cloudy with a chance of spicy autism

My brain:

- Chasing people who don’t want you

-Making up lots of stories and worlds

-Overtalking whenever there’s someone to talk to

-Excessive reading

-Daydreaming

-Clinging emotionally to others

-Being the ‘disposable’ friend in the group

-Excessive baths

-Talking to oneself

-Obsessive friendships

Hate of pigeons didn’t start until the 20th Century. Before that was about 9,900 years of loving them. The rock pigeon was domesticated 10,000 years ago and not only that, we took them freaking everywhere. Pigeons were the first domesticated bird and they were an all-around animal even though they were later bred into more specialised varieties. They were small but had a high feed conversion rate, in other words it didn’t cost a whole lot of money or space to keep and they provided a steady and reliable source of protein as eggs or meat. They home, so you could take them with you and then release them from wherever you were and they’d pretty reliably make their way back. Pigeons are actually among the fastest flyers and they can home over some incredible distances (what fantastic navigators!). They were an incredibly important line of communication for multiple civilisations in human history. You know the first ever Olympics? Pigeons were delivering that news around the Known World at the time. Also, their ability to breed any time of year regardless of temperature or photoperiod? That was us, we did that to them, back when people who couldn’t afford fancier animals could keep a pair or two for meat/eggs. 

Rooftop pigeon keeping isn’t new, it’s been around for centuries and is/was important to a whole variety of cultures. Pigeons live with us in cities because we put them there, we made them into city birds. I get that there are problems with bird droppings and there’s implications for too-large flocks. By all means those are things we should look to control, but you don’t need to hate pigeons with every fibre of your being. You don’t need to despise them or brush them off as stupid (they have been intelligence tested extensively as laboratory animals because guess what other setting they’re pretty well-adapted to? LABORATORIES!) because they aren’t stupid. They’re soft intelligent creatures and I don’t have time to list everything I love about pigeons again. You don’t need to aggressively fight them or have a deep desire to kill them at all. It’s so unnecessary, especially if you realise that the majority of reasons pigeons are so ubiquitous is a direct result of human interference.

We haven’t always hated pigeons though, Darwin’s pigeon chapter in The Origin of Species took so much of the spotlight that publishers at the time wanted him to make the book ONLY about pigeons and to hell with the rest because Victorian’s were obsessed with pigeons (as much as I would enjoy a book solely on pigeons, it’s probably best that he didn’t listen).  My point is, for millenia, we loved pigeons. We loved them so much we took them everywhere with us and shaped them into a bird very well adapted for living alongside us.

It’s only been very recently that we decided we hated them, that we decided to blame them for ruining our cities. The language we use to describe pigeons is pretty awful. But it wasn’t always, and I wish we remembered that. I wish we would stop blaming them for being what we made them, what they are, and spent more time actually tackling the problems our cities face.  

And also pigeon poop was a very valuable fertilizer before we had other options, people would hire guards to stop thieves from stealing their flock’s poop.

We never intended to train her for educational programs. It was a job reserved for our raptors. It was our pigeon who decided she would be a part of what we were doing. One day, when we entered her enclosure to change water and food, she decided to fly to my hand and perch like our raptors do. 

No training, no treats, just the reward of being with us. 

What we hadn’t noticed for the couple months prior was her watching us. This brilliant little bird had been watching us every day as we trained and worked with our raptors. Finally she decided she didn’t want to be left out any longer. She made her place on our hands.

This occurred several times before we finally put her on a glove and brought her into the public. Needless to say, she was right at home. She fluffed up and preened the entire evening while people gawked and asked us why we had a pigeon on one glove and a hawk on another. 

Since then, we’ve added 5 more rescued pigeons to our growing flock. And our pigeon (Tybalt) has become a mainstay ambassador for our programs. Each of our pigeons are incredibly fun to watch and interact with. Pigeons simply don’t get enough love. They are marvelous creatures incredibly suited to life alongside people both physically and mentally. 

Photo by .jocelyn.

They have a complex and fascinating social structure, both within a flock and with other individuals:

Photo by Ingrid Taylar

AND THEY ARE JUST SUPER CUTE, HONESTLY:

Most wild animals all look alike within a species, with TINY, RARE individual variations in terms of rare color morphs, unusually big or small animals, different facial markings and other subtleties. But there is no evolutionary benefit to having species where everyone looks slightly different, and in fact, it’s beneficial for species to be similar and consistent, with a distinctive aesthetic. Especially if you’re trying to blend into the environment - a black wolf is all very well, but it looks positively silly in the summer tundra, where its grey/brown/brindley cousins blend in. A white deer has a great aesthetic - and a very short lifespan in the forest. Distinctive Protagonist looks are rare in the wild, simply because natural selection usually comes down heavily on them.

