Status update: If your income last week was more than US$15, you should be supporting this web site. Here are the ways to do that:
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You can also mail a U.S. postal money order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322.
Last week I'd been paid to post, but had no words. I had written an e-book in half the time allotted under the original contract, sort of as a challenge, and finishing it while fighting an infection felt like a real challenge. Afterward it felt as if I might have strained something in my brain--or else programmed myself to focus on the e-book alone, during a reasonable amount of time for revising and improving it. I came online and read some things but really didn't think of any more to say than I said on Twitter.
This week I had not been paid to post, but had to go into town, anyway, to vote, and to collect my more functional umbrella, and (if anything came to mind) to post something here.
I had a lot of stuff to take home on Friday and thought, since the cafe was going to be closed on Saturday, I could just leave my favorite brolly on my favorite chair. Whoops! The cafe was closed to the public, but it was in use...There is a lot to be said for a cafe whose staff recognize your abandoned umbrella and hold on to it for you. There are a lot of people who believe the thing to do with abandoned umbrellas is adopt them, particularly on a wet day.
Last week's income had been $15; I did not, in fact, walk in having enough money to buy coffee, although I did walk in having reasons to expect that an online payment might have come through, which (at the time of writing) hasn't happened. If the payment had come through I expected to be able to send money to the bank and borrow the price of lunch and coffee. That didn't happen but someone saw me sit down without buying coffee and rushed to buy me coffee and a gluten-free Cow Patty (sort of a cookie-shaped chocolate candy with oatmeal in it; delicious). If people aren't my own personal dates, I would much much much rather they handed me cash for something I'd done than presumed to buy food for me; that five dollars could have paid for real food rather than junkfood. However, the cafe staff deserved a bit of overpayment, I thought, for holding on to my best umbrella...
The function of the Cow Patty was strictly to hold down the coffee. I'm still having out-of-control celiac reactions and currently have no idea what, if anything, I can safely eat. I've not really digested anything I've eaten since early September; that's why I was so run-down I actually ran up a fever in reaction to a silly little strep infection, the weekend before last, and I still have a residual cough. This had seemed like one of several valid reasons to spend this damp, dreary-looking day at home in bed.
I don't know whether even regular readers can possibly imagine the split that's been my life for the past ten years or so.
When I'm actually at home with the cats and the computer, my life is wonderful. Apart from the fact that my favorite people are dead (and even my favorite living people are starting to act "old"), I really do have everything but money. I'm where I want to be, with whom (among the living) I want to be with, doing what I want to be doing.
Then unfortunately considerations like food and heat remind me that, in terms of finances, my life is terrible. I have no income. Everything I do can reasonably be described as work, but it's a rare day that I see any payment for it. There's a very clear message coming from the outside world that other people would prefer that I just lie down and die so they can get on with their lives without me. That is the message you are sending when you fail to support this web site. The fact that most if not all of the foods I've been able to eat for years are now making me sick...really. If my private life, at home, where I don't have to think about most other living people at all, weren't so nearly perfect I would have euthanized myself a long time ago.
What allows me to enjoy most of my life, most of the time, is of course the fact that I was born an introvert. This is a permanent hereditary trait, like height and color, not a personal virtue--but it's an invaluable trait for active senior citizens. Highly Sensory-Perceptive kids are a minority. Highly Sensory-Perceptive seniors may not be a majority of the population over age 50 as a whole, but are the solid majority of the active, healthy seniors having all the fun.
Anyway, ( #phenology !) being the first customer in the cafe meant leaving the house at 7 a.m. Heavy rain had stopped, and the air temperature was balmy, so instead of taking time to dig the emergency-only umbrella out of the closet I decided to walk briskly into town and, if necessary, borrow an umbrella from a lurker halfway along the route. Last week's frosty mornings had finally brought out the color in the oak trees, and last night's rain had brought some of them down, gorgeous red and orange and coppery brown, all over the wet black pavement. Technically the sun was rising behind the sort of dense fog that really is a low-hanging rain cloud. That is, around the Cat Sanctuary the air was just very very humid; down on the paved road I could feel actual raindrops. The Cat Sanctuary isn't far enough above town that anyone has ever been able to look down through the fog and see rain falling, but this morning we did get that phenomenon--the house was at the very bottom of the cloud, just above the raindrops.
