Let's see, what have I been doing this week... I've passed 1600 hours on server. You guys coming in on mobile don't see my gamer banner.
I fixed up my MS solitaire with a minecraft mesa background at sunset and a floating autumn leaves screensaver to look like a desolate planet with falling embers while I play. I find it soothing.
I found myself content curated into a page on nerf gun sales.
I haven't been on twitter much, but still checking in.
Main thing is we're not dropping too many eggs or chainsaws around here, although we are extra very tired this week. Bunny's mama is taking on extra shifts at hospital, my surgery has been scheduled for Tuesday, and mostly I'm just getting my house in order and my player shop stocked for down time. And naturally, while we're so busy, deer are practically walking up and knocking on the door during deer season. Bunny says Papa can't shoot one.
New season, new syllabus. (Syllabus post collection here.)
The world revolves around tiny people. It's subtle, and you probably don't notice it unless you have a tiny person in your life. For instance, Game of Thrones. Not tiny person viewing. If you have a yappy 4 year old in the house who can't sit through a 15 minute favorite cartoon, there is no way you're making it through Game of Thrones. May as well DVR that b*!c# and put a bag over your head, turn off twitter and facebook for 2 days and plug your ears at work, only to have someone casually BLURT THE MAIN SPOILER IN A GAME SERVER CHAT.
😂 I'm laughing. I laugh.
Yeah, if you don't have a tiny pet human in your life, you really don't have a clue just how much the world actually bends around them. This one recently flipped from daycare in the city to small town pre-K. She's like super savvy #handleallthethings to the staff, but a little fuzzy on the cool rural stuff the kids around here take for granted. Like buses. omg she thinks the school bus is the coolest ride ever invented in a theme park, for realz.
But this is about my new syllabus, not hers. Remember how I used to boing out of bed and hit the blog every morning? All that cool disciprin and focus and GET TO WORK!! ? That's gone. Well, except for today. Today I'm starting off with the Weather Channel because other kiddos being out of school for Harvey. Anyone else noticing that the mid-alphabet hurricanes kinda push for more attention than the other ends of the alphabet? Alphabet philosophy is an extra credit course this week.
This fall's syllabus is the most rigorously strict schedule I've ever had since 2006 because I'm winging around 3 other schedules and filling in the holes. There's is Papa's work, mama's work, and Bunny's school. It's my job to make sure there's no #foodfail, #laundryfail, or #pickingupBunnyfail. I'm pretty good at my job most of the time, but we've had a couple of #facepalm days in the food and laundry departments, so I might not be getting a + after my A even if I can keep my grade up. Right now I feel kind of at a B, but that's my personal dissonance problem and I try not to let it bother me.
For example, I'm having to balance OCD laundry compulsions with fibro flares, and I learned long ago that fibro flares are more controllable if I can let myself shut my eyes and just do stuff without extra steps. You know, like sorting. Just throw all that laundry in there! Don't worry if it's wadded up! Who cares if it's lights and darks and tiny things with big heavy things? Who cares if the sox don't all match back up after every single load? (You guys have no idea how hard that is on me...) (Srsly, bcuz everyone else in the house wears matchy sox.) (If you don't yet have context, see #PinkySox.) (That search thread goes back to January 2, 2015.)
One of our biggies this season is Communication. Our current skills include Hit and Miss, Forgot to Tell You, Nearly Mentioned It, and Oh Yeah. Tutoring from yours truly is on the fly as needed, and I'm sure the cinnamon thing will be a joke for years to come. They'll learn fast if they want me to shut up.
Part of my curriculum includes another round of intensive work on my nervous system challenges. 3 days a week focus on cervicocranial junk. Since I haven't smashed anyone's face into an info screen, my family is unaware of the big dealiness of this kind of stuff, and that I'm handling all their stuff on top of my stuff. They are unaware of how I feel about this being a last ditch effort before I wind back up on heavy meds and possibly big surgery that would complicate our lives really fast, since original cause miraculously didn't kill me. Their plates are very full and they're handling loads of stuff I thankfully don't have to handle myself. Like jobs. Car problems and car shopping. Paying bills. Somehow.
Today is a field trip to my massage therapist. I will be driving myself round trip about 30 miles, and I will have roughly 2 hours of 'free' time before I pick Bunny up from school. Then I will have (if the day remains typical), 3 hours of Bunny time. We're adapting into a new afternoon routine. Come home, put on play clothes and wash our hands, get yummy food started for supper, help with laundry (she loves laundry so far), and then settle into an hour of TV and an activity like matching or coloring. By the time other big people start arriving, I feel pretty done and do my best to escape to my room, where I set up a little tech center. I'm getting good at minecrafting in bed.
This weekend is extra credit. I'll continue watching the hurricane coverage and hope my other kiddos keep power and don't get any water damage. It'll be a long weekend for me.
Since I've covered Pain Levels 101 in other posts and even other blogs, I'll spare you that. I'm relying on sheer obsession to see me through this semester. I don't even care if I'm in in a fantasy world. Survival is priority. Cut to video!
This week is hard, but I'm getting those shoes on.
I've apparently missed another big day here over the weekend, over 500 visits pretty much all at the same time from the same referral. Whatever is going on out there, yay! and always remember where your towel is, ok?
