Stim4Stim episode 4 transcript

ZACK: Hello, Mr. & Mrs. Autism and all the ships at sea. You’re listening to Stim4Stim, the relationship podcast by and for autistic people. I’m your co-host, Zack Budryk. Who else is here with me today?

CHARLIE: Hi, Charlie Stern, and Paris is around here somewhere but he’s being pretty quiet today.

JOY: And I’m Joy, AKA sol1dsnack.

ZACK: Hey. Great to have you today.

JOY: Thanks, it’s good to be here.

CHARLIE: So Joy is my friend, formerly from Brooklyn, now living in D.C., and they’re actually the person who named the podcast, and they are a Twitch streamer, a cosplayer, all sorts of things. I want to have you talk about yourself because, you know, you’re the best person who knows you.

JOY: Yeah. I haven’t really been up to much this year, honestly.

CHARLIE: I mean we’re about to talk about that because none of us have been doing anything.

ZACK: Mmhmm.

CHARLIE: Do you want to talk about the content that you put out and how that’s been going during the pandemic?

JOY: Yeah. So basically all I’ve really been putting out so far is doing some very small streams and I also put out my first cooking stream, which… trying to edit it for video on-demand stuff has been a total disaster, but it was a lot of fun. I feel like a lot more people are sort of looking for different sources of entertainment just because a lot of traditional methods are not really virus-safe. There are some states that have opened up movie theaters and whatnot, but sometimes people jut want to have fun within the house.

CHARLIE: Yeah, and I feel like for me personally, if I’m watching a stream, that’s sort of keeping me company in a different way than if I had a movie on for example. So I want to introduce our listener topic because it’s all about COVID and also all about dating, but this person first of all, says that our podcast is a much-needed antidote to Love on the Spectrum…

ZACK: That’s right.

CHARLIE: And I’m very flattered to hear that because this podcast is founded on spite for that program. But they said they’re in a relatively new relationship where she — this person is a she/her — and she’s autistic, her new date friend is neurotypical, they are considering different options about what to do about more serious lockdowns coming in the future in New York City, breaking up their routines, causing them to spend less time together. And I guess I want to talk about online relating to each other, the world of Zoom, which we’re on right now, the world of Facetime, the world of even Netflix Party, where you can just watch something with your friends. I’ve had to personally get really creative. And I’ve also had to get really strict and faux-monogamous, because I have to know everybody’s test results all the time and know what their bubbles are, know who they’re seeing and be really weird and paranoid and controlling. So of course this has sort of opened up to more sexting, for example, getting better at taking nudes and Facetiming everyone and watching Netflix together, which we would be doing in person but now we have all of these different factors. So that’s not an answer, that’s a beginning to the answer, but that’s where I’m at right now, forcing myself to live within these very unnatural rules.

JOY: Yeah. I would say that one thing that I guess is almost convenient about being a gamer, and then I guess this also ties into my experiences with being chronically ill too… of course there was a huge adjustment with lockdowns and not being able to see people in person, but a lot of these alternative social methods, they’re things that I already do, or things that I’m already used to doing, either because I had periods where it was difficult for me to meet up in person or I just wasn’t comfortable doing so. So I don’t know, I think that I do do a lot of watch party-type stuff where we put something on and either sound off in text chat or even voice-chat, like talking over the movie, which is really bad for audio-processing but if you want to have something in the background…

But online gaming itself has been a really nice source of socialization. It’s kind of like the only real positive interactions I’m having with strangers besides people trying to talk to me in the grocery store and I don’t know, it’s nice. It’s nice to sort of… since it’s not really safe to interact with people in most methods, it’s really nice to just go into a digital world where we can interact in many similar ways. Sorry, I’m rambling.

CHARLIE: No no no, go for it.

ZACK: This is Ramble City here.

JOY: Another thing I was going to bring up is the advent of … so there have been digital music festivals in the past … but with COVID, this kind of idea really exploded. You have really mainstream stuff like Travis Scott’s Fortnite concert, which was amazing, by the way, I really recommend checking it out. And also I’m forgetting the name, but there’s a huge three-day-long music festival on IMVU and a lot of different artists are all coming together and doing their own festivals. There’s even one I’m going to I think on the 13th. But that has been a really nice way to hang out with people just because… I can’t exactly go to a show and have a bunch of people doing their thing, but…

CHARLIE: Sweating on you.

