Author: msmaryb

Concert Buds

As a parent, it’s always nice when you can find shared interests with your kids. As an autistic parent, it’s especially lovely because the primary way I relate to other human beings is via shared interests. I guess that’s part of being bad at small talk and other socially-related skills.

With Madalyn, my oldest, it has always been music.

When I say “always,” I’m not exaggerating. When I was pregnant with Madalyn I purchased a Walkman (*author pauses to lament how old she is*) with a pair of headphones inside an elastic band that went around my waist. I started playing The Beatles to her probably before she even had ears. There exists a video of Madalyn, on the day she turned 19 months old, correctly naming all the Beatles from a picture hanging in our living room.

When she was 5 I took her to see Ringo Starr in concert. We were in the second row of the theater and Ringo acknowledged her for dancing and singing along during Yellow Submarine. She doesn’t remember the show, but I do, and it was the beginning of our being concert buddies.

The next music we shared was Train and Maroon 5. I went through a brief(ish) Maroon 5 phase with them as my hyperfocus. I wasn’t as obsessive about Train but I enjoyed their album that was out at the time, as well as their older stuff. When she was 11, Mad came with me to see Maroon 5 in the pit. We have pictures of our hands touching the stage. Around the same time we went to see Train at the Oklahoma City Zoo Amphitheater. It poured rain on us the entire show, but we’d come prepared with ponchos and we had a great time.

Once I’d moved on from Maroon 5 I found myself without a hyperfocus group. Meanwhile, Madalyn started exploring music more on her own and eventually got into One Direction. I was snooty about it at first, as I’d never been into boybands in my life. (The Beatles ARE NOT A FKING BOYBAND, THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY TED TALK.) In fact, I actively hated groups like that. My middle school bestie and I wanted NKOTB placed in a rocket and fired into the sun, for example.

In 2013, a documentary movie about One Direction, called This is Us, was released. Madalyn being too young to go to the movies alone, I volunteered to take her. Incidentally, this happened thanks to High School Musical. HSM 3 had recently been released in the theaters and my ex had taken Mad to it so I didn’t have to. When TIU came out I figured it was my turn to take the bullet, and off we went.

I walked out of the theater a fan. I even went back to see it again by myself.

Over the course of the next two years, Madalyn and I went to see 1D eight times. Yes, eight. We saw them three times on the Where We Are tour (Dallas, St. Louis, and Tulsa) and four times on the On the Road Again tour (San Diego, Santa Clara, Kansas City, and Chicago). Our final time seeing them before they split up was at Jingle Ball in Dallas in December 2015. We had endless amounts of fun and made memories I still look back on fondly.

Once 1D split Mad moved on to BTS. I refused to do so for quite some time. I saw what seemed like all my mutuals on Twitter switching over to being BTS fans and it upset me because it felt disloyal. (This is an autism-related thing…I am excessively loyal and it takes me a long time to switch gears in any sort of situation.) But they finally got me…New Year’s Eve 2019 I watched BTS perform in NYC and I was hooked. They were set to tour and had two dates in Dallas. Mad and I got floor tickets for both nights and soundcheck for night two.

The concert dates? May 9-10, 2020.

Needless to say we did not get these shows, as they were canceled for the pandemic. We waited, in limbo, for almost two years before we were able to attend their post-Covid shows. Instead of a proper tour, BTS did a series of four shows in Los Angeles in November/December 2021. Madalyn and I attended, in person, on night 3, and we were in the YouTube Theater, next door do SoFi, watching the show live stream the other three nights. Then, in April 2022, BTS did four shows in Las Vegas. Madalyn and I drove up there and attended night 3.

Our most recent concert experience was seeing Min Yoongi a.k.a. Suga a.k.a. Agust D on his solo tour before he enlisted. In May 2023 we traveled to Oakland, CA, for his show there. We had GA floor tickets and, for the first time, I got a really good look at a member of BTS with my own eyes (rather than on a monitor).

Currently, we have no solid plans to see any shows, but we have the intention to do so. BTS, having just completed their military service, has not gotten back on tour yet. However, their comeback is set for March 2026 and there were certainly be a tour after that. Madalyn and I will be moving heaven and earth to be there. Hopefully for multiple dates.

Madalyn turns 25 this year, which means we’ve been attending concerts together for 20 years now. And to be honest? I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather do that with.

‘Twas the ’tism, m’lord

I have had multiple autism-related epiphanies recently.

