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Erika Hammerschmidt
Blogs from 2018
Etsy shop
2018/01/01
John has been helping me by putting some of my jewelry up on Etsy.
I've been tinkering around with my websites and social media, and just recently added some info to my jewelry page at https://www.theheathersmith.com/...including a link to my Etsy page and my Google Calendar, where I'm posting events I'll be attending.
They say that having an Etsy shop can increase sales, but I'm uncertain about their search algorithms and promotion protocols. It's hard to get noticed in the sea of other artists selling online.
Cold weather phone calls: a PSA
2018/01/02/
Just a reminder that if you are going out in the kind of weather Minnesota has around this time of year-- do not rely on smartphones to make emergency calls!
If it gets cold enough, a smartphone will stop working. It can look like a battery failure, but I think it's some kind of safeguard to make sure you don't use it in weather that could damage it.
For example, on my way to work on the last Friday of 2017, a five-mile bike ride at -3 degrees Fahrenheit, my phone completely lost power. Luckily I didn't need it while I was out. But when I got in to work, I tried to check my email and was met with all the signs of a dead battery.
But it can't have been an ordinary dead battery, because when I plugged it in, it was almost instantly fully charged again. I think it just refused to admit it had battery power until it knew it was warm enough.
(Wish I could do that. "Can't get out of bed this morning. I'm dead. Ooh... you turned the thermostat up! Yay! I'm alive again!")
So-- don't assume your smartphone is gonna be there for you in sub-zero-Fahrenheit weather. Don't assume a backup battery will help, either. Bring a wall-plug-in charger, and if you need to call someone, take shelter in a warm place with an outlet.
If there won't be any places like that along your route, be sure to make plans beforehand with whoever you might need to contact. For example, John knows the route I take on my bike, so if I go missing and can't call him, he knows where a search team will need to look for me. And, before I leave, I always tell him what time I'll leave and whether I'll take my bike route or the bus route, or ride with a coworker.
It's getting into the negative double digits! Be safe out there!
More wire wrap classes!
2018/01/03
Remember that wire-wrapping class I taught at the Goddess of Glass in November? It went really well! I'd never taught a class like that before, but it was really fun to see all the different styles that emerged around the table, from different people starting out with the same materials and instructions. Some people made wire trees, some made pendants, some made both, and all of them were unique in fascinating ways. You never know what your style of art is going to be until you pick up the tools of the trade.
Anyway, I had a great time, and I'd love to do it again! And luckily, Connie from The Goddess of Glass has offered me that opportunity! I'm teaching 2 classes this winter:
https://conta.cc/2ADSMfg (Sunday, January 28th, 12 to 3 pm)
https://conta.cc/2AD8YNR (Sunday, February 25th, 12 to 3 pm)
Both are at
The Goddess of Glass /The Warren
4400 Osseo Road
Minneapolis, MN 55412
My left middle finger is a non-conformist
2018/01/04/
Today I sketched a picture of my left-hand fingerprints.
Now, this is not an exact depiction of my prints. (I would not publicly share an exact depiction, because, while I don't plan to commit any crimes, I also don't trust the motives of every person who might see my public posts.) But I'd say it's a fair approximation.
As you can see, most of my fingers have the world's most common print pattern: the loop, an inverted U-shape of nesting curves alongside a triangular delta.
All my right-hand fingers have this pattern, and all but one of my left-hand fingers. They all have it symmetrically, too, with the delta toward the thumb and the loop away from the thumb. The thumbs have it as well. Very normal, with only the smallest irregularities in the concentric curves.
But my left middle finger?
Well... I suppose its pattern can be considered a loop too. Sort of. At least, that's the closest known pattern to what that finger has.
It's like it tried to grow a loop, but the loop kind of flattened, squashed, lost most of its layers, and fused with the delta into a vaguely tent-shaped mess. Fingerprints can be arches, loops or whorls, but this finger refuses to look like any of them.
I guess, in its own defiant way, it decided to give the whole concept of biological labels and categories a big middle finger.
Playing around with watches
2018/01/05
Here's a choker necklace I made with old watch parts, brass wire, pearls and amethyst beads.
I don't like how I look in pictures, but I modeled it anyway. I like the fit.
Hoping to have it for sale at my table at the 13 Gears Steampunk Bazaar this February 10th.
Have I mentioned I have a table at the 13 Gears Steampunk Bazaar this February?
https://13gears.yolasite.com/
I am so excited! It's February 10th, 11:00 am - 6:00 pm at the Grain Belt Bottling House in NE Minneapolis.
I will have a table with all sorts of fanciful jewelry and trinkets that I've made.
Steampunk bazaar
2018/01/06
Here are some earrings I'm hoping to sell at the 13 Gears Steampunk Bazaar this February 10th. I made them out of wire and old wind-up watch parts.
Steampunk stuff
2018/01/07
Here are a few more pieces for the steampunk event: some pendants I made with wire, stones, and old watch parts. I'm pretty happy with them.
Thoughts about children's songs
2018/01/10/
When I was a kid, my cousins had a tape of children's songs that included one about an alligator raiding a department store and taking a refrigerator.
The first several verses were funny, light-hearted and not that remarkable, mainly playing with the rhymes of "alligator," "refrigerator," "elevator" and "escalator." As a kid I guess I found it entertaining.
But the last verse was very out of place. It seemed as if it had been tacked on as an afterthought, to address criticism about the song being unwholesome because it depicted stealing.
In the last verse, the singer reassures the listeners that the alligator was honest and paid for the refrigerator, by mailing fish from his swamp to the department store afterwards.
Okay, but this made it way worse.
The first several verses were never going to give children the impression that stealing is okay. Children know from a very early age that you're not supposed to take anything from a store without paying. Children hearing the song will fully understand that it depicts something they are not supposed to approve of, but that they can laugh at anyway because it's ridiculous.
But the last verse? That could actually confuse children about what is right and wrong.
While young kids are totally aware that you have to pay for what you buy, they may not be clear on the details of how payment works. And the last verse teaches them that
1. stores accept payment in non-cash goods, like fish
2. stores accept payment mailed in after you have taken unpaid merchandise out of the store.
Your kids were never going to raid a department store and steal a refrigerator. And you know, they probably still aren't going to steal something just because of this song. They'll probably just ask you questions about the parts that don't make sense, because asking questions is what kids do.
But, if any part of this song was going to convince kids to shoplift stuff, it would be the last verse, which basically tells them it's okay because they can pay later by mailing some random possessions to the store they stole it from.
And this is typical. I have seen so many songs and stories edited to make them more kid-friendly and the editing actually worsens the message.
Adults have seriously no idea how kids think. I don't know what happens in most people's brains when they grow up, but in the vast majority of cases it seems to involve totally erasing the memory of what being a kid was like.
Wire Wrap Class coming up Jan 28th!
2018/01/11
Link (Sunday, January 28th, 12 to 3 pm)
The Goddess of Glass /The Warren
4400 Osseo Road
Minneapolis, MN 55412
I'm so excited to teach this wire wrap class at The Goddess of Glass! Price has been lowered to $25 +$10 supply fee. Hope to see some of you there!
A brief history of my life in relation to the Super Bowl
2018/01/20/
Pre-teens:
I learn that "bowl" is a reference to the shape of a football stadium, and the Super Bowl is not, in fact, a bowling tournament
Teens - young adulthood:
I cycle through many years of completely forgetting the time of the Super Bowl and being unpleasantly surprised every time it happens
Age 30-something:
my brain finally absorbs the information that the Super Bowl is in February every year
Age 36:
I react in shock to the discovery that the Super Bowl is NOT IN THE SAME PLACE every year.
"...wait, it's called a Bowl because the stadium looks like a bowl, but it's not even referring to an actual specific STADIUM?"
Age Nearly-37:
"...holy god, that means it could end up in MY city?"
(curls up in fetal position and prays I do not have to go downtown that day)
Kea's Flight sequel updates
2018/02/06
I've been having a sort of upheaval in the editing of the Kea's Flight sequel, "Kea's Landing." It's a story about what happens when the ship in "Kea's Flight" lands on a planet and builds a city there. But the subplots seem to be taking over.
The draft got mostly positive feedback from initial beta readers, but it's getting a more critical look from John, who, after all, is my co-author, and has to put even more thought into his reading of it.
And I'm facing some of the places where I tried to avoid one bad trope and, in the process, may have gotten myself into something else just as bad.
So, basically, there are two subplots that are troubling. One involves POC representation and I plan to talk about it in another post (each one of these is going to take a long time to explain).
The other one is Mara.
Some backstory, first. "Kea's Flight" took place on a starship carrying Earth's rejects into space to colonize other planets. The ship was populated with young people ("rems") who were grown from removed embryos.
In this dystopian future, abortion is illegal, but unwanted embryos can be removed and kept frozen until they are wanted. Of course, there were more than Earth could care for, so they sent them into space (raised by robots and exiled human convicts called BGs.)
Kea, the main character, and her group of friends, were grown from embryos that were removed because they had genetic predispositions to mental disabilities. Their disabilities are in the range that is sometimes simplistically called "high-functioning." I wrote their story from my own perspective as someone who was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome as a child, and who has learned enough coping skills by now that I can usually pass as neurotypical. Focusing on this part of the disability spectrum was what felt safest to me, because I knew it from experience.
It is stated that there are other rems on the ship with more severe disabilities, but the first book never went into their lives much, and I received some criticism for that.
So, in the sequel, I introduced Mara. Her story is viewed through the lens of Kea finding a hidden folder of her old journal entries, and gradually managing to decode and read them. At first it appears that these entries were written by someone who has died, but as time goes on, it starts to look as if Mara might still be alive and need help. Kea's only hope of finding out more is by reading the whole journal.
Mara uses a wheelchair. She was born with sirenomelia, a rare condition where the legs are fused like a mermaid tail. They were separated with surgery when she was a baby, but she is still unable to walk. Her mentor told her about the circumstances of her birth, and the idea stirs her imagination. She still often dreams of herself as a fish or mermaid, and has become somewhat fascinated with aquatic life, even though she's never had a chance to see it in person.
Mara is also intersex and transgender. Since the sirenomelia prevented her from developing genitals, she was surgically altered at birth to match her chromosomes, which were XY, and was raised as a boy. Her feelings have never agreed with that, and her story follows her finding a group of friends with whom she can be herself.
This is difficult at first. Mara is also nonverbal. She can communicate by typing, but only very slowly. This, too, is somewhat tied in to her physical condition: in one of the few real-world cases of sirenomelia, a patient who underwent the splitting surgery in childhood lost her ability to speak afterward (although in that case it was temporary). It's not clear whether the same thing caused Mara to be nonverbal, but whatever the cause, it's one more challenge she faces in her quest for friendship and love.
Part of my own challenge here is questioning whether I am putting too many things on Mara's shoulders. This may be one of the places where I encountered one pitfall by trying to avoid another.
In the past few years I spent a lot of time, maybe too much, browsing social-justice-related blog posts about fiction, and trying very hard to use their advice to make my own stories more respectful and inclusive.
One thing I see a lot is a desire for intersectional representation: characters who belong to multiple marginalized groups.
I was trying to do that with Mara. I may have overdone it-- although beta readers have generally said that they were surprised at how well it worked.
Maybe it can work, but I gave it the wrong mood. One of John's main complaints is that I show Mara being sad too often. I agree. This is a flaw of me seeing her challenges through the eyes of someone who has not faced them personally. When you've lived with a particular challenge, it doesn't seem as tragic and unmanageable as it might seem to those who haven't. If Mara is going to be a relatable character, she needs to spend less time comparing her life unfavorably to others, and more time just dealing with interesting things in her life.
John's other main complaint is that Mara and her group of friends don't "contribute to the plot." That is (at least during the first half of the book or so) their story doesn't really intersect with Kea's story, except in Kea's moments of reading the journal and thinking about it and trying to find out what happened to Mara. It takes a long time before their story has any clear effect on the lives of Kea and her own group of friends.
Later in the book, their story and Kea's do connect in what I think is a satisfying way (and Kea finds out that her worries about having to rescue Mara were very interestingly off the mark). But it takes a long time before that happens, and John found the wait boring.
Part of the problem may be that John is a science fiction reader, and not really a reader of stories focused on romance or friendship.
Mara's story, as it stands now, doesn't really have action, throughout most of the book. It's a story of some people who were lonely, who lived in a society that made it very hard for them to get together socially, and who found a way to get together, build friendships, and fall in love. It's ALL character building and relationship building.
Part of why I did that was because of another complaint I see frequently in social justice blog posts: "Don't act as if disabled people are only worth something if they contribute to the rest of society. They can be valid just for themselves." At the time I wrote the draft, I felt I was trying to show a group of disabled people being valid and worthy just for themselves and each other, not as a device to support the other characters.
But maybe, in trying to avoid the trope of requiring disabled people to be useful, I made the opposite mistake of showing their lives as being dull and unimportant.
I'm contemplating what I will do as I revise it, but after much discussion with John, I do think I should add some genuine, interesting problems for them to solve other than just "we're lonely."
But there's also the problem that the whole book is over 800 pages long; some readers find it daunting already, and adding any more plot will make it even longer.
So my current plan is actually to split the book into two.
The first one will end with the ship landing on the planet, and its plot will feature Mara's story prominently, with whatever interesting plot twists I add to it. I can change it so Kea reads most of the journal before landing, and Kea's pre-landing adventures will be almost a subplot of their own. The second book will continue with Kea's story after landing, with her continued investigation of Mara being a subplot.
I hope this works. But I'm learning a lot about the complexity of representation and how to do it well. It's raising a lot of questions for me and I truly want to address them in the kindest and most respectful way.
Another dilemma: if I do two books, which one do I entitle "Kea's Landing"? And what do I call the other one?
Feel free to share this post and add comments. I welcome all the input I can get.
Results of art contest
2018/02/07/
As for that contest for the cover art for a book about autistic women:
The author has chosen her favorite.
Congratulations to Victoria Busuttil on the winning entry!
(And I know they left a letter out of my name; the author is working with them on that.)
Steampunk sales and wire wrap classes
2018/02/17
The steampunk event went great! Not only did I sell a respectable amount of my art, but it was also highly entertaining, with parasol dueling, tea dueling, a costume contest, and old-timey music by Sister Tree.
Weirdly, I didn't sell any actual steampunk stuff. Well, I sold one crown decorated with old camera filters, to an awesome little girl. But nobody bought any of the jewelry I made with watch parts, or any of the ruffly umbrellas I sewed.
I guess maybe it's because there was already a lot of stuff like that for sale there, so mine didn't stand out as much, and so I sold more of the stuff that was unique to me? Whatever-- it's okay, I sold plenty of that! And it was fun.
At the steampunk event, I also handed out some brochures about the wire wrap class that I'm giving on Sunday the 25th. I hope some people sign up for it! The one scheduled on January 28th didn't get enough signups and had to be cancelled, but there might be more interest in this one.
Again, here's the info if you'd like to sign up or encourage others to sign up:
https://conta.cc/2AD8YNR
Wire Wrap and Tree Making Class
Sunday, February 25, 2018 from 12:00 PM to 3:00 PM CST
The Goddess of Glass /The Warren
4400 Osseo Road
Minneapolis, MN 55412
Some of John's drawings
2018/07/17
Just because I feel like it.
Fear of the Unimaginable
2018/08/06
Lately I've been having a resurgence of some of my social fears, probably brought on by the process of moving to another state, somewhere I haven't been before, with different people and a different culture. Rationally, I know there isn't much cause for fear. I've studied in different countries, and Pennsylvania can't be more different than that. But fears still keep coming up from time to time.
I have a lot of weird fears. Many of them have to do with social conflict or having others view me in negative ways.
But there's one that I can't even quite put into words. It's not one of my strongest fears, but it's definitely one of my strangest.
The best I can do to describe it is to say that it's a fear of being weird in ways nobody else has been weird before.
And, as I said, that description doesn't really cover it. Of course I'm already weird in ways no one else is. Uniqueness is a trait of every human, every living thing-- hell, every physical OBJECT beyond a very low level of complexity. No two people have ever been weird in exactly the same ways.
Furthermore, in most aspects of my life, I take pride in being unique. I even take pride in being unique in especially unique ways. Which looks like a contradiction, when I talk about this fear.
So what is this fear, exactly?
Well, it comes up when I think about social situations, when I imagine making a social mistake, or think that I may have made one. But it's not a fear of making social mistakes that make me seem unintelligent, uninteresting, unkind, prejudiced, rude, or just pathetically awkward. I mean, I DO have fears of those things, but they're not what this specific fear is about.
I can kind of map the outline of this fear by identifying what thoughts can help assuage it. For example, if I'm feeling this fear in response to something awkward I've just said, I can calm the fear by thinking about a scene in a book or movie where someone said something similarly awkward. Even if everyone in the movie instantly hated the character who said it. The fact that the writer of the scene could get the idea to portray it proves that it does not reach the level of weirdness that I am apparently afraid of.
Or, I can calm the fear by imagining people's reactions to the awkward thing I've said. As soon as I model a believable human response to it-- even if it's nervous laughter, confused silence, or an uncomfortable change of subject-- I've proven to myself that it's not what I'm afraid of. If the situation I'm thinking about has already happened, and I've seen people's responses, all I have to do is think about what those responses were. It doesn't always turn the fear into relief, but it can turn it into a different fear.
So what even is it, originally? What would have to happen in order for that original fear to come true? I don't know. It seems to be a fear of doing something so utterly bizarre that human beings do not have a way to respond to it. But it's not a fear of getting NO response, either, because being ignored doesn't set it off.
