pandora_parrot | Recent Entries

Recently, this accusation has come up again, and it is something that I, emotionally, need to talk about. Did you know that one of the most common stereotypes or beliefs about autistic people is that we don't have empathy? That we are essentially, or in some cases, actually sociopaths devoid of the ability to feel what other people feel?

There is an article which discusses the difference between sociopathy and autism. One element that stood out to me was related to this concept of empathy. Simply put, the sociopath shows no empathy because they cannot experience empathy. The autistic person may also show no empathy *because they don't understand* what's going on inside the other person. When they do understand, the empathy starts flowing.

This has been my experience of life. A life of experiencing a great deal of empathy for everything around me, but often feeling completely baffled by what's going on inside the minds of others. They have mental and emotional experiences that I find utterly baffling and confusing. Once I actually understand what it is that they're going through, the floodgates open and I feel so much of what they feel. The limitation I experience isn't one of inability to feel what others feel. It's lack of awareness and understanding of it.

About 10 years ago, I got into aviation. I learned how to fly airplanes, as it had been a childhood dream to learn how to fly these machines. A few years after that, I bought my own small aircraft and spent several years flying all my friends and family around, going on adventures, and more.

This year, I had to give up aviation from my life. Why? The biggest reason had to do with empathy. More and more, the specter of climate change and environmental impact was on my mind. Seeing people talking about the way that our planet was changing as a result of people spilling carbon into the atmosphere bothered me. It started to become all I could think about whenever I operated a vehicle that made use of fossil fuels. I could barely drive my partner's car around because these thoughts would become intrusive. Flying over the countryside, I just found myself ruminating on the ecological impact of humanity upon the world and how we were killing ourselves.

As gas prices went up and as the difficulty of maintaining the aircraft in the face of unreliable mechnics increased... the choice seemed clear. I would give up aviation and instead focus on creative and artistic pursuits. Game development, most especially.

I have learned over recent days that my ex suggested that I gave up aviation because I'm a sociopath. Because I do not have empathy nor a rich depth of personality. That hurts. A lot. Giving up aviation was giving up a lifelong dream. I still wistfully look up at the clouds some days and imagine myself up there, flitting in between them on a partly cloudy day, seeing the world from above, visiting places far away and beign home in time for dinner. I've cried a lot on losing that from my life.

It's perhaps the fate of every autistic person to suffer being accused of lacking empathy. I assure you. It is nonsense. You can see in your own heart what you know and feel. No matter what anyone says, you know in your heart that you feel DEEPLY about so many things. Fuck people that claim that you lack empathy. You know what you feel and they can't see inside you. They don't even try.

I'm going to spoil a bit of Alan Wake 2, and a LOT, if not most, of House of Leaves in this post. So please make sure to turn away if you're interestred in House of Leaves, and consider doing so if you're looking to avoid spoilers for Alan Wake 2. That said, let's go in.

( Read more... )

To start building back my skills as a writer, I'm doing an exercise I learned about called morning pages... Here's what I wrote today.

More morning pages. I do like the idea of writing every morning, but I definitely struggle with the idea of what to write. It feels like journaling is easiest for me right now, at least to start. They say "Don't think too hard about this. Just write." So that's what I'm doing.

I've been thinking a lot about my goals as a writer. Why do I want to get "serious" about writing this time? What does that even mean? The answer is that I would like to stretch my skills as a writer and regain my confidence as a writer and storyteller. Throughout my relationship with my ex, I've lost a great deal of my confidence as a storyteller. I've found it more and more challenging to freely and openly create stories for my starfinder campaign, for example. I fear giving people a boring experience or doing something less pleasant than it could be. I rely on published adventures as a way of avoiding that. To have someone else "write the story" and I just fill in the gaps and bits.

In terms of stretching my skills, I want to push myself to tell stories and write stories in ways that make me uncomfortable. In ways that I struggle with. In ways that I feel challenged or unskilled in. I want to grow as a writer.
Sometimes, people approaching this sort of thing might ask themselves "Do I intend to write a novel or a book or short story or something like that?" and frankly, no. While I *may* attempt such things in service of my goal of pushing myself, I have no current aspiration to become a novelist. I just want to bring this act of writing things back into my life after my ex spooked it out of me.

