How Can I Keep From Talking?

February 19, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

It’s a double entendre because on the Internet, I cannot shut up. In real life, I try to escape talking any way that I can. It’s almost as if I social masked for so many years that I decided I was over it. The turning point for me was establishing that I do not like the phone and I do not care if you think I’m weird. I will adjust to the fact that you think it’s weird I don’t like to talk if you will give me a heads up that I need to talk to you…. and even then, I cannot always respond. I get demand avoidance over speaking because I need to choose my words carefully. I need to pore over every one as if they are precious pearls of wisdom…. because they are.

But only to me.

This web site is not useful for fawning all over myself, and if you’ll notice, I have noticed. That there’s no guts or glory without “writing about what hurts.” It is not because I will get a bigger audience that way; it is not that I will be adored any more or paid any more if I capitulate to the demands of my audience. It’s that I will have written a mountain of work that does not teach me anything about myself when I go back and read it.

I don’t want to know what I had for lunch today, and I can bore the everliving shit out of myself when I go on about Linux. I do it anyway because that is what is interesting to me that day. I just don’t go back and read it. That is for other people who have not stood where I was standing when I wrote it.

I am not immune to the fact that a lot of my stats are bots and are therefore inflated. But over a thousand of you get my words delivered to your desk or phone most days- today three times because I’m agitated about the whole world. That’s actually a thing about being neurodivergent. Our sense of injustice is fine-tuned, which is why I beat myself up badly for every mistake I make and also apply that feeling of anger towards the world when it is burning.

Make no mistake, I am an internal dumpster fire looking for ice because I am overloaded with the needs of my friends both spoken and not. Just because I am not in contact with my friends doesn’t mean my mirror neurons don’t feel them moving in the world. My heart walks out of my chest on a daily basis because I actually know people in Finland and Ukraine who feel threatened. I know Finnish immigrants who are scared for their relatives, and same for people in the US with relatives in China.

It scares me to the point that I will never visit, because my favorite Chinese blogger was threatened by the CCP. He escaped to Hong Kong and is now being actively blacklisted from the YouTube algorithm because apparently the CCP has some influence there.

I do not go where I am not wanted, and China sure the hell does not want me. I would bust them up when I got home. That’s because I notice everything that other people don’t.

I won’t remember your name.

But I’ll remember the way you smiled and what shoes you wore if they were cute.

I’ll remember little things forever, like if I offer you a Diet Coke and you say, “make sure it’s loaded with Jack,” I’ll remember you like Jack until I die.

But your name will not be important.

Your face is.

I memorize lines in faces and go carefully over them, like Mary “pondering them in my heart.” In a lot of ways I am breaking open over the mistakes I’ve made because they’re final and I have to grieve them even though they were necessary to let go of the person I was and become something new.

My whole fight with Supergrover revolved around us both slinking away because we thought we didn’t deserve each other, over and over in a loop that didn’t end until I finally called an end to it. I was rude and rough because I was wet cat claws out. It wasn’t necessary for her, but it was necessary for me.

I didn’t have enough strength to leave without being angry, because hers is the only picture in my mind that’s in color and never desaturates with time. It never will, because the chemicals she left on my palm metaphysically do not lift and won’t.

You do not accept grief, you learn to live around it. I fully believe that there’s a part of each of us that believes the other is not real and are too scared to face our demons. It was easier for her to run than it was to put on her big girl panties and talk it out. Over and over it was this way until she finally told me my narrative was tired.

Easy to pigeonhole a narrative as tired when you’ve never actually addressed anything and I have. Like, I still have questions that now I have to care won’t get answered, and I feel that she has a fuck ton of responsibility that she just decided wasn’t there.

She used my crush as an excuse for years not to get close to me after already dumping everything about her into me that made her interesting in the first place. So I just carry it, and it sits while I wrestle with her all night, walking away with my hip disfigured. It’s just better this way because now I’m only getting the responses I want because I made them up. She turned into a wire monkey long ago, ignoring my cries for affection and closeness as she twisted in a net of her own making.

We alienated each other because we got too close, too fast. Then we pushed each other way….. until the trauma bond started to itch and we’d come together closer than ever….. for a little while.

Kuuma.

Kylma.

Caliente.

Frio.

Hot.

Cold.

Over and over through the years, which is why my pattern recognition says that even though she’s not talking, she’s always listening. A pen pal relationship lives inside you, always. It’s funny that her words come out of my mouth constantly and yet I cannot imitate her properly in person.

But I’ve got her patois down.

What you are seeing is the product of someone completely different than me also being me through social masking what I thought she was. All autistic people need models for social masks, and in retrospect it’s a mixed bag that I chose her. That’s because in some sense, she’s taken on my personality as well. I have turned her into a cook, she’s turned me into a boss.

I couldn’t have made it here without her, and yet I’m good. Thanks.

She broke me down and built me up because her way of thinking was so different than mine. I don’t mean that she emotionally manipulated me in the slightest. I mean that she grew up in a military family and it provided her a lot of structure that I never had. I was social masking perfection and trying to be interesting to someone I view as the brightest mind in the natural world.

I wish I were being hyperbolic.

You just have to understand why my brain is on steroids, why I no longer struggle with suicidal ideation or really depression and anxiety. It’s all autism. All of it. When I can manage my emotions, I do better. Managing my emotions comes from writing it out and not bringing my voice into it. I’m too emotional on the page- in person I’m overwhelming and I know it.

The thing I liked most about her is that if I’m complicated, she’s The TARDIS.

She’s popped off at me too often now. When I try to defend myself, it’s manipulation. All her darts are fair game. Her narrative is tired. Write all you want and I’ll respond.

That turned into “I’m frightened by your output even though I logically know you’re a writer and I’m not so I will completely shut down and hope you don’t notice.” I noticed.

I’m there when she’s all snuggles and light, but I realized that was her social mask. That in all honesty, if I was getting the bitch on wheels, I was actually getting her inner monologue instead of the bullshit that everyone else gets. What made her invincible made me realize she loved me because she realized she didn’t have to front. She could just say, “Lanagan, fuck off.”

Sometimes I wrote it at the end of my letters just to save her some typing.

I feel bad that only my side of the story will ever get told, because she’s more wonderful than I am.

We are both perfect in our flaws, and I want our relationship to rest in peace. She’s back where she belongs, because she decided that traveling with me wasn’t worth it about the time I decided I was done. It was a natural conclusion because I know what I don’t want and it’s someone that completely shuts down and expects me to guess what they’re thinking and what mood they’re in. I don’t pick up social cues.

I have to focus on local so it calms me enough to talk about global. I am over focusing on problems. I am focusing on solutions. The plan to expatriate is real unless the people revolt. There’s probably not a chance of that because Kamala flat out lost. She lost both the popular vote and the electoral college. America has spoken and Project 2025 is everything they wanted and so much more that people regret their votes after being told over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over that all of this would spell destruction and it just wasn’t worth the time to pay attention or to vote. When people get overwhelmed they tune out.

Pod did not, in fact, save America.

I am not bitching about one election loss. I am saying that out and out fascism is already here and enough people aren’t alarmed enough to care about me and my issues, so why not go to a place where they already do? If Democrats continue to capitulate, it will not take one election to restore my passport rights, it will take eight of them alternating. My rights will always be up for grabs and my passport always at risk of being invalidated.

There is a possibility gay marriage will become this way again, and abortion already is. I’m not old enough to be able to relax on body autonomy because I cannot think of a worse idea than pregnancy at 47

I’ve thought about it for almost a minute now. Still can’t come up with an idea worse than that.

I am not cut out to be a mom. I am cut out to be a babysitter. I have never had the energy for other children, even when I was a child. I love them more now than I did then. Back then I was just a third grader who’d swallowed tweed.

It wasn’t until I realized that I had picked my lane early and social masked my way out of it that I became strong again. I’ve always been one of those autistic people that cannot survive in the real world because they live in a world of their own making- you have to literally pull them out of it. It’s just that no one recognized they had to pull, and I couldn’t tell them. I didn’t know the symptoms of autism, and I was not allowed to isolate.

Neurotypical people know better. The room should be loud and interactive. This is true for neurotypical people while I have to Perform Happiness.™️ I don’t have the energy anymore. I want to be authentic so that when I have a bad day, I’m surrounded by people who love me and are not dependent on that mask staying in place.

I am stronger and more capable at my computer than I am in conversation because I do not process voices well.

I come across as demanding while I’m passionate and easygoing when I’m not. You have to know me for a long time before you get into that rhythm and stop taking everything personally. That I am passionate about an idea, I am not “on the attack.” That I cannot perform happiness while talking about devastating things.

Devastating things like money, financial planning, business costs, etc. They are not devastating in and of themselves. It’s that I begin to burn and itch with discomfort because I know my logical function is poor ahead of time and being taught these things is not easy for either party.

I have to learn them cold, because I’m not about problems like these…. I am about solutions that allow me to dance above the clouds when the weather is poor.

A Fourth Reich is coming, because people didn’t believe it was possible.

Surprise.

The Ladder

February 18, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have an enormous task in front of me, and that’s supporting myself in another country. I have a cushion, but not really. It will go fast without either an American job to pay me overseas or a job in another country. I am looking at every single way to do that and school in Finland is probably the last thing anyone would recommend, but it’s not the United States. I know everyone thinks I’m panicking for how good I have it, but if I want something to happen I need to direct the flow. The United States does not deserve my talent and I’m not being precious about my writing. They don’t need my cooking labor. They don’t need my tax dollars. They don’t need me. I am trapped here until the end of November because I do not want to break my lease. That means I am being loud enough about my intentions to make a move like this happen. Because when I’m loud on the Internet, people take notice.

I’ve already had people offer support in helping me get out of the country and I know it will still be there later on. Repatriation takes forever and no one believes it’s real until all of the sudden they actually don’t realize you’ve been living overseas for six months due to the nature of how Facebook works.

For instance, I would bet that some of you still think I live in DC. I don’t. I live in Baltimore. I moved a few months ago and it has been mediocre. I am not completely happy, and I am not sad. I think that a lot would be fixed by moving into a different apartment on the property, so I’m not even necessarily looking to move at the end of this lease, either. That’s because the next application period for Vami isn’t until September. Until then, I’m sending out resumes all over the world while also trying to build my writing into something viable.

I’ve made a lot of dumb choices in my life and am trying to rectify them now, but some of those things will never reconcile. Dana and I had a solid, nuclear, family and we both blew it all to hell. The fallout affected us differently. As I reflect back over all of those choices, I alienated people I need now and it’s too late.

The regret of those choices cannot eat me now, but it has tried for many years. I have treated myself like absolute shit because of those regrets and I feel like I’ve paid all I want to pay for them. It would be a blessing to be able to mend fences, and because I know that is not possible I do know that scar tissue makes you stronger. “Til I Collapse” is running through my head because the Finnish, Mexican, and English languages are duking it out in my head. Wait. Mexican is a murre, not a kieli. Puhun espanajassaa y tengo preguntas con sandias/juevos/whatever your country uses for “balls.”

“Wait. Mexican is a dialect, not a language. I speak Spanish and I have questions with watermelons/eggs/slang for balls here.”

“Questions with Balls” is the best way I could think of to describe asking hard hitting questions. Why do they let me write here? Oh. Wait. I pay them. I am starting to wonder about your taste, but don’t worry. The fact that you read me speaks highly in some circles. Just not in all of them.

