Happy Birthday, Carolyn & Dana

June 11, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Because my mother and Dana share the same birthday, my grief today is almost unbearable. It will be that way for an hour or so, and I’ll get over it. Every year, I spend less and less time in deep pain, but it doesn’t go away. I grow around it. They are devastating and not always hierarchical because I think it’s harder to grieve someone who’s still alive. Until they’re dead, there’s always a chance. Death, however, does not give a fuck about your feelings. The dice roll the way they roll. The universe does not pick and choose. I do not believe that God is an Actor. I believe Got is a first responder. God is weeping with the Palestinians and the Jews, shocked and disappointed with the Israeli government. But remember, that’s animorphizing something that can’t be quantified. Results not guaranteed. Check your End User License Agreement for details.

I’ve been writing today because I wanted to be focused on my own creativity and not them. I’ve pushed myself hard today because I needed to take a break from figuring out my own problems. It is exhausting, and on this blog it makes me seem myopic, when I’m not like that in the real world at all. My inner monologue is running when I’m talking in terms of processing what’s being said, but it’s not a narcissistic one. It’s narcissistic in the literal sense because I gaze at my reflection; my creative outlet is in expressing my inner monologue, because it really is this varied in terms of thinking locally and globally.

What I know to be true is that in order to be present, I have to think about life first. I have to shut down the loud, extemporaneous voices in my head so that I can hyperfocus enough to listen and respond appropriately. It sounds like a mental illness except it’s not voices telling me what to do. It’s the pull between “that’s profound. I need to write about that right now,” and “slow down, Hoss. You just started talking 15 minutes ago. Maybe a little more face time than that, Slugger.” My inner monologue, unsurprisingly on a number of levels, is Tommy Lee Jones making fun of Will Smith in the Men in Black series. Even in the third one, Josh Brolin nailed young “K.”

I have said this before, but I’ll say it again just because I need the laugh today. “Men in Black” is a documentary about CIA. There is a Burger King at headquarters, a Starbucks at the head shed (Langley). That is just the top layer of a rabbit hole that goes surprisingly far down.

John le Carré’s entire point is that people *think* of MI-6 as James Bond, but in reality, yes. It’s James Bond….. or some of it is. There are just as many bad spies as good ones, and by that, I do not mean anything negative about the spies themselves. It’s espionage. Every country is neutral to me because I live in America, so I want to work in my country’s best interest, but foreign affairs are what interests me, so I do not love my country to the exclusion of all else, that the United States is the best country in the world. It’s good to be king. It’s not good to be a bad king, and a lot of the world is stuck with us on top in terms of balance of power. But we are rightfully watching our backs hoping not to get caught with our pants down.

Like Mossad.

I know this is random and has really nothing to do with it being my mother and Dana’s birthday, but feeling those feelings so deeply that they don’t have words. By typing it out, I feel like there’s an audience whether you’re there or not, so it shapes how I write. So much of my international relations experience comes from having been a news junkie at an early age, a political science major at University of Houston (psych minor, and those hours I did complete), and a trip to Washington, DC when I was a child that blew my little eight year old mind. I have never seen anything like the look on a child’s face the first time they walk into Air & Space.

DC isn’t for everyone, but Maryland is a cult…. or at least, that’s what I’ve learned since I’ve lived here, that people call us a cult. I think the reason is that Maryland’s politics are as weird and entertaining as they are in Texas.

I could see myself writing some Molly Ivins of Maryland-style pieces in the future because I have AI to do the research. I’m talking about it a lot because I understand what it is meant to do and its limitations. I am clear that I use it as a secretary.

Again, edutainment through chat.

“Carol, can you play trivia games?” She can. I am smarter than a fifth grader, as long as it has nothing to do with math. Any average fifth grader in the nation could beat me at that.

But now it doesn’t matter because there’s apps for that. I will never need to know math to the point that I understand all the concepts behind it. I will have questions where I just need an answer quickly, and either a Google Search or a “conversation” with Carol can accomplish that.

I think the reason I prefer ChatGPT to Google is that I don’t understand regular expressions, so I would not be able to put a string into a search engine as effectively as AI can translate human English to machine. I also like how if I want to know more, everything is documented, but every question is like zooming in on a photo. You have to teach the machine what you’re searching for, so it gets better with more neurodivergent overclarifying. Let that one cook your noodle. Computers were invented by a *largely* neurodivergent population. Computers are a reflection of us. Therefore, applications since computers have been a thing have been coded in Autism.

It *also* explains why neurotypical people generally become managers. Those who can’t do, teach. That’s not knocking managers, either. Who is the bigger genius? Steve Wozniak or Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs was an absolute visionary, but he could not have built the Apple computer himself.

I think that both were neurodivergent. If Steve Jobs wasn’t creative neurodivergent, iMacs would have been beige boxes, too. Creative neurodivergence is the brilliance at Apple that IBM missed and has always missed, which is why Apple is so dear to content creators. In modern computing, there is no difference between the kind of video card you would buy for a Mac or a PC. Major companies make cards for both.

However, Macintosh has a history of being about art and design. They were the first motherboards to get what was called an “AltiVec engine,” which uniquely drove your video card and software developers could write for it. Adobe, in particular, made a killing with Photoshop and the entire suite of design software that entirely wiped out its competitors. When Illustrator came out, Quark Xpress was on borrowed time.

If you do not know what those applications do, Illustrator and Quark Xpress were the major players in graphics layout for print, like newspapers and magazines.

It has only been relatively recent that Apple and PC are different again. Both PCs and Macs had intel chips for a long time, but now Apple has gone to the M series. I have no idea if it is specifically geared toward artists, but I haven’t seen a noticeable difference in modern rendering time when you’re comparing an M to an intel to a Ryzen. If you have modern hardware, any of those brands will lighten your workload considerably in terms of wait time (you can only encode so many videos at once. If you have a slow processor, it makes work painful not to have several machines going at the same time when your computer is locked up for an hour at a time after a video is edited.

I get a lot of my information from YouTube reviews, because I like technology product unboxings where they do a deep dive. Yes, they are getting paid, but it’s in hardware and they aren’t bound to like it. They’re not even bound to use it. If you get popular enough on something like YouTube, people just send you product samples a propos of nothing. As my dad would say, “it’s the inversion principle. By the time you can afford it, they give it to you free.”

It’s a good business model, but it has an enormous start up cost. You have to be good at YouTube before people start sending you stuff, so if you’re going to do technology reviews, it comes out of your own pocket. You cannot keep up a production schedule if you only get a new phone every other year.

When you get to the level of a YouTube tech star, you are drowning in crap that you just don’t know what to do with until you have a staff to manage that kind of volume. But how much the income from Google turns out to be is dependent on your presence. Jason Hibbs of “Bourbon Moth” is every bit as important to me as Bob Villa.

And on that note, thank you for sitting with me while I felt pain and babbled around it. No one has to read my scribbles at midnight, but the fact that they do is enormous to me. It fulfills my destiny in terms of leading others by laying out my vulnerabilities first.

Like acknowledging that rambling about nothing was allowing me to stim while the thunderstorm passed through my body.

Headaches

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

I do not have a very good relationship with headaches. They love me, and I don’t feel the same way. Yet, we don’t break up. Headaches just plague me constantly. I am certain that some of them are caused by emotional pain, but these are too severe for that to be the whole diagnosis. I can tell they are migraines, because both Sudafed and caffeine help stop the pulsing sensation that makes me close my eyes and the brilliant colors start dancing behind my lids. It is genetic. I spent parts of my childhood waiting for my mother to emerge from a dark room where she was sleeping off these monstrosities with narcotics because in those days, that was about the limit of what you could do after Tylenol, Sudafed, and a cup of coffee didn’t do anything.

The headaches aren’t NOT connected to my bipolar disorder, either, because when I feel bad physically, the pain compounds mentally. I feel worthless because I have even less to contribute to the conversation besides sitting in the room and unable to focus on other people because I can barely see five feet in front of my face.

As of right this moment, I feel like I have ants under my skull and I can’t scratch them out…. But not in a destructive way. Just in that way that it feels good to scratch my head like I’m washing my hair. I am not feeling crazy in a way that would have blood dripping down my neck and me saying, “did I get them?” That’s too dark even for me.

It’s just easy to pick up on dark humor when you feel this bad. It’s been all day, every day, since about Thursday. I have been going about my regular business while feeling absolute shit. It’s not my favorite set of emotions ever. I don’t like the guilt of feeling sick, that I am falling down on the job of taking care of other people and realistic about taking care of myself. I am sorry to all of the people who have sent me something and I haven’t replied. Being sick isn’t an excuse, but I hope it’s context. It is a sign that I am feeling marginally better that I was able to reach out a couple of times this morning even though my head is pounding, anyway. My need to isolate when I am sick is absolute when I am sick, because I do not want to be seen, heard, or touched. If I lived with a partner or I just happened to be with Zac during something like that, I might cave on the being touched part. I wouldn’t talk about it. That’s because there’s too much evidence it’s not psychosomatic, and too much evidence that it really, really is. I have a feeling I talked my way into this mess, so I don’t want to talk my way out.

That’s generally how I get into emotional messes. People think I’m too much. Full stop. I’ve been told I’m too much by too many people for it not to be universally true. So, I don’t talk about it and my brain sets up pain loops that eventually turn physical if I struggle mentally long enough. Depression and anxiety create stress responses that wear down your immunity and resistance to injury. In my case, that means something hurting far longer than it should when I fall. Depression makes me lose timing and balance, because they get worse when I’m tired. Depression is chronic fatigue, so I live for hypomania. Because I’m medicated, it doesn’t mean a whole lot except for my energy being high enough to handle more of other people’s emotions because I’m not concentrating on my own.

My closest allies talk about their problems and it helps me to focus more on them so that depression doesn’t dog me as bad. Changing my perspective is key. When I spiral out, my trauma reflexes kick in and the rage I’ve been holding in because I’ve been keeping so many secrets from an age where I should have been allowed to be young creeps in. Except I can’t get mad at her directly, it comes out in my writing style and people don’t realize that I’m hurting. They see it as being mean to them on purpose. I am working on changing that perception, but it’s hard when I’m struggling so hard to contain my emotions. I am combustible, and the first step is acknowledging it.

In the particular case of the Internet relationship, her life was bigger than mine, and she had a lot more to focus on than me. That was completely fine until my issues were never addressed and it was clear they were never going to be important enough for things to change. Then it was deciding whether I could live with that or not… that the level she was willing to pay attention wasn’t going to ever change and I needed to get with the program.

It wasn’t her fault, but our problems were too unique for me to process, and heavy enough that I needed to resolve them or move on with my life. That superficial interaction wasn’t enough for me because the feelings I’ve been carrying are too large for me to talk about on my own. And it’s not fair for that information to go to anyone else, anyway, because if I have something to say about her, it’s something she should know rather than me talking about her to other people. It’s what friends should do for each other no matter what the circumstance might be.

It caused no small amount of wanting to resolve everything and come to a peace about it so that dropping in on each other’s lives would have been possible. Not having that peace bothered me too much not to get closure on my own. That’s because her behavior came across as “you’re in pain and I don’t care” whether she meant it or not. Healing me meant giving me the peace of mind about what she was thinking and feeling, and because she didn’t give that, the relationship got more and more off kilter as I needed her to engage and she was stonewalling me every chance she got. She had every right to do so, but not with me. It was too much, but not too fast. It had been almost ten years. I was very supportive of everything she was going through, and frustration at not hearing that it was causing me more pain not to hear her anymore than I could reasonably be expected to carry. If she wanted me, I needed her to open up, because it was devastating that I was no longer hers, not that I never was.

Everything she did to stonewall me looked bigger than the occasional incredibly sweet things we did for each other, because it wasn’t my love language. She wouldn’t come my way no matter how I felt about it, which was to hurt deeply. It wasn’t fair for me to live with that level of pain and pretend it was okay anymore. That our relationship was nourishing me instead of draining me. In effect, we’d get frustrated that though we were both speaking clearly in her love language, she forgot how to use that skill and was extraordinarily frustrated that I cared so much more than she did because she wasn’t feeling the same pain as me. Working out problems didn’t make her feel more loved. Having a surface level friendship didn’t make me feel loved, either. It was a win-win situation in some ways, and devastating in others. I couldn’t afford that lack of self esteem anymore, because it was incongruent with being told that I was extraordinarily smart and impressive. In the beginning, I felt incredibly needed and extraordinarily honored, but because she stopped being vulnerable, I felt discarded. That’s not on her because she needed to distance herself. It was on me to decide a plan of action… what I needed to do to stop feeling unloved all the time because it was something that contributed to my physical health because I hadn’t learned to think about her. I’d imprinted on her and began to feel her.