I think the first thing I really need to do is tell compressed stories... Instead of breaking things down into just writing for the sake of writing, what I should probably do is write a story. A tale. And try to do a *complete* story. Even if I don't write the scenes or the moments, create a structure to flesh out later.

I then wrote a vignette about my backyard

The autumn wreathed trees stood tall above the houses and freeways it sat near. The small forest consisted of an acre or so at best of trees still sitting here since the days when this land was a farmland for a free Black man and his family who had escaped slavery in the south to come here and start a farm. Whenever someone goes back into the small woods, they might stumble upon long rusted farm implements discarded amidst the trees, relics from that time not so long ago.

The forest was bigger back then, covering the space around and in between the farmland. Today, though, that space has largely been converted into apartments and big box houses for medium wealthy individuals.

Nestled against the trees, in the clearing next to the houses, is a small pond in which ducks, geese, and other waterfowl flock. Interestingly, this pond didn't always exist here. It was constructed as a detention basin for the nearby new construction neighborhoods. A low spot in the ground for water to flow to so it didn't fill the streets of the households nearby.

Young trees, barely a few years old, stand around the small pond, stretching upwards and slowly growing to fill the gaps created during the recent construction.
Everything about this place screams of liminality. The forest edge creating a boundary between present and past. The infant trees just barely born, slowly growing to fill the gaps. Beyond the forest, the freeway, installed here some 80 years ago, itself a boundary and edge, filled with cars flitting to and from Detroit, MI.

This is the backyard of my home, a home we lovingly call Pondwatch. Looking out over the pond from the back windows of my house is a constant source of peace and happiness. It's a source of delight and inspiration. It's an environment in which I can think. It's a place of magic.

PostScript

It occurs to me that while recent events have caused me to heap the blame for this on a single incident that happened with my ex... in reality, I think that was merely a catalyst for a change that would take place over the next few years for many reasons, not the least of which had to do with the changing landscape of social media.

When I first got online in the early 00s, I wrote constantly in my livejournal... But livejournal died, and twitter/facebook rose in their place

Facebook exposed my writing to my family and coworkers, so I became anxious about being seen by them.

Twitter exposed my writing to anyone doing keyword searching and had people send me many awful messages, including threats of various sorts.

It all combined, I think, to cause fear to replace courage, and cause me to mostly stop writing over the past decade.

To my ex's credit, she did try to undo the fear her early criticism caused. She even tried to create art with me a few times.

I suppose some updates are in order since the last time I used this site was 6 years ago and pre-pandemic, and so much has happened since then.

Looking back, I see that my last posts were about the fact that I was buying an airplane. It was a small plane, but really fun to fly. I took that thing all over the place. My favorite memories were flying out to the desert or small strips with campgrounds next to them, and landing there. It was so much fun. When the pandemic hit, I used our little plane to travel to Michigan to let us look at houses and plan our cross-country move without using commercial air and risking covid exposure.

Alas, I'm giving up flying. Sold my plane earlier this year and will not be returning to it, not for a while anyways. The reason I'm giving it up has to do with several things. Probably the biggest reason is that I've been growing increasingly concerned about climate change, to the point that it's reached the level of intrusive thoughts. The last few times I went out flying, I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that I was pouring 15 gallons of leaded gas into the atmosphere every hour I flew the thing. It actually got so bad, I didn't even want to drive a gas car. Now I have an electric car, so I'm laundering the pollution through the power company, and that makes me feel a heck of a lot better, tbh.

Also aviation gas prices have been rising, and I've been feeling a powerful desire to go back to focusing on creative pursuits over the past year, which makes trying to keep up with my pilot's license a bit frustrating. It's not really what I've been wanting to focus on anymore.

