I took these pix around 1:40 p.m. on the way home from town. The top one is so foggy that the camera refused to even focus. Even using my eyes, I didn't see the lights until the next click. I didn't click until I could actually see the lights. The time passing between the two shots is about an eyeblink.
This is further down the road closer to my home. Driving out this morning was like white out, but at least I could see the trees on the way back.
We're taking a little break from the nasty cold, it seems. I guess Thursday we'll go way below freezing again. I'm super thrilled I wasn't driving in on ice today.
I love damp drippy foggy days, any time of year. I'm literally in my element. 😆😁😂 I've got old fashioned settler's beans and cornbread cooking, so my cave smells beautiful.
Now that I've got my peace and quiet back during the days, I've got a more fun video trail going.
This next vid is a compilation made by a fan, but you can find all the originals here, there's more. I love this so much.
I chased a few rabbits around and found RichieFromBoston (sorry, Richie, I couldn't make it through more than one vid, but keep up the good work), a whole swarm of Herobrine conspiracy vids (conspiracy off the hook, once you find out the real conspiracy behind it, lolz, I loved it), and after DIY Camper brought me back to earth, I dug back into Space Cowboy history. You gotta admire someone who basically starts off with a completely digital homemade music vid series and winds up touring with Lady Gaga, so the miles of comments are just jealous.
They say do what you love. I love fans. I keep saying that. I'm a fan of the fans.
I just made that. It's dumb unless you know both the show and the fandom.
This was too safe for work. Let's mess that up a bit.
Executive decisions are in order. My new BP med definitely boosts glucose levels, and my morning fasting is now up to 106 instead of the 90s. I get a thumpy heartbeat now after coffee and I know it's the creamer, not the caffeine. Glucose strip testing confirmed I'm getting higher readings now after just coffee, and when my glucose hits 130-140 I get thumpy heartbeats on the way back down to 120, always, anything I eat, no caffeine. I've reconfirmed this many times. Once I'm back below 120, no more thumpy heartbeats. SO. Instead of my 2 large cups of coffee (I've needed rocket fuel for Bunny preschool mornings), it's time to go back to 2 small cups or 1 large cup. That will cut down on some of the lactose bumping my glucose up. (I don't use sweeteners at all in any form, it's just canned milk.)
My menu planning needs to tighten up some more, too. I've been allowing a few starches and sweets here and there, and it's evidently affecting my A1C if my fasting glucose is defaulting higher. If I want to feel well for the holidays, I need to stick to healthy fats and proteins. If I'm going to live well with this new BP med, I need to be smart with my nutrition choices.
Walked through the livingroom last night while @bonenado was flipping channels and caught about a minute of Young Sheldon. Secret from an #actuallyautistic- learning the rules behind breaking the rules was a biggie for me. While the show might've concentrated on the NT viewpoint all around him, what you might not have seen was anyone have a logical discussion with that kid on the rules behind allowing rule breaking (I didn't watch long enough to find out). I have a very sophisticated mental flow chart with many loop counters that I've constructed over many years dealing with this from autistic POV, and I've learned that the rules behind breaking rules is much more important than the structure set up for keeping rules in place. Honestly, I couldn't sit through the show. It was immediately very painful for me. I won't say any more about it, except that I grew up in an era of continual corporal punishment and belittlement. If Young Sheldon helps to change that, great. I just can't rally behind it personally without triggering.
Still not back on server yet, which I'm ok with for the time being. I'm needing to handle a few things around my house and stop putting a couple of other things off. I'm in the pre-holiday-still-funtioning part of fall and need to keep this focus I have before it's gone. Once I get back on server with the new concrete, I may be going some pink places.
I'd have set this to different music, like Craig Chaquico's Dreamcatcher. Both vids are about the same length, so mute the first one and play the second while the first one runs.
May hafta bullet point because I've walked off from this blank page for nearly 3 hours now.
I'm down 4 pounds now since 1/1, technically 6 but I'm not counting that 2 pounds that kept bouncing on and off all through holidays.
Blood pressure was 132/70 at my primary doctor yesterday, a super rare event since I usually have white coat syndrome in his office. Not sure that losing only 4 pounds would knock it down that much (I'm a solid 138/84 kind of person), but maybe adding the meh thing from yesterday's post helps, because my anxiety was down and I spoke well.
I'm preferring to hold off on increasing my gabapentin dose until I touch base with neurologist next week.
May have seduced my psychologist to the minecraft side. Hauled Jawn in and gave him a live tour and had a really good session about that memory impacting me, and it really was cool seeing how it expressed in my build. I'm cutting visits back to once a month through the winter so I won't have to drive in weather, but I think I'll be ok because I'm doing so well blogging and daily touch bases with key people.
Got crucial restock done, poor house has been wiped clean after holidays and we needed so many things. Promptly conked on the couch after I got all that in (it really was a long day for me) and Scott woke me up coming in from work, so that was a solid nap like I haven't had in forever.
Tentatively shooting for pushing the publish this year, so I may not be on social media as much as in the past. I had plans to push the Mantrid post out already, get content moved to SyfyDesigns and write for Cryonet, but the moved tonsillectomy and sleep study all at the same time really blew my personal time table out of the water, and picking up pieces is always slow. Doesn't mean I'm diverting or walking off, just means my ship is creeping through hopefully the last of an asteroid mine field.