We had a big Bunny sleepover wherein I was up past midnight Saturday and then back up around 4 a.m. on Sunday, and good thing because she was back up before 6, and the entire visit was high gear high energy high speed ADHD. And then she went home to her mama and still zoomed circles around her. And hopefully this isn't connected, but last night she zoomed into a 102 temp and now she's got a tummy bug other people in her family had previously. So if I've been exposed, I'm hoping I get a big brain and energy boost from the viral invasion like she did before the croaking off part hits. *joking*
I actually dragged through pretty well, maybe the CPAP is helping. By the time she left here, I had all the dishes AND laundry ~caught up~. That's right, *caught* *up*. That's never happened before. Plus I was still able to hang out with her a little bit and cook and stuff, and that on 4 hours of sleep. But it was CPAP sleep. Keeping that OSAT above the 78 percents is a good thing. I still feel like I'm dragging, and here I am doing all this stuff.
By the way, @bonenado says working in clay and sand all day smelting into clay brick and glass blocks is NOT working (I keep that going in between doing stuff around the house), and I said It is if I write a post about it. So I hope to get a Mo Creatures post out later. I'll insert a cameo feature of another player that I thought was cool.
Since I've seen the Doctor Strange movie twice now, which, by the way, is a fantastically well done preamble to how he fits into the Marvel universe, I've been thinking a bit about arrogance. The focus in the story is that Stephen Strange is one of those 'beautiful brain' people with an eidetic memory, which made him the successful neurosurgeon he became. I think the audience might assume that because he's successful, he became arrogant, and that certainly seems the case as he is discussing which case to take next to keep his unblemished record going in his career. Because of this 'arrogance', he winds up wrecking his car and his life. BUT. That arrogance is what also winds up making him capable of saving the world, since he is able to look the biggest baddie right in the face without hesitation (and seemingly very little fear), and it took that kind of arrogance to be able to handle that situation.
I grew up outside of neurotypical norm, and I tend to notice the 'arrogant' people. They are my people. I love showing off when I'm right about something, or when I do something cool, and yes, I can come across myself as a very arrogant person. But I'd like to take a closer look.
When we have Bunny sleepovers, we feel a bit swooped over with tiny child activity, but one of my favorite things is when she wants to show us what she can do. Bunny is 3 1/2 and can do lots of stuff now, and she loves showing us what she learned in 'gynnasics' and how fast she can go or what she knows about drawing and TV shows and our phones... lol. She's a smart kid.
When I was a little girl, when I wanted to show visitors what I could do, I was told not to 'show off'. I was expected to be 'good' and 'behave'. I was so bad at interrupting conversations and doing things that wound up with me getting hurt that my parents had to really grind into me how important it is to be quiet and let other people do the talking while I behave quietly on the sidelines. These were not pleasant discussions.
I very quietly grew into a very smart and extremely arrogant person, quietly appointing those all around me as 'stupid' and 'slow'. Because I didn't grow up learning how to interact appropriately, I am still learning decades later how to interact appropriately. I'm about to say something really important.
Aren't kids supposed to show you what they can do? They're learning. Demonstrating and getting vital feedback are important and seem to be naturally built into little kids. Is arrogance born out of breaking this natural cycle?
If Stephen Strange was the typical neuroatypical, this likely started in early childhood. He was a little more than the people around him were able to juggle, and instead of embracing his natural skills and abilities, they fenced it off into behavioral problems. That alone stimulates atypical kids to try even harder to get positive attention somehow, and a lot of us wind up in academics. Stephen Strange is a great example (a bit exaggerated, yes) of how a different kind of mind can learn to channel itself into positive outcome.
Part of the Stephen Strange character set up is that he took an oath as a doctor, and he doesn't hesitate to try upholding that oath even if it costs him his life. I know a lot of people who are like that. They are really good at something, they step up into those roles, and they put their lives into thriving at what they do. A lot of those people, incidentally, are neuroatypical.
You know it's been awhile since you've done stuff when everything in your system prompts 2-step verification. I'm busy.
Little bit late for Valentine's, but just so y'all know, my Halloween sox have all bitten the dust. I wear them nonstop year round, so that's not surprising.
Totes duked it out with CPAP last night. I imagine it's still the med withdrawal, but the panic attacks were incredible. Aside from an eye twitching, I seem to be ok today. Well, no I'm not. #transparency Let's just say I'm sort of wobbly ok at the moment coming back down off a med that had me not only super stoned, but puffed me up with 6 pounds of fluid in 2 weeks flat, and I didn't tell you guys about the week my gums were oozing blood. Yeah. Aside from a very nice cessation of neverending nerve stabs and constant itching (it's like living with wasp stings and poison ivy with no visible causes, simply put), for me personally, it turned into the med from hell at 900mg total dosed through the day because it's super seductive and rather delicate getting away from it. I might've been able to hold at 600mg per day, but by the time I was going back down to that, it was like being in systems crash and I had to prioritize a reset. *I* control me, not a med. I can choose to use a med to help me control, but when it wrests control away, f* that. I've been there. There is no rescue from meds except cleaning off them. I've seen how prescriptions pile up until there are so many to control side effects other meds are inducing that the original reason for being on meds in the first place gets utterly lost, and the patient floats away in a hellish kind of slo-mo Titanic. If you are one of those people and desperate for more info, comb my blogs at spaz and Bluejacky (some posts might be private, that blog kinda crashed). My survival plan goes back to 2008, and it works. Yes, working on a survival manual. Sorry it's taking so long.
