Anxiety Is A Bully

Bullies, Life, Stress

NewYears_LunarbaboonOn New Year’s Eve, we indulged in something that has become a tradition in our household: Junk Food Dinner.  We cook up some hors d’oeuvres and have chips and dip.  The boys love the chance to eat foods that we rarely otherwise eat as we ring in the new year.  NHL even made it to midnight for the first time.  (JSL fell asleep earlier but woke up 5 minutes after midnight.)  After the ball dropped and the boys were tucked into bed, we climbed into bed ourselves hoping for a good night’s sleep and the ability to sleep in the next day.

I woke up a couple of hours later, though, feeling off.  The first thing that I could tell was wrong was that my nose felt clogged up.  This began to make me anxious that I wouldn’t be able to breathe.  Ever since my surgery, I’ve found that a clogged nose is quickly followed by anxiety attacks of this nature.  During the day, I can stave them off by distracting myself with various activities.  During the night-time, though, there is less to do.  The house is quieter and the anxiety looms larger.  This also brought back memories of my post-surgery anxiety attack when I couldn’t fall asleep nearly the entire night.  Add in that I started to feel nauseous and my anxiety of not being able to breathe was joined by the anxiety of possibly throwing up and I was a nervous wreck.  Even my own skin seemed to feel wrong.

The next day, I was feeling better.  However, as nighttime got closer, I could feel my anxiety climbing.  The night before had had an anxiety attack that kept me awake.  Obviously, tonight was going to be no different.  Obviously, tonight I was going to lie awake, getting in and out of bed and pacing around with my mind racing with worst-case-scenarios.  Obviously, I was doomed to have anxiety attacks every night.  Right?

That’s when I realized that my anxiety was being a bully.

Years ago, when I was safely away from the bullying I suffered in high school, I realized that bullies try to dictate reality.  You’re not allowed to go to someone for help because the bully dictates that this conflict is between you and him.  He can gather his friends together to taunt you as well, though, because that’s allowed (by him).  Any attempt by you to seek assistance reduces your position – or so he says.

Similarly, this anxiety was framing the argument.  I was approaching the night when, during the previous night I had had an anxiety attack.  Therefore, my anxiety bully proclaimed, there was a 100% chance of an anxiety attack this night.  And the next night.  And the one after that.  The anxiety bully told me that I was incapable of going to sleep and staying asleep the entire night.

In truth, though, the bullies NEED to define the rules to protect themselves from behaviors that would stop them.  Seeking help doesn’t weaken the bullying victim.  It strengthens them.  Getting help when you need it can lead to the bully being forced to back off.  Similarly, the anxiety bully was purposefully focusing in on the nights when I had an anxiety attack and ignoring all of the nights when I went to sleep and slept fine.  It tried to keep my focus away from anything that might help me to increase its own power.

Thankfully, I was able to get to sleep just fine that night and proved my anxiety bully wrong.  Putting your anxieties in context can be tricky when in the midst of an anxiety attack.  It won’t help defeat every one you might have.  However, if you feel one coming on, remembering the times that everything went smoothly might aid in warding off anxiety’s bullying tactics.

NOTE: The image above is a portion of a web comic by Lunarbaboon.  He posted this comic the night I had an anxiety attack about fearing not being able to sleep due to an anxiety attack.  Besides drawing funny, insightful, and amazingly entertaining comics, he obviously has hidden a camera in my house somewhere to gather his material.  How else would his comics mirror my life so often?  In any event, he was gracious enough to grant me permission to use part of his comic in my post.  Go to his website and read a few dozen of his comics.  You won’t be disappointed.

Playing The Think Of The Children Card

Education, Politics

Cuomo_QuestionRecently, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo defended tying high stakes tests to teachers jobs. Instead of talking about any actual issues students and teachers face, Cuomo said: "We have teachers that have been found guilty of sexually abusing students who we can’t get out of the classroom."  Yes, Governor Cuomo was claiming that, somehow, high stakes tests would expose teachers wrongdoings. I could talk about the inability of tests to measure teacher performance or how high stakes tests just lead to teaching to the test. I’ll address how high stakes don’t reveal inappropriate sexual relationships later in this post. Instead, right now, I’d like to address the root cause of this statement.