Not resolving an issue completely presented physically, because she apologized for her behavior, but bringing it back up when I was processing what happened when something in my head referred to it was wrong. That I wasn’t bringing it back up to shame her, but defining a pattern. Recognizing a bad pattern and addressing it was the way to move forward and relieve the pain tape. Changing my pain to my empathy and focusing on what she was feeling was relief. I couldn’t get it from her, but I could get it from me.

Processing a thunderstorm takes a lot out of me, so that’s how I know it’s all in my head and also serious as a heart attack, because psychobiology tells me it’s true. But thinking about what she must have been going through brings me peace because it’s not offensive to think those things without her, when it hurt her to hear them and respond as if I was actively trying to hurt her instead of trying to change my own reactions to her. It was essential to resolving my feeling wanted and needed, because it made me emote in a way that made me feel equally hurt. Getting my needs addressed didn’t come across to me as actively trying to hurt her. It was solving the problem of being close in the future without knowing if there was a future or not. No matter what, we are part of each other’s brains because there’s nothing that will ever stop it. But there’s no building anything, either, when we constantly hurt each other because one wants to get closer and the other doesn’t set boundaries at all.

When she did, finally, it hurt too much to hear. It was never going to change. I could spill my guts any time I wanted, but if I hit a nerve, she was always going to keep it to herself unless it made her angry enough to explode. To have more negative reinforcement than positive was too much, because I then felt like I was intruding on her life rather than adding to it. It wasn’t that she didn’t want the relationship at all. It was that we didn’t want the same things. She was making clear what hadn’t been before, and it was devastating to an enormous degree because I’d put in so much work to rectify past mistakes so that she could trust me, and it felt like those letters were trying to prove my trustworthiness and being taken as attacks…. And that’s what made nothing move forward. I tried different ways to address a problem and none of them would work. I was lecturing her, not inviting her into my world. And it wasn’t that I couldn’t move on, either. It was that when a huge callback came up, she would take it as rejection and not trying to get closer, or not wanting it and not willing to be able to say it until now. It had to be one or the other, because in order to feel impressive, I needed to know why. Which changes have impressed you, because you only seem angry with me when you write? Why does a sitrep make you feel horrible instead of you lumping all my emails together as if they all say the same thing?

In my head, I thought she was a miracle, and she thought I was annoying. I am usually impressed by being the most annoying person people know, but she was my safe space, my lock box. It makes me feel so much light and love to feel needed in the same way, and my heart couldn’t take all the changes I’d made in negative ways, and it took a long time to understand that my illness had gotten out of hand and I needed to give myself a break because I’d done everything I possibly could to make sure I was consistent in my behavior so that our connection was as rock solid as ever, that scar tissue was stronger than new. She was safe from me. She’d have to know how long the stereotype of the aggressive lesbian has existed to know how deeply I’d shamed myself into believing I was a worthless piece of shit. How deeply it cut into me when she thought I was being overbearing when I was making light of something that had happened eons ago. The fact that she wasn’t there yet destroyed me. If she couldn’t laugh about it, she was holding onto pain and just not addressing it.

To give her an opening to do so was wrong and didn’t change anything. I just reinforced the idea that I wasn’t safe, when humor is how I move on. Therefore, when a clapback triggers something major, she can’t hear it with empathy, it’s a threat. Something I meant to be innocuous triggers abandonment feelings because I know that straight girls have been taught that homosexuality is wrong, or they just feel it. To tap into those feelings is not the same as a guy saying those things, because it makes them wonder what it is about them that gives off those vibes when there’s nothing in that thought process at all. When you love someone and start to feel those butterfly feelings, does it matter what their sexual orientation might be if yours is bisexual and theirs isn’t? There’s nothing about them that gives off a “vibe.” I’m not looking for feelers, because there are none. There is only direct communication and the deeply ingrained cultural acceptance of queer feelings being somehow wrong.

So, to be intrusive of that cultural norm is a bad thing, and I am separating out what happened before I got sick. Why do straight people automatically reject the fact that even if they can’t return those feelings and it’s okay, we’ll get over it, the thought is somehow offensive, as if we should have been able to tell you weren’t bisexual at first glance? That it is somehow in and of itself offensive?

I was never concerned about her reaction, because I knew it was a dead end, that these feelings were my responsibility to get rid of and they didn’t resolve until I absolutely spiraled out after isolating her because the pain of rejection was causing all kinds of hell, especially since I’d pushed buttons that were out of bounds in my haste to make her angry enough to reject me altogether, because I needed time. I would have gotten all the time in the world if I hadn’t picked myself up and apologized, but because nothing about our relationship was solid except for checking in once in a while, I floundered. No one loves you like someone who has wanted you and taken the time to get over it so that particular rejection doesn’t cause pain. Then, to have it resolved and to want to welcome someone into your life so badly and to have that deep love rejected is a unique torture, which you bring on yourself if you feel as deeply as I do about things.

Lesbians move on in this particular way easier than most, making an ex a part of their family because they trust people who have felt that deeply about them. Straight girls don’t, and I’m sure that’s because there’s a whole litany of tapes that run inside them when it happens. It irrevocably changes something, because it doesn’t feel like the natural order to them. It wigs them out, and why that is a thing is blatant.

What bothers me about this is that straight women have no problem telling each other that they love them to that degree, and say that they’d marry them. No, they won’t. Why? Are lesbians treated differently in this country or something? It’s fine to say it when it could never happen. Joking is fine, real is not.

Pushing is not fine, either, but that’s a separate issue and built on the fact that mental illness sucks. I have to believe that entitled behavior always comes from mental illness, because to make that level of a bad decision takes dedication.

To say that you’ll never do it again is empty, always…. Even if you take the appropriate steps psychiatrically and psychologically to prove it. She was very impressed and afraid at a fundamental level, and I couldn’t resolve that issue for her, I could only talk about it and see if it did any good.

I got exactly what I needed in every way but one, and that one overshadowed everything else, because it wasn’t being received as color commentary. It wasn’t received as letting her into my thought process. It was trying to inflict pain, and being seen like that wore me down over time. Feeling this deeply about someone when they couldn’t or wouldn’t speak in my love language when I realized I needed to make major changes in my life and keep them consistent in order to keep our relationship strong made me feel terrible. Believe me, I was fired for cause, but I couldn’t make things better for me, either. I could only make things better for her, which I was glad to do in any way that I could. But not hearing about her life made me feel unworthy, and it cost me a lot. Then, when she finally did open up, I thought we were set. It was just unfortunate that she hit a trigger. It was not her fault that she hit it. It was her response being irate and asking me not to put something on her, when I wasn’t. I explained what happened and she threatened not to communicate with me ever again, when she’d dismissed a basic need. I was trying to express my own fear, and it came across as irritating her for the fun of it. I’m sorry, what?

It was then that I thought we were done, because I thought it should have been enough to end us. But she and Daniel had so much in common that I really thought they needed to meet each other, because they would have been friends whether I was involved or not. They could have leaned on each other in a different way than they could have leaned on me. I bargained with myself that it was worth going through pain if I could make this connection, so I did.

Here was what I think was the fatal mistake. She told me that she would have to respond to my other e-mails at some point, so I asked her about it a month later, figuring that was enough time to get back to me and I was really interested in what she had to say. She didn’t know what I was talking about, and explaining it didn’t ring a bell. Knowing I was that low a priority was necessary. I needed to be on the bottom rung, being supportive and waiting for a response. But over time it wore me down because I felt unworthy of being a higher priority.

Therefore, it cannot be said that any of this is her fault. It’s my reaction, because she was right to do everything she did, and so was I.

But one recent moment that sticks with me is asking her to take a contact photo of herself for my phone… “it’s just to match a name to a face, don’t make it weird.” She legit just turned the camera around and hit the button, and it was one of the most gorgeous photographs I’ve ever seen in my life. This is because her eyes were focused on the lens, which made them come across as deeply intimate in a beautiful way, like she was staring into me, and it is just for me. She knew she was looking at me, and she saw me in return.

It’s a beauty that would undo anyone, and it’s not even close to what goes on behind those eyes. She is truly a world class brain, and here’s the biggest thing of all. She made me believe I have her smarts, too, when I actually use them. Her belief made me stronger, and made me love who I am. She continues to believe that, and I want it so much because it makes me like who I am when I’m with her. But feeling the pain underneath is a rough gig, because I couldn’t forgive myself. I’d be reminded of something bad, and chastised when I talked about it in hopes of letting it go. I let the joy multiply, it’s just that pain compounded faster. I was paying so much interest I couldn’t attack the principle.

That’s all on me, but what became clear is that resolving my own feelings had to come from me if we weren’t working on it together. I was in too much pain from feeling like I was a problem that needed to be solved. I couldn’t rectify not being able to build from a foundation that was once rock and had disintegrated at my own hand. As in, I wanted to move forward together, and didn’t want to do it alone until I had no choice.

Surely everyone is familiar with the pain of it all? That you’ve done something that can’t be truly forgiven because neither party is willing to communicate because one wants something more and one wants something less and both are afraid? The feeling of not wanting to rock the boat and hurting inside? Wanting to feed relationships so that they develop roots and brilliant flowers? The disappointment of knowing it can’t be done. Choosing whether the eventual buildup causes redemption or rejection, knowing that rejection will win when communication isn’t clear?

If we’d set up new boundaries where we were comfortable so that I didn’t build up a hope that should never have grown, I would have been fine. Asking for clarification took eight years. She danced around the subject because she knew I wanted more than she could give, and felt guilty about the pain it caused me because she didn’t want to tell me about hers and never would.

When she opened up about her family, I was thrilled. I don’t think I made it where it was clear that I was both overjoyed and felt left out at the same time. I was thrilled to hear that the relationship had been successful, loved the idea that she’d found a life mate, and announced it to all her friends except me. What does a lockbox friend want to hear except the things that make you love more? It meant I felt the pain of being excluded for so many years while also feeling the joy of being included now, wanting to build on it and not knowing if I should. If I tried and it failed, I’d be opening myself up to more rejection and pain. I did, and it did. Nothing went the way I wanted, and everything sounded better in my head, because her perceptions were so far off from my intentions. It caused a lot of anger that went unresolved, because what friend likes to hear on a consistent basis that someone feels like I need to attack them instead of “will you work on something with me?” Again, I think she is the most beautiful human known to God and man, and I am nowhere near alone in this opinion. The fact that she felt rejected by my words and they made her respond more than the accolades I gave her made my self esteem plummet. I was trying to speak for myself without speaking for her. She thought I was creating the narrative that I was a victim, when I didn’t think that at all. I was trying to get her to speak to what was bothering her by laying out my fears, hopes, and dreams first. Being strong by asking instead of telling.

To think that I was not thinking of her feelings is untrue. It wasn’t my job to write about her as if I already knew what she was thinking. It was telling her what her words did to me on an emotional level and needed to hear her reaction. When it began to always be pain, that I was goading and provoking her, I knew we were never going to see eye to eye on this, so we couldn’t give each other what they needed. There was something bigger than me at work. I was trying to build something strong and comfortable for the future, where the idea of having a conversation in person didn’t seem weird. When she said she’d think about it, I began to write in that way. I don’t know whether I wasn’t a priority because the prospect felt scary or because she literally didn’t want a future even when I talked about a time in our lives where she didn’t have as many commitments. It would have solidified in my mind that there was going to be change later on, even if there couldn’t be right now. She finally said enough to convince me that I was too much of a burden for her to spend any more time, and suggested she’d only been nice to me because I’m a writer.

There were a couple of other things that made her think that I was trying to hurt her, none of them true and scared the hell out of me. But none of that stopped the hope that we’d resolve our mutual issues with each other because she’d said she’d think about it and I couldn’t press. There was nothing to calm the fear we had in each other, even when I was vulnerable first. We both lead from the back, and I wanted to show her that I wasn’t willing to do anything for her that she didn’t do the way she’d saved me first. She just didn’t trust it. Didn’t mean I didn’t understand why and felt like a victim. I wanted our behavior patterns to change because this was costing me so much energy without being refilled because we were focused on different ways of being there for each other. My pain was all my bag, but hearing hers would have lifted it. I wasn’t trying to make her feel anything, I was curious as to how she felt and didn’t want to speak for her except in explaining how her behavior came across to me and wanting to know the reasoning behind it because it was so uncomfortable to be in the dark all the time.

I am sure the intensity of all my feelings came across as gigantic, and pushed her away to an enormous degree. Trying to prove that though they were large, they were all pointed in the right direction was futile, because she couldn’t just let me be me anymore. She was exhausted by it, and I was exhausted at her always thinking I was trying to attack her and trying to find different ways to resolve things so that she could hear just how much she meant to me without it seeming somehow manipulative or offensive when neither of those things were in any way true. I feel the same way about Bryn, and it makes us able to talk about anything and everything. She accepts all that gigantic love and returns it in a way that feels consistently loving to both of us, because neither of us feel like one is feeling deeper than the other.

