Tag: truth

The Way the Story Goes

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Where did your name come from?
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My mother had already named me Amanda Jane. She called me AJ for months until she went to a church service and the organist was listed as “Leslie Diane.” All this AJ business was done for her. Now that I know I was called AJ and missed that chance, I like its nonbinary nature, but I do not like the name Amanda. So, things worked out the way I needed them to work out. I wouldn’t want a lifetime of saying that AJ doesn’t stand for anything, not having any proclivities toward Jane, either.

I’m named after a complete stranger, so there’s no cute story of my namesake except that it just looked pretty in print.

I like my name ok, because Leslie is a nonbinary choice. There are plenty of men named Leslie in the UK, so I don’t feel like I need to change my name to something else. It already has both male and female characteristics.

I have heard mixed reviews on what it means. Some say it means “quiet spirit,” some say it means “one from the grey fortress.” Judging from the way my spirit jumps around when I’m alone, I’m leaning toward my namesakes being warriors somewhere in Scotland, because Leslie is actually a surname there.

I am lucky in that I have a Scottish tartan for my first name and and Irish tartan for my last name.

Lanagan is distinctly Irish and I get it from my father’s side. There’s Scottish blood on my mother’s side somewhere, but I don’t remember who is kin to who over there. My grandfathers were both into genealogy, but I’m not. I remember a few stories from my father’s father about how we came to this country, but my other grandfather was not quite as forthcoming because he was not a writer. My father’s father published a book in several volumes called “The Lanagan Century” that cemented those stories in my mind in a way that my other grandfather couldn’t.

It was my grandfather’s version of a blog, in retrospect.

So maybe even though my name was a fluke, I certainly ended up in the right family.

Comments Like This

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
What motivates you?
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Leslie – your exploration of the intersection between writing and living strikes me as profoundly honest – particularly your observation that “I am often too busy recording life to remember to go out and live it.” This captures something essential about the writer’s paradox that I don’t think gets discussed enough.

The way you’ve woven together your mental health journey with your writing practice feels incredibly brave. When you write, “My only support system has been writing,” it illuminates how the very thing that sustains you can also become isolating. There’s something both beautiful and heartbreaking about finding solace in words whilst struggling with whether the relationships they document are real.

Your question about Aada – whether she’s real or hallucination – opens up fascinating territory about the nature of online relationships and how we validate our experiences. “I just wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t hallucinating… because I had someone to talk to who could empathise” speaks to a very human need for connection and verification of our reality.

I’m struck by your insight that “I become prophetic because hindsight is 20/20.” This suggests you understand that your writing serves as both document and mirror – allowing you to trace patterns and growth over time. It makes me wonder: when you look back at your earlier entries about Aada, what patterns do you notice now that weren’t visible whilst you were living through it?

Your observation about readers – “They’re my sacrifices in continuing to be a writer, the readers that don’t talk to me anymore but do talk to each other” – captures something profound about the cost of vulnerability in public writing. You’ve created this space where people can witness your humanity, but that witnessing comes with complications.

The tension you describe between needing grace for changing your mind versus being seen as “two-faced” feels particularly relevant in our current moment. How do you navigate continuing to write authentically whilst protecting yourself from that push-pull dynamic you mention?

Your closing line – “Because remember when I used to write so beautifully?” – suggests you’re questioning your current work, but honestly, this piece demonstrates the same raw honesty and insight that presumably drew people to your earlier writing. Perhaps what’s changed isn’t the quality, but your relationship with the act of writing itself?

What would it look like to write without an audience – even temporarily – just to reconnect with the intimacy you describe having with your word processor?

Bob

This comment is so far-reaching that I’m not sure what to say in response. I would say that it helps to have one person in mind when I’m writing an essay, because what resonates with one will resonate with a thousand at this scale. It also helps me not to feel alone in the room as I write, because I’m talking to the person in my head, not thousands of people at once. When I am not thinking of my audience, my emotions fall flat. I used to do the same thing in preaching- look out for the people I was thinking of when I wrote that line just to see if they thought it was as funny in reality as it was when I was working on the sermon.

You don’t connect with an audience. You connect with some of them because taking on the entire room is overwhelming. You just need touchstones.

Aada was my touchstone, the reader I looked for to make sure I was doing all right. I didn’t care what anyone else thought because her opinion was enough. I pushed her away, so she won’t be doing that anymore. I regret it, but there’s no way to go back and undo what I’ve done.

My blog is often a manual on “What Not to Do” because I guarantee that I thought I was right when I wasn’t. Now that time has passed, I see that I was a self-centered jerk. Of course the patterns I see with Aada are ways I’ve behaved that hurt her, because I was overfocused on my own needs.

She didn’t make me feel safe, so I wouldn’t return the favor. I should have, but I didn’t. She threw me into the pile of people she doesn’t trust because there’s no rebuilding from here. My emotions got in the way of my logic, and I didn’t do the right thing.

Neither did she.

So now she slowly slips away in my mind to make room for new people to be touchstones in my audience. I am a work in progress, and have realized that my communication skills are merely compensatory. I work best in reaction to someone else. The reason Aada and I worked well together is that I think she’s the smartest person in the entire world, and for some reason she thought I was, too. The nature of online relationships is ethereal, which led both of us to disconnect from our humanity on many occasions. Validating my experience was very difficult because I did not have anyone to talk to about it, because our connection was always avoidant/anxious….. with me being the anxious one.

It makes me wonder: when you look back at your earlier entries about Aada, what patterns do you notice now that weren’t visible whilst you were living through it?

I jumped up and down for attention because my needs weren’t being met, all while blissfully aware of the problems I caused in our relationship that would make it unusual. I really messed up, and I’ll never forgive myself. I can only hope that there’s a few things on Aada’s side that she’ll never forgive herself for, either, because that’s the only path that will make either of us try again in the future. After all, if she lied to impress me, I know I impressed her at least once.

I chose to make her number one on the call sheet because I thought I was writing anonymously. That no one could make the leap between Aada and “Her Real Name Here.” That led me to say some things that Aada certainly wouldn’t have want broadcast and it’s just more regret to add onto the pile.

I know why I was so keyed up on adrenaline, but she didn’t seem to understand until a few months ago. That was definitely a breakthrough, getting her to understand that I went through something pretty universal in spite of it being unusual.

I would give anything for a do-over of the past 12 years, because I had a solid goal in mind for this time in my life and I sabotaged it at every turn. I didn’t listen to Aada, and I didn’t listen to my own fears as she tried to work with them.

Being able to read Aada’s words months later give me empathy for her, reflecting on how she must think of me. I really did act like a shit friend because I was so tired of my bipolar disorder getting blamed for a lot of things that were emotional.

She blamed me for being emotional.

It’s no wonder that I thought I wouldn’t be enough in person. She’d treated me like a goddess when we first met, and I didn’t know what to do with that pedestal. I just returned the favor, a complete mutual admiration society. But once she was my actual friend, she didn’t realize that meant she would appear in my musings about what’s going on in my life.

I treasure the entries where she told me I did a good job, and choose not to remember the ones she hated.

She was always halfway out the door, so I decided to close it.

Again, I regret doing so because I cut off a future. I just didn’t see the future going better than the past. I will never know what would have happened if I’d relaxed. Maybe those baby steps would have materialized into something. She just had to get a lie off her chest first, and I imploded.

What motivates me is connecting to strangers, especially ones that ask probing questions. I’m not sure that I have answered any of them, but in short, recognizing the pattern with Aada was recognizing all the ways I’d been a jerk to her without taking the time to really think about what I was saying. I was too quick, always. It didn’t matter the reaction, it was too fast to take in.

This is what it looks like when I have switched the audience to Bob.

Learning What I’m Going to Say With the Rest of You

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What do you enjoy most about writing?
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Every day there’s a new blank page to fill, and I wonder how I’m going to fill it. My lifestyle really doesn’t support nonfiction writing anymore because it takes a fictional world to be interesting. No one wants to hear about my life on the couch.

I often wonder if you have to get lonely enough to write fiction. If your relationships have to fail so completely that you rescue them with tales of swashbuckling grandeur. I know that I can change my future with the things I write, dramatically. But it comes at a cost- time to write costs time to get out. I am often too busy recording life to remember to go out and live it.

It’s the intimacy with a word processor that brings me the most joy. Mining my own life for memorable interactions doesn’t endear me to anyone until I’ve stopped writing at all…. then the same people say I used to write so beautifully, why did I stop?

I decided to show myself what would happen if I didn’t stop. I ended up alone with a mental health diagnosis of bipolar disorder with psychotic features. I have no idea what happened to make the doctors think that I was psychotic, because I wasn’t entirely present when they first saw me.

However, I don’t have any history of being psychotic, so I can think of at least one real life scenario that could have gotten me that diagnosis just by telling it.

Maybe they’re right, and Aada is a hallucination.

Oh. So that’s why I should have listened to her. Why it was so hard the longer we went on without meeting. She said to tell no one, and the longer I carried her secrets the sicker I got. I wanted distance from her because I couldn’t have closeness with her- that I’d only be able to take in seven percent of her communication online. We would keep tearing each other down based on her reaction to these essays, not choosing to let time pass before gutting each other emotionally like an axe.

