Tag: doctorwho

New Who (May Contain Spoilers)

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I asked Carol, my secretary, to search reddit and gather the top 10 questions that people have about the revival of Doctor Who.

Certainly! Here are the top 10 questions new viewers might have about “Doctor Who,” focusing on the show’s revival after 2000, based on discussions from Reddit:

  1. Who is the Doctor? – New viewers often want to understand the basic premise of the character known as the Doctor¹.
    • When I started watching, The Doctor was about 6 or 700 years old. I don’t know how old they are now, but the last number I remember is 1103, I think? The reason they’re old is that they’re actually immortal. The Doctor is every story that’s ever been told, a running theme in my life. Since they can travel back and forth in time, The Doctor is acutely aware of what points in history have to happen, even if they’re tragedies, and what can be changed. They try very hard keep aliens from attacking our planet without changing the nature of that time and place…. to hilarious results because you can only control so much. The aliens are often complete villains, and the show is scary for young viewers because of it. However, it is quite a kick to go and see The Doctor defeat an alien by outsmarting it. The Doctor, in that way, reminds me of Sam Seaborn from “The West Wing.”
      • Toby: When did you write that last part? Sam: In the car. The Doctor’s plans often come together at the last minute, creating the worst possible screams when The Doctor is in danger and the dreaded words appear…. “in the next episode…”
      • Famous people in history are often involved in The Doctor’s plots and plans. They accidentally married Queen Elizabeth I.
      • The Doctor does not work alone. He is the head of a British intelligence agency like “The X Files.” However, they are basically “C Emeritus,” while the acting head of UNIT, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, serves as his modern day counterpart on the ground, ready to step in militarily if necessary. Any story that involves her is my favorite. I would love to be her assistant just to watch her banter with The Doctor, because it would be a great decision to revive Torchwood (an anagram of Doctor Who and a show about the day to day operations at UNIT), and have 14th Doctor drive Kate up the wall five days a week.
      • The Doctor is half Time Lord, half human. He has the heartbeat of a drummer because he has two hearts, and in fact, the musical theme starts with the rhythm of his heart. The rhythm of his heart IS the show.
  2. What is regeneration, and why does the Doctor change appearance? – The concept of regeneration is unique to the series and can be puzzling for newcomers.
    • Regeneration was introduced by the show because they wanted to be able to recast the actor if something happened to them. William Hartnell was not young when he took the role. Regeneration is a way to keep the show going even if the lead actor moves on. In the beginning, The Doctor only had 12 regenerations. Now they are immortal, but it would be too big a spoiler not to let you see the scene itself.
  3. Do I need to watch the classic series to understand the new one? – There’s curiosity about the connection between the classic and modern series.
    • Absolutely not. You can watch the show in either order, just watch the shows in order for both series. However, what tends to happen is that the confused people who are really interested want to go back and explore the lore. Classic Who runs on TV all the time if you have Pluto. You will quickly get into the culture and the fandom because it’s exciting to talk to fans. Some people have been watching it since the day Kennedy was shot.
  4. What’s the significance of the TARDIS? – The Doctor’s time machine is iconic, and its importance is frequently questioned.
    • The TARDIS is a sentient spaceship in a relationship with The Doctor. She always knows where they need to go, and they are a little bit in love with each other, when the TARDIS transferred into a human body for an episode (written by Neil Gaiman) and beautifully played by Helena Bonham Carter.
    • Because it is alien technology, it looks like an old British police box, but when you step inside, it is huge. It also regenerates when The Doctor does, so it will look a little different every time the actor changes.
    • The TARDIS is stolen.
    • The Doctor trusts the TARDIS to take him where he needs to go, not where he wants.
    • The reason that The TARDIS always looks like a police box is that all TARDIS have what’s called a chameleon circuit. On The Doctor’s, it’s broken. This leads to hilarious results, like a full on British Police box landing in the middle of the Oval Office next to Richard Nixon.
    • Because of UNIT, you get to see a lot of cool spy stuff because it’s MI-6 and sometimes CIA. You also get to see an entire armory of Time Lord weapons. I think the TARDIS likes trying to avoid all of them. It’s her show.
  5. Who are the companions, and why do they change? – The role of the Doctor’s companions and their turnover rate is a common inquiry.
    • Because The Doctor has so much extensive scientific knowledge, companions were originally designed to be the eyes of the viewer… to understand The Doctor from a lay person’s point of view. They have all sorts of endings, from death to just wanting to go home. No two stories are the same. However, the ones that are living and want to go home usually end up working for UNIT.
  6. What are the Daleks and why are they important? – As the Doctor’s arch-nemesis, new viewers are interested in learning more about them¹.
    • The Daleks are The Doctor’s nemesis, because it’s personal. There are only two Time Lords left in the galaxy because time would have collapsed if he didn’t let The Daleks destroy his planet.
  7. Can I start watching from any season? – With the show’s long history, viewers wonder where to begin².
    • You will enjoy every episode, and a guide will tell you which episodes are standalone. However, the rest of it will not make sense to you because in the early days, there were a lot of references to previous episodes that few Americans watched unless PBS had it in your area. However, Doctor Who doesn’t talk down to the audience. If you want to know, look it up. There’s over 60 years of history.
  8. What are the key episodes or arcs I should not miss? – Fans often share lists of must-watch episodes for those new to the show².
    • The most unique episode is “Heaven Sent,” It was a monologue delivered beautifully by Peter Capaldi.
    • The episode that makes me cry is “Vincent and The Doctor.” It explains mental illness by using aliens as a metaphor for depression. It’s masterful. There’s plenty of clips on YouTube, but go in blind. You will need two boxes of Kleenex if you don’t go into it knowing how it ends. I believe it’s one of the best two or three minutes ever filmed in the history of the BBC.
    • My favorite episode next to “Vincent and The Doctor” is the 50th anniversary special The dialogue is so clever that you just want to watch it over to laugh again. Because of time travel, a few of The Doctors all got to be in the episode at once.
    • In the end, I really can’t choose any more than this, because I’m a writer. There are things I like and don’t like about different aspects of the show. Few episodes are all or nothing for me. I criticize it lovingly, though, because I’m so eager for it to continue. I was relieved to hear the show runner say that their viewer numbers were beyond expectations, so they’re free to keep making it. The BBC has almost canceled New Who twice over the budget. No matter the budget, the storyline is so good it keeps me coming back. They don’t have to have this high a production value to have an enormous fan base. Doctor Who was originally put together with spit and rubber bands, or something like that.
  9. How does the show balance standalone episodes with overarching plots? – The structure of the series and its storytelling approach is a point of interest.
    • They do it by not telling you which ones are connected and which ones aren’t. You are waiting constantly to see what happened with what. It’s time travel. They can add and drop storylines at will.
  10. What makes “Doctor Who” different from other sci-fi series? – Viewers are curious about what sets the show apart in the genre.
    • No show that I know has kept a country together like Doctor Who. Doctor Who is a national treasure in the UK, so when you are tapping into Doctor Who, you are tapping into a fan base that goes back to 1963. Billions of people have seen an episode by now, because it spread to the other commonwealth countries and broke out into America. I think I speak for all of us when I say it’s frustrating that Disney and the show runners are dumbing it down to make the learning curve easier for new viewers. Most of us are neurodivergent. If we want to know something, we will take the 384 hours to find out. Doctor Who appeals to neurodivergent people because it’s a world where everyone fits in.
    • No show has such a wide variety of topics because anything anywhere in time and space can be a conflict for The Doctor to solve. I really liked the Shakespeare episode, of course.
    • There’s so much love and acceptance that it spills over into the fans, because we fight like cats and dogs, but we’d rather be doing that than not talking about Doctor Who. Again, we’re neurodivergent. We can all research for hours and we all have strong opinions. There’s no one way to be a Whovian because the number of fans is so large it’s unquantifiable.
    • Generally, at first you’ll hate the new Doctor because you’re grieving the old one. By the end you’re ready to hate the new one again. Every actor brings something different to the role…. and the two most important regenerations to fans across the world, the first two questions you ask a Whovian, are:
      • Who is your Doctor?
      • Who was your first Doctor?
    • You will remember both answers for the rest of your life.

