Exercise is Amazing

I’ve been pushing myself more than usual to exercise. This is mainly because the weight loss pill I was prescribed gives me a burst of energy lasting about 6-7 hours every morning. Unfortunately, a crash of tiredness then follows, but a caffeinated drink reverses that. The burst of energy feels nice, and the point is to use it to exercise. 

I’ve also usually described my anxiety as a certain feeling in my arms, legs, upper chest, and upper back. The feeling itself is not anxiety, but causes anxiety, I think. The feeling makes it super difficult to initiate movement. I have to really force myself to get out of a chair or out of the car, and so on. It makes me feel suspended, like my arms and legs are being held back. I think this has contributed to weight gain for me. This happened after I finished college. This muscle feeling happened, and the extreme difficulty in initiating movement caused gradual weight gain. Also when you have anxiety, everything is an emergency, and I personally kind of eat like it’s an emergency. If that makes me sound “fat phobic,” then please try to understand about anxiety and the fight, flight or freeze responses. 

Ever since I started taking phentermine, I have not had this constant emergency feeling surrounding food. I can eat just enough and be good for several hours, not even feeling hungry or anticipating what I should eat next.

Before the phentermine, I was only walking about 1,000-3,000 steps daily, even though my goal is 10,000. Last week, I hit my goal of 10,000 five out of the seven days. This week, I hit it all three days in a row now. 

Trust me, I am SORE AS HELL.  But the creepy Crawley muscle feeling that I've had since finishing college actually is cured by that soreness. It's hard to explain. The soreness is preferable. 

This morning, I went to the gym at 5:00 am and did 5500 steps on the treadmill. Then I went to the park at 7:00 am and did about 3,000 more as well as got on this machine. You push those with your arms, and it works your upper arms and upper abdomen. I completed my 10,000 steps goal by doing some side jobs (taking pictures in stores) and parking far away from the doors. I think this is a great way to heal the stuff I've been through the last 12 years. I definitely have “the high”  And the sore. 

 

10 Unfinished Projects

 I feel like the poster child for late diagnosed ADHD right now, because I feel like I’ve started ten things and haven’t finished any of them. 

The book I’m writing called The Child Advocate. I did write out a few scenes in the spiral notebook I talked about earlier. That thing is too heavy to work on every day. Every day would be ideal, though. 

All the reading and research on anti-ABA online, which now includes  This culmination

The two books I’m reading on the same subject.  The book by the author “Julie Roberts” who I can’t find info on because of her similar name to Julia Roberts is all full of scientific studies. I simply can’t remember much of what I learned in methods in research class at University of Houston.  I’d need a brief refresher, probably something on YouTube.  I texted my daughter asking her when she takes it at TXST.  She doesn’t know.  Probably in her junior year, as it’s a 300 level class. 

Working as a caregiver and trying to set at least some boundaries with musical schedule boss (gift card boss).  She does sort of a professional version of love bombing.  It’s not real love bombing, it’s work appropriate.  She says I’m amazing, I’m a rockstar, I’m this and that  and maybe I am 🤷🏻‍♀️.  I’m also fundamentally exhausted, and musical schedules affects my mental health.  

I am trying to do more side jobs on the merchandiser and field agent apps, and now my husband wants to try them.  We are planning to go do some together, but haven’t gotten a chance.  This weekend, the field agent app had a lot of freebies.  I got two free subway sandwiches plus $3 each, free chipotle (I got vegetarian tacos) plus I think $3 or $5, and another free stick of deodorant plus $5.  We will never run out of deodorant at this rate.

Writing my own recipe cards based on stuff I find in cookbooks that I like and want to try. 

I bought an old art history textbook from half price books and am trying to cut out pictures of art and make collages with decoupage.  I worked a little on a Byzantine inspired one for my mom for Mother’s Day.

Reading the handful of books I have on writing. 

Purpose nigh to walk 10,000 steps daily  

The fun I’m having with ChatGPT helping me come up with elements to the other book in my head- the one with the couple based on me and my first love, Matthew. I’m actually creating story lines for all seven kids based on the kids of some influencers I semi-follow. 

