I Have No Heart or Brain

December 28, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

How have your political views changed over time?

They say that if you are a conservative when you are young, you have no heart. They say that if you are liberal when you’re old, you have no brain. They do not suggest the unexplored third option, the permanently exhausted political science student who really doesn’t like any of you. 😉 Actually, I think it’s also due to age. Gen X (technically, I’m a Xennial) is now the adult in the room, because people older than us don’t understand technology, people younger don’t know how to function without it. We are the hybrids that remember what it was like to function on paper, the glue holding pre- and post- internet together.

If there’s anything I credit with my political views changing, it’s being in college before the Internet was really a thing. I was still fascinated by T1 connections at that point- you mean it’s always on? I don’t have to dial into anything? Plus, when I got to university, I was studying poli sci in school and my boss in IT was also a lawyer.

A lawyer who had a t-shirt that said, “Charter Member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.” Today, this would be ominous. It was 2000, so I still laughed. I’m not sure anyone knew back then how this whole thing would turn out, but I didn’t have Donald Trump on my Bingo card, I’ll tell you that much.

I will say that I think younger people than me are coming up with the best ideas on the liberal end of the spectrum, and I think what being conservative in your elder years means to me is deciding which of these ideas are too wild to fund and which ones are worth pursuing. At its heart, universal basic income is a good idea. Other countries have implemented it and it works. But how do we scale up something like that without breaking the funds available for such a thing?

When it comes to money, I want everyone at the table in terms of ideology. I want James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on every single issue, not what passes for dialogue now. It’s not a good idea if you can’t explain a liberal idea to a conservative or vice versa. That’s because 99% of the time people don’t get what they want because they don”t actually know the question.

The liberals don’t have worse ideas, they just can’t sell them. I think it was Aaron Sorkin who wrote that originally, but it has stuck with me. The Republicans demand complete buy-in and loyalty, the Democrats don’t because we like free thinkers. While not a bad thing, this has cost Democrats DEARLY and they have no idea how to fix it.

I’m including me in that statement, because I’d like to see the party embrace bigger and better ideas, but also to have a concrete idea of how to fund them. There is no sense of polity in the Democratic Party, because both Bill Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are Democrats, but their platforms were/are worlds apart. Hillary Clinton’s is closer, but that’s only because she stayed in presidential politics longer.

I am definitely a Clinton Democrat, because it’s the lens through which I take in information. I voted for Bill in 1996, my first election….. although I also went to the Republican convention in 1992 and was thrilled about it, because back then it was just a chance to go to a major convention, because first of all I was a child and couldn’t vote. Second of all, George H.W. Bush grew to love both Clintons, so I think he’d forgive me for voting for them.

In terms of the way I was raised, I didn’t really know anything about my parents or grandparents’ political leanings until I was older, because they didn’t wear hats like they were pitching for either party. The only thing I remember from being a young kid is that my grandfather did not like LBJ, because of the Viet Nam war.

Fair.

But if you do a little digging, you find that it’s not the whole story. The thing that people are most known for isn’t necessarily what is going to do the most good or the most damage from a historical perspective. I agree with my grandfather that LBJ made some terrible calls during Viet Nam, but we also wouldn’t have gotten Great Society passed without him.

It is controversial to the general public, but not in political science circles to say that Lyndon Johnson was objectively a better president than John Kennedy. That when you take away the mythology of Camelot, Kennedy was wonderful for the American image and Johnson was more effective legislatively because he knew how to whip. I do think that John Kennedy deserved to be president, and that he was good at it- most political science students agree that it would be easier and more fair to compare both of them at full term, but we’ll never get that chance.

What I do not think is that we’ve managed to capture the fever behind one idea like “Great Society” that will get us elected….. and The New Deal before it. We need people on the extreme fringe of the party to come up with the new and better ideas, so that the more conservative members of the party can red team them. It’s not “shooting everything down,” but it seems that way because a red team’s job is to take you to the mat before you’re in front of the Republicans.

When I think about red teaming now, I think about Molly Ivins, who was not afraid to call out hypocrisy or bullshit on either side of the aisle, and was in fact more mystified by Texas politics than anything else. She thought it was wilder and weirder, and proved it every day in her columns.

I am not standing outside looking in, I am definitely a Democrat. But at the same time, I do not discount conservative ideas. I discount bigotry, and that has become 99% of the Republican platform. How we got here is not really a mystery. If you’ve studied the rise of Hitler, you know that what is happening now is what happened in Germany- the people were starving for a leader, and they chose the most racist asshole they could find because he parroted all their shitty beliefs.

Trump is not Hitler in his later years, but we’re ignoring the signs of fascism nonetheless. Here are two things that you really need to take in about this, and they’re important:

Trump discredited CIA on day one. He went into their house and told them point blank that he trusted the Russians more than them. So, the message from day one was “don’t believe the intelligence experts that have historically been the best in the world, and only pay attention to me.”
Trump discredited the journalists. So, not only should you not believe the raw data coming out of CIA (filtered for publication through State and the committees on intelligence in Congress), you should not believe any stories written about it.

Trump has the same outlook on domestic policy. Don’t read any stories about me, only look at me. Meanwhile, he’s not really running the country because he doesn’t know fuck all. Getting his whole family security clearances was downright offensive to the spies I’ve met, because that is not a community you join easily or lightly. You have to be trusted beyond a reasonable doubt to carry that kind of information, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Jared Kushner is not one of those people, and neither is Donald Trump.

The president of the United States WAS NOT QUALIFIED to see the documents he saw, and managed to show other world leaders things that he should have had in his possession because he’s the president and should have had enough sense he was actively harming American interests.

But that doesn’t matter, because he’s a Russian UI.

Putin’s revenge for Khrushchev’s treatment by Kennedy was to make us implode, and I believe it worked. There are people who still believe with a passion that the election was stolen due to Russian interference that Trump welcomed. Trump didn’t want to be president. He wanted to have been president. I believe that he sincerely thought he was going to lose, and 2016 was a bid to get more people into his DC hotel, not a legitimate presidential campaign. Hillary and Donald have known each other too damn long for either one of them not to see through the other’s bullshit, and I don’t think that Trump really thought he had a chance, which is why he was such a total asshole the entire campaign. I honestly think he was wondering “what do I have to do to lose?” By the end.

But we elected him anyway, and the rank and file judges and State employee jobs stayed open for months because there was no one to direct presidential appointments.

People, the damn president of the United States didn’t know he was president of Puerto Rico, and that’s just okay because people in the US don’t know that, either. Do you think that the president is less the president to our territories?

The president also commands lots of people overseas being Commander in Chief and American representative in global affairs. Honestly, the fact that Trump got to be that for us is alarming, and other heads of state noticed. Do you really think that Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, Jacinda Barrett, and especially Sauli Niinistö (president of Finland- rake the forests? Get out of here with that bullshit.) and Kim Kielsen (premier of Greenland- I’m sorry. You want to buy WHAT now?) were in any way impressed with us at all? The only reason we didn’t lose the plot with the UK is that they’re experiencing the same wave of conservatism that we are.

If there’s any way in which my political views have changed, it’s by leaving the Democratic and Republican parties alone and just doing my own thing by studying world systems. I’m looking at the forest, not the trees. I love dating someone who works in intelligence, because I am with someone who also has the ability to look at global systems and not get stuck in the minutiae of daily life. The world looks different when you’re talking about countries at war and humanitarian aid and everything that comes with it, vs. the fact that Chuy’s is too far away for my liking and Whole Foods continues to be out of the veggie dogs I like.

Perspective.

Years ago, I was on IM with Supergrover and I was telling her that I was having a really crappy day….. and that one of my cases to call back didn’t have a name at the top, so I dialed the number and the woman answered “Doctors Without Borders.” I died for a second because absolutely anything I was thinking about that day melted away with perspective. There’s never going to be a day in my life more stressful than being a doctor in a war torn country.

It’s like working for NASA and actually being an astronaut. Not the person on the ground that has every resource available to them at a moment’s notice. No, the guy who’s stuck in a tin can having only what they brought with them. IF MSF doesn’t bring a medication with them, it may be unlikely to get a local supply. We’re not talking total health here- we’re talking HIV vaccinations and TB tests.

So, again, if we’re talking about politics, then I’m probably not the person to ask how to fix the party.

But I think the first step is leaving your heart and mind out of it, and committing not to elect someone who tells you that what you’re seeing and hearing is the truth, when he’s just the mouthpiece.

In this case, you should absolutely pay attention to the people behind the curtain. They’ll be the ones trying to save us from ourselves.

Strawberry Letter #23

December 23, 2023December 23, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Share what you know about the year you were born.

The number one hit by The Brothers Johnson in the title was at the top of the charts the day I was born. When the funk bass starts, and you move; if you have heard Louis start that vamp it’s still going on in your head right now……. so addictive that you might have to find another earworm to get rid of this one.

(Small aside- if you are a Louis Johnson fan (bassist), Thundercat is his heir apparent.)

I was delivered on September 10th, 1977, so for most of what happened during that year I was only marginally present. Jimmy Carter had just been inaugurated as president the previous January (election in ’76, the first presidential election since Richard Nixon resigned). As far as I can gather, it was not one of those years that had a huge historical event. It was a year in which we were recovering from being led by a criminal, which has no bearing on today.

There were smaller accomplishments.

