Why I Love ChatGPT Used Appropriately

May 14, 2024May 14, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

ChatGPT has become an invaluable tool for me, because I don’t use it to create art. I use it to help me create art. The last thing I asked Copilot (using GPT4) was “give me five blog prompts appropriate for a personal blog.” This is the one I chose out of the five. Since you can’t re-use prompts from WordPress, I’ve used Copilot to create my own program. I am not asking it to write my entries for me. I am using it to jog my own memories and give me a jumping off point. I can use Copilot to create a framework to keep going every single day, because it’s not being provided by WordPress itself.

Because here’s the thing. I could have done the same exact thing by going to all the web sites from which Copilot pulls data, because it didn’t really create the prompts. Copilot went to web sites that offer prompts and collated them for me into a single, easy-to-read package. It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen, because it is not limiting my creative juice. It’s like discovering I have a secretary and I don’t even have to pay her (if anyone would like to be my EA, I am accepting applications. I don’t pay in anything but words of assurance and great hugs, but you get a three meal signing bonus….. that joke is funnier if you know I’ve been a professional cook).

So, I have stopped bagging on ChatGPT as a concept and started ripping people to shreds for thinking that ChatGPT is capable of human art. You know how you can tell it’s ChatGPT? Nine times out of 10, it’s too perfect to look real. Human emotion is messy. Humans are messy. Machines are not.

I admit that I did ask it for a picture of The Muppet Show cast dressed as spies. It was hilarious.

I feel bad about it, yet no…. I don’t. Because it’s pretty obvious why it wasn’t created by a human. Putting a hat on someone does not make them a different person. My biggest problem is people who post things like this and don’t say “I created this with ChatGPT. It looks cool, but I didn’t actually design it.”

The writing prompt I got with Copilot is after the jump.

Share Your Personal Style: Write about your personal style—whether it’s fashion, home decor, or a unique way of approaching life. Share tips, inspiration, and photos that showcase your individual flair and taste. Who knows, you might help someone find their own style through your posts! 🌟

I think I will write a little bit about all of them, actually, because I don’t have too much to say on any one topic.

Fashion
- I think that I look better in boys’ clothes because women’s clothes tend to come in washed out colors and with a lot of ornamentation that just doesn’t fit my vibe. If I am dressing down, it’s usually jeans, a t-shirt, and a hoodie with kitchen Crocs or Chuck Taylors. If I am dressing up, I like to wear an Oxford and trousers with a sport coat and boys’ dress shoes because I cannot stay upright in heels. I like the way heels affect my body carriage, so sometimes I will buy cowboy boots with a heel. They’re so chunky it’s hard to “fall off.” In a lot of ways, I would love to be able to wear heels and beaded gowns and the whole nine yards….. but you have to see it through my eyes to know why I don’t. It is an enormous sensory nightmare and I rebel against it- I have since childhood. Trust me when I say that things like lace are going to drive your autistic children batshit insane. My style is simple and classic because of it. If I’m just doing jeans and a t-shirt, I have five t-shirts that cost $25 apiece, not five in a package at Target. Tommy Hilfiger comes to mind immediately, because the quality of their v-necks is impeccable. When I am dressed up, I look very much like a tiny college professor.
- Here’s a thing I learned about dressing myself from my dad. If he sees a model dressed in a catalogue and he likes the outfit, he will buy the entire thing. He doesn’t buy things piecemeal. Therefore, he actually looks like a picture in a catalogue most of the time. It’s so easy. Why didn’t I think of that? Don’t worry that your style is bad, pick someone else with good style and just buy the whole look. I don’t normally have enough money to pick an entire outfit out of a catalogue, but I have bought the entire outfit the Goodwill employees have put together for their show store (across the street from the Portland library- they pick through all the clothes and only sell the best of the best. I got a London Fog navy trench with full liner for $24).
Home Decor
- It’s a good idea. In terms of priority, it’s low on the list because neither David nor I are decorators. My dad is a decorator (not professionally, but you should see the things he’s designed for himself at the house), so basically I copy everything he does. It saves me a lot of time, like ChatGPT. He approaches design of a room like clothes- he wants to see the forest before we drill into the details. I don’t know what those are, yet, I just remember telling David that I wanted my office to have a cigar bar feel to it. He said, “sure. As long as you’re not actually smoking cigars in there.” I think I’ll manage.
Unique Way of Approaching Life
- I calculate odds because of my executive dysfunction. I cannot say “this is where I’ll be in five years” and work toward it because of the number of stumbling blocks in my way. I cannot have a disability more than five or 10 days a year with a job. I don’t mean that all autistic people are incapable of employment. We very much are. It’s just hard to stay employed with the number of sick days, doctor’s appointments, communication issues, you name it. I cannot predict in advance, so I take in information as it comes and move to the next thing. I don’t second guess myself. If something doesn’t work out, I’m on to the next thing rather than spending time crying about the past. I have done enough of that.
Tips and Inspiration
- Pray even if you think there’s no God. There’s a lot of resolution you come to in yourself through the process of praying. If you prefer the word “meditating,” it’s the same thing. I don’t want to argue about semantics, you just need the protein. For instance, Supergrover says that she thinks her running is a form of prayer, and she’s right. Get centered. I think if I’d taken up jogging when she said that I’d look a whole lot better today….. so maybe meditate and also move.
16 Pieces of Flair
- It is, of course, an “Office Space” reference. I’m not even sure what the prompt means by “flair,” so I’m just going to have to take a wild guess.
  - I always include a bit of whimsy, and it’s important to me. For instance, I want my office to look like it costs millions of dollars, and I also want a Chef Tiana doll. My friend Rhys makes custom dolls, and we’ve been talking about it because I want to be able to dress her myself, as in have her whites custom made as well. It is my opinion that Princess Tiana would HATE being called Princess Tiana because you’ve never met a cook in your life if you think they’d prefer Prince/Princess to Chef. In terms of the way I dress, it’s being very conservative and having one focal point that’s humorous, like a Mickey Mouse watch or tie-dyed Crocs.
Taste
- I have very expensive tastes in groceries. I like fine olive oils, balsamic vinegar, Himalayan sea salt, etc. One of the best presents my friend Amy ever got me (at least, I think it was Amy) was a Himalayan salt cooking surface. You put meat or veggies on it and they roasted on the salt in the oven. It was magical for shrimp.
- I do not have expensive tastes in knives. The one I like the best cost $20 at Wal-Mart or Amazon. It’s from Chicago Cutlery, and it’s an eight inch chef’s knife where the blade and the handle are both steel, and the handle is molded to fit your hand when you’re cutting using the French technique (using the back of the knife, as opposed to Japanese, which uses the front). It hardly ever needs to be sharpened, and it’s cheap enough to replace if it dulls. However, I prefer to keep the same knife, even if it was originally $20, because over time it grows into your hand. It is very much akin to writing with a fountain pen in which the nib will not work the same for anyone but you.

I think that’s at least enough for a blog entry. It’s time to go and make some breakfast before I get into the shower. I have to go to the pharmacy today, so I am hoping to stop at Trader Joe’s again. I do not have a problem with drugs and alcohol, but I am starting to notice a dependence on ube pretzels.

The Asset

April 17, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I had one of the strangest, most moving experiences I’ve ever had with a person just because he was my Uber driver, and I was wearing a baseball cap. If you’re a fan, you already know what it says, and your heart is probably beating a little faster now that you’ve read the title.

I have told you that I am the kind of person that people get deep with, fast. I hear a lot of “I’ve never told anyone this before.” People spill information to me that they would never tell anyone else. And in fact, I’ve been sitting on this story for about a week because I had to feel it completely before I could describe it.

I was using Uber Share, so I ended up in the front seat. I got dropped off last, so we had plenty of time to talk. I asked the driver where he was from. He said, almost too quietly, “Afghanistan.” Because of his demeanor, I thought, “oh, Allah. Here we go.” I walked right into it, because when people say “Afghanistan” quietly, there’s a story there. I knew it was going to be large, and it was going to hurt. However, I did not know in advance that it wouldn’t hurt because I’ve wanted to meet someone like him for a very long time. It was a blessing from Allah for both of us, reciprocal in nature…… Like slicing over a wound until he touched my arm.

He was a cleaner in the Afghan government somewhere, and we asked him to work for us. Then, we got him out when shit hit the fan. He knew he wanted to come here, and that’s why he agreed to work for the letters stuck semi permanently on my head…… The OG have seen it coming.

They’re my three favorite letters in the whole world because of three people. The first and second are Jonna and Tony Mendez. The third is Anthony Bourdain, who is a double dipper because he loved spies with every fiber of his being, and he also went to Culinary Institute of America.

One of these days, one of Zac’s friends who is “recovering CIA” will cook with me….. And I will get my moment.

“Didn’t they teach you ANYTHING?”

So, this man (a boy in my eyes) weaves a tale that has me so mesmerized I don’t even notice when we arrive at my house, nor do I want to get out of the car. Not really.

He left everything just for the American dream. Happier than he was in Afghanistan, but devastatingly homesick and can’t go back. Family still there that he won’t see for years, if ever.

It’s a lot.

People who sacrifice for America aren’t just Americans.

He started to cry as he was telling me how much he missed the land, more so when he told me about his family.

The reason I didn’t want to get out of the car is that I was crying, too.

When you are voting on immigration, think of people like him and not the pictures of immigrants that politicians try to make without reading any actual data. There is no doubt that once he was recruited, he could have died for our country and not his own. That’s how badly people want to come here. It’s people who believe in us more than we believe in ourselves….. Because we’ve created a pyrite dream all over the world, where the riches promised are left to the imagination…. Harder when that reality really sets in.

I do think that ultimately it was worth it, because even he agrees. That’s what matters. And an Uber driver in the United States probably makes the same as a cleaner in Afghanistan due to the value of each currency. It is not like he had to come here and discover all of his certifications were worthless. However, I do understand the feeling of exile. I had so many rights in Oregon that I lost when I moved to Texas. That’s because gay marriage didn’t come along until 2008 federally. So, even though we were a married couple in Oregon, we weren’t in Texas. It is a different feeling when you don’t want to go back than when you can’t.

He healed more things in me than he’ll ever know, and I hope that unburdening himself made him feel lighter as well.

Now I can say quite literally that CIA has given me some of the best moments of my life- meeting the Chief of Disguise, and now the type of people we need to collect information in the first place.

We saved him, because he saved us first.

Thanks Pea to God…. Raaa-men

April 6, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday I watched a YouTube video on interesting things you could do with ramen. If you have never tried ramen before, this is not for you. You need to go to a real shop, where they have the broth boiling 24/7, with the lime and the chili sauce and the plum sauce. It is not an experience that is repeatable at home, especially in white kitchens. Most white people do not have the things on hand to make authentic ramen broth even if they wanted to, and not nearly enough culinary expertise. So, if you are a “newbie” to ramen, this cannot be something you do the first time you try it. Don’t even think that prepackaged ramen is close, because even the noodles are a little bit different.

That being said, I, like David Chang, love ramen. It’s easy and quick, and the sky is the limit on what you can put into it. Most people do veggies and some form of egg. A handful of frozen peas and carrots in the pasta water is generally all that’s necessary. The stock spices are good enough, unless you get the water ratio off. But most people don’t think of all the sauces you could serve. Today, I did a white American cheese noodle dish, and the only thing wrong with it is that it’s a bit too salty. I added too much of the stock spice to the roux, which was flour and two packets of spice (I was making two servings). I am now betting you could get away with half a packet, but I didn’t want to under-season the cheese and noodles. Since the “spices” are mostly salt, I should have realized this. But I don’t have to sweat it. Being a professional cook is about being able to go in a different direction IMMEDIATELY. THE MOMENT you realize you need to go in a different direction, you know what to do. Acid neutralizes salt, but I need more volume as well……….

I fixed it once everything was done, with pasta water, mustard, and ghost pepper wing sauce. If I’d had it on hand, I think I would have gone with more herbs, spices, and pasta water rather than making the acids do the heavy lifting.

I think that’s the last of my ramen packets, but if I find another one, I’ll try to do a carbonara…. I should start buying the noodles pre-cooked because I like making the sauces so much more than watching noodles boil…..

Saucier is literally my calling.

Your best bet when making new ramen sauces/broths if you’re going to use the spices it comes with is to keep extra on hand. You can control the amount of salt more easily if you are able to add volume- noodles without any seasoning at all.

