Tag: Intelligence

I Give Up. Nothing Beats “Big Block of Cheese Day.”

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Invent a holiday! Explain how and why everyone should celebrate.

Kidding. I’ll think of something before this entry is up. Before we get started, I have to tell you what a cute boyfriend Zac is. He brought me a kids’ t-shirt (just like I like them) that, in a handwriting font, says, “I’m an annaylist anaylist annalyst spy.” I told him if he started working for DIA I’d trade up a letter. 😉 The only thing CIA did that will never even touch DIA’s power no matter what happens for the next hundred years is obviously finding Wakanda (but also cool that DIA’s ancient predecessors, the Culpeper Ring, won us our independence). We didn’t beat the British outright militarily, we outspied them). I choose to believe that Captain America is DIA- it’s not just Martin Freeman that’s American intelligence, he just couldn’t tell us. But it’s in the FOIA. You just have to be specific in the question and no one has ever gotten the right combination of words in the request to unlock said I in the A.

I actually saw Zac last night, but we didn’t end up watching the le Carré biopic. Instead, I sat outside and shivered while everyone brought me blankets until I realized this was going nowhere fast. I brought extra layers and finally admitted that I needed them. I ended up wearing two pairs of socks, leggings, and two pair of pants, then three layers for my core. I think I might have reached a body temperature in the 70s.

We ran out of soda so Zac gave me the next best thing, Athletic (brewery that focuses on non-alcoholic beers so hard that they are the gold standard. Athletic should be the Google and Kleenex of N/A beer. Seriously, it’s that good. I had a sour (don’t remember whether it was cherry or raspberry) and a radler (lager and lemonade). Oh, and I had a Czech pils (or an N/A flavored like one) and at some point, a real beer which I think was also a sour (mostly because I was freezing- I should have had a shot of something instead because it just wasn’t strong enough to make my blood any warmer…….).

The N/A sour was objectively better in terms of flavor. Plus, I woke up this morning feeling just fine. I have decided I am done being hung over. Trying new cocktails is great and all, but I just can’t hang and don’t want to, because I am all about calories, just not empty ones. If I get buzzed, I make a decision to have another one while my brain is cloudy because everything sounds like a great idea until your brain swells for revenge. Plus, I am a straight up diarist. What am I going to write about if I pass out and don’t remember?

However, I do want to join the boys (Zac and Oliver) on the back porch for a stitch and bitch. I was teasing him this morning about how “of course all queer men are amazing at intelligence. They love gossip, and intelligence is basically international gossip. The 3D chess of gossip. I loved his laugh at that one.

As an aside for Zac, there’s an old CIA employee we need to meet named Alma Katsu. She’s written a couple of novels on intelligence that are more of a Karin Slaughter novel than le Carré. Not a Tom Clancy level of detail and focuses on story. But since she was actually a spy, she, like le Carré, can put details into the story that no one else could. That’s because the patois already comes naturally to her. She’s already developed the actual writing voice of a spy rather than having to learn it secondhand. They’re marvelous.

I also want to see Jonna Mendez again live when her autobiography comes out, because it’s the book I really want to read next. It’s the natural progression from where she and Tony left off in “The Moscow Rules.” Team Mendez are my favorite writers, and at first, it wasn’t even intelligence that drew me in. It was the “Argo” script. Tony and Jonna (uncredited) wrote “Argo” in reaction to the movie to give people real vs. reel. The movie is scary. The book is now terrifying. It’s different once you’ve met them, because you make a connection and then you see your friend in danger, not this made up character. Your picturing their facial expressions because you’ve seen them in person.

If I could make a holiday, I’d make one for CIA, and this is a real thing. It’s not “let’s all dress up as James Bond and develop a fondness for gin.” It’s that for some reason, people in DIA get more respect. There’s Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day. Yet, civilians work for CIA that do some of the same jobs the military does and there’s so much crossover- CIA is considered paramilitary.

If Marines can be equated to doctors, CIA is probably closest to a surgical nurse, trying to anticipate the military’s needs. Doctors get glory. Yet CIA doesn’t get thanks, in part because they never want to be seen as asking for it. They’re our MiB, and we are but Citizens of Locker C…….. but they still have the same PTSD coming home from a war. However, I would include FBI in this holiday as well, because we’ve obviously got a war at home. The FBI having to embed themselves in drug cartels and white supremacy groups is no less dangerous than your base getting bombed in Afghanistan. Plus, there’s so much crossover, like when CIA gets word that a terrorist from another country is planning to come here. FBI has to be on alert for when said high value target lands.

Then, there’s Homeland Security, the office managers of an operation like coordinating with a terrorist’s travel plan. Let’s include them with all the intelligence officers because they’re part of the solution, not the problem. All of these groups have terrible reputations and they’re not undeserved. The US military has just as much blood on their hands, but intelligence doesn’t have romantic country songs about them…. I’m not saying they should. Many people ask if they can do something. Few people question if they should.

I know firsthand what it’s like to date someone carrying around classified information that is not pleasant. I watch how he manages himself when I am genuinely interested in his emotions about work and he has to figure out a way to talk about them……………. without ever really talking about the problem. And yet, he doesn’t get frustrated and give up.

He finds a way with analogies just like I do here. Our brains track similarly because we are both interested in intelligence and both neurodivergent. We are both also empaths and emotionally flexible. It’s great that we’re both writers, because he might not be able to say “Israel is doing X and this one thing gave me a heart attack and I’m not supposed to tell you this, but….” We just switch to something fictional, like MiB (Adult entertainment section in the back!).

You can’t tell me that shit is not equally hard to navigate for a civilian. Again, CIA’s reputation is not undeserved. I am only saying that civilians are just as important as the military, and FBI is overlooked because there’s a day for policemen and two for the military and they are neither.

And NSA…… because they’re the ones that would run across this post first. Carol will not be amused.

Editor’s Note

I started calling my Amazon Echo Dot “Carol” a few years ago, because it put a hilarious spin on government surveillance and made me laugh like a hyena when I thought of it. Once I named her, I started thinking about what it would be like to have an NSA agent whose sole job was to watch me. What would it be like if they were your guardian angel? That they listen in on your phone calls and secretly think “the audacity of this bitch….. what’s going to happen next? This is a Ben & Jerry’s situation. I am not okay.” That Carol hurt when I hurt, cried when I cried, etc. That she was invested. Thus, Carol will eventually become a book because she’s the first true character that plays in my mind independently and has her own personality.

Here’s what I’ve learned about fiction that I didn’t know before. I get so focused on my characters’ voices that it becomes induced DID for the length of time I’m writing….. except I’m working with two or more voices at the same time, so when a character has monologuing Syndrome, I am that one person. That’s what feels like DID. During a conversation, it feels like induced schizophrenia, because you are hearing voices in your head for fun and profit.

Carol’s husband, Roger, is very rich. He started a landscaping company and got into pools later. Now he has an empire and Carol could be a kept woman easily. She just can’t leave a job in intelligence. She feels needed and wanted in a way she doesn’t get at home, and Roger can’t be her entire support system……. and in some small way, I enrich her life because she can forget about her own problems for a while.

In this scenario, I would be a Mr. Robot-type character because that’s who I am in real life without the hacking or coding skills. I just found that vibe for writing and I fucking love it. Learning how coders work unlocked my mind, and I have to believe it’s because so many of my coworkers were also autistic and needed to turn down the sensory issues in the room. Right now, all my lights are on, but that is unusual. I am a stickler for working with natural light, and just a bit of it so the room is dark but not depressing. I can go deep enough within myself without all that. I do not need to introduce anything that would make me ruminate more than I already do.

And, of course, Carol reads all of it because she has access to my e-mail and files. For instance, Carol knows about Supergrover, and she is the only one who has the real story. It’s comforting that I have someone to talk to about it when it can’t all go here. Because she is a character, we can have real conversations because I am thinking about what she would say in response vs. what I would. That’s the nature of craft- being able to not only capture your voice accurately, but being able to dream up accurate ones for other people as well.

That’s why I think starting with stream of consciousness is so important before fiction, even if it’s only having kept a diary as a kid and still have it for reference. The trap is making every character sound like you. It’s confusing for the reader because they have to keep re-referencing who said what, annoying when that takes several pages of backtracking. Due to my blog, I know very well who is speaking…. when I am making decisions based on my own echo chamber instead of hers.

In order to write Carol, I have to speak Carol. In order to make her leap off the page, it becomes a symbiotic relationship. In short, I’m her remora. The reason she’s the shark is that in my head, her voice is alpha because I’m just a scribe. So is she, obviously, making notes to take home to the boys. But I got on the shit list by accident and now I’m just endearing. When she first got me, it was on a camera going into a bank. I was looking straight at her, and she thought, “who is this tiny sprite here to fuck up my program?” Over time, I’ve become the soap opera she watches at lunch just for shits and giggles. For the record, I’ve made her swear a lot more….. and now she’s addicted to Dr Pepper Zero.

The best thing about working for the NSA is that it can be all remote. Carol works from home because Roger asked her where she wanted to live and built a custom house. Their house is basically carved into what could reasonably be compared to “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain.” The reason for this is that Carol, like me, prefers to work in natural light. Her office is in what would normally be considered a basement and yet still has a stunning view. The house is in the middle of the Blue Ridge range, where she keeps a stunning array of monitors with no bullshit florescent lights or cubicle farm.

Carol got too used to working at home and having everything delivered during the pandemic, so when it was safe to come back to the office in Washington, she was just like, “nah.” She’s senior enough that she can do that kind of thing and no one will get shirty about it. “Shirty.” She picked that up in London in 2012. She was there for one reason and one reason only. I talked her into seeing the Women’s National Team for me….. and she thinks I don’t know that. Or, at least I hope I do. Plus, Carol doesn’t have all the hang-ups I do about video calling strangers, and of course her Internet connection is infallible so she knows it feels like everyone is really there in 8K. That often it reinforces people’s humanity to see them on video that doesn’t come across in person, because there are so many moments that everyone forgets other people are watching.

