Finally trying to get down for some sleep, after at least two hours of meaning to because I’m that exhausted. With the amount and quality earlier.
I don’t really want to do the split shift thing again, but it might be better anyway with the ankle thing. Going to try bracing it, and maybe that will help keep it from doing whatever ridiculous thing it’s been wanting to do.
Dealing with
executive dysfunction and ADHD becomes so much easier when you stop trying to
do things the way you feel like you should
be able to do them (like everyone else) and start finding ways that
actually work for you, no matter how “silly” or “unnecessary”
they seem.
For
years my floor was constantly covered in laundry. Clean laundry got
mixed in with dirty and I had to wash things twice, just making more
work for myself. Now I just have 3 laundry bins: dirty (wash it
later), clean (put it away later), and mystery (figure it out later).
Sure, theoretically I could sort my clothes into dirty or clean as
soon as I take them off and put them away straight
out of the dryer, but
realistically that’s never going to be a sustainable strategy for me.
How
many garbage bins do you need in a bedroom? One? WRONG! The correct
answer is one within arms reach at all times. Which for me is three.
Because am I really going to
get up to blow my nose when I’m hyperfocusing? NO. In
allergy season I even have
an empty kleenex box for “used
tissues I can use again.”
Kinda gross? Yeah. But less gross than a
snowy winter landscape of dusty germs on my
desk.
I
used to be late all the time
because I couldn’t find my house key. But it costs $2.50 and 3
minutes to copy a key, so now there’s one in my backpack, my purse,
my gym bag, my wallet, my desk, and hanging on my door. Problem
solved.
I’m
like a ninja for getting pout the door past reminder notes without noticing. If I really don’t want to forget something, I make a
physical barrier in front of my door. A
sticky note is a lot easier to walk past than a two foot high
cardboard box with my wallet on top of it.
Executive dysfunction is always going to cause challenges, but often half the struggle is trying to cope by pretending not to have executive dysfunction, instead of finding actual solutions.
ok y’all it’s time to stop using the word “neurotypical” to mean “someone who told me to do yoga when i said i was sad”. that was not it’s original context (it was, in fact, coined by autistic people and yoinked by mentally ill allistics lmao), and the idea that “non-mentally ill people” is a coherent class of people is BONKERS. ANYONE can be susceptible to mental illness, you do NOT know everyone’s history with mental illness, and even though people who are vocally against mental healthcare are obviously shitheads and dangers to themselves/their loved ones, to claim that their views are because they have a squeaky clean bill of sanity is just fuckin……wild.
Neurotypical wasn’t ‘yoinked’ by allistic mentally ill people, there were discussions about it and many autistics, both mentally ill and not, noted that the word itself being used to refer to just people without autism was misleading given that many other things eg. ADHD, schizophrenia, OCD mean that a person wouldn’t have a ‘typical’ neurotype.
Thus allistic came about and neurotypical moved to being used to indicate somone who has neither development disabilities like autism or mental illness.
Also anyone can be susceptible to mental illness but not everyone has actually been mentally ill. Just like anyone has the potential to become disabled in their life but that doesn’t mean they will or have been. The word neurotypical exists because there are people who have not been mental ill or developmentally disabled and they have privileges that a mentally ill/developmentally disabled person who is from otherwise the same social class does not have.
I agree, but I don’t think any of what you’re saying really counters the main point of the post which is that “neurotypical” isn’t really a label we can go around applying to other people, especially given how so many people are undiagnosed and so many neurodivergencies are trivialized.
I do agree with the main point of you can’t go around applying the term as you please to anyone and if I implied otherwise my bad.
That said while the main point is true the doesn’t mean I’m comfortable with people continuing to say that neurotypical was stolen when it wasn’t and there were good reasons for the switch to allistic. Nor am I comfortable with declaring neurotypical an incoherant class when there are people who are neurotypical and they are priviliged for it.
Have I ever told the story of how my mom almost died because a giant Gene Simmons burned down her apartment building?
I wanna hear! (I mean I’m really glad your mom is okay, but this sounds like an incredible story amd I can’t miss out.)
Okay, so when my mom was 19 and living in San Francisco, she broke off her engagement to this really sweet Belgian boy because was like “holy shit, I love girls” and moved into a shitty apartment in the student corner of town because rent was cheap and the people on the block were her kind of folks.