But that’s starting to change as well. I make a habit of meeting people all over the world. People in Europe and Canada are objectively more frightened for America than we are for ourselves because so many more of us still believe in the cult than outside our borders. We are taking harsh, harsh criticism and by that I mean that I have been wounded many times with anti-immigrant rhetoric in both directions.

If I bring up a problem, a Republican will say, “you don’t like it? Get out.” I say, “I can’t even change my gender on my passport because you decided I wasn’t a person. I’m trying to get out as fast as I can.” Then I’m a coward, a traitor, and a Nazi. But Elon Musk and Donald Trump are not.

If I bring up a problem, a foreigner will cry with me and say “don’t come here.” If I say I want to immigrate to Finland, I become part of their immigration rhetoric, because they only have one idea what “immigrant” looks like and they are picturing a brown man that possibly wants to live off the government.

When people find out that I’m an American and want to start a media company, it all of the sudden becomes, “well, I don’t count that. You’re not one of them.” I am absolutely one of them, because I’m NOT LIKE US.

Only once have I ever gotten back up on something like this… not this. One woman made a complaint about immigrants drinking all day, and I said, “geez… I hope no one would care if they saw me having a drink in the middle of the day because I work odd hours. What they don’t know is it’s been six weeks since the last one, not last night.” This woman says, “I don’t count that.” Then, this guy says, “well, maybe you shouldn’t make such sweeping generalizations, then.” Sweeping generalizations are how countries function now, especially because of the Internet. What they know about American culture comes in soundbites.

I am taking everything I have ever learned from my time in DC and building it into something new. It’s a miracle what you can do when you don’t have a choice. I know that I will look back on this time in my life and realize that it was the most productive, the part where I really found my true voice and people who read me 10 years ago wouldn’t always recognize me now.

I have limits. I have boundaries. I have tolerated far too much because the only advice I’ve ever gotten in life is to grovel. That eventually someone would be able to put up with me…. as an employee, as a partner, as an anything.

Now, I do not care if I am any of these things, I deserve a voice and I use it. I wish other people would. I wish other people were willing to scream as loud as me and they are out there but not in my apartment. They’re in the UK and Canada and Europe and Africa. One local friend tells me that her kids are AuDHD and queer and there’s no life for them here. I am hoping that she does not notice I’m standing there on moving day…………. She has six children. I’m pretty sure I’m golden.

She is also Finnish, and sees WWIII landing on our doorstep. I do not disagree. I am just too far down the road in planning a Finnish move in the fall to know anything about immigration policies in any other country (except Canada, because I exhausted that research for months when I was 18). Canadian vitriol has convinced me I don’t want to go there. Meag has made it clear that she does not want contact and I don’t know anyone else. I have made it clear with myself that I do not want contact because she was a shitty friend to me from the beginning and doesn’t deny that. I just put up with a lot. So, whatever it is that she’s mad about can rest in peace, because I feel like our entire relationship has been both of us caring about her.

This is not “All Pick on Meag Day.” All the women I have ever loved become my special interest to a degree that they do not want. So, I went the other direction. I decided not to invest in any one person ever again. That, however, has been recent. All of the women in my life are still on this blog in tribute as I age because as much as I might like a mind eraser, there is no such thing. Passing over trauma has never worked, so working through it has become a mantra. Once I really started examining my hangups in fine detail, I could resolve it and move on to bigger and bigger things. My purpose feels enormous, because I know that I not only have the power to communicate, but to facilitate others’ success.

My heartbreak was worth writing down so that I could see later what was really important and what was just filler.

I have watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind several times to remind myself that love is always worth it. Sometimes it even works.

Koi ja liekki (The Moth and the Flame)

February 18, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have a friend who’s an immigrant from Finland (actually, I cannot remember whether she is an immigrant or whether she was born here- whatever, the connection is close) who says that we should not move to Europe anymore, that we should build a queer future in New Zealand. As a fan of Finn Bell, I agree with her. However, I still have concerns about moving anywhere other than Finland despite Russian aggression. This is because I have found a way to move there for cheap. Of course my living expenses would not be covered, but my school tuition is. I don’t have to work very hard to get into culinary school, because I already know I’m a talented cook. I am not the best, and I do not have to be. I could make a bazillion dollars….. if I had it…. by bringing authentic Mexican food to the ski lifts of Levi, and don’t think I haven’t thought of it. I just know that running a restaurant is literally the most expensive thing I could choose to do.

Learning to cook is not.

I know that I do not want to run a restaurant. I know that I want to live the life of a student so that I actually have time to create content for the web. I am slowly networking in Finland, reaching out to Dave, Aleksi, and Cyril (other content creators in the area… Aleksi is actually Finnish, Dave is from the UK and married to another content creator, also Finnish, and Cyril is a student at the culinary school where I want to go, but he’s Indian). Because I want to work with Cyril, it is possible we could open a restaurant once we start making money from our media. It is not “using” the Finnish government for school if you decide that food costs are too high after you graduate. A culinary degree is good for anything, particularly intelligence. I know where I want to go, and that’s not CIA. That’s a quiet agency in the ass end of nowhere.

New Zealand is not “nowhere,” but it’s less exposed than the US. I have been making very inflammatory statements online because they deserve to be heard, but I am not immune to the fact that those are the people the president singles out first. I have loved the US my whole life. I do not want to work for foreign intel because I have any information to contribute; I would only work for US allies, anyway. What I do know is that real life intelligence gets me out of bed in the morning, but in ways you wouldn’t think of when you think of espionage. Like, how does it all work? I don’t have a particular allegiance in mind and generally don’t care that there are foreign spies in the US because don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Here’s where I draw the line.

The line was drawn in the sand when Donald Trump went into CIA’s house and told them that he trusted Russian intelligence more than theirs. It deserves a “Meet the Grahams” level diss track, because the president is a Russian asset. He’s not even bothering to hide it anymore, and Reagan knows all Republicans are going to hell for ushering Russia in the front door…. Hell, let’s just give Putin keys. And if that is not what you, Republican voters, were saying in the last election, then you need to take accountability for the fact that perception is reality. All republicans are traitors. All of them.

There was a mountain of evidence that a felon was not capable of being president, nor was there a mountain of evidence that Trump would change his behavior to the straight and narrow if he got the job. He didn’t even promise to quit drinking like Pete Hegseth. Speaking of which, I wonder how that’s going?

All Republicans are traitors, and the horrifying aspect of it is that you have to have sympathy. They were genuinely taken in by a cult. You cannot be mad at Mitch McConnell telling Kentucky voters that something is bad for them when he should have been doing it for the last 10 years, but here we are.

All Republicans are traitors because the party was lost and you stuck to the message. You stuck to the message that it was ok to be a convicted felon and to be president at the same time. What kind of future have you set up for your children?

All republicans are traitors because they didn’t know they were voting to have the AP press wire barred from the gaggle.

That’s because when AP calls it “Gulf of Mexico,” they’re the ones spreading disinformation. The first echoes of fascism started coming long before now. It wasn’t until I put it together that no one was actually holding you accountable that I decided to get loud. News anchors aren’t allowed to yell “WHAT IN THE ACTUAL EVERLIVING FUCK HAVE YOU DONE TO THIS COUNTRY, YOU BOTTOM FEEDING LOW LIFES?” It was bad when they wanted to kill Mike Pence. It was bad when they wanted to kill Anthony Fauci.

But then you came after Marianne Budde and I realized that I’m not a violent person, but I will slice your throat on paper.

The problem with American Evangelicals is that they are drawn to power like a moth to a flame. They do not care that Jesus was a poor itinerant preacher who loved his friends deeply and valued teaching and praying quietly. If you want to be Jimmy Carter and not Joel Osteen, you’re going to have “Christians” yelling that you’re not good enough because you just don’t hate enough people.

That’s the thing about Evangelicals. Their God hates everyone they do.

When you advocate for that “old time religion,” do you ever stop to think about what it is you’re really cheering?

White straight people had a good time back then, but fuck everyone else up the ass no K-Y.

You are advocating for Jim Crow, for women with no bank accounts and possibly no vote, queer people in the closet and all erasure of gender/sexuality rainbow excluded….. which shuts our country down in education behind the rest of the world. I do not know what everyone else is doing, but I am not going to sit around and watch everyone get dumber. Christian Evangelicals have ruined my life since it began, and you can all go to hell.

I am sure you will get there, because you profess the faith of the master and not of the slave.

I’m not black, but I’m not like us, either.

I’m autistic and depressed, so you think you can control my medications better than my doctor?

I’m nonbinary, and you think you can have that discussion with me as the USG than my doctor as well?

I’m AFAB, and you think you have the right to access to my body that I don’t have? Go fuck yourself.

It’s also amazing that we still have a problem with gun violence in this country considering we haven’t tried anything.

If you get sick, you can just go die.

Love, “Christians”

I am done with all of this and I’m not an emcee on a mic but I definitely feel the energy of a halftime show where America is concerned.

“God bless America? God damn America.”

The black UCC pastor had it down in 2008.

You’re 200 Late.

If I am lucky, fascism will die out quickly. Pattern recognition says I’m screwed for life and I’m dealing with it.

But not the fuck here.

Duolingo ei ole täydellinen, mutta olen rubiiniliigassa

February 17, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today’s lesson in Finnish (Suomi in that language, Day 26) started with learning how to negate something. I’ve been able to say what I am for a long time. It is a relief to be able to say both that I am not an adjective… and I do not have a noun.

The worst sentence (lause) in every language is “Meillä ei ole kahvia.” Finns, calm yourselves. I am actually okay. I have enough. I have to say that out loud because this sentence would send shivers down any Finn’s spine…. “We do not have any coffee.” However, I am not opposed to getting Finnish coffee in the mail. I have resources.

It’s good to have a friend on the ground who said she’d let me mail things to her house when I buy my tickets to Finland. That’s because it’s actually difficult to buy Finnish products over the internet. I am having a hell of a time finding Moomin books in Suomi, so please advise in the comments. I do not want a new boxed set. I want one that has been colored in, dog-eared, and annotated in Suomi because a child loved it so much. Moomin is the new picture I carry in my wallet… er… phone.

This is not an official, licensed picture. I asked the WordPress AI to do a line drawing of Moomin for me, if that is a thing you needed to know you could do, @one4paws. I needed to make that clear because it doesn’t exactly look like Moomin to me, either. However, I do think that if she were alive Tove Jannson would think it was inferior yet clever. I would have gotten one of my artists to draw it for me, but they are currently sleeping. I am often left to my own devices because my body clock is set differently than most people. I move with the sun, going to bed and getting up early.

My favorite fact in life is that when I told Katya that I thought Tove Jansson was a smoke show, she made sure to tell me she was a lesbian. I said, “sounds like a woman I would have liked to have flirted with.” She said, “Well….may be…. she was loved by all….” 😁

Janie the Canadian Editor says that I make her spit out her tea; this line made kahvi stream out of my nose.

The Finns are an interesting case study to me sociologically because so much is counterintuitive to some American cultures, not all. For instance, Finland is like Texas in that people are brave and daring and do lots of outdoor shit comparable to “hey Bubba…. watch this!” They just aren’t conservative socially. Finnish culture is Oregonian. It is no surprise to me that Linus Torvalds moved from Helsinki to Hillsboro or wherever it is he’s living now. My love of Linus/Linux is legendary, and it doesn’t surprise me that I would want to make the reverse move, either. I just may not end up in somewhere as warm as Helsinki because culinary school in Vaasa is free.

The average temperature in the winter is 22 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not colder than Baltimore- it’s just colder more consistently. The average temperature in Helsinki during the winter warms up dramatically…. it is 24 degrees.

