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.
This post is about the TV show Sherlock. If you've not seen this show and don't want spoilers, shut this page right now!!!! I'll also put a bunch of memes in the way so it's harder for you to glance down and accidentally see something just before the page closes. No cheating and scrolling first.
All pix click back to where I found them.
This has been in my head a long time about the whole Johnlock thing. It's very distracting that we're always seeing John's POV about he's not gay, they're not in a relationship, etc. Let's look at Sherlock for a sec.
Sherlock is the Emperor of factual information, and often leaves out details that others don't catch. He doesn't stop and explain. I love this kind of writing. I couldn't help noticing that Sherlock never corrected Angelo bringing the candle for his date. Angelo knows Sherlock. He assumes Sherlock is on a date. This alone implies mountains of stuff about Sherlock, both in his mind and in other people's minds.
When Sherlock introduced John as 'my friend' to Sebastian at the bank, it's quickly revealed that Sebastian knows Sherlock from their college days. It is significant that Sherlock would introduce a 'friend' (as opposed to colleague, like John insisted) to someone who probably made remarks about Sherlock being too weird to ever have a significant relationship (point blank, boyfriend). Sherlock knew this.
Sherlock never questioned John and Irene meeting up. He heard the entire conversation. "You jealous?" "I don't know, probably." He didn't question two people 'fighting' over him. It felt very much like a current bumping into an ex. Even though we see John feeling rather left in the dark, even he can feel this is a triangle.
Because I'm asexual pangender and talk about being sapiosexual in brain sex, robot style (although I didn't know there was a term for it when I wrote that), I know that people don't have to have orientations or even be sexually active to be in love with other people and it still feel very sexual. They don't have to consummate relationships to feel deeply bonded with them, to feel ownership, to say 'mine'. "My friend." Sherlock is very careful with his words, and he always means them. He took possession of John immediately, perhaps like someone does a pet at first, but nonetheless, the world around him knew he owned John, and that John accepted and liked being owned as this "my friend".
In fact, this turned into John saying "My friend" over and over when he thought he'd lost Sherlock. Not just any friend, not just a friend- "My. Friend." And as I've pointed out (links below), if you really look at John, Sherlock is his only real friend up to this point, because in this context, acquaintances don't count as friends. He loves Sherlock.
Sherlock was so sure of this relationship that when he showed back up, he didn't take into account that John would be so upset. Sherlock erroneously assumed John would fall right back into step with him, because they were each others', and time passing would never change how they felt for each other. And it didn't, but there was definitely a readjustment period.
Mary replacing Irene in the triangle is a neat way to show Sherlock growing emotionally, in several scenes him identifying with Mary as one of John's emotional consorts. Mary and Sherlock easily share John, something Irene hadn't done.
Some of us are wondering if Irene will come back and upset the balance. Season 4 is rumored to get ugly and much more upsetting than previous, and we all know the previous seasons were upsetting enough. I would be in heaven if Irene and Moriarty both came back and had a bunch of kids and started a gangster baseball team, but we know that can't happen. I'm terrified something will happen to Molly, because she stepped into the 'sister' role so well, working alongside Sherlock at the morgue. I can't help wondering if Sherlock will finally be forced into that last 'I love you' scene with a dying brother or something, and I don't even want to think about what's going to tear John up if/when something happens to Mary and/or the baby. As much as a large part of the fandom wants a good scene about how close they really are, I really don't want to be destroyed seeing John having a meltdown in Sherlock's arms after something happens to Mary.
Keep in mind this entire show is about Sherlock and John. I questioned what started this story in my post John Carl Powers Watson and discussed what's in Sherlock's mind regarding John in the post f(x) where x = "reflection John". I like thinking about John, as we've seen in blogger on blogger on blogger. John is kind of slow to pick up on a few things, but the only one who can keep up with Sherlock, and I find myself identifying with him as much as I do Sherlock, between PTSD and autism spectrum.
