Tag: storytelling

A Comprehensive Response

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I blog, therefore I am healthy.

Writing is a comprehensive response to life. That is true no matter what kind, but particularly blogging because the story moves forward every single day, because it’s a choice to post, not a responsibility. I do not feel like I have an audience to whom I owe anything. If I needed to, I’d push the red button and everything would be gone. Nothing threatens you if you don’t need something out of it. I would be giving up a lot, but I wouldn’t stop writing. It’s a huge deal to be a blogger, because people cannot predict what you’ll remember and think they can.

Someone might be totally freaked out and barking up my tree not to write about them, but what they don’t know is that if I can’t make an illustration out of them that works, I won’t. Not everyone makes a good character. Telling them that is worse than blowback, because their ego gets involved. What do you mean, I don’t make a good character?

I feel like I handle this better than most after coming out to straight people without a clue. You’ll never see a more butt hurt child than when they’ve told a gay person they don’t like them “that way” and the person says “you’re not my type.” They are horribly offended in the most hilarious of ways. It is more than physical attraction, and they’ve taken your rejection as if you think it isn’t.

My straight girl crush was because I was struggling in my marriage and it was easier to feel high as hell on new relationship energy than it was to deal at home. She is drop dead gorgeous and it didn’t mean anything to me because I wasn’t looking at her picture while I wrote. She was the equivalent of my “corporeally challenged celebrity girlfriend on the radio.” (I went on a date with a woman from OPB/NPR… maybe two… but this is what Dana and I called her for 15 years.) I could have a crush on a straight girl because it couldn’t go anywhere. I’d get all the good stuff without all the bad except I didn’t. My trauma bond screamed with empathy because she didn’t give me a slap bracelet after the fire.

When I say that someone makes a bad character, I mean that when I write about you, the emotions fall flat on the page. If I can’t make myself feel anything, no one else will feel it, either. If you go back to my older entries, you’ll be able to tell when I’m distressed. I can, but I also have the memory of writing the piece if it’s so overwhelming it made me sob. People think I get really angry when I’m actually crying my eyes out. I am literally pouring myself out onto the page so that I have an accurate idea of how my mental and physical health are treating me. I realize when I’ve been too harsh. I realize when I’ve been too nice.

What makes Supergrover such a great character is because when I write about her I can cry. Not many people evoke emotion in me like that because I just won’t get vulnerable enough. When I write about my beautiful girl, I step into a museum with ten years’ worth of collected art. Some of it was bought and paid for. Some of it we stole in a heist. We’d push and pull and tumble and roll, but for whatever reason, we didn’t cut each other off. That’s because the museum had no easily accessible exits.

I became exhausted because bringing up conflict and it never getting resolved was eating my self-esteem for every meal.

It was very, very confusing because we’d have a fight and she’d say we were done. When I assumed she meant it, I’d try to move on and then she’d drop in. When I assumed that she was just angry af and apologized, it was perceived as me trying to get attention. She would tell me that she told me it was over and I just pushed, but I have two solid memories that stick with me.

The first was a huge fight that really was the end of it for me. Like, I am just not capable. She reads on my blog that my dad is having surgery and checks in. I was pleased, but I felt weird about it because I thought, “surely she sees why this would be problematic.” It felt like “leave me the fuck alone, but I’m going to make sure you know I’m watching.” It has never gotten any more resolved than this, because when she dropped in on me, it was fine. When I dropped in on her, she felt creeped out because she thought it was me saying “I’m always watching.” It happened again when we had another blowout and I thought maybe then I’d get a break long enough to figure out what really happened. Someone said something to her that reminded her of me, and she was back in my DMs.

Neither one of us could break the connection, just “tumbling through a freefall, no one’s going to go unscathed….. but it’s not because you held back, and it’s not how I behaved.” Now I’m humming…. “and I believe that underneath it all, you are my friend. And the way that I fell for you, I’ll never fall that way again. I still believe despite our differences that what we have’s enough” because I believe in her (and I believe in love). You know I have the ability to cry about this if I’m writing and suddenly quote Indigo Girls.

I told my friend Missy that I didn’t even listen to them for the longest because it created a “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” amount of “AS IF I’M NOT WEIRD ENOUGH.” I had a stereo in my room. Their albums didn’t leave when I did for years.

Now, one of my favorite songs is “When We Were Writers.”

Writing is not what Supergrover does for a living, but she does write in her spare time to get away from work. She’s right. It’s a bubble, When I say that I can’t do something or I have to go because I’m writing, it is taken every bit as seriously as when Lindsay says, “I’m going on a run.” Nothing else is more sacred than spending time alone so you can actually hear your thoughts.

With a virtual relationship, you never have to feel alone. That’s because their physical presence has never been needed. The relationship wasn’t created that way. We’d become each other in our work, borrowing style, structure, and tone. It was quite sophisticated in retrospect. It’s amazing how much we were able to do for each other virtually, and now everyone knows it because of the pandemic. We were virtual BEFORE IT WAS COOL.

We’d trade off being The Holy and The Moly.

We both went scorched earth too much when it was infinitely possible to just be out with it and either be done or decide we have something and work toward it. My emotions were larger than hers and always have been. She absolutely knew this. But I do not think that she ever thought that she’d be reopening a wound if she reached out. My part in all this is that because my feelings were large, I ignored everything bad and just kept on believing that one day, I’d find the combination of words that would unlock her. In my mind’s eye, I’m 14. She’s six. I’m older, and I should have known better.

When you know better, you do better. Maya Angelou’s words, but true for me as well. I don’t even know if she likes Coke, but she has a unique name and I knew for damn sure she wasn’t going to find a “Share a Coke with…..” bottle anywhere. So I ordered her one from Atlanta. There were actually six. One with her actual name, one with her character’s name, her husband, her kids, and her dogs. Except the Coke bottle said “Boytoy” on her husband’s because that’s how we referred to him. She never saw them, because I mixed up the address and put my name on the wrong part of the form. So they got a box addressed to me for a reason completely unknown to them and returned it. I was furious because it cost so much to do, but I was only angry at myself for mixing up the web form. It was so unique, and ADHD fucked me. I was absolutely miserable because it was the nicest thing I could think of to do virtually because I’d been a jackass. It was the friend equivalent of having to sleep on the couch and buying chocolates and flowers to beg.

Since she wears suits and crap for work, she also travels sometimes. I sent her a bracelet with a charm for her favorite cause. She told me it was perfect and sent me a picture of her wrist. I feasted on that for weeks because now I could go wherever she was, metaphysically. She just isn’t the sort of person that would tell me where she went, because it’s not important in her daily life and that’s really what I wanted to hear. I don’t care how she’s doing professionally. I care how she’s doing emotionally. I am the red telephone where she is concerned. Even now that we’re done I won’t hear a bad word about her because my friends don’t care about her. They care about me. They don’t recognize how much she gave me because even I’ve never heard her side of the story. I couldn’t make anything better. She was looking for hurt, so she found it.

The bracelet said to me that as long as I kept my behavior consistent, she’d know that my drug protocol was working , and not to worry if I spiraled out, that it had nothing to do with her. It had to do with my mental health, and no one else is in charge of managing it. I know when to go to the ER/psych ward. If that doesn’t end up being the whole story, still not her damage. Blame poor health and bad medicine, not the patient.

It all seems scary to people the way I lay it out because I’m dispassionate. I have a disease. It has to be managed. People need to know they’re off the hook for checking in on me, because when mental health issues pop up, if I don’t do anything that’s my fault.

“Oops. My bad. Should I leave a note?”

Wow. That was dark, even for me. I’m mostly fine, so that’s not an indication that things are about to get worse. It’s just a reality check. Run the numbers, don’t diagnose me.

I am awaiting the cause of Sinead O’Connor’s death. I think I already know what it is…. and no matter what it is, you don’t die at 56 of natural causes.

I don’t want to know, but I ran the numbers.

Here’s the other thing you need to know. You cannot guess what mood I’m in, or whether I’m experiencing depression or hypomania in my work because I write about things that have already happened and I’m searching for the road ahead. I map out what I feel now to plan for what I’ll feel later. It’s not because I know you better than you, it’s that I have to decide how I’m going to react to our next interaction based on past history. I will know whether it’s time to stand up for myself or apologize with fancy Coke.

However, I did not just send a gift and assume that she’d take it as “I’m sorry.” It’s just that her love language is action and mine is words of affirmation. I compromised, she didn’t. She could respond in her own love language, but she couldn’t meet me halfway and talk about her feelings. I never knew which way was up. It’s just not fair to leave someone in that much confusion because my need was being rejected. I needed her to show up, be present in the moment. Instead, her responses were dismissive or angry. Meanwhile, I’m trying to do things that make her less angry and annoyed, but I couldn’t because I was guessing all the time. I got done with guessing way too far past my breaking point. She had enough information to blow up my life, not the other way around. And yet she saw me as a threat without realizing she felt like one to me, too. We were in the same boat, just back to back.

She is the Aunt Voula. I am the Toula. She will be everyone’s favorite and I’m okay with that because she’s my favorite, too. We’re in that weird age gap where I’m not young enough to be her kid, but not an average age between siblings, either.

In the beginning, she treated me like an equal. After fights, she treated me like a pest. It is my fault I treated her badly, and her fault that she never got over it.

The problem isn’t even that she “never got over it.” It’s that she is free to be someone who decides how they feel about you on a daily basis for someone else. It was chaotic and I was tired of the swings.

It wasn’t good for my mental and physical health.

How Am I Working?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What do you listen to while you work?

When I am writing, I have two modes. The first is complete silence, sometimes with a blocker like white noise or several fans in the room. The second is listening to either the soundtrack to Argo or The Bourne Supremacy. It has to be spy music, and it has to be Middle Eastern in nature. I don’t write about spies in my daily life, but the music translates into everything else because it’s mathematically quick when my brain isn’t. It jogs things I wouldn’t have thought about on my own. It is basically making my thoughts compete to the rhythm and tempo of the music.

When I’m doing chores, I like to listen to rap or hip hop. Sometimes angry country where women kill their husbands. It’s not hilarious if you haven’t lived in the South and grown up on these jokes…. like how in Texas, we don’t get divorced, we just have big backyards……… thus the joke about Bryn having a yard large enough to *garden.* I may not ever put a ring on her finger, but good luck proving she’s not mine. With us both being bisexual, I can’t prove one way or the other what’s going to happen, and there are too many complications to figure it out so why try? The story will unfold either way, and both of us are happy right now having other partners and just leaning on each other the way a best friend would. To think that is more important than having a romantic partner is crazy because I will never find a better friend. We undervalue friends in our society, and to me it’s your other marriage because you can’t go to anyone else the same way you can with them because no one else catalogues the books in your library.

Right now, there is an entire reddit thread of people who are crying over bff divorces, people who feel exactly the way I do about Bryn. No one is her, no one will ever be her, she broke my heart in third grade and I’m still not over it, et cetera. Third grade and you’re 55? Yes, let’s make sure that never happens. If I want her, I need to act like it.