I dunno. Maybe deep down in my alien brain there's some repressed knowledge that if I did something weird enough, far enough from human nature, it would trigger some reaction in those poor Earthlings that would be so horrible I haven't even been able to imagine it yet.
Altered State
2018/08/07/
So, as I've mentioned before, I'm no longer living in Minnesota.
There was a very sad time, beginning when Sirius the starling passed away, and getting worse as John and I experienced health and money problems and began to realize that we couldn't afford to stay in the condo we were living in. It culminated in a decision to move to Pennsylvania, where we could share an apartment with Sibre Collard, a successful airline pilot who can pay the majority of the rent, allowing us to finally save money once more. I got a new job at a new pharmacy, and things are finally looking a little better for us.
The chaos of the world around us is still overwhelming, and the overall stresses are still putting strain on our home life. We are still far from being content. The world has been in turmoil long enough to wear out my emotions of fear and outrage, and most of what I feel now is just a bleak exhaustion.
But, after the move, it feels as if maybe we have just a little bit more hope now. Our new living arrangement is much more affordable, and selling the condo will bring a fair amount of money to set aside for the future. And the area we're in is better for artists and authors, with a wide selection of sci-fi/fantasy conventions.
I will be back in Minnesota for a speech at the Autism Society's Self-Advocacy Summit on September 22nd. I'll arrive a few days before that, and anyone in MN who wants to visit with me will have to plan for some time in those days.
My new job is at Partners Pharmacy-- the first job where I've ever had a desk, so of COURSE I must decorate it with all the shiny and pretty things I can. It's already decked out with drawings, photos and several of my handmade wire-and-bead trees mounted on shells and geodes.
My coworkers are already fascinated with my wire-wrapping hobby, and are trying to get me to teach a class at the nearby community center. I hope I do get the chance to do that. While in Columbia Heights I did get to teach a small class at the Goddess of Glass, the little art shop where I consigned some of my handmade jewelry and tree sculptures. I truly enjoyed teaching it, and seeing how each student's unique style emerged immediately, despite being given the same supplies and instructions. But there was never enough interest to fill a second class. Maybe I'll have better luck here, in a smaller town with less competition.
I'm also thinking about the Arisia convention in Boston, and the Pennsylvania and New York Renaissance festivals. Last year I had the chance to sell my wares at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival and at CONvergence, both of which inspired high hopes at first, but were in reality somewhat disappointing. CONvergence had outgrown its usual hotel and this year had its dealer room in the hotel next door, and within that space the dealers were actually divided into three smaller rooms, making it confusing and hard to find anything. I sold enough to be worth going, but just barely, and many other sellers reported similar complaints.
At the Renaissance festival, it seems the ones who succeed are the sellers who have season-long booths. I just had a pop-up tent on two weekends, and the space where they set those up gets surprisingly little traffic, even on the busiest days of the festival.
I've had a few truly great years at WisCon, the convention in Wisconsin, but in the past year even that had gotten slower and less lucrative. Perhaps new surroundings will bring a change in my luck.
As someone whose passions include making things and selling them at events, I'm afraid I will never be able to have a light, easily movable inventory of material possessions. Again and again I've downsized the luggage I have to bring to each sci-fi/fantasy convention or Renaissance fair, and the arsenal of supplies I use in my craft, but even at its bare minimum it takes up every shelf of a huge metal shelving unit against the wall of our bedroom.
I have learned a lot in this last move, though, and I think I'm finally getting the hang of selecting, limiting and arranging my possessions in such a way as to make them easier to move the next time around. While I definitely want to settle down within the next few years in a more permanent home, I know this one is not permanent and I want to make it as easy as possible when that time comes.
Though we no longer have a bird, we are living with an elderly yet lively cat, a fourteen-year-old Persian named Tariq. He's been Sibre's cat for a long time, and now that we share the apartment with Sibre, he's loving the abundance of attention. Sibre, being an airline pilot, is away a lot, but when he's here he gives Tariq plenty of affection, and Tariq expects the same from us when Sibre is gone. He's sitting beside me as I type, content to be nearby.
Despite having all his claws, he is gentle to the furniture, and his voice is limited to polite meows, no yowling in the dead of night. He is pretty good about leaving my houseplants alone, as well. He's chewed on a few leaves, but never overturned a pot. He's the best-behaved cat I've ever known.
I'll always be more of a bird person than a cat or dog (or people) person, and I dream of having a bird again someday. But after Popcorn the cockatiel fell victim to my brother's dog, and Rain Man the Amazon parrot became too violent to keep, and my dearly beloved Sirius the starling died of a tumor that the vets couldn't treat because vets know nothing about starlings, we're going to have to give some real thought to how to create a home that can truly handle a bird.
This town is so much more beautiful. Which is odd because it doesn't look that much unlike Minnesota... just... more so. More trees, more plants and vines between the trees, more green, more growth, more birds and mammals, warmth, light, everything.
I have seen mockingbirds! And praying mantises in the wild! And a park full of fireflies! In the little park behind our building, there is a family of groundhogs, ranging from a little bigger than a squirrel to the size of a large beaver. They hide out under a wooden platform on the ground, and I guess they bring in things they find to pad their nest down there. I saw one of the smaller ones carrying a plastic bag to the hideout this afternoon. Nature's litter cleanup crew. (I hope groundhogs find plastic bags comfy and not suffocating.)
My route to work is just 3 miles, from a typical suburban residential area to a typical suburban business district, but there's a field of cows halfway between! I walked home one day, and when I got to the farm I stopped in and chatted with the farmers, and they sold me a couple zucchinis and a jar of honey. They sell eggs and meat too. The chickens and cows are theirs; the bees live on another farm. The zucchinis, I think, grow everywhere.
The farmers told me the farm has been there since 1789, before the business district and residential areas were ever built. Impressive that it could last that long. And things are getting harder for farmers all the time.
Though I am troubled by many aspects of livestock farming, I would rather see it happen on a friendly farm like this if it has to happen. I worry about the future of local farms, but this one seems to be doing well for now.
I look forward to the days of self-driving cars and other sustainable transportation options, if humanity can make it through this tough time in history. I dream of days when cities are designed around rail transit and bicycle paths rather than cars and roads. This town is not ideal for biking or walking to work.
I do love my work, though, and mostly get along with my coworkers very well. It's the first time I've been on the data-entry side of pharmacy work, and I think I like it a lot better than packaging pills.
There's a steep learning curve, of course, and it's mostly taught to me by people who have been doing this job so long that they find many things obvious that are definitely not obvious to me. So there are gaps in my education where people assumed something went without saying, and it's taking a while to fill them in. But everyone has been patient with my mistakes and, in general, impressed with my speed of learning.
This job does involve answering the phone, which can be stressful, but the callers are nurses from the assisted living facilities that we ship meds to, so it's less stressful than dealing with, say, Target customers.
And, of course, having a desk is nicer than standing all day, and I make up for the unhealthy aspects of sedentary work by being able to walk or bike there most days (as well as living in a building with a gym).
We get to go on so many great walks! There are 8 state parks within an hour of here! And lots of little nature areas that aren't quite state parks, but are charming in their own way. We've been to a few already, including a place called Columcille Megalith Park, which seems to have been built on the premise that every natural area in Pennsylvania already looks like fairyland, so you might as well decorate it with whimsical stone statues, castles and decorations meant to maximize that feeling.
More posts, full of photos, to follow. I am getting increasingly frustrated by the low quality of my phone camera, and I'll post many more photos of my surroundings once I have a camera that does them justice.
Music and Me Don't Mix
2018/08/08/
For some reason my brain loves to make mashups of songs that really do not belong together, and yet somehow remind me of each other.
I'll pick up on some faint similarity in the tune or words, and before you know it I'm smashing two incompatible songs together... even adding my own words sometimes, which make even less sense than the whole concept does in the first place.
Examples that have gotten themselves stuck in my head in the past year:
Immigrant Song and Paradise City
("I come from the land of the ice and snow
Where the grass won't grow and the girls all froze")
Oh Susanna and Don't Cry for Me Argentina
("Argentina, don't you cry for me!
For my first name's Angelina and my last name is Jolie")
(I don't know, that part just grew from the rhyme)
Sailing, Sailing and Puff the Magic Dragon
("Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main," and then I don't know any more of the words, so my brain just continues with "and pirate ships would lower their flags when Puff roared out his name!")
Daft Punk's Technologic and the commercial for the Bop-it toy
("Bop it, twist it, pull it, bop it, scan it, send it, quick erase it, Technologic")
Alternating lines from the Alphabet Song and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Baa Baa Black Sheep
(easy since they all have the same tune)
Yankee Doodle to the tune of Good King Wenceslas
The Star Spangled Banner to the tune of the First Noel
and, while we're mixing patriotism and Christmas:
Oh Tannenbaum and Oh Canada
("Oh Canada, oh Canada
Our home and native lan-a-da")
Then there's Coldplay's Speed of Sound and Pocahontas's Colors of the Wind
(just
"How high can a sycamore grow?
If you cut it down then you'll never know,"
but to the Coldplay tune)
and
Old MacDonald and Bingo
("There was a farmer had a farm!
MacDonald was his name, oh!
E! I! EIO!
E! I! EIO!
E! I! EIO!
MacDonald was his name, oh!")
and perhaps my favorite,
So This is Christmas and Sixteen Tons.
("So this is Christmas
And what do you get?
Another year older
And deeper in debt.
St Nick don't you call me
cause I can't go
I owe my soul to
the department store.")
(That's sixteen tons of coal in my stocking, and no, I'm not sorry.)
No-Pump Fountain Tutorial
2018/08/08
(Just imagine this is made of bigger, better-looking containers. I work with what I have.)
One of my fascinations is finding simpler ways to do things that are almost always done with complicated machinery. Or even not-so-complicated machinery. Maybe I feel more in control of my life when more of my possessions are easily-understood things that I would know how to build if they needed replacing.
For instance, fountains. I love the idea of decorative fountains, but I hate nearly all the ones you can buy. The pumps and tubes just build up bad smells and algae. The machinery makes a noise that interferes with the pleasant noises of the water.
At times I've imagined building a fountain that was just one giant barrel draining into another-- decorated to look prettier than that sounds, of course. With big enough barrels, the fountain could just be re-set once a day, and the rest of the time it would run without pumps or electricity.
But who has the physical strength to switch the positions of two giant barrels after one of them fills up to the brim with water?
So, here's how to make a fountain that requires no pumps, runs for several hours on gravity alone-- AND can be restarted easily by hand.
I've modeled it in miniature, in these photos, with metal food cans and other small containers. But I see no reason it couldn't be scaled up big enough to be the centerpiece of a room, with much prettier and fancier components.
You'll need:
- 1 very large container, like a washtub or barrel. It's okay if it holds more water than you can lift by hand. (Represented here by a soup can.)
- Several identical smaller containers that you CAN lift by hand when full of water. Enough to fill the big container when you empty the water into it from them. (Represented here by four cat food cans.)
- Another spare set of small containers just like the others. (Represented here by four more cat food cans.)
- Several objects that can be stacked to elevate the containers at different heights, like bricks or wooden blocks. (Represented here by some pill bottles and small jars and a tomato paste can.)
- A device that can be used to make small holes in the containers. (Represented here by a metal punch tool and a hammer and nail.)
-A waterproof, lipped surface to catch any water that falls while you're fine-tuning the design. (Represented here by a glass pie pan.)
1. Make a very small hole in the bottom edge of the largest container. A large enough hole that water can drain out through it, but small enough that it takes a long, long time to drain the whole container.
2. Make small holes in all the smaller containers, too-- both the original set, and the spare set. But in these, place the hole near the top, a little bit below the upper rim. Be sure to put it at the same height on all the containers.
3. Set up the blocks or bricks in a stepped formation, with the highest column wide enough to hold up the big container, but narrow enough to let the big container overhang its edges. Nearest to it, build the second-highest column, to hold one of the smaller containers in the same way.
And so on, until the columns are set up so that the whole set of containers could sit on the columns, with each one's edge overhanging the top of the next one down.
4. Then set them all up that way.
5. Take the spare set of containers, and fill them all with water to just below the hole.
6. Empty them, one by one, into the largest container.
Over a long time, the water will pour out of the largest container into the set of smaller ones on the columns, filling the first container, then the second, then the third, and so on.
If the big container is big enough and the hole is small enough, the fountain may run for a whole day before having to be reset.
When it runs out, you will have an empty big container and several full small containers.
Move the full small containers aside, and put the empty spare ones in their place. Then repeat the process, pouring the full ones into the big container one by one.
Bad Mistake Vegetarians Make
2018/08/09/
I'm not vegan, but I try to be mostly vegetarian. I probably would be vegan if it were easier to get necessary nutrients on a vegan diet, or easier to get vegan food in this society.
I'd like to add some insight into what may be going through the heads of vegetarians when they use Holocaust analogies to promote their cause, and how I realized that was harmful.
I used to think in terms of similar analogies, although I never viewed any specific group of humans as "equivalent to cattle." Not any more than others. I just felt that all animal life, including all humans and all cattle, had equal value.
Or at least I felt that I ought to believe that, because I couldn't rationalize an argument against it.
The only non-religious argument I knew in favor of human superiority was that "Humans are more intelligent than animals." This has two problems.
First, it felt very wrong to judge our species as superior to others just because we score better than others on these tests. Tests that we devised, with our own superiority in mind, and that only we care about the results of.
Second, it's not even true for all humans and all animals. Human toddlers, for instance, don't score as high on intelligence tests as parrots. Not until they're about four years old. Why, then, do we value the lives of human children above those of parrots? Two possible reasons:
1. Human children have the potential to become human adults. (But so do sperm and egg cells that haven't even joined yet, so by that logic we should value them the same, too.)
2. The results of those intelligence tests are questionable. Infants and toddlers may be much smarter than parrots, but just be unable to demonstrate that intelligence. Maybe because they're immature and lack coordination. (But then we should question the results of all tests that show animals are less intelligent than humans. All animals could theoretically have more intelligence than they're able to display.)
So I felt I had to choose between two worldviews:
1. Stop valuing the lives of young children. And any other humans that I couldn't prove were smarter than all non-human animals.
2. Or: Stop thinking of intelligence as the trait that earns you the right to live. And start valuing all animals the same as all humans.
I felt that if I didn't go with one of those two belief systems, my beliefs would be contradictory and I would therefore be a hypocrite.
And I didn't want to devalue any human life. So I decided all humans and all animals were of equal value.
After all, it seemed like the natural conclusion of the teachings I'd learned. The ones that told me all humans are worthy of equal rights, regardless of race, religion, gender or ability. It seemed that you couldn't logically believe that without also extending it to species.
And that led naturally to the conclusion that the systematic killing of animals was equivalent to the genocide of groups of humans. And that both should be reviled and condemned as harshly as possible.
All this reasoning took place in my pre-teens and early teens, as I was trying to establish my worldview.
But this worldview ended up being impossible to live by.
In present day human society, you cannot function without in some way contributing to the slaughter of animals. All products you need for survival are produced by methods that kill animals.
Not just meat and other animal products, but also vegetables. And anything else that's produced on land. They had to strip the land of existing plants and animals before developing it. And they had to constantly keep it free of animal invaders in order to keep using it.
Even if you grew literally all your own food, there would come a time when you had to exterminate pests, in order to save your harvest. At least at the insect or arthropod level. Even if you grew your food indoors. Believe me, I've tried. You still get bugs. Especially spider-mites. And you cannot reason with spider-mites. You have to kill them.
You have to choose between your own single life and several animal lives. And by choosing yourself, you would demonstrate that you valued one human above multiple animals.
It could be viewed as self-defense. But if you consider the killing of animals to be genocide, then that defense wouldn't hold any water. No more than the defenses of World War II concentration camp workers. The ones who claimed self-defense because they executed others in order to avoid being executed themselves.
And this doesn't even begin to address the question of whether killing plants is as bad as killing animals. After all, biologically, there's not such a clear line between plants and animals. There are organisms classified as animals that aren't perceptibly more intelligent than plants. It begins to feel like the earlier attempt to draw lines of value between animals and humans.
And from there it led into a very bad part of my journey of self-discovery.
It led to seeing humans as the single most destructive force on Earth, to both themselves and other species. The creature that could not survive without wreaking genocide on more different creatures than any other predator could dream of.
It led to thinking that, if you really, truly hated genocide, you should be willing to relax that principle. Just long enough to exterminate the species that commits virtually all of it.
This whole thought process begins with the same teachings that go against Nazism. But it ends with feeling like you have to take the side of the Nazis.
It ends with feeling that mass human-killers like Hitler have done the world more good than anyone else. And that their only mistake was limiting what groups of humans they killed. That they should have just wiped us all out indiscriminately.
This is the very bad place that I got to for a while, as a kid trying to figure myself out. Trying to live by moral rules that were always clear, always consistent, always followed. Always possible to put into words without loopholes, gray areas and exceptions.
And that's not how moral rules work. Almost ever.
When I got to this point, I did eventually back off.
I backed off because I realized I wanted to function in human society. That functioning in human society is really the only option for a human. And you can't properly do that, when you profess to believe that humans should all die.
And even though applying logic to my baseline morals kept leading me to the conclusion that humans should all die...
My actual emotions never really got there.
I could not emotionally convince myself that humans weren't worth the harm they caused. Despite all my supposed logic, I couldn't stop feeling that there was something uniquely special about the things humans can do.
Although I couldn't morally justify valuing humans above other animals, I still do, in the emotional centers of my being. Emotionally, I still feel that human consciousness is a truly precious thing. And that it should be preserved even if it means horrible things for other creatures.