What else has been happening... Oh yeah, burying the lede a bit there... I moved to Michigan! One of my partners, Coda, grew up around here, and California was getting too expensive for my tastes. So we moved out here, built a beautiful home, and have been nicely settled in for the past few years.

One of the motivations for moving here was to make it possible for me to leave the unreasonably lucrative job I had at Netflix. Loved the place, but damn it leaned into the "golden handcuffs" concept. I've since taken lower paying jobs doing game development, and that's been super super fun! I love having a job where I get to participate in such a creative process, instead of the increasingly hyper-capitalistic process that Netflix had become.

Let's see... what else do we got...

Oh yeah! I came out as non-binary over the past few years and changed my name to Robin. That's a whole thing that I probably should journal about at some point in its own article... My journey to acceptance of being non-binary.

Last, a more recent development... my wife of 11 years left me, and it's probably the strangest and most confusing breakup I've ever been through. I'll tell that story in another article as well, sometime.

I'm sure there's more, but I think those are the major major highlights! See you soon!

Splintered into ten thousand pieces
Dripping, drifting, slicing
Falling
Who was I back then? Why did I lose this?
Like liquid metal
I will reform

Social media over the last 15 years has been interesting. Waaaaay back in 2005, I started my first online blog over on livejournal. The archives of that blog are still archived here on this dreamwidth account.

When livejournal was sold to the russians, I along with a lot of other people, headed out to Facebook to do my postings and journaling. That was fine until around 2016 when I learned more about how Facebook was using all of our information to help fuck up our society. Since then, I've been mostly living on Mastodon.

My wife of 11 years is leaving me, and with her departure, I'm re-evaluating a lot of things in life. One such thing is the lack of creative writing that I've been doing for the past 10 years. In part due to the loss of livejournal in my life, and in part due to the fact that my wife expressed an attitude of being critical of what she considered "bad art," I've been hesitant and/or to do much in the way of creating written art. I'm trying to change that.

I think one of the things I need is a place to put my writings and nonsense. Here seems like a reasonable place. It's the best continuation of my livejournal space from 2005 and gives me an opportunity to use the same basic format to create longer forms of writing. I don't really have a lot of friends on this platform, though... I left most of them back on livejournal or on other social networks.

But as I was putting together a really weird "laptop" project in the aftermath of this ongoing divorce, I found myself thinking about keyboards and writing software for the first time in over a decade. I even pulled out my old copy of Ommwriter and did a little poetry and writing with a prompt.

It felt like coming home to an old friend.

Thing about me. I used to write constantly. Lots of poetry, a few short stories, lots of essays, tons of journaling, and lots of other little things. Some of it even won awards of a sort. It really hasn't been much of a part of my life for most of the past 10 years. But I want to change that and bring it back to my life. I want to start sharing my thoughts in a journal like fashion again. I want to write again.

So let's do it. Let's write.

Learning to fly this new plane has me feeling a little bit like I'm all the way back at PPL training again. Part of it is that my instructor, Sasha, is absolutely fantastic and super knowledgeable. I'm learning a lot of *information* from her that I never learned from past instructors, or that I've forgotten in the 5 years since I last studied this stuff intensely. I think what makes it great is that she connects the information from those textbooks directly to things that are going on in the airplane in a way that makes perfect sense to me.

Another part of it is that I'm feeling like I'm struggling with my landings again, like I was feeling when I was working on my PPL. Landings were frustratingly difficult for me, and to be honest, I never really fully understood what I was doing with them until several flights after I actually got my license. Like, I could do it *by rote,* but I didn't understand what was happening on a more fundamental level.

With the new plane, there's a lot more room to get into trouble. Going from exclusively flying the Cessna 172 to flying the PA-32-300... it's a lot more airplane. And as a result, it gives me more options for things to do, and more trouble I can get myself into. As much as I want to, I'm still struggling with it a bit.

But that's why I'm doing the training!

Sasha says that the thing I'm struggling with is the "last 5-10 feet" of the landing. I definitely feel it. It feels like right before I start flaring, I start losing some control of the airplane, and I'm struggling to keep it on the centerline and all that. I'm going too fast, balloon, and bounce and it's all awful. I'm sure I'll get it in another flight or two.

