Theme
2:21am
July 27, 2015
UHURA: Contact broken, sir.
KIRK: Re-establish.
UHURA: I’m sorry, sir.
KIRK: I’m not interested in your excuses, Lieutenant. Re-establish contact with that transmitter.
UHURA: I’m afraid that’s impossible at the moment, Captain. They stopped broadcasting immediately. They do not acknowledge my contact signal.
KIRK: Keep trying to raise them..
UHURA: Yes, sir.
Can I say I absolutely love the steeliness in Uhura’s voice and body when she stands up to Kirk’s arrogant demanding belittling attitude?
It’s little moments like this that keep me coming back to Star Trek, and particularly the original series. There’s all these tiny things that people miss, that are really cool.
(Such as the line Uhura ad libbed when Sulu (while intoxicated by some kind of thing that was never fully explained in The Naked Time) grabbed her and called her a “fair maiden” – she said “Sorry, neither” and pushed away as hard as she could. Apparently they could get away with leaving stuff like that in if it was ad libbed, but not if it was in the script.)
Oh if it’s not obvious, Uhura has always been my favorite character in the original Star Trek or any Star Trek for that matter, ever since I was a little kid. I used to study languages because of her, I thought I wanted to be a communications officer like her and that a communications officer would have to be good at foreign languages. Unfortunately I sucked (and continue to suck) at most aspects of foreign languages, but it didn’t stop me from trying over and over again to learn them. Unfortunately my abilities with languages were and remain too uneven to achieve fluency in anything but English, although I have the ability to read some amount of languages I’ve never even seen before, because of my ability to make connections between word roots and things like that. But again, not enough for fluency – I have a couple of amazing language skills in a couple of isolated areas, but mostly a lot of terrible ones. I would not be able to do her job for so many different reasons, but there was a time I sure wanted to.
Oh and these screenshots are from Operation: Annihilate (season 1 episode 30). And I still totally love her standing up to him when he’s being a jerk. I notice she always pushes back. I also notice that even in scenes and entire episodes where she has no lines, she’s always there in the background, acting as much as she can, reacting to everything around her, refusing to just be stuck in a corner even if that’s what the script would rather her do. And I love it.
When I had a Star Trek poster in my room, I made sure it had her on it. I didn’t care who else was on it. I’ve recently ordered myself an Uhura figurine to stick next to my Fiona (from Shrek) figurine as characters I really, really like and look up to. Sometimes little objects like that are more meaningful than they look, even if they were created as toys or merchandise for someone to make money off of fans.
46 notes
6:03am
July 5, 2015
Adult Life Tip
Did you know you can buy those cakes at the grocery store without it being your birthday or any celebratory thing? Like you can just walk in and grab a cake and buy it and nobody’s gonna say anything. You can even walk in and get like one of those little kid batman themed cakes (or character of your choice depending on availability) and everyone there is just gonna assume that it’s totally for some small child in your life and meanwhile you get a batman cake all to yourself. Yeah, it’s not gonna be a super fantastic cake since it’s just from the grocery store, but that’s not the point. The point is cake. Cake.
I remember when I discovered that I could buy one of those chocolate creme samplers all for myself for no reason whatsoever, same with cookie dough. It was a revelation.
These days, I can’t eat things without serious consequences (anything I eat has to be possible to drain out of a g-tube quickly, otherwise I get really sick and could even die in the wrong circumstances, not exaggerating) but there was a time when this information would’ve been really cool to know. Right now my food intake is limited to soup broth, and only certain kinds of soup broth at that, so things are different. Plus, I like umami flavors so much more than sweet ones – the older I get the more true that becomes. If I ate the same amount of sugar I could eat as a kid, I’d get sick in ways that have nothing at all to do with my gastroparesis and everything to do with the weird way that kids vs. adults process sugar. Which must suck if you have a serious sweet tooth but your body has changed how much sugar it can handle at a time.
Right now pretty much the only time I crave sugar is when my steroid dose increases at the same time that I miss part of a tube feeding for some reason. That combination makes me go “need sugar NOWWWWWWWWW”. But other than that, sugar actually feels vaguely repulsive a lot of the time. Still, I sort of wish I’d known about this soon after I started getting my first paychecks of my own, because it would’ve been cool to have a cake entirely to myself once in awhile. And I never, ever thought of buying one.
