Scream Dream

Superman fans, please do not take offense. I have never read a single Superman comic, and my knowledge of him is pretty much the stuff that everybody knows. My subconscious mind, though, seems to want to analyze his psyche, as evidenced in my dream last night. And it did a pretty bizarre job.

So, I had this dream where there was a character named "Screamer" in the Superman comic. She was supposed to be Superman's girlfriend (in the dream Lois Lane didn't seem to exist) and she was a superhero whose power was her ability to scream-- but I got the impression that her screaming didn't actually do anything to the bad guys, it just boosted Superman's power so that he could kick their butts.

And no one ever saw Screamer. Superman talked about her a lot, but he was apparently the only person who ever interacted with her. When he needed her help, he would go someplace where no one could see him, and then people would hear a scream, and he'd come back and say that Screamer had done her job.

In the dream, it seemed that there was a common idea among Superman fans that Screamer wasn't a separate person of her own, she was in Superman's head. The idea was that Superman did the screaming himself, and just told everybody it came from his unseen girlfriend. But it wasn't like she was an imaginary friend, and it wasn't like she was an alien consciousness trapped inside his head with him... it wasn't even a split personality thing, either. It was that Superman was in love with a part of his own mind... apparently the part of him that liked to scream, I guess.

And since the rest of the world would find that very odd, Superman personified this part of his mind as a girlfriend that nobody saw.

I do NOT know where this dream came from... except that I'm writing a short story in which a young lady experiences a sort of identity crisis, wondering who or what she truly is... and the Superman character is mentioned a couple of times in passing. And it's also the time of the month when my brain produces the craziest dreams.

Maybe I should name that part of my mind "Dreamer." And, like, lock him up somewhere.

Singing with the world's stickiest head

I could write a whole blog about the songs that get stuck in my head. Seriously. A typical entry would go like this:

First I got "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" stuck in my head and then I got "Oh Susanna" stuck in my head, and since I don't know more than the first couple lines of either of them, my brain merged them into a version of "Oh Susanna" that replaced the words "Oh Susanna" with "Argentina." But it still only had the first couple lines, so my brain grabbed the first rhyme it could think of and built it into something that went like this:

Argentina, don't you cry for me
Cause my first name's Angelina and my last name is Jolie

which my brain found so clever that it considered adding more verses and making it into a satirical song about Angelina Jolie, but then realized that such a project would require knowing at least five times more about Angelina Jolie than I actually do, and I wasn't interested in doing that kind of research, so I just sang those first couple lines over and over in my head for the rest of the day.

I have the world's stickiest head. If only I could understand and remember enough of the words of any song that I could hum the whole thing sometimes.

My website

Just letting you all know that my website, which used to be at zekibaka.com, has moved here. That's why my picture on blogger.com is dead-- it was a link to a copy of a pic on zekibaka.com, and blogger keeps crashing when I try to change it. Hope it at least lets me post this.

Site still has pretty much all the same stuff-- my writing, my art, and information about my books and speeches. Some new stuff on the jewelry page.

Just thought I'd let you know. Now must try and get ready for bed.

Website downtime upcoming

Our website at www.zekibaka.com will quite likely be down for a day or so at some point in the near future.

See, zekibaka.com is hosted by Midphase, and our other site, johnanderikaspeak.com, is hosted by Bluehost. The renew deadline for Midphase is coming up and we can't afford the extra $100 right now, so we've decided to move zekibaka.com onto our Bluehost account.

It'll still be on the same domain-- you'll still get to it by typing www.zekibaka.com -- but it'll be hosted by Bluehost and covered under the same fee we're going to pay Bluehost in February, so we'll have both sites up for the price of one.

But it may take a day or so to get back up... just letting you all know.

"Christ won eternal life for you. It's a separate download."

