Heated Rivalry - Musings on Shane’s Ginger Ale

Like many romance fans, Heated Rivalry has been most of my personality since S1E5 dropped. If I haven’t saved  a fan edit/supercut, I probably have it bookmarked.  I’m collecting WYCTMCTS scenes like infinity stones. I had to navigate an unfriendly file system over 200x, so far, to do so, so you know I’m invested. I’ve read more AO3 than ever.  I’m getting further into the weeds of niche interviews, reviews, and hot takes - largely on YouTube  I’m trying not to go full parasocial with OhHiClaire, who frequently posts delightful updates to feed the beast  Today I watched Chala the intimacy coordinator then jumped to autism rep  

 Only halfway thru, this fine disquisition on Shane's austistic presentation in Heated Rivalry I had some thoughts wrt alexithymia. This is a condition wherein someone, commonly an autistic someone, finds it difficult to identify and name their feelings and needs. I'm going to narrow that to say it more likely they’re unable to do so in the moment or on demand. I think autistic people can & often do figure out what they want and name it, but like many other social things, it may need to be deliberately done with extra care, often because it doesn't match the cultural/social script (that script autistic kids don't get issued but must also deduce deliberately.) And even if that want or need is identified & named, that doesn’t mean it will be satisfied, for both just & unjust reasons. (Autistic people are often not given grace when requesting even reasonable needs be allowed for, so why bother learning to name wants that likely won’t be granted?)

 In the Show Heated Rivalry, most everyone says Shane’s mom is pushy but I see it more as she’s paving his way, the best she knows how. She sees her kid wants to play hockey so she will make sure** he can play as much hockey as possible. In Momager mode it does get pushy but as more of a shepherding. “I’ve made these NORMAL choices that would be expected of someone in your position (and gassed you up because you’re my awesome kid) so you don’t have to think about details.” He just has to show up to do the work and/or wear specific brands. 

(IMHO She tells him about the salmon and rice (S1E4 post tuna meltdown) to *reassure* him that he’ll have acceptable food & won’t be surprised by what comes, rather than dictating his choice.)

Which is to say that Yuna has swept the path clear for her boy,  in every aspect except his love life, probably without much more input that “yeah I wanna play more hockey”. She even tries the love life options with the prince… or princess. So beyond being interested in hockey and houses, things which are structurally and societally normal, Shane has NO PRACTICE asking for what he wants. Because, with the notable exceptions of Ilya & ginger ale, what he wants isn’t different enough from what his mom sets him up for to fight her on it. He doesn’t ask to do the dorky drink commercial but he does the dorky drink commercial and doesn’t really care one way or the other. He doesn’t have noticeable non-hockey hobbies so he may as well make the ad and get the money. He says “I eat a macrobiotic diet” and people willing to please The Shane Hollander provide macrobiotic foods for the athlete. He plays hockey and people give him everything he needs to win at hockey. He needs sheets on the bed or clothes to wear and he either uses his team swag, branded gear, or hires a stylist and tells them to make normal choices. He doesn’t have a big opinion on much outside of Hockey, Housing, or Ilya… or ginger ale. And he’s not particularly adept/lucky at securing ginger ale away from home. So he has little practice *noticing* what he wants or asking for it because by and large what he needs and wants, within the standard deviation of acceptable, is already there. And the few times he asks for what he wants that isn’t “the usual” thing his peers would want, which is to say ginger ale, a normal Canadian soft drink, he’s rarely accommodated without fuss. If he can’t reliably get accommodations in his life to get his boring ginger ale, how the heck is he going to get a relationship with a man, another A-list hockey player, his putative rival, Ilya?

So Ilya is a whole situation he doesn’t have a plan for. At first. It’s the only thing he really does make a plan for eventually because it’s the one desire/life-choice he can’t outsource. And in the beginning, Ilya is enough of the instigator, Shane can largely follow Ilya’s lead. 

Early on, Shane does his best to ask Ilya for more boyfriend stuff than just sex and gets shot down pretty comprehensively, so he accepts the “better than nothing” “banging after games” option and follows that path. Then Ilya ‘boyfriends’ with a tuna melt and now Shane doesn’t know the path. For years and Years, he hasn’t allowed himself to ask what more he might want. What he might want isn’t structurally/societally supported. So he doesn’t know/realize what it’s even possible to want. He “wants Ilya” but hasn’t got any prepackaged, managed options for what that looks like beyond the status quo because there aren’t scripts for it in his social or professional environment. Even in private, there were no new possibilities on the table, so to speak, until the tuna. Shane melted down when presented with the sudden possibility of options with no clarity.  This is why Shane panics and leaves Ilya, crushed, no matter how Ilya signals he’ll pretend the first name thing never happened and to revert to ‘Hollander’ status. 

