The problem of people

One of my biggest problems of the last few years has been going out and dealing with people. First I didn't do it because I had many small children who needed naps and were hard to take anywhere. And then I didn't do it because of the pandemic. And now I don't do it because, if I ever did know how, I've forgotten.

Periodically I realize I am achingly, heartbreakingly lonely. Despite being very well loved (and sometimes smothered) by my family. I want to go OUT. I want to see PEOPLE. I want to have FRIENDS. I know that I like these things. There have been lots of times when I did like these things, when (I at least thought) I was good at them.

But now, I go out, like, quarterly. It's just so much work. I have so much anxiety before I go, and there's always a certain amount of organization required to actually do it, and then afterwards I think that everyone was annoyed by me and I shouldn't have bothered. And that's if I actually successfully do it at all. Sometimes my idea of being social is to go to a fair, walk around looking at stuff and speaking to no one, and go home. Not because that's what I wanted, but because I didn't know how to do anything else.

This past weekend, I actually did successfully do a social thing. A very social thing! I went to a convention for three whole days, stayed overnight, and interacted with people a lot while I was there. This is my third convention. The previous two involved a lot of wandering around through crowds of people, wishing I could be part of their conversations and not knowing how to join in. This time I felt like I knew better what I was doing. (Also, masks weren't required most places. I cannot explain just how heavily I rely on people being able to see that I am smiling and hear that I am trying to say something.) I met at least half a dozen people, attended three parties, and went to lunch with people once instead of simply scarfing down a granola bar in the hallway.

On the one hand, this was great. I am extremely proud of myself and hope this presages a future where I do this more.

On the other . . . It's hard to explain this without sounding like a horrible person.

But in-person people are just so much more challenging to deal with. They take up space, they have smells, their mouths sometimes make wet noises when they talk, they have annoying physical and verbal tics.

This is just a normal thing about being with people that I had just kinda....forgotten. You learn to not notice many things about people, in the interest of being able to hang out with them. But if you've spent the past several years interacting mainly online, you lose this skill and the physicality of the people around you feels like way too much. I sometimes put my mask back on just because I was disgusted by the very idea of breathing previously breathed air. And even with a mask, the elevator was upsetting. People stand so close.

On top of this, you don't get to be nearly as picky about in-person friends. My online friends are not all very similar to me, but I have many who have almost everything in common with me: background, politics, favorite jokes, interests. If I want to talk about, say, historical costuming, I have at least five people I can chat with online. But if I'm at a convention, even a science fiction convention, sometimes I find people who are not interested in talking about any of the same things I am. Even though we both like science fiction! I'd be like "do you like Bujold?" and they'd be like "no, how do you feel about Heinlein" and eventually we would drift apart because there was nothing.

I can tell doing most of my interactions online is not good for me. It's given me habits that don't serve me with people. However, it annoys me when giving up social media is floated as a solution. It's not like I'm on social media instead of hanging out with people (except that one party recently when I got shy and spent half the time on my phone: oops); I'm on social media because I can't hang out with people at that moment. And social media has brought me all four of my local friends: every single one of them, I know because of the internet. One of those friends introduced me to more people recently and one of them invited me to something. Giving up the internet would not have helped me like this!

But I definitely need to work harder on prioritizing in-person stuff, even if it's horrible at first. It's like I'm slowly starving to death but I've forgotten how to chew and everything tastes too strong. That's not going to get better by continuing to go hungry. It's a thing I have to muscle through. (I hope people take that in the spirit it's meant: "I am really messed up so this is hard but I am doing it because you are great and bring me joy," not, "I am enduring you but hating every moment.")

Anyway, I made a roaring success of this convention and friended two of my new con friends on facebook. I gave my business cards to lots of people and I even showed off my costume on stage. I am proud of all that and I think I'm right to be.

But I also feel like I have a long way to go. I can't go to conventions very often (it cost me over a month of what I make at my job), so I'm going to have to find smaller-scale ways to be a normal person who interacts with other people. Probably I should reach out to my local friends and organize more things. Or actually go to the game store Magic: The Gathering evenings. Or an SCA event. There are so many things I could be going to. I could try, a little bit more than I do.

But probably next week, because it's so hard and I'm so tired.

In which I abandon utilitarianism

 Okay, to be fair, I've never really described myself as a utilitarian. I find utilitarianism to be a handy rule of thumb when considering policy issues or charities to donate to. The things that prevent the most suffering, or make the most people happy, are the best ones. These are two different things, but in everyday ethics it doesn't even matter which you use. "Saves the most lives" is another good one. It's just a way to come up with a unit you can measure interventions by, to pick the most effective one.

But I've always known it gets a little wonky when you try to use it for everything. For instance, should you have another child? Well, it will cause suffering if you do that, so by negative utilitarianism you shouldn't. But it will also cause happiness, so by positive utilitarianism, you should. And if you try to expand it universally, it comes to either "everyone should have children, provided each child is likely to be even slightly more happy than miserable," or else "no one should have children, ever." Neither one of those seems like a very good answer to me. (I think you should have a child if you want one, personally. Whichever the "right" option is, there are plenty of people choosing each, and you will not be saving or damning the world personally by the one you pick.)

But I haven't thought about it much in a while, till recently I came upon two things that made me think utilitarianism is much worse than I realized. Sure, it might have been handy when used casually by people who also have other ways to do ethics and quickly abandon ideas that lack common sense. But some people want an ethical system to replace common sense, and when used that way, utilitarianism becomes as rapidly disastrous as most theoretical systems.

The first thing I ran into was the concept of longtermism. It's an offshoot of effective altruism (the people who say we should give to the charities that do the most good--which seems unarguably a good idea). Longtermists point out that there may very well be more people in the future than there are alive today. And if we want to do the most good, shouldn't we worry more about future generations?

