The swifts are here! [photos]

Staying with my family over the weekend of my and my brother's birthdays, one of the things we did was to go for our customary-when-I-visit walk round one of the local resrvoirs, which is also a bit of a nature reserve, and attracts a lot of species of easily-watchable birds. (Things are... somewhat complicated between me and my family, but one of the "safe" subjects on which we all have at-least-apparently-genuine common ground is nature in general, and wildlife (which in the UK usually pretty much equals bird) watching in particular.) There we saw the first swifts of 2008...

I always get really excited when the swifts arrive - they only come to Britain from Africa when the weather is warm enough for them to tolerate (about a month after the slightly hardier swallows and house martins), and thus they symbolise for me the passing of winter and the return of tolerable-for-me weather, and in a wider sense the return of hope to my life... especially this year, when after having felt truly hopeless for a long time, something like a return of hope looks like it might actually be happening. (The coming of the swifts also usually roughly coincides with my birthday, which makes me idly wonder about things like if it's possible for the time of year you are born to influence the relationship between your emotional cycles and the natural cycles of the year, and whether that might actually explain some of the appeal of (at least Western-style) astrology. In passing, i've also noticed that a *lot* of people in the Green movement seem to be spring births...)

There's also something intensely passionate and poetic about groups of swifts to me - screaming and wheeling effortlessly around the sky like little black scythes, often seeming to ride in on storm winds like the advance guard of some kind of conquering or liberating army in some great cosmic struggle between the Warm (freedom, life, hope) and the Cold (captivity, death, despair). The vanguard of Summer. (I've tried dozens of times to write a haiku about them, as that poetic form is supposed to be focused on the change of seasons, but i can never get the number of syllables right..)

I tried to take a few photos of them, tho with the speed at which they move, their small size and distance, I was pretty much shooting from the hip, and not really expecting to actually get any photos, certainly not any decent ones, so I was pleasantly surprised that a couple of my shots actually had swifts in them - the best (cropped to the extreme top left corner of the original photograph) being this one:




original (actually with 2 swifts in it!):



(some much, much better images of swifts can be seen here...)

(Another odd thing about swifts: they were given the generic name Apus because they were believed at one time to have no feet, and never to land but to spend their whole lives in the air. They do have feet, but they are very small and they have difficulty walking on them, and cannot take off from the ground, so they only land on high objects to nest. They do actually both sleep and have sex while in flight. :o )

Reservoirs tend to be the sort of places where migratory birds gather when they first arrive in the country, a few days before being seen elsewhere, so hopefully in a couple of days I'll see them shrieking and wheeling around the streets of Birmingham. I didn't actually hear them screech yesterday, which meant i didn't quite feel the full excitement that that cry always creates in me. I fully expect to be jumping up and down with the hair on my arms standing on end in joy when i hear it...

Also seen: some prints in the mud of a drained stretch of canal (I think they're probably badger prints, tho i'm not 100% sure), here with house keys for scale:



and a slightly wider scale image, showing a faint 3rd print nearer the bank:



(The weird thing is that the animal seemingly stepped out into the mud with only the 2 feet on the left side of its body...)

and various other birds, including geese:



and, in town the next day, a heron:



This heron seemed totally unafraid of humans - I first saw some other people taking photos of something behind a canal boat that was going past, then the heron landing on the bank behind the boat, with a big fish in its beak (of course, it had swallowed it by the time i could turn my camera on), and itlet me stand and take snaps of it for a good 5 minutes, only flying off when a slightly aggressive-looking swan came too near (although it's blurry, i quite like this pic of it flying off)...





(spot the town from its "iconic" building, if you've ever been there ;) )

I have a whole load of other planned wildlife-photography posts that i never got round to/felt up to doing, going back to last summer/autumn... if anyone appreciates these kind of posts as opposed to (or as well as) the more serious/political ones, i might post some of them over the next month or so...

