As for this new edition of the WordPress dashboard, yecccccch. lastcrazyhorn has already described the awfulness better than I could. This is completely disorienting and annoying me.

The other blogs should be up shortly. We’re restoring them, as far as I know, in alphabetical order by subdomain. Everything is going smoothly, and because of this Laura is wondering precisely when the inevitable disaster will occur. She has stocked up on caffeine. I am being handed old envelopes with passwords scribbled on them, and my job appears to be to restore and maintain the blogs.

I still can’t check email efficiently. There is one person I replied to, who emailed me back, and now her email to me is stuck in my apartment and I’m still failing to be in my apartment, so I can only check webmail. Problem is I think her email address is lost. I owe emails to Roz Picard as well, and probably others.

And of course, I Am Kathleen, but I have been unable to write a post on the topic. I’ve got two saved as drafts (if the database backup process didn’t eat them somehow) but I was never able to finish them. And by now everyone knows about what’s happened to Kathleen anyway.

Obviously this would affect me as I am listed on the subpoena, and she is a trusted friend of mine, meaning that in addition to thinking this whole thing is utterly disgusting for Kathleen, my own privacy (and, relatedly, safety) is at stake here as well, because we keep in touch mostly through email. The only exchanges of money we’ve had have been over things like paying her back for pizza. Back before I’d met her, I sent her something I’d written that I only sent to a small number of people I trusted. It dealt with areas of my life that I was still only just daring to figure out.

I also think the little dig at her as a Muslim is both awful and silly: I am trying to imagine a Sufi conspiracy with Big Pharma, and it is about as ridiculous as a Quaker conspiracy with Big Pharma. Then again, Quakers tend to get put on lists too. But people are clearly trying to capitalize on fears about Muslims, and that’s just basically hate propaganda. As someone, somewhere, said about this whole thing, “Muslim is the new Communist.”

At any rate, Kathleen is my friend. We have gone out for Japanese food a few times and Middle Eastern food once. I have met her husband and her teenage autistic child. They are fun and delightfully geeky.

She has helped me as moral support at two separate meetings of a formal hearing when I filed a complaint about a case manager who wanted to put me in a more restrictive living situation. She also helped fold me and stick me in the van we were driving there in the time that I was frozen or semi-frozen the whole time.

She has also helped me sort through my extremely chaotic private medical records for CNN’s fact checkers, and helped me file them in a coherent order so I could find them. She has also been there as moral support at one of my interviews with CNN.

She has helped me navigate two conferences, that I have gone to as an autistic self-advocate (like Kassi says… and Kassi was at one of them), and she read aloud my speech at one of them when I didn’t have the communication equipment to do it myself. She has also assisted me with movement at these conferences by pushing my wheelchair, putting a hand on my back to help me through doorways and over other thresholds while I was walking on foot, and once helping support my arm so I could type when I would have otherwise been frozen. She has helped me negotiate travel and airports and all that kind of stuff. And she has helped me help Kassi as well (such as the time I lent Kassi my wheelchair because the hotel people had, in their infinite wisdom, put her in a room all the way down the hall when she had a bad ankle).

She has, despite malicious rumors to the contrary, never put her words in my mouth, and in fact has always been very careful not to attempt to speak for me. She is not my puppetmaster.

And aside from all this, and more than all this, she has been a good and trustworthy friend to me. Neither of us are in the pay of Big Pharma, neither of us is in on some Big Awful Conspiracy ™. And the way to find out if someone is in the pay of Big Pharma is not to invade the privacy of (and possibly, thus, endanger the safety of many people from) their entire blogroll.

You can buy I Am Kathleen, the T-Shirt on Zazzle.

And that’s about all I have to say on that matter right now. I hope Kathleen’s motion to quash succeeds. I was at one point planning to link to every single blog post about this, but, by now, that’s just impossible and I’ll never get this posted if I keep trying to do that. Kathleen and her family have my full support in all this, whatever amount I can give.

(and the lolcats version (i r katleen. and i r leejun))