I even feel that... if it somehow became possible for us to survive without the other life forms on our planet? And then it somehow became necessary to survive without them? And we had to choose between our lives and theirs? I would want to choose ours.
And that's not just self-preservation, because I'd want people to make that choice even if it happened after I died. I feel as if the meaning of my life is the impression I leave on other humans. And the moment humans become extinct, even if it's many years after my death? That's the moment my life stops having a meaning.
And, as much as I rationally think that these feelings are illogical and immoral, I realize I probably can't change them. I realize it's probably one of our deepest instincts, valuing our own species above others. Way, way stronger that any tendency we may have toward valuing our own nation or ethnicity above others.
It's probably one of the deepest instincts of almost every species, to put its own kind first. Whether or not you can rationalize it morally, it's easy to explain it in terms of causation. A species that didn't value itself highest would have a hard time surviving.
And I still feel bad about it. Because usually I hate it when people hang on to their viewpoints even when they know they can't rationally justify them. But in this case I honestly don't see an alternative.
I backed off, but I see no reason to run to the other extreme. I still feel that people being vegetarians does less harm to the world than the other options. That animals really shouldn't suffer the way they do in meat, dairy or egg production. That animal farming is inherently bad for the land.
That yeah, production of soybeans can damage the environment. But hey, it's either grow them and eat them, or grow them and feed them to pigs and eat the pigs. And eating pigs actually takes more soybeans than just eating soybeans. Same for other crops. Agriculture hurts the environment whether it's growing food for humans or livestock. And there's more damage from growing the amount you need for livestock, plus the damage of raising the livestock itself.
And yes, there are places where animal farming is the best way to get nutrients to people. Some places the land is good for grazing livestock on scrub and not any good for growing crops. But we should use the most efficient method for wherever we live. And where I live, livestock are pretty much always fed crops that could more efficiently be used to feed humans.
(And I still don't know how to morally approach the question of whether it's crueler to keep raising animals for meat, or give up eating meat and let those animals go extinct. How can we make the decision, for another species, on whether their suffering is worse or better than nonexistence? I'm not sure I could even decide that for myself.)
I don't have all the answers. I still try to do as little harm as I can, within the practical restrictions of my life. But I've realized that there is no point in trying to take this to near-impossible extremes, or trying to guilt-trip other humans into doing so, either. What people want to eat is a very personal thing, tied up in their feelings about their health and their physical pleasure. It's as visceral as their feelings of sexual attraction, and just as unchangeable. You just can't expect to turn it around with moral arguments, and especially not with moral arguments that make you look like a jerk.
Which includes the Holocaust analogies. Whatever reasoning vegetarians have for comparing animal slaughter to the Holocaust-- the only thing you are ever going to accomplish by using that analogy is making people angry at you and far less likely to listen to any good points you do have.
And I'm not saying vegetarians don't have good points-- but we've got to be careful about taking its points all the way to their extremes, because that just leads to wanting humanity dead, or being frustrated because you feel like you SHOULD want humanity dead but your human heart refuses to actually want that.
Question about Bottles
2018/08/10/
Question for people who take regular medication, such as insulin. Or any other injections that come in little glass bottles.
Is it feasible to sell those containers to artists?
I ask because I am an artist who likes to incorporate small glass bottles into my art. There are plenty of them available very cheap on Amazon and eBay. But in general they are thin and fragile. And I suspect that a lot of them are made with unethical business practices.
Once, though, I found a bag of very nice little bottles at a thrift store. They were much stronger and a little bigger than the ones I've found online. I made some lovely pieces with them (tiny wire-and-bead bottled trees) and I wish I could get more.
I don't know where they came from, since they were just in an unmarked plastic bag on a thrift store shelf. But I suspect they were someone's medicine bottles. See, my day job is in a pharmacy, and I see a lot of medication. I don't personally take any meds that come in glass containers. But I'm aware of several that do, mostly injections.
So... are there any people out there who use such things, and have a bunch of used bottles they want to sell?
Are there any health, safety or logistical reasons this wouldn't work?
I doubt my pharmacy would let me use any of the ones from the IV department. Pharmacies tend to be very strict about waste disposal practices. But I would assume that if someone did let me use their old bottles, it would be perfectly safe as long as they cleaned them.
But if you have any knowledge, either confirming or refuting my idea, let me know! Is it feasible to get repurposed tiny bottles from someone who could use the money, instead of buying them new and shoddily mass-produced? I'd love to go that route!
Sweet Randomness: Choosing Chocolates
2018/08/13
Whenever someone passes around a box of chocolates in a large group, I get some comment from someone about my process of picking a piece.
Which is weird, because I don't really HAVE a process for choosing chocolates. I just reach out and grab one, almost totally at random.
"Wow, you're reckless!" people say. "You don't even check the little guide under the lid to make sure it's something good? What if you got coconut? What if you got the one filled with toothpaste?"
And... well, I'm glad that none of these chocolate boxes were being passed out by, like, prospective employers. The type who judge applicants based on personality traits they deduce from their eating habits.
Because I'm really not reckless. It's just that it doesn't matter to me which one I get.
Because I like virtually every kind of chocolate.
Coconut is fine! And the mint cream chocolates don't taste like toothpaste to me! Really, I only dislike one thing I could reasonably expect to find in a chocolate box. And that's a cherry cordial. Which always has a distinctive domed shape, so as long as I avoid anything with that shape, I will have no regrets.
I mean, I do like some chocolates MORE than others. So I suppose that I would get an overall higher amount of gustatory pleasure if I took more care in choosing them. But that does not offset the amount of social discomfort I would get from taking a longer time and making other people wait. Or taking the best chocolates and then facing the wrath of someone else who wanted them. As much as I love sugar, I hate social conflict more.
This is why it annoys me when people make assumptions about other people's personalities based on one detail like that. You always need context. Nothing in life is that simple.
Hotter Juicier Bus Ride
2018/08/14/
So here I am, sitting in a McDonald's in Bethlehem, PA, staring at the least appetizing thing that could possibly be printed on a drink cup.
Waiting for the next bus home. When I could easily have caught an earlier one, if Google Maps had just managed to be consistent.
Buses here are not like in Minnesota. They run less frequently. A transfer is 25 cents extra, not included in the $2 price of a ride. There are no GoTo Readers that read bus cards with a touch. There are little disposable 10-ride tickets, which you can't reload and can't order online. You can only get them at two specific little shops in downtown Bethlehem. And so far, in my experience, they always quit working before you've used all 10 rides. People mostly just use dollar bills, because the tickets are just not worth it.
And the relationship that Google Maps has with Bethlehem's bus system is... complicated.
As I ride a bus and follow my progress using Google's GPS record of my location, I stray significantly from the path that the directions said the bus would take. Which is not surprising when you look at those directions. On my phone's map, the color-coded path of the bus (purple for the 108, orange for the 212) seems to follow streets that no longer exist, crossing directly through buildings and yards.
Today I walked to my first dentist appointment. The walk took about 40 minutes. The appointment was quick, revealing only that I was in good dental health and needed nothing urgent.
After seeing the dentist, I thought, "Hmm, while I'm out, why don't I catch that bus to where Goodwill is, and see what this town's thrift shopping is like?"
I had checked out the route from my new apartment to Goodwill before. My preferred bus route, according to Google Maps, had involved walking to pretty much this exact location and catching a 108.
Sure enough, the 108 took me straight from there to Goodwill, where I managed to find a couple good pairs of tennis shoes and a shirt, though it was nothing like the gigantic, abundantly-stocked Savers near my old place.
And then, getting ready to go back, I was betrayed by Google Maps.
Asking my phone for directions, the only result I saw was a ride on the 212 the following morning.
I was furious.
It wasn't that I was in any danger of having to spend the night camping outside the Goodwill. Sibre was still in town and could most likely drive me home if I called him. Uber and Lyft were also options.
It was just that I'd been SURE the bus ran later than this.
And so, I took refuge in a McDonald's to pass the time while I figured this thing out.
And from the window of the McDonalds, I saw the 108 go by.
So, yes-- Google Maps tricked me into missing my goddamn bus and having to wait for the next one.
Because, see, for SOME godforsaken reason...
"Walk to the dentist's office and take the 108 from there" comes up as an option when searching for home-to-Goodwill bus routes. But "take the bus from Goodwill to the dentist's office and walk home from there" is somehow unthinkable to the same damn artificial unintelligence.
I tried Googling a bus route from Goodwill to the dentist's office, leaving out the walking part, and yeah, there it was.
The 108 runs plenty late. Google Maps just doesn't always know it.
More thoughts about realism vs. believability
2018/08/15/
I've been talking about the divide between realism and believability for more than a decade. And lately I've been thinking about various degrees of realism and fantasy in works of fiction. Specifically, the question of how the audience decides what to take issue with.
For instance, cartoonist Gary Larson once published a comic about a mosquito in a business suit. He comes home to his wife and tells her about his busy day spreading malaria.
Larson later said that he received countless letters of complaint, pointing out that "male mosquitoes don't bite."
Why, he wondered, would so many people complain of that? Nobody had any problem with the idea that mosquitoes wear clothes, live in houses and speak English.
Similarly, here are two questions regarding the interpretation of Shakespeare plays.
1. Is the dead king at the beginning of "Hamlet" a real ghost or a hallucination?
2. Is "Romeo and Juliet" a story about true love? Or just meaningless infatuation that turned deadly before it could burn itself out?
Now, Romeo and Juliet were teenagers who decided they were in love the moment they first laid eyes on each other. So, suppose you say "Their story depicted true love." Most people will take that to mean "I believe true love is possible in those circumstances." And/or "I think Shakespeare believed true love is possible in those circumstances."
But what if you say that Hamlet's vision of his father must have been a real ghost? People will generally NOT take that to mean that either you or Shakespeare actually believe in ghosts.
I'm not even expressing an opinion here on the existence of either ghosts or love at first sight. I'm just saying it's weird. Only one of those things will get people assuming that you believe in it, when you depict it in a story.
You might say the difference is how widespread the belief is. The fewer people actually believe in it, the more likely that your audience will assume that you knew it was imaginary. They'll see that you included it because your work was a work of fantasy.
And the more people do believe in it, the more likely that your audience will think you do, too. Nobody actually thinks mosquitoes wear clothes and live in houses, but many people do think male mosquitoes bite.
The divide between realism and believability is a bit more complex than that, though.
For one thing, I'm not certain that love at first sight is more commonly believed in than ghosts. And for another thing, what if the mosquito in Larson's comic had done something else that nobody thinks mosquitoes do?
What if, say, he sucked blood with his legs instead of his face?
The fact that mosquitoes don't do that is about as well known as the fact that they don't wear clothes. Yet I'm sure that readers would find it far more confusing, and at least as troubling as the idea of a male mosquito that bites.
The real answer, of course, is that it doesn't matter if your plot point is realistic or how many people believe it could be. What matters is the way that readers expect to see it used in fiction.
Once again, believability in books doesn't have to do with actual realism, actual likeliness of something happening in real life.
It has to do with how commonly it happens IN BOOKS.
People expect to see what they're used to seeing in the stories they read.
And if they see something they're not used to, they're likely to think it's somehow wrong-- even if it's closer to reality than anything else they've ever read.
Why do I keep having to explain what a bird nest is?
2018/08/16/
As someone who grew up with both birdwatching and keeping pet birds , it always throws me for a loop when a conversation reminds me that most people do not know what a bird's nest is for.
It's for raising eggs and babies.
They build it when breeding season starts, and they abandon it when breeding season ends.
No, they don't "live in it." Not even if they build it inside a birdhouse that's shaped like a pretty little 18th century bungalow. That's not what it's for.
You've seen birds sleeping, perched on a branch with their heads tucked in. That's how they sleep. They don't sleep in nests. Unless they're sleeping while incubating their eggs.
Well, there are a few exceptions. Quaker parrots are among the few birds that live and sleep in their nests year-round, and they are really fun because their nests are basically multi-family condos, and sharing their body heat allows them to live in places you'd usually consider too cold for parrots. There are even some feral Quaker parrot communities in Chicago.
But most birds? Their nests are just nurseries. If they don't raise babies, they don't build a nest. You know about cowbirds and cuckoos, who reproduce by laying their eggs in other birds' nests and tricking them into raising the babies? They've got zero instincts for nest-building, and couldn't do it if they tried.
Necklaces, necklaces, necklaces
2018/08/17/
Here are some new necklaces, some of which I've modeled on Nearly Neckless Nicki, my jewelry mannequin. I'm experimenting with multi-stone choker styles, so these are different from anything else I've done.
I made them with sterling silver wire and gemstones. One of them has amethyst, pearls and labradorite. Another one just has citrine and very light amethyst. And the third necklace has labradorite, garnet and citrine, smaller stones this time.
All of these are up for sale on my jewelry site at The Heathersmith , so go check them out! Shipping is always free, and I always welcome questions and comments.
sunshine-and-moonbeams-necklace/
Spanish Puns - New Comic on Abby and Norma
2018/08/18/
There's a new comic up on Abby and Norma, because I want to talk about Spanish puns.
(actually puns about trains in Spain are in bad taste, ever since March 11, 2004)
OK, so I've got this comic "Abby and Norma," although it's currently recovering from a hiatus. What I'm posting now is a series of redrawn old strips, and sometimes a few new strips.
The comic is about an autistic college student and a good friend. A pet starling and two precocious little cousins. An uber-geek whose parents bred him so his antisocial genes would save the world. And a modern artist Trekkie who speaks only in palindromes.
Ice Pack Backpack- Keeping Cool for August 20th
2018/08/20/
The Ice Pack Backpack
On this day in 2005, John and I got officially married. Yay for us.
I don't currently feel inspired to write a whole long post about marriage and what it means for us.
So, I'll just post a video tutorial on how to turn an Ace bandage into a little ice pack backpack, to keep you cool if you have to walk to work on hot days. Because it is deadly hot out.
(Works best with big thick ice packs, like the Rubbermaid Blue Ice Block. They hold the cold longer.)
Basically you just sew the bandage into a pocket with shoulder straps, as shown in these pics.
The Reluctant Cat-Person
2018/08/21/
So, at the moment, my family has a cat.
By "my family" I mean me, my husband John (divorced on paper, for financial reasons), and John's husband Sibre (married on paper, for financial reasons). Yes, we're a complicated family. And our relationship with the cat is also somewhat complex.
The cat is named Tariq. He's a 14-year-old silver Persian who is maybe the prettiest and certainly the best-behaved cat I've ever known.
He's been Sibre's cat for a long time. But he was living with Sibre's mom Beatrice, in the Twin Cities, near where we were living, because Sibre was off in Newark training to be an airline pilot.
And then Sibre's mom Beatrice got a kitten. And Tariq didn't like the kitten. I mean, she was a rambunctious little troublemaker and he was a calm old loner with a tragically fluffy and alluring tail. Of course she annoyed him.
And John and I, visiting Beatrice, noticed how unhappy Tariq was. And John offered to have Tariq live with us.
Now, something you have to know about John is that he does not like cats.
Cat lovers sometimes say stuff like, "People who don't like cats aren't to be trusted, because they want to control others, and they hate cats because cats won't be controlled."
But this is incredibly far from where John is. No way would he want a pet that he could control. That would be totally boring for him. He doesn't like dogs either. His favorite pets are birds. You ever see someone trying to control a bird? On the domestication scale, dogs are at the extreme, cats are a bit before them, and birds are waaaaay the hell at the other end.
I'm kind of in the same boat as John, but to a lesser degree. Birds are totally my favorite, but I like cats and dogs too. Though I wouldn't choose to have them as my own pets, I can enjoy hanging out with them.
So why did John volunteer to adopt a cat? Well, he'd rather have a cat than a dog. And he'd rather have Tariq than most cats. And, most importantly, he felt Tariq needed it.
Another thing about John: he has a conscience that is completely separate from his feelings. He will put enormous amounts of unrequested effort into helping people he thinks needs help. Even if no one expects him to help. Even if he personally, viscerally hates the person he's helping and gets no happiness out of it. His desire to do good in the world has more control over his actions than his desire to be happy.
He will spend hours talking about how he doesn't like Tariq, how he doesn't like the smell of his food or his litter or his shed fur or the sound of his meows, and then he'll voluntarily put another hour into cleaning the cat's butt when something got stuck to it-- not just removing the offending crap, but polishing it to a freaking shine-- even though afterwards he says he feels like he's in shock after a traumatic experience.
Anyway, now that we're living together, Sibre has been able to take over some of the cat care. John and I still end up doing a lot of it, though, because Sibre is a pilot and is gone for long chunks of time, flying planes.
Whenever we find a permanent place to settle down, though... a house with enough rooms that I can section off my own area for pets... or maybe a little community of private tiny houses... I'm getting a bird. Or at least I hope so.
I really wish I could adopt another starling, but it depends on where we'll be. The laws vary from place to place when it comes to keeping starlings. In Pennsylvania the government will actually go to the length of confiscating and euthanizing them. I guess they really have nothing better to do.
And, wherever we live, a starling does require more bird-proofing than parrots. At least when it comes to mess. They don't chew on things, but they do poop almost constantly, much more than parrots. And their food includes applesauce, which they fling everywhere, and which sticks forever when it dries.
You can tell, from my website theme, that the starling I had is a very fond memory. And starlings tie in to so many aspects of who I am and what I value in life. If I can't keep a starling in reality, the starling will still be my mascot at heart.
I also kind of want to keep pigeons someday... And lizards... dammit, there are so many kinds of pets I want to have, and I'm sure I'll never have the time to give all of them the proper amount of attention, and I am not EVER going to keep pets I can't properly care for, because I get freaking recurring nightmares about that kind of thing. So I'm doomed to miss out on most of them, and pick only the ones I know I can handle.
