It’s very kind of people I speak other languages with to assume that my slow comprehension and endless requests for repetition are as a result of us not speaking my first language, when in reality, my auditory processing is just complete shit.

15 questions, 15 people

thanks @transboyzuko for tagging me! legit read your post and was like 'aww i wish i got tagged to do stuff like that:(' and then you tagged me! anyways:

1. Are you named after anyone?

My middle name was my mother's middle name, and my initials are the same as my fathers(i think that's where the gender started). Also, I have the same name as a locally famous guy from my hometown, so I used to say all the places named after him were named after me instead lmao

2. When was the last time you cried?

A few days ago while watching a kdrama (rowoon is such a good actor y'all)

3. Do you have kids?

Haha, good one

4. What sports do you play/have you played?

I played tennis for most of my childhood through high school, and was on a pop/cheer dance team for like five years when I was a kid, and I still dance for fun :)

5. Do you use sarcasm?

why would I do that

6. What's the first thing you notice about people?

I'm autistic, this is a terrible question.

7. What's your eye color?

Good question. I'll let you know when I figure it out.

8. Scary movies or happy endings?

Happy endings all the way babey! I'm too soft for most scary movies, unless they're fun and thinky

9. Any talents?

Sure, I'm mildly good at languages and artsy stuff. I'm also a bitching (and, technically, professional) whistler

10. Were were you born?

In a hospital(read it and weep, bitches)

11. What are your hobbies?

Learning about languages, linguistics, etc. Some music-y, artsy stuff. Writing. Reading. Picture me as a an artsy gay rich man from the Victorian age, but one who dabbles and doesn't get too good at any of it

12. Do you have any pets?

Yes, my two sweet babies, a purebred husky(inherited) and a little street mutt that's probably some mini schnauzer/Irish wolfhound combo. They're both adorable and have big personalities

13. How tall are you?

Like 5'8" ish, I think it's like 173 cm?(I'm ~American~)

14. Favorite subject in school?

Any foreign language! After that, probably English bcs you get to read and write and talk about it. I know, shocking, right?

15. Dream job?

I do not dream of labor.

But yeah like a cushy bs job with good pay and benefits that can afford me a comfortable lifestyle in which I can pursue my passions in my free time

I, in fact, do not have 15 active mutuals lmao so here are some mutuals/people I follow/people who follow me: @jatersade @aire-bnb @themainbeetleboy @killmongerdreams @negativeginger @theneurospicecabinet @muspellssynir @thisblogiscool @adriannlily @gender-luster @lostmy-waa-aa-aay @cristaldacier @criscrave @fenatics @the-modern-typewriter

Oh hey, look who finally got around to start this blog... Hi guys!

Before we actually start, here's a few things about me:

- Zami

- She/her

- Autistic

- Linguistics student (uni takes away a lot of my time so I won't be super active all the time but I'll try)

-Local birds enthusiast. Birds are my special interest, pls feel free to share birbs with me

- If you bounce around in the furby fandom, you've probably seen me once or twice, I am Mod Cm! This is my personal art blog.

I am also the author of that furby and autism comic that went around a few blogs and keeps recieving notes to this day lol

- I have an awful ranidaephobia, so if you have a frog as your profile picture I'll most likely block you. Nothing against you I promise, I just can't stand frogs and all of their kind, sorry

- Always up to discuss about my ocs and answer questions! Don't be shy

Things I post about (these are subject to change due to my changing interests)

- My ocs

- My art (mostly original content)

- Furbies

- Vampires

- D&D stuff, mostly tieflings, especially mines

- Monsters and critters in general

- Flight rising (come and say hi! My account is Microfauna #415868)

- Autism related stuff. Sometimes I like to vent and discuss my feelings and thoughts in a somewhat positive way

- Birds, especially parrots

- Clown husbandry

No-Go(s)

- Don't even try to interact if you are misogynistic/ homotransphobic/ racist/ antisemitic/ any kind of discriminatory asshole and pretty much a piece of shit all around

- I don't like drama and don't condone bullying, if someone I reblogged from is acting funny let me know in private, no grandiose callout posts or messages please.

