- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
Erika Hammerschmidt
Blogs from 2020
(Note: For some of these posts, earlier versions went up on my private or public social media around the dates indicated, but not here on my home page. In revamping my page I have chosen to include those posts here. Links are included when a public version is available.)
weird and colorful craft project
2020/01/14
It's my system for pills. I got sick of pill containers with plastic flip tops on each compartment that always broke
So, color coded contact lens containers it is
I made the little satchel specially to fit them
The only hard part is remembering the order
I mean it's not that hard, because I know the order of the week and the rainbow, but these are not quite Roy G Biv colors -- the blue and indigo are off
And also....
Synesthesia throws me off a bit. Because I DO associate the days of the week with colors, and they're not these ones, LOL
I couldn't use the ones I associate them with, because there's some repetition.
The yellow of Tuesday is the only color in this system that seems right, but unfortunately Saturday and Sunday are also yellow in my mind
(I think of Monday as dark blue, Wednesday as dark teal... Thursday is reddish orange and Friday is tan. I dunno why, maybe it has to do with the sound of the names or something)
But I shall adapt
lizard dream
2020/01/16
...Now my brain is overthinking this.
If I wake up into a world where I'm a lizard who just dreamed this whole life... that means that in the REAL world, lizards have brains complex enough to dream up all the BS that goes on in this world, and in my mind.
Clearly biology and physics works a lot different in the REAL world from what we've learned in this dreamworld, if lizards can have brains like that.
What do they use this intellect for?
What do they think about in their normal lives, while licking their eyeballs and hunting bugs?
Is it all suppressed when awake, leaving them totally incapable of the complex thought that makes me ME, except when dreaming?
How long do they live? do they have an afterlife?
Are there predators hunting them? are there humans messing up their environment?
Do they worry about those things, with their enormous brains?
Or are they oblivious when awake, and unable to comprehend whatever finally kills them, their last moments nothing but mindless horror?
...this is how I get story ideas!
Bird Seeds
2020/02/09
So when I first heard the song "Blowin' in the Wind," I thought it said "how many seeds must a white dove sow."
I imagined it was, like, metaphorical seeds of peace, or something
but it still struck me as a weird metaphor, because
- doves don't do anything remotely like "sowing seeds"
- except fruit doves, who eat fruit. birds that eat fruit disperse fruit seeds in their droppings
- but fruit doves are not white
Then: "wait those aren't even the words. It's 'How many seas must a white dove sail.'"
but then:
- doves don't sail seas either
- wait
- Bob Dylan grew up in northern Minnesota.
- born in Duluth.
- you ever been to Duluth? you see what flies over those beaches?
conclusion
Bob Dylan mixed up
doves
and
seagulls
thanks for coming to my ted talk
I miss you all
2020/03/18/
I wish I could say that I'm writing this with a feeling of silver lining in the dark cloud, from this overwhelming time.
But I-- and my recent experiences-- stand by the message of my post back in October of last year. Look for silver linings where you can, but not especially inside of dark clouds, and never expect that any silver lining will be bright enough to be worth the cloud's darkness.
I've gotten very little, if any, silver lining out of this. I still work full time and then some, with no possibility of quarantine unless I actually show COVID-19 symptoms (I expect that I'll still be going to work if I have symptoms of something else just as unpleasant but more common, as I often do around this time of year.) The job of supplying medications to nursing homes becomes busier, not slower, during a time like this, and I'm not expendable.
Which is perhaps a silver lining, if one looks at it that way. But it does not allow me any free time to work on the creative pursuits that I consider my callings in life.
I'm writing this during a single day off, when the others in my home have graciously agreed to leave me undisturbed for an unspecified period of time, despite my still not really having a Room of My Own.
If you're one of those who have been following me online all this time (a group of questionable existence, but bear with me), you've seen that I haven't been posting much of anything. The Abby and Norma comic, despite my attempts to revive it, has faded again. My blog has not been living up to anywhere near the weekly post count I've tried to promise.
Can I list the factors behind this? I don't know. They may be just guesses, or maybe excuses. But when I try to think of why this has been happening, these are the first thoughts that enter my head, in this order:
1. Work. This pharmacy job is the most exhausting job I have ever had, and the one that expects the most overtime work from me-- although I still work nowhere near as many hours as the other employees here, whose capacity for self-destruction in the form of overwork is beyond my capacity to imagine. When I get home, I have little time or energy left for anything.
2. My partner is still working from home, building a Patreon for short stories. Our relationship is better than it ever has been, and that could be another whole post, though I'm not quite ready to write it yet. We're getting through this beautifully together...but, this leaves me close to zero time actually alone. No matter how respectful one's housemates are, there is no substitute for a room of one's own, when it comes to creativity.
3. Lack of incentive. For quite some time now, nothing I've done on this website has brought either income or recognition. For a long time it has felt to me as if these posts have no point at all.
4. Lack of community. We moved partially because we were growing apart from the communities of friends we had in Minnesota. But we have not succeeded in building new communities here. There are various reasons, and I'll talk more about it if I'm asked. But we feel isolated here, and that affects creative inspiration as well.
We're working on deciding a next step. But this is where we are now.
It's not that I haven't been creative. In fact, my creativity has lately leaned very much toward the practical, with my brain constantly producing inventions and lifehacks, and my hands always itching to make things.
And this, maybe, is the most authentic reason why I haven't been posting my usual stuff online.
The reasons why I haven't been posting about my crafts and creations, though, are all linked to the list I've provided.
The combination of work and home life leaves me not quite enough private time and emotional energy to make all the things I want to, let alone enough to document and post about them. And the lack of community here, and lack of audience response to my online presence, leaves me with no real reason to try and share those ideas anyway.
I am tired. But in this time, when one's online presence is as important as it can be, I'm going to try and keep posting.
Novel: Coronavirus
2020/03/19/
Being a writer can really warp one's view of current events.
If you write mysteries, you probably look at crime stories on the news with a bit of disappointment, wondering if the defendant was really that dull and simple, his crime so sparsely planned and so full of spur-of-the-moment bad decisions. You might feel that there's got to be something more complex beneath it, something hidden that the real-life investigators just aren't looking deeply enough into.
If you write dystopian fiction, you might feel that way about... well, everything.
My thoughts focus a lot on the difference between what is expected in fiction and what is expected in reality. The patterns that stories follow, the way that foreshadowing pays off, and separate plotlines come together in a unifying conclusion after just the right amount of time to build up just the right amount of suspense.
The idea that truth is stranger than fiction is just because truth doesn't follow these predictable conventions, and so it surprises us in more random ways than a story ever does.
I think about this a lot, and frankly that may be what keeps me from being an outright conspiracy theorist. Real conspiracies definitely happen, but most conspiracy theories that circulate in society... well, they portray people behaving in a much more orderly and predictable way than people do, in my own experience of reality.
What has been happening lately scares me, in a dystopian way.
Not because I think the virus is particularly scary to a healthy person like me, or that the measures taken aren't reasonable in view of how many people are genuinely at risk.
But because the structures of this country, particularly its health care systems, have done almost nothing reasonable in a very long time. And now, suddenly, they're doing this.
I had lost some of my urgent fear of the government, falling back on a lower-key, longer-term fear, because I had truly begun to believe that this bureaucracy is incapable of accomplishing any goal more than halfway (and that only over a long, struggling journey).
Even after the initial bungling, to see a threat like this addressed with the current efficiency... is a shock, an out-of-character moment. The sort of thing that sets off the dystopian author's reflex: "There has got to be something more behind this."
If this world were a work of dystopian fiction, with foreshadowing having to pay off, and hints having to have a meaning, and everyone having to have a well-planned motive... the likeliest conclusion I can imagine from these past few weeks would go like this.
- The lockdown goes on until all small businesses go bankrupt, with only the richest surviving. The few megacorporations who own all the world's biggest brands, and have the most ties to politicians and the most influence over laws, now have no competition except each other, and their goals are all mostly in line.
- Anti-Chinese prejudice grows, but the Chinese government retains huge influence on the US, because we've been reminded of just how dependent we are on things imported from there. (This combination of hatred for other nations and awareness of our reliance on them keeps us in the self-loathing mindset where we're most easy to control.)
- Lockdown is lifted, allowing non-essential employees to go back to work (though now they can work only for the richest corporations).
