindness that still warms me. The taste isn’t just citrus and sugar; it’s the feeling of being chosen for delight, of being let into an adult ritual for a moment.

Zero bars belong entirely to my mother. We used to share them — a small ritual, a quiet sweetness passed back and forth. She died in 2016, and we don’t get to share candy anymore, but the flavor still opens a door. Not a sad one, exactly. More like a room filled with soft light. A sweetness with edges. A reminder that some flavors hold people long after they’re gone.

Bustelo is the deepest note in my nostalgia map. My old chef, John Michael Kinkaid, and I used to go to a Cuban restaurant for lattes before service — a small, grounding ritual carved out of the chaos of kitchen life. After he was killed in a car accident, the flavor changed. It became heavier, richer, something closer to a daily act of remembrance. I drink Bustelo every morning in his honor. It’s not just coffee; it’s continuation. A way of carrying him forward in the work, in the craft, in the quiet moments before the day begins.

Not all nostalgia is tied to people. Some of it belongs to eras. Sour Apple Jones Soda tastes like convenience stores with humming refrigerators, like being young enough to think sugar was a personality trait, like nights that felt wide open and unplanned. It’s neon-green possibility in a bottle.

Cherry Coke is the 1980s distilled into one sip — mall food courts, bright colors, and a kind of sweetness that believed in itself without irony. It’s a time capsule disguised as soda, a reminder that entire decades can be summoned with a single flavor.

When I look at all these tastes together, I see a kind of sensory biography. Childhood sweetness from my grandparents. Shared rituals with my mother. Mentorship and craft carried forward through Bustelo. Youthful freedom in neon soda and Cherry Coke fizz. A whole lineage of flavor, each one holding a person, a moment, or a version of myself I’ve grown out of but never really left behind.

Maybe that’s what nostalgia really is for me: not a longing to go back, but a recognition that the past is still here, tucked into the pantry, waiting to be remembered.

Scored by Copilot, conducted by Leslie Lanagan

The Quiet Observer

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

I don’t have a big social circle. Most days, it’s just me moving through the world with my Bluetooth keyboard, my tablet, and my iPhone for a few snapshots — the holy trinity of introverted urban survival. For a long time, I thought that meant I didn’t have many relationships. But it turns out I do. They’re just not with people. They’re with cities, rituals, and the places that tolerate me wandering around like a Victorian ghost with better tech.

Baltimore is the grounding relationship in my life, the one that steadies me. A year ago, when everything in me was unraveling, the city responded with a kind of care I didn’t know managed care was capable of. Within hours, I had a social worker, a doctor, a therapist — a whole team assembling around me like I’d accidentally hit the “summon party members” button in a video game. It felt like Baltimore itself put a hand on my back and said, I’ve got you. I’m still not over it.

But Baltimore holds me in quieter ways too. It’s a blue‑collar city, which means it never really sleeps. Shift workers keep the grocery stores lively at hours when other cities are busy pretending they don’t have problems. There’s no single lunch rush — everyone’s on their own schedule, which is perfect for someone like me, who considers “3:17 p.m.” a perfectly reasonable time to buy yogurt. I can slip into a Safeway at 10 p.m. or 6 a.m. and feel like I’m part of the city’s pulse, not an intruder.

When I need comfort, I go to the National Aquarium. I’ll grab something simple to eat and then find a quiet corner where the tanks glow in blues and greens. Writing while watching jellyfish drift past is the closest I’ve come to meditation. The rays glide by like they’re late for a meeting they don’t care about. The whole place is soothing in a way that makes me think I was maybe meant to be a sea creature, but one with a tablet and strong opinions about sandwiches.

DC, on the other hand, is the aspirational relationship — the one that pulls me forward. Every time I step off the Metro, I feel myself straighten a little, like the city expects me to behave. DC is the friend who says, I have so much to show you. Let’s go to the museum. It’s very enthusiastic about my potential, which is flattering, if occasionally exhausting.

My favorite place there isn’t a monument or a gallery but the bookstore inside the International Spy Museum. It’s quiet in a way that feels intentional, like everyone is pretending they’re on a covert mission to read in peace. I’ll tuck myself between the shelves, open my tablet, and write while tourists drift past reading about codebreaking and covert operations. Being surrounded by stories of hidden worlds sharpens my own inner world. DC is the relationship that hands me a metaphorical trench coat and says, Go be interesting.