That's probably plenty of that. Got a 5# pork roast into the crockpot a little bit ago, and I think I'm going to spaz out and play minecraft off and on today while I'm in spoonie fatigue mode. I'm not thinking and talking out loud very well this morning.
coconut meringue, toasted like a giant marshmallow
The throbbing headache is finally gone, sure hope it stays that way. Although I usually blame not being able to move around for pain that bad, I was surprised to find during a quick search that radioactive dye can also lend to some pretty rough joint pain. My worst 'joint' is C1, so maybe it was affected.
Coming off that amount of pain sometimes leaves me a bit disenchanted, even if I'm actually feeling way better. I guess old brain chemicals are still seeping out the ol' coils after percolating around the pain. I'm ticked 50 different ways over nothing, and not even coffee is helping. I'd also considered part of the headache might be caffeine withdrawal since I cut my coffee in half this last week, but the headache was gone before the first coffee of the day, so maybe not.
Woops, said that all too soon. I had to get up from here because a pull in my back set the throb off again. So, super fibro flare it is. It's ok though, moving around helped immediately. My physical therapy training wasn't wasted.
Insert: I'm glad I cut my own hair. I have an awesome shag and my bedhead looks fantastic.
I got this email alert last night. Since I don't have an account with these guys, and since they handed me a password, you know all my cat toy alerts went off.
A quick search on that dot-org pulled this forum thread up. "I am planning for massive web spam and want to make sure my assets are safe." Um... So I looked at home page. My favest thread title is "100% Content Automation [Looks Human-Written & Passes Copyscape] intelligent software". I just lol'd. omg, there is so much crap out there. The whole world is fake and everyone's making money on it. Plastic all around us, all methaphors included.
Compared to THAT, statcounter is like sucking on a sugar cube, there's just no nutritional value whatsoever. I've been playing nice with my trackers. I put a harder hitting tracker on for about a week maybe what, a year ago? And I couldn't hide it and IPs shot out of it like neon for everyone to see, so I removed it. I could piddle around in the darker recesses but they'd want more money than statcounter ever got out of me, so I'm this close to just letting that go and flying blind for awhile. Numbers jump and drop and I can pretty much see certain percentages of incoming staying steady over time, app bugs poking around not really making a dent in the actual load numbers, and real time hits from link shares have been surprising successful, so I guess it's a matter of letting go of an obsessive tic on my end. Checking stats is like people checking social media on dinner dates, it's a bit repulsive if it's automatic. So I'm going to start practicing NOT looking. Statcounter expires in March, and then I might just delete it. All the info I might want to save can easily be copy/pasted or screen shot.
As for that dot-org busting into my email trying to tell me what to do, that was a blatant invitation to surf the outer edges of wide out in the open doorway to darker webs, and personally, it feels like a foolish move. Flies going in get eaten by spiders (spydars), and they have nothing I want. There's no fun in making fake content for fake readers, I don't care if it makes me a jillionaire. I cherish one real reader at a time making their way through real content because it touches something personal.
Yesterday was a small venison roast. I think today I might look into shrimp with some kind of homemade Mexican rice or something. I've got a tomato, a bit of bell pepper, and a few olives. Just remembered I also have some taco meat frozen back. Who knows how far this could go.
All the rest would be awesome falling back into place- Bunny back in daycare, @bonenado back at work, getting all our $$ sorted for taxes- but *boop* the heater blower blew out in Scott's car and just missed warranty by that much, so here we go, it's below freezing around the clock and time to scrape up some money. It wouldn't feel right if something wasn't going wrong, would it? Thankfully, he can take my car.
It's all good.
Oh, forgot to mention my mixer nearly caught on fire making that meringue yesterday, so now I'm looking at mixers.
I've started attempting to share my journey into understanding and using communication to my psychologist. I grew up epic fail at communicating ideas and feelings, failing to interact well with others, misunderstanding their needs interacting with me. Social skills are definitely not my forte.
I've always been verbal and able to respond, but from the gitgo, I was that difficult child who always seemed to do things backward or wrong. Even if I understood the dynamics of what to do, I couldn't follow the emotional dynamics of the instruction communicator once emotions became involved, and there's nothing like frustration to really tangle up a set of instructions. Adults who repeated themselves often started chopping off parts of previously said sentences, not realizing those might be the most important parts to what I was missing, so disaster followed me around in very facepalm ways. But I thought you *didn't* want me to... oh, well. By the time someone was yelling, yes, I would follow those chopped up instructions exactly.
THIS IS WHY ROBOTS WILL KILL THE HUMAN RACE. It's not their faults. Y'all need to listen to yourselves talk sometime...
I was in college when I finally learned communication SCIENCE. The process of words between people is beautifully expressed as an irreversible algebraic function, and you can add all kinds of variables. I didn't learn this in communication class so much as plug in what I learned in algebra to the idea that once something is said and added to, those are irreversible parts of communicating and must be taken into account in order to move forward. When I saw that combination of concepts blaze across my brain, I was finally at a place to start communicating "I need", "I like", "I want". I was in my 30s before I realized how vitally important it is to say "Thank you" to my spouse and be emotionally cognizant of people around me. It's not so much a matter of being functional for each other, but of helping us feel good about being with each other. Aspienado is here to bridge that gap between the autistic brain and the neurotypical brain, which I see as the 'instinctive' brain. I was born without natural instincts for socializing, but thankfully, I was born with the tools to help heal social problems.
I'm the sort who can easily break down communication at any level and see it in my mind as logic trails, like the way people program robots with flow charts, simply put.
