Connective Cube

Connecting the hard edges

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Quite memoir, Quite fiction.

  • Layouts layouts

    http://www.masterdynamic.com

    This site is a grid layout that shifts between mobile/tablet/laptop/desktop versions easily.  

    This website features a hero image as the focal point on all versions of the website, which utilizes positive space above the fold.  Below the fold, the site utilizes negative space in order to highlight the product line, reviews, an about blurb and a navigation section.  This allows for variations in the size of the elements, which include images, texts and call to actions to purchase the product.  This minimalist design provides plenty of balance and allows for the products to be featured while minimizing cognitive load.  The medium size images of each product on the desktop version also allows for people to view the intricate design of the headphones.  The smaller images on the mobile and tablet versions still allow for plenty of negative space, thus successfully highlighting the products.  

    The footer on the desktop has far more negative space, while the tablet and mobile versions have lines separating the navigation area.  The text is quite hard to read in the tablet and mobile versions on the desktop given the small and thin text, and the lines between the navigation are almost too thin.  

    The user can click on the shop buttons to learn more about the product.  If a user wants more information, they can either click on the icon at the top left for further navigation, or they can scroll to the bottom of the page.  This call to action is simple and easy to use.

    The site was clearly designed with mobile first in mind, and the minimalist approach requires an easy experience for anyone shopping on their phone.  The size of the over the ear headphone images on the mobile and tablet versions are cut off, and perhaps reducing the image size would still preserve the integrity of the product while showing the whole image.  However, the desktop version almost features too much negative space, and a user may want to learn more about the product without having to click further.  Perhaps a tagline of short product description would do in this case.  

    Also, the blinking e-mail subscription call to action appears after the user is on the site for a few minutes.  This disrupts the balance of focusing on the product, and the blinking may alienate people.  

    Overall, one won’t experience cognitive overload on this site, sans the lines in the footer on the tablet and mobile versions.  

    http://hammer.ucla.edu

    The Hammer Museum – 

    This desktop version website effectively uses space, size and balance by focusing on the museum’s visual art specialties.  It is a content heavy website with many navigation points, and the designer has to keep this in mind to simplify many potential points of navigation. 

    This grid based site uses more positive space than negative space on all versions, and many of the larger feature images for each content section contain photography with a focal point.  The focal point contains a hero image of the latest installation that pops out along with the headline and tagline in the desktop version. There is more positive space than negative space on this site, and the images that display visual art gallaries are the bulk of the positive space.  However, the images selected range from minimalist – greyscale with a lot of negative space within the photo – to more complex images – full color with multiple objects/people.  This gives the viewer some room to breathe while scrolling down the page and provides much needed balance with the heavy use of positive space.  The page ends with negative space in the footer that displays simple navigation and key museum information (address, hours, contact information). 

    On the mobile and tablet sites, the hero image is no longer the focal point.  Instead, the logo is the primary focal point with the text leading to further content are the secondary focal points.  This accounts for people who may be ‘on the go’ and want to quickly access information about closing times and active exhibits.  It also seems like this site was designed with mobile first in mind, and the tablet version has some content that is slightly askance.  

    The logo at the top serves as a secondary focal point on the desktop version, but the hero image with N. Dash’s work provides an easy navigation opportunity to view more of her work, which is rooted in fabric and indigo coloring.  The hero image is slightly larger than the other images, but it appears the same size with the navigation bar at the top and the content navigation page to the specific site.   The images below are smaller, yet use the same headline teaser to encourage the user to learn more about Mario Garcia Torres’ or other exhibits that are opening soon.

    The images that are roughly half the size of the hero image are for openings that are happening later in the year or for educational programs. 

    One could argue that there could be more negative/white space.  This site may not be ideal for someone who likes lighter coloring.  However, I think the headline banners break up the content well and provide useful information for learning more about what is going on at the museum.  More white space could be achieved by decreasing the size of the images and text, therefore allowing for the negative space to highlight the images and text.  The wrong series of images can easily make this site look cluttered.  In addition, the hero image may be underwhelmind to some people, and more white space could highlight the minimalism of M. Dash’s work.  The text is also a large size, which works well for accessibility purposes. 

