Tag: Virginia

Replacing Sleep with Caffeine

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have had a lot of caffeine in getting ready for my apartment to be inspected on Friday. They never showed up, so I will have to check in again with them on Monday. They apologized for the inconvenience, but I reserve the right to be perturbed that I thought my lease would be settled by now. Thank God I have time on Monday to go to the office and sit down with them. They don’t seem to do much if I’m not right on top of it. The reason I’m staying is that I don’t have the energy to move. It’s not that they did everything right.

They’ll have a chance to change gears with the new apartment, so I’m hoping for good things. If I do not get them, I can always move in a few months. This is just really bad timing to pack up everything. I am going home for the holidays on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Fitting a move in there is just silly.

I’m already drinking too much coffee trying to get everything done. It’s going to be hard enough to get movers to take my furniture to my new apartment, much less across town. But a move across campus is something I could manage by myself (I think). I will have to consult my counselor at Cognitive Behavioral Health and see what he recommends. Surely his other clients have had to move before, and I know he’s at least a sympathetic ear.

He’s the kind of person who takes action, and will step in with my apartment complex if he thinks I’m being taken advantage of or anything like that. It’s good to have someone in my corner that’s local, because my dad and sister definitely are, but they are not here. I’m sure it would be easier on them if I lived in Texas, but it’s not easier on my health insurance. I have to stay where the Medicaid expansion is.

I need to take some major sleeping pills when I get home tonight, making sure to sleep in tomorrow. I’ve been getting up so early that “having a lie-in” means 7:00 AM, not noon…. not that there’s anything wrong with sleeping until noon when I need it. I haven’t been sleeping deeply and I desperately need the rest.

Long, hot showers do a lot of restorative work, but they’re not everything.

I’m getting excited because it’s almost time to load up and go to Tiina’s farm. She’s not a morning person, so I promised her I wouldn’t arrive before 11:00. That means I need to leave here sometime around 9:00. I don’t know what the traffic is going to look like, but it doesn’t matter. It’s Saturday morning and the mood is lazy. When we get there is when we get there.

DC always has traffic even when it’s the weekend because of construction. I may be able to go around the city and miss it entirely, but I doubt it. The fastest way to Tiina’s will invariably involve getting on a freeway, and in DC, that means the odds of it being worked on are high on the weekends.

I wish I could get my car to drive me, and I practically can. Once I get on the freeway, I’ll set the adaptive cruise control and let the car do the work.

It really settled my mind seeing on the Progressive app that I’m rated four out of five stars as a driver. I know for certain I am not a five star driver, but I have also been too hard on myself.I can tell you from having ridden with many Uber drivers that I’m not that bad. So, apparently, if I tell you that I’m a bad driver, take it with a grain of salt. Apparently, I just have low self-esteem.

It’s coming up with the freedom of driving and the feeling I get when I walk out to my spotless car. Well, not spotless. I could use a car wash. But the inside is still fresh from being vacuumed and the leather smells good. I put on my sunglasses and just smile. It makes me feel so luxurious to have a nice car.

But notice I said “nice” and not “expensive.”

I am not sure that I could have gotten this good a quality of used car in Maryland because this car has never spent a winter up north. I’m not looking forward to that part of it, that my car’s undercarriage could get rusted out with the use of salt on the road when it ices. There are spray coatings you can get to protect against that kind of damage, so I need to do some research on how much it is. I would much rather keep putting money into this car than shopping for another one. Shopping for cars is something that you think will be fun and very quickly becomes overwhelming.

It’s now 5:30 PM, and I’m home from my friend Tiina’s. That’s her dog, McLaren, in the photo. He’s a French bulldog and the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. His favorite hobby is slobbering. 🙂

I would say that this was one of the best days I’ve had in DC since I got here in 2015. The drive from Maryland to Virginia was so beautiful I would have cried had I not been driving. The fall colors and the monuments were in full glory, and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway is just unmatched. Then, as I got deeper into Northern Virginia, there were more forests and hills to explore.

My check engine light in the Fusion came on again, because whatever they did to it at Ford to turn the light off before doesn’t work now. It’s throwing the same error it was before, that the inner fuel door isn’t sealing properly. I’m going to take it back on Monday or Tuesday if the fix I found on YouTube doesn’t work. It didn’t before, but I’ll try it again. You spray WD-40 on the fuel door and push a funnel through it until it reseals. If it’s a permanent problem, it might be expensive to fix, but I don’t think it’s OH MY GOD. Luckily, I have enough money not to sweat it. I’m trying to get my car completely stable before winter. Nothing is worse than when the car won’t start and you didn’t bring a jacket because “I don’t have to get out of the car.”

Mostly I want the light off because it sends my blood pressure into a tizzy, even though I know that nothing is going to happen. The inner fuel door in the gas tank not resealing might make me lose gas, but I’m not going to be stranded on the freeway.

And hey, Tiina likes to drive, too, so I know she would have bailed me out even if I broke down close to home.

Oh, man. I still can’t stop thinking about the brilliant fall leaves I saw, because they were just as beautiful as New York. The reds, in particular, stood out to me because I was wearing blue blocker sunglasses. I went past all my favorite places, from Alexandria to Waffle House.

I almost pulled over, but Tiina lives about 20-30 miles past it, so it wasn’t worth it to eat when I wanted to see if Tiina was hungry first.

We ended up having pulled pork sandwiches with cole slaw, and a delicious herbal tea that’s supposed to bring down your stress level. Everything about today brought down my stress level. There were animals, a huge yard, and just a vibe around the house that makes you relax.

It felt so easygoing to sit and chat with friends.

Then, I decided to come back to Baltimore and the traffic was horrible. On a Saturday. I shouldn’t be surprised. There were wrecks and construction the whole way. But again, my attention was taken up by the scenery. I also got to see the monuments in bright light and just at sunset. That’s worth coming to DC all by itself.

I just felt so free, and so at home because I think of Virginia that way. I lived there in my early 20s and it changed my life. Thus the drive to come back here in my late 30s…. “here” being the general vicinity of DC and Baltimore. I am tied to the land in a spectacular way because DC and Baltimore are both characters in this blog.

If Kathleen and I had been smart, we would have bought a house back then. Even if we’d had to sell it, we would have made money on the deal. Real estate in this area doesn’t go any way but up.

Tiina sent me pictures after she’d hung her outdoor chandeliers, and it was marvelous. I can’t wait to go back, and I’m so glad to know I’m invited.

Rojo Cielo es Mi Cielo, Tambien

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Last night, Zac took me to my favorite Mexican restaurant in the area because I had to show it off (he’s from Arizona and we’re seemingly alone in this city in terms of “our food.” Texas and Arizona are Mexican influenced to a very heavy degree, and DC is, shall we say……. Not.

I like Salvadoran food. I like Nicaraguan food, etc. But there’s no nostalgia in banana leaf tamales for either of us. It’s not that it’s inferior, it’s that it’s not home. I have learned that the best way to eat in the city is to talk to other cooks, and ignore the white guys (for the most part). It’s not because white people don’t know Mexican food……. Around here.

I have very, very high standards because I will take a quick aside to tell the story of how I met Pati Jinich.

My father is a huge Pati Jinich fan. Huge. I didn’t even know who she was. My dad just bought us tickets to go and see her do a cooking demonstration at the Mexican Embassy (my God DC makes normal things sound amazing). I am always excited to go hear a chef talk. I did not know who I was meeting in terms of PBS fame. She is to him who Vivian Howard is to me, although my dad is definitely on the Vivian train as well.

So, my stepmother noticed my dad’s fascination with Pati and started calling her “his girlfriend.” So, when he called to tell me he wasn’t coming, I said, “careful, Dad. I’m going to steal your girlfriend.” I told her this story.