So far, not too bad. I mean, I certainly don't want to set humanity up for a future where we either destroy ourselves or have miserable lives. That's why I care about the environment--well, that and my fondness for going outside.

But, as I read further, things started to get weird. For instance, there was the idea that, given a billion times more humans might live in the future than do in the present, harm to those future humans is a billion times more important than the lives of people who, you know . . . actually exist. Then, they dream up a possible extinction scenario that might happen. Does it have a .0001% chance of happening? Well, then preventing it takes priority over saving the life of any individual alive today. Because after all, a tiny risk to a very large number of people is like murdering a moderately large number of people, right?

My first objection to this is the math. All of these problems should be multiplied by the certainty that your efforts are going to help at all. The farther out in the future we look, the less we know, and the more vanishingly small become the odds what we do will make the slightest difference. Next, we could refute it by saying that a person alive today might have one billion descendants, so saving his life is saving a billion potential people, so really, it's more efficient to save lives now than to plan to save future lives. Third, we could point out that future humans, since they don't exist, have no real rights. If they did, we'd have to live in moral terror, knowing that every butterfly we diverted from its course might wipe out one billion and create a different billion. That's . . . that's not how ethics works.

But that is just introductory stuff. Once you get into their actual dream of the future, it gets weirder. (By they I mean: a few cranks I read on the internet. It doesn't really matter who, the stuff just got me thinking. I'm sure there are better longtermists.)

These people think the ultimate future of mankind is to somehow upload ourselves into computers. In this scenario, we can simply program ourselves infinite bliss. We can be thousands of times happier than any person alive today. So in that way, our descendants matter much more than anyone can possibly matter today, because we can only be mildly happy at best (everyday life being what it is) whereas they can be perfectly happy, potentially forever.

In service to this end, they think it's justified to ignore any issues around today, focus on creating AI, plan to colonize other planets, and so on. If whole continents of people are lost to war or climate change, that's small potatoes. So long as any humans survive (preferably the most privileged ones, as these are the most likely to invent the tech we need to reach this future) it's all good.

I stopped, at this point. I didn't need to read any further or do any more math. I simply thought: these future digital people are nothing to me. They are not human in any sense I care about. I sense no connection to them. And I don't see why I should want them to exist.

Utilitarianism could bring people to thinking that endless techno-bliss is worth fighting for, just because someone, somewhen, could be happy. But my common sense says no. I do not want endless techno-bliss. I want my species to survive, sure, but that's not my species anymore. I want to prevent actual suffering by actual people alive today. I care about a homeless guy getting to come inside when it's cold, and medical care in another country so that a mom doesn't have to mourn her child. These things are real. The rest is . . . simply not.

So that was the first thing. I realized that utilitarianism can take you to some weird places, and maybe instead of working out better math (which I think you can, it's completely valid to) I can simply drop the whole idea.

The second thing was a pair of books by Hank Green, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing and A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor. Both are fantastic, especially the second one, and I won't spoil them because I think everybody should read them.

But they brought up the question, from the perspective of an extra-terrestrial, about what the best future of humanity is. From that perspective, humanity is not a collection of individuals, it's a beautiful system of interconnection, which has a destiny to be and do great things.

But from another perspective, it's too dangerous to let humanity try to achieve any of that. So doesn't it make more sense to plug us into a digital matrix and dream away the rest of our future? We won't be unhappy. We'll be pacified. We won't be able to harm other societies. So what if we don't achieve anything further, don't do or dream or make contact with the rest of the galaxy?

The negative outcome in that book is the dream of the longtermists. Plugged in and happy.

It made me see why I reacted with such strong disgust to that idea in the first place. Infinite happiness isn't the way humanity has ever lived, or how it was meant to live. We always have a bit of dissatisfaction--and that can be a good thing! It drives us to do more. You don't get the Star Trek future of exploration and achievement by being contented.

I tried, when I was very depressed some years ago, to get into Buddhism or Stoicism. They promised to hold the secret to happiness. That secret is to stop desiring. If you're sad, it's because you wanted something and didn't receive it. If only you wanted nothing, you would be happy.

Then as now, I recoiled. I want to be happy because I've earned it somehow. I don't want a happiness that is simply an absence of desire. I can even be happy while desiring more.

Happiness can be kind of a treadmill. You wanted a big house, you thought if you had a big house you'd be happy. Now that you have it, you're no longer conscious of it. If you lost the house, you'd be sad. But you aren't happy now--now you want a house by the beach.

I've noticed this in my career as an author. I wanted to get good at writing, and I did, but I wasn't happy. I wanted a book deal. So I got a book deal, and was I contented? Heck no! Now I want to sell a zillion copies and get good reviews. I see other authors who have achieved all that, and are they contented? Nope! They're afraid their next book won't do so well, they want to be a bestseller, they want a Hugo Award.

But . . . to me, this isn't misery. This isn't an outcome to be feared. This is the nature of being human. Sure, we could all do a little better to appreciate what we have. And there are goals we strive for that aren't really worth the effort--stuff like being popular or rich, which are both black holes of your effort that never pay as much back as you hoped.

But wanting? striving? having dreams? I want to live like that. When I play a video game (Stardew Valley, naturally) I enjoy the part where I'm building up the farm. When it's all perfect and I've achieved everything, I'm bored.

A good life, to me, includes both happiness and striving. Smelling the roses and digging a fresh garden bed. I want to always have dreams. When I think of a positive future of humanity, I don't imagine people plugged into a vast network where we can't feel the slightest discomfort. I imagine a future where we've learned how to achieve the different parts of a good life in a sustainable way. Communities the right size to really get to know your friends. Art that we can all participate in without needing to make a living off it. Homes that rest easy on the earth, without extracting resources that aren't replaced.

