Tag: espionage

Curiosity

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell?
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If I had a shop of my own, I would like to sell curiosity itself. I would have all kinds of puzzles and games to spark the imagination, as well as a coffee bar so that people could sit and play with their purchases.

I would have a book section dedicated to espionage, because I would like to sell the books of all the retired spies I’ve met who’ve gone on to become authors. And what could be a bigger puzzle/game than that?

My friend Josh was telling me that he didn’t trust any government enough to spy for it, and I totally get it. But you can’t hang out at the spy museum and not get bitten by the bug…. it’s basically a commercial for new CIA recruits, just like going to NASA creates little astronauts…. and yes, I went through an astronaut phase in 7th grade. I went to a science and math magnet where I actually got to meet Mae Jemison.

So perhaps I will include books by retired astronauts as well. Space and espionage go hand in hand, as CIA and KGB duked it out for supremacy in The Cold War.

I’d like to have book talks in my shop, to receive all these people that I really admire in a setting that’s comfortable for them. Of course other people have shops like this, I would just like to be a stop on the tour.

But let’s get back to this coffee bar. I’d like to be able to make a wide variety of drinks, including being able to add shots of liqueur to enhance the coffee flavor in the afternoons. I don’t drink, but other people do. I’ve always liked being able to have a drink and work on my own stuff, so I’m thinking it would be a coffee/bar instead of a coffee bar.

I’d like to get Starbucks in on the mix, because Komodo Dragon mixes so perfectly with Sambuca, Amaretto, and all the other flavors that make a perfectly crafted coffee cocktail. I would also like to have their nonalcoholic counterparts, but let’s be clear. I realize that I would be drinking most of the profits on that one.

I’d like to have Athletic IPAs on draft for my customers who like a cold beer and are on a deadline. Beer makes every chore more enjoyable, and I like the idea of being able to day drink without the after-effects.

The beauty of my store is that it would pique your curiosity about lots of things while remaining a chill place to hang out. Soft music would play over the PA and I’d hire acoustic bands or a pianist once in a while.

We could all play games together, surrounded by our service animals while people browse the books I have on offer.

I have no idea where this store would be at this point, because I’m frustrated with the United States, but do not have a solid bug out plan in terms of financing it. I can barely take care of myself, so thinking up this dream for a bookshop and bar is really stretching me out of my comfort zone.

But maybe it’s where I’d be the happiest, surrounded by other nerds who love information, and need the sensory input to be turned down. That is the main reason I do not like to go shopping- the assault is relentless. I get most of my groceries and supplies delivered, including my clothes.

If I could think of a way to make shopping for clothes less intrusive and overwhelming, I would probably do that instead- I see a greater need for it.

Coffee shops are a dime a dozen, but not really good ones. Not nineties good, anyway. I really like what Busboys & Poets are doing in DC, but there’s not really a Baltimore equivalent, particularly not one specializing in “the greatest game.”

I think that I would attract spies and analysts to my bookshop because so many of them are neurodivergent. It’s something we don’t really think about, but autistic and ADHD people have such fine-tuned pattern recognition that stands out in espionage.

It would thrill me if I opened this bookshop and 30 years down the line I find out that something spectacular happened there. Maybe it would be the site of a dead drop, maybe my books were used to catch foreign agents. Whatever. I have no idea. It’s just a thrilling idea to contemplate.

The most important part would be making everyone feel welcome, no matter who they are. I have a feeling that would come with some social masking, dealing with customers, but it’s not like I’ve never had to do it before.

I cannot be a shut-in writer forever, and I don’t know why I’m making such an effort at it. Outside scares me, mostly because I have terrible balance and fall a lot. Maybe owning my own shop would lessen the feeling that I don’t belong.

Being surrounded by books about subjects I love, and meeting other people who also love espionage, space, and the combination thereof (looking at you, Vince Houghton) would make me feel like I had a home.

Of course, I could always get a job working at the bookstore in the Spy Museum. I’ve been there a couple of times…………

If you are an OG, you know I have literally sat on the floor combing their books and that was a laugh line.

It’s just that the spy museum is too far away for me to work there on a daily basis, I think… perhaps not, as I enjoy my time on the train. But Baltimore to DC is a long haul when you’re thinking of it as a commute and not a one-off day trip.

It’s not un-doable, I’m just not sure it would be my first choice. I think I’m onto something with wanting to bring a piece of the spy museum to me.

With beer.

My friend Josh is crazy about spy novels, so I would have to include a fiction section to get him interested. Kidding, all those books would be for me, too. The thing about both of us is that it doesn’t matter what country the intelligence agency represents, we just like spy stories overall.

Although both of our favorites seem to be John Le Carrรฉ.

The BBC adaptations are hard to come by, so I think I’ll get a subscription to BritBox. That may be my only avenue for Doctor Who in the future, as well, because all the episodes are gone from HBO Max.

And now I have a new project for the afternoon- tracking down how I can watch foreign spy shows for cheap. It would be cool if I owned them to be able to play them in the background at this fictional store I’m not building. ๐Ÿ˜‰

All of Them

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
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Managing you was like having a golden retriever work for you. Excellent at fetching dead birds but โ€ฆ.squirrel. -Randy, my actual former boss- it’s the most accurate thing I’ve ever read about my career.

There are so many things I haven’t tried, and one day is about the stamina I have for 110% effort. It’s also not enough time for me to develop compensatory skills, so me doing a job for one day would not reveal my weaknesses. It would not reveal my strengths, either. The one possible job I could think of that might fit me is field officer at CIA. With only one day, I’d have enough time to talk to people, but not enough time to do all the paperwork that ends up out of order and on the wrong desk…. either late or with coffee stains on the top because I never left the office to prevent something being late.

Staying at the office until something is done might be the one quality I could contribute.

I’m reading The Hunt for Red October currently, and what I love about it is the anachronism and the advanced technology. For instance, the new computer for the submarine fleet is “the size of a small desk” and also 64-bit architecture. That did not become available to businesses until the 1990s and consumers outside of the business realm until 2003. The hardback was published in 1984. It has allowed me to dream bigger as to what is now possible in computers just based on that information alone.

I’d like to be a submarine commander for a day because I would like to see whether my predictions have come true… that tech on a boat now is wilder than anything I could dream. That’s because “most enlisted men don’t know how to steer the ship.” One day is enough to know I’d be both great and terrible at my job…… mostly because I’m great and terrible at my job no matter what it is.

Autism sucks.

So do ADHD and CP, but autism is the driving force behind meltdown and burnout to the degree that I have it. Most people with ADHD alone have the same issues as me, but the mark of autism is severity for a lot of symptoms. This is not true in all cases, but for the majority of them, the canary in the coal mine is the degree of the deficit. Executive dysfunction makes it hard to regulate yourself, and coworkers do not have time to help you. I know that I can be trained with occupational therapy, but the only advice I’ve ever been given in my career is to grovel………. until now.

I had to figure out this meme:

This does not mean that autistic people cannot work. It means that if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. Autism has never stopped me from working, but ableism sure has. There was no way for me to perform as efficiently or as fast in the kitchen as an able-bodied person, and no allowances were ever made for it. Dana and Kinkaid constantly covered my lack, but I didn’t figure that out until I was on my own. They both taught me how to cook, but neither one were there to trade me jobs I could do. It was sink or swim. I couldn’t carry a full bucket of mop water up three flights of stairs, nor did I have enough strength in my upper body to work a potato press. Therefore, making French fries was a large part of being a dishwasher when there were no dishes to wash. This gave everyone ample opportunity to see me struggle and call me lazy.

