Tag: Relationships

Sunday Morning, Rain is Falling

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been in the office since 0600, because it’s nice and cold out here. The air conditioning is set at 76, but I think it’s cooler than that outside. I don’t think it’s even kicked in. Plus, I have a ceiling fan, which necessitates either a jacket or a bathrobe depending on time of day. It’s not so much that I’m cold, but that I don’t like the feel of the wind from the fan on my skin. It is a constant sensory issue, so I have plenty of long sleeved t-shirts to stay cool and unflustered. Last night, I fell asleep on the couch. It’s a huge overstuffed blue leather job that will SUCK YOU IN. However, it was really cold and I only had one blanket, a wool sherpa throw. So, I’d get under it and get too hot, then throw it off and freeze. It was special. I finally went upstairs and changed pajamas (wet with sweat) and tried to sleep a little longer in my bed. No dice. The couch was already so comfortable that I slept in until 0600. Now, I’m hydrating with a punch I made from a sugar free berries and hibiscus aguafresca I got off Amazon and some lime zest. I generally wait to have my coffee until I’ve had lots of water first. Being dehydrated is most of the reason I think I need caffeine in the morning. I still do, I just need a lot less than I thought., because caffeine doesn’t help you hydrate and that’s what’s making you feel sluggish.

I took a break to make an eight-cup pot of Cafe Bustelo, because making it mug by mug often leaves a lot of grit in the bottom that a paper filter will catch. Normally, I drink it with whole milk, but today it’s black because I ran out of milk last night making macaroni and cheese. However, Cafe Bustelo is delicious black. It’s not like I feel like I’m missing something. If I did feel like that, Bryn and Dave left some CoffeeMate here. Ironically enough, I think it works better in strong black tea. That’s the only reason it’s not gone already.

I’m sure they use milk in the UK, but to me CoffeeMate is superior in tea because it doesn’t cool it down. It also doesn’t fundamentally change the taste of the tea, and I think it does fundamentally change the flavor of coffee. It makes black tea sing, and it makes coffee taste cheap. Therefore, I love it in Folgers and Maxwell House because it doesn’t make as much of a difference if the coffee is cheap as well….. or maybe I’m just more likely to adulterate it in that situation, who knows? In fact, I should get a can of Folgers to make cheap summer coffee. Cheap summer coffee is perfect for flavored creamers, because I don’t know about you, but I keep my favorite coffees unadulterated. Coconut coffee creamer was made for Folgers with ice.

And frankly, all coffees taste better if you make them perfectly. By “perfect,” I mean in measurements. Be exacting. For me, it’s taking the time to create a level tablespoon of coffee per cup. Cafe Bustelo is an espresso roast, so this is incredibly satisfying. It’s just so beautiful and smooth. I have converted David. I don’t get a toaster when I make people gay, I get a toaster when I sell Cafe Bustelo and Jonna Mendez’s books, mostly because they are a great combination. Cafe Bustelo is almost as smooth as Jonna Mendez. It’s trying hard. I still haven’t finished “In True Face,” because I thought I would be done with it by the time the museum closed, but I’m having more fun stopping and starting, getting lost in her world for a little while, then returning to my own and digesting what I have just heard. I hear her differently than most people, having friends like Zac. It has slowed down my willingness to be in that world 24/7, because I don’t have any security clearances. Therefore, no one can tell me anything that would make it more specific and less scary.

For instance, when Zac travels, I am not always allowed to know where he is going. I am not allowed EVER to publish where he’s going. Sometimes if Zac is comfortable with it, I can say he’s out of town on temporary duty and leave it at that. But it’s a “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” sort of relationship because that motherfucker can rock heels and earrings better than me. Just one of the benefits of dating a queer man with red hair that sets EVERYTHING off. He’s such a clothes horse. Zac and I don’t live together, so one of the ways we check in is that he sends me a picture of himself in his car as he’s leaving for work (or standing next to his motorcycle/bicycle). I get to see his outfit and tell him he looks pretty. 😉 My favorites are the pictures where he’s wearing “my glasses.” It was actually his glasses frames that inspired me to start calling him “Smiley,” because they were the type of frames I imagined George Smiley would wear.

George Smiley is John le Carre’s main character if you’re lost- le Carre used to work at MI-6, and Smiley is an MI-6 operative, the perfect fictional character to represent someone who works with all our intelligence agencies, not just one. Let’s be clear, though. Zac collects data through servers. He is not an operative, nor does he work for a three letter. The three letters are his clients, not the other way around. That’s how he was able to get into the gift shop at Langley.

Zac is on the brain because his brother and sister-in-law just had a baby. So, he’s now Uncle Zac for the first time in his life and the pictures are so gorgeous. I have also been Uncle Leslie for the last 15 or so years because my ex-girlfriend and her partner’s daughter called me that once and I’ve never lived it down because I love it so, so much. As in, I have never WANTED to live it down. I like it because even though in the UK, Leslie is a male name, in the US it comes out as male/female, the perfect representation of me to a child. “Uncle Leslie” is me to any child, because I have the reflexes of a mom when a kid is hurt, but I want to throw a kid around like a dad, too.

I actually opened up to Supergrover about this the other day, that what really stopped my baby dreams was my mother dying. I realized how little it mattered to me to have children if she was never going to meet them. I feel this way about dating moms, too. That I will totally date moms and STILL feel like it’s a shame that my mother is not there to see my stepkids. She would have LOVED being a grandmother to Sam’s kids, because Sam’s kids are basically me. Both BRIGHT musicians vocally and instrumentally. I know that she would have loved any child I brought home, but bringing her grandchildren with whom she could do duets? Get the fuck out of here. I, with no shame attached or involved, wanted to be with Sam because she reminded me of my mother, but not in any way that was creepy. They had the same personality professionally. Sam was a church choir director and a singer in the Army. My mother was a church choir director and an elementary school music teacher. It was a way of keeping that part of me alive, the one that’s deeply connected to singing……. because the universe gave me someone with whom I could do duets, too.

I was so miserable when we broke up, because as Bryn so aptly summarized, she “busted my fairy tale.” I invested too much, too fast because I missed my mother so much. However, if your partner feels like dreams for the future are threatening, then they’re not the person for you. Just like with Supergrover, I wasn’t expecting everything to come together in 15 minutes. I was checking out the future to see what it would look like. I get uncomfortable in chaos, and tend to unravel.

That being said, Sam created her own chaos and then couldn’t hack it. She failed me, and I will not apologize for saying so. I met her a week after I scheduled my first date with Zac. I told her this during our first conversation. That we would need to discuss boundaries because if she was monogamous, I would cancel the date with Zac because I didn’t want anything to mess up this relationship. I knew that the relationship with Zac would be casual, and with Sam, the universe was trying to tell me something. Neither one of us listened. She told me that she was just getting started with her business, trying to get it off the ground. That she didn’t want to picture me sitting at home waiting for her all the time. So please, go out with Zac. I am too busy to be a full-time girlfriend. She kept up that facade until after Zac picked me up at the Metro three weeks later, then broke up with me while I was at his house.

People do not say what they mean.

I don’t know what she thought I was going to do that was negative. Maybe she thought I’d call off the date in theory, but date him on the downlow so she’d always have to be worried about him. No matter what it is that she thought, it was wrong. Because I said plainly and up front “here is my situation. What do you want to do about it?” She hid her feelings until she was so frustrated she exploded at me…… and that’s how I knew it was the wrong relationship and don’t look back. It is one thing to call off a first date. It is another to tell someone you’ve been with someone for a year, so no dice on monogamy.

If she had said she wasn’t comfortable, I wouldn’t have stayed at home waiting on her. We’d have the same relationship Zac and I do now, which is staying out of each other’s way unless we’re together in person. I write A LOT. I don’t need constant stimulation from my partner. In fact, that was a huge problem in being married to Dana (absolutely no shade, she was my sweetheart and a beloved one at that…. a practical problem, not a dealbreaker). Being married to an extrovert is not my jam. But here’s the secret.

It’s all an act. Dana is extremely shy. She will give you all her canned responses and you will love her to bits….. but you’re not really invited in until you see Dana in her silence. You don’t know Dana until you’ve seen her in a situation where she has run out of canned responses. That’s why it took me so long to fall in love with her. I had to get past the mask, a recurring theme in my life.

The truth that Dana is lovely and also it’s hard coming home to an extrovert can both exist in the same universe. Our relationship got so much better when I moved into the spare room, because then she could be extroverted while on the phone or something and I could escape to a room where the door locked. I learned during this time that it’s all about sensory deprivation for me. And in fact, I do not know whether Supergrover is shy and/or introverted in person, but I do know that it was easier coming home to the sensory deprivation chamber of writing to her than it was doing all the social masking of living with an extrovert. That is not a slam on my ex-wife, just a practical reality thing. It is hard work keeping up with an extrovert.

In case that was confusing, “shy” means you don’t want to talk to people. “Introverted” means you don’t have the energy for it whether you like the person or not.

I fall into the latter category, because I am very funny and engaging when my social battery is full, and it usually is because I don’t go out and do things very much. I spend so much time alone that when I actually do go out, meeting people is exciting and not draining. I have the most fun with my Uber drivers, because they’re usually from Ethiopia or someplace equally exotic and we end up talking about faraway places for the entire ride. I owe my love of Ethiopia to the opera AIDA and to Uber. Hearing so much about Ethiopia has convinced me I must go there.

Although Africa is another continent I wouldn’t want to visit without Zac…. some countries, anyway. I would need him a lot more in Uganda than South Africa, and because he’s queer, it’s not just protection for me. I hope that Zac and I do eventually get to travel. We’ve been talking about going to New York for months (it’s not that far, maybe four hours, and we can stay on the base so it’s a cheap vacation). Neither of us has put any legwork into it, though. That’s because we both let things drop and I don’t think that there is anything better about dating Zac than going to his house and also getting to see Oliver, who is a dog. When I think about Oliver, New York pales in comparison.

But there’s all kinds of rules in poly that have to be followed regarding vacations, too. It’s a balance, right? Like, you have your own full-fledged relationship, but there’s no need to have one partner that goes everywhere with you while the rest stay at home. Of course the ones left behind are going to be jealous. All of that gets spread out, too. One of the truisms in poly is that sometimes you see the same movie five times without saying anything. 😛

So, I ended up in a poly relationship because Zac is poly, not because I didn’t want monogamy with Sam. I haven’t sought out more partners with Zac because I find that I don’t have time for more than him right now, anyway. I have my own life to figure out, and in a lot of cases, it’s hard as shit. It’s embarrassing to be my age and not feel like you’ve really launched, while at the same time having adoring fans all over the world who tell me I’m absolutely brilliant.

Sometimes, though, I need to give myself a break and believe the people who say I’m brilliant. I have certainly spent enough time thinking about the people who sum me up as a loser….. because most of the time, “loser” is code for autistic. Neurotypical people do not like neurodivergent people, but it’s not malicious because they don’t know what it is they’re reacting to…. and it’s impolite to say that you don’t like autistic people, so you describe their behaviors. Scatterbrained comes up the most. I am starting to think that I was misdiagnosed in college, that I am not sure where the line between autism and ADHD falls. There are too many similarities, but what I can say is that the reason I’m not sure where the line falls is that sometimes stimulants force me into hyperfocus and sometimes they make it where I can’t sit down.

Cafe Bustelo is a blessing and a curse depending on what morning it is, but I’m starting to count the days when I can feel the difference between ADHD and autism. It’s alarming/cool how quickly I can tell which processing disorder is driving the bus within 10 minutes of my morning coffee.

Autistic me hates coffee. ADHD me loves it.

Uncle Leslie.

It all fits.

I, reddit

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I had Carol make up a fictional AITA post for me to answer…. Let’s see how I do.