JOY: Yeah [all laughing]. But instead I can be like, in bed, eating a sandwich, and I’m still listening to like trance music, I’m still listening to freak-core or whatever, and have all these people in chat and talking to each other. It’s actually, I want to say a more comprehensive type of interaction, because I don’t have to worry about being able to hear what anyone’s saying over loud music and if it’s a smaller show I can actually see the chat a lot easier for individual people. It’s not… I really empathize with the isolation that everyone’s feeling right now but I do feel energized by some of the alternatives that have…

CHARLIE: Yeah, absolutely. And I know that you and I have gone to shows before but there’s so much planning because of both of us are chronically ill, and it’s sort of a roulette of when our good days are going to line up.

JOY: Yeah.

CHARLIE: A lot of my life hasn’t changed but I do miss that option. I do miss, for example, just running errands, like aimlessly running errands, giving myself something to do that doesn’t need to be done. And there’s a writer for the New Yorker, Rachel Syme, and she was tweeting about New York City and the death of the fuck-around, and that really hit me hard, because obviously we’re able to attend shows online and I just went to a gallery opening in Ireland the other day… it was from a gallery that they had painted and put a bunch of furniture into, so it was almost like a living room and they were just streaming from there, but I do miss there being an antidote to cabin fever. That’s definitely hard for me because in the past, being a shutin, there was once every two weeks and that little asterisk doesn’t exist anymore.

ZACK: One of the big things that I miss is, which I guess I’ve only recently been thinking about how much I miss, is the movie theater experience, which, I know that neurotypical people, a lot of them really miss it as well, but I just feel like the whole experience of going to The Movies, capital-T capital-M, is… because film is one of my special interests I guess you’d say, and that whole experience of going to the movies, I feel like everybody sort of understood it was okay to nerd out during that, like it was a whole experience in a way that… even if I can enjoy sitting on my couch watching something it’s not really the same, like you don’t really feel like it’s this whole thing that you’re participating in with everybody around you, and I guess I was just thinking about that the other day, there are a lot of kids who love movies and they can’t afford to go to film school, so they end up getting a job at the theater or the video store and it would really suck if both of those experiences ceased to be a thing.

JOY: Yeah, I’m really hoping that theaters are somehow able to pull through the financial devastation of this pandemic because they’re definitely one of my favorite social spaces, IRL.

CHARLIE: And they’re so good for going alone.

ZACK: Absolutely.

CHARLIE: There’s no shame or awkwardness when you’re sitting in the dark alone because everybody’s sitting in the dark.

ZACK: Yeah.

JOY: Yeah. Definitely when I guess at times when I wanted to be and interact with people but in sort of a more passive way when I’m not necessarily talking to anyone but I didn’t want to be alone, movies are just great for that, because you still get the social interaction aspect of people… I guess sort of seeing people being able to be people.

ZACK: I guess to get kind of biblical with it, it’s a way to be in the world but not of the world.

CHARLIE: Yeah. At least at home you can put the subtitles on.

ZACK: Yeah. That’s big.

CHARLIE: That is wonderful.

ZACK: Can pause if you want to get up and get a snack or something.

JOY: One of the downsides of home is you cannot enjoy the thrill of the movie-hop, though.

CHARLIE: Yeah, there’s so much about the COVID world that doesn’t lend itself easily to crimes. Not as much shoplifting from Sephora is happening now that everything’s so clinical and sanitized.

[Crosstalk]

CHARLIE: Wait, both of you. I heard “computer crimes.”

ZACK: I was just saying you gotta pivot to computer crimes.

CHARLIE: Hacking.

ZACK: It feels like a Sopranos storyline where they’re realizing how much the world is changing. “We gotta rip off da Doordash guy!”

JOY: Yeah, and I was gonna say it’d be difficult to do that with everything being like curbside pickup now.

ZACK: Just let them think the house is condemned.

CHARLIE: This doesn’t have to do with dating. We got too far from the mark unless we’re talking about couples who shoplift together.

ZACK: So romantic.

CHARLIE: I do have a friend who made 4/20 their anniversary with their now-late partner and for them it was a shoplifting holiday so I really admire that. I’m looking again at the email because I want to talk about routines, because obviously everything is thrown off and we don’t have control over businesses opening or businesses re-closing or even public transport is less frequent now, which is actually more dangerous for COVID transmission, because there’s going to be more concentrated numbers of passengers on fewer buses and trolleys and subways. So I want to talk about how to deal when nothing is in our control.

JOY: Sure. Go ahead, Zack, you want to go first?