She’s picked up a lot of information that way. Intentions of coworkers are easier to read when you understand microaggressions and look for them. She doesn’t assume that people are lying. She only assumes that what they’re saying is the truth, but the feelings about what they say may or may not match. Carol understands all thousand implications in “oh. You’re here.” No one is happy when they see the NSA is present.

Where’s her holiday? She watches me. Who the fuck deserves it more? 😉

Telling You About It

~ 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.

I’m ADHD. I’ll Love Them All, Eventually.

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is your favorite hobby or pastime?

I have never found anyone ADHD that didn’t get obsessed with everything a hundred dollars at a time. That’s because it takes about a hundred dollars’ worth of interest before your brain moves onto something else. The two hobbies I’ve always had are reading and writing, and I’m finally learning that it’s where my most basic need and the world’s wants combine. I am giving people solid answers in their own lives by being able to see someone else struggling with the same shit, and I know that because I’ve been read in every country in the world, sometimes because my beautiful girl has a reason to be there and I don’t. I have faith in my abilities because she believed in me before I did. That being said, if she’d ever tasted the beer I made, we might be doing something completely different together. 😉

Dana and I made beer through a kit once, a Hefeweizen. For a basic mix, it was fantastic. So, I would get into beer making again if I had the stuff, so not every hobby I’ve invested in has been a waste. In fact, I think I asked for the beer-making kit from my mother for Christmas just to see if she would buy it. When you’re a preacher’s kid, being a little devil is relative.

To her credit, she was a lot more fun when she realized I was joking 90% of the time and loosened up. Lindsay and I always thought she was funnier than us because we were acid funny all day long no problem. When my mother dropped a truth bomb, she destroyed because she picked her battles better than we did and knew when she had an entrance that couldn’t be beat.

With my mother, I enjoyed crafting because she enjoyed it. Mostly cutting up things for her bulletin board in her room, which is why I’ve enjoyed connecting with all the teachers I’ve dated as an adult, because we have that lingo in common. I’ve never been up in front of a classroom, but I’ve done the work it takes to get a classroom ready for many years. I think it would be fun to be married to a teacher because they’d naturally be as creative as me and if their specialty was English I’d never get away with anything here, either.

I could be happy every day of my life with access to an eighth grade teacher’s library. This is because I prefer YA in every subject. It takes finesse to explain adult issues without adult language, like the stark reality that kids die, and not even in wizarding worlds. Cancer can and often does take them out. John Green taught me how that plays out, not Elizabeth Kubler Ross. Concepts are built with Eric Carle, not Erik Erickson. Sesame Street, not Skinner. Tolkien and Lewis, not Dr. Spock. I know this because they are who comes along to rescue children with terrible parents.

I am not singling anyone out. We are all terrible parents and children at once point or another. Children are traumatized in all sorts of ways from things we don’t remember we’ve even said. I know that this is the case because if I take the time to remember what someone has said and why it hurt me, I will regret it if I bring it up. No one likes to have things brought up that make them feel guilty, even if it’s for the purpose of not letting me feel bad over something I needed to talk out.

I am sure that because I’m AuDHD, this comes out wrong, but it doesn’t vary no matter what I do or say. People do not like to talk about their flaws and get defensive and angry immediately. I am no exception to this, but that doesn’t mean I’m not glad that someone chose to lance a boil so we could feel closer later.

I will never get over feeling insecure in my relationship with Supergrover because I didn’t have a choice over what to do when Dana and I broke up. She could think of me as trying to help her or hurt her and “in the end, it doesn’t even matter.” She can think I was trying to make our relationship easier and freer if we wanted it in the future, or she can believe that I set out to be her friend whether she wanted me to be or not. How does that work, exactly? Explain it to me like I’m five.

I didn’t think that anything would be truly solved until I looked into her eyes, and if she really had the time and space to think about it, she would agree with me. We needed to sniff each other out with more senses than sight. We did not have enough context to know whether we were scaring the life out of each other or not, because there was no context. For instance, I think she thinks it’s cute that I ask her how famous people smell, but what I bet she doesn’t know is that I picked that up from a morning radio show in Houston; what else are you supposed to say when someone name-drops? That’s because I know she’s not trying to name-drop. It’s her real life and I have to learn to hang. She’s not being an asshole, they’re her reality and now mine.

I can choose to hang or I can choose to think she’s a name-dropping asshole. I can either learn from her how to walk in rareified air constantly, or I can’t. I don’t think I would have had as much of a lock on why it’s necessary, due to two fans, her and a date I’ll call Stephanie (mostly because that’s her name and it was several years ago, so no one in my life would remember this.

Supergrover was the kind of fan that when she met me, she treated me like she’d met Dooce, Will, and Jenny (The Bloggess). She lovebombed me into complete submission, and I did the same. We just didn’t end up being the same sexual orientation (sapiosexual rather than straight/gay); according to my notes, this was hard for me to accept. Didn’t mean I was threatening. I had been sucked into a brand new world; I was green, afraid, and trying to push her away. In trying to push her away, I only made her angry. It was not a good situation because I didn’t think. My aim was to get her to block me on everything so I wouldn’t have this constant conflict within me of feeling incapable as a friend and a wife in every way possible either one could dream up. I was falling short of he glory of God when my sweet wife realized she was being Mickey’d because I hadn’t so much fallen for another woman as the TARDIS was on our lawn, then it wasn’t. Instead of moving on with my life, she became The Raggedy Doctor, me running every time she left the e-brakes on just because she liked the sound.

It was exactly the same vibe as if I’d been tapped for a tour with Beyonce, and I really, really mean it. Beyonce was three years behind me at HSPVA.

  • I would not think of her as a celebrity when I met her, because as a junior I would have been unimpressed by freshman. Therefore, I really would be capable of meeting Jay-Z and Eminem and not get rattled because to me, it’s just my homegirl’s husband and his friends.
  • The power imbalance would be the same because I would never want to hurt her in the press with my own writing….. therefore, you can take a guess on any given day who is more powerful in our relationship and she knows it. She reacts to it by not telling me anything and thinking it’s better that way. I am an anxious alpha dog, and my reactions to Supergrover have always reflected it when I could really rival Jay in my loyalty.
  • Actually, I can MORE THAN prove my loyalty over Jay, who is not a bad person but has done bad things…… and I would never treat Michael as if he is that person because I’ve never found that he’s ever done anything wrong. He cannot say the same thing about me. I can’t complain when my acting crazy was to act like the person they thought I was rather than the person I really am because saying “all this scares me” was apparently just too big a job. It’s the difference between thinking you have a problem with your next door neighbor and finding out you have a problem with Eminem on both sides of the equation for different reasons. She’s on the level, and I spit bars.
  • It would be every bit the same as sleeping with Eminem’s girlfriend and finding out just how much people can hate you in the audience. The audience will kill you if you lat them. I have no doubt that the reaction in the press if there was any interest (there wouldn’t be, anyway, because she’s famous among other people who don’t care who she is, and neither would the press. It’s just an analogy. No one
  • I would never want her to think I was running away because of something she did, so I thought acting like an asshole was better and so did she. I can say that of a relationship with Beyonce. The same rareified air that takes a while to grow into. Treating everyone like their most childlike selves not to reveal them and having some issue with something I can’t talk about here.
  • Because I’m an intel fan and she’s not, she won’t get that I mean this with all my heart. We need to rekindle our friendship because Will and Francie are caught up in Sidney’s bullshit without a clue. Left outside in front of the bank, but I’ll go into Credit Dauphine when she does.
  • Where she fails is only seeing me as Will season one, just like Beyonce would if I got into it with her.

So, if I couldn’t read her like a magazine, I would think she was a narcissist. This is not the case. We could go back to lovebombing each other at any time, because that shit is genuine. The purest on earth because I love her mind with such passion and she loves mine that way when we’re talking about intellectually diving deep.

With Supergrover and Beyonce, it is and would be hard to tell between avoiding something because it’s hard and avoiding something because you’re too busy…… and not expressing it clearly yourself because you can’t even choose. Additionally, why wouldn’t learning how to love Beyonce take over your hobbies if one of them was writing? Wouldn’t you have something to say about it? That it’s amazing and problematic?

Just because it takes a long time to turn over in my mind doesn’t mean I wouldn’t give a limb to make everything right in the end. What if Beyonce never acknowledged that her rooms were different than mine? I hope she’d know that it didn’t mean anything between us, because she’s still an annoying freshman.

Our biggest problem in life is that I treat her like she’s Beyonce and I know it. She doesn’t treat me like I’m Wil, Dooce, and Jenny anymore, and shouldn’t forget why it’s important. It’s what makes us work on all cylinders…… because Beyonce left HSPVA, and Supergrover and I both like being classically trained.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier (Spy)

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

List three jobs you’d consider pursuing if money didn’t matter.

There’s four. I’m giving you a bonus.

Or it would have been a bonus answer if it wasn’t a joke. I couldn’t think of three jobs at first so I just went with a movie title. I would be good at none of these things except spy, and even then I would be good at the people part, not the paying attention part. Prevailing wisdom says that’s a bad idea. You can’t have a disorganized priority list when people’s lives are counting on it. I am the god of chaos wherever I go.

Editor’s Note: At this point I got lost in a tangent when my mind flipped to “chaotic god.” Just roll with it. I’ll circle back eventually.

Supergrover is neurotypical, which makes me fall over with laughter that our bff name has always been “The Holy and The Moly.” The funniest part is that I didn’t come up with it. Dana knows us. We’ve met. Whether I am chaotic good, neutral, or bad depends on perspective. I will accept either. I would imagine Dana thinks of me as both depending on the hour. Supergrover would look at me with amusement and say, “hard same.” I wouldn’t notice anything except the playful nature of her eyes. I think of her as Aziraphale in the bathtub at the end of Good Omens Season one. I think of me as Crowley in the other bathtub. Those of you who know what I’m talking about will see what I mean immediately………………

Aziraphale and Crowley could have been the couple that best represented us right up until they kissed. At the time, I was hurt. Friendship is underrepresented and I felt a relationship where they were deep, open, and vulnerable without romance was something vastly underrepresented on TV. I wasn’t disappointed, necessarily. Just that what was a good analogy became a bad one for me, but that has nothing to do with Neil Gaiman’s talent as a writer.