I just realized I made Mac and cheese and there’s both chili and sesame oil in my pantry. I should have done an oil sauce….. but I have more cheesy goodness for lunch tomorrow. I have designed it to be nuclear hot on purpose. It works so much better than over the counter nasal decongestants.

Seriously, if you’re willing to endure 20-30 minutes of discomfort, the effect on my sinuses lasts a couple hours at least. I also don’t go any hotter than normal grocery store hot sauce. Yes, they’re ghost pepper, but it’s not like I went to a specialty store and demanded a sauce that will absolutely rip my asshole out through my ear. The ghost peppers are tamed with quite a bit of garlic. It’s not about the amount of Scovilles. If you can’t eat 30,000 Scovilles’ worth of heat at a time, don’t. The hotness of the pepper is essentially the highest “dose” you can take at one time. Same effect eating a pepper with less heat, but eating more of them.

I’m pretty sure I just ate my weight in sodium, though, so that probably wasn’t the best move ever. It would have been healthier just to make my own Alfredo, but of course I wanted to see if this YouTuber was onto something.

I think I would have preferred oil and chili flakes to Mac and cheese, but I will definitely make it again. Especially when you have American cheese, it’s irresistible. I just want to grab some rosemary, thyme, and basil out of our garden first.

There’s only so many ghost peppers I can eat.

Homosexual Twizzlers

February 8, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your favorite candy?

I like the pack of Twizzlers that comes in “rainbow” because I like the lemon ones best……. and who doesn’t like calling them “homosexual Twizzlers?”

I can’t make a whole journal entry out of liking lemon Twizzlers best, but I can tell you some of my other favorites.

I like to mix a pack of Tropical Mike and Ike’s with a box of Good and Plenty because tropical fruit and licorice is a good flavor combination. I sent a picture of this to, I believe, The War Daniel, and he said, “WHAT ARE YOU ON?!” My bad, maybe the pic was too close. It did look like a pile of uppers and downers, just to be fair.

I like chocolate covered pretzels, both alone or chopped up in ice cream. I like the ones from the bakery at the grocery store better than anything premade, because these have to be five times the size of the pretzels you get in a bag of Flipp’d. If Safeway is out of pretzels in the bakery, I’ll get a tub of them at Whole Foods. They’re smaller, but also come in yogurt, my other favorite. Best buy two tubs because you have to mix them together………….. and now I’ve just spent $20 on pretzels.

I make responsible decisions because I’m an adult and I use my money wisely.

I’ve mentioned before that I like Zero candy bars. Most of this is because that was my mother’s favorite. I like Three Musketeers because it was her father’s favorite. I still like all the weird Brach’s flavors- spice drops, maple creams, etc.- because my father’s grandmother fed them to me when I was a little girl.

And though it is not a candy, my maternal grandfather is entirely responsible for my love of Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew. When I was a child, he hadn’t retired yet. My grandmother kept these 8oz glass bottles of each in the refrigerator for his lunch, and would give me one if she had extra.

Now, it’s Dr Pepper Zero, but that’s because of my mother. She raised Lindsay and me on diet soda, so now regular just tastes too syrupy and feels like it’s clinging to my teeth. Probably because it is.

In terms of candy I’ve had overseas, I think my favorite is the Aero bar. I did like the whipped texture, and some of the flavors. Ultimately, I’m a purist…. especially since by the third or fourth mint Aero I thought they tasted like toothpaste (not in a row).

I learned disappointment in candy early. When I went to England at eight years old, I found jawbreakers I liked called “cola balls.” Apparently, the silver they put on the outside of them was found to be food-unsafe and they were discontinued shortly after I got home. Therefore, my relatives couldn’t mail me any, either. I am not sure I will ever find a replacement, because cola does not seem to be a popular flavor for things….. even though it’s divine. Ginger, orange, lemon, spices….. what’s not to like?

For instance, I would be so happy if they made cola bottle hard candy like they make root beer barrels. It would be better if they came in sugar free, though, because I’d eat more. I like Coke Zero better. 😛

They have incredible ginger candy at both Trader Joe’s and Costco that Zac buys in bulk. He doesn’t do it for me, but it helps because my medication makes me so nauseous. They work instantaneously…. and the only reason I thought of them is that I was already thinking about cola, for which I believe ginger makes an ultimate life sacrifice. Will they end up in a craft home brew or in Atlanta? May the odds be ever in their favor.

If we are talking strictly about candy you can make at home, I love marshmallows. I’ve never tried flavoring them with anything but vanilla, but both vegan and not are incredible. The texture is just enough you can tell it’s different, but it’s not bothersome to me. It’s also not quite as firm, so vegan marshmallow fluff you can use on sandwiches is a much more realistic expectation…….

Zac’s roommate made marshmallows flavored with raspberry, and they were delicious. So I know it is possible for me to make my favorite candy at home and now I’m hoping I do not go the way of “Marshmallow Girl,” the way my housemates noticed I made pancakes several times a week.

I am sure that I would make marshmallows constantly and then my ADHD brain would move onto something else.

And when we’re together, my favorite candy is whatever you’re having, because I like knowing those things about my friends. Simple things I store away so that later on, you say, “how did you remember?”

It’s your favorite candy.

Taking Things Literally

February 2, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I spent a lot of time walking around the grocery store this afternoon. I ended up walking out with a lemon parfait and a Diet Pepsi after almost 45 minutes of trying to decide what I would actually *eat.* That’s what happens when you’re on Adderrall and you go to a grocery store. You intend to buy groceries, and nothing looks good. Plus, I was absolutely lost in thought. I couldn’t have shopped at gunpoint because I was so knocked for a loop emotionally. The reason I walked out with so little is that the longer I spent lost in thought, the more demand avoidant I got. It happens to me frequently, a sign of the neurodivergent brain. If I can’t think about anything else, I can’t do anything else. That’s because autism is famous for monotropic thought processes.

I could not pick out food I would like to eat in the future when my appetite is so suppressed that I honestly can’t remember the last time I ate. This is also because I get demand avoidance around cooking, because I don’t like going downstairs. One of my roommates and I are tight. One of my roommates and I are now in a war because she expects me to clean up after her in the bathroom, to the point where she won’t even change the toilet roll.

I can’t remember the date, but the time I got together with Zac before Burns Nicht, I was at his house for two nights. Since I knew I was going to be gone, I didn’t change it just to see if she would.

She didn’t.

We have cameras in all the public areas, so people would notice if this was happening in the kitchen (it does). I have been her maid for nine years, except for the day the maid comes. It won’t take three hours before there’s hair all over the vanity because she has washed her hair in the sink.

The shower is a mess of her hair, because I don’t shower that often in the winter. It’s too big a swing in terms of sensory environment and if I was going somewhere, of course I’d pull out all the stops. Mostly, I just want to avoid cleaning up after someone else.

She will not talk to me about this issue at all, because she thinks I’m unclean (she’s a Trumper, a Modi fan, and has so far made me aware of all the cultural stigmas that come with being queer in India. It has never happened to me before. One of my previous housemates was a Nigerian. No issue whatsoever, and their taboos are probably worse than India.

Said Nigerian was a doctor who went to medical school in Crimea, so he’s the only black person I know who is also fluent in Russian. Oh, and Arabic because he worked in Saudi for years. I don’t remember whether he was a GP for the populace or whether he was working in a palace taking care of the royals.

My hatred of the Saudi monarchy knows no bounds, but I am not insulting the people of Saudi Arabia. The people have nothing to do with how they’re governed. What I know for sure (because my landlady is Lebanese) is that families in the Middle East are all about hospitality and being welcoming. For instance, if I could get into Iran, there are a lot of people who’d want to welcome me because they have no beef with the American government. A minority would be trying to peg me as intelligence, shouting “death to America. Death to CIA.”

Actually, I can’t remember if they said that last part in “Parts Unknown” or whether I’m mixing up the Iran episode and the first few minutes of “Argo.”

Incidentally, there is an “Argo” quote for every occasion… but if I had to pick a favorite, it would be when Jack and Tony go to present their idea for the film crew. Right before Jack opens the door to what is presumably a 7^th floor kind of office, he says, “careful. It’s like talking to those two old fucks from The Muppets.”

Iran’s continuing ire at us is a real thing if they’re still protesting us exfiltrating the Shah. He lived out his days in Great Falls, VA, working for us (presumably) because one of the reasons we exfiltrated him was that he had cancer that he knew would kill him with the medical treatment in Iran. So, we got him to the US and that was the end of that.

I understand that the Iranis have the right to hate our guts for it, too. I don’t have to have a dog in this fight, because it’s been going on since I was two. No one, especially me, is going to figure it out. The best outcome would be coming to an agreement at least good enough to reopen the embassy. But that’s a pipe dream, like asking Israel to stop bombing the hell out of Jerusalem, because Netanyahu doesn’t seem to care who dies. If he has to kill his own people to make the Palestinians pay, he doesn’t lose sleep over it.

They came to a sort-of deal in the 70s, in which the Palestinians were given land. Good to go. But then Israelis were encouraged to move into those neighborhoods so that they could push the Palestinians out.

“You can’t do that. We live here.”

“Do you have a flag?”

-Eddie Izzard

We could solve a lot of this by cooking together, as Anthony Bourdain showed us for many years. We are more alike than we are different. Even the Israelis and Palestinians have learned this. There are many, many integrated neighborhoods where Israelis and Palestinians live side by side and never spout that Zionist shit, because they live in the real world… the one where Muslims lives are not worth less to Jews because they know them… not like the Israeli government.

Israel is a recognized state. Palestine isn’t. Therefore, Israel has all the military power they could ever want. Both Palestinians and the Israelis who support them are the Resistence. Zionism has been used to great effect, both in Israel and in the United States, to not only try and push out the Palestinians, but have the world’s full support to do it.

In America, this leads to Evangelical Christian money being pumped into Israel because they think that since Christianity came from Judaism, that means we are like, the same.

I don’t have time for that bullshit. This is not our fight, and we are clearly picking sides. There has to be a reason, I’ll tell you that. I just don’t know what it is. Because that’s what generally happens to me. I criticize based on what’s public, and find out later what really happened, through either the news or an op being declassified so you can look it up online.

So, maybe I’m telling you all the wrong things because there’s more to the chessboard than I can see at present. But this is what I think based on what I know *right now.*

And as I’ve said before, I dive up and down in my writing because I’m using a technique that Louis L’Amour taught me. He said to just start writing and let the faucet drip. Say whatever comes to your mind, because eventually you’ll hit on something worth exploring. For me, that shows itself in having random connections with stories in my brain, and some of them are not pleasant.

Therefore, I start feeling anxious about what I’m writing, and I come back up. Then, as I’m sitting with my negative feelings enough to breathe, I can dive back down again.

Because if I take the blog prompt from this morning literally, my favorite foods to cook are the ones I learned from Dana. She was my first chef, and I wouldn’t know anything about cooking on a professional level without her. So, I take time with breakfast.

My housemates called me “Pancake Girl” for a year.

The Food Doesn’t Matter

February 2, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What’s your favorite thing to cook?

Before we get started, I just wanted to tell you that I am willingly using my iPad today because oh my God. I refuse to code in anything but a monotype font. It has been 15 years since I’ve used anything but “Droid Sans Mono.” On my Android, I still do. That being said, when I dug into the app iOS app “Koder,” one of the recommended fonts was……. wait for it……… Helvetica. I’ll take a screenshot of the app so that you can see its ultimate superiority over Arial, the font that was so good Microsoft made a knock-off of their own…….. instead of buying the font from the actual artist. Seriously, fuck them. They did what people do to artists all the time. Although perhaps Steve Jobs had a non-compete with the artist so that Microsoft had to rip off Arial. I will be finding a documentary on YouTube shortly.

I absolutely loved the doc “Helvetica,” because it shows the artist, and just how many street signs are made with it in how many countries (it’s a lot). But, even still I had to justify switching from monospace. I had to sit there and justify it for a little bit. In the end, it was “you’re a writer…. you don’t code that much, anyway….. bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. I just love fonts an autistic amount. And now I’m sitting here looking at the way I’ve loved Macs since I was 18. I had a Mac SE in my room in high school, and it was my favorite computer ever because it’s the last one I had that didn’t connect to the Internet. I want a computer from 1990, Zac just bought a word processor and called it a day.