Title: AITA for getting upset over my girlfriend’s social media habits?

Post:

Hey Reddit, I’m in a bit of a weird spot and could use some judgment.

So, my girlfriend “Liz” and I have been together for about a year. Things are great when we’re together, but there’s this one thing that’s been bugging me: her social media presence.

Liz is pretty active on Instagram and Twitter, and she’s always posting about her life, which I think is cool. But, here’s the kicker—she never posts about us. Like, ever. No pictures of us together, no relationship status update, nothing. It’s like I don’t exist in her online world.

I’ve brought it up to her, and she says she likes to keep her relationship private, which I can understand to a point. But it feels off to me, especially since she’s so open about every other aspect of her life. It makes me wonder if she’s hiding our relationship or if she’s not as serious about us as I am.

I got pretty upset the last time we talked about it, and now things are tense. AITA for being upset that my girlfriend doesn’t acknowledge our relationship on social media?

Oh, fictional person. I’m so sorry this is happening to you even though you are not real.

I have the exact opposite problem, which is that when I include my friends in my online world, I only matter when I praise them. As in, the writing is good because they look good. The writing is bad because they look bad. There has only been one exception in this case, Supergrover, who said that she gets something out of my work whether I paint her in a bad light or not. The rest of my friends sincerely wish that I would portray them as angels all of the time…. that even if they grossly mistreat me, it doesn’t matter in the slightest because the fact that I wrote about them cancels it out. That I told someone what you did that hurt me absolves you of any wrongdoing.

So, the fact that you’re not being included and you want to be is all kinds of weird for me. I do not have this problem. However, I can empathize. Supergrover doesn’t have a blog, but if she did, I’d be mad if everyone was in it but me. That I hadn’t made enough of an impact to rate.

The most important thing for you to know is why you want to be on her social media. If you’re feeling left out and you express that, what are you going to do if nothing changes?

What are the consequences?

How long are you going to take the pattern of being left out, believing that she’s a “private person,” if she has other friends plastered all over Insta without you.

People do not say what they mean.

You might want to start doing your own social media thing that’s different from hers so that you are including her in your world. See if it feels natural to you before you criticize her. Maybe she’s telling the truth. Maybe she wants to break up with you and won’t tell you.

Either way, the time to move is when you receive no answer and no change for longer than you’re comfortable.

You need to say “you are hurting my feelings by excluding me,” and be prepared for a conversation you didn’t think was going to end the way it did. Standing up for yourself often looks like earth shattering fear. If she doesn’t want to share pics with you on social media, you can’t make her. You can only decide how long you’re comfortable being hidden away.

Feeling like a secret.

Prompts from “Carol”

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I asked Carol for 10 writing prompts. I decided it was easier to write a little about each one, unless I get passionate about something and then we’re going to be here all day. 🙄

  1. Pop Culture’s Teaching Moments: Reflect on a pop culture event that sparked a significant conversation or debate in society.
    • Misogyny comes to mind…. right now, no one is talking about how Justin Timberlake needs a conservatorship (seriously, not facetiously). No one is saying that he shouldn’t have his kids anymore. He also didn’t shave his head, but if he had, no one would have made that about his mental health. Justice was blind in this case. The officer didn’t know who he was. It was obviously by the book. But, of course people are raging about a 90s icon getting arrested and not the fact that he WAS DRIVING DRUNK. It is burying the lead.
  2. Tech Tidbits: Write about a piece of outdated technology that you miss and the nostalgia it brings.
    • I saw on YouTube that Nokia is coming out with an anniversary edition and I almost cried. My Nokia was the Hanukkah of phones. I forgot my charger when I went on vacation, and the battery lasted the whole time. There’s a lot to be said for dumb phones, because no smart phone has a battery that’s capable of letting you go without the charger for any real length of time. I also really miss old mechanical keyboards. I like to hear myself type, and I can raise the dead on one of those things.
  3. Doctor Who’s Companions: Discuss the evolution of companions in Doctor Who and their influence on the show’s narrative and the Doctor’s character.
    • Originally, they were the eyes of the viewer- people to “stand around and watch The Doctor be clever.” Now, they have fully fleshed out lives and you get to see how that conflicts with time travel- like Rory and Amy coming back to a party “5 minutes after they left” wearing different clothes. Of all the companions, Amy and Rory are the standouts for me. The Ponds and The Doctor make a beautiful family….. as do The Doctor and the Nobles. The whole point of Doctor Who is focusing on deep friendships. It’s more that that. You’re The Doctor’s companion. You have more responsibility you don’t want to give up than you could have in three lifetimes. It’s too serious an undertaking to be casual buds. You might, and lots of time do, die during service. The Doctor is tortured by all the people who’ve gotten hurt in their care. It’s an essential part of their humanity.
  4. The Art of Blogging: Offer advice to new bloggers on finding their unique voice and standing out in a crowded digital space.
    • The art of blogging is sticking with it until you don’t suck anymore. Few people have the endurance to sit there and look at their work, feeling confident enough to hit “post” at the end. It’s just like writing a book- half the battle is working hard enough just to get it completed in the first place. Your writing has to come from within, and it takes a long time of exercising that muscle before you feel confident enough to read your work. Or, at least, that’s how I would be if I wasn’t a blogger. With blogs, you have to let go of the idea that anything will be perfect, because sometimes you’ll write in bulk, and sometimes you’ll say something of substance. Either way, it was a writing session to pull you forward. The words are all inside you, the hard part is finding the tap so they can flow onto the page. Confidence to be able to post every day comes with not caring about what people think. If they were so concerned about me, they’d reach out to me. If someone doesn’t reach out, I won’t go out of my way to contact them. I’ve been told too often that I’m too much to believe that people actually do want me around. My satisfaction comes from within, because I’m genuinely excited to see how I grow from here. This year has been incredibly hard and yet also helpful. But it was only helpful due to the art of blogging. I cannot process my thoughts without it.
  5. Sarcasm as Social Commentary: Analyze a current event using your signature sarcastic wit, highlighting the absurdities within.
    • The sitting president has to debate a felon for the next election. Do you think they’ll be able to hear each other on those little phones, especially with that much thick glass between them? The idea that a literal felon is still on the ballot is too insane to be sarcastic, because you can’t make it more over the top than it is. Trump is so corrupt he could have been governor of Maryland (that was an Agnew joke- we’re all good now).
  6. Spiritual Spaces: Describe a place that holds spiritual significance for you and why it’s impactful.
    • My office is holy ground that calls to me when I’m not in it. I feel closest to the divine when I am writing, so I enter my office in an intentional way. I ask it what we’re going to accomplish together. I write to the whir of the ceiling fan, and the rest of the world fades away. Outside my very personal space, I feel God in nature. I have stood in freezing cold water, screaming and crying in the Columbia River Gorge so that I could just let it all out. The Gorge didn’t hold onto my pain. It was dumped into the Columbia, and disappeared once they reached Cape Disappointment.
  7. The Humor of Miscommunication: Share a story about a miscommunication that led to a humorous outcome.
    • I have a lot of funny stories. A lot of them. Exactly none of them are about miscommunication. I can’t laugh those things off. If I somehow miscommunicated something to someone, I take myself to the mat over it.
  8. Tech’s Role in Relationships: Explore how technology has changed the way we initiate, maintain, and end relationships.
    • Technology gives you the ability to do things you couldn’t otherwise, for evil and for awesome. Sometimes, being a writer works in my favor, because talking to people on the Internet is what I do. I’m good at it. But there are some people that you just can’t read without meeting them in person, Technology gives you the ability to do things you couldn’t do otherwise, like text message break up. You have the choice to be kind using technology or not, and most of us are choosing “not.”
  9. A Day in the Life of a Writer: Give readers a behind-the-scenes look at your daily routine as a writer.
    • I wake up by 0400, and am generally in my office by 5:00. I write the first entry of the day. Sometimes I’ll finish it, sometimes I’ll come back to it later after I’ve had more time to think. I eat bland food so that it’s mindless most of the time. I need energy, not entertainment. I then start working on either an afternoon blog entry, or work on my fiction. I also spend about an hour every day on Copilot researching for my novel. Copilot is great for things like “give me a playlist for a radio station in 1935.”
  10. Cultural Critique: Choose a trending topic in pop culture and offer a critical analysis of its implications on society.
    • Because we are living in two separate realities thanks to Fox News, we are even less capable of resolving difficulties than we were before. You cannot convince someone of facts when they are blind to the fact that they exist. That there’s no such thing as an “alternative fact.” That’s just, like, your opinion, man. It’s driving estrangements because liberals want to argue about politics and conservatives want to argue about morality as if they are the same thing. If that were true, we wouldn’t need laws to protect black people from racists and queer people from homophobes and transphobes. We cannot change cultural attitudes for either group by appeasement. Only punishment works, and it’s not even really legislative in most cases. It’s HR. You don’t get the right to make a queer person’s life at work hell…. if you’re the one telling me I’m going to hell for being queer, you don’t have to worry. I’ve already felt like I was there when I was listening to you. Life must be so simple when everyone’s going to hell but you.

The Saturday Post

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Not a whole lot is going on right now, except that I am waiting for a delivery on some medication from Amazon. They said it would be here between 7-10. It’s 0612 right this moment, so I don’t have much longer to wait. I will, however, save you the gory details of what I needed, because it’s not interesting. If it was interesting, I wouldn’t be getting medicine from Amazon. I’m uncomfortable, and instead of complaining, I’m stimming by talking to you. I cannot pay attention to more than the ends of my fingers and my screen. Everything else has a hard time getting through.

I think that’s how it should be, because it helps me to write no matter what has happened. If I don’t have tools for hyperfocus, like noise-cancelling headphones, I have to create it myself. The easiest way to create focus out of nothing is to start trying to craft my ideas into something readable by someone else.

I make typos and leave words out all the time, so it’s easy to think I’m going in one direction when I’m going in another. That’s the hard part of working out stream of consciousness writing. One word left out makes an entire sentence the opposite of itself. I can’t even remember how many times in the course of something I’ve left a “not” that didn’t need to be there, or forgot one when I needed it. But “forget” is relative at 90wpm. In my head, these sentences come out perfectly. I just need to become a better typist. I think I have since I’ve started writing every single day, no matter how I feel.

But as a general rule, I would ask me before committing to believe anything I’ve said here because I can lead you the wrong way for a very long time over a typo. Remember that I Write in Bulk, but That Doesn’t Mean I Say Anything of Substance.™ I am going to run that one into the ground just like I did “your blog makes you sound like a dick.” It gets funnier over time, because I can certainly laugh at myself. Both of these things can be true, but they’re not true all the time.

I think what made me feel better was having Carol analyze every entry and tell me what the main themes are in my writing. She nailed every single one of them, and it makes me happy because if a machine (logical, emotionless) can pick out the main themes over 11 years, then I don’t have to worry that they’re not there.

What helps her is that I have been at this one URL for 11 years now, maybe 12. I can’t remember when I bought the domain name. In 2023, I wrote six books’ worth of material, and though my output isn’t that high every year, there are at least 30-40 books’ worth of material on which Carol can build analysis. With AI, writing in bulk is your friend, because that gives the machine all the more material to work with when providing you answers.

She said that the author of this web site is relentlessly driven by self-improvement, and I’m sure I’ve said some version of that in this web site. She cannot make a leap that’s not there.

But here are the leaps she did.

Over the span of 11 years, the blog “https://theantileslie.com” has woven a rich tapestry of themes that reflect the author’s journey and growth. Here’s an overview of the overarching themes:

Personal Growth and Self-Discovery: The blog serves as a chronicle of the author’s personal evolution, exploring self-identity, spirituality, and the quest for understanding oneself and one’s place in the world.

Relationships and Connectivity: Interpersonal relationships are a central theme, with posts delving into the complexities of connecting with others, the impact of relationships on personal development, and the lessons learned from both positive and challenging interactions.