I just got a spam email with one of those blocks of randomly generated text, which was pieced together from a religious essay and a set of instructions for some computer application... some of the juxtapositions are simply hilarious:



Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason. sitemap files in your application. See Isaiah and the Gospel of John. This package is a series of sample ControlExtenders that attach to existing controls to do some really cool stuff. Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. Your phone is "busy". Either you think there is a personal God, a superhuman Creator who made the world according to the Book of Genesis, or you are a rational believer in the scientific method. It is a welcome change for me, because educating my business partners on technology was a daily exercise in futility.
It'll work most of the time," said Prosise. That is why I needed to get Einsteinian religion out of the way to begin with: it has a proven capacity to confuse. Initials instead of having to do it manually. It's still enjoyable to read.
God waits to be gracious to each person that knows they need to be forgiven. So the easiest way to do it is to split the string with a space character, and grab the first letter from each resulting string.
Of course, you can add a lot more information to your OpenSearch provider.
this is very important, Satveer.
Beats having to click a bunch of checkboxes, huh?
It is a welcome change for me, because educating my business partners on technology was a daily exercise in futility.
Didn't you know, man? Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason. Select the assembly, and drag it onto the Toolbox, in the tab you want the controls to be in. And it involves APS meetings and Fourier transforms, all intensely romantic.
com e-mail address instead. at some moment in time, yet? Take some time to get acquainted with this power-filled Jesus. He said He'd be back, and He said it first.
This is the us-versus-them trick.
"; this one is the Incredibly Agile Evasive God trick. Get to know Him and know yourself. Get to know Him and know yourself. Get to know Him and know yourself.
Christ won eternal life for you and said so. It's a separate download from the main "Atlas" release, but I would assume that this would be rolled into the "Atlas" releases at some point.
This is the us-versus-them trick. Initials instead of having to do it manually.
no doubt with good wishes! sitemap files in your application.

Sometimes a lizard is just a lizard?

Forget Freud and his book of what things mean in dreams. Yes, dreams have symbolism, but it is different for every single freaking person.

The other night I had a dream where a lizard symbolized an aloe plant. Seriously. In the dream I had a couple of pet lizards that kept running around and getting their tails cut off in various ways. Like, I tried to keep them in my locker while I went to work, but I closed the locker on their tails and accidentally cut them off. I suppose they must've grown back, because they got cut off a lot of other ways too.

But the point is that when they lost their tails, the tail stump wasn't red, it was translucent green, like when you cut a leaf off an aloe plant. And then when I woke up, I noticed that my aloe plant had fallen off the shelf and was lying in a big pile of dirt on the floor. I mentioned it to my husband, who said that it had fallen off the previous day, but I hadn't noticed it and he hadn't gotten around to telling me.

So I must have noticed it subconsciously, and my subconscious mind was trying to let me know that my aloe plant was in trouble. Except instead of telling me directly, it had decided to symbolize it with lizards getting their tails cut off. Have no idea why it chose that particular symbol, except that I dream about lizards a lot, and I also have a lot of dreams about pets suffering horrible fates due to human neglect or stupidity. (I suppose that has to do with the fact that I had a lot of pets as a child, and some of them did get hurt or killed because of errors on my part or my parents'.)

Freud said that dreams use symbolism because there are things your mind can't handle thinking about directly. Supposedly almost anything sexual was in this category-- which is stupid, because people think about sex more than they think about anything else, and I'd certainly rather think about sex than think about lizards losing body parts. I personally think that dreams don't symbolize for any good reason, they just do it because they're confused and mix things up with each other.

Or maybe it was just a coincidence. But in any case I'm not asking Freud what it means when lizards lose their tails in a dream.

Moving and selling stuff

Random stuff:

Voptras and my pointy ear headbands, two of my inventions, are available for sale on my website.


I'm also selling my dollhouse and its contents on Craigslist, and I think it's worth what I'm charging for it-- at least I don't want to sell it for any less-- but I haven't had any offers yet. We'll see.

OK, I promised an update on moving into our new apartment...

Husband's parents and a friend helped us move at the end of September. It is a great apartment-- bigger than our old one, which means that we can actually walk in a reasonable fashion around our pieces of furniture instead of holding our breath to squeeze past them. Better than old one in many other ways too. Wonderful big French windows. Kitchen has a garbage disposal. Electric stove, as opposed to old apartment's ancient gas stove with pilot light that kept going out for no reason and flooding kitchen with methane. Old landlord wouldn't even try to fix it; said there was nothing he could do. We had to go in with a screwdriver and turn off the valve to the pilot light, and light it with a lighter every time we turned it on. Husband also had to improvise a stove vent out of a big plastic bowl and a length of duct pipe that led to the window, but the new apartment has a stove vent built in.

Has a pool that we'll be able to use come summer. Has a rental office on the property, and maintenance that reliably comes and fixes problems soon after we call. Laundry room has three washers and three dryers, unlike old apartment which, inexplicably, had three washers and two dryers. Washers don't unbalance nearly as easily as the old ones, too. And there's a quarter machine in the rental office.