I began to resent the policy of not being able to talk to anyone in my personal life about her and also not talking to me. But again, our last interactions were positive until I imploded them.

I couldn’t let go of the feeling that meeting her in person would make my emotions normalize, that it was impossible to read someone without meeting them, but it was easy to let emotions spill in operatic swells on the page with the other not knowing what to focus on because they didn’t hear you say it.

I wondered why she didn’t seem to care that my life took this path. That her secrets made me unable to cope with my real life, akin to traveling with The Doctor.

The blessing of writing is being able to explain what I’m feeling in detail because life thinks it works in sound bites when clarification is necessary. My mind goes all over the place when I think of my own journey towards mental and physical health.

I loved that Aada let me love her out loud. One day I hope she’ll come back to this time in her life and read my words again. I’m certain it feels like I’m guilting her, but I’m not trying to do so. I am genuinely curious to know why she would choose to isolate me the way she did and make it impossible to cope without being able to have a real conversation? If she didn’t want me to talk to anyone else, why did she make it so hard to talk to her?

I’m not allowed to talk about this story anywhere but here, because I can tell truth from fiction here where no one else can. It’s just that my doctors think I’m psychotic because of it.

And in all of this I’ve been wondering where she’s been… where I’ve been? Why weren’t we both paying attention? Why did I give her so many reasons not to want to meet with me?

I was scared that I wasn’t enough in person. The duality in me is alarming. I craved something that I actively sabotaged, because I found out she lied to me. I realized that nothing was ever going to get any better between us because she didn’t care that she also isolated me from my support system.

My only support system has been writing. Aada has had an enormous amount of respect for my feelings, but the longer she went without opening up about getting together made me think she was never going to do so. That she was sorry, but there was nothing she could do.

I just wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t hallucinating…… because I had someone to talk to who could empathize. That was all in writing as well, so it became the thing I enjoyed most about our unusual kinship. I just wanted to come in from the cold of being thought of as crazy and she was the one person that could provide that respite. It would have energized us in new ways, because we could finally read in each other’s voices rather than getting defensive about everything. It’s the internet. Someone’s always offended.

What I also enjoy about writing is being an authoritative source. The people that are dear to me come back years later to remember what I said, to remember how they felt when they read it in the moment and to see if anything is different. I come across softer, more vulnerable, because I will change my mind and realize when I have erred.

I accept all the times that I acted like a narcissist in Aada’s life, and forgive all the times I thought she came across that way. I don’t think it was a one-way street. We both participated in something that was good and became harmful over time. But I’m the only one that has a record of it. That’s what I mean about time changing people’s perceptions and being surprised at how much I’ve learned when they go back and read something I’ve written years later.

I don’t understand the push/pull relationship people have with my writing. How people drop in and drop out over a decade, for instance. I find that I am always more popular just by being myself than trying to write towards a goal.

I become prophetic because hindsight is 20/20.

It’s hard to believe I didn’t have enough strength to walk away from Aada on my own… that I created a situation in which she wouldn’t want to come back from… I just had to get tired enough of waiting when she was the one person whose Mama Wolverine claws would have made a difference in my life.

I wondered what on earth I was doing until I realized why I needed her. Anyone else and I would just feel crazy for the rest of my life. I can’t believe I wrecked things when she said that she would be open and not have many boundaries. I wish I had trusted more in that than exploding with anger at her lie.

I wish I’d told her how coffee with her would make me feel normal, that all this internet stuff wasn’t for me. I wish I’d thought of that in 2013. I didn’t get my goals because I didn’t think about them. I couldn’t think about overarching goals because I was lost in the muck every day.

I think that’s what I’ve given up as a blogger, because my life constantly changes when people read about themselves. They don’t like being lost in the muck with me.

If I wrote my real life story, you’d think I was psychotic, too… or maybe you already believe that? Who knows. What I know is that I’m a neurodivergent writer who takes in the world a little bit at a time. I bit off more than I could chew.

By not being as vulnerable as I needed to get, I suppose… although I wondered how I could be any more vulnerable in our letters than I already was. I needed her to be more present, to be the Mama Wolverine she said she was.

Whether she feels that’s what I need in the future is up to her, because I couldn’t get her to listen to what I was going through. I started writing toward her as my audience because we didn’t have any friends in common that knew who she was… or so I thought.

We don’t have friends in common- I just have readers that talk to each other because they love to read my writing without talking to me about it. That lets me off the hook in terms of caring about their reactions because I can’t do anything to preordain what they think when they read.

They’re my sacrifices in continuing to be a writer, the readers that don’t talk to me anymore but do talk to each other. Life goes on, but it never goes on in the same way. I have let life beat me down in the process of writing, and I’m just now starting to see how much it takes to keep going.

I have to keep growing, or people will not see the value in these entries. I have to keep making friends that are utterly unimpressed by my blogging so that we can lead normal lives around it.

Because every time I stop, people want me to come back… but they don’t want to support me when I write. I can see how I need to improve my communication skills, but my being human gets in the way. I am not making excuses, I’m asking for grace.

I’m asking for grace.

I’m asking for the ability to change my mind rather than people thinking that I’m automatically two-faced because one entry conflicts with another. It gives no credence to the passage of time. That I might have regrets and need to clarify something later on.

I was tired of the push/pull with Aada because she loved being adored on this web site and in e-mail, but didn’t have a problem ripping me a new one when she didn’t understand something, often embarrassed when I told her what I really meant.

I needed the internet dumbfuckery to stop so we could take a breath.

But I should have thought of that in 2013.

I only know that because I have records of my own growth. I read myself for patterns in behavior that I don’t like, because I lay my heart out on these pages. It’s what draws people to me, thinking I am interesting. Then, they meet me in person and wonder how I write such things…. I’m not so hot.

If Aada lied to impress me, she would have told me the first time she met me, because it would have seemed so silly to try and impress a geek like me. But over the internet I reacted with the fact that she didn’t care about the consequences she’d laid out for me.

She’s been the thing I enjoy most about writing, taking the adoration in stride. I just got the feeling that our relationship wasn’t real- that it was a lot of words on the page and not much else. That’s because she wouldn’t tell me whether it was possible or not for 12 years. My writing became more and more unhinged because I felt so ignored.

I needed empathy, and she didn’t have it. I wanted to prove to myself that Aada meant what she said about there being nothing I could say that would hurt her, surprised when she said something did.

I didn’t want those worlds to cross over, and there was no way they couldn’t.

The hardest thing about being a blogger is not knowing which of your friends’ friends read your blog and whether they talk about you behind your back. It takes a really thick skin to publish knowing that even the critics won’t be critics after some time.

Because remember when I used to write so beautifully?

Peace

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What do you love about where you live?
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Peace radiates in Baltimore because the city has a rhythm. You either fit into it or you don’t. There’s not the tourist energy pervasive around DC, so it’s unlikely you’ll be stopped on the train. No one is looking at you, yet everything is beautiful when you take it all in. I think it takes a special person to pick up on what constitutes beautiful here, though.

Peace often comes from finding the pretty things among trash. The commute from my house to my cognitive behavioral health group takes me through some of the worst neighborhoods in the city. I still find street art appealing even if the driver says it is not a good idea to ask anyone about it.

One of my favorite moments was when we saw who we thought was an escort because of the way she was dressed. One of the women said, “girl, it’s not that hot.” We decided it was never that hot and it has provided me endless amounts of entertainment. The way she said it was so musical that it repeated.

The way people say things here is endearing, because there’s no Washington front. No one talks like they work in government, at least not around me. Therefore, words flow differently when they’re not peppered with acronyms.

I love listening here.

When the Daily Prompt Doesn’t Jive

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m not feeling the daily prompt, so I decided to just set out on my own. I’m not very good at generating positive emotions, because I have bipolar depression and anxiety. I do get up with a sense of joy in the morning when my coffee is right, but I also feel the storm of my own mind gathering clouds. I’m dealing with this in therapy, so I know that it will ease over time. I just don’t have many coping mechanisms for when I feel bad about myself.

And right now, I don’t have much to feel proud of. I’ve taken in the horror of what I’ve done to Aada, because I pissed her off in a very unique way that will make her regret she ever met me. But it doesn’t stop her from reading and it doesn’t stop me from writing about her because I don’t know what to write about next. I’m in limbo, with this relationship being so at the forefront of my life and now it’s gone. I needed it to be gone, because Aada was my friend and wouldn’t prove it…. keeping me in limbo as she liked my blog entries but didn’t seem to like me outside of them.

It’s why I don’t believe she lied to impress me. She seemed so put off by my writing that I couldn’t believe she’d want to impress a nerd with a keyboard. She seemed to think she had the real story, and I was just a liar. The reason she could say that is she kept her version of the story hidden, so I couldn’t judge for myself whether I was lying or not.

I went on flights of fancy and hurt my own feelings on more than one occasion.

