MOAR.

A year ago yesterday. Chili and Escher hanging out

But first. ..let me take a selfie. #selfie #rescue #chihuahua #mutt

A photo posted by Crystal and Chili (@criosphynx) on May 27, 2014 at 10:01pm PDT

Chili has so few friends, but I think thats ok. Hes an introvert

Tongue out.  #rescue #chihuahua #dogs

A photo posted by Crystal and Chili (@criosphynx) on Apr 14, 2014 at 8:08am PDT

mOaR Escher





much yay.

Chihuahua for scale

So I found a giant monitor.

The spice was not pleased.

Parkinson's Law

 

 

"Expenditure rise to meet the income available."

 

 

 

When I was a kid, my bestest bestie friend in the world was Andrea. We spent most of childhood and young adulthood together before she decided I was too mature for her and I realized she was never going to grow up.

 

 

My parents gave us allowances, small ones. Mine was $7 a week for many years and it eventually bumped up to $12, briefly before I got my first job at 15. At which point it vanished.

 

 

Andrea grew up in a single parent household with lots of siblings. My family was considered middle class and hers was considered poor, but I never really saw any difference in our abilities to get through life and the day. The only thing that reminded us of her "poverty" were not the lack of things, but the lack of attention paid to things. After all, mom had to work, which meant she had little time for grocery shopping, yard work or cleaning.

 

The house always had stuff in it, lots of stuff, new furniture, new decorations. The kids had new clothing and toys. I remember Andrea always  had the coolest new clothes and interesting things for her room. Her mom regularly bought her and her siblings things or just gave them large amounts of cash (granted usually for xmas or a b-day).  My parents would screen the things I bought, esp clothing, and her mother did not.

 

 

Several red flags waved in my face during our friendship. The first was when we were kids. We both were obsessed, I mean absolutely obsessed with legos. She had a large collection when I met her, and I had one measly bin. This gap decreased and I overtook her collection dramatically in just a couple years. I saved all my pennies for legos, asked for them for xmas and birthdays. She did the same, except for the saving part.

 

 

We would walk to the mall and I'd but a small set at Kaybee toys. She would blow her entire wad of money at The Sweet Factory.

 

 

This would have been fine and dandy except she began to become upset that I had "more" things than her. I would point out that she was eating her money in candy and she didn't want to hear it. She just wanted to go on and on about how privileged I was and how she had nothing.

 

 

This taught me early on that happiness and wealth is a matter of perception rather than an actual dollar amount. Andrea always wanted more, more, more and was never happy with what she had. She also spent her money on silly things. As kids it was candy, as adults it was still candy and overpriced make up and clothes. She was never satisfied. She'd also blow her entire paycheck and then complain she didn't have money to eat and it was never her fault. Granted, as I learned to budget as an adult I occasionally overspent and had to scrape by for nessessities. But I never, unless I was unemployed, starved or spent so much money I had to beg and guilt others to feed me.

 

I often wonder if shes still stuck in the endless cycle of buy (stupid things) and be broke, buy and broke, buy and broke. I know I learned a lot from watching her over the years, and learned a lot about myself in the process.  I can only hope she came to an realization at some point that true happiness is from within and not the mall.

 





Things do not change. We change.

"To improve is to change. To be perfect is to change often"

Winston Churchill

Blast from the past

I found this on google. Emma and Critter. One of my fav photos ever.

Four things Friday with random Photobuckets

I decided a random assortment of old photos from my photobucket account would be a good way to pop the cherry on my first FTF blog entry. There might be blood. 

Heck its me, there will be gross stuff.

First up is my first acrylic painting ever.

While I do consider myself an above average artist. Better than most, not as good as the people who do it professionally.  My art is certainly not "above average" in this category. I've tried to paint numerous times and I always get discouraged and never finish. Watercolours I fair a bit better, and ink and pencils being my medium of choice. (For my real, albiet old, shiz, click here)

 This painting of Adjour was the first I actually forced myself to finish. I hadn't created any art in almost a decade when I painted this to boot.  As is pretty obvious, I can grasp sky, water and creatures pretty well, but rocks have always baffled me.  I can remember being in elementary school and having to draw rocks for this or that and always knowing I sucked at it. Basically I can draw anything you want, but my rocks are the equivalent of stick figures. 

I will add that the entire thing was free handed and was not sketched out of planned in any way, including Adjour, who came out pretty dang proportionally correct considering theres no erasing paint. So maybe I'm not so hopeless after all. Damn rocks.

A nerd and her tree.

This tree in San Diego is a Ficus  (or fig for my non nerd readers) but I can't remember which one to save my life and the top is chopped off in the photo. I know I saw a huge Ficus Macrophylla that day, but don't have a photo of it. This tree is too tall to be Macrophylla in my opinion. 

The best part about this photo is when I uploaded it I named it "anerdandhertree.jpg" which, years later, reminds me that being funny is so ingrained I do it even when its not meant to be remembered.

Chili's DNA results from Wisdom Panel. I find it hilarious to look at because all the chihuahua images are identical and Chili doesn't resemble them at all. It contaminated my brain so whenever I try to think about what Chili's parents looked like, tiny limbed, brown and white long hair chihuahuas facing left always creep into my mind. I imagine them all barking in unison. Its adorable. Finding the thought of a bunch of chihuahuas barking adorable is a clear sign that you're a small dog lover.

