journal

Two makeup brushes (that should last forever with proper care), eyeliner, blue mascara, lip gloss, a blush palette, and an eye shadow palette.

These got added to my tiny collection of no-name makeups that I basically never use, in part because I had no idea how to actually use them properly.  Makeup was just kind of a thing that was annoying, I didn\’t like, didn\’t know how to use, and made it so I wasn\’t allowed to itch my face.

I still mostly hold those views, but thanks to my friend, I now better understand how to use makeup.  She kindly taught me the very basics of how to use it, and then was good enough to summarize those basics and text them to me.  I\’ll note those basics here for future reference and also so any interested parties who happen to want to learn as well.  Or y\’know, anyone who thinks the way I phrase things is funny.

You start with foundation, if your skin needs it.  That goes over most of your face to even out your color.  Then you focus on your eyes.  These are where the brushes come in.  You use a palette of colors for the eye shadow, currently.  It\’s in fashion to use a lighter color on the inner third (near your nose) of your eyelid, and a darker color on the outer 2/3s.  You then blend the two colors together to have a spectrum.  I favor blue, in case the picture of the hair from last week didn\’t make that blatantly obvious.

After you\’ve done the eye shadow, you break out the eyeliner pencil.  Apparently a common mistake is to insist on making straight lines on the skin above your eyelashes.  The better course is to use short, smudgy strokes, which is a more striking look.  I didn\’t entirely understand why this works, but fashion and beauty really aren\’t my forte.

Then it\’s mascara time.  The mascara I have in the picture is blue, but most are black or brown.  Putting on mascara is kind of weird, but essentially you put the brush close to your eyeball and blink your eyelashes through the brush.  This can be really challenging because eyeballs aren\’t supposed to have stuff right next to them.  Fortunately, I\’ve had practice with that, because I sometimes wear contacts.

Once that\’s done, your eyes are done.  Then you do the blush, which you apply with a cotton ball or a special brush I don\’t have.  You blend the colors if you have a palette, or use a single color if you have one you really like.  It goes from the point of your cheekbones back toward your ears.  It\’s basically just to make it look like you have more color in your cheeks.

Finally, you do your lips.  I was told by a different person that you always start with a layer of lip balm before you apply color.  No idea if that\’s true, but I\’m usually wearing lip balm, so it works just fine.  Atop that, you apply the lipstick or lip gloss.  To avoid leaving lipstick marks everywhere, you can take a tissue and blot your work when you\’re done, then reapply a bit more, and repeat until you\’re happy.  And apparently, if you really need that stuff to stay, you can put some of the powder from your blush makeup on top of it.  She said that makes it feel weird, but it makes the stuff stay approximately forever.

Beyond the makeup shopping, the last celebration of my birthday happened this weekend.  My parents and grandmother went to a fancy-ish restaurant, where we ate very good food, chatted, and had presents.  It was a pretty good time.

The only other majorly notable event was that my spouse and I voted yesterday.  I expect I won\’t be terribly pleased with the results of the election, but since I did vote, I have full right to complain when things don\’t go as I\’d like.  The way I see it, if you don\’t vote, you don\’t get to complain.  

I was seriously considering calling off my birthday this month and celebrating at some later date when I wasn\’t completely overwhelmed and crabbity, but things seem to be shifting in a more positive direction. 

Notable good points this week include eating freshly made beef stew with my spouse and my parents, a combination birthday party for myself and a friend, and a trip to a local orchard with a different friend group. 

Seasoned readers will know that I tend to eat vegetarian in most contexts, which makes the beef stew all the more special.  In truth, I\’ll happily eat meat, but I\’m touchy about where it comes from.  So in restaurant settings and pretty much anywhere except home, I\’m strictly vegetarian.  At home, I can find humane chicken, turkey, bison, and beef, but usually it\’s quite expensive compared to the grocery store standards. 

So after our original birthday plans fell through, having a well-prepared, fresh beef stew made for me (well, partially by me, but mostly for me), is a real delight.  Getting to share it with my parents was an extra treat, and they seemed to enjoy it as well.

In recent Mondays, I normally see a pair of my friends to watch the latest episode of a favorite TV show together.  This week that happened, but another couple friends came as well, and we made a proper party of it, celebrating my birthday and one of the friends\’ birthdays (his was yesterday).  There was good food, good company, and we played a trivia game that had basically everyone in fits of laughter.  Other than the laughs hurting my abs after a while, it was excellent. 