    Also, one could argue the hero image for the desktop version is too large.  Perhaps supplemental imagery or a split image of two N. Dash works of art could be displayed on the homepage to break up the simplicity of the hero image.  The large hero image also disrupts the balance of the site, and the negative space below almost looks too clean compared to the vibrant image on the top.

    Driving users to the content succeeds with the image heavy teasers.  The logo is on the top, which provides easy navigation back to the home page.  

    Similarities and Differences

    Both sites utilize sans serif fonts and display a hero image in the desktop version.  The hero image is minimized as the focal point in the mobile and tablet versions.  This makes sense, as both sites feature objects, rather than text, to be viewed.  

    They are vastly different in how they use positive and negative space.  The Hammer Museum utilizes little negative space in the desktop version, and more negative space in the laptop/tablet/mobile versions.  However, more positive space is utilized than negative space in the smaller screens.  

    On the other hand, negative space is a main feature of the desktop version of Master & Dynamic below the fold.  The mobile/laptop/tablet versions feature 

    Both sites are more balanced in their smaller screens, and they both use the hero image with corresponding text to draw the user deeper into the site on the desktop version.  The Hammer Museum verges on being too image heavy, but it works because the image content 1) differs enough and 2) has insightful text and text overlays (by that, I mean the boxes behind the text!)

    All in all, The Hammer Museum site is slightly more balanced as a whole than the Master & Dynamic site given the presentation of content and display of images that is appropriate for each device.  However, Master Dynamic uses negative space in a way that gives the user clear call to actions.  Both use size in a systematic approach though the site, giving the user a solid sense of hierarchy with the information.

    What makes one solution more clear than another?

    http://www.kooslooijesteijn.net/category/blog/ (Skip to “Website Sketching Workflow)

    Koos Looijesteijn not only utilizes primitives to communicate potential layouts, but he includes different pen colors and text to identify the most optimal solutions for the user.  Within this, he includes ideas about user flows within different layout solutions.  

    In addition, he indicates when pages external from the site should be opened on a new page.  Items that require interaction are demarcated in green.  

    http://designshack.net/articles/inspiration/close-photoshop-and-grab-a-pencil-the-lost-art-of-thumbnail-sketches/

    What works about the Design Shack solution is the simplicity of the primitives within potential layouts.  This may not explain the process and expectations of the user in detail, but rather provides a final solution for the visual designer to layout materials in more detail.  However, these are low-fidelity mock-ups, so further research and details on potential user flows may be necessary.  This designer clearly is making a case for thumbnail sketches.  

    Both sites are geared more towards creating personal websites than client projects.  Both argue the sketching process fuels creativity and provides a way start the wireframing process with ideas in mind.  At the end of the day, the first solution is clearer than the second solution in terms of communicating why certain wireframes are being created.  This allows for any potential questions about potential user flows to be discussed in a larger meeting context.  The second solution gets the layout on the page, but the lack of user flows and context is perhaps more for the designer to elevate ideas to the next level.

  • Old binders

    I pulled an article out of a binder from my graduate school days. When I lived in Atlanta, I purchased binders and a three-hole punch and crunched a few thousand pages and assembled them. Knowing I couldn’t access many of these articles that, in retrospect, shifted my consciousness, I decided it was necessary to archive them.

    After I completed my thesis, I wanted to burn the articles. There was this distinct pleasure of knowing that I did not have to read a bunch of scholarly articles on gender, sexuality, and the environment on a schedule. However, I also knew that I would have to go to graduate school again and remember everything I read, authors and all. Or have access to expensive databases to pull everything. Given that I have a hard time remembering the names of people who produce art and culture, I decided to take the time.

    Now, I want to re-read the articles and re-contextualize them to the present in some manner.

    ***

    Over the years, I stopped thinking of gender as consciously performance, or performative. The idea of disrupting gender, for me, started when I was six years old ripping heads off of Barbie dolls.

    I still loved my ice cream dress, one that had a simple ice cream cone in the middle of my chest. It got lost in a move. My desk was intensely messy, the one with papers falling out and unknown gooey food grime.