4:59pm
June 5, 2015
Question about adolescence
How do you personally feel it fits in with childhood and adulthood? I know this is a very culture-bound concept to begin with. Here’s my take on it. You don’t have to agree. I’m curious both how you see it in the abstract and as applied to your life. Also when do you think it begins and ends? Do you think of adolescents as children, adults, both, neither…? All these questions both for you personally and for your view of people in general, our you can just pick one or the other and pick which questions to answer.
I’ll answer on my own in a reblog.
I see adolescence as something that is different for different people. For some people it is more childhood, for some it is more adulthood, for others it is more in between.
I started thinking about this when an asshole told me I was lying when I said I met a friend in childhood, because “12 isn’t childhood 12 is adolescence”. First off, I beg to differ that 12 is always adolescence. But second off, I still consider myself a child-adolescent up until the age of 19 or so, at which point I became an adult-adolescent somewhere in there.
I think adolescence ends in your mid-twenties, and when it starts varies a good deal based on the person. For me I’d have it start around 13, although my period started age 11. I just still see myself as pure child up until 13, at which point it’s child-adolescent up until very late in adolescence.
I know other people who by the age of 14 or so are somewhere between just adolescent, and adult-adolescent, but that just wasn’t me.
1:48am
May 11, 2015
This was a song in one of my piano books as a kid.
White clouds are floating
As gentle as snow
Silently passing
The earth belowLong past the meadows
The hills and beyond
Turning to gold with the dawnClouds moving on
Day after day
Greeting the sunrise
And then drift away-ay-ayClouds moving on
Day after day
Greeting the sunrise
And then drift away
So… I have no idea why I remembered that song just now. There’s a lot of songs in children’s piano books that never make it onto Internet lyric sites or anything.
6:50am
May 10, 2015
Childhood mondegreen
A childhood mondegreen from a Beatles song. First the real lyrics, then the mondegreen.
Real version:
I’ll never dance with another
Whoooooo
Since I saw her standin’ there
Mondegreen:
I’ll never dance with her mother
Whoooooo
Since I saw her standin’ there
I know mondegreens are common but I can’t help but imagine language processing problems don’t help.
4:17am
February 14, 2015
When I was young…
My mother told me of a friend of hers who didn’t have a floor in her house yet.
I wanted badly to see this. My mom had no idea the reason: I thought with no floor, there’d be no ground either, just a hole that went on forever, to the stars.
I wanted to jump in.
I never got to see it.
Now i wonder what I’d have thought, had I seen the reality of “no floor”.
9:42pm
February 13, 2015
“Meow – tss tss tss
Meow – tss tss tss
Uh-uh-uh
Let’s not be hasty now!”
— This was accompanied by claw-like hand gestures on the hissing. I’d come up with the gestures and cat noises. My friend(1) made up the last two lines. Every. Single. Time. That we said goodbye, I insisted on going through this routine at least five times. Not autistic or anything. Yeah.
10:27pm
January 22, 2015
Headdesk time, double feature.
The first conversation was with an old acquaintance from college. The second conversation was with my dentist. Neither of them knew at the time that I’d been diagnosed with PDDNOS/atypical autism and was about to have that diagnosis changed to autistic disorder in the near future.
“My best friend is autistic.“
9:12pm
January 20, 2015
This is possibly my favorite childhood picture ever (it ties with one where i’m climbing a tree… maybe). We were in the woods, and my mom had put flowers in my hair and wanted to photograph them. Meanwhile I was staring at the hillside, it was na overwhelmingly reddish-brown color and I was losing myself in that, as my mom snapped the picture. And apparently playing with my hair. It reminds me strongly of a photo of Donna Williams as a child where she was standing ‘staring at nothing’ and playing with her hair.
My parents were inclined to describe my staring at nothing as “thoughtful”, but it was more the absence of conventional thought, and a whole lot of sensing. I guess I like the photo because it reminds me of that time, and because (to me) the presence of that sensing mode of thought is so abundantly clear here. But I couldn’t explain why.
6:01am
December 28, 2014
I couldn’t play football, though I wanted to.