Looking at my life, I feel I maybe haven't been striving enough. I've been trying to protect my mental health and my energy by taking it easy on myself. I've been reading a lot, playing some video games, taking walks. And that's fine, I don't feel guilty since I get my work done. But it hasn't done as much good for my mental health as I hoped. Thinking over all I've said here, I think maybe I should be striving a little bit more. Every time I'm drafting a novel, I feel much busier, but I'm also more happy. I like working on a difficult problem and making progress. The same with crafting--I can sew or weave happily the whole day long without feeling restless the way I do when I'm just scrolling the internet.

I've wandered far from the topic of ethics. I don't have an answer for what to do instead of utilitarianism. I'd hesitate to substitute it with "the good life," because everyone has a different idea of what that is. Instead I'd just say, when your ethical system leads you to ignore good sense, you need a new one. 

But I think that considering only happiness and suffering is just not enough. What kind of happiness? What kind of suffering? I'm happy to work to reduce suffering such as poverty, sickness, and death. But I'm not going to try to change who I am as a person so that I don't suffer. Instead, I'm going to try to pursue goals that are meaningful to me, and see how that goes.

Three basics of parenting autistic kids

 When Marko was diagnosed with autism, I spent a lot of time stressing out. I wanted to know what this meant for my parenting. Where was the book that would tell me how to raise him? Where was the expert that was going to come and tell me what to do?

What I didn't realize right away was that I already had a leg up on any expert or book, because I had been raising him already for seven years. At this point, I've been raising an autistic kid for almost 13 years, and another one for six, and it's safe to say that I kinda know what I'm doing.

Especially as nobody else knows any better. Books exist, but some of them are dead wrong, and others simply can't tell you everything you need to know about your kid because the variation in autistic children is vast. I would argue it's much greater than the difference between a neurotypical kid and an autistic kid. I did read lots of books on autism, some of which seemed to be describing something very different than my kid, and some which had some helpful tips. Memoirs by autistic people actually helped the most, because what I really wanted to know was what was going through my child's head. When you know that, you can figure out what to do about it much more easily.

I could probably write a series of posts about this (and I might) but for today I just want to say: it's not complicated. It's just parenting. You have the same goals as other parents have, and while some of the tactics in standard parenting books will not work, plenty will. And that depends more on your kid than on whether they're autistic or not. Sensitive kids do not take well to yelling. Spirited kids hate to be told what to do. Some kids love when you joke around (Jackie does) and some will get more upset when you're silly (like Marko).

One of my main worries at the time was, do I try to change his autistic behaviors, or do I treat them as hard limits beyond which he can't grow? Should I be frantically trying to catch him up to his peers, or shrugging and watching them sail by?

In the end, it wasn't a helpful question. The real question is, which skills does an autistic child need and which behaviors are harmful? You should help them develop the skills they will need in life and guide them away from behaviors that harm themselves and others. Exactly like you do with other kids. But you need to have a lot of inner strength to stop yourself from comparing to peers, separating out the autistic side of your kid from the rest of the kid (you can't. your kid is your kid), or letting other people tell you to panic more. The person who tries to make you panic more is almost never a person giving you helpful advice. Either they're panicky themselves about autism, or they're trying to sell you something, but either way they clearly aren't here to help you.

Here are the three most vital skills I can think of for autistic kids. Though I am sure this is influenced by the specific ones I have; yours may be different. 

1. Regulate their emotions

2. Detect and regulate their sensory needs

3. Communicate needs to others

These are skills everyone needs, and autistic children may struggle with them more than others. There are many other skills autistic children struggle with: speech, fine motor skills, stylish dressing, detecting sarcasm, etc. But many of these are kind of optional, when it comes down to it, or they will naturally be getting some help with them at school. If you have an autistic child, you need to let go of the idea of your child being cool in school. They may eventually develop their own brand of coolness, but it's not a thing you can make happen. If they struggle with speech or writing or numbers, go ahead and nab all the therapy that seems useful, but be aware that some autistic kids won't catch up to their peers on these. You just can't know.

But these three are going to be vital, and the bulk of teaching them is going to rest on you, the parent, because you are there in more situations, when the need for them arises.

Emotional regulation

Not every autistic child struggles with this, but it seems like most do. I have seen arguments that autistic children only melt down a lot because they're treated so much worse, but I don't think it's just that. I have a sample of two autistic kids and two neurotypical kids, and the autistic ones just freak out more about the same size problem. Apparently the emotion parts of the brain are straight-up bigger in autistic kids.

At the same time, I'm not going to just roll with a house full of unhappy screaming. Let alone the physical aggression and property damage. I want my kids to be able to meet their upset feelings and work their way through them. At the same time, I don't want them to become repressed or self-hating.

I think a lot of emotional regulation problems stem from not being able to detect and name emotions, so that's step one. "I am upset, this is what upset feels like." This lesson alone took us years. And then "I can pause between becoming angry and acting on it." And last, "I have strategies to calm myself down."

This is all a work in progress. As kids are growing, you're not getting to step three on every meltdown. My main efforts lately are stopping them from hurting anyone, eventually de-escalating, and bringing the child to a point of being able to reason again. This looks like taking the angry child to another room, sometimes distracting with a conversation about a topic they like or giving them time to read or play a game, and then talking through the issue. How did you feel when that happened? Do you think it helped to scream at him? What could we do instead? Let's go back downstairs and ask him if he would like to play the game later.

To that end, I also bargain with my kids a lot. I want them to know that no is not a hard wall they have to crash into and then melt down, but only a roadblock on one specific avenue. What if they could still get something they want? So, no ice cream today, but maybe we could put an ice cream date on the calendar. Or we could go home and have the ice cream in our freezer. Whatever. 

And I never, ever set boundaries on the kids just for the heck of it. If there's no reason I can explain, well then I guess you can take a bath with your swimsuit on. You can go to school with your shirt on inside out. I'm going to encourage the whole underpants thing but that's not a hill I'm going to die on. With an autistic kid there are so many hills. You can't die on them all.