Fear While Changing Trains

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.

First of all, :::checks notes::: WordPress, it’s “describe a phase in life in which it was difficult to say goodbye.” Just like it’s not “where’s the library at?” It’s “where’s the library at, asshole?” Never end a sentence with a preposition.

I do it a little bit.

Humor before I start diving deep this morning, because there have been many, many times in which it was Boyz II Men hard to say goodbye.

The first time it was a really hard transition was moving from Galveston to Naples the summer after first grade. I loved the beach (my sister did not- she used to run away from the waves saying “don’t. Don’t! Don’t!). I mean, she got over it…… she did get married in Galveston. The cultural difference between living on the island and living in small town Texas wasn’t hard because I didn’t like it. It was just a transition. I was especially close to my friends Asbury and Beulah Lennox, who kind of took over being my grandparents when my own grandparents were so far away. The bonus was moving about 12-15 miles from my biological grandparents, a complete change as well.

I do not do well with change, and I’m glad we moved in the summer so I could ease into it. Incidentally, since The War Daniel was not a member of our church, I didn’t meet him until September. I can’t remember when it was second or third grade when we made it official. 😉 I will say that it wasn’t until I met The War Daniel that I felt truly comfortable, the INFJ/INTJ people we have always been. We were the book nerds, the music nerds, and the ones who didn’t give a fuck if people thought we were weird. We both have this historical Jesus personality, we just come at it from different directions. He’s a thinker. I’m a feeler.

Editor’s Note:

Two things. The first is that “The War Daniel” is a play on words, because of John Hurt in Doctor Who- “The War Doctor.” Daniel was a Doc in the Navy, embedded with a team of Marines.

The second is that if I say that I or anyone else has a “Jesus” personality, or that “it’s as hard to be me as it was to be Jesus,” I’m talking about his day to day life, not that I or anyone else has a Savior complex. Jesus cannot be much different than any current pastor (especially those in clerical collars willing to be arrested at protests), because he was a rabbi, though they didn’t have that term back then.

Incidentally, there is also no evidence one way or the other that Jesus wasn’t married, and it’s been a debate for centuries; think Catholic vs. Protestant- Catholic priests are told they have to bear the burden of ministry alone, because they can’t love everyone if they love only one person that deeply…. takes away objectivity or something. The Protestants, like The Avatar, discovered that pastors could not do it without a support system. His partner could have been anyone from John, the Disciple marked as “whom Jesus loved,” and I have not looked at the original Greek or Hebrew to see if there’s more context, like philia or agape. But right now, I’m willing to say that there is no evidence Jesus was gay one way or the other, either, because there is also a debate on Mary Magdalene.

Supergrover actually sent me several novels about this, and it’s basically that Jesus and Mary were married and were writing their own Gospel, the Book of Love. It does make sense. After Jesus died, the story is that Joseph of Arimathia (rich merchant) helped Mary and the children escape to France. It is, of course, fiction….. but based on the little evidence we do know. It’s just been too long, there’s too many questions that will always be unanswered. So, Jesus is who you need him to be, not the other way around…… as long as you realize that Jesus did not come here only to comfort the distressed. He came here to also distress you out of your comfort. No power over. Power with. It’s why he was peaceful about it, but probably hated the Sanhedrin because they were the most vociferous Jews regarding law and very little around compassion, which has no bearing on the church today.………….

I think what The War Daniel misread as anger was actually fear. We should have video called more before he went to rehab, but we’re *both* writers, and lapsed into that personality way too easily…. which took away too much of our compassion. I also know that being in a relationship your first year out of rehab is absolutely not advisable, so when we got engaged, I kept dating Zac because it really didn’t bother him. Because Zac is poly, Daniel knew he was no threat. That if Zac and I are building a life together, it consists of exactly what is happening now. I have so much love for him because he’s a solid dude as a friend and as a boyfriend. How our relationship is supposed to go is unknown. I just know that we probably won’t get closer than we are now. Neither of us has the time.

