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spectrumed · 4 years ago

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3. sadness

Don’t be like that. Be like this, or be that other thing. Be unique, but don’t be too unique. Fit in, but try to be a rebel. Be a renegade, but don’t rock the boat. Don’t know what you are supposed to be? What? Do you have imposter syndrome or something? Just be yourself, but, y’know, sand down the edges a little bit. Be friendlier. Be the kind of person everyone likes. Be the life of the party! Don’t be some shut-in, some crazy cat-lady with absolutely zero social life. Don’t be sad. Don’t burden others with your sadness. Work to maximise the total happiness of your community. A smile goes a long way. Can’t smile? You really can’t help but being a sourpuss all the time? Well, I guess maybe that if you can’t help but stay in a perpetual bad mood bringing everyone else down… then maybe you should just stay isolated? Better stay alone, away from others. You’re toxic. You’re just so damned sad. You really must be quarantined.

I am sad, a lot of the time. Are you? But, no, you can’t just admit that you are sad. Don’t be a buzzkill, try to inject a little humour into the things you say. You can admit you’re depressed, if you do so with a joke. Don’t let others know you’re being sincere. Ironic jokes work the best, don’t they? They let you confess your secret gloom to everyone around, but they’ll never know just how serious you’re being. With a wink of the eye, any candid expression of your inner turmoil can become a hilarious post-modern gag. Are they or are they not telling the truth? Oh, I’ll never tell! And it will all work out excellent, up until the day you commit suicide. But every comedian’s time in the limelight has to end at some point, right?

This blog is supposed to be about autism spectrum disorder, why am I suddenly discussing depression? Well, I suppose that it is time we bring to the table this little thing called comorbidity. Psychology is messy. Some would argue that it is barely even a real scientific field (I tend to think that it is the best thing we have, but I acknowledge that in places, psychology is fundamentally flawed.) You may have thought that you’d get just one diagnosis. One simple label that you can work through and overcome. You’re bipolar, now go deal with it! But instead, you find yourself with a whole fistful of diagnoses. What to hear my proud list of diagnoses? Oh, please, don’t think because I am listing them this one certain way, I put them in order of relevancy to me. I love all of my diagnoses equally.

My diagnoses are:

Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD)

Agoraphobia

Possible Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

Asperger syndrome (AS)

No, I was never officially diagnosed with depression, but largely because, at the time I received these diagnoses, my depression was so blatant that it felt as if I was walking around with a cloud of miasma surrounding at all times. Imagine me as Pig-Pen from Peanuts, but instead of being covered in dirt, I was covered in the funk of melancholy. And whatever treatment I would eventually go on to receive (and still am receiving to this day,) would go about treating my anxiety first, and hopefully, the depression would give in alongside the anxiety. It has, for the most part, though, I still feel the presence of that black dog from time to time. I also got only a half-hearted potential diagnosis of OCD, but later, during a trial of an antidepressant that had a freakishly negative impact on my psyche, it blossomed into a fully-grown attention-craving condition. Turns out that OCD can be a real hog for the spotlight, really not allowing any of the other diagnoses to take their turn on stage. Thankfully, when I got off that particular antidepressant, those symptoms stopped, but it has led me to be far more aware of my internal obsessive-compulsive thought patterns. For me, OCD largely lacks physical compulsions, but my mind is ablaze with intrusive thoughts, and I will routinely force myself to repeat certain phrases in my head to make them go away. The funny thing is, I never realised that wasn’t normal.

Diagnoses are an attempt to map out a spiders’ web of problems. Things come hand in hand. While I’m no psychologist, I can speak from the perspective of someone who has been through the psychiatric process, which I suppose, lends me a certain kind of expertise, doesn’t it? Maybe it really doesn’t. Maybe I’m just throwing words out there, thinking that I could serve a good purpose, but instead all I am doing is contributing to this great onslaught of digital disinformation we’re all suffering under. But I’m probably just too doubtful of myself. I am speaking about myself, after all. I’ve got first-hand experience in being myself. I know exactly what it feels like to own this skin, these bones, this heart, and this mushy brain of mine. I’m not claiming to know everything. I’m just claiming to know about this one sad individual writing this hoping it might allow someone to reblog my posts with the hashtag “relatable” one day.

Anxiety runs in my family. The neurosis demon gets passed down from generation to generation, only occasionally skipping a beat. My mother and I share many of the same neurotic quirks, though, she has for the most part of her life not had it to quite the excessive degree that I have it. I really took that genetic predisposition for anxiety and ran with it. And while I’m the only person in my family to have gotten diagnosed as being “on the spectrum,” there are a few members that I kinda sort of in a way actually quite seriously suspect might also be here somewhere on the spectrum. Still, as always goes with diagnosing, there’s no point in doing it unless the person is in need of some kind of treatment. I wholeheartedly believe that most people on the planet belong to one spectrum, be it an autism spectrum, a bipolar spectrum, a narcissism spectrum, even a schizophrenic spectrum, but diagnoses should be exclusively reserved for those who need psychiatric care. The world is a spectrum, and it’s worth noting that the terms “sane” and “insane” do not alone capture the complexity of the human psyche. A person can appear perfectly sensible, yet at some point in their life, they may have been a real silly little bugger who thought that their pet hamster was the reincarnation of the Buddha. Just as with physical health, one can struggle with one's mental health for one period in their life, only to later on in life feel utterly and entirely mentally healthy. Or, well, sadly in a lot of cases, people who were perfectly mentally healthy may suddenly become diagnosed with dementia. But that’s really sad, so let’s not talk about that.

Is it all genetic? Well, no. Or well, maybe? In regards to autism, I am pretty sure that, yes, it is genetic. While, yes, I do admit that I’m just a dummy on the internet, so what do I really know? And the brain is such a complex bit of mushy meat, so I could always be proven wrong. Though, I tend towards thinking that there most likely is principally a genetic factor to conditions like autism, or attention deficit disorder (and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,) or things like bipolar disorder. But with anxiety, quite frankly, I can’t say how much of it is nurture and how much of it is nature. I mentioned that my mother and I share many of the same neurotic quirks, so that would imply that there is something in one's genes that can make some more prone to anxiety than others, but my mother does not struggle with agoraphobia, nor does she seem to have any obsessive-compulsive tendencies. In fact, in my family, even those that exhibit some element of heightened anxiety, they don’t seem to show any milder symptoms of this kind. I can’t help but feel as if these conditions I gained through that tortuous period of every boy’s and girl’s (and boy-girl’s) life is called puberty. I hate to conform to stereotypes but I did indeed hate being a teenager. Believe it or not, I wasn’t a jock, and no, I didn’t go to parties. I mostly spent my time crying.

The question that no doubt plagues every movie psychiatrist to no end is what kind of trauma must a person undergo to make them go mad? Abusive parents? Abusive uncles? Abusive teachers? Abusive dogs? Honestly, to be an adult raising a child must be rough, considering how any mistake you make might suddenly turn your little babe into a future serial killer. Now, there’s no doubt that there are some seriously terrible parents out there, and that a lot of people have mental woes that definitely came about due to their parents and their abysmal lack of parental care. But generally, how much can you actually blame on your parents? We know the cliché, let’s go sit down on the sofa and complain to our Freudian hack-shrink all about those times as a kid our dad missed the big game, or that time our mother embarrassed us in front of all of our friends. I have plenty of things to complain about my parents, like I believe we all have. Our parents are flawed, messy human beings, of course they occasionally made mistakes throughout our upbringings. But is that nearly enough to turn a person mentally ill? Putting up with an at times really embarrassing mom? No, I don’t think so. And of course, there are some real awful parents out there, I’m not doubting that. Trust me, I’m a fan of true crime, so I’ve heard some real grizzly stories of what some kids are forced to grow up with. But I am thinking that those instances are more rare than they are common. Most people with mental illnesses can most likely not blame their parents.

How ‘bout bullies? Yes, them bullies. Them awful mean bullies that made all of our lives so painful. It’s funny, it seems like every school had their own fair share of bullies, and yet no-one as an adult ever comes forward to admit that they themselves were the bullies. It’s almost like as if no-one ever thinks of themselves as being a bully, even when they are throwing rocks at that weird chubby kid with blonde hair who happens to be named Fredrik and who just wants to be left alone. Was I bullied? Well… yes. But I can’t say I got the brunt of it. I got bullied, but overall I’d say I only ever had it slightly worse than most people. I was still quite tall, typically taller than my classmates growing up, and for the most part I could roll with the punches. If you really want to talk about a kid I knew growing up that got bullied, let me tell you about this kid who knew all the right dances for all the right Britney Spears songs. He was gay, I think. Not quite old enough to have come out, I suspect, but, well... He liked all the female pop stars, but not in that way of wanting to kiss them and fondle their boobies, but in the “I want to sound just like them when I grow up” sort of way. I don’t know what happened to him (or them, or her, depending on how they identify now,) but that was real bullying. Like most folks, I found myself stuck in that limbo of seeing others get bullied far worse than me and being too cowardly to intervene, in fears that I’d end up taking their place. Yes, isn’t school just a marvellous place? It’s a wonder any of us turn out okay.

No, I think that, fundamentally, the problems I have arose with myself. This, blaming myself, is not something that I am unused to doing. I have a long history of blaming myself, that’s really the problem. As a teenager I knew that I was different, and I was frightened and scared of being exposed. I didn’t even really know what it was that was different about me, I just knew that I didn’t fit in. I felt as if I didn’t deserve to fit in. The older I got, the more intense these feelings got. And I started taking it out on myself. I started hating myself. And I really mean furiously hating myself. It wasn’t some casual self-loathing, it was searing self-hatred. I did not physically hurt myself, but I did engage with self-harm. I kept repeating the mantras of “I hate myself,” and “I am pathetic,” over and over again, with the ultimate goal of making myself cry. For a period, I couldn’t go to bed without making myself cry first. I began taking days off from school, pretending to be sick. Well, I suppose I was ill, but not physically. I began failing most of my classes, I only ended up doing well in art. I stayed away from school for whole weeks at the time. Once, when I shame-facedly returned to school some of the meaner boys came up to me and said that they were surprised to learn that I was still alive. They were surprised, but also a little disappointed.

This was a time in my life when I really needed psychiatric care. This became increasingly obvious to my parents, and my teachers. I was clearly suffering from depression. Not just some teenaged angst, but full-blown, wholly insidious, depression. But, well, I didn’t get the care that I needed. Oh, I did go to see a psychologist a couple of times, but she saw no reason for me to continue seeing her. I don’t know why she felt as if I wasn’t in need of help, frankly, I can’t fathom why she felt as if I wasn’t in need of help. I suppose I avoided telling her the truth of what went on inside of my head, but I feel like as if any good psychologist would have been able to tell that the kid sitting across from them was clearly suffering from something a tad more intense than just some common concerns about puberty. At most I was able to confess was that I was feeling ashamed over myself for getting so fat, but it should have been clear to anybody that I was only using that as a hook to hang my self-hatred on. There very clearly was some underlying condition that I had that should have gotten addressed. But it went ignored.

At most I can think to explain this is the fact that I wasn’t “problematic.” Not in the way some kids are, when they’re struggling with their mental health. I did not act out, I did not take drugs, and I was certainly not violent. Even to this day, though I have at many times suffered from suicidal ideation, I am a real low-risk for actual suicide considering my intense fear of dying (yes, that’s an odd combo to have.) So, I’ve come to realise that the only way I am getting treatment is if I actually seek out treatment. And back then, I was just as placid as I had previously always been. I was quiet and introverted, just desperate to get back home so I could go and hide in my room. Many teenagers are like that. And it is easy to ignore them, because they want to be ignored. They just don’t want to exist. When you are desperate to be left alone, eventually people will leave you alone. I would go on to receive psychiatric care later on my life, but only after several years passed. I did have a better time living in my later teenage years, but like with a bone that heals wrong, I needed someone to come in and sort me out. I was sad as a teenager, but I would become really sad as a twenty-something. Hopefully my thirties will be jolly.

#neurodiversity #neurodivergent #autism spectrum disorder #autism #aspergers #mental health

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fourteenacross · 6 years ago

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octet - 5/25/19, 2pm

Hello, hello, I'm back from New Jersey! Which, you probably didn't even know I left, because I never post here anymore, but since we've yet to find a new platform for fannish happenings, I don't really have anywhere else to post show notes and the like.

