Tag: dailyprompt

I Don’t Admire Professions

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What profession do you admire most and why?

In the United States, we have a tendency to focus on what we do for money, even at parties. It’s not a party conversation, but we have them all the time. Washington can be soulless like that. I have had several people see me out and about with my sister. When she walks away, they ask me how much money she makes. First of all, ask her that. Second of all, she’s a Democrat. AIM LOW.

I make Washington less soulless because even though Lindsay’s crowd is political, my words are not and they need a break. You can see the table relax when my sister says, “This is Leslie. She’s a writer.” Or “she’s a cook.” The writer thing is only seen as positive when both of us make it clear I’m not a journalist. That’s a tupperware party I’m just not going to host. The difference is that if someone knows you’re a journalist, they’ll monitor everything they say because they think you’re looking for sensitive information. Bloggers don’t do that. They’re looking for a slice of real life, and politics is anything but that.

I’ll give you a for-instance in a completely fictional example that could indeed happen the longer I live here.

If Kamala Harris and I met, I would not remember the date or time. I would not remember much of what she said. But I’d remember the way her hair sparkled in the sun, whether her hugs were memorable, whether she smelled like generic soap or a perfume I’d recognize, definitely whether she was wearing Chucks or not.

I wouldn’t even say on my web site that I met Kamala Harris, most likely, because the higher you go in government salary, the less of your schedule is published. I wouldn’t want to say that I met her on a day she was supposed to be in Ukraine. In Washington, you learn to think like that no matter who your friends are, because you know you’ll have to do it for at least one person in your life, so why not do it for all of them? I doubt there would ever be a scenario in which I met a public figure at a time where they weren’t supposed to be there, but it is the nature of living in the federal city and not watching them on the news.

If I did respect a job, it would be journalism. I am very, very picky though. I figure out my favorite columnists and stick to them like glue (Shane Harris, Greg Miller). I will buy their books (I have most of David Halberstam’s, several of Rachel Maddow’s, and “The Apprentice” by Greg Miller). As I was telling Supergrover, I like to read novels, but I do not like to write them. I find that journalism jogs my brain for blogging, and I am in a rut with fiction because I am working on my own content right now. Novels will come back soon. I have just gotten into the groove. I don’t think “let’s go see what’s on the Internet today.” I think, “let’s go make the Internet today.”

Disrespect of someone’s profession comes from years and years of being tired of listening to complaints about people’s lives. If they don’t like what they do, why should I ask them? I would much rather ask them what they love. This works with anyone, because everyone has that thing. For me, it’s writing content for the web…. but not because it makes me popular. It’s that when I didn’t have any readers at all, I changed myself an entry at a time. Just because other people read my entries now doesn’t mean that it’s not all about self-improvement. I do the same thing I’ve always been doing. I wake up, think about my life for a few minutes, and the urge to write wakes up hungry.

I want to hear about that fire in other people. For Supergrover, it was also writing, She’s a blogger and writes children’s fairy tales that I hope to God one day I am old enough to understand. She writes clearly and beautifully, but what I mean is that I do not have a child’s heart anymore……… but she does. I will never carry a tenth of her little-kid wonder.

For Bryn, it’s all kinds of things. She likes cooking, gardening, making, being outside, having dogs……. all of it is creativity she pours into her relationships with animals (and dirt).

For Zac, it’s all the same stuff Bryn does on a smaller scale. He loves hiking and being outside with Oliver. The fact that what Zac does for money is my real life interest is a new thing. I am never more interested in what he has to say than when it’s about life inside his intelligence agency. His is a generic one that collects raw data from all the others, but he has the backstage pass to places like CIA and NSA.

It’s nice to know that even if I only have lawn seats, I can giggle with Zac after the show.

And yet it’s another relationship in which our interests feed each other to an enormous degree, because what I want to know isn’t even close to classified. It’s not important to me whether he has chatter on Iran, although I will definitely be listening to that if he does. It’s that he can tell me what his day to day life is like. He tells me when he’s going into a  no personal gadgets building, and because we’re both on the think it, say it plan, when I’m on a government computer and when I’m not (as in sending to his work computer). I learn what circumstances dictate being in a SCIF vs. why he’s actually there. Does that make sense? I want to know everything without knowing anything.

I’m dating the man who’s president of his queer group at the agency and it’s definitely not “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military anymore. Zac is also in the Navy Reserves, and I want to hear about every waking moment of that, too. That’s because he got to learn what it was like to walk into other countries and have people know they were talking to an intelligence officer based on past history with other people………… and being able to sniff them out so that he can deflect questions in advance.

I called him an intelligence officer, but I’m using a generic term because I don’t know military slang. He was active duty in the Navy and his job was intelligence. What that’s actually called is beyond me. Now, he works at a national intelligence agency and does his Navy stuff as a side gig. 😛

If I tell you what I love, it’s going to be reading and writing. But people vastly underestimate how much I actually write because blog entries seem like they take a very long time. If I’m going full stream of consciousness like I do on this blog every day, I type as fast as I think and generate about a page of single spaced type every two or three minutes. I have found that I am getting faster at this by writing every day, because it’s difficult to sum up a week at once. Much easier to sum up a few hours.

Even the conflict I was talking about the other day doesn’t matter now. I thought I was being told one thing, I was being told another. Once the communication freakout was over, I got back in on the ground floor of something exciting. Doesn’t mean the conflict wasn’t worth remembering in the past. Just that I’m glad it all resolved in the best way possible for all parties.

But no one takes into account just how long it takes to nurse an idea, or how long I slave over other ideas in addition to blogging.

I have also learned something important. If I want to be successful at a party, tell everyone I’m a professional cook. If I don’t, tell them I’m a writer.

So I suppose that if I admire a profession, it’s writing……. only because someone has to.

It might as well be me.

Nothing You Don’t Need

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell?

The idea of working retail appeals to me as long as I don’t have to count on the store to be successful in order to eat. I just don’t like retail. I would put out what there is and say “good luck.”

I think I would like owning a bookstore, but I’d read them the whole time I was there- or sit with my tablet and keyboard at the till, hoping not to treat customers like they’re the irritating, unnecessary evils they are at other stores. I’d still want to be polite, but no one would expect that of me if the books were in random order. Being a grumpy asshole proprietor is non-negotiable in that scenario. But again, it’s a store where I don’t have to sell anything. People see what they like and give me money.

I do not have to show them anything, point out how they could save money overall by buying 10 books instead of three, etc.

I know within myself that I could be good at selling books because it is not the same as selling cars. I would be good at selling cars, too, because I have that preacher’s kid personality show…. but I wouldn’t use it because it’s bullshit. It’s not the real me. The real me is the cranky jackass in Parts.

I went to a store once in Memphis that said, “if we don’t have it, you don’t need it.” The store was just stacks and stacks of crap. Good luck finding anything. And yet, you could strike gold if you looked long enough. Everybody knows that feeling…. grateful you don’t have to go to Marshall’s and Target because TJ (TK) Maxx had it……… but you didn’t know they had it until you went through everything and part of the time you sat on the floor.

That’s the kind of shop I’d run. It would be a glorious mess no matter what was in it. But even if it were only books and books alone, I wouldn’t sell nothing you don’t need.

Into the Multiverse

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe your life in an alternate universe.

I am good at a lot of things. I’m going to write until I find something real. That might be in one scene, that might take a couple. Today is one of those days where I just have to start the tap running and hope something comes out. I am very low energy today, but I’m fried. I’ve written an entry every day for over a month- today is my 40th day in a row. I know that I am posting more than normal because I can’t find things as easy when I go back. 😉 I am dedicated to letting the past stay there, so I don’t link to anything. If you’ve missed it, good luck. It’s a different way of reading the web, and it is successful. That’s because people know they’re OG and can prove it. A true Fanagan knows what my life was like in 2013 and still does, so I can make jokes about things I’ve written without all of you knowing what I’m saying.

It creates intimacy, and it keeps blowback to a minimum because if someone didn’t read something about them, they generally won’t go look it up unless someone sends them a link. Trust me when I say that no one ever lets someone know when I’ve said something glowing about them. It’s a lot to want to escape from, which is why my inner circle is so small. I cannot have anyone in my circle who doesn’t understand that they are a complete person. That they are light and dark and angels and demons and hot sauce and peanut butter. All of ’em. None of us can truly be changed by the other, and no one gets changed by my silly web site, because they don’t pay attention to it unless they want to be here. There is no requirement on being a reader and being my friend. But when I don’t have friends who care about my writing, it makes me comfortable enough to continue. My writing matters. My personal relationship with every one of you does not.

If Hottie McHotterson wanted to define me by one entry and I was happy about it, it would have been “Go Tell the Bees,” preferably the audio version as I think it means more in my voice. I’d re-record it if I had spare time and server space, because I was so emotional the first time around. But it got me where I needed to be. Full of love, anger, remorse, grief….. and also joy. In one scene I told her about the day she was having a moment and I told her that we were sitting outside with a glass of wine in the sunshine, and we worked at GEICO.

That would be a good jumping off point if only because I’ve thought about that picnic for 10 years, and have imagined it many times. However, I can make our friendship look good. I can do nothing for working at GEICO.

So, I’ll write about what I could have done had my life followed the track that most people’s do. I used to be married, and I had all the hope in the world for that relationship. In fact, I was married twice on too much hope. With one, it was that we were the wrong personality type for each other. With the other, we were so much alike that we didn’t take our conflicts as seriously as they should have been taken for far too long to course correct. I’m going to write about being married to Kathleen, since it’s the closest to my real life now. I could have stayed in Alexandria after we met. It’s an alternate history that starts in college as opposed to 20 years ago.

I am alone in the doctor’s office. Kathleen would have come with me, but she’s at a softball game. I’m flipping through a magazine when she comes in. She’s smiling.

Leslie…. it took.

