~metaphorically~

I normally bounce in and out of kill mode with my moods, but I don't seem to be bouncing out this fall. I've had my claws out for awhile, and I've been pretty open about it several times. I'm not liking this direction I'm veering into, but Pinky blog is my go-to for my head stuff, so this is me untangling a few feels and looking at them. If you think you can do this with me, fine, but stand back a little in case words slap your eyeballs or something.

It's been really hard coming out and owning who I am in a very public eye, especially after a past rife with scrutiny, but I believe it's important, and it certainly has been good for my personal growth. (My psychologist agrees.) Aspies all over the world are coming out the same way, ducking in and out of public view, gritting their jaws and dealing head on with stuff they were taught to keep hidden all their lives. Since aspies also go through the same kinds of emotional issues everyone else does, what you see on this blog is aspienado working on not scaring the straights, as @bonenado likes to say.

Several people are trying to stay friends with me and I'm not making it easy. I'm sorta sifting a small number of close attachments out of a whole lot of acquaintances, and I think a few people are noticing that and feeling a little upset about it. Trying to win a contest for my affections is very dangerous. I bite. And I relish biting. You will think I'm killing you. I'm not. Just a heads up for those who might feel confused about winding up in my mouth like a rag doll. Please do not fear. Once an aspie owns you, YOU ARE OWNED. If it's any comfort, @bonenado thinks I need to wear a bell. I have described in other places how perplexing twitter was for me at first, how I learned to adapt and even thrive, and now even coach others on how to handle being on twitter and other social media. I fondly compare it to juggling eggs and chainsaws on a tightrope. I simply don't know what to do with friends. My favoritism bounces all over the place with my moods, and I suck for checking in regularly. I've spent a lifetime losing friends, and it's not usually me who does the walking away, even though I'm beginning to understand that it might look like that from a different perspective.

exercise a little caution clicking to this source

Thanks to finally coming to terms with several really big emotional issues the last couple of months I've got a big ol' soft spot lately, a place easy to push a big red button on and innocently set me off, and unfortunately, it's such a cool button that a few can't help but press it. I have choices, like ignoring, or playing along, or biting, or I can block. After many years' experience on the internet, I know blocking rarely works to solve a problem. Humorously, very few readers ever saw the Xanga years when I had to keep blocking one account after another for bombing my Lexx posts with very lengthy comments about how I was going to hell, and it wasn't a Christian targeting me. As soon as I'd delete and block, there'd be a new copy/paste, and since it went on for a few months, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a spam fluke. Thank goodness for spam and comment controls now, right? Anyway, my point is please remember aspienado doesn't process emotions in real time, which later turns into very slowly processing repressed emotions. Assuming what I'm feeling from your point of view might be very erroneous, and me not responding to passive-aggressive hints about emotional misunderstandings is my way of not blowing up bridges. My past is so full of carnage trying to talk misunderstandings out with emotional people that I just don't do it any more. No more death by tray, guys. That is a really long-running joke with me that goes way back to 2008, I'm not going to explain it, if you haven't picked up on that by now, you probably won't, so- moving on.

Speaking of comments, as it were, just putting it out there that I've heard every aspergers-introvert-*insertwhateverhere* joke, I've been given advice and links to every conceivable natural and pharmaceutical remedy by well-meaning people for everything I've ever opened my mouth about, I've been followed very excessively by well-meaning people who've been determined to be the best friend I ever had, and with a great deal of practice I've learned to do on public blogs what I learned to do in real life as aspienado- just be still and let it pass over. The best PR advice I ever got from an actual professional (seriously, guys), is "Don't respond." Not responding and not encouraging interaction hasn't hurt my internet growth one little bitty bit, and it beats rocking back and forth between the bipolar social whiplash of blocking and disappearing. I understand people want to be helpful and empathetic, but honestly, you don't see other aspies doing that with me. This is my fave aspie artwork, which clicks back to my Aspergers board on pinterest (I'm not finding the t-shirt anywhere).

When Existential Aspie comes out (yes, taking forever), you'll see why it's so difficult for me to remain pleasant through continual reminders that 1- I'm 'different' and 2- why who I am is either hilarious or annoying and 3- how people with brains like mine should be fixed, almost to the point of genocidal vehemence.

I don't need pats on the head. What do I need, then, some ask. If I don't acknowledge that someone is exhibiting tolerance and/or fondness, what is the point?

Let's do a thought experiment- close your eyes, you're standing next to Spock, you're not sure if he's pissed or thinking about how RNA strands joining up from two different cells look like zippers zipping up- turn and give the guy a *hug*. What do you imagine will happen? Most of you will think Nothing, he hates hugging without even considering what you just did plowing through his event horizon of personal space, touching miles of skin nerves that went on high alert, interrupted thoughts galore, and turned all that attention to wtf and why?? Spock might not hate being hugged at all, he just facepalms over the misunderstandings that a lack of lengthy convo will now eat the other person up with if he doesn't immediately respond positively, even though it's not in his nature to do so. When the huggy person fills that void with friendly mocking to make up for the lack of response or reciprocation, it only complicates things for Spock. Very few people can really imagine what it's like being him, but nearly every aspie on the planet automatically identifies with him. Spock is basically the first Aspergers television role (remember, Vulcans are fiction and humans wrote the scripts, so arguing 'canon' at this point is silly). Spock became a world phenomenon, not because humans love Vulcans, but because so many humans either identified with them or recognized them, probably from interacting with aspies. Back then Aspergers was still unidentified, and there was very little frame of reference other than 'nerds' back then. 'Nerd' has all new meanings nowadays, but back then, it very seriously meant the people who couldn't seem to fit in anywhere because their social skills were so abysmal. Spock was like a beautiful bridge opening up a dialect of understanding, and that's why he was embraced. HUGGED.

Skidding off topic, you guys have no idea how hard I crack up inside about the idea of shipping Spock and Khan. The whole Sylar-Khan thing (SyKhan?) I brought up has nothing to do with me hooking two guys up in my head for a tryst. I have no idea how people are able to bend such rigid pissy characters into tender moments because I'm not capable of that, even in my own marriage. I enjoy a good conundrum, and shipping people who hate each other is one of the weirdest biggest conundrums I've ever run into, and it makes me laugh. I don't get caught up in gooey romantic feels, I laugh. Because it's weird. I'll tell you a truth- me and Deanna Troi would not get along. I find the whole Worf feeling uncomfortable with his feelings thing uncomfortable. People awwwing over Spock's inner feels turns me into Khan. Khan kills.

So yeah, this me being a jerk thing and 'not noticing' when people are trying so hard- I call those head games. Y'all know what head games are. String pulling, chain yanking, basically one person tries to get another person to react to something, and if it has anything to do with hurt feelings, I usually just step way back before I claw people up. With my claws. You know, because, claws.

I am out here for a reason. I've had long talks with psyche guy about how I never meant to become a depression blogger, a worldwide champion for Lexx, or even a role model for people with Asperger's. Things just keep happening, and I finally accepted that the only way I can be out here is embrace ALL of it, be my whole self, and learn how to not let all the little things that bug me distract me from my own goals. That last part is the hardest. Aspie is notoriously aspie, and has a difficult time not noticing some things. I want to keep being honest about my stuff without dragging junk in. Regular readers watched me process a huge load of stuff over the last six months, stuff that was private for many years, stuff that I felt was important to both bridge building and my own healing.

Along that particular journey I've been poked a few times by several pouters. Y'all have every right to be who you are, feel how you feel, say what you want to say. Doesn't mean aspienado has to tolerate it, much less enable whatever baggage is yours to figure out. It's your stuff. My stuff is my stuff. Being 'friends' doesn't mean I'm an emotional butler that jumps when a notification goes off. You'd be amazed how often that has happened over the last year. Some of you would wonder how in the world I didn't go on bigger rampages than the Pond of Death. Pinky blog is how aspienado processes all the feels. If Pinky blog goes out of control, those must be some pretty big feels. When big feels asplode, it's time to step back and assess what's going on and what aspienado needs.