    It was always in me to stomp on the trope that being pretty is what I had to offer. Of course, my sixth birthday party yielded 20 new Barbie dolls to draw on and one pair of jelly slippers.

    There was always something in me, at a young age, something not desiring to perform, but desiring to exist.

    ***

    The first article I pulled was Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s ‘Doing Gender’.  My first semester of graduate school, I thought I might want to research public education, so I enrolled in a Developmental Psychology course with a Russian trained psychologist. The questions we explored in-depth was undoing the binary between nature and nurture. I knew right away that I didn’t agree with the Eriksonian approach that personality remains relatively static over time; if anything, I feel like something inside me dies when another adult says ‘people never really change.’

    Part of undoing the binary came from reading material that I have yet to re-read. The popular term in developmental psychology was ‘ecological approach’, which is rooted more in a social constructionist understanding of human relations. That is, the environment plays a larger role in the development of our consciousness rather than inborn qualities.

    The individual human is at the center of ecological systems theory, and the following systems impinge on development over the life cycle:

    Microsystems – Family, friends, social institutions (arts, religion, neighborhood associations, etc.), school.
    Mesosystems – The intersection of micro and exosystems.
    Exosystems – Medical providers, media, cultural institutions, workplaces
    Macrosystems – The larger culture at the moment.

    Gender, according to West and Zimmerman, negotiates all points on the ecological scale. The present the case of Agnes, a transwoman who negotiates passing as a woman with ascribed behavior.

  • I need a nap

    All I can say about 2017 is I need a major nap. Fragmenting, exhilarating, and exhausting immediately come to mind. If there is something that I need to work on, it is not pushing people away with my silence.

    Sometimes I become mute when I feel extreme anxiety, even if I am comfortable behind a keyboard, paintbrush, or pen. Writing and painting gives me time to exercise my memory, to slow myself down enough to generate a coherent thought. Fusing memory with quick reactions means altering the speed of my thought process, which means ugly facets about how I communicate emerge. Without intentionality, I lose control over my automatic responses. With intentionality, I forget how to even respond automatically to my environment.

    Sometimes I like to avoid my own stories when I meet people. Mostly because I dig to find any way to not dominate the conversation, and listen more. To speak my own stories to new people still seems like a daunting task, as I can feel a distance from myself as I tell a story about a past fragment. Sometimes I confuse the locations, the details,  or the people in the narrative for the everyday events.

    My life-cycle rarely shows, at least to me, a unified narrative. One of the consistent feelings is trust issues toward other human beings. Perhaps that is borne out of fear that correlates with my past experience.

    Another narrative that emerges is this deep desire to shut up a listen while also asserting myself. As a white cis(ish)-woman, I know that my tears can cause someone else’s suffering, and that we are given permission to cry.  Sometimes, my anxiety doesn’t need to eat the room. Sometimes, I need to cry alone.

    But sometimes – it is okay to feel in front of other people, to show emotion off the stage, to have strong feelings about a performance choice.

  • Of Molar Importance

    I cringe at the memory of the drill.

    A huge part about experiencing depression, for me at least, is bouts of self-neglect. Sometimes this manifests in becoming very externally driven, but without all the right tools to not totally push people away.

    Meeting people reminds me to take care of myself. Brush my teeth. Shower. Other people go through this to. It is a mantra, a string the spiritual belief web. I used to go deep with people.

    Now, I find that my adult self could get into more trouble than it is worth to sling my quirks on the chopping block.

    The guardedness is a cycle, one that breaks with time. I am now okay with that now, as it really and truly is none of my business what people think of me, especially if that guard stays up and I am not giving it my all.

    Of course, it is my business if I am hurting anyone.

    ***

    There was this one time I imagined this girl hated me in high school. A runner with a technical mind. She avoided me. I only really spoke to people who approached me and poked me out of my tent. I didn’t have an issue with her, but I hated her because I thought she hated me.

    One day, one of her friends sat next to me after class. This was someone I played competitive tennis with at 13 and softball at 11 and 12. Mom drama made me keep my distance from this person.

