Connections

I just want to start by saying that I am addicted to my phone as anyone else (TJ probably takes the most heat for this, so my apologies, honey) given the right circumstances. I know that it isn’t our fault, that phones and apps are designed to make us want them, to feel like we need them. They use dopamine against us, as well as the brain’s tendency to focus on the negative (some info on this from Tristan Harris).

I didn’t know much about this until my mom called me one day pretty upset over some puppies that had been found in bag in a field.

Me: Wait, which puppies? Who found them?

Mommy: I don’t know, I don’t think they were speaking in English.

Me: (suspicion creeping in – she once spent at least 10 tearful minutes telling me about a horse being treated miserably before I recognized the 1946 movie Black Beauty) Where did you see this?

Mommy: Tube! (which is how she refers to YouTube)

I looked up the video, discovered it was at least two years old, found the original poster and the follow up video that most of the puppies survived and made it into happy homes. After…

Me: How did you start watching that video, anyway?

Mommy: Well, I was looking at cute puppies, you know, like Blessing (her Pomeranian at the time). They are so funny and small! And then another video and another and then this one. Oh, so sad.

YouTube claimed at some point to make changes to the algorithm but who knows?

All of that to say, I know this isn’t about poor choices or some inborn “addictive tendency,” or even “this generation.” The whole thing is very much designed to keep us online.

Once I realized it, I have done what I can to resist it. I rarely open Tube except for specific videos. I don’t turn on notifications on my phone. I keep the ringer (all sounds, really) turned off on my phone. I have used various apps (I know, ironic, right?) over the years to keep track of my time online or to shut down automatically at 9 pm. I have the timer set on my phone these days to turn off social media after 20 minutes. It almost always surprises me when it pops up.

Meanwhile, I was recently out of town and stayed with a local family. Luckily, my housemate was terrific – we connected right from the first day. We spoke every day, sometimes for literal hours at a time. Then I got sick. My host family and housemate were rightly concerned about getting sick themselves and so I was more or less quarantined in my room.

I listened to audiobooks, but often I do that while doing other things, like chores or driving. I found myself unlocking my phone over and over again to do random searches (some prompted by the book but others just random things that popped into my head). I had to stop and reverse many times because I wasn’t really listening. I found myself reading an email from REI – like ALL the little blurbs. Did I mention I had very little internet? Yeah, that was what was saving me from social media. Without the near endless scroll of social media what I had was: incessant checking of email, reading emails I would usually just delete, crossword puzzles, other word puzzles and incessant checking of email.*

What was missing from my days that led to this drastic change in behavior? People. Like my awesome housemate (plus all my people at home). Humans are hard-wired for connection – we crave it more than food – and not having any was leading me to look for it in my phone. Sadly, mostly what I got from my phone were advertisements – both the obvious and the more subtle. It’s true I also had Signal messages and WhatsApps that helped so much, but I really did refresh my email feed every time I picked up my phone.

You might be asking, what’s your point, doc? My point is, if you notice people around you (because I’m sure you would never) who seem a little too interested in their phones, consider what points of human connection they have access too. For some folks, online connection is the bulk of their contact with other humans. If you aren’t sure, think about how you could help increase those points. TJ and I hosted our first block party about a month ago and we are planning a second one next month, in part to build just that, a bit of human connection. Showing up to events at your local library is another option – those events are harder to continue to host if no one shows up! Just by attending, you are helping maintain access points for others. Hosting a game night, or inviting people to a live music event – there are so many options. As humans, we need other humans. Let’s do what we can to create and maintain these human connections. What do you do to connect?

*I know I said this twice. It really was incessant

Image shows a red background with multiple rows of cell phones with white screens.

The thing is…

…wherever you go, there you are. TJ (Caitlin) calls me The Ruiner, and it’s a title that I hold with pride. IYKYK. However, noticing racism, ableism, sexism and other oppressions takes a toll. TJ and I went on a cruise, y’all, and I had no idea what to expect. Neither one of us has ever done it, but this was our idea of a vacation that combined travel with a special interest, so we decided to go for it.

I’m not sure why I was surprised to find that this floating hotel was a small microcosm of the US. Or maybe a slice of rich mostly United Statesians. Yes, there were people there from other places, but we mostly ran into yt people from the US. Also, if you are looking for the highlights, you’ll have to scroll to the picture at the bottom.

The whole trip started out rocky because they (the cruise line AND the Star Trek folks) refused to make the printed material accessible to Caitlin. All they had to do was email her the things! I know that those documents exist in e-form, because they were printed out and left in our rooms every day. I’m guessing they were printed before we left shore, so they could have, in theory, emailed her everything before we left. Yes, I know things can change, but they could have said, This is how things stand right now, and the schedule is subject to change. It’s not that hard. And I suspect that kind of accommodation would be helpful for many people, not just blindies.