That’s how we roll. Us cooks.

At the end of the day, it wasn’t a cooking demonstration. It was like flipping shit to every chef I’ve ever had. So, she talked to me longer than she talked to anyone else and was the only one who she said, “let’s take a selfie together.” She didn’t tell me she was going to kiss me, and you can see it on my face. It’s one of the most beautiful shots I’ve ever had in my life and it was taken by a total stranger.

Which is why I will tell you about the next great chef I met, Rachel Bindel, and then I’ll post a worse one. It’s not how I would have wanted it to turn out in terms of myself, but it is on brand. I feel shell-shocked at meeting Someone. A capital S because getting back into the rhythm of speaking “kitchen” burns in my soul. I am fluent in food, it’s what I love, and I just don’t have it together physically enough to really do the job well. As my last chef told me, “you have the heart of a chef.” It took me a very, very long time to accept that I couldn’t hack it physically because I was so determined to run my own kitchen at some point. Then, at some point, it was like “fuck it. You have CP. You can’t get better by working harder.” I was working 12 and 14 hour days multiple days of the week trying to get my performance consistent. If there was an award at restaurants for perfect attendance, I got it in DC.

So, it means a lot when chefs talk to me, because I was married to a chef for a long time and rode her coattails into the business, but stayed with it on my own. I miss cooking with her, personally and professionally. She remains to this day my favorite coworkers ever. Like, I definitely wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with her, but I would be absolutely fucked not to have her on my staff.

In food, you speak with your eyes because you don’t have time for communication except for “heard,” “behind you,” “coming in hot,” “around the corner,” and my particular weakness at calling back because math, “how many we got all day?” “All day” means counting up every instance of every entree on the board. If I’d become a chef, I would have let the sous handle all that (just the math part). I am not quick enough and I know it. Being a creative with autism/ADHD affects me differently as well, because my autistic side doesn’t multitask and my ADHD side thrives on chaos. It wasn’t a good fit for me, but it is my idea of heaven.

If heaven exists and you arrive at the Pearly Gates, what would you like to hear God say?

“Bourdain says you’re on dish.”

So, when I met Rachel Bindel, new chef at Cielo Rojo (the former chef has taken on a second restaurant, so she is chef de cuisine by a hair’s breadth), I absolutely fell apart inside.

I asked her where she went to culinary school and she said simply, “Hyde Park,” and then she forgot who she was talking to. My jaw was on the floor at “heytch.” She went to CIA.

The first thing I asked her was “have you been to the Bourdain and Ripert wing?” I thought, “you better get this woman’s phone number rightthefucknow.” If you’re in The Six, you’ll know why it’s important. We are now entering a new phase of research for my novel, which is a clue, but of course you know that if I write it, it’s going to have something to do with CIA.

So, anyway, she’s a lot younger than me and just tapped my phone and gave me all her details. For as excited as I was to meet her, she looked as excited to meet me…. After I started talking. I hesitate to ask if I can meet the chef, and I don’t know why, because I always put them at ease immediately by being inside the wire. It’s different going to a table full of lay people. You absolutely have NO FUCKING CLUE what to say.

In my case, sometimes this works beautifully. In some cases, it does not. Self select as to which applies to you, and “you’re welcome” or “I’m so, so sorry” as applicable.

So, I hope I’ve made a new friend because both our heavens, at this moment, are red.

Oh, and Zac was there, too. 😉

We just had the funniest conversation where I said, “it’s okay that I’m writing about this, right? That we did this?” He said, “sure, and I appreciate that you asked. I said, “but you don’t care that I mention you, right?” (Insecure after a year and two months…. Eyeroll.) He said, “of course I don’t care if you *mention* me. I said, “ohhhh, you’ll barely rate as more than a mention in this one, too.” We weren’t in the same room, but I hope his response would have been flipping me the bird.

He knows how I feel about him, that he’s the most stand up, stable guy I know and I am blessed beyond all measure in the amount of attention he pays to details. He remembers things I don’t, and it just adds to our institutional memory. I like that we’re creating memories together so that I have him to write *about.* I’m glad to write about anything and everything, but I often write the best about the people I love because I’m so moved by them. Good writing doesn’t come from shallow emotions, and neither do good jokes.

If you’ve been following me for a long time, you know I needed to meet Rachel like I needed air, because I needed to replace some bad memories with good ones. The like cook who sexually harassed me also went to CIA, and I needed to replace a bad CIA memory with a good one to really move on and forget.

Now, I can say I know people who have been to both CIAs.

Zac doesn’t just get a mention. Last night was magic that he created himself.

So, just once, you get to see the wizard.

A Whole Lot of Probably

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know what to do except get my room ready to have pictures taken for Zillow. I overheard a conversation that my landlords are selling the house. They didn’t deny it, just said they were getting it appraised. Therefore, I know that pictures are going to be taken, just not how all this will turn out. I’m not going to sit here and wait until the very last moment. I also know that they think there will be a lot of interest in the house, so they say they’re waffling, but I’m not so sure that’s true. I’m looking around for a place, and it doesn’t matter where as long as I’m close to a train station. I might stay in Maryland, or I might move out to Virginia. It really depends on my tax and health care status.

The thing about moving to Virginia is that there’s too much space. It takes longer to get everywhere. However, there are some pluses. One of them would be being closer to Zac. We wouldn’t get to see each other any more often than we do now, I don’t think, but it would be nice if I could cut that commute down…….. but then I think, “you write on the train.” So, there goes my need to look for a house in Virginia except for some very specific laws I don’t like in Maryland. But, they’re not so important to me that it’s worth gaining a shittier health care system. I have work to do in terms of where I go next, but I do think it’s time for a change. And yet I don’t. I’m miserable thinking of leaving after just starting my 10th year here.

I’d like to move into another group house, because I like having a front and back yard, plus a big kitchen, all that. I don’t want to go back to a white box alone every night. It doesn’t have to be the right fit at first. I will find the right fit. I just lucked out when I called these landlords first. It’s not coming at exactly an opportune time for me because it never would. This is a huge deal, a huge life transition.

I called Hayat from Houston pretty much the day after Dana hit me. It sped up my timeline quite a bit, honestly. I figured I could live anywhere for a month, so just stick it out and get the lay of the land. I joke now that if Hayat hadn’t picked me up from the Metro nine years ago, I’d still be there.

But now Hayat is thinking about retiring, and everything looks different. As it’s supposed to do….. nothing is certain except moving on.

What I do know is that I will not be taking off for another city unless it’s within the DMV. I even thought about Baltimore for a hot second, because I love it there. However, I know it’s so much easier to see my sister without having to get the MARC train involved. It would also be nice to stay near downtown Silver Spring, because I love the way it’s so walkable. I feel the same way about Alexandria, though, so maybe I’ll check over in my old neighborhood and see what’s available. My old neighborhood is only one Metro stop up from Zac’s, and the buses in Alexandria are just as good as the ones in Silver Spring.

I get weird vibes about my old neighborhood, though, so we’ll see. It just depends. As of right now, everything is coming together in terms of Lindsay, Matt, Bryn, and Dave all being here at the time I’m supposed to move and I have like three boxes of stuff (kidding, but not by much).

The only reason I don’t have much is that I switched to a Kindle.

I know that when one door closes, another opens. I just want to start looking for the right handle.

This is Going to Take a While

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Name an attraction or town close to home that you still haven’t got around to visiting.

DC metro is much, much smaller than Houston. I cannot express this enough. That’s because even though there’s maybe half the space of the city from whence I came, if you don’t live in The District, you forget it’s there.