- Same thing goes for pretty much everything else, don't tag me in drama stuff, I am too old, sick and tired for those things

- Not interested in fandom discourse, actually not interested in fandoms in general

- While I am pretty friendly overall, don't use my pms for venting and stuff. I have my own fair share of problems to deal with and really don't need someone else's. If you want to chat, however feel free to contact me!

Tell me about your ocs

I have a comically long composition notebook with 657 characters listed in it but it needs editing. Here's a picture of three that I've been thinking about a lot lately.

Left to right: Peppa Fillius Potts, Aurélie Lemoine, and Marshall Knightly.

Under a cut because this will get long.

Peppa is trans femme, British, and autistic, and her special interest is gardening, and specifically growing peppers. Her favorites are an ornamental variety that she's wearing in her hair (dyed green and styled like that, with resin hairpins she made that are real peppers and flowers). She also named herself after them. I'm obsessed with them myself. I really, really love gardening and peppers are something I really enjoy reading about but I've been having a hard time growing them so I live vicariously through Peppa.

Next is Aurélie, who is an anxious little mess made up entirely of mathematics and caffeine. She's an elf from France (used to be a WoW Nightborne), because I just pour all my OCs into my own setting where magic is real, and Aurélie is in magic college right now. She's a mathematical genius, a skilled codebreaker, and a linguist who can speak over 10 languages fluently, but she's extremely gullible and for a while didn't think that true crime was real and after she found out she was terrified of America. She's living there now because of magic college though.

Marshall is a vampire and he's studying at the magic college for the fields of enchantment and summoning. His background is in theater as a stagehand so he's actually very handy but he tries to look super aesthetic all the time because he's a bit of a bitch. He's American. And he has Instagram brain. I just like assigning random traits to my OCs.

So Aurélie and Marshall met because they were roommates. Aurélie was afraid of him for a while, because she's afraid of everything, but wanted to be on his good side so one day when their dorm was just suddenly filled with plants she went out to a local garden center and got him a new plant. That's how she met Peppa. They liked each other's vibes and started hanging out.

Marshall, who loves plants and being kinda weird, started writing Peppa letters asking about what plants she had in stock and advice on plant care. Aurélie was the one who delivered the letter, and Peppa definitely thought it was weird, but figured it would give her time to consider how to word things and so they started passing letters through Aurélie (who they nicknamed "Snail Mail" after this).

After almost a year of this they wanted to actually meet in person, but they were more interested in seeing how long it would take Aurélie to get tired of the arrangement, but since her brain is SO fried from math and magic and linguistics and codes she just Let's things happen to her a lot of the time. So she barely even noticed she was being used as a free postal service. Peppa and Marshall did compensate her, though she didn't even notice they were doing it at that point. Just, "Here, give this to Peppa, here's a muffin."

Marshall liked enclosing gifts in the letters too, seeds especially since it was a safe thing to get for a gardener. Peppa started growing a lot of them and would sometimes send some of the produce back to Marshall, but also let Aurélie have some too. They did end up meeting in person when Marshall was hiding in their dorm to avoid someone he'd pissed off (a whole other story) and Aurélie brought Peppa there to hang out. They reacted in a "WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE" sort of way and Aurélie thought they didn't like each other for a second before they explained what they were doing and Aurélie just kind of went "Oh, okay :)" and continued on, so now the three of them hang out in person.

Peppa teaches Marshall how to take better care of his plants, Marshall learned to cook so he could experiment with some weirder produce that Peppa wanted to grow but doesn't like to eat, Aurélie plays chess with Marshall and beats him every single time because she's a computer who can experience sleep deprivation, Aurélie likes trying peppers that Peppa grows because somehow she has an incredibly high spice tolerance, Peppa likes watching Marshall try to eat the peppers Aurélie eats and not having a spice tolerance, and Aurélie and Peppa like to attend plays that Marshall helps put on. They're all good for each other :)

Try a bit harder.

