Unsolicited Advice

Ratmas has come slightly early this year, as two of the four are on their way out, and I didn't want them to miss getting a third holiday just because I insisted on hewing to human schedules. They don't know what day it is anyway. They got new bowls, new boxes, new hammocks, a new cage cover, and more food than any four rats can reasonably eat. One of my dear friends gave the rats a chew toy and a bag of yogies to share last year.  This year, she has escalated, and got them each a bag of cookies. Tagged and everything. I can only assume one of the tribbles figured out how to work the phone, and got to her in the meantime. Plus they got a dish of egg nog, because everyone loves egg nog. I used one that I sincerely hope they cannot tip over. It is not the most elaborate Ratmas I have ever come up with, nor the most thorough cage cleaning I've ever done, but I'm sick and exhausted, 50% of them are sick and exhausted, and I figured we'd all rather be warm and comfor...

How could I possibly not know my attachment style until I was a teenager, you ask? Well, mainly because I had nobody to get that attached to. My mother likes to tell people the story of my first steps. I was sitting on her lap one day at a family gathering, while she was chatting with the other adults, and I let it be known that I wanted a toy that was across the room. Nobody could be arsed to get it for me, or even walk over there and crouch beside it to encourage me to go get it myself. Eventually, I got tired of squalling, squirmed free, and toddled over to get it on my own. No stumbling, no falling; I just walked over, plopped down, and focused on my toy to the exclusion of all else. She thinks this is an adorable story. It would be if it were a case of 'took our eyes off the baby for two seconds and look what happened'. It was not. This was my mother's parenting technique through my entire childhood: Whenever the baby wanted something inconvenient, ignore her until...

I'm giving up on Duolingo Korean lessons. I'm going to have to learn hangul before that will make any sense. Those blocks are not only constructed on a logical basis, but the shapes of the consonant pieces are meant to represent the shape your mouth makes when saying them. It takes a lot of effort to make a system like that confusing and evil, but Duolingo has managed it. They really do want you to memorize the han like they were kanji , and... no. Everyone I have showed this to thinks this is the dumbest possible way to do it, including the Japanese lady who has personal experience with memorizing a bazillion kanji in order to read things, and the actual Korean lady who works at the desk on weekends. The Esperanto lessons, on the other hand, are working out fairly well. For starters, the software will accept, or at least overlook, the ASCII-X convention if you don't have an Esperanto keyboard, which is nice. Esperanto involves circumflexes -- aka 'hats' -- on ...

Another story, or: Why I don't bother lying to ye ballroom instructor anymore: I do not remember exactly what was going on, but I was having A Day. I was sick or in pain and hadn't had one or more of the normal meals, I was probably behind on the dishes or the laundry or something, and possibly I hadn't slept. I was definitely staring down the barrel of a five-hour shift running a theater. I do rather like that job, but it involves a lot of running around setting things up and standing at a lectern selling tickets, so I was not looking forward to it just then. I'm not fond of passing out, so I picked up something that could be mistaken for food if you didn't look at it too closely, and hid in the studio office to eat it. I didn't expect to find anyone there, but in fact ye ballroom instructor had had the same bright idea. He's not normally in on weekends unless he's in the show or running it, but apparently he wanted to see that one, and decided to g...

Apparently the only interesting thing I have to write about right now is the ongoing saga of some random dude I know. I still have no idea why other people are interested in ye ballroom dance instructor and what I think about him. I try to justify the existence of this blog by using stuff in my life to launch into actual important thoughts about people and experiences and how social interactions work, so I hope you all get something out of this. The important part, so far as I'm concerned, shook out several months ago. I was assistant stage manager on a show that ye ballroom instructor was arranging, liasing, producing, and performing in, because sometimes the really talented ones are also slightly insane. It was about 85% brilliantly orchestrated, but we kept running into things that should have been done but weren't, or information we should have had but didn't. The stage manager and I both finally popped a sprocket at him when he remembered to tell one of us (me) tha...

Two of my housemates are learning things on the Duolingo app right now -- I think one of them is doing French and the other Spanish, but don't quote me on that. I signed up for the free version, and currently have nine languages running, because that'll keep me from getting bored and blowing through the entire skill tree on any one of them in like three days. I've spent the past two hours poking at it, because I currently have one of those plagues that's long on extra snot and short on oxygen, and I can do nothing that takes me more than lunging distance from a box of tissues. Au début, j'ai découvert que je fais du français encore assez bien, lorsque je me suis remplie des drogues. Duolingo will give you a fluency score; it tops out around 50-60%, because Duolingo isn't life, and right now my French hovers around 53%. It would probably be higher, but I'm far enough into it that it's asking me to translate things that can be said in a number of slightl...