So since January 19, I've gone from tripling that med in a less than a week, being stoned outa my mind for a week, and then knocking it back by a third over another week, and then I had to get permission a second time and a new script just to ramp back down to original dose, which is still in progress, down to 400mg now, shooting for 300mg (original dose was 100mg 3Xday), actually hoping to just get completely back off while I'm at it and take a real break from it so I can get some context back. If a low dose is no longer working because it creates addiction dose monitoring and I keep hovering between not really getting help vs going off a cliff, I need to rethink this med. And it's not one of those pills you can just cut in half, it's in capsule form and not easily titrated like I've done with xanax. Imagine getting off caffeine, nicotine, and codeine all at once. Yeah, like that. The suck is strong with this one because it very strongly affects certain brain receptors. I'm a mess and a half.
But I've lost a pound of that stupid fluid, finally. 5 more to go... ðŸ˜
And I know it's there if it ever gets so bad that I'm really that desperate, but this little experiment has prompted my survival instinct, and I'm more redetermined and recharged back out of that stupid depression I was sinking into through the holidays. One could argue that maybe I just needed to get stoned, but I would argue back that putting on 6 pounds in such a short time doing it is reason enough alone to do a risk assessment on pros and cons of this med on overall health. I *get* how depression works, I've lived with depression most of my life, pills are not fun toys, and me spinning out of control again emotionally is not a good thing. This went beyond crying jags into weepy meltdowns that lasted several hours at a time, and I think I mentioned I was starting to scare people. I should probably let a few people know right here that I'm kind of back out of that part now, it has scaled way down.
I feel like I'm still barely braining, though, and the only way I'm able to keep moving forward is running a playlist. Thank goodness I made this, it really is helping, got a shower and preparing for a recap meeting on the phone, have chicken thawing for supper, and pulling a grocery list together because we are OUT of stuff and starting to scrape the backs of shelves. So far today is the most capable I've felt in weeks, and I feel like I'm brain crawling like a slug. Actually, I may have just used up the tiny quota I had available today, I should stop this and go stare at a wall before that phone call catches me flatfooted in uber stupid mode.
It took that long to get an upvote...
That clicks to source, btw.
And don't start asking me questions on Quora, I won't answer them.
In case you don't get it, a Perdue chicken isn't a chicken breed. Perdue chicken is a product.
I know, "in" makes you think recipe or something.
A contracted Perdue chicken farmer later shared his story.
So the whole original question wasn't about actual feathers at all,
and I'm amazed no one jumped on my answer before now.
But we still don't know who is conning whom...
I mean, I get Tyson cornish hens with feathers left on all the time...
I complained to Tyson about it and they sent me a wad of coupons,
so I got a whole bunch of free cornish hens...
Finally just had to pull my 'control' post back that I made back in November to draft mode. 244 hits on that one, never linked, never shared anywhere by me, and every single day it got pounded by one particular country. So I guess I have my answer. Since that was posted over 2 months ago, mathier stalkers could probably figure that into a percentage of the total views I've gotten since then. Yeah, I know, I could've left it out there to keep adding to my view count.
I've been debating whether to leap to a new Pinky blog (this one is the second) and keep watching the numbers here. The first Pinky blog went super dead once I left it. This blog has lots more material that pulls in specific searches, but aside from that, it's also a little compromised to bot activity, which I still blame on lingering post paper.li code embed, a Ukraine app, and occasional Semalt blitzes. (The Brazil thing is nothing compared to these other bots.) The rest seem to be fairly random, but all that still accounts for less than 10% of total traffic I've gotten here. Still, 10% of 70K is 7K, which is a pretty hefty number. Actual real people pageloads from link shares and continued reading are probably more like 50-60K, which is respectable. I'm leaving some leeway for random incoming, like the whole Rick Lagina crowd surfing around and bumping into Pinky being silly.
But not right now. Counting drafts, I currently have 888 posts here now. And yes, people do settle into them once in awhile and go through about 20 before they get tired and go make some food or something.
I'm teetering on a brink of wallow vs get super pissy. Generally, turning to the pissy side usually saves me and I get lots of stuff done. Either way, I'm a real drag to be around irl when I'm like this, so thank God for internet, right? I used to try to power through, and I do have good content out there from that, but I can also tell you behind some of my best public content are some of my worst days.
Today is the kind of day where I'm telling myself to get some real clothes on, put some shoes on, walk around a bit. So hang on...
Here we go. Double dose of bacon today.
I see people blog about depression all the time, but don't really see much about the nitty gritty about how a person really feels inside after destroying a weekend for someone else and then everything is awkward and no one feels like talking and the depression level spikes all to hell but you know you have to really super pretend now that everything's ok because you can't lose the last friend you've got, blahblahblah. Yeah, one of *those* mornings. One of those glitchy spoonie aspienado mornings where I know I can change the world but I wanna sink into comfort food and a pillow and forget the world for awhile. Except minecraft. I had an ***awesome*** idea in my sleep last night, so I might be trying that out sometime. In the meantime, between banging my head over what really aren't lost causes (or wouldn't be if I'd get the lead out) and actually having laundry going already before 6 a.m., here I still am, getting a Plan on for Today.
OH. Almost forgot! @bonenado was gerbil cleaning in our closet again and ran into some really old paperwork. At one point in my life, 1999, I had an actual merchant's license and tax identification number for Janika Banks. Proof of ownership! *evil laughter* I've been toying with reestablishing my property name, even if I never sell anything. Back in the day I was beading and other things and thought about selling online, but it never went anywhere because I wound up in retail. And besides that, I have a paid contract with a publisher now for pen name, so I need to get my butt going on something real.