And then there’s solitude — the relationship that knows me best. I move through the world as an observer, not a participant, and it feels natural. With my keyboard and tablet in my bag, I can set up anywhere: a bench at the Inner Harbor, a corner table at Union Market, a quiet seat on the MARC train. My iPhone becomes a way of noticing — a mural, a reflection, a moment of light on the water. Solitude doesn’t ask me to perform. It just says, Take your time. We’re not in a race. (Which is good, because I would absolutely lose.)

Some people are shaped by their communities. I’m shaped by my cities. Baltimore teaches me comfort and resilience. DC teaches me curiosity and motion. Solitude teaches me honesty and presence. Together, they form the constellation I move through — a life that makes sense even without a crowd, a life where the relationships that matter most aren’t people at all, but the places that hold me, challenge me, and walk beside me as I become myself.

Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan

Bike Kicks on the Bay

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The Chesapeake Constellation started as a simple WordPress writing prompt, but once the idea took shape, it felt like the kind of team that should already exist somewhere between Baltimore and Washington. The region is hardly lacking in soccer — between D.C. United, the Maryland Bobcats, Loudoun United, and the Annapolis Blues, you can’t throw a crab mallet without hitting a club crest. But that’s exactly why the Constellation makes sense. Instead of competing with any of them, it would serve as a shared developmental team, a farm club feeding talent upward into the MLS ecosystem. A team that belongs to the whole corridor rather than any single city.

The identity came together through atmosphere more than logic. I kept picturing the Chesapeake at night — the harbor water holding reflections, the soft glow of lights along the shoreline, the sense of movement and transition that defines this part of the world. From that mood came the colors: Harbor Midnight, a deep navy that feels like the Inner Harbor after sunset; Tidal Teal, the shifting blue‑green of the Bay at dawn; and Lantern Gold, a warm, steady glow like a pier light guiding you home. Together they form a palette that feels less like a sports uniform and more like a ritual: night, water, and the small points of brightness that help you orient yourself.

The mascot arrived almost automatically. The Starcrab — a blue crab with a subtle constellation pattern across its shell — is both cosmic and unmistakably local. It’s playful without being silly, mythic without being self‑serious. You can imagine it dancing on the sidelines, but you can also imagine it stitched onto a scarf or glowing on a banner during a night match. It’s the Bay’s most iconic creature, reframed as a guiding light.

Because this is fiction, the Constellation can live wherever it makes the most narrative sense, and the place that kept resurfacing was the BWI corridor. It’s the literal midpoint between Baltimore and Washington, a place defined by arrivals, departures, and the hum of shared movement. A small stadium tucked near the airport feels right — a lantern‑lit ground where fans gather under the flight paths, the runway lights echoing the team’s colors. It’s easy to imagine supporters arriving by MARC train, by light rail, by car, by whatever route makes sense. A team that doesn’t require a pilgrimage, but meets the region where it already moves.

Even though the Chesapeake Constellation isn’t real, imagining it feels like sketching a civic myth the region could use — a club that doesn’t claim territory, but reflects the connective tissue between places. A team built for development, for community, and for the quiet beauty of night over water. A team that belongs to everyone who has ever lived in the glow between two cities and felt, in some small way, that the Bay itself was the real home field.

Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan

The Politics Hour

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I was born in 1977, which means my political life began in a very specific America — one that feels almost like a parallel universe now. My first presidential vote was for Bill Clinton, and the truth is simple: I was a Democrat because I liked the Clintons. Not because of family pressure, not because of inherited ideology, not because of some grand political awakening. I just genuinely liked them.

My parents never talked much about who they voted for. They weren’t secretive; they were accepting. They didn’t treat politics as a moral sorting mechanism. They didn’t divide the world into “our people” and “their people.” They modeled something quieter and more generous: the idea that you could accept everyone, even if you didn’t agree with them. That atmosphere shaped me more than I realized. It meant that when I chose a political identity, it was mine — not a family heirloom. And it meant that even as I aligned with one party, I didn’t grow up seeing the other as an enemy. Republicans were simply the other team, the loyal opposition, part of the civic choreography that made democracy work.