Because I see communication that way in my mind, I can easily find where a convo goes off track and try to reset someone I'm talking to back to a point where we can start over and move on. However, other people's heads don't work that way at all. I didn't know this as a child. I would try and try to steer someone back to a very particular part of the convo where we'd need to start over in order to understand something between us, but most other people get super tangled up and very emotional when someone tries to do that. They don't understand from their POV what is even going on, no matter how it's explained.
So I lived most of my life frustrated at others' frustrations over me not getting things while I quash my own frustrations over them not getting things, either, and even learned to master the art of avoiding the pitfalls they couldn't see were coming. I'm getting good at steering people clear of misunderstanding me when I'm paying attention. Sadly, I start zoning out fairly early on because communication is 'boring', and so it's easier to just stop talking most of the time. I keep it really simple, using little cues I'm able to pick up to interject questions and therefore keep the other person talking so we last longer without getting frustrated. But because of this, many people around me rarely know how I'm feeling or what I'm thinking.
One of my best examples of someone not knowing what's in my aspienado head is that Scott and I were married for 15 years before I felt he was finally ready to understand (and I was finally able to verbalize better) what I gave up when I quit my advanced degree program to stay home and be a good mom for his kid without us getting into a fight about it because of misunderstandings and feelings. I am that patient. By then there was no emotion from me, no malice or bitterness, no regrets or wistlessness. Just information. Yes, I gave up what could have eventually turned into a multimillion dollar project that would have set me for life, and I accepted that because it was my choice, but it wasn't a choice I discussed with my husband before I made it. Just because I'm autism spectrum doesn't mean I don't have a clue what love and commitment are, but I did understand back then that no matter how I tried to share it, neither of us would have been able to talk about it without melting down into something emotional, mostly because we were young and beset with too much input from other people. The idea that I'd value a second marriage above becoming a multimillionaire isn't something I find astounding, because logic also extends to satisfaction levels. I needed Scott in my life. Despite his full blown ADHD, he's the most patient person with me that I've ever met, even when he's frustrated. He has NEVER left me, no matter how much he has felt like it sometimes. I see far too many lonely people online wishing they had someone like that, so I know how valuable this relationship is, no matter how I feel at any given moment. How I feel is transient, chemical, and usually brought upon myself. I can't even imagine humans creating robots to 'feel' and not understanding this themselves.
Autism spectrum is very scary to some people. Aspienado is here to change that.
The people around me cannot see what is in my head. I cannot get it out to share. It has taken me decades to learn how to express what I can see and how it works in here, and now I'm practicing doing that out loud on my psychologist. Part of my path is this blog post. This is part of my map through the jungle. It's ok if you don't get it or even like what you see. Not everyone enjoys this kind of stuff, but the people who do enjoy it are making really cool things for your lives, like cell phones and games and TV and stuff. Awesome.
So the question is- how did I figure it out? The first part up there was the key that opened the door, that communication is an irreversible function. Over several years other things started falling into place. Another key is the idea that socializing is a game. Once I figured out how the game works, I was able to play it better. There are bits I used to dismiss as useless and irrelevant that I didn't see were vital to 'start up'. Most convos begin with a start up routine. This routine must be engaged before one successfully continues to discussion. Aspies like jumping straight to discussion, kind of like R2D2 plugging into a wall socket (I so love when I can do that!), but other people feel more comfortable with some variable of hello-how are you-cool shirt/nice shoes/insert noticing something here- eye contact and a smile- let's get a coffee / won't you sit down / come in I'm making cookies / insert invitation to join here- you see what I mean. I've always assumed all that stuff is a given and I can skip those steps and jump straight into convo, but that dismisses the human in front of me. If I skip those steps, that person feels awkward and used. I didn't even think about that for years.
So seeing communication as an irreversible function and then as a game were real eye openers for me. I can game my way through convos now, and I can gauge my success by the way we part. I won't go into the disengage routine here.
Believe it or not, the science of chaos was one of the big ice breakers for me, and it began with understanding some of the things in that video I put at the top of this post. Please notice that the whole reason that entire video started was over communication problems between computers over a wire service, so this is communication about communication servicing communication. Aaaand I just metaphorically mandelbrot'd an idea about communication. I could koch curve it with lots of little inserts that jaunt off into multiple meanings, but then I'd lose most of you. Heads up, I think I'm being cute with words here, and I know it's failing, but I think it's fun anyway.
Chaos is exactly what humans are to me. Everything in my childhood felt chaotic, not making sense. Cause and effect are not always easy to see with human communication, and it took me a long time to learn cause and effect anyway, so let's just blame that on leaps of thought for now. But the secret in the science of chaos is that there are inherent patterns even in the midst of wild chaos, and human behavior is no different. I have a sociology degree and was deeply into Asimov's trilogy about psychohistory. Douglas Adams also played with human predictability in his Dirk Gently series (the books, which I adore), and all through his Hitchhiker's Guide series.
Imagine a person like me working on a sociology degree intersecting interpersonally with a mathematician working on an advanced degree in topology and having convos about whether human predictability was a real science or a mockery. Back then I wasn't able to discuss anything very well. If I had been, I imagine we'd still be a thing, or at least still in touch, and I sometimes still feel sad about that.
So. Now we are building a list.
Communication is an irreversible process,
a game that can be manipulated and played well,
and predictable. That is crucial. If one can learn the predictability of behaviors and responses, one can begin to understand what the patterns are in the chaos of communication. Behaviors and responses rest on how one's day really is going, how one's meal is not settling or hasn't arrived yet, how one might be worn out from a long day or a virus. Communication must bend around lots and lots of variables in order to be successful. It's not as simple as plugging into a wall socket and exchanging information.
