Little, Broken, but Still Good

July 31, 2023July 31, 2023 ~ 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

July 28, 2023July 29, 2023 ~ 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

July 27, 2023July 27, 2023 ~ 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.

I Am Already Changing Modern Society

July 25, 2023July 25, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What would you change about modern society?

I am already holding a mirror in front of society, because my microcosm represents everyone else. People read me because if it’s true for a hundred people (my on the ground reach), it will be true for a thousand. If it’s true for a thousand, it is a good indication that everyone will find something they can relate to written by me. That’s because I’m a bisexual man wrapped in a lesbian’s body, a minority who is trapped in the majority (I’m white), with spirituality and religion weaving themselves into the themes of my life.

I am always spiritual and seeking an audience with God. I am sometimes religious. I enjoy church and miss it, then go back and see why I don’t go anymore. It’s not that I don’t believe in organized religion. I believe in it so much because it has the power to change you if you let it. It’s just different for me because I don’t find God there anymore. I find God in other ways because I know how the sausage is made. It’s like being a musician and a line cook. Everything changes once you’ve been on stage, sat in the orchestra pit, and worked in the kitchen. I enjoyed being a lay preacher of all the jobs I’ve had in church, so I lay out my thoughts here as if I was preaching.

Every entry has a thread of that preacher persona running through it because I’m making connections through a library of images collected from every piece of media I’ve ever consumed. Very few entries are so stream of consciousness that I forget to tie it up at the end. It is short sighted AND impressive that every entry I write is one shot, hit post, go back and fix typos. When I go back and read something from five years ago, I am astounded at how quick I am at writing sentences that will flatten me emotionally and other people say that as well. My marriage entry, the one that was shared all over the world, some of them celebrities? It took about half an hour.

My blog is the very best example I can give you in terms of why I was terrible at school until I got to college. It all looks like the ADHD kid who stayed up all night trying to finish a paper. In college, you can do that because there is no daily homework to be checked. English and Language Arts didn’t eat my lunch, but remembering to turn things in sure did.

Blogging is how I know to use my ADHD superpower. I have been capable of thinking very deep thoughts and writing them down since I was a child. I have not been so capable at remembering the minutiae of life. I can best be summed up by Rhythm of Love by The White Ts, because this is a conversation that makes me laugh in terms of several relationships where I’m this man……..

My head is stuck in the clouds,
She begs me to come down,
Says "boy, quit fooling around."

No one likes a dreamer. Even fewer like what happens when our creativity is cut off or managed. Russian and Chinese TV is an extreme example of it, but it’s the best illustration I can think of at the moment. They are held back by strict standards. I would be lucky to find some.

I tell people I like the view from up here, and their constant quest becomes telling me why I’m wrong. I don’t write because I’m talented. I write because no one will ever understand themselves without being able to read themselves later with a dispassionate eye. Journaling is so important whether you let others read it or not. I am glad that’s the message the church instilled in me that stuck. Praying gets your ego out of the way, but it will creep back in when you think about a situation in retrospect and you can’t fact check anything. If someone tells you you’re being unfair, you have no way to check and see if they’re right. You won’t know when you need to yield, and dollars to donuts you won’t figure it out immediately because it takes so long to convince you that you might, indeed, be fallible.

You develop a more acute sense as to whether people are listening to you, because you have concrete examples of where you did and did not take in love or justified anger. If you grew up in a family that doesn’t fight and you’re terrified of it, that’ll be something I need to know up front, because I know it will make you run from every conflict for all time and to be gentle. Also, to learn when you’re running too much of the time and decide whether I want the relationship to continue. I can stop doing your emotional work for you at any time when you refuse to show up.

I see so much on the Internet about how women are not hospitals for broken men, and yet we are. We so are. Men can’t emote for the most part and you become their entire emotional support system within three months flat. It’s not because they’re not capable of having multiple relationships so they’re not putting everything on you. It’s that they won’t emote in front of anyone but you. The best thing you can do is encourage your partner to go to therapy and get their shit handled. You cannot do anything more. You can only notice when you’re not seeing results and move on. You get to decide how tired you’re going to be from getting your needs constantly ignored while they think nothing of trauma dumping while not being able to take it when they dish.

