Rearranging Emotional Furniture

October 22, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What have you been working on?

Hm. Today it’s “Sunday mornin’ rain is fallin,” and I’m hearing Adam Levine singing in my head. I made myself an outstanding cup of coffee in which I mixed every kind I have in one airtight container (the only one I have, thus mixing the end of other bags). It’s Cafe Bustelo, Community Coffee King Cake, and some kind of Folgers I don’t remember buying, but someone did. Not sure what I’ll brew next, but I have a lot of tea I’m looking forward to as well. I still haven’t drunk all the Pu-erh John sent me and I’ve also got lots of Stash English Breakfast and powdered matcha. Of everything I make in the morning, I like matcha the best. I just don’t like to drink it every morning because making it takes longer than a Keurig pod. I have about two hours before I have to “get ready for church,” and by that I mean I’d like to take a shower before I watch YouTube. It might be a good day to take a look at the scriptures later.

I had a line cook that didn’t know me from Adam come after me online for saying that the pen with which Biblical literalists paint the Bible is the root of all evil, and he thought I was saying that Christians were the root of all evil. Ripped me a new one for saying David and Jonathan were in love. We can’t even prove Jesus and John weren’t, it’s just more likely that he had a partner and a housecarl……. like me.

If that wasn’t clear, I meant he was married to Mary Magdalene and it is written that John is his favorite Disciple, so I’m sure he showed up big for everyone to think that and write it down. I don’t think it was sex. I think it was being willing to give up your career for someone else’s…….. like me.

The line cook said that if he made fun of my community, it would be a hate crime. But if I made fun of his, that was fine. Got butt hurt, so I knew that it was a pointless fight before it started. I said, “you don’t even know who you’re talking about when you say I have no idea what I’m talking about, and this is not a fight you want to have with me.” And I tapped out, because I couldn’t get across to someone with a literalist view of the Bible that taking the Bible seriously and not literally is the only thing I can do in this day and age. There is no proof, and we need to stop pretending there is. There’s not even any proof in the Bible that God exists, only people’s reactions and responses to them. No Biblical literalist is going to accept that as truth, so why bother? He doesn’t study theological giants. I do. If I am the one studying debates between Rowan Williams and Christopher Hitchens to learn the finer points of what puts Christopher off about organized religion, I can use it. I can use Hitch’s words against him in a wonderful way, because I know he doesn’t care about Christians who take constructive criticism and use their faith to improve themselves. I feel like Christianity would do a lot better in this country if it stayed in its lane.

It is embarrassing. EMBARRASSING. That England does this better than we do and they have had divine right of kings and no separation of church and state since the beginning is one of the weirdest things on earth. We supposedly built this country on separation of church and state….. but what we really said in effect with our cullture is that each state was free to pick its own organized religion. Georgia and Massachussetts Bay were not the same.

We of the United States have never protected freedomm from religion as much as we’ve needed, and I’m tired of it. Again, there is only so much of white supremacy Jesus that can be justified, as well as hypocrisy. People are leaving the church in droves and we shouldn’t stop them because we brought this upon ourselves. Our membership will change when we do and not before. In my opinion, I can hold everything I love about religion in my own heart. I don’t need the church if it decides to die, and it seeems to be doing much to help itself along the way. Catholocism will probably die before it changes because Pope Francis is not as liberal as it needs to get. He is just a Band-Aid, and cannot be even that because there are so few priests willing to push the envelope further than saying that gays and the divorced are people.

You have to leave behind what no longer serves you. I have already decided that I am right for the church, but they decided when I was 15 that they were not right for me. I moved to a denomination where I could be ordained, I was just tired by then…… and frankly, too hurt. I really think so. I think I went into shock at my situation, then my adulthood believing I wanted something I didn’t. It wasn’t untrue. It waas when I was ADHD and masking I could handle leading a congregation. When I was autistic and trying to comfort myself, I couldn’t handle even one other person in the room because of overstimulation. All of my behavior cannot be contributed to depression and hypomania, because my energy levels switch too fast for that.

I am a neurodivergent that is self-aware to an enormous degree. I realized that I should not handle a congregation because of what I could do to them and vice versa. I don’t think that mentally ill people make good pastors, because you react differently to emotional stimuli when you feel good, and the difference is so striking that you can’t project stability because you aren’t stable, actually. And there’s no shame in it. Realizing that you are not mentally healthy enough to take on the needs of others because your own health is a lot to manage is courageous.

I didn’t want to stop leadding people. I wanted to start leading people in a different way. I think I do because so many people tell me that. A woman yesterday told me that I have a very interesting life and that I wrote from deep inside me. Exactly what I was trying to portray in my writing and something I needed to hear because things haven’t been going all that well in my estimation.

I have no doubt that Supergrover has looked in on me and decided that healing and moving on is better for me, but I’m only doing it because I have no other choice. It’s what I’m working on because I have already done all I’m going to do. The way I write is assuming she’s out because she told me she was, but she rarely holds me to one entry or letter forever. We’re just not close enough to stop her ire because we’re not checking the story we’re telling ourselves anymore. She has no idea what I’m doing or not doing in trying to portray our lives when they meet. I use the adrenaline of sex to cover a lot of other ground and I promise she’d rather people think we were naked in the middle of the freeway, and even more interesting to think about what has more adrenaline than sex? All right. You’ve got me. She designs roller coasters.

She doesn’t like all this, but she gets it. Symbolism in writing is a thing. Also, Dana will laugh. She doesn’t like it, but she gets it……. or at least, I hope they both laugh because it’s been 10 years since all that for Dana and 8 years of trying to manage just the two of us since. It’s an interesting conundrum because the longer I go without contact, the more okay I am. And then I’ll hit a trigger and need her immediately, but I self-soothe instead of getting anxious she’s not around. However, I do not think this is the way our relationship should go. I think we’d be much happier if we made the commitment to be imortant on both sides. This is because the more we communicate intensely in the time we have, neither of us have to worry about each other. For instance, having one 45 minute meeting early on would save us a lot of them later, preferable for people who are both obsessed with other things, including their families.

It’s weird to feel like our spines are sewn so we don’t face each other, and our strength is in the seam. I wish I could watch her face when she reads that line, because I think it’s one of the images that she’ll love. I have so many perfect pictures of us, and exactly none of them are something she wouldn’t enjoy as well. That by now Michael is real to me in a way he wasn’t before, especially the way he changed her life in a way that I would have wanted for her if I’d been able…. and not just on one level, but many. I told her than and she thought I was trying to make her feel bad. No, just trying to say that I love her for who she is, not who I’m trying to get her to be. That she can be straight if she has to be. I am absolutely certain at times she wonders why, because I’ve never met a woman who didn’t say that if they were in any way queer their husbands would never hear from them again.

What has happened over time is that I want to be there like a family member without forgetting where I started. That our relationship is an evolution and I’m always going to treat her like I used to be attracted to her and not because I am and trying to hide it. It’s that I can’t change my speech patterns. I’ll always have a hundred terms of endearment for her. She will always take my breath away in a photo or audio/video. There’s not a moment I feel I won’t love her forever in a way that people remember love in third grade. What she has to decide is if she’s okay with that in a friendship. That it’s tinged with romance because I felt those feelings and moved on, not that I’m uncomfortable with her life now. And I know she knows that, and feels so guilty that she cannot be there to catch me right now, because she thinks I have no idea what she’s dealing with and I do. Desperately and completely. It’s why I have no idea whether she’s taking time to mull things over or never coming back. She does not have time to pay attention to anything. She, like Mel, is in the position of starting her own kitchen and I treat them the same way. “See you in three years.”

What she views as goading and provoking is not that I get impatient with timing. I get impatient that no matter how long we go, there’s never an e-mail longer than a few words…. which indicates that no matter what I’m talking about, she’s always avoiding it. When she does have time, she’ll respond to anything that doesn’t involve our relationship. We don’t work through anything and yet she’d eat anyone’s face off who tried to look at me in a way I didn’t like and I feel exactly the same way about her. I would bitch slap her boss if I thought they needed it, and neither one of them would like that very much….. but I would. I would be Mrs. Don Draper on their asses and every single one of them would hate me down to the mailroom. The thought of this makes me laugh harder than it should, because she is definitely a Don Draper-type personality (or comes across that way in text), and I feel like I have the sensibility of Betty’s chihuahua personality.

The funny thing about Betty Draper and me is seeing how much she got away with and what I could’ve….. I am actually pretty happy she ended up with a husband when I think about how her life would be different with a female partner. Like, this could be a script. I’ll think about it. However, it would not be based on us. Just the idea is funny. All powerful women who have wives act differently in a large crowd than those with husbands. It doesn’t jive with the way straight women are vetted to work at high levels in government or industry. The way they are groomed to react like men because nothing gets done if they don’t. A woman with a wife has been pissed off by that her whole life and has the strength to fight back because she doesn’t have to deal with it at home. Her career is also the worst when it comes to her partner being a writer, so if they were like me in any way at all, it would only be that they have that one thing in common to create comedic tension.

And the thing is, Supergrover is just an archetype. Hillary Clinton. Michelle Obama. My sister Lindsay. Carly Fiorina. Melinda Gates. Helen Thomas. I could base what I’m thinking about on any one of them…. the push/pull of a powerful person meeting a no one on the Internet and finding out the other one is smarter in some ways. I feel that I am older than Supergrover, that she is older and sometimes not wiser. I hope that she is impressed enough that she would agree with me and that she is every bit as much right as me on the opposite end of the spectrum. That we all age at different rates and in different ways. But to find that it transcends class is a particular blessing. If she thinks I’m smart, I’m smarter than nearly everyone and no one could have convinced me of it that didn’t have her pedigree. I’ve felt like a dumbass since I was born because I didn’t realize how much I had stacked against me. How much the Internet took away my limitations in communication. I feel smarter around her than anyone else because it comes with such strong belief in myself. She also has the presence of Picard. When she says something, it’s with the authority to make it so. She thinks I think of her as a suburban mom. No, I think of her an an Evelyn. A Michelle Yeoh, an accurate description of her beauty in one picture.

She doesn’t have a prayer life except running, and I hope it’s productive. Sometimes, you feel more in prayer by zoning out and letting your body do the work. Sometimes, it’s thinking through things. The answer comes from praying, not what happens afterward. You know yourself, you’re just afraid to say what you want outside of the intimacy of prayer, because that would involve talking to someone else with an opinion. Either way is fine, and I feel like she is taking care of herself by listening to her body. I am taking care of her by listening to her mind and sending her support by letting her know that I’m thinking about her. But if I tell her that I’m thinking of her and she doesn’t want to open up to me, it doesn’t mean my prayer hasn’t mattered. It means thoughts and prayers can be only that because I haven’t been invited to sit down at that particular table.

I picked up a term on “Covert Affairs” that I really like and I use it all the time to describe my blog. At CIA, to talk about security credentials, they talk about who has been “read in.” In my life, that fits perfectly, because I know exactly down to the letter I’ve typed how much you guys have been read in, and it’s only the amount I want you to have. To go further than this is not helping me, it’s hurting them. That’s because if they wanted to tell their sides, it would be in the comments section, not from me. I reveal so much that anything more is their story to tell. I don’t push limits on purpose. It’s hard to negotiate boundaries and hard when you’re brave with them out of necessity, not lack of love for others.

Dana and I had a hard time because when Supergrover found out that I’d read Dana in on something that she didn’t okay, I freaked out. It wasn’t the initial secret that kept Dana and I emotionally apart, but its reverberations and how she reacted to me after it. I was a hndful, and so was she. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. When I say I didn’t have a choice on whether to leave Dana (because that would have involved our triangle or foursome being solid and it wasn’t), I mean that if Supergrover had talked to Dana and I had talked to Michael, Dana and I could have worked it out. But, I was left in the position of choosing between them and Dana had to lose because Supergrover forced my hand in a way that no one else could. I had to write about her to handle our lives together and I couldn’t let Dana see my reactions to it. Case closed.

But then Supergrover had the audacity to look at the clusterfuck she created and make it all about her. That she hadn’t created a situation I couldn’t handle, but that I was stalking her by coming to DC……. then getting surprised when I was perturbed about that. We’ve been stuck in that push/pull since 2015, and I didn’t decide to stop loving her. I decided to stop working on it.

