Imagine I am a sentient, emotional robot. I can learn anything you teach me, but I can't imagine what you know, which is a lot more than me, about social cues.

So we play a game where you teach me about feelings: I imitate you, and learn to associate a feeling with a tone of voice, an expression and/or body language, and then later, I can understand that you have that feeling when you make that expression, use that tone of voice, or hold your body that way. And when I have that feeling, I do the things I learned from you, so you can understand my emotional state. The more you teach me, the more I can pick up. You may start to think I'm "just like you."

But the subtle, complex cues are hard. If you later show me a set of behaviors I've never seen before, or that are too hard for me to follow, I won't know what's going on.

Because you think of me as human now, you will think I'm ignoring you, or being mean. It can hurt your feelings a lot. Eventually you may show an expression obvious enough that I understand, but I won't know why you're feeling angry, upset or sad. I'll only know if you tell me. I may have to learn a subroutine called, "I can't read your mind, what are you upset about?"

No rejections.

Many years ago, my therapist (after 10 years of seeing her), told me "If you care about someone you better not reject them."

I didn't really understand that some of the things I said to people were pushing them away. These were things people I loved said to me all my life. Criticisms, complaints, nagging. Being autistic makes understanding this social stuff harder.

I had to ask her to spell it out to me, and I had to think about it for a long, long time. Watch it happen over and over until it sunk in. And I still catch myself doing it wrong. The coworker who asks me out to lunch when I brought mine -- say yes, not no. My kids who wanted me to play with them instead of reading. Say yes, not no. My mother, wanting me to pick up the phone.

There are nuances to this: people who invite you to something but don't mean it, really. People who ask to come along to some event but don't really intend to. Apparently you're supposed to say yes here too, and then just deal with it. This is complicated.

There are keywords-- come by "sometime", let's go for drinks "next month," "call me next time you're in town."  I imagine some people say this and mean it, and are disappointed when I don't follow through. I assume what most of them mean is "I don't dislike you and I don't want you to dislike me, but."

But they really don't know how to deal with my oddness, or my inability to read them, or anyone. Cues are wasted on me. It's their way of not-rejecting me. Sometimes I get it. Sometimes I've even used this method of protecting my distance. I like being alone because I don't have to ride the people roller coaster.

Back then, I was probably talking about my partner, back when I was the kind of person who got upset about how the dishwasher was stacked or who dusted the bookshelves last (it was always me, unless I nagged him). It took us oh, a couple of decades to reach a stalemate on things like that.

Truth is, we both get angry when we're stressed. We both let things build up. Because of my health, there's less i can do now, and he has had to take up the slack. So I try not to be that person. Still, when the frustration bubbles up from him, I feel indignant, rejected, alone. Only now I tell myself, this is how it feels for them if I don't keep my own house in order.

Regarding bad options

Once I got lost on hike deep in the Sangre de Cristos mountains, on a stretch where the slopes were overgrown with brush and trees. The trail had disappeared under my feet, and it was getting late. I stumbled into an abandoned campsite that seemed haunted -- why just walk away and leave all your stuff? Did they make the mistakes I did, and never make it back?

The sun had begun to sink below the next ridge, but I could see the bright sky and the last sunlight still lit the eastern slope. Ahead of me was a river of boulders that had cascaded down from above. No water, just boulders bigger than me, piling up to the top of the ridge. I'd have to hop from one to the next, hundreds of feet up, to get high enough to hope to get a glimpse of my campsite, or the trail. If I slipped on the moss, I'd break my leg at the very least, and no one would ever find me. Worse was what might live there. It would take me hours to climb that.

The only other option was to hike down the overgrown slope through dense brush I knew hid rattlesnakes, bear and elk, toward the foot of the ridge, to try to follow the river back to camp. I knew both options could end with me dying alone in the middle of nowhere. But at least the river had water, and it knew where it came from.

Diagnosis

I'm outside all the labels I've had stuck to me over time. The ones I embraced, and the ones that drove me away from everyone I knew, and every other place I've lived.

Weird, that's a good one. I didn't mind it. After all, I didn't want to be normal. Normal felt dishonest. It seemed to me then that everyone was "playing" normal out of fear. And I was not afraid.

But "weird" is what your family and schoolmates and teachers, everyone uses to mark you as untrustworthy, flawed, maybe dangerous. Weird lumps you in with creeps and serial killers and pagan goat worshipers. You don't even realize how you feed into that perception.

I was... possibly 50? When I realized that other people really meant and felt the things they said and did. They weren't afraid, mostly. The socialization was what they wanted. It was also when I realized they really meant and felt the things they said about me.

Justice isn't enough.

Justice would be for her killer to suffer exactly what she went through, while she gets her life back -- the clock winds back to August 2011, our collective memories erased of this last two years and all the horror and grief and fear, and the shattered, stupid wishes that she was still alive somehow. Maybe justice would be for people who attack  her family and friends, and make our suffering worse; and for those who pretend they know more than they do, who exaggerate their role in our lives to get attention for themselves, to  make themselves feel important-- that they should go through the same thing they've inflicted on others, and we get our  lives reset to before any of this happened. Her with us and whole, us never knowing what we do now about human nature.

Maybe real justice would be all of us getting our wish to be there that night and protect her. Because that's what haunts everyone who knew her, and don't mistake that, every real friend, everyone in both families, her father, her fiance--we all want to have been there to stop her from stepping out that door. Everyone but the person who actually showed up.

With bright colors large against the blue

It only works because there's nothing in it

this hole in the sky that lifts you up
past comfort
forces you to see
how small you are in the world
but not quite high enough to
understand
how small the world is
beyond the land

A silken cup of air inverted
above a fire
A basket full of your life and
bags of sand
all held together in
Twisted strands that cross the crest
and somehow form the bones
that shape the air and carry all the rest.

