Archive for March, 2010

your dreams will be reduced down to breathing, and you will be grateful

The thing about not-being-a-person is: They will say those people and the price of being a person is to nod and agree that yes, those people aren’t people at all. They will have no idea who they are talking to. You yourself will start to forget, too. They will say a million small things that sow the seeds for violence done against you, and you will smile and let them. You will do math, constantly. How much do I want to be a person today? How much do I want this project to succeed? How much honesty can I afford? How much dishonesty will kill me? What is the cost of coming out? Is there a way to delay, soften, transmute? How long can I survive as half a person? Ever since the world ended ... I don't go out as much. People that I once befriended, just don't bother to stay in touch. Things that used to seem so splendid, don't really matter today. It's just as well the world ended -- it wasn't working anyway. Your dreams will be reduced down to breathing. [Read More]

on 03/5/12 | 2 Comments | Read More

Publicist: Must Be Willing to Out Prominent Autistics

Author Michael Lewis, as interviewed recently on NPR’s Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me: Alright, ah, the first, first investor to make a bet that this whole subprime mortgage bond experiment was a disa...[Read More]

on 03/31/10 | 2 Comments | Read More

Accompanying the Metaphor

The idea of evolution is often confused with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. This is in no small part because science representatives of evolutionary biology, such as Richard Dawkins, ...[Read More]

on 03/29/10 | 1 Comment | Read More

Virgil Caine’s Autism

Last November while weighing in on the proposed changes to the DSM which will drop Asperger’s Syndrome as a diagnostic category, I quoted George Carlin’s take on Catholicism’s Limbo as a way to ...[Read More]

on 03/26/10 | 2 Comments | Read More

A Tale of Two Rivers

The following is an informal continuation of Laurence Arnold's musings on autism as geography, featured recently in this space under the title Rainbows End. I suppose I ought to comment on the curr...[Read More]

on 03/25/10 | No Comments | Read More

I Am ——— . . . Who Are You?

I am told I am "sick," that I am "disabled," that I am "abnormal" and that a cure is being searched for for my "condition" and others who suffer from it. So I ponder and back I trace to when I coul...[Read More]

on 03/24/10 | No Comments | Read More

Autism and Evolution

That I might have featured Asperger’s when I was young never crossed my mind until this year.  I’d been studying autism for 12 years.  Working for 12 years with the thesis that testosteron...[Read More]

on 03/22/10 | 2 Comments | Read More

Rainbows End (a landscape model of autism)

I am not a scientist; indeed like Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain I only recently discovered that I have been a Whorfian [1] relativist all my life.  I am in a sense a consumer of numerous scientific and...[Read More]

on 03/22/10 | No Comments | Read More

Quiet Desperation and the Larger Picture

It’s an odd business, blogging for a constituency that’s not only unaware that you exist and are writing for and about them, but also unaware that they exist and are many enough to make up a c...[Read More]

on 03/19/10 | 4 Comments | Read More

Melting Down an Autism Stereotype

By now, I expect we've all seen plenty of articles, books, and other media depicting the "autistic meltdown," wherein a slight change in routine supposedly triggers some kind of massive brain shor...[Read More]

on 03/18/10 | 2 Comments | Read More

Language, Rhetoric, and Expression: There’s Power There

Language is a peculiar thing.  It can be twisted, turned, spinned, mangled, mutilated.  Connotation and denotation are explicitly different things, and we rarely stick to the denotative meaning (and...[Read More]

on 03/17/10 | 2 Comments | Read More

Who ARE You, Really?

Mark Stairwalt, one of the editors over at Shift Journal wrote an article (about me, or a previous post of mine), and brought up something I've been meaning to write about.  He writes: Coincidentall...[Read More]

on 03/15/10 | 4 Comments | Read More

… It’s Hard to Remember Your Original Objective Was to Drain the Swamp

(continued from When You're Up to Your A** in Alligators) With that in mind then, how to make full and best use of a site like Shift Journal? Actually a tiny, excellent example happened just thi...[Read More]

on 03/12/10 | 4 Comments | Read More

When You’re Up to Your A** in Alligators …

One thing I’ve kept an eye on over the six months since Shift Journal launched has been, “What can we be doing here that isn’t already being done well elsewhere?” Last weekend KWombles and I e...[Read More]

on 03/12/10 | 2 Comments | Read More

Performance

Bill Wallauer is a videographer, a colleague of Jane Goodall.  Click here to read Bill’s observations of chimpanzees behaving in ways that are fascinating to consider.  Bill observes males displ...[Read More]

on 03/10/10 | 1 Comment | Read More

Theory of Mind and Self

I’d been studying Asperger’s and autism in connection to human evolution for maybe ten years before it dawned on me, after reading Michael Fitzgerald’s Autism and Creativity, that Asperge...[Read More]

on 03/8/10 | 4 Comments | Read More

++ungood

Sometimes I ask for feedback on pieces I’ve written before I post them, and sometimes I’m lucky enough to get a reply that’s in itself more compelling than what I’d intended to post in the fir...[Read More]

on 03/5/10 | 2 Comments | Read More

Diversity and Inclusion: How Society Fails Us All, How We Fail Ourselves

Leave aside for the moment your immediate foray into divisions, into the ideas of a neurodiversity movement. Leave aside for a moment the split into camps of curing and not curing, the false dichotomi...[Read More]

on 03/3/10 | 3 Comments | Read More

The Perils of Normalization

How far would you be willing to go for a more attractive and socially pleasing look?  Would you choose to sacrifice part of your cognitive functioning, leaving your brain less able to process verba...[Read More]

on 03/1/10 | No Comments | Read More