Politics is a process where people of different opinions come together and work out a compromise. In an ideal world, that is.  In the real world, politics can often be the art of hiding your true intentions and scaring your opponents into submission.  When it comes to this, there are two phrases that can work to a politicians’ advantage: "Think of the Children" and "Terrorism!"  These are designed to silence opposition and bolster support.  Anyone who asks any uncomfortable questions or voices their opposition a little too loudly is branded as a traitor who either wants to see kids hurt or wants to see terrorists attack America.  People don’t want to be seen in this way – especially not other politicians – so some people will think twice before confronting someone using these phrases.

Before anybody thinks "this post is pro-Party A or pro-Party B", both parties engage in this behavior.  I’m taking all politicians who use this to task no matter what politician party they belong to.  In addition, this isn’t a new phenomenon.  There is a long political history of this, though the phrases have changed.  Back in the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy, opposing him and questioning his list could get you branded as a "Communist."  People didn’t want that label slapped on them so they stayed quiet.  A lot of people’s lives were ruined before McCarthy and his list were exposed as frauds.

The problem with these phrases is the same as their strength.  They silence opposition.  They stifle debate on the subject.  The promote advancing an agenda based on fear of reprisal as opposed to an honest discussion of viewpoints.  In addition, they cheapen the very things they claim to protect against.  Yes, there are times when children’s lives are on the line.  In those instances, it might be appropriate to say "think of the children."  However, when it is used in every third speech, it becomes the political equivalent of crying wolf.  Everyone gets so used to cries that kids will be harmed and/or that terrorists will attack that any actual threats are treated as political rhetoric.

When a politician declares that we must do X to "protect children" or to "prevent terrorism", you should always stop and question the politician’s motives, examine the course of action’s effects, and demand proof for everything.  In the case of high stakes tests tied to teacher jobs, Andrew Cuomo has demonstrated time and again that he is anti-public-school-teacher.  He wants to open more charter schools and would love to shutter as many public schools as possible.  They might not all be able to be shuttered since charter schools tend to only accept certain students, i.e. kids without special needs.  So he might to keep some underfunded public schools around to shove the special needs kids in.  As a bonus, he can point to how those schools are failing (since resources are going to charter schools and they need to spend more of their limited resources on special services) as reason to open even more charter schools.

Additionally, the teacher’s union refused to endorse Andrew Cuomo in the election.  They didn’t go so far as to endorse his opponent, but politics is often a game of "make a public show of supporting me… or else!"  Had Governor Cuomo harbored any thoughts of working with teachers, those were ditched once they didn’t support him.  Their lack of support needed to be punished so he’s ready to paint all public school teachers as lazy sexual offenders who are failing our kids.  That’ll show the union that next time they’d better fall in line.

With the motive in place, we need to look at the action’s effects.  Suppose Governor Cuomo goes forward and institutes high stakes tests tied to teacher jobs.  We’ll also assume (for the moment) that he’s right that there are a lot of teachers committing sexual abuse of students.  Governor Cuomo is insinuating that these tests will somehow root these teachers out and let us fire them.  The problem is that tests can’t possibly measure whether or not a teacher is having an inappropriate relationship with his or her students.  There’s not going to be a "fill in the bubble on where your teacher touched you" question.  (At least, I hope not, but I probably shouldn’t put it past Pearson.)  At best, you might be able to tell that a specific teacher’s class doesn’t meet the state-set standard.  This doesn’t mean that they haven’t learned the material and instead were having classroom orgies, however.  Instead, it could be due to various factors like kids who don’t test well (possibly special needs), a poorly designed test, or perhaps even a teacher who taught his kids well – but just didn’t spend a lot of time trying to teach to the test.  (So the kids learned a lot but just not what was on that specific test.)

