Someone else recorded a meeting I need to take notes for, and I just noticed that in the AI notes she sent me, the they/them pronoun user has been misgendered! Despite saying extemely clearly in their introduction that they use they/them pronouns!
And I don't think anyone in the meeting misgendered them (I flatter myself at being pretty good at spotting this!) so I wonder how the AI decided which binary pronouns to assign them. Just from formants, or something?
Anyway, grr.
While I was waiting for a bus this evening, I happened to glance over at the direction the sun was setting in. It had disappeared behind the buildings but was still making the clouds glow. And a contrail in the clear blue sky was lit up the same way, bright and gold but also so thin.
I looked at it and thought There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. That's what it looked like: a tiny glimpse of the glowing power on the other side of the sky, trying to get in here to us.
We seem to have crossed some axial-tilt threshold and today get sunlight in the afternoon.
Folding laundry in a bright and colorful dining room, I mused on how the seasons I'd grown up with make so much more sense here in northern Europe than at home where 6 weeks after Groundhog Day would be an early spring.
Also for the first time since I put it up in September, Gary's portrait on the living room wall gets a rainbow from the sun shining in beveled window glass. Just like our many photos of him with such rainbows. V pointed it out this afternoon and it was so bittersweet I thought my heart might burst.
I had the radio on while I was working today, as I often do, and I found myself singing along with some version of "The Christmas Song" sung by a breathy soprano.
And I could never sing soprano but today I found my singing voice more resonant (literally buzzing in my chest!). It was easier to sing and it felt better.
(I am impatient for my voice therapy referral to get to the top of the waiting list. I haven't paid any attention to my voice or deliberately attempted anything with it.)
Maybe something about singing a song I'm familiar with made the change extra obvious?
But I love that trans thing of "this is has never happened before but it also feels familiar and normal." Same thing happened when I started getting the fuzzy little hairs on my arms and torso.
You know you're at a good disability-focused event when people can talk openly about their imposter syndrome.
I have rarely felt so "old man yells at clouds" as when I recently started really suffering when walking around in the dark or even riding in a car at night time, because I keep finding myself thinking
Yknow what, car headlights are too bright now.
And taillights. And brake lights.
All of it is Too Much! Just because you can make everything brighter cheaper now doesn't mean you should!
Bright spots in a dark environment make my nystagmus flare up. It's so disorienting and tiring.
My phone is haunted lately, it has lost a bunch of data.
So now Signal thinks I'm a new person on my phone which is sad for two reasons:
D should be green (best color, no surprise), now he's gray. A yellow friend is now purple. And a blue friend is green! I just nearly sent him a text meant for D!
I didn't realize how much I depended on the colors, ha.
I love how V does descriptions for me of wildlife that I can't see.
One of the first things they said to me this morning (and it was a fucking miserable day at work for me so this was particularly welcome) was that there was a flock of long-tailed tits outside, moving so quickly that they couldn't even see what color the little birds were. They said they'd seen long-tailed tits before but never a whole flock of them. So they'd just been standing at the kitchen window watching them zoom around our backyard.
And Saturday, when we were sitting on the patio enjoying the return of sunshine and summery weather (it might have hit 70°F!), they told me there was a hoverfly investigating my shoe to check if it was a flower. Those shoes have lime green trim which we decided might look very vivid and interesting to an insect sensorium.
One of the nicest sounds I regularly hear is the little tinktinktinktinktinktink of V tapping her watercolor brushes on the side of a little ceramic pot of water as she is painting.
I can notice it even downstairs (they paint upstairs) if the house is quiet, and it just makes me smile every time I do.
It's such a calm, orderly sound in itself. But I love its connotations: if it's happening, she has enough energy to paint. It feels cozy to hear it.
Do you hear any little ordinary sounds that make you happy?
Here it's rarely ever what I, a midwesterner, find humid. This afternoon is the first time this summer I was been sweating just, like, walking around my house.
So naturally this evening is also my first time back at my gym class in weeks! Ahaha.
The gym is air conditioned, but we all still got so sweaty that my bandana and my towel were looked upon with envy by newbies.
And the sweat and the juxtaposition with the weather made it all the worse to leave! Feels like I'm walking through soup.
Walking out of the house behind me to walk the dog this evening, D said "Oh you've got another gray hair! And over here... There's a little bunch of them now." He touched a couple, they are on the back and top of my head where I can't see them. I haven't seen the first one yet either! I wonder how much longer it takes a partially-sighted person to know they're going gray if they're single. And like, in my case, far away from my mom because I am certain she will mention this as soon as she notices it. In an accusing way, like I'm just allowing this to happen through carelessness.