I say, “are you sure?” This woman has run three blood tests, but I’m asking if she’s sure….. #thankselizabethwarren

The doctor’s glasses slip a little on her nose and she looks at me like she’s gotten an A on the group project. “Your little monsters are going to own this town.” She knows she can say stuff like that to me, that I already feel like there has been some sort of alien invasion…. one that I can’t feel yet….. but she can. There are two heartbeats, both of them strong. We weren’t trying for twins, just a side effect of the implanted embroyos. We only did two, because Kathleen is Catholic and neither one of us wanted to think about having to remove them. I just hope that they turn out looking completely different from the jump. Otherwise, I will have to write their names with Sharpies on their foreheads. If I don’t, I know myself. One baby will get fat, one will look like it’s malnourished, all because I’m embarrassed that I don’t know which child is which. Thank God there’s not a chance they’re identical. There’s a chance they won’t even be the same race, because we didn’t use one donor. We chose based on education. Both donors majored in math- if I’m going to be of help in the homework department, it’s not there.

My doctor has noticed that I have left the conversation and that I am off in my own little world….. and when I get home, I’m going to blow up someone else’s. Oh, wait. I’m not going to need to go home to blow up someone’s world.

Kathleen is at work softball, but my mom and dad aren’t.

Kathleen is at work softball, but my sister isn’t.

That’s three whole ass phone calls to jump up and down and say “it’s twins” before I go home, because I know how my parents and sister are going to react. I cannot predict my wife, and I stopped trying long ago. I’m surprised she didn’t want to quit trying to have babies at all. She’s been distant lately, but I don’t care. The entire world fits into my tiny 5’2 frame.

I’m not in it for her reaction. I’m in it for my kids.’

It’s not that I think she won’t make a good mom. I don’t think she makes a very good wife, but she’s what I’ve got and I’ve made promises I intend to keep. Besides, I don’t really have to pay attention to her if I don’t feel like it. I have better things to focus on than who she’s screwing this week. If it makes her happy to have boy toys over a real relationship, I can only go with the flow. I cannot change her behavior. I can only change mine.

If I didn’t have to tell Kathleen I was pregnant, I probably wouldn’t. I wanted the real deal, and I got it….. but having everything costs something. If I had it to do over, I might have chosen differently. Now, it’s all a matter of dancing with who done brought me. I am only asking her to hold onto more hands when she twirls.

My doctor says “you’re not even really here anymore, are you?” I apologize and say, “I absolutely was not, but I am now. How do we do this?” She tells me to cut down on the pizza and beer (I found this banana cove one out in Fairfax…) is non-negotiable. I look at her and say, “I can understand why babies don’t like pizza, but why is beer a problem?” She laughs because she knows I’m joking and we start making a diet plan.

It will all go to shit later. I know it will. Kathleen and I do not have the emotional fortitude to fight through something like this. But right now? In this moment? She’s going to hear the most important words of her life and I get to say them.

“Sweetheart, I went to the doctor today…… and we’re going to need to do a lot of shopping. I’m not pregnant with a baby. I’m pregnant with two.”

She will look at me with the same wide-eyed wonder I gave my ob/gyn.

“Are you sure?”

Whatever It Is, It Isn’t Enough

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the most money you’ve ever spent on a meal? Was it worth it?

I am a cook, therefore I cannot afford to eat all the places I’d really like to go. Since my sister can afford to treat me, she does. But that’s not how I spend money on food and drinks. I lay out serious cash at the grocery store, because I can make food exciting by making a dish, then making a completely new dish out of the leftovers. I buy things at grocery stores that most people just think, “it’s too much work.” I will roll sushi at home. I will soak beans overnight so that I don’t need the convenience of cans. I will wash rice. I will do all the things it takes to be an awesome prep cook so that I’m comfortable on the line at home as a solo act.

The only thing I don’t do is buy meat at the grocery anymore. It’s fine if I’m eating out at a restaurant. I just don’t like wondering if it’s going to spoil, or the whole process it takes to thaw things without cooking them. I don’t want to leave chicken in the sink with water dripping down because my housemates will either get soap in it or try to clean it up. I have had them throw away things when I went upstairs to get my phone.

I think the most money bit comes from having the “keeping up appearances” marriage first. We ate a lot of money trying to be social with our ExxonMobil friends. We went to bars and restaurants that cost a lot, but we never really got anything substantial out of them. There’s only one thing I remember from that time in my life with clarity. It was a brewpub out in Fairfax that made banana clove beer. The combination of lightly sweet banana (not artificial) with Belgian spices made my palate sing. This was before I met Dana, before I went to her mini culinary school. The palate was there, I just wasn’t putting energy in to the right direction.

Meeting Dana brought a lot of things together. The above paragraph is why we would have had a lot of fun in DC together. The thing is, though, I had to get away from her to become a better person, and I hope she feels the same way about me- that we are both wonderful people, but we do not need to be together to know that. We’ve checked.

It would have seemed less weird to the outside world if we’d moved to DC together, but the plan was always to end up here eventually. It’s an adventure we wanted to go on together, and when we split, I still had fire in the belly to do it.

It made it look to the outside world that I was chasing a girl, and I did nothing to help myself out there, but I just didn’t care. It wasn’t worth the energy to figure out how to care about so many things that were beyond my control. Getting the girl in the end would have been nice, but it wasn’t necessary. She and DC are not synonymous in that if I’d suddenly taken off to a city I knew nothing about and the only thing other people knew is that she was there, I’d allow everyone to raise eyebrows at me. Clearly that’s insane.

But when you’re presented with a move that will solve every need including getting the girl? We’re getting somewhere. That’s because there was never any pressure on the relationship to succeed. Washington is big enough to hold both of us, even at full strength.

I stopped thinking about food a few paragraphs ago because I’m still reeling after getting an e-mail from Supergrover that I don’t know what to do with. I’m just spiraling out in my little neurodivergent head because she is bound and determined to wall off and let me know she thinks I’m not that great a writer because I paint my feelings as fact and everything is all about me.

This is my web site. I don’t project feelings onto other people unless they’re interacting with me and I am trying to explain it. No one else in her life has made any move to get to know me, so what they think is all her business and none of mine….. but it would be my business if I knew what she was talking about.

I am only an authority on me and what I perceive.

What I perceive is that prepackaged food holds no nutrition, and very few people are willing to create a dish without shortcuts.

Wash the rice. Soak the beans. Dice the mirepoix.

The most expensive ingredient in food and relationships is time.

It Has All Become Uninteresting

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Scour the news for an entirely uninteresting story. Consider how it connects to your life. Write about that.

I have scoured the news, and I cannot find anything on the surface that fascinates me. I am obsessed with hearing the real story on the news, then mining my resources for details. Zac and John (Fot) are my best bets for chatter about international relations and cyber warfare. John also worked with me at Biddy McGraw’s, so I ask him for a heard on things I write about the kitchen. Both he and my former chef, John-Michael Kinkaid, are both great about critiquing my work when it relates to something we went through together. When I’ve surpassed those two things, it’s off to the library or the spy museum.

What I am saying is that the story isn’t the story anymore. It’s how we got here. The former president being arrested is uninteresting. Why it took so long? We’re getting somewhere. I don’t mean the current rounds. I mean why did SDNY have to have 36 counts of something before they built a case? They’re the reason he thinks he can get away with anything. They waited until there was an exponentially larger amount of evidence than needed to convict.

The cost of food is rising. It generally does. That is not interesting. What is interesting is why. Are there crops failing in other parts of the world? Why do we not have the infrastructure to grow our own crops? That’s where the real story begins.

Why have the Republicans decided that the only thing they can do is say no to Democrats? That question is uninteresting. The interesting question is why they are so unsure of their own policies working that they don’t put anything forward? Why are Democrats doing the work while Republicans run out the clock?

Why have Republicans stopped caring about our standing on the world stage? Why aren’t they interested in what our allies think of us? I would venture to guess that they think the United States is the beacon of hope it once was. That’s because they stopped listening to our intelligence agencies when the former president told them to do so…. in front of a wall meant to honor case officers who had died in the line of duty.

The former president’s path to power is the most embarrassing thing that’s happened to our nation in a very long time. People gave into their basest instincts after a black president ran the country successfully. His biggest scandal was a tan suit. Racism that was quiet got its volume turned up to an enormously frightening degree. Where racism goes, so does homophobia and transphobia. The story is not that we had a black president. The story is how so much of the country reacted to it.

The story is not why Joe Biden was elected. The story is why Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren weren’t.

The story is not why Joe Biden is great, but why Kamala is the most unique individual in our nation’s history. If Joe runs again, I know it’s because he knows that if he dies in office, he will create history and no one will have to vote on it.

The story is not Michelle Obama’s arms, but girl…… we all know it ought to be.

Oh! That’s a news story I can connect to me, indirectly. My friend Giles is married to a lawyer that used to work in the Obama administration. Therefore, my friend Giles has seen Michelle Obama’s arms. The fact that he did not write me a two page essay on the subject is his only flaw as a friend.

Probably more interested in his husband’s arms, but whatever.

I like thinking about the Obamas, because they’re a few public figures I’d actually like to meet….. but not in a formal setting. I mean that even though they only live a few miles from me, they’re so famous we’d never run into each other at the grocery store. I have learned that if you really want to meet your political heroes, it is really damn hard unless you were there during the campaign.

As a writer, I feel this intimately and I do not argue with it at all.

If you have to tell someone to carry the bricks, they’re not the ones to be building with.

I hope it’s how my sister feels about me, that I cannot give her everything she needs to be physically safe and sound, but I am caring for her heart. She is my news story at least in Texas every day of my life.

When you see on the news that a law involving trans kids is up in the Texas legislature, know that my sister has a vast network on the ground working to make sure that it doesn’t even get out of committee. They can’t always do it, but no one talks about the people that do that kind of work. Those people who walk into the dark so that they can bring the light……

The story is the law that passed regarding a bathroom bill, excluding trans kids from sports, etc. But that is uninteresting. The story is how close the vote was, and how much it took to get even that.

Always look for the story, because it isn’t on the surface.

Life happens when you’re doing something else. In order to get the facts to line up with the news, you’re going to have to make every story relate to you. The hardest part if you are an American is tuning out all the messages that say you are already the best because you are an American.