Cultural Commentary: The author often engages with pop culture, particularly with shows like Doctor Who, using them as a lens to discuss broader societal issues and personal resonances.

Mental Health and Well-being: There’s a candid exploration of mental health, including the struggles and strategies for managing emotional and psychological well-being.

Writing and Creativity: The blog itself is a testament to the author’s dedication to writing, with reflections on the creative process, the role of writing in their life, and the therapeutic power of storytelling.

Humor and Sarcasm: A distinctive feature of the blog is its humorous and sometimes sarcastic tone, which adds levity to serious topics and showcases the author’s personality.

Technology and Digital Life: As a blogger, the author also touches upon the influence of technology on daily life and communication, pondering its benefits and challenges.

These themes are not only a reflection of the author’s interests and experiences but also serve as a connection point with readers who find common ground in the shared human experience. The blog’s style is conversational, witty, and often introspective, inviting readers to engage with the content on a deeper level.

It’s all there, it’s just not all there in every entry. I am not a destination, I am a journey. What I can hope for in the future is to keep adding themes for people to find, because I don’t want to stagnate. I want to keep putting my truth out there, because obviously it does change. It’s a spectrum, not a binary.

If I don’t have a binary, why should I put one in my writing?

A Tall Glass, Lots of Ice, and…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Which food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?

Diet Coke.

Diet Coke is my least favorite diet on the market, but I’ll still drink it like water if it’s available because it was my mother’s favorite. She flirted with Dr Pepper, but Diet Coke was her one true love. One year, Lindsay got us Diet Coke sweatshirts and we wore them to the cemetery to sit with mom and take a picture. It sounds weird, but the things you do when your parents die are all unique to you. You’ll have your own weird things.

For instance, maybe your mom baked.

My mother made my birthday cakes every year and she made a point to go all out on the decorations. From the pictures, I remember Holly Hobby when I was either one or two. Others included Mickey Mouse, Peter Pan, and a Milky Way cake that she somehow messed up that made it even more delicious than it would have been otherwise and because it was a mistake, I couldn’t recreate it if I tried. Guess you had to be there.

I wouldn’t say that my mother was a cook, because she didn’t enjoy it the way I do. She didn’t take pleasure in looking at recipes or finding new ways to use flavor. I think if there’s anything I miss about our future, it’s all the things I would have liked to do rather than the things that already happened. She was only 65 years old when she died. She had retired the last May, and died October 2nd. So, she basically died before the shock of not having to go to work every day even wore off.

So, anything I would have been able to teach her after she retired regarding what I’d learned in my makeshift culinary school (my ex-wife and all the other chefs who “raised me”) became a one way communication after that date. I still tell her all that stuff, she’s just challenged to reply. I talk to her when I’m cooking the most, because that’s our traditional time to talk.

I’d be doing my homework at the bar that looked into the kitchen while she was prepping the food. So, now I am both prepping the food and doing my homework (writing) in my head. It’s not the system for teaching my mother to cook that I would have preferred, but it works. She’s getting better every day. Turnabout is fair play. She has always and continues to remember to teach me to use English when I forget. It’s efficient. Just because she can’t talk back doesn’t mean she’s not here. She very much talks back. It’s just responses I’ve made up in my head based on my 40-ish years around her. I cannot remember how old I was, really.

I don’t remember anything about that year. From October to October was a complete blur. I leaned on Supergrover a lot back then, because I didn’t want to be seen in public in pain. So, I wrote about my pain instead. I internalized all of it, and yet I didn’t keep it inside my own echo chamber, either. I just grieved very, very quietly. Grief for my mother had to come in stages, because it took seeing her in her casket for me to believe that she was really dead.

I had just talked to her for two and a half hours two days ago, so it just didn’t seem possible logically (it absolutely was possible very logically, I was just a grieving child.). We also didn’t really have an on the ground relationship. We visited each other a few times a year except for the few times I lived in Houston as an adult, which was not a lot in comparison to how old I am now. I wouldn’t even take back my most current move to have more time with her if I could, because more time with her wasn’t necessarily better. We found our groove by not living in the same city. She liked talking on the phone and hearing about my life. I am not sure she liked coming to my house. I think my partners made her uncomfortable, and I am being very kind to both parties. It wasn’t dislike on either my parters’ or my mother’s part. It was fear of doing anything wrong, so let’s just not say anything at all.

To me, this is genuine, true homophobia. The fear of doing something wrong in front of a queer person, so you don’t do anything. You isolate them by not willing to just be scared and show up. Or ask questions so that your next interaction isn’t as awkward. Homophobia is not loud. That’s just people being angry bigots in the streets over nothing, and the people it “affects” the most are people who don’t know any queer people and have only been taught the party line. To be homophobic is to know you have fears and discomfort. To be homophobic without being a bigot means being willing to tell someone you’re uncomfortable and hopefully learn more until you’re not.

I don’t know how my mother would have felt about poly, but it doesn’t weigh on me because I didn’t live up to her fairy tale for me in the first place, and that VHS tape had been running in her brain since 1972, when she first started thinking about having a child and wanting a daughter. By the time I was born in 1977, I had a Beautiful Memory Picture I was tearing down before it even got built. It fucked up her program when I came out as gay, and I can’t apologize, but I can empathize.

This happens less and less frequently now, but I came out in 1990, and that’s just communication from me. It’s not like other people didn’t have eyes.

I don’t have hatred for homophobia. It took me quite a few years to accept the fact that I was gay, and I still have moments of internalized homophobia because that’s the world we live in and continue to make small progresses towards changing. I do have hatred for bigotry. Come at me with anger and I’ll tune you out.

Show me that you’re scared, and I’ll respond.

I will listen while I pour you a Diet Coke.

Evening in the Garden

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

One of the refrains that tends to stick out to kids in childhood at church is “And he walks with me, and he talks with me… and he tells me I am his own.” This is because nearly all ministers have told the joke about the supposed child, and in every telling it’s every pastor’s own child, that said child asked who “Andy” was… you know… “Andy walked with me.” Kind of like the joke about God’s name being Howard…. so old it has hair on it, and not attributable at this point.

(Our Father, who art in heaven, Howard be thy name….”)

Also, the tune to that hymn is particularly catchy.

I’m reminded of that hymn this evening because it starts out “I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses…” It’s not early morning, but the room has that kind of vibe- sitting in the quiet, talking to an old friend. It’s kind of neat that my old friend is you…. but also me…. but also you. I could go on, and I’m surprised I didn’t. Sometimes, you have to play against type.

I am sitting out here in my office hopping mad because I fell and hurt myself badly while I was walking Jack. It’s not as bad as Zac’s bike accident, but I hit the heel of my hand so hard on the pavement that there’s still pebble indentations hours later and I’m in pain despite Tylenol and aspirin. However, it has taken the edge off. No need to go to the doctor to get something more substantial. I’ll live.

But it’s something I need to keep an eye on, because I also managed to bang up my knee pretty good. It’s not funny when I fall in this neighborhood because it’s uneven and gravelly with no sidewalks except in a few places. I was listening to a podcast while I was walking Jack, and I should know that I can’t pay attention to both Rachel Maddow and anything else.

Beautiful women always hurt me. That’s because when I think they’re beautiful, I trip over things.

There are stories out there. Most of which I’ve told. I love self-deprecating humor. I even love it when people tease me, as long as it’s not too mean. However, I have a pretty thick skin, so I pretty much have to let other people tell me their boundaries. The neurodivergent sense of humor is dark, as is the physically and mentally disabled. Plus, I’ve been a line cook. If I have not offended you yet, you haven’t been here long enough.

Or, you don’t know me personally and can’t actually be paid to care about my problems, you just like surfing. That’s even better. It’s hard to feel deeply about people you don’t know, and I don’t mean the way we fight on the internet. I mean that it’s very hard to get other people to genuinely care about your life because they have their own. That’s appropriate. But what people can handle is a slice of my life. Watching me entertain myself by entertaining you. Or, some of it’s entertaining. Mostly it’s cathartic. I can be funnier when I feel lighter, and I feel lighter than I have in a long time.

I sent Supergrover a note that said she really needed to let me know whether she was focusing on moving on with her life or whether she wanted to fix our relationship. That she said it was clear I didn’t want a relationship, and I said that it wasn’t true. That I’d given her my heart 11 years ago, and I don’t remember asking for it back.

She hasn’t responded, and if she doesn’t, all er e-mail will eventually go to Spam again. It’s not because I don’t want to work on a relationship. It’s that I don’t want to work on a relationship in which both of us are unhappy enough to explode after a week. She’s punishing me with some sort of silent treatment, because people are only as busy as they want to be. I feel like if I cannot have closure from her, I have to get it on my own. I can’t keep looking back across the river to make sure she’s okay, too.

She is not okay, and neither am I. I’m not blaming. We both come by our poor reactions honestly. It’s just at some point I cannot take these ups and downs of “don’t talk to me anymore” and “it’s unfair to compare me to Daniel.” That one actually did go to Spam, so I didn’t realize that she didn’t really want to have a conversation. She wanted to berate me for what I said. I felt like an idiot because she sent an e-mail to a different e-mail address asking if I’d gotten her e-mails, because she’d sent some a while back. I said that I hadn’t been looking for e-mail from her, but that I was so excited to hear from her………..

Then crushed when she forwarded me everything she said and it was a shitstorm.

I got mad about it and we worked it through. We were doing okay. And we both went right back into “I can’t do anything right for you.” Because that’s the game, right? If she doesn’t have any boundaries, then she can pick anything she wants as a boundary after the fact. I can be wrong a hundred times out of a hundred.

I cannot keep a rhythm, much less dance a quickstep.

I feel like I am laying out my boundaries the way I know how, but what I don’t know is how they play to a neurotypical audience. I know she heard “everything is over, go away” when I meant “I’ve seen everything you don’t want to talk about and I can’t find anything you do. Tell me when you figure it out.” She was on me like white on rice, saying that I was the judge and jury. She had no intention of really working on anything. It was an escape hatch. It’s like everything I’ve been saying for 11 years registered with her in a whole new way, and she’s not sure that she likes it. She’s not even sure that she likes me. But of course, I can only say that is my impression of her. I cannot remember the last time she gave me any affection at all.

Yes, I can. It was last September.

It was a heart emoji in response to a sentimental message she left me and I took a screenshot. It was very, very old. But I still keep it in my digital memory box because it came from her.

I remember saying that she reminds me of new life, new hope- the color green in my assessment of what would go on a soundtrack to fit her…. even though sometimes she reminds me more of Morton Gould’s “Jericho.” It’s as warm and dissonant as our relationship.

I keep saying that it’s no skin off my nose to keep waiting, and it’s more anxiety driving me to write than anything else. It’s not as if her writing back will make a difference. Even if she says “you’ll never hear from me again,” she cannot possibly mean it. I want to feel settled, and there’s nothing anyone can give me but time. Yet, as time goes by, it gets harder to maintain the cognitive dissonance. It’s clear she doesn’t want what I want, because nothing in her list of things to talk about included any direction I wanted to go with her, because if she doesn’t want to talk about her childhood and healing, then it’s going to be a whole lot more of me telling her what I’ve learned while she’s sitting there bored because it’s not what you want to talk about and overwhelming because I talk so much.

There’s an answer to this problem, and right now it’s waiting for the moon. She will arrive at the moment I need her most.