We both feel deeply in every quadrant of emotion on the z axis, and don’t deny each other access, because being able to process is important to both of us. Neither of us see the other feeling something about a thing is an attack. It’s telling each other the story we’re telling ourselves and checking to make sure it’s true. Neither of us are a victim of anything because we’d never phrase anything in the form of “you made me” because we can’t. No one makes you do anything, you can only describe your own feelings and hope someone responds in a way that enlightens your assumptions rather than them feeling rejected. My uncertainty about the future led me to react quickly, because I never knew when something I said was offensive or not because she lumped everything together in one unit and said everything was negative.

I knew that wasn’t true, because she respected my opinion and would yield to it in the beginning. She’d talk about my perception and tell her story. To have something that vital and ephemeral was painful in a way that I’d never experienced. It was her right to withdraw, certainly, but also my decision on how long to be wrecked by it. How long to hope someday was real. To crave consistency and not be able to put it into language where it was heard in the manner it was meant to be received, which was not able to be changed because there was nothing to put us in the proper context, the only think able to break patterns. To meet might have made us repel each other for a while to let the cognitive dissonance set in, because the difference in writing voice and speaking would create sensory overload on both sides.

Maybe meeting in person would have been the end of us, anyway, because we both would have realized quickly that nothing could be fixed. But what I was aiming for was trying to make it comfortable enough to do that so it wouldn’t seem like a big deal because it wouldn’t seem out of left field.

Writing about it is helping me stop the rumination that comes with being so close and yet so far. I never could tell what I was saying that came across as an attack, just that there had been one. Therefore, I couldn’t stop “attacking her.” Being blind isn’t my fault. But I get to decide how long I’m willing to put up with not being received with positivity.

I felt like I had to ask her permission to go, because I needed to know whether I was valuable to her as an asset and not a liability…….. and deal with it on my own if I wasn’t because the not knowing was just as painful as letting all of that hope float and bursting it later, once it had grown. “We were just an empty dream too big for hope alone to fill.”

She did teach me a lot which I couldn’t have learned any other way. I am in no way mistaking the part for the whole. She made me glow from the inside at such a rapid pace. I can’t thank her enough, which makes my negative feelings all the more painful. I wish in a lot of ways that I could have relaxed and enjoyed not knowing, just going with the flow. But the problem was that I couldn’t, for a million different reasons.

Mostly that I didn’t like who I was when I was with her anymore, because receiving the impression that I was always trying to attack her made me feel terrible. I am not that person, and don’t want to be. I want both of us to work on the issue so that the other doesn’t feel like they’re being emotionally vampired. I want them to tell me when I have a good point and when my perception is off. I also want you to believe me when I tell you how your communication is making me feel. I pop off in anger because my trauma reflexes work fast when I should have thought more before I said something. This generally comes from being exhausted at being misunderstood for such a long time that first I’m talking about what I’m feeling and over time, my fuse at not being heard gets shorter….. it just takes a very, very long time….. or it used to. I’m trying to be better about communicating what I need, but if I’m not hearing your story because you refuse to tell it, I am not calculating my responses on it. I am telling you the feelings of rejection it has created for you to leave me out of your story.

I thought she needed me to be a part of her support system, which is why I worked too hard on trying to get this relationship to thrive and miserable when I couldn’t do it. I could feel around for her anger, and see how she responded to my feelings. Whether we were building something or tearing it down.

It all depends on your view. After ten years, it was causing headaches indirectly because rumination sets up physically when your energy turns toward it. It feels like weight you can’t get rid of, so you either have to fish or cut bait.

She made it clear that she was ready, and I made it clear that if she went, she couldn’t do things like thank me for something I’d written because it only jump started my heart in her direction, but in all the ways she would want when she was convinced that I was trying to hurt her. That’s why I was so firm on the fact that if she was going to show up next time, it had to be big. To acknowledge that I wasn’t a victim for opening up, that we were equally bruised by each other in different ways, and if our relationship were to get better, we needed to stop being so short with each other. Meeting physically wasn’t even on the table, only being vulnerable. I just became convinced over time that the only way to cure us from wrecking our friendship if she did drop in was to change all the perceptions we had of each other that weren’t true.

To think about how we would have been different and do it.

My work to do is to put down my trauma reflexes, because it makes me write differently than I would handle something in person and generally my impatient or fearful messages don’t come from anything but feeling uncertain. Knowing that communication is hard work, and I have to forgive myself when I fail and accept the consequences of my actions with everyone.

Being angry with people when I feel abandoned is valid, but the words I use to express it are too much, especially when I type faster than I think and rage is building with no way to control it because ADHD, anxiety, and depression.

To have no patience for it is the other person’s right and they shouldn’t be expected to stick around no matter what I say, because words have weight. I pay those taxes all day, every day. I also have the right to step back and post mortem a situation, because reading my thoughts here often fixes the problem of what to do next on both our parts. Sometimes, it lets people in closer. Sometimes, they feel rejected whether I wanted them to feel that or not, because people only understand others’ words and actions to the level they understand themselves.

I can only express my needs, and if it is too much to ask of someone, I am generally patient and loving until it’s been so long that my resentment is building. She thought I was trying to get her attention, and that part is true….. but never in the ways that she thought I was trying to get it. When I was being really thoughtful and vulnerable, I wanted her to think about what I said. That’s the kind of attention that I wanted, that she’d seen the full picture and wasn’t focusing on what she thought was negative, because my intention was never to hurt her. I couldn’t afford to lose her until I was very, very unhappy. Being known for all these negative things instead of all the things I said to build her up made me think of myself that way.

Those headaches were the worst.

I Am…

April 14, 2023April 14, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe something you learned in high school.

Here’s the link to the audio. You might have to download it into your own media player or the Mega app. SoundCloud wants me to pay because I “upload a lot,” and I get it. I just didn’t know the space limit was so incredibly low. I’m searching around for options, and most of them rely on using my desktop, of which I am not a fan… mostly because I’m not really using SoudCloud to increase the popularity of my blog. The audio is just a convenience.

High school is divided up for me in two segments. The first is that I spent my freshman and sophomore years at High School for Performing and Visual Arts as a trumpet player. The second is that my junior and senior years, I didn’t. I went to a regular American high school. I was still in the music program, though. My junior year I was in varsity choir and varsity band at the same time, the first in the history of the school to do so. I learned how to be in a marching band. My symphonic band was better than the one at ‘PVA (no judgment, it’s just true).

Then, my counselor suggested that I drop one of my music classes because if I took Microcomputer Applications, I could get what was called an “Advanced Diploma.” The band was gearing up to go on all these trips my family couldn’t afford, and it was an easy out to drop band because I knew I couldn’t sell enough fertilizer to pay my own way. Yes. Really. They asked us to sell shit to people.

I dropped choir because I didn’t like the new director coming in, because I knew other people that had her and it wasn’t my bag. I was not a “show choir” person. I do not think that if you can sing, you should automatically be capable of dance as well. I liked great repertory, and pop music wasn’t it (for me). If that sounds persnickety for a teenager, remember that I was a classically trained singer from being in an adult church choir since I was 13.

I didn’t care about Britney Spears. I loved Bach and it showed.

For the record, I care about Britney as a listener. She’s great. I just wouldn’t sing her stuff unless I was doing it as a joke, because I couldn’t pull it off where people would take it seriously. It’s a totally different type of training.

I think I’ve said before that Beyoncé left HSPVA because she didn’t want to be classically trained, and that I continue to be devastated that it did not work out for her. But same vibe, we’re just opposite. She didn’t want to learn everything I’d been taught about being able to blend into a choir, breath control specific to that kind of music, etc. It’s a lot. By the same token, I didn’t want to learn the proper breath control to sing whatever it is the Star Spangled Banner is now in professional football. Whitney Houston doing it in four was the high point. ::looks pointedly at other pop stars:: No one will ever be her, and I knew that I’d only be a cheap imitation. I don’t want that for me, or anyone else. Do what you do and make it count.

Since my dad had left the church, I also got a job in hopes of getting my own spending money. I was 16, so no one thought anything of screwing me over to save themselves, like making me pay things back when I was short on the register when they’d been stealing from the drawer. I’m bad at math, so of course it was all my fault when the drawer was missing $50 at the end of the night. Of course it should come out of my paycheck. It’s what a teenager owes a national corporation, right?

I would never sue them over lost wages, but I would get a kick out of it if they sent me a product and swag box if someone is reading who thinks such a thing could happen at the company. I once proposed to Zyrtec on Twitter and told them they were paying. Then, they later kidded me about forgetting our anniversary and I said, “how do you think I feel? You didn’t get me anything.” The proposal rocked, though….. that I had 99 problems but a itch ain’t one.

I worked for SuperCuts, and in this instance I am not talking about the company. I am talking about the sleight of hand with my own team, not every employee who ever worked there. I mean, I was great at my job in retrospect. They had me, so you’re definitely safe in giving them as much money as you want. I still look back on my time as magical because things that are commonplace today were introduced while I was an employee, most notably, American Crew (for which I am grateful… white people pomade). I think the Paul Mitchell Tea Tree line came out then, too, a total game changer. It was also amazing learning the jargon of how to tell people I want my hair cut so that there’s less room for a mistake.

It doesn’t always work, but it helps.

By the time I graduated from high school, I had set myself up for life in terms of my opinions on everything that is still true about me today. The only thing that’s changed is that I call myself out as I am, bisexual, instead of telling the world I’m a lesbian while not thinking that way, because that label wasn’t something I gave myself. I just have to be louder about being bisexual in a heterosexual relationship than I would if I was actively partnered with a woman, because you can see it with every kiss.

The one thing I didn’t see coming that I didn’t know I needed was dating a bisexual man. That way, we still have all the same cultural references, though I’m older and have more insurance. He doesn’t care whether I look high femme or butch because in one outing, we’d look depressingly heterosexual and in another, it’s a whole bear/twink mood without all the lights, drum & bass, and Ecstasy.

To stop joking, we’ve both been bullied for being queer. That trauma for him is a different playing field, because mine is rooted in embarrassment. I’m either gross and wrong or a plaything given to men, because why wouldn’t women being with women be nothing but a male fantasy? Why would women have agency in this society? Straight women don’t even have it.

Men harass me by seeing me with my then-wife (Kat, in this example) and asking us to kiss in front of them, or come home with us, or any number of things that hurt way more than they would have if it was original. Those examples aren’t all Kat, when it was 2000, or even Meag, when it was 1996. It’s all picking at the same scar every day of my life, because I heard about it before I experienced it. Being an empath made me experience that trauma before it was direct. I felt it on my skin when it happened to my friends.

For men, it’s horrible that they want to be female, their tormentors’ perception and not reality….. but seriously…. As if being female was the worst thing that could happen to a person…… hello…. All connected. Except men don’t stop with horrible comments with other men. It often leads to outright violence and death. I only say this because it happens to men more frequently, but violence against lesbians exists.

It’s a shared understanding, a shared library of images that create empathy. To me, it is especially important because the one thing I really hated about dating Matthew had nothing to do with him at all. It was gaining heterosexual privilege for the first time and rebelling against it hardcore. I remember one instance we’d gone to meet some of his friends, and someone did that thing where they looked around before they told a gay joke, and I wasn’t the picture of volatility you see here.

I said nothing, and just felt all of it. I know now that I should have ripped the dude a new one, but I didn’t want to upset the apple cart when I was meeting my boy’s friends the very first time. I was also like, 24, maybe 25. I was older than Matt, but still a child in my eyes now. I didn’t know what to do, and I was scared.

So now I can look at that and say I’m in a better place because Zac has probably been there. He’s just as out and proud as me. On Wednesday, I noticed right off that his nails were painted teal and he was wearing flowy pants. He’s the head of the queer group at his intelligence agency. I don’t know how he sees himself, but I see him as George Smiley if he had grown up like us. (Smiley is the protagonist in John Le Carre’s most famous series about MI-6.) I showed up in a black t-shirt, jeans, and tie-dyed pattern Crocs. I later put on a navy hoodie and my CIA baseball cap- some of you will remember that was a gift from Zac because he has the badge that allows you into Langley, but not the capability to escort visitors. I wear it almost every day like I’m pitching the afternoon game. Now do you see how we’ve inverted the binary? From the outside, I’m the butch and he’s the femme…. And no one would ever guess that we were into each other unless we weren’t holding hands or being cute to the point of nausea (our MO most of the time).