In other cities, where I live would not be a suburb. I live 11 miles from The White House, northwest of The District in a suburb called “Silver Spring,” In another city, a neighborhood. The District and The Potomac define the geographic lines of something that doesn’t exist and yet very much does. One of the first things you learn when you move to DC is that people who live in The District are territorial, because they have to be. If you don’t live in the The District, you forget it’s there…….. The reason it’s hard that they’re territorial because they’re unseen is that Marylanders and Virginians can’t vote to do anything to help them. It has very much been an offense to tell someone I’m from DC if they live in The District and I have lived in Maryland and Virginia, Therefore, to a local, I tell people my “suburb,” but on my blog I say “DC” because that’s the city people know.

For instance, I actually did live in Houston, but for some of the time I lived in Sugar Land, an actual suburb. International audiences shouldn’t have to care, but in person I’m more specific. No one from Houston would care if I wasn’t specific and said “Sugar Land,” but people in DC are particular about it. They are a tribe of their own, and you have to fit in. It’s a weird setup.

Most of the population doesn’t live there, and the income disparity is enormous. Gentrification is everywhere, and the heart of the city is being destroyed because our history is African American and again, gentrification. Plus, DC only has a city council and The Senate to govern them. DC residents’ needs shouldn’t have to depend on the Senate, because they get ignored by pork barreling something unacceptable into a bill on a different topic that also contains something for DC residents. It is a whole other world to Virginians.

I think for Marylanders a little less so geographically, but more so politically because being governed by a state looks so different. The Potomac makes DC seem very far away from Virginia, yet Portland, Oregon looks the same- there’s just not the same geographical feel because you’ve changed the name from a district to a state once you’ve crossed the river.

Because DC’s history is African American, historically Virginia was where the white people lived and 5:00 pm became known as “white flight,” and still is in some circles because the federal government is overwhelmingly white. Very, very few people who work in Washington want to have The District as an address. The only person I can think of is Barack Obama (Kalorama Park).

It’s like other government employees found something about DC that they just didn’t like, and couldn’t put their finger on it……… more recently. Historically, it’s always been very clear why white people don’t live in The District. The government employees who bought in Georgetown should have bought up more neighborhoods and made it affordable and invulnerable to creep because we need cheap housing for people on those salaries. We could have insulated it from the beginning, but it’s too late now. What is happening is that the few white people who lived here got rich and then it took about 30 years for gentrification to happen in other neighborhoods, and now it’s insane. Crack houses will still sell for way more than they’re worth because of the land.

In addition to Barack Obama, I also love that having Kamala Harris here feels like having her “home,” because she went to Howard. She thinks of it as one of her hometowns as well, so that love is returned.

Speaking of Howard, that reminds me of a thing I haven’t done yet in DC that I keep putting off. I’ve been to the African American History Museum, but not recently. Chadwick Boseman, also a Howard grad, has his original Black Panther costume there and I haven’t been to see it. I know it will be emotional because so far, Chadwick has been my favorite superhero in both the real and Marvel universes.

I do try to get to museums often, but don’t have the spoons. My favorite is The National Portrait Gallery, followed by Air & Space. Since my sister and I are planning a “staycation” over Galentine’s Day (must remind her we need to go for waffles), we are going there soon. I joked that I would be surprised if she did not bring at least $400 just for space ice cream (it’s been her favorite since childhood). I can’t remember if Lindsay has ever been to A&S on her own, but I know she wasn’t on my trip. She was a toddler and was being shuttled between my grandmothers at the time. 😉

I told her to think of some things she’d never done but wanted to in DC, and she definitely wants to go to the Zoo. I don’t know how many animals we’ll see in February, but I’m down. It’s a great park and I love walking through it when it’s not precipitating. Even in the cold, it’s wonderful because if you’re wearing layers, it’s a workout and you’ll generate enough heat to keep yourself warm.

I also haven’t done Mt. Vernon since I was eight, but I don’t know how much time Lindsay’s got. It takes a while, but it’s one of my favorite tours. I’m not sure Lindsay has been to Ford’s Theater and the house where they brought Lincoln after he was shot. The memory of seeing that gun does me in to this day…. as well as the fact that the blood stains are preserved on the pillow. I went to Ford’s Theater when I was eight, too, and it’s a core memory. So, in a lot of ways I feel like the attractions I’d want to see are around here, just not in DC. For instance, I’ve never gone to the Maryland coast. I’ve been to Annapolis, but that’s on the Chesapeake Bay and a different experience from Ocean City.

I also want to go to Great Falls, Virginia, because I hear there is hiking equivalent to the Columbia River Gorge. I need to walk with Zac and Oliver, who is a dog, before i make that commitment.

If you love being outdoors, this area really is for you. So much great hiking, biking, kayaking, sailing, waterskiing, and actual skiing within a few hours’ road trip. I love the idea of being a biker and no idea what to do with it once I get somewhere. However, I have found that I do love sailing. Lindsay and I have been sailing on the Chesapeake, and I’ve been in Galveston and Corpus as well (not sure about her). The difference between moving here and moving to Oregon is the weather. Having more sun in my life really does make a difference, but there are no less outdoor things to enjoy and it doesn’t irritate my depression.

DC was just a great choice all around, because everything I’ve ever wanted has been here the whole time. I’ve known it since childhood. It’s just that now, the “Local” section of The Post means more…… I mean, after Shane Harris at National Security. Let’s not get stupid.

Let’s All Say it Together- The International Spy Museum

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

What is your favorite place to go in your city?

If you’ve read me even twice, you probably know I love intelligence. I believe wholeheartedly that I could have been a spy based on my preacher’s kid upbringing (really, really not much different growing/maintaining a congregation and recruiting/handling assets), genetics (great uncle was C/DIA), and the fact that I’ve “done” news like cocaine since I was eight.

There is a direct correlation.

When I was eight years old, I came to Washington for the first time. It was love at first sight. A miracle dropped in my lap that the first offer Kathleen got out of school was from ExxonMobil, because we got to choose whether we lived in Houston or DC. Moving became a monotropic thought process in which I envisioned my life playing out much differently….. and it did. Absolutely none of the plans I made for myself materialized, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have a hell of a good time making them.

If you’re that kid, the one that grows up in a small town and travels so that they see how much bigger the world really is than 40 square miles, you become a “type.” By 10 I had been to Mexico, the UK, and The Bahamas. I noticed the highs and the lows, the looming cathedrals and the neighborhoods made with tin. Global issues become important early. News becomes important early. Politics become important early. You begin to see that working for the government might be a positive thing because instead of reading the news, you are helping create it.

Kids like me end up at State or at the Washington Post. Rarely do we want to be the story. We want to shape it, especially for writers who process “verbally” in stream-of-consciousness spaghetti code. Writing about my life in DC is learning how to say “Hello, World” in every language.

(Sometimes when I write, I imagine people’s faces as they’re reading and now I’m smiling to myself knowing my programmer friends. Just for them, that line should be “every language……….. except JavaScript. Fuck JavaScript.)

My autism and ADHD are why my plans haven’t come to fruition, and my bipolar disorder threw my first choice out the window. So, right now, I am trying to concentrate my energy where I feel it can manifest. I am a better writer than I am anything else, and I know that I’m not the best. What I do know is that by writing every single day, there’s no way to get worse. I am sure that this brings hope to many, many people. Living in DC is where I feel the most alive, because I’m tapped into The Source. The United States is a living, breathing entity, and I am deep within the carotid artery (or the vena cava, depending on administration).

When I go to The Spy Museum, it’s not about seeing the exhibits. I’ve done it 10 times, they don’t change it that much. I hardly ever go during the day anymore, because it’s more fun at night. After the museum closes, all the Bond mannequins…. kidding…. after the museum closes, that’s when they do book talks and record SpyCast, how I met Jonna Mendez and Tracy Walder.

