I am at Lake Merrit, about half way around. Online. This is cool. I am trying to type with 2 thumbs. Better than last time I tried. Still appreciating David Pogue’s punctuation shortcut every time I use it.
It is so nice to be able to leave the house again. The water helps my brain. Easier to think now. Stopped to look at birds that are right here in front of this bench. This rocks! There is no wifi here but I am on the internet. Magic.
Too hard to sit still anymore. Gotta go.
At the bus stop now on MacArthur Blvd. It is still loud in my head but better than before. It is time to go home now. It is very hard to think. Someone who lives near this bus stop has unprotected wifi. Thank you stranger.
Back home now. The bus was crowded. No seats. Standing in front of the yellow line and the driver kept letting more people on at every stop. I don’t think that is legal. Usually the driver tells people to get behind the yellow line. Didn’t have to get off before my stop. That is a rare and beautiful thing.
I wish I could think. Or work. Or play. Or read. At least I got lots of work done this morning. Another reason why it is so much better to work for myself than for someone else. If I worked somewhere else, the morning hours would be lost and commuting would have zapped all the energy that I would have had for working.
I find myself wishing there was a copy of BBedit on the iphone that would sync w/my computer. I notice that I compare it to a computer more than to another phone. What would it be like to code on the iphone? Hard to imagine. I would have to get way faster at typing and it is hard to even imagine what having the numbers and symbols and letters on different keyboards would be like. I didn’t even notice if there were curly braces on any of them. You never really appreciate curly braces until they are gone. It is a cool phone, but definitely not a laptop replacement.
I was thinking about strange things on my way home from the bus stop. At one point, I rolled up my sweatshirt sleeve and somehow ended up holding a bee in the opposite hand. I flicked it off of me. I am allergic to bees. Not very bad, but it seems to get worse every time. When I was younger, just a little sting and maybe swelling. The last couple of times huge swelling and the very last time I got a fever too. I haven’t been stung by a bee in a long time.
I like to watch bees and to think about bees, but not to hold them. I like the way they fly around flowers. Up and down, back and forth, fly away and then come back again. It looks random, but I don’t think it is. It is their way of doing things and it works. They get the job done. Very different than ants. Ants like straight lines. When they are doing their job, they don’t look random. They look very organized. I don’t like watching ants. It stresses me out. Part of it is that I hate killing them and sometimes have to when they are crawling up my kitchen wall in a line. It is not an ant friendly world. There is no way I can feel right about wiping out an entire community in less than a minute but I do it anyway. What a strange world.
Humans as a species sometimes remind me of green belts in karate. It is a transitional period of having knowledge and power, but not necessarily knowing how to use it. Sparring with a green belt is much scarier than sparring a black belt. I know I am safe sparring with a black belt. I have been hurt more than once sparring a green belt. With the exception of the occasional teenaged boy who has something to prove, they usually don’t mean to hurt anyone but they can strike hard and are still learning to control their techniques in an amped up situation.
Humans have enough knowledge to make theories based on things that they don’t have complete information about. How do I know I am better than an ant? What gives me the right to decide that they have to die because I don’t like having them in my house? Why do we think we are the most intelligent species? If you check the facts, we are obviously not. Without humans, there is balance and an ecosystem that works very well. We kill each other and we kill our planet and it has gone on for so long that it is hard to see another way to live. We don’t know how to live in a different kind of world. I am sure there are human societies in the world that know how, but if we find them we will steal their land and try to make them be like us. Welcome to PMS week.
The other reason that I don’t like watching ants is because I can’t do it without thinking. It is like trying to read in the same room where there is an interesting tv show on. When I watch a bee, it is just part of everything. Something to anchor my attention in the background. Keeps me connected to the world while still being able to leave it. I like that.
A couple of weeks ago, I was wondering when my life would be back to normal. This past weekend, it bulldozed past normal and entered into surreality. Friday night I was still my regular self. Karen went to the dyke march and then out dancing at Mango with Lorena and Tess, and I stayed home because I didn’t want to be around so many people.
On Sunday, the day of the pride parade, I decided that I wanted to go. Not just go. I wanted to MARCH IN THE PARADE with our temple (or at least what might be our temple if we ever get around to checking it out more). I had a good time. It is actually less crowded in the parade than watching it from the sidelines. There was this Jewish youth group in front of us that were all wearing bright orange shirts. Fresh squeezed orange jews. Sorry, I tried not to write that, but I couldn’t resist. Every time the parade stopped, they would perform a same sex jewish wedding under a rainbow flag chuppah, smash a plastic cup wrapped in a napkin, and then run around in circles singing. Made me happy.
I was the sole member of the queer autistic jew contingent. I was wearing my autistic planet t-shirt to create some queer autistic visibility. Not exactly sure why, but it is San Francisco and every other subcategory of subcategory is represented. Seems appropriate that it was a contingent of one.
After the parade, K and I went into the crowd to find some food and try to meet Lorena and Tess. In the crowd, I reverted to my normal self and started gradually getting overwhelmed until I couldn’t think at all. We walked all the way to 16th St. and Mission BART so that we could get a seat before it got totally crowded at Civic Center. We were completely spent by the time we got back home and took a nap for a couple of hours. It was great! It is very rare that I can take naps during the day.
Last night, I went back to Cuong Nhu class for the first time since before my medicine hell started. I was kind of scared because there is a lot to process there and other people and instructions. My Sensei had told me that I can take it slow and do stuff by myself. I had thought I might just go and watch, but even before I left the house, I realized that there was no chance that I was going to enter that dojo and not kick something! I like to kick things. I kicked air 
It was nice to see everybody. There was a new white belt that I had never met before and two of our white belts had become green belts. Color belts are especially exciting in Cuong Nhu because there are only 4 of them until 5th degree black belt. White, green, brown, and black. In between, there are 2 stripes of the next color belt sewed onto your current belt. I think I am permanently stuck at one black stripe, but I don’t even care. At least last night I didn’t. I was so happy to be back there.