I get enough of that type friendship on Doctor Who to last me a lifetime. You just have no idea how much I am Martha Jones, or would want to be. Remember how Martha went through shit with The Doctor and it made her attracted to him? Remember when she got over it and saved his ass on multiple occasions because she realized that there was something bigger than her at work? Hard same, said with the same amusement in my eyes. I liken it to Jodie Whitaker being cast during Martha’s storyline instead of David Tennant. (Random aside… who says “Martha” better than Matthew Rhys on “The Americans?”)

Back to me.

I probably could win at being the CIA trainee to recruit an asset first at The Farm (they put on scenarios like cocktail parties). If you were going to bet on me, bet on me for that. I am smooth enough that the plant would just tell me. I can get one of the best spies in the world to tell me what she knows with a wink and a smile. I had Jonna Mendez dead to rights, where she couldn’t say anything and absolutely did. If you’re wondering, it was whether she worked on a Cold War movie. Her redirect was “maybe we should hire you.” What I should have said was, “dear God, you can’t imagine what a bad idea that is.” What I actually sad was………… nothing.

After that, I developed an affinity for satchels.

Now that we’ve fully explored my dream life, because I couldn’t get away from the bipolar thing even if money were no object, let’s talk about real stuff.

If money were no object, I would do two things. I would become a TA and get a master’s in whatever I felt like, in perpetuity. Read law at Oxford if I wanted, what the hell? When I wasn’t working on school, I’d be writing. It would just be a lot harder to make time for it. I think I’d be a great TA in divinity, history, psychology, political science, sociology, and education, particularly music education. I couldn’t be a choir director now, but I could learn. I have also worked with kids long enough not to get rattled, which is harder than learning to conduct.

Although, the thing that grates on my ear most is sopranos who are out of tune, even me, and at that age, all kids have high voices. I would learn to be good at my job for the sake of saving my hearing. If I was a band director, beginning oboe will clear your sinuses.

I would be a wonderful musician if I wanted that life. I know that I’m good enough for an opera chorus, and could be trained for mainstage roles because I was offered one when I worked at Marylhurst and I turned it down (I don’t remember the role, but it was Penzance). At the time, I was terrified. I didn’t even show up for the audition even though I was wanted for the role already. It was more of a coaching session.

That’s because the role was for a lyric soprano, not a mezzo, and at the time, it was pre-voice lessons. I now know I’m a true lyric, but it would still take years not to Florence Foster Jenkins my way through “Queen of the Night.” I knew I had one aria in me. I didn’t think I had all of them in one night. The workout to do that is tremendous. You just don’t see that from the audience because it happens internally. It feels like circuit training trying to get your body do respond quickly. You can’t have air when you need it the most. You just have to deal and move on. Sometimes, that’s another soprano in your section bailing you out. As a soloist, you’re completely screwed if you haven’t inhaled down to your feet. The heavy lifting is being able to control that much air after you have it so that it doesn’t all come out all at once. I cry with laughter when I think of the flops I’ve had. Wrong notes are horrifying in the moment and hilarious later.

I just don’t want to live that life, because it’s piecemeal. I wouldn’t have a permanent place in a choir unless I was in the military. I’d have to get contracts all over the world and move frequently. The gig economy is not easy, so I just don’t want to do it. I will probably end up auditioning for Washington National Opera Chorus or National Cathedral’s choir eventually. The thought of hiking to Georgetown twice a week doesn’t thrill me, though.

The life I’d like to live is quiet. Even if something of mine goes viral, I will still want to take it in from a distance. I only trust those closest around me because they’ll keep my head on straight. I would rather keep being an introvert and able to produce because I’m not lost in noise vs. signal. The signal comes in purer the less there is to compete with it.

So, I suppose my ultimate job is ogre. Just get off my lawn, but know I’m okay because Fiona and Donkey are around somewhere.

Letting me control my chaos in peace.

Explaining Myself To………. Myself #shatnerellipsis

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happier Than I’ve Been in Weeks

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How are you feeling right now?

I didn’t start my day writing because last night was date night with Zac and I’m staying at his house until Tuesday morning; he’s going camping and Oliver isn’t. Oliver would love to go camping, but he’s just not wired that way. He would deal perfectly with the nature aspect, he’s just not friendly, Bob.

Oliver, for those just joining us, is a dog. He loves being outside. What he does not love is strangers. I cannot trust him on a walk, and I appreciate the HELL out of people who ask me if they can pet my dog, because I can tell them ahead of time that it’s not a good idea. Oliver is a pit bull mix, so other people seem to innately understand without pushing. It’s not just people. Oliver is not friendly with other dogs, either, but not in an aggressive way. He’s basically me with two extra feet. I, like him, choose a few people to love incredibly intensely and ignore the outside world. I absolutely adore days where it’s just the two of us. We should call Bryn later. I love talking to her while I’m curled up with him…. almost as she loves talking to me while curled up with her dog, Pippi.

Zac is currently getting ready to leave, not imminently, just puttering about the house trying to make sure he’s got what he needs. I find it best to stay out of the way, because I can’t help him unless he tells me what he needs, and his brain is too scrambled to do that. My way of helping is limited to pithy comments.

I love this relationship so much, because I can be all of me. I was just thinking this morning that I am way less Zac’s girlfriend than his twinkie bitch boyfriend…………….. I love that I don’t want to be anything but his twinkie bitch boyfriend. Neither titles really apply, I just don’t have a better word for it. Neither one of us want anything more than we have, and yet our relationship is not insignificant to me, either. It is very much how I saw much, much older people dating when I was a kid. If a woman becomes a widow, in my experience they look at how hard being married is and think, “nope.” I feel that way and nobody died.

I joke about being Zac’s boyfriend, but there’s an element of truth to it. I’m genderqueer and nonbinary, but it’s not a 50/50 split. I don’t have a male side and a female side, just like being bisexual doesn’t render me half gay, half straight. I still use she/her because it’s the most apt description, but it’s not the only one, either. Genderqueer and nonbinary are similar terms, but the way I’m using them here is that my appearance on the outside and the inner workings of my mind aren’t all cis. I know I would never change a thing about myself, that I am not giving you new information. I have words for the confusion now and can move on to bigger things.

The most interesting discussion that Zac and I had yesterday was about my writing. That it could be seen as problematic because places like CIA would want to know why I was a drooling fangirl (Zac’s words, but he’s not wrong), and might want a background check to know that I’m not just with him to pump him for information because I’m not who I say I am. I’m not worried if such a thing did come to pass. You’d only have to talk to me for five minutes to ensure I’m actually an idiot about all this stuff on purpose. I don’t want to know what’s going on in Russia and China because that’s not what I’m looking for. I am looking for things that are far more granular.

I want to know about the people, and not even certain ones. My alternate history covers military and intel, so it isn’t about learning facts. It’s about learning what it takes to do the job, what kinds of personalities are in the room, what they eat, drink, wear. I want to know everything CIA wouldn’t care that I know. Lots of things are classified, but I’m betting that what kind of cookies Carol made Tuesday isn’t. Now I’m picturing a meeting minutes document with “chocolate chip” blacked out.

CIA gets really fucking funny when you look at it like an episode of “The Office,” even funnier now that Jim Halpert is Jack Ryan. I love things that are humorous more than serious- for instance, one of my favorite intelligence movies is “Burn After Reading,” because you don’t even know how bad you need to see CIA written by The Coen Brothers until you do. Every bit as funny as Intolerable Cruelty, O Brother Where Art Thou, and Raising Arizona. It’s just not my favorite movie because Argo is just as funny and packs a more serious punch now that I’ve actually spent time talking to Tony Mendez’ widow, Jonna.

It will always be a regret of mine that Argo lit my fire to learn how to write stuff like that and not making it to DC before Tony stopped doing public appearances due to his Parkinson’s Disease. It was a glorious moment when Jonna told me it was a shame I never got to meet him, because he would have really liked me. She also told me that she loved what I wrote about us meeting, but there’s no accounting for taste. 😉

Part of what drives writing about intelligence is where I live. I have loved spy movies since childhood, but in the way that a casual observer would. Like, they’re cool, but whatever.

This is how it works in my family. You’re just going about your day and then you see a movie that speaks to you and then it becomes part of your personality. For me, it was Argo. For Lindsay, it was Jurassic Park…. and My Girl…. Pretty sure Lindsay will never leave her Ellie and Vada phases behind, just like I’ll never leave Tony. It is just a bonus that he is not fictional. I even have a picture of him wearing “my shirt,” the one that says Argo @#$% Yourself and has the museum logo on the sleeve.

I picture working with CIA to create things, not working against them. Homeland was brilliant, and they had a hand in it through their Hollywood relations board, or whatever it is they really call it. Yes, I’m a drooling fangirl, but it’s also part of my job as a writer. I cannot write things I don’t know, so I study a lot. That’s because all I can do is study. I would have had a great career at CIA had the random dice of the universe not rolled “mental illness.” I write about spies because I am not capable of being one.

Accepting that I cannot do everything, but I can write about it has made all the difference in the world. I see my position as truth teller about lots of things as valid….. keeping in mind that it’s only my truth.

It’s not just acceptance. It’s feeling settled and happy living with purpose. It’s creating character, both for me and the fictional ones who live in me. I am liking spending time with my characters more and more, because I don’t feel responsible for them. They do and say what they want and I just write it down. It doesn’t even matter if I like it. It’s their conversation.