To fly my friends and family, I need to meet 3 requirements:
1) FAA legal requirements.
2) Insurance requirements
3) Personal requirements.

1) The FAA legal requirements to fly my plane are pretty basic. It's just "Have a PPL and a high performacne endorsement." As of my flight last night, I now have the High Perf endorsement, so I am now legal to fly, yaaaaayyyy! (There's also a requirement to be "competent" in the airplane, but that one is fuzzy, so I'll ignore it for this discussion...)

2) Insurance requires me to have at least 10 hours in the plane before they'll cover me. So even though I'm now technically legal to fly the plane, if I got into an accident of any sort, insurance would laugh and smile and thank me for paying premiums that they'll never have to cover anything for! And I'd have to cough up the payments and cash myself. I'm at 5.6 hours in the plane, so I need 4.4 more before I'm clear.

3) The final, most strict, and most important requirement on this list are my personal requirements. For me, that means feeling really in control of the landings more than anything else, because that's always been my weakness. Also, I want my instructor to give me her blessing as well before I'm cool about it. Technically, she doesn't *have* to, but I'd be very foolish to fly without her saying I'm good to go.

Last night, I flew my own plane for the first time. It was only a half hour... two laps around the pattern. But it was delightful. The experience was fantastic. Lots of errors and whatnot... but fantastic.

I started by getting the plane fueled up. The way it works, I just have to call ahead and it'll be fueled up when I get to the airport, a receipt emailed to me. That's... super convenient and nice!

Then I met up with Sasha, my instructor. She's fantastic. Like really really awesome. It's great to work with someone that is very similar culturally to me. Like... being polyamorous, transgender, femme-presenting, etc... I often have this concern about discussing aspects of my life with any instructor I'm working with. With Sasha... we can just focus on flying and I don't have to worry about any of that coming up because... she's a lot like me in those regards! It's ironic that having so much in common with someone means we can more easily ignore those things and focus on the bits that are important.

The ferry pilot broke the tail cone when we were parking it. Stepping back, the previous owners didn't leave me any of the tools you need to fly the thing. No tow bar. No fuel tester... Nothing. So a lot of things are kind of awkward right now... I have supplies and tools coming in throughout the week to get me up to speed on those things, but right now, we have to make do. Part of that involves trying to figure out how to park the damn thing without a tow bar. The ferry pilot thought pushing down on the tail would be a good idea. It was not. The thing cracked and sent plastic-y pieces everywhere. Sasha wasn't entirely comfortable with the way it looked, so we took it to the mechanic to get taped up.

We did the pre-flight inspection slowly and carefully for a first time, since I had never done this for a plane like this before. Frankly, we did 3.5 hours of ground-based instruction and work around the plane, and I really appreciated every minute of it. There's a lot of new things, and I'm trying to be really careful not to let my prior experience with Cessna 172s cause me to do the wrong thing because I'm used to the other plane.

After the pre-flight, we went down to the mechanic and he fixed that, and also fixed the idle mixture as well. He noticed that one of the fuel injectors seemed to be leaking, so he fixed that as well. We then took it up for a flight. On takeoff, there was a really REALLY strong gas smell in the cockpit. Since neither of us know the quirks of this plane, we decided that we wanted to abort our flight and get back to the mechanic to have it looked at. Sasha landed the plane and we went back over there.

The mechanic tore the plane apart looking for a leak, and found nothing. That's... frankly what we expected, but with it being a new-to-us plane, we didn't want to make any assumptions. It took about an hour or so, so we wound up not having a lot of time to go back up. It was basically one more lap time.

Without the distraction of the gas smell, I got to feel the plane a lot more this time. I even did the landing all by myself. And... wow. The plane handles like a dream. With its big control surfaces, it is incredibly responsive. I'm still trying to fly Cessna 172 speeds, which is bad, because this plane needs to be about 20 knots faster to be happy... but the handling was great. The landing was frankly one of my better ones, though I was a bit off the center line. I definitely have room for improvement, but I can tell that I'm really going to enjoy flying this thing.