I'm sorry this is difficult to read
I'm not very good at interpretation, and I love reading what other fans get from scenes that I completely miss (although I do think a few go a little overboard, but who knows how far Moffat will go with pink lighting, right?), plus I was very resistant to everything else Sherlock Holmes for years (I live with a super fan who watches ALL of it), so I feel my thoughts are mediocre, at best. However, this is the first fandom I've ever gotten emotionally involved in enough to write about character subtext, even though I started out being a Spirk fan many years ago and came up through the Xena and Merlin ranks.
I personally don't have a preference for whether Sherlock and John ever go the next step on TV and what is or isn't canon, but shows like this do have a big impact on both straight and LGBT communities. I don't think we need to demand a pro or con statement either way to have a great story, and the story is about Sherlock and John getting through all this stuff together, ups and downs and still there for each other. I think the writers would be crazy to pick one community to represent since that would create havoc, and I think they're geniuses keeping the question up in the air because it helps sales. Having said that, I personally feel like some of the LGBT community being so demanding is just as insensitive and bigoted as the straight community not recognizing it, and I'm standing up for some of us on the side applauding that it's just very well done all the way around anyway, and we'll take it because we are sapiosexual.
Thanx to a friend's character name on an RP board, I dreamed about an old boss I'm not at all fond of all night with the same name. It got weird. No, I'm not telling you. Because. Ok, all I'm saying is I nearly got caught hiding the butter, the office was a wreck, he was using an old WWII radio mic, and for some reason, the British were coming and threatening to break in and I nearly got caught stealing his butter out of the break room fridge. Yes, there's more, that's all you're getting. Of all the people in the world I never wanna have another sexual tension dream about, it's him, and one of these days one of my dreams will go epic and then I'll hafta deal with the morning PTSD of having raped and murdered my old boss in my dream. The WWII mic really threw you guys, didn't it? I think it was an allegory for how bad he was at communicating during our morning meetings. Also, I was in the store when the Twin Towers got bombed. There's way more, but seriously, that's it. Those dreams are nearly as bad as my old school bus dreams that went on for years and years. No, I have no idea what the butter was about. Yes, I'm pretty sure we can all guess. I stole his mojo. Srsly. One day he was off the clock and walking through the store in super short super thin shiny gym shorts, and of course everyone he walks by tells him how hot he looks, as he passes me I snort and blurt that he looks totally gay in those shorts (he had a wife and five kids), and everything just went spiraling down like a smoking biplane since then. He jumped on the death of a child in my family as an opportunity to harass me till I broke and left just before my 401K rolled into its 5 year thingy. The nightmares ever since then have been ludicrously laced with sexual tension and one-upmanship (I looked that up, that's the way to properly spell it). Doesn't help at all that he really was kinda hawt.
No. No new lappy yet. Tuesday night was all about @bonenado's pickup, so since I had to run in against traffic in the dark ahead of possible freezing rain, we went ahead and got the shopping done and I just canceled my appointment Wednesday and stayed home. So still on old croaky offy lappy. Yes, he's still driving my car.
My brain is all blurred up. This whole FOCUS!!! thing is only grinding my wheels on one blog right now, and I think I'm pretty much done with dredging my soul as writing practice. Some of you are going thank god. Others are going but leave in the dreams.
So, 2015- Conquered fears, processed deaths, clawed a few eyeballs, found an old friend, got Sherlocked, explained all the things, watched numbers, learned out to make tables, got a new phone, discovered banoffee, counted sox, ran with a goat god gang, had good holidays for once, decided being called a sox goddess was a little overboard with the whole Pinky sox porn pun and generally drew back into a shell, although thankfully not my cave.
2016 so far- Totally dumped a buncha twitter lists, scaling down public priorities, cut a few projects, sized down my gangs, going underground more to WORK, still want staff to help me interface with my publisher, but dang it, one last hurdle to wrap my head around called "close your eyes and hit that frakkin send button", and all kinds of Lexx about to consume my life while facepalming my way through learning more new stuffs, which my brain is rebelling against even thinking about right now, but I'm obviously in a mood to raze last year to the ground and start fresh.