So I think there’s some alexithymia in the moment but also, outside of Ilya, as a successful pro athlete, Shane’s world is set up to guide him to success without serious input from him. (Not for nothing neurodivergent and queer people tend to be more interesting by dint of needing to think structurally about their place in the world and evaluate the non-standard paths in front of them that status quo people largely aren’t aware of because they don’t have to be. Marginalized people have to make more, harder choices, and have to think about those choices.)

Don’t get me wrong, Shane does the work & he works extremely hard & competently. But a woman working that hard at hockey would not be assured of a smooth path to the pros and top tier brand deals no matter how hard she works. She might still be expected to cook dinner. (Shane being Wasian wasn’t guaranteed a spot either, hence Yuna’s careful shepherding. My point stands.) Shane shows up to work and everything in his life shepherds him to professional success. Except Shane wants Ilya. and every system in his professional & personal life shepherds him away from that choice. So he has to learn how to navigate outside the status quo to get what he wants personally. Problem is, deviating from compulsory heteronormativity can lose him everything else in his life and possibly his life if, say, a rival or his own team’s enforcer goes after him too hard. So he can’t “ask wrong (badly timed, wrong crowd, not slick)” for the “wrong thing (Ilya)” without risking everything. Meanwhile the only thing he has practice asking for, just for himself, outside his role as professional athlete, is ginger ale. And he can barely get a dang ginger ale, a thing he knows he wants and can name and is widely available to the general public.

After the tuna meltdown, with Rose, THE A-list starlet (naturally), Shane tries once more to take the path that doesn’t require his input or passion, only his presence. And that doesn’t work in a romantic relationship — unless the women are structurally bound to make it work. Rose is not so bound and breaks up with him. But does so with the gentlest possible off ramp, and shepherds him to the path he actually wants. 

Rose also shows him how he can be an A-list athlete but still take down time, which he struggled with before (diet, drinks, nights out, non-athletic clothing). Now that he knows it’s possible to eat 3 french fries without losing his contract, and knows that he wants Ilya, and gets shepherded to the necessary path, Now Shane needs to figure out what he wants with Ilya with more specificity by asking himself and Ilya what they want (S1E5 “If we could be something, would you want to?”) and then asking the world around him to accommodate that choice, knowing it will be harder to get accommodations for than ginger ale. 

So if Shane wants Ilya he has to figure out how to ask for, or decide to demand, accommodations in both his personal and professional life and with that context it suddenly makes a lot more sense that it takes Shane & Ilya nearly a decade, & some structural changes to their world, to figure out how to change their status quo.

_____

** On Yuna Hollander making the world safe for her boy(s): In S1E6 when Shane says they “can’t come out” outside family, the affect & posture I read from Yuna was the grim determination of “I will make it so you can, just watch me!” And I love this for them.

Crocheted cord pattern instructions

A green jellyfish with the final tentacle being constructed around yellow yarn used to mark chain stitches. 

A while back I watched this video trying varied cord making methods and it stuck it my mind.  I spent quite a while this summer handmaking cordage out of corn husks  and mulberry bark while out in the yard watching my dog chase squirrels. I’m starting to get ok at it. I still have no use case for the product but the process calms my seeky neurons. So I’ve been thinking about cords.

I also have a favorite amigurumi pattern, adapted from the book Crocheted Taxidermy, of jellyfish. 🪼 It’s a ball with a skirt and several long tendrils. The tendril/tentacle pattern I’ve done for years now is ch48, then start at the 3rd stitch, do 45  HDC back to the jellyfish base. 

3 important points: 

• the tentacles look better if I HDC into the vertical back loop of the chain stitch instead of into the ❤️ part. This way there’s a knit stitch on each edge. However, this makes the process incredibly tedious. 

• Every so often I would get a weird divot in my tentacle. 

• I was inspired by yet another video! It’s about using spare bits of yarn as stitch markers.

I started using yarn markers to catch every 10 stitches in my tentacle’s 48 chain. Then I realized it would decrease the tedium & difficulty of getting a HDC hooked  into the rear loop to mark every stitch as I go. It’s actually faster to add the yarn in than not, because I don’t pull the chain out of shape, I have better tension on the chain, I can easily find each stitch, and it’s harder to pull the upcoming loop too tight to get the hook thru while wrestling the crochet hook thru the HDC. 

Then I was doing a jellyfish and ran out of yarn halfway up my last tentacle 😖.  I also realized the occasional divot I got in my tentacles (which I would pull out & redo), happened when I pulled the first YO thru all the stitches instead of doing a 2nd YO after pulling one loop thru the chain. So I thought I could be thrifty and get a whole tentacle by skipping the 2nd YO of the HDC. It required rotating the hook during each stitch to get it thru the 2nd to last loop on the hook.  But instead of being a flat stitch with knit Vs/ ♥️s on either side, the tentacle was a squarish round cord.