But in the meantime: here are some gifs of Tariq playing with a catnip fish.
Weird dream I had
2018/08/22/
A while ago, I had a dream about a society where machines did all the world's work. But every part of every machine was controlled remotely by a person playing a video game.
The better they played the game, the better the part worked. I guess the goal was to give people something productive to do? Without undoing the benefits that mechanization had for human leisure time?
Whatever. I told John about this dream when I woke up, and he said I have to make it into a story, but I am not sure where to start.
Maybe I would do it if I knew more about video games. But I don't even play them. Why did I even have this dream?
Importance of Explanation (WHY should I feed the pet now?)
2018/08/23/
When you're telling someone to do something, even if it's a child... give them an explanation. Tell them why.
Seriously. Do not say "because I told you so." Tell them why, and tell the truth.
And because I'm a decent person and I follow my own rules, I'll tell you the reason.
You may think, "I shouldn't have to give any explanation. They should just follow my instructions without question." But this is not always what people will do. It isn't even always what they should do.
Rules have exceptions. This is common knowledge, even among children.
Whoever you are giving instructions to, they probably know that there are some potential situations where your instructions would not apply.
But what are those situations?
It depends on the reason for the instructions. If they don't know the reason, they don't know in what situations your rules apply or don't apply.
If they have to guess the reason, and they happen to guess wrong, they will also be wrong about the exceptions.
Say you're asking me to take care of your pet.
It's a type of pet I haven't taken care of before.
So you give me instructions. You tell me his dinnertime. You say, "He must eat at this time or earlier. Do not wait until any later to give him his food."
If you don't explain why, I'll probably think, "It's because he'll be badly undernourished if I don't feed him on time."
And then, heaven forbid, what if something prevents me from feeding him? What if I get locked out of the house, or stuck in traffic on my way home, and I'm not able to feed him until after his dinnertime?
If the reason for a specified mealtime is that he could starve to death if he waits any later... then this is an exception. In this situation, I clearly can't follow your instructions to the letter. You said "don't feed him this late," but I've got to feed him now, even though it's late, because then at least I've got a chance of saving him from starvation.
And if the pet was a Mogwai and the time was midnight, and you come home to a freaking swimming pool full of gremlins, the only thing I'll have to say for myself is "You shoulda given me an explanation."
World's Best Liquid Lip Balm Tutorial
2018/08/24
So, a couple years ago I got into making scented lotions and stuff.
And mostly it was a big waste of time and money... but with John's help in the area of emulsifiers, I DID manage to invent possibly the best lip balm EVER.
Some points in its favor:
- Deep moisturizes your lips instead of just sitting on the surface
- Shiny, so it's basically a lip gloss as well
- Liquid, so does not require any heating and cooling to make
- Made with easily available ingredients
- A tube of it lasts a loooong time, even if you use it every day
- When it does run out, it's easy to make more and refill
- Incredibly long shelf life... I have some of this stuff that's like 5 years old and still fine. Must be the clove oil.
So, here's what you need:
- Honey
- Lime juice
- Grapeseed oil
- 2 flavor extracts of your choice (Shown here with vanilla and coffee. Another of my favorites is vanilla and orange extract for a sort of orange creamsicle taste.)
- Food grade essential oils: you'll need peppermint, lemon, and clove, in dropper bottles.
- At least 3 glass lip balm tubes with screw-on caps and roller inserts (got these online)
- Tiny funnel (also online)
- Teaspoon and quarter-teaspoon measures
- Little whisk
- Little glass cream pitcher
- Heavy 5-millimeter beads (you can use stainless ball bearings if you want; I used hematite beads from a thrift store necklace 'cause I'm a gemstone scavenger like that)
So, go ahead and spoon the ingredients into the little pitcher. First, 5 teaspoons of grapeseed oil. (Helps to do the oil before the honey, because then the honey just slides out like water off a duck's back.)
One-and-a-quarter teaspoons of honey.
Then one teaspoon of lime juice. (This is the emulsifier that makes it all blend together and stay that way longer, instead of blobbing up into separate ingredients inside the tube. John figured out this part; yay for chemistry expertise!)
Then 6 drops of peppermint oil, 6 drops of lemon oil, and just 2 drops of clove oil. (These oils prevent it from going bad. They're responsible for the amazing long shelf life, as well as some of the pleasant taste and fragrance.)
Then add a quarter-teaspoon, EACH, of your two flavor extracts.
Whisk it up until it's smooth and creamy...
Then put a bead or two in each tube. (With my hematite beads, I do best with two, but if you've got something heavier like stainless ball bearings, you may only need one.)
And, using the tiny funnel, pour the lip balm into the tubes. (Keep stirring frequently to make sure it's still well mixed before it goes in, because it does slowly separate over time.)
Then you pop in the roller ball inserts and screw on the tops, and your lip balms are ready to go.
Like I said, the mixture will separate over time. That's what the beads are for, to facilitate shaking it up.
When you've left your lip balm standing a while, it'll look like the above picture. All you need to do is pick it up and shake it until you can hear the beads rattle back and forth, and it'll begin to look smooth and creamy again.
(Shaking is important, because if it separates, there could be too much of one ingredient in the same place, which could irritate your skin if you put it on that way.)
Then, all you've got to do is open the top and roll the ball onto your lips!
Before and after:
Comic Time!
2018/08/25
There's a new comic up on Abby and Norma, because I want to talk about antidisestablishmentarianism:
Abby and Norma
However, my spellchecker breaks it down weirdly. Seems like "antidisestablishmentarianism" and "disestablishmentarians" are real words, and "disestablishmentarianism" and "antidisestablishmentarians" are fake words.
OK, so I've got the comic "Abby and Norma," although it's currently recovering from a hiatus. What I'm posting now is a series of redrawn old strips, and sometimes a few new strips.
The comic is about an autistic college student and a good friend. A pet starling and two precocious little cousins. An uber-geek whose parents bred him so his antisocial genes would save the world. And a modern artist Trekkie who speaks only in palindromes.
Musings on a disconnected childhood
2018/08/27/
Sometimes I forget how much it shaped my worldview to grow up in my household. In a household that was so fundamentally clueless about popular culture.
I mean, my parents didn't forbid me from watching popular movies and TV shows. But they didn't encourage me either. And I ignored the social scene at school so much that I never showed much interest in any popular culture.
Mom says that when I was a toddler, I saw some image of Big Bird and said "Look at the duck!" That was when they decided that they had to at least make me watch Sesame Street, otherwise everyone was gonna tease me. Even then, it was never them sharing their favorite shows with me. And it was never me deciding I wanted to watch something. It was a calculated choice: she's got to be exposed to this, because she'll be ostracized if she doesn't even know what Big Bird is.
(Though, was I wrong? Is there any onscreen proof that Big Bird ISN'T a duck?)
(Also: my mind just found a word very amusing. Ostracized. Ostrich-sized. Big Bird. Ha.)
The Sesame Street thing didn't stick for long. I never got used to watching TV shows.
Throughout the vast majority of my childhood, the TV was just a device for playing the small collection of VHS tapes we had.
They were a weird assortment of cartoons, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and obscure old movies.
There was some popular culture among those. Partly because my brother cared a little more about it than I did, and partly because relatives sometimes gave us popular tapes as gifts. I do have whole scenes of Ninja Turtles dialogue memorized. From about ten episodes of the original animation that we had had sitting around. And about two episodes of Scooby Doo. Outside of those very specific, detailed chunks, I am an ignoramus about both shows.
As a kid I read books, pretty much whatever books happened to be lying around. And I had a lot of fun making up my own stories and drawings and worlds.
And by my teens, I did manage to get into Star Trek , to the point of an unhealthy obsession. But before that, in my truly formative years, the whole world of TV was pretty much alien.
When I became aware of the concept of being a "nerd" or "geek," that persona was never presented as having anything to do with popular culture.
It was all about being smart and studious, caring about studies more than social life. It wasn't until college that I ever saw anyone make a distinction between the words "nerd" and "geek." In my childhood, they meant the same thing. That thing was all about doing homework, reading books, and NOT watching TV.
Kids who would later call themselves nerds for liking Transformers and Ghostbusters mocked me as a kid. Called me a nerd for NOT liking those same things.
So there are whole pieces of culture in this country, nostalgic feelings and references that people consider part of the human experience, that I am not part of.
It feels so weird to see everybody mourning their ruined childhood when some iconic TV star like Bill Cosby turns out to be a creep. I have absolutely zero feelings invested in wanting to believe they're innocent, not even a split second of denial from starstruck admiration.
And it's scary to be the only person who is genuinely SCARED by the horrific monopoly that Disney has become. Other people's feelings about it are full of warm fuzzy childhood Disney memories. It's hard for them to believe the company can be THAT bad.
Mystery In My Pants
2018/08/28
A while back, I found a pair of secondhand pants at the thrift store. They had fully functional pockets, but with the tops sewn shut.
I'd seen false pockets and comically small pockets before, but this baffled me. Why bother making a whole pocket, and then go to the extra trouble of adding a row of stitches that made it unusable?
I mentioned it to a friend, who happened to be from a very wealthy family. I'm from a wealthy family too, but mine was extraordinarily unconcerned with appearances. So they had never taught me this fun fact, which my friend happened to know:
Some really fancy, expensive pants will have the pockets sewn shut when they're in the store, to keep the insides of them clean while people try them on, and prevent theft of small items. You're supposed to cut out the stitches after you buy them.
And wow, I had just been ready to accept that this was just one more inexplicable way of putting useless pockets on women's clothes.
And, apparently, so was the previous owner of these pants, who never thought to take out the stitches. We're so used to our clothes making no sense, nothing surprises us anymore.
The Tricked-Vegetarian Trope and Why I Can't Understand It
2018/08/29/
So here's a thing about portraying a vegetarian in a story.
It feels so weird to me whenever I see the trope (either in fiction or in real-life anecdotes) of feeding meat to an unwitting vegetarian and seeing them reply that they can't believe how good it tastes. "OMG, this is the best veggie burger ever!" "Guess what, it wasn't really a veggie burger!"
And I don't just mean it feels weird to me because it's an awful thing to do (although it really is). I also mean that it's lightyears away from my own experience of what eating meat is actually like for a vegetarian.
I mean, clearly there are some vegetarians who would react like that?
But I have trouble wrapping my head around it.
And I'm not even fully vegetarian. I eat fish and seafood. I don't ask if there's meat-based broth in the soup. Or gelatin in the candy, or lard in the pie crust. And once in a great while, I will eat an actual piece of chicken. If John swears to me that it has no gristle.
But for the most part, I just do not like meat.
I used to like it as a child. Mostly. But I gave it up around the age of seven. That was from a combination of feeling sorry for animals and realizing that the texture of meat CANNOT BE TRUSTED. For every four pieces of meat that child-me enjoyed, there was a fifth one that contained gristle, fat, blood vessels, or other textures that could activate my gag reflex. I realized I was just not okay with those odds.
Over years and years of eating little to no meat, my dislike for it has expanded beyond the texture and begun to include the taste as well. The vast majority of meat now tastes just simply WRONG to me, like something not quite edible.
If I had to describe it... it's probably like the feeling that most American meat-eaters get when they try to eat foreign meat dishes that contain parts of the animal they aren't used to eating. Like intestines, or brains.
Doesn't matter how good it tastes to people who grew up with it. If you're not used to it, it's probably not going to taste right to you. (Yes, I know you feel sorry for me not being able to have the pleasure you get from a good burger. But just remember, somewhere in Australia there are people who feel sorry for you not being able to enjoy eating witchetty grubs. That doesn't mean they should sneak those into your food.)
And yes. If someone does convince me to try a bite of meat, I almost always regret it. If, heaven forbid, someone tricked me into eating a meat burger disguised as a veggie burger...
Not only would I notice the deception immediately, but I would gag and probably be unable to swallow the first bite before throwing the whole thing away.
Not to say that all vegetarians dislike the taste of meat. There are plenty who became vegetarian late in life, after their enjoyment of meat was fully established. Maybe they haven't gone without it long enough for the liking to fade.
But, if you MUST write scenes into your books or movies where someone forces or tricks a vegetarian into eating a hamburger? Please occasionally include one where the vegetarian doesn't praise the taste and beg for more. Just because you like meat, that does not mean everyone does. And those who have been vegetarian for a long time? They probably don't like it nearly as much as you do.
The Real Problem with Anthropomorphism is that Humans Have No Theory of Mind
2018/08/30/
I've got thoughts about the dangers of anthropomorphism.
And no, by "anthropomorphism" I don't mean making up fictional anthropomorphized animals for the purpose of telling a fairy tale. (Or for whatever... hey, I don't judge.)
I'm talking about anthropomorphism of real-world pets, livestock and wildlife. I'm talking about the problems that come with treating them like humans. Specifically, treating them as if they've got the same thoughts, desires and motivations that humans have.
Specifically, I've realized one thing.
Quite often, the problem with anthropomorphism ISN'T that we assume animals have thoughts that they are not mentally capable of having.
Quite often, the problem is that we assume they have thoughts that they lack the SOCIETAL context to understand. Thoughts that they couldn't understand even if their minds were identical to ours.
I mean that we assume they know things we know. Even if the restrictions of their lives make it impossible for them to even have access to that information.
One example of this situational anthropomorphism:
There's a story going around in which a parrot saw a small roast chicken. He responded by saying the name of another parrot in the house (whom he didn't like) and then laughing.
I mean, yeah, sure, the story is funny. For a second there, it looked as if the parrot was comparing the chicken to his not-so-favorite housemate.
But a disturbing number of people responded to that story as if it proved that parrots were capable of humor. Or sadism. Or sadistic humor.
There are two assumptions that could lead to that conclusion:
1. that the parrot genuinely thought the chicken was the corpse of the other parrot, and found that funny
or
2. that the parrot was joking that the chicken LOOKED as if it could be the corpse of the other parrot.
Those assumptions don't only require the parrot to have the capacity for humor. (Which I do think parrots probably have).
They require him to know things he had no way of knowing.
By the time a chicken reaches a human's kitchen, it looks almost nothing like a live chicken. Or any other type of bird. I mean, yes, it may look the way a parrot would look if some awful person decided to cook it chicken-style. But the parrot in the story had (I hope) never SEEN another parrot get cooked like a chicken. So he had absolutely no way of knowing that.
Now, suppose that the parrot somehow did know what a live chicken looked like. And suppose he also somehow understood that a cooked chicken and a live chicken were the same creature. (A fact that even human children don't understand until you tell them).
He still would not have any reason to compare chickens to parrots.
Birds are as different from each other as mammals are. A parrot has no more reason to identify with a chicken than a human has to identify with a cow.
(This is why it annoys me whenever people make those tired old jokes about cannibalism. They do it every time a pet bird is even in the same room with any food containing poultry. Dude, I don't joke about you being a mammal every time you eat a hamburger.)
The only reason humans would even think of parrots and chickens in the same category? It's because both are very different from humans. The more you perceive two things as different from you, the more likely you are to focus on their similarities to each other. It's the same reason Americans lump China and Japan together. And people who've never worked in a pharmacy keep calling me a "pharmacist." And then they respond with "Whatever, same thing" when I tell them I'm a pharmacy technician.
So, equating parrots and chickens is an view that comes from a profoundly human (or at least mammalian) perspective. It's extremely hard to believe a parrot would have any such thought process.
What would it take to get saturated enough in human culture to make that joke? He'd have to observe a large number of human conversations while understanding human language as fluently as a human. And if parrots were capable of such fluency in human language, they would act very differently when we speak to them. So I'd say it's pretty clear they are not.
I'm guessing the anecdote was a simple coincidence.
But there are a few other possibilities I might consider.
For instance, while parrots show no sign of having human-level language fluency, they CAN be very good at learning words. And associating them with the contexts where they're used. It's possible the parrot noticed that humans associated the word "bird" with both live parrots and roast chickens. From that, he could have extrapolated that the name of a parrot could also apply to a roast chicken. And then he might have decided to use it in that context.
But that wouldn't mean he knew that a roast chicken used to be a live animal. Or that this animal resembled a parrot in any way.
Another example of situational anthropomorphism:
There's a Temple Grandin story about a herd of cows that suddenly started acting terrified of human farmers, even though they'd been around human farmers their whole lives.
Grandin solved the mystery when she found out that the farmers had only recently started going among the cows on foot. Before that, they'd always been on horseback. The cows had never seen a human without a horse, and had no way of knowing it was even possible for those two creatures to be separate. Of course it scared them!
The fact that the farmers didn't figure this out on their own is frankly disturbing. It's not that they overlooked some way that cows' minds are fundamentally different from ours. It's that they failed to look at it from the cows' viewpoint at all.
If they had, they'd have realized that a human in similar circumstances would have much the same reaction the cows had. "Holy crap, I've never seen that animal before! It looks just like a walking disembodied body part of an animal I know! That is creepy as all hell! For all I know, it could be dangerous too! I'm going to panic and run as far away as possible!"
The farmers didn't anthropomorphize the cows' minds. They anthropomorphized their situation and their past experience. They treated the cows as if they ought to know things that humans know, when the cows had never gotten any chance to learn those things.
This type of anthropomorphism is the most unsettling to me.
Far more than anthropomorphizing the actual function of an animal's brain. Sure, it can cause problems to assume that animal minds work like human minds. But we can't know first-hand what it really is like inside an animal's mind, so I'm inclined to forgive that sort of anthropomorphism, because 1. it's understandable and 2. we can't know for sure it isn't somewhat accurate.