Therefore, I will not have a problem when it’s sunny out. Being layered and in the sun is great. It’s the rain, snow, and wind that becomes a problem. However, you have these problems everywhere. In Oklahoma, “it’s not that the wind is blowin….’ it’s what the wind is blowin'” (Ron White). Those are the days you say inside and celebrate your sauna.

Again, I work on the internet. I don’t have to go outside unless I just want to do so…. and I do. I love cold weather, feeling bundled up and secure in all my gear. I am not a prude of any sort. I just have sensory issues with a tremendous amount of heat and there it is. That’s why they do it…. and why they don’t care that they’re naked. It’s just about being comfortable in said heat.

I have said this before, but in case it’s behind a paywall on Medium, Finland has the highest rate of neurodivergence in the world that has been diagnosed. I believe that there are quite a few more undiagnosed people due to the amount of coffee they drink. Caffeine is my go-to choice in managing neurodivergence. Apparently, they already thought of that.

Portland is the same way in terms of volume. I never really had a cup of coffee until I went there on vacation. That’s because Texans don’t drink their coffee as bitter and dark as Oregonians, coupled with the fat of half and half, no sugar. I like Texas coffee just fine, my palate leans toward bold. Therefore, I want something French roast and cream thick enough to stand up to it. It’s hard to please me in vegan, but soy milk does nicely. It’s the thickest and all coffee shops have hazelnut syrup to make the nuttiness of the plant milk make sense in your brain.

I would argue that one of the best drinks in coffee shops is a soy hazelnut latte, because soy milk is not better than cream. Soy beans and hazelnuts bond together in your mind and it just tastes better. Use cream for something else. Everything has the right application.

These are the things that keep me going, because I have found that coffee is cheaper and more efficient than energy drinks. Energy drinks aren’t bad if you buy them by the case, but coffee is still cheaper overall. Plus, I like it when my coffee every morning tastes the same and it’s plain. I haven’t found an energy drink that just tastes like Coke, Pepsi, or Sprite. Therefore, I drink energy drinks as often as most adults who liked Fanta as a kid would drink it…. occasionally to remember, not an every day beverage. The same goes for grape, cherry, and fruit punch. They make me feel like a kid so sometimes I’ll indulge, but my energy and money goes toward fine coffee at the grocery store and cutting out leaving the house.

As I told Katya, “I like working in my own office because no one makes my coffee for me. Therefore, it’s always right and I do not have to share.” I do not mind sharing my coffee, to be clear. I mind other people beating me to the coffeemaker and I have to suffer through it until it runs out and I can make the next one.

Just level a tablespoon when you’re measuring. One level tablespoon per cup. Being exacting is what makes it taste good. And if you do not have a tablespoon that is capable of being leveled, then err on the side of too much rather than too little. You can add hot water later. You cannot fix it when there is not enough coffee flavor and too much hot water.

12 tablespoons is a cup, so I do the shortcut of keeping my coffee in a large enough container to accommodate a one cup scoop. I do not make a cup at a time because coffee (especially mine) is so acidic that I don’t mind drinking left over in the morning.

I do not reheat coffee, though. I prefer it over ice once it’s already cool. If it’s cold outside and I just must reheat, it’s over the stove. Some people cannot tell a difference, but when I microwave my coffee, it seems to change the properties of the drink itself. I can’t name it. It’s just weird.

I also alternate between putting a cup of coffee into a coffee maker and putting a cup of coffee into a Mason jar with a chinois (fine-mesh sieve). The percolating process and cold brew yield different results, and I like the change. It doesn’t matter what temperature it is outside, I like iced coffee when I’m inside. We have heat here.

The point is that I have taken an enormous amount of crap over the years for drinking energy drinks because it makes me look younger than I really am. Meanwhile, caffeine is one of the most effective ADHD medications on earth. I do not need to feel ashamed of “being addicted.” I need to manage how much I drink in accordance with the laundry list of what’s wrong with me and why. For instance, one of the huge reasons that I order cases of energy drinks from Amazon (when I do) is that coffee irritates my stomach and I still need the caffeine. Soda is not as acidic, and it is also sugar free (in my case- all the flavors I really like are either zero or 10 calories). Therefore, it’s another case of application. When my stomach feels better, I go back to cold brew.

Cold brew actually saves my stomach as well, which is why I haven’t used my coffeemaker in a few weeks. It is naturally less acidic when the water is cold, and I brew in the fridge or (when there’s not a danger of it freezing) outside. Sun coffee is just as beautiful.

“Sun coffee” is apt, as I am energized by the sun and need to be outside. My neighborhood isn’t the greatest place to walk around (it’s not dangerous, it’s just not touristy with parks and community, either. My readers might not agree that it’s safe, but one break-in in the DMV over the last 11 years is probably some kind of record- and he was so high that if the patio door had been locked, he would have moved on. He did not look like the type of guy that would break glass. He wasn’t even moving that fast. I just decided not to chase him over cheap ass shit.).

I need to find a place in the city that fits the bill. Right now it’s Panera because I have a gift card, but where is up to me. I’m glad I have a gift card to something familiar while I am looking for something permanent. I support local coffee shops, I just haven’t been here long enough to explore Baltimore. Wherever my mythical perfect coffee shop is, it does not exist in my neighborhood. I’m going to have to search farther.

For Portlanders, I’m looking for Rimsky’s Korsakoffee. For Houstonians, I’m looking for Notsuoh. For The District, I’m looking for Tryst. I am sure that there are many great coffee shops in Baltimore, I just haven’t found them yet.

Luckily, I have help here. My friend Ernest is a young college kid willing to help me get settled because I’m willing to help him get settled. I told him he could hang out at my place if his room was too loud. I have plenty of space and wouldn’t mind someone working with me during the day. His being African helps me out because the way he cooks, I haven’t learned yet. The way I cook, he hasn’t learned yet.

So, I definitely need to meet up with him soon. It’s a great story. We met on an Uber Share. I was looking at apartments and was planning to move to Baltimore. It was his second week in America from Liberia.

Silver Spring to Baltimore isn’t much of a change in demographics, only that there are more African Americans here, as opposed to African immigrants who have come over recently to study and work. Silver Spring has an enormous African immigrant population, one of the reasons I’m interested in learning languages.

However, I did tell my housemate Valentin (Cameroonian) that “francais c’nest pas comfortable pour moi.” His mother, who didn’t know a lick of English, fell on the floor laughing. Because of course when I’m on the spot, I say the first thing that comes to my mind…. “French is not comfortable for me,” a line from an old Michel Tomas recording rather than thinking out how to say “I don’t speak French.”

Puhun suomaista.

However, I am not advanced enough to know why the name changes from Suomi/suomea to suomalista. I just have to roll with it at this point, thus the flaw of being at the top of the ruby league by rote. I need more grammar study because parroting back (see what I did there?) words isn’t helping me to understand systems.

I see everything through systems, and Finnish is called a pyramid…. but it’s a garden. You pick up yksi sana, ja yhdestä sanasta tulee kaksi sanaa. You pick up one word, and one word becomes two words.

Minulla on norjalainen ystävä kuka kirjoittaa. Norjalainen kissat on viikinki. J.L. Henry on viikinki. Tämä vaustaus on oikein koska kirjoittajat ovat kuin kissat.

This is what the Ruby League has gotten me. The paragraph reads “I have a Norwegian friend who writes. Norwegian cats are Vikings. J.L. Henry is a Viking. This answer is correct because writers are like cats.”

One of the sentences that comes up in Duolingo the most frequently is “Norjalainen kissa on viikinki.” It means “the Norwegian cat is a Viking.” I have extrapolated this to mean all Norwegian cats are Vikings because I have owned one and I know that that means….

Life is about breathing steadily right now, turning panic into progress. Slowing down and making plans to breathe next week.

I’m overwhelmed with the amount of support you’ve given me over the years, so I’m paying it forward.

Duolingo is a vocabulary builder that will allow me to become C3PO. The spiritual arc is gravity’s rainbow. The bomb inside you goes off in every language.

Your life’s purpose is to figure out what kind of shrapnel there will be in advance, because you’re the one directing it.

Pro Tips from a Small Writer at Large… Who, Lightbulb, Writes for Medium

February 16, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dedicated to a house and a refrigerator magnet no longer there.

Dear @one4paws (and Bryn B on Medium, if you’re looking for the actual talent in the family),

To the “just being helpful” brigade, I will no longer give you purchase. When people ask me why and how I’m queer or trans, I don’t always sit there and explain. I do when the person is kind and wants to be educated; when they do not, I walk away. I am not going to go 20 rounds with a homophobe, nor will I tolerate this:

Me to them:

I don’t want to fix it. I couldn’t even get married until 2001, and even then, it was a domestic partnership. Let them fix their own problems.

Them to me:

I’m sure the Nazis said the same thing.

Civil Unions did no good except on state taxes. No queer person is asking for special rights. They just call it that in the GOP to fear monger and make you think that queer people are so different. That straight people are not fully capable of evil, but gay people are… because we work in the shadows. That is not my present situation with being gay, that was my situation with being gay.

Lack of being able to file jointly with my wife on federal taxes for so many years and breaking up before we married federally never saved us anything. We didn’t pay much in tax, so a state return was maybe $30. I would have been able to build up more wealth in both Texas and Oregon if my federal taxes had been filed jointly as well. The United States has cost me too much emotionally and financially. I have no choice but to slink off to Europe where my being isn’t offensive and my need for help in my disability doesn’t translate to “you’re a dumbass” all the time.

Hate doesn’t get erased. The goalposts just move.

Before I recognized that I was autistic, it was reinforced that I was a failure. I wasn’t autistic and therefore special needs. I was bipolar and had a personality disorder. It is an absolute shot in the dark as to whether which diagnosis is correct, because a lot of people have both and the same drugs work. The reason I changed my mind and diagnosed myself is that no doctor will diagnose you until you have enough concerns to speak with them.

And then you’re an adult and they don’t want to label you because it creates a stigma; 🎶 stuck in a moment you can’t get out of. 🎸

If I had a slogan for autism, it would be “stuck in a moment and can’t get out of it.” If I had a slogan for ADHD, it would be “not stuck in a moment and can’t get into it.” Perkele and saatana would walk into my brain and say, “I’m so sorry.” That’s because the two disabilities fight, and if my psychologist in Houston was right then, it does not render him wrong now. It means that I cycle too rapidly for Bipolar II and I do not know if there’s a bigger arc overall that comes in months, not half hours. It’s not a personality disorder, it’s how my brain processes logic and emotion. I do not know what you are actually saying without a tremendous amount of clarification. Only my friend @aaronbrown8cc63b4e5d4 and you, my darling friend, have been there through it all with me. The laughter and love as I loved hard and let go, refusing to give up long after I should have. I am not in that lane anymore, and have sped ahead. I do not think I have a future with anyone except the people in my life right now. I have little faith that when people are mad they have enough emotional strength to sit and work things out. Autistic pattern recognition says I’m going to be viewed as a problem, so I handle everything alone.

Props to my friends for becoming great pals and advisors on many things, particularly my clothing because all of them been to Finland, but all of them know what cold feels like and how to beat it. I have people from all over the world in the chat group regarding the future of LMG and I don’t accomplish anything alone. I am constantly looking for ways to monetize queer voices because especially women are not financially validated and suffer even more financially in a female/female couple. And if anyone is offended by polyamory, you can look on a calendar at the exact date and time as to which we even had the option of being monogamous. Pro tip: NOT THAT LONG AGO.