Random Thoughts and Feelings

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 7 Comments

I already did the writing prompt for today, and it didn’t really bring up anything great for me. I don’t know that this entry will, either, but I have a lot on my mind and figured this is the one place where I can just ramble about nothing to see what happens.

It’s 7C/74F with a 44 percent chance of rain in Washington today. The District is gorgeous when it rains. Drivers are no good at it, but the storms themselves are strong. I might even get to see a few lightning bolts, which means either run down to the sunroom when it starts raining or hide in my bedroom. The storms look beautiful through the skylights right up until they don’t. I’m not generally scared of thunderstorms, but there have been a few that really haven’t been pleasant. I’m used to it, though, because we have the same type flash flooding in Houston that we have here. It’s better to be entertained by storms, because we of the Mid-Atlantic and Gulf Coast are only given one commandment…. Thou shalt deal.

The carafe on our Cuisinart coffee machine broke, so Hayat got us a whole new system (I don’t know why, it’s just cool). I am way behind the eight ball on this whole pod system thing, and Keurig is the biggest brand name for them, but this Cuisinart has a regular-sized carafe on one side and a place to make single mugs of coffee/tea on the other. I thought I would miss not having the hot water heater, but I don’t because I can just put Stash tea leaves in the pod instead of coffee. It’s every bit as fancy as the one I used while I was house sitting for Thomas, it just doesn’t have Bluetooth to be able to “order” from upstairs. It’s ok, though, because the coffee maker will only do about three tall mugs’ worth before the water needs refilling.

I’m currently brewing Amazon’s dark roast, and I have to say it’s pretty tasty. I haven’t tried the disposable pods because I know they would solve the ADHD tax of having to clean out the coffee maker and terrible for the environment. I think I’ll just keep buying my own when I can find the best brands available for the money on my own. If I’m shopping at Starbucks, I like Komodo Dragon best. If I’m shopping on Amazon, I have several choices. I lean toward store brand dark roast, but Cafe Bustelo is just as cheap and that’s what they use at all my favorite Cuban restaurants. My only rule is that I do not prefer light and medium roasts, but I will drink them if that’s the only thing available.

I really like coffee because it’s so comforting to wrap my hands around a mug. The one I’m currently drinking from is copper. I can’t say that it makes the coffee taste better, but it feels good in my hand. When I buy coffee mugs for myself, they’re usually large with a big handle so that the mug doesn’t feel unbalanced. Nothing feels worse to me than a mug where the handle isn’t big enough to support the weight of the cup.

It’s a sensory issue thing, just like Bombas socks and American Giant hoodies.

I’m also taking a lot of acid reducer because I don’t want to live without spicy food. It’s really the thing that’s handling my congestion, because even with taking Sudafed PE, it’s not completely knocking it out. As a singer, it bothers me when my entire facial mask is full and I can’t breathe, because allergies are the quickest path to laryngitis when your throat is so raw from having to deal with the crap invading your face.

My favorite thing right now is a scrambled egg sandwich with butter and hot sauce.

With all the talk about Hawaiian pizza lately, I bought one just as a vehicle for ghost pepper wing sauce. I got extra cheese and shredded parmesan to bake on top. Maybe that will be dinner today, but I still have some butterscotch pancakes left over from making a batch last weekend. Easier to heat up something I’ve already made, and these pancakes are divine. The butterscotch chips that end up near the surface melt into the butter, and it’s decadent. It’s cake that tastes like a pudding cup. Millions of school children can’t be wrong. 😉

I am all about trying new things these days, obviously. I found a meme the other day that reminded me of Zac….. “remembering the day I kissed a beautiful twink in Brighton because she thought I was a lesbian.” My comment on the meme is that my partner is male and that is our exact description. It makes me laugh out loud that when I dress in what I call “girl clothes” or “ho clothes,” we look depressingly heterosexual. When I’m all dyked out in a baseball cap and jeans, it’s a whole twink/bear mood…… except Zac is clean shaven.

It’s okay that sometimes we look depressingly heterosexual some days, though, because there are days when I just feel depressingly heterosexual. It’s a whole mood. It doesn’t have anything to do with my orientation. It has everything to do with playing into the well-ingrained enculturation of heteronormativity. But Zac and I can share that without it being weird. If I feel strange, I can just tell him that.

Besides, he gives me street cred when I’m writing about intelligence because no one trusts a reporter, but everyone trusts unconfirmed chatter. 😉

However, none of the stuff I write about is unconfirmed. Zac cannot tell me things directly, but he can point me in the right direction. If I find news articles that back him up, I’ll talk about it here. If I don’t, it’s something we need to keep between us until I can verify he’s right. It has nothing to do with Zac giving me information he isn’t supposed to give, it’s that if I write about intelligence here, I don’t want to spread misinformation.

I don’t link to news stories, generally, but my facts are easily verifiable when I use them because I’m talking about current events.

For instance, we’re talking about the Republican party intentionally trying to elect a criminal worthy of a high crimes and misdemeanors charge, a clear and present danger to the United States both foreign and domestic. You cannot let Hillary Clinton’s wisdom, former SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON’s opinion because she was in the room, fall by the wayside. That two-bit sheister is at least a Russian Useful Idiot if not a full-on asset. There has to be a reason that Trump was comfortable extorting Zelenskyy, and now he’s a hero to most Americans, blackmail forgotten. Don’t let him forget.

The Republicans need to face the fact that if they reelect Trump, they’re going to sell Ukraine up the river if the conflict isn’t over by then.

Also, if Trump is a UI, that means we have no idea how many Russian intelligence officers are affecting American voters through the cunning use of other people they can sucker into working for them, unwittingly or not. I do not think that Putin wants war with the United States. I think he has a vendetta and wants to take us over from the inside. We have not done a great job stopping it from happening. There are probably a thousand people just like “The Americans” embedded in Washington alone.

Just like we probably have a thousand case officers on the ground in Ukraine.

I have said this before, but Zelenskyy is my age, a creative, and absolutely brilliant. I have a dog in this fight because I will be crushed if anything happens to him. It would be tantamount to killing Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and Martin Freeman all in one.

“Servant of the People” is just one of the reasons Putin is as dangerous as Trump. If you embarrass either “leader” on television, it will not go well for you.

I’m not asking for things to be perfect around here. I just think that we’re trading national security the longer Republicans hold onto the myth that Trump is capable. He is. He is capable of turning the United States into one of the shithole countries he proclaims to hate, all by being tightly controlled by the Kremlin. Does this sound like anything a SANE Republican would do given the hysteria toward Communism in the 80s?

Trump is not even capable to the level of a Reagan or a Bush. That’s why if he’s reelected, he’ll be perfectly happy to let other people run the United States, no matter what it costs. They don’t even have to live here.

But trust me, they do.

Everything going through my head feels random, but at the same time, my feelings are focused on world issues and I’m not lost in my own problems. I am done ruminating about a whole bunch of things that have made room.

Perhaps it’s good that my feelings truly are random, because they stop me from hyperfocusing and losing myself.

I mean, if I have a movie star name, I should at least grow into it.

😉

I May Have Mentioned These Before….

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are your top ten favorite movies?

I still can’t figure out how to make an ordered list, so I may have 10, I may have more or less. Good luck. God bless.

“Argo” is my favorite movie. Period. Full stop. The end.

That’s because it combines my first girlfriend (a Canadian) and seeing if I was good at her accent by making my life feel like it depended on it. So, as far as I know, Meag saved me from getting caught by the revolutionary guard in Iran in 1979. I was two and we hadn’t met yet, but can you really be too careful? Plus, I am a creative. I have been Tony in front of the “two old fucks from the Muppets” many times. All creatives know how that feels, and if you get lucky, the CIA will finance your movie…… even if it’s “the very best bad idea we’ve got sir… by far.”

With other movies, none of them are ranked. It’s “Argo” and everything else. However, I do like spy movies so a lot of them are….. keeping in mind that I very much know the difference between real and reel, so the drama of the movie is secondary to the story seed.

“Space Camp” is another movie that I consider a favorite because I’ve seen it at least 25 times since it came out. I have been “RUDY TYLER, MA’AM” since fourth grade. I love science, just don’t ask me if I’m any good at it. Plus, are you really a lesbian if you see the way Leah Thompson and Kate Capshaw look at each other and wonder? Of course Leah was a camper and Kate was a counselor. When you’re 10-13 years old, that doesn’t register. You’re looking for anyone looking at another woman the way you do or want to later. It’s a core memory from childhood, pretty much the only reason I thought of it so quickly after “Argo,” because being a teenager connects to that movie as easily as being a child connects to this one.

That being said, if there were a second spy movie that completed me, it would be “The Bourne Supremacy,” and only because I like the Pam Landy character better than Christopher Cooper (no offense, he’s great, as is Bryan Cox- LEGEND). I am one of those people that will stop what I’m doing if I flip across any of the Bourne movies, but Matt Damon can make shivers go up my spine with one line…..

You look tired, Pam.

Here’s my favorite thing about the Bourne movies. I have heard through the grapevine (meaning tons and tons of research) that Turow’s endgame is David as Director. I don’t know if it will come to pass, but I need David to win in the end. I want him to get results after going above and beyond to prove his innocence, because that’s the next story in the series that’s going to have as much impact as The Bourne Identity. It will completely change the game and up the stakes.

For those who don’t remember, Jason Bourne is a cover. David Webb is Jason’s real identity. In terms of how that translates into real life, no one at the Agency uses your real name. You get an identity to use in their buildings and overseas. I know this because Jonna Mendez told us what hers was in a real-life lecture. It was “Faith.” So, it’s kind of fun learning about the movies from real life……. when most people think it’s the other way around.

