Unsolicited Advice

When I was a kid, I used to think that sitting by the bedside of someone who was sick or suffering was something people only did in movies. Like in The Princess Bride , where the frame story is a grandfather reading an adventure novel to his grandson, who is home sick from school. Or maybe something that people used to do in Good Middle Class Homes, where Mother's "only" job was to keep the house and tend to the kids, but which had slowly died out under the pressures of modern life. Certainly, no one did it for me. I learned early on that it wasn't much good to ask my parents for comfort. I remember my mother running herself ragged when I had the chicken pox, but it stands out to me, because I can't remember her ever doing that before or since. The main result of pestering either parent for help was that they'd stand around being crabby, especially if I tried it in the middle of the night. When I was ten or so, I decided that I could just hold my own hair ba...

I see from Wikipedia that Malaysia Airlines 370 is still considered missing. I also see from Wikipedia that a thousand conspiracy theories have already sprung up to account for that. Apparently some people do not deal well with loose ends, or just aren't aware that there are quite a number of aircraft that have crashed and were never found. I realize that it is de regueur  to blame terrorists for everything up to and including the late night pizza joint getting your toppings wrong, but there are several previous losses that fit the same profile as MH370 -- that is, an aircraft that flies silently on in an unexpected direction long after all radio contact with the humans on board have been lost, and then stops pinging after a length of time consistent with running out of fuel and nosing into terrain. (Well, in this case, ocean.) All the ones I know of have been decompression incidents. If the cabin loses pressure in an explosive fashion, generally the oxygen masks drop down from t...

About 3pm. I am in a foul mood. I have been listening to music and entertaining myself by trying to put together some hooping choreography. Then all at once the bottom drops out, and it dawns on me that this is a pointless exercise, as nobody is ever going to see it. I fetch up in the kitchen with the computer, grousing at someone unfortunate enough to be on Facebook Messenger. I have no idea if the sudden plunge is a harbinger of migraine, a trigger for migraine, or merely co-morbid with the migraines. An acute case of emo is part of the prodrome of colds and various gastrointestinal misery for me, to the point where I can tell something is up before my nose even starts running. On the other hand, stress triggers depressive episodes, which in turn trigger headaches, which in turn put me under more stress, because I can't cope with anything when my head hurts. YMMV. It takes the person I am grousing at pointing out that mood changes are connected with his migraines for me to...

I am very good at getting into other people's heads. Not infallible, mind. But good enough to know that I should never try it on anyone I don't genuinely like and want to listen to, because if it works, I'm going to wind up hearing a lot whether I want to or not. It's a combination of intelligence, skill, constant practice, and hypervigilance. It's probably fairly obvious that I came by most of it from being surrounded by dysfunctional people: Two of the things I can spot most reliably are people who are lonely and depressed and trying not to let anyone else know that, and impending train wrecks that I want to stay far the fuck away from. If you live in a house of lunatics and can't get out, you learn this stuff as a matter of self-defense. I can usually work out if it's welcome or not. It throws some people off-balance; others just plain don't like it, or me, and are not interested in telling me a damn thing. I try to be hyper-alert for signs that som...

I am completely incapable of finding something interesting without also wanting to know exactly how it works. Not just physical objects like toys, or mechanical processes like figure skating and hooping, but also abstract things like linguistic structures and social scripts. I'm willing to do the kind of obsessive research you need to make this work, so the fact that this is weird normally doesn't bother me much. The most troublesome part is that I keep unintentionally convincing people that I'm the local expert in something I've only been cramming into my head for a few weeks, which can get awkward. At least by that point, I can direct them to other people who know a lot more than I do. I also do it in personal relationships, which has the unfortunate side effect of confusing and annoying other humans. I gather they feel that anyone who wants to scrutinize interaction in that much detail is determined to find fault with whatever's going on. I think it's just ...

The house was always a menagerie while I was growing up. My mother couldn't turn away an animal. Several times, we had neighborhood people ring the doorbell to ask if a kitten wandering around stray was ours. If it wasn't before, it was now. The minimum complement was two cats and two dogs, plus any small caged critters we had lying about, but it ranged much higher than that at times -- one of the cats escaped for the night before we could get her into the spay/neuter clinic, and we briefly had ten of them, before the babies were weaned and re-homed. Have you ever been in a house with ten cats? It's an adventure. My father had to check his size 13 work boots every morning before putting them on, in case a kitten had decided to nap inside. The dogs were generally fewer in number, but made up for it in mass. Right around the time I was born, my parents had a dog named Yeti. It was apt. He was half Lab, half husky, with mismatched eyes, and completely indestructible. He wa...

One of the highlights of any Supernatural convention is, of course, seeing the actors live on stage. They generally do panels, which is con-speak for sitting there with a mic and answering audience questions. In theory, anyway. Some of these people should not be allowed to run a panel by themselves. A show, sure; a panel, no. Sebastian Roché has the attention span of a fruit fly on meth, and without a babysitter will bounce around and produce a stream of early-Robin-Williams-esque comedy monologue. You can remind him that he's supposed to be doing a Q&A, but unless you're standing right next to him the whole time, it'll go in one ear and out the other. (Not having a sitter also deprives Roché of one of his favorite things, which is a friend to cheerfully molest. There's a running joke to the effect that the main difference between Roché and Balthasar, the character he plays, is that Roché already speaks French and wouldn't have to ask how you say ménage à ...