puns and scripts

I use tumblr for a few, very specific purposes. To look at pictures of baby animals and to find puns and other bad jokes. I maybe started it as an extension of this blog and definitely do have a bit of autistic people I like to read on there*, but quite honestly, it is mostly puppies. Today I found this piece of beauty.

So I was gallivanting along on tumblr and found this delightful little thing.

And I really truly love it.

Puns make my brain happy.  I don’t necessarily understand the puns all at once, but once I work it through, I love them. They are just so clever, how they can turn around the meaning of the words. Once the trick is all worked out, it is exciting. There is an answer, a definite answer. There is a reason why they are funny.

Sometimes I can’t figure out puns, and I hate that, because I haven’t found the answer.

And this puns was based off of one of my scripts. One of my conversation fillers. One of the things that I can repeat when I need a break or when I need words but I don’t have them yet. When I want to talk, but there aren’t really words yet or I don’t have anything specific to say. One of my ready-to-go, preformed, pre-made words.

And it had numbers in it, too.

So it was like the universe had combined to create this magical combination of all the things that make my brain happy and safe into one gigantic, perfect, inside joke.

Which is wonderful.

~~~

*Which is something I feel irrationally guilty, or at least I think irrationally guilty for, that I don’t use it more for that. That it isn’t a serious real thing where I write about issues and all that. But mostly I am ok with it. Because I really like bad jokes and pictures of puppies.

~~~

P.S. I am back to the Midwest now and have much recovered from the bit of a mess I was in when I left. So that is a good thing. Maybe I will make some more thoughtful-insightful/autism related posts soon. I have a lot of half formed ones floating around.

bad no good

I want to drop out of grad school
I want to just go home and never have to do anything again

I don’t want to think about getting married
I don’t want to think about picking a lab
I don’t want to talk to professors

I can’t go home I have so much to do
I can’t miss a flight I already checked in for
I can’t stay here
I can’t function properly
I can’t eat or make food
I can’t talk to people correctly

I want everything to stop
I want everything to stop
I want everything to stop

…

Normally I do well in grad school. Now is not one of those times.

Grad school is self-directed which means I don’t have enough direction. I don’t know how to choose and how to convey my interest appropriately in joining a lab. And when I did, there were not-clear-things that resulted from the conversations (and from me crying in the middle of conversations) and it is all a no-good mess, still. And I talked to advisors and people I rotated with and they just kept asking more questions and not answering anything explicitly because it is up to me to decide so I have to make the decisions. And because it took so long for me to talk clearly enough that people understood what I was actually saying (on the order of weeks), now I am leaving for 2 weeks without knowing what I am doing when I come back. And without having joining a lab until who-knows-what or if people want me to join or WHAT because it is all an awful NO GOOD HORRIBLE BAD MESS.

Eventually I calmed down a bit and talked to people and wrote out the steps for the current life-grad school-rotations-communication dilemma. At least I’m not in the meltdown-crying-every-hour-awful-mess-state that I was earlier. I have a plan. Well, sort of a plan. A plan to figure out a plan. To fix all the big horrible mistakes that I have made and have gotten behind on. To make up to all the people I have disappointed. To stop disappointing people and stop making mistakes.

Normally I do well in grad school.

But I am going to go home (which was already planned) and my parents are going to take care of me for two weeks and I can e-mail professors about things and do everything except meet-in-person which is something that I need a lot of preparation for anyway. And I can focus only on the tasks I need to do and break them into steps and hopefully figure out how to do things.

Maybe going somewhere safe will fix it. Seeing if hiding from my problems will fix it. (Or “taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture” if I put it in more friendly terms).

Messy mind, messy writing, sorry about the blurry thoughts.

Hiding

There’s been finals and papers. I’m going home Monday.
I have to figure out which lab I am joining at some point.
I HAVE TO FIGURE OUT WHICH LAB I AM JOINING.

AKA WHERE I AM GOING TO SPEND THE NEXT 5-7+ years of my life doing science.

Scientists are bad at communication
but so am I
(because I am a scientist)
so that has all been a stress-mess of no one knowing what is going on
Every time I have talked to someone it has become a bigger mess. So I will be leaving Monday for two weeks probably with no real idea of what I am going to do when I get back.

For the last week or so,  I have had to step evenly on every crack on the sidewalk on my way to work or else my feet get uneven and that is bad. Even when I wear my big thick running shoes, even when I don’t look down, I can tell. (And the sidewalks are horribly sized sections so there is no good way to walk… it’s about one and a half strides per block no way to make it even ever). So it’s been a tough week.

