Tag: truth

Isn’t There Already?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If there was a biography about you, what would the title be?

I think this is kind of a weird prompt for me now, because since WordPress actually gave me the statistic that I wrote 614,000 words in 2023, there are six autobiographies about me already. And that’s just one year.

I did start an autobiography once, but I didn’t take it seriously enough. My own doctors, dad, and stepmom told me that using the work of Susan Barry to induce stereopsis on myself wouldn’t work. I tried for a few weeks, and the only thing I noticed the whole time that was actually in 3D was that I could see both sides of my nose at once. I called the book “Staring at Myself.”

That being said, I might go after it again because I don’t see how it’s impossible yet. That’s because there’s been a couple of movies with 3D effects that did work on me. One at EPCOT Center (Muppets 4D) and one at Wizarding World of Harry Potter, but I don’t remember what ride. That means I can’t see red/blue stereopsis, but if it comes in a different form, then it’s open to me.

In both instances I saw a 3D movie, I cried. I was a freshman or sophomore in high school at EPCOT, and I can’t remember the year for WWHP, but not so long ago. Within the last 10 years, at least.

What I do know is that it was before JK Rowling burned down her legacy by bullying trans kids over the Internet. Trans kids know horrible people all the time, but not generally people who’ve written a book about full acceptance first.

Otherwise, Lindsay and I might not have been so keen to go there. We loved the rest of the park, too, because we got to go on rides with themes like “ET,” “Jurassic Park,” and “The Simpsons.” I also got my picture taken in SpongeBob’s pineapple house.

“Why don’t you just buy a ticket to see the places you love on TV?”

“How’m I gonna get a ticket to Bikini Bottom?”

We did the MGM thing because we’d already done Disney before- just not together. I’d been on a high school trip with my orchestra, and I don’t remember when Lindsay went, but both of us have been to Disney World. I don’t believe anyone in our family has been to Disneyland. I hear good things, though.

I’m a daredevil and I love roller coasters. Therefore, going to a different Disney park sounds great. At some point, I hope to make it to Six Flags here. Kathleen and Dana have both planned trips with me to King’s Dominion, and neither panned out.

But there’s so much hope because at least now I live in the general area again. My trip with Dana was based on her parents living in the general area as well. I remember the first time I saw a picture of her here after we broke up was hilarious because I was so fake indignant that she was wearing my “Regular Show” belt. She loved that belt, so there was no actual ire. She stole it from me almost as soon as I bought it.

Because there are no pictures of me actually wearing it, I will tell you it looked better on me and you cannot prove otherwise. 😛

These are all the funny things that should go in my book about myself, and I’m trying to drag those things out of myself as well. Because this can’t be therapy all the time. It will sound like I’m a morose person, when I’m not. I use this space to work out what makes me happy and what doesn’t, so I can surround myself with those things.

I am sharp and funny in person, because I know myself so well. Again, I wrote six books about myself last year. If I didn’t learn anything about myself, I wasn’t paying attention. But so many entries are built on analyzing what I’ve said before to work it out in my own head makes me feel secure in my connections. They can’t rattle me the way they used to, because I might not know what to do in a conflict, but I do know where my heart/conscience lie. There are so many unknowns working with other people, but there’s a benefit to knowing what you’ll tolerate and what you won’t.

The moment I realized it was over with Supergrover was the moment she said that she wanted me to find people who brought good things into my life and didn’t give me issues. To me, that said that she was never going to resolve any conflicts with me and this would be our life. Her avoidance and my need to clear things up ad nauseam until we died.

While we actually needed to lean on each other because every time I’ve stepped over the line, she’s had to contact me to tell me to back it up. I finally got it through her head not to do that anymore, because she couldn’t have it both ways. She couldn’t push me away and then critique me. It made me think that she was interested in resolving things every single time. My heart would be full of hope, and it was dashed every single time.

I take responsibility for being angry about that, and not using the appropriate words for nearly anything. Doesn’t make my side of the story untrue. They were my experiences of her, not her experiences of me. She fucked me up. Just slaughtered me emotionally, then threw a bomb over her shoulder and walked away.

She has the right to do that; she doesn’t have the right to say I should be happy about that.

My crush on her gave her a good excuse to walk away when she absolutely couldn’t, because she needed a clear connection to me in order to say the things she needed to say without me jumping to any conclusions that weren’t there.

But she wouldn’t talk about that.

Too scary.

Go find other friends.

I hate her for it. Just fucking hate her. But not all day, every day. She’s not worth the energy anymore, because there’s no percentage in it. She doesn’t get the right to rattle me out of my skin because I’m bad at transitions. She can’t drop in and out like a Disneyland dad.

And that’s because of her side of the story, not mine. She can blame everything she wants on me. To her, I can be the biggest judgmental dickhead on earth and I don’t give a flying fuck. This is because if she’s angry and bitter and all of those things, she’s sitting in them because she won’t resolve it, not because not talking about it leads to anything good.

So, she can go be bitter and angry all on her own, because she’s the type person that would rather be bitter and angry about something until she died rather than be open about her feelings. If we’d had even one knock-down drag-out in person that could have lasted long enough to put all our issues on the table and come to resolution in the end, we’d both be a lot happier, jointly and severally.

But, she went on the attack in order not to be vulnerable, and then she told me that she never would. It was a message I couldn’t ignore, because over time the dropping in and out became a cat and mouse game that she insisted wasn’t there. That’s because her dopamine doesn’t go up and down when she talks to me, so she doesn’t feel like a Disneyland dad, and can’t imagine feeling that way in empathy towards me, so she thinks nothing of dropping in when to me, it’s everything. And that’s as much as I’ll ever be able to say about it.

She absolutely took her turn in fucking up my life to a degree I’ll never get back. So, to blame everything that went wrong in our relationship on me is ridiculously unfair, but it is what it is.

I looked absolutely insane to the whole goddamn world because people could only understand my side of the story. I wasn’t allowed to tell absolutely any of hers. Therefore, I just had to look crazy and not give a shit that I did, all the while dying inside because of the perception of me, because it didn’t matter what the perception of me was. It couldn’t.

So, she’s sitting with the guilt of fucking up my life while also unwilling to open up about it. Telling me to go find new friends was just the shitty icing on top of an already shitty cake because her side of the story is not something I can share. So, I can’t talk to her and I can’t talk to anyone else.

Fuck her and the horse she rode in on, and I can only say that now, after having had 10 years to think about it. I owned my shit in front of her and in front of an audience of thousands (legitimately), and a lot of those people were close to me. Still couldn’t talk about it. She pushed me into a corner and just left me there.

Both sides of our story are problematic to each other, yet being in love with someone when it is absolutely inconvenient doesn’t happen logically…. however, it is universal. I could talk about that because it transcended race, culture, creed, everything. Some people may not understand divorce or polyamory, but everyone can understand having feelings that they need to get rid of because they’re threatening or dangerous to your relationship. I do not believe that when you get married, you also become blind.

I also didn’t bullshit Dana in the slightest. I didn’t say things like, “she’s really pretty,” because if I had to list the 10 things about our relationship that make it amazing, it wouldn’t be on the list. It wouldn’t even be in the top twenty.

But it’s still on the list. 😉

I feel like a troll most of the time, so it doesn’t suck that if she stood next to me, it would make me look better by 150%, easily. She also makes beautiful babies, so standing next to them wouldn’t suck, either. I would say the same about her husband, except I don’t know what he looks like.

However, because I do know her, I bet he’s a god- because through her, I’ve found that it’s possible to be both brilliant and the best looking person in the room (just trust me, we’re all trolls next to her). I’ve always imagined that they thought each other was the greatest thing since sliced bread for a long time, and I am overjoyed that she found her person.

I’m just bad at transitions.

Who isn’t when you’re talking about something that is “highly illogical?” I told my heart every day how fucking ridiculous it was and to stop feeling 18 all the time. But if you knew her like I did, it would have been just as impossible for you as it was for me.

What I laid out in front of Dana was not the whole “she’s gorgeous” bit, and Dana knew it. She said that because our relationship was writing, it was more serious because we’d seen each other’s souls.

Her soul and inner world is the first time I’ve ever met anyone who could match me feeling for feeling in terms of not being able to share things, and needing a place to vent where we were both anonymous.

Except she chose the wrong person to open up to for logical reasons, not emotional. The reason I needed her was more important than the reason I needed Dana, but that didn’t become clear to me until Dana smashed my glasses into my face.

Otherwise, I would still be dealing with Dana’s jealousy for Supergrover and me to need ironclad privacy. What wife wouldn’t be jealous of that in a lesbian relationship, especially when I irrationally caught feelings over it. Just because Supergrover didn’t return my feelings didn’t make it less problematic. It made it more, because Dana realized that Supergrover would always be more important than her, and she had to let me go…. but not until we’d had a knock-down drag-out about it.

Supergrover bears no responsibility in why I got hit. Dana and I were not fighting about her, but the amount of time I was willing to devote to both of them and it was so off in the beginning. We hadn’t learned a middle ground, and so she was this specter in our lives, there when she wasn’t there.

I didn’t give up my relationship with Dana for her, but realistically, yes I did. I didn’t want anyone to be able to tell me how I should spend my time, and Supergrover made it where it was impossible for it not to be her as first priority ever again.

And I do mean ever.

So, in a lot of ways, Dana made my decision for me very clear. At that point, I needed Supergrover because I was in so much pain from the fight, both physically and emotionally.

So, she was my first priority for the next 10 years with her participating in the relationship, and for the rest of my life without….. without being able to talk about it with anyone else, either. It’s too private, too us.

The “too us” is what I miss the most.

The closest I can come to describing what happened is “accidental polyamory, but ok……” And even that’s a euphemism for everything I can’t say.

What I’m actually married to and not her personally. Why I wish I could be in the inner circle that her husband is, because of course there are certain times when you want your partner to know something that your friends don’t, and that’s ok. It’s not my place to go through the same emotional experience as him.

However, in her absence, we both love her so much that I wish we could lean on each other. And by now, we’ve both loved her that much for a long time without ever meeting each other. It’s weird, and it’s not. Supergrover has the right to keep as much private as she wants, but that doesn’t mean it helps our relationship.

She does not want to help our relationship, and she hasn’t made the connection that it’s not possible. That we have to have something sustainable and drama-free…. which is exactly what she wants, just without the discomfort of actually addressing anything, ever.

It’s not the right relationship for me, but it has to be. So, fuck all of it, because I don’t know what to do now. I can’t think about it because it’s too painful. I can’t write about it at all, I just have to sit in it…. and you cannot imagine how much I mean I can’t write about it. It’s killing me every day. She has listened to my story over and over, calling me a dictator when I am standing up for myself and just telling her my feelings straight out in hopes of her doing the same.

It worked in the beginning. It doesn’t work now. That’s because she thinks that our only problem is that I’m in love with her. First of all, no I’m not. Second of all, the other problem is not mine. Not mine to carry, not mine to handle, not mine to own. But, she can run from her impressions all she wants. Doesn’t make them accurate.

That’s because she has never once asked me any questions about anything I’ve ever written. She’s never responded with her own story when I’ve laid out mine, because it was easier to get mad and say “you’re just throwing emotional bombs and waiting for the shitstorm to begin, aren’t you?”

No, I’m trying to explain the process of letting go of the wrong things while keeping the right ones. I explain an exhausting, autistic amount for a neurotypical, and she’s a jock and a childhood trauma victim, having learned to cut off her emotions from a very young age to protect herself first and then to accomplish a goal.

I love her the way I love Zac, just platonically and not romantically. That’s because I can’t be specific, but they both have a hard shell and a vulnerable place just for me.

In fact, this weekend Zac and I had all the conversations that are just as uncomfortable as the ones I would or could have with Supergrover on different issues…. but not all of them, because they both have a hard shell and a vulnerability that comes out because I ask for it.

A few weeks ago, one of Zac’s young friends (I think she’s a tween, or about to be) overheard an adult conversation and asked him what a safe word was. I can’t imagine how much of the table died inside except Zac. He is the ultimate person to ask any question about anything, because he’s neurodivergent so he’s good at conversations that need explanations, and we’re kind of kids ourselves so we both can explain very adult things in kids’ terms.

He told her that a safe word was something that was only between people who really trusted each other, and it was either the word to stop or shorthand for “tell me the truth.” The friend said, “I think we should have a safe word, then.” He said, “okay. What do you want it to be?” She said, “lemons.”

He’s also seen Ted Lasso, but is not familiar with it so I didn’t know if he’d remember “Oklahoma.” So, in several discussions this weekend, I said, “Oklahoma. Lemons.” We got more done in becoming closer in 24 hours than I have in years with other people. I’m not poking at Supergrover. I know a lot of people with a hard shell and won’t get vulnerable I make it clear that you being emotionally unavailable is a dealbreaker for me.

I am sorry that seems threatening at first to either Supergrover or Zac, and yet it will never not be true. The difference is that Zac is emotionally mature enough to recognize that his emotional availability is feeding our relationship, and we’re comfortable with it because from the first moment we started talking, we sort of made this “no bullshit” pact.

You have to when you realize that you’ve actually asked out one of your friend’s boyfriends…. or, more accurately, who is a mutual friend with Zac, me, and another person that’s not important enough to mention except that I didn’t want her to know anything about my life anymore, and I didn’t want the mutual friend to say anything.

I should have just contacted the friend and said, “keep it tight,” but I didn’t because I don’t know shit about polyamory. But first, I didn’t know how important it is for everyone in a polycule to know each other, even if they don’t get along because a few times a year, it’s important for us all to support Zac and not have it be about us. We don’t have to get along, we just have to treat each other with respect.

I asked Zac to keep it tight when I shouldn’t have. I hope for my sake he didn’t, because he knew I didn’t know shit- and he would have been smart enough to tell his partner the reason I didn’t want them to know at first. But now, I do want everyone to know me because I’m here to support Zac, just like them.

On the other hand, I didn’t know if it was appropriate to contact the friend, either, because I don’t know how Zac operates with his other partners, just how he operates with me. I didn’t know if it would be breaking a rule somehow.

Although I did call “lemons” with him on some of that stuff because I don’t need to know about his partners. I need to know how he’s feeling. For instance, if he’s feeling low about another relationship, I don’t want to suggest we do anything intense. He can suggest it, but I won’t. By intense I mean going out and doing the thing after we’re already tired.

Our commitment is drill weekends so he’s worked seven days in a row. I know that by the time he gets home from drill, he’s usually into an introvert night. Since I only have housemates and not other partners, I don’t get a lot of affection. I want a kind of night where he’s tired and only wants to hold me. I sleep with him even though I’ve said that I wouldn’t sleep with a partner again because it’s harder for me to go deep enough to sleep well.

But again, it’s about wanting more contact comfort and it’s not every single night. I have decided that I need to start taking sleeping pills at his house, though, because he moves and snores A LOT. If I don’t fall asleep first, I won’t. It’s kind of funny. He dreams like Oliver, who is a dog. When he’s in REM, he kicks like he’s chasing rabbits.

This is uncomfortable because he’s also an octopus. But everything that’s uncomfortable is also everything I love about being with him…. which is why I tease him lovingly.

I hope he doesn’t mind me poking a little fun at him, because our relationship feels so free and easy when it’s back and forth like that. He teases me in person rather than in writing, though. I don’t know why that is. Maybe he’s just not thinking about teasing when he’s writing, but I always am. He’s never let me know that something has cut too deep, but I hope he knows it’s not like I’m afraid of him telling me that. I want to take care of him.

If your partner is really your partner, they want to know the things that bother you…… especially when we see you trying so hard for us. Someone who doesn’t see that isn’t your partner, and staying together becomes harder and harder the longer someone feels unheard. And I am totally talking about my history in relationships here. It’s universally relatable, and luckily, something I don’t struggle with now.

I think part of feeling unheard went into my relationship with Supergrover as well, because basically as soon as we got to Houston one of my mutual friends with Dana who’d known us for a long time in Portland told me to my face that Dana was stepping all over me.

Supergrover treated me like I was important when she’s the one with the big-shot schedule. That dopamine will stay with me for the rest of my life, because for as uncomfortable as I made her by falling in love with her and being open about that, it freed me from a relationship in which my needs went unmet because Dana thought she had a lock on being right. She comes by it honestly…

For as much as it hurt Supergrover to hear that I didn’t just love her, I was in love with her, I needed it to change me. I was never looking to change her. She told me in the beginning that she was stunned and amazed at my emotional bravery. She didn’t like it when I was emotionally brave with her, because it was something she lacked- yet wanted it from me. She wanted to be friends with someone who had what she lacked, but didn’t do much to bridge the gap so that both of us could feel safe and secure in our connection.