Men, 99% of the time it’s your fault. Period. End of story. You were not socialized to do anything but be angry all the time and it’s a lifelong battle to be whole again. It is not that you are generally wrong in your beliefs. It means that you are really bad at communication because you fear other people so much. If you open up to a woman and she breaks your heart, then what are you going to do? Who do you tell about those feelings? Why do you need another emotional support person/rebound right away? You can’t handle your emotions on your own. Everything stems from that one issue.

You can’t handle a household, either, because you weren’t taught those skills because why would you ever need them? Your mother’s frustration doesn’t mean shit to you, Holmes. She’s not going to be there forever to wipe your ass, but she loves you enough to do it even though you’re ungrateful because you’re not taught to look around and notice women’s contributions to your life, either.

You need to be able to communicate your needs and wants so that we don’t have to take care of you physically or emotionally. If you want a woman to cook and clean and raise the children and stay home all the time so you can be with others, you are free to be that for someone else. I’m not playing. There are going to be certain times when you’ll submit or I’ll walk away, and you’ll have those dealbreakers as well. It takes a tremendous amount of work to be in any serious relationship, and men are treating all their relationships with women as if they matter so much less. That’s because their way of doing everything is better according to them. I don’t have rights because I shouldn’t need them, etc.

If I wanted to get my tubes tied, in a lot of states I’d have to marry Zac to get my tubes tied, because I need my husband’s permission…. and then we’d have a marriage that didn’t mean anything to either one of us, I just needed health care.

This has no place in society at any time.

My happiness and survival shouldn’t be dependent on whether I’m working, and I don’t mean whether I can be lazy or not. It’s whether I can afford health insurance on my own or walk away from a job with really good benefits because my boss is a walking nightmare.

Proving that you have a disability severe enough not to work is a nightmare for many people. That’s why you have to get a lawyer and it costs money to be different. It is severely ableist and makes people live check to check because it’s not enough to generate savings. The one thing that’s sacred about disability is that they can’t take it away from you and make you dependent on your own money again. In order to live paycheck to paycheck, there cannot be an end in sight. A gap will drown you immediately.

If you have to go to the ER without health insurance, you will almost certainly be fucked for a number of years. You have to pay a lot of money to get Band-Aids and ibuprofen, because women’s pain doesn’t mean as much as men’s to doctors. They’ll think nothing of prescribing another white man enough oxy to down an elephant, but you’re suspicious or needy for being hysterical when you’re in pain.

They need to cut that shit out if they’re going to say Tylenol and Advil are strong enough to compete with narcotics after surgery and/or childbirth. It will work in the days and months after, but never immediately. That’s not your first call when you’ve sliced someone open, ever, unless the patient is an addict and are self-aware enough to know they need nerve blockers instead.

If you can’t get narcotics after a serious injury that all people with eyes can see, your arm’s off, you’ve cut your bleeding leg off, etc., it is not merely a flesh wound. Your doctor’s just an asshole.

Ibuprofen is right out.

I am not pushing for giving out oxy like Tic-Tacs. I am saying that narcotics have a time and place, and that place is in the delivery room, the ER, and the recovery room. It takes more than your hospital stay to heal, and most doctors are very concerned that Karen is going to become a frequent flyer while ignoring Chad’s warning signs. Chad gets what Chad wants. If not, it’s time to call Daddy.

Daddy will think his daughters’ lives are worth less and not with words. It will play out in actions. Boys get condoms and a later curfew because their dad is just as excited about the loss of his son’s virginity as he is, while shaming the women that provide the outlet.

The whore/madonna complex is real and it’s deep.

Either we’re the ones that wipe your asses or the dirty sluts who will actually sleep with you.

It’s why I’ve dated women so long. I don’t have to deal with your bullshit. I can live around it.

Here’s the take home message that really ties the room together:

Modern society is only going to change when men realize that they’re just as emotionally needy as everyone else, while blaming women for being hysterical. This will not change in my lifetime. I can only get more men to see what it’s like for women from an outside perspective.

It’s the difference between getting the ticket to La Boheme and playing in the pit. We’re just “the help.” It’s the same issue with media. You love Succession and Archer while shitting on arts grants. All of it stems from having your creativity and humility quashed.

In order to change society right now, start getting there faster and keep up.

“When my coach said ‘you run like a girl,’ I told him that if he picked up the pace, he could run like a girl, too.”

– a paraphrase of Mia Hamm

How Am I Working?

July 24, 2023July 24, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What do you listen to while you work?

