Tag: webdev

I Am Not Normal -or- “Hi, My Nickname is ‘Way Too Much.'”

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the first impression you want to give people?

I have bigger problems when people think I am normal than when they don’t. This is because neurodivergent and neurotypical people have two different perspectives, and the neurotypical person (also referred to as “allistic”) is always going to assume I am just like them because majority is implied– neurotypical. I do not have to start every conversation with “hi, my name is Leslie, and I’m an autistic (‘hi, Leslie’),” but I do not think it would hurt if I did. When I do not, people can see that I am irregular, but they can’t put their finger on why.

I have cerebral palsy so I move and look different, but not by so much that you’d think “neurodivergent and physically disabled.” My biggest issue in life is not looking disabled or autistic enough, because I can say it all I want and there’s still going to be a look of disbelief when I actually show people I’m not Bruce Almighty. I would rather people love me backstage, because my social masks are worth nothing. It’s valuable to go through the process of an official diagnosis just for confirmation that you’re not crazy. You’ve done the research and you believe you. It is only when you believe that you know more about your own brain than other people do that they push back. Why do you think you’re the authority on telling other people who you are? “You don’t look autistic” is my favorite. I struggle with imposter syndrome because of it, or I did……….

I actually do think I look autistic now that I know. Like, I just looked around one day and realized my closet was serving Young Sheldon realness (also “Old Sheldon” realness due to all the long–sleeved t-shirts)……. which is also serving Jim Parsons realness because we are both Houston gays of a certain age (he’s older), and our accents are nearly identical when we fall back on them. If you met Jim and me together, it would seem like you met two people who have always known each other, and I mean it. That boy knows what HATCH is, maybe thought about going. For all I know, Michael has a picture of him somewhere.

Michael and I met at a Houston gay club, then found out we were both HATCHlings and he starts going through a photo album on his phone. Complete strangers, except not…….. I was in his pictures. I was in my 30s and the pictures were taken when I was 18 or 19 and he was still in diapers (15). In short, Jim Parsons has the same accent as the gays who raised me. I love him like he personally vouched for me at The Ripcord…… because that’s what you do at the end of the night in Houston if you’re with the boys.

When I’m with “the boys,” I feel more comfortable in a club, gay or straight. That’s because the club is an unfamiliar environment with lights and sounds that are way too fuckin’ loud, but the boys feel like home when the club doesn’t. My favorite memory of clubbing in Houston is the night I went to JR’s in a white t-shirt, jeans, and red leather CFM pumps. It was a great outfit, but within two hours I thought I’d never be able to walk again. My friend Brian knew that I could hardly stand up, so he carried me to my car. I looked like the butchest fairy princess on record.

Looking like a butch fairy princess is also a neurodivergent trait, interestingly enough. Neurodivergent people have loose definitions of gender and sexuality. The spectrums between gay and straight, male and female, mono and poly are all enormous, why I call it “Avatar state,” and you probably will, too, if you’ve seen Avatar: The Last Airbender (not the movie- skip it).

“How dare you make me, a bisexual, choose between two or more things?” #bumperstickerwisdom

I identify with Toph because she’s physically disabled (blind) and coded as autistic in her bluntness. This was even more apparent in Legend of Korra. But, of course, that is not acknowledged because There is No War in Ba Sing Se. Problems do not go away if you sweep them under the rug, and get worse the longer you ignore them. Local is national.

We were engulfed in flames, the embodiment of our own ignorance because the former president going after John McCain for being a POW never even raised an eyebrow. FUCK those people. How could you not see that and the former president’s treatment of the mentally handicapped thinking, “this is surely a leader?” People who think the former president is Jesus have never recognized he’s actually Brian…….. but they know he’s the Messiah. They’ve followed quite a few (I’m not convinced God wanted George W. Bush, either…… but they were).