When I was a teenager
My father slept in his running shoes
To prevent me running away from home
In the middle of the night
He was autistic too
And has hyperacute hearing
So there was no possible way
To slip by his door unheard
He’d block my path
I’d head-butt my way past him
Pitting my 105 pounds
Against his 250+ pounds
And often winning
Because I didn’t feel the pain
And then he’d have to chase me
All the way down the sidewalk
Tackle me
And convince me to come home
Before my screaming
Made a neighbor call 911
Which would inevitably lead
To a mental institution
My father said
I’d have made a good linebacker
This always pleased me to hear
Not that I wanted to hurt him
But that he cared so little for gender roles
That he was willing to envision his daughter
As a football player
When I was young
I wanted to play football
He told me the girl
Was the best player on his team
This worried me
Because for all I wanted to play
I knew I’d suck
And I knew of no life path
In which a girl could play football
Unless she was the best of the best
And maybe not even then
I would not have been able
To see the ball
As more than
Fragments exploding
In all directions
Brown and white
But disconnected and unfamiliar
Just like in basketball
Give me ping-pong
Give me badminton
Give me a game with a small ball
Moving fast
A light ball that my arms could hit
Without bending backwards
And that would activate
My tracking instincts
And I would be able to
Coordinate everything unconsciously
Even stand a chance of winning
But I didn’t want ping-pong
And I didn’t want badminton
Not at school, not there, not then
I wanted football
And nobody would let me play
My arms were too weak
To throw a good pass
My eyesight too jumbled
To make sense of all the players
Moving in all directions
Or the ball, at al
Football is a game of strategy
Of multitasking
I couldn’t do either one
Not to mention social skills
Visual perception
Ability to perform under pressure
If there was a game that was built
For everyone but me
It was football
Still, I wanted to play
I wanted the opportunity
To play, and to suck
And to be allowed to play anyway
Even if not on the elite school teams
I wanted to be able to do this
Without the girls who came after me
Being told:
“Sorry, we tried a girl once.
It didn’t work out.”
I wanted to play badly
Without letting down
A whole gender
I wanted to be
Just another player
Who was always picked last for the team
But who at least got to play
6:41am
December 27, 2014
Crater Lake, Oregon. I know it looks like I’m sitting in front of a giant postcard, but this is a real place, and a beautiful one. Unfortunately, I rarely got to experience the beauty of such places firsthand. Travel filled up my brain so heavily with new visual experiences that it was all I could do not to scream or collapse by the end of the day. It’s only when places get pushed back into my long-term memory, and all the sensory pieces reassembled bit by bit in some kind of warehouse in my head that they don’t let me see directly, that I can actually enjoy a totally new place without feeling like my head will explode. Often my memories of a place are much better than my direct experience of a place at the time, and this is why.
Unfortunately, there are times when my brain gets so full and so overloaded that nothing can put the pieces back together again, ever. And then i’m just left with the original sensory experience s my only memory of the place.
2:10am
December 9, 2014
Owl Eyes
I was born
In the doorway of the delivery room
At change of shift
My mother had to lift the sheets
To show them I was here
I didn’t cry
I just stared
With big eyes
And big pupils
“Owl Eyes”
My dad nicknamed me
As my parents wondered
“Who the hell is in there
Behind those big black eyes?”
I guess they found out
Slowly enough
As I learned to communicate better
But I feel like my father and me
Never fully understood each other
Until he was dying
Because there was something he feared
About opening up to love
But he trusted me enough to do it
And I trusted him enough to do the same
And suddenly it was as if everything in our hearts
Was known to the other
On a level too deep for words
I was born during so many transitions
But death is the biggest of all
And I know my dad was scared
But I told him:
When it gets to its worst
Or when the pain gets too much
Lean on Love
It will not let you down
And he did
And we could see more
In each other’s eyes
Than we’d seen in a lifetime before
And my mom said when he died
He trusted us enough
To walk into the Light unafraid
Owl Eyes I was at birth
And Owl Eyes I was again
When my father took me out at night
To listen to the owls in the woods
And my eyes got big every time
I heard an owl hoot
And when my father was dying
All I wished was that
My Owl Eyes could get big enough
To see, and capture, his soul
In my memory
Forever
[This was in response to the writing prompt “Allies”. I doubt this is what the person had in mind, at all. But every time I came back to the writing prompt, “Allies” sounded like “Owl Eyes” in my head. And yet I still couldn’t write the poem. Every attempt was so unsatisfactory that I rarely bothered saving my drafts. My father, who had given me this nickname, was dying of cancer. And I just found out tonight why I couldn’t write the poem before: His death was a necessary part of the story, a part that hadn’t happened yet the last time I tried to write this. It’s too bad. I would have liked him to see it. He and my mom followed my poetry blog, because that’s where I communicated the most how I was feeling about his illness and upcoming death, and my feelings in general. I just wish he’d been around to see this one. He was the one who called me Owl Eyes, after all.]
