Wibbly-Wobbly Ramblings

Voyager lives! (Again!)

"Silberman said he 'always' flinched to see media stories about autism presented primarily in terms of their cost to society, for example 'an estimated fifty million dollars a year.' He asked: 'what is the cost of a human life? It’s inestimable and no one knows what someone’s potential is going to be, particularly when that someone is a child.'”

"Whatever Steve did, his heart was always in it, a lesson that has remained with me."

"Whatever Steve did, his heart was always in it, a lesson that has remained with me."

So I'm starting a new gig out of town in a week. (Yes, already.) And cast members and guest artists have all been sent a personal info form to fill out in order to collect bios and headshots, demographic info the theater is supposed to track, emergency contact info, allergies, etc.

And it asks "Do you consider yourself a person with a disability?" (yes), and then "How would you describe your disability, and is there any way in which we can help accommodate you to ensure a smooth and comfortable working process," something like that, I'm paraphrasing.

And part of me just wants to go "...where do I even begin?"

And another part kind of wants to tell them "Honestly, considering that I had a plane ticket and a firm arrival date a full two weeks before said arrival date, you're already killing it..."

Like I'd really love to think about what it would mean for a company or producer to be proactively accommodating.

But every time I sit down and try to think about what my dream scenario is in terms of accessibility and autistic-friendliness of a process, it's just... that the things that should be happening on a basic level anyway are actually happening.

And it's just so rare that that is even the case.

reminds me of when I was in Disability Studies. My program was developed by activists, so was designed with universal design. Pretty much every program class had lecture notes in various formats, and powerpoints available, in class days had plenty of breaks. Professors were often very accommodating and understanding if I needed a bit more time for an assignment. It was great! It was so accessible that I often didn't even register at the disability center until I had to take an elective.

"It doesn't matter, Trump's going to win anyway"

Guys, this is INDISTINGUISHABLE from what the right would love for us to believe.

They want us despairing and hopeless. They want us to complete their goals (our obliteration) for them. I have to remind myself, whenever a piece of news makes me feel like a hole opened up under my feet, that I'm not going to do it for them. I'm not going to make it easy for them.

Look, if they’re going to drag us all screaming into hell, we’re going make it cost them DEARLY.

Before people decide they or their kid has "PDA," I wish they'd look up and read something old about autistic inertia or exposure anxiety.

And I wish that before they decide "my autistic kid is good at pretend play and has a drive for social interaction, therefore they have a PDA presentation", they'd have a good long think about the stereotypes they're perpetuating.

Autistic people CAN be social and imaginative. These aren't characteristics of some special subtype.

Before people decide they or their kid has "PDA," I wish they'd look up and read something old about autistic inertia or exposure anxiety.

And I wish that before they decide "my autistic kid is good at pretend play and has a drive for social interaction, therefore they have a PDA presentation", they'd have a good long think about the stereotypes they're perpetuating.

Autistic people CAN be social and imaginative. These aren't characteristics of some special subtype.

WE’VE GOT TO INCENTIVIZE OUR ASSETS FOR CORE COMPETENCY. STEVE. STEVE. THAT’S WHAT I SAID, STEVE.

Yesterday’s t-shirt of the day award goes to the woman in a burgundy t-shirt, lettered in the style of a state college name, but the name of the school was “Fugue State.”

My shirt of the day yesterday was a bi pride shirt that said “I swing both ways. Violently. With an axe.”

“What strikes me here today, more than it did before, is that sometimes we try to protect the places we love and end up losing them anyway: a neighborhood, a peninsula, a marsh upriver, a riverine woodland. We need space and time and ritual to grieve these losses, but we also have to love whatever emerges in their place. This place—where herons pick through marsh grass looking for crawfish and mounds of bramble swallow swimming pools and fire hydrants—is just as precious and vulnerable to destruction as the places that were here before.”

Midori and St. Louis Art Supply are doing the lord’s work of selling affordable and nice stationery and letter paper. They’re not even paying me to say this. Or giving me free stationery. But if you’re even halfway as annoyed as I am that it’s gotten so hard to buy reasonably priced stationery other than note cards and that stuff like Crane is so expensive, check them out (and help them eat Rifle Paper Co’s lunch).

I’ve seen a couple of my favorite sets sell out and have to be restocked already, so I like to think they’re getting the message that if they carry this stuff, people will buy it. There are a lot of fun, novelty letter sets but also some nice basics with like halfway decently sized letter sheets.

Something I had not clocked until I went looking for commentary on Goodreads, and would not ever, ever have guessed, is that L’Engle didn’t finish the original Time quartet, and then write the second generation quartet.

She published A Wrinkle in Time (1962), and then she published The Arm of the Starfish (1965).

A Wind in the Door wasn’t published until 1973.

Which on one hand… kind of explains the incongruity of Calvin’s character between Wrinkle and Starfish. She’d envisioned what came ~20 years after the events of the first book, but not written anything that actually happened in between.

On the other, it’s kind of remarkable how completely sketched out the whole trajectory and world of this family of novels had to have already been in her mind for it to have turned out even remotely as coherently as it did, being written that way.

And there’s a question that this at least partly answers for me, which is… what was the experience of people reading Arm of the Starfish when it first came out, in terms of it being a plausible question, like, at all, whether Calvin has turned evil?

Because having read the whole other three books he’s in, it’s just not. It’s laughable, and Kali is obviously a bad actor, and Adam is being ridiculous.

But if you’ve only read A Wrinkle in Time, and then been jumped 20-25 years into the future with no further context, I can see how it could at least be an open question whether somehow, due to events you don’t yet understand, that Calvin’s gone to the dark side (or at least been horrifically misled).

Or like, since he’s only initially called “O’Keefe” by the Cutter crew, did readers assume it was Calvin being referred to at all, or that it might be a more tangential member of the O’Keefe family?

Slept in and was going to go out to the coffee shop to get some work done but now I’m not going ANYWHERE until my roommate who woke up with a fever comes back with a negative COVID test.

HAPPY 2022!

Just a reminder, fellow New Yorkers: Your radiators are so ungodly overzealous because they were actually designed as a flu mitigation measure for people who lived in tenements/small apartments during the last major pandemic!

The idea is that you’re supposed to be able to have your windows open in the winter time to increase ventilation. So crank ‘em up and open those windows!