Time together or Together alone?

Modern life is certainly very different  compared to that some of us can recall having had one form of entertainment cease to work properly and require replacement this week in this post done exclusively on the Chromebook.
I think one of the big factors has been that increasingly we are living separate lives even when we say we're living together say as partners  or with our families, often in isolation in not just our own mental space but actually increasingly our own physical ones.
It's by no means uncommon to hear of families may text members about either meal times although increasingly that's no longer shared or to have snacks fixed for them ready as they emerge briefly to return in minutes.
When I was growing up the television was seen by some as threat to their way of life, taking away from things people did together such as playing games or just talking to each other with us becoming just passive consumers of that coloured tube in the corner of the room.

People didn't anticipate we'd talk about what we were seeing to each other, on the subway or at school or work so in some way you can look at it as a 'golden era' like that family in the picture, that's how we lived including for some of us the wonders of NTSC colour that was like going to the movies, 'cept it came to you as huddled around it.
Today though we consume our YouTube, NetFlix an co wherever we happen to be and you may be watching that as someones chatting away or playing a game which is really cool but as people we need some US time as well as ME time to catch up with each other, talk about what we've seen and done, maybe gain some perspective too.
I think it matters for all of us to try to get our modern lives into some kind of balance, sharing time with each other as well as with watching or keeping up with our friends online. Don't you?

Wednesdays musings

To be honest while the next edition of the main blog is written and ready to go, I'm actually a little behind on writing this one but there is a bit of story to that.
I was feeling a little grouchy yesterday which people at one site may of noticed, nothing big and and bad but low level but out there which may of been connected thinking about some past events plus the Daylight saving Time that over here we've just entered that messes my body clock up.
You see, I'm really more a mornings girl, off out of bed with bounce, getting things done but starting to feel run down by afternoon, happier with my earlier than most legal adults with early fixed bedtimes.
I feel sad when I see dark mornings, setting me off with the wrong sort of attitude- it's hard to explain but it really bothers me - and I think that's what kicked all that off.

 By the end of last nights littles chat I was feeling more playful and fun just in time for bed so at last I end up between the sheets next to Theodore the IInd  on a high ready for a good nights sleep.
I was talk to a person the other day about  where and what this littles/middles life slots in with me which is funny cos it's just been me being me but to me it's my natural relaxed state, laying across a bed, maybe reading clutching a teddy  surrounded by my dolls and that. Carefree.
Until next time, Jo.

Am I too old to play with toys?

It's bin an eventful week over here obviously as those of you who have seen the news since Tuesday afternoon will have seen as we're all affected by it in differing ways.
Today though I'm going to be talking about something that you might be going through or maybe it happened to you in your childhood that I think matters.
Most of us grew up with our parent(s) or a very close relative rather than say being with foster parents, in care or adopted and generally they oversaw how we grew up including the things we did or played with.
Every so often there was this talk about  the toys we had like if we still wanted them, could a sibling or cousin have them and sometimes they might of said something like "You no longer need Millie, Jo. You're a big grown up girl now and you don't play with dolls."
If you were really unlucky, you'd come home from school and just find your toys decimated and probing why would produce the answer "You're too big for them now so I took them away"   which tended to be what happened with mine. That sucks!
Actually they could well be wrong especially as it applies to younger teens and a few months back a girl wrote in to the American Girl dolls magazine with the following question to which they wrote this reply: 

This is actually pretty interesting and I have little doubt influenced by children's welfare 'experts' who see so much pressure on acting more sophisticated, in many ways trying too hard at being grown up, being too serious for our own good.
Writing this as someone who is legally an adult I like what they have to say about maturity a  lot which is really what we mean by  being grown up which is more about how we treat others and how we  run our lives. In a word, being responsible which we can struggle with and I won't lie to my younger readers that I haven't had this  too but that is all it is.
Growing up and even being Grown Up doesn't mean we should not enjoy play or doing something creative, indeed only this week gone, someone who isn't an age regressor like me just came out and said they were going to make a Lego model and did, showing pictures to our circle of plain adult  friends. I said life's too short not to do the things we enjoy and they agreed.
If you feel like it, then don't be afraid to especially if you are feeling stressed.

I posted this in part as a response to the young people, mainly French around this age group who were injured in Wednesday's tragic terrorist  incident in London, Great Britain who are in need of our love and support right now.