The first official flight of the Concorde took off from JFK after having had several successful test flights. It cut travel time to London in half. Interestingly enough, cutting the flight time in half wasn’t the end goal. As I grew, the Concorde got better. Its fastest speed run from the US to the UK was 2:52:59, and then it was discontinued (thank God, for environmental reasons, yet still sad…… I don’t know why. I wasn’t buying tickets).

That wasn’t the only advance in business, though, because 1977 was one of the years in which personal computer companies were popping up everywhere. Instead of a mainframe and dumb terminals (like at the office), you could get a fully functioning machine that fit on your desk.

Kids, I’m taking a moment out to say that because things have changed so much, I am not sure that you’ll have a reference for this, so I’ll explain.

Before the personal computer, at an office you’d have what was called the “server room,” and every desktop monitor was reflecting what was going on in the server room. None of the desktop terminals functioned independently, similar to today, when it is impossible to use some apps without being connected to the Internet and for the very same reason- the processing is done on the web servers, not on your local device….. which is why a solid network connection is every bit as vital as the CPU/RAM/graphics card/etc. But back then, there was no “internet,” there was the intranet. The server you were connected to was physically located near you, because everything was a wired connection.

I do not think that the Internet would be what it is today if we hadn’t learned how to pipe data through a wireless connection. I believe this was possible because our drive to be wireless all the time came from internet connectivity through your cell. Having a basic web browser on a dumb phone led to everyone being connected, all the time, for better or for worse. But in 1977, we couldn’t see it coming yet. We were satisfied with creating documents and saving them to a floppy disk for easy carrying….. until you bent it…… and then, cell phones only supported calling. Short Messaging System (SMS) had not been invented.

We could not see the future, but how computers operate in 2023 is merely an evolution, it is not wildly different from anything we did back then. What we learned at networking an office turned out to be instrumental in how we network the whole world at once.

In terms of the world at the time, things were tense with the USSR, but in different ways than they are today…. the biggest reason is that the Soviet Republic fell apart, and now there’s only Russia. Any dreams they had of world dominance went with the republic’s collapse. They didn’t have the money to be big players anymore, and honestly, I don’t know that they have it now. As with American leaders, they make it look good….. but who knows what cards Putin is really holding?

(The answer is Hilary Clinton, btw. When the former Secretary of State to the most powerful nation in the world says Putin is masterminding our demise by having a Russian UI in the White House, you believe her. I’m sure your next question is “what’s a UI?” Useful Idiot- the stooge planted in a country who doesn’t do anything outright evil to show they’re being traitorous, just makes mistakes that are bad for American interests because they’re being manipulated by a foreign state. When we elected Trump, we learned that Russia thought they were getting a UI, then even they were surprised with 45 because there was so much emphasis on the “I,” not so much with the “U.” You get what you pay for……… I’m sure Putin thought it was marvelous when 45 went into CIA’s house and ripped them a new asshole. I didn’t. “Say that to Martin Freeman’s FACE.”)

Speaking of Hillary, I don’t know what she was doing in 1977, but I do know that it was near the beginning of of Hillary becoming a one-person monolithic idea of who a president’s partner should be; as such, it was the beginning of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” But the 70s would have been the beginning of social justice awareness, because back then was when the emphasis on social justice really took hold with white people. It’s not that there weren’t white people interested in social justice before, it’s that American Christianity divided in half, and the horseshoe of extremities divided into Evangelical white supremacy apologists and “the woke.” If white supremacy was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for everyone.

Except there is no way for Jesus to be a white supremacy apologist because the image painted of him in every white church in America looks like Jesus was the only French baby born in the Middle East, and at that time, it would have been a severe anomaly because people didn’t generally travel that far, first of all, and second it’s impossible for him to be white as as a descendent of Jesse and David. It was part of Matthew’s whole schtick. He was the captain in charge of “see? I told you he’s the Messiah. I’ve followed quite a few.” Kidding, but not inaccurate. Matthew focused on proof…. not of Jesus’ divinity as the actual son of God, but proving to Jews that he (waves hand) was the Messiah they were looking for.

But in the end, it wasn’t proof that mattered. It was “how do we appropriate Jesus’ culture and religion to fit our justified racism and inequality?” Thus, the Democrats eschewed religion and the cancer of racism spread into the Republican Party at an alarming rate, because they didn’t have to believe racism was wrong.

That’s not limited to the US, by the way. In the 1970s, they were also struggling with this very idea in South Africa. As Trevor Noah has pointed out, when South Africa came up with apartheid, they researched all the ways you could be racist, and took the worst of each system and applied it. Guess what? Most of the really evil stuff came from us.

If you remember nothing else about South Africa, it’s that Jim Crow laws are directly responsible for apartheid being implemented and maintained, because we built the system that had the largest impact on apartheid policies. So, the cancer that is Evangelical white supremacy spread and made South Africa malignant, too.

Even Thai people applaud Ho=Ho great job.

It was Barry Goldwater who warned us, and we didn’t like AuH2O, so we didn’t listen and now we’re fucked:

Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.

Want to hear something really interesting? Goldwater was a progressive Republican, the people most lonely at parties. You cannot convince me otherwise if he also said, “you don’t have to be straight to be in the military. You have to be able to shoot straight.” Millions of gay men have said, “I can do that.” Despite it, “those preachers” became the voice of Christianity and people like Jimmy Carter, Barry Goldwater, and me are left out of the conversation.

I was telling a Facebook group who was, at the time, coming down hard on Evangelical colonialism through mission trips. I said, “I am a Jimmy Carter Democrat. I know that mission trips on the whole are problematic, but I’m a Jimmy Carter Democrat. I didn’t talk about faith, I helped build them a house.” I got emotionally pummeled into the ground. Par for the course. American Christianity as a whole does not like Jimmy Carter’s version of Christianity unless it’s a meme of him and not the rest of us.

Stephen Colbert said it better than the rest of us, the question we should have asked ourselves before we let the Republican Party become a theocracy:

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.

So, if there’s anything good that came out of 1977, it’s that I got the liberal version of Christianity in the Methodist church…………….

Just like Hillary Clinton.

Special K -and- O Canada

December 14, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

From October of 2003.

I got an e-mail from someone who works at ExxonMobil the other day, interested because I mentioned being an out lesbian and working there in the same weblog.

So I talked a little about my experiences in Fairfax, both the good and the bad. I started with Kathleen and I walking in Dupont Circle and picking up a copy of The Washington Blade, then nearly dropping our ice cream on the pavement as we read a quote from senior media advisor, Tom Cirigliano. I’ll paraphrase it here: “ExxonMobil does not support domestic partner benefits, but in countries that allow LEGALLY BINDING gay marriage…” We started planning our trip to Vermont that afternoon.

But the real fun began after we came home.When Kathleen presented our certificate to Human Resources, they acted like they had never heard of civil unions, and to be fair, they probably hadn’t. We were assigned a caseworker and given a possible date at which we might be given more information. That date came and went. We finally called back. We were given another date at which we might possibly be given information. We went to church. We prayed. We crossed fingers.

Another month went by, and the date at which they said they’d call us back came and went, and we were assigned another date at which they might possibly give us more information. It was a nightmare of bureacratic red tape. What we didn’t know is that the senior media advior had spoken without any clear definition of what he was talking about. They were literally having to write a proposal for how they were going to include us from the moment we presented them with our certificate. No advance planning had gone into it, presumably because they thought no one would take them up on it.

Another few months went by, and I was hired by ExxonMobil Research & Engineering, which alleviated our concerns about joint health coverage. Now that I had my own, we weren’t concerned about my getting ill- but it was still a justice issue in that each of us wanted to be listed as the other’s spouse in case of a true emergency.

Another two or three months went by, and we finally sent a letter that was very kind but firm- something to the effect of “if the next time we meet we are only given another date at which we might possibly be given more information, we would like to seek legal counsel.” It was worded more diplomatically than that, but our intentions were clear nonetheless. I sent copies of every e-mail and every transcription of every voice mail to the ACLU, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and sincerely thought about the Washington Post. In retrospect, I would have had a lot of compassion for the people in HR if they had just e-mailed us and said, “we didn’t really think anybody was going to use this, so be patient with us while we write this thing from the ground up.” Wading through months and months with no inkling that any information would ever be forthcoming was the hardest part.

This morning as I sat down to write I didn’t particularly feel like writing about anything. But people who work on the assumption that you only write when you feel like writing don’t get book deals. So with that in mind, I went to Yahoo! and searched for “writing prompts.” The first site that came up was a writing resources page for people who teach junior high. Most of them were pretty inane, but this one just cracked me up: “What does Canada mean to you?”

I’m assuming that this prompt was meant for Canadian teachers wanting to bring out a small bit of patriotism in their students. But in the interest of having a good laugh, I’m going to attempt it anyway. So here it is, for your viewing pleasure:

What Canada Means to Me
by Leslie Lanagan

I am pretty sure that if Canada weren’t around, it would have taken the world a lot longer to realize just how ignorant and egocentric Americans can be. For instance, when I was in high school, I dated a girl from Fort St. John. Her accent was so thick you could cut it with a knife, so when we would go out together, people would instantly start in on this conversation in various forms:

Random person: Hey, that’s a great accent. Where are you from?

Girl I Dated: I’m from Canada.

RP: Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone from there. Do you guys have Christmas on the same day?

GID: (flustered) Of course.

RP: Say out and about. Come on, please!

GID: Ok, let’s just get this out of the way: Out, about, house, mouse, boot, shoe, sorry. Is there any other word in the English language that you’d like to hear me pronounce before we move on?

RP: End a sentence with “eh.” Come on, you know you want to.