Anyway, we saw Octet and Hadestown over the long weekend. I saw Hadestown at the NYTW in 2016, but I saw it the same day I saw Hamilton for the first time and my notes are lost to the ages. More about that later, though. (Tomorrow, probably.) For now, I'm going to focus on Octet.

So, here's what I knew about Octet going in: - Part of Dave Malloy's five year residency at the Signature Theatre - internet/discourse - Alex Gibson - a cappella? - support group?

The day before I did a little bit more digging, but I was kind of into going in blind, so I didn't dig too much.

Overall, I really liked it! My above the cut review is that, like all good Malloy shows, it brought up a lot of interesting concepts and shined a light on very relatable behaviors and ways of thinking. It doesn't really have a plot or narrative, and seems to largely exist to explore different types of internet denizens. As such, the characters vacillate between being actual people and being archetypes. I think all of this is fine--not everything needs to be a tautly plotted story, it's okay for this to be a song cycle, not a narrative musical. But I'm putting that out there for anyone who's thinking about going, just so you're aware when you head in.

First off, the set dressing is amazing. It looks just like a ratty church all purpose room, down to the way the light switches are labelled and the signs on the wall with clean-up instructions for group leaders. The walk in is papered with flyers advertising self-help groups, tutoring, charity walks, etc.

The show is set up like a support group meeting. A couple actors come in before the start and clean up the detritus of a bingo game and set up for the meeting, and then the group gathers and they begin. The group is “Friends of Saul,” and group members are told to put their phones off and in a basket against the wall, as they're here for various screen addictions.

Hymn: The Forest: This was a very Malloy song--it starts off a a meditation on a beautiful forest and takes a left turn. Delightful. Halfway through, Velma comes into the meeting and joins the other seven folks for the end of the hymn.

Refresh: Paula, the group leader, welcomes Velma to the group and tells them that Saul can’t be here this week, but he’s asked her to lead. She then asks if anyone wants to share. Jessica acquiesces and talks about how she was the subject of a viral video and has been "egosurfing" ever since, a compulsion to read all the shitty things strangers are saying about her without knowing her at all. (Unsurprisingly, Malloy says this song was heavily influenced by his feelings post-Comet.) Margo Seibert kills this song, which delves into our kneejerk tendency to pile on, sometimes without knowing or caring about context. It made me think a lot about how this goes both ways--the song focused on the negative, but obviously Milkshake Duck Syndrome is the same basic concept at its core.

Candy: Henry offers to share next. He talks about how his life is going okay at the moment, he's been on a few dates, but he hasn't had the heart to tell the guy about his "problem" yet, which is that he's addicted to video games. The song obviously invokes Candy Crush, but also refers to various other games including MMORPGs, FPSs, RPGs, and other phone puzzles games. I love this song--it is insanely catchy, Alex Gibson is delightful, and it's also profoundly sad and relatable. Henry eventually reveals that he uses games to avoid the real world and he's fairly sure he doesn't care if he dies, so he uses these games to string himself along and pass the time. Ouch. Also hashtag relatable content.

Glow: Paula shares next and talks about how she and her husband are both screen addicts and how they'll lie next to each other in bed, each on their own devices, ignoring the other, and how she wishes he would stop bringing the catastrophes of the world into their bed. She's lonely and sad and he doesn't see it because he doesn't look up from his phone. Starr Busby is incredible and, as a person who had to take an eight-month twitter break because she couldn’t handle the constant barrage of despair, I feel this song pretty hard.

Fugue State: Paula sets a metronome ticking for a five minute silent fugue state. The characters cycle through various thoughts about social media and the internet, calling out specific formatting for jokes and call out posts and "um actually"ing other people's comments in a whirlwind of commentary on how we interact with each other online. It's a very well put together song, but it's another one of those moments where it's clear this is a collection of songs about a concept rather than a narrative story.

Hymn: Monster: There's a five minute break, in which Henry approaches Velma, who's been quiet up to this point. She launches into a fast and awkward explanation of how she's on a self-imposed internet hiatus because she keeps getting tied up in discourse that's not good for her. She talks about being a part of a previous group that was not good and how she's since gotten into tarot instead, but there are parts of that group that aren't good, too (she delves into the Sephora Starter Witch Kit debacle), so instead she's taking a break and only talking to her one friend, whom she refers to constantly as "my friend." It was a very stark moment of self-recognition, tee bee aitch, and Velma is definitely the closest to the fannish millennial internet archetype. She says she found the group after Saul broke into a chat with her friend to tell her about it, so her friend said she had to come to check it out. After her monologue about all of this to Henry, the others return from their break to sing a hymn called "Monster" that talks about online trolls and how engaging with them and reading their exploits poisons your brain.

Solo: Karly and Ed alternate in this song, coming together in moments of similar sentiment. It's really an interesting way to handle the topics in question. Karly is singing about dating apps and how hard it is to find a dude who actually cares about her and the thin line between being asserting herself and the possibility of being the impetus for another MRA mass shooting. Ed, meanwhile, is a lonely dude who is on the verge of turning to the incel community because they can relate to his feelings of rejection and isolation. The whole thing is creepy and awful and very well blended--there's some empathy on both sides, while also making it clear how awful these dudes are.

Actually: This is Toby's song. Toby is a former punk kid turned conspiracy theorist. This is the song I struggled with the most. I just couldn't follow it narratively--I wasn't even 100% positive about the "conspiracy theorist" part until I could come home to read the lyrics. The lighting in this song was wonderful, though, and the ensemble was great. It just didn't click with me and it was harder for me to follow.

Little God: Dang, I loved this bit. It was the weirdest, and also had a distinctly Douglas Adams flavor, which was especially apt as I was attending the show on Towel Day. (So, honestly, it’s not surprising that I liked this bit so much, in retrospect.) Marvin, a neuroscientist, is up late with his new baby daughter when he has a vision from god. He chalks it up to a dream until god appears to him again the next morning. He goes to his lab, where all the other scientists have had a similar experience, and god appears to them in the visage of a little girl, whom they call Little God. They do a series of tests to prove whether god is real, and can manage to find scientific explanations for them all, trapped in this cycle of seeing wonderful things and then dissecting them clinically. Velma ends his story by telling him he's "The Hanged Man," the tarot card that represents everything one believes about oneself being flipped on its head.

Tower Tea Ceremony: The group starts a tea ceremony, passing around cups of tea, after which Paula comes around adding drops of something to the cups. Velma nervously asks what it is, and Paula calmly explains that it's a powerful group psychedelic that induces a five minute coma. Everyone else is chill with this, but Velma is visibly startled and nervous and does not drink her tea. Everyone else passes out, leaving her alone.

Beautiful: While everyone else is passed out, Velma sings her story. She was lonely and felt ugly and fat and stupid. She spent a lot of time alone and cut herself, but eventually found another girl just like her on the other side of the world. She had the same interests and liked the same things and felt the same way. She tells Velma that she's worthwhile and that there's light inside of her and, through seeing the same within her friend, she's able to start to accept that about herself. Kuhoo Verma is something else entirely on this song. It felt so personal and quiet and perfect. And, to be honest, it really anchored the show for me. After almost twenty-five years of being a nerdy, lonely kid on the internet, I tend to be very kneejerk protective of internet friendships. When people deride the internet as toxic, my urge is always to defend it because it's the source of all the good things in my life. I didn't have a lot of friends as a kid and I was socially anxious, but the internet was a way for me to meet other people who liked the same weird things I liked. These days that's a much more common, accepted story, but it was weird and new in 1996, so I spent a lot of years either lying about how I knew my friends or insisting that the internet wasn't just pedophiles and murderers. Obviously in the years since, the internet has grown into something bigger and, frequently, more toxic than I could have imagined at ten, eleven years old on the AOL Jonny Quest message boards. The urge to defend it has never gone away, however, and so I was obviously a little nervous about this show. But I trust Dave and I know that he's a big ol' nerd like the rest of us and doesn't pretend to be above our petty, silly forms of entertainment. And I'm glad I did, because it's important to me that this was the song he ended on--a quiet reminder that there's good to be found on the internet, that it's not all bad, that parts of it can be life-saving.

Hymn: The Field: The show ends with the group closing out their meeting with another hymn. Paula tells everyone next week’s meeting will be somewhere else and that she’ll email the details. Velma says she isn’t sure if she’ll come back, and she’s told that it doesn’t matter—the same people don’t always come week to week, but Saul will make sure there are eight people in attendance. The hymn is a nice, sweet song about coming together beyond the fighting and ugliness to appreciate each other and the world.

So, yeah, overall, I enjoyed it. I really needed to sit and think about it for a little bit after first seeing it, and I think repeat listenings will find a lot more to enjoy about it. Like I said, there’s not so much a story or narrative to get lost in, but the individual songs hold up well in the loose framework of the show, and a lot of them are both catchy and thought-provoking in a very Malloy way. I’m glad I got to see it, and I’m interested to see where it goes from here, if anywhere.

#octet #dave malloy #show notes

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chongoblog · 6 years ago

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The Big Personal Post Where I Talk About How August 2018 Was A Fucking Great Month

Over the last couple days, I’ve made reference to some big changes I’d made to my life around the tail end of 2018 and said I’d probably talk about them, so here’s that post. I don’t know how long this post is gonna end up, and it’s a lot more on the personal front than my usual content, so I’m gonna put down a quick Read More. If you’re interested, feel free to read more.

So the FIRST thing I’m going to say is that in previous posts referencing this, I mentioned it had to do with my “identity”, and I realize that phrasing sort of hints towards me finding myself to be transgender/nb or something of the like. If you thought that was what the implication was, I apologize for leading you on in that way! My gender identity is still cis male.

Also as a disclaimer, I obviously won’t go into many details, as real people are going to be brought up, and their privacy is important.

Now as for how things have changed for me. First let’s talk about what my life was like before this big shift in my mindset.

In early 2018 I had gotten a job at a consulting firm. It was my first full-time job, outside of a paid summer internship. The job was well-paying, but there were a WHOLE lot of factors working against me. A majority of training was done lecture style (which I’m terrible with), with strict deadlines on difficult projects, I was kept in an isolated cubicle with no one nearby, the commute from North Georgia to Downtown Atlanta was a nightmare, and due to unfortunate circumstance, I was the only new trainee in the Atlanta location.

A few months into the job, right at the tail end of training, they let me go from the job, leaving me unemployed. I was fortunate that my parents were still willing to let me stay at their house (and even moreso I got let go two days before I was going to sign a rather expensive lease).

There was also my relationship. I was with a girl who we’ll name “X” for the sake of privacy. I want to make it entirely clear that X isn’t, like, a bad person or anything. There are parts of our relationship that I look back far from fondly, but I would be absolutely hard-pressed to say that there was any malice from X. However, the relationship was both long-distance for a VERY long time, and we weren’t compatible for a few reasons. I wanted to try to stay around GA for a while, and she wanted me to leave GA, Most notably, she really didn’t express much interest in the stuff I created. It wasn’t going to work. At the time I got fired though, I thought it was, which was unfortunate because we started to grow pretty distant around that time.

Finally, there was a sort of mindset I’d had for a while. A mindset where I felt like I had to completely divide the life I live online and the life I live in reality, being completely unable to share what I do for fun with the people around me. It probably sort of stemmed from a few things. I’d probably go with my dad’s take on how companies can run background checks on your social media when hiring you for a position. That is a true statement, and I’m glad that my dad taught me that, but if I were to critique him, I’d say that he laid it on too thick, since he gave me the idea that saying “fuck” one time online would get me blacklisted. Another reason this mindset probably came about was that I was bullied in middle/early high school, and those guys found my channel, which ended poorly. I think this sort of mindset left me really guarded towards showing people what I did, and it sort of split who I was between who I was in real life and who I was online, which led to a lot of problems down the line.

So spring/summer of 2018 wasn’t a great one. I was unemployed, living off of a few thousand in savings from three months salary. The relationship was fading, and my mind just wasn’t in the right place. I’d broken down crying multiple times, including once at a party and even once or twice on the phone with friends (if you’re reading this, you know who you are, and it cannot be understated how grateful I am). I hunted down jobs, believing I could get one with ease, but I couldn’t. I faced rejection after rejection, I almost fell for multiple scams, for some reason, I couldn’t will myself to go to the career group meetings that could seriously help me. I never wanted to say that I was depressed, because I felt that it was just a rough patch and there were so many people who had it worse. But I was depressed.