There’s an article in The Guardian about the author Tom Cutler, and his diagnosis of Asperger’s. My pedantic head wants to correct that to ‘Autistic Spectrum Condition’, but that’s just as problematic for my twisted linguistic brain to cope with. ‘If you look at anyone hard enough you will see traits consistent with autism.’, the ‘spectrum’ and being ‘a bit autistic’. 

All of my life, my entire life I’ve dealt with the ‘come on, it will be fun’, the ‘come in, sit down’, the ‘smile, fake it until you make it’. Most of my life, I did the joining-in things, and assumed that everyone else was as uncomfortable as I was, and that they were just better at pretending. When my last manager told me they wanted me to be ‘happy, with a sense of belonging’, all of the air was sucked out of the room, and I had to escape, quickly. ‘I have no desire to belong to anyone or anything, can I go now, I lost half a day of work to the interview?’ I CAN work as part of a team, I just don’t do the ‘socialising’ thing. Work is work, and in my peculiar mind, work and home/life are distinct and separate. There’s a half-chuckle there, the ex never actually told me I couldn’t ‘go out’ with work, but the sulky strops he threw meant it wasn’t worth the hassle, the hissed conversations about where I’d been, with whom, and why.  I eventually stopped going out with him, too. If I stayed in the shadows, and didn’t speak to anyone, I was a miserable bitch, ruining everyone’s night. If I spoke to anyone who wasn’t ‘in the band’, there’d be allegations of infidelity. Most of the time, I drank heavily, to blur the edges of my world, and his.

‘Come in, sit down, we won’t bite you.’ Almost 20 years of that from the in-laws, my cigarette consumption was massive, because I could go into the garage to smoke, away from the heat, the smells, the people being uncomfortably close to me, TV blaring away with nobody paying attention... I originally started to sit at the dining table, away from the sofas and TV, but that generated ‘Come here, lass, do we smell?’ Yes, yes they did smell. The father-in-law didn’t believe in anti-perspirant, because ‘fresh sweat doesn’t smell’, it does, and, given that he had a bath about twice a week, the sweat wasn’t always fresh. The mother-in-law was worse, hairspray, perfume, and dental decay, she was only about 5ft tall, and had a habit of touching the person she was talking to. They both needed hearing aids, and I’m very softly spoken. My son despairs at them, the F-i-l will complain that the TV is on too loud, and the M-i-l will say ‘Well turn your hearing aid off.’ 

The family Sunday Lunch was even worse, one of my compulsions/behaviours/traits is objecting to eating ‘contaminated’ food, by, let’s say the M-i-l using her eating utensils that had been In Her Mouth to take food from a serving dish. I’m hyper-sensitive to smells, crowds, and sounds, especially eating sounds, it’s misophonia . Sunday Lunch was torture.

Bugger, I’ve done something to the font. This keyboard is knackered, I’m already contending with missing keys e, r, t and down-arrow, the number keys have stopped working, I’m consciously avoiding contractions within quotation marks, because I’m a Grammar Pedant, and don’t want nested apostrophes.

I wandered off a bit, there, describing the sensory overload of a ‘normal’ environment. It honestly is overwhelming, for years I thought I was being ungrateful, or miserable, because people seemed to enjoy things I found almost intolerable.   I tried, I really did, whether it was my mother taking me to nasty wine bars, and hiking my skirt up, and my top down before repeating that all-men-are-bastards-and-they-only-want-one-thing, or being dragged hither and yon to watch the ex’s band in yet another working men’s club. I ‘put my foot down’ in my last job, procedural-precise, and mostly professional, apart from all the times I flung my exasperated self into colleagues’  offices, and said ‘She is doing that thing with her tea again.’ In the 14 years I was there, I ‘went out’ once, it was a train-wreck.