We are learning how to love each other and be strong women at the same time, which is actually a bigger deal than everyone else might think, because being lost in trauma bonds constantly makes us doubt that the other one is sincere. I, like her and Michael, am stuck fighting her on letting me love her….. and she’s sharpening her weapons to take care of me because we are The Timeless Child. I will not tell you her story, because she is starting to believe that she needs to tell it herself and I have the platform to allow her to do it.

I realized I had told her how much I loved her because she could see how big a decision it was to add an author on my platform, responding by making my platform even better. She has a completely different writing voice and reminds me to be happier. I could return the favor.

We both run the gamut between reading a room and making those observations float into our echo chambers. We pick up the negative emotions in a room first, because we are programmed to respond to everyone else’s unhappiness because we are trying to keep our secrets. We are in protective mode of our spirits and bodies. This is not a problem. We have taught ourselves that we are worth protecting. The echo chamber just makes the negative emotions feel bigger and scarier than they really are because the boss music is playing, but they (jointly and/or severally) can’t touch us because we also have good boundaries.

Bryn will have my undying emotion forever, just an eternal soldier’s flame because our emotions run so deep they stack like a sandwich. That’s because she studies animal behavior just as closely as human behavior and she takes in all the things about homo sapiens that we cannot see. Her book title is literally “All the Dark We Cannot See.” Bryn “grew up with me” starting when I was 19 years old. So if our mutual friends want to start sweating bullets, this is where they should start.

Fuck them and their little cult of adoration. They just make me even more glad I got away from them and have spent the last 10 years worshipping the goddess who made me see what a nightmare you’d all become, because the people that do nothing are culpable.

This goes back to when I was 12.

My confusion and horror started then (but horror came later when I really understood its aftermath, but that’s what causes the panic attacks…. buy now, pay later). I was 12, and you very much weren’t. This is the call of The Timeless Child. It never changes, and it never gets better, because our abusers have taught us to beat the system and we do it whether we want to or not because we’re trapped. You have to identify, and you’re bad at it……………… because you don’t study animal behavior and Bryn does. I swear to fucking Christ, if you want to find an abuser, don’t hire a detective. Hire a dog trainer and I fucking mean it.

That’s because the child is acting just like a dog. Frightened behavior leading from the abuser making them alpha dog, and everyone else are puppies they have to take care of or their lives get worse. We will protect ourselves forever to avoid emotions and it goes two ways. They generally marry each other. The first is the one that cuts off all their emotions. The other is the one that bleeds out. One only takes care of themselves. The other can’t get out of bed in the morning, they’re so emotionally laden.

For the former, the sins of the world do not affect them. For the other, they’re the caretakers. They want everyone to feel safe and work toward it happening. It all stems from animal behavior. One becomes Black Panther, the other becomes Erik Kilmonger.

It will never vary unless you break the cycle. Bryn and I found each other. Instead of trying to handle someone’s emotions because they don’t have any by choice, we’re handling someone’s emotions that will handle ours. It’s a radical concept, being healthy and responding in a way she can hear it because I’ve found out that we’re the same person. Trying to love someone who can’t hear it is exhausting.

Although, I will tell my beautiful girl to reassure her that one of her three word e-mails cut me in half because that was the moment that all her love flooded into me at once and I realized that her feelings were large and I shouldn’t have blown it (for the 345454354354435345435th time). It’s one of the times I can quote her because it’s so innocuous:

“Also. Thank you.”

There was a big goddamn thank you because when she is humble she is fucking quiet. You can hear a pin drop.

Those words reverberated and she didn’t take in that part of it. She only took in the part where the consequences for me were vast and I also expressed unhappiness about it because it was a more complicated issue than I thought it would be. No support, no commiseration, no anything.

Just another confusing moment that could have been cleared up and just won’t. I don’t have to be sad about it, because I’ve let it go. But I just won’t go into a relationship expecting that someone understands they need to respond when their actions have caused pain and lift me up so that I can deal. I’m tired of dealing with people who are content to let me struggle. It is more work than I should be allowed to take on without positive reinforcement. That there are certain things I will do for you as long as you are doing certain things for me. That a relationship is a balance between anger and love and what we feed is what we get. I have absolutely been the villain in one case and the victim in another. I get that I’m not going to be the hero in every story and I’m tired of catering to people who think they’re the whole story. I was just willing to bend more on this one because first of all, when I was wrong I was really wrong. Secondly, when she was wrong she was really, really wrong as well. Neither of us could hear love very well, and we both focused on “everything was bad.” I thought she didn’t express herself enough to be clear over time, because saying everything was fine and withholding love was devastating because she’d gone from sunshine to cold, but not really. It was a spectrum as well, so I was feeling her out a lot of the time because only her annoyance would come through and she’d withdraw, then come back and make me wonder why she was reaching out if she was always so angry.

I found someone who is not always so angry.

We have music in common and listen to a lot of the same things. I’m looking forward to collaborating with her because I know she’ll only make me a better writer because I’m responding to her.

I know it to be solid because I have been smart about responding to my beautiful girl as well. I have learned how to be me by learning what I both do and do not want. Both lessons were just as important. I need to find the people that will forgive you over and over without shutting down, because I will always be human and so will they. I will give them the responsibility of helping me manage my emotions because I am offering that as well. The way I think of you rubs off. You’ll find yourself feeling better about who you are because I’ve told you that you do matter in a way that you can hear it. It’s the basis of something healthy and sustainable. It was where I thought Supergrover and I were going, because I’d been that for her before. But because I had hurt her, it wasn’t that she was malicious, it was that she was one type, and I was the other. But our behavior lined up. We could zipper our DNA, because it was permanently sealed when we were kids. She cuts off her emotions, I become the frightened dog. It’s how we’re programmed and she couldn’t see it.

That’s why the ostinato is “help her anyway.” I’m hoping that in time, she’ll realize we were just wrong for each other from the beginning because we couldn’t take care of each other once there was a schism. There was a power dynamic in all areas because there was a solid one in place from something that was pure.

She approached me like a dog as well. Loyal to a fault. Sniffed my hand and decided I could pet her head. Let me hold her leash. Would heel to an enormous degree and bark at everyone else. I did something to offend her, and the bark turned toward me for every conflict for all time because she had something concrete she could use and so did I. We just became two different types of dogs and couldn’t break the cycle.

It didn’t stop me from loving her and wishing for something healthy. We’d just gone too far into the woods and gotten lost from each other. It was a conflict like a dog being too heavy to carry who’d gotten injured. I was working on pure adrenaline, and my energy had run out six trees ago. But I never stopped loving her. Not once for one moment. I could get angry enough to tell her to fuck off for all eternity and never in six billion years mean it. I’d just get tired of dealing with her anger and confusion bullshit that I needed a fucking break. Any break in that pattern would cause unrest because she started to feel a push/pull that I didn’t. I knew she could be alpha dog if she wanted, and she was unsure. It was terrifying because when I had a conflict with her, she reacted as if I was trying to hurt her and not trying to get her to pay attention to the fact that it hurts me when she pulls back and it shouldn’t feel like an obligation because it shouldn’t hurt when I pull back, either. That’s because we both know where we stand at all times because we’re both emoting good and bad things.

Alternatively, I have the choice to believe whether she means good or ill and react appropriately. Everything doesn’t need to be put through the ringer of bad or good behavior and I overexplain because it’s a trauma response. But she never learned that I needed to tell her everything because that’s who I am.

Her self esteem went up and down as we talked because she decided that I would always be a threat. My trauma response irked hers and we were connected at the brain despite the fact that we brought out the worst in each other. I will be sorry about it for the rest of my life, but I will not think we should have continued hurting each other, either.

That’s why I want her man to be the best he can be. It’s not that I can’t be the shorter, more female version of him, just someone who cares about her without reason or rhyme because it’s so crazy solid and immense. It’s that she won’t let me be him anymore, because she’ll never see me like that again. It was a painful goodbye because it had to be. I would never walk away unless I felt it was necessary. Her words didn’t ring true consistently and she would say the same thing. It’s just that I was looking for desperately needed love and she was looking for desperately needed anger and guilt. We focused on all the wrong things, and I sat with the bees and cried while she felt justified in treating me this way because I’d always be an asshole.

What she confided in me was never the problem, because she never focused on what I was actually saying.

I will always love her a crazy amount, just beyond all measure because she proved to me every day she was worth it and wouldn’t acknowledge why I saw that. She thought she had too much sludge in her soul to be mine, and I thought I was sitting next to Christ in a hallucination. That’s funny because she’s an atheist.

I will never forget finding my person. The one I was meant to love like this. She wasn’t meant to be my Jamie. She was meant to be my Jenny, and she let me go………… but we’ll always be the same person on the opposite ends of the spectrum because we acted like dogs.

…………………..and Bryn is a dog trainer.

The Wood Song

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment 
...but the wood is tired 
and the wood is old
And we'll make it fine
if the weather holds
But if the weather holds
we'll have missed the point.
That's where I need to go......

Here’s what you need to know about Zac.

The journey I wouldn’t have taken led me to where I actually needed to go.

If you have to date someone, make sure it’s the kind who reads a blog entry about them trading off holding their dog’s leash and when you get to their house, say, “we should get a picture of you going up the hill because you’re holding Oliver’s leash.” My heart melted on the spot and I will never recover. He’s listening, perhaps a little too well. I’m not used to it, and small kindnesses enter an echo chamber as well. It’s not because I’m distorting them. It’s that the small things *are* the large things. He’s not threatened that I’m a writer and we’ve actually sat down to discuss those boundaries before anything pops up. So you’re free to know that yes, I’m dating a man ten years younger than me because I had no idea how old Zac was when I asked him out and being a cougar is an added bonus. In every lesbian’s life, there is a point at which they stop chasing cougars because they realize they are them. I will let your mind wander as to when I decided that was a real thing.

It was just too wholesome, and the whole weekend was allowing each other room to be us, without diminishing either. Most of our weekend was spent outside. There was this hike, but he also has an Olympic-sized neighborhood pool that looks a lot like the one where I took a picture of Human Oliver. We had access to grills and a griddle, and we took sausages both days. One had a central American vibe, like jack cheese and peppers. The other one was loaded baked potato, and I have never had anything like it. The texture was incredible. I cannot see myself as being so interested in sausage that I actually bought the stuff to make it, but there wouldn’t be another sausage I did make that didn’t have mashed potatoes in the recipe somewhere.

I had my new favorite drink this weekend, a non-alcoholic beer called “Chelada Nada” by Athletic. The black pepper and lime go as hard as alcohol, so you’re not missing the bite. Chelada is basically Bloody Mary Mix and beer, so if you didn’t “grow up” on it, kind of an acquired taste. Very, very popular in northern Mexico/southern Texas.

That was the other funny part. I ate a HUGE meal before I got on the train because last time my downfall was being handed alcohol on an empty stomach. Then, I had several beers and the NA Chelada beat the pants off all of them. It appeals to my little cook heart, because how in the fuck did Athletic do it? Seriously? I am ACTUALLY looking forward to your letters on this one as opposed to using a line Craig Ferguson said on The Late Late Show almost every night during its entire run.

We also spent time on the back deck just talking, sometimes sitting in the hot tub, sometimes sitting at the table with all our vices sat between us.

Life happened while we were doing something else.