Finally, we get to evidence.  Governor Cuomo claimed that there are teachers who have been found of sexually abusing students who can’t be fired.  I demand proof of this.  The merest allegation of sexual wrongdoing is usually enough to ruin a teacher’s local career.  Teachers who face this, might need to move districts – especially if the media was involved.  No matter how certain a jury finds a teacher innocent of all charges, some people will be convinced that the teacher whose face was plastered on the cover of the paper with the headline "LOCAL TEACHER ARRESTED FOR SLEEPING WITH STUDENTS" was guilty.  If the teacher was proven guilty, they can easily be fired and teachers have been.

I’m not going to claim that all teachers are angelic creatures only devoted to helping their kids learn.  In any profession, there are rotten eggs and teaching is no exception.  Look at enough teachers and you’ll eventually find one who did something bad to his/her kids.  However, finding this one exception does not mean that you get to declare him/her the rule and paint all teachers with that brush.  If he wants to play this game, we can certainly find plenty of corrupt politicians – does this mean that Andrew Cuomo is corrupt?  Perhaps he should take a high stakes test to determine whether he’s fit to keep his position.

Remember, real-world politics is (sadly) a game of "silence your opposition and push your agenda through by any means necessary."  Dirty tricks and smear tactics are a politicians’ conventional weapons of choice.  Don’t be fooled though.  Always question what they say and why they are saying it.  Perhaps if we "test" enough of their statements, the stakes will be raised high enough on them to weed out the bad politicians.

NOTE: The image above is a combination of a photo of Governor Andrew Cuomo taken by Diana Robinson and released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license and "Simple Question Sign" which was posted by boobaloo on OpenClipArt.org.

My 25 Favorite Posts of 2014

Blogging

Looking through all of the posts I made in 2014, I tried to narrow the list down to just a dozen or so of my favorites.  Unfortunately, I wound up with 40 posts instead.  I narrowed those down a bit more and organized them.  So now I’d like to present my favorite 25 posts across five categories.

Autism, Parenting, and Life

This category contains posts about living with Autism, raising a child with Autism, parenting in general, or just the normal things that happen in life.

First up was Letting Your Child Shine (Or Fail) where NHL taught me a lesson about not imposing limitations on your child simply because they have special needs and "obviously" can’t do something.

Next, in Asperger’s, Empathy, and Butterflies, I told the tale of what happened when NHL tried to go into a butterfly house – but empathized too much with the butterflies.

I tackled a tough subject in Battling My Own Brain.  One I had wanted to write about for awhile but shied away from:  My own brain.  My brain can be amazing – giving me ideas that astound.  Unfortunately, it can also be a minefield.  One wrong move and I can get stuck worrying about something (see The Anxiety Loop later on) or I can get "bad thoughts" that try to paint everything in the worst possible light.  While I stop short of claiming that I suffer from depression (I don’t think it’s that bad and wouldn’t want to trivialize people who actually suffer from depression), it can be a challenge some days.

After my birthday, I spotted some grey hairs.  I went into full blown Aging Denial mode.  I even geeked up my denial by taking a photo of myself, using a photo of me from 2005, and morphing us together to prove once and for all that my hairline is NOT receding.  This would be told to me again a couple of months later.  "Once and for all" doesn’t last as long as it used to.

While NHL was succeeding in some respects, in others he found himself failing.  In Asperger’s and The Humor Struggle, I detailed the problems that those of us with Asperger’s have with humor.

Finally, in The Anxiety Loop, I detailed an anxiety attack that I dealt with after surgery.  In hindsight, we think this was brought on by some of the medication I was on.  I’ve had mini-attacks here and there since then (almost always at night), but nothing to the racing through the house at 2am panic attack I went through post-surgery.

Front Page News

This category is devoted to talking about the topics that made the news.

In March, Fred Phelps passed away near Fred Rogers’ birthday.  In Love and Acceptance Trumps Hate, I showed how tolerance and acceptance were more powerful than hatred and bigotry.

A month later, a baseball player named Daniel Murphy was taken to task by some sportscasters.  His crime?  Missing opening day to be with his wife as she gave birth to their son.  I posted In Defense of Paternity Leave Trumping Baseball to express just why I thought those anti-paternity leave arguments were just plain wrong.