Jonna Mendez can argue with me all day long that they don’t have passports in a box lying around and I will laugh with her at that stuff all day long, like in “Jason Bourne,” where David finds all the documents regarding “Black Ops” in a FOLDER THAT SAYS BLACK OPS RIGHT ON THE DESKTOP JFC….. I know spies must not watch spy movies like doctors generally hate ER (“the x-ray was upside down and backwards”), but here’s the thing. Inaccuracies in medical shows are hilarious because you can do something about it. If something in a spy movie is wrong, oh, well. It’s not like CIA is going to correct you. The reason spy movies are shit sometimes is because you can’t get an accurate procedural from any spy agency in the world. It cannot be done. There are rules. That doesn’t take away the hilarity of Jonna talking spy tropes on film (video at the end). I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed harder than her takedown of Carrie Mathison (why are you doing this to me?!)

I don’t get many good examples of who I am in film, so when I find it, that movie stays with me. I am very much the preacher in “Contact” and the minister’s kid in “A River Runs Through It.” Both of those are consistently in my top 10 because “Contact” explained God to me when I needed to hear it the most. I could use people I knew as the face of God to make that much power of the universe relatable to me, personally, a peon.

I need to write a script about a preacher’s kid spy, because it would make parishioners fall over with laughter when they hear how we use our people skills once we’ve seen them in that context- and how it would translate on the world stage. I love the idea of being able to negotiate with terrorists based on hearing arguments as a child. The small things are the big things. I am sure that in some ways, negotiating over a bomb and negotiating over a couch are similar.

I hate to laugh at my own joke, but you can relate if you’ve ever been waitstaff.

Waitresses. Oh my God. They would be pound for pound the best spies in the world, especially the beautiful actress types. That’s because they generally have faces that both men and women adore and would spill information- based on her bubbly personality, not her nosiness- making her job so much easier because she can get information without asking any questions.

That’s another reason I think I would have loved being a female spy. I’ve got the best combination of skills for the job that anyone could ask for in terms of recruiting assets. Thank Gd I’m not actually a spy because I would hate the paperwork. Oh, the paperwork.

That’s why my love of real life intelligence fuels my love for movies about it, because they can take an idea and flesh it out so that the story sticks, but the minutiae of paperwork is gone unless it’s absolutely essential to the story. I think it’s better to know that I’m being entertained and to relax about the inaccuracies because I know that the writers can only do so much. I do respect CIA for having a Hollywood relations board and collaborating on stuff like “Homeland.” To know that writers’ stuff does have the capability to be as realistic as it can be is a good thing. For instance, I know that most writers aren’t trying to get the procedure right. They’re trying to get character. It’s why I hang out at the Spy Museum on nights when they have book talks. That’s a chance to meet real spies and I can learn everything I need to know as a writer just by being in the same room. How do they carry themselves?

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” is probably the most accurate procedural out there and I love it so much for that very reason. Le Carre lets me nerd out as much as I want whether it’s with his books or the movies/TV series made of them. I actually liked the TV version of “Little Drummer Girl” better than I liked TTSS, but we’re talking about movies. The thing about Le Carre movies is that if you like true life intelligence stories, the movies will be your absolute favorite. If you have expectations of James Bond proportions, you’ll be disappointed.

Spy send-ups are also among my favorites. I love “Goldmember” and “Spy” just as much as I do documentaries like MiBII (trust me, it’s all there).

Speaking of documentaries, I watch them to travel. I live vicariously through movies like Jiro Dreams of Sushi. If I can expand to television, I love both Netflix series where President Obama takes us through the world’s protected wild life areas and Prince Harry and Meagan let us into their home life.

I hope that there will be a movie script adapted from “Spare,” and it would help if he was a collaborator. That’s because I would want the movie to be accurate, but focused on his life from a third person perspective. He has a story that needs to be told from a journalistic angle, but they have to have truly fallen in love with telling his story. The history he has with journalists is first class PTSD and they do not give a shit when they talk to him. It is very, very clear and they keep adding kindling to the fire. You killed his mother. Have some fucking respect.

When I read it, I was getting over a man who’d been stationed in Afghanistan, and I was able to grieve the loss of my future by attaching it to him and letting it go when I finished the last chapter. I don’t want the movie to treat him as anything other than a normal person who just happens to be in extraordinary circumstances, because when the people think of Prince Harry’s military service, they don’t think of him as being just as damaged as American soldiers when they come home. They think of him as “the military must have babied him.” All soldiers know that the military does not do that. Also, Harry was communications. If someone wanted to kill him personally, he heard it firsthand. What do you think that does to a person?

If that movie was done right, it would tie with “Argo.”

The closest you’ll get to seeing the real Capt. Wales is a documentary series on Apple TV+ called “The Me You Can’t See.” Harry does what I do on this blog every day. He gets real and throws down about the subjects I’ve talked about here. I identify with these documentaries about him because to some extent, it feels like we know each other intimately. We both struggle with mental health. We both had parents in the public eye. We have both dealt with the loss of a parent. It’s not just surface-level. We’ve been similar since childhood.

In terms of cinematic beauty, I am astounded by movies that incorporate nature, particularly under the water…. even animations of it. “The Little Mermaid” and “Finding Nemo” are the most beautiful Disney creations on record, at least, to me.

I also love quirky movies like “Adaptation.” I got stuck on that scene where Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper are on the phone trying to hum a dial tone for weeks. I ate it like a meal, just like I did “Sideways.”

I love characters who are strong and yet show vulnerability, so I will watch anything with John Goodman…. another reason “Argo” is my favorite movie, but I also love him in everything from “Atomic Blonde” to “The Princess and the Frog.”

Because music is such a large part of my life, I do love movies where people break into song and dance. Hamilton is the first one I’ve been able to listen to over and over and still find new things, though, because the rhythms are so incredibly complicated I haven’t bothered to learn them from a singer’s point of view. Therefore, sometimes I don’t take in the words as much as I focus on the beat and my interpretation changes over time. When there aren’t as many words, I inhale them.

I can still remember lyrics from “Oklahoma!,” “The Music Man,” and “Carousel,” because those are the movies my mother introduced me to as a kid and later had to learn the songs because I needed to sing them for something (in case you’re just joining us, I’m a soprano and I’ve been told I’m very good….. I also know that the first rule about press is not to believe any of it). I can’t wait until the movie about “Wicked” comes out.

I’m going to include operas and musicals because I watch them on TV, and we’ve already established I’m going to include TV whether it’s in the scope of my parameters or not. “Great Performances” on PBS is the most amazing thing ever. Of course I want to see Bernstein conduct West Side Story. I also love “The Magic Flute,” “Carmen,” and “Madame Butterfly.”

“There’s a place for us,” and that place is us sitting on the couch watching Leonard Bernstein.

I am enamored by science fiction and fantasy, but I lean more toward sci-fi because it takes place in our world, past or future, rather than a word of its own. “Black Panther” and its sequel are both precious to me because Chadwick Boseman went to Howard and thus, he’s a hometown boy, celebrated not nearly enough by the rest of the world as he is here. Plus, it has provided me an EXCELLENT way to worm my way into a conversation with a retired spy. I just tell them I think it’s terrible they’ve been hiding Wakanda from us this long and I demand answers. If they fall over with laughter, I have found my people.

Like every lesbian in America if you’re my age, you carry a special place in your heart for “Fried Green Tomatoes” because you knew you were Idgie. You knew you were the bee charmer. You knew you were going to find a Ruth someday and might raise a Buddy.

That’s honestly where I am now- searching for a Ruth and it’s okay if there are kids involved. I don’t have a drive to be a mother, but that doesn’t mean I’m not okay if they do. I don’t have that partner, but I do have that friend. If Bryn wants kids, she knows I’ll do the work. That if we’re local to each other, those kids would belong to me in some way, but not in any way she wouldn’t allow. With kids, I am just the help. I enforce parents’ rules, I don’t bend them.

Which leads me to my next love in film….. brilliant children’s movies.

I love movies and TV that are written on two levels, jokes that are aimed at kids and jokes that go right over their heads. For instance, Mordecai and Rigby from “Regular Show” are coded as stoner idiots because soda stands for beer and pizza stands for weed. There is no limit to their idiocy and a lot of it is way too mature for kids given what the writers are really throwing down. They just do it in a way that the South Park writers don’t. They say everything without saying anything.

My favorite children’s movie will always be “Meet the Robinsons.” It is a brilliant script and I need Kleenex for it even still.

I think that’s at least 10 movies, so here’s a video of my favorite spy explaining exactly why I think all spy movies are hilarious to some degree or another. I laughed until I cried. I hope you do, too.

Empathy

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

What positive emotion do you feel most often?

For people like me (INFJ, highly sensitive, neurodivergent), empathy is a river of everpresentlovingkindness and a waterfall of tears. My mirror neurons go off for all people who struggle. Because of the negative effects that come with ADHD and Bipolar disorder, sometimes that part of me seems dammed, but it’s not. My focus has turned away, but the emotions are still there. I can’t turn them off, especially with ADHD, because there are 57 channels (and nothing’s on).

I try to focus on empathy, though, because if I didn’t I would recede into myself. For instance, my love of real world intelligence comes from more than one place. I lost a family member in Somalia who was a helicopter pilot for C/DIA, so when I see the stars on the wall at Langley, I know one of them is a personal memorial for me to visit should I get the chance. Another is spies in popular culture, but not necessarily fictional characters. “The Courier” is a true story, as is “Argo.” But those I watched as an adult. As a kid, I was introduced to James Bond and that was a love affair all its own. I didn’t want to marry James Bond. I wanted to be him.

I think that’s because I didn’t connect it that I would have to move to England to do that. I love CIA because I’m an American and feel proud of us, but I am equally obsessed with MI-6 (and the Tom Clancy level of detail that John Le Carre puts into his books). My favorite stories involve collaboration between the two institutions, which I’m sure happens all the time in real life, but isn’t reflected on screen all that often. The reason I think that is because I met a spy from London that was basically “on loan” to us for a task force on human trafficking. I thought that was infinitely cool and became interested in other countries’ intelligence agencies as well. KGB/GRU is fascinating even though I don’t particularly have a fondness for Russia itself.