Children, women couldn’t have bank accounts in America until 1974, and their grandchildren think women should be over it. I am so tired of the gold digger narrative that quickly turns into “I thought you were going to wipe my ass and clean up after me” and women think, “I thought you were going to financially support me so I didn’t have three jobs, like working outside the home, maintaining the house, and raising the children.” If they say it out loud, that’s when you get nervous if there’s guns in the house.

Men expect service, and they’re not shy about asking for it, because they are entitled to these things according to their fathers and grandfathers………. while also not doing the work their fathers and grandfathers did to provide. They want a maid who supports them financially so they can do nothing while the children play. This is, of course, not all men… but it’s where our country is going. Make no mistake, women were included in Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.” Before the blue, there was a stark red and white image that said, “OfKendrick.”

I’m not saying it like that idea is offensive or anything…. I don’t care that he’s a famous rapper, but I definitely care that he’s won a Pulitzer.

I am also still peeved that Matt Damon married someone else, but that’s neither here nor there. I’ve never met him, so my take on it is that he loves his wife more than me, which is appropriate because he met her first. 😉 This does not mean that I am any less capable of being one of his crew. I see the entire cast of Ocean’s Eleven as colleagues, and I’m not kidding because George Clooney bought “Argo” and then Ben Affleck directed it. Therefore, I’ve never met them, but I feel a kinship to all of them. It’s like the Coen Brothers. John Goodman is also my homeboy.

I’m scared of Clooney, but I have picked up some tricks from Kendrick Lamar and 50 Cent……

Did you guys know that Ja Rule planned a return concert and was bugging out because the tickets were selling so fast….. only to find out that 50 had bought most of the tickets? Josh Johson told that joke in his standup and I nearly fell on the floor. He’s my favorite comic, so I joined his YouTube channel to see how he workshops his material. He posts his deep cuts to YouTube and you can see them all for a small fee. Josh is a master class in storytelling, and the point is to learn style and structure. I am not a comedian.

I am sometimes clever.

People perceive me as having a lot of false humility and virtue signaling; that I manipulate people. That is not true. I am autistic and do not pick up the proper social cues. I am also not afraid to fail. Me speaking my mind is different from me anticipating your reaction, and it took me until about 12:00 this afternoon to realize that was the case (I realize it all the time; I backslide and this is just another mountaintop day). People do not take in that their actions hurt me just as much as my actions hurt them. Such is the nature of life. I am not trying to oppress you by being me.

There is no queer agenda and there never has been. Quit spreading lies until you flip the script and get it through your (proved by science) smaller capacity to be open-minded. Realize that the queer agenda is the same rights you have. No more, no less. If we get really busy we might add laundry.

But no promises.

Don’t you agree?

I love you, Bryn. Thanks for always being there for me, and I’m excited that you’re getting to know Aaron, too. Someone needs to make him behave. Might as well be you.

😉

Schengen -or- Finnish Grammar for Dummies, and by That, I Mean Me

February 16, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes life tells you where you want to go, but not before you can silence yourself enough to hear the answers.

The Schengen Area has become my next goal in terms of a passport. I have redirected in terms of options, not final decisions. I have until the end of November to make a final decision, and I have many before me. The Netherlands has a refugee program for trans people, and it is cheap to start a business. Finland is the cheapest option in terms of going to culinary school for free. I believe that Schengen will be more useful later in life if the British apologize.

I am not stuck on any one thing. I am trying to map everything out. I work backwards. The goal is a Finnish passport because it’s so much like Oregon. Any job becomes available to me once I speak Finnish fluently, and I’m on my way for it being day 23. I am finally understanding how verbs work and a few of the ways singular becomes plural. Finnish is so difficult that it takes up my entire brain, and that’s what I like about it. I cannot function on the constant barrage with what’s going on in my country. Laws are changing too fast and if I leave the country, I may not be able to get back in. Trans people are being harassed at the airport and their passports taken. At that point, I shut down:

a dog is a koira, dogs are koirat. Form follows function. A cat is a kissa, cats are kissat.
Romance language grammar sometimes applies. Minä olet is “I am.” Sinä olet is “you are.” Me olemme is “we are.” Ne ovat is “they are.” You can leave out the pronoun if it’s conjugated in the verb.
There is no pronoun…. and I’m crying when I say this…. to indicate the gender of the person speaking.

Hän on is both “he and she is.” The Finnish language is nonbinary.

You cannot legislate hearts and minds on trans issues, so there’s discrimination everywhere. But what Finns will die to protect is human rights. Having a Schengen visa opens me up to being able to live more places, essentially being able to live in Finland whether I have actual Finnish citizenship or not. I do not hate America for what it has done. I am a political science student. I will never not be a political science student interested in both State and CIA, because they do the same job. One is just public, one is just private. I am not as interested in DIA and the military, but not because I don’t like them. I just prefer information to violence because that’s where I’m the most capable.

One of the things that I talked to with Bryn was being secure that I was not offering to be approachable to foreign intelligence agencies because I have any information they’d like to have, unless what kind of cookies my boyfriend used to eat at meetings is burning inside them. He shared nothing, and we’re not together anymore (sadly- we just weren’t going in the right direction together- no harm, no foul).

I said I was approachable on both web sites as a message in a bottle to intelligence agencies that need me because they’re dying to recruit people and trans talent isn’t needed here.

Fuck you, Mr. President.

I’m more of a man than you’ll ever be and more of a woman than you’ll ever get. Choke on it, motherfucker.

But I’m not bitter.

If you’re wondering why I’d curse out the president, it’s because he said he’d grab me by the pussy on a hot mic that was intentional. It wasn’t even locker room talk…. not that it’s excusable. It’s just comprehendable. None of this makes any sense and I am struggling to understand why I should go on in this country. I do not mean in terms of struggling with suicidal ideation. I mean begging for a way out.

Applying to countries that have jobs in the Schengen region is my first choice. Somewhere like Starbucks would have no problem training me in the US and possibly paying for my flight to work in The Netherlands or wherever they operate in the region where the store works in English.

A restaurant would be better in Finland because it’s an easier transition. Terms are all in French. I could work in Viet Nam, I could work in Afghanistan, I could work in Tanzania, I could work in The Phillipines. Doesn’t matter. Cooking is French. Escoffier brought it to Europe and the rest of the West, Ho Chi Minh brought it to Asia and the East.

The problem is that I am really not capable of working in a restaurant, but the lighter load of culinary school fits. It’s an easy A compared to Finnish uni. I’m interested in getting my sword, but uni is cheap and I need a way to work through it. Culinary school is free and I might not. It depends on what happens between now and the end of my lease. I can’t default on it because even though it wouldn’t follow me, it would follow my dad. That’s what happens when you have money and not income.

My mother died. I have some time to rebuild now. I’m using it. I’m being up front because people ask me all the time how I’m living. I have to live rough so my expenses are covered for a number of years, but I’m okay.

I have a possibility of collaborating with others, and we’ll discuss that if and when it happens. Just know that I’m riding the Rainbow Railroad for all it’s worth because trans talent and money is not needed here.

There is a great big correlation between leaving the country and leaving the church. The United Methodists told me for years I was a sinner while taking my money and I didn’t have a choice.

Instead of staying and participating in a system that I have to fight against until I’m black and blue, I want to use it to move into a different system where there is no homelessness and consistent medical care. Prevention is worth an ounce of cure. If you can go to the doctor every time you sneeze wrong, there probably won’t be million dollar surgeries in your future. But you can’t do that in some states when you’re poor. Luckily, mine is not one of them. But my home state is, so that’s not an option unless I just think, “I’ve lost my fucking mind, why not lose it completely?”

As I was telling Phillipa, one of my new writers, “I could buy a house in NE Texas and settle down permanently, but then I’d have to live there.” Of course there would be perks, like immediate access to my family. However, I would lose everything in terms of the social network. The Deep South is not my place anymore, as if it ever was. Maryland’s politics are more in line with Albany than Richmond. Virginia continues to struggle deeply with St. Bob- what a Northern Virginian told me a Southern Virginian calls Robert E. Lee, thus the disconnect in Virginia culture. Maryland is objectively safer for minorities, and home of the greatest intelligence officer who ever lived.

I am not being specific here, because Harriet Tubman, Jonna and Tony Mendez all lived here. Jonna lives in Virginia now, where she’s on the board at the Spy Musem. I’ve met her several times and she’s delightful. We’re not close, but I admire her greatly.

“In True Face” is essential reading if you want to know what happened to Tony after “Argo,” and “The Moscow Rules” is the last book they wrote together. The reason I pick “In True Face” and “Argo” as your introduction to real life intelligence is that you have to be able to pick out Jonna and Tony’s voices separately and you cannot honestly do that until after Tony dies in Jonna’s timeline. I told her that.

Congratulations on owning yourself.

Her lip trembled because she knew what I meant. It was the second time I’d made her cry, and I’ve written about the first time so much that I don’t need to tell it again. I have felt those emotions and they don’t dissipate with each writing. It’s an experience I’ll remember forever because it changed the direction in which I wanted to go.

Jonna decided to go to a wedding in Europe, and that was all it took. She was a citizen of the world who had the fortunate and unfortunate experience of loving two intelligence officers. The only reason I say it is unfortunate is that she had to learn how to hang quickly, and as you read it’s a different kind of love. It’s harder to watch someone else going through a thing than it is to go through a thing. It’s easier when you’re both going through a thing at once.

It’s not a trope that spies date each other. It’s reality because they never leave the office because they can’t.

They’re as trapped as line cooks during a shift, and the reality is that cooks are often messengers for intelligence and waitresses are the silent witnesses that listen to everything. No one cares if a female waitress is listening, so waitresses are often spies in a uniform and people don’t notice.

Social masking is everything. Intelligence is nothing more than a small stage, which you will learn by rote as I did if you get into the rabbit hole of Jonna and Tony’s voices. I don’t enjoy the idea of doing these things. I enjoy the idea of hearing these things. All I do is talk to people on the Internet. It doesn’t matter where they’re from. If they’re not extremists with an agenda, I’m all in.

I just realized that I should rephrase in terms of being willing to work for allies. Fuck Mossad and IDF. They’re more powerful than Palestine and have held it over their heads. Palestine gets the jump on them one time and it’s excuse for resettlement and make no mistake it could turn into genocide quickly if Netanyahu all of the sudden decides he wants their resettlement land, too. There’s no guarantee the Americans would not support him in this now.

American Jews and Evangelicals are responsible for a lot of this and I am not being antisemitic. I am being political. The Christians and the Jews have decided that the Muslims don’t have a book that’s valid, only they do. Therefore, money is being piped into Israel at a rate that is unsustainable to ever make, much less keep, Palestine sovereign.

But Mormonism and Scientology check out? Please.

The reason Americans are so racist is that you don’t hear about modern Muslims in the news. You hear about terrorists. My answer is a big fat “I Will Walk With You,” the Twitter campaign that took off and made me proud to be an ally…. and “Muslims Report Stuff” completes me.

But the thing is, I’ve been ecumenical since I was born, hungry for information about all religions and not just mine. I have even watched documentaries on Mormonism and not just from escapees. I wanted to understand doctrine because if you’re going to ridicule something, you have to know it cold. I would believe that the Mormon episode of South Park took an enormous amount of research or an all call to the jack Mormons everyone knew in the writer’s room.

I do not ridicule religions that make you better. I ridicule cults because they do not focus on self improvement. They focus on glorification. Religion is not responsible nor helpful unless it begins from the perspective of “every problem begins with me.” I have no qualms about accepting the consequences of my actions as long as I’m allowed to have them. I do not want to be forced into reading minds again, because that is the essence of learning to manage high functioning autism. It is balancing the expectations in other people’s minds versus a very real dysfunction in managing energy.