    The friend asked me why I hated the runner so much, and didn’t make an effort to be her friend, since she was new and all.

    It took many years to realize that people regard my guardedness as a sign of dislike. It took even longer to stop attributing other people’s shyness and anxiety into a binary headache.

    ***

    anyway.

    Speaking of brushing my teeth, I admit I didn’t do that all too well in my younger years. Even at a young age, I neglected self-care in order to work more, do more, sleep more, mope more, act more, jump more.

    This turned into drink more, work more, walk more, go out more, crash and not want to talk to anyone once I got somewhere in my early and mid-20s. There were many sweater teeth crashes in a drunken stupor.

    Drinking shirks the guard, if temporarily. I pay for it now, with many fake molars in the back that still crush too much chocolate and hot bread.

    One of my quarter life crises was finally going to the dentist while I had insurance at a full-time job. This was before that mandate went in that anyone under the age of 26 could stay on their parents insurance. I was 26 at the time.

    The previous year, I attempted to go to the dental school to get some deep fillings. At a dental school, you pay a nominal fee to get a lot of dental work done by dental students needing to fill their practice requirements.

    I was attempting to go to The Peace Corps too. At least, that is what I told employers. Working in schools in Brooklyn and Queens made me realize there was plenty of work to do here. But that, and the immense amount of work I would need on my teeth and my lack of insurance situation at the time working three part-time jobs made me realize going to help people far away was an expense, a benevolence I could not afford.

    ______

    I think there is a general melancholy now, an intense fear of knowing what happens, historically, when people fight back at the emergence of a potentially facist regime.

    (My spellchecker in WordPress doesn’t recognize facist as a word. It’s alternates include racist and facets).

    For those of us prone to introspection and depression, I say let us challenge ourselves to be out there, to not abuse substances, and to forgive ourselves when the guard is stuck. It will unstick at some point.

  • Neon Sensuality

    Vulnerability, trust, assuming good intentions from others, and generally opening up to people still is difficult to this day. I feel vacant when I read about another massacre, another outgrowth of this item I forgot to embrace. I go out quietly, rarely impinging on my surroundings. When I participate, I feel thin, tin like, whinny on the walk. I guess I need oil. I get oiled. Wow, I need a lot of oil right now.

    Stop resting underneath the whimsey of smiley faces, neon green, and gushing sugar BloBs. Retrograde sensual shocks, and natural is the color.

    How shocking stark spaces are, and the people who create them. There has to be a storage space, or a basement. The last of the archives in a dusty basement. I lament, again.

  • Stop Me From Being a Wet Blanket

    Performance and vulnerability perhaps go hand in hand, especially without a script. Enter improv. This opening up to people in a group setting elicits fears of a whole group of people sitting away from me, with their backs turned, finding awful things to say about me. Okay, that is not really happening in the present, but the outsider schtik was comfortable and easy. If I don’t try, then no one can hate me!

    In most group interactions, I want to curl in a pompazon chair and bury myself under a fleece blanket. Put some water on it, and you have a wet blanket once I go out, sweat from moving around and place my chair in the center of a setting, a room, or a gathering. Group interactions inspired a deep desire within me to hide out in single stall bathrooms, and sit next to a toilet my best friend.

    Bathing in my own solipsism and living in my chair for 50 years is not particularly an option, and eventually, I would need to attempt to connect with people again. Also, all that wetness gets cold, or sticky, or moldy.

    After all:

    Well, shyness is an embodiment of anxiety for some. Others are quiet, and prefer to not speak until they are ready. I was more of the variety who had 10,000 things to say, but the feedback of the past reverberates in my head. The motto ‘Trust No One’ binds to ‘Don’t Speak Until Spoken To.’

    Apparently, people brand this combination unapproachable. And why not? The chair seems more comfortable, anyway. Especially if I dab lemongrass lotion all over my hands. It smells good here too! I don’t need anyone if my nostrils excite with cellular action! I am my own diffuser!

    I can’t say the people I love in my life particularly liked that, so I would leave the chair for them. Only them.

