Inside the Little Plastic Castle

I’ve come up with a short meditation which helps me calm anxiety, anger, or despair. I first tried it when I was floating on my back in the pool, with my arms and legs extended like a starfish.

All of these breaths are gentle, typical not exaggerated.

1. Inhale into the top of my head, then exhale out and down to my left leg
2. Inhale into the sole of my left foot, then exhale up and across to my right arm
3. Inhale into my right palm then exhale across my chest to my left palm
4. Inhale into my left palm then exhale down and across to my right leg
5. Inhale through the sole of my right foot then exhale up and out the top of my head

When I focus on the star-shaped breath moving, my monkey brain is quiet. Each star takes around 30 seconds. It’s based on how I learned to draw a five-pointed star freehand.

( details of five lines and five points oriented on a clock face )

Do you have a go-to rescue routine?

...after the election I let all my news wall filters go down.

It felt great to be *f*r*e*e* but I encountered lots of toxic stuff that made me anxious as fuck. So I raised my walls a little bit, but still wasn't sleeping well, unable to focus on things I'd formerly liked to do.

Now I've found a balance which works for me.

I've set up my net filtering software -- Freedom.to -- to create cracks large enough to hunt down information, and scheduled to minimize plunging into driven doom-scrolling.

News sites are only available between 11:30 and 11:59 am.

Twitter is only available between 12:30 and 1pm.

I can't follow news links from Twitter -- have to wait a day. Mostly, that's fine. Happily MyGuy, who's connected to the original streaming service (radio) has promised to let me know of anything vital.

Mia Mingus has written another short, powerful essay on interacting with nondisabled people. She examines how we are forced into intimate interactions because we are disabled.
( a taste )

It's challenging to maintain my self-confidence while experiencing the assumption that my boundaries don't exist, or don't count. Self-compassion meditation helps some. Snarkiness helps some.

Been a while, but I've been amusing myself, as well as intermittent low bits. Turned my back on Facebook, abandoned Twitter after the SDS conference, spending way too much time on MetaFilter, which is beginning to annoy me in useful ways, as well as doodling away a happy hour on Tumblr posting nothing. Reading actualfax books—paper as well as e—and fanfiction, of course. Here's a sprinkling of things I've stumbled across. Ask me anything (as they say) in the comments and I'll bloviate.

I've worked as a freelance calligrapher, typesetter, and graphic designer. This cartoon beautifully, and painfully, captures the continual teeter-totter between "being true to your own self" and "getting paid"
http://the-toast.net/2014/08/13/a-cartoon-about-book-design/

I've been having more difficulty understanding speech, especially at noisy places like cons (use your mics!) and restaurants. I've also had a strange two-tone mechanical humming in my ears for the past year or so. Okay, time for a hearing test. Mostly painless: put on these headphones, play noise in one ear and words in the other, parrot back the words. But then there was
( non-consensual penetration of body cavities )

That was a lesson in how to alienate prospective patients. It makes me wonder what in hell medicos mean when they say, "this will be uncomfortable, but let me know if it hurts"? Is there some level of pain which reliably causes a reflex response in humans, and therefore docs can ignore unreliable information like "Oww! That hurts! Stop that! NO."? I know that enough pain makes me pass right out. Or say if I vomit, does that mean I've crossed the line from "uncomfortable" to "hurts"? How about if I curl up on cool bathroom tiles? Or maybe when I sandbag myself with microwave hotpacks? I'm just working back from the "pain behaviors" I've demonstrated when it's hurt too much for me at home.

Anyway, the exam result is: I have

• excellent hearing in optimal conditions (cool)


• difficulty "hearing in noise" (yeah, that's why I was there)


• tinnitus (Checking just now at HearingLossHelp druglist (PDF), I'm taking three meds known to cause tinnitus in some people. Huh and


• Hyperacusis

She says wearing 29dB earplugs only makes the hyperacusis worse. (I wear them swimming and when I'm on the bus.) She's making "musician's earplugs" for me which dampen all sound equally across the noise spectrum which should "take the edge off" of the loudness of things.