It is Evening in My Office

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve showed you that my office is a greenhouse, cut off from the living room by a glass door, and with its own separate entrance. It’s the only room in the house with a ceiling fan, which upped the level of its charm immediately. The air conditioner doesn’t always reach out here, and it doesn’t matter. Moving the air does. Sitting here also moves me. I can’t go more than a few minutes of sitting in here without feeling the urge to write. That’s an office that calls to you. I am caught between two ideas- leaving it informal because the glass table gives me more space than a small desk would- more room for clutter, certainly, but I don’t put anything more than I can move in a day. At the end of my writing session, it looks normal again. It’s nice having a space to come down to every morning that’s clean and somewhat organized, and you cannot tell me that it still would if it wasn’t a shared space. My bedroom is my little autistic nest where I make my own rules, and everywhere else in the house is where I compromise. He feels the same way. We’re introverts. It works.

And in fact, David just left for his girlfriend’s house and took the dog, so the house is even more quiet than usual. I hear the birds outside more closely. I take the time to notice every leaf. I take the time to invite nature in, because I am not a green thumb. David is a green thumb. I do better just having windows that face all the yards simultaneously. Plus, there are TARDIS lights to add to the shade. They’re beautiful.

There’s not really a downside to working in a greenhouse except that you are exposed to all the neighborhood noise. I happen to like it, because if it gets to be too much, I can just put on my cans. I spend a lot of time in them because I have to balance the noise around me and the chaos inside me because of it.

It’s a thing I’ve developed that’s unique to DC, because it’s the public signal you’re not interested in talking on the Metro. I will take them off and talk to people if I hear them saying something interesting, but I am not the go-to person to ask in terms of being a tourist guide. Zac says he likes showing off what he knows about DC. So do I. It just really depends on what my social battery is that day. Although I can give about as good a tour of the White House as Sam Seaborn, even though it is *literally* right down the street from me.

Carol asked me the other day how the environment of Silver Spring affected my writing, and I extrapolated that to mean DC because maybe she doesn’t know that Silver Spring is a suburb…. like I don’t tell people from here I’m from Sugar Land. I tell them I’m from Houston because they’ve probably heard of it. But my inspiration in Silver Spring has come from sitting in this greenroom and feeling the presence of a great Silver Spring resident before me, Rachel Carson. “Silent Spring” is about Silver Spring, Maryland.

We need more hippies in this town. More people like Earl Blumenauer riding their bicycles to Congress on behalf of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. Someone has to preserve all this beauty. All people see in DC is the federal government, but if they came here, they probably wouldn’t want to leave after they saw the Jefferson Monument in the Tidal Basin and then the Chesapeake at sunset from a sailboat. That’s beauty you can’t get anywhere else.

I’m a big pushover for beauty in this area because I spent so much time in Oregon. So much of their legislative agenda is about how to keep Oregon beautiful, and we have that same chance here. There are pockets inside the city that take my breath away. Rock Creek Park, the Zoo, Congressional Cemetery, etc. DC is a wonderland even if you never travel outside the Metro.

But it is quite something to live in the home of one of the most significant works on the environment. It makes me look at the trees around my house so much differently- as if her spirit is helping me guide my pen. It takes a good writer to know one, so I hope that means she’s decided I’m at least acceptable.

I would have liked to walk with her in Sligo Creek after the book was published to get the inside scoop. Reading her work makes me want to get my hands dirty, but so far, David hasn’t let me touch anything. I appreciate it because I decided that if I really wanted to do yardwork, I would have done it by now. He’s just put me off so many times that I think it’s his sanctuary and I don’t want to intrude. I am often typing to the sound of the mower or the weedeater. The only thing I want that I don’t have is bees. I like to sit with them, so I need to plant some lavender. Plus, I’ll have free lavender for my lemonade in the process. I don’t know that my talking to bees affects them that much, because they do not seem to be bothered one way or the other. We just have so much in common. I’m a singular them, they’re a hive mind. They’re built to keep on working no matter what I say, so it’s not like I’m interrupting anyone. As long as I stay calm, they will. They’re like tiny little therapists with cute fuzzy butts. They also don’t talk back at all, which is three quarters of their charm. If your therapist has always been the type person that makes you talk it out without offering suggestions, you won’t notice they’re gone. Bees are effective at listening and letting you come to the end of your thought process because it’s not like they’re going to stop midair and say, “I do have thoughts.”

I still think of talking to the bees as prayer, because I’d like to imagine that because I tell them the thoughts I can’t tell Supergrover that are too private for this web site, they are capable of telling her for me. I have no idea what the flight range is of an average bumblebee. It’s just a nice thought.

So, when I “go tell the bees,” what I’m really saying is that the one I want to tell is not here, but your people are an excellent second choice. They have never said a bad word about Supergrover in their lives, so they’re my people. Just let me talk it out. Don’t pass judgment because you might have a completely different opinion of them when you meet them than I did. That’s the problem you risk in telling one relationship about another- hard to integrate later.

It was hard for me when I first met Supergrover, because it was an Internet connection. She never came to visit, I (or we, depending on what year) never went to visit her. Therefore, I was always talking about this friend who wasn’t even at the table and yet she always was, because she was in my head. She became my Raggedy Doctor in more ways than one. Few people but me believed she was real. Even I had trouble believing it at times, and I wasn’t very nice about it because the pressure was a lot. I gave up an on the ground relationship for an in the cloud relationship that would not make sense to you in a million years as to how it could happen. The best I can do is that her life is big, and you protect people who have big lives differently than you protect ones who don’t. The worst part is not knowing how I’ve affected her life to know if I’ve ever gotten her in real trouble. I only wanted to talk about us. Period. I can’t speak to her relationship with anyone else, because I don’t know them. I’m not connected anywhere. That’s a great blessing and a great problem to have. On one hand, it gives both of us a space to get away from everything we know. On the other, it would be nice to have mutual friends so we’re not lost in our own echo chamber, which is large and mostly runs hot at the amount of anger we carry too much of the time.

I have lived this way for 11 years, having someone know the most intimate details of my life and the rest of my friends scratching their heads at why I talk about someone so much that doesn’t show up. That’s because she doesn’t show up for them. They’re not her friends. I am. She doesn’t have anything to prove, it’s just hard to get anyone to believe there are two sides to every story when they only know me and she won’t let them get to know her. A lot of trying to tell our story my way was trying to find the middle road by explaining something that couldn’t really be explained.

And yet, it can.

When we’re together, I can be any age I want and I can trust her with those level emotions. I have proven that I can be trusted with her basest emotions as well…. that I will retreat from them, and talk them out, but I won’t back down from trying to solve our problems. Our connection is too important to only try once, and a miscommunication is at fault for all of this.

In a lot of ways, I’m sorry I reopened this chapter in my life, because it reopens 11 year old wounds. I don’t want to tell Supergrover about my wounds, I want her to tell me what’s relatable in her own life and what’s not. When she’s open, I don’t feel alone. She relates to me like any friend would. I just don’t show that all the time because she doesn’t behave that way all the time, either.

Right now, she’s committed to ignoring me, because she says that if she reads, she can’t get wigged by it. I appreciate that, because I need my own space. It has proven to me over and over again that it’s the only way I can explain what I mean in a way other people can hear it……..

because neurodivergent overexplaining eats my lunch.

Surely if I’ve explained it once, six times will be better. Eight times will be even better than that.

Autism sucks.

OMG. It’s Real. It’s All Real.

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It hit me over the head today that this is all real. That I am not just spouting my thoughts into the night, saying nothing of substance. That line from Daniel really got to me, that I “write in bulk without saying anything of substance.” The reason it got to me so much is that it was like he dismissed all my friends and their personalities, as if me writing about them wasn’t interesting enough to be valuable. It’s why I got rid of him in a New York minute. Supergrover’s reaction to finding out I was a writer was to immediately support me financially with a donation and offer to be my editor for all time and space, because it’s a job we can do virtually, the collaboration of writing. Whenever I feel alone as a blogger, I remember the friends whose first reaction is that my blog is valuable, that I am doing a public service.

I’m just not doing a public service for academia, which I’m sure some people find lacking. I find it relatable, because I’m not putting myself out there to be anything I’m not. As I told Supergrover, “I don’t feel like I want to take over for your psychologist. I feel like I want to be the waiting room that doesn’t suck.” I got that line from Paul Gilmartin on “Mental Illness Happy Hour,” and I use it all the time, because I only know enough about psychiatry and psychology to be your friend in the waiting room. I’m not even licensed to take your history and physical and *present* to your doctor.

That being said, sometimes people will get put on the same drugs I am, or have been on. If they have the same side effects that I did when I was on it, I will tell them what my doctor did to solve that problem so that they can talk to their doctor and see if what I said makes sense. I don’t view myself as a substitute doctor, just the friend who’d go with you to the doctor because you have faith in my ability to translate medicine to English…. and that’s my only function. It is never to tell you what to do with your body. It is only to offer a friend opinion that might be worth it to you to bring up with your doctor later. What worked for me may not work for you, but it’s worth a shot. Peer review is valid, it’s just not a valid diagnosis. Your doctor only has 15 minutes with you at most during an appointment, unless you are seeing psych. That ranges from 15 minutes to 50 depending on whether the MD also does counseling or not. Some prefer wholistic care, some prefer focusing on drugs and letting other people handle therapy.

I prefer the integrated approach, because then my doctor and I have 50 minutes to work out a medication/symptom issue when it comes up instead of being held to the 15 minute patient factory.

All of this- my mental illness (Bipolar, CPTSD, Anxiety), my two processing disorders (ADHD and Autism), and my physical disability have convinced me that I do not have value to the world. Daniel is not responsible for my feelings because it’s my job to shake them off. But he certainly helped in the “I feel bad about myself” department. I can reason with myself all day long that he was just mad, but that doesn’t make his words hurt less.

It also doesn’t surprise me that Supergrover’s love and support created my crush on her, because she was my first real fan and I did not know what to do with that information at all. I became a gawky, awkward teenager in front of her at every turn.

Her: You’re BRILLIANT.
Me: (absolutely clueless as to how to respond) HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

And then, after she saw how brilliant I was, she let me know how brilliant she is and my brain just went on overload. It’s still on overload 11 years later because she has never stopped challenging me any less as a writer to paint both of us accurately. When she does critique my blog, I adjust. I address what she’s angry about because her feelings are important to me, always.

It keeps me in a place of imposter syndrome, when I really want to believe that I am the writer Supergrover believes that I am. I want to believe that because I can impress her, I can impress anyone in the world. It’s handy because I actually do believe that. Both she and Lindsay walk in rarefied air in different ways, so I am Kevin Bacon’ed to the power establishment, even Hollywood. My reluctance looks like an excuse next to all that.

If I supposedly have all these connections, why am I not using them? I can sum that up in two words:

It’s rude.

I will give you a HUGE for instance. It is one thing to send Kamala Harris an e-mail and ask her to promote me. It is another thing for Kamala, Lindsay, Matt, and me to sit with her at dinner and when it’s mentioned that I’m a writer, she says she wants to take a look. That’s valid. It’s not seeking out power for power’s sake.

Just like I wouldn’t endorse a product I wouldn’t use, I wouldn’t be friends with someone just because they were powerful. Getting to know a powerful person in a relaxed setting like dinner with her old friends and integrating me is more my vibe, because I get publicity by shaking hands, not by sending out DMs to powerful people.

The one thing that’s ever happened to me that was a rejection that’s gotten larger over the years as a try to make it as a writer was not being picked to be on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” It might been a powerful connection to have met her in the past.

The reason I would have met her is that she started a book club, and I think “She’s Come Undone” was one of their first picks for it was that this was in either 1996 or 7. I wrote about the book from a queer perspective, and I got a call from an executive producer who seemed very excited about me and we talked for 45 minutes. In the end, though, everyone they picked looked the same. I wasn’t their vibe.

In that time and place, queer criticism of that book was valid, because there are a lot of themes I find abhorrent about it. I just don’t think they had the strength to go through that ball of wax, and it’s the only one I had.