GID: (turning to me) That guy is a total fucking hoser, eh?

As an American citizen, Canada also means easy access to good Cuban cigars and cheap European imports. Hey, let’s not forget that even though I am sympathetic to the fact that Canadians have little to no identity outside their own country, I am also one of the egocentric bastards they do their best to avoid.

The end.

18th and Potomac

November 17, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

Sometimes I use old West Wing episode titles rather than making my own because I live in DC. They’re plays on words for something that really happened. 18th and Potomac is where Mrs. Landingham died in a car wreck. The car wreck in this case is that my smallest dream (therefore my most desperate, my heartbeat) is the least affordable- a house in the DMV is going to set you back enormously. You, your children and grandchildren may buy well and it returns your investment fivefold. But in order to do that, it takes about half a million dollars (at least- better if it’s a 500k downpayment to make the mortgage reasonable).

That’s because in order to get an actual deal, you want to buy the worst house in the best location…. anyone can make money in Georgetown these days no matter what you buy, but the jump in value will be much smaller from the time you move in to move out.

It takes special skill to buy a house in SE Waterfront, which one of my friends did in 2001. If you weren’t there, you have no concept of what it looked like. It was a concrete jungle in a neighborhood with high crime, and this is important, at the time. He completely overhauled the entire thing, building custom everything. That house is worth at least a million just because of the land, more because the house is absolutely one of a kind.

In DC, the sky is the limit on real estate, because as I’ve mentioned before, DC is only 60 sq. miles. It moves fast and furious. I know other cities are more expensive- I’m not sure that the market is as consistently volatile with a third of the House rotating in and out with all their staff, the Senate rotating in and out every six years with all their staff, and the military, intelligence agencies, and State all having jobs that move them around the world (even if the DMV is home base). DC is a permanent address for fewer people than it isn’t.

You don’t get to know our city until you know our poverty. This is because poor people don’t move in the same way as middle class government salaries. Lower economic classes tend to grow where they’re planted because they don’t have the money to do anything else. Therefore, the poorest people are the richest institutional memory. You don’t go to them for history of the nation, you go to them for the history of DC. They are the authority on the riots in the 60s, the night Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated (DC is heavily black, and I think at one point the majority), the best mumbo sauce, go-go music, Duke Ellington, and, apparently, public television. We have three stations within, like 30 miles. It’s fabulous. This Old House is always on somewhere. DC isn’t a city, it’s a whole mood. God willing, I will live here a very long time.

I will never in my lifetime make enough money to buy a house in the neighborhood where I rent, though. The house is just “nice” in comparison to the location, and it’s gorgeous. My mother left me enough money for a down payment on a small house in northeast Texas if I wanted to buy it today (I’d be taxed at 40%, so no thank you), or a better area when I turn 65. Even with leaving the money where it is and not touching it until then (I’m 46 now), it still wouldn’t be a down payment in Silver Spring, Maryland….. I am open to moving within a certain radius, like Hagersville (home of the Southern MD Blue Crabs, who happen to be in the same league with the Sugar Land Skeeters, my home town minor league). I would also consider buying a small house in Baltimore, because getting between the two cities is stupid easy and Baltimore is much, much cheaper. I could even commute if I had to, more and more possible with remote work.

It’s funny, I never would have said that I wanted a house here until I had been here awhile. I lived in Alexandria, Virginia the first time I moved in 2001. (I’ve lived in both MD and VA, but not DC proper…. like I tell people I’m from Houston, when I lived in a suburb for most of it.) I thought of myself as Virginian until I’d been back for more time than I thought it would take. There is a much different vibe in Maryland. MUCH different. You feel it- going over the Potomac introduces you to something you ignore in the South….. Yankees.

Maryland is the last state under the Mason-Dixon line. No one is undermining its pedigree as part of the south. However, our culture is led by New England, not Virginia. Annapolis has politics closer to Trenton and Albany than Richmond. The difference between someone raised in the North and in the South becomes clear…… and racism isn’t everything, but it’s a lot.

The further you go into the suburbs on the Virginia side, the more people make jokes about this being “St. Bob’s Country,” where “Bob” is Robert E. Lee…. or that if your last name is “Lee” in that area, you are either of THE Lees or you are Chinese. At no time do those people recognize why that’s not funny. If you have any blowback to any of their “jokes,” they will remind you that Robert E. Lee gave the government the land for Arlington Cemetery. To push back on that one is never a good idea, because it’s their only sword in the fight; they get feral when you knock it out of their hands because they’ve lost the high ground so goddamn fast.

Living in Maryland is escaping all of that, because once you cross the river, Virginia isn’t even a thing anymore. The time it takes to adjust to the culture between Maryland and Virginia is longer than it takes to drive here, I’ll just put it like that.

Culture is the entire reason we don’t cross-pollinate, why Zac thinks I live a thousand miles away and Google Maps ETA (0633) tells me that if I leave right now in an Uber it will take 33 minutes…. and it’s only two and a half hours door to door if I took public transportation the whole way (leaving out shortcuts like being picked up at the Metro or Ubering from the station to take care of Oliver, who is a dog. It would cut off my commute to Zac by a large margin if he lived near the Metro, but he hadn’t met me before he decided to move (that was a joke, Zachary- please laugh).

No one I know who lives in Virginia is someone who thinks they’re a racist, and I don’t either unless they’re just white and that’s the only standard we’re going on. I do, because even when people aren’t overtly racist, they still benefit from racism.

Racism is a top-down system of oppression that minorities cannot duplicate. Living in that system, upholding it makes one racist. To be antiracist is to be loud about the fact that you are calling out behaviors you exhibit; you have to realize that you are at least currently steeped in those attitudes if you refuse to grow away from them. I am a huge fan of the writer who, I think, Tweeted that they were tired of catering to old people that lived through the entire ass Civil Rights movement and didn’t learn shit from Shinola.™ I’m paraphrasing.

I have become louder about this as I’ve realized that my white partners have not made the connection and I am too pissed off to be with another white person who cannot admit complicity. I mentioned this was an issue with Daniel, but he’s not the only Southern white person I’ve ever dated, either. Don’t think that shit didn’t happen more than once. I didn’t get the lines about Richmond from nowhere. One of my partners had bigger fuckin’ problems than Daniel about it…. and the worst part is that white people characterize them as jokes because they think minorities are cute.

In “Go Tell a Watchman,” Harper Lee makes the point that white people like taking care of black people and race relations would have been fine if they hadn’t stopped seeing the white savior complex as a good thing. Whites weren’t hiring black people after the Civil War. They could get slave wages at best without colleges being open to them.

Abolutionists/Progressives had left slavery in the dust (introducing egregious hiring practices, redlining, the Tuskeegee experiments and Henrietta Lacks), trading it for their do-gooder feelings. “If we give to charity, we can help minorities by keeping them from falling into the river and not exploring why the current is so strong.

This is where my red mist rage is directed. Fuck the white savior complex. The Green Book was a fucking masterpiece at highlighting bullshit, brilliant because it was so fucking atrocious and satirical- if you were picking up the subtext and feeling more tender toward the black queer musical genius than his fucking driver. That scene in the bar. My God. I have never wanted to give a standing ovation to a musician more. Let’s not ignore the queer part. Mahershala Ali played a big hate double ticket.

I am not “progressive Karen,” the virtue-signaling haircut with an attitude. I won’t unload on someone about it unless it naturally comes up. Cultural norms about race inform those about sexuality. I don’t want to beat white people over the head, I want to say how I feel and have the right people come to me.

If you’re a white person who can’t admit they’re a racist by being enculturated as one, we don’t have much in common. I’d rather spend my time around people who share my values and goals. Which, I might add, means I get along more with queer POC than white, because there’s a special hell for people who have more than one minority at play. I’m not just white and queer. I have two information processing disorders, mentally ill and physically disabled…. although mental illness is not a processing disorder and I am making that distinction. That is the stone cold fact that “mental health goes up and down, but AuDHD will affect you (suck) no matter what”

I am AuDHD (autism and ADHD, I can’t remember if I’ve directly explained the word before- telling you about it in case you want to watch a video on YouTube or something. That’s been the most helpful for me- here’s what to do now that you know. The bitch of it is that autism and ADHD present the same way a lot of the time, but the coding is generally different on the backend. You’re trapped, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.).

I also have a Bipolar II diagnosis. I’m a big hate double ticket in that I am both making people uncomfortable with my queerness in some arenas, and infantilized in others. Discrimination either comes from straight culture not accepting me, or all people with wrongheaded ideas about autism, ADHD, and bipolar rendering me an incapable adult….. or alternatively, the reaction to saying I’m autistic is generally “you don’t look autistic.” When I figure out how to do that, I’ll let you know. If you know an autistic person, you know one autistic person. No two people are alike, and AuDHD is more complicated than autism alone.

Therefore, I feel incapable enough on my own time. I do not need any reinforcement in this arena.

Editor’s Note:

All of the sudden, I have developed an *immediate* need for coffee. Hold please.

Now that I have coffee next to me, we can get back to why living in DC is so important to me.

I would have not grown in any of these ways regarding antiracism if I hadn’t moved, full stop. Living here in 2001 was only my second exposure to black people that didn’t speak AAVE, and had a completely different culture (the first was meeting black people in The Bahamas- Freeport specifically- with a British [RP] accent). I am no longer a product of my northeast Texas upbringing, and I just thought about this- I was no longer a product of my upbringing the moment we landed in the Bahamas.