When I am writing, I have two modes. The first is complete silence, sometimes with a blocker like white noise or several fans in the room. The second is listening to either the soundtrack to Argo or The Bourne Supremacy. It has to be spy music, and it has to be Middle Eastern in nature. I don’t write about spies in my daily life, but the music translates into everything else because it’s mathematically quick when my brain isn’t. It jogs things I wouldn’t have thought about on my own. It is basically making my thoughts compete to the rhythm and tempo of the music.

When I’m doing chores, I like to listen to rap or hip hop. Sometimes angry country where women kill their husbands. It’s not hilarious if you haven’t lived in the South and grown up on these jokes…. like how in Texas, we don’t get divorced, we just have big backyards……… thus the joke about Bryn having a yard large enough to *garden.* I may not ever put a ring on her finger, but good luck proving she’s not mine. With us both being bisexual, I can’t prove one way or the other what’s going to happen, and there are too many complications to figure it out so why try? The story will unfold either way, and both of us are happy right now having other partners and just leaning on each other the way a best friend would. To think that is more important than having a romantic partner is crazy because I will never find a better friend. We undervalue friends in our society, and to me it’s your other marriage because you can’t go to anyone else the same way you can with them because no one else catalogues the books in your library.

Right now, there is an entire reddit thread of people who are crying over bff divorces, people who feel exactly the way I do about Bryn. No one is her, no one will ever be her, she broke my heart in third grade and I’m still not over it, et cetera. Third grade and you’re 55? Yes, let’s make sure that never happens. If I want her, I need to act like it.

We are learning how to love each other and be strong women at the same time, which is actually a bigger deal than everyone else might think, because being lost in trauma bonds constantly makes us doubt that the other one is sincere. I, like her and Michael, am stuck fighting her on letting me love her….. and she’s sharpening her weapons to take care of me because we are The Timeless Child. I will not tell you her story, because she is starting to believe that she needs to tell it herself and I have the platform to allow her to do it.

I realized I had told her how much I loved her because she could see how big a decision it was to add an author on my platform, responding by making my platform even better. She has a completely different writing voice and reminds me to be happier. I could return the favor.

We both run the gamut between reading a room and making those observations float into our echo chambers. We pick up the negative emotions in a room first, because we are programmed to respond to everyone else’s unhappiness because we are trying to keep our secrets. We are in protective mode of our spirits and bodies. This is not a problem. We have taught ourselves that we are worth protecting. The echo chamber just makes the negative emotions feel bigger and scarier than they really are because the boss music is playing, but they (jointly and/or severally) can’t touch us because we also have good boundaries.

Bryn will have my undying emotion forever, just an eternal soldier’s flame because our emotions run so deep they stack like a sandwich. That’s because she studies animal behavior just as closely as human behavior and she takes in all the things about homo sapiens that we cannot see. Her book title is literally “All the Dark We Cannot See.” Bryn “grew up with me” starting when I was 19 years old. So if our mutual friends want to start sweating bullets, this is where they should start.

Fuck them and their little cult of adoration. They just make me even more glad I got away from them and have spent the last 10 years worshipping the goddess who made me see what a nightmare you’d all become, because the people that do nothing are culpable.

This goes back to when I was 12.

My confusion and horror started then (but horror came later when I really understood its aftermath, but that’s what causes the panic attacks…. buy now, pay later). I was 12, and you very much weren’t. This is the call of The Timeless Child. It never changes, and it never gets better, because our abusers have taught us to beat the system and we do it whether we want to or not because we’re trapped. You have to identify, and you’re bad at it……………… because you don’t study animal behavior and Bryn does. I swear to fucking Christ, if you want to find an abuser, don’t hire a detective. Hire a dog trainer and I fucking mean it.

That’s because the child is acting just like a dog. Frightened behavior leading from the abuser making them alpha dog, and everyone else are puppies they have to take care of or their lives get worse. We will protect ourselves forever to avoid emotions and it goes two ways. They generally marry each other. The first is the one that cuts off all their emotions. The other is the one that bleeds out. One only takes care of themselves. The other can’t get out of bed in the morning, they’re so emotionally laden.

For the former, the sins of the world do not affect them. For the other, they’re the caretakers. They want everyone to feel safe and work toward it happening. It all stems from animal behavior. One becomes Black Panther, the other becomes Erik Kilmonger.