Sensory regulation

Everyone has a zone of sensory stimulation where they're happy. Maybe you're bored if you don't leave the house every day and you enjoy noisy parties, but after two hours of loud music you want to go home. Well, autistic people have a much narrower band of sensory comfort than other people. This may mean being over sensitive to some things, like textures or tastes or noise. But it also sometimes means they get twitchy and restless if they don't get to jump up and down, swing on things, or crash into the walls. So all the time you're working on giving your children the sensory things they need and protecting them from the ones they can't stand.

When your child is small, this is mostly your job. Your child can't communicate why that shirt is a bad shirt, but eventually you figure out it's tight on the armpits and go looking for shirts that aren't. You may learn how to bake veggies into muffins to avoid unpleasant textures, or give your kid hot sauce so there's a nice strong taste and they eat more food. It's a whole trial-and-error process. There's a growing market of items like ear defenders, seamless clothing, sensory swings, and compression garments to help autistic kids get into the zone where they're happy. There will be way fewer meltdowns this way, the child will be much more free to learn and relax and make friends and eat food when they are comfortable.

But while you're working on this, a lot of society is on the opposite track. They think sensory needs are a thing we fill for small children and have to train out of as they get older. Do they really need the headphones still? If they don't actively complain, we should take them away! And all that hand flapping or chewing on things is getting annoying, let's train them to stop.

The problem is that this strategy does not actually expand a child's zone of sensory comfort. It only gets them used to spending most of their time outside of it. They are under more stress, learn less, and are less happy. They may eat less and lose weight, but since they're a teenager now it's called an eating disorder instead of a sensory issue. They often melt down the second school is over.

It burns my cookies. Instead of transitioning to less sensory adaptation as children get older, we need to transition to children regulating their own sensory needs. They need to learn how comfort feels in their body and what tools they have to get there. I am 36 years old and I'm still working on "am I feeling listless because I am overwhelmed, or because I am bored?" If that's a struggle for me, it's obviously a struggle for a 12-year-old too. But it's so important to teach this, because at some point they'll be an adult and will need to keep themselves in their own sweet spot. And they may have to advocate for themselves about it. So at this age, we should be encouraging kids to understand their needs and ask for what they need. First from us, then from teachers and other adults. A child who can ask the teacher, "Can I please sit in the front, it is too loud in the back," is a child who will eventually grow up to say, "Can I work from home? I'm much more productive there."

Communicating Needs

This follows off the last one. Unfortunately autistic kids can sometimes be their own worst advocates. Some, of course, don't speak. Others can be amazingly articulate so teachers don't realize they don't know how to ask to use the bathroom.

I hardly know what advice to give, because communication difficulties vary so much and I'm only doing middling well at teaching this. Marko can ask to use the bathroom now, but he's constantly missing assignments in class and is terrified to ask the teacher for permission to turn them in late. A work in progress. And Jackie, for reasons I can't hope to understand, sometimes refuses to say "I would like some strawberry-kiwi juice, please," but will trace the letters SKJ on my stomach and expect the juice to arrive.

I think it's vital to accept every attempt at communication and encourage it. The last thing we want to teach is that efforts to communicate aren't worth it. We don't always know what is preventing a child from communicating in the way we might prefer. So refusing to comply until they communicate the way we want can result in the child getting frustrated and giving up. It is okay to become something of a telepath when it comes to our children's needs, detecting that "zzz" and a vague gesture toward the top cupboard means "raisins" or "I'm just going to change my clothes, no reason" means "I have had an accident and feel embarrassed, please play along." What we are teaching is that attempting to communicate is good and gets you things you want. Demanding "please" or clear enunciation often trips the stubbornness switch and they'll just climb on the counter and try to get their own dang chips.

When Marko was about four to seven years old, he refused to talk to any adults outside the family. He had a really pronounced stammer at the time, but even when it was important, he wouldn't even try. I finally found out--after years of this!--that he had noticed that adults in the family understood him when he spoke but adults outside the family often didn't, or didn't have the patience to let him finish his sentence. So he figured, why bother. It was considered "selective mutism" but what I call it is very sensibly saving his breath on people who might not listen. Once he went to school, he quickly overcame it because the adults at school asked him questions and waited and waited and when he finally did try answering, they listened patiently.

So always listen, even if the communication is a sign, gesture, tugging at you, sidelong vague passive-aggressive comments, whatever. And then after you've listened, you can suggest other ways. "You know, you can say 'strawberry kiwi juice' in words, I would have understood that one a lot faster." "Can you hand me your card next time instead of dragging on my body? I like that more." "Once upon a time, there was a little girl who peed her pants, and she decided to tell her mom, 'I had an accident, can you find me some fresh pants?' And her mom was not mad at all! The mom said, 'Thanks for telling me,' and got her some new pants." (This last is a real story that actually, to my shock, worked.)

When it comes to hard conversations, like talking to a teacher, our kids will need our coaching. I've sat by Marko and helped him draft emails to his teacher. I've sent him to go and talk to the counselor while also shooting off an email to the counselor saying, "I have sent Marko to you, please talk to him if he doesn't approach you." We don't expect our kids to be able to do things the first time without us holding their hands.

* * *

This list is obviously not exhaustive. There are a heck of a lot of other important things to teach autistic kids. But these are my main focus right now. I know that my kids will be on the way to building their own successful lives if they master these skills. None of these skills have to do with being less autistic, and all of them are about achieving their own happiness.

In another post, I hope to write a list of general tips about managing autistic kids. There are so many things I've learned along the way that baffled me at first. Parenting autistic kids is not mainly a list of hacks (which is why I decided to leave the other one in drafts and publish this one first) but I'm pretty sure we all need more hacks.

