When I was a child, my mother suggested I keep a diary. I told her that boys don’t keep diaries, they keep journals. Or maybe I constructed that memory. Maybe I mentioned to some friends that I was keeping a diary, and they laughed at it until I started calling it a journal. Memory is…
Author: Clio
A Trip to the Ocularist
I have a prosthetic eye. The last one I got was about twenty years ago, so I decided it was time for a new one. This is a write-up about my experience while it’s still fresh, and also to answer many of the questions I get. (Weak narrative structure here, this is somewhat stream-of-consciousness.) Popular…
8/24/22 addendum
I was not fully trained until I was a tween. I have a lot of shameful memories involving my encopresis. It was only recently that I learned that it could well have been associated with my autism, specifically with a weaker interoceptive system. A lot of fancy words to say: I pooped my pants a…
8/24/22
Last week I had a long conversation with my brothers about our childhood, and immediately my brain slipped back into the toxic cycles that it had already been headed towards. I am now coming out of that iteration with fresh perspectives. First, addiction: I come from a context of addiction, and though I have generally…
What is a fraction?
The other day, I saw a tweet joking that while calculus teachers insist that \(\frac{dy}{dx}\) is not a fraction, the LaTeX is \frac{dy}{dx}. That reminded me of my longtime complaint that “fraction” as a mathematical term is vaguely defined, so I asked my Twitter followers a simple question: “Which is a fraction?” I provided these…
Sheldon Cooper and Me
While I believe it has never been explicitly stated on either “The Big Bang Theory” (BBT) or “Young Sheldon” (YS), it seems pretty clear that the character of Sheldon Cooper is intended to be autistic. He represents one of the common stereotype sets of an autist: Annoyingly obsessive about some topics, lacking in overt empathy…
The Raccoon in the Trashcan
Sunday: My two brothers and I had a long, deliberate talk about childhood traumas. This is the first such conversation I remember having, at least in person, with both of them together. My older brother lives in northern Saskatchewan and visits every few years. My younger brother lives about an hour south of me. Saturday,…
8/3/22
I have an appointment on Monday to get a replacement prosthetic eye. I’ve had this one for about 20 years, and while it seems to still be in decent enough shape, it’s time for a new one. It got me thinking about when I was a teenager and it was time for a new prosthetic….
The first of August, 2022 (2)
I have long had this discomfort having conversations, especially about emotional topics. It feels like I’m playing out a script: I speak, you speak, I speak, and I can see the galleys of dialogue that we’ve been working our way through. As if the point of conversation is not to connect with another, but rather…
The first of August, 2022 (1)
It would be nice if the people who live in my head would pay rent from time to time. The first people who moved into my psyche were my parents. They have separate rooms in the cellar, well entrenched there in apartments that most of the other residents aren’t even aware are there. There’s no…