- But the precedent for keeping tight control of the public's movement stays very much in place. Government, and those who influence government, can easily shut down any peaceful assembly of citizens in the name of safety, and of course they present dubious rationales to cherry-pick the ones that they don't approve of.
- Election day is postponed indefinitely, for health reasons. President becomes basically king. Heavy-handed emphasis on the "crown" symbolism of the prefix "Corona."
- Anything bad that comes from this is largely blamed on liberals, because the conservative government made a point of looking reluctant to go along with this at first.
- Actual fault... not sure how this would turn out in a dystopian novel. The writer might reveal that the virus was genetically modified and deliberately spread-- or else that it spread naturally but society's reaction to it was deliberately amplified in order to foment chaos.
- If I were the author, who would I put in the mastermind's seat? I would never suspect Trump of being able to plan something like this, but Pence or Putin or a collaboration between the two, I could totally see. (More likely Putin would be at the center of it, since so many countries are affected, and so little of it is in his country.)
But... I'm not going to write this novel.
No goddamn way. Books are for escaping from this messed-up world. Not for getting yourself deeper into it and then getting sued for libel.
And I'm not in any way convinced that any of the world's governments have the competence to plan something in this much detail. Or that they'd have any reason to, considering how bad this seems to be turning out for everyone involved.
In conspiracy theories, and in fiction, it's easy to make up a reason why someone might have done something, even something that goes against their apparent goals. And yes, in real life, people often do things that aren't in their obvious best interest-- I mean, this entire presidency has been full of decisions that I could just not wrap my theory of mind around, no matter what goals I imagined people having.
But... in real life, I find that such decisions tend to be a lot more chaotic than anything you see in a novel or a conspiracy theory.
Then again, who knows? Maybe there is no real life. The idea that we ARE characters in a work of dystopian fiction is seeming a bit more credible every day now.
Though, the recent frequency of people talking about that idea? A pretty bold fourth-wall break on the author's part. Not sure how I feel about this writing style.
But hey, I'll keep reading to see how it goes.
Trying to go one day at a time.
2020/03/20/
So, here are some of my very near-term plans:
1. Make "Born on the Wrong Planet" available online.
- This one's already in progress. My memoir, Born on the Wrong Planet, last published in 2008, went out of print. I've revamped it into a new edition, and here it is.
Barnes and Noble: (coming soon)
2. Make some of my short story collections available online.
Also happening already!
- My short story collection "If the World Ended, Would I Notice?" is being republished as three smaller collections, edited and curated for quality, with a few new stories added.
- Here they are:
Lonely and Precocious
Amazon ***(currently free!)***
B and N: (coming soon)
- I had been planning to make that first one permanently free on Amazon, but it looks as if Amazon doesn't offer that now, and I will have to manually do free promotions from time to time, instead. *** I'm doing one now,*** and the other two books are available as free gifts for signing up for my mailing list.
Loving and Precarious
B and N: (coming soon)
Logical and Preposterous
B and N: (coming soon)
3. Relaunch Kea's Flight.
- My co-author and I are still in the process of coming to an agreement on a cover design, and the details of the interior are being fine-tuned, but it will be out. Some day soon.
4. Launch the sequel, Kea's Landing.
- This has taken a lot more work to come to agreements on, and is farther from being ready. But it is a priority.
5. Document and post about some of my crafting projects.
- Lately my creativity has been leaning very much toward handcrafting things. I feel that I've come up with an abundance of good designs I'd like to share. Making posts about them will take some time, but I want to do it.
- We can all use more ideas for making our own stuff. My own doomsday prepping has always tended less toward hoarding and more toward finding reusable or homemade/homegrown alternatives to things that would otherwise make me dependent on stores.
- I don't know if the current crisis will get more people to consider these options, or if it will ultimately do the opposite and push people away from the reusable and homegrown, through an epidemic of excessive germophobia. But wherever humanity wants to go, I'm going to do my part in offering the ideas I have.
Mailing list
2020/03/21/
If anyone has been having trouble signing up for the mailing list at my book page and/or claiming the free books promised there, please let me know! Send me an email at erikahammerschmidt@gmail.com or a tweet @earthtoerika, or reply here. I'm still working out the Mailchimp glitches.
Thanks, and stay safe and rested and hydrated, as much as you can!
School Dream
2020/03/25
I have always had nightmares about being back in school. Which is normal, because school is a traumatic experience that scarred every one of us, nothing weird there.
And there's one weirdly specific school dream that is so common that xkcd posted about it. The one where you're back in school and you realize that there's one class you haven't been attending or doing any work for, and it's close to the end of the semester and you suddenly realize your grades in that class are in serious trouble.
My version of this dream has been getting more and more specific over the years.
As of this year:
It's always a college math class. No specifications on what kind of math, but it's so beyond my level of math knowledge that I just have to guess at the answers.
It's in one of the older buildings at my college, and it's in a place that is hard to find. Which is part of why I haven't attended. I keep getting a sense that it's between two of the floors in the building. Maybe in a "split-level" kind of way, instead of a secret-passages or spatial-anomaly kind of way, but still I can rarely find it when I try to attend a class. I'll also have a memory that this class has changed location and I don't know where it currently is.
And I can rarely find the class schedule, either. My general sense is that I tried to figure out when and where this class was, and gave up, and then forgot about it, and am now suddenly remembering... and frantically trying to find it before I fail.
I usually have a memory of having gone to the class once or twice before, though. It's a small room, with individual desks, pretty standard classroom. The memory tends to involve doing some work that's been handed out to the class on paper, and not understanding most of it, and trying to figure out as much as I can from the small bits of context I have. The professor is not a consistent character, and I don't tend to have much memory of them.
The stress and fear of this dream always centers on the struggle of trying to find the class, and frustration at myself for forgetting about it, and the fear of failing (I never failed a class, never) and trying to focus on getting to the class when other weird and scary things keep happening around me and distracting me from it.
In these dreams I do often remember that I graduated from college a long time ago... but whenever this thought comes up, the dream shoves in some explanatory memory of a reason why I am being forced to take college classes again.
(It used to always be that my mother has made me go back to school because she's worried that I don't have a good enough job. But lately the explanations vary, and sometimes they're so nonsensical that my waking mind can't even parse what they were.)
But... a few nights ago, I had a variation on this dream that I've never had before.
I met and spoke with the professor of the class I've been missing. In this dream she was a friendly, laid-back lady... not much memory of her appearance, but I seem to recall she was white and kinda thin with long brown hair, wearing professional and nerdy clothes, and glasses, I think. (When I describe it, I realize that's kinda like me? Or a younger me?)
I expressed concern about the class. She said, "No, no, you took my class a long time ago, you did fine. No worries."
I was confused. Yeah, I remember college was a long time ago, but then why do I keep being told that I have to repeat it, if I don't?
She said, "Sorry, I'm so sorry. I'll stop sending you those notifications."
In the dream I imagined she was talking about email notifications, and I couldn't quite figure out which email notifications she meant, or how they could be forcing me to repeat college, but I sorta assumed this must all make sense somehow. (These dreams really try to give me a feeling that nonsensical stuff makes sense, even if my dreaming mind doesn't understand how).
I am very interested to see what this will mean for future dreams.
Latest speech
2020/04/26
This month, Indigo Education asked me to give a recorded speech for their online conference on Autism in Girls.
I thought it might be of interest to a wider audience... so here it is.
Also here, including locally hosted video and text transcript:
https://www.erikahammerschmidt.com/2020/04/26/latest-speech/
Redefinitions
2020/05/27
First posted here on Twitter.
May 27, 2020
In Orwell's "Animal Farm," the pigs who rule the farm make a rule that "no animal shall sleep in a bed." Later, when they are caught sleeping in the bed, they rewrite the rule:
"It says, 'No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets,'" she announced finally.
Curiously enough, Clover had not remembered that the Fourth Commandment mentioned sheets; but as it was there on the wall, it must have done so. And Squealer, who happened to be passing at this moment, attended by two or three dogs, was able to put the whole matter in its proper perspective.
"You have heard then, comrades," he said, "that we pigs now sleep in the beds of the farmhouse? And why not? You did not suppose, surely, that there was ever a ruling against beds? A bed merely means a place to sleep in. A pile of straw in a stall is a bed, properly regarded. The rule was against sheets, which are a human invention. We have removed the sheets from the farmhouse beds, and sleep between blankets..."
