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I met an autistic boy today in the waiting room, and reconfirmed that the difference between them (autistic boys) and us (autistic girls) is really more on a surface of things than on the inside. As in, we feel the same things, but we express them, and our reactions to them, completely differently.

(We were both very uncomfortable because the lights in the room were too bright, and it was interesting to watch how he expressed himself and made sure the lights of specific color were turned off.)

It’s such a strange difference.

It also kind of feels that it’s more stressful to be an autistic girl, because we are the one’s who mask, mimic, hide, keep things inside, care about others’ reactions… While autistic boys tend to be very rigid in their routines and needs, and show their issues on the outside.

Girls try to tiptoe and camouflage (while not always successfully) while boys drive over everyone in their tanks and often don’t even notice they are doing it.

Sometimes I wish I could also drive a tank. It probably would be a bit less self-destructive than how I usually end up dealing with situations that drive me mad (as in not dealing with them and trying to endure until I get too overwhelmed and too exhausted).

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As if I didn’t have enough expensive audio devices already.
At least I decided not to buy Solaris because they seemed a bit too big for my comfort to buy without testing them out first. And Polaris seemed like a better fit for my emotional needs than Andromeda.
Fun fact is that out of the pretty big selection of earpieces they come with, I can only comfortably use the very tiniest ones. I don’t know how I feel about that. Did I always have such tiny ears or are they closing up on their own gradually because there’s too much bullshit to deal with in the world.
Great sound and noise cancelling. (Without relying on weird technologies for noise cancelling.) Feels like having a concert hall suddenly appear in your brain and take up a lot of space. Which is a really good thing.

I’m also writing about earphones because there are too many emotional things I wish I could write about but can’t really.

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I went from reading around 30 books a month in two languages to hardly reading any, because I lapsed into the ‘I’m gonna re-read the hundreds (if not multiple thousands) of fanfics I have on my Kindle again’ phase.

(And I have a weird relationship with fan fiction, where I have a couple of specific fandoms, two which are based on TV shows I’ve never watched a single episode of (and not going to), and another one is Star Trek, and mostly skip the porn and any lengthy angsty staff, and focus on fluff-and-comfort and weird comedy AUs.)

Problem is, there is only one kind of books I want to read, and it often feels like it’s the opposite of what ‘publishers’ and ‘public’ believe constitutes a good book.

In fact, the only books I would say fitted into the ‘what I need from a book’ the closest were self-published books with a relatively small fan base.

And what I need are the books that make my life better, that bring something positive into it. Books that are not based on the nauseatingly popular ‘angst is cool’ and ‘death, gore, suffering, and pain are even cooler’ presumptions.

I went through the phase when I read all kinds of books the world has to offer—the classics, the dead white guy hits, the award winners, the problem works—when I was a teenager. I had two good English Lit teachers in high school who also chose books meant to teach you something (Color Purple, Black Rain, 100 Years of Solitude, etc). I also did my postgrad thesis on women’s literature, including people like Tony Morrison, Joan Didion, Dorothy Alison, Loise Erdrich, and others.

And the thing is, that was more than enough. I don’t need any books that try to teach me about monsters in my life anymore. The things people call ‘profound’ and ‘raw’ and ‘deeply influential’ and ‘unsettling commentary’, with all the ‘exploring the challenges ans struggles’. I don’t need books that focus on the portrayal of horrors, pain, human problems, conflict, hatred, prejudice, drama, and all the other negative things that for some reason are considered to be a must-have for a book to be a bestseller. It’s like people think that a story is only worth telling if there’s pain or sadness in it. Like ‘good’ is not enough to be interesting.

I need books that banish and eradicate horrors, pain, human problems, conflict, hatred, prejudice, drama. Books that focus on good, happiness, love, and comfort.

And honestly, I don’t get why they are so hard to find. Why people are so obsessed with angst and drama that they think a book cannot be considered a book unless it has some hurtful drama in it.

