My friends are heavily immersed in what you might call geek culture; they're basically all on the same wavelength with regards to, if not what's included within the culture, then what's excluded from it. Part of their culture is a narrative: different/outcast/lonely in high school, now way cooler than most of their classmates in a very particular way and still outcast/misunderstood by mainstream society. They're nearly all night-owls with a shared cultural hate-on for mornings, have little knowledge of the natural world and less respect for that knowledge, and we can include their own bodies in the concept clump of 'natural world'.

I am aware of the culture, but it's not me. I probably fit in less well with these friends than I ever did in high school, but in both cases I spend a lot of time doing my own thing and liking my own things and there's just not a lot of overlap or understanding from the people with whom I surround myself. Don't get me wrong, I worried about whether people liked me in high school sometimes, but it turns out they all did, and everyone was nice to me most of the time; I also believe strongly that, if I'm misunderstood, it's only the same way that we're all misunderstood because of the contradictory nature of humans and our tendency not to take time to try and understand each other.

That's not to say I don't have many similarities with these people, that I don't love them, or that there aren't reasons I run with this crowd. It's just brought home to me in some of the culture-building experiences I see that, really, my home is in myself and not in this society.

School helps with the sense of being different somewhat; these are all people who will stop on a walk outside to look at something interesting that's growing or living there because they can find that sort of thing interesting. Spending time at varied events with a spiritual/reverent/outdoors/inclusivist feel (Spring Mysteries, plant and permaculture event, folk music festivals) helps a lot; skipping the whole concept of "social group" and just hanging out with people with whom I have things in common is good. There doesn't seem to be any group anywhere which links up my major interests or prejudices in a cohesive fashion.

I think I feel it more nowadays because I'm much more certain of who I am. My personality is something reliable and I don't question it much, even when it's fluid, so I see where it contrasts with the cultures in which I find myself.

This post brought to you by two posts by friends, one on how people who were misfits in high school do better in life and another on how people who stay up late are smarter than people who go to bed early, by someone who most of the time feels both successful and smart enough... and who believes in the enoughness of such things.

So a couple of miles from the Mexican border a rat hoarder was found. Rats were running loose in her house... domestic rats, descended from a couple she'd originally got. The Humane Society was taking them away. The numbers we were hearing kept getting bigger... 120, 170, 300. The rats are all pink-eyed whites-- lab-rat-looking rats, very hard to find homes for with the general public, all of whom want fancy blue dumbo rats (if you don't know what this means, come to my housewarming and I'll show you).

The Humane Society was going to begin to euthanise the rats today, but between a large offer of help (just give us a few days to organize transport) from the rat community and a bunch of news outlets who were now covering it ( http://www.lcsun-news.com/ci_15131269 & http://www.kfoxtv.com/news/23624490/detail.html ) they decided to wait a week, because-- well, because Pacific Northwest rat people are amazing. In the past, with the Petaluma hoarder, we'd organized a rat train up the coast, with different people volunteering different legs of the trip and people along the whole way adopting or fostering as many as they could. Many rats were saved from death. My own Honeypie was from that rescue, as fine a gentleman as you can imagine. He passed away awhile ago and was mourned by those that knew him.

Now it's happened again-- fewer rats seem to be involved in the hoarding incident than in Petaluma, but fewer seem to have been put down thus far, and as always no sex seperation means that we could have... let's see, assume half of the perhaps 300 rats are female, and half of those are at fertile age (a possible underestimate), and the average litter size is 6-8 pups. With good vet care many of those might survive. Now it doesn't usually work that way, we can do emergency spays if we get the girls early enough, if the rats are very stressed they reabsorb babies, but you begin to understand the magnitude of the issue.

The original thread is here: http://www.goosemoose.com/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,118/forum,rat/topic,4070335.0

If you can help, either by donating money or by fostering (for any length of time) or adopting any number of rats, can offer vet care at reduced rats, or can do anything else you can imagine to help, or you know anyone who can, please get the info to simone@littlemischiefrescue.org . She's coordinating. She basically makes the impossible happen on a regular basis.

We may just have found a miracle in the form of a pilot who has some time off and is willing to fly out there and bring back pacific northwest rats. We're trying to work quickly, because next week they start killing these kiddoes.

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In other news, I've been using more pictures lately-- I thought hard about my own face going up. I've been taking a lot of pictures around the city with my iphone. I think I need to do some sort of pay thing or upgrade thing to post those pictures up here easily, and I'm wondering if I should do that. I thought a lot about voice posts for awhile, because they could be made from wherever, but the ability to organise my thoughts quickly enough as I go and speak at the same time may be beyond me-- at least for longer posts.

This place has been my voice for a very long time. I think it may contain my eyes too? A lot of stuff goes through here lately.

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I'm rediscovering the art of conversational phone calls. This makes me so happy, in so many directions. It's an elegant solution to a bunch of things involving time, conversational styles and interpersonal awkwardness, and social drama for now. It's also something I haven't done in awhile. When I first asked if I could call him (after being reminded that the phone was an option) I felt as nervous as the firs time I called Kynnin. It's settling now, though I still-- you know, I do still feel like I'm an obstruction in people's lives, frequently, an intrusion or an unwelcome duty. I don't like to insert myself where I'm not explicitly invited. I get better and worse at this, and in different situations it switches around some, but there it is. It may be at the root of the interesting thing where people don't call me because they think I'm distancing myself from them which I'm only doing because they aren't calling me.

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Speaking of distancing, here is a week in the history of my hair. Monday: aphids. Tuesday: unidentifiable kid sticky. Wednesday: raindrops, windstorm. Thursday: ficus lyrata latex sap. Friday: sunscreen & dirt.

Why am I growing it again?