Word processors don’t have Helvetica. But maybe e-Bay has a Mac that old. On second thought, I’d rather have one of those old as shit Mac laptops, because even though they’re much heavier than a normal laptop, I’d rather write with the computer in my lap as opposed to my desk. My desk chair is crap and I don’t want to change it because nothing modern would match. In the end, I might give in because I really do like sitting at my desktop, I’ve just gotten used to lying in bed with my tablet and keyboard in my lap, because I’m 10 times more productive that way and both my tablets have everything I need to work and play.

One of my readers said that she felt anxious I responded to her in a blog entry. I did it so she wouldn’t be intimidated by the length of the reply, because it wasn’t personal at all. She said something that stuck with me, that she’d been married for decades and we had completely different outlooks on relationships. I thought that was so universal that it was a blog entry all on its own. That yes, people do have different outlooks on relationships because there are so many permutations of human behavior that nothing in this life is a binary.

She’s not wrong, and neither am I. And I’m pointing it out because of the stigma that comes with ethical non-monogamy. I like what Jada Pinkett said on the matter. “Will is his own man. He has to make choices that make it ok for him to look himself in the mirror.” She made the point that she doesn’t control his time, and that’s how I feel about Zac. I do not get to dictate what he does while he’s not with me. I’m just here to receive him, because he offers me so much solace even when we can’t be together all that often. He’s cooked for me, and of course it’s always fabulous. That’s my boyfriend cooking for me. I’ve talked to him many times about cooking for/with him, but he says that he’s just always had this outlook that you could for guests. I am so thankful he’s not impressed I’ve cooked professionally.

“Food is hospitality. When you reject someone’s food, you reject them.” -Anthony Bourdain

Which is why my favorite meal to cook is never about the food. The food doesn’t taste gorgeous because of something I did as a professional cook. It tastes better depending on who’s at the table. I don’t celebrate the people who aren’t here, I value the ones that show up. It’s taken a lifetime to learn, this not yearning for someone who isn’t here, because again, that goes back to 14 years old. I made people priorities when I was only an option, and could even see it and not give up.

I have deep and abiding abandonment issues from my emotional abuser, probably why I lived in Portland for so many years. I had to prove to myself that she wouldn’t abandon me, and found out when I got there that was not the case.

With Supergrover, I don’t know what would have happened if I’d kept my big mouth shut a lot of the time, but I do know that her hotheaded anger fed mine. My dopamine and adrenaline went through the roof when she snapped at me. I don’t react well to that, and neither does she. But I can count on one hand the number of times she’s apologized for her own words, because it’s so much more convenient to believe that I am the sole cause of everything. I have no doubt that she’s telling people that I’m the most toxic person she’s ever met, because she couldn’t take accountability for shit when it was emotional. I know she’d send a fully armed battalion to remind people of her love if she thought someone was hurting me. What she cannot do is take in that I feel the same way about her. We just don’t have the same love language, and I became fluent in hers- acts of service. Over time, she became less and less interested in mine, words of affirmation. I would tell her that I felt bad she called me a dickhead all the time, and then all of a sudden I was enormously impressive.

So, in a lot of ways, I feel that we could have fixed a lot with one night where she was my sous chef. She’s a very good chef. Horrible line cook….. which means that what I wanted was being able to tumble and roll in those roles.

This wouldn’t be appropriate for us because we’re not a couple, but it illustrates a point.

One of the things that therapists do in age gap relationships, because they often become a big damn problem, is to ask the older partner if they ever lay in the younger one’s lap. If the couple says no, then generally they’ll make them do it in the office. Over time, the older one views themselves as wiser because of course they are, but not about everything. The problem becomes the older half parenting the younger, making their relationship a strict power dynamic rather than one that’s fluid.

She couldn’t lay in my lap. That’s all on me, but that’s what we lost that made me push her away. I didn’t like feeling that my letters were making her feel guilty and not knowing it for weeks on end. I hated that she always relied on her own instincts to figure out what I was saying, and she was often wrong. I have no doubt that telling me she’s “read through many lines” means that she’s read through the wrong ones because she had no context and didn’t ask for clarity so that I could reassure her that I wasn’t attacking her. She assumed I was attacking her, so we never got back what we lost.

Here’s why it’s such a shame. I told her that I was French-trained, but that I’d had friends who were Japanese-trained and either works well. She said she didn’t know the difference, so I sent her two pictures of me holding a knife over a cutting board and wrote “French” and “Japanese” on them. She said she kind of uses a mix of the two, and one of the things I would have told her if we’d cooked together is “there is no such thing. You’re holding your knife wrong. Here, let me show you. “Spider on a mirror, Supergrover. Spider ona mirror.”

The. Food. Doesn’t. Matter.

P.S. Look upon my beautiful font.

This Was Going to Be Fiction, but ADHD…

January 20, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I really need to start making outlines before I write, because gardening leads to great things in blogging and plot holes in fiction. The reason there are no plot holes in my blog is that I don’t care if you find them. Just because I didn’t tell you the whole story according to everyone in the room doesn’t make it less untrue. It is me crafting the narrative without taking anyone else’s feelings into consideration. It sounds harsh and cold, but I don’t mean it that way. The reason I only include my perceptions of people’s feelings rather than what they actually are is because I am not a mind reader.

If they were bloggers, their stories would be up to a hundred percent different from mine because we were watching something from different perspectives.

“What color was the light?”

This is why I don’t care what anyone says about me, either, because they’re just as entitled to their opinions as I am to mine. For instance, I know for sure that Supergrover’s story is completely different from mine because she stopped telling it; she could then easily blame me for being a dictator when I laid out my fears, hopes, and dreams. In fact, she actually said that I was not the only arbiter of our relationship, and that’s the message I’ve been trying to give her for 10 years. She doesn’t have as much power in the relationship because she’s not vulnerable. If she laid out her thoughts and feelings, mine would adjust. Because now I just feel like I’m intruding, I’ll write her a long letter every few months because I can’t be sure God is listening, but I can be sure she is. I’ve been saying that for 10 years as well.

I destroyed that relationship out of my own insecurities because she would not do anything to calm them. She’d waffle between feeling like my Mama Wolverine and wanting out of my life for good within weeks of each other. She has also said that no matter what, we have a past, a present, and a future….. because I’m part of her wild and crazy brain. When she said that, I told her she was part of my wild and crazy soul. It’s true. I’m yin and she’s yang, except with a lot more gray area in the middle. What I’ve always tried to stop is feeling worthless because the cycle ran thusly:

I would open up about something deep, and she wouldn’t respond at all because “she didn’t have time.” I didn’t get frustrated that she didn’t have time. I got frustrated that her letters were short and didn’t tell me anything. I know that’s half because she’s protecting herself and half because I’m a blogger. My blog is the bane of my existence because it brought us together and tore us apart all in one breath. She knows she’ll always have to be a reader because we know each other, and as I told her in my last letter, “none of this will mean shit to you until it’s been five or 10 years and you see yourself as a different person. Then, the 3D character you don’t see will emerge, because you’re looking for the good things now because you want to remember. I told her about the 614,000 words I’d written in 2023, so I said something like I’ve talked about our problems, but I’ve loved you up just as much…… in all six books.

I also think that if her life is cut short like my mother’s that other people who knew her will want to read my perceptions all the more, because they’re the ones that are going to want to “spend time with her” the most. I feel like I started writing more deeply about her after my mother died, because she wasn’t my mother, but she was someone’s. The worst time she never knew she hurt me (because I didn’t want to rock the boat) was when I told her that she had a “suburban mom vibe.” She said that was probably the meanest thing I’d ever said to her, and because she is who she is, I thought she was joking. She proceeded to rip me a new asshole, when in my mind that archetype was the one I needed the most desperately, the one I’d just lost.

I’ll never forget that because she was a fan first, she has read my story and accepted it as my reality, not hers…. but she’s found truth and beauty in it. When she hasn’t been angry, she’s been very kind about how brilliant a writer I am. But what I don’t know, and will never know at this point, is how she really feels about me.

I called her on it, and she noped out…. because she realized she was waffling and couldn’t give me a solid answer. But what I know for sure, like, Oprah-level sure, is that she’s worth it….. that the experience was worth it even if it’s over now.

I didn’t move to DC to be near her, because I already had my own thing going and my sister dropping in all the time (I actually see her more now). But what I didn’t expect is that we’d still be having the same fight 10 years later when it would have been so easy to solve everything in the length of one coffee/beer.

What I know is that I was too hard on her in my own insecurity, because if she didn’t want to make up her mind, I was out. I didn’t need to inflict fear of a phone call or get-together. I was furious that after 10 years she wouldn’t tell me the truth about anything.

She practically treated me like a stalker when I never was that…. at all. If I was, we wouldn’t have made up. But those feelings of fear remain, so I thought it was crazy when she said, “do you think I care if you look up public information about me?” Ummmm…. yes. Yes, I do. To the point where if I really thought about it, I might throw up. Going back to those days in my mind is torture, and I’ve been trying to forgive myself and can’t. I said some things that never should have been said on a wide variety of topics, and the fact that she hung in for the ride means more to me than she’ll ever know.

However, when I started doing actual conflict resolution and not letting her rattle me by escalating, I was dismissed. That leads me down two trains of thought. The first is that she likes the ups and downs because getting her anger out is a good thing. I don’t care if it’s at me. She’s got to emote sometime, and anger is an emotion. Her outbursts at me are the most emotion I’ve seen out of her in a long time. That’s because I know she’s going through the shit, so I pray for her. The second is that she’s simply avoidant because she doesn’t know how to open up, and that’s not personal to me at all. I can imagine that if she’s shut down with me, she’s shut down with more than just me.

The way you resolve conflict is learned in your first family, and it takes extensive therapy to make a relationship last because you’re constantly trying to merge two parenting styles. My family was all buttoned up for many years. We got over it. It was better to be mad in the moment and forgive quickly than it was to hold onto frustration for years and years. Therefore, it’s very hard for me to be in a relationship where people keep their anger, guilt, whatever bottled up. I can’t stop thinking about when the other shoe is going to drop. Neither does my beautiful girl, because her answer is to keep avoiding everything and my answer is “there’s no way back, only through.” I can’t do much to help the relationship heal, but like I said, I pray for her every night, and it’s been the same prayer every night for the last 10 years.

If there truly is a God, they can go places with her that I can’t. It comforts me to know that she’s not alone, because even if she doesn’t think God is listening, it’s a comforting image, anyway.

What I missed were all the ways we treated each other during new relationship energy. We lovebombed the absolute fuck out of each other. I have never found anyone like her, and I keep saying that, but some things are too unique. It’s not only that letting you know would be telling her story and not mine, it’s that there are some things about any relationship that I keep private so that there are some things only for me.

You absolutely can’t go back to lovebombing each other if you can’t do conflict resolution over and over. When I stood up, she did not rise to meet me. I didn’t so much let her go, but let her go back to the way she used to live.

I told her she was a phoenix, and I can’t wait to see her rise from the ash…… because she has, professionally. I’m not so sure about relationships, but I only have ours as an example.

I got that INFJ judgmental bastard urge to drag people into the light whether they want to go or not. However, I am not judgmental of people. I’ve wanted to be a lawyer most of my life and have done well in undergrad regarding the preparation for it. Therefore, I will lay out facts representing what I think about both sides of a situation. I am not saying “you’re a bad person.” I am basically reading my emotional docket and the case in front of me has as many complications as medicine. The diagnosis in medicine is the same as the verdict in law: it depends.

I am emotionally capable of being fair and balanced, but because I’m autistic, I’m often not thinking of how to phrase things so that they’ll come across as how I meant them to a neurotypical person. And here, on my blog, some of the literary devices I use don’t make sense unless you’re talking to me behind the scenes.

That’s always what brought Supergrover back around. She didn’t like reading the blog without the brochure, as I’ve said before. But if she talked to me, she’d see that I was being quite reasonable and had a good head on my shoulders. What she has not realized is the lengths I’ve gone to in order to protect her and harps on breadcrumbs I never would have seen……… unless we had talked about it.

In this way, I am my own main character (in the original writing prompt, the kid was a picky eater), because when I feel these emotional situations weighing themselves in my mind, I develop sensory issues because I need deprivation so badly to regulate my emotions. I don’t even listen to music when I write anymore. I just listen to my typing.

There are days when I can’t take exciting food, because I’ve already had it up to my eyeballs. A meltdown would be serving me something from a restaurant instead of a peanut butter and banana sandwich, because I was overstimulated before you brought home lobster.