So I walked on, and started to become wet, and knocked on the door of the lurker halfway into town. "Could I borrow an umbrella?" And the lurker said, "I don't have an umbrella."
Why is it so hard to imagine, given the incidence of umbrella thefts and losses in this world, that a person who owns a house might not own an umbrella?
Another friend would be getting children ready for school. Another friend might not be awake yet, not being able to look out a window and see full daylight. Another friend's house has a small porch that wouldn't keep off the rain, and although my head, feet, and shawl were wet, the cell phone in the pocket on my leeward side was still dry. Might as well rush on to the storage space and take out the computer and the second-best umbrella and the flip-flop sandals.
Part of my mind was going "I'm too old for this kind of thing, I could get streptococcal pneumonia," and part was going "Age has nothing to do with that; it's all about the glyphosate poisoning," and part was going "How do you know it's glyphosate poisoning? How do you know your longsuffering colon isn't developing cancer at last?" And the answer to that is that I don't know. All I know is, I am too old to bother trying to survive cancer under Obamacare. I was born too old for that form of torture.
So I took out the computer and flip-flopped on out to the cafe. Wash hands before eating. Glance at the mirror. What I saw in the mirror did not look like an old person who ought to lie down and die. Nor feel like one. Actually, it feels like a body that may still be fighting off a disease reaction a healthy person would not have had, but has a lot of mileage left in it anyway...like a body that nature intended to dance on a lot more graves of greedheads who think people in their fifties ought to lie down and die.
All this to-be-or-not-to-be stuff is not what you wanted to read, of course, nor is it what I like to write, but it does come to mind every time I do work for which I don't see payment. It's what you're saying when you're not paying.
Corporations have invested a lot of money in giving you the idea that you're supposed to be able to read blogs for free, maybe even instead of buying books, what fun...but if corporations aren't paying the bloggers, and they're not, the whole Internet is going to collapse under its own weight.
I see a lot of stuff on the Internet about these days about how the market for paid online writing is shrinking and shrinking as more people try to get into it and more corporations realize that the Advertising Age is over. The corporations that are willing to pay (pennies) to fund blogs want them to be corporate blogs, full of messy screaming ads that would put you off reading them and bland, uncontroversial content that wouldn't hold your attention even if it were ad-free. And "Ooohhh, don't post anything religious or political! Google doesn't like religion or politics!"
So, how much does Google pay for book blogs that aren't "religious or political," if they existed--which they don't--or, more accurately, for book blogs that don't trigger Al Gore's and his cronies' reactions to "religious or political" dissent? Er, um, not much. Right. Honest, interesting blogs are going to be religious and political. Google is not going to fund them. Advertising is not going to fund them, either, because advertising is not going to generate enough revenue to fund anything in this century. If you want honest, interesting, independent blogs (or books or magazines or newsletters or publishers) to continue to exist, you need to fund them. You, the reader. If you want people to write what we have to say to you as a neighbor rather than what we might be paid to say by some corporation, then you need to pay us, just the way you'd pay for a book or magazine.
After sorting out the headlines-are-enough type of e-mail into the Bacon Folder, I had eighty-some e-mails to read this morning. None of them was the one I wanted to see, about improvements in or payment for the e-book. Thirty-some of them came from fellow "SEO Clerks," who advertise ourselves through a forum where we discuss the market for electronic content, the latest tips and tricks for "search engine optimization," the future of visual blogs and so on. Basically some of us are currently earning money, some are not; some of us have had years when we earned money online, some have not. None of us is, however, earning enough to hire others of us at a decent wage. Sigh.
