Late Night Entertainment

So this is what happens when it's past 10pm, I'm bored, the meds have worn off, and I remember that my laptop has a built-in webcam.

Pretty wacky, right? Well, it wasn't enough for me. I realized it needed something more, so I went straight to work improving it.

Oddly enough, she found it entertaining. We'll see whether or not she does it in the end, though.

Just Type Something

Every once in a while I'll be in the mood to write something but I have no idea what to write about. Recently I decided that the best way to deal with this was to just open a blank text file and write whatever came into my mind. The results make me think that I could make a living as an inspirational speaker. I mean, these are some pretty deep, philosophical quandaries, wouldn't you agree?

From Monday, December 2nd, 2013

The finding of the things was incredible indeed. They seemed to be tribbles but yet they were not. Redundancy is repetitive and overrated. Yellow Texas mascots are endearing and troublesome. Whitewashed cacti in beds of snowflakes take leaves of brown and transform them into jewels of sunshine.

To go is to leave and to be headed somewhere but to stay is to eat pizza and find your inner Jew and make it do a funny dance.

Justin Timberlake eats boy bands for breakfast and murders evildoers in the dark of night under the guise of a giant French chicken named Max.

Yellow purgatories are the high castles of maharajas of time and space imported from west Eritrea.

Your inner Jew must eat a sandwich every five minutes or face the perils of witchcraft on a mountaintop with yellow roses of Texas and trashy green picnic baskets.

To gain a friendship from the netherworlds of yesteryear is similar to the face of destruction by which all men must eat grass on a Tuesday morning.

Grass is the substance which reads a comic and tells itself that the majority of philosophical opinions are complete and utter bullshit.

Comics are books in third form of image and parallel washout of grassroots nations.

Trying too hard to be difficult in a man's world by the fireside is the bane of all existence of grass in all its forms.

Grass is what cows eat.

Grass is what cows eat when the soul of the fire inside the great oven of life shudders at the thunderstorm by the prairie.

The elevators of the Doom Tower are speedy but easy to fill.

I don't know what I'm doing with my life.

Please Be Impressed Mr. Oancitizen

I seem to have this recurring dream where I'm back in college and I'm very confused about my class schedule and constantly forgetting to do work so I seem to be in a constant state of panic. Last night my brain decided to make it a little more interesting by putting me in a theater class where Doug Walker of thatguywiththeglasses.com was teaching, with the help of many others from Channel Awesome. His assignment for the weekend was to find a song to sing for the class on Monday, and I decided that my song would be De Strangers' Jantje Zag Eens Pruimen Hangen because I already have the lyrics memorized and I thought it would be a good humorous addition to all the songs my classmates would be choosing, plus I really wanted to impress Kyle Kallgren of Brows Held High with my Flemish heritage and consequent knowledge of Dutch music. The dream ended in a panic because I couldn't find any Lederhosen or even a regular ol' pair of suspenders (I own neither in real life but I was convinced that I had suspenders somewhere), because I might as well go all out, right?

I have no idea how the performance went since I woke up before it happened, but I'm assuming it was fantastic.

Storytelling Is Hard

A thoughtful little piece from Kieran*. Enjoy.

Every once in a while, it occurs to me that my life is essentially one big, massive train wreck, and I'm not really sure how to feel about that.

It's hard to talk about my life, not because it pains me, but because the people I talk to either can't be told the full story or they stare at me in horror throughout the whole process and when I notice I start feeling really uncomfortable and I can't bring myself to talk about it anymore. It's weird to think that almost everything I've experienced is so terrifying to other people. I mean, yeah, I know it's bad and all, but it's my life. I got through it. I'm okay now. Mostly. I don't see why everybody around me has to have a more dramatic reaction to the stories of my childhood than I had while actually living through those stories. I suppose that's just how things are in the world, but I wish that people would stop making me feel like I'm not traumatized enough by what happened to me. So, I end up talking about the events in my life that other people can relate to, like the time I went camping and a hobo spider bit me while I was sleeping and I panicked when I saw the rotting skin near my elbow the next morning and cut out a huge chunk of my arm. That scar is actually bigger than the one on my neck, and I'm grateful for it because it's usually the first one people notice, and it's an easier story to tell than the one about my mother's head getting blown off right in front of me and being trapped under her corpse for several hours with soiled pants and a couple of bullet wounds.

The thing is, I know that a lot of what happened to me is horrible. I still can't shake the feeling of being perpetually alone and ignored that came from those first few weeks in the lab. It's just that when you spend ten years of your life being constantly observed and tested by scientists, some of whom had a severe case of head-perpetually-stuck-in-anal-cavity, it tends to warp your sense of humor a bit. I honestly can't tell half the time whether the story I'm about to tell is funny or disturbing or both. So, I've started prefacing my stories with that, which doesn't make things less awkward, but at least it's a funny awkward and not a painful awkward most of the time.

I guess I'll have to share some of those stories at some point in time. Maybe I will, but only after I've gotten a better idea of whether or not they're stories that I can share without traumatizing everybody who reads them. We'll see.

*Kieran is a fictional character. More will be revealed about him over time.

Sometimes OCD is Funny

...And sometimes it's not. The trick is figuring out when it's okay to laugh and when it's best to keep your mouth shut. This actually applies to ADHD, too, only I feel the need to put a lot more emphasis on the whole "sometimes it's not funny" bit because DAMN.

So let's talk about the Simpsons. There was once an episode about Bart.






...Oh, do I need to be a little more specific? Fine...