I can handle what she’s dealing with on my own, but no I can’t. She can read this blog and not worry about her safety, but no she can’t. We could solve all this in an afternoon, even if it was just chatting on Facebook Messenger, but I’m betting we won’t. After eight years and no need to look me up because I gave her all my contact info, she cannot possibly have been too busy to connect. She just wouldn’t. She decided what kind of person I was then and has looked at me through that lens ever since……. the one that says I’m perfect for everyone else except her because she can’t forgive me and never will. Not in the way that truly means redemption and intimacy. But she said she could do nothing about how I felt, how she felt, etc…… but she could do something about the present. If she can, I hope she will. I just will not accept being the person she only talks to short sentences at a time. I don’t want to get by on a glass of water when I have ridden her waves.

I am working on why she affected me the most because I don’t completely understand how it happened, but I want to. I want to even if she does not, because even if she didn’t want the next decades, I did. Even one is a long time when you’re talking about life afterward and how it changes. But it is very interesting to work on the issue of how relationships change over time when you don’t have context for anything but each other- the fact that I have seen she has dogs, but never petted them. That I have heard she has a husband and kids, but never met them. That she likes art but I’ve never been to her house, etc. And yet by writing to each other like a soldier and a lovesick girlfriend for 10 years, it has created the same type intimacy now that they felt then. Do you think my love for Supergrover is less real than those type movies and novels based on very real life? Hayat only spent a few hours more with Mike than I spent with Supergrover before we created a lifetime connection like reader/writer, which carries more responsibility for me now than I had before. It is not a wonder that I wanted my wife and that responsibility to be locked into one person because it was too hard to manage it when they weren’t. But that’s because I was green and didn’t know what I was doing. It’s easier now that I don’t feel the pressure that she’s paying attention to anything I say. I just hope it shows I do see her in 3D when she can open her eyes to that possibility. I think that the message will resonate later, it’s just that right now it’s incredibly loud and extremely close.

Working on how I feel about everyone else is easy because I don’t have the pressure of keeping their identity secret to the degree I do with Supergrover, which is why it’s so hard to put anyone else above her for any reason. I’ll do that when she’s older. Right now she’s my baby, and I have to wait to go back to work til she’s in kindergarten. It’s the best analogy I could possibly have for what we’re going through, and I hope she takes it in because I’m childless so what I’m putting down is not something she’d pick up. That I am definitely responding to a baby, but it’s her. She doesn’t see it because she doesn’t think she needs it, and I’m the one that sees the burn on her face when no one else can. It’s a lot. She’s a lot. But thank God my life isn’t anything else, because I’d still believe I was straight trash if it hadn’t happened.

I don’t want to be disrespectful to her, ever, so I’m just arranging my life so that it doesn’t matter when she’s here and when she’s not. I am Amy Pond and River Song, setting a place for her at dinner in case she shows up. And with her even unto Trenzalore………….. but only when and if she’ll have me.

Or at least, it’s what I’m working on.

The Tao at Play in the Writer’s Brain

October 20, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do lazy days make you feel rested or unproductive?

Let’s get one thing straight.

As a writer, there is no such thing as a lazy day. Work is inverted. In order to put out content, you have to spend time thinking about the ideas before you start typing. Writers look lazy and unproductive because they’re lost in thought….. and that’s a good thing. I sit at my keyboard with my head working independently of my hands. I will stare off into space, typing as I think of something. Some days, the thoughts are fast and furious. If I feel that kind of mood, I’ll put on some EDM and dare the bpm to keep up. EDM really makes me type faster, because it takes an extraordinarily high amount of beats per minute before I lag.

This is not to say that there is no such thing as being a lazy writer. I’m just not, so I don’t assume others are, either. To me, being a lazy writer is avoiding typing. That if you really want to be a writer, you’ll do it. The longer you say you’re a writer and don’t type anything is where the issue lies. If there are stories inside you that you can’t type, you are only limiting yourself by your own fear.

Intelligence is one of my favorite topics, and I love Jonna Mendez on YouTube. She’s a former spy (Chief of Disguise before she retired) who is also a local, so I cannot remember if I heard this from her directly at her book talk here (for The Moscow Rules), or whether it’s from one of her videos with Wired Magazine. But she says that the bigger the crowd, the more no one notices what you do. it inspired me as a writer, because of course the bigger the sample selection of readers, the less will care what I do. I can say whatever I want, because people are always going to be lost in their own lives and so am I. I’ll deal with their feelings about me when they realize I have feelings about them. When you think about it that way, you allow yourself to step off a ledge. Those who know you best might not catch you, because they cannot adjust the version of you in their heads. It might take a different audience for you to level up. As a blogger, my audience gets bigger and changes every day in different ways. Sometimes it’s that Facebook brings in more people than WordPress. Sometimes, it’s that i’m more popular in India or the UK than I am here in the US. Sometimes the US is even third, and those are the days I really, really relax. Whatever it is, it is not waiting for criticism or letting me cripple myself with fear. It is also not letting fear of criticism build, either. It’s getting bigger and getting used to it. I can only dish as much as I can take, and my level is just about where the trolls come in.

I write in the dark to walk in the light, because I cannot take in what others think at all. It would paralyze me. Everyone’s a critic and most of the time wonder why I stop writing about them. So, in order for someone to criticize me and for me to need to keep writing about them after that must take a hell of a lot. Trust me, you don’t even know.

There’s no way to be lazy with the way a writer’s mind works. You haven’t signed up for a nine to five job. It doesn’t matter if the baby woke up fifteen minutes ago and you just got back to bed and “why God? Why won’t it stop?” If you have an idea that you know will express how you feel as art, you have to write it down. I don’t mean writing down every thought you have. I know on this blog it seems like it. I mean leaving yourself key words so that you can pick up the brainstorming session later. It is so very, very difficult to strike gold at an inconvenient time because the creative process is a flow. It, like grace, does not leave you where it found you. To help this, I have two modes and I do one or the other. The first is that I have a lime green Moleskin so it’s easy to see that also has a pen attached next to me in bed. Not on the nightstand. I literally sleep with it like a teddy bear. If I want to write something down, I use the flashlight on my phone. This is my preference almost 100% of the time because the idea is cemented in the writing of it. But occasionally, I’ll be lazy and just say, “Siri. Open Notepad.” I don’t know what the app is officially called, I just said that to Siri one day and it worked. I use voice dictation rather than voice notes, though since Beck and I communicate with them, I’m liking it more. So, perhaps. The best thing about voice dictation is that speaking aloud and reading it later helps ensure I’ll remember it.

It’s also not a lazy day if you take the time to have deep interactions with people, because as a writer you have to have things to describe. Your life is on display, particularly when you write fiction. On my blog, people already know I’m talking about them. Case closed. Not knowing for sure creates buzz that isn’t here. But at the same time, you have to have real life experiences on which to base your world. For me, that’s my angle on everyone else’s behavior and not because their behavior is bad. This blog is the result of trying to overexplain to myself why people are doing what they are doing. It is less intimidating than trying to build a fictional world, which is why I’ve gotten into a professional writers’ group on Facebook that’s really not for sissies. Supergrover would be so proud of me, and I know it. I also know that I’ll miss telling her about my criticisms because she would want to see me grow over time just as much as my writing group does.

Do you remember that scene in “Eat. Pray. Love.” when Liz and her friend are talking about all the people signing her divorce decree? Like, they weren’t even there… Mother Theresa and people like that. Well, that’s how I feel about Supergrover. That if she knew about the wriing group thing, it would make her feel good so I’m imagining her signing off on it.

Most days I know I cannot be a writer without her, and I wish I could mean that differently, because it would make me look like less of a sad sack with an excuse not to be great. It’s not that. It’s that when you love someone, your dreams have to be balanced. You have to take the other person’s fears into consideration. I do not want to be great in a way that ever costs her something. What thrilled me about being together was that we both made the other feel capable and strong… but only when it was good. We turned on each other and never recovered. Now, I’m struggling with a work in progress that could introduce questions neither of us want to answer and she doesn’t see that as problematic. I do as I’m looking down the road. My romantic life doesn’t depend on her. My career as a writer does. At no time do I mean this blog. I mean I don’t want a book to be published and I get those questions nd handle them badly. I’m working through it because I believe my idea has legs, but it’s not anything I’ve talked about before. It’s something I sit in when I look lazy.

I have new ideas for books every day, but I don’t let it control me. Having an idea for a new work in progress is like being polyamorous. You need the stability of the day in, day out grind…. doesn’t mean your life won’t flip upside down during new relationship energy. I cannot fall prey to those bursts of dopamine, because it’s just my ADHD. Those are the things that go into my Moleskine or I dictate into my phone. They’re the brain droppings that could later on become content in my books.

You work every minute of every day of your life when you write. This is because whether you’re completely immobile or laying brick or cooking or coding software or selling insurance or modeling hand cream, you’re still writing.

You’re writing when you’re doing everything else. The collation of your ideas is the most important part, because it really helps to have a clear map of a subject before you start typing. If you think that is not true of this web site, that I wander into nowhere, you’re both right and wrong. I do not see plot and character until I am reading something back. Not while I’m laying it down. It’s the only thing that allows me to be completely open and honest- my willingness to completely change my opinion. I also look at “All Things Considered,” but it might take me a week or two to get there. I can’t explain everything I was feeling during a situation in one entry. To hold me to a single entry is a literary device called “synecdoche,” when a part represents a whole… like calling cars your “wheels” or female lawyers “skirts.” I do not know whether “skirts” is offensive or not, because I never heard it said with derision. But I’m also from the South, so please don’t cancel me in New York or some shit. My synecdoche for Supergrover was “Cheerios,” and yet it doesn’t come close to representing her whole self. Reducing me as a writer to a snapshot of my day isn’t fair or helpful, but lets my beautiful girl score as many political points as she needs to avoid opening up to me. Therefore, I rattle on about her here because our shit is unresolved. She thinks I’m doing it to get back at her, I think I’m doing it because this is how I survived life before her. She seems to forget that I was a writer for 10 years who also blogged before we met, so it doesn’t seem to occur to her that I’d be processing this way no matter how our relationship was doing.

It doesn’t surprise me that her synecdoche for me is “entry.” I cannot get her to accept that she is everything, everywhere, all at once. That no one entry can contain the complexity of our relationship and doesn’t try. That’s because I hope I’m explaining to her like I’m explaining to everyone else; I haven’t stopped seeing the world in 3D, writing about the world around me. She has stopped talking to me about what I’m doing. I don’t have enough information to put it to rest, and I never will at this point. I just had to let the train wreck happen and pick up the pieces. I am just not blessed to have someone who thinks they can learn something from it. She thinks I’m out to get her when I’m the main character on my own blog. How dare me! Of course I should write about my anger from your perspective……. no, I can’t, and here’s why. That’s expecting someone else to read your mind and then getting upset when it doesn’t happen.

What all writers know is that the more we look lazy and unproductive while writing and no one understands the way we process, the easier it is to lapse into thinking your only friend is you….. wherein you spend even more time alone writing into a Moleskine or asking Siri to open Notepad.

State Farm?

October 18, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What makes a good neighbor?

I will certainly try to keep to a topic, but no promises. I’m in a space case sort of mood because I am miserable. Nothing serious like COVID, just allergies that won’t quit. I am laughing over “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” right this moment because I’ve been saying that Sudafed PE should say “does not work” right on the box. One of the things on the show I listened to last week was that the FDA just released a statement saying “Sudafed PE does not work.” So, if I want to feel better, that means a very hot shower and taking my inconvenienced ass downtown where I can get the real stuff. If you can get alcohol delivered, I don’t know why you can’t get Sudafed. Couldn’t you just use the same ID scanner I’d get if I needed an emergency White Claw? Seems like an unrealistic expectation that I would want one, but someone does. 😉

It would make someone a good neighbor to do this for me, but I don’t actually know any. The queer boys next door seem to be nonplussed about me. I think it’s because they’re probably 10 years younger and upwardly mobile yuppies. It doesn’t mean that they don’t like me or vice versa, just that we don’t have much in common. I hold out hope, though, because we’ve only been able to meet each other and have said “hi” from our yards. Maybe by next year it will look totally different. I have no idea, but having cute boys next door never hurt anyone.

One of my other neighbors is Gladys Kravitz and we are united in the fact that we don’t like her at all. She can take a long walk on a short pier. She saw all our cars in front of the house and called the county on us, saying that we had too many people to all be living in one house. So, I had two weeks to get my disaster area of a room in spotless shape (which I almost never do because AuDHD) before the county came to inspect. They got here and saw that everyone has a bedroom and we haven’t spoken since. I think that was five or six years ago.