Jonna is one of my writing heroes, because she writes about the stuff I like in the way I like to hear it. She’s got a very concise, no bullshit tone and the wit of someone like David Halberstam or Rachel Maddow, who have also written a wealth of political non-fiction thrillers. I should tell Jonna that if she sees an uptick in sales the next few days, merry Christmas. The post I talked about yesterday for reddit re: Spy Dust and Moscow Rules has had 471 upvotes in 23 hours. I hope I sold her a thousand copies, and I’m not even going to tell her about it because “Secret Santa” is a thing. Book sales are the best gift I could have picked.

A woman said her dad wouldn’t read a book about intelligence if it was written by a woman, and I think that if Jonna can’t convince him, he’s a misogynistic lost cause……. being Chief of Disguise at CIA isn’t impressive or anything (my eyes are rolling out of my head). I like Spy Dust better in terms of being able to pick out Tony’s voice from hers, but The Moscow Rules is my favorite of them all….. and I thought Argo was hard to beat. The book was made in reaction to the film, and it was still better.

I have a different relationship with/to Tracy than I do with/to Jonna because Tracy is so much younger, and in fact, is a bit younger than me (I think). Do you ever have a moment where someone says something and your heart just walks out of your body in empathy? I know it happens to people with their families, but Tracy was a complete stranger to me when she told the audience that she was born with hypotonia. I had never met another person who’d been born with it, she’d never met anyone outside her family. It was not just that kind of moment for me. The emotions we felt at seeing each other mattered. It is one of, if not the most intimate moment of my life. I wasn’t proposing or having a baby, and yet it was still that big because the chance of us connecting was so small, our affliction so rare. It’s one of the few times in a relatively unfamiliar situation in which I’ve been able to breathe that deeply.

However, there is a reason I chose Jonna over Tracy with the reddit comment. That dude is already predisposed to disliking female intelligence writers, so handing him a book with a sorority sister protagonist didn’t seem like the wisest choice. You get Jonna until you can handle pink coffee mugs without being an asshole about it. But make no mistake, he definitely needs to read it. There’s more dirt on scumbags like him inside FBI who don’t trust women in intelligence. To be clear, Tracy did not have problems at CIA. She had problems with FBI. Tracy has a problem with FBI, so they have a problem with me. It’s just that simple.

I am sure that Tracy appreciates the support in which I do legit nothing but talk shit about the FBI on my web site……… but hey, she has a great autobiography called The Unexpected Spy. It’s a thrill ride through her life having worked at both agencies, and thrilling to find out that CIA is actually as forward-thinking as I thought it was. Tracy also made an interesting style choice. When you write a book involving CIA (and I’m not sure if it applies to me, but it definitely applies to employees), it has to go through a publications review board. When Tracy got her manuscript back from the PRB, there were parts that were blacked out….. and she just left them in and published as is. Tracy’s is the one book I don’t have on my Kindle, and the one hardback I’m grateful to own, because the words come across the same on e-paper with Jonna and Tony, but the feel of the paper with its saturating amount of black ink looks official.

And in fact, I liked it so much that she signed my book after the lecture and as she was writing the inscription, I asked her if she would black out a word. Tracy understood the assignment. 😉 She blacks out one word, and you can still see what it is, so she asks around and finds a black Sharpie. She hands it back and it says:

To Leslie-

Go [redacted] the world.

Then she says, “there. Now no one knows what I told you to do to the world.”

We’ve (sort of) kept in touch- I should reach out and see what she’s up to these days. Last I heard she was in Dallas (went to SMU just like my dad, went back to teach at Hockaday). If she ever comes to DC, first coffee’s on me.

Here’s to hoping we can [redacted] the world together……..

because the Spy Museum is my favorite place in my city.

I am including the link to both book talks, and I’m in them at the Q&A. In the Walder video, I’m wearing my CIA baseball cap. In the Mendez video, I am “Sir Not Appearing in This Film,” because the video cuts off right when Jonna stops speaking.

I’m Not Sure I Don’t Pay Attention to All of Them

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What details of your life could you pay more attention to?

By writing to and for myself, I pay attention to my life in minute detail. It is literally my job if I want to sell books later. Brene Brown has nothing on me, I swear to Christ. I am betting that we process much the same way in terms of throwing everything out on the table and seeing what it looks like. I don’t know if she’s a natural INFJ, but I do know she’s a professor in a profession to which INFJs naturally gravitate, so even if my letters aren’t hers, we’d be simpatico. I know that, because we’ve spent some time together informally.

Editor’s Note: If I sound like an ass because I keep mentioning it, it’s not because I’m trying to name drop. The answer is twofold. My audience is growing every day. Every single day. That means if you read every day, you’re in the know. Other people aren’t. Secondly, the more times I say Brene Brown, the higher I’ll be in Google rankings for searching her because it has indexed how many times I’ve said it and how many people have clicked on my link because of it. It’s not personal. It’s trying to use her platform to introduce myself to new readers, and not only is a good way to find my target audience, I know for a fact that this is not something she’d care about in the slightest.

I just taught her how to use Microsoft Word, but now that it’s so essential I know I did ACTUALLY help her in her career.

She taught me that it’s okay to throw emotional bombs on the table and look at them, because if you don’t stay silent, there’s a 50/50 chance that you’ll resolve the conflict. If you keep silent about your needs, those odds fade to zero either way.

The hardest part is developing the strength to say what you need out loud, because I call them emotional bombs for a reason. If you express a need, people who have low self-esteem will see it as an attack. You’re screwed either way, because either that person’s going to get mad at you and walk away, or they won’t. If you are in any way an anxious person, you’ll put off that conversation for eons. You don’t want to chance it. If you say you need something and they get angry, it might lead to the relationship ending. You have to learn to care nothing about that. This is because stating your needs clearly and walking away when they’re not being met is your only choice. People don’t change because they’re not willing to do the work. You are mostly the age you got married, because that’s when you set up your new family patterns and they repeat. In a lot of ways, people divorce to grow up….. particularly couples who get married at 20 and stay together until they’re 40.

This is why I’m not married and just dating. I do not want to stagnate. If it happens that I find a partner, I still want someone that wants their own space, even if we live together. I want to normalize it not being weird if I’m holed up in my office and they’re not holed up with me. I’m dating one of the biggest extroverts I’ve ever met, and I love it because I can pay complete attention to my own life while he’s off doing his thing, because he knows that partying is his jam and not mine and that’s perfectly okay. I don’t need him as a possession.

Supergrover, Cora, and Bryn are the one I treat like possessions in terms of being a seriously pissed off mama bear. Come after my girls and I will end you, if combat is limited a really mean letter.

I write differently when I want to work things out, I will only say that.

Healing an anxious attachment style is built on learning to believe someone the first time. It is also learning to believe when they’re lying to themselves. Learning to tell when actions and words don’t match, correcting the story that you’re telling yourself. If someone is unwilling to help you correct that story, they should be uninvited to participate. You also can’t hold anything over their heads. You just have to wait it out. Life is long.

If you are thinking of someone else’s needs all the time, you are doing immense harm to yourself if you have low self esteem . You’re making decisions based on your own echo chamber and trying to read someone else’s mind. Those two things will put you in an asylum if you let them.

The hardest part about throwing an emotional bomb over your shoulder is that you have to walk away and see if they come back.

You have to pick yourself up out of rejection sensitivity dysphoria to be able to even trust that they will. So you wait. And you get more unhappy. By the time you do express needs, you’re mad as a wet cat backed into a corner claws extended.