It wasn’t that we were rushing into anything, we were just each other’s end game. Daniel didn’t offer to marry me because of anything but I needed it for the health care and benefits as a military dependent. And it was his idea not because I wanted it, but because he saw I needed it.

So, the hardest transitions I have to talk about today are the summer before I met Daniel, and the months after he left.

The reason I chose to write about this instead of the transition after my mother died is that I just can’t go there today. So, I will tell you what I was feeling in the moment, instead. It is so raw and real that if you are also in grief, it might help you as well.

The ones who have helped me through all these transitions just being kind enough to sit with me and listen.

Rearranging Emotional Furniture

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What have you been working on?

Hm. Today it’s “Sunday mornin’ rain is fallin,” and I’m hearing Adam Levine singing in my head. I made myself an outstanding cup of coffee in which I mixed every kind I have in one airtight container (the only one I have, thus mixing the end of other bags). It’s Cafe Bustelo, Community Coffee King Cake, and some kind of Folgers I don’t remember buying, but someone did. Not sure what I’ll brew next, but I have a lot of tea I’m looking forward to as well. I still haven’t drunk all the Pu-erh John sent me and I’ve also got lots of Stash English Breakfast and powdered matcha. Of everything I make in the morning, I like matcha the best. I just don’t like to drink it every morning because making it takes longer than a Keurig pod. I have about two hours before I have to “get ready for church,” and by that I mean I’d like to take a shower before I watch YouTube. It might be a good day to take a look at the scriptures later.

I had a line cook that didn’t know me from Adam come after me online for saying that the pen with which Biblical literalists paint the Bible is the root of all evil, and he thought I was saying that Christians were the root of all evil. Ripped me a new one for saying David and Jonathan were in love. We can’t even prove Jesus and John weren’t, it’s just more likely that he had a partner and a housecarl……. like me.

If that wasn’t clear, I meant he was married to Mary Magdalene and it is written that John is his favorite Disciple, so I’m sure he showed up big for everyone to think that and write it down. I don’t think it was sex. I think it was being willing to give up your career for someone else’s…….. like me.

The line cook said that if he made fun of my community, it would be a hate crime. But if I made fun of his, that was fine. Got butt hurt, so I knew that it was a pointless fight before it started. I said, “you don’t even know who you’re talking about when you say I have no idea what I’m talking about, and this is not a fight you want to have with me.” And I tapped out, because I couldn’t get across to someone with a literalist view of the Bible that taking the Bible seriously and not literally is the only thing I can do in this day and age. There is no proof, and we need to stop pretending there is. There’s not even any proof in the Bible that God exists, only people’s reactions and responses to them. No Biblical literalist is going to accept that as truth, so why bother? He doesn’t study theological giants. I do. If I am the one studying debates between Rowan Williams and Christopher Hitchens to learn the finer points of what puts Christopher off about organized religion, I can use it. I can use Hitch’s words against him in a wonderful way, because I know he doesn’t care about Christians who take constructive criticism and use their faith to improve themselves. I feel like Christianity would do a lot better in this country if it stayed in its lane.

It is embarrassing. EMBARRASSING. That England does this better than we do and they have had divine right of kings and no separation of church and state since the beginning is one of the weirdest things on earth. We supposedly built this country on separation of church and state….. but what we really said in effect with our cullture is that each state was free to pick its own organized religion. Georgia and Massachussetts Bay were not the same.

We of the United States have never protected freedomm from religion as much as we’ve needed, and I’m tired of it. Again, there is only so much of white supremacy Jesus that can be justified, as well as hypocrisy. People are leaving the church in droves and we shouldn’t stop them because we brought this upon ourselves. Our membership will change when we do and not before. In my opinion, I can hold everything I love about religion in my own heart. I don’t need the church if it decides to die, and it seeems to be doing much to help itself along the way. Catholocism will probably die before it changes because Pope Francis is not as liberal as it needs to get. He is just a Band-Aid, and cannot be even that because there are so few priests willing to push the envelope further than saying that gays and the divorced are people.

You have to leave behind what no longer serves you. I have already decided that I am right for the church, but they decided when I was 15 that they were not right for me. I moved to a denomination where I could be ordained, I was just tired by then…… and frankly, too hurt. I really think so. I think I went into shock at my situation, then my adulthood believing I wanted something I didn’t. It wasn’t untrue. It waas when I was ADHD and masking I could handle leading a congregation. When I was autistic and trying to comfort myself, I couldn’t handle even one other person in the room because of overstimulation. All of my behavior cannot be contributed to depression and hypomania, because my energy levels switch too fast for that.

I am a neurodivergent that is self-aware to an enormous degree. I realized that I should not handle a congregation because of what I could do to them and vice versa. I don’t think that mentally ill people make good pastors, because you react differently to emotional stimuli when you feel good, and the difference is so striking that you can’t project stability because you aren’t stable, actually. And there’s no shame in it. Realizing that you are not mentally healthy enough to take on the needs of others because your own health is a lot to manage is courageous.

I didn’t want to stop leadding people. I wanted to start leading people in a different way. I think I do because so many people tell me that. A woman yesterday told me that I have a very interesting life and that I wrote from deep inside me. Exactly what I was trying to portray in my writing and something I needed to hear because things haven’t been going all that well in my estimation.

I have no doubt that Supergrover has looked in on me and decided that healing and moving on is better for me, but I’m only doing it because I have no other choice. It’s what I’m working on because I have already done all I’m going to do. The way I write is assuming she’s out because she told me she was, but she rarely holds me to one entry or letter forever. We’re just not close enough to stop her ire because we’re not checking the story we’re telling ourselves anymore. She has no idea what I’m doing or not doing in trying to portray our lives when they meet. I use the adrenaline of sex to cover a lot of other ground and I promise she’d rather people think we were naked in the middle of the freeway, and even more interesting to think about what has more adrenaline than sex? All right. You’ve got me. She designs roller coasters.