One morning, she gets home from work and it has just been the shittiest day ever because it was laundry day so she had to wear the clothes she hated most, the shift leader was talking about layoffs, and her car had literally exploded on the Golden Gate Bridge on the way home. She is exhausted and thinks to herself “well, at least this day can’t get worse”.
My mother later told me that uttering this sentence is like standing in front of god with your arms flung out screaming “whatca FUCKING GOT???”
She collapses in bed still in her most hated outfit and passes the fuck out.
On the bottom floor are a pair of art students who I could never quite confirm mom was quietly banging in her spare time, who were building a giant Gene Simmons statue out of scrapped denim jeans for their final project. Something about meta-symbolism. They had left a can of open turpentine by the statue and also an electrical outlet.
While no one was paying attention, the outlet sparked, the turpentine caught, and the 20foot tall Jean Simmons lit up like a goddamn fireworks show.
Mom wakes up to screaming and the sound of someone banging with all their might on every wall and door they pass in the hallway to alert the apartment dwellers of their impending fiery death. She is very tired. She hasn’t eaten in like two days. She can barely think. So she just kinda stumbles to the door. As she’s reaching it, she notices smoke coming out of her electrical outlet. Mom originally went to school for physics and mathematics before she dropped out, so she stops for a second and thinks to herself “wow, the smoke is exiting the outlet at a complete horizontal for a solid 6 inches before it starts to rise, there must be a lot of pressure buildup for that to……HOLY FUCK I NEED TO RUN” and just fucking books it out of the building.
She stands there on the ground with other students watching everything they own go up in smoke while Jean Simmons’ terrifying two story face laughs at them from behind the building. Mom says that she never got the smell of smoke and burning tar out of her most hated work outfit and eventually embraced that fact and burned them.
This is also the story of how my mother ended up homeless and standing naked in a stranger’s bedroom with an absolutely petrified 22 year old cop holding a gun to her head while she cried and laughed like she had gone round the fucking bend, but mostly this is the story of why my mother once slapped me across the face so hard I saw birds because 3 year old me tried to comfort her one day by saying “at least it can’t get worse!”
Okay now I need to hear about the cop thing please? Very interested ^.^
So Jeans Simmons burned down everything mom had ever owned right? The emergency responders brought these little kits with toothpaste and a hairbrush and deodorant and such. But the shift leader who’d been talking about layoffs was in fact correct and she was fired the next day, so now she’s homeless, has no money, no clothes, no possessions, hasn’t spoken to her family in three years, and her car is still a smoking wreck on the side of the bridge waiting for a tow. All she’s got is the little emergency kit, her least favorite work clothes that smell like fire (incidentally she didn’t smoke another cigarette for 15 years after that day), and her vinyl records that have been melted into slag.
And as she’s standing on a street corner that evening, waiting for a bus, smelling of smoke and wondering why the fuck she’s still holding her melted records, it starts raining cats and dogs. Mom takes one look at herself in a shop window and realizes she’s not going to make it like this. But luckily she’s just hooked up with the local queer circuit, and there’s a dungeon Mistress who’s going out of town and needs someone to watch her cat. She says mom can stay there until she gets back and then she’ll help mom figure out something more permanent.
So mom picks up a key and comes by the next day. She only has to spend a few minutes in a house that doesn’t smell like soot and tar to realize how bad she must smell and decides then and there to burn her clothes. She wasn’t exactly thinking through what to do after that, and suddenly she’s staring at ashes in the fireplace and realizes she has nothing to wear anymore. At this point, mom just stops thinking, turns around, and goes to bed naked because why the hell not.
Problem is, Dungeon Mistress didn’t tell the neighbors she had a house guest. So all they know is that an incredibly be-draggled young woman who smelled terrible wandered into the apartment after Dungeon Mistress left town and started a fire in the fireplace.
So they called the cops.
Now mom hasn’t slept since the fire, in part because hello trauma and in part because sleeping on the street in SF isn’t the best choice as a 19 year old homeless girl. So she’s fuckin dead to the world. Until next thing she knows, the bedroom door of the apartment flies open and there’s this baby faced cop standing in the doorway yelling orders at her. She’s panicking and falls out of bed and is still super naked and way too tired and hungry to think properly, so as soon as she registers “gun aimed at my face” she just starts fucking LAUGHING. Like, howling, cackling, rib-cracking laughter, tears just pouring down her face the whole time.