Your conversations will be a mix of “well, that probably sounded better in my head” and “well, that escalated quickly.”

I realized that I had to stop interacting with Supergrover because it was killing me. She was the person that when she talked, my self esteem went up and down. It wasn’t the message, it was the medium. She has lived inside me for 10 years. Her signal is the purest, because her voice is the only one that is always in my echo chamber because our e-mails are all mixed together in my head. Who knows who said what after a while? It’s one story. It just got to where we were alternating between tennis and fencing. We take turns having the high ground, but I can be angry and still think “as you wish” all day. (I like The Princess Bride, despite the fact that it has kissing in it.) That’s because it’s not her worth going up and down.

I threw that bomb knowing she was emotionally incapable according to past behavior, but she can do something about the present.

One of the things that will stick with me is that she said she could do nothing about the past. But she could do something about the present. She didn’t realize that I was saying it as well, in heels and backwards.

It’s the reason we complete each other when everything is going well. Her IQ is higher than mine. My EQ is the highest of anyone I’ve ever met considering how much people tell me how frightening and intense I am.

Dave Chappelle (incidentally also from Silver Spring) once wrote a skit for Chappelle Show called “The Ni**er Family.” It was absolutely hysterical and I laughed until I cried. But Dave said it was a mistake, and the why stopped me in my tracks.

He said:

Everyone was just cracking up in the audience….. but then I noticed this one guy. And the way he laughed, I knew he was not laughing in the way I intended.

It changed his entire career because he left the show and really did the homework on himself. We do not agree on trans issues and never will, but I’m not going to take away from his success or be less proud that he rose from the ash of what he burned down. But the only reason he could do that is that he, Jesus, and I all know the same thing.

The resurrection didn’t happen on the cross.

Jesus went into the garden of Gethsemene the same way The War Doctor wrestled with The Moment on Doctor Who, the bomb that developed a consciousness you had to argue with to get it to go off. There are no records of his prayers there, but here’s what Dave, Jesus, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt: Jesus did not forgive everyone else for their indiscretions without first forgiving himself.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I can’t believe I’ve held out on you (without realizing it). I didn’t remember the story I was going to tell here until Zac picked me up from the Metro, because he’s not an intelligence officer, but he does work in an intelligence agency that gathers data from the other 17-30ish (depending on who’s counting). His office is at Ft. Belvoir, which is what made the story come up in the first place.

I was sitting next to a random dude on Southwest coming back to DC a couple weeks ago. I asked him if he was coming or going. He said he lived in Fredericksburg and worked at Ft. Belvior. I wait a second and say, “so what kind of intelligence operations are you doing right now?” The look on his face was simply priceless. Just “how in the hell did you know that?” We laughed together and he said “I’m not a spy. I’m their ride.” He was an airplane mechanic. Just so fascinating because he talked me through takeoff and landing as it was happening. I’m not a nervous flyer at all. This is because I automatically assume that if the plane is going to go down, there is nothing that I can do about it. I don’t have to sit there and worry because no one is going to ask me to help out.

Even the airplane mechanic next to me can’t help if the plane is currently in the air.

Up on the airplane...... nearer my God to Thee.
I start making a deal,
Inspired by gravity.

He did that DC thing where people complain about the traffic and I said I preferred public transit because I can zone out and do something else, not advisable in a car. 😛 The thing that I really like about this area is that even if you live in the suburbs, you can use public transit to get anywhere. The Virginia Rail Express connects to the Metro, and there’s a similar line for southern Maryland called the MARC (transfer is available on lower level). It runs between Union Station and most of Baltimore. Having grown up in Houston, this is the most amazing thing ever. It’s cool to own a car, but it’s even better when you can get one because you want it and not because there’s no other option.

I also think “why drive? Let someone else do it.” I’m not talking about mooching rides off friends. I’m talking about Uber and Lyft, which I generally use to get to the train station and not my final destination. 😛

Other days, I walk. It’s about two and a half miles from my house to downtown Silver Spring, which is just long enough to feel like I’ve worked out and thus accomplished something.

I also love that I live in MD and Zac lives in VA, because the vibes at our houses are so incredibly different. I think that’s because Maryland is so small and Virginia is so large. We in Maryland do not spread.

Taking public transit is kind of the point for me. I am introverted to the point of insanity, and trying to branch out. Yesterday, I met a woman named Angel. We’ve been texting for about the last hour. She also has the cutest kids on the planet. Meeting new people is exciting, because it’s the beginning of a story. Right now the story we’re working on is hers. She asked me if we could collaborate right off the bat, and I told her I’d never been in a writer’s room vs. alone and why not? Also nice to have a friend in Brookland, which isn’t too far from me. Red line represent.

Holla.

Zac and I shot the shit and drank way too much and I hate being hungover, so this morning was a wash. I didn’t feel so hot, but was touched that I woke up next to a cup of coffee and a sippy cup of water (does he know me or what?). The train home was the worst part, but it wasn’t the train’s fault. Feeling bad physically didn’t do anything for me mentally, and I was tearing up thinking about my writing. What I’ve put out into the world lately have been the most vulnerable pieces of me that have existed so far. It’s little fragments of lines that stick with me, like “ironically the score is love when we’re the most furious.”

I think I was at the airport when that one passed by. Speaking of which, I think the Metro stop for the airport is in the wrong place, because I like the old building better. 😛

Also, it’s been years and years and years. Still never heard a local call it by its name. I won’t even say it during Pride month. The person it’s named after did more to fuck up my future than anyone could have guessed, because that was the beginning of every message about queer people on TV being that we were going to die and we deserved it.

It will always be National. Full stop.

……when I’m up on the airrrrrrppppplaneeeeeee……..

A Major Key

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Sandra Cisneros just floored me while listening to “On Being with Krista Tippett.” She said that the Sufis say life keeps breaking your heart over and over until it *stays* open. Words to live by, because heartbreak is inevitable in a multitude of ways, and to me, this saying gives it a purpose. It is a deep, lifelong learning.

It came up in my Facebook memories this morning that Dana and I broke up five years ago today, and so the quote was especially apt in that light…. I feel that heartbreak was so great, it is the one that keeps me open to the world. No one ever expects to start a marriage preparing for its end, but I felt especially blindsided by all the things I couldn’t (or didn’t want to) see. There were many things I took seriously, and things I didn’t take seriously enough. In retrospect, knowing which was which is still a mystery. I just know they exist and don’t feel the need to talk it out with her, like some sort of post-mortem closure. I don’t care to know how she feels. It is not a matter of feeling heartless, just done.

And in fact, I care even less about how our marriage came apart than I do about our friendship, which preceded marriage by almost four years. Though it’s not like we talked daily when I first moved to DC, we did talk a few times and laughed a lot. But there must have been too much pain roiling underneath to keep it up, and that is the beginning and the end of it to me. I don’t have need to cause her more pain just because of something I wanted. Her feelings do matter in that respect. But it was extraordinarily difficult to go from talking from the moment we woke to the moment we went to sleep to absolutely no communication, ever. I didn’t insist on it, but I respected her wishes. It was a large factor in my moving to DC, because I am not the best at emotional boundaries. I figured that with half a country in between us, it would be so much easier to find new people to fill the void, and I was right.

I met a swath of people who had no connection to me as a married person, didn’t think of me as “DanaandLeslie,” and for that I can be grateful. Friends who had no connection to my history at all allowed me the freedom to discover who I was on my own again. I was alone, but was not then and never have been lonely. I decided to move into a house with landlords on site and three other roommates so that I would not come home to an empty apartment every night. I figured that with my mental illnesses, living alone with no one to drag me out of my shell would be a very bad thing. The last time I lived in a one bedroom, even then I sort of had a “roommate,” this loud, brash best friend who never really wanted to go home because her own house was empty….. and I grew to love her company more and more every day.