Life taught me how to stop with all that lesbian shit, and I don’t mean that nearly as horribly as it sounds. Not everything has to have a conversation or processing about something. Part of it is that our relationship is not heavy. Part of it is that women are generally much more into talking about feelings. With Zac, I’m not all up in my head unless we’re doing our own thing.

It’s funny that we’ve had the same trauma dump you start in the beginning of every relationship because we’re getting to know each other……………… we’re just not handling it the way two women would do. When I am listening to Zac, I am not hearing a monologue of “how does this affect me?” My opinion of myself is not going up and down when he talks. I am not holding back information because I’m not sure of his reaction, or going to the other extreme and saying too much. We both have moments of expounding, and both allow for it.

I don’t want to marry Zac, but he let me know that marrying a man is possible. It’s not that I wasn’t bisexual, it’s just been the wrong situation. It has also been a journey. I’m not the same person I was when I was 25. Bisexuality does not always refer to having two partners, although some people construe it to be that. No, it’s that when you look over your entire life, you are probably bisexual. There is no such thing as an ex-gay. There are only bisexuals with people they trusted. Bisexuality is not my Sam Axe/Chuck Finley. It’s why I will never date another straight man, even if they were a person of color. It’s not the same.

Even if my husband and I were completely monogamous and had heterosexual privilege, the memories of bullying remain. We have the same reflexes. I still look around to see who’s watching before I kiss him. WHY WOULD I DO THAT?

Realizing that little tidbit was a fucking treat. It’s a trauma reflex. Zac understands that when he’s really affectionate in public, it is pushing the needle too far at times. I want to be moved in the right direction, but at my own pace. That’s because he’s had to look around to see who was watching to protect his physical safety as well. A straight man would not empathize to the level a queer one could, possibly treating me as if I were stupid or frigid.

The novelty of me dating a man as an idea has not gone away. It truly makes me laugh because I’m not their type and I don’t even know them. The reverse is also true. They’re not my type right up until they are. It just took a long time to find bisexuality as an identity because thoughts of men were so passing. They didn’t register because they didn’t have to, and I’ve missed a lot of messages in the middle of the mess.

I grew to accept more, and when I did, Zac rose to meet me………

If the weather had held, I would not be here in this moment. I am taking a moment to say a silent prayer to the storm.

Let’s Think About Breakfast

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What foods would you like to make?

Because Dana and I had a brunch gig for years, we made a lot of breakfast at home. It’s the thing we knew how to cook the most quickly and efficiently. We were also auditioning recipes for the restaurant. The most fun I ever had off the clock was picking my own chesterberries, because it made me feel like a real chef. They weren’t even for the restaurant, but they were by the time we got back from our little “pick your own” road trip. I still have a cute picture from that day, but I don’t want to post it without asking and I don’t want to ask. So, know that chesterberries are a cross between a berry and a grape, and in some applications (I know this is Oregon heresy), better than marionberries. I look forward to your letters.

I started out with simple syrup (1:1 sugar to water) and added the berries. I let everything cook for a while so that it became a thick, smooth compote. I must have added at least a pinch of cinnamon, but I don’t remember putting in anything else because even cinnamon is too much for some berries. You literally have to know their personalities as well as you know your coworkers. The point was to make the chesterberries sweet without adding anything that would cover up their natural undertones.

I know I used it for stuffed French Toast. If I had it to do over, I would have made chesterberry Croque Monsieurs. That’s because I already know it’s traditionally served with raspberry jelly and making anything more “Oregonian” is a big hit.

If you cannot see how much I love food, I spent half a day picking berries for myself and donated them to the restaurant at the end. I didn’t even ask to be reimbursed for them, and it’s not even because it would have been a whole other thing. It’s because I was thinking about work when I wasn’t there to an ENORMOUS degree. What I found is that I could cook every dish a thousand times without blinking, which gave me the confidence to have an opinion. There was no executive chef. If I want to make hazelnut pancakes, go for it.

I think the most adventurous I ever got was pineapple thyme stuffed French toast, but not because that’s the most adventurous thing I can do. It’s that in a restaurant, you can try whatever you want. That doesn’t mean someone else is going to agree and pay money for it. The pineapple thyme worked, but I did not have the luxury of making just anything avant garde.

For instance, my chili in Oregon is never as hot as I make it here.

Also, anything can become breakfast if you put eggs on it:

  • The aforementioned chili
  • Cheese pizza
  • veggies and kale/spring mix/spinach/etc. sauted with sesame oil and hit with rice wine vinegar to finish.
  • Rice, beans, salsa, and cheese
  • Cheese pizza
    • Tthere are more, but this one will blow your mind so I have to say it twice. It tastes the best putting them raw on a frozen pizza and letting them bake together. It just mellows the egg out because caramelization is key.)

Therefore, I do not go out of my way to make breakfast, because I don’t really do anything to make it special. I don’t separate out what I will and will not eat into times of day. What makes me a pro to everyone else is coming downstairs in the morning and seeing me flip my eggs like a boss. Everyone can tell the difference between a home cook and a pro by how much fear they have that veggies will go everywhere.

That’s partially because it will go everywhere when you miss and most people are too scared to make a mess. They’re too scared to suck until they don’t. If I miss, it’s a two minute cleanup job because I’ve done it so many times on the line and had my ass beaten for not working clean that I could give a shit who’s watching at home. I can do all the things I used to do in a pro kitchen and actually enjoy it because no one is telling me I’m terrible at it.

By the way, this is no indication of how good I am. Some people think I’m great. Some people think I’m terrible. It’s just that the people who think I’m great know nothing and the people who think I’m terrible were kind enough to make me as much better as I could handle. No one was trying to make me feel bad. It was like private lessons in voice or trumpet. It’s isolating to a sandbox so when you get on stage, everything is perfect.

If you want to get good at flipping eggs, you’ll need way more butter than you think. Flipping eggs is not for people who think butter is the devil. Even margarine doesn’t have the same properties. Hell, even olive oil sucks at this particular application.

If you want to get really good, take out your egg pan and try to flip a piece of bread. Getting really good sometimes requires buying multiple pounds of veggies you won’t use, either. You cannot learn how to cut a carrot in a day. In a pro kitchen, you can’t learn to cut any veggie in a day. It’s not that it’s hard, it’s just that it won’t look natural until you can make an entire pan of something and it all looks the same.

Carrots and apples are my favorite, because as Chef taught me, always find an edge. Turn the vegetable so that the most mass is always touching the cutting board. It makes julienne and batonet so much easier. If you’re wondering, learning to julienne/batonet an apple and carrot were for spicy cole slaw. It was a particularly unsweet Granny Smith. I had to practice that shit for weeks, because of my lack of 3D vision. It affects the way my knife comes down.

Therefore, I’m a speed demon at home because I don’t have to perfect anything. It’s only me. I still treat myself like I’m in the kitchen, just not like I’m constantly going to get fired, because I’m the boss and fuck her, she’s a bitch.

By the way, when I stopped thinking all my opinions were like that, my life got better *FAST.*

I am well and truly fucked in terms of technique, and if I married another chef/pro cook, that’ll be why. Together, we have a complete education and I’ll miss that part of being married to Dana forever.

It’s something I’ll seek out in a partner, because if I don’t have it, I know enough to teach it. I don’t care if someone’s interest is cooking or not. They’ll know how to feed us by themselves if it kills me, because my worst nightmare is feeding someone until I die because “I’m the pro.”

I don’t care if my husband has made his past wives eat shit because they thought they were so important. Remember who I am in the kitchen and submit, or you will not last very long. If being with me is important to you, you will learn to cook. It’s that simple.

You can treat me like a know-nothing asshole or you can treat it as lessons from a truly great chef who taught me every day, and that isn’t limited to one person. Dana is not more important than the Johns, Drew, or Knives. It’s just that Dana was with me for the most meals both served at at home. We started making brunch based on the very idea that because we worked well at home, we’d work well at work. This was absolutely true except when Mommy and Daddy were fighting, and you can take a guess as to who was whom on those days, because it was never a one way street. However, if the conversation was only about the food and didn’t move goalposts, I was wrong. Period. End of story. I didn’t spend time and money at culinary school. She did. She earned those fucking blue stripes and I heard about it to the point that I cannot watch Julie & Julia anymore without sobbing through the scene where Julia is cutting onions.

When we’re talking about “Mommy and Daddy fighting,” we’re talking about less than 4% of the time. And who cares about the other 97%….. 😉

And if Dana had been honest with herself, she would have realized that we needed to pack up and move to DC for all sorts of reasons, because she didn’t think about who I am and what I do, either. She thought working and playing on the Internet was invalid, and I’m a fucking blogger. She was never going to see me as valid, and she was never going to truly see what I’d gotten myself into, or she did and didn’t want to play. Either way, she knows and it’s just as bad as she thought it would play out because the Internet relationship didn’t listen to me and what I do.

I hope she feels relief that I actually said, “Dana wasn’t right, but she wasn’t wrong, either.” I hope for two things. The first is eventually feeling peace that I did the right thing. The second is that my beautiful girl didn’t get screwed over by me (for that particular issue) and I wish I could take away that pain. Not being able to is a massive regret, and now I am either so far down the list that I’m not worth addressing, or I fell off. I won’t know it for years, and I might not know it, ever. She has truly gone into the wind at my own invitation, which was warranted. She cannot come back until she gets herself together, because she couldn’t learn to sous. She’s a boss. She couldn’t generate her own light to compensate for the lack of light from above (God, Ani is brilliant). She couldn’t learn how to bend and sway like all same-sex relationships no matter who they are to each other. She flat out learned to love me, worried for me, protected me, all the things. What she could not do is let me do those things for her and didn’t see that as a problem. It showed me exactly who she thought I was.

I also, if I could have a third thing, I wish she would realize that it’s not just me that gave up someone fantastic. She truly fucked up, because we could have had something. It wasn’t what I thought it could or would be, but it’s so solid you could build a house on it. I watch videos on DIY, and I know what it takes to make a foundation. The concrete is now cured.

Now I’m overexplaining why I don’t have private lessons anymore and why I feel bad about it. DC might have changed both our lives in concrete ways, but we’ll never know that, either.

I didn’t choose the wrong relationship, we chose to move to the wrong ass city.

And that’s why I started doubting all my decisions. I lost True North and I paid for it.

I just never got change.

That is the Question

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dogs or cats?

It’s an eternal debate over whether dogs or cats are the best pets. Bryn and I would say that dogs rule because we both know how to handle them, she’s just a professional and I’m picking up what she’s putting down. Here’s the difference between us. Bryn has enough space to get a dog and I don’t. Bryn has the time and money for a dog that I don’t. I would get a cat not based because that’s the pet I like most, but because that’s a pet I could easily take care of and maintain their well being. In order to get a pet, you have to know what kind of owner you are, and not bet against it.

The dog is not a catalyst for change, necessarily. If you aren’t prepared to care for a dog, you won’t. If you don’t want to walk them, you’ll let them out in the backyard. A dog’s life is not being holed up in your house for weeks or days with fifteen minute increments on the yard.

Don’t treat your dog like a gym membership hoping to get motivated. There are entire empty clubs downtown based on people maintaining them financially without ever walking in.

Extrapolate.

