Mystified.........
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I went back looking at the comments left on this blog. For some reason, a LOT of Tim's comments are flat out GONE! :-( I enjoyed going back and reading them....

There are other comments, by someone termed "friend", and this is what has me puzzled. Who is this 'friend'? I don't have very many friends, and this one feels male. There are even fewer male friends. I think it might be a Christian, which narrows it down further, but I don't think it's the father of my children....he would probably sign his name. :confused:

I went to a play/musical program at my daughter's school last night. It was, in two words, absolutely horrid, and I'm saying this aside from being surounded by some 200 people, lots of sounds from speakers, and people clapping, etc etc, all the usual sensory overload stuff. It was rampantly patriotic and Christian, and perfectly demonstrated the herd mentality. An excerpt: "We owe our freedom of speech not to the organzers of protests, but to the soldier. We owe our freedom of religion not to the (can't remember), but to the soldier" etc etc, ad nauseum. The gist was that, essentially, we owe every civil right we have to violence and to men who are willign to carry out violence. That the world just can't get along without people who are willing to commit violence! What an awful, misguided theme for a children's play!

Would it be so....unthought of...to have a children's play with some innocent, childish them, or something educational, or something such as peaceful efforts towards improving the world, or understanding different cultures, or saving the environment, or living conciously? They will grow up soon enough...do they have to be indoctrinated towards committing atrocities at such a young age?

(and then we wonder why we have school shootings and stabbings...)

Sometimes I wish that I could leave my body to its daily chores, to go around it's work as a sort of golem. And that my heart could soar in its own thoughts and be mindless of the troubles and pains of the world...

Everyday Eroticism

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It's the theme of all my art (well, all my recent art from the past year or two). I see it everywhere, the thread of creation and reproduction, sexuality. Understand: by sexuality I don't mean merely a man and a woman having missionary intercourse. No, I refer here to sex in its far reaching sense, from hermaphrodite nudibranches to the kelp they cling to...waving sensuosly in the ocean currents...to the pine trees showering the air and earth with their grains of pollen...I could go on in this way for a long time.....

Now, consider this: the custom of a man giving a flower to the girl he wants or loves. What kind of a flower? A rose. What sort of a rose? Longstemmed...no thorns, and very few leaves, if any. Color? Red...dark, passionate, blood infused red. Lastly, the profile of the flower: full blown, fragrant, with the beautiful shape we associate with a rose bush? No sir...a tight, pert rosebud. The contours of it should be fairly clean. OK: now picture this, all these factors, in your mind. In hand: a flower, held upright, with a long stem, culminating in the most important part, the dark red bud. Think, think, think.....what else could this represent? Hmmmm.....is it any wonder that this is the symbol used as an emblem of acceptance or rejection? Could anything be more heartening to a man than to see his girl clasp his rose lovingly and bring it to her lips?

Now, don't go blaming this on me. I didn't come up with the custom. I don't even like red roses much. All I did was to observe what should have been obvious anyway!

Re: Standing up for oneself: I hate to do it. For one thign, it's very hard for me (at times) to deliniate the line between doing a favor for someone and being taken advantage of. For another, I simply dislike having to assert myself in order to obtain fair treatment. In a relationship of any kind (intimate, friend, aquaintance) if the problem becomes a recurring issue, I have a bad habit of simply dropping the relationship altogether, or at least dropping it to a less intimate level.

People very often assume that I'm a doormat. That isn't necessarily true... It's more along the lines of: If someone is willing to take advantage of me or to treat me badly unless I stand up for myself, I really don't know if I care to continue the relationship. I feel like I shouldn't have to assert myself in oder to be treated decently.

An analogy: You are playing a game with someone, a board or card game, perhaps. You catch them cheating. Perhaps you call them on it, perhpas not. At any rate, they continue to cheat, and to escalate the bahavior. Do you continue playing with them? No. Why not? They are not fun to play with.

Or, to put it another way, if a person is so inclined as to take advantage of or be mean to me, I don't really want to continue being as close to them. It isn't worth the hassle or confrontation and stress and adrenaline. Screw it! After all, doesn't their behavior say something about the value of the relationship to them?
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But, there is a problem. I don't know how to *confront* someone unless I'm so angry that I could scream. (By that time I don't much care how they react.) My co-workers are not treating me well, and I'm not mad enough to scream. What to do, what to do? One of them is a manager so I can really let loose with her.

