Random Scribblings in the Margin

Ah, yes. Because bombing people into peace and freedom worked so well when we tried it in Afghanistan and Iraq. With its past record of resounding success, it is the obvious and indeed the only option.

One of the firms bidding to run it is Capita.

OH SHIT WE'RE ALL DOOMED.

Right! Someone set up a safer alternative. I'm A-positive and I have a sharp object and a bucket...

The internet hadn't hurt my attention span. I was as patient as I'd ever been (not very). Nor did I jump to conclusions on insufficient evidence.

Then I spent a very frustrating hour playing Don't Shoot the Puppy.

I am, to quote Christopher Brookmyre, suffering from a condition referred to in the medical journals as "all fucked up".

I'm just all stressed and antsy and discombobulated. I think I overestimated my caffeine tolerance today - it has been creeping up, but not to the point where I can drink three cups of sod-the-teaspoon-just-pour-it-in coffee when I'm working at the most sleepy and tedious campus and I've nothing to distract me. So that hasn't helped. But generally, I'm all... eh. Karate helped, but the high from exercise is a temporary solution. I'm so stressed out about the things I'm not doing that it's stopping me from starting to do them. And I know the way to deal with this: a little bit at a time, focus on what I can do rather than what I can't, ditch the idea that if I can't do everything then I can't do anything. I know. Come on, girl.

It's just difficult, again, and I'm tired. I think it's unreasonable how I have to keep doing things like cleaning the house, shaving my head, weeding the vegetables... can't I just do it once? I could manage to do it once.

Eh. </whine>.

In Cameron's generally ludicrous article about how if you want essential services, you'd better provide them yourself for no wages Big Society is coming like Jesus to save us all, one bit was particularly egregious:

And if someone wants to help out with children, we will sweep away the criminal record checks and health and safety laws that stop them.

Wait, what? WHAT?!?!?!?!

Now I'll grant you, there's room for discretion in criminal record checks. I don't give a damn if someone shoplifted ten years ago or possessed cannabis ever. But is he seriously saying that if someone wants to work with children (or vulnerable adults, for that matter, though they're generally a lot less photogenic than the darling little kiddies), someone shouldn't check to make sure that they don't have a history of violent or sexual crime?

Oh, but they're volunteers, you see. Because in Conservative Land, nothing is serious unless a profit is to be made from it. So if there's no money involved, then it happens in a magic special bubble where there are never any consequences. It's not a real thing, so we don't have to apply real-world rules. They talk up the importance of volunteering, but they betray their real feelings: we don't need to apply the usual rules, because it's voluntary, so it doesn't count. There's no money. How could it matter?

Okay, that's the easy one out of the way. On to the dreaded Health and Safety. ( Read more... )

So... is there any medical reason why I shouldn't go for my cervical smear after a glass of wine or two?

( Vagaygay neurosis )

I don't know if this is a reasonable thing to be bothered by. I absolutely cannot stand training courses about communication and interpersonal skills, especially when I'm quite clearly the only mental in the village. I need to stop going on them, because they fuck up my mood and my day.

There's just far too much talk of how people think and what people do and how people communicate. And, being your friendly neighbourhood nutcase, I don't think like that or do that or communicate like that. And so for several hours, I get to be reminded, constantly, that I'm a freak and I'm doing it wrong. That I don't work like normal people work. That, as Elizabeth Wurtzel puts it, I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and I should've been sent back long ago.

The behaviour you see as friendly and encouraging I find creepy and intrusive. There's talk about how they don't understand why people from different cultures would want to segregate themselves, and I'm thinking, well, it's probably for the same reason that I don't like hanging out with non-crazy people. They don't share my experiences or assumptions or shorthand. They don't understand my needs. They march over my triggers and hit all my buttons. They're exhausting, and why the hell would I want to be exhausted by my social life?

For example, they were talking about eye contact, what it means when someone won't make eye contact. And after this long list of negative meanings, I piped up, "Or maybe they just have autism or mental health problems?" Because I find eye contact exhausting. I don't understand the rules for it. I overthink and obsess and panic. And when I get stressed, I stop being able to interpret sensory input correctly - for instance, when my agoraphobia's kicking in, I don't experience a crowd of people; I just experience colours and shapes and noises coming towards me.

So when I'm stressed, nervous or just uncertain, I will drop eye contact. I might start doodling on a bit of paper, or picking at my hands or, if I can get away with it, knitting. It's not that I'm not listening to you; it's that I'm having to concentrate on your words extra-hard and so I don't need your face distracting me. I'm not bored; I find simple repetitive motions soothing, and I can multitask conversation + simple movement a lot better than I can multitask conversation + incoming panic attack. I can't follow your words and your face any more than you can follow two simultaneous conversations in different languages. You might understand both languages individually, but at the same time, they just become nonsense.

And it is intermittent. Some days and situations are better than others. I can switch it on and off, up to a point, at the cost of my finite energy and emotional resilience. One day I might be sitting in the middle of the room taking part in the discussion; the next day I will be sitting as near to the exit as possible, scowling furiously at my notes. And it's nothing to do with you.

I think this is another beserk button for me, the notion that anything I do out of the ordinary must be some kind of message to someone else. No. Crazy is supremely self-absorbed and when I'm trying to fight a panic attack, everybody else in the room could catch fire for all I care. Managing my brain is a full-time job and I simply cannot spare the energy to act normal at the same time. Dear, fragile, well-meaning, easily-offended, non-disabled folks: it is not all about you.

This needs to be required reading in every workplace.

Things Real People Don't Say About Advertising

Now they've changed their logo, the brand values make so much more sense to me!

Maybe I just need a t-shirt. "I am highly intelligent with a wide vocabulary. I understood every word you said and noticed every psychological trick you used to make me believe them. Unfortunately, they have just made me angry."

Damn it, Dick King-Smith's dead.

When I was a kid, I liked books and I liked animals. I was painfully shy, so I didn't like people. Dick King-Smith wrote a huge number of kids' books about animals. You see how he might've been a massive part of my childhood.

I read The Sheep-Pig and Saddlebottom and The Hodgeheg and King Max the Last and Pets for Keeps and Sophie's Tom and Martin's Mice. All or most were published by Young Puffin, I think.

I mean, he was 88. But damn it.

With the Julian Assange thing (my view is Kate Harding's view, via gavagai, and I am not interested in discussing it), as with earlier discussions on date-rape and alcohol, some people are very kindly identifying themselves as people you would want to avoid. Now, if only they could be persuaded to get tattoos to this effect. Preferably on their foreheads.

Edit: Please do not use the comments to discuss the case. There is an entire internet for that.