My landlords are kind of my neigbors, but not really. We have separate entrances and don’t interact much. However, if I needed something, I could call eihter of them immediately. We don’t talk every day, but we gather for holiday meals…. though that may change this year. I don’t know what the plans are, but my landlords have one daughter that live with us and one daughter that just recently bought a huge house. So I don’t know what Thanksgiving and Christmas look like for me yet, but what I do know is that I’m not slated to come back to Houston for either holiday as of yet, but it’s very early. My dad and I are the kind of people that will wake up one day and say, “I want to go to DC” or whatever and just do it. He just has a lot more frequent flier miles than I do. 😉

In short, stay tuned.

The people that affect me much more than my actual neighbors are the friends I’ve met through becoming a writer. In particular, J.L. Henry and Tyler Moore are essentially taking over my education. Tyler added me to his writing group, and I swear it was like getting into grad school. I am done. Floored. I cannot thank Tyler enough, and I will be back to group as soon as my latest stint in Facebook Jail is over. This time, I got banned for something even more stupid. I hit the enter key and was promptly accused of bullying. The text box for the infraction was blank. I can’t get anyone to look at my case, so I’m stuck until November 11th.

Therefore, if you find something you think is worthy of posting on Facebook, I would really appreciate it. Not asking for random praise, just that engagement is important…. but at the same time, I know not every entry is worth sharing, either. I hope you all find something and probably will because the thing about AuDHD is that by not staying on topic, you’ll cover so much ground that there’s a topic for everyone.

I have learned that non-tech people will listen to my opinions on linux even though 90% of my readers will never actually use it. That’s because I have the tech background that is almost exlusively “translating Geek to English” and I’ve gotten the IT job every single time I’ve put that on my cover letter or resume. It’s true, I am operating system agnostic, but I hate iOS for iPhones the most. Luke Miani agrees with me, and he’s one of the preeminent Mac vloggers on YouTube (also a local, incidentally). I should reach out to him and ask him if he needs a copywriter or something. Huge for my CV. Anyway, Luke, if you’re reading this, do you need a copy editor or something? (He doesn’t know I’m alive, it was a joke).

Also, do you guys like vlogs? I’ve done a couple, but I’d be willing to do more. I just don’t because my primary mode of communication is writing. It’s nice to get out of that rut, though, and just talk into the camera like I’m video calling Bryn instead. I might do it, anyway, just because I know Bryn likes them. I will eventually start recording my entries again, but it will take some time. The only reason I don’t do it now is that I need server space. I can’t decide whether I want to host the .mp3 files myself, or buy into something like SoundCloud. I could do all that on YouTube, but I specifically want audio because Bryn “likes to listen to me like a podcast.” If I can find a way to do that, it’s priority one. If more of you want it than that, drop a dime in the box and it’ll be done by tomorrow. 😛

Speaking of donations, I don’t ask for them but it’s a necessary evil. I don’t make buckets off it or anything, but I love it when people will send me $3 and say it’s for a cup of coffee to keep me going. You know what makes me feel better than three dollars for coffee to keep me going? nothing. It’s so much less about income and so much more about validation. I also don’t expect to make real money here- I am building a religion, living Comfort Eagle….. my hat is on backwards. I’ll show you my tattoos. I am in the blogging business I am calling you DUDE!

Today is tomorrow. Tomorrow is today. Yesterday is weaving in and out.

Cake provide the lyrics to my life at all times. My favorite painting of all time is “The Persistence of Memory,” and of all things I would tattoo on my body (as opposed to will) is a dripping clock. I don’t care if Dali was ADHD or not. He make the official logo.

I don’t know what this has to do with Neighbors. I’ve never even watched that show.

But I do know what it’s like to be ADHD and just feel like talking for no particular purpose. I lead down winding roads, and one of the criticisms I only get from my family and friends is that it seems like you “wander into nowhere” and that leads them to believe whether I’m on an up or a down. I’m Bipolar II, and you have never seen a woman get angrier in your life than when receiving that particular criticism. It’s because they become parental about it, infantilizing me to an enormous degree when I have so far made it through 46 years while on ups and downs. Slow your roll. They aren’t very good neighbors when they do it, even under the guise of being helpful. Depression and mania are two completely different sets of emotions and physical responses. Anxiety adds another level. At no time does this turn off my AuDHD need to ramble about nothing. I don’t do it because it is easy. I do it because it is hard.

Rambling about nothing, like neighbors, is the easy part. Anyone could do it. But I would challenge anyone to be as brave as I am in these pages. I don’t get to know you like an Internet neighbor I wave to- you guys really know me. You see me every day. You know what my life is like if you even read once a week….. it’s probably better if you only read once a week (in my estimation) because themes are repetitive as I look at them from more than one angle. Finding an angle on something is what brings me peace, because I can walk away from that writing session feeling lighter.

No one sees all the crying.

I write differenty at Starbucks. I don’t dive as deep so I don’t have emotional reactions in the store. I cannot do what I do without sitting alone in a room, lights off, with the door locked for safety. This is entirely doable since I start writing at 0500 and the house is eerily silent. But in that kind of mood, before the sun is up, I sit down at the keyboard and slice open a vein.

The Supergrover entries take the most out of me, the reason I was so offended when she said I didn’t write her as a 3D character. It was a body blow, and I hope she really takes in how much she wrecked me with that one line. Not a 3D character? Have you even read me, bro?

Anyway, I shake and cry and try to find things that make me laugh, because that was the biggest clusterfuck I have ever been party to, and I’ll never be the same. Neither will she. In some respects, I want her to come back and say she was wrong. In others, I hope she deletes everything and moves on with her life. It depends on what day it is. How bad the pain hurts. How much her behavior affected me and really fucking sucks to deal with on a daily basis, because it’s relentless breaking a trauma bond, and I’m sure she thinks I’m being dramatic. She can also take a long walk on a short pier, because I have wrestled our problems to the ground with no solution, because she’s the only one with answers to my questions, and they’re too big for me to handle alone.

And she knows it.

I’ve told her that for 10 years, and nothing. She doesn’t deal in emotions. I don’t deal in avoidance of them. We are totally fucked unless someone gives, and it’s not going to be me this time. I have done all the giving in I’m going to do because it’s been a decade. If she was going to show up in any real way, she would have done it by now. Fuck the hypocrisy and either get right with me or move it along. Your mama wolverine claws are coming out and you don’t even want to hug me? Get out of here with that bullshit.

I am so done there’s not even a word for it, and I still reach out for her in the middle of the night when I’m scared. Again, only one with the answers. But fuck my feelings, right?

I told her it came across as “only Supergrover is allowed to need things.”

And here’s the plain truth. In a lot of cases, she is. But she doesn’t get this one. She fucked up, she knows it, and won’t deal with reality because that involves feelings she can’t access. That’s because she thinks she’s fine. I do not. I think she’s a hurt little girl and needs a mama wolverine just as badly as I do……… because there’s always going to be things we share with friends that we wouldn’t share with our biological mothers.

I bet she didn’t even think of that, and when she does, so much of my need to be near her will make sense. We are now, in a very real sense, mothering each other. And if she has to wonder why, I’m going to need her to put on her fucking glasses and “read through many lines” again. She reads my e-mails so fast that she’s only picking up a quarter of my meaning, like saying I called her a liar. What I actually said was based around “the lies you tell,” a Southern way of saying you’re being polite to save someone else from harm. I said “the lies you (universal) tell,” and that’s not like you (personal) at all.” I wasn’t saying “you’re a liar.” I was saying “I think you’re being nice and not laying your feelings on the table because you want to protect me from emotional injury.”

No, she saved up all her “laying it out on the table” when I expressed the same need I’d been expressing ad nauseam for 10 years and she wrote me a long ass e-mail saying she didn’t have time to answer anything and I’d just have to be happy with the neverending cycle we’ve got going, which is toxic. We aren’t toxic people, but we do not have patterns of healthy people, mostly because she won’t open up to me except when she’s telling me how busy she is. Letters that really hurt me and don’t get us any closer to healing are long and involved. E-mails that say “I was just thinking about you. How are you?” are almost nonexistent.

She says way too little, and I say way too much.

We have turned into me and the queer boys next door, waving to each other but not really making an effort. I love her too much for that. I cannot put toothpaste back into a tube, another thing I’ve been saying for 10 years. If you can’t commit, as a general rule for all my friends, then please just leave me be. I don’t have room for any more anxious attachments with avoidant people. One is enough, because no matter how hard I try, I can’t turn off my mama wolverine, either.

Fewer Than I Think Most People Do, But More Than I Thought I Did

October 16, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What principles define how you live?

I don’t have strict principles because I’m AuDHD. ADHD and Autistic people may only have one: “annoy the shit out of everyone and see who stays.” I can joke about that because we drive each other up the wall. But when we joke about our symptoms, we’re not punching down. The thing about “seeing who stays” is that neurotypical people do not have an easy time in neurodivergent spaces like my house.

Zac and I are made for each other in this respect, because his house is a neurodivergent safe space as well. He’d have to tell you what his neurodivergence is, I just know that we have a lot of crossover because we love being together and are also bad at scheduling. He gets busy or has a TDY (temporary duty) elsewhere, I’m utterly obsessed with writing and forget to look up. All of the sudden it’s been several weeks or a month. That’s because neither one of us treat the other like a possession. I can’t remember who said it, but “he’s mine like my neighborhood, not my notebook.” It’s an attitude I carry now, because I feel like Bryn is mine in that way, too, and so is Supergrover even if she never puts it together that I am indeed the friend I said I would be from the beginning.

(I am her old, grumpy wizard and she is my young, brave, crazy knight. I am chronologically younger, but wouldn’t have her energy level at gunpoint. Not enough Diet Coke in the world. “Doctor Who,” as I’ve mentioned before, is not the only television analogy that fits between us, because we are very much like Arthur and Merlin from the BBC drama “Merlin” and Merlin and “Wart” from “The Sword in the Stone.” I take that back. She is still like “Wart,” but I am definitely, definitely Archimedes. She will be remembered as King Arthur, and I see her as Wart to cope. I do the same thing with my younger sister. Her professional persona is intimidating, so when I’m talking to her in real life it helps to think of her as a six year old. That reminds me of a principle I live by. Never treat anyone as if they’re older than 12 because they won’t respect you for it if they’re bad people. Good people need people who disagree with them and ignore their celebrity status. The evil are certain about everything, especially how important they are.)

Now, if there’s any principle I live with, it’s wanting relationships that are as drama-free as the one with Zac…. although I hope that Zac knows just as much as I do that our inattention doesn’t mean less care. We’re busy and we live over an hour from each other. The principle is just to be the person that has the other’s back. I frequently wish I could do as much for him as he does for me, but we’re at different points in our lives. It’s kind of different getting to be a princess every once in a while…… A princess that wears space man underwear, but still.

As I was reading back over earlier paragraphs, I realized that one of the principles I live with now is that my sister needs me more than she used to in a very concrete way. I am what she has left of my mom, because we’re still in touch with our aunts and uncle, of course, but we lived with her. My dad can tell her some stories, but not all because I was there with her after they divorced. I am the institutional memory of what was and will be, not because I can predict the future. I can just predict I won’t want to stop writing it down as it happens.

It’s something I know that I hope I can pass on to Supergrover and Bryn, as we’re all eldest children but their mothers are still living. My mother’s life was cut short by so damn much that I am going to be there for things that my mother never could, in way she never could because Lindsay and I didn’t open up to her like we open up to each other. I hope I can pass on that your siblings become your children when you realize you’re what’s left. No one gives you that authority, you’re just doing what you’ve always done and it feels weird not to try because grief is this whole other thing you will never understand. I don’t even say “I know how you feel” when someone tells me that they’ve lost their mother, because we almost certainly aren’t going to have the same experience. I am jealous even now at how much older Supergrover is than me and she still has her mom.

On the other hand, if she hadn’t died so young, me dating Zac (or any man) would have killed her… I wouldn’t have allowed myself to struggle with those questions on my web site because I never allowed myself to date anyone without thinking it was permanent before. Without knowing up front they were capable of marriage. It’s only because I’m starting to look at what I can manage that I can handle the dissonance between what works for other people and what works for me. I could not dive into myself to this degree if I was responsible for other people, and as I get busier I hope I will look back at this time in my life as a burst of creativity no matter how painful. I hope I’m now on a better path because I took the time to search for it.

I can’t control what principles guide others, the most important principle for interacting with others I live by.

Be Yourself

October 11, 2023October 11, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What was the hardest personal goal you’ve set for yourself?

