I need a word to describe this thing I have where like…
If I am doing a mindless task or a semi-mindless task, that I have no emotional engagement in, I literally cannot focus on it or do it unless I have something I DO care about to pay attention to.
Like, my brain will refuse to pay attention to things that do not matter to it, and will wander off and mentally compose a three-page Tumblr post instead. Or worse, I will find myself having written a three-page Tumblr post when I was supposed to be working or paying attention in class.
It’s like things become mental teflon, and repel my brain.
So like, right now I have a temp job that consists just about entirely of mental teflon. Finding documents, printing them out in the right order, stamping them with the signature stamp, scanning them and making two copies, writing the addresses on envelopes, metering and sealing them and dropping them in the mail thingie.
I can do this all day long, but I cannot focus on it whatsoever because there’s nothing to focus on. It’s just a series of repetitive tasks. When there’s some interesting challenge I can create for myself, like “now let’s see if I can do TEN of them in an hour!” I can get more engaged, but I have to have the energy/spoons to go that fast and I don’t. (And this is literally like 4500+ separate mailings, so if I do push myself I will burn out.)
BUT if I put in my headphones and watch Netflix or whatever while I do it, I can go all day long.
I keep thinking about how the allistic world would view this. Imagining how ridiculous they would think that sounded – “I HAVE to watch TV while I work, or else I can’t focus!”
I imagine that they would be like “wow, what a load of bullshit excuses.” Because they have no concept for that. There’s no, like, “ah yes, you are engaging the blahblahblah part of your brain so that the other areas, that do repetitive work, can continue undistracted and undisturbed. Good job.”
I guess one way to look at it is like, if I have 100 units of attention, and only 1 one of them is needed to do my work, the other 99 are desperate for something to engage them. It’s like sensory deprivation.
(Sensory starvation, btw, is totally a thing for autistic people in particular, and you can even find books where “autism professionals” have talked about it causing meltdowns in the kids they work with. And how they avoid it by providing different sensory toys, those ball chairs to sit on, water tables, et cetera, and trying to make sure the kids get enough sensory stimulation during the day.)
So I guess I could say that I can’t function mentally if I don’t have enough to stimulate my attention.
It’s also kind of a special interest thing; I tend to gravitate toward shows that are related to my various special interests, or compulsively thinking about and writing about my special interests.
It’s like my brain is set up to engage only in these interests, and I can get it to work on other things if I also feed it enough of the special interests.
I would not be averse to renaming special interests “brain vitamins,” tbh.
And stuff that doesn’t take any mental energy is like brain junk food. Like I’m sure nobody wants to hear that their filing project or whatever is mental junk food, but if it’s…
ooooooooooo, I just thought of something!
anniegst has a theory that the whole “special interest” thing is an integral part of how autistic brains process the world differently than allistic brains. And from what I understand, this would fit into that.
We tend to get interested in things that we can master. That have systems and details that we can learn. Like, one of the appeals of a special interest is that, even though we have to spend time in the baffling allistic world whose rules don’t make any REAL sense, (they can be understood, but they are *ridiculous* rules tbqh), we can also spend time in these worlds where the rules make sense and are enjoyable to discover.
We can get that sense of power and self-worth and fitting into the world from that. Of having our own worlds and domains, whether it’s the world of Doctor Who, or of crocheting, or a tiny thing like, “I now know enough about why and how you would buy a specific set of headphones to buy the perfect set of headphones!”
So like: when people say “you can earn this money, but you have to earn it by doing something that your brain gets nothing from, doing things that you know nothing about except what we think of telling you, in a company and industry that you know nothing about,” it’s like “you can go up to Mars and do this work for the Martian companies.”
And I have to put on my spacesuit (headphones) and fill it all the way up with breathable air (special interests) in order to make my psyche be able to do this.
I suppose this is sort of like how doing things like household chores is the bane of my existence because of it’s tediousness and repetitive nature. And yet if I’m listening to my favorite album I can go about my day and do what I must because I’m actually just focusing on the stim provided by the music, rather than focusing on the chore itself.
The argument that I cannot possibly focus on something someone is saying to me if I’m bouncing my legs and staring at the floor seems to follow the same logic as someone thinking it’s impossible to watch netflix while doing a repetitive task. And yet the fact remains that we can engage better when we multitask in this manner.
I myself actually can really enjoy doing repetitive tasks cause it frees up so much brain space and I can literally entertain myself for hours just in my own head, cause it never turns off. I’ll be writing essays and going on adventures and plotting out novels and analyzing my favorite TV shows or thinking about the meaning of life in my head for hours while stuffing envelopes or whatever.
It has to be a truly repetitive task like that though cause household chores aren’t exactly repetitive to most extents and they involve a level of executive functioning that messes me up.
But my brain is never off. And it seems like some things that take a person’s full attention only take a portion of mine. This screws me over in class a lot because I get bored, honestly, understanding and mentally engaging with what my professor is talking about often times only takes a portion of my mental energy and the other part of my brain is just screaming. So then I might also start engaging it in something else. I used to read books while listening to lectures when I was in high school and I could honestly fully engage with and retain both sets of information.