On the forum, today's hot topic was scams on social media that encourage people to display their real names and invest their real money, because they can supposedly trust people who supposedly display their real names...well, duh. A lot of those people are using other people's real names. The way to avoid being cheated out of money online is...not to transfer money online. Set up a Paypal account, preferably in a different bank (and, if possible, a different State) from any actual bank accounts in which you've deposited more than US$100, and don't let the amount in your Paypal account stay above $100 overnight. If you do have a credit card, never even mention having it on the Internet. Use Paypal or giftcards for any payments you make online. Do not, ever, even if you know a business owner personally, put your real name and address on the Internet; the best way to make sure burglars won't steal your keys from your best friend is not to burden your best friend with your keys.
I've done full-length posts about cybersecurity, too. I didn't want to do another one.
Then an e-friend blogged about a neighbor's passing. Apparently the e-friend's neighbor had been active in cyberspace, then become less active as person became "old." Although the e-friend knew the neighbor's real name and screen name, person never met the heirs who moved into the neighbor's house during the neighbor's illness, and didn't realize for a few weeks after the funeral that it had been the final illness. "Why don't people get to know their neighbors any more?" e-friend lamented.
Well...all cities and neighborhoods aren't alike, but when I lived in and near Washington, there was a pretty solid consensus that the way nice people can endure living crowded together, constantly within sight of each other, is not knowing each other personally. Your neighbors are familiar strangers. You don't want to know their names. On one street where I lived for some time, (some of) the people at the same number on the next street west of us were called Jones; I knew that because every few months the postman got careless and dropped a piece of the Joneses' mail into our box, and somebody would walk around the block to put it in the Joneses' box. They did that for us too. And if you saw an Emergency Situation you'd call 911, and if someone appeared to be ill or injured on the road you'd offer help, and if someone whispered that s/he was going out of town you'd even house-sit, free of charge...but you didn't want to know anything about the neighbors except that they were keeping to themselves, as usual. Apart from those Joneses I maintained, not without pride, an unbroken record of not knowing the names of anyone who lived next door, directly across a street, or in the same block or row, where I rented a city address.
It's a matter of common decency, not wanting to foment gossip and resentment. You know city neighbors are going to say things like "Somebody was out late last night, up early this morning, taken to hospital," etc., etc., and you want to keep it to "Somebody" and not have people telling a whole story about any specific "body." And so, if you did ever get into a non-emergency conversation and exchange names, most people in Washington are actually known to their neighbors by "street names." Some street names sound like nicknames, and some sound as if they might be somebody's actual legal given name, but not particularly like the actual legal given name of the person using them. If you hear someone answer to "Hey, Joe," on the street, you can be reasonably sure that neither "Joe" nor "Joseph" is part of his legal name. This helps prevent someone's casual vent-of-feelings from doing harm, if it's heard by outsiders who can't consider the source or ask further questions about the story, and thus helps keep "Somebody was out late last night" (true) from morphing into "Joe's giving Jane grounds for divorce" or "Joe can't be relied on to get to work on time in the morning" (false). It's not foolproof, but it helps.
This morning's e-mail contained, also, a survey in which someone asked, "Have you ever changed your first name, or wanted to?" No, I've never changed the first name printed on my (long lost) original birth certificate, but then again nobody's used it since my father died. My mother prefers one of the traditional short forms; most friends in the city (including my husband) liked my street name; people with whom I do business, if they're worth talking to, use "Ma'am." I looked at my voter identification paraphernalia, and the name on those documents felt to me like the name of a much younger person, from far back in the past...
Then there was the Yelp e-mail. I don't like, trust, or respect Yelp, and hadn't planned to post anything there, until a search engine showed that a few grumpy visitors had down-rated the cafe where I blog. How good do baked goods get? How much does it mean that the Roberts Family Bakery & Cafe has been rated among Virginia's best? Nobody could possibly sample all the baked goods in Virginia on any given day, and if they could, the recipe they liked best on Monday might not be the recipe that turned out best on Tuesday. Very few people open bakeries if they're not willing and able to deliver good baked goods. Which you like best depends on your personal taste, your preference for buttery over sweet, dark chocolate over fruity lemon or savory onion, cupcakes over doughnuts or bagels or deli rolls. I could understand why people might say "I'll give this bakery three or four stars and this other one five, out of five." But I suspect anybody giving this bakery a low rating of having an axe to grind. Three stars out of five is a matter of taste. One out of five? Somebody's got a problem...