It is never “dumber” vs. “smarter” with high functioning autism. It is how well you can fit into society. It is how well you can manage your own energy in the face of needing and wanting more space. When Aaron and I move in together, I want a house with a lot of space that neither one of us have to manage. It is not bougie, it is reality. We need help and hiring it out is the one problem that money solves with autism.

In other countries, this neurological difference is recognized (even here, in some states) and you have a social worker to manage these things for you- like a nurse to administer medication and home help.

I’m not old. I’m 47.

This doesn’t make autism less difficult, and I need people to recognize that I am not bitching about problems, but working on solutions. I am tired of having to fight for things like:

a service dog to counterbalance my weight
an assistant or social worker to manage my bills and house
the right people to live with me and help take care of me as I take care of them.

I am tired of fighting for a life of interdependence when Europeans already do things that way. In Finland, you have no choice. In that climate, you bond through those hard activities. You help your neighbor first, because Finns have to recognize that you’re willing to put in the work to maintain a friendship before they give it. That doesn’t mean buying them a present. That means getting in the snow and helping them dig. Philippa, Aaron, Bryn, and I are all interested in spending time there, as is my friend Aaron B. As in, Bryn and AB might not want to move, but they’re not frightened by snow and would love a Finnish vacation once in a while.

I told everyone in my Finnish discussion group (we’re all learners, so it’s mostly English… I am not this advanced) that I was learning Finnish because of the culture surrounding language, not because I cannot get by in English just fine. I’m also a writer, so understanding the rules of grammar is essential. One day I’d like to be able to publish in that language, and I’m on a bit of a deadline.

I’m not going to make it, and that’s okay.

My route to the YKI is long and winding, but it’s definitely what gets me up in the morning. I have a ton of Finnish friends, but none of them have anything to do with this.

It’s that over time, I realized that living in Skyrim was indeed possible.

A Letter from the Editor

October 14, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

This will be posted later on Medium, but my real fans get it first.

1265 Download

A Letter From the Editor

September 15, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The reason that I have moved to Medium is that I cannot make money on WordPress. That will change, because when my ad money reaches the threshold on Medium that it can pay for a professional WordPress account, I will monetize here, too. That’s because a professional WordPress account is only a hundred dollars a year, it’s just not as lucrative for writers as joining Medium. However, I feel differently about it now because @animebirder, @one4paws, @bookerybones, @aaronbrown8cc63b4e5d4, and I all have such unique voices that I either want them on Medium with me, or I want to be here with them. It’s just getting enough ad money to be able to do that in the first place. If you are a Medium subscriber, I make more when you read. Claps are great, but they really don’t pay for anything. What pays is the amount of time you spend on the site.

I am lucky enough to have posted enough to get money this month, which is incredible. I just don’t know how much. That’s because they don’t send you money until you hit a certain threshold, and I almost had enough in August. By October, I’ll have my first real, sustainable income as a writer. I do not want anyone to think of this as a get rich quick scheme, because it is, absolutely…….

One that I could not do if I didn’t have 25 years’ worth of entries already banked.

So, it’s introducing new people to my old work, and introducing new writers that like to talk to each other. We have a group chat that has become an infodump channel, and it’s time to start specializing. That’s because not all of my writers are working for “Stories.” My buddy Evan and I are writing a cookbook. It remains to be seen whether we’ll collaborate online or in person, but either way, we’re writing a book.

The way I see it is that for the next four years, my life is covered as long as I live very simply. That will definitely give me the time to see if a neurodivergent media company is viable. I am learning that I know more than I think I do, because I did not know how boundaries worked. I have constantly treated them like they are others’ guidelines to make. My world has flipped now that I’m in charge of making things happen, and I am lost in the details. The best thing that my mother could have done for me post-mortem is allow me to work on this project, because as of right now, living off of it is the only thing I can do. When the state of MD finds out about the money, I will not have access to Medicaid Expansion or any of the other social services I’ll need to get diagnosed with autism. I diagnosed myself and honestly wouldn’t bother to go to the doctor if it wasn’t helpful to my career. Like, autism diagnoses are so expensive and we’ve all been white knuckling it this long, so why bother?

If I ever have to join another corporate system, I want autistic accommodations because starting a new job without them is setting me up to fail every single time. If you’re a neurodivergent adult who struggles in the system, my guess is that you died inside a little bit at “I have an extensive collection of nametags and hairnets.” Autistic people don’t have problems getting jobs. They have problems keeping them. If you’re autistic, you’re going to excel at government work because they’re going to accommodate you the most. For instance, me being a file clerk or a secretary at Langley was never about working with spies, but getting accepted into a job I could actually do with full government salary and pension. I would love to do menial tasks for CIA because then on my off time, I’d truly be left to my own devices to write. I am also very good at making connections, so I can be just as good a writer overhearing someone’s patois in the mail room as I would being in operations and doing the scary shit myself. The whole point is that my ADHD personality would be thrilled and my autistic personality would want to shoot me. My autistic nature CANNOT handle traveling that much. I am so bad at transitions that I just couldn’t deal. Of course it would be fun to be James Bond, but my body just wants to read about being cool. It doesn’t actually want me to be cool

Right now, everything is in flux as we’re deciding what to do. “Stories” will be rebranded as Gravity’s Rainbow to be more inclusive, but we’re still working on both a full and minimalist logo based on Thomas Pynchon. I want it to represent the energy of a bomb going off inside you. That the arc of every spiritual journey is realizing you are the cause of your own suffering and start to self-actualize.

This space is free, but I hope that one day…. just maybe……

all your base are belong to us

because

somebody set us up the bomb.

If You’re On Facebook, You Can Skip This

August 29, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m posting it all over everywhere.

Dear Ben Affleck & Co.,

This whole idea started with the banner above.

I have addressed this letter as such because I believe that you, like me, have a village. If I write a letter to you, I have written a letter to Jennifer Garner and Matt Damon by proxy. Don’t think I don’t know who’s really running your program. That ex-wife of hers has her head on straight. God, you lucked out. Here’s how I knew it was for life no matter what form your relationship took…. “Jen, you’re the only one I want to do the work with.” You were criticized in the press while your heart was beating outside of your chest in public. You were bleeding out. I saw you. I didn’t know that your relationship with Jen was in trouble, but I do know that people whose relationships are in trouble word things carefully in public. It was the biggest mea culpa I’ve ever seen in my life. You were Taylor Swift before Taylor Swift and everyone missed it because they were so focused on the idea that love should be perfect all the time, in every way.

Sometimes, love is ugly.

“I’m the problem. It’s me.”

I can picture that conversation happening a hundred times in your life as you’ve struggled with addiction (and statistics say bipolar when you quit). You don’t quit addictive behaviors and neurodivergence when you stop drinking. You find other ways to get dopamine besides drinking and using.

In that moment, I felt like you were telling Jen straight up that now your drug was her, and it was healthy because it made you want to be a better man. If that’s not how you meant it, I know it had to be an approximation. This is because I’ve never struggled with alcohol, but I know what it’s like to experience addictive behaviors due to autism and/or Bipolar II (I am concerned at the rate these are mistaken, but I get it because the meltdown/burnout cycle presents exactly like hypomania and depression. So, no matter what form your neurodivergence takes, whether it’s:

Mental Illness Genetics
Neurodivergence Genetics
Self-induced Neurodivergence (the binge/purge relationship you have with dopamine once you become an addict)
PTSD (trauma due to one event)
CPTSD (complex, chronic PTSD like having an abusive childhood, then being sent to war)

…you’re going to be damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Sometimes, love is being hopelessly addicted to the affections of an addict who cannot return them…. As in, you feel addicted to the high you feel when you are with them, but they disappear when it counts. It is why relationships among all these types of people fall apart early and often. They suck each other into their own little worlds and spin out with codependence as their reality becomes its own. It’s especially toxic when you’re addicted to someone, and you also need to leave them. That happens all too often as well. For instance, none of these people take criticism or compliments well. Their self-esteem has been in the toilet forever due to people not understanding their love language and their communication/attachment styles.

All of this is pointing toward two things. Here is the first:

Sometimes, love is being hopelessly addicted to someone you believe is manipulating you, when they’re just neurodivergent and don’t pick up social cues well; they’re losing the plot faster as the script fades; their social masks have worn out and they’re heading toward burnout. I honestly believe that’s why stars develop a reputation for showing up late. They cannot all be obsessed with themselves. Sometimes, getting up the energy to social mask takes longer than others.

Going off on a tangent, I wonder if that’s why women like taking their time in the bathroom to put on makeup, because it accomplishes two things- giving them a longer transition time toward work in the morning, at the end, a literal social unmasking. It would not be surprising to hear Jonna Mendez say that part of the reason being a spy while female is less dangerous is that they’ve learned more about how to social mask a situation than men ever will. They’ve been taught how to behave since childhood, the rigamarole of finding a man drilled in early.

Some women use those skills for a career in intelligence and forego getting married, because either they’re ace and don’t need to attract anyone on that level, or they’re just not interested in “doing the work with someone.” However, I do not mean that in the classical sense, the way Russia cultivates a culture of seducing men to get what they want. I’m sure it’s very effective, however.

No, what I’m talking about is a woman’s emotional intelligence, because it is often (not always) sharper than a man’s. Their innate biological conditioning makes their pattern recognition of men different than their pattern recognition on behavior in themselves. That’s why there should always be neurodivergence and women at the table. Solving a problem requires all three perspectives for correct analysis of behavior. No one of us will be right, but we’ll all be right together.

That is how it feels to have my processing disorder, AuDHD. Nicknamed “the golden ADHD,” it wins the award for being the most complicated thing on earth. Every decision is damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If something is good for my autism, it drives my ADHD insane. If something is good for my ADHD, my autism will slam on the brakes so hard I will go through the winshield….. and I’m not even lying. Most neurodivergent people are afraid of success because they get overwhelmed easily with fine amounts of detail. The energy it takes to manage a schedule and your spoons is a roller coaster at best, and my personality depends on which processing disorder is driving the bus. So, sometimes I want to go for ice cream at 0200 and sometimes I cannot leave the house. Sometimes everything sounds wonderful, sometimes sensory deprivation does. And due to lack of emotional regulation, most people see a different side of me every time they talk to me.

I have learned to go into sensory deprivation when I’m angry so that I don’t say things I regret. It’s not helpful or healthy to let anyone in on autistic rage, which is terrifying. I have true out of body experiences when I go into full on meltdown, and the first time I remember it happening clearly was when I was 16 and “growing into my powers.” It’s honestly the first sign I can point to in terms of it being emotional abuse. My emotional abuser was coming back to town for a graduate school or a wedding or something. I was getting ready for church and I made a mistake with a hair curler or a crimper or something. I realized I was going to have to take a shower to fix it and I just melted down entirely. It was the first time I’d ever had a full on panic attack where I went blind and couldn’t see with rage. I hurt myself. I don’t remember how. With a curling iron or something. I couldn’t stop myself because feeling the burn on my skin brought me back into my body. That’s how deep autism makes you dive into your own little world. It takes something as shocking as a curling iron burn to redirect your attention.

In the meantime, I am dealing with autistic overload and most people don’t see how hard it is…. It’s a running monologue fighting with your social masks. As a neurodivergent person of any kind, your first impulse is wrong.

