nightinghoul

[nightinghoul]

I had a VERY stupid dream last night that Lex Luthor was trying to obtain a super rare fish that was kind of like... a blue tang with a double set of teeth? And he was being really cagy about what the fish looked like, making it very hard for anyone to get this fish. Also, if people went around sharing what the fish looked like, they would potentially get killed by his goons.

But everyone, everywhere, knew he wanted this fish, and was trying to catch one, because if he didn't get it he was going to destroy the world. And I was like, it is so annoying when super villains won't just TELL you what they WANT.

[nightinghoul]

Super long post about fatigue/narcolepsy/using a mobility aid/being chronically ill...

Last Monday, I socialized for several hours. Tuesday, I went to a protest march, which I participated in using my powerchair (even though I was embarrassed, because the day before I was running around like it was nothing. But Tuesday, I needed to recover from Monday, but couldn't.)

Wednesday and Thursday, I spent the day in bed recovering. Friday, my husband took me grocery shopping. Saturday I spent most of the day in bed, then went to see Superman, which was amazing. I took my cane.

Yesterday, I had a D&D game at 5:00pm. I spent the earlier part of the day resting up for it. Around 4, I guess you'd say I had a narcoleptic sleep attack. I felt uncontrollably sleepy, laid down to rest, and experienced sleep paralysis for about an hour, during which time I consistantly hyperventilated. This is normal.

My husband checked on me and turned on some music, and I had a pleasant synesthesic experience, which is uncommon for me, but not unheard of. The music was dark blue to bluish purple with green ripples. Some sounds popped up from below the flush of color in nearly black bubbles. Some sounds washed over it in swelling white waves.

My D&D game went well for the most part. I started to doze off after a few hours, but healthy people get sleepy, too.

I had been embarrassed about using my powerchair. But last night, I thought about how my medications affect me. The only reason I ever function at all is because I take my meds. Without them, I am bedridden. With them, sometimes I am exuberant, animated, maybe even a little too energetic, and I get to use my whole body, which is wiry and limber.

It's like I'm battery powered. Not like a car battery. Not like a phone either, because I don't recharge my batteries. I'm more like a child's toy. I use up my batteries, and have to have them replaced. My meds are my batteries. If I do a lot, my battery gets used up faster. My powerchair is my low setting, so my battery doesn't get used up before I can get it replaced.

The analogy doesn't totally work, because often I am still in recovery mode when I have taken my meds. Then the meds just allow me to recover. I'm a recovery machine.

Anyway, this is about my journey as a narcoleptic person working through internalized ablism. When I share stuff like this, I always do so in the hopes that it will reach someone on a similar journey who could use the encouragement.

[nightinghoul]

I've always wanted to play a musical instrument, but I never had focus. As a result, I can play the ukulele (passably, I guess), the bow psaltery (at a very beginner level), the stick dulcimer (sorta beginner okay), the concertina (poorly, but I know two simple songs), the piano (very poorly but I'm learning the Tetris theme), and the harmonica (not bad, actually).

I think I'm a solid harmonica player - not a genius, but if you listened to me play, you'd be like, "Oh, yeah, sure! They play the harmonica!"

For most of my life, I've had a harmonica in my possession. I just mostly didn't know what to do with it. But now I have Ritilin, and have been able to make progress on my interests.

Unfortunately, one of my dogs hates the harmonica. If she even sees me pull it out of my pocket, she freaks out. I can't play unless one of us is outside, and the other is inside. If she's downstairs and I'm upstairs, I still can't play.

I think today she realized that I'm sometimes playing the harmonica when she goes outside, or that I go out back without her and play. She now knows that the harmonica exists all the time whether or not she can see or hear it. And now, it could be anywhere, and anything could potentially be a harmonica in disguise.

I think I broke my dog.

I wonder how she feels about kazoos.

[nightinghoul]

I have visual processing issues and also am often very dissociated and disoriented, which makes me do things like answering on the wrong posts, and just missing big blocks of information that are right directly in my face, and it makes it seem to outsiders like I don't know how anything works. But I do. I do know how things work. I'm just not entirely here.

[nightinghoul]

I'm going to a good trouble protest tonight. I'm taking my power chair. I haven't needed it in several months. Yesterday, I was bouncing off the walls, barely even used my cane. I overdid it.

Today I was going to skip the protest, but then I realized I'm still allowed to use my chair, even if I didn't need it yesterday.