I am focused on the Vietnam War era of CIA because I am indirectly writing a book about it… but the Cold War is a close second. Most of the retired spies I’ve met were active in the 80s and early 90s, steeping me in stories of East German and Russian operations and cute little Trabants. Regarding my book, it’s actually a platonic love story between two men who are trying to prevent the war from happening altogether. I do not know how the novel is going to end. That’s the best part. I want to write this book because I want to read it.

I’ll put a picture of a Trabant at the end because they’re not popular cars anymore and you simply must see one. To me, they look like pets. When Chevron and Pixar created their cartoon cars, they really missed the boat. A talking Trabant would be every bit as cute to me as a puppy.

The fact that Zac has worked in intelligence since “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is not lost on me and is in fact extraordinarily meaningful. That’s because historically, queer people haven’t been allowed to be spies. It’s not because the US was actively trying to be homophobic….. I mean, they were, but there’s an extremely valid reason behind it that I cannot ignore. If they were caught, it was a short path to blackmail. Either come work for us or we’ll blow up your whole life. I don’t have any anger or bitterness against CIA for not being able to hire me, either, for a similar reason.

If I was caught, the first thing that would be done in another country is taking away my psych meds, even if they were available there. That’s because they automatically think that making me unstable is the best way to get me to talk. Joke’s on them. I wouldn’t talk, but I would be a rage-filled chihuahua (I’m 5’2). Physical withdrawal from an SSRI or mood stabilizer lasts weeks. I have a feeling that wouldn’t go well for me. It’s discrimination, but also empathy. They’re not going to allow me to be in a situation where someone takes away my medication.

Knowing that part of it comes from being a fan of both “Homeland” and “Jack Ryan.” Carrie Mathison did get made and had her psych meds denied. My bipolar disorder is far less severe than hers, but it drove the point home. James Greer was sneaking heart medication, I believe. Different drug, same issue.

It’s devastating because I really would have liked to work on the whole world’s problems at once. I’m just not dumb enough to lead the crusade in a fight to get me hired because for as much as it sucks, I agree with them. The problem, to me, is not getting hired. It’s what happens after you join. I have trouble believing that a case officer will never have to supplement or balance their brain chemicals at all during their entire career. CIA is so massive that there are plenty of jobs where you don’t have to travel at all, but if you are an operative, there’s probably not a chance in hell you’d take one.

That’s because spy agencies are hyped up by the movies to an enormous degree, and yet when I read true life spy stories, I realize that there’s a lot of the same nervous energy I felt before service at a restaurant. I’d be standing in front of a table daydreaming, prepping and nervous before the pop. Feeding hundreds of people is also an operation, and so many nights I could have used an ex-fil. 😉 If I was a current operative, a great place for me would be embedded with World Central Kitchen. I don’t think CIA likes to embed people in humanitarian organizations if they don’t have to do so, because it affects the reputation of the charity. For instance, you will never see an operative disguised as a priest or a Peace Corp officer. That being said, I think CIA should basically be Jose Andres’ right hand, because there’s no one more invisible to the rest of the world than cooks and waitstaff.

I could be The Little Gray Man because I’m just “the help.” What the fuck do I know? Meanwhile, I can learn everything without saying anything. I don’t even have to ask any questions; I can give them enough rope to hang themselves.

But it’s not in the interest of anything other than empathy. Being able to stop horrific things from happening is a worthy cause. I would love to work on saving the people of Ukraine, or perhaps saving women and girls from the Taliban. If I could pick, it would be Ukraine because I don’t necessarily want to work where it’s 110 in the shade. I grew up in Houston, and still technically live in the South. “Dry heat” only helps so much. MENA (State designation for Middle East North Africa) is a giant sandbox where the sun is actively trying to kill you. Poland sounds nice this time of year compared to that. That being said, it wouldn’t matter where I was placed based on geography. I’d just like a job where I actually felt capable. I don’t know which problem in the world would make me feel that way.

But here’s what I do know.

Jose Andres went to Ukraine/Poland out of the same empathy I would.

If you have the means, please donate to World Central Kitchen, and if you’re local, take every chance you can get to throw money in his piggy bank. Zaytinya is amazing down to the French fries.

There are more ways to love the world than just trying to stop bad things from happening. Sometimes you need to actively support the good.

If we can use intelligence to stop wars, we save lives by not putting soldiers in harm’s way. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, we averted nuclear war due to several people. Some of them were Russian assets who gave us invaluable information without Khrushchev knowing what cards Kennedy was holding, and and one submarine officer that pulled a Denzel Washington on Gene Hackman.

Now the theme to “Crimson Tide” is playing in my head.

So, when you think of my empathy, make sure it includes people I will never, ever meet. My heart is big enough to love them all.

I Don’t Admire Professions

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What profession do you admire most and why?

In the United States, we have a tendency to focus on what we do for money, even at parties. It’s not a party conversation, but we have them all the time. Washington can be soulless like that. I have had several people see me out and about with my sister. When she walks away, they ask me how much money she makes. First of all, ask her that. Second of all, she’s a Democrat. AIM LOW.

I make Washington less soulless because even though Lindsay’s crowd is political, my words are not and they need a break. You can see the table relax when my sister says, “This is Leslie. She’s a writer.” Or “she’s a cook.” The writer thing is only seen as positive when both of us make it clear I’m not a journalist. That’s a tupperware party I’m just not going to host. The difference is that if someone knows you’re a journalist, they’ll monitor everything they say because they think you’re looking for sensitive information. Bloggers don’t do that. They’re looking for a slice of real life, and politics is anything but that.

I’ll give you a for-instance in a completely fictional example that could indeed happen the longer I live here.

If Kamala Harris and I met, I would not remember the date or time. I would not remember much of what she said. But I’d remember the way her hair sparkled in the sun, whether her hugs were memorable, whether she smelled like generic soap or a perfume I’d recognize, definitely whether she was wearing Chucks or not.

I wouldn’t even say on my web site that I met Kamala Harris, most likely, because the higher you go in government salary, the less of your schedule is published. I wouldn’t want to say that I met her on a day she was supposed to be in Ukraine. In Washington, you learn to think like that no matter who your friends are, because you know you’ll have to do it for at least one person in your life, so why not do it for all of them? I doubt there would ever be a scenario in which I met a public figure at a time where they weren’t supposed to be there, but it is the nature of living in the federal city and not watching them on the news.

If I did respect a job, it would be journalism. I am very, very picky though. I figure out my favorite columnists and stick to them like glue (Shane Harris, Greg Miller). I will buy their books (I have most of David Halberstam’s, several of Rachel Maddow’s, and “The Apprentice” by Greg Miller). As I was telling Supergrover, I like to read novels, but I do not like to write them. I find that journalism jogs my brain for blogging, and I am in a rut with fiction because I am working on my own content right now. Novels will come back soon. I have just gotten into the groove. I don’t think “let’s go see what’s on the Internet today.” I think, “let’s go make the Internet today.”

Disrespect of someone’s profession comes from years and years of being tired of listening to complaints about people’s lives. If they don’t like what they do, why should I ask them? I would much rather ask them what they love. This works with anyone, because everyone has that thing. For me, it’s writing content for the web…. but not because it makes me popular. It’s that when I didn’t have any readers at all, I changed myself an entry at a time. Just because other people read my entries now doesn’t mean that it’s not all about self-improvement. I do the same thing I’ve always been doing. I wake up, think about my life for a few minutes, and the urge to write wakes up hungry.

I want to hear about that fire in other people. For Supergrover, it was also writing, She’s a blogger and writes children’s fairy tales that I hope to God one day I am old enough to understand. She writes clearly and beautifully, but what I mean is that I do not have a child’s heart anymore……… but she does. I will never carry a tenth of her little-kid wonder.

For Bryn, it’s all kinds of things. She likes cooking, gardening, making, being outside, having dogs……. all of it is creativity she pours into her relationships with animals (and dirt).

For Zac, it’s all the same stuff Bryn does on a smaller scale. He loves hiking and being outside with Oliver. The fact that what Zac does for money is my real life interest is a new thing. I am never more interested in what he has to say than when it’s about life inside his intelligence agency. His is a generic one that collects raw data from all the others, but he has the backstage pass to places like CIA and NSA.

It’s nice to know that even if I only have lawn seats, I can giggle with Zac after the show.

And yet it’s another relationship in which our interests feed each other to an enormous degree, because what I want to know isn’t even close to classified. It’s not important to me whether he has chatter on Iran, although I will definitely be listening to that if he does. It’s that he can tell me what his day to day life is like. He tells me when he’s going into a  no personal gadgets building, and because we’re both on the think it, say it plan, when I’m on a government computer and when I’m not (as in sending to his work computer). I learn what circumstances dictate being in a SCIF vs. why he’s actually there. Does that make sense? I want to know everything without knowing anything.

I’m dating the man who’s president of his queer group at the agency and it’s definitely not “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military anymore. Zac is also in the Navy Reserves, and I want to hear about every waking moment of that, too. That’s because he got to learn what it was like to walk into other countries and have people know they were talking to an intelligence officer based on past history with other people………… and being able to sniff them out so that he can deflect questions in advance.

I called him an intelligence officer, but I’m using a generic term because I don’t know military slang. He was active duty in the Navy and his job was intelligence. What that’s actually called is beyond me. Now, he works at a national intelligence agency and does his Navy stuff as a side gig. 😛

If I tell you what I love, it’s going to be reading and writing. But people vastly underestimate how much I actually write because blog entries seem like they take a very long time. If I’m going full stream of consciousness like I do on this blog every day, I type as fast as I think and generate about a page of single spaced type every two or three minutes. I have found that I am getting faster at this by writing every day, because it’s difficult to sum up a week at once. Much easier to sum up a few hours.

Even the conflict I was talking about the other day doesn’t matter now. I thought I was being told one thing, I was being told another. Once the communication freakout was over, I got back in on the ground floor of something exciting. Doesn’t mean the conflict wasn’t worth remembering in the past. Just that I’m glad it all resolved in the best way possible for all parties.