Perhaps no news story spawned more blog posts from me than Network Neutrality.  If you’re not sure what this is, I’d recommend reading Save Our Internet, My Open Letter To The FCC Concerning Network Neutrality, and Network Neutrality Shouldn’t Be A Political Issue – my three favorite blog posts of mine on this subject.

Finally, just because a news story was on TV doesn’t mean I followed it.  Many news stories fell under my News Avoidance.  At times, there were too many sad and/or scary stories on TV and I had to tune them out lest I get overwhelmed.

Crafting

2014 saw a lot of crafting in our household.

First, we made foam lightsabers.  In Making Foam Lightsabers, I showed how to construct these extremely inexpensively.  (Only $1 per lightsaber in materials.)

Later this year, we became Addicted To Perler Beads.  In The Perler Bead Addiction Continues, I showcased some of my newest creations.  Finally, I posted about My First Perler Bead Earrings that I made for B.

Geek

This year was a banner year for my geeky side.

I delved into the world of Extreme Geekery by Printing A Hard Drive and performing a Jupiter Jump.

I also wrote my Geek Bucket List.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to check off one of these in the coming year.

In Kicking Down The Door To Munchkin Fun, I detailed our introduction to the world of Munchkin – the tabletop card game where you kick down doors, fight monsters, and take their treasure.  We still have fun alternating between stabbing each other in the back and helping each other.

In fact, we loved Munchkin so much that the boys helped me write a parody song of "Do You Wanna Build A Snowman" called Do You Wanna Play Some Munchkin?  We even made a video of us singing it in Belated Father’s Day and a Munchkin Video.

Fun

What would this list be without my favorite fun posts?  I’ve saved these for last because I like to always end on an upbeat note.

In February, while struggling to stay warm, fight exhaustion, and push back the avalanche that was Frozen, B and I began tweeting each other some Frozen song puns.  I compiled them together for posterity in What Happens When Frozen And Exhaustion Meet On Twitter.

Later, on a whim, I decided to see what people named their Wi-Fi networks.  This whim turned into B and I laughing hysterically at some of the names and scratching our heads at others.  There was definitely a lot of Wi-Fi Weirdness afoot.

Finally, on NHL’s 11th birthday, he went on a big adventure with his cousins and brother.  I documented the photographic evidence of this Green Screen Birthday Adventure complete with a trip to Disney World and the Moon.  Those kids sure get around.

 

And there you have it.  2014 is drawing to a close and 2015 is raring to go.  What adventures will we have in the new year?  What stories will we discuss?  What topics will we geek out over?  I can’t wait to find out.

My Top 10 Posts of 2014

Blogging

As the year comes to a close, we naturally tend to look back over the past year and wonder:  Wait a second, how is the year over?  Wasn’t it just August a second ago?  Why is time moving so fast?!!  Is someone sitting on a cosmic remote control’s fast forward button?!!!  Ok, maybe I’m the only one who wonders this last question.

Still, now is the time to look back and see what were my favorite posts of 2014.  To begin, I should probably see how many posts I’ve made in 2014.  *checks* Uh oh.  I posted 125 times in 2014.  This might take some time to go through.  Instead, let’s go with a Top 10 Posts of 2014 as measured by Google Analytics.  NOTE: I’m specifically excluding posts from 2013 and earlier.  (Sorry, Freeware Review: Shape Collage which for some reason continues to be a highly visited post five years after I posted it.)  Also, I’m only counting traffic to the post’s page.  This means a ton of traffic to a blog post when it was on my main page won’t matter in this roundup.  Fair?  Probably not, but it keeps things simple.

10. Asperger’s, Empathy, and Butterflies

Too many people seem to think that having Asperger’s Syndrome means that the person doesn’t feel empathy.  The reality is that – while those of us with Asperger’s might have trouble understanding people – we do feel empathy.  If anything, we feel it stronger than neurotypicals do.  Our empathy can be so strong that it can become debilitating.  This was the case when NHL tried to go into a butterfly house.  His enthusiasm turned into horror when he began to worry that he might hurt one of the fragile butterflies.  This was so unacceptable in his mind that he refused to enter and watched from behind the glass.  His empathy extended not only to other people, but to insects like butterflies.