Aspienado likes Pinky blog. It feels like a cave where a person could order pizza and have a cat walking around. Aspienado misses Bluejacky and wants to go hang out at Pond of Death more, but Pinky says GET TO WORK! >=l FOCUS!!! Aspienado loves to work, so Pinky is a good boss reminding us all what's going on. I've got a Mantrid post to finish. After that... who knows. I just know I'm not working enough lately for my own original goals. It's like Dr. Evil wandering off into therapy and then onto Jerry Springer with Scott, world domination kind of gets put on hold when real life stuff pops up.


omg, you guys, my dad asked me on the phone last week what the hand thing is that people suddenly do when they talk, suddenly their hands go up with two fingers and then back down again. After a few minutes of fine tuning his description with question after question, I cracked up and then spent another 5 minutes explaining the "quotes" gesture to him. One of those gold star convos, wish I had that one on youtube.

These are way better when you know @bonenado has a dad and 2 stepdads.




My youtube account is one of my oldest public accounts. I've had a private playlist for several months that both cuts me up and motivates me to keep going in public. The description is simple- "Part of #aspienado's journey learning about relationships. These are feelings I've gone through all my life and very rarely articulated. It's been life changing learning to see my own feelings and process them. All the vids were made by other people with their own intentions and storylines, but they have personal meanings for me, too. Fanvids help me process feels, and I appreciate the work fans have put into making them." I made the playlist public yesterday. These vids in particular triggered some deeply buried emotional processes, and because of them and Pinky blog, I've got both a psychologist and a psychiatrist congratulating me on making so much positive progress.


Last Halloween I wrote a special post for lurkers, and since then I've come to terms with being a depression blogger. Click that if you are needing to follow a path out of some really dark woods. I know holidays can be really hard after loss and/or big change, and like I keep telling you guys, it's not a contest. Every loss and change is very personal, and there is no ranking system to how devastating one loss is compared to another. You might have lost someone very dear (pets included, they become our children and friends), gone through a divorce, found out you or someone you care about has cancer or something else really hard, or you might be struggling with caring for an aging parent, or dealing with some kind of addiction. There are so many hard things we go through. I must be doing a bit better this year, because night before last I dreamed I caught myself doing 110 mph down the highway, which was a tad alarming but so much better than the strange driving up a 90 degree angle or skidding off a chat road and down a hill into a river dreams I've had. I'm taking it as a sign that I'm handling my stuff better nowadays.

I have more links spread out through the depression posts, but in case you need it NOW-

If you need someone to talk to right now- *click*
international suicide hotlines
national domestic violence hotline (U.S.)
veterans crisis hotline
24 hour crisis hotline (depression)

Halloween is hard for me. I still don't really know why, but I do know that getting through Halloween is just really hard. Behind all the festivities and treats and parties, I know there are others out there who are having a hard time, too.

I call my stuff Pinkyween now. It's my way of dealing. From here on out till New Year's is what I call the holiday slide, just a long crazy blur of stuff going out of control until tax season hits and we wake up and stumble around wondering what just happened. Despite my long history of being the holiday kid in my family, I really don't do holidays well, and as years go by, it's become more about surviving them than enjoying them. That used to depress me, now it's just a thing I embrace. Holidays are great for getting more work done because I dive so hard into distraction to stay sane.

Ok, it's Pinkyween, and I need some mood music. I hope you guys have a great weekend.

what's a love song doing on Pinkyween Eve?

There are some youtube vids I generally avoid. The weird ships are ok, they mostly make for great protagonist forays with good action music since action/violent scenes lend such a good visual companion to sexual subtext, but the parent/child AU smashes are completely opposite and rather devastating. There are a lot of those. It's rather stunning to realize how well each actually understands the other when it comes to vid story construction, but still can't break out of whatever vicious loop they might have going in real life. Or maybe it's just that I so rarely stop and think about these things.

Yes, up at 1:30 a.m. again. I go in for 6-month psych follow-up (the one who prescribes and can't get me to commit to meds) and I'll have to come clean and say no, I'm not sleeping that great. Totally split shifting again for several weeks now. At least the total is still coming up to 6-8 hours in every 24. I'd so much rather just get up and move around and then go back to bed than zombie out solid and not be able to move in the morning.

So this was my first October in over ten years where I managed to keep some kind of real time cognitive involvement going pretty much daily without bombing into complete distraction to survive. No teeter-tottering through emotional shutdowns, no significant time disorientation bubble breaks, no angsting over a daily plan...

Taming the brain That's a pretty good site.

The daily plan thing is a toss-up. I feel like I'm bombing because the angst of stuff piling up is visible on my kitchen table, but even the least amount of reflection recognizes I'm easily keeping up with daily living nowadays as meals and chores and writing automatically happens without much conscious thought, much less having to create daily planning around them. Same with simple grocery shopping. I spent several years making elaborate lists of places to go, errands to run, things to pick up, and would still come home with it mangled up. It's nice being able to remember a few things now without having to write every little bitty thing down. Still, the daily planning was a very good habit, the root command under all the crawling back up the mountain stuff, but I think my conscious discipline is becoming an unconscious automatic routine.

Enough quickie psyche assessing. I'm stalled on the Mantrid post for good reasons. I've already spent every day in town this week, and not all of it over my own stuff. Bunny has something going on that we're watching, other people close to me have stuff, plus holidays and family birthdays and their baby stuffs have started popping in and out of scheduling, so I'm generally just not even on the computer much lately. I see several people are still wondering why I'm not personally responsive online, well, I'm actually functioning better in real life, so yeah, juggling 100 people means prioritizing and it's taking some of you a really long time to accept that. If I were a good cartoonist I'd create a panel visualizing calamities galore dive bombing all around and me holding a hand up and saying "Wait a sec, someone I've never met needs me online" while I'm bent over a failing phone or glitchy laptop. Social media is fantastic, I'll never say different, but the hilarious idea of aspienado being on-demand for people who've never met me in real life hasn't quite sunk into a few heads yet. My empathy is sketchy, and my time is extremely restricted. I apologize.

But you're blogging. You have time for blogging. But I'm not sleeping. I should be sleeping. If I'm up working on my own head/life stuff while I get through a pain problem that won't allow me to sleep, I don't owe anyone a pleasant conversation. I've spent incredibly long sleepless hours in the past online with people who were actually in hospitals or getting through other people being in hospitals, many hours logged keeping people company online sometimes right up to their last hours, and to grind my head back down to people demanding interaction of me simply because they are ~*~bored~*~ or restless (not being more forthcoming) kind of twists my head up. I'm saying this as kindly as possible to several people. The reason I'm public is so people can talk to me publicly. And having said that, if you do tag me, I can miss it because I'm tagged a lot, and if I still don't 'like' every single thing I'm tagged in, it doesn't mean I'm not paying attention or hate anyone. It just means I'm not going to slow down and hit the 'like' button a hundred times. In case anyone still feels left out or put off because I haven't personally acknowledged your presence lately, just wanna say you don't see anyone in my family complaining about me paying more attention to people I don't know than I do them.

Actually, kinda rambling while I listen to the latest SNews. Just put coffee on. It's about 3:15 a.m. now.

Ok, where was I? AU parent/child youtube ship smashes.

I grew up fantasizing having different parents. I imagined so many different scenarios and how many ways my childhood could have turned out. I've imagined having other kids, which I've discovered in 2012 is actually common for parents who've either lost or never managed to have babies or children.