It will never vary unless you break the cycle. Bryn and I found each other. Instead of trying to handle someone’s emotions because they don’t have any by choice, we’re handling someone’s emotions that will handle ours. It’s a radical concept, being healthy and responding in a way she can hear it because I’ve found out that we’re the same person. Trying to love someone who can’t hear it is exhausting.

Although, I will tell my beautiful girl to reassure her that one of her three word e-mails cut me in half because that was the moment that all her love flooded into me at once and I realized that her feelings were large and I shouldn’t have blown it (for the 345454354354435345435th time). It’s one of the times I can quote her because it’s so innocuous:

“Also. Thank you.”

There was a big goddamn thank you because when she is humble she is fucking quiet. You can hear a pin drop.

Those words reverberated and she didn’t take in that part of it. She only took in the part where the consequences for me were vast and I also expressed unhappiness about it because it was a more complicated issue than I thought it would be. No support, no commiseration, no anything.

Just another confusing moment that could have been cleared up and just won’t. I don’t have to be sad about it, because I’ve let it go. But I just won’t go into a relationship expecting that someone understands they need to respond when their actions have caused pain and lift me up so that I can deal. I’m tired of dealing with people who are content to let me struggle. It is more work than I should be allowed to take on without positive reinforcement. That there are certain things I will do for you as long as you are doing certain things for me. That a relationship is a balance between anger and love and what we feed is what we get. I have absolutely been the villain in one case and the victim in another. I get that I’m not going to be the hero in every story and I’m tired of catering to people who think they’re the whole story. I was just willing to bend more on this one because first of all, when I was wrong I was really wrong. Secondly, when she was wrong she was really, really wrong as well. Neither of us could hear love very well, and we both focused on “everything was bad.” I thought she didn’t express herself enough to be clear over time, because saying everything was fine and withholding love was devastating because she’d gone from sunshine to cold, but not really. It was a spectrum as well, so I was feeling her out a lot of the time because only her annoyance would come through and she’d withdraw, then come back and make me wonder why she was reaching out if she was always so angry.

I found someone who is not always so angry.

We have music in common and listen to a lot of the same things. I’m looking forward to collaborating with her because I know she’ll only make me a better writer because I’m responding to her.

I know it to be solid because I have been smart about responding to my beautiful girl as well. I have learned how to be me by learning what I both do and do not want. Both lessons were just as important. I need to find the people that will forgive you over and over without shutting down, because I will always be human and so will they. I will give them the responsibility of helping me manage my emotions because I am offering that as well. The way I think of you rubs off. You’ll find yourself feeling better about who you are because I’ve told you that you do matter in a way that you can hear it. It’s the basis of something healthy and sustainable. It was where I thought Supergrover and I were going, because I’d been that for her before. But because I had hurt her, it wasn’t that she was malicious, it was that she was one type, and I was the other. But our behavior lined up. We could zipper our DNA, because it was permanently sealed when we were kids. She cuts off her emotions, I become the frightened dog. It’s how we’re programmed and she couldn’t see it.

That’s why the ostinato is “help her anyway.” I’m hoping that in time, she’ll realize we were just wrong for each other from the beginning because we couldn’t take care of each other once there was a schism. There was a power dynamic in all areas because there was a solid one in place from something that was pure.

She approached me like a dog as well. Loyal to a fault. Sniffed my hand and decided I could pet her head. Let me hold her leash. Would heel to an enormous degree and bark at everyone else. I did something to offend her, and the bark turned toward me for every conflict for all time because she had something concrete she could use and so did I. We just became two different types of dogs and couldn’t break the cycle.

It didn’t stop me from loving her and wishing for something healthy. We’d just gone too far into the woods and gotten lost from each other. It was a conflict like a dog being too heavy to carry who’d gotten injured. I was working on pure adrenaline, and my energy had run out six trees ago. But I never stopped loving her. Not once for one moment. I could get angry enough to tell her to fuck off for all eternity and never in six billion years mean it. I’d just get tired of dealing with her anger and confusion bullshit that I needed a fucking break. Any break in that pattern would cause unrest because she started to feel a push/pull that I didn’t. I knew she could be alpha dog if she wanted, and she was unsure. It was terrifying because when I had a conflict with her, she reacted as if I was trying to hurt her and not trying to get her to pay attention to the fact that it hurts me when she pulls back and it shouldn’t feel like an obligation because it shouldn’t hurt when I pull back, either. That’s because we both know where we stand at all times because we’re both emoting good and bad things.