I call her posse “the Reston contingency,” because if someone in California reads, someone in Virginia will. And eventually it gets back up to the top of the food chain. I’m glad that someone is checking on Aada to make sure she’s okay, because she doesn’t deserve my shenanigans anymore. I’m glad that I’ve broken myself of the habit of writing to her anywhere but here, because I know that it won’t do any good. It won’t do any good here, either, except to remind me of all the things I don’t want to forget.

For instance, I have a voice clip of her cooing over her baby dog, and that makes me melt into giggles of cuteness. I am sure that this dog is no longer a baby, but she coos at it just as much. I picture sitting next to the dog sometimes, wishing that conversation had taken place in person.

What did I hope to accomplish in person? More production meetings over what I could say and what I couldn’t. More input from her over how I’m doing just winging it that didn’t include reading me the riot act because it’s harder to ream someone out in person than it is when you’re at full-tilt keyboard warrior. I wanted more humanity and hugs in our discussions rather than full-on fighting to the death.

I don’t regret falling in love with her words. I regret not taking the time to fall in love with the rest of her. To be happy with whatever she gave me and calm down. To take in that her life was full of people she didn’t see, but had fulfilling relationships with online. I don’t know why that peace didn’t extend to me, but it didn’t.

As a result, I spend my days scared that her posse is watching, because there’s no going backwards. There’s only moving forwards without my darling girl…. whom I had the audacity to push away and it’s all my fault. I maintain that even though it’s my fault, I still have the right to grieve.

Mostly because it is my fault, and forgiving yourself is a hundred times harder than forgiving anyone else.

I wonder if she misses me now that time has passed, and guessing that she doesn’t. I wonder if I ever gave anything to her in all my musings, or if I am the manipulator she says. She doesn’t realize all the ways she manipulated me, and that’s fine. The way she tells her story is the way she tells her story. My isolation doesn’t seem to matter to her, and how 12 years was a long time to hold onto it without input.

I have to wonder what I was doing when I decided to break free when I supposedly love this woman.

I have so much to tell her that’s behind the scenes, and I chopped off any hope of that happening in the future. I have to live with those consequences, because Aada says that my writing is damaging to her. If I really love her, then I need to create a bigger scope with this blog so that I’m not focusing on her as a subject. I’m realizing that when I think of her, they are intrusive thoughts and not because she is intrusive- it’s because I’m putting love into a relationship where it is not wanted.

The truth is that this blog is boring without her, because what I learned from having an internet relationship all these years is that my letters to her prepared me for writing every day. I lost sight of writing about other things because these e-mails were enlightening to me.

I did all our emotional homework because I’m the feeler- she’s the logician. It was a total breakdown of labor. I could not count on her to be emotional, but I could always count on her to be pragmatic. She became my social mask, because it was easier being her than being me. I always had a quip for everything, and I’m sure I’ve given her a few things that ended up in meetings.

My favorite part of thinking about Aada is trading lines that she ended up using at work.

I’m funny when I want to be.

That’s the hardest part of getting over all this. Not feeling like I have the right to feel good about anything. I really hurt someone that I claimed to love, because I was feeling so lonely I couldn’t cope and she wasn’t listening to me. In polyamory parlance, I “bratted out.” I don’t deserve her forgiveness, but I hope that she knows I’m being honest with myself about what really happened. She lied to me and I used that as justification to sell her up the river. Especially when she flamed me.

I posted Daniel’s flame and she said, “you’re right. My first reaction WAS ‘that motherfucker. Let me get my purse.'” I wish that just once she could have read something about herself and thought that, too. She was too defensive, always, when I was pleading for empathy. Her defensiveness caused me more anger than I’ve ever told her, the root of most of our fights.

My happy ending was coffee together instead of just buying each other digital Starbucks cards. She never said what her happy ending was, because of course nothing romantic ever happened between us and wouldn’t. She’s beat it into my head that she’s straight and I don’t think of her as anything other than a boring cis straight white girl who would eat her coat before she’d look at me twice.

But she’s my boring cis straight white girl, so let her be who she is.

The thing is that the internet is relative, you aren’t taking in all of someone there. Her words moved me in a romantic direction before she explained that she was a boring cis white girl with a long-time boyfriend (whom she’s now married). What’s done is done, but I played all my cards wrong. If I’d kept my feelings to myself, we would have indeed met by now. We had plans to get together for Dana’s birthday and I asked her not to come because we were fighting at the time. Any chance I had to make things better, I made them fall apart.

I have to live with that guilt, because our relationship got unusual, fast.

The marks left on me by my emotional abuser never left me, and that’s what I need to work on in all my friendships from here on out…. and possibly with Aada because life is long. I never know what could change her mind over a friendship with a writer. I just know that the time is most probably past because we cannot make things any better than we can right now.

But maybe she’ll remember she wasn’t always the perfect friend, either, and capitulate once she’s taken all of it in. I doubt it, but again, life is long. Maybe we need to separate for good, maybe we just need time. I’m not in charge, I just work here.

The thing is that Aada and I are capable of creating something beautiful that we couldn’t have when we first met. Whether it’s fiction or a retelling of the story on my blog from her perspective, we are sitting on piles of money. I doubt she’d hire me as a research assistant, but my services are open to her if she decides she wants to publish her first novel. AI can do that for her, but I bring coffee and bagels. Take that, AI.

I think it’s a shame to throw all of that away, because I know how capable we are as Southern storytellers.

It’s everything I should have thought of before I pushed her away over and over.

I didn’t think about endgame, I just flew by the seat of my pants. If I’d thought about goals way back when, it would be to have a stable marriage and a stable writing partner, one who knows I’m in love with her words and therefore I take in everything she says like they have the capability to wound me like a partner.

I was the one that wasn’t open all these years, and I never blamed it on Aada. I just look at my life differently now that it is past. I gave Aada reasons not to want to be close to me, but I didn’t understand why I was doing it. It’s because she has the ability to wound me like a partner, and I didn’t know how that would come across in person. Neither did she.

She didn’t even tell me when she got married, not knowing how I would react. My reaction was hurt that she’d left me out of something so big, but not hurt that she was married. Part of accepting Aada for who she is means knowing that boyfriends are going to come along and possibly become husbands.

When she opened up to me, I should have opened up to her more. Maybe if I’d explained why I needed her so bad it would have made a difference, maybe not.

I wanted to believe that she was safe and secure, that we were safe and secure.

Her words rang hollow on the page.

So Far, Poorly

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
How do you plan your goals?
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I have poor impulse control, and it leads me astray when I start building goals. Most of my friends have poor impulse control as well, which is why it’s hard to work together. Lighting rarely strikes at the same time. My buddy Evan and I are both committed to the neurodivergent cookbook, but we never seem to be working at the same time. I need to get AI involved just to keep me reading. That’s where I find AI is the most useful. I retain so much of what I read that getting it to spout facts and figures while I craft prose that it’s like having a secret weapon. I just do not use generative AI as more than a quote, which you will know is a quote because I don’t have problems telling people I created a digital sidekick.

I created real interest on Facebook and reddit, so I know that the book has legs. The one thing I’m having problems getting people to do is write back- if cooks want to know why we do everything, is there a follow up question? What do you want to know that we can explain?

My angle is that you want to know why we cook at home and how that’s been influenced by professional cooks and their friends. Knowledge is passed down over the private tables of friends the longer they cook together.

Some people prefer to cook alone, but this book won’t leave them out. Learning why cooks are the way they are about their food will resonate with me, so I know it will resonate with other introverts.

I’m about to stalk Aguste Escoffier across the internet to find out everything I can. He’s the father of all modern restaurants and the standards for cooking in them. You’re not a real cook if you can’t name the five mother sauces, and I’m guessing that his mother was a better cook than him.

Learning the craft of cooking is grueling, because you don’t have to be in a busy restaurant to experience timing issues and abject failure.

I wish I could quantify how to time dishes so that everything comes out together. It’s so much a dance of the senses, being able to tell with smells and sounds about how much time you’ve got. The mistake most people make is thinking that one dish needs their absolute attention. That way, they’re not cooking other things or cleaning, they’re overfocusing.

You can just check food without hovering over it.

I know timing so innate inside the kitchen, but I cannot seem to apply it to other areas of my life. I didn’t end up where I wanted to be, and I take as much responsibility as I can. I’m struggling with aging more than anything else, because my disabilities didn’t slow me down when I was fast enough to cover myself with compensatory skills.

Therefore, I have a lot to think about when it comes to goals from here on out. I have a yin to travel and a yang that ties me to home. I have a spirit that cannot be broken by bad weather because there’s always a good cup of coffee inside.

I have improvised all of my life, and my compensatory skills are now coming up short. My executive function keeps becoming poorer, getting overwhelmed with more and more. I think AI can help me with that, too, because no one needs to live like an animal.

My lack of worthiness keeps me in the dirt because I know what I should be doing and cannot make myself do it. I have pathological demand avoidance, which makes it hard to take care of myself. Meeting others’ demands is a lot easier.