Then everything came to a head in August.

It started when my dad looked over my resume and suggested that I put Go! Child as more than just something in the “Fun Facts” section to catch the eye. He told me that what I do in G!C really is something more than that, and I put a whole lot of work into it with some hashtag marketable skills for businesses. I guess hearing that kind of flipped the switch in my brain.

That day, I willed myself to go into my church’s career group. I may have cried there too, but the people there were incredibly helpful, telling me that adding G!C was a good idea and doing what they could to give me solid advice. A lot of it I’d heard before, but I felt more motivated to follow up on it. One of them (shoutouts to Steve) invited me to a follow-up meeting a few days later. Between that time I’d spruced up my resume a little more and I’d even made business cards. Steve even said that I was carrying myself much more confidently than the Monday before, so it did help to hear a validation of sorts that I really was in a bad place, along with knowing I was already improving.

Meanwhile, with X, I had showed her the new resume, and she stayed sort of adamant that I should keep Go! Child listed as a hobby. Afterward we had a rough conversation that led to her giving me an overbearing amount of pressure to get a job. A few days later, I had to break it off with her, and then some time later, I decided to ask someone else on a date. Her name’s Amanda and I love her. I told her about EVERYTHING I did online before anything else, and she seemed to like that.

The day after I did that, I was on a call with a staffing firm who was taking a look over my resume. I’d had conversations with these firms before, but this time I did something different. Right at the end they asked if I have any other preferences. I originally never answered that because I thought my answer would make me seem childish or unprofessional, but this time I just straight up said that I wanted to work with video games. And what do you know? They had a position open with a company that makes slot machines. And now here I am.

I feel a lot more “true to myself” now because of this whole mess. I don’t really hide the stuff I do online anymore, even taking pride in it since it’s a culmination of my hard work. I guess it makes me feel less fragmented. Along with all that, I came to the whole bi conclusion too, so I figure that was part of that too.

So moral of the story? I guess be proud of what you do, and be all of who you are whenever you can. I dunno. This post has gone on forever.

Thanks for reading. Peace.

#personal #ill say its okay to reblog this if only because the information might help someone else

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moocdiary · 5 years ago

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Week 1 (Course 1)

I finally went through the first week of the Learning to Teach Online course. My feelings were mixed when starting because I had no idea what to expect and thought there would be chaos taking over. I was luckily wrong.

The whole course had started with an introduction video and text in which the needed introductory information was thoroughly explained.

Each week there are two modules and each module has videos, articles and “tests” (self-evaluation and knowledge quizzes you’re taking for yourself). and there will be also 2 peer-graded assignments throughout the course.

It put me at ease knowing you are not forced to do everything or follow the modules as they are designed (I will follow them and try to read/watch/do all the videos, articles, tests and assignments, but just the thought of possibly forgetting to do something and not face any consequences for it is relaxing enough).

The whole platform has been easy to adapt to and after introducing myself in the discussion forum, I went straight to Module 1 and Module 2. It took me some time to finish both and do the assignment on top of it, but at least I’m feeling really accomplished right now.

Module 1

This module’s purpose was to explain why it’s so important to include technology in your teaching nowadays and how blended-learning and fully online teaching can be an advantage for the teacher and the students.

I particularly appreciated the video (funnily enough it was the optional one), where teachers and students were talking about their experiences using online technology to teach and study. What mostly stuck with me was when one of the students said that one can feel “isolated” when they’re undertaking an online course (as an example for possible negatives for fully online education) and I have to say I finally found a name for how I mostly feel when I’m taking fully online courses – it really is isolation. Even kind of felt it while I was going through the first and second module of this course, but the provided videos, where the two teachers (who run the course) explain things, helped since it felt more personalized and the feeling of isolation was slowly disappearing thanks to that.

The whole course is about auto evaluation and working with your own knowledge and experience of others – what I actually learnt from this module is that even something little as a video that shows the teacher/s speaking can help make the online course feel more alive. Also noticed that for me, the discussion forum didn’t really help with the whole isolation thing – it’s mostly just people with faceless accounts to me, but hopefully it will change as the time goes by and I will contribute to the discussion forum more.

Module 2

Module 2 was more knowledge-based. I’ve actually learned (or “re-learned”) some things about institutionally supported technology (e.g. LMS) and open access technology (e.g. social media) used in educational context.

Again, went through the videos, the readings and the quizzes and the thing I haven’t really realized before and found interesting was that there is a huge risk and a huge responsibility concerning the open access technology if used in education. What I’ve learned is that if teacher decided that students should use an open access technology as a part of their class activity/assignment/etc. (for example, setting up Twitter and use it to tweet out opinions on some matter using hashtag, so the teacher can go through it), the teacher is actually responsible for the students’ privacy. Meaning, if the student (even in future) were to get attacked by some people on Twitter for tweeting out those things and the student would complain to school – the teacher would be responsible. It kind of makes sense, but it kind of doesn’t as well?

Assignment

I have submitted my assignment and I have yet to review 3 of them. As soon as I review them and as soon as I (hopefully) get feedback, I will type out my feelings about it and what the assignment was actually about in next week’s post (along with my thoughts on Module 3 and 4).

Thoughts

I appreciate that the course is designed the way it is – after I go through the quizzes, it actually gives me a list of recommended and personalized sources that could be helpful for me based on the answers I have given. Already saved three of them because I found them to be really helpful. Hopefully this positive feeling will stay with me as the weeks go by.

#course 1

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dzpenumbra · 2 years ago

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1/12/23

I'm eating Ben & Jerry's Dirt Cake ice cream. It's good. :D

Today was pretty heavily dominated by a difficult focal point. I'm noticing that my isolation and social starvation has sent me to social media again. It always seems to, I really don't have a lot of options socially currently. It may seem odd saying this... on a social media platform... but this site has pretty constantly been mostly one-way communication, people don't really interact on here with my stuff. And that's cool, don't get me wrong, I don't mean that passive aggressively, merely factually. My purpose of doing this journal is not affected even remotely by interaction, the purpose is solely to keep my stream-of-consciousness create flow muscles in shape, to therapeutically work through the day's issues and to counteract my own social anxiety by doing this in a public format. By the time I hit Post, my process is done, so... no big there. Anything else is extra.

After the whole thing last week, I haven't really felt cool with my city's subreddit. And reddit as a whole just... most of the conversations are like 80% people I really don't want anything to do with. Like... super judgmental, superficial, egotistical, hedonistic, antisocial people. Just not the kind of people I want to be hanging out with. And reddit has had by far the most ridiculously heinous ads. So I really want to stray from there. I tried Insta today, but that is seriously 1 ad every 5 posts you look at. It's fucking stupid. The ads are more palatable but like... it just puts a bad taste in my mouth. Like I'm sorry, I'm not in the mood to buy something right now, I just fucking woke up and I just want to watch some skate clips and art stuff.

I did yoga, which was good but... again... I hit the road block of not being able to get into a pose and then I was just super behind for a bit. Frustrating. But I got past it and it was good. After that... was the big bad moment.

I fell for clickbait. I saw a video on my recommended feed that was blaming The Berrics for fucking this dude over. It was over an hour long of this dude just sitting in front of a camera with a super expensive mic and just talking. Let me preface this by saying I actually got an early start to the day and was planning to get groceries. I clicked the video. This guy was... ... sad? I guess? I don't know how to really put it. Like... he was trying to impress his dad or something? But... in a "I'm a self-help guru" and "I'm a professional businessman" kinda way. And I looked through his videos, he had like 67K subs but his last few videos were getting like double digit views. Like the highest view count video he had was like 20K, and he had over 60K subs? I mean... yeah. I shit you not he was wearing both a hat and a hoodie with the words "Doubt Me" on them, and had his hashtag "#doubtme" (please for the love of god do not give this guy the analytic affirmation of searching that, no matter how morbid the curiosity may be) on screen the whole time. It was his "mantra". <facepalm> How could I say no to that? I doubted him. I mean, he was asking so nicely!

I start to write my "reaction" in the comments section. I could go on for a long time rehashing the details of that, but to put it succinctly, he did some... really sketchy and possibly illegal shit... and was putting this video out there as like... shifting the blame onto the Berrics. Trying to specifically out the founder, Steve Berra. Like personally naming him, and using his logo and his fucking face as the thumbnail for the video. Like... talk about defamation lawsuit, man. The dude just got control of his business back from sketchy stockholders like 3 fucking days ago after 5 years, and he has this eyebrow-waxing motherfucker shitting on his name like that. And, from as far as I could tell, it was primarily because he was having trouble being assertive and saying "no" to someone who was very blatantly trying to use The Berrics brand and image as a way to self-promote, trying to piggyback off their fame. Ugh, I'm getting upset again.

So here's the problem. I finally wrapped up the video and my whole like... in-depth 2+ page response. I was squirming in my chair like a toddler I had to piss so bad. I looked at the clock, it was past 5PM. I have no idea when I sat down and opened that, I'd ballpark around 1:30 or 2. I felt like I fucking time-traveled. And it wasn't even worth it. For real. I deleted the fucking comment. It wasn't going to make a difference, it was like a 2 page comment, who is going to read that? And what difference will it make? It's like... a reaction video in itself. I just deleted it and booked it up to the shower, praying I could get to the grocery store in time because I had my therapy appointment today.

I did not have enough time. I started shopping on Instacart, because a storm is coming, so I needed food. I got the order in the cart and... my mom calls. Half an hour before my meeting. I pick up and start unloading, which just spirals into catastrophizing. It got dark real quick. From "I lost time" to "I'm a fuck up" to "I have no friends" to "its not safe to meet new people". In like not even 10 minutes. Ugh. Luckily I went to therapy and got tons of that cleared up, and got a huge dose of like... "hey dude, by the way, that's not your fault. You suffered because of that, and you didn't even enjoy it. You were baited, and you didn't enjoy it, so don't beat yourself up over that. It's in the past." It helped a ton, and we went over different executive functioning tools to help with getting stuff done and daily structuring too. It was super helpful, I felt a ton better.

Then I called my mom back and apologized for my depressive episode, which is weird because... again... I shouldn't really apologize for something I can't really help because it hits me the hardest... but I apologized for how it affected her, because it must've been jarring. I felt like it was the right thing to do. And it was a nice moment.

The rest of the night was cooking potatoes, taking down timestamps on the Ancestors vids so I can maybe put together a little short narrative video from that. And... ice cream. Yep. That was my entire day. But, good news, got my groceries. I said fuck it and got the Instacart and I got lucky because the person made good substitutions when I was in my session. Now I'm just gonna prep for an early night. I'm really emotionally drained from it all. I don't fucking care anymore (at least not at the moment) if people out there think my problems are stupid or other people have it worse. The chain reactions in my head, the spirals that happen, the emotional burden of it all... it's rough. And if people are just going to scoff and compete and talk shit, I really hope they just keep fucking scrolling.

If it's one thing I need to take from today, it's that I need to stop giving my emotional bandwidth and energy to people who would never offer that much to me in return. I wrestle back and forth on where that fits on an ethical scale, as far as like... being a "good person"... but on a survival scale? I just can't do it. It doesn't make me a bad person to walk away from people who don't take my debilitating struggles seriously, it makes me... a self-respecting person.

#diary #journal #online journal #stream of consciousness #stream of thoughts

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studyinsuburbanisolation · 5 years ago

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Study in Suburban Isolation - Day 27

‘Anova Day, Anova Lesson’

The lessons of Day 27 are only alive because of Day 26.

Yesterday was a really beautiful day. The whole 24hrs had a reassuring sense of ‘normal’. I like this time of season as the warmth transitions from crispy to toasty. The sun begins to wear her winter coat and it suits her, which suits me. An early evening stroll to sayonara the day and welcome the cooling evening has become quite the treat and by about 4.30pm I can sense my feet getting ready to go. Watching the sun set as my body falls into a leisurely rhythm seems to reset my mind and transition me from the day’s ‘have to’ into the evening’s ‘get to’.