Alternatively, I have the choice to believe whether she means good or ill and react appropriately. Everything doesn’t need to be put through the ringer of bad or good behavior and I overexplain because it’s a trauma response. But she never learned that I needed to tell her everything because that’s who I am.

Her self esteem went up and down as we talked because she decided that I would always be a threat. My trauma response irked hers and we were connected at the brain despite the fact that we brought out the worst in each other. I will be sorry about it for the rest of my life, but I will not think we should have continued hurting each other, either.

That’s why I want her man to be the best he can be. It’s not that I can’t be the shorter, more female version of him, just someone who cares about her without reason or rhyme because it’s so crazy solid and immense. It’s that she won’t let me be him anymore, because she’ll never see me like that again. It was a painful goodbye because it had to be. I would never walk away unless I felt it was necessary. Her words didn’t ring true consistently and she would say the same thing. It’s just that I was looking for desperately needed love and she was looking for desperately needed anger and guilt. We focused on all the wrong things, and I sat with the bees and cried while she felt justified in treating me this way because I’d always be an asshole.

What she confided in me was never the problem, because she never focused on what I was actually saying.

I will always love her a crazy amount, just beyond all measure because she proved to me every day she was worth it and wouldn’t acknowledge why I saw that. She thought she had too much sludge in her soul to be mine, and I thought I was sitting next to Christ in a hallucination. That’s funny because she’s an atheist.

I will never forget finding my person. The one I was meant to love like this. She wasn’t meant to be my Jamie. She was meant to be my Jenny, and she let me go………… but we’ll always be the same person on the opposite ends of the spectrum because we acted like dogs.

…………………..and Bryn is a dog trainer.

Starch

July 23, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your go-to comfort food?

I don’t have a go-to comfort food, I have a comfort Venn diagram in which any combination of groceries could be my go-to, but starch is always the base. It’s going to be some kind of rice, mashed potatoes, or corn. Possibly all three if we are eating fried chicken.

I also enjoy fried and baked potatoes, so sometimes the base is French fries whether I’m at home or out. As I was telling Zac, I like the fries at Zaytinya, because I will slowly build the most monster poutine you’ve ever seen in your life if you sit next to me long enough. See Lindsay for details. I am a human trash compactor.

One of the reasons I eat so much is that I have trouble maintaining my weight. It follows my anxiety to an enormous degree. When I am troubled, I do not eat. You can take that check to the bank and cash it. When I feel out of control, it presents by controlling what I can…… presenting as “food is unsafe, but drinks are okay.” I buy cases of Instant Breakfast when it happens. I also don’t eat much. Yes, it may be 2,000 calories but I haven’t been hungry enough to eat more than once a day for years.

Not being hungry is hard to diagnose, because when I get down to “food is a straight up problem,” sometimes it’s me and sometimes it’s a drug interaction. ADHD medication is not known for allowing you to have nice things. Physically well and mentally stable are constantly buying new military equipment to blow the other away. My physical health says “eat all the things,” and mentally that feels like an overwhelming task. It is hard to grocery shop when you have medically induced appetite suppression. I’ve cried when I realized I needed to buy enough food for a week, but everything looked unappealing. I have teared up at restaurants because there was nothing on the menu that sounded good. Being ADHD is a kitchen superhero skill, but only in managing other people’s food.

Therefore, I rarely step outside my comfort zone when I’m doing other things. I can’t focus on food when I have two sentences that are falling flat. Not focusing on food is going to be a sandwich and potato chips, or baking French fries in the oven if I have them.

Dating Zac has brought my appetite back a little bit, because I am more likely to eat if someone is eating with me. That’s because they’ll get hungry when I don’t and thus remind me to cook something, or cook it for me and bring it to the room where I’m tearing my hair out.

So much of my blood is spilled on these pages, more in the lines you don’t read.

Most of the time, my own blog entries make me go to the place of not finding a carb I wouldn’t inhale. It takes a lot out of me to read this shit, because you didn’t live it, are not living it. Depending on how you think my situation is going, you have no concept of that fact. Some entries break me, but they let light in.