ZACK: I can, yeah. A big thing for me, I guess, was sort of taking the time to find new routines, as much as I can. This is obviously not universal, particularly with people like chronic illnesses can’t necessarily do that, but I started jogging, which I had not really done before everything was locked down, but you know, it keeps me from feeling like I’m stuck in one place all day, it gives me time with my thoughts, it’s a way to change the scenery a little bit, and I realize that… this is just an example because to be able to do that you have to have the neighborhood for it, you have to be physically up to it, it’s not for everybody but I guess I’m sort of making a more general point about how if you find a new hobby or, maybe pastime is a better word than hobby, but it can really… something that doesn’t require you to reinvent the wheel but still allows you to break up the monotony and I guess for lack off a better word have little adventures within your limited setting.

JOY: Yeah. I would say that I kind of get a lot of… basically since the only time I’ve been going out are essential things like grocery stores or doctor’s appointments, sort of trying to make those things enjoyable is something I need to do more of. I just put on some music yesterday and it just kind of made the experience… it’s a small thing but it made something really mundane more enjoyable. And it’s kind of weird but because everything is kind of topsy-turvy and you have no idea what’s going to be happening week to week or month to month, it’s nice getting these weird moments of connection with strangers just because everyone is feeling incredibly isolated right now. It’s nice. I’ve noticed people are way more chatty and/or friendly to me in public, which is not something that really used to.

CHARLIE: Yeah. People talk a lot about COVID being the great equalizer and I think masks are actually a huge equalizer. I’m getting street-harassed less and I’m sure that’s a similar experience… all of us are able to be a lot more anonymous in public and I feel like that’s really freeing.

ZACK: Yeah. God, maybe a little too much in my case because I can’t grow facial hair at all, it just looks like this horrible, shitty patchy thing no matter how long it takes. But I’m not going to the office and nobody but my wife sees my face, so sometimes I’ll just let my freak flag fly for a few days and let those horrible shitty patchy little hairs grow slightly longer, until it becomes too much on a tactile level.

CHARLIE: Yeah. Though I’m allowing myself to get too unclean some days in my little apartment, so that’s not great.

ZACK: Yeah. Everything in moderation, including moderation.

CHARLIE: True.

JOY: Yeah. I definitely need to get better about having more of a solid point of interacting with… the more essential things I need to be doing for care.

CHARLIE: Although this is a good segue back into my sex life, because the few people I have been seeing, and the one person I’ve been seeing unmasked, that person is willing to be submissive and also in service to me, so it’s been really great to tell them to clean for me. That’s a very COVID-specific thing that I didn’t necessarily ask for pre-pandemic but now everything is laid bare, everybody knows I’m disabled and chronically ill, and I’m functioning at my bare minimum every day, so I’m able to lean more into the dom thing.

ZACK: Hell yeah.

CHARLIE: Just because I need literally so much cleaning. I need my shower scrubbed and I need my dishes done and my Keurig descaled, so I just make men do that.

ZACK: That rules.

CHARLIE: Yeah. It’s definitely been freeing to be that honest.

ZACK: Growth industry.

CHARLIE: Yeah, true.

JOY: We’ve got a new disruptor in the shower-cleaning industry.

ZACK: Fuck yes.

CHARLIE: Paris is here.

ZACK: Hi, Paris!

CHARLIE: For those who can’t see our group Zoom, he just flew from across the room onto my head.

ZACK: Yeah my cat’s messing around in the background so she may pop up at some point too.

CHARLIE: But I do want to talk about this person and their disruptive routines and the person they’re seeing because they could absolutely do grocery shopping together, clean their apartment together, bake bread together, try new recipes together. People are really pulling out the stops in terms of culinary adventures, because they have, finally, four hours to roast something together when they didn’t before. So I’m all about people bonding with their partners over domestic things.

ZACK: A hundred percent. I’m pretty sure I’m the only person here who’s married except for Alyssa, our editor, who is muted right now, but I… I felt like this was the case when we first got married, my advice to people was before you move in with somebody, figure out the most annoying thing about them and either make peace with that or don’t, and I did that and I’m especially glad now that we are pretty much the only people we’re coming into regular contact with, and I think that’s fairly good advice for anyone you’re going to be in contact with during COVID. It’s just that… and I think that’s fairly good long-term relationship advice in general. I think that particularly people like us, if something gets on our nerves, it really gets on our nerves, I think it’s important to have a baseline in terms of what you can put up with.

CHARLIE: Yeah. I actually just checked out a new apartment yesterday and I went up to the neighbors and I asked them, what’s the worst thing about living in this building? And they told me, and now I feel better, and I feel more informed.

ZACK: Hell yeah. And I think that also ties into my anxiety, for some reason, or on some level, and I kind of feel like I will never fully disentangle my anxiety from my autism just in general, but my tendency to catastrophize means I always want to have a clear idea of what’s the worst-case scenario.