When people in power choose not to enforce laws, or even choose to break them, remember: They do NOT usually admit to disregard the law. They claim the law has always allowed this behavior.
They claim the law does not apply to this specific situation, even if they also claim it DOES apply in other situations, which may look pretty much identical, apart from the detail of who is on which side.
This is especially easy in a real-life society, where laws are complex and ambiguous and written in a language that only lawyers can speak fluently.
And even to them, laws are often ambiguous, and the interpretation you'll get from a particular lawyer often depends on who's employing that lawyer.
So while some small things really DO make a difference in whether a law applies to a situation, most of us are ill-equipped to know when that's true and when it's a lie told to cover up hypocrisy.
And since laws only HAVE meaning if they're enforced, they become less and less useful to society when those with the power to enforce them are always doing it selectively.
I don't have a solution for this problem. But it's worth being vigilant. It's worth NOTICING this when it happens.
It's worth preparing for, say, a time when the President decides he's going to be a dictator, and not have elections anymore, and serve for life.
Because if he does, he won't say "we're changing the rules." He'll say there's always been a loophole that allows this exception.
And it'll even be true, in some sick way. Because laws are made of words, and words have meanings based on how people use them, and if enough powerful people choose to interpret the words of the law in a new way, it stops even mattering how they were originally intended.
I see people saying "Don't worry, he can't serve more than two terms." Or "If he cancels the election the Speaker of the House automatically becomes President." Or "If we vote him out overwhelmingly enough, it won't matter how much he cheats."
But if he's gotten enough people in power who agree with him, it won't matter if those are the rules.
And remember, they will not admit they're breaking the rules.
They will come up with an INTERPRETATION of the rules that says they're allowed to do whatever they want.
And yes, absolutely, vote like your life depends on it, because it may be the only thing left that CAN make a difference.
But if it can't, we sure as hell better keep looking for solutions.
We better NOT get complacent, saying "well, the law allowed this terrible thing to happen in this situation, through a loophole, but that was just a fluke. It'll protect us next time."
They won't let it.
Window Eyes
2020/07/02
First posted here on Facebook.
Neurotypicals: Eyes are the windows to the soul!!
Me: Got it. Windows. Yep, eyes are for seeing. They let visual information in, so that my soul has access to it. Just like a window.
NT: No! I mean when other people look at your eyes, THEY see into your soul.
Me: Nah.Windows aren't really made for looking in. The sun's brighter than the lightbulbs in a house, so when you look at someone's windows, you mostly just see your reflection. And when people look at my eyes, they mostly just see whatever their own soul feels like projecting onto me.
NT: Forget the windows! You autistics are bad with metaphors! The point is, your eyes express emotions!
Me: I mean, the mouth changes a lot more with facial expressions than the eyes do...
NT: No! The eyes! Look at the eyes! Let other people look at your eyes! Eye contact is everything!! Here, take this special ed class and study these flash cards to learn facial expressions! Sure, they're just smiley and frowny faces, the eyes are all featureless dots, and only the mouths are different, but TRUST ME, eyes are like 90% of nonverbal communication!!
Covid-19: (makes us wear masks)
NT: Noooooo! I can't see people's mouths anymore! I'm having trouble reading facial expressions!!
Me (rolls eyes)
NT: What emotion are you expressing?? I have absolutely no way to tell!!!
.....these were my biking-to-work thoughts today. (Biking to work is my version of shower thoughts, with better inspiration in the form of scenery and brief interaction with strangers).
Vulcan Childhood
2020/07/04
I had a long, complex dream in which I was watching an old video, made in the 80's or 90s. (And sometimes being a character in it, because my point of view often switches around in dreams. But it was mostly from the POV of me, present day, watching it.)
It was a sort of Star Trek fan video. A sort of series of slice-of-life scenes from the household of Sarek and Amanda (Spock's parents). Except Spock never really showed up. It was all about these other kids they'd adopted. (Maybe my brain was thinking about Discovery and how Michael apparently grew up in their family, but in the timeline of the dream this fanvid would have been made long before that).
This video does not exist in real life, but in the dream I remembered having watched it many, many times, to the point that I could predict all the dialogue.
I also remembered that I had made the video. In the 80s, when I was a child. Some scenes of it were stop-motion, and I remember thinking, "wow I was a lot better at stop-motion when I was a kid."
Specifically, I remembered that I had made it during the part of my childhood when I was seeing a counselor at this place called Washburn Child Guidance Center.
(This was a real thing from my childhood, but in real life i can't imagine why I'd even think of making a movie there.)
In fact, the video was titled "Washburn." I had the general feeling that the setting and the title had some meaning related to the whole complex social dynamic of the mixed Human/Vulcan household it was about.
(Perhaps the title was meant as "Wash + Burn" = water and fire = humid Earth and hot desert planet Vulcan? I don't know. It didn't occur to me in the dream)
But near the end of the dream, one particular meaning was becoming clear to me. The character I played in the movie, my child self, was one of the human children raised in this Vulcan family.
This child kept facing pity from humans, regarding her Vulcan adoptive father and the whole Vulcan culture she was raised in. Pity that she never got the love and affection that a human child should have.
But she personally never seemed to mind it at all. It was what she was used to, what she'd grown up with and was comfortable in.
She liked it this way. She couldn't understand why humans pitied her.
And looking back on my child self who had been the director and producer and lead actor of this movie...I understood why I'd made it, and why specifically in the setting of my childhood counseling for behavior problems.
Sarek, the Vulcan father, represented my mother.
I realized I'd made this movie about the experience of being an autistic kid with a classic "refrigerator mother."
The kind of emotionally distant mom who used to be blamed for causing autism. Except of course, if refrigerator mothers ever really do cause autism, they just do it by being mildly autistic themselves and passing on their genes.
And I never wanted my mom to be emotional and touchy feely. I liked that she could relate to my own emotional distantness. I liked that she was calm and rational enough to deal with all my chaotic behavior and not snap.
I liked that she didn't expect emotional expression from me that I couldn't give.
All these humans pitying me just didn't understand Vulcan culture.
At least that was the meaning I came up with in the dream.
And I woke up-- wide awake like I'd slept until 11-- when it was only 6 am, and it took me forever to get back to sleep.
In real life I have conflicting feelings about my mom's emotional distantness. But this is definitely one side of it.
I know that during my childhood she got a lot of blame from other people... I wasn't very aware of it at the time, but I had bad behavior problems, and it's typical to blame parents for that.
And I know there were people who specifically said my mom being unemotional was bad for me. One of my uncles said "your parents don't give you enough hugs, the moment a boy kisses you, you're going to be stupid and get pregnant because you're so starved for touch"
He was wrong. I was starved for that kind of touch, but I am also calm and rational and capable of thinking while I'm horny
And I never felt I needed more touch from my parents. I think my mom specifically was exactly who she needed to be to deal with my childhood, and I'm very grateful to her in some ways, for not being a "normal" parent in ways that would have been catastrophic
I do wish sometimes that she was better at talking about feelings, and accepting how I sometimes have feelings and desires that are very different from hers, instead of just kind of closing up about feelings the moment it looks like there could be a conflict.
But that worked pretty well in my childhood, I guess. Better than anything else anyone tried with me.
I feel like my dreams are getting... wiser. Or more meta, or something.
Like when my recurring "back in school and failing a class" dream basically told me ...it's ok, you don't have to have this dream anymore.
Weirdly, "finding out that I made some far-beyond-my-years accomplishment as a child, which I now remember barely or not at all" is a recurring dream for me too. But again, this was a new take on it
Rainbow
2020/07/10
"why are there always rainbows in memorial pictures for pets"
"It's supposed to be the rainbow bridge to heaven"
"...the Bifrost?"
"... Yes, the Bifrost. All pets go to Valhalla."
Prisoner's/Voter's Dilemma
2020/07/14
I've been thinking about that prison scenario where two accomplices are arrested and questioned separately, and told that their fate will depend on whether they testify against each other or not. I'm fuzzy on the exact conditions, and I guess they can vary, but it's something like, "if you both stay quiet you go free, if you both testify against each other you're both in trouble, but if you stay quiet and your buddy testifies against you then you're in bigger trouble."