It’s why I binge-read so many weird romances in the last year, because they felt like the closest you could come to literature made for fun and comfort, but then even the silliest comedy-romance books (in any genre) would have some ‘weird unnecessary drama’ phase around 70% into the story, like they all went through the same cookie cutter. Like someone told all writers and publishers that a book won’t sell if you don’t put some unnecessary angst and stupid drama into exact same spot in every book. And I’ve literally read hundreds of them, and found out that about 90% follow the exact same pattern.

Right now, I believe that books that don’t make my life better—and I don’t mean some “educational” and “how-to” crap, I mean the books that make me feel better, that bring me positive emotions, that make me smile, that take me somewhere where I don’t need to deal with angst, pain, and drama—are just not worth my time anymore. Why would I willingly spend my time on something that bring me negative emotions? Why do other people do?

So once again I find myself too tired of angst and drama to open any of the 100smth unread books I have piled in my apartment, and am hiding in a ton of fluffy fanfiction instead.

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Somewhere inside, even if I pretend like I don’t, I still believe all the negative things people told me about me, all the hurtful things they said about me, simply because no one ever told me anything else.

Even if logically I can understand that they mostly said those things not because of who I am, but because of who they are, there is just nothing to counter-balance it with. No one ever showed me different. It’s all I know.

You can’t counter all the negative things people do to you all by yourself. It’s like physics. If the force applied from outside is only ever applied in one direction, how can you ever gather enough energy on inside to move in the opposite direction?

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I’m aware that I’m very very late on this train, and by ‘late’ I mean the train has probably come and gone so long ago most people already forgot there was a train, but

I’m watching the US Bachelor for the very first time in my life, because I caught it by accident on the TV, and experiencing this very weird sort of glee…because:

I really don’t like the guy (like, I’m sure he’s fine, I just wouldn’t want to touch him with a 10ft pole and the more I watch the more I dislike him),

I hate his ideas of ‘dates’ (and it’s kind of amazing how people can do this with straight faces and squeal in delight at all these things. I’m yet to see a single one I would want to participate in even with a person I liked (upd.: well, fine, they finally went horseback riding in the mountains so I guess there was one)),

I don’t get how these women can subject themselves to all this (and in public! on the TV where everyone will see!) and why they behave the way they do… Actually, I think I just don’t get these women at all.

And really, the whole idea of this show, with all it’s falseness and insincerity, the whole ‘I’m gonna have this long ‘romantic’ date, talk about feelings, and make out with this woman…and an hour later I’m gonna do the same and make out with another woman’ and then rinse and repeat about 20 more times? (I do hope he rinses though, because that’s a lot of making out with strangers) And everyone knows it and acts like there’s nothing weird about it?

It’s like watching a fascinating Animal Planet documentary, although I’m actually supposed to be same species with these monkeys.

Also, I don’t think it’s really healthy to keep watching by getting hooked on the feelings of ‘wow, wtf is that/I kinda really hate that’ I get with literally every next thing I see on this show, but here we are.

I think I need to watch the Bachelorette. (which I never knew it existed until yesterday)

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Japanese society may be extremely rigid and unforgiving in many ways.

But it’s also kind of extremely understanding and welcoming to all kinds of kinks, weirdness, and otaku-ness. Especially when it comes to making money from all the said kinks and otaku-ness. Which means it’s pretty easy for people who are into some specific things (sometimes harmlessly weird, sometimes outright wrong…from having full arena concerts for holographic anime characters instead of real singers and to all kinds of fetish sex places, including common pubs where you can pay to touch women’s breasts all you like) to find a niche and fellow-minded people to realize their wishes and live true to their weirdness.

It’s a land of contrasts, and I think what makes it special is that you can find your own niche of extreme here, your own safe place, be it the clean places where everyone follows social rules or the underground places where everyone goes to enjoy breaking them very explicitly, and you can choose the world you’d rather live in here.

I, admittedly, land on the rather rigid side, and the weird places and things people do I sometimes hear about still blow my mind from time to time.