Absolutely all of the times she contacted me to resolve something on my blog, the conversation continued long enough for me to need things from her again, and to ask for them. But the moment I did, everything she said came across as “only I am allowed to need things.” She was like, “we can’t just be people out here who respond to your work?”

Of course they can.

But she can’t.

That’s because she thinks she can get friendly with me again without me ever being able to bring up the dark side of our relationship so I’m not carrying that shit in a bag all day. I’m not so much angry as lost, confused, and sitting in accurate memories of my own stories while not knowing hers to be able to know how I feel about it.

I told her directly that I thought she was hiding something, and that something was “we’re not really friends.” That’s because I loved the hell out of her thoughtful gifts and encouraging words as long as we never talked about our relationship.

That being said, if you have a real conflict, you’re just covering it up. You’re not actively making each other feel more trusting/trusted. I don’t want someone who can only do the surface-level things after they’ve emotionally vampired me because then they’ve made it clear that they’re not interested in my inner landscape, but I better be ready for theirs.

Saying Supergrover and I weren’t really friends probably stung because she was never tracking with me. Our love languages are not the same (she’s action, I’m words), and I do not lightly move past any problem in order to gloss over it. I do not have many relationships because I want to be able to go deep with very few people than have shallow relationships with a whole bunch. When we stopped exploring each other, that should have been the end of it right there. But it wasn’t because she didn’t give me a choice.

I could make her submit, but it wouldn’t make me any happier, it would just show that I was an asshole on a bigger scale. It also wouldn’t change things between us for the better, it would kill anything there is left. If I have hope for anything, it’s that she really is busy right now and that she will eventually stop licking her wounds long enough to resolve things rather than her feeling trapped because I do.

I have always been a White Hat at heart, and I’ll never give that up. She will always be my brave, crazy and wild friend whether she returns that affection or not.

I just know that our conflict has to be resolved to go forwards because otherwise, I will not be happy in a relationship with her. It’s a detente we’ve got going, because I’m never going to be happy with Christmas and Easter friendship and she’s never going to open up.

All I can do is try to move on when I can’t.

I open myself up to it by being vulnerable and letting a power imbalance stand whether it’s me who caused it or them; even when I can read clearly that I’m not doing the right thing in not walking away. In this case, I was absolutely doing the wrong thing because I didn’t have any other choice. And she knew it.

I want to have accurate memories of my perceptions, but how can my perceptions be accurate when all I can talk about is how emotionally avoidant someone is and not how we solved a conflict?

She’s seen Ted Lasso, but she would have made something up around “Oklahoma,” too. And by “make it up,” I mean words that don’t mean anything except kicking the can down the road. Synergize, logistics, etc. rather than “I am so mad at you right now because you said X and it made me feel Y.” And then I could explain why I said it and she could tell me whether she agreed with her assumption or not.

She could correct me when I was wrong, and I could figure out how I felt about it on my own. This is so much about my output and her lack of input so that she always knew what was up with me and I had to guess what was up with her; God help me if I was wrong.

My curiosity became a problem because it wasn’t curiosity anymore.

And that’s a summary of the autobiography I wrote last year.

Maybe it’s not “Stories That Are All True,” because I only meant that the lessons were universal and not the facts, just like the Bible.

And that was offensive to Supergrover, too, because she assumed that the title was all about “this is my story and I’m always right. The facts are all accurate and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong.”

I am not a dictator. She’s not brave enough, and saying I’m emotionally bombing her is her only move. If you only have one move, I will learn the diagonals, the Ls, the rank and the file.

For me, I feel like I’ve reached the end of the game.

Checkmate.

Maybe that should have been the title last year. It would have worked.

You also won’t get anywhere by telling me my memory is fallible, which Dana constantly did.

My blog is all about my memories, and I go back and look at what happened when because I’m my favorite author. I have to believe in myself when no one else does. Therefore, it used to irritate the shit out of me when I could see every goddamn day that my memory is pretty fucking great. She accused me of not remembering things right all the time, and would start telling my story “correctly.” Who treats a blogger like that? Not only did I write in the moment so the story was accurate, the experience of writing the piece does just as much to reinforce my memory as going back and reading it.

However, not one of my partners has ever asked me to look up what happened or thought about the fact that my memory can’t be that bad. That it wasn’t just having written the piece, but going back and reading it over and over and over to see what I can learn from that experience to write the next day.

More and more often, especially because she was drunk more and more often, she’d interrupt me constantly when I was telling a story to “tell it right” for, in her mind, comedic effect. She was The Dana Lanagan Show™ more and more often because alcohol limited her ability to see she was hurting/embarrassing me and also the ability to control THE VOLUME OF HER VOICE.

So, that’s why I say that falling in love with Supergrover was the best thing that could have happened to me and not the worst. Everything happens for a reason, and that cloud had a larger silver lining than I ever saw coming. It was not continuing down the road of life with an alcoholic because I’d learned to people please in childhood and I would have stayed with her and justified her drinking for far too long. I don’t give up on relationships, which is why I’ve loved Supergrover so long and excused her emotional unavailability for 10 whole ass years.

Giving Him the Finger

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I had a breakthrough in accepting myself on Sunday. Forgiving myself for everything I didn’t know before my mother died (my mother didn’t want me to know I was disabled because she thought that I was too smart for what was then called “the special classes.” I don’t know. Maybe I would have been happier. My teachers would have seen how smart I was and I probably could have taught myself better than they could. Special Education is actually more about room to stretch out than it is the curriculum being different. Special Ed understands meltdown, burnout, demand avoidance, lack of executive function, going selectively mute when you’re overwhelmed, and everything my other teachers wouldn’t have understood because they didn’t study being neurodivergent for a living.

I have trouble with transitions. I absolutely hated school after first grade, and it’s not that there weren’t genuinely good moments. It’s that in every school I attended, there were only five minutes between each bell. That’s not enough time for an AuDHD person to adjust to the next thing. It is EXACTLY like being at a party and needing to go to the bathroom just to recharge.

Also, five minutes is not enough time for a person with floppy muscles and depth perception issues to be able to run fast enough to be on time. I have been punished for my disability many times, which is how I found myself in the nurse’s office because a teacher was pissed at me for being a couple of minutes late every day and I knew it……. so I was hauling ass and I fell down two flights of steps.

Because I am low needs, I am trying to speak for the ones who can’t. You can’t imagine how brilliant most autistic people are if you take the time to get to know their brains rather than focusing on what they cannot do. It bothers me that people treat those with autism in which they can’t social mask like children. It’s one thing to have a childlike brain. It is starting how many people think all high needs people have problems with intelligence and not communication. It’s what bothered me so much about the “Autism Speaks” ad where a mother talks about one night in which she thought about putting her daughter in the back seat and killing them both. If her problem is limited to communication and not intelligence, what do you think it does to a person to sit with that knowledge for years on end? People think they’re talking behind our backs because in their minds “autistic” is shorthand for “stupid” and not different.

I would bet there are many more AuDHD people than me out there, but would never want to get tested because of how autistic people are treated.

  • Because Autism Spectrum Disorder means that your brain processes information differently, people at the lower needs end are told things like “you don’t look autistic.” “Everyone’s a little bit autistic.”
  • I am going to bet that those people have never experienced demand avoidance down to not being able to make demands of *themselves,* much less being able to communicate when other people make demands of them. If someone makes a demand of me, I have to white knuckle my way through it if I’m on a deadline, because I have problems with, again, transitions. I like to know what people need from me plenty in advance, because I know at first my body will say, “no. Not doing it.” Autism makes it where when someone makes a demand of you, you go into fight or flight (meltdown). It’s not because we don’t want to do things for other people AT ALL. It’s transitioning from one thing to another. We all wish that part of it would go away, because it’s the biggest reason even low needs people have trouble taking care of themselves. It’s not laziness, it’s not an unwillingness to do anything. It’s that our brains are shutting down because we cannot handle overload.
  • I realize that I have anxiety and I go through cycles. Sometimes, I want to stay home and chill because I’d rather spend time with myself, either writing or reading/watching something to spark my own creativity. This is problematic in two ways, and neither one of them have anything to do with me.
    • Sometimes, I’m on a down and I’d rather isolate than interact because I’m more likely to go into a meltdown from feeling overwhelmed. Recharging also means getting away from my own writing, navel gazing. I have learned that many, many autistic people are like this (the isolating part, not the blogging part) because too much activity in a room is overwhelming to an enormous degree. If you are low needs, that seems incredibly odd and they’re weirded out by it. People can clearly see that in high needs autism, but they cannot see that low needs does not mean less distress. We are just capable of social masking because we can recognize when we’re making you uncomfortable and adjust constantly, knowing you won’t adjust toward us. I am sure that you cannot say this about an autistic kid’s parents or siblings most of the time, but I’ll say it again….. NO ONE KNOWS what to do with autistic kids after they graduate from high school.
  • There has never been an apology to me by a boss when they have miscommunicated with me. It’s “how can you be so stupid/airheaded/flaky?” Why are you “not living up to your full potential?” Because you don’t have the skills to communicate with a neurodivergent person nor any empathy for those disabilities. It is always on the neurodivergent person to pick up what a neurotypical person is putting down when they literally can’t. Especially in an office, where everyone and their dog has a PhD in bullshit. If you don’t, you’re a problem child quickly….. mostly because since most bosses don’t know how to work with neurodivergent people, they don’t know how to get their message across in the way that they meant it because the chasm is *wide.* Bosses do not like to hear the truth most of the time. Very few will let you speak truth to power. Therefore, if I acknowledge a problem in their logic during a meeting, it doesn’t matter that I didn’t pick up on the social cue. I wasn’t focusing on them at all, but the matter at hand. I also want to contribute to the discussion in a major way because I’ve had bosses talk to me privately and steal my ideas.
    • It really, really matters whether your boss can hear criticism or not when you’re autistic, because you are literally trying to help with your different pattern recognition and it is seen as threatening, particularly to men. The first boss I ever thought really had my back was at Marylhurst, when in a meeting with Google I laid a truthbomb on the table and he saw what dog I was walking immediately. I was so touched when he said, “I think we should get back to what Leslie was saying, because I’m going to need an answer on that.”
      • I’d spent so many years thinking my words and opinions didn’t matter, so it made my year.
      • He actually did that twice. Dana thanked him for hiring me and he said, “Leslie is worth every penny.”
  • These are the things I remember when it all goes to shit later because literally no one understands me after a while.
  • I am one of those people who needs iron structure every single day like clockwork, and also angry when I feel micromanaged. There has to be a middle ground, and there is. But it’s more work than it would be for a neurotypical employee because what you say is not what we hear and vice versa. It’s why when I need to relax, I watch cartoons.
  • If you react to us realizing the pendulum has swung too far with negative attention….. “oh, look who FINALLY decided to show up FOR ONCE,” we’ll never show up to anything ever again. It’s easier to watch family friendly and kids’ shows so that you can study shows that present big ideas to little kids. Avatar: The Last Airbender comes to mind………… It’s almost as if it’s a hidden layer that’s gold when you find it.
  • Here’s what I mean about good writing where you least expect to find it…… Rigby says “tonight, let’s do something REALLY scary.” Pops says, “we could go to bed early and be alone with our thoughts.” It was at that moment I realized Pops had given me nightmares. 😉 It was a truth I, and most people with mental heath issues/processing disorders need to be able to voice. That’s part of the problem. Not being able to completely take care of ourselves makes us bad at communicating our needs as well. That makes society doubly difficult.

There is nothing scarier than being alone with your thoughts when you’re disabled. The system is not built for you, especially when you’re low needs and “seem normal,” You walk around all day, every day, feeling worthless and useless because we cannot accept that we have disabilities. It’s easier to believe everyone else….. you’re either slow on the uptake or a judgmental dickhead.

When you think of us as “stupid,” it comes across in a sugary sweet voice that no one needs. That voice is the shortest and quickest path to driving me up the wall. If I have to ask for information again because I didn’t catch it the first time, it’s downhill from there. That’s why I prefer working through e-mail. I do not like conversations at all regarding work because I do not want there to be anything missing in the conversation that I can’t go back and read. It’s what keeps me from having to ask “stupid questions.”

We don’t need your pity, but we do need your advocacy. Thank God the neurodivergent community found programming, because starting when I was a senior in high school, being a programmer meant getting rich. Not necessarily working at a company, but joining a small company that has venture capitalist money on a project in which you really know to the core of your being that it will succeed.

But that has backfired in a lot of ways because when programmers are sitting around together, they’re all tracking the same way and they get shit done faster than you can imagine. Therefore, the perception is that you’re either a savant at something, or you belong in special ed. There is no middle ground, because we’ve made it that way. Social masking has made it where we’re choosing not to take up room not to rock the boat.

Has it worked yet?

And now I realize I haven’t explained the title. In accepting my disability, I could laugh about it. In accepting his disability, Zac could laugh about it. He said “if you think I’m adorable, it probably has something to do with your depth perception issues.” I said, “I’m wondering if I should give you the finger you don’t have.” He said that was VERY well played. Because I realized something. That I can joke about it with Zac in a way I won’t let anyone else in the world get away with. EVER.

That’s because he’s not punching down, and neither am I.

I Came Here to Kick Ass and Chew Bubblegum………. and I’m ALL OUT of BUBBLEGUM

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you had the power to change one law, what would it be and why?

That’s a quote from a movie I’ve never seen, “They Live,” but the boys I went to HSPVA with had seen it a million times and that’s the only line I know. But Arnold Schwartzenegger plays some kind of badass (as per his usual except my favorite, Kindergarten Cop). So, basically it means nothing to me in the context of the movie, but the frustration I feel with the American government so much of the time. Because I love intelligence, that annoyance runs the gamut from local to global.

I don’t like what we’re doing in Israel because I think no good can come of it. I think that every state not having Medicaid expansion is a crime. I think the way we treat soldiers when they come home from war is atrocious. I am starting to feel the burn in terms of groceries, because of course I spend most of my money on food. I know that in time, this will become the new normal because of course things can’t cost the same as they did when I was 25. I probably just sound like an old person, but it is the price of progress.

“Progress.”

It’s hard to choose what one law I could use to really make a difference, because there are so many playing fields. So, I think I’ll go local on this one. I would make it illegal anywhere in the United States to deny a trans child their medication.

People are making this a bigger problem than it is by a large margin. The debate is that these parents are either making their children do this to themselves for attention, or they’re monsters for believing their child and taking them to get evaluated.

I have come out as queer.

I have come out as nonbinary (but don’t care about pronouns, call me how the spirit moves you, I guess….).

I have told everyone that I have cerebral palsy, autism, and bipolar…… and that they’re all connected.

I have told the world that I’m poly to make it easier for other poly people to say something, because I didn’t plan it out. Zac just told me he had other partners and I thought, “can you really imagine giving a shit about that? You’re a writer. You don’t even notice when you’re home, much less someone else.”

In short, I have told people a lot of scary things, just throwing it out there and expecting them to keep up. I learned that from Aaron Sorkin. Never talk down to an audience, they’re smarter than you think they are. My dad was the same way as a pastor, and I started preaching as a layperson about the time The West Wing was in its second or third season.  I learned a lot about how to say things like Aaron Sorkin, that the music of the dialogue matters. That the reason he doesn’t let actors change even a comma is because he’s not listening to the words. He’s listening to the beat. To him, it looks as bad as coming in half a measure early on a rap track.

Therefore, I know how to say something loud and clear. Your entire body shakes in fear if you are not secure in that connection, and sometimes even still. Because I’ve had to say these things, I know how scary it is to tell someone you’re trans in a global sort of way. Everyone’s coming out experience is different, and it feels like trans kids are being treated now like gay kids were 30 years ago.

Your behavior didn’t change, you just found new kids to hate.

Meanwhile, the AMA and the APA opinions are entirely left out of the equation. Think about it. Really think.

Why would you ever come out as trans if you didn’t really need it? If a doctor prescribes medication, why is it your right to take it away? This is not about them. This is about you. We as a whole ass community are tired of straight people making our existence dependent on their comfort level. I will no longer kowtow to “that’s just how he is.” To me, it’s “I lived through the entire Civil Rights movement and I didn’t learn a damn thing.”

Statistics show that we have a hard enough time keeping trans kids alive in this country, and there’s a whole lot of people complicit in that problem.

I particularly hate the shot of Max Klinger on M*A*S*H* as proof that there’s always been trans women in the military. I get the joke, but it’s not funny. Being female was not part of Klinger’s identity. He was trying to get a Section 8……. because obviously acting like a woman is so crazy. Plus, he went back to his gender appropriate clothes when he realized he actually wanted to stay.

No trans person has ever gotten back into their old gender’s clothes and thought, “yeah. I could do this.” Body dysmorphia is real and it’s deep. It’s why trans kids kill themselves in large part, because their family keeps making them be who they’re not so that the trans kid can’t take up any room in the house, judged on every action that looks too feminine or too masculine.