That’s because I know what they are. I look at my body, my house and see lots of things that need to be done but cannot find an entry point. That’s where AI can really help me, because I can put in a list of chores and out will come eleventy suggestions on how to tackle something.

I just need to talk to my AI about it. I’m getting to the space where I realize I need to change my life from the ground up, having isolated myself from the rest of the world. Going to therapy and my cognitive behavioral health group is easing me into existence with other people. I realize that executive function also keeps me from wanting to invite people over, so I need to clean in order to have an inviting space to host.

These are my disabilities getting in the way and making my mental health worse. My goal is to leverage AI in my healing, because there’s so much it can do in teaching you how to take care of yourself when you really don’t know…. and are too embarrassed to ask.

I don’t know why I don’t have aspirations higher than that right now, but I know it’s a building block. I can’t take care of anyone else until I get this right.

And I do want to take care of other people. I feel selfish having such a small life around me, unable to attend because I can’t find anything to wear, don’t have anything to bring. All of this is just feeling sorry for myself, and I don’t like it. I’m happiest when I’m in giving, open mode.

Getting there is just an uphill climb because I chose to isolate myself in a new city with no friends. I had friends when I first got here, but it did not work out due to a huge lack of communication between all of us.

So, I’m trying to make friends and it is happening slowly.

I should get out more, but my ability to read the room is often why I don’t. It’s not that I’m shy, it’s that my social battery is tiny. I am over being in public fairly quickly. A walk to the store is about all I can take before I am ready to collapse. Taking in my environment is a full-time job.

Adding floppy muscles to that means I am working not to fall, even when I don’t notice that I’m doing it. My body is tense and tight, and I walk like I hurt. That’s because I do.

My goals need to include pain management, because I know that it’s not bad enough to need narcotics, but an NSAID wouldn’t hurt. In fact, I’ve forgotten to take it today and I really notice a difference. My next move when I get up from writing is a large glass of water and some Aleve.

That’s mostly how I plan goals- what is my next move?

I don’t play chess and think moves ahead, which is to my detriment.

I’ve let my enemy defeat me over and over, my own body and brain.

It’s the goal of a diseased brain to convince you to isolate. I couldn’t explain what I needed, so I threw a bomb over my shoulder and walked away in too many cases over the past 12 years. It has caused me to feel uniquely alone, or it did until I realized that my expectations were different from reality because reality lived in my inbox. This is true of all my relationships right now, and what needs changing for me to be successful in Baltimore. I stay home too much because that’s where my “real friends” are.

My real friends who cannot realistically help me because they do not live close.

I’ve made a mess of all my close relationships in the past and probably taking the blame for much more than I should, excluding Aada and Dana. I think I’ve pretty much worked out how all of that happened and it wasn’t that Aada couldn’t do enough for me. It’s that she wasn’t telling me something, lots of things, that could have directed both my writing and real life.

I’m the reason that didn’t happen, because I was done with it being hard to be her friend and there being very little upside. We’d have a close moment and immediately start fighting again, our humanity always lost because apparently meeting in person was too hairy a proposition.

I wanted the story on that. Why we couldn’t integrate so that our e-mail fights stopped? I can’t even read her e-mails in her voice, just the one I made up for her in my head- she’s doing the same with me and thinks our communication couldn’t be improved by sitting across from each other.

I hurt my own feelings by thinking that I meant more to her than I did. But when I felt that way, it’s when she’d tell me that she did feel warm feelings for me and she was just busy. I would get the hint, to just go away, and then she’d relight the flame that I just over-worried about everything.

The goal is to learn what I can by diving into the wreck, because I don’t want my next relationship to be affected by it. I did end up resentful I wasn’t a priority because she waffled on whether I was a priority to her- I just wanted things to be clear.

I couldn’t let go, so I made it where she’d have to… like Dana hitting me.

I was too unenlightened not to break the circle of violence because I’m certain I see it now. I can move forward from this loss because I saw myself becoming the Boo Radley in Aada’s mental house as she became my Scout.

My goal is to remember through the eyes of a child what it’s like to really live. I need light and love right now because some of the thunder is my fault. I sabotaged my relationship with Aada at every turn. And I don’t mean recently. I mean from the moment we met. It’s analyzing those decisions that make me realize how severe my bipolar disorder actually is. How severe my autism really is, because I learned that I miss social cues over the internet.

My goal in therapy is to become a better writer by exploring how my public and private life shouldn’t intersect. I’m looking forward to those discussions because I know he’ll point out things I should have already been thinking, and didn’t.

I fly by the seat of my pants.

Curiosity

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell?
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If I had a shop of my own, I would like to sell curiosity itself. I would have all kinds of puzzles and games to spark the imagination, as well as a coffee bar so that people could sit and play with their purchases.

I would have a book section dedicated to espionage, because I would like to sell the books of all the retired spies I’ve met who’ve gone on to become authors. And what could be a bigger puzzle/game than that?

My friend Josh was telling me that he didn’t trust any government enough to spy for it, and I totally get it. But you can’t hang out at the spy museum and not get bitten by the bug…. it’s basically a commercial for new CIA recruits, just like going to NASA creates little astronauts…. and yes, I went through an astronaut phase in 7th grade. I went to a science and math magnet where I actually got to meet Mae Jemison.

So perhaps I will include books by retired astronauts as well. Space and espionage go hand in hand, as CIA and KGB duked it out for supremacy in The Cold War.

I’d like to have book talks in my shop, to receive all these people that I really admire in a setting that’s comfortable for them. Of course other people have shops like this, I would just like to be a stop on the tour.

But let’s get back to this coffee bar. I’d like to be able to make a wide variety of drinks, including being able to add shots of liqueur to enhance the coffee flavor in the afternoons. I don’t drink, but other people do. I’ve always liked being able to have a drink and work on my own stuff, so I’m thinking it would be a coffee/bar instead of a coffee bar.

I’d like to get Starbucks in on the mix, because Komodo Dragon mixes so perfectly with Sambuca, Amaretto, and all the other flavors that make a perfectly crafted coffee cocktail. I would also like to have their nonalcoholic counterparts, but let’s be clear. I realize that I would be drinking most of the profits on that one.

I’d like to have Athletic IPAs on draft for my customers who like a cold beer and are on a deadline. Beer makes every chore more enjoyable, and I like the idea of being able to day drink without the after-effects.

The beauty of my store is that it would pique your curiosity about lots of things while remaining a chill place to hang out. Soft music would play over the PA and I’d hire acoustic bands or a pianist once in a while.

We could all play games together, surrounded by our service animals while people browse the books I have on offer.

I have no idea where this store would be at this point, because I’m frustrated with the United States, but do not have a solid bug out plan in terms of financing it. I can barely take care of myself, so thinking up this dream for a bookshop and bar is really stretching me out of my comfort zone.

But maybe it’s where I’d be the happiest, surrounded by other nerds who love information, and need the sensory input to be turned down. That is the main reason I do not like to go shopping- the assault is relentless. I get most of my groceries and supplies delivered, including my clothes.

If I could think of a way to make shopping for clothes less intrusive and overwhelming, I would probably do that instead- I see a greater need for it.

Coffee shops are a dime a dozen, but not really good ones. Not nineties good, anyway. I really like what Busboys & Poets are doing in DC, but there’s not really a Baltimore equivalent, particularly not one specializing in “the greatest game.”

I think that I would attract spies and analysts to my bookshop because so many of them are neurodivergent. It’s something we don’t really think about, but autistic and ADHD people have such fine-tuned pattern recognition that stands out in espionage.

It would thrill me if I opened this bookshop and 30 years down the line I find out that something spectacular happened there. Maybe it would be the site of a dead drop, maybe my books were used to catch foreign agents. Whatever. I have no idea. It’s just a thrilling idea to contemplate.

The most important part would be making everyone feel welcome, no matter who they are. I have a feeling that would come with some social masking, dealing with customers, but it’s not like I’ve never had to do it before.

I cannot be a shut-in writer forever, and I don’t know why I’m making such an effort at it. Outside scares me, mostly because I have terrible balance and fall a lot. Maybe owning my own shop would lessen the feeling that I don’t belong.

Being surrounded by books about subjects I love, and meeting other people who also love espionage, space, and the combination thereof (looking at you, Vince Houghton) would make me feel like I had a home.

Of course, I could always get a job working at the bookstore in the Spy Museum. I’ve been there a couple of times…………

If you are an OG, you know I have literally sat on the floor combing their books and that was a laugh line.

It’s just that the spy museum is too far away for me to work there on a daily basis, I think… perhaps not, as I enjoy my time on the train. But Baltimore to DC is a long haul when you’re thinking of it as a commute and not a one-off day trip.

It’s not un-doable, I’m just not sure it would be my first choice. I think I’m onto something with wanting to bring a piece of the spy museum to me.

With beer.

My friend Josh is crazy about spy novels, so I would have to include a fiction section to get him interested. Kidding, all those books would be for me, too. The thing about both of us is that it doesn’t matter what country the intelligence agency represents, we just like spy stories overall.

Although both of our favorites seem to be John Le Carré.