I am taking the places inside me that are empty and filling them with gold. I would even settle for wax, because no human is ever sin cera. In sculpting, if you were able to see the angel in the rock and get it out in one shot, it was called “sin cera,” without wax, because there’s no filler to cover a mistake.

On days when I can get the entry out of me sin cera, I feel well. If I take myself to the mat, the road through hell is paved by Ore-Ida.

Oh! You’re Awake!

July 22, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your favorite game (card, board, video, etc.)? Why?

I’ve actually put enough into Skyrim to enjoy it. I’m not the gamer in my family, my brother-in-law is. I started with Fallout 3 on a whim, and Skyrim is made by the same company. The gameplay is fun, but what makes it so enormous it’s hard to take in is the story and the score.

Oh my God. The score. I could listen to the Skyrim soundtrack for 12 hours straight, and other people agree with me because there are 12 hour Youtube videos that play it for background noise.

Skyrim also takes place in the equivalent of Scandinavia, and it’s fascinating learning how the gamers portray characters living in that amount of snow. Even the architecture changes as you go, and you can spend thousands of dollars on graphics cards and mods to make Skyrim look like you’re literally walking through it. Just photorealistic. The great part is that even the vanilla game is gorgeous. You just have to tweak it to run on Windows 10/11. That’s actually the hardest part…. being able to sort through all the memory managers to find one that works.

My character is a wood elf, because they’re archers and it boosts my natural ability there. She has gray hair in a short asymetrical haircut, purple makeup accents, and purple war paint. I wear Orcish armor not because it’s the best you can get. It’s the sharpest I can dress.

I set it on stupid easy level because the story and puzzles are the best part. Killing things gets repetitive and doesn’t move anything forward. I have also added a ton of mods that extend the storyline and let you collect cool things so that the game is less about fighting overall. In fact, I use an alternate start so I can go to Windhelm first and book it to Solstheim. That way, I can get the first Black Book, and the power that allows your companion to stand in your wake and not get hurt. This has been the theme of my life, finding that particular enchantment. I also enjoy wielding Bloodskaal Blade because of the energy that pulses through it. Then, I go on the quest to get the warhammer with the chaos damage enchantment…. mostly because it’s fun to destroy it and enchant a bow. Arrows are so much cooler when they also shock, burn, or freeze the victim.

Those three things set me up for the rest of the game. You’ll be ridiculously overpowered and one shot kills are really fun, particularly at long range. As ESO would say, “get wrecked, sir.” I also make a point to collect everything in the game at one point or another because there’s a spectacular mod called Legacy of the Dragonborn where you become an employee of a museum dedicated to yourself. It’s ridiculous and also makes sense in the context of the story. So, the game is more balanced that way because I’m not willing to be the bad guy without significant reward. Checking items off that list is crack.

My favorite storyline starts out with becoming a thief, because I had to set beehives on fire and get out before anyone noticed. It’s fun being able to test your smarts at deception without your life depending on it. I am not Jack Ryan, but I will never admit it.

In the vanilla game, my favorite player home is a toss-up. I have bought all of them except Hjerim. Windhelm sucks as a place to live because the people are coded as particularly hostile even though you’ve just saved their lives. So, obviously I work for the government.

Ironic because I think that’s actually the house I’d love the most. The best thing about the vanilla houses is that everything works. There’s not going to be a glitch where if it says a relic can be put there, it will hang upside down or something.

The mods make it where you can store everything you collect, so I also like my safehouse in the museum.

That’s because in addition to tools like a forge and a workbench, I have archaeology tools there as well. If I want to display something in my home, I can make a fake. That way, I still have all my stuff and the museum fills up simultaneously.

I love that Skyrim feels so pristine and beautiful even though my computer was top of the line in 2014-15. I didn’t have to spend more than $60 for a graphics card that would play the hell out of it. I am sure that if I’d beefed up the graphics card more, I could play more recent games. But I haven’t played Skyrim enough to see all of it and I finish one story before moving on. I don’t really have time to game, so I don’t until I’m truly out of things to do.

Explaining my level of gaming is important because I don’t want people to assume that if they’re in a relationship with me, that means they need to know gaming is a huge part of my life. I play Skyrim when there’s nothing good on TV. It’ll keep.