26

Today... as of about half an hour ago... is the 26th of April, 2008. I was born on the 26th of April, 1982. (The circumstances of my birth were somewhat odd, like most things about me... my mum didn't know she was pregnant with me (despite being as thin as me, which is very thin) until about a month before I was born, which was over a month prematurely - I was born on the day before the day she was due to have her first antenatal class. She didn't think there was a possibility of her being pregnant because a doctor had told her she was infertile (doh). And they had to use forceps to get me out, which i can't help wondering might have been a contributory factor to the autism (although there are clear traits in both sides of the family... but, AFAIK, no one before me with enough or disabling enough traits to merit a diagnosis), as well as to my somewhat small and narrowly proportioned head. And, y'know, the possible links between premature or otherwise unusual births and autism are an area that, AFAIK, hasn't been seriously explored...)

Anyway, this is the only time in my life that my age yesterday was the same as the day of the month yesterday, and my age today is the same as the day of the month today. Which feels like it should have some significance, but i'm not quite sure what.

A year ago, i felt like there should have been some meaningful significance to the quarter-of-a-century figure, 25... some extra layer of "adulthood", or something. Now it just feels depressing that i am now clearly, unequivocally past that figure, and yet no more, in any meaningful sense, of an "adult" than before. Most of the time i still feel like i am in my early teens, and i still catch myself seeing groups of teenagers in the street and thinking of them as "about my age"... then realising i am divided from them by 10 years or more of basically-having-achieved-nothing... at least, in the part of my brain that ranks "maturity" by some kind of "normal" (or should that be "normative"?) progression through life - qualities like confidence, charisma, "life experience", and that undefinable thing called "authority" (not in the political sense, which as an anarchist i know i don't believe in, but in the most basic sense of being worthy of being listened to, deferred to at least in matters primarily concerning one's own life, and given "respect"), which it is expected for people to develop in those years of life, and yet which i am painfully aware that i don't have.

I am 26 and I have probably less relationship experience than the average 16 year old - and the single, desperately passionate and intense yet, in retrospect, shamefully awkward and inept sexual relationship I have had lasted 3 months, and was over 5 years ago - which is 5 years of nothing whatsoever to show for myself, of slowly but inexorably approaching the point of "accepting" that i will never find any kind of relationship, nor be found attractive by anyone, other than that one, never to be repeated fluke.

And yet... while this reads like a highly depressing post (possibly because I am slightly drunk), I am feeling some hope that the next year might be one in which i can make somthing of my life. There are really exciting projects happening which i am a part of - in fact, which several of the other people involved seem to think I am the primary, central person in (which is pretty scary in itself, since i'm really, really not sure at all that that's true). And i am in the middle of moving house, which, while a highly stressful and exhausting experience (not least because of cutting me off from the internet for an uncertain period of time), is getting me out of a situation which i really, really needed to get out of, and putting me into one which, while almost certainly not what i want from life in the long long term, is at least one in which i can (perhaps) have the space to begin to sort out some of the key questions - who and what i really am, what i can contribute to life without losing too much in exchange for it, how much interaction with other people i can "safely" cope with, and if there really is a long term purpose to my life.

(Yes, there are a lot of other stresses, worries and disappointments in my life right now, including a few that have happened in the last few days - such as losing the opportunity to earn £150 in an hour's work by accessibility-testing a website because my computer broke down (I am now posting from the new one which I have been given, currently at my brother's house, but hopefully soon to be installed in my new flat) - which could have enabled me for definite to go to Autscape - however, i also recieved an email today saying that the Autscape organisers want me to run the workshop i proposed to them, with some alterations - which would involve me faclitating a panel discussion, something i have never done before, as well as doing a lot of research into the subject it's about (the relationship between the autistic rights/advocacy movement and the wider disaility movement)... but is pretty cool, if a bit scary... and some other things... but, despite feeling highly overwhelmed overall, i'm still feeling like the positive at least has a good chance of outweighing the negative... and i have stuff to say about the seasons of the year, and just how tied into them my emotions are, but that's for another post...)

Some very valued friends have also recently proven that they genuinely do care about me, and while i could do with a bit more of that, it's enough to give me at least a stick, if not much more of a weapon, to try to fight off the part of me that says "no one could possibly really care about you, and anyone who says they do is clearly just pretending, either out of politeness or some purpose of their own to either explout or make fun out of me"... which, i think, will always be there, to a greater or lesser extent, but, well, at least now has some challengers.

So, to all the real friends i have (not wanting to list, because i feel like that would devalue the individual nature of each friendship - if you are reading this, you know who you are) - i just want to say - you are gorgeous and wonderful, and i love you.