I don’t have very good meltdowns. I have shutdowns. I am not very good at standing up for myself, nor being impolite or socially awkward in any way. Therefore, having a meltdown in front of someone would have to be major. I’d eat the lobster, I’d just hate that the food is one more thing I don’t have the bandwith with which to pay attention.

Meltdown often comes online, when I am overstimulated and itching for a fight. But I’m so dextrous with words that I’m not looking to destroy people (though some would say I am after a straight woman read an entire thread from me and a friend talking about how straight people could support queer people, and then asked me for ideas on making an ally flag. Now, in this instance, angry black woman and angry white lesbian are not dissimilar. I don’t want to do work for straight people. Look it up. Read the rest of the comments, at least.

She caught me on a very bad day and she was also uneducated as fuck, so I could have been nicer and I didn’t know how. I just had to be kind. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was heated…. where I took apart every one of her talking points in order to educate herself on being the parent of someone queer, because if you have a queer child, you can’t possibly have institutionalized homophobia, now can you? I also have mixed emotions about straight people wearing rainbow flags, because they have the option to take them off.

Most of the time, though, I go in and de-escalate a situation. I’ve whipped line cooks’ asses and it turned into an actually deep conversation. It was a Taylor Swift joke in poor taste and I took issue with that.

I am certain that I have responded like this to Supergrover, but because she didn’t see the meltdown, she didn’t see me as trying to be kind but not nice. I will agree that I was over the top, but I never said anything untrue about our anxious/avoidant attachment. I don’t expect her to treat my anxious attachment with kid gloves. I expect her not to withold information so that I know exactly what’s going on, because I can’t process situations on no information from the other person. I will send myself into a spiral. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem about which I couldn’t overthink.

So, the less information she gave me, the more I spiraled out trying to fix things, because I assumed that everything was all about me. It’s not because it actually was. It’s that I had absolutely no information to the contrary to put things into context/perspective.

We don’t have a context, and that’s a good thing most of the time because we can talk about things without it affecting everyone else in our physical lives. But over time, it began to be a hard row to hoe, because I wanted peace……

One way or the other.

The Sunday Shop

December 19, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

List your top 5 grocery store items.

Here, in no particular order, are a few of my favorite things- minus raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens….. sadly, even if I order food from Amazon, it still won’t come in brown paper packages tied up with string………. the dog bite and the bee sting in the whole operation.

Dr Pepper Zero
- Of all the no sugar sodas out there, I think it tastes the most authentic. Everything is held to Dr Pepper Zero standards, and few have met it. If Dr Pepper Zero was unavailable (at Safeway, it usually is), I don’t mind any of the zero colas. DPZ is just my favorite. Interestingly enough, I don’t buy a lot of it anymore. I used to drink a ton of soda, but now that I drink flavored water, soda is on the back burner.
Water Bottle Mix-ins
- Most of the things on this list will probably be drinks because I don’t go out of my way to eat. I know it sounds weird, but most people with ADHD or ASD (or AuDHD) have trouble remembering to eat, or get demand avoidance with cooking. I do stay hydrated, though, and my favorite are the little sticks of drink powder you can add to a water bottle. Giant makes a lemon honey green tea that’s very good, and so is Crystal Light Pure.
The Crab Chip, Utz
- They’re too salty, and you notice quickly. You will never stop eating them at any point. There are other brands of Old Bay flavored potato chips, but this is the gold standard. It’s also not a requirement to like Old Bay when you arrive in Maryland, either, but I will say you’ll have a hard time adjusting if you don’t care for it. 😉
Beyond Italian Sausage
- I know that this is going to sound weird, but I like Beyond Italian sausage vs. pork/beef in everything requiring it. I can’t even explain to you why I think it’s better, I just think it is. There’s no moral judgment here, I’m a line cook. I’m telling you what I like. It’s very good sautéed loose for spaghetti sauce or in the casing for sandwiches. It’s probably better for you in saturated fat, but that’s not why I eat it. I like what I like. 😉 I also don’t know who needs to hear this because I don’t have a deep fryer. Beyond sausage tastes amazing dropped in a deep fryer and just served on a bun. You don’t even need condiments.
Tillsmook ice cream
- If you’re an Oregonian, cheese identifies as Tillamook. We don’t have any other brands. It has extended to all dairy for me, because it’s the brand I trust. Their ice cream is every bit as decadent as their sharpest cheddar. I usually get Oregon Dark Cherry, but I’ve gotten other flavors in the past…. but not for at least a year or so, because I find something I like and eat it until I’m tired of it. It’s very, very hard to get tired of Oregon Dark Cherry ice cream. The only thing better is if I could get marionberry instead.

If there is a bonus, sometimes I grab a 5 Hour Energy in the checkout. They’re great with a seltzer “back,” and even though the vitamins don’t taste ideal, I do need them. I’ve just cut down on caffeine an enormous amount, because I realized that I couldn’t replace sleep with drugs, as much as I’d like to be able to do so……… I’ve checked with me, though, and sleeping the correct amount is non-negotiable. I’ve missed a lot of tricks from being tired, because my disabilities don’t have a chance to be less annoying if I keep getting more and more exhausted without recharging. I’m not even sure I have USB-C yet. 😉

It has also been years since I’ve been grocery shopping in person, because I started getting my groceries delivered during the pandemic and I never stopped. It’s a necessity for me because I’d still have to Uber home with all my groceries, so why not just pay someone else? It works out to be the same.

Also not a grocery store item, necessarily, but I love it that stores have SBUX inside. I love to drink an iced tea when I’m shopping, and the only time I do that is when I’m getting prescriptions refilled and have to pick them up in person.

If there’s anything you should be glad I get at the grocery store, it’s my medications. 😉

I Could Take It or Leave It

December 4, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are your feelings about eating meat?

I used to be vegan, and probably would be full time if I was interested in spending all my money at Whole Foods (but God, is it fun….. I’ve found so much that I love). Now, I’m mostly vegetarian because I don’t like cooking meat, but I’ll have it if it is prepared for me. For instance, once in a blue moon I’ll get a whole roasted chicken from Safeway. I can’t eat a whole chicken, but many times I have tried. 😉 In true autistic fashion, I have my favorites and I order them every single week. This is because I truly love adventurous food, when that is my focus. I have to cut out all my sensory issues to be able to focus, so food is one of them. White bread. Pizza with extra cheese and mild sauce. Eggs. Butter. Cheddar. The most challenging thing I bought was a jar of pesto for a frozen pizza and later spaghetti this week. Sometimes I make pesto Alfredo with pumpkin seeds as protein. If I am writing while I work, it’s ham, turkey, or egg on toast with cheese, or plain pancakes with one note syrup. However, I don’t like the same sandwich forever. I don’t choose one food and eat it every day. I choose a diet for the week and buy the same thing every time. It is so comforting when every bite is the same, and also something rich in its simplicity. I can do a lot with an egg and some cheddar. I prefer the texture of cheese when it’s cold, so I learned early on how to make the perfect scrambled egg and just lay it on top of the cheese and toast.

I am also very, very fond of the classic French-style sandwich. It’s really good white bread toast (I use Wonder, there is no substitute in this country), lots of butter, Swiss, mustard, and black pepper. I’ve been eating that almost every day for lunch this year. Very occasionally, I buy spring mix to wilt into eggs, rice, and lentils…. sometimes Brussels sprouts either fresh or roasted. But again, not often, because I tend to repeat things. I don’t have to eat fancy food all the time- that’s what makes it a treat.

I had a craving for fried chicken the other day, and that’s because Uber Eats was having a sale. I got 10 pieces of chicken (first of all, I really had no idea how much food that actually was), two sides of collard greens, and a Mac and cheese. When I got the chicken, I immediately deboned it and put it away for sandwiches, because by the time I’d put everything away, I’d snacked on enough. Really good local place, cheaper and better than KFC and of course now I don’t remember the name of it. I hope I recognize it again, but there’s nothing like trying a local restaurant that hast stuff on sale. It’s how I found out you can order prepared crawfish, which is also on the list of acceptable foods. AuDHD requires stability and flexibility, which in me is an iron structure for when I experience new things and when I don’t. Sometimes I have the bandwidth, sometimes I’m a picky eater. It depends.

Today it was chicken, cheddar, and honey mustard- total Boston Market throwback. Probably Sunkist limon later, a drink that tastes like the best Mexican street lemonade in the world and is sugar free. I could mix it with tea if I could be arsed to cold brew. I know I’ve already forgotten milk this week (or haven’t checked to see if I need more, but it’s almost time). The only problem is that you can’t get the bags back out of soda bottles easily, so it becomes a two use sort of deal. But I get plenty of soda when I’m out, and 20oz Coke Zero bottles work well for cold brew. I would use one tea bag if I was going to drink it straight, two or three if I was going to add milk (shaking it with Splenda and almond milk is delicious).

I’ve also started buying a package of cookies every week because they’re good as an accessory to ice cream if someone comes over and I need something nice, or just on their own. I like the white bread biscuits with the chocolate square on top. Yes, it’s a cookie, but it tastes British so I’ll give it to them.

I also generally get bananas, because I get some sandwich meat and eggs, but that’s not enough protein for every meal. It might not seem related, but vegans live on peanut butter and, often, banana sandwiches. It’s as packed with nutrition as rice and beans. (Rice, beans, and eggs are everything you need to start your day.) I know I have these things in the pantry somewhere, but I need to look for them. Frozen pizza is life because I can’t make cheese toast that good.

In short, I believe that eating meat is fine as long as you do it in moderation. Eat food. Not a lot. Mostly plants. Michael Pollan set me on the right track, because I eat whatever I want. Most of the time, it’s something ambitious with vegetables because there are just so many recipes I haven’t tried……. or made my own.

I have “fixed” many major sauces and soups. Campbell’s is the gold standard, don’t touch it. If I had to pick a favorite, cream of lettuce or mushroom made with whole milk and extra fresh lettuce or grilled/sautéed mushrooms. When you eat Campbell’s, you’re generally invoking someone’s childhood and it’s hard to mess with that. With all soup bases it’s easier not to reinvent the wheel unless you just like boiling chicken carcasses. Yes, I agree with David Chang that all pre-made stock is garbage, but I’m not standing over the stove to make fresh, either. He can. I’ll just add some of his momofuku pepper sauce to my boxed setup and he can tell me if it’s not okay. I don’t need it to be perfect, I just need it to be the base when building a chord.

It’s beautiful whether I’m eating meat or not, because I actually like mushroom stocks and gravies better than chicken. To me, it actually tastes better….. particularly on poutine.

Let’s end on poutine. I’d like to think about mushroom gravy and cheese a while longer. Maybe get some collard greens with bacon to go on top.

It’s a good image, because yesterday was a day and I’m still recovering. Sometimes I think so hard I have to stop. I have reached the end of my battery, but it will recharge eventually. I always set out with the best of intentions to post, and for the last several months I’ve missed one day. Some of it is the feeling of wanting to get plunked out of obscurity knowing that blogging is not X Factor material, Most of it is that in order to be ready for what’s coming, I need to be in shape.

I get that through how I feel about eating meat- nonplussed, except on the days when I’m obsessed with it because I’ve made the commitment to truly cut down. It’s been a dramatic change, but worth it. Superfood is really a thing. You’ll like greens better with vinegar. On the poutine. That’s you’re going to eat because I suggested it.

My Family Does

November 30, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do you or your family make any special dishes for the holidays?

I don’t cook anything for holidays anymore, because when I got divorced and moved to DC, I moved in with a family who already had Thanksgiving wired, and I wasn’t the only cook in the house. One of my housemates when I first arrived had gone to Johnson & Wales, and was the chef at Jaleo Crystal City (Jose Andres is the executive chef, I mean the guy who actually ran the restaurant on a day-to-day basis). Therefore, I know Jose Andres intimately, even if he doesn’t know me…. and all of his secrets are safe. 😉

We used to laugh together about the things that happened around us that we were helpless to stop. Neither one of us in all of our cosmic culinary power could get people to stop putting knives in the dishwasher or in the bottom of the sink. More than once did we look at each other and say, “I can’t.” We honestly didn’t spend that much time together, it’s that our relationship was like all brothers in arms. We had an emotional shorthand not there for others in the house. If you are not a person with ADHD/Autism when you start a kitchen job, you will gain the ability to see the kitchen that way. Everything in cooking is a sensory issue, and you’re learning to fine-tune it. The tiniest changes will cause absolute anarchy.