Going-out aside, there were multiple things at work I found difficult, but worked-around. I can’t apologise enough to the old ‘matron’, when I shared an office with her, I always had the BBC news playing at low volume. I was trying to drown-out her incessant verbalising of what she was typing or writing so I could concentrate, and she was speaking-out-loud to concentrate over the tinny terrible headlines. Chuckling at myself, for the period when I had two walkie-talkies, one on channel 2, for medical, on earphones, and the other on channel 3, for behavioural.

I’d generally do that working men’s club thing of having ‘my’ seat in any given meeting-room, and had a bit of a showdown with the Health and Safety manager, about having a map of the site, in an attempt to ascertain a reason for a student always heading for a precise corridor when he was distressed. I have worked with some VERY autistic students.

The point of this 3am waffle is the ‘try to join in’ ethos, whether it’s employers, friends, or family. A couple of years back, I crossed swords with a man I’d known since I was 18, him saying all the trite ‘you only have one family’ gubbins, and me bouncing back that I didn’t ‘have to’ do Christmas, or family gatherings. I don’t. My brother appears to have drawn the short straw this year, I’ve politely declined his offer of Christmas Lunch. 

Rounding this up, I’m not a size-ten-blonde, I haven’t bought new clothes in years, my make-up kit is one eyeliner, one mascara, and one lipstick, I wash my face with soap, and haven’t been to a hairdresser since 2014. Somehow, for some people, my objection to aesthetic ‘norms’ is easier to deal with than the whole biopsychosocial mess that IS me. I’ve had years of people telling me to ‘try’ to fit in socially. I don’t. I’m not quite as bad as the gentleman in The Guardian, I’m incredibly careful about what I say, so I’ve never been ejected from a house-party for upsetting the host. Even that time when I vomited chilli-con-carne all over myself, and ended up with the hostess hosing me down in the bath, then giving me a pair of her pyjamas to wear.

To some extent, I know that I’ll have to do things that make me feel uncomfortable to ‘fit in’, I’m not unique in that, my odd  brain is the equivalent of trying to access stairs in a wheelchair, I just have to look at it differently. Thanks, head, for the name of the man in the Local Authority that organised the evac-chair training, and the general observation that the interim site-safety-manager looked like Elvis Costello.   

Hwaet

I’m having some thoughts this morning. I was having them yesterday, too, but I ranted to husband and felt better for a hot minute. I no longer feel better.

I feel like a lot of people have forgotten what it’s like to be a beginner, to be just starting out. I’ve only been doing this polytheism thing for around 2,5 months so I’m still very much a beginner and I’m aware of that so I am by no means claiming to be an expert. I’m also autistic and have been told I have no empathy /// I have empathy for the wrong things, so I may be entirely off the mark here because I do not know how to human.

So here’s the thing. Because I am just starting out, I can very much remember what it feels like to be looking for information for the first time. I’m in Germany and we’re still in lockdown here. I don’t belong to the local university so I can’t use their library right now, and I don’t know if the city library is open. Even if it were, I’d rather not because I’m an at risk person and I don’t feel like dying of plague. I could go to my university library, but that would require me to take a day trip to another city, and even for university members there are restrictions for how long we can be there etc, etc, etc and I still don’t want to come down with plague.

So what do I do? I say, hey, I bet there’s a tag on tumblr. I bet I can scroll and see if there’s someone who doesn’t seem like an idiot who posts information about Greek paganism. I figure blogs like this must exist because I’m a historical linguist and I follow a few academically inclined linguistics blogs, so why wouldn’t there be academically inclined blogs about other topics.