Anyway... this is not the post i intended to write when i started writing it, but it's... something. And i will probably regret posting this in the morning, but... whatever. Somehow or other - certainly not by deliberate design - I have managed to stay alive for 26 years. I will leave it to those, if there are any, who my life affects to judge if that is worth celebrating.

Most Excellent

So, last week i was honoured to be given the Rated E For Excellent award by Last Crazy Horn... and so, I have to pass it on to 10 other bloggers.

This is a somewhat difficult task, because Last Crazy Horn picked Miss Crip Chick, who i was going to pick, and one of the other bloggers she picked picked Sweet Perdition, who i was also going to pick, and then Sweet Perdition picked... most of the other bloggers i was going to pick, namely Abnormaldiversity, Ballastexistenz, Chewing The Fat, The Gimp Parade (who i'm a little worried about actually, as she hasn't posted since March 22nd, which is rare for her), Questioning Transphobia, and Asperger Square 8... so, those i have picked are picked from the set of blogs i read not including that list... listing is strictly alphabetical and does not indicate any sort of order of preference (as if that was even possible between diverse individuals) (also excluded are group blogs or strictly-news blogs, so sorry BBC Ouch and F.R.I.D.A.)...

Andrea's Buzzing About blogs on neurodiversity, education (from both the "educator" and "educatee" standpoints), and the fight against pseudoscience... as well as insects and other creepy creatures. She combines simultaneously impassioned and rational defence of difference with devastating deconstruction of curebies and other nonsense-peddling quacks and hysteria merchants... and she also makes absolutely hilarious Dadaist poetry out of bizarre Google search terms ;)

(She also gave me a blog award back in December, so it's nice to be able to reciprocate the honour)

Emi Koyama's Eminism is more of a website than a blog really, but does contain a blog (even if it isn't posted to often), and needs inclusion simply because of the awesome way that ze interconnects discourses on transsexual, transgender and intersex issues, disability issues, fat acceptance, postcolonial economics, and feminist sex education (among other things i've probably forgotten) into a complete, consistent and fully intersectional radical libertarian approach to embodiment. Cutting edge in every sense.

Larry Arnold aka Laurentius Rex is, AFAIK, the only other autism or disability rights blogger who i've actually met in real, 3-dimensional space. If i live to his age, then i would be very, very satisfied if at his age i am anything like him.

No Designation hasn't been posted to much recently, but is one of the better blogs i've managed to find on queer and/or trans issues that manages to intelligently yet readably write about the distinctions and interactions between gender and sexuality, while arguing for the abolition of all forms of gender- and sexuality-based discrimination, both overt and subtle.

Charles Johnson aka Rad Geek is about the only US-based political blog i can stand to read, and also probably the best defender i know of of the true meaning of libertarianism. There are issues (particularly economic ones) that i disagree with him on, but 90% of the time he writes incredibly powerful and passionate commentary that expresses my views far better than i could. And he's one of the very few non-disabled blogger/activists i can think of who care about disability issues.

Elizabeth McClung's blog Screw Bronze! is one of the most raw, powerful and moving blogs out there, while getting wickedly dark humour out of even the most harrowing of situations... and she writes posts averaging over 100 words every day, even while on an awesome culture-packed trip to Japan. She has made me laugh, she has made me cry, and, generally, she fucking rocks.

Trinity at The Strangest Alchemy blogs on subjects as diverse as BDSM, disability rights and sex-positive feminism, and manages to tie them all together with a passion for freedom and autonomy that is both highly intelligent and very sexy. If only we lived on the same continent... :( I also have to give props to her blog for being on LiveJournal and still looking better than those of many WordPress users ;)

Joel Smith's site This Way Of Life, including the blog NTs Are Weird, is one of many great autism advocacy sites. One of the things he is best at is connecting autism advocacy to the wider disability rights movement, and demolishing hierarchies of "functioning level" or diagnostic label within the autistic community, He's also one of very few Americans who properly understand, and both believe in and practice, the social model of disability, and one of the best at explaining it.

The brilliantly named Autistic Bitch From Hell's blog Whose Planet Is It Anyway? is another passionate, no-bullshit autism advocacy blog. There are things i disagree with her on (such as her support for Barack Obama), but she destroys curebie-ism and other forms of bigotry, and exposes the hypocrisy of much of the so-called "autism awareness movement", with devastating effectiveness...