Some of the greatest American patriots who ever lived worked for governments they couldn’t stand.

But that wasn’t the story.

Commence Smiling

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

List 30 things that make you happy.

The thing that is making me angry right now is that I cannot find a way to do an ordered list, and the way the instructions are worded, the software won’t do what it says it will, either. No, you cannot just type a one and a period and the list will automatically begin. So, I don’t know if there are going to be 30 or not. Decide it’s 30 when you get bored.

Disco and Rosie are the dogs I cared for all last week. They’re both adorable and hilarious. Both of them have elongated toes, and once I massaged their feet, I was not allowed to slow down or stop. Paw massages were very popular with Rosie when Disco would let me give her attention. Paw massages were very popular with Disco as long as I gave Rosie no direct eye contact. Learning their quirks made me very, very happy.

Bluetooth coffeemakers make me happy, and I didn’t know that until I got to use one while housesitting. Very cool to make your order from the app upstairs and come down into a professional coffeehouse. The only drawback is that it makes one mug at a time. I can just picture my partner and me racing to wake up five seconds before the other one to ensure our order is made first. The interface was like Starbucks Mobile. It didn’t add milk, but you could choose coffee/espresso/Americano and how bold.

Jason Moran makes me happy. The last time I saw him, he told me he was planning on doing a Duke Ellington concert in DC. I told him he was a brave, brave man. Then, Saturday I got a brochure in the mail announcing that the time has come and the concert is this season. I believe it will be a hit because Jason will do the homework. No one leaves a Jason Moran concert sad they didn’t see someone else. The last concert I attended was the 25th Anniversary of Black Stars. Sam Rivers had passed, and it was still one of the most moving things I’ve experienced at the KenCen.

Robert Glasper makes me happy, because he does concerts here that also blow my mind……. and at the same time, we’re both the geeky jazz kids who stood behind Jason Moran just to watch. A kinship was born in our teen years from sitting together in history and also watching a master at his craft. Jason could do something as a high school student that most professionals can’t. He could speak with authority. If Jason said something about jazz, it was true. Period. It wasn’t because he projected that…. it’s that we could all see that he was a subject matter expert and we were kids with instruments. His virtuoso didn’t start with being on the cover of Jazziz and Downbeat. It started with walking the halls of HSPVA with not a single moment unaccounted for in terms of bettering his jazz education. When he wasn’t playing, he was listening. When he wasn’t listening, he was teaching us how much we could learn if we listened. If he runs across this, he has my undying devotion for introducing me to Oscar Peterson, and realizing I needed to listen to Miles with different ears. So, seeing Robert is a reminder that we both aspired to do great things by watching someone who already had things handled.

The marvelous thing that has come out of ending the Internet relationship is that I’m not spending energy crafting pages for her. I’m spending energy crafting pages for you. It’s not that hers were more or less intense, it’s that now my energy feels so much higher because all the information is going in the right direction. If I could be a great writer in a sandbox, I could be a great writer on the world wide web. The difference is how much to personalize something. With blog entries, I’m always looking for the thing I’ll want to remember about someone 20 years later. Everything matters, good and bad. I own everything that has happened to me. Blogging feels much more like an episode of one of those podcasts where you have to read your journal. It makes me happy to know I’ll always have a time capsule.

It makes me happy that those things I’ll want to remember often jog people’s memories and take them to where they need to go. I hope it matters that you can clearly see how much people mean to me even when they aren’t acting all that lovable. That I do remember the little things, and I write them all down. I heal myself by not forgetting the moments I loved you so that I have a place to go when I feel weak. My writing makes me fall in love with you when I think I can’t. I am a better partner and friend because of my web site, not in spite of it.

It makes me happy not to hold myself above like a sky god watching ants. I am a deeply flawed, scarred individual and I take myself to the mat as often as I can so that my wounds don’t become infected. It makes me happier that Zac and Bryn understand this.

It makes me happy that I was able to create boundaries with them on what I could write and what I couldn’t, but that wasn’t just it. They respected me enough to see why writing was important to making me a better person. I thought it was really sweet when Zac said that he should be a bigger fan. It was in no way true that he should be, it pleased me that he said it.

Washington makes me happy, has always made me happy. I came here the first time when I was eight. That awe and wonder is still present. I cannot land at DCA after sunset without crying when I see the monuments. It has stopped happening during the day. That’s just exciting.

Taking off at DCA is a trip in and of itself. That’s the happiest I’ve been as a speed junkie. The incline at takeoff to avoid federal airspace is the most expensive roller coaster ride on record.

Cooking makes me happy, as does gardening as I watch more and more DIY. I wouldn’t want to get into gardening for a living, like selling produce or plants, but I would like enough yield to feed myself. I get the whole commune thing now. I don’t know that I’d want to do it, but I get it. See “gardening for one” for details.

Food makes me happy. It would be a blessing every day to pick out my own chilis, for instance. I could wait to pick them until they were truly ready, caramelized just by age before I take out the seeds and roast them, making sugar dance on hell’s tongue.

Shaving makes me happy. It’s one of the few rituals I remember to do on a semi-consistent basis. I’m into it. I have the soap and the brush, and I watch YouTube videos. It’s surprising how many tips for getting a great shave on your face also help you get your legs that smooth, too. I had to study up because I don’t have a bathtub anymore. It’s just a shower. Shaving is not the same when you can’t soak in the tub for 10 minutes before you start cutting.

Walking makes me happy because it means I can eat what I want. I don’t have to worry if I want three slices of pizza for breakfast because after three miles, it won’t feel like enough. But that’s only when I’m not appetite suppressed. The rest of the time, I’ll have three pieces of pizza for breakfast and not eat the rest of the day.

Speaking of which, I do need to eat breakfast. I’m sure there are 30 ideas here, even if I couldn’t find the ordered list button.

You’ll Have to Define It, First

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe one habit that brings you joy.

People with attention deficit or autism don’t create habits. There is nothing in our brain to create subroutines and keep them going. Every task takes the same amount of energy as learning to do something the first time, from brushing your teeth to remembering to take out the garbage on Wednesday nights because trash day is Thursday. Trash day seems insurmountable to someone with time blindness.

There is a meme going around Facebook that addresses this. “The problem with 10:30 PM is that it is one minute before 2:30 AM if you’re not careful.” The way time slips away at night for most people is how time works in neurodivergent people all day long. It’s relentless. We live and die by our calendars and task lists with alarms, because otherwise we’d have no real sense of the month, day, or year. It my mind, it has been six minutes since my mother died and also years.

Memories are arranged by importance, not when they happened. Time blindness was actually a good thing in one case. The way I was treated during my childhood melted away and I stopped thinking about it at all. It just failed to register. Every bad memory I have of ages 12-36 is not locked away anymore because it doesn’t have to be. None of those things can create a reaction in me unless I let it.

I will dig deep into them for resolution, but that is only to make the present me a better human being. It has nothing to do with trying to resolve those memories to make anything better for them. Too much has been done for there to ever be reconciliation, and if being sorry was ever childhood abuser’s intent, she would have come to me long before now. She said she was sorry, but I don’t believe it because her actions didn’t line up. I had every right to make her jump as high as I wanted, so when she proved that she couldn’t even do the barest minimum, it was okay to be done.

Our relationship was virtual in that before the Internet, there were letters and calls. Even with both of those things, you’re not really living the same reality. You’re fitting each other into your real lives…… except it cost me money I didn’t have. There was no such thing as long distance calling across the country for free. I didn’t even have a cell phone until I was an adult, so my parents knew who I was calling because they could see the number on the bill. I think they thought that making me pay the money back would make me quit calling. They did not understand the game. They did not understand the trap. They did not understand being willing to die before you’d tell a secret.

It is my habit to treat everything I know with that kind of security because it was ingrained when I was 12. It doesn’t matter how the secret makes me feel, even if it is toxic I have proven that I won’t say a word. It made me who I am for richer or for poorer. In some ways, I’ve kept secrets that have made me sicker. In others, it makes me powerful enough to be someone like Bayard Rustin, who knew all MLK’s secrets and lies. If I’d go so far for the wrong woman, just think of how far I’d go if I met someone like Martin?

Olivia Pope completed me because I saw her as having to manage the same secrets I did when I was a child. It was translated through the lens of politics, but to me keeping Fitz’ and Jake’s secrets was as difficult as keeping mine.

There was also light and dark. Keeping the president’s secrets was one thing because he was a public figure. Jake very much wasn’t. But one fed the other and Shonda Rimes healed me with a bit of media. Art imitates life, and it was so awe-inspiring to have that mirror.

My abuser’s public persona needed to be protected, and so did the dark undercurrent from everything else in her life. I knew that because I was a preacher’s kid. I’d been taught to be that kind of friend since I was born. Therefore, no one could get a word out of me and even though my personality changed practically overnight, no one noticed because I was already hard to predict being ADHD. I always had my head in the clouds to one degree or another. I am an INFJ, the pastors to the whole world at once. I am built for it, and all the things I don’t know cost me because I think I can take on way more than I can without support from everyone else. That requires someone like Bryn, who can deal in emotions as large as mine consistently because she knows I can offer what I require. Her secrets are mine, in some cases, literally. When Supergrover convinced me of what I’d been ignoring, I didn’t get to tell her that she helped another little girl, too, because I got to pass on the knowledge that her strange feelings weren’t strange at all.

There was a reason I became a frightened dog, not sure which way was up in almost every relationship of my life. I had so much to protect and nowhere near the ability to choose how. The secrets made me the alpha dog, given the responsibility of protecting the person and the path, but no support in how to do it. I think that’s because of the nature of the cycle of abuse. No one taught them how to react during trauma, either.

Support would be empathy that goes in both directions. No abuser tells a child thank you for keeping those secrets. No one notices when you’re saving their career. Therefore, as adults we know we need it. We know that a relationship is not equal when one person is the dumping ground emotionally for another………. because they’re so focused on themselves that they don’t think to ask about us.

