A picture of a picture...

Today is pictures.

Ick sent me a picture of a pacing tiger in a cage... and I thought-- wow. that is a great picture of him.

Which got me thinking about photos and images. Because Ick is a person who has to live in a house, not a corporeal tiger.

And i thought about photos of me. i have noticed that most people don't like photos of themselves. i don't either. But i don't like certain photos, because, i am not IN them.

Photos in which i look nice/presentable/have makeup on-- these are "good" pictures according to my family/friends. However, i best like ones that i feel capture me or a mood- which are usually the pictures that they label odd, depressing, goofy, or strange.







For example, this is not a "good" picture of me. No makeup or smile, you can't even see my face, just my poor taste in pajama bottoms...

but my brain yells, "THERE'S AMANDA!" to me when i look at this one-- evokes more recognition than a "good" picture.


i am in the left ankle, in the angry-fisting-toes...

when i am "hiding" is when you can see me best.

Gluten. and Milk-Poetry

I do not fully understand the whole gluten/autism thing. They guess that in some people, gluten makes opioid peptides, and this is the Wiki explanation for opioid peptides:

Opioid Peptides are short sequences of amino acids which mimic the effect of opiates in the brain. Opioid peptides may be produced by the body itself, for example endorphins, or be absorbed from partially digested food (casomorphins, exorphins and rubiscolins). The effect of these peptides vary, but they all resemble opiates. The opioid food peptides have lengths of typically 4-8 amino acids. The body's own opioids are generally much longer.
Brain opioid peptide systems are known to play an important role in motivation, emotion, attachment behaviour, the response to stress and pain, and the control of food intake.

My motivation, emotion, and stress/pain response is wacky. My sleep patterns are screwy too, and i read this other blog where the girl said her sleep was also all tied into her gluten thing.

bread is nice, but it's just food-- i don't feel particularly attached to it. MILK, however, is a very different thing. i need milk. i love milk. when i am mad, i want milk to drink to calm down and i hum when i drink it. if there is no milk at 3am, this is an emergency-- it is not a problem that can wait until morning-- i need to be taken to the store at 3am.

i had a awful period of a few months where milk tasted sour to me. this was very bad, as i still CRAVED it, but then i'd drink it and it just didn't taste right, so i would just think about it all the time and be depressed about it. (i was taking medication at the time, which may or may not have been the reason for the milk tasting bad. haven't taken any kind of medication besides aspirin/Tylenol for a few years now.)

it occurred to me that perhaps this it a rather dramatic way to feel about milk... and that most people are not inclined to dedicate sonnets to it, or think about it quite so much...

i have eaten low-carb for periods of time in the past, but i just can't seem to do without milk. if i have one little taste, i need MORE, so it's an all or nothing kind of thing. i have not had any milk today... so this is day one of going cold-turkey. i'm trying to write this down for the record...

i wonder if this means i am more susceptible to opiate addiction? maybe some morphine could get me off the milk ;p

Sage F ight Club Escape Artist

in the two places at once. tyler isn't here. tyler went away. tyler's gone. but in disassociated-manda-land, ALL the magic is in the breakdown, baby.

not a genius, just a genie-- poof i'm gone.

Sage Francis. A healthy distrust of sea lions...

i don't have a very large music repertoire. when i like something, i listen to it for months sometimes... so the same few songs can keep me interested for years.

today is sage francis on repeat.

mental-music-video, over and over... that haunting melody of sea-lion, that so captures that trudging numbness i hear all the time, the what? huh? why-should-singer-care part that i just want to lie down and drown in, that takes so much effort to pull away from.

building the same sand-castle over and over. watching it melt into the sea over and over. firing into the sand, nothing tangible to shoot down...

so many times i have heard it... and the girl's voice at the beginning still startles me sometimes, it sounds to me so like my own, i'm always disconcerted. how did i get into the song? wait. where am i? who is where and which is real...

my wooden arms are too tired to pull off the armor. too tired to remember why i should care. but Being only among songs is not where i want to BE, only where i am.