It's that time of year

Years are funny things. You'd think I would remember what year things happened in, but I absolutely don't. I had to go back through my blog archives to remember what my resolutions were. And the word that was supposed to guide my year? Yeah, total news to me today, reading it. (It was "nurture." I guess I did it?)

My goal was to take care of myself and my family. Which I did. Today was the year I've been waiting for for years and years . . . the year all four kids were in school. So, for the first time in years, I've actually had abundant time for self care. And I pretty much did use it for that, although I didn't meet some of my goals.

Practical resolutions were these: 

• Go on a vacation.
• Submit the next book to agents. 
• I'd like to look into taking some classes at the community college in the fall. 
• I have already found a pool I would like to purchase a membership for in the summer. 
• Finish my solar sailing trilogy and keep looking for a small publisher for it. 
• Keep writing and submitting short stories.
• I want to make sure to take my boat out a lot in the coming year. 

So, mixed success. I took four trips this year. Two as a family (a weekend at a mountain lodge, and four days at the beach). Two on my own (to Rochester for a friend's wedding, and to Cincinnati to meet a long-time online friend. However, I mainly discovered that we are all absolutely terrible at traveling. The kids whined all of both vacations and just couldn't settle down as much as usual without their usual routines. Of course in retrospect they remember having a lot of fun and wanted to do it again. Maybe we will but I am not in a hurry.

And I don't travel that great by myself either. I can drive eight hours by myself, though I don't enjoy it. But then I get there and sleep barely at all and am weird and shy with everyone because I'm out of sorts from traveling. Just . . . I am terrible at this.

I sent maybe ten or fifteen queries. It was hard to get excited about querying, and I've mostly gotten rejections or silence. And I just don't know about this book. Maybe it's bad?

Did not take community college classes. I decided not to on account of being exhausted and overwhelmed. I'm probably missing out and would be meeting fun people and stuff, but . . . ugh, it feels hard to even contemplate. I'm so tired.

Did not purchase a pool membership. It ended up not being worth it. But we did go to the pool most weeks and also the kids had swimming lessons. Everybody but Jackie was swimming by the end of it.

Did sell my solar sailing trilogy! Biggest triumph of the year.

Don't think I submitted short stories at all. Maybe once? 

Took my boat out exactly once. It is very hard to go boating by oneself.

Overall, this year has been a little disappointing. I imagined that when my kids were all in school, I'd have all this extra time and jump into loads of interesting new hobbies and a previously unseen dedication to chores. But instead, I just took twice or three times as long to get started doing work. Oh, and laid around a lot. The only part of the house I really like is my room, and the only place comfortable to sit in there is my bed, so . . . I spent a lot of time in bed. I did read quite a lot, which I'm happy about. But I also wasted a lot of time, which I'm not.

I'm unclear if having less to do just made me that much more sluggish and my time more formless, or if I genuinely have been tired and would be even more overwhelmed if I'd committed to more things. Part of it is that I was sick the entire month of November. And I did manage to finish one novel and write a whole other one. So, it's not like I've been doing nothing. But have I been exercising, sewing, finishing my knitting and weaving projects, or hanging out with friends? Not very much, no.

I did do one thing that nurtured myself, which I've been putting off since we moved. I found a new doctor and finally had a checkup. Turns out my thyroid numbers are not right. I probably have Hashimotos. However, it's not very bad yet, apparently, and therefore there is nothing they can do about it but wait. This seems wrong to me, and I'll have to follow up with an endocrinologist I guess. Because if it's bad enough for me to feel this tired, maybe there's something that can be done?

It's the most reassuring and wonderful thing to think my thyroid has been busted all this time and that's my excuse for all this slacking. Very un-reassuring to then be told I shouldn't be this tired and there is nothing they can do it yet. 

I think I have been less depressed this year. At least, during the summer and fall. Being home alone with just Jackie was, in retrospect, really bad for me. Getting a break helps. But I still have days when randomly I feel horribly sad. This, too, can be caused by thyroid disease, so . . . ? I don't know, it's a thing to look into.

Thinking about the year to come, I find I don't really know what I want to do. Do I want to get better at accomplishing things every day? Do I want to cut myself slack and realize this is my recovery for twelve years of almost nonstop kids? Do I want to get out more? I am lonely, but all my efforts to hang out with people this year have mostly led to me concluding that I am so bad at it I should just give up and stay home. So do I keep working on that or accept the inevitable?

Here are a few things I hope for in the coming year:

• I made it into a by-application-only online writing seminar, which terrifies me, but I'm going to do it. (I mean, I paid my money so now I can't chicken out.) Hopefully that will be good for my career and my ability to handle zoom.
• I wrote a romance, which I hope to revise and then do something with. I'm considering self-publishing something after my book comes out, hoping to coast on my improved reputation (if . . . anyone likes the book, that is).
• I've got my novel coming out in July, so that's one thing that's definitely happening. I hope to talk to some bookstores about carrying it and maybe doing a launch event. I am so bad at that kind of thing. But I may end up even doing some podcast and youtube interviews. I gotta do my best for my book right? No matter how terrified I am of being perceived?
• See an endocrinologist.
• Get that stuck wisdom tooth out finally.
• Keep prioritizing my mental health: go outside, exercise, don't spend too much time on social media, do creative things.
• Go to two science fiction conventions. I am dreading both, but maybe I could meet some people or publicize my books. I feel like they could be fun if I could only get the hang of them. One of them, luckily, is close enough I won't have to sleep away from home.

I came up with my word after several days of struggling to think of what I even want to do next year. The word is SIFT. By this I mean, sift through the things I can't change (and should accept) and the things I can't accept (and must change). There are so many of these things in my life, and my default is to accept them all. But maybe some things aren't going to get better until I choose to change them.