It’s not that we mind being the emotional dumping ground, we’re asking for equal airtime. Reconnecting with Bryn reminded me why that was so important. That I couldn’t have a healthy, successful relationship until I’d been in a more serious one with her in terms of emotional intimacy because I needed to learn what a healthy relationship felt like before I could extrapolate that into a full-on romance with someone else. I even know that’s hard, because Bryn wouldn’t care if I slept with someone else, but she’d for damn sure notice if I ditched her emotionally for someone else. It would have to be a balance, because she needs to know that I have enough love in me that my partner will know how much you matter to me and not taking us as a package deal is in and of itself a dealbreaker. There will be times where she is way more important than you. Die mad about it.

I feel like that’s the way Zac loves me. That if something was up, depending on the situation there would be times when I was more important, die mad about it. But at the same time, I am also respecting the fact that he and I are not close enough to expect his attention the majority of the time and I am not asking him for that. I am saying that if I was in the hospital, I could call him from there because he would definitely want to know. That would be true whether we were dating or not. I don’t care about the dating as much as I care about the not, because a long term relationship isn’t built on romance. The cornerstone is knowing you’ve got someone who will be there for you in a crisis, big or small, because even if they can’t do anything to fix it acknowledge that they want to know. Acknowledge how big that is. Relationships take showing up, and people won’t if you don’t communicate that you need it. You’ll just feel stepped on all the time, and I’m telling you it’s your own doing if you’re the Type B who never says anything.

Not saying anything doesn’t allow our friends to respond the way we want them to. It doesn’t test anything. It doesn’t allow you to notice the way you’d be treated if you needed something, and that is completely fear-based. You’d rather not know until it’s so bad you can’t ignore it.

Choose not to stuff things down so that you can see if someone can give you what you require instead of constantly giving them what they need emotionally in hopes that someday will come because they’ll divine that you’re in trouble.

I moved heaven and earth to stand next to greatness because I could give what I required. The fact that she couldn’t is of no consequence, because I love it here. The main problem is how to get Bryn to think it’s her idea to move here. 😉

The thing is, people, I have that friend. I have that friend who would move heaven and earth to be near me if I needed her. Even if it damn near killed me, I’d do the same for her. It would be a lot. I’d have to live in the city where I chose to continue a very toxic relationship based on the one we had when I was a child. But her life is so different there that I could see it working out long term. I think it would be hell on wheels in the beginning as I grappled with being grateful to be near her and muting all the triggers that would reappear.

I was in a bad relationship the last time I lived in DC, too, with the same archetype of the woman I’m talking about when I call that character “Supergrover.” It was like trying to hug a cactus every day. I got a lot of negative attention…. It will pop up if you search for “The Great Raspberry Jello Caper” or something like that.

It was so different, though, because Kathleen and I were both adults. I could expect her to respond like I thought she would, or I could express needs and she’d kick my ass. It was unsustainable. I have chosen that relationship over and over, making them that if they weren’t that already.

It’s the pattern with which I’ve become most familiar, and I bring it out in people after having wronged them, then them getting very resentful that I need anything because the fissure has begun.

Bryn deserves me because she doesn’t expect me to be perfect, and I’ve tested her on that to an enormous degree. I have never intentionally tried to hurt her, and she knows that, too. It counts for a lot.

What I have learned is that Bryn is completely unique, and Supergrover is a dime a dozen. That’s because once a fissure began, the power imbalance was set for the rest of our time together. It was imperative for me to jump high because I’d found someone I could be as vulnerable with as I could with Bryn. That became problematic when I was vulnerable to her about her. I was trying to be tender and to heal wounds. She thought I was trying to load her up with guilt, make her feel bad, etc. and didn’t tell me that for a long time. I wrote her the longest love letter of my life, annotated with detail about why I wanted to help her. I wanted her to know that I really saw her. It was not a one-way transaction. I shouldn’t have said anything, because she just took it as psychoanalysis and that I was trying to provoke her.

I thought she was the sweetest person I’d ever met, and she liked thinking that I thought of her as a monster. It’s why I call her Supergrover…. that even when she acts monstrous, she’s still cuddly, furry, and blue. It’s the smallest part of her, the little girl I love.

It’s a habit.

The Library in Alexandria

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What are you curious about?

Even when it was 2001 and I struggled through the aftermath of 9/11, I wanted to be here in DC. I don’t live in Alexandria anymore, but it is a library of images that I’ll never forget. I do not judge people on their reactions to that tragedy, but I do feel my own stomach turn when people talk about their reactions from hundreds of miles away when the pictures rattled on my walls and the fighter jets flew over my house every 10 minutes for days. The entire city shut down, because the Pentagon had been hit. People drove up to the site and turned off their cars to gawk. This interrupted drive time to an enormous degree, but I don’t remember anyone complaining. We mourned as one person, breathing through it (or trying). FBI and CIA had a fire in the belly, as did the entire military.

And then we went after the wrong person on purpose.

Soon after, I moved to Portland. It was a mistake that has now been long forgiven and forgotten, because I wouldn’t have met the one I needed to meet so that I could rest easy for the first time in years. I celebrate having erred every day.

Therefore, I felt a strong pull to come back, because I didn’t feel like I was in the middle of everything unless I could get on the Metro. I wasn’t here long enough last time to be satisfied. Washington is a city where you can look at a new thing every day and still not see them all by the time you die. Some things, you want to experience over and over. I could not do what I do if I didn’t have the International Spy Museum close, where I can sit on the floor with six books open like the store is my personal office (it is. Don’t tell them. Snitches get stitches.). This is because in my alternate history, CIA is part of it to an enormous degree, because one character is a political figure who has to make a choice to work with us or not in order to stop a war………………. or not. I haven’t decided because it would be infinitely realistic either way.

Both case officer and handler become those roles over time, which is why I need so much help. Zac is the only person I know that has any access to CIA at all. Even then, he knows so much more than he lets on. I lean into the gaps, taking the trail and following it to six books open on the floor at a museum.

I sent both the museum and Jonna Mendez (on the board) my idea for something that could fall under continuing education. I thought it would be cool if retired spies started a class for writers called Farm 101. It would be the entire experience from Day One to making it as the director. It would just be what it takes to do the job, not any actual specifics. I figured they might be able to do that because CIA already does outreach to screenwriters. My favorite intelligence officer in the entire world is the one Allison Janney plays in “Spy.” The shit she comes up with, like making her the most stereotypical white woman in the nation. Her pocket litter even identifies her as the “vice president of the gardening club,” and Melissa McCarthy says, “I couldn’t even be president?” I died for a second.

It never escapes my attention that it was Tony and Jonna Mendez’s job to make sure the pocket litter was accurate, and now I picture both of them up to those antics. They make me laugh because the picture is so clear. Jonna is currently writing her own memoirs, and what I want to know isn’t going to be in the book, I’m guessing, because I don’t care what she did with other people. I want to know what she did to her staff. This is because she talks a lot about men who refuse to dress as women, refuse to wear a mask, etc. I don’t want the book to be about operations. I want the book to be about revenge. Like, she didn’t have to make someone wear a tiny rock in their shoe, but it just felt right for no reason at all……….

She has said in interviews that she was a hardass.

That’s the part that makes me laugh the most. Of course she was. She was what all women in the military, intelligence, and politics are encouraged to be. They have to put away anything that makes them different. Tracy Walder bucked the system by carrying all kinds of girly shit, which made people underestimate her when she was actually an expert in counter bioterrorism. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t a sorority girl in college. So what if her coffee mug is pink? Who cares? Lots of people, apparently.

Tracy’s book is my favorite in my entire library because she made a style choice that no one else has. She sent her manuscript to CIA’s publications review board, and when CIA blacked out something, she left them in. They’d cut out parts of sentences, and it was exhilarating because you could figure out what they meant if you did the homework.

My favorite homework actually came from “Homeland.” I was confused about the creation of Space Force, so I went back to the show. Turns out, we may not need a special branch of the military for them, but ownership of the moon and its resources and having to defend against threats are very real. Whether it is true or not, our panic during the space race was that the moon would be armed with nuclear weapons by Russia. We need to increase our capabilities in space, but I believe that should be mostly intelligence-based, because we have no business building a military base up there. Keeping it staffed isn’t the problem. It’s what it would take to have comfortable facilities there with the intent to maintain them. My fear is that they’d create the atmosphere and the appointments on the cheap so that more money could go toward weapons, which is the same situation in the rest of the military. It’s not a big deal to spend money on weapons, but it’s looked down upon to spend money on boots, clothes, hats, and air conditioning.

If the military can’t handle taking care of soldiers for the rest of their lives when they’re on the ground, why do we think they’ll be any better about it in space? This is not the final frontier just yet, because we’re not ready. We need to stop pretending that we are.

it’s hard to acknowledge problems in space when there are so many problems right here. That doesn’t mean they’re not important, just secondary. We don’t need to give resources to other countries (in aid or defense) until ours is clean. It’s not that we shouldn’t collaborate, it’s that we have a history of working on a deficit while giving money to countries who can’t possibly pay it back. Now, we’re defaulting on our own loans and expecting the world to understand. I think some of that is valid even if it doesn’t do anything to move the needle. We’ve gotten respect from other countries by helping them out. They need to recognize that costs something. But they don’t need to excuse that behavior. They need to make it where money is money and politics is politics. I do not want money to affect diplomatic relations or vice versa.

Ukraine will never be able to pay off this war, even if they win. Too much corruption, too few taxes going to the right place. Zelenskyy is determined to change things, and for their sake, I hope he does. I’d really like to meet him if I ever had the chance. I’d tell him that I’ve spent time with his characters and that he’s a brilliant writer….. and what would it take to get seasons two and three of “Servant of the People” on Netflix? He is every bit as funny as Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

Being able to write intelligently about all of this stuff means everything to me, because I’m one of those people who wants to love the whole world at once. I can’t unless I actually understand both the pro and con of the arugument. If the Republican party was worth a damn in terms of not screwing over the American people by trying to parent them all, I wouldn’t vote liberal on every issue. I just have to get on the right bus at this point. That’s because there are absolutely no points on which the Republicans will bend. Even the most clever of them have shut down like a steel trap and act like they’re actively drinking Kool-Aid even though they know it’s poisonous and they can’t help it.