That still didn't give me enough to work with for good communication, but I started applying as much of my new knowledge as I could when I could with fairly sweet results, for the most part. And then everything went horribly wrong...
Schematics in my mind weren't a good substitute for the inherent intuition that others are born with. I was still bypassing far too much, not realizing my coping skills were affecting my own communication efforts. I had been taught all my life to hide my flaws and 'perform', so playing the social game amounted to playing a game of masks. That isn't a very good way to keep friends. I would keep up a dialogue that I thought sufficient for interchange, possibly equal to the amounts of whatever I got incoming also outgoing, which meant convos turned into competitions. I really had no idea that's what I was doing, and I grew very annoyed at it when I realized that's how it felt. All I had to do was step out of my own routine and acknowledge someone without the reciprocal balance of give and take. I could have had a very good lifelong friendship with a real person on my own street if I had realized this simple thing. The dynamics were puzzling, and I was given every chance to respond to some very real reaching out. I can look back now and see how valuable I could have been as a person in someone's life, and this person probably never understood how valuable they were in mine, because I didn't understand that reciprocal give and take isn't the way we play the communication game.
I see now that I was far from reciprocating. I matched content. I didn't validate or 'hear'. I misinterpreted attempts at real connection because I didn't understand what connecting IS. Connecting in simplest terms for aspienado is like electron flow. It's the point where exchange can flow, and exchange is genuine caring. Being friends and communicating isn't about spending time and back and forth exchange, it's about connecting. It may have nothing at all to do with the content, but feeling like that content was heard.
I understood none of this until that friend was long gone. A lot of my sadness was about not feeling heard myself, but I'm pretty sure now that I was heard very clearly and couldn't see that because I was so lacking the ability to connect socially, to appreciate and exchange genuine feelings, whether or not content was shared. I can see now I was a dismal failure at being what another person needed as part of a support network- a friend.
Irreversible process,
gaming,
predicting,
connecting...
By this time I was 40 years old and close to giving up on ever having a friend.
By the way, Lexx fans, have any of you noticed (watch the videos) that the Lexx is a character representation of Mandelbrot's all-inclusive Julia set equation?
Ok, now we're arriving to the weird place where I was nearly ready for my whole world to flip me upside down.
Connectivity is energy flow. We already think of emotions in those terms. Sometimes interaction can be a real drag, other times it can sparkle. Words we use to describe interactions and particularly conversations involve words that also apply to energy flow. "I am on fire!" "The conversation was electric." "The party was hopping." "Class was stultifying." You could play with this all day.
I had become a rogue dipping in and out of internet convos for quick exchange, not really connecting. Once in awhile I'd spend more time talking somewhere, but not usually for purposes to get to know anyone. When others wanted to get to know me, they either quickly dropped by the wayside or clung on parasitically. I was very used to this, having been in and out of fandoms for years. Not much of it phased me, most of it irked me, and I was just as bad as everyone else to hit and run.
A TV show changed all that. Because it caught my attention so hard, I went down a really big rabbit hole going after everything I could find about it, and along the way ran into other real people doing the same thing. I did my usual blitzing in and out of forums, leaving comments in guest books, and then something changed, basically, blogging became a thing. I made my first couple of blogs, wrote a few feelings about the show, and the first contacts started. I increased my content output, drew more interaction, and so forth. Back then I was very green, and right on the cusp of super fail. 2004 was the year my world crashed into darkness, years of illness and grief, and everything from there was me split into two- the me in a mask online and the me behind the mask trying to keep up. I didn't realize this for four years. During those four years I slogged through mental sludge akin to the kinds of mental loss that people go through after brain injuries from strokes or car accidents, although there was no sign of damage. I lost math and spacetime orientation, became dyslexic, suffered short term memory deficits, and long term memory jumbles. I could no longer hide being autism spectrum, like I'd been taught from childhood. I also plummeted physically to the point of wondering if I'd lose both hearing and vision, and finally had to quit work for good as my health crumbled even more into needing help with self care. I could no longer put on my own shoes and socks, needed help shopping and bathing, and even had to stop driving for awhile.
During this time, I hung on as hard as I could to the only thing I could still seem to do- construct sentences. I very slowly built a fan blog for that TV show and spent a laborious amount of time creating a little bit of content for it. I credit that obsession with keeping me out of the kind of self destructive depression that would have been horrible for my family.
And during THAT, there was a person that talked to me nearly every day. Not the usual parasitic follower I had become accustomed to. Not a needy person needing attention. Not one of the 'crazies' in a raging fandom. No, an actual, real person was talking to me, on the side, about real life, about hopes and dreams and real thoughts about story content...
I was on the brink of understanding relationship connectivity. I was so close to grasping what I need to do to be someone's friend, but sadly doing it through crushing loss and disability. I tried to keep it all separated, but it was like steering my spaceship through a violent asteroid field during battle while trying to text, to borrow what at that time would be a futuristic visual. My kind of contact was like emotional hit and miss because I was working so hard to hide all the distortion I was filtering and fighting through just to be able to chat a bit. It never occurred to me to be honest. I was so used to a lifetime of being pressured (forced) to hide my autism challenges and then years of internet masking to avoid real people showing up at my house (it happened) that I couldn't see I wasn't making myself emotionally available. The friend eventually slipped away and over several very sad years I finally realized THAT was it.
AVAILABILITY. Let's add that to the list!!!!