What a great plane and what a great experience... I did a bad job of recording tach time and hobbs time, but whatever. That's not important right now. I'll start doing that next time correctly. Especially as more equipment starts coming in to handle this. I also ordered a camera so you can watch me fumble around with the thing. :P

This is going to be so fun. Especially the lack of schedules and whatnot on this. It's a very different experience and a very different world owning the plane vs. renting it. :)

I really don't like what twitter and facebook have done to online discourse and writing. Back in my livejournal days, what I loved was writing about my life. Sharing stories of events happening to me, personal contemplations, etc. But since LJ died and I started using Facebook more, my posts got really limited.

I tried, for a while, to make longer contemplative posts on Facebook under filters and whatnot... But the tools to review things that had been posted int he past were not well built. Both Facebook and Twitter are designed to enable you to produce content in the moment, and then to leave it behind. On Facebook, the goal is to get as many likes as you can! On twitter, it's all about the follower count and retweets. These elements subtly encourage us to create a performance. A presentation for others to consume, rather than being our most genuine selves.

In some ways, that's great! For an artist or performer, twitter is a perfect platform on which to create jokes, bits of music, art, etc. It is perfectly designed for this sort of engagement. It's also great for talking about politics! Soundbytes and bits of outrage and terror and fear and activism and justice. I think fondly of the Arab Spring and other movements that have sprung forth from twitter and similar social media.

But there's the dark side to that, too. I've seen people destroyed by angry mobs that create their own narrative of what someone is doing. I've seen mobs of people descend on feminists and others that are just creating simple content to explain things. I've seen conspiracy theories about flat earths, vaccinations causing autism, pizza parlors, false flag operations, and more grow increasingly unchecked. In small ways, I've seen people struggling with mental illness or disability get dismissed and ignored.

On the personal level, I find my ability to even write things that are personal, vulnerable, and long hampered, even in this medium. I am so trained by twitter to condense my thoughts into quick tweets, and by facebook to santize my content for public consumption by others.

I think my title to this is hyperbolic. I don't think twitter and facebook are entirely bad. But they are a different thing than stuff like LJ was, like dreamwidth is, like usenet used to be... They are not open forums, but advertising platforms masquerading as such. And for all the good people get from them, this fact steers it to places I don't like.

I want to start posting here more. Being vulnerable again. Talking about my own life. Recording an online journal that is open for sharing with others.

5 years ago, I finally had all my debts paid off for the first time in my life. The first thing I decided to do, before starting to save money and do all that financial stuff you're supposed to do, was get my pilot's license so that I could fly airplanes. It's something I had always dreamed of doing, and I really wanted to do it. I found the most trans friendly flying club I could find and went for it. 3 months later, I had my pilot's license.

Along the years of flying, I've always been disappointed with my inability to really *use* flying for anything. You see... If you don't own your own plane, you're beholden to the rules, regulations, and schedules of the club that you rent from and fly with.

My first club was pretty lax on all of this stuff... I could wander into the club at any time, and as long as no one else was scheduled to have a plane, I could take it and go flying for as long as I wanted, pretty much wherever I wanted, with no extra fees. But with those lax rules came a lot of lax maintenance as well. Those planes started to look a little scary to me.

The rest of the clubs I flew with all had desk clerks who would hand out the keys for the airplane when you came in. Alas, this meant that planes were only available during typical business hours. If you wanted to schedule an airplane after hours, you'd have to make sure to let them know while they were still in the office. No last minute 8pm evening flights with them! Also? If you wanted to keep it overnight anywhere, you had to make sure you were doing at least 3 hours a day of flying. Any less, and they'd charge you for the full daily minimum anyways.

That basically relegated me to flying on silly little joyrides and $100 hamburger runs. But even those get cramped at the club I'm flying with nowadays, because I have to basically schedule every flight I wanna do 2-3 weeks in advance due to how much training is going on there. Last minute flights are just out of the question.