I feel like that's the two-party system lately. "Going free" is electing a really good candidate. "In trouble" is things getting slightly better than the shitty status quo. "Bigger trouble" is things getting apocalyptically worse.
And there aren't two prisoners, there are millions, so many that one individual's decision has practically no chance of changing the outcome. The outcome depends on a high enough percentage of them making the same decision. "Testifying" is voting for the lesser evil, and "staying quiet" is voting third party (though it's complicated by there being multiple third parties that we can't agree on).
So I guess it's not really that much like the prisoner's dilemma, but there's a similar feeling. A feeling of "whether this choice is a good one depends on whether other people also make the same choice."
A feeling of "well, the candidate I really like would give us the Best Outcome, if elected... but, voting for the candidate I really like is a waste of my vote, and could increase the chance of the Worst Outcome... unless enough other people also vote for the same candidate... so my choice will depend partly on my guess of how many others will think it's worth it to vote that way... and their choices are probably following the same process..."
Whatever. All I think we can hope for, at this point, is that the cops even give us the choice to testify or not. Instead of, like, just choking us to death instead.
Circles
2020/07/15
First posted here on Facebook.
I accept that I can't change some people
I change what I can about popular usage of diagrams
I make a diagram to show the difference
(you can accuse me of going off on a tangent in that diagram)
(but I'd never do that)
(because I wouldn't make that pun)
(cause that's not the way those circles are touching)
Stickman
2020/09/14
First posted here on Facebook.
so I saw an article about Pennsylvania COVID safety policies getting struck down by a corrupt judge
and this was how I reacted
accurate duck tales
2020/09/14
First posted here on Facebook.
You ever think about how the story of the Ugly Duckling would be much more likely to happen in reverse, because swans aren't the ones that go around carelessly brood-parasitizing everyone else's nests the way ducks do?
Twelve Nameless Ladies
2020/09/16
So today I want to introduce you to my matryoshka doll.
This is one of the strangest objects I own. Not because of what it is, exactly (although it's a rather remarkable matryoshka doll in itself). More because of my relationship with it... in several small but individually weird ways.
It consists of 12 nesting dolls, the biggest one maybe eight inches tall, the smallest one shorter than a grain of rice. The bigger ones are very intricately decorated, with many colors of paint and little lacquered-on wooden pieces. As they get smaller the decoration gets less detailed. The second-smallest has only three black dots for a face, and the smallest has no paint at all.
Smallest 8 dolls
These are the most recent pictures I have of it. First one is all 12 dolls, lined up. Second one is close-up detail of the smaller ones.
They are ridiculously low-quality images because they're from the digital camera I had in (I think) 2001. This was when I lived in a college dorm, the first space that really felt like my own, and was a bit obsessed with displaying and showing off my possessions.
I'm still the kind of person who loves to photograph and show off any interesting objects I have. But somehow I just have not ended up taking any photos specifically of this matryoshka doll in the last two decades or so.
I don't know why. It isn't because I feel no connection to it. On the contrary... we have a whole display cabinet of trinkets and collectibles from decades past, but when I looked through it and decided which things to give away and which things I want to keep the next time we move, the matryoshka doll was the only thing I decided I had to keep.
It's one of my oldest possessions. Not in terms of its actual age, but in terms of how long it's been mine. My mother bought it for me at a silent auction at an open house in my elementary school. This was definitely before I was ten years old.
I own almost nothing from that early in my childhood, since I've generally been a person who hangs onto ideas more than physical objects. I'd often rather photograph a cool thing and then give it up for someone else to enjoy, instead of letting it keep taking up space in my home. It's quite possible that the only thing I've owned longer than this doll is my birth certificate.
And somehow, in all that time, I never lost or broke a single one of the dolls in the set. This is nothing short of astonishing. I was a chaotic kid who broke and lost almost everything, and for most of my childhood I had complete access to this set of dolls and could have strewn them all over the house if I wanted. They may have been the only one of my childhood possessions I was ever careful with.
Yet, despite my evident love for them, I never played with them either. None of the dolls have ever had names-- even though I was a child who made up names and personalities and backstories for everything, including the snow igloo we built in the yard, which had a tragic long-distance love affair with the snow horse we built on the other side of the house.
The snow igloo didn't even have a face. The matryoshka dolls have 11 faces and 12 humanoid figures, but in 30 years I have never felt any impulse to name any of them.
I have also, a few times, lost track of how many there were. For years I was completely sure there were 13 dolls in the set, although that would be a very weird number to put in a set of anything. I don't think I ever miscounted them, though. I think I mixed up the number of dolls with the price my mom paid for them at the silent auction, which I am pretty sure was $13, when I think back on it.
I have never been much of a mathematically inclined person. I can get rather fascinated with mathematical concepts, but whenever I try to do any math, I make small errors, transpose one quantity with another, and end up with the wrong variables and mess up the equations. Mixing up the price with the number of dolls is very on brand for me.
But weirdly enough, these dolls helped me through a college math class once. It was a finance course, which I got into without really understanding that it was a finance course and that the math was quite a bit beyond my level. The title of the course was "Math of Interest," and the synopsis talked about learning math that could help you plan how to pay off a loan or save money for retirement. I thought it was just practical, useful everyday math, the kind that would be "of interest" to an average person.
But it turned out "interest" meant financial interest: a concept that is represented in equations by "i," the same variable used for the square root of -1, and very nearly as baffling to me.
I didn't do well in the class. I passed, but I'm pretty sure it was only because I showed my work on each assignment and the professor could see how close I always was to getting the right answer, how a trivial mixup between variables was almost always what led me astray.
And I think once I seriously impressed him... because one day I got a random whim to bring the matryoshka doll into class, take it apart, line up the dolls, and show him how I'd realized I could apply the formula for compound interest to the change in size from each doll to the next one up in the set.
I truly don't know if that was something in character for me. But if not, I suppose that's typical for my interactions with this doll.
So... I guess if any one of my possessions is under some sort of magic spell, this is it.
And again, this messes with what's in character for me. Because I don't believe in magic, and I'm not in any way a superstitious person... but now that I've realized all these things, I'm strangely reluctant to change any of them.
I could give the dolls names; I could take more photos of them. But if I haven't done so already, was there a reason? And if I did it now, would it throw off the balance of the universe?
Whatever. It's not like the balance of the universe can get much worse at this point. Maybe breaking the spell could improve things.
New photo, featuring names
Pharmacy nightmare
2020/09/27
I've been having nightmares lately where my pharmacy job somehow gets even worse and I try to quit, but somehow can't.
Last night I dreamt that they started calling me in to work in the middle of the night, unexpectedly, as if I was a pharmacist on call. Except the work I had to do in the middle of the night was different, and involved going to a prison and making evaluations on prisoners, but it seemed to have nothing to do with their pharmaceutical regimen.
There were three men being tried for murder. I knew nothing about them, but I was required to testify by choosing an answer from a multiple-choice question that looked like the ones in the Continuing Education tests that I'm doing in real life to renew my pharmacy tech license.
Those questions can have answers like "An 84-year-old male newly diagnosed with type II diabetes and hypertension." But this question in the dream had three options, which all just described the defendants by the shape of their noses.
I had no idea, so I randomly picked the one that said "A man with a broken nose."
(I guess it sounded the most negative? Having a broken nose is bad, and murder is bad, so they must go together? There was some vague thought process like that, but nothing clearly thought out. It was the way I think when I'm answering a multiple choice question in a CE course and I have no idea what's the right answer and I'm just making my best guess based on the only thoughts that come to me.)
(I don't remember what the other choices said. I'm surprised I could even read that one so clearly. For me, reading in dreams is either just a few words, or else I look at a longer text and get a general understanding of what it says, but no clear idea of what all the words were. I think that line was at the upper limit of what I can read clearly in dreams.)
There were at least two other employees from my workplace answering the test questions too. One of them was a pharmacist I know, and I don't remember who the other was.
It was understood that whichever answer most of us chose, the defendant who fit that description would be executed for murder.
The man with the broken nose got the most votes, and he was taken away. But the layout of the building and the doors and hallway ahead of us were all weirdly confusing. For a second I couldn't tell whether we were going out and the prisoners were going into their cells, or vice versa. I had a second of being terrified that the prisoners had somehow gotten control and were locking us up instead.