And speaking of accommodations – I saw a number of so-called service dogs on the boat. I know, I know, there’s no way to tell from over where I am what those dogs were there to do. There are MANY ways a dog can provide a service that I would not be able to see. That said, I saw several that I had serious doubts about. The thing is, if I had doubts, other people also had doubts. I’m not saying people cannot have their service dogs with them. At all. But there are people who game the system and convince someone that their dog qualifies. If that dog then behaves badly, it makes it that much harder for people with actual service dogs to get access later.

Meanwhile….colonizer vibes were everywhere. Almost all of the people working on the ship were BIPOC. Wait staff, cleaners, stewards and cooks, all BIPOC and working with a level of invisibility that I found super uncomfortable. Passengers (mostly yt) walked past them without a word, so much so that when we greeted people they seemed surprised that we noticed them. We heard one woman tell the wait staff that he needed to have his eyes checked, and asked if he was blind because he jokingly told her he needed to see her ID when she ordered wine. I met someone just before the trip who had worked on cruises before and they told me that they don’t make much money and that tips would likely be appreciated – but twice employees told us that the tip was too high, and tried to give it back.

The whole thing was extremely wasteful, too. Given that the food is included, I knew there would be waste, but it was more than I imagined. We made it to breakfast just once (it was a vacation, y’all. Don’t judge) and as we were going out I saw a man scooping yogurt out of the cup and into a bucket. Straight to the trash. I get it, once they’ve put them into those cups with fruit, they can’t save them for the next day, but there were another dozen cups waiting for him. Every day I saw many people leaving piles of food on the table as they left the dining area.

The steward was prepared to change our towels twice a day! And sheets once a day. I told him that wasn’t necessary for us, but walking down the corridor our room was on I saw people removing piles of towels and linens from the same rooms every day.

Image shows TJ gleefully petting a dolphin. She was the only one in our group that got to tickle a dolphin and the resulting vocalizations were awesome.

All of these things are present in my everyday life – but on a boat out in the middle of the ocean – there was no respite. I loved being able to spend pretty much every minute with TJ. I was happy to watch her enjoy the Wave Rider and go down the water slide. I enjoyed some panels and Tim Russ jamming with his band. We got to hang out with dolphins which, while also fraught, was a fantastic experience. We walked around holding hands for hours every day. We read and talked and laughed. I love her dearly and appreciated every minute of our time together. AND I was VERY ready to get off that boat at the end of the trip. TJ and I really have co-created a life that I love, and I feel fortunate for every minute of it.

WELCOME, PLUS A LIFE UPDATE!

Hi, people!

So, in case you are either (a) fully sighted with no blindies in your corner and-or (b) living under a rock, you oughta know that Facebook, in addition to all its inherent security and political badnesses, is becoming a regular trash-heap of accessibility problems. The most heinous of these include having to go through ridiculous work-arounds to do things as simple as composing a post, writing a comment, or being able to know what link we’re clicking on before we leave Facebook. Again, basic things. Totally unacceptable that these issues have been dragging on for literal months. Non-disableds would not stand for this.

As you can imagine, this app inaccessibility, combined with the fact that Facebook Mobile (on the computer, not the phone) is now also a cluster, has made me less and less inclined to post status updates. Therefore, ergo, and henceforth, the plan is to move gradually away from Facebook and more toward blogging. Will it work? No one knows. But it definitely won’t work if I don’t try!

Let’s break it down into nice paragraphs. I’ll even do little fake titles / headings. Mostly for the sighties. I think they like that. But I’m not doing formatting.

WHY A BLOG?

A long time ago, Martha and I thought it might be fun to blog together. Do you like our cute title?

Dots: speaks, of course, to my love of all things braille.

Doc: Have you met Doc Martha? She blogs and Instas already, but hopefully she’ll bring some Doc Martha Magic, as I call it, over to this little corner of the Interwebs.

Roc: The cool shorthand way of spelling “rock,” which is for Maíte, the Rock Wilder (Rottweiler). She is our eight-year-old dogter and we love her. She enjoys raw meat, singing, chasing “creachers” to the best of her abilities, and “para-ambulations.” She may guest-post on here occasionally, if she’s not too busy “ressing” in the “tsunchine.” Plus, we, all three of us, rock. And enjoy rocking out.

Most updates, I imagine, will be more brief and topical, but I have a few life updates that I think it will be helpful to fill you folks in on so you know where we are these days in Caitlinworld. I’m also not going to update on, you know, seemingly everything in ways I once did, but more things that feel more sharable for, and consumable by, the general public.

SCHOOL

This is my ninth year of teaching. It is ridonculous. Like, seriously, I don’t even know how that happened.

