If we’re going to update the pantheon of regrettable artists, can we add “white male writer who was legitimately progressive twenty years ago, but hasn’t learned or grown as an artist in any way whatsoever since then, and now exists in a state of grumpy bewilderment at the fact that he’s being critcised for doing exactly the same stuff that used to win him praise”?
The most valuable thing I learned doing a Masters degree with depression, anxiety and ADHD was to change my “things I’m bad at” list to “things I can’t do on my own.” Stop thinking of them as things I could do if I tried hard enough, and accept that I can’t accomplish them by effort and willpower alone; they’re genuine neurocognitive deficits, and if I need to do the thing, then just like a blind person reading or a mobility impaired person going up a storey in a building, I need to find a different method.
I’m “bad at” working on long-term projects without an imminent deadline or someone breathing down my neck? Okay, let’s change that: I can’t work on long-term projects without an imminent deadline and someone breathing down my neck. So let’s create an imminent deadline and recruit neck-breathers. Find a sympathetic prof who will agree that 3 weeks before the due date they expect me to show them my preliminary notes and bibliography. Get a friend I trust to block off an hour to sit with me and keep asking, “Are you working on your project?” Write a blog post about my progress. Arrange to trade papers and proofread them with another student.
Accept your limitations and learn to leverage them, instead of buying the neurotypical fairytale that they’ll go away if you just try hard enough.
I’m sorry. Just like the disabled people you speak about finds a different method to help them, you should too, try a physical calendar, or even the calendar on your phone to set your own deadlines. If you need help reminding certain things use a notebook. Sitting there pushing the responsibility off onto someone else is wrong. Forcing someone to be a nag and enforcer is wrong. There are steps you can take, gadgets to help. That’s just my $0.02.
Take em back, I don’t want your shitty pennies.
For the record, given our relative physical sizes and temperaments, @star-anise‘s ability to force me (as one of the friends who has done this) to do anything is about nil.
I mean I’m literally not sure she could force me off a couch. I am just saying.
This week I tried to emotionally terrorize a squirrel who kept coming and stealing food off our picnic table. It was not much of a success.
More seriously, for anyone reading who might need some clarity: none of us MIND. The only thing that would be wrong is if @star-anise actually did push “responsibility” off on us – that is to say, blamed us if that day the strategy didn’t work, or she didn’t get things done, or we didn’t spontaneously read her mind and know she needed nagging, or even if she pitched a fit or made it our fault if on that day we have something else important to do.
That is what “pushing off responsibility” would actually be. “@violent-darts couldn’t nag me on Tuesday so it’s her fault that I didn’t get my project done!” See how that works? Mmmkay?
Otherwise, frankly, given the personalities at play, she’s just giving useful boundaries within which we can do something we’ve almost all had to break ourselves of the habit of doing unsolicited anyway. Remembering to go “oi you, work on the thing” every hour or so is hardly onerous.
Also seriously I’m pretty sure we’re all bigger and meaner than she is.
AND THIS HAS BEEN TONIGHT’S EPISODE OF FEATHER-OVERCLARIFIES-A-THING. THANK YOU AND GOOD EVENING.
Another instance of a busybody attempting to police behaviors of someone else that do not and will not affect them. Cause trust me, if you’re this vocal about Do It Yourself And Don’t Ask Anyone To Help You Because That’s Cheating, you’re already on the list of people not to ask under any circumstances.
Heck, I bet there’s a special, secret lounge accessible only to students who convincingly give the door an answer it hadn’t had in mind.
Do you think Ravenclaws ever argue with the door to their tower? I bet they do. Like, the eagle says their answer to the riddle is wrong, but they argue the point and the eagle eventually comes around to their side and lets them in.
Okay, but I actually think about this all the time. Ravenclaws and their problems with their dormitory door.
Like, imagine Su Li and Lisa Turpin coming back from dinner having some conversation or another about how they have some Herbology essay due tomorrow and neither of them did it because they were too distracted with a tangent they got on while doing their Potions homework. And Lisa’s going, “Alright, Su, Tony’s already got the books, so we just have to buckle down and do this. We got this. It’s fine. We’ll just go in and work our asses off.” They get to the door and knock, still talking, entirely on muscle memory. They’re barely listening when the eagle asks them, “Where do Vanished objects go?” Lisa’s brain is a little too fried with worry to think at the moment, but she’s not too concerned about getting in because Su looks calm and thoughtful about this one. And then Su turns to her and goes, “Where DO Vanished objects go?” Damn it all to hell, Lisa knows that look. “Su. Su, no. It’s a riddle, Su. It’s just a riddle.” “Yeah, I know it’s a riddle, but it’s also a legitimate question. I mean, Vanished objects have to go SOMEWHERE, right? For you to Conjure them again afterwards? Or are you just creating an identical object out of nothing? Or maybe not nothing… what are Conjured objects made of, do you think?” “Su, we really have to write this Herbology essay.” “I know. But it’s an interesting question. I bet somebody’s done a study on this. I heard Padma say that Conjured objects are different to real ones. Do you think that there’d be a way to tell if your Conjured object was the same one you’d Vanished? Like, if you bespelled it with a charm and it came back with the spells?” “Well… I once heard an upper-year say that Vanishing bespelled objects is tricky. They were looking into it for their Curse-Breaking apprenticeship. But it might be possible. I definitely don’t think it’s possible to Conjure bespelled objects from nothing.” “It might be. I read this book where somebody talked about conjuring a Sneak-o-scope and those are definitely enchanted objects.” “Was it a Gilderoy Lockhart book? Because that sounds like bullshit to me.” “No, I can show you. It was in a Auror’s Memoirs. I just returned them to the library this morning, so I bet nobody’s taken them out yet. And-” “That sounds like an unreliable source.” “AND I was reading this Charms book the other day that referenced a book on the specifics of Vanishing objects that had an author who was an expert in their field and a retiree from the Department of Mysteries with the same last name as the book by the Auror.” “I’m not believing this until I see a source.” “Fine, come on!” The eagle knocker has long since settled back into its resting state by then, Su and Lisa immediately run off to the library, arguing the whole way, and the next day, Professor Sprout gives the extremely apologetic students an extension on the essay while sighing, “Ravenclaws.”