I got out of my culture, and I noticed. The repetition of that idea had an impact, that black culture was not monolithic. The first time was in the 80s. The second was 2001. Most people don’t ever learn that when they’re eight or nine in the Deep South; most people in the Deep South don’t go to The Bahamas, and I’m not being an asshole. Look it up. People rarely leave their state and don’t have passports, and this is not limited to the South. They’re oblivious because sometimes they can’t get out, sometimes they don’t wanna. That’s a crapshoot.

And, of course, even then you’re taking a huge bet on cultural awareness. Americans are Americans everywhere we go. If there’s anything that going to The Farm would do for me that I’d value more than anything else is language skills in something besides English…..

I’m closer to being fluent in Spanish than anything else- I identify as gringo Texican- the white girl with seven abuelas in three different cities. Incidentally, I also have a Lebanese Omm (Arabic for “mother”). She speaks the Levantine dialect, so I’m sorry if this is not the word for mother in others- I was trying to be sweet. I am at least worth a “habibi” from her most of the time… (it’s Arabic for “sweetheart,” or something like it…. akin to mulkvisti in Finland- “one I hate less than the others”).

The other invaluable asset to spy training is not looking like so much of an American when I travel…. especially when not starting to count from my thumb in Europe can cause such devastation. 😉

Luckily, I don’t have to go to The Farm to pick up all these things, because between retired spies on YouTube and the plethora of non-fiction books on espionage I have enough information to be able to adapt into a lot of cultures. I can’t always look “not American,” but I can at least be aware of cultural norms even if I can’t social mask them.

In effect, my smallest dream is fulfilling my largest. In order to travel, I need to know the feel of home. The feel of home is being excited about world events, making history… have always made history.

Because let’s face it. When you’re talking about the United States,

I live in the history.

Now, not only is DC where we keep the history of the nation, I am part of it. I am loud about it in some spaces, quiet in others. I will never be anything but a silent observer in Frederick Douglass’s house, the African American History Museum, or staring at the stunning photographs on the wall at Ben’s Chili Bowl. It’s actually, in some ways, a more moving experience than the entire museum. I reserve the right to change my mind when I go back to see Chadwick Boseman’s original Black Panther costume. He’s a hometown sensation and I absolutely will stand in front of it and cry.

What I have noticed through having a blog is that being a silent observer allows me to take that information away and slam it into the faces of people who most need to hear it. I am not responsible for changing the black community, I am responsible for changing my own….. living where I most want to live in the world.

Who Doesn’t?

November 8, 2023November 8, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do you need time?

We all need more time to understand things than we think we do, and are trying our dead-level best to overschedule; we’re all going place to place and taking in none of them. When I travel again, I’d like to stay at least a week if possible. It takes a while for my body clock to accept a new rhythm, particularly going east. Jet lag was objectively worse coming back to DC from Oregon than it was in the moments I was taking the obligatory Portland airport photo (iykyk). I am using jet lag as an example of needing time because it’s the best way I know how to explain autism to a layperson. Imagine feeling like you have the pressure of your emotions changing to that degree all the time rather than just after a long-haul flight. Taking on change is easier when you feel normal, right? Would you enjoy living in jet lag fog permanently?

This is why transition time is essential to the autistic brain, and why I am yet again grateful that I do not drive. I caused my last wreck from rumination. I’d talked to a close friend earlier in the day, and we hadn’t spoken for years before that. She’d ghosted me without a trace and then reappeared. It was jarring, a new environment for me, so I did what any normal person would do. I thought about it so hard I ran into a guardrail trying to blow town for Frederick, the closest Waffle House. I was about 800 feet from a triple order of hash browns with chili, cheese, and onions (superior to Frito Pie, fight me) when I took a curve a little too hard. Girls with blonde hair will do that to you.

Editor’s Note:

You should absolutely add Fritos to bean burritos at Taco Bell. Also, every once in a while when I hit 7-Eleven, I buy a snack bag of Fritos for the back of the pantry because I’m a Texan and I don’t make the rules. Sometimes you have to have Frito Pie and in that instance, there is no substitute so you might as well be prepared. Not being prepared is such a rookie Texan mistake, because whoever heard of homemade Fritos? You’re going to the store. It’s not that you can’t make AMAZEBALLS tortilla chips at home. I can and they’re fabulous. But they sure as hell don’t taste like Fritos…….. just like pastry chefs are going to use Oreos/Oreo crusts. They’re not going to reinvent that particular wheel.We’ve learned it over time.

Back to our regularly scheduled program.

What you learn with enough time is how to control your environment to the extent that you can and let go of the rest. I’m not going to be able to convince Supergrover that what she read as narcissism was actually an autistic meltdown. I am sure that she regularly thinks I am the most toxic person she’s ever met because I just keep throwing these truth bombs because I’m an asshole and not because I am genuinely curious and love her more than anything on earth. If I throw an emotional bomb, it means I care about the answer and want to hear it. I heard a line from “Friends” that expresses this so well…. when Chandler looks into Monica’s eyes and tells her that she’s high maintenance, but he likes maintaining her. I am not an asshole with a God complex, she has complex problems that cannot be solved with “yeah, I’m fine.” If you want to see a question as an attack, you will.

I honestly found out I was autistic because of this relationship. I had to find out two things. The first was why I was so empathetic on the inside and yet it came across as being self-absorbed. Everyone knows that autistic person, or we know each other. Bet.

I learned over time that the meltdowns happened in a cycle because I would unmask and start letting my brain run wild on these ADHD/Autistic tangents and she would take offense at me not acting like a woman, seriously, and I’m not being dismissive toward her. It’s that traditional women are programmed to fix/please and anticipate everyone else’s needs.

We used to be a little too much alike in that arena, but I felt safe enough to stop with her because she’s so goddamn strong. She lays down the truth bombs as easily and often as I do. It’s just that hers are in the context of what she knows, and mine are in the context of what I do. Her emotional bombs are surrounded by not understanding my neurodivergence, her stepping all over my ass while I’m trying to teach her why my reactions to her are so much more intense than her reactions to me and failing miserably. Why it feels like I’ll always go a little stupid in that dreamy-eyed kind of way when I think of her, and have to stuff that kind of emotion back because it’s part of a social mask I don’t have. Just so many sensory issues that I attach to her, like the smell of coffee or the feel of the t-shirt that I kidded her I ordered that “has her portrait on the front.”

I have already said that the building blocks of our relationship are adrenaline and dopamine. My ADHD/Autism created those memories of smell when my brain chemicals were the most flooded. It’s why I’m so attached to her with a love that won’t die, but not like I loved Dana. Like I love my parents and siblings. The thing is, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she loves me the same way, because when Sam dumped me I told her and then she said her Mama Wolverine claws were coming in. I have never been so grateful for anything in my entire life because my next line to her was that my biggest delight in life was thinking about just how pissed off she was about this. It was that night I formed my first company. It’s called Leslie Lanagan & Pet Monsters on a Fraying Leash, Inc. We’re waiting on our 501, though.

When I become the most upset, I have a meltdown and then burnout. In those moments, burnout looks like me losing function and going mute, only communicating through writing. I get sensory issues from eating because it’s an ADHD hyperfocus interruption and I switch to vegan protein shakes. If that’s not enough, I develop sensory issues with leaving my house, reinforced by depression, anxiety, and an overactive imagination. The overactive imagination is a straight up problem because everything I imagine is a hundred times worse due to rejection sensitivity dysphoria, a common trait among neurodivergent people because we’ve been programmed to think of ourselves as problematic.

I should mention that there is also fascinating research suggesting that the number of autistic people who are nonbinary, queer, and poly is off the charts. My behavior suggests I’m not poly unless we’re talking about writing and physiciality, because emotional intimacy with multiple people is easy. Physically? Not so much. I’m just not wired that way. That doesn’t mean I’m not poly. It just means I probably wouldn’t meet someone on the ground and behave the same way. It remains to be seen whether I could manage that or not, and doing the work to see whether I’m doing the right thing for me or lending myself to getting into a situation where I can’t help myself and put someone I’ve made a monogamous agreement with completely uncomfortable because I broke the rules. Just because it happened organically doesn’t mean I didn’t cheat. Just because it only happened to me doesn’t mean I didn’t cheat. The road to hell was paved with good intentions.

I need to make it so clear that I cheated on Dana, but Supergrover didn’t cheat on Michael because of course since I’m queer, my reaction to her was different than her reaction to me. That doesn’t make my emotions to her invalid, just different. She also doesn’t have autism or ADHD, so none of her sensory issues are going to run as deep as mine, and she gave me some pictures that caused sensory issues, but not sexual ones. They activated my alpha dog and my mama wolverine. When I feel that way about someone, it makes me attracted to them…. and in fact, when I don’t feel connected to someone in that way, being physical doesn’t come up. Romance, as with all things, has two modes for me. Obsession and absolute disinterest. It’s why autistic people have trouble with relationships. If they have neurotypical partners who take everything personally, they will not be happy, and probably jump too quickly to the conclusion that their partners are lazy, unmotivated, and angry at them because of their rejection at lights out.

It was a relief to come to that resolution in my mind with Supergrover, that even though the relationship was not nor would ever be physical, I had learned a lot about the way I work in a relationship because she took so much personally that I never intended.