Last night we cooked some broccoli and got our favourite takeout pizzas. We toasted them up in the sandwich press, added some realllllly good olive oil & chilli flakes and sat down to watch a film. It was ‘Knives Out’ and it was fabulous, absolutely incredible! It takes its time to build up pace so if you do choose to watch it I’d advise pressing play before 8pm. We paused half way and did a round of cuppas and a few left over Easter eggs.

For all of the ‘can nots’ ‘do nots’ ‘better nots’ ‘will nots’ staring down at us at the moment yesterday felt like a blissful ‘remember when’ dream. Normal, with an indulgent and generous side of ‘thankful’ hashtag blessed. It’s been about 5.5wks since a day felt so peace-filled for me. About 10.45pm I realised I had not yet met my SISI deadline. Better yet, I hadn’t even contemplated it and I was exhausted from being happy and content and absolutely had not felt much inspiration the past few days, in that capturing direction.

I internally decided Day 26 didn’t really matter (which generally, for me means, what I do doesn’t really matter), no one would care and Day 26 could wait because I was exhausted and probably to be quite honest, feared adding something to the essay that I didn’t think was up to scratch.

Somewhere I got the energy or determination or a combination of lots of good gritty things to search the house, find something that caught my eye, shoot it, transfer it, edit it, upload it and title it. Sounds simple enough but there was a significant amount of umm’ing and ahh’ing and doubt’ing and then the crunch moment...

‘These aren’t as good as some of my recent shots. Actually they are uninspired and feel forced to me. They’re not very good. What if someone looks at my essay and they only see these top shots, don’t scroll a bit and think my ability and worth is the sum of these few files’

Sounds like a lot of over thinking, it’s not. Most of it was subconscious but I know myself well enough and I clearly sensed my hesitation. I had an array of these inadequate thoughts circling my ‘save’ button.

The irony of the moment was not lost on me. I was de-valuing the very thing I set out to achieve. The ‘change’ & ‘perspective’ was no longer enough. I had lost sight of the purpose and goal I set FOR MYSELF and handed it over to an unseen expectation assigned to the old chestnut ‘what other people might think’. Ahhhh! Even in my own self assigned, doesn’t matter to anyone else, no-one is paying me project I am acquiescing to comparison. Why?! Human nature you are so frustrating!

The shots weren’t super inspired, although I did actually begin to get quite excited when shooting them and then I thought ‘maybe I should save this idea for later when I can make it better’. I shut that thought down and made myself make some choices and deliver before the 11.59pm deadline.

Day 26 was a wonderful lesson (again) in the value of pursuing and meeting the brief in spite of the lack of ‘mojo’ or ideas. I went to sleep with a different sense of achievement and it was really sweet and pure and selfishly, it was all mine. It was not, ‘gosh I am so happy with those shots’ but, ‘YES I did it!’ Despite all the plausible excuses.

The achievement placed me back perfectly where I began. To see normal things differently, with an engaged intent to change ‘common’ to interesting, beautiful etc. Yesterday a common mindset of inadequacy did change, and it changed because I looked at it. I definitely wanted to sleep on it but am so thankful I didn’t because somehow today, Day 27 arrived with a fresh outlook. A distinct new sense of inspiration aka dusty blind with sun beam equals beautiful.

This is a long story, but as I did my wind-down-day-stroll this evening I realised how quickly great changes can become dim as we slowly and unknowingly weave our way back to past tendencies. I hope that in post-corona land I am strong enough to ensure that great changes become great ‘normals’.

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bigyack-com · 5 years ago

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How to Make Friends Online the Old-Fashioned Way (Buying Clothes Together)

Emily Useche, who is 27 and lives in Arkansas, had just put her baby down for a nap one afternoon when she decided to post some family photos on Facebook. But she didn’t simply upload them for friends and family to see. She also posted the photos to a private Facebook group for a whole other community: A fan club for Pyne & Smith Clothiers. Ms. Useche was wearing one of that brand’s dresses in the photos — a style she had posted about once before when she saw it being sold secondhand — and was ready to show it off. Minutes after she posted, other members replied with compliments for her, and praise for the sunflower check dress she was wearing.The group, Pyne & Smith Clothiers BST and Chat, is one of a number of so-called buy-sell-trade communities. Part social club and part marketplace, the groups have sprung up on Instagram and Facebook and have, for some users, become a daily place to socialize and shop.While many serve enthusiasts of mass market brands, others are powered by dedicated followers of idiosyncratic indie brands, the sort rarely featured in glossy magazines and often escape the notice of major retailers. But they have devoted followers, many of whom are attracted by the idea of slow, ethical fashion. Facebook and Instagram communities can be a very real alternative to traditional retailers, providing shoppers with not only products, but also friends.“A lot of us are millennials who are trying really hard to take steps toward sustainability,” said Lacey Camille Schroeder, 32 and a jewelry designer who lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She created the PSC buy-sell-trade Facebook group. “People buying these dresses tend to be like-minded when it comes to fashion. A lot of them are in the ‘crunchy’ category.” That line was founded by Joanna McCartney. She stumbled into making clothes in 2014 when she couldn’t find a linen dress she liked during the hot Los Angeles summer. Made of flax linen and produced in California, the dresses look like the kind you could wear to a dinner party and to collect eggs from your free-range chickens the next day. Their prices range from $146 to $186, though by the time the dresses make it to this group, they’re usually sold for about $120 each. Ms. Schroeder set up the group, which has 2,888 members, two years ago when a follower of the Pyne & Smith Clothiers Instagram said she was looking to sell a gently used Pyne & Smith dress that was taking up space in her closet. Ms. Schroeder got on the phone with Ms. McCartney and hammered out the group guidelines.Civility and a promise to be kind when posting critical feedback are among the few requirements for membership, and Ms. Schroeder said she rarely has to moderate conversations. In some cases, a single dress may be sold and passed between three or four members, who connect with each other and facilitate their own sales along the way.

Friends Through Fashion

Groups range from small pop-up Instagram hashtags like #JamieandTheJonesForSale, with fewer than 100 posts, to accounts like Noihsaf Bazaar, which was started on Instagram in 2013 and now has more than 30,000 followers. Noihsaf was founded when Kate Lindello, 36, a stylist, fashion blogger and stay-at-home mother, wanted to sell a pair of Rachel Comey flats that didn’t fit.Today Noihsaf, which focuses on emerging and independent designers, operates multiple Instagram accounts, including one for vintage and one for beauty products, and posts 1,200 to 1,500 items weekly on its main resale account. Ms. Lindello employs three freelancers to help her sort through the hundreds of daily submissions and choose items to post. Unlike volunteer-run accounts, Noihsaf charges a $3.80-per-sale fee.“Tech is a blessing and a curse,” Ms. Lindello said. “We’re behind our phones so much, but you also have the chance to make this human connection.” In 2017, after posting a pair of her own denim jeans on the account, she was surprised to see that the buyer lived only two miles down the road.“I could have mailed those jeans to Allison in Duluth, but I wanted to know who this person was,” she said. “I emailed her, and she said she’d just drop by my house. She ended up being a New Yorker who had just moved here, and we’re buddies now. She’s my kid’s dentist.”

From Online to In-Person

Around that same time, Nicolle Rountree, an African-American logistics manager who lives in New Orleans and wears plus-size clothing, was fed up with feeling unwelcome in stores and buying new pants every month when fast fashion ones fell apart.Through online research, Ms. Rountree discovered Elizabeth Suzann, a label that offers classic staples in natural fabrics in sizes XXS through 4XL — and then discovered that used Elizabeth Suzann clothing was being sold on Instagram accounts like Sell/Trade Elizabeth Suzann and Sell/Trade Slow Fashion. One day, a fellow Instagram shopper tagged her in a post for a used pair of black Clyde pants in size 16 that she had spotted. Ms. Rountree bid by commenting on the post and bought them from the seller for $125 (normally $245), becoming the third owner of the pants and a committed Elizabeth Suzann customer.This year, Ms. Rountree became a volunteer moderator of the Sell/Trade Slow Fashion Instagram account (more than 18,000 followers), which hosts and curates sale posts for slow fashion items, hosts trade forums and prompts weekly discussions about ethical fashion. Through the group, she has met more and more women who care about slow fashion.It’s an online community that became even more real in October, when Ms. Rountree met two other moderators of the group and road-tripped to the Elizabeth Suzann sample sale in Nashville.“I got out of the car, and there’s this line of women, many of whom I knew, mostly by their Instagram handles, and they ran up to me and hugged me. It blew me away,” she said. “We were all there waiting and shopping in terrible 90-degree Southern summer heat, all stripped down to just bras and underwear. And people are handing you stuff to try on, and you’re handing them stuff to try on, and you don’t even know them. They’re strangers who aren’t strangers.“I’m a black woman who lives in the South,” Ms. Rountree said. “I have never felt that safe around that many people before.”

A New Social Network

Sali Kelley, 50 and an American child care provider and E.S.L. teacher in Italy, has also seen her life changed by online buy-sell-trade communities. Between 2015 and 2016, Ms. Kelley’s best friend left the country, leaving her adrift and depressed, and she and her family moved from Milan to Varese, a smaller city in northern Italy. Feeling alone and isolated, Ms. Kelley found herself having more interactions online. Eventually, most of them centered around a newly discovered passion: slow fashion, and one brand in particular, Ace & Jig, a female-run American company that uses vivid Indian textiles to create whimsical, colorful clothing.Though Ms. Kelley was initially turned off by Ace & Jig’s retail prices (new pieces are $200 to $300), she began searching Instagram, where she discovered hundreds of women selling under hashtags like #aceandjigforsale (more than 16,000 posts) and #aceandjigcommunity (more than 5,000). Noihsaf also has a channel dedicated to Ace & Jig.Before long, Ms. Kelley had started an Instagram account dedicated to celebrating the label, as well as a private message group for plus-size members to trade their Ace & Jig items. She even began organizing an April 2020 meeting for fans in Paris and London, and says it’s not unusual for her to spend hours each week chatting with other Ace & Jig fans and commenting on community posts.She is also managing the cross-country journey of an Ace & Jig shirt that is being mailed from fan to fan every couple of weeks.“The rules are basically there’s no rules,” Ms. Kelley said. “You wear it once and post a picture of it and pass it on.” Termed the “traveling Baja,” after the shirt style and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” the shirt is size XS but seems to fit most of the women who want to participate, Ms. Kelley said. Currently making its way through Tennessee after traveling from Italy through 13 other states, the shirt is a way for people in the community to connect that Ms. Kelley said she dreamed up one night when she couldn’t sleep.“Most of us are women with the same core values who care about women’s issues,” Ms. Kelley said of the 500 or so online friends in her network. “We talk about kids, life, jobs. We’re constantly messaging each other and commenting on each others posts. If I haven’t seen someone post for a while, I’ll check and ask, ‘Hey, are you O.K.?’” Read the full article

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rategain-blog · 8 years ago

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A couple of years ago I came across an article published by an Italian blog titled “Pizzeria sues TripAdvisor for psychological abuse”. I was intrigued and honestly curious to understand how a review site could possibly psychologically damage an inanimate thing like a restaurant, as I was sure that psychological traumas were a prerogative of mankind and, to a certain extent, animals.

Digging through the blog I discovered that the owner of the pizzeria (I quote literally) “reserved the right to refuse to serve TripAdvisor users, because” he continued, “We are here to work and not to be the target of the frustration of reviewers”.

As the name of the pizzeria was published in the article, I went online and checked his reputation and, not surprisingly, not only it was very bad (actually it was terrible), but the manager responses to the client comments were full of insults and threats.

Now, as a former hotel General Manager, I know how frustrating it can be when you do your best and guests slash you on review sites anyway, but that is part of the game. At the end of the day, you will not be able to make everybody love you. That is true for anything in life. Therefore, the only thing you can do (unless the reviews are completely misleading, and in that case, you can always report them to the review site for further investigation and possible removal) is to swallow your ego, calm down and apologize. I was feeling bad for the owner of the pizzeria and I imagined him as a 70-something old school Naple guy that never get out of the pre-web era, so I tried to contact him privately to give him some advises because, with this approach, he was actually damaging his business (giving the F-word to a client is never a good idea). To my big surprise, when I finally reached him, I discovered that he was around my age and pretty familiar with social networks too.

