what's a love song doing on Pinkyween Eve?

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

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

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

Taming the brain That's a pretty good site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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

shipping in our daily lives

I get these funny ideas and start snickering, and @bonenado hears me from the other room and has to come ask what's going on, which is interrupting his psyching up for his next fantasy football draft (only four teams this year, last year he had seven), and then I stumble all over myself trying to explain why a silly idea is so funny. Stuff like that can take up to 20 minutes and wind up in what feels like frustrating massive wastes of time to both of us, so I actually put my hand over my mouth and snicker as quietly as possible, because once I start laughing, I can't stop for beans.

I'm always popping on and off my blogs for something, sentence here, paragraph there, and as I cruised through again this morning I screeched to a stop and thought, "Not one person on this planet doesn't look awesome in a pair of sunglasses." I linked that back in case you're interested.

Anyway, every little bit I get funny thoughts twisting fandom stuff into real life, so this morning I was musing again on how easily fans automatically leap to assumptions that people working together on a job must have a real life relationship beyond work, no matter how platonic, they must still think about each other unceasingly because the fans do. And I see this all the time on twitter, Bradley can't show up without a virtual swarm of fans asking point blank about Colin, as if his life still revolves around a former coworker and he has the same warm fuzzies for him that that fans do. What really brought this idea home was an interviewer mentioning to Martin that he'd recently interviewed Ben, and Martin said "Who?" because they hadn't seen each other in months and there are plenty of Bens around, so why should he automatically assume which Ben, right? But once actors are coupled up in fandoms, it's basically married for life, whether they have a clue that's happening or not.

I've had a variety of jobs, everything in and out of food, hospital and hotel services, radio sales, worked up in retail. I've been offered hospital administration and teaching at one of the local colleges and told I really should finish my certification in professional counseling or nursing (or what the heck, my thesis in resource planning), but I have this habit of turning down salaried positions, God knows why (I do have reasons), so it's not hard for me to cross pollinate funny visuals of celebs working menial jobs.

So imagine those two up there working a department store. They have separate lives, they only know each other through work, they're not pals outside of work. They simply work in the same building, probably run into each other because the floor plan requires it or they wind up at register together or cover for each other on breaks.

Now imagine a few other coworkers in the store going home and shipping them into fanfics. Does anybody really do this in real life about their coworkers? I've not seen it, but surely they do. I was thinking how long something like this could go on without the two guys even being aware of it, until, say, a little gang of 5 other coworkers grouping up on break was giggling every time one of them went by, or asking one about the other on his day off, or bringing up weird convos about the two of them, and the guys going Huh?

At first I thought this seemed silly, but it's kind of occurring to me how stress relieving this could be, actually. Say you have a manager you hate, and a lead over you driving you crazy, you go home and ship the two of them into these wild dirty flings and laugh yourself silly because they reeeeeallllly don't go together in real life. And you could completely reorient them sexually and have them carrying on steamy affairs on the dock or something, and wind up pulling several other coworkers into your stories (both in the stories and in real life) and really have a ball with it.

STRESS RELIEF.

Except don't get caught. I have a suspicion if you hit too close to home with shipping people you could wind up in some kind of legal entanglement.

When I retailed, there was only one other person in the whole store out of 150 people who knew what Lexx was, and I was very careful not to tell him who I was on the webs. He'd have died. (That was before I ever put a real pic of myself up on my fansite.) But every little bit a group of us would get 8-8'd to bunch up and blitz a messy area together real fast, and it was fun driving other coworkers crazy shooting Lexx quotes back and forth. It wouldn't be long until the rest joined in shooting other scifi show quotes around, everyone anteing up, and I loved it. That was probably the closest I had to actually having friends in real life, except outside of work I never saw them, and they had no idea who I really was.

That was it. I really need to get back on my day. Hope you guys are having/have had a good weekend.

another Bunny survival day

Scott and I take turns so we can recover from the intense brain drain that watching a nonstop Bunny causes. I spend my time chasing down distractions on the laptop in between doing dishes and folding laundry, and then he spends his time freaking out about his fantasy teams in between running outside for dumb little reasons like chasing a stray cat off or getting the mail.

Tuesday was awesome, warm and sunny and Bunny got to go outside, Wednesday was dismal, cold and rainy, but Bunny was awesome playing indoors. Today we're all getting a little worn down and she wants to go outside and it looks sunny but it's still too cold, so maybe I need to cut back on the coffee and plug in another Star Trek movie and just lay on the floor letting her destroy me dropping stuff on my face and using me as a footstool or a bridge.

After she goes home I usually morph into a brainless blob, but yesterday Scott went out for some high speed weedeating before the sun went down. It's been interesting noticing the ways our different genetic makeups handle a long day. His people never die, my people grind to a halt and nuke whoever ripples the pond. I need serious down time to recover, Scott needs serious buzz time. Speaking of buzz, this is a cool thing I saw today, clicks to source.

Click next pic for more buzztrooper goodness.

Star Trek Into Darkness was a surprisingly soothing background yesterday, and I took the opportunity during parts of it to brainwash Bunny some more. Like, at one point I let her dig into a single serve bag of potato chips with me and every time she stuck a chip in her mouth I said "Spock is good". She heard the words "Spock", "Star Trek", "Enterprise", and "spaceship" a lot. Hey, if VBS can do their brainwashing with cookies and koolaid, I can use potato chips for Star Trek. She ate yogurt, fruit, eggs, cheese, and ravioli, so she earned the chips.