Especially in conservative households, this is early and often. Kids don’t see an escape.

Because it a lot of households, their support system is the doctor that to them hung the moon because they didn’t say “you’re fucked up.” They said, “there’s lots of words to describe what you’re feeling. Let’s make you feel better.” Puberty blockers are temporary so that surgery is a long way away off. They’ve had years of living as their real gender before that’s even on the table.

What puberty blockers do is keep their sexuality from changing their bodies even more into the gender they don’t want, making surgery harder, like for an enlarged Adam’s Apple. As a singer, having it shaved feels really fucking dangerous.

So, it’s a lot. A lot they need to talk about with the doctor they’re not allowed to see.

We can do better than this. We are better people than this.

:::stares in Texan:::

Somewhere you got lost along the way with the queer community. You’ve got the “y’all are welcome” down. “All y’all?” Gonna need some work….. and you know EXACTLY WHAT I MEAN.

The clue phone is ringing, because the call is coming from inside the house.

A Place for Us…. Somewhere, a Place for Us

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Write about your dream home.

I love musicals. I couldn’t resist.

My perfect house would have enough space for Zac and me to spread out when he’s there. It’s the one thing I don’t have. I’d like to be able to host him, but I also like that coming to his house is a completely different vibe than my house and it’s nice to get away from it once in a while. However, we don’t have to spread out much. Right now we’re both in his office playing on our computers. There’s a pork butt in the Instant Pot. We’re both looking forward to “Slow Horses.” I also got him my favorite Shiraz (Yellowtail- there’s more expensive, but not sure about “better”), a heart-shaped box of chocolates with a rainbow flag on it, and a card that’s going to take him a while to read…… because as I told him, I could probably write you something better than I could buy.

And that’s all I really have to say about that, because we had a prompt like this not long ago and I told the story of how I’d rather build my own relatively tiny house because I’ve watched hundreds of hours on YouTube on both construction and sustainability. I know for certain that I could get by on a Jackery and a cell phone. I know for sure that I could sound knowledgeable in front of a contractor or carpenter.

You’ve got to check out Bourbon Moth, Perkins Brothers, and foureyes furniture.

If money were no object, Perkins Brothers would build my house and the other guys would be responsible for all my furniture.

On that note, it’s “Slow Horses” time.

Try Not to Panic

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

You get some great, amazingly fantastic news. What’s the first thing you do?

I have problems with transitions, and even if something is good, it takes me a while to adjust. I seem like that’s not true, like getting a while hair to move to DC. I hated leaving DC from the moment I left. It was not a bad move to come back, it just took me about three years to really settle down and feel like I had roots.

Living here has been a lot longer than I ever lived anywhere as a preacher’s kid. In the Methodist church, they’re “rated.” You don’t get more money from the same church, you move on to a different one that pays more….. which generally means bigger problems, but that’s neither here nor there. I could write an entire blog entry on the way I’ve seen parishioners behave with all religious piety- the letter of the law and not the spirit.

So, I could see those things on a small scale until we got to Houston and Sugar Land. It got bigger. More people to minister to, too many people who weren’t sure about us because we were new and the last pastor, no matter what, walks on water. Because of this, we all got the hell out of Dodge the moment it was time to move, because you never wanted to seem like a threat to the pastor that took over for you in what’s called “move day.” I only remember the exact date for Houston, because it was the day before I met my emotional abuser (we moved on a Saturday).

In order for their to be continuity across churches in the conference, everyone moves at the same time. There are exceptions to this, like when my dad received an emergency appointment because of the previous pastor’s death. But on the whole, it’s in the summer when things aren’t as busy, anyway, and it’s amazing how efficient the system is. I never had a parsonage that was full of things that were left behind.

They’re furnished because with parsonages, you really only carry your personal effects when you move. It’s a huge cost savings, especially for very small churches who can’t afford to pay their pastor much. Not everything has been my style or color because generally people furnish it with their old stuff, the “Dear Aunt Sally” collection at Goodwill. Naples was the first house that was perfect from the beginning, and Sugar Land made it perfect because they asked me what I wanted.

I wonder if the walls are still pale yellow (I accented everything with sunflower paintings, pillows, etc. I was inspired by the Elizabeth Arden perfume bottle. Of course I was in 1994).

I was lucky in that my father took me along for many meetings, visiting “the sick, the friendless, and the needy,” and consoling people whose relatives had died. I wasn’t around for this one, but I only remember one instance where we lost a child. It is felt by the whole community, particularly an empath.

She wasn’t even a member of our congregation, but in small towns, you’re everybody’s pastor when they’re talking to you. One person who talked to my dad a lot was the principal of the elementary school. They liked each other, I wasn’t a “problem child” all the time. In fact, the worst time I ever had in school was when a boy tried to kiss me and I punched him in the face.

That same principle walked through the reception area saying, “Leslie, I don’t condone fighting and this is not acceptable.” I’m sweating bullets as he closes the door. Then, he says, “I keep pencils in my desk for people I think have shown courage…. and they are some very special pencils.” He was bluffing, and also he knew what was up. Of course you hit a guy that tries to kiss you without your consent. It is the way they receive information the fastest because since men are angry that’s what they do. The principal knew that, which is why the loss of “our child” was so devastating for the entire area, not just the people that were closest to him.

Melanie Allen was a fifth grade student who was invited on a class trip to the principal’s house. He lived on a lake, and had a barge. Everything was going perfectly until Melanie realized that swimming looked so easy everyone could do it, and jumped off the barge. She started struggling quickly. The principal jumped into the water to save her, and had to let her go when he realized that unless he changed tacks, they were both going to drown. I don’t know what happened, but what I do know is that the principal survived and Melanie didn’t. The principal was absolutely blameless, because I’ve heard lifeguards on This American Life that not every one is a good save.

I can’t imagine the grief that comes with surviving something like that, but he learned to deal with his demons and was very good about boundaries so that we were as protected as we could be.

I tell that story because to me it illustrates how much pain I’ve taken in since I was a child that didn’t belong to me, and now I’m trying to shed it to be my own person….. and I feel more me than I’ve ever been because Zac and I are stable, Lindsay’s dropping in a lot of the time now, and my house situation is going to get resolved one way or the other because today I cleaned up hair dye. If I’d gotten a chance to talk to Bryn, that’s what I would have told her. Maybe there’s a light at the end of the tunnel because I am finally getting someone to notice that I’m doing all the work when it comes to taking care of common spaces.

I had to finally get tired of not being heard, and finding people who will listen is the thing that makes me the happiest. I do not need people to agree. I just need them to hear me out. I will always hear you out, because hearing and listening are sometimes very separate things. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder…….. what if I know that this amazing, wonderful thing will only be good for me and not my partners/friends/family/etc? I want the shiny thing, but I’ll brood for hours over any benefit to only me because I don’t want to come across as demanding or undeserving of anything.

I am way too hard on myself, but that’s probably because I know that there’s got to be a combination of words that will unlock my mind. I will find the secret to life, the universe, and everything. Because I’m neurodivergent, I’ve had a lot of emotional moments where I thought I was saying something new and exciting, but the way I said it made it seem like a bad thing…… when in reality, that’s my own social anxiety talking and unfortunately I am passing the savings onto you.

I have so many stories that have sad elements to them, because everyone is fighting a battle you don’t know anything about. I just tend to hear a lot of them, often, because I have that vibe that says, “tell me anything.” And people do. Sometimes it turns out great. Sometimes not so much.

Part of it is me; I am not always the same person in terms of where I am in terms of depressed or manic, meltdown or burnout, etc. I have so few moments of feeling well that here’s the good part about seeing pain on other people’s faces. I am grateful for what I have, and those I love….. and even when I don’t have two nickels to rub together, I have people who love me. Even when I’m not of sound mind and body, I still have people who love me.

It doesn’t make me feel better about transitions, though. I need time, and then you’ll know that I’m truly content. For instance, of course I want to go to San Diego with you, but I’d like some notice. If I got the news that I was going to San Diego, that would be one of those things where I’d call Bryn, the thing I do when I get the most excited about something.

The flip side of being able to deal with so much hurt is being able to take in joy as well. I will try not to panic in the moment, but I have a different perspective than I did when I was young. The first is that given enough time and space, I can make it through anything. That includes things that are supposed to blow my mind and make me happy- I will be, just give me a chance to take it all in.

I do not live for the bad moments, I live for the good. I try to find it, but my stories don’t always go down the road where there’s gold at the end. Happiness always writes white, as if the ink isn’t dark enough to make an impression. I have a tendency to delve into the dark so I can get a lantern in there. I also need to be reminded to look up, because my mind is a very busy place.

Going to see Charlotte Cardin was a great experience and I loved it. However, a live concert would not be my first choice to go out because of the noise, lights, etc. Therefore, it was wonderful news we were going, I was excited for weeks, then wanted to back out because of social anxiety until I put on my “honey badger don’t care” face and got my happy ass to the train. Sometimes I have to straight up say out loud, “you’re being ridiculous.”

It was Lindsay. It was my city. It was my kind of music. Charlotte is Canadian and it was her first American concert ever.

Still almost missed it because I didn’t have enough spoons. Luckily, I generally get a second wind. But if I get home, I do not have enough energy to go back out because generally, again, transition time.

The hardest part of this growing up is that my mother had a very specific idea about the way I should look and it took time in the morning. My dad would be like, “I have a wedding/funeral/visitation to do this afternoon. Want to come?” Of course I did. Free food. “What time are you leaving?” “Oh, I think we’ve got about 15 minutes.”

15 minutes to do my hair, pick out a dress, and hope I left with the shoes on the right feet. I wanted to go to the wedding (or whatever, this happened at least two or three times a month), but not having any transition time made my anxiety go through the roof. But then I’d get to where we were going and be okay again……. after I’d had some time to get used to my new environment.

The second thing I do is pour myself a drink. I need to relax, because we are celebrating. I don’t think I’ve ever done a toast with Sugar Free Tang before, but that’s what I’ve got.

Tomorrow is an exciting day- Air & Space with Lindsay and then it’s date night for Zac and me. There’s also a possibility that I’ll get to see her more than once because she’s staying in the NoMA area (which I always pronounce with a HUGE Boston accent like when Garciaparra played for the Red Sox).

And the first thing I did was tell you, so maybe that’s the real lesson in all this. What’s the first thing I do when I get good news? Share it with the community who has come to love me and my weird little life over the years.

But again, transition time. I haven’t had a boyfriend all that long. It’s taken a year for me to even get used to the idea that this is a real thing. He’s so unfailingly kind that I know he has my back, and I feel the same way about him.

Even when he’s snoring.

Outgrown

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Are there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?

When I was a child, I had eight Cabbage Patch dolls, a “Kid Sister,” and an ALF plush (that was probably the worst thing I’ve ever given away). I didn’t like playing with dolls, but I liked having them around me as comfort objects. For instance, I did not make up elaborate stories about them. I enjoyed that they took up space in the bed. The last doll I loved was SpongeBob, probably the second biggest thing I’ve regretted giving it away because it wasn’t really a doll. It was more like a structured pillow, and I shouldn’t have cared that pillow was yellow and absorbent.

The last time I remember holding it clearly, I was in the hospital at Inova Fairfax, where I was being evaluated for appendicitis. There were too many people in the ER, so I got put out in the hallway and given something for the pain. It was very scary, because they got pretty close to prepping me for surgery (or it seemed to me, because they kept waffling). Then, they realized that I have a birth defect in my intestines (or something, I can’t remember…..) where there’s a hole that can get infected. It presents like appendicitis.

I don’t know why I stopped loving dolls as comfort items. Probably because I didn’t want anyone to look down on me and I feel everyone’s eyes everywhere… and I did.

I would be remiss to mention that Dana went to Build-a-Bear and built me a stuffed cat in her clothes with a voice recording in the paws and it still took me two years to figure out I should marry her. God, I’m such an idiot….. or at least, slow on the uptake.

But that was when I was older, maybe 27? At that point, it became a display piece to keep on my shelf, and it was a very cool one. I think I would have been happier using it as a comfort item, but “I was too old for that.”

I gave up dolls as comfort items until I moved to DC. My dad sent me a stuffed “Postman Pat” that I got in London when I was nine. It’s the only thing I own that I kept after the fire. I do not know what got him clean, only that he could use a little more stuffing but otherwise he’s perfect. Now, when I’m anxious, I do have something to self-soothe and I’m not denying myself anything. That Postman Pat doll is so rare that I’ll never find anything like it. It’s not a plush, it’s a fully knitted postman. I could not afford it in 2024.

But other than Postman Pat, I have given up the need to surround myself with comfort items when I sleep….. unless you count my tablet and phone.

I used to love science as a kid, watching Mr. Wizard on Nickelodeon. Then, science became too complicated when they added math. It sucked all the joy out of learning, which I have re-found with documentaries, professional and on YouTube. It is fun to learn facts about science. It is not so fun to sweat over a chemistry exam. Therefore, my interest in science tapped out at about 8th grade, and I didn’t think it would return.

I think that’s why so many people are interested in podcasts like “Science Friday” and “Hidden Brain.” They both unlock science in the way that a layperson could take it in, and the TED and TEDx stages are very good at this as well.

Speaking of which, the first time I learned of “TED” was during Kathy Griffin’s “Life on the D List,” where she pressured Steve Wozniak in to taking her. Dating the Wizard of Woz was planned for TV, and I think Woz already had a girlfriend, he was just willing to play along. I love how she was surprised that Woz’s favorite restaurant is “Bob’s Big Boy.” Apple fame didn’t turn him into a completely different person. I bet he still plays with technology in his garage.

As would I, if I had a garage. I’m great at fixing desktops and laptops (and could learn to take apart phones, I’m just scared of both the glass and the glue currently). I’d also like to learn how to bend acrylic to install water cooling in a PC. I don’t advise it, I just want to do it because it looks cool.

I know this is getting off-topic (but what’s new?), but I don’t advise water cooling your PC unless you are dedicated to maintaining it like an aquarium. The distilled water/liquid coolant needs to be serviced, as well as making sure the seals keeping your PC water tight are still intact while the loop is empty. I air cool because I don’t want a pet.

Although I assume that if I had the money to buy such a gaming rig, I’d have enough to pay someone else to do it.

Besides, the air is always chilly in the house because either it’s already cold outside or we’ve got the air conditioner cranked down to Santa’s Workshop. My PC is mostly passively cooled. You can hear the whoosh when it boots up, but most of the time it doesn’t run because the air it takes in is already chilled. It’s why server rooms are kept so cold.

Computers are an interest I’ve never given up, and not because I can get down into the details about how they work in terms of capacitors on the motherboard, or how to program anything. I like figuring out problems, especially other people’s. It’s an ego stroke to walk into a room, spend a few minutes talking, and at the end the other person thinks you’re a genius. I’ve done that at many jobs, and that’s the fun part.

The not so fun part is that sometimes the problem is that the computer is not on, and someone ends up driving because they access the server remotely. They have been assured that the computer is fine, nothing’s wrong with it, of course they’ve checked to see if it’s on. How dare we not think of something so simple? You’ll just have to figure it out on your own. If you walk into that situation, the magic of seeing you hit one button is the same, it just doesn’t match up to the agony of driving for sometimes hours without really being given adequate compensation or a real thank you, because a lot of the time shit rolls downhill when they realize what idiots uninformed users they are. It’s not fair, but it is what it is.

It’s the same on a college campus, particularly miserable when it’s in Houston because nine times out of 10 when you arrive at a building after walking between a half and two miles, you’re dripping with sweat at the walk, the heat, and the 99% humidity. I’ve been in a bad mood over a printer that wasn’t on and getting a huge sunburn for my effort.

But sometimes, people are really grateful and if I didn’t love that part of it, I wouldn’t have stayed in IT so long. Over time, it just became draining when cooking gave me energy. I began to put more and more energy toward it because I actually loved it and I didn’t care that I only made pennies. It was worth it to be able to live Anthony Bourdain’s life for a while. I’d never understand him to the level that I do if I hadn’t worked in several kitchens where the lingo is all the same.

I left behind the professional part, but still enjoy impressing my friends. I don’t do much in the way of impressing myself because I prefer to keep my sensory issues down. However, I am definitely making myself a pesto and tomato pizza later. I took my Adderrall yesterday and the appetite suppression hasn’t worn off yet.

I’ve lost interest in food, and that love is so big it took over my whole life, and I do not regret it now. Maybe one day I’ll write a non-fiction piece that will revolutionize the culinary world. Well, “revolutionize” might be a step too far, because that depends on whether it resonates with the public and not just the service industry. But Bourdain has proven to me how he crafted his narrative, and how mine crosses over in a big way.