Fantasizing relationships is a form of problem solving. It can get weird, yes. People can seem like creepers when they share what's going on in their heads. Exploring situations and conversations that never happened irl (in real life) is no different from imagining doing other things we either enjoy or don't normally do, like riding a horse or skiing or decorating a cake. Brains are pretty awesome for projecting scenarios.

But it's possible to get stuck in scenarios without resolving why one is there in the first place. Getting stuck in fanfictions, either in our heads or in actual print, without moving on to new or different material seems like a red flag. I've read some really excellent fanfiction, and I've tried writing some, but in the long run, I don't find it satisfying. I do find it helpful, but youtubes go way faster getting ideas across. I like the kind of anguish I can zip through, like ripping bandaids off with lawnmowers or something. I feel like I don't have time to slow down and lolligag around feels.

It hit me yesterday while I was driving around again (driving way too much lately) that part of my problem processing emotions in real time might be that it takes too long, so half the time I just shut it off. Emotions are really different from absorbing myself in technoweenie garble, a completely different kind of jigsaw puzzle. It's probably an apple and orange thing, like soduku and crossword puzzles. I'm not crazy about either one, but I'll take the crossword puzzle over the soduku if I'm desperate and there is no other distraction available. I think AU shipping vs real life is like that. Whether it's coworkers or significant other or family structure probs, it's just easier to turn to the distraction of puzzle solving scenarios than actual puzzle solving.

There are games that are never over. Chess and checkers definitely have an endpoint. Monopoly gets a little fuzzy, especially with rule-bending that allows credit. I'm a repeater, I like gaming for the fun of gaming, playing for the fun of playing, thinking for the fun of thinking. I think that's what the vids are, emotional game playing that never really has to end. Like soduku. It doesn't matter if you've solved a block, you just keep moving on for the sake of doing soduku.

I'm not good at feels, so I shut mine off and watch other people grind through theirs. I learn all kinds of stuff way faster than I ever did in real life. That SNews show I linked up there is the same thing, going over and over a scenario and outcomes, taking sides and leveling up in the debate arena with facts over something that is fiction. It's good practice, and provides interaction opportunities, just like shipping vids and twitter do.

Sooner or later, I can tell, I'll need to tackle the parent/child stuff. Since I've reached the point where I'm starting to deal with glitchy/missing memory stuff, this kind of struck me. There is more about the story setup in the youtube description, if you need it.


I have absolutely no interest in this pairing, nor the reason for it (back to regular shipping), but it's just a really well done vid story. A show we were watching on TV last night quite bored me for a long five minutes and prompted me to blurt that I never went through that poor me love stuff in high school (asexual aspienado's so facepalmingly aspie), and it hit me I'm sitting next to a guy who's managed to stay married to me for more than 20 years despite me so epic failing in the whole relationship department. This kind of video actually helps me 'get' stuff about other people that I otherwise don't normally even notice or go through myself.


For someone who doesn't get romance and can't flirt to save my life, much less even look like a girl half the time, I've been amazingly lucky. What really struck me about that last vid was the idea that part of the relationship revolved around a traumatic incident. Most of my life is one long traumatic mess of incident after incident, but I know that's not uncommon. What is uncommon is winding up in a successful relationship in spite of that. What's even more uncommon is having no idea how and having to look back to figure it all out.

I'm the sort of aggressive person who triggers into extremely destructive violent thoughts if I go into the angsty places too long (don't worry, just my style of fanfic shipping, if I had one), so it's time to spring back into the mockery I make of normalcy and get all over my day. I told someone earlier this week (or last, maybe) that I credit being pissy with getting me through the hard stuff, and since this week has gone a little further off the rails getting hard again than I projected, I wound up making another playlist to deal with it.


And if that doesn't do it for you, I like the softer stuff, too.

still thinking through my next Lexxperience post

Yes, we all know I have an evil villain thing. My biggest obsession over them is that they all make drastic mistakes. That doesn't mean I can't love them and learn from them, though.

Unreciprocated love is all good if you still win the game.


Using people is all good as long as you enjoy them.


Your ringtone mirroring your psychosis is all good as long as someone gets it. (It's cool if you have to spell it out anyway, as long as you win the psychosis game.)


Putting all that together into finesse is just plain all good.


Brilliant game playing needs to be appreciated. That is the flaw. I can't tell you how many times I've yelled JUST KILL HIM at my TV. No, they always have to stop and explain what they're doing. See, it's not actual winning that they want. I mean, yes, they want to win, obviously, and they are powerfully motivated to do so. It's just that something else sneaks in and next thing you know, they're self sabotaging with all this talky stuff.

Real evil doesn't waste time talking. And it certainly won't stand there politely listening until you're finished making complete sentences.

Winning the game is useless if no one is left to listen to you when it's over. Or love you. Or admire your skillz. Winning is hollow and sad and empty after all the sparkles have been used up getting there.

That's why I am a loser. And I'm going to lose really really big.

On a side note, I was wondering why the heck I couldn't find a big bottle of real vanilla anywhere. This is a big deal because vanilla is the second most expensive spice in the world, and my very favorite. I've been known to pay $2 and more per ounce for the real stuff. Guess what- a 4 ounce bottle in my local Price Cutter is just under $10 now. It's nearly $3 an ounce right now at Walmart.

click to shop

You can check out price comparisons if you're interested. Yes this is laughably out of stock now, but it helps one appreciate what I'm talking about. ALL the big bottles are gone.

This says out of stock on one page but not on another. I've actually paid more for this stuff.

So. I'm buying store brand real vanilla because even though I'm super picky, I can't bring myself to hand over $5 for a tiny bottle (a few drops, if you think about it) of anything else. I'm sure I'll cave when this little bottle runs out because vanilla is one of the rare food pleasures I have left. I can still taste it properly (nerve damage) and I'm not allergic to it. (Hope I didn't just jinx myself.)

Vanilla is the kind of product that requires a hierarchy of evil villains to bring access to my area. (Well, according to some people, capitalists are evil villains, which I kind of embrace, and I'm sure there are a few despicable people/aspects to the whole industry.) The reason Walmart and Price Cutter are good is because it means I don't have to buy black market vanilla.

Yes, I'm spiraling down rabbit holes this morning. Nothing is organizing my thoughts beyond mild obsessions. Just worn out, I guess. I'm booked up in PT right up till Thanksgiving, so lots of running to town kind of stuff. I don't do sitting in cars well or lots of driving well. I commuted for so many years to college and work, 3 of those years were 60 miles one way. It's just not good when I go on autopilot while I'm thinking nowadays, I have to make myself pay more attention.

I'm struggling with evil villains. They're becoming too fashionable. Plus they've been so cuted up the last few years. Everyone loves a good villain, right? Actually, the whole point to being a villain is that no one loves you at all. Or if they do it's out of pure fear or their own psychotic weirdness, like the way Vigl loves Mantrid. Blurring the lines for family entertainment only creates a cushioned illusion for those not yet tainted with abuses in all their dark glories.


If that user or the vids there disappear now after sharing that on my blog, it'll only prove a point I made a couple of months ago. I don't care who's doing it, just saying that using me to hurt fans is lame. If this is a legal claim problem from a legitimate source, the least compensation could be reinvestment in new merch.

Moving on. Really having trubba moving on this morning. Another hour has passed, I'm wandering around the house. I have to leave in 40 minutes, egads. Need to get a jam on and walk away.

2 days till Pinkyween

Not real often people see me out of a t-shirt. Metaphorically.
You can click on that to click on each pic to see better.
I'm so matchy. Even had a green umbrella.

Extra points to this guy for actually making it all the way into town like that. Hey, he's green, too!

So I got a yes on some of the degeneration thing we were watching earlier this year, but in a good way. If that makes any sense. The new stuff will be assessed again later. It was a good day to get out, at any rate. I made myself pay attention and soak in some autumn. It's going really slow this year, peak is lasting forever.

I would love doing this in a jigsaw puzzle.