She doesn’t like all this, but she gets it. Symbolism in writing is a thing. Also, Dana will laugh. She doesn’t like it, but she gets it……. or at least, I hope they both laugh because it’s been 10 years since all that for Dana and 8 years of trying to manage just the two of us since. It’s an interesting conundrum because the longer I go without contact, the more okay I am. And then I’ll hit a trigger and need her immediately, but I self-soothe instead of getting anxious she’s not around. However, I do not think this is the way our relationship should go. I think we’d be much happier if we made the commitment to be imortant on both sides. This is because the more we communicate intensely in the time we have, neither of us have to worry about each other. For instance, having one 45 minute meeting early on would save us a lot of them later, preferable for people who are both obsessed with other things, including their families.

It’s weird to feel like our spines are sewn so we don’t face each other, and our strength is in the seam. I wish I could watch her face when she reads that line, because I think it’s one of the images that she’ll love. I have so many perfect pictures of us, and exactly none of them are something she wouldn’t enjoy as well. That by now Michael is real to me in a way he wasn’t before, especially the way he changed her life in a way that I would have wanted for her if I’d been able…. and not just on one level, but many. I told her than and she thought I was trying to make her feel bad. No, just trying to say that I love her for who she is, not who I’m trying to get her to be. That she can be straight if she has to be. I am absolutely certain at times she wonders why, because I’ve never met a woman who didn’t say that if they were in any way queer their husbands would never hear from them again.

What has happened over time is that I want to be there like a family member without forgetting where I started. That our relationship is an evolution and I’m always going to treat her like I used to be attracted to her and not because I am and trying to hide it. It’s that I can’t change my speech patterns. I’ll always have a hundred terms of endearment for her. She will always take my breath away in a photo or audio/video. There’s not a moment I feel I won’t love her forever in a way that people remember love in third grade. What she has to decide is if she’s okay with that in a friendship. That it’s tinged with romance because I felt those feelings and moved on, not that I’m uncomfortable with her life now. And I know she knows that, and feels so guilty that she cannot be there to catch me right now, because she thinks I have no idea what she’s dealing with and I do. Desperately and completely. It’s why I have no idea whether she’s taking time to mull things over or never coming back. She does not have time to pay attention to anything. She, like Mel, is in the position of starting her own kitchen and I treat them the same way. “See you in three years.”

What she views as goading and provoking is not that I get impatient with timing. I get impatient that no matter how long we go, there’s never an e-mail longer than a few words…. which indicates that no matter what I’m talking about, she’s always avoiding it. When she does have time, she’ll respond to anything that doesn’t involve our relationship. We don’t work through anything and yet she’d eat anyone’s face off who tried to look at me in a way I didn’t like and I feel exactly the same way about her. I would bitch slap her boss if I thought they needed it, and neither one of them would like that very much….. but I would. I would be Mrs. Don Draper on their asses and every single one of them would hate me down to the mailroom. The thought of this makes me laugh harder than it should, because she is definitely a Don Draper-type personality (or comes across that way in text), and I feel like I have the sensibility of Betty’s chihuahua personality.

The funny thing about Betty Draper and me is seeing how much she got away with and what I could’ve….. I am actually pretty happy she ended up with a husband when I think about how her life would be different with a female partner. Like, this could be a script. I’ll think about it. However, it would not be based on us. Just the idea is funny. All powerful women who have wives act differently in a large crowd than those with husbands. It doesn’t jive with the way straight women are vetted to work at high levels in government or industry. The way they are groomed to react like men because nothing gets done if they don’t. A woman with a wife has been pissed off by that her whole life and has the strength to fight back because she doesn’t have to deal with it at home. Her career is also the worst when it comes to her partner being a writer, so if they were like me in any way at all, it would only be that they have that one thing in common to create comedic tension.

And the thing is, Supergrover is just an archetype. Hillary Clinton. Michelle Obama. My sister Lindsay. Carly Fiorina. Melinda Gates. Helen Thomas. I could base what I’m thinking about on any one of them…. the push/pull of a powerful person meeting a no one on the Internet and finding out the other one is smarter in some ways. I feel that I am older than Supergrover, that she is older and sometimes not wiser. I hope that she is impressed enough that she would agree with me and that she is every bit as much right as me on the opposite end of the spectrum. That we all age at different rates and in different ways. But to find that it transcends class is a particular blessing. If she thinks I’m smart, I’m smarter than nearly everyone and no one could have convinced me of it that didn’t have her pedigree. I’ve felt like a dumbass since I was born because I didn’t realize how much I had stacked against me. How much the Internet took away my limitations in communication. I feel smarter around her than anyone else because it comes with such strong belief in myself. She also has the presence of Picard. When she says something, it’s with the authority to make it so. She thinks I think of her as a suburban mom. No, I think of her an an Evelyn. A Michelle Yeoh, an accurate description of her beauty in one picture.

She doesn’t have a prayer life except running, and I hope it’s productive. Sometimes, you feel more in prayer by zoning out and letting your body do the work. Sometimes, it’s thinking through things. The answer comes from praying, not what happens afterward. You know yourself, you’re just afraid to say what you want outside of the intimacy of prayer, because that would involve talking to someone else with an opinion. Either way is fine, and I feel like she is taking care of herself by listening to her body. I am taking care of her by listening to her mind and sending her support by letting her know that I’m thinking about her. But if I tell her that I’m thinking of her and she doesn’t want to open up to me, it doesn’t mean my prayer hasn’t mattered. It means thoughts and prayers can be only that because I haven’t been invited to sit down at that particular table.