The joyrides and stuff are fun enough, for sure. But I want to fly for a purpose. I want to travel, go places, visit people, help my friends get around, etc. Like, I have friends and family all up and down the west coast, but visiting them on our tight schedule never works out. I want to do road-trips-in-the-sky. Visit random cities. Just explore our world. Like picking up a friend from So-cal a year or so ago. That felt amazing. To be able to fly down and pick him up instead of forcing him to take a train or commercial flight. And being trans, that certainly was a lot less painful.

So since those early days, it has been a dream of mine to own my own plane, so that I can just go wherever I want, whenever I want, on my own schedule. There's a price premium for it, to be sure, but the extra charges are just annual costs for the most part. The hourly rate to fly your own plane is just the gas you use while you do it. Oh, and oil, ofc.

WELP. I did it. I bought a plane. At least, as of tomorrow, I will have bought a plane. We close tomorrow on the deal. They get a boatload of cash, and I get a plane to fly. I'll post pictures once it arrives here, as it's out on the east coast right now. :)

I look forward to doing all manner of trips in the coming months! But first, TRAINING!

I really dislike what Facebook has been lately. I miss using these sorts of long spaces to write lots of interesting things about my life and what's going on. I really wish everyone would just come over here and we could get back to blogging like it's the oughts again. :)

During portions of yesterday, I talked to Amy about some elements of music that I've needed to learn about. She explained measure length and time (4/4, 3/4, etc.). I finally understand what that means... I mean... I knew for a long time what effect it has on the measure... 3/4 time means 3 quarter notes per measure. But what I didn't understand is what that meant for the music. It seemed utterly arbitrary. What she explained is that it reflects the structure of the music. How often you repeat what you're doing. That sort of thing.

I sat down for a couple hours last night and tried to fix the ending to Mechanical Savior. This is what came out of that. I'm calling it Mechanical Savior B. It's a lot nicer, AND I got to learn to use a synth last night.

The synth thing was kind of hilarious. Especially initially, it was just this mess of letters that had very little meaning to me. I had no idea what ANY of it meant. But it was incredibly easy to use, and I was able to start messing around with the sound there. I got several sounds that I kinda wanna play around with in other conditions as well. But for now, I did this.

Although I was enjoying doing things with Project B, I kinda wanna take this synth thing and mess around with it to see what comes of it. There's a few note progressions and certain sounds that felt certain ways to me, and I wanna see what comes of that, now that I have a tool like this. I'm also downloading some other synths to see what I can do with them.

I'm learning to write music. I think I'll document my education here, because why the fuck not?

Messing Around: Here was the first thing I put together. Just a silly thing as I learned the interface. It kinda sounds like part of a military video game background music. Just 24 seconds of stuff.

Anxiety: The first real "song" type thing I put together. It's short, but it's a little more complex and involves more stuff... I also felt like this was some sort of video game background.

Mechanical Savior: Don't ask about the names. Whatever. This song was my first "full song." I put together some loops and then composed them together. I also soloed over them at the end, and honestly, while I like some of the ideas there, I'd want to clean it up or remove them entirely. I do like where I was trying to go, but I don't think I got there, and didn't want to put in the effort to make it all the way. I wanna come back to it though, because I think I can improve it. Some bits in the solo really make me wince. Ugh.

Dark Rave: Seriously, don't worry about the names. They're mostly random, tbh. This one is probably my favorite so far. I really like several parts of it, and I could actually see myself listening to it.

Bridge Song: Aborted. I tried to take the Final Fantasy Bridge song and do something with it, but my lack of skill with the tools rapidly got in my way, and I couldn't figure out what I could do about it. It was really frustrating.

Project B: I decided I wanted to try making a fast song. OMG is this hard. At first, I couldn't figure out how to make fast drums, so I watched a bunch of videos online to see how they do drums, and I see you use cymbals a lot more. I learned while working on this that they're called hihats. I also learned what BPM meant! LIke, I knew it was "beats per minute," but I had no idea what a "beat" actually was. How many bass drum notes there were? I had no idea. Turns out, it's quarter notes! OR really whatever notes are at the bottom of the timing thing.