Irreversible process,
gaming,
predicting,
connecting,
availability...
I have spent the last several years practicing on being emotionally available for others. It's like learning fancy dance steps for a cotillion. I like it. And as I'm learning this part, I can now see where and why others are afraid of learning this. People can be pretty mean. *I* used to be pretty mean! I can look back now and see that when I thought I was being my cleverest or wittiest, I was actually being quite mean.
I didn't have an empathetic bone in my body for many years, and I don't think it's necessarily because I was incapable of it as much as I was raised by someone who didn't understand even the basics of it. My dad wasn't intentionally cruel, just extremely practical. My mom's overwhelming feelings were like a silly string hitting a boulder. I grew up without empathy, never felt forgiven for being a problem child or understood as a person, closed myself off from everyone most of my life so no one could hurt me (that's a great way to wind up hurting oneself instead), and pretty much the only way I learned empathy was over many years of very slowly waking up through my own children and learning to see from their eyes and my mother's eyes simultaneously. My children are natural caretakers. I have no idea how I missed all that when it was my turn, except that I was so terribly deficit at being emotionally available, I just didn't know how.
I'm a natural problem solver, and my biggest problems in life have always been social. I can feel what I need- stability, validation, mutual support, stuff like that. It took me awhile to figure out how to get those. You can't shortcut and force it. Just getting married to someone doesn't do the trick. It's an internal journey, and journeys must align for that kind of bonding.
Somehow, my journey aligned. I could see and feel that I'd had what I needed, but I was at a loss how to have kept it. If I'd been more emotionally available, a lot of those lost feelings would never have happened. I had spurned emotional attachments most of my life, but deep down I know I need them or it feels like I'm dying inside. Humans are natural bonders, we bond with nearly anything that moves, even plants and places. We 'own' our loves, take what we need into our souls. We don't just abide alongside, we deeply entangle ourselves with someone, something, anything. Hobbies or games if nothing else. We need that emotional attachment to be healthy.
So that's where I'm at in this journey now. I'm sure there is more to come. I wanted to share my perspective on the importance of learning to communicate well from my own point of view. It's not just about pouring out my soul, dumping my day, splatting my feelings (or hiding them). It's about realizing that everything I've ever said to a person is still inside them painting a picture of me, that I have the power to enhance that picture, that I can imagine how the next brush stroke will go, that I can help hold the brush, and that we can both feel good about that.
Yes, it's complicated and it's hard. That looks intense even to natural instinctuals, right? But imagine growing up with a deficit and none of that comes naturally at all. It's kind of like a Beauty and the Beast scenario, I guess. Both sides must figure out how to come together into a bonding friendship.
I need to be done with this, it's been a bit consuming, lol. Aspienado touching down and blowing stuff around...
This is extra thinking if you're in the mood- basics for colorizing a mandelbrot. About 11 minutes in we arrive at a sweet communication function visual, continue from there so see 'attraction' splitting into a group convo, if you will (minute 13 on is fabulous). It's idealized, but that's how I 'see' communication. I think Asimov would've had a ball with twitter trend prediction.
So the other day someone publicly reminded me that they are a big fan of mine and to have a great new year. Since that particular person was a key pivot in how I interact publicly, and then a later reminder why I've stopped tit for tat support for it's own polite sake, I didn't respond at all. Call me rude, but being prodded like a work horse on demand without so much as a shared link back or even a personal click to see what my own deal is during interaction crisis (from my point of view, probably completely missed and at least ignored from the other point of view), how could this aspienado conceivably keep up any kind of polite face? For someone claiming some sort of savvy in the writing and publishing world, I'm not sure what I'm seeing on that account is much different from actor obsession and possibly internal challenges not that much different from mine but never acknowledged.
It's one thing to miss being polite about help with several hours of tech support and no recompense, it's another to be praised with odd nicknames and the kind of intimacy that misleads others and still doesn't really share my part of the work back. (Several people noticed and asked me privately what was going on, it was so obvious. The fact that *I didn't shred this person in a live feed* means humongous personal growth.) If treating me like a butler and then a cousin is how we define this 'friendship' (using that word as loosely as possible without dropping it), then I'd love to submit my resignation and never be tagged again. It could have been part of a bigger beautiful mutual support network I'm building, but I think bigger picture gets pretty lost on some people.
Aspienado wrangles relationship meaning like a cat, which also leaves me wondering how this person could possibly not get it, with all those cat pix... I am NOT- have never been and will never be- Pinkapalooza or Pinkmeister or any of the other nicks that don't seem to stop with this person. That rankles me like someone jamming a pointy stick up my nose.
So this is a challenge. Part of being public (along with having my facebook identity copied) is being projected upon. People will see me the way they see me, and I have no control over that. I must allow others to be themselves and see the world the way they see it, even if it means they jovially nickname me and prod me to interact. Doesn't mean I have to respond, it just means I need to let it go and stop allowing that kind of stuff to turn my head. I'm too easily distracted over things that don't have near the depth of meaning I lend to it (dump on it, smother it in...), and part of my aspienado challenge is to stop turning aside for that kind of stuff. It's just part of the process, and actually a good part, so instead of ruining it with darker colors and venom because I'm a weirdo, I'm going to do what I can this year to say THANK YOU. I don't exactly mimic elegant delicacy, but it doesn't mean I can't aspire to it.