Being intelligent just can’t compete with that, because it works its way around everything that makes logical sense. It also reflects the values of the leader. Eisenhower was wonderful about actually caring what happened to poor people and trying to make everyone’s lives easier. Nothing like him has happened for the Republicans in years because they’ve locked him out of being elected. If I was a Republican, in 2016 I would have voted for John Kasich. He had the only platform I could stomach. It wasn’t about the best person for the job. It was about winning. It was about revenge, and it’s been going on since the country began. Both parties are so powerful that when one splits, the other wins. There’s no way for a third party to win, or there hasn’t been in recent memory. The Democrats are the same in terms of being electable. Speaking of recent memory, it’s surprising how old you have to be not to think of your childhood in terms of the president being a Bush or a Clinton.

That’s because they both played the game brilliantly from opposite ends of the spectrum. They liked Clinton because he was brilliant. They liked the Bushes because they got the tax cuts they wanted and didn’t think of much else. Things have deteriorated in government significantly with the advent of the Religious Right, because you can’t argue with that , either.

The presidency has become essentially the difference between someone who can do the job and someone who can make it look like they can do a job.

I learned just how interested I was in world politics when I went to see Masha (Marie) Yovanovitch do a book talk.

I was curious….. at the library in Alexandria.

The Day God Sent Me an Angel

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

Write about a random act of kindness you’ve done for someone.

As I’ve said before, I live in Maryland and Zac lives in Virginia. Therefore, going between our houses takes a little minute- on both sides. Zac would get stuck in traffic longer than it takes me to ride the Metro. Using public transportation, it takes me about an hour and 20 minutes. In Washington, that is definitely shorter than fighting through rush hour, even shorter if you also have to find a parking space. Finding parking will make you 20 minutes late even when you thought you were half an hour early.

Therefore, it makes more sense for me to go to him all the way around. He doesn’t want to be away from Oliver any more than I do, plus I like to hike and there’s a trail starting practically in his backyard. It also gives me a chance to talk to lots and lots of random strangers, but it never turns out the way either one of us thought. I am so emotionally open that people tend to spill everything to me whether they want to or not. They can look up at the end of that hour and 20 saying, “I can’t believe I told you all that,” and I am very confident in my ability. In fact, I believe that’s the one consistently true thing about me over my 45 years. There’s never been a time where I seemed “unapproachable.” I do not deal in small talk, and neither do others when they talk to me.

I think it was two months ago that this story takes place.

To get to Zac’s, I take the red line to Metro Center, then switch to blue to get out to Franconia-Springfield (interestingly enough, one stop past my old house in Alexandria, Van Dorn). It generally means I have two random encounters instead of just one. If I’m lucky, they’ll ask for my number or vice versa. This is because I’m always looking for new connections, no matter what kind they might be. It doesn’t matter what they look like or what they do for a living. Everyone is going through something in their own way. I just have to pay attention and notice when I really, really feel something. It has never been romance. It has been good stories.

I saw her before I talked to her. Biracial, hair in braids, white t-shirt, nice kicks. She looked to be about nine years old. Her younger sister and her mother were with her, but they were outside my purview at the moment because I noticed that something was up. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. So, I say what I always say when I feel eyes on me. “I like your shoes.” It’s the best conversation starter ever.

Her face lights up and we talk for a few minutes about nothing. Then, out of nowhere, “my dad is dead.” It was a non-sequitur of enormous proportions, but when you’re a preacher’s kid and empath, these non-sequiturs are par for the course. You just have to line up the shot. Your response cannot seem startled, especially when talking to children. I don’t want them to think they’ve said anything wrong. So, even though my internal monologue is “SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT,” outwardly I say, “I am so, so sorry. My mother died in 2016 and it is so difficult.” She nodded at me quietly.

Her mother looks at me and says “we lost him during the pandemic.”

The last three years dropped in my stomach like a rock because I hadn’t lost anyone close to me. It became real very, very fast. We move on to lighten the mood a little bit and her mother says, “hi. I’m Angel.” We go through the pleasantries of what we do for a living and she is infinitely interested that I’m a writer and wants to collaborate on a few things. But the whole time, I’m watching her daughter as she battles with what she just said. The truth bomb left a visible crater.

The subject turns back to her dad, where Angel and both daughters told me about him in reverential tones. When I saw that her oldest was nearing her breaking point, I said, “look at me. Your father is not dead. You are half of him. He lives in you.” I could tell my words ran deep, because she struggled not to cry. We pull into the next station and Angel asks if she can call. I tell her that she surely can and her daughter mouths, “thank you.” They exit and I cannot hold it together anymore. The pain inside all of them was enormous and I took it all on. I had to go through the process of blessing and releasing it, because that pain was not meant for me to carry. We are not close enough yet.

I can say “yet,” because Angel is the first person who has asked for my number that actually meant it. I think it must be a sign.

After all, it came with an Angel.

I Wouldn’t

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How would you describe yourself to someone who can’t see you?

If there is anything I have learned over the last eight years, it’s “stop trying to describe yourself to someone who can’t see you.” It is wasted energy because they’re running on deduction and inference, and skipping over what you’re telling them. It is also true that people see what they want to see. Know when you’re not it, and celebrate the people who show up.

I was reminded of that by my favorite author, Jonna Mendez. However, if I hadn’t started with her late husband’s books, we never would have met at all. It is so beautiful to me that my first favorite spy/writer introduced me to the second…. and he thought she was just as beautiful inside as I do now.

She made my heart overflow with gratitude when I sent her “The Spy in the Room,” a blog entry where I talked about seeing her live at the International Spy Museum:

It was so validating to have someone who writes professionally really take in who I am and what I do. It changed my perspective and my self confidence, because she saw me in a way that no one ever has.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy compliments from readers. I really do. They’re so valuable. At the same time, there’s something about meeting your heroes and them saying they think you’re on the right track.

The reason I’m posting about this is it’s actually a screenshot from four years ago today.

It humbles me to stand next to greatness, and for a few minutes, I really, really did. She thought I was perceptive because the entry talks about the armor you put on when you’re in grief.

It was not a one-way transaction.

I saw her, and she saw me.

I have just described it.

Which One?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What traditions have you not kept that your parents had?

My parents didn’t split until I was 17, so the biggest thing I’ve given up that we did every year is buy a devotional book and take turns reading to each other during Advent. It didn’t have to be a book specifically designed for that purpose. One year it was “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.”

Since Gladys was the only one in the pageant who had anything to say she made the most of it. “Hey! Unto you a child is born!” she hollered, as if it was, for sure, the best news in the world. And all the shepherds trembled, sore afraid—of Gladys, mainly, but it looked good anyway.

That book is seriously amazing. It will have you hooked from the jump. The first sentence starts, “the Herdmans were the worst kids in the history of the world….” It is absolutely hilarious, and then you get to this part, which is very close to Christmas Eve if you time it right.

They looked like the people you see on the six o’clock news- refugees, sent to wait in some strange ugly place, with all their boxes and sacks around them. It suddenly occurred to me that this was just the way it must have been for the real Holy Family, stuck away in a barn by people who didn’t much care what happened to them. They couldn’t have been very neat and tidy either, but more like this Mary and Joseph.

It is too early in the morning to be this emotional, and yet, here I am.

In some way, shape, or form I’ve kept up with writing Advent/Christmas sermons, which my dad did for years…. except he doesn’t manuscript. He does note cards with choice phrases. I can do it, too, but I took this piece of advice from Martin Luther King, Jr:. “If you have something important to say, write it down.” This became even more true as I became a blogger, because I learned that if I only did note cards, I couldn’t publish anything afterwards. When I’ve hit home runs, people have seemed disappointed that it was off the cuff. It’s a completely different style, because you have to learn to read while not looking down.

The way I do it if I’m actually preaching as opposed to publishing is to write in LibreOffice instead of WordPress so I can make the font larger- at least 18pt. Then, I put it in a notebook. You can barely tell when I turn the page. But that was back then. Now, I use the Android version of Microsoft Word and put it in Reader View. Same software, different case. I love it because usually my sermons end up being 10 pages of double-spaced type and printing them out is impossible. Mostly because I have a printer, but I haven’t bought ink for it in seven years.

The last time I preached an Advent sermon has bearing on the conversation I was having in the Sinead O’Connor thread previously. I preach Advent like a physician, because that’s what Luke did for a living.

Advent is waiting for the baby. Setting out the layette. Watching the clock until Mary is 10 cm dilated. Our only job is to wait by the Pepsi machine until Luke emerges to say, with celebration and fanfare, that it’s a boy.

Luke reminds me of Atul Gawande, a brilliant writer and cardiologist. That’s because religion and cardiology both take care of your heart. Luke has a direct connection to God. Atul Gawande has the checklist. They are two sides of the same coin.If I cannot be spiritual, I can be religious. If I am not religious, I can be spiritual. Losing a connection to God makes you create God in your own image. It takes away from “the ineffable mystery” (Neil Gaiman) and makes it where, as Anne Lamott says, “it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Luke has the connection to God. Atul Gawande has the checklist.

If you focus on one, it will bring the other back around. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve gone to church feeling completely unworthy of all of it…… BECAUSE THEY TOLD ME I WAS. I knelt at the communion railing every Sunday until I felt better.

It took years.

If there’s anything I wish I could remember perfectly, it’s the first time I learned about Janie Spahr and the More Light Presbyterians. I wasn’t Presbyterian, but I’d never seen a church where lesbians were allowed to run the whole show. She started the movement, and then came Michael Adee and Katie Morrison, the first queer people to be ordained in PCUSA (Spahr was ordained before she came out). It was then that I learned to be “responsible and let go of guilt, mindful but carry no shame.”

That’s a story.

When I preached the first time at Bridgeport, I knew I would stumble over that phrase in the liturgy. So, to keep me from being nervous, I took a Sharpie and wrote “R,M” on the palm of my hand. Then, I did it every time after because you never know whether you’re going to have “stage fright” or not.