9. Phone Upgrade Reluctance

In this post from February, I told about how I was reluctant to upgrade my phone.  My old phone might have had severe battery issues, but I was afraid of having to start my games all over again.  This upgrade issue would repeat in early December when I upgraded to the Droid Turbo and was forced to join Facebook to move some game data.  Thankfully, I won’t be moving phones again for some time.

8. Dragons: Rise of Berk

From phone upgrade game data transfer to one of the games I recently wanted to transfer.  In Dragons: Rise of Berk, you play the story of the How To Train Your Dragon 2 movie – with some modifications.  You take on the role of Hiccup and help to manage Berk, hatch dragon eggs, train the hatched dragons, and collect fish and wood.  Since posting the review, I’ve gotten to later stages in the game where you get to upgrade your dragons to Titan class (bigger and better) and fight battles against the invading Outcasts.  I’ve been playing this game for over seven months and I’m still enjoying it.

7. My Sleep Study Experience

For the longest time, I wasn’t able to breathe through one of my nostrils.  It had been that way for so long, that I just accepted this as normal.  However, a night of stopping breathing while sleeping (which scared B), restlessness while sleeping, and waking up feeling exhausted (even when I got plenty of sleep) led us to worry about sleep apnea.  I went for a sleep study and wrote about my experiences.  It was just like sleeping in a motel – if the motel hooked you up to a ton of sensors.

In the end, it turned out that my sleep patterns were normal.  However, an MRI later revealed a bad deviated septum (which I already knew I had but didn’t realize was *THAT* bad) was likely the cause.  An operation later and I had to get used to the weird sensation of being able to breathe through both nostrils.  (It really did feel weird at first.)

6. Extreme Geekery: Printing A Hard Drive 

I’ve wanted to veer into the extremely geeky territory for awhile but was afraid I’d drive away readers.  Apparently, though, people liked this foray into the realm of the uber-geek.  Here, I wondered what would happen if you printed the contents of a full 1 TB hard drive.  Not assorted photos, documents, and videos that resided on it, of course, but printing the 1’s and 0’s that represented those onto paper.  Spoiler alert: You’d better have your space suit handy if you’re going to stand atop the stack of papers representing the contents of a full 1 TB hard drive.

5. Cheating On Cable

Cord cutting is a topic I’m very interested in.  While we haven’t cut the cord yet, the scissors are primed and ready.  One rate hike from the cable company and we’ll be ditching cable and getting our video entertainment from Internet Video sources (e.g. Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube) and from DVDs (both purchased and rented from the library).  We might even get an antenna to pick up Over The Air signals of our local stations.  So why is this called "Cable Cheating"?  Cable companies wanted to rebrand people who use Netflix instead of paying their cable company more money for Video On Demand as "cable cheaters."  As if we are cheating on cable by going with another service.  The intention was to raise an image of marital infidelity.  Here we are, happy consumers married to the cable companies but then we go and watch Netflix and mess everything up.  The only problem is that we aren’t married to the cable companies.  We’re consumers – not spouses – and are free to get our video entertainment where ever we want.  If the cable companies don’t like it, they should try improving their offerings, not attempting to make us feel like we’re "cheating" by using anyone other than them.

4. Extreme Geekery: Jupiter Jump

This was another big geek-out moment.  I read a post by Phil Plait debunking "Zero G Day."  The story went that an alignment by Jupiter and Pluto would affect gravity on Earth so much that jumping at the right time would let you float in the air for five minutes.  While Phil showed why this was garbage, I decided to take another angle and – to borrow a term from the Mythbusters – replicate the results.  That is, figure out how close or how massive Jupiter would need to be to make the "jump for five minutes" story true.  By the way, as tends to happen with these stories, it is circulating again with a different date for "Zero G Day."  The date might have changed, but it’s still not true.