In this manner I stumbled on a pretty good crocheted cord!

I call it a quarter double crochet chain stitch (QDCC) but it likely has another name. I don’t know how to look it up. Let me know what it’s called by other people,  if you do know!

The cord looks round/square with 3 knit stitch looking sides & 1 ~H side (2Vs up, 1V down). It’s pleasing looking to me. It has some stretch, but it comes to a hard limit. The crochet goes 2 ways so there’s at least 1 redundancy, if you need it to be reliable, unlike a plain chain or a single direction stack of crochet. (And I would guess if it’s lightly felted, less likely to unwind if there is a break.)

—

Here’s how to make my pretty cord:

Supplies: 

-chosen yarn

-crochet hook sized for that yarn. (The yarn I measured for this post recommended a 5mm hook but I used a 4mm to keep the jellyfish body from having gaps the stuffing peeks thru. A smaller hook means less stretch.)

- an extra piece of yarn of equal or slightly thicker weight, about 6X the desired cord length. (optional, but it helps with gauge, counting, & stitch placement) OR a crochet hook 1 size larger than the main. 

—

Cord Pattern: with extra yarn method use the main hook to crochet a chain 10% longer than desired cord, with the extra yarn marking each back loop. (See ** below) Without the extra yarn, use the larger crochet hook to make a chain 10% longer than desired cord length. 

Return: 1st stitch: Ch 2 then SC in 2nd stitch from hook. Remaining N-1 stitches are “quarter double crochet chain stitch” back to starting stitch, working in the back loop only, not the V stitch where 

QDCC= YO, (2 loops on hook) & put hook thru back loop (marked with yarn), YO and pull thru chain loop, then twist the hook to the back of the chain and continue pulling it thru the 2 loops on the hook. (If it’s not twisted, it catches on the initial YO loop.). 

That’s it!  Do it a couple hundred more times & you have a nice cord!  A Ch-45 (+2) with 44 QDCC return stitches using “sport weight” yarn with a 4mm hook makes 8” of unstretched cord and 9.5” of stretched cord. Pulling thru the back loop instead of one of the “knit” V legs makes the chain shorter as stitches are added, hence starting it ~10% long.  9.5/8 = 1.19 or 19% ≈20% stretch from relaxed if you need to cinch the cord. 

End: At desired cord length, cut a 6+” tail and pull the end thru the last loop.  For redundancy, weave/sew the yarn tail(s) thru each of the last 6 stitches to lock them too, then hide the tails down the middle of the cord, adding at least one loop around a piece of yarn at full stretch before finishing hiding it.  (For the jellyfish, I anchor it on either side with a 1 loop or 2 loop single crochet plus a chain stitch, then chain to next tentacle location & repeat. Then weave my one end into stuffed body in a couple directions. I hate weaving in ends so I sew as little as possible if I can crochet in one piece instead.) Or tie the 2 tails into a knot and have 2 strings at the end, or do that and add a couple extra pieces of yarn via clove hitch/ latch hook to give it a tassel.

It’s trickier to extend the cord length (other reason to add 10% up front) but easy to make it shorter on the stop/start side of the cord . Options to extend it are to undo & redo the whole thing, make the extension piece, looping the turning chain of the extension thru the turning chain of the original, or chain in the opposite direction from the initial starting point, work in the opposite direction and cope with the weird change and the bulk of weaving in more ends.

(** extra details on the yarn marking: During the chain stitch, pull up a loop, then flop the marker yarn over the new feed yarn behind the hook, then pull up next stitch over that yarn. Flop the extra yarn back over the feed yarn line, leaving a visible bend, then pull up next loop over the extra yarn. Keep the marking yarn loose. It will look like a loose series if Ss behind the knit stitch looking side of the chain.

For longer chains, I find it’s easiest to keep the marking yarn up and forward. For shorter lengths I hold it with my lips, for longer, I stuff it behind my shirt collar. Catch a small tail at the first stitch, then flop it back and forth with each stitch. Every 10 or 20 stitches you can add a stitch marker or make a double loop with the marker yarn. 

When doing the QDCC return, the hook follows the marking yarn to secure the stitches. If the loop’s tight, pull the marking yarn out just before each stitch.  If there’s room, leave the yarn in, hook next to it being careful not to stab thru it, and pull it out at the end by scrunching up the cord and yanking, or using a hook to unwind it more gracefully. The marking yarn can be reused if you don’t damage it. Or multiple shorter pieces can be used, which might help with removal and stitch counting in longer cords. It sounds harder to use the yarn marker than not, but it keeps the chain straighter and the stitches easier to find. So much so that the effort of marking, and the space that adds, improves the tension of the chain & makes it so much easier to place stitches that the time is wholly made up.)