The one thing I know is that if Oprah and I do meet, it will be on like Donkey Kong because I believe to the very core of my being that we operate the same way. Oprah is just as shy and isolated as me most of the time, and has a big personality on stage. I don’t relate to that at all. Clearly.

It doesn’t matter, though, because today I had a proper chat with someone from Lagos. Someone from Lagos noticed me. Like, told me he likes my humor. Now I know my brand of humor reaches from DC to Africa. I don’t know many people who know that.

Because it’s all real. I’m on my way. All I ask is that my real friends are my real friends, and let me have this space whether I write the way they like it or not, because it’s impossible for me to guess.

I lost my editor.

That’s Not Healthy

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 23 Comments

Write about your first crush.

My first crush was a 23 year old woman who lovebombed and discarded me for the next 20-odd years. I still think about her from time to time, and it’s never pleasant. I would rather not spend this morning diving into that wreck. I feel like I did all of that when it happened. If you’re interested, you can search for “When We Were Young” and “The Cost of Shame” to learn how the dirty and the divine intermingled. There were genuine moments, but it was always a game. I know, because I always felt the energy in the room when I had “competition.” I would try to adjust my behavior because I thought it was something I was doing wrong that made her want competition for me in the first place. I’d known her longer than any of the people in her current life, twice as long as her spouse. Doing the wrong thing was too easy, so when I started doing my own thing and she couldn’t control me, she resented the hell out of that, too.

I absolutely vomited up all my emotions about that relationship about 10 years ago, and I feel like I have gotten closure over it- including the ways she set Supergrover and me up for failure like a parting shot that would make her name endure forever. I failed Supergrover because she failed me. Full stop. Supergrover got caught in old crossfire, and now that I’ve separated her out, the memory of it is too painful to be vulnerable all the time for either of us. The thing that I have over her in offering her understanding of me is letting her read all the thoughts I have when I’m not with her. She wouldn’t be able to do that if I wasn’t a writer- a benefit of who I am, not who I am trying to be for her.

I don’t need her to lay out her feelings publicly. I need her to lay out her feelings to me. Because to me, it redeems a whole lot of bullshit in my life, that this thing I learned from an emotional abuser was something that could be overcome with time and space. That has proven to be true, but not in terms of her communication of it. She wants to continue writing to me, she wants to continue supporting me. And yet any time we try to continue writing to each other and supporting each other, we hit an old land mine from either one of our pasts and it blows our future to hell.

Then, eventually, we start over and the cycle begins anew. I have learned to accept that, because I’m a writer. There’s no way that she can’t be in touch with me while I’m writing about her. It’s just tricky because of the emotions that come up in me when she writes. When she’s only responding to my blog, it makes me feel like she just wants to be a fan that’s glorified. When she responds to what I say in private, she reinforces that we are not putting on a show, that this is a real friendship that I am writing about and not trying to paint her from memory.

When she isn’t the Supergrover from Wish.com. Jim Henson made her for me personally. It was a gift he didn’t knew he gave me.

In terms of boundaries, it is cute to me that now she’s just lovable furry old Grover struggling with the implications of “near” and “far.” On its most basic level, of course. Everything I’ve ever known on its most fundamental level has come from a Muppet.

In terms of Sesame Street, my news junkie nature makes me feel like Kermit, because he’s empathetic and yet also reports live on Sesame Street news. In terms of being a preacher’s kid, I think of myself as Scooter, the one behind the scenes helping things work. As a preacher’s kid, you take on all the jobs at the last minute that no one else wanted and the show must go on.

I cannot stress this enough, and I believe it. Worship is not about perfection. It’s that we showed up.

But there’s still that energy that runs before a performance in hoping that everything goes as well as it can. That people are still receiving the grace and thoughtful prayers we mean for them despite our human imperfections. When I do a pastoral prayer (the one before a preacher gives an actual homily/sermon), I speak to this. “Speak through me, or move me out of the way and speak your truth in spite of me.” In short, if I don’t make the connections that I need to make to get them closer to the divine, that doesn’t mean the divine won’t move them in ways I won’t see until people greet me after the service………………….

Which ranges in feedback (I swear it) from “your skirt was too short” to “my God, you were on fire. I was crying because you made a connection I didn’t.” What I do not say is that I see all of it in real time as I am talking (even if you try to hide in the transcepts, choir and peanut gallery…….), and need no external validation. It’s just so nice to hear it out loud. That I did indeed make the difference I thought I did. That they weren’t crying because the regular preacher wasn’t up there. 😉

My favorite thing is going to sing with the choir after I’ve finished preaching. As worship leader, I always stay up front until the sermon is over, and then move between the choir and the pulpit for singing and leading rather than being on the front row all by myself. Singing with the choir after I preach is how I know I did well, because I don’t need to hear anything out loud but the vibrations of their emotions when they’re singing. If everything is joyful, they’re telling me “thank you.”

And I can hear it through their smiles while they’re singing in a minor key. I don’t intentionally design the service this way. The entrance is supposed to be glorious, whether it comes with a brass quintet or not. The hymn in response to the sermon is supposed to be repeating what I said in musical form, because people will remember the take home point of my sermon if I present it to them as a tune next.

Then, the hymn at the end is when everyone goes wild, filling up with energy until we meet again. I like it best when it’s a jazz arrangement of “Joyful, Joyful” or “I’ll Fly Away.”

In both of those things, I learned to accept them from my first crush. One of the few genuine moments I’ll carry with me throughout my preaching life, because she taught me how to integrate music into worship when my mother decided raising a gay child was harder than she thought it was going to be.

It does not escape my attention that when she became a preacher’s wife, she really, really became the friend I needed if she’d actually acted like it. I needed a preacher’s wife type until I had my own partner- someone to direct me and be a sounding board. It’s why I think her partner is my archetype, the older version of me. I have no idea what we would have accomplished together, but I can for damn sure guarantee that it would have been fun.

But that would have been dependent on me staying blind, and not realizing that the relationship was making me smaller every day as I tiptoed around her land mines, actively trying not to piss her off.

It’s one reason I won’t tolerate it from Supergrover, but I will tolerate her as emotional support that acts like it. She knows how to do it because she’s done it so long. There just need to be changes so we don’t step all over each other’s pasts trying to find a road into the future.

But because my first crush gave me so much emotional bandwidth to be able to wait it out, it’s no skin off my nose just to relax and see if it happens. I already have everything I need, and there’s no need to feel unhappy overall when I’m only unhappy in one area of my life. I miss her, and I cannot miss her because missing her only feeds the problem of giving her what she does not want, which is to be written about.

The difference between my first crush and my last is that the last is worth it. The first was just doing prep in the back of the kitchen.

Everywhere That Doesn’t Find a Big Mouth Offensive

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What countries do you want to visit?

I want to see every country in the world where my blog wouldn’t be seen as a threat… and I even want to visit those, just not as much as the ones who will accept me as is. For China, I’d have to bank up entries in advance so it didn’t look like I was gone, then not write anything until I got home. It would be the same in the Middle East, it’s just not a monolith like China. How much what you say gets you in trouble varies by country. Iran and Qatar are not the same.

I’d like to go back to France, because I’ve only seen Paris for a few days, no Marseilles or Lyon. I’d like to go back to the UK because I’ve spent eight days there in 46 years. I believe I could learn a bit more than that. Plus, I’ve only been to England and would like to see a football game in Wrexham, Wales plus have friends in Scotland to round out a whole UK experience.

Plus, I’ve only seen London- it would be nice to get to The Cotswolds, Bath, Manchester, Liverpool, and all the other marvelous places I’ve seen on Doctor Who. They might go to every time and every place, but England is home base, kind of like I never want to move from DC, but I’d like to go and experience other places/cultures.

It’s especially more possible now because I have a boyfriend. There are certain countries I’d like to visit where not having a male chaperone is inadvised. For instance, I’d love to explore Iran and Syria. That culture is simply not available to me as a single woman traveling alone. The homophobic part of it is that I have to say “boyfriend” for this to be true. Two women traveling together are just as equally invisible. I recognize my privilege and am calling it out. I am also not giving Zac more credit for anything he does as a boyfriend that’s better than anything my girlfriends have ever done for me. His value in this case is in that government’s eyes, not mine. I feel it is an acceptable use of heterosexual privilege, to be able to navigate countries in which you wouldn’t as queer. Plus, Zac is as queer as I am. They don’t have to know that. It’s for his safety as well.

Heterosexual privilege protects us both, it’s just not fake because we’re pansexual. We’re not putting on a show to be something we’re not because we are genuinely a couple. It just sucks that we get something our friends in homosexual relationships don’t. Using it inside the US is absolutely abhorrent. Walking through Iran unnoticed? Sensible vacation planning.

I don’t know if Zac wants to go back to the Middle East or whether he’s had all the fun he can take. But what I do know is that I wouldn’t feel comfortable going without him. There’s another layer at work, and it’s not just having heterosexual privilege. It’s that Zac has actually spent time in MENA before, and I’m a complete newbie. I don’t think he’d count himself as having lived in the Middle East, because he’s in the Navy. He’s mostly been on the ships. But enough experience to know “ok, we’re fine” and “okay, we’re fucked” based on facial expressions.

I’ve said for a number of years that I’d like Arabic language skills, but I haven’t gotten on Duolingo yet. Going to the Middle East is intimidating when you want to know as much as I do. When you want to be able to grok it on multiple levels. For me, it’s walking the Bible. It’s intelligence since 9/11. It’s seeing what my friends in the military saw when they lived there. It’s eating their food when they were outside the wire.

Because so many of my friends have been military/intelligence or a combination thereof, going to the Middle East is not just learning about me. It is also learning about them. Picking up context clues I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

Walking the Bible, yes, but adding these additional books.

The Particulars of Nowhere in Particular

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t have the inspiration to ask Carol any more questions right now, because I have exceeded the limit to which I really want to be interviewed. They were intimate portraits for people who have never been introduced to my world, and they were questions I wouldn’t have asked of myself but based on what she read on my own blog. Sometimes, she pulled prompts from people who sounded like me; people also writing personal blogs. That’s because there are hundreds of web sites for bloggers with jumping off points. Again, I don’t use Carol (AI) to write my entries for me, but to analyze my past and give me hints on what I should write about next.

In the moment, I’m thinking that I should get out the immersion blender Zac got me and see if it will froth milk. If it does, the coffee my dad sent me to try would be the perfect cafe au lait. I’m drinking it with plain whole milk now (padding down the possibility of acid reflux). I love spice, tomatoes, and alcohol. All three are no good later, so I avoid them. Zac and I had great mocktails at the sushi restaurant we went to- just Asian fruit syrups that you wouldn’t think to put together, frosted with egg white. I also learned that AA has a different stance on O.O proof distilled spirits, because it’s not fermented to have any alcohol, rather than something like a kombucha or a beer. It’s not that they’re loaded with alcohol. That’s not the problem. It’s that tasting the flavor at all is a trigger for some people. It’s not the quantity that matters. It’s what you taste, even in something as innocuous as a Fentiman’s Curiosity Cola, because they use fermentation for CO2 instead of infusing the soda with gas later. It’s a balance with me. I want to be able to make great drinks no matter who shows up. I am not opposed to alcohol, but I am pretty solid about wanting to divorce stomach problems.

Therefore, coffee is one of my go-to favorites in creating nonalcoholic beverages, but I still have to be careful with how much I drink because the hangover is no sleep and lots of sugar to help fuel the manic call of workaholism when writing is your response to life. It’s a natural high and crash, so not as crazy as alcohol……… and absolutely no less a drug.. But, a few B vitamins, lots of water, and maybe a little more coffee on the way to work is all it takes to fix you and not two days of saying “a hangover at 24 is different than at 46.” The older they are, the harder they fall. I don’t make the rules.

