Unsolicited Advice

A couple of the blogs I read have recently touched upon the topic of things we don't blog about, things we do blog about, and how you choose where to draw the line. I recognize that here, I write about things that a lot of other essayists wouldn't touch with a ten-foot fountain pen: Appearance, the internal workings of social justice movements, psychiatric disorders, and a lot of others. I do it on purpose. One, this blog is pseudonymous. You could probably find me if you really wanted, but there's no real point in making it easy. I don't care if other people can link this identity with me, the physical person, but I've had a lot of issues with dysfunctional relatives in the past, and I try to at least keep a couple of clicks between Google results on my real name and the name under which I write. I don't think they'd do anything physically or legally scary, but they have a habit of writing me long vicious screeds about the things I say, particularly if I ...

I was wandering around Harvard the other night, mostly in celebration of being ambulatory enough to leave the house again. (Dragging myself to CVS like a snot-ridden zombie doesn't count.) I do that, from time to time, especially when I'm going stir-crazy -- after growing up in Phoenix, I find it very soothing to walk around where four hundred years of university have soaked into the ground. I live about three miles off. It was dark by the time I got to the Yard, and I could see flashing lights through the trees. Three fire trucks were pulled up outside one of the buildings. I finished my loop of the green and wandered off down Mass Ave again. It wasn't until I was walking away that I realized that this is probably the sort of sherlocky thing other people are curious about, and I might as well write it up. By far the largest part of this superpower is just paying some fucking attention. Not walking smack into ladder trucks is a great start. The trucks themselves weren...

About a week ago, I got an email from a perfect stranger. She thanked me for, essentially, being a separate person who wrote down some of the stuff that goes through her head. I get these, every so often; I never know quite what to do with them. I'm very glad that something I said made someone else feel less alone, but at the same time, the fact that people send me deeply emotional thanks for this means that it's still rare for them, and that kind of sends my heart right down into my feet again. The other night, at the Awkward Army meetup down at Davis, I was talking to one of the other Awkwardeers, trying valiantly to explain the weird problems you run into when you can't turn the subtitles on social interactions off. "You're like a seeing-eye dog for awkward people!" she cheerfully informed me. She's right, I suppose; I spend a fair amount of time trying to gently steer people away from metaphorically walking into traffic. I have no idea what the aut...

I did finally sit down and read the essays "explaining the autistic experience by analyzing Sherlock as though he is a high-functioning autistic" . I think personally that the bits on stereotypies and physical movement are assuming a lot of facts not in evidence -- in general, the author presumes Sherlock has learnt to conceal things in pretty much the same places I presume he's playing things up intentionally to cover for things he can't figure out how to hide -- but in general, Sherlock-as-autistic strikes me as about as plausible as Sherlock-as-deeply-isolated. It is cheerfully accepted as alternate head-canon, and my brain won't bitch at me about out-of-characterness if I find well-written fic on the premise. That wasn't the interesting part, though. Because the author of the essay is an autist writing for a largely allist audience, there is a lot of compare and contrast, particularly when talking about Sherlock and sociability. "In general, allis...

Before I jam my foot in my mouth a few dozen more times with people I'd really rather be on speaking terms with, I should probably clarify a lot of the words I use when discussing... well, people I'd rather be on speaking terms with. I have a degree in sociology (that, and a bunch of other random stuff -- I was such a PITA in college that I eventually just defaulted to a 'build your own' liberal arts bachelors, because nothing else covered everything I did), and there are a lot of places in the social sciences where words that have one meaning in casual writing have another, narrower meaning as technical jargon. I use the word normal a lot. "Normal" does not mean "ordinary" or "how things should be". It also doesn't imply that "not normal" is wrong or broken. Social science does a lot of work with statistics. When you survey a population, you find that most people in it will react to most things pretty much the same way mos...

People occasionally flip out when I tell them I'm chronically pareidolic. Briefly, pareidolia -- from pieces of Greek meaning roughly "faulty perception of shapes" -- is seeing a familiar pattern where none is developed or intended. It's a form of apophenia, which is perceiving meaning in randomness. It is not the same as hallucinating or being paranoid; hallucinations are experiences perceived as resulting from external stimuli where none exist, and paranoia involves the belief that the pareidolic patterns are real, and generally out to get you. All humans are pareidolic to some extent. Otherwise we wouldn't see a rabbit in the moon, faces in the clouds, or the patterns in the stars that we call constellations. An inability to group things into patterns, in fact, is considered dysfunctional, and is part of a variety of neurological and psychological conditions like prosopagnosia, and some autism spectrum disorders. I have told psychologists, counselors, and the...

I spend almost as much time being fascinated by people as I do trying to figure out  why  I'm fascinated by people. This has not been a lifelong thing for me. When I was a kid, in fact, I thought other people were incomprehensible, arbitrary, boring, and mostly mean. When I was a kid, they kind of were -- adults don't really bother to explain much to young children, and assume kids don't have eyes and ears and basic reasoning skills with which they can figure this stuff out partway for themselves. The other kids and I didn't have much to talk about, which in kid-speak translates to them picking on me for being weird. [cut here for length and rambling]

You may notice that I do all these profile deals in the present tense, even now that I'm doing one that involves watching things that were committed to film at the dawn of the 20th century. I get called out for it from time to time, usually by someone confused who inquires politely as to whether I'm aware that my subject has done very little work for the past thirty-five years, on account of being somewhat dead. As far as I can tell, this is an irreparable schism between how I think of people captured on media and how others do. I'm not sure I can make it make sense to anyone else. I think of recordings not as just collections of pixels and pitches, but as moments in time, uprooted and transplanted into a different section of the continuum. When you're on film, on disc, on paper, those moments that you spent on that creation are also impressed there. Your state of mind goes with you. There's a part of you there that never dies. What I'm doing, when I do this...