Double Dutch

 Growing up in the 1970s I was *sure* the next Olympic Sport would be Double Dutch, a jumprope style that has two rope turners wielding 2 long ropes while someone(s) jump elaborately in, over, among, and through those 2 ropes.  It’s a thing of beauty, not to be missed. 

Every Olympics I expected the world to acknowledge the divine art of Double Dutch by adding it as the new sport. The grandmasters were mostly Black women. Thanks to overwhelming racism with some bonus misogyny, Double Dutch has not been honored as an olympic sport despite lending itself to creative spectacle and clear ways to judge it. 

Instead we got 

• rhythmic gymnastics, which is … adjacent to jumping rope, kinda, and should have taken the “artistic” gymnastics title. It’s niche and seems made up for the sake of adding something for girls to be good at that won’t upset boys. Absolutely no shade to the tremendously gifted and coordinated athletes who compete, but it’s a very hothouse, solitary kind of sport. It’s also quite proscribed & regimented, and not really stuff one sees people doing just for fun outside a Cirque show.

Double Dutch can be done on pavement by anyone who can scrounge 2 friends and 2 ropes. It’s fun for beginners and experts.

• X-games sports like snowboarding and BMX. I think snowboarding is a great addition to a spectacle featuring skiing and I think BMX is questionable but both require access to purpose built environments (or at least open space) and expensive training and gear. A snowboard, like a skateboard, can be affordable, but lift tickets are not. A trip to the mountains is not necessarily accessible or cheap. Regular trips to ski or snowboard cost big money. Competition Bikes (and medical expenses after wipeouts) aren’t cheap (in the US). Neither sport is a thing someone can pick up just anywhere. It’s gatekept by virtue of expensive gear and access.  Despite some strong female contenders at top levels, both sports’ ecosystems cater more to male athletes.

Double Dutch can be done in cramped or expansive environments with varying qualities of rope. You can see it, think “that looks fun” and start trying it yourself in as little a time as it takes to find some rope and one or 2 someones with rhythm willing to thwack you with it when you mess up. It’s gender agnostic, near as I can tell.

• Breaking, aka breakdancing. Dance is a bit of an odd thing to add but not without precedent.  I don’t necessarily love sports that are almost entirely judged on vibes but, well, gymnastics & figure skating exist & are beloved. And it evolved in a dueling format so judging it has a long history and the historians know which vibes earn out.  To break dance you need a beat, some inspiration, and a slick surface - often cardboard, from a used box. Anyone who sees it could try it themselves, but it takes dedication to get even the basic tricks down. (I happen to love watching breakdancing. We kids in the 80s practiced the worm for weeks/months. I never quite got it.)  But it’s extremely male coded. 

Double Dutch was dominated by women, near as I could tell, but men got their steps in too.

And here we get to the purpose of this entry.  Breakdancing is not just heavily male, it comes primarily from America’s Black communities, as does Double Dutch. (It’s here I ponder whether breakdancing would have evolved without the existence of Double Dutch. I suspect not but have no data on that, just vibes.) It’s one of the first events added that doesn’t favor white trust fund kids. 

And in its first year of competition/inclusion into the Olympic pantheon (?) , the commentary was overwhelmingly about RayGun.  (That may not be the correct spelling of the competitor’s name but I refuse to do her the honor of looking it up.) She was a “competitor” from Australia. She’s a white woman who is *Spectacularly* inept at breakdancing.

We were breathlessly assured by all the Very White sports reporters that she had a long history of involvement in breakdancing and we shouldn’t hurt her feelings by pointing out she had no business being in this competition. “But she studied it so hard!” That’s all well and good but that means you hire her to do technical or color commentary for the event, not to participate. 

Breakdancing isn’t new. Anyone who watched a few American music videos or movies from the 1980s knows enough to identify it and try it until they hurt themselves.  Anyone since the advent of the internet could get enough information to advance in breakdance while minimizing breaking themselves. We all know what quality breakdancing looks like and RayGun was not up to the task  She apparently “won” her slot by beating other candidates but that’s obviously some form of lie. It is not credible that Australia couldn’t field a better candidate.

The fact that someone so laughably incompetent from a wealthy, white dominated country was allowed to compete was more than an insult to the sport/dance. It tells everyone who values breakdancing that the system may be forced to add a sport developed and dominated by Black athletes, but they can’t be forced to take it seriously. 

That white ignorance is as good as Black excellence for getting in the door. Her laughably bad performance sucked all the energy away from the medalists.  It’s my personal shame that I don’t remember the medalists.  It’s the media’s shame that I know RayGun exists at all, let alone being the name I can remember, just from incidental exposure. The commentary was absolutely dominated by this one figure, out there doing it wrong. And that was the purpose of allowing her to compete. A new Olympic sport should get good press even just for the novelty. But allowing this travesty made sure all the press was about what a joke this event was. As if it was unserious sport not worthy of serious effort.  It was done to diminish the event.

