The article that pic clicks to might seem unnerving, but at least it's not Skynet.
Whiny robots are unacceptable. Whiny robots irritate people. #transparency is one thing, #uglytrewth is another. I will quickly power point the current root causes for whine and move on.
Post acute withdrawal syndrome. I'm only 2 weeks out from surgery, and less than that back off opioids.
Nasty headache.
Lost more weight than I went in with because virus on top of recovery and couldn't eat much between the two, imagine how hungry I am.
And now I will entertain myself, like I've been doing for years when I actually had no one to talk to.
Or how about an HTML5 version of the original Lemmings game, including the original sound?
But you don't have to load the game to listen to the music!
So when you have arthritis in your cervical spine and a history of trigeminal pain and they do airway for surgery, then have you lay in one position for extended time, the resulting fibro flare is off the wall once the drugs all wear off. Not whining or anything. Just saying. The Lemmings music in my headphones is helping. It's like a brain stim to distract me from paying attention to my nerves pinging over and over like BBs pelting the side of my head.
What was I posting in the old super pain days? Lemme jump back a few years and grab something.
Oh, here you go, my old Sikes and the Alien Nation (all the youtube vid codes got wiped in the Xanga server move). You might not be able to see that on mobile. And that post led to Gary sharing something I put into another post at EMP threat- imminent? Interestingly, just yesterday North Korea demo'd they can reach anywhere they want now with a missile, and next comes a nuclear warhead 'test'. You guys know that 'testing' a nuclear warhead in the atmosphere above the U.S. would knock our power grids offline, right, not to mention the fallout. So I was saying that back in April 2009.
Well, full circle I guess. I ran into Treat Me Like An Athlete, and I'll pull part here and leave it at that. This is an excerpt, because I was still voraciously super wordy back then and this is only a part of that. Bluejacky wasn't a top blog or anything, but got really good traffic on some things, and it was the first blog I tried being both public and myself on, although back then I never shared who I was anywhere else.
Ok, guys, I felt mean the other day, so I'm gonna partially retract and make an apology, but not because anyone got hold of me and demanded one. And I'm not doing this to get attention from anybody, because I've got recs and comments turned off anyway. I made a post called'puny' blogs, which I still stand by because I'm aspie and that's the way my head works, but I can look back and see that it was still a punch below the belt, and I feel like that's not who I am and how I operate. I'm not trying to do ~this~.
And here I put South Park's infamous cripple fight, which is now blocked for content rights stuff, but here's a snip.
I'm a big believer in the whiny crabby people being the ones who survive. I have watched others 'wisp away' under the burdens of their illnesses, and even though med info pages on the internet insist that things like lupus and fibromyalgia are NOT terminal, those others I knew have passed on already. I'm still here, and my whiny crabby butt says hell yeah it's killing me, and dang if I'm gonna lay down and let it. I'm not against anyone talking about their stuff on their blogs, that was NOT what the 'puny' blogs post was about. I've got a private blog popping with my crap, and the reason it's private is because the things I say there are things that help me survive, and that includes my black side, my bad attitude, and all the mean feelings that come out on my really bad days. I don't want to share that with the public. To me it looks like a big tangled mess of ugly confusion, probably because I see it all the time. To the few allowed to sub there, it probably looks more like endlessly long boring posts about being sick all the time and every little thing that bugs me, which is probably a real drag to read. Aspies can be notoriously wordy.
This next part is a big deal. Very few people dare to stick out there and really be REAL without apologizing or masking or faking or fighting. Just being real.
So it's only fair that I bring out where I'm at *right now*. I created this blog to share information, to 'be real' about stuff like Asperger's, but as I've pointed out in a couple of posts, I feel the Asperger's is what's giving me the edge on surviving the illnesses I live with because I notice patterns and obsess over details and collect information to the point of being irritating. So this week I'm going to assess what my situation is as of August '08, and then map out my plan of action for dealing with my stuff for the rest of the year. If you have chronic illness and feel like you are spinning your wheels in the mud, this is how I have survived 20 years of lupus, severe fibromyalgia, and a variety of complications that include things like Lyme disease, heart surgery, and a really wacky immune system.
Kinda what's been happening this week. I'm talking to myself because no one else wants to talk to me like this.
The cold hard truth about illness is that it sux. Just like with my Asperger's, I pretend to be 'ok' or 'normal' with my illnesses, too, because I learned real fast no one likes a whiny butt with a bad attitude. That's the real me, but I can't be the real me without people walking away in disgust, and I have learned to hide the howling blackness so I don't scare the straights. But the real me is the survivor. I don't whitewash the crap I go through to myself. I punch the virtual walls and grab myself by the collar and shake me. There is a piece of brain that refuses to go down with the ship, and thank God I go through the really crabby stuff, because I think it has helped save my life more than once.
I actually do this to people that I love-
Because, damn it, it takes a mean person to survive a mean disease or illness. And my gut reaction is that any time I see someone else whimpering with their pain, I want to kick *them* into full blown whiny shit kicking mode, too, so *they* can survive. This isn't about life sux so someone owes me something. This is about Indiana Jones hanging off a cliff and climbing back up. It's about Jack Bauer breaking people's necks after he's been tortured nearly to death. It's about Cat Woman getting fed up and raking her claws around rich bastards. It's about ~*~surviving~*~. I personally know a woman who wisped away to her death, refusing to make the necessary changes in her life that would have made all the difference and possibly given her 20 more less miserable years, in spite of surgeries and medications galore. There are a number of corporate conglomerates, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical CEOs who aren't going to like what I have to say in this post.
True story.
Yes, the imagery helps. If your senses are too delicate for this post, go away, and don't pretend to feel sorry for people you don't understand. True story. Years ago I was working in a hospital. I was preparing to put my things away and step onto an elevator to move on to another floor when a couple of older ladies stepped onto the elevator with me. They were dressed in nice clothing, had nice hair, nice jewelry, but they were not being very nice. The lady they had come to see was on the cancer floor, and since I'd cleaned her room earlier and spoken to her, I knew she was terminal any time, and that she was distraught with a number of issues about being afraid, stuff about her family, feeling all alone since her husband died, etc. So the ladies on the elevator (probably from this woman's church) were disgusted that they had taken a really expensive beautiful flower arrangement to this sick woman, and she hadn't even said thank you. She had gone on and on about something going on in her family, and she didn't even acknowledge that they came out to visit her and bring her flowers. And I'm standing there thinking- You expected her to be a gracious *hostess* on her death bed???? My God, people, the woman is ~dying~, and you're griping about her failure to say thank you for the flowers. And that leaves so much wide open to wonder about, like how those nice ladies could judge someone in need like that and think they were better than her because they played a *social game* correctly. They weren't really there to comfort a dying woman. There were there for brownie points. And I can't help but also wonder if the church paid for the flowers, in which case the nice ladies were even that much more ugly about getting that thank you.
Srsly how I feel about comments. I don't need pats on the back cheering me on. If you can't get out there and plow walls with me, just stand back before the bricks fly with me tearing that wall down.
So if you've never known anyone personally or yourself lived with chronic or terminal illness, your advice is not welcome here. (My mom used to be very eager to give others advice on vitamin E and herbs and stuff without any experience or medical knowledge whatsoever, so I'm a bit sensitized to that kind of zeal.) This is partly why I turned comments off. I don't waste my time with ignorance and pretense. It's my 'aspie way'. I am who I am and I don't care if someone gets upset about it. The rest of you who agree with me, thank you, but I don't feel the need to show that off to anyone by hosting it in visible comments.