(This list took me far longer to put together than i thought possible...)

Anyway. You are all Most Excellent. Now go name some other excellent blogs that i haven't yet heard of...

Technical issues prevent update...

I have a shitload of things to blog about, but for several reasons they're going to have to wait for a while...

Firstly, i came back from spending the weekend helping to run a temporary social centre (on which i will, hopefully, eventually report) to find that my hard drive had, apparently, died (first telling me, when trying to boot up, that there was some sort of error on drive C, and then not even getting to that stage, but stopping in the middle of a line of the stuff that briefly flashes up before the Windows loading screen appears). That hard drive contained all the photos I have ever taken with my digital camera (of which i have no backups), a fair amount of downloaded music that i don't have on CD, and several unfinished or nearly-finished blog posts. :(

I'm currently using a temporary computer for internet access, but am also incredibly busy at the moment as i'm in the process of moving house, and will need to get internet set up in the new place, which might be somewhat complicated, as i might not be able to get it in my own name due to financial history. As i have to be out of this house by the end of April (tho i'd prefer sooner), i probably won't have it properly set up until some time in May.

(I am getting a new computer, which my brother has given me, for the new house, but won't actually have it until i've moved in. Still, it's a strange coincidence that my old computer chose to die almost as soon as i was given a new one... i just hope that, when i go to see my brother next weekend (his birthday is the day after mine, the 27th and 26th respectfully), he being the computer expert that he is will be able to recover the data from my old hard drive and transfer it onto the new one... ie, i'm hoping that it's just some Windows files that have been damaged by whatever disk corruption happened, and My Documents is still salvageable...)

Lastcrazyhorn gave me a blog award, which requires me to pass it on to 10 other blogs, which i will do as soon as i manage to get enough time to think of who to pick and why... but a big thankyou for picking me, and i will pass it on when i get the chance to... :)

I'm also thinking about possibly changing the look of my blog - among other things, i'm not happy with how narrow the column of text appears when viewed on larger monitors (which i didn't realise while using my old computer, which has a small, old, crappy one), and a visually impaired friend who uses screen-enlarging software told me she found it hard to read because white text on black "dazzles" her. (I chose the white-on-black template because i had heard that light-on-dark is easier for VI accessibility, but some people on Ouch have complained about the light-on-dark colour scheme there recently, so i presume that that info, wherever it came from, is false...) I'm not sure, however, what i want to change it *to*, so suggestions welcome...

Anyway, i'm off to London tomorrow for what might be the first major disability-themed direct action in the UK for several years... and which, hopefully, i'll be able to report on... and i will be posting "proper" blog posts (a substantial backlog, if i get my data back) as soon as i can...

Autscape

Autscape is a three day conference organised by and for autistic people. There are workshops, leisure activities, social opportunities, and more, all specifically oriented to the needs and preferences of autistic people.

I really, really want to go to this conference. Just about everything about it looks utterly awesome. I really don't know if i will be able to afford £155 (which is the lowest rate, for people on state benefits or similar low incomes), tho...

I almost can't imagine what it would be like to be in an environment in which almost everyone is autistic. While i have met quite a lot of people on the spectrum in my life, and sort-of-know a few other autistic disability activists in the UK (one of whom is apparently one of the people behind this), and of course i "know" lots of autistic people online through blogs and forums, i don't in fact really know (at least not to actually regularly talk to or spend time with) any other autistic people in "real life", and it's a definite hole in my life.

(One of my closest friends, who might possibly also be going to Autscape, and who actually now works for the National Autistic Society, has some autistic/AS-like traits, but probably not enough for an actual diagnosis... although enough for her to "get" me in ways that nearly all neurotypical people don't - i suppose perhaps she fits into that "shadow syndrome" kind of category... or a "Half-Aspie" as i kind of jokingly call her, as her dad was, while undiagnosed, almost certainly an Aspie, but her mum seems to be pretty neurotypical... but she's still far, far more able to fit into the neurotypical world than i am, and i would really love to become closer friends with some other actually, unambiguously autistic people... the majority of the rest of my close friends have physical impairments, but i don't really know how coincidental or otherwise that is - while i definitely seek out disabled people, i don't think i particularly seek out those with physical impairments over those with mental...)