I have much more trouble understanding a misconception about animals that you could dispel by simply imagining yourself in the animal's situation for a second.
I guess it bothers me so much because it's the same mistake humans often make when dealing with other humans.
The unwillingness to look at anything from anyone else's perspective is one of humanity's most dangerous flaws, for both our own species and others.
Stethoscope Music
2018/08/31
My brain just made a weird invention involving music.
On a recent plane trip-- the one where I sat across the aisle from a guy who for some reason had appointed himself Bathroom Police and yelled at everyone who went to the toilet while the seatbelt sign was on, even though the actual flight attendants kept telling him to stop it-- I really got to thinking about headphones.
The one single thing I just cannot stand about public transit, aerial and otherwise, is other people's conversations. It can be fascinating to observe human communication. But my phobias surrounding social conflict will just not let me enjoy or even endure it.
I am a person whose feelings about music are almost entirely neutral. But there is one reason I will actively choose to listen to an iPod, and that is to drown out strangers' voices in public places. My favorite genre is whatever has the most cymbal-crashing and buzzing noises. I've found those work well.
So I like to bring headphones for music on the plane. But of course my anxieties pose all sorts of scenarios in which that fails me. What if my battery runs out? What if the device or headphones just spontaneously break? What if the flight attendants tell me that I have to turn the thing off because it has wireless capabilities and could ruin their navigation system? It doesn't matter whether my fears make sense, I've gotta be prepared for everything.
I'm not saying I have an answer yet. But in one of my moods of impractical creativity, I imagined this monstrosity: the portable music player and headphones that can only play Fur Elise.
(Well, I suppose you could switch out the music boxes. Keep extras in your carryon. This whole setup will not look suspicious to the folks at the security checkpoint at all.)
Comic time!
2018/09/01
There's a new comic up on Abby and Norma, and it's all about children:
Why aren't you dating any boys, Abby? One of these days you should have children, you know.
I'm only in college, Mom! And even if I do get married someday, I'm never having children.
Don't be silly. Nobody can be happy without having children.
Don't I know best whether I'd be happy having them?
You'll change your mind.
No I won't. If I ever get the amount of money it takes to raise a kid, I'm going to donate it to save thousands of lives-- not waste it on creating one new life.
Oh, don't be ridiculous. You would never deprive your mother of grandchildren, would you?
You wouldn't like having grandchildren. Nobody wants to feel old. And nothing makes you feel older than having grandchildren.
Don't I know best whether I want grandchildren?
You'll change your mind.
This is not my mother, and for that I am so grateful.
Idea: The Autistic Eye-Contact Simulator for Neurotypicals
2018/09/03/
So here's an idea about eye contact.
I've talked before about how exhausting, distracting and near-impossible it is to have a conversation while making eye contact, if you aren't mentally wired for it.
The problem? Eye contact, for most people, is a system of communication. We are expected to communicate using this system (which some of us are not even fluent in). And we have to do it at the same time we are also communicating through spoken language. We get criticism if we slip up and do either type of communication "wrong" during this process.
To me, it's downright baffling that a majority of people are able to accomplish this feat pretty much instinctively. But, to them, it's hard to understand why I have any trouble with it at all.
Sometimes I think that, to help them understand, I'd like to make an animated chat bot. It could simulate the experience of being an autistic person having a conversation with a neurotypical person.
To make a proper simulation of what it's like, I'd have to redesign the chat bot's eye-contact communication. It would need to work in a way that neurotypicals DON'T instinctively grasp.
Like, say, blinking in Morse code.
To ease them gently into it, the simulation would start with simple lessons on how to blink in Morse code before asking them to use it in a conversation. It would teach them a few basic messages, the same messages that everyday eye contact transmits. They could start with a vocabulary like this:
"I agree with what you're saying."
"I disagree with what you're saying."
"I don't understand what you're saying."
"I don't believe you."
"I feel angry."
"I feel guilty."
"I think something's funny."
"I'm nervous about how you're going to react to what I'm saying."
"I want to say something, could you pause for a second?"
To be kind, we could use abbreviations for these messages, instead of having to spell the whole thing out.
The software could use the computer's camera to track their blinks and give them feedback. Once they develop basic competency at transmitting these few blinked messages, they'd be ready to try conversing.
The chat bot would appear as an animated face on the screen, providing synthesized speech and animated eye-blinks. The user would be expected to respond in kind, while being tracked by the camera and voice recognition software.
If the human successfully carried on both a vocal conversation and an eye-blink conversation, simultaneously, appropriately, without lags or mistakes, then all well and good.
But, if your vocal speech ever slowed or stopped while you were trying to focus on the eye-blink messages? Then the chat bot would get angry and demand to know why you weren't talking normally.
If you ever halted the Morse code for a moment to focus on vocal speech, the bot would scold you for not looking it in the eyes.
If you didn't correctly read the messages it transmitted with its eyes, it would attack you for not responding appropriately (such as pausing to let it speak when its eyes transmitted the message "I want to say something, could you pause for a second?")
And, of course, if there were any errors in your Morse code, the program would either accuse you of not making sense, or misinterpret your message as one of the other messages.
The chat bot would call you out on it:
"Why don't you agree?"
"What are you angry about?"
"I don't believe you; you look guilty. What are you hiding?"
You'd have the option of giving a response like "I didn't mean it that way," and the bot would reply, "Don't lie to me. I saw in your eyes what you meant, and eyes are windows to the soul."
After all, the chat bot is perfectly programmed so that its eye-blink messages always say what it means. If its eyes can't fail to transmit the truth, then why should it assume yours can?
It's not impossible to master this game.
There have been prisoners of war who successfully taught themselves to blink Morse code messages while reciting the words their captors told them to say on video. With enough effort, you could learn to blink simple, abbreviated messages while having everyday conversations. After years and years of practice, it might even begin to feel almost natural.
But more often than not, it would just end after a few minutes in keyboard-smashing frustration. "Why does this bot have to use such an overcomplicated system? Why in the world can't it just say everything in the same language with the same communication organs? Why is it so damn unaccommodating about the fact that I'm not programmed to talk in two ways at once? It's not like it has to learn anything new in order to talk with me. All has to do is disregard one of the systems it knows, for just a little while. Is that too much to ask?"
And I can only hope that sometimes, for some people, this leads to a realization that there are humans out there facing this same struggle every freaking day, for real, at the same time they're going through all the other struggles of daily life, never, ever getting a break.
Fun Facts About Bethlehem
2018/09/04/
So, here I am living in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
(No, that's not my house, that's a barn on a nearby farm. But I am living not too far from it.)
Here are a few things I've learned about this odd city in the months I've been here.
1. It got its name because settlers first came here on Christmas.
One of its names is "the City of Christmas." I am curious what its Christmas celebrations are like.
2. It contains an amazing old defunct steel plant...
gradually being overgrown by real plants, which is called the Steel Stacks. Bethlehem's other nickname is "the City of Steel." Maybe its mascot should be the Christmas Steeler. A Grinch sorta thing. I should draw it.
3. Despite having a name from the Good Side of the Bible...
Bethlehem also has suburbs named Hellertown and Hecktown. (Also Butztown, just because.)
4. I fed a neural network 10,000 American place names...
and it created these:
Pocopson
Inglis
Monocacy
Abington
Lititz
OH NO WAIT actually those are real names of streets and stuff around here.
5. There is also a Sesame Street.
It's right behind the Steel Stacks. I faintly hoped that when using a cellphone in Bethlehem, asking Google "Won't you tell me how to get to Sesame Street" would result in actual Google Maps directions. But I tested it, and it doesn't. Google, you dropped the ball.
6. They invented Marshmallow Peeps in Bethlehem.
The JustBorn factory, which makes Peeps and lots of other candy, is here. But you can't tour it. You can just stare at it, like sad little Charlie outside Wonka's in the beginning of the movie.
7. When you get your Pennsylvania ID card...
they make it right there for you, instead of cutting the corner of your old ID and making you carry it around with a paper temp-ID until they mail you the real thing, like in Minnesota. I don't know how (in comparison with my home state) they can be so amazingly competent with IDs and so utterly sucky with bus cards.
8. Bethlehem weather is really nice.
Lots of warm sunny days, but also plenty of cool overcast days so you don't overcook, and when it rains it's often a gentle mist that's really pleasant. And there are places where you can see the tree-covered mountains in the distance and they're gorgeous when they're cloaked in mist.
9. This town is ridiculously picturesque.
It's so pretty it doesn't even look like a real place. Maybe it's just that lots of the oldest American paintings were done around here? So when Americans imagine places so pretty they don't look real, they think of fancy old paintings, and the old paintings just happen to look like here? (Kind of like when I saw olive trees for the first time, and I thought, "Those are too pretty to be real trees! They look like trees in paintings!" and then I realized how many old paintings have friggin' olive trees in them.)
10. But seriously, this town couldn't decide whether to be town or country.
My route to work is just 3 miles, from a typical suburban residential area to a typical suburban business district, but there's a field of cows halfway between. (They stink really bad. But not always. It depends on the wind.)
The farm is open to the public. We stop in and buy produce, beef and eggs sometimes. They reuse egg cartons, so we bring them back when we're done. Except sometimes I keep them and mess with the sticker they put on, just because I'm silly:
Ineffability of Cats
2018/09/05/
Posted this thought on Cats and Good Omens, a while ago. It still amuses me, so I'm reposting it.
I was petting Tariq the ridiculous cat, and murmuring "Nice cat," and all was well...
Except I had just read " Good Omens " by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. So every time I think the word "Nice," I end up trying to define it the way Anathema Device did...
So this poem ends up forming in my head. (Evolving over the course of a couple weeks until it had a better internal rhyme scheme, but I'm not going to let it grow any more; it needs to get out of my system.)
You're a cat
And you are nice
And by that
I mean precise
For your pounces
Are exact
Catnip mousies
You've attacked
They would never
Have survived
If they'd ever
Been alive
They'd be dead
If they were mice
Hence I've said
That you are nice.
Grasping at Straws
2018/09/06/
So, the straw man fallacy.
This is when you want to make your opponent's argument look bad, and so you make up a fake argument. It kind of looks like his argument, but is a lot worse and easier to attack. If you're lucky, other people will actually mistake it for your opponent's argument and think you're actually defeating him.
Kind of like making a scarecrow that looks like your enemy and then beating it up. Your goal is that people seeing it will think you're beating up your enemy for real.
It's just...
Sometimes I think we're getting to a point where it's impossible to commit a straw man fallacy. Because no matter how ridiculous an argument is, somebody somewhere has sincerely made it.
It's like living in a world where there's no deception in beating up a scarecrow that looks like your enemy, because all scarecrows are alive and they are all your enemies.
(I guess it's still a straw man fallacy if it isn't the argument of the specific person you're arguing against. But people avoid that problem by being sufficiently vague about who they're criticizing.)
New jewelry
2018/09/07
I've been making jewelry and trees!
New jewelry: Here are some small creations, with a quarter for scale. Copper wire-wrapped iridescent quartz points. And wire trees on agate bases, with glass bead leaves, inside tiny corked bottles.
I'm particularly happy with the trees in bottles. They're like the bottles that I use sometimes in making necklacesand other stuff. It's a tricky endeavor to squeeze the tree inside and then adjust its branches with the tips of my longest pliers.
I plan to sell them for maybe $10 each at craft events-- and a bit more if I put them up on my https://www.theheathersmith.com site.
Comic time!
2018/09/08
There's a new comic up on Abby and Norma, and it's all about cellphones on buses.
Apparently "people being more upset about public cell phone conversations than public in-person conversations" is a real issue, or was, at the time I wrote the original version of this. There was some actual study that showed that people find conversations more annoying and difficult to ignore if they can't hear all of the words. (I think this has lessened as cell phones have become more commonly used, though.)
Follow-Up on the Eye-Contact Simulator for Neurotypicals
2018/09/10/
Here are some follow-up thoughts about eye contact.
If you recall, in my previous post, I said it's unfair to expect autistic people to make eye contact while talking. It's like expecting neurotypicals to do some communication through speech and some by blinking in Morse code, at the same time.
You might argue that this analogy doesn't apply to transmitting information, only receiving it. You might say, "Yes, autistic people have trouble reading other people's expressions. But they still show their own feelings in their faces naturally, like everyone else."
And yes, being autistic doesn't mean you can't have natural, involuntary facial expressions. But, first of all, they might not look the same on you as on other people. I've known people whose crying looked like laughing, or whose anger looked like fear.
And second, a LOT of facial expressions are voluntary.
If I find something hilarious, I will laugh uncontrollably, whether I'm alone or in public. But if I find something mildly amusing, my facial expression won't automatically change enough to notice.
I have to CHOOSE to show mild amusement. And I only do it when I'm with other people who expect me to look amused. If I don't, my natural expression will look as if I didn't hear the joke or didn't find it funny.
The voluntary expression of amusement that I put on over my natural expression is a learned piece of communication. It's like blinking in Morse code. It comes easily to me, after years of practice, but it still feels like habit, not nature.
It's the same with my communication through eye contact and other body language. It doesn't mean the feelings are faked, it just means that my natural expression of them is so subtle that people don't notice. Not unless I augment it with deliberate expression. And I'm pretty sure this is true for a lot of people.
Columcille Megalith Park
2018/09/11/
This post is a gallery of pictures from our trip to Columcille Megalith Park. Someone seems to have thought, "Hey, every forested area in Pennsylvania basically looks like fairyland, so what if we accentuate it with all sorts of fanciful-looking rock sculptures and stuff?"
From time to time I'm going to post galleries of photos from forested areas that we visit. We're within an hour's drive of about 8 state parks and lots of other natural areas. So we might never run out of places to go hiking in all the time we live here.
I think this particular place belongs to some people who actually live in a house on the land. Right in front of their house is a truly fantastic pond full of big koi.
Pics below:
Thoughts about the Kea's Flight sequel
2018/09/12
So, a while back I made a post about the progress of our new novel, Kea's Landing.
I am still in limbo on this. My co-author John has taken a very, very long time to read any further in Kea's Landing. Now that he has, he's giving me LOTS of criticism about how disjointed the plot is.
This is a source of conflict for us. I am having a hard time accepting that John knows what kind of book will succeed better than I do. (He rarely even reads fiction.)
But I do have to face the fact that I don't really have another source of input. I asked several people online to beta read Kea's Landing. The few who finished it had mainly positive comments. But they were a small subset. And the ones who didn't get back to me never told me WHY they weren't able to get further in the book.
So I'm dealing with frustration at having to redo or delete large portions of the book. And having to trust one person's opinion on how that should be done.
But I do agree with much of what he's suggested.
His input on the storyline about the severely disabled rems makes sense. I agree that I need to stop portraying Mara as always sad about her situation. And her interactions with her friends would benefit from the addition of a genuine problem for them to solve, other than the relationship issues within their group.
And I see his point about the character of color that I introduced. I wanted to show through her viewpoint that the hierarchy on the BGs' side of the ship included racism and classism, because of course it would.
But for a white author to describe racism and classism through the words of a character of color is definitely hard to do right. I think John is right that I should back off from that. There is no necessity to specify the race of the character in question, so maybe I shouldn't.
I don't know, though, how long it will take for the whole revision to happen. John is talking as if he finds almost all the scenes irrelevant, and I am getting the impression that there will need to be so many changes that it'll be almost like writing a whole new book.
I have been impatient to get this book out, and it is very stressful to have to wait longer.
Musings on Pennsylvania traffic
2018/09/13
I love living here in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
But holy crap, Pennsylvania traffic is awful.
The roads here aren't like a grid, more like a branching structure. You'll see little roads coming off the main roads, but very rarely actually joining up with each other. So there aren't multiple ways to get someplace.
I had a hell of a time trying to find a bike route to work that avoided all the streets that are just plain dangerous. I did find one eventually, but it's imperfect. Part of it is on a walking path that has "no bikes" signs. So having to walk my bike slows me down.
Ever try to cross a crosswalk in Pennsylvania traffic?
At the few intersections where they even bothered to put a crosswalk, drivers pay no attention to it whatsoever.
I've faced horn-honking and squealing brakes for walking across a crosswalk. I've learned that you have to do it as if you were jaywalking. Wait until there are no cars within sight, and run across as fast as possible. No WAY is anyone gonna stop for you, or even slow down.
The buses have severely limited routes and hours, too, perpetuating the cycle that plagues public transit in so many towns. (It sucks, so no one uses it, so no one improves it, so it sucks).
And despite how all these things make life hard for anyone who doesn't have a car...
Pennsylvania is ALSO one of the hardest states to have a car in.
There's a LAW that you are not allowed to drive a car that isn't in good shape. This is judged by a test that usually ends with you paying multiple hundreds of dollars. Just to get just the minimum repairs for your vehicle to be roadworthy.
In the end, what saves me is the fact that I always choose the places I live and work based on how easy it is to travel between them without a car. I picked an apartment and workplace where I could still walk the distance in an hour if I had to. Even if all possible vehicles failed me.
And sometimes I do. But on hundred-degree days I'm gonna need an ice-pack vest.
Things to make with wire storage cubes
2018/09/14/
One of my favorite household devices to misuse?
The square wire shelving unit.
You know the ones:
Wire storage cubes. Simple metal mesh squares, designed to assemble into any number of shelving configurations. You can buy them in hardware stores or online, complete with little plastic corner thingies to hold them together.
Or you can find them in thrift stores, usually missing the plastic corner things, for a much lower price.
Which is the best option, since the plastic things are pretty much the worst way to hold wire storage cubes together.
The best way?
U-bolts.