Thinking of Matt brought a memory to mind. When we first started dating, we worked together at a supermarket. He used to say he wanted to work his way up with that and eventually become a store manager. This was very much discouraged. He was basically yelled at that there was no working his way up in the supermarket business and that it was a dead end job to even be a store manager. He was pressured to go to college and get a degree instead.  We all were. Well, about a year ago, my inventory coworker, who used to be a grocery store manager told me that she was making $120-$130,000 a year. I was floored. She was making that in the past, not just now days. When I expressed my disbelief, her husband told me that store managers actually do make that much. What?  I literally said, “Why then, when you are a kid working in a store, they tell you that working your way up there is a dead end?  They both said, “I don’t know.” And “It’s not a dead end.” 

One more thing to add to the list of “things they were wrong about.”  RIP Matt

AI Family Portraits

It dawned on me today that there would be no way possible to get my three cats posing together in a nice grassy meadow for a family portrait. So I had ChatGPT do it. It came out perfect, except for the fact that Alex has less white on his paws. He wears ankle socks, not crews. 

Then I thought- you know what else would be impossible?  Getting my family together to pose for a family portrait. It’s not just because we all live in different cities and states, it’s also because many of us/them don’t even speak to each other. I tried to get ChatGPT to do one family portrait of me with my paternal first cousins, and one with me and my maternal first cousins. 

This one is what came up when I entered pictures of me and my cousins on my father’s side. That’s supposed to be me on the far left. My only female cousin on that side has aged significantly since looking like this, and she looks exactly like our mutual grandmother now.  The four men all look spot on. 

My mother’s side was a little more complicated, because there were 16 of us.  I’m supposed to be the one in the black shirt in the front row. It looks nothing like me. This was way more complicated to make, because I didn’t have pictures of everyone. For the ones I didn’t have pictures of, I gave ChatGPT pictures of their siblings that they resembled most. That’s why there are a couple in here that look like twins. In my opinion, only half of the people here look like the actual people, but this one was just hard to do. Maybe when I have the mental energy and headspace to do so, I’ll submit more changes to ChatGPT to get a more realistic family portrait. 

I didn’t like being an only child, and I gravitated to my 19 cousins as much as possible. Yes there are 20 total, but one was an adoptee that we didn’t find out about until about 2017.  Two have passed away, two have gone no contact with everyone (it’s not known if these two are alive or dead but I presume them alive), and there are three that won’t speak to me and are among my biggest haters now. But that’s ok. Haters are gonna hate!  

I’m not sure if the children of one’s first cousins are considered your second cousins or your first cousins once removed, but in total, I have 29 of those now. Most of those 29 are adults with their own families, and I do not have a count on how many grandchildren of my first cousins there are. (Great grandchildren of my parents siblings). On my father’s side, it’s 8.  On my mom’s side, who knows. It’s 24-25 that I know of. 

When I’m old, with grandkids and great grandkids, I hope we can take family portraits like this in real time, instead of having AI do it because we are all so distant in so many ways. In the 1980’s in Chicago, my holidays looked like this. 

If my grandparents saw these fake images with everyone hugging and smiling, they’d be proud if they thought it would be real. Realistically, they couldn’t possibly proud at the sheer number of generational curses that have been perpetrated. I’m confident that third generation, the one I don’t have a count for, will “break those curses” and do way better than we did. In fact, I believe the young people in general are already doing way better than we ever did, in most families. 

The kids are alright. 

I’m the Proudest Mom

Today my daughter Anna volunteered again with the animal sciences club at Texas State U. Then, she went to a No Kings protest and posed with a drag queen. 

I’m so proud of my kid. I never tried to live vicariously through her, and I never pushed things on her that would make her “have things I didn’t have”.  But here she is, living her best life at 18. 

Tuesday Tidbits

Thanks for the advice you two, but I kind of despise getting out my laptop. I have no idea why!  I was able to upload photos by simply opening safari on my phone instead of chrome. Here’s my friend DP showing how her broom stood up on the spring equinox. I also heard that eggs stand upright on the two equinoxes. I didn’t know these things had any sort of validity. 

I’m getting a lot better at going to the park intentionally to get my steps in while speed walking  while there, I saw this interesting flower.  It’s too big to be a dandelion. 

While walking, I’m listening to an audiobook that was a free download (with membership) on Audible called Writing with Impact: Crafting Compelling Arguments by Barrett Williams. It’s read by an AI voice, but the voice is tolerable and doesn’t sound too robotic. 

Last but not least, we have a nest outside, and here’s a short clip of our baby Jordan really thinking he can get those birdies. He’s really a joy.  He gets along better with Mitchell. Alex is old and just ignores the two of them. If they bother him, he hisses as if to say “Get off my lawn!”
 