Back to here and now. We have Bunny one more day. She's almost clear to go back to daycare, yay! I'm so worn out from this really long 'vacation' (started in mid December) that I'm losing control over 'zoning'. Yesterday Papa wasn't even back out the door with her yet and I was already globbing all my words up and suddenly just spacing out at distant walls in mid sentence. I needed down time so badly last night that I was in bed by 6, and I'm still not sure how I'm going to get through today. Lalaloopsy and 'puppy show' are ruining me. My thinkability plummets into 3-year-old land and Bunny is thrilled to find herself smarter than Meemaw. I have nothing but praise for people who are able to work with small children all day. My own sploit was a very quiet child because autism spectrum, and didn't start the talking a lot stuff until nearly 4 years old, so, besides helping out with Bunny's mama during chicken pox and stuff, this is my first real venture into all-day ADHD nonstop 3-year-old broadcasting. I find Bunny very enjoyable and extremely pleasant for her age, but there just isn't break time at all for hours and hours. Thankfully I've got years of her mama under my belt, but the full time stuff started at 5 years old, so I'm an aspienado meemaw teetering on a the brink of zone fail as opposed to going full zone. I'm remembering my Jedi training, as it were.
For now, I'm holding my days down to fighting with W10 xbox minecraft beta controls. I discovered yesterday I don't have colored glass in my inventory and I can't make any manually, so grrrr.
I have never liked comfortable ruts. I'm very serious when I say I've watched a few people sit in their ruts for ten, fifteen, even twenty years in various fandom places, and nothing has changed the whole time. Yeah, they've raised kids and gotten divorces and maybe even moved or something, but they repeat the same words and phrases ad nauseam as if they are caught in a time bubble. I used to mock it a bit, but now that twitter has exponentially magnified this in its massive sticky web, I am fearing it. Fours years of the same day in and day out chatter screams zombies to me.
And I'm especially in shock that nearly 4 1/2 years have flown by since I showed back up. Thank goodness I've tried keeping a crazy balance doing way too much, but I can see my retreat into Pinky blog becoming that comfortable rut, and the part of me that is recoiling doesn't want to listen to the part of me that is saying calm down, this isn't stagnation death. Not by a long shot.
I quietly had a very typical aspienado reaction to someone beating me to my own timehop yesterday. First of all, Timehop tells me people don't see those until I share them, and the entire Timehop memory actually got shared before I ever reshared, so that's a lie. Second of all, I have to remind myself I set all my stuff up especially to be stalkable, so that means SUCCESS, right? It's just aspienado has a hard time with the Plan sometimes. It goes against my inherent nature. This isn't the first time it's happened, it's just an internal struggle that I don't usually share but is a very real thing I deal with forcing myself to stay public.
I have PLANS. I also have a real life. When I open twitter and the first thing I see on New Year's Day is a bonanza of links to buy this book and hate the prez-elect and let's count all the ways this year is awesome so far (looking at watch) and finding nothing so let's retweet everything we can find on human spirit before we crumble back into mass emotional casualty, I'm either following the wrong crowd or y'all really need to figure your shit out. OR. I'm the one who needs to figure my shit out and not be getting on twitter first thing on New Year's Day....
Some people joke about OCD. I have a distraction compulsion that runs very deep, because I'm an addict. It's really easy to fall into that hole with a bunch of other people and flail around. Every time I do that, I wind up NOT doing something else I wanted to do. Every. Single. Time.
click for a chuckle
So here's the thing- if I want to have a better 2017 and get some of my Plan stuff executed, I need to prioritize again. Pinky blog is great for focus in the mornings, so it stays. Other stuff is going onto a rotating list, like the old fashioned Monday is trash day, Tuesday is shopping, Wednesday is laundry day or whatever, except it's my rotating writing. I was doing that for a couple of years and it's kind of stopped, actually for good reasons if I think about it.
I'm actually sleeping better and longer, which is fantastic after 20 years of severe insomnia.
I'm helping out with a little person who has 50 times the energy of most humans because ADHD.
I've processed a ~mountain~ of emotional stuff over the last year and a half, hitting it hard and fast with the psychologist.
I have alternately plowed and faceplanted through so much pain challenge that I'm kind of surprised I'm not curled up in a ball and all the blogs shut down, but I made a vow, so here I still am.
Anyway, I desperately need to get back on track with my focus and direction and plan and ALL THE THINGS because if I don't, I will wind back up wallowing in the pit of despair I was using all this to escape from in the first place. Nothing personal if I don't see #allyourthings on the medias, but I really need to get my butt into some kind of gear.
If you guys ever need to be able to say "I know a person who washes trash cans with real soap and takes things apart to disinfect or clean tiny hard to reach places", that's me.
Slowly getting my house super stripped. Learning just how much work one raisin on the bottom of a person's shoe can create later. I was down on the linoleum scraping smears of sticky raisin leather because nothing else I did was working. They should make superglue and nail polish out of raisins.
Totes forgot about my fantasy team till this morning, but it's cool, no one played yet. I'm currently 5-7 and 8th place, solid hold on that plastic cup level of possible prize winning. @bonenado is 9-3 in first place, a 'champion of champions'. He's obsessive over fantasy ball teams like I am over stat trackers.
Speaking of stat trackers, I'm trying to downgrade my statcounter account to just barely above free and facepalming because I forgot that means I'll have to reload all those tracker codes now on the projects that are still left. I'll do it later. Not in the mood. I've reduced it so far down now, once the big year thing I paid for last spring expires (practically infinity data logs), it'll be like weaning off any other addiction. I just need to stop it.
