Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

I have some thoughts that have been circling in my head and I hope no one minds me putting some down here. I think public expression has been helping in processing even if no one has anything to say.

What am I? I’m finding myself confronting people in different places online and thinking about what I’m doing. Why I’m making my choices. What I’m identifying in their comments and how I’m working with it. What my specific social goals are and why. I’m thinking dispositionally with two audiences. I still need more information, I need to pull more general patterns from my in-the-moment reactions.

I can’t safely proceed with much public speech without some solid ideas about the shape of the social instincts that I’ve inherited. Some accidental boundary violations in the last year give me pause. I have to make a new set of filters for socially sensitive phenomena and and recheck the existing ones I have. Socially impulsive speech is not a game for me and I feel like I am always in the -7 – -10 and 7-10 zones of our felt intensity ranges.

Update on our new kitty Spooky: Still happy, learning new social rules, gets fluids every 4 days. The vet says he could be happy for years. The vet let’s us take the bag home and do it ourselves.

@Shadowplay
It feels like I’m reformatting my sense of my personal head space as it relates to my feeling of social interaction and responses to social phenomena. The difference between the feeling of “meat space” and social media is relevant. Basic individual difference that seems to cluster around useful but I’ll defined instincts is a variable.

Other systems are definitely useful, ill think about your examples. But my feeling of social interactions is different from the population at large in ways I’m still trying to responsibly define. I’ve always felt social media as grating, and increasingly negative. Generalized anxiety from social stress was related to the increase.

I’m supposed to feel this in terms of how my monkey meat computer works. I’m supposed to feel the negativity in my society like this, but does it have to be so relentless? And the positivity, but there is much to be negative about. Should I feel better? Society needs fixing. This is on top of other things I’m working on in therapy and how that relates to all of this.
This is even If I can change how I feel biologically. I’m trying to be optimistic about social media. Meat space feels possible.

I meant “ill defined instincts”, rather than “I’ll defined instincts” above. I did that in another place too.

@Z&T

You’ve had a rather traumatic loss recently.

I don’t really do holidays either, but I’m not immune to feeling isolated and hopeless at this time of year. Or maybe my isolation and hopelessness make me not want to do holidays.

And I have this idea that you shouldn’t lay your problems off on others and I really don’t know what to do.

Opening up to others is not laying your problems off on others.

In today’s adorable news, we just rescued a baby ringtail possum! My cats were clustered around the back gate and when I investigated, I found a wee baby all alone. I checked all around for a mum or siblings but there was nothing. The wildlife rescue said it must have fallen off its mum while sleeping. It’s safely with a wildlife carer now who’ll feed it and release it back into the area when it’s old enough.
This pic isn’t of the one I found, but it’s exactly what my little orphan looks like:

http://www.westgatepark.org/wp-content/uploads/Baby-Ringtail-Possum-1.jpg

Happy Christmas (or other seasonal celebration of choice, garnish to taste) to you all, especially Dave. May we all have more to celebrate this time next year.

Merry everything! For a present, I bring you the single dumbest tweet thread on the Internet.

Watch, laugh and thrust your palm through your face as a Trumpshirt twists “Some random plane got turned around” into “Therefore these C-list celebrities are simultaneously Deep State Illuminati Satanists and working with Trump to take down PizzaGate from the inside”! Completely seriously! And several other Trumpshirts agree!

@SFHC

I… I can’t make sense of any of those tweets. Is this a good thing?

Continuing the “war on xmas” from JoeB’s posts, the hostility to “happy holidays” is especially funny given that the word “holiday” itself means “holy day”.
I also saw this story on a friend’s FB today, about the “profane origins of Merry Christmas”. My favourite bit:

In this setting, “Merry Christmas” was born. The greeting was an act of revelry and religious rebellion, something the uncouth masses shouted as they traveled in drunken mobs. Troubled by such behavior, the New Haven Gazette in 1786 decried the “common salutation” of “Merry Christmas.”

Chrissy Teigen cracks me up.

Those white rabbit hole assholes do not.

@Z&T:

I’m sorry to hear you’re feeling depressed. I can only echo what others on this thread have said – that you should take care of yourself, and be kind to yourself.

I know you didn’t ask for any advice, but I find that physical activity is very helpful when I’m feeling depressed or anxious.

I have a brother-in-law who has severe Parkinson’s disease. Several years ago, he underwent brain surgery that was supposed to arrest the disease’s progress. Well, it didn’t work out that way. He’s now quadriplegic.

Whenever I’m feeling depressed or anxious, I think of this poor man, Peter is his name, stuck in a hospital bed, unable to turn the pages of a book, or scratch the top of his head.

@Brony:

I don’t know if you’ll read this, but I understand you have a blog. May I have the web address for it?

@Well traditioned female

In July, he was fined £7,000 for falsely advertising his B&B as a four-star establishment – despite the bloodstains on the walls, mouse droppings in the bed and mud in the fridge.

@Well traditioned female

Reading that article, I just kept hearing Mike Nelson’s voice saying “And quit going around being a woman!”