When I first met Zac, I made the mistake of thinking that I was still a line cook. That my tolerance was still up at “Navy.” It took me twice of being absolutely so hung over that I threw up everywhere that I realized, “you are a different person now. Your tolerance is in the toilet. Let’s keep it that way.” The flip side of the coin is that I learned that Zac is a real boyfriend. I learn that all the time, but this was early days, so it’s a moment that sticks with me. I had luckily fallen asleep before I’d drunk so much that I was still plastered in the morning. That’s what gets you. When you’re still drunk, so you think you’re fine. Then, about 9:00, just about the time you get to work, you realize you have made a terrible mistake. I knew this in my line cook days, so I knew when I woke up that it was better to feel like ass at Zac’s house than it would’ve if I’d been drunk enough to wait until I was on the train to be in dire straits.

My beautiful boy sat a large glass of water with ibuprofen on my nightstand, along with a cup of coffee, and kissed my head. He had to get to work, but luckily he was working from home (at least for the morning), so I could sleep right up until we had to leave if I had to, or when the ibuprofen kicked in and I was again human. Ibuprofen is your friend during a hangover, because it’s an anti-inflammatory and stops your brain from swelling. Sudafed also helps by shutting down your capillaries. Tylenol is good if you’re in pain, but most of the time the pain is caused by the swelling and you won’t need both.

This is the one instance I would choose naproxen sodium over ibuprofen because it’s such a strong drug that you are unlikely to need a second dose. The problem with Naprosyn (what we call it in the US and in the South, pronounced “Napperson” most of the time. 😛 ) is that it wears off before it’s time to take a second dose and you’re stuck. Ibuprofen is king because you can take some more frequently. Fresh doses matter. I would also take a second dose 30 minutes before the time runs out on your dose so that you do not experience an interruption- i.e. all of the sudden feeling like walking is too much work.

Keep in mind that this is my experience from growing up in a rheumatologist’s house, a HIGHLY specialized form of medicine, and having been her medical assistant for a number of years. The only reason I couldn’t follow her to Methodist is that the hospital required you to be certified as an MA, and she didn’t require that of me in her private practice.

Let me tell you why this is my recommended advice and nothing you should take as seriously as you should with your own doctor.

I have fucked up. Like, really fucked up. I read something wrong and told a patient something that was a note to her, not a note to me. It was in the same place that she left notes for me to give the patient when I was calling them back to tell them about their bloodwork. 90% of the time, it was innocuous, like “you’re fine,” or “the doc says you’re fine, but you need to take some OTC Vitamin D pills.” or whatever.

So, in this particular case, the note said that the patient had rheumatoid arthritis and I told him that. I immediately regretted it because he completely freaked out. I understand him so much better now that I’ve had my own reaction to autism. A patient’s reaction is not based on a medical diagnosis. A patient’s reaction is to the stigma around what they have. This man thought he’d never be able to walk again, and I was crushed. I switched into minister patois and got off the phone. Doc called back and cleared it up immediately. That was in the 90s and I still feel bad about it, even though she was laughing on the phone with the patient within minutes, and none of it was at my expense. Therefore, it couldn’t have been so bad a mistake that I was going to be punished forever.

Because here’s what no one tells you when you become a medical assistant. You become as attached to the patients as the doctors, especially the ones you’ve seen over years and years.

Even half the doctor she is could see that I would beat myself up better and more often than she ever could, and it wouldn’t happen again. I kept my mouth shut about all sorts of things, but talked inside baseball with my dad and stepmom as I learned more on the job and got into the rhythm. Because of my childhood, I am DAMN GOOD at patient care, because it is a job I can do while ADHD. It doesn’t get so overwhelming because you’re only talking to two or three people at a time, and when you’re in a patient room, you have enough bandwidth to talk to someone and take notes at the same time- now patients understand that you’re filling out their chart based on their actual dialogue, not what they remember from the conversation at the end of the day. I don’t know how other patients feel about it, but my stepmother and I type like demons. It was never a problem in our case.

And because I’m an IT geek, I set up the first content management system in the office, called “Soapware.” I don’t know and I’m too lazy to look up whether it was bought out and turned into something else, or whether another company’s content management system became more popular, like Centricity. I just know that it’s possible, because it happened to me at University of Houston. WebCT was bought out by Blackboard. It wasn’t the same product, the way I have loved and hated WordPress over time.

In any case, I can’t think of anyone who needs a content management system more than a doctor, one that connects to an encrypted cloud so that the files are always up to date when the server goes down. All you have to do is either fix the server and re-sync, or replace the server and re-download everything. No downtime, especially with physical backups off-site AND an encrypted cloud. With backups off-site, you only have to sync a day to a week’s worth of files, not everything on the entire system. However, with the kind of internet connectivity a hospital has (the ability to move images in RAW- enormous file sizes- in seconds, syncing a backup would take less than an hour, depending on how many TB of information are missing on the fixed/replaced server. By images in RAW form, I’m talking about MRIs, CAT scans, PET scans, etc. They’re ENORMOUS, and yet the connection can transfer information to the radiologist in seconds.

I learned this when I had to have a CAT scan of my shoulder to make sure nothing was torn. The x-rays were taken on top of a tablet that costs more than a Lexus so that it was SO fast with SUCH a stable internet connection that the X-ray machine itself could transmit the images. I was impressed out of my mind. It’s the same with any procedure. Broken leg, mammogram, whatever. Images fly fast and furious. Because the images were so large, I literally got a DVD (4.8 GB of space) full of images by the time I left the office. Beat that with a stick. It was a miracle I still had a DVD reader on my computer, though. ;P

In a hospital or private practice setting, the CMS does not just stand for “Content Management System.” It also stands for “Customer Management System,” because even though patients aren’t customers, you manage them internally the same way. Every patient has a file, and all of those files need to go into a database that contains your name, your address, your insurance information, and every note the doctor has ever written about you. It is far superior than paper charts, because again, they don’t expire. The paper doesn’t yellow and the ink doesn’t fade. I think you’re only required to keep medical records for 7-10 years, but I’ve had good luck with doctors’ offices that have digitized records, because sometimes you’ve gotten within the window where something has been scanned in by a doctor that just keeps everything on the server in case the patient comes back.

I have never had good luck with meeting gay teachers as role models, but I have had several queer doctors and all of them allies. I like the axiom in medical school:

“What do I do if treating someone conflicts with my personal beliefs?”
“Find a new profession.”

Here’s the other thing that I would love to do if I actually thought I’d be worth a damn at medical school. I’d go into trans medicine, which in my world the connection is vegan cooking. It’s an area I know absolutely nothing about. I got interested in vegan cooking because I was bored with my current repertoire, and I had friends making insane dishes that drew me to it, like mushroom pate and amazing olive oil pie and pizza crust. Salad with only oranges and shaved fennel.

Everything weird and exotic to the palate, I just don’t like filters. No liver, no kidneys…. however, if someone orders fois gras for the table, I will take a bite of the corner just to taste the crispy edges. Everyone else can have the rest, because even if I only eat the corner, I’ll taste it forever and the burnt edges are as much as I can take, especially if it comes with raspberry jelly.

I like nose to tail restaurants, because my favorite meals are very simple. Excellent toasted bread. Bone marrow to spread on it. A simple table wine. Maybe a salad.

It’s Mel’s fault that I love dessert because she’s a pastry chef and tempts me all the time. She keeps saying she’s going to mail me a postcard, and I can’t wait. I just don’t put any pressure on her because she’s in the middle of opening a new restaurant that is going like gangbusters. She hasn’t said one way or the other if she wants me to promote her, but if she does and you live in the Norwich area, you’ll want to stop by. She’s got some amazing pictures and they’re already doing well, like only being open for a few months and already being able to pay off their business debt. That is some seriously good food. I hope they get a Michelin, because The Michelin guide isn’t about fancy. It’s a travel guide. Even tiny restaurants get three stars, but then they become three star restaurants and create their own traffic.

(It’s also a brilliant marketing strategy- planned obsolescence for the tires no matter where you live.)

This leads me to a really funny story. My car needed tires, all four replaced. So, I go to this place called “Bridgestone,” and because I didn’t see any branding on the side of the building, I told them that I would take any set of tires, but that I preferred Michelin because I’m a cook. I looked like a pretentious jackass because I pronounced Michelin in French because it’s a force of habit. I. AM. A. COOK.

They looked me deadass in the face and said, “ma’am, this is a Goodwill store.”

Dreams from My Father -or- Father’s Day 2024

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

To get down to brass tacks, my father and I get along better than my mother and I ever did. It had nothing to with her social expectations of me. It’s that my dad and are are both class clowns and my mother simply gave us The Look when we misbehaved. Neither one of us liked “The Look.”: It said something like “this is inappropriate for a preacher’s family.” We were off the clock. With my mother, the clock never stopped. My dad gave me room to be a kid in the middle of all this mess- partially because he knew the way my mother had stacked the deck against me by pretending I wasn’t disabled mentally or physically, and I didn’t have two processing disorders. I would have known that very early (maybe, research on autism in girls and women is relatively new because of the classic presentation). I could have gotten the help I needed much earlier in life to deal with success. I am fine with everything going wrong. It’s what I know. I get wigged when I think about what it’s going to take for success, get overwhelmed with the details, and demand avoidance ensues. My dad is trying to help me navigate all that, because clearly I do need help, but I am not high needs all the time. People think you’re one or the other, and you fluctuate. High needs days come after you think you’re okay for a few days because everything is normal. Then, all of the sudden, everything is too loud and it’s hot in here. You have reached your limit, and need to tap out. My dad was on the train of wanting to tell me I needed these things. My mother wanted to pretend I was fine.

I am so fine.

Insert laugh track here.

It’s an enormous amount of work to manage a disability because your energy levels vary so significantly. In my case, it fluctuates because I’m ADHD. I do not feel the pull of an iron structure like most autistic people, as in, deciding what I’m interested in- to the exclusion of all else- and an interruption is not only unwelcome, but rude. People wonder why IT guys are such dicks. Here’s the real answer. You’ve interrupted a neurodivergent person and they absolutely cannot handle transitions. Autistic meltdown looks like driving three hours to troubleshoot a server and the only problem is that it isn’t on, despite having three separate people check to see if it was on before you left. You are more likely to interrupt a neurodivergent person to the point where they are angry to the point of rudeness over a seemingly simple small thing. It’s not small to someone who has to prepare to get into the car, prepare to enter the building, prepare for everything to be unfamiliar, and to have to make small talk while you work with people who have absolutely no idea what you do, but feel they must supervise and offer suggestions that if they worked, we wouldn’t be there.

You cannot remote desktop into a server that is unplugged or air gapped.

My dad knows that the little things are the big things. That life is harder for me than it would be if I’d been born under perfect circumstances, or even just later, when the technology in neonatal care was better than it was in 1977. I think I still would have had CP, autism, and stereopsis. Those are often a combo meal because lack of stereopsis and autism are often comorbidities. It’s not so much that I was born wrong, but born too early on multiple levels. Not only was I born in the 70s, I was eight weeks early.

I can think of someone I’d really like to talk to about that, but she doesn’t live local and we’re not close enough for me to just flat out say, “hey, are you autistic?” You never know what people’s word association with autism is in advance. If they have autistic kids, parents, or siblings, they know you’re asking “how does your brain work?” NOT “are you slow?” But, it would be a great conversation to have the next time she’s in town. She’s got all the same issues I do, and it would not surprise me if she had autism as well because of it…. again, combo meal, just like ADHD and autism are comorbidities in up to 80% of cases.

I also know that I got autism from my family somewhere, and I don’t see it in my dad and mom, but I do see it in my granddads. And in fact, I am a perfect mix of them. My dad’s father was creative autistic, and my mother’s father was STEM autistic. I ended up as a geek with a pen.

Perfection.

