Snek Sister Storm

I decided to create something that I wish I had when I first got diagnosed with autism - so here’s my comic for ASDComicTakeover! You can find out more about the project here!

My therapist has been helping me find a reward system that works for me, and as it turns out, gold star stickers are really helpful for making me feel like a tangible goal was met, and helps give me that sweet, sweet dopamine release that comes with completing a task, something which us ADHD’ers really struggle to achieve and are already coming at from a disadvantage with our brains regularly not producing enough “happy” hormones as it is.

It was supposed to be “a sticker for every time you finish a chapter”, but after some revision, my therapist said that was too tall of a goal, and that I should pick something smaller. So instead I now get a star every time I finish a 500-word milestone, placing the sticker in my writing calendar/journal thing that I use to keep track of my writing, and ironically, I have started to produce more work than when I was stiving for one chapter a day.

To give you an idea of how staggeringly effective this has been for me, I’ve written over 30k of original fiction in the last week. (75k total if you include my social media and blog stuff, which I currently do not but likely should.)

So this is what it looked like when I was attempting to do a chapter of edits and revisions a day during the month of December 2019 (note: I was supposed to start this in Nov, so you can see how well that worked out for me lol):

ID: A calendar showing days of the month with a shiny star sticker showing a completed task.

And this is what my writing journal looks like now that I’m doing a star for every 500 words:

ID: an image of a handwritten journal with the dates mapped out, followed by a shiny star sticker for every completed 500-word milestone. There are 65 stars in total for the month of January 2020. It’s also tinged by a green light cause I’m doing a chronic pain experiment, so far with positive results!

So as of today, January 8th, with ever star = 500 words, then 65*500 = 32500 words totalled in 7 days. This does not include, like I said, my social media output where I am far more productive, this is just my fiction and some editing work for friends.

(Which side note: this is not to flex, or to say that others should be able to achieve this level of output. I am a professional writer, this is my main job and only source of income. And also, I was forged in the fires of understaffed editing hell where we would be expected to churn out 100k+ a week in edits and revisions to keep on track. I have the time and a learned skillset I have spent years amassing to be able to do this and am working towards a rigid deadline. I simply have not been healthy enough in a long time to manage it, and am finally working my way back up to speed after years of illness. Don’t look at this and think, “I’m not achieving enough”, every victory no matter how small is worth celebrating. And I say that with the utmost sincerity, as someone who spent most of the last 2-3 years unable to get out of bed.)

I’ve also started using it to help keep track of bills and chores around the home. So every time something gets done/done on time, whoever completed the task gets a star on the calendar. This includes Oppy the Not-A-Roomba, who does a very good job of taking care of the house on a daily basis:

ID: an image of a chore calendar denoting various tasks that have been marked off with a holographic silver star sticker, including our robot vacuum who does an excellent job and deserves all the stars. (Our names got blurred out cause ETD doesn’t want his real name out there in the world, so that’s what is blurry.)

This system is useful for several reasons, the primary one being a sense of achievement and continued motivation, and the second, to allow you to review each month to see where you are doing well, and where you might otherwise be struggling.

For example, if I have a bad day for writing or decide to take a day off, I write that down in the calendar rather than leaving it blank, so that I have a record of what went wrong (or right, if I am electing to self care that day and take a day off) and how my overall progress is doing.

In terms of house stuff, this has been especially useful for ETD and myself, as it shows us where we are managing to do a good job with the house, and where our executive dysnfunction issues really trip us up and where we need to make improvements. And I don’t just mean in an “I should try harder way”, I mean you have to actively sit down and be like “hey! What is preventing me from completing this thing” and trying to figure out effective ways to either get around it or resolve a larger issue at hand.