It's hard to get used to using the accommodations I need without thinking about what other people might say or how they might react.

[nightinghoul]

Since I didn't get a job recently, I have thrown myself into writing my webcomic. Then a couple of days ago, I started a sci-fi comic, which I wrote the first 24 episodes on, and outlined art for.

And it turns out you can work all day every day for a week on these things, and feel like you've done absolutely nothing, which is disheartening.

But at least once I start posting again, I'll know I'm not a person who does nothing. I'm a person who creates and publishes webcomics.

Nobody has to know they don't make money. Nobody has to know I can count my audience in one hand. I don't have to judge myself against people who have been doing this longer who are more successful than I am right now.

I've sold more paintings than Van Gough, and I'm still younger than Stan Lee was when he made Spiderman.

[nightinghoul]

Some days I am...

Using a cane for general malaise.

Using a cane for tired legs.

Using a cane for, "I'm fine but sometimes my knee says "nope" without any warning.

Using a cane for vertigo caused by dissociation.

Using a cane for standing even when I can walk without one.

Using a cane because someone without a cane is in front of me and they can't walk fast, but if I don't walk fast, I loose momentum, so walking slow is super hard.

Using a seated cane when standing in line to take pressure off my shoulders.

Using a cane just in case.

[nightinghoul]

Oh Yay, I finally figured out what my comic that I'm already currently publishing is about, so I wrote a description:

"Most people think the old stories of the past should stay in the past. Anyone with a touch of magic is a changling and an outcast. The Fae disappeared centuries ago, and this is the age of Elves. But Elodie is tired of hiding her magic. Maybe if she can get to the Fae Realm, she can reclaim the magic that the world left behind.

"Sweetbriar was born in an Elven city, but her found family is in the Valley, with the last of the true Fae called the Woodwose. Unfortunately for her, something terrible has cursed the Woodwose into a deep slumber. She can only watch over them as they sleep. But she can't give up hope. Surely someone brave and curious will find these woods and help them!

"Here, music and poetry are literal magic, and dreams are places that friends can explore together. Through dreams, memories, and melodies, a clever bird and a band of bardic heroes will seek to put their world back together."

Yeeeah, Woodwose Valley.

Link because occasionally it is asked for

[nightinghoul]

I meant to tag my last post "neurodivergent" and I typed, "Neurodivergency".

I think a neurodivergency is when everything is just too EVERYTHING, and you're like, "Help, I'm having a neueodivergency over here! I need earmuffs and coloring books, STAT."

[nightinghoul]

I was at the pharmacy today standing behind this lady and her husband. They must have been around 80 (late seventies, early 80s)

The lady was talking about how she had just started Ritalin and what a huge difference it was making in her life. Apparently, she had just been diagnosed with ADHD, and she was telling him all the ways that it affected her, and he was just agreeing with her like, "Yeah, that all sounds like you."

Listening to a senior citizen talk about being listened to and having treatment for something she'd struggled with her whole life was just so cool and so sad, and I'm just really happy and angry for her all at once.

[nightinghoul]

Yall, there's a narcolepsy group. I didn't start it, but I joined it a few days ago, and I think it needs more people, so we can all share our experiences and support each other. Because I don't know many people with narcolepsy, and it's hard to find support!

(Edit: Make that, I know one other person with narcolepsy, and it's the person I inherited narcolepsy from, and we aren't close.)

[nightinghoul]

Why is it common knowledge that tomatoes are a fruit, but not that cucumbers, squash, peppers, eggplant, nuts, legumes, okra and avocados are also all fruits?

A fruit is the seed bearing part of a plant.

A vegetable is any edible part of a plant that isn't a fruit, with the exception of many, many fruits that everyone has agreed to call vegetables.

Thanks to language, all of the fruits people have decided are vegetables are now fruit vegetables, unless you are a botanist in which case no fruit is ever a vegetable, unless you are a botanist who is ordering a salad.

Tea leaves are a vegetable, but only if you have a biology degree and hate nice things.

Grass is a vegetable if you are a dog.

Mushrooms are vegetables unless they are toxic and therefore disqualified from being edible. If you don't know whether or not a mushroom is toxic, it remains in a state of being simultaneously both a vegetable and definitely not a vegetable until you eat it and subsequently either live or die.