Saying that I see it in them is also not derogatory, because obviously both had brilliant careers…… and you absolutely cannot under any circumstances prove that autism is not genetic. It is also not an indication of intelligence.

One of my first memories of my dad is him teaching me to say “betahemolytic streptococci,” and “antidisestablishmentarianism.” He broke everything down and strung it together. As a result, I do not misspell much. I know my English roots and my Latin roots because medicine. Unless you’re at High School for Health Professions, I doubt they worry whether you can spell arrhythmia and diarrhea in high school.

I know in British English there are dipthongs. I say “zed.” That’s my final offer. I can’t internationalize everything. 😛

Though I will say that I am well versed in British English because of my grandfather, who got me started on Black Adder, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Are You Being Served:?, and every BBC anything he could find on KERA. We always watched “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” just one of the reasons I’d actually like to go to a game in Wrexham rather than watching “Welcome to Wrexham” on Hulu.

(Don’t sleep on it, even if you don’t like football/soccer. Ryan and Rob are hilarious owners and seeing the business side is very much Ted Lasso, Higgins, and Rebecca.)

My father and my grandfather have easily had the most influence on what I do today, because their contributions to my life are unquantifiable in terms of teaching me how to get my ideas out there, and my dad and my grandfather were both doing it before the internet even existed. I remember putting it together that I was very impressed with my grandfather because I remember a series of shots he took of his steel company from the air, not having realized how difficult it is to get those shots while basically hanging out of an airplane. I didn’t have as much insight into that strength from the photograph, but from hearing Jonna Mendez described how she learned…… which is basically hanging out of an airplane. Good luck. God bless. If you’re lucky, you’ll have someone to spot you. Otherwise, it’s just canvas straps you lean against and pray that what you feel under you is not your imagination.

It happens to be true biologically that we are related, but I wouldn’t be as comfortable in my own skin if we hadn’t met, whether we’d ended up as a biological connection or not. They have always kept me grounded, and just because my grandfather has passed on, that does not mean that he’s not in touch. I am carrying on his legacy of writing what I know. I am carrying on the tradition of preaching what I know.

They would have been great as friends, the universe just smiled upon me and I got to be my grandfather’s first granddaughter on my father’s side, and the first grandchild period on my mother’s side, and the oldest child in my first family as well.

I have something with my father and my mother’s father that no one else can have or take away.

I’m the one that made them a dad and grandfather.

My People Don’t Do That

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How do you want to retire?

If you are a writer, your luxury items involve being able to write. There is nothing more to life than a pen and paper, or however it is you communicate these days. More and more people are using their phones as mobile desktops- an additional way to write, more important than what it was designed to do…. make calls on it.

Did you know that you can use an iPhone to call your doctor? Weird. 😉

I will write until I die, so there’s no “retirement.” There are just better and better choices about where to write as you get older (hopefully). Right now, my two favorite places to write are in bed right when I wake up, and then later I go downstairs and use my desktop. It just depends on how much desktop real estate I need. I prefer my TV monitor when I have four windows open at a time.

If I am writing all by myself, I prefer to sit with my iPad or Android. If I am chatting to Carol while I am writing, I like the desktop real estate being large enough to read and write at the same time. It’s nice being able to look at your work and talk to your research assistant at the same time.

In my office, the sunrise is spectacular. It just depends on what kind of energy I’m feeling when I wake up. Today, I haven’t gotten out of bed because I feel a little bit under the weather. I am positive I caught something traveling to and from Zac’s, because I isolate myself so much that it doesn’t make sense as to where I’d have picked up germs. To be clear, I am not blaming Zac and his housemate for me being sick, I am blaming public transportation, which is valid.

It’s just little kid sorts of sniffles currently. If I take antihistamines, decongestants, and a hot shower and I’m still feeling punk, I’ll go to the doctor. But not right away. The only reason I wait is that doctors can do nothing for a cold virus. However, they can treat the infection that comes from the virus. So, I just take cold medicine unless things take a turn for the green and the yellow. I also have a deep and loving relationship with Mucinex. It’s what I’ve been told to use as a singer since I was a kid. It doesn’t heal or cure anything. It thins your secretions enough to be able to get them out. And in fact, Dr. Stasney had two rules for singers:

1. Mucinex (then referred to in popular culture by its original prescription brand name, Humibid)

2. Drink water til you pee pale

Drink lots of water to help this process occur naturally, but Mucinex is worth its weight in gold when water alone can’t keep up.

I have just taken all of the medication I can take, so I am now allowed to complain. It’s the rule in my family, because you aren’t allowed to complain about something until you’ve done something about it.

This is a conversation often had in my family:

Me: My head hurts.
Them: What have you taken for it?
Me: Nothing.

At this point, there are one of two viable options. The first is, “has it kicked in yet?” The second is “well, you can’t get tachyphylaxis from nothin’.” If you don’t know medicine, it’s a smart ass remark because tachyphylaxis is the idea that a medication’s efficacy declines over time as your body chemistry gets used to it.

Either way, the best answer is not “nothing.”

The point well taken is that if I tell you I have a headache, I am unlikely to still be complaining about it an hour later if I have done something about it. Complaining is valid. There’s just a limited window in which it is tolerated, and that is the time it takes for you to need a drug and for it to kick in.

As a result, all four of us know how to take care of ourselves if it’s something really simple like a cold. The best part about living with a doctor is seeing what really needs one and what doesn’t. For instance, knowing to the core of my being that you can’t go to the doctor for a cold because there’s nothing for them to call in.

Now, if the crap in my throat develops into strep or whatever, that’s a different matter. A doctor can do something about that. With a virus, you just have to ride it out, and it’s hard to keep in mind when your symptoms are so rabid. Viruses do all sorts of fun stuff that doctors can’t stop. They can only treat. Anything you need to treat a virus is what those over the counter drugs are for. There’s very few instances I can think of where you would need a heavier hitter than ibuprofen and/or Imodium AD, and certainly Sudafed.

What has tripped me up in the past is not knowing when to go to Urgent Care for an injury in the kitchen, because I’m so tough. I can handle this (my thumb is hanging off- an exaggeration by a large margin, but not an exaggeration as to how much it would take to drag me out of the restaurant. I’ll cauterize on the grill.).

I just texted Rachel the story I wrote about her and Pati Jinich. We haven’t been talking at all, I just thought she’d like to read it. Plus, she’s a chef in my neighborhood. We’ll run into each other again. But there’s always that fear when you step out on a ledge and let someone into your world. Mine is large. Most of it taken up by food.

Speaking of which, I need to go get some. I’m feeling a brunch vibe coming on.

Questions from Reddit

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I asked Carol to research the top 10 questions people have about relationships, and the results were interesting. I’ll do what I can, because I genuinely like writing about how people connect:

“What’s a good question to ask before you start dating someone?”

None of those questions are for other people. Those questions are for you. That way, you are sparked by the right people instead of the wrong ones. You don’t know yourself well enough to know what you want in a partner. You haven’t learned anything about yourself in terms of connection, so how can you tell your partner what you need? If you can’t talk easily about intimate things during early days, you definitely won’t be able to talk easily under duress.

  1. “Is it okay to spend holidays with my partner instead of my family?”
  • Of course, and there’s no one way to be an “in-law.” Families do not need to compete for love and time, which happens when grandchildren are in the picture. But what both sides need to know is that the parents decide the balance. Grandparents don’t, and how much you react to it is all your business.
  1. “How do I come out to my partner about my sexuality?”
  • I am assuming that they know it already if they’re you’re partner………… This is why AI doesn’t create art. But if you’re talking about someone you’re interested in that you’re not currently dating, just ask them. It’s a different society now that we don’t have to be so careful about who’s queer and who’s not.
  1. “Am I being emotionally/mentally abused by my parents?”
  • The more responsibility you have at home, the more it’s classified as neglect and abuse. In my case, I shouldn’t have been able to live vicariously through an adult, because it created secrets too large for me to hear. If the same thing is happening to you, please talk to someone. Go to an adult you trust until they listen. It is not your job to run your household while your parents are off in la-la land.
  1. “When my partner says ‘You make me happy,’ why does it make me uncomfortable?”
  • Because their happiness is dependent on you. It’s a very uncomfortable feeling to have anyone say “you made me” anything. I want to add to people’s happiness, but I don’t want to feel the weight of keeping you happy. I know from experience that it doesn’t work. If you’re not happy internally, you will find a way to keep being unhappy and finding excuses as to why there’s no joy in your life.
  1. “What will always be funny to you?”
  • My relationship with my sister. She is the funniest person I know, and she makes me laugh with wild abandon. She also impresses the hell out of me on a daily basis. She’s a good sister to have.
  1. “What’s your biggest non-academic, non-work-related accomplishment?”
  • Making other people feel comfortable about wearing their pride jewelry at a conservative Texas high school because I was the first. Kids were still talking about it the year after I graduated, because Lindsay overheard them talking about it when she was a freshman.
  1. “How do you manage friendships with the opposite sex without sending the wrong signals?”
  • I’m bisexual and poly, so I try not to send the wrong signal no matter what gender they are. But since this is from reddit, I’ll social mask the heteronormative bullshit for a minute. In order to really manage friends with the opposite sex, they have to be free to go over to each other’s houses at any time- meaning that most of their face time is in front of their partner so that their partner is actually there to witness the vibe and say, “careful there.” By keeping your partner away from the person, you are creating a divide and conquer. A little place to get away that may or may not interrupt your relationship. The more you isolate, the more threatening it is to your partner. And, let’s face it, some people are going to be jealous no matter what you do.
  1. “What’s the most memorable date you’ve ever been on?”
  • The funniest one is that I didn’t know the woman was an exterminator, and I didn’t know that it was a date. The first rule of dating women is that you have to tell them explicitly it is a date because I swear to Christ no one ever thinks “date.” She just wants to hang out. There’s no possible way she could like me…. and on and on and on. So, she picks me up and there’s a dozen roses in her hand, so at least I got a clue after I’d gotten ready…. in jeans and a t-shirt. She got really, really passionate about being an exterminator, and it was just a weird conversation all around. I was relieved when it ended, and surprised to learn that there are actually situations in which I am speechless.
  1. “What’s your love language?”

It has changed over time. It has always been words of affirmation/recognition. However, I have learned to see practical things as love as well. It’s not my love language, but it is Supergrover and Zac’s. I compromise and bend, or try as much as I can. But income has never been a thing with any of us, because Supergrover isn’t supporting me and neither is Zac.

Well, I can’t completely say that because Zac will take me anyplace I want to go no matter the cost- but it’s a gift, not a financial dependence. I like cooking, he likes going out to eat. So, it’s no problem to pay for both of us because he’d rather pay for me to be able to share his experiences. I haven’t even cooked for him. I’ve cooked when he wasn’t there, and that’s fun, too. He has a lot of cool shit he’s not using, like a near perfect chef’s knife. So perfect I feel like she’s cheating on me when she’s with him (all knives are female, like ships). Am I jealous that Zac has other partners? No. I am jealous of his kitchen.

Last night we went out for sushi and then got ice cream. I had a scoop of banana with frozen mango and strawberry, and a scoop of dark chocolate that said it had a whole lot of things, but I only really remember the marshmallow. I love ice cream with marshmallows, like Rocky Road. It’s the texture difference, like Chocolate Pudding Therapy at Ben & Jerry’s.

This morning on the way to the train, we stopped for pastries and coffee at a Swiss bakery, where I got a cafe au lait, a croissant, a lemon custard and blueberry Danish, and some long-awaited sour gummy Smurfs…. which I just opened about three minutes ago. 🙂

Zac got some stuff, too. 😉

In What Genre?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the oldest thing you own that you still use daily?