I am not nearly as furious at the former president’s supporters as I am at the people who stood by and did nothing, and there are a ton of them. Voting participation is usually less or right at half in a presidential election, and you have to pay people to show up for the mayor/city council/state leg, dog catcher, etc. I believe that is actually an elected position in West University because my math teacher in 10th grade was mayor and I think I remember her mentioning it.

OMG, now *that* woman was a monotropic thought process…………. Where were we again? 😉

I do not know how people see me the way they do, I just know that it is the same way that people have looked at others who have raised me. I am not dissimilar from a pastor or an opera singer, because that’s what was modeled for me. I have a stage presence every bit as big as theirs, and I never want to use it ever again, because it’s everything about me that’s not really there. It’s the end of the movie, and I’m stepping out from behind the curtain……. while everything is still in color. I am trying to stop the desaturation, or at the very least, turn up the shadows to make stunning, stark grayscale photography. I have said “pay no attention long enough.”

Perhaps Jack Ryan’s archetype can’t be autistic easily, which is why it was easy to let go of that dream. I don’t think I could have taken the pressure cooker, even as an analyst. Some analysts are even forward-deployed, and though I think it would be exciting, I know through talking to Zac and Daniel that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. They both got to explore, they both went through trauma. Both are figuring it out with me.

I have an alternating lateral isotropia which makes one eye focus while the other eye drifts. I have no 3D vision. I don’t always have the correct social masks and say things that people just don’t say in a conversation. They don’t know how to address the elephant in the room….. how to tell me that I’m weird because I obviously don’t already know.

People gloss over my limitations all the time and I am brutally honest about them. Others think I’m shitting on myself and placate me, later realizing I was right and they resent me “because I didn’t tell them.” They still feel snowed because they were seeing me through their filters and not the ones I told them existed. In essence, what is happening is that my social masking is so good, so practiced, that when I say I’m autistic or ADHD it is dismissed. I am not special. Most women with autism/ADHD face this to some extent. It’s more often for me having been raised in a fish bowl because I am skilled at making things look fine (while everything is actually on fire).

Other people seem inversely weird to me, and I could not put my finger on it, either. Until now, I’ve thought I was an alien, taking refuge in science fiction (dear God how did I not know this was coming…… I’m basically Mac and PC [John Hodgman and Justin Long]). Come to find out, it’s because people have been asking me to do things way beyond my capability and I’ve let them down because “I didn’t know any better.” It is never that I told them I was ADHD (haven’t had to tell an employer I’m autistic), explained that it meant I had limitations, and you didn’t look it up. I am only responsible for half of a conversation, and I have never been good at holding people accountable for their part. I hate and am also too weak to stand up to authority most days.

The thing is, though, I run a tight ship with an order all its own, which generally looks like there has been some sort of struggle. I desperately need structure and hate authority simultaneously, because my system is in collaboration with no one and I am lost in my own little world– no one is capable of helping me maintain it; I couldn’t explain it if anyone offered. It’s comfortable in my mind, but it also feels like waiting for God to make Eve when I don’t have a sounding board. According to Zac, this might take a while (he’s an atheist). It’s an apt description because the most beloved trees in my mental garden touch upon knowledge of humanity and the divine.

I think deep thoughts and ask the real questions of myself every day. “Why am I like this?” is a constant refrain, but not a pejorative. Fuel to keep the fire going. Writing is working and I’m getting further along in my healing journey, like just now realizing that I was programmed to look for people like my 10th grade teacher because I was already chasing a cougar (she was young, but I was 11 years younger). Oh my FUCK have I just played a huge hand in making myself feel better and someone else worse, just not her. All the archetypes that came afterward, Supergrover the last and most precious in a line because I’d never met anyone like her, and I never will again. It is all just so sad- one f the reasons I’m isolating because I don’t want to take out grief or anger on others. She calmed me and won’t let me calm her. Somehow, we’ve become a part of each other’s heartbeat despite actively disliking each other and stuck in a loophole-less Massey Pre-Nup.