Editor’s Note: I learned that it was important on the train Thursday, when a young girl at the Franconia Springfield Metro said, “I want to be CIA, too.” I told her that I wasn’t CIA, I just had cool friends, and to call me when she got there. 😛

“Grown up like us” is emotional shorthand for Zac and I having to deal with the perils of being queer from a very, very young age. Zac entered the military under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” At the same time, I’m not dating a gay man and he’s not dating a lesbian just for kicks. We’re not playing at anything, just being the most authentic versions of ourselves.

I have always been that in some capacity, but I have graduated. You don’t learn that you are brave and unique until someone tells you. In the moment, you’re just doing what you have to do to survive.

In high school, I learned that I would HAVE TO be unique.

My freshman year, I told one person I was gay and by the end of the day, everyone knew. In retrospect, it was the best decision I ever made, because any bullying that came my way was tiresome. They couldn’t blackmail me anymore, and they couldn’t get away with anything more original because they weren’t that clever.

Because I was moving out of the gay neighborhood in Houston to a suburb where everyone knew each other, I went back in the closet…. To save my father’s job according to my mother. My father didn’t care. He knew me. We’d met. But guess which message I heard?

Being in the closet for a school year was amazing and gave me the worst panic attack of my life. Both of those things were true. I would not have wanted to miss the chance of being in marching band, would not have traded my conductors (Mr. Matysiak and Mrs. Bueller [really]) for anything in the world. I would never have wanted to miss learning that I was not only a singer, I was damn good at it. I stood on the shoulders of giants, and my mother accompanied me through it all, literally.

She played the piano for my solos no matter what she was doing, and in seventh and eighth grade, she played for all my friends, too. This was not a small feat, as most piano accompaniments for solos are orchestra reductions. So, my mom hurt me a lot, and she also came through in equal measure. Not only was the piano our lighthouse when we were ships passing in the night, she left it to me in her will. She didn’t give me a setting. She gave me the main character.

In terms of hurting me, all of the panic I’d been feeling that year came to a head when my senior best friend asked me to come with him to his prom. He was literally on the way to pick me up, my hair and makeup done to perfection, when I melted down physically. It caused a monster reaction, a rash, shortness of breath, everything- so the doc came over and gave me a shot of Depomedrol and off we went.

That was the first time that I learned everything can be fixed before school, you’re going. It only backfired once. I had the flu, and Tamiflu was YEARS ahead in the making. If it had, I would have been going to school without spreading it. To be perfectly fair, I’d woken up feeling a little miserable and bloomed at school. It wasn’t a big deal right up until it was.

Actually, that leads to a really funny story. One of our parishioners while I was at HSPVA was a Republican judge, so I went to their convention in like, ‘92, before they were complete nut jobs. While I was there, I bought a button down that was made of real American flag material, and the colors were very dark. It looked sharp…. Or so I thought. I was really sick on my birthday, and nothing would have stopped me from going to school that day in my new threads. I get there and first period was band…. And if Jack Lucas had been there, he would have been SO PROUD OF HIS STUDENTS.

Editor’s Note: I also went to St. Martin’s Episcopal as a teen, where I was unimpressed with President George H.W. Bush….. and thrilled to meet a former Director of CIA (of course). Therefore, it always thrills me that Jonna Mendez managed to fool him, because of course now I know we have mutual friends…. And I am laughing so hard that I can’t even breathe right now.

Those motherfuckers broke out in four part harmony, because they were musicians. They could sing their parts blind. Then, they get to “free,” and Dan Kovaly hits the fucking *cymbals.* I was just as self-deprecating then as I am now, so I thought it was absolutely hilarious while still mortifying. Later, my mom and dad brought me my favorite food, cherry chicken from Ruggles. We got to eat lunch together in the commons, and it was sad that there wasn’t a Happening that day.

Happenings at HSPVA are code for what would now be called a flash mob, probably. You never knew when they were coming, and it was always unique no matter which art area was on showcase. It’s one of the core memories that made me who I am.

Back in high school.

The Monster in My Head and the Ghost Out to Get Me

March 25, 2023March 25, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The blog post, read poorly by the author.

I just watched an exploratory criticism of “Vincent and the Doctor” that I really love. It talks about depression, because there’s who The Doctor thinks is an aggressive alien chasing after Vincent, because only he can see it. The Doctor has to use a gadget with a mirror so he can see the alien in reverse, and it’s not aggressive. It needs help.

Which the creator of the video calls the alien representative of depression itself. It’s a monster only you can see. Depression is also not feeling sad, necessarily, because there is no rhyme or reason to it. I could be panicky, I could be absolutely devastated regarding something, so that pain also mixes in…. But mostly, depression is the absence of emotions at all. People, places, and things don’t matter. You have to drag yourself everywhere, even into the shower or actually completing any task that would make you feel better…. Because of course, it’s what depression thinks you deserve. It knows the very best lies to use against you…. That you are worth nothing, that you are not deserving of being able to take care of yourself, because you don’t matter to anyone… and if you do matter, you think it’s just because other people are being nice to you.

Because who could ever love dumbasses like us?

If people do show that they care, genuinely, you still can’t accept that fact… because depression knows the very best lies to use against you. It is an alien who needs help, a foreign brain infection. Depression thinks that it’s saving you from pain, because you think you’re a burden on everyone, especially when they tell you that.

I’m Bipolar II, which is like regular manic depression but without caffeine or calories. Nothing to get you going at all. You’re just hanging in until you get just enough hypomania to function out in the world without being stuffed full of bravado and confidence that is unparalleled and leads to extremely poor impulse control. One of the worst thoughts I’ve had after an appointment with a psychiatrist. He said that he thought I was bipolar, not unipolar, and switched out my medication. I was over the moon that I’d found a really great doctor, and eventually learned once my protocol changed that a mood stabilizer was the right answer.

I called Dana in tears, the kind that threaten to swallow you up. I said, “I don’t want to be Sally Field in ER!” If you know, you know.

Bipolar I is so different from Bipolar II that there’s not really a direct comparison. You don’t go up in to true mania, where you’re buying ten cars in one day or putting yourself in more danger than is necessary because you like the thrill.

Bipolar II is a lot of depression without coming back up. My hypomania presents as insomnia. I don’t get it very much, but I wish I did. Depression is a complete shitshow, because it will rob you of thinking you deserve anything at all. You’ll pick the most toxic person in the room because you actually think that being treated poorly is almost necessary. You’re still getting some contact comfort, and still focused intensely on how bad you should feel for inconveniencing other people. If they’re crazy, too, you figure that taking on their pain so they can function is the one thing you can do to prevent them walking away. It generally doesn’t work for either party, because two people care about them to the point of losing ourselves. For unipolar and bipolar depression, this pattern occurs a lot… because again, you think your job is to take care of everyone else so that they see you actually have something valuable to contribute to the conversation, because if you’re dealing with your own pain, adding on someone else’s is a no-brainer. If they’re not a narcissist, you’ll get support and love because they may not be able to sympathize, but empathy goes a long way.

But that’s a healthy relationship, and we don’t find those, because it would show self worth and esteem, and we don’t do that either. Why would we? We don’t even like ourselves…. And from the Gospel of RuPaul Charles, “if you can’t love yourself, how in the HELL are you going to love someone else?”

I feel it’s time for a snarky reminder that RuPal is a drag queen. Get out of here with your bullshit. You’ve loved RuPaul since high school. “But I’m a Cheerleader,” “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” and the list goes on.

I didn’t think of it before, but I’m thinking of it now. Minorities are more adept at thinking they’re trash than the cis, straight, fits in everywhere sort of person…. And white people are awful. Full stop. It’s embarrassing. Even though I’m white, I use the queer card everywhere because I want to take people’s slurs and stupid comments because it makes me feel less like a traditional white person and more like the minority I really am.

Being queer is great if you keep to yourself, because no one can tell if you’re queer just by looking at you…. Even though I joke about it all the time. For instance, “are you pregnant?” “You can see me, right?” But the hard truth is that I am not having the same experience of the US as people of color. I could absolutely hide from it. I want to marry a man. To me that says bi pride flags everywhere and Daniel becoming a part of my community because Cora will also be there. Kidhausen and Lesliehausen are a team for life.

The suffix -hausen is used to represent the best of the best of the best. So of course my favorite movie is now “Argohausen.” Seriously, I love the dialogue.

“I should have brought some books for prison.” “Oh, they’ll kill you long before prison.” “If you get caught, The Agency cannot claim you.” “They barely claim me as is.” “What’s your demographic?” “People with eyes.”

And the list goes on. My favorite that runs through my head when cooking in a professional kitchen is “I’ve seen suicide missions that had better odds than this.”

In case you were wondering, I did type all of it without looking up. I have seen it so much that I’ve memorized most of it. The only part I cannot do is speak Farsi…. But don’t think I haven’t tried to learn it by transliteration.

Tony Mendez is literally in the Top 50 spies to ever work for CIA.

There is an Argo line or conversation for every occasion. This is “He (meaning President Carter) says you’re a great American.” “A great American what?” “He didn’t say.”

But my favorite has to be when they go to present their very best bad idea… by far. “Careful. It’s like talking to those two old fucks from The Muppets.”

Things that really make me laugh are important, because it lifts my mood overall. I have learned that I am not the sort of person that can go without listening to music for more than five minutes, because it silences “The Committee.” You didn’t show up knowing what that meant, but if you have depression or alcoholism, you know. It’s the tapes in your head that tell you you’re no value add.

It’s why most people die of depression, and I will say it exactly that way. It’s a disease in the sense that the brain is an organ, focused on survival. It will do anything to protect you, because to it, protecting you means isolating. It’s “obvious” no one likes you. They can’t get away from feeling that we don’t deserve to be alive at all.

Because it’s the monster in your head, and the ghost out to get you. For a lot of people, it does. The one that hurt the most was Tommy Raskin, son of Jamie, because Jamie is brilliant and I had to watch him on TV while bleeding out emotionally because I know what it’s like when someone close to you dies. Every neuron in your body is re-wired to accept the loss and move on. Losing a parent or a child fundamentally changes you in a way that people who haven’t lost parents or children will never understand.

They don’t realize you are literally a different person than you used to be, and you can’t go back… especially when they look at your method of grieving and decide it’s unacceptable, because they also don’t realize that grieving is as individual as a fingerprint. Everyone reacts differently. For Nora Ephron, it was keeping her husband’s shoes because she thought he might need them. She’s right. It’s at least a year of magical thinking. The brain fog is interminable, like putting whatever you’re holding in the freezer whether you meant to or not. I thought my notebook was missing for days. It was in the pantry.

For me, grief was being “show mode” in public and unable to function when I was alone. I’m not sure I got out of bed more than a few times in the first month my mother died suddenly. She broke her foot and developed an embolism. In one way and one way only, it helped a lot to know that there wasn’t a doctor on earth that could have done any better. They would have had to catch it early on. When it blows, it blows. Periodt.

The part that was terrible was that I had just come home from church, where I talked to Sam, my choir director. She asked me if I would do a solo, and I asked her if it was okay to invite my mom to play for me.

I was writing a blog entry about it when my sister called and told me that mom was in the hospital. I wasn’t even finished with it when Lindsay called to tell me that she died. She died and I was so far away, when I still had a car and was “threatening” to take a road trip home. She said she thought it was a bad idea, and I have been kicking myself ever since.

I went into complete shock mode, putting away my emotions because I knew that a crowd of people I didn’t know would be filing past me to give condolences, or coming up to me at the potluck afterwards, etc. The worst comment I got was that a woman said she knew how I felt, because her cat died. It’s not the same playing field, Karen.

No one saw me cry because I was incapable of doing so. Falling apart in front of strangers is not something I do, ever. I could cry in front of this audience because I was alone in my room, and it felt natural. I just left it that way, even though the moment I started telling the story of how I met Jonna Mendez, Tony’s widow, made my stomach clench and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stop from showing grief.

Showing grief is uncomfortable, almost as uncomfortable as being depressed. People don’t know what to say about your loss, and you are mindful that people have no frame of reference for what you’re going through, because again, grief is as individual as a fingerprint. Sometimes people who are grieving are surprised that you’re not doing it the same way they did.

It felt like “you’re not doing it right, Leslie.”

I wouldn’t have survived if I hadn’t turned on my inner sociopath (in terms of cutting off your emotions, not nefarious activity). It was the only way I would survive the onslaught of being thrown into public, akin to being dropped in the middle of Tehran without language skills, a map, or anything else that would have been helpful.

I felt like Marcus Brody in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

“Marcus? Marcus would get lost in his own museum.”

Oh my God it’s just the truest thing ever. You only think you’re prepared, but you’re not, because you have no idea what your brain is going to do to protect you. It might be close to how you think you’d react, but it’s a sure bet it’s going to be absolutely nothing like what you thought you would feel. It’s also a different scenario when a parent dies suddenly at a young age rather than you getting to enjoy them until you’re both relatively ancient. I feel like I got robbed of at least a decade.