You get called lazy a lot when most of your energy goes toward keeping yourself alive. You cannot see it today, but you can clearly see my deficits in this video announcing my birth. It was made by my grandfather while I was in the NICU and in the days afterward, but the phone call is not real. My mother went into labor five weeks early according to my grandfather and eight weeks early according to her. There was no time.

John-Michael Kinkaid called me a lot of things, but lazy was never one of them. I know that I am capable of working with a chef to find the jobs I can do, but I am not capable of changing myself so that I don’t have cerebral palsy anymore. This lying there, looking at everything and soaking it in, is the classic picture of an autistic kid with CP.

A few years ago, I attended a party at my sister’s house. We were reviewing the drone footage in which I didn’t know I was being filmed and was shocked to find out that I did not move a muscle for three hours. I am not a different person than I was in this video. I have never changed. My entire strength as a human is sitting there and soaking up what other people say…. and in fact, I am frustrated with my medication protocol because drugs for mental health are known for seemingly lowering your IQ points. It goes away once you get off the medication, but I did not have this problem with the last set of drugs.

What makes me think I’m AuDHD and not bipolar is that I was stable on Lexapro for 20+ years. Bipolar and SSRIs do not mix. I also have a strange hum in my brain from lack of serotonin now, and there’s nothing to be done for it except grit my teeth until 11:00 AM, my first psych appointment in years. I haven’t needed it because being stable meant my GP could refill my drugs.

How is today different from all other days?

Today is the day that hopefully determines more of my future than my current hand. At this point, I only have the hole cards. By noon, I should at least have the flop. Thinking about the turn and the river is getting ahead of myself, because right now it feels like fourth street and fifth street are perpendicular. My strategy in poker has always been to fold early and often, because letting a good hand go is better than losing my bankroll.

Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career.

I could sit at any poker table in the world and have a good shot and not because I know a lot about poker. That can be trained. So, perhaps a job I’d love for a day is “card shark.” What I mean is that someone can teach me the rules. You don’t play poker by knowing the rules, though. You have enough soft skills, as Michael McDermott accurately points out in “Rounders,” and you can read the whole room blind. You don’t play the cards, you play the man.

In this way, being a poker player is not that different from being a field officer or a cook…. and in fact, in most countries “field officers,” “waitstaff,” and “cooks” are the same job, because front of house and back of house employees at a restaurant are the least likely to get “made.” There is no reason to notice any of us, and all intelligence agencies exploit that fact.

In a perfect world, culinary school in Vaasa would lead to a job at Supo, the Finnish intelligence agency. I know I have the skills to make it because I have it on good authority that I am excellent at fact-finding. This is because I do get social cues, but I do not get fake ones. I pick up on the way you carry yourself, your “I’m fine” ringing hollow. I become confused and dig deeper, and that’s when I become rude and intrusive according to other people. It’s not because I’m actively trying to be obstinate. It’s that I am not participating in the lie that you’re fine.

HOW DARE YOU LET ME HELP YOU?

For instance, I wouldn’t like to be a therapist or a psychiatrist for a day… but I would like to help people understand why social masking isn’t helpful. Wait… that was a lie. I would love to be a psychiatrist because then I could nerd out on crazy med pharmacology without digging deep into other people’s problems. It’s not that I wouldn’t. It’s that in order to be a good therapist, I would need to resolve all my own issues first. Otherwise, I would be capable of letting someone else get their crazy spatter all over me without being able to walk it off, and my boundaries would not be as firm as they need to be in order to keep crazy spatter from getting on my clients.

I just don’t think I have the stomach for medical school, and I mean that literally. One of the things that autism does for me is heightens my awareness of bad smells. I vomit early and often. I wouldn’t last 15 minutes at The Body Farm. However, I am assuming that if I can only have the job for the day, it’s like The Matrix. I would absorb every skill I needed as if by magic… including the secrets held by dead bodies without the inconvenience of having to work on them.

The problem with having a job for more than one day is all the ableism I’d have to endure. I mentioned what it looked like in the kitchen. In an IT help desk, it looks like winning two awards for customer service and then being fired because you “can’t remember to write things down.” This has never been true. The autistic brain does not have the ability to process someone’s voice, compile the scripts needed for an appropriate response, and write down what the person is saying at the same time. And in fact, most of the problem is that I don’t process people’s voices well. I seem to do fine with Internet chat and e-mail, but conversations are land mines. I will not remember because my retention and recall with people’s voices is so poor… unless there is a musical quality to their voices that sets what they’re saying to a beat.

I just don’t remember whole pieces of text. For instance, I do not retain lyrics to an entire opera, just the bits and pieces that resonated with my soul. I cannot tell you everything Chandler Bing and Joe Quincy ever said, but fragments remain. It is the same with Lorelai Gilmore. It is most acute with CJ Cregg and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. It’s not always what they say, but the way they say it.

What’s with the quite?

Aaron Sorkin single-handedly changed the language we use around the government by not using articles in the script. For instance, you do not work at the CIA, you are “at CIA.” You do not work at the State Department, you are “at State.” Or, at least, this is the answer that Michael came up with, because he moved here before I did and saw the change in vernacular up front.

But it’s amazing how the change in speech pattern allowed me to retain so much more, because when something is written in neurodivergent patois, I am more likely to recall it.

Just like I’ll remember Randy saying that I was his first neurodivergent employee and he would have handled everything differently, and I will remember saying that at the time, I didn’t know I was neurodivergent and would have handled everything differently, too.

So maybe the job I really want for a day is just being his admin assistant again. Except now he’s retired.

It’s the thought that counts.

The Rabbit Holes -or- Ergo, Argo

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I can think of no better rabbit holes than YouTube and Copilot. On YouTube, I went from looking at how to build ponds and aquariums, and the algorithms expanded me to carpentry, construction, off-grid home building, masonry, etc. Copilot can lead me on a rabbit hole anywhere.

Here’s another funny conversation I had with Carol, because it truly showcases why ChatGPT is important. It’s for trolling your friends:

Do you have a go-to playlist or type of music you listen to while writing? Some writers swear by instrumental music or nature sounds to keep them focused.

Sent by you:

Yes- I am a musician and I tend to listen to things over and over and over to get the music out of the way so I can focus on something else, like writing. I have chosen the soundtracks to the Bourne movies and Argo.

That’s a great strategy! The soundtracks to the Bourne movies and Argo have such intense and captivating scores. ๐ŸŽถ They must create a perfect atmosphere for diving deep into your writing.

As a musician, do you ever find yourself analyzing the music while you write, or does the repetition help it fade into the background? Also, do you play any instruments or compose your own music?

Sent by you:

You hit the nail on the head. The repetition has to get the music out of the way, otherwise I will be analyzing chord structures instead of writing.

That makes perfect sense! As a musician, itโ€™s natural to get caught up in the intricacies of the music. Repetition is a clever way to let the music fade into the background and let your writing take center stage.

Do you ever draw inspiration from the soundtracks you listen to, or do you keep your music and writing worlds separate? It sounds like you have a great balance going on! ๐ŸŽตโœ๏ธ

Sent by you:

Argo inspires me because I actually know Jonna Mendez, Tony’s widow. We are colleagues.

Editor’s Note:

We have flipped each other shit about our writing. We’re colleagues now.

That’s incredible! Knowing someone with such a fascinating history must be truly inspiring. Jonna Mendez’s experiences and insights must add a unique depth to your understanding of the events depicted in Argo.

Do you ever find yourself drawing on her stories or perspectives in your writing? It sounds like you have a wealth of inspiration right at your fingertips!