So for us, the biggest thing we tend to miss is doing dishes after dinner, meaning we get left with a pile-up of dishes to deal with first thing in the morning, and my ADHD can’t handle that. It won’t let me eat until I’ve cleared all the mess, but I usually don’t have the energy to clean up if I haven’t eaten, so it’s this awful cycle of ineptitude. We’re doing better with the star reward system, cause it’s showing us our progress loud and clear on the fridge door, but we are both usually so fatigued and exhausted by the end of dinner that doing dishes is just one thing too many for our mutual disorders. So, the solution for this would, of course, be a dishwasher, cause if we had one of those, we could load stuff in, turn it on, and let those dishes get done while we go to bed then put them away in the morning. We can’t afford to do that right now, and we have other appliances we need to buy/replace before we can do that (still don’t have a tumble dryer, or a washer I can access, rip) but it does give us a tangible goal to work toward, and also, the motivation to keep on top of things because it goes from “an endless task with no end in sight” to “there’s a solution for this, we can manage a while longer.”

Now you could be saying, but Joy, I’m an adult! Surely I shouldn’t expect rewards for completing every day tasks that I should be able to do?!

To which I say, neurotypical people get rewards all the time and get an unconscious dose of dopamine/serotonin from their brains every time they complete a task. They’re playing the game of life on easy mode, the gold star is your achievement for completing it daily on Nintendo 99 hard mode. IF THE STICKER WORKS, TAKE THE STICKER

So. Here is what I am looking for: an app or program that let's me do this automatically or at least semi-automatically. I want to set a buy price and two sale prices (one just below the buy price to hedge losses and one at a few dollars above.)

I dont need or want anything else. No analytics or stock histories or financial news links. Nothing. Just a way to pick a couple of stocks, give each of them a starting allowance, and watch them go. Maybe clicking a "confirm" button every once in a while if I have to. Oh wait, I need a cash out option. I suppose I do need that.

20190127

Another design is using 2 20x25x1 filters, taping them to the sides of the box fan and then to each other so they sort of make a triangle, then cutting cardboard to make a top and bottom to the triangle.

This was discovered as a more effective design during the 2020 US west coast fires.

https://tombuildsstuff.blogspot.com/2013/06/better-box-fan-air-purifier.html

- Shades of white in Europe range from ‘freshly fallen snow’ to ‘I am frequently mistaken as being from the Middle East’

- White European is a thing. When you fill out a form, under ethnicity, there are several options for white; white British, white European, white other. Because people make that distinction

- There are Europeans who don’t class their ethnicity as their skin colour, but as their nationality. I have family who don’t think of themselves as white, they just think of themselves as Italian and don’t really give much thought to their skin colour

- People here in Britain always question if darker skinned white Europeans are ‘actually white’. I get it a lot myself. My response is always ‘well I’m not anything else, so obviously I must be’

- Despite being white, a lot of Europeans from Italy, Greece, Spain etc, don’t feel white in the traditional sense. We’re not white like white British people. We’re not white like white Americans. We’re our own white. White British is one thing. White Italian is another thing. White Greek is another, etc

- Which is why we have this notion here in Europe of ‘nationality over race’. Being white isn’t as important as where you’re from

- So this really only becomes an issue if you’re an immigrant

- So being white in Europe doesn’t save you from racial discrimination, because sure, you’re technically white, but you’re not white white. Not the right white

- Here in England, Europeans with really blatantly foreign names, such as myself, find it more difficult to get job interviews, because they take one look at our name and don’t bother reading the rest of the CV. A guy I know was actually told by his boss to reduce the pile of CVs he had by ‘chucking away any with a name you can’t fucking pronounce’

- And then even when you do get an interview, half the time you walk into the joint several shades darker than everyone else and feel like you’ve walked into the ‘Swedish supermodel’ clubhouse and you just know you’re not getting hired

(That’s Mila Kunis. She was born in the Ukraine.)

(Sebastian Stan. From Constanta, Romania.)

(Mia Wasikowska, from Poland)

(Nina Dobrev, who was born in Bulgaria.)