"I am not at all surprised!" I said about the further gray hairs, gesturing to the dog but also just everything has been stressful. This was my first five-day work week in almost a month (what with Springsteen and EMF and a bank holiday, I had a three-day week and then a two-day week and then a four-day week) and it felt about a month long.
When D gave me a hug this afternoon, he noticed a gray hair sticking out of the top of my head.
My first gray hair!
Perhaps it's in honor of my list of things yesterday.
For decades now I've been saying I'm impatient for my hair to go gray because it might be easier to dye (it's so dark and resistant to bleach right now).
And I'm always aware of everyone who doesn't get this far. I wonder what my brother would have been like with gray hair. So I am looking forward to people not having to wonder that about me.
I have a love/hate (or, participate/grumble more like) relationship with Duolingo, I have for years. They keep changing it and making it worse, too!
But one change I do like, which I've recently enabled, is "making my profile private" which, whatever, but what that means is I'm not part of leagues and friends don't "congratulate" me for gamified things like learning 1000 words or completing a monthly challenge.
I'd be alarmed to see "all six of your friends congratulated you" on something that I didn't even know had happened. (That's not false modesty: the app doesn't tell you how many "words" you've "learned" as you go along or anything and, once the month challenges stopped being mere points targets, I stopped even understanding what they were, much less if I'd done those things yet or not.)
Also I truly fretted for the Wellbeing of friends who finished a month's challenge in the first third of the month, or even the first day. I know whenever I complete a lot of lessons in one day, it's because of insomnia or depression. So, I silently refused to press the "congratulate" button for this until at least halfway through the month. I expect this to have as much impact as the times I don't say "thank you" to the bus driver when I'm getting off the bus because they were mean to me or drove too fast or whatever other slight I am annoyed about: it makes me feel ever so slightly better to stand up for my values, and it surely never even gets noticed by the person from whom I am withholding my politeness.
I expected the lack of "leagues" to be a relief, because I never cared which one I was in or what my place within this week's was, so being constantly notified of such things was just annoying. But I am surprised at how much difference it makes to not see or be seen by other people there at all. I'm sad I'm no longer able to send applause or party-popper emojis to my friends for their achievements! But I'm relieved they can't do that for mine, for some reason.
And I'm surprised at how relieved I am now that I don't know how they're doing in their leagues and goals. I have so little data to otherwise extrapolate from (except for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
diffrentcolours, I'm not duolingo "friends" with people I actually hear from much) and this feels like exactly the wrong amount of information to be getting from someone: either too little or too much.
I knew that the gamification and social elements of the app are supposed to encourage and reinforce regular learning, and I thought I was just indifferent to those, but it turns out I might have been using it in spite of them! Removing both has, oddly, removed a stress from my life. I say "oddly" because that has surprised me, it doesn't feel like it makes sense... but who am I to argue with anything that quiets my brain a little!
Making a photo book for my family as a Christmas present seemed like a nice idea. I haven't seen them, they don't know what my house is like or what I've been up to this year.
But doing it when I can't tell my family anything about myself feels like doing this on Hard Mode. "Do I look enough like a girl in this photo?" "diffrentcolours and I don't seem too couple-y here, do we?"
But I expected that. It turns out the most surprising thing for me in this whole process has been realizing that, while I have a million hoodies, I wear the red one all the time. It's in so. many. photos.
(Doesn't help that in a couple more of the photos I'm using, I'm wearing a red t-shirt!)
The stock photography commonly used in stories about vaccines are often medically inaccurate in a range of ways, from showing the wrong syringes to showing shots being administered incorrectly. In addition to that, you typically see a lot of crying babies, anxious-looking patients, and close-up shots of oversized needles. While it’s no secret that getting a shot isn’t usually a fun experience, imagery that’s frightening and inaccurate only further perpetuates the idea that vaccines are just scary, painful, and something both parents and their children dread. And look, there might be some truth to that—lots of people dislike needles. But it’s also true that vaccines save lives.To my shame, I hadn't even noticed the wider points -- I think I notice the race of people in stock photos, but none of the other matters being addressed here had ever occurred to me. And it's especially important, especially in places like the U.S. that already have an embedded anti-vaxx ideology underneath the covid-specific animosity, that articles particularly about the benefit and importance of this vaccine portray it as the enormous positive it is, and not legitimize the fear and stress some people are already having about a covid vaccine that will change all of our lives when enough people get it.
baggyeyes