Later in the dream, the pharmacists and I were talking about it and we all agreed that there wasn't enough information on the test to make an informed choice, and they had all picked "A man with a broken nose" pretty much at random. We had some vague discussion about whether there was some subconscious cultural bias toward choosing that answer, and why the test had been written that way and by whom, and why they were trying to incriminate the broken nose dude in such an unfair way.
I remember feeling guilty that I hadn't thought to ask any questions about the test, like whether I had the right to abstain from voting if I didn't know enough.
I'd basically gotten a guy executed without knowing anything about him, just because my job told me I had to pick an answer and I never questioned it.
Near the end of the dream, I had just told my boss I was quitting, that I couldn't do this anymore. And she was telling me I had to stay, and "everyone in this building is prepared to thank you for staying."
I remember feeling this sense of not-really-shock, at the fact that she didn't even offer me a raise or any benefits that might actually convince me to stay, she was just promising on other people's behalf that they would thank me. The feeling was more like "this is supremely messed-up, and yet it's totally what I expected from this job."
I'm a bit annoyed at how obvious the metaphors in my dreams are getting lately.
Dreams are supposed to be nonsense. Any hint of symbolism should be questionable at best
But this dream was very ham-handedly lecturing me about several different ways my job sucks, and the metaphors were barely veiled at all
Being called to work in the middle of the night-- natural extension of the overwhelming amount of work and hours of overtime I'm expected to do
The murder trial is about how I'm constantly expected to make decisions affecting the lives and health of vulnerable sick and injured people, without being given enough time or resources to know what the best decision is
And the moment when I was scared of being locked up in the prison represents my own fear of aging and health problems, and how easily I could become the people whose lives hang in the balance of a long-term care pharmacy as badly managed as this one
Gender and stuff
2020/12/05
First posted here on Twitter.
Update, April 2021: This was first posted in December 2020. My partner had chosen a new name, Esme, which she later changed to Elle. I have since edited this post to reflect the change.
So anyway: I have some things to say about gender and orientation, mine and others.
Some personal revelations that have been a long time coming, and my thoughts about them.
Anyway...
Part of the reason this has been so long coming is that I have always been... both uncertain and ambivalent about what labels to use for my own identity.
Labels are important. For lots of people, in lots of ways. But respecting that, respecting other people's labels, has always been very separate in my mind from how I feel about labels for myself.
As long as you don't intend any insult to me or others, and you're reasonably clear about who you're referring to... I don't care what words you use for me. I just don't.
That goes for my gender, orientation, race, nationality, disability. It goes for nouns, pronouns, names, everything. It does not matter to me. And that hasn't changed.
Perhaps the only reason I'm writing this now is because... well, some stuff is happening that means if I DON'T label myself, in certain ways, that choice will now also be questioned.
It began, I guess, with my sexual orientation.
Well, actually it began with gender identity.
Not mine, though. My partner's. (Together 15 years, in and out of legal marriage for insurance reasons, in and out of various polycules, but still very much my partner the whole time.)
My wife-- who is now named Elle, but is still deadnamed all over erikahammerschmidt.com because things are chaotic and we've just not yet gotten to the question of what-all we need to change on there, and in what ways.
It's been a hell of a time to try and make the shift from protecting her privacy when she wasn't out yet, to affirming her identity now that she is out.
I've known for a while, and kept using the old name and pronouns as long as she wasn't ready for the world to know, but that has felt so bad to me that I've kinda just not talked about her much lately, at least online.
That's going to change.
I'll leave it to her to speak in more detail, IF she wants, about exactly what her gender is and what she's doing about it. But for now, all you need to know is that she's my wife and I love her.
She has beautiful long wavy red hair and is very good at matching makeup to her coloring, and she wears pretty cowl-necked sweaters and long colorful skirts, and her name is Elle and her pronouns are she/her.
Even long ago, when there was no new name or pronouns, I was completely sure that IF anything like that ever happened--
(because I'm a writer and my imagination will show me every possible What-If scenario)
--I would be totally fine with it. No matter what extent of transition she wanted to pursue.
There were issues in our relationship, yes, there have always been problems we've been working through-- but pretty much all of them have gotten BETTER since she's embracing this side of herself.
And the problems did not ever include the way her body looked, or what clothes she wore, or what words she wanted people to use in referring to her. Those are just... not things that affect how I feel about a person.
And even back when it was just a What-If question in my imagination, I knew people might say "you'd feel different if it actually happened"... just like they told me "You'll change your mind" when I said I didn't want to have kids.
But when time went on, and situations came and went, and neither of those things ever changed... well, I was not even slightly surprised. I know myself pretty damn well, and that was what I expected of myself.
But I hadn't given all that much thought to what that would mean for my own identity.
I mean, I had thought about it in the abstract, about how my sexuality wouldn't really be changing, and I still wouldn't really feel any need to label it.
I've even written some, in the past, about the nebulousness of my own orientation and how hard it resists labels.
Sometimes it seems closest to "asexual" or "gray-asexual." Because my sex drive comes and goes kind of sporadically, and the times I've felt a focused, physical, sexual attraction, toward a particular person, have been...
Well, it's pretty much not happened in real life.
It's been just two fictional characters (Spock and the Tenth Doctor, if you must know)... played by actors for whom I DIDN'T feel strong physical attraction, despite the fact that they looked a lot like their characters.
So, while that very limited pool of examples does seem to suggest I have a physical "type"... it also seems like my emotional and intellectual type is at least as important.
And that part has very emphatically been the most important thing in my real-life romances.
Which I'd thought was normal. And maybe it is.
But, however natural it feels to keep on loving my spouse despite outward changes, it does put me in the position of... well, other people seeing me as being in a lesbian relationship, and labeling my sexuality based on that.
And that was the part I hadn't really given much thought to.
I can predict my own inner feelings pretty well, but... I sometimes forget how much I'll obsess about other people's perception of me.
If anything "feels different when it actually happens," that's it. I hadn't really thought about how this would result in other people seeing my orientation, or how I'd feel about that.
It's not a bad feeling, though. Just complicated. And I don't really have to make it all that complicated.
In regard to my sexuality, I think it can be as simple as just reiterating that I don't mind whatever words people use to describe me...
...While also admitting that "pansexual" and/or "panromantic" is probably the closest.
I can enjoy sex with people regardless of gender identity or assigned sex.
And those things also don't change my ability to feel attraction to people (although it's an emotional attraction that isn't like the hyper-physical obsession I've had a couple times for sexy fictional characters.)
But my exploration hasn't stopped there.
As I've been around Elle exploring her own gender, and been around other people she knows who are also exploring their genders, I see them making observations about my gender as well.
I see them pointing out which of my traits feel masculine or feminine to them-- perhaps as part of their own exploration of themselves, or perhaps in an attempt to express connections they feel with me.
And, while they understand that I don't see any personality traits as inherently masculine or feminine, that doesn't mean that those perceptions are wrong.
The more I'm around people who are encouraging exploration of my gender, the more I feel some... curiosity, at least, about how I might label it, if I were going to do such a thing as labeling.
And again, it has resulted so far in a reaffirmation of my ambivalence...
...along with the admission that yeah, if I were going to label myself, there probably is a word that fits better than others. In this case, the word seems to be "agender."
But I think part of the reason that took me so long is that... I genuinely believed that agender was how people are supposed to feel.
In a way it was like some anecdotes I've read about the obstacles that have blocked people from realizing they're trans or gay.
For example, a post by a trans woman who assumed in childhood that obviously everyone wants to be a woman, of course, why wouldn't they?
Or the homophobic rant by a man who seemed to believe that same-sex desire was a universal temptation pushed by the Devil on everyone, and he wasn't gay because he virtuously chose not to act on it.
Then again, those two stories really don't have much in common... except for the assumption, at some point, that one's own feelings are the norm.
And I guess that's what they have in common with my story, too, although mine is also very different from both.
What I'm trying to say is that I grew up being taught lots of different lessons about how to live... and certain lessons I was taught, about bodies and genders, came very easily to me.
And because I'd been taught them as lessons, I didn't feel that there was anything unusual about living by them.
They were the sort of lessons that came up in an upper-middle-class, eccentric, liberal yuppie-hippie family in the 80's and 90's.