Eventually, there were three of us, all single and looking for family. I don’t know why my apartment became the hang, but it did, and I was grateful. I knew ahead of time that in DC, I didn’t have the built-in connection of friends of friends and church and all that, which is why I opted for a group house. It would take at least a few months to reconnect with the friends I’d made here before, and to find a new church because with public transportation, my old church was too far away to really get involved on any kind of deep level (I was actually involved with two of them back then- Westminster Presbyterian in SE DC and Fairlington UMC in Alexandria, VA).

I realized I could make it on Sunday mornings easily, but not choir, and choir is far and above the biggest reason I love going to church. I feel that I am a much better soprano when I can feel the other moving parts under me, and even though I’ve done solo work (even well), it’s not my favorite (my favorite is actually singing in a quartet so I can hear myself think……..).

It was also important to me that I be free of any connections to Kathleen, my first wife, as well. I bear no ill will toward her, either- we never should have gotten married in the first place, but I was filled with so much hope as an early 20-something that it didn’t register that even though she was bisexual, her preference wasn’t women….. or at the very least, it wasn’t me…. and we’d attended both of those churches together. stone_labyrinthOne of my favorite memories of that time in my life was helping to put in the stone floor labyrinth, because, of course, you can still see my handiwork…. but you better get there fast because they’re about to build a new building. 😛

I also went to Foundry United Methodist for one Sunday just to check it out, but Fairlington was so much closer to my house and just as liberal (one of the first Open & Affirming congregations in Virginia).

Now, I don’t go to church at all (but will someday…. just be patient and stay tuned…), but do go to Foundry on Thursdays for a mental illness support group when I can feel confident about getting out of the house when I don’t specifically have to do so……

It also took me a while to get out from under the burden of people thinking I moved here specifically to be closer to Argo, because that was never the case…… just a persistent rumor that affected me greatly because it was never true. What was true is that I could have moved in next door to her and she still never would have seen me, because I tend to hole up, anyway. As I have often said, I mostly sit at my computer or tablet with my headphones blaring, so a bear ripping out the side of my house wouldn’t even have registered unless I was facing that direction.

Even though I thought of DC and Alexandria as my “home towns,” I still didn’t want to take the chance of feeding that rumor even more than it already had been, so I chose Maryland. It turned out to be the best decision, anyway, because my cousin Nathan (who is a psychiatrist in Alexandria) told me about all the mental health services available in Maryland that Virginia couldn’t even touch….. and even if I was perfectly healthy when I moved here, going through a divorce still would have required talk therapy, especially after a friendship of over a decade and a marriage of seven years and change. So I got hooked up with talk therapy and a psychiatric nurse practitioner that really worked with me instead of at me, which I require because I know enough about medicine that I abhor being patronized. Additionally, I have suffered enough that not only do I know the drugs that do work, I’ve been through the list of everything that doesn’t.

There are two instances where my nurse practitioner really shone. The first is that he wanted to change my SSRI to Prozac, and I shuddered. He asked me what was wrong, and I said that it made me so nauseous that I couldn’t function or eat. The second is that we were talking about ADHD, and he asked if I’d tried Stratera. I told him that it was interesting, that opioid agonists work on me, like Tramodol, but methamphetamine agonists didn’t. That was how our relationship matured quickly, because he raised his eyebrows at the fact that I knew the word “agonist,” and his tone quickly changed to “ok, we’re equals now.”

He really listened to me as I told him that I liked to do short courses of Ritalin or Adderall in order to get my coping mechanisms under control, then stop them until I felt I needed a refresher course, and I liked the lowest dose possible to get the maximum dopamine effects without the awful side effects.

At the time, I didn’t have any weight to lose. I was so sad that I wasn’t eating, anyway. I survived on drinks, because I had a block on eating. Things like Carnation Instant Breakfast, Slim Fast, Ensure, etc. were the basics of my diet until I felt better. I am now up to a healthy weight, but back then I looked like a heroin addict (which, for the record, I was not). I also stopped drinking alcohol almost in its entirety, because I noticed that I felt and slept better when I didn’t, and I really needed sleep to let my body recover from trauma. Divorcing from Dana was traumatic on so many levels, like the fistfight that ended our relationship permanently because I didn’t want to leave the house at all until the bruise under my eye was gone and the phantom pain wasn’t all day, every day.

And it turned out that the phantom pain lasted for months, because I was devastated and that’s how it manifested. It’s gone now- forgiven but not forgotten. But I was so weak in the moment that even a punch to the face didn’t stop me from wanting to get back our relationship at first. It was moving away and really reflecting on what happened that convinced me that while I could accept friendship, I could never accept getting back together, because I couldn’t live in fear that something like it would happen again.

I was not innocent in that fight in terms of emotional escalation, but when Dana broke the physical barrier, I went off like a rat dog with a Napoleon complex…. an apt description because Dana was over a hundred pounds heavier with a fist three times bigger.

And perhaps that is yet another reason I’m so much more willing to talk about Argo now than I am about Dana, because Argo has never hurt me…. I mean, she has, but less than I’ve hurt her and never in a physically threatening way.

I actually just put that together, that I can’t extricate myself from thinking about Dana without going back to that moment in time where my eye was bruised and my heart was broken….. and that with Argo, all I think of is love and laughter. It’s just so much easier to go back to those moments, because even when I try my absolute best to only remember the love and laughter with Dana, I still hang my head in shame.

Although I do hang my head in shame at the relationship with Argo crumbling at my own hand, because even though it was never true that I moved here to be closer to her, it would have been a dream and a half to get to know the real her instead of just the black and white version….. to include her in my family of friends rather than always being on the outside…. my Raggedy Man.

My body memory is so strong for both of those days, my love for both women an intrinsic part of me, just in vastly different capacities. I saw a funny memory on Facebook the other day about having to stop calling Argo my “wine and yoga pants-type girlfriend” because I kept getting ads for wine and yoga pants on my feed. 😛

It was an unfortunate side effect that at the beginning, my wires got crossed and I had a mountain of shit to work through regarding the toxic version of friendship that was presented to me at a very early age, the part where all close friendships initially made my teenage heart go haywire. But to my credit, I worked my way out of that hole, just not as quickly as I would have liked, because first I had to get rid of the toxicity that made me think those things in the first place….. and I did, very successfully. Now I am in great shape when it comes to friendship, being close and vulnerable with people I respect and admire without the emotional baggage of my own teenage “stuff.”

I feel it is apt that “Clearing Iranian Airspace” from the Argo soundtrack just started playing, because I am ending this entry on a major key.

Amen.

The Hours

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

I’ve gotten a lot more hours at work, about which I am incredibly happy. More money never hurt anybody. But at the same time, my life is exhausting. Not to the point of wanting more time off, it’s just a cook’s life that when you get home, everything hurts. I know I’ve said this many times before, but I’m really feeling it today. This is because not only do I ache in my bones and muscles, my arms are still recovering from being burnt to a crisp. Thanks to Dan & Autumn, this will stop somewhat, but it doesn’t help the burns that are already there. Once they start scabbing over, they hurt even more than when they’re fresh, especially the ones that start out as bubbles full of serum. I’m beginning to think I need to buy stock in the company that makes Neosporin.™ The kicker is that all of them are my fault, generally from moving too fast.