My comfort level with fighting is nil. I don’t know what to do when I express my opinion and someone gives me theirs in return, because no matter how hard I try to make my voice sound inert, people will add things into it that I don’t mean. This seems to be even more true of the last 10-20 years, where patience was destroyed one Facebook Notification at a time. God forbid you think about what you’ve done rather than ripping a relationship apart.

One of the reasons I allow myself to get so angry on this web site is that people do it to me all day, every day. I’m just processing my problems with them in a way that neither one of us has to listen to it. I don’t hear that anger until I’m reading back to myself. The difference is that I take the time to really make friends with why I’m angry. The root of the issue. A quarter to never will you actually see me pop off at someone here. Generally, by the time I’m mad here, there’s little hope for our relationship because if they don’t care about being my friend, I sure as shit won’t care about being theirs.

I am hard on myself because I ask the questions other people won’t and they get angry. For instance, I am sure that Supergrover hated it when I told her that I hated not knowing what her husband thought of me. Whether he hated me or got turned on by me created two different sets of problems. One I was willing to work on. One I am absolutely not. I will never in my lifetime look in that man’s face if he’s put her through that even once, and thus me by proxy. He doesn’t deserve to know me on that level, and neither does she if she’s not willing to warn me what I’m walking into…… and she couldn’t unless I just directly said it out loud. A man being turned on by one of his wife’s friends is not something he’ll tell his cute, perfect straight wife. No, he’ll wait till his angel is in the bathroom and suggest entrapment…… but this is all done as a joke, of course. Who wouldn’t think that suggesting I could get what I wanted by working with him wasn’t absolutely on the up and up? I didn’t think all men thought this way until they did, my beautiful girl. This is not between Michael and me. This is the dance between Frank and Idgie for all time.

I think my personal goal is just to be a bee charmer. You know Idgie would have gone on loving Ruth until she died whether Frank had fucked up and made being with her possible or not. Sure, there would be others. Just not in the same way. And she is every bit my Mary Louise Parker, apt because she kind of reminds me of Amy from “The West Wing,” too.

Being myself as a personal goal meant growing into the love I have for Supergrover (and Michael. And the kids. And the dogs. And the fish. And the books.). Growing into it meant allowing me to be me, because by asking questions without bullshit filters, most of the time I got what I needed to know and could build on it. Telling her that I had feelings for her destroyed all that , because she didn’t know how to react to me as a woman anymore. It’s cute and innocent in some ways, very hard for me in others. What’s easy is being ridiculously cute to each other online. What’s hard is knowing how much of that translates, if at all.

I am glad that she doesn’t treat me as if those feelings have to go away. They did, and we agree that they should have. They do not disappear as if they were never there, though, and it’s wonderful when she remembers that fact- she’s not my love, but has been, and is tender with me because of it. Being tender with each other is all I want out of our relationship now, and because it’s too unhealthy to interact, I’m glad I have a garden here on WordPress. I have lifted the plants, but the leftover roots season the soil. Romantic love has been allowed to attach to other feelings and the wheat separated from the chaff quite naturally. Love is a thriving aquascape of growth. The goal was just to make “in-love” feelings the chlorine you have to remove first. I never struggle with chlorine removal anymore. I have to protect life.

Things were unclear about meeting up in the real world and neither one of us knew (knows?) whether we’ll meet in the future. The reason I plan a future with her is simple. She is such a writer that she will kick herself when she thinks of how lame her last words were to me and she’ll want to say something better and so will I because I love her. Her last words to me were “obviously you’re the only person who can change.” I assured her that was not true or would ever be the case, but she disappears if I don’t say something against which she can rage. I am also trying to step away from a trauma bond, which makes your emotions play tricks on you, anyway. I waffle between wanting to cry on her like a four year old and being perfectly fine. She doesn’t deserve to come back at this point, because she’s not willing to change a damn thing. Letting her in would be a disaster, but I’ll never be strong enough to keep her out. It’s just not me. I believe everyone has a resurrection story, and I forgive them over and over. This often leads me into spending more time on a story than I really should. Not interacting has shown me how much I initiate.

It’s so hard, living in that disconnect between “it’s not personal” and “it really is personal to an enormous degree.” I always want to be the one to give her the next thing she loves to read. I don’t like it when she doesn’t provide me any reading material in return. It makes the relationship feel too one-sided, pouring emotion into someone where it’s not wanted. She doesn’t see that I love her in every color, in every dimension, and tries to say that I’m writing her as a flat character.

My boyfriend’s dog is better at context clues than that.

I set out to be a bee charmer when I realized she didn’t love her as much as I did.

The personal goals came in when I realized that I was talking about a universal problem. Women aren’t taught to love each other because they don’t know how to love themselves, especially as part of a patriarchy.

She says that I write about everything as if it’s not multifaceted in anger, as if I wouldn’t give everything to hear her tell me one of them. I feel like I am painting this journal with our emotions, and it would be great if she would also show her work. She’s doing all the algebra in her head and her teacher’s counting off points- not in judgment but because they can’t get there without showing their work.

The hardest personal goal for myself has been walking away from her in order to make my emotional life stronger. I want her in my life, but not at the steep, steep cost of always feeling terrible about myself.

She wants me to be her friend without her having to invest anything anymore, and her life is too complicated to go without investing in each other.

The second hardest is not feeling like running back toward her every time something doesn’t go right. To know that I really was meant to grow in this direction, and that she’s strong. If she sees where I’m going and wants it, she’ll pack.

The hardest personal goal is being yourself even when the one you love the most doesn’t like them.

Vincent and Salvador

October 10, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 7 Comments

Who are your favorite artists?

Vincent van Gogh and Salvador Dali showed me my illnesses in real time, making graphs of my brain so I could see it. When van Gogh goes into the places that make rings appear in his vision, the ones that dot his galaxies, my mind has that mode as well. It just comes out in words. The cast of Doctor Who didn’t do as good a job as I did searching for paintings that say “For Amy” in the Musee Dorsay. I never found one (nor “for Leslie,” either, but that wasn’t the point. The point is that he is now long dead…. long….. and you can still feel his presence when you go to his wing of the old train station. It’s like people gathered all his stuff, put it in the train station, and he decided he lives there, now.

The Persistence of Memory is a grid, with time dripping all over it. Time drips all over me because of it. Like them, I have no discernable future as to what life my writing will take on after I’m gone, if at all. I can’t worry about that, because my blog’s purpose is fulfilled just by existing. But it does resonate with me when people tell me they read in the bathroom, because that’s about as vulnerable as I have to get when these entries are being written. I’m in my room, alone and sometimes covered with blankets using a laptop. Still naked, exposed, and afraid.

I would find it interesting to know what Vincent and Salvador think of me in those moments. Are we tracking together like I think? Can I hang with that kind of brilliance?

I have known enough artists in my time to know what I can. Because in the creativity stage, we are but small children who need to reassure each other constantly. My art is fed from theirs. Who knows who is fed frm mine?

However, I cannot focus on what will come after me, but what comes through me. What will come out of me using only the persistence of memory on a starry night?

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

October 9, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is your favorite hobby or pastime?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Already Have

October 8, 2023October 8, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

What would you do if you lost all your possessions?

My house, the United Methodist parsonage in Naples, Texas, burned down to the ground on December 20, 1990.

It was a child’s Christmas in wails. Presents were given that year that would have been cool had they not been distorted by smoke or water damage, and I only know that looking back. Alternatively, we got presents that we knew were collected five minutes ago, and knew enough to be grateful because we had an awareness that of course no one has our lists anymore. Lindsay and I were grateful for any normalcy at all. The the first few hours, I internalized absolutely everything because I was the only one home. My parents and sister weren’t there. So, I did what I always did in that situation. I became a very tiny hostess to the fire department….. so sorry I was inconveniencing them. There were church members in my neighborhood that were all flocking to the middle of the street and I just started doing everything through an out of body experience. Too much pain to stay connected. In order to emote where people could understand me, I had to put my feelings away. My trauma reflexes do not all come from emotional abuse as a teen, but those reflexes were built on someone who’d already developed those reflexes independently.

I learn a lot about trauma using myself as a case study, because I’m looking back far enough into the past that I write like I’m someone else’s little girl. It’s a lot easier to parent yourself when you see yourself now as a different person…… because when you do all the work, you realize that you are indeed the same person and uncovering all your trauma allows you to reclaim the childlike parts of yourself that were stolen. I also use myself as a case study because even if I had an MD and a PhD, I would still never be as sure about someone else’s history as I am about my own. Patients lie, and about the stupidest shit because they think doctors are judgmental (they’re not, and you have no idea what you’re doing when you leave something out, capiche?). Doctors are, for the most part, judgmental like our last letter in Myers-Briggs is J, not judgmental like an asshole. A doctor is just as much of a geek as a computer programmer. Don’t hold back the tools that let them “if, then.” My dad was a pastor and my grandmother worked in a blood lab. I’ve been steeped in the languages of ministry and medicine since I was born, so it’s entirely possible for me to lose my shit and be completely fine in the same exact moment.

My computer had melted into my desk. My hangers had melted onto and into my clothes. When it all started, I’d been the only one home in my pajamas, getting ready for a district-wide church dance and even had a date.

I was wearing pantyhose and curlers with a Snoopy nightgown when I rang the doorbell next door. I was in preacher’s kid trauma victim mode, the first time I’d ever experienced trauma in its true sense. My house was burning down in front of my eyes and I was the only one of the four of us who knew it. My mother and sister were shopping. My father was delivering communion to shut-ins. It was all me.

All. Me.

I had just turned 12 three months earlier. My grandfather wouldn’t have known what to do in this situation, it was so unique. Age couldn’t line up to experience here because what happened was rare. The other thing is that I would not have felt as alone today. This was at least 10 years before I had a cell phone (because I’m that old, not “we didn’t buy one”) and every contact programmed into it so I wasn’t dependent on my memory for the numbers. In that kind of situation, you’re glad emergency services only have three numbers to remember.

If I’d had my current cell phone, I could have called my mother and sister at the shops. I could have called my dad while he was visiting the elderly. I could have called my grandparents because they only lived about a half hour away. My cell phone now is not handy to me because it can call out. It’s handy because without it, I wouldn’t know who to call.

(As an aside, aren’t cell phones a miracle? I have been impressed with being able to walk around and talk on the phone anywhere since our mobile was in a black bag.)

I am certain that I assured Doris nothing was wrong, it was no big deal, but I had to call the fire department. And would it be okay if I waited with you? I was doing all those things you do when you’re a preacher’s kid, assuring everyone around me that everything was under control.

So, in short, I learned two lessons. The first is that stuff doesn’t matter. The only thing I lost that were precious to me were photographs, and even those don’t matter anymore because any I have that are precious are also on Facebook or WordPress, so they’re backed up. There is no material thing I could lose that would hurt me, really. What hurt me was the second lesson.

Even when things are fucked six ways to Sunday, the reflex to make everyone else more comfortable is intact.

It’s something you don’t find until you lose everything else. You don’t find it until all the bullshit is stripped away and realize you’re pretending to be fine. The reality break from trauma makes it where you live and reflect. You have a binge-purge relationship with feelings because when they come up, you are too overwhelmed. It’s a continual cycle.

It was a brand new ball game when I realized that an anxious attachment is just an avoidant attachment style in disguise. I’ve just been avoiding me.

Helvetica Brought to You By Genetics

October 6, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It doesn’t take much in life to make me happy.

I have always been a font nerd. Just incredibly so. It started with newspapers, and not even with reading them myself. When I was a teenager, one of my dad’s contributions to our church was to make a big sign for it. Not like cardboard… like a huge logo built onto the side of a stone wall, or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it was made of, but I do remember the conversation before it was constructed.

He said that if we were going to advertise the church, the font didn’t need to be readable when you were standing in front of the church. It needed to be visible when you were driving down the road at 35 mile an hour.

And it’s not just one thing, but it is another story about my family. I have no proof of this, but my feeling about it is that my love of fonts started with my grandfather, Mayo.

Both of my grandfathers worked at Lone Star Steel for their entire careers. My mother’s father was a computer geek (this has no bearing on my current situation). I also think I may have inherited his autism, but I am not basing that on a diagnosis and it may be complete bullshit. I just observed him for years.

He, like me, ate about five things. (I’m a pro cook, but I don’t do it for myself. As a writer, I like consistency as not to interrupt my flow.)

He, like me, was the first in the family to adopt computers as a career…. except he was more high-level than I was. Not only did he do projects for NASA at Lone Star Steel, he would have been (I think, not 100% certain) the modern day equivalent of a systems administrator. The things that I recall that happened to my mother, aunts, and uncles back me up on this, because in retrospect it really seems like he was a neurodivergent struggling in a neurotypical world (which also has no bearing on my current situation, clearly). Not only did we have the connection of me being his first grandchild out of many, he could see me. For instance, literally no one around me knew how to tutor me in Algebra except him.