    I decided one day that I need to get over my fear of group interaction when I moved to Baltimore. After all, I am going to live here for some time, and it isn’t feasible to walk into every group interaction assuming that I am just too much of a smelly pus scab to even bother with. And in ten years, scabs that are too big become scars.

    Do I need to keep picking my own scabs? When can I just ignore the scabs, the bruises, yesterday, and just focus on interacting with people in front of me? New people do not know about yesterday, or five years ago, or my childhood.

    Speaking in front of a group, attending an event alone, or dancing in the midst of a crowd? No problem! Actually speaking to someone after the fact without my heart racing? Chair, please, and wrap an entire roll of twine around me inside the fleece blanket.

    This all plays out in improv classes. Now, I am into my third class. To say unequivocally that ‘I love improv, it has changed my life and cured my social anxiety’ would be quite the stretch.

    The first time for anything is often easy for me in a group. I pick up new ways of doing things quickly, and I initially blend into the crowd. The 20+ person 101 class had cool people in it, looking to break out of their shells. We all cracked, emerged from wet blankets, and some people dreamed of becoming improv stars, or performing in a troupe.

    It was easy enough to take the second class. The unique challenge was being the only woman in the room. As if I already had fears about being different and laughed at perhaps did happen, as I was awkward as hell around vocal, bombastic men. I realized I could listen to what people do, but the blend of trust no one let no one in started taking its toll. I rarely went out after, and if I did, it was with the one or two people I trusted in the class. A little under half the class dropped out, and the half that stayed painstakingly worked through awkward scenes.

    I also realized my memory can fail, I can forget certain scenes happened, and then remember with an alarming alacrity that I just deeply offended that person and confirmed my worst nightmare for them.

    Ugh! I took a break. Now I am in my third class, and opening up to the new group has been a trepidatious, yet rewarding experience so far. The harder part about this class is a lot of the people have already taken classes together. Which means I have to rely on the quality of performance to open up to people. When I feel like I perform badly, I mentally slink away from opening up to people. I also do this thing where I could pay closer attention to scenes. So here is my attempt to remember last weeks class.

    The scene revolved around the building of a normative relationship. one where you have an introduction, a connection, a conflict, and then a resolution.

    1. Scene 1: This took place in a podiatrists waiting room. The couple talks about corns and ingrown toenails. They bond over skateboarding, and they go off into the sunset and skateboard together. One has sweaty hands, and they both discover they have sweaty hands. They are overall very sweet to each other throughout, and hold hands often.
    2. Scene 2: Fishing boat – Singles vacation. The two in the boat hit it off and eat chicken parmesan by the lake. Then, they catch a fish together! Except dude thinks it is his fish, and they argue weather the fish is shared or not. Mmm, then they cook the fish and take selfies.
    3. Scene 3: Baseball game! It starts with a frank conversation about their dawdling boyfriends grabbing food below. They bond as feeling abandoned. Then, the conversation goes to conversations about the amount of Instagram followers. One has 1000s of followers, and the other has none. After a scuffle, the popular Instagrammer agrees to tag the other in a photo.
    4. Scene 4: Myyyyy sceeene. My scene partner and I were at a bus stop. He meets people at bus stops, and I am on my way to an interview. I reveal initially that I took two years off from formally working, and he mentioned his role as an office manager. We bond over our love of smoking. He tries to convince me to skip the interview and smoke, and I say no. Then, we resolve that he will come to the interview with me, and we will eat crabcakes (forget the cigarettes) afterwards.
    5. Scene 5: Okay, this scene involved three nine year olds in the principals office. One is an artist, the other is a budding business person, and the third is an athlete. They are in the office for drawing a penis, talking back to a teacher, and throwing a ball, respectively. They decide they want to have the business child steal porn magazines. Lots of friendly jabbing.

    Clearly I have an issues with vulnerability and intimacy. Shall I say, I need to learn to open up without silently screaming with my body interactions ‘I don’t trust you’ and ‘Yer right, I am not going to initiate any interaction with you! That is all on you!’

    K, a few more classes here. I do need to process all this group interaction somehow, so here I go again, on my own.