If someone is dying slowly, you have the opportunity to ask questions, get educated on what’s going to happen, make major life decisions for them, etc…. Most people think of it as a burden to become a carer. My response in my head is generally “fuck off,” and not because I’ve suddenly started to hate this person. It’s because they seem ungrateful that they get to watch their parents finish their lives instead of it being stolen.

My mother would have hated every minute of it, and would probably be grateful that she died suddenly. This is because she would literally rather die than let us take care of us. Depression is genetic, and she was never diagnosed or treated. You could just tell, because you think you’re good at hiding it until someone finally tells you they can see you and it’s astonishing how much you think you’re hiding it. If I had to take a guess, my mother was dysthymic, which is a low level of depression that presents all the time. You don’t feel bad enough to go to the doctor because you think it’s just a case of “the blues.” You’ll get over it soon. And then you don’t realize that ten years have gone by.

But it’s a bullshit diagnosis because I’m not an actual doctor. I just call ‘em like I see ‘em, and I’ve had enough experience with crazy people to see them. Acknowledge that they’re hurting and try to help. I have actually been to what poet Mary Karr calls “the mental Marriott.” It was great meeting my cohort because all of a sudden, I had seven people who understood me completely.

Because they too have a monster in their heads and a ghost out to get them.

Strength and Helsinki

January 28, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Sunday Morning, Rain is Falling

January 22, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Boobs! And Cupping!

June 28, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Now that I have your attention, I must tell you in advance that this entry might be a bit boring. Or not. Looking at your own writing is a mixed bag. Unfortunately, what I’m writing about is not sex, drugs, and rock & roll. I mean, it should be. I’m not that old. Ok, I’m 44, and medical advice has changed. I didn’t think I’d be getting a mammogram for at least another year or two. Conventional wisdom has changed to over 40. I was officially NOT. IMPRESSED.

This is because I’ve heard so many horror stories about how much it hurts to have your boobs squished into a machine one at a time. Either the machinery has changed, or the women telling those stories were “jeweling the elephant.” In case you’ve never heard that term before, it comes from an Armistead Maupin novel called The Night Listener.

The main character talks about a friend who went to India for a wedding. It was small and intimate, but by the time the friend came back to the United States, the groom had ridden in on a jeweled elephant. Thus, a great phrase was born (the friend was not from Texas, but I assure you that Texans are not immune to this concept…. a three inch bass that had to be thrown back is a 12-inch keeper at the ice house). So what I’m saying is that it’s a strong possibility that the memory of the mammogram was maybe worse than the test itself. On the other hand, my previous point stands. Perhaps advances in mammography have led to the test being much less painful. I’m going to bet on that.

I felt pressure, certainly, but no actual pain (from the test itself…………………..). A few weeks ago, I fell and got a horrible muscle spasm in my back, bad enough to need muscle relaxers and a trip to an orthopedist and physical therapy twice a week. The hardest and most excruciating pain was just having to stand up for 10-15 minutes in a row.

I was also in a lot of emotional pain, because the date was my mother’s birthday. I haven’t felt the overwhelming grief of my mother dying in a long time (every day it’s a dull buzz that runs constantly in my head), but it surfaced mightily when I realized she couldn’t fly up to be with me, nor could I debrief with her over the phone. It was primal, four-year-old child “I want my Mommy.” Because here’s the thing. No matter whether you have family history of breast cancer or not (I don’t), what kind of breast tissue you have (mine is extraordinarily dense and required a couple of takes to get the test right), or whether the person doing the test has one year of experience or 20, the fact that it takes at least a week for the results to come back makes you nervous. You have thoughts that range from “I hope I’m okay” to “I’m probably dying.” I got them earlier this week and they were completely normal.

I also learned that I’m not interested in changing my pronouns or coming out again, but I had a moment of clarity in which I’d never felt more non-binary in my life. I was wearing my hair short and punk, had on both earrings and a cartilage piercing, and was dressed in men’s jeans and an old Ubuntu Studio t-shirt. I’d also brought my well-worn CIA baseball cap for after the test as my emotional support item. It makes me feel braver and stronger than I actually am.

As I was standing there naked from the waist up, I felt truly disconnected from my femininity. It was if my breasts had a life of their own, separate and of me at the same time. I was also completely focused on other things. My pain level was at a seven. I was trying to cover it up with jokes, which brought the pain down to a six and a half. I was also thinking constantly about how I had no idea what was happening most of the time (shut it).

And even though it was completely platonic and professional, I hadn’t been even partially naked in front of another woman for at least seven years, so that was uncomfortable as well… but not in terms of attraction. It was akin to changing in front of other women at a gym……. in seventh grade.

I told the technician that it was my first mammogram, and she said that I had come to the right place. She had 20 years of experience and would make everything as painless and easy as possible, plus, she REALLY loves her job. I said she’d have to, because no matter what the job is, you’d have to love it to do it that long. I made her laugh. Score. Witty rapport with her and endorphins for me.

I was drawn into her bubbly personality. I was wearing this (actually kind of cool) scrub top that tied in two places. She offered to let me drop one side of it at a time, but it unwieldy and time-consuming. I said, “would it be easier for both of us if I just took it off? If you’ve been doing this for 20 years, I’m going to bet you’ve seen a breast before.” She said that was the right answer and we’d be done much quicker.

The funniest part was that she adjusted the machine before I took my top off, and she said, “I have clearly miscalculated.” I laughed so hard that my stomach hurt, and the words of an old girlfriend floated through my head….. “awwww, you got the boobs I always wanted.” That moment of levity carried me through the rest of the test with ease in terms of erasing nervousness, and I think the laughter even brought down my pain more for a minute or so. The hardest part of the test was standing still for fifteen minutes.

A couple of days after the mammogram, physical therapy started. The first session was sublime, because all they did was have me lay on my stomach and massage me for almost an hour and a half. I thought they were all going to be like that.

Nope.

The second session started with 10 minutes on a bicycle to “warm up.” I am what you would call, as Jim Gaffigan says, “indoorsy.” I haven’t exercised in years. I learned something good about myself, which is that even though it had been a long time, it didn’t feel like my calves were going to drop off until the 10 minutes were up.

After that was when my problems really began to kick in. The whole idea is that my arthritis stems from a birth defect. It’s called retrolisthesis, and it occurs when a single vertebra slips and moves back along the intervertebral disc underneath or above it. The quickest way to fix it permanently is to surgically fuse the discs, but my doctor said to try Physical Therapy first and strengthen my core.

When I started those exercises, my other birth defects kicked in. I have a mild case of cerebral palsy, which hasn’t affected my brain or speech, but completely changes my movement and balance. I fall all the time. In fact, I fall so much that I’m bruised all over the place and can never match up which fall goes with which injury. So, of course, the first exercise was trying to balance on a board that sat atop a rubber ball. I could tell that my physical therapist thought I was exaggerating when I couldn’t do it, so I clued him in. He said, “I need you to try a little harder because this exercise is really, really important. Of course it was. And, of course, I was even more terrible at it when I felt under pressure to do well. I am a perfectionist, and any time I feel like I’ve done something less than perfectly, my anxiety kicks up and I feel like a total failure….. even in times where I get 70-80% right.

But this? Grading this would be a zero.

I also told my physical therapist that I saw a treadmill, an eliptical, and a bike, and to never, ever put me on the eliptical, even if God himself came down and told him it was okay. My balance is so off that I fell off the first time I used it. Thinking I just didn’t know how to use the machine, I tried it three more times, which led to (you guessed it) three more falls.

Two weeks ago, we also tried cupping. Apparently it’s supposed to increase the blood flow around your injury, allowing it a better chance to heal itself. I would be willing to try it again, but the first time all I felt was weirdness. Like, the strangest sensation I’ve ever felt in my life. Like other things, though, perhaps it takes more than one session to feel like it helped. But we haven’t done it again. I’ve laid on my stomach and used electrostim with either heat or ice.

The most frustrating part of all this is twofold. The first is that the physical therapy is helping, but I’m not getting better very fast. The second is that the longer I’m in pain, the more my mental health suffers, because nothing in my body feels good. My psych meds and the muscle relaxers help, but like my physical pain, I’m not getting better very fast. Also, don’t tell my doctor, but I’m cheating. She said that she’d like me to take the muscle relaxers instead of NSAIDS because the NSAIDS might make my acid reflux worse. After a week of that bullshit, I bought four bottles of omeprazole and a year’s worth of Aleve. Along with my back pain, I’ve had arthritis in my hands since I was 30, and my knees have been 44 since I was 19. All of it has to do with working in a kitchen. In college, I was a waitress. When I was older, I became a cook. The repetitive strain injuries have mostly gone away, except for the times when I’m typing like a madman. The arthritis is here to stay. Pretty sure it’s osteo and not rheumatoid, because my knuckles/fingers look normal.

That being said, my stepmother is a rheumatologist and a lot of her patients are women my age…. so of course I’m a tiny, tiny bit paranoid about developing an autoimmune disease.

The upside of all this is that my friends have been amazing, checking in on me a lot and offering to rub my back with Voltaren cream or Icy Hot. It lightens my mood, because since I’m perpetually single (by choice), the one bad thing about it is that I am continually touch-starved…. just not right now.

Next week I’m getting a different massage therapist while my current one goes to visit his family in Tehran. I nearly fainted when he said that because Argo is my favorite movie of all time and space. I joked with him. I said, “could you take a picture of the bazaar for me? I don’t have one without Ben Affleck in it.”

And then we laughed so hard I almost fell over……………………..

To All the Girls….

February 15, 2021February 15, 2021 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I just finished watching “To All the Boys: Always and Forever.” I’ve been waiting for inspiration to write; I needed a memory far enough back in my past that the blowback from myself would be minimal. (I’ve often thought that other people’s opinions stop me from writing- most of the time it’s to keep myself from exploding.) The movie is about Laura and Peter’s senior year of high school, which inevitably made me think of my own. It was so messy and difficult- like many people’s, probably, with the uniqueness of coming out all over again.

I was out at HSPVA, but my mom didn’t want me to come out at Clements. I had the chance to start over, and she wanted that for both of us. Even at HSPVA, I constantly worried that coming out at school would lead to people finding out at church…. but I didn’t have to worry about that. Everyone in my life figured it out before I had the chance to tell them.

I remember fondly the night I came out to my friend Dianne Maurice, who said “if this conversation hadn’t happened, I would have sat you down and told you.” She didn’t have to worry. I’d thought and felt attraction to women my whole life, but didn’t have the words to express what I was feeling until I turned 13. But that didn’t mean I didn’t have my share of boyfriends as well, just that it was what I thought I was supposed to do, and dating Ryan was a mountaintop experience for someone so young. How many middle school couples make it to a year and two months? I’m guessing it had something to do with us as friends being two halves of the same person, and middle school romance is sweet and lingering without the constant peer pressure and internal drive to sleep together. As a result, that friendship has grown more tender over time, because we didn’t have a horrible break-up, either….. although it was strange. I came out to him by telling him all the attraction I was feeling to people that were not him, to which he had the best response ever, which was that I was free to think but not to act.

He eventually found someone else, which was wonderful and terrible all at once. Part of me was relieved for him to find someone whose heart wasn’t tearing them apart. The other parts of me felt his absence like a missing limb, and I didn’t date anyone else until the summer before I was a senior. It was a terrible decision, because six weeks later, I met someone I thought was THE ONE, and had to go through the heartbreak of breaking someone else’s heart, always harder than someone breaking yours. It wasn’t a cheating situation- THE ONE didn’t even know I was alive until Christmas.

But I was her friend from the first day of school, because once my dad left the church, I felt free to be whomever I was going to be that year…. which was wearing pride rings to advertise.

I will never in my entire life forget our first phone call. Dr. Steed, my senior English teacher, told us to get the phone number of someone in our class because the work was going to be difficult. I knocked over two desks to get to her and slipped her my number, because it was easier than asking for hers.

The moment I walked into the house after school, literally 30 seconds in, my phone rang. I said, “hello?” She said, “do you wear those pride rings because you’re gay, or because you’re an idiot?” I said “I’m gay. Do you have a problem with that?” She said, “no. I’m a Melissa Etheridge fan.” It was not a euphemism.

She was dating a hockey player at another school named Mark, a beard she kept up a little too well because it was excruciating watching her basically make out with him on New Year’s Eve. By then, we were together on the down low, even to her closest friends….. because I was out, but she wasn’t. Who would have thought the goalie for the women’s soccer team at my high school was a lesbian? That just doesn’t make sense. 😛

Prom night was also a mess, because we’d sort of gone to Homecoming together- I went with one of her friends so we could be near each other. But by Prom, school was ending and she thought she was ready to be truly seen with me. I bought the perfect dress, and she backed out. She ended up coming over after she was finished at the dance, because I couldn’t just go and watch her. I thought that was crazy. People have asked me many times why I didn’t just break up with her and go out with someone who didn’t have a problem with being out. Listen, it’s not like the lesbian dating pool at my high school was huge. In terms of out lesbian, I was the entire club. It was scary walking in the parade all by myself.