Tension

One contributor to how you are feeling and by extension how you may behave  under it's influence is the other things that are going on in your world and an increasing area I find is in the online world.
On social media in particular, groups fragment periodically with the segmented part starting a battle in part to justify to whoever is listening  just why they split off and to blacken the name of the very group not so long ago they were proud to be a member of.
You see people who for medical/disability based reasons unable to withstand endless negative and aggressive discourse actively pouring oil on the fires who fail to see after just saying why the don't like interaction with one group, make accusations often baseless just to enjoy watching the fireworks.
I find this not just troubling from how it has left certain communities feeling just interacting with anyone is just like walking on eggshells but also I find it spills over into me feeling disheartened about being the age regressed person I am and times seeping into feeling on edge with people.
That's one reason sometimes I limit the amount of time I'm on and make a point of doing things more positive like reading an uplifting story instead.

Thoughts from my desk

It's the weekend so I'm sat here working on today's entry after thinking over some of the weeks experiences.
I think the first thing is last weekend's written work showed I am capable of doing something I have  agreed to to a very good standard, being prepared to work with my conditions and the emotions that build up in me.
Another thing showed how not respecting how certain of my conditions are creates a situation where I feel very much out of things, unable to use those same abilities in what was on the face of it a less demanding task.
I have as some of you know from being with me severe problems with short-term memory, concentration and find noises very distressing and I was in the process of writing a Thank You card to a relative where I have people dashing all around me looking for things, shouting to each other without making it plain who it is they are speaking to, then trying to ask for information that isn't relevant at that point.
I can't hear myself think, I am struggling to remember what the sentence is even I'm trying to write, having to cross out one word as I got muddled up and what I did write wasn't what I wanted to convey even. I felt embarrassed to hand it over to the person who was going out to mail it even.
This was so unneeded and that kind of thing when I'm out at the check outs in stores paying for things and so on just gets to a point I just 'freeze over' and 'shut down'.
On the other hand where on Friday I found a micro sd card that contained sixty odd music albums that gone awl, where I the past I'd of been getting super anxious and stroppy I just calmly checked my back ups for the artists I had recordings by on the card, identified  them and got on with the job of ordering a replacement to put them all back on again maybe taking advantage of its bigger capacity to combine it with another.
In that way I'm getting at handling my conditions and how they affect me but you do to a greater extent than a good many others need to bear them in mind even if that other example is one that perhaps isn't fair to expect anyone to work around never mid  someone like me.

A leopard can change its spots

It is easy to get into a mindset of thinking about those things in  your life that may not be going so well or even into comparing how you are doing compared to others but that's a habit which so easily leads to you beating yourself up.
Like for instance we may only know of what another person really is doing from what it is they've shared with us which may well be selective, missing out any mess ups and only as they feel it is so really those comparisons may not be too accurate.
The other side of this is we may be understating our own abilities, using a very high baseline to judge them by or be so used to perceiving our failure that we automatically feel we have when maybe we've done okay really.
This came to me on Sunday where I had spent this weeks Study Weekend working on a longform part of guide working with a person I hadn't collaborated with before with no indication of the exact format and structure they were working for even.
Let's say the absence of that usually gets me into tailspinning territory  as I stare into the blank page on my non microsoft office suite so I type a few headings  and eventually find one to start typing to and slowly work may way to the final one.
I review it and send it to the person I am working with with not to say it's not perfect but it's like the best I can do here thinking to myself it's not really good enough, maybe they'll do the electronic equivalent of tearing it up even.
Imagine then you get a message to say although it may need the odd change, they really like it that even they say it's a pleasure to read something so well written, that actually I'd structured it similar to their own section.
Really, Jo that boarding school girl severely dyslexic actually manages to pull it off when she was feeling like walking the corridors thinking she'd failed!
I think the point here is I grew up so much with the idea I was no good at this that I came to believe it didn't matter  what I did or anyone said they could help me, that I couldn't change that outcome.
I changed the outcome cos I actually believed in it enough to do the work using techniques that I had learned and was prepared to spend my time on learning  and learning to trust people who were prepared to help me make those changes.

Wrapped Paw

First off thanks Tracy and Sam R for your birthday greetings and no nothing Sanrio came this year although I can always raid the kitty for something or other!
This weekend was a kind of study weekend spend working on a collaborative project which was fun cos blank paper or areas on a word processor page usually make things harder for me to get started  so I put up some subjected headings and I found one bit to get started on and as if by magic, the rest in time came and was appreciated by the person I sent it to.
Expect the unexpected as in with the birthday presents  was something different

Yes, we had white and grey school socks, harlequin and pastel fashion ones and even cute fashion ankle socks before now.
Introducing now black long soft school socks as bought by my folks!
Maybe apart from me being a bit more grown up they're getting more to grips with what I feel okay in or like to play with which is a good thing imho.