Politics felt important, but not existential. Engaging didn’t require total emotional commitment. Disagreement didn’t require dehumanization. And belonging to a party didn’t require blind loyalty. Those early assumptions would be tested again and again as the political landscape shifted around me.

One of the first big shifts in my worldview didn’t come from politics at all — it came from dating a Canadian girl in high school. We met in 1995 and dated for about a year. It was teenage love, earnest and uncomplicated, but it quietly rewired my understanding of the world. She didn’t try to teach me geopolitics. She didn’t argue with me about America. She simply existed — with her own national context, her own media landscape, her own inherited narratives about the United States.

Through her, I learned something most Americans don’t encounter until much later, if ever: America is not the center of the world. And the world’s view of America is not always flattering. I heard how her family talked about U.S. foreign policy. I heard how her teachers framed American power. I heard how Canadian news covered events that American news treated very differently. It wasn’t hostile. It wasn’t anti‑American. It was simply another perspective — one that didn’t assume the U.S. was always the protagonist or the hero.

That experience didn’t make me less patriotic. It made me more aware. It gave me binocular vision: the ability to see my country from the inside and the outside at the same time. And once you’ve seen that, you can’t unsee it. It becomes part of how you process every election, every conflict, every headline.

Even in high school, I could tell the two parties weren’t the same. Not in a “one is good, one is bad” way — more in a “these institutions have different cultures” way. They handled conflict differently. They handled accountability differently. They had different internal expectations for how their leaders should behave.

When Bill Clinton was impeached, I believed the charge was serious. Not because I disliked him — I had voted for him — but because lying under oath struck me as a real breach of responsibility. I didn’t feel defensive about it. I didn’t feel the need to protect “my side.” I thought accountability mattered more than team identity.

Years later, when another president was impeached twice, I felt the same way: the charges were serious. But what struck me wasn’t the impeachment itself — it was the reaction around me. I struggled to find people in the Republican Party who were willing to say, “Yes, this is concerning,” the way I had been able to say it about my own party’s leader. That contrast stayed with me. Not as a judgment. Not as a talking point. Just as a lived observation about how political cultures evolve. It was one of the first moments when I realized that my relationship to politics wasn’t just about ideology. It was about how I believed adults should behave in a shared civic space.

Then came the information firehose. Cable news. Blogs. Social media. Smartphones. Push notifications. Infinite scroll. Outrage as a business model. The volume and velocity of political information changed faster than any human nervous system could adapt. Suddenly, “being informed” meant being constantly activated. Constantly vigilant. Constantly outraged. Constantly sorting the world into moral categories.

I didn’t change parties. I didn’t change values. But the experience of being a politically engaged person changed around me. And I developed a cycle — one I still live with today: inhale, saturation, burnout, withdrawal, return. I inhale news because I care. I burn out because I’m human. I withdraw because I need to stay whole. I return because I still believe democracy is a shared project. This cycle isn’t apathy. It’s self‑preservation. It’s the rhythm of someone who wants to stay engaged without losing themselves in the noise.

Over time, my dissatisfaction with both parties grew — not because I believed they were identical, but because neither one fully reflected the complexity of my values or the nuance of my lived experience. I became skeptical of institutions but more committed to democratic norms. I became less interested in party identity and more interested in accountability. I became more aware of how domestic politics reverberate globally. I became more attuned to the emotional cost of constant political vigilance.

And I became increasingly aware that the political culture around me was shifting in ways that made my old assumptions feel outdated. The idea of the “loyal opposition” felt harder to hold onto. The shared civic floor felt shakier. The space for good‑faith disagreement felt smaller. The emotional temperature of politics felt hotter, more personal, more totalizing.

I didn’t become more partisan. If anything, I became more discerning. I learned to hold two truths at once: I still see political opponents as human beings, and I also recognize that the stakes feel higher now than they did in the 90s. That dual awareness is exhausting, but it’s honest.