My father’s father was the public relations man for the whole company. He wrote like a journalist, he took pictures like a journalist. Probably neurodivergent and struggling as well, because genetics and past history in terms of observation.

I started with a tangent on my maternal grandfather before getting to the story because I am an interesting mix of both of them. I have my father’s father’s widow’s peak and my mother’s father’s nose. My dad attested to this in the video the other day…. “she’s got my face.” I assume he got it from somewhere. I don’t know whether me being genderqueer makes me notice it more, or whether it’s objectively true, but I find myself in them more than any other family member. Put together, I look an amazing amount like my dad’s littlest sister….. but inside, I’m both of them down to their careers. Not only do I use linux, I’ve got the skills of a PR man to make documentation and linux evangelism come alive on the page. It’s such a drag to read boring documentation and comments in the code, and every one of us knows it. So far, the best comment I’ve gotten when I’ve installed a package is “not guaranteed not to kill puppies and steal your women.” It was bleeding edge, and the reason it’s funny is that linux isn’t corporate and doesn’t have to conform to Microsoft bullshit. I would have a lot more fun working with developers on Launchpad than I would ever get out of Seattle……. because I could say things like “if you install this on a live server first, God have mercy on your soul.”

Where fonts come in is that coders are persnickety about the fonts used in the code editor (ironically enough, I prefer Microsoft Visual Studio Code because it’s every bit as good as Notepad++ and will run natively. Most coders use some version of the same font. It will look llike Verdana with a few notable exceptions. The first thing is that monospace type means exactly what it says. Every letter takes up the same amount of room. This is important when looking at coding because it’s so much easier on your eyes. In the newspaper business, they don’t do that because they’re not looking at the same thing. They don’t have to read the code between the content.

In an office suite and with coding, for me it’s Droid for everything- sans, serif, and mono. Not only do I just like them, it looks better for documents to always use a complete family of fonts rather than picking them out piecemeal. You can, it’s just easier on the eyes because then the spaces between the fonts look the same…… except for Droid Sans Mono. We have covered this.

If you’re an Android user, you’re used to the Droid font family because it’s the same one used on your phone. It makes it easier on your eyes due to looking at it all day.

Editor’s Note: “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face” from “My Fair Lady” is playing in my head right now as the designation below font familiy is font face.

The only thing that ever wins over Droid Sans is Helvetica…. that’s because it’s hard to find if you’re not an Apple user, because Apple actuallly bought it for distribution and Windows didn’t. They made up their own knockoff called “Arial,” and if they’d followed Steve’s advice to focus on design, they would have bought it, too, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. In case you didn’t think Helvetica is worth serious money, there’s a whole ass documentary by the same name. Helvetica is everywhere you look. Everywhere. I once bought a copy of Helvetica at Goodwill and a whole ass Mac came with it. Buying a Mac at Goodwill was on purpose. The first is that it would be old as shit. More like a glorified typewriter. The second is that it didn’t even have a wireless card in it, so I wouldn’t be tempted at Starbucks.

When I go to Starbucks, I’m there to play for keeps. I am going to get something out of this writing session if it’s the last thing I do. “Getting something out of a writing session” is relative. Sometimes it’s that I can judge whether my writing is better or worse. Sometimes I realize that even if it’s six pages of bullshit and four wide margins, I still worked out. Writing is a muscle, and you’re strengthening your core.

I am just saying both my grandfathers have taught me a lot about what it takes to be a computer geek and a writer who focuses on art. A lot about what it takes to be neurodivergent in a neurotypical world…. particularly with my father’s father, I feel like a resurrection now that he’s dead. I am certain my father would say that, too, because he’s observed us together his whole life. I, just like him, have leapt in my bedroom to escape all the peopling. Everyone else just worked around us. Now that I’m older and I’m looking at his life in retrospect, the things that seemed weird about him when I was a kid are the exact same things that are making me weird now.

I am dying laughing thinking about how tears will roll down his face at that line. How tears would have rolled down my mother’s, aunts,and uncles’ face as well because I have just revealed the fact that I have both their dad’s numbers because I are them.

“All lesbians have this straight guy side to them…….” -me

Through my father’s father, I know that I have found both of my beloveds in this life, and they are to me. Invaluable and precious just like my grandmother was.

So, when I think about my personality, I am my dad on the inside and my mom on the outside in my behavior and actions. I think like a man, I look like a woman. This isn’t problematic to me because I’ve solved the mystery because now I have a word like nonbinary, where that disconnect doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. I named it and claimed it, sister.

Although I know my first and ony thought at the first sign of breast cancer means rip them both off immediately, because what I saw when I saw Tig Notaro is that it didn’t make her look any less feminine than she did before and my shirts would hang right.

I say this not to say that I’d have top surgery on purpose because I feel I was born in the wrong body. I just know I won’t struggle with body issues afterwards because you cannot even guess how little it would bother me to look male to some people. My mind is big enough to accept that I contain multitudes and no answer is easy…. why most people think I’m the most intense personality they’ve ever met because when they tell me they have a problem, I say, “do you want some advice, or did you just want to vent?” If they say that they’d like advice, I will go Griffin from MiBIII on their asses. I can “if, then” my way through an emotional situation like a doctor, and I do that because of my dad. He left the ministry to pursue a career in medicine and my stepmother is a rheumatologist. They got married and we lived together when I was young enough to pick up their patois quickly and easily. I get lost in a psychological H&P.

So, to get back to what I was saying about fonts, I know what to use and when because I have all the use case scenarios where you have to make readability a priority, and that comes from my dad, too. He preached about it. He said, “when Kennedy was assasinated, it said, ‘Kennedy Shot!’ in about 80pt font. When Jessica (llittlle girl that got trapped in a well) got rescued, the newspaper said, ‘Jessica Safe!’ in about 80pt font.” I don’t remember the sermon verbatim, but it centered on the ways in which bad and good news is delivered. Perhaps it was that you can only control what you broadcast, not what you take in.

When broadcasting your good news, it helps to make readability a priority.

Difficult to Say

October 6, 2023October 6, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Tell us about a time when you felt out of place.

It’s really difficult for me to find a time when I’ve felt out of place, and not because I’m so confident I never do. It’s the opposite. It’s combing through every day of my life to figure out if I can remember a specific story about this, because feeling out of place is almost a continual state of being. I write with confidence and self-assuredness because I am not dealing with social anxiety while I type. You are getting how I sound when I’m alone… not when I’m trying to balance all the energetic forces in a room.

In public, I tend to go out with one person or perhaps meet up with two or three friends at a time. I do not like to go to parties very much, because I find that I only have one mood that likes to party and I don’t know how to get there. I have just been at a party and sometimes enjoyed myself without knowing what I did to deserve the favor. I like overhearing conversations more than I like participating in them. People are interesting to me, and if I don’t know them at all and just overhear them, it’s impossible to identify them on this web site. You won’t meet them, because I don’t even know who they are.

So, to the people at Starbucks and the zoo, I’m listening (trying to bring you Niles and Frasier Crane realness here). I honestly believe that I’ve become a blogger to learn to handle my shit because walking around and hearing everyone else and having my mirror neurons go off makes me feel tired and low-energy. I hurt for what I see around me, particularly homelessness. If I ever have cash, I won’t by the time I get home. That’s because I carry cash a quarter to never and when I do it’s only two or three dollars at a time. I will give it to anyone who asks, because since I don’t carry cash, I don’t often have the chance to give poor people money at all.

If I saw someone buying beer or cigarettes with it, more power to them. I don’t care. The gift was not in seeing what they did with it. The gift was seeing that I may have issues, but being kind is not one of them. But I also notice how long it’s been since they’ve had a shower and I take all that on, too. I empathize with Jacob who wrestled with God. Being empathetic doesn’t incapacitate me, but the struggle constantly disfigures my hip. My blog is a record of the scars.

One of the reasons I wish I’d gone to medical school is that balancing the energetic forces in a room and having your mirror neurons go off at everyone’s pain is the plight of the INFJ. I wouldn’t have gotten in to medical school because sciences and maths aren’t my gift, but I wish I had gone to gain clinical separation. It doesn’t stop an INFJ from doing these things, it just turns the volume down to a point we can take care of ourselves. Our nature says “give it all away.” I am learning to do it on my own just through the nature of becoming stronger in myself. I’ve felt so out of place not being the person to take everything on, and emotional strength is helping me create and maintain boundaries.

Those boundaries are more important to me now than they used to be, because what I’ve realized is that especially growing up queer in Texas I developed a habit of trying to be perfect in all things, do all things for others and not myself, so that people would overlook my deficiency……. because society and culture tells me that there is one. I have tried to be the queer version of the acceptable minority, and now my current favorite documentary is “I Am Not Your Negro.”

I am alive today because of James Baldwin. “Go Tell it on the Mountain” was assigned by my ninth grade English teacher and she had a pretty good idea what was up. I cannot imagine that a black woman teaching in Texas wouldn’t know what she was doing placing James Baldwin in the hands of high school students studying the performing arts. Like no one would pick up on the fact that she was surreptitiously trying to give us a hero without saying anything………….

In education, my experience is that it takes a black soul to reach out to a gay one. Not one of my white teachers ever gave me a gay author except one, and she wasn’t intelligent enough to realize Celie was queer as a three dollar bill (and couldn’t have said it that way even if she did). Because friends totally do that stuff with each other, right? It’s all normal. Totally and completely normal platonic behavior. The difference in tone at the two schools was stunning and had everyhing to do with context. It was like being taught about antiracism from Kendi and Coates, then having to live with Karen’s commentary on what she thinks they meant. Karen hasn’t had to deal with any of the shit on the list.

Black people dealing with internalized racism have a better sense of what internalized homophobia does to a person, and it shows. Sure, lots of black people spew hate at me, too, but it’s not personal. It’s been programmed into them by their churches and most don’t think they’re doing great harm because they think they’re helping me by telling me I’m going to hell.

But I could find that in the white church as well.

Evangelicals all suck, because the opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty (picked that up from Anne Lamott). For the people who aren’t evangelicals, we find common ground easily and often. It helps me find my place in the world to an enormous degree.

I am never trying to be egotistical, just trying to stop apologizing for my existence. I have the rights to thoughts and emotions. Freedom of speech, but not freedom from consequences.

When I sound egotistical on my web site, it does not mean that I am egotistical. The difference is that in person, I am only one piece of the conversation. I do not have a lock on anything except my memory of a situation. Ego doesn’t come into it except when I’m writing about the past. First, I am cognizant that this is only my perception of a situation, and others’ perceptions are just as valid. Second, it’s not your name in the author slot. It’s not my story because I’m all that, it’s my story because you didn’t write it.

I am also projecting confidence because I am aware that I am in front of an international audience, and people who are creating blowback are taking it personally a hundred percent of the time, often castigating me over a sentence that could be construed to have been about them because it reads universal, but it isn’t. Their egos are so involved it doesn’t matter what I say. I do not tolerate their foolishness because my opinion is just as valid as theirs, and I know my own intent. I also know when I’m wrong and I just sit there and take my lumps.

Those conversations generally center on “I AM SO FUCKING ANGRY AT YOU FOR SAYING SOMETHING TRUE IN A WAY I DIDN’T LIKE.” Not once has anyone come up to me and said, “now that I know the whole story, I really acted like an asshole and I’m sorry.” No, they show up on my doorstep full of spit and vinegar and I talk them down off the ceiling if I actually care about them. My tolerance is less these days because it doesn’t help me to have friends that care what I say here.

If I am talking about a univeral concept between abused kids, for instance, someone who is not abused will see it and turn the meaning inside out and backwards and now I’m a fucking terrible person for something I never said. That’s happened quite a lot, and made me feel out of place.

I’m going to close with a Kristina Mahr poem, because it encapsulates everything I’m trying to say to everyone who pops up here….. because generally when people are angry, it’s because I’ve said something that called them out for hurting me.

This web site is my place.

Another World Before Columbus

October 5, 2023October 5, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Your life without a computer: what does it look like?