You put things out in the universe and have no idea what will stick.

It’s the one tradition in my family I’ve kept.

It’s Only 0600

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Was today typical?

I’ve been up for the last hour or so, but there’s surround sound system on the TV where I’m housesitting for the week, so of course I’m watching “Jack Ryan” loud enough to rattle the windows. You really need surround sound for the full experience. Otherwise, you don’t know Jack.

I’ve loved Jack Ryan since I was a kid, and John Krasinski is amazing. It’s kind of funny watching Jim from “The Office” as an action hero. I will fall over laughing if he ever breaks the fourth wall and looks into the camera. He didn’t last season, but I’m only halfway through the first episode now. I have ADHD. When my brain says “start writing now,” I do it. That’s because if I tell myself something is a priority, I have to do it right then. Otherwise, the flow disappears.

Flow is a good thing, but so is being distracted. I’ve been talking about Sinead O’Connor’s death from a medical standpoint, and proceeded to chat about medicine. The only time I got even a little bit angry was when this woman said that her husband had a widowmaker heart attack and died instantly, then his daughter found him. I told her I knew exactly what that meant, and that I was so, so sorry, and that my mother had died at 65 from an embolism, which isn’t that unusual, but it felt like she was young. Someone replied that her husband had a heart attack, but that the fancy insurance package at his job saved him…. and oh, I lost it. What if the husband had died because he didn’t have health insurance? As calmly as I could, I said, “interestingly enough, my dad had a widowmaker a few days before my mother died. I just didn’t say that because I thought it would come across as “my dad survived and your husband didn’t. I should have said so to avoid confusion, but I was only trying to avoid pain.” I figured that was the nicest way I could tell this woman that I thought she was an insensitive jackass.

Groupthink leads to violence so in a later part of the thread I got, “you’re not an MD. You’re just the help. You are a vicious little nobody.” Ohhhhhhhh, is there a lot to unpack there……. But I told her that I’d already said I wasn’t an MD many times and that it was only my opinion and that I was out. She then called me some other choice name, but that’s when I blocked her and went about my day. I’m still thinking about the hypocrisy. Sinead O’Connor wasn’t a vicious little nobody. She had a celebrity career and a disorder…… but when you only have a disorder and you’re not famous across the world, the compassion for them does not extend to me, a nobody. The “therapist” said that I must have been triggered because she thought I was “clinging to the lurid details of someone’s death,” because she wanted to remember Sinead another way. I had told her our perspectives were different, that I was talking about medicine, and that if she wanted to grieve a different way, then my thread wasn’t the place for her. That’s because there were no lurid details. Everyone in my thread was talking about young people dying all over the world from a lot of different stuff.

It went from passive-aggressive to violent speech very quickly, but I’m not one to engage a troll anymore.

That’s because I know I can verbally bitch slap just about anyone, but people I don’t care about don’t deserve it. They’re not going to change or grow from anything I say, much less in anger. It’s just hard to tell tone of voice from my words, so people assume I mean harm when I’m just neurodivergent. Overexplaining is both a trauma response and a symptom of ADHD. Being objective and dispassionate leads to people thinking I’m condescending, which means I look down on people. 😉

I am not responsible for what other people understand. It’s just that most people don’t register ADHD/Autism in Facebook comments. I also can’t reassure everyone when the hate starts piling on. I don’t let it get to me most of the time, because I know that they’re not angry at me. I’m just an outlet. I know I can be angry and loud on the Internet, but this wasn’t it. I don’t think I’ve ever been angry when using a word like “comorbidity.”

I need to try and forget that she said it, because she got into my head and it won’t let go. She had no idea what trigger she was pulling, and being a nobody is it. I’m not a person, I’m just wallpaper. So I replied that it seemed that she had anger issues that she needed to resolve with the real people in her life because I didn’t deserve it. I went about my day and this woman had left a series of comments that were equally rage-fueled, so I said, “I was asleep. I wasn’t ignoring you, but now I am. This is going nowhere productive.” And then I blocked her.

Keep in mind that this is a thread where I’ve already said I had the same brain disorder that Sinead had, that the thread was all about mental health from a patient’s perspective, etc. where everyone was pouring out their grief for O’Connor and acknowledging we should help people… check in with them….. because no one loves a bipolar person more than they do at their funeral. What I mean is that I was relating to her hardcore and telling people what it was like, but only Sinead deserves compassion, apparently. That’s ok. They can use me as their punching bag, because I’ll remember that hurtful shit, but I don’t have to react. It was just ironic how bad the hypocrisy actually got.

So, to people who think I was exaggerating about being attacked, no one tells you that you’re a vicious little nobody when they don’t want to bait you, especially when at every turn you’ve tried to de-escalate a situation, because that only makes trolls madder. If their opinion of you is nasty, it doesn’t matter what you say after that. I don’t know the leap between medicine and her rage, but I didn’t want to find out. I’m going to take an educated guess and say that someone peed in their Wheaties, but it wasn’t me.

If someone thinks I sound vicious when I talk medicine, they probably don’t know many doctors. It’s not meanness. It’s blunt. Medicine doesn’t run on touchy feely crap. I don’t sound emotional because I’m not. Medicine does not require me to be that.

You also have to go to medical school to be a psychiatrist, which means I am flat affect about that, too. Something will eventually kill me, and this might be it. There are a TON of things that go wrong with your body when your brain is diseased. Again, your brain will do everything it can to protect you. It uses the very best lies against you. It will shut down rather than allowing you to feel unsafe.

Telling people about your mental health doesn’t generally get results.

Because I’m not a person. I’m just wallpaper.

Little, Broken, but Still Good

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How would you describe yourself to someone?

I can hear Dana in my head. She has a marvelous Stitch impression.

I’m supposed to be describing me, and this is the best I’ve got.

I’m trying to stop being nice, without losing being kind. I find that if I try and people please everyone, it’s not the flex I thought it was. People treat you to the level they see themselves, and are self-serving a lot of the time. They’ll help you if there’s something in it for them. Very few people will help someone a propos of nothing.

Those few are worth more than you have in your bank account, and I don’t care how high your balance may be. It is even truer for billionaires that they need good friends, because they have to worry about things most people don’t. What if their kid gets kidnapped? It’s very real when the kidnapper can set the release at anything he or she wants.

Most people think it’s justified, like eating the rich. That doesn’t make it right.

It’s just one example to make my point, but there are millions of others.

It is interesting that now people see that my boundaries are ironclad, they don’t test them. It doesn’t matter whether they’re scared of upsetting me, whether they think I’m being an asshole, or respecting my privacy. I am not responsible for what they understand, and they don’t live in my head. No one can predict me, because I want them to stop.

The heuristic in their heads is mild-mannered preacher’s kid who will do anything and everything not to offend anyone. I was constantly trying to figure out how people emoted and thought so that I could keep them from getting upset. I wasn’t standing for anything, I was falling for everything, and I could hear Ben Franklin telling me to stop.

It’s probably because of the summer heat in Philadelphia. I hear it is not pleasant. If you do not know how bad, you should let Jill, Lindsay and me school you. We all had to read a book about early America that focused so much on the heat during the many Congresses it took to get to ::gestures broadly at everything:: that everyone sweated and grumbled and got drunk at lunch. Now that’s how you whip a vote.

I’m betting at least some of those guys had good boundaries, but not Franklin. He became the toast of Paris trying to win the Revolutionary War with their money and resources.

At the end of the day, there’s this gem from the International Spy Museam. “Washington didn’t beat us, he simply outspied us.” It’s a paraphrase, but you get the gist. Intelligence over military might, my goal in every conflict vs. putting boots on the ground. I have too many friends in the military to think of any of them in danger. Spies save lives by having good boundaries.

The first Moscow Rule, not Tony Mendez’ explanation but he wrote them down is, “don’t fall in love with your asset.” It doesn’t mean sleeping with them (a Moscow Rule…… for RUSSIA), it means that if you don’t have boundaries, you won’t be able to protect them. it means that you’ll start wearing rose-colored glasses instead of running the numbers. it means being emotionally incapacitated to some degree, because sometimes they get caught. It’s one thing for you to go to prison or be tortured. It’s another thing to watch someone else, and it’s something you asked them to do that got them caught in the first place.

It’s a metaphor for life, or it has become that for me. I have fallen in love with the whole world, but the whole world doesn’t deserve me. It takes my focus and directs it externally, leaving me with no energy. Pushing people away is not trying to hurt them. It’s trying to say that I only have enough energy for *some* people because I have many, many, many acquaintances and readers that are not my close friends, and yet I would bleed out if they needed anything while my needs, and my family’s needs from me go by the wayside.

I think when you’re an INFJ, if you are interested in International Relations at all, you love CIA because they keep people safe. It’s one thing to have a few people steal some documents. It’s quite a different experience walking into a base in Afghanistan or Iraq and seeing how massive it is because they have to accommodate thousands (or at least hundreds…).

CIA has done some shady shit, too, but what you see is what you get. If you want to see that they’re evil, you’ve got material. If you want to see that they’re amazing, you will. It just depends on your filter. Now, extrapolate that to everyone you know. Are you capable of accommodating six friends or at least, hundreds…….. What people see in you is what people see in “the Manson family,” which is what the FBI calls them in “The Looming Tower.” It’s not a real thing. It was just funny in the show (it’s on Hulu, I think).

But of course the FBIs filters are different. They’re a law enforcement agency built on slave catchers. Who’s really the good guy in either scenario when you look at them through those filters?

Giving the important people in your life the attention they deserve means shutting others out and not feeling bad about it. No one has the energy to have 50 friends, and if they do, they don’t know all of them that well. But if you’re a people pleaser, you might cater to people you don’t know well for a while, but then you’ll get overwhelmed and give up.

It reminds me of one of my favorite hymns:

Draw us in the Spirit’s tether
for when humbly in your name
two or three are met together,
you are in the midst of them.

Now, God does not work for CIA that I’m aware of, nor do they belong to The Manson family. That’s all on us.