These ones:
Also known as "wire rope clips," available for about 15 cents each from boat rigging suppliers:
Some for sale on Rigging Warehouse
Unlike the crappy plastic things, they don't break, and they don't slip off and send your shelving tower tumbling down. You can affix them quite easily with a socket wrench in the proper size, and once affixed, they stay put for as long as you want.
then you can use these awesome wire storage cubes to build all sorts of things they were not intended for.
Like the lap desk I'm using as I type this:
Or this cat water fountain made with wire storage cubes, plastic bins and a tiny drilled hole:
Or this privacy screen that we use to hide our ugly hardware shelves. I made it by bolting a bunch of squares together overlapping to make tall panels, joining them with hose-clamp hinges, then sewing a couple of thrift store bed sheets around them and delineating the folds with decorative green macrame cord tied around that:
Or these shelves I use to organize mail, craft supplies, and clothing:
And when we had a starling, I even made a bird cage using a similar process, with steel fryer screens that have a tighter mesh:
And any time you need different shelves you can take them apart and rebuild them. and when you move you can compress it all down to a plastic tote full of tightly packed squares. It's fantastic. Some day I almost want to design a home where all the furniture is made of these things, just as proof of concept.
Comic Time
2018/09/15
There's a new comic up on Abby and Norma, and it's all about coincidences.
Have you ever noticed that in novels, there are no coincidences? Authors are afraid that having a coincidence in their story will make it unrealistic. But really, stories WITHOUT coincidence are unrealistic.
In real life, coincidences happen. For instance, you and I might go to the mall and start talking about Cathy the cheerleader, and she could happen to be there and overhear us. It would be a remarkable coincidence, but it could quite possibly happen without the two events being directly related.
Sure, there'd be some connection-- everything's connected on some level. But the connection could just be that both our trips to the mall resulted from chains of events that led back to the same butterfly flapping its wings in South America...
Speech on Sep 22 in Minneapolis
2018/09/17/
We're giving a speech!
In case you hadn't heard yet, John and I will be keynote speakers at the Autism Society of Minnesota's Self-Advocacy Summit 2018.
The AUSM invited us shortly after we moved to PA, and we decided it was a good time to plan a trip to visit back home.
We'll be speaking at 8:30 am, then sticking around for the breakout sessions. Come see us!
Link to register for the speech:
https://ausm.org/events/ausm-events/self-advocacy-summit.html
Date, time and location:
Sept. 22, 2018
8:30 a.m.-3 p.m.
Location
University of St. Thomas - Minneapolis Campus
Schultze Hall
46 S 11th St.
Minneapolis, MN 55403
My Tiny Nose
2018/09/18/
Today I talk about my small nose.
There are several physical traits that seem to be common among people on the autism spectrum. Many of them, for whatever reason, have to do with looking young (which was a plot point in my story Alpha Spy).
I definitely have some of those.
Case in point: My nose is ridiculously small.
Here are my parents on their wedding day, when they were a little younger than I am now. I bet they thought I'd grow up to have a big beaky nose like them.
But no. My nose is still as tiny and stubby as when I was a toddler. I don't know whose nose I've got, because it sure isn't anyone's in my family.
And yes, we live in a world with pointless and often racist beauty standards that have all sorts of negative associations with large noses. And, in such a society, it is a form of privilege to be a Nordic-looking white person with a small nose. My tiny nose will never cause me more problems than prejudice can cause for those whose noses fit the stereotypes of other ethnic groups.
But I still complain about it a little bit. Because, from a practical perspective, a small nose is not always the best thing.
It's not great for breathing.
I'm a mouth-breather, especially when I'm physically active. It sucks. My mouth dries out faster, I need tons more water, and if the air is cold it stabs me in the lungs.
But I have no choice. Your breath speeds up when you exert yourself, and you know what happens when you take a fast breath through nostrils as tiny as mine? They close up. Like a friggin' sea lion's nose when it dives underwater. Fast breathing is impossible through my nose, even assuming there's no congestion at all.
It's also not great with congestion.
When you've got so little space in the nostrils, every bit of it that gets clogged up matters so much more. A cold incapacitates my nasal respiration much faster than it does for someone with a bigger nose.
A while back, John blew his nose and showed me the tissue (because old married couples are gross and do stuff like that; deal with it). He was like, "Look how big this is!" I was unimpressed. Despite the small size of my nose, my boogers are regularly three or four times as big as his. With less space to get out, they have more time to build up. My nose is gross, everyone.
It's not even great for smelling.
You know why I like sweet and salty food so much? Because those tastes come from the tongue. Most of the other nuances of flavor are aromas, and I can barely appreciate them.
Come to think of it, maybe that's also why I'm so picky about the textures of food. There's so little else that I can have preferences about-- it's all so bland when you can hardly smell.
I won't deny it has its advantages. Things like a stranger's body odor on the bus? It doesn't bother me nearly as much as it bothers most people. I can function better in a smelly environment than other people can. But I have to be careful because it's easy for me to forget my own deodorant, or underestimate the smelliness of my own home.
So, don't envy small-nosed people too much. Society has some weird ideas of what a cute face should look like, and they do hold too much sway in this world. But the stuff that goes on under the surface of that face can really stink.
Steel Stacks
2018/09/19/
Here are photos from our visit to the Steel Stacks , a huge steel manufacturing plant that used to be the lifeblood of Bethlehem'seconomy, but now is being reclaimed by rust and plants and vines.
It appeals wonderfully to a sense of aesthetics fascinated with dilapidation and weird mixtures of nature and architecture. But it's a bittersweet fascination, tinged with loss of a bygone era.
The nearby building is used for various events. It has some lovely glass art in it. Sibre and I went hat shopping at the gift shop.
On the day we visited here, there was also some festival happening in the area around the Stacks. One of the events was some sort of dog-jumping-into-a-pool contest. John got a video of one of the contestants, a very happy-looking black lab who jumped pretty far.
Pics below:
Refrigerator Mothers
2018/09/20/
Remember the old theory that "refrigerator mothers" caused autism?
Well... If that refers to moms who are calm, cool and emotionally distant, then my mom is totally a refrigerator mother.
Which I always just attributed to her having undiagnosed autism herself. Or maybe just undiagnosable nerdiness that combined with my dad's undiagnosable nerdiness to make diagnosible autism in their offspring.
Maybe so-called refrigerator mothers really are more likely to have autistic children. And it might just be because they've got the genes for it.
And hey, it might even make them better moms for autistic children. It sure did with mine, because she could relate to my own emotional distantness, and she didn't expect emotional stuff from me that I couldn't give.
If refrigerator mothers cause autism, they do it just by being autistic themselves and passing on their genes.
And that is a damn good thing for their kids, who get a parent who can actually relate to them.
We're way better off than the unlucky autistic kids who were just a random twist in an otherwise neurotypical family. Because who wants to end up with some conformist mom who whines about how she can't love her kids because they don't want cuddles and eye contact?
Ringing Rocks
2018/09/21/
Here are pictures of whenJohn and Sibre and Iwent to Ringing Rocks. It's a park whose main feature is a humongous field of boulders, like a giant's gravel pit.
They are "ringing rocks" because they contain enough metal to ring when you hit them with a hammer. People bring hammers to this place to hit rocks. This is apparently a thing people do to entertain themselves.
This did not interest me. It's not even really a ringing sound. More just a normal hammer-on-rock "clack" with a faint hint of metallic noise in it.
John and Sibre went running around on the rocks and I sat on the sidelines ready to help if they twisted their ankles. But they were lucky enough to come back with all joints intact.
Pics below:
Eggplant - New Comic on Abby and Norma
2018/09/22
There's a new comic up on Abby and Norma, because I want to talk about eggplant.
When I don't want to eat eggplant, my parents tell me that I have to because there are starving people in Africa.
I asked them how I could possibly make life better for starving people in Africa by eating eggplant, and they wouldn't answer me.
OK, so I've got this comic "Abby and Norma," although it's currently recovering from a hiatus. What I'm posting now is a series of redrawn old strips, and sometimes a few new strips.
The comic is about an autistic college student and a good friend. A pet starling and two precocious little cousins. An uber-geek whose parents bred him so his antisocial genes would save the world. And a modern artist Trekkie who speaks only in palindromes.
Wildlands Conservancy
2018/09/24
Here are photos from Wildlands Conservancy, one of the closest places we can go to hike in the woods.
This is where I became fascinated with a weird vine. It has triangular leaves, blue berries, and weird round leaves called ocreas that just grow around the stem like balconies.
I looked it up on Wikipedia and found out it's edible, and got obsessed with growing it in a pot in the apartment, and decided to go back to collect some berries and plant the seeds (since it's also invasive and not protected by law).
But the next time we went back to Wildlands, the berry season was over. The vines were almost all gone.
There are also GIANT rocks in this park, as big as small houses, which people climb and paint graffiti on.
Pics below:
Jacobsburg
2018/09/25
Some photos from Jacobsburg, one of the first forested areas we visited here in PA. The greenness and abundance of the foliage struck me so much that I was just constantly calling it a fairy tale forest, and Sibre and John decided to act out a Sleeping Beauty scene on one of the benches.
(I was in awe of the groundcover. I spent quite a while coveting it for the house and yard that I may or may not someday get to have. Why do people waste water and time on grass that needs sprinklers and fertilizer? It doesn't stay below the desired height, and always has to be cut. There are so many plants that would work better for our lawns. Don't know if this is one, but almost anything would be better than the usual grass.)
Pics below:
Hugh Moore
2018/09/26/
I can make puns about the name of this park because I have a sense of Hugh Moore.
Pics from Hugh Moore Park and the National Canal Museum . They have rides in a canal boat pulled by mules!
We didn't get there at a time when the boat rides were available, but we did get to take a walk to the barn where the mules were kept. We saw a lot of impressive scenery along the way.
There's a working lock and dam, and a little house next to an older, probably-not-functional lock and dam. The mules are near that house, in a pen. People seem to live in the house. Imagine having the job of just living in a nature park and managing the tourist attractions.
Pics below:
Pocono Snake Farm and the Delaware Water Gap
2018/09/27
Some pics from Pocono Snake and Animal Farm, where we saw monkeys that caught food we bought to throw to them, sloths that did nothing, and an emu that looked VERY interestedly at the food when it was in my hands but was somehow unable to find it after I tossed it into the pen.
We didn't stay very long at Pocono Snake and Animal Farm, because we wanted to do some hiking afterwards. The rest of the pictures are from Delaware Water Gap . It's a fantastically beautiful area that somehow managed to remind me of both Vienna and Mexico. We hiked alongside a creek that people were swimming in, constantly lamenting the fact that we hadn't brought swimsuits.
Pics below:
Cicadas
2018/09/28
While Minnesota cicadas make an uninterrupted droning noise, Pennsylvania cicadas sound like choppy sprinklers.
They seem to call and answer each other from one tree to the next. I'll hear their rat-a-tat scream in one tree. Then, as soon as it stops, I'll hear the same thing from across the field.
The season when I actually see them everywhere is ending. I still hear them occasionally, but no longer see their giant winged shapes and their discarded skins clinging to trees.
I'm always noticing new things about the wildlife in my new city. There are creatures I never used to see in the wild.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyFlDrXMmNU
Knock-Knock Jokes - New Comic on Abby and Norma
2018/09/29
There's a new comic up on Abby and Norma, because I want to talk about Knock-Knock Jokes.
Abby and Norma
Would you remember me in a week?
Sure.
Would you remember me in a month?
Of course.
Would you remember me in a year?
Certainly.
Knock knock!
Who's there?...
OK, so I've got this comic "Abby and Norma," although it's currently recovering from a hiatus. What I'm posting now is a series of redrawn old strips, and sometimes a few new strips.
The comic is about an autistic college student and a good friend. A pet starling and two precocious little cousins. An uber-geek whose parents bred him so his antisocial genes would save the world. And a modern artist Trekkie who speaks only in palindromes.
Delaware Water Gap
2018/10/01
On a 90-degree day in August, John and I finally got around to going back to the Delaware Water Gapto hike the Dunnfield Creek hiking trail.
We went past the popular swimming hole, full of people splashing and playing. It was a beautiful section of the creek with cascades between calm little pools like something out of a fairy tale. We kept hiking, past places where we had to clamber over and around fallen trees to keep going. We went on until the path had weeded out any hikers who weren't up to the obstacles, and we were the only ones left.
It was a supremely quiet cathedral of a forest, full of sky-scraping trees and colorful clouds of flowers. Every few minutes we found another spot in the creek that looked more beautiful than the last, but John insisted we keep looking.
And at last we found this place. A little cascade pours into a blue-green pool deeper than we are tall. A magnolia tree hangs over the quiet, ice-cold water. The shade and cool, and the perfect seclusion and quiet, are well worth the forty-five minutes' hike in summer heat.
Pics below:
Are apologies ever good?
2018/10/02/
In 2005, my uncle played a prank at my wedding. He put a fake bow and card on a Mini Cooper that belonged to another uncle. At the time, John and I badly needed a car, and getting one as a wedding gift would have been wonderful. Getting our hopes up and then being disappointed was crappy. We never received any apologies for this.
But then, we never asked for them.
I've always hated apologies. Both giving them and getting them.
This was a big problem in childhood, since I was a kid who got into a LOT of trouble, and very often ended up having to apologize.
And I was also someone the other kids liked to pick on. So I got my fair share of other kids being forced to apologize to me, too.
I understand why apologies are a necessary part of living in society. But in my experience, they are never a pleasant thing, for anyone involved.
For the one apologizing, it often goes like this.
You're a kid. You got in a fight with another kid. Each of you feels that you were the victim, and that it was the other one's fault. Regardless of who is right according to generally accepted moral principles, the feeling of being right is very strong for both.
But the teacher judges it to be your fault, and says you have to say you're sorry.
If the teacher manages to convince you that you were really wrong, then your apology comes out with genuine sorrow and regret. Those are necessary feelings in this world sometimes, but are still pretty miserable things to feel.
If you are unconvinced, and still believe you are right, then being forced to say you're sorry is being forced to lie.
You don't actually feel sorry, and you can't force yourself to feel sorry just because someone says you should. The teacher is making you claim to feel something you don't feel.
And that feels like a big helping of injustice, with a side of humiliation. This encounter is going to end with you feeling angrier than ever.
For the one accepting the apologies, it often goes like this.
The teacher judged that you were right and the other was wrong. There's some satisfaction in this. But now comes the apology.
You might be able to tell whether the other kid is apologizing sincerely or not. Or maybe your social skills aren't that strong. But you know both possibilities are there, and neither one feels good.
If the other kid is genuinely sorry, then that just means you're watching another person feel bad. Maybe some people enjoy watching their enemies feel bad. But that was never the case for me, even as a kid. It felt awful, icky, cringey. Like an emotional version of watching someone's eyeballs getting pulled out.
Even if I hated you, even if I thought you DESERVED to have your eyeballs pulled out, I still would not enjoy seeing it happen. That's just gross.
And if your enemy isn't feeling genuine regret? Then you're still watching someone feel bad. But in this case, the bad feeling is that mixture of injustice and humiliation and anger.
This is worse, because there isn't even any reconciliation for the fight you had. You're getting a fake apology from someone who isn't sorry.
And the obligation to make this fake apology... that's making this person much, much angrier at you. That kid is going to pick an even worse fight with you, as soon as the teacher goes away.
This isn't just true for kids.
Practically every time someone apologizes in the adult world, the same dynamics are at play. Instead of a teacher, a social obligation or a public outcry may force the apology. But the people forced to give those apologies feel the same resentment. Because they truly think they're right, regardless of what the rest of the world thinks.
And the people receiving the apology still know it's fake and useless. So the only reason to even want it would be for sadistic pleasure.
And when it isn't fake? Then what you get from it is the assurance that your enemies aren't really as terrible as they seemed, they're at least trying to be better. And then you have to feel sad for a not-so-terrible person who's being torn apart by genuine feelings of guilt.
Like I said, this is all necessary sometimes.
Sometimes apologies are the only way to mend a relationship, whether it's a romance or friendship, or just two colleagues who won't be able to work together if the conflict isn't smoothed over.
Sometimes you need to find out whether someone actually cares about being a better person, and sometimes the only way to find that out is by hearing that person apologize. Or sometimes you just need to see whether someone cares enough to pretend to be sorry, even if they don't feel it.
But the idea of WANTING an apology? Of getting satisfaction from it? That's beyond my ability to grasp.
Kea's Flight Relaunch
2018/10/04
Way back in 2011, John and I self-published a novel called Kea's Flight .
It was one of the first sci-fi novels with explicitly autistic protagonists. Don Sakers reviewed it in Analog Magazine, and for a while it got a fair amount of attention in the online autism community.
In the 25th century, unwanted embryos can be removed and cryogenically frozen until they're wanted. This means there are more frozen embryos than anyone wants, and Earth's hypocritically pro-life government has found a solution. Robots and human convicts will raise the surplus kids, who grow up on starships bound for distant planets.
Kea was exiled as an embryo for having a genetic predisposition to autism. She has spent the first two decades of her life on a ship populated by young people who were removed for having disability-related genes.
She invents secret codes using board games, lectures herself on linguistics to stave off panic, and named herself after a species of parrot. And when a disaster threatens their plan to find a home, Kea must join with other rejects to save the ship from its own corrupt government.
We are getting gradually closer to publishing the sequel, Kea's Landing. And as we approach that time, we are thinking about a relaunch for the first book.
Although the book was notable for its time, I now feel that we could have done better. We're planning to relaunch a new edition by the end of this year, with some editing and a new cover. I hope we'll improve it a little bit, without disturbing the essence of what made it appeal to early readers.