Real is an interesting word. I'm making this all up as I go, my own reality. I'm creating a reality, creating myself, making myself REAL. So much of the time none of this feels real. But I really am here, I really am someone, I really am scribbling I WAS HERE on a wall and strangely feeling not real at all. You wanna know what mental illness feels like? Wanna understand depression? Start with It's a Wonderful Life. I know, I dis that movie like crazy in this house. I don't suppose anyone remembers when The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley cartoon (1988) did their parody version of that movie. Wo, just found the series on Amazon, sweet.
See, all this stuff I'm feeling that grabs me and holds me back or pulls me down when I'm doing my best to do something cool- I'M NOT ALONE. A whole buncha people out there feel just like that, too, and I get warm fuzzies just knowing some of you are still in your pajamas reading this (or wishing you were back home in your pajamas), and I'm dressed and ready to GO because Pinky blog is a life saver.
When I remember I love you guys, I feel better and then I GET TO WORK!
Waving hello to the variety of countries visiting me from facebook links this last couple of weeks. Top hits outside the U.S. are from Canada, UK, Germany, France, and Ireland. All y'alls are big on vote stuffs, I hear ya. 'Muricans are being a bit silly over here and the fate of the world is in our hands, omg.
And I'm not making fun, I know all you guys are way closer to the nukes and other missiles currently revving up than we are.
Also, hello California *mwah*, buncha sweethearts over there watching the Missouri experimentation and testing area for what's coming next. For those who don't know what I mean, I casually mentioned years ago that militarized police were seen eating lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Nixa (birth place of Jason Bourne), and that was pre-Ferguson. I kind of disappeared into the mist for awhile, because it got super weird when Langley area hits super revved up on my blogs after Obama got in, but I'm used to it now and we're cool. I'm being a good little 'Murican, watching my TV and talking about my meds and socializing like a good little consumer.
I know people who have worked themselves up silly over this. They feel sick, for realz. I grew up in a family where prophetic doom and gloom were more exciting than birthday and Christmas, so I'm in chomping popcorn mode and grinning like a silly idiot. These click out.
Hang on, it's time to run out the door and go vote so @bonenado can get to work. Back in a few.
votevotevotevotevotevote
Ok, I'm back.
Vote now!
Who would you vote for?
I actually take voting very seriously. I get after @bonenado for skipping some of the bubbles when there's only one candidate on the ballot (like treasurer or something), but I couldn't bring myself to vote for 'Growcock', had to skip that one. I'm sure she's awesome, but I just can't SAY I voted for ...
Why? Because I cannot keep a straight face. I launch right into asthma attacks laughing so hard. I just can't. I refuse to risk dying laughing over something like that.
K, I've got serious minecraft stuff to work on, plus I've already stripped the bedding into the laundry because time for winter sheets to go on the bed, and stuff out to finally make my chocolate cake waffles. I know, right, nothing like finally getting to my birthday plans 2 weeks after my birthday. October was the longest month, just glad it's done and autumn finally arrived here (November casually mutated into awesome like Hey, sup?), and now it's countdown to turkey (Macy's Parade!!!) and Christmas (hiding presents!!!) and I'm in a froody mood.
All righty, I'm all over the place again, so let's see what's going on. @bonenado made fun of me this morning.
Facebook says I'm going to hell. This clicks back to facebook, and from there you can click to the test to see where you're going.
I really want this blue shirt like Daniel Tosh is wearing. Pic clicks to Tosh on Comedy Central.
I am apparently one of the rarest and most difficult to deal with personality types there are, so it's not surprising that Facebook says I'm going to hell. The pic clicks to the test if you want to find out your own personality, but you can also learn more here.
It's amazing how fast the rest of your face dries out when you have to spit a lot. Spitting sounds easy, how hard is it to produce a little bit of spit? Harder than you think. Our little human spit pouches feel like a big deal until we get graded on how fast we can produce the stuff. (You people thinking bad things, shame on you.)
That's right, I've been flagged 3 different ways for hereditary cancer, and medicare does NOT pay for this, so I'm hoping my supplement plan picks some of it up. The rest will go on a payment plan. I'd rather know than not know, right? My sisters and daughter will all be curious to know the results when I get them about a month from now. No idea if I'm the first family member to be tested, so if I turn out positive for carrier, the results will get passed around privately among a national network of genetically related individuals. This pic clicks to more info.
In the meantime, @bonenado is out picking up more stuff for salssssssa. We've got a tomato hill growing on the counter that needs immediate attention. Oh, and a scope for a deer rifle. We've decided his Native American name is Man With Bad Eyes And Crooked Bow. He also got scent bombs, fox urine, buck urine, a cool vest with a slick back pocket big enough to hold a machete, leg zip water proof camo pants that'll go with his new boots, and a tripod stool for when he's bow hunting. He's demonstrating it to me now. Woops, folded up on him. He's practicing the stand up maneuver. My knees would be too locked in place to stand up from something that low. Every year is pretty hilarious. I should look through my old private blogs sometime and do a special @bonenado post.
Sometimes I just have to pause on minecraft and appreciate that I'm actually part of real time 'living' art.
Real life. I keep telling you guys I live in Mirkwood. My house is on the other side of that huge wall of jungle in front of us there. (insert- that unmown grass on the left is 5-6 feet tall, and I'm not kidding, use the mailbox on the right for context) (and so you now have a mental picture when I start whining about pollen again...)
The forest looms.