It’s a reminder that to have a truly spiritual experience, it can be quiet. You cannot go deep with 50 people, especially if you can’t go deep with one.

Talking to 50 people is easier than talking to one when you don’t hate small talk. Being on stage or in the pulpit/lectern is even easier. That’s because even when I’m preaching a confessional sermon with 200 people hanging on every word, I still don’t feel responsible for their actions. I don’t feel responsible for the way they feel when I’m done. I know from experience how I did. If I did well, they’ll tell me so. If I blew it, they’ll say, “I like your dress.”

“I like your dress is polite, but it doesn’t indicate someone who will show up for you.

And that leads me to a story about Mikal, my 11th grade best friend. We were on a mission trip to Reynosa, and it turns out that I, in fact, cannot preach in Spanish. But I tried.

I think it was something like “los ninos es la corazon o la iglesia” (the children are the heart of the church). That’s because I preached Sunday worship after vacation Bible school (I was the only one who could even attempt such a thing. Had nothing to do with my qualifications except two years in school that barely covered first grade. Anyway, I say a couple of things after that and then I run out of words and couldn’t really “think of a closer.” So I just repeated the above line twice and said, “Amen.” My mother cried (partially because she had no idea what I was saying) because that’s what mothers do when you preach.

I finish not really knowing how I did, because everyone was polite.

I get back to my seat and Mikal says, “that was the worst piece of crap I’ve ever heard in my life.”

And that’s why she was my best friend.

Looselie, Based on Actual Events

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the story behind your nickname?

I remember my mother telling me that my first word was “peaches.” Because I was physically developmentally delayed, I absorbed everything mentally and emotionally. When I started talking, I went from “peaches” to “car keys” to my dad teaching me how to say antidisestablismentarianism and beta hemolytic streptococci. I know I’ve said this before, but even as a child I was a grumpy old man. I was the OK, Boomer of Parker Elementary School.

But by far, the greatest moment of my education was in the parking lot at Wal-Mart. I had *just* learned to read, so I was maybe three and a half or four. We got out of the car, and my face lit up.

WE SELL FOR LESS

I am such a grammar nazi that I didn’t even notice they had the audacity to spell my name wrong (My legal name is Leslie in case you didn’t know that). I don’t know if it happened afterward or if it had happened before and I am just blending memories, but I went from Les to Lesser to Looselie. That last one is probably my favorite.

I didn’t have another nickname until I got to HSPVA, when my friend Scott called me his “personal Leslian.” At first, I wasn’t into it. But when it stuck, it stuck. It didn’t matter whether I liked it or not. It was better than when I was in the closet and people teased me about my name like my parents picked my orientation before I was born and named me as such. I have never wanted to stab anyone more than when they called me Lesie on purpose just to see if I’d react.

Hold down the madness, Caroline. Hold down the madness.

I swallowed a lot of homophobic behavior because my school didn’t do shit to keep me from being bullied. In fact, when I told my high school counselor that I was being bullied, she asked what I did to provoke them. I did what I always do. When I left PVA, I took Creative Writing and roasted them over the coals. My teacher read it, and I got an A, but she said it was too personal to share with the class. That didn’t make me feel so hot. I spent five pages telling her how I felt about being closeted, being outed, being bullied, etc. and it was a TEACHABLE MOMENT. It was also 1995. It ain’t happening. Not in Fort Bend County. Probably not anywhere. But I had the courage to lay it out there. I was trying to change hearts and minds, which was probably limited to the English department so I’d be the most humiliated.

That’s because I got really close to one of my teachers, came out to her, and she had me transferred out. I think she thought I had some weird thing for her, but she was kind of a bitch which why I liked her. As in, I liked being AROUND her. Really not my type. I just needed a safe adult and she fucked me.

That’s because the class she transferred me into was doing the things we’d already done that semester. Because of transferring from PVA to Clements, I was on a third reread of “Of Mice and Men.” Not going to lie. Still hate it.

I was the only out kid in the entire school, and there were almost 3,000 of us. That led to a lot of choice nicknames, which is why I am so internally shut down when I hear a straight person say the word “queer.” I am having to do an enormous amount of work to turn off that reflex because the younger kids coming up have embraced it. To them, it’s a real word. To me, it’s the same thing as calling me a faggot to my face. Which even though I’m female, I got called a lot. I even got called that in elementary school. I “started showing” when I was in fifth grade. That’s when the real fear starts.

The moment you realize that homosexuality is wrong and yet “you have it” is the gravity’s rainbow of sexual orientation. You can hear the whistle as the bomb aims for your brain. You’ll spend the rest of your life with some form of internalized homophobia, and in the beginning, you’ll wrestle with God and all their angels. Some people try and pray the gay away. I didn’t. I knew enough to know that people around me needed to change, so I prayed for that.

That’s because I learned very quickly that this was an airplane crash sort of feeling. Once the plane starts going down, you know nothing will stop it. I could feel attraction to women everywhere, and not in terms of sex. In terms of wanting their energy. I liked having older women around me because the girls in my class treated me like a freak show. Not going to front. I was. I was in a different kind of hell than everyone else. Older women don’t have mean girl streaks.

No one questioned it because they thought I had the vocabulary and the emotional range of an adult……. when the reality was, “sort of.” I was a teenager in a weird relationship with a 25 year old. So, my brain grew rapidly with lots of blind spots. I think I’ve figured out the wrong way to address every one of them so far. I’m starting to fix it, though. I’m a work in progmess.

I don’t remember her giving me a nickname, because she’d always say “this is your middle name callin’ you.” I do remember my boyfriend’s dad (not yours) called me “Lester.” I did not like it because I thought he was making fun of me for being genderqueer. He probably was, a little bit, he just didn’t know. It was the 1990s. I didn’t even know. I just felt weird about it because I knew I’d be a husband in one way or another and he could see it. I was in that stage where all the adults gossipped about me when they thought I was out of earshot. Churches do a great job of making you feel spectacularly inferior because you’re a sinner and you’re going to hell, but of course we knew you were gay when you were five. That Happy Meal is missing some French fries.

Nicknames turned to Very Knowing Looks that they thought I couldn’t interpret. They made snide comments about how much I look like kd lang, and I do actually look like her. I get it. But it was their tones of voice. They were not trying to tell me that kd was pretty and I looked like her. People don’t realize that I sense energy and read microaggressions. I can read both sides of your face.

It makes me feel better about the state of the world than if I couldn’t, though, because I can always find truly authentic friends. I can also protect my energy, because I can tell when conflict is coming. What I am not so good at is remaining calm when I feel it. I have trauma reflexes, and I’m trying to turn them off. I do believe that if you’re a reader, you can see that my life has not always been easy. I have come by all of those reflexes honestly.

It has made me a completely different person than I would have been, and I can’t say I’m grateful for that right now. My trauma reflexes pushed away the person I love most in this world. Not woman. Person. Supergrover is one in a billion. Yes, I’m certain. Yes, I know how large a billion is. Still holds up.

I loved her hard, like a Boston marriage in the 1800s, teachers who just loved books and wanted to forego all the romance- but keep all the intimacy. I could tell her anything. She gave me a name. Goddess Jana, of the moon. It made me cry because it was so perfect. Of course she was writing to the moon. I was writing to the sun.

When she said it, my sister’s voice was in my head.

When I was nine and Lindsay was three, we went on a cruise to Mexico. There was a talent show one night, and tiny baby Lindsay started singing.

Somewhere out there…. beneath the pale moon light, someone is thinking offffff me, and loving me tonight……

If the sound of a three year old baby singing that song doesn’t make you cry, nothing will. If you’re not familiar, it’s on the soundtrack to “An American Tail.” The singer is a little boy. In the animated movie, he’s a tiny mouse with a hat that’s too big….. I think a metaphor for my childhood, really.

One of the reasons I loved having a virtual relationship is another line from the song. “And when the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby, it helps to think we’re sleeping underneath the same big sky.” It didn’t matter where in the world either one of us were. The sun and the moon would always dance.

I still think that way, because I’ve given up hope that anything will get better, but I also don’t want to put her back on the shelf, because the character is what I have left. I am afraid that my memories of her will fade, so I have to put them down somewhere. It’s not an experience I want to forget. I do not want to lose my Raggedy Doctor.

She didn’t seem to realize that she was losing her Amy Pond.

I really couldn’t think of a better way to categorize our relationship than Doctor/Companion…. except we’re American. It’s apt not just because our feelings were platonic. It’s apt because even though the story of the Raggedy Doctor is in the Matt Smith era, her personality is The Fugitive Doctor. Namaste AND don’t try me. 😛

I should put in here that The Fugitive Doctor is a wonderful, lovable character lest she runs across this. She doesn’t watch the show, so “fugitive” might raise an eyebrow. It’s so much fun to use these analogies, like a mom and dad who speak Spanish in front of their kids so they can have private conversations….. except now you guys are collectively one parent. You choose. I’ll take the one you don’t want.

I think it was about a year ago when I mentioned a Doctor Who gift I got for my nephew, she told me that she “didn’t watch The Doctor.” I laughed and then said, “it would be confusing to me if you did, because you’ve told me you don’t watch Doctor Who for :::checks watch::: nine years.”

She has read what is basically the spin-off in terms of ideas, Outlander, so she does like time travel stuff. It’s workable. If I think Doctor/Companion, I also think Claire/Roger. In fact, I don’t think even she’s thought of that. I’m a preacher’s kid and I have monocular vision. I was so happy that I got to tell Diana Gabaldon how much Roger meant to me and have her respond on Twitter (shut it)….. and I just realized that Amy Pond is The Doctor’s mother-in-law, so neither one of us can escape that description.

I would give an arm and a leg to see her face when she realizes I just called her my mother-in-law. We’re first children. I’m betting “old person” has been apt since she was born, in some sense, anyway. When you’re the oldest, you’re sort of a child. You’re also sort of a junior partner at the firm because you manage the associates.