I looked up billing history on several internet toys. It's no different from other people paying to go to movies or salons or something, but it adds up, and the cost/benefit isn't holding up any more. I'm disillusioned. Meh, it was fun. Moving on.
This background is animated, really cool.
I'm 4 days into reducing my coffee intake, too. Yowza, you say. Yes, I say, I'm a glutton for punishment. I love torturing myself. Sweet caffeine withdrawal headache all weekend. Noticed this fall I had ramped up to 4-5 cups a day (plus coffee ice cream), so I'm working on holding back down at 2 cups in the morning and half a cup at noon. Really need to get back to one cup a day. Grabbing coffee at all hours is a sign I'm not managing my nutrition and sleep very well.
I finally wiped my history since I got Jawn last January. 17K+ items, not including temp files. Wiped those, too. My deep cleaning is off the hook this week.
Bunny has a tonsillectomy in less than 2 weeks. After that fixed point in time, everything in our lives will revolve around recovery, Christmas, and whatever the week between Christmas and New Years holds. I am doing everything in my power to brace for impact.
At any rate, the new bathroom rugs are now down, everything else washable has been stripped and the last of it runs through today, once my kitchen floor is done, I'm going down the minecraft hole for awhile. The only things left will be 1- light remodel/restructure of counter surfaces for holiday (that doesn't sound at all light, does it?), and 2- menu planning. My fridge is BARE.
Side note- Anyone thinking of getting me sox this year, please donate sox to homeless shelters. They need them way more than I do. Thank you.
I'm a euphoric crab. Let's see, what can we find to appease me so I'll get off here and get busy again...
One of these days it'll all just work. We won't need a million accounts, we won't have to worry about or pay for upgrades, all our tech will be a smooth experience that never crashes...
I was all over this kind of thinking back in 1998 when Virtual Slide aired.
Yeah, I'm mean, you have to pay to see that, but it's a really good ep, so worth it. But tell me what you think- the new science ideas physicists are tossing around about our universe being a hologram, our reality already being virtual- philosophically, it's like saying experience is an ongoing fractal. Those are my own words. I didn't read them anywhere. Ha, just made that my title.
Anyway, now I'm thinking how Hawking's light cone of events can be applied to fractals, kind of like turning the cone sideways and seeing time a little differently. Ok, I'll confess- I am one of those people who was thrilled when M-Theory sprung into life in the mid-90s because I'd already been thinking about that kind of stuff (thanks to Douglas Adams' obsession with couches and a character obsessed with digital graphing and mapping {1987}), but I never made it through calculus because the second week in, my Chinese professor told me in very Chinesey-French-accented English (got his degree in Canada) that I needed to stop jumping to third semester calc and stick to learning first semester homework (apparently I'd backward engineered calculus theory in two weeks) and asked me to leave his class or he'd flunk me. I'm also a big philosophy buff, as we shall see in my Existential Aspie when it comes out (God, please help me get DONE with this), so yeah, I'm all into experiential fractals now. I may possibly be the first person in the world to say that phrase. I should jump on that hashtag. #experientialfractals The picture of the universe in my head is more like that, if you can even imagine it.
How do I disentangle from this post. Perhaps Benedict being Hawking. I've never yet seen that. I'm afraid I'll bawl my eyes out. I've been a staunch Hawking fan since the 80s. I wrote somewhere on bluejacky that he was my icon through college while I ground around through classes in so terribly much pain, reasoning that if he could do it, so could I, and I learned to super focus my brain past pain, even using pain to force the focus. It's like the more pain I'm in, the deeper I can think. I spent several hours off and on yesterday sculpting the words for a Stanley Tweedle post. I should try to get that done today, my brain is super on right now.
Once in awhile I go almost into full shutdown where I stop talking, and responding in real time is a big effort. This weekend was like poking little holes in a thick cocoon just long enough to feed Scott and then going back into my head. Between all the pressure in my ears from allergies and antihistamines and the air pressure changes from the cold front, I feel like my brain is being squeezed. The only tv I watched the whole weekend was The Last Ship, and the only way I made it through that was keeping one eye on the live hashtag feed.
I was very rarely allowed to go into a real shutdown as a child, especially in response to stress. I was also never allowed to go anywhere near meltdown without heavy consequences. I learned to turn into a vigilant rock to avoid extremely negative attention, and my stress levels were so high by the time I hit young adulthood that I was like a ticking time bomb.
You guys who've never gone through shutdowns before would probably think this is like a killer load of narcotic. It's nirvana.
We've got two more bidding guys coming out this afternoon about the roof and the guttering. +_+
You can't go wrong with me mixing food and SCIENCE.
And then we'd have weird Pink² twitter kids or something.
Can someone pleaseset this mix to a fractal vid, thanx. Seeing Benedict's face zoom around doesn't do it for me. Again, sorry, Ben, I love you, but I neeeeeed funky spacy weird brain stuff right now. "Rapture (Avicii New Generation Extended Mix)" by DJ Fernando (eMusic) I'm having to imagine artsy floaty colorful fractal art in the back of my mind while I work instead of going deep for a few minutes into something real, so my brain is already working overtime and I just had my first coffee.
This is the day before the big Bunny turns 2 party. I still have a watermelon shark to carve and the 'ocean' cupcakes to make. The 'beach' cupcakes are already done. Oh, and homemade Oreo ice cream in little pails, to look like sand. Like this, but without the holiday color. I also picked up some real crab legs for garnish on the beach theme. I'm not hosting, there's a whole meal and decorations already being rounded up elsewhere. Big weekend.