You don’t have to know who a dog is and what they represent. They have to know that about you. They have to see consistency, and that’s the biggest reason you don’t get a dog trying to start a new habit. The dog will not change you, but you’ll change it.

Zac reminded me that if I ever get another dog, it can’t be big. That’s because I like to hike, and I need to be able to carry my dog if they get hurt. I think it would be wise for me at 125 pounds not to pick a Great Dane. I also do not want something too small, because they generally can’t handle hiking.

So, picking out a dog for me would be a careful, careful decision. Definitely a mutt to avoid injury in the first place through the cunning use of shitty genetics. The dog I’m picturing in my mind is somewhere between an Italian Greyhound/Miniature Doberman Pinscher and a Boston Terrier. I’m thinking IG/minpin for height, Boston Terrier for weight limit. I would still need to lift weights consistently before I could carry that size dog a half mile, but it probably wouldn’t take long considering if my dog was hurt I’d be freaking out too bad to work on anything but full on adrenaline.

The problem runs out when the car is a half mile away and your adrenaline has run out six trees ago.

At home, you cannot let your dog get away with anything even once. They are not you. They do not reason the same way. There is no higher functioning. People get frustrated with training dogs to an enormous degree because it doesn’t work…. and it doesn’t work because the owners just will not get with the program.

With the little dogs, it just gets worse. Whether I own a Great Dane or a Yorkie, I’m going to train them exactly the same way. Little dogs are allowed to be crass and unrefined because they generally aren’t threatened with three cups of terror. Doesn’t mean the dog is happy and knows its place.

Knowing your place is a big damn deal in dog training. Owners get into the trap of making their dog protect them all the time because they don’t see that’s what the dog is doing. If you cater to your dog’s needs, it will go apeshit when it realizes it is alpha dog because the people who said they’d take care of them are actually puppies and they’re responsible for everything. They’ll do anything to get your attention, and this behavior comes out in different ways.

It’s never the dog’s fault. The question should always be “why would a pet choose me?” If you love dogs, but you have the capacity to take care of a goldfish, don’t lie to yourself and think it’ll change.

The pet is not the issue here, Dude.

Dog owners are also insufferable people sometimes, and this plays out on walks. You’ll see dogs unleashed because entitled dog owners are so goddamn sure that their dog isn’t the problem. You are asking for trouble. You don’t know what’s going to happen when your dog meets mine, and you’re not strong enough emotionally to handle a situation when our dogs fight. I can tell by the tone of someone’s voice when they speak commands. If I don’t feel a need to snap to attention, they sure as hell won’t.

I’m tired of going to people’s houses where they’re unfamiliar and so are their pets. Entry is an assault on my senses, and it would have been made so much easier if the dogs knew to chill out when the doorbell rang. People know that a Mastiff jumping on you isn’t cool. They could give a shit whether their purse dog likes you or not. If a purse dog shows aggression, it’s written off as little and cute. Meanwhile, dogs are generally aggressive when they’re scared and don’t know what’s going on.

When you don’t train your small dog, you are not helping it. Full stop. If it does not have a big dog’s sense of hierarchy in the pack, it will become a problem fast. That’s because the dogs aren’t the problem children here. You haven’t established enough dominance that your dog can relax in your presence. Your dog is a train wreck because you are.

There’s no deviation of this pattern ever. If something is wrong with your dog’s behavior, 100% you’re the problem. Dogs are the best in the world at teaching you how to be a better human, but you have to learn their language in order to hear.

Your Blog Makes You Sound Like a Dick: Kitchen Edition

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 41 Comments

Here’s how to run a kitchen, even at home. It’s what I would have taught my friends if they’d ever asked me to cook with them. Maybe Zac and Bryn are all I need in that arena, because they both actually like it.

Start with the basics. Those aren’t sugar, salt, acid, fat. It’s never stopping movement. Wash a dish while something else is cooking. Never wait for one thing to finish when you could be doing something else. Don’t lean when you can clean, and you’ll enjoy cooking much more. People who don’t enjoy cooking don’t have time to think about it, so they don’t think about ways to make it easier, either.

If you have time to lean, you have time to clean. Everything else is procrastination, and the dread of having to do dishes after dinner is miserable. Do all the kitchen dishes while you’re working so you only have to load plates into the dishwasher. You cannot soak a pan. Period. You can leave the stuff soft until you get back, but it will still be as hard to clean it later as it would have been had you not let it soak. If stuff sticks all the time, you’re not using enough oil and/or butter. The reason food is so caloric at a restaurant is that we don’t have time to cook and clean if we don’t have enough pans. If a sponge doesn’t work, get some steel wool. If you say you have nonstick pans, that’s on you. The problem with non-stick is that there’s no real way to get everything off without sucking the life out of the pan. I also need pans built for my height and weight. I am not going to flip a full paella, but I’ve done it and that’s why I don’t do it anymore.

You cannot replace the undertones of anything. Butter flavored Pam will not taste like putting butter in something, and not because the melody isn’t there. You’ve taken out all the chords. With beverages, sometimes you need to let them heat up or cool down, because the extreme temperature makes it where you can’t taste the full measure of the dish.

When you taste something, ask the dish what it needs. If you have added too much salt, add vinegar. If you have added too much salt, add starch. If you have added too much of anything, you can fix it by adding more volume. If I oversalt my mac and cheese, I’ll add veggies that have no seasoning at all. If a dish is too hot, add sugar and fat. If I want to eat hot peppers because my nose is stuffed up, I make the base with tomatoes, avocados, purple onions, and honey. That works with mango and pineapple, the most likely culprits in a habanero salsa. That’s because even different peppers are for different applications.

You might as well be interested, because you’re not going to feed yourself any other way without destroying your cost of living. Not paying attention to food matters. You know how we know you’re not paying attention? You are blind to what goes on in a professional kitchen and don’t have any compunction about telling us that. It’s never you, the customer, that has ever done anything wrong in the history of any dining experience. We are stupid, lazy, angry bastards who have no right to feel what we feel. Who the fuck are you to tell us that?

If you don’t acknowledge your humanity, you have made it known that you think you’re a deity. And we’ve noticed.

I can make all the mother sauces, but only two matter at home. You won’t really touch the rest (Yes, chef. I’ve made all of them.)

Bechamel is the base for all cheese sauces. You can make it any way you like, because it all starts the same. Heat up butter in the pan, and add your vegetables. For mac and cheese, I’ll use anything. Onions, garlic, celery, spring mix, etc. After the veggies are cooked, add some flour. I think it’s a one to one ratio, but it doesn’t matter. You’ll be able to tell when the food is getting more thick and you need to add milk. DO NOT add too much at once. Making the mother sauces the way I do it is like driving a stick shift car. Everything in balance. The sauce should thin out slightly. As it thickens, add more. You can substitute boxed cheese mix for flour if you need to, just add extra butter and keep the heat low so the cheese doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. Here’s also where you add your spices. Montreal Chicken Seasoning is good, so are Old Bay and Tony Chachere’s.

Once you’ve gotten the sauce to coat a spoon, add your cheese and stir. You don’t want to add the cheese until last because when it melts, it will make everything stick. Take it on and off the heat if you need to, because you want it to be hot enough to melt, but not hot enough to stick.

When in doubt, finish every dish with butter. Sauce will redeem anything. In short, relax.

Hollandaise and mayonnaise are exactly the same. Put three egg yolks in a bowl or blender and whisk. Add a tablespoon of acid. For Hollandaise, it’s always lemon. For mayonnaise, I’ll use anything just to try it, but I like olive oil and plain white vinegar (I would use apple cider vinegar if I was making a dressing for something sweet, and sesame oil for anything Asian. You can take any of these combinations and emulsify them. Plain, oil and vinegar is mayonnaise, lemon and butter are Hollandaise. If you say that you can’t do it, you haven’t done it 30 times while so hung over you couldn’t breathe. Anthony Bourdain and I have a deeply intimate relationship with Hollandaise being the smell of failure.

Bechamel is the white sauce used in Alfredo. Alfredo is just butter, flour, milk (whatever kind you want- I can make vegan bechamel just as easily). Just add parmesan. A good bechamel requires excellent ingredients. If your parm doesn’t cost $8-10, you’re going to think it’s kiddie food. See Olive Garden for details.

Most people get frustrated with cooking because they don’t have a professional palate and don’t know how to catch a mistake and correct it before service. That doesn’t come through anything but time. The way we get better so fast is making every dish a thousand times so that our ability to tweak is incredibly refined. It also allows us to understand what we haven’t tasted.

Really developing palate came through my sense of smell. I was a dishwasher. I smelled all the food once it was already mixed together. Ideas came to me that didn’t come to other people. I can taste food without having to eat it because I can analyze it like sheet music, no lie.

Nothing makes a cook boil like being at a party and someone saying the food is so good someone could cook professionally. I do not want to see their bullshit on my line fucking ever. Get out of my house unless you’re willing to do the work.

You absolutely do not want to start as a dishwasher. You absolutely do not know what it feels like on the brigade. You don’t want to know what it feels like to have to carry out the trash after your adrenaline has come down. You don’t see how fast we clean because we’re racing against our energy.

So, you cook at home and disrespect us. We could teach home cooks a thing or two, but there’s two good reasons why we don’t, and there’s a great big fuck you behind it because you’re making us walk a fine line.

When we offer to help, you say no. When you say yes, you criticize us because being a home cook and being a professional is like, the same. Bitch I earned this.

I earned it with blood, sweat, tears, and searing flesh and I don’t give a flying fuck if you think I’m a dick for saying so.

In terms of caring whether you respect me or not, I wrote this all in one shot and it took 15 minutes. Bite me. There’s your fucking resume and recipes.

This Feels Like Getting Right with the Lord

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What bothers you and why?

This is another entry that will just jump around, because a lot bothers me. I just talk about all that here so my friends don’t have to hear it. You’re the place I go when I’ve overfocused and they’re exhausted. 😉

My being bothered encompasses a range. It bothers me that I can’t work on my computer unless I built it from scratch, and it bothers me that Russia is trying to make Ukraine fold.