I picked up a term on “Covert Affairs” that I really like and I use it all the time to describe my blog. At CIA, to talk about security credentials, they talk about who has been “read in.” In my life, that fits perfectly, because I know exactly down to the letter I’ve typed how much you guys have been read in, and it’s only the amount I want you to have. To go further than this is not helping me, it’s hurting them. That’s because if they wanted to tell their sides, it would be in the comments section, not from me. I reveal so much that anything more is their story to tell. I don’t push limits on purpose. It’s hard to negotiate boundaries and hard when you’re brave with them out of necessity, not lack of love for others.

Dana and I had a hard time because when Supergrover found out that I’d read Dana in on something that she didn’t okay, I freaked out. It wasn’t the initial secret that kept Dana and I emotionally apart, but its reverberations and how she reacted to me after it. I was a hndful, and so was she. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. When I say I didn’t have a choice on whether to leave Dana (because that would have involved our triangle or foursome being solid and it wasn’t), I mean that if Supergrover had talked to Dana and I had talked to Michael, Dana and I could have worked it out. But, I was left in the position of choosing between them and Dana had to lose because Supergrover forced my hand in a way that no one else could. I had to write about her to handle our lives together and I couldn’t let Dana see my reactions to it. Case closed.

But then Supergrover had the audacity to look at the clusterfuck she created and make it all about her. That she hadn’t created a situation I couldn’t handle, but that I was stalking her by coming to DC……. then getting surprised when I was perturbed about that. We’ve been stuck in that push/pull since 2015, and I didn’t decide to stop loving her. I decided to stop working on it.

I can handle what she’s dealing with on my own, but no I can’t. She can read this blog and not worry about her safety, but no she can’t. We could solve all this in an afternoon, even if it was just chatting on Facebook Messenger, but I’m betting we won’t. After eight years and no need to look me up because I gave her all my contact info, she cannot possibly have been too busy to connect. She just wouldn’t. She decided what kind of person I was then and has looked at me through that lens ever since……. the one that says I’m perfect for everyone else except her because she can’t forgive me and never will. Not in the way that truly means redemption and intimacy. But she said she could do nothing about how I felt, how she felt, etc…… but she could do something about the present. If she can, I hope she will. I just will not accept being the person she only talks to short sentences at a time. I don’t want to get by on a glass of water when I have ridden her waves.

I am working on why she affected me the most because I don’t completely understand how it happened, but I want to. I want to even if she does not, because even if she didn’t want the next decades, I did. Even one is a long time when you’re talking about life afterward and how it changes. But it is very interesting to work on the issue of how relationships change over time when you don’t have context for anything but each other- the fact that I have seen she has dogs, but never petted them. That I have heard she has a husband and kids, but never met them. That she likes art but I’ve never been to her house, etc. And yet by writing to each other like a soldier and a lovesick girlfriend for 10 years, it has created the same type intimacy now that they felt then. Do you think my love for Supergrover is less real than those type movies and novels based on very real life? Hayat only spent a few hours more with Mike than I spent with Supergrover before we created a lifetime connection like reader/writer, which carries more responsibility for me now than I had before. It is not a wonder that I wanted my wife and that responsibility to be locked into one person because it was too hard to manage it when they weren’t. But that’s because I was green and didn’t know what I was doing. It’s easier now that I don’t feel the pressure that she’s paying attention to anything I say. I just hope it shows I do see her in 3D when she can open her eyes to that possibility. I think that the message will resonate later, it’s just that right now it’s incredibly loud and extremely close.

Working on how I feel about everyone else is easy because I don’t have the pressure of keeping their identity secret to the degree I do with Supergrover, which is why it’s so hard to put anyone else above her for any reason. I’ll do that when she’s older. Right now she’s my baby, and I have to wait to go back to work til she’s in kindergarten. It’s the best analogy I could possibly have for what we’re going through, and I hope she takes it in because I’m childless so what I’m putting down is not something she’d pick up. That I am definitely responding to a baby, but it’s her. She doesn’t see it because she doesn’t think she needs it, and I’m the one that sees the burn on her face when no one else can. It’s a lot. She’s a lot. But thank God my life isn’t anything else, because I’d still believe I was straight trash if it hadn’t happened.

I don’t want to be disrespectful to her, ever, so I’m just arranging my life so that it doesn’t matter when she’s here and when she’s not. I am Amy Pond and River Song, setting a place for her at dinner in case she shows up. And with her even unto Trenzalore………….. but only when and if she’ll have me.

Or at least, it’s what I’m working on.

Explaining Myself To………. Myself #shatnerellipsis

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If I hadn’t been trauma bonded to Supergrover and not to Dana, none of the last 10 years would have happened. I am not “goading and provoking.” I am talking about the things I understand to the best of my knowledge, knowing that my memory can’t always be correct and if I want a relationship now, being able to forgive and forget extraordinarily quickly because I’m using the power of my writing to lift me out of depression when I go back and read it.

This makes me self-sustaining to an enormous degree. This epistolary chapter is a “lecture” on how a relationship is affected by deep secrets that aren’t bad in any way at all. I am accepting the reality of the situation. I am acknowledging my humanness- being responsible and letting go of guilt, being mindful and carrying no shame. I believe the good news of the Gospels, that we are loved unconditionally by God. This is part of the creed from the UCC church I attended in Portland, written by my abuser’s partner. That’s how good I’ve become at letting go through my faith. I hope you’ll let go of yours by the end. This is because my relationship with God is not cute. Everything in these entries is me arguing with God like an old grumpy writer with the personality of an Evangelical Orthodox nut job who is an emotional dumpster fire a lot of the time.