Being able to Shout is a tremendous power, and something we don’t do nearly enough in our daily lives. We just have to manage how worthy the target is of that shout. If you don’t address something, it shows where your priorities lie. We’re responsible for telling you we’d like something to be higher priority, because if we’ve never expressed a need we’ve become part of the problem (that was Bryn’s idea). Whether you care about the outcome should mean less, because you’re not responsible for what someone else does, says, or understands.

In Skyrim, this shows up in aggression towards other characters. You absolutely get to decide how much shit you’re going to take from people and damn the consequences. What you have to decide is who is worthy when they state their own boundaries in return, and notice when they aren’t being set.

In short, if you kill undead soldiers long enough, you realize that everything and everyone is a spectrum. You have perspective on what matters. You will accept consequences from your partners, family, and friends. That’s because you can’t be vulnerable to the whole world. Protecting your energy enough so that you can fly under your own power is key. Getting too spread out is enormously frustrating. I am an empath fixer/pleaser, which makes me even more likely to shoot someone in the face to deal with my wallflower nature. I do the same things that other people do when I play violent video games and listen to rap. It’s just to blow off some steam. I can let them be angry enough for both of us. I can also let my character be braver and more dedicated than I am and let my character rise to meet theirs.

The more I write about myself, when I get some distance from a situation I actually love my character here, and I’m not saying that because I think of myself as fiction. It’s that to you, my audience, I am fictional because you live in India and I don’t. You’re falling in love with a story, not a person.

It is not lost on me that a huge part of falling for my beautiful girl was reading my own blog entries when I wanted to spend time with her while she was away. I didn’t just fall for the person she was, I fell for the person I made her in my mind and poured onto the page.

It is not unlike what I would do in a video game. I create a character, and then I read good or bad depending on the decisions I’ve made in my past.

My beautiful girl is not Supergrover, they’re the words I would use to describe her, and the actions I would have taken to make a future that had room for both of us. I am writing down everything I didn’t get that I wanted, not to guilt, goad, and provoke but to be able to come back later and read the story of what happened….. like all moms and sisters read baby books.

Trying to find the child in everyone is the only way to improve relationships. We all need to be sensitive to the fact that we are still the people we were in first grade, covered up by an enormous amount of scar tissue. If you take the time to reclaim your inner child and work from that place of vulnerability, your reactions will go back to what they once were…. when the troubles of the world seemed so small because you didn’t have to adult so hard.

Skyrim is a way to find out what that inner child really wants, and can choose all of it. It’s a do over for your life if you follow the story that way. You can choose to be a villain, but you also have to live with it. Living with those consequences isn’t the flex you think it is.

Yesterday’s entry broke me.

I sobbed all the way through writing it, and made myself cry several times on the train while I was reading it. Such a beautiful goodbye and “peace be with you” that even if nothing more happens, something did.

If I’d been at home, I would have played Skyrim to stop the tears. As it so happens, it was date night with Zac. We had the best conversation I’ve ever had about my blog tied only with my conversation with Bryn. I’d already been crying over my writing earlier, and Zac isn’t a fan yet. He’s said that he needs to be a die hard because it’s important to me, and yet it’s not. I am perfectly happy for him to be a fan, but I also love having someone who is oblivious because they haven’t already read what I wrote today so my conversation is fucking boring and they don’t know how to tell me. That’s my own interpretation, but it is not untrue because I can read microexpressions so easily.

He said something interesting, because he summed up everything I believe. He said, “if you come after me, I know you’ll only go after the parts of our relationship that are bad. You’re not going to come for me professionally because you know what I do.” I have not let myself get close enough to Zac to have bad parts of our relationship, therefore it was a very theoretical conversation. It’s not that I don’t trust him. It’s that I don’t trust me. I don’t trust me not to become lost in him, and to a certain degree giving up my drive to do and be more. It’s not that I would fall so in love I was blind. It’s that my personality is dedicated to helping someone understand themselves, and I would be so busy doing that because it affects my life directly that my audience might dwindle. As a person writing a book I hope to *sell,* that is a very bad thing.

One of the reasons I post so much is that it’s the best way I know to heal myself. I cannot speak for others, I can only let them read my experiences and decide if they want what I have. I’m offering peace for people who’ve been through a lot. I’m showing you how to get there because as I get happier, my writing does. Light begets light.

My only job in life was protecting Paarthurnax, and I found out that sometimes I’m Alduin. However, I would not have learned to accept the angel and the demon I am as one being without them.

But hey.

It’s only a video game.