I go on, but that's the gist of it. THAT is where it originally all started. Pinky blog is a continuation of Bluejacky. Bluejacky is too gut punchy. Pinky said tone it down a bit.
click pic for more memes
Now where were we? I started out looking for fun, wound up with nukes and a crabby rant. I need to get back on track. I was thinking that maybe in December (tomorrow) I need to go in a different direction than last year. Last December I did a countdown thingy and facepalmed midway over the archive stacking up with identical title beginnings, and by January I was just weird. I floated into dissociation land and wound up on handfuls of meds and then spent nearly the entire year dealing with ignoring a real problem (surgery this month could have been done 9 months ago) and winding up with multiple problems swamping me because I was over medicated.
pic clicks to interesting demotivational collection
And I'm still talking too much, but surely I'll be cured by the time someone is free to hang out on game later, if all works out. My internet was pretty sketchy today. Thankfully, a fiber optic crew has been out this week getting the entire subdivision prepped for a massive fiber optic installation, and their equipment is all parked up and down the street in front of my house. They made it to my house just as it was time to stop and go home, so first thing in the morning it's going to be noisy. Can't complain though if I wind up with fiber for Christmas.
I am admittedly worn out from this post. I just want to lay down for a bit before I get on game. Hopefully I don't fall asleep and miss anyone. I'll pass along what got shared to me today, it's really cute.
I WANT ALL OF THESE
pic clicks out to way more pink mug stuff
I especially like 'live what you love', 'prove them crazy wrong', and 'make it happen'
I'm actually back up to my 2 extra large cups of coffee every morning. I was doing really well cutting back for about a week and I guess just hit a big ol' rebound over the last few days while I was juggling a few eggs and chainsaws. One of those sucker punch weekends on all fronts, and today feels like the 3rd Monday in a row kind of thing.
I grew up in a world of stigma and have seen all the nasty things it can do to relationships and self worth. Inserting stigma into any convo is the fastest way in the world to sabotage, using stigma in social structure is the surest way to mass control.
Fuck stigma. I don't care who thinks or says what about me any more, and I'm going to keep saying honesty and transparency are the path to healing, from micro to macro. Everyone benefits from this point of view.
If you want to stay trapped in stigma (and bless your hearts, I know it is so hard), then realize that you make the conscious choice to allow others to victimize, harass, and emotionally (sometimes physically) rip you. Yes, I know that simply deciding to flip to the other side of the coin doesn't solve all the problems, but like I've been saying in public blogs since 2008- MAKE A PLAN.
Who are you?
Who do you want to be?
How do you get what you want?
What small steps will it take in between the bigger stepping stones to reach your destination?
Social mapping is foreign to me. I suck at understanding human interaction. That doesn't mean I can't learn to navigate the choppy waters, lurking undercurrents, and deadly rocks jutting up from below. I don't have to be shipwrecked because of a rock I didn't see coming. I don't have to stay beached in a place I never wanted to be. I don't have to be sucked into a downdraft and drown because someone else is oblivious or mean.
And I don't have to be mean about it myself. All I gotta do is walk away from it, float over the top of it, steer around it, and keep sailing to where I want to go with my life.
For some people this will mean literally leaving families. For others this means simply adjusting schedules. Any change is always disruptive, and sometimes our comfort zones are deep ruts carved into dysfunctional relationships for reasons. Could be money, could be physical or mental handicaps, could be anything. But tiny incremental small changes over time add up to big changes you never dreamed you could make happen.
I've spent the last 5 years blogging my way through small stepping away from hopeless helpless despair because I wanted to. I had an idea I believed (desperately hoped) could work, and yes, it's working even way better than I ever imagined. I put together my own care team, I put together a plan with clearly defined goals, and I asked for my care team to help me. This care team includes
primary care physician
chiropractor
psychologist
endocrinologist
gynocologist
neurologist
psychiatrist
physical therapy team
massage therapy person
I sought out all those people (and my family) and told them they are part of my team, and that they would all know all the things all the rest do. They all have input, and therefore I've been able to successfully stay off meds that exacerbate problems. My favorite is the neurologist wanting me back on amitriptyline for nerve pain and my psychiatrist letting me know that would make anything mood related much worse. In the past I floundered through so much confusion with only one doctor trying to handle all my stuff, and wound up so miserable and sick all the time that I literally crumbled into immobility and loss of function. Her abruptly abandoning her practice for hospital work and leaving me dangling for 4 months set me on a path that ultimately saved my life.
I crawled my way back out of that, I'm honest with all my people about all my things, I ask for very specific help with reasons why and what I hope to get out of it, and they are more than happy to help me. No more confused wandering through a health care system for me, thanx.
I am #aspienado. I know who I am, what I want, and where I'm going, and I hope to be good for other people so that my life won't feel wasted at the end of it. The legal diagnoses I listed in my last post don't mean I can't make decisions about my own health care (including mental health). Yes, I deal with a mountain of stuff, but that doesn't mean I am incapable of seeking out advice and making educated decisions about how to go forward into making my life better, and I trust my team to guide me through what I don't yet understand.
The most important thing I ever did in my life was learn to ask others for help. I don't instinctively trust anyone, and I'm super fail at reading people, so that was hard. In order to get good help, I put together lists of questions I needed answers to, and I learned to keep it simple and focused so that I wouldn't overwhelm anyone, because I really am an overwhelming person when I get going, and often other people don't realize quite where they triggered a mass of confusion in me that tips my world over. It's called the KISS method and I learned it in high school. Keep It Simple, Stupid.
That regular 'heartbeat' you see at the beginning of the last 7 days, what I termed the Master's knocking, completely died out over the last 24 hours. This is the first time in MONTHS I have seen normal stats, i.e. real people coming and going. Several posts on the auto hitting scored well over 1500 hits apiece (one wound up over 2000, but I think part of that was actual traffic from a special interest group), and I am still so calloused from seeing fake traffic that I can barely believe real people actually hit them, but I see once in awhile that they really do. Also must've gotten picked up on someone's content curator on the 1st, that spike the other day was a surprise post from the past that had nothing to do with the auto hitting, and surges continued through the day to one particular post. Since actual posting had gone completely dead during that time, I can't take any personal credit for that at all, so thank you to whoever.
I'm doing my best not to fall into the "I'm missing Syfy's Sharknado Week with the Snarkalecs live tweeting" abyss, but last night I dove into the #ToxicShark feed for a few minutes and absolutely loved it. I miss that so bad. Sharknado 5: Global Swarming airs this coming Sunday night, and I.WILL.BE.THERE. I still think the Sharknado franchise is the most brilliant all-inclusive contract collection ever conceived. Check out Sharknado: Know Your Meme.
Meanwhile, not quite keeping up live with GoT and several other shows, catching up when we can.