I know I have also said this before, but it bears repeating. Working in a pub is different than working in a restaurant. In a pub, there are no waves of seating. We are sometimes hit with 25 tickets at once, and we don’t want to make some people wait 15-30 minutes for their food. As a result, the kitchen is utter chaos, grabbing things from the fryer before they’re cool, etc. It’s the baskets that get me the most. When I’m taking things out of them, invariably my arm will touch the edge, resulting in burns that actually look like thin cuts. The rest of the time, I have no idea. Burns just happen, and I don’t notice them until long after the fact. I suppose that the silver lining is that I don’t have to deal with cuts as well. My knife skills are solid. I haven’t even gotten first blood on either of my chef’s knives, which in kitchen folklore means we are bonded to each other, and I’m not stupid enough to make it happen on purpose. Fingers, even when cut lightly, bleed all over the place.

The other thing about being a cook is that you’re so tired, you tend to sleep right up until the next shift begins, because your muscles need more time to recover after a job that’s so physically demanding. This turns out to be gross negligence in terms of taking care of yourself. I mean, why take a shower every day when you’re just going to get horrifically dirty again an hour afterward? Just please be reassured that in the kitchen, I scrub in like a surgeon multiple times a shift and wear gloves constantly. The only time I really get “all dolled up” is when it’s my day off and I have plans with friends. Yes, it’s disgusting. It’s also real talk. You also have little time for laundry, so I do several weeks’ worth of clean underwear and don’t care if there are stains on my shirts and pants. I’m just going to get more of them… to the point that when I had a tech interview, I had to buy a new pair of pants for the occasion, because every pair of pants I currently owned had food stains that wouldn’t come out in the wash, even the black ones, where the stains aren’t as noticeable. I do wash my clothes, just not as often as they need it…. and as high as my wage is, it’s still not high enough to afford a maid so that all the crap I have to take care of is done once I get home. I also don’t have a partner to share the load, as it were, so everything falls to me. But don’t think I’m not grateful for being single.

I am incredibly introverted, and being single affords me only as much human contact as I want. Though with a partner, there is no need to be “on,” there is still compromise and difficult discussions and a whole lot else I’m just not prepared for in the slightest… maybe not ever, but for sure not right now. I’ve been single for, oh, I don’t know exactly how long, but sufficed it to say it has been multiple years, and I’m okay with that. Sometimes I daydream about the kind of partner I want, and joke that the perfect girlfriend for me would be that since I live in Maryland, she should live in Virginia. That way, in order to get together, we really have to want it. Really.

Another bonus is that because I’m not busy with a girlfriend, I have so much more time for my friends. They’re people I love like sisters and brothers, so it’s important to me to stay in touch and available for whatever they need. That being said, we’re all so busy that life seems to be a series of text messages and DMs on social media. I am positive that this is normal for adults our age, especially for people with children. Alternatively, I am not the type that likes to go out in a major way. I don’t need clubbing excitement. I am happiest sitting on the couch and chatting or watching a movie. I think this is also normal for people my age. We’ve already done all the stupid shit we’re going to do, and have little patience for it. I feel like I’ve done all the stupid shit I want to do, or have done by accident.

If I get invited to do something I would consider “wild,” I just give them a dumb look and say, “I’m 40.” The wildest thing I like to do these days is occasionally have a shift beer after work. The rest of the time, the pub has this Mexican cola that is so good it’s on my chef’s game “Last Meal.” I would much rather have it than anything else.

One of my favorite restaurants, Cava, has started carrying a sugar free version of the same brand, and I am not ashamed to say that I generally drink four in a row, especially since they have the good ice. Diet soda is my last vice. Just give me this one. Nothing helps beat the heat of the kitchen than a soda with ice. The pub doesn’t carry sugar free soda, so I generally drink seltzer water the entire time. You’d think I’d be stuck in the bathroom every thirty minutes, but I stand in front of a gas stove, a 500 degree oven, an open flame grill, and a 350 degree griddle and two fryers. My body is constantly using that moisture. Every once in a while, it is a blessing to be sent to retrieve things from the walk-in refrigerator. It only takes about 20 seconds to cool down, because it’s cold enough to keep ice frozen for hours before it even thinks about melting.

But the very heart of my work is that I do not have any Anthony Bourdain “underbelly of the kitchen world” stories. We are clean and efficient, we all get along well, and for the first time in any restaurant I’ve ever worked, there is no “war” between the waitstaff and the kitchen. If front of house drops something, it’s a quick re-fire with no judgment. In a fast-paced kitchen, everyone messes up at one time or another. “Stuff” happens. We just roll with it. Plus, the waitstaff doesn’t get angry at us if ticket times are slower than normal, because all their customers are drinking and have no concept of time, anyway. We just try as hard as we can not to test it too much.

The only thing that really trips us up is an order with a whole bunch of modifications or substitutions, and that’s in all restaurants. It interrupts the dance we’ve created not to ever be in each other’s way. Not that we won’t do it, of course, but from our perspective unless you have a genuine food allergy, we’ve created the recipes so that everything complements each other. Change that and you change the way the food is supposed to taste. Maybe you don’t, say, like pickled onions, but you’ve never tried it mixed with our perfect aioli. Give it a chance- be surprised. Branch out. You might discover you like something you thought you didn’t before. Additionally, don’t add salt and pepper before you’ve tasted what we’ve created. If you think it needs something afterward, don’t be shy. Make it to your own taste. But at the same time, trust us first. You don’t do this for a living. We do.

My whole life revolves around cooking, and doing it well. Especially since I’ve gotten more hours at work.

Craft

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Last night’s dinner with Pri-Diddy was relaxing and just what I needed. Oh, how we laughed. It was good to get back into the normal swing of things. For instance, I found a really cheap parking garage next to the Metro that’s WAY less expensive than Lyft, and because we were meeting at 5:30, I can’t think of a less desirable place to be than searching for a parking place in Dupont Circle during rush traffic/Happy Hour. It was nice to have someone to “drive” me into the city, and I played games on my phone until I got there. Just for kicks, I looked up the route from Silver Spring to Dupont by car, and in addition to time to find parking, the route at that hour said anywhere from 28 to 58 minutes. This is partly because of traffic, and partly because the speed limit on 16th Ave. is mostly 25.

Going anywhere inside the Beltway during rush hour is a nightmare, because there are no freeway exits where I’m located that would drop me off where I need to be…. and yes, for those who don’t live here, I am talking about THAT 16th Ave… the one that when you arrive at Pennsylvania, you see a large, white house with many dubious occupants.

I don’t want to publish my exact address, but what I will tell you is that I’m a few blocks inside the Beltway between University and Colesville. Getting across the river into Arlington/Alexandria or toward Baltimore is easy.

Driving into the city would take away my sanity without my incredible lists of podcasts and the Bluetooth connected to my phone, so that I can talk to my family unimpeded. I don’t tend to listen to music because I’d rather have my brain engaged. It keeps me from road rage (not that I ever really had it to begin with), because there are often moments in which I like traffic because I want to finish a story. I have lots and lots of driveway moments.

And though I don’t drive it that often, I like being stuck in traffic on 395 between the Pentagon and the city, because it is breathtaking. You see every monument on the way in, and traffic is just an excuse to gawk at that beauty. I also enjoy the Baltimore/Washington and George Washington Parkways, because they are both beautiful- green space everywhere and, on GW, the thrill of passing Langley.

Now, I don’t know the difference between the George H.W. Bush campus and the one in McClean (or perhaps they’re the same thing and the road I’m looking at takes you to McClean, but I do know that on one of my favorite TV shows, Covert Affairs (on Amazon Prime now), Annie Walker works at GHWB, and she drives this little red Volkswagen that reminds me of my own little “spy car,” Eggsy (named after the main character in Kingsmen: The Secret Service… also because she looks like an egg). I think I’ve said this before, but every time I pass the entrance to Langley, I hear Austin Powers’ voice saying, your spy car’s a Yaris?

