MarsCon 2018: Rose-Colored Glasses

This is the story of how, and why, I spent the past weekend in a planned state of panic.

Spoiler alert for any uninitiated bots following my Twitter feed: I'm a nerd. A geek. A self-conscious fan of science and folklore, as manifest in both forensic and fictionalized forms. I have a double BA from Northwestern in Mathematics and History. I have read the entirety of Frazer's Golden Bough and often perform non-Euclidean geometry in my sleep.

I'm also a survivor of child sexual abuse. I wish I could say that's not relevant, but I suspect it may be coloring -- the panic, obviously, but also my take on that.

Despite my deeply dysfunctional, profoundly introverted personal inclinations... I am also a MOM. I chose to have children. Probably the most selfish choice I have ever made. And yet: You. Anyone. Everyone. Can tell I don't regret it.

Which brings us to MarsCon 2018. Annual gathering of geeks in Williamsburg, VA. A mini-vacation, fun family time for myself, my partner, and our nerdling teenage daughters. Second consecutive year we've attempted this, and I have to say I am owning it.

Cons ("conventions" -- I love the cognitive dissonance) like this are places where individuals are allowed/expected to "geek out" over their favorite cultural icons. Usually in the context of science fiction or fantasy, but almost anything goes; the people who stand out the most are actually the ones in mundane, ordinary outfits. As an anarchist, I'm not a super enthused fan of pop culture... but I do like some stuff, enough to want to share it. In the context of MarsCon, I wanted to share my affection for Rebecca Sugar and her cartoon "Steven Universe." I liked the character Rose Quartz to such an extent that I hand-crafted a costume for cosplay.

My first ever attempt. Spray-painted (pink) foam sword from 5 Below, wrapped the hilt in darker pink Duck Tape. Poofy tulle pink ombre skirt from a true artisan on Etsy, white t-shirt a Tar-zhay, dainty pink velvet ballerina slippers from J.C. Penny's, perfectly matching pink velvet backpack via Wal-Mart.

Immediately upon entrance: small children gaze @ me & whisper to one another: "Steven Universe!"

Before lunch, I have to stop counting the positive reactions I am receiving. Information overload, bias encountered, how to correct? System failure!

In the dealer room, I am waiting to buy something when a middle-aged man approaches me. "My daughter wants to know if you're Rose Quartz from Steven Universe, but she's too shy to ask." I reply, "Yes! I am! And I am super shy too!!!"

Couple hours later, I am huddled in a corner sipping chai; a tiny, super extroverted 4-year-old human appears next to me: "I like your pink hair. I want to touch it?" I tell her of course she can. She asks me if I have my own hair underneath? Yes, I do. "What are you?" she asks. "I'm Rose Quartz!" I can tell she has no idea who that is, and yet she is supremely satisfied.

My life partner needed me to take driving control on our way to MarsCon, when we were weary and I was (artificially) hyper-alert. Google had lied to us (no surprise) yet we managed to find our way despite disinformation. Normal people would have registered our experience as negative, or at least a minor setback... and yet what I took from it most was our delight in street-level fog over the Rappahannock River. Mystical environment encompassing us as we achieved objective goals!

I was 30 years old before I learned to drive. No excuse, no reason outside the admission that attacks on children can lead to craziness, and this trend is drastically under-reported by science. I wouldn't think of going here, except that I am outside my box and my closest genetic relative can't comment because he is pigeonholed as a crazy sub-human.

Anyone who has ever interacted with me knows that I'm not an optimist. It's not just that I don't automatically look on the bright side. I have empirical trouble seeing anything but darkness.... anywhere. So it meant something, at least to me, that I chose to role-play a positive person. Someone who can see beauty in anything. Someone who accepts everyone around her for who they are. Someone with the courage to practice real-life curiosity and compassion.

Street-level fog corresponds one-to-one with obfuscation re: facts with regard to the narrative of the last 30 yrs. I can't cleanly divest myself from this shit, ergo I cannot endorse anyone who claims to achieve that.

I am not Rose Quartz. But I'd like to be.

And for a little while, other humans saw me being her.

Beltway Psychic Broods Bitterly upon the Finale of a Frigid Year

I doubt any of my followers/fans/catfishing specops stalkers realize how intricate my antipathy to social media actually is. I am not, by nature, an anti-social person. I earned my aversion the hard way.

Connecting almost always leaves me cold. And yet, this algid response has its genesis in a conscious choice. I am much too easily moved by the emotions of others. I feel their feels without even wanting to. It's strongest for people I am closest to -- my husband and my daughters -- but it can happen with almost anyone. It's not reliable, but it's real; by which I mean it gives me statistically unlikely results even though I don't believe in any explanation for it.