I remember telling her that it was really hard hearing about the abuse she endured as a child, that my heart walked out of my body and I just had to breathe through it. She thought I was trying to make her feel bad, but I was trying to explain both why our trauma bond was immediate and deep. She became a monotropic thought process, what I mean when I say she lives in my ink. I was telling her why I loved her with such intensity and drive, and that in some ways I was sorry that process came across as negative, but not sorry for loving her as much as I do. She’s amazing, and part of the reason that I haven’t fallen in love again is that I hold every woman to her standard and find other women uninteresting. Why would I put myself out there when intellectual stimulation is more important and no one gives it to me more than she does? No one will ever be able to beat her in that area, even though Zac and I are wrapped up in my special interest. It’s not because he’s not brilliant, it’s that we’re talking about history and she’s making it.

If you never believe another word I say, believe that.

She jokes that other women are the smartest woman in the room except her, but you don’t know the room where she said it and I do. She knows an actor I would kill to meet, and a director, and neither of them do what she does. She knows them by dumb luck, the same dumb luck that put us together. Karma is magic and I will never believe anything more than that. I got a gift from the universe at the exact moment it needed to drop in my lap, and my nose got red at that, the first signal I’m about to cry, when I wrote that. And yet, even Zac doesn’t know who she is and respects my privacy like I know when to stop pushing about work. She’s my “classified information,” for all practical intents and purposes. I could tell you if it wouldn’t embarrass her across the world, but I wouldn’t. I keep it tight to love her, not to diss you. The “classified information” joke just fits in with my whole vibe. I will never stop being, in the immortal words of Zac Wood, a “drooling fangirl” over CIA, but that’s only because I’ve seen the disparity between the way people treat soldiers and the way they treat spies. Civilians matter.

And I’m a judgmental bastard, just not of people. Of institutions and situations. It’s how I can feel every emotion in the spectrum about Supergrover. How love and fear are inextricably interrelated, why I have no problem walking on eggshells for years and yet struggled so hard with my needs being met that I finally walked away. It was killing my self esteem and better for me when I stopped letting it.

Doesn’t mean I don’t miss her, and at first it was every moment of every day. You don’t learn to let go overnight, and my writing has proved it. She’ll never be far from my thoughts, though, because in the last 10 years of my life, my thought processes and emotions regarding her have been so deeply ingrained. It’s why I even thought we’d be good for each other as partners in the first place, but not that I insisted on it. It was just too good a question not to ask, because it made sense at that point, a united front. But then my monotropic thought process spiraled out about that, too, and it was just bad juju. It was a question better left unanswered, I’m just autistic and ADHD. My autism made me hammer away at it and my ADHD gave me no impulse control.

I didn’t know how those diagnoses affected my behavior until I knew I had them. I only knew about one. I didn’t know about the other, that when I am in autistic mode relationships take over my whole brain because I’m also an INFJ. I wanted the best for both my red and yellow strings and got them tangled. It was a struggle to stop dwelling, but I’m glad I did it and I know the root cause.

I have learned not to let relationships take hold of me in that way because it makes me give all my energy toward making them a better person. All INFJs are attracted to teaching and social work sorts of positions because we want all of our close relationships to be the best people that they can be. I wasn’t obsessed with who Supergrover could be, but helping her to be her best self. An INFJ will not watch anyone stagnate.

It was all reinforced by the fact that it’s easier for me to talk to other people about their problems than it is for me to talk about mine, because then I can stop social masking. I can stop remembering to make my thought processes masked and just listen.

I notice things that no one else does and people call me brilliant for pointing it out when it’s something they love and hurtful even when I don’t mean harm. It’s a lost place to be when your self-esteem is dependent on other people to that extreme, because when you take off your social masking and other people react poorly, you drift toward making masking the priority and it drains your energy before you even have the spoons to leave the house. The meltdown/burnout cycle is real and it’s deep.

Neurotypical people can only take so much before they decide you’re too much for them, and that has been true of neurodivergent people since we were born. “Autism Speaks” has an awful video where a mother says in front of her child that she thought about strapping her into the car and killing them both. I am sure that she thought she could get away with it because her daughter wasn’t “high functioning,” whatever the fuck that means, and she has no idea what her daughter is capable of processing emotionally without being verbal. What if the internal tape that plays in her head is “my mom wanted to kill me and didn’t.” Being “high functioning” is being able to speak for the mute and letting them speak for me when I am….. more specifically, I am non-verbal a lot of the time but I can reach out through text.

I need the world to adapt around me, and I am not being selfish or egocentric when the problem runs as deep as children feeling like their parents don’t want them. I am not alone when I say that I feel the pain of being too much for people, driving my depression and anxiety. Everyone wants to stop me from drowning, but few people are willing to help me from falling into the river in the first place.

Supergrover did the best she could, just not fast enough for my autism not to kick in. A trauma bond is a hell of a drug. It’s what made me rearrange my life around her and not Dana. It was the same deal with her- I never wanted to have a situation with another partner where I leaked information that wasn’t supposed to go to them because I felt so bad when I did it. She forgave me and moved on, but thought it was impulsive to solve the problem.

When you have situations where your sensory issues attach to a problem and it gets deep fast, you move quickly…. often what leads to getting married in a hurry and things like that. You are always trying to create a secure environment and you’ll grasp at straws because acceptance of your neurodivergence is transient. Because of this, Supergrover is the longest of any of my significant relationships by almost three years. It was more significant to me because it was in my wheelhouse, the writing.

Her greatest gift to me was that time, and I’ve loved it despite walking away in frustration. I needed a secure environment and couldn’t get one, so I grasped at the comfort of isolation whether I wanted it or not.

I want more because she’s wonderful. I also love her enough to let her go because the relationship didn’t serve us presently like it did in the past. I didn’t have room for other people like Zac, and in some ways my pathways are so changed there might not ever be. Sam got in under the wire, but even then my attention didn’t completely turn.

I need more time to spend with her, but only in reflection if need be. I learned so much from her, and it’s time to take all that away because I don’t want to pour love into her if she does not accept it. I would rather be alone with my thoughts in that case. The affect she has on me is tremendous and I cannot underestimate its effect. She doesn’t think of her (or me) in this way, so it clouds our judgment on whether we’re telling the truth. We both have trauma reflexes, and don’t treat each other like we’re worthy of being treated like goddesses. That’s because the root of our anger is how we feel about ourselves. We are both fixer/pleasers, and both easily jump to the conclusion that the other means the worst.

For instance, when Supergrover said “I can do nothing about the past. I can do something about the present,” and “this is all I can manage,” I took it to mean I would never get anything I wanted and to die mad about it. What I didn’t say is “what can you do about the present that you haven’t in the past?” I saw the writing on the wall and pushed her away.

I will never know if I was correct, but I do know that our relationship had that cycle for 10 years and I didn’t want to do it anymore. There was quite a difference between Mama Wolverine and ignoring me because you think I’m goading and provoking you instead of asking me questions in return. We both got defensive immediately.

I never wanted a war, but I started it. I am only suffering under the terms and conditions of the surrender. My bad behavior was supposedly forgiven and I haven’t been able to express a need without nuclear war for eight years. I didn’t think she was lying because she said she forgave me. I thought she was lying to herself about how much she wanted to be friends with me because she always seemed pissed off. I know enough to know that the world doesn’t revolve around me, but I can feel the energetic difference between “I’m busy” and “I’m ignoring you” even in text.

For instance, I have lots of friends that I hope aren’t mad at me because I’ve gone mute and can’t handle conversations right now. I have enough energy for an occasional Facebook comment, but mostly I am spending my energy on changing my own thought processes here. I will never be able to sustain myself if I don’t. It is how my life is coming together, not how it is falling apart.

I had huge sensory issues that Zac didn’t tell me he had a roommate before I arrived on Sunday, but I told him that and he apologized. He wasn’t trying to offend me, just spaced it, but that didn’t render my feelings invalid. He’s a solid dude and remembers so many things I don’t remember saying, so I know he does listen to me, deeply, I just have to roll with it because he’s neurodivergent like me.

It’s why I need Zac, and why I need time.

Telling You About It

November 3, 2023November 3, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

What historical event fascinates you the most?

There is no one particular thing in history that fascinates me the most, because it would be like asking me about my favorite book. I cannot pick one because genres are so different. Types of historical events run thusly.

My fascinating war is WWII, because I love reading about both England and America’s contributions to intelligence. It’s not that the intelligence itself was new and different, it’s that the rules we live by today were codified then…. particularly for Americans, because OSS transitioned to CIA in its’ aftermath. Being obsessed with British intelligence during that time period is based on one man. You could argue that he was the first hacker by breaking the Enigma. You cannot argue over whether he was queer. Alan Turing is the best and biggest example of why queer history must be taught. The crown prosecuted him for “homosexual acts” in 1952, AFTER HE BROKE THE FUCKING ENIGMA. Breaking the enigma machine was his Palm Sunday. Good Friday came two years later, when he died by cyanide poisoning. It is thought to be suicide, but unclear. It doesn’t matter. They hailed him as a hero and crucified him, with no resurrection until Gordon Brown issued an apology in 2009.

2009. That’s 57 years.

I do not know how Jesus and Alan Turing would think about being connected to each other in this way, but it’s an apt description of the process… an innocent man encouraged to bully himself to death (or was murdered- with cyanide it’s hard to tell either way and he worked for MI-6 or its equivalent. I am not implicating the British. I’m saying he had a lot of enemies foreign and domestic plus a nightmare of a life…. and don’t give me that “Turing was never recognized” bullshit. He was recognized by those who knew exactly how much he mattered. You cannot tell me that no one could have pulled strings for Turing in terms of being prosecuted by the crown. No matter what, they just didn’t. Never forget that Bletchley Park isn’t as wonderful as you thought it was if the people who worked there later washed their hands of him. It’s why I can love and hate intelligence at the same time, because with stuff like this, their “intelligence” is relative. In terms of American intel, we wouldn’t have done better than England, it’s not “all shit on MI-6 day,” though if Le Carré just saw me type that, he probably laughed and thought, “every day is “all shit on MI-6 day.”).