To make a very, very long, nine-year story short, I’m still having problems with our school district, to the point that I was pushed out of a school due to accommodations-related reasons. Last year, for the first time, I taught a special-day class for third, fourth, and fifth grade students with mild to moderate disabilities, in the hopes that the main accommodation issue would be less prevalent. In fact, the issue was still prevalent, and a bunch of other issues in that setting compounded it, most notably never being fully staffed.

Our school district is infamous in the news for its struggles and, thankfully, school sites seem to understand that, with almost a decade of special education teaching under my belt, I’m actually a useful staff member to have on their team, in spite of the fact that, you know, I can’t see things. This year, I’m back teaching small groups of kinders through fifth graders at a little elementary school that’s actually walkable from our house. The children are delightful, and some of the most hardcore, dedicated learners I’ve ever had. We haven’t had a special educator at our school for the past two years, so from the get-go, my crew, by and large, were extremely eager to receive the support.

I know some of us, myself included, miss kid-quotes! Kid-quotes make the world go ’round, don’t they? I have gotten out of the habit of putting them in a palatable format; I just tend to scribble them in my daily notes and across my lesson plans. And I haven’t made up kid-names in ages! But I will keep chewing on the idea of bringing them back. Maybe in, like, a weekly or monthly digest?

ARFID

As some of the long-time Facebookers may recall, my therapist was able to give me an official diagnosis of ARFID, or Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder. For the uninitiated, ARFID is often handily explained as “more than picky eating.” It’s when people struggle to eat typically, due to low interest or appetite, fears of choking or becoming ill, and-or sensory-based things like flavor, color, texture, etc. For me, it’s mostly about texture and poor hunger cues.

The texture component has been present for as long as I can remember, but the interoception piece, I think, worsened during the shelter in place, when eating was much less structured. School and being out and about in the world tends to help me with scheduling my eating; I just never really thought about it that way.

Long story short, after the shelter in place and returned to school, I had unintentionally lost a lot of weight, due to eating both less food and less frequently. I worked on it over the summer, got some guidance from providers familiar with ARFID, and joined some ARFID Zoom groups. Things got better for a while, but got worse throughout the school year. ARFID on its own was difficult enough, but last year, we were extremely short-staffed, and I wasn’t used to teaching the special-day class.

By the end of March, I’d lost so much appetite and weight that even Kaiser people were concerned, and I was referred to a partial hospitalization program in the city. I had to go on medical leave for the rest of the school year, and was at the program for eight hours six days a week. That gradually decreased as I was able to work on my eating.

Because ARFID is such a relatively new disorder, there aren’t really best practices on how to address it. I ended up trying a new med, which increased my appetite drastically and helped me put on weight rapidly, but it made me feel absolutely miserable. I quit the med after about a month, but it took a while to taper down, which was very unpleasant. But I’d put on enough weight and learned enough new skills that I got sprung from the program.

The folks at the program were pretty kind, and … well, you all know me, I brought my signature joy as best as I could. If nothing else, being able to focus on eating and not stress endlessly about school helped, and then I had the whole summer to stay in good patterns.

This school year has gone so much better, and I’ve kept up with eating … knock wood. My main takeaways have been to just TRY to eat, even if I don’t think I’ll be able to. And to eat whatever feels doable, even if it’s not what I quote “should” be eating. Relatedly, we have banned the concept of “junk food” in this house. It has been renamed to “simple” food, which you say with a French accent and hair-tossing. I will do a video of it sometime.

So that’s the ARFID update. Oh, also, we’ve been doing some fun videos of me trying new things, but, thankfully, the program did not force me to eat different things. They encouraged me to eat a higher volume of my “safe foods,” which was a big relief. I’ve never felt motivated to eat, quote, “normally,” and my blood tests have always been okay, thanks to vitamins and, at some points, iron.

OUR LITTLE FAM

Image shows Maite lying on the couch with her rainbow pull toy between her paws. She has a big, open mouthed smile on her face. The colors are interesting (to me) because the wall behind her is yellow, the cover she is on is blue, and underneath that is the red couch. Very bright. Very Caitlin. – Martha

We’ve now been in our house for about three years.

We have the best next-door neighbor ever, “Uncle Wayne,” who calls himself the Mayor Of the Street. He is hilarious and always keeps an eye on us. Martha, in particular, knows all the dogs and their families, too.

We also hosted a block party, and now have a great sitter and walker for Maíte. So I feel like we are slowly but surely finding some community.

WRITING

This part saddens me: I have done literally NO writing. No Facebook posts, but also, for the first time in my life, I don’t have any story ideas, either. It’s super saddening. I did NaNoWriMo successfully for the first time in 2023, but flunked out midway in 2024 … and the stuff I did in 2023 wasn’t that great.

STAY TUNED

Hopefully, I can stay on this wagon and get back in the posting / writing groove! Think good thoughts for me!

If you made it this far, I shall send you e-hugs and rainbowz!