So I checked Yelp and found, sure enough, true to Yelp's avowed goal of giving big chains generally better ratings than independent businesses, somebody saying "A supermarket bakery's just as good." Hmm...what supermarket might that be? It's possible. Back when I ate baked goods, Giant used to have in-store bakeries, and Mr. Cohen was still alive, and everything was fresh, and if it wasn't cheese it was vegan, and goodness gracious, some of their baked goods were good. I'm not saying that all big-chain supermarkets' in-house bakeries, deli-counters, or fast-food corners are bad. But you do need to specify which supermarket; maybe which individual store within a big chain, because they can vary.
I can tell you that Gate City's very own Food Lion used to have a deli-bakery corner, and gave it up, for the good and sufficient reason that the food was execrable. It still is. I can tell you that last winter I went into Food Lion while I had flu, with the conscious intention that if I breathed on people it was going to be only on hostile people, and I bought only name-brand items that looked just like name-brand items that hadn't made me sick during the previous week--those items being on sale at Food Lion--and they made me sick. Do name-brand food manufacturers deliberately send lower-quality things to Food Lion? It's possible. A lot of people hate Food Lion for the good and sufficient reason that that chain charges preposterous prices on name-brand items that aren't on special manufacturer-discount sales, in order to push store-brand "equivalents," and the store-brand "equivalent" products are vile. We are talking about peanuts that waft up black rot when you open the container, about baked goods that sprout whiskers, about meat that's full of salmonella, and about canned veg with roaches floating in them. So maybe it's not surprising that even the name-brand food in such a store is inferior even to the same brands, even in the "dollar stores."
And then there's Weber City's Food City, where gluten-tolerant people rate the deli-bakery food decent, and the few naturally gluten-free items I've tasted there seemed decent to me, but...if you've caught some of the employees in the dishonest acts some of them practice, they do hold a grudge. I have, they do, I know I'm not just feeling standard small-town-storekeeper hate for my frugal shopping habits in that store.
Which brings me to the reason people cited for down-rating the cafe: a felt lack of emotional "warmth." Does that ever tell me something about those people. It tells me that they're extroverts. It tells me that they're unenlightened extroverts. It tells me that they're the sort of people who may have been able to convince themselves that the way they behave is "friendly," but if they were paying attention they'd have to admit that it is, in fact, profoundly hostile, stemming from deep-rooted fear and self-loathing...Extroverts are extroverts because their neurological development is incomplete, and probably they shouldn't be blamed for that; probably they should be lovingly encouraged to overcome their fear of quietness, but they should be taught to be careful about projecting their hostilities onto others.
Gate City's independent storekeepers are a very independent lot indeed. I know the Food City where I reported a thief has an active grudge against me; I knew, before he'd destroyed his own business, that the token woman-hating homosexual Gate City was being nice about one year hated me because he'd bought a partnership the more competent partner had been considering offering to me; and then there are certain storekeepers whose political rants have been recommended to me as positive tourist attractions. That's not what those who down-rated this cafe were talking about. I don't think any of the Addington-Roberts family have been guilty of that kind of thing. I've spent a lot of time in here and I've not heard anything that sounded like hostility toward any person, or even like a rant.
I have overheard things, after the lunch crowd had gone, about family problems that might have left family members drained and tired. Personally I have a policy about store employees who seem drained and tired, though not pushy or hostile--people who wait on me promptly but don't smile, that sort of thing. I've been there, and as a point of policy I salute those people. And I recommend that you do, too, Gentle Readers, because I seriously believe that the human conscience exposes people to very unpleasant things when they get judgmental about the suffering of others. I only wish every person who'd ever waxed judgmental about someone else fighting the flu was guaranteed to come down with pneumonia within a week. They deserve it.
Nobody will ever have completely perfect "people skills," the ability to guess whether someone who seems quiet is a depressed extrovert who wants to be cheered up with chatter or a happy introvert who loves us because we're not pushing chatter in his or her face...but what these United States desperately need is more awareness that a good half of the population are likely to be introverts, or at least people who "like peace and quiet, early in the morning."