One thing to sift is moving again. I don't like living here, there's no getting around it. This place is not good for me, it does not make me happy. But I also hate moving. So every time John brings it up (given that he's working from home again, and we could live anywhere) I just panic because I remember how bad it was going through the last move, how many months it took me to stop feeling terrible every single day. And there's the question of whether it's worse to disrupt the kids' lives yet again just because I was unhappy. If I sift this, I work out whether there is a way to be happy here, or whether this is a thing to be brave and do despite the temporary difficulty of doing it. 

I want to sift whether to keep trying to get a literary agent or keep working on small presses or self publish some things.

I want to sift whether trying to apply more willpower and get out of bed more will, in the long run, make me happier and better able to do more things. Or whether this is simply the speed I can manage my life. Or whether in fact there's a combination of different pills that can transform me into a reasonably energetic person!

Because the fact is, there's no one kind of answer to all problems. Sometimes you make a brave resolution and do a hard thing. Sometimes you gradually get used to a thing until it doesn't bother you anymore. I need the wisdom to know the difference.

A web content writer's take on AI

 My day job, as many of you know, is writing web content. Basically just writing informational articles for a company to put on their blog. It's a great job because I can do it at home, I can do it part time, and the money is pretty good for the time I spend on it. And, of course, I've been blogging regularly for 18 years, so you could say I have some experience.

But I realized recently that a lot of people don't understand what the job of writing web content is, or why it's a bad thing for this job to be automated.

Web content started to be popular when companies realized their websites weren't ranked as highly in search results unless they had recent updates on them. It made sense to run a small blog. At first, this was just something anybody at the company did, perhaps mentioning recent updates to their services. But more and more, they realized it could be helpful to hire someone to produce quality content and post it often. People searching for the answer to a specific question, like, "Why is my toilet overflowing?" would land on the page of Gold Star Plumbing, and as often as not, they'd go, "Huh. These guys seem to know what they're talking about. I'll give them a call."

As search engines developed more and more methods of finding good results, content writers had to keep up. This process is called search engine optimization (SEO) and involves stuff like including keywords, subheadings, and pictures to convince Google and its competitors that your page is high quality and has the answers people are looking for.

This led to a golden moment in the history of the internet. Companies with no real interest in educating the public for free still created lots of informative content for you to find and read, just on the off chance you might need their services at some point. And they employed armies of writers at decent wages to provide this service. Any big company tends to run at a certain surplus, and some of that got rolled into providing a real good for humanity. I love it when that happens.

So, my job consists of four things:

• researching a topic so that I can provide accurate facts for the readers
• putting the information in my own words--plagiarism is theft
• explaining it clearly, in a way that's easy to read
• optimizing the content so search engines can find it (and, by extension, my company)

If I failed at any of these, I wouldn't be doing a very good job. My main audience is robots--the little crawler bots that index things for search engines. And I feed them what they want (keywords). But I also do have real people reading my work, and hopefully they learn something from it. My boss particularly wants to provide financial education for free for those who can't afford to use our actual product (appointments with financial advisors). So all this time I've been working for them, I've built a knowledge base you can go into and learn about budgeting, investing, picking a good health insurance plan, that kind of thing. All in terms I hoped were easy to follow and understand.

Enter artificial intelligence. A bit of a misnomer: hardly anyone claims current AI is actually intelligent. It's a remixing machine. It takes in text that we feed it and produces more in the same style. It's a little mysterious because it's programmed to be self-teaching. It's not, strictly speaking, taught to use good grammar, for instance--it mimics us. That leads some people to think it must understand what it's doing. After all, humans learn to speak the same way and we understand what we're doing. But, as far as I can determine, there is no sign it understands any of what it says, can tell fact from fiction, or wants anything.

Of the jobs I do, AI is amazing at job number four, search engine optimization. And why wouldn't it be? The audience is robots, it's a robot. They are definitely speaking each other's language. Already, I've noticed AI-written articles leaping to the top of search results, especially if you're searching for something very basic or AI-adjacent.

So imagine the owner of a company. Currently, the company website publishes an article every weekday, at a cost of $100 per article from a freelancer, for a total of $26,000 a year. But now, they can buy a content creating AI engine like Jasper, which will cost them about $1000 annually for the mid tier package. The savings is amazing, you can hardly say no to a deal like that.

Now, the thing about Jasper is that it cannot tell fact from fiction. It can't even keep its facts straight over the course of a single article. It can, with a bit of trial and error, produce something readable, something that looks like real web content. But the gold kernel in the heart of it, the truth, is not there at all.

Here's an example I found while trying to answer a different question.

We are living in a world where artificial intelligence (AI) is taking over jobs that were once reserved for humans. The question of whether an AI can write a novel has been asked many times. And the answer is yes, an AI can write a novel. 

The question of whether or not artificial intelligence can write a novel is a difficult one to answer. It’s not just about the ability to generate text, but also about the ability to generate compelling and engaging plots. 

AI-novel writing software is still in its infancy stage and it is hard for them to create engaging plots, which is what makes writing novels so challenging. However, there are some use cases where AI writing software has been used successfully such as generating content for an online course. 

Some people might think that the quality of the novel would be lower than if it was written by a human, but this isn’t always true. There are many examples of novels written by AI that have received praise from readers. One such example is “The Day A Computer Writes A Novel” by Patrick Malone and David Levy, which was published in 1973.

It starts out okay. Not the world's best writing, a little cliché and redundant, but we're used to that already. (This is because a lot of web content already is of very poor quality, produced for low pay and in a hurry. The problem, you see, starts before we introduce the machine--a pattern we can see with industrialization everywhere.)

But then you start to notice contradictions. First the answer is yes, then it's difficult to answer, then it's still in its infancy, and then suddenly there's the wild claim that AI has written lots of novels that readers loved, even back in the seventies!