Today I suppose there's a split between people who'd view them as dangerously radical and others who'd view them as not progressive enough.
But at the time, they felt average to me, and were probably representative of the overall time and place I lived in:
Don't focus on the appearance of your body or your clothing. It's not important.
Don't focus on the appearance of other people's bodies or clothes either. What's inside their minds is what matters.
Don't make assumptions about what's inside someone's mind just because they're a boy or a girl. That's prejudice.
Do the things you love, regardless of whether people say they're masculine or feminine things. They don't have to be. Boys can play with dolls, girls can play with trucks.
There are no boy pastimes or girl pastimes, no boy colors or girl colors, no boy books or girl books. Gender doesn't affect what you can do.
And because I was taught these life lessons, it took a long time for me to even think of analyzing my own adherence to them.
They seemed like the default in life. A default that many people found hard to follow, yes... but a default that we all knew was the right way.
Being taught these things was the reason I spent so little time questioning them. But it was not the reason why I lived by them so fully.
In childhood I learned plenty of lessons that I ended up not agreeing with, and plenty of others that I agreed with but still struggled to live by. These ones were different.
They made effortless sense to my way of thinking. They came easily to me. I followed them not because they were lessons, but because they aligned with my identity.
And, as I've matured, I have realized that life's a lot more complicated than those lessons. Despite intuitively feeling right to me, they're often very wrong.
You can't realistically expect people to be 100% neutral about their own appearance, especially when it comes to gender identity.
And you can't expect people to be 100% neutral about everyone else's appearance, especially when it comes to attraction.
And you can't expect people, in a gendered society, not to associate masculinity and femininity with things and people...
...not to feel emotions connected to those categories... and not to let that ever influence their expectations.
And you probably shouldn't, even if you could. These things that are inevitable in our society can also be joyful.
Having feelings about bodies and genders is often way better than being neutral. It can be freaking awesome to find your own body and clothing beautiful.
It can be just as awesome to look at someone you love and find them beautiful.
And depending on your identity, it can be wonderfully validating and empowering to view yourself and the things you do as masculine or feminine, and to feel the emotions you associate with those labels.
Some of these things I know because I myself am not immune from feeling them.
Others I know because people I care about have told me that's how they feel, and I believe them, even when I don't understand.
The thing is, I'm sure that even the various authority figures who taught me these lessons didn't intend for me to take them as far as I did.
To me, being pansexual was the logical conclusion of "Don't judge people by their bodies or clothing."
To me it was unthinkable that my husband turning out to be my wife would change anything about how I felt.
All that was changing was her body and clothing! Her mind was the same all along. And it wasn't having a female mind that attracted me... because minds didn't have genders, did they?
It was a long process for me, to accept that they could.
And I still wonder just what part of a mind the gender identity is, and whether it's a part that is even possible to be attracted or unattracted to.
I think, in another universe where Elle was made differently, she could still have all the same personality traits I love-- including many that society labels "feminine"--
--even if she didn't have the part that causes her to identify with the noun "woman" and the pronouns "she" and "her."
For those of us who respect people's self-identified gender, that part is the only thing we consider when labeling someone as a woman.
And I don't think that part, by itself, plays any role in whether or not I love a person. I can't even imagine how it could.
To me, being agender was the logical conclusion of "Don't worry about your own appearance" and "Pastimes and ideas aren't divided into boy and girl things."
And "You can't assume anything about people's minds based on them being male or female." It didn't even require a train of thought to get from there to the assumption that minds couldn't have genders at all.
It took me a while to even grasp the idea of having a gender identity. I thought that being transgender was outside the norm because having ANY inner sense of one's own gender was outside the norm.
It took me a while to separate the idea of gender identity from the idea of gender stereotypes.
To accept that "feeling that you're female" didn't mean "believing that you adhere to stereotypical expectations of femininity," and that I may never fully understand what it does mean, because it's not a thing I ever feel.
And it took me a while to come to terms with how real a socially constructed thing can be.
How a feeling of gender identity doesn't always mean either fitting stereotypes or wanting to change one's anatomy...
... but it CAN still be influenced by one's feelings and experiences regarding those things... and being influenced by those things DOESN'T make it fake or unimportant.
After all, pretty much everything about human minds is shaped by our environment. It's all real, and it's all relevant. And it can't be turned off just by realizing where it came from.
Our whole identities are in our heads, our intricately complex human minds and thoughts, built through their interaction with each other.
If we dismissed everything that's in our heads, everything that's shaped by society, and called it not real... we'd be disregarding humanity itself.
Yet, even while my mind expanded to recognize that this diversity of human thought could include things like gender identity...
...I still had trouble convincing myself, on an emotional level, how having an inner sense of one's gender was even possible.
And this was reinforced a few times, when a few people told me that the reason I didn't feel any gender identity was because I was cisgender so of course I couldn't.
Gender identity could only be felt if it was out of place, they said. If I didn't feel my gender, that just meant it fit perfectly into my body and didn't need to be felt, and I should be grateful.
I accepted this, because, after all, I WAS grateful not to feel dysphoria, and it didn't really matter to me what would happen in those hypothetical thought experiments where I got transferred into a male-assigned body.
I didn't think I would feel wrong if that happened. I couldn't imagine it feeling any more wrong or right than my current body. But I accepted it as unknowable and gave up on caring, because it wasn't going to happen and didn't really matter.
It still itched at my mind, though, when I saw the various posts online trying to help cis people imagine what being transgender was like.
There was one that encouraged cis women to picture themselves trans, not by imagining that they wanted to be men, but by imagining that everyone mistook them for men until they had no choice but to live as men.
Another post asked the readers to imagine that nothing had changed about them at all, except that everyone else saw them as a different person and attacked them if they said otherwise.
Imagining myself in these situations, I didn't think my life would be much different.
I would still have the same eclectic mixture of "masculine" and "feminine" interests that I personally refused to label with either of those words.
And I would hang out with people who liked me as I was, and I wouldn't care what they called me, as long as the feeling behind it was friendly.
And, if I was around people who called me male, who would fight me if I said I was a woman... I wouldn't care enough about it to challenge them anyway. Why would it matter what words they used?
The only thing I imagined being a problem was the fact that I like wearing jewelry and dresses occasionally. If I wore them on a body that people viewed as male, it would lead to conflict in many social settings.
But... I don't like wearing dresses and jewelry THAT much, not enough for that to be a huge loss for me. And in any case, that was a problem with society labeling jewelry and dresses as feminine-- not with my identity being feminine.
Because it wasn't. "Feminine" was a word that society meaninglessly stuck onto a bunch of different things that really didn't have much in common with each other. It meant nothing to me.
At least, those were the kinds of things my mind said, when I pushed it into these scenarios.
I didn't become less sympathetic for trans people, nor did I become more sympathetic.
I recognized, as before, that there are people who feel things I don't, and I may not be able to imagine how they feel, but I can still show them kindness and respect and courtesy even without fully understanding.
Only one thing changed... I started to question the assertion that cisgender people never had an inner sense of gender. If they didn't, how could any of them relate to these thought experiments?
There were replies, after all. There were people saying things like "Keep sharing this post because this is what got me to understand."
At least some folks, who had previously not understood trans identity, did figure something out about it just from doing those little exercises in empathy.
There was another post, which began with similar thought experiments, then went on to suggest that IF you don't relate to them--
--if you don't feel you have an innate gender that would stay the same no matter what your body was like--
--then you might consider the possibility that you have one of the other identities under the trans umbrella, such as "agender."
This wasn't exactly a realization for me either.
I had considered it before. There had been a moment when I said something like, "I have trouble imagining how a mind can have gender at all, and I don't know if that makes me agender or if it makes me a TERF."
I did not want to consider myself a TERF -- a trans-exclusionary radical feminist-- even though I had seen TERFs express some of the doubts I felt, doubts about how gender identity could be a real thing at all.
I still didn't want to align myself with them, because they expressed those doubts in senselessly cruel and hateful ways.
They took it to the conclusion that trans people should be denied all sorts of basic rights, just because the TERFs themselves used definitions of "woman" and "man" that did not align with how trans people defined themselves.
But, if they truly felt that minds didn't have genders, that genders were defined only by the body, with everything else being nothing but inaccurate stereotype...
...then why did they care at all how anyone else defined "man" or "woman"?
