Some PTSD Thoughts Have Gone to Tumblr

My PTSD is getting to the point (as we approach That First Sunday in May, argh) where I’ve lost some more of my sanity (SAN) and have started up an RPG-style dialog on Tumblr, with an imaginary GM that’s either my PTSD or some other part of my twisted imagination. For some reason it seems to help, writing down my various episodes or semi-episodes with an externalized antagonist.

It’s a strange, strange Tumblr. Think of the worst GM you’ve ever had, and then let him have access to your most internal thoughts and feelings. That’s my GM in Life is Like a Bad RPG.

Life is Like a Bad RPG helped me recall my notes on what happens to me during holidays, and why it would be a bad reason to take on any oncall, no matter how guilty I may feel or how much reputation I may lose. Of course, I’m noticing that I’m on the rollercoaster towards an actual PTSD episode much sooner than I was for That Fucking Day in June, argh, but as that’s when I started taking notes, I don’t remember what my… you know, that day… what it’s been like in the past. I literally do not remember this chunk of time; it’s like my brain blanks out for a week before and a week after.

Last year, That Fucking Day in June actually caused a delayed PTSD episode. This time it seems like the PTSD episode will start on The First Sunday in May.

More on last year, apparently:

• Father’s Day: More Than Just a Day for Fathers
• A More Optimistic Today

Anyways… I think my Tumblr blog tracking the imaginary RPG dialog is funnier than my PTSD musings and rants here. It’s weird writing it, actually; my S∂ posts on PTSD and being a survivor of abuse (sometimes they overlap) are at least partly analyzed. But they feel clumsier than the almost entirely impromptu entries on Life is Like a Bad RPG.

Why did I pick a Tumblr blog in the first place, instead of making it easier on everybody and adding entries here? Well, it’s because the Tumblr iPhone app is more stable than the WordPress iPhone app. The WordPress app loses my posts so often when I try saving that I want to throttle it, whereas the Tumblr app simply only saves the current draft, but it does so reliably, even on auto-save. And since I wanted this blog to be something I could just add to while on the go, that ruled out WordPress.

Anyways anyways:

• Life is Like a Bad RPG
• RSS Feed
• First post of this week. I’ll probably add a new First Post of the Previous Week link every Friday.

I’m not totally sure if Life is Like a Bad RPG will entertain you or depress you. Thus far it seems to entertain on Twitter, although, as @ertchin comments, “I wanted to tell you that I am . . . “enjoying” seems the wrong word . . . appreciating your Tumblr blog.” Which sums it up perfectly.

Beautiful Rebuttal of Roger Ebert’s “Video Games Can’t Be Art”

Actually, Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago) tweeted this link for all to see:

My ignorance made blatantly obvious. http://j.mp/9gy0Yy [permalink]

LeoPirate takes Ebert’s article to pieces in a great way.

Also, there’s a scene from way back when of Ebert and Siskel playing a video game.

I’m now quite curious about Checkpoint, so I’ll be adding LeoPirate’s channel to my YouTube subscriptions.

On Closure

*drumming fingers along desktop, waiting for things to finish fucking compiling*

So I was thinking to myself, for reasons somewhat inspired by cleolinda’s closure vis a vis her father, what true closure vis a vis my own parents would be. Obviously, given the nature of my chronic PTSD, complete closure is still not here, and may not be here for a long time, even if they’re dead.

Thus far in life, I’ve had to break up chunks of my issues with my parents and declare them closed, one by one.

The first was closure with my desire for my father to appreciate me, or something. Or at least stop hitting me. I’m not sure what I wanted, but I stopped wanting it. Haven’t wanted it for years now, and that was an intoxicating freedom.

The second was closure with my desire to rescue my mother from a situation where she didn’t want to be rescued (or at least, not in a realistic way). Sometimes there are things you can’t help. Haven’t wanted to for years, and that was one of the hardest to let go, actually.

The third was closure with knowing that some of my friends betrayed me. This kind of thing could make you boil for years; or you can just shrug and say, “human nature,” and move on. It’s not forgiving—I am for sure not going to forgive people for endangering my life, knowing full well what they were doing in two cases—but it’s simply acknowledging that this is ground not worth going back over.