We had a long chat and I explained to him some best practices in order to deal with the (unavoidmakable) occasional bad reviews (all for free, of course). I didn’t really expect gratitude, and I did it just because I felt bad for the guy, but what he said to me at the end of the conversation shocked me: he accused me to work secretly for TripAdvisor and he told me that I wanted him to buy something from the famous review site. At that point, I stopped any kind of contact with him, as the whole situation was turning into an Illuminati-like conspiracy and I honestly did not want to waste more time on it.

Nevertheless, this incident made me think about how restaurants and hotels managers underestimate the power of reviews when it comes to food & beverage.

Within my clients, I have a hotel with an amazing two-Michelin-star restaurant but, even though they actively reply professionally to every single review published on the hotel review sites, the restaurant TripAdvisor page stays on an incredible state of abandonment. Even worse, whenever they receive a bad review, they try to report it in order to move it to the restaurant page. They use the restaurant review page as the hotel parachute. And we are talking about one of the best places you can eat in southern Italy.

Sure, often hotel restaurants are forgettable (at best), overpriced and the majority of guests eat there as a last resort because the closest restaurant in town is half an hour Uber ride away, but does this mean that you have to give up managing your online reputation tout court? I doubt it.

Listening to your guests is, as always, the golden rule. However, there is another one that’s often forgotten: when was the last time you ate at your restaurant? I am sure between your duties as a general manager you have to inspect rooms, meet your staff and speak to your attendants on a daily basis, but how much time do you spend in the kitchen?

Everybody is complaining about the quality of the veggies on Yelp? Well, maybe it is time to change your distributors. The name of that rude F&B Manager pops out on every single review. I think you should have a chat vis-à-vis with him and solve the issue once for all.

Hotel restaurants have the tendency of being seen as sons of a lesser God when it comes to hospitality: as long as rooms are clean and Wi-Fi works fine then there is no need to worry about the undercooked pasta. They are conceived as unanimated appendages to the main entity: the hotel. However, the reality is that they are not. Even though they do not necessarily reflect the hotel style and vibe, it does not mean they are just tools to make some ancillary revenue. Especially if your hotel is located far from the city center, it is vital that you give your guests a great experience. Would you risk destroying your hotel online reputation just because you serve watered down margaritas? I do not think so. Great experience can mean good prices too. If you know that your restaurant is average, it can be a good idea to review your à-la-carte menu to make it look less like a robbery. Remember that with the rise of mobile and social networks your reputation is just one click away so sometimes listening to your clients when they are in the restaurant is not enough.

Therefore, what you should do to actively monitoring your restaurant online reputation?

We gathered 10 golden rules to improve your restaurant experience:

Collect and aggregate data from all the review sites that mention your property and your competitors. This will give you a better understanding of what is working and what needs to be improved. There are modern online reputation management tools that can do it for you, so adapt an online reputation technology that could simplify all the unstructured data in way that is more actionable. Insight on what are reviewers writing about your restaurant, is crucial to identify the gaps and improve guest experience.

Use an online reputation management tool to map your service style and cuisine with your competitors so that you can benchmark and improve by doing apple-to-apple comparison. Remember that Devil is in detail of guest experience.

Once you start analyzing your competitive set, focus on key metrics for these four categories a) Food & Beverage: consistency, freshness, value for money, portion size, smell, taste and temperature. b) Dining Experience: business hours, greeting, internet access, location, parking, restrooms, seating room and standing room. c) Service: Quality and speed. d) Ambiance: cleanliness, décor design, atmosphere, comfort, heating and cooling, noise isolation and lighting.

That should be understood, but claim all your pages. You should always have control over those and make sure there are no duplicates. It’s free and easy to do and you can add a lot of useful information like your location, your average price, etc.;

Reply to ALL your reviews. Not only the bad ones, ALL of them. If your clients are happy then just thank them, if they’re angry apologize and promise that you will make everything in your power to improve the service

Do not focus on TripAdvisor only. There are dozens of directories out there: Dineout.co.nz, Facebook, Foodio54, Google, Opentable, Restaurant.com, TopTable.co.uk, Yell, Yelp, Zomato etc. Make sure to be listed and active on all of these. Your online reputation management tool can help you to structure data and get all your online mentions in real time.

Foodies love images: think about opening an Instagram account and share your best dishes every day. You can create a hashtag to give to your clients too, so they will share more images and you will have free contents on a daily basis!

Foodies love videos too: you can think about connecting your Google MyBusiness page to a YouTube channel and publish an interview to the chef or a video of your bartender preparing a perfect Martini Dry. These kind of contents are always appreciated;

You can think about inviting influencers to your restaurant and get a great article written on their blogs. It can be expensive, but usually the return on branding is totally worth it.

Last but not least: create a proper strategy: improvisation is good for jazz, but not if you want to re-brand your restaurant.

So, is managing restaurant’s online reputation a priority for hotel general managers? It surely is, if you focus & leverage on technology it can turn out to be a Secret Sauce in enhancing your Hotel Brand.

Originally published at rategain.com on June 28, 2017.

#online reputation management tool #improve guest experience #Hotel Brand Reputation

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marsupial-tapir · 8 years ago

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☾ voltron crew

sleep headcanons for the space kids LETS GO

pidge: Sleep Is For the WEAK. pidge asserts they’ve optimised their sleep schedule into a complex system of power naps, which produce maximum mental output for minimal sleep time and thus skillfully eliminate the need for “”beds””. the fact that they fall asleep in the middle of the day on inconvenient semi-perilous surfaces is an unfortunate side-effect, and one that will be WORKED OUT if u just give them time to TEST THEIR HYPOTHESIS,, shiro,, listen,, its an unperfected theory,,, theyre still mapping out their circadian rhythm but theyve nearlly got it now…. they donnt need to go to bed rig htnow they DONT they can stay up a litlle… longer… nno theyre not falling asleep on their keyboard theyre just… powernapppign… shiro lissten,,.,

oh um also when they were kids pidge and matt shared a room (byproduct of their parents putting them together for convenience when they were tiny, and as they grew up they liked it too much and protested whenever their parents tried to give them their own rooms) and theyd stay up late into the night talking abt science or trying to outdo each other with dumb made-up stories about aliens or making intricate structures out of bedroom items (piece of cake during the day; much more fun in the dark). pidge stopped sleeping properly the day matt disappeared. one day theyre gonna get him back and theyre gonna stay up late again and probably set up prank traps on the ship at 2 in the morning and give shiro grey hairs together and its gonna be great

shiro: u know nobody’s gonna sleep well after 3 years as a prisoner on a galra ship. im sorry space dad. i wish u could rest too. luckily after a few weeks of sleepless nights coran or allura probably notices and then altean tech steps in to help. (theyve got stasis pods or brain-calming alien fruits or something). also helpful are his Pidge Retrieval Missions. some nights when sleep is bad he does a top-bottom search of the ship and the pidge-sized nooks therein. carrying a weakly-protesting 14-year old back to bed is aq surprisingly calming activity. he is lulled to sleep by the fulfilling sense of Dadness

keith: hasn’t had a full night’s sleep since he came out of the galra womb. poor kid. i would like to say that it’s because peaceful sleep messes with his Constantly-Vigilant Cryptid-Spotting Tortured Fashion Icon aesthetic and that he stays up all night watchign illuminati confirmed videos and trying to replicate shiro’s eyeliner technique while listening to mcr albums on repeat,, and not because he lived alone in a freezing shack in a hostile desert,, probably angsting abt whether shiro was alive,, and where his family was,, and how old and isolated he was gonna get before he found out whether bigfoot would ever love him back,,, but regardless of the cause he’s a fitful sleeper and has lived his whole life pretty much getting short snatches of rest here and there throughout the day. he’s never really felt safe enough to know what deep sleep feels like. UNTIL, of course, he boards the castle of the lions, and then suddenly.. its like…. he has a bed?? a?? roof?? the comforting ambience of noises from people who arent gonna try to eat him in the night?? shiro right next door and not in need of rescue?? i mean he still keeps his knife under his pillow but as time goes on he starts getting this weird like. unconsciousness. its kind of like napping but it involves almost no nightmares and goes on for HOURS. he can feel this happening and he is UNCOMFORTABLE like nnO i cant rest i gotta stay VIGILANT i gotta.. i gotta… until he is lulled soundly to sleep by the sound of hunk snoring and coran singing space opera on some far corner of the ship and pidge tapping on their laptop as they perch on the end of keith’s bed (handy hiding place from meddling shiros). he feels safe. its weird.

lance: i mean the first thing that comes to mind is that scene with lance swanning out of his bedroom draped in a silk bathrobe, nourishing facemask and custom blue lion slippers, glittering with the otherworldly radiance of the ultra-rare Well-Rested Youth, and based on this evidence youd think lance would be the World’s Number One Beauty Sleep Expert. HOWEVER. u remember that post that zoomed right in on lance’s sleep earmuffs and they had green on them?? and looked suspiciously like pidge’s nerdy headphones from episode 1?? ya pidge gave him their headphones because lance has trouble sleeping. hashtag confirmed my dudes. certainly back home lance could sleep 11 hours through the apocalypse in the middle of a storm with a dance party happening next door (when u have to juggle 6 siblings, hunk as a roomie and an obligatory 12 hours beauty sleep u learn to Adapt) but now, lightyears away from home, sleep doesnt come so easily. the ship is quiet in unfamiliar ways, and when ur supposed to be sleeping u cant fill those weird silences with ur own comforting noise. he doesnt talk abt it to anyone, of course. that would be Lame. (but pidge notices him sleeplessly fidgeting one night and quietly lends him their headphones. just to shut him up, of course. sleep well, you fucker.) also important: lance keeps up with a strict nightly skincare routine and adorns himself with luxurious sleepwear each night, partly because u have to look fab to have good dreams,, obviously,, but also bc this doubles as a comforting bedtime ritual. facemask, nourishing space spa-bath, tai-chi before bed, smooch each lion slipper on its little nose. just little bedtime things. he’s not great at going to sleep at first but every night he drops off a little faster. its getting easier.

hunk: sleeps like a log. takes 30 seconds for him to fall asleep and then he’s out like a light for 9 hours. even when he’s anxious. he’ll fall asleep like “oohhh man im so far from home what if we dont MAKE IT BACK what’s zarkon gonna do oh ma - [snoring, 10 hour version]. oh ya he snores. i think this is canon probably?? if it’s not it should be. the depth of his sleep is too profound to be contained within his body. also, hunk is at the nucleus of every communal sleep pile. this works because 6 people can pile onto his huge soft belly and he doesn’t feel a thing. first sleep pile happens because hunk falls asleep in the middle of the training deck; lance drapes himself over him in a show of theatrics and just forgets to get up, probably; shiro tries to extract them but is ambushed by hunk’s remarkable Sleep Hugging reflexes; keith meets a similar fate, not entirely unvoluntarily, and makes a very unconvincing show of protest; pidge pretends to use them all as a comfortable backrest while tapping away at a tablet and promptly falls into the deepest calmest sleep theyve had since they were 6. even when he is asleep hunk spreads wholesomeness and love. god bless my sweet son

coran and allura: i put them together because?? do alteans even need sleep??? have they evolved beyond simple biological constraints?? was 10 000 years of stasis enough and now they’ve stored up enough rest to stay awake for years?? somehow i cant imagine either of them sleeping regularly. HOWEVER coran enthusiastically jumps on the new paladin trend, which “reminds me of viskralian bio-stasis!!” (this he demonstrates by flopping into a gracile position with one eye squeezed shut, humming violently in the key of F). allura remains baffled and slightly disapproving of all the wasted time, despite the flood of positive reviews (HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM JOIN IN PRINCESS HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM ITS VERY RELAXING) but one time she walks in on the paladins collapsed in a pile together and shes like… u know what. im gonna let this one slide. this is also the day she learns of the remarkable comfiness of hunks.