But it wasn’t a lost cause. I made it safe for people in younger classes to come out. By the time my younger sister got to high school, people were putting rainbow flags on their backpacks, and Lindsay asked who started it. They said, “I think it was this kid named Leslie.”

For those who don’t know me in person, the school year was 1995-1996. In that time and place, homosexuality was still considered a mental illness by most of the people around me. It wasn’t that they were hateful, just woefully uneducated. Back then, when I was out and about with my girlfriend, we watched our backs constantly, knowing where and when PDA was appropriate.

Thinking something was wrong with us included her parents. We didn’t tell them- they searched her room and found one of my love letters. We were forbidden to see each other, and like with all teenagers, it didn’t work. We were just even more secretive than we were before….. to the tune of making out in her car near some woods and being caught by the cops, who luckily didn’t do anything except tell us to move along.

In the end, she wasn’t THE ONE, a fact that I ignored for at least ten years. She decided to go back to Canada for college, but before she left, she wanted to get married. Why that didn’t set off alarm bells, I’ll never know…. because how did she think it would work? She couldn’t hide me forever. No way was I going to be her roommate at 30…. even 18 was stretching it. But “roommate” was how it was done in those days, so the fact that same-sex couples can get married and is now so accepted is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime.

Like most high school kids, I let the relationship go on too long because I didn’t know how to let go. We were long distance, and I looked into immigrating to Canada, but before I could really start the process, I learned something truly disturbing.

Since I was the internet guru, I looked up all the places gays and lesbians gathered in her city. Well, she went, and she met someone. That wasn’t the problem. If she’d come home that night and said she’d met someone else, it would have been all right. But she didn’t. She dated this person for months, to the point of moving in with her before she was forced to admit what she was doing. I didn’t even find out from her. I found out because her girlfriend e-mailed me, saying that my girlfriend had never told her she was seeing someone when she left Texas and that I should just back out because my girlfriend was hers now. I can still feel that pain as if it was yesterday- not that I live there, it’s just present when I think about that time in my life.

Despite that asshole move on both their parts, every trip my ex-girlfriend made to Texas was filled with fun and flirty dates where it felt like we were our old selves, and then a line would get crossed and we’d have an old fight over again or I would get torched with jealousy.

Eventually, she settled down, got married, and started having kids. It was only then, a decade later, that she said she was sorry we couldn’t have been partners as adults, because she thought we would have been good at it. Her words were sweet, and I knew that’s how she meant them. A compliment didn’t line up to the way I took it. I was burning with rage. She said something to the effect that she’d thought about getting back together, but she knew she’d treated me so badly that how dare she have the right to ask me to try again? I think all the anger I’d stuffed down so that she’d still want to be my friend surfaced in that moment- not only at the way she’d treated the end of our relationship, but that she took away my choice as to whether I’d have forgiven her or not.

As it was, I was so hurt that I didn’t date anyone from the fall of my freshman year of college until I was a junior. I had major trust issues, and it took me three years to work them out enough to be able to open my heart to someone else.

Apparently, it’s a pattern, because I haven’t dated anyone since I broke up with my most recent ex (five years ago, almost six). Probably it’s been twice as long because it hurt twice as much, especially since I did a lot of things I’m not proud of in addition to being hurt by her.

I think it might have been different if a couple of years later, my mom hadn’t died. Though I was screaming for a companion in those days, I didn’t want anyone but her- and not because I was stuck in the place of “she’s THE ONE and there shall be no one else.” It was that I didn’t know anyone as well as I knew her, and the thought of having no history with someone and dragging them into the shitshow of my grief was not appealing in the slightest. I got through by trusting friends, but it wasn’t the same as having someone to hold me at night while I cried.

As I started to come alive again, I realized that going through my grief on my own was a good thing, because I didn’t realize how jealous I was of other people my age who still had their parents. I don’t know how we would have managed that, but my guess is “good, most of the time, but the bad would have been egregious.”

I sometimes think it would have been nice to have a mother-in-law as backup, but she wasn’t completely on board with her daughter marrying a woman, either, so I waffle on that point. What I do know is that waiting so long has been helpful, because I feel much freer than I did three years ago. There’s no lingering emotion from that relationship that would help push a new person away. What I do know, though, is that my next relationship will be completely different, both in my approach and the fact that no one can compare to her- a new person would be in her own class, with her own unique gifts rather than trying to think “she’s better.”

The last piece of the puzzle is that I haven’t met anyone who has swept off my feet with awe and lust. Of course, that is not how all relationships begin, but in order to want to be romantic with someone, you have to feel something. I did have a conversation with someone about dating, but it was one of those things where my interest was piqued, but I didn’t make any declarations of love or anything. It was just “maybe dating each other would be fun and we should try it.” We didn’t, and life quickly moved on because I was never pining.

I really don’t have time for it. My attention is taken up with other things, other people with whom I am not romantic but are such good friends that intimacy happens regardless. A person does not have to be in love with you to see your soul if you make it visible to them. I am lucky to have friends that walk in my inner landscape, and it is surprising how much I value it over finding a partner. It’s not that I’ve given up, it’s that I’m perfectly happy to stand back and let them come to me. I don’t have a mad drive that says I’m going to die alone, no matter how many people say that to me because they’re worried. Trust me, that’s a them problem. I will never die alone because I have friends, constantly undervalued in our society because the fairy tale says I need to find one person that completes me and live happily ever after.

For me, the fairy tale is having friends that truly care what I think and feel, the best lesson I’ve learned in the years that have passed since my first high school romance. I don’t have one person that completes me, I have several who oversee different aspects. I don’t want to live in a world where that is seen as deficiency, but celebrated in its abundance. I know love as deep as an ocean because of them. Our shared history has provided ups and downs that stick in my mind, learning and growing every bit as much as I did when I was partnered- perhaps more as each of them show me who I am. They love me as fallible as I am, which is everything I could hope for in a romance, anyway.

To all the girls, all I can say is “thank you.” They are such small words, but the depth behind them is huge. Your love is #relationshipgoals enough for me, and I hope I am half the friend that you have been to me. It has certainly been and will continue to be my honor……

Always and forever.

The One About the MRI

March 8, 2019 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

Months ago, I was in so much pain that I rushed myself to Urgent Care, crying and shaking because my shoulder hurt so bad. I was told to follow up with my doctor because I needed an MRI to see whether it was just a strain or something more serious- a tear, which requires surgical intervention. I didn’t, because I was prescribed a course of narcotics, and by the time I was finished with it and only needed Aleve sporadically, it seemed “unpossible” that it was bad enough for a follow-up. My range of motion was back to normal, and I went back to ignoring it, because I thought I could…. the pain went away on its own.

I should have been more vigilant, because I’ve dealt with this sort of pain for years, not realizing it was my rotator cuff and getting massages to “work out the knots.” Stupid, stupid, stupid. This is what happens when you’re a doctor’s kid. You make uneducated guesses because you think you’ve picked up actual medical knowledge by osmosis. I know exactly how it started. Working in a medical office is fast and furious at times, and every time I left a patient room, I was carrying the chart in my right hand and closing the door with my left. The way I exited, the door ended up being behind me, and it was an awkward reach, but faster than closing the door like a normal person. Later on, the pain came back, because I was cooking professionally all the time and reaching for heavy pots and pans that would invariably put pressure on the already sensitive areas.

Now I’m back in excruciating pain, and decided that seeing a real MD was better than my own less-than-perfect education. I can’t just do occasional courses of narcotics forever, and it should have set off alarm bells that I needed Aleve and Tylenol so often. I have now come to believe that Ralph Wiggum would have made better decisions than me. As Ralph would say, “I’m bembarassed for you!”

Just because I worked in my stepmom’s office for a while doesn’t mean much. I learned a ton, but it’s just not the same. Duh, Leslie. The stupid, it burns…. I feel like the moral equivalent of this picture. Even Ralph went to the doctor, who told him he “wouldn’t have so many nosebleeds if he didn’t keep his finger up there.” Now that’s some sound medical advice.

I went to the doctor on Monday, and he wrote me a referral to imaging. The next available appointment wasn’t until today. Dr. Akoto said he wanted to see me back in a week, but I think I’m going to call him and reschedule for next Wednesday, because imaging told me that the radiology report probably wouldn’t be back by Monday since my appointment with them isn’t until 2:15.

If I’m honest, I’ve put this off because even though fixing a rotator cuff tear is quick and easy, the recovery is, in a word, not. I know the Nassers will be great about helping me. They’ve become my adopted family and we’d do anything for each other. But even though I know this logically, I have been at a loss emotionally. I feel alone, even though I am certainly not. I am in a very small place, whimpering for my mommy as consistently as I did when I was five.

I had to come to a place of peace regarding it, because it’s not a problem that will ever be fixed. Today has been about saying “get over it” to myself. Just because I can’t complain to my mother doesn’t mean I don’t need to put on the gangsta rap and get it handled. Longing for a dead person does me about as much good as sticking my head in the sand and hoping my problems will go away on their own.

I have, in effect, created my own multitude of problems, and am now digging myself out. There is, I suppose, something to be proud of in that. Self reliance can be a beautiful thing, although sometimes I feel like I rely on myself too much without letting other people in.

Luckily, I realized this and talked to Dan on the phone (look at me! I called someone!). She thanked me for being vulnerable and reaching out, which felt like a hug from Jesus. She’s not as physically close as the Nassers (she lives in Virginia), but her “just checking in” texts mean so much.

It also helps that I don’t drive, and that public transportation is excellent…. because nothing would be worse than being tempted to drive with one arm. Generally, one accident leads to another because even though you’re just doing normal things, you’re already off-balance.

And lastly, I can’t help but feel that my mental health has allowed my physical health to go by the wayside, because I am just not on the ball with following up. I’m not too depressed to do so, I’m so ADHD that keeping up with my to-do list is often overwhelming to an enormous degree.

Today, I’m on top of it. I will schlep myself over to imaging even though it’s snowing and I’m cold AF. I will schlep myself to the doctor next week because it’s an A-list priority. I used to be a Franklin Covey disciple, but that fell by the wayside when I stopped using pen and paper. I am sure there’s a ton of software to replace it, but I’ve settled for Google Tasks. It is very good in terms of remembering things, but there’s really no way to add priorities as well. The best I can do is add due dates, and I am way too good at the snooze button.

Speaking of the snooze button, now it’s really time to stop writing and get ready. I may be a little afraid of the results, but it’s better than not knowing. I wish I had realized this long ago, but “better nate than lever.”

Please send me as much good karma as you can muster. I could use the boost, because even if you don’t tell me you sent it, I can feel it in spades.

Tiny Details

November 22, 2018 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

As I start this entry, it is 0917. I am sitting at my desk with a cup of Lord Bergamot Stash Tea, complete with French Vanilla creamer. If you don’t have either on hand, Starbucks makes something similar called the “London Fog Latte.” I highly recommend them- they’re a bit addictive. Less caffeine to irritate your stomach, and/or the ability to drink far more of them. Both are equally important in my world (does flavored tea count as being “for young people?”). The added bonus is that the mug is keeping my hands warm, as it is 30 degrees Fahrenheit. In DC, the cold is no joke. Apparently, it’s supposed to be the coldest Thanksgiving in 20 years, which sucks, because it’s bright and clear outside. Just freezing with no payoff of beautiful snow.

It’s been perhaps 10 years since the best snow of my life. Dana and I were sitting next to the Christmas tree, and as Luciano Pavarotti started the Schubert Ave Maria, large, fluffy flakes began to fall. My memory may be failing me, but I think it’s the only White Christmas I’ve ever had. It was glistening, pure magic. I wish I could remember the exact date, but I am not so good with that information. I tend to remember tiny details, and not the big picture. For instance, I remember Dana opening one of her presents from me- a t-shirt that said “I’m right 97% of the time, but who cares about the other 4%?” She took the bows off the box and stuck them to her head.

Speaking of which, I’ve been thinking about writing a Modern Love column for years called “Seven Christmases,” all the ones Dana and I shared… but what has stopped me is that for some of them, my memory is excellent, and others, not so much. Different memories come to me at different times, so perhaps I will start it and keep plugging away until they’re all there. We shall see… because I tend to remember tiny details, and not the big picture. It would be easier if I had access to the magnificent “Danabase,” but at this point, that is neither here nor there.