We've got several kinds of wild grapes (raccoon grapes are a real thing) and whatever berries, I think this might be bittersweet, but that's just a guess. Between the gallons of acorns, hickory nuts, and walnuts and all the crazy wild berries and fruits around here (persimmon, pawpaw, osage orange), we have no lack of wildlife. Sometimes the squirrel population explodes, sometimes it's chipmunks, other years we might see foxes regularly, it's just up and down, mostly depending on weather and diseases spreading around. Big rabies and distemper area. (Scott just let me know the number of bats in the bat house has tripled since he looked last.)
Yeah, you can tell, right? I'm evening out on my meds this week. This is now my 5th week on gabapentin, first week back on beta blocker, first week of doubled zyrtec, and I seem to be busy and juggling all the things pretty well for a change. I'm able to do things without constantly maneuvering and planning around pain. There's still a bit there, but it's a little more manageable now. I've been able to start my workouts again, and I assess back into physical therapy in a few days, so just being more capable has shifted me into a terrific mood. I know that could be transitory, but while it lasts I have been enjoying getting my new syllabus on track, where I spend an hour every day reading and/or watching TV during the day to keep me time oriented and off minecraft. Minecraft is still hard and fast but less often, and so far my money and calendar syncs are still matching, even though I feel ditzy half the time.
That was quite a confession the other day, wasn't it? I remember in my 20s it was so taboo to even say out loud "I'm depressed." Over the years it was still taboo to admit it even to a doctor, much less a friend or someone from church, because the stigma of mental illness was so prominent that it meant immediate judgement and hushing up to hold down the tittering that would go on behind people's backs. My mother never got the real help she needed because of that. She begged people for help in the only way she knew how, ways that were controlled and sanctioned by a rigid belief system, and she died way too soon because of it, even though she fought hard the only way she knew to be herself, with all her glorious mood swings and the ways she could never quite fit into what people expected of her.
My mom was one of the kindest people anyone around us knew, spending money we didn't have to make sure other people's bills were paid, actually taking food to the destitute falling through cracks, making sure lonely people got cards in the mail during their last days of long illness. I'm not capable of that, but I am capable of standing up and saying I'm mentally ill and the world hasn't ended and my life is good, and I share this because it's important, and I hope other people can learn and realize that standing up for our own truths and honesty is how we survive.
I am not an easy person. I've learned how to be kind, but I'm not naturally born sweet. Hi, I'm Pinky, and I'm ok with myself.
I don't even bother wearing armor any more. I've taken over 20 arrows at a time without croaking off, so big deal, Neal.
Had a huge twitter weekend yadayada, sure you guys are tired of hearing about it. I think the more important thing is that dishes and laundry are done and we ate awesome food and watched Keanu. Also, Scott and I are trying to figure out a plan about writing down all the things in case one of us croaks off, because we see people around us *ahem* not planning, and I've already been through getting my dad through bankruptcy after strokes took my mom down too fast to asplain her banking/billing system, so me and @bonenado wanna be hoopy froods for our own kids and get our hipster down with living wills and lists of bills and accounts and insurances and stuffs.
You know I'm good for it.
There are a jillion things I can think to write about, but the most important thing is that I discovered I completely missed the cocoa pasta revolution before I developed a wheat allergy and a carb processing problem.
And this. Back in my 20s in my college days, I usually wore jeans and oxfords with lace anklets and didn't care if none of that went with whatever top I threw on, which was usually something button up and as neutrally a-femme as possible yet still nice (one of my fave tops was solid shiny jet black, the other I called my 'puke shirt', a neo-Native American geo art in bright primary colors that usually had people tuck and rolling for cover, and in between I was in my awesome red and white Magnum PI Hawaiian shirt). I smashed several decades together long before it was cool (dang, it was the 80s), could probably call it 'granny punk' or something. It really ticked people off for some reason, especially a woman in one class who finally cornered me and told me she HATED MY SOCKS.
Those socks are back. I could've blown a hundred dollars last week, but I held it down to 3 pair, and these are really conservative compared to the Victorian lace I used to wear, and I used to pay a lot more and looked hard to find socks like these. The yellow pair are so comfortable I wore them for nearly 48 hours straight before I finally took them off.
Also back then I was one of the first people to start mismating earrings, too, a long dangly on one side and a short different color on the other side, so the mismate thing just goes way back with me.
And of course, among my top 3 most important things this weekend is minecraft, right? The story behind this vid is a long one, but here goes. I'm working in unclaimed territory on multiplayer, currently getting this pillaged and long abandoned village fixed up, and about the time I start seeing unreadable name bars through the sand beneath me, players are getting interrogated and banned for using xray to dig straight to diamonds, so I assumed they were digging out the ores beneath me before I could annex a claim on it since I was working there. I really didn't care, what I'm doing right now doesn't need anything from mining besides iron and coal, so I just let it be for awhile. But today I got curious... So I went out a little ways from the village and started digging down until I hit a shaft, and started lighting it up and looking around. Dang if I didn't run right into a skelly spawner. I've handled a dozen spider spawners by now, and glassed off a zombie spawner beneath the town's main house, but this is my first skeleton spawner. I didn't know they'd do this till I saw it, but it didn't take long for them to get overexcited and accidentally shoot each other trying to shoot me, and then all hell would break loose, and as they shot each other, health bars showed up above their heads, and I was all like ohhhh, that's what I was seeing through the sand... So I ran video while I glassed it off, and it might seem a little boring until you see me accidentally fall right in there with them, lol. It's long, so don't force yourself, ok? But it's not something you see every day, even when you minecraft all the time.