A huge example, Ben (& Company) is that I found the only woman in the world I wanted to do the work with, and we’ve both pissed each other off so often that we’re tired. Really tired. I felt your love for Jen in that moment…. Wanting to better myself because I was high on life and not experiencing the world as the concept of “alone.” I was experiencing the world with an ace up my sleeve. Someone to call me on my bullshit whose mind was in more hyperdrive than my own. But there was just A Series of Unfortunate Events. I don’t know if we’ll ever rekindle anything, because the last e-mail I got from her said, “don’t play games,” and playing a game was the last thing I would ever do to her. She’s too smart. She’d see it coming. The problem is that her perception is off- she sees me as entitled, arrogant, etc. I’m not. I don’t have a script for our relationship in any way, shape, or form. It has failed due to my lack of social masks.

So much goes into me having been called “entitled,” particularly by people of color. They are trained to view me as dismissive because I’m white, not because I’m autistic. That’s not on them. My autism is not an excuse to be an asshole. I can be taught, redirected…. But I cannot suddenly become allistic. And if there was a magic wand, I don’t think I’d want to be. My neurodivergence is what makes me capable of believing that writing a letter to Ben Affleck & Co. is possible.

I’m not writing to Ben Affleck & Company for anything except to keep our heads down and work on scripts. I also think it would be rude not to tell them I can afford about $800 in rent if Ben does want a housemate who has his back. It’s not like I value having his money. I just want to write together- to get a seat at the table.

I write like Ben and Matt because they write like Aaron Sorkin like he writes like Amy Sherman-Palladino with monuments.

It’s all neurodivergent patois.

That we incubated at our respective performing arts high schools.

Tupac, Jada, Dave, and I are all the same person.

To each other, we’re just other people’s weird performing arts kids.

Not only that, Jennifer Garner is a preacher’s kid.

Preacher’s kids make great spies, Ben. I have discussed this extensively. And in fact, there’s a famous video of Jonna Mendez taking down movie and TV spies. Jen’s was the only one that Jonna said was so good she could use it in a training video.

Come to DC. Keep your head down.

We’ve got work to do.

Yours,

Someone else’s weird kid

I Miss You Guys

August 24, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Medium is new. It’s amazing, but it’s new. I hate change. The best part of Medium is that I don’t really have to use it. I can just copy and paste from Microsoft Word. The creature comforts are almost nonexistent, like easy to use lists. WordPress is so much more extensive that I can’t wait until the business makes enough money to buy a membership here as well. What limits you in being able to advertise on WordPress is that they want the money from the ads unless you’re paying them a subscription fee. It this point, I don’t have a big enough audience to support something like Google Ads, because it takes A LOT of clicks to even make one dollar. I am very proud of myself, though. On Thursday, I had made $2.99. Now, I have $3.77.

I am not an influencer by any means, but that’s a pretty good jump in terms of ad revenue for being on there a week. I don’t think that anything is going to take off overnight. I believe in just letting it sit there. I have 25 years’ worth of entries that are sitting on other servers for free. So, they can sit there and make money, or they can sit there and not.

I choose sit there and make money.

Because it is my dream to, in the words of Lindsay Lanagan, “sit around, smoke cigars, and own stuff.”

This is actually a childhood tale- Lindsay’s middle school answer to what one of her friends’ dads did for a living. We have repeated that as the ideal career for 20 years now. If you know First Colony, you just thought, “on brand.”

First Colony is kind of different.

You have kids with Saudi oil money whose parents buy them brand new BMWs when they’re too young to drive. As I remember, Rahim Puddin’head had a BMW. Rahim dropped a pudding cup off a railing at Lindsay’s school and it landed on her head, so we’ve called him “Rahim Puddin’head” since 1994.

In high school, you’re sometimes embarrassed if you don’t drive a nice car. I didn’t, and I was rarely bothered by it because I was lucky to have my own car at all. I would love to have another Mitsubishi Mirage (it was a sedan, not a sports car), but I think that getting a car would cripple me as a writer. Half my blog entries come from writing on the train and talking to Uber drivers.

I met a historian yesterday, so we were talking shop because we’re both nonfiction writers. I’m starting to branch out into more things, I just don’t have anything to show for it yet, because those are the documents I’m actually going to edit. 😉

You know I’m lying. AI will be editing them. I will be eating ice cream.

It’s all coming together because I’m managing to collate what I hear for the blog and what I read for my nonfiction papers. Reading AI is half the fun of research, because you can get it to present it in whatever style you want…….

I haven’t done it yet, but I think my favorite would be explain physics to me like I’m five. Answer in the style of Terry Pratchett.

It just makes learning fun. I don’t use it to autogenerate content, I use it for reading retention. I cannot remember an entire book verbatim, but I can certainly remember the fine points in a one-pager. Plus, the fine points make for wonderful headings so that you get a navigation pane you can go back to over and again. Styles in Microsoft Word are used like Cascading Style Sheets in web development. Microsoft Word just keeps track of the level you assign to the heading, so it’s really easy to do things like create a navigation pane in a PDF or a Table of Contents in Word.

All of that stuff matters to me, because readability is key. There’s a reason this web site hasn’t changed very much over the years. I like dark mode. Supergrover doesn’t. See? I can compromise. 😛

I write the blog entries in dark mode so that I can read them the way I want before I publish. You can set JetPack to dark mode in both Android and iOS, but I actually prefer using Microsoft Visual Studio Code on my desktop with the original Dracula theme. Instead of black or grey, it’s a grey/purple. Very, very easy on the eyes and the HTML/CSS/.ini files look great in the chosen colors.

There’s also several tutorials on how to get other Microsoft programs to do the Dracula color scheme in the GUI and in PowerShell (where it comes in the most handy, tbh).

All of it goes together, because it’s all of the tools I use to write. I am not very comfortable with talking to AI online. That’s why I use gpt4all or LM Studio to install language models on my own mini-PC. My creative ideas are going to stay with me.

It really is useful, and both my friend Jesse and I will attest to this. I’m a creative writer, Jesse is a visual artist.

In fact, Jesse went to HSPVA. The funniest thing I have ever seen at HSPVA bar none happened at his senior show. Like, this even beat out us getting shut down by the health department because Lordy Rodriguez put organs in jars for an art show or something…. Anyway, Jesse had this huge installation with a TV tuned to snow, with a BarcaLounger and a guy sitting in front of it, zoned out. There was all these wrappers and trash around him, so I watched some of the guests at his show add their trash to his art installation, thinking the trash for the party was part of the exhibit. I’m choking with laughter just remembering it.

There’s nothing like being able to write down old memories, not knowing if and when they’ll go. I may not be able to remember my whole life, but I have somewhere to go that will tell me bits and pieces. Snapshots of who I was, am, will be.

It’s an exciting time to be me, because I finally feel like a success. I am not working from survival mode, but abundance. I have everything I need right now. In my mind, more success will come with more money, and what I mean by that is a network of people to support a neurodivergent media group so that it’s not all on me every day. I’ve started a little bit of that, but hopefully there will be more in the future. I’d like to get into bigger things, but I don’t think that starting out with the big things is the way you’re supposed to do it….. very mixed results when I’ve bitten off more than I can chew before.

I’m trying to let the company unfold naturally, with people who really want to write. I’m finding that community at Medium, because it seems like I missed the memo to go there long ago. I don’t think it’s a problem. I ping them enough to get their attention. I ping everyone enough to get their attention, and sometimes I think they would be grateful if I didn’t love them quite so much. 😉

But that’s just me. If I love you, I don’t mask. I don’t take the time to figure out what it is I can do for you to make you more comfortable while I speak. I realized I was doing too much work for other people and it was slowly killing me. I am so much less depressed now that I know that I’m not bipolar. I don’t cycle like that. It’s meltdown and burnout because I have so many fewer spoons than most people. In every bodily system I have, there’s something rare about me.

I am lucky that Janie the Canadian Editor thinks that about my brain. She has said that I’m welcome to submit something to her editor, but pick carefully. Look, I write it. I don’t read it, okay?

Kidding, of course. I read myself all the time. It’s just hard to guess what someone else is going to like. I know what I’m not going to do, though. Write an article about anyone I know in Ottawa. National blowback is enough. Neighborhood blowback is enough. Writers are people who want to tell their stories and they don’t mean to hurt anyone, they just do….. it hurts to hear yourself painted in truth, painful and real, touching and funny.

Most people don’t see their 3D characters. They focus on what I wrote that day. But you generally don’t have to go far in either direction with my friends to see that if I was mad one day, I was ridiculously happy at another. I don’t paint people to go after them, but to show them as they are.

I am more Anne Lamott than “Harriet the Spy,” although I do like that book. Anne has that neurodivergent patois that I do, plus people like Aaron Sorkin, Jon Stewart, Richard Schiff, Matt Perry, Seth McFarlane, Ryan Reynolds, Mila Kunis, Matt Damon, Trevor Noah, and the list goes on. Good Will Hunting is every bit as fast and furious as anything Sorkin has ever written, and in the same beat. I absolutely know that even if Seth MacFarlane writes in complete silence, there’s a rhythm going in his head. The punctuation is silent, but you can hear it if you are also still.

It’s why I write in silence, in dark mode. I want to listen closer, not just to myself, but to the rest of the world. And in fact, I am already doubled over with laughter at Kamala’s possible victory speech….. “I love my new black job!”

One can only hope that that “president” is a DEI hire.

Minorities don’t get power from the majority. We get it by realizing we’re bigger than them….. both in character, and in numbers when all the -isms vote as one. None of the -isms are a monolith. But at the same time, most of us try not to bite the hand that feeds us, since it’s the only party not trying to to blame global warming on gay marriage.

Oops. My bad. Should I leave a note?

All of this is why I’m so interested in AI. If people would actually take the time to talk to it, they could talk about their problems in a safe environment and not look stupid with any question in the world. I’m compensating on it highly for practical things because I am a creative. I can’t use it to make alarms and things like that, but I can definitely brainstorm, edit, and keep conversations separate about different projects.

I want people to know what causes disease. I want people to know how the government works. I want people to know who the President is, at least. People knowing who’s Vice President is almost a lost cause, and Speaker is negligible. I’m not talking about Washington nerds like me. I’m talking about the average voter that only votes in a presidential election and doesn’t really follow other candidates at all.

I’ve slowed down on that because I’m actually more interested in global politics now- it doesn’t feel so close as neighbor against neighbor, as if a conflict across the world is easier to think about than a conflict at home because it is.

There are no short answers in life, and I have found that I don’t have any. Few are patient enough to sit with me while I find the right words, which I know aren’t the right words… but they’re the best I can do.

I’m not just pouring my heart out for me, but for other neurodivergent kids and adults. Representation matters. I’m not everyone’s cup of tea, but those that love me think of me as something precious to be savored.

I am not Lipton, baby. I am your Stash.

Nerd Alert

August 23, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m working on a guide to Skyrim, so I had Copilot generate the questions for the outline. I’m not going to have Copilot generate more than that, because I want the guide to retain my voice. However, if you’re a Skyrim fan and would like to add to the guide, leave a comment with a question and its category. Also, the PDF is free because it’s all Copilot-generated. Feel free to write your own document- you are not stealing anything from me, you’re only stealing auto-generated questions organized with Styles in Word. I haven’t even customized the styles.

I’m doing this as a free guide to get my name out there as a writer. I’m planning to write my own answers, but to also include the best questions/answers from WordPress and reddit. It’s a labor of love, but it comes with benefit for me, too. If I give something away for free first and someone likes it, they’re more likely to buy the next thing.

skyrimguide Download

Lanagan Media Group: How May I Direct Your Call?