For me, a big one is soap. They’re all concentrated differently, and it seems there is a large leap from generic to brand. It also affects the kitchen to change the smell of the dish soap, because you get used to how those fragrances mix with spice. For instance, going from a floral scent to a lemon scent gave me gastrointestinal issues because the lemon mixed with the scent of eggs and ruined Hollandaise sauce for me because every time I think of it one of the flavor notes is surfactant.

Soap is a trigger for a much bigger sensory issue overall. Most autistic people who have sensory issues with smell are because it’s turned up to “pregnant woman.” I throw up more due to bad smells than anything else, and why when I live alone and have a cat, I have disposable litter boxes and change them out often rather than ever force myself to change it. I was lucky in that Dana didn’t mind and had permanent boxes at her house, but I wasn’t counting on her to care for Asher. I had my own system, I just didn’t have to use it. I wasn’t allergic to chores. I traded that one out.

Being married is really the last time I had any holiday traditions, because when I moved to DC, I was folded into an established family here, Lebanese heritage and not Irish. For Thanksgiving and Christmas we have turkey and dolmades. Stuffing and kibbi (Kibbi is actually one of our dog’s names, too- “meatball,” basically, in Arabic). It’s a wonderful life. Hayat and I have talked often about the fact that “I’ve picked up Arabic,” because when I first moved in, Hayat spoke Arabic and Nasim spoke Farsi. I asked both of them if it would bother them for me to listen in on their phone calls, because I didn’t want it to feel creepy and I knew they wouldn’t really, either since I don’t understand either language. I just wanted to take away the feeling that I was trying not to watch them by making it obvious that I was.

Listening to Nasim was hearing the end of “Argo” all day long. Learning the Levantine dialect of Arabic was learning the rolling lilt of the ocean and not the Middle East RP equivalent, Cairo (I checked). Some words in Egypt and Lebanon are different, some words are the same because Lebanon has had a bigger influx of Mediterranean immigrants. In fact, my cover photo on Facebook is a picture Hayat took of the marina in Beirut, now a city on my bucket list if it ever calms down enough for me to go. I would feel comfortable with Daniel or Zac in that situation, but I would not feel comfortable traveling without someone who could defend both of us. That whole idea started the romance with Daniel, because I initially wanted a travel companion and then I realized I wanted him. I don’t know whether Zac and I will ever travel together or not, but what I do know is that he may have not been in the same situations as Daniel, but not because he didn’t train for them.

But Zac and I haven’t started our own traditions yet because we haven’t spent a Christmas together. Since he celebrates Yuletide and not Christmas proper, it doesn’t matter whether I see him on the 25th or not. What I do know is that we as people are a spectrum. Maybe we’ll go for Chinese, maybe we’ll finally watch “The Pigeon Tunnel,” the Apple TV+ documentary based on interviews and John le Carré’s last book. I would have jumped on it the moment I saw it if I wasn’t so insistent about not cheating on him. Infidelity is one thing. This is couple TV. THERE ARE RULES. There are shows I still haven’t finished because I promised Dana I’d wait. It’s getting a bit ridiculous. Still can’t do it.

I have been asked to make a Christmas list and so far the only thing on it is a long-sleeved SAS t-shirt. I’d also like a Senators baseball cap because of the Duke Ellington concert in the spring, because even if I didn’t wear it, oh my God would it ever look good with Jason’s signature on the side. For my international readers, the Senators are the current hockey team in Ottawa, but the baseball team in DC was called the Senators when we first joined the league. Duke Ellington started selling peanuts when he was like, 11?

When Jason told me that he was going to do a Duke Ellington concert in The District, I told him that he was a brave, brave man. He laughed because he knew exactly what I meant. If you come for Ellington in his hometown crowd, you best not miss. Here’s what I know that you don’t. Jason is objectively better at piano than Ellington ever was. He can take Elllington’s ideas to a place that the composer himself couldn’t- another brain seeing different patterns. Ask me how I know that? He’s been doing it since he was 17 (probably younger, but I’ve known him since then), the Mozart of jazz, too many notes that boggle the mind.

I do not say this lightly. It probably sounds like I’m just part of the Houston jazz scene and trying to promote my boy. No. Jason is different. Jason goes to places I don’t like and I don’t know why and then I fall on my ass when I figure out the chord structure. It’s not that I didn’t like Jason, it’s that my mind wasn’t big enough to hold Jason yet. I had to grow into him. He’s an artist that is perfectly capable of giving you a beautiful haircut that you don’t like until you realize you were wrong. You thought it was a mess, and it makes your whole face.

The last time I saw Jason, I left the Kennedy Center and walked around for two hours trying to deconstruct that concert in my mind. Every time I came to a new metro stop, I decided I wasn’t done thinking about jazz yet. If you’ve never been to see Jason, I do not believe you have a grasp of modern jazz and where it’s going. I hope the concert is not too esoteric for Zac, but I don’t think it will be. I just think the difference is that when he looks at Jason, he sees the finished product. I see every iteration. Tall, skinny, quiet, softspoken when he does, can’t get used to the fact that he doesn’t wear a stocking cap every day. Can’t believe he and John Schutza aren’t a thing at lunch anymore.

Zac is going to become a bridge from my old life to my new one, and I think that’s a beautiful thing. I know Jason wouldn’t necessarily look for me at the concert, but what I do know is that he would be disappointed if I came to the concert and didn’t say anything. If I had my life to do over, I would have loved to be as serious a jazz musician as Jason. But, on the other hand, I did not have the ability of Konrad Johnson to “see where they were going and go with them.” I did not have Jason’s ability to see the rules of composition in such a way that he plays as if they aren’t there. No open fourths? Here’s seven in a row. Deal. Not a real example, but on brand.

Jason, like I am, is an unapologetic artist trying to get the audience to come to him, and he’s so good at his craft that he deserves to be a leader.

If there’s anything in my family that starts with me, it’s a love of music- the only special interest I had before intelligence because the first time I ever sang in front of an audience (congregation), I was three. Never in my lifetime did I think I’d get involved with it enough to understand what an open fourth might be, but here we are.

I know that when we talk about dishes, we’re often talking about the things put on the table. To me, sharing music with someone is every bit as important as a Christmas or Thanksgiving table. It’s where my mind goes now that I don’t have to cook for either holiday.

I also talk about music not to talk about what is going to be missing.

Also, here is a meme to express my feelings, one of my love languages:

I Actually Am a PhD

October 28, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am driven to create through writing stream-of-consciousness blog entries because it is showcasing the random order of my brain and entertaining people (even if only through schadenfreude). I haven’t been told that I’m worse writer than Brene Brown, Glennon Doyle, and Martha Beck- so I continue to believe that I am capable of writing on their level with an editor. Someone to collate my thoughts into a self-help book by taking out the filler and focusing on what matters. An editor is important because I do not want to be the one in charge of going through what I’ve already said and deciding whether it’s worthy of editing and publishing. I also think I’ve got a framework for at least three books woven into one based on past writings, but not enough hubris to say that they deserve more than they’ve been given…. which is readers on the day it was published.

When I’m in the middle of a problem, it runs continuously in my brain and I look at it from a million different ways. Therefore, I do not know which of my entries regarding any of my characters/subjects/plot points explain something the best. One runs into the other. It is a continuing monologue. I have been told I should publish a bound anthology, but I will not do it unless I’m approached because I do not want to take on the task of deciding which entries are essential and which are just fluff. That’s because sometimes my intuiition is off as to what will resonate with people and what won’t. An editor coming in blind would relieve my soul greatly.

The other thing that relieves my soul is that I don’t have to write a book to have something worth publishing. I already have 20 years of entries- 10 from this blog and the other 10 in the Wayback Machine. If nothing else, writing these entries has proved to me that I am capable of writing a book. That’s huge.

I have known that I could write a book since I was a child, but I didn’t have the confidence when the writing went so well and my research skills were so poor. I developed a doctorate in bullshit, because I could get an A on a paper by writing the whole thing as fast as I write a blog entry and just making up the books I used as sources; I knew the names of the publishing houses off the top of my head and wrote convincing titles. I didn’t do this in college because I did not have to manage my papers against six other academic subjects, choir, and marching band.

I am going back and picking up building blocks for my true self that I never had because I couldn’t see all the social masking I was doing for ADHD and autism. What I know now is that I am capable of taking in a firehose’s width in information all the time, but knowing what’s important and what’s not is a challenge. My brain uses an obnoxious yellow highlighter on every word, because I am making connections so fast that everything is important under the right circumstances.

I have started reading celebrity autobiographies recently, and not because I like stardom and pop culture. It’s that there’s no other genre that sounds more like me. First of all, they’re actors. I’m a writer. Creative process. Second of all, they’re just telling the story as they saw it. Making judgment calls about how others’ actions affected them. Being angry. Being remorseful. Being guilty. Being all of it and through the process of writing it down, letting it all go.

I started with Prince Harry, Kelly Ripa, and Lauren Graham. I’ve got “Worthy” by Jada Pinkett Smith on hold at the library. It’s helping me find a lightness in tone that doesn’t come across with spy fiction and non- except “The Unexpected Spy” by Tracy Walder- she’s a TV show and Ellen Pompeo noticed. By and large, people like Le Carré don’t put as much humor into their books as I’d like, but it’s ok. The jokes land harder when they don’t happen all that often.

My favorite line from “Homeland” is “Karachi….. After you stole the car.” My favorite show about intelligence is “American Dad,” and feel that if I was any character on TV, I can best be summed up by Roger Smith. Pretty sure I asked for Pecan Sandies. I am the type person that grows to love a subject through the criticism of it. As in, someone becoming more beautiful to you because of their flaws. Both shows are great at taking the piss while also being sensitive to the fact that intelligence officers are people. One of the reasons I loved “Argo” was the incredible humor while in the midst of a serious situation. Using humor as a reflex to deal with what’s hard. Masking to protect their real identities, feeling like frauds. Roger Smith is the only one that walks in the world unafraid of being caught. I want to walk like that, and I am trying to find the keys to be able to unlock that part of myself.

I like seeing people without their social masking because if they stop doing it, so will I. For me, it’s to cover a neurodivergent brain. For others, it’s just the secrets they’ve kept are now killing them. For neurodivergent writers, it’s both. You’ve kept the shame and guilt at not responding to others the same way they respond to you hidden because you know it’s all your fault. My brain is not different, it is damaged.

When people do not understand this, they treat me as intellectually inferior. When they do, it’s so much better… but there is only so much of a leap you can make between having empathy for a disorder and having a disorder. Those two types of people communicate completely differently, because that person has what they’ve read on their minds while the other has a lived experience. Having a disorder is exhausting when you feel like you have to prove you’re ill because you look fine. Autism is just a processing disorder, but the anxiety and depression stemming from it is caused mostly by the enormity of the difference between what we mean and what other people hear.

This entry was interrupted by my need to eat. I sauted some hot dogs in butter, then added eggs and ghost pepper cheese. Hot dogs aren’t my first choice, but I thought that’s all I had and in retrospect, lunch meat would have been better. All sausages, vegan and meat, taste better if you split them down the middle and let them confit. The butter will mix with the fat in the sausage and develop a sweet, firm crust. Thus why it’s called caramelization. I also tend to saute sausages whole and cut them up later, because it’s easy to obtain said crust when you don’t have more than two surfaces. Hot dog pieces are too small to make sure every piece touches metal and cooks evenly. The better the crust, the more expensive it will taste. Because butter has a lower threshold for heat, I’ll wait longer for the caramelization so I can keep using it. Even if I was using Pam or olive oil, I wouldn’t put the temp up much further. You don’t want to burn the crust while the inside is still warming up. Burgers cooked low and slow this way are pretty hard to beat, particularly vegan because the crust will taste familiar even if the sausage doesn’t. A good crust made ith butter will cover a lot of sins in a sausage’s ingredients….. particularly if all you can afford is franks from the Dollar Tree. For breakfast, I would choose low-sodium Spam before hot dogs because it’s sweeter, but the outcome is the same. Caramelized, crispy outside, soft texture inside. The thinner you cut it, the better it will taste because the butter and caramel will be the forward notes, skipping over the flavor in the Spam and making it taste like real food.

There should be an award for that.

