Currently viewing the tag: "international relations"

stare up at the sky

By On September 12, 2010 · 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking about inertia and perseveration lately. I thought I’d been thinking about depression and my own early signs of a life-long sprint from black clouds, but apparently the part of my brain that ruminates without my knowledge was busy at work on something altogether separate.

I’ve talked about inertia before–I should probably start using a tag for it and the other things I mention regularly. And I’ve talked about perseveration, and how I think it’s a useful, adaptive process in working through executive function difficulties (see the link to rumination).

A quick recap: inertia is the tendency to keep doing what you’re doing rather than change paths (with a nod to Newtonian physics for the basic concept), and perseveration is going over something endlessly, either because it provides comfort, stimulation, or a solution to a problem or otherwise fills some need.

I think they are the same thing, or facets of a larger single thing. And I think that thing is at the heart of difficulties in choice making in autism spectrum disorders and at least partially to do with why concrete plans are necessary. I’m not sure if it is part of the larger executive function or a related but separate thing.

Inertia has negative connotations, at least for me. Inertia is continuing to do something that isn’t really great for me (like not eat or not sleep) because it is easier than the alternative (procuring food or getting ready for bed–which usually entails saying goodbye to Kitty, something I loathe). Inertia means staying in bad jobs because it is easier than finding new ones. Inertia means multiple degrees in a field which doesn’t hold a career or major interest to me, because considering a change took too much thought and spoons to be done at a pace that would have allowed me to change.

Perseveration has a mixed connotation. Perseveration is going over and over songs until I know them by heart and can sing them pitch, tone, and word perfectly. Perseveration is almost always thinking about one of the few topics I am especially interested in, like autism or MBT. Perseveration is the way my brain works to process complex information by letting it tumble around and then finding notable, interesting things in what that information sticks to inside my head. Perseveration is eating the same food for three, four, five days in a row all. the. time.

Both are the inability to change topics or actions without a strong desire to do so. That desire can be internally or externally motivated, emotionally or physically motivated.

This inability to move off a single track can make it difficult to impossible to make decisions and choices. I know that the DSM is too strictly categorized for this to ever happen, but perhaps autism should be considered partially an anxiety disorder.

I wanted to buy a computer–a laptop. I researched laptops for months, learning about screen types and the inner workings of a machine, learning about various OSes and interfaces. I learned what my price range would need to be to get something like what I wanted (a tablet with the ability to write directly on the screen). And then I didn’t do anything. I knew what I wanted, but I was absolutely paralyzed by the idea that as soon as I made a choice a better, cheaper, more awesome choice would appear and thus be unavailable to me. I finally bought my laptop only because it was on woot that day and the price was about half what I’d been prepared to pay previously. I needed that external limitation to make a decision: woot is only one item per day and there is no guarentee the item will ever turn up again, the price is drastically lower than anywhere else online, and there is a limited number of units available–but you can’t tell how many until it’s sold out. I’ve had this laptop for about two years now and I suspect I would still be dithering about getting the BEST LAPTOP EVAR had I not been constrained by this.

Having choices makes choosing extremely difficult when you tend towards this style of thinking. The more choices I have, the more likely I am to fall back into the holding pattern of inertia and just not choose. When I am hungry, I need to have explicit options rather than an open ended “what do you want?” because the latter will only lead to frustration and upset. (Kitty, in her wisdom, knew this years and years ago and tolerated my saying over and over that I hated planning meals and that it made food unappealing, and to her I apologize again for being a shit. She was completely right and knew me better than I knew myself at the time.) Having a schedule means I actually get things done. Without, I am likely to spend all day online, playing games or looking at tumblr.

Unfortunately, none of these things allows me to write coherent blog posts sometimes!

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threw away his bag and said he had no friends

By On July 31, 2010 · 3 Comments

I’m at a bit of a loss for what to read online lately.

In May, the Autism Hub disbanded itself. One of the bloggers who had been a hub member was bullying others on the hub and many of my favourite bloggers removed themselves from the group a few days before it was officially disbanded. I’ve tracked down most of the blogs I enjoyed reading there, but find it much more difficult to keep up to date with them now. I’ve tried using an RSS reader, but I’m not very good at remembering 1. to add blogs and 2. to visit the reader to see if they’ve posted. The Autism Hub had been a really great website for a few years