The problem is when the second thing I’m engaging with becomes overall more mentally stimulating than the first thing, which it usually is cause it is usually an intense special interest of some sort. So I end up using all my brain space on that and the tiny bit of brain space used to pay attention in class is shoved aside. Sometimes it helps to just take over some of the excess mental space with stimming and listening in class but usually a large chunk of my brain is still screaming.
I feel exactly that, sensory deprivation, in my classes most of the time cause they’re never setup in such a way where you’re fully stimulated mentally but you’re supposed to be giving them 100% of your mental attention.
Month: August 2017
my sister just sent me this screenshot and honestly this is a prime mood
what a dream
The downside to having a glass dining table (Source: http://ift.tt/2wXTcuO)
Shout out to @chris_hek, a true Texan icon, for the pic.
Black Lives Matter Is Not a Hate Group
Generally speaking, hate groups are, by our definition, those that vilify entire groups of people based on immutable characteristics such as race or ethnicity. Federal law takes a similar approach.
While it’s no surprise, given our country’s history, that most domestic hate groups hold white supremacist views, there are a number of black organizations on our hate group list as well.
A prime example is the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), whose leaders are known for anti-Semitic and anti-white tirades. Its late chairman, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, famously remarked, “There are no good crackers, and if you find one, kill him before he changes.” Bobby Seale, a founding member of the original Black Panther Party, has called the NBPP a “black racist hate group.”
We have heard nothing remotely comparable to the NBPP’s bigotry from the founders and most prominent leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement and nothing at all to suggest that the bulk of the demonstrators hold supremacist or black separatist views. Thousands of white people across America – indeed, people of all races – have marched in solidarity with African Americans during BLM marches, as is clear from the group’s website. The movement’s leaders also have condemned violence.
There’s no doubt that some protesters who claim the mantle of Black Lives Matter have said offensive things, like the chant “pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” that was heard at one rally. But before we condemn the entire movement for the words of a few, we should ask ourselves whether we would also condemn the entire Republican Party for the racist words of its presumptive nominee – or for the racist rhetoric of many other politicians in the party over the course of years.
Many of its harshest critics claim that Black Lives Matter’s very name is anti-white, hence the oft-repeated rejoinder “all lives matter.” This notion misses the point entirely. Black lives matter because they have been marginalized throughout our country’s history and because white lives have always mattered more in our society. As BLM puts it, the movement stands for “the simple proposition that ‘black lives also matter.’”
The backlash to BLM, in some ways, reflects a broad sense of unease among white people who worry about the cultural changes in the country and feel they are falling behind in a country that is rapidly growing more diverse in a globalizing world. We consistently see this phenomenon in surveys showing that large numbers of white people believe racial discrimination against them is as pervasive, or more so, than it is against African Americans.
It’s the same dynamic that researchers at Harvard Business School described in a recent study: White people tend to see racism as a zero-sum game, meaning that gains for African Americans come at their expense. Black people see it differently. From their point of view, the rights pie can get bigger for everyone.
Black Lives Matter is not a hate group. But the perception that it is racist illustrates the problem. Our society as a whole still does not accept that racial injustice remains pervasive. And, unfortunately, the fact that white people tend to see race as a zero-sum game may actually impede progress.
Don’t schedule important events on major Jewish holidays
A lot of things get scheduled on major Jewish holidays, in a way that prevents Jews from being able to participate. This needs to stop.
If you’re in charge of scheduling things like:
- Protests
- Conferences
- Public school orientations
- College orientations
- Exam schedules
- Field trips
- Other important events
Please avoid scheduling on major Jewish holidays. The most important ones to avoid are:
- Rosh Hashana
- Yom Kippur
- The first two nights of Passover
These holidays are at slightly different times each year, because the Jewish calendar is lunar. Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are in the fall, Passover is in the Spring. You can check when they are at hebcal.com, and hebcal.com also has a calendar you can subscribe to that says when the holidays are.
Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are the times at which Jews who don’t go to synagogue at any other time of year go. (In the same way that some Christians only go to church on Easter and Christmas). They are also major family holidays, even for people who are otherwise secular. Yom Kippur is a 25 hour fast (from both food and water) and most people who observe it are pretty wiped out immediately afterwards.
The first two nights of Passover are when Jewish families hold Passover seders. It’s a major family holiday, even for people who do not consider themselves religious and never go to synagogue at all. Nearly all Jewish families have some sort of seder.
It is considerate to also avoid scheduling important events that would require travel on the day before and after these major holidays. It is critical to avoid scheduling events on the holidays themselves.
There are other Jewish holidays that will create conflicts for some Jews, but they’re not as important to most Jewish people.
tl;dr: If you value Jewish participation and solidarity with Jews, it is critically important to avoid scheduling important events on on Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and the first two nights of Passover.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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