But Cranky, you can’t say that was on purpose! You just had that realization in the shower a couple hours ago. Yes I can.  It’s a little ironic that I’m here in what could be my ignorance putting up a claim as truth while deriding people who can’t be bothered to be good enough.  But after decades of watching Double Dutch get overlooked by Serious Moneymaking Athletes, of it not becoming a sport spectacle on par with gymnastics and figure skating, because Black people, even the poor ones, were really skilled at it so white folks wouldn’t take it on at scale or acknowledge its greatness.  And knowing the white supremacist underpinnings of my society in general and the Olympics more specifically, for however well Usain can bolt, I think I’m right in claiming she was a deliberate spoiler, intended to devalue the sport from the jump, the year it was launched.  Pernicious bias gets to skate through on plausible deniability all the time.  I can only hope breakdancing stays included and grows in popularity, and that more people grow to love it.

But RayGun was allowed to compete, however pure her personal intentions, as a message that for all the oddball sports we collectively take seriously every 4 years, Black sports won’t be taken seriously. At least not yet. 

The amount of waste resulting from upholding racism is staggering. Also, put Double Dutch in the Olympics already. Even if kids don’t really do it anymore - it fell by the wayside as stranger danger protocols moved kids indoors where their moms would have to watch them like a hawk, instead of them all having a go jumping rope, now and again. It’s not like kids are out there dancing down the streets tossing ribbons, but that gets to be there. Surely there are still a few old heads that could school us in How It’s Done so we could all revive the blurs of their feet, making magic.

Musings on Menstrual bleeding

In a video showing the first ever movie of an embryo​​⁠ (blastocyst?)  forcibly digging its way into a (lab grown) endometrial lining in an attempt to implant, a commenter asked how it was energy efficient to bleed every month rather than reabsorb the uterine lining.  

Well

____

Here’s what I felt compelled to come up with.  It’s not maximizing for energy/nutrient protection, it’s minimizing the danger from infection  

The menstrual tissue being discarded is subject to outside contamination. Shedding it keeps the spread of contamination to a minimum. The fallopian tubes open to the abdominal cavity, they aren’t in a closed loop with the ovaries (this is why ectopic pregnancy can occur in strange places). And in the case of a failed implantation, shedding expels it from the body - remember half its DNA is foreign! 

Without the placenta (and other pregnancy specific elements) running interference, the mom’s immune system will damage or kill the blastocyst/embryo. Then there’s dead, potentially necrotic tissue with foreign DNA in a place open to the outside world but also into the gut. Best not to risk it getting into the gut. It’s best not to reabsorb that if you don’t have to. I imagine those that reabsorbed the tissue in our evolutionary antiquity fared less well over millions of years so now humans are stuck with bleeding. 

Although historically, a great number of women only had a few years worth of periods in total after their first kid. The majority spent the majority of their post pubescent life pregnant or recovering from pregnancy. Unless subject to the Rh factor, other fertility issues or they managed to avoid sex, they had a baby, recovered somewhat, maybe had a period, maybe not, then got pregnant again. 

Regarding contamination - anything going in the vag can catch a ride on a sperm or be pushed by a dick or dildo  being slammed into it , on a feminine hygiene product or randomly move around into the cervix. This could be sperm, ejaculate, crusty unwashed urine, dirt, sand, oil, lube, bits of unsafe toys, lake water, you name it. All this foreign tissue is an infection risk.

(iirc, the hymen is there to keep literal and figurative crap out of the cervix and uterus when we’re babies who wear diapers and can’t stand up for a gravity assist.)

Mucosal membranes are where we have our greatest risk of infection because it’s purpose is to interact with external bodies and only let the ones we need in, but it’s not as good as intact epidermis/skin because it does need to let some stuff in, like water or sperm or placentas. the cervix is kinda like the end of a balloon with a tight neck. It blocks a lot, but it has a hatch that can be breached. And wily enough germs or forcefully introduced grit, can get into the uterus, which is lined with yet another semi-permeable surface. Because we don’t want stuff going up the fallopian tubes easily, the forces acting on the area favor flushing detritus out. When the uterine lining detaches, it too gets flushed out. 

QED, it makes sense for people with a uterus to bleed regularly rather than risk absorbing dangerous contaminants and infectious pathogens

On masking in an ongoing airborne pandemic

I have a friend with some debilitating disabilities who I have been giving as pass on mask wearing to because they already have a lot to manage & masking is actually difficult for them.  But even after their last round with Covid had them throwing up and shitting themselves for 2 solid weeks, they recently made some crack about masking and I went a little mask off in my reply.