In “Road Runner,” I realized that we lived the same life. Wake up at noon or one, then prepare for the day and get to the restaurant early because “the mise” sucks when you’re under pressure to get it done. Then, you are balls to the wall until almost midnight, and then it’s time to go home and write. “Kitchen Confidential” was originally a short piece in The New Yorker. He was writing detective and spy novels then, most of them becoming actual books on the shelf. The adrenaline of writing all night is unparalleled, like Mike McD in “Rounders.” You buy in at 8:30 PM and all of the sudden it’s morning.

I showed up to work dragging ass a lot of the time because I was in a moment that I know I’d lose if I went to bed right at that moment. ADHD doesn’t lend itself to remembering an idea.

It’s a lot easier to write about the kitchen in retrospect than it was in the moment, because I was already exhausted. Exhaustion is why it takes my chef friends to jog my memory.

I didn’t so much stop loving it as I stopped participating. I genuinely wasn’t strong or fast enough. When I was cooking alone, it was the most hell I’ve ever experienced. I can do it because I’ve had to do it; it’s not my favorite.

Now, I do the thing that I’ve loved since I had a computer in my room since I was nine. I figure things out. I write text files. I play games, they’ve just gotten more complicated over the years….. so much so that I only understand two of them (Fallout 3 and Skyrim, respectively). Now, I’ve played them both so many times that I’m tired of it and wanted to install Ubuntu as a dual boot. I crashed my system because for some reason it crashes a lot of systems like my mini-PC. I don’t know how to fix it, because for some reason, my NVME is not set as “Drive 0.” That belongs to my SSD. So, if I want to install Windows on my NVME, it installs system files on my SSD so I can’t use it for anything. When you add a Linux partition, it will screw up both your Windows and Linux boot.

And that’s what I’m dealing with right now as I pull out my hair. The cable I bought for my 6 TB mechanical drive is not working, even though the hub is powered from the wall. Linux can see the drive, Windows can’t.

It’s so maddening. I’m going to go drink flavored water about it.

Because I’ve given up many interests due to lack of it feeding me. Computers are the one thing that make me feel powerful.

So it gets to stay.

Homosexual Twizzlers

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your favorite candy?

I like the pack of Twizzlers that comes in “rainbow” because I like the lemon ones best……. and who doesn’t like calling them “homosexual Twizzlers?”

I can’t make a whole journal entry out of liking lemon Twizzlers best, but I can tell you some of my other favorites.

I like to mix a pack of Tropical Mike and Ike’s with a box of Good and Plenty because tropical fruit and licorice is a good flavor combination. I sent a picture of this to, I believe, The War Daniel, and he said, “WHAT ARE YOU ON?!” My bad, maybe the pic was too close. It did look like a pile of uppers and downers, just to be fair.

I like chocolate covered pretzels, both alone or chopped up in ice cream. I like the ones from the bakery at the grocery store better than anything premade, because these have to be five times the size of the pretzels you get in a bag of Flipp’d. If Safeway is out of pretzels in the bakery, I’ll get a tub of them at Whole Foods. They’re smaller, but also come in yogurt, my other favorite. Best buy two tubs because you have to mix them together………….. and now I’ve just spent $20 on pretzels.

I make responsible decisions because I’m an adult and I use my money wisely.

I’ve mentioned before that I like Zero candy bars. Most of this is because that was my mother’s favorite. I like Three Musketeers because it was her father’s favorite. I still like all the weird Brach’s flavors- spice drops, maple creams, etc.- because my father’s grandmother fed them to me when I was a little girl.

And though it is not a candy, my maternal grandfather is entirely responsible for my love of Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew. When I was a child, he hadn’t retired yet. My grandmother kept these 8oz glass bottles of each in the refrigerator for his lunch, and would give me one if she had extra.

Now, it’s Dr Pepper Zero, but that’s because of my mother. She raised Lindsay and me on diet soda, so now regular just tastes too syrupy and feels like it’s clinging to my teeth. Probably because it is.

In terms of candy I’ve had overseas, I think my favorite is the Aero bar. I did like the whipped texture, and some of the flavors. Ultimately, I’m a purist…. especially since by the third or fourth mint Aero I thought they tasted like toothpaste (not in a row).

I learned disappointment in candy early. When I went to England at eight years old, I found jawbreakers I liked called “cola balls.” Apparently, the silver they put on the outside of them was found to be food-unsafe and they were discontinued shortly after I got home. Therefore, my relatives couldn’t mail me any, either. I am not sure I will ever find a replacement, because cola does not seem to be a popular flavor for things….. even though it’s divine. Ginger, orange, lemon, spices….. what’s not to like?

For instance, I would be so happy if they made cola bottle hard candy like they make root beer barrels. It would be better if they came in sugar free, though, because I’d eat more. I like Coke Zero better. 😛

They have incredible ginger candy at both Trader Joe’s and Costco that Zac buys in bulk. He doesn’t do it for me, but it helps because my medication makes me so nauseous. They work instantaneously…. and the only reason I thought of them is that I was already thinking about cola, for which I believe ginger makes an ultimate life sacrifice. Will they end up in a craft home brew or in Atlanta? May the odds be ever in their favor.

If we are talking strictly about candy you can make at home, I love marshmallows. I’ve never tried flavoring them with anything but vanilla, but both vegan and not are incredible. The texture is just enough you can tell it’s different, but it’s not bothersome to me. It’s also not quite as firm, so vegan marshmallow fluff you can use on sandwiches is a much more realistic expectation…….

Zac’s roommate made marshmallows flavored with raspberry, and they were delicious. So I know it is possible for me to make my favorite candy at home and now I’m hoping I do not go the way of “Marshmallow Girl,” the way my housemates noticed I made pancakes several times a week.

I am sure that I would make marshmallows constantly and then my ADHD brain would move onto something else.

And when we’re together, my favorite candy is whatever you’re having, because I like knowing those things about my friends. Simple things I store away so that later on, you say, “how did you remember?”

It’s your favorite candy.

I Need a Break from Feeling Other People’s Feelings

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do you need a break? From what?

I’m an empath.

I like feeling other people’s feelings if I’m close to them. When I’m in the grocery store or a crowd, it’s too much. I tend to put on my “doctor hat” in public because it allows me to act as if I have clinical separation because no one actually wants to know when you’re upset. If you have my URL, you know when I’ve been upset. But again, I don’t talk about this stuff anywhere else, because the things I talk about would just be bombs in the middle of a conversation, and I have found that people don’t like it when I’m speaking to them directly.

Sometimes I’m in so much pain that I don’t phrase things correctly and it comes off as if I feel worse than I actually do (by being snappish, etc.); I don’t have the time to craft a sentence in person that would convey it. I don’t do as well with conversation and get flustered. I’m overwhelmed, up to my eyeballs, and I’m always sorry when I cannot remain calm and sugar coat my way through everything.

But that’s with my friends. That’s where I need to dig deep and try to remain calm because those relationships are very important to me (whether they believe it for not). I am trying to develop coping mechanisms for having hard conversations so that I don’t get rattled. Most of the time, I feel meek and mild-mannered. Then, I’ll get angry about something and not know how to handle it. That’s when my fuse gets lit like a firecracker- this confusion- and I cannot even think straight. I am lost to the rest of the world until I can regulate my emotions again. I have talked while I was in that state. It doesn’t end well.

Which is typical of an autistic meltdown and I’ve had too many in front of other people that ended in disaster; they didn’t know I was autistic and neither did I. However, if they did know I was autistic, that’s still not an excuse for my words being uncontrolled. It’s just context.

It’s a way to bridge the communication gap so that I might be able to give someone empathy, not to try and excuse away my behavior. No one should stay with anyone no matter how bad it gets. I explain what was going on and that might give the other person empathy. It will help us both move on from this problem and solve the next of the same kind from ever beginning. But that is dependent on whether the other person sees me as making excuses. I know a lot of other people do, but it’s the kind of information I’d want from them in order to move forward. I’d want to know why they did what they did. Without that context, I will not be able to see why you’re struggling in the future. I will not know what to notice.

But because people don’t think like me, they think of me as justifying something when it can’t be justified. Not everything I do makes sense, both from a processing disorder and a mental illness standpoint. Therefore, they’re missing what I’m saying and I’m not getting what I need. When I don’t know what you’re thinking and what you expect from me, I will spin out trying to find it. I also spin out trying to find out how people’s brains work in general, because if I know how they take in information, I will give it to them that way. However, people rarely give me the information I give them because they think of it as making excuses…….. when the context heals the situation. God is in the details for me, that my light bulb moment is realizing why you did what you did and having empathy for it. Most people cannot open themselves up to me the way I can with them. They do not want to dwell on their own details, food for thought as we sit together and try to work out a conflict.

But until I learned I was autistic, I couldn’t put my finger on why I was so angry that this miscommunication happened all the time. Why did people think I bugged them for details because I was trying to hurt them? I found out later that this is pretty typical of autistic kids, and in retrospect, I definitely was one.

I couldn’t explain why I felt the way I felt. I didn’t have words for things like “demand avoidance.” I didn’t have words for things like “meltdown” and “burnout.” I didn’t have coping mechanisms to remain calm and be nice through all of that happening in my body when someone was frustrated with me because I was either asking them a ton of questions they didn’t want to answer or giving them so many details it was overwhelming.

In a lot of cases, they were just campaigns to convince someone of my worth, and it took learning that to go on this journey of self-acceptance. Once I started talking to autistic people and reading their stories, I realized that I wasn’t actually an alien. My sensory issue is other people’s emotions. It overloads my brain and I am constantly trying to give the people I love the room I want to give them because I feel the same amount of emotion bleed out in the mall as I do being alone with Zac.

I don’t need a break from feeling open and vulnerable to him, and people who are just as close to me. It’s the having to defend myself from being everyone’s fixer/pleaser because the ills of the world bother me just as much as the problems I have at home.

If you’ve ever had a fight with your partner in public and I saw it, I took it in. Probably tried to fix it until I checked out. If the store isn’t busy, I’ll ask the worker how their day is going and really listen to their answer. I can tell when they’re bullshitting me. It all matters.

It all contributes to the amount of spoons I have for going out. I really do have to make sure I sleep deeply, because my body cannot repair itself from that kind of psychological toll without it.

It is also my job to learn to handle my relationships with care, but because I didn’t know I was autistic before, I know that I have to do it differently than most people. I have to learn to regulate my emotions better than I have in the past, and that has to come through my own therapy/writing. However, I also have to learn how to translate better to people who aren’t like me. That I am not asking invasive questions because I mean them to be invasive. I am analyzing what you said because I was really listening to you and took it in.

I’m sure that eventually, I’ll learn to handle it all.

But I need a break.

The Personal Computer

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The most important invention in your lifetime is…

I was born in 1977. That means computers were everywhere, you just couldn’t see them. Most computers were taller than you were and twice or three times as wide. If you had to have a computer at your desk, it was a “dumb terminal.” That’s a monitor, keyboard, and mouse that seemed independent on your end, but were actually mirroring the server…. and even that came later. At first, you had to physically be at the machine to use it, because there was no networking.

The 80s were a true cultural revolution, because IBM and Apple both sold millions of units that were as powerful as the computers that took up an entire room, but could fit on your desk. I just don’t think that people thought of getting a computer as a “cultural revolution.”

We went from it being a big deal to get a computer at all to everyone being connected to the Internet in about 40 years.

We have gained and lost much in those adjustments, but it is not an understatement to say that the personal computer changed the world.

I didn’t choose the geek life. The geek life chose me.

I Don’t Care How You Feel About the Royals If You’re Tracking With Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you’re tracking with me, I feel that The Firm is in a crisis right now, because King Charles hasn’t been King for all that long and he’s been diagnosed with cancer. I’ve already posted about this on Facebook, but I have way more international fans here than I do there. I want input from English fans, and I know I have at least one. She’s not impressed with the royals, so I don’t know if she’d comment or not. I’m not impressed with The Firm because they’re important people. I’m interested in their family dynamics because I read the ghostwritten autobiography that Harry wrote in collaboration with whomever (sorry, not going to look that up) was an intimate portrait that is every bit as important as anything Richard the Lionhearted ever said…. not that it was so good (it was) but records of the royal family have proven to be eternal so far.

Plus, I loved where I could pick out the parts in which I sounded like him, as if it’d borrowed style from me without ever surfing here. It was great. Even if I don’t have everything about Harry’s personal style (I do believe he wrote parts of it because the ghostwriter had to know what Harry wanted to say, I have the style of one of the most famous ghostwriters in the world.

But there’s just something so universal and so specific about this particular situation.

Losing one parent is devastating. Losing both is losing your anchor to the world. For a moment, you don’t even know who you are in both cases. Actually, not a moment. About three years. The first year, you walk around in a fog of grief, finding your diary in the freezer and constantly forgetting said parent is dead and it shocks you all over again.

Nora Ephron gives the example of not being able to throw away her husband’s shoes, because she thought he might need them.

The fog of grief is universal. One of the things that Bryn pointed out is that there’s a possibility that both boys could lose their dad almost as quickly as they lost their mother, because unless you catch it early, there’s only a 20% chance you’ll survive it, anyway.

So, while William is grieving, he’s going to have to constantly reassure the public that the monarchy is stable… even though it’s not. But I’m not saying they’re hiding anything. I am saying that grief is so consuming that William is going to constantly have to stuff down his emotions just to get through the day. But the monarchy still won’t be unstable by the nature of anything that William would do, just by the nature of the quick change.

It remains to be seen whether Harry and William will end up needing each other or not. There may be too much bad blood…. that sometimes gets worse when both parents die. Sometimes it doesn’t. Most of the time tragedy drives people apart, and both boys have PTSD. How could they not? The trauma for Harry was twofold. Grieving because he’d lost is mother privately, and in front of an audience so big you cannot take it in. His trigger is the flash of a camera.

And that was before he went to war.

They’ve both been to war after the tragedy of losing their mother in a horrific accident. Both boys have had more days now with trauma than without, because it stays with you your whole life whether you open up about it or not.

Losing a parent fundamentally changes you, because there are parts of you that belonged to them. In my experience, this presents in two ways. The first is how much they’ve changed you. The second is how much time you were spending with them. What are you going to do to fill it? In the beginning, there is nothing that will fill that space because there’s nothing interesting enough to stop you from dwelling on it constantly, especially in the first few months. It is shocking whether you’ve known long in advance or lost them in a moment.

Especially when people get old enough where you realize it was just time, you’re still shocked because it’s the loss of not being able to drop by or call. You try because you forget, dialing or driving by, and remember on the way or right before you’re about to hit the icon for “call.” You might have a lot of car accidents during this time because your brain will blip out at inconvenient moments….. very much like they tell you not to drive under the influence. Your attention is every bit as scrambled as the rest of you.

Because again, you’re rewiring your nerves to the point where you will no longer recognize who you used to be before. Both in the liberation of not needing their approval because you can’t have it anyway, and the absolute abyss-deep process to get back up to the new normal.

People who seem functional are the ones hiding it well. They’re not getting over it any faster than anyone else. As time goes by, there is an expectation that you’ll get back to your old self, and it’s much too fast for my liking. First of all, there is no old self. I am not software you can roll back after a traumatic event.

No one is. Whether you know it or not is whether they want to open up to you, because most of being in public is just armor. They’re dying inside, trying to compartmentalize while their brains are spinning out like a tornado with memories. You spend a lot of time trying to hold back tears- even more pretending that you’re not crying all the time when you’re not with people.

Just because people don’t see grief doesn’t mean it isn’t happening to all of us. Losing a parent is in some ways universal, in some ways as individual as a fingerprint. What is universal is that it takes a long ass time, not just when the casseroles stop. People don’t check in after about six months, in my experience. This is not malice, it’s because they think you’re okay again now.

But the reality is just like the moment when Elizabeth realized that she was going to be queen. It’s just as jarring for the monarchy as it is in everyone else.

But most people don’t see their own grief writ as large as a change in the monarchy, and don’t take it seriously. They begin to act as if, rather than really focusing on what matters- their mental health. They feel fine, of course. They’re not being snappish because they’re overwhelmed with grief, they’re stressed at work (when before it was nothing). They’re doing things they wouldn’t normally do, like my own example (finding my journal in the freezer). Even that is written off as forgetfulness, even when they haven’t been like that in their whole lives.

You absolutely lose your mind for a little bit, no matter what your relationship with your parents was like. This is because it’s losing your tether, your protectors. You’re your own parent now, and therefore an “adultier adult” just by the nature of hierarchy. You’re the new generation, the changing monarchy in which you have to resurrect yourself, whether you use the analogy of the Christ or the phoenix.

You will definitely feel mocked in some cases.