Unless you are a botanist, in which case no mushroom is a vegetable. Which brings me to the schrodenger's mushroom botanist paradox: If a botanist eats a mushroom and doesn't die, the mushroom is still not a vegetable. Yet Schrodenger's Mushroom states that in the event that the mushroom is not a vegetable, it is toxic. Therefore, all mushrooms are toxic to botanists.

Everyone dies eventually, rendering all mushrooms everywhere toxic for all of time, and as previously stated, anyone who can't eat a mushroom is a botanist.

Tomorrow we will discuss logical fallacies.

I am sleep deprived.

[nightinghoul]

I never practice studies of my OCs because I'm lazy, and also because it took so many cringy tries (story and design) for so long before I felt like any of it was bordering passably acceptable, I'm embarrassed to still be at it. But ya gotta get through a few stinkers before you can get better. That's what I heard, anyway. Also, you're never too old. I like that one, too.

It's the ol' Woodwose Valley link again.

I have 16 subscribers, including myself. But I think I actually have four real, living human readers, which totally blows my mind.

[nightinghoul]

I read a good bra rant on tumblr, and wanted to add some information but their comments were turned off. But it was a good rant, because I hear people disparaging this most respectable undergarment fairly often, in the name of feminism. So here I go again: Bras were not created by men to subjugate women. Bras were invented by women for comfort and support.

The first modern bras were designed by Herminie Cadolle and Caresse Crosby.

Cadolle made the first design, which she called corselet-gorge, in 1889. It was a two piece corset, and the top part was specifically for breast support.

Around 1914, Caresse Crosby made the backless brasierre. My grandmother, who was a proud and dedicated *certified* corsetier, used to regale me with the story of the first bra being made from handkerchiefs by a young woman who was exasperated with her uncomfortable choices for undergarments.

A brief internet search provided me with enough information to see that yes, this is true. Crosby was nineteen years old, and other accounts say that she used two handkerchiefs and a pink ribbon. And thus, we were freed from the constraints of boned corsets and bustiers.

Thank you, young pioneers of comfortable breast support.

[nightinghoul]

[Sexual humor, things you can't unsee, sexual imagery descriptions, sexual anatomy]

I'm not gonna post this in my ace group. It's too much. I just already posted something weird there recently.

So, anyway! Many years ago, I was dating this guy who asked what my sexual fantasies about him were, and he was really hurt and disappointed when I was like, "People actually do that?"

I felt bad, so after that I tried really hard to have some sexual fantasies, for his sake.

The best I could conjure at the time was, like... an... outer sex organ... appendage... sort of presented with this feeling like it was saying "Ehh? Eehhhh? Look at this! How d'ya like ME?" Except I didn't really know what they looked like, so kind of just... the general idea of one, I guess? Like whatever I saw scrawled on bathroom walls, but fleshy? Then I would get grossed out and try to shake it out of my head.

Every time I remember it now, it gets worse. At this point it has googly eyes, and a pirate hat, and... I think it's voiced by Adam Sandler? But, you know what? I have an instant intrusive thoughts interrupter. Just try to have a depressing thought with Ol' Google-eye Peen around. Go ahead, try. You're welcome.

[nightinghoul]

Thought I was dying again, and it's the grapefruit.

Uuuugh I LOVE grapefruit.

Too bad it breaks down methylphenidate (AKA Ritilin/Concerta), which I take to function.

I thought I was being sneaky. I thought the pills didn't SEE me eating grapefruit.

They did. They know. They know I'm up at midnight wretchedly guzzling whole fat wedges over the kitchen sink like Gollum crouching in the creek, slurping fistfulls of wriggling fish. Down the gullet, you slippery slice of bitter paradise. Don't look at me, I'm a monster.

Dammit. Grapefruit was one of my special treats.

[nightinghoul]

Something I read made me want to say this again:

The weakness I was experiencing - the reason I needed a wheelchair earlier this year - was caused by a medication I had been on for almost five years.

This is the second time this has happened to me. Why didn't I catch it the second time? Because it just crept up on me both times. It was so slow, I didn't noticed how much worse I felt until I couldn't stand at all. The first time, I didn't notice until I couldn't swallow.

It just creeps up on you, and you're looking at things that have changed RECENTLY. You're not looking at things that made you feel BETTER five years ago.

I'm not saying it's bad to take medications. Just, it's good to reevaluate your meds. Your body can change how it's feeling about them.