I filled out the functionality report this week, which is a many-pages-long form that they send you when you apply for disability. You have to fill it out and send it back, and they use your answers to help them decide how fucked up you are.

What a bastard.

I had not expected it to be as difficult as it was. It's like the world's worst homework. Ever.

First, the Y/N questions. "Do you finish what you start? (For example, conversations, chores, watching movies, reading books.) Y/N" "Are you able to leave the house? Y/N" "Do you prepare your own meals? Y/N"

HOW ABOUT "Y/N/SOMETIMES?" Radical notion.

Most of those questions came with a space for you to explain any "no" answers, so I put down "no," and explained the shit out of that. But some were just Y/N, and left sitting there on the page like an unburied cat poop.

That was just annoying, though. That wasn't really painful.

What was painful were the six lines they give you to answer "Explain how your condition affects you."

I told Bat_Cheva that I could do it in four words: "Fucks my shit up." But they want specifics. "Fucks my shit up on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. . . ." is not the sort of specifics they want.

Maybe for someone who is missing part of a leg or has no arms or is blind it is easy to describe how you are affected. At least the people looking over the application most likely have arms and legs and eyes and so on, and therefore no matter how stupid or non-empathic they are, must have at least a rudimentary idea of what those parts are used for and what it might be like to not have them.

With mental illness, not so much. Being crazy fucks up parts of your mind you didn't even know you had. Parts of your mind that lots of people don't even believe in. Like, all those "You can choose to be happy!" people who are all "You can look at the negative or the positive, so look at the positive, and everything will be fine!" and don't just apply it to themselves, but to you, too? Those people? They Do Not Get It. I can look at the positive all I want -- I do -- but when the problem is "I am frequently incapable of feeling happy, or even somewhat content," all the half-full glasses in the world won't do a damn thing to change that.

So you are left trying to describe the horrific thing that is devouring your life to someone who a) does not know you and therefore does not in any way care, b) is motivated to find reasons to reject you, and c) might not even understand that depression is a real thing that screws up even the most basic parts of your life.

Then there was the part where you have two lines to explain how your social life has changed since you became disabled, or describe what things you are no longer able to do that you used to be able to do, or the bit where it asks how often you are able to do things that normal people do every day and you have to admit that you are able to do them maybe a couple times a week, if it's a good week.

Or they part where they ask you to describe your typical day, and you do, and then you feel like a pathetic failure because it goes pretty much like this:

Get up. Brush teeth. Get reminded three times to take your fucking pills. Surf the internet. Wait for someone else to cook your goddamn food. Try to write something meaningful. Fail. Watch Youtube videos of explosions and bathtub farts. Try to make something pretty. Fail more often than not. Think about calling a friend. Decide that the phone is evil and should be avoided. Play video games. Think about doing some chores. Decide that you would rather give yourself a lobotomy with a rusty icepick. Watch a movie. Fall asleep halfway through. Answer some email. Pet the cat. Maybe take a shower. Go to bed. Get up, take pills you forgot to take. Go back to bed. Sleep badly. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Which, admittedly, describes a not-very-functional person's day, but you try writing that about yourself without feeling crappy about it.

It's not that I judge other people for being this way, or judge myself. It's that I hate that I -- or anyone -- must live with this. It's that it genuinely does suck, it sucks unbelievably, and having to describe it is so depressing. Especially when odds are good that they will look at this and somehow decide "Yeah, this person could totally go and get themselves a 40-hour job and support themselves without going completely off the deep end."

It doesn't help that my typical day during which I am supposedly disabled looks a whole fucking hell of a lot like most folks' days off. You know, excluding the failing at doing anything constrictive bit, and the part where I am crushingly depressed some days, and the bit where I can't cope with normal things like going three different places in one day or making food for myself or cleaning up the goddamn kitchen.

Frankly, most of my time involves sitting around desperately bored and wanting to do something else, and wishing like hell I felt like doing something else. And we are taught from a very young age that this is wrong. Not just an incorrect way of feeling, like giving the wrong answer to a simple question, but a moral failing. When you say "I wanted to go and paint and I tried and I couldn't," or "I wanted to write, but I couldn't," or "I wanted to get my room cleaned up, but I couldn't," people hear "I didn't want it enough."

Believe me. I want it. I want it so fucking bad. But we are taught that if we want something really badly, we can get it. You just have to want it enough. We aren't taught that sometimes, just wanting will not bridge the gap between desire and ability to execute that desire. We are not taught that we may have drives and desires and hopes and dreams that cannot be fulfilled. We aren't taught how to deal with that, not for ourselves, and not when we encounter it in others. And when people like me complain that we are not made for what we want to do, we are told we are spoiled, that we expect engraved invitations and silver platters, that we should be ashamed, and we should shut up and work harder. Or we are told that we should want something else, as if it is just that easy.