I've gotta mention that I finally caught a possible Stan Lee nod on Doc McStuffins. In one particular special hour-long episode titled Welcome to McStuffinsville, we learn that Grandma shares in Doc's secret and gives her a 'toysponder' disguised as a bandaid that transports them to a world of toys, and Doc is promoted to head of the toy world hospital. Along the way, there is a broken toy named Stanley who plots to break lots of toys in order to make new friends that will have to hang out with him. At one point a giant magnet is turned on, entrapping toys containing metal, and Stuffy turns to him saying, "Not cool at all! Stanley, you don't have to do this!", and Stanley replies, "I do, Stuffy. I do." I've seen that ep a few times because it's in Bunny's top ten, and today I happened to be looking away from the screen when that line came through, and I heard it- "Stan Lee, you don't have to do this!" and immediately flashed back on all the cool evil villain scenes, and everything about Stanley clicked perfectly into Stan Lee's superhero wisdom and how villains originate. The scene was absolutely perfect, and if you're a Marvel fan, just *wow*. I loved it. Oh, look, I found it on youtube. See if you think it sounds like Stuffy says "Stan Lee" at that spot, about a minute into this.
My brain is on Hyper Active right now, so I'm slinging thru some new uploads.
And some old ones.
Those of you who envisioned me sitting here buried in youtube, I've jumped up from this chair 8 times since I started this post, and paused each of the vids at least 5 times. Live blogging. I'm not sure how Sunday evening will go, but I've announced to my family that I'll be camped in the livingroom with my tech rolling thru live tweet feeds that will not stop for anything, and I imagine I provoked every Loki in the multiverse just saying that. That means any and all of the following list could happen during my attempt to focus on something I enjoy for 2 hours straight-
death (srsly, how many times has someone in my vicinity DIED {or nearly died} right after I actually announced something, and y'all know I've got the blogs to prove it)
dismemberment (hey, if a chainsaw accident can happen within an eighth mile of me on Father's Day, anything can happen)
epic natural disaster (how many times has Missouri flooded this year?)
epic tech fail (I will be risking a 4 year old {and other adults} walking by with liquids that hopefully have tightly sealed lids on them)
epic facepalm (drama never stops, and if ANYONE jolts my family into sadness in the middle of my joy {looking at YOU, ex idiot}, I will def make you famous)
various and sundry odds and ends just simply going wrong, because that's what the cosmos DOES
During that list I completely stopped for something else and then got up 2 more times. Start placing your bets on whether I actually get to live tweet Sharknado 5. 😁
I need to make Sunday a party day. I'll hafta think of some fun food.
I'm thinking chocolate pie with an ocean meringue. I may not get much more creative than that if I keep sidetracking into other stuff.
Most of all, I miss live tweeting my fave TV doctor who, by the way, actually has a medical degree. Wild veer down a youtube path there. See ya.
Wonder if that would happen a lot more if I'd boost this post. I've never boosted a post on Facebook, but I probably will once the book comes out. One of these will click to the twitter link, which already has over 400 impressions in less than 12 hours, the other will click to its new Autisable home.
And I really don't know if that had anything to do with waking up to a Google Alert that Janika Banks has been added to a German white pages listing on Denmark internet.
This is translated.
And I wanted to see if that's a real thing, and sure enough, comes up on page 3 in a Google search for Janika Banks. Brand new out of the bag.
A couple of years ago someone told me they were going to write up my Wikipedia page, and I laughed and said sure, go ahead. No one really has yet, but for some reason I've either been auto-boosted into legitimate search or manually entered by someone on a job or weirdly obsessed. I'm going with auto boost for now. There are so many automated info pages out there I could claim (traity was dumb, I had it for awhile and let it go), but that's way too much work.
Like I told a friend privately a few days ago- "If I don't get my crap done by end of summer, I'm an idiot. My launch platform has never been more visible."
So I get a porn boost right on top of #netneutrality, crack me up, and then I get a major Google Alert on top of my self-stim post. Never in any parallel dimension did I wildly dream of sex selling anything about Janika Banks. Wow.
:edit: Space Cowboy suggests putting pretty girls in vids to sell merch. Pretty sure some of us are in it for the actual music, so here you go.
Also, this is a thing. I have lifetime potential earnings of $33, crack me up. Bet that would change real quick if I could get some of my friends talking with me about Lexx and stuff. Anyway, you can get into this and click around, kinda fun checking out other channels. Very handy.
Cautiously optimistically hoping the asthma flare is about over. o_o Woke up breathing normally for the first time in at least 2 weeks or longer. ... Well, maybe not. Sorta still coughing.
I've been saying this is my worst allergy year since 2010, but this week screamed past that and left it behind in the dust, so 2016 is now officially my worst. This is the kind of week where my anxiety should be kicking in like crazy, but I'm getting through it GREAT. Well, comparatively speaking. I haven't run in to town to be around people in case I die, worst case scenario kind of stuff. I haven't even paced my floor very much at all. I've mostly just glued myself to minecraft, which was amazing for taking my mind off time passing and all the sensations irking my nervous system, very soothing, considering I've been in and out of asthma flare since probably sometime in March, because I thought the cough was something else for awhile. Think what you will, but being stuck home alone for 12 hours a day with a medical situation with no one around on your road to call in case there's trubba tends to lend to more anxiety than you'd think, even for a recluse like me.
And the best part of yesterday was getting Kai to myself for a few hours. That doesn't happen very often for various reasons in both our lives, but when it does, I can so thoroughly immerse into minecraft that I don't even think about anything else bothering me, which is pretty monumental when your nervous system is in 250% overload.
I've never yet built a big structure or a real house in minecraft. Usually that's one of the first things most people do, go build something. All my houses are like tiny huts or bunkers, not even on par with a nice cottage. I've got base camps deep in mine shafts and scattered across landscapes on several worlds, but no real house or building. I've been noticing how the way I play minecraft reflects the roots of who I am. I have lived in a nice house for 23 years that @bonenado designed and built, and even though I was supposed to have some input, didn't really get what I wanted beyond bare specs that got readjusted for this reason or that. I felt for a long time like this wasn't even my house, since my stepdaughter and mother-in-law kept reminding me it wasn't. I haven't been free to decorate to my own taste, which I've mentioned, which has been more than ironic since I'm living in a neighborhood full of retirees with money who seem to get to relish what they want in life.
And it started way before that. I was in the 9th grade when we moved to Missouri to a big acreage with an old house only heated by a woodstove, very campy in every sense. Real Things You Might Not Know About Me My brother slept on a screened in porch on a cot most of the time. After graduating, I traveled the summer and then came back to my parents having moved to another big acreage and a completely different house without even telling me (WHO DOES THAT???) and I wound up sleeping on a floor for 6 months until I finally got a bed. When I got married a year later, I wound up living out of a car for a week and a skanky hotel room for a month, and one horrible used trailer after another. I finally got my own apartment after I divorced and scraped some student loans together to escape being back at my parents' crap house, which had been converted from a machine shop.
My life from birth to 8th grade never once indicated I'd live like that. We started pretty well off. My mom had upper middle class relatives sprinkled around here and there. Her marriage to dad was snubbed as a step down, but she couldn't resist a cowboy on a motorcycle who dreamed of owning his own ranch. My view of materialism is a unique blend of tasteful elegance (gold silverware and table etiquette) and bunkhouse simplicity and functionality.
So getting into minecraft and seeing people build what they wish they had (I'm assuming) has only triggered a lot of tangled and somewhat painful memories for me. If I do any kind of real building in minecraft, it's certainly not going to be typical. I've been thinking about what kind of building I want for months while I stay busy doing other things.