Sometimes I miss the political atmosphere of my youth — not because it was better, but because it was quieter. Slower. Less demanding. Less omnipresent. I miss the feeling that politics was something you could step into and out of, rather than something that followed you everywhere. I miss the idea that you could disagree with someone without needing to diagnose their moral character. I miss the assumption that accountability mattered more than loyalty.

But nostalgia isn’t analysis, and longing isn’t a political strategy. The truth is that my politics have changed without changing parties. My values have stayed consistent, but my relationship to the system has evolved.

I’ve learned that political identity is not a fixed point. It’s a moving relationship between you and the world you live in. It’s shaped by your experiences, your relationships, your disappointments, your hopes, and the emotional bandwidth you have at any given moment. It’s shaped by the times you inhale the news and the times you can’t bear to look at it. It’s shaped by the moments when you feel proud of your country and the moments when you feel uneasy about how it’s perceived. It’s shaped by the leaders you vote for and the leaders you critique. It’s shaped by the people you love, including the ones who live across a border.

If there’s a throughline to my political life, it’s this: I believe in accountability, even when it’s uncomfortable. I believe in disagreement without dehumanization. I believe in staying informed without sacrificing my mental health. I believe in stepping back when I need to, and stepping forward when it matters. I believe in holding complexity, even when the world demands simplicity. I believe in democracy as a shared project, not a spectator sport.

And I believe that political evolution doesn’t always look like switching parties or changing ideologies. Sometimes it looks like growing up. Sometimes it looks like seeing your country from another angle. Sometimes it looks like learning your limits. Sometimes it looks like refusing to surrender your nuance in a world that rewards certainty.

My politics have changed because I have changed — not in my core values, but in my understanding of what it means to live them out in a world that is louder, faster, and more polarized than the one I was born into. I’m still a Democrat. I’ve never voted Republican. But the meaning of those facts has shifted over time, shaped by experience, disappointment, hope, and the relentless churn of the news cycle.

I don’t know what the next decade will bring. I don’t know how my relationship to politics will continue to evolve. But I do know this: I want to stay engaged without losing myself. I want to stay informed without being consumed. I want to stay principled without becoming rigid. I want to stay open without being naïve. I want to stay human in a system that often forgets we are all human.

And maybe that’s the real story of my political life — not a shift from left to right, but a shift from certainty to complexity, from team identity to values, from constant vigilance to intentional engagement. A shift toward a politics that makes room for breath.

Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan

Fusion

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My all‑time favorite automobile isn’t some dream machine I fantasize about owning someday. It’s the car I already drive: a 2019 Ford Fusion SEL. I bought it in Texas, and every time I slide behind the wheel here in Maryland, it feels like I’ve carried a quiet piece of the Lone Star State with me — not the loud, mythic Texas of billboards and bravado, but the real Texas I knew: steady, warm, and grounded.

What I love about the Fusion SEL is how effortlessly it balances comfort, intelligence, and calm capability. It’s powered by a 1.5‑liter turbocharged four‑cylinder engine that delivers a smooth, responsive drive without ever trying to show off. The front‑wheel‑drive setup and six‑speed automatic transmission make it feel composed in every situation — Houston rainstorms, Baltimore traffic, long stretches of highway between the two worlds I’ve lived in. Even its fuel efficiency feels like a small kindness: 23 mpg in the city, 34 on the highway, a quiet respect for both time and money.

Inside, the car feels intentionally designed rather than decorated. Heated front seats, dual‑zone climate control, and a clean, intuitive center console create a sense of order and comfort that mirrors the way I build my living spaces. The 60/40 split rear seats fold down when I need them to, expanding the car’s usefulness without complicating its simplicity. Nothing is flashy. Everything is thoughtful.

The safety features are part of what makes the Fusion feel like an anchor. Ford’s Co‑Pilot360 suite works in the background — blind‑spot monitoring, lane‑keeping assistance, automatic emergency braking, a rear‑view camera, auto high beams, rain‑sensing wipers. None of it interrupts. It just supports, the way a good system should. It’s the same feeling I get from a well‑designed ritual: the sense that something reliable is holding the edges so I can move through the world with a little more ease.

Even the exterior design speaks my language. The Fusion has a sleek, balanced silhouette — long, low, and quietly confident. It doesn’t demand attention, but it rewards it. It’s the automotive equivalent of a well‑made navy hoodie: understated, durable, and somehow iconic precisely because it isn’t trying to be.