Relationships like ours don’t happen often,, where both people are just too much for the other because of our different outlooks on life. We actually have little in common if you look outside our thoughts. We track together, but “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” We are in different social, professional, and relationship situations, with the difference being an absolute power balance and not one we made. Alternatively, there is no such situation in which I wouldn’t just roll with it. You need snacks? Ok. You need me to steal something? Ok. I’ll be at the National Archives by eight. LET’S DO THIS. My inner Nicholas Cage is struggling to get out. 😉

Just text me first.

I grew through wanting bugs to be features and realizing I couldn’t just release the beta as official and publish a patch later…. I am not Microsoft, and she is not Windows…… but her e-mail address does mark her as having had a 56K modem that came with a proprietary CD (Compuserve, Wow, take your pick- not even AOL? Really?), because that’s the only way you would have gotten an e-mail address that ancient, and yes, I am making fun of her. That’s because she’s basically “Windows 98 and the Plus Pack!” years old.

It would have been fun teaching her terms like “mommy save,” the idea that women only have one personal folder and it is the desktop. You know it immediately because you sit down at the computer and the icons are layered (we also have what we called “12:00 flashers,” ’cause every appliance in their house is always blinking 12.). And that line isn’t making fun of her because A) I don’t know what her desktop is like. II) I was making fun of my users and my own mother from “back in the day.”

My mother assumed that if it plugged into the wall, I could fix it. This is not untrue if we’re talking about a desktop/laptop/tablet/phone. I, like Daniel Stern, have no concept of how to program a VCR. “The cows can tape something by now.” My mother once flew me from Portland to Houston because it was cheaper to house and feed me for a few days than it was to call the Geek Squad and I provide better service. I am sure that she did want to see me as well, but she got a bargain, ijs.

All of these things combine to make me dig down on every topic. I’m creative. I like writing. I like computers because they enable me to write. I like tablets because they allow me to write anywhere with a minimum amount of effort. It genuinely seems like the longer I say silent, the more the words flow.

In Scotland, I can find no record of it, but my parents tell me that they chose my name because it meant “quiet spirit.” Today I realized for the first time just how much they actually nailed it.

There are lots of bugs, but the feature is me. The best impression I can give is that I allow myself to take up room in the world because I am not frightened of yours. Be as big as you are.

I’m trying.

Dooced

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever found (and kept)?

For Heather

Web design and development are the coolest things I’ve ever found (and kept) as special interests job-wise. That’s because of anything I’ve ever found, it has led to this moment. Lucrative in the beginning by being IT, possibly lucrative later on as well because I know how to express myself using those tools. I don’t think I have the capability to be a developer anymore, because there’s too much Python, MySQL, and JavaScript for me to keep up. When I started, it was only HTML and CSS. Toward the end, I learned how to read XML, but not write it. Therefore, I can still design, I’d just have to hire out the backend (things like making database connections if I had a content management system, pulling in APIs from other apps, etc.). I know how to edit a script to connect to a database with my username and password securely, but not all the ins and outs of getting the results from the database to appear in a web page. Although in terms of development, search engine optimization is very important, and I do know how to do that. And in fact, search engine optimization is why I’m still here and not using something like Dreamhost.

I have access to a community here that likes to read……. which, if you write 1500 to 3,000 words a day is pretty damn important.

Without getting interested in computers, I wouldn’t have been interested when my friends Joe and Luke said they were starting a linux server and did I want an account on it? I started writing on Darkstar, their (our) server. It connected to the web and you could get to it from the outside, but things didn’t start getting interesting until WordPress, the next big thing I found and kept. However, I didn’t have to transfer from Darkstar to WordPress directly. By that time, my job at University of Houston covered three things that propelled me here. The first was web design, getting used to publishing to a production server to make sure there were no issues before I went live (I caused a few disgruntled looks occasionally, but luckily I never broke a site designed to serve millions of people at once (oops, my bad…. should I leave a note?).

Design includes things like how the page looks, like the columns and where the ads fall and all that (I don’t control ad page breaks- sorry if they suck).