You rise, and don't quite know
where you will go
float beyond the reach of trees
and trust the wind

Listen: trust the wind
does that sound wise?
But still you rise
and hope for forward thrust.

Someone below
chases along,
disturbs the road no more
than a finger drawn along an arm

She follows the fleeing ball of air
She cannot see you
but believes you are still there.
You both know
there really is no
other way home.

(still working on it)

Thought for the day

I feel like I should keep track of these little ideas somehow. This one's relevant, something I've often seen in myself and others:

Confusion is the first step in learning.

When we're confronted with something we've never seen before, we may not see it at all.  Or we may see it, but ignore it. Or misinterpret it with our old set of beliefs.

When you do recognize a new phenomenon or fact as an unknown, you feel confused and try to make sense of it. Let's say someone speaks to you in a language you don't know. Are they babbling nonsense? Or is it your lack of knowledge?

People don't like to feel confused. It signals a lack of control. But confusion is your friend.

Confusion is your mind's way of telling you it's time to learn something.

The question is, how do you deal with it? Do you try to explore this new thing? Work hard to make sense of it? Or do you dismiss it, because it doesn't match what you already believe or understand? Or do you work hard to force it, to make it appear to match your previous beliefs? Do you argue it out of existence?

It's easy to imagine someone with a rigid need to feel control, dismissing the foreign language as nonsense.

But what if it's important, just in a form you don't understand?  By demanding the world conform to you, you miss that information, even if it's a loud, shouted warning that your house is on fire.

The more you ignore those confusing facts the further you move from reality. Confirmation bias is the psychological term for being unable to see clearly when a fact doesn't fit your belief or theory. Here's an example. Let's say you're looking at a friend's Facebook page, and you notice she stopped posting in public at a given time. Your belief might be: no public posting means she's not at her computer any more.

As every teenager knows, there's more to a computer than Facebook. Unless you have her computer, you can't really know whether she went offline.

You can't see whether she was on a different Web site, or using other software on her computer after that last post. But the longer you go on convincing yourself she wasn't, the deeper that belief becomes, until you can't be objective any more. You've built a whole theory of her evening based on that one moment in time. But it's wrong.

It's not logical or helpful to assume she stopped using the computer just because she didn't post again. And even less logical to draw larger conclusions, but you have. And you've announced them to the world. Your own conclusion, based on the only fact you have at hand, becomes a stumbling block to finding the truth. The more you crave the appearance of control/mastery, the harder you will work to believe your presumption. It blinds you to a degree.

And now you've put your name behind that theory, so you can't easily admit you're wrong. Say you've accused an innocent person of something horrible, based on that tiny, tiny fact. And everything that happens, and everything you hear seems to further prove you are right. You've veered off reality because you can't admit you're wrong, you don't know enough, you can't think clearly. You're not objective. You want to be right. And that in itself has caused you to jump to the wrong conclusion. And now you're trapped by it.

And even worse if you don't sort facts from gossip. We all know that the more often something is repeated, the more it seems to be a fact. So the more people you have offering biased information the harder it is to wade through it to reality. Soon, an imagined event becomes very real in your mind. You think you remember someone saying something that seems to fit in your theory. So that becomes a fact too. If it doesn't fit, then it's just someone making things up. Your theory becomes more real to you than reality. You know with all your heart and soul that you are right. And everything in the world seems to tilt toward your being right.

But there are tests, even if you can't see her computer. You can still examine the actions and comments of sources who do have access. A friend of hers, who chatted with her on AIM or Google Plus later that night; an IT professional who can see her activity log and what programs she was using. Other friends who texted with her, talked on the phone, or on Skype. There can be any number of sources and activities that inform or contradict your first assumption.

Let's say you distrust some first-hand sources, but others are reliable. You can use all their reactions, statements, behaviors,  and decisions as a way of determining reality, much the same way you can tell whether another person is behind a tree when all you see is their shadow. The more first-hand sources you have, the more likely you are to get a close approximation of what happened after that last FB post.

Or you can choose to stick with your previous belief, and ignore any facts to the contrary.

Let say some sources say, "she was working on a project on her computer" or "she was doing something but it wasn't homework" or "we have verified his statements are true" -- you might dismiss it as not matching your lone Facebook fact, as unreliable information. But when a reliable source with full professional access to her computer,  and good reason to examine her activity closely, takes the trouble to say your "unreliable" sources are being truthful based on conclusive evidence, what are your choices?

Your choices are: A. stick to your belief and pursue unreality or B. try to figure out why the reliable source doesn't agree with your belief.

Is the reliable source now unreliable if they don't confirm your beliefs?
Do you tear apart their statements trying to find an interpretation that makes it seem they're speaking in code, in secret agreement with you?
Do you assume they're agents of the unreliable source now? Is there some vast conspiracy now, some coverup that encompasses every first-hand source?

As the balance of statements and behaviors from various first-hand sources continue to pile up against you, do you dismiss it all, ignore their actions and statements? Do you look for loopholes or more complicated scenarios your theory might fit into, or accept the simple fact: if there were evidence that confirmed your belief, it would have been acted on.

The more you fight that possibility, the further you go in the wrong direction. Next thing you know, you've wasted days, months, years, trying to support an untrue belief.

Win one

So I'm back with no shortage of things to say about Corona virus and what it will be like when all our hospitals are lined with gurneys full of the sick. Just like the 1980s only this time, the old and comorbid. This, kids, is what dishonesty looks like. Then we had Act Up. Now, we have Act Blue. Go vote.