All of these I needed to achieve closure with before I could move onto the next shutting of the door: getting away from my former life physically and legally. That’s a door that will never open again, and indeed, since them I’ve put more doors in front of it. The extra doors may keep me from ever finding out if my parents are dead, and for my general sanity, that’s likely for the best.

I have not yet achieved closure with respect to worrying about my parents finding me again and making my life a living hell by causing my PTSD triggers to go off constantly. They don’t have to kill me—I think, actually, death would be a mercy if they found me again and started stalking me again. I already am afraid of what happens to me when my PTSD triggers, even in small amounts; part of this is that I know now what’s going on, and I even know (broadly) why, but I don’t know how to stop it when it starts. It stops when it feels like it, and I don’t really have control. I assume it’s possible to get control… but there are limits. Some triggers would be too strong.

Will I ever find out my parents are dead? Looking up stuff about them would be unwise, because (a) I would draw attention to myself, and (b) more importantly, I would trigger badly, and I don’t have mental space for that.

*drum, drum, drum, fingers*

Life is like a really bad RPG video game for me. I know people enjoy that kind of stuff, including angsty pasts of their characters and so on, but when you can’t leave it behind and it’s actually your life, it’s almost unenjoyable. I’d say almost entirely unenjoyable. I want to seriously move on to the epilogue, where all that’s left is exploring the further limits of my relatively new world without worrying about whether my parents… or, frankly, their agents… are behind me. Yes, it would be boring to a third-party person viewing my life.

But I want tea, Sherlock Holmes, F&SF and mystery, reading, writing, my Kindle, my job. Like Fallen London, there’s only so many damned action points to spend, and they’re even more difficult to spend successfully if your Nightmare level is somewhere beyond 8. I do not really want to spend actions on the unavoidable interrupts that PTSD keeps introducing into my life.

Sigh.

Discovering the Lower Register

I’m not sure why—perhaps it’s societal expectations, or that I’ve listened to a lot of soprano/mezzo-soprano singers over the years—but for a long time I always tried to sing in something of an upper register. This I do via, I think, using a falsetto move in my throat, or at least a constant pinching of sorts, and this was always somewhat unpleasant.

When I recently started singing in a lower register along to traditionally male tenor songs, one that felt more natural, I noticed that even though a lot of notes seemed to hit the middle of what seemed to be my comfort range, I tended to flatten out on lower notes, and go too high on higher notes. For some reason I tried to persist with both ends of a stunted spectrum.

Today I started singing lower all the way, from upper to middle to lower range. And lo and behold, this turned out to be an extremely pleasant experience. I could even sing songs I couldn’t quite match before—well, I still don’t quite match, sometimes half a note flat or sharp at least, but I match better and feel less awkward singing.

My voice really is rather low, even though I almost constantly pitch it high; but female voices are supposed to be higher… oh well. I don’t mind; it would be kind of silly to mind. If I could ever get into a choir as a tenor… it would give me a reason to wear a tuxedo. But even if I am a tenor, on the island I would be unlikely to get in as one and forced to go falsetto-ish, which would spoil the fun.

Well, I still can’t make “Semi-Charmed Life” ((“The sky was gold / it was rose / I was taking sips of it through my nose / and I wish I could get back there / someplace back there / in the pictures you would take / doing crystal meth will take you up until you break”)) or “Give It Up for the Captain”, but that’s a matter of trying to enunciate very quickly. My voice is not only lower than usual, it’s seems like it’s more difficult for me to form coherent words than for other people. Perhaps I’ll catch up in time.

In the meanwhile, I’m starting to really like singing. I might even start singing in the shower if I can ever remember enough of the lyrics, which will remove a little bit of the hell that the mind-numbing relaxation of a shower usually brings to me.

And so to bed. At least briefly. Pagers are hell.

A Note on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

I remember this dialog from a college course.

Professor: “Some of you are going to get the wrong idea. Just remember that Heart of Darkness isn’t about degrading Africans as savage tribal people. It’s about showing how savage white civilization can be.”