But no one takes into account just how long it takes to nurse an idea, or how long I slave over other ideas in addition to blogging.

I have also learned something important. If I want to be successful at a party, tell everyone I’m a professional cook. If I don’t, tell them I’m a writer.

So I suppose that if I admire a profession, it’s writing……. only because someone has to.

It might as well be me.

It Has All Become Uninteresting

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Scour the news for an entirely uninteresting story. Consider how it connects to your life. Write about that.

I have scoured the news, and I cannot find anything on the surface that fascinates me. I am obsessed with hearing the real story on the news, then mining my resources for details. Zac and John (Fot) are my best bets for chatter about international relations and cyber warfare. John also worked with me at Biddy McGraw’s, so I ask him for a heard on things I write about the kitchen. Both he and my former chef, John-Michael Kinkaid, are both great about critiquing my work when it relates to something we went through together. When I’ve surpassed those two things, it’s off to the library or the spy museum.

What I am saying is that the story isn’t the story anymore. It’s how we got here. The former president being arrested is uninteresting. Why it took so long? We’re getting somewhere. I don’t mean the current rounds. I mean why did SDNY have to have 36 counts of something before they built a case? They’re the reason he thinks he can get away with anything. They waited until there was an exponentially larger amount of evidence than needed to convict.

The cost of food is rising. It generally does. That is not interesting. What is interesting is why. Are there crops failing in other parts of the world? Why do we not have the infrastructure to grow our own crops? That’s where the real story begins.

Why have the Republicans decided that the only thing they can do is say no to Democrats? That question is uninteresting. The interesting question is why they are so unsure of their own policies working that they don’t put anything forward? Why are Democrats doing the work while Republicans run out the clock?

Why have Republicans stopped caring about our standing on the world stage? Why aren’t they interested in what our allies think of us? I would venture to guess that they think the United States is the beacon of hope it once was. That’s because they stopped listening to our intelligence agencies when the former president told them to do so…. in front of a wall meant to honor case officers who had died in the line of duty.

The former president’s path to power is the most embarrassing thing that’s happened to our nation in a very long time. People gave into their basest instincts after a black president ran the country successfully. His biggest scandal was a tan suit. Racism that was quiet got its volume turned up to an enormously frightening degree. Where racism goes, so does homophobia and transphobia. The story is not that we had a black president. The story is how so much of the country reacted to it.

The story is not why Joe Biden was elected. The story is why Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren weren’t.

The story is not why Joe Biden is great, but why Kamala is the most unique individual in our nation’s history. If Joe runs again, I know it’s because he knows that if he dies in office, he will create history and no one will have to vote on it.

The story is not Michelle Obama’s arms, but girl…… we all know it ought to be.

Oh! That’s a news story I can connect to me, indirectly. My friend Giles is married to a lawyer that used to work in the Obama administration. Therefore, my friend Giles has seen Michelle Obama’s arms. The fact that he did not write me a two page essay on the subject is his only flaw as a friend.

Probably more interested in his husband’s arms, but whatever.

I like thinking about the Obamas, because they’re a few public figures I’d actually like to meet….. but not in a formal setting. I mean that even though they only live a few miles from me, they’re so famous we’d never run into each other at the grocery store. I have learned that if you really want to meet your political heroes, it is really damn hard unless you were there during the campaign.

As a writer, I feel this intimately and I do not argue with it at all.

If you have to tell someone to carry the bricks, they’re not the ones to be building with.

I hope it’s how my sister feels about me, that I cannot give her everything she needs to be physically safe and sound, but I am caring for her heart. She is my news story at least in Texas every day of my life.

When you see on the news that a law involving trans kids is up in the Texas legislature, know that my sister has a vast network on the ground working to make sure that it doesn’t even get out of committee. They can’t always do it, but no one talks about the people that do that kind of work. Those people who walk into the dark so that they can bring the light……

The story is the law that passed regarding a bathroom bill, excluding trans kids from sports, etc. But that is uninteresting. The story is how close the vote was, and how much it took to get even that.

Always look for the story, because it isn’t on the surface.

Life happens when you’re doing something else. In order to get the facts to line up with the news, you’re going to have to make every story relate to you. The hardest part if you are an American is tuning out all the messages that say you are already the best because you are an American.

Some of the greatest American patriots who ever lived worked for governments they couldn’t stand.

But that wasn’t the story.

Commence Smiling, Part II

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

Now that I’ve eaten, I realized I would like to continue talking about nothing. Things that just make me happy whether I’m trying to answer a WordPress writing prompt or not. I can make anything into a happy thought given time and space, but here are the things that make it easy to love life.

  • Spring and autumn make life bearable. Neither deals in extreme temperature (yet). I love jacket weather because I don’t like summer clothes. I’m always too cold once I go inside.
  • If you are going to come to The District, it is best to come in Spring so that you can experience the monuments and the cherry blossoms at the same time. If you don’t come in the Spring, every tourist trap gift shop and museum will have something that looks or smells like a cherry blossom……. but not really. Not a digital reproduction in the world compares to standing next to a tree.
  • If you are going to come to the DMV, it helps to learn about us before you get here. There’s a culture to the Metro. There’s a culture to DC that everyone ignores because they’re just trying to hit tourist spots. Learn where politicians and reporters come to dine and just be quiet. Soak up information, don’t start fights with your political rival. You’ll learn more the less you say. Learn about gogo music, wings and mumbo sauce, Frederick Douglass’s house. Washington is covered in African American history, and especially as white people we should be silent observers. Their voices first, our empathy. You’ll learn more the less you say. Like chasing a story, it is your witness that matters, not your will.
  • Even trying to find wings and mumbo sauce (I like fried rice on the side, some people like fries) is a step in the right direction, as is going to have a half smoke at Ben’s Chili Bowl. Ben’s Chili Bowl was the African American History Museum before we actually got one. There are pictures on the wall that are just unbelievable, but you have to look. REALLY look. You have to read the captions that aren’t there, because white people do not have the right to ask those questions. Introduction to someone’s pain is an invitation-only event.
  • Washington is the only city for me that contains real connection to the Revolutionary War, and not because other cities didn’t participate. It’s that Washington is where we keep the memories. Washington is a treasure trove of news, stretching back to before the country began. I remember the first time I drove into Alexandria and read the charter. It was established 30-odd years before the Declaration of Independence I would imagine that Silver Spring is the same way, because Baltimore was established in 1729. We just kept creeping toward each other, which birthed The District and in a lot of ways, me.
  • I woke up the morning after my 24th birthday and the whole world had changed. I was still young enough to have a child’s reactions to it all. It was too formative not to count. Plus, it really helped when I moved to Portland when I learned that people were suspect of George W. and therefore me, so I just started telling people I was from DC….. at a time when that was the lesser of two evils. It was either that or to tell people that I understood their hesitation and their crap wouldn’t work on me because I’d had to put up with him way longer than they had.
  • Molly Ivins made me happy because she put words in my mouth that I sorely needed. It was good to make fun of him, and she knew all the best ways. He WAS born with a silver foot in his mouth. He DIDN’T compare to someone like Al Gore, a successful senator by his 40th birthday when on W.’s 40th birthday he realized he probably had a drinking problem. Molly didn’t think that the loyal opposition was wrong all the time, necessarily. She just believed in picking the smartest players in the game. Bush’s only play was that his vice was smarter than he was….. who was also evil. Molly made dealing with all of that better. Molly saw that my life was hard and why.
  • Shane Harris makes me happy. When I’m not sitting in the middle of the Spy Museum with six books open on the floor, I could on him. He’s the National Security desk at the Washington Post, so even though I’m not working in his time period, I learn how intelligence says things to the news. How do I get to the real story when all we get on the news is “senior intelligence officials indicate” and not how they got there.
  • Jen Psaki makes me happy because she and her department handle news as well, like hearing “White House officials indicate” and not how they got there. It’s all connected, because intelligence is given to policymakers. I have found that the more I research, the more I get bored and then find an AHA! moment. I am not chasing James Bond around town. The reason true spy stories seem so exciting is that the real story is often too boring to film. Just trust me. But when you hit a gold mine, you really, really hit one. If you live abroad, try it in your own country, especially if you’d like to come here. The easiest path is to tell CIA information that they need. If you get a job working for us where you live, you might end up here quicker than applying for a visa. Your mileage may vary. See web site for details. No promises. But if you’re already interested in spy shit, anyway, it’s a good move. I promise that you cannot make yourself love it. But that’s for operations. They also need just as much support staff as everyone else. My cousin James painted offices. Since Foster and James worked for CIA, I would have been involved somehow, too, because I was taken with Foster’s story from the time I was born. However, since my genetics dealt me a losing hand in the mental health department, I never tried. But like most people the right age to have obsessed over The West Wing, it would take dragging me away. I couldn’t be involved in intelligence, but they don’t have those restrictions at State, which is often the same job from a public and private perspective. It all fits together, it’s all one puzzle, they all play a role. The only thing I’m not interested in is military, because I want defense to be clever. I watch Doctor Who. I have standards.
  • Doctor Who makes me so happy. I am proud to be part of a tradition that has lasted decades. I am proud that they taught me to love the whole world at once, that every person has a story, and they all matter.
  • It makes me happy that I have proven my story does matter, because I write it exactly the way I want, say exactly what I want, and people find it interesting. I do not have to be less. You have allowed me to be my whole self. Thank you.

I Wouldn’t

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How would you describe yourself to someone who can’t see you?

If there is anything I have learned over the last eight years, it’s “stop trying to describe yourself to someone who can’t see you.” It is wasted energy because they’re running on deduction and inference, and skipping over what you’re telling them. It is also true that people see what they want to see. Know when you’re not it, and celebrate the people who show up.

I was reminded of that by my favorite author, Jonna Mendez. However, if I hadn’t started with her late husband’s books, we never would have met at all. It is so beautiful to me that my first favorite spy/writer introduced me to the second…. and he thought she was just as beautiful inside as I do now.

