That's A Cute Looking Cat

The Autistic Urge to Study Other People and Society…

Neurodivergent_lou

I want some nice cereal

During the most poor and homeless period of my life, I had a lot of people get angry with me because I spent $25 on Bath and Body Works candles during a sale. They couldn’t comprehend why the hell I would do that when I had been fighting for months to try and get us on our feet, afford food, and have an apartment to live in.

Those candles were placed beside wherever I slept that night. In the morning, I would move them and set them wherever I’d have to hang out. At one point I carried one around in my purse - one of those big honking 3-wick candles. I never lit them, but I’d open them and smell them a lot.

I credit that purchase with a lot of my drive that got me to where I am today. I had been working tirelessly, 15+ hour days with barely any reward, constantly on the phone or trying to deal with organizations and associations to “get help at”. It’d gone on for almost a year by the end of it, and I was so burnt out, to the point that I would shake 24/7. But I could get a bit of relief from my 3-wick “upper middle class lifestyle” candles. They represented my future goals, my home I wanted to decorate, and how I would one day not be in this mess anymore.

When we moved into the apartment, and our financial status improved, I burned those candles every single day. When they were empty, I cleaned them out, stuck labels on them, and they became the starting point of my really cute organization system I had ALWAYS planned to have.

So whenever I hear about someone very poor getting themselves a treat - maybe it’s Starbucks, maybe it’s a home deco item, maybe it’s a video game… I don’t judge them. I get it. I get that you can’t go without anything for that long without it making you go crazy. You need to pull some joy, inspiration, and motivation from somewhere.

Gay

As great as Ego's speech is at the end of Ratatouille, he's wrong. That whole thing about, "Now I know that when Gusteau said, 'Anyone can cook', he didn't mean anyone can be a great artist, but that a great artist can come from anywhere."

Like, that's true, but it's not really the point he's making. Gusteau's not saying anyone can be a great artist. But he is saying, "Anyone can cook." It says nothing about greatness. It's encouragement to beginners, saying that you don't need to be anyone special or have any special level of talent. You--yes, you--can follow these instructions and in the end, you will have cooked something, and that's a good thing to do.

It's still a great metaphor for the creativity, and cooking is a particularly fitting illustration. Not everyone will be a great chef, but everyone needs food, and you deserve to know how to cook at least something for yourself. In the same lines, not everyone will be a great artist, but everyone can draw some kind of picture. Not everyone is a great musician, but everyone should sing. The fact that you're not the next Shakespeare shouldn't bar you from the joy of writing poetry. You're not going to win any literary awards, but you should still write stories. The act of creation is something that anyone can do, and it's something everyone should do, because it feeds you. Greatness doesn't need to enter into it at all.

Isn't this just being autistic, except people are more understanding cuz they're aliens and not human.

Consider: Aliens land on Earth, they are vaguely humanoid in shape and size, but there is no real way to communicate with them. They're social, curious and friendly, though, and try to get to know humans and interact with us the same way as cats do. By mirroring.

They follow humans around - not necessarily any specific ones, but just wandering wherever people go - and do human things with them. Or at least do their best to try. In gravely serious, intensely focused, but deeply confused silence, they join human activities with this air of "I don't understand what we're doing, or what this achieves, but we're doing it together now."

When there are people waiting at bus stops, one or two of the creatures will join the group, standing in wait. When the bus comes, they'll join the queue lining up inside, and once inside, turn their open palm into a light source and show it to the bus driver in the exact same way as the people showing their bus passes from their phones (the aliens' ability to shapeshift this way has raised theories that they may not be naturally as humanoid as they seem, they've just adopted the human shape to better interact with us), and then go find seats wherever, just like humans do.

They're not going anywhere in particular, nor are they capable of actually paying for their ride, but since there doesn't seem to be any force to stop them from this, people just have to accept their presence. If the bus is crowded, they'll stand just like people do - and sometimes when seated aliens see a human offer their seat to someone who is pregnant, disabled or elderly, they will unpromptedly get up and offer their own to the nearest standing human.

They go to churches, temples, grocery stores, libraries, wherever people go, and clearly try their best to do whatever people are doing. In temples and holy places, they will sometimes join hymns in their eerie, wordless howls, which follow no melody but stop when humans stop singing. They sit and stand where the people do, and copy the positions in which humans pray, and many places of worship don't just tolerate, but downright welcome them - no matter what these creatures are, do they not have the right to pray?

In the libraries they are silent, eerily wandering the hallways, picking up books at random and staring at the pages, turning the page this way or that every few minutes. They don't bother anyone much, once the librarians figured out how to make them put the books they pick up into the returns cart, instead of some random place in the shelves. Some of them seem to enjoy simply grabbing random books, and carrying the whole piles to the returns cart.

They don't understand why we do what we do. We don't understand why they do what they do. But we're now doing it together.

I need waffle

Isn't that like, just being a vtuber

Need a sugar daddy but we don't have sex and I don't send nudes I just say "hi" and receive 1000 dolalrs