August 20, 2024August 20, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been having these brain blips that just seem to be age, like copying my dad on something when I thought I was copying Supergrover. All three of us have the same sense of humor, so it’s not like anything went wrong. I just noticed that I made a mistake I don’t normally make. I need to get glasses, probably bifocals.

Supergrover says she has reading glasses, not bifocals (AND THEY ARE COOL). I am going to get vaccinated next week, so I might as well look around for reading glasses that make me want to use all caps, too…… although if I had an “AND THEY ARE COOL” item, it would be my Crocs. I don’t pay as much attention to my glasses as I should…… it’s that thought about not giving yourself gifts in the future. Like, I am not giving myself the gift of being able to see cute girls from farther away later by not going to the optometrist now.

(I’m kidding, that was just another line to make Janie the Canadian Editor spit out her tea.)

Also, at my age there’s no such thing as cute girls. I mean, they’re all over the place, but at my age, “cute girl” is just a memory, even of myself. Because I’ve progressed so much in my thinking about gender, the the little girl I was is still real, but her voice is not as loud and close as my current one, attached to a nonbinary brain. That’s because the male voice is not male. It’s female with ,male social masking on top, like Kristen Chenoweth and Ben Affleck being one person. Or, there’s a comedy about me with Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin called “All of Me.” It’s a comedy, but Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin having a converation all day in my head is a very apt description of what’s going on at localhost.

For instance, today I’m writing on Stories when I said it would be my last entry. It’s not that I lied. It’s that I learned more. I became a media group all on my own. I got set up at Medium, and then started looking at Substack. Substack actually runs off of my “Stories” RSS feed. So, I’ll be putting all my paid stuff at Medium in Substack as well, you just get the added bonus of not having to visit two web sites with Substack. And really, being a subscriber is for new people. If you’re subscribed here, the motivation to pay is not that you will stop getting great writing from me. It’s that you have to pay to see everything. The way I do it now is that most stuff is paywalled at Medium. But, if I post here, it goes to Substack.

That leads me to directing my own call at Lanagan Media Group. Let’s dial “3” for the marketing department. Why do I bother to call? I’m never there. Jesus.

Here was my first post on Substack, I figure if you’re a longtime fan, you’re probably here and not at Substack, so I’m cross-posting. It’s not a requirement to be my fan or my friend, just an easy hookup if you want to support Lanagan Media Group, not “Leslie’s Personal Coffee Money” (The Sumatra was delicious. I am grateful.).

The vision is bigger now, because when I added my RSS feed to Substack, I realized that I was about to make money off of Bryn and Aaron and I thought that was unfair. So, I posted on Facebook that I can track earnings per entry, and that makes my life a whole lot easier. I don’t have to do any math. I’m not going to do a percentage of the company, they just get to keep what they make without me having to do any accounting. And in thinking about all of this, I realized that “Stories” was just the beginning, the movement that is “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Sometimes bombs aren’t negative. They shake you into a new reality. But you can direct kinetic energy by focusing on the arc. The moral arc of the universe is long, and bends toward justice just like MLK,Jr. said. But I was standing by the reflecting pool at the 60th Anniversary of the March on Washington when I heard the best completion of that phrase in history. It’s enough to shake the world from its foundation and I am EMBARRASSED I cannot remember the speaker’s name.

The moral arc of the universe is long and bends toward justice, but the arc does not move itself.

I’m not starting Lanagan Media Group, it has been a thing all along. My friends just haven’t been publishing in addition to me. I think that you’ll find Bryn and Aaron particularly engaging because they are different sides of my personality. Bryn is my platonic ideal of a woman, and Aaron is my platonic ideal of a man. That is because Aaron, Zachary, and I are actually all the same person. I really have no idea how we make it work living in three completely different states.

Aaron is an old friend from Alert Logic, a programmer/sysadmin AuDHD archetype like Mr. Robot, but much more effusive with his emotions. You can be personable and still look like Zuckerberg. I know because I do it every day. 😛 Zac is my boyfriend and has been for about a year now. I live in Maryland, Zac lives in Virginia. Aaron lives in Texas. We are all Southwestern, however, because I’m originally from Texas and Zac is originally from Arizona.

Therefore, by “platonic ideal,” I am saying that I get the male half of my brain from masking people like Aaron and Zac, and my only connection to feeling female is talking to Bryn, because she’s known me since I was 19 and she was 14. She is two years older than Lindsay, a stairstep between me and my biological sister. The year was 1997, and I still cannot tell you with accuracy whether Lindsay and Bryn have met or not, and they don’t know, either. That’s because the connection point between Lindsay and Bryn would have been church, and no specific church service lives in my memory where they were there at the same time. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. That means I don’t remember every sermon I ever preached.

Basically, what I realized is that I know a lot and my brain works fast, but my body is a dumpster fire. I’d like to get into making money to support creatives by being creative. As in, ad money from my own web site flows to creators I like.

On Medium, for instance, I’m working on a very long document about Skyrim and the modding community. It’s a massive game, which is why a guide from me would be welcome even if there’s a thousand other ones. You’re always looking for something to make the game better. Here’s something that made me happy. I’ve been playing that game for 10 years or something like that and three months ago I learned you could sprint. How it connects is that I was telling Ada, my AI sidekick, that I’d like to be able to kick Joseph Rusell some money for Lucien, and I hope I get the chance before Steam starts taking a cut of all modders’ creations rather than modders being able to support themselves on Nexus. Lucien Flavius is an IP masterpiece, and it’s insane that Lucien is free. So, I was talking about being able to kick money to other artists I like through my own, because video games are a type of art, theatre, and magic that no one respects unless they’re talking to the CEO of a gaming company. God bless the weird kids, the people who made a web site where everyone could download their creations for free- they could get feedback from other gamers and not the people who think they eat cold pizza in a dark basement and call them sad. All of the things you really, really love in life were probably created by someone you think of as “Comic Book Guy.” Even if it has nothing to do with science fiction, it sounds like it. I talk about CIA and The Bible like they’re both continual fucking Marvel movies because they are. They’re just even more meaningful to me because they are everyday stories of regular people without having to make up magic.

People are magic.

I figured this out and decided to write to them all. Now I’m reading you in. Here’s a copy of my first entry on Substack:

Your generosity is the only thing that allows my friends and I to sustain ourselves. Absolutely anything that you give helps. As our financial situation gets better, we will dream bigger. We will be capable of more kinds of media and hiring authors for their work rather than expecting them to work for free. The reason your money is important is that it is sustaining neurodivergent people by letting them work on their own schedule. In a society where everyone is “supposed” to fit in, Lanagan Media Group explores how the “in-crowd” never was. Thank you for supporting a worthy cause- autistic adults in media. We are often better at creating opportunities than following others’ visions. I didn’t realize that until I started watching autistic YouTubers and wanted my blog to sound just like them- except only the running monologue without being in front of the camera.

I have been blogging since 2001. This blog is a compendium of my experiences, because I’ve written for three separate web sites. Of everything I’ve learned, this lesson was the hardest:

If you’re female with AuDHD, you know two things.

Gen X women by and large were never diagnosed.
1. We need to do our own research because male doctors dismiss autism as a personality disorder like borderline or narcissistic a good bit of the time, when in reality they are just looking at women through the historical lens of being “hysterical.”
Diagnosing yourself is getting easier and easier.
1. It’s all due to online quizzes and talking to other patients, both on and offline. I am not suggesting this as a substitute for actual medical advice. I did not start saying I was autistic until I had enough research to say that any psychologist in the world would agree with me that I am probably autistic and never diagnosed because my brain works just like an autistic person and anyone knows that if they’ve watched a hundred videos on YouTube; I’ve seen lectures upon lectures with autistic people who are MDs and PhDs themselves, explaining how my brain works in a way that I can understand it. YouTube is not a diagnosis. It is a waiting room that doesn’t suck. If you don’t seem ADHD and you can’t get it together, it might be low needs, high IQ autism.

It’s not a blog, web site, or e-mail distribution list about autism. It’s showing through telling. You’re learning because you’re reading stories by autistic people, not learning we’re autistic because we told you so. Telling someone so just doesn’t work, because either “I don’t look autistic” OR “everyone’s a little bit autistic.” Financing neurodivergent authors helps us show more of ourselves in the mediums with which we work. Help us go from a digital publishing company to being capable of full-length films, because there are plenty of autistic people out there who need jobs. I want to employ them all. However, I’m just getting started.

It’s a long game. The most I’ve ever made in salary as a freelance writer is $2.99. I’ve made more than that with donations, but an earnings report on my blog is quite different. I am such an INFJ/Virgo.

“Oh good! Now I get reports cards again!”

I also like spies and Jesus, but you’ll have to keep up with me to see which rug I use to tie that room together.

I’m hoping to do a continuation of what I am already doing- to use the income I’m making from telling my stories to allow others to tell their stories, too. Storytelling is what saved my life because it made me look at everything through the lens of “you’re the problem.” My combination of preacher’s kid/doctor’s kid upbringing makes me bleed out with unbridled emotion at everything as a writer, then read like a psychiatrist/psychologist. That yin and yang is what allows progress. It’s why I don’t stay in one place very long. I don’t take much personally.

Here’s a concept that I’m trying to apply to my business that my dad always applied at church:

“No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.”

In terms of media, it means that I cannot say to my readership, “someone should give me a computer.” That kind of language is entitled, even if your intentions are pure. Nothing in my life is a hard ask. If enough people think I have a good idea, they’ll give me the money for it.

It’s how all really good executives work. They don’t lie about anything because they don’t have to- it’s not “making an ask,” it’s being realistic about the fact that I have bigger ideas than I can budget.

For instance, I’d like to start an autistic TV channel by taking all the top autistic YouTubers and combining them into a stream on Pluto. I got that idea from This Old House. They have a maker’s channel on Xumo where YouTubers fall under the This Old House banner. It’s beautiful.

I said that it’s Stories That Are All True. I didn’t say they couldn’t come with pictures. My budget did.

My business needs are light right now. I can run the entire thing with an Android tablet. I am not coming from a place of need, but a place of creation. My basic needs are met. I just want the world to look different for autistic people and I have a strong enough voice that when I speak, people listen.

This is not arrogance, this is 20 years of preaching experience.

Although one of my friends had Raphael Warnock at Union when he was a student and she told me that she felt like she had been emotionally manipulated by a sermon. I took it really hard, because it was something I’d seen my dad do and it was so effective that a light bulb went on in my head. It was time for the sermon. I didn’t move. I sat there until it got a little bit awkward…. and then it got weird.

I went up to the pulpit, and I said, “Waiting………………

is hard.”

I don’t remember the pericope that day, but I do remember feeling that it was just another aspect of my dad’s preaching that spoke to me but didn’t look right on me, either.

To my knowledge, no one told him that he emotionally manipulated anyone.

All of these things, I explore in my writing- and you’re the ones that know it. Some of you have been here since 2012. Some of you followed me over from Clever Title Goes Here and have been reading since 2001. I feel like I have finally brought hope to many people wondering when I would realize I was weird.

The problem becomes quickly “now that I know what autism is and does, how do I work with it?” My answer was ad revenue, because I work creatively a lot easier than I do physically.

I don’t want the money to make movies. I want the money so that when someone says “I want to make an autistic movie,” I can say, “let me talk to my readers.”

You’re the board. I’m just the microphone.