I seem to be suddenly realizing all the habits and quirks I have that are actually a result of the ASD. I think part of why it’s taking me so long to fully grasp the effects it has on me is because of that autistic rigid thinking. When I hear or see a symptom described, I tend to have a very narrow perspective on what that symptom looks like – basically, I picture it exactly the way it’s described, and if I don’t meet that exact description, I think that means ASD doesn’t affect me that way.

I also find I approach descriptions of autism from a masked perspective. People speak of needing accommodations and my immediate reaction is, “I don’t need those,” because I can get by without them. But that doesn’t mean it’s comfortable for me to do so. I probably do need them…I just don’t ask for them, since I’m trying not to be “a baby” or inconvenience anyone else. So I did sort of a thought experiment…I thought about, if I wasn’t worried about bothering anyone, or what they might think, how would I envision the perfect outing or social situation? Turns out there are actually a lot of things I’d ask for, or do differently, if I didn’t worry about annoying people or seeming like a weirdo who can’t function normally. I don’t not need accommodations…I have just learned to get by without them and swallow the discomfort.

Wow, I just now was looking for a screenshot on my phone and found a pair of tweets from when the kids were little that illustrate that the symptoms are not a recent development and that I’ve been struggling this entire time.

First post: “Great start to the weekend. Just had a complete, utter, howling breakdown at the kids about their junk everywhere.” (Howling = crying)

Followed by: “I do not know what is with me today. First the outburst at the kids, now I feel semi-catatonic. I’m alone but I have no desire to leave the house.”

Hello, classic autism meltdown! Like, that’s pretty textbook for a “high-functioning” adult autistic, right there – both the meltdown and the aftermath. And, in answer to the question people are probably asking themselves, no, I did not realize this wasn’t normal. It was normal for me. Hence my beginning to ask myself, years later, “Why do I have such a hard time just being a human being?” Another meltdown example from the past is, back when I used to attend Abbey Road on the River every summer, I would inevitably find myself in my room at some point during the weekend, crying and spiraling over something extremely minor. It was quite some time after being diagnosed that it finally occurred to me that I was overstimulated and exhausted from masking for a sustained period of time, and was falling apart.

Anyway, back to the original purpose of this post…I’m actually really annoyed right now because I thought of a great example of this phenomenon the other day, meant to write about it, and have totally forgotten what it was. It was an “a-ha!” moment, when it finally dawned on me that, yes, I do actually exhibit this symptom, just in a slightly different way than what’s been described. Hopefully it’ll pop into my head at some point (probably randomly, at 3am) and, if it does, I will take notes this time.

The main thing I am coming to terms with is just how much support I needed when the kids were little. My train of thought used to be along the lines of, well, I raised three kids, much of the time by myself, and I did alright. But, looking back on those two tweets…did I really “do alright?” Clearly there were issues. And when I sit and actually think about how much I was hands-on with the kids, it wasn’t a lot. All three kids started going to preschool for a few hours a week at age one. By age 4 they were in school all day, four days a week. Yes, their dad was gone most of the week for work, but I didn’t have them all day, every day, when he was. Then there’s how much help he did give me when he was home. He would take all three kids over to his dad’s house on Saturdays and sometimes also Sundays and they would be there all day. Like noon until 8pm. That left me to do my own thing all that time. When they weren’t at his dad’s house, R. was doing all sorts of things for the kids at home, and it was because I couldn’t quite manage a lot of it. As in, things would have gone (and very often did go) undone if he hadn’t handled them. That is needing support. It’s just a different kind of support than someone who, for example, needs assistance with personal hygiene.

I have more I could say but this entry is already rambling and somewhat disjointed, so I’ll save it for another time, preferably one when I have notes.

한극 학생 (Hanguk Haksaeng – Korean Student)

I started learning Korean in the spring of 2020.

It was the pandemic, everything was shut down, and people were taking on all sorts of new and sometimes obscure or rare hobbies.

I did have a reason for choosing to not only learn a new language, but one that used an entirely different writing system. A new alphabet to learn…it was like being a toddler and starting entirely from scratch. But if my new favorite music was Korean, well, then, what other course of action did I have except learn it, myself?