I got absolutely inundated with posts that terrified me. I saw post after post about how deity work wasn’t for beginners. I saw posts saying that only certain deities were okay for beginners. I saw posts saying you had to ask a deity’s permission to worship them, and if they told you no, you weren’t allowed to (they’re deities??? They literally want to be worshipped?????). You have to do an introduction. You don’t have to do an introduction. You need to be very formal at first to avoid offense. You don’t need to worry about offending the gods, they know you’re a beginner. Unless you purposely blaspheme, you can’t offend the gods, you’re a mortal.

How do you ask a deity’s permission? How do you know which deities are okay for beginners? How do I know if a deity has given me permission to worship them? What’s an introduction? How do I do it correctly? You need an altar. You don’t need an altar. You need to build a relationship with the deity. I am autistic I literally cannot build relationships with humans how do I do that with a deity. How do I avoid offending this immortal being who I already revere because they are a literal deity and I am a mortal??? I need details, please.

Do your research.

So I do some research. I find some decently academic blogs with resources and free PDFs and I am foaming at the mouth because I am a grad student and free information yessssss. I scroll through these academic blogs and see what sorts of people they reblog from, betting that they’ll know a few other academic blogs. I am correct. I get lucky and see that someone has posted about introductions. I find some other posts about introductions. Some are lacking details. Some have details, and it seems easy. Some are very elaborate rituals and I realize hey, I need to research what all of these terms are that I don’t know, and figure out how to do the things that are listed because this is written using technical terms and I am a historical linguist, so this is very much not my department and I do not know what they are talking about. Also when you say ‘recite a hymn’ do you mean I actually have to memorize and recite it, or can I just read it out.

I need to research.

Yes, fine. I have got multiple books on my laptop, thousands of pages of information. But how do I know what’s important? Do I have to do months and months of research before I can worship, because it seems like I need to do an introduction which I need to have a good foundation of research in order to do correctly to avoid offending this being whom I really want to adore, then wait on the deity to give me permission to worship them after doing this ritual, and I am a burnt-out autist who needs to throw themself at the feet of a deity now I need them now. I came to Dionysos while in a pretty rough patch after trying to drink myself to death. I spiritually crawled to him on my hands and knees, tears quite literally running down my face, begging to worship him. The Dyllan Owlglass who had just puked their guts out on the bathroom floor, whose husband had to call an ambulance to try to help them, was not in any state of mind to do any sort of research for weeks. I wasn’t anti-academic. I needed a deity who didn’t hate me, to give me spiritual solace, and I needed that deity in that second and not a second later because that quite literally may have been the death of me and I couldn’t research the right way to do it.

If there is one thing I cannot stand it is being called intellectually lazy. Grad school and all. I’ve almost finished my current term paper, after which I have one more, my research module, then my master’s thesis. I know how to research. I’ve got over a decade of experience. But the thing is, when you’re just starting out in a topic, there’s a lot of information. It can be difficult to know what’s important and what isn’t.

Let me put it this way. I’m getting my MA in historical linguistics after having gotten my BA majoring in German (with a focus on linguistics) with a minor in linguistics and a second minor in TESOL. I have been working with linguistics for over a decade. I am bilingual in English and German, and have studied in some capacity at some point Old High German, Middle High German, Old English, Old Norse, Old Persian, Latin, Lithuanian, Icelandic, French, Spanish, Italian, and Scottish Gaelic. When I first started learning Latin my husband, who took Latin in school, made a game of giving me a Latin word which I would then translate to German then English by doing sound changes in my head. I defy someone who has no knowledge of Latin or linguistics or language change to figure out that stare means ‘to stand’ without a dictionary. Want to know why German is Like That? Have a seat. I hope you have time. Want to know why your brain did that weird thing with language just then? Let me get you a cup of tea, I have an answer or two for you and will likely go on a tangent about language acquisition. Do you have a moment to talk about invisible pronouns. You say you like epic poetry; if you have a minute I can give you a detailed explanation of how language change influenced language and caused the death of particular metrical forms that were used in Old English epics like Beowulf and are no longer extant today.