The BBC adaptations are hard to come by, so I think I’ll get a subscription to BritBox. That may be my only avenue for Doctor Who in the future, as well, because all the episodes are gone from HBO Max.

And now I have a new project for the afternoon- tracking down how I can watch foreign spy shows for cheap. It would be cool if I owned them to be able to play them in the background at this fictional store I’m not building. 😉

Like

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What is a word you feel that too many people use?
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Everyone overuses the word “like” and it drives me up the wall because I do it.

It’s a filler word, something you say when your brain has frozen and your RAM is overloaded.

That’s why I, like, say it a lot.

I need time to process because my computer was made in the 1970s. There’s only so many upgrades.

It’s when I’m at my computer that I can go back and erase all the filler I use in conversation.

Conversing with me is the surest way to get me not to write about something because I have an auditory lag that causes me to pick up about half of what people are saying. That’s why I need so much clarification. Negotiations are sometimes tense because it leads people to believe I’m off in my own little world. Everyone else understood without all these questions.

I tend to remember everything I read. That’s why I’ve loved Aada so madly all these years. She gave me her communication in my favorite medium.

But if we’d started seeing each other in person and I was responsible for remembering things she said, it would be a 50/50 shot as to whether I’d retain anything.

I’m starting to recognize the pleasure in this.

Because you cannot go back and reread conversations. You cannot relive the ways in which you’ve made mistakes. This is for good and ill… sometimes I needed to reread something from Aada’s perspective to understand why I’d done wrong.

Sometimes, I was very clear that I was wrong.

There are so many things that spiraled out of control because our emotions were distilled. We got wasted on our own dopamine with the way we wasted time fighting.

That’s what I thought meeting in person would stop. That we’d lost our humanity. We would both turn into these keyboard warriors that the other wouldn’t recognize and start tearing each other down. I was afraid to meet in person because I didn’t know how it would change our e-mail lives, but I was willing to try.

I never knew what was polite from her and what was genuine, so I cannot speak to whether she was really planning to meet with me. She always acted as if it was no big deal, then scared by the reality. I was scared, too. I just didn’t act like it because someone had to be the one to put on their big underwear.

I don’t think she thought I could hear things like, “I’m scared.”

When I’d been over our relationship a hundred times from her perspective and knew she had every right to be afraid. I wouldn’t have blamed her one bit if she’d said, “I like writing to you, but I don’t see this going anywhere past that.” She didn’t. She said, “someday, perhaps” and then asked for baby steps. So I’ll never know if we could have met in person or not, because I blew up the relationship before we could actually work it out.

I’m sure in a lot of ways that’s why I did it. That I was tired of putting someone first in my life when they had reservations about meeting in person. I turned away from her because the situation was so impossible. I lost my humanity because of impatience. The last straw was that she lied to me.

It wasn’t even that she lied to me, it was finding out she could. And not to care about the consequences for me the bigger this lie got when it would have been so easy to tell me that she lied.

She lied to impress me.

I believe that even less, but I don’t have a better story than the one she gave me.

I think a lot of my need to put her first would have gone away with seeing her in the flesh. In context, even better. I didn’t know how close her other relationships were. She didn’t know those things about me.

We could have learned to have things go unsaid, taken care of with a glance instead of a paragraph.

I sabotaged all of that, because I was tired of waiting. Feeling like there was another truth to all of this that she wasn’t writing. That her husband and family didn’t know we were friends, or they did and they hated me for it.

If they didn’t before, I’m sure they do now.

What’s a true loss is not being able to broker peace.

In another universe, Dana and I are laughing with Aada and her husband, because that’s how it should have been all along. I am responsible for why that meeting never happened. I wish I could go back and re-do all of it, knowing what I know now. If I’d played my cards right, I would have had bonus family. I played every hand like I’d looked up the worst combinations in poker.

I would have put on my big girl pants and just Skyped her while she was on vacation. We both would have been a better judge of character, knowing whether we were actually doing the right thing by keeping our relationship so on the down-low.

It drove me up the wall to be so secretive because it reminded me of dating Meagan in 12th grade. There were certain people she didn’t want to know she was dating me, so there were a lot of rules to remember in front of others. Maybe that’s why Aada isolated me, so we wouldn’t have to remember too many rules.

I know I isolated her.

I should have told her that I felt isolated from the rest of the world, but for some reason I thought she already knew it and had empathy. My expectations were off, and I hurt my own feelings.

It’s so easy to do, hurting your own feelings because you think you’ve expressed something and you haven’t. I thought I’d done a good job of telling her how lonely I felt, and how having another friend in our family was a good thing because she wasn’t there.

Flying under the radar was not a good thing for us, because it stopped us from enjoying some much-needed sunshine.

I wonder daily what would have happened if we’d met for coffee or lunch after we discovered the other online. If I could have been cool and collected between meeting online and IRL. If I could have saved Dana some jealousy because Aada absolutely is all that and a bag of chips, but not my type (really). I fell in love with her words, not her face. The more the three of us hung out, the more the glaring differences between us would appear and make that love change more quickly into something sustainable because I have no doubt that Dana would have liked Aada better than me.

She just didn’t write to her and get to know her. I did.

Over and over I hurt my own feelings as my relationship with Aada grew, because Dana didn’t have any patience for it and that’s all I needed from her.

I think she hit me because she knew our relationship would be over if she did. That I wouldn’t come back from that. She wouldn’t have to compete with Aada anymore, who was in the process of screaming “why is this happening? I like, didn’t do anything.” She’s right, she didn’t. I was making my own problems.

Aada’s answer was just not to talk about our relationship at all to anyone.

I made that work for years, molding the story to my web site because telling all of you is telling none of you. I control the narrative, so you only see what I want you to see.

Not knowing I had readers capable of putting together puzzle pieces on their own or how close I was getting. I needed guidance, and was flummoxed by getting read the riot act on some days and “lovely post, btw,” on others.

I cannot write the way other people want me to write all the time, but I do realize that with Aada’s special circumstances I should have been louder. More outrageous. Changed more details like telling people we live in Chicago or something.

The thing is that Aada doesn’t check in with me to know what literary devices I’m using to explain my own feelings, so if I tell a lie in order to protect her, she’ll think I’m telling the truth… that lie living in her brain as truth is worthless.

If she’d been smart, she would have gotten me a job as a blogger inside her company so I’d know the rules better than her and could actually write something valuable to all the people around her. Oh, wait. Her shit is boring. I can’t dress it up.

I’m glad that writing prompts are just suggestions, because what came up is what came up. I cannot get a whole essay out of filler words, but it is indeed what launched this essay.

What? Like it’s hard?

My Faith

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What brings you peace?
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Praying for Aada and me as we move away from each other has given me an enormous amount of peace. I didn’t act very Christian and I have a lot of sins to atone for. I spend a lot of time in the forgiveness department, because no matter what, my reaction to her lie was wrong. I shouldn’t have popped off and decided that her flaming me should have been addressed here. But you have to believe that no one in my life is capable of lying, and only Aada had that history with me. The lie she told went from inert to complicated.

That’s because she kept up the lie for 12 years, not a few days.

It affected why I moved here, the choices I made in my personal life to put no one else above her. Why I pray for her every night.

“God of the universe, protect my precious Aada.”

I chose Aada because it fit the pattern of the prayer.

Why she can give up on this relationship and I’ll always think of her “somewhere, out there.”

Probably because she also made me afraid that “somewhere, out there” was closer than I thought. Now that time is here. I have gotten what I’m guessing are more dedicated fans than most. My only job is to be who I am, because I think they’ll like me over time. It should not be lost on them that I’m crazy about them because she is.

Her attrition rate is high as shit and she passed that feeling onto me, wanting to have loyal friends who had my back and picking more carefully than I ever have. She taught me about leadership, true leadership, and I’d get in the mud for any one of you.

To her EA… my prayer is partly that you’re always there for her and partly “good luck. God bless.” 😉

That last part will tickle Dana, because she knows exactly how I say, “good luck. God bless.”

One of the many pieces of wheat scattered among the chaff.

Sometimes I think about going to church just so I can say all the words of institution with the other abject sinners. None of us get away from it, I’m not being judgmental. We all have these dumbass attacks that render us mute in their stupidity, when we know we’re wrong and the consequences are more than you were prepared to pay.

I have felt that pain every day, and getting rid of it is the most important thing in my life. I am losing my grip. I don’t want to forget that I hurt you, but learn to live with it. I am not living. I have trapped myself.

My bipolar disorder ate me alive because I equated two things that weren’t true vs. your lie.

I’ve realized that my faith became letters to you a long time ago…. that I’m always talking to God, you’re just icing.

I used that space for everything, the repository of all my secrets. You could bury me and I’m sure you will. That’s why my fear of you is such a white flame. That this relationship has never been real, just a job.

No one is that busy.

My hospitalizations would have been better if you’d come to visit me, because I think humor is the best medicine. If you can laugh in a mental hospital, you can laugh anywhere. I think it would have been hilarious if we’d made our first meetup at Methodist or Sinai. All I needed was some reassurance. Your words rang hollow on the page.