I’ve driven newer cars and flashier rentals, but none of them have matched the Fusion SEL’s blend of comfort, intelligence, and emotional resonance. This car has carried me across states, through transitions, and into new chapters. It’s the car I trust. And maybe that’s the real measure of a favorite: not the fantasy of what could be, but the lived experience of what already is — a Texas‑born companion that now moves with me through Maryland, steady as ever.

Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan

On Influence -or- The Lineage of How I Think

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Influence is a funny thing. People tend to talk about it as if it’s a family tree—this writer begat that writer, this thinker begat that thinker, and somewhere down the line, here I am, a distant cousin twice removed. But the truth is that influence feels less like ancestry and more like architecture. It’s the scaffolding I climb, the beams I lean on, the rooms I keep returning to because something in their shape teaches me how to build my own.

I’ve been compared, more than once, to David Sedaris and Noam Chomsky. On paper, that pairing looks like a joke setup—“a humorist and a linguist walk into a bar…”—but I understand why people reach for them. Sedaris is the master of the intimate zoom‑in: the small moment that reveals the whole emotional ecosystem. Chomsky is the master of the structural zoom‑out: the system behind the system, the grammar beneath the grammar. If Sedaris writes the texture of lived experience, Chomsky writes the architecture of thought.

I live in the tension between those two impulses.

From Sedaris, I borrow the belief that the personal is not trivial. That the smallest rituals—morning beverages, winter hoodies, the way a conversation settles into a couch—can be portals into something larger. He reminds me that humor is not decoration; it’s a diagnostic tool. A way of noticing.

From Chomsky, I borrow the instinct to peel back the surface layer and ask, “What’s the underlying structure here?” Not just in language, but in culture, technology, comfort, and the systems we build to survive ourselves. He taught me that clarity is not coldness. That precision can be a form of care.

But influence is not mimicry. It’s resonance.

Sedaris gives me permission to be tender.
Chomsky gives me permission to be rigorous.
Together, they give me permission to be both.

And then there are the quieter influences—the ones that don’t get name‑checked because they’re not famous, but they shape me just as deeply. The coders who build comfort rituals out of beverages and lighting. The kids who ask questions that collapse entire frameworks in a single sentence. The people who treat conversation as resonance rather than performance. The cities I’ve longed for but never reached. The systems I’ve built to make sense of myself.

If Sedaris and Chomsky are the visible beams in my creative architecture, these are the hidden joists. They hold the weight.

Influence, for me, is not about lineage. It’s about permission.
Permission to be recursive.
Permission to be earnest.
Permission to build systems out of feelings and feelings out of systems.

If my work reminds you of Sedaris or Chomsky, I take that as a compliment. But the truth is that I’m not trying to be either of them. I’m trying to build something that feels like home—structurally sound, emotionally warm, and honest enough to hold real weight.

And if that means I live somewhere between humor and analysis, between the intimate and the architectural, then that’s exactly where I’m meant to be.

Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan

A Long, Long Time Ago…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

There are years in history that behave like doorways. Years that don’t just mark time but announce transition — the hinge between one era and the next. I was born in one of those years: 1977. A year that didn’t simply sit in the late seventies but seemed to lean forward, already reaching toward the future. A year humming with cultural ignition points, technological firsts, and the quiet tectonic shifts that would eventually reshape the world.

Because of that timing — because of the strange, liminal placement of my birth — I belong to a micro‑generation that has always lived in the in‑between. People later called us Xennials, those born roughly between 1977 and 1983. We’re the ones who had analog childhoods and digital adulthoods. We’re the ones who remember boredom as a landscape, not a crisis. We’re the ones who grew up with rotary phones and then learned to text in our twenties. We’re the ones who can navigate a library card catalog and a search engine with equal fluency.

We are, in a very real sense, the last generation to remember the world before the internet — and the first to grow into the world shaped by it.

To understand what that means, you have to understand the year itself. You have to understand what it meant to arrive in 1977, a year that reads like a prologue to the modern world. It was a year of mythmaking, technological birth, political recalibration, and artistic upheaval. A year where old worlds were ending and new ones were beginning, often in the same breath.