Here it is so I can reference it later:

I don’t insist you mask around me because you have a slew of disabilities that make for harder for you than most, & I think people with fewer barriers should be doing more of the work to protect you and not place all the burden on you — not because it’s safe for me to be around you when you don’t wear a mask. 

You may not even know if you give me a life ruining virus but I care that I don’t give one to you and prefer to not get sick. The only reason I’m resigned about your attitude and not incandescently angry all the time is that public health and the medical establishment told you you could vax & relax. And you should be able to trust the public health authorities on stuff like this. 

But right now we can’t. I know better so I do better. You ask when we can eat inside. I haven’t eaten inside with you, not once, for five long years, because it’s not safe enough. I don’t do this because it’s fun for me. I do it so you don’t hurt me & I don’t hurt you. I will continue to have to be on guard even around people who claim to like me until viral transmission is *orders of magnitude* lower or we get sterilizing vaccines. If that never happens, then I will be eating alone or outside forever. 

Because the alternative is a faster, more painful disability that leads to my early death. And as much as my disability and not being able to eat comfortably are a giant pain in my ass that I would give up tomorrow if I could, I prefer them to being in a nursing home or dead. 

It’s particularly not safe for me now that you routinely _lie_ to me about whether or not you are ill, whether or not someone in your household is ill, whether or not other people are in your house at the time I plan to be there, and whether or not they are ill. Add in asymptomatic spread and it doesn’t matter if people think they’re ill or not because they can still be infectious. So I mask around everyone. Then when I show up to help you shower, and you casually drop that you’ve been sick with covid all week, I have some protection already in place. 

It’s not safe but it’s a bit safer now that many people are vaccinated so I can briefly remove my mask in public if outdoors, (preferably in direct sun to reduce viral exposure). I do understand that it’s limiting but my choice isn’t “eat with friends indoors” or “eat outdoors”. It’s “eat with friends outdoors” or “eat alone”. My goal is limiting viral exposure because fewer virions means less for my immune system to fight off and less virus means less damage to my vasculature. Which is what covid damages. Wearing a mask means I can limit my risk of heart attack, aneurysm, and stroke. I can limit my risk of losing even more energy. I do not understand why my wanting to prevent illness and debility is controversial. It’s not popular but it’s not wrong.

On the “Polite No” & Comfort

A friend asked if it would be ok to not eat when at my house.  My soul wants to feed people. But more than that, I want people to be comfortable, and if them not eating my food makes them more comfortable than eating my food, then to be a good host, I must let them starve on my watch. I’m told it’s even safe for people to go 3 hours without eating. It fine. I’m sure it’s fine. This blog is a reminder I need to be better at letting people refuse food. 

This friend wasn’t worried I would judge them. They were worried that their choice would distress me. I needed to assure them that any distress about them not eating my food isn’t harmful to me. I’m only ensuring they aren’t refusing for politeness purposes, as I want to include them and if there’s something they would eat if offered, I would provide it. But if they would rather not eat *for any reason* — other than being worried I can’t provide without straining my resources — as a host my priority is their comfort, not *my* idea of what comfort is.

Here comes the monologue!

A lot of people spend a lot of time worrying what others think of them. Evolutionarily this makes sense because community is the best survival advantage humans have By Far. But while people can & do judge, the judgment, even if other people are thinking about you specifically, which they often are not, is rather passive. This means, by and large most reasonable adults let things slide unless & until it hits a threshold of taboo/ick/safety/weirdness. 

Unfortunately autism can put people into uncanny valley territory, a weirdness people pick up on and have difficulty leaving it be until they address it head on. Uncanny Valley triggers, like some autistic traits, make people fearful & aggressive unless or until they acclimate that version of autism into their “acceptable”, if not normal, paradigm. I would say that most people who care enough to aggressively judge someone on performing normalized behavior, where a deviant behavior is harmless, aren’t worth bothering with. But that only applies is they can’t or won’t hurt you.  For many autistics, we learn that people will hurt or exclude us for being weird so reducing the quantity of weird is useful, if tiring. Masking is one way to do this.  Learning societal scripts by rote, instead of osmosis, can also help to know how to manage expectations on both sides.

After navigating weirdness, food can be fraught. Food is also central to survival so a lot of hosts want to make sure everyone is fed. A better host makes sure everyone’s needs are met, which may or may not include eating. There are  STRONG cultural scripts around offering people food/drink. The dominant script in many places, including here, in one where the host offers dood/drink/service, the guest refuses to “be polite”, and the host overriding ones’ “no” insists on providing said food/beverage/service. This gets tricky because there are fewer scripts allowing you to say no because you mean no. 

One piece of writing that has stayed with me more intensely than anything else was a travel guide. 