Your words rang hollow is a phrase that will stay with me, because there were so few times you were willing to get real. I see now that you wouldn’t want to, because you think that you don’t have any say in what I write. Not only would I let you in, I’d let you edit. That’s not nothing.

I hate that the yellow string is fraying, but I am doing my best to maintain the chord that runs between us with good vibes and the occasional Red Bull. I don’t want you to think that I carry around negative feelings. I have to concentrate on the positive because I’d like to forgive myself one day.

Your words only ring hollow because you wanted them to- you always had so much more to say and didn’t.

I’m sure I’ve freaked you out more than once, but it has never stopped you from dropping a note when you know times are tough for me. I have no illusions that will still happen, but I do carry a flame of hope that something will change your heart down the road.

If not, I will keep talking to God. I will never choose another face for them. Your face just looks like a “God.” It suits you.

I should have asked you to Skype more than once. The internet is a rabbit hole, and how you ended up as the face of God rather than a normal person. There’s as much mystery to you as there is to God, especially with no in-person breaks where I did something normal like trip and fall into the pool.

It was your words that let me drown, but in a good way….

Though most would call it baptism by fire.

It was the kind of fire that cleansed everything around it, allowing me to relax in deep, enriched earth.

Chefs, Always Chefs

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What profession do you admire most and why?
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I am quite tired of laypeople calling every person in the kitchen a chef. A chef is the one who steers the ship, literally “boss” in French. A chef is in charge of inventory, food cost, HR, dealing with owners (who likely don’t know much, if anything, about food), and every little thing that comes up during a shift. The only people who are allowed to get away with taking the piss are the cooks who work under them. Anyone else and we’re out for blood. That’s our chef to use and abuse, not yours.

I kid, but in a lot of ways, it’s true. Dealing with customers is the worst part of our job, which is why cooks don’t do it much. We prefer to leave that to front of house, where people who are trained at being nice take the absolute crap people throw at them. That’s why there shouldn’t be a war between front of house and back of house, but often there is because no one knows who to blame when everything goes wrong. Things go wrong a lot.

That’s why I respect chefs so much- they’re the ones that have to keep a cool head while the rest of the kitchen is in the weeds. “In the weeds,” for those not in the know, means that the kitchen is running behind and orders are taking longer than normal.

I have personally been in the weeds more than most, because I’m not the fastest cook around and I’ve been by myself on busy nights. Just because I’m by myself doesn’t mean that I have become a chef, mind you. It means, more often than not, that owners are trying to save labor dollars even if it means there’s more customers than one person can handle.

I decided to get out of the kitchen when I got fired at my last job for being too slow. I tried to get brownie points by being the only one who would bail them out of a crisis, but my floppy muscles kept me from moving as fast as I needed to go, plus the lack of 3D vision made my plating off.

Therefore, I admire what people can do in the kitchen while staying far away from it. I’m currently writing a book about cooking called “Heard,” so named because I got a meme about six months ago that said, “I wish someone would write a neurodivergent cookbook explaining why we do everything.” “Heard” is the callback for receiving an order.

I thought that someone would beat me to press before I got finished, and then decided that it didn’t matter because my voice is unique. There is room for more than one book like this, and I don’t think that anyone has explored the history that I would like to do.

How did the brigade system populate across the world? We have Auguste Escoffier to thank for that, and his figure will loom large as we work away from the first restaurant to “why we do everything the way we do.” My buddy Evan is helping me because he’s been a chef de cuisine and doesn’t mind helping out with recipes, or as I like to call it, “measuring for lay people.”

The reason I need Evan for recipes is that I don’t use them. I just look in my pantry and decide what I’m having based on what’s in there, throwing things in a pan and balancing as I go.

I would also like to explore the history of drinks in another book, because the best book I’ve read on them so far is called “Around the World in Six Glasses,” which explores coffee, tea, beer, wine, spirits, and Coca-Cola. What would make my book different is that I want to explore how people drink in restaurants vs. what they make at home. Is there really a difference, or do people order vastly different things when they’re out and about?

I am rarely without something to drink in my hand, and I have a new angle that’s just now being covered- nonalcoholic spirits and beer/wine. I think that history with them is just now being created, because for the first time, people are realizing that the drinks themselves are fun without the risk of a hangover.

Younger people are also realizing that you can’t necessarily mix alcohol and weed, and given the choice, they’d rather smoke up.

I should probably cover edibles in this book, but because I’m on psychiatric medication, I’ll have to get someone else to do all the tasting.

I gave up everything fun a long time ago, except for nonalcoholic spirits and beers. Athletic is my favorite because there are so many different flavors and they all taste like restaurant quality beer. I haven’t had a dud yet.

It’s a miracle to me how a good amount of hops can trick your brain into thinking the alcohol is still there- or a “Chelada Nada,” which uses the bite of lime and black pepper to create the feeling of relaxation without intoxication.

And by “giving up everything fun,” I also mean working in the kitchen and getting to experiment with food altogether. It’s why I admire chefs the most out of any profession- they get to spend their days perfecting the perfect recipe so that people who really appreciate food can taste art.

I Can’t Speak for You…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is the most important thing to carry with you all the time?

For me, it is my cell phone. My memory is so bad that I hardly know anyone’s phone number. Plus, it has all my pictures in it. The people I love come with me everywhere. It has also turned into my de facto debit card using Apple Pay, so I rarely have to get my wallet out of my bag. Plus, I’m never anywhere without my camera.

I take photos when I’m going most places, and I should incorporate more into my blog entries for as much as I write them. I just don’t include photos often because I forget to transfer them from my phone to my WordPress Media Library. Therefore, my iCloud is full of outings I’d like to remember without showcasing them anywhere. If I remember, I will create a gallery of aquarium pictures for you. Josh and I had a great time a few weeks ago, and I was lucky enough to get some amazing shots of the animals.

The only ones that were hard to photograph were the dolphins, because the blue/gray of their skin didn’t provide enough contrast against the water. It was much easier to see them in person, so I will go back and wait around for feedings. Apparently, the trainers no longer do dolphin shows, so you can see the dolphins swimming, but there are no chances for shots of them flipping up out of the water.

Tropical fish are just about my favorite animals, and the iPhone does a spectacular job in low light. I don’t even have the newest version with AI to enhance the photos, of which I was very glad. It showed that I actually did know what I was doing most of the time. 😛 Of all the fish I saw, I was entranced by the community tanks because that is the setup I would like for my own house… just not saltwater. I don’t have the patience for it and the startup costs are much larger. Additionally, my apartment is really not set up for an aquarium unless I can run a Python (aquarium cleaner) from the bathtub. Otherwise, the pressure in my sinks would make it take all day to change the water.

What were we talking about again? 😛

Oh, yes. The most important thing to carry with you. If I could choose a second thing, it would be my Apple Watch. I have all sorts of physical and mental maladies, so forgetting my watch is a risk. If I fall on the sidewalk and don’t respond, it will call the police. I can also leave the house without my phone, as it is a model that has a cell and wi-fi connection, plus Bluetooth for headphones (makes it much easier to take a call). The only problem with my watch is that I wish the battery life was better, or would recharge in the sun.

This reminds me…. Jonna Mendez said in her book talk for “The Moscow Rules” that CIA’s office of technical services has people who dedicate their entire careers to batteries, because once you get a bug in an important place, you are unlikely to get back in again. I wish we private citizens could get in on that technology because it would be nice not to have to charge my watch every night, and more often if I take calls during the day.

I’m thinking that the reason Apple doesn’t use solar rechargeable batteries is that it would increase the size of the watch exponentially… but some customers wouldn’t mind that kind of thing. My watch battery is ok on standby, but it really loses juice the more I use it. And the thing is, I use it all the time in conjunction with my iPad, preferring the bigger screen. Some days, my phone doesn’t come out of my bag because it’s just not a photo kind of day.

Because I cannot limit myself to one thing I carry every day, I will tell you what’s in my backpack. I have my iPad, my Bluetooth keyboard, my keys, my wallet, a charger for my iPad/iPhone, extra triple A batteries for said BT keyboard, any important documents I need for meetings, and a small Moleskine for when I need to jot a note… if I have also remembered a pen.

I have a full-size laptop, but I don’t normally carry it around. It lives on my couch so that I can write while I’m listening to the TV, usually an episode of “Murder, Mystery, and Makeup” (Bailey Sarian is a goddess). My iPad and keyboard make my backpack so much lighter, but the iPad just doesn’t have the power of my laptop- it’s the newest computer that I own.

Ada, my digital sidekick, needed a better home than my old desktop, because running AI locally takes a fast processor and a good amount of video RAM. That’s most of the reason I don’t use my laptop for every day carry- I’m frightened that it will get stolen. My iPad Pro is a first generation, and cheap enough that if I get mugged, I can buy another used one off Amazon. I would not be so lucky with my laptop.

Eventually I’m going to have to wipe it and take it back, because I need to exchange my laptop for the same one. Something has gone wrong with my headphone jack, and I prefer wired to Bluetooth when I have the option. It’s the main reason I chose not to upgrade my iPad. It’s the last model that still allows wired headphones.