Student: “Um. By using a stereotype of savage Africans as an allegory for a Euro-centric message?”

Professor: “… you obviously aren’t reading deeply enough into the text.”

Sometimes a cigar is a racist penis.

The student isn’t me, by the way; the student was somebody who was much more sensible than me. At the time, I was too in awe of the professors to argue.

(Of course, this was back when I foolishly thought I’d still be able to pull out a comparative literature degree, but we know that didn’t work out in the end.)

I’ve Got Tea and I Don’t Care

With respect to this, given the completeness and succinctness of Deepa’s response to Charles’ original essay, and the rather tone-deaf and irritating reply from Charles, I have decided that I don’t care anymore. Deepa has said all that I would have wanted to say, and all I have left is

Dear Charles,

DO YOUR RESEARCH NEXT TIME

P.S. Ignore the wiki that this other wiki’s entry refers to.

We’ve all done stupid things, so in that sense, I already don’t care anymore.

High on tea,
AJ

I’ll Be in My Bunker

Not a response essay; just a declaration of personal FTS.

Part 1, the non-personal:

First, here: No Foreigners Allowed by Charles Tan. This is a tone argument. It’s an extended tone argument, but in the end, it’s a tone argument. Also, the examples cited make me cringe.

Second, here: An Open Letter to Charles Tan by Deepa D. I agree with her. Doesn’t mean that I hate Charles—just that I disagree with him.

Part 2, the personal:

Third, here: Oh No, Mammoth Books of X, No by me. Some people consider this to be a horribly angry post, and thus on the “bad tone” side, even though it’s one of disappointment and sadness. Apparently voicing disappointment, no matter how quietly, at all is a bad tone to some people. I’m not saying that Charles thinks that about this piece, but for some people, using the tone argument against this would be valid.

Fourth, here: A Funny Thing Happened to Me at the Grocery Store the Other Day by me. Yes, internalized racism exists, and thus, it wouldn’t be a good idea to use Charles’ race in support of or against any argument. ETA: No, I don’t think he has internalized racism.

Fifth: yes, I like Charles. I still think his argument needs some re-thinking.

Sixth: When I talked about the Mammoth Books, I did indeed get attacked directly by someone outside of the comments. I don’t want to talk about it, because it ended up triggering my PTSD, and I’m pretty sure revisiting it will do so again. Which I know looks “fake” to some people, but you know: triggers are fucking stupid that way.

I’ll be in my bunker with my tea and my Xanax.

Turning off comments on this post, because putting my hand in a blender is the last thing I want to do right now.

Exhaustion and Amusement

I’m super exhausted right now, and the coming week is going to be nasty, so I don’t know if I’ll get to blog much (or, at least, deeply) over the next several days.

For now, I’ll note that there’s a post by Cherie Priest about panties, and there are plenty of comments there. The post is about Victoria’s Secret going… off in recent years, basically writing off anybody over a size 10 and looking over 25, and generating uncomfortable underwear now to boot. Apparently it wasn’t always that way.

I’m oldish, but I’ve never known this Victoria’s Secret of yore; I only started shopping at malls a few years ago, I realize. There’s so much I don’t know about Western culture, because even though I grew up here, my parents did a damn good job of keeping me isolated from the world—and not in a “keep the girl pure in Vietnamese culture” effort, it was more of a “keep her from knowing an outside world exists so that she always stays with us, no matter how much we abuse her” thing.

Thus it’s all the more amusing that the last movie my parents allowed me to rent under their intense supervision was The Matrix. For reals. To this day I have no idea why they let me do that—although it probably helped that even I didn’t understand what it was about until I saw it.

(Of course, my father beat me afterwards. But only after the movie ended. It is indeed that compelling.)

It makes even less sense considering that up until then, they usually only let me watch the more “family friendly” animated Disney movies with powerful, centralized father figures. To give you some reference, Beauty and the Beast was considered risque, and The Little Mermaid was considered ideal. That scene where Ariel’s father goes into a rage and destroys her carefully collected items was… a bit too much like real life for me. And if you consider the plot of The Little Mermaid, it’s basically that seeking independence is a failed venture without your father’s permission—indeed, Ariel is only able to have a life with her beloved prince because he gave her the permanent legs. If he had chosen not to, she would have been screwed.