The mitosis thing cracks me up.
this source rocks, click if you're bored
Meanwhile. #brainfry You guys didn't see the old days when I wrote limericks of luv to a dead assassin on an RP board as a robot head. I'm not very good at this stuff at all (although I'm awesome with limericks), but I can totally see this one if Khan ever fixated on a pet.
Oh well, moving on with the day as best one can with a 3-day (so far) headache. I actually forgot about coffee entirely for about 20 minutes because I was so brainless dragging out of bed.
This just made my day. I'm going to run this 100 times while I do stuff.
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.
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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...
I mention having a facial recognition problem every little bit. Last night during a couple of new TV shows I scored on a couple of actor spottings before Scott did, and he was all like wow, you're getting better at this.
I've been paying real attention the last few months on what exactly helps me recognize people. For instance, from my original post on mind blindness-
Likewise, I get tv personalities mixed up like crazy. I never could keep Dan Rather straight from a couple of other news reporters. There are a few actresses I can keep straight because I've seen their movies so often (usually scifi movies), and by now Harrison Ford is iconic in my head, but I had no idea Steve Carell, Dan Burns, Maxwell Smart, Evan Baxter, and the mayor of Whoville were all the same guy. Do you know how many times I saw the complete Star Wars trilogy before I knew who Mark Hammill was? Probably dozens.
So you guys probably don't realize, after three months of Benedict vids, that the marker I use to recognize him across character changes is the way his eyebrows look as he turns. For some reason, I'm pretty good with eyebrows.
Since I already mistakenly auto-sub eye and hair color for everyone I see with my faulty cataloging system, I can't count on eye color since his crazy eyes change color almost scene to scene, as confirmed by rabid fans around the world and this article mentioning sectoral heterochromia. (His eyes even have their own blog.) My own eyes are a mix of yellow and brown that I think make me look kind of werewolf-y in certain lights, which I bring up in my 100 Girly Questions Survey.
click for more Ben eye studies
The last thing on a person's face I can manage is noses for some reason, so everyone that I recall in my mind either has a blur there or a variety of noses I can plug in like a Potato Head. I'm pretty good with silhouettes, so the way a face moves means more to me than how a face is arranged. The more quirky a face is, the easier it is for me to remember and keep attached to a name, so Steve Buscemi has been a favorite for years, plus I actually like him. Cartoons and animation, on the other hand, are EASY. I never forget an artistically depicted face.
One of the ways I do most of my actor spotting is when I hear them speak. Very few actors can disguise their voices from character to character. But last night I was on point for two actors by their faces, despite some key changes that threw Scott off, and we've both been noticing I seem to be getting at least one a week now. I'm the person that watches TV with phone in hand, pausing the DVR to race through IMDB links, and I'm usually wrong, so me getting two right in one night this week was epic. I think I'm getting the hang of 'tagging' face parts in a sort of linear way so I can keep names attached to them.
I've said in the past that I'm a Sherlock fan, not a Benedict fan. I'm also obviously a Khan fan. What I need to be clear about is that I don't dislike or shun Benedict as a person. I simply don't recognize him from one movie or interview to another, so I don't attach any sort of meaning to his face unless he's doing a particular character that I'm watching. I'm very Benedict deficient when it comes to Ben fandom. It kind of hit me the other day that some people might misunderstand why, since there's been a little controversy around him here and there, which I could care less about.
I don't often see people talking about fandoms from a point of view like mine, a prosopagnosicasexual. Since I am, as a fansite owner, a highly visible representative of a show that actually uses continually sexualized characters, themes, and plot devices, I imagine it's difficult to think of me not giving an eyeblink to any of it. Lexx is brilliantly done. I love every shred of it unconditionally, like I do Sherlock. Star Trek, as some of you have seen, is a whole other beast for me, conditions galore had to be addressed before I finally embraced the new timeline.