What bothers me about mental health issues is that I have to be vigilant about taking care of myself, because my brain chemicals will take an issue like the former and make it as big as the latter due to my own echo chamber. So, really it’s me that bothers me, most days. Here is an itemized list:

  • It bothers me as a writer that if I write about someone’s behavior, they will constantly overfocus on what I said and not how they behaved. If they’re mad I wrote something, they don’t think “Leslie’s hurt” and come running. Ever. They think I’m out to get them, when in reality I am explaining them to me. How do I know how to change gears if I don’t know how I acted? The not focusing on the part where I wrote down my behavior is where it gets tricky, because I stab the knife further into my own chest than I do others.’ They just don’t talk about it because it’s easier to believe that I am a monster. That’s why I’ve gotten rid of a team of people in my life. I realized that if they were going to treat my blog as a threat, they couldn’t have me as a friend anymore. Mostly to protect them, because obviously my writing is too much for them and I don’t have time to cater to everyone. I have tried, and it has failed.
  • It bothers me as a writer that people think we are lazy freeloading assholes until we’re Brandon Sanderson. You’re not a real writer until money is on the table. You don’t write movie scripts until a studio has paid you for one. You’re not a novelist until you’re on the Bestsellers List. It becomes clear very, very quickly that we are a no-value add if you don’t understand the creative process and devalue us in every conversation. You think you’re being helpful and you’re actually destroying our self esteem.
  • It bothers me that I don’t always know when my favorite foods are going to be discontinued and like anyone on the ADHD/Autism spectrum I’d like to be able to buy six cases of whatever before it happens. Sensory issues are real, and I try to avoid them in order not to be distracted. When I am not “in the zone,” I’ll eat anything you put in front of me because the food is my focus. In writer mode, I will tell you that it’s been six months and I’ve eaten a vegan ham and cheese sandwich, chips, and a banana for lunch every day. Before that, it was veggie hot dogs with vegan cream cheese and hot sauce designed to wake the dead. If you think this is weird, it’s not. Mark Zuckerberg and I are just the same archetype. He wears the same thing, so I bet he eats the same thing. Source? I also have three hoodies and good luck getting me out.
  • It bothers me that people should look at me like Mark, but they should also acknowledge that I am hugely emotionally intelligent because I am self aware. If you treat me like a problem child, you’ve missed out on the best part of what I can do. The way I think rubs off. You’ll learn to love yourself, mostly because in my writing I’ll remind you of it all the time. I don’t write about people’s shitty behavior because I’m out to get them. I’m writing it because that is what happened the way I perceived it.
  • It bothers me in any conflict when people expect me to behave the way a normal person would and hold me to those standards because I have never met a normal person……. and my personality type is only found in 9-15% of the population before the trauma and mental health issues start making me complicated. I have had it confirmed by people in all tones of voice that they have never met anyone like me. I am deep and frightening and intense in every way imaginable. Mostly because other people have so much armor that they’ve forgotten how it feels to emote deeply.
  • It bothers me that I may never find a partner because of it. I couldn’t even make a close and loving friendship work on that level. So now I think I belong more to the world, as writers often do. If I make my focus all of you, I am not focusing on my lack. I am focusing on an upward direction that will hopefully cast a wider net on making friends.
  • It bothers me that people don’t understand my Internet relationships. Most of it is that my personality is so rare that I don’t find many people like me to connect with locally and I process better when I’m typing. I get together in person a good majority of the time because other people aren’t writers and I’m good with it. It’s not that I don’t need conversation, I am just unlikely to remember that I need it.
  • It bothers me that being a writer and getting your work read are two different skills and I really only have the first. I don’t want to have to tell you to engage, and I want to earn enough money to eat. The struggle is real.
  • It bothers me that the world isn’t built for me. People say, “you weren’t born to fit in, you were born to stand out.” They think it’s a compliment when I feel disconnected and lonely most of the time.
  • It bothers me that I don’t have emotional fortitude in person because I am frustrated at my lack of being able to craft sentences on the fly, because people say they don’t like my writing and get frustrated with talking to me as well, because then I’m stammering and can’t get words out……. but I seem so self assured…… the medium is the message.
  • It bothers me that there’s so much noise and so little signal, and fighting through it is immense. What I have found is that the way I fight through it is not seen as valid to many people, because it’s not the way they would do it.
  • It bothers me that Supergrover and I have a concrete need to be in each other’s lives, that we should have collaborated the whole time because we can’t not….. and then we proceeded to destroy each other. It is devastating that it’s easy to love her from afar, and terrifying to be close because I cannot feel lost and confused that much of the time…. and when I express that, to have it ignored. I get it. She’s a big shot, and I’m not. Alternatively, there hasn’t been a problem smaller than me for eight years, and there never will be. I’m not a priority because I’m not on the list. We created a trauma bond, jacked it up to eleven, and then when I had a genuine need, she treated me as if I was just trying to cause trouble for her. That’s unacceptable. From the outside, it looks like I decided she was the one and moved here to be with her. That is frighteningly incorrect, but I cannot lay out my feelings about that except “other factors at play.” To let go of those reasons would cause hurt, and not even to her. When I said that I did move here because she was here, you don’t know what idea that was based on, either, and that didn’t have anything to do with me at all. I misspoke when I said that I did move here for her and I was tired of covering it up, that’s what I meant. I didn’t show up because I thought she’d change her mind, or I’d sit and wait. No, it was much, much more than that. I’m sure where her ire lies is that for her, my valid reasons felt like a game I was playing, because she invalidated my feelings. It will always bother me that we never took a time out and just called each other.
  • It bothers me that people are fine with internet communication right up until they aren’t and don’t change mediums. What sounds creepy in an e-mail sounds fine in a phone call because more of what goes into communication comes out. If you start with 7%, you’re going to spiral downward into much less than that.
  • I was a product of my illness, and she forgot my personality, even after the fight was over. It made me think that she thought my illness was bigger than my personality by saying the opposite and never opening back up.
  • It bothers me that I understand why people pull back, but if I write about it hurting, that’s an attempt to provoke someone and not a genuine need to communicate with other people because I can’t rely on them. This is an all call issue. I don’t write about you because you’re you. I write about you to understand how I interacted with you. Sometimes, that encompasses our behavior. Only when you haven’t stepped all over my boundaries will I allow for reconciliation. Provoking people is the last thing on my mind, because my ruminations about them aren’t directed. I have a bigger fanbase in India than I do in the United States.
  • It bothers me that I cannot thank India enough. I did not expect to be more popular overseas, and if I was going to pick one, I don’t think it would have been Asia due to cultural slang. It’s mind blowing. Thank you.

Talking About Boundaries

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My friendship needs are different than most people. I’m bipolar and have chronic PTSD. I also have ADHD. It means that I get frustrated when things aren’t clear, so when people aren’t, I overfocus and they’re exhausted. I am not trying to hurt them, I am asking for more information. If you do not understand that, then I am going to be a straight up problem for you and I do not want to be fixed. I don’t have some stereotype to fill, because I’ve never been that for anything except maybe Arthur. Most people don’t know that ADHD presents like Asperger’s sometimes. Mine doesn’t come across verbally, but it does when I allow myself to write into and out of a problem. If no one will tell me how to understand, I will find out on my own. Whether it is right or wrong is of no consequence, because no one else is responsible for what I understand. It just helps if they’re willing to do the little bit of extra work it takes to communicate. Exhaustion leaves me in the same state of dread as he is here:

This is the first time I’ve ever gotten my own Arthur meme. It’s not that someone made it just or me, it’s that I’ve never related to anything so much.

Because I process online, I’ve noticed a beautiful symbiosis between David Sedaris and me. My style and structor is borrowed from him, and his style and structure seems borrowed from me in his new book, “Happy Go Lucky.” He takes a hard, hard, look at himself and his family and every word resonated.

He also talked craft in a way that I felt he was in the room with me. He said that when you’re writing these essays, you’re not writing about your friends. They’re the characters. You’re writing about their characters and not them.

He talked about my frustration with blowback, because it happens more than you think. “I don’t want you to write about me at all.” “Ok.” “It seems like you don’t like me because you don’t write about me.” This can go ad nauseam for years. This is especially true of people who also struggle with mental health issues because they don’t like being criticized and love being praised.

It comes across as that you don’t care you’re teaching us how to love ourselves, and in turn, how to love you. It is the mystery of faith, to be able to hold in your mind that you are capable of great decisions even after you’ve cratered your life over and over because of the very conflict I’ve mentioned. People don’t want to do that kind of work, especially bosses. We’re not aware of our interactions with you because we’re focused on other things.

We want to know how the world works, and stifling that is very difficult. No system is built for it. We just have to feel anxious or stop buying in. A lot of people lose their lives because the system for dealing with mental health is so poor in this part of the world, specifically our country (and thank God not my state).

Being ADHD means that through hyperfocus and medication, depending on whether it’s natural or drug induced, you lose your appetite until your body screams.

Nothing gets easier, and yet we pretend it does.

Edited to add that the prompt for all this was someone breaking a boundary. “Michael,” the guy I was chatting with, deactivated his Facebook account and started flirting with me. I said, “what I need you to realize is that when you deactivate your account, I don’t think about you at all.” It’s not because I’m an asshole, it’s that he’s already done it once, then when he came back, he called me “baby girl.” Those are trigger words for me because they do not belong to him. I told him that if he called me baby girl again, I would block him. So, when it happened a second time, I blocked him. If I tell you that’s a sore spot, believe it. I am made of nails right now and I need to be because I am not settling for fine.

If lightning can’t strike again, it doesn’t even matter.

Half a Line Bouncing Around

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
  • I’m going to do another list because the dot reminds me to change topics.
  • What I have learned about emotionally unavailable people is that so much gets left unsaid, because they won’t address the issue and talk about it so that there is resolution of the conflict and/or dissolution of the relationship. Relationships rarely end peacefully, which is why I try so hard to be vulnerable. It’s not so that my pain matters more than someone else’s. It’s that if I explain fully how I feel, conflict won’t pop up. You understand intimately where I’m coming from, but you might not agree. The hard part is how to handle disagreement. It’s like learning to bench press. That’s because negative emotions feel like weight. You cannot be a wimp to carry it. The analogy would be that it’s not easy to carry an infant, either. You may not be a jock, but it helps if you can consistently lift 50 pounds.
  • Develop emotional strength to avoid anger, because what happens with cortisol is that it rushes in so fast you think you can’t breathe. Anger is powerful. There is no need for it, but conflict is also avoidable and people are fallible. Think long and hard about starting a conflict, because you never know what’s in anyone’s past and when you feel about them deeply, both your love and your anger are enormous.
  • Anger 100% leads to regret. Always. If you want to spend your life regretting what you said, go for it, but if you’re going to be that way, don’t expect people to stay no matter how bad it gets. Think to yourself “who am I to tell someone how they feel?” If you love them, you say “I gave you the right to have an opinion because I love you.” Your job is to believe whatever comes next. Actions tell a different story than words a lot of the time and exactly none of it depends on what you understand. You can’t have empathy for a story that’s never been told.
  • You will always come across as a selfish jackass to someone who can’t listen to your needs and respond. Notice when that happens early in a relationship no matter what kind it is. Even when you are a child, you are entitled to certain boundaries. It drives me up the wall when parents ask their kids to hug people, because sure as shit if they’re being abused they won’t want to and too many parents are way too fucking blind.
  • If you are going to have a child, before you do it you need to ask a very important question. How capable am I of being emotionally available to a child? Maybe if you’re an addict or have trouble expressing how you feel, use more birth control. When you know that about yourself and acknowledge it, you can make the decision to heal yourself before you start trying………. or not. But you won’t hold your injury over your child’s head, either way. Your child is not equipped to hear all your shit, and they will if it’s all about you.
  • Here’s a tip for working with teenagers (source? volunteer youth pastor): treat them as if they’re all grumpy old men- especially the popular kids, because that’s a mask they’re using to cover their anxiety. They are not the role models, they’re struggling like everyone else and they don’t know it, because they won’t talk about it to anyone, much less each other. They are not trying to fight with you, they are isolating to protect their energy. Recognize that it is the most emotionally vulnerable they’re ever going to be in their lives because too much comes at them way too fast. Treat them as such. Respect the process, even if you don’t understand it. Know when to be a helicopter and when to leave them the fuck alone.
  • “The hardest part of teaching is remembering what it was like not to know.” -Wayne Borum
  • We are all but broken children who need each other, trying to pretend that we don’t. This doesn’t show itself in just one way. We don’t allow ourselves to believe that others’ thoughts and feelings are as valid as they are. Like not thinking a monster level of neighborhood improvement came out of pain and anguish.
  • I think I just wrote another line I’m going to ponder for a while.
  • Maybe lists don’t remind me to change topics. Respect the process, even if you don’t understand it.