On April 9th I accidentally cross loaded my multiplayer ID onto singleplayer and wiped my hostile mobs right out of existence on chicken world. Life there instantly became boring. I was there to experiment with moats and had just about figured out the weird physics of trapping mobs in water flow. Well, without the mobs to experiment on, that only turned out to be a drag.
So what do I do? Start running. I had worked so hard setting up in this world, the least I can do is run around and go see it. Found a village on the plains, obviously bombed up a bit in the night by creepers but still thriving with gardens and animals and villagers. Stuff like that really makes a person think about quantum observation- does the game play itself even if I never see it? Does it create and spawn chunks as I come near? Mobs seem to spawn because of my presence, but they had already hit this village and I wasn't even there. Well, problemo solved since I cross loaded. I amused myself for an hour in the village and then took off running again.
And then that translated to multiplayer, where I'd already played around with tree farming and plowing beaches for glass manufacturing, made highways in deep cracked caverns like I was a dwarf. I just wanted to run. I thought OK, if I find a cool place to set down my own roots and actually build a house or something, let's see what comes out of my head.
Years ago during an attempt at a masters in guidance and counseling, my house-tree-person house was a 2D floor plan, and I guess I was the first person in 30 years that the teacher (a child psyche professional) had ever seen do that. No one knew how to analyze it, so I self analyzed it to mean I wasn't hiding a thing, you get to see the guts of my thinking and I'll even detail it for you like a blueprint, but I was obviously missing emotional depth and indicators of any kind to interpersonal connections in my life (the house drawing generally indicates one's relationship to a mother figure, which barely existed for me). When put together with my tree (a very pointy Christmas tree full of baubles and chopped off from the roots, many signs of anger and disconnection from my father) and my person (a cartoon me in a bikini doing a circus act on a horse with a big smile and my eyes shut, a pretty vivid indication of splatting myself all over people without truly sharing myself), yeah, my childhood was a mess. Along with other tests we had to practice doing and analyzing, I pretty much hit schizophrenia on the head, but my MMPI and a personal interview nixed that one, the teacher saying my anger issues, exhibitionism, and wildly different ways of doing things only seemed to hide that I actually have a stable personality and an emotionally healthy way of dealing with stuff. That was about a year or two before the word Asperger's ripped around the world. They had no word for me yet. I realized by the second semester in that I would hate being a professional counselor (many of the ones I've met say I'd be a really good one and have tried to push me back into the field), and switched to a masters in resource planning. After my sociology/anthropology degree, I took to geology and geographical statistical analysis and NEPA laws like a duck. And then you throw in several jobs I've had, like retail, and next thing you know, I'm in minecraft multiplayer helping other retailers play store.
Is it any wonder people love minecraft? I can only wonder if psyche analysis will start extending to what players create and do instead of just people whining about their kids or SOs being addicted to gaming. Minecraft is the most house-tree-person thing I've ever seen. I can run through other people's buildings and basically typecast their emotional lives. I've been professionally trained.
So yeah. Me finally making a commitment to building a real thing on minecraft is kind of a big deal. The real me is going to come out. The most surprising part, for me, was once I found the spot I like (didn't have to run very far), I immediately told Kai. I knew sharing would be too exciting to control, and sure enough, I had to relog over some serious lag issues and found Kai already all over an idea I'd mentioned without me even being there. That is a huge step for me. I have trust issues galore. If I'd truly wanted to think of my building as mine, I'd never have shared my ideas in the first place. I am gloriously reclusive in my wild exhibitionism. I love hiding and springing forth. (If I were a cat, I'd be the most annoying pet you have.) Ever since kindergarten my life is rife with "Does not play well with others", and jobs only confirmed "Does not work well with others", and while none of my blurting and doing is because of animosity, I do disdain and bypass the human connections one must make first, like saying Hello, how was your day? I bounce all over people like SpongeBob, then disembowel them verbally like Spock without a single thought to how my opinion might make someone feel. Thankfully, the relog was quick and the repercussion of Kai's enthusiasm was mild, and cool stuff happened. I doubt anything this cool would have come out of blending my head with anyone else.
I'm not going to spoil yet, but I can already tell you this is NOT going to be a typical house. We've got a sky island like Avatar, for one thing, so bridging a skyway over to it and extending it was inevitable. And then Kai had run off exploring and had me come see a witch's hut in a swamp (those are cool), and was going to show me the way back, but we both got killed at the same time and then got turned around, but it was all fortuitous because we found inspiration. If you've never ridden down a waterfall on minecraft, you've gotta try it, especially if you find one this big.
As you can imagine, taking that idea home to the sky island was instant fun. This is the short vid of our new waterslide. Kai originally started it way higher but the water kept freezing up.
~later~
We've got a Bunny spending tonight, so went out and picked up some tiny ice creams and baby bananas and other fun munchies, and a kite.
Despite my years of analytical training in several fields, it took fandoms to plug me in emotionally.
Those emotional connections are so important.
The key to a fandom sometimes hangs on that connection. I want to turn that key and change the world.
To call this improvement is almost a massive understatement. I'm trying to get out the door, doing 5 things at once, grabbed shoes and sox and leaned my butt against a wall putting them on, and it hit me while I was doing it that it was the first time I've put shoes on AND tied them standing up on the first try in very many years. Between my hands sucking and my terrible balance problems since the accident, I've actually spent a few years not being able to tie shoes at all (went to velcro), and even sitting and tying shoes was difficult at best. So to be standing and putting onning and tying without a thought is IMPROVEMENT.
~yesterday afternoon~
I told the occupational therapist that and she totally put notes in my chart.
I keep forgetting to call my Dad (srsly, this our talk history- Dec. 26, Feb. 1, and last night), so he called last night and we talked about ladybugs for 34 minutes. I read him the stuff I found about them being fakes, how to tell real from fakes, basically the entire infestation SW MO has been going through is all fakes, and it doesn't matter, he still opens a window for them so they can get out, or carries them gently outside. I finally broke Scott of doing that this year. And it hit me last night rereading through some of the articles that the reason my house has been smelling so weird this year is because we have millions of these things in the walls. Fake ladybugs have a gross odor, and my house often smells like someone's old sour sock when the heat comes on. I'm the one stuck at home all the time smelling this, by the time Scott comes home the house smells like supper cooking. Anyway, all the extra cleaning I've been doing, it's really these stupid fake ladybugs piling up in our central vacuum tank because all our vacuum hoses hook up to the walls. x_x I told @bonenado that seemed like a dumb idea.
It's ok, I'm mostly just crabby because my arms and hands ache again and there's not much more I can do about it. And I can't eat pancakes any more on #nationalpancakeday because I'm diabetic.
Aside from general pain-related crabbiness, I've noticed my 'nerves' have gone down pretty sharply over the last month. I haven't felt this laid back in ages, it's wonderful. I keep waiting for a shoe to drop or something, but I'm driving without anxiety attacks, I'm handling all my stuff, I'm keeping my money straight, and I'm not sweating stats and analytics like a game I have to win. Last couple of weeks have even been enjoyable, which is interesting because I've had some pretty difficult days and nights that normally have me cycling through a daily hitting and splatting a wall thing. I mean, I don't think my depression is cured or anything, but I'm not manic and floaty and I'm not cringey and weepy, and I'm not pacing around pissed and plotting revenges, and I'm not eating all day or losing myself in anything. It feels like the pressure is gone. There was always this pressure I put on myself to keep grinding through stuff.