Ok, this is getting a little ridiculous. Non vous aussi, LinkedIn.

Thanks to an incoming lurker from a referral link, I've discovered webmii.com (seriously, I don't go looking for this stuff, this one's apparently been around awhile). Spock is sort of impressed with how thoroughly they gathered my public info compared to other ranking sites I've seen.

This is actually the sort of thing I've been shooting for, in case the ridiculous amount of time and effort going into my fleet seems like a waste of time. I know this score doesn't look very high (for "Janika Banks"), but it's actually not bad out of millions (and more millions) of web profiles on the internet.

It also shows how crucial it is to find a stand out name on the webs because when I tried Pinky Guerrero, it totally smashed me and several other Pinkys together, abysmally lowering the klout score, among other things.

I know, silly time wasting stuff. Like I said, hipster coffee shops. I'm in one of my twisted funks where nothing looks right because I'm way too tired. BUT HEY, I was ready for early Halloween and it didn't happen, lol. At least I'm actually ready this year. I like to make goody sacks packed with treats.

I think I'm still sad from all that death stuff I finally dealt with, but it's hard to tell because I'm so good at not lingering on dwelling. Well, ok, I dwelt all spring and summer and partway into the fall (after 8 years of shutdown, part of my head points out), but I mean it was a more angsty kind of confusion because I had no idea that's really where it was headed. Now everything is just really quiet in my head.

I've rather carefully never wished for anything in my life, not really. I'm the sort of person who sees the futility in wishes and hopes, and if stuff doesn't happen, you either just make it happen if you really want it, or walk away and don't whine about it. Imagine spending a childhood like that. If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride, right? Adults actually said that to me. But something is sneaking up on me. No one sees the horses in my head.

"What we are we cannot be, what we are not, we are."
emo_rainbow_unicorn (Jess)
click pic for source

I think I'm feeling a wish starting to form. I'm not really sure what it is yet, but I know it's there. If Pinky had one wish... I wonder what it would be. Or is. It's already there, lurking, not letting me see it yet.

It sure is making for an interesting Pinkyween this year.

babbling, just something about dead animal fat =P

I didn't actually lay down on a Walmart bathroom floor (convo), but yeah, this was me in a Walmart earlier today drawing absolutely no attention to myself whatsoever. At least I hope I looked this cool.


It was hard to tell, but I think security kept an eye on me loitering around doing stretches all over my cart after it eased up enough to move around again. Associates kept sauntering by me asking if I was finding everything ok. Security used to have me do that at Kohl's when we watched people.

I'm the first person in Mercy therapy center history in the city of Springfield to bring in Diaper Doo in lieu of massage lotions, oils, creams... I was doing ok on shea butter up until last year, then one day my whole back exploded into this charismatic neon pink like I'd gotten third degree sunburns, and we didn't realize at the time that was my first really big latex reaction. Does Shea butter contain latex? Anything and everything with nuts and citrus has been out since 2011, so I've even tried emu emollients, but that actually kind of grosses me out since it's not much different from using goose grease in the days of yore, basically an animal had to die for the product. (Here, let us smear dead animal fat all over you...) What's nice about the Diaper Doo (thank you, Bunny, I owe you one for this) is that it's mostly lanolin from sheep wool. Keeping our fingers crossed, but so far so good, not even a hint of a reaction, which is awesome since I grew up with sheep and have had plenty of time to develop a sensitivity to lanolin. I pretty much smell like a sheep shearing barn right now, but I'm good with it.

(great, got stuck in alpaca memes, pack a lunch before you click this pic)

You know how last year I forgot to pick up Halloween candy? Remembered at the last minute today. It's getting easier to find Halloween candy that's gluten, peanut, and tree nut free now, mostly just stay away from the big chocolate candy manufacturers. Unless you have food allergies yourself or have or know kids who do, you have no idea just how scary Halloween really is. Bogus rumors still fly around about candy being laced with this or that drug or toxin, but no one pays attention to all the people who have to miss festivities because allergens float so freely amongst the populace and every surface they touch. Ironic, isn't it, that a death holiday really is a deadly holiday for some people. I think the scariest Halloween character should be Mr. Peanut. Click this pic for instructions on how to make the costume. I find it way more disturbing than a grim reaper clown smash.

My recovery goals are partially met- high protein lunch (tuna junkie), all over the hydration (plus hot tea, mmm), time to get a little nap (if possible), then bounce back up and make popcorn balls (I promised). Just finished putting a little pot of chili together.

I was looking for an Oswald Cobblepot Sherlock smash and ran into a bunch of Sherlock Clara Oswald smash. +_+  I like Clara, but I can't go there. I'll just stop where I'm at, it's horizontal break time.

HTTP 404 Not Found error- Pinkyween no es Halloween

Got a heads up that we might get early trick-or-treaters, oh, you know, about WEDNESDAY. I'm a gramma now, I can do this...

All you guys who think/thought the toddler years are/were rough, you've no idea. In 20-30 years you'll do it all over again with the added benefits of 1- unbendiness, 2- unenerginess, 3- unbraininess, and 4- unenduringiness. You'll still retain your basic rights to sleepless nights and long mind-numbing days while honing your older gen skillz repeating all the stupid cliches from your own parents that you swore would never come out of your own mouth, because old people say the most idiotic things to little kids they don't know what to do with in giant warehouse stores when everyone gets tired and a 2 year old decides to crawl onto a shelf of pillows and take a break until the shelf above gets bumped with a little foot and suddenly your descendant has to be unburied from a pile of shelves and pillows. Yes, I got video.


This was another birthday present I got. I'd never seen one of these before.

Next one clicks to what the crawl bot couldn't 'see'.

So somewhere out there is a phone brand/make/model that *might* not be able to see the mobile version of my 'about me' bio section if they switch to desktop/web version, or something. Whatever. It's probably my own phone. Anyway, my first 404 error(s) started showing up on my birthday. How cool is that???

I've gotta get off here and split like the Flash, I'm supposed to be in PT by 8 a.m. Laterz.

Psycho Stats- I spy with my little eye...

cliquez pour source d'origine

Statcounter finally caught a referral from someone in Egypt that wasn't logged into google (being logged in gives the search engine user more privacy), and I'm pretty sure this older post is being randomly hit because of this search result, because it links to my page.

Translate gives me a G+ user name that isn't viewable except through the direct links on that G+ user search page.

This isn't the first time I've found my material pulled into someone else's religious or political feed/stream. My content being linked into that other stuff makes no sense since I have no other context and can't see the page it's used on or the comments people might've left. However, the hit count trickling in on that particular post is still so slow that it's hardly a problem, not like it's being bumped up into a most-viewed 30-day or all-time status. Yet. (Remember I found one of my chicken vids had garnered over 2000 hits without me even knowing it.)

Blog views are kind of like rolling dice, you can't really see who all is standing around the table watching you roll. There is a special kind of troll that lurks around watching for content movers and then attaches to them, and next thing you know, the search engines are crossing streams and pulling their content into other people's innocent content. It's an old game. I know it because I play it myself, I just do it out in the open and everyone can see all the linking and sharing I do. I don't make any money on clicks, but lurker trolls probably do, and some of them probably make a pretty good income on that kind of trolling. This guy is probably raking in some dough picking up other people's content and there's nothing anyone can do about it, at least from my standpoint, since I can't point to a specific place he's using my content, which looks like it's actually someone else's youtube content crossed with my keyword 'asexuality' and then posted in a protected (not searchable in the U.S. at any rate) stream hooked to heavy news content about (given what I can see) prostitution, drugs, and homoeroticism in a country that kills people for such things outside of strictly sanctioned 'law-breaking' in the name of religion. (You can see why my Zev vs Xev post was a big deal when you look at it this way. The keywords for your eyes opening are 'kills people outside of strictly sanctioned law-breaking'. Yeah, you're kind of getting that there's an oxymoron going on here...) (Can we all say "I worship his shadow....") (If you're not on the Lexx train yet and you think you're a big political activist, you really need to turn your head and start seeing the real world.) (Just saying.)