Zipper Dog

 I chose this pic because I thought it had been lost and was pretty excited that it still existed. Critter went in for two mammary tumors and my wonderful vet ended up removing four total. If I remember correctly it was just over FIFTY staples.  This is what can happen if you don't spay your dog people. Spay your damn dogs.

Gross stuff. See I told you.

Prosopagnosia...

its whats for dinner!


Seriously though, tonight I wanted to talk about Prosopagnosia aka "face blindness".

Face blindness is essentially the inability to recognize people from just their face. There are different nuances to the condition that I wont get into, but I will start off by stating it effects people differently. Some people can't even recognize their own family, at all. Without a contextual cue. For example a man can come home and know the woman in the house is likely his wife, and act accordingly. Yet if she surprised him in the grocery store he'd have no clue who she was unless he recognized her outfit. This is because theres no context to cue him as to who she is. Without context she could be his mail lady for all he knows.

I'm no where near that severe. However there is a noticeable deficit now that I deal with reasonable amounts of people on a daily basis. I really can't think of any instance of this happening in childhood or even early adulthood, but I don't doubt it existed. I've never had large circles of people around me and my contexts were pretty limited, so there really weren't any situations to bring it to my attention. No proverbial wife to surprise me at the grocery store.

Today I had a client in class. This is one of my regulars and I noticed she didn't bring her husband like she normally does. When he arrived later during class, he hung back for a while watching. I always like to play the game in my head of "who does the guy belong to" and see if I can correctly guess who's husband had showed up. To my startle (or rather not) he belonged to my regular client.

This wouldn't be profound except I've met the guy probably about 15 times now. I've had conversations with this couple. At length. But without him being next to her for context, I would have sworn I'd never laid eyes on him.

This is just one of countless examples I could bring up. Sometimes people arrive and I recognize the dog and not the owner. AT ALL. These are people I've spent time with. One time I had two owners reversed in my mind. Like they had swapped dogs. I'd even fudged the dog context. Instead their body type PLUS the dog was the context and when two people with the same body types showed up at the same time, my brain found them interchangeable.

I have a theory however.

Face blindness is pretty much considered either Brain damage or hereditary. I know I was never dropped and I already know there's some odd genes present in me so we'll run with that a bit. The thought with it being hereditary is there is an actual physiological difference causing the impairment.

I hate the word impairment. Firstly.

here's the slippery slope. I CAN remember faces if I want to. If you asked me to remember a persons face I CAN do it. More and more I am reminding myself to do so, for careers sake. This would suggest the ability is in fact intact but my brain is just not running the program automatically.

Also I remember some people automatically and others my brain simply skips over. Its picking and chosing  which faces are important to attend to, and thus, who it can remember at a later date. I can pass all the celebrity face blindness tests I should add.

So I took this one. Without famous faces.

http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/index.php

Overall I scored decent. 85% was my lowest score, and on one of the tests I got 100%. So what the heck gives?

I got bored.
 

During the test I had to force myself to focus on the faces. Focusing on a task is what I do best. I am the exact opposite of ADD. I tend to be understimulated.  I can handle and process a very large (non social) information load. In fact I'd say I can handle pretty large social loads as well as long as its not direct interaction (for example, noisy crowds don't bother me) I also pick up on details others do not. Pretty much I'm an info junky in every sense of the word and if the environment isn't stimulating enough I get very bored. ( aka most of my childhood) In this case I found my eyes kept leaving the screen and my mind would wander in the middle of it. It was so unlike me that I was pretty startled. I am the test taker, the task doer, the finish things quick and now. I'm not the kind of person to wander off mentally in the middle of something.

Yet, as I suspected, this is what my mind does when confronted with human faces. It wanted nothing to do with the task at hand. I could feel my mind saying "c'mon theres gotta be other stimuli here thats way more important". And when I ignored its whining, it tried to leave the room anyway.

 I remembered the asymmetrical eyes and the odd teeth easily and struggled with the rest. Pretty much my brain is an information junky and unless I find something entertaining, odd, or distinctly memorable, my mind decides its uniportant and that the texture of the carpet is more interesting. Basically, my brain decides that recognizing and remembering faces is not important and instead attends to the other cues as to who the person is.

This makes me wonder how much of the typical eye contact issues are less about being uncomfortable and more about our brains saying its an unimportant behavior . Then as you age, society demands it and you feel awkward about it because it wasn't ingrained as a child. Your brain sees it as an "expensive"  behavior and not worth the calories it burns. After all, people aren't the most interesting thing in the room, most of the time.

 I will also note that while I have no issues with giving or receiving eye contact typically, I find if I'm tired, overstimulated or lazy that day, or don't find that person important (like someone bothering me), I'll fall into not looking at people, like a habit. I'm not uncomfortable with it, its just too much effort for no real benefit to me as far as information gathering if I'm conserving energy. When taxed I'll spend my calories on other things that will reap more benefits. You aren't thinking about digestion when your running from a lion.

So pretty much my physiology is saying; Social interactions are not important unless its someone you find interesting. This seems to match up with my behavior in other, more tangible realms.

Fascinating, but nonetheless, it basically means that if I recognize you at the grocery store, your in a good place in my mind :)