Meat always tastes better to me cooked in its’ own fat and butter. This is why I don’t grill. Whether it’s a Beyond Burger and margarine or a beef burger and butter, the caramelization beats the fat dripping off onto the coals. I do like grilled meat, I just don’t prefer it. I also like turkey because you’re continually circulating the butter over the bird by basting it. Grilled and fried turkey is also very good, but I prefer a crispy skin with Cajun seasoning.

Also, people tend to have way less faith in the red button than they should. When it pops up, people kid themselves that they know better. What they don’t know is that when you take a turkey out of the oven, it continues cooking internally. The red button accounts for that time.

“Zip code. Fargo, North Dakota. Right now.”

I learned everything I know about turkeys from Joe Bethersonton, “King of Auto Sales” and the Butterball Hotline. When I realized that there were things I didn’t know about cooking a turkey, I credit that show for making me want to learn. Dana usually grilled our turkey outside, and it was great. I wanted to be good at the classic presentation, one reminiscent of Norman Rockwell.

These last few paragraphs are indicative of how my brain works. My superpower is being able to explain the things I do well as much as I do the things I do wrong. For instance, acknowledging that I am not at fault for every conflict I’ve ever had. I own part of the fault. That other people are not responsible for my reactions/responses, but they are responsible for knowing that they don’t come in a vacuum. That we have to talk about my behavior in the context of what triggered it, because without it we do not reach mutual empathy for the other’s position.

Thus, trying to find solutions to the ways in which I feel like a burden by focusing my talent on something productive. Getting to know myself certainly is, because by admtting my failures, I let go enough to move into the future. Otherwise, you are trapped by feelings of murkiness at unclear boundaries, unsure of how to proceed. Even worse when you establish boundaries and they run right over them due to the nature of their personalitites. It’s hard to deal with consequences when you know your ADHD is at fault- your disorder, not your personality. No one else can excuse your behavior, a “get out of jail free” card, but people might have more empathy for you if you’re honest rather than trying to hide the limitations in how your brain works. It helps other people cope in the way they phrase things to you so that conflict doesn’t pop up to begin with.

So many people do not establish boundaries at the beginning of a relationship, the most important time. That way, when you’re wrong it’s clear you’re wrong. There’s no way to argue about it, you apologize and move on. Difficult to do when the other person’s response is to shut down at a threat. It only keeps you out, it doesn’t help to resolve anything. People think they feel better by avoiding a problem when solving it is just harder than they thought and they give up. Understanding someone else’s perspective is so hard when you’re invested in the fact you’re right.

Nobody made you do anything, yet no one should make you do everything. We are built for friendship intimacy, eros, agape and philia, whether you’re monogamous and coccoon with one partner, shutting the rest of the world out, or whether you’re a social butterfly. But there is also a fine line between interdependence and codepence, which everyone should study. You cannot be emotionally intimate with just one person and expect all your needs to be met. You don’t have a sounding board with which to correct the story that you’re telling yourself. You have to have friends with whom to bitch about your spouse and a spouse to bitch with about your friends. But both parties have to know that you’re just going somewhere to vent, you’re not going somewhere to make an escape plan….. and it always will be if you don’t develop emotional bravery.

I haven’t had it lately. I’ve met some incredible friends and dropped off the face of the earth because I had to- I’ll get back in touch. I am just trying so hard to focus on my own mental health that it’s taking my ability to connect with others. I just don’t have the spoons. I am in the unenviable position as to having anxiety about going through all of this on top of social anxiety when I call people, a necessary evil when you’re dealing with health insurance companies, GPs, and specialists…. not to mention the government if my occupational therapy doesn’t reveal my gaps and fix them. It just feeds my anxiety that I’m incapable of living within a system that helps most people. I do not want to go the disability route in the slightest. I just don’t know where I am on the spectrum and I want to get it resolved. Why I can spill my thoughts like a pro and struggle with things that make you look like a dumbass in neurotypical eyes. I think that’s because neurodivergents are not managers unless they’re high-functioning ADHD. Enough executive function to deal with fires and not drop details in paperwork. I think that’s because younger people are diagnosed than me, have had years of training in how to cope. I have no idea how people just learn those things on the fly, and get horribly anxious when I struggle.

People with ADHD require inertia, hard to get started when you’re bipolar and anxious about everything. I don’t need to tap out, I need to tap in. I’m just discovering that the barriers to entry are great and I wish I could hide from it. Surely I’ll just get better by not leaving my house because a magic fairy will come and fix me.

Learning to deal with autism and ADHD is the grief that you’ll never get your moment. You are told your entire childhood that eventually things will all come together as you get experience and I have gotten none of that. I have developed a talent for bullshit that I only saw when I started getting real. Patterns emerged in my writing that I couldn’t see before, the reason my autism is beating out my ADHD on a consistent basis. Going out is too much stimulation, but my ADHD side makes it where staying home isn’t stimulating enough. So, I go out and want to come home nearly immediately because walking in the world seems like our entire society is blaring at me. It is through no fault of their own. It’s my sensory percepton issues. The world is loud even if you were born neurotypical, male, white, able-bodied, straight, and cis. With sensory perception issues, the fact that the tag on your t-shirt is scratching the back of your neck feels as important as anything the boss has handed down, because the stimulation of it is overwhelming and covers everything else.

“It’s just a tag.”

I don’t go anywhere in which I don’t feel armored to take on the world. Clothes that do’t irritate me, comfortable shoes, a hoodie to guard against being cold in the air conditioning or outside in the season for it (you need good gloves, socks, an insulating layer like a vest or thermal shirt, and shoes padded on the inside with good tread. More important than the quality of your coat- with all that, I can wear a hoodie. Uniqlo. Look into it.). In the winter, I like sweats and long underwear as opposed to jeans…. but an open cuff so that I don’t always have to wear sneakers with them…. and stirrup pants drove me crazy in the ’80s because of the elastic strap. I wore them anyway because I liked the feeling of my pants not sliding loose and they kept me warm. I like hiking sandals with socks, but the kind that look like tennis shoes so that only the color of your sock shows through. I like wearing them without socks, but it doesn’t look good with pants. The reason for this is that in the cold, water dries quickly from your shoe, but not from your socks. They get soggy and you’re finished. With hiking sandals, you dump out the water and your foot is warm again because of the rubber in your shoe heating back up. Sandals don’t have anywhere for water to absorb except the top straps…. and we have already mentioned that my toes are covered. I don’t understand those people, but William Sledd’s Summer Rant goes through my head when I see it. “If you see someone with a toe ring, I would just go up to them and say, ‘girl? What the fuck is on your toe?'” “The anklle bracelet…. the perfect accessory to a toe ring.” I think it came out over 10 years ago, and it makes me double over with laughter every single time.

Again, entertaining my audience through only storytelling, a stream of consciousness unmasking of what it’s like to live in a neurodivergent brain and the struggles in remaining positive around it. You don’t immediately realize it’s relentless. And then the struggle sets in. This is not a transitory state. This is the same hassle you’d feel if your cat got diabetes. You mean I’m going to have to give it shots for the rest of my natural life? You mean I’m going to have to teach housesitters how to do it? You mean I have to justify why I’m willing to take care of an animal with serious needs? It’s all too much because in this case, the cat is you and the last person you want to take care of in that way. Most people are focused on others to avoid the deep dive I do.

And it only helps them so much. Breaking free does not come without costs, but it does come with self-worth when you realize you do things extraordinarily well…. it’s just not the way in which everyone expects. I hope that one day I’m in the position to say that I don’t like the crowd and where it’s headed so that I’m grateful for this journey, but right now it’s too difficult and scary to say that.

I just know that I have a doctorate in bullshit, and now I’m learning all the reasons why…. not to avoid having responsibility, but to learn which ones I can manage.

Yours

October 26, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What food would you say is your specialty?

When I love someone, I love their food. I make breakfast the best, in my estimation, because I spent so many hours bonding with Dana over our brunch program (chef and ex-wife for those just joining us)… but it wasn’t just that. We loved to cook together more than life itself, and breakfast was the thing that made her face light up. Breakfast food comes easily to me, because now I picture what Dana would do and how she would do it every morning of my life. This is not a bad thing. We’re not together anymore, but I decided to stop spending time with our negative memories a long time ago. I will talk about them to use them as an illustration, occasionally, but I would never talk shit about her just for sport. Our fights make us both worse characters, because our joy was so apparent. I am also not in love with her anymore, which I know is confusing…… and yet not, in my brain. I can write about her in all the romantic terms I want because of the tense. It may sound like I’m in love with her, but not when you look at all the “used to” instead of what is happening in my life right now. Remembering someone fondly is easy. In your memory, they become the people who fucked you up, and it doesn’t matter because you’re at peace with the fact that you fucked them up, too. No one is 100% a victim…. or at least, that is the case most of the time. I am sure there are examples, but by and large everyone contributes. Just like when I cook.

Because breakfast food is my love language, I used to have dreams of cooking Supergrover breakfast, and I don’t mean that in a sultry “morning after” kind of way………….. anymore. 😉 I mean that I could have been the chef, directing everyone as to what to do. That’s my happy place. Lording over a kitchen in order to teach other people how to fend for themselves. I want to go into a kitchen where I am given that authority without the responsibility. For instance, everyone saying “you should do it because I’m not a chef.” That’s not helping me, that’s succumbing to fear. If you don’t teach other people to work with you, over time you’ll become the cook all the time. “You’re just so good.”

That’s what’s great about marrying a professional cook. They work on you from day one, and it’s better if you want them to do so. They are not going to be your personal chef. I, like her, started with the basics. An egg. Diced vegetables……… repeatedly. Respecting first contact with eggs and knowing when to flip them. Interestingly enough, learning to make an omelet is so storied as part of a cook’s education, but Dana never taught me and I was never in a restaurant where it was on the menu and had to get up to speed fast. I play around in my own kitchen, but I’ve never folded anything successfully…. and because of anything but effort. I can only get better so fast, because I can only feed myself so much. I can only store so much when I make it ahead of time. Getting good at pancakes and oatmeal took a week or so of doing multiple iterations every single day.

Breakfast is also the only time I bake. I do everything from a can or box, but still. My favorite are orange rolls. The bread is the same as a cinnamon roll, it’s just the at the icing has orange or orange juice in it. They’re pretty divine…… If I’m in a savory mood, though, scones are stupid easy and forgiving. You can throw anything into them and the dough will react like a pancake, adjusting so that the food doesn’t take a left turn at Albequerque when you used a teaspoon and a quarter of something because you didn’t measure it. Cooks, by and large, hate baking because they’re used to tweaking by hand. You can do that with dough and pancakes. You cannot do it with cakes. In general, dinner service and pastry are two different fiefdoms, and bakers’ personalities are more laid back because they’re not in the same pressure cooker that the brigade is. Of course, there are exceptions. But most restaurants don’t sell as much dessert as they do main courses, anyway. Most nights the restaurants I’ve worked in could have had only one person on pastry, because we didn’t need more than a pie’s worth of dessert all night. Dessert went out of fashion with Atkins and South Beach. For people who aren’t foodies, dessert has been passed over for more bacon.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The only thing I don’t use much is chocolate. I mean, I’ll put chocolate in pancakes a lot of the time, but it’s just a flavor note. I don’t make chocolate pancakes with chocolate chips and chocolate sauce because I’m not a Death by Chocolate sort of chick. Black raspberry chip vs. New York Super Fudge Chunk.

Ice cream is the dessert that’s my specialty, but I don’t have an ice cream maker, so I haven’t done it since Tapalaya.

First, you take a bunch of bacon and cook it in a rondeau. Then, you strain the bacon and put it aside, making ice cream base in the pan loaded with bacon flavoring with the drippings from straining it and re-adding it to the base. But the bacon just makes it insane when I prefer plain sweet cream or Mexican vanilla. Mexican vanilla is the one place skim milk is a good application, because you can make an amazing ice milk with it. Ice milk, to me, tastes better without fat because you can tell a difference between it and ice cream.

I would rather have ice cream with 23% butter fat and just eat less of it.