I have the option of blocking URLs in my Google analytics so the hits won't be counted at all anymore on those posts, so if a post ever does go really sour with bogey hits and I can't find any other way to make it stop, I'll just block that count from my accumulating overall total. I run into blogs all the time with ridiculously high view counts, and my first thought (especially if it's a boring post on a savvy monetized blog) is that they don't know how to cut out the spam, bot, and pingback 'views', which aren't real readers at all. Some realize that's going on and just blow anything outside of the U.S. off as generalized 'spam' and still fail to grasp how outrageously wacky their view count still is for something so boring, and they still don't take the time to go fix it, probably because they assume, quite wrongly, that a high view count makes them look really popular. To anyone who knows stuff, it screams robot.txt. The last thing I want to look like is a noob, hence, I check on my stat referrals. Constantly. (Believe it or not, this gives me a higher rating as a 'real person' on the internet. Yes, that's actually a thing they can measure for now.)

I never was one to cheat in games, either. I once played with a couple of kids who cheated at Monopoly and still beat them without cheating myself. I find cheating so tiresome. Cheating is quick and easy, and even if it takes a little bit of cleverness to not get caught, it takes much more cleverness to actually beat a game, and I'd so much rather be the second kind of clever, even if no one has a clue because I'm busy beating the game by being tricky looking stupid.

Anyway, the reason I keep digging is because I very much doubt I'm really that cool to be pulling in this many views lately, unless what I'm seeing really are a handful of new discoverers who are literally reading every post I've made (that has happened a few times), and possibly using the tagging system doing it because the visitor paths seem a bit jagged jumping around hither and yon. BUT, when I see the same path identically repeated 2 or 3 more times in short order, I can't help wondering if a string of bots are feeding on each other's trails. So I keep digging. (Yeah, totally got a visual of a web centibot, right?)

I do know from experimenting that the view count from my own mobile views is extremely accurate, as are a couple of other readers who've been regularly showing up in traffic for months. If I question a visitor trail, I just check the device and browser stats. Some bots can mimic that info to look like real people, of course, but patience and curiosity have helped me untangle several mysterious threads of clues and nail down actual people. I could care less who they are, I just want to know they're real and not bots.

What a boring post this is, huh? I'm killing time until the TWD live tweet. I've got chores done and there's not much left to do but snack, and I'm trying not to snack. I'd work on a project but then I'd bury myself and not pop up for air in time for the live tweet.

@bonenado leads a much more exciting life. I keep telling him he should blog. You guys would love his rants and rambles. And he's way less wordy than I am. And super dyslexic so the typos would be hilarious. You missed the sprint from the window after he saw an armadillo and zipped across the house out the door across the yard and back again because he was foiled by the basement door already being locked and he couldn't get to his pitchfork or shovel. I just said I don't wanna know about it. It's like living with a super bored action figure wound up to spring.

Ok, need a brain cleanser so I can dislodge my eyeballs and go get jammers on and get ready for the live tweet. Let's see, something fun...

step by step

This meme collection is awesome, click to check it out

You know what the best part of my birthday was? YOU GUYS. It got so busy here that I went back and scoured GWT making sure I wasn't being hit by a bot swarm, but it was mostly just a steady pingpingping of people bouncing around through the archives all day long, and I could tell much of it was definitely keyword driven. So- thank you. What a pleasant surprise to watch all my all-time scare records being broken on my birthday. This is from statcounter, which is super conservative. (I'm still not clear why certain countries aren't even acknowledged in my statcounter, much less not counted, but I guess that's better than the people I see complaining of bot probs from those countries.) Since I don't monetize, I don't have to worry about click fraud, but I use that kind of thinking to keep an eye on real people vs bots.

That is why I so aggressively scour referrals. Are you guys real? No sense getting excited over numbers if it's auto-clicking.

Checked on a deeper GWT social network referral list yesterday and discovered I somehow got tied into twopcharts (I qualify for global), nuzzel (that one was pure Kai poster/Lexx fans and was near the bottom of the referral list), and someone using the darkwm.ru domain linking one post (also Lexx related) that got me one indexed referral, so I'm thinking someone grabbed the page in a private download, like I do with my Torch browser grabbing vids or something.

I could keep my eye on Russia for bots, but the hits are already slacking way off again this morning, so good night and sweet dreams. This was the last 24 hours. Russia is normally only a fifth of the total (again, assuming Lexx or other fandom visits if no verified bot behavior). Whatever the motivation, it's not significantly alarming. Since some of my material has been translated and fan pix salvaged and saved, I'm always happy to see Russia.

We didn't do a whole lot on my birthday. I didn't have cake or anything (I'm diabetic), and I very thankfully got a nap after a day out with Bunny and her brother because I'd had one of my boingy bouncing out of bed at 1 a.m. nights the day before and then popped back out of bed at 3 a.m. on my birthday. Anyway, this is the cuteness my birthday party leveled up to. This happened at Bass Pro. twitter - facebook - webapp Not paid to link those.


@bonenado picked up some hunting boots and jeans there (yes, on MY birthday), but I got these cute sox from Tractor Supply in Nixa. My birthday continues to be about footwear, lol.

This was the card he got me. It's so us.

This wasn't too shabby as far as birthdays go, either. It clicks out if you want to see more.

I 'live out loud', so I'm still finding my balance with private stuff, how much to share, when to share it. We kind of have a running gag in our morbid little family about people we care about dying or having funerals on Twink's birthday (that is Bunny's mama), but somehow sailed right past her birthday for once without anything awful happening, yay!

It's my turn for the jinx. And it got a little tense.

I don't say much about our real stuff, but I did share a post called interruptions a couple of years ago that got pretty personal. We'd gotten through a really tough Christmas, and I won't repeat any of all that stuff right here. It's out there if you care to go deeper. A few harder core lurkers know Twink spent a miserable and very frightening Christmas in a big hospital across the state several years ago, and after that I just stopped taking holidays seriously any more. One of the reasons my Lexx fansite boomed in 2006 was that I had to stay distracted during stuff that culminated into a Christmas tree never getting decorated. (Scroll down to the bottom of Why Lexx Is Personal to see my Twink.)

Given all that info I just linked, you might understand why I stepped back from being public on my own birthday when Twink's mama needed to go to hospital and have some tests run, and found out some pretty big stuff was going on. The question actually came up- What if she dies on your birthday? Two people asked me that. I'm sure more would have asked that if more had known what was going on. Part of family politics is damage control around gossip, and it's bad enough keeping stuff private in our own house, much less keeping it off facebook and phone calls and stuff. We protect ourselves and those we love with our silence.

I had a good think about that, and I realized very quickly that I would embrace it because I love my Twink. Can you imagine your mom sharing a death day with your stepmom's birthday? *wow* Her mom has been part of my life for a long time, and part of my whole marriage. I have learned more about myself through Twink and her mama than through anyone else on this earth. I have learned commitment, compassion, and some very deep love and forgiveness stuff, which is a biggie for aspienado. I've learned more about my humanity from them being in my life than from anyone else I've ever known. Many people have a problem letting go of their boundaries and embracing the more difficult challenges, but I've come through two decades of learning what family is really all about. Twink's mom is family to me by extension, and even though I'm relieved we're past the awkward morbid joke stage, I know now that I would never feel conflicted about it. What good would I be to Bunny's mama if I took something like that personally? I would be mortally embarrassed if anyone turned this into me selfishly feeling upstaged by an ex-wife, and I was horrified thinking how that would backwash onto Twink's feelings for the rest of our lives. I don't want to be awful, but I grew up with grownups around me being snotty about things like that, and I can't even imagine what I'd be like now if I'd never had these opportunities to learn to think differently about how I see the world.

click for meme explosion

While I may not automatically believe in the inherent goodness of humanity, I don't believe people are naturally bad, either. Who we are and become has so much to do with the world around us, and we wouldn't be human if we didn't stumble and fall, sometimes quite a lot. Very quickly we could wind up in the dark alleys of choice, and from there into the extremes of victimization, but let's quickly divert into the eyes of a watcher, one who knows the dark well enough to see in it, but not so much to pry as to dabble with metaphorical ink. Perhaps pry + ink = pink.