Important things are important. We get carried away thinking the news feeds and social media feeds and entertainment feeds are important. We are important. Our lives are important. What we enjoy is important. Who we are when we like ourselves is important.
Plz to go like who you are while I enjoy this pretty song.
I started this Monday morning and came back to it through the day.
R.I.P. all-time fave sock.
I've never had a memorial for a sock before. I would wonder if I've gone off the deep end except I'm at home around bedrock already.
So last night. SPOILERS.
"Hodor".
Imagine experiencing your death many years before it ever actually happens, never ever ever being able to talk about it, and then someone else experiencing your death with you both at the end of your time and the time when you lived it during a massive seizure. And then every single time something bad happens in between the seizure and the final end, it triggers those memories of previewing your death, and you suffer PTSD the rest of your life over something that hasn't even happened yet.
"Hodor".
That got me. That was such a brilliant idea, brilliant writing and filming and acting.
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One of those coming back to this days. I just woke up from one of those super detailed dreams where you know something is another way somehow, and you do everything in your power to not only remember it in your dream, but actually find it again, and then go wow, yeah, I remember doing this, and it goes on and on, and then you wake up- none of it was real.
When I was at my glitchiest after the brain fail and time order flew apart and memories became elusive, I had dreams about losing and looking for stuff, and one of the most difficult types of dreams to deal with was knowing I had another blog or page or something 'out there' and I couldn't remember the web address to find it. Since this has really happened because blog hosts and websites are fluid and flutter in and out of real time like leaves on a windy day (I've lost Yablo's House on AOL hometown, which was 7 or 8 pages of interactive fun, plus a geocities site I dearly wish I'd been able to screenshot, plus others), anyway, since this really happens (some of you saw me go through the Xanga server move and how terribly depressing it was), waking up from one of these dreams is ~difficult~. Pretty sure anyone who's lost all their junk in myspace or suffered facebook problems totally gets this. It's depressing.
Well, I just woke up from one where I had finally found one of the neatest pages I'd ever made, and I was so happy. I was finally able to access it and was thinking about moving some of the content because the ads had overtaken everything and my own content was so far down my own page that it didn't even show up until you scrolled, which meant half the visitors probably thought the crap at first load glance was my content and it wasn't. And I remember saying in my dream- "You can tell what's really my stuff because my blogs are ad-free." I woke up and rolled my eyes...
I like excavating around the ores, like an archaeologist gently lifting bones out of the earth
I haven't mentioned this in awhile, but have you noticed Pinky blog really is ad-free? And that I don't have any kind of button or link to paypal or gofundme or any other kind of donation page? (Ditto on my Lexx blogs.)
Google analytics recently let me know that this site is too big for the crawlers and I need to set up a site map. This blog is now well over 600 posts long, and I don't have a single ad anywhere on it. I've never monetized. Every link I put on this blog is my personal recommendation or link-back to someone else's content that I get neither paid nor compensated for. And this blog is worldwide.Kewl.
having way too much fun with lava challenges
But that dream reminded me it's the time of year for me to get ready to pay for my ad-free stuff on Xanga, which includes my original Lexx blog. On top of some of the ad-free investing, I've got 4 domain pointers. All of this investment comes out of pocket because I consider my blogs a hobby, not something I'm doing to make a living. I do this for me because it helps my head to writewritewrite and play with code. Blog hosts that insist on interrupting this process don't get used much, unless I'm using them for something else. WordPress is set up for gravatar verification and not much else except place holding and private content archiving. Maybe one day I really will have staff and open up the WordPress blogs in all their imagined glory, but for now, we wait.
I do wish my dream had been real. I wish I really could get all the content back I've ever lost. It's bad enough to have your blogs and websites closed out from under you, but even worse to delete your own content and then regret it years later. There is nothing more PTSD triggering on the internet than settling down roots in such a transient environment. I've even lost everything dear in an interactive gaming site because I didn't know it was beta created by a genius kid. Lately, Minecraft has updated, and now I'm nervous as hell that everything I've built on a 60-player server will be dumped before the end of the year because it's all outdated now.
lol, looks like Christmas season
You see why I get so many screen shots and vid captures now? Imagine not only losing the game you love because it shut down, but losing your memories of it. Thank goodness it was temporary, but the attempts at memory reconstruction have been nightmarishly depressing. I think I mentioned last fall that I was finally able to reconstruct a fairly accurate time line of ten very scrambled years in my past between severe PTSD over those memories and then the brain fail during a nasty viral illness hitting my nervous system.
It can all go *poof* at any time, every bit of it. Memories are the most precious things we have, next to living relationships, and the most fragile part of our existence in this world. All our silly squabbling over politics and opinionating over what we believe are nothing compared to being able to recognize someone we love, smell something lovely (I love the smell of fresh made alfalfa hay in the field), and taste our food. I've lost smell and taste for months at a time, I've nearly lost vision, partially lost a little hearing (and lost my ability to sing on key because I went tone deaf in one ear), and I'm still fighting not to lose what I can feel in my hands. I think I've mentioned the year my entire head, face, sinus, and even throat suddenly went numb. It's very unnerving. (Get it? haha)
I don't sweat the small stuff. Every day I'm getting through something, but one of the most important things you can know about me on the internet is that I will never ask readers for money. I write because I love to write, I share because I believe it's important, and I pay because that makes it more fun for me. I take ownership of my own content.
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Now it's Tuesday afternoon.