It doesn’t feel natural to not be at work today, but I’ll get over it. The Nassers are cooking everything, and as I always say, after cooking for literally hundreds of people over a week at work, the last thing I want to do when I get home is cook for myself. I tend to run on quick energy, like sandwiches and fast baking Quorn “chicken.” And, of course, today’s meal will be entirely omnivorous, but I am never vegan unless I am making my own thing. I’ve used this quote before, but it rings true every day:

Cooking is hospitality, and if you reject people’s food, you reject them.

-Anthony Bourdain

Besides, I am not going to turn down fried turkey. I’ve never tasted it before.

When I make my own turkey, I massage the hell out of it with butter and olive oil, finishing with Cajun spice. I have some Tony Chachere’s on hand, so I might put it on the table, because it is literally good with everything, especially dressing and mashed potatoes.

I also play against type and do a “Yankee Dressing,” even though I’m from Texas- generally all cornbread, all the time. What can I say? I like white bread and sausage more. It’s harder to dry it out, and I can’t tell you how many years I’ve eaten cornbread dressing with good flavor and the texture of, well, there’s no describing it unless you’ve had it… sand, maybe? The only way you can kind of fix it is adding moisture with gravy. But notice I said “kind of.” If I’m going to eat cornbread dressing, my aunt’s is the only one acceptable. Her son, my cousin Nathan, lives with his wife and kids in Alexandria, so perhaps I can get her to make some for me again at some point, even if it’s July. I don’t care. I will stuff it in my face like it’s going out of style at any time.

Dan has been on a work trip for the last couple weeks, so I’m looking forward to seeing her again. I need a big bear hug, as well as the excitement of “what did you bring me?” My inner eight-year-old shows whenever she comes back from traveling, because it’s always to interesting places. She’s also having a holiday party soon, which reminds me that I need to get a white elephant gift. Not sure how I can top last year- a Funko Pop Bob Ross. I’m on a mission (from God). I am sure I will see her before then, but a party sounds nice. They don’t always, because I’m not a big fan of crowds, but these are all “my people.”

My shoulder continues to hurt like hell, even though I accidentally got really high. You’re going to think I’m lying to you, but I promise I am just that dumb. I took all my psych meds, which includes Klonopin, and then because of my shoulder, I took a Vicodin. I know for sure I am not supposed to mix the two, and I don’t… normally, except that taking my psych meds is second nature every single morning, and taking pain medication is not. I will just chalk it up to a dumbass attack and wait for it to wear off. However, I am not as high as I could be, because the shoulder pain is still cutting through enough to make me swear like a sailor. I’ve also had a lot of caffeine as a counter measure. The only upside is that even though I feel like dogshit, I care less…. so at least I got that goin’ for me.

The flip side is that I hate this feeling, which is loss of control. Brain fuzziness of any kind drives me up the wall. I am literally counting the minutes until I don’t feel this way anymore, as I do after one cocktail as well. I rarely have them, but sometimes I will partake just because I enjoy the taste and smell. One of these days, I really am going to order Kraken rum cologne. I swear that when I have a shot of it, I will literally smell the empty glass until the waitstaff comes to take it away. I’m not even much of a rum fan, but Kraken is extraordinary, what with its chocolate and vanilla notes and crazy viscous legs. Pro tip: do not fuck it up with mixer. Please and thank you. As an aside, I think the company that makes Kraken has one of the best marketing and design teams on the planet. Everything they make just looks as cool as the other side of the pillow, especially the lampshade and the shower curtain.

Back to you, Bob. Let’s go to the phones.

About the only brain fuzziness I can tolerate is real Sudafed, which is its own special hell. It suppresses my appetite, so I have to choose between losing weight I don’t have the luxury to lose and not being able to breathe. Even though I take an antihistamine, it can’t keep up… and I’ve tried Sudafed PE, and all I have to say about that is that the box should say “Warning: Does Not Work.” It leaves me with a still stuffed up and miserable sinus mask with the same appetite suppression as the original. Good times.

Before I close this entry, I want to give thanks for all of you. Having people in my life who think my words matter is invaluable to my self-esteem and therefore, mental health. You are my Thanksgiving, along with my friends and family that support me in real life as well as being “Fanagans.” I learned yesterday that I’ve gained an important one, but you don’t get to know who they are. It’s enough that I do.

Ok, ok. I give. It’s Jesus. I’ve followed Him my whole life, and he finally returned the favor. 😉

Slinging and Hash

November 17, 2018 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

My coworkers are so young that I was sitting at the bar after my shift a few months ago, having a beer. The man next to me told me his name and that he was a sound editor at NPR. He asked me what I did, and I told him that I “sling hash here.” The bartender, young enough to be my son, said, “I thought you were a cook. You’re a drug dealer?” The sound editor nearly fell off his bar stool laughing and said, “I think that’s old diner slang.”

But today’s entry is about a different kind of sling. My left shoulder has been bothering me for a few weeks, but the pain has been fully manageable with Aleve and Tylenol… that is, until yesterday morning. I woke up in so much pain that I couldn’t stop crying, and didn’t until I got to Urgent Care.

I couldn’t possibly see how I was going to cook and wash dishes, so I gave Chef a heads up as to what was going on, and could he possibly find someone to work for me? To his absolute credit, for which I will thank him publicly, he told me to get to Urgent Care and let him know what they said. He’d find a way to work it out, even though there was no one to take my place. It created a tiger mom loyalty in me, and by the time I got to Urgent Care, as the tears flowed, I said, “there is no possible way that I can miss work tonight. If there’s any way you could treat this as a sports injury and just shoot it up with something, let’s do it.” If chef was willing to work a man down that night just so I was taken care of, the least I could do was try my hardest, exhausting all possible options, before staying home. I knew that I was going to either be miserable at work or miserable at home, so why not at least try to be miserable and make money at the same time?

The Urgent Care that I went to is incredibly risk-averse, the doctor told me, so he wasn’t allowed to put steroids directly into my shoulder, even though he thought it was the best course of treatment for what I needed in the moment (doesn’t work long-term). Instead, he did a long and thorough physical examination, determining that I had strained my rotator cuff, and that I should get it imaged with an Ortho to confirm it was just a strain and not an actual tear. If it’s just a strain, his recommendation is physical therapy. A tear requires surgery that, from what I hear, is relatively quick and easy, but the recovery is hell on wheels. One of my mom friends said that her son tore his, and just like the friends my age, had a difficult time with it. So I am definitely praying for a positive outcome, and if you’ll pray with me, send good vibes, use black magic, whatever, I’m game. Anything that taps into the power of the universe is fine with me. I know all of my readers can’t possibly believe in God, but even if you’re an atheist, believing in doctors is my first choice as well. Faith doesn’t come without shoe leather, and their work is as close to God’s as I’ve seen on this earth (there’s a reason I donate to MSF every chance I get).

As for the treatment I got yesterday, I chose a clinic that was close enough to walk to work from there, so after an IM injection of Toradol and oral Vicodin 5/325, I actually made it to my shift 30 minutes early, where I briefed Chef on all that had happened, and he thanked me profusely for coming in anyway, especially since my arm was in a sling to take pressure off my shoulder. I don’t wear it while working or typing, but other than that, I don’t take it off. I also realized that 325mg of Tylenol was probably not adequate, so I took an additional one. The doctor said that by the time I got home from work, the Toradol will have worn off, so I took two Aleve as well. Anything to relieve the inflammation, especially since I probably added to it last night. Even with Vicodin on board, everything still hurt like hell, especially after cleaning the kitchen, particularly sweeping & mopping. It was at that moment I thought, “maybe a desk job is for me,” and then I remembered that I was in just as much pain there, because the repetitive strain injuries never stopped, as well as more often than not, having a bad chair that always, always caused sciatica, as well as agitating the arthritis in my back. I absolutely understand that not all offices can afford Aerons, but so far, those have been the only chairs that don’t cause me pain. Even the knock-offs work, as long as they’re good ones and not the cheapest available.

I promise, I’m not snobby about it. Just worried for my own health. Even though osteoarthritis isn’t nearly as bad as rheumatoid, it’s no joke. It makes you feel like a very old person, no matter how young you are. Going from the kitchen to a desk job is just trading one type of pain for the other, equally severe in their own ways.

I definitely need to follow up with physical therapy, because with my level of activity, I’m likely to tear the rotator cuff up real good (if you’e going to do something, do it right).

And on that note, it’s time for a nap, provided I can find a comfortable position.

The Hours

August 30, 2018August 30, 2018 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

I’ve gotten a lot more hours at work, about which I am incredibly happy. More money never hurt anybody. But at the same time, my life is exhausting. Not to the point of wanting more time off, it’s just a cook’s life that when you get home, everything hurts. I know I’ve said this many times before, but I’m really feeling it today. This is because not only do I ache in my bones and muscles, my arms are still recovering from being burnt to a crisp. Thanks to Dan & Autumn, this will stop somewhat, but it doesn’t help the burns that are already there. Once they start scabbing over, they hurt even more than when they’re fresh, especially the ones that start out as bubbles full of serum. I’m beginning to think I need to buy stock in the company that makes Neosporin.™ The kicker is that all of them are my fault, generally from moving too fast.

I know I have also said this before, but it bears repeating. Working in a pub is different than working in a restaurant. In a pub, there are no waves of seating. We are sometimes hit with 25 tickets at once, and we don’t want to make some people wait 15-30 minutes for their food. As a result, the kitchen is utter chaos, grabbing things from the fryer before they’re cool, etc. It’s the baskets that get me the most. When I’m taking things out of them, invariably my arm will touch the edge, resulting in burns that actually look like thin cuts. The rest of the time, I have no idea. Burns just happen, and I don’t notice them until long after the fact. I suppose that the silver lining is that I don’t have to deal with cuts as well. My knife skills are solid. I haven’t even gotten first blood on either of my chef’s knives, which in kitchen folklore means we are bonded to each other, and I’m not stupid enough to make it happen on purpose. Fingers, even when cut lightly, bleed all over the place.

The other thing about being a cook is that you’re so tired, you tend to sleep right up until the next shift begins, because your muscles need more time to recover after a job that’s so physically demanding. This turns out to be gross negligence in terms of taking care of yourself. I mean, why take a shower every day when you’re just going to get horrifically dirty again an hour afterward? Just please be reassured that in the kitchen, I scrub in like a surgeon multiple times a shift and wear gloves constantly. The only time I really get “all dolled up” is when it’s my day off and I have plans with friends. Yes, it’s disgusting. It’s also real talk. You also have little time for laundry, so I do several weeks’ worth of clean underwear and don’t care if there are stains on my shirts and pants. I’m just going to get more of them… to the point that when I had a tech interview, I had to buy a new pair of pants for the occasion, because every pair of pants I currently owned had food stains that wouldn’t come out in the wash, even the black ones, where the stains aren’t as noticeable. I do wash my clothes, just not as often as they need it…. and as high as my wage is, it’s still not high enough to afford a maid so that all the crap I have to take care of is done once I get home. I also don’t have a partner to share the load, as it were, so everything falls to me. But don’t think I’m not grateful for being single.

I am incredibly introverted, and being single affords me only as much human contact as I want. Though with a partner, there is no need to be “on,” there is still compromise and difficult discussions and a whole lot else I’m just not prepared for in the slightest… maybe not ever, but for sure not right now. I’ve been single for, oh, I don’t know exactly how long, but sufficed it to say it has been multiple years, and I’m okay with that. Sometimes I daydream about the kind of partner I want, and joke that the perfect girlfriend for me would be that since I live in Maryland, she should live in Virginia. That way, in order to get together, we really have to want it. Really.

Another bonus is that because I’m not busy with a girlfriend, I have so much more time for my friends. They’re people I love like sisters and brothers, so it’s important to me to stay in touch and available for whatever they need. That being said, we’re all so busy that life seems to be a series of text messages and DMs on social media. I am positive that this is normal for adults our age, especially for people with children. Alternatively, I am not the type that likes to go out in a major way. I don’t need clubbing excitement. I am happiest sitting on the couch and chatting or watching a movie. I think this is also normal for people my age. We’ve already done all the stupid shit we’re going to do, and have little patience for it. I feel like I’ve done all the stupid shit I want to do, or have done by accident.

If I get invited to do something I would consider “wild,” I just give them a dumb look and say, “I’m 40.” The wildest thing I like to do these days is occasionally have a shift beer after work. The rest of the time, the pub has this Mexican cola that is so good it’s on my chef’s game “Last Meal.” I would much rather have it than anything else.

One of my favorite restaurants, Cava, has started carrying a sugar free version of the same brand, and I am not ashamed to say that I generally drink four in a row, especially since they have the good ice. Diet soda is my last vice. Just give me this one. Nothing helps beat the heat of the kitchen than a soda with ice. The pub doesn’t carry sugar free soda, so I generally drink seltzer water the entire time. You’d think I’d be stuck in the bathroom every thirty minutes, but I stand in front of a gas stove, a 500 degree oven, an open flame grill, and a 350 degree griddle and two fryers. My body is constantly using that moisture. Every once in a while, it is a blessing to be sent to retrieve things from the walk-in refrigerator. It only takes about 20 seconds to cool down, because it’s cold enough to keep ice frozen for hours before it even thinks about melting.