One of my dreams last night took place in a Shoney's type restaurant buffet, except the food bar was a street drugs bar with an impressive spread of everything from cheap mail order xanax (your basic instant mashed potatoes) to high dollar cocktail blends (the savvier stir fries and lasagnas). Along this buffet all the people freely mixed, rich suits and smelly rags, heeled vixens and crippled homeless, prep and jock and lab students and downtrodden and cast off and drop out students. Everyone imaginable was there, getting along for show like people do at Christmas parties. No one is sinless in this. We are all part of this culture and all its subcultures.

And as it turns out, I did get a call on my birthday that someone else I'm actually related to really had died. You guys know I live for irony. So many hugs from my heart go out to you guys. I hope one day I can do so much more than blog.

lyrics

really super boring stat compromise stuff

click to try 'Hacker Typer'

Friday @ 4 p.m.-ish

I think I've figured out the google play store app referral thing. I was able to get into the app referral elements and see a 'client' that goes to a completely empty blank page, my pinterest button in my browser being used as a router of sorts, and my GWT blogger ID hijacked almost in the same code line. So I went to statcounter, the interface with GWT there is screwed, and it looks like statcounter just chopped GWT off all my projects as a failsafe. I can't even get into the config pages right now to set it back up. I have no idea if that'll stop the referrals.

For someone trying to control for real people hits instead of bots, this is something I want to get on top of. I mean, it's not like I'm spiking off the chart or anything, so far it's less than 40, which is actually way under what the Brazil thing did to my other dotcom. Wonder if the hits that skidded in got a surprise, they're coming in from an age rated app in another country, so maybe they're expecting Pinky porn or something.

I was also able to get into some cache code from the app referral elements that blogger allows me to open up from 'traffic sources', and there is like a jillion lines of pure gobbledygook, it's not even number lined or oriented into code 'sentences', just everything all run on. I went back to the app in the google play store and discovered the FAQ page is empty. I got several screen snips of the referral elements, if I wind up having any problems I'll be able to give all kinds of info to 'complain to google'. I think what I'm seeing is a hijacker app that loves Pinky blog because it's so link and graphic heavy. (I'm sure the word 'pinky' doesn't help...) I doubt this was personal. It's like how I complain about bots running everything, right?

So I went to my GWT console, and sure enough, crawl stats totally spiked over the last 24 hours, so I just removed the statcounter ID user for now. So far nothing terrible- "Currently, we haven't detected any security issues with your site's content. If you want to learn more about security issues and how they could affect your site, review our resources for hacked sites. However, if you see a malware warning in the browser when navigating to your site, it's likely that your site is referencing code or content from another domain that has malware. Read up on cross-site malware and learn how to address it." I've mentioned crashing a hard drive a few years ago pulling an illegal music download off a super buggy fan site, so I think it's nice to be able to get a doctor report on my blog like that. I occasionally run into serious malware warnings popping up that freeze my screen and I immediately just kill lappy and reboot. If my own blog ever does that, there will be serious excavation going on around here.

Pic clicks to source, but this is another one of those click here to right click for gigantic version

