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NOW AND THEN | 1995 ↳ Directed by Leslie Linka Glatter

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The Autobiography of a Neurodiverse Oreoette (Can Shorten to TANO (or just....NO)) Chapter 1

I warn you. This writing piece might come across as a bit pitiful. I'll write out all of the trigger warning before I get started. This writing will contain childhood suicide ideation, bullying, Marxist musings, social rejection, social anxiety, adulthood suicide ideation, anger management issues, empathy deficiencies, so much failure, and maybe after all of that, just sprinkle of acceptance and hope.

This author has loved writing see the beginning of time ( yes really), and may or may not be partially stuck in some mixture of childhood, teenage, and young adult reasoning. This author has also spent most of her life alone, so please forgive any misperceptions on the outside world. This author can only conceive of what is in her head, a side effect of her neurodiversity. This writing will likely not be written chronologically, but the author hopes that the order makes some sense to the reader. This author wishes the reader luck on this journey.

Now that the disclaimers are written and the audience is established, let's begin. There are things that are different, but in a normal way. Let's take fashion. For decades, centuries, millennia even, each generation has felt a need to reinvent their expression of themselves through the clothing adorned on their bodies. In high school in the late 2000s, skaters and their admirers waltzed through the halls very tight jeans that hugged the ankles, known as skinny jeans. Other students wore bright red lipstick, and dark hair, a reflection of a vampire obsession caused by Young Adult novels. But the perceived norm were expensive shirts from labels like Abercrombie and Fitch, Hollister and Aeropostale, maybe with a pair of flip flops from Bebe. There were norms, and accepted deviations from those norms. Deviations could mean you were treated with hostility from the accepted norms, but there were usually at least a handful of people to clump up with in the cafeteria, even on the furthest points from the norm.

And then there are people like me, who wore clothes from elementary school, that were untaken care of, who who thought less of her appearance because they had read Dr. King and took his statement on being "judged by the content of their character" as literally as possible. This was not a deviation from the norm, it was an attack on unspoken values that our culture holds dear, it is never socially acceptable to look "unkept" or as if you just rolled out of bed and threw on garments. That is not a fashion statement. That is a failure to do humaning correctly. And so one might imagine the confusion at the way may classmates ignored me, snapped at me for asking questions, moved away from me when I approached, and held a general disdain for my existence. You also might imagine that when others respond to a person negatively, that person may be inclined to do some self reflection and change things about themselves to covert to more acceptable ways of being. But not me. My brain works differently. Like many students of the Barney era, I was taught that uniqueness was a prized possession, and I was stubborn enough not to change, even when facing painful isolation. After all, if all of your friends jumped off a bridge, you wouldn't do it too would you? Yet another idiom that I took literally. Nuance was not, is not my forte. It really doesn't help that flat out rejection of social norms are usually not met with kindness, not from students or adults. My parents and teachers, god bless them, were just as curt and cruel as the students in school. I think the most cutting comments about my appearance came from my mother, and my stubbornness and unwillingness to let go of my core principles, that a person's appearance has nothing to do with who the person is on the inside, caused a household where compliments were non existent (at least towards me), and violent outbursts were the norm.

There's that word again, norm. See, another unspoken rule is that it's okay to be cruel to kids if they are failing at grasping one of the basic tenets of society. There was so much sympathy for her .How could she have been cursed with such an evil child? We know she's evil because of how she looks. Surely these acts of cruelty we witness are acceptable because when a child exists outside of the rules, the abuser is justified in any and all attempts to force them into compliance. Particularly true if the child has very poor hygiene, like I did/do. That would exhaust the compassion of any reasonable person, thus violence is a completely fair response. I wonder if his is how terrorists groups justify their behavior.

End of Intro

#books #neurodivergent #neurodiversity #adhd #autism #depression #african American culture #afro #memoir #black women #black tumblr #infj feelings

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Shaved Ice the Sheep

After my last con, I needed a quick little palette cleanser personal project - I love making things for other people, but sometimes you need to make something for yourself! I decided that what I wanted was a little friend to sit up on top of the Color Machine, and the sheep from the logo design felt like a perfect choice. She’s accompanied by dye bottles and a couple little balls of wool, and has a magnet in her base to help her stay steady up on top.

This was a personal piece and is not for sale, but my commissions are currently open and I’d love to talk ideas with anyone who wants to add a felted friend to their world!

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no caption needed

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Facts.

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Happy Wednesday, March 22, millennials! Cosmo had a idea today! 

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the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?

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Monday, January 1

You did it.

2024 is here, and so are you. Cheers, kid. Glad you're around for this one.

May your 2024 be filled with the kind of love you deserve, the kind of people who make you feel good, and absolutely zero bed bugs.

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find a protest near you

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The tweet has since been removed from twitter, but Israel’s deputy mayor of Jerusalem had posted this, and many other horrific tweets calling the unarmed Palestine civilians taken from their home and stripped naked and detained (including at least 2 children) “subhuman” and “Muslim Nazis” as well as saying they should be buried alive