Except on the nights when I’ve been too tired to cook and it was immediately available. I can save my cooking for the morning, when I have the most energy for it. Getting up early and eating breakfast sets the tone for how much energy I’m going to have later. If I just drink coffee because I’m too lazy to eat, I don’t have enough strength to mask and I recede inside myself rather than sounding like a put-out dickhead because I can’t cope with my environment and it’s not personal but it sure sounds like it. I take precautions not to be that guy. I can’t get by on a piece of toast. My body needs a load of energy early on. So, I need eggs at a minimum. Eggs with more butter than people usually add and probably peanut butter toast and some Greek yogurt (full fat). Vegan sausage patties if I have them, and I don’t care whether it’s Just Egg (plant based eggs) or actual chicken eggs. One doesn’t really taste that much different than the other when I add all my spices. I love Old Bay or simply salt, pepper, and garlic. Season eggs like you would season a chicken. For instance, Montreal Chicken Seasoning is really amazing in a scramble. So are Tony Chachere’s, Paul Prudhomme’s Chicken or Red Fish Magic, and Slap Ya Mama. SYM is Cajun spice like Tony Chachere’s with the heat turned up. It’s probably beyond most people’s comfort level, so use sparingly when cooking for white people.

Another breakfast favorite is extraordinarily thick Greek pudding with cinnamon and nothing else. It makes your brain *find* sweetness in the cinnamon rather than sugar. If I had an Instant Pot, I could learn to make my own and I would, because I like it thicker than most companies make it. Yogurt is particularly good with fruit like raisins, prunes, and dried cranberries, because if you add them and put it in the fridge, they’ll plump back up. Yogurt with plums sounds more legit, right? Raisins are good in ice cream base for the same reason, particularly rum raisin and putting the alcohol in the base at the end so that the alcohol doesn’t all cook out. The bite of alcohol stands up to the fat of ice cream base very well. It will also make you feel tipsy immediately. Tread carefully. It will hit you before you really know what you’re doing.

Two scoops would have done it.

That’s an old joke for three people.

I think I’ll wrap it up there, because I have so much to discuss that doesn’t have to do with food. But I’m going to go make some breakfast first.

A Mel of An Entry

September 30, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Mel is a chef in England who loves my food posts, so I keep thinking of writing them, especially as the food entries climb to the top of the leaderboard. I got this writing prompt from a web page called “19 Creative Writing Prompts About Food for Kids.” This seems to be in my natural age bracket. I’m 46, but I identify as a nine-year-old, I just say “fuck” a lot more. 😉

Describe a trip to the supermarket. What kind of food do you find there? What would you buy? How much would you buy and why?

I follow the Michael Pollan rule at the grocery store. Don’t shop in the middle. Everything you need is on the outer rim. To add to that, the aisles are a trap of advertising the new and most convenient thing, but it’s not always food. As Pollan also says, “don’t eat anything your great grandparents wouldn’t recognize as food.” I also adhere to this last piece of advice: “Eat food. Not a lot. Mostly plants.”

I only eat meat when I go out because I don’t like preparing it at home. So, I will tell you what I think in terms of an omnivore’s diet, which for me is mostly vegan with all bets being off if I’m outside the house. I feel like I’m showing I take Pollan seriously. I do eat “mostly plants,” even when they taste like Italian sausage.

As an aside, one of the best meals I’ve ever had was ordering a Beyond Italian sausage on a bun in a restaurant, because in a restaurant they’ll drop them into the deep fryer. If you’re a vegan, buying a deep fryer is a lot of fun because there’s not a lot of saturated fat in the food, so you can afford to let loose on preparation. Deep fried sausage would taste good even if the sausage originally didn’t. You can cover up a lot of shit with fat, more if the protein is breaded. A good example would be that you may not like Beyond Beef or Impossible Burgers, but you’d have a foodgasm if I served vegan “chicken fried steak.” But people get touchy about that stuff. The idea is off-putting, so they won’t touch it. I’m never going to get people to try vegan food by telling them it’s good. We don’t have to talk about it. Just eat it. (oh, and even the most hardened vegan can relax about deep fried foods. The temperature is high enough to destroy ALL biologicals. This is not true of a flat top. Beef *will* get on your Impossible Burger at Burger King if you don’t tell them to microwave it instead……… but that little bit of beef fat is really fucking good.)

I’m also not the person that likes to fool people for fun.

I don’t categorize my diet at all. I’ll just tell you what I eat, because I’ve already told you the rules.

“Eat food. Not a lot. Mostly plants.”

I swear to you, this advice is better than you think it is. You are better off counting calories than counting fat grams and carbs. Just make sure you stay under 2,000 calories a day. You could have a healthy heart and eat a stick of butter that way. Fat in and of itself is not bad. Calories are simple math, don’t force them into calculus. You will naturally slim down by eating more plants because you won’t be eating all saturated fat and you can eat way more of things that have very few calories and plenty of vitamins. You’ll also stop craving so much sugar by eating fruit. It’s not that your body doesn’t crave sugar, it just needs complex carbohydrates and Hot Tamales won’t cut it (I am bad about taking my own advice. Hot Tamales are life.)

I cook with concepts, so I’d start with a couple of ideas.

When buying staples, you want to duplicate salts and sugars. For instance, a dish will taste better with soy sauce AND salt, or brown AND white sugar. It adds complexity, more notes in the chord. I also like to double up on fats, because olive oil can withstand higher temperatures and butter has a completely different flavor profile. You can go on baking your turkey with butter alone, but mine is better and I haven’t even tasted yours. 😉

A NOTE ABOUT STAPLES

You’re going to think laying out serious cash for staples is a mistake. Let me tell you why it’s not. Good salts, sugars, vinegars, and oils will obviously last a lot longer than the proteins you’re cooking with them. $200 spent on those things will last six months to a year depending on what you’re making, whereas you’re buying protein and veggies every week.

With expensive staples, you can afford to buy everything else on the cheap. Cooking isn’t down and dirty when I’m making a Filet Mignon. I’ve started with the best ingredient, so it’s automatically going to be worth three stars. Give me a meal that’s three stars when you started with chicken backs and necks. That’s when you’ll lose the audience because the idea of a desperately cheap ingredient that tastes bad is stuck in their minds when they think of peasant food. In my world, they don’t matter. I’m not here to impress you, I’m here to impress David Chang, who would know implicitly that I started with garbage and made him a feast. Because that’s how he cooks, and Bourdain before him.

Editor’s Note:

Here’s the dirty secret to peasant food.

Food is beholden to gentrification. If I made a flatiron for someone 30 years ago, it would have cost about the same as picking it out of the garbage. Rich white people found out what you could do with a flatiron, and now it’s an expensive steakhouse item and five to ten times what it used to cost before it was valuable to Karen and Chad. How did it get valuable so fast? There’s only two flatirons per cow.

If you’re going to make the next trend, peasant food also requires the best in spices. I would prefer to buy it all fresh, but I can’t find that and neither can you. I can always find basil, oregano, rosemary, mint, and cilantro. Harder to find more than that, but I do recommend buying them when you’re actually going to cook something within a few days, and just buy a small amount, otherwise, it will be as rotted as the salad you bought with the best of intentions.

In my own kitchen, whether it’s vegan or dairy, I like to have plain yogurt on hand. It is useful for everything breakfast and everything that needs an emergency dollop of sour cream, like putting too much ghost pepper sauce in your eggs. Also, yogurt is the best at cooling Indian dishes. You don’t have to make raita. Vindaloo is just as good with plain Greek yogurt.

Moving on, sauces are easy to make if you have containers to store them. They just won’t have preservatives in them, and there’s no shame in buying them because of it. I like Grey Poupon just as much as the next person. I also have never attempted ghost pepper wing sauce, but I eat a hell of a lot of it.

However, I’ll tell you how to make the sauces I use most frequently, even though I’ve explained some of them before. Fresh salad dressing is so much better, especially with fresh herbs. You just don’t need as much fresh vs. dry.

Top of my list is mayonnaise, but I hardly ever leave it plain. I could live on vegan Hellman’s for the rest of my life….. I make my own mayonnaise when I’m branching out into salad dressings or burger toppings…. pasta salad is also a hit around here.

You need a large bowl and whisk or a blender. I recommend a blender because mayonnaise is so much easier with both hands free.With a bowl and whisk, get ready for a workout because you’ll be holding the bottle above the eggs and whisking them simultaneously and it’s a bitch if you haven’t done it a thousand times with a chef watching to make sure it’s perfect.

You need three egg yolks, a bottle of good oil (canola, grapeseed, and avocado are all very good), and some acid. Lemon juice is classic, but other vinegars are just as good or better. I do white vinegar the most often because it tastes like the “tangy zip of Miracle Whip.” However, I have made creamy ginger salad dressing with lemon juice and sesame oil.

How thick or thin it is depends on ratio, but you can thin it out with a small amount of water (an excellent fix if you feel it start to break, and you will definitely feel it….. it’s like watching a bowl of spaghetti sauce balanced precariously on a table knowing you’re the klutzy five-year-old.)

The easiest way to get egg yolks (for me) is to crack all of them into a soup bowl and carefully pick up the yolks, placing them into the blender or mixing bowl. Please for the love of God do not tell me you have an egg separator. In cooking, your best allies are your hands. You can learn to separate eggs with a gadget, but you know implicitly when all the eggs whites have left your hand. Just don’t pick up more than one at a time. They’ll break, and you’ll have to start over.

Editor’s Note:

Always put a cutting board down if you’re going to crack eggs. Egg whites on your countertops are an invitation to food sickness. After you’ve cooked with eggs, it’s very important to scrub down all your surfaces, because egg whites are invisible. Also, much easier to use a cutting board if you dampen a tea towel and put it under. It will keep the board from moving as you chop if you’re working with plastic (or wooden and not as heavy as a butcher block). My recommendation for how to clean the kitchen no matter what is a few drops of Dawn in a bucket of warm water. It will strip the oils and biologicals off of anything, superior to something like 409 in my opinion because I’ve never worked in a kitchen where we used multipurpose cleaner instead of Dawn. If it bubbles too much, just wipe with a towel and use less soap next time. 😉

Once you get the eggs yolks in the mixing bowl/blender, add your acid- one tablespoon of whatever. Whether you’re mixing or using a blender, the acid will make the egg yolks turn white. In French, that’s called the sabayon stage, and it’s the signal you can start pouring in the oil.

I don’t have any set amount of oil to add, because I just add it until I have what I need. Three egg yolks, I’ve found, will support a large amount of oil. So, whether I’m making one meal or several, I just keep whisking until the gods whisper to stop.

At this point, you can add anything you want. I will always add a pinch of salt, but anything else is a no-go unless the mayonnaise is a compound, like, say, blue cheese dressing. Salad dressing is not fancy. It’s just mayonnaise with stuff in it. So, you can literally throw anything you want at mayonnaise and it will adjust. Throw in some garlic powder or roasted garlic, it’s an aioli. Ranch dressing is probably the most complicated on the list, and not because it’s technically more difficult. You have to shop for more herbs and spices (I also add fresh tarragon- it’s not for everyone, but I love it). For burgers, I just throw in a little ketchup and sweet relish. A good pesto sauce will rock your face with mayonnaise. You can make a killer blue cheese dressing by buying all the ingredients for ranch and just adding blue cheese crumbles to it. Either of these dressings taste much better after the flavors marry, so leaving it in the fridge overnight is advisable before you serve.

For dressings, I really like sesame oil. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. Mixing it with any kind of vinegar or citrus is just amazing. Put your oil and acid in a jar with fresh herbs and shake. You’ll have to shake it every time you use it, but it will still taste better than anything you could buy.

Peasant food is also things like lunch meat. For instance, shaved ham that you bought at Dollar Tree can be transformed with eggs, jalapenos, and butter….. even better if you have nopales as well.

I can also cook the hell out of Spam.

The trick is to get it so thin it looks like it’s been shaved, but not quite. Then, respect first contact and put it on medium-low heat (a three on electric). Walk away. Don’t touch it. Call an adult. No, seriously. It will take about 10 minutes per side (I think…. I’d just look at it and decide if it had enough color on it rather than setting a timer. Instructions are for um…. civilians.) What you’re looking for with Spam is the same carmelization that you’d get on plain ham or bacon. It’s red, then brown, then black. I like cooking Spam until it turns the color of the caramel on a creme brulee. What you end up with is something that’s crispy and perfect on the outside, a little mealy inside. Perfect for breakfast or diced for a hell of a fried rice, though I’d also saute pineapple in butter and carmelize it before adding it.

(Mel, shut it. This is Hawaiian friend rice. ;))

The staples you can skimp on are things like rice and beans. The no-name is going to taste exactly the same as brand, including buying them raw in nondescript bags and preparing them yourself.