Truth According to Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.

  • The button you need is not where you can see it (ever). I can’t find the button for “ordered list,” so I will not notice if there are nine or a hundred. Good luck. God bless.
  • Conservative churches and kitchens are exactly the same. Men are allowed to be great, while the women take care of everyone. Churchs love Marthas. They are not so sure about Mary. That is because Mary doesn’t fit the mold of a cis woman, so no one really understands why she wants to be taught by the men……… except Jesus.
  • When you’re growing up, you’re taught that adults are making it up as they go along. Yet, not many of us internalize that and have crippling fear of not being enough. Yes, you are.
  • Android is better than iOS and I will die on that hill.
  • I have never been so satisfied with being single. I think I finally taught me that I’m enough just by breathing, and I’ve had so many moments of thinking I’m not that it’s a welcome relief.
  • I figured out today that because Supergrover loves fairy tales, I wanted to give her one of her own. I realized that I could indeed make it up, but that would require more emotional strength than I will ever have in three lifetimes, and it wouldn’t be a fairy tale to her. I know for certain it would sell, and it would be important work if I could do us justice. I just can’t see that happy ending and be happy with it, knowing it’s false. She also doesn’t realize the fairy tale she gave me. It will last for eternity, and it’s all right here. If it is important to me, I am dead certain it will be important to others. When I think about our story, I’m not thinking of this century. I’m thinking, “what would I want people to remember about us from my perspective?” What I want people to remember is that I know for sure we are perfect in our imperfections, and to write the story we have. It is enough. I am not foolish enough to believe it will matter to her within a year or two. But what about 20? Even our story begins with “once upon a time.” Just because the happily ever after didn’t turn out to be mutual doesn’t mean it was time wasted. I am not mistaking the part for the whole and I’m sorry if it looks that way from the outside. One day I hope she’ll smile and remember that I think she’s the most amazing person in the entire universe, because she means the universe to me.
  • The fact that I’m no longer struggling with what to do in any of my relationships is definitely making me feel lighter. If I am not networking, I am prone to the pain Olympics of trying to exorcise demons. Writing comes out angry in the moment, but when I’ve cooled down I can see where I went wrong and correct. But when your only feedback is you, it gets problematic fast.
  • If you are white, you need a black friend. Stop with the “my black friend” bullshit, though. You don’t need someone you can CALL a friend while you congratulate yourself. Get in the shit. Listen hard. Take on some of their emotional burdens FOR ONCE, JFC. This is not about going up to a black person and saying, “I see that I have caused you pain. What can I do to help?” No. You make the commitment to be friends. It’s work, and it’s important. Probably the most important work you’ll ever do, because until you can see the United States from a minority’s perspective, you cannot see the United States.
  • I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before, but one of the most embarrassing conversations I’ve ever had was with a black friend who said she suffered from internalized racism. The reason it was embarrassing is that I’ve hated myself for being queer since I was nine. So relatable. But my dumb ass wasn’t thinking of enculturation, just “why would you hate yourself for your skin color?” OMG. Idiocy. The shitty tapes white people instilled in gay people were there long before they changed race to sexual orientation, because as one group becomes more acceptable, there are people who insist on replacing it with hating somebody else. By internalized racism, read “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison.
  • My favorite classic is Frankenstein, mostly because that’s the one I’ve most recently read. What I know to be true is that there’s never been a movie done well enough that I thought it was true to the book. That’s because there are so many more characters in the original work. If I had a second favorite, it would have to be Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because I felt like it was a blog. Stephen Daedulus and I are the same person. Where’s the lie? (I tried Ulysses and I made it to “the Sassenach requires his morning rashers.” That’s on like page 10. Can’t win ’em all, Joyce.)
  • There will never be a successful movie adaptation of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. We could get into it, but it’s impossible. However, I am far enough into it that the library of images it has given me is enormous. Even knowing what gravity’s rainbow is has helped me…. it’s the arc a bomb makes.
  • I know it to be true that I am a better typist than I thought I was, because I went into my settings on my iPad and turned off everything except predictive text. It doesn’t correct shit, because when Apple thinks it knows how to use English better than me, I get violently angry.
  • If Internet Relay Chat hadn’t been invented, I would not be a blogger today. Learning to touch type was the fastest way to make it where I could get my thoughts out, and I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t need to type fast to keep up in a conversation. Many, many, many A/S/L requests have gone into this blog. I am definitely sure what that says about me and glad that era is over so that only people who are my age even know what that means.
  • There is absolutely nothing a cracker cannot steal with enough time and dedication…. and I’ll be delighted if you think that’s a joke about white people. No, it’s that hackers are ethical, deconstructing code to improve it. Crackers are the ones that do injections into databases and try to take down firewalls. Oh, and by that definition, Anonymous is a group of hackers, because they’re not trying to break something. They’re trying to fix it, civil disobedience style. Generally how you view them is akin to how you view politics. If you’re a conservative, you hate them. If you’re a liberal, you love them.
  • Every day I tell myself that I’m going to write something beautiful, and every day I do. But it’s not the entry I’ll find glorious. It will be half a line that is still bouncing around in my head months later.
  • One of the purposes of my blog is to remind people of Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message. Therefore, use the Internet carefully. If you think I am scolding you, I am coming from a place of having ignored it and these few months is how it worked out.
  • Cheese pizza is superior to toast in the mornings because either you can crack some eggs on top before you put it in the oven or heat it up in the microwave and cook the egg separately. I look forward to your letters.
  • In my opinion, Craig Ferguson is the best late night talk show host that has ever been given the job, because I would watch it every night like a religion even if he never had any guests. I can’t believe I didn’t think of him for my dinner party because I was obsessed with the show for years. YEARS. Proud member of the Robot Skeleton Army.
  • I know that my work gets better when people say, “hey, thanks for introducing me to your blog. I really enjoyed it.” That’s because for a moment, the tapes in my head that tell me no one’s going to like an entry stop.
  • I hit post as soon as I’m done so I can be a fan, too.

Adventure Time

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Are you seeking security or adventure?

I talk a lot of shit for someone who gets their groceries delivered so they can maintain isolation.

It’s stopping, though, because I feel stronger than I have in years. A lot of the last few months has been diving into the wreck so that now, I no longer feel those injuries. I haven’t made up with everyone, and that’s okay. I have tried my best, and all the other stuff isn’t my call.

I am thinking bigger these days because I’m exhausted. I have been told for years that I’m too much, so I’m going big or going home. I am sure that some people think it’s a mask to social climb, but what I have found is that if you want to be spectacular, stop hanging around people who don’t challenge you. I need to constantly up my game, and if there’s any justice in the world, karma will come to those who’ve wronged me and say to them that they lost something really spectacular. Whether that produces results or not is inconsequential. I’ve just noticed that more people will fawn over others when they’re popular than they will when they’re not. I wouldn’t be able to convince anyone I was a good writer if I didn’t believe it, and I shed a tear for Brandon Sanderson the first time I watched him on camera. That’s because he told me to keep going at a time when I was done. All the inspiration had leaked out.

A student asked him how he dealt with years of rejection and people saying he should get a real job. He said “I waited and got my moment. I was at a party and this guy asked me what I did. I told him I was a writer and he said, “oh, so you’re unemployed.” He said, “I hit the New York Times Bestsellers List last week.”

If you don’t start like me, you don’t turn into him.

Writing is a muscle. The longer you do it, the more your sentences are crafted. The only problem is that we don’t often see ourselves getting better and don’t recognize it. In my own opinion, I have made astounding progress because I’ve been in a writer’s room for 10 years. I am, therefore because of it.

Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

I am ready to go big or go home, not because I’m taking a shot. I have been quietly plugging away for 20 years, and the Internet has changed around me. Most people don’t like reading stuff that’s this long, which is why I think I’m more popular on WordPress than I am anywhere else. First of all, WP was designed by my brother in arms, Matt Mullenweg. We both went to PVA (he’s younger), we were both in the jazz department, both taught by the same person, and both still count those years as some of the best in our lives. There will never be another Doc, and I am humbled beyond belief that he entered my life when he did.

WordPress is also where writers hang out. Writers like to read. My blog is slowly but surely gaining a bigger audience through the subreddit, the Threads, the comments on Wil Wheaton’s page, etc. Every tiny bit helps, because the hardest part of being a writer is having to talk to people and get them interested in what you have to say. A writer wants to share their stories as long as nobody asks them about it….. while at the same time suffering the weight of crippling anxiety that our friends make worse. Daily.

Our imposter syndrome makes it impossible not to want positive feedback, but bound and determined not to receive it. When I told Supergrover that I thought she had more to say on a topic, she thought I was telling her she was a shitty writer. There are entries I have memorized.

We internalize all the shit people say to us and constantly battle not to say it to each other.

I’m starting to make writer friends by the dozen, and it’s making me happy that we can mutually stitch & bitch. I think it’s better that I’m a blogger and they’re novelists, because if they want to pick up blogging tricks, that’s a different style than fiction and I can pick things up from them. However, they don’t know what I’m working on. That’s just for The Six. I added one of my family members at my grandfather’s funeral. She offered me a place to stay and an office. That’s what I mean about friends who see where you’re going and want to help.

The best part is that she’s another person I can ask questions about Foster, because I have to get his personality down. We are going to be that character. He was a C/DIA helicopter pilot in ‘Nam, one of the settings for my alternate history. By “we,” because he’s my great uncle, I want him to be both of us. I make characters of my friends so that they’ll have something autographed on their shelf that reminds them how much I love them.

It would be a plus if it was such a good idea that it made money. The money doesn’t really matter, though. The fact that someone bought it sure does. You should see how apeshit authors go when they have even four purchases. It is another profession that is absolutely relentless.

Absolutely all of it is to prove the people in our lives who said we were lazy that we actually are worth something. Because no one respects a writer until they’re Brandon Sanderson.

You just have to hold on to the thought that this is not just an adventure…..

It is yours.

Yes, Chef

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Two things have tickled me this week. The first was a meme talking about how people fawn over line cooks and somebody replied that line cook energy is Pete Davidson energy and she’d dated 15 of them. I wondered why if that was the case, why aren’t celebrities asking me out?

The other thing is that because of The Bear, people are starting to give line cooks/chefs Pedro Pascal energy. Yes, Chef is the new Daddy and I think it’s also hilarious. That’s because there is definitely something to watching us work. It’s mesmerizing. The mental and physical gymnastics on the brigade while it’s 110 degrees make us crazy and yet effective. Just know that it takes a lot to keep up that energy. Baby us when you can, because we hurt all over and our brains are fried. It’s not that the thinking is hard. It’s that it’s relentless. How do you time things to make sure everything is ready together? You work obsessively the whole time. We have more in common with athletes and ballet dancers than we don’t, because they don’t turn on the heaters and crank them up to hell at a basketball game.