I'm an empath. Which is not to say I'm a nice person. One of the (obviously not clinical) tests I perform is to focus my attention on another human in a public place. Someone I can see, who cannot see me. I focus my rage and fear at them. More often than not, I make them uneasy.

Deeply unethical if you think about it, yes?

I'm a broken being. Sure, all of us are. Sanity -- peace -- is an illusion people share. The main difference between me and Them has always been that I never shared it.

Increasingly, as America collapses, humans are shifting towards my perspective.

I don't know how to deal with this.

Redux

I recently found myself making what was, for me, a rare decision: deleting an entire thread on my Facebook timeline, due to the toxicity spiraling among some of my relatives and friends.

I’m no stranger to toxicity. There is much that is toxic in me. My social ethics are unrefined, little more than a basic rubric: try to be more generous to others than I am to myself.

Yes, I’m aware that this ethos may be construed as masochistic. But the reasoning behind it makes as much sense as anything else. When I’m hurt, it is always because I am the only one who can. No one else on this planet is allowed to damage me. I’m nobody’s fucking victim.

I feel an ephemeral sense of guilt for abrogating my friends’ 1st Amendment rights. I’ve been working on guilt lately; I think it’s a trap, a social construct with good intentions that doesn’t actually produce good results. I am in no way a no-platforming advocate; and yet, this was all happening on my timeline, my very own garden patch in the moral wilderness. I was deep in my downstate, jaded not-quite-close-enough to numb.

For anyone who’s followed my posts or read my blog, the context should be obvious: #metoo.

Very likely, my willingness to be hurt derives from childhood sexual abuse. The traumatic experiences of my childhood automatically confer upon me unquestionable victim status. WHICH I EMPHATICALLY REJECT. I was damaged before I could formulate any rational response. My father honestly believed that being cruel to a child would make it stronger. He channeled Nietzsche without ever actually reading the bastard. (They shared syphilis though). And, to be fair -- I did emerge stronger than I might have otherwise. Just not in any way he envisioned, or was even capable of comprehending. Very early in my life, I cracked. I broke. There is great strength (power) along faultlines. But it’s an unpredictable strength, unwelcome, chaotic. I saw -- and eventually said -- so many things I wasn’t supposed to.

All this is why I’m so conflicted when I see women coming out everywhere with #metoo. I always knew you were there. But I have never expected sympathy or sisterhood from any of you. I don’t even know how to process those concepts. And the cynical, anarchist side of me sneers at your addiction to the trending norm. I have spent decades brazenly sharing the brutal truths of my life. Not to acquire sympathy (as I’ve said, I can barely stand it) -- but to prove to myself that I am not a coward. Not a victim.

I’m not posting this to attack anyone. As a natural empath, dissociated from society -- a survivor with hypervigilance and sensory processing disorder… I could be SO much more evil than I am. If I gave in to the temptation to channel the vengeance of the victim.

I refuse that path too. Yes, I listen to my intuition. I’ve spent decades training my conscious mind to communicate with my subconscious, struggling to understand an unruly talent for psychological insight. Skepticism and self-awareness have been true friends. Free will isn’t a blessing bestowed upon you at conception by a benevolent omniscience. It’s a skill that must be learned. An achievement that must be earned.

Which isn’t to say that those who have acquired it (to whatever degree) are superior, objectively, to those who haven’t. People who have mastered auto mechanics or Latin or football or astrophysics or waitressing are not morally superior to those who haven’t. We are all thrust into being without consideration of our will, into arbitrary circumstance. Radical contingency. I figure the best response to this (absurdly shitty) deal is universal compassion.

How I Failed To Be Carrie

Millington Central High School, 1989-1993. Home of the Trojans. Adolescent educational center of mid-Southern Americans: an unconventional admixture of Navy brats, the rural poor, and bused-in African-American youth.

I was an outlier, in so many ways. My parents were impoverished Navy brats whose idiotic conservative worldview ineluctably encouraged me to sympathize with "other" demographics. The story would have ended there, except for the fact that I was born too sensitive for my own good. So sharp I cut myself, time after time.

My firstborn daughter Eris will be starting her senior year at Robinson Secondary School next week. I gave birth to her when I was the same age my bipolar mother gave birth to me.

I was Eris's age when I first read Stephen King. You have to realize, I was a "gifted" student -- I took every AP class my high school offered. All 3 of them. I was an absurd intellectual snob who only indulged pop culture because of the soul-destroying pre-Internet information desert.