9:18pm
December 6, 2014
This was a favorite toy of mine as a child. (Which says a lot about our AC family.) But what is it? Does anyone know what it is and what it’s used for?
9:37pm
November 16, 2014
It wasn’t for attention.
I was living in a residential facility at the time. All of a sudden my body would not stop moving. It felt like I was being carried along with it. Running in circles around the house, making yelping noises. Hands grabbing things, setting them down in new places. Or pounding the walls, flicking light switches on and off, opening and shutting drawers and cabinets. All on infinite repeat until I thought I would collapse.
Fortunately it was Nick on duty that night. Nick was the good staff person, the one the other kids conspired to get fired because he was nice to me and kept them from bullying me. (I heard them describing to each other how to systematically, one by one, come to the other staff and say that something about Nick made them “feel unsafe”, and how eventually if they just kept implying that he could be a chid molester, he’d get fired. They were right. He did. He was not a child molester and they knew it, they said out loud that they knew it. They did this to remove the protection that he represented for me and my roommate, both of whom were their prime bullying trgets because we both actually had severe cognitive and emotional problems, rather than being put there because the place had started admitting anyone whose parents wanted them off their hands because they were a general pain in the neck. Bad combination, that, but it happens all the time when facilities or schools start losing money.
But fortunately none of that had happened yet. So Nick came in and immediately knew something was very wrong. He asked me, “What’s wrong?” My entire demeanor said “I don’t know, and I’m scared, and I don’t know what’s going on, and I’m really scared, and I want to stop.” He could actually read me, so he took all that in. OTOH, my mouth said, lightly and breezily, “I just want the attention.”
He immediately said “No, I know you, and I know that’s not the reason.”
Not that we ever did figure out the reason until five years later. But I hate that I’d been told “you do stuff for attention” so much that I actually echoed it back as a reason for why I did something I didn’t understand. I used it the same way staff usually used it – “I don’t understand this person’s behavior, and so I will assume it’s just for attention because that’s convenient.”
I know other autistic and neurodivergent people who learned to say the same thing in response to the same line of questioning. I find this really upsetting. We get trained to do their job for them. To put ourselves in their compartments before they even need to get a chance to. It scares me, it disgusts me, it angers me.
The answer, by the way, is autistic catatonia, specifically catatonic excitement. Possibly with some akathisia thrown in. But those answers weren’t going to be found at a place that had me misdiagnosed with “infantile psychosis and childhood schizophrenia” like some kind of 1970s nightmare transplanted into the nineties. This sort of thing is why it’s a terrible thing for anyone – anyone – to automatically make the first assumption of a person’s motives as “attention”. Because usually it’s not. Usually there’s a reason. Sometimes that reason is really important to find out. Calling it attention-seeking means you stop looking. Catatonic excitement sometimes kills people.
3:28am
October 31, 2014
I was in the Girl Scouts as a child.
I hated every moment spent with my troop. It was a social skills nightmare not just with the kids but with the parents who ran it, who were of the belief that if you brought a problem to an adults attention, you caused the problem. So I started trying to solve problems myself socially, and would still get accused of tattling even when I didn’t speak to an adult the entire time. This baffles me. How can you tattle without talking to an adult? But anyway that’s not the main gist of this story.
I did like the day camps. We went on nature walks in amazing places in California. There are lots of amazing places in California. Anyway on one nature walk, we were getting a lecture on the value of protecting the environment, not littering, and above all, the thing where a Girl Scout always leaves a place cleaner than she got there.
And for my own more selfish reasons, I was picking up bottle caps as we walked around the lake. There were bottle caps everywhere. Beautiful ones. I had a whole collection at home and I was going to be able to add dozens to that collection.
Another kid started picking up bottle caps too.
Eventually the counselor who’d just been lecturing us about all that saw us and went ballistic. “Those are filthy! You shouldn’t touch them! Throw them in the lake right now!” I couldn’t believe my ears. I hesitated a long time. I loved those bottle caps. And I didn’t want to be a litterbug. They were always telling us not to be litterbugs.
But she stood there and wouldn’t let us go anywhere until we threw the bottle caps in the lake.
It’s funny how you never learn what authority figures try to teach you. I learned nothing about ecology that day. But I learned a lot about hypocrisy. I felt queasy as I threw the bottle caps in the lake – the same queasy I felt killing butterflies because adults told me I could mount them and they’d look pretty. It took me a long time to learn that queasy feeling was my conscience.
But seriously, Girl Scout camp counselors telling campers to throw bottle caps in a lake, that hits some kind of low.