Eeeek! Ok, it's my turn now to be a shallow, self absorbed female...the sort I don't like. I just got back from the thrift store. For some reason they had the bathroom mirror cruelly mounted directly opposite the toilet! Talk about tactless!!! I don't even much enjoy looking at myself clothed, thank you. Anyway, it was/is a little depressing. See, I *knew* that I had gone from 105# (my all time lowest as an adult, not bad after 5 kids!) back past my usual 120# to 125#. Five pounds over niggled me a little bit...but not too much. Many of my pants still fit...the size 1-3's, as a rule, did not. Oh well, wear something else. That was my attitude, until I was so rudely confronted by that mirror. Cellulite? On me??? I don't even care very much what I look like, but this bothers me. It's gross. Twenty pounds of fat! Ick, ick, ick. Sadly, I know what is doing it: the birth control. I'm not actually eating more or exercising less. I could probably cut back to one meal a day and not lose very much of it......:sigh:

I feel like such a pathetic piece of shit. He is so nice to me, and all I seem to do is to wait for some warning sign that yes, it's too good to be true and he doesn't actually like me the way I thought he did, That there's been some sort of a mistake, that something has changed or is changing. I am so used to it, it's all I've known. I feel like my hopes have been dashed so often that there just aren't any anymore, that the stuff faith is made of simply doesn't reside in me any longer. I feel so safe, so happy with him, but it's hard to enjoy it, because I'm always afriad that it's going to end. Because it always does.

One of these days he is going to get really tired of my worrying and insecurity, and he is going to say, "Fine! Have it your way! I give up! I don't want you if this is the way it's going to be!" and then he'll go. :-( :-( :-(

I really am a pain to deal with.

I am considering dropping out of the goat world as such. Oh, I'll still keep my girls (I am still looking for a place for us and them), and I'll keep breeding them for the same traits I've wanted (nothing foils a goatbreeding program, or any breeding program, as quickly as changing your mind constantly about the goals!!!). I'll renew my ADGA membership, even though I'm convinced by now that they're a bunch of back stabbing, membership bleeding crooks, because I need teh records and the registry. But as far as showing very much, or including it as an element in my goals or plans.....I dunno.

See, what I'm realizing is that the showring B.S. is all about social interaction, who you know, who likes you, and who you hate and will gossip about. And this, my friends, is soemthing that I am simply unable to do well at. I know, because I've tried. I've rubbed the right shoulders, talked to the right people, done my homework backward and forward,and made the mistake of showing it off. Soem of teh breeders have been nice. Others seem to have been nice to my face one day and ignore me the next (or even within a day, for no reason I could ferret out). I thought, at first, that mayeb people disliked the lady I bought my broodstock from, but others have her stock and seem to do alright. What I do see is that the showring itself is politics. It's about who you know, and whether the judge likes you. Occasionally you have a truly honest and fair judge. They're rare! For a very long time, I've wanted to be one of them, a fair and honest judge who could black out the faces and just look at the goats, and only the goats. But frankly, I really don't feel like having lots of people mad at me.

Could I forget the people surrounding me and see only the goats, keep my concentration and drive the anxiety away? Could I even speak? If I could, could I actually articulate exactly *why* one goat is better than the next. I often just know, intuitively, and it takes me time to figure out why. What will I do if some hot shot with their head in the clouds walks by disgruntled and insults me or threatens me? (I suppose I'd ignore them). Do I have what it takes? I know that I can do the goats justice. The social issues and their stupid games (and believe me, they whine about this even among themselves) are what worry me.

Frustrating: That I am not able to adequately communicate my thoughts through speech, so impatient people assume (unfairly) that I'm unintelligent. Yes, I'm articulate enough here, in writing. Get me on a phone or in person and I fumble and can't grasp the spoken words to my satisfaction. I have an excellent vocabulary, but I cannot...organize it to my liking in the time frame that most people expect in a typical conversation. If they pressure or criticize me, I quickly turn into the likes of an inarticulate idiot, sputtering vehemently. They say that it's very funny when I get mad. :-/
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Carrying on from the previous thread: sometimes I have the wish to be an advocate for other autistics. I miss the autistic people I used to work with as a 'worker' (they were called 'consumers', how sick is that??? I called them clients instead, it sounded more dignified). I don't miss anyone else, just the other autists. I had a dream that I was working there again, only this time I was working with one of the ones they only let me work with once or twice (they quickly curtailed my interactions with my kin when they saw I was on their side). I was communicating with him, in non verbal ways, and we were interacting. I hesitiate to have written this. It isn't professional (fuck their professionalism!!!), and it feels weak somehow. But it bothers me deeply, the way our kind are treated. Frankly, I don't care where on the spectrum they are: they have a right to stim, a right to experience the things they do, and a right to be unique. They have THE SAME BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS that regular people take for granted. I get so upset, I feel so futile. We are autistic, NOT sub-human.

I was lucky; for all that I was smothered and abused, it would have been far, far worse had I been labeled. I am not against labeling per se, hell I like to label and categorize anythign that comes to my attention. If I see a plant, I want to know what it is, what it's related to, etc etc. But when a person becomes nothing more than a label, something to be dehumanized, to excuse inexcuseable behavior to them *because* they're autistic is WRONG.