The Flying of the Freak Flags

Except apparently not for lunch, according to my kids. I do find that a little weird!

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Depends on the sandwich. We never ate cold lunchmeat on Wonder bread sandwiches for dinner, but we had Reubens all the time, as well as roast beef/Italian beef sandwiches, sausage sandwiches, and burgers. Must be a Midwest thing.

Also, any time thereā€™s bread, other stuff that isnā€™t bread, and preferably meat, thereā€™s the opportunity for sandwiches.

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Midwesterners represent! (fist bump)

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A British cab driver once spent an entire ride telling me how amazing American sandwiches are because theyā€™re a complete meal while the British ones are just a couple of bites at most.

My reaction went from ā€œI know what you meanā€ to ā€œWow, you really like sandwiches.ā€

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I donā€™t really like sandwiches as a meal. I prefer British ones.

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Good thing, then, because even a couple dozen of those wouldnā€™t be much of a meal. Then again, Iā€™m a gluttonous American, and even my vegetarian sandwiches are stuffed full.

It does look like a nice tiny snack, though.

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To be fair, that nice tiny little snack has a tendency to be only one small portion of the entire meal:

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Thatā€™s not even a meal. Itā€™s just afternoon tea.

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Tea is a real meal in Britain. Followed by supper in the evening.

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Only for proles :wink:

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(What about second breakfast?)

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Since I got sick, Iā€™ve been working on autopilot; purely physical, just pulling weeds. Before, I was supervising sites, writing reports and planning public information campaigns.

Trying to fix that now; working at getting my plant ID back up to scratch. A lot of it fell out of my head during the manic & housebound year.

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Love it! The size of each dish and the meat emphasis would have to change, but otherwise Iā€™m all for sitting down with you 12 times a day!

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I really hope you can get the right balance soon. Do it for me, since I doubt Iā€™ll be getting there ever again!

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I grew up with the usual breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but on Sundays, the order was breakfast, dinner, and supper. This was just How It Was until at some point my sister and I asked what was up with the dinner/supper on Sunday thing, and my dad admitted that he was trying to make Sunday ā€œmore Britishā€.

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And he started with supper rather than elevensies or tea?

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Last night I went to a benefit concert* where one of the guests was a journalist who had spent time in Afghanistan and written a book about her experiences. She read a chapter from her book where she met some people who had started a political party for insane people. They gladly accepted her as a member and declared her their first international emissary to Germany.

Itā€™s actually an interesting cause that my wife is involved in: a cardiac surgeon she works with has organised a program where Afghani children with congenital heart problems can fly to Germany for operations. Theyā€™re paired with host families during their stay and remain in contact once they return to their own families.

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Have you looked at the idea of autistic burnout? Iā€™ve seen a number of articles about it and it seems to explain quite a bit in my case. Obviously plenty of NT people get burned out too, but it seems to be a lot more common with autistic people and look a bit different. Iā€™m getting increasingly convinced that I was getting toward burnout before I started the medication a year and a half ago, and it wasnā€™t as sudden as it seemed at the time. I suppose partly because I didnā€™t know I was different at all, I dismissed a lot of the internal warnings telling me that I was overdoing it, since I didnā€™t see other people having so much trouble doing ordinary things and I figured I was just being dramatic. In my case, I can do quite a bit but I have to build things up in stages. I guess thatā€™s one thing about the love of routines ā€“ if I do the same thing again and again, it doesnā€™t take up too much bandwidth, but incorporating new tasks is much more difficult. When I started the medication, I suddenly had big mood swings and crashed, and itā€™s like everything just fell apart and I donā€™t have the energy to put it back together again.

At this point itā€™s very difficult to do more than the basics, my memory and concentration are terrible and I can be really disorganised. I find it really difficult to do more than one thing at a time, and it takes longer to switch between tasks. I canā€™t spend much time with others, sometimes even in my family. My sensory issues are worse than they used to be too. Iā€™ve probably had five good days of work since June (although Iā€™ve been muddling through and managing a reduced workload to some extent). Today I made a huge mess making dinner for tonight, I was almost half an hour late picking the kids up from school, then it took me an hour this evening to clean and wash up and make tea.

Autistic burnout makes sense for me ā€“ autistic traits become more pronounced and itā€™s more difficult to function in normal life, so itā€™s often seen as regression. It also explains a lot of high school, since I was like that a lot of the time between ages 13-17, and thatā€™s where I really went from being one of the better students to just barely able to cope. I had just switched to my fourth school in two years, and I guess that was too much. My (probably also autistic) older brother burned out at the same time, but the assumption was that it was post-viral fatigue. He stayed off school for two years, while I went back after a few weeks. It gets to the stage where coordinating things like meals, sleep, exercise and personal hygiene is difficult; I feel like I donā€™t have the bandwidth to maintain a basic routine. I actually remember significantly less of that period than I do <12 years old.

Iā€™m probably going to be staying in a clinic from next week onward; Iā€™m hoping a hard reset will put me back on track, since I havenā€™t done any work on my studies for the last month. Itā€™s bad enough that my family is OK about me leaving them for weeks or even months until I feel better, so I guess itā€™s worth doing that. This video has a pretty good summary of burnout in children and adults, and it includes links to more information.

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Alas, I have little to add here since Iā€™m so normal.

On an unrelated note, we are internet famous (except the fame part):

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Weirdly relevant:

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