One woman compared my grief over my mother to her grief over her cat. I was offended, but I’m sure she meant well. I don’t know what her relationship with her cat was like. I’m just not the kind of pet owner that would compare losing a mother to losing a pet. The worst part about you feeling mocked is that you know everyone means well, so you just have to let it roll off when those comments are impossible to forget……

I showed someone my ichthus necklace that has my mother’s fingerprint pattern in the middle. He asked where I got it and I said “the funeral home.” He said, “well… that’s really creepy.” Where else would I get something like that if I couldn’t ask her for it and the funeral home thought to do it when I didn’t?

That was a comment I’m still not over, and it affected my life in a big way because I never talked to him again.

I couldn’t look at him anymore, because I was so hurt every single time and it wasn’t worth working through it because he’d never been the most respectful person I’d ever met. It was just the last in a string of one-liners that were “jokes.”

It was not something I liked tolerating at the best of times, and this was when I couldn’t even see straight. Grief that deep is heavy and exhausting. You don’t learn to live with it all at once because you can’t. You’re basically in a shock blanket at first.

It comes over time, when there are fewer and fewer moments where you deny yourself happiness because of what they won’t get or what you promised that didn’t come true. You don’t heal from grief so much as sit with it until it doesn’t hurt anymore.

By thinking about it, over time you remember more and more good memories. It makes thinking about their death less draining and more about the things that make you smile. At first, I could only picture the open casket at her funeral, and it’s still the first picture that comes to my mind when I think of her because it’s etched in a way that my other pictures aren’t.

(I don’t mean I literally took a picture. Gross.)

If there is an open casket at King Charles’ funeral, there will be billions of pictures of it. In the newspaper. Can’t hide from it.

So specific.

So unique.

Like grief.

Today’s Not That Bad

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.

I woke up this morning, took a shower, and got to the doctor. Turns out, I was within the range to refill my medication, and I freaked out for nothing. I was worried because my insurance doesn’t cover my meds if I try to refill them before a certain time. I do not know how or why, but my count was off by a few days and I was panicking…. until I saw my doctor.

She’s so great. I think she’s actually a PA, but I wouldn’t see an MD as an upgrade. She really listens to me. What’s really funny is that I always call her “Doc,” because she’s a PA. The MD’s name is on everything. She never says her name when she comes into the room. Therefore, I have an excellent doctor, but I couldn’t tell you her name if my life depended on it…. Now I’m laughing to myself, the greatest part of an ideal day.

I’m getting a full work-up because when I came in last month, my UA was off; I was on my cycle (I hadn’t realized it yet, but the test did). Then, I remembered several years ago that I’d done a UA for rheumatoid arthritis years ago, and that had been off for the same reason. So, not only am I getting my hands x-rayed, I’m getting my theumatoid factor checked- which I would not have known to do if I hadn’t been a rheumatology MA for a number of years.

I remembered today because my knuckles are particularly sensitive/swollen today and my doctor agreed with me that we should rule it out. I realize that osteoarthritis is just as painful, but if I have an autoimmune disease, I want to catch it early.

It’s funny that if the test comes back positive, I’ll be using all the same lingo for myself that I’ve learned for everyone else. That being said, again, osteo is no joke and I’ve been taking ibuprofen a lot lately. I am also of the opinion that we’re just ruling it out, because I’ve had osteo in my back and knees for years. Cooking is not for the faint of heart.

My spine is just as weird as I am. It objects to that.

I also got neurology and psychology referrals so that I can do the thing with both those specialties. I need the neurology workup because I haven’t had one since I was 18 months old and I’m still just as physically weak as I was then.

You’ll also be delighted to know that since I’ve moved to Washington and left Portland behind, I’ve made impressive strides in my quest for a higher Vitamin D level. The last time I had it checked, it was 6 (it’s been a long time). After all these years, I am proud to say that I have worked my way up to 6.4.

Progress.

I said, “Doc, I have a funny story about that. When my stepmom read my lab report the last time I got my Vitamin D level checked, she called and congratulated me for having the lowest Vitamin D level in the history of her 30 year practice.” She said, “I’ve seen ‘4,’ but you’re top two.” We both laughed that that one. But to my stepmom, I was living in Portland and visiting, so I said, “I’d like to thank ‘location, location, location.'” Now I know that’s not true.

Perspective.

What I didn’t know is that there’s a once a week medication for that, and I’m on it now. The regular Vitamin D pills do not work for me. They never have (obviously). A normal level begins at 30, and I hope that this medication works. Vitamin D affects your mood and behavior so much, and I think I’ll be grateful to feel so much better in a few months.

I just had a Dooce moment. She once joked about writing like a Southerner and she said “I AM SPARING YOU THE DETAILS OF EARL’S ANGINA.” This is absolutely hilarious to me because basically, I’m not. I’m a Southerner who loves medicine, so I’m going to blog about it.

I have so many stories about the hospital/office living vicariously through my dad and stepmom. I wasn’t in the patient rooms, but definitely in the lobby when we were there for a consult. I wasn’t really joking when I said I went to medical school in the back seat of a Lexus. I overhear a lot. I pay attention to a lot.

I can still tell you about the patient whose son hit her in the head with a frying pan (she didn’t die, but she was never the same). I can still tell you who my favorite patient was to mimic, because her voice was so damn funny. Absolutely not a slam, I just love the way people speak and I pick it up over time.

I’ve picked up “valid” from Zac. It’s a great answer to everything.

I’ve picked up the occasional Canadian “eh” from Meagan, but I use it infrequently because there are certain times when a Canadian would say it and when they wouldn’t. I can tell where it would fit into a sentence just by the lilt of Meag’s accent, and when I know I want to use an “eh,” she reads the sentence back to me in my head so I can double check.

I can pick out a million things that have shaped me from all my friends, but those are my biggest examples. The current and the first. 😉

I decided to stop talking about medicine because when Franklin and I lived together, no one wanted to sit with us because we’d go off into the way doctors talk when they’re amongst themselves and no one could even enter the conversation because there was no concrete way to jump in. If I didn’t understand something, he’d explain it because he knew I was perfectly capable of picking up what he was putting down. As a result, part of my ideal day is spending time with doctors, because I can relate and am genuinely interested.

I think I would have been a good doctor in terms of patient care, but I would have struggled mightily before I got to that point. I didn’t even make it to calculus in high school.

I never saw anyone do calculus, you just have to make it through it…. plus organic chemistry, a different kind of math. However, most of what I’ve learned in a medical practice vs. a hospital is that there’s time. You pick up so much more through social engineering than you pick up through facts. That’s because you have to prescribe for them and hope to God they’re telling the truth about what they’re really on.

A great example would be not telling an anesthesiologist you’re high. The gas man doesn’t need as much, and has to hope they don’t kill you by putting you so far down.

A great example would be not telling your GP that you’re taking Sudafed and Adderrall at the same time.

A great example would be telling your doctor that you’re depressed, but neglecting to tell them that you’ve been taking St. John’s wort for months. Most SSRI’s react poorly to it.

This is basically a public service announcement to tell your doctors everything. They’re not going to judge you, they’re not going to call the police because you do drugs (unless you threaten to hurt someone else, yourself, or you’ve hurt your child). They’re not going to try and get you deported. They’re the ones you tell. Always.

I have now had my X-rays, and I took off a ring I’ve been wearing since 2005. It was very, very hard- again, swollen knuckles. I should stop wearing it, but it’s such a part of me. But eventually, it’ll get harder to remove it for X-rays. I just like having a silver ring on my thumb, and have since I stole it from Katharine. She knew I did. I doubt she’d know I still wear it. But, that’s how it came to be on my thumb. Her hands were bigger. 😉 It’s basically a fidget spinner, and I use it to stim. There was no way I was ever going to let go of it.

Then, I finally had enough to drink that I could do the UA, because of course the moment Doc wants it I’d just been to the bathroom. I went down and got my pills, then shotgunned a bottle of water and a Diet Pepsi. I was worried that my teeth would be floating by the time I got back to the doctor’s office, but no. I just hope I don’t have to do this again next month because it was too watered down to see anything.

But, as Matthew McConaughey says about beer, “I like to dehydrate while I rehydrate.” I know I couldn’t drink him under the table unless it was Dr Pepper, and even then I have my doubts.

But I’m constantly rehydrating like a Graves Disease patient, but there’s apparently nothing wrong with my liver and kidneys. Seriously, I can think of very few times in my day when I don’t have something to drink in my hand. I prefer cold cans and bottles so it’s not watered down. Unless it’s Coke from McDonald’s. Let’s not get stupid.

It’s good to know that my weight is under control and I haven’t dropped too much with the re-addition of the Adderall.

I have more in common with my Skyrim character than anything else, because I also look like an elf at this point.

However, I am getting to be a better elf.

This is the perfect day. I had such a significant increase in my Vitamin D level that it really boggles the mind.

#winning

How Do They Not? TW: Combat

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?

As a blogger, I have a perspective on life that is more accurate than most, because I cannot tell myself in the moment how something happened 10 years ago unchecked. I will go back and look. I do not have any moral superiority, because I can only go back to what I was thinking at the time, not another person’s thoughts. Therefore, it’s not “I’m right on the principle.” It’s “I’m right in that this is what I told you, and this is what you said at the time.” People confuse the two, because it’s “throwing things back in their faces.” To me, it is Brené Brown 101. I am checking the story you are telling yourself, because my blog made me check the one I was telling me.”

People think that I am pointing out that they’re lying. No, it’s “now you’ve told me two different stories and I need you to explain why your thinking has evolved.” I don’t care why there are two stories. I’m autistic and I want to know how everything works in your mind. I do not need judgment and I haven’t given any. I am asking for information, and people do not like that (as a general rule).

I complain about bosses who say “explain to me how this happened,” and then when I proceed to explain an autistic amount (which is, granted, neurotypically exhausting), they’ll reply, “I don’t need your fucking excuses.” I complain because I do not understand asking for information and refusing it. In short, I do need your fucking excuses. I just don’t call it that because I’m not going to judge you on your answers. I just want the whole story when you think I should pick it up on my own. That’s because there are social expectations everywhere that I cannot pick up, and you are setting me up for failure by “knowing” what I’m going to do next because of them.

My perspective also changes because I take in information through reading and writing, so I retain a lot of what I write, and what I go back and read here later…. which I often do because nothing spurs something I’m going to say like taking an old thing I said and turning it upside down and backwards because new shit has come to light.

If I didn’t, I would sit in anger and bitterness all the time. In short, this blog is my “Let It Go.” I’m not going to do it in a moment, but you’ll see the process as I make my peace. There’s very little that’s truly important in life, and you’ll begin to see what I think is and isn’t. And mostly that I am vulnerable enough to admit when I’m wrong, both when I see it in myself and when I yield to another person.

But I will never appreciate the phrase “throwing it back in my face,” because that’s an autistic trait, to see pattern recognition in everything, including behavior. When I am pointing out pattern recognition in relationships, I am actually trying to make us stronger by saying, “this problem has come up six times now- why does it always come up in the same way? It always hurts me. How can we make it stop?” The other person always makes it about them, because me noticing pattern recognition is more offensive to them than fixing the problem. The “how dare you” aspect is strong in a lot of my friends.

I notice my own patterns of behavior accurately and I love it when other people can do it for me. You also have to be strong enough to deal with criticism because I know what I will tolerate and what I won’t; it’s not because I’m trying to hurt you. I know me. What will make me feel better and what won’t. If you cannot hear me on those things, I do not want a relationship with you.

This is the standard by which we should all run our relationships. “How do I feel when I am with you?” If I constantly feel invalidated, I am not going to stay. You cannot hear me, and when my problems fall on deaf ears and yours never do, then I’m out. For instance, if you are vulnerable with me and tell me about a problem going on in your life, I will listen until you are ready to stop talking. Just vent for hours if you need it. I expect the same of my friends, because I do not want to be someone’s emotional dumping ground when they’re upset and too busy to take my calls.

I get that I’m a lot. What I don’t get is how many people refuse to acknowledge that they’re the same. All people are a lot. To love someone is huge, because you have to accept a whole lot of good and bad behavior without blinking. That’s why I do not believe in love at first sight. Infatuation and sexual attraction? Surely.

I don’t think you can say you love someone until you’ve wanted to smother them in their sleep with a pillow AND ALSO would give them an organ AND ALSO take care of them if they were sick, travel with them, and smile through family functions even if you didn’t want to go because even if they don’t, you feel like half of them hate your guts. You don’t love someone until you’re willing to clean up their vomit….. because you partied too hard OR you’re going through chemo.

If you don’t know how I learned that, you don’t know my writing. I cannot be in love with Supergrover because she is not capable of loving me that way. I cannot love Supergrover because she won’t let me. And by that I mean that she will listen to my problems about other people all day long, she’ll read my adoration and love with that intensity, but she will not address problems in our relationship.

It makes me feel like she’s here for the dopamine and not for the long haul. That can’t be me anymore. I want reciprocity, and I was tired of not getting it in the slightest. It doesn’t matter how I feel about her, that I would do all of these things as a yellow string and not a red, that who she is as a person was never dependent on her ability to switch hit. That I could have been a support person for both her and her husband, because I’m interested in keeping them together, not being a wedge.

I am not a jealous ex. If you’ve read “Outlander,” I’m Lord John Grey. John could learn not to want Jamie sexually, but he could not learn how to let go and not love him anymore.

We have a lot in common, me and Grey.

It took me six or seven tries to get into “Outlander,” because I wanted to read it. I always read my favorite people’s books, the ones that shaped them. However, I couldn’t get past the rape scene in the first few chapters. I had to read it, get distance, and try again. Once I made it over that hump, I inhaled the whole series up to that point in like, 11 or 12 days. I held all my calls and “Buy Next” is dangerous if you’ve ever been to the Kindle Store.

That’s because representation matters. If you want to read my two recommendations in stories for understanding who I am, they are, it’s “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, first of all. Great series, but you only need to read the first one for representation of me. There is no more important character to me in the world than that because I think both The Giver and The Receiver are INFJ. The way that The Giver explains information is very much the way an INFJ would, and the way The Receiver takes in information is very much an INFJ on the flip side. I use their titles and not their names because I think that tradition has continued in the world of Same for a hundred or two hundred years. They are The Keepers of the Memories.

The only ones in their community who are allowed to feel.

The only ones in their community whose brains work differently than everyone else’s because of it.

Not understanding anyone else when they can’t feel, can’t explain how they feel.

When they do feel, their emotions run as deep as the scene where The Giver gives The Receiver the concept of war.

You cannot imagine what happened in my heart and brain when The War Daniel had his hands on my back. Honesty about war is too much for everyone who hasn’t been there and is hearing what it is like for the first time. Daniel had a particularly rough emotional time of it because he had an experience where he won a piece of fruit salad that most people win posthumously, coming through unscathed, but a near miss by a fraction of a second. Daniel was in the Navy, a medic embedded in a team of Marines. The Marines’ mission, and therefore Daniel’s as well, was to make sure there was no violence at an event where they were giving out vaccinations. About a hundred people were gathered that day (in my memory- it might have been a little more or less).

A terrorist had rigged up a five year old child with explosives and had a remote detonator so he could throw the child in the middle of the crowd and blow it up. Daniel caught it out of the corner of his eye and shot the terrorist before the child exploded, saving the entire crowd. If the child was already wired and no one had caught it already, it was a near miss by seconds. Daniel also, presumably, was not the one in charge of watching for terrorists, just had his eye out because he did have responsibility. Yet he was a medic, one of the people who was giving vaccinations at the time. I think that makes his actions even more amazing, because there’s two things at work. Being able to notice both the people he was vaccinating and his complete environment, and being able to react before anyone else in both directions.

It was a memory that cost me a lot of spoons, but with perspective it helped me grow more than anything in the last, I don’t know, decade? It deepened my love for all people who have been to war, down to a Starbucks clerk I noticed was a Navy Corpsman. It’s the reason Daniel was embedded with the Marines in the first place. They don’t do medicine or travel. It’s amazing how much crossover there is, and rivalry because of it. People think the Marines are the toughest, and they do absolutely nothing to dispel this.

I had to bring in a little humor to the situation, because I realized that as I was getting deep into the combat aspect of my story (not being in it but feeling my partner’s emotions about it so viscerally), that when I tell The War Daniel’s story it doesn’t lose power. It feels like he’s touching my back every time I hear it in my head. The War Daniel was (is?) one of the loves of my life. The timing was just off. That being said, I have no idea how he feels about me now having broken off our engagement, but he hasn’t cut off contact. We’ve e-mailed each other once, but unfortunately I didn’t get it until a month after he’d sent it. I think it led him to believe I was uninterested in him. But, if he hasn’t been reading, he wouldn’t know that. I prefer it that way, to be honest. That if he doesn’t want to know how I feel, then I have my answer because in order to know me, you have to know my writing as well. I am a range of people depending on our experience.