They are white! Just because they are white, it doesn’t mean people from their countries cannot face horrible discrimination, and it doesn’t mean that they can’t be constantly told that they don’t work as hard as people from Western Europe, and that they don’t deserve basic human rights.

But as somebody who has lived in England and the US, I can vouch for all of this. The race issues in Europe and the race issues in the US are not the same.

For the last few years, there has been an awful backlash against immigrants from Poland, with some of the same language used that Americans use about “Mexicans” (By which, half the time, they mean anyone from south of the US/Mexico border).

It’s worth understanding that

1. Racism and discrimination are everywhere.

I was yelled at in the street because a lady thought I was Polish. People have pushed their chairs into my parents and insulted them in a restaurant because they were recognised as Germans.

Less than 100 years ago we were considered mongoloid (and while it’s not entirely wrong, though Uralic or North-West Asian and Caucasian mix would be lot more accurate), and were oppressed by another nation (Russia) that tried to enforce cultural and linguistic genocide on us, and before that we were oppressed and practically enslaved by Sweden, not all that differently as in any other colonized nation–which we were for 800 years.

I’d like to point out that also italian people have faced discrimination from other european countries. We were, and sadly often still are, always seen as part of the mafia and therefore dangerous, or inferior and poor (y’all can find signs saying pretty nasty stuff online, and i’m leaving this here even tho it’s in Italian), i’ve heard a lady telling his son to stay away from me and my family because we were speaking italian and so we could do “bad things” to him and there were times when in shops we were made feel not welcome because we are italian…..and guess what my family is white.

“What are you talking about?” say my sister and I. ‘There are two Italian guys RIGHT THERE.” 

“OMG you cannot say Italian people are not white,” he says.

“Yes we fucking can,” says the Italian friend watching the show with us, deeply offended. 

And then we had to pause it and a lot of complex explanations ensued. (Including the fact that Greek and Italian people generally aren’t considered White in Australia and in fact many a Nonna will smack you if you suggest otherwise.)

Basically, ‘white’ is a category upon which no two cultures/countries can agree on the definition, they all think they have the only possible definition, and it usually boils down to Preferred Flavours of Bigotry.

The kicker is that our royal family has been allochtoon for generations. Our reigning queen is from Argentina, so our princesses are all allochtoon.

Except the government now changed the terminology, because ‘allochtoon had negative connotations’ (go figure). It’s now ‘people with a migration background’, but the term still functions the same. The government is still profiling these people more heavily for tax and social benefits fraud, especially the ‘people with a non-western migration background’, which is a whole different can of worms.

‘Non-western migration background’ is not as straight forward as you’d think. Indonesia, for example, is considered western, because it used to be a Dutch colony. But Curacao is not considered a western country, even though it’s still part of the Dutch kingdom. The government’s categories of western and non-western have more to do with how close you are to the equator than whether you are West or East on the map.

allwilderness

To any kids out there: I know that quarantine is stressful and we’re all depressed and lonely bu please please please don’t give out your information to strangers on the internet, and if you do there are dozens of safer options than just giving everything to everyone and just hoping for the best

books read in 2020 ✨

“Howl’s moving castle” by Diana Wynne Jonnes

There’s a running joke among people who know me personally that I unwittingly go out in public with a sign on my forehead stating “I Am Non-Threatening. Come Talk To Me.” Because if there’s a chance a bizarre conversation with a total stranger is going to happen, I’m typically the person it happens to.

Some context: I have been pretty darn sick this week. (It’s not Coronavirus, don’t worry.) Since the work in my queue for my day job is comprised entirely of audio narration right now, and I currently sound like a waterlogged Demi Moore, I haven’t been able to work these last couple of days. As a result, I’ve been using my down time to knock out as much of Manu’s redesign as possible. Today, to ensure I didn’t spend the day languishing in sinus misery, I medicated the crap out of myself and took Manu to the Starbucks down the block from my son’s day care.