I would explain to you how to make rice, except that making rice over the stove is hard to me when rice cookers are as low as $14, the only specialty item I have in my kitchen because it also does grains like oatmeal, brown rice, millet, quinoa, etc. You can learn to make rice over the stove from someplace else. I have $14. Why spend time explaining something that will actively make you stop reading? 😉

I don’t use water when I make rice, though. I use vegetable stock. I also don’t generally make rice plain, so I keep lots of dried cherries, cranberries, nuts, and seeds around. This is also useful for breads and pancakes, so dried fruit and flax seeds are a minimum for me. I also have hemp hearts, chia seeds, cashews, walnuts, almonds, sesame seeds, and pumpkin seeds. Putting these things into bread/carbs gets me the protein I need in addition to Beyond sausage dropped in a deep fryer (praise to you, Lord Christ).

Let’s wrap up by talking about drink staples.

I will not buy skim anything.It is devoid of everything about milk that is good for you, including taste. Plus, if you are not putting full-fat milk in your coffee, you are allowing the acid to have free reign. Let the acid bind to fat and your stomach might have a fighting chance. I use soy milk since it’s the thickest of the plant milks, but only because I can get it shipped by the case from Amazon. If I was buying from the grocery store, I’d probably buy Ripple, which my dad will be pleased to find out is not, in fact, a 40. It’s milk derived from pea plants. I call it “Gregor Mendilk.” I like it in coffee because it’s a little sweeter, like lactose free.

Always buy decent coffee. It’s like a gift to future you. However, what many people don’t do is buy a pack of Folgers and mix the expensive coffee with it. I prefer a very, very dark roast, so you won’t notice the difference and you’ll only have to buy coffee once a month or two (the time savings alone make it worth it). I also recommend having a backup Folgers, because it will keep forever. You know what’s worse than having cheap coffee? Getting up at 0500 and realizing you don’t have any coffee.

I also buy Stash teabags in obnoxious quantities. I’m going to have to buy some loose leave at some point, because I think it would be cheaper than using two or three bags at a time in the Keurig. I use that much tea in the Keurig because what you lose with it is steeping time. If you are using a kettle and pot (microwave water and you are dead to me), I recommend steeping for a lot longer than the British do. I’ll leave my teabags in for 11 minutes if that’s what it takes. I want my tea to be as full-bodied as coffee, which generally means letting it sit longer.

My mind has just been wandering regarding food. Like, what is it I really know? What advice do I have to pass on?

I don’t. I am passing on everything I have ever learned. Just follow the rules.

Eat food. Not a lot. Mostly plants.

Writing a Letter, Part II

September 29, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dear Mel,

I thought you might enjoy a food post since you’re in “learning a new kitchen” hell right now. I hope you’ll think of me when it’s time for your shiftie. If you don’t get this, I completely understand. See you in three years.

Love,

Leslie

When I think of food, I think of Mel, because she has jumped on the bandwagon of telling me to write more about it.

Because I am not up on current trends, I pick her brain looking for inspiration. I ask her food questions, she sends me pictures of Bletchley Park. It’s an even exchange. This is because asking her questions about food gives her energy. Getting the pictures is just a bonus. I don’t remember what food we were talking about at last interaction, I just think of her in general, the chef who can tell me about food culture in England and yet we’re tracking together like white on rice due to Escoffier’s meticulous detail.

If you have worked in a professional kitchen, you are beholden to him. The entire system was made by him. That’s why Julia Child was a tough motherfucker, and my language skills aren’t good enough to tell you how much of an understatement it is when you go through a program like that while female now. She was the first.

Working for OSS in Technical Services carrying around highly classified information is way less dangerous, but she did that, too. The reality is that there’s probably more sexual harassment and rape in kitchens/culinary schools than there is at OSS. I could be wrong. Those things are everywhere. Men do not like competition, and when their words fail, their fists come out- with other men. There’s a special hell for smart women, because few men truly recognize female brilliance when they see it. They’re programmed to be annoyed.

This is not any less true in the kitchen. It’s harder for women to speak up in all fields, but the kitchen is its own kind of hell because when you’re working that closely, you can’t help but touch each other. Assault happens every day of your life if some guy decides you deserve it, and some guy will. It hasn’t happened to me in every job consistently, but it has happened to me in every job. Every male line cook who has ever stood next to me saw me as his assistant. Every goddamn one.

We were paid the same, we had the same rights and responsibilities, and every day Daddy Knows Best. Nothing changes, whether they’re shit or fantastic. Male line cooks won’t ask women for advice unless they’re so young we have a matronly vibe to us- because they know they’re both screwed and scared and they can’t talk to anyone else. Men will not ask women anything until they’re afraid they’re going to lose their jobs and they have no choice but to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable to another male line cook is deadly for all kinds of personal and professional reasons….. one of them being that they’ll start treating the vulnerable kid like they treat women. Sexual harassment is real for men at work, because the amount of towel snapping and ass grabbing is highly regulated….. amongst each other.

Food isn’t worth it if you’re female. It’s just not. Those misogynistic French bastards took the thing women had been doing for millions of years unsung and decided it was valid when they learned. Just one of the many things women regret teaching men because thinking that women are the way they are (intellectually more stumped yet emotionally intelligent to the prehistoric) has so often come from theft. I can’t even imagine the numbers on an intellectual property lawsuit covering all women everywhere.

I am not saying women should quit (go on strike, really). I am saying that if you are female, you pursue this job because you can’t fucking do anything else. This is your passion, your drive, your coffee, your cocaine….. when you are high as hell on adrenaline after a rush, it becomes as primal a thrill as can be had legally. You dream pars and food cost. You have no idea what to do with yourself before 5:00PM. Days off are a story they tell little kids. Your family is a distant memory.

You didn’t come here to win. You came here to own the whole fucking thing.

And that’s what I’m thinking about when I think about Mel taking on a new kitchen. She can handle herself just fine. But I hope she has a me on the line, because there comes a time in every young man’s life where he will not accept female authority and needs to be disabused of the notion. This is probably best done by a chef barking down. But when they don’t, there’s safety in numbers and laughter in revenge.

I hope it’s going well for her. At least well enough to get a “heard.”

What’s On Brand for Me

September 27, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What brands do you associate with?

Sometimes I think about “if I were an influencer, what would I want to promote?” It’s just a fun thought exercise, but if I had enough power to get things done in the advertising industry, here’s the people I’d like to give me stuff for free because I’ve been singing their praises for years without them cutting me a check.

Bombas Socks

I got the recommendation from Pete Holmes and have never looked back. Just order 10 pairs and throw your other ones out. They’re just the best ever and I will buy them until I’m dead unless they do something lame like change them in any way at all ever. They are ADHD/Autism relief in a box.

American Giant Hoodies

The Original Hoodie is the only jacket you will ever need. It’s double weight, double stitched, and all the hardware is strong and comfortable. No rough edges and extraordinarily well made. If you have teenagers, you need to buy one for yourself and one for them or you’ll never see yours again. Can’t find it? Check your daughter’s closet.

Starbucks Coffee

I don’t like Starbucks because it’s the best. Far from it. I like Starbucks because I’m ADHD and it tastes the same all over the world. It tastes the same on Connecticut Ave. in downtown DC as it does at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. I checked. (CDG does have chocolate cereal milk lattes and I will die mad they don’t make them here.)

Nescafe

Talking about Paris reminded me that Starbucks was the best coffee I had while I was there. I think “French Roast” is a lie they tell little kids. My dad and I didn’t find a decent independent coffee shop or a Starbucks anywhere. The Starbucks was at the airport. So, I became absolutely reliant on the little packets of Nescafe the maids left for us at our hotel, which does not taste like American instant coffee at all. It was good. Therefore, I would pitch Nescafe all over the world because you can stuff packets in your suitcase in advance just in case you get somewhere and nothing is above Folgers with extra water. I know I will have a personal friend living in France or a French reader that will tell me I just went to the wrong coffee shop. Please, prove me wrong. That would be great. I need a place to go the next time I’m in Paris, and I want to live there for a few months so we can stretch out. I can already tell you that you can just show up at the Musee D’Orsay the first couple of days after I arrive. No worries I won’t be there. Vincent and I need some alone time. Maybe I can sneak some Nescafe into “our room.”

Chuy’s

No clothing brand represents me better when they’re on point. I think they have the best graphic designers in the business. I have several t-shirts and a hoodie that I wear constantly, except the one that says “Expecto Burrito.” I gave that one to Goodwill. Yes, I know Chuy’s is a restaurant, but their merchandise is very affordable and well made. I think my favorite Chuy’s shirt has the outline of the Chuy’s fish with Walter White hat and sunglasses. It says “Heisenchuy.” I also have a very cute kids’ t-shirt that’s a throwback to 80s Nintendo and says “Super Tex-Mex Brothers.” It’s perfect because I’ve worn it enough that now it actually looks retro instead of a current kids’ shirt. I also have one that’s still in production. It’s a Tattooine-type desert with a lone man and says something about “Juan Solo.”

Bourbon Moth

I love Jason Hibbs’ designs, and I would fill my whole house with his furniture if I could afford to commission Jason or buy the equipment to make it all. Having no idea how to construct anything, I think everything would turn out better if I just paid him. Jason is the kind of furniture maker that you want to entrust with your daughter’s first rocking chair when you find out she’s pregnant, or the crib she’s eventually going to need. You don’t just trust anyone with those projects, and he’s at the top of my list. Here’s how much I would trust Jason:

I would trust Jason’s vision if I lost a child, as well.

CIA/FBI/DNI/DIA/Pentagon/Branches of the Military,etc.

I’m putting the names of the agencies in here because I can’t find the name of the company that makes their swag. So, I know you can’t just walk into any of these gift shops, but you have options in terms of seeing if you know anyone. I say this because Zac has brought me several things from those shops and they’ve all been as well-made as my American Giant hoodie. None of the t-shirts have had tags, all the hardware is smooth, the workout clothes are double weight so you can run in he winter. I am sure that if I could find the name of the company, they make clothes without logos and I’d be there for those, too. It’s the difference between getting a jersey at Eastern Market (knockoff) and ordering it directly from the NFL. With my CIA baseball cap, I loved the logo, but I don’t wear it all the time to look like I’m pitching for USG. It’s so comfortable on my skin that I can’t take it off. ADHD Life, the struggle is real, etc I also walk a lot and “it’s beginning to look a lot like fuck this” becomes a refrain in my head when I don’t want to take the time to get fixed up; it won’t last. My baseball cap feels even more comfortable on those days. I don’t know how they would actually want me to support them, but I know I can’t not. My country is depending on me to want soft clothing, and who am I to stop them from providing it? Before CIA, I had a GAP hat that was just as comfortable and I wore it for 15 years straight. By the end it looked like I had old underwear on my head. I did not care. This hat has the same vibe and I’m looking forward.

Celestial Seasonings

When I say I switch to something innocuous like fruit punch when I’m not drinking caffeine, I really mean cold brew Red Zinger at obnoxious amounts. Obnoxious. I should buy stock.

Wendy’s

I don’t really care about their food. I want to work for them. I would have a riot in that writing room if I was on the social media team. Also, I have been repping their French fries and Frosties since I was a shorty (for the rest of the world, that’s American slang for a child. I am still short.). To me, theirs are the ones that taste best because they actually taste like they have real potato in them somewhere. They’re not as crispy, but they’re authentic. They’ll actually put a little more color on them for you if you ask nicely and wait patiently, just like at In-n-Out. I just think Wendy’s are better than In-n-Out because I prefer a thicker cut (more like they’d serve at a steakhouse).

McDonald’s

I want free smoothies and soft serve for life. I don’t know what I would do for such a favor, but I am willing to negotiate heavily. I know it won’t cost you much because the ice cream machine is always cleaning itself. Maybe not. I can drink the hell out of those smoothies. If you start making orange vanilla with the soft serve, you can just build me a house in the ball pit.

Chicago Cutlery

They’re some of my favorite knives because they fit my hand, whether it’s chef or santoku. They’re also cheap and hardly ever need sharpening. I choose to get mine sharpened over getting another one because even though it’s the same price or more expensive, your knife grows into your hand and vice versa. It’s like getting a fountain pen. Once you bend the nib to your handwriting, you cannot lend it out. That’s because the nib will bend to someone else, and it won’t go back to you. It’s the same in the kitchen, even for pastry chefs because their cuts need to be even more precise than the cooks who just throw things into a pan. Your knife becomes as close to you as a lover, why we often name our knives after women. It’s an extension of our bodies, where we cut to the beats of our hearts.