Really? Yes! They explained that when you come to their house/store/restaurant, you will be offered coffee. The polite thing is to refuse, no matter how thirsty.  This offer-refusal pattern happens thrice, and after the third “no” coffee will be provided, and they watch you drink it. Everyone there understands this.  My problem is that I don’t like coffee  I can’t drink it to be polite. I don’t know how to operate in that system. I have spent literally years trying to figure out “polite” ways to navigate such a situation. The easiest is to offer an alternative  “I don’t enjoy coffee, do you offer tea?” would be my go to but as I age I’m now comfortable saying “no means no”, ignoring the coffee, or leaving to make my point. (You can see where similar situations that aren’t about coffee, but use the same script, and rely on the host correctly intuiting a no nmeans yes, could be problematic?) I never yet travelled to that particular region in part because of this coffee situation. Meanwhile I have noticed that script is actually common nearly everywhere.

Saying no when not meaning no (a thru line to many social problems) and hearing no & not respecting it is the culturally dominant script and it can take a lot to shake us off script. Some people literally can’t, and others won’t, parse that you really mean no. Some of us, like me, take an iteration. Because as a host with food it would be rude to not feed you, tho better hosts know it would be rude to give you something you don’t want. But probably 70% of people are on the main script and don’t question it. Or even know to question it. So a guest has to offer up a reason to break script to get the “no” to register, which is a problem if the reason is personal. 

Maybe you’re on a special diet. Maybe you’re pregnant. Maybe you have a feeding tube. Maybe you’re on a schedule. Maybe you don’t trust the host’s hygiene. Maybe you’re having a bad day and food isn’t appealing. Maybe you’re a zombie, but a polite zombie. It should not be incumbent on a guest to divulge personal or medical information to get a host to listen but it’s often required as anything less than “I have a notarized doctor’s note for a recognized & respected disability” won’t flip the script,  which makes it tiring & emotionally draining on the guest. A tired and emotionally drained guest who is that way because of you is not comfortable. If your hosting instincts say “feed them” override that with “make guests comfortable with or without food”.

At most gatherings where one don’t want to draw attention or don’t feel the need to share personal details, taking a small amount of food and casually disposing of it draws less comment/concern than refusing food outright. So for most encounters it is the sensible, least effort choice. Or lying and saying you ate already or are on a special diet & you “forgot” to bring some, etc… 

But at my house please say “I would prefer not to eat” and I will let you not eat.  I do have the “must feed people” script locked and loaded and will doublecheck. I try to let things go after 2 no attempts (I do 2 instead of 1 because some people do have that “refuse, to be polite” practiced to a reflex.) My concern is you not feeling included you or you being hungry when I can solve that, especially knowing how long I can extend a goodbye.

There’s also a confounding factor.  Part of raising kids to adulthood is introducing them to foods they may not initially take to, and not everyone navigates that ideally. But it does mean that people offering food who have outwitted cranky toddlers have a lot of persuasive scripts and techniques at their disposal to help convince you to eat. Including putting the food within reach so if you change your mind you don’t have to humble yourself to get the food. Which is fine if the timing was off but irritating if you don’t want the food there.

I really don’t want to give someone coffee who doesn’t genuinely want coffee. I don’t want to sit there with stinky coffee I will never drink. In a society where false “no” is considered more polite than truth, this host-guest dynamic remains tricky. But respecting a no is a good start. And those people who judge one for making off script choices really aren’t worth bothering with if/when we can escape them. 

On Fake problems from the Spin Machine

I wrote most of this as a comment on a friend’s FB post forwarding a statement from the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson. The quote I start with is from him, abbreviated slightly by me. It’s something I want to write about more but don’t usually have the bandwidth. This post is a reasonable start on it.

——-

 “The willing fists of a regime that cannot solve real problems so must invent new spectacles” is on the nose. (Tufts seems to be backing their students & this one in particular, legally.) I’m incredibly concerned how eager some folks are to be anonymous jackbooted thugs disappearing people off the street. But beyond that, the GOP can’t solve problems. Because they try to only ever “solve” problems they made up, so when an actual problem arrives they have no tools to solve it, except (1) spin through their propaganda machine helmed by Fox and (2) distraction. The distractions/spectacles they choose are life & death stakes as well as a clear & present danger to individuals, marginalized folks specifically, & democracy generally. They disappear people to convince us not to point out that they’re useless and unable to meet the demands of their jobs. 

The main purpose of Fox “news” entertainment is to gin up outrage over fake problems. The fake problems have a grain of truth for verisimilitude but, crucially, aren’t actually problems that need immediate attention or complex solutions. They’re a PR “problem”. They’re spin. 

