collage

The Need to Stay

In fact, I love wordplay of all kinds. Teenage me was fascinated to learn all the types of figurative language there are in poetry and literature.

But paperwork and questionnaires are hard, because there's so much they don't state clearly. Or they don't leave room for enough nuance.

"List all the jobs you've had, with start and end dates." What if I don't remember the exact day or month? Is the year enough?

"Have you been suffering from blurred vision?" Well, if I take off my glasses the whole world is blurred, but I'm fairly sure that's not what the intake form at the optometrist is asking.

Or the infamous (and infuriatingly stereotypical) "Would you rather go to a library or a party?" What sort of party? Where? Who's there? I work at a library. Am I currently at the library for work or pleasure? Does it have a good collection?

Heya! I am assuming these are leather hiking or work boots.

Remove the laces and clean those seperately.

Brush off the big mud chunks and then wipe the boots down with a damp cloth.

Use a clean damp cloth and rub in saddle soap in overlapping little circles until foamy, then wipe off again with a fresh damp cloth.

Let the boots air dry.

Coat with mink oil (little overlapping circles again with a cloth) or other conditioner of your choice and let dry.

Buff with a soft flannel-like cloth and/or horsehair brush.

Put the laces back on.

This does require 2 speciality products, but a tin each of saddle soap and mink oil last a very long time and can be used for other leather goods.

The process for dress shoes depends on how much you care, but if you care a lot, I recommend this video:

You also want to avoid over conditioning - too much conditioner just sits on the surface, captures grit, and becomes an abrasive that massively reduces the life of your shoes.

If your boots or shoes are rough out - looks like suede but has the smooth side of the leather still attached on the inside - you really can just brush them for the most part. You can still use saddle soap on suede, it will just take brushing to get the nap back. You also can (and should with heavy use) use a conditioner. A good balanced one is Bicks 4, whereas a more heavy duty one is Obenaufs (I probably misspelled that). Apply according to the directions, let dry, then brush to bring back the nap. A boar bristle brush is good for more aggressive, and horse hair is good for day to day.

Try to brush any leather boot after wearing - if you don't let dirt build up, it can wear away at the leather. A dry cloth works well for day to day dust too, and then a just barely damp cloth for mild to moderate mud.

Regular maintenance should mainly need just the brush and cloth.

and like the reality is that if you fumble a conversation or accidentally say something that the other person takes issue with or do something embarrassing, it actually is not a high stakes situation. it's simply not. it's one of the lowest stakes types of social interactions it is possible to have. and I think probably why it took me a long time to get used to, and why it often takes other people (especially neurodivergent queer ppl!) a long time to get used to, is that you need to build up a number of interactions in your memory database in which either you or someone else fuck up in a minor embarrassing way and NOTHING BAD HAPPENS. that's the fastest and best way to get over this. which is scary! but! crucially ITS NOT AS SCARY AS REMAINING ISOLATED FOREVER AND BEING TERRIFIED OF OTHER HUMAN BEINGS.

the thing I did that helped me with this as a young autistic person was that I gameified interactions in my head. by which I mean I would literally practice having low stakes pleasant Chats with strangers like, at shops I went to etc, and every time the other person was clearly pleased to be having the chat with me or they laughed at something I said or it was just a pleasant interaction, I would play a little Mario Party Coin Get! noise in my head for myself. this worked INCREDIBLY well and I was able to develop pretty strong small talk skills pretty quickly after implementing it. obviously I still fuck up like... regularly and obviously I still remember and often dwell on the negative interactions because at the end of the day I am very neurotic about socializing. but I have also made myself into someone who is largely pleasant for strangers to talk to. and there's a small number of really simple guidelines I follow to do that, like truly really simple things like "asking people low stakes questions about themselves" and "showing interest in what people say" and so on. I have had people who met me at age 23 meet me again a few years later and be like "who the fuck ARE you you straight up DIDN'T SPEAK TO ME before" and I had to be like "yeah sorry. I hadn't developed those skills yet" lol. which was itself an awkward conversation, but also? I was fine. nobody died.

I really like to learn things, so reframing interacting with strangers as Learning Things really helped me also. every person is a rich mine of information and you can discover many interesting things by talking to them! <- extremely autism statement but w/e. you have to customize your approach to how your own brain works and not pressure yourself to do things the way you perceive other people as doing them.

Good parents forgive this debt. Bad parents expect it to be repaid, one way or another. The accepted currencies are varied and cryptic and might be mostly innocuous or they might be horrifically criminal.

Many families don’t realize that there is a debt until the child defaults on it somehow. That could be for any reason—the child simply fails to deliver on the parental investment by not adequately being the child they paid for.

if you're learning HTML for any reason, i can't recommend HTML for people highly enough. it's a fantastic introduction to HTML and CSS targeted towards beginners who aren't technically inclined, and it isn't patronizing towards the reader for that. it's a very relaxed and kind (but informative) resource that even i reference from time to time (and i consider myself pretty good with semantic HTML).