The second aspect of my job was development. Generally, when I was working on design, I’d do it in Photoshop/Illustrator first to get page layout. Development is being able to slice the images I just made and get them to fall the same way through an HTML interpreter. Believe it or don’t, that is a million times easier than page layout in Microsoft Word (amiright?).

The third aspect is content, at which I kick ass and take names. I doubt I’d be able to find all my articles now, because I worked for UH from 1999-2001. When I graduated from lab supervision to the web, I helped run a web zine (looked professional, but that’s basically what it was) called “Information Technology Daily News.” It is in no small part why I can write 1500-3,000 words every single day without blinking. I was trained like a journalist.

It was through that job that I interviewed Helen Thomas, unofficial dean of the White House press corps (the one who said “thank you, Mr. President” at the end of every gaggle). She and people like Sam Donaldson would get information and run to the phones, so I asked her how the Internet had changed all that with a 24-hour news cycle. In Helen’s own spicy way, she said basically it was a bitch on wheels. The question was possible through continuing legal education, but I got into the law school with a press pass.

Editor’s Note:

I didn’t want to see Helen Thomas at all…. eyeroll…. the Mia Hamm and Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson of news? I was dead. DEAD. Boss came through for me even though Helen Thomas was one of his least favorite people on earth (had a t-shirt that I thought was hilarious; it said “charter member of the vast right-wing conspiracy.” I remember when I could laugh at that…..) I cried when I saw Helen’s old press pass at the Newseum later that same year.).

The transition from Houston to DC in 2001 was when I really started getting popular, blog-wise. This is because my friend Chason, one of my staff at UH (I was sort of in charge of my area once the original supervisor of the zine left, but I didn’t have hire and fire privileges, just input.) introduced me to people like Anil Dash, Ernie Hsuing, and Wil Wheaton. He may have introduced me to Dooce as well, but I can’t remember how I found her. I just know it was right after she’d gotten “dooced” for her “Asian Database Administrator” comments, but hadn’t taken anything down yet. It was before Jon Armstrong, before Leta was just a twinkle in Heather’s imagination.

The path to Chason was the one directly to Chuck, the former Congressman (who was a dog), the Avon World Sales Leader, BYU dry humping and Sprite,™ and what to do about blowback (nothing).

I wouldn’t have gotten good at WordPress without her, and I miss her every day. People tell me that I sound like David Sedaris and the compliment is astounding….. meanwhile, “I am sparing you the DETAILS OF EARL’S ANGINA.” I wrote a piece on her the moment I found out she died. It was one of the worst moments of my life…. yet, it didn’t have anything to do with her at all. It’s that my virtual friend lost her battle with neurodivergence. I do not know her from Adam, because even though we are both OG, we never crossed paths.

I was not but a few years from a time in my life that I felt that way- not that I wanted to die or anything like that. It was having to choose between physically sick and mentally well every day of my life….. the relentlessness of managing a disease like that, not a particular want to escape from people….. And by that I mean dropping out of society, not my personal relationships. In short, I know what it’s like to be Dooce even if we’ve never been in the same room.

Painting my feelings as fact, she stopped checking the story she was telling herself, betraying heather and leaning on Dooce.™ I do not believe she was a narcissist. I believe that she was protecting her brain from injury with social masking. Blowback will do that to you, and why I believe she started focusing on products instead of her life. People understand “influencers.” They do not understand blogging and why it’s important.

For most of history, we have had to divine it. We had to search for signs of life in archaeology and ancient language. Blogs will eventually shed light into how we lived. The observers to history and culture will be valued in a way that they aren’t currently, like authors becoming famous posthumously.

Speaking of “posthumously,” the second worst moment during Heather’s death was seeing my stats spike as a result. It was a mixed bag of knowing my time has come and what to do about it. I am not the only blogger left standing, because Jenny (The Bloggess) and Wil (Wheaton) are still going strong. We are more of a group than we’re not, all writing through the painful moments in life and trying to make sense of them. It’s carving out our own niché while also being similar…. even the way Dooce, Jenny, and I use humor is simpatico.