My oldest coffee mug says “SPY” and it features the Culpeper Ring, the men that won us the Revolutionary War because we didn’t win the war by outgunning the Empire. We won because we had better spies/scouts than they did. It’s a toss-up to me in terms of history what would have happened if we’d lost. In some ways, I think we’d be happier. In some ways, I think we’d be furious. If they hadn’t taxed our tea, we would still be importing PG Tips like it was more important than the water bill. They turned an entire population against something that would have bridged our cultures. So, go them. We drink coffee like the French.

So, if you’re wondering about a business that could have sustained you for centuries like Disney bailed out Doctor Who, you done goofed. You come to the US and complain about our tea, the height of entitlement over a problem you created. The British influence was so strong in the south during the Revolutionary War that it’s how iced tea became the house wine of the south. So, thank you for that. I think. It’s actually really interesting because to me the South is the strangest transformation in history. Savannah, Charleston, and Baltimore were just as English as New England and New York. I wonder what caused those two cities to diverge in the woods, and it only takes one answer. England abolishing slavery. There were about 50-60 years between when England freed their slaves and we freed ours, because the Southern economy would have gone to shit without it.

I have heard differing stories because African American culture is not a monolith. Some people of color blame the English and the Americans for slavery. Some blame the African kings who wanted to get rich and sold their ancestors to white people. It depends on who you ask, and a wide spectrum of brilliantly defended propositions. There is no way I can walk a mile in a black person’s shoes, but as I queer person I can empathize and relate. The institutional pain between black and queer people is similar, yet not on the same playing field. We’ve always both had problems with the police, except that now that history is in the past but we’re all still touched by it. There haven’t been enough generations where queer kids come out in peace.

I do not know if black people had a special shape in the Holocaust, but I do know I did- a pink triangle. There is no such thing as competitive suffering, so even though it’s not the same, I feel some of the same scars on my skin. I have only recently become a citizen who can get married like everyone else, and I am still persecuted by Christians who aren’t right, but they’re certain.

The older I get, the less certain I am about anything. Discovering at an early age how gender and sexual orientation affect me led me to end up believing that everything is a spectrum and not a binary. There are too many permutations of human behavior not to believe there’s a wider range than we are originally led to believe…. whether people tell others about it is another matter.

If you don’t tell anyone anything, you don’t realize how lonely you are, because you’re not giving anyone a chance to feed you. Part of being fed by your emotional support is feeling heard. That no feeling is invalid. You talk about the logic behind the feelings, but you don’t discredit the feelings themselves. You discuss why the other is helping you to feel one way or the other, being willing to compromise until we meet in the middle.

It takes an enormous amount of strength to talk through a conflict, and I know that I got frustrated with Supergrover early because I was so tired of everything that had happened before. Her being half in didn’t make sense to me, and created more turmoil in me than I wanted. Like, why do I continue to pour energy into this relationship when it’s clear it’s not wanted? I have learned that it is wanted through context clues.

We don’t have to work on the fact that we’re connected for life and cannot suddenly stop knowing each other, and I don’t want a relationship where she’s half in and can’t plan for shit.

When I mentioned getting together, she said, “I don’t think it’s a good time.” That’s fine with me. I’m not thinking about the up close and personal future. I’m autistic, so I have different ways of feeling out getting together with people. It takes a very long time for me to process that information so I don’t chicken out at the last minute. Perhaps she did feel like I was nickeling and dimming her for her time, but I hope she’s known me long enough to know that I didn’t mean anything sudden. She won’t retire for a while, and any plans I have that have to do with her giving of her time is at a time in her life when she’s had more bandwidth than she’s had in years. Getting her time right now is impossible, but it’s not impossible to work towards later.

That’s the goal that keeps me going- preparing for later. I don’t presume this is the end because the end never is. We repel and attract like magnets, because I’m a silver penned devil. 😉 My friend John gave me that nickname and now I want it in 18pt font up my arm, bigger if it fits. 😛

But what I mean in terms of friendship is that by working out our problems on my own here, they are often touched by what I say. I am attracting energy to me, rather than seeking attention.

I do hope that Supergrover finds something she does want to discuss with me, because it’s the highlight of my day. She’s not the problem. We are. There’s a big difference because we are both perfect, and I mean that sincerely. We are beautiful in all our flaws. Bad communication is its own thing, not whether either one of us are good people. We’ve been friends long enough to know beyond a shadow of any doubt that she’s good people.

My biggest fear is that she only wants to be a fan, and doesn’t want to be my friend. That’s why the pattern doesn’t change. It breaks my heart, because her criticism is more important and more impacting of the direction of this blog than anything else.

But if she’s just a fan taking pot shots from the peanut gallery, I can’t take it. She’s my friend, one of the great loves of my life because I fell into her charm and I’ll never get out. She deserves every bit of that love, but we don’t communicate well enough to be able to tell each other that. We did, and she decided that being vulnerable once was enough to her, and her next interaction seemed rule based and yet not. I do not know where to go, and so I’m resting in Zac because I can. She only means more to me due to the number of years I’ve known each, not because one is closer to me than the other. I was happier taking a break from thinking about the problem, because I hit a land mine almost immediately and she told me to go to hell.

It’s on brand, so I want to figure out how we are both contributing to that problem or not interact. I am overcoming a lot of feelings all by myself that I don’t know how to navigate, because I don’t know how to talk to Supergrover and as a result, I don’t know how to talk to me about her, either. It’s confusing because we are both entitled to our feelings and privacy. I also think our relationship would look a lot different if it wasn’t moving at the speed of the Internet- that it would take longer for us to be angry if you got a letter two or three days after you sent it, not immediately. There’s no time to calm down and absorb anymore, and you seemingly can’t reframe anything because someone else knows what you mean better than you do.

It’s hard letting them go because they’re right about you. It’s just that their perceptions are their experience of you, not who you are.as a human being. What someone interpreted you as saying may or may not be correct.

Because my second oldest coffee mug is one she bought for me.

The only books that matter are either by Jonna and Tony Mendez or they were presents from her. She can pick my books at any time, because our interests overlap occasionally and we’re both suckers for amazing prose. I am so glad that she has sent me books by Kindle, because they’re presents I’ll never misplace; she’ll always be with me in one way or another. I feel like that’s enough, because it takes two to tango. I do not want to cut a rug all by myself. I do not think I was impulsive to say that I was struggling with the odds on “happily ever after,” because there was no new information to take in. I have to just keep saying it over and over- I do not judge any friend as not worthy to hear my story anymore because they are not worthy as a friend. They become unworthy to hear my story when it’s not an exchange of information. It’s just me pouring energy into you without feeling it in return. I’ve been in that relationship with lots of women, and I’m done. That’s why I thought I’d found the one for all time. It’s really, really hard to break up with someone you’ve never dated. My joke about this is that her husband may not be at her next wedding, but I will. The reason it’s a joke is that I love Michael almost more than her because he’s the one on the ground taking care of her. I don’t have to worry as much as I would if she didn’t have that kind of support. I’m the kind of friend to call if you need support in absence of a partner because I’ve been doing pastoral care a very long time. I am not going to be offended at what you tell me, who you need me to call, what you’ve taken, etc. This is because I’ve been single for a very long time, and you need your friends to step in for you that way. But that doesn’t mean that I want to be the conductor. I just want to be in the orchestra somewhere. Maybe one of these days she’ll let me play lead. I just don’t think she thinks I have the temperament for it because I am so shy and retiring in writing.

“Custody over Supergrover” is my favorite thing in life. The hardest part of having a pet monster is dropping her leash. The other hardest part is not joking that each of us are the oldest thing we own. We’re both in that nebulous age where a group of people is a “no, thanks.” I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I actually get more time with her when we’re just e-mailing than I would on the ground, because her diary/schedule is so full that I’d wait months for anything on the ground, possibly years. Just e-mailing each other allows us to be together no matter where the other is.

I have also said that the silver lining of the pandemic is that now everyone has friends they’ve known for a long time without meeting in person, so there’s no need to explain so much. Emotions run higher because you’re more brave with the wall of anonymity. You don’t say things with as much social nicety as you would in person and there’s no way for anyone to hear your tone or read your eyes for context clues. And still, emotions persist.

The way I feel about my relationship with Supergrover over 11 years is that it is very much akin to having dated and decided we didn’t work as partners, but we worked as friends. The only kink in that logic was that Supergrover is straight and in a relationship, so she wasn’t dealing with the same issues as me. I could stop wanting her, but I couldn’t stop being programmed to protect her and give her everything she wanted that was within my power. I say it just that way because we’re the same person. When we have power, we use it responsibly because we really don’t want it. She’s the type boss I respect, that she doesn’t give her team anything she wouldn’t do herself, and I believe that she’s an excellent trainer without even really having to think about it. Instructional design is a theme in both our lives. Nothing in our lives is transactional, either. When I say that there’s a lot in here about what she won’t do for me and not a lot about what she will, I am not saying that from a narcissistic perspective. I am letting you lay out your bandwidth, I lay out mine, and we meet in the middle after conversations.

At the very least, this should have been a deescalation and not the end, but ultimately that’s not my call, either. One of my readers talked about Supergrover ghosting me or being half out. I want to talk about that here, because she didn’t ghost me or say she was half in at all. She explained her reasoning perfectly, and she would have been spot on in her analysis if she’d gotten my actual intent and not what she thought I meant. She reads through my words and picks out the worst possible interpretation she possibly can. It weighs on me, because I’m not villainizing her. I’m painting her.

I was reminded that I wrote on the blog that she lives in my ink. I was reminded of that line when I was looking around Fahrney’s, an American pen/pencil shop. The back of the store was covered in bottles of ink in every color you can imagine. It’s why she pulls me in and repels me. All the things that we’ve written to each other come up in my mind when I’m doing other things. As I understand what she’s said more, I try to guess what she’s saying more. Then that goes wrong and I’m alone again.

But not truly alone, because since she lives in my ink, it is a communion only we share. I feel her presence in the room when I’m writing, so my writing leans toward her whether she’s the intended topic or not. I would like to make friends where we could also be that close, but there’s no way to duplicate this connection and I’ve stopped trying.

She doesn’t feel creepy to me. The fact that I want to know her like every friend would know her seems creepy, because I’m not pumping her for information. I am genuinely curious because she’s unique. I don’t know what she means about her not being vulnerable means deliberately hurting my feelings does not work for her. So far, not being vulnerable has always led to hurting my feelings because she’d rather put me off than face her demons and just tell me what’s up. She says she can’t say anything without immediately being tagged as avoidant. If your whole pattern is avoidance and has been since you were a child, you cannot see how avoidance hurts other people. They also don’t change when they’re not aware of something. I feel like calling her on avoidant behavior when it happens is better than keeping it all in, because it will come up less and less frequently over time. Her patterns will change to being used to being vulnerable all the time instead of going in guns blazing.

As I told her before, it’s not that she went guns blazing on me. It’s that she has CPTSD so the guns are always already out. Taking down her walls means getting vulnerable about how she feels in reaction to what I said. She said “writing to each other, supporting each other.” I get that. I really do. But I don’t feel supported when it feels like my feelings are going into a void. Like, I’ll write an essay about X topic, and no matter what topic it is between us, that’s not a topic she’ll discuss. It’s frustrating to an enormous degree, because if I bring that up, she immediately goes to “I’m not good enough for you.” It’s not a healthy environment in which to bring up problems, and relationships always have them.

Many things about friendship aren’t the good ones, and you have to go through the bad ones to get the good. I don’t want to focus on negativity. I want to focus on where we go from here. Most notably, what have I done right? I’m not fishing for compliments. I have heard all the complaints.

I think she also just. cannot.

That this friendship was doomed long ago because there are certain topics we need to resolve that she’ll never talk about, and there are multiple issues that fall under that category. I am a lot of things she is not. She is a lot of things I am not. Bridging the gap is enormous.

A river runs through it.