The Bible actually comes down on the side of those who are underwhelmed by loud "greetings in the marketplace." Jesus disparaged "hypocrites who love greetings." The Bible recognizes that "whoever blesses his friend, with a loud voice, early in the morning" can be "counted as cursing him."
We have to stop allowing extroverts to tell us that business owners who respect introverts' preference for quiet are guilty of "coldness," that everybody has to keep ramping up the cheerleader act and screeching louder until everybody has had a nervous breakdown. We have to start teaching these people that at the very least, if they want to be chattered at in stores, it's up to them to start the chatter instead of demanding it and blaming the people who are happier without it.
Sometimes the cafe gets quite noisy. Some members of the Addington-Roberts clan have no problem with shouting out friendly banter above a chattering crowd. Sometimes when a midlist celebrity, book writer or musician or Delegate Kilgore, comes in you hear fannish shrieks from people who want others to notice them squealing "Hi, Terry!" and I was brought up to find that tacky and embarrassing, but usually the loud conversation is mutually enjoyed by all participants, and doesn't bother me. I hear very few words in the commotion. I do my thing, and the people who like the loud conversation do their thing. This loud conversation starts with the people who want it; it's not shoved at everyone who wanders into the cafe.
One thing I like about Gate City is that the bullying of introverts into thinking that "people skills" means extrovert skills, which means we're not "people," has been much less successful here than it was in some places. Introverts. Are. People. In fact, we're nicer people than extroverts are, we live longer, and we have more fun! When we study introversion as the effect of any of a group of healthy permanent physical traits, the evidence just keeps piling up that it's not only that introverts have human rights. It's more like "Introvert is to extrovert as sighted is to blind," only on a moral, ethical, and social level, which is much more important than eyesight. We should be charitable toward extroverts; we should not let them bully us out of appreciating ourselves, appreciating each other, and appreciating our kind of "emotional warmth"--our ability to be comfortable around other people without constant mindless babble.
One of the extroverts on Yelp mentioned leading groups of "children with special needs." I don't know to what extent children's "special needs" are actually served by their being led around in groups, although the neediest child I ever met (mute, wheelchair-bound, tube-fed) was an extrovert who communicated, via biofeedback, that she positively loved garish colors and loud music and noisy, messy, kindergarten-like classes at school.
I have, however, seen children respond positively to the introvert kind of "emotional warmth," too. Some of those children had been accurately identified as gifted-and-talented, and some had been mislabelled as "shy" or "backward" or "bashful" or "neurotic" or, more recently, "high-functioning autistic" (always by people who'd never met a child who really was autistic). Before High Sensory Perceptivity had been studied in any scientific way I'd learned to anticipate the predictable accolade: "S/He almost never goes to people, warms up to people, bonds with people, the way s/he has with" me or some other HSP-introvert friend.
Both my husband, who had melanism, and the fellow I'd been dating before I met him, who had albinism, were average-height, wiry, stronger-than-average men with big hands and low voices. How often I heard from adults that albinism and melanism are things some people consider ugly and scary-looking. How often I saw little children run after these men, even latch onto them in public places. More than once we were told, "S/He is usually afraid of men we don't know well." I don't know how many of those children had "special needs," or were thought to have. I know some of them did, and one of the needs they felt they had was for the introvert kind of social warmth that is communicated by respectfully leaving people alone until they decided they want more attention.
For me, as an introvert, it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to encourage a group of children to chatter in a store or restaurant. It's not, however, hard to imagine someone wanting to encourage an allegedly asocial child to talk to a friendly storekeeper. I've seen that, while I was keeping a booth or store.
If I wanted to encourage a child, or children, to talk to a storekeeper I would take the initiative to introduce the child, or children. I know if I'm the storekeeper and you bring a lot of kids into my store, I'm likely to feel overwhelmed and go straight to my default reaction of leave-them-alone-so-the-ones-worth-caring-about-will-leave-me-alone. If you want me to talk to a child, or children, that's not a problem, and I am interested in Today's Youth and their opinions, but you need to communicate that to me by introducing the kids. ("This is Tracy, who's eleven, and on the way out here Tracy was wondering whether you had...")