To humans, most wild animals are visually indistinguishable from each other.

As a result, most wild animals are like

“Oh it’s obvious - you can tell the twins apart because Kara has a big nose.”

Wild animals usually have a pretty consistent aesthetic within their species. It’s important to them!

SO WHAT IS GOING ON WITH PIGEONS?

Look, in one small picture you’ve got a red color morph in the center, several melanistic dark morphs, a few solid black birds, a few variations on the wildtype wing pattern, a PIEBALD, a piebald copper color morph…

Like, there are LAYERS UPON LAYERS of pigeon diversity in most flocks you see. Pure white ones with black wingtips. Solid brown ones with pink iridescent patches. Pale pinkish pigeons.

WHY IS THAT? When other wild animals consider “being slightly fluffier than my brother” to be dangerously distinctive in most circumstances? BECAUSE CITY PIGEONS AREN’T TRULY WILD.

MANY OF THEM (POSSIBLY MOST OR ALL) ARE FERAL MIXES.

THEY WERE ONCE BELOVED PETS, SPECIAL MESSENGERS, EXQUISITE SHOW-WINNERS, AND PRIZED LIVESTOCK.

THEIR PRETTY COLORS WERE DELIBERATELY INTRODUCED BY HUMANS.

AND NOW THEIR HUMANS DON’T LOVE THEM ANY MORE.

See, pigeon fanciers bred (and still breed!) a huge array of pigeons. And the resulting swarms of released/discarded/escaped/phased out “fancy” pigeons stayed around humans. What else were they going to do? They interbred with wildtype pigeons.

Lots of the pigeons you see in public are feral. They’re not wild animals. They’re citizen animals. They’re genetically engineered. And now that’s what “city” pigeons are.

These “wild” horses are all different colors because they’re actually feral. Mustangs in the American West are the descendants of imported European horses - they’re an invasive domestic species that colonized an ecological niche, but they are domestic animals. Their distinctive patterns were deliberately bred by humans. A few generations of running around on the prairie isn’t going to erase that and turn them back into wildtypes. If you catch an adult mustang and train it for a short period, you can ride it and have it do tricks and make it love you. It’s a domestic animal. You can’t really do that with an adult zebra.

No matter how many generations these dogs stay on the street and interbreed with one another, they won’t turn back into wolves. They can’t. They’re deliberately genetically engineered. If you catch one (even after generations of rough living, even as an adult) you can make it stare at your face, care about your body language, and love you.

City pigeons? Well, you don’t have to like them, but they’re in the same boat. They’re tamed animals, bred on purpose, living in a human community. Their very bodies are marked with their former ownership and allegiance; they cannot really return to what they once were; if you caught one, you could make it love you (in a limited pigeon-y way.) They have gone to “the wild,” but not very far from us, and they’d be happy to come back.

So next time you see a flock of city pigeons, spare a moment to note their diversity. The wing patterns. The pied, mottled and brindled. The color types.

All of it was once meant to please you.

Damion Poitier played Thanos in the Avengers(2012) post-credit scene

Kathleen Cauley played Lavender brown in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secret and Jennifer Smith played Lavender Brown in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 

Now, I want to start by saying I think the peanut panic is actually, ultimately, a good thing.  Because suddenly you had this previously unheard of awareness and caution about deadly food allergies springing up in elementary and middle schools.  

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Suddenly it became seriously not ok to bring in class goodies with nuts of any kind ESPECIALLY peanuts, and those who chose to ignore those warnings were appropriately educated.  One of the kids I went to school with (whose mom was actually my mom’s best friend) went to the ER one day because some kid’s mom decided it wasn’t important enough to keep nuts out of the brownies she sent for the class.  And they were chopped small enough that he didn’t notice and had to be treated for anaphylaxis. (He was ok in the end, but it was pretty terrifying for all involved).

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But the downside of the peanut panic is that even now, there’s this assumption that food allergies always equal death.  So if you have a mild or even moderate food allergy and you try to avoid it- you can often end up in an endless loop of not being allergic enough to be considered allergic.

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Celiacs deal with this A TON.  Aside from the obvious battle to just be taken seriously at all (which is bullshit), there is a lot of- “but it’s not like gluten will KILL YOU so it’s not an allergy.”  

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Except it is.  I have a similar problem with nightshades, so does my sister.  We’re both allergic, in varying degrees, to nightshades. I got lucky and mine is what you might call relapsing/remitting.  (which is a pain in the ass).  Hers though, is not.  For me, when my allergy is active and I eat nightshades (which in case you don’t know is all the delicious veggies like potatoes and tomatoes and peppers and chilis … oh, and eggplant), I end up spending anywhere from  hours to DAYS in the bathroom.  In extreme cases I will not only have… digestive issues? But I’ll also end up throwing up everything I’ve eaten in the last month.  It can get BAD.