We don't want to change much. But we feel it would be appropriate to do a few things, like:
- tone down how much the narrative talks about savant skills. (Not all autistic people have them, and they shouldn't be the only reason to accept us)
- add some moderation and nuance to Kea's rather opinionated rants about Earth's political issues, early in the book
- cut out some excess expository dialogue in places where readers feel that the story drags on too slowly
All this will be done gently, so as not to mess with what worked well for many readers. I'm well aware that some of the appeal of the story came with certain passages that may seem excessive to neurotypicals.
Those who loved Kea's linguistic infodumps, for example, should not fear losing them in the new edition. We'll only cut the parts that actually manage to bore US on our current read-through.
Anyway, we are hoping to have the new edition out by January of 2019. This may be over-optimistic, since our lives have been quite busy. But having a goal is better than nothing.
As time goes on, I'll be posting updates regarding the search for an artist to do our new cover, and any other developments that come up.
Trees - New Comic on Abby and Norma
2018/10/06
There's a new comic up on Abby and Norma, because I want to talk about trees.
Abby and Norma
Abby is the authority on trees, and on the rules of jokes.
OK, so I've got this comic "Abby and Norma," although it's currently recovering from a hiatus. What I'm posting now is a series of redrawn old strips, and sometimes a few new strips.
The comic is about an autistic college student and a good friend. A pet starling and two precocious little cousins. An uber-geek whose parents bred him so his antisocial genes would save the world. And a modern artist Trekkie who speaks only in palindromes.
Font for the Abby and Norma Comic
2018/10/09
Have you ever been curious what font I use in Abby and Norma ?
Well, in the older strips, I used Apple LiGothic. Yeah, it looked nothing like how a comic strip font is supposed to look. But my fans all said that it fit the style of my comic very well, so I kept it for a long time.
And then, when I switched from Gimp to Clip Studio, I found that the Apple LiGothic font somehow looked totally different in that program. And the closest I could get to the way it USED to look was Futura. So I used that for a while.
And then I had my hiatus, and Abby and Norma was reborn from the ashes, and I started redrawing old strips, still mostly copy-pasted, but in a new style that actually looked kinda-sorta like real drawing. And with this new style, I got a strong feeling that I needed a new font.
Something that, like the new comic, looked more hand-drawn, and yet preserved a bit of what the font used to look like.
My ideal fantasy of how it should look? It was basically that I would hand-letter the comic while trying to make it look like LiGothic.
But of course I don't have the time or energy to hand-letter. So...
I went to Fontstruct.com.
(It was way easier than I expected. I invented "AbbyNorma Regular" in one morning, while lying in bed before work (it was an early shift, too). Took me hardly any time. I did it with my laptop trackpad; didn't even need to use my drawing tablet.
And it's far from perfect, but I'm way happier with it than I expected to be.
I'm not quite as satisfied with "AbbyNorma Handwriting," which I made for the times when Abby writes a school assignment or draws a comic of her own. (I used to fluctuate between various handwriting-esque fonts for this, so it's not like Abby ever had good, consistent handwriting anyway.)
And "Abby Computer" is just plain silly! But I made that for the rare moments in the strip when I show characters communicating digitally (like texts or emails). I don't expect it to show up very often. Making it was more just for fun than anything else.)
So, if for some weird, ridiculous reason you like these fonts enough to use them in your own stuff, go ahead! Download links are here, under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Reusable Gift Wrap
2018/10/11/
Reusable gift wrap is a Christmas tradition for me.
It started with my mother-in-law. I began to notice that every time I gave her a gift, she neatly folded the wrapping paper and gave it back to me "to use again some other time."
At first, I confess, this annoyed me. Her intentions were good, a truly laudable desire to reduce waste. But I didn't really need extra gift wrap, and I knew it would get uglier with each use. It really bugged me to re-use things that were meant to be disposable.
But then I realized-- why use something disposable in the first place?
When something's designed for re-use, I delight in re-using it. And there are lovely fabrics out there, beautiful cloth ribbon. Even pretty brooches to hold the seams and decorate the package. I could find all of those at thrift stores for next to nothing. It was a whole world of creative wrapping-crafts!
I went to my local Savers and picked up some brocaded satin napkins and tablecloths, colorful pillowcases, a bunch of pins and keychains, and some grab-bags of fabric ribbon in a variety of colors. And the fun began.
It was easier than I'd imagined!
Two napkins could combine to wrap a medium-sized gift. One napkin sufficed for the smallest. And a tablecloth (folded a few times if necessary) could handle pretty much all of the larger sizes.
If a length of ribbon was too long for a particular package, I didn't have to cut it and reduce its potential for reuse. I could just make loops of the excess and tie them together again and again, creating a handmade bow.
I even came up with a system for reusable name tags on my gifts.
On pieces of brass wire, removable alphabet beads spell out the names of the giver and receiver.
Now, when I give people wrapped presents, they are free to give me back the wrapping to use on future gifts. If they don't want to, they can feel free to keep it and use it as they wish, or give it to their local thrift store, or pass it forward as the wrapping on the next present they give.
Since coming up with this tradition, I've learned that Japan has had reusable gift wrap for centuries, and I think that's wonderful. I hope someday this sort of thing catches on all over the world. I hope someday every country has its own unique version of reusable gift wrap, and we all just keep passing around and sharing it forever.
Triceratops - New Comic on Abby and Norma
2018/10/13
There's a new comic up on Abby and Norma, because I want to talk about a weird triceratops.
This triceratops is extra horny. (Which is a joke that Abby would not share with her little cousins.)
Okay, I'm sorry I interrupted your joke. What did the tree say?
It said, "That triceratops has an extra horn!"
OK, so I've got this comic "Abby and Norma," although it's currently recovering from a hiatus. What I'm posting now is a series of redrawn old strips, and sometimes a few new strips.
The comic is about an autistic college student and a good friend. A pet starling and two precocious little cousins. An uber-geek whose parents bred him so his antisocial genes would save the world. And a modern artist Trekkie who speaks only in palindromes.
Picking at my Skin
2018/10/16/
The problem with a bad habit is that willpower only works because you want it to work.
And wants are ever-changing.
The problem is that it is technically impossible to choose to do something you don't want to do.
Any time you choose something, it is because you either want that thing (good food, a book to read, a project to work on)... or you want something that you can get through that choice (good health, an education, a paycheck).
Sometimes the thing you want is hard to define, and sometimes it isn't even for you. Sometimes it's just that you want to feel you've done something good for someone else. Or you want to NOT feel BAD about what you've done. Or you just don't want other people to punish you for it.
But whatever it is, it's based on your wants, your desires. You can't make a choice for any other reason. That's just not how choices work.
And you can plan a whole structure-- like a work schedule, or a diet, or a New Year's resolution, around one long-term desire.
But within that time, there are going to be moments when your immediate desires-- for things that break your long-term resolution-- will become stronger than the long-term desire.
What do you do then? How can willpower hold up to that?
My problem is that I pick at my skin.
It's a bad habit, bordering on an addiction. Mostly the skin of my face and chest. Mostly starting with an attempt to remove blackheads and pimples. But it goes on until I'm opening every tiny imperfection into a scab, then picking the scabs. Sometimes even using a needle, when I think there's a pimple too far below the skin.
I am very bad at knowing when to stop.
I'm also bad at knowing when not to start. This habit is a repeatedly broken promise to myself. It can start with an ultimatum: "If I don't pick this month, I will buy myself another pair of bird earrings to use as ornaments on the Christmas tree." But then my argument with myself, throughout the month, will go something like:
OK! No picking, ever!
Wow, I've gone a long time without picking! My face looks great! Let's lean in close to the mirror and take a look at how well I've done!
Oh, look at all the blackheads! Well, if I use the pore unclogging too on them, that's not really picking, right?
Well, the pore unclogging tool didn't get that one. I'll just clear THAT one up with my fingernails.
And that one, and this one...
Aaaand now I've picked my skin to hell. I've failed, so no point in trying anymore. Might as well pick every day from now on.
It's a cycle that keeps repeating. Making and breaking and remaking the resolution.
I try to value the trying, even though it is so often undone. And I try to remind myself that the trying is worth it, because if I didn't give myself those short times to heal, the picking would just go on unstopped and do its damage constantly.
I try new things sometimes. Lately I am doing my nails. I haven't done my nails in years and years. I am overwhelmingly not a person who uses makeup or nail polish. But if picking could endanger a manicure that I worked hard on, then MAYBE I will have an easier time resisting picking.
For me, the things that work best are the things that tip the balance of want.
In the moments when my desire to pick becomes stronger than my desire to heal, I need something to push it back the other way.
Either by making the act of picking less attractive or more difficult, or by making me remember how good it would be to have healthy unpicked skin.
Right now I have four strategies going:
Fancy manicure
Bird earrings for Christmas
Plan to make a new website image for The Heathersmith where I model some of my favorite jewelry pieces, as soon as my skin looks good enough to model
and this:
Last night I asked John for ideas to help me control my skin picking habit. This morning he asked me to draw the cutest potoo bird I could. Tonight he hands me this, which is now in front of our bathroom mirror. (A picture of a cute sad potoo bird with huge eyes, captioned in John's handwriting, "Don't make the potoo cry. No picking.") Love my weird guy.
We'll see what works.
Pennsylvania Accents
2018/10/18/
Since moving to Pennsylvania, I have made the acquaintance of the following people:
- a man who has the same voice as actor Christian Slater
- a man who has the same voice as actor Donal Logue
- a woman who has the same voice as my childhood dentist
And I suppose I'm having a problem of bias, like people who have trouble telling apart individuals of another race.
Except in this case it's not that people from here all LOOK the same to me. It's that, to my Minnesotan ear, their accents SOUND the same.
Except not all of them, and not exactly the same. It's complicated.
I guess there must be lots of factors determining a person's voice. There's the structure of the mouth, tongue, nose, throat, and chest, all of which affect what types of sounds a person can physically make.
And then there's the regional accent, which varies not just by state but by geographical divisions as small as a city block, as well as social class within the city. And that's determined by whose voices you heard the most, at what ages, throughout your past. It can be a mixture of multiple dialects, and it can be somewhat under conscious control (especially if you've had to learn to speak differently to different people in your life).
Of course not every East Coast voice will sound to me like some specific actor from the East Coast. People can grow up in the same town and sound different, even to people outside that town.
But in a place with so many people who have East Coast accents? Here, the chances are higher that I'll hear people whose learned accent combines with the shape of their vocal apparatus in such a way that it resembles a voice I've heard before.
A voice that I know from TV, where so many actors come from this side of the USA. Or a voice I know from back home in Minnesota, where any non-Minnesotan voice stands out quite a bit.
Still, these voices I've heard before... sometimes I didn't even realize they had an accent. My childhood dentist lived in Minnesota, but she must have either grown up around here, or grown up around people who did. But until I heard a Pennsylvanian with her exact voice, I never thought of that voice as being partly accent.
Living in a new place makes me think so much.
In-Laws - New Comic on Abby and Norma
2018/10/20/
There's a new comic up on Abby and Norma, because I want to talk about in-laws.
Actually, your sibling-in-law can be either your spouse's sibling or your sibling's spouse. But that rule of reversal doesn't work for a parent-in-law. The rules are far more complex than they seem.
I heard that one language (Mandarin Chinese, maybe?) has different words for "aunt" depending on whether she's your mother's sister or your father's sister, and also further specifies whether she's a younger or older sister. I can only assume the same language also has different words indicating an aunt-by-marriage on either side.
So does "X-in-law" always mean "spouse's X"?
Well, that works for "mother-in-law" and "father-in-law." And "sister-in-law" and "brother-in-law."
But not "son-in-law" or "daughter-in-law." Your spouse's children are either your children or your stepchildren, not your children-in-law.
So... how DO you define in-laws?
People who are related only by marriage, I guess.
But that would include stepchildren. And the aunt I was talking about. No definition seems to work...
OK, so I've got this comic "Abby and Norma," although it's currently recovering from a hiatus. What I'm posting now is a series of redrawn old strips, and sometimes a few new strips.
The comic is about an autistic college student and a good friend. A pet starling and two precocious little cousins. An uber-geek whose parents bred him so his antisocial genes would save the world. And a modern artist Trekkie who speaks only in palindromes.
Kea's Flight Book Cover Commission
2018/10/23/
Book cover needed!
I'm looking for a photorealistic painter who can draw human faces and spaceships.
I'm interested in commissioning a design for a new book cover, for the relaunch of our novel Kea's Flight.
It's a book about a future where people end unwanted pregnancies by removing the embryos and cryogenically freezing them until they're wanted. There end up being more than anyone wants to raise on Earth, so many of them are sent into space on colony ships. The main characters, who were removed for having genes for mental disorders, have to band together and overthrow the corrupt crew of their ship.
Basically, I have a pretty clear idea of how I want the cover to look, but I want to commission a truly amazing artist to draw it way better than I ever could.
I'm willing to pay what that's worth.
The rough drawing above is my concept. Please read the details I've explained below.
I'd like the cover to depict a young woman's face (the narrator, Kea) looking over the surface of a chessboard on a table.
I've drawn her just from the eyes up, but you can show more of her face, and maybe even her hands on the table, if you feel the cover will look more compelling that way.
In the book she is described as having hazel eyes, sandy brown hair and light olive skin. She should look as if she's in her teens or early twenties. (The book depicts her life from childhood to age 20, so her age in the picture is flexible. Go with what looks best to you, but remember, most of the book happens while she is 19 and 20.)
There is a parrot-shaped barrette on one side of her hair. (This is not in the book, but it represents her fascination with parrots.)
The chessboard is a piece of checkered fabric with frayed edges, and the chess pieces on it are a button, a screw, an action figure's foot, and a broken marble.
The space behind her head is outer space, with a planet and moon on one side, and a spaceship on the other.
The spaceship is made of two cylinders joined with a tube. On the back end are some engines firing to propel it forward. Here is a fuller description from the book:
"The Flying Dustbin was made of two cylinders lying end to end, joined by a connecting tube. The whole ship spun like a giant screw as it moved forward, creating a substitute for gravity. On the inside, each cylinder resembled several cans of different diameters, nested one inside the next. The floors were on the inner walls of those cans; the farther inward you moved, the lower the gravity, until you were in the cylinder's zero-g center. "
Feel free to add any details to make the ship look more interesting, as long as they're consistent with that description.
The top third of the page should say the title, "Kea's Flight," and the authors, Erika Hammerschmidt and Z.A. Tanis, but I am very flexible about the font and other details of how that looks.
Below that, there should be some empty space in the starfield, where I can put in a tagline. (I haven't decided on it yet, but maybe something like "When exile begins at conception...")
Colors of the whole cover are also flexible. I trust a good artist to know what colors look best.
To give an idea of what I'm looking for, here are examples of some artists whose styles I think would work well for this:
The Bird Christmas Tree Tradition
2018/10/25/
Christmas and the surrounding holidays are a time of tradition.
That's why new Christmas songs very rarely catch on-- Christmas isn't about doing new and different things. It's about doing everything exactly the same every year, because it gives you a warm safe nostalgic feeling.
John and I have a few holiday traditions. Or rather, I do. John tolerates them, but doesn't get into them, because he's about as sentimental as a Komodo dragon. I'm not exactly a bag of mush either, but I feel something warm and happy around Christmastime, even though I know it's probably just nostalgia for when I was a greedy little kid who wanted candy and presents.
One of our traditions is the Bird Christmas Tree.
In my teens, my mom and I bought a huge box of painted wooden parrot-shaped earrings on impulse, because they were really cheap. I used them as ornaments on a little white fake Christmas tree I had.
Eventually that Christmas tree fell to pieces, the paint flaked off the earrings, and John convinced me to get rid of them... but the tradition lived on.
John and I now have a more durable artificial tree. We've experimented with different setups over time, but what we have now is a weird-looking tree that I made out of plumbing pipes and chicken wire:
Every autumn, I shop on Etsy.com, looking for struggling independent artists selling handmade jewelry. Every year I buy myself a pair of bird-related gemstone earrings and hang them on the tree.
Sometimes the search takes a while. My sense of aesthetics is very particular when it comes to jewelry. There are lots of earrings on Etsy that don't interest me at all. There are some that ceased to interest me a while ago because I already have something too similar.
Sometimes it seems as if more than half of the bird earrings out there use the exact same tiny metal figure of a swallow, and of the ones that use it, more than half call it a sparrow in the description. (It's a swallow! It has a forked tail, for crying out loud! No way am I buying an inaccurately identified ornithological specimen!)
But eventually, every year, I manage to find something unique and beautiful that I can afford, and I welcome it into the family on our little Christmas tree.
Carolina locusts - New Comic on Abby and Norma
2018/10/27
There's a new comic up on Abby and Norma, because I want to talk about Carolina locusts.
Carolina locusts live all over the United States. I've read that the southern ones make a crackling noise as they fly, but the ones in the Midwest fly silently like butterflies.
I almost wish it were summer. I really miss the plants and bugs and stuff.
You miss bugs?
Yeah. Especially Carolina locusts.
Carolina locusts. That's very specific.
I like them! When I was a kid, I thought they had magical powers.
You did?
Yeah. I mean, I would see this little black butterfly fluttering over the grass, and run after it, hoping I could get a good look at it when it landed.
But when it landed, it would just vanish, and all I could see was a grayish-brown grasshopper...
OK, so I've got this comic "Abby and Norma," although it's currently recovering from a hiatus. What I'm posting now is a series of redrawn old strips, and sometimes a few new strips.
The comic is about an autistic college student and a good friend. A pet starling and two precocious little cousins. An uber-geek whose parents bred him so his antisocial genes would save the world. And a modern artist Trekkie who speaks only in palindromes.
