Yesterday I went to a talk with Sparkly

It was about the CIA and how they recruit people from other countries to give them information. I expected it to be historically interesting, and it was, but parts of it were also very counterintuitive and confusing to me, in a way I didn’t expect. It’s the idea that US citizens are “us” and everybody else is “them”.

How did this talk express this idea? Well, the (public, online) posting about this (free, open to the general public) event specified that only US citizens could attend, first of all.

There was also the idea that when students from other countries attend university in the United States, that contributes to the proliferation of potentially dangerous information to the rest of the world (e.g. students majoring in chemistry and physics graduate knowing information about how to make bombs and chemical weapons.)

There’s also the idea that being a US citizen who has friends who are “foreign nationals” makes you potentially compromised in some way?

Thinking of US citizens versus other people as an us-versus-them sort of thing is just foreign (no pun intended) to me, I guess. Both because I’m not used to lumping “everybody else” together in one group, and probably also because I don’t think of the whole United States as “us”.

Terminology

Last week’s minor controversy in the autistic community on Tumblr was over the phrase “on the spectrum” and whether people should use it to refer to other “spectrums” besides autism. Here’s my two cents.

  1. Yes, as far as I know the phrase “on the spectrum” originated with autism, so in some sense it’s “ours”, we started it.
  2. Yes, it’s confusing and frustrating when people say “on the spectrum” without context and you can’t tell what they’re talking about.

 

Why would we want to lay claim to this phrase, though?

Is there any reason for us to say “on the spectrum” instead of “on the autism spectrum”, or if that’s too long for you, why not just “is autistic”?

The only reasons I can think of are:

— if you think the word autism only means ~severe~ cases and think there needs to be another term for when you’re including everybody else

— if you think the word autism is unsightly and embarrassing and you want to talk about it without actually saying it.

To anybody who isn’t already familiar with how people talk about autism, “on the spectrum” is confusing when it refers to us, too. It’s inherently confusing. Why do we need it?

I’ve been writing

a sort of “why you should read”/introduction type thing for the Lieutenant Leary series. Because someone reminded me that such things  exist. I’ve got a rough draft and now I’m going to sleep on it and decide later if it’s too pretentious or not pretentious enough.

Perspective

Really the weirdest thing about having special interests being older is that there are things I Used to be into, which I still know a fair amount about but I’m not actively studying/following anymore. And sometimes I forget that those things are part of my “I’ve known that for ages” background knowledge, but not part of other people’s background knowledge, because they’re actually kind of obscure and most people never had a reason to spend time reading about them.

I feel like I may have made a post about this before, but if so I can’t find it.

Brain come on

I swear I didn’t used to have this reason-less aversion to New Things. I really didn’t. I used to pick up random books at the library based solely on the cover art. Hell, I once spent an amazon gift certificate exclusively on books I knew nothing about except the blurb, and read them all and enjoyed them all. How the fuck did that happen?*

But now here I am like “I was expecting a blog post, where it’s all written by One Person and the tone is consistent and  you can guess what the conclusion is going to be, but here I am at a forum thread– on a forum I’m not part of, where I don’t know anyone– with Lots Of People typing in wildly different styles and derailing the discussion in various ways and I Don’t Want To Read This.”

Sorry brain, unless or until you come up with a better search term there is literally nothing else about this topic for you to read!

—————-

* I guess this is a good example of what I mean when I say I used to be really un-critical of what I read and suspension of disbelief was really easy for me.

I really really believe

in embracing the inevitable awkwardness and ambiguousness of communication, and just doing whatever works to get your intentions across, even if it’s not Smooth, because 99% of the time, the other person is just as un-Smooth as you,

and it’s a good thing I believe in & enjoy this process because god am I awkward.

even when things are going objectively awesomely: still awkward. but it’s ok.

Anyway in other news

I had a great birthday lunch with Sparkly in downtown and then we took a long walk and ey played Pokemon Go. They have a holiday event going on and ghost pokemon are Everywhere. Ey caught like 20 of various types of creepy things.

Also the weather was nice, not too cold, and I’m getting over my cold, and on the way home I got myself apple cider and some candy as a birthday treat.

Rejection

There’s this article being passed around on Tumblr about something that’s apparently a pretty new idea in psychology. It’s called “rejection-sensitive dysphoria” and it purports to describe how people with ADHD are particuarly prone to being sensitive to criticism, as an inherent part of the neurology of ADHD brains.

And like.

I don’t have ADHD, but if someone was trying to tell me that my sensitivity to rejection

(which is pretty similar to what that article describes)

was just how my brain works,

and not, say,

a reaction to having been repeatedly criticized and rejected, my whole life, for things I did not understand and/or could not stop doing,

(those things having been caused by the way my brain works)

I would be offended, personally.