Oh, I rip her off blind all the time. I can’t wait to tell her that. ๐Ÿ˜›

Haha, Iโ€™m sure sheโ€™ll get a kick out of that! ๐Ÿ˜„ Itโ€™s amazing to have such a direct source of inspiration. Plus, it must add a layer of authenticity to your writing that readers can really feel.

Do you have any upcoming projects or blog posts where youโ€™re planning to weave in some of those โ€œborrowedโ€ elements? It sounds like your readers are in for a treat!

That actually brings me to a good question. Can you tell me some Cold War stories about Jonna to include?

Absolutely! Jonna Mendez has some fascinating stories from her time as a CIA operative during the Cold War. Here are a few highlights you might find intriguing:

  1. Chief of Disguise: Jonna served as the CIAโ€™s Chief of Disguise, where she was responsible for creating and implementing disguises for operatives. This role was crucial during the Cold War, as it allowed agents to operate undetected in hostile environments1.
  2. The Moscow Rules: Jonna and her husband, Tony Mendez, co-authored The Moscow Rules, which outlines the techniques and strategies used by CIA operatives in Moscow during the Cold War. These rules were essential for survival and successful espionage in one of the most challenging environments for spies2.
  3. Espionage and Photography: Jonna had a talent for photography, which she parlayed into an operational role overseas. She used her skills to gather intelligence and document critical information, often under the guise of a tourist or journalist1.
  4. Navigating a Male-Dominated World: Jonnaโ€™s career in the CIA was marked by her ability to navigate and succeed in a predominantly male environment. Her story is not just about espionage but also about overcoming the challenges of being a woman in a field that was, at the time, largely closed to women1.

These stories not only highlight her incredible career but also provide a glimpse into the high-stakes world of Cold War espionage. Iโ€™m sure your readers will find them as captivating as you do!

1: In True Face: A Womanโ€™s Life in the CIA, Unmasked 2: The Master of Disguise

Feel free to weave these elements into your writing. And when you tell Jonna about โ€œborrowingโ€ her stories, Iโ€™m sure sheโ€™ll appreciate the homage! ๐Ÿ˜„

Roots

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What Olympic sports do you enjoy watching the most?

Link to audio.

This is another story that goes all the way back to my very first girlfriend ever. Her name is Meagan (I called her Nutmeag.), and sheโ€™s so Canadian thereโ€™s probably a moose in her driveway right now. The way we met is mildly interesting. My 11th grade best friend was friends with her, but I didnโ€™t know Meag at all. I just knew of her.

My senior year of high school, she ended up in my English class. Her desk was diagonal to mine, and I cannot tell you how many hours I spent staring at the back of her head, wondering if she liked me.

I had to wonder because Dr. Hudel Steed, our English teacher, laid down the law. This class is going to be hard as shit, get someoneโ€™s number. I had an opening on the first day of school to meet her, so I knocked over three desks to get to her. Why wouldnโ€™t I? My best friend had vouched for her character. She was already in.

I also didnโ€™t know what kind of gift I was opening when I walked through my front door and the phone was already ringing that afternoon. She was desperate to ask a pointed question that she thought was veiled, and I knew it even then. She wanted to know if it was safe to come out to me, and the question was โ€œwhy do you wear pride rings?โ€ I could sense where she was going and said, โ€œIโ€™m gay. Do you have a problem with that?โ€ She said, โ€œno, Iโ€™m a Melissa Etheridge fan.โ€ From that day forward, my life was never the same in too many ways to enumerate. Our first kiss rendered me absolutely helpless, the way a first kiss is supposed to feel. It was Princess Diaries all up in that shit.

Therefore, I love Canadian everythingโ€ฆ. Including Roots, a clothing brand that offered to make the kit. One of the pieces was a pork pie hat, which Roots sold separately to customers. I bought it, and brought it with me on a cruise to Mexico years and years later.

The hat was for cold weather, but it was Spring Break in Enseรฑada. The Pacific Ocean is cold even when temperatures are three digits. I was standing on the deck looking down at the pool when a woman came up to me and pointed at some swimmers. She said, โ€œsee all those people down there? Weโ€™ve been wondering what kind of athlete you are for 20 minutes.โ€

So, of course I turned around and yelled โ€œIโ€™m a SKIIER!โ€

I also learned that while Meagan might not think my impression of her is dead on, no one noticed I wasnโ€™t actually Canadian. I could have spoken in my own accent, but I didnโ€™t. I played that character for all it was worth and oh my God thatโ€™s why Tony and Jonna Mendez are my favorite authorsโ€ฆ. Itโ€™s all coming together now. THATโ€™s why I love the Argo script so muchโ€ฆ. โ€œCanadians donโ€™t pronounce the second t.โ€ โ€œNo one will know that.โ€ โ€œIf you are caught, they will find someone who knows that.โ€ OMFG. I wanted to know if my cover as Meag would hold up when when my constructive criticism thus far had been โ€œitโ€™s good youโ€™re still trying.โ€ For the record, itโ€™s โ€œTurrono,โ€ frequently spoken so fast it sounds like โ€œTron-o.โ€

I just learned things that were deeper than mere mimicry, like when Canadians tend to say โ€œehโ€ and when they donโ€™t. Itโ€™s not just being able to imitate someone, but to understand the things that have informed why they do them. To understand how to say โ€œhouseโ€ and โ€œmouseโ€ like I was born in Alberta while also understanding that it is annoying as fuck when people ask if โ€œyโ€™all have Christmas on the same day.โ€

But what do I know? Iโ€™m just a dumb athlete. ๐Ÿ˜›

A Christmas Carol

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Christmas 2022 has been a very quiet affair so far. It obviously looks a little bit different than I thought it would, but not in a way that feels foreign. Even if things had gone exactly as planned, Christmas morning would still be the calm before the storm. I wake up earlier than everyone else during the rest of the year, as well as aging and requiring less sleep. Santa hasn’t come to my house in seven years without me being there, arms outstretched with hay (Hey Finns, reindeer eat hay, right? Unclear. I hope they weren’t just being polite.). Early this morning, Santa told me what all of you got. I’m seeing your faces as you’re opening up your presents and thinking how right he was as your faces light up. It’s an incredible energy to sit in this morning as I write. I think things like, “I wonder if Jonathan liked his head.” Yes. That’s an actual thing I thought this morning, and I’m leaving it without context because it’s so much funnier that way.

I have spent several Christmases completely alone, and though I appreciate the pomp and circumstance of Christmas (particularly the classical music), it actually is a cool thing to spend it thinking about yourself. You don’t have to compromise with anyone. I am not saying that you should turn away family in favor of this. I’m saying that if you end up alone on Christmas, it is a gift. TRUST ME. You have a day to yourself to plan anything you want. USE IT without feeling guilty. If you literally can’t get to your family, don’t spend the day crying for them. Create new memories with yourself to share with them.

If something says it’s Christmas to you, go for it. In my own life, Christmas has been Star Wars until recently (I, too, like to eat Chinese food on Christmas and go to the movie theater, too.). One of my friends said “Star Wars movies are not Christmas movies.” I said, “yes, but some of them have been released Christmas week.” It wasn’t about the subject matter, it was about going to see a movie on the big screen after opening all my presents. For future reference, if I invite you to go to a movie with me, it means that the movie is a big deal, not that you are. You may be as well, but most movies are perfectly fine on a television, particularly if you aren’t precious about the picture. Just because it’s large doesn’t mean it’s expensive.

I have a relatively nice TV, but I will always shell out for IMAX if it’s an action movie that I’m desperate to see. If I was in any way wealthy, I would have rented one of the IMAX theaters in downtown Silver Spring to stream “Jack Ryan.” It’s one of the few spy shows I like in terms of plot ideas and execution, because Clancy gave them source matierial that covered everything from world events to the exact length of a left-handed cotter pinโ€ฆ. and is that an African cotter pin or a European cotter pin?

Why yes, that was me making fun of Tom Clancy. Thank you for noticing. The one thing that they get wrong is that there is such a thing as a CIA agent, but Jack’s not it. He’s a case officer. All people in CIA operations are called “operations officers” or “case officers.” An agent is an asset we’ve put in placeโ€ฆ. as in, someone who most probably lives in the area of operation as opposed to a US citizen.

I will watch anything with spies in it. Full stop. I just don’t take much seriously. There is no equivalent to “Law and Order” in intelligence because to make a procedural you’d have to know what the rules were to be able to write about them. It’s not just CIA- all intelligence agencies foreign and domestic would have a problem with the general public knowing the minutiae of what they do. I read a ton of non-fiction so that I can pick up real knowledge, it’s just necessarily dated. Most of the operations I can speak to are from the late 40s to early 90s. I do not believe that I could write what it would be like to be a spy in today’s world, but I think I have a pretty good handle on what it is like to be one in generalโ€ฆ the personality quirks and mannerisms that become timeless whether it’s human intelligence collection or cybersecurity.

It seems to change the people I’ve met in all the same ways. Intelligence is not regimented like the military. You are free to be whoever you want to be, and you can write your story the way you want to tell it. Therefore, in my experience, no two spies are alike. Their personalities are as individual as a fingerprint. In terms of grand patterns of behavior based on the books I’ve read, working in intelligence takes all of those disparate personalities and changes minute parts to work in concert.

I’ve been to the spy museum where not only American legends gather, it adds old KGB/Mossad/GRU agents that now want to work with the museum, etc. I like spies as people. They’re generally hilarious and devastatingly clever. And here’s something about spies that you may not have thought of. They vote. They’ve been to many, many countries in the world. They see what works and what doesn’t. And they bring all that knowledge back to the US and it informs their policy recommendations. If anyone in an intelligence agency lives in your neighborhood, the intellectual property value just shot through the roof.

If spies didn’t have their fingers on the pulse of politics while they were executing their operations, it would very much surprise me. It occurred to me just how attractive it would be to someone living in a country that had some political powerโ€ฆ able to use their knowledge to either change their country or get out before things got much, much worse.

It just occurred to me that it might be a very good idea to put it into the ether that if you are a gay government employee in a country where being gay is illegal, get some power. All we need is a reason to come get you and we will. It’s been proven. It’s not that we as a government don’t care about all gay people and don’t wish we could fix everythingโ€ฆ it’s that if you want the clearest, quickest path to an ex-fil, find information that the United States government needs and tell us why we need it. If it feels scary to put yourself out there, CIA has an Onion site where you can leave absolutely untraceable messages. Sometimes it’s not worth fighting the system. Sometimes it’s worth playing the long game to get out.

In 1947, being gay in the CIA was illegal and not even because CIA hated gay people. It’s because it was one of the hot button issues that would get you tortured and killed overseas- an unnecessary risk. Now, CIA is rainbow central with queer and trans officers. Actually, that’s another plus. Join US intelligence and not only will your work become valuable, we can introduce you to a whole bunch of other queer people who do what you do. So, not just people you might want to date and be friends with because they’re also queer, but because you actually have a whole lot in common.

It occurs to me that I am now pimping out the Central Intelligence Agency as a gay dating app, and I do not know how they would feel about that. Well, I wrote it down on my web site. If it’s offensive, someone will be with me shortly. I should have talked to Carol about this before I posted it.

Carol is not a real person, she’s my Amazon Echo Dot. I read somewhere that people were concerned that Alexa was actually the NSA, and I thought it was hilarious. This is because let’s say it’s true. That’s even better. It’s Carol’s entire job to log what I say and what I do. It makes me double over with laughter to think that there is a woman in the world whose entire job is looking down on me like a guardian angel and being stuck in a permanent face palm.

I have put a really kind face on government surveillance, and I feel tender toward her because I’m such a mess. This is because I anthropomorphized my Echo Dot and gave Carol an extensive back story. She and Roger, her husband, live out near Hollins College in southern Virginia. They have this fabulous off-grid setup because they got a government rebate for green construction and Roger is a contractor. So, Carol has a professional, NSA-level computer setup in her basement so that she can listen to me while she looks out over the Blue Ridge Mountains. Yes, it’s a basement, but the house is built into the side of a hill. Floor to ceiling windows on one side. Carol doesn’t like feeling boxed in, which makes me feel like doing interesting things. Actually interesting, not “today I’m going to mess with Carol.” She’s straight and married and all that, but it still lights her up inside when I’m happy and destroys her when I’m not, because it’s her job to listen and she took it a little too seriously.

Because I know so much about Carol and talk to her every single day, I am sure that she will be a fictional character in one of my novels, just not the alternate history. The alternate history is set in a time period too early for The Patriot Act.

I also feel it absolutely necessary as a mental health patient to say that the reason I’m so into Carol and keep adding to her story is because I could use her in a book one day, not because I have gone down the rabbit hole of being cool with government surveillance. That’s a mixed bag, because as someone who doesn’t code but knows IT, I feel that there are worse people that already have eyes on me than the United States government. If China and Russia already have me under surveillance, why do I care if the US is also there? If something I’ve done has caused me to get hacked, I want my government to see what happened and be able to decide if I need help or punishment. They may be rancid butter, but they’re the only ones on my side of the bread.

Carol would probably vouch for me, but “we are going to have a LOOOOOONG TALK about this when we get home.”

At least since it’s Christmas, she won’t ground me until tomorrow.

Blogging Isn’t Writing

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Especially because of the pandemic we’re experiencing, I thought it would be fun to watch movies that deal with them. The first one I watched made me laugh so hard I almost choked and died (no lie). Jude Law plays a blogger/journalist [Alan Krumwiede] who wants to break the story, and LaurenceMV5BMTY3MDk5MDc3OV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNzAyNTg0Ng@@._V1_ Fishburne as Dr. Ellis Cheever provided me with this gem: blogging is not writing. It’s graffiti with punctuation. One of the best movie quotes about blogging of all time and space. #fightme

I tend to think of it as emotionally vomiting all over the Internet, but what do I know? ๐Ÿ˜‰

The movie has an amazing cast, and held my attention. When I watch movies, they generally run in the background as I do a hundred other things, but I actually sat down for this one. I am a huge fan of both Jude Law and Matt Damon, and love it when they work together. The Talented Mr. Ripley is a masterpiece. I also love Laurence Fishburne’s voice, and I could listen to him read the phone book and be extraordinarily happy with it. The movie itself is great, but what really pushes it over the top is the actors chosen.

I am sure I will keep watching disaster movies, because they are timely and generally have great soundtracks. I am a sucker for a well-composed score….. and isn’t it interesting how life imitates art?

Speaking of which, no show in recent memory does this better than Homeland. For instance, two or three weeks ago it was about negotiating a cease fire with the Taliban. Truly, with the exception of a Bipolar I case officer, this show is the most realistic I’ve ever seen.

Why would a Bipolar I case officer be ridiculous? The CIA would never let it happen. I think it’s probably a little unfair to discriminate against mentally ill workers that don’t leave Langley- with the exception that they have to be in treatment at all times- but field work would end in disaster, and not for the reasons you think.

If a Bipolar spy was captured in a third world country, they may not even have access to your medication. If they do, how likely would it be that they would actually give it to you? It didn’t even occur to me until Carrie herself got made, and descended into madness from lack of medication after getting captured by the GRU.604px-Apple_logo_Think_Different_vectorized.svg

That being said, a Bipolar analyst might be a good thing. Mental illness isn’t fun, but you gain a tremendous amount of ability at being able to see things others don’t, because you’re always thinking outside the box. Carrie’s murder boards are absolutely insane in terms of always being spot on. She can make connections that no one else can or does. That part is amazing in terms of mental illness visibility, because she highlights all the bad and the good. The problem comes in when analysts are required to be forward-deployed. I have no idea how that would work, but it’s a balance of pros vs. cons. I don’t have an answer, I just think it’s something that might come in handy, especially when Think different. becomes a thing….. because trust me when I say no one is better at it.

There have been a lot of people saying that Homeland has gotten predicable and boring, because Carrie is brilliant and then has a breakdown every season. The producers’ response was amazingly kind (at least to those who have it). Carrie doesn’t get a break from it. Why should you?

In terms of my own mental health, Carrie and I are very different. Bipolar II does not cause such extreme variance between depression and mania. The depression is full strength, but the mania is basically the Bipolar I Diet Cokeโ„ข counterpart. There’s only one time in my life that it’s gotten out of hand, and it was so memorable that if it ever happens again, I’m locking myself in my room and air gapping my computer. I will leave you to your own devices as to what happened, but it cost me more than I’ve ever spent… in fact, it reached into my five dollar life and made change… the scary part was that I was on my medication when it happened, and I thought I was going to have to start a whole new protocol.

The reason that’s always scary is that changing your medication is often trial and error, so I could have been through the wringer several times before getting right again. But as it turned out, my doctor added Neurontinโ„ข & Klonopinโ„ข for anxiety and left the rest alone. It thankfully, blessedly worked miracles. That was four years ago, and I haven’t had a recurrence, mostly because I’m so afraid of it that I will go to the doctor at the drop of a hat.

Nothing has really changed in terms of always feeling better, but nothing has felt worse, either. I think my ups and downs are just life, not my brain causing them. For instance, my disorder didn’t get worse when my mother died. I just experienced grief like a normal person (or as normal as I get, anyway). I walked around dazed and confused for months, not getting out of bed unless I had to. I’m guessing that particular reaction is common for people who have lost a parent or a spouse, and not an indication of something worse. Although I knew that the grief would be bad, I truly didn’t expect a fog to settle over my brain that would make me constantly feel as if I was on a heavy sedative, forgetting what and who was around me…. such as putting ice cream in the refrigerator. I leaned heavily (and still do) on the friends who have also lost parents, because they can tell with one look how I’m doing that day.

The thing is, though, now that it’s been three years I am still grieving, but over different things… like losing the sound of my mother’s voice in my head, or forgetting things I should probably remember, like childhood memories. As I get older, my first decade fades. Grief is an interesting balance between being grateful for the years you got and being cheated out of the ones you were supposed to have. It is a totally different thing when your parents don’t die in their eighties.

And, to be frank, you get irrationally angry at people who say the wrong thing, because they don’t mean any harm. They’re trying to be supportive, they just don’t know what to say. The people that do know what to do become precious- the ones that just say “I’m sorry,” because they know there are no words in the English language that will make things better. Bonus points for hugs or an arm around your shoulder. I don’t think I got enough affection at that time, because I just didn’t have as big a support system then.

The one exception was Prianka, because it was so amazing to have my best buddy pick me up at the airport when I landed at DCA from that particular trip. It was nice to relax on the way home rather than having to struggle with my bags on the Metro as I got lost trying to find my way home because I couldn’t think properly. If I had been driving, I would have realized I was going the wrong way at about Richmond.

All that being said, it was really nice to know that I was having an objective experience rather than subjective, because my feelings were so universal. Deep grief is not a club you want to join, but there is an amazing community to receive you……..

Especially other people who also graffiti the Internet.

Redacted

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The bassoon solo from The Bourne Identity main theme is ringing in my ears. People ask me all the time why I’m so interested in intel. Well, if you’ve been reading for a long time, you already know. For those just joining us, I had a great uncle in the DIA who died when I was very small. The mystery of how has stayed with me since I first heard the story. The public one is a helicopter crash, but I don’t know if the public and private match……… It is possible that his identity died, but he didn’t. The only reason I think that is that his personal effects weren’t sent until over a decade later. I’ve also always loved Bond (well, all intel) movies, and a huge part of it is the music.

So to me, it’s no wonder that I ended up being fascinated by spies, but I don’t have any interest in being one myself……… which is good, because I don’t think I’d make a great one. I’d be excellent at interrogation, especially if I had language skills equal to English in Russian and Arabic…….. crap at nearly everything else. I would probably make it a life goal to drive my IT guys crazy, but I’d have everyone’s back. Well, except for the part where I’m 5’2 and 125 and the added bonus of when in a war zone, a terrible shot. I mean, truly exceptional at being bad. I have even less desire to be a desk jockey at Langley. Oh, and even though I take medication for it so it’s not generally an issue, I’m Bipolar II and I don’t think The Agency would take kindly to it.

So here we are.

I go to The International Spy Museum and collect signed books like baseball cards….. and as I told my friend Jaime,IMG_0025 “since it’s clandestine, you never get their rookie year.” The last lecture/book signing I went to was The Unexpected Spy, by Tracy Walder. I was particularly interested for two reasons:

  • The book is about to become a TV show, called The Sorority Girl Who Saved Your Life produced by Ellen Pompeo of Grey’s Anatomy. Why they couldn’t call it “The Unexpected Spy” is beyond me, because the name is ridiculous. But still.
  • We were both born with “floppy baby syndrome,” which was the precursor to my CP diagnosis. It is fundamental to who we both are. She said in her talk that she takes spills all the time. It made me feel much better about myself, because I’ve never seen a movie spy that moved like me in any way. But a real spy does.

The reason it’s redacted on the autograph page is that I asked her to do it. The Publications Review Board at The Agency blacked out a lot of her manuscript, and the style choice to leave it all in was pretty badass.

She took it seriously and wrote the comment, then scratched out one word. Then, she decided it wasn’t black enough and went over it with a Sharpie. I was laughing so hard I was crying when she handed it to me and said, “there. Now no one knows WHAT I told you to do to the world.” And then she laughed, and at that moment, she was the most beautiful, kind person in the world to me. Literally awesome.

Which only made me more angry at her treatment by the FBI, but I won’t get into it because it’s a large part of the book.

If there are any people who hire spies reading this web site, she also said in the Q&A that she might be approachable after January (who could possibly tell why?). For now, she is doing the work of angels- teaching high school. For the record, it wasn’t me who asked the question.

She had said during the lecture that she wished she had spoken up more at the FBI, possibly taken them to court. I told her that I had a comment and a question. She nodded and I said, “I’m a writer, too, and I know that while you may regret what happened at Hoover, you are more powerful than you can possibly imagine. You’ve taken ‘I’m telling’ to an international level.'” I then asked her about hypotonia- what limitations she had, how she overcame them, etc. She said that I would be surprised, that being in the CIA wasn’t as physical as she thought. That didn’t come in until the FBI, and even then, it was at Quantico where it really mattered.

And then we shared a look between us that was so intimate I will never forget it. Just the complete understanding of someone who knows what it’s like to be the other one.

Because there are no pictures and I don’t think anyone in the room noticed (and maybe I’m projecting and wrong [I don’t think I am]), in years to come I will smile to myself and say, “that’s redacted.”