The Garden in My Window
2018/10/30/
Throwback Tuesday. I'm reposting an old favorite postof mine from 2014, about the garden I had in our old apartment, and that I hope to have again when we settle down more permanently.
In the world of autistic adults, we keep hearing about the challenge of "living independently." This is used to mean such things as cooking one's own food, shopping, cleaning and maintaining a household, as well as holding a job to support oneself.
I have made unusual progress in that regard. I've had a job for over nine years, and my husband and I manage our small condo in Columbia Heights very well. Bills get paid on time, the place is clean, and we always have tasty and healthy meals to eat.
But, somewhere in the back of my mind, a little voice keeps telling me that this traditional idea of being "independent" is just another way of being dependent.
One of the big disillusionments of growing up, for me, was realizing that almost all my possessions will need to be replaced someday, no matter how durable they seem right now. And worse, realizing that when that time comes, the place I originally got them might not carry them anymore. Stores change out their inventory, and manufacturers discontinue products. As a consumer, I'm at the mercy of the market, and the things I like to buy could stop being available at any moment. Shopping for your own stuff is just a way of being dependent on the people who produce and sell that stuff. Alas, they are not always dependable.
In the same way, having a job is a form of dependence on an employer, who could decide to fire you or cut your hours at any time. There is no way to live independently; everything in the world is interconnected, and everything depends upon other things.
At times, I have very little trust in the infrastructure of society as a whole. At times, it drives me into a panic that I am dependent on a society that is largely unstable and unsustainable.
We all have our ways of coping with this sort of worry. And mine is to take "living independently" to as far an extreme as I can take it. The more self-sufficient my home is, the more I can imagine that I'd be able to survive if society somehow collapsed around me.
I guess, in a way, I'm sort of a doomsday prepper.
But most of the time, there's nothing frantic about the process. Making my home as self-sufficient as possible is a pleasant and calming project for me. I feel a great satisfaction whenever I figure out a new way to reuse something, make something from scratch, or substitute a more sustainable alternative for something.
I make my own lip balm from grapeseed oil, and my own spray cleaner with a mixture of water, rubbing alcohol and dish soap. In the kitchen, I use old washcloths instead of paper towels.
And, of course, John and I make a lot of our own food from scratch, down to homemade bread, sauces and pie crusts.
But as Carl Sagan said, to really make a pie from scratch you would have to create the universe. No matter how you cook your food, you can't make every part of it yourself. Even if you start with the ingredients exactly as they are found in nature, you still have to get them from somewhere.
That's why I've become a little bit obsessed with making some of my food out of such basic elements as earth, water and air.
In other words, growing a garden.
I'm not an expert, by any means. I'm figuring it out as I go along. And there have been lots of setbacks-- bugs, mold, overwatering, underwatering, plants dying for reasons completely hidden from me. But I keep doing it, because every time I succeed, the joy of harvesting and eating home-grown vegetables-- even just a few-- is well-nigh addictive.
I do grow a few things on the balcony. But the bulk of my veggie garden is on shelves by the window; that way I don't have to worry about the weather, squirrels, or birds (unless Sirius decides to raid the plants someday, but as a mostly insectivorous species of bird, he'd probably eat the bugs on my crops before he'd eat the crops themselves).
The window faces west, not south, which would be preferable. But I still get strong light all afternoon, and I supplement it with several LED lamps plugged into a timer.
It's a pretty simple arrangement.
A set of shelves, open on both the front and the back, to allow both me and the sun access to the plants... placed on top of a sheet of plastic to protect the carpet. (I tried forever to find a suitably-sized plastic tray with a lip around the edge, but boot trays were too small, and farming mats designed for livestock were too big. I eventually bought a roll of clear vinyl and rolled up the edges, then clipped them in place with binder clips, creating my own lipped tray... so if a water spill happens, it'll stop when it gets to the edge.)
The plants are growing in a wide assortment of containers.
Small plants like basil and green onions are fine with little flowerpots. Bigger things, like potatoes and tomatoes, need larger pots, and for many of them I just used big plastic storage containers. Poke a few holes in the bottom of a storage bin, use the lid as a tray underneath, and you can grow potatoes in your window.
I like to buy heirloom seeds for my garden from online suppliers like Seed Savers and Park Seed . If seeds are labeled "heirloom," that means they're meant to be grown for generations, harvesting the seeds from each plant and planting them to start the next season of growth (unlike hybrid plants and some genetically-modified plants that are unable to reproduce). To have a self-sufficient garden, you've got to have reproductively-viable plants.
But the internet is not the only source I get my plants from. Some of them I get totally free. It's surprising how many growable and reproducible plants you can get out of your kitchen waste!
I'm not kidding.
Plant the seeds from some leftover cherry tomatoes, and you can grow tons of tomatoes of your own:
Have an old potato that's sprouting? Cut it into chunks, with about one sprouting eye per chunk. Put a little dirt in the bottom of a big storage tote. Bury the chunks. Water them. As the sprouts grow upward, add more dirt, until you've filled the bin and the potato plants are going crazy with foliage. In about three months you'll be able to harvest your own potatoes:
Bought some green onions, chopped up the stems to season your food, and don't know what to do with the little white bulbs at the base? Plant them. They'll grow new stems, and you might never need to buy green onions again:
You can even grow your own watermelons from watermelon seeds (not the few seeds in a seedless watermelon-- those are genetically messed-up-- but the ones from a normal seeded watermelon). They're harder to grow than most of my plants, because you have to hand-pollinate them by picking off a male flower and rubbing it against a female flower, and even then the rate of success is pretty low. I never actually got a melon to grow to full size. But I got fairly far once, before bugs ate it. This was before I learned to keep a close eye on the pest population. If I had kept cleaning the bugs off the underside of the melon as it grew, it might've survived.
When I first encountered bugs on my plants, I was horrified.
I imagined that they were a scourge of the kind you see in movies, like zombies or gremlins, where you have to kill every single last one or they'll all come back and you're doomed.
But gradually I've come to realize that they're a fact of life in a garden, and my realistic goal is not to exterminate them all, but to maintain a balance where there are few enough of them for my plants to stay alive and keep producing food.
I've had little gnats that land on the leaves and appear to suck their juices; I've had some sort of tiny black dots that crawl around and chew holes in the leaves; and worst of all I've had spider mites-- near-invisible tiny creatures that suck the goodness out of my plants, leaving the leaves transparent in spots, and festooning them with little spidery webs in the process.
If a few of these are on a plant, that doesn't mean the plant is about to die. I currently have several bean vines that are suffering from mild infestations, while still growing and producing plenty of tasty beans. It's just a matter of keeping things under control.
This means spraying the plants as a regular part of tending them, not just as an occasional attack to purge the pests.
Spraying daily with plain water, and making sure the plants are always well-watered, works to deter pests if they aren't there already. Bugs love to prey on plants that are already vulnerable due to dehydration.
If there are already bugs, I spray with a mixture of water, dish soap and rosemary oil. Mixed in a regular spray bottle, it's a mild, gentle, and pretty effective pesticide, and it costs very little to make (a few drops of rosemary oil go a long way, and it can be bought from the same supplement stores and online retailers as my lip-balm supplies). I do it whenever I notice new bug damage on leaves, which can be once a week or so. It doesn't eliminate all the bugs, but it keeps them at bay enough to keep my veggies alive.
I also hang fly tape, which is sold at hardware stores.
It's a set of two spools, one wrapped in sticky white ribbon, which stretches across the area you choose and then winds around the second spool. I mounted them on the wooden shelves I use:
As the ribbon collects flying insects, you wind more of it around the empty spool. It lasts a long time and really helps keep the fly and gnat population down.
Most of the bugs that eat plants won't bite a human, and won't get into your stored food. So, beyond the harm to your garden, which your diligence can keep under control, you don't really have to worry about those bugs being in your house. There are bugs in every house, and the ones that get into your veggie garden are a lesser evil than the ones that eat your clothes, your cereal, or your blood.
In fact, sometimes adding more bugs is a good idea.
I've gone on Arbico Organics to buy predatory mites that eat spider mites. It's good to get numbers down with a high-performing species like Phytoseiulus persimilis and then keep them down with a long-term species like Neoseiulus californicus that has a lower kill rate but can survive periods of low spider mite population by eating pollen and other tiny bugs.
Sometimes, though, plants do die, and you just have to let them go and plant something new in the garden.
You can re-use potting soil. It might have bugs, bacteria or fungi in it, though, so it helps to sterilize it. You can put it in some large container with holes in the bottom, put that inside another container with no holes in the bottom, and pour boiling water through it from a big teakettle.
It also may have nutrients depleted from the plants that have grown in it before, so it helps to add fertilizer of some sort. Hardware and plant stores sell good all-purpose garden fertilizing powders that you can mix with water and use to water the plants.
If you're very ambitious, you can also make your own fertilizer with a composter. The Worm Factory or the Can-o-Worms is a good one. Add red wiggler worms, newspaper, and your biodegradable garbage, and you'll have a supply of nice rich fertilizer in a few months. (They have to be red wigglers, not night crawlers or standard earthworms. And if you can find someone in your area who does worm composting already, it's better to get worms locally than have them shipped through the mail; they're delicate little souls.)
My parents have done this since I was a kid, and they have the loveliest garden.
It inspired the title story in my collection "If the World Ended, Would I Notice?"
I don't know if I could support myself with my garden if I had to. It would probably involve starting new plants in every single window and still living on the edge of starvation, if I survived at all. But I take comfort in every new bit of experience I gain in self-sufficiency, every new skill I learn that makes me a little stronger on my own.
I don't think people should stop depending on each other, but I think the world would be nicer if we all learned the simpler and more sustainable-- though less convenient-- ways of getting the things we need. When you have eaten a tiny, delicious bowl of beans that took five plants on your windowsill three weeks to produce, you never look at vegetables quite the same way again.
Vibration Music
2018/11/01/
A while back, I had a job where I sometimes felt I would die of boredom if I couldn't listen to music.
If you know me, you know how remarkable that is. I am almost entirely neutral about music. As a kid, I was in denial about that, trying to convince myself I liked music. Because in every media portrayal ever, people who didn't like music were soulless, inhuman, maybe Blue Meanies.
But when I said this to John, he joked that I'm more of a "Meh Meanie." I just don't care one way or another about music, ninety percent of the time.
Until I worked that job, the only time I ever felt a desire for music was when I was on the bus, wanting NOT to listen to other people's conversations.
But apparently, if you bore me enough with simple, repetitive physical tasks, I reach a point where I actually feel as if some music would be nice.
This was a problem. My workplace did not allow music or any auditory distractions. It was written into the actual, official rules of the company.
(Who's the real Blue Meanies, huh?)
So, for a while, I got desperate enough to look into every possible loophole.
And I found something that I would LOVE to see become a more widespread musical device.
There are vibration music vests!
They play the beat of music, and some of the melody, in a way that you can feel in your body but no one around you can hear.
Since they are not a SOUND-based distraction, but a vibration-based one, they would technically be allowed under the code of my old workplace. I feel that having something like this would have taken the edge off my boredom, without interfering with the auditory aspects of my job.
But, a few problems:
-They're over $300
-They're bulkier than most people would like wearing to work
I'm sure they're awesome for partying. But I'm also pretty sure it would be possible to design something smaller, maybe an armband. Something that would deliver a similar but lesser effect, with less cost and bulk.
A device for people just trying to make life bearable through a day of work or travel.
So, could someone please get on that? The world's workforce is in need.
The Flu - New Comic on Abby and Norma
2018/11/03
There's a new comic up on Abby and Norma, because I want to talk about the flu.
Oh look-- it's Cathy the socialite. She's so friendly she'll even sit next to a couple of nerds.
Shut up. I'm only sitting with you so I don't give the flu to any normal people.
Aww, you have it?
Duh-- yes, I have it. Now shut up so nobody notices I'm anywhere near you.
You know, it's not really surprising that you got the flu...
OK, so I've got this comic "Abby and Norma," although it's currently recovering from a hiatus. What I'm posting now is a series of redrawn old strips, and sometimes a few new strips.
The comic is about an autistic college student and a good friend. A pet starling and two precocious little cousins. An uber-geek whose parents bred him so his antisocial genes would save the world. And a modern artist Trekkie who speaks only in palindromes.
Bike setup
2018/11/06/
Just thought I would share my bike-to-work setup, because it's something I'm pretty proud of.
I ride my bike to work most days. Even back when I lived in Minnesota, I rode through most of the winter (although I had a trike then). We'll see how far into winter I can make it here in PA on two wheels.
One disadvantage I have here is that my apartment is on the third floor with no elevator, so storing my bike indoors really doesn't work. The nearest place I can park it is on the bike rack by a little playground just down the street from our building.
This means the bike is constantly outside, which will be challenging for maintenance. Today's my day off, but I'm going out to oil the chain and do some regular cleaning. And while I'm there I'll take pictures of how my bike is rigged out.
It's a wonderful red Dahon, a gift from my parents. The hinges in the middle and on the front mean that it can fold up for easy transportation in a car, if need be.
I've attached foldable baskets to the back, secured with hose clamps and a small bike lock.
Another lock keeps the seat on (hey, people will steal parts of bikes if they can't steal the whole bike; I'm taking no chances).
My coworkers worry about me riding at night, but honestly, it's safer than riding in the day. Deliberate attacks by strangers are very rare. Most violent crime is by someone the victim knows. So yes, coworkers, I feel safer going home alone than having you escort me. Because I know you, and therefore statistically I must fear you.
The real biggest worry for a cyclist is a car accident. And as long as I've got a good light, I'm LESS likely to get hit by a car after dark than in the daytime-- just because there are fewer cars on the road then.
The lights are small weatherproof flashlights (a white one on the front and a red one on the back). I've tried various devices for holding a flashlight onto a bike, but what works best for me is a couple of interlinked hose clamps.
This is my work bag. I made it out of waterproof canvas, heavy-duty beading thread, and a belt.
Inside, it's lined with a plastic boot mat from a hardware store, with the edge cut off. It holds my lunch cooler and a change of clothes for when I get to work. (I can carry this all on my back with the shoulder straps, if I have to walk home.)
Here's my purse, which I also made. It's big enough that when I go biking, I can put in the the yellow bag that carries bike supplies, like extra lights and batteries, locks, my pump and tools.
It can also hold a seat cover that I made out of the same fabric. This keeps my seat dry when the bike sits out in the rain.
So, once that goes in the basket, I put the bigger bag on top and hold it in place with a bungee cord.
Then I put on my helmet, with its protective brim, and I'm ready to go!
Steal my style:
Foldable baskets to go with the foldable bike.
White light goes on the front.
Red light goes in back. Tell that to Rudolph, please.
Hose clamps. I can't get over how many uses I find for these things.
Cut the edge off and it makes a good support structure for the inside of a homemade backpack.
Klein Bag. More internal capacity than a Klein Bottle. Guaranteed.
Bike tool kit. Just the basics.
Sterling Silver Fingernails
2018/11/08/
A while back I mentioned doing my nails to discourage me from picking.
Here are some pictures of those fingernails.
And no, that isn't some mysteriously shiny fingernail polish. That is actual 34-gauge 925 sterling silver:
34-gauge sterling sheet, 6 inches wide by your choice of length
Making the nails was a very personalized process. First I used a tin snip to cut rectangles of silver sheet, about the size of my fingernails. Then, snipping off corner after corner, I rounded them until they roughly matched the outlines of my nails.
The tin snip's serrated blades didn't leave a knife-sharp edge on the silver. It was rough but safe to touch. I rubbed the rough edges against a file until they were smooth enough for my liking.
Then, using round nose pliers , I curved the flat surfaces until they matched the curves of my own nails. I ended up with ten silver nails, each one individually shaped to fit one of my own fingers.
Using the sharp end of a metal nail file, I scratched up the soft silver inner surfaces until they were rough enough to hold glue well.
Artificial nail adhesive holds pretty well on these. Superglue or Krazy Glue probably holds longer, but can do more damage to the nails. Even the strongest glue will work itself loose eventually, it just might take some of the nail surface with it.
When the silver nails do come off, I can clean them with nail polish remover, and reuse them again and again.
And it does help discourage picking. Both through the fear of possibly breaking the glue, and the fear of doing more damage to my face than usual with metal claws.
Through the power of fear, both my face and my hands now look awesome!
Potato Chip - New Comic on Abby and Norma
2018/11/10
There's a new comic up on Abby and Norma, because I want to talk about a potato chip.
TEXT OF COMIC:
A: They say you can't eat just one potato chip. Well, they're wrong. I managed it this morning.
A: In fact, I managed it twenty-five times in quick succession.
A: Want to see me do it again?
N: No.
I can also do it with every other snack.
OK, so I've got this comic "Abby and Norma," although it's currently recovering from a hiatus. What I'm posting now is a series of redrawn old strips, and sometimes a few new strips.
The comic is about an autistic college student and a good friend. A pet starling and two precocious little cousins. An uber-geek whose parents bred him so his antisocial genes would save the world. And a modern artist Trekkie who speaks only in palindromes.
Wasps made me a tiny clay pot
2018/11/13
Underneath the box where we punch in our entry code for the building, I found some interesting structures, probably built by the type of wasps that gather mud to create their nests. The wasps had abandoned them for the season, so I took this one home with me.
Unfortunately the tiny clay pot was very fragile. It crumbled into dust in my attempts to put it in a safe place. But I got the picture.
I'm not sure why insects love to build their nests on and around lockboxes of various kinds.
Here's another pic taken when John was visiting a friend in Florida. I think these are the kind of wasps that make nests of paper:
The emergency would have to be very bad before I'd approach that.
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