I’m also neurodivergent, so I spiral out when everything is in writing and therefore hits harder because I’m making up their tones of voice and no way to correct things when a joke doesn’t land. No matter what starts a conflict, my anxiety rises to the level of The War Doctor, where I am the bomb and you are The Moment……… because that’s my definition of what God is and will always be. The moment you are abused, your reality breaks and you need a third party. That’s why being an addict and bipolar present the same. It’s how trauma affects you your whole life once it happens. I know that now because I met my emotional abuser when I was 12 years old. It didn’t get physical because it didn’t have to. We trauma dumped and handfasted because I intrigued her mentally whether it was intentional or not. I had to forgive her and move on, but I swear to God her world will fucking end if she trauma dumps with someone else that age. No one will kill her, but she might not hate it as a viable option. That’s because Dante’s Inferno is every bit as real in terms of the lens through which I see everything and so do you if you’ve had anything similar happen to you. That’s why I trauma bonded with Daniel and agreed to marry him so fucking fast. I didn’t go insane. I’m emotionally equipped to deal with a Doctor Who is a very bad patient (a turn of phrase from voice dictation on my iPhone in a letter to the absolute love of my life. She just doesn’t accept it because she thinks that her trauma is so much worse than mine and treats herself like shit because of it. If she only knew what kind of person I think she is and started to believe what I’m telling her the first time, she’d see a person who has no problems with worshipping the water she walks on while also being able to tell her that I think we’re headed for a train wreck.

She escalates because she doesn’t want to open up and so do I.

We could have had a love that lasted for all time in these pages, because our secrets married us the moment we said them. Words made it real. Real fast. I agreed to all of it. It was Oppenhemer, and Fallout 3 is entirely responsible for the allegory I saw in playing that game because it was Biblical. When I destroyed Zax with logical fallacy, that he was omnipotent because he was programmed to be omipotent, seeing the loop in the code for the first time, I saw my inner Vault-Tec for what it was and accepted that I was a Lone Wanderer- not only because I wanted it desperately. I also couldn’t get out of it, and that’s why both Supergrover and I think that no matter what, we have a past, a present, and a future.

I am not asking for her to be mine, I am asking her what our future looks like and my problem with her is now twofold. The first is that she only understands me to the level she understands her. I am not guilting her. There isn’t a human who doesn’t do this. I am saying that we cannot interact in the future if she can’t acknowledge her humanness as well. I don’t want the stakes to be so high in our relationship. I wanted to normalize everything, and it was up to her whether that was virtual or physical, but never in a way that she thought was inappropriate for reasons that span from she’s straight to us both acknowledging that if we did it, there’s more chance that we’d destroy each other afterwards than accepting a different reality and being happy in the long term. That if we fuck this up, it’s over for both of us. Just mutually assured destruction and I’m serious as a heart attack. I didn’t give her my whole heart because I wanted her inappropriately. It’s because our emotions made us Siamese twins.

It’s why I devour everything about intelligence. I crave it. I don’t know anyone at CIA and I don’t have to. The reason I love it is because they can blow shit up when things are actually wrong and I can’t. I’ve been emotionally laden like a pack horse since I was 12, a deep cover operation in which I got lost and forgot my real identity. That’s why I need David Webb to become Director of CiA by the end of the story. When he wins, so do I. That’s why I love the conflict in Black Panther. I am both T’Challa and Erik. When love wins, they have a Tolkien CIA agent. Now you know I’m actively trying to make Zac laugh. He is giving me what served me in relationships I’ve had previously, without taking on the baggage of what didn’t. That way, I can love him with my whole heart while also not being bothered to care about absolutely anything he wants to do when we aren’t being the most obnoxious couple you’ve ever met in your life. Really. Talk to us together and you’ll throw up in your mouth a little bit. I’m not bothered about finding someone else because I am not desperately seeking attention and validation……… as people who are sick from trauma do when they don’t get well. Boldly keeping all your emotions hidden in order to be what other people want will kill you, and I mean that literally.

The best sermon I’ve ever heard came from one of the people I’ve been emotionally intimate in an extremely healthy way right up until it wasn’t because we reverted to who we are- neurodivergent and unaccepting of each other’s humanness while both being ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. It’s why I think things could be perfect between my beautiful girl if she’d let it happen. Our professions are compatible and we chose them for a reason, which makes us literally perfect for each other when we aren’t complete assholes.

The first line was “the day my father died, my brother was in jail.” She gave an unpacking of what it’s like for a church to hold on to that level of trauma and I’m a fucking PK. You have no idea what kind of trauma I was dealing with and not because of their inner demons trying to hurt me. I was bleeding out in empathy because I didn’t have any clinical separation. That’s how my trauma bond presents, and it is as ironclad as a marriage in the Holy Roman church………….. and you have two wolves inside you. You decide which one you feed. I express that by talking to a God in which I can stand up and say “I AM BAPTIZED.”

That’s a whole story in and of itself. When you’re a PK, if you pee on the person doing your baptism, you’ve just peed on your dad’s boss. Given how the UMC treated my father, I have embraced their inner Aziraphale and Crowley. The bishop who baptized me served a predominantly gay church after he baptized me, so clearly I was baptizing him as well. I love the idea that he made me a queer person loved unconditionally by God, and he is the YouTube video of Supergrover waking up Superqueer after an organ transplant with me. When I resolve trauma, I get funnier. That’s because Jesus is hilarious to me when he’s not struggling with his own demons. But what I’ve never done is go straight to Golgotha and looked away. I am Emmit Till’s mother. I want you to see what that man went through and how I view his story as a trauma survivor. He didn’t need to be bodily resurrected for me to believe that because his religious leaders gave him hell. He went straight to Golgotha without looking away and while he was on the cross he emotionally blessed and released everything by forgiving the people who murdered him. Doesn’t mean he didn’t want to murder them with words. But in order to forgive everyone on the cross, he had to walk through his own valleys of vulnerability. He had to get as mad at God as he possibly could in order to go to the mountaintop. To me, the importance of the crucifixion is a negative amount, because the resurrection didn’t happen on the cross.

He resurrected himself when he was ready to leave the garden and face death. if I could translate the scriptures written to account for his time there into line cook, it would look a lot like “fuck you. How could you do this to me?” He raged until the Red Sea parted in his mind, and if I know him as well as I think I do, he made that connection while he was still alive…………

because he was a rabbi, and I was born to upper management.

Rose

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Doctor Who has been running in the UK since 1963, but not continuously. “Rose” is the title of the first of what is now called “New Who.” Every day, I realize that her story tells mine, because if you watch her story from beginning to end, you see mine so clearly without me actually having to say anything.