There was no law in England to retroactively pardon all men convicted of homosexual acts until 2017.

2017.

It doesn’t matter that now CIA is actively recruiting everyone, no matter their gender identity and sexual orientation. Same with the United States military. I am sure that there are still the same type traps queers used to fall into in the US/Britain are still there in third world countries (Africa in particular scares the shit out of me for queer American and British case officers in Uganda and Nigeria. I doubt there would be time to instigate a plan to get them back.). But the reason it doesn’t matter is that we still feel the internalized homophobia and institutional pain of all of it. What our countries have done for us, even when we did the jobs literally no one else could. It hasn’t been enough time for that kind of relief, and if African American pain is any indication, ours isn’t going anywhere. You can’t make marginal changes to society where you keep perpetuating racism/homophobia so that there are reminders of it everywhere and also say “get over it.” England has made leaps and bounds of progress over us because their culture adapted quicker. They got rid of slavery faster and have had even more time to get over it, and they never had anyone buy into slavery to such a degree that they decided to break off from the UK and create their own country just to keep it going. Say what you will about Jonathan Groff, but he abolished slavery in 1807, probably by sending a fully armed battalion to remind them of his love. They also got gay marriage faster and did away with cultural stigma earlier.

I am ultimately glad we won the Revolutionary War, but I often think about what would have happened if we’d resolved our differences. Canada, for all practical intents and purposes, lives in a much colder climate and has a rougher life in all aspects because of it….. and yet they are always happier than we are. Getting rid of cultural stigmas fast would be better than :::gestures broadly at everything:::. We seem to do better in the northeast, not that homophobia doesn’t happen there, but it’s usually not as bad as the Deep South, where attitudes about race have informed attitudes about homosexuality because they’ve used the Bible to interpret the law with no signs of stopping now. They do not give a fuck about freedom of and from religion, and they’re traitors to the Founding Brothers’ message. They would have been on board with hating gays just like they owned slaves and said all men were equal. But if they were worth their salt, they wouldn’t have denied my right to exist. Thomas Jefferson would have been apoplectic because he thought that the highest form of government was limited to perhaps a mayor and a school board. If that. He was all about personal liberty, a blessing and a curse.

In the immortal words of Jed Bartlett, America’s best fake president, “these people don’t vote, do they?” It was sarcastic, but some of the Founding Brothers were very elitist and thought that only people who were educated about the vote should be able. I agree with this in theory, but what are we going to do? Go house to house and check? It’s a democracy, and yet it does hurt it to have someone vote on name recognition alone and things like that. I’m not saying that voter shouldn’t be educated. Far from it. The people who go door to door in that manner are invaluable because most people won’t take the time to research. It’s easier to go to a free event where candidates are shaking hands, but even that’s hard because lots of candidates run on empty-headed charm.

Politics is the world’s second-oldest profession, and I have found that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

-Ronald Reagan

There are a lot of books out there.

That’s one of the reasons I love intelligence. I feel like the news is always getting half the story right. Though I cannot get the whole story on current operations because no one does, the old declassified ones make me able to read and digest; I can make my own opinions rather than a news anchor spinning it for me. Looking up operations during WWII is easy because it has the most that’s been uncovered by now. I want to meet the Ministers of State in the UK as much as I want to meet the Secretary of State in the US. That’s because they would have the most information about current operations, but just the public face of it. The press secretary for received intelligence vs. talking to someone under cover. It’s not that it wouldn’t raise the cool points out the window and twist you up in the game. It’s that they’d have to avoid everything by nature because they don’t know what they can say and what they can’t. Talking with someone at State is superior because they know the talking points. However, they do not know sources, methods, and locations.

Reading the news just isn’t as fun as learning by conversation. It creates more historical events that fascinate me, and it’s exciting to think that I might find the next one. History repeats itself. I was here for 9/11 and 1/6. They’re both dates that “live in infamy,” but sooner or later I’ll find something good.

Here is where I’ll be telling you all about it.

Be Jesus Somewhere Else

April 21, 2023April 21, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

That’s the short answer.

Bryn gave me the writing prompt of “if you could go back in time and change anything without revealing the future, what would it be?” Her example was Claire Fraser not being able to tell everyone she was from the future, but she could treat sick people with homegrown antibiotics, or tell them when to plant the correct crops, or magically knowing that she and the fam don’t have to go home, but they can’t stay here.

Because she was thinking world events, so was I. It became a Doctor Who moment for me, because I realized that no matter where I went, I’d be Jesus somewhere else. I’d be that person who tried to change things by taking care of people on a large scale, saying things that would upset people but also make them think. But I’d do it through someone else. I don’t want power, but I’m great as a backup singer/spin doctor. All it would take would be getting close to someone in actual power early on so that I can get in before the wire; many, many, many factors go into how people behave and I do not want to be the one standing there without any heuristics on mood and behavior when bad things happen. I don’t want to go back in time and start CIA during the Civil War, I want to go back to the meeting where everyone decided that Africans weren’t people. I would encourage people who actually asked themselves why they thought skin color mattered. I’d check out who was willing to talk and who wasn’t, and pick someone who I knew could change things and I’d help them. It’s the way Jesus did it. He focused on himself and the Disciples and it translated into helping the world in both tangible and intangible ways. He prayed to God, but he wasn’t ivory tower. He was sandals.

The emotional strength he portrayed wasn’t all him. He was preparing the way for something bigger.

Jesus is the main character in the story right now, but who knows whether the Disciples were better or worse at preaching than him? Was Peter better than Jesus when he was having a bad day? Who knows. All I mean is that I do not have a Messianic complex. It’s that of all those people, Jesus and I have the most in common. It has nothing to do with me wanting to be a Christ figure. If I was more like Thomas, I would tell you that instead. I don’t just know Christ, I know them all. That’s what you get from years and years of new criticism. Personalities emerge and you absolutely know that it’s fiction because you can’t infer that much about their mannerisms and habits. You read every single time with new ideas coming at you because several authors have disagreed with each other and you had to go and look it up. Very few people study Biblical geography when the setting is one of the main characters. It’s a very dry humor. They’re desert people.

I would have been happy with any character in that story, hoping not to deny that I was his friend and standing tall through my own ministry and crucifixion or being boiled in oil or whatever. Anywhere anyone is challenging the system, I’d want to be there.

I would try to change world events by becoming close to the right people at the right time so that I could counsel them away from the thing that they’re about to do…. A Doctor Who moment because I’d have an inner TARDIS that knew which problem needed me most.

The trick would be showing up early enough in a person’s life to make a massive difference in their personalities. I’m not the kind of person that will solve all your problems in five minutes. I’m the person that genuinely cares and wants what’s best for you, but it takes time to build that relationship. It’s peeling away our public armor when we talk if we’ve known each other a hundred years. By then, we have our own language because we’ve probably already been through all the ways it can be misinterpreted once or twice.

Jesus got power by influencing those in office, particularly Saul (Paul) and Joseph of Arimethea, yet quietly. Even Pontious Pilate got rattled and knew he was wrong. They heard his message and just happened to be in office. It was never about that for them. It was never about that for him, either. I’d do the same thing with the world’s most advanced intelligence agency. What it would be like to start CIA and keep it up from the time that kind of travel was possible. so that we as a country didn’t bomb the shit out of people? Because war hawks aren’t made overnight. We’ve had a long history of getting what we want. We’d be the Doctor Who of the world instead of the colonizers. They fight enemies by collating dossiers on every race they encounter and give everyone the benefit of the doubt. They don’t even have a gun.

I would want that for the US or for whatever country I was in. Just to be able to affect change with information and not violence. I’m the medium smart anti-hero who actively knows they’re too smart for some and too dumb for others. I want to find other people on that wavelength people are actually counting on, and have a mechanism that tells me to go where I am needed the most. The more emotionally safe people feel, the more you can direct change. That’s because it happens when you’re doing something else.

Picking Up the Clue Phone

April 20, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe a decision you made in the past that helped you learn or grow.

Every decision I have ever made has helped me learn and grow, but by far the biggest was thinking “I could be good at blogging.”

This is because in my archives, I have solid evidence of what I was thinking during past mistakes, and can thereby change my behavior when I’ve been doing something for x number of years and it still isn’t working for me. I saw other blogs and I really liked them, that people just talked about themselves, writing what they knew. I have a general working knowledge about everything on earth and can talk about anything to anyone for a few minutes…. but on minute four, I got nothin.

I am a master of none, and writing is the only way I know how to express all of that. I turned feeling insecure and lonely into being able to make connections and draw parallels and be comfortable talking about my emotions in real life, with the caveat that I sense changes in energies quickly and I’ll shut down if I feel you’re not really catching my meaning. It gave me the ability to choose a direction and not a distraction, because I can tell you how “Wild Bill” Donovan started the OSS, why it doesn’t matter whether there’s a God or not, and how to cook using concepts and I’ll throw in locking down your router for free if you’re ridiculously good looking…. and most people are, depending on their personalities.

Writing taught me that I’m demisexual, that I don’t start to feel an attraction until my brain is excited to know someone. That I want to grok them… and I’ll be delighted if you think that’s dirty (it’s not).