She made my heart overflow with gratitude when I sent her “The Spy in the Room,” a blog entry where I talked about seeing her live at the International Spy Museum:

It was so validating to have someone who writes professionally really take in who I am and what I do. It changed my perspective and my self confidence, because she saw me in a way that no one ever has.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy compliments from readers. I really do. They’re so valuable. At the same time, there’s something about meeting your heroes and them saying they think you’re on the right track.

The reason I’m posting about this is it’s actually a screenshot from four years ago today.

It humbles me to stand next to greatness, and for a few minutes, I really, really did. She thought I was perceptive because the entry talks about the armor you put on when you’re in grief.

It was not a one-way transaction.

I saw her, and she saw me.

I have just described it.

Little, Broken, but Still Good

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How would you describe yourself to someone?

I can hear Dana in my head. She has a marvelous Stitch impression.

I’m supposed to be describing me, and this is the best I’ve got.

I’m trying to stop being nice, without losing being kind. I find that if I try and people please everyone, it’s not the flex I thought it was. People treat you to the level they see themselves, and are self-serving a lot of the time. They’ll help you if there’s something in it for them. Very few people will help someone a propos of nothing.

Those few are worth more than you have in your bank account, and I don’t care how high your balance may be. It is even truer for billionaires that they need good friends, because they have to worry about things most people don’t. What if their kid gets kidnapped? It’s very real when the kidnapper can set the release at anything he or she wants.

Most people think it’s justified, like eating the rich. That doesn’t make it right.

It’s just one example to make my point, but there are millions of others.

It is interesting that now people see that my boundaries are ironclad, they don’t test them. It doesn’t matter whether they’re scared of upsetting me, whether they think I’m being an asshole, or respecting my privacy. I am not responsible for what they understand, and they don’t live in my head. No one can predict me, because I want them to stop.

The heuristic in their heads is mild-mannered preacher’s kid who will do anything and everything not to offend anyone. I was constantly trying to figure out how people emoted and thought so that I could keep them from getting upset. I wasn’t standing for anything, I was falling for everything, and I could hear Ben Franklin telling me to stop.

It’s probably because of the summer heat in Philadelphia. I hear it is not pleasant. If you do not know how bad, you should let Jill, Lindsay and me school you. We all had to read a book about early America that focused so much on the heat during the many Congresses it took to get to ::gestures broadly at everything:: that everyone sweated and grumbled and got drunk at lunch. Now that’s how you whip a vote.

I’m betting at least some of those guys had good boundaries, but not Franklin. He became the toast of Paris trying to win the Revolutionary War with their money and resources.

At the end of the day, there’s this gem from the International Spy Museam. “Washington didn’t beat us, he simply outspied us.” It’s a paraphrase, but you get the gist. Intelligence over military might, my goal in every conflict vs. putting boots on the ground. I have too many friends in the military to think of any of them in danger. Spies save lives by having good boundaries.

The first Moscow Rule, not Tony Mendez’ explanation but he wrote them down is, “don’t fall in love with your asset.” It doesn’t mean sleeping with them (a Moscow Rule…… for RUSSIA), it means that if you don’t have boundaries, you won’t be able to protect them. it means that you’ll start wearing rose-colored glasses instead of running the numbers. it means being emotionally incapacitated to some degree, because sometimes they get caught. It’s one thing for you to go to prison or be tortured. It’s another thing to watch someone else, and it’s something you asked them to do that got them caught in the first place.

It’s a metaphor for life, or it has become that for me. I have fallen in love with the whole world, but the whole world doesn’t deserve me. It takes my focus and directs it externally, leaving me with no energy. Pushing people away is not trying to hurt them. It’s trying to say that I only have enough energy for *some* people because I have many, many, many acquaintances and readers that are not my close friends, and yet I would bleed out if they needed anything while my needs, and my family’s needs from me go by the wayside.

I think when you’re an INFJ, if you are interested in International Relations at all, you love CIA because they keep people safe. It’s one thing to have a few people steal some documents. It’s quite a different experience walking into a base in Afghanistan or Iraq and seeing how massive it is because they have to accommodate thousands (or at least hundreds…).

CIA has done some shady shit, too, but what you see is what you get. If you want to see that they’re evil, you’ve got material. If you want to see that they’re amazing, you will. It just depends on your filter. Now, extrapolate that to everyone you know. Are you capable of accommodating six friends or at least, hundreds…….. What people see in you is what people see in “the Manson family,” which is what the FBI calls them in “The Looming Tower.” It’s not a real thing. It was just funny in the show (it’s on Hulu, I think).

But of course the FBIs filters are different. They’re a law enforcement agency built on slave catchers. Who’s really the good guy in either scenario when you look at them through those filters?

Giving the important people in your life the attention they deserve means shutting others out and not feeling bad about it. No one has the energy to have 50 friends, and if they do, they don’t know all of them that well. But if you’re a people pleaser, you might cater to people you don’t know well for a while, but then you’ll get overwhelmed and give up.

It reminds me of one of my favorite hymns:

Draw us in the Spirit’s tether
for when humbly in your name
two or three are met together,
you are in the midst of them.

Now, God does not work for CIA that I’m aware of, nor do they belong to The Manson family. That’s all on us.

It’s a reminder that to have a truly spiritual experience, it can be quiet. You cannot go deep with 50 people, especially if you can’t go deep with one.

Talking to 50 people is easier than talking to one when you don’t hate small talk. Being on stage or in the pulpit/lectern is even easier. That’s because even when I’m preaching a confessional sermon with 200 people hanging on every word, I still don’t feel responsible for their actions. I don’t feel responsible for the way they feel when I’m done. I know from experience how I did. If I did well, they’ll tell me so. If I blew it, they’ll say, “I like your dress.”

“I like your dress is polite, but it doesn’t indicate someone who will show up for you.

And that leads me to a story about Mikal, my 11th grade best friend. We were on a mission trip to Reynosa, and it turns out that I, in fact, cannot preach in Spanish. But I tried.

I think it was something like “los ninos es la corazon o la iglesia” (the children are the heart of the church). That’s because I preached Sunday worship after vacation Bible school (I was the only one who could even attempt such a thing. Had nothing to do with my qualifications except two years in school that barely covered first grade. Anyway, I say a couple of things after that and then I run out of words and couldn’t really “think of a closer.” So I just repeated the above line twice and said, “Amen.” My mother cried (partially because she had no idea what I was saying) because that’s what mothers do when you preach.

I finish not really knowing how I did, because everyone was polite.

I get back to my seat and Mikal says, “that was the worst piece of crap I’ve ever heard in my life.”

And that’s why she was my best friend.

It’s More Simple Than You Think

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What makes a teacher great?

I’ve been close to Bryn’s mom and dad since I was 19, as well. Here’s the most important thing her dad has ever taught me, because it has influenced a lot of what I write and preach. The hardest part of teaching is remembering what it was like not to know.

It’s a very difficult thing to be enlightened and also remember the dark. If you can record that transition, you might be able to explain it. You can help others by acknowledging their fear, and being their Moses.

The phrase “being Moses” means something to me, because Tony Mendez has taught me a thing or two about being a writer/teacher. In “Argo,” he tells State that the only way out of Tehran is through the airport…. That State should “send in a Moses” to bring them home. Because the meeting was speculative- so State could say they ran their ideas past CIA’s best ex-fil guy- I am not sure that Tony Mendez meant to say “it’s me. I’m Moses.”

The next scene in my mind is Tony preparing The Six for their trip to the grand bazaar in the middle of the city. Moses is sweating bullets for two reasons. The first is that if he is caught, The Agency cannot claim him. He’s working without a net. The second is that it’s not just his ass on the line. He and The Six get caught, as Jack points out, they die badly. The entire world will be watching.

That is an extreme example of having to teach someone, but it illustrates frustration on both sides of the equation. If Tony doesn’t prepare The Six, one if not all of them will be pulled in by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for questioning. Alternatively, The Six are just basic policy wonk diplomats with no training in deception and Tony has to teach them to walk their covers in a day.

It’s not the same as remembering what it was like not to know multiplication and division, but it’s the same concept. The difference is an age-appropriate level of fear. It clutches your chest whenever you leave your comfort zone, which is not the same when you’re five and when you’re fifty. It’s a proportional response.

Remembering what it was like not to know is often a failing of mine, because things that are so patently obvious to me are hiding in plain sight for others. I am going to be able to feel you before you even say anything. I can tell what kind of mood you’re in simply by watching body language. I can feel the frustration, anger, etc. steaming off you and the moment when that energy changes. I don’t have to learn someone’s mannerisms, habits, mood, and behavior to do this. It happens automatically. I will not be able to tell that there is a problem, but I know what it looks like to move in the world showing different emotions. The more people claim there isn’t one, the more I know whether they’re telling the truth or not, because there is an energy behind truth and white lies. I can feel that shift, and can feel you bullshitting me. Your next words don’t even matter, because the way you stiffened up before you answered betrayed you.

I feel like I can tell the most about people’s personalities and group dynamics without saying a word. I stand there and soak up everything in the room. I’m not just feeling how we are interacting, but how everyone is. I can tell not just how your behavior affected me personality, but also how well you know how to read a room…………

I am not bragging on myself, because others have this gift. Bryn is better at it than I am. Having her is like having a bloodhound. She can sniff out when I’m upset, and sometimes I think she does it by reading how the phone rings. 😛

Speaking of Bryn, she told me that she feels like a celebrity when I write about her on my blog. I told her that she is not the first person to tell me this. My friend James nearly made me die of laughter when he said, “I really just go to your page and search ‘James.’ Yes, I am that fucking shallow.” She told me that my entries were the perfect length for a morning constitutional, and I told her that she was nowhere near the first person to tell me that.

I missed my calling. My blog should be called “The Shit Show.”

It was more simple than I thought.