Most people don’t see what happens when the TARDIS lands on their lawn in real life. Doctor Who doesn’t even really take the companions’ families into account. I have seen the look on Mickey’s face, and I never want to see it ever again.

I didn’t run toward Supergrover because she was romantically interested in me. I ran toward her because I could not travel and stay in place. Time always moved forwards, but at different rates in all three of my lives. Doctor Who showed me characters that suffered just as much under these constraints as I did. That it got harder and harder to go back to Mickey when you were fighting alien battles on distant planets or seeing the last day on Earth.

And, just like in the show, companions get tired and want to go back to their real lives.

The Doctor hates goodbyes.

I had that moment just like Rose did, of feeling butterflies. But they never mattered. Therefore, the way I feel is that there is a thread of me in every companion. That I am definitely Rose because I fell in love with The Doctor. That I am definitely Martha because she fell in love with The Doctor and got over it. I am definitely Clara because I am The Impossible Girl. I am definitely Amy Pond because I got used to waiting on my suitcase. I am also Amy in that I’d like to have other romantic interests while we are traveling together, and that is a delicate balance. I couldn’t move on with my life while our relationship was unclear because our agreement would have changed the world. I couldn’t go to another person and say “I’m with you, but only up and to a point.” Not many partners love when the TARDIS lands, but they’re fucked because they know anyone would go. It’s not personal.

Because she physically travels and I don’t, it is very much a relationship of convenience because I don’t have to care what time it is. Maybe she’s up, maybe she’s not. Best case scenario is when I get her on a long haul flight. It’s not that it really matters, just the image of her curled up reading my words means more than she has ever imagined.

Our relationship creates responsibility for me. The companions know up front that they’re going to do things no one will understand and people just have to roll with it. They’re going to show up at the same party but forget that they need to change back into their original clothes. I made it where my life could accommodate this because it was too hard trying to manage two lives.

We had different emotional requirements. Hers was always to move forward, and it irritated her that I wrote backwards because she didn’t want to think about the past. She didn’t see it as affecting her future. That the fights would continue to occur because we weren’t actively seeking common ground. At no time did that mean I wanted to stop being the one who stands there and watches her be clever.

The Doctor deserves that.

The only thing that The Doctor has is that her magic is created by real-life situations, and theirs is created by who they are. They can change things because they are Time Lords. No one asked them, they just showed up.

I am also River Song, born of the time vortex, but as a child, before she knew how her story with Amy and The Doctor would end. This is because I knew that my destiny was to be a companion, and not The Doctor’s Wife. Bonded to them by circumstance, happenstance, yet bound nonetheless. I hate to say that Supergrover missed a lot by not watching that show, but that’s not my call. 😉

That’s because she would have learned the sense of duty that being a companion requires. How there is no love greater than to lay down your life for your friends. That I didn’t make a sacrifice because of anything but it needed doing.

I heard the emergency brakes, and I grabbed my suitcase.

I thought of Michael and me as every companion combination ever, but it was humorous to picture him as Alex Kingston (River Song). That’s because everyone else has been more of a dalliance and River Song is the real deal. They are married in canon.

The problem in all my relationships has been how to explain this one. I can’t believe it’s been under my nose the whole time.

I am Jack Harkness, the relentless flirt that still does everything for everybody no matter how he feels. He can die on command. 😛

This is also me every time my beautiful girl makes me blush. I love it when my cheeks get hot because she’s struck comedy gold, and I hope to bring it out more when I write about her character. I want to be 3-dimensional in the best way possible. To be perfectly honest, I don’t even know what “Flat Stanley” means, but I have taken it to mean a term of endearment because there’s no way on God’s green earth that it’s true.

But if I hold the right to give her my feelings as fact, so does she.

The fact is that because she doesn’t watch Doctor Who, she has no idea the capacity for love that my friendships entail. They aren’t modeled very often. Maybe Will and Francie on “Alias.” I loved the Benedict Cumberbatch film “Courier,” because it was a very good example of the kind of platonic love story I would write if I could. Friendships like that cover all sorts of genres, and I could write Shirley Maclane and Olympia Dukakis in my sleep.

Supergrover will absolutely slap Ouiser Boudreaux, and sometimes it’s me.

Doctor Who is a big enterprise I’m using to describe this relationship because it’s international. I use the love of God in equal measure, mostly because God brings many names and I think one of them is The Doctor. There aren’t really many examples of doing what needs to be done, and I’ve met two of them. It was only in retrospect that I learned I’m one of them.

If there’s anything that Supergrover did for me that means more than all the other stuff combined, she proved to me that I was capable of being a companion.

Every one has that moment where they go from freaked out to being able to hang. Supergrover just didn’t know how that presented, and I didn’t handle it well. I felt like I was in the TARDIS alone a lot of the time,

Now is the parting of the ways, but I am not stepping away. I know that if you hear the emergency brakes once, you’re likely to hear them again.

I don’t want to go.

The Man Who Regrets, and the Man Who Forgets

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

The title comes from a Doctor Who episode about The Moment. The Moment is a weapon that can take billions of lives, but has developed a consciousness and you have to reason with it and accept your fate before it will activate. The Moment stays with The War Doctor as he grapples with whether to blow up Gallifrey to save the universe from collapse. The Moment is with The War Doctor when he’s with Ten and Eleven. The Moment tells The War Doctor that this is who he will become if he blows everything up….. that he will live long enough to become the man who regrets, and the man who forgets.

It resonates with me today as I look back over 40 straight days of posting, because I talk a lot about regrets and remorse so I can change myself going forward. I forget to play. I forget to explore alternate universes and dream bigger. In my last entry, the alternate history was staying with Kathleen long enough to have had kids, but I didn’t change anything about the relationship itself. Everything that cost me would have continued right on being expensive.