That means there’s only four people that I can think of off the top of my head that have been left doing what I do. One of them is me, and one of them has passed away. I am not special because I am getting better. I am special because I am getting rare. I may be getting better, too, but that’s not the source in terms of why people read. I learned though Supergrover that I was talented, that I did have promise in a way that, if I played my cards right, I would be a success. Other rabid fans to come after her have said that I’m going to be a big deal. But it only took 10 years for me to realize that I had to have the same confidence in my writing that they did.

I can stand in 20 years of observations on society without that confidence. I can stand in the fact that I can write about a lot of topics, and people will still find it interesting. I am floored that people will wade through Android/Linux to find Zac, Bryn, Supergrover, Lindsay, Oliver (who is a dog), and the characters that are less prevalent, but no less important. It all adds to the fabric of my life, which gets richer with age as I shed my need for approval.

I get to own my story. I get to take up space.

Heather “From Whom All Blessings Flow” Armstrong is counting on me…… and now my nose is getting red, the first sign I’m about to cry. It’s okay to be wrecked, tears are not a problem….. which is what I do to correct the story I’m telling myself. I needed to hear desperately that the world needed me, and if I could have convinced her of the same, I would have made it a full-time job….. one in which I could go the distance, and we’d have been able to cross the finish line together.

So, when push comes to shove, Heather is the most important thing I’ve found and kept. First, I read her. Then, she moved out of her mind and into mine. I’ve tried to make it nice for her.

She has a pool.

Nothing -or- Bow Before Me, for I Am Root

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are you doing this evening?
View all responses

It’s been a whirlwind of a few days, so tonight I am sitting in front of my computer. Not by choice, really. I need the quiet. I crave it. Tonight, though, I’m rescuing a computer that I hosed myself. I’ve only been working with partitions and drives for 30 years. One of these days, I’ll make some progress. Anyway, I run Ubuntu Cinnamon and Windows 10, but I don’t use Windows except when I want to play Skyrim, so a quarter to never. I’m not a big gamer. I’m interested in how computers work and I know what I’m doing all the way up until I don’t. The best thing ever is cloud storage, because I don’t spend much time on anything. I reformat the whole thing and start over.

Today I thought I wouldn’t have to. I used timeshift to back up my hard drive in case I hated what I was installing (Kubuntu, to try out KDE Plasma), which is like Time Machine on a Mac. I thought I had a complete copy of everything. Turns out I do, but the version I restored the drive from was not the same, so the files didn’t overwrite properly. That means I was trying to boot into two versions of linux at once. Guess what? It didn’t work. I said “fuck” a lot and then got back to it. Linux gonna linux, but Wes Borg was right. Every OS sucks in its own particular way. Like in relationships, you just have to decide which disk flags you’re going to ignore. That was a little partition manager humor for you there.

For 90% of you, I can’t explain the joke without you falling asleep. Just nod and laugh. I change topics a lot. Lean in.

I’m feeling punchy because I had to use DOS. That doesn’t make sense unless you’ve been a linux user for years, because I don’t know about other IT guys, but I constantly type linux commands in DOS and get way too angry at the fact that it doesn’t work. Within linux, it’s the same way. In Ubuntu, the extension for an installer is .deb, like Windows .exe. In Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS, the extension is .rpm.

I was once looking at the folder that says RPMS in the command line and still typed sudo dpkg -i *.deb. But that’s nothing compared to the number of times I’ve reinstalled drivers because something didn’t work and then discovered after much tearing of hair that it was off/unplugged. This is very, very easy to do with network printers, when the printer could be on a different floor. Because SURE AS SHIT no employee will tell you correctly whether it is on or off. Ask a server administrator how many times they’ve driven three hours to press a button. Don’t wonder why we’re dicks anymore, because that number shouldn’t even have to be greater than one, but it is.