After this, I continued to work on trying to get something to go over those drums, and was finding it nigh impossible. I took a break to work on my scales, and found that my fingers remember all of my white key major scales, which is nice. I'm working on relearning the black key major scales and moving onto minor scales.

Today at work, I'm listening to a tutorial on how to use ableton to make EDM, and discovering a lot about how to think about music. First of all, a strong drum beat is more valuable than a fast drum beat. You can get good dance music without it being breakneck fast. I might abandon Project B to try some of the ideas I'm learning from this. I also found that I might be able to get that cool synth the dude uses, Xfer Serum for $10 a month from something called Splice

Avery thinks I shouldn't bother with a paid synth right now and just try this free one. We shall see.

I wanna listen to more music to learn this stuff, but I also want to look at tutorials to get a better sense of how to "see" the music. My symbolic library for representing and understanding music is so poor, I don't really understand the structure of what I'm usually listening to. It's just this mass of nice sounds, but what is in there doesn't make a lot of sense to me. God, there's so much to learn here.

I went and became a furry... Because that's what you do in 2016 or 2017 or whatever.

Everyone's a furry now, didn't you know?

Eh, it's okay. I've been furry adjacent for over a decade, so I basically count.

This started as a letter to someone, but it's good general advice to myself, and anyone else that needs to hear it.

We live within a system that is generally referred to as a kyriarchy. That system has taught all of us to perpetuate the systems of power present in it. Women are "crazy" and "bitchy." Blacks are "uppity." Poor people are "jealous" and "greedy" or just "pitiable." etc. etc. Our thoughts and language are constructed, in part, by a society that seeks to place certain people at the top by stepping on those below.

As much as I hate it, to me, it's never a question of "if" someone engages in ableist, sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. behavior. It's a question of "what" behavior a person has, and how to change it. It's not about attacking a person and calling them a ____-ist. It's about recognizing the behaviors we have that affect certain people around us disproportionately, and negatively.

To me, this is a liberating thought. Knowing that we all have these behaviors, that we're all "a little bit racist" (as the song goes) enables us to spend time LEARNING about it and changing. We can, without taking it personally, learn how to be better people, every day. Instead of using its ubiquity to dismiss it, embrace it and do a better job of changing.

To be a good ally to those that are lower than you in some axis of oppression, you need to, at least in part, be ready to be called out, (or called in). When someone tells you they're being hurt by something you're saying or doing, when it exists along this sort of axis of oppression, listen.

Yeah, it's true that sometimes, people aren't going to be right. No member of any minority group is a perfect representative of their entire group. Sometimes, people project things onto their kyriarchical oppression where it doesn't belong. But regardless, an ally should always listen to it when they're being called out in this way.

Simply put. Allies don't get it. As a white person, I'll never grok what it means to be black. I'll never fully understand the life experience of what a black person goes through in life. And any ally, on any axis, is more than likely disadvantaged when it comes to understanding how behavior can affect those they claim to support. Chances are, as an ally, you don't know what you're talking about. So shut up and listen and learn.

When you're called out. Stop and think about what is being said. Talk to other socially conscious people about it. Learn about it on the internet. Educate yourself.

But for the love of god, don't get self-righteous about how you're not ____-ist and how the person who is being hurt is mean to call you ____ist.

You will forever be my favorite social network, even if I don't use you anymore.

It is not inaccurate to describe me as an atheist, a skeptic, and a fan of science. I don't really "identify" with these things in any meaningful sense, since I don't feel these things define my identity so much as they describe my behavior.

I'm a fairly strong atheist, as evidenced by this: http://paradox-puree.livejournal.com/818024.html

But there's an issue with atheism. The body of people that are atheists tends to be white, male, educated, of higher income, etc. And the biases of these groups dominate the gestalt perspective of "atheism" as a group. Many prominent atheists have issues with sexism, racism, classism, etc.