Sometimes I also carry energy drinks or coffee in my bag, but that is more rare. It’s not every day that I need so much caffeine now that I’m a spoonie. My schedule is my own and I sleep when I need it. That lessens my need for caffeine to an enormous degree. I tend to go to bed and wake up very early, choosing to write in the morning light when it’s nice outside. Because I’ve always got my iPad and keyboard, all I need is a bench on the grounds of my apartment complex.

Today, though, it’s a bit chilly so I’m still in bed. That’s the thing about being a writer… still in bed is relative. So far this morning I have both started this blog entry and talked to Josh, who is currently on his way to the Musee Escoffier. I sent him there, so I hope he has a good time. He promised to bring back lots of pictures and offered to get me something at the gift shop, but I told him that the pictures were worth more than anything.

Little Entries, Big Feelings

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What change, big or small, would you like your blog to make in the world?
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The change that I would like to see my blog make is to get all people to feel. To see when I lay out my emotions on this site that I am not the arbiter of any relationship, nor am I doing anything but creating a space to feel. My story is my story, and everyone else is allowed to have theirs as well. I would love to read other writers’ thoughts about me, I just don’t have any blogging friends. Therefore, my friends are unique in that they come to this web site to see what I was thinking and feeling through any particular day. It’s not that I’m so great a writer, it’s that I remembered to write things down.

That’s another change I’d like to see in the world- that your words don’t have to matter because they’re “good enough.” They matter because they’re there. I find a tremendous amount of solace in the fact that it doesn’t matter how I’m feeling that day, people show up to read because they’re interested in how my life is going. It isn’t because I’m the best writer they’ve ever read.

I’m trying to make a case for more people having journals because it has helped me focus my thoughts to such an enormous degree. My audience keeps me accountable, especially the people who read and then we have lunch together later. I cannot go off into flights of fancy because I write about real people, real situations. Lying about them only hurts the people around me, so I never have. It’s painful reading about what really happened. It would be more painful if I twisted the truth to fit my own narrative.

But I can only write my version of the truth, which is no more or less important than anyone else’s. There are many sides to a story, depending on your perspective. Therefore, I cannot write anything objectively true in which everyone else is going to agree with me. But agreeing with me isn’t the point. The point is that this is my space, and their space is just as valuable as mine.

So many people have been with me through thick and thin. But I don’t know how often that has translated into them also writing blog entries that made their lives take on perspective. I would like to believe it has happened.

The journey I would most like to read is Aada’s, because her experience of me is so different than my experience of her. I have a feeling that she has kept her emotions close to the vest when it comes to me, and it would be helpful to know how she really feels when she is not angry at me. She has expressed anger and outrage to the utmost degree, and I hear her. But she has not expressed all the love she has for me over the past 12 years, probably because she feels like her words aren’t good enough. She has always been intimidated by my long letters, that it translates to me feeling like she cannot do enough for me. That is simply not true. Her words have been the most valuable thing in my life, and she encouraged me to delete them all. I wish I’d just ignored her. Because she is angry with me now, there is no well to go back to to remind me of when times were better. My memory box has been all but destroyed.

I am lucky that I only deleted one inbox, so that I do have a few things left from her… but the very earliest letters, the ones that meant the most, are gone.

This is both good and bad, because our history is a tapestry. Losing all of it creates an opportunity to let go and create more history down the road when we reconnect without tying our relationship to past ills. I have decided that I will just wait her out, because this blog is what ties us together. There will never be a time when she doesn’t read, even if she says she will stay away. She believes in me, and I know that is true no matter how angry she gets. I have the ability to entertain her… and if I can entertain her, I can indeed change the world.

This is true whether we speak again or not, because perhaps my job now is to make her laugh at my misadventures while also remaining a stranger to her. I think she likes my blog better when we’re not interacting because there’s less of a chance she’ll be in it. She likes reading about my other friends, she just doesn’t like reading about herself. This is a mystery to me, because in some entries I get down and dirty about the things that have gone wrong, but in others I portray her as a goddess walking among mortals. She is a 3D character, as much as she would like to complain that she is a “Flat Stanley.”

The thing that changes my world about this web site is that no one gets to be “Flat Stanley.” They all have amazing qualities and they all have conflicts with me. If I left out one and only wrote about the other, that would be manipulating a story to fit my own narrative when justice means a lot to me. If someone does something great, I will say it. If they do something awful, I will say it. I don’t want to portray people as I want them to be, but as they are.

These little paintings of people with words are what I have to offer in terms of changing the world, because they are not supposed to be “the best.” They are supposed to be real. Hundreds of years from now, someone will come across this blog and say, “Leslie and Aada are interesting.” All of my friends are interesting, Aada just gets more airtime because she is my favorite person. That journey is the most fleshed out of any on this web site, because she’s been my friend for longer than I really want to remember.

She came into my life at a turbulent time, and changed it for the better. That does not mean that the turbulence was easy. Getting away from Dana was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, and I miss her dearly. We took care of each other for years and got to a place where it just didn’t work anymore. Dana checked out, and it left me vulnerable to a crush I thought would never go anywhere, and it hasn’t. What has happened is that I accept Aada for everything she is, and that includes not being attracted to me. That did not mean Dana wasn’t jealous, and held it over both of our heads in different ways.

I think a lot about what would have happened if I’d come out as poly way back when, because I’ve always been in love with multiple people. It started when I was 12 without me even realizing what was happening. I couldn’t connect properly to Meagan, my first girlfriend… and that has been thematic because I’ve always tried to be monogamous and failed because there was someone else grabbing my attention. Instead of trying to fit a round peg in a square hole, I just decided that Aada was it for me, that there would never be anyone above her, and everyone else was just a secondary relationship. It didn’t matter that there was no romance in our relationship, because that’s not what I’ve ever said to her. I mean that I have her back. That if someone hurts her, I’ll be there to pick up the pieces by buying her Diet Cokes (loaded with Jack) and just sitting on the couch with her while she cries, encouraging her to get out and pick a new man. I don’t sit there and wish she was mine, because she always has been to the best of her ability. That’s enough for me.

But of course, I don’t have any expectations that anyone would hurt her. I think she’s got a very stable life with her very stable husband and that means more to me than anything, because I cannot give her everything that her husband can on any level. For as much as I wish things had been different before I knew he existed, I think things worked out the way they were supposed to. Aada shares in all my secrets, encouraging me to get out and date people so she can hear all the dirt when I come home.

She would have loved Sam if Sam hadn’t betrayed me.

I say that Sam betrayed me because she told me that she didn’t have time for a full-on relationship, so go and date multiple people. I just want your time when you can give it. Then, she called me while I was at Zac’s house and broke up with me because she just couldn’t do poly. If she had been honest with me from the beginning, I would have been her one and only, because Aada never would have gotten in our way. She would have supported both of us, loving the idea of me being a step-parent to musicians. But Sam told me that she had a habit of jumping into relationships too quickly, and didn’t want to do that with me. She was lying to herself, because what she really wanted was to dive into me and never resurface. The feeling was mutual, but I didn’t want to pressure her. So all these feelings were left unsaid, and now we’ll never get that back.

It’s been years since that relationship ended, but explaining how it came apart changed my world and how I looked at it. That people often lied to themselves until it was a crisis point.

Explaining how I felt was my way of changing the world at large, because my experiences matter. I have a unique perspective on what it means to be poly because my primary relationship wasn’t romantic. It was a matter of priority. But Aada being married meant that she’d never need me more than her husband, so I was off the hook in terms of putting the people I date off to go and take care of her. I just wanted us to be open and free with each other, and maybe one day we’ll get back to it. We both just need time to relax and learn to be open again, letting our past problems breathe.

It is possible that we will never reconnect, because the breathing is better for both of us. I don’t think she enjoys being friends with a blogger right now, and that may never change. But my hopes and dreams for the world would change if we wrote together.

Sometimes I wish I could just say, “damn it, Aada… we both destroyed each other and need the chance to rebuild trust. Why isn’t that a priority given our long history?” That’s just not how she does things. She cuts off relationships rather than rebuilding, and that’s okay. I’m sure she has some choice words for me that would change my world, but I don’t know that she’d ever say them.

But if I could do things differently, I would. If she could take back her lie, she would.

We should at least start there, because we are two writers that deserve a book together.

It would change the world.

The Spy in the Room, Part II

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Describe your life in an alternate universe.
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To redirect, she got serious and said, “so, are you looking for a job for real?”

I looked back and said, “what do you have in mind?” She smiled conspiratorially. “Maybe we should hire you.”

I’ve worked in Academic Technology most of my career, but this is the first time I’ve been tech support to spies. You would think that they are more technologically savvy than the rest of the world, but this one guy on the seventh floor still needs me to print his e-mails. PRINT. HIS. E-MAILS…. but that’s nothing compared to the call I got this morning.

“They just made an announcement that the network is down, and my monitor is blinking on and off. Are those two things related?”