  • Fizzy Explosions In A Mouth

    Tea. Fizzy water. Another day of coffee, pulpy orange juice and nibbles of chocolate. And that bottle, another new one with good ole H2O.

    The recycling now whittles down to cans of grapefruit soda water. Beer, he calls it. He can down six of them as quickly as the high gravity beer of the moment. It is still easy to do on the sofa, the one that provides a momentary relief from the full effects of gravity. Strangely, it made her back hurt more than walking, sitting on the couch night after night.

    Sugar cravings explode. Time to go to the store, a reason to get off the couch.

    This time, Liz spots five different types of chocolate items at the store. Chocolate granola bars with peanut butter, moose tracks ice cream, milk duds, chocolate milk syrup and a bar of Swiss chocolate. Liz pulls her cart close to her hips, observing the items scattered among plain yogurt, almonds, spring mix tea with a flower pattern, spinach, mcintosh apples, lemons, goat cheese crumbles and frozen mushroom pizza.

    Time for some items to go back to their shelves. their appropriate shelves, justifying an increase in her step count. From the front of the store, and to the of the line spilling into the baby diapers, took 27 steps.

    Around the end cap, to the right three aisles and to the right in the cereal aisle. Granola bars tend to stay on the top shelf for months, ready for her when she takes quitting chocolate seriously. 45 steps.

    The ice cream is already out of the freezer. It stays. It is rude to give someone freezer burn.

    29 steps to the milk duds and puts them back.

    Wouldn’t chocolate go great in Kahlua? Melted chocolate with coconut rum and Kahlua? That could be the ultimate milkshake. Welp, chocolate milk it is.

    39 steps back to the line. She averts her eyes, gazing at the sunburst logo on the spinach package. The new cinching on her jeans pinch her lower right hip. It is also that stupid time of the month.

    Tampons. around the corner, around the left bend. 22 steps. More flower bursts.

    Back around 22 steps. No one else got in line, for once. Liz stares at her phone, and let’s Rob know that she got the pizza. That’s the plan tonight. Mushroom pizza and bed. And fizzy water.

    liquidcoorage

  • Overcoming Misogyny

    I have an impossible time opening up to many women identified cis-women over the past few years. It has especially been hard with women who scream that they are the biggest and best feminists, or that a vagina is the main identifier of womanhood, or that thrive on gossip.  Usually those who are loudest look at quieter people as meek,  and have a way of talking about themselves as egalitarian, anti-racist and into some form of religion.  I also know that these same women are likely the first to turn their noses up at someone who is working class, not-so-good-looking or, god forbid, a little husky. Or that three letter word FAT. The amalgam of experiences, primarily in Atlanta and Philadelphia, make me very hesitant to befriend queers and women. That’s right, men of all types have been kinder to me over the past several years than most women.

    Wow, when did I start feeling so much misogyny? A chunk of this has to do with working in a toxic small office with fashionable women who routinely gossiped about anyone in their clutches. Two of them un-ironically and proudly referred to themselves as Regina George. Ew. I was one of the main targets, and I dealt with it by being good at my job, staying poker faced and putting up a defensive shield and speaking to people only when forced. I took the job to pay off a chunk of graduate school debt and came out as an easy target for an Andrea Dworkin essay.

    Oh, and therapy, group therapy to learn to relate to women again and my first dose of medication because all the stress triggered a mood disorder I had managed through exercise and eating well. I gained 30 pounds and cried while stuffing my face over cookies and foot long sandwiches. Mmmm, D’Bruno Brothers.

    When I had a chance, I vented to a couple of office mates that I likely should have never trusted. Gossip rarely cures gossip. I do think venting is one thing – when someone is injured by someone else, then it is good to not bottle up feelings and to share them. Gossip, on the other hand, is the purposeful assassination of someone’s character for no good reason. There is a fine line between the two, and it is easy to cross when you experience the day in and day out pain of being bullied.