I laughed so hard I nearly died the first time I read “Bastard Operator from Hell.” My friend Donnie and I nearly had to call an ambulance for both of us when we heard “Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie” do “Welcome to the Internet Helpdesk.” The latter is really funny because it’s what users say to us. The former is what it would be like if we could get revenge. There is always so much “don’t want to” in “can’t.” That’s because it’s learned helplessness. Why be in any way knowledgable if someone always comes to bail you out? That’s our job and it’s okay, but years and years of questions like “can you install Firefox for me?” are great. Easy. The facepalm is when the user says, “do I have to turn my computer on?” I have also had people want me to walk them through how to do something in M$ Office when their computer is at home and they’re calling from the car. Even if I could explain it without you doing it while I’m talking, how would you ever retain that information? You’ll call back.

Being a woman in IT Support is very hard. I mean, it’s hard anyway because it’s soul sucking to watch people be that stupid that consistently. I wouldn’t sound like such a dickhead if the problem wasn’t so dire. But it’s worse for me because there are simply some people who refuse to believe I know something about computers. Some days they’re right. 😉 (Reminds me of an overhead voice at the Spy Museum that says “you’ll have to survive on your wits.” I turned around and said, “grrrrrrrrl, we fucked up now. I’m like Josh and Toby from The West Wing. If I miss wheels up and Donna wasn’t with me I’d have to buy a house.) Though I’m a bit spacey at times because I’ve forgotten more than I’ll ever know about computers, if you got a problem, yo I’ll solve it. I have managed the impossible with data recovery more than once…… as well as doing a lot of other people’s work for them because they just don’t want to do it. I understand if it’s a technical issue with the operating system. But when your entire job is putting courses online and you try to pass it off on IT because you have a technical issue every 30 minutes because you won’t learn anything about the software you’re PAID TO USE, that adds up, especially when the questions are about where buttons are laid out and you’ve helped them eight times that day. It’s the equivalent of getting frustrated and going to the bathroom at school to take a break. And you can feel guilt free about it becaue it’s not a problem with you. It’s a problem with your computer.

At other times, things spiral because people aren’t thinking. Their computer doesn’t work, and the electricity is out. Or they’ve plugged the power strip into itself instead of the wall (yes, really. I figured it out over the phone, but it took 45 minutes because I never would have assumed to check something like that. He said it was plugged in, and there weren’t camera phones back then.) It’s gotten a lot easier with remote desktop and the fact that when I ask people for pictures or screenshots, they can do that on their phones. Most people don’t know how to use screenshot programs on a PC, but they can do it on an iPhone.

Even iPhones have their issues, though. One of the professors I worked with couldn’t get her iPhone to play music in the classroom. She called IT, but the only problem was that the aux cable didn’t fit through the case.

When you get into web development, two things about that. The first is that people tell you they only want you to do the design, but they have a million changes to add in terms of copy even though I’ve set it up where they don’t have to use HTML tags at all (a content management system like WordPress). They don’t want to manage their web site, they want you to do it. They’re no good at computers. They’re making $150,000 a year to learn that kind of software, because sure as shit the person that asked me to make said web site is going to be “in charge of social media.”

The second is that web sites are like art. Everyone wants the art, no one wants to pay for it. You can design the most fabulous site in the entire world, and they’ll tell you that. Many times. You give them the bill, and it’s the shittiest web site they’ve ever seen. Plus, friends and acquaintances won’t think anything of asking you for hours and hours of coding for the “exposure.”

I would not like to work for more people that don’t want to pay me, and there’s an “Argo” quote for every occasion. I’m paraphrasing Lester, but “exposure ain’t worth the buffalo shit on a nickel.”

The other thing is that when people ask you to make a web site, you’ll give them a flat fee for the code. But they’ll call you every time they have a change for the next ten years and get angry if you say it’s $40/hr. They want you to do it for free, forever.

And now you know why I have such a hell of a time as a cook. There are no Karens there.