I was able to do more than I thought I would. I knew I would remember basic techniques and kata because I have been doing them for over 10 years and they are beyond the part of my brain that has to think. I start forgetting moves about half way through the more advanced katas, but I will probably remember after practicing a few times. The part that surprised me was that I could actually participate in the group as long as we were doing separate things.
During the first part of class, we did drills up and down the dojo where each rank gets a different set of moves to do. I was in my own group even though Rosanne is a brown belt too. There was no way I could follow the instructions she was getting. Long series of moves. Sensei Amy was very kind to me and kept mine to 3 moves or less. I think that was about my maximum memory span. I am not sure how she knew that too. After that, we did kata and I practiced the basic ones. The rest are for next time I think.
About 15 minutes before the water break, my brain was starting to crap out. I started forgetting moves to a kata that I had just done three times in a row without a problem. I got very confused about directions and couldn’t focus at all. I would forget what I was doing in between moves. I thought about leaving, but I knew we were having a break soon, so I stayed. I considered staying after the break. People were practicing self defense techniques and I was going to practice something by myself, but everything was too confusing. I decided to leave while I was still able to drive home.
By the time I got home, I couldn’t think at all, but I didn’t really care.
For the past couple of weeks, I have been feeling much better than I have in at least a year. My new meds are finally working pretty good, even great in comparison to the last 2 horribly failed experiments. I can breathe. My body is not completely taken over in every way possible. I can work. I can leave the house.
Still, things do not feel completely normal yet. This weekend, me and K went to a party to celebrate one of my Sensei’s promotion from Godan (5th degree black belt) to Rokudan (6th degree black belt, Master) and a bunch of other promotions too. Rokudan is a pretty huge deal in Cuong Nhu. There are only 5 in total and only one woman (my Sensei). I wasn’t sure I would make it, but I really wanted to go. It was a great reason to celebrate and I miss my dojo very much.
It occurred to me that the thing that would make my life feel “normal” again would be going back to class. Besides from loving martial arts, going to class was the only regular contact I had with other people. A dojo is a special place and I have been very lucky to find such a great school with the most amazing teachers I could ever imagine and a bunch of nice people in general. I have been a student there for 10 years.
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One good thing about being useless for a couple of days is that my brain gets a rest and then suddenly I can do things! I have worked almost non-stop for the past 2 days and gotten tons of stuff done. I realize that working non-stop was how I got to be useless in the first place, but at least there is a flipside.
My biggest jobs are done. Another site is almost done. Another couple lined up after that. And a bunch of smaller maintenance type jobs. I also worked on another free autism site that looks like it will be very cool when it is done. Wordpress, of course The folks running the site have been hard at work adding content and getting it ready for public launch in September.
K almost always sees the glass as half full. I love that about her. She had a crappy day today, so it is one of her rare half-empty days. Maybe I can cheer her up. Not exactly sure how since we were both up half the night and are completely exhausted. We weren’t even up for the same half. She was up until around 3am and I got up at around 3:30am. We just missed each other. Dang.
We have been listening to Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince on tape from the library. 12 tapes to be exact. It is unabridged. The guy who is doing the reading is really great. He does different voices for all the characters. I have been trying to read that book for the past 2 years since it first came out and have not been able to. Sometimes I can only read tech books. K listens to books all the time. This is my first one. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to concentrate, but it turns out that I love it.
Another good listening experience has been these nature sounds cd’s that K got for me to help me relax. We have been listening to them before bed and I am out cold pretty fast. There is one of frogs, one with birds, one with assorted wild life, and one with waves. I am getting tired just thinking about them. Good night.
My new meds are still working much better than the last ones. It is still hard to concentrate, work, play, and read, but for the most part, I am feeling about a million times better than I was just a short time ago
It is easier to be with people. I had a really good weekend that turned out to be very social and I didn’t even hate it at all. On Friday, I met D at the White Horse for a little while. It was very nice to see her. She is one of the very few people that I can ‘talk geek’ with. It is a rare and beautiful thing. We have other things in common too that make it easier for me to hang with her than it sometimes is to hang other people. She came over and had dinner with me and K.
After dinner, we all went to Velvet to meet Lorena and Tess. It was a good night. We played pool even though we were all sucking pretty bad, even D who is actually good at pool. There were a few obstacles like a giant pole and huge speaker in the way of making certain shots. Still it was fun, even though my knuckle is still a little swollen from smacking it into the giant pole while trying to shoot around it. Eventually, I completely lost all focus of what was going on around me and went into my own special world where it is quiet and stimuli is almost non-existent. I think D ended up in some other world too. I am lucky to be able to do that. Otherwise I would have needed very badly to get out of the bar immediately.
Yesterday, me and K went to Spin’s birthday party. That was lots of fun too. Happy birthday Spins! Nice people and a custom ‘Pin the Tail on the Tigger’ game with Spin’s features imposed on Tigger and magnetic tails for pinning that was made with obvious love for her by her guy. He even had a special ‘tail’ for himself which was actually a heart that matched the heart on the card that he gave her (at least I assumed that card was from him. Only saw the outside, but it had an identical heart). Very sweet Other than that, me and K did some errands and even had a little bit of quiet time to watch Prehistoric Planet and for K to start a puzzle that she has wanted to do for a while, but hasn’t had the time.
And then, tragedy struck… (not really. just having a sudden flair for the dramatic)
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