I hit the bathroom, then picked an empty table, but as soon as I sat down with my venti Comfort Tea and started tweaking the inks on my iPad, I felt the eyes of the man next to me looking over my shoulder.

When I looked up, he had his phone out. “I’m sorry,” he said (in a thick accent I couldn’t place geographically), “I don’t want to disturb. I notice you art. You are artist!”

I tried to smile. “Yes, I’m... Well, I’m trying to be,” I croaked.

He leaned in, like he was sharing a secret.

“I am artist, too.”

He stuck out his hand.

I gently took it, grateful for the bathroom trip I just took in which I washed the scourge off of my fingers.

“Can I?” he asked, holding his phone up.

“Take a picture? Uh... sure,” I said. It’s not like he would be able to steal Manu out from under me or anything, I figured. The panel I was tweaking was magnified out to Guam.

“I am artist. Architect and Designer,” he clarified while he steadied his phone over my iPad. “I am Ilker. What is your name?”

“I’m Venessa” I said, trying to be polite. This, I thought warily, is precisely how I get myself into trouble. I’m too damn nice.

“You know, I come to America twenty years ago from Turkey...”

I put down my stylus. This was going to be a while.

“I like Turkey,” he explained. “I like the country and I like the people. But I am artist. I am not... religious man.”

I nodded.

“I told my wife I was going to go to America and she said, “what are you going to do? You don’t have job! You don’t have money! No Visa!” And I said, “I am artist and architect. I will paint and sell my paintings.

“So I come to America alone. To New York City. I sit outside, and I paint. And people, they liked my paintings. They bought them. This one for $30, that one for $50.

“One day, a man comes over to me and he say, “I like your painting. I see you are also architect.” And he gives me his number and asks me to go to meeting at his office. Because he wants to offer me a job. He starts to talk about a building contract.

“I tell him I don’t know anything about contracts. I have no Visa. I am not American citizen. But he says, “That’s okay. I will take care of everything. You will have nothing to worry about.” And this man, he gave me a job. $173,000 a year. And my wife, he gave her a job too. She was project assistant. I bring her and my two daughters over from Turkey.”

“Wow,” I said, not fully believing the veracity of what sounded like a full-on immigration fairy tale.

“Here,” said Ilker, unlocking his phone and opening up his Facebook app. “I show you my work.” He paused and looked up at me. “I am interrupting. You don’t mind?”

At this point, I was invested. I had to see. Because whatever he was about to show me would either prove or disprove this yarn he was spinning. “Please,” I said, gesturing for him to go ahead.

He opened his photos and my jaw dropped. His work... was UNREAL.

“This is building I designed on Madison Ave.... And this one in Chelsea...”

Holy crap. I had just been to Chelsea with my sister last month on a trip to see a broadway show. I had crossed the intersection of the building he was, at this moment, telling me he designed.

He flipped through more buildings. These, he’d designed in Washington, DC. In Bethesda. In Arlington. All beautiful, streamlined, modern structures I had visited and parked my car in front of. He told me he did much of his concept work freehand. That he worked exclusively in natural media. His preferred media was pen, ink, watercolors, and chalks.

Between photos of his wife and daughters, he went on to show me photos from the RUSSIAN EXHIBITION OF HIS ARCHITECTURE ARTWORK.

Y’all, I was stunned. I couldn’t believe the talent I was sitting next to. Scattered among these gloriously rendered images of some of the most beautiful building concepts I’d ever seen were paintings of scenes in Central Park, the National Mall, and nudes from a life-drawing session he attends from time to time.

When he was done flipping through his phone, he looked at me and smiled. “I hope you don’t mind that I interrupt you. I show you all this because what you are doing is very good. And you should be encouraged. To draw is to make beauty.”

I nodded, a lump in my throat. “Thank you,” I managed. “Your work is astonishing. I don’t even know what to say. What is your name again?”

He held out his hand once more. “Ilker Kocahan,” he said. “I am getting more coffee. Can I get you one?”