When democrats get hounded about these ginned up problems out of the blue they look unprepared. Because they _aren’t_ prepared to discuss made up nonsense. By the time they assemble the facts to address this concern — the media won’t let them dismiss it out of hand as would be proper for made up nonsense — they get hit with some new ginned up nonsense or are accused of doing nothing about the 1st ginned up nonsense because of course they haven’t been working on a problem that the GOP spin machine invented on Tuesday. Meanwhile all this scrambling distracts and prevents them from pursuing their own agendas  

They of the GOP spin machine keep this topic going (But Her Emails!, migrant hordes overrunning borders) for as long as it serves to harass & distract people from pursuing modern, relevant agendas (climate change, ahem). If the GOP gets elected they either drop the topic all together, pass draconian laws to “solve” the non-problem they invented, or just claim that they’ve solved it, secure in the knowledge that investigation will show it’s no longer a problem - because it never was a problem at all or not a problem on the scale of their claims. It was always spin meant to derail progress by diverting attention from real problems that need real solutions. And this is how the GOP have “solved” problems for my entire adulthood. 

So when they’re asked to address real problems like, say, a pandemic, they have no tools but PR. They have no problem solving skills beyond spin through propaganda. They exist to avoid letting people who mean well solve problems. It was ironic that in Rick’s statement saying as much, he listed off several of the fake problems as real ones, because sometimes even they forget not to buy what they’re selling.

(insert paragraph about feckless dems who claim to want to solve real problems then let just enough of their caucus defect so that they “can’t” pass that bill, so sowwy. But “slow walking real solutions to actual problems” is a different scale and nature of problem to “obstruct real solutions and divert attention from real problems until the government ceases to be addressing reality” then using fake crises (Iraq war, her emails) to roll back rules on oligarchs and curtail freedom for everyone else.)

And then they pull evil stunts like disappearing people off the streets! While we’re all rightfully focused on that, we can’t bring up anything else relevant (progressive agendas) that needs solving because these insults to humanity need top billing to avoid imminent catastrophe. 

I’m so frustrated by the media that plays into these narratives on purpose or by being credulous tools! 

I’m so frustrated that no one in power seems to have a plan to obstruct this evil nonsense. 

I’m so frustrated that enough people prefer being mean to being kind that this propaganda works.

(Next pgh added Aug2025 when fixing typos above)

I’m just flat out appalled that white voters have *never* voted over 50% Democratic since the Civil Rights Act was passed. Grow the fuck up. Just like Brexit didn’t re-seat Britain as the Crown of Empire, almighty and untouchable, bringing back chattel slavery is a dream of resentful entitled failures who would create a waking nightmare for everyone rather than go to therapy, ask their government to function, or be happy with a C+ life. You’d still have a C+ life, you’d just get to make sure other people suffer, which apparently makes you think your C+ is a B- that you round up to B. Slavery is antithetical to survival. The boot on the neck doesn’t advance any more than the trodden upon; both are stuck fighting old fights, solved fights. And for what? To live in a wasteland full of hate? Get a goal and a hobby that isn’t dependent on making others miserable. Figure out how to be a better person and get out of the way of people who can make the world a nice place to be.

——-

That was my comment, with a couple upgrades. I want, in particular, to point out the “migrant caravan” or “border invasion” nonsense. At the time the GOP started really leaning into the “illegal immigrant” narrative, the “punishment” for it was an $18 misdemeanor ticket.

… and a need to get the paperwork sorted for a vast majority of cases. We didn’t hold migrants in detention centers.  We gave them vouchers to stay at a motel until their initial paperwork got sorted out, then they would go live in the community where they had sponsors. The entirely unnecessary detention centers were built to become concentration camps and I hope that everyone knows this at some level.  When we elected Democrats in 2020, my expectation was that they’d demolish the detention centers.  Building new facilities takes more time & effort than upgrading existing facilities with established personnel and supply chains, and making concentration camps harder to build and use should be a priority. 

Of course the US has incarcerated more of our citizens by % than any other country and more by sheer numbers than most in an effort to (primarily) derail the lives of Black men for most of their productive & reproductive adult years. And we keep failing to address that at scale although we occasionally inch closer to it. California got so far as a ballot measure repealing the use of slave labor from prisons in 2024 and failed to get it over the finish line.  This is all of a piece with the spectacle and terror. The GOP establishes it then the Dems treat it like the norm, to appear “tough on crime”, another PR spin, instead of dismantling unnecessary prison populations and going after the real criminals, like private equity and corporations who commit wage theft at scale. But that would involve holding rich men accountable and US leadership and legal systems don’t want to set the precedent that rich men, particularly rich white men, can be held accountable for crimes.

I apologize if the intermingling of “and” and “&” is distracting. But we have Genocide & Concentration Camps and No One in power, those with the fuck you money, seem to think that’s an urgent problem, let alone the emergency it is. We’re speed running the Comic Book Villain Evil Agenda & I’m so frustrated that a sternly worded letter wasn’t enough to set these OBVIOUS wrongs right.