Ok, here's what's really going on with all the deep mining pix. I get these weird association obsessions because that's the way aspienado deals with stuff. A friend is moving this weekend, has about a 20 hour drive, and I guess this is kind of my way of being there in spirit. While my friend packed, I purged and organized all my minecraft chests and stocked the store because it made me feel like I was helping. And now that we're down to the cross country wire, I'm obsessively digging my way through the bottom of the world to a destination myself. Our township is pretty much in the -8000s longitude, and I have this weird curiosity to see whether I can follow a latitude line underneath all the things to the original world spawn point, which is 0,0. My latitude start point is -510 and I'm trying to stick to it as much as possible at a 5 block level up from absolute bottom of the world. I've been circumnavigating very dangerous lava beds and water, and part of what I hope to run into on my journey is 1- a stronghold, 2- a mesa biome, and 3- like I said, world spawn point. I've been watching the coordinates and designated biomes move past above me, have taken a few notes of places of interest I'd like to go see when I'm back out on top, like the ice mountains biome. I've already tunneled completely under two different oceans and several very different biomes and haven't yet run into a single other demarcated township through which I would technically be griefing if I kept tunneling without going around. I'm in multiplayer, so I'm really surprised I've had all this untouched wilderness to myself, and I'm seeing wonders no other eye has seen. I'm also getting really, really rich. I'm plowing through some pretty sweet ores down there. Anyway, I've got at least 5000+ more blocks to go to get anywhere near zero longitude, then I turn and zero down on the latitude. After that, who knows, I might keep on going for awhile. Something to do in between chores while I'm counting down to Memorial Day weekend.
This is from a week ago. It clicks to source, which clicks to this clip. I've spent the whole week thinking about this.
I don't fish for compliments, but I do take them seriously because I'm a difficult person to be friends with even on good days. A few lurkers have also let me know that they get what I'm doing and they're glad I'm doing it. In a very mixed up world, so many of us get lost in the dark, and like so many of my own lurkers now, I spent years sifting through the webs on very long dark nights and very sad empty days looking for little lights that let me know I'm not alone- I'm not alone feeling sad, I'm not alone feeling scared, I'm not alone feeling lost. I'm an autism spectrum super spoonie who has navigated blindly through terrible loss and frustration and anger, rebuilding my world tiny millimeter by millimeter up what seems like a very steep and jagged mountain looming over a nasty chasm. I know the ins and outs and angles of depression very well. I know how easy it seems like it would feel sometimes to just let go. I know how hard it is believing that hanging on is the right thing to do.
Pinky blog is a map I'm working on, the path I'm finding little by little up my mountain, and I share it because I believe that what I'm figuring out about how to survive is good and healthy for not just me, but for other people, too. I believe it's important to share what we learn, the joys and pains that helped us learn, and the hope we find in ourselves along our daunting journeys. It wound up turning into a love letter to a lost friend, and continues to grow now that we've been reunited.
Depression comes to us all in some form sooner or later. There is no contest over whose is worse or where it falls on a grading scale as simply sadness versus a diagnosed chemical imbalance. Depression is depression is depression. Sooner or later we all experience some level of depression, because we all live in our brains and we all experience life.
It's very important that we not tell each other to be quiet about our stuff, or to pretend everything is ok when it's not, or to make a game of self harming or self medicating for attention. Over this last year I had to make a very hard decision about disassociating from people who have quite severe depression in my opinion, but who have become so toxic that they think it's funny or 'right' to corrupt others around them into fellow self harm for the sake of words like love and friendship. It can get pretty twisted up, and since I've been there, I get it, but I cannot keep saying it's ok just because I'm friends with someone. I have other friends sinking in quicksands and stuck in quagmires who watched me try to keep my balance doing that, and in the end, all it did was hurt other people I care about, mainly lurkers teetering on brinks. Being a public person on twitter has consequences we don't always see.
If I'm part of hurting other people through ignorance and neglect, thenI am part of hurting other people. One of the saddest things I keep running into in the entertainment industry (which now seems to include twitter and blogging) is the idea that we must play the game to get brownie points, because someone 'above' us has some magical power that will wash down onto us if we do that. NO.
Everything we do in a spotlight sets examples to other people. I've been a very bad example a number of times throughout my past. I even nearly got a young man (and several others, if I think about it) killed because I was such an idiot. What brought us together was sadness. What blew us apart was self medicating to the point of neglect of our own safety. What we really needed was words.
We needed to hear I love you from people who made us feel bad. We needed to hear kindness from people who used their own emotional messes to manipulate us for their own reasons or beliefs. We needed to hear forgiveness and gladness when all we seemed to get was accusations and fault finding. We ran away to find each other, and everything only got worse because we didn't know how to start saying new words, so we found them in drugs and alcohol, and in very loud places where people wink at the way newbies are used up like new toys while people are reassuring them they love them.
I won't go into again how and why I found myself wrenched away from that pit of human despair, but I will say find your words. YOUR words. Not someone else's words. Don't get into the habit of repeating other people's euphemisms and catch phrases. SAY YOUR WORDS. We are here on this earth to say words because nothing and no one else alive here can. (We make up stories of animals and space visitors that can talk because we dream, but WE are the ones with words.) It's up to us to get this figured out. And if you can't say them, then type them, paint them, sew them, build them, create the things you see in your heart because you love them. Live your words.
But never tell someone to shut up when they are telling the truth.