Tweakers at Dollar General

 One of my friends used to say she believed they must hold job fairs for Dollar General managers at meth recovery centers, because to her, they all look like they’ve done meth. She said it was a joke, and I do know that not all dollar general managers are current/former meth users.  Just to get the “not all” out of the way!  But the one I saw today when I attempted the cigarette merchandising job fit the description. She was supposed to have the signage at the store, and as soon as I read that I kind of knew they weren’t going to have it. I hate it when they say DG will have supplies at the store. More often than not, they don’t. This lady looked everywhere and said she didn’t have it. She then said she had posterboard and markers if I wanted to make signage, but the instructions reiterated like three times not to do that. The job would be rejected if I did that. I explained it to her, and she immediately got irate and said, “Well I was just trying to give you an alternative!”  Oh!  “That’s fine,” I said in a calm voice in an attempt to calm her down. “But I’m just not allowed to do that.” I told her I was stepping outside to message the person in charge. That person never responded, so I just documented what happened and submitted the job and left. Another person from merchandiser messaged me and asked what time I would be completing the DG cigarette jobs. I messaged him the whole story and said I had another experience last week where the customer service desk employee didn’t accept the LOA from the vendor. (This is true, they didn’t, and this was at an HEB). I said I no longer felt comfortable doing assignments from that vendor. 

Now, it’s a huge deal for me to say that. I was raised that if you do anything like that , you’ll get fired immediately and they’ll get extremely mad at you and you’ll never work again, because no one will hire you, because they’ll badmouth you all over the place. I should know by now that it’s not like this, but that freak out crept in. The merchandiser dude just messaged me back, and said “No problem.  (That vendor jobs) are removed from your list. Thank you.”  

I finished the day out by doing the rest of what was on my list- two more Costco jobs that I did five of last Wednesday, and one with electrolyte straws at Target. They were easy, and the staff was knowing!  

Tomorrow, I plan to do another one that just posted today where, like the Costco ones, you don’t have to talk to management unless there’s an issue. I plan to do them all the way to my mom’s house, take a bath and take her trash out, and do them on another route back. 

Then gift card boss texted everyone saying there was a call out for the client I worked with yesterday morning. She needed someone with her from 6-8 pm tonight, and aside from getting paid (two hour shifts also have a differential for being short), she was offering a $75 gift card!  Oh?  Are gift card incentives back?  I entered the client’s address into my navigation, and it would have taken an hour and a half with traffic. Then she texted that someone took it. Eh. At least gift cards are back. 

The Anti-ABA Rabbit Hole 🕳️

Recently, this Wall Street Journal article was posted to social media trying to expose Medicaid fraud by ABA facilities. It doesn’t surprise me. The centers seem to have a ton of money, and there are a ton of them too. Every time I log into indeed to just browse, another ABA center “behavioral technician” job pops up on my suggestions. I always click the thumbs down for “this is a bad match.”  Indeed doesn’t get the hint. 

Here is a list of books I’m in the middle of reading about this issue: 

The Autism Industrial Complex by Dr. Alicia Broderick. Dr. Broderick also talks about this issue on a couple podcast episodes here, and here

A book I have but haven’t looked at yet is The Gold Standard Fallacy of ABA by Julie Roberts. She’s hard to find any more info on without coming upon tons of links to Julia Roberts. 

TikTok content creators I like: 

Songbird Speech (an adult with autism and a speech language pathologist)

Jean (autistic adult, educator with a doctorate in education)

They both do a lot of talking about how communication isn’t behavioral. This is one of the things “wrong” that I couldn’t put my finger on when I attempted to train to be an RBT.  Communication is innate, and it’s not true communication when it’s treated as a behavior. Maybe once I learn more, I’ll get into it more. 

YouTube links:

Paige Layale’s video on her own childhood ABA experience. Some people on Reddit say that about half of what she says is spot on and half is her projecting, but to me, if she’s been in therapy her whole life, then she should know when she’s projecting and not do it in a YouTube video. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Because of that, I give her the benefit of the doubt. 

How to advocate against ABA without losing your mind.  They do a very good job explaining a lot of things, as well as understanding many aspects of “the other side of it.”  

I think that’s all for now.  More later.   I re-watched and re-listened to all of that and most of the TikTok’s before linking. You can also fall down the rabbit hole on Reddit by searching for ABA SLP. One might ask, well what would the alternative be?  The alternative would be speech and occupational therapy, along with pouring some of the billions from that Medicaid fraud into special education and parent education. 🫶🏼