And there's no extra price for all these improvements-- the rent is actually $50 less than the old apartment. Probably because it's on the freeway-- but we don't mind the noise, and we like the convenience.

A few little problems: the window is drafty, and the walls are not very thick (one neighbor complained about our video game noise all the time, even when we had it turned down so low we could barely hear-- until one day she knocked on our door when we weren't even playing video games, and we let her in and showed her that the noise she was complaining about wasn't even coming from our apartment, and since then she's been very decent to us). Our upstairs neighbor's footsteps sound like a dinosaur, and our downstairs neighbor probably thinks the same of us... the floors seem to amplify every sound.

Also, the bus routes to the Target where I work are not as good as from the old apartment-- they sometimes involve transfers at places where I have to wait up to twenty minutes. But that's okay because in January my Target is going to rebuild itself into a Super Target, and while it's rebuilding, the employees going to be moved, and I'll be moved to a Target that's practically in the backyard of where we live now, and I'll be able to walk to work. They might want to move me back when the rebuilding is done, but I bet I can get them to let me stay.

I was having a lot of stresses and obsessive worries, but stuff has calmed down lately. My mom says she'll help me with psychologist and psychiatrist visits if I need them, but for now I'm emotionally fine. Our financial situation still sucks-- any extra money we get always goes to buy necessities that we'd been holding off on when we didn't have enough money, so we haven't been able to save a cent-- but there are some promising career options occurring to my husband now, so things are looking up. Also the new publisher is going to start printing my book eventually, and I'm in the editing phase of my new science fiction novel, so at some point that will be at least a little source of extra money.

That's it for now. Got to go.

Realism vs. believability

And here's a post about my novel, now that I've gotten to the end (at 182 pages) and am in the editing phase. Or rather, it isn't a post about my novel, per se, but about one aspect of being an autistic writer.

When writing fiction, it doesn't matter if any of the events in the story are based on fact-- what matters is whether the story is convincing, whether the reader is able to imagine the events being true. And this convincingness doesn't necessarily even have to do with whether the story is similar to reality-- often it just has to do with whether it fits what people expect to see in a book.

For example, my mom is an extremely intellectual and scientific person. In conversation, she speaks as casually and colloquially as anyone, and when you hear her, that casual way of speaking doesn't seem out of place with her intellectual mind. This is because we know that in reality, almost everyone talks casually and colloquially in ordinary conversation, including intellectual people.

However, for part of a writing project in college, I once had her tell me a family story and I wrote it down almost word for word as she said it. I was shocked to find that, to me, my professor and all my classmates, it read as if she were a socialite yuppie soccer mom with no interest in anything scientific or intellectual at all. The same words that had seemed completely in character when she spoke them seemed completely out of character when written down.

I realized then that written "voices" are not anything like the patterns of speech in reality. For a character in a written story to seem intellectual-- especially a female character-- she must speak in a stilted sort of way that no one speaks in the real world. If she talks casually, like a real person, readers will assume she is not intellectual, except in cases where she is actively talking about something intellectual. There was no way I could have quoted my mother telling me that totally unscientific, unintellectual family story and preserved both her patterns of speech and her impression of intellect.

Furthermore, when you write fiction about a subject on which most people have misconceptions-- like autism-- it isn't enough to say something that you know is realistic, or even something that is based on a true story. You also have to try and predict what misconceptions people will have when they read it, and add enough explanation to get rid of those misconceptions.

For instance, I once wrote a story for creative writing class that was almost entirely true. It was based on a conflict I had with a special ed worker in junior high school. But instead of using my real name, I told the story in third person, calling the main character "The Autistic Child." It was a statement about how people forget our true names and personalities as soon as a label like autism becomes known to them.

I showed it to my critique group, not telling them that it was based on a true story. And they tore it apart. They said it was completely unrealistic. An autistic kid wouldn't behave like that. An autistic kid wouldn't have the intelligence and the verbal eloquence of the character in the story, and someone with that amount of intelligence would never be as socially inept as that character. Basically, they felt the story was unrealistic because it didn't fit their own completely inaccurate idea of what an autistic kid would be like.

