The Trials and Tribulations of a Transfer Guy

no, your friend probably has not noticed they cut you off four times in this conversation. 

no, your brother didn’t realize his music was that loud while you were studying. 

no, your bff or S.O. doesn’t remember that you’re on a tight deadline right now.

no, no one else is paying attention to the four power dynamics at play in your friend group right now.  

a habit of abused kids, especially kids with unstable parents, is the tendency to notice every little detail. We magnify small nuances into major things, largely because small nuances quickly became breaking points for parents. Managing moods, reading the room, perceiving danger in the order of words, the shift of body weight….it’s all a natural outgrowth of trying to manage unstable parents from a young age. 

Here’s the thing: most people don’t do that. I’m not saying everyone else is oblivious, I’m saying the over analysis of minor nuances is a habit of abuse. 

I have a rule: I do not respond to subtext. This includes guilt tripping, silent treatments, passive aggressive behavior, etc. I see it. I notice it. I even sometimes have to analyze it and take a deep breath and CHOOSE not to respond. Because whether it’s really there or just me over-reading things that actually don’t mean anything, the habit of lending credence to the part of me that sees danger in the wrong shift of body weight…that’s toxic for me. And dangerous to my relationships. 

If your anxiety, depression, or executive dysfunction is making you scroll endlessly on your phone or laptop

Stop

It’s okay, I’m not mad. It happens to everybody sometimes. It’s frustrating, isn’t it? But it’s time to get up now.

Don’t worry! You don’t have to do that

One Thing,

just get yourself a glass of water for now, or brush your teeth, or pet a cat.

After you’ve done that, maybe you could make yourself a nice cocoa, or open a window. If you’re feeling really crazy you might finish a homework problem, or respond to an e-mail, or wash a dish.

But no matter what, if you get up then you’re moving forward, and I’m

super proud of you!

I know you’re having a difficult time, but I’m really glad you’ve made it this far, and I love you!

I cannot stress enough how incredibly dangerous this is.  I believe that they recently changed the law to stop making generic older insulin available without prescription specifically to prevent people from trying this trick which will absolutely kill you.   

Don’t even change from one brand to another without checking with an expert or, again, YOU WILL DIE.  For example, if you take Lantus (which I take) and ran out and wanted to borrow someone’s Tresiba (which my aunt takes) by injecting the same amount I normally do…..I would quite possibly die and/or gorge myself on ice cream for 24 hours to stave off death because Tresiba is twice as strong as Lantus.

The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Reblog this and bold the titles you’ve read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 34 Emma – Jane Austen 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

A new paper about how people with synesthesia map colours onto vowels. Abstract: 

We report associations between vowel sounds, graphemes, and colors collected online from over 1,000 Dutch speakers. 

We also provide open materials, including a Python implementation of the structure measure and code for a single-page web application to run simple cross-modal tasks. We also provide a full dataset of color–vowel associations from 1,164 participants, including over 200 synesthetes identified using consistency measures. Our analysis reveals salient patterns in the cross-modal associations and introduces a novel measure of isomorphism in cross-modal mappings. 

We found that, while the acoustic features of vowels significantly predict certain mappings (replicating prior work), both vowel phoneme category and grapheme category are even better predictors of color choice. Phoneme category is the best predictor of color choice overall, pointing to the importance of phonological representations in addition to acoustic cues. 

Generally, high/front vowels are lighter, more green, and more yellow than low/back vowels. Synesthetes respond more strongly on some dimensions, choosing lighter and more yellow colors for high and mid front vowels than do nonsynesthetes. 

We also present a novel measure of cross-modal mappings adapted from ecology, which uses a simulated distribution of mappings to measure the extent to which participants’ actual mappings are structured isomorphically across modalities. Synesthetes have mappings that tend to be more structured than nonsynesthetes’, and more consistent color choices across trials correlate with higher structure scores. 

Nevertheless, the large majority (~ 70%) of participants produce structured mappings, indicating that the capacity to make isomorphically structured mappings across distinct modalities is shared to a large extent, even if the exact nature of the mappings varies across individuals. Overall, this novel structure measure suggests a distribution of structured cross-modal association in the population, with synesthetes at one extreme and participants with unstructured associations at the other.

I wanted to ignore him, but my temper, as always, got the best of me. “That’s all thanks to you, isn’t it?!” I snapped out loud, regretting the words as soon as they were out. 

Despite my harsh tone, his smile got wider. It was the first time I’d spoken to him in ages. I would have thought he would have gotten bored by now. 

“How is any of this my fault, darling?” He stood up, towering over me as he got closer. “I gave you a gift, proof of my love, and all you had to do was love me back.” His face was only inches away. “But you spat in my face, and now you have to live with the consequences.” 

And that was the real reason he stuck around so much. He wanted to see me suffer, to cry and rage against the unfairness of it all. To turn to him for help, to beg for mercy…

Too bad, I wasn’t the begging type. 

“Not my fault.” I shrugged, grinning at him, “If only you were actually lovable.” I had to laugh as his face darkened. A loud crack sounded out as my whole house shifted slightly on its foundation. It was noon outside, but I couldn’t see the sunlight through the window. 

“I am adored by thousands. You mean nothing.” His words were spat out, his rage so thick it was difficult to breath. 

“If I mean nothing then don’t waste your time here.” I made a shooing motion with one hand while turning away, effectively showing how little I cared about his presence.

There were a few tense moments of silence. I wondered if I had pushed him too far. I couldn’t regret it though. This jerk was the sole cause of all my pain and misery in life. 

Some guys just can’t take no for an answer. 

“Foolish girl, you’ll beg for mercy when I’m done.” His snarl made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, but I didn’t turn around. The room quieted down, and not sensing him behind me anymore, I turned to find an empty room. I let out a sigh, resting my face in trembling hands. 

“That… wasn’t smart.” 

Back when I was in high school, I sat for the pledge to protest the Iraq War. This was in 2002-2003 when people were hyper-patriotic and nationalistic, slightly more than you see today (though still maddening today).

Anyway, I got sent to the principle’s office and so on and so forth, and teachers and administrators wanted to punish me.

However, thanks to a law teacher, I was well educated. If you decide to sit, please keep in mind Tinker vs. Des Moines. That is a Supreme Court law  that states students do not relinquish their Constitutional rights when they enter school. This means you have the freedom to protest, as long as it’s peaceful and not disruptive to school, such as wearing an armband or sitting for the pledge.