CHARLIE: Oh yeah.

ZACK: And even if it’s scary I feel like I really benefit from that perspective.

CHARLIE: Does it alleviate dread?

ZACK: Sometimes. Sometimes even in that worst-case scenario it can be grounding to remember that, I’m already there, so there’s less left to the imagination. After I got my first adult job in Washington, something like seven years ago, I was living in constant fear of being laid off and like three years later I was laid off. And like it sucked, it was the worst I’ve felt in a while, but again at the same it was the thing I had been dreading, so what was I dreading at that point, and that sort of on some level was sort of the ground beneath my feet and it helped me figure out what to do from there because I didn’t have that hanging over me.

CHARLIE: Well, Zack, how do you stay married through all this?

ZACK: Well, geez, it’s kind of goofy but it’s kind of the same thing you talked about. Like, just finding stuff to do together like very low-key date nights, things like that. We cook a lot together, we go on walks together, Raychel’s trying to get outside a little more. We are currently babysitting my mother-in-law’s chihuahua…

CHARLIE: Ohhhh THAT’S where the chihuahua came from.

ZACK: Yes, yes. She is obsessed with me. She starts going full jumping around, head-wagging every time I walk past.

CHARLIE: Aww.

ZACK: And Raychel sort of has similar Paris positioning with her where she’ll sort of just sit on her shoulder like a parrot or something.

CHARLIE: Aww.

ZACK: But yeah. It’s… I think it comes back to the, what Sara was talking about, about how you should be married to your friend. It’s really convenient to be in the position that I am with someone where you can just sort of hang out with and be stuck there and that’s okay, like you do with friends sometimes.

CHARLIE: Uh-huh.

ZACK: Like, I’ve said to her a couple times, I feel like you’re the best possible person to be locked down with, and that is really helpful. It really helps us… I think that we are like sort of an old married couple by the standards of people our age, but we’re constantly finding new ways to bond and discovering new sides of one another, and I think that COVID has really sort of nurtured that.

CHARLIE: That’s wonderful.

ZACK: Thanks.

CHARLIE: Let’s see, what else can we talk about? Does anybody have any sort of lingering thoughts about socializing in alternative ways right now?

ZACK: I mean I have said before how much I feel like COVID is the great equalizer socially. And I feel like I am particularly… starting from the same point as everybody else with something like Zoom. I’ve been at a couple Zoom social gatherings since this began and I don’t feel disadvantaged relative to neurotypical people, necessarily, the way I was when we were all hanging out in person. I don’t feel like I have to perform neurotypicality or I’m going to be expelled as a heretic or some shit … because I feel like the limitations of the format apply to me, but they apply to everybody else as well.

CHARLIE: Yeah, although I do feel like I’m losing my eye contact skills and my small talk skills in person because I’m still working and sometimes the people I’m seeing to take their pictures for money are the only humans I’m seeing all day so that’s really fucking weird.

ZACK: Oh yeah, definitely.

CHARLIE: Joy, I want to ask you about having roommates during COVID. How is that going?

JOY: It’s mostly been going pretty well. We’ve all been taking precautions to make sure nobody else is… I guess, unnecessarily at risk. Obviously some tension will come just from not being able to leave the house, and you’re just kind of in a high-pressure situation where no one has access their normal routine and things they would do to help calm themselves, it’s hard to I guess sort of keep things going smoothly, but while I struggle with communication, it’s, I guess it’s been incredibly helpful to be around people that are willing to talk to me about whatever issues have occurred and need to be changed.

CHARLIE: Yeah. And I think that we should wrap up and go to our segment of the week, but I do want to ask, how is our self-soothing going? Is it better, is it worse? Are we building more skills? Personally, sometimes I’ve been so angry and tight-chested out of rage that I’ve had to crack into my anxiety meds because of that, and that is a very 2020-specific feeling.

ZACK: So, full disclosure, I have been drinking a little more while we’re locked down, and I don’t think I’ve been doing it to self-medicate, which obviously would be a terrible idea, but I obviously am a reporter and had fairly high stakes last week at work so I deliberately didn’t keep any alcohol in the house during that because I feel like if I’m going to drink to take the edge off, it’s going to be bad for me to have it around in a situation this stressful. So my self-soothing in the meantime has probably been more to the effect of… my cats are very, very fluffy, is the thing about them [Charlie laughing] And they’re always very close by, which is not great for my keyboard but good for high-tension situations because they absolutely always want to be all up on me and I think it can be grounding.