3. Learning Lessons From Frozen Songs

Who here has NOT heard the songs from Frozen at least a dozen times?  I’d be willing to bet few have escaped Frozen’s grasp.  I’ll be the first to admit that I love the songs.  They are powerful, connect well to the story, emotional, and have proven staying power.  They also have some good lessons behind them.  In this post, I delved into some lessons I took away from "Let It Go" and "In Summer."

2. Making Foam Lightsabers

After Perler Beads, this has to be my favorite craft of 2014.  Take a pool noodle, saw it in half, then apply some silver duct tape and black electrical tape.  You get a lightsaber.  (Actually, two since it is sawed in half.)  The boys still love taking these outside (when the weather cooperates) and having big battles.  They have even come up with combat rules.  You start with two sabers and drop one each time you’re hit.  If you lose both sabers, you’re dead.  (After a gratuitous strike or three to "cut you to pieces.")  Last Jedi or Sith standing wins.  No Force pushes, Force choking, or Force lightning allowed.

1. Defeating BuzzMyFx Content Scrapers

It is a blogger’s job to produce great content.  Unfortunately, a lot of people see that content and think they could get some great traffic if they had that content.  Instead of contacting the blogger and paying for the content, these people will use computerized programs to scrape the content off of the blogger’s website and put it onto theirs.  Some of these content scrapers will link back to the blogger’s website (as if that makes up for taking their content) and some don’t.

In the beginning of the year, a content scraper called BuzzMyFx pulled this on a big group of bloggers, myself included.  Unfortunately for them, messing with me meant they were messing with a webmaster who knows what he’s doing.  I was able to track back where they were coming from, how to stop their scraping tactics, and was able to replace their scraped content with a page that alerted anyone who stumbled upon the scraped site just what they were looking at.  In my blog post, I shared what I did so others could employ it to stop this scraper.  The good news is that BuzzMyFx disappeared.  The bad news is that there are other scrapers out there just waiting to pull content for their sites.

 

Well, that’s my top ten stories of 2014.  Now to go through the giant stack of posts that I made in 2014 and narrow it down to my favorites from the year.  Hopefully, this won’t take me long.  After all, there aren’t that many days left in 2014 – since SOMEONE keeps sitting on the cosmic remote control’s fast forward button!

Rapid Charging With The Droid Turbo

Review, Smartphones/Tablets

DISCLAIMER: My wife received a Droid Turbo due to being a member of the Verizon Life Style Bloggers.  Since I was in need of a new smartphone, she gave it to me.  The opinions expressed below are my own.

When you’re out and about, the last thing you want to see on your smartphone is:

droid_turbo_battery

Even if you brought your cable, you might not have much time to recharge your phone.  You might gain a few minutes of use but you can wind up fighting a losing battle as your charging times don’t give you enough battery life to make it to the next charge.  When my wife received the Droid Turbo to review – and gave it to me – I wanted to put both its long battery life and rapid charger to the test.

One day, while out, I decided to put the battery through its paces.  I took photos, played battery-draining games, and used the phone as much as possible.  The end result was that my phone went from 100% to 14% in 12 hours.  If this seems like a short time period, note that this wasn’t "typical usage."  I was intentionally trying to use up the battery’s charge.  My old smartphone would, if I was lucky, probably have lasted half of this time with this level of usage.

Once the indicator reached 14% and the warning was popped up, it was charger time.  I plugged in the rapid charger and kept an eye on the percentages.  A half hour into the charge, the battery had gone from 14% to 46%.  This was a whopping 32% in only 30 minutes.  Basically, this half hour of charging gained me almost 4.5 hours of extreme usage.  Were I attempting to conserve battery life (instead of trying to drain the battery as quickly as possible), a half hour charge using the rapid charger could mean having enough juice to last the rest of the day.

Just over an hour in (65 minutes) and the percentage had reached 79%.  At the 81 minute mark, the battery was at 93%.  Finally, 143 minutes (2 hours and 23 minutes) after I plugged my phone in, the charge reached 100%.

Needless to say, I’m impressed with the results.  The Droid Turbo’s rapid charger definitely lived up to its name.  If you are out and about and your Droid Turbo is running on fumes, a short recharge break can give you enough battery charge to last you a good, long time.

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