I looked at my still-full venti cup. “No thank you. But here, please take my card.”

He held my dinky business card like I’d handed him a treasure and thanked me.

Then Ilker got his coffee, and left the coffee shop.

At some point in his ramblings he talked about America as a place of dreams. How he credits this country with helping him rise to the top of his field where he is now able to sell his paintings for $800-$1000 a piece now that he’s retired. My heart ached to hear him talk about that, knowing how our leadership’s positions on immigrants have taken such a dark and horrifying turn.

Imagine the buildings and museums and public places that would never have been if a business man in the park hadn’t lifted up a Turkish painter who spoke little English.

And now that painter was paying it forward on me.

I still feel pretty darn sick. I’ve still got body aches and a nose that has taken the rest of my face hostage.

But today was a really good day. And I just wanted to share it with you in case you are looking for reasons to keep drawing/painting/dancing/writing. It all counts and it is all good.

If you would like to see Ilker Kocohan’s work, please click here.

As luck would have it, I saw Ilker one last time before my area received the mandate to start social distancing. I came into the Starbucks to work on the “Simon Is On the Ground” comic while waiting to pick up my kid from day care, and there he was, happily chatting with the Starbucks manager, who gifted him with a Starbucks hat while I ordered my tea.

A week had passed since our first meeting, so I wasn’t sure he’d recognize me. Lo and behold, as I turned the corner, I caught his eye, and he waved at me. This time, I asked if I might sit with him, and he warmly offered the seat beside him.

While I settled in, he told me that his project was being delayed and that he was going to leave the area and fly home before COVID-19 could make it impossible to travel. The hat was for his wife, whose only understanding of Starbucks was that Ilker really liked the coffee.

As one might expect, we immediately fell into another conversation about art, except this time, I eagerly abandoned my work to hear him talk.

And friends, did I ever get a master class.

He pulled up a painting on his phone which he’d sold for $800. It was a life drawing in ink and watercolor of a woman in a demure gesture, barely detailed and colored in but for her rose-tinted lips and the shadow cast across her neck. He said he felt sad that he’d sold it because he really loved how it came out.

“This is no detailed like yours,” he said, comparing his painting to my panel of Simon and Baz. “Mine is simple. But in a few strokes, I can capture the life of the lady.”

He took his napkin, turned it over, and pulled a pen out of his chest pocket. “Look there,” he said, pointing to a man sitting a few tables away. He began to scribble away on the napkin, lines and lines and more lines. “You see,” he murmured as he ran his pen over the napkin, “I can, with speed, capture the man. I don’t have hours to ask him to sit. I must let go of the planning.”

In seconds, the man across the room took shape on the napkin in a series of confident if also messy lines. It was incredible to watch.

I could instantly see what he meant. He had not produced a photorealistic version of this person on the napkin. But he had captured the man’s essence. The aura of a real person sitting contemplatively with his coffee while reading the Washington Post. I could feel the life of the drawing radiate from the paper.

(When he was done, to my horror, he crumpled up the napkin.)

I shyly mentioned that I’ve been working hard on my own gesture drawing, but had a long way to go, so he asked to see my sketchbook.

I mean... is there even a word in the English language to describe the combination of dread and embarrassment that precedes showing an art master your crap-ass sketchbook that no one sees but you? I didn’t know what to do with myself as he sat there and flipped through the pages.

Eventually, he nodded approvingly and said, “Okay! Is good. But this is sketchbook like every other.” He gestured at the page. “Where are you?”

I was lost for how to respond, but lucky for me, he’s a talkative guy seemingly incapable of awkward silences.

“The world needs to see you in the lines,” he explained. “Someone can look at my work and know, ‘that painting is from Ilker Kocahan.’ You need to draw more and more so that when people look at your drawings, they will know: this work is Venessa’s work.” Then he shrugged and said, “And who knows. I will maybe see you in two years at this Starbucks, and by then, your drawings will be truly yours.”