I’m trying to get smarter about where my energy goes. I haven’t lost myself in new relationship bliss because I’ve stayed motivated to write to my heart’s content, which is far more than I thought it would take to keep it happy. I am relentless about self-discovery, and I truly do not love when other people think they’re the main character. They’re the main character when we’re interacting, but they do not have a lock on our memories together because we were having different experiences when those interactions occurred. How I perceive someone shouldn’t have bearing on how anyone else sees someone because they’re not going to get the same interaction I did. They bring a different set of experiences to the table.

Those are difficult conversations to have, which is why it’s easier for me to have partners and friends who either get it or don’t care. People who get it see everything I write about them. They lived it. They don’t have to love it. They know when our conflict is resolved in real life, it will be resolved here. That I do not have a preconceived notion of who they are and expect confirmation bias. I am a diarist, and the only reason I’m considered good at blogging is that it’s not very popular anymore. It’s easier to stand out, the way it was when both Dooce and I had 200 readers on a good day.

I absolutely tanked the blog that made me in a fit of rage. I didn’t have the coping mechanisms to deal with blowback that I do now, and I couldn’t get mad at anyone else. I self destructed.

I have been afraid I would do it again, and instead of attracting people into my life that care I write said diary, I actively avoid them.

Zac only reads something if I tell him to in any kind of urgency. The rest of the time, he just surfs because he knows that writing is my interest. He doesn’t have to make it his. It just helps that he’s also a bookworm and I wake up to “Zac has gifted you” for my Kindle. He’s introduced me to writers I never would have discovered on my own. He also knows I’ll read anything, so just send me what he likes. I don’t need him to find me things he thinks I’ll like, because I’ll dig into whatever since he likes it. I’m not being cute or coy. If Zac likes something, I probably will, too. None of that classic gender role shit, because he’s fairly femme looking for a man and I’m fairly butch looking for a woman. Christian evangelicals and queer radicals all get what they want and everyone wins.

The part about Christian Evangelicals winning was way more about being afraid to walk into just any bar holding a woman’s hand than it was about hoping they ever win anything. And how it would be twice as bad for Zac to walk into just any bar holding a man’s hand.

It’s important to me not to project heterosexual privilege, and when people can tell that Zac is queer, it means something to me. When I’m not glued to his hip, there’s an equal chance that someone is going to say something nasty to us. It’s why I don’t want to date straight men again. It would be too harsh to say never, although I’ve said it. If it happens, you’ll know something extraordinary has happened and it is a flaw I’m willing to overlook. The benefit would have to be huge.

Bryn has the same outlook that I do. Say what you want, we’ll work it out. I just collaborate with her a lot so she has a rough outline of what I’m going to talk about She reminds me of past history so I have a jumping off point to connect the past to the present. Developing our relationship is the best thing I’ve ever done for myself because I don’t have many people in my life with whom I share that much history.

It’s how I would have liked my relationship with Supergrover to go, but she didn’t like bringing up the past for frames of reference and didn’t want to collaborate with me for the future. She has just influenced every single thing I’ve written here because I was workshopping the idea with her, first. She was getting the rough drafts because I wasn’t publishing my letters to her. I was going back and taking the feelings out of them that read universal. I was taking the details that made it too personal to the two of us and casting them aside. When she cut contact with me, she was no longer that internal monologue, so she wasn’t hearing my thought process every day like she had for the last 10 years.

She didn’t like the play because I stopped giving her the brochure.

I am not comparing the two women to each other, only the reason they are both so valuable to me. My history with Bryn starts in 1997. My history with Supergrover starts in 2013. Both of them have palaces in my head because they’ve lived there long enough to create them. Bryn likes hers. Supergrover doesn’t. I am not turning one away in favor of the other. I am giving my energy to the one who needs me.

I have needed Supergrover from the moment I laid eyes on her. She needed me. I still need her, but I can’t put energy toward her because I don’t feel needed. She told me that she’s read through many lines, and I think it was probably that she thought I’d found a new toy and I’d forgotten what she meant to me, has always meant to me.

I stopped responding to her because I was willing to do anything for her and I didn’t feel a quarter of that coming back at me. It doesn’t mean that she didn’t feel it. It means that I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t get her to interpret it. I didn’t want to be the equivalent of the girlfriend who obsesses over the meaning of intended punctuation……………… anymore.

I missed laughing when she flipped me shit about things, missed having make up text after we fought, missed telling her I loved her and I missed her and that being a good thing.

That’s always what I’ve meant by “showing up.” “Loving me enough to struggle.” Lay out your thoughts, fears, dreams, hopes, secrets, lies, all of it. I used to be that place for her, and I will always be there if our differences are reconciled and celebrated. There’s no possible way I could tell our story as if it was fact. You’re not even getting the whole picture in my head because I can only write one line at once. So, not only are you not getting her side of the story, she’s not correcting anything with either one of us. Your guess as to what her story might be is absolutely as valid as mine. Other people influence her behavior to an enormous degree, but I don’t write about them because I do not have a relationship with them. Here’s a big for-instance. I learned about Michael way too late for that knowledge to be helpful. But over time, he became a useful coping mechanism. That our relationship could be virtual because theirs was on the ground. I didn’t have to worry about her- he had it handled. Remember, in my head, she’s six years old with a lot of layers to cover up that fact. I needed her to have a boyfriend. I needed her to get married. I needed her to be the country mouse to my city mouse. Knowing that I would have run to the drugstore in the middle of the night if she was sick didn’t have to eat at me because she already had someone to do that.

I wish she would just take in the enormity of the things I’ve said that I don’t regret, like “of course I’ll want to be the first one tested if you need an organ. Please.” To me, that promise is every bit as real as running to Walgreens at 0300. I didn’t do anything because she needed me to do it. I did it because I saw it needed doing.

Although before I gave her an organ, we would have had a very serious conversation about the YouTube video in which she woke up from surgery queer as a three dollar bill. Just the weirdest organ rejection side effect ever.

It has been long enough since I’ve wanted to be the person that ran to the drugstore at 0300 that I know within myself just how much I am…………

The Man Who Regrets, and The Man Who Forgets