If you don't like the truth because it opens up your own can of worms that you hide, you need to be dumping those worms out and turning them into words yourself. If you don't like the truth because it exposes something you keep secret, you need to stop either creating secrets to keep or holding secrets that others tell you to keep. If you are part of creating lifetimes of sadness in other people, you need to look into what is so broken in yourself that you would keep breaking more people. But pretending everything is ok isn't the solution to anything. I see far too many people doing that.
The best television is when we see characters tear themselves open and reveal truths, or discover truths, or fight for truths. But in real life we get addicted to TV shows and self medicating because we don't live our truths. Think about that.
The coolest people on earth, I think, are the ones who rip themselves open and shred themselves apart looking for ways to share how to see truth. The best entertainment on this earth is that which pulls us into that emotional abyss that makes us really feel something. But the most ironic thing about ALL of it is that the entire industry rests on real people keeping secrets, and the viewers using the merch of industry as a catatonic because they're afraid to deal with real truth themselves.
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Now it's Wednesday morning.
I haven't been able to decide whether to post this or not, rewrite it or not, possibly delete it or not.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." Some of you know this from Willy Wonka, but he was quoting Arthur O'Shaughnessy.
“We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.”
I got this snip on 2-5-16.
The witch thing in the title came from a dream a couple nights ago. Silk touch is used to enchant tools and weapons, and I've been thinking about making another silk touch pickaxe for removing ore blocks intact and using them as part of my evil lair construction. 'Distressed' ore just looks cool. I wish they had purple ores for amethysts. I think the witch thing came from me getting blasted in the face with potion again the other day, and as I was staggering away I accidentally hit inventory and noticed there was a little ball and chain emblem and a countdown going on for 'slowness'. No wonder I can't seem to win a witch fight, I'm in slo-mo. Good grief.
I'll be very curious to see if the 'Frontier invasion motif' adds history to what comes after the Enterprise series. For old and new fans alike, let me remind you that the entire series rests on Vulcans first discovering humans in First Contact, and as we watch developments throughout the Enterprise pre-TOS history series, we see humans and Vulcans struggling with precedents and rules about noninterference and very accidental, very dangerous and destructive (to Earth!) involvement because there is a race out there that is greatly offended about humans showing up and exposing their secret design to control the galaxy, and they use time as a weapon in ways that not even Doctor Who could fix. Enterprise (the series) does a very nice job setting up for TOS, and since Justin Lin is a huge fan of the entire franchise, I really hope he continues this filling in bits of ST history.
Ok, that got my blood pumping this morning. I'm kind of Schrodinger's cat today, playing phone tag about an appointment that got moved and just missed the office last night, so I hafta be ready first thing this morning for just in case whatever. Got a great start on my new list stuff yesterday and then fell right into #napclub and next thing you know, the day was gone, but hey, at least I actually made a The Flash live tweet, yay!
Storm rolling in and might hafta unplug. Time to get moving.
Nearly 2 weeks ago I discovered Pinky's Sox got over 500 views in July and over 300 in October, and I haven't even posted there since last March, right? I decided to pop in and see how far flung those views are and came up with 17 different countries. Yes, Brazil was my top contender with a full third of the take, but I'm seeing countries there I never see even for Lexx, like Mongolia and Uruguay.
Just seeing the word 'Uruguay' triggers flashbacks of an almost hawt 9th grade geography teacher with hyperhidrosis teetering on the edge of a complete nervous breakdown in a school system prone to violent hallway fights involving police and emergency medical response. My best friend keyed his brand new car just before he left and never came back. I knew she could be cruel, but that day I also learned she was more heartless than I was. The day she did that, I'd been learning about Uraguay, and I was the only student in class who correctly identified and pronounced it, and when I met up with her and expressed my disappointment in his lack of control over the class afterward, she nonchalantly keyed his car without any warning while we were walking past it. I never told anyone, not because it was bad, but because I was so surprised by how supportive that felt in a quietly intimate way. I didn't laugh or act shocked or anything, just quietly noticed out of the corner of my eye as we walked by and savored a feeling I'd never felt before, not at all glad she did that, but glad. This is the first time in my whole life I've tried to put that feeling into words, and I'm still not sure how to say it, so I just kinda stared at my Pinky's Sox page for a few seconds thinking of her. You know, because she's been gone all this time and that trigger felt so fresh. Uraguay.
And we all know now how she and her became a tangled thing with my feels that I finally had to untangle all these many years later.
I have come such a long way. Once in awhile I wind up looking for something and run into something else and this one ground me to a halt. I remember being so tired and sad all the time, and even though everything was so hard, I was still so determined to keep grinding my way through even when I still had no real clue what the driving motivation was. I'm just going to reprint it here and call it a day.
Holy cow, I'm zapped. I spent the last two hours stripping mangled code out of my Lexx film study posts parts 1-9, because the server migration into new text editors was like slamming existing stuff through sieves. Got curious how many words that totals as a complete work so far and got 13, 228 on the calculator. Old Xanga didn't use to have a word counter, now that they're adopting Word Press I can see how many words all my old posts are. So my eyes are kinda twirly right now. I went through every single little bitty line of code... Every post contains between 40-100 screen grabs. I didn't bother counting those so far, but my host site has them numbered, looks like nearly 500.
It's been over a year since my last Lexx film study post. I can't believe I've lost so much time. I could have doubled that by now. In some ways I feel a little bitter and disappointed in myself. I'm trying not to let that eat me right now.
Will hafta spend the rest of the day resting my eyes. Have the blinds closed against the bright sun, skating toward a migraine if I don't back off. Purged my brain with a little Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, now I've got this going, feel my second wind coming.