If your love were taken from me
Every color would be black and white
It would be as flat as the world before Columbus
That’s the day that I lose half my sight
Suzanne Vega

If the Internet didn’t exist, life as I know it would be very different. I still would have gone to Oregon, but I wouldn’t have married Dana. Dana moved to Oregon for an Internet relationship, so without it, I wouldn’t have met her or her former partner (said Internet relationship is a mensch). I went to Oregon for what I thought was family, but I stayed because I made my own. I really did like it more than Texas, and the only reason I say that is even in 1997, no one cared if two women were holding hands if they walked down the street. I walked into all kinds of things (not just a door) seeing cute girls interact. I wasn’t trying to pick anyone up- I just noticed sweet female couples all around me and thought, “I want that.” I might have gone to DC, I might not. This is because Kathleen worked for Global Information Systems. I don’t know what she would do had the internet not been invented, but it wasn’t as prevalent then as it is now, so perhaps we would have still gone to DC because databases don’t need internet connections to function. We could do everything old school- backing up to tape drives and floppy disks if we needed them.

No e-mail necessary.

I wouldn’t have joined AOL chat rooms or Internet Relay Chat, so I wouldn’t have been able to widen my network to the extent that I have now. There are some people I’ve known for 30 years and have never seen their faces in real life. When you’ve got as many complications as I do, and the personality type that I have, being friends online fits better. I can cast a bigger net for people like me. I express my thoughts clearer when I’m writing, but it takes out tone of voice and everything that goes with it. There is also no way to redirect after a sentence or two, also problematic. I type 90 words a minute. You cannot imagine how far down the wrong road I can go before someone calls me on it.

I also would have gotten worse grades in college. If I wasn’t doing so hot, I’d go up to the professor and ask if they needed a web site. Cher Horowitz had nothing on me. It was a jumping off point to start negotiations. I worked my way to an A one blink tag at a time. (That was actually a joke. I made fun of it all the time. When the blink tag was deprecated, it was like working for a restaurant. Web developers were popping champagne while Geocities went apeshit. It was a very good day when the customer realized they were wrong.)

I wouldn’t have gotten a job in IT when I was 19. I started as an Academic Support Assistant in the main computer lab, then eventually got two of my own at different times. The first was the one in the Graduate School of Social Work, where I met Brene Brown and still kid her that the hottest ticket in Houston is being invited to her house to watch her watch “Ted Lasso.”

I wouldn’t have learned that Brene had really done well for herself unless she’d been on television after writing successful books. If I close my eyes, I can literally see her next to Johnny Carson. I think those two would have had a riot together, and I’m sorry it didn’t happen. I do think that Brene would have been successful, I just don’t think I would necessarily know who she was because my introduction was YouTube. It’s not her books that made her famous. It’s the Internet.

The second computer lab I supervised wasn’t for the kids. It was for the professor. I was the only support staff for the entire college when it came to WebCT (distance education software bought by Blackboard), because there weren’t that many professors interested in using it, frankly. It was hard to get buy-in at first. The smartest ones saw that this is where we’re going now. I need to learn this before I have to rely on it. It reminds me of a Netflix president, though I don’t remember their name. “If we didn’t know streaming was coming, we would have called it “DVDs by Mail.”

The worst said “I’m too old for this shit” and tried to pass their course management onto me, because they were far too Important to do it themselves. Male professors treated me like “the help” a good bit of the time. Men are not programmed to see women in IT. I never fit their narrative. What they didn’t know that I did was that I was more man than they’d ever be and more woman than they’d ever get.

Now that I’m 46 I still think that, but I have empathy for not wanting to learn new software now. I have reached saturation, and did a long time ago. What is this “Instagram” you speak of? Seriously, though. I don’t use it. I accepted a Threads invite right away because now I’m using social media to introduce myself to readers (and you, for that matter. The comments section is just as important what I say.). I have to go back and learn what I’ve missed, because you’ve never seen a more “deer in headlights” look when I think about the fact that I haven’t noticed anything since SnapChat.

I started using linux when I started being a web developer, because at the time, Apache was vastly superior to IIS, the Windows version of a web server. In fact, that was about the time I learned how to install WordPress on my own server, which I used as production before I transferred everything to go live. Still a database for content management, which was a game changer in terms of managing web pages. The difference is that back then you also had to know webdev because you had to get a hosting company, install and maintain it yourself, and code all the things that didn’t come with the theme.

I did all of that for my first blog, “Clever Title Goes Here,” but for my second, I decided I was a writer. I don’t have my own hosting company anymore, but I’m thinking about it because I could do so much more with it. My main problem is that in the free tier of WordPress, I don’t have access to what’s called a head tag. That’s where you put all the things you need for web analytics, because if you don’t, WordPress offers a pay-by-month solution for a free product. I understand that it’s the labor dollars to pay the engineers for updates to the plugin, but it’s not necessary for someone who already knows this stuff.

And finally, I wouldn’t have met Supergrover. I’d have been an arrested teenager the rest of my life. I’m angry af at her right now, because her actions are making her look like a jackass and she won’t listen to that. She ramps up my anxiety and beats me up emotionally when I tell her that. It’s not personal. Emotions are for weak people. It’s the only reason she’s even got a shot at redemption, that it’s not personal. She’s a hurt little girl with third degree burns all over her body and she doesn’t realize she’s spreading the fire to me. I cannot say for sure, but either she does this with everyone, or she does it with me because she’s pleases everyone else and I’m the only dog she has to kick. It is generally one of those extremes, and in abused kids it rarely varies. She’s not a narcissist. She’s protecting everything she has left. She doesn’t emote because she can’t access emotions all the time.

It makes her invulnerable and impervious, the things she does in her job that make her piss excellence are killing her when it comes to strength coming to her through her vulnerability instead.

I finally just cut through the silence and told her that her actions made her look like a jackass because she wasn’t giving me the tools to love her or move on. Either way, I’m screwed. She doesn’t get that she made me responsible, and I hear Ben Affleck as Tony Mendez in my head when I say that word, because he’s about to get the houseguests to the airport not knowing if he has tickets for everyone or not. He calls Jack Donovan and tells him he’s going to take them through, and to get his shit together before he gets there. “I am responsible…….” It’s disturbing to think I’ve heard Ben Affleck in my head since 2012, but it is what it is.

As an aside, I love Ben Affleck’s films so much. Argo was great. It won best picture and should have. But Air has the same vibe; it’s set in the same time period, so it’s the same color palate, etc. It is amazing, and I want more from him. Doesn’t he also have a friend that acts or something? Seem to remember something about it in the news. 😉

We could have watched both movies together and bonded in 15 minutes, but we didn’t. Just another cultural reference of mine she never picked up, because intel and science fiction are my bag, not hers. She didn’t even know what I was talking about when I said that Wakanda had a Tolkien case officer. 😉

Her face would light up at the music in Argo because she’s never seen me when I listen to it. Never seen me excitedly say, “OOH! OOH! Listen to this! The horns are about to enter the chat.” I think she would also enjoy my reaction to the bassoon solo in my other favorite movie, which I’m betting only Jack Lucas will know because even I thought it was an English Horn at first. But he’d know it was a bassoon even if I woke him up in the middle of the night. For the rest of you, there’s a correlation between Air and the movie I mean. But I’m not going to tell you what it is because I want to know if Jack knows what I mean first. 😉 He absolutely will.

She doesn’t think about me at all, but not because she’s trying to be an asshole. She just dicks me around because she doesn’t get back to me when she does have time unless I get angry enough at having my needs ignored that I don’t walk on eggshells around her. Walking on eggshells has been my only choice in this matter, and I’m just not going to do it anymore.She took away my right to write whatever I wanted and now constantly ramps up my anxiety that all I’m good for is getting her fired.

She really didn’t have the right to shut down for eight years, but I let her. It’s because I’m emotionally intelligent enough to know why she’s an avoidant attachment style, and she’s not emotionally intelligent enough to deal with it, nor my anxious attachment style on top of it. An anxious attachment style is not bad, per se. It’s bad when people talk to you and you don’t believe them, worrying yourself to death, anyway. This is what I’ve done because she keeps her trap shut and doesn’t give me anything to calm me down. I’ll give you a for-instance. If I say to Zac, “hey, you seem distant. Did I do something wrong?,” he’ll say he’s been slammed and he’s sorry. Now, I can choose to believe that he’s hiding something or not. If I spiral out, that’s on me. He told me what he thinks, and I’m undermining him by not believing what he says.

But you can’t do that with an avoidant attachment style because if they’re being avoidant, they won’t even give you words like, “no, we’re okay. I’ve just been slammed.” For an avoidant personallity if they say them, it could be the truth or it could be a lie. You do not know because their words and actions do not match…. and they’ll leave you in that anxiety til Jesus comes or you die mad about it.

They’re reassuring you while being their avoidant selves at the same time, talking around nothing. It’s the same way that when people meet in the grocery store and say they want to get together. Good luck. God bless.

In short, without the Internet, I don’t have a life. I love her in color, but when she pulls back, I fall into a world before Columbus. I’m not in love with her, it’s just that my life becomes all gray area, all the time. It’s too much pressure and she knows it.

And the more I think about it, that might be a good thing. The jury is still out, and “the hardest part of being a lawyer is convincing 12 K-Mart clerks you’re right.” -John Grisham

About ADHD and Autism

October 4, 2023October 4, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What skill would you like to learn?

I am not picking something I don’t know anything about, but if I start now, I might learn some of the finer points by the time I die. I will never know them all. There is a crossover, and I’m starting to think that I’m more autistic than ADHD. Stopping the Adderrall only convinces me some of the time. I mean, I can list the symptoms I have and they’re all text book……. but they’re also signs of being autistic and trauma reflexes. Even if I went to a doctor, I think my issues are so complex that they would think what I do…. it’s not a case of just one thing. Everything in medicine starts with one diagnosis. Just one.

“It depends.”

That’s why med students are asked for diagnosis, secondary diagnoses, and protocols.

Experts in medicine are not counted by how many As they got in medical school, though if they fuck up, that’s definitely an indication. No, being a superb doctor depends only on what you’ve seen and what you haven’t.

You’ve seen it if you’ve ever watched “House” (it’s not lupus). Those kids go through every dependency like they’re on a bender searching for House’s opioids. They don’t tell you this on the show, but every illness they’re talking about is what’s called a “fascinoma,” probably Latin for “first case” or something. I’m too lazy to look it up, but that’s what it means for lay people, anyway. In law, it’s “prima facie” (pronounced “fa-chee.”). My three fields have dependencies in common. You have no idea how much they matter in Ubuntu.

In all of these things, particularly Ubuntu and medicine, the consequences for being wrong are drastic and cause gastrointestinal distress.

Here’s why I’m specifically mentioning Ubuntu. Most linux nerds have autism. Most nerds, for that matter. You don’t have to be neurodivergent to be a nerd, but neurotypicals, you should know not to intrude on a safe space. You do it all the fucking time by thinking you’re going to be cool and go to ComicCon, but when you get there you’re somehow put off by the other patrons. If you can’t learn anything about the Autism spectrum by observing a Star Trek convention, you’re not paying attention. Neurotypicals seem to live by the slogan “walk softly and carry a big stick.” That’s because you’re perfectly lovely until we do something you don’t understand, and then you get judgmental and sometimes angrily so.

Supergrover definitely didn’t have empathy for it, but at the same time, she didn’t know enough about me to really take it in, because she knows from autism. And she didn’t see any neurodivergence in me not because she wouldn’t, but because she couldn’t. I’m not blaming her, because it would have been totally different if I’d been hanging out at her house for the last eight years. If she’d actually seen me in my day in, day out appearance and mannerisms, she would have had me pegged by the way I walk. Also, I’m not sure that it would occur to her how much crossover there is between me and some of the other people she interacts with on a daily basis. She didn’t get it and not because she didn’t want to. It was impossible to do all that online.

“The medium is the message.” -Marshall McLuhan

I think after a while, we just got so used to our rhythm that meeting up seemed weird, plus I could have more of her if I was only in her DMs because I was the only one traveling with her consistently. I am not sure that anyone e-mails her more than me (by quite a large margin…. and if that’s not true, what I lack in frequency, I make up for in volume.

I wonder if she ever knew I was writing letters to her like a WWII-era high school sweetheart. I didn’t even realize that until today. News from the home front, essentially. I wanted to be one of the pictures taped up in the cockpit, but I never wanted to be the only one unless that was a possibility. Next to her son or something. I don’t know.. Just not left in a box in Virginia.

I know by now that I am every bit the photo I say I am, and here’s how I know that.