So apparently I'm being rewarded for dissecting my own psyche in public now? Really? Hokay, I guess that's where we're going with this. While I appreciate the intent behind all the advice on what to do in re: ye ballroom dance instructor, I would like to note that at no point in all of that did I ask 'what the hell is going on here?', or did I solicit suggestions on what to do about it. I know what I'm going to do about it, which is exactly the thing I am doing already. I've generally been treating him like he has a charmingly obvious squish that by now is probably visible on Google Maps. He is neither acting confused nor backpedaling as fast as is humanly possible, so that seems to be about right. The tl;dr for those who don't feel like going through the AVEN forums is that a 'squish' is what the asexual community calls the ace version of a crush. Isn't that just wanting to be friends? you ask. No, wiseass, it's not. The salient dif...

Okay, like the fourth total stranger has now suggested that ye ballroom instructor has a crush on me. Y'all aren't crazy; this has also crossed my mind. He did kick this off with pretty classic crush behavior: A sudden barrage of attention out of nowhere, that he kept up for a solid two weeks or so, until he got clear acknowledgement that I'd noticed. My initial read of him was that he is exactly as gay as the stereotype of male dancers would suggest, but this all was actually ambiguous enough to make me reconsider that. The thing is, this is still ambiguous . The reason that kind of behavior comes about with crushes is that wanting to bone someone makes the idea of fucking up your first conversation with them carry a lot of emotional weight, so you get super nervous about it. The sudden burst of attention happens because it takes an extra push to get over the inhibitory effect of What if I screw it up?  and make yourself start. The internal wrestling and abrupt resolutio...

I am pretty good at figuring out where other people's pressable buttons are. It's a shitty, shitty superpower you win as a consolation prize when you grow up dependent on someone whose mood swings have no clear correlation with anything happening out here in the wider shared reality. Because their experience of the world is so different, there's no good way to predict what their reactions will be, so you just learn to throw logic out the window and watch for early warning signs that you should make yourself scarce. [My mother, for instance, used to get into these moods where everything made her angry, and she took it out on the rest of the household. In hindsight, she was probably suffering from terrible anxiety/overload, which I completely understand. I don't blame her for needing a quiet space in which to recover. I do  blame her for deciding this quiet space needed to be the kitchen . Where all the food and ice water was kept. In an open-plan house. They had a perf...

Those of you who have been hanging around for a while know that I am badly addicted to the Professor Layton games. Every time I get a new one, I sit down in the evening to start the story and then whoops! It's dawn. The main series of games have all been for Nintendo handhelds, but the spinoffs all seem to be coming out for Android/iOS, and I have a Kindle Fire, so... To be fair, Layton Brothers: Mystery Room is not really a Layton game. Also to be fair, the Layton name got me to buy it (well, "buy" it -- unlocking all the episodes costs about $5 total, which is the kind of credit I can rack up on Google Opinion Rewards ). What it is, is a rebranded Atamania game, which is how all of the Layton games started. Atamania is a portmanteau of atama  (lit, "head"; atama ga ii , or "head is good", is the colloquial phrase for "intelligent" or "clever") and the English word "mania", and is the title of a series of puzzle ga...

I found out a few weeks ago that ye ballroom dance instructor fusses when he's anxious. Just wanders the building, doing tiny, neglected, low-priority maintenance tasks. I have no idea if he does things because he can't sit down, or can't sit down because he feels like he should be doing things. Haven't asked, at least not yet. I had friends like this in high school. I used to think it was my mission to "calm" them by getting them to sit down and stop twitching. I honestly couldn't tell you what gave me the idea that I was personally responsible for making other people stop wigging out, except that I was miserable as a teenager and assumed that pretty much everything was my fault, pretty much all the time. I don't think I quite grasped that the fussing and the nervousness were not the same thing, or that forcing someone to stifle all their anxious tics would make things worse, not better. In my defense, nobody had ever done anything but shout at me o...

I apologize for the lack of intelligent content here lately. It is summer. Summer is hot. Heat does not agree with me. I have become an indolent puddle, mainly made of an emulsion of apathy and discomfort. On the rare occasion that I scrape together the wherewithal to move, I am surprised to be reminded that I still have bones. Many of which I can see in the mirror now, because the one thing I am doing is making repeated trips to the dance studio. It's free, they like me there, and someday I may accidentally make some progress. Otherwise, I tend to do things like lie here listening to four solid hours of Dateline Mystery on YouTube, because I can't be bothered to turn my head far enough to the right to actually  watch  it. As far as I can tell, this is another one of those weird symptoms I can't do anything about. It is fatigue unrelated to sleepiness. More sleep and more food do not alleviate it. Nor does double Bronkaid, for that matter, which is a dose of ephedrine th...