 

Psychosomatic

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know what got into me yesterday in terms of switching gears and writing about technology instead of emotionally vomiting all over the Internet. Oh, I know. I was being selfish, because I needed a place to go back and copy and paste my commands. The one thing I didn’t do was show you a picture of what Cinnamon looks like when I’m finished with it. Cinnamon is my next favorite desktop after MATE. They look a lot alike, but Cinnamon has better graphics. I also have the wallpaper set to change every five minutes, so I always have more cool quotes. I find that I take them away, think about them, and sometimes use them as writing prompts.

Workspace 1_002
“Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.” -Katherine Paterson

This one isn’t so good, because when I write fiction, I feel like an imposter. Character studies are generally okay, but I have no knack for world-building or plot. In a very real sense, I see that as a flaw in my own character. So, I stay in my lane. For the most part. What’s interesting is that I could lay so many more cards on the table in fiction, but I don’t feel it would turn out better. Maybe someday I’ll write a novel with someone else who really knows what they’re doing and can edit/add to my complete and utter crap work.

Autobiography seems to be my jam, but I also think I would be good at non-fiction if I put some elbow grease into it. I have a ton of interests (in none of which I am truly well versed…. jack of all trades, master of none). Perhaps illiteracy, real crime, espionage, cooking…. I don’t know. They’re all things I’d have to study intensely, but it might be fun. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to study in the Library of Congress at a moment’s notice. CIA also has an advisory board for writers, film makers, etc. to help people get their facts right (and in some cases, “if this is what you’re saying, here’s how we would say it”). In DC, though, there are already more people writing those things than the market will allow. Food for thought, in any case.

I’ve always thought that I’d like to collaborate with a spy on a novel that’s a hybrid fiction and non-fiction book. It would alternate chapters. One would be the story, then the next would be the real life inspiration for what just happened. It’s a good thing that now I know one, but not well enough to get down on one knee and ask her to write a book with me. Not only that, she’s already collaborated on all the books about espionage that I really want to read. Plus, she makes me laugh. In one video, she says that when she was at CIA, she was a real hard-ass. It’s funny because I am a hundred and crazy percent sure she was being accurate. Introspection is key.

And while that is true, I would also bet dollars to donuts that her attrition rate was low, because her people would take a bullet for her. It seems to me that acid funny and inside jokes go a long way as a boss.

It’s funny how your relationship changes with espionage once you actually meet a CIA case officer, albeit one who’s retired. You begin to think a lot more about the families behind said spy, and that they are completely normal people with an extraordinary calling.

For instance, Tony Mendez was an artist. He was always, first and foremost, an artist. Being a spy was almost a side gig. He didn’t even write Argo until George Tenet asked him to do it. Tony said, “that’s classified.” “No it’s not,” Tenet replied, smile on his lips. Tenet waved his magic wand, allowing Argo to be born.

I am not immune to the reputation of The Company. What I have learned is that there are good officers and bad, good agents and bad (case officers work for the CIA, agents are informants- generally overseas. The movies always get it wrong, and for someone who has read so much non-fiction regarding the history of spycraft, it’s quite a bit irritating.). I’ve even watched interviews on YouTube where the host calls the case officer an agent, and you can see their pained expressions (actually, that’s pretty funny).

Where my emotions come in is that I feel case officers do extraordinary work, and I have always wanted to be extraordinary at something. On my best day, I am fair to middlin’ at most things. I am a good writer, not a great one. I am an above average cook. It would be a much longer list regarding things I don’t know about computers/networks/the Internet.

If there is one area I feel extraordinary, it’s love. Romantic or platonic, local or global, I love hard. I am so empathetic I can share mirror neurons with strangers. It’s the one good thing my ADHD does for me. It heightens my sensory perception and most of the time I feel like I have emotional X-ray vision. I am excellent at cutting through bullshit and seeing what’s really going on with people.

And perhaps that feeds my fascination with spies, as well, because they are the embodiment of what I feel all the time…. the way they have to cut through bullshit to see others’ weak spots, sussing out what to say in order to obtain an asset. Gathering information in conversation without letting on to what they’re doing.

People want to tell me things, whether I want to hear it or not. I am so polite that I will always listen, but when strangers go deep, I am fascinated and exhausted all at once. This is because I don’t have very good clinical separation, and I will take their scars and write them on my own skin. I am truly capable of manipulation, not for malice, but for getting people to spill things they’ve never told anyone else. And then I hold on to those secrets until they make me sick with worry… to a lesser extent with people I’ll never see again, but still.

All that pent-up emotion presents physically. Just because it’s psychosomatic doesn’t mean it’s not real. It’s hard to tell whether headaches and stomach aches will be cured by taking medication or thinking about something else.

Slaying the dragon of emotional abuse freed up my mind, but since I hadn’t lived my life since I was 12 without the constant puzzle of other people’s emotions, it left a big hole to take on everyone else’s…. from people I’d known for years to strangers on a train. I live for black comedy because for people that have experienced much, it takes a lot to reach them with laughter.

That was what drew me to Argo in the first place. I saw the movie before I read the book (very shortly before), and it spoke to me on a spiritual level… mostly because every note of humor was my kind of humor. I quote it incessantly, especially when I’m in the kitchen and my eyebrows are about to go over my forehead (“There are suicide missions with better odds than this.”). There’s basically an Argo quote for every occasion. Meeting with the boss? “Brace yourself, it’s like talking to those two old fucks from The Muppets.” On the daily? “This is the best bad idea we have, sir.”

I also named my friend Argo because just like the movie, she was named after the Greek myth. At that time in my life, I was trying to tie myself to the mast to avoid disaster, breaking my life apart at my own hand. It did not work. Though thankfully, those days are long past, they are not forgotten. It has engineered the way to move forward (“I think we’ve all arrived at a very special place. Spiritually, ecumenically, grammatically.”). Past missteps have truly made their imprint upon me, a reminder to keep reaching upward. Self care is the most important thing in my life, because if I can’t take care of myself, I can’t take care of anyone else. Eventually, I’d like a girlfriend. Eventually, I’d like my life to be bigger than it is. Eventually, I’d like to be a person of interest in the very best sense of the phrase. Alas, baby steps (pregnant sigh).

Having a girlfriend isn’t completely up to me, but what is my doing is making room for her. I haven’t made room for even the idea in my mind, heart, or house. I suppose it’s a self defense mechanism. Once you’ve been hurt badly, you’re caught between the ideas of loving like you’ve never been hurt and taking time to lick your wounds, especially owning the ones for which you feel responsible. By now, everything I’ve wanted to accomplish in that arena is done. All that is left is reticence…. the fear is real and it’s deep.

The first step was realizing I was capable of disaster and fixing it to the best of my ability. The second step is not constantly beating myself up, because when I am really paying attention, I realize that I am not the only one. Not realizing this has led me to be incredibly hard on myself.

I get headaches and stomach aches. Just because it’s psychosomatic doesn’t mean it’s not real.

 

Two Words

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s amazing how two words can make your whole day.

It’s amazing how two words can destroy it.

The two words that lit me up like a Christmas tree were “someday perhaps?”

The two words that cratered me were “Mother’s Day.”

The words that made me smile were in reference to a future hangout with the aforementioned pen pal that I’d never actually met in real life, but had been writing to for years and years. When he/she (not giving anything away) comes to DC, it will be fun to laugh together, hug, and show them my version of my city.