I think that’s why Karens bother me so much.

It’s fine to complain about a restaurant’s food or service. However, Karens don’t seem to know how to get what they want without launching grenades. They will absolutely destroy someone’s self-esteem for a free soft drink…. and that’s not the scary part. The scary part is that they keep doing it over and over with absolutely no remorse. If I went on a date with someone like that, I would absolutely walk out in seconds. Even if I think you are God’s gift to the world, I will leave boot prints on your ass if you’re ever mean to waitstaff and cooks. That’s because there are some problems that can be worked out. There are some that can’t. Most of it depends on attitude. I have been a line cook for so long that I will not let it happen twice. Ever.

That’s because I’ve been hurt so badly that I’ve been taken to the ER twice in 25 years (I was waitstaff before I cooked), but I didn’t injure myself twice. I’ve worked a five hour shift after picking up a hot spoon where the plastic fused to my skin. I’ve still got a pink triangle on my arm from touching a convection oven, and I am proud of it on multiple levels.

Pink triangle on my sleeve…….

I have worked through the flu, migraines, shingles, you name it. In every restaurant where I’ve worked, if you needed help, you got it, but that shit takes a minute and a half, get back to work.

I could cut off a finger at some restaurants and they’d just put it in the walk in until we closed, because no one leaves til we’re done.

Yes, it is that bad, and I’m telling you that so the Karen shit stops.

I still have scars on my stomach from accidentally touching it with a fry basket because someone came toward me and I grabbed it reflexively.

If you’re wondering why so many of us are alcoholics and drug addicts, a small part of that is having no health insurance, so let that sink in. If no one is prescribing you actual medication, you have to get it from somewhere. However, we are all severely addicted to caffeine to the tune of several 300mg energy drinks a shift if we think we’re in the weeds.

And people wonder why I don’t watch “The Bear.” That shit is for waitstaff. For us, it’s just “trigger, trigger, trigger.” If I am ever in a coma, just play the sound of a ticket coming in and I will have my ass on grill IMMEDIATELY. I know that *some* cooks will watch it, but that’s not the majority. Most of us need Xanax after the first episode. You think that shit is easy? Chasing down a delivery before everything opens? That scene is where I went “nope.”

I went to bed thinking about my pars.

I went in on my days off because I needed to make sure everything was prepped because first rule is don’t trust anyone else. No one has your back in a meritocracy. It wasn’t a big deal to me, though, because sometimes it was just a matter of driving Dana when I was off. It wasn’t like I made a special trip. But still. Most blue collar workers don’t spend a second thinking about work off the clock and we dream ours.

If you quit a restaurant job, the sound of tickets coming in will haunt you for years.

The other thing you have to realize is that most waitstaff aren’t required to tip out the cooks, so the income disparity is enormous. They’re getting the pay while we’re doing all the work. It’s not your job to remember to tip out kitchen staff. People hardly ever do. But it is your job to recognize that you’re only seeing the top layer of a submarine…. just Denzel and Gene smoking cigars that cost more than drugs.

……and we’re all little ducks.

To handle that kind of pressure, we’re all assholes. Every single one. There has to be a relief valve somewhere. It is not unlike being a world class surgeon. You have to have the arrogance to believe you can save a life just like you have to have enough arrogance to believe that feeding 500 people is child’s play.

When it gets bad, people drink themselves to sleep. They drink on the line when it gets worse.

The kitchen itself is a drug from the moment you walk in. Even if you’re stone cold sober, you’ll feel adrenaline coursing through you. When I worked at a local brewpub, I drank Mexican Cokes after work and it still took several hours to calm down. I’m not an alcoholic/addict, but I don’t drink often now because I didn’t want to fall into the trap. Besides, their beer was barely below room temperature and all I wanted was ICE. The sugar replacement didn’t suck, either.

When I was working in the kitchen, I stayed up all night and slept most of the day. That’s because since it took so long to come down, I’d write until the wee hours. My favorite schedule was writing midnight to 0400, because I didn’t have to go to work until at least 1500, sometimes later. I fell easily into waking up at noon or one, and I had Bourdain’s perfect life, complete with anxiety and bipolar depression. It’s why he’s St. Anthony to all of us, really.

Dooce is not the only manic rambling spiral I aspire to be. I wanted to be Tony first. I didn’t want to do the whole TV thing, I just wanted to cook and write so that I didn’t have to do IT. I couldn’t write when I was in IT. I was tethered to my phone and laptop 24/7. I loved being able to be off.

The hardest part of cooking is that very little is open all night, and even though we *can* do our business before noon, dollars to donuts we won’t. We are too tired to do anything but sleep right up until service. I can be totally sober and still look like a tweaked out addict because there’s no one who doesn’t using caffeine at that level. It is straight up abuse.

So, when you come into our houses and treat us as lesser than, we get a bit………… testy.

If you want to know the power of the high, ask your coworkers whether they’ve ever been cooks. Most people who tell you they were will tell you they got out because of the stress and pain, and tell you it was one of the happiest times in their lives without taking another breath.

We don’t do it because it’s easy, we do it because it is hard…………. and chicks dig scars.

“Back of House”

Ryan Reynolds and Company

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you could host a dinner and anyone you invite was sure to come, who would you invite?

I want to meet Ryan Reynolds so much, because I love the Deadpool script. Based on that one thing, I think we’d have a great time. We’re writers who both struggle with anxiety, and if we are talented alone, we’d be hysterical together. If it was cool, I’d like to go to his house, because he has a brick pizza oven and I don’t. I know this because he invited Dave Letterman and that’s the only thing I remember. Ryan can make pizza. So, my perfect picture of a dinner party with Ryan is a large conference table decked out with food we made so that Blake Lively can eat with us before we throw down. My anxiety doesn’t help me write jokes that often, and being with other people helps tamp it down enough to get over myself. I’m really quite tired of me some days, and Ryan would relate. I know it. I can see it, feel it. There is a silent connection because he is my brother in arms, because it’s a huge fucking war.

We’d start with an MiB script because I love documentaries. 😉 If you don’t get that joke, it’s because I think MiB is a satirical look at CIA and MI-6. The Starbucks in the middle of Langley is my space port Burger King. Hot Sheets are PDBs. They’re arranged in a British hierarchy where Z = C, etc. Even K is a thing, although the rank above M hasn’t been in use since WWII. Since spycraft is built on deception, the rest of the world….. the ones that DON’T work for Mossad, we are all but citizens of Locker C (ADULT ENTERTAINMENT IN THE BACK). It’s all a send up, but if you’re looking for it, everything is there. Everything.

There’s also a *little bit* of FBI in there, because as Ken Taylor (Canadian Iranian Ambassador) points out in Argo, “I was expecting more of a G-man look.” Speaking of which, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are invited as well, because it would be the most idiotic move ever not to invite them. Matt Damon is one of my favorite writers, and Ben Affleck drove Argo like he stole it. Just holy shit. It’s fantastic. Remember yesterday I was talking about meeting creatives? Matt has been on my mind since Good Will Hunting, because he’s the one with serious chops. Good Will Hunting didn’t start out as a movie script. It was a play Matt wrote for a college class. A COLLEGE CLASS. In college, I had some home training, but not as famous as Marshall (or Kendrick, for that matter).

I would also invite Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, and Snoop Dogg. This is because people don’t think of this when it comes to rap, but it’s my next favorite genre behind classical…. because they tell stories just. like. me.

There is no justice in this world because I can’t invite Tupac Shakur. If you had anything to do with ANY OF THAT, I think I can say for all of us that we will never forgive you. Ever. There will never be another “Brenda Had a Baby.”

Oh my God. I just realized it’s hilarious that Ryan Reynolds’ first break was “Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place.” It makes me fall over with laughter thinking that he has a pizza oven now because he was a method actor back then.

I would be remiss not to invite my PVA friends, like Justin Furstenfeld, Mireille Enos, Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, et al. This is because I’d only want to invite the people I’d already met, because I am the type person that needs to have at least one person there that already knows me because I will stick to them like glue in order to feel safe.

Bryn is invited because we don’t have a relationship in which I wouldn’t, and not because she’s my friend. She deserves a seat at that particular table, because sometimes she’s funnier than me. I’m not being a jackass, it’s that we’re a tennis match. We trade laughs like stock.

I also have someone in mind that would go apeshit to be in that room, but she is not invited just so that I can watch her spiral out. It’s mean and it’s really fucking funny. I have a reader that will just die when they get to this part, and it’s not her. The only thing better would be popping popcorn and watching that level of crazy for free.

If I were to branch out on PVA alone, Justin Simian is also invited. I’m not sure there’s a funnier show on Netflix than Dear White People. His takedown of Scandal was just brilliant. I’m inviting writers and directors to get Mireille in something because watching her on screen is one of my great joys in life. I’m not hot for her, though I should be. It’s more than that. I love her to bits because she smiled at me on the first day of ninth grade, and I’ve never forgotten it because she was a senior when I was a freshman. That’s just not done, and she broke protocol.

I am glad that we’ve never taken a picture together, because that look? It’s just for me.

My friend Karen is also invited, because before she retired she was a kindergarten teacher and someone needs to keep me in line. I feel her professional skills would help her in that respect.

It would be a mix of people, but the writers are the most important. I don’t want to know them because they’re famous and I’m not. They don’t have anything I don’t, they’ve just hit big and I haven’t. I know because I went to High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. I am capable of being as good as they are now, because even they weren’t that good when they started.

It’s not the fame I’m after. It’s being able to workshop ideas.

It’s a working lunch….. with pizza.

Getting Help

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am touched to the point of tears that Bryn wants to create the audio version of “Stories.” As in, when the tracks are up on the web, it will be her voice and not mine. I said, “of course you can do it.” That’s because even though I was 19 when we met, that was still enough time for her to pick up my style and structure because her family raised me. I was 19. I was an idiot. Well, I suppose it didn’t start at 19, because I didn’t have much time with them until I actually moved. Before then, it was huge summer parties for a couple weeks three summers running. She hears me in her head when she reads, so I trust her when she speaks my truth.

She’s the one I go hard for because I can go to her as well.

We don’t have a hot emotional temperature, which makes me relieved in all the right ways. Yesterday, I told her that she was free to feel as deeply as she wanted about me. That there was nothing she could say that would frighten me away. That it’s already been three lifetimes, let’s go get some more. Now we want to go to Iceland AND Finland, because in Iceland we found a group that lets you ride horses and bills it as business terms. The horses even walk on a giant keyboard, so I guess you could work out logistics, create synergy, table it, and circle back around.

This is totally, completely us.

Bryn had a hand in scaring Sam half to death, because I speak dog and Sam doesn’t. My alpha dog is scary because it has to be… but Bryn goes a step above because she needs it. She worked with deaf dogs for a long time, so she had to train them by touch. When she told me that, I nearly asphyxiated and died. I said, “Bryn is the dog toucher, because when she whispers they can’t hear her.” Even now, tears are running down my face with laughter.