Agreeing on definitions was only important for segregating the sexes-- for regulating who had permission to do things and go places that were permitted only for one gender.
And if the genders were different only in anatomy, in superficial appearance of the body, then why would there be any need to segregate them?
I had never in my life really believed there was a need to segregate the sexes.
Even as a child in the restrooms of 80's and 90's elementary and middle school, I felt that every argument for dividing the boys' room from the girls' room depended on flimsy stereotypes of how boys and girls acted.
If the goal was to prevent violence and sexual assault, or even just sexual contact of any kind... it fell apart as soon as you realized those things could happen between people of the same sex.
And, of course, the problem of feeling uncomfortable or unsafe next to ANYONE in the restroom would be solved if you built stalls with real walls and doors, for proper privacy!
But TERFs tended not to agree with me on that. To them, separating the sexes was a big important deal.
And that was at odds with the very concept of the doubt I felt, the difficulty I had in grasping the concept of internal gender.
So that feeling couldn't possibly be anything for me to bond with TERFs over.
Yet I also shrank away from the idea of calling myself agender, nonbinary, or genderqueer. To me, words like those were for people who felt their identities strongly enough to need the support of the trans community.
The trope of a nonbinary person, or for that matter a bi or pansexual person, saying that they "don't care about labels"... is, from what I've seen, unpopular in much of the LGBTQ community.
To say anything of the sort is dangerously close to implying that labels are unimportant across the board.
It's close to disregarding the very real importance they have to those who need to find a community and express their identity in solidarity with it.
So, even if my identity seems to fit every part of the definitions of agender and pansexual, I'm very reluctant to use those labels, because... I AM a person who doesn't care about particular labels in regard to myself.
I respect the many valid reasons why other people find them important, but these reasons apply to me very little, if at all.
For someone like me, a double language major whose autistically obsessive fascination has always been linguistics... to say I don't care about words may sound a bit ridiculous.
But this ambivalence is happening BECAUSE of my fascination with language, not in spite of it.
I've been bilingual (English and German) since infancy, and trilingual (English, German and Spanish) since middle school.
I can't remember a time when I wasn't aware that words are symbols for concepts...
that different people can use different words for the same concept...
that the meaning of a word can encompass a range of different things...
...which may or may not overlap closely with the range encompassed by its closest equivalent in another language, or even the same word's usage in a different locality or social group.
Culturally, words are important, and using the correct one for the situation can make a world of difference. But the REASONS why a word is correct are so arbitrary. They can depend on so many different things.
No matter how much I think about the importance of a word, I can't FEEL its importance, on an emotional level.
I can't stop thinking that a few changes at crucial moments in history could have given the same word a completely different meaning, and the same meaning a completely different word.
It reduces my capacity to care, really care, which word is used.
And I worry that if I used the labels that others care about so much, it would feel like a mockery-- a mean and meaningless appropriation of a thing that has no value to me and immense value to others.
But, any time the topic arose with the trans and otherwise queer people in my life, this never seemed to be a concern.
Elle, in particular, has been encouraging me to identify openly with the labels that describe me. She feels it will help me connect with others in the community.
She shows no hint of fear that I'd be taking anything away from her, or from other trans people, by sharing this.
On the contrary-- she seems to feel that my embracing my own identity under the trans and queer umbrella would feel like a deeper acceptance of her.
And really, she has a point.
As important as labels are to many people, at the end of the day their purpose is to describe ourselves and the world around us.
By claiming a label, I would not be laying claim to any particular privileges or status. I wouldn't be expecting that everyone else who uses that label will accept everything I say as speaking for them.
I won't expect that anything I write about the genderqueer or pansexual experience is now automatically immune from criticism because I'm labeling myself OwnVoices.
And I certainly wouldn't claim that I've experienced the same oppression as any of the other groups in the LGBTQ+ community, or that I can speak about their issues with the authority they can.
I expect no more acceptance or respect from anyone than I expected before. All I'm doing is sharing information, using a label to describe who I am, for anyone who cares to know.
After all, that is the only way anyone can know. For those of us who respect how others self-identify, the only source we have for information on their identity is what they tell us.
Especially for a trans or genderqueer identity, because that's an identity fully within the person who feels it.
A sexual orientation can at least show in one's actions; for example, people can decide to label me bi or pan, even if I don't label myself, because I've been known to have partners of different gender identities.
But no one can know if I consider myself agender unless I say so.
It will probably always be that way, too. There can be no absolute outward proof of inner gender.
Yes, there are some measurable manifestations of it-- parts of the brain that tend to be one size in both cis and trans women, and a different size in both cis and trans men.
But I don't know of any study that has even applied this to agender or nonbinary brains. And anyway, it would be dangerous to place too much weight on any such studies as a scientific proof of trans identity.
Brains and minds are hugely complex and diverse. There's pretty much never a hundred-percent correlation between details of brain structure and details of emotion, thoughts, behavior.
Tendencies, that's all. Diversity is going to provide exceptions to rules. There will be some people who feel and express trans identity, and yet don't exhibit the correlated brain features.
Even if it someday became possible to test everyone for these cerebral indicators of transness, by some new brain scan that was as simple and cheap and harmless as, say, a pregnancy test--
--then what would we do with the exceptions, the people whose transness the test didn't validate?
Would we tell them their feelings weren't real? That they weren't really trans and didn't merit the respect that real trans people deserved?
Would it become nothing more than a new version of checking the genitalia to see who's a boy and who's a girl?
I don't know. But I do think that, no matter what scientific discoveries are made about gender identity, the truest information we'll get will always be from the words of the people experiencing it.
And that's why I've put this whole thing into as many words as it took me to get my thoughts across.
It's a lot, and thanks for reading through it.
It boils down to "I probably fit somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum, both in gender and in sexual orientation, and the words you use for me don't matter to me personally but I respect why they may still be important to you."
Tl;dr: My wife is a trans woman. You can call her Elle and refer to her with she/her pronouns. You can call me agender and pansexual, or not. You can call me she/her or they/them or whatever pronouns you were using before.
Just don't call me late to dinner.
Oh wait, you can call me that too, because I totally AM late to dinner when I spend my whole day writing long essays like this.
Goodnight everyone!
How I spend the time when I should be allowed to take a break
(if I don't have to get a phone call during it)
2020/12/10
![Text conversation: (ME), [12/10/20 6:34 PM]/The Law of Attraction says if you focus on things being bad, they will be bad. The Law of Don't Jinx It says if you focus on things being good they'll be bad. I don't believe in either of those laws. But together they make Murphy's Law -- everything is bad always. And on days like this, I believe in THAT with all my heart/(ROOMIE), [12/10/20 6:35 PM]/...shit... I'm so sorry that things are so tough/(ME), [12/10/20 6:37 PM]/My boss says we can get started on the process of Me Getting Free as soon as a draft a resignation letter. I've never had a job that required a formal resignation letter before. Can it just be 'FUCK YOU I QUIT' scrawled on a kleenex?/(ROOMIE), [12/10/20 6:38 PM]/....that's fucking stupid/(ME), [12/10/20 6:39 PM]/Yeah it is, but then so is everything here.](https://www.erikahammerschmidt.com/blog2020/pix/mu1.png "Text conversation: (ME), [12/10/20 6:34 PM]/The Law of Attraction says if you focus on things being bad, they will be bad. The Law of Don't Jinx It says if you focus on things being good they'll be bad. I don't believe in either of those laws. But together they make Murphy's Law -- everything is bad always. And on days like this, I believe in THAT with all my heart/(ROOMIE), [12/10/20 6:35 PM]/...shit... I'm so sorry that things are so tough/(ME), [12/10/20 6:37 PM]/My boss says we can get started on the process of Me Getting Free as soon as a draft a resignation letter. I've never had a job that required a formal resignation letter before. Can it just be 'FUCK YOU I QUIT' scrawled on a kleenex?/(ROOMIE), [12/10/20 6:38 PM]/....that's fucking stupid/(ME), [12/10/20 6:39 PM]/Yeah it is, but then so is everything here.")