    During that time, I had “How to Deal With Grown Up Mean Girls” as a favorite of my obsessive Googling on mean girls in the workplace. I haven’t read it in a year, because quite frankly, I work with kind people who have better things to do than gossip about how weird someone is. We are all weird. It is another office full of women, and I actually have conversations that involve puppies, planets, design and other dorky things nerds like. It is nice to work with women again who have been previously been stuck in the ass crack of women who think their shit doesn’t stink. Yes, a few of these women have also been targets of the mean girls set at points in their lives.

    Did I gossip it when I was younger? Sure. The irony is that those who have experienced bullying will bully at some points without being fully cognizant of their defensive actions. While developing a thick skin is at times necessity for economic survival (sarcastic thanks Trump), it is even more important to work with others to come up with strategies to help us heal from our bullying tendencies. It is perhaps the most important decolonization and anti-racism tool.

    Oh, and there was the situation with a ‘girls’ identified arts related camp where I may as well have been invisible. As in, the infamous cliques of women that I thought I had freed myself from were in full force. The spoke of croissants, but I was really outside of a delicious bagel. A lot of people like to be the loudest in the room. I don’t want to take them down, because the program benefits young women from a variety of class backgrounds. I cried in corners, feeling like I was at my workplace all over again, unable to disarm my own self-bullying tendencies and defense mechanisms.

    If my gender identity matters, I do identify as fluid, or free, or not really attached to  identity.  On the surface, I look like a cis-woman, and of course, I get some of the privileges that come with it, especially when I apply products to my face and hair that make me look even more feminine. To this day, when people congratulate me for wearing a dress with a belt that matches my shoes that matches my hair that matches whatever two tubes of lipstick I have, I get mad and quite wearing dresses. I don’t get the same congratulations when I run a quick comb through my hair, forget to apply lotion to my face or prefer comfort to aesthetics. Oh, and I am queer, bisexual, whatever the hell people call it.  I don’t give a rats donkey about your gender or sexuality. Just be smart, kind and cut the mean-spirited gossip and ostracizing of people who aren’t like you.

    Gossip is now as big of a turnoff to me as eating a plateful of raisins. All of these experiences make me shut down when people engage in a character assassinations about others. In groups, I double check to make sure there isn’t someone standing in the corner looking lost, even if they are awkward and shy at first. Not out of pity, but because I am still that shy and awkward person, despite appearances that may suggest otherwise.

    Thanks for listening to me vent.

  • Who Put The Peach Pit in the Bed

    Self-diagnosing has a long and popular history that pre-dates having an eMedical doctor on hand to confirm whether ADHD causes OCD tendencies. The tendencies I reference, though, are not ones of extreme cleanliness or repeat routines that pepper popular narratives of OCD. Rather, they are the absence to attach deeply with object. Is this a lack of compulsion, or a desire so deep to create an anti-routine in a world deeply obsessed with time? Is perpetual uncleanliness an auto-unconscious defense to a time obsessed world?

    My right foot though, used to cramp slightly when my left foot stepped on a crack in the sidewalk. I had to make sure the left foot also stepped on a crack. Both sides need to stay even, right? I can’t hurt my foot’s feelings.

    A constant stream of self-diagnosing keeps me in check, ensures that I don’t post nihilistic rants on every social channel, views that I only believe in part, and in times of extreme darkness. Depression is like that, helping you believe that you are the only one who could ever possibly feel this way. It is easier to feel depressed and to stay away from humanity when your living space becomes a fort of all the objects that are half-finished, organically dead or useless.

    Anyway.

    Something about writing helps documents racing thoughts, gets me reading material to distract me from my loud mouthed inner critic, keeps me from falling into a complacency of self-obsession. It is also is a refuge from the space around me. Keeping words neat on a flat page beats picking up physical objects and distributing them in space. So long as my computer is open, there is another world out there, waiting to be created.

    If you are like an iteration of me, you can relate to the normalcy of a peach pit in the bed, using your fingers to cut through butter rather than using any proper tool and leaving spilled coffee beans on the floor. Maria Yagoda outlines her embodiment of ADHD and her eventual treatment plan with an SSRI drug. Part of her article outlines an encounter with the fire safety patrol officer’s threat to fine her for the off the charts level of filth in the room.