Another shower

Maybe the emotion is leaking from my head and affecting the physical world. I was just in the shower, thinking, and the shower-head kind of exploded and gushed sideways and loud. The startle of it almost made me cry. But I didn't. But almost. And then when i picked up the shampoo, tried to pour it into my hand, i almost missed because my hand was shaking so. But i didn't miss. But almost. Sometimes i think i am all calmed down, and then i will notice how i can barely hold a towel, how i don't feel the weak and shaky until i see the towel shake.

i am racing and racing, my thoughts are pacing. i am egg. i am fragile. i am so full of thoughts and talking. Poor little caged thoughts.

i spoke to someone yesterday. they said-- i am a quiet person.
and i said-- why?

because i really wanted to know. because i wanted there to be a REASON.
but all they said back was-- because i just am.

which was not a very exciting or dramatic response. and i tried to pretend a bit, that there might be more to it, because of course, if you are quiet, and then you give a long-winded explanation as to why that is so, well, that is not very quiet. but i do not think they said "because i just am" to be ironic or funny, i think that was just the end of the story. which was disappointing.

all the real-life people i know are still imaginary in every other sense.

who are you?

Showers

A semblance of a dremblence of a trembling, dreaming, dead. Assemblence of remembrance, of a deadened teeming head. Dead-end dreaming, alone not team-ing. Seeming, seaming, almost meaning, almost meaning, at the cusp of MEANING, but no such gleaning ever quite, ever quite...

I have a lot of conversations in the shower. Oh wait, sense and order. Um, yes, lets post the email first then get to the postscript...

i think of W. writing down that he wanted a popcorn snack. if i hadn't had reading so early, i think my life would have been so much different. i wouldn't have had a way to understand and connect and communicate with the humans. when the kids have tantrums, i wish they could write it down, tell me they want a popcorn snack... when i am angry, writing is so much closer to reach than spoken words.

i've been thinking how all my interactions read like a scrip. (you know how i imagine conversations with people and how they might go.) i wouldn't actually explain it to the people at the school, since that would be too much talking about myself, but i pretend that maybe we'd become friends in the future, or a conversation would come up where i could ask and explain and compare/contrast my way with theirs, because maybe theirs is the same?

my notice of things is heightened at the school. how i do all those little things that people do without noticing, like breathing, blinking. when i say hello to someone-- it is: person approaching, should acknowledge, crap, relax, make eye contact, smile, say hello, they asked me something... laugh, cock head to the side, grin, say yeah, roll eyes, look amused...

i think about all my affectation. the grin and roll eyes. i play it all out like i think i'm supposed to, and i wonder a lot if other people hear all that stuff in their head or if it really just comes naturally, unthinkingly. i match my behavior, responses, to scripts i know-- books i've read, tv i've seen.

So i wrote that to someone this morning. Just took a shower. I have lots of conversations in the shower. In-my-head-conversations, not actual conversations of course, I am not that kind of movie. One reason I don't write more often, is that, sadly, I don't have a lot of new thoughts. I like to think about the same things over and over. I am stuck on this script thought. Hopefully writing it down (again) will "get it out of my system" a little.

I have heard that it's "a girl thing" to act out conversations internally. Any girls out there care to comment? I spend an awful lot of time on just one sentence. Playing it over and over. How much smile? How much laugh? This way? This way? And when i get it "RIGHT" I like to keep playing it over, because it makes me feel calm to know i have it perfect, and i feel so witty and clever when i get a conversation, or part of a conversation just right, i like to just keep having it over and over and clapping with delight at myself.

Sigh. Self-depreciating grin. Except, i don't really FEEL self-depreciating. I FEEL yay-yay-lets-do-it-again!!! But I also feel somewhat obligated to make some, "I am such a dork" type comment, because that's what humans do.... YAY YAY AGAIN! ;p