One of the rare good memories I have of spending time with family over Christmas break when I was a kid was the video games. Starting at age five, the year my parents brought home a Nintendo and a gold Zelda cartridge, we always took the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve to sit in front of the TV and save the world. My father had the controller, my mother had the notes and the guidebook, and we kids sat on the floor and kibbitzed. ("Have you gone through that door, Dad? No, that door. No, that door. No, Dad , that thing is a door.") We kids had no school, Dad took the week off work, and we lived on cheese and crackers and sandwiches and takeout so that Mom could take a break from cooking. After Zelda, I remember playing the original Final Fantasy for NES, and later the first one for the SNES; Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest, in Japan) I, II and IV; The Secret of Mana; The Illusion of Gaia; and ChronoTrigger. I think I'm forgetting a couple. I don't think we...
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I've given up on the series of CPTSD book reports I planned. I spent too much time wanting to throw the books at the wall. Which is a problem, because most of them are e-books, and I'm pretty attached to my Kindle. Plus the noise would scare the rats. Almost all of the available books on the subject are formatted as self-help texts, and fall afoul of the same thing all self-help materials do. They're written for the lowest common denominator. They don't necessarily assume the audience is stupid, but they do assume the audience is starting from a place of complete ignorance. This is great if you are indeed starting from scratch, but irritating as fuck if you've already gotten past the 400-level research class and really just need to know how the last guy to run this lab kept the still from exploding all over the inside of the fume hood. The books also spend a lot of time holding your hand. They talk in circles and spew a lot of words reassuring the reader that they a...
So as soon as I set out to write a series of book reports -- a series of anything, really -- life slammed in on me. There's a bunch of stuff colliding messily in my head right now, which makes it difficult to get any of it out. I've been limping along, but I really need to get better at determining in advance what things I need to drop and when, rather than letting it get to the point where I just need to let the next thing fall, no matter what it is. In the meantime, I've given up, called out of the one thing I thought I was going to get accomplished today, and am holed up in my room to try and get some of this shit done. One of the things eating my attention is that a friend is going through a messy breakup. Or, rather, she should be going through a messy breakup, but she refuses to let go of her horrible abusive relationship. The details are unimportant, but, as Dr Nerdlove says, assholes gonna ass. Every time it happens -- which is often -- she runs to us, her friends, ...
When I was a kid, I had no friends. There were a couple of other kids whom I was told were my friends. In retrospect, none of them liked me or wanted me around, they were just forced to include me because my mother wanted to gossip with their mother without interruptions. The one whom I was told was my "best friend" didn't like me to the point where she ignored me at school, but she was the kind of kid whose mother picked out her clothes and hairstyle every morning, and she got clocked with a hairbrush if she protested, so clearly she couldn't do much to stop it. The message this sent was that friends were people who would tolerate you when you were there, then roll their eyes and start running you down to others whenever you weren't. So far as I can tell, this is how my mother actually believes friendship works. She consistently behaved this way with all of her friends, back when she had them, and sailed merrily onward with her siblings once my sister and I aged...
Well, Hurricane Henri was a bit of a bust. It was very humid and we got a bunch of rain, and that was about it. I didn't even close my window all the way. To compensate for all the nothing that happened, the National Weather Service is posting "weather history" tweets about Irene ten years ago, because whoever runs their social media has great enthusiasm for their job. Irene was my very first hurricane. For context, I had just moved here from Arizona, where the very concept of getting catastrophic amounts of liquid water from the sky was terrifying and alien. I'd grown up in Phoenix, where "monsoon season" brought brief, violent thunderstorms that flooded out low-lying roads for about six hours before all the moisture vanished into the porous sandstone. I was by myself in a sublet up near Electric Ave in Somerville, barren but for a futon, my suitcases, and an internet connection. My sister had just sent me a charmingly abusive email, which became the last ...
I am still in the slightly-overdramatic juris doctor 's class. Classes. They're intense but useful enough that it's worth killing myself to get through them. They're also bringing up a lot of uncomfortable stuff about my educational history, and how I handle a classroom environment. I learn best when given as much information as possible right up front. I joke that I learn everything via cryptography, because that's actually the standard procedure you follow when trying to decrypt an unknown message in an unknown system: Gather as much cyphertext as possible, put it in a big pile, and then sit down and stare at it (or get a computer to stare at it) until patterns jump out. I often make better progress starting out in the advanced class, as I've done here, and then doubling back to the foundations course once I have some experience. Most beginner classes are streamlined and pared down until you're learning only the thing that is directly relevant at any given...
The slightly-overdramatic juris doctor has been waging a campaign to get me to take his class. And more recently, to take all of his classes. I didn't... miss it, exactly, I just doubted my perception of causality. To now get too far into the amateur psych profiling, he is surprisingly rule-based. I think most people just think he's super on top of everything, and highly self-critical when he does miss something, but it also comes out in socialization, and I suspect is a lot of the reason he comes off as eccentric. I accidentally instantiated a rule about answering my emails with emails and not randomly in person next time he saw me. It was only relevant once, when the office wanted a written confirmation of something, but it's stuck very, very hard for several months now. I have to interpret him for my smart-but-normal coworker a lot. He has this schtick where he borrows the staff to come in for the last five minutes of his classes to watch the choreo and give feedbac...