Unexpected gifts

Monday, it had to be said was different not least for being my birthday the bulk of which is written about elsewhere really but in a number of ways, one totally unpredictably this does seem on reflection to have felt different.
Generally birthdays and me are not particularly grown up affairs both from the way in which I approach them with a very child-like sense of anticipation and excitement, the sort that keeps you awake   and also from the point that what I get in the way of presents is also more child-like to the point this year of including a girls  colouring book. We go out but it feels more like taking a child out for its birthday treat minus the balloons and pink icing cake, overseen by parents cos we're not nor never have been exactly equals.
The initiated know the issues within the immediate family, not least my treated as not a relativeness by my younger brother and indeed when he came at a time totally of his choosing and for a matter of minutes although he was last here only  just under three months ago being totally ignored as usual.
The other thing was my older brother came, who hadn't been since November last so if you work that out meant both we'd not seen him for Christmas AND his Christmas gifts (and his to us) hadn't been exchanged!
Well, he'd been invited to lunch and was supposed to have arrived around Eleven but had turned up at half Ten instead with just myself in the house thinking "crumbs what are going to talk about" as unfortunately he's the type of male that talks work and technical stuff that frankly bores the pants off me.
Anyway he comes in and it's obvious from the get go he wants to talk and I really mean talk as if it's been bottled up inside of him for like ages so I sit opposite him, listening more or less three parts to every one contribution, remembering to keep some eye contact.
It's obvious he's the adult here from how he addresses me, more like a teen in the room in many ways reminiscent of how things were when he lived with us as he had authority over me (and my younger brother) when they were not in and he leaps into a conversation that was in part quite a revelation and actually a conversation about in the wider sense, discipline.
He opens the topic with an apology for mentioning it  but starts an ensconced discussion of my brothers attitude to both people in general, to being a part of a family and to how I am treated, parts of which I am familiar with what he at length eloquently described as his  childish lack of maturity-going to sulks for several weeks, refusing to help when people need it, preferring to make kits all weekend instead, looking for arguments with anybody who doesn't just meet his wants and so on. He says it's because he's not grown up.
He pauses, talking to me about what I think about that and how I would deal with such  situations as if he actually cares about my attitudes and behaviour almost like sticking a thermometer in to take a reading as he resumes.
Then he drops a bombshell that part explained part of a visit late last year by my younger brother and his partner where redacting the substance, my younger brother had really lambasted her on a well known social media site and this had gone back and forth with increasing anger and bitterness in full public view with him mentioned.
He asks me what I think of this, he tells me how upset and angry about it he was that he intervened insisting they stopped and removed it all before telephoning each scolding them especially my younger brother, making him apologize not just to him but to his partner making it plain the consequences if either of them do it again.

He repeats that bit three times to me.
I say in quirky humorous way "That's very Big Brother" and he just laughs as he realizes something.
He's reconnected to a more tween-like me as an authority figure who isn't afraid to discipline having set out what he expects and most people do.
The most unexpected gift of all turns out to be the return of him and his fair minded firmness in my life, the one who would say NO to Jo and did spank me growing up.
This is one awesome present.

Sports

Miss Kitty and I go back quite a long time actually not that I was much good at tennis or badminton on few times I did play it at high school preferring ball games or swimming which is an equalizer when you're disabled which was why I went for a period to a disabled swimming club apart from understanding company.
The instructors were super good at understanding you, your needs encouraging you to try swimming different ways to your fullest abilities and unlike regular pools our water was warmer.
When I hurt my upper right arm in my mid teens, physical therapy in the water was part of how I was helped to regain strength and confidence in using it.

Online bullying

I am sat her reflecting on a couple of things with a tenuous connection that have had quite an emotional impact on me.
One happens to be the online encouragement of a person from another Tumblr community to commit suicide for what was seen as a slight on another communities member. The person concerned was a young Kidhearted member as I was until an incident lead to us parting  who has a number of mental health and developmental disabilities and as such I always kept an eye out for them
This is being condoned by a teen mod of the other Tumblr community.
Ya know this takes me back to English Literature, would of been about aged fifteen reading William Golding's The Lord of The Flies where a group of well educated English boys bereft of adult authority due to a crash separate into groups  in a downward spiral from mean-spiritness to outright savagery.
My problems with all this drama start with inappropriate moral equivalency in putting offence caused by a ill considered comment (and god knows we all can do it) with actually encouraging a person to take  their lives after taunting them.
They are two different things.
The other is the lack of tolerance which is not about agreeing with somebody but respecting the right of an other  to hold an opinion even one most would consider ill judged that soon leads into mean spiritedness.
This so often manifests itself in NIA banners or Non Interaction Allowed where people from one group are told because they either belong to a community on Tumblr or interact with one they don't like you cannot 'like', reblog from or comment from another because one says the other is wrong.
It means since what happened with me I cannot even post message of support for this person subject to the sick suicide baiting  because their community bans ours (although we ban none) from posting to them.
I am waiting for certain communities to grow up and  at least  agree to disagree on some topics and work together on keeping people really safe.