Or imagine there’s some Muggleborn student who has an astrophysicist for one parent and a biologist for the other, and they think magic is amazing, but they’re also really into Muggle science as well. “Which came first,” the eagle knocker asks them at one point, “the phoenix or the fire?” And they’re immediately like, “the fire.” While their friend is like, “Benny, no, that’s not how this works. My brother told me about things like this, it’s one of those paradox questions.” “What? No way. Fire came first.” “Benny…” “Fire is a chemical reaction and, as far as I can tell, phoenixes are a fiery bird that probably evolved just like everything else did on this planet. We’re a really small speck on the cosmic calendar, Raleigh, and I’m saying that unless phoenixes are actually aliens – which would be AWESOME, you-” “Benny…” “-have to admit – fire came first. There are trillions of stars that haved burned and died billions of years before our sun was even born. This is just like that chicken and the egg question, in that it sounds like a paradox but it’s actually not, because the egg existed long before the bird we know as the chicken ever evolved-” “Benny!” “What?” “You… the door opened.” “What? Oh cool. Finally, someone who recognizes science in this nutty place.” About a week later, Benny completely disrupts and derails their Astronomy class by arguing with Professor Sinestra about the school curriculum (that hasn’t been updated in more than fifty years or more) being “WAY TOO OUT OF DATE, PROFESSOR! THIS TEXTBOOK WAS WRITTEN IN 1910! THESE TELESCOPES ARE RIDICULOUS! WHEN’S THE LAST TIME A WIZARD WENT TO AN ACTUAL PLANETARIUM?! OH MY GOD, DO WIZARDS EVEN KNOW THAT THE AMERICANS HAVE GONE TO THE MOON?” And the wizardborn kids are like, “The Americans have WHAT?” While poor Raleigh has his face in his hands and isn’t even surprised.
Or imagine other things. Like that time the first years has to stand around for two hours after the Welcoming Feast because their Prefects gave them a short speech, a small tour, and then got into an “academic disagreement” (as the house of Ravenclaw has come to call them) over the riddle. So there’s this group of eleven-year-olds playing party games in the hall while their fifteen-year-old “mentors” yell at each other over the riddle. And they only got inside in the end because someone actually managed to notice that the first years never came in and “Hey, that’s sort of weird”, and sent some second year to go look for them.
Or when NEWTs season came around, and there was a seventh year SO STRESSED that they came back from the library at three in the morning and when the eagle knocker asked them a riddle, they just burst into tears and sobbed against the door for ten minutes before the eagle awkwardly declared, “Nicely answered!” and let them in anyway.
i did not tell my hand to throw that thing. i told it to gently pick up the thing. but i guess it decided throwing was better.
boyfriend has gotten very used to sudden crashes and screams followed by cheerful yell of “i’m okay!”
or not. bones broken so far: collarbone, wrist, finger, rib, toe.
elbows & knees bend backwards. good party trick.
every dance or aerobics lesson sounds like “this step is very simple. all you have to do is put your left on right foot in hand out up down through!”
THINGS ARE NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE THAT TEXTURE. NOT. ALLOWED.
fidget fidget fidget fidget fidget
hey, hand? can you hold something, but just hold it a little bit, instead of in a white-knuckle death grip? no? oh.
what is a facial expression
<3<3<3 tagless underwear <3<3<3
why do people want to make eye contact anyway, you already know what eyes look like. if you do not: they are round things. white mostly, colorful ring, black in the middle. there. that should cover you, now let’s have this conversation while looking comfortably over each other’s shoulders.
“let’s go to a crowded place with lots of overlapping conversations and people bumping into each other!” or we could not. how about not.
this food is Not Allowed.
weird stutter that isn’t technically a stutter, it’s more just a total failure to make the word happen
SOMETHING. IS. TOUCHING. ME. RED ALERT ALL HANDS TO BATTLE STATIONS THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
handwriting like a can of worms crawling through a pile of sticks
Is that all the time? Because that sounds very familiar but not all of it or all the time. (Paranoia for the loss…)
It’s all the time, mostly. Some things like the stutter come and go, but the majority of the symptoms don’t change. YMMV though, and there are a lot of related developmental/neuro issues that can present similarly.
Finally made a nice spot for a kitchen altar. My fox salt and pepper shakers act as my kitchen guardians. I have the tea light in a small dish of brown rice, my mini cauldron with cinnamon incense, citrine and quartz clusters, and my spoon rest with my kitchen witch spoon, and a besom made of rosemary.
In the center is a Kitchen Witch Bottle consisting of nine intents I would like for the Hearth and Home. Not everything is visible in the picture, but I have in the bottle
From bottom to top:
Course Sea Salt – clarity
Rolled Oats – good health
Cinnamon Chips – love
Orange Peel – happiness
Brown Rice – abundance
Coffee Beans – energy
Pinto Beans – luck
Peanuts – prosperity
Corn – protection
developed by dissonent | Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux
“A puzzle game that connects the past and present through a supernatural take on the polaroid-within-a-polaroid fad.
“Inside a mysterious room with no door, you seek a way to get out. A set of polaroid photos on the wall hint at the story of this room’s past. With only an old polaroid camera in hand, you must solve the puzzle of each photo by matching them to the scene.”
Kimchi and Justice 