Being online friends and in real life friends is totally different, because I understand things differently in person than I do in writing , and therefore present myself differently because of it. I am just not going to waste time on a man who doesn’t care how I feel……… because I’m not shut down. And neither was he, in the beginning, when it was all the rush of having known each other as children and him saying “I’ve been in love with you for 36 years.” I do believe that he meant it. I really do.

That’s because in the beginning, he could lay it out for me. That’s because he was on medication to control his alcoholism and drinking one beer to avoid the shakes so he could come down naturally and at home before he admitted himself to rehab. Therefore, his emotions were stable. When he started rehab, he was a different person and we started nitpicking each other. Because he was in rehab, there was no way to have an in person relationship for a while, and our engagement fell apart.

But here’s what I know. If he was serious that he’s been in love with me for 36 years, then it’s always been me and he’ll get off his ass or he won’t. But it’s not a matter of love, it’s a matter of pride.

Does he think he deserves the love of his life or not?

What he could lay out for me is that he knew he was fucked up, and therefore encouraged me to keep seeing where my relationship with Zac went, because he couldn’t be there for me in person and he needed someone “on the ground.” It helped that he found Zac charming and wouldn’t have been threatened if we wanted to stay together when he got home. That he did want the life we envisioned, which was living overseas if we were able and having our daughter, Cora, join us if she wanted. We even wanted to live in a country with protections for trans women, like Thailand, because she currently lives in northeast Texas and doesn’t know what a life without that persecution is like.

Our job was to be there for Cora, and when our relationship fell apart, we lost that ability to tag team as co-parents, which we absolutely were. Cora and I still have a relationship on our own, but I don’t tell her how I feel about Daniel because she’s not the monkey in the middle. I am happy to talk to her about cats, her fictional worlds that would be famous if she puts them out there, us both being queer and having that experience, etc. It is enough, that she can always reach out to me because I’m her “queer mom.” We are emotionally available to each other even when The War Daniel and I are not. Again, our relationship reminds me so much of The Giver, because The War Daniel was the first person to touch me with the memory of war the way Lois Lowry set up imparting all memories by The Giver putting their hands on the backs of The Receiver. However, I know that I was the right Receiver for him because I’d had the experience of listening to so many other people with complex problems that I was ready for it. And before he touched my back with war, he touched it with love.

It’s the perspective that made me believe I’d done a lot of things right in my life. The War Daniel was the first person that made me turn my attention from Supergrover, because he showed me everything I wasn’t getting from her that I needed to function in our relationship. She went too long between touching my back with good memories instead of bad. I deserved a lot of criticism and anger in the moment, but being forgiven made me think there was a future that wasn’t really there.

In my world, forgiveness meant something opposite from what it meant in hers. That loving someone meant forgiving them honestly and completely so that we can talk about our issues again, because we can both be vulnerable without fear of the other’s emotions. I feel that Supergrover was scared of my emotions because she wasn’t used to dealing with them on her own. Therefore, she could not give me what she didn’t have, and could not admit it. It was an unbreakable power imbalance, because we could not move past anything by actually resolving it. We just kicked the can down the road. There were two reasons I had to love her as a whole person, and love her husband that way as well. We all needed each other, and we all turned on each other as well (I mean, I assume that they’re a team on this one- that he probably wouldn’t want to go for beers).

It would have been a better situation all the way around if we’d sat around a table in a relaxed manner and actually talked about what was happening. That I couldn’t undo what had happened, she was it for me on multiple levels, and her husband would know why better than anyone else. That I didn’t liken it to polyamory because I thought I could weasel my way into some sort of weird unicorn hunting them. I likened it to polyamory because in the poly community, close emotional relationships matter just as much as romantic ones because we’re all talking about priority and time, not whether we’re banging during said established date. It’s not the kind of love, but the kind of attention.

I have not given her that place in my life, my first priority, because I am who I am. I have given it to her because I’m a writer and she’s a muse- in her world, problematic. I am not calling her out on being a bad person, just bad at not having realized this before. She’s not a bad person, it’s a bad situation. Therefore, what I have always been trying to get across is not “I am scolding you.” It is “this is a real problem for me and we need to talk about it. Here’s what I think.” If you don’t reply with what you think, not my problem. I’m not going to encourage relationships with people that go on the defensive every time I try to express an emotion. But because Supergrover is my muse, the one who puts me in the mood to write, not encouraging a relationship with her was never going to happen. If we didn’t submit to each other, we were fucked. I began to pontificate on how she felt, but she wouldn’t pontificate on how she felt in response. She’d blame me for telling my story when it was off from hers, but didn’t correct any of my assumptions. Our relationship became perfunctory, the way I learned in “The Giver.” My feelings were evident and hers were not. She said “you’re not the only arbiter of our relationship” and once called me a dictator. She didn’t realize that I’d be telling a different story if I knew what hers was. I wasn’t the arbiter of our relationship, I was waiting on her input………… that never came.

In Lois Lowry’s world of Same, their communities not being able to feel, down to being given shots to repress their sexualities, is mandated by the government and everyone is used to it.

In the real world, people have a choice to be locked down or not, and most people do because it’s so much goddamn easier.

And less worth it, which I think the book makes an excellent example in showing it.

I don’t think you notice those messages until you go back and read YA in adulthood. I think that’s why books like The Giver and all other science fiction stories that have Christ figures are such hits. Everyone wants to know how being able to feel changes the world, and they see that bravery in media, but not in them. They’re drawn to the media that does it because they cannot find it in themselves, yet are inspired by it. It is admirable, just not for them.

For instance, if Supergrover already had all the people in her life that she wanted to do those things for her, that was fine. I would be in her life to whatever level she would accept. Even if she never wanted to meet me in person, that was also acceptable because I can say just as much in writing as I can through other senses, if not more. But, as I told her 10 years ago, “a hug would be a nice goddamn thing.” It was great when she agreed with me, and I promise you there was a time, even if there’s not now.

It is the most important I’ve ever felt in my life.

The fact that she gave me that gift, even once, is more than I can take in. I just had to give myself The Tiffany Talk before I could be vulnerable with her again, because I needed space to get over my crush and get on board. Because I was so in love with her, I got resentful and bitter that I needed to separate myself from her for two reasons. The first is that I was married and feeling like total ass about myself because I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. The second is that there’s a reason I was so in love with her. No one had ever put my mind in hyperdrive like that- made me care about the world and not just my little piece of it.

I just realized something, and now I’m making me cry. When we began, she was my Jamie Frasier, and Dana was my Frank. Thankfully, it was a totally different situation, but those are the only literary characters I can think of that accurately represent what it was like to be married to two people at the same time. The difference is that Dana and I loved each other deeply and fiercely. I didn’t find out that I needed Supergrover because Dana was capable of being toxic until much, much later. I learned that I was poly by going back and reading what I’d written about both women 10 years ago, how it was possible to love two people with such rabid attention and not have boundaries on either. We did have boundaries that helped me be safe, I just ignored them all because I was under every kind of stress you can possibly imagine and I became more mentally ill than I’ve ever been in my life.

Now, I realize that I have been The Receiver the whole time……….. with perspective.

All of it spiraled into me checking myself into Methodist Hospital, because I believed that neither my psychological nor psychiatric reactions were correct, and that my behavior was driven by both not having the emotional tools to deal with that amount of enormous emotion at once as well as not the right protocol.

Dana, Supergrover, and I all have massive life stories. It wasn’t the romance of it all that put me in the hospital. By then, I was already in it for the long haul with both of them. Hearing both of their stories bonded me to them in a way I’ve never felt about anyone else, and why I’ve made the decision not to enter a monogamous relationship ever again. It’s not that I cannot be monogamous, it’s that if it happened once, it could happen again. I am not going to bet against the house and end up wrecking my life at 46 the way I did at 36.

I lost a stable life with both of them because I spiraled out, but because of the already established long haul relationship, I never stopped hoping that Supergrover and I could, in a sense, start over once I got better. She’s not vulnerable enough for that, because it would require talking about a lot of uncomfortable things. If we’d ended up as partners, those uncomfortable conversations would have been different, but no less important. In a lot of ways, I am glad that I did not end up married to her, because what I learned from spiraling out is that if it hadn’t been my crush on her, it would have been something else.

Those intimate conversations wouldn’t have happened no matter how our situation turned out. I learned this by going back and reading my own work, because her emotional reaction to everything is to lightly move past it if it’s not all that serious and full on attack when she feels threatened.

It’s why “She’s So Mean,” “Your Love is My Drug,” and “I Believe in Love” (Matchbox Twenty, Ke-Dollar Sign-Ha, and Indigo Girls, respectively) have been my favorite songs since their release. “Your Love is My Drug” is particularly sentimental for me in two ways. The first is my connection to Supergrover, because our adrenaline was that hyped on many levels, and the second is that Dana and I danced to it at Lindsay’s wedding.

Accidental polyamory, but ok……………

Incidentally, my favorite meme from that Facebook group is when a guy texts another guy who is dating his girlfriend and he gets pissed about it. He says, “relax, bro. She is dating both of us. You are my boyfriend-in-law.”

Relatable. It’s how I think of Zac’s partners. That I’d hope they’d never react poorly if I reached out to them, because I don’t think of them as threats in the slightest. I get irritated with Zac about our relationship, which is different. The conversation we had about his newest partner was about me being jealous because he treated her completely differently than he did me, and it was particularly egregious for a number of factors.

My jealousy had absolutely nothing to do with his partner. It had everything to do with how Zac behaved, which, in the poly community, is called “being a bad hinge.” I was calling him out in love, because I want the best for him. I was also standing up for myself, because I am an older partner who can absolutely lay in his lap….. I also refuse to be a doormat on the other end of the equation. Zac prevented me from doing that from the beginning, because this is the first time he’s ever been a bad hinge and I had to call him on it. He established that the partner who never called him on anything was the worst because he couldn’t respond to their needs if he didn’t know them, he was bad at communication/getting back to people, etc. Therefore, the person who never called him on anything never got their needs met because they weren’t taking up room.

His honesty floored me because he’s the first partner who’s ever laid that out for me before we ever got intimate. Generally, that’s something I figure out after being with them long enough to pick up those things on my own. How much I care is dependent on how much I love you. If I don’t love you, I won’t call you on anything. That’s because I don’t want to do anything to make the relationship worse.

I have abandonment issues, and it’s something I’ve known since I was 14, because I knew even then that it was a core memory.

My emotional abuser was always as honest with me as I am with everyone else (about most things). I appreciated it at the time because as I found out through a Facebook meme, “you don’t like powerful women because they’re powerful. You like powerful women because you’re autistic and they’re direct about what they want.” It’s a terrible match, because they’re direct about everything except their emotions.

I have a feeling there are a lot of ASD/ADHD people trapped in that cycle, because we’re programmed to throw truth bombs whether you like it or not, and emotionally avoidant people HATE THAT. They would rather follow social convention and get mad when you ignore it. Social convention is nice, but it’s not kind.

What is kinder? Zac laying out everything for me beforehand, or surprising me later? What if he’d led me on for months before telling me that he had other partners? He could have, because telling someone that you’re dating other people is not required when you haven’t had the talk about whether you’re exclusive in the first place. I don’t feel like it’s a conversation you have on the first date, necessarily, because you haven’t even found out if you like the person well enough that you want to sleep with them.

Although if you do know on the first date, then that definitely is a first date conversation. You will wreck both parties, otherwise. One is disappointed because they found a great connection, the other is furious that they thought they might get a love story and they were actually one of many…… because most women are programmed to believe that when someone shows interest in you, that means that means We Are Really Starting Something™ from the moment we start texting.

The reason I say women are programmed to think that is that I was programmed to think that from a very young age, so I can relate. I also have found that if you express that you’re not interested in being exclusive from the first day forward, they’ll stop talking to you because they want that fairy tale so bad.

I was single for seven years, happily so, because I was more interested in Supergrover’s emotional support than I was interested in finding a red string. That’s because Dana’s trump card was punching me in the face, and I needed those seven years to recover. There was no way in hell that I would trust anyone that much, because I didn’t trust myself. I participated in us spiraling out to that degree, and by writing it all down I got perspective on the way I behaved and why.

That’s because I could go back and read it later without having the emotional attachment to my words because I was still struggling with the same problem. Looking at your own behavior with an omnipotent third eye is invaluable, whether you’re writing it for publication or secretly at night.

I choose to publish how I feel because I find that as I’m learning myself, other people learn themselves in turn. It’s what my personality is designed to do.

I’m an INFJ.

Like The Giver.

I love whole people, not just superficial attraction.

Like Lord John Grey.

Perspective on my life comes from other writers. Maybe yours will come from what you read here.

Here are my two favorite quotes about writing.

The first is a teacher asking a little girl who her favorite writer is, and she says, “me.” After writing since grade school and being 46 now, I cannot say that I am a great writer. I can say I’m my favorite author. It is one thing to love your characters when you see them in fiction. It is quite another to love your friends in real life so much more when you can see how you’ve both changed each other over the years. The second is “one day you’ll be someone’s favorite author.”

I hope that my friends realize that as I pass down memories like The Giver, they’re the reason I can do it, my reason for living because my experiences make my writing so much richer and deeper. I have been compared to Dooce, The Bloggess, David Sedaris, and a lot of other comedic writers. I can express things comically because perspective means I can laugh later, while having felt like Sylvia Plath in the heat of the moment.

I just realized that I told you that I had to give myself “The Tiffany Talk,” and I didn’t explain what that was. I then realized I couldn’t describe it better than I did the first time, so here’s a link to a sermon I preached at Bridgeport that I believe is the best I’ve ever done- and not because I’m that great.

She was.

Taking Things Literally

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I spent a lot of time walking around the grocery store this afternoon. I ended up walking out with a lemon parfait and a Diet Pepsi after almost 45 minutes of trying to decide what I would actually *eat.* That’s what happens when you’re on Adderrall and you go to a grocery store. You intend to buy groceries, and nothing looks good. Plus, I was absolutely lost in thought. I couldn’t have shopped at gunpoint because I was so knocked for a loop emotionally. The reason I walked out with so little is that the longer I spent lost in thought, the more demand avoidant I got. It happens to me frequently, a sign of the neurodivergent brain. If I can’t think about anything else, I can’t do anything else. That’s because autism is famous for monotropic thought processes.

I could not pick out food I would like to eat in the future when my appetite is so suppressed that I honestly can’t remember the last time I ate. This is also because I get demand avoidance around cooking, because I don’t like going downstairs. One of my roommates and I are tight. One of my roommates and I are now in a war because she expects me to clean up after her in the bathroom, to the point where she won’t even change the toilet roll.

I can’t remember the date, but the time I got together with Zac before Burns Nicht, I was at his house for two nights. Since I knew I was going to be gone, I didn’t change it just to see if she would.

She didn’t.

We have cameras in all the public areas, so people would notice if this was happening in the kitchen (it does). I have been her maid for nine years, except for the day the maid comes. It won’t take three hours before there’s hair all over the vanity because she has washed her hair in the sink.

The shower is a mess of her hair, because I don’t shower that often in the winter. It’s too big a swing in terms of sensory environment and if I was going somewhere, of course I’d pull out all the stops. Mostly, I just want to avoid cleaning up after someone else.

She will not talk to me about this issue at all, because she thinks I’m unclean (she’s a Trumper, a Modi fan, and has so far made me aware of all the cultural stigmas that come with being queer in India. It has never happened to me before. One of my previous housemates was a Nigerian. No issue whatsoever, and their taboos are probably worse than India.

Said Nigerian was a doctor who went to medical school in Crimea, so he’s the only black person I know who is also fluent in Russian. Oh, and Arabic because he worked in Saudi for years. I don’t remember whether he was a GP for the populace or whether he was working in a palace taking care of the royals.

My hatred of the Saudi monarchy knows no bounds, but I am not insulting the people of Saudi Arabia. The people have nothing to do with how they’re governed. What I know for sure (because my landlady is Lebanese) is that families in the Middle East are all about hospitality and being welcoming. For instance, if I could get into Iran, there are a lot of people who’d want to welcome me because they have no beef with the American government. A minority would be trying to peg me as intelligence, shouting “death to America. Death to CIA.”

Actually, I can’t remember if they said that last part in “Parts Unknown” or whether I’m mixing up the Iran episode and the first few minutes of “Argo.”

Incidentally, there is an “Argo” quote for every occasion… but if I had to pick a favorite, it would be when Jack and Tony go to present their idea for the film crew. Right before Jack opens the door to what is presumably a 7th floor kind of office, he says, “careful. It’s like talking to those two old fucks from The Muppets.”

