Living with diabetes, a reflection

Around this time in 1988, I started to get really, really sick. So sick that I lost a substantial portion of my bodyweight, was thirsty enough to empty a double-doorway refrigerator of all its liquids, and spend substantial portions of days feeling so listless that I was practically sleepwalking. Then, on my mother’s birthday that year, I was taken to a general practitioner who listened to a brief rundown of my symptoms, tested my blood and my urine, and told me plainly that I had developed diabetes.

Orwell would be proud. A bit about language and choice of words.

Of all the things ailing our present oh-so-wonderful mass-communication society, none anger me quite like political correctness. In fact, if you were to ask me on a particularly bad day, I would tell you that I believe conservatives invented political correctness as something to tar and feather liberals with. This essay by Steve Kangas tells a lot about why I find this a credible belief.

Sometimes, enthusiasm is like mania.

Around this time last year, whilst I was still on vaguely speaking terms with all familial units, I used some chicanery and creative monetary organisation to purchase a digital SLR camera. My reasons for doing this were as short-term-focused as many of the other reasons I do things, but I like to take pictures. Going through a large collection of pictures that I have taken and picking out the best of the lot is a joy for me. Especially when an unexpected and pleasant result is found.

No, I am not happy or well. Thank you for not asking.

I have made a lot of angry, spiteful, and even violent remarks concerning what I see as unjust behaviour on the part of others. That is true. Like, for example, when London police saw fit to force a severely disabled boy who, according to the article, has a mental age of five into handcuffs and leg restraints. As one woman who commented on a Fudgebook link put it, she would really like to hurt people who hurt children and “special needs children”. She asked if this was possibly “mother instincts”, but I disagree. I think this is what I call “decent Human being instincts”. And really, if a police officer things it is somehow warranted to hurt a child in this manner, I suspect perhaps they need to consider another career. Shovelling fish guts, for example.

One month ends, another begins, blah blah blah… by the way, Queensland sucks

As you may have gathered from other posts during this month, June of 2012 was not a good month for me. Well, all bad comes with a certain lining of good, but that is all that the good in this instance really amounts to. A lining. And that good is in the form of making one of the toughest, most painful decisions I have ever had to make.

Please allow me to clarify (about Lance Henriksen, and other celebrities).

A couple of posts ago, I wrote something with the title “Lance Henriksen has done more to represent the autistic than Suzanne Wright ever will”. This resulted in some confusion in conversations I had elsewhere concerning what I write here.

Internet designers nowadays: eat me. Sincerely…

When I think back to the mid-to-late 1990s, when I first started taking my tentative steps onto this whole new, “exciting” medium called the Internet, I think of all the promises that were made and the promise the medium was reputed to hold. And in those days, it did promise a lot that was exciting to a technology-dreaming boy like myself. But promises are like wishes. Put one in one hand, then shit in the other hand. See which one fills up first. And never has there been a better example of this truism than the Internet after the commercialists realised that it was not just some “geek” trend, that it was not going to just go away whilst they ignored it, and that it posed a real, credible threat to them. And since then, they have been working overtime to try and negate what made, and to a degree still makes, the Internet a far better medium for all concerned.

Now, you have probably noticed that I inserted a capture of what I see when I load this journal in one of the web browsers on my computer. It is not for vanity reasons. For one thing, I am not that vain. For another, I do not like to use graphics in these things unless it is for an actual purpose. And if you have even the slightest interest in design, one glance at the image I have placed near this paragraph should be able to tell you what that purpose is.