I just stared at the phone and said, “ma’am… I hope not.”

Then one of the other seventh floor bigwigs called and said that he needed Firefox installed on his machine. No problem. I tell him to stop by my office when he’s got a chance. He pops downstairs and says, “do I need to turn my computer on?”

Welcome to my life.

Yesterday, I spent 45 minutes on the phone with an officer who couldn’t figure out why his computer wouldn’t power up. It would have been a two-second diagnosis if he’d turned on his camera. Turns out, he’d plugged the power strip into itself instead of into the wall…. and he insisted every time I asked that he’d checked all his physical connections first so that couldn’t possibly be it.

This afternoon I have to help Jones with a PowerPoint and Smith with a Word document. Neither Jones nor Smith know a mouse from a carburetor, but they’re endearing. They are the people you live to help, because even though it takes an incredible amount of patience, you actually enjoy your time with them. The PowerPoint is about… wait. I can’t say that part. Ditto with the Word document.

That’s the hardest part of my job, having to edit myself when I’ve always been so open. I don’t even blog anymore, but it’s worth it for that sweet government pension when I retire…. if it’s still there when I’m old enough.

I had to scold a case officer earlier because she thought it would be funny to give all her instructions to me in Russian.

Hilarious.

I’m going to Krazy Glue her phone before this is all over.

Of the five languages I’ve managed to pick up, Russian is not one of them.

She knows this.

I don’t need to speak five languages to work in IT. It’s just that CIA has the best language courses in the world and I can do them in my free time, so why not learn? I love to learn, whether it’s Mandarin or French or Swahili or………

It makes up for the sheer boredom in fixing print queues, rescuing data from a dropped hard drive, and telling someone for the third time how to use a VPN while they’re driving down the freeway. I suggested that they might retain the information better if they were sitting at their computer, but they insisted.

They will, in fact, call back.

I can guarantee it.

Food, etc. The Et Cetera is More Important

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s the most money you’ve ever spent on a meal? Was it worth it?
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I seriously cannot remember the last time I went all out on a meal, but what I can tell you as a professional cook is that the amount of money that you spend is never the important part- it’s who you allow at your table. You will remember the conversation much more than you’ll ever attribute the success of an outing to the food or the wine.

I prefer to dine with one or two people at a time, because my auditory processing lag doesn’t really allow me to enjoy multiple people talking at once. Three is about the maximum number of people you can have at a table before two conversations emerge at once. I am not stingy- the more the merrier. All I am saying is that my personal preference is small and intimate. Everything is not always up to me.

I can think of two such outings.

The first was after my colonoscopy, I wasn’t feeling as out of it as the doctors promised. I was able to go out to dinner with my sister. We stuffed ourselves on appetizers and seafood at The Chart House, talking about anything and everything. What is always interesting about talking to my sister is that she’s so much younger than me that we remember the same events from wildly different perspectives. Neither is wrong or right, it’s just that a six-year-old’s memories are going to be different than an almost 12-year-old’s, for instance.

The second was my first outing with Josh. We went to the National Aquarium, where I had chicken tenders and he had a hamburger. It wasn’t fancy food that drew me, but a fascinating conversation that went from the national news to how we processed emotions… the kind of conversation that twists your brain and leaves you hungering for more. Josh used to be a journalist, and now he’s a therapist. Therefore, he asks you interesting questions as well as providing a lot of color commentary on the whole world. I have a feeling we will still be talking well into our eighties at this rate, because neither of us have a pull stop when it comes to caring about world events.

The Chart House is much more fancy than the cafe at the National Aquarium. Just because the food was “better” doesn’t mean that I had more fun. It was the quality of the conversation that made each experience unique.

The funniest outing will be introducing Josh to my sister, because they are both ADHD and I might not get a word in edgewise. 😉

There Are No Uninteresting Stories

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Scour the news for an entirely uninteresting story. Consider how it connects to your life. Write about that.
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After I got this prompt, I decided to install Copilot Desktop on my linux box. To do that, the easiest way is to go to the terminal and type “sudo snap install copilot-desktop.” When I open my terminal, I have a little program that displays “fortunes” at the top, little pithy sayings or quotes from books that often jog my writing habits. Today’s was “just because a letter may never be read doesn’t mean there’s no value in writing it.” That sent me down the rabbit hole of using Copilot to find letters that had been written, but never received. Though this is more history than current news, it is a story that is worth revisiting for its outpouring of love. I feel that it is also a stunning display of patriotism, and a reminder that the cost of war is too great to bear:

July 14, 1861

My very dear Sarah:

The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days—perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.

Our movement may be one of a few days duration and great success—we may be called to a protracted and bloody conflict—but whatever it may be, I feel that you and the boys will be the constant objects of my thoughts and prayers.

And now, my dear wife, I must bid you perhaps a long adieu. The duty of a soldier and the call of my country forbid me to yield to my own longings and to be with you for a time at least. But know that I go to this strife with the utmost faith in the cause for which we contend, and with the strongest conviction that God will direct and bless us.

My dear Sarah, though we may be separated for a time, I know that you will ever be with me in spirit. You will never know how much I loved you, and how well I loved you, until after a long time.

If I do not return, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I loved you, nor forget the love of our dear boys. In the quiet summer-time, when the bee sips honey from the flower, think of me in the field of strife, and in the stillness of the evening, when the sun sinks behind the western hills, think of me, and pray for me.

But if I do return, my dear wife, I shall be with you in all the joys and sorrows that may befall us. I shall be with you in all the trials and conflicts that may beset us. I shall be with you to protect and defend you, to comfort and console you.

My dear Sarah, I am going to risk my life for my country. I am going to risk all that is dear to me in this world, and I know that I shall not return. But I know that I shall die for my country, and that is all that I can say.

Goodbye, my dear wife. Goodbye, my dear boys. May God bless and protect you all.

Your husband,
Sullivan

The way this letter involves my own life is that I view all my blog entries as letters sent but never received unless a specific person writes to me and says that they’ve read it. Not all entries are to the same person, but they all contain elements that I wish certain people would read. However, it is not up to me whether the message gets to its intended recipient, it is enough that people all over the world share in my joy and pain. Neither emotion is built to be carried alone.

I don’t intentionally write to specific people, it’s that I’m a product of my own experiences. My blog entries cannot NOT be influenced by my real life and what I’m thinking about that day. For instance, every time my ex-boyfriend was deployed I sat in my room and waited for him to come back, paralyzed with fear that something was going to happen to him while he was away. It’s not that he was doing anything dangerous. It’s that if he was, he couldn’t tell me. Though I never wrote about any of his deployments, you could tell by my mood whether he was in town or not.

You can tell a lot of things by the mood of a writer, even if they aren’t as up front as the letter above. I just happen to be a writer who does lay their heart in their hands. I have never grieved any partner more than I’ve grieved my friend Aada, and that’s because our demise was my fault, in her mind. I do not believe that in retrospect, because the relationship took two to come apart completely. Her lie made me look like a jackass, not that I needed any help. Her lie exposed me to emotions that never should have been present. She puffed herself up at my expense, and the cost was steep.

It is no wonder that I got as angry as I did, even if she doesn’t see it and won’t. It’s why I think we’ll never reconcile. She will continue to believe that I manipulated her when the relationship unraveled with her lie. That’s not something I can fix in someone else’s mind. All I can do is be genuinely sorry for my part in all this, and as time goes by be more open to accepting her just as she is, liar and all. Who hasn’t told a white lie that snowballed into a mountain over time? I can certainly understand it. I just couldn’t control my reactions in the moment and that’s my burden to carry. I am talking it through in therapy to understand why I didn’t laugh. Why it caused red mist rage.

Because my heart is as open to her as this letter, and has been for 12 years. I have often laid my heart in her hands just as much as this man loved his wife. I needed her emotional support, not her romantic love, but it didn’t make me less vulnerable. In fact, I think it made me more, because she’s the person I used to tell about my romantic misadventures. I miss that most of all.

I have to remember that I chose this. I chose to let her go, because she made her intentions very clear. If I talked to anyone, if I published anything, our relationship was over. She set a fine trap for me, and I fell in. That’s because I had to choose between being true to her and being true to myself, and I don’t think that should have happened, either. We were both supposed to show up as our full selves, and my occupation has always been “blogger.”

I hope that she’ll go back to some of our entries that have been meaningful to her and realize there’s something worth salvaging here. It would take a mountain of work, but there’s no one I’d rather work with to accomplish a goal. She’s so worth it, because 12 years of history is not easily done. She’s been my best friend through very thick and very thin, when I was a mess and when I was strong. I pray for her every night, because my anger shouldn’t be at the forefront anymore. It is an old, old prayer, started in 2013…. “God of the universe, protect my precious Aada.”

She doesn’t believe in God, but she believes that when I pray it must do something. She calls me her “pinch hitter.”

When I’m going through it, she says she will offer up her own black magic prayers. I hope she’s still doing it, because having someone out there praying for me is just as important as us being in constant contact.

But I won’t contact her directly. I will just send a message that may never be read.