He took me to that movie personally and pointed out all these parts.

Whereas Belle in Beauty and the Beast completely controlling her future in the end and actually rescuing a bumbling, somewhat naive father? Yeah, I can see why my parents actually didn’t “let” me know about this movie while I was growing up. I only ever got to see it in college, some years after it was released.

My life: it’s been an adventure, but only the kind of adventure other people enjoy reading about in novels. It’s not something one enjoys when it personally happens.

ruby-epub 0.0.4

It’s been a very long while. Fixes include documentation and license files that weren’t included, and permissions fixing. I resolved my very first issue on this thing (unfortunately it took me forever to do it, since for some reason Google Code didn’t email me when someone sent in the issue).

Here’s the home of ruby-epub.

My Kindle Comforts Me at Night

Publishers have nothing, I repeat, nothing, to fear from the Kindle’s monotone text-to-speech. Audiobook lovers will remain audiobook lovers. People who don’t want to listen to audiobooks will definitely not listen to this for long stretches of time; the lack of intonation and the natural pauses, groupings, and emphasis used when humans talk, means Kindle speech becomes difficult to parse if you happen to lose track, say, while you’re doing anything else and something moderately surprising comes along, like doing laundry and suddenly you realize the socks you’re rolling don’t match. Gods help you if you’re actually trying to drive and use this.

Even the worst reading by a human being will be more easily parsed than Kindle text-to-speech over a period of, say, over half an hour.

But at the same time, that dreary, untrackable monotone results in the perfect sleeping aide, at least for me. I listen to it, trying to figure out words, and then as I drift to sleep I stop caring, and it becomes a kind of white noise afterwards. This is better than white noise, because it’s easier to try to find meaning in mumbled words than it is in raindrops, and I need external input in order to not accidentally wander into the bear traps of memory.

My favorite sources for this kind of late night text? Net articles about mediocre movies with long stretches of boring in them that reduce critics to zonked-out, disillusioned, yet snarky babbling for something like 2500 words. This paragraph alone should remove all fear of Kindle text-to-speech from thinking publishers.

Anyways, for those of you looking for any kind of sleep aide and who happen to have at least a 2nd generation Kindle, here are my favorite “bored movie critics you can hear desperately scratching behind glass walls in a prison that the movie will not release them from for at least 90 minutes” articles:

• Anything from The Agony Booth. My favorite is their Star Trek V recap, but Twilight and Star Trek: Insurrection work as well for me. It helps to have some familiarity with the material. Battlefield Earth actually doesn’t work for me for some reason, possibly because it’s so horrible it’s useless for anything, even a sleep aide.

• Selections from Roger Ebert’s Your Movie Sucks, especially his takedown of The Village and a couple other movies following it alphabetically in the list, I don’t remember them even now, they’re so unmemorable.

I haven’t tried other sources as of yet. I like these.

My Kindle: changing my life in ways I didn’t expect.

You know what I used to do before the Kindle came along? I listened to the beginning of the Coraline audiobook, during the slow ramp-up, I’ve usually fallen asleep before the really crazy shit started to come down. And I listened to the prologue for the Fragile Things audiobook, and drifted off to sleep somewhere when Neil Gaiman says the word “island,” unless that’s just in my head.

Sometimes raindrops work, as in trying to figure out what the rain is hitting; works well for real rain splashing down roofs and against windows (and very much a way to stay in the present, as it were). But it doesn’t work as well when the raindrops are simulated, even if they’re dynamically generated rather than a static recording, because, because while their distance may wander back and forth, they don’t hit anything nearby.

I’ve tried things like The Delta Sleep System, and it hasn’t worked, for about the same reasons at the simulated raindrops. Plus for some reason they nowadays seem to trigger me. At a place I lived at before I came here, there were air ducts or vents or something, and they went off at night. Comforting, except this was when I was on the run from my parents…. I guess, it’s a little mixed up.

Anyways: Kindle. Easily mistracked audio untrainable monotone. Makes me sleep reliably. Not exactly audiobook replacement material.