Five years later, I’m still a toddler, at least Korean-wise. I have the comprehension and vocabulary of a two-year-old – my vocabulary is single words, mostly animals and food, and I get really excited when I hear someone use a word I know (and I usually repeat it back, aloud). I can actually read Korean, and my spelling isn’t terrible…I just don’t know what most of what I’m reading means. I can pick out words but almost never enough to get an actual idea of what’s being said. (This is unlike my Spanish ability, in that I can look at a lot of written Spanish and get at least an idea of what’s being discussed.) I really wanted to be more advanced than this, by this point. I didn’t really expect to be conversational but I did expect to be able to maybe ask for a product in a store, or ask where the restroom is – like I can in Spanish. Unfortunately, as it turns out, without Latin root words, languages are a lot harder for me.

After the first year or two of grad school, I decided to let myself off the hook from studying Korean until I graduated. I knew there was absolutely no way in hell I’d have the spoons, the intestinal fortitude, the attention span, or the brain power to do a dual Master’s and learn another language at the same time. 

It turns out I was right to make that call and in my assessment of my abilities. Just in the weeks since I graduated I’ve seen a change. It’s sort of hard to describe but it’s like…before I started grad school, my brain liked Korean. I’m not saying I was picking it up quickly, because I wasn’t. But my brain seemed attuned to learning it. For example, I liked the challenge of sounding out words and trying to figure out what they said. I enjoyed trying to spell new words, just to see if I could, and then looking them up to see what they mean. I quit doing all of that during grad school, and it really wasn’t even a conscious decision, at first. It’s like my brain simply couldn’t attend to language learning and study/academic writing at the same time, so it 86’ed the superfluous task. And now, since my mental capacity has been no longer bogged down by school, I feel like my brain has perked up and gotten interested about Korean again. 

During school, when I watched or listened to any BTS content, I feel like the words were just going in one ear and out the other. My brain wasn’t actively involved at all. I even quit the echolalia, where I repeat Korean words and phrases I recognize when watching tv. I’ve resumed doing that, again. It’s basically involuntary; I don’t make a conscious decision to do it (thanks, autism!) 

Anyway, I guess the best way to put it is that, since graduating, my brain is much more actively engaged with the language. I find myself numerous times a day stopping what I’m watching to look up a word or phrase – another thing I’d quit doing during school. I feel like I’m easily hearing the words I know in conversation again where I hadn’t noticed them as much for several years (also applies to words in songs). It’s hard to describe but it’s like the words I know jump out at me somehow when I hear people say them. It’s like spotting a longtime acquaintance’s face in a crowd of strangers. 

I’m just generally interacting more with the language than I had for several years. The other day I heard a sentence I actually understood most of, and then I went on a 10-minute odyssey to find out what the one word I didn’t know meant and why it was used there. This is an example of one of the ways I interact with Korean while trying to learn it: 

I heard Jungkook say a sentence I understood most of: “나 여기 왔어요, 이 집” – “Na yeogi wasseoyo, i jip.” 

I had all the words already except one. I knew he said “I,” “here,” and “this house/place.” (I also can tell he’s speaking informally, which tracks, as he was speaking to the other members at the time.)

I turned on the Korean captions to find out the other word because I wasn’t 100% sure what I’d heard. I looked up the word I didn’t know, wasseoyo, and it’s the past tense of to come. 

So what Jungkook said is that he’d been to the restaurant before. Literal translation from Hangeul to English is “I here came, this place.” (This is typical Hangeul sentence structure, S-O-V, instead of S-V-O like in English.) 

 Another change I’ve noticed since school got out is that I’ve resumed catching incidences of elaborated or contextualized translation. Korean tends to use minimal words as a general rule, and they aren’t particularly fussed about pluralizing. In English one might say “The students are going home.” Korean would edit that down to what translates literally as “Student house go.” When they translate to English they put the sentence into English sentence order and add the filler and contextual words English-speakers are used to. Because I know a bunch of Korean words and a little bit about sentence structure, I sometimes catch when the translator has added information or assumed context. For example:

I was watching Are You Sure? and Jimin said something to Jungkook that was translated in the captions as “Are you hungry?” but I heard and understood the words he actually used. I backed it up and put on the Korean captions to double check that I’d heard it right, and I had. What he really said was “배 괜찮아?“ – “bae gwaenchanha” – which translates literally to “stomach okay?”

My intention, now that I don’t have any other sort of study or homework to do, is to join a Korean learning program online. The two problems are finding the money to cover it, and deciding which one to use, because there are a lot of options. Once I sort both of those questions out, I hope to start making better progress. I feel like my brain is open to learning, I just need a program to follow!