![Text conversation: (ROOMIE), [12/10/20 6:39 PM]/I... Huh. Did they give you a prompt or something?/(ME), [12/10/20 6:40 PM]/No. I'm gonna ask around and/or look up how this works/(ROOMIE), [12/10/20 6:41 PM]/No, I can tell you. It has to be a haiku and a palindrome, and it must be less than 6 lines/(ME), [12/10/20 6:44 PM]/...that would not even be super hard for me](https://www.erikahammerschmidt.com/blog2020/pix/mu2.png "Text conversation: (ROOMIE), [12/10/20 6:39 PM]/I... Huh. Did they give you a prompt or something?/(ME), [12/10/20 6:40 PM]/No. I'm gonna ask around and/or look up how this works/(ROOMIE), [12/10/20 6:41 PM]/No, I can tell you. It has to be a haiku and a palindrome, and it must be less than 6 lines/(ME), [12/10/20 6:44 PM]/...that would not even be super hard for me")
![Text conversation: (ME), [12/10/20 6:59 PM]/No meds. Not one./ El Fin. I flee. / No tons, demon./(ME), [12/10/20 7:00 PM]/SEE? IF I HAD BREAKS I COULD A DONE THAT ON MY BREAK/(ME), [12/10/20 7:02 PM]/(the only part that doesn't quite make sense is 'no tons' but to me it means NO MORE TONS OF BULLSHIT)/(ROOMIE), [12/10/20 8:03 PM]/Lol. Totally send that to them/(ME), [12/10/20 9:12 PM]/It might not be good enough, I put more work into meaning and palindromicness than haiku meter so it's missing some syllables/(ME), [12/10/20 9:12 PM]/But to be fair I was slacking off at work to do it](https://www.erikahammerschmidt.com/blog2020/pix/mu3.png "Text conversation: (ME), [12/10/20 6:59 PM]/No meds. Not one./ El Fin. I flee. / No tons, demon./(ME), [12/10/20 7:00 PM]/SEE? IF I HAD BREAKS I COULD A DONE THAT ON MY BREAK/(ME), [12/10/20 7:02 PM]/(the only part that doesn't quite make sense is 'no tons' but to me it means NO MORE TONS OF BULLSHIT)/(ROOMIE), [12/10/20 8:03 PM]/Lol. Totally send that to them/(ME), [12/10/20 9:12 PM]/It might not be good enough, I put more work into meaning and palindromicness than haiku meter so it's missing some syllables/(ME), [12/10/20 9:12 PM]/But to be fair I was slacking off at work to do it")
![Text conversation: (ROOMIE), [12/10/20 9:35 PM]/Lol/(ROOMIE), [12/10/20 9:35 PM]/Omg/(ROOMIE), [12/10/20 9:35 PM]/Honestly I forgot I asked you to make it a palendrome. Fucking hell erika, you actually did it./(ME), [12/10/20 9:55 PM]/See this is why my true talent is underutilized at this job/(ME), [12/10/20 9:56 PM]/Sucks to be someone whose savant skills are very close to 190% useless](https://www.erikahammerschmidt.com/blog2020/pix/mu4.png "Text conversation: (ROOMIE), [12/10/20 9:35 PM]/Lol/(ROOMIE), [12/10/20 9:35 PM]/Omg/(ROOMIE), [12/10/20 9:35 PM]/Honestly I forgot I asked you to make it a palendrome. Fucking hell erika, you actually did it./(ME), [12/10/20 9:55 PM]/See this is why my true talent is underutilized at this job/(ME), [12/10/20 9:56 PM]/Sucks to be someone whose savant skills are very close to 190% useless")
Rollers
2020/12/16
First posted here on Twitter.
I've spent way too much time cataloguing the various anti-skating signs I've seen in parking garages
"No Rollerblades"
Pros: prohibits Rollerblades
Cons: allows old-fashioned roller skates, and allows inline skates of brands other than Rollerblade (R)
"No inline skates"
Pros: rules out all inline skates regardless of brand
Cons: still allows any skates that aren't inline
"No roller skates"
Pros: prohibits all roller skates
Cons: some people will think "roller skates" doesn't apply to inline skates
"No skates"
Pros: prohibits all skates of any type, and also takes less space to write than any of the previous options
Cons: also prohibits driving a car or carrying a backpack into the parking garage if it happens to contain skates
"No skating"
Pros: prohibits the active use of any skates, and arguably also skateboards, while not prohibiting their passive existence
Cons: also prohibits ice skating... But honestly if someone figured out a way to do that in a parking garage, you WOULD want to prohibit it
Masking
2020/12/30
First posted here on Twitter.
There is a real but not always relevant difference between "masks are harmful to me; I cannot wear one" and "when I wear a mask I get increasingly uncomfortable, distracted, and brain-fogged from sensory overload."
Likewise there is a real but not always relevant difference between "my job forbids me to wear a mask" and "my job does not mandate a mask, and DOES mandate a level of multitasking and stress management that I am not able to achieve when wearing a mask."
I'm going to share some things about my current job, at which I've already put in my notice and will be leaving by mid-January. Even if anyone at work cared about me enough to read my Twitter, which they don't, I feel safe sharing this now.
Many other people, in many other jobs, have similar circumstances but could not safely talk about them.
I work in data entry at a long-term-care pharmacy, so I am in an office with other people-- not usually close to them, and never close to strangers from the general public. But for most of the day, most days, I wear a mask.
I have to take it off to eat. I eat at my desk, in between phone calls (because despite the 30-minute break that exists on paper, our work for the day would never get done if any of us actually took that.)
I try to put it back on right after eating or drinking. The interval before I put it back on can vary, due to things like my meal getting interrupted by phone calls or other urgent work demands.
And a factor in the delay, sometimes, is the knowledge that being masked can affect my work proficiency.
I'm working on building my mask tolerance. At my current level, I COULD perform data entry with good proficiency while masked, for an entire 8-hour shift with breaks only for eating.
But... my job is not only data entry. And what it is, exactly, depends on the day.
Often it's data entry of two different kinds, eRx and faxed prescriptions, while also constantly keeping an eye on newly received orders and sorting them by priority...
and also taking phone calls, at least half a dozen an hour: anything from nurses rattling off long lists of meds they need refilled, to nurses demanding why something hasn't been filled yet...
(usually because either the insurance doesn't cover it or the doctor hasn't actually written the prescription yet, neither of which I can control)
...to doctors calling in verbal scripts, to confused patients calling us from the nursing homes, to family members calling about a bill when they should be calling our billing department in a totally different city...
...to wrong numbers and random people who call us thinking we're a retail pharmacy that can fill their prescriptions, or salesmen asking to speak to the purchasing agent who is hardly ever there.
And at the same time I also have to deal with insurance claims in case the billing department isn't keeping up with them, and watch my email inbox for any urgent new tasks that take priority over whatever else I'm doing.
And change prescriptions when the fill techs bring them back to me saying they don't have the right product in stock, and answer the pharmacist's constant demands for updates on how soon I'll have the data entry done...
...because I'm often the only order entry tech THERE, for at least half of my shift.
Others often help with the data entry, logged in from home, although they are doing overtime and should not have to.
I am less overworked than most order entry techs there. But that's not comforting at all.
And I'm trying to do all these things while wearing a mask. But when I do, I'm slower. I more easily forget what I'm doing, and lose track of things.
And the discomfort and sensory distraction of the mask is not an accepted excuse for such distraction...
...since the obvious answer would be "why are you even wearing a mask; none of the other data entry techs do."
I'm not being forced to wear it. Just being forced to work all day surrounded by people who don't wear masks, and who feel they have no choice but to come in to work no matter how much they're coughing, as long as they don't have a positive COVID test yet.
It's so frustrating, because most days I feel I have to choose between safety and being productive enough to appease this soul-crushing machine.
And it's not that I CAN'T wear a mask!
I'm at a level of mask tolerance where I could do my job perfectly fine with reasonable accommodations.
And in this case "reasonable accommodations" just means the way that any reasonable workplace would treat ALL its employees.
Accommodations like "not being treated as if I'm three data-entry technicians and three all-purpose call center employees at once."
It's NEVER gonna happen, at this workplace.
Even on days when I manage to keep the mask on all day, it's not much protection when others around me aren't wearing theirs.
With this job, I'm guessing I've either already had the virus or will get it soon.
I hope my case is asymptomatic.
But I don't have much energy left to worry.
Whenever I imagine myself dying in a hospital on a ventilator, all I can think is... "wow, then I wouldn't have to be at work."
More