Along this journey I discovered Itzel Pinky Guerrero on soundcloud and actually really like it. No, that person isn't the app problem, that's why I'm sharing. I'm not the biggest rap fan, but I liked that pretty good, had the playlist going while I checked all this other stuff out.

~~~~~~~~~~

A few hours have passed, I can't pull up statcounter at all and I see people on twitter complaining that it's down, so I imagine they're scrubbing the code squeaky clean again.

Saturday @ 3:15 a.m.

So... Google turned it off on their end first? I have no idea what's even going on at this point, but the play store app thing seems to have stopped since last night. On top of this, Brazil has showed back up on my other dotcom, and I can now correlate the old buttons-for-website question thing to them. I just went through the whole GWT console deleting statcounter user IDs. Also, thanx to GWT, I can see that on the 19th, 4 different much older posts on Pinky blog were index-compromised because of a pinterest widget resource block, and I'm assuming that's why I saw pinterest in that elements code for the app referral link. I was wondering why those particular posts were showing back up in stats out of the blue. 

There is another resource block from a really old widget I put in the first day affecting indexing on 58 other posts, but has nothing to do with the play store app and doesn't seem to be causing any problems. I think GWT is fussing that it can't get the data back from you guys clicking on it or something during visits over time. It's a really old widget that I've used for years, long before google was anything more than a search engine. so it stays.

Hang on, I need a second cup of coffee.

You guys know this mess was the best birthday present ever, right? #aspienado


Now that I've got my little stats mess figured out, I'm going to move on to continued dabbling on the Mantrid post and continued projects around my house while I keep my phone open. I do sincerely apologize for the severe lack of twitter all week, I really mean it, and I also sincerely thank you guys for not DMing me with support or asking what's up. By now you know I'll tell you stuff, it's just not appropriate yet and you'll get way more and better info later if I don't get scattered wearing myself out repeating the same thing over to one person at a time (super aspie's so aspie). I've made this decision out of respect more than anything, so hang on, we'll get there. I'm not sure yet if today will be a long one, and I want to stay ready for backup assistance. You guys know I don't do private updates for friends-only on facebook or anything, everything is all public, and I'm balancing a need-to-know thing.

Oddly, I don't feel in a frivolous mood today, but a respectful one. Some days are meant for being conscientious of other people's stuff. All my hopes are for a good day, a good weekend, and a good rest of the month in my family, and keeping in mind that it isn't always about me.

ok, this one is an actual touch base

When stuff like this happens in my notifications.

links to #teamspooge convo headed for #ironchefspooge production

I bet all you people who create bot algorithms think you're hot stuff. So many of the robot accounts gather and retweet, the slyer ones think they look more like real people helming the controls when they leave fav trails through activity feeds.

Can you imagine running into another world out there with real intelligence spewing out all over the place? We'd be in this giddy news heaven repeating all the stuff we interpret from their communications going on, and eventually we'd grind down to an emotionally deflated drag through what turns out to be nothing but millions of bots regurgitating each other in feeds (which we in turn regurgitate...). I'm sure that's what most of our stuff would look like to aliens. What would be funny is realizing that there was nobody left under all that endless yap. Everyone croaked off, the bots continued their feeding frenzy. Get it? Feeding frenzy. Timeline feeds. Nevermind...

You can click this pic back to the funny convo
but right clicking and saving from there
won't get you a really super big wallpaper
like finding it in search like I did
Right click that one and it's huge
You're welcome

I keep running into blogs about how to blog, how to start writing if you go into a torpor and don't know what to write, how the catatonia of writer's block is actually cathartic, how a running stream of content is preferable to stagnation, and all I can say is, all you guys are doing it wrong.

If you are miserable trying to set up a blog or miserable trying to actually blog or miserable and leaving a trail of abandoned blogs or miserably frustrated and deleting blogs, peut-être pas le blogging est votre forme d'expression, si? If you are feeling relieved a goal was reached so you can take a break (especially if you are paid for the content or otherwise grinding through forced content to push monetization efforts), peut-être que vous avez choisi de ne pas faire ce que vous aimez.

I'm under huge loads of stress this week, and it's all I can do to tear myself away from my blog right now. I want to write so bad. I have so much stuff. I have to keep parseling my time out over parsing my thoughts.

But I've gotta pull myself together! This is a big month with big stuff going on and I need to keep moving and doing and staying ready. By the way, I finally lost a pound. Remember those two pounds that showed up during the 14 hour Bunny day? I think I've finally convinced my good fellow cellular citizens that we don't need to pull that kind of a panic and keep such a tight inventory over calorie clinging. Chillax and let it go, froody little dudes.

God bless fans, for ye maketh my dayeth bettereth.


This is me giving a few more minutes to chillaxin before I bound off into the world of laundry and cooking and floors and dentist and another Bunny day and all those new pre-deep tissue reconditioning nerve flossing exercises I've started. That's right, we've arrived to nervous system assessment and retraining, which means relearning how to move everything in my body, since I'm such an aggressive strength trainer that I'm pushing nerve fail. Iz a delicate balance, and an indicator that I may be on another fence regarding reassessment between severe fibro vs mild MS, or even both. Nothing scary after all the stuff I've been through so far, more like exciting to reach a respectable let's rethink this diagnostic approach level.

Big weekend! My birthday! #napclub lol Did I mention I finally broke out the blu-ray set?



p.s. I promise I'll be back on the twitters soon, gimme a couple more days, ok? Love you guys.

#TeamWells #FlashbackFriday

You saw that too???

click for douche news

Yeah, y'all got excited when you saw the previews this week just like I did, and now you're totally hitting my Flash rant.

We're excited.

I can't tell you how hard it is stop myself from making a special blog centralizing all my movie and TV rants into one streamlined neverending crabfest. I've started a Mantrid post, so I need to stick to that. FOCUS!

The app referrals are kinda funny, but how in the world is google news referring me now? Srsly, 3 referral hits from google news. (I imagine a blog reader list comes up on a personalized G-news page, perhaps.) I'm not a google news reader, so I'm having a little fun comparing how that comes up differently between my phone and my laptop. I mean, Johnny Depp's illegal dog smuggling is cracking me up, the Daryl Dixon riot is concerning me a little, but my eyebrows are more furrowed that my phone showed me Sherlock going to China and my laptop didn't. By the way, Ben's nickname over there is Curly Fu (lol, sounds kinda like Curly Sue), and Martin's is Peanut. How cute is that?

click for Martin interview quotes

11 of my last 14 keyword referrals ranked between first and fourth place on google, very cool, free tacos for regular readers. I'm still trying to figure out how I get direct referrals from the google play store (I love a good puzzle), and accidentally ran into this bit tweet html strung out in all its glory. I feel so naked, like I got caught in a tryst or something. By the way, don't pursue those, lappy froze up over malware alerts going crazy and I had to reboot just now. Live blogging, skidding around the dark alleys of the interwebs.

Sorry about going scarce on the twitters and stuff, still keeping myself available and my phone free through the weekend, but very much hope to get a sort of all clear by the TWD live tweet.

I may as well put the coffee on and get my day started. Hope you guys are having a good Friday/Saturday.


I still wanna grab the writers and shake 'em. This pause and rant stuff makes my DVR the most valuable appliance in my whole house. When my own thing I'm working on goes to film (oh good lord, that'll take another decade at the rate I'm going), I will shred noobs who rewrite classic physics into glib cliches spouting from the wrong characters' mouths in the assumption that the viewers 1- are stupider than the writers, and 2- need a quick science lesson every single time Star Labs intros a new idea. I mean, Dr. Stein drawing circles on glass and labeling them E1 through E6 as a graphic assist to explaining parallel/alt worlds was as kindergarten as it gets, and I need to stop right now before I spend another hour on why I pause and rant over The Flash more than any other show. It has nothing to do with science fiction or comic universe and everything to do with presentation. It's ok to break the laws of physics and smash worlds together, what isn't ok is telling us to assume these characters are brilliant and then dropping the ball portraying them as simpletons. (There's a reason Planet Sheen got canceled, it was missing Jimmy...)
I dream of fixing Thawne probs.

Speaking of dreams, tonight's was about working in a warehouse-sized department store that was visited by Obama and his whole family, which somehow included a chain smoking Latino mother-in-law and a bunch of bratty little kids. That's twice Obama has showed up in my dreams this year. Guys, I don't dream about presidents. I don't watch politics, I despise magazine-style news presentations (even parodies), and I have no opinions any more because I just. don't. care. So if I were to interpret this one, I'd say keep your eye on the chain smoking mother-in-law, whatever that's supposed to mean. Pretty sure it had nothing to do with Michelle.

You and I both know this trumps all right now.

I may or may not be messaging from the right time vortex

There is a place I go sometimes called reeling around like I just made it through a level 4 Halo shoot out in Valhalla (ok, I'm borrowing a visual from a game) where everything in my regular routine is so upside down and inside out that I go a little slack-jawed from shock and ask the nearest person where the portal back to the Devron System is, like a noob, only I don't really want to go to the Devron System, I just want to replace the ice cream cone I dropped. Except I wasn't eating an ice cream cone.

And it's not over yet.


I keep wondering why my head is on the wrong calendar week and have decided it's probably because I'm so dreadfully behind on Doctor Who that I caught #timefailpox and have barely been saving near misses with appointments right and left. At this rate, I'll be wondering why trick-or-treaters are showing up on the wrong day. I've procured the Thanksgiving turkey, though, and stuffed it into the downstairs freezer. Get it? Stuffed the turkey in- oh, never mind.

Let's just call it a bad week and let it go. It went defcon two days ago, universes collided, possibility storms whirled around us, and my actual birthday may be/have been/will have been blown up and the only way not to get cake smashed all over everything is to not make cake.

But I got this.

I am the sand

May as well play along. My top referring URL to this blog over the last 24 hours is this app. *waving hello to Russia* I imagine at least a couple of you totally get this whole blog.

Still in a way too busy place, so this is it. However, this is still my jam this week.

quick note for friends