She rips me off all the time. We’ve been writing to each other for 10 years. I absolutely know that things I’ve said have entered her lexicon, and she quotes me almost every day. I know they weren’t all bad lines, and hers weren’t either. I think I’ve said “painting my feelings as fact” 50 times since she said it. She says “pack up your toys and go home” now. There are word associations with me by the thousands. This is why I believe that I am her Impossible Girl, woven into her from the inside out. I haven’t changed her because we interact. I have changed her because now our brains are inextricably interrelated because reading someone’s most important thoughts makes them last a lifetime. She has two legacies now…… the one that’s big and impressive, and the one that fucking matters. We’ve been writing to each other for 10 years. I absolutely know that things I’ve said have entered her lexicon, and she quotes me almost every day. I know they weren’t all bad lines, and hers weren’t either. I think I’ve said “painting my feelings as fact” 50 times since she said it. She says “pack up your toys and go home” now. T This is why I believe that I am her Impossible Girl, woven into her from the inside out. I haven’t changed her because we interact. I have changed her because now our brains are inextricably interrelated because reading someone’s most intimate thoughts is different than having a conversation.

Reading things makes you retain information longer than conversation.

It’s just that she’s so busy she cannot retain all of it. I’ve made it impossible. “LORDAMERCY” is a direct quote. 😛 I wish she would just not read it until she had time rather than responding immediately, because writing is what I do, not her. Of course I’m going to have more output than her if I’m workshopping an idea. During one of our big fights about it, I called her out on the carpet and she didn’t respond at all to it. “I told you to create a folder in Outlook and a filter so that my e-mails weren’t coming directly to your inbox, but going into that folder so you weren’t getting notifications for them. It was your choice not to do it. I didn’t expect you to be johnny on the spot, but you were.” That’s because she’s a fixer/pleaser always trying to please me as well.

Interestingly enough, this did not start happening until after I was a total idiot, so I’m wondering if she’s reacting to me like she reacts to her husband now. That nothing is ever good enough for me because she’s trying to please me and doesn’t see that I don’t need it. That gives me more empathy than anger, enough to bring me to tears because if I’d noticed what she was doing, I could have said, “my beautiful girl……. stop. You’re perfect.” And in fact I did try to say that a million different ways, but it didn’t take.

She is so pure- concentrated hope, love, sweetness, and light. She will also eat your face off.

Only my mother knows the whole story, and she didn’t hear it until long after she died. I comforted her and told her she could go, because I was safe. That she never had to worry about me again, both because she couldn’t and didn’t have to anymore. All the mother-love I have in me transferred to her and not as a replacement. Because she has kids. She’s already a mom. She got offended when I said she had that vibe, like it was some sort of joke. Even if I had been joking, I would have meant “I think of you as that vibe because it’s the one I need most desperately.” But it’s a mix. I kidded her later about our past and she destroyed me, not a sick burn that I thought was funny, either.

I told her that, too. Then she got even more defensive. I realize that I dropped an absolute bomb on her, but it’s never about me. Ever. I don’t have needs. I just said something to piss her off. It’s only my behavior, not what triggered it.

But my mother is the only one who knows exactly who I’m dressing down when I do it and she would be horrified. Absolutely horrified. That’s because my mother put a lot of stock into titles. But the rest of the world sees her as her title. In my head, she’s six. Our inner children talk to each other in adults’ voices. (What could possibly go wrong? Editor’s Note: A LOT). I am not sure that she’s taken in that I’m 14 when I talk to her…. and I’m not 14 with anyone else, because I don’t trust anyone else that much. She got in under the wire and disarmed the bomb. You only think my anger management is bad now. She metaphysically hugged and kissed me back together…. but I’m still a work in progmess. I have just begun the process to complete the transition.

Transitioning is a big word in my community. I hope I have a quarter of resurrection in me that my friend Evan has. God, he’s the most beautiful trans boy I know, and a redhead like Zac. Trans people have a lot of crucifixion moments. Lots of Sanhedrins out there, lots of Pilates…… but unlike Pilate, they were never chosen by anyone to have input.

I don’t have contempt for the Sanhedrin, because they were always going to be assholes. I have contempt for people who have the ability to not be an asshole and DON’T. Pilate could have saved all this from happening…. crucifying someone for their words and not their actions, a minority in culture because the Jews were ruled by the Romans. Jesus has more in common with Sandra Bland than he has with Joel Osteen, and please go right up and tell him to his face…. also don’t be an asshole. Put that shit on YouTube and send me a link. 😉

I would give up my life’s savings for that asshole to get a clue. He is a white supremacy Jesus apologist with one of the biggest platforms in the world.

He could overhaul American Christianity………….. but he doesn’t.

What all of this has to do with ADHD and Autism is that I’ve been rambling for 30 minutes without stopping regarding things that excite me because I can. I cannot do this in conversation witih anyone else, and I have stopped trying. No one puts up with it

Even when I can’t help it.

So I have to learn it on my own.

I just want you guys to know that I’m crying right now. Writing these entries take a lot out of me, a tempest in a teacup. Sorry for the cut and paste mess.I left it in because it proved my point.

Let’s Pretend It’s Yesterday

October 2, 2023October 2, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 6 Comments

What’s your #1 priority tomorrow?

Pretending it is yesterday is important because there is no tomorrow. There is only today and making it through. Every year I think it’s going to be different, but it’s not. The anniversary of my mother’s death hits me like a freight train. I don’t forget my mother is dead anymore. I don’t have the three second heartbreak every morning. It doesn’t stop body memory from throwing me for a loop, though.

I think that’s because I didn’t cry at her funeral. I worked it.

I didn’t fall apart until after I’d come back to DC, because I don’t do public grief. Being in show mode cost me, but it was less expensive than what I would have felt if I’d wept openly. No one would have made fun of me or anything like that. Me not emoting isn’t based on other people. It’s based on how I feel about being vulnerable, because my personality seems to believe that empathy only flows one direction at church. I’ve never been a member of a church in my life. Not really. I’ve never turned off that preacher’s kid mentality where it’s not my turn to grieve, it’s the congregation’s. So, at church (regardless of denomination because I haven’t been UMC since 17) I am always in show mode.

After my mother died, I lasted a few weeks at church. I eventually went back, then noped out a second time. I won’t go back unless I’m a paid ringer in a choir, because I can catch sermons on YouTube (or preach them myself by putting manuscripts here). I can find a lot of things at church, but God is not it. Doesn’t make me less spiritual, or make my belief in Jesus’ message less pure. It’s that church, for so long, has only meant “work” to me. Thus, getting paid to be a section leader instead of being an actual parishioner. I’m great at church as a choir member or lay preacher. I’m am absolute shit at sitting there and just taking it all in. Just being a member does nothing for me, because I’m a preacher’s kid. I can’t turn it off. I am not there to serve. I am there to lead, because that’s what i know to do. I got an F in church member. Periodt. Pastoral care is for other people, those that can look at a church without seeing the sausage being made. That tape starts running the first Sunday I attend, because I’ll overhear someone on the vestry or whatever at coffee hour. I can case the joint in 15 minutes and tell you whether the church is healthy or not, because you don’t have to have a degree to know that. You have to have thousands and thousands of hours of observation.

I have them.

My dad said something to me after he left the church that’s always stuck with me, and why National Cathedral is my church now (via YouTube) and why it’s pretty much the only place I want to audition. He said that after he left the church, he just wanted to be anonymous. We ended up at St. Martin’s because they had like, I don’t know, 10,000 members or something? I don’t know what it is, but it’s a lot. Everyone from me to James Baker and George Bush (who I was not that excited to meet……….. as a president. Meeting the former director of CIA was amazing.) Speaking of which, that reminds me of something Zac said. Just replace “church” with “government.”

When I walk into a church, it feels like when Zac says, “I’m a middle aged white man who works for the government. I’m here to help.”

I fall over laughing because it’s funny, AND I’m 10 years older than him and finding out HE’s middle aged was quite a trip. but the point stands. I feel like that on the first Sunday I visit every church. It was so freeing when I stopped doing that.

So, to anyone who thinks I’m an idiot for preaching about Jesus while also not going to church, you and me? We are not the same. You love it because you don’t feel the pull between “this is amazing” and “been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.” I will never fit into a congregation until I can submit and give up an authority I don’t have. That authority was the nature/nurture that raised me, so I’m never going to get there, never ever in my five dollar life, so I made change.

Preacher’s kids come in two flavors. “This is everything I want out of life” and “fuck this shit.” The latter is for second children, and gets stronger the more kids you have. i think the pull to follow in your parents’ footsteps is based on how old your younger siblings are in comparison, because what I’ve noticed is that the longer you spend as the only support staff, the more you feel bound to it. If you don’t become a minister, you’ll marry one because it’s what you know. Do not ever in your five dollar life think I’m bullshitting you about having been support staff, because even if you’re a “fuck this” preacher’s kid, your congregation will still see you as an employee. They can’t help it. The preacher’s kids are divine somehow, way better than their kids.

Having known two of them my whole life, I’m going to go with “that’s a no from me, dawg.” Sending your kids to the preacher’s house because you think we’ll rub off on them is valid………. but what you see is what you get. You just weren’t looking for truth. You were looking at me through the filter of my dad’s platform. I promise that if I’d been a pastor, I would have been every bit as good as he was, because you learn everything by osmosis and then you get a degree you don’t need. Ministry could come through work experience alone. That’s because you’ll learn a shit ton of new things, but old habits die hard. What was modeled is how you’ll be.

The reason I would have been great and not just good is that my father’s forte was going into churches that had been fractured and making them whole, and you can see it clear as day. I am so glad that I did not grow up with a toxic mess of a pastor………. the one who broke the church before him, which has absolutely no bearing at all on my 20s and 30s. Eyeroll (seriously. Biggest one on record).

Pastors, let me scare you a little bit because you need to be aware. If you have the type child that can case the joint like I am, we can tell what kind of pastor you are. If you are a toxic mess, we know it. You cannot hide it. Handle your shit and get help. Do you think we know this because we’re so smart? Fuck, no. It’s because when you’re a train wreck, our behavior makes us political pawns. I know that and I never did anything that as out of the realm of normal teenage girl behavior and I was still in this shit if the finance committee decided to revolt.

They’re mad at you, but they don’t get mad at you. They treat us completely differently as if we can’t read them blind. Their energy has changed. Just because my dad wasn’t toxic doesn’t mean he didn’t walk into a wall of bullshit first.

My mom walked me through that with all the strength she had, so when she died, church didn’t look the same. I didn’t realize how much association there was in it. That when my mother left the church building, God left with her.

I find God through music. Bach is like praying twice. If I have a God moment in church, it’s going to reside in a chord. The ultimate God moment for me is Easter morning at a church like National Cathedral, where they go all out with pipe organ, brass quintet, and full choir. Welcome to my definition of the trinity. Trumpet players act like they’re God, so it’s a shorter leap than you think. 😉

Maybe I’ll use great works in my plans for tomorrow. Listening to music like that heals grief, the only thing I really need.

To close, here is the best Mommy and me moment I own, made for me by my father’s father:

The Other Marriage Article

October 1, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have talked about the unconventional arrangement accidentally made between me and a friend, that we are bound out of loyalty and not romance. That at first, it was impossible for me to remain cool when she was so hot (and boy does that not have anything to do with her looks). She’s married, I’m as settled as I want to be. But just because it’s not romantic doesn’t mean there aren’t a huge set of problems between two people some days.

That relationship led me to thinking about politics, when one of my friends was talking about how the Republicans are the dad.

Republicans are the dad.

Republicans are the dad.

It has become a toxic relationship not because Republicans are the dad, but because they see being kind as soft……………..

They’re treating all Democrats like they treat women.

Toxic masculinity has reared it’s ugly head. I don’t know that people really grasp what happened on 1/6 in terms of intelligence. Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran all saw us shit ourselves on international tellevision.

Get your shit together, Congress.

Toxic men and vegan lesbians are going to have to put away their egos for a second and work together. I think they’re the ones with the biggest egos in the room here, let’s face it.

It is not lost on me that vegan lesbians are a very effective weapon against toxic masculinity- because we aren’t dependent on men for sex. We see right through what you’re doing (before you do) because we had to learn we didn’t want it when we were nine…. and not even the creepy touches. Touching at all. Thinking you’re entitled to hugs and kisses from me.Thinking that my wife nd I exist for your pleasure. I assure you we exist for ours. If that makes you feel bad, it must be so hard to be you. I have empathy for a man. Men do get close to me. Obviously. That being said, as a collective you’re so fucked up I don’t think you could find a clue with both hands and a flashlight.