You can see the impact prosopagnosia has had on me being a fan. I really do obsess over story lines and characters, film edits and effects, and the way I get swept up into a story. I could be halfway through a show before I realize someone I like from something else is in it, so I'm not just following actors around from show to show like many fans do. Either I very seriously love a character portrayal or I don't, and usually don't even care about stuff like Batfleck quibbles.
This has actually been a taking a break post, time to get back to the other thing I am working on.
What many have mistaken for me hating sex is usually me trying to steer clear of accidentally triggering even more sharing when a convo is already headed for an overload cliff.
Real answer: I don't hate sex, but I do get a little worn out from share overkill. Sex is one of the single most redundant things ever invented on this planet. People complain about aspies never shutting up about their train (or whatever) obsessions, reverse the position here. Ha, a sex pun, I'm so punny.
2. But you're married and have children.
Have you noticed it's easier to get through life teaming up with someone else to help with housing and bills and being there for all the ups and downs? My cloning machine still works, too.
Real answer: Imagine that.
3. This isn't a real thing, you're just making it up because you don't want to deal with something.
I'm the first to admit I suck at sex. Wait...
Real answer: I think we'd all agree that if that excuse could cover not having to deal with a mother-in-law, dambetcha.
4. I found you online and want to share all my sex thoughts with you since it doesn't affect you and get feedback on whether I'm normal or crossing the line into weird because (insert whatever here).
This has happened so many times that I bought a forehead stamper that says "CERTIFIED" and will auto-stamp you just to save us all time.
Real answer: In my experiences talking to people, the root of most of their problems seem to have more to do with abuse/drugs/alcohol and/or unaddressed behavioral problems in both their sexual and nonsexual relationships than any amount of sex insecurities ever could. Please consult with a professional counselor/psychologist if you cannot work things out with families/friends/lovers. Me validating you on the internet only feeds into your dysfunctional way of handling your problem. I'm cool with you hating me for not letting you dump after some of the very one sided online friendships I still can't believe I've been through.
5. You know, I think I may be asexual, too.
Awesome, can we talk about cake now?
Real answer: Awesome, can we talk about cake now?
~~~~~~~~~~
I really wouldn't have thought much about it, but the more than usual hits on a post I wrote last month mentioning asexuality surprised me. I didn't realize it has become such a big public deal. If someone reading this seriously feels in a quandary about the subject of asexuality and wants more context, this is me being honest.
How I knew I was different-
-Even when I felt attracted to other kids in school, which was rare, I never once thought about having sex with them. I never imagined kissing anyone, never wondered if someone was attracted to me. I never had a boyfriend, and the only date I ever went on during high school was with a male gay friend. He called it a date so his mom would stop bugging him. When I did think about sex at all, it was more trying to figure out why both the whole subject and sex itself in general was such a powerful tool people used over each other in oh, so many ways. Animals having sex, yeah, no problem, instinct is a given. People sex- so many lines to cross, so many secrets to keep, so many lives to ruin...
-Even though I'm strongly attracted to particular male types, I very rarely think about having sex with them. The shipper vids I get into usually have lots of violence in them. I dig action protagonist experimentation, and since shipper vids heavily rely on insinuation, I can easily ignore original intent. Some have suggested that perhaps I'd prefer being that male type myself, and while I wouldn't be against it, I'm actually fine with my own body. Loving to watch action scenes, to me, is no different from loving to watch horses run in slow motion. Humans going up against all the odds in dire situations to save the day is a beautiful art form to me.
-I didn't/couldn't visualize having sex with someone in my head until I went perimenopausal in my late thirties, which indicates that for me that it's a brain thing, likely something to do with social mapping and Aspergers, possibly related to being a synesthete with prosopagnosia. I didn't even realize I literally couldn't imagine kissing someone until I was nearly in my mid twenties and already had a child, which was an odd thing to discover since I've been proficient from childhood at visualization techniques that mimic computer programs, such as mathematical modeling of fractals. I am apparently not hardwired for sex simulations.