It's actually happened that children who'd been misidentified as autistic have warmed up and made eye contact, showed appropriate facial expressions, body-synced and all, as they've gone from telling me about the latest games to talking about school and friends and their lives in general. But if the adults in charge of these children didn't encourage conversation, these days my main concern would to avoid intimidating the children even by looking at them...you never know what kind of crazy reaction may form in a mismedicated brain!
I'd be very concerned about leaving a child in the custody of an unenlightened extrovert, especially if I thought the child needed a little special coaching to develop social skills. I've watched children with "special needs"--e.g. one of my own young relatives, who's never shown any deficiency in empathy as such, at home, but who does have both a severe astigmatism (inherited from the mother's side of the family, which includes me) and a significant degree of hearing loss. If you want that child to freeze, you get up in per (= the young person's) face, stare into per eyes, and loudly demand "Look at me. What am I feeling?" If you want to see for yourself that person has a capacity for empathy, you reward the child for practicing per learned greeting behavior by smiling and shaking hands, then talk to a classmate or sibling, and wait. Sometimes this "child with special needs" will go off by perself. Sometimes person will come up to you and volunteer a remark that makes it painfully obvious that (a) person has heard very little of what's been said, and (b) person has been paying attention to, and is concerned about, someone else's feelings. Sometimes person will just make an ordinary "kid" comment about a game, a book, maybe if you're lucky even something you're trying to teach a group. But none of that is likely to happen if you push this child.
There's a degree of sensory hypersensitivity and fragmentation that has nothing to do with the positive hereditary kind of High Sensory Perception, that can be caused (permanently) by autistic-type brain damage or (temporarily) by fevers, drugs, or injuries. How do adults know which a child has? It can be hard for adults to tell, and it's hard for the children to tell us unless and until they've lived long enough to know they have the good kind of sensitivity. There are a few parameters. For instance, healthy HSPs can usually be potty-trained as soon as they can walk, but even if they're allowed to wear diapers "until they train themselves" they're likely to do it before age six. But since every case of brain damage is different, and it's possible for healthy perceptivity to coexist with unhealthy hypersensitivity, some children can be hard to label.
One way to tell which category a child fits into may well be protecting the child from the harsh judgments of unenlightened extroverts and observing whether or not the child reacts to introvert-style "warmth." Autistic children are still autistic around people who give them time to react to things and people in their own way. Healthy, perceptive, introvert children become perky and chatty around friendly but not pushy adults.
In other words, although the extrovert on Yelp reported that some of her students "warm right up" to people who smile and chatter at them--extroverts like themselves, no doubt, and very likely extroverts are a majority in the "special needs" category--I have to wonder how many of them "warm right up" to people who forbear, to fellow introverts who respect their feelings rather than demanding that everybody feel the same way about the same things. I have to wonder how many more "high-functioning autistics" are, in fact, normal children who may or may not even have genuine neurological damage (other than autism, e.g. hearing loss) but who have become shy when exposed to social bullies.
I was lucky to be a child when genuine autism was only just being identified, when the term "autistic" was often used, objectively, just to describe specific behavior in which people indulged with no reference to other people. (The word for people with real autism, at the time, was "idiots," spoken in a very different tone than the Irish-American way I'm likely to chide "idjits.") So I wasn't mislabelled as autistic, or even identified as dyslexic, which I was and am. I was labelled "gifted" and "neurotic." And, thank God, at the time those labels meant that at least some adults left a person alone, so that I did have a few opportunities to warm up and bond and like adults and even learn things from adults, rather than being constantly bullied because I was and am relatively healthy in neurological terms.
I want to set the record straight. Louder, faster, more intensive chatter does not feel "warm" to shy, quiet, sensitive children. It feels hateful. It feels like fingernails on a chalkboard, like the black rot in bad peanuts, and like stepping barefoot on a whole nest of tent caterpillars.
To some children who may need encouragement to build social skills, quietness feels "warm."
(This is the original and classic study; there's a follow-up specifically about The Highly Sensitive Child, but I've not read it.)
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