I have a JOB. I’ll be working with young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities in their group home(s) and work program. I go in on Monday to fill out all the HR paperwork. It looks like the timing might be a bit weird since I’ll be in Florida August 8-14, so I hope that’s okay. It’s a straight weekday job, first shift.

I’ve been blogging here for a year, and nearly a hundred posts.

There have been two Kate-lyric exceptions (both for MBT fangirling) and this will make my 97th published post. In this time, I have:
-Used lyrics from “Caught in the Crowd,” “Dreams,” and “The Truth” six times each (fun fact: I don’t like “The Truth”!)
-Used lyrics from “Blah Blah Blah,” “Day After Christmas,” “Our Song,” and “Out and In” five times each
-These seven songs account for 39% of my post titles
-I’ve used 34 songs, 32 of which are part of the official discography (including Elsewhere, Kate’s previous band). Including Elsewhere there are officially 54 songs (not including multiple releases or versions of a song), and I have an additional 32 or so demos. I think I’m going to have to make an effort to use all of the released songs for a title in the coming year. No promises.

In less compulsive, more personal news, I’ve had a bunch of interviews for jobs. The one I like best is for a group home and assistance organization in Chapel Hill who work with kids and adults with intellectual disabilities, developmental disabilities, and some neurological disorders. In practice this means a lot of people on the autism spectrum, some with Down Syndrome, some with CP, many with more rare disorders and disabilities, and a huge variation in levels of assistance needed. I knew it would be a good fit when the interviewer went off on a long tangent about how their clients are people and have every human right we do (I guess I passed for NT yesterday), even if they also need some help with ADLs or holding down a job. He used some language I only hear in the disability rights movement and stressed that you have to respect everyone as an individual or it would never work. I have a follow up interview tomorrow (after the first yesterday), so hopefully it works out! I’ve also interviewed for an in-home counselling position, and didn’t get a job at a local bookstore–but I did get an interview at a sister store later this week.

AT NO POINT DID I BREAK DOWN INTO SOBS OF FRUSTRATION OVER THE AMOUNT OF MONEY I NEED TO SAVE TO SUCCESSFULLY MOVE TO MELBOURNE.

I credit the cat and his soft, soft tummy for this. Little known fact: sticking your face in a cat’s side and breathing deeply is incredibly good for destressing.

I’m looking for something that will keep my brain occupied. I love anagramming and the last phrase was very successful. I want a two or three word phrase (maybe four, if one is an article) that is easy to remember and has 20-25 letters. The last one was “the very hungry caterpillar” and it worked really well. Suggestions?

This might be a little bit dense at the start for most of my friends, but I found it so fascinating I have to link anyway. It’s a summary of a recently published study on empathy responses in mice. Basically, if a mouse sees (or, to a lesser extent, hears or smells) another mouse respond with fear to an environment, it will likely respond similarly. If the mice are siblings or mates, they are even more likely to respond. Further, the scientists doing the study had a few ideas about where this empathetic response would be located in the brain and performed genetic and pharmacological knockouts on the mice–and they were right about two of their three hypotheses. Via knockouts, they were essentially able to make sociopathic mice–mice who feel no empathy for others.

So basically, they made the Brain.

Photos from last weekend. More are available on my flickr.

Hopefully these will work:

No subtitles or captions, I’m afraid, but a lot of what is spoken is either illustrated or written down in the course of the video.

It takes a special sort of neuroticism to make a spreadsheet of post titles to make sure you don’t repeat (I have, shamefully, two and a half times). I feel better now.

ALSO IT ARE DYLAN’S BIRFDAY! HAPPY BIRTHDAY THE BROTHER I ALWAYS WANTED.

Grading People from Rolling Credit on Vimeo.

A short commentary on the use of the terms “high functioning” and “low functioning” as applied to autistic people

My attention span is currently at a level I would describe as “kitten.”

I’ve known for a long time that my attention is directly correlated to the interestingness of the material–this isn’t unusual for kids identified as gifted (nor the adults they grow into), or anyone on the spectrum. In fact, it was this extreme hyperfocus that first had me questioning if I might be on the spectrum as I read tales of kids and their encyclopedic knowledge of topics and saw myself. This one time, I drew the same picture with only minor variations a couple hundred times; I was nine. I suspect I could still draw it.

I’ve also known for a long time that if I’m otherwise engaged, I can pay attention to topics of less interest with some reliability. In a school setting, for example, I’m usually really strongly into one class and then have varying levels of caring about the others–just like anyone else. Because of that high interest class, though, I have this sort of carry-over attention effect making it easier to pay attention to other material that is not as engaging for me. This has led me to the conclusion that I do well in moderate to high stress environments, but yesterday I started thinking (a rare thing these days when my mind lands on a topic and only stays for a few minutes at most), and this may not be the case.