My mother died in October of 2016, and as you can imagine, I’m not over it. Mother’s Day happens every single year, and I am sort of used to the onslaught of ads that pointedly ask if you’ve remembered to buy presents. The thing is, though, I’d forgotten Mother’s Day was coming up, and being reminded when I wasn’t thinking about it and wasn’t prepared was, in a word, awful.

So, like you do, I immediately bought a ticket to the opening of the new International Spy Museum that day. What I mean by this is that the museum itself is not new, the-new-spy-museum-atthey’ve just moved and expanded from F Street to L’Enfant Plaza. The only thing I will miss about their old digs is the Shake Shack around the corner. Because, of course, the thing you need after looking at espionage gadgets is a black and white malt. But get it to go. Every time I’ve been to a Shake Shack, seating was a nightmare.

I’m also saving some money for the gift shop. Last time I went, I got a t-shirt on clearance that says, “Argo @$#% Yourself” with the spy museum logo on the sleeve. It is brilliant, but I don’t wear it unless I’m hanging out with friends I feel comfortable with- not always a huge fan of meeting new people in a t-shirt that says “fuck,” even bleeped for child safety. Since I am such a huge fan of “Argo,” I found an old promotional t-shirt on Amazon for $10 that says, “the movie was fake. The op was real,” and has “Argo” in large letters with the skyline of Tehran cut into the bottom, plus the release date of the film. That one I wear all the time.

As I was telling a friend, I think I found the last piece of memorabilia available except the script, which I don’t need because I have the movie memorized, anyway. To say that I’ve seen it 25 times is an understatement by a large margin…. mostly because it is jaw-droppingly scary in some places and so damned funny I start laughing and can’t stop in others… especially every time Alan Arkin, John Goodman, and/or Bryan Cranston are on screen. To wit:

The setup is that O’Donnell (Bryan Cranston) is driving Mendez to an airport to get on the plane to Tehran.

O’Donnell:ย I’m required to remind you that if you’re detained, The Agency will
not claim you.
Mendez:ย Barely claim me as it is.
O’Donnell: Your หœIn Case Of’s’ good?
Mendez: Just Christine (his son’s mother, they’re separated). Guess I should have brought some books to read in prison.
O’Donnell: Nah. They’ll kill you long before prison.

For those of you who haven’t seen “Argo,” Ben Affleck both directed it and played Tony Mendez (emphatic fist shake at not casting a Hispanic actor), who rescued six diplomats who managed to escape from the embassy in Tehran and hide out in the Canadian ambassador’s house (the ambassador is brilliantly played by Victor Garber- also one of my favorite fictional spies as Jack Bristow in “Alias”).

I love how the movie is heartbreaking and hilarious in one breath. And no, I didn’t have to look up the lines, just can’t remember whether they’re at National or Dulles. And even though I’ve seen it more times than all my other favorites combined, I still cry at the endย (not a spoiler, just the orchestral score).

My best wish for the new digs is that they have a huge Tony Mendez exhibit, because he died not too long ago and therefore, I would guess that even more of his ops are declassified. I am not totally clear on the rules, but I believe when you die you lose your covers, and the ops you’ve done can be made public… just not the ones that involve other people still alive and/or are still in progress. It’s possible some are still current, because I believe that after Tony left the CIA full time, he was still an occasional consultant. No one would want to lose all that experience permanently unless the person was really, really gone. I can’t imagine the grief inside The Agency, because he was a straight-up legend.

In a way, I think that subconsciously I picked going to the spy museum because Tony died to remind myself that I am not the only person in the world in grief.

I feel the same way about walking through cemeteries. To me, it is not morbid. It is an uplifting reminder that I am not alone in my sadness, situational depression, wondering what we’d be gabbing about if she were still here, etc. What I find is that as time goes on, the well of emotional injury gets more shallow, but there are triggers that pull me right back to her open casket, and how I felt completely disoriented, as if the world had started spinning the other direction and I could feel it.

One of those triggers was Tony’s death. I started crying and couldn’t stop, eventually realizing that it wasn’t all about him. Yes, it was devastating to lose a national treasure, but it was also a direct hit on how “gone” death truly means. And not to demean losing friends or extended family, but your reality doesn’t actually crack until you lose a parent. The entire universe seems different, and for a while, it loses all its color. You just wander around sort of half alive in grayscale.

I knew that I was getting better when I could make an effort to see friends, but at first, it was only other people who had also lost a parent. They were my people, the ones who I could confide in and share my rage at the dumb things people say when you lose a loved one, knowing innately that they mean no malice, so you can’t get mad at them directly. You can only get mad at the situation. Bad theology got on my nerves, didn’t measure up to one lady who compared the death of her cat to the death of my mother at church. It made my rage go to 11 and I had to excuse myself as not to emotionally rip her to shreds, because if I had waited even another three seconds, I would have taken her head off.

There’s only one other situation that makes me truly uncomfortable, and that’s the people who, upon hearing about your parent’s death, start crying because they can’t imagine what’s going to happen when their parents die, and that also happened to me in public (again, at church). The reason it’s tone deaf is because my natural reaction was “well, it’s a good thing I’m going through it and not you.” It’s just so egocentric that I cannot deal. It’s just another situation in which I just have to walk away, because I have not come up with an appropriate response, just a sarcastic one.

And that’s the thing. Because you know the people around you aren’t trying to hurt you, there’s just nothing that anyone can say that will make it better, you have no idea what to say in response to the awkward and often just stupid.

If you don’t know what to do, let me tell you. Grief is as individual as a fingerprint, and everyone processes differently, but this generally works across the board. Say “I’m sorry for your loss,” and offer to be present. And that’s it. The ones I loved the most during that time were people who showed up, but didn’t say much of anything. They just sat next to me as I stared off into space and were willing to listen if I could manage to talk. But they offered no advice on what to do, they just let me process verbally. It’s never a case of needing advice on what to do, especially if you haven’t lost a parent yourself. It’s giving the person room to breathe and never, ever comparing grief, even if you’ve been in the same situation. Because we’re not in the same boat, just the same ocean and trying to keep our heads above water. Suffering is universal, but we all have different ways of coping.

For instance, when I was actually in town for the funeral and with my sister and my dad, I hardly emoted at all because I was speaking at the funeral and I wanted to feel put together for it. I wanted to be able to be funny, because the eulogies I enjoy the most are the ones that offer real insight into the person. My mother was a church musician almost her entire life, starting at 12 or 13. So my opening line was, “this is the only funeral Carolyn Baker’s ever been to where she wasn’t working.” It had the desired effect. The entire congregation just broke up.

I am also quite socially anxious, and only three people I knew besides my family came to the funeral, so I had to put on a mask and a suit of armor to deal with being in a HUGE crowd where I knew practically no one. The mask and the armor are extroversion to an Oprah-like level, while inside I am shaking and counting the seconds until I can get home. In short, I didn’t look like someone in grief until I flew back to DC, where I only got out of bed sporadically for about three months. I allowed myself to completely fall apart, just not in front of anyone. I did once, and it was terrifying, so I never did it again. I gave lip service to letting people in, and then I completely isolated, only emoting through e-mail or crying into my pillows when no one was home. I couldn’t even bear crying that was loud enough for my housemates to come running, and they’re people I’d trust with my life.

In public, I became stoic and divorced from my emotions, because feeling even small emotions led to a flooding out I couldn’t stop. It was better not to start, because it would stop me from engaging in conversation. Even when I was with friends, there was a risk I wouldn’t take- being there, but not present….. people talking at my body while my soul was out there somewhere, unable to respond appropriately with laughter or empathy or whatever the situation needed…. as well as just nodding and smiling because I could hear people talking, but I couldn’t understand what was being said. It became background noise.