Anyway, this episode was about Bart's inability to concentrate, or something like that. It's been forever since I watched it last so I'm a little shaky on the details, but here's the basic premise: Bart gets diagnosed with ADHD and put on a drug called "Focusyn" or something. He then proceeds to become a jittery, paranoid wreck and starts doing some really strange things. It ends with him destroying a satellite that was spying on people or something and the family deciding that he doesn't need to be on drugs anymore. He'll just take Ritalin and that'll solve everything.

And then there was the King of the Hill episode where Bobby gets sent to the doctor's office, gets a half-assed diagnosis of ADHD, and gets put on drugs that make him act all wonky. Hilarity ensues! LOL!

So, I saw both of these episodes when I was in middle school, I think. That's not too long after I got diagnosed with ADHD and started on Ritalin. And you know what? As much as the Simpsons have a reputation for 'making fun of everybody' and generally being good (at least in the beginning) at tackling social issues and being a pretty well-done satire of stuff in general, and King of the Hill is... uh, a show about stuff, I wish these episodes had never seen the light of day.

See, here's the thing. You can make jokes about mental illness. You can even make tasteful jokes about mental illness. You can make jokes about the misinformation that gets thrown around and the mindset that Drugs Fix Everything and My Kid Isn't Stupid or Misbehaving, He's Just ~S~P~E~C~I~A~L~! But when you do this, you owe it to the rest of us, particularly those of us who HAVE a mental illness that is looked down upon as being made up or a pathetic excuse for lazy children or thought of as being severely over-diagnosed even though the people in the scientific community most involved with said diagnoses are generally in agreement about the diagnostic criteria and the accuracy of properly-made diagnoses, to do some god-damn research about it. It's hard enough getting people to take me seriously about having severe social anxiety, you don't need to make my other disorder into a walking punchline on top of it.

Because that's what's happened. You try to explain ADHD to somebody, you end up hitting a wall most of the time. It's either 'you just need to work harder' or 'are you sure that's really the problem here' and it's just about impossible to find someone who really understands it who hasn't actually been diagnosed with it. It's hard to make ADHD sound like a serious issue that has an impact on your ability to take care of yourself, like the fact that I literally go hungry on an almost daily basis because I can't make myself stop what I'm doing and go eat a sandwich or something even when my stomach is growling and I'm starting to feel nauseous because the meds I'm on make me feel nauseous when I'm hungry.

Of course, I would be the biggest hypocrite in the world if I said that mental disorders should be off-limits to comedians. I make jokes about my disorders all the time. If I didn't joke about it, if I didn't laugh about it, I would go into an ever-deeper spiral of depression and self-loathing. And really, there's plenty to laugh about. All I ask is that the jokes at least accurately reflect the realities of the disorder, and more importantly don't make it more difficult for the average person to get help and support for their mental illness. Because in the end, fffffffffffFFFFFFFFFUCK YOU BART SIMPSON 5T%&*$#@^YTVT ERGJKF%^&DN GSJLD GFJL( Y^*&%Q403 95UTY89*^$^&*(

Cleaning Stuff, and OWAIN THE SCION OF LEGEND

I was told by one of my friends on twitter that I should write about cleaning stuff today, and so I did my best to do that. Here is my very, very accurate account of how cleaning stuff works in my house.

Every time I start thinking about cleaning I get the urge to do like fifty other projects that I suddenly had some kind of inspirational revelation for. I never get very far with the cleaning when that happens, but it does boost my productivity in several other areas of life.

This can also be said of many activities in my life, and is especially true for that one episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic where Rarity makes dresses for everyone and sings about it and some drama happens but then everyone realizes their mistakes and things get wrapped up nicely in the end because all the ponies are REASONABLE F@#$ING PEOPL- PONIES and are capable of realizing (and admitting) their mistakes and doing what they can to make up for any hurt they've caused, which made me realize that it would be really fun to take the sewing machine that's been sitting in a corner of my room since the Christmas before last, when my sister came home and tried to sort through everything she'd acquired from her many, many voyages and endeavors throughout her life and gave me a bunch of crap* that she didn't want to try to lug around all over the country with her anymore, and make something fun with it. And, of course, it just so happens that Halloween is coming up and I use any chance I can get to dress up in a costume, so...

This year I am Owain.

Who is Owain, you might ask? He is the Scion of Legend. He is the greatest Myrmidon who ever lived EVER. He is a character from Fire Emblem Awakening and I love him to death because he is awesome and hilarious and awesome and also awesome. I am about halfway done with this endeavor, and I have been documenting my progress so that I might share it with you at a later date. Look forward to it.



*Nice crap, of course - my sister is a collector of only the finest assortment of memorabilia and frivolities.

Pondering the Merit of Group Work

So. Group Work.  ...Why does this exist?

It's almost as if every teacher on the planet thinks that the one thing that's more important than the subject they teach is the ability to work in groups. Not only that, but they must feel like they're the one who has to teach this valuable, impossible-to-learn-anywhere-else skill to their students because there's absolutely no way that they could possibly learn that skill anywhere else ever. At all.

Or maybe they think that the only way that anybody could possibly learn anything about the subject they're trying to teach is to force them to cooperate with other students so that they don't have any distractions keeping them away from that valuable learning. Because that's totally what happens whenever anyone assigns group work.

What lessons do you really learn from group work, though? I mean, I guess there's the lesson that trying to coordinate with other students is a pain in the ass, and there's the valuable skill of learning to deal with the disappointment that comes when somebody else can't fucking pull it together and get some fucking work done and you're the one who has to pay for it.

There's also the lesson that when you split up work into parts and have each student do their share, you don't learn anything about what they focus on because you're too busy trying to learn your own stuff. Oh, and you do learn how to bullshit your way through a presentation with pretty pictures and roundabout explanations. You also learn how to shift the focus onto your partners when you can't answer a question, which can always be helpful.

But what all do you learn about the subject you're supposed to be presenting about?

...

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure.