Things I think about things I see

just because you’re doing something to cope doesn’t mean it’s not hurting you, or that it isn’t hurting others.

sometimes, coping mechanisms hurt other people, like compulsive lying or constantly expecting your partner to give you reassurance every second of the day. sometimes, your coping mechanisms harm your recovery even though they feel good at the time. sometimes, your coping mechanisms just further entrench you in whatever you’re struggling with.

So right now there are pretty crazy right-wing nationalist sexists in Japan. They’re dressing up in WWII military outfits, they’re standing outside of Korean schools (in Japan) shouting that Koreans should be killed, and just generally being horrible human beings. For reasons unknown, the Japanese police haven’t done anything to stop them, and when people get physical with the right-wingers and a fight breaks out, it’s not the right-wing people who get punished.

Enter: the Yakuza.

Yakuza, for those who don’t know, is the name for the world of Japanese gangs, commonly known for being covered in tattoos. A few retired yakuza members (most of whom are notoriously and vocally conservative) got tired of this extreme right wing BS. They believe that picking on people who are weaker than you, like the children at the Korean schools or refugees, is embarrassing, and not something to be proud of. They want these right wingers to man up (the group is almost entirely men) and shut up.

These old retired yakuzas start showing up at the right wing protests and intimidate the hell out of these guys. When they feel like it, they’ll use physical force too. The police don’t mess with the yakuza so these right wing protesters become human punching bags. All their talk of killing Koreans or their superiority to just about everyone flies out the window when these gangsters roll up.

It started with only one or two yakuza who were bored and fed up, but more and more started to come. They started training in boxing and street fighting, and wouldn’t you know it…the number of right wing protesters got less and less.

Then, people of other walks of life joined in too. With the yakuza throwing the police off, professors could join by writing about the issues profusely. Suddenly a ton of otakus joined too, using their art and community to protest. They’d show up in droves and stand behind the muscle (yakuza) and make a ton of noise. They literally staged an “otakus against racists” rally.

Slowly, the protests have seen the right wing attendance drop more and more and I am living for these “manly men” being trashed by retired gangsters and fans of Love Live.

In conclusion:

First, I’d like the extreme right wing to gtfo

A lot of folks in the comments are talking about writing on themselves or setting phone/calendar reminders. Your mileage may vary on those. You may also want to consider ways to set a habit of referring back to a planner or similar every day/hour.

To get those brain juices flowing, check out this Buzzfeed article on different ways folks with ADHD stay on top of things.

VISUAL BACKGROUND NOISE?!

These women are not nasty, they are not evil, they are women who were so excited to welcome their little one into this world. They are women who had a nursery set up and baby clothes bought. They are women who excitedly waited for their due date, took belly photos and updated the world on how their pregnancy was coming along. They are the women who woke up one day and felt that their baby wasn’t moving anymore. They are the women that felt in their gut that something was terribly wrong, just to have their worst fears confirmed.

They are the women who went to a regular checkup to find out that their baby is severely deformed and won’t live outside the womb, or will but only for a few days and suffer terribly the whole time. They are the women who have to make a decision to not let their baby suffer.

The remainder are performed in the 2nd trimester, generally as a result of fetal abnormality or a severe congenital defect.

The vanishingly rare 3rd trimester abortions are generally for one of two reasons:

1) the life of the mother is in serious danger 2) the fetus is either dead or dying

So no. Women aren’t just bouncing on coat-hangers at 37 weeks for a giggle, they’re undertaking a serious medical procedure for a heartbreaking reason.

If the first doctor she saw had listened to her, all that stuff might even have gotten used. But instead, the kid died that night. Her mother carried a corpse in her uterus for 3 days, running a horrible fever and coming close to organ failure.