I want you to know how the token minority became Will Truman and *not* Jack McFarland. I want you to know how Will Truman became Caitlin Jenner, the acceptable trans woman.

I want you to know how much I rail against being the token minority because it’s time I didn’t need ammunition. I’m tired of the income disparity between male and female couples, so gay (usually white) men are the loudest and get what they want. It’s why HRC didn’t support trans people for so long.

Acceptable minorities promote the majority system down to their haircuts, while minorities that wear their differences proudly and have their own culture are under just as much attack as taking over Native American land, it’s just a different culture. We’ve created a tape in cis, white men that they deserve everything, because they created that system where in order to get things, we had to ask them first.

For Native Americans, we just killed everyone we didn’t like. And that pain continues today, it’s just more emotional upheaval now. I was still looking around before holding my wife’s hand in Houston because I’d forgotten in Portland. Trying to be an acceptable minority has cost me more than you can possibly imagine and I’m done.

It’s exhausting trying to be acceptable when you know you’re not and you never will be, because this system won’t end in my lifetime. The only thing I can do is rebel against it, without actively trying to be the least likable person you’ve ever met. Writers get more and more protective of their energy as they age, beaten down by the process. Alternatively, I can be really funny and engaging, to the point where people are surprised when I say I’m an introvert. It’s not that I’m shy. It’s that my social battery varies wildly. No one who meets me at a party would recognize me the next day (in terms of mood and behavior), because they’re meeting two people. One is me when I haven’t been around people in a long time, the other is when I’ve suffered internal bleeding from taking on every emotion in the room… because of course, I don’t stick to the dance floor. I want to go where people are talking, because I’m always listening. I don’t remember anything verbatim, but it moves me to hear people talk about their problems and feel empathy for them. I often find it’s easier to soak up socialization by listening than talking until I’ve realized that I haven’t said anything for a half hour and the point is for me to actually talk because I don’t do it that often. I write, yes, but I don’t talk to people every day using my physical voice.

I think we have covered this- that I don’t like my voice because I don’t hear myself all that often. That in my head, I can read me like I want to sound, which is generally Matthew Perry in The West Wing.

I’m not a journalist, because I don’t look up anything objective. I don’t even link to things most of the time because if you’re curious, you’ll search for something. It takes work off me when I don’t need to care whether you go back to an entry or not. My current favorite of anything recent is “Your Blog Makes You Sound Like a Dick.” I keep laughing about it over and over because it was just the truest thing I’d ever heard in my life. It’s just hard when people don’t get that it’s the point. If I was 90, you’d write it off as old man grouchiness. It’s kind of true. I’m tired about a lot of shit. I’m just Tall. Mustache. Fishing Hat….. the kind of person that if I was male, in Texas they’d call me a “good ol boy,” what you call someone that has so kindly relieved you of your previously held opinions with a yarn that always ends in “you’re a dumbass.”

For people who are thought of as bumpkins across the nation, let me tell you that there is nothing smoother than a Texan telling you to go to hell, helping you pack, buying the tickets, and complimenting you on your choice of vacation spots. I’m riffing on Churchill, but you get the drift. We are every bit as bitchy as New Yorkers, we just hide the knife in a pie.

So, when I get on my high horse, it’s just me being a Southern asshole who’ll bitch slap you with a casserole dish on my hip.

Listening to it is optional. Maybe I’m not a reliable narrator when it comes to trying to describe other people’s emotions so that I can describe mine. It is not my intention, but it certainly happens and I am not immune to that fact. Everything about this blog is subjective, but it gives me what I need to function. Right now I’m working on an entry with a writing prompt that Bryn gave me about if I could go back in time and change anything without literally telling the future, what would I do? My short answer was doing everything I could to stop MacArthur from being an asshole and not listening to Bill Donovan when he told him that his entire air fleet was about to get bombed and to get his planes in the air. MacArthur wanted military to show intelligence just how much they didn’t know anything, and our bases on the Phillipines were bombed nine hours after Pearl Harbor. I don’t know how I would have done it. Maybe meeting MacArthur early (teenage) and becoming the one who can tell him he’s full of shit early on, so that when it counts, my word is law… because at that point we’ve had years of recognizing that we’re both angry hothead jackasses that pop off and regret.

But that’s just spitballing. I thought I could think bigger than that. Don’t change your dial.

50 Things You’ve (Probably) Never Been Asked

September 16, 2019September 16, 2019 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

Hat tip to Martina for the writing prompt. 🙂

1. What is the color of your toothbrush?

It’s black & red, but I need a replacement soon. Stay tuned.

2. Name one person who made you smile today:

Bryn, who said she was sending me birthday presents in the mail (my birthday was 10 September). I love mail.

3. What were you doing at 8 a.m.?

Talking to my sister on the phone. Sometimes we talk during her commute.

4. What were you doing 45 minutes ago?

Drinking coffee with cinnamon & soy milk and talking to my new housemate. I’d tell you all about the conversation, but it wasn’t that interesting. If it had been, this entire entry would be about it instead.

5. What is your favorite candy bar?

I’m not really a candy bar person, although I do like Zero. Right now I am all about licorice allsorts. I ordered the original from Geo. Bassett & Co., Ltd. for my birthday and I just sat there and ate them until I felt fat…. and then I ate some more.

6. Have you ever been to a strip club?

Several, but it’s not a turn-on. I have to love the person to be attracted to them. There was a strip club across the street from my apartment in Portland that I used to go to for a drink occasionally, because it was within walking distance of my house. But I didn’t sit where you could see the women. There was a closed off bar section that was really fancy and the bottles were back-lit with neon. I didn’t even know something that cool existed in my neighborhood, and to this day I’m not sure why I went in the first place. I’m sure it was originally someone else’s idea and I just went with it, but I went back because it was a cool place to hang and no driving afterwards.

There is also a famous vegan strip club in Portland that I went to for another lesbian’s birthday party. I ended up sitting outside for most of it, but honest to God I loved the food, particularly the sloppy joes and mac & cheese. The part of the show that I saw, I liked, though. It wasn’t just women looking bored and dancing to music, it was acrobatics that defied the laws of physics, like Cirque Du Soleil but naked. Not only that, there were no French existentialist clowns. For that reason alone, 10/10. Highly recommend.

7. What is the last thing you said aloud?

I can’t remember exactly, but I was trying to get out of the conversation with my roommate so I could go back upstairs and enjoy my coffee quietly.

8. What is your favorite ice cream?

Every flavor I try is my new favorite, but I have a special spot in my heart for the banana/vanilla swirl soft-serve at Florian Fortescue’s in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. My dad, sister, and I got different flavors to try, and I think that was the winner out of all of them. Now that I’ve been eating a lot of plant-based frozen stuff, I like “ice cream” made out of almond milk that has almonds in it….. really ties the dessert together.

9. What was the last thing you had to drink?

Coffee…. are you even paying attention?

10. Do you like your wallet?

I love it, and I haven’t seen one like it, so if I find one, I need to buy it because this one will wear out. It has a clear pocket on the front that I’m sure was originally for an ID, but I put my Metro card in it so I don’t have to take it out to swipe. The only thing I don’t like about my wallet, and this is a small gripe, is that it has a money clip on the outside that makes it uncomfortable to put in my back pocket.

11. What was the last thing you ate?

Extra, extra Hot Tamales.

12. Have you bought any new clothing items this week?

Does a new clear protector for my Apple watch count?

13. The last sporting event you watched?

Franklin, one of my housemates, is a rabid soccer fan, so I watched a game for a few minutes with him, but I can’t remember who was playing.

14. What is your favorite flavor of popcorn?

If I’m buying it while I’m out, it’s hard to find but I love cinnamon-glazed. I also love caramel-glazed and cheese corn mixed together, which is much more widely available. If I’m making it at home, I pop low calorie butter-flavored and then spray Pam on it to get turmeric and All-Purpose seasoning to stick (the more garlic, the better).

15. Who is the last person you sent a text message to?

Well, I use FB Messenger a hell of a lot more than texting because I can respond on any of my devices. It was to Dan, confirming our birthday plans for Tuesday.

16. Ever go camping?

Once. For me, the line about only wearing long underwear in your sleeping bag was the worst piece of advice ever. I finally got up around 4:30 and put on every piece of clothing in my suitcase. I would probably enjoy it more at a lower elevation where it’s not so cold. I was on Mt. St. Helen’s, which to me was freezing even in the summer.

17. Do you take vitamins daily?

Not always, but I do take an iron pill daily because I donate platelets and your iron level has to be above 12.5. Multivitamins give me terrible gastrointestinal distress, so I limit my intake…. but sometimes I need them because I am not the best eater on the planet.

18. Do you have a tan?

As Jim Gaffigan said, “I am what you would call ‘indoorsy.'” I tan vicariously through my friends who do that sort of thing. I think I’ve only tanned a few times in my life, and that was from living in Houston/Galveston. The most serious tan I ever had was spending weeks outdoors. I went to Mexico on a mission trip, then spent a week at choir camp, then three weeks at marching band practice before school started. Marching band practice in Houston is akin to signing up for a three bedroom, two bathroom condo in hell, except hotter. Who was it that said given the choice, they’d live in hell and rent out Texas? Same.

19. Do you prefer Chinese food over pizza?

I can’t. I eat pizza every Friday night in memory of my mother, who started the tradition when Lindsay and I were young. Besides, Argo, Aaron, & Dana would be so metaphysically disappointed (I’ll link to the entries, but if you got those jokes without clicking on the link, you are an OG “Fanagan”).