Also being first children, we are both used to being right and not having to argue about anything because our opinions are law. I wish she could have seen my face at “be careful painting your feelings as fact,” because I got all that shit from her. If she ever goes back and looks, she’ll see a solid progression. It’s not that I intentionally did it, it’s that when I was writing, I was thinking about her. My words in her writing voice. Kettle. Black. You get it.

Nearly every time, if I sounded too much like her, she’d call me a judgmental dickhead. At first, it was funny af. After a few years, it felt relentless. It was all in tone. But every once in a while, if I listened close, I heard a full orchestra playing our song. What is it? All of them. They’re the chords that run between us.

Maybe I should buy something that reminds me of her. I could go to Wal-Mart.

THEY SELL FOR LESS

A Comprehensive Response

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I blog, therefore I am healthy.

Writing is a comprehensive response to life. That is true no matter what kind, but particularly blogging because the story moves forward every single day, because it’s a choice to post, not a responsibility. I do not feel like I have an audience to whom I owe anything. If I needed to, I’d push the red button and everything would be gone. Nothing threatens you if you don’t need something out of it. I would be giving up a lot, but I wouldn’t stop writing. It’s a huge deal to be a blogger, because people cannot predict what you’ll remember and think they can.

Someone might be totally freaked out and barking up my tree not to write about them, but what they don’t know is that if I can’t make an illustration out of them that works, I won’t. Not everyone makes a good character. Telling them that is worse than blowback, because their ego gets involved. What do you mean, I don’t make a good character?

I feel like I handle this better than most after coming out to straight people without a clue. You’ll never see a more butt hurt child than when they’ve told a gay person they don’t like them “that way” and the person says “you’re not my type.” They are horribly offended in the most hilarious of ways. It is more than physical attraction, and they’ve taken your rejection as if you think it isn’t.

My straight girl crush was because I was struggling in my marriage and it was easier to feel high as hell on new relationship energy than it was to deal at home. She is drop dead gorgeous and it didn’t mean anything to me because I wasn’t looking at her picture while I wrote. She was the equivalent of my “corporeally challenged celebrity girlfriend on the radio.” (I went on a date with a woman from OPB/NPR… maybe two… but this is what Dana and I called her for 15 years.) I could have a crush on a straight girl because it couldn’t go anywhere. I’d get all the good stuff without all the bad except I didn’t. My trauma bond screamed with empathy because she didn’t give me a slap bracelet after the fire.

When I say that someone makes a bad character, I mean that when I write about you, the emotions fall flat on the page. If I can’t make myself feel anything, no one else will feel it, either. If you go back to my older entries, you’ll be able to tell when I’m distressed. I can, but I also have the memory of writing the piece if it’s so overwhelming it made me sob. People think I get really angry when I’m actually crying my eyes out. I am literally pouring myself out onto the page so that I have an accurate idea of how my mental and physical health are treating me. I realize when I’ve been too harsh. I realize when I’ve been too nice.

What makes Supergrover such a great character is because when I write about her I can cry. Not many people evoke emotion in me like that because I just won’t get vulnerable enough. When I write about my beautiful girl, I step into a museum with ten years’ worth of collected art. Some of it was bought and paid for. Some of it we stole in a heist. We’d push and pull and tumble and roll, but for whatever reason, we didn’t cut each other off. That’s because the museum had no easily accessible exits.

I became exhausted because bringing up conflict and it never getting resolved was eating my self-esteem for every meal.

It was very, very confusing because we’d have a fight and she’d say we were done. When I assumed she meant it, I’d try to move on and then she’d drop in. When I assumed that she was just angry af and apologized, it was perceived as me trying to get attention. She would tell me that she told me it was over and I just pushed, but I have two solid memories that stick with me.

The first was a huge fight that really was the end of it for me. Like, I am just not capable. She reads on my blog that my dad is having surgery and checks in. I was pleased, but I felt weird about it because I thought, “surely she sees why this would be problematic.” It felt like “leave me the fuck alone, but I’m going to make sure you know I’m watching.” It has never gotten any more resolved than this, because when she dropped in on me, it was fine. When I dropped in on her, she felt creeped out because she thought it was me saying “I’m always watching.” It happened again when we had another blowout and I thought maybe then I’d get a break long enough to figure out what really happened. Someone said something to her that reminded her of me, and she was back in my DMs.

Neither one of us could break the connection, just “tumbling through a freefall, no one’s going to go unscathed….. but it’s not because you held back, and it’s not how I behaved.” Now I’m humming…. “and I believe that underneath it all, you are my friend. And the way that I fell for you, I’ll never fall that way again. I still believe despite our differences that what we have’s enough” because I believe in her (and I believe in love). You know I have the ability to cry about this if I’m writing and suddenly quote Indigo Girls.

I told my friend Missy that I didn’t even listen to them for the longest because it created a “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” amount of “AS IF I’M NOT WEIRD ENOUGH.” I had a stereo in my room. Their albums didn’t leave when I did for years.

Now, one of my favorite songs is “When We Were Writers.”

Writing is not what Supergrover does for a living, but she does write in her spare time to get away from work. She’s right. It’s a bubble, When I say that I can’t do something or I have to go because I’m writing, it is taken every bit as seriously as when Lindsay says, “I’m going on a run.” Nothing else is more sacred than spending time alone so you can actually hear your thoughts.

With a virtual relationship, you never have to feel alone. That’s because their physical presence has never been needed. The relationship wasn’t created that way. We’d become each other in our work, borrowing style, structure, and tone. It was quite sophisticated in retrospect. It’s amazing how much we were able to do for each other virtually, and now everyone knows it because of the pandemic. We were virtual BEFORE IT WAS COOL.

We’d trade off being The Holy and The Moly.

We both went scorched earth too much when it was infinitely possible to just be out with it and either be done or decide we have something and work toward it. My emotions were larger than hers and always have been. She absolutely knew this. But I do not think that she ever thought that she’d be reopening a wound if she reached out. My part in all this is that because my feelings were large, I ignored everything bad and just kept on believing that one day, I’d find the combination of words that would unlock her. In my mind’s eye, I’m 14. She’s six. I’m older, and I should have known better.

When you know better, you do better. Maya Angelou’s words, but true for me as well. I don’t even know if she likes Coke, but she has a unique name and I knew for damn sure she wasn’t going to find a “Share a Coke with…..” bottle anywhere. So I ordered her one from Atlanta. There were actually six. One with her actual name, one with her character’s name, her husband, her kids, and her dogs. Except the Coke bottle said “Boytoy” on her husband’s because that’s how we referred to him. She never saw them, because I mixed up the address and put my name on the wrong part of the form. So they got a box addressed to me for a reason completely unknown to them and returned it. I was furious because it cost so much to do, but I was only angry at myself for mixing up the web form. It was so unique, and ADHD fucked me. I was absolutely miserable because it was the nicest thing I could think of to do virtually because I’d been a jackass. It was the friend equivalent of having to sleep on the couch and buying chocolates and flowers to beg.

Since she wears suits and crap for work, she also travels sometimes. I sent her a bracelet with a charm for her favorite cause. She told me it was perfect and sent me a picture of her wrist. I feasted on that for weeks because now I could go wherever she was, metaphysically. She just isn’t the sort of person that would tell me where she went, because it’s not important in her daily life and that’s really what I wanted to hear. I don’t care how she’s doing professionally. I care how she’s doing emotionally. I am the red telephone where she is concerned. Even now that we’re done I won’t hear a bad word about her because my friends don’t care about her. They care about me. They don’t recognize how much she gave me because even I’ve never heard her side of the story. I couldn’t make anything better. She was looking for hurt, so she found it.

The bracelet said to me that as long as I kept my behavior consistent, she’d know that my drug protocol was working , and not to worry if I spiraled out, that it had nothing to do with her. It had to do with my mental health, and no one else is in charge of managing it. I know when to go to the ER/psych ward. If that doesn’t end up being the whole story, still not her damage. Blame poor health and bad medicine, not the patient.

It all seems scary to people the way I lay it out because I’m dispassionate. I have a disease. It has to be managed. People need to know they’re off the hook for checking in on me, because when mental health issues pop up, if I don’t do anything that’s my fault.

“Oops. My bad. Should I leave a note?”

Wow. That was dark, even for me. I’m mostly fine, so that’s not an indication that things are about to get worse. It’s just a reality check. Run the numbers, don’t diagnose me.

I am awaiting the cause of Sinead O’Connor’s death. I think I already know what it is…. and no matter what it is, you don’t die at 56 of natural causes.

I don’t want to know, but I ran the numbers.

Here’s the other thing you need to know. You cannot guess what mood I’m in, or whether I’m experiencing depression or hypomania in my work because I write about things that have already happened and I’m searching for the road ahead. I map out what I feel now to plan for what I’ll feel later. It’s not because I know you better than you, it’s that I have to decide how I’m going to react to our next interaction based on past history. I will know whether it’s time to stand up for myself or apologize with fancy Coke.

However, I did not just send a gift and assume that she’d take it as “I’m sorry.” It’s just that her love language is action and mine is words of affirmation. I compromised, she didn’t. She could respond in her own love language, but she couldn’t meet me halfway and talk about her feelings. I never knew which way was up. It’s just not fair to leave someone in that much confusion because my need was being rejected. I needed her to show up, be present in the moment. Instead, her responses were dismissive or angry. Meanwhile, I’m trying to do things that make her less angry and annoyed, but I couldn’t because I was guessing all the time. I got done with guessing way too far past my breaking point. She had enough information to blow up my life, not the other way around. And yet she saw me as a threat without realizing she felt like one to me, too. We were in the same boat, just back to back.

She is the Aunt Voula. I am the Toula. She will be everyone’s favorite and I’m okay with that because she’s my favorite, too. We’re in that weird age gap where I’m not young enough to be her kid, but not an average age between siblings, either.

In the beginning, she treated me like an equal. After fights, she treated me like a pest. It is my fault I treated her badly, and her fault that she never got over it.

The problem isn’t even that she “never got over it.” It’s that she is free to be someone who decides how they feel about you on a daily basis for someone else. It was chaotic and I was tired of the swings.

It wasn’t good for my mental and physical health.