Lastly, there was an outing planned to a local orchard that turned out pretty nicely.  It was a nice day, though quite chilly.  There was a hay ride and a corn maze activity offered, both of which I did.  The corn maze appears to be an excuse to wander around outdoors and enjoy the day, or at least this one was.  There were two separate spots where you could climb up and view the maze from above, and the corn itself wasn\’t super tall, so you could kind of peer over it and decide where you were going next. 

The crowning event for the orchard visit was the eating of the cider and doughnuts, though.  Fresh, hot doughnuts on a cold day was lovely, and the cider from this orchard was pretty good.  I\’m still searching for a comparable cider to the orchard I lived near in CT, but this stuff was rich, sweet, and tangy, and of course fresh and unpasteurized.  I know pasteurization is a marvel of modern technology and makes storage and transport really easy for many liquids, but I\’m happier drinking my cider without it.  I\’m not actually sure if it\’s good for my gut or not, but I hope so.  I didn\’t have any obvious pointers to yes or no, anyway.  

I don\’t think I mentioned the latter thing in this blog yet, so for background, in January this year I participated in a government grant application review panel focused on autism research.  Basically, the Army gets lots of government money, and when the US isn\’t at war, they spend some of it doing research on various conditions and diseases in hopes of improving the lives of the soldiers.  So, things like cancer and major skin burns, but also autism. 

They recruit scientists to review the applications for that money, but in a remarkably forward-thinking twist, they also have people affected by the condition or disease weigh in on the applications.  This is unprecedented elsewhere in the US, as far as I\’m aware.  Usually organizations simply ask other scientists what looks scientifically viable, and meh to what anyone else thinks.  It\’s also somewhat unprecedented for autistic people to not only have our opinions sought and listened to, but also to be compensated for our time and travel.

This year, they\’re doing it again, and I\’ve again been invited to participate.  Basically, it\’s a really awesome opportunity, and one I can\’t reasonably pass up. 

It does take a certain amount of prep work and paperwork to successfully complete the requirements for the program.  For example, I needed to spend some time in the last couple days reading 11 scientific abstracts and deciding how competent I felt on the subject the proposed study was addressing.  If I had been a scientist, I would also have needed to pay careful attention to the people and institutions named on each application, because you\’re not allowed to review an application whose people you\’re familiar with.  Interferes with the impartiality of the system and all that.  Fortunately, I\’m mostly a nobody in academia, so although I read over the names, I recognized literally nobody and therefore can review anything they put in front of me.

Anyway, that\’s keeping me busy… so while I\’ve slacked a bit on the blog, I still feel like I\’ve been productive.  And I do still have a buffer, almost up to my birthday.  That allows me a certain amount of breathing room I wouldn\’t otherwise have.  Which is very good for my mental health. 

Speaking of the blog… hello to those of you reading from Europe and Asia.  I have no idea how I acquired readers from Poland, Germany, Ireland, Ukraine, Spain, Russia, South Korea, and France, but I\’m flattered to bits that you think my blog is worth your time.  My blog comes with an activity tracker-type thing that tells me where people who visit the blog come from, and while I write to a mainly USian audience on autism and special-needs issues and research, I\’d like to think I\’m slightly less US-centric than most USians.  Very slightly.  Hopefully. 

I usually ignore the statistics on how many visits my blog gets, because the low numbers depressed me when I was just starting out.  I preferred to focus on putting out quality, useful, interesting content (hopefully).  Looking at the numbers now, they\’ve grown some, but I expect I should learn how to work SEO and various other self-promotion things at some point.  I also expect that once I do so, I\’m going to start kicking Past Me for putting it off that long… but my life has very much been a \”slow and steady hopefully finishes the race\” kind of deal, at least so far.  The alternative is burning out before the finish line, like the impatient hare in the story of the Tortoise and the Hare.  Hopefully Future Me will remember that and not hold too much ill-will about it. 

Regardless, please know that any of my readers are welcome to contact me via Blogger or on Twitter with any questions, comments, suggestions, or recipes.  I\’m afraid I\’m monolingual (to my shame), but I do like to hear from my readers and other interested parties.  