That was when I realized that you have to try and predict your audience's misconceptions. To avoid critiques like the one I got from that group, I would have to revise the story, mentioning somewhere in it that autism is very misunderstood, and that the main character does not fit people's stereotypes of autistics. It's sad that I would have to do that... nobody ever has to explain in a story why their characters don't fit racial or gender stereotypes. But people recognize that racial and gender stereotypes are often inaccurate. They don't recognize that about stereotypes of autistics, and writers just have to keep pounding it into their heads until they do.

The reason I'm thinking about this is that several main characters in my novel are on the autism spectrum, and I hope that I've learned enough by now that I can make them realistic without making ignorant readers think that they're unrealistic.

Return of the Novelist

I posted this to LJ a while back and forgot to post it here. But it's quite relevant.

I thought I should let you guys know why I've been so silent for a while. The fact is, I'm writing a novel.

It's the strangest thing. My interest in writing fiction pretty much disappeared some time ago. I hadn't written a novel since I was fifteen. I had been writing essays for my website, lots of them, and of course a few chapters for my published book. But writing for publication had gotten very, very hard for me to do. The new publisher wants to publish a book my husband and I are going to write together, about our relationship, and I'd been trying to write for that, but it always felt like a class assignment. I'd gotten almost none of it done, because I had to force myself to do it, and even then couldn't always succeed.

Then I got caught up in a project (making a lizard costume) and my husband got worried. Not at what I was doing, but how intensely I was working on it, and how snappy I got when he offered advice or tried to talk to me about anything else. We had sort of an argument, and it ended with him suggesting that I try writing fiction again. He felt that I was desperate for a project and was trying to fill that need with things that were insufficient.

I had a science fiction idea that had been sitting around in my head. At most, I imagined a short story, because I'd been pretty much unable to write anything long since years ago. But I thought I'd run with it and see what happened. My husband said he would help me with the science and some of the plot if I needed it.

It's over sixty pages already.

I'm stunned. I had no idea that ability was still in me, and I'm spending nearly every free minute writing.

But I have realized a few strange things about my writing style.

1.

I seem unable to invent an original character who is not like me. Maybe I just don't have enough theory of mind to write from the point of view of a person who doesn't think the way I do. When I create characters, either they're based on me, or based on someone I know very closely, or else they end up completely boring and one-dimensional. In this book, I have six main characters, and three of them are based on different aspects of my own personality, one of them is based on my husband, and the other two don't have much personality at all.

2.

When creating characters of my own and making them do stuff, I am lost when it comes to characterization. See, in the real world, characterization doesn't make sense to me, because I see real humans as immensely complicated and full of contradictions. Every person I know frequently does things that seem out of character to me. I can only understand those things when I realize that humans have many, many different parts to their personalities, and that any one of a huge variety of seemingly contradictory actions will be in character with one part or another. I know I myself have moods so different from each other that they seem like different people, and something that would be completely uncharacteristic of me in Mood 1 is totally typical of Mood 2, 3 or 4.

But when people read a book, they expect the characters to be simple enough that you can tell right off the bat whether an action is in character or not. So when I make my characters do wide varieties of things, some seeming contradictory, am I being more true to life than most books, or is it bad characterization?

That's all for now. Gotta go write more. Thanks for reading.

More disease definitions

On to my next installment of the Disease Definition Rant. Sorry for the delay.

And, because I may not have made it clear last time-- the opinion I am expressing in this rant is that it makes no sense to try and classify anything as either "a disease" or "not a disease," because the word "disease" is essentially impossible to define.


So in the last installment of this rant, I analyzed a definition of "disease" that turned out to be saying nothing more than "a disease is a condition of a body part; it can be identified by signs and it has a cause." Which could include such things as hair color, skin color, or the length of your fingers, whether unusual or not.

Now let's move on to some more definitions.

dis·ease
Pronunciation: diz-'Ez
Function: noun
: an impairment of the normal state of the living animal or plant body or one of its parts that interrupts or modifies the performance of the vital functions and is a response to environmental factors (as malnutrition, industrial hazards, or climate), to specific infective agents (as worms, bacteria, or viruses), to inherent defects of the organism (as genetic anomalies), or to combinations of these factors : SICKNESS, ILLNESS called also morbus; —compare HEALTH 1 —dis·eased /-'Ezd/ adjective

Source: Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary, © 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc.



So according to this definition, a disease is an "impairment." Impairment" is the noun form of "impair," which is:

im·pair
tr.v. im·paired, im·pair·ing, im·pairs

To cause to diminish, as in strength, value, or quality: an injury that impaired my hearing; a severe storm impairing communications.