The deadline for submitting proposals for workshops or presentations is the 11th of April, which is this coming Friday... which is really annoying, because i would really love to propose one on the relationship between the (impairment-specific) autism rights movement and the wider (cross-impairment) disability rights movement... but i've got no chance of putting together a proposal by Friday, and in any case i don't know if i'd have the confidence, even in a primarily autistic environment (and i don't even know whether that would increase or decrease my confidence) to do a workshop/presentation myself... plus i'd probably want it to be something like a panel discussion type thing, which would involve others being involved in it as a collaboration... still, they have an email address and a discussion list for "if you are not interested in doing a presentation yourself, but have ideas for workshop or discussion topics", so i might email them...

I don't know whether to go to Autscape would be some sort of massive, emotional "homecoming" experience, or whether in a mostly-autistic environment i would have less communication/understanding problems than in a mostly-neurotypical one, or whether in fact they would remain the same... still, i'm quite unreasonably excited by how awesome, for example, the coloured badges idea is*, and the whole idea of spending a weekend somewhere where i'm the majority neurological type... while i'm not that into impairment-specific identity (i prefer to identify across impairment boundaries in solidarity with all disabled people), i think i still do have that attraction to the idea of being among "my kind", problematic as that concept is...

* I have a really vague idea that this might actually be an adaptation of something that originated from the gay club scene, and had to do with sexual availability... but i'm not sure... i think i remember an event held at my uni for something like HIV awareness called the "Traffic Light Ball" that was based on this idea... anyway, wherever it comes from, it's IMO a brilliant idea, and perfectly repurposed if it was repurposed...

The theme of "Inertia and Action" is one that is particularly appropriate for me right now as well, being all too familiar with the kind of inertia problems that Amanda (of Ballastexistenz) describes one type of very well here, but also believing passionately in the need for action (in all senses of the word!) for disability rights and liberation, as well as all other forms of radical social change...

Would be really interested to hear from anyone who went to Autscape last or a previous year, and what kind of experience they had...

Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy #1

The first Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy is here. Absolutely loads of awesome posts (many of which i know i agree with, a few i know i disagree with, and quite a lot that i need to think a whole lot more about) - i haven't even read through them all yet, but they cover topics like sex work, porn and anti-porn, BDSM, sexual orientation and presumptions about it, transsexuality, and more... there are loads on topics (such as the relationship between radical feminism, sex work, and Marxist concepts of exploitation) that i need to write about, if and when i can get my writing head together enough to do so...

(I'd love to write something bringing disability into it for the second one, if there is going to be a second one...)

Another awesome call for papers...

This one via Miss Crip Chick:

“Feminism For Freaks”

At its best, feminism offers an emancipatory potential from gendered oppression, inequality, and violence. At its worst, however, feminism can work to simply affirm the rights of middle-class, heterosexual, white women, and exclude the voices of already-marginalised groups such as women of colour, trans* women, sex workers and so on. Like Derrida’s democracy, a truly liberatory feminism is mostly a feminism to come.

Not un-coincidentally, those marginalised groups of women are often demonised by the dominant culture, rendered as monstrous - simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible, compelling and threatening, desirable and disgusting – and forever denied a voice of our own. The question of if and how monstrosity can be reclaimed or re-worked is a vexed one for feminists.

We therefore invite proposals that affirm the voices of socially excluded people, that seek to create new and exciting knowledge and address themselves to feminist theory and activism or the wider culture, on such topics including, but not limited to:

* Monstrous bodies and identities
* Social marginalisation and exclusions (for instance, borders, walls, and immigration laws, and the silencing of voices such as those of women of colour and transgendered people)
* Liberation/transformation/organisation
* sex work
* queer sexualities and genders
* BDSM
* Visible signs of difference (Muslim women wearing the veil, disabled bodies etc)
* religion and spirituality
* freaks in popular culture, body modification etc
* fat positivity

Academic, non-fiction and creative work will be considered–the call is broad, and we’re willing to accommodate new and interesting work by freaks of all kinds.

Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words by May 31st to estrangedcognition[at]hotmail.com and suzanmanuel[at]gmail.com

*Note - Given that some contributors may not feel safe or comfortable telling their stories in the public sphere, submissions under pseudonyms will be accepted.