I can tell this is wrong, because a) I know that AI can't yet write novels, and b) this wasn't edited even enough to look convincing. But at times, some of this content may reach the level of being believable, and then it becomes truly dangerous.

Because AI can't think. It can't consider the truth of falsity of anything. You could probably train it to seek out legitimate sources, but it still wouldn't be able to tell what's fact, what's fiction, and what's speculation. It could go looking for sources about what to do about headaches, find a passage about paleolithic treatment for headaches, and recommend drilling a hole in your skull. Because hey, the encyclopedia said that's a thing!

Ah, you might say, but a human could oversee it. That's true. Very often we think of machines doing things, when really, machines are tools allowing humans to do more things in the same amount of time. Like the self checkout. It's not checking out my groceries for me. It's allowing one cashier to supervise the checkout for 10 people at once. This cashier is way more harried, doesn't have time to trade pleasantries with me, and I'm doing most of the work myself and having a terrible time, but--efficiency is improved, which is what capitalism cares about.

So, okay, the content writer has been fired and the boss is using Jasper. But the results are pretty wonky, so the boss calls the writer back up. "I don't need to hire you as a writer at 10 cents a word," says the boss. "But it says here in your ad that you'll edit for 2 cents a word." Okay, sure, says the freelancer. It takes her two hours to write an article, but only ten minutes or so to edit one, so she figures 2 cents a word is fair. 

Unfortunately, the job is way more than editing. She's having to fact check every claim and ends up rewriting most of it. It took an hour and a half, and she only made $20, bumping her hourly rate from $50 to $15.

So she complains to the boss. "This work is a lot harder than editing a human," she says. "It basically only did a quarter of the job, the SEO stuff. I want 8 cents a word at least."

The boss looks at the text Jasper wrote, and then at the text the writer edited. Sure, the latter is clearer, more accurate, and the only one a human would ever want to read. But then he thinks, "It's not my company's job to inform the public for free. I really only want to boost my site in the search results." He calls back the editor and fires her. Every day, a thousand more words of misinformation go up on the internet, and it doesn't hurt his bottom line much at all.

Already search engines aren't as good as they used to be at finding good material. Remember when you used to search for something and get sites run by hobbyists in the field, collecting every single fact available on the topic? Now all the top ten results are the exact same six facts, in the same obnoxious contentese ("Most of us have wondered about this question. To find out the answer, read on!"), covered in so many animated ads it's hard to find the text. AI will only accelerate the decline. And it will become even less possible to hold anybody accountable for plagiarism and misinformation, because nobody actually wrote the text at all. You can hardly blame the boss for something he didn't write.

Now I can tell you this is a bad thing that will take jobs from people and make the internet worse. But that won't stop it from happening. I'm not sure, at this point, that anything will. An informative internet was always a bit of a lucky break. We all benefit from it, but nobody makes money creating it except on the edges here and there.

I hope that many businesses will realize this stuff hurts their reputation. Mine, at any rate, is counting on attracting human eyeballs and educating real people so they are in a good financial position to eventually hire their services. Nobody shares an AI-written article with their friends except as a novelty. You can't go viral with that stuff.

I also hope search engines evolve a bit to reward good sites, whether it's by measuring what sites people click on, allowing us to report bad content, or learning to detect the markers of AI. They, at least, have everything to gain here, because their service is not usable unless they do. However, I worry that their real customers are the businesses they point you to, and they will be more worried about upsetting those businesses than about serving you machine produced word salad.

We will see what's to come. I find myself depressed that we finally got artificial intelligence, and instead of a kindly robot who can teach me the meaning of human existence, I got jumbles of words and surreal pictures with distorted hands. This was not the future science fiction promised me.

Goodbye to Pandora

 Today, I said goodbye to my beautiful cat of 13 years, Pandora (Kitty Kitty to her friends).

I'd always had cats, but John swore when we got married we wouldn't have any, because he did not like them.

Six months later he got me a cat for Christmas because of course he did.

She was a teeny-tiny little thing, found on the mean streets of Philly by some college students. But she didn't get along at all with their other cats, so they put her on Craigslist and passed her on to us.

She was terrified at first. She spent her first week hiding behind the washing machine; all we saw of her was a pair of yellow eyes. Another time I couldn't find her anywhere and thought she'd escaped, when we found her behind an open dresser drawer.

But after a while she warmed up and turned into a very affectionate, one-person cat. She loved me and only me. She demanded to sit on my lap or, if I had my laptop on my lap, would get on the back of the couch and purr against my shoulder. Every single day, if I was home, she was snuggling with me.

She did not like it when we had kids. The nerve. Marko once tried to play with her and she scratched his face. She wasn't having it. She especially hated the dog, when we brought him home. Honestly I'm not sure what we expected. Gilbert always respected her space, having been smaller than her when we got him, but she never relaxed around him.

She had a spot to nap out of his reach, on my desk, and she kept me company every day, despite all the other chaos that was going on.

Then we moved, and she decided the only part of the house she liked was the basement. I tried and tried to convince her otherwise: no dice. But when Gilbert had been shut up for the night, she would come upstairs for a little snuggle sesh on the couch.

Tummy rubs were even allowed, under the right circumstances.

Curled up, she was so tiny.

She was a picture of elegance, as only a black cat can be.

But don't let her elegance fool you: she was as derpy as the next cat. Sometimes she would try to leap onto something, fail, and walk off casually hoping nobody saw that. (We did.)

As she got older, she started warming up to the kids a little bit. She didn't come to them, but if I was already petting her, they could join in.

We got Tiger, and she hated Tiger. Tiger tried to be friendly but no dice. Kitty Kitty would attack her without warning. Sometimes I think Kitty Kitty did not know how to speak cat. She didn't do the normal warnings cats do, and she failed to recognize Tiger's signs of friendliness. Maybe she was kitty-autistic. Or maybe she'd just had some bad experiences with other cats before she came to us.