-I found out via blood tests in my thirties that I make too much testosterone, but since that never turned me into a lesbian, I think we can cross off fixing brain hormones as a cure for sexual orientations. No, I'm not being sarcastic, but I am being facetious when I say that probably explains my penchant for imagining throwing people off buildings and exploding things. I jest, I'm sure that's an estrogen problem. Pretty sure...
-I have always loved androgyny, ever since I was a tiny tyke, and enjoy seeing gender bending as a fashion statement. Humans are wonderfully inventive and creative in all their variety. I feel no sexual attraction to a particular gender face or body type. I think my lack of sexual attraction frees me to be less judgmental about our differences.
I've been writing out some very real problems I've had to deal with in my life because I'm naturally asexual. I strongly oppose it being the 'invisible orientation', since me refusing to step up into a gender role as a child caused problems galore between me and my mother. It also threw monkey wrenches at understanding other relationships I've had, and is a very big part of who I am. Learning that asexuality is a real thing was a big relief for me, especially since I'm married.
It's ok to be asexual. It doesn't mean someone is broken or something's not working right. In fact, I would think people would welcome asexuality as an alternative to sex trafficking, rape, and child molesters. Think of all the lives not being screwed up (literally) by asexuals.
One thing I generally don't talk about is what it's like being an asexual aspie synesthete, a topic that draws no end (literally, bcuz aspie) of passive aggressive discussion as people compare notes, although no one else seems to have ever quite rounded it up in that particular phrase before. I don't think being weird is a contest, and y'all still talking about colors=sounds stuff come off like you're in kindergarten. Existential Aspie is gonna make it realz.
So, it's time for me to GET BACK TO WORK! >=l Hope you all have an awesome day.
I've never been diagnosed a megalomaniac, probably because I don't step on people to get what I want. That is a fail I suspect would be rectified if my psychologist had been able to read my mind. I'm a very patient person.
So last week I was yapping away to @bonenado about some of the stuff I'd gotten written, and he suddenly blurted, "I don't know you at all before we met, do I?" I had to remind him we were years into this marriage before he shared a few things himself, so I'd say we're equally matched in the being more in the moment department. One of the more pleasant things about dating Scott in the beginning was that he didn't grill me about my past like others had, and I was able to simply be myself from the start. He's watched me morph and grow from that point, but now he's getting glimpses of before and I can't tell if he's feeling a little rattled. Since I'm up to a point where the patchworking on the book is coming together into a somewhat coherent theme, I went over a few bits of it with him in a sort of time order so he could get a feel for the overall goal, which no one else has actually gotten to see yet, so he alone so far knows the secret behind the evil villain plan for world domination. And he approves.
This is probably a good place to share that I was just as devastated by Moffat saying Sherlock isn't asexual as other fans were by him saying he's not gay. Sexual tension sells merch, and the writers make it easy for fans to insert their own subtext, which I think highly personalizes viewer experience and translates to sales. Sherlock's personality basically provides the same Mary Sue viewer experience that Mr. Spock did for decades.
I'm not much of a shipper since I'm naturally asexual, but I love shipper vids because fans are so creatively brilliant and bring out emotions I tend to miss seeing in people around me and struggle expressing myself because aspie's so aspie. Since I've been misinterpreted myself often enough by others, and since I'm working through a decades long pattern of how this has affected school and work and super aspie blowing up friendship after friendship out of ignorance, I'm getting a few eye openers watching my own behaviors on a screen, something I rarely experience.
I think our modern society is losing a grasp on what used to be assumed in generations before us, that we naturally develop lifelong same gender friendships that become much closer than if they were sexualized, and that jumping to pre-conclusive sexual labeling has become ridiculous to the point of ruining true deep friendships almost before they can even begin. The whole debate usually flies over my head because I genuinely don't care and don't take sides, but this video is cute and I can't help sharing it after all the shipper vids I've waded through over the last six weeks.