I’ve shared this story with some close friends who took mild offense on my behalf at his observations, but I really think it took sitting there watching him draw to understand exactly what he was talking about.

Ilker Kocahan has no imposter syndrome. He is supremely confident in every possible way where his art is concerned. The lines that flowed from his pen were fueled by his soul, not his brain. I didn’t think artists like him existed anymore until I was sitting there looking over his shoulder while he scribbled a man into existence, like it was nothing. When I asked if he plots out the perspective on his building sketches in advance, he shook his head no and doodled this on my cake pop wrapper while he rambled on about the components he likes to include in his architecture concepts:

(Don’t worry. I kept it.)

So when he talked about “finding me” in my sketches, I really think he could sense—by the light scratch of the pencil, the trace evidence on the paper of my erasing and failed attempts—my own lack of confidence, my second guessing and self-doubt. My desire to be as good as other artists instead of my desire to express myself.

And in that sense, everything he was saying about my sketchbook was correct. He urged me to get off the iPad as often as possible. To sketch with ink, which is riskier because you can’t erase it, and in that way, give myself no choice but to commit to the lines.

The conversation turned to lighter things after that. He’s apparently an extremely talented basketball player who loves hanging out with his wife and kids. His daughters are both designers. He thinks quirky viral videos are the best thing about the internet. (I agreed.) He’s weak for New York pizza.

Eventually, he bought me a refill for my tea and asked if I would meet him again in a couple of days so he could talk to me about my artwork and help me with my sketching. He even added me as a Facebook friend. When I left the Starbucks to pick up Colin, I was so excited and overwhelmed and grateful to the universe for bringing me into his acquaintance, I texted everyone in my family about it.

But as fate would have it, that night, the local government released its mandate regarding social distancing. He’s likely in Belarus right now with his wife.

I won’t lie and say I’m not devastated that I lost the chance to be his student for an afternoon. But the impression these coffee shop chats left on me was profound. I think about it all the time. For one who struggles with feeling like the artist version of Pinocchio waiting around for permission to be a real boy, it makes all the difference in the world to linger in the huge, unstoppable energy of someone who lives without an inner critic.

I hope I get to see him again after the quarantine is over. I’d love to see if I can fulfill Ilker’s prophecy and meet back at that Starbucks in two years with a different sketchbook in tow. One that I can hand over knowing without doubt or trepidation that anyone looking for me in the work need look no further than the bold stroke of my hand.

Taken the last time we chatted:

That said, you can imagine how my heart sank when last night he sent a message out to his Facebook friends letting us know he contracted Coronavirus and has been hospitalized. He’s been ill for two weeks now.

I asked for his consent to share this with friends in case it could inspire some good vibes, and he agreed. If you felt moved by his wisdom and kindness in the above posts and feel inclined to send a healing thought his way today, I would be grateful. While I believe his constitution is strong thanks to his being so active, this virus doesn’t discriminate, and the world needs humans like Ilker Kocahan right now. (Or at least, I do.)

I am happy to report that he is back home from the hospital as of this week and reportedly feeling better. He said he feels extremely lucky and credited his healthy/happy lifestyle for his resilience via text message. I quote: 

“No smoking No Drunk Basketball Good food Family life enjoying And happy character” 

While he was in the hospital he generously texted me photos of little notes he’d scrawled on paper napkins of his vitals (temperature, blood pressure, blood O2 levels) since I had asked him to keep me posted. Of all the notes he sent, this one was the most interesting, as it shows they’ve been making patients sleep in a prone position with some kind of ventilation over the face, presumably to leverage gravity in opening up the lungs?

Anyway, I’m so grateful to everyone who sent well wishes and look forward to passing along those kind messages to him after this. Thank you, thank you for those good vibes.  ❤️

I hope that if and when I ever come down with something scary like COVID, I can handle it with as much grace as this guy right here:

Loki, holding up the newest baby Lion King-style: IT’S!!!!! A WOLF!!!”