Iran’s continuing ire at us is a real thing if they’re still protesting us exfiltrating the Shah. He lived out his days in Great Falls, VA, working for us (presumably) because one of the reasons we exfiltrated him was that he had cancer that he knew would kill him with the medical treatment in Iran. So, we got him to the US and that was the end of that.

I understand that the Iranis have the right to hate our guts for it, too. I don’t have to have a dog in this fight, because it’s been going on since I was two. No one, especially me, is going to figure it out. The best outcome would be coming to an agreement at least good enough to reopen the embassy. But that’s a pipe dream, like asking Israel to stop bombing the hell out of Jerusalem, because Netanyahu doesn’t seem to care who dies. If he has to kill his own people to make the Palestinians pay, he doesn’t lose sleep over it.

They came to a sort-of deal in the 70s, in which the Palestinians were given land. Good to go. But then Israelis were encouraged to move into those neighborhoods so that they could push the Palestinians out.

“You can’t do that. We live here.”

“Do you have a flag?”

-Eddie Izzard

We could solve a lot of this by cooking together, as Anthony Bourdain showed us for many years. We are more alike than we are different. Even the Israelis and Palestinians have learned this. There are many, many integrated neighborhoods where Israelis and Palestinians live side by side and never spout that Zionist shit, because they live in the real world… the one where Muslims lives are not worth less to Jews because they know them… not like the Israeli government.

Israel is a recognized state. Palestine isn’t. Therefore, Israel has all the military power they could ever want. Both Palestinians and the Israelis who support them are the Resistence. Zionism has been used to great effect, both in Israel and in the United States, to not only try and push out the Palestinians, but have the world’s full support to do it.

In America, this leads to Evangelical Christian money being pumped into Israel because they think that since Christianity came from Judaism, that means we are like, the same.

I don’t have time for that bullshit. This is not our fight, and we are clearly picking sides. There has to be a reason, I’ll tell you that. I just don’t know what it is. Because that’s what generally happens to me. I criticize based on what’s public, and find out later what really happened, through either the news or an op being declassified so you can look it up online.

So, maybe I’m telling you all the wrong things because there’s more to the chessboard than I can see at present. But this is what I think based on what I know *right now.*

And as I’ve said before, I dive up and down in my writing because I’m using a technique that Louis L’Amour taught me. He said to just start writing and let the faucet drip. Say whatever comes to your mind, because eventually you’ll hit on something worth exploring. For me, that shows itself in having random connections with stories in my brain, and some of them are not pleasant.

Therefore, I start feeling anxious about what I’m writing, and I come back up. Then, as I’m sitting with my negative feelings enough to breathe, I can dive back down again.

Because if I take the blog prompt from this morning literally, my favorite foods to cook are the ones I learned from Dana. She was my first chef, and I wouldn’t know anything about cooking on a professional level without her. So, I take time with breakfast.

My housemates called me “Pancake Girl” for a year.

 

 

The Food Doesn’t Matter

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What’s your favorite thing to cook?

Before we get started, I just wanted to tell you that I am willingly using my iPad today because oh my God. I refuse to code in anything but a monotype font. It has been 15 years since I’ve used anything but “Droid Sans Mono.” On my Android, I still do. That being said, when I dug into the app iOS app “Koder,” one of the recommended fonts was……. wait for it……… Helvetica. I’ll take a screenshot of the app so that you can see its ultimate superiority over Arial, the font that was so good Microsoft made a knock-off of their own…….. instead of buying the font from the actual artist. Seriously, fuck them. They did what people do to artists all the time. Although perhaps Steve Jobs had a non-compete with the artist so that Microsoft had to rip off Arial. I will be finding a documentary on YouTube shortly.

I absolutely loved the doc “Helvetica,” because it shows the artist, and just how many street signs are made with it in how many countries (it’s a lot). But, even still I had to justify switching from monospace. I had to sit there and justify it for a little bit. In the end, it was “you’re a writer…. you don’t code that much, anyway….. bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. I just love fonts an autistic amount. And now I’m sitting here looking at the way I’ve loved Macs since I was 18. I had a Mac SE in my room in high school, and it was my favorite computer ever because it’s the last one I had that didn’t connect to the Internet. I want a computer from 1990, Zac just bought a word processor and called it a day.

Word processors don’t have Helvetica. But maybe e-Bay has a Mac that old. On second thought, I’d rather have one of those old as shit Mac laptops, because even though they’re much heavier than a normal laptop, I’d rather write with the computer in my lap as opposed to my desk. My desk chair is crap and I don’t want to change it because nothing modern would match. In the end, I might give in because I really do like sitting at my desktop, I’ve just gotten used to lying in bed with my tablet and keyboard in my lap, because I’m 10 times more productive that way and both my tablets have everything I need to work and play.

One of my readers said that she felt anxious I responded to her in a blog entry. I did it so she wouldn’t be intimidated by the length of the reply, because it wasn’t personal at all. She said something that stuck with me, that she’d been married for decades and we had completely different outlooks on relationships. I thought that was so universal that it was a blog entry all on its own. That yes, people do have different outlooks on relationships because there are so many permutations of human behavior that nothing in this life is a binary.

She’s not wrong, and neither am I. And I’m pointing it out because of the stigma that comes with ethical non-monogamy. I like what Jada Pinkett said on the matter. “Will is his own man. He has to make choices that make it ok for him to look himself in the mirror.” She made the point that she doesn’t control his time, and that’s how I feel about Zac. I do not get to dictate what he does while he’s not with me. I’m just here to receive him, because he offers me so much solace even when we can’t be together all that often. He’s cooked for me, and of course it’s always fabulous. That’s my boyfriend cooking for me. I’ve talked to him many times about cooking for/with him, but he says that he’s just always had this outlook that you could for guests. I am so thankful he’s not impressed I’ve cooked professionally.

“Food is hospitality. When you reject someone’s food, you reject them.” -Anthony Bourdain

Which is why my favorite meal to cook is never about the food. The food doesn’t taste gorgeous because of something I did as a professional cook. It tastes better depending on who’s at the table. I don’t celebrate the people who aren’t here, I value the ones that show up. It’s taken a lifetime to learn, this not yearning for someone who isn’t here, because again, that goes back to 14 years old. I made people priorities when I was only an option, and could even see it and not give up.

I have deep and abiding abandonment issues from my emotional abuser, probably why I lived in Portland for so many years. I had to prove to myself that she wouldn’t abandon me, and found out when I got there that was not the case.

With Supergrover, I don’t know what would have happened if I’d kept my big mouth shut a lot of the time, but I do know that her hotheaded anger fed mine. My dopamine and adrenaline went through the roof when she snapped at me. I don’t react well to that, and neither does she. But I can count on one hand the number of times she’s apologized for her own words, because it’s so much more convenient to believe that I am the sole cause of everything. I have no doubt that she’s telling people that I’m the most toxic person she’s ever met, because she couldn’t take accountability for shit when it was emotional. I know she’d send a fully armed battalion to remind people of her love if she thought someone was hurting me. What she cannot do is take in that I feel the same way about her. We just don’t have the same love language, and I became fluent in hers- acts of service. Over time, she became less and less interested in mine, words of affirmation. I would tell her that I felt bad she called me a dickhead all the time, and then all of a sudden I was enormously impressive.

So, in a lot of ways, I feel that we could have fixed a lot with one night where she was my sous chef. She’s a very good chef. Horrible line cook….. which means that what I wanted was being able to tumble and roll in those roles.

This wouldn’t be appropriate for us because we’re not a couple, but it illustrates a point.

One of the things that therapists do in age gap relationships, because they often become a big damn problem, is to ask the older partner if they ever lay in the younger one’s lap. If the couple says no, then generally they’ll make them do it in the office. Over time, the older one views themselves as wiser because of course they are, but not about everything. The problem becomes the older half parenting the younger, making their relationship a strict power dynamic rather than one that’s fluid.

She couldn’t lay in my lap. That’s all on me, but that’s what we lost that made me push her away. I didn’t like feeling that my letters were making her feel guilty and not knowing it for weeks on end. I hated that she always relied on her own instincts to figure out what I was saying, and she was often wrong. I have no doubt that telling me she’s “read through many lines” means that she’s read through the wrong ones because she had no context and didn’t ask for clarity so that I could reassure her that I wasn’t attacking her. She assumed I was attacking her, so we never got back what we lost.

Here’s why it’s such a shame. I told her that I was French-trained, but that I’d had friends who were Japanese-trained and either works well. She said she didn’t know the difference, so I sent her two pictures of me holding a knife over a cutting board and wrote “French” and “Japanese” on them. She said she kind of uses a mix of the two, and one of the things I would have told her if we’d cooked together is “there is no such thing. You’re holding your knife wrong. Here, let me show you. “Spider on a mirror, Supergrover. Spider ona mirror.”

The. Food. Doesn’t. Matter.

P.S. Look upon my beautiful font.

Helvetica

Diving Into the Tech

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 6 Comments

Write about your first computer.

I think there has only been one time in my life that I shared a computer with someone. My dad and I had a desktop in our apartment after my parents’ divorced, but it was easy because we were never using it at the same time. Here’s the one thing that was really funny…. I was running late on a paper for English, and I knew I could bang it out easily and be on time for class. So, I ran out of school at like, 11:00 AM and flew home (it seemed).

Then, my dad walked in for lunch and was genuinely surprised to see me not at school. The cool thing was that he saw I was working and just left me to it. He knows me. We’ve met. We only work exactly the same way. The adrenaline of the moment makes us write better. I do not remember a time when either of us finished a sermon before 0200 on Sunday morning. He just said, “are you skipping a day?” I said, “no, I’m late on a paper. I’ll be back by 1:00.” And that was the end of that.

The reason I remember it so clearly is that I was under a lot of pressure. I wasn’t doing well in school except for Microcomputer Applications, English, and Creative Writing (where’s the lie?). Math and science have always eluded me except in seventh grade, when we had a “group project” and I turned all autistic on it, writing down everything the teacher said so that my notes and lab calculations were correct.

He took me aside and said, “I gave you a higher grade than everyone else because it was so obvious that you carried everyone else on your back.” For instance, I would say that Lindsay did marginally better than me in Con Law thanks to me, because she had a transcription of every class. And yet, those are the only two classes in which I was any good (Con Law and Life Science).

I went to the city-wide science fair twice, and I don’t remember who came up with the ideas, me or my dad, but it wasn’t like he did the work for me. I just took his idea and expanded it.

In seventh grade, it had something to do with how dyes are carcinogens. It takes a very, very, very, very long time, but both blue and red are toxic, making grape Kool-Aid one of the worst things you can drink all day, every day (I do it a little bit now that it’s sugar free).

In eighth grade, it was all about car safety, but I don’t remember exactly what it was about…. maybe seatbelts? I don’t know. By then, science was the bane of my existence and my dad helped drag the project out of me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in doing work. I wasn’t interested as much in the subject, so my mind wasn’t completely taken over with facts…..

It wasn’t grape Kool-Aid. Let’s not get stupid.

It wasn’t until I was in 11th grade that there was even a class called “Microcomputer Applications.” Because I already had techie friends, I figured out that we were networked with the middle school Lindsay attended. So, my first order of business was to “hack into” Lindsay’s user account at her school and leave a letter for her in her home directory. “Hack into” is in quotes because you had to know the person’s Social Security number. Yes, they were that stupid in the 90s. It was all new. This would have been 95-96, and I didn’t even have an e-mail address until the second half of my senior year (I gave up music altogether because I couldn’t graduate with an “Advanced Diploma” without moving my schedule around to accommodate MA and study hall.

Since my dad was at work, I had my own computer for the hour I was supposed to be in study hall, so basically I was the original “WFH.” I’d do homework a little bit at night, but mostly rushed it in study hall so I didn’t have to stay up until past midnight AND do a full load the next day.

The thing about my high school, and many others, is that teachers in your grade do not collaborate at all. They do not give a shit if they’re giving a high school kid six hours of homework a night while also expecting them to function during the day. Even if I started my homework after “Jeopardy!” at 1600 and “Animaniacs” at 1630, that still left me doing homework until midnight because I had to take breaks to eat, spend time with my family, and if I remembered, pee.

I also didn’t really have time for friends until late, because with my parents being divorced, I needed my own spending money. So, in addition to all that studying, I was a receptionist at SuperCuts. Sometimes Meagan (or Meagan and Tony) would come and pick me up from work and we’d go to Starbucks or Chili’s.

Back then, SBUX was new and basically the only bar for high schoolers. My first date ever with Meagan was that she picked me up for school and we went for a coffee run on the way. I am amused at myself in retrospect because I had never heard of a “Frappucino,” and I love being marketed to, so that’s what I wanted.

Meagan said, “are you sure? It’s December.” I didn’t pick up what she was saying because I didn’t know the word “frappe,” either. I’d never been north of the Mason-Dixon line (then), and she’s Canadian, not fluent in French but enough to have had a secret language from her kids until they started school….. why I’d be so happy in a Mexican-American family where Mom speaks English and the kids are all Big Macs and Coca-Cola, Spanish is lame.

Wait, Coca-cola is a bad American example…. Mexicans are Coke addicts and it’s a big damn problem. Fabulous documentary on YouTube. Even “beisball” is a bad example because Mexicans love it, too. Maybe our differences lie in apple pie and apple empanñadas. This paragraph is really making me miss Houston. If you look at the demographics, we don’t have an overwhelmingly Mexican population. I meet people from Central and South America all the time, but I haven’t met any Mexicans (yet).

If I find a pocket, that’s where I’d like to live. I’d get to practice my Spanish, if they needed it they could practice their English, and because I’ve been to Mexico so many times, we have some of the same cultural references…. especially since both Mexicans and I have had kitchen jobs. I’ve never worked in a kitchen in Texas, so I’ve never worked with Mexicans (Portland is so white the best representation is our hip-hop station. Another good reason I got out.). I have never worked in a kitchen where I didn’t have to speak Spanish, or learn words for things in Spanish on the fly because cooking moves fast.

It’s just again, Salvadorans, Hondurans, etc. I think what I’m missing is that the Mexicans I have met have such a strong connection to Texas. Therefore, more cultural references than I have with South America because even though the kitchen is common, our upbringings aren’t.

The worst time I’ve ever felt in the kitchen was because I broke a cultural taboo that I didn’t know was there. I couldn’t tell whether the dishwasher thought I was being a white entitled bitch or truly being horrible to him, but either way he couldn’t and wouldn’t explain what I’d said was wrong. We were practically besties before and never talked again, and because of the language barrier (I’m nowhere near fluent, especially if it’s not “Texican.”), he got pissed about giving me information at all- why I’d hurt him- and I got hurt because even if he opened up to me, I could only understand part of it.

It was a bad situation all the way around, because what I did know is that I said something about his mother. I know I deserved what I got, I just didn’t know that he wouldn’t take it the way an American would. “Yo Mama” jokes have been famous since the 80s. That’s why I think he was genuinely hurt- he had a cultural norm I didn’t.

I tortured myself over that for months, because I couldn’t explain and he didn’t want it. I did the best I could….. a very sincere, loving, “I am so sorry. I didn’t know.” And in fact, I still don’t know what I said that irked him, and it’s years later……… and still painful.

But other people don’t have to forgive you, and that’s okay. It’s on you to let go of guilt and move on. It’s how you get more resilient over time, because people walking away hurts less when you realize that first, you don’t get to decide how hurt someone else might be. You don’t get to decide how much apology is enough. You have to know when progress is being made and when you’re banging your head against the wall. Because getting to the point where you’re banging your heads against a wall means that you’re actually both hitting your heads against the wall and something’s got to give.

If you know what makes you happy inside yourself, your intuition will tell you which relationship you’re getting…. are you getting the one in which progress is being made, or are you getting the one where you’re spending time and energy on a relationship where the other person is “just not that into you.”

Speaking of which, I saw a meme that made me laugh. Someone had set up two books in a bookstore and snapped a picture…….

“God is Not Mad at You” -Joyce Meyer
“He’s Just Not That Into You” -Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo

Aside from the fact that I use the singular they for God, I couldn’t help myself. I needed that laugh. I’ve also loved Joyce Meyer for years, because I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Plus, she has the same way of preaching that I do…. a female voice who projects with authority because so many men complain about hearing The Gospels and the sermon in a woman’s voice.

I feel like Joyce Meyer and I are Erik and T’Challah. It’s not that she doesn’t have a point. I’m not trying to take anything away from her audience. I’m only saying that in this case, she’s smart and also The AntiLeslie.

And, to be honest, I’m pretty sure she’s been married to a man for a long time, but she reminds me of “Suze Orman” on SNL…… “it’s ALL. ABOUT. THE. Jackets.”