When it came to abortions, even in hospitals that allowed them, people could “opt out” of scrubbing or circulating on those. We usually had at least a few who would participate. We were called the “Angels of Death” 

There was a place where women who were carrying a malformed fetus who would not live outside the womb had to wait until the child died in utero or reached her due date to have a c-section. I can’t imagine how hard it was for her and her family, but I can tell you what a toll it took on the folks who had to deliver the baby and know before hand that it would arrive dead. The feeling of the flacid, still warm little one in your hands and know there was nothing you could do to revive them was heart breaking. We angels of death arranged among ourselves a rotation so that we almost never had to do more than one a month. 

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:

Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.

This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer. 

But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine. 

Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:

But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!

Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,

and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.

Wires going through magnets.  This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily.  Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1.  Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:

You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is.  But these are also extreme close-ups.  Here’s the scale of the individual cores:

The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers.  Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.

With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY. 

ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon. 

And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC. 

One gently squeezes my hand between both of his palms as he says “squish.” I reciprocate. When he looks like he’s feeling sad or lost, I ask if I can squish him, and he will show me where I can squish him. Sometimes it’s almost like a hug, but most of the time, it’s just a hand or an arm I press between my palms. Then he squishes my hand in return, says “squish,” and moves on. He will come ask for squishes now, when he recognizes that he needs them.

Another boy smiles and sticks his chin out at me, and if he’s really excited, he’ll lean his whole body toward me. The first time he finally won a game at circle time, he got so excited he even ran over and bumped chins with me. He now does it when he sees me outside of school too. I stick out my chin to acknowledge him, and he grins and runs over and I lean down for a chin bump.

Yet another child swings my hand really fast. At a time when another child would be seeking a hug, she stands beside me and holds my hand, and swings it back and forth, with a smile if I’m lucky. The look on her face when I initiate the hand swinging is priceless.

Another one bumps his hip against mine when he walks by in the hallway or on the playground, or when he gets up after I’m done working with him. No eye contact, no words, but he goes out of his way to “crash” into me, and I tell him that it’s good to see him. He now loves to crash into me when I’m least expecting it. He doesn’t want anything, really. Just a bump to say “Hi, I appreciate you’re here.” And when he’s upset and we have to take a break, I’ll bump him, ask if he needs to take a walk, and we just go wander for a bit and discuss whatever’s wrong, and he’s practically glued to my side. Then one more bump before we go back into the room to face the problem.

I verbally express affection. A LOT.

My husband… doesn’t. I don’t know why. For the longest time part of me wondered if it meant he loved me less.

At some point I told him about a thing I had done as a kid. Holding hands, three squeezes means ‘I Love You’.

Suddenly he’s telling me I Love You all the time.

Holding my hand, obviously, but also randomly.

taptaptap

on my hand, my shoulder, my butt, my knee, whatever body part is closest to him, with whatever part of him is closest to me

All the time.

More often than I ever verbally said it.

It’s an ingrained signal now, I can tap three times on whatever part of him, and get three taps back in his sleep. Apparently I do the same.

It’s made a huge difference for us.

heres a friendly post from your neighbourhood intersex guy

intersex oppression -> intersexism (yes theres a word for it)

h*rmaphrodite is a slur/derrogatory lol stop fucking using it

theres no i in lgbt… intersex people can be cishet, and it isnt a gender identity its a medical condition. go away. stop doing this.

if youre dyadic, you shouldnt be arguing about intersex politics. period. intersex people are oppressed under intersexism and face systematic oppression (just this year intersex infant genital mutilation was illegalized in the US). even if youre gay, you still oppress even cishet intersex people under the axis of intersexism.

seriously. read the above bullet again and get it through your skull.