I ran the house alone as best I could, but between caring for him and my regular work, things inevitably fell behind.  I feel very fortunate that I was able to work ahead so much on this blog, because I think otherwise I might have been a neurotic mess.  Well, more of a neurotic mess.

Anyway, my spouse was finally well enough to go to work yesterday, which let me have some badly-needed self-care time.  I spent at least half of yesterday either sleeping or doing nothing that resembled productivity.  Sometimes it\’s really hard to tell if I\’m doing self-care or if I\’m just entirely unable to work…  but by the end of yesterday, I\’d taken care of a number of my chores, done some personal hygiene things, taken care of a lot of to-dos, and written this entry.  So it wasn\’t a full waste of a day.

I\’d like to entirely blame my spouse\’s illness for all the falling behind I\’ve experienced in my self-care and such, but in truth, it was just the capstone.  Other than breakfast, my diet has been poor lately, and as it\’s gotten colder outside, I\’ve found it more difficult to be interested in biking.  The comfortable self-generated breeze of biking in summer becomes chilling and unpleasant in fall, and I actually don\’t have biking pants or shorts.  At all.  I already have so many things on my wishlist for my birthday (which is coming soon), so it seems greedy and/or foolish to add biking gear to it.  Especially now that the biking season is all but over.

Adding to that, I don\’t really know anything about activewear, and what\’s comfortable or what you should look for when buying it.  I haven\’t had a very active life, suffice it to say, and I\’d rather not buy clothes online and then find out they\’re not comfortable or I don\’t like them for some other reason.  Meh.  Perhaps I\’ll tackle it next spring.

Hopefully I can start getting my life back on track this coming week.  

I\’m trying to decide whether the effect was due to the interaction between the two new substances, or if it\’s literally just the broccoli sprouts.  I took the CoQ10 for about a week before adding the broccoli sprouts in properly, and didn\’t really see much difference.  But sometimes things can take that long to kick in.  The test, I suppose, would be to continue eating broccoli sprouts every day and then dropping the CoQ10.  Now\’s probably not the time to try that, though, since I\’m feeling down and grouchy and ouchy.  (The lattermost is because I\’m biologically female, and every month that fact makes me miserable for roughly a week.)   

I had a relatively successful week, as that goes, at least.  The student who\’s been doing my hair color graduated, and while I actually missed her on the day of, I did end up getting her the balloon and fancy cupcakes I\’d bought in celebration of her graduation.  I had to drive about 2.5 hours round trip to do it, though, so it\’s fortunate it was just a one-time thing. 

Then this weekend my spouse and I saw my grandmother for a lunch and grocery shopping outing.  We tried a barbecue place, which was pretty decent.  I had fish and chips for the first time in years, and it was pretty darned good.  The fish was proper fish fillets, too, not processed ground fish.  I\’d go there again, needless to say. 

Also this weekend, I hosted a very small party.  It\’s the first party I think we\’ve had in this house.  (It\’s within the first year of us moving in, though, so that\’s fine.)  We had a couple friends over to watch a just-released episode of a TV show (The Good Place) that all of us enjoy.  It was pretty fun.  They brought dinner, which was thoughtful, and we spent a good amount of time just chatting about things besides the TV show. 

It\’s a little ambitious, but I\’m hoping that maybe that event could be a regular thing.  We don\’t quite have a TV setup for the downstairs area yet, and may not for several months, due to prioritizing other things in the budget.  But so far Chris has been good about being okay with borrowing one of his computer screens for events. 

I don\’t really consider myself much a TV watcher, but this particular show was available on a streaming service that Chris has, and it came with high recommendations from multiple sources, so I finally gave up and watched it.  And it was, in fact, excellent.  Also, I have memories from college of getting together with friends, eating snacks, and watching a single episode of a TV show like this.  So I guess maybe it\’d be a good thing to add to my life regularly.  

Free time activities are, I think, supposed to be either fun or meaningful.  Or both.  You work for a living (and maybe you love your work too, but most people don\’t have that luxury).  But when you\’re done with work, you go home or go to some other space, and decide what to do with yourself.  Maybe that\’s volunteering at a pet shelter, or maybe it\’s marathon-watching TV shows on Netflix.  Either way, what you do is probably either fun or meaningful to you.  You can even fold doing chores into this, because the meaningful thing you\’re acquiring by doing chores is \”a pleasant home environment.\”

This last week\’s activities, other than the time I spent at the Autism Support of Kent County meeting and the time spent walking with a friend, I would firmly classify as \”neither fun nor meaningful.\”  I am, suffice it to say, kind of down about the whole thing.