By the time you guys read this, I'm probably going to be in a tech rehearsal. Not even mine. As trying as it is to sit through your own tech, it's even more tedious to sit through someone else's. The experience from within a technical rehearsal is similar to the old aphorism about war ("months of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror") in that you just sort of exist in limbo waiting for someone who outranks you to shout for places, but someone else's tech is likely to be many hours of watching people repeat the least interesting parts of the show until they stop screwing it up, interspersed with a lot of staring at tumblr on your phone. Why am I doing this, you ask? To be frank, I have an ulterior motive. A couple, actually. One is that this is the ballroom instructor's show. He's co-producer, featured performer, and artist liaison for the theater, largely because he's bats and I think he might hate sleep. I'm hanging around specifi...

I spend a great deal of time pretending I'm not paying as much attention to people as I actually am. People love that they can come ask me questions, and I can tell them where everyone else is and what they're up to. They hate thinking this through to its logical conclusion, which is that in order to do this, I have to be keeping tabs on pretty much everyone I recognize, pretty much all the time. I do it because: I like having a working mental model of my environment, which doesn't go so well if I don't track most of the moving parts; I find it fascinating and in some ways very elegant to watch people wandering up to and into and past one another all the time, like the chaotic Brownian pattern of pollen grains on water; I can't turn it off without busting out the really good drugs. These thoughts are apparently weird, and most people get very squirmy if I share them. They get uncomfortable when they realize that not only do I know what they  are  doing, I ...

Still sick. Still losing my ability to cope more and more with each goddamn tissue I throw in the general direction of the wastebasket. Still have to get up and do things anyhow. I have got to the point of overload where people being nice is now confusing me. The ballroom dance instructor, of all people, has suddenly started talking to me. I had no idea he was aware of my existence beyond the fact that I show up to work and don't burn the building down, but I snarked at him on the phone one day about running around herding cats in a tux, and apparently that got his attention. I had no idea what the fuck, then I thought I did, now I think I don't and I should really just stop thinking about it. I have just enough objectivity left to understand that people who do not like you do not stand around having conversations with you in an empty lobby when they could just as easily have cruised on by with their eyes glued to their phone and done something productive with their time inst...

One of the nicer perks of managing house for events at the dance studio is that, when the stars align just right, I actually get to see some of the show. A lot of them are repertory shows for the various schools that teach in the area, but others are professional deals, and some are Serious Art. I don't always know what it's going to be until I turn up; the permanent staff are responsible for booking things, and all I get is the ad copy, and some sheets of paperwork when I get there. Whilst channeling the usual amount of chaos a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the staffer whose project it was had wandered off at some point and changed his clothes. It's not strange to have that one roaming the building. Staffers don't have to babysit their shows in person, although he usually does. It's just a little out of the ordinary for any of them to be doing the babysitting in a tuxedo. I was just like, kessé?  I know not wherefore the monkey suit, but now I have got to...

One of the little boogers (Plugh, for the record) has developed a head tilt. There are a few different things this could be, but the only fixable one is 'clogged ear', so I ordered some amoxicillin on the theory it was infected. (The differential is stuff like stroke, tumor, or torticollis. The official treatment for those is 'Tylenol for discomfort, and love your slightly-tilted rat until he expires.') The MSPCA clinic has a compounding pharmacy, in case your cat needs to violently refuse liver-flavored meds instead of generic pills, but it turns out that mail-order AmoxiDrops are the exact same sugary pink bubble gum-flavored goo  I got when I had ear infections as a kid. Well, I do keep telling people the rats are basically tiny furry toddlers. I feel like a terrible monster holding an animal down and jamming a syringe in his mouth, so I've developed a much more roundabout method for medicating small spoiled critters: Remove rat from cage. Stuff rat into ...

I keep going through cycles where I try to convince myself that there's nothing wrong with me, I'm just a lazy sod, and I'm whining over nothing. Symptoms are subjective. Nobody likes getting up early in the morning, they do it anyway. Nobody likes hot muggy weather, but they don't let themselves melt into a useless puddle on the bed all afternoon. Then shit happens, and I am reminded that not only are all the things I think are wrong with me actually wrong with me, I am usually introduced to a brand-new symptom that I didn't even fucking know was a thing. The tech who did my hip imaging mentioned in passing that low body temperature was a known feature of EDS. Judging from the comments I got when the nurse couldn't get an IV into me last week, and the fact that she tried to fix that by heaping me with heated blankets, I don't just think  my hands and feet are always cold, or  feel chilled when I'm short on sleep, I actually am having temperature regulat...