The reason I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater is that my dad was more conservative theologically than me, but not Joyce Meyer. His line about this was some dumbass came up to him in the “God Quad” at SMU and said, “I was a Methodist until I got saved.” My dad said, “I was a Baptist until I learned to read.” My dad has never been a Baptist, but Texans don’t let facts get in the way of a good story.

What I also mean is that I grew up listening to all this stuff because my dad didn’t generally use headphones. I got used to the sounds of the men’s voices, Fred Craddock’s in particular because he’s just about one of the most soft-spoken preachers you’ll ever meet…… who can also punch you in the gut emotionally with half a line (he was liberal for the time as well, taking care of the population of Appalachia).

Here’s the highest compliment I can give him, because it will make sense to the people that hate Christianity. He was a Jimmy Carter Christian. The kind that prays for you and then builds you a house…… because that’s how “thoughts and prayers” are supposed to work.

I also learned to love criticism of The Bible, because I was interested in studying it even when I didn’t feel all that moved spiritually.

It’s something I learned from Gordon Atkinson, a Texas preacher who became such an amazing blogger that he left the church to write full time. I think he’s doing books now, but here’s a link to his archive. I don’t normally put hyperlinks in my work so the past can stay past, but these essays run back to 2002.

Because the essays aren’t organized by date, I’ll just have to tell you what I learned from him rather than linking to that entry specifically. I was already in a mood, and I found a minister who was struggling with the same thing I was…. how called he felt, his imposter syndrome…. how sometimes he loses his faith when he’s doing hospital rounds and has to rescue himself, etc. I wasn’t doing a hospital rotation, but it’s something that I knew I would struggle with as well if I went the pastoral route.

Incidentally, the reason I didn’t go into ministry is the same reason I didn’t become a therapist. I can’t manage my own problems. That gives me two disadvantages. The first is that I will be constantly overwhelmed by other people’s problems and continue to not work on my own…… because it’s a monotropic thought process to think of other people first, because you like it. What says avoiding your own emotional work by pretending that other people’s problems are more important than yours?

When you start taking up room in the universe, you realize just how much you’re not getting by not asking for it. This is because once you start working on yourself, you know when you’re kowtowing to someone and afraid to take up room, or whether you’re trying to make progress. When the other person is receptive, that’s truly healthy. When your issues cause anger and frustration in them, that’s when the toxic cycle begins.

It actively says to the one who brings up problems that theirs are unimportant. Only the person who is completely shut down is allowed to need things. That’s because the person who expresses emotional needs and gets ignored tries even harder not to make the other person angry, because the last time they brought up an issue, all hell broke loose.

This cycle can go on for decades, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s with your first family or your partner and kids. Plus, there’s a lot of resentment and anger that boils under the surface when one person lays out their issues, and the other person seems receptive…. but “seeming” and “actually” are two different things.

Here is What I Know For Sure.™ In my relationship with Kathleen, if I brought up a minor problem, like housekeeping, she’d step all over my ass. When Dana started doing things like that, we spiraled out… mostly because at the time I was in it up to my ass and I didn’t have much patience. But what I learned is that when someone starts shutting down, that’s the end whether you like it or not.

Now, I have a lot of patience and if I expressed unhappiness about anything in my relationship with Zac, he wouldn’t just say “we’ll talk about it” and forget. He’d either remember on his own or send me a calendar invite to talk, either an audio/video call or in person.

That’s what I mean about it being the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had. I don’t have a partner who tries to kick the can down the road on hard conversations.

Speaking of hard conversations, I made a mistake because I was typing too fast. I am not Zac’s newest partner, but because I’m not around much, people think I am. We are also not cutesy in front of our friends, we are cutesy when we’re out on the town, which mostly means making people want to throw up in the grocery store.

The conversation was surrounding how, since we aren’t cutesy and aren’t together all that often, how do I fit into your life and what’s your bandwidth? That’s a hard conversation to have, because I was terrified that he’d say he was overwhelmed and we needed to break up because I live so far.

My logic was 100% upside down and backwards. We’re good for life as long as we stay where we are, with which I am completely comfortable. He’s just as dedicated to me as an orange string as I am to him. I need his friendship as much as his romance, at which he is very good.

He might not think so, but what really sticks in my mind as romance is remembering things I say. When I said I liked Bullet Coffee, he got me an immersion blender just because.

Editor’s Note:

In case you’re not familiar, Bullet Coffee is a tablespoon of grass-fed butter, a tablespoon of coconut oil, and very, very hot coffee in the blender. The official recipe is the tablespoons of oil and butter with 80z of coffee. I like Cafe Bustelo best. The reason I like it so much is that it provides all my morning calories and brain food at the same time, so 8oz of coffee is enough to start my day.

He sees when I’m struggling and likes helping out, and I don’t mean monetarily…. although he is sweet about telling me to put whatever I want in the cart at the grocery store and Trader Joe’s because he knows that I’ll want to have food and drinks at his house that I’d buy at mine.

The latest was kidding him about me being fake irritated that he was out of Dr Pepper Zero and he actually stopped by the store on the way home and bought a 12-pack. He had a million other drinks I could have chosen, just nothing sugar free.

Well, that’s not true. He has a Soda Stream and I love putting in a bottle of still water and turning the carbonation up to hell.

I also like soda with hard alcohol, fresh fruit, juice, etc. and it’s so great that it tastes fresh from our water. But juice, I think, is one of the worst things for you on the planet if you’re not drinking the kind sweetened with Splenda. You can ask your doctor if they think Splenda is bad for your child, but what you cannot ignore is that all juice is mostly sugar.

Just like restaurant food is mostly animal fat and butter. You get to choose whether you want that rich a meal, and also if way more fat is worse than way more sugar.

I would also rather eat my daily allowance of calories than drink it. So, that’s why I drink diet soda or the drink mixes you add to water bottles. When I drink alcoholic drinks, I tend to use seltzer as a mixer, and even with non-alcoholic beer, you have to be careful. They’re sometimes less calories than a real beer…. sometimes not.

My current favorite drink mixes are an import from Mexico and it’s only, like 10 bucks for 44 drinks…. take that, SODA. They’re sugar free aguafrescas. Both the lime and the piña colada flavors blow me away, because they’re not really sweet. The lime tastes like the real limonada you’d buy on the street in Enseñada…. and yet, not as good as Sunkist Lime, tbh. The piña colada tastes like real coconut water and a little bit of pineapple. It feels like being in Mexico 16 oz at a time. I have such fond memories.

Plus, other countries have laws around dyes that we do not. What I have noticed is that Mexican drink colors are not loud. Given my 7th grade science project, I believe this is for the best.

And through all of this, you may be wondering why I’m changing topics a lot. It’s that in my entries, I’m a gardener. I don’t pick and choose what’s important to say and what’s not. The plot reveals itself, I cannot predict what it will be because in order for the writing to change, I do. I start at a subject that’s not too deep and dig down until I feel comfortable enough to let go.

And now we’ve arrived at that moment, what I’ve avoided saying for almost a hundred paragraphs now. One of the biggest roots of my trauma, my first case of PTSD, was walking into my room and seeing my precious first computer melted and mangled into my desk. I’m autistic, always have been, and computers are one of my special interests.

Given the way that I use the internet for writing now, you can only imagine how much I lost in terms of text documents….. and I saved everything on hard drives and floppies, but of course I didn’t have any on me. They couldn’t have been, because I had to rush out of the house too quickly to grab anything, because my room/office was already full of smoke.

The bad thing from that time was twofold. The first is that scanners hadn’t been invented yet, nor e-mail (outside of the military), so there were no pictures to save that way. The second is that I didn’t think of my files as important back then. Apparently, I didn’t think pictures were important, either, which happens when it’s the choice between saving memories and black smoke chasing you down the hallway. I did not see anything burn.

The fire started in the attic, so of course I smelled the smoke, but luckily I do not have any trauma of actual flame.

I think that’s why the image of my first computer is burned into my brain. In the moment, I did not have time to take in the horror, and I was all alone. My mom and Lindsay were shopping. My dad was delivering communion to the shut-ins. I called the fire department from my next door neighbor’s house dressed in Snoopy pajamas, black pantyhose, and heels. This is because I was getting ready for my first church dance. I was wearing the nightgown until my hair and makeup were done, so I was also sporting hot curlers.

I got to make up for that missed dance later, and even met someone I really liked… but it was just a sweet crush on both ends because he was a little bit older. It was the type relationship where we realized we would have been good together, but the timing was off.

That was an excellent night because it took me a while to get over being the only one who knew our house was burning down for a while. In fact, my mother drove up to the house surrounded by police, fire, ambulance, the whole bit and thought I was dead.

It was a very good moment when she realized I was standing right there in the neighbor’s yard, still having nothing to change into, but she knew why. She was the one that was going to help me with my hair. The worst part is that it was December and I didn’t have a hoodie. The best part is that it was NE Texas, so it was still 50-55 degrees. Uncomfortable, but not unbearable.

That fire was so memorable that it literally appeared in the Naples paper for 30 years under “On This Day” (Dec. 20th). I believe that’s because it affected the church just as much as it did us.

In those days, less so now, you moved from parsonage to parsonage instead of buying your own house. Because of the housing market and ministers retiring without many assets (nor a place to live), the UMC started giving people living allowances separately from their salaries so they could work their own way up in real estate and have a place to retire.

I am sure that it was difficult for the church in that moment, realizing that they needed to rebuild an entire house. I never got to see it. We rented until we moved to Houston. My friends John and Linda have told me it’s beautiful. I believe it. It was the most majestic house on its street before.

From what I have heard, they just took it down to the studs, because the outside was fine. It relieves me because my favorite thing about the house were the Greek columns out front. It was the best house ever, and looked above a minister’s station in life even before it burned. But we drove old cars. There were no BMWs to match the vibe.

I do believe that it was easier to buy a parsonage that large and beautiful because it was bought in Naples, Texas. In DC, that house would be worth a quarter of a million dollars, especially because of our big front and back yards.

In DC, you’re lucky if your yard is bigger than a postage stamp.

I can say now that living in Galveston and Naples were some of the best years of my life, because I was young enough that things weren’t complicated….. except for being physically weak and mentally strong. The kind of thoughts that you’re hearing stream-of-consciousness now are the same way I processed emotions as a child.

Which is “try to take up the least amount of space possible and maybe no one will notice how weird you really are.” Here’s a for-instance, and it does have to do with computers.

I went on an interview in Portland once where I was going to be a contractor, not a full-time employee. The representative from the agency who got me the contract was trying to give me a “pep talk” before the interview and said, “I think when you walk in, you should announce the problem you have with your eyes because it’s noticeable enough to be distracting and you could make everyone uncomfortable.” When I told Lindsay about this yesterday, she wanted names and numbers.

She was going to sue the pants off this guy until I told her that it wasn’t recent enough, so I don’t remember the name, nor the agency.

Funny enough, I walked in and owned the room. I got the job in 25 minutes. However, the employment agency would not let up on me about my disabilities and “making other people uncomfortable,” so I fired myself and moved on to a better fit at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU).

We lost our funding for that project, so that’s when I moved to cooking. Dana was having a blast and I couldn’t stand being in an office anymore. I wasn’t the best cook, but I’m not the best office employee, either. In fact, I’m a much worse office employee.

I understand chefs because I’m autistic and they’re direct. I don’t understand bosses and HR-speak, and I don’t mean it like I don’t understand telling an employee to fuck off in the middle of a meeting will probably land me in hot water.

I mean that I don’t understand the things that go on behind closed doors, the way the bosses talk about me, and how I interact with coworkers because they’re trained to bullshit around everything.

I know that a lot of people don’t know what it means to “synergize,” but I don’t understand the difference between overperforming and underperforming because so much of it is calculated on your behavior and attitude whether your bosses/coworkers’ impressions of you are correct.

I understood it better at ExxonMobil and Alert Logic, because ExxonMobil ranked you and you got “grades.” Alert Logic displayed metrics in front of all of us so we knew how we were doing. It was uncomplicated because it was based on numbers and achievement, not (always) nebulous office politics.

At Alert Logic, though, I found my people. Other linux geeks like me. At ExxonMobil, I was stuck with a very large amount of STEM autistic geniuses, and because I’m creative autistic, let’s just say *our quirks didn’t line up.” That’s because not everyone was autistic, but everyone treated me like their personal secretary when I was actually IT support.

Why yes, I have printed out e-mails for people because they wouldn’t read them on the screen. Thanks for asking.

The one time I genuinely offended someone was when I told her what a simple fix it was for her audio problem. I meant it as “no big deal,” she took it as “you’re stupid.” What happened was that she was trying to play something from her iPhone, and she couldn’t get the aux cable to connect. She thought it was an IT problem, so she called us and I responded.

When I got there, the audio was fine. The case was preventing the audio cable from going all the way into the phone. So, I told her that all she had to do was remove the case and she’d be good to go. It embarrassed me in front of everyone when she said, “you didn’t have to say that part so loud….” and looked butt hurt.

I don’t like my job when people think I’m actively trying to make them look stupid. I save all that for when the day is over and I’m blowing off steam.

It was a lot of fun sitting around with my linux homies to set us apart from users, and regale each other over the calls we’d gotten that day.

In those days, we got a lot of calls about floppy disks, and we had to tell them, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Your work is gone. You didn’t save it on a hard drive as well.”

Two reasons for this. The first is that floppies were not that stable to begin with. It’s what happens when you have a tiny drive with magnets in it and only a thin layer of plastic to protect it.

The second is that people discovered that the side of the computer was the same material as the side of a refrigerator, and hard drives worked the same way, except metal surrounding the drive instead of plastic. So, they’d stick the floppy onto the side of their computer and it would erase the floppy so hard you couldn’t even retrieve the file structure, much less “final_final_final_paper.doc.”

If you put the floppy close to the hard drive, then the magnet would interfere with it as well. Remember I worked as the lab supervisor at the largest computer lab on campus, then the next year was promoted to supervising the smaller lab in the Graduate School of Social work all by myself. Therefore, I cannot tell you how many students I’ve had where I felt like I had to stop them from not contemplating suicide over it.

As an aside, USB flash drives are more stable than floppies, but I only think of them as “transport media.” As in, I work on my desktop and transfer files over that I’m taking to someone else. I don’t use it as permanent storage except for on laptops and tablets that have microSD slots.

If I had to sum up my love of Android tablets in two words, it’s “MicroSD slots.” The Ten Commandments stone tablets will have an expansion card slot before the iPhone, and even the newest Samsung phones don’t have them for the same reason. If you need more storage, they’re going to charge you an arm and a leg for it by having the storage soldered onto the motherboard. You can’t get a 32GB phone and add a one terabyte card anymore. Apparently that is now reserved for tablets only.

The best thing is that Android .mp3 players are the same way. My little Sansa Clip can hold a 512 GB card, and what that means is that I can either have every album ever made, or a smaller library in lossless quality….. for instance, copying the .wav file on a CD directly to your SD card is going to take up way more space than even the highest quality .mp3. But on a large expansion card, you can do that.

Because Apple did the same thing with iPods that it does with phones now. No expansion slot. If you wanted more storage, it was more expensive. I think the plan was to go to phones in the first place. The iPods were the equivalent of Microsoft Solitaire and Minesweeper.

Those games were not included with Windows as fun. I mean, they were, but that’s not the point. The games were included so that you’d be interested enough to learn how to use the mouse.

You learned the interface on an iPod Touch that would connect to wi-fi, so that when SIM cards were added, it wouldn’t feel different. Everything that used to be in iPod Touch is on the iPhone now, and again, no actual room for your music collection unless you’re willing to pay premium dollars. Even on the iPhone Mini 12, which I still carry because of its size (the form factor was not popular and they don’t make them anymore), the cost difference depending on disk space was enormous.

Meanwhile, you can add an expansion card to a tablet in two different ways. The first is that it will be formatted in a way that other computers can read, so you can take the card out and plug it into your desktop, etc. The second is that it will format as a virtual hard drive which doesn’t leave that tablet. The difference is that with the card integrated into your tablet, it doesn’t see the difference between one drive and the other, so you can install apps easier, because if you run out of space on your tablet, it will start installing apps to the card flawlessly without you having to move things over manually…. and honestly, only some apps can run disks formatted to be portable storage because they’re integrated into the operating system. I think the last time I did it, I used App2SD or something like that, and it would tell you which apps could be moved and which couldn’t.

Now you can skip the middle man.

I have a 128 GB expansion card on my HD Fire because I don’t have to want to be dependent on my internet connection. I will always download movies from Netflix, Amazon, etc. rather than streaming them because I might start them at home and finish on the train.

Again, wandering off into nowhere because it’s easier than wandering into everywhere pain lives.

Like seeing my very first computer melted into my desk.