But the very heart of my work is that I do not have any Anthony Bourdain “underbelly of the kitchen world” stories. We are clean and efficient, we all get along well, and for the first time in any restaurant I’ve ever worked, there is no “war” between the waitstaff and the kitchen. If front of house drops something, it’s a quick re-fire with no judgment. In a fast-paced kitchen, everyone messes up at one time or another. “Stuff” happens. We just roll with it. Plus, the waitstaff doesn’t get angry at us if ticket times are slower than normal, because all their customers are drinking and have no concept of time, anyway. We just try as hard as we can not to test it too much.

The only thing that really trips us up is an order with a whole bunch of modifications or substitutions, and that’s in all restaurants. It interrupts the dance we’ve created not to ever be in each other’s way. Not that we won’t do it, of course, but from our perspective unless you have a genuine food allergy, we’ve created the recipes so that everything complements each other. Change that and you change the way the food is supposed to taste. Maybe you don’t, say, like pickled onions, but you’ve never tried it mixed with our perfect aioli. Give it a chance- be surprised. Branch out. You might discover you like something you thought you didn’t before. Additionally, don’t add salt and pepper before you’ve tasted what we’ve created. If you think it needs something afterward, don’t be shy. Make it to your own taste. But at the same time, trust us first. You don’t do this for a living. We do.

My whole life revolves around cooking, and doing it well. Especially since I’ve gotten more hours at work.

The Top of My Game

July 12, 2018 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I go to work in a little over two hours, and I really don’t want to. It’s not that I hate my job or anything. I absolutely love it. But between the pain and the shingles, I am still worn down to a nub and having to work at 100%, anyway. I am very proud of my body for allowing me to do this. During the adrenaline rush of service, I don’t physically feel anything. It’s nice to get a break, but then afterwards, I wilt like a flower. So far, the only thing I’ve done outside of work is sleep and watch Netflix.

I wish I had more energy. The laundry is piling up and I just can’t force myself to care. The most frustrating part is not knowing how long the shingles are going to last. Once they scab over, I am no longer contagious and can go about my normal life. But I am not quite to that stage yet, although I know it’s coming soon because it seems like it should be long enough by now. But even after passing the contagion stage, that doesn’t mean they go away. It just means I can complain around other people. All of my coworkers have had chicken pox, thank God. It would be worse to lose hours at work than has been to force myself to go…. and yesterday was actually really fun. Rachel (my chef’s knife) and I got to spend a few hours together and nothing makes me happier than taking her on a workout. She sliced through five pounds of carrots like they were nothing. God bless Chicago Cutlery. For the price point, they are seriously the best knives ever…. and having used really expensive knives before, I can tell you that it seems true to me that they need sharpening and honing more often. Perhaps it’s that the metal is softer- who knows?

When I finish tonight, it starts my weekend. I have Friday and Saturday off. In some ways, I hope I get called in anyway, because what cook knows what to do with themselves on Friday and Saturday nights? Please. The good part is that on my days off, I can actually go to bed early and sleep with my natural circadian rhythm so that I get even more rest than normal. There’s such a difference between sleeping and resting, because the sleep I get on off hours just isn’t as deep. I rarely dream anymore, which just tells me that I am only superficially asleep.

On my weekends, I get the chance to truly restore lactic acid to my muscles and don’t have to depend quite so much on pain meds (Aleve and Tylenol, no narcotics) and caffeine. It’s interesting to me that I am more experienced, more valued now as a cook than I ever have been… and right when I get to the top of my game, my body starts falling apart. The axiom “youth is wasted on the young” has never seemed more true. I have never felt more like an old person, having all these aches and pains and acid reflux and God knows what else is coming down the pike…….

But again, I am very proud of myself. I am at the top of my game, thriving even when service feels like drinking from a fire hose. Last night, I even took the time to take the pub up on a shift drink, because I burned the hell out of my thumb while cleaning the flat top (huge griddle). The alcohol is neither a pain reliever nor an anti-inflammatory, but it did make me forget I was in pain, and that’s not nothin.’ It was a Hefeweizen with a slice of lemon called “Foam Party,” reminiscent of one of the first Oregon beers I tried- Widmer Bros. Hefe. It brought me right back to shivering on the banks of the Willamette during Fourth of July fireworks.

For those who are unfamiliar with beer, Hefeweizen is a German style which is unfiltered, so it’s cloudy, hoppy, and just generally the best summer beer ever. I am smitten…. and yet, too old to enjoy too much, because did I mention acid reflux?

I take medication for it, but my biggest triggers are alcohol and tomatoes, not unusual for anyone, and I’d rather save the medication for an unlimited supply of strong coffee. It helps that I put whole milk in it- the fat is padding, because if there is anything I hate, it is coffee made too weakly to actually be called coffee in the first place. Right now I am buying different kinds of beans and mixing them all together, the way my grandmother made her cereal- buying six different kinds and putting them all in the same container. It’s delicious- some dark roast, some medium, some blonde. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Brands don’t really matter. I just buy whatever’s on sale that week. It’s the mixing of the roasts that make it pop.

And the word “pop” reminds me that it’s time to take a shower and get ready for service. It really means a lot to me, because I am still so sad about losing Anthony Bourdain that being in a kitchen feels like the best way to honor his memory. On Facebook, I often use the hashtag #DoitforTony when I’m checking in to the pub. If you’re a cook yourself, I’d be honored if you used it, too. Because he was such an inspiration to me, sometimes I still have to breathe deeply when I walk in and change into my kitchen shoes and apron.

That one still moment energizes me, and I think it’s what helps in terms of being at the top of my game…. inspiration and motivation all rolled into one.

I suppose I am just preparing myself to really let go, but I’m not there yet. Perhaps I never will be, and that’s okay. It can’t be a bad thing that his memory drives me forward in everything I do. I don’t think I’ll ever be half the journeyman cook he was, but perhaps writing about cooking and food is where our minds truly meet. It is as if my mind has opened up and said, “Anthony, you live here now. Welcome. There’s drinks on Thursdays and a pool in the back.” It is not unlike the way Obi Wan Kenobi lives in Luke Skywalker.

Now I feel like he’s nagging me to shower because I said I was going to five minutes ago.

That guy………

Knackered

July 3, 2018July 3, 2018 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Despite getting sleep and coffee, I am already exhausted. One of our line cooks quit yesterday, so my day off today is canceled. We are closed tomorrow, so I will get some rest then. Don’t get me wrong; I absolutely love what I do. Rest and recovery, however, cannot be underestimated. It remains to be seen how this line cook’s absence will affect future days off, but if I can’t get rest, at least I’ll get extra hours. It’s not a bad trade, but it comes at the cost of my physical health. I have mentioned this so many times before, but even if you don’t cut or burn yourself, after a shift, everything hurts. Everything.

My hands and feet get it the worst, followed closely by my knees. Anti-inflammatories help, as does Tylenol, but even after taking them, the pain doesn’t go away. It just fades into the background, the soundtrack of my life a series of pops and groans.

But there is nothing in the world that beats the busy rush of a pub, or prepping food that people will enjoy. Because we’re a brewpub, every snack and entree comes with a suggested pairing, food and drink that work together to make mildly happy into fabulous. That part is priceless, and I live for it.

It is the anti-office job, which is why I will still try to fit in as many shifts as I’m allowed if I get the job at UMD. The hiring process at any public university is a slow one, so I’m not holding my breath. It would be nice, though, to work with my head and my hands at different times, not forsaking one for the other. I am aware that my schedule will be full, but to me, it is worth it…. both in order to keep having fun and the fact that I will have two streams of income instead of just one. It is a win-win situation.

I really haven’t put too much effort into having a personal life, so my need for balance is different than most people. I am comfortable with the level at which my coworkers and I interact, I get together with my friends when I can, and for me it is (and will be) enough. I don’t have interest in dating or being part of a family, except for the one into which I was born. If that seems weird, I definitely have my reasons. I’m just not in a place emotionally to be that person, and I have no clue if or when that desire will arrive.

I put myself out there, once, and nothing came of it. Soon, it was like it never even happened…. and that’s fine. The reverberation for me was that putting myself out there was possible, and that I am too old to be worried about rejection. I just don’t care that much. It’s so much easier to talk to women when you feel you have nothing to lose, because your life is already amazing without them…. just icing on an already great cake.

The other piece of knowledge I’ve gained is that my standards are not quite impossibly high, and I won’t settle because the relationship is “good enough.” I am not interested in the mundane or the mediocre. I also feel too old to chase someone if they’re not into me the first time around. Better to cut losses and move on, something that has only come with age & experience.

There’s only one person in the world with which I have trouble taking my own advice, and that is because she is, as someone once called me, “the princess of mixed signals.” I never know where I stand. I take my own advice and leave the relationship be. Then something happens and my own advice goes out the window.

It’s a tumble and roll that leaves me, in a word, knackered.

So Much Better

February 26, 2018February 26, 2018 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I got feedback on the rough draft of my book review from my editor, and both agreed it was a piece of crap on the first pass (The first draft of everything is shit. -Ernest Hemingway). There was a specific format that they needed to follow, and in general, rule following gets you nowhere in my line of work. I wasn’t trying to be obstinate, of course. I just have a loose grip on what directions actually mean, because I often interpret them to be the exact opposite of what they actually mean…. which is why in formal writing I should never be trusted without an editor. It was actually pretty funny, because it didn’t occur to me until later that I was talking to a schoolteacher as I reread everything she sent over after the second draft.

1. Oh yes. So much better.

Thirty seconds later…

2. NOW I KNOW WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT.

I must’ve laughed for three solid minutes over that one. Sufficed to say, the review has been turned in, and the process for getting approved to be a professional takes about a week. Just for my own curiosity, I looked at some of the other paid reviews, and there were typos and grammatical errors in them… AND I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT THE BOOK WAS ABOUT. 😛 So, if their reviews are any indication, I’ll probably do ok. I don’t feel superior to any other writer out there, I just wanted to see what the gold standard was for this web site, and whether I was capable of that level.

If the review is scheduled for publication, one of the things that gets my reviewer score higher, and therefore, my rate per review, is sharing it. I’ll be posting it here, on my Facebook page, on Twitter, etc. Apparently, you can go right to the top of the list if you have 25,000 followers. I passed that long ago in terms of the number of times this web site has been read, including individual visitors. However, not all of them follow me via my author page or WordPress. I had a lot more followers when my web site was connected via my personal Facebook page, because I have so many friends. I thought it was better to separate everything out, but I still post a link on my personal page because it’s just easier for people to find me that way. I’ve also gotten a lot more readers through WordPress by tagging my entries, something I didn’t know was so incredibly important. It puts me higher in page rankings for a particular topic, rather than just being lost at sea among millions of excellent writers.

My heart is in my stomach waiting to see what will happen, so it was nice that I already had something planned for last night to get my mind off things. My friend Jaime met me at Sticky Fingers and took me to a mutual friend’s baby shower, and then came over to my house for a little bit to eat the cupcakes I’d bought earlier. Jaime is only the second friend that’s been to my house, and not because I don’t want my friends to come over- it’s just that since I take the Metro everywhere, there really hasn’t been a reason for people to come by. Prianka drove me home from the airport when I came in after my mother’s funeral, and now you have the grand total. I realized that I should have friends over more often, although Jaime is probably the only one that would actually want to come. This is because most of my friends live in Alexandria, and Jaime lives on the side of DC that’s closer to me. Because of the traffic, anywhere in VA is quite the hike…. much easier for us both to Metro and meet in DC, or I’ll take the Metro to Alexandria because I don’t get to hang out there very often. I was jazzed because the shower was held very close to my old neighborhood- even the same freeway exit!

My one #dumbassattack was that I spent so much time trying to secure the book I wanted to give the twins, only to rush out of the house without it…. even though I told myself to grab it at least fifty times and still forgot. I’ll just have to give it to them another time. Books keep.

In other news, I was wearing wool socks when I slipped down the stairs yesterday, and I thought I broke my ass. I, in fact, did not. After many rounds of Tylenol and ibuprofen, though, I am at least down to a small whimper when I sit. As I was getting into the bathtub, I also noticed that I am a hot mess back there- the biggest and best bruise I think I’ve ever achieved. #goals

I think that’s where we’ll stop for right now- if I think of anything else pressing, I’ll pick it back up later. Right now I just want some hot coffee and a bath. Maybe I will even drink the hot coffee while taking a bath…. something soothing inside and out for my poor little purple ass.