During the evaluation for the low-cost mental health care I'm in the process of getting, the trainee doing my intake survey asked me "What is your purpose in life? What is your goal, what do you want?"

I thought about it, and I told her that at one point I would have said "It's to be the best companion I can be, the best person, the best friend and partner. To be a good person. I am here to make the world a better place."

Then I explained that, fuck that shit, I want to be the best at doing the things that only I can do. I want to write the stories only I can write and make the art only I can make. As far as I am concerned, that is why I am here. That is what I have to offer that no other human being could possibly offer. Yes, I want to make the world a better place. I want to do it by expressing myself fully, not by trying to make other people happy.

I am a good companion, a good person. Not perfect, but pretty good. It's not what I'd call easy, and I am working within some limitations, but I can do it. I don't need to make it a goal. I am already there, and part of being there is that you never stop trying to be a better person. So, you know, I actually think I'm doing okay there.

I certainly don't need to make my value to other people as defined by what those people consider valuable part of my goal in life. If I did, I'd go back to starving myself. I'd have gone to college.

I only need to care about the things that make me valuable to me. And that is what is fucking murdering me by inches every day. Those things, the things that I love and which define me to me -- specifically, the writing -- are inaccessible. Gone. The things I care about most are out of my reach. The things that make me me are out of my reach. I am unable to be myself in the ways that mean the most to me.

THAT is the effect that this shit has had on my life.

That is what I cannot put into six lines or less, and what they probably would not care about even if I did, because all that matters to the government is whether I can Keep A Job, no matter how soulless. I'm so goddamn broken-down from not even being able to be myself, there is not a chance in hell I could Keep A Job, even a wonderful one. I can't even cope with scooping the goddamn cat litter, or washing my sheets. I can barely cope with having a set time to get up once a week. Twice a week is out of the question. How in the name of Zeus' butthole could I work 40 hours a week? I am not kidding when I say that even if I was working at the all-day kitten-snuggling and incredibly attractive Brazilian model grooming and obedience training day center, I still could not do it every day. That, my friends, is sad.

So I had to finish that seven-page travesty and turn it in, with all the weight of what cannot be expressed in a few short answers to a few inadequate questions pressing in on me, and all the things I cannot say suffocating me slowly, with the knowledge that it will most likely be denied. That my human pain will be weighed, measured, and found wanting.

But I still fucking did it.

I think I did a pretty good job, and I feel sort of like a rock star.

Mad props to Sargon, who also filled out the version of the quiz for the person who knows you best, which can't have been easy. But I can't write about that, because I didn't have to do it. If I get through this at all, it will be because of him.

X-posted from Dreamwidth. Comment count:

Yossarian decided to change the subject. 'Now you're changing the subject,' he pointed out diplomatically. 'I'll bet I can name two things to be miserable about for every one you can name to be thankful for.'

'Be thankful you've got me,' she insisted.

'I am, honey. But I'm also goddam good and miserable that I can't have Dori Duz again, too. Or the hundreds of other girls and women I'll see and want in my short lifetime and won't be able to go to bed with even once.'

'Be thankful you're healthy.'

'Be bitter you're not going to stay that way.'

'Be glad you're even alive.'

'Be furious you're going to die.'

'Things could be much worse,' she cried.

'They could be one hell of a lot better,' he answered heatedly.

'You're naming only one thing,' she protested. 'You said you could name two.'

'And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways,' Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. 'There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about -- a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?'

( more )

[...]

When you asked me if I was an island, I told you that I was not. When you asked me to join you in the drawing room, I told you that I could not, that I was in fact an island and I couldn't join anyone anywhere.

Saddened, you revealed to me that you were not the two things that jut outward into the sea as I had assumed, but the little bit of gray sea between them.

Then I told you I was the entire Arctic Ocean sometimes.

Zachary Schomburg, from The Man Suit

She was learning the value of boredom. She was clearing out her mind. She had always know that her body was just a shell she lived in, but it occurred to her now that her mind was yet another shell- in which case, who was 'she'? She was clearing out her mind to see what was left. Maybe there would be nothing.


"When my first wife was dying," he told Delia one afternoon, "I used to sit by her bed and I though, This is her true face. It was all hollowed and sharpened. In her youth she'd been very pretty, but now I saw that her younger face had been just a kind of rough draft. Old age was the completed form, the final, finished version she'd been aiming at from the start. The real thing at last! I thought, and I can't tell you how that notion colored things for me from then on. Attractive young people I saw in the street looked so... temporary. I asked myself why they bothered dolling up. Didn't they understand where they were headed? But nobody ever does, it seems. All those years when I was a child longing for it to be 'my turn,' it hadn't ever occured to me that my turn would be over by and by..."

-Ladder of Years, Anne Tyler

A tip for those wanting to start up a guild: you can't open the guild charter if you have the guild invite block option turned on. Forgot I had it on, of course...