My favorite fact in life is that the picturesque farm where Langley is built was owned by a lesbian couple before they bought it. So, to me that just says that we have the world’s most sophisticated intelligence agency and lesbians sold them their whole look. You are welcome. Thanks for eventually hiring us. That was rude. I’m sorry. You have made up for it many times with the way you’ve embraced trans people, women in particular. But even though I was a bitch to you, it leads to my next point. Please forgive me, I was on a roll…………. and I know you guys hate when I do that. 😉

It’s not your Alexa that’s dangerous. It’s your microwave. Don’t tell them I told you Pop Secret information. They’ll put me over the stove in a Jiffy.

I think it’s hilarious that men are so bitter that we’re so angry, because what is it in society we could possibly dislike? I mean, we got our own credit cards in the 70s. Straight women will take your crap because they want you and also you have in large part done jack shit to make women less financially dependent on you when it comes to needing money and love. It seems like we have to choose between those two things quite a lot when we need groceries.

It matters when we’re pregnant and vulnerable and we have to nickel and dime you for everything because you aren’t doing the planning for the household and think everything costs a fortune and absolutely go apeshit even when numbers don’t lie. You’ll go off like a bomb and if we’re lucky, we’ll get the money after you’ve come back to reality. If we’re strong enough, we’ll beat your ass (verbally and physically). Not all of us fight the same way, but we’re all furious. We will absolutely go balls to the wall with you and steal your wives while we’re at it (KIDDING, Jesus. Calm it down.).

Traditional marriage is killing this country, because the only people that ever talk about it are the people who are still trying to hold up a system that doesn’t and shouldn’t exist. They hate queers and all the other expletives. In fact, their view of women informs their view of queer men. Queer men are soft. Democrats are soft. Transitive properties that all add up to a disorienting set of problems because they’re tangled as tight as that necklace you left in your underwear drawer when you were nine. There’s no clear path, and we’re trying. It would be helpful to be able to cull laws like old e-mail. To have one set of people working to maintain this system while another tries to create something better. I don’t know what that looks like in total, but I don’t mean switching from capitalism to communism. I want a system more like Canada, which is a capitalist society with a free market that also has a better safety net than we do because they aren’t nickel and diming vulnerable people who have to choose between love and money.

They don’t have it all figured out yet, either.

But they’re in mediation and we’ve literally got guns on the table.

Republicans are trying to be the husband that slaps his wife around. The party of no. Led by a naked, soulless, incompetent, greedy imbecile that those people think is an Emperor.

Democrats cannot stop violence by being passive all the time because we’re getting asses handed to us on most things. That’s because we don’t want to respond with violence and peace doesn’t work. It’s a gridlock.

We need a restraining order, because there comes a time in every abused person’s life when they’re just done. That’s where I am now. Just done. It’s not that I won’t vote and volunteer and all that stuff. It’s that I have burnout because I’m not moving the needle, and really no one is on a grand scale. Realistically, how long do you think it will take white supremacy to fade if we start working on right now? My guess is at least a century or perhaps two. I do not mean working on it legislatively. Legislatively does a quarter of nothing for me. That’s because Congress reflects culture, it doesn’t create it. If there is no culture for something irregular, we will not legislate it into being.

We are stuck in this, from the global to the personal. This is just unsustainable, and I am shocked at how many people think it is.

Because all of us, women and minorities, have to ask daddy for everything.

First and Second Chair

October 1, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

In what ways does hard work make you feel fulfilled?

The title is a music reference, because when you’re the lead trumpet player, depending on where you live it’s called “first chair” or “first desk.” Everyone has a chair, and they’re ranked. Yes, I have been as low as 7th chair. I wish I’d done better on that audition. But I was 7th in the city of Houston. Beat that with stick.

I was also 13 years old.

I am not a prodigy. I make a lot of mistakes. I’ve splatted wrong notes on the back walls of MOST Houston auditoriums, but a time I didn’t and it went really well, I was on a television show called “Black Voices.” I was a soloist during Summer Jazz Workshop. Didn’t make it less funny when I was on camera. I am just picturing all my black friends falling over with laughter right now. “You were on what now?” My favorite was the logo over my big ass glasses.

Another time it went really well was when I was in one of the jazz bands (I was in Jazz II. I told you I wasn’t a prodigy. But again, different playing field. You know who else was in Jazz II? Robert Glasper from “The Robert Glasper Experiment.” and Jon Durbin from “The Suffers.” If I’d stuck with it, maybe I’d have a Tiny Desk Concert of my own, but I sincerely, sincerely doubt it. I loved performance. I was unconvinced by hard work. It’s not because I didn’t want to do hard work. It’s that my embouchure was wrong (how you set your jaw and ilps), which made practicing for more than a half hour complete murder, and it’s good concerts don’t last that long because I’m not sure I would have made it through all of them, either. For that reason alone, symphony was wonderful for me because in general, trumpet parts in classical music alternate between resting for 200 measures and the most majestic clarion call you’ve ever heard. It feels like being a goalie when your team is superb.

Most of the time, everyone is on the other end of the pitch, but when it’s your turn, you come up BIG. You have to have enormous balls for classical music, because a random eighth note high A in the middle of nowhere and perplexingly alone is not uncommon. The other thing s that I could hit a high A out of nowhere, but it may wander a bit in pitch from left to right until I find dead center. In classical music, this is not an option. It must be crisp and clean, every note tapered. The hard work was never the notes, though. The hard work for me was in reading music the first time accurately, which takes thousands of hours to learn how to do.

I have never been so relieved in my life than when I went to a huge ass choir competition in high school. The sight reading portion was lifted straight out of the United Methodist Hymnal. It was the first time in my life I had “sight read” anything so perfectly. And no, I did not tell anyone…. no trumpet player (or soprano, for that matter) would tell you they had an edge at something. Trumpets are line cooks. Sopranos are line cooks with nail polish.

I got into choir the same way. I auditioned, and I got into the junior varsity choir. I asked the choir director, “are you sure? I’ve done major works at my church…. messiahs and requiems and all that stuff.” Believe me, questioning her was the hardest work I’ve ever done, but I came up big. She gives me this contemptuous look and throws a Handel at me. Hard. Then, she picks the most exposed, most difficult entrance she can find……………… FOR HER. Bitch, I earned this. She thought she was so clever, but I’d been in the adult choir for three or four years by this point. You know what you do EVERY SINGLE YEAR? The Messiah, or at least highlights. Few churches put on “the whole thing” (in quotes because even that is redacted most of the time by taking out optional sections. It’s long. It’s really, really long. And you do “The Hallelujah Chorus” occasionally at Easter as well. This was not a piece with which I was unfamiliar. I’d memorized the highlights by now…. and if I could explain my voice type, it would be “Charlotte Church as a teen.” My voice (and hers) has matured, but still what people at Bridgeport used to call my “high, high, fluty voice.” I drove that audition like I stole it, and I was the first person in the history of Clements to be in varsity band and choir at the same time.

I’ve just noticed I sound like an obnoxious dick. It goes with the territory, but I figure I can tell you I’m good at something when I’ve spent so much time telling you all the ways in which I need to get it together and how my life is an emotional dumpster fire of my own making a lot of the time.

Additionally, I gave up trumpet a long time ago. I’ve taken prescription meth for a very long time (Adderall or Concerta, depending on what release schedule we’re doing this month……… eyeroll……..), and it has been murder on my jaw and teeth, just like for junkies. Therefore, playing my horn is painful because of the sound vibrations. The fact that I don’t play anymore has not occurred to the rest of my personality, because I have turned ego up to eleven when I need it. The key words are “when I need it.” I don’t need to walk around DC feeling 10 feet tall and bulletproof all the time. I’m sure that if I dressed like a baller I could walk into any meeting anywhere and fake it. You cannot convince me for love or money that I do not have the smarts to be a Rep or a Senator. Not possible anymore. But I have the mental acuity to do the job. I am woefully unelectable, mostly because I would hate every minute of campaigning. I would frustrate the fuck out of my support staff because my answer to every problem would just be “let’s skip it. There will be people there. ” But if I was in Congress doing the job, I’d be as diligent as ADHD allows you to be, and on my worst day I would wipe the floor with Y’all Queda. I’d probably be censured by my own party for my language, but nothing I said would be untrue. Congress has issues and they scare me. The legislation doesn’t matter right now. The people are sub-par, and that’s okay now.

Because of all of these experiences (except working in Congress. I was a political science student, so I know about working in that part of Washington, I just don’t.), writing sets me on fire. I’m old enough now that I really have stories. It’s age that gives me credibility now, because I don’t have letters to fall back on. Graduating from college has been a shit show because I am barely capable of working a full-time job and going to school. I should have stayed the extra year in Houston to finish up, but I had a partner with a very lucrative job offer who said “go to George Mason. it’s right across the road.” I didn’t even get a chance to enroll and register for classes before that deal fell apart.

Besides, I got my money’s worth, anyway. I wasn’t one of Brene Brown’s kids at Graduate School of Social Work, but she was one of mine when I was the supervisor of their computer lab. I actually got into the Graduate School of Social Work contingent upon my BA. I’d just helped the Dean figure out a very complicated computer issue and she was very grateful. But I didn’t get into GSSW based on that issue. It was based on the conversation I had with her while trying to fix it. I always chat about nothing because people have no idea what I’m doing. All they hear is “blah, blah, blah, I’m done.” So, we engage in small talk and she’s the Dean of the GSSW and I’m an INFJ. I didn’t get in because of what I do. I got in because of who I am.

The thing is, though, I’d forgotten all about it because all I heard from Kathleen was “blah, blah, blah let’s go to DC.” And if I had thought about it, it wouldn’t have changed my mind because unless I’m at my family’s house and never leave to do anything, Houston feels like a toxic mess. The only exception to this is that Lindsay still lives there and introverts don’t make friends. An extrovert adopts you and drags you into public.

That’s the hard work right there. Being industrious enough to make my own friends and get my own dates. It took a lot of courage to lay it all out in front of Zac and say “this is what I’m dealing with, are you in?” In fact he was. ❤ The added bonus is that Zac told me that he was military intelligence the second time I met him, but not the first. So, I actually was brave enough to get my own date that time and manifested a really great partner, because my interest in intelligence doesn’t come from him. It just provides us with “intelligent” conversation.

He doesn’t emotionally overload me and I don’t do it to him. That’s because I process like a lesbian all day and by the time it’s evening I do not give a fuck about my feelings. (I just laughed so hard I would have made Oliver jump straight in to the air if he was here.) Zac doesn’t hear my bullshit, because I don’t need him for that. In fact, it’s great when he opens up to me about his problems, because I’ve spent enough time on myself.

Editor’s Note: Straight women are crazy. Absolutely insane. Why do you not date bi men when you’re all over gay men like white on rice? I would bet A LOT of money that my boyfriend smells better than yours and I’ve never even met him. Remember when we used to have a special term just for straight men who bathed? Straight women worry a whole, whole lot when his ex is male. They can save a lot of time and energy by not doing that.

Also, I’m a good enough writer that I could have gotten into a GSSW anywhere. You see all the stream of consciousness crap, but I clean up nice. 😉 I sometimes feel bad that you’re getting the B-sides and rough drafts, but at the same time, this is the hard work (said in Kristen Bell’s voice). Blogging is writing as a valid art form. It is a lesliecology of brain droppings in which I can cherry pick the best lines I’ve come up with and use them elsewhere. So much of my writing comes from e-mail and Facebook comments because I’m reflecting on something that someone else said, or something I’ve written previously works even better in another context. Making the commitment to write every day without fail. I got up to 63 days before I broke my streak for one. This is because writing is a muscle. I will not be a good writer until I can write in any mood, in any situation, in any anything. Creativity is a grind, and I will not be where I want to be without woodshedding, a music term that extrapolates nicely here.

When you’re practicing, some parts of a piece are really easy. The notes, that is. You still have to craft a narrative and that’s where the work comes in. That being said, you have to be technically accurate before you can craft the narrative, so you isolate the four measures in which you’re really going to be screwed during a concert if you miss. In a symphony, you have moments where if you miss a note, it won’t be noticeable because there are 150 people playing next to you. At others, there are three. When you’re out there all by yourself, it is frankly really fucking scary. You learn to manage, but it doesn’t go away.

Through voice lessons, I’ve become a phenomenon with singing comparatively.

It’s not how good of a singer I am, it’s what a train wreck of a trumpet player I was. I mean, obviously, there are high points to when I was living that life, but I feel so much more at home in my body as a singer because apparently the large amount of metal in front of my face was blocking my talent.But now that I’ve worked really hard in all things, given my whole heart to everything and everyone I’ve ever loved, I only have one thing left to say.

I am fulfilled.

Second chair no longer exists.