The trouble with including "impairment" in the definition of "disease" is that it automatically makes it a matter of opinion whether something is a disease or not. Value and quality are matters of opinion; something that I feel has high value or quality may seem to have low value or quality to another person. Strength is another issue-- a condition that makes my hearing less strong is definitely an impairment to my hearing. But what of our previous examples, homosexuality and Asperger's Syndrome?

I would certainly not consider being gay an "impairment" to anything. It does not reduce any abilities, and does not cause harm to the body or mind. But there are plenty of fundamentalists who would consider it an impairment to morality, mental health and the natural order of things.

What the definition says, however, is "an impairment of the normal state of the living animal or plant body or one of its parts." What does "impairment of the normal state" mean? Does it mean that the organism becomes less able to function in the normal way? If so, how do you define normal?

And that is the problem with this definition. There is no way to define normal.

Try this:

nor·mal
adj.

1. Conforming with, adhering to, or constituting a norm, standard, pattern, level, or type; typical: normal room temperature; one's normal weight; normal diplomatic relations.
2. Biology. Functioning or occurring in a natural way; lacking observable abnormalities or deficiencies.
3. Abbr. n or N Chemistry.
1. Designating a solution having one gram equivalent weight of solute per liter of solution.
2. Designating an aliphatic hydrocarbon having a straight and unbranched chain of carbon atoms.
4. Mathematics.
1. Being at right angles; perpendicular.
2. Perpendicular to the direction of a tangent line to a curve or a tangent plane to a surface.
5.
1. Relating to or characterized by average intelligence or development.
2. Free from mental illness; sane.



Okay, #1 has to resort to using the word "norm" and a bunch of its synonyms; and #2 has to resort to using the word "abnormalities." When you have to use variations on a word in its own definition, you know you've got a problem.

Ignoring the chemistry and math-related definitions, all that's left is one definition that uses the word "average" and one definition that uses the word "illness" (which is disease, which makes the definitions circular.)

You can't define normal as average. Suppose, for example, "a normal human behavior" is defined as "something most people do." Most Americans don't know all of the Bill of Rights. Thus, for an American to know all of the Bill of Rights is abnormal, and if you use "abnormal" in the definition of "disease," then an American who knows all of the Bill of Rights has a mental illness.

I'm getting dizzy now, I have to go lie down. I'll work more on this definition later.

Dissecting definitions

So... the Pentagon has decided homosexuality is a disorder.


I'm particularly interested in the meaning of the words "disorder" and "disease," for two reasons. For one thing, I am very friendly with the gay community, which frowns on using the word "disease" to describe being gay. Secondly and even more close to my heart, I am diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, which is officially considered a disorder or disease, although I strongly dislike using those words for it, since I see the condition as beneficial in many ways.

So, on to Dictionary.com, I say to myself.

Well, Dictionary.com lists several definitions. Let's start with the first.


dis·ease (d-zz)
n.

A pathological condition of a body part, an organ, or a system resulting from various causes, such as infection, genetic defect, or environmental stress, and characterized by an identifiable group of signs or symptoms.

Okay, let's dissect this definition. First: "A pathological condition." Look up pathological, and we get:

path·o·log·i·cal
adj.

1. Of or relating to pathology.
2. Relating to or caused by disease.
3. Of, relating to, or manifesting behavior that is habitual, maladaptive, and compulsive: a pathological liar.

Look up pathology, and we get

pa·thol·o·gy
n. pl. pa·thol·o·gies

1. The scientific study of the nature of disease and its causes, processes, development, and consequences. Also called pathobiology.
2. The anatomic or functional manifestations of a disease: the pathology of cancer.
3. A departure or deviation from a normal condition: “Neighborhoods plagued by a self-perpetuating pathology of joblessness, welfare dependency, crime” (Time).

So, since the definition of "pathology" includes "disease," using "pathological" in the definition of "disease" is circular and makes no sense, and so the first part of the definition is meaningless.

On to the second part: "of a body part, an organ, or a system."

Well, the difference between a gay person and a straight person, or between an Aspie and a non-Aspie, is only known to be in one part of the body: the brain. Your brain is where you experience your feelings of falling in love, with the same or the opposite sex, and your brain is where you experience any social difficulties, obsessive behaviors or savant gifts you may happen to have.

And since the brain is a part of the body, the definition still applies.