Friday and Saturday, I attended some group activities in the computer game my spouse and I play together.  Normally that\’s at least somewhat fun, because the people are generally decent and it\’s cool to see that part of the content.  But I\’m doing rather poorly with my individual contributions, and it\’s not going unnoticed.  That makes me feel bad about myself, and these activities are 5 hours of my week, so it\’s not exactly a short time we\’re talking about here.

Additionally, the leader of the group has been downright mean to most of the group in the last couple months, and it\’s really starting to wear on me.  There are literally dozens of places I could go if I wanted people to be mean to me, I don\’t really want that invading my fun, too.

Then on Monday, I returned to try to stick out the D&D game I complained about last Friday.  The one with the rigid, childish group leader that insisted that everything I did in the actual game was wrong and that I needed to change it all immediately, without admitting an ounce of fault on his part.

I\’d kind of hoped that maybe if I could do things the way he wanted, I\’d at least be accepted… but nope.  I got disparaging comments when I wasn\’t being ignored, and what little time I did spend roleplaying, I proceeded to do very poorly at and feel terrible about afterwards.

The crowning barbs on that experience were that literally everyone else was having a great time, including my spouse, and so it was just me being sad and lonely and extremely disappointed with everything.  I was really going to try to stick out this mini-campaign until it was done, but I\’m not sure subjecting myself to that level of pain is worth the satisfaction of seeing the story through, or getting to play the character concept I came up with.

So I\’m mentally kicking around non-offensive ways to bow out of the campaign, such as, \”I\’m not handling my workload on Mondays/Tuesdays well when I attend this game,\” and \”a family member is ill and I\’m cutting out various evening obligations to help care for them,\” but both of those are lies.  The real reason is that the DM handled my differences like a spoiled toddler and I don\’t see the point in subjecting myself to emotional agony every Monday…  but you can\’t say that in polite company.  I also don\’t want to ruin my spouse\’s fun in the game by leaving on a very sour note, because they know I\’m his spouse and they\’ll associate my actions with him.

Feh.  I\’ll think of something.  Or lie through my teeth like a \”normal\” person.

In happier news, I\’ve added CoQ10 to my supplements lineup.  I\’m not super happy about having yet another pill to take, but considering the algae and such, having additional detoxification support isn\’t a bad idea.  I haven\’t noticed any super-exciting developments in the week since I started taking it, but it\’s probably not hurting anything.

In the same vein, I\’m trying to eat broccoli sprouts on a daily basis now.  You\’re familiar with the health benefits of broccoli, I\’m sure.  It\’s a powerhouse of vitamins and minerals, along with providing lots of fiber and very possibly fighting cancer.  The same chemical that supposedly fights cancer (sulforaphane) also has some research that shows it helps with treating some symptoms of autism.  (Symptoms like depression, communication difficulties, and anxiety, specifically.)

While I\’m not really sure how much that\’s going to apply to me, eating broccoli sprouts and young broccoli is most likely not going to harm me (other than the taste, blech), so trying to add it to at least one meal a day is a good plan.  My current default meal is chopping the stuff up really good and then putting it on my sprouted grain bread and nut butter sandwiches.  It looks super weird, but the nut butter politely drowns out the flavor, so I\’m calling it a success.  

My car is finally fixed, at least for now.  We ended up having to bring it in twice, because the mechanics ran out of time to work on it, but the brakes will hold out for a while yet, and I guess nothing was wrong with them other than the wear.  But I finally have two headlights again, so that\’s excellent.  The first time I got pulled over by the police, it was because I was missing a headlight.  The experience (which included misunderstandings, but at least no fines) was sufficiently upsetting that it makes me nervous to have a headlight out.  So that\’s all taken care of.

In very happy news, I\’m almost kind of succeeding at making a set of posts ahead of time (a buffer) for this blog.  This was one of my year goals, and I\’d kind of started managing it, but then fell behind again and was back to making posts as they were due.  These Wednesday posts, about my life and current events, are never written more than a day in advance.  But the Reading the Research (Monday) and the Friday topical posts can be written ahead of time without messing anything up, so it behooves me to do so.  It\’s just hard to write more than one per week, especially if you\’re struggling to manage your life already.