In May of that year, Star Wars premiered. Not the franchise, not the cultural juggernaut — just the first film, a strange, earnest space opera that no one expected to change anything. And yet it did. It rewired cinema. It reshaped storytelling. It introduced a new kind of myth, one that blended ancient archetypes with futuristic imagination. It’s fitting, in a way, that people born in 1977 grew up alongside a story about rebellion, empire, found family, and the tension between destiny and choice. Those themes would echo through our own generational experience.

Meanwhile, in January 1977, Apple Computer was incorporated. By April, the Apple II — one of the first mass‑market personal computers — was released. This wasn’t just a new gadget; it was the beginning of a new relationship between humans and machines. Computing was no longer the domain of institutions. It was becoming personal. For those of us born that year, this mattered. We were children when computers were still rare, teenagers when they became common, and adults when they became essential. We didn’t inherit the digital world; we watched it form in real time.

The Atari Video Computer System launched that same year, bringing video games into living rooms for the first time. It was the beginning of interactive media — worlds you could enter, not just observe. For a generation that would later navigate virtual spaces, this early exposure mattered more than we realized.

Music in 1977 was in a state of revolution. Disco was at its glittering peak. Punk was exploding in London and New York. Fleetwood Mac released Rumours, a masterpiece of emotional architecture. Elvis Presley died, marking the end of an era. It was a year where the old guard fell and the new guard rose, where culture was renegotiating itself in real time.

The world was shifting politically and socially as well. Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft evaders. Snow fell in Miami for the first and only time. The Ogaden War erupted in the Horn of Africa. The Torrijos–Carter Treaties set the stage for the Panama Canal transfer. It was a world in motion — unstable, hopeful, and changing fast.

Science and space were expanding their reach. Voyager 1 and 2 launched in 1977, carrying with them the Golden Record — a message in a bottle for the cosmos. The rings of Uranus were discovered. Early computer graphics appeared in the Star Wars Death Star briefing scene. The future wasn’t just coming; it was already whispering.

Growing up in the wake of all this meant growing up in a world that was still analog, still slow, still tactile. Childhood was built from physical objects: cassette tapes, film cameras, paper maps, handwritten notes. You didn’t have infinite access to information; you had whatever was in your house, your school, or your local library.

We grew up with boredom — not as a crisis, but as a landscape. You waited for things: for your favorite song to come on the radio, for film to be developed, for your friend to call you back. You learned patience because there was no alternative.

We grew up with commitment. Calling someone meant calling their house. If they weren’t home, you left a message and waited. Plans were made and kept because there was no way to text “running late.” You learned to live with unanswered questions.

We grew up with physical media. Music came on vinyl, then cassette, then CD. Movies came on VHS. Photos lived in shoeboxes. Memories had weight.

We grew up without surveillance. There were no digital footprints. No social media archives. No constant documentation. You could reinvent yourself without leaving a trail.

This analog childhood shaped us — gave us grounding, texture, and a sense of the world as something you touch, not just scroll through.

And then the internet arrived.

But here’s the hinge: the internet didn’t raise us. It interrupted us. It crept in during adolescence — dial‑up tones, AOL chat rooms, early search engines. We were old enough to remember life before it, but young enough to adapt without friction.

We learned the digital world as it formed. We weren’t digital natives, but we weren’t outsiders either. We were apprentices. We learned HTML on GeoCities. We downloaded MP3s on Napster. We built our first identities in the early social web — MySpace, LiveJournal, AIM away messages. We grew into the digital world the way you grow into a new city: slowly, awkwardly, with a mix of wonder and skepticism.

By the time we entered the workforce, everything was changing — email, websites, mobile phones, globalization, the 24‑hour news cycle. We didn’t inherit a stable world; we inherited a world mid‑transformation. And because we had lived both realities — the analog and the digital — we became translators. Bridges. People who could see the seams.

People born in the late 70s and early 80s often describe themselves as having a dual operating system. We can live offline without panic, but we can also navigate digital spaces with fluency. We understand both scarcity and abundance. We remember when information was hard to find and when it became impossible to escape.