So in the midst of procrastinating on this work, I have been posting some posts. But then I’ve also been reading other ones. And I got worried so incredibly worried about hurting other people. I would rather a million times be forced to the point of hiding and stress and bad things than hurt someone else. I contemplated deleting everything I have ever written. I contemplated just deleting some posts. I contemplated adding disclaimers to everything ever. So in this panic, I decided that the easiest temporary solution was to just hide it all. Not to delete anything or edit anything that I might regret later. But to just block it all from everyone but me.

So I changed my privacy settings, and tried to forget about it, because I had other things that I needed to worry about this week.

So I hid from the internet for a while.

Because hiding is one of my favorite defense mechanisms. It isn’t really the best one, in terms of effectiveness or long-term-effects or really defensibility, but it is easy when things are hard. And it is a way to postpone things until brains can work again.

This morning, I realized that maybe I should have said something about why I went away, but I didn’t know how to have just one page publicly available. I tried initially when I hid things, but it was too much and I just needed things to be hidden and safe. Because if no one can read what I write, no one can get hurt. So this morning I posted on facebook a rather delayed message about my hiding.

But, I think overall this blog is a good thing. It’s good for me. I’ve made friends through it. (As boyfriend said in his infinite wisdom and good words ability) I’ve ” learned a lot about yourself and gotten good affirmation and confirmation over the blog.”So I will change the privacy settings back so that anyone can read it again. I will keep up my posts. I will be ok with the fact that some posts are messy, that some things I have are rough ideas, that the writing is not always perfect. I will try to come back from hiding, because avoiding good things does not seem like a way I want to come back from life.

“And if people get upset they don’t have to read it”

Choosing not to talk

One of the best classes I ever took in undergrad was an introductory sign language class. I’m not really sure why I decided to take it, except it seemed interesting and fit into my schedule well. I liked the idea of being able to talk to  But it has been so incredibly, unpredictably useful for me, in ways I didn’t expect it to be.

Today was a busy day, where I met a lot of important people in boyfriend’s life. We went and talked to a lot of people and talked and hung out.* And then boyfriend drove me home (I should really pick a name for him).

The moment I got in the car, I was exhausted.
Talking started to be very hard, when I was talking just fine before.
I was quiet.
Very, very tired.

Interesting point: I can hold off my tiredness and my not-talkiness for a certain amount of time. I do have some control over it, but then once I no longer have to, and get to a safe place, I can switch it off. Or at least the waiting and the talking and the being-around-people switches off.  

Then he came in with me to check that I was ok because I wasn’t really talking.
Helped me change into my safe comfy clothes and find my blankets.
Be safe and make sure I have all the steps I needed to calm down and go to sleep.

And through all of this, I was tired and stressed. I could talk, maybe not well, maybe not in full sentences, but I definitely was capable of talking. But it was so much easier to not. Sometimes I lose all my words, but not this time. And because there was another way to communicate, I did. Being able to communicate without having to use my mouth is wonderful. Even when I can talk, sometimes it is incredibly hard. It is so much easier to sign yes or no or food or sleep. (I know very little signs, and certainly don’t ever use enough for grammar to even come into question, but the little I know has been helpful.)**

I think it is ok to not talk sometimes even if you are still able to talk at that time. I think it is important if you know that you sometimes have trouble talking (verbally) to have alternative modes of communication. I think that it is ok to use other methods of communication whenever, not just as a last resort. It’s ok to put my energy towards different sources rather than speaking. I think that it can be ok to choose not to talk.