SO. Senior year, rural TN, 1993. Less than a month before Homecoming. Elite football quarterback found himself disgraced due to personal scandal: according to all & sundry, he had physically struck his girlfriend, precipitating a scandalous, dramatic breakup.

Quarterback boy happened to be in my Econ class. He actually talked to me. That year, 1992-93, was the frigging height of my social life ever -- everyone was aware that I'd ranked high on national math tests, aced the SAT, and was applying to Stanford, Harvard & Yale*.

I wasn't even surprised when the football star, who'd lost his status in a too-soon-maybe #MeToo moment, decided he had nothing to lose by asking the genius chubby chick to the dance.

Even now, 25 years later, my hypnagogic half-dreaming mind contrives occasional hallucinations of killing him -- and everyone else -- at Senior Prom. Fortunately for the world, I have excellent impulse control. I just said no to bloody vengeance.

That moment of generosity has colored all my life choices ever since.





*Thank DISCORDIA I wasn't accepted; high-status universities are fucking full of fratboy rapists, after all.

Cromwell: A Cautionary Tale of Love and Loss

Date: Autumn, 1995. Physical place(s): Northwestern University, Evanston IL; UVA, Charlottesville VA. Ethereal location: alt.angst, Usenet.

The year I ventured past my comfort zone into cyberspace.

Free internet access and an email address were complimentary perks associated with my acceptance into one of the nation's top colleges, the moment I registered as a freshman in 1993. This was back in the days when dialup AOL charged by the hour. Back then, I was a neo-Luddite -- opposed to technology on sheer principle, out of a visceral mistrust of power: a consequence of my parents' miscalculations raising me. It took me two full years of spiraling despair to achieve the desperate courage to apply for my email address. To seek out new life, new civilizations. To boldly go...

Split infinitives aside, eventually I decided that being aggressively alone did not necessarily constitute a virtue. I tuned in, turned on... but felt no obligation to drop out. I did, however, find myself connecting with a VERY weird group of people.

I'd known, from early childhood, that I was irrevocably weird. My mother was bipolar, my father was an abusive drunk. My brother has heard the voice of GOD telling him to kill his son. Schizophrenia is poorly understood by humanity generally, but I suspect (as a skeptic) that it is an extreme version of our innate ability to recognize patterns, coupled with a yearning for meaning which is rooted in the fact that our consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. We all want to believe we are real, that we have meaning independent of anything we ourselves create. 

So. In 1995 I signed up. I sought out the other weirdos. I found alt.angst.

I shared my story, for the first time ever. I crafted poetry that still blinds me with its truth. I told the truth, despite every instinct telling me I shouldn't. Couldn't. I was so deep in despair, I didn't see anything else. Lies were so utterly worthless; I knew that, whether or not I knew anything. 

Cromwell came to me as a savior. He came to me in pain and sorrow, a victim of the American South and its Puritanical worldview. He came to me as a soulmate, as a light in August, as William Faulkner and Walker Percy. I shared hours and hours of expensive phone-time with this young man, David Bjorlin, who convinced himself I was the semi-schizo heroine of The Second Coming.

What a letdown. What a disappointment! For him. When I spent my father's borrowed money to meet him in 1996. I was 5 foot 9, and a size 14.

It took me more than a decade to realize that being too short is the equivalent, in males, of being too fat in a woman. All I saw was his all-too-explicable rejection. It never registered for me when David Perry told me that Cromwell told him, "She was bigger than me, what can I say?" All I could register was that I was wrong. Unfit.

I'm posting this, ostensibly, as a cautionary tale. Against seeking soulmates in cyberspace. People are weak. They are shallow, not by inclination, but by design. The design of the ruling class. 

None of us deserve to be pawns in class warfare! 

It IS possible to elude. To avoid. To circumvent! The paradigm. It is possible to reject those who seek to program you. But you'll never achieve that following the path of Cromwell. Truth is messy. It's complex. It's not an ideology. It's the fucking reality behind your perception, and there are (potentially) as many perceptions as there are perceivers. JUDGE YOUR FELLOW HUMANS AT YOUR PERIL.

How Does Your Light Shine, In the Halls of Shambala?

Spring Equinox, 1975. Doctors told my mother I was a dead thing in my mother's womb.

Susan Phyllis Keir Faucher was a reluctant flower-child hippie in mid-70's Memphis, TN. Her father, Stephen Duncan Keir, was a WWII veteran officer who had volunteered to venture into Vietnam. Susan's classmates at Millington Central High School had denigrated her as the daughter of a collaborator. A daughter of The Man. Peer pressure led her to personal drug experimentation, which led her to a "rehab facility," where she met William Franklin Faucher. Like her, Bill was the son of a Naval Air Force veteran. His family were lower-class; his father never achieved officer status. Both families were children of the Great Depression, and in terms of 70's socioeconomics -- the rehab-clinic military connection was more than enough to constitute a fresh start. A new beginning.

"Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain

With the rain in Shambala
Wash away my sorrow, wash away my shame
With the rain in Shambala

Ah, ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Everyone is helpful, everyone is kind
On the road to Shambala
Everyone is lucky, everyone is so kind
On the road to Shambala

Ah, ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

How does your light shine, in the halls of Shambala?"

I was born in the spring of 1975. Family lore tells me my father cried that day, because my mom had had 4 previous miscarriages. I've no evidence of this, but it makes sense, given her history & lifestyle. Susan was the child of a Yankee military father and a Southern belle mother. She was born in 1951 on a military base at Chincoteague, VA (famously home of feral horses). A crucial part of her adolescence was spent at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.


My father (who may or may not have raped me) was born in San Diego, CA in 1953. His father's (unknown) people came from Orange County, Massachusetts. His mother's came from rural TN. Somehow, Bill & Susan ended up in the same rehab clinic in Memphis in 1974. Just in time to fall in love... and merge to make ME.


I was a dead thing in Susan's womb, corrupt and weak. I should never have been born. Against all odds, I stole my first breath on 23 May, 1975. Bill and Susan wept.


I am sharing this to explain what an improbably angry hippie I am. Poverty tends to nix IQ scores. Performance is strongly correlated with socioeconomic status. But there are exceptions.

I myself am "exceptional."

I consciously chose (free will? maybe?) to mate with an exception. Therefore, my offspring are even more consciously exceptional, even more self-aware, than I am. I'd caution you, except I'm hoping they'll take you all UNAWARE.

Why I Married Sheldon Cooper

Well, okay. Not literally. Sheldon Cooper is a fictional character, and while I myself am likely an illusion, my empirical husband almost certainly exists. The parallels between my darling homunculus (a pet name for him, which I posted online years before Penny used it for Leonard) and the character of Sheldon will be obvious to anyone who has watched the show and encountered Jonah Thomas online. Obvious at a glance -- to me suspiciously obvious, even eerie -- including details like Jonah's published plan to solve the conflict in the Middle East, which Sheldon also offers in "The Jerusalem Duality."

(As a person whose family history includes bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, I must take care when confronting coincidences. I don't have the luxury of the layman, whose magical thinking passes unnoticed, deemed harmless. My creativity is real and it has claws.)

Nevertheless. It doesn't take much of a mental leap to see similarities between "high-functioning" people on the Spectrum.

People like my husband -- people like Sheldon and Sherlock -- are almost always portrayed in fiction as outside the realm of normal human intercourse. Their relationships with others are characteristically few and atypical. There is a recurring motif of insensitivity, as if rationality is somehow incompatible with empathy. One cannot avoid the implication that such a person could never connect with someone who is emotionally vulnerable.

In my experience, the truth is utterly the opposite.

I was physically, emotionally, and sexually abused as a child. As a toddler I learned -- instinctively -- to trust no one. No one at all. As a naturally emotional individual, I secretly yearned to be appreciated and understood, but the extreme wariness I acquired from my dysfunctional parents prevented me from connecting with anyone -- until I encountered the internet.

For all its flaws, the internet is a place where strangers can meet safely. Strange people who would never have connected with one another in the course of ordinary "real" life. I was a mathematics student at Northwestern University when I first encountered the man I would marry: he was trolling the Usenet group alt.angst, a place I posted prose poetry.

(My children still can't overcome their incredulity that I married an internet troll.)

Why did I marry him? Why have I remained his partner for almost 18 years?

The answer lies embedded within the theme of this blog: "Reflections on the Myth of Sanity." Assertion: no modern human can claim sanity. On one level or another, we are all insane. Human intellectual achievement has eclipsed our biological evolution. Our brains can't cope with what we do to ourselves on a daily basis. Our brains lie to us all the time. My hypothesis is that people with "Asperger's syndrome" exhibit superior objective clarity to those who prefer self-delusion (which includes almost everyone, even myself).

Therefore I submit, as a pragmatic suggestion -- that persons who have been abused should seek out persons who fall within the Spectrum. These people can be trusted where others cannot. They will not soften their words to comfort you, which means you will have to be strong; nevertheless, they will not casually lie to you. They will not manipulate you. My Asperger's husband actually enjoys sex more than I do. Yet he is okay with my boundaries; he knows that my aversion to physical intimacy has nothing to do with him personally.