#THANK U AND GOODNIGHT #im sorry about the length which ironically is the reason i personally am not sleeping right now #THE THINGS I DO FOR THESE KIDS..........#voltron #headcanons #thank u for the question shena this was fun #I PERSONALLY LOVE OVERINVESTING #humandisastersquad #long post #my hcs

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dpargyle · 4 years ago

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Radio Free Lucy: Episode #1: Out from the Wardrobe Transcript

[RADIO ARGYLE INTRO STING - This 5 & a half second sting involves: the fumbling of a needle onto vinyl, the low murmur of vinyl crackle, what sounds like some sort of scifi engine ramping up, the rumble of thunder paired with a distinct sonar blip - then finally - a high-pitched female youth with a British accent (filtered through the subtle distortion of a phone/radio line) saying “Radio Argyle”]

[Lead In Background Music FADES IN: It’s playing soft & low in background as lead in rolls on. Lead In Music - it’s “Arrival” by How the Night Came - an upbeat, brief, acoustic guitar piece]

[Podcast VO - Lucy. A youthful female British voice]

Welcome! You lovely lunatics & worthwhile weirdos! This! is Radio Free Lucy.

[Lead In Music FADES OUT.]

[Episode Background Music 1 FADES IN: - it’s “Fluidscape” by Kevin MacLeod, which serves as a slightly hopeful, slightly ambient underhum for the piece.]

Episode One: Out from the Wardrobe

Hi.

I’m not sure how to say any of this out loud, yet. This Radio Argyle Bot player, which is a modified text to speech robot voice, will serve my purposes best. She’ll be clearer than my, actual, garbled disabled, boy, voice. Anyway, here goes. This isn’t going to come out perfectly, sequentially, or even logically, but I hope it’ll come out, me.

This isn’t a persuasive essay. You’ll either listen, & at least try to understand, or you won’t. I know a lot of what I say may be shocking, & it’ll definitely take some time to adjust to, even for me, but all I’m asking, is that you try.

This is more a memoir, or a prose poem. & poetry is flowers. Beautiful. But they can, & they will, cut you with their sharp pointy thorns. Truth, like the gods, can be a fickle bitch. She can hurt you. So please, be patient with me, while I bleed here before you, for a bit. I also ask that you make yourself comfortable, & listen to this in a safe space, away from prying ears.

Thank you.

While my primary purpose here will be to explain to, you, what’s truly been going on, with me, I think it will also be very helpful for me, to explain to, myself, what’s been going on with me. In as concise & as clear a manner, as I possibly can. Conciseness, however, has never really been my strong suit.

So you might as well buckle up, buttercups. Shit gets heavy from here.

I’ve always had a pretty contentious relationship with my body. When you drive a wheelchair, essentially as big as a Warhammer forty k mech, into the first day of suburban kindergarten, you realize pretty quickly, you’ll always be set apart. Not only in all, Their minds, but also always in, your own mind, as well. This isolation has lasted my whole life, & increasingly in my adulthood. Please understand, I don’t blame anyone. It’s just been a fact of my life. Family has been a boon, but family can’t, & shouldn’t be, my entire social circle.

The thing is, this isolation isn’t merely social. It’s mobility wise. If something is off my local light rail line, I simply can’t get to it, without extensive help. It’s logistics-wise. If people want to hang out at night, which let’s be honest, that’s when most people are available, I can’t participate due to having people who take care of me working at specific schedules & times, which means I have to get in bed way before any fun parties, even think, about ramping up. Not that I’m much of a partier, but perhaps there’s a reason for that. & now I’m too old for any of that shit, anyway!

This segregation. yes, segregation! Has also affected my career prospects, which I won’t get into here, as I no longer dream of labor. Just know that I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to make any sort of consistent money in this life, even after graduating college, & jumping through all the world’s nonsensical hoops, & playing along with their games, which have all been rigged from the start. In the end, though, I’ve always wanted to earn my way through my creative endeavors alone, so that’s why I’ve been working so hard on my podcasts lately. I don’t know how much I can earn from them, but I’m giving it my best go.

More painfully, the world’s reaction to my disability has deeply affected my romantic prospects, too. Not just because a lot of people refuse to even see me as a sexual being, or are repulsed by my disabled monstrousness, or whatever, but because, even if I did happen to meet a girl who reciprocated any kind of romantic slash sexual feelings, if we did get married, the bastard government would slash my healthcare entirely, immediately rendering me completely financially dependent in that relationship. I’m not saying monogamous marriage is the only valid endpoint to any successful romantic relationship, but these cobwebbed bureaucracies, running all our lives like great evil capitalist elder squids, have severely limited my choices in life. I’m not even legally allowed to save up more than two thousand dollars in my own bank account, before they start slashing my funds. I have, increasingly, felt as if my life is not my own.

So if I ever do get married, it will be an elopement & the government will be none the wiser. I have no use for illegitimate certificates from the, equally, illegitimate Powers That Be, anyway. The holy union will be between myself, the woman in question, & the gods, alone. Though these days I’m beginning to realize, a polyamorous situation, like a polycule, or a commune, or something, would be healthier & a stronger support network for someone in my situation. We were always meant to live communally. It’s what our noble ancestors once did. Hashtag every day we stray further…

Anyway…

I am getting slightly off topic. What I’m trying to illustrate with these examples is how the world, & my experience within it, have severely affected how I see my body, & how I see myself as a person with any value to give, in, that body. It’s hard not to start feeling a little bit like Quasimodo, thrust high up in the bell tower, shunned from all the realms of mortal men, after a while.

My whole life, I’ve tried to make the best of it. I survived by carving a distinction, in my head, between my mind & my body. I saw myself. & then I saw my body. They were always these two bifurcated things. Weirdly, I always saw my mind as sort of like those hilarious detached floating Presidential heads from Futurama. I found my worth, not in my two headed boy, circus freak in a jar body, but in my mind. I was a brain, & nothing more. I was my words. My wit. My passions. My epic, ineffable, nerdery. I could rely on that. I could never rely on my Judas body. I hated it. I still do.

I’ve never told anyone this, but back when my babby sister was born, when I was fifteen, I remember so vividly the first time I saw her precious face. I remember the moment like it was yesterday, because, well, obviously, because it was the first time I met this person who I knew, even back then, was immediately one of the most important people in my life, but also because, I remember the first thought I had when I gazed upon, the infinite galaxies of her kaleidoscope eyes. “How could anyone so beautiful, be related to me?”

I hated myself for thinking this, because it was otherwise this transcendental, celebratory, jubilant moment, & I had to go & make it all about me, at least in my head. So I never told anyone about it. I just let my self-hatred fester. I pushed it down. I endured. As men are expected to do. Stiff upper lip, always look on the bright side of life, etcetera etcetera.

I built this happy, plucky, go get ‘em! persona, who doesn’t want, nor need, the finer things in life. The finer things, like happiness, non-digital community, & self-actualization. I don’t remember the last time I was happy. Maybe it was back in college, but even then, I struggled mightily. I’ve suffocated myself so long, I’ve forgotten how to breathe. But sometimes, even drowning folk get sick of being wet!

I don’t tell you all this so you can pity me, or feel guilty about not seeing this, because first of all, I’m a phenomenal actor, & a seasoned liar, so how could you possibly know what lay beneath? Pity & guilt are pretty useless, in my experience, in any case. I tell you all this, so you can truly understand where I’m coming from.

Life is too short to keep concealing the things I really want. The things I really need. The things I really am.

For the last several years, with increasing intensity, urgency, excitement, curiosity, &, ultimately, hope, I’ve begun to realize some things about myself. Well, one thing about myself, really.

Holy shit, time to be brave, for once.

[Lucy inhales FX]

Sometimes. OK. a lot of the time. I wish I was a girl. A woman.

The yearnings began to coalesce six years ago, when I was. Uh. You know. fantasizing, as one does, & suddenly I was imagining myself as a girl. It scared the ever, loving, shit, out of me. I immediately stopped.

It scared me so much, because…

I liked it.

The thought excited me. In this fantasy, I was still disabled. But I was desirable! Girl me finally felt, OK, in my body. I was happy in my body! I could celebrate my body! It felt like coming up for air. It felt like freedom. Like some sort of, & forgive my nerdy metaphors, they are all I have, Pacific Rim mech pilots style, drift compatibility. At long last, both my body & my mind hooked together seamlessly. But it was just a dream, right? A fantasy? A fetish! I’ve felt so few moments of, genuine, freedom in my life, I instinctively crawled back to my comfortable, miserable, corner.

I tried to push it out of my mind. It wasn’t real if I didn’t think about it, right?. Denial has kept fossilized empires running, simply on calcified inertia, for hundreds of years! I could do that in the comparatively short amount of time I had left on this dumb rock, right? But my denial couldn’t last. I couldn’t just put these intrusive thoughts out of my mind that simply.

I tried to tell myself I was just a creep. Some sort of pervert with a fetish. I was appropriating trans girls’ experiences, & obviously making light, of very real, incredibly terrifying, hardships they go through in this world. I’ve done a lot of research & soul searching since then, but back then I still believed the lie, in order to be trans, you absolutely had to have had gender dysphoria as a kid. & I didn’t think I had. But upon further reflection, I realize I’ve had dysphoria, my whole life. I just thought all these feelings were what being alive felt like, for everyone!

I grew up in an Evangelical Christian household, so I was incredibly sheltered as a kid. I didn’t even know trans folk could even be a thing! until I was 21, & in college & literally face to face with a friend, who got called a name of a different gender they no longer went by. I asked them, “why did that person just call you by that name?” & they graciously explained they were trans, & that they had just been ‘dead named,’ as the community calls it. In retrospect, they were being incredibly generous with me, considering the mental violence. yes, violence, which had just been wrought upon them, right before my eyes.

As you can probably imagine, that conversation blew. My. Freaking. Mind. It was like some scifi crap – like the trill symbionts from Star Trek Deep Space Nine, etcetera, who always made my mind go brrr, but in a very good way, back when I couldn’t quite verbalize, or even admit to myself in my own mind, why even the thought of them made me feel. A certain something I didn’t even have words for, at the time.

But talking to this trans person was in the actual, flesh & blood, realm! I knew about Drag Queens, & cross dressers, thanks to that dusty library copy of, Rocky Horror Picture Show, my brother & I hid from our parents, which I only vaguely understood anyway, but changing your actual, GENDER? In real life? Wizard shit!

At the time of this college era conversation, I was still drowning in Evangelicalism, Patriarchy, chauvinism. all of the things, but despite all this, I remember this moment so vividly too. Because my friend, who had just been violently dead named, was leaning across the table from me, being honest with me, open with me, almost begging me to accept them, & I realized right there, right then. This was a human fucking being. & even though my mind had just been BLOWN, & I was still HIGHLY CONFUSED, & terrifyingly curious, I could be a cowardly dickhead, or I could follow the path of love. True love, not White Jesus Love, (TM). & that night? That night, I chose love. & I’m so freaking glad I did.

Looking back on it, this moment turned out to be one of the first bricks I tore down in the Tower of Babel, that had been my Evangelical Faith. I was still a sexist, phobic, (of everything!), clown at the time. I still had a lot of deep character building & reworking to do, far down within my soul. I still do. I always will. Self-improvement is a life-long, internal battle. but this became one of the first steps.

Which have led me all the way to here. Staring down into the chasm of femininity. I am scared, but determined. I am leaning across the table from you, but I will not beg for your acceptance. I’ll have it or I won’t. & we’ll just have to live with that, won’t we?

I still posture, at least somewhat, masculine. I still often get my head shaved, down to the skull, like I’m going off to war. Because, living in my body has often felt like a war, to be quite honest. So I try to be masculine. No frills. Surgical. Spartan. Because I’ve been terrified if I grow my hair any longer, people will, know. My judging parents will, know. The true believers in this red as a rash state will, know. & what if they all, knew, the truth?

Would they hate me?

Would they hate me if they knew, I yearn to grow my hair out long, & dye it blonde, or pink, or blonde & pink, like a total badass? Would they turn their heads in shame if I wore cute makeup & sweaters, & not wear the same scruffy football hoodie & T-shirt combo I’ve been wearing, every day, since I was fifteen?

Truth be told, I hate wearing men’s clothing. I’ve always hated it. Especially male dress up clothes. The jacket & tie? The monkey suit you wear, for getting choked by the noose of always looking like every other mediocre asshole dying, a little more each day, in some dark dungeon of a cubicle?

I don't want to be mediocre anymore. I want to be. fucking. spectacular.