I think it is important that other people are also ok with using alternative modes of communication. I wouldn’t do this with anyone but boyfriend (partially also because he’s one of the few people I have this system worked out with), but I wish it was more ok to use alternative methods of communication. I know that being able to get across what I want without having to use my voice was part of why I didn’t meltdown today after a long, busy, people-filled day. I think it needs to be safe and needs to be acceptable to choose other ways of talking.

~~~~~
*[He is smart, though, and knows me, so one of them we met over food, so there was food as an excuse for quiet. The other one, we met at their (parent’s) house. However, they had a dog. An adorable, friendly mini Australian Shepherd who is my friend now. So boyfriend and his friend spent a lot of time catching up, and I spent a lot of time hanging with my new friends. We were there for almost 5 hours, which is a long time to spend in a living room talking with someone I had not met before. The only reason I was able to do it for so long was because of the dog. (One more reason why I should have a dog.)]
**Boyfriend knows a smattering of ASL that he taught himself while working at a summer camp in order to talk to a few of the kids there. Neither of us are particularly fluent, but it works enough for us to get our point across. And really, usually when I am that tired, I am on single words, anyway. 

A brief rant about brain activity

Everything is all in my brain. Because my brain is the filter through which I interpret the world. Everything is all in your brain. Because your brain is the filter through which you interpret the world. Everything is always in your brain.

In our grad school ethics class, one of the topics was science and religion, and the presenter brought up some brain scan studies done on religious people praying, and how they had specific brain activity when they were praying. One of the people in my class decided to take this to mean that therefore it couldn’t possibly be real and it was just a brain malfunction. That it was proof that all religious experiences were not real.

I did not like this conclusion. Or this logic.

Because it was missing the clear bit of information, which is that everything we experience we process through our brain. I’m not going to argue about religion or God or gods or personal beliefs, because in general those are up to you to decide. But saying that something isn’t real because there is specific brain activity associated with it is a horrible argument. Of course there is brain activity when people are praying or having religious experiences. The presence of brain activity does not make something NOT REAL. Because you experience everything through your brain.

That is sort of the point of having a centralized nervous system.

Sunglasses, I love you

I do not like the sun.

When I say this, after this ridiculously long Midwest winter, people look at me strangely.

“But you’re from California!”

That is very true. And I even like sunny weather. I like it being warm but not hot outside. I like it when it is not a ridiculous negative temperature. I lived a lovely life before I came here and learned all about wind chill and layers and that you can’t just look outside in the morning to figure out what the weather is going to be like that day and if you should bring a sweatshirt or not. I did enjoy living somewhere that it was never cold enough that closed-toed-shoes were necessary, where the warmest thing I owned was a sweatshirt. But that doesn’t mean I like sunlight.

You see, there is also shade in California. It is possible to enjoy the nice weather without being in the direct sun. For some reason, people seem to forget this fact.

For some reason, though, I did not discover how amazing sunglasses were earlier in life.

Despite what this picture may suggest, I did not wear sunglasses particularly frequently. I was however, as you can tell, clearly a very cool kid, as you can tell by both these sunglasses and this lovely pose in front of the fireplace sometime in  kindergarten-ish.

The reasons for this:
(1) My parents made us wear hats a lot if we were going to be outside for extended periods of times, like hiking.
(2) At the beach, most of the time I was underwater or in the process of going underwater. So the sunlight was a mere distraction. There were so many other things going on.
(3) The rest of the time, I would probably chill out in the shade.
(4) I wore glasses. I did not like contacts. It is sort of awkward to put sunglasses on over glasses.

(5) I did not own sunglasses anyway, and I was a relatively unobservant person. I also didn’t really hang out all that much with other people who wore sunglasses. Who does that, anyway? I guess if you are all outside? But most of my outside activities were either shade-capable-ones or too-active-for-sunglasses-ones.

(6) I thought sunglasses were something for adults.

I remember the sun bothering me earlier. I remember that I would close my eyes when we ran the mile in PE (which is really a bad move, especially when you are running around a block 4 times and not on a track, so there are impediments like palm trees and cracks in the sidewalks and people’s trashcans and sometimes people).

But then sometime late in college, I discovered I could wear sunglasses for things other than driving at sunrise and sunset. This happened because of free sunglasses. And because of lovely friends, who after hearing me complain about the sun being bright, suggested that I put on those free sunglasses. And it was pretty amazing. (Although I still have to carry my other glasses around, so sunglasses are still an awkward option). And that is how I started wearing sunglasses at the beach.

This year, I started experimenting with ways to avoid the sun when walking to work in the morning.

I have tested out sunglasses and a baseball hat. I think the winner will probably be BOTH, but I have not tested out that combination yet.

Baseball hats block the sun from the top and also keep my face from getting sunburnt, but they don’t block sun as well as sunglasses, but they block it differently. Also I can wear my normal glasses with them if I need to actually see for some reason (I don’t have very bad eyesight, but I like wearing my glasses.)

But sunglasses also have other advantages besides blocking the sun.
(1) They hide your eyes. They prevent people from using their magic eye-tracking powers to see exactly what you are looking at. I do not really understand how they can do this, but they do. So conversations with people outside are wonderful because you can look wherever you want to.
(2) They look super cool, right? All the cool kids are wearing sunglasses. (Sort of sarcasm…)
(3) They block things from blowing into your eyes (admittedly, my glasses do this too, especially since they are abnormally large, but my sunglasses are still slightly larger, so they do a slightly better job).

The only problem is that it requires taking stuff with me, which is something I would rather avoid. I like leaving all the stuff where it is safe and where it belongs in its spot. I do not like taking it out of its spot. But that is the point of stuff. To be used. So I will work on that, too.

Because sunglasses are pretty awesome. But they only work if they are on my face.