And this cop is just fucking terrified because ~what~ the heck?? He keeps trying to yell at her and she just keeps laughing, and at some point she just sits down on the floor, still laughing, and the cop just sort of nervously drops a sheet over her and is like “I still have to ask you to leave” and mom was like “I’m fucking cat sitting?” And of course the cat chooses then to just come over and headbutt her because it’s hungry.
So mom ends up giving him Dungeon Mistress’s phone number who confirms what she’s doing there and is frankly ~fucking pissed~ that mom’s being put through this. The cop is like “maybe try not being homeless and looking like a wreck next time?” And mom looks like she might deck him so he just fuckin scoots.
Mom spent a few months couch surfing with Dungeon Crews and shelters like that before she finally managed to gather some clothes of her own and get a new job. But that experience pretty well solidified mom’s opinion of “fuuuuuuuuck cops” and set her on the path of being a political agitator.
And the moral of the story is that if you’re having a bad day, try to make responsible decisions like not burning your only set of clothes or not daring god to personally ruin your month.
when the name changed to Jean Simmons the first time I didn’t notice the pun and I was like, they changed the name to a more androginous one? was it a genderbended Gene Simmons? A lesbian Gene Simmons?
Now I deeply wish that they had been building a lesbian Gene Simmons, but sadly he was merely made of denim.
one of my friends is a very pregnant dog and like 3 times a day i say to her “hello! you are full of several other smaller dogs!” and she wags her entire body at me like “it’s true!!! i contain multitudes”
One thing I notice in Trump’s law enforcement speech is that he explicitly states he wants to change the laws so police can get violent with suspects.
A lot of focus is on this statement:
Now, we’re getting them [criminals] out anyway, but we’d like to get them out a lot faster, and when you see these towns and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, I said, please don’t be too nice. Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over, like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody. Don’t hit their head. I said, you can take the hand away, okay?
Obviously this is bad because it’s the president encouraging police brutality to cops. Cops who then smiled and clapped at his statement. Then the Suffolk County Police Department released a statement on Trump’s comments:
The SCPD has strict rules & procedures relating to the handling of prisoners,“ the statement said. “Violations of those rules are treated extremely seriously. As a department, we do not and will not tolerate roughing up of prisoners.
K sure, but anyways Trump actually briefly addressed these rules and procedures in the speech. He said that gang violence exists right now because of weak political leadership that doesn’t allow cops “to do their job.”(He also blamed children coming into this country seeking asylum but I’ll stay focused on this.) Here’s the full comment:
They’re there right now because of weak political leadership, weak leadership, weak policing, and in many cases because the police weren’t allowed to do their job. I’ve met police that are great police that aren’t allowed to do their job because they have a pathetic mayor or a mayor who doesn’t know what’s going on.
What exactly stops cops from doing their job? What’s Trump talking about? He’s addressing the rules and procedures that police are supposed to follow. Which he blatantly says in his speech:
The laws are so horrendously stacked against us, because for years and years, they’ve been made to protect the criminal. Totally made to protect the criminal. Not the officers. You do something wrong, you’re in more jeopardy than they are. These laws are stacked against you. We’re changing those laws. But in the meantime, we need judges for the simplest thing, things that you should be able to do without a judge, but we have to have those judges quickly.
Again, he blames the laws that are currently in place that are supposed to protect the citizens from police brutality and keep police in check. He’s blaming the rights people have when they are being arrested, questioned, and suspected by police. Then he says “WE’RE CHANGING THOSE LAWS.” These comments made law would severely increase the amount of police abuse and violence that we already see.
Trump is not only encouraging police violence to the delight of said officers, but he’s now openly stated that he wants to change the laws so the citizens are less protected from their abuse. That’s terrifying.
The White House has now addressed Trump’s comments where he encouraged police violence. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told the media that Trump was “joking,” when he told police to get rough with suspects.
Sanders was explicitly addressing this part of the speech:
Now, we’re getting them [criminals] out anyway, but we’d like to get them out a lot faster, and when you see these towns and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, I said, please don’t be too nice. Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over, like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody. Don’t hit their head. I said, you can take the hand away, okay?
However, if Trump actually was joking then why did he continue to go on about policy changes that would allow cops to get rough with suspects? Why did he talk about changing the laws? Were those “jokes” too? Funny that they want to boast that Trump “says what he means,” until he conveniently doesn’t.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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