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Odds are though, it won’t ever actually kill me. 

But that doesn’t mean I’m not allergic.  My sister experiences her allergy expression in pain.  Body aches and pains all over, constantly, for days.  She didn’t even figure out what was causing it until I mentioned my allergy and she did an elimination diet to test it.

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We are both allergic.  We’re not going to die if we eat a tomato, or have french fries.  But you better believe we make sure it’s worth the pain first.

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The point is- we really need non-allergic people to stop equating all food allergies with death.  Because it’s just not that simple.  And having a non-lethal food allergy is no less valid than having a lethal one.  So when your friend or loved one says, I can’t eat this I’m allergic- don’t flip out and invalidate it just because you know it won’t flat out kill them.  BELIEVE people with food allergies- no matter how severe or uncommon.  And RESPECT those allergies.  Don’t try to be sneaky and slip in things they’ve said they’re allergic to.  Just because it won’t kill them doesn’t make it ok to fuck with someone’s system and you have no idea what kind of misery you’re handing out just because you want to roll your eyes and stay ignorant.

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So those times people screw with you add up.

And things can start having increasingly dangerous consequences.

Lawful: Rules matter more to me than individuals. Chaotic: Individuals matter more to me than rules.

Good: Other people’s well-being is more important than my own. Evil: My own well-being is more important than other people’s.

Neutrals: My opinion of what is more important is determined on a case-by-case basis.

I’m Paige. She/her or they/them.  I have bipolar type 1, ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, and chronic pain syndrome.  I use a cane and a wheelchair, but am mostly homebound and unable to work.  I’m in the super long SSI app process.  Meanwhile, my cripple mum and I are living off her tiny SSDI payments.  I get food stamps, she does not.  I try to get editing work (I have my MA in English), but it’s hard to come by.

My late father’s family has disowned me for identifying as queer/genderqueer (they think it’s a bad word) and “panhandling” (having a fundraiser).  My mother’s family is anti-queer, so we don’t have much support.  I have Celiac disease, and my gluten free food is more expensive than normal; we struggle to pay for food when the food stamps run out.

You aren’t educating anyone when you do that. You’re pity-seeking and you’re embarrassing the disabled / autistic person unless they gave you permission to mention their diapers. If the person’s development progresses in a way to let them be mainstreamed in school (even if part-time), their peers will be relentless. Yes, the stuff you blog is seen by everyone unless your blog is strictly private.

But most caregivers never friggin’ consider that. (Sarcasm) It’s all about them and how they are affected by living with an autistic / disabled person, right? (/sarcasm)

Stephen Hawking managed to go through the last years of his life without the internet knowing what’s under his trousers. I think you caregivers can afford the same dignity to the autistic / disabled person in your life.

I just showed my 11-year-old son how many coffee shop AUs there are on AO3.

Why?

He sat down the other day to write a Minecraft story about three kids who go through a portal in their back yard and end up in the world of Minecraft where they have to battle all the big bosses (I didn’t even realize there WERE big bosses in Minecraft but that’s beside the point). He wrote three chapters with a little input from me – his first beta – and y'all?

He was fucking excited. To be writing a story.

Today he came home from school and seemed a little down, so I asked him about it only to find out that some little asshole at his school told him, “There is already a Minecraft story.”

Me: Okay? So what?

Lucifer: If there’s already a story, no one will read mine.

Immediately, I dragged him in and pulled up my AO3 account. My boys know I write fanfiction, so I showed him my account and how many subscribers I have. Then I showed him how many Teen Wolf stories there are. And then, because it seemed like the perfect analogy, I said, “What if I wrote a story where two characters meet in a coffee shop and fall in love? No werewolves, nothing at all to do with the actual Teen Wolf universe. Just Stiles and Derek meet in a coffeeshop and fall in love.”

He laughed.

I showed him Mornings Aren’t For Everyone. Showed him how many hits it had, how many kudos, how many lovely comments.

Then I said, “So do you think, if anyone else wrote a story about those exact same characters meeting in a coffee shop and falling in love… would anyone read it?”

He laughed and said, “No because you already did.”

So I clicked on the Sterek tag and refined to coffee shop AU. His mind was blown to see that they ALL had thousands of hits and kudos and comments. Then I clicked on JUST the coffee shop AU tag and showed him all the fics across all the fandoms written by countless different people.

I’m going to tell you all now what I told him because it applies to everyone.

Write your story. It doesn’t matter that someone else has written a story about that subject. They didn’t write YOUR story. Only you can do that.