I am so tired of people telling me I’m high-functioning. It’s not a useful label. It’s problematic; like the phrase “mild autism” in the above quote, it frames an autistic/Aspie person’s experience in terms of how hard it is for other people to cope with him or her, rather than how hard it is for…
A trend on the internet for the last few years has been to pick a word for the new year. This is sort of like a new year’s resolution, but rather than a bossy expectation you fear you won’t live up to, it’s more like a guiding principle for the year. After some reflection at…
Today felt like Spring. It’s the 23rd of September. I have decided that Spring is my favourite season. It probably always has been, but I was fooled into thinking it was Summer, and that I only liked Spring because it meant Summer was coming. I remember Spring of 2009. I was going through a mental…
I have been going crazy* from not writing so I just spontaneously decided I am going to post 100 words in a blog post. I am not even going to allow myself the distraction of checking my blog to see when the last time I posted a blog post was. Today it is Saturday but…
When I was growing up, I was told that the reason we give presents at Christmas is because it is a celebration of Jesus’ birth, and because Jesus is no longer here in the flesh to give presents to – like we do on people’s birthdays – we give them to each other. Since I…
She walked into the house one day like she had always lived here. Which I suppose was true. “Um, hello?” I said to her as she busied herself making coffee. “Hey,” she said, flashing me a brilliant smile and then turning back to the manual grinder. “Uhh, who are you?” “You know who I am.”…
Past Tents: Camping We had not been camping in about two months. Not overnight camping. We had been on day trips a couple of times to a sweet place called Jacob’s Hole (by white people; I don’t know what the traditional owners call it). But The Pilot kept getting rostered to work on weekends. And…
https://chuffed.org/project/ourhopeforhealth Tomorrow is the last day left in the Hope For Health crowd-funding campaign, raising money for a traditional health retreat to be held on Elcho Island this September. At time of publishing, they have reached $61,597 of their goal of $80,000. If you donate any amount of money to any Indigenous cause this year,…
So we have woken up the day after election day with no clear result. Neither parties have enough seats to form a majority government, and the Coalition looks only set to be able to form a minority government. Back in 2010, before the election, I didn’t even know what a ‘minority government’ or a ‘hung…
If you are still waiting for part two of my previous blog post, “Fear of Marriage: Part One”, don’t worry! It is coming. (Just like Christmas.) Yesterday, I went to the library to edit my thesis*, but while I was walking to the library I started thinking about an idea, and as I was thinking, my…
Trigger warning: Domestic violence, rape. One day last year, I got involved in a furious Facebook debate on a friend’s page about marriage. The debate started off being about same-sex marriage, and quickly slipped to a discussion of how marriage is a patriarchal institution. My friend whose page it was on is a married man…
I was full of good intentions to blog throughout the course of the road trip from Canberra to Cairns with The Pilot. Road-tripping was far more draining and time-consuming than I anticipated, even when we were only doing 300-400km per day. We did the whole trip in 14 days, and drove 3819.8kms in total. I…