So final attempt to do this before I loose my mind - if anyone can sign my guild charter, my Troll Reull is sitting crying quietly in the Orc start area on Wyrmrest Accord.

NOTE: all done, thanks very much.

I’ve said, in my previous post, that ASD children are afraid to make mistakes; they’re afraid to be wrong. They speak of the things that interest them because, in some ways, they feel secure in their knowledge - secure enough to talk. If they become comfortable enough about speaking - even if it is about their current obsession - they then develop confidence in the act of conversing, and since conversation itself is now familiar, it becomes a second comfort-zone from which they can then begin to tackle topics which are not as relevant to them.

I think this is true, on a vastly smaller scale, of anyone. Hold that point for a moment.

Two days ago, I wrote about communication, and this post, although it’s in theory about my son at age seven, ties in with comments made on that post, which was about two adults who were both working toward a goal of mutual understanding - when words alone were not enough of a bridge. The right words for me, in that post, were not the words that worked for my husband. He wanted to understand what I was saying, but the first several times, it didn’t happen.

I felt that I understood my son as well as - or better than - a raft of experts could. I lived with him. I observed him daily. But I’m also myself, and I come at things from the paradigm of my interests. Even the things I observe are coloured by me.

My son had a successful, if trying, grade one year. His teacher was a godsend. More. I can’t emphasize how much of a difference she made to my six year old. She had him for five and a half hours a day for ten months of the year - and everything she did during that time laid foundations for all of his school life thereafter. In my universe, she would be paid more than most CEOs. Sorry, that was a digression.

( Grade Two and the educational aid )

On this, the morning before my -08 birthday, I find myself quoting one of Spooky's high-school history teachers: "If you assume, it makes an ass out of you and me." Can I exchange this day for the apocalypse, please? Big space rock, please?

Happy birthday to Billy (docbrite), whom I miss dearly, and for whom I wish a kinder year to come.

Depending who you ask, today is either Geek or Nerd Pride Day. I prefer geek, but whichever. In honor of this, I leave you with the Guild's "I'm The One That's Cool":



Reaching for the Slide Rule and Polyhedral Dice,
Aunt Beast, La Cabrita

So, Fire Mages. I'm in love with my little 83 mage at the moment, but I have some questions.

1) Pyroblast - do you ever hard-cast it, or only ever wait for a proc? Do you need to keep the dot up at all times? What about at the start of the fight, if you can't pre-cast a bit before combat, would you stand there in the fight and hard-cast? I usually try to cast it at the start of the fight even if it means hard-casting, because I like to pop combustion at the beginning. Is it better to not hard-cast, and hold combustion back until you get a pyro proc instead?

2) Ignite - how much do I need to worry about this with regards to combustion? I do have Combustion Helper, so I can see when it goes green, but is it really important to wait for ignite to proc? Sometimes it seems like I'm waiting forever for it to go green so I just cast it without waiting. Do I need to worry about ignite threshholds to get the most out of my combustion? How do I know when the ignite is big enough?

3) Mana - OMG mana is an insane drain right now. I know it comes with the gear and level, I went through the same thing with my shadowpriest, but she has a lot of tools for regaining mana, whereas the mage not so much that I can see. I use mana gem and evocation on cooldown, and I'm still falling way behind the groups because I have to drink to full after every trash pull (I keep getting locked out of boss fights because I'm still drinking when they pull!). Are there any tricks I've missed? It's kind of embarrassing but I've started using Mage Armour instead, do I just have suck it up until I get better gear at 85?

4) Impact - sometimes I will hit a fully dotted mob with impact and tab to another target immediately and there are no dots on it. Does is have a hidden limitation to the number of targets it spreads to, or am I just overestimating whuch things are in the 12 yard range?

I think that's all I wanted to know, thanks!

Look who's finished!

And look who's on eBay!

I'd really appreciate any signal boosting you wanted to do for this one.



I did decide to curl her hair! The uneven and kind of messy look is all right, I think, in the context of a wild rose pony. I am not 100% sure I prefer it to the straight hair, but I'm leaving it as it is. If the person who winds up with her reeeally wants to straighten it, they can do so, and I'll tell them how (not responsible for results, but it shouldn't hurt her).

( You SO need to see all of these pics. )



The silver around her eyes is so pretty.

So, I learned a lot from her, and I look forward to putting all that learning into play on my next pony.

And, again, because clearly I haven't linked it enough, eBay! Yes, bidding is starting high. There's actually fifteen dollars' worth of hair there all by itself. Not to mention the OMG hours of work. So bid freely!

Questions? Ask 'em!

X-posted from Dreamwidth. Comment count:

Hey ladies! So I have a super ignorant technical question for the community. I know there are a lot of computer-savvy women in our ranks, and since everyone is always so generous with their expertise I thought I'd turn here first.

( computer stuff )