I say all that to say this: I know my topic, at least a little, after dealing with it for as long as I have, and because I’m in it so much, if I don’t know the answer, I likely know someone who does.

But if an 18 year old came up to me interested in linguistics and was like, hey, you know these things, I heard there was a language from which German and Greek and Italian all came from, I want to know how we got to this point, can you help me get started, I wouldn’t fucking hand this kid the copy of Urheimat der Indogermanen I have sitting on my shelf and say here, do some research, because they don’t even fucking know what phonological notation is yet. How, in the names of all the gods, would I expect a beginner to process that? Yeah, it seems easy to me. It was an easy read. Okay some of it was difficult because it has essays in there written in the late 1800s and that stuff is dense. But otherwise, pretty easy read, but I’ve also had literal years of experience. I wouldn’t even hand the kid a copy of Martinet to explain language change. I wouldn’t even give them a copy of Introduction to Historical Linguistics, at least not only, not at first. They need an introduction to linguistics and, because I have literally been doing this for a decade, I would know which chapters are important for a beginner. Here’s an intro linguistics book. I’d start with these chapters; you can read these if you want to but it’s not necessary for your particular question; this one is dry but it’ll help you get the basis you need to build things on later. Then here’s an introduction to historical linguistics. These chapters in particular will be interesting to you, but read these chapters here first because it gives you an overview of the method for how we got to the information in those chapters. If you find a topic that strikes your fancy and you want to know more, hit me up, I may have a book or two I can point you at. If you see a book in the rec’d reading, I may have it as well, and if not, I may know where to get you a copy if you can’t find one.

And you know what? I’d do the same thing for someone who had gotten a BA in some other subject. Yes, they know how to research, but they still don’t know this topic as well as I do. I may not hold their hand, but I’d still point out which chapters are the most relevant for their particular question to get them started and they can find related information from there. And I wouldn’t expect the 18yo or the person with a BA to understand terms that are particular to linguistics. Why, for the love of everything holy, would I expect them to know what a frequentative derivational morpheme is when no one who isn’t in morphology has any reason to know what that is. Yes that is a real thing. Yes I can explain it to you if you really want me to. Sometimes it’s difficult when you’ve been in a topic for a long time because you forget that things which seem basic and normal to you are not basic and normal knowledge for people who aren’t in the topic.

Now I’ve done okay on my own. I know how to research. One has to know how to research if one is going to get their MA, at least I would hope. It’s overwhelming at first because there’s a lot of information, but because I kind of know what I’m looking for, and since I do have quite a bit of experience in doing academic things, I wasn’t as lost as I could have been. There are still some things I’m lost on, but the Theoi are good and they know I’m just a mortal. Seeing that other people did the same sort of thing as me, just starting their worship and learning as they went, was really helpful to me. Seeing examples of other people’s practice is also helpful to me -- it gives me things to think about, things to consider, and helps me draw relations. I’ve listened to some good podcasts that have given me ideas on other starting topics.

But I know not everyone has years of experience being an academic. I wouldn’t get angry at a baby linguist for not knowing things, for needing quite a bit of help. I remember what it was like to be a baby linguist, too. To start you need to know the basics, but it’s hard to know what’s basic when you’re just starting. I have no doubt that some people are lazy. I have no doubt that some people just want others to do the work for them, or just want to complain. I had a guy like that in a syntax class in my undergrad; I had to turn him in for plagiarism because fuck that guy and I got harrassed by him for a semester until he dropped out.

But that was just one guy in years and years of academia. So I feel like there are less baby hellenics on here complaining because they don’t want to research as much as there are baby hellenics on here bonding over the fact that damn this is hard, there’s a lot, it can be overwhelming, and when there’s so much information it can be difficult knowing where to start and when you know “enough” especially when you see as many posts as I have claiming you can’t worship a deity without doing your research, but not specifying at which point you have done research enough to be allowed to worship.