I have signed up for class with the somewhat-overdramatic juris doctor from previous posts. It is... interesting. Not getting too far into the amateur psych profiling, he shows every sign of being someone who was tracked into every gifted and talented program they could find as soon as they figured out he could read. Which was probably before anyone else got around to teaching him. He is pathologically observant and terrifyingly smart. I like him, a lot. The popular concept of what happens when you tell a kid they're exceptional from day one is basically House, the intolerable asshole genius. I won't say that never happens, but it's pretty rare. Getting that result involves a lot of confounding factors, and, let's be honest, some significant inborn asshole tendencies. More often, you get someone who is no better or worse a person than anyone else, but is really oddly calibrated in many regards. One of the earliest things you learn as The Gifted Kid is that the other k...
I hate heat. Normally I write these things at 2 am because that's when I'm awake. I'm writing this particular thing at 2 am because that's when it's not 95F outside. It's not quite 95F inside, but it gets stupidly close. My room only has one window -- so, still legally rentable as a bedroom in the state of Massachusetts -- and for some reason only the upper sash will open. I'm not dumb enough to wedge an AC unit into the top of a busted antique double-hung window, so my bedroom has been temporarily converted into a large solar-powered oven. The rat has been spending his days in the living room, where it's climate-controlled. (Rat, singular. I am down to only Tseng at the moment. If you don't keep up with my Facebook, Errand, the remaining old man foster, finally got to go back to his original mommy. He was very weirded out by being packed up into a carrier and trundled out to the Fenway, but happy to be returned to someone who is home enough to sati...
#spoiledratupdate
I lost Garion -- one of the old men -- a week ago today. It was not unexpected; a previous owner actually happened to know their birthdate, June 1st 2018, which means Garion was just shy of three. Hitting three for a rat is like a human hitting a hundred. Domesticated rattos live a lot longer than their feral counterparts, but not a lot of them make it quite that far. Garion also spent a fair chunk of last year suffering through the single worst bout of pneumonia I have ever seen a rat survive. He recovered pretty well, but never quite regained all of his weight, and had persistent breathing trouble that I'm guessing was down to scarring of the lungs, since it didn't respond to antibiotics but did remit a bit with the faceful of Dulera he got every morning. I kept the two old men when the other six went off to Mainely Rat Rescue specifically because I figured Garion didn't have a lot of time left. It's difficult to re-home senior rats, I was already their third caretake...
You may recall that a while back I posted an anecdote about spooking one of our dance teachers. I asked him about his JD out of what he thought was the clear blue sky, having momentarily forgotten that he'd put it in his email sig. I admit the impulse to do this strikes mostly because I find the startled reaction funny; I indulge this one because it's arguably a good thing to remind people that the cool things they do are, in fact, visible to other humans. Turns out that once I explained how I knew that, he also thought it was pretty funny. I was suddenly a very interesting person, and he wanted to hang out and chat. This is great, and also makes me very nervous. It's not that people never talk to me at the desk, just that I'm the receptionist and therefore basically scenery, so it's not something they have much investment in. I am a part of the familiar tableau, and the small talk they make is part of the ritual of coming in for their classes, like saying good morn...
For anyone who didn't catch it on other social media, I have finally moved out of the "temporary" apartment I was stuck in for 7 months, thanks to a lot of emotional and logistical support from friends, and a generous amount of financial support from the folks who gave to my GoFundMe. I am endlessly grateful to all of you, and if I weren't so goddamn tired right now I'd be more eloquent in saying so. I've spent the past few weeks of unpacking and working out the bus routes around my new place trying to figure out how to explain what was so terrible about the last one. Most attempts devolved into page upon page of rage, which is not really what I want to be doing here. On the other hand, I also don't want to downplay how bad it was. Spoiler: The temp apartment was Very Very Bad. The tl;dr is that I was offered someone's spare room on the condition that I help out a little extra with household chores and caring for their rats, because the pet owning roo...
I bought another coat last week. I feel like I should have been more upset about that, because I don't really have the money to be clothes shopping. But I'm also incredibly tired of figuring out how to work around not having things I need, so I just went to fucking Goodwill and gave them $30 to solve that problem. I actually own two nice winter coats. One of them is ten years old and the other one is about fifteen. This strikes me as a pretty good record, considering I don't buy utility coats -- anoraks and parkas make me feel like I'm walking around awkwardly embedded in the center of a pillow. I buy fashion coats, and I wear the hell out of them. The younger coat is a winter white skirted pea coat I got at Macy's when I first moved to Boston, and the elder is a black brocade sack coat with a giant faux fur collar I got at Target when I worked there. They both need repair work. The black one is unwearable at the moment, as it's missing too many important button...
Hello all! I am not dead. I apologize for the long irregular silences, but I'm having issues devising a schedule that lets me stream on Twitch, AND update a blog/a Patreon/a GoFundMe/several Facebook pages/Twitter/an Instagram account, AND go to a few things I need to be physically present for on someone else's schedule, AND, like, sleep. This is a persistent problem with my life. I'll get it eventually. I'm only about to be 40, I have some time. Meanwhile, I have been trying to teach myself this New Media thing. As an elderly and decrepit OG Millennial, I have been consuming this stuff since I was a teenager, but my knowledge on the assembly-code level of production is pretty much all from a half-finished electronic media degree from about 2006. It's more useful than you'd think, but I still need to Google to find out where all the buttons are in OpenShot. Behold my rudimentary video editing skills: "Meet The Rats". It is followed by a long list of pl...