Flotsam and Jetsam

I have recently – within the last 4-5 months – taken a big step back from microblogging social media sites; namely Twitter and Threads. Twitter has obviously become a festering cesspool of MAGA activity and I figured if my suggested “for you” page was making me nauseated to read, maybe my association with that app needs to come to a close. I thought Threads might be a good replacement but I quickly discovered I do not like the people who are on Threads. It is populated by angry lefties who want to fight with everyone, even those who are on their side. I never in my life have been attacked by so many people I align with politically as I was on Threads, simply for imagined implications on their part.

Funnily enough, once I stepped away and quit doomscrolling, it helped with my anxiety. Go figure.

Anyway so now that I don’t have those sites/apps to dump all my bits and pieces that my brain comes up with that are too short or too numerous for Facebook statuses or my IG story. I suddenly realized, hey. I’ve been paying for this blog hosting and the URL for nearly 20 years and I’m not currently using it at all. What better place to stash all the little thoughts and notions that pop into my head than on my very own blog? In light of this I’m going to create a new category of post, for the ones that are collections of brief ideas or statements that don’t really fit anywhere else.

I’m calling the category “banchan,” which is the Korean word for all the little side dishes you get with a meal. 🙂

Mary B., MLIS, MAMS

After 14 years, my school journey is finally over.

I’m not exaggerating about the 14 years. I started college, first time in my life, at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, in 2011. In 2013 I transfered to the University of Oklahoma (I actually was enrolled at both schools for a semester or two, finishing up gen ed stuff). In 2019 I completed undergrad with a BA in anthropology (archaeology focus). I had two years off during which we were dealing with a pandemic, and then I started grad school, pursuing two degrees, in 2021. Two weeks ago, I graduated with a Master’s in both Library and Information Science and Museum Studies.

Y’all, it was a LOT of work.

I really hadn’t let the amount of work it was sink in, like…ever. I think if I’d ever sat down and envisioned it prior to doing it, I’d have given up and quit, thinking I could never manage it. The only way I made it through with a shred of sanity in tact was to focus on the classes I was currently taking and absolutely nothing else. I always felt that I was getting off easy not having to write a thesis but the volume of what I did write throughout the five years honestly probably equals a thesis. It was when I started assembling my end-of-program portfolio (upon which my degree hinged) that I really realized the scope and breadth of what I’d produced during that time.

Oh, and, incidentally, I finished grad school with a 3.63 GPA. That’s redemption enough for the kid who graduated high school with a 2.14. I always knew I wasn’t stupid.

As for my processing of the situation, I’m still not really grasping that I’m truly finished. Once in a while I’m like, oh, damn. I’m done done. But mostly my brain is in waiting mode, expecting to return to studies after summer, like usual. Maybe when it’s fall and I’m not starting classes is when reality will really kick in. Or maybe when I get my big girl job. Who knows, with me?

I mean to write more in this blog. Now that I don’t have school work to devote all of my brain power to, I’m finding I have the capacity for other things I’d long neglected. Also, I have basically abandoned microblogging sites (Twitter, Threads, etc.) and I keep having these thoughts and nowhere to put them. Then I thought, well, how about the website and domain you are paying for every year? What a concept.

Guess who’s back, back again…

For around 20 years, now, I have been paying an annual fee for both this WordPress account and also for the domain name, always with the intention of starting to write again. Lately it has occurred to me that this blog would be a much more appropriate repository for some of the musings I have been posting to Twitter (no, I will not call it by any other name) or Instagram Stories.

When I used to post here, regularly, I had multiple reasons for doing so. One reason was for my distant family and friends to be able to keep up with my life. One was to document slices of life from my young family. One was because, if there’s one thing I can do well, it’s write, so why not?

But another reason, the one I didn’t really ever articulate, was validation. I was about to type “to entertain,” and, yes, there was an element of that. However, the reason I wanted to entertain was to keep people reading, and the reason I wanted to keep people reading was validation. Perhaps it wasn’t quite as narcissistic as it sounds; after all, I lived in a town I wasn’t fond of and had no family or friends to socialize with. My entire socialization came from the people who lived in my house, and people online. Still does, if I’m being honest…but my attitude about this medium, specifically, has changed.

Essentially, I have realized that the only purpose this blog should serve is as a place for me to record things I want to remember, and to offer me an opportunity to sort out my thoughts and feelings by writing about them. IF people want to read it, that’s fine. Good, even. I’d never say no to positive feedback. Ultimately, though, I am writing here for myself, because I feel it could be beneficial on multiple levels.

So, if anyone happens to see this, welcome, and read on. I’ll be here, posting, whether anyone does or not.