There are different kinds of stress. Google thinks there are three–acute, episodic, and chronic–but that’s not what I mean. Those factors certainly play in, but I think stress can and should be divided by what part of you it engages, not just the length. Intellectual stress would be things like heavy schoolwork, complex reading material (fiction or no), non-rote professional work, puzzle solving. Emotional stress is identifying your own and other people’s feelings, social cues, working with other people. Physical stress could be identifying sensations (like needing to pee or being hungry), things that involve physical labour, or enduring discomfort (like working in a too-cold or too-hot place). Some combination of three things creates the stress, and that can then be chronic, episodic, or acute.

By this system, I really like things that are chronically intellectually stressful, with low levels of emotional or physical stress. I don’t like to move or worry about what my body language says. That is…not how I would currently describe my life. So even while I feel stressed, worrying about money and the cat and immigration, it isn’t the sort of stress that puts me in a position to spend a lot of time thinking. Those stressors are not comfortable for me, so they use up many more spoons than the stressors I like–and because I’ve wasted those spoons, I can’t do the things I enjoy (like reading scienceblogs) which could potentially refresh my spoons.

When I’m stressed–in the bad, not comfortable way–my memory and attention are spotty. I need to have a constant stream of intellectual information coming in–and going out, such as via blogging–to feed my own ruminative processes. Not only do I think they are a good thing, I now think they are essential to my well-being. When I am taking in enough information to have a viable ruminative background process going, my whole mind is working in concert, concious, unconcious, and memory. Being able to ruminate this way requires a precise memory, which is the first thing to go when I’m under stress (I often have no memory of meltdowns, for example–they’re just missing or I have a handful of photograph-like images).

I have been incredibly, risably forgetful lately–and lucky Kit doesn’t mind. Things we discussed multiple times have slipped my mind as if they never were. There is no sense of loss, of having forgotten something. My memory is not recording in the first place. Even when she reminds me, often with my own words, they feel new, unseen.

We talked about it yesterday, and I think it shifted my brain into the right gear to ruminate, because it hit me this morning, how all of this is connected for me: I need intellectual stress (and preferably as little of the other kinds as possible) to function well; I know alternate sources for this when I am not in uni; when I do not get this stress I become unable to seek it out because my will to live attention span grows shorter and shorter the longer I go without; this correlates with an unusually poor memory; these things are because with information coming in, I am able to ruminate properly (like any good ruminant and/or monster), because it is an adaptive and helpful process for me rather than being a destructive way to rehash bad memories or thoughts; therefore I have to just force myself to do something brainy, because it will sort of kickstart the whole process and I will stop feeling leaden. Which is…a helpful conclusion, and hopefully writing this will have done enough kickstarting I’ll no longer feel like my brain is dribbling out my ears slowly and painfully.

Despite the loss of spoons and almost inevitable migraine that will have me in bed tomorrow afternoon through sometime on Tuesday, I have to say that this weekend has been incredible.

I drove up to Staunton yesterday (Saturday) morning, taking a long route through a national forest and over many pretty streams. Lots of wildlife. Last night I saw Kate in a private gig in Charlottesville with Stina, Dylan, and a few other friends (and about 50 strangers), where Keir kissed my cheek/ear and I got sweaty hugs. I’ve just returned from Vienna, Virginia, and another Kate gig. More hugs. A new t-shirt.

Oh, and the part where Kate dedicated Shoebox to me on a whim, explaining how she felt like she should dedicate something to me because I was an American who had been in Melbourne when they were taking any gig they could get, and I’ve seen all of these songs thousands of times, but at least it’d been a while since then.

There was also the part where the audience was so genuinely enthusiastic that she did a real encore, not at all like in Melbourne, where it’s just expected. She was genuinely flustered and pleased, asked for suggestions. After rejecting mine (For The Hundredth Time or Apartment), she accepted Dylan’s early birthday wish for I Got The Way. It was fabulous. I’ll post a video once I have my camera cables. Later, she let him buy her a beer and promised I could pick out songs in the future, as long as I gave them a bit more warning than that.

I will sleep when my insides stop feeling electric.

Oh, Jezebel.

Let’s talk. You recently went through a transition of Editor in Chief, moving from Anna Holmes to Jessica Coen. Why yes, that is the Jessica who destarred me for calling out ableist language–and, yes, it’s reflective of the tone of the whole site, now.

A number of blogs have sprung up to deal with your shit, and that’s not really what I’m trying to do here. I took a whole day off yesterday–the first Day Without Jez I’ve had on purpose in about two years. And it was…great. There was less stress, less frustration over a formerly well-written website that can no longer be bothered to turn on the spelling and grammar check features in Word before posting. I didn’t see the dozens of comments using “lame” and “retarded” as insults, or an editor call anyone assholes. Again.

It’s not me, Jez, it’s you. And I think we might be done.

A lot of people are dissatisfied with the turn of the site, and leaving, and it’s led to some of the best wikipedia editing I’ve ever seen.

A full compendium of the edits are available here.

There have been mass destarrings (usually for pointing out explicitly racist language), and more than a few bannings for the same.

In conclusion, this was the best thing to come of it:

(Credit for that goes to the lovely Haugenite.)