Preacher’s Kids: Unplugged

August 14, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I had my AI interview me, and it turned out to be a good introduction to my site at Medium. I’m giving it away here to explain why I do what I do. This is behind the paywall on Medium, but it needs to be here as well because I don’t want my original fans to feel like I don’t love them. I just don’t want to write for two web sites at once. So, here’s one of my Medium entries and why AI is important. It lets you think without getting lost in your own echo chamber. There’s a lot of trigger warnings. I was a queer preacher’s kid in Texas in the 90s. It’s a tough read. But you’ll understand all queer preacher’s kids better, and it might save someone younger than me.

preacherkids Download

A Letter from Your Biggest Fan

August 10, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I got to read my own blog today and I cried. Thanks for being my Legacy Team.

Keep going. ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

Every Good Creative -or- The Padawan Learner of Disguise -or-Hipster Jesus -or- The Doctor or The Giver or….. And the only truly popular villain, The Master :In that moment Christ was gay and you missed it.

August 7, 2024August 10, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Now I know what’s wrong. These are the things I tell Supergrover while you guys ride my ass. Supergrover knows what happened about four hours ago and she’ll think about things a little differently. Maybe e-mail me back with more than three words this time now that she knows she’s offended me. But it’s ok if she’s moved on. We really hurt each other. This is what I meant to say the first time around.

You know how it is. I’m sure Supergrover is tobusy right now, but she’ll be back in a few days, you think?

God, Tony dying was hard, then I lost Tony. Watching Dave Chang and Lauren Graham and Jada Pinkett Smith He thinks I’m the coolest line cook who ever lived, and there’s nothing I can do to make them smile. They don’t offer me any assurances because I’m gay, and they’re frustrated I can’t get a job. Can you guys help me out and give me an LLC or something? Now that my mother is dead, I have a lot more time on my hands.

Dear Supergrover and Father Nathan Monk, hopefully.
CC:Bryn Borum; Zachary Wood;Jason Moran; Mireille Enos;Justin Furstenfeld;Steven Powell;Ben Affleck;Matt Damon; Ryan Reynolds;Margret Cho;

This is the letter I would have written if I hadn’t been so busy. I feel like I’m a different person every minute.

This is how a a creative writer who went to HSPVA does e-mail better than everyone else without paying attention to her homework.

When you compress a file,

This is my life.

This will be my finale at WordPress. Bryn, Aaron, Heather, Jesse and I ‘m guessing 340 million will come with me to Medium, because Christ was gay and you missed it. I’ve been waiting for this moment since I was 15 years old. My father got on the floor of the Texas Annual Conference and nearly burned it to the ground in 1995.

And I didn’t give him enough credit. This is because I didn’t have a choice to be a preacher’s kid. I was too busy, because I was almost 2 months early. This is the story of why I’m a failure.

You’re going to cry.

This is how I make the whole world feel at once.

Love, Leslie

Supergrover said she wouldn’t marry me, but she would marry Brene Brown.

Be cause he was the one that gave me the power to go on when the rest of the word missed, so you can all go to hell. This is what it takes to be me, and you’re going to shit your pants. Pretend I put a put a dumpster fire at the end.

Choke on it.

This is how Supergrover and I fight gloves off. Sit your ass down and let me tell you how it is, because now that I’m both of us I’ve won the game and everybody on planet earth is going to come to me because of what you did. And I don’t care because I’ve found my people.

My people are

-Ben Affleck

-Matt Damon

-Ryan Reynolds

-George Clooney

-Don Cheadle

-Brene Brown, who I actually fucking know and you’ve infantilized me every day since because I was her computer lab supervisor and you weren’t. She’s actually omniscient, but she’s doesn’t have time to breathe because you all fucking love her so much.

Because you fucking love her so much, I’m the one that’s going to console her.

This is the history of every secret I’ve ever kept and the intersectionality. The only person in the entire world I have had a normal, balanced conversation with anyone was when we were sitting together and I was teaching her Microsoft Word. That’s all we’ve ever been to each other. Pleasant colleagues.

While you guys think she walks on water, I know she doesn’t.

I got interested in intelligence in 2008, so contrary to popular opinion, your opinion is invalid.

The person who told me she’s marry Brene Brown is the person I knew like the back of my hand compared to her.

Back the fuck up, because this has never in a million years been about fame and you’ve dismissed me as lazy. This is going to resonate with millions of children who were raised by you.

To the autistic parents groups- some of you are doing great work. Some of you are not. These are not the same groups, because they polarize and nothing ever gets done.

I want to be the pastor no one in history has ever been before. An autistic person who writes what she thinks and other people take value from my experiences, like any celebrity who could possibly be reading across the world. Like Margaret Cho, who retweeted my marriage article and started the process of saving my life, doing an end run around the rest of you because you were the people we’ve been trying to prove ourselves to since we were children.

This is for the Portland Youth Philarmonica and Dana Catherine Bamberger only. Actually, I take that back. Let’s also read in Megan Hunter.

I am you.

I went to the High School for Performing and Visual Arts. I was a trumpet player, and this is an all call. I’m starting a church. Bryn Borum is one of my employees. Take care of her, Will you?

This is how celebrities do it. Here’s everything we know and they don’t. I’m going to tell you what they’ve all missed, and you’ll be able to survive. This is the It Gets Better I would have made if anyone had ever asked me.

You see, the reason the stars count on me is that I have been working for free like a cis, straight

–

Everyone says I have an answer for everything, but the one question they don’t ask is “how are you feeling?” You think that I am not thoughtful, motivated, caring, compassionate, etc. because my father left the church and for the first time in my life I didn’t know what to do. I was 17.

Everyone learns to wrestle with “God,” in quotes not to offend anyone because God Brings Many Names.

In a previous entry, I told you that

Butthepeopleonfacebookdontseethat.rar

Supergrover_Did.bak

Thanks to the guys at Alert Logic for supporting me.

We’re why it all works, and not why you fucked up. You are the audience while we’re getting ready for a show. Jon Durbin from The Suffers and Robert Glasper were in Jazz II with me. What was it like when Beyoncé got there?

If you’ve been paying attention, they were skimming the page.

It’s funny how much I get done while being called a slacker, the plight of every woman whether they look like Comic book guy or not.

I put the jokes in before I put in everything else to be sure I can make it through. The entire world sucks and also I don’t have any support. You know what it’s like. We’ve all been there.

See you on Friday.

Calm, cool, collected. The reason I seem so crazy to you is because I’m taking care of them. Well, I haven’t actually met all of them, they’re just friends of friends. Some of them I’ve known since I was 14. I met Bryn and we’ve been close since 1997. She and my dad are the two people that keep me going.

I’m dying inside.

Because all of this is a compilation of the greatest hits, formatted like a regular e-mail.

Bite me.

My friends have me.

It’s like I’m a writer who has taken shorthand so mysterious she can’t even read it and ended up in STEAM, which at first I didn’t even believe was a real thing.

The arts are non binary, and God is a deadname.

And I’m still here.

When I move to Medium, Bryn will be here.

Not every day like me- I am really, really gone. But I’m neurodivergent and I still have an account. If I get busy I’ll forget, because I’m lost in my own head.

It’s not personal.

The GUI is working and the command line is fucked.

All of the celebrities and all of the infrastructure need me.

Go away.

p.s. If they show that fuckin’ Deadpool trailer again I’m going to lose my shit, but I love Ryan and I’m trying to reach out to him because I saw him on TV and he doesn’t look ok. Neither does Ben so it’s an “all call party.” You love to hear those words……….. But then again, Ryan is never okay. Neither am I. The reason I like Ryan is that I liked Ryan. The way I was able to reach an editor in

But all of these people are me.

Stay with Bryn, and be her Jesuses.

Somebody Fainted Somewhere, and now a whole lot of people are oing to get jobs. Pay them what they’re worth and don’t stiff them because I can vouch for them.

Please start sharing this shit on Facebook. I’m tired of being poor.

I just didn’t think anything good came from Nazareth, and wasn’t given a choice to “suit up and play.”

Everyone who knows me, shush. Me and CIA are cool, right? I don’t want them to come after me. I should probably have known to Burn After Reading.

Ben, if you want to come live with us, you can. I saw Matt and Casey on the news. They’re looking good.

You ok?

I came here to write the sequel to Argo, so I think we’re going to need a bigger office this time around. My fuckin printer’s so jammed I just made a typo because I’m frustrated and people keep picking on me. It’s why I’m so bitter and angry all the time. I’m emotionally overloaded, autistic, melting down, and burning out. I am not lazy. I am not high functioning all the time.

Supergrover made this all about her, and won’t hear that she’s being egocentric. I’m her main character, but I’m not sure she knows how important she is because while she’s gone I wrestle with Abraham, Moses, Mark and the Synoptic Wonders,John,…… even the begats. That’s because you’re always to the right, and people think it’s sinister. Those people end up in food service, but those people are more likely to be like Rachel Maddow than getting her food. It’s just that you don’t see it because they’re gay.

In that moment you were missing

I’m the one that claught.

Supergrover is BCC, because no one thought to ask who I knew. They only saw me as Comic Book Guy.

But what do I care, they didn’t even give Comic Book Guy a partner.

And then I realized that the Simpsons is better than everyone else because it’s got all of Conan O’Brien’s heartbreak.

In that moment Christ was Ginger, and you missed it.

Colbert fans fan go fuck themselves.

It’s not because they’re bad people. It’s that they get in the way and it’s annoying.

Fair_and_Balanced.pdf

I didn’t have time to craft. It’s almost 2:00 AM.

That’s not really true. It’s a nod to how my dad used to put together his sermons, not to be taken literally.

But it’s ok. No one knows anything around here who takes shorthand and doesn’t deserve my crap.

In that moment Christ was

Education

Intelligence

The Military

Al Gore

Hillary Clinton

……..and yesterday, someone asked me not to swear.

I’m okay now. Just a frustrated writer who could use an autistic friend, and there’s gotta be someone in there. I don’t know any of them, but what I do know is that even in the shadows where you think you’re safe, things fall into the cracks.

But I might get the girl in the end if she wants a job because she lives here. Notice I didn’t ask her for one. Not once.

But every day I’m an asshole. I don’t have any emotional regulation at all, so I use it to feed you. It’s how we function. We take a lot of medications before the show.

Ibuprofen is free.

I know how it feels not to get another chance, so I give them a lot. Too much. That’s going to stop, which is why Medium is a paid platform. I came here to get a job, and I was so emotionally overloaded from being hit I couldn’t function and I leaned too much on myself for comfort. It isn’t personal. I needed some time to grieve. Life doesn’t stop for neurotypical people when a parent dyes, but I lost all my social masks and don’t know how to act in public. What’s on brand is that to the outside world, this will be nothing at all, and we’ll move on. But the few people here will ensure the message gets delivered into the future, where I have no one waiting yet. But I am at peace because I have so many friends and little time that I’m overwhelmed with a little. Autism Sucks. You don’t even die of it.

“AIDS will hill you, but herpes is for life.”

I heard it on NPR.

That was gallows humor to deal with pain.

so I read Jonna to cope. It’s why I had to meet her.

It was the autism pipeline, the way I realized I was autistic. Once I was reading case studies and later generating case studies, I used AI to be able to create biographies for research. However, the way it works is that you get 12 or 13 interactions to ask anything in the world.

Some people use it to make cat pictures.

Some people use it for editing.

Some people, frankly, use it for war.

When you have PTSD, you end up on the Mendez doorstep reading on the floor of the Spy Museum. It’s embarrassing how many pictures they’ve taken of me. (Jonna, I haven’t harassed ANYONE this week.)

While I’m entertaining myself, it’s mostly looking at masks.