Also fun was this weekend.  Michigan, the state I live in, has a bunch of renaissance fairs, with medieval events, turkey legs, performers, and lots of interesting shops.  I kind of like going to them, and so does my spouse, so this weekend we went to a really big one in Holly.  It was a long drive, but we arrived safely and met up with a couple of my friends from college for like 5 hours.

It was really cool to see them, particularly since it was their wedding anniversary weekend.  They were willing to take some time during that occasion to see us, which was very thoughtful of them.  We mostly shopped, but also saw a comedy show and got food and drinks.  There was actually even a veggie burger stall for me, along with everything from barbecue to quesadillas.  As in most events, the refreshments were expensive, but mostly, the food and drinks were good.  So that was nice.  I highly recommend the apple dumpling stall, if you end up going.  It\’s a whole apple, cored and baked, wrapped in pastry and then topped with vanilla ice cream. 

The weather was sunny and fairly pleasant, if perhaps a mite hot, but the temperature only topped out at about 80 degrees, and we were wearing street clothes.  I can\’t imagine how the dedicated people wearing leather, plate mail, and/or corsets survived, but last year it was much hotter.  Even in street clothes and comfortable shoes, I ended up sweaty, hot, and footsore by the end of it.  Still, the sore muscles in my legs told me I\’d gotten good exercise along with my good company.

I did end up buying a couple things, too.

Faux fur fluffy slippers!  Very warm.  Super nice for cold basements.

A red rose… made from leather!  Scented with rose perfume, too.

Chris and I went and did Pokemon GO-related events downtown on the weekend, which involved the social awkwardness of speaking to strangers you\’ve never met and may never see again.  It\’s not as bad as it could be, because you at least have the game in common, but different people play the game in different ways, for different reasons.  Anyway, we attended both events and were reasonably successful at them, so that was good.  I did manage to lose my temper with the game at least once, though, which kind of detracted from the experience overall.  (The game crashes, a lot, and if it does so during a time-sensitive thing, it\’s very frustrating.  Especially if it just keeps doing it.)

On the health front, I\’m signed up for another year of chiropractic care… but only for once a month this time.  I was getting frustrated with going every two weeks, right in the middle of my afternoon, while I wanted to be working on this blog.  I don\’t particularly deny that it\’s doing good things for me.  Or at least it\’s really handy to be able to show up and be like, \”yeah, my neck really hurts, help?\” and have that sorted out in less than 24 hours.  But the toll on my bank account can\’t be ignored, either, so I\’ve pared down how much I\’ll visit, and we\’ll see how that goes.  If I keep hurting my neck, or my tension headaches start up again, I\’ll see about finding the money in the budget for it.  Otherwise, I\’ll still have some of the benefits without nearly as heavy a toll on my wallet.

Also changing is my haircut and coloring routine… the student I\’ve been seeing at the school downtown is finally graduating at the end of this month.  On Monday, I went for the last time to get my hair cut and turned blue there.  I\’m going to see about showing up on the student\’s graduation day with a cake and a balloon, because the school does literally nothing to celebrate a graduating student, and I think that\’s crap.  Maybe you don\’t need to break out a whole graduation ceremony, but just clocking out for the last time and waving to whoever happens to be there… strikes me as kind of insufficient.  So meh.  I can personally change that for this student, so I will.

After that, I\’m going to start seeing the first student I worked with, who now has a job downtown at a salon.  She was positively salivating over what hair dyes she might use to get my hair to a more sapphire shade, rather than the darker blue that I\’m currently sporting.  So we\’ll see, I guess.  I\’m not thrilled about still having to drive downtown, but I might, at least, not have to pay for parking.  I hope.

In the meantime, I\’m trying, reasonably hard, to make a buffer again.  I currently just have a Monday entry ahead of time, and I guess a flexible Friday entry I\’ve been studiously ignoring each week in favor of making one.  I feel like this shouldn\’t be so hard, but I guess in my heart I was always that person that waited \’til the day before a school project was due before actually doing it.  Or at least a week before, if it was a big project.  I\’m a firm believer in the ability to change your habits, but with all the other things I\’m still struggling with, I\’m just… not really willing to fight all possible battles in front of me.  I prefer to pick and choose, marshaling my energy and time as effectively as possible.  Smart, or lazy?  Maybe both.