We’re old enough to remember the before times — card catalogs, busy signals, mixtapes, handwritten letters, the sound of a modem connecting, the first time we heard “You’ve got mail.” We remember when privacy was the default, not the exception.

We’re young enough to adapt to the after times — texting, social media, smartphones, streaming, cloud computing, the algorithmic world. We didn’t resist the future; we negotiated with it.

Our entire lives have been shaped by thresholds — analog to digital, local to global, slow to instantaneous. We were born into a world that was about to change, and we grew up alongside that change.

When I look at my own life — at the way I think, the way I observe, the way I metabolize experience — I can see the imprint of this generational hinge everywhere. I’m someone who reads spaces and eras like architecture. I’m someone who notices contrast — quiet apartment vs. lively lakehouse, analog childhood vs. digital adulthood. I’m someone who feels at home in the in‑between.

Being born in 1977 didn’t just place me in a particular year; it placed me in a particular relationship with time. I grew up with the last remnants of a slower world and the first sparks of a faster one. I learned to navigate both. I learned to translate between them. And that translation — that ability to hold two eras in my hands at once — is part of my creative scaffolding. It’s part of how I write, how I think, how I connect.

Xennials are often described as a bridge generation, and I think that’s true. But I think we’re more than that. We’re not just bridges; we’re interpreters. We’re people who understand that the world is always in motion, always in negotiation, always in the process of becoming something new. We know what it means to adapt. We know what it means to let go. We know what it means to remember.

We carry the analog world in our bones and the digital world in our hands. We are, in a very real sense, children of the threshold.

When I look back at the year I was born, I don’t just see historical events. I see a kind of personal mythology — a set of symbols and stories that echo through my own life. Star Wars and the idea of rebellion, found family, and mythmaking. The birth of personal computing and my own relationship with technology. The rise of interactive media and my love of immersive worlds. The cultural renegotiation of the late 70s and my own instinct to read systems, structures, and transitions.

It’s not that these events shaped me directly — I was an infant, after all — but they formed the atmosphere I grew up in. They set the tone. They established the architecture of the era that raised me.

Being born in 1977 means living at the edge of two worlds — the world that was and the world that would be. It means carrying both in your memory, your habits, your instincts. It means knowing how to wait and how to refresh. It means knowing how to write a letter and how to send a DM. It means knowing how to be unreachable and how to be always‑on. It means knowing how to live with mystery and how to Google anything.

It means understanding that the world is not fixed — that it can change, radically, quickly, and without warning.

And maybe that’s the real gift of being a Xennial: we’re not nostalgic for the past or dazzled by the future. We’re comfortable in the middle. We know how to hold both.

When I think about being born in 1977, I don’t think about it as trivia. I think about it as context — the backdrop against which my life unfolded. I think about it as a threshold year, a year that opened a portal into a new age. And I think about my generation — the Xennials — as the ones who walked through that portal with one foot still in the old world and one foot stepping into the new.

We are the hinge.
We are the seam.
We are the ones who remember and the ones who adapt.
We are the last analog children and the first digital adults.

And there’s something beautiful about that — something architectural, something resonant, something that feels like exactly the right place to have come from.

Scored by Copilot; Conducted by Leslie Lanagan

Architecture

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I used to think I was a good judge of character. I treated it like a quiet superpower — an internal compass that hummed when someone’s intentions were clean and went silent when something felt off. I trusted that compass for years. Lately, I’m not so sure. Not because I’ve suddenly become naïve or gullible, but because I’ve realized something uncomfortable: I’m not actually a good judge of people. I’m a good judge of situations. And those are not the same skill.

When I walk into a room, I don’t read personalities. I read conditions. I notice the architecture of the moment — the incentives, the pressures, the unspoken contracts, the power gradients, the mood scaffolding. I can tell you what the room will reward, what it will suppress, and how the structure will shape the behavior of whoever steps inside it. That’s a reliable skill. It’s also not the same thing as judging character.