On to the second part: "resulting from various causes, such as infection, genetic defect, or environmental stress."

Well, neither Asperger's nor homosexuality is caused by infection of any kind (parasites or microorganisms), and the part of environmental factors in causing either of those conditions is disputed. If they are genetic, it's a matter of opinion whether or not the genetic factor causing them is a "defect."

But the phrase "such as" implies that those causes are not the only possible causes for a disease, and so all it's really saying is that diseases have causes. Which does not rule out either Asperger's or homosexuality, yet.

So on to the third part of the definition: "and characterized by an identifiable group of signs or symptoms."

Both homosexuality and Asperger's are characterized by identifiable signs-- in the former case, sexual attraction to one's own sex; in the latter case, the long complicated set of traits outlined in the DSM-IV, which I will not quote here for the sake of my sanity.

Whether or not one considers those signs "symptoms" depends on whether one considers the condition a disease, but since the definition says "signs or symptoms," it doesn't matter if you consider them "symptoms" or not; the definition can still apply.

So what is this definition? Basically it says that a "disease" is a condition (that is, a way of being), and it's in some part of your body, and it has a cause, and it can be identified by signs.

Big useful definition. By that definition a freckle is a disease. By that definition your hair is diseased whether it's brown, blond or red. By that definition every race is a disease, and it doesn't fricking matter whether Asperger's or homosexuality is a disease because the word disease has no meaning.

Tomorrow, on to the other definitions, which are just as pointless. Watch for my diatribe on definitions of "disease" that use the word "abnormality," which is flat out IMPOSSIBLE to define. Watch me laugh at Dictionary.com's attempts to define "normal" and "abnormal." Watch and weep...

Article called "Backs to the Future"... (ha ha)

An amazing article about a culture where people's visualization of time is opposite to that of the rest of the world.

It seems all human cultures try to imagine time in a spatial way, and most of them visualize the past as physically "behind" them and the future as physically "ahead" of them. In fact, this way of picturing time is so common it was viewed as a universal trait of humans.

But they've found a South American culture where the opposite is true. Not only does their language use words meaning "front" or "forward" when referring to the past, and words meaning "back" when referring to the future, but they also gesture behind them when talking about the future, and in front of them when talking about the past.

The theory is that the past can be known, so it makes sense to place it ahead of you, where you can see it, and to place the unknown future behind you where you can't see it.

Which I think makes just as much sense as other cultures' way of reasoning-- that as you move through space, you're also moving through time, and the places you've been in the past are behind you and the places you will be in the future are ahead of you.

It fascinates me when different cultures have completely different and yet equally valid ways of seeing something. I loved the story "Shakespeare in the Bush."

Updates to my site:

Added palindrome cartoons to my Art Page.

Added links to my page and John's page on ArtRemains.

Added an essay about the Sally-Anne Test to my Essay Page.

Hmmm... did I do anything else? I'll post again if I think of any more recent updates.

Magneto...?

So I had this dream where my husband and my mom and dad and I were on vacation in a hotel on an island, and then all of a sudden there were tsunamis crashing in on the island from both sides, and more and more of the island was being covered by water, and I ran and ran until I got to the middle of the island where Charles from X-Men took me up a mountain and told me that we had to stop Magneto from controlling the water, and then... I don't know what happened.

I remember wondering why Magneto was controlling water and not metal, and deciding that this must be because we're currently watching several animes where the villains control water as a weapon. (Seriously, why are there so many animes like that? We're watching Naruto, Bleach, and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and villains use water to fight in all of them. And then today we watched an episode of Naruto filler where there was both a water-fighter and a magnet-fighter.)

So anyway, have a happy Father's Day and Autistic Pride Day, and stay away from anything metal and anything wet, just in case.

*goes to bed bewildered*

jewelry...

Take a look at my eBay stuff. Wow. My hands are tired.

http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZviasotaQQhtZ-1

Have spent most of today ebaying the jewelry that we inherited from my husband's aunt. There are a few other pieces of jewelry we got from her that aren't up for sale yet, because we think they're cubic zirconia but are not yet 100% sure they aren't diamonds... want to make certain before we sell them.

Am also trying to sell the tiara from our wedding... I listed it almost a week ago, it ends on Tuesday, and it has one watcher but no bids so far. (I wasn't really all that crazy about it in the first place, and I certainly can't see myself ever wearing it again... but I'm still not willing to sell it for any less than $150, since it cost $212 to begin with.)