Among many things, there is, amongst these folks, a belief or worship of quantifiable and verifiable truth as the highest possible virtue or value in the world. For some, all other forms of truth are irrelevant or inferior. Subjective, emotional, moral, ethical, perceptual, and mythological truth.

There is this sense that the quantifiable and verifiable aspects of reality are the only ones worth relating to. But our subjective emotional experiences are worth looking into.

When I step out under the night sky and look up at the stars, taking in a breathtaking view, you can quantify my heart rate. You can quantify my reaction. You can quantify the fact that I report certain emotional reactions. But none of that is relevant to the reaction I have, which is of a sense of connection to the vast universe that we are all a part of.

Words like "reality" or "truth" or anything like that are loaded terms. Each exists only within a set context. The objective version of reality and truth is certainly extremely important, and recognizing what happens there is vital to our happiness and success, but it is just one context within which you can evaluate the "truth" of something. Another might be one's emotional truth, or other forms of subjective truth.

Categorical errors occur often, and I think this is where issues arise. Many religious people believe their mythological or emotional truths to be objective truth. Many skeptics may focus only on what is objectively happening in a particular scenario and miss asking the question "What are people experiencing, why, and how?"

Concepts of science, objective truth, etc. are superbly useful, but they are but one tool in a large toolbox.

My life has fallen into a fairly pleasant pattern.

Monday: Attend or host Monday Night Dinner and Games with my friends in the evening.
Tuesday: Free day for personal time, or unusual activities.
Wednesday: DM D&D with the guys
Thursday: Date night with my wife
Friday: Play D&D or free day.

One day each weekend switches back and forth between these two things:
1) Exercise/Active date with my girlfriend.
2) DM D&D with the gals

The other day is a free day for planning activities like visiting my mother in law or friends.

Not a lot of room for discovering or building *new* friendships, nor much room for exercise, but it's fun and pleasant.

Ouch. That subject is going to earn me some negative attention.

And for that, I'm sorry.

Wow, let me do my best to do damage control on that before I even launch into my essay.

I respect everyone's choices to believe what they want to believe. And I also will not get on anyone's case about what they believe. I also acknowledge that I don't know everything, and there are things I might not know or understand. I also think there's a lot of value in many religious activities, behaviors, social steps, and I don't oppose all aspects of religion.

*breathes* Okay. Let's try to dig into this.

( Read more... )

I stood in the wings of the ship.

First, two people I barely knew, but SHE knew well, and I had come to know now, stepped in front of the crowd. Their swords crossed, blades clacking against one another as hard plastic weapons tend to do. Once, and then again, and a shout of violence. "HEY!" They walked forward and took their places.

Then again, two people stepped forward. One, a friend as old as can be. Another, another person SHE loved, and I had come to appreciate in our short time together. A clash, a clack. A shout. And they too walked forward to their assigned place.

Now, two of my most beloved, and HERS as well. Slowly they crept into position. Their swords clashed as the others did. One! Two! HEY! And now they too were in place.

It was my time. It was HER time. We stepped forward. CLACK CLASH HEY! We twirled around one another and again, our swords clashed, once twice, and we let forth another shout. Yet again, a third time we whirled about one another, weapons clashing and shouting. But this time, the voodoo Mamba at the stern of the ship shouted "HEY," to ask us to stop. Our parents walked up behind us, took our swords, and as a group, we walked up the aisle to be married.

( Read more... )

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Pandora Parrot

November 2023

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Page generated May. 30th, 2025 03:23 pm

Bird droppings

Something something stuff

Recent Entries

Empathy

House of Leaves contemplations (with Alan Wake 2!!!!)

Morning Pages

Some updates

Splintered

Let's write

Learning to fly again

Flew my own plane for the first time yesterday

Twitter and Facebook have ruined us

So I bought a plane...

Facebook sucks more and more

Music Journal Entry 2

Learning to write music.

Much better

How to be an ally: Calling in, shutting up, and listening.

I still love you, LJ

Quantification is not reality

Life snapshot right now

I am anti-religion (and the difference between knowledge and speculation)

And the world continues to turn