~this morning~
I have unfollowed nearly 1500 twitter accounts now. I kept wondering why so many keep sticking around in spite of that (my actual follower number has only dropped around 500), like, surely they can't like me that much, right? So I just started going down a list and checking, and you wouldn't believe how many of those accounts went dead. Real people, just stopped. Did they die? Get bored? Get new phones and lose their passwords? So many mysteries.
At any rate, I see no point in following people who've not tweeted a thing since 2013 or 2014. This makes me feel even more cautious about new followers. I think I've followed about 5 back this last week that seemed pretty real. I can't help noticing that amid the hundreds of dead accounts I've unfollowed (over 500 just in the last few days), which the only other person I know on twitter also identically followed from the moment we met, there's one new account that followed a few of us recently but not that person yet. I can't help feeling this is a very pointed point that someone besides me is making a point of. No one else seems to care. Auties and spoonies and hashtag bloggers and other still active accounts in what I thought was my somewhat unique blend of followers is exactly duplicated by what I'm now coming to recognize as the biggest troll I've ever met in my life. I think what's hitting home is how the words "care" and "love" mean nothing more than a numbers game and winning a popularity contest. I might not have even given this a second thought except for that blaring inconsistency from that new follower catching my eye and really driving that point home, because I know the duplicator noticed (I cannot believe how many of my far flung acquaintances even from the Merlin and Sherlock fandoms are duplicated into that follower list, when none of them have ever interacted and this person has never seen the shows- the only common denominator is me), and jumped up and down trying to get noticed and followed, too. Srsly, nearly my entire follower list was identically duplicated, and I was following nearly 3000 people.
Oh, well. I just don't know how to fake it is all. I need to stop whining like a pathetic loser. If I'm interpreting this feeling correctly, I think it means the whole thing still hurts and I just don't know what to do with my feelings. I might seem arrogant, but I spent a rough hour last night feeling just plain stupid for being so openly stupid, easily manipulated and used for years by a person calling me friend, so easily pushed this way and that into directions I never meant to go. I feel like I'm peeling the twitter smear off so I can start over again. Some people just delete and make new accounts, but I've already been through rebuilding from scratch and I'm not doing that again, so I'm peeling it off and cleaning house smudge by smudge. I know exactly who I am, what I like, and what I'm doing now. Nothing galls me more than someone making like they're cool and copying ALL my interests and obsessions and still not lifting a finger to learn anything about them or even watch a single episode of a show *I* love. I mean, srsly, following Merlin and Sherlock and autism and #MondayBlogs and spoonies.
A couple of people are already saying this is just a phase and we'll be friends again soon. People who say this based on the public interaction they witnessed do not have a clue how deeply this runs, and how utterly and terribly aspie Aspienado is. The line is crossed. The moment has passed. The damage is irreparable if I won't shut my eyes and play along to someone else's game again.
I said it once before- it takes a lot of guts to stand up to someone on public social media. It takes a great big load of pride swallowing to keep revealing myself as a real person when everything I'm doing is being watched by people who keep me on notification. Only a tiny handful even have a clue about the public fights and side taking I never allowed to erupt by people wanting to protect me, even before any of it showed up on blogs. And last night it finally processed and really hit home how very visible my gullible stupidity was to those people all this time. Bystanders watched all the teasing, all my confusion, all the pain, and then they watched me put a stop to it after 3 years of sleeve tugging. What one person hasn't seemed to figure out yet is that I'm the one showing autie parents what's in their kids' heads, and giving them hope for their naturally innocent and easily manipulated loved ones surviving their futures all grown up. I broke through a lifelong emotional disconnect and communication barrier, and I'm building a bridge of understanding, brick by brick, and everything and everyone that happens to me becomes part of the brickwork.
Like I said, no more telling me to shut up, no more icing over the depression cake. No more feeling stupid over mixing up the word 'love' with 'troll'.
Don't forget this is about losing. "Sentiment is a chemical defect found in the losing side," so says Sherlock Holmes. It's imperative that I lose, and lose big. I imagine Jack Sparrow would understand. We lose to ~*win*~.
Yesterday's vid from my 'StarStruck' world was captured full screen and took for-EV-er to load, and then spilled over on my phone so I could only see one section of the vid on my screen, so today I vid capped on shrunk screen, hopefully that problem goes away. I carried my mountaintop house idea over to 'Pinky' World and turned it into a hunting lodge. I cannot say enough how wonderfully absorbing this was for distraction. Didn't need anyone to talk me down or through anything on a phone, didn't crave more than a couple of touch bases (apologies to the person who suffered the written wordiness) (remember I'm home alone 12 hours a day through the week, I don't have coworkers or customers or any other human contact), so in future if you don't see me much here or there on social media, if I'm not working on a writing project or going to appointments and running errands I'll probably be somewhere on minecraft, thanks again to Kai being so super patient with me helping me transition over. Aspies can get very stuck in ruts and everything new is stubbornly resisted until it flips into obsession. Those of you with autie kids will totally get this. This is your autie kid all grown up now learning to slide into a different interaction mode that also helps distract from or navigate through anxiety. I used to game alone and people have actually and quite literally dragged me off a console in the past because I go down that hole so hard, so I stopped anything games for several years (along with weaning off other addictions), so now I'm learning how to game in a healthier way with real people.
Honesty is key, isn't it? According to this logic, the guy who called me an f-ing psycho on a public feed and then blocked me was a true friend, because at least I got some real closure.
Some people don't give you real closure, even if they've been part of your life for a very long time. I'll call that bluff and raise it, because no more head games.
Moving on. Part 2 is going out of control. The whole Vigl thing is just a delight, the jealousy in the political ranking is intriguing, and basically I just go full blown psyche analyzing Mantrid. If I say any more I'll wind up doing a lengthy summary right here right now, so best stop. Here, have a screen cap from old lappy that I'm not going to use because I started all over again on Jawn.
Oh, what the heck, have another one.
Feeling silly today, but this vid is so wonderfully done. Need to get my workout going and get all over a project.
In that quiet period where the bots have all gone off to crawl other blogs. If this were minecraft it would mean I could work without interruption. On blogger I am always in /gamemode 1 here in the editor. I don't notice the bots until I /gamemode 3 over to another place where I can watch them blink in and out with the people.
Had a great talk with psyche guy yesterday about going full blown hypomanic this week. I usually just float in a euphoric luvfest, but this one twisted into a massive flameout and I have eaten numerous heads without a single feeling about it. Pure animal. If I were someone's pet, it would be more adorable, because I'd be furry all over and have a tail and this would be the perfect time to post pix of the evil pounce thing. Funny how it's not adorable when humans do it.
This is where the last, what, six or 9 months of blogging kicks in. It's all out here. Every shred of my personality, confessions galore, warning after warning... This is aspienado dealing with a week of very high pain spikes (cervical, another MRI being scheduled) and bipolar and doing my best to work through this as honestly as I can. No head meds, no street drugs, only two cups of coffee a day, I don't smoke, no alcohol, just me and my head for 12 hours a day. I set my psyche guy scheduling for every two weeks through March instead of just a once a month touch base. Whatever is going on needs a little more supervision.
I do love my head like this, though, it's helping me make some executive decisions I otherwise have trouble making. I'm a very indecisive creature, was hammered into my head throughout childhood to put other people first, and that has definitely shown up as a consistent problem trying to go more public. The people who keep an eye on me are very patient, but after several years of watching me fumble and stumble my way through defining and redefining the word 'friend' to myself in my head, several have stepped up in the last few months and very bluntly told me to just stop. My focus had gotten so entirely lost over the holidays that I was clearly off track. Like this. Yes, that is an evil bunny. He will eat you. Look at the red eyes.
I wrote a bunch more stuff here and then deleted it all. (You're welcome.) I've only spent months writing out my angsting and confessions, if that's meaningless to some, so be it. No one ever said someone owes me reciprocation. Whatever that problem I'm having in my head is all about is exactly that- my problem. There've been plenty of times in my past that I was unable to reciprocate myself. I of all people should understand that. Doesn't mean I'm good with it, though. Gonna chuck this one over to the pain spikes and walk off. When it comes down to it, I know exactly what the definition of 'friend' is.
The description for this song touches me personally. "It broke me also seeing how John remained faithful to Sherlock, despite S saying that their relationship was just a lie. When everybody else doubted him, he was there, standing beside is friend and not letting the words throw him down. They love each other, they COMPLETE each other, and no one can deny it :)"
And this is my head. After one of the best winters I've had in over 12 years, this has been one of the worst weeks I've had in a very long time. I just want to say, if *I*, of all people, can publicly and very honestly blog through my real stuff, you guys reading this can make the step toward healing through your own depressions and addictions and sadnesses. Find a way. Get help. I've spelled out how. If you are hanging on and need to keep reading, here is everything on Pinky blog tagged 'depression'.
And quite frankly, I'm missing Merlin pretty badly this week. Just hanging out, waiting for the brain chemicals to lighten up, like you do...
This is a continuation from the nuts before Christmas- part 1, part 2, and part 3. I ran my data plan out and couldn't get this really long HD vid loaded until it rolled over again, router refused to handle it.
If this is your first jump in, my family is ASD, and @bonenado's family is ADHD, so it was really interesting getting Bunny and Batman together in one house for the first time. Parts 1 and 2 were watching the kids acclimate by running around, part 3 was watching Bunny experiment on my dad (super young ADHD + super old ASD). Part 4 here is Batman retreating into the laundry room, which makes a really good cave for kids and pets who come into our house, and Bunny adjusting back down from the wild activity when he disappeared.
I've noticed with Bunny being super social (I'm not, I've had to adapt) that keeping a running dialogue with her works really well, and apparently Batman picked up on that and even adapted to it himself. Bunny has a much bigger vocabulary and was speaking in complete sentences by the time she turned 2 like her mama did (they're both 2 1/2 here), but Batman is more inward like his mama was at that age, and I don't remember her talking a lot with me until 3-4 years old, and anyone could tell when she didn't pay attention on purpose because she preferred being in her own little bubble. Bunny kind of walked in all over Batman's bubble because she wanted him to come back out and run with her again, and I got a kick out of how their communication signals crossed and then started smoothing out. I think this would be a great intro vid for child social psyche students. I felt kind of like a brain interface for awhile, but it's something I've become used to. I'm saying that last bit because the simplistic narration I use in the beginning actually annoys me silly (ASD), but it really does work when one can be patient enough to handle 20 minutes of interface adjustment, like I was doing here. My opinion is that neither barking orders nor interfering work well with neuro collisions, and that patience and narrative are key to same-paging, essentially lining up our brains. I can imagine teachers and daycare workers not having the time to apply this on more personal level, so I applaud programs that help begin integrating neuro atypicals together before they slam through the culture shock of suddenly going to school. I'm pro neurodiversity, and I believe all of us have talents and skills that we can find niches for.
click pic for
"37 Cats Inside Things That Are Much Too Small"
I've either broken my Pinky statcounter or you guys have successfully graduated to hardcore lurkers like I've taught you. Blogger says I'm getting steady traffic and shows legitimate referrals, statcounter says "What people? I didn't see any people." But as much as I've messed around with it, it's very possible I've corrupted the config. I could reset, but then all previous data is unrecoverable, so one of these days I might just add another one to pick up from now-ish and see if that works. Still feeling too lazy to do more than muse on it right now, though.
I'm crashing through a depressive cycle this week, which I was expecting because I was a bit euphoric for awhile again through December, so I'm doing all the usual routine stuff that keeps me functional while it passes, like house chores and research. I have a hard time watching TV when I'm like this, so I have ventured into a friend's RP forum for a good story to help distract me through this, and I'm loving it. In case you're new to me and would like more info about my head stuff, I'll put it at the bottom of this post, which you're welcome to skip down to if you don't want to read this next bit.
One of my distractions is writing through the aspie chaos in my head on weeks like this because focusing on a writing prompt helps my mood stay more balanced, so here we go, a whole buncha sex stuffs, lol. Close your eyes if you're easily miffed by discussions that challenge your belief system, whatever it is. I'll tell you when you can open them back up.
~~~~~~
One of the more amusing things I've run into in the last week was a trans friend wanting to know in a protected status update why asexuals were making a big deal planting their flag if they don't even want sex, because it can only be an attention-seeking thing, surely.
I've known since puberty that I'm pan (there was no word for it back then) and since high school that I prefer androgyny, although I do also really like strong male and female figures as well. I came out pangender asexual on a public blog in 2008, before it was fashionable for regular people in mainstream lives outside of entertainment to do that. That blog (one of so many I've had) is gone now, so I can't link to it, although several people in my life are aware and are fine with it. I don't bring it up much, although I have written about it here and there.
6-15-15 Khanlock One of the most popular posts I've ever created, and I never mention sexuality in any form.
7-1-08 self stim (this is an ongoing debate I have with my psychologist over aspie-autie kids having no self awareness during compulsive erogenous neuro stim, which I'm sure parents of autism spectrum children have a little difficulty understanding) (The book I'm working on, Existential Aspie, will have a LOT of autie kid POV in it that I don't usually see out in public, based on my personal experiences.)
Plus I've also had fun mocking the whole subject of sex in some of my silly surveys through the years at Surveypalooza.
For anyone in the world looking at that list and the length of this post thinking I must be one of those people who yaps about their sex stuff, rest assured this was very much me most of my life. For those of you who've not yet seen The Abominable Bride, I must put the word "spoilers" here, but seriously, not really much of a spoiler. But yeah, this is me at parties, on dates, through two marriages...
I'd love to source this for you at 5 a.m. because I grabbed it with my phone, but that was 2 days ago and the original tweet is already so buried in the twitter feeds that it would take at least an hour and I'm not feeling that patient.
My issues started early, about the time I hit puberty. I'd been sent to school in dresses for years and fought for my first pair of jeans around fifth grade, which my mom was strongly against until a friend of hers, who had five boys and wasn't that terribly feminine herself, shrugged it off, and they went through a stack of rejects in an outlet dump and brought home bargains, one with a twisted leg, one with a leg shorter than the other. I was ecstatic simply because I'd won. After that my mom got hold of someone's hand-me-down flare leg jeans and I spent a glorious year getting my jeans caught in my bike chain over and over like normal kids were supposed to until the jeans were too shredded to wear.
Being allowed to wear jeans didn't solve my problem, of course. I still had to be a girl. I really didn't care that I was actually a girl, I just hated being continually reminded I wasn't girl enough. I didn't sit right or move right or stand right or behave right, and then when I took things too far it was nice girls don't do that, like shave my legs above my knees. A kid at school actually made fun of my knees having bangs in P.E. Top that one, I dare ya. I wolfed out when I hit puberty, despite being a girl. (Irony has brought a patchy alopecia into my life, and I very rarely need to shave my legs any more.)
I liked being an action figure, along with being the secret genius behind the schemes my friend and I pulled off. I liked running cross country and jumping over fences and out of trees (and off the roof), and tried a few times to jump my bike over things, resulting in some impressive scrapings up and nearly ruining my bike. I liked that boys got to look cool and be cool running around and hated that I was expected to stand around looking demure. I studied how the fastest boys naturally ran differently from girls and taught myself how to move the same way. Same thing with throwing. I practiced throwing rocks and balls over our barn roof after school for days until I could mimic the way the boys at school threw stuff. There was no way I would ever be caught "throwing like a girl". It was bad enough that 'girl' was derogatory, it was worse to not overcome it and just accept it as my fate. All this before I was even twelve, and all my mom could go on about was her exasperation with me. We fought constantly (passive-aggressively, I wasn't allowed to yell at her without severe consequences), and the root of it all was my refusal to be gender typed.
So, yeah, it's a big deal to stand up for being asexual pangender, because I was treatly poorly over being my natural self. It has nothing to do with accepting who I have sex with and whether I sin, but about standing up to a demanding society shoving me down into a tiny little box and not allowing me to shine in my natural capacity with the instincts I was born with. While other girls were fighting to wear hip huggers to school, I was fighting to let my God-given hair grow out on my legs that no one ever saw except in P.E., and I was such a joke already that it wouldn't have made a difference. Believe me, I've investigated every which way hairy legs and nylons could possibly have anything to do with my status as a human being, and that is the tiniest tip of the asexuality iceberg that was my problems growing up in an ultra conservative household. You'd think asexuality would be a plus in a setting like that. It wasn't. I caught all my mother's repressed sexual issues head on and flung them back with vehemence. I look back now and feel quite sorry for her feeling so stuck and frustrated with her own stuff and never being able to verbalize it.
What no one knew at the time was that I come from genetic stock heavily leaning into polycystic ovarian syndrome, and along with extremely heavy periods, I grew an impressive amount of body hair for awhile and developed a fairly aggressive personality. A doctor confirmed in my 30s that I was making way too much testosterone and put me on hormone therapy to help control and regulate that and several other symptoms. (This is coming to light as a fairly common condition.) These are not things I chose. I've always been able to feel the duality in my brain chemicals. I feel very 'boy' sometimes along with the girl. If my brain chemicals are prompting things in my body I have no control over, and these things are in turn prompting behaviors like acting out and aggression, how in the world have I chosen this? As I have learned more about myself, I have come to realize that no one chooses their sexuality. We are caught in waves of hormones and chemicals, and we all do the best we can with what's going on in our brains and bodies. I see no shame in this, and no reason to 'choose' against who we are in order to appease a larger society of anxious and guilt-ridden believers who would rather turn their backs than forgive what they don't yet understand. People remind me of chickens sometimes, the really bossy ones pecking to death those who don't fall into step, out of sheer orneriness. How is continually picking on someone any different? You either love people or you don't. Actions speak louder than words. If there really is a God, and he really does promise a heaven, no wonder so many turn away when they're nearly picked to death for something they can't help and didn't choose.
My second best friend in high school was gay, and the treatment he went through got pretty ugly. A friend of his actually had to leave school out of fear for his life. Anyway, I had no problem being seen with him all over school, so he took me on my only date in high school to convince his mom everything was cool. She dropped us off at a movie, we never kissed, went back to his house, he showed me his bedroom, huge Marilyn Monroe poster on his wall, and he told me I had great lips and should be wearing lipstick. I still think that's a pretty awesome compliment.
Since many of my friends are gay, trans, alt, and whatever (I'm finding out there are a LOT of orientations out there), I barely even think about this stuff. I can swim in sex and never blink an eye, I am that asexual. Once in awhile my head turns, yes, but I miss unbelievable amounts of subtext and even blatant sex references in convos while at the same time I see it all around me much like a botanist would a forest. I grew up on a farm and know quite a lot about sexual anatomy and birthing and then wound up in nursing school for awhile, and I'm not squeamish at all, just terribly inexperienced with the social exchange that must accompany actual coupling up. I imagine I'd make a really good whorehouse madam or brothel priestess, sort of above it all and running things.
As for sex, I actually like it quite a lot, I just don't feel the need to share it with other people, and my asperger's makes it difficult for me to get past all the extra sensory overload anyway. Ever wonder why alcohol and sex go together? The entire human race would probably have died out long ago if it weren't for rape and alcohol. Yes, I actually believe that. I don't think most of the world has a clue what normal sex really is to begin with, especially belief systems that squelch women and children into third class citizenry, whether it's obvious or not. I grew up pretty third class right here in the United States. No one ever asked me growing up whether I had fallen in love with anyone. That just wasn't even a thing. The only reason I don't make a bigger deal of it is because I've met so many people who've actually been held hostage or have been owned either by default (family) or purchase (seriously, child trafficking) specifically for sex. Yes, right here in the United States. I've seen ultra conservative right wing Christians wink past the obvious under their noses to debate whether a divorced person can remarry without it being adultery, and I just walk away. Righteous people exasperate me.
Anyway, so I rarely find myself discussing the actual rights and wrongs of anything sex, but here we go. I grew up conservative, so naturally I start with the 'legalism' of faith. I'm not against faith, I'm just tired of it being used as a weapon or a shield.
The problem with debating about the natural order of nature being the correct way for things to work, especially if we are assuming a deity setting it all up, is running into little monkey wrenches like finding out male otters will steal harbor seal pups away and pleasure themselves on them to death, or that crabs will mate with so much gusto they kill off females that don't fight to get free. The instinct to mate is only that, a blind driven compulsion. The object of the mating, ideally, results in healthy offspring, but as we share more and more to the internet, we see a growing number of cats and squirrels doing sex trains, hunters having to get out of the way of elk or deer attempting to mate with their vehicles, the odd horse here or there rearing onto a police officer or rodeo clown for sex, dolphins happily pinning humans down, and I'll go so far as to say I actually saw a spider mate with a dead spider hanging limply in an old web, which is arachno-necrophilia. If natural sex has a directive for what is morally correct versus what is sinful, I'm not seeing it expressed so much as mowed over in the world around me, and I'm sorry, I can't blame all that on a fallen angel. And we must admit humans have been overseeing all kinds of breeding programs throughout human history, from cattle to fruit flies, and everything else on down to plant life. Anything that has DNA has been interfered with sexually by humans out of experimentation and the incentive for financial gain, which increases power, not to mention the food supply.