You didn't see us jump up and get coats on in the middle of that last paragraph and play with a bubble gun out on the wet 47 degree deck and then come back in for a cookie and a cheese stick. Grampa was reticent, I think he's burning out already. You guys ever notice how grampas don't run daycares? That's no accident. (time passing) And now you didn't see us fold all the towels and washcloths in the dryer. I told Bunny don't go in too far or she'd wind up going back in time like Cole. I folded as fast as I could but she was still faster than me and kept reloading the dryer. We got a LOT of work done today. I wouldn't be surprised if we got tomorrow's laundry done already, it was crazy.

By the way, we caught up on The Flash last night, and I never saw the live tweet, but did anybody else have to stop the show and rant about Caitlin asking what a singularity was? She works at Star Labs and doesn't know what a singularity is. That question would have come off way better out of Eddie's mouth, but nooooo, it had to be Caitlin, a genetics specialist that works side by side with Cisco, only the most brilliant scifi lovin' brainiac on the planet. Let me be clear about my feelings- the word "singularity" has been around since the 80s and has inundated nearly every scifi show on the planet ever since, plus it's a biggie in several very real science discussions, so for Caitlin to act like she'd never heard the word singularity before in a lab sitting over a particle accelerator exploded my brain. To me this was like a baseball player asking what a tip off is, or like an executive chef asking what a convection oven is, or a mathematician asking what a sine curve is. They trust Caitlin for knowledge in tight situations, and she doesn't know the crap what a singularity is. If we feel the need to explain it to the audience, at least use a more appropriate way to spell out how dumb we're not supposed to be at Star Labs, ok?

Scott gets a little tense going to movies with me. My 2009 Trek rant is legendary in this house. And that's just a small portion of the 3-month rant I went on. You guys, I'm not even a Flash fan, I'm #TeamWells, and I rant about Wells getting sloppy all. the. time. For a genius he's just pretty stupid. I want five minutes in lockup with evil Wells/Thawne, I will fix so much stuff for him. Fortunately, Scott has never lost it over me hitting the pause button every 30 seconds when I go insane over writing problems. This next pic clicks to a very moving and deeply personal blog post written by a science fiction psychologist, I love it.

Anyway, so you can bet Bunny will be getting a full education on Vulcan physiology, Goa'uld defense strategies, Scarran weak spots, and sing the Brunnen-G battle song on the way to school. Singularity. I need to go breathe into a bag.

Ok, here we go, this is me destressing while grampa and Bunny are out on a walk. I finally just bundled her up, tossed her onto the front deck (it's fenced and gated) and told grampa to get his shoes on.

My fave BC pic bcuz eyes. I have mentioned having a facial recognition problem, and that tweet links to a post I wrote on what it's like living with prosopagnosia (facial recognition deficit), so when I do happen to notice features, which isn't often because aspienado's so aspie, they really stick with me. I've also mentioned being a Sherlock fan and not a Benedict fan, so it took awhile for me to even notice, but he's got spectacularly beautiful eyes. I'm actually being annoying putting this giphy here, lol. I know it's hard to read when stuff moves on the page, which was one of my biggest problems with myspace when it first launched.

I need to be off here before they come back so we can trade off again, so lemme find a quick brain juicer and post this thang. Too late, here they are. See ya.

shipping asexuality isn't as boring as people think, certainly not Moffat, and I'll prove it

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.

'There is a clue everybody's missed': Sherlock writer Steven Moffat interviewed (spoiler alert)

The Pink List

Guess this is the closest I'm going to get this morning to pink coffee.

I'd like to thank the person/bot in Brazil that pumped up my dotcom traffic count last Friday. I hadn't checked that blog in ages till yesterday, no idea why this happened.

It feels kinda Black List-y, only instead of Berlin it's Brazil.

So here's the thing. I'm running a little behind on my Santa chores because I haven't had a car this month.

Actually, that's been Scott's car since 2009, was mine for years before that. He's driving the CRV now because the thermostat is out in the pickup, very sucky driving with no heat, can't defrost, etc. We've been way too busy to solve this problem (hopefully this weekend), plus who wants to pay a year of property tax on another vehicle that's only a couple of weeks in the family, right?

So I'm getting the house ready for a big pajama party on Christmas Eve, plus the week of Christmas will be a busy burrito week so the daycare lady can enjoy Christmas, too. Got all kinds of deep cleaning and freshening up going on, moving stuffs around so presents can magically appear without us tripping over them, fine tuning my lists for the days I'll finally get back into town. The more I can get done this week, the easier it'll be later. I'm actually very surprised and pleased I still have so much brain access this time of year. I'm usually in core shutdown by now, just a numb robot going through motions. Guess my brain chemicals must finally be resetting back to a healthier cocktail in there.

In the meantime I'm counting down the mailing days till Christmas. It'll be here in TWO WEEKS, guys. Click this for more info.

We also had a box arrive Fed-Ex yesterday from a mail order company that was so shredded I thought the worst, thank goodness everything inside was well protected and survived. I've been told when I ship through UPS that packages need 2 inches of cushioning on all sides and must be able to withstand bumping around 40 MPH automatic conveyors. Click for more info.

Another click if you've got questions.

And if you're still not sure you're doing it right, UPS will pack your box for you for an additional fee.

Now comes my favorite part. I've been obsessed with the shipment of goods and services around the world since the fourth grade (#aspienado), I love watching videos like these. I like to think about my own packages being part of the crazy jumble, wondering if my box coincidentally bumps a box from someone I know, traveling across the planet to people I love, like magic. If I'd had the proper guidance back in the day, I think I'd have been very happy going into shipping logistics.

UPS, FedEx, and USPS have their own youtube channels if you want to see more. I've gotta tear my eyes away and get busy!