Let’s Think About Breakfast

July 21, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What foods would you like to make?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just never got change.

That is the Question

July 20, 2023July 24, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dogs or cats?

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

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

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

Extrapolate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pet is not the issue here, Dude.

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

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

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

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

Whose time is it anyway?

July 19, 2023 ~ one4paws ~ 3 Comments

Daily writing prompt

Which activities make you lose track of time?

View all responses

Sometimes my time sensing mind is like a goldfish and every 10 seconds something new has my attention. Other times it’s on hyper focus mode and nothing can drag me from whatever is captivating me. Sometimes my brain is just too loud to know that time even exists, and I need a nap and maybe I’ll be human when I wake up.

In general, though, having done so much work where each task takes approximately 5-10-15 etc minutes, I can usually set an internal timer and am generally spot on as to how much time has passed.

Now, I have noticed that, for me, there are places that have their own time fields. Like the barn or the river. When I am in those places, the timing of the outside world no longer matters, minutes no longer denote the passing of our lives, but gentle calm breaths and slow deliberate movements take over. I can be absorbed into the peace of my activity. Places that have their own times are places that call you to become fully present. When you’re working with horses for example. Your plan is to just go on a simple trail ride, from your own barn on your own property. Even if you know how long your trail is and how long it may take you to walk that trail on your own feet, you cannot assume that doing that trail on horseback will have the same yields. Horses, well they’re wild animals with their own minds. So planning that trip with your best equine pal is gonna add some time cause first you have to get them ready. You gotta brush them and check their feet and get all their tack on. Sometimes this is a straightforward endeavor and sometimes Ol’ Ginger has a rock stuck in her hoof and is having a real bad day and tries to smash you against the wall of her stall each time you pick up any of her feet (of which there are 4). So now you were fixin to go on a relaxing trail ride and you’re making progress towards your goal but you’re also sweating and swearing and bruised from your friend trying to crush you with her whole body. It’s not my fault you can’t stay out of the gravel Ginger! Now all the rest of her clothes have to go on and you also know that in order to get that cinch tight enough that ol’ Ging can’t slide you off on a tree on the first corner, you’re gonna have to walk her around the pasture for 15 minutes, and gradually tightening that cinch up. Ging is all dressed up, you’ve got your lunch and beverages in your saddle bags and are now ready to head out. Going from the barn to the trail head is easy as pie but then there’s the creek to cross. You and Ginger both know she is able to cross the creek but each time she sees it she has to remember her abilities and you’re the one who has to remind her. She decides today she isn’t afraid of the creek but she is afraid of the bridge so as long as you go around the bridge instead of over, you’re both in good shape. And thus your ride begins, and knowing you’ve set aside the whole day to go on this adventure you and Ginger ride off into the woods to relax and deepen your bond with eachother and Mother Nature.

Similarly with the river or the ocean, the destination is known, but the journey and experience are what really matter and if existing in nature isn’t a time we should let our existence be timeless then I don’t know when it should.

People have told me so many times in my life how patient I am. When I have been working with children or monkeys, or dogs or horses, the list goes on.. For me, in those moments, it didn’t feel like patience, it felt like pressance.

The time I am spending with my dog, me standing calmly still and making soothing noises while she is overly excitedly trying to engage that other dog walking by some of that is patience, the patience to relase any judgement I have of myself or am percieving in others because my dogs is making ‘a scene’. But most of it for me is presence, because if I am there with her, while she’s too excited about that other dog, I can sense the moment when her brain has space to listen to me again and I can call her back and reward her. Then our bond and trust is that much stronger because I was patient with myself and present with her. It’s the same with other animals, including human primates. If we can have patience and empathy with ourselves, we don’t project our terrifying stories onto others. And that leaves space for understanding and growth.

Time doesn’t really exist anyway, so I may as well focus mine on things that do make me lose track of it, because then, I will know I am present and doing something I enjoy so much that I don’t even remember the rest of the world has a clock.

In the Right Context, All of Them

July 19, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Which activities make you lose track of time?

I have an extreme case of time blindness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It worked.

This Feels Like Getting Right with the Lord

July 18, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What bothers you and why?

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

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

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

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

Truth According to Me

July 17, 2023July 17, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.

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

Adventure Time

July 16, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Are you seeking security or adventure?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is yours.

Ryan Reynolds and Company

July 15, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a working lunch….. with pizza.