11.25.25

It's 3 AM im just checking to see if my rss post filters properly...

Ok I finally got it working! Rss is live babyyy! My only problem is that now the preview looks crazy. It's all code, no regular text. And something similar happens when I look at the GUID because it's private. On the way home from getting my glasses I read this article and i realized; I'm not idea gardening to my fullest capacity! I'm sure that sounds dumb or like overthinking to a lot of people but personally the way I tend to this garden is very important. I don't just want it to be a blog (polished content) or like my IG story (reflexive content), which is what this page was originally going to be like. I want to use this garden to genuinely nurture ideas and articulate my thoughts in a purposeful, but not methodical way. And I don't want this to be a chronological blog either! Half of the purpose of digital gardening is Non-hierarchal Thinking (Although, as Betin notes, there are people who focus on chronology, but I identify more with the other styles she listed).
I also want to see other people's gardens so I can really think about the seeds I want to sow. So far I have this captain's log, web clippings for my Knowledge Base (an attempt to archive every concept or piece of information I've learned), and that's about it. I also have folders ready for web-related stuff, "official" resources and archives (which I might move to Knowledge Base), memes, media ratings and reviews, my art, fandom stuff, and current events, but they're empty right now. My index is also...sparce. I wish it was more than a link and my guestbook but that's just how it is sometimes 🤷

Circling back to cultivation and the article I read, I think my final thoughts are just that it's becoming increasingly important to me to migrate away from social-media-thinking. Despite this, I will be making a digital garden webring. Hopefully people will join, because I do want to see other people's work and acknowledge them, and create an implicit sense of community, even if we aren't existing as a federation, club, or friend-group. That's also what makes me hesitant to put my guestbook on my site, and prohibits me from adding a chat. This really is personal. This is MY space. I will probably turn on comments so I can learn from others but still have control over what gets in, but even that is a maybe. This garden is for public showing, not public use.

I thought about this later, I'm def not putting on comments. If you want to start a conversation, dm me ig? But my garden isn't for that

Side note about getting glasses today, good lord! A poor older woman was in sobbing and screaming, having a tantrum because she found out she had astigmatism. Her voice had the cadence of a child: I suspect she was somehow developmentally arrested (although that is certainly true pertaining to her emotional regulation). At first I thought it was a bit funny, but then I remembered she's just as human as anyone else, regardless of her lack of behavioral control. I wasn't thinking that explicitly, it was just a sort of quiet shift that happened the more I heard her scream and cry. I realized that, as an autistic person, I really shouldn't even categorize it as a tantrum, since my own meltdowns and panic attacks have been called tantrums by ************. I use
tantrum a sensory descriptor.

Anyway, I had to go back into the doctors office after waiting for the eye pressure drops to kick in. The intern who was examining my eyes said "Sounds like an angry kid, huh?" and I replied, "It's a grown woman." Not too fond of the way I emphasized her age, because I don't think it was relevant to her emotions. I could've just said, "She's an adult." But that's not the point. The point is that I told him that what I gleaned from the conversations around me is that she was upset because she had never had astigmatism written in her doctor's notes before now (to her knowledge), and that she was already afraid that something would be wrong with her eyes when she arrived. So he said something along the lines of, "Astigmatism is pretty much harmless. It's not a big deal," so I said that it's not a big deal to us, but it is to her, and he said I was right, and that we have to consider other people's perspectives.
Long story short, I hope I made a kinder, more understanding doctor.