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I’ve been seeing a lot of trippy dreams lately. And they often feel much longer than I actually get to sleep. It’s a lot of flying, killing, hiding, disturbingly vivid and just disturbing details (there was this abandoned half-constructed bridge I was flying over this night, and it was full of feathers, and cages, and bird poop, and rabid chickens and turkeys both alive and dead, because apparently people abandoned crates with birds and animals on this bridge for some reason? And I remember so much detail about those stacked dirty cages and giant rabid brown chickens…), rooms, people I don’t know at all, but I do there, …and it’s both half-lucid, and mostly false-lucid, in the way that the me in the dream who thinks she is lucid thinks and remembers things that are also not real, and then I have a lot of trouble of sorting through things and figuring out which ones were real when I wake up. Because apparently I now dream in layers, when I dream about another myself who is dreaming. There are also layers of stories, when I kind of witness someone else’s story while dreaming my own, and in my dream I think ‘oh, I know this story, it’s from that book/movie/thing I read’…but it’s actually not, because I dreamt that part too.

Getting half-lucid dreams feels kind of like playing chess against someone else. They throw all the bad things at me, trying to corner me, but I get to decide that when an army of ‘evil super heroes’ (or mutants, I don’t know, it was trippy) attacks me and my own, overpowering everyone one by one, I get to climb where I want to climb, grow wings, and turn invisible in the air; and even though they still try to follow me when I’m invisible, because they are freaky supernaturals too, I get to decide that I will escape no matter what. I also get to decide that all my people are alive and I can know it for sure in my heart. My opponent throws more difficulties and monsters with super powers my way, but I get to be an invisible avenging angel with black wings and a sniper rifle. I sometimes get distracted by the disturbingly real post-apocalyptic world we happen to be in (my real dream worlds just make me want to stop and take in every detail) while I fly over it, and the weird side stories I witness (there was a boy and a horse locked on a very high floor of a very big abandoned factory building, drug dealers, and cold pizza I stole), but in general it feels like I get to dictate my side of the story, while someone else dictates the setting and the side I have to fight against. Which is strange, because in the end, it’s all in my head. Even though I have no idea where most of it comes from.

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Ordered a very overpriced late lunch on Uber Eats and realised I should have chosen McDonald’s.
They have a Hawaiian phase there now, with very good garlic shrimp burgers, pancakes with delicious caramel&macademian nuts butter, and vrry nice spicy new sauce for the nugs. I’m not a fan of McDonald’s and can stay away for months and not think of it once, but these spacial limited-time menus they get there from time to time are sometimes just pure genius.

The stuff I see on Ubet Eats sure looks pretty, buth both times that I tried it, the food itself felt worse than what I can usually get from my usual food delivery places, and definely didn’t match its pretty high price.

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I don’t like summer. The heat and humidity drive me to panic attacks, and make me want to stay inside for months. If I lived somewhere cold when summers were short and summer nights were cool, I’m sure it would be different.

But there is one thing about the Japanese summer that has gotten under my skin. It’s the cicadas’ songs. I don’t like summer, but when I lie in bed and listen to the familiar melodies of the Japanese cicadas outside that sing of summer heat, the world feels right.

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I love to buy the largest, meatiest tomatoes I can find in the store (yellow ones are my favorite, but pink ones are great too), and then messily eat them whole, while sprinkling some salt, without cutting them into pieces.

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People may have a lot of things.
You may even look at them and think, ‘Oh, they have so many things I don’t. They have so many things I wish I had. I would be so much happier if I had the things they have.’
And by ‘things’, I mean all things. Like family, friends, money, careers, houses and homes, hobbies, plans, places to be and people to talk to. All the things.
But the problem is that no matter how many things people have, it doesn’t mean that they have the one thing they need to keep living.

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I’m usually too afraid to waste it to use it often, but:

The ultimate medicinal combination for a Sunday when you were hurting and feeling like shit:

  • curtains that shut out all the light from outside
  • softest clothes you can find
  • iced sweet late
  • sweets
  • painkillers
  • aroma oil in a diffuser
  • and the extended editions of Lord of the Rings

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I’m sure many people noticed/knew about this all these years, but I just made this discovery for myself for the very first time.

How funnily the world is connected in all the weird places.