    ADHD does not look the same in boys and girls. Women with the disorder tend to be less hyperactive and impulsive, more disorganized, scattered, forgetful, and introverted. “They’ve alternately been anxious or depressed for years,” Littman says. “It’s this sense of not being able to hold everything together.”

    I was that person who would leave keys in the theater, at the grocery store checkout, or buried under three layers of clothes in my bedroom. The good days were ones when I could find my keys within three minutes. Despite my utter slovenliness, I did have an obsession with being on time, so I would leave up to a half-hour to find my keys. Sometimes this motivated me to leave my keys on the clean edge of my dresser, or in my unlocked car out in the suburbs of Atlanta.

    In my college years, I also did not believe in carrying a wallet. After losing my drivers license and debit card three times in six months, I finally purchased a wallet. The cards still floated outside the wallet, collecting link, chocolate and orange peels at the bottom of my bag. IDs are replaceable, and what if I could go around the world, free of showing my ID. That could be possible if I didn’t require a bar at least every other day.

    My one saving grace is I avoid shopping and have a miserly bend when it comes to spending money. The thrift store is my  enemy. I watched Hoarders not because I wanted to gawk at people with mental illness. Rather, I was gawking at what could be a real iteration of me. Manage thyself by not repeating the psychosis of the other. Without my very neat partner, I may very well sit on a mattress surrounded by a heap of trash and two cats, only two cats. I could still write.

    Could I write well? Now I am not so sure.

    The funny thing is, writing surrounded by clutter makes transitions disjointed and awkward. Procrastination comes with spilling a half-filled soda onto your book, the brand new one that already has a thumbprint of chocolate on the cover. Deep meditation into a sentence, into a line of thought gets laced with that annoying, sharp pang pressing on my hip, a coat hanger that somehow made its way onto my bed. Fleeting meditations become the norm. Capturing those meditations require fits and starts, battling the physical with the imaginary world. I now find the starting and stopping exhausting. It is no longer a pleasure to run into my own mess constantly while I tap away at my grimy keyboard with a smudged, dusty screen.

  • Social Litmus

    A decade ago, I realized that I would not be the person with 1,000 Facebook friends first, or if ever. All of the sudden, I go from easily ignoring the faces from my past to a nostalgia trove of connections that I could not longer forget, unless I opted out. FOMO to the max. Flows of data about any likes or desires that I put on there come back to me, thick with glasses,  beauty boxes, essential oils, insurance, design education and skin care suggestions.  Oh, and models with glasses, brunettes with glasses.

    Now I deal with social media by lurking, then having fits of posting, then reading about the accomplishments of people who are, or were, part of my everyday life.  That is to say that many people are a part of my imagination, increasingly figures rather than flesh.

    It says something for tangibly locking eyes and smiling at another person.

    Perhaps they are part of my life because I tend to be the type of person who thinks about people far more than I interact with them. Part of this is due to proxy – after all, moving to three different cities in five years doesn’t exactly bode well for someone who tends to build friendships at a turtles pace. Wandering, floating rootlessness makes for a fantastic lurker, the perennial fly on the wall.

    This doesn’t exactly enable me to get close to people quickly, or easily. Even as a kid, I was considered aloof, not open with my emotions, turbulent and shifting without cues. I almost got placed in post-Kindergarten and pre-1st grade because I was socially immature. I had a perchance for crying in the middle of class, making out with boys and girls under wooden gyms on the gravel playground, failing to learn how to skip and sticking to gallops in motor exercises, and staying  mute when I was asked questions that I had known the answer to for two years.

    Teacher: What is your address?
    My mind: 417 Pink Oak Drive, Tucker, GA 30030.*
    *It is right there, I can see the letters and numbers flashing. I can’t really remember the color.
    My voice: Muurrmrurururm

    Teacher: Katy, you skip by alternating legs, back and forth. You keep galloping, and not switching legs. Left to right, right to left.
    My body: Gallop on the left foot first, and then get confused at the switch. Maybe trip.
    My mind: How hard is it to switch legs, dweeb?

    I still find myself in situations like this, that same mind and body kerkuffles. All it means is I make terrible first impressions. Or surface impressions.