Ok, looking for some focus. <- that's a 'fractal art animation music' search list on youtube, check it out.
Little slow, kinda educational, those of you who've never plunged into fractal animation set to music, I'm easing you in because it's likened to a faux LSD cleanse for the brain without all the horrible side effects. I mean, assuming you have time to waste because it's Friday and work sux.
This WTFness keeps popping up in suggestions. Good lord. Those of you who couldn't sit through that last one, stare at Benderbatch while the rest of us move on. I facepalmed at the intro and moved on by 20 seconds in. (Sorry Ben, I really do love you #itsnotyouitsme) (later- actually have it going on in the background, people who can carry on convos like this mystify me #aspergers One convo like this would last me a month and I wouldn't talk again for days.) (Yes, the irony is kind of hitting me.) (If you're asking "Irony?", it's ok, go back to sleep.)
Ok, take the plunge. You have been warned. If you stick with this you'll soon understand why I'd like to reset my own mix to it, like I mentioned above. I've seen fractals set to dubstep, omg rake my brain OUT, that is an abomination that just doesn't speak well of finessing brain rhythm for quality deeper thinking. Anyway, 3 hours is super overkill, I just need a few minutes and the kind of music that syncs my coils up for Thoughts, as per yesterday's posts.
Suddenly visualizing a living cat from a Clifford torus POV and realizing I could hypertorus it in my head and still keep it intact (the cat would be unaware of a higher dimensional being looking at it) and dropping everything to run to the laptop to look up things like mobius torus isn't helping me get birthday party food prep done. >=l This snip clicks back to one of my fave pages on the internet.
No, I suck at math, but I get theory. Anything I see in my head I can usually find within minutes on the webs even if I didn't know it existed, although I doubt I find a Clifford cat. Oh, I'm so funny. But there's some dang awesome fractal art cats out there.
In case you're curious and wanna usefully waste some time.
And then I just get lost in youtube.
On days like this when I can't turn my head off, I see awesome cool things and make notes for stories. I love weird strange stories.
This isn't getting cupcakes made. =\ #lostintheawesome You NEED to see the Bucky Brain Gear. Just go do it. This post will still be here whenever your twirly eyeballs finally wander back.
Ok, now I need some serious refocus. Very serious. I know it's not Friday yet, but you guys need some distraction from work.
I had no idea. I feel so behind the times now. You knew you could click those, right?
I have apparently been misunderstanding vital interacting components of state laws and the Gregorian calendar all week, thought gun season opened today. Or maybe it's the way Scott jumps around in convos while we're walking around Walmart and says "Uh-huh" and then butts in and mows over the words I'm saying when I ask questions. I actually asked in surprise last weekend, "Gun season opens on a Friday this year?" and he actually said "Yes", but that interaction was smashed into all kinds of other stuff going on. You'd think I'd learn. Last night he couldn't believe that I thought gun season opened today. Our whole marriage is based on this conversation technique. Aspie chick marries ADHD motorbrain, 21 years of wibbly wobbly timey wimey.... stuff. He smashes several conversation topics into one convo stream in real life the same way twitter does. I just wish I could go back to time stamps and show him how our misunderstandings start getting tangled up. He gets very annoyed that I tell him he said the exact same thing last year about something, like next year he's going to target practice through the summer with his bow and go bow hunting, and then he says that again the next November and doesn't remember he said it the year before. This has happened so many years in a row that one year I got a piece of paper out, wrote that quote, made him sign and date it, and put it on the fridge. We walked by it so many times it became invisible, and *bam*, he said it again, I put that piece of paper in his face and laughed. He really hates when I do that.
As per yesterday's blog post, yes, I can remember details like that, but I can't remember one idea that pops into my head long enough to get it written down. I can remember seeing something several months or years ago and go straight to it, even if I can't remember details about where it was, and I can remember words people say or things I've read like a tape recorder, but I can't remember what day it is, what month it is, what I've done through the day, or what I was just thinking. I can't remember faces I've seen or people's names, but I can remember what they wrote on twitter four months ago and actually find the tweet.
Yesterday got sideswiped, stayed very busy but wound up on a completely different track. Need to stay off the tech today, at least for awhile, and then I need to narrowly focus on my scheduled work plan when I do come back to it.
I know dreams don't always mean much but I woke up this morning from a very distraught me in a huge beautiful wealthy home wailing to my (deceased) mother about turning 40. Since I turned 40 years ago and actually had a fun time with it, I'm wondering where in the world this dream came from and how in the world could that be me. Unless I was having another one of those experiencing someone else dreams, in which case I wanna say Buck up, geez, you big baby.
Total brain reset. Let the mystical parts of your brain get through to the tired, angsty side that thinks everything looks too hard and let yourself wonderfully float through your day. I have this idea that when the brain chips come, normals will have access to the same aspie neural stim experiences I have that allow me to step around all that crap and be as awesome as I wanna be without having to stop and reflect on whether I'm cool enough, kind of like being on pot without the dumb and dumberer side effects. If you could have this or some other fractal zoom with some kind of enjoyable repeating music pattern running in the background of your mind, your brains would pump out endorphins like crazy and it would be better than xanax. That plus having twitter in your brains, you'd feel like part of the Collective and everything would be right with the world.
Since I turned 40 years ago and actually had a fun time with it, I'm wondering where in the world this dream came from and how in the world could that be me. Unless I was having another one of those experiencing someone else dreams, in which case I wanna say Buck up, geez, you big baby.