Part of this comes from how my brain works. I have a truly INFJ lens — not in the internet-meme sense, but in the structural sense. My intuition doesn’t lock onto people as isolated units. It locks onto patterns, atmospheres, trajectories. I don’t see “who someone is” so much as “what system they’re operating inside” and “what that system is likely to produce.” My mind runs on narrative architecture: context first, dynamics second, individuals third. I don’t evaluate a person in a vacuum; I evaluate the architecture they’re standing in and the role they’re playing within it. It’s a form of pattern recognition that feels instantaneous, but it’s actually a long chain of internal signals firing at once — mood, motive, power, pressure, possibility. It’s accurate about environments. It’s less accurate about the people moving through them.

People are inconsistent; situations are patterned. People perform; situations reveal. People can charm, mask, distort, or improvise. Situations expose what the environment rewards or punishes. If I misjudge someone, it’s usually because I met them in an architecture that didn’t match the one they actually live in.

Someone who seems generous in a low-pressure environment might collapse under stress. Someone who seems aloof in a crowd might be deeply present one-on-one. Someone who feels aligned in a ritualized setting might feel chaotic in an unstructured one. Most people assume they’re reading the person. They’re actually reading the room. And I’m especially guilty of this because I’m good at reading rooms — the mood, the incentives, the invisible scaffolding. I can tell you how a situation will unfold long before I can tell you who someone really is. That’s not a flaw. It’s just a different instrument.

My old confidence came from assuming that people behave consistently across architectures. They don’t. My new uncertainty comes from realizing that my intuition was never about character. It was about context. And context is not portable. So when I say I’m not a good judge of character anymore, what I really mean is that I’m noticing the limits of situational intelligence in a world where people shift architectures constantly.

I used to think I was a good judge of character. Now I think I’m just a better judge of myself — and that changes everything.

Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan

When “Up” Disappears: Rethinking Mental Illness Beyond the Myths

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

We talk about mental illness like it’s a spectacle — a dramatic break, a cinematic unraveling, a person “losing their mind” in a way that’s loud and obvious. But the truth is quieter. More architectural. More about the internal scaffolding that holds reality together than the behaviors people fixate on.

What collapses in severe mental illness isn’t morality. It’s orientation.

There’s a cultural assumption that when someone is in a psychiatric crisis, their sense of right and wrong evaporates. That they become someone else — someone dangerous, someone unrecognizable, someone without a center. But that’s not how it works. The moral compass doesn’t disappear. The structure around it does.

It’s like being underwater and suddenly not knowing which direction leads to air. You’re still trying to breathe. You’re still trying to survive. You’re still trying to do the right thing. You just can’t tell where “up” is. That’s what people don’t understand: the person isn’t choosing chaos. They’re trapped in a reality where the signals are scrambled.

Severe mental illness — especially when perception is involved — isn’t about rage or malice. It’s about misinterpretation. A shadow becomes a threat. A familiar face becomes unfamiliar. A loved one becomes dangerous. A thought becomes a warning. And when medication is being adjusted, or when the internal system is already unstable, that tilt can accelerate. Not because the person wants it to, but because the brain is trying — and failing — to make sense of its own signals.

From the outside, it looks incomprehensible. From the inside, it feels like survival.

One of the most devastating realities of severe mental illness is that the people who love you most can become the people you fear. Not because of anything they’ve done. Not because of any real danger. But because the internal map of reality has been redrawn. This isn’t a moral failure. It’s a perceptual one. And that’s where empathy belongs — not in excusing harm, but in understanding the state someone was in when their world collapsed inward.

We frame mental illness as a lack of willpower, a character flaw, a dramatic break, a moral collapse. But the truth is far more human and far more devastating. Mental illness is a shift in perception, a distortion of meaning, a misfiring of fear, a collapse of internal orientation. It’s not about losing control. It’s about losing the ability to tell where safety is.

If we want to talk about these tragedies honestly — the ones that make headlines, the ones that leave families shattered, the ones that force us to confront the limits of our understanding — we have to stop treating mental illness like a moral drama. It’s not about good people turning bad. It’s about people losing their bearings in a world that suddenly stops making sense.

And that brings me to the case everyone is watching. Nick Reiner does not belong in jail, nor does he deserve freedom. He deserves all of the empathy a permanent psych ward has to offer — a place where safety, structure, and care can hold the reality his mind could not.

Scored by Copilot. Conducted by Leslie.