MY FUCKING GREAT GRANDFATHER LITERALLY FLED LEBANON DUE TO A FUCKING FAMINE AND MY GRANDMOTHER AND DAD AND I ARE ALL FAT AS FUCKING HELL.

combine that with the fact that gen x was the last generation allowed to play outside, pretty much, and the fact that everybody nowdays is working service jobs that exhaust them without working their muscles, and there is basically no way on earth you’re going to get a fit and healthy population without changing the basic structure of our society.

don’t fall for the hype. don’t focus on weight. it’s actually far more dangerous to be underweight than overweight. even with what is clinically defined as ‘morbid obesity’ it’s possible to be healthy as a horse, if your bone structure and metabolism are set up for it and you’ve got lots of muscle to support it.

on top of that, the charts for ideal weight are at least a generation out of date. they were compiled based on a population that didn’t regularly get enough dairy and fresh produce, at a time when girls didn’t do athletics in school. young women in the 1960′s were measurably smaller than young women today. their bones were thinner, they had less muscle mass, their shoulders were more sloped, they had a smaller lung capacity – society discouraged them from being physically active past the age of ten or twelve, and they finished their physical development in a sedentary setting.

boys were plenty active, but just like the girls, they were eating just about nothing but red meat and starch and some mushy greens with the vitamins boiled out. the thing where the poor get fat because sugar and fat are cheap wasn’t really happening yet, especially in rural areas; a farm kid’s diet was beef and wheat in the north, pork and corn in the south. “eat your vegetables” was such a hard sell because everything else was expensive and bland and overcooked. you’ve seen the godawful cookbook excerpts from that time. mushy green beans and fried spam on a bed of mashed potatoes, seasoned with nothing but a pinch of white pepper.

sorry, that was kind of a tangent. i guess my point is, even the people who ate well by the standards of the time were malnourished compared to the standard of today. your lunch of a matcha cucumber smoothie and a cobb salad with one ounce of ham, one ounce of turkey, and 15 kinds of fresh vegetable, would give them the explosive shits because they’ve never had that much fiber in one place before. there’s more vitamins and antioxidants in your black bean fajita dinner than they saw in a week.

so first of all, the idea of trying to be the same size and shape they were is absurd.

and second, if malnourishment in one generation primes the next two for protective fat retention, the combination of that and the incredible wealth of nutrition we have available to us today is obviously going to make us HYUGE.

Let me tell y'all something—

I’m terrified of heights.

And I don’t just mean in the sense that I’m probably going to go the rest of my life without ever getting on a plane. I mean that I can’t stand on a chair to change a light bulb without feeling like I’m going to pass out, I can’t go up a flight of stairs without having a death grip on the railing the entire time (stairs without railings are cursed things and I avoid them at all costs), that just looking inside of an open elevator makes me nauseous, getting in one puts me on the verge of an anxiety attack, and I feel the same sense of horror about approaching an escalator that some people I know feel about approaching a very large dog.

But the thing is that my feelings about heights? They’re my problem. I don’t mean that in a dismissive way or to downplay the fear and discomfort I feel but the fact is that this is an issue–that while really crappy–isn’t anyone’s fault, not mine and certainly not anyone else’s, and I don’t get to dictate anyone else’s life or force the world to change because of my fear.

While every staircase I get on makes me feel like I’m climbing into hell, that doesn’t change the fact that they’re pretty damned mandatory as a part of any tall building. Elevators may feel like boxed in death traps for me but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re really useful for other people, particularly those who can’t use stairs. Light bulbs need to be changed, roofs need to be painted, planes need to go in the air, and plenty of other things need to happen in the world where heights are a very large part of getting said things done.

My discomfort with heights doesn’t change that and the same is true for a lot of things that people may find discomforting or even triggering because a thing making you uncomfortable—a thing triggering you—does not mean that that thing should not exist.

I’m uncomfortable with heights, some people are uncomfortable with dogs or spiders or clowns or even other people.

And some people are uncomfortable with the word queer.

Online, we have the ability to tag these things in our posts and we have extensions available so that we can avoid them but offline we don’t have that so—what do we do? Do we demand that these things not be allowed in public spaces? Do I tell people that their buildings can’t be more than X feet high? Does someone tell people that they can’t take their dogs on walks outside? Does yet another person say that all spiders need to be eradicated from the face of the earth to prevent them from ever coming into contact with one again?

No, of course not, because while certain things are triggering or discomforting to us that doesn’t mean that they’re inherently awful and it doesn’t erase the fact that they’re incredibly useful to other people—or, as I said before: just because something is triggering or uncomfortable for you does not mean that thing should not exist.

