Giving a seminar at Armagh Observatory tomorrow! It's genuinely a bit silly that I've never been there before, after twenty years in Northern Ireland and twelve years at QUB.
I did not really practice my seminar. I threw forty slides together from a couple of other presentations. I know what I am talking about and I know not to run over time and that will do.
This is not quite Professional Academic levels though. For that I'd have to be throwing the slides together on the bus down there.
My decision to not practice most talks I give is not because I don't care. It's just that practicing talks makes me nauseous with anxiety and I know that if I just show up with my slides on the day my enthusiasm and knowledge and general ability will carry me through just fine.
Plus I will only be nauseous for about half an hour before I speak. Then I will start talking, at which point I am magically replaced with a much more confident and competent version of myself.
it is frankly out-of-character for me to be good at public speaking, it makes no sense, I spend most of my life in a state of low-key anxiety with occasional peaks of very high-key anxiety
but honestly when I am giving a talk I know I am doing the right thing? like, yes, right now I am supposed to be talking about these slides to this audience! there is a clear and simple social role to play and I know the rules to this one!
...yes, I am exactly as neurodivergent as that sounds.
patiently explaining to my shamefaced dad that the reason I can rattle off the offside rule verbatim is because he isn't the first bloke in the world to attempt to challenge my football knowledge and he won't be the last
I know meal-kit subscription boxes are probably ethically terrible in many ways but can we acknowledge that if you're disabled but still enjoy cooking they are a bloody lifesaver?
My partner and I were against the idea for the longest time but we gave them a whirl and it's SO MUCH EASIER. Less struggling through the sensory nightmare of Tesco. No missing out on groceries entirely because we're too unwell to go one week and living on sandwiches. No decision-making! Just dinners!
The fucking meal-kit boxes even got us cooking together again. I'd forgotten how much fun we have doing that.
We're saving the recipe cards for anything we especially like and when we stop getting discounted boxes we'll probably return to bloody Tesco. But this has been NICE.
Also yes, sometimes the produce is not of high quality, but back when I was supporting myself and my partner on my PhD stipend we lived on tins and clearance veg, I'm not going to be upset by a floppy pak choi.
Actually managed to have a successful pair-coding session today with a grad student.
I find pair-coding really difficult because I don't process linearly. My thought process sees a problem as a big tree: I hop about from branch to branch very quickly and get a good understanding of the whole tree that way. I can't stand back from the tree and see it all at once, then take it branch-by-branch sequentially.
This makes me very annoying to pair code with. But I managed to restrain myself today.
If I'm asked to write new functionality, I'm making a Jupyter notebook and testing tiny little bits of what I think might work, with seventeen Firefox tabs open, jumping from cell to cell as I have new ideas, building the whole thing up from the bottom.
I can't just, like... open a file and type into it, taking it line-by-line. That feels really weird and unstable. I don't know what I'm DOING yet.
I find that neurotypical people find my way of coding and problem solving to be alien and confusing; they assume it can't possibly be productive because I'm not looking at the "big picture" and coming up with a plan first.
I had the same issue with essays in school. I didn't see the point of an essay plan, yet teachers told me I HAD to have one to write a good essay because they couldn't comprehend how I could manage without. (I have an A* in my English Lit A-level. I managed.)
Does anyone cook with lard any more? Lard was sort of ever-present when I was a kid, but I was raised by my grandparents so I don't know what aspects were really out-of-date, which were normal, and which were just, well, poverty.
I can tell you that my grandmother's idea of a curry would have most folk recoiling...
@michael_w_busch Yeah, it seems like suddenly everything is cooked in duck fat these days. Which is fine, nothing wrong with duck fat, but it seems weird for it to be so... advertised? I usually only cook with it when I am roasting a duck, because damn there's a lot of fat in a duck.
I've never cooked with tallow! What is it good for?
@michael_w_busch Interesting, thank you! Beef drippings were a staple of my childhood. I kind of want to roast some beef just for dripping. The nostalgia would be insane.
For new friends: I'm out as non-binary socially and professionally, just not to my family. My parents are very unlikely to be hateful (they know I'm bi and mostly ignore it) but my mum is very likely to not understand and say something like "you'll always be my little girl", and I would find that very hard.
My brother, however, is pansexual and generally trans-positive. So coming out to him SHOULD be okay?
He's also as bad as me at checking his messages so I might be in suspense for a bit.