JOY: Yeah. I’ve definitely been focusing on satisfying textures. I don’t know if there’s a term for it but… yeah, that has helped significantly. And also cooking. I’ve been just trying to sort of take myself out of all the commotion that’s happening and just have a specific, executable thing that I can do in a certain amount of time and that’s where I’m at for that category.

ZACK: I was just gonna say, I find cooking really relaxing as well. I just really love anything where I can just be alone in the kitchen and be working from a recipe and be listening to a podcast and just have my little walled-off kingdom for however long it takes. It just feels like something I have full control over and something I am able to self-direct and call the shots on and I find that really relaxing.

[Music]

CHARLIE: Well are you guys ready for our segment of the episode, or segment of the week? I don’t know, we record every two weeks.

JOY: Yeah.

CHARLIE: What’s your least favorite texture right now?

ZACK: Charlie, do you have one in mind?

CHARLIE: I think corduroy is my worst enemy, but actually before this recording I had to dig out a tag from this custom lingerie that I had ordered, and it was so rough against the small of my back that it was making me feel almost unsafe.

ZACK: Oh God.

CHARLIE: Yeah, I was like when a dog or a cat gets a bur on them from outside and they’re running because they’re trying to outrun it. That was me in this underwear, so I had to cut the tag out.

ZACK: So mine is more on a taste level, but you ever think a bowl is dryer than it actually is?

JOY: Yeah.

CHARLIE: Oh yeah, all the time.

ZACK: So I found myself with some damp cornflakes the other day and I can’t recommend avoiding that whole experience enough, just full zero out of 10.

CHARLIE: You didn’t add milk?

ZACK: I don’t eat cereal enough for us to keep milk in the house because we’d end up not using it all because cereal is basically the only thing we’d use it for but no, this was just a bowl that I had washed but not dried sufficiently. And all of a sudden I get this horrible little surprise that feels like it’s put me off of bowls, cornflakes and water conceptually, all at once.

CHARLIE: Oh, that’s awful. Sometimes Paris gets his little oat pellets in my water and then I drink it.

ZACK: Oh God.

CHARLIE: Yeah, it’s bad.

ZACK: Oh jeez, Paris. Get it together.

JOY: Yeah that’s a nightmare. Mine is also food-related. For me it’s the texture of overcooked steak or overcooked meat.

ZACK: Oh no. Speaking of the presidential election.

[All laughing]

JOY: Yeah, I made a steak a couple days ago and it was definitely in ketchup-dipping territory. I was so upset.

CHARLIE: Isn’t it wonderful how in the recent photos of Trump he looks barely alive and tanner than ever? That’s what I’m thinking in terms of burned steak, both in terms of the way he takes his steak and the way his skin is looking.

ZACK: I know that there’s this sense that he’s a New York institution but this whole thing with him formally changing his residence to Florida is like, yeah. Yeah. This was the only logical outcome of all this. Like Florida really feels like the burnt-steak state.

CHARLIE: He’s got Florida-man energy.

ZACK: Hell yeah. But like the gated-community Florida, where everybody in there is still a Florida Man but they own a boat too.

CHARLIE: Yeah. I think that’s gonna do it for us. Joy, what do you want to plug and how do you spell your username on Twitch?

JOY: So my username is spelled s-o-l-the-number-one-d-snack and it’s the same as my Twitter handle. And that’s the only thing I’m really plugging now. I have a couple ideas for projects I want to start working on but I haven’t really pulled the trigger on anything yet.

CHARLIE: Do you have a regular schedule of events and watch parties, and do you have a big one coming up?

JOY: No, I don’t, but I should. I usually will just post on Twitter a couple hours before I’m going to do a watch party and see if anyone wants to show up. And I’m also in a Facebook group that’s really good for that so if anyone wants to join that just hit me up and I’ll link you to it.

CHARLIE: And I think I’m in that group as well. It’s not only a watch party function group, it’s also, you can request if you are looking for a certain thing and someone will find it for you, whether on Hulu or Netflix or foreign sites. It’s really good for that. So I recommend getting in any good social organization where you can do watch parties and communicate with other people and have fun in group chats.

ZACK: Cool, Joy, thank you so much for coming on today, and thank you for the name of the show, obviously.

JOY: Yeah, no worries.

[Music]

ALYSSA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Stim4Stim, a relationship podcast for and by people on the autism spectrum. Special thanks to our guest, Joy/sol1dsnack. Stim4Stim is hosted by Zack Budryk and Charlie Stern and edited by Alyssa Huntley.