Last night, I sat down and picked apart one of the more popular character moments in the Avengers  movie. The clip was seventeen seconds long, and the analysis was several times longer than what was actually written in the screenplay. Apparently this amazes people. What's amazing to me is that I managed to keep it down to just a couple of pages. Human interactions are fractal in nature. Everything people say and do is supported by personal experience and cultural context, which in turn is supported by cultural and familial history, which in turn is supported by the development of civilization. To drastically oversimplify: Everything is related, somehow, to everything else. The problem with getting this down on paper is that after a certain point, it starts to lose linear structure. The trails of context start to shoot off in a lot of different directions, and rapidly diverge to the point where trying to hit them all in one explanation would make me sound somewhere between schiz...

I went out for a walk a little while ago armed with a debit card a CharlieCard a cell phone an MP3 player a 4GB flash drive the Kindle It weighs a few ounces, all told. My money, my transit pass, my books, my SMS conversations, my music, my podcasts, my blog, and whatever it is I have on that jumpdrive that I have undoubtedly forgotten about all exist inside a neverwhere shadowspace composed of electromagnetic waves and the traces of their existence. I don't carry them with me; I only carry a variety of scrying mirrors, each carefully  tuned to pull something out of the aether. Of course, being as it is springtime in Boston, I have also elected to bring with me a sturdy umbrella. And I'm sitting in the roof garden atop Tisch, which is a great crenellated concrete bunker full of obscure dead-tree editions of a variety of things that no one has thought about in fifty years, but which someone will undoubtedly have to write a term paper on soon. So not everythin...

Dear everyone who is here from GossipRocks: I tried to follow your trackback link and participate in your thread, but for some reason my account has been banned for "spamming advertisements". I have no idea why, because the only thing I've ever posted there was a hello-world message in the newbie forum, as directed. I would be more than happy to take requests for assessment of random YouTube interview clips or whatever, but since I apparently can't join in over there, y'all will have to come here. People go "Hey, what do you think of this person?" and "What do you know about this weird topic?" to me all the time both IRL and online, and I think it's fun to do the research. Questions, pointers, and non-public chat back to miss.arabella.flynn@gmail.com , please.

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me how I had all this stuff in my head, I wouldn't have needed student loans for college. It's a combination of things. One is that I read incessantly. If reading is physically impossible, or at least untenably risky, like when I'm walking somewhere, I have audiobooks and podcasts on my MP3 player. If I'm not reading, I'm working (which often involves Googling things like mad), or playing puzzle games (which often require me to recall things, or deduce things from clues I'm given), or writing (which requires me to regurgitate things which I have taken in via other methods). There's words around me all the time, and they say stuff. I try to parse out the useful ones. Two is that I have an eidetic memory. I don't have a true photographic memory, where you can look at a random dot field and recall it while looking at another random dot field and tell the memory researchers leaning over you and probably alre...

I am very, very smart. I'm not putting that out there because I want to impress the internet -- I'm not sure I would even know how to impress a gestalt entity which routinely ends arguments by invoking the ghost of Hitler, and whose main point of comparison for coolness is a picture of a cat with a hollowed-out fruit on its head -- but I because I think it's an important piece of context. When you are the smart kid in your little social arena, it affects how everybody reacts to you, and that in turn affects everything you do. People treat you differently when they think you're smarter than they are, and the amount of different goes up in lockstep with the amount of smart, until you're ten and sitting in the back of a classroom, being (successfully) taught algebra by a volunteer eighth-grader and copping these sidelong looks from the adults, like they're not sure whether you might sprout a second head at any moment. Or at least it did for me. This does weird t...

I do a lot of celebrity profiles in my writing. This isn't because I'm obsessed with celebrities. This is because I'm obsessed with people. I people-watch all the time. I think people are fascinating, and I also think the process by which we generate our guesses and impressions of people are fascinating. This is what happens when the kid nobody talked to in grade school goes into the social sciences. My family is bats and my classmates demonstrated a remarkable talent for bullying me and ignoring me at the same time, so I had very little meaningful or helpful social interaction as a kid. I pretty much had to teach myself socialization in my late teens and early twenties, the same way I taught myself everything else: by frantically inhaling as much information as I could and combing through it for patterns and rules. The ability to read people is not unique to me. Most people can do it to some extent, and there are people out there who are far better at it than I will ev...

So, who are you anyway? I am a bunch of words on the internet. Everything on here is my opinion, and if you don't like it you're welcome to not read it. If you do like it, please hang around -- I like having an audience. I mean what I say, but I'm really snarky and enjoy using sarcastic hyperbole to make my point. Figure my writing has 'for entertainment purposes only' stamped everywhere. That's nice, but what are you like in meatspace? I'm female, and as I write this, I'm 30. Nobody believes this. Occasionally someone will actually argue with me when I tell them, which always makes me check to make sure I haven't wandered into a Terry Gilliam movie by mistake. In person, people usually conclude I'm younger. My dress sense tends to skew young, mostly because I'm on the small side and clothes from the Juniors department usually fits better. I'm allergic to benzoyl peroxide, so for the past fifteen years my acne-control technique has ...