I saw this going around facebook yesterday (originally posted last summer), someone else doing research on why homosexuality is natural and important across the animal kingdom, and I agree it comes in pretty handy. (I'm not going to copy it here, sorry.) Case in point, my step daughter's mom has absolutely no natural mothering instinct just because she's a woman and gave birth. I grew up on a farm, we had farm animals like that, too, particularly noticeable among very young first time mothers, everything from cats to sheep and goats. If a first time birth is scary and too overwhelming, the mom rejects the babies and it's up to the kindness of strangers to make sure they stay alive and survive.
The Kindness of Strangers is a popular title when you run a search on it, but my first experience with the idea was a very thick textbook style research on orphanages being what saved quite a bit of old England during the dark ages, because so many people dropped babies and children off at churches that half the population could have died out if someone else hadn't raised the children. One of the concerns the priests had back then was that the children eventually wound up in brothels and it would be a sin for a father to be having sex with a prostitute daughter, even unawares. My mind was blown over this particular after so much else had been dismissed as not sinful, like an entire society making it impossible for parents to raise their own children in the first place between so many hard laws and taxing the people nearly to death (church and state were co-complicit in this). Humans have a long history of males raising children through rough patches. Whether the males were gay or not is kind of beside the point. Monks around the world have been taking in children as long as religions have existed. Those with nurturing instincts gravitate toward nurturing. Simple concept. We see this with pets, too, and with other animals both on the farm and in natural settings.
I once watched, in my own backyard, a bluejay swipe a baby bird out of nest, carry it to the ground, and viciously drill its beak through the baby's head. What got really interesting was not only the distraught parents darting around, but the anxious cowbird couple that hovered around the ground within inches trying to stop this from happening with their efforts to distract the bluejay. That baby bird had two sets of parents. Why does this happen in nature? Because there are killers out there. Because life is really hard and sometimes it takes a whole crowd of people to make sure babies survive. Perhaps human societies formed out of this very need. Perhaps the origin of society lies within the nurturing instincts of both male and female strangers feeling upset that babies get killed, and cooperating to keep babies alive.
I've mentioned I have a sociology degree, right? I was originally going for an anthropology degree but my college only supported a minor at the time, despite housing one of the most famous archaeologists in the world. I blame the bible belt. Sorry, got way off track. But my point is that sex hormones working properly enough to get babies born doesn't mean we're working properly as people. Pretending to fit into gender roles because a belief system requires it doesn't assure the proper survival of humanity. If anything, it encourages secret taboo behaviors that can't be talked about without severe repercussions. Trying to make people fit into standardized molds of any kind has a tendency to backfire into years of therapy at the very least, rampant public shootings at the very worst. A healthy sense of self within an accepting group creates an optimally functioning member of society, does it not? This is really basic stuff, not quite sure why it's still so hard for so many people to grasp. Oh, yeah, religion and politics. That.
What is often missed in gay debates are some of the secrets and problems that create conflict for a few caught in the middle of it. Gender reassignment isn't always a prerogative. Sometimes babies are born intersexed and a gender assignment must be made, creating conflict later as the brain matures into the 'wrong' hormones. Once in awhile an accident happens with circumcision and a boy is brought up as a girl. And sometimes a distressed parent with severe depression (and quite possibly other mental illness) just ignores the baby's gender and raises it oppositely. I met a guy that happened to. All his young child photos are in dresses, and he seems to be a girl. Somewhere in grade school his gender suddenly flipped because it became obvious, and he's dealt with that the rest of his life, plus being suddenly rejected by the parent who did that to him. He's not alone. Babies are like dollies for people in emotional pain. Likewise, how many girls are there who feel the fail when their parents really wanted a boy? Or passed themselves off as boys or men so they could do something females weren't allowed? I could go on and on. Gender issues aren't always about the individual being different, and they're not always rooted in the individual. Society creates gender problems before people are even born into their genders. Then entire lives are spent teaching children to hide things and perform for society.
In case you still haven't seen The Abominable Bride, the speech Sherlock gave near the end on women's suffrage was spot on, and in our own day and time, I would extend these thoughts to everyone on the planet. Here, go buy it right now.
The gay debate is not a simple one. There can be no black and white right or wrong or stamps of religious and political approval or disapproval if we don't have the whole story on each case. To deem any one person at fault for something beyond their control (so many maladies in this world are beyond our control, are they not?), and then to ostracize and lump individuals into a generic group and then make the entire group outcast from society in one fell swoop is as heartless as throwing unwanted pets out of moving vehicles onto highways. I say it this way because most people I've met would sooner have a tender heart for a derelict, abandoned, and abused animal than they would a mistreated and shunned fellow human being. We don't judge animals so harshly, and we are so much faster to stand up for their neglect and abuse, but that doesn't restore my faith in humanity as long as I'm still seeing humanity abuse, berate, and neglect whole chunks of its own over misconstrued opinions and ideologies. No wonder human trafficking thrives in all countries around the world, even under the very noses of the most adamantly religious and faithful- we so easily throw out our own.
There has always been a thriving underground of human trafficking and sex slavery beneath every civilization, and anyone studying human religious and political history and social psychology knows this. Perhaps the initial reason it wasn't ok for gays to come out was because once they did, they could no longer be secretly shuffled through an underground ring of perverted religion and politics, opening up many cans of worms, as it were. It's ok to see cabaret and S&M openly expressed in the entertainment industry going way back (war and sex seem to be market buddies), but it's not ok to admit it's real and all around us, and that accepting each other the way we are will save lives.
The answer between my trans friend and I wound up being how ridiculous all sexuality issues are in the first place, and we left it at that. It's not a competition for attention any more than any other sexual issue. It's people openly standing up for who they are, just like all the rest.
And yes, let's all facepalm and have a good laugh imagining Sheldon Cooper incorporating asexuality into his Fun With Flags series.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You can open your eyes now.
In case you skipped down for my head stuff-
On top of autism spectrum, I do have a 'mood disorder' diagnosis, although it's never been formally called bipolar, and this last fall I got 'adjustment reaction disorder' from my psychologist after I told him I finally processed through my friend's murder and my mom's death, since both of them happened years ago. Emotional shutdown can be pretty serious, but you guys know that because I'm always talking about it. I keep a standby team of touch base friends within reach, and about once a week someone is making sure I'm doing ok. As long as they see me out in public tweeting or facebook sharing or blogging, they know I'm not going down the rabbit hole. One of my constant goals is holding my weight steady and keeping a regular sleep schedule, both of which are high priority when I check in with my psychiatrist every 6 months. He literally counts pills. I'm allowed half a xanax 3X a day and that's it. I'm mostly otherwise managing to handle my anxiety disorder with diet, which I believe is directly related to diabetes and glucose spikes. As long as I can continue to self monitor and report in regularly, I'm allowed to stay off other head meds. It also helps that @bonenado oversees everything in my life and that I trust him to notice when I go off track and help me get back in routine. He's pretty cool about it, we laugh a lot.
~I'm kidding~
Off the subject, I have discovered Black Diamond Premium Reserve cheddar, aged 2 years. I'm the sort of person who will skimp on everything else in my life to spend $20 a pound on very hard to find cheeses, like aged gouda, so if you guys can find this one, it's totally worth it, even smoother and sharper than Cabot's Seriously Sharp. (Black Diamond is Canada based, Cabot is Vermont based.) I actually found it in the fancy cheese section in my local Walmart, so there you go. Good luck. It is absolutely wonderful with morning coffee.
Let's see, what can I find to get me out of here now and moving on into my day...