20. Do you drink soda with a straw?

There aren’t many “always” and “never” questions in this life, but here’s one of them. I never use a straw if I’m sitting down at a table, but I will always use one on the go. I am down with both the reusable and plant-based plastic straws, and I am so proud that my McDonald’s (don’t know if it’s a national thing) has switched to the latter.

21. What did your last text message say?

“Leslie, your Rx order is ready. Get it delivered!” I get wigged because they don’t offer delivery in my area and it irritates me that I get the possibility of delivery with every message and the disappointment of reality at least three times a month.

22. What are you doing tomorrow?

Finally, I have something exciting to say on the topic!

Drink coffee and be awesome.
Find something cool to do until 8:00 PM. I’m thinking of going to the National Gallery of Art, because I just learned today that they have a Van Gogh room, and I didn’t get nearly enough “time with him” at the Musée D’Orsay. I’ve always said that if I ever go back to Paris, I would like to spend an entire day there, staring at Van Gogh paintings while writing so that my crazy mixes with his crazy and we’ll see what “comes out of us.” I would be lying if I said Doctor Who had nothing to do with this (truly memorable trying to not freak out with joy at seeing The Church in Auvers-sur-Oise for real). By the way, none of the sunflower paintings say “Amy.” I checked. Twice. Also, as far as I know, Bill Nighy does not actually work there. I could be wrong.
Meet up with Dan for outrageous desserts at Tryst. You might have heard of it during the Gary Condit/Chandra Levy scandal. Not why we’re going there, but when Dan suggested it, I realized I’d walked past it but had never been in, so it’s not NOT why we’re going there……….
Curl up with a good book. Right now I am in the middle of Three Women, Blink, and War and Peace. That last one may sound ambitious, but after reading The Moscow Rules, I decided it was appropriate (and only 99 cents for the Kindle version with amazing commentary). I wanted to go back and read Tolstoy’s take on Russian history having started it in high school and never finishing. This time around, I have learned that the Russians thought Napoleon was every bit the fool and tyrant that over half the country thinks our current president is now (for reference years in the future, I’m talking about Donald Trump).
Eventually fall asleep, but there’s no telling when because it depends on how engrossed I am in reading.

23. Look to your left, what do you see?

An empty McDonald’s cup that I need to refill with green tea, all of my medications, and my iPhone.

24. What color is your watch?

It changes at least four times a week, because I have an Apple Watch that makes it way too easy to slip the bands out. Today it is hot pink with a black & white Minnie Mouse face. I have a red leather strap that I wear the most often, with the classic color Mickey Mouse face. Today, Minnie is in grayscale because she is also classic colors and I needed her to coordinate with my choice of band. The face also has lots of colors, as you can put on “complications.” I have no idea why they’re called that. They’re basically “desktop icons.”

25. What do you think of when you hear the word “Australia?”

Not a thought so much as pictures of my friend Allison and a meme of Bindi Irwin (if the text is too small for you to read, click on the image for hi-res).

26. Do you go in a fast food place or just hit the drive thru?

I don’t drive, I am rarely pressed for time, and generally there’s free wi-fi. So, inside it is.

27. What is your favorite number?

So easy I don’t even have to think about it. Eleven. Matt Smith, the baby giraffe in a bow tie (and sometimes a fez), is my Doctor. I’m in love with him a little bit because when he got the role, the Internet rebelled against him and said he was never going to be any good, but I haven’t felt more emotion in the show than watching his interactions with Amy, Rory, River Song, Vincent, and himself in a memorable soliloquy in “Nightmare in Silver.”

Also, Stranger Things. Eleven completes me.

28. Who’s the last person you talked to on the phone?

We have covered this.

29. Any plans today?

Well, my prescription is ready and they don’t deliver in my area.

30. How many states have you lived in?

Lots of geographic areas, four states:

Texas
Virginia
Oregon
Maryland

Maryland is where I have really put down roots, but I would move back to Texas to be with my family in a heartbeat if they needed me. It is the only reason I would ever move again. I’m done.

31. What most annoys you?

A little thing? When people use up all the toilet paper and don’t replace the roll.

A big thing? Injustice, anything and anywhere. I am never more angry than when I feel something is unfair, locally or globally.

33. Can you say the alphabet backwards?

I would really, really have to think about it. Not something I’ve ever really had to know…. although a funny thing about me and the alphabet is that when I was first learning my ABCs, the setup is that my mother’s name was Carolyn. I thought the song went “ABCDEFG, HIKJ Carolyn NOP.” “KJ” is not a typo.

34. Do you have a maid service clean your house?

No, but I would think I had died and gone to heaven if I did. So jealous of Disney Princesses, Mary Poppins, and Molly Weasley.

35. Favorite pair of shoes you wear all the time?

It’s a three-way tie between brown Converse All-Stars, black Converse All-Stars (black laces, rubber, AND canvas), and Keene sandals. I told this to a friend and she said, “ok, you just lost cool points for wearing Keenes.” I had an unprintable response.

36. Are you jealous of anyone?

Disney Princesses, Mary Poppins, and Molly Weasley. I would even settle for Shary Bobbins.

37. Is anyone jealous of you?

I didn’t think so until I was telling a friend that I was absolutely done moving (unless my family needed me in Texas) because I had already moved so much in my life that I was ready to settle down permanently. She told me that she was jealous of me, because she wasn’t ready to make that decision yet. Actually, I’ve had that conversation twice with the same results. One lives here in town, the other lives overseas.

38. Do you love anyone?

Not romantically, but agape and philia are the rivers that run inside me. I couldn’t do without my friends. They are my lifeline, the brothers and sisters I chose for family because my bio family is so far away.

39. Do any of your friends have children?

Yes, some of them even on purpose.

40. What do you usually do during the day?

A little of everything except laundry. It’s an issue.

41. Do you hate anyone that you know right now?

Hate is such a strong word, and changes me a lot more than it changes them…. but everyone I dislike at the moment, I’ve never actually met in person.

42. Do you use the word “hello” daily?

No. I generally say “hey” even though “hey is for horses.” There’s your “Texas-ism” for the day. The reason I don’t use “hello” daily is that I generally only answer the phone that way, and people rarely call me (not that I don’t like it).

43. What color is your natural hair?

Dark brown, but liking it better and better now that I have a few gray strands that look like highlights. I might dye it anyway, though, but only because the color isn’t quite deep enough for me. It looks a bit mousy. Probably won’t go back to auburn, though. Stay tuned.

44. Are you thinking about someone right now?

Deeply.

45. Have you ever been to Six Flags?

I have. I’ve been to three Six Flags-owned parks. Six Flags Over Texas in the Dallas suburbs, AstroWorld and WaterWorld in Houston. For those that aren’t familiar, the company is named after the governing bodies throughout Texas history:

Spain
France
Mexico
The Republic of Texas
The United States
The Confederate States

It seems apropos right now to also give you this fact: Texas and Hawaii are the only states in the union that can fly their flags at equal height to the US flag, because we were both once our own countries.

46. How did you get your scar?

Christ, which one? I fall and hurt myself all the time. Although here are the ones tied for first place. When I was 16, I was cutting a lime with a serrated knife and sliced into my thumb. Those nerve endings never came back, so I have a dead spot I play with all the time. When I was in my early 20s, I had choir practice on Thursday nights and my first wife was way too obsessed with ER. I forgot my house key one night and even though she wasn’t a mean person, she did a mean thing. She wouldn’t let me in until a commercial. So I’m fumbling around in the yard because it’s after 9:00 PM in the fall and I trip over a tree stump, scraping and cutting my shins so badly that the scars are still so deep it feels weird to shave those parts of my legs. Let me remind you that it’s been 20 years, and the scars are no more shallow than when they happened. Geez, and I actually spent time wondering why that relationship didn’t work out……………..

47. Do you have tattoos?

Yes, an ichthus that says “Yahweh” in Hebrew, a tribal dragonfly, a Celtic knot, a quill dripping blood, and $1.83. The last is the smallest, but it’s the most important. Here’s the story behind all of them.

48. Have you ever been out of the country?

I’m not especially well-traveled, but I’ve been to Mexico, Canada, England, France, and The Bahamas. I do have a bucket list, though, and I may never make it to some of them because in the Middle East, I am terribly afraid that everything I want to see is going to be reduced to rubble, and even if it isn’t, I don’t currently have a male chaperone. I’m a feminist and all that, but I’m not stupid.

49. Looks, brains, or personality?

I am going to go with personality, because if they have a great one, their intelligence will naturally show itself. I don’t know many dumb people I could stand for more than a few minutes. For me, personality and brains are inextricably interrelated, because brains inform humor, and if I don’t think you’re hilarious, I’m out.

50. Biggest regret?

Let’s end on something real. I used to be on the “think it, say it” plan no matter what emotions I was feeling. My biggest regret is all the misdirected rage in my life at Argo. It was over-the-top and egregiously wrong, because by then I wasn’t fighting with her. I was fighting the real enemy and Argo was a not-so-casual bystander, the receiver of all the shit rolling downhill. It was not a short amount of time until I realized that I was fighting with two people who weren’t even in the room, and only one of them deserved it.

I am so glad that part of my life is over and done, but if I could pray for a do-over and it materialized, I would go back and love her the way she loved me…. with sweetness, bright, white light, honesty (both painful and real), walking around in each other’s inner landscapes……………… truly receiving all the other had to offer- no more, no less.