Anyway, there were a few precious moments in her life when both cats would tolerate each other in order to get close to me, and I always took a picture.

When we moved, she decided the basement here was not adequate, and she claimed my room for herself too. She always wanted me to be on the bed with her. Sometimes she would wander the upstairs hall crying until I came and sat with her. Sometimes she would just hide in the back of my closet instead. But anytime I came to sit or lie on my bed, she would join me.

Have I mentioned her toe beans? Look at those toe beans.

Well, she got old. She had a few concerning symptoms, we took her to the vet, and it turned out her whole belly was full of cancer. There was nothing anybody could really do. It was strange to hear that when she seemed pretty close to fine, just a little on the skinny side and more snuggly than she used to be.

But within a week after that she had a rapid decline. It was really hard to see it happen to her. The hardest part being that she no longer wanted to cuddle. She only wanted to hide under my bed or pace around the house crying. It's been a hard week with her like this. I've woken up at night to carry her to the litterbox, I've syringed water into  her mouth. Not because I thought there was hope, but because I wanted to make it easy for her as long as I could. She deserved everything.

I said goodbye to her today. I had told myself a lot of things about it. That she was a cat, that this is not too bad of a lifespan for a cat, she had a good run. Or that nobody would miss her but me, because at least she was a one person cat. Or that having cats that grow old, and then you get another cat, is the circle of life.

But when it came down to it, I cried so hard. She's been my friend for such a long time, longer than I've known any of my children. She was so tiny and soft. She loved me with her whole heart, a heart that was not open to very many people. I wish we'd had more time, even though I know no amount a cat could have would ever have been enough.

Telling the kids was really hard too. I thought they wouldn't care, but they do. She's been a distant, hostile part of their whole lives. And in the moments when she let them approach and scritch her ears, they felt so special.

We will eventually not be sad anymore. At some point we will get another cat, hopefully one that Tiger gets along with. Loving cats hurts because you know the whole time it won't be forever, and then it's not and you're somehow still surprised. But I'm not going to stop doing it. They are beautiful creatures whose time with us is always worth the pain of loss.

But today, I'm crying because when the kids go to bed tonight, she's not going to pop up to cuddle with me. I wish she could.

It's somehow fall now

So, uh, I haven't updated here since June. Oops. I try to post here at least once a month so my archives look nice and neat, but July was stressful and I missed it then, and then my perfect record was gone so I wasn't motivated anymore. You know how it is. Or maybe you don't, not many people have decade-old blogs they still keep alive anymore!

My parole from fulltime parenting has finally come. Jackie started kindergarten. I've been looking forward to this moment for YEARS and it finally happened!

I was terrified Jackie wasn't going to adapt well. The open house before school started was a disaster. The teacher hadn't seen her IEP, called Jackie "Jacqueline," and had that name on her desk and cubby and everything. Way to give the worst possible impression to a kid already skeptical about the whole business. Jackie spit at her and called her stupid and basically made her worst impression possible.

And yet, once the first day of school rolled around, she was actually fine! She loves her teacher now. Her name has been fixed on everything. She has a best friend she plays with every recess. She always gets ready fast on weekday mornings and wants to go wait at the bus stop 20 minutes before it's time.

Everyone else is doing fine in their new classes. Marko is in Advanced English, which is exciting for him. His grades aren't great, because he keeps missing assignments and not asking for help, but he's learning a lot and trying. I just hope the teacher understands it's an executive function issue, not a lack of effort. Michael is in robotics club a second year running and is also learning the cello. To me, it's just amazing that they give a kid a cello and lessons for free. I want a cello and lessons for free! That was never an option at any of the schools I've been to.

Miriam likes school less this year, because her best friend is not in her class. But she's still doing extremely well and is pulling As in everything because of course she is. I worry about her perfectionism, but I'm proud of her hard work.

John quit his library job and is a project manager now. I feel bad about this, because I think he could have loved libraries if his particular library hadn't been so dysfunctional. Plus a pandemic. Plus underfunding and understaffing and libraries being expected to solve all societal problems simply because they're the only place people can go. But he's very happy in project management and is working from home. It's so nice that he doesn't have to spend hours and hours every week fighting DC traffic. 

Of course I feel like a colossal fool for moving here only one year before he stopped needing to commute. We could have stayed in our old house! We can, of course, move back, but moving is so stressful for everyone and everyone's finally settled in at school, so it feels impossible to consider doing it again. It took me a year to even feel comfortable here. I don't want another year where I feel homesick and homeless because I don't feel like home in the perfectly good house we moved to.

Having Jackie in school had an instant positive effect on my mental health, as I hoped it would. She's just a lot, and I need quiet time to recharge. Now I finally have some.

It did not, however, increase my productivity as much as I thought it would. I have all this time! How is it taking me all that time to do my work, run a couple errands, and occasionally clean the house? My hope was to make a schedule for myself that made my responsibilities routine. I can do just about anything if it's a routine. Unfortunately, that routine keeps getting thrown by other things. I get sick, or a kid gets sick, or I get a bad headache. Every fall I get lots of headaches, and I still don't know why.

So it could be better, but honestly being productive isn't everything. I'm doing the same amount of paid work as before, but I don't feel massively stressed about it. I'm getting book deadlines done. The house looks slightly better than it did during the summer. And I feel significantly better about all aspects of my life.

But my prior ideas of taking on more freelance work or maybe taking some college classes feel ridiculous. With what time? With what energy? Would I maybe have more energy if I had some scheduled activities? But what if I did and it just made me stressed all the time again?

Since I don't know the answer, I'm sticking with this for the present. Just getting done the stuff I need to, and maybe having a little more time for my hobbies. Hopefully going outside a non-zero amount, at least until the weather gets cold. And once it does, maybe making a weekly visit to the local indoor pool.

How are you all doing?