Look. I know how hard it is in this society for disabled people to be seen as sexy. As desirable. Clothes never fit right because they are often not made for us. They’re always cockeyed, or ruffled, or simply utilitarian. But damn it! I want to be sexy! I want to be desirable! I want to be lovely! Not just for other pretty girls, (though for them too, obviously!), but for me. For my confidence. For my self-worth. For my fulfillment, & happiness.

I no longer seek the dullness of masculine sexiness, either. Muscles, in my honest opinion, are wasted on dudes. I don’t want to wear anything with lots of buttons, either. I never have. My hands aren’t great at working them, anyway. For the last few years, I’ve made a whole index of feminine clothes I like the look of on Tumblr. I want to wear girly jeans, skirts, dresses, & on, & on. I want to experiment with jewelry & makeup & nail polish.

I don't want to live in a box anymore. I want to live in a curve. I want to, be, the curve. I want to be the fire, & the twinkling lights &, the hair on the wind, & the giggle on the grass. I don't want my stupid testosterone holding back my tears. I want to weep, & laugh, & LIVE! I know it sounds like I want to become a manic pixie dream girl, or something. But. Like. Why the hell not? Girls can be whoever the hell they want to be!

I’m tired of sublimating everything. I’m tired of holding back what I mean. Holding back who I really am. I’m done with the mask. Give me the cape, & the show. Give me the whole damn theater, & I’ll light up the world.

Though, look, just because I want to be more femme, does not mean I want to immediately, if ever, wear pink layer cake dresses like I just stepped off the carriage from Versailles, or somewhere. A lot of this is going to be an adjustment period. For everyone. I still love a lot of traditionally masculine things. For example, I’ll always love my Packers. (That’s the Green Bay Packers, who play American football, by the way, for those who thought I may have been referring to the, other, kind of packers, trans masculine folk sometimes use.) Again, I want to reiterate. I’m still going to be me. Just new & improved.

Over the last few years, I’ve also come to realize I’m not, entirely, alienated from my body. In fact, there’s parts of my body I’ve always had affection for. I’ve spent the last twenty nine years, (since I was three), sat in a wheelchair every day, eight to twelve hours a day. As a result of this, my growth has been stunted. So, I'm five feet nothing basically. To be honest, I've always liked being short.

Also due to my disability, (but probably also as a result of my genetics), I have small, delicate hands & feet. I've always loved them, too. I've often been complimented on my feminine eyelashes, & my thick hair, (usually by jealous girls), & my hair grows faster than a chia pet! I’ve liked those aspects of my physical body.

I understand to be femme, & or feminine, you don't need to have any of these attributes. That would make a boring ass world, no doubt. These are just, 'traditionally,' feminine attributes. & the parts of myself I've always liked, are, in fact, girly. Again, in the, 'traditional,' sense of the word. I am, of course, qualifying all this, however, due to thirty two years of drowning in patriarchy, & beauty standards, & racism, & fatphobia, & just a whole bunch of nonsense. That's all bull, obviously. Femme is whatever we make of it.

Along with preferring these, more, traditionally, feminine, aspects of my physical body, I have also always preferred the company of women in general. I always felt more comfortable with them. Not just because of my attraction to them, but because I’ve never found their presence anywhere near as exhausting, or demanding, as the presence of men, at least in large groups. Perhaps this is a biased assessment, & the only reason I feel this way is because women, & girls, have always clocked me as male, & therefore never involved me in the infamous vicious backbiting, of their group politics.

Even so, women, on the whole, have always seemed, softer, to me, in every way. With men, especially in groups, there’s always this endless jostling, this never ending posturing! There can never be two male lions in the pride, two tigers in the cage. You must always, always! PROVE YOURSELF! & FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT to assert dominance. What a weary way of life. Meanwhile, I always just wanted to talk, & laugh, & hug, & be affectionate, & be myself. I suppose I was yearning for something I could neither have, nor ever, be, as a man.

The way in which I have always related to women, I realize now, has often been in a quite feminine way. I’ve always like girls. I’ve always, loved, girls. I had my first crush when I was five. At least on a non-fictional girl, anyway. (More on my first fictional crush, which occured even earlier, if you can believe it, a bit further along in this mini manifesto.)

I was fascinated with girls. Obsessed, with them. Enthralled, by them! Not just because I found them pretty, or beautiful, or captivating, though there was always these aspects to it all, humming hungrily in the background, but I hungered for other things I saw in them, too. Subtler things. The way girls moved through the world. What soft, heavenly, potent, magic! I wished I had even one ounce of their fairy dust. It was, & is still, intoxicating.

I didn’t always dream of making love to them, though there was quite a bit of that, admittedly. I yearned for them in less carnal ways, as well. For their companionship. Love. Trust. Affection. I was always entranced by the ways in which they navigated the world. With a dignity & strength men could never hope to match. (They don’t have, THE RANGE!) & then when women put on ARMOR? Holy shit, HEART EYES! It was like, they were almost, underdogs, in the patriarchy.

As a disabled kid, I knew what it was to be an underdog. I saw me in them, & them in me. I'm not saying being disabled & a woman are equivalent in this society, they are most certainly not, obviously. But I could, sympathize, with being seen as less capable than I actually was. Still can. Every day of my life.

Also, from my teenager hood all the way up through my long & lonely years, I had this very irritating habit of falling in love with sapphics. Which is, to be honest, kind of devastating, when you are under the impression you are a dude. But once you realize you certainly are, not, a dude, things begin to really click into place for this aspect of your sexuality. I kept crushing on lesbians & the like, because I, am, one!

Duh!

Speaking of sexuality, & please bear with me if this makes you uncomfortable, I’ve been realizing I have always, actually, related to my sexuality, & therefore my body, in a feminine manner. I’ve never really been interested in pornography, or other titillation, which panders to the assumed male gaze. This genre of cinema’s incessant focus on men’s pleasure bores the hell out of me, to be quite frank. But show me genuine female pleasure, or erotica focused on feminine sexuality, especially if the arousal is conjured by another woman, & I am, all about, that good time. Not in the leering sort of way, either, like, “oooo look, two girls making out, that’s, soooo, hot!” I never imagined myself watching them. I always imagine myself, being, them.

Lately, I’ve even come to accept that I long to relate, & indeed do, now, relate to sex, as a woman. The thought of having sex as a man, with male parts, doesn’t hold as much interest, excitement, or fulfillment, for me, as the thought of making love as a woman, with female parts. It’s the difference between machine-like mechanics, & almost, animalistic, apotheosis. I don’t know how I’ll ever get there. But I will.

OK, the really sexy times confession session is over. Apologies if I over shared there, but I felt it was necessary. If not for you, then certainly for me, in my quest to become more honest with myself.

I’m a writer, & a lover of stories, so I find a lot of solace, strength, & truth in fiction. The deep lore, the myths, the characters. They all matter. So much. Long past the moment the poets who wrote them, turned, to dust. So that’s why I’ve chosen a name for myself, straight out of fiction.

A brave girl who believed.

Queen Lucy the Valiant.

The character who has always been closest to my heart, & who always will be.

Now. Look. I know she comes out of C S Lewis, & The Chronicles of Narnia, & therefore there is, A LOT, of baggage wrapped up in all that. The particular flavor of Christianity, forever entangled with the narrative & thematics. My boy Clive’s, GAPING, blind spots, specifically when it came to the portrayal of a faux Islamic world, or girls & women, particularly at the time he wrote those books. But. Look. I have a lot of baggage too. These are still my roots.

Narnia were the first books I read when I was three. Or listened to the abridged audio versions, anyway. The first fictional character I ever fell hard for? Lucy Pevensie. I told you. I’ve always, loved, girls. The first fictional character I aspired to be like? Lucy. Not because she was a warrior. But because she was still the bravest, despite being the littlest. Perhaps, because, she was the littlest.

[Episode Background Music 1 (MacLeod’s “Fluidscape”) FADES OUT.]

[Lead Out Music (Instrumental) FADES IN.]

She was always the best of them. Lucy believed when the others could not. Would not. She was the first to go to Narnia. She had seen the next world, & it was nothing short, of spectacular. Lucy believed in its wonders. In its endless promises. Lucy had hope. Sure, it was all meant as some sort of stilted Christian allegory. But I’m taking what I want, & leaving the rest. Because, I believe her story speaks to something universal. Lucy believed in, a BETTER, world. A BETTER, tomorrow. The name ‘Lucy,’ originally meant, ‘as of light,’ or, ‘born at daylight, or the dawn.’ She is the light bringer. & that’s who I aspire to be. The girl full of hope. Belief. Faith. Maybe not in any single church, or doctrine, but in love. In that, BETTER, tomorrow.

So here’s me. Rolling out from the darkness of my old wardrobe.

Lucy.

I’ve been terrified to talk about all this for the past several years, as I already feel like a burden, with all my disability stuff, & then I lost my job, & then the pandemic happened, & then, & then.

But I can’t live as I was living. Not anymore. I hope you can understand that.

I still don’t know how any of this will work. How my future will look. How I’ll figure out how to scrape the money together, on my own, I won’t be asking for any money for any of this, to transition in a safe manner, with all my other medical crap. I don’t know how my caregivers, throughout my life, will react. I don’t know how, anyone, will react. All I can control, right now, is myself, & how I need to be, myself.

My babby sister came out as bi this year, at least to the immediate family, & her self-assurance, & joy, have given me hope. I want to learn how to be brave like that again. Like my sister, before me.

Like Lucy.

[Episode Lead Out Music FADES IN: - playing soft & low in background as lead out rolls on. Lead Out Music - first the instrumental & then the vocal versions of Josh Woodward’s “Words Fall Apart” - which is a piano piece - almost a lullaby - featuring the following words:

“We're here at the start, where the words fall apart

Where language is lost in the wind

The syllables sway, in an ancient ballet

The meaningless sounds that we sing

Sleep, baby, sleep, baby

Sleep till the feeling is gone

Sleep, baby, sleep, baby

Everything's new in the dawn

The faces and sounds, where the truth goes to drown

In the deepest expanse of the sea

Our dreams and our hopes are concealed in codes

And no one would dare hold the key

Sleep, baby, sleep, baby

Sleep till the feeling is gone

Sleep, baby, sleep, baby

Everything's new in the dawn

Everything's new in the dawn”]

Lucy VO: Radio Free Lucy, is written by, Lucy Argyle, & performed by Lucy, a Radio Argyle Bot Player. Join Radio Argyle’s Patreon at patreon dot com slash Radio Argyle. All one word.

Music in this episode included “Arrival” by How the Night Came. Find their music at the Free Music Archive.“Fluidscape,” by Kevin MacLeod. You can find their music at Incompetech dot com. &, both the instrumental & lyrical versions of Josh Woodward’s “Words Fall Apart”. You can find their music at the Free Music Archive, Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, etcetera.

Other episode credits, as well as free transcripts for the show, are available on my Tumblr, where my user name is Radio Free Lucy. Also all one word. Simply search the hashtag Radio Free Lucy on my blog there & you’ll find them.

I’ll be back. Soon! Until then, I send you all, my love & strength. Take care, you lovely lunatics, & worthwhile weirdos.

[Lead Out Music eventually FADES OUT.]

[RADIO ARGYLE OUTRO STING - This 7 second sting involves the intro sting, mostly in reverse: the scifi engine powering down, the high-pitched British girl saying “Radio Argyle” - and then the needle fumbling off the vinyl - into radio silence…]

EPISODE CREDITS:

Join the Patreon!

(patreon.com/radioargyle)

Muse Tier Patrons:

A.W. Glen

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Music (All Edited):

“Arrival” by How the Night Came. Find their music at the Free Music Archive.

“Fluidscape” by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100393

Artist: http://incompetech.com/

“Words Fall Apart” (Lyrical & Instrumental Versions) by Josh Woodward: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Josh_Woodward/Addressed_to_the_Stars_1995

Sound FX (All Edited):

“45rpm needle drop” by FreqMan: https://freesound.org/people/FreqMan/sounds/42819/. Courtesy of Freesound.

“Girl, female, inhale, exhale, sigh, breathing” by SpliceSound: https://freesound.org/people/SpliceSound/sounds/218309/. Courtesy of Freesound.

Podcast (& Ephemera) created with:

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#radio free lucy

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paperbackwritersblog · 5 years ago

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Black lives matter- in the modern world

As I am writing this, an american black man was killed by a cop in the states and this has started a trend, a trend of Hashtag blacklivesmatter............ coupled with a select few using the protests to push a darker narrative.