Birthday

You know you're grown up when you're looking forward less to your birthday than to the paycheck that comes on the day after it.

Yep, on June first I hit the quarter-century mark, and all that's on my mind is the fact that we're going to be pretty much okay financially this coming month, because I get three paychecks, but that we still have to be careful and make sure we don't spend the extra money unwisely.

I don't have a birthday party planned or anything. We might go out to eat with a friend. Who knows. The only sure thing is that Mom and Dad will give us cookware. They always do. We need a bigger kitchen.

Two of my latest paintings

Check out my two most recent paintings.

The last clipped wing feathers our parrot shed. And some of his unclipped feathers.

A crocheted bikini top on a canvas. With paint.

Two autistic essays

This essay explores the subjects of eye contact, hidden emotions, and different kinds of lies.

This one ties in theory of mind to the Golden Rule, and expresses some opinions on both.

Essay: free will

Do people have free will? Depends on your definition.

Rhyme Rules: another of my essays

This one tries to define a rhyme. The funny thing is that in my poetry I don't worry much about whether words completely rhyme, even though I've considered that concept very thoroughly.

More essays

The story of a member of an oppressed group.

My answer to an accusation of selfishness.

Burnt Toast

Still posting links to essays from my essay page, to get this blog started and give people an idea of what I'm like.

This one is one of my insights as a fence-sitter between religion and atheism.

I'm going to post links to essays on my essay page

... just to get this journal started.

This one is something I wrote in college, about why I identify with a certain beloved Star Trek character.

Choices and responsibility

People think of punishment and other legal action as a response to an individual's choices: "If you choose to do something bad, you deserve to have something bad happen to you." "If you made a choice that causes something to be needed, you must provide that something." People think of it as if the choices made by the person were all that mattered.

Really, though, there are many instances where some of the things that make a great difference are not choice, but pure chance.

Think of paternity suits. Suppose the mother doesn't know who the father of her child is, but knows it could be any of three different men. Those men all did the same thing, all made the same choices, and all had the same chance of being the father.

But only one of them will have to pay child support, because only one of them is the father. Random chance, not choice, made that one the father, and thus it is random chance, not choice, that decides which one will have to face the consequences for his choices once the DNA test results come out. The others, who made the same choice, will not have to do anything, simply because they were lucky.

Or consider a traffic accident between a bicycle and a car, in which the cyclist's head hits the side of the car with great force. If the cyclist is wearing a helmet, he's likely to survive; if he isn't wearing a helmet, he's likely to die.

In either case, the law will try to decide whether or not the motorist is at fault for the collision, but in one case the law will be trying to decide responsibility for a death, and in the other case it will only be trying to decide responsibility for an injury.

Suppose that the law decides that the motorist was at fault. In that case, he will face much more severe consequences if he is at fault for a death than if he is at fault for an injury... even though his choices were exactly the same in both cases, and the choice that made the difference was not the motorist's choice at all, but the cyclist's choice of whether or not to wear a helmet.

(This argument, by the way, was put forth by my brother, an avid cyclist, to illustrate the fact that wearing an helmet is not just a personal choice that affects only the wearer-- it can also make a great difference to a complete stranger.)

Furthermore, consider the fact that attempted crimes are punished much less severely than actual crimes. Attempting to commit a crime involves all the same choices that committing a crime does-- the difference is made by forces outside the criminal's control that do or do not prevent him from succeeding.

Clearly, punishment makes no sense as retribution or revenge. The explanation for punishment is not "If you choose to do something bad, you deserve to have something bad happen to you, that's just the way it is." That's illogical because no one can explain why... and because, as I've explained, the law considers some actions more punishable than others even when the choices are the same.

A more reasonable explanation is "If people have to face legal consequences for what they do, then people will think more carefully about the choices they make." This works even with the knowledge that chance, or another person's choice, could affect the outcome. The thought of child support can make a man think before sleeping with a woman, because it's possible that he could become the father of her child. The thought of responsibility for an accident can make someone drive carefully, even though an accident will not necessarily kill someone. The thought of jail can keep people from even trying to commit crimes, whether they would succeed or not.

Random thought

Why do people get so upset about the development of Spanglish and other language fusions? It's just the English language's way of making up for all those times it chased other languages into dark alleys and rifled through their pockets for vocabulary.