While the word queer might make you uncomfortable or trigger you, the fact is that it is a useful word for a lot of people. It’s a word that people fought for years to reclaim and it is, to be very blunt, absolutely beyond disgusting that so many people are trying to undo that hard work and reduce the word to nothing more than a derogatory slur once again. Online, you have the resources available to avoid the word queer without trying to bully or guilt queer people into censoring their own identity—you can put the word on your blacklist, you can install a text replacer extension, you can make that choice for yourself rather than trying to force the onus on queer people to change themselves.

Offline, you don’t have those resources—I get that. You can’t avoid seeing the word queer at pride parades or wherever else as easily as you can online. But in just the same way I don’t always have the choice to avoid climbing stairs or getting into elevators. People who are terrified of dogs don’t always have the choice of avoiding them everywhere they go. People who are uncomfortable around other people can’t always avoid going places and being around them.

People with all kinds of triggers and discomforts can’t always avoid the things that trigger us and make us uncomfortable because the world isn’t built only for us, it isn’t only about us, and our triggers and discomforts are ultimately our problem, not anyone else’s. Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s okay for people to call you queer without you being okay with it just like it’s not okay for someone to throw a spider in an arachnophobe’s face or to force me up a flight of stairs but heights and spiders and, yes, the word queer are all allowed to exist and are all allowed to exist in public because public spaces belong to everyone, not just you, and things that trigger you or discomfort you are allowed to be in those spaces because a thing being triggering or uncomfortable does not mean that thing should not exist.

And if you can’t accept that then you need to get help. And I’m not saying that to be condescending, I’m saying it the same way I would to anyone who is triggered by something they have to come into contact with on a regular basis or who has triggers they can’t avoid and who is having difficulty accepting that those triggers are not going to just disappear off the face of the earth no matter how much they want it to, whether that trigger is the word queer or a giant dog or whatever.

The word queer is not going to go back into the closet no matter how much you want it to because, while you may have some very negative feelings about it or even about queer people themselves, the world does not revolve around your feelings. The lives and choices of queer people are not controlled by your feelings. The right that queer people have to exist and be a part of the community without censoring their very identity is not determined by your feelings.

Your feelings about the word queer are no one’s problem but your own just like my feelings about heights or someone else’s feelings about needles or dogs is no one’s problem but their own. We don’t get to dictate the lives and behavior of other people just because of our own feelings. We don’t get to dictate what is and isn’t allowed to exist just because of our own feelings.

And if you feel so negatively impacted by something that it’s harming you on a daily basis—if just seeing the word queer on a banner at a pride parade is horribly triggering to you—then it is 100% up to you to do something about that, to seek help for it, and to find a way to either minimize or avoid your trigger because as I’ve said about a thousand times in this post already:

Just because something is triggering to you does not mean that thing is not allowed to exist.

Just because something is uncomfortable to you does not mean that thing is not allowed to exist.

From this perspective, three defining features of ADHD emerge that explain every aspect of the condition:

1. an interest-based nervous system

2. emotional hyperarousal

3. rejection sensitivity”

I called one, set up an appointment to talk about meds with a psychiatric nurse practitioner, they gave me a few quizzes to fill out at home before the appointment.  (I don’t know if they were super official?) 

I chatted briefly with my psychiatric nurse practitioner during my appointment, mayyybe did another quiz (I can’t remember) and she thought my ADD symptoms were really obvious and giving me more trouble than my anxiety symptoms.  So we tried some ADD meds.  I found they helped me focus, but amped up my anxiety like wow.  Since I have better coping skills for my ADD than anxiety, I talked to my NP at my next appointment and we switched to an anxiety/depression med that had some evidence of being helpful for ADD.  We do check ins on those meds w/ decreasing frequency, and they seem to be working out okay.

Soooo.  I still don’t know whether I’m “officially” diagnosed, but that’s how I got on meds.