I have started writing as I am finding the entire saga to be full of hypocrisies and virue signalling on the grandest of scales.

I have been in and around race and culture my entire life , with mixed race members of family I have seen and felt the changes throughout the early 90s til today, 6 month into 2020!

What I find mind blowing is the utter ignorance of society as a whole, so hungry for something or someone to project their hate upon that they are completely incapable of seing themselves and the pots they stir.

The thought of someone being punished in some way for the colour of their skin sickens me. However, has it sickened me to the point I have done something active about it?! No it hasnt , it hasnt caused me to go on marches and rallies to raise awareness of the atrocities being carried out in africa, has it made me march and raise awareness for the murderous regime that is china?! No again, and neither has anybody else! Certainly not the people on the streets calling for the system to be torn down!

So I ask the question, when do black lives matter? Do black, yellow,brown, white lives matter equally?

Do black lives matter more now in western societies because of years of oppression? Do we need to give black people a higher status for 100 years to help balance things out, leading to racism in the other direction?

When do lives matter, regardless of colour, sex, beliefs?? What is the catalist for the current outrage!

Because racism exists in every country in the world to varying degrees, apart from maybe a select few, isolated tribes where only their race exists, like the Awa tribe in the amazon etc.

Is it possible that western countries, under an education system that tries to create a utopia within the narrative , has convinced us all that we should be well beyond the tribal instincts that have kept us alive and evolved us to become who we are?! Because anyone with a degree of understanding of biology and evolution would understand that no matter how civalised society becomes, the transition for our biology wont just catch up with our culture because we say it should!

The people marching are attempting to create an us and them narrative that is just as devisive and destructive as the narrative they claim to be marching to erradicate!

At this moment in time its too insensative to create an alternative narrative, however I can only but wonder when an alternative will come to be?! When will all lives matter equally? Will they ever?

Most will point to me being a white man and therefore I have no voice in the current climate! But that hasnt stopped thousands marching! So my voice will matter when it supports you but the moment I question I become the enemy, my voice has lost its worth, my opinion so obviously fuelled by fear etc.

Sounds awefully oppressive to me, Is it not oppression that is the problem! How can you fight oppression with more oppression!!

Again, in a world of no thinking we judge and react..................

E.Plaistow

#alllivesmatter #blacklivesmatter #hypocrisy #undertone #alternativenarrative #philosopher

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makingscipub · 5 years ago

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Silence, songs and solace: Music in the time of coronavirus

This post is jointly authored by Brigitte Nerlich (University of Nottingham), Martin Döring (University of Hamburg) and Pernille Bogø Jørgensen (University of Lancaster)

***

Almost two decades ago, Martin Döring and I did a project on ‘the social and cultural impacts of foot and mouth disease’. Foot and mouth disease is an infectious and sometimes fatal viral disease that affects cloven-hoofed animals, such as cattle, sheep, pigs and so on. In 2001 a major outbreak of this disease devastated farming and farmers in the UK and left visible scars on the countryside in the shape of burning pyres of animal carcasses, closed farms and much more. The impacts were huge in certain communities, but they were nothing compared to the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic now and into the future. (If you want to read about these experiences of 2001, please consult this book)

One of the things we noted during the foot and mouth disease outbreak was that children, farmers, vets, anybody really, wrote poems about their experiences. Here is an example of such a poem, one of many we studied in the project, that will resonate to some extent with people in the current crisis:

Foot and Mouth

No children are playing down in the lane. No dog owners walking their pets in the rain. The parks have all closed and the footpaths are blocked; the farms are all shut with their gates firmly locked. All racing is cancelled, the countryside’s still; no cows in the pasture on top of the hill. The lambs have all vanished the pigsties are bare. The stench of burnt flesh fills the damp morning air.

Now it’s spring 2020 and some people are, again, starting to write poems or circulate poems already written, together with dystopian fiction, about the novel coronavirus outbreak that directly affects humans, not ‘just’ animals’.

In the UK, the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, for example, has published a poem entitled ‘Lockdown’ in which he links the current pandemic back to the plague and the village of Eyam which chose to isolate itself after bubonic plague was discovered there, so as to prevent the infection spreading. In 2001 the then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, also published a poem about the foot and mouth disease outbreak and farmers isolating their farms. It’s entitled “No Entry”….

Poems are not yet as conspicuous during this pandemic as they were during the foot and mouth crisis. Instead of witnessing an outbreak of poetry, we are rather witnessing an outbreak of music. It started in China, emerged also in Italy, then France and Germany and is spreading all over the world.

During the foot and mouth crisis the silence was maddening, as it is now with almost all the world in ‘lockdown’. In a collection of foot and mouth poems, one can read for example: “Dead and stunned, silence gnaws, At the very soul of the countryside, Like a hungry rat, Or a sleek raven on patrol.” (Crowden 2001). Perhaps the music that is emerging now is there to dispel that silence – to mask yet another ‘silent spring’ – but there is more to it, as we shall see.

An outbreak of music

We thought it would be a good idea to take a look at this music – but, oh dear, there is so much of it. So we can only scratch the surface of this social and cultural phenomenon. We also wondered how to sort our emerging collection. One could do it by countries, by genre, by purpose, by location (lots of balconies in Romance countries and also Germany), by composers, instruments, such as cello, piano and much much more, performers, flashmobs, audiences….and so on.

When Covid-19 was still very far away in China and didn’t even have a name yet, we noticed this ‘quaint’ use of song to keep up morale or keep the spirit up amongst quarantined people in Wuhan. When people in Italy broke into song and then in France, this felt much less ‘quaint’. Now this has become normalised and ‘ensocialised’ all over the world, together with quarantine, isolation, and social and physical distancing. There are even lists of the best songs being compiled.

What can people do to socially and emotionally connect when they can’t congregate, hug, kiss, exchange handshakes and talk face to face? They can of course go and phone each other and also use social media, such as ‘facetime’ and they are doing this in their millions. But they can also bridge physical distances by sound and music. The important thing is that they can sing together while being apart!!

They can, of course also engage with music, individually, where formerly they would have enjoyed it together. Music festivals and live music in all its forms are being replaced by streaming and so on to provide income for musicians – there are even “no concert tickets” currently on sale in Germany with the aim to help musicians cope financially with the corona outbreak. Orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra also make music available for free of course – in this case 600 of its concert recordings. We focus here on the spontaneous and community use of music.

This use of sounds of music to bridge silence, physical distance, social isolation and desolation found expression in hashtags like #togetherathome, #songsofcomfort, #youllneverwalkalone and many more.

We won’t sort all the material that one could potentially accumulate as systematically as one could. Instead we focus on what the singing was for.

Awareness

Some songs were written and shared in order to raise awareness and educate people about the virus and the most effective ways to deal with it, namely hand-washing and keeping one’s distance, such as these rap songs and this song written by school children for other children. This message has also been illustrated in dance.

Some songs address practicalities of following the new social rules beyond hand-washing, for example not to buy more than you need, to give family and houseplants attention and clean properly, like this wonderful (satirical) song by the Danish vocal group MAGT.

And here is a song from Brigitte’s hometown of Nottingham, where a Junior Doctor from the Queen’s Medical Centre, just across the road from the University, sings her advice about coronavirus!

Solidarity

But most of the songs and music were there to create a feeling of solidarity and social proximity, such as these Germans singing the Italian revolutionary song ‘Bella Ciao’ to express solidarity with Italians, which are so badly affected by the pandemic. (More info here) Bono wrote a song “Let Your Love Be Known” for Italians under lockdown which was sung across rooftops. And much more, for example the Spanish police driving into streets and playing popular songs on their guitars!

Some songs were sung even across nations such as the football hymn “You’ll never walk alone”, which was played on over 150 radio stations across Europe and all over the social media. In Denmark – Pernille’s home country -, the most popular national football anthem Re-Sepp-Ten was performed by the satirical vocal group ‘MAGT’ with a new text that cheers on all the healthcare workers.

Many songs were of course patriotic songs, such as this ballad sung in Siena, but often music was used to counter racism and stigma. Music, like science, knows no boundaries and goes beyond meaning including emotion and affect.

There is also music encouraging people to rally round, to play their part in the pandemic, such as this performance by the New Zealand National Orchestra (the players are all at home).

Comfort

Much of this music was there to bring comfort to those trying to deal with the pandemic. This aspect of the spread of music was exemplified in particular by a Yo-Yo Ma who “has been posting videos of himself performing short pieces and encouraging other musicians — of all levels — around the world to join him in offering ‘Songs of Comfort.’” (PBS) In an interview he spoke of the virus knowing no boundaries, much like music, and the healing and soothing power of music in a time of global fear.

Others bring musical comfort to people who can’t celebrate their birthdays (and there are many more videos out there). Other people made pandemic playlists to cheer people up. And others still brought ‘balm’ to the soul by composing songs on their instrument of choice, such as Steve Martin’s ‘Banjo Balm’.

Kindness

Ralph McTell, who wrote the legendary 1969 song Streets of London, has added a new verse to the song and asks people for kindness, especially towards homeless people. Listen to it and be kind! Here is the new verse:

“In shop doorways, under bridges, in all our towns and cities You can glimpse the makeshift bedding from the corner of your eye Remember what you’re seeing barely hides a human being We’re all in this together, brother, sister, you and I.”

Thank you

And finally, all over the world, people are saying or rather singing ‘Thank You’ to all those who keep us safe, alive, healthy, fed, clean and so on and put their own lives at risk, even die. Here, for example, German people sing a hymn out of their windows, while in the city of Hamburg – where Martin lives – each evening at 9pm people are clapping on their balconies as a big thank you to those working in hospitals, driving busses or keeping supplies up in supermarkets. Last night the whole of the UK did this to thank the NHS and there are thousands more examples across the world.

And here we have Italians playing the Chinese national anthem to thank China for providing aid to Italy!

Looking forward

In many countries songs are gradually being replaced by silence, either because normality is gradually and precariously returning, as in Wuhan, or else because the horror of the situation, as in Italy, is just too great. However, music also encourages us to look forward to better times.

This one is a Norwegian song called “we will meet” written by Hans-Olav Mørk and composer Hilde Trætteberg Serkland. It is about meeting in a café and a church when this is over. The second verse is about promising each other to share what we learned when this is over, and the third one says that we already know the answer: that to love each other is to carry burdens when someone else has too much to carry and lift somebody up when they have fallen.

To end this potentially endless blog post, we come back to poems and children, our hope for the future. This one, by Louise Gribbons, ends on a hopeful note that we will take better care of the world after we have given it a ‘spring clean’.

The Time We Spring-Cleaned the World

(Poem for children)

The world it got so busy, There were people all around. They left their germs behind them; In the air and on the ground.

These germs grew bigger and stronger. They wanted to come and stay. They didn’t want to hurt anyone – They just really wanted to play.

Sometimes they tried to hold your hand, Or tickled your throat or your nose. They could make you cough and sneeze And make your face as red as a rose.

And so these germs took over. They started to make people ill, And with every cough we coughed More and more germs would spill.

All the queens and kings had a meeting. “It’s time to clean the world up!” they said. And so they had to close lots of fun stuff, Just so these germs couldn’t spread.

We couldn’t go to cinemas Or restaurants for our tea. There was no football or parties, The world got as quiet as can be.

The kids stopped going to school, The mums and dads went to work less. Then a great, big, giant scrubbing brush Cleaned the sky and the sea and the mess!

Dads started teaching the sums, Big brothers played with us more, Mums were in charge of homework And we read and played jigsaws galore!

The whole world was washing their hands And building super toilet roll forts! Outside was quiet and peaceful, Now home was the place for all sports.

So we played in the world that was home And our days filled up with fun and love, And the germs they grew smaller and smaller And the sun watched from up above.

Then one morning the sun woke up early, She smiled and stretched her beams wide. The world had been fully spring cleaned, It was time to go back outside!

We opened our doors oh so slowly And breathed in the clean and fresh air. We promised that forever and always Of this beautiful world we’d take care!

Let’s all look forward to that day when we can open our doors again to the world and to each other and remember what we learned during the days of the pandemic: Be kind to each other and the world out there.

Image: Pixabay

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