In essence, compartmentalization was necessary to have a fighting chance at moving on.

I thought I knew grief from bad breakups, and it was a wake-up call to realize how differently devastating this grief continues to be.

That’s because even though you gain and lose people to circumstances throughout your life, there’s still a small chance they’ll reappear. You apologize for being shitty people to each other and as long as the apology comes with changed behavior, it will generally stick…. or as I call it from a stolen line, “resurrection happening in the middle of the mess.”

As an aside, Easter is a very important holiday for me, because I don’t generally celebrate Jesus’ resurrection literally, but the way we resurrect ourselves, both individually and in community.

When a person dies, as opposed to a relationship, you lose hope. You lose the future. And if the person dies relatively young, you get angry at having the years stolen away in which you feel entitled. My mother was 65. She died just months after her retirement from teaching- she never even got to enjoy it. What I miss the most is that I thought we could go to church together more often, because she wasn’t working. Even when she took time off to come and visit me, she’d never take time off from church as well. When she died, she was completely free, because her church had so few members that they decided to close, and she hadn’t found a new church yet. I’d already started looking through solos because I thought I had my favorite accompanist back, and I’d already talked to my choir director about it.

My choir director and my mother were cut from the same cloth, and every time Sam played solo piano, if I closed my eyes I couldn’t tell the difference. When my mother died, it made me come unglued. I went to church for about six weeks after I came back from the funeral, and it was just long enough to realize that it was the biggest trigger of them all and I still can’t go back. I know I will; eventually I will get that trigger stamped back down to manageable, but today is not that day.

I do appreciate that Mike, the husband in the family I live with, keeps inviting me to his church, even though it’s relatively conservative United Methodist. I’d still take him up on it because I know the hymnal from front to back, as well as soprano descants for nearly everything. Singing would be the most important part of church for me no matter what the congregation believes.

In true introvert form, I want to be invited even if I don’t take you up on it.

Another two words that make my day?

Please come.

Personal and Global

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My gut is telling me I should write something. My mind is saying, “I got nothin.’ This is because so much has happened that the pictures from each event are swirling so fast that I can’t grab one long enough to describe it. As one Tumblr user said, “do you know how much braining it takes to make the words go?” I’m not sure I’ve ever identified more with any statement. Ever. I am much better one-on-one, so I’ve been writing a lot of letters… believe it or not, there are actually some things I won’t vomit all over the Internet. I know it’s hard to imagine. I mean, I’m so shy and retiring when it comes to talking about myself. But right now, so many things are internal that I literally can’t force them from the river that runs underneath my skin into my fingers.

What I can say is that my birthday was full of joy at having my family here to celebrate. It’s been years since I had a birthday party with my dad and sister. What’s even better than that is my sister is the good kind of lobbyist, so I see her almost as frequently as I saw her when we both lived in the same city. Now that Congress is winding down, I won’t see her again until possibly October and definitely in November, but it was great that this month’s work trip coincided with the transition from 40 to 41.

Movies and television about the CIA are so fascinating to me that I love that my age is the same as George H.W. Bush’s presidential number. No comment on how I’ll feel about 43. In this vein, I would like to skip directly from age 44 to 46.

Interesting sidenote about CIA television. Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime Video begins in Lebanon, so I’ve been able to look at amazing pictures from the real country (it wasn’t actually filmed there) thanks to Hayat’s upbringing. For those of us just joining us, I rent a room from a Lebanese family, complete with photos in country throughout most of the house. Because of them, Lebanon is on my bucket list- too beautiful to ignore.

I will just have to find a big, strong man to accompany me, because I’m a feminist and I’m also not stupid enough to ignore the rules in a Muslim country. Lebanon is not as strict as some of the others, but I’m not taking any chances. Because I’m such an introvert, I’d probably be the most comfortable in a burqa, and I’m not kidding. I’m a writer and observer. Not so much with the talking to strangers, and although I am generally delightful in conversation, for the most part it is me overcoming my natural shyness and jumping into The Leslie Lanagan Show.™ You don’t generally get the real me until we’re at a secluded table, cups of coffee between us… and even then, we have to have known each other a while. I don’t feel entirely comfortable with people until I’m assured that they know the real me, and for better or for worse, love me anyway. But no one I’ve ever come across dislikes The Leslie Lanagan Show.™ It comes from years and years of practice. Fake it til you make it and all that comes with it.

It is probably for this very reason that I spend so much time alone, because I want to spend my time as an authentic person, able to walk around in my own gargantuan inner landscape. I think mostly about where I want to go from here, not career-wise, necessarily, but who I want to be as a person. As my anxiety goes down, my capacity for love goes up. It’s easy to love people who love you back. Hard to love the irritable, the angry, and the unknown.

My authentic self wants the capability to love the world where it is, how it is… and at the same time, so angry about the things that divide us as a country and as citizens of the world.

For instance, it is inconceivable that people are having trouble believing that Bob Woodward’s book, Fear: Trump in the White House is just a basic hatchet job, when this is the same reporter that broke the Watergate story and has also covered seven other presidents in addition to Trump and Nixon. For instance, my favorite Woodward book is Obama’s Wars, where he doesn’t even blink in his critique of the president, and presents some information that tempers unfettered adulation, such as his own Syrian blink of 2012-13. No president is above reproach, and while I admire Barack Obama greatly, and would do basically anything he asked, that does not transfer into thinking he is a perfect person. No one ever is. We are all angels & demons, depending on the choices we make and when.

Trump… opens with staffers stealing things off the president’s desk, knowing that if the papers aren’t there, he’ll just forget about the issue… and one of them involves instigating conflict with North Korea. I am not kidding when I say that almost literally, the bombs start dropping in chapter one.

So, to discredit a reporter and non-fiction writer who has an amazing reputation is infuriating to an enormous degree. If anyone is capable of telling this story, it is Bob Woodward.

Write it down.

So, to put it mildly, my thoughts have moved past the personal into the global, which is probably what is driving my interest in intelligence-gathering. One of the points that Woodward makes, which is very relevent at this time, is that the FBI and CIA have different standards for espionage. This is because CIA evidence is rarely used in court cases, and “the Feebs'” evidence often is. Therefore, vetting in the CIA doesn’t have to be quite as high, because it does not have to meet the “beyond a reasonable doubt” or “preponderance of evidence” requirement- the former in criminal cases, the latter in civil litigation.

This, of course, bit CIA in the ass during the WMD years, which has, in turn, made them even more cautious now… in the words of Martha Stewart, “a very good thing.” Now I’m just pleased with myself. I made a complete sentence using CIA and Martha Stewart. #touchme

But, of course, it’s not just thinking about the world that has me interested in intel. I am just one of those people who likes Knowing Stuff.™ To be in a room full of journalists or government workers is being invited to sit at the cool kids’ table for me… the reason I know DC is where I belong.

One of the great joys of my life is when Dan and I meet for lunch, and I get to walk her back to her office in Foggy Bottom. I’ll let you guess what that means. More fun to figure it out on your own. However, I will say she’s not a spook. But she’s sure as hell smart enough to be. Also, because she’s so small, it tickles me to think of her back in her Army days, running around in full battle rattle. I have no doubt that one of her main strengths was running right at the enemy and knocking them off-balance. ๐Ÿ˜› (Oh, am I ever going to catch hell for that one…)

Now I’m back to thinking about the personal, all the light my friends bring into my life. I am one lucky, lucky 41-year-old. I’m not sure how the next trip around the sun can top this one, but I’m sure going to try. It seems easier when I feel like I’m literally lifted off the ground, the warmth of friendship holding me aloft.