I may be absent for a few days helping with a family medical crisis, but I hope to be back by the TWD live tweet, if not sooner. Please do not worry if you don't see me.

perspective

Woke up in a new place, after my arduous months-long tortured crawl through this blog sorting my head out, feeling neither listless nor compelled, wondering what direction one goes after one actually figures out where one's been. And then the first thing I saw on facebook this morning was

It both scares and humbles me when I see local headlines like this: "Pedestrian Hit Near MSU Earlier This Month Died"
Excuse me while the PTSD kicks in...

That reminded me that my direction, as always, is clear.


To all the people out there who have survived something and watch the rest of the world keep sprinting in the rat race while we crawl for awhile in the slow lane, remember that tortoises win the races. Speed and distance are illusions, and being bumped out of the illusion only means we can see the world better. Once that happens, there is no stopping us. Life sux and then we conquer.

Blogger is telling me this is my 400th post. If this were wordpress there would be some kind of silly badge for that. Hang on while I give myself an award. LOL, I grabbed my own award back from Angelbacchae's screen capture site. The pic clicks back to her awards page.

So this is my birthday week, and all this is making me feel pithily observation-y. Like, thank goodness someone still had some of my stuff when I got stupid and deleted entire folders of it. Like, fortunately I didn't disappear from my accident years ago and even after I metaphorically killed all my content off the web, I'm still here scrawling 

I was here.

Aaaaaaand my screen blipped and half the stuff in a whole other paragraph up there just disappeared. Cosmic joke's on me. If this were wordpress, I'd be able to recover an earlier timestamped autosaved version, so that's what I get for mocking.

Holding true to my theme, this pic's source has disappeared.
I linked it anyway.

Jaunted through someone's fan tumblr yesterday and I don't feel so obvious about overthinking now, in any capacity, just as I've mentioned that any time I feel I might be wasting my time doing anything on the internet, all I have to do is go read the lengthy thesis on the pros and cons of Bradley's facial hair. This snip clicks back to the survey it came from.

Well, I read through what is probably only a tenth of a really excellent blog of many posts devoted to every innuendo of sexual inference digested into paragraphs of what can only be the writer's ego (my opinion, since I'm trained in psyche eval and can notate every personal interjection) overlaid onto every single little bitty jot and tittle of conspiracy filming (THAT is a whole different awesome blog I wound up on, holy moly) to hide the truth in plain sight about how John and Sherlock really felt about each other (because we all know that's the most important part of everything, even when people are being murdered), and now I'm way more satisfied about the quality time I've put into figuring out my own life instead of obsessing about fictional characters no one can agree on. I mean, it all made sense, yes, but honestly, the surprising thing was how much of what was said was almost identical to what I've written (in an extremely briefer way), only the exact opposite, so it seems to me that POV interpretation is still what drives sales, to make a blunt conclusion. In short, it doesn't matter, as long as fans keep buying the merch.

What I'm saying is, those blogs allow me to look into the bloggers' own minds, not just John's and Sherlock's. The way they interpret scenes that I interpret very differently, based on my own subjective experiences, is what makes this whole study so fascinating to me. Sherlock and John are fictional characters, we are not. Studying the psychosocial phenomenon that is fandom on the internet is my favorite thing in the whole world. If I were going for my PhD I'd be doing this kind of stuff for my thesis. And, honestly, this is exactly what fandoms are for, to simulate open discussion about difficult to discuss subjects. They defer the content away from the incrimination or apology or emotional angst of self onto a harmless subject with much lower risk of repercussive psychological injury.

It's just nice to know that other people (yes, more) spend insane amounts of time thinking out loud, like I do. Gives me something to read. I love you guys. I love all your head stuff.

Yes, I obviously lived. Yesterday sucked, but I kept reminding myself that it's all familiar, no matter what decision I would have made, I'd have spent the same amount of time doing nothing about it until it eased off. Did the logical push hydration and protein thing, slept great last night for the first time in ages again, feel so much better this morning. Did a search on how long zithromax stays in one's system, got a half life math thing that concluded 15.5 days after last dose, cowabunga. So just stay calm and distract on, right? Quick, look over there.

click for more trew stuffs

That one never fails to get a guffaw out of me no matter how my day sucketh mightily. Interwebs, you are so good to me.

And so is my kiddo! Looky, a birthday box arrived! With sox!!!

I'd like to thank Bob for the card.

@bonenado immediately went into a guilt spasm and had me order new slippers because mine are shot, so my birthday this year is all about footwear. That clicks to amazon if you want to browse.

My phone keeps warning me that storage is critically low. Every warning goes down to a new lower number, even though I faithfully clean and purge and wipe and restart- we're getting into the 19 mg free range now. Yeah, I'd say that's critical. I've eeked so much extra life outa this phone, far beyond its life expectancy.

That reminds me of a dream I had years ago during my cave days, when I was taking a break from the internet. I had bought the Stargate Atlantis set so I could marathon at my convenience, and who knows what kicked this off, I know I was complaining back then of xanax making my dreams way too vivid and real and barely slept because sometimes they got so terrifying or sad that I just couldn't, so when I did sleep, I DREAMED. Maybe my brain was super dreaming trying to catch up from all the insomnia, who knows.

At any rate, Zelenka had been dropped off on very small satellite station orbiting some ancient and now extinct planet or other, and was going to be picked back up in about 12 days. He had the long and tedious job of getting all systems back up, restored to original capacity (if possible), backed up, and then start on assessment and interpretation until rendezvous time. It was a really boring dream for the longest time, just watching a guy in a spacesuit reconfigure systems until he reached a point of being able to take off the suit, and then keep working on debugging and reinstallation for nonworking parts, just really intricate and tedious. And then something went wrong. Something always goes wrong. Power went completely out in a tiny station nearly out of everything consumable, including air and ecosystem control like heat, and after about 6 hours of clamping everything down into sheer survival mode, there was nothing to do at all but sit still and just wait to be picked up.

Of course in my dream I could see the calculating going on in his mind, and knew he knew he'd be long dead before they got back. There was just no way to beat time passing, no tricks to pull out of a sleeve, no magic hat of ideas, just nothing left and no way to contact anyone. Just be still and relax, use as little air as possible and let his body go into hypothermia as slowly as possible.

I was upset in my dream. I wasn't corporeal, I wasn't even me. I don't know what I was. Just an observer of a fictional character. I felt so frustrated. Usually in dreams, by this point, I either know I'm dreaming (I didn't know this time) or I figure out I can push in and do something (I didn't realize I was 'there' to do anything). I've been lucid dreaming since I was a toddler, so looking back on this is really odd how stuck I felt not realizing I could maneuver as an entity in any way. I only felt frustrated.

Time passed. I hovered around, in and out of the station, watching him go unconscious, watching the stars, watching the planet rotate. Nothing else happening. I hovered back into his head, and he was nearly gone. I knew all it would take was one transmission to get someone back there, even though they were impossibly far away, because the tech they used allowed that kind of travel, but there was no way I could send a transmission, even if the tech was working, because I didn't know how. At this point in the dream I actually tried fiddling with some switches in the dark. Of course nothing happened. I have no idea if it would've looked like the switches were flipping themselves, I didn't dream of me actually being there.

I made a decision to go find the people who'd dropped him off and tell them to come get him. That part was easy. All I had to do was slip back through time to when they dropped him off and left and tag it, kind of like tagging a piece of code, and then doing a search later for the tag and the highlight taking you right to it. (Don't ask, I've been dreaming like this for a long time.) So bing, next thing I was hovering around a busy deck full of people and no way to communicate. I told you this dream was long. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to say even just his name (I couldn't, I had no way to vocalize) or get his name onto a screen (I couldn't, I have severe symbol fail in dreams, I can't type or spell or keep numbers straight). I finally got so frustrated that I just pushed into someone's head and screamed ZELENKA, and she dropped the stuff she was holding, and from there was about an hour-long fight to get a single idea through to her to the crew. All I needed to communicate was GO BACK NOW. That was ridiculously difficult. But once that got through, they did go get him, barely in the nick of time. He'd already stopped breathing and was close to brain death, but they did manage to pull a rescue and eventually get him healed to full capacity.

That dream was obviously about my own brain trying to repair and communicate. I yap all the time about my glitchy brain. I had that dream during probably the blackest part of my existence. During the dream it really did feel like long hours and days were passing, but I don't think I slept more than 4 hours max, more likely 2 or 3. I very clearly remember that dream but still have memory problems around real life during that time frame. I've actually had to draw out a timeline for reference, make a list of dates, and go back through old blogs at least once a month trying to keep my life straight, but I remember that dream in great detail. That was my brain showing me how it was working on its own repair, connecting disrupted synapses, giving me context for what was going on in my real life inside my own head.

Neat, huh?

Think about it. My brain cells were able to give me a picture of their existence.

So waking up this morning wondering what to say next, I think the point is to just keep saying. A lot of us have stuff, much of it is very confusing and frustrating, but I believe no matter how tangled up things get, every day is an opportunity for discovery of self and for caring about others. Through all the sadnesses and sufferings, I think the most important words that ever came out of any human's mouth are "I love you."

I love you guys. This is my birthday week, and I'm very glad to still be here. If I could hand out birthday favors on my blog party I'd give each of you an awesome day, some yummy food, and the warm fuzzy feeling of being truly loved. Thank you for reading my blog. That is your present to me.

I was looking for an awkward hugs compilation and ran into this wonderful gem.



:edit: one hour later

O.M.G. "I was upset in my dream. I wasn't corporeal, I wasn't even me. I don't know what I was. Just an observer of a fictional character. I felt so frustrated."

Guys- that is my brain talking. My consciousness is the fictional character to my brain.

Just- wow.