Bryn’s got big dick energy, too, because she’s kind af unless she needs to be a hardass. This is not because she’s trying to be difficult. What I mean is that working with animals makes you a hardass while you’re in the room with them. She’s not forceful with people, but she can piss off a primate without blinking, because they’re going to do what she says whether they like it or not. Bryn doesn’t work at the primate center anymore, which is a relief, tbh. She told me about two inch canines and I realized that I was a friggin’ idiot. She’d been in a lot of danger and I didn’t notice because I don’t know shit about monkeys. Because I’m so geeked out over spies, my reaction yesterday was that she was probably fine, but one op gone wrong…. Same with the military, where I could argue that is a primate center in and of itself. Where’s the lie?

I am also going to be adding Bryn as an author, which means that there will be more posts here, but I don’t mean that she’s taking over for me on some days. I just mean that you’ll have more to love since we collaborate well.

This is exactly what I mean about friends who know where you’re going and want to help. We even had the difficult conversation I needed to have in order to feel safe. “If this blows up, can you love me through that?” She said, and I’m going to cry, “I don’t know, but I want to try.” I’m not being an arrogant asshole. I’ve already been recognized in public at the level I currently occupy, and here’s where I’m going now that I wasn’t before.

I want to take over for Dooce, and I’m not apologizing for it.

I am done apologizing for my existence if I’m going to be the badass Heather said I’d be. I wish I was talking about Dooce, because then I’d have a memory of us meeting. We just have so much in common. I trauma dump here because she did it first, and it helped her right up until it didn’t.

I do not want to be an “influencer.” I want to help the people who are already a train wreck and find comfort in realizing they’re not alone. Bryn and I are both fucked up and we know it. That’s why we’re relentless in self discovery and don’t have much time for people who aren’t. We are so done with people who are emotionally unavailable, and as I told her yesterday, “we don’t feel it in words, we feel it in energy.” We can case a whole room that way in 30 seconds or less. Together, we are unstoppable and we know it.

You get vulnerable, you get stronger. It’s inversely proportional. If I lay out all my thoughts and feelings, I am teaching you how to love me. I am teaching you what I will tolerate and what I won’t, and there will be consequences for trampling over a set boundary. I’ve never had that before, because I’ve been such a people pleaser that I had no inner monologue that said “take care of yourself.”

Now that I do, I’m being called difficult, off meds, crazy, all the things. But it’s not because I am those things. It’s that I’m not letting people walk all over me. I walk softly, and carry a big stick.

I have big stick energy.

0930 and 0530

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What time do you go to bed and wake up currently?

If it seems like I’m really old, I’m going to be 46 on my next birthday. Sometimes I feel old, sometimes I feel like three little boys in a trench coat. Waking up so early doesn’t come from anything but being able to be creative in a much more solid manner, because morning is when I write best. I always write something that early, even if I don’t publish it until later because I’ve taken a break and we still have shit to discuss.

Just yet another reason my beautiful girl would have dumped me in a heartbeat. Don’t poke the bear.

And yet it would be worth it because I didn’t settle for fine. I got hit by lightning.

It’s not lost on me that someone else has to deal with her when she wakes up, because fuck. That’s what he’s for. We both had different roles, and in retrospect it’s the best thing that could have happened.

I am really annoying at 0530 to people who don’t have a circadian rhythm that wakes them up naturally and they feel good. I have learned over time that it’s the best time to write because I can sit quietly until everyone has had coffee.

It helped me to get past what she didn’t want to think of him as an ally. I’m so thankful to him in ways he’ll never understand if she doesn’t tell him that. It would have been a big moment for us to look at each other and understand. The fact that I didn’t get it says everything to me about what my beautiful girl meant in terms of friendship,

For her, I was a hot mess because she didn’t know me. She didn’t take the time to say “now that I’ve talked to you in person, you seem more solid than you’ve ever been. However you are now, you’re good.”

Meanwhile, if I continue the analogy of my sister being my first priority and not my wife, the baby’s needs woke me up every night.

And that’s the crux of the last 10 years. I could hate her for it, but I don’t. I’m letting her off the hook in a way she never let me, and to be the bigger person makes me happy….. mostly because I’m so much smaller. It’s not that she’s so much bigger. It’s that I am about as tall as a party size bag of Doritos and about a buck 25 soaking wet. She looks like a real adult with suits and crap and everything.

To let her off the hook is to release her back from whence she came and just feel peaceful about that. I can do all my emotional work here. She doesn’t have to look at it. But she damn sure will. She has to make sure I’m not a problem to be solved, because she knew I’d be a problem for her and she told me that very, very recently. Why I didn’t tell her I thought that was a dick move, I don’t know. But she thought I was trying to meet someone for the sole purpose of making her blood pressure boil, a running theme because she thinks I seem to do everything that way, because she’s being a jackass and not listening. Jackass is, of course, not a permanent state (estoy, not soy). So, she can think I’m a judgmental dickhead for all eternity, because I have a lot more pet names than that. I will never let go of “judgmental dickhead,” because that’s all she let me be.

The problem is that I very much wasn’t.

She had someone who’d absolutely bleed out for her, and reacted poorly to it. I’m guessing because she thought she’d heard this story before and used all her heuristics to tell her she was fucked.

The problem is that she very much wasn’t.

I loved her, she tolerated me, and she didn’t think that way. She thought that talking at me and sending me stuff was enough and to just shut up about it. That’s because she wanted to be a fan, and I wanted to be a friend. So she didn’t set down boundaries and acted as if I was out to get her.

I wasn’t responsible for what she understood, and yet, I stayed. Things eventually got to fantastic and then slashed into ribbons once again. That’s because we couldn’t solve the base issue. She’s a thinker. I’m a feeler. She doesn’t understand touchy feely crap. I don’t understand treating your friends as if you don’t have any.

For the last eight years, only her pain has mattered.

She made the choice to keep her pain away from me, so I couldn’t help her be less angry. I couldn’t call her out on being avoidant. I couldn’t call her out on playing games, because she insisted that she doesn’t do passive aggression or play games. She is firm in her belief, and then I get shit like “I don’t have time, of course, not good enough for you.” I never said that being busy was a problem. Her being a judgmental dickhead was the problem, because she’s every bit the asshole I am. The game was “how long can I get away from feeling guilty?” and “no, nothing is wrong. Someday you’ll realize I’ll tell you when something’s wrong.” Fuck THAT. No, you won’t. You’ve proven it for eight years.

She’s not the sort of person that looks too deeply at patterns, so we had the same fight eight times and she never noticed because she didn’t want to. In the beginning, she didn’t understand why I pulled back and didn’t talk to her for three months and called me on it and I said nothing, because I was in over my head and it had nothing to do with her. Every time we talked, it wasn’t a thought exercise. It was strengthening our bond and only making me want to dive deeper into her at a time I couldn’t afford it.

When I took my armor off about it, I told her that it was getting damn hard to look in the mirror because I felt so guilty. If I’d ever looked up polyamory, it would have helped. I am unsure whether it would happen again, but I was over the moon for both her and Dana. I have enough love in my heart for both of them, especially since I was married, so it provided a natural safety net until I spiraled out with bipolar bullshit.

It was navigating how much of me both of them could have that got difficult. Before that break, neither one of us went an hour without talking. It was the most intense relationship I’d ever had, because it caused such a struggle within me that made Dana jealous and her deeply uncomfortable. I was fucked six ways from Sunday, and the only answer was to disengage. I didn’t tell her all that at first. I just disappeared and it mystified her.

How she had no interest in learning why I felt that way, I’ll never know. Because even though she knew some of it, she didn’t ask any questions, either. She didn’t recognize that even if it was always platonic, I’d always need her. I’d always need her to look over my blog (it was only creepy when she was doing it behind my back), and I’d always need to be able to reach out because I’m a moron and she’s not. Instead of letting me go off the deep end, she could have helped create the narrative, because none of my shit includes how she felt. It’s only a guess.

I never felt like she saw the situation as the problem. She thought it was her. She moved me deeply, challenged me, made me want to fight together instead of each other. We were never back to back shooting out. We had guns on the table, pointing toward each other (I don’t want to argue about semantics, I just want the protein). She thought I wanted it that way, when I just wanted her on my six.

She didn’t seem to get that once the fight was over, all I wanted was to move on and let ourselves connect, but too much happened to make that a reality on both sides. If she eventually remembers who I am to her, She will not be received with open arms unless she’s willing to own her shit and give me what I need. In short, stop dicking me over and stop saying that you wish our relationship never happened because you have this wrongheaded idea that I also think it shouldn’t have happened.

I absolutely think that the relationship should have happened, I just don’t think we should have moved so fast. We excited each other’s brains, but she excited my body as well because she could. Not that she was malicious or held any culpability in my feelings. I mean that if I’d been straight, too, none of this happens. It didn’t happen because she said she didn’t want it and did, or did anything to promote that kind of behavior. I’m just not sure she was aware that she’d be playing with fire, even though I told her that and she still showed up…. so, okay. You’re not threatened.

She couldn’t see the forest for the trees, and that’s not her fault. She’s not enculturated the same way.

So, she’s telling me things that would spark anyone’s interest in her and was completely oblivious. That’s not her fault, either.

However, she could have helped Dana and me immensely if she’d told us she had a boyfriend already. I thought I was flirting with someone who was single, and then I REALLY freaked the fuck out. That is not my wheelhouse, and lesbian wasn’t hers, either.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that she thought she was protecting me, and it did. It protected me from seeing reality. By the time she lowered the boom, I couldn’t walk away for love or money. Still can’t in some ways. Obviously. I wouldn’t write about it if I didn’t care.

What has been good is seeing how much of my crap was harmful and not internalizing it as “everything everywhere at once is all your fault.” It wasn’t all fighting, either. Some of it was just miscommunication because for as much as we thought we knew each other, we were strangers.

For instance, it was idiotic to say she’d marry Brene Brown, and not because I wanted her to marry me. It was that she was kidding and straight women do that too much of the time while ignoring the fact that it would hurt me. Why wouldn’t it? If straight women want to get married, that’s fine. I don’t care. But qualify it. It’s not a marriage. It’s a Boston marriage. The difference is that Brene Brown will never invite her to metaphorical dick o’clock. And I know her well enough to know she’d think that was fucking hysterical, so I’m leaving it in even if she finds it.

Straight girls, stop doing that shit. It fucks us up.

That’s because now we know you think our marriages are playtime.

If you think that, then you’ve probably never seen what we want to do to you and how we know you’ll react. That’s because we’ve been with enough women who didn’t think they were bisexual before scream so loud the neighbors needed cigarettes. The fact that you want the Fisher Price version of that tells me all I need to know.

It’s time for them to throw away their fucking rainbow pins, because when push comes to shove, lesbian marriage isn’t real.

You’re not bad people, it’s just not funny. It’s taking something serious and making light of something serious, mostly because you think we’re just like you. That we’re besties who just happen to dig each other more than you dig Pam at the office.

If you believe that, you’ve never seen a butch work a room, and I am NOT talking about me. If I was, Zac would call bullshit and I’d get sued for false advertising. I do not need that today. 😛 (But I do need Zac and Oliver.)

Do they really think that women’s sexuality is that tame? It’s wild, hair pulling passion, and I’m not going to tamper that down for her or anyone else, and I don’t mean in terms of pursuit. I mean in terms of understanding that if you’re an ally, you don’t know shit. Stop pretending you do.

It wakes me up at 0530.