I don’t have any desire to work there. First of all, they’d never hire me, anyway. There are two main reasons I wouldn’t be able to get in, neither of them bad for a civillian, but not up to snuff when you’re talking about working for the government. I’d tell you what they were, because they’re not secrets of which I’m ashamed, just better saved for an in-person conversation rather than blasting it all over the world.

However, if there’s one thing I know I’d be good at (with the exception of only being able to speak English [and REALLY bad Spanish]), it’s interrogation. For all of my life, I’ve been one of those people you can sit down for a conversation and let the other person get up later not having realized the sheer amount of information I’ve been able to gather.

I know the questions that get people talking, because what do people like to talk about more than anything else?

Themselves.

I can’t see myself in a room with HVTs (High Value Targets) and having to do shit to them to make them talk. I am better at a party or a dinner in which I disappear with one person at a time, creating intimacy that makes people spill. It’s a game I don’t even know I’m running, because I am genuinely curious about people and want to know them, know their stories, their backgrounds, what makes them tick… but you don’t get that information without being willing to be vulnerable about yourself, either.

With my friends, I will spill as much information as they do. We are on equal ground. If I was actually in a position with the FBI or CIA, I’d be poring over alibis to be able to be vulnerable as someone else… spilling their details rather than my own.

But it is a fantasy, because I know where I really belong… outside of all the danger, outside of all the intrigue, outside the Beltway, period… unless my government job was the same thing I’d be doing for a private IT company.

I’m just a geek and a writer. I can live out my fantasies through fiction while my day job is tame and relatively uninteresting.

I’d rather fly under the radar than be a part of it. My great uncle worked for the C and DIA before I was born (or shortly afterward). I would have loved to hear his stories, but he was high enough up that he couldn’t have told me anything, anyway. Now that he’s been dead for 40 years, I might be able to get a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) casefile on him, hoping that his ops are declassified now. It would be great to have snippets for my fiction that echo my real family. But what I think I would get is a few sentences and a lot of black sharpie.

But there is a cost… and that is possibly finding out more shit than I would ever want to know. Would it make me a stronger writer, or wrap me uplike a burrito in fear?

Supposedly, he died in a coup in Africa… but the jury is still out on whether that’s what actually happened, or whether he disappeared off the grid like a Man in Black… putting on the last suit he’d ever wear. In my mind, he could have been Agent F…. he didn’t die, he just went home.

By now, there is probably a star on a wall for him somewhere… another thing that goes through my mind as I’m driving toward Alexandria, because GW Parkway is the shortest path.

Escaping into this fantasy world is one of the things that lifts me out of my grief, and I’ll take anything that will do it. Yes, it’s dark, but at the same time, all-encompassing, like a novel taking place in real time… If I could get away with it, though, I’d want to write a biography, because I am much better at writing in first person than trying to create a fictional world. I’ve proven that to myself over and over. I don’t want to give up on trying to learn to write fiction, but I’m not there yet.

Part of the reason I’ve started so many novels without fleshing them out is that I get stuck quickly with plot holes and transitions. This will change over time as I get more and more experience at it, but right now I am not confident enough in my abilities.

The parts that stick with me are the character analyses, because I can imagine a person, but not the environment where they live. I am trying to read more fiction these days, but the reason I haven’t in the past is that I tend to pick up other writers’ voices quickly, and the fiction I write down sounds like the last writer I just read instead of me.

When I first started with Clever Title Goes Here, my ideas were all my own, but the style echoed Ernie Hsuing, Heather Armstrong, Mrs. Kennedy, and all the other popular blogs I devoured on a daily basis. Clever Title doesn’t exist anymore- it’s a link to the Wayback Machine, where you can look at my old entries as archives. I owned the domain from 2003-2015, and the entries are still there, but the comments aren’t always because the links to them are broken. The only one I lost that really meant a lot to me was from Wil Wheaton. I was talking about a singing audition and feeling amazing about it afterward, saying that it felt like flying. He replied that it was the same for him after an acting audition.

I didn’t have a very thick skin in those days, and after a few comments from my friends, torched the entire thing… an impetuous, grave mistake because there were so few daily bloggers that I became very popular, very quickly… as evidenced by Wil Wheaton knowing my work.

I met Wil at Powell’s Books when he came to read snippets from Just a Geek. I introduced myself as Leslie from Clever Title Goes Here, and he smiled, then wrote in my copy, “To Leslie… Clever Inscription Goes Here. Love, Wil.” I can’t think about what might have happened if I’d kept my blog going from 2003 until now, because getting into the blogging crowd before everyone was doing it was paramount to real success.

In writing fiction, I don’t want to fill someone else’s shoes. I brought my own.

So,for now, the idea of “bringing my own shoes” exists in this space alone. In most cases, I’m doing okay work, with a few outstanding entries. That is mostly because I don’t work on them as craft. It’s a brain dump, unedited, all stream-of-consciousness all the time. Even my article on marriage took about 15 minutes to write, and it is the one thing I’ve done that’s consistently been shared all over the world, because I wrote about something so universal that anyone whose ever been married and read it have had the same comments, boiled down to #me #same.

Sometimes I imagine what I’d be able to do if I really put some thought into all this, but then I think, “nah.” My blog works for me because of everything it isn’t. It’s not for anyone else but me, being able to look back over my past and see with glaring clarity all the flaws and failures I need to fix, as well as the great moments along the way. If I took the time to worry about craft, I’d get stuck in Virgo perfectionism, and I’d never publish anything… Editing gnaws away at my courage until I think “it’s not good enough,” and the thousand or so words that I’ve written get erased with one CTL-A and one backspace.

I just try to tell my truth, which isn’t anyone else’s… something that’s gotten me a lot of kudos and a lot of anger all at the same time, as if I have a problem with someone calling me out on my own bullshit.

I don’t.

People are free to disagree with me all the time, and I appreciate comment threads that do so. This is because I appreciate people who are willing to see all the things I don’t…. the part of the story I don’t know, because it’s not mine… it’s theirs. It’s not my job to tell their stories, and it’s not their job to tell mine. I am responsible for my words, but not their responses… but I do take them in as valid, because all emotions are. It’s a clinical separation, a step back to hear people without internalizing it into the fear of never saying anything ever again… the reason I torched Clever Title to begin with.

What I didn’t know then that I do now is that writing on the Internet is like getting a tattoo on the face. I didn’t know that even if I torched everything on my own server, a cached version like The Wayback Machine even existed. There’s nothing I will ever be able to do that erases past mistakes. The only topic I am not willing to publish is how I’m doing at work. The term “Dooced” is so popular that it was even a question on Jeopardy! For those of you who’ve been reading Heather Armstrong since the beginning, who didn’t love her take on the Asian Database Administrator, et al?

I have to believe, though, that getting fired is what launched her into this higher plane, that the worst thing became the best over time. That being said, I’m brave, but not THAT brave… and I believe that Heather intended to teach all bloggers from her mistakes, and I’ve taken them to heart.

Although this entry from The Bloggess about work is my absolute favorite of all time, bar none. It was written in 2008, and still makes me fall out laughing, because had I been sitting next to her, I wouldn’t have been able to hold it together, either… like looking through the Methodist hymnal as a kid during the service and finding out that one of the composers/lyricists was named P.P. Bliss.

Now, had I been on the committee who put the hymnal together, I would have suggested we just go with Phillip, because I’m betting I’m not the only kid who’s ever had tears running down her face trying not to cackle in church… and then, knowing it was inappropriate to laugh while I was supposed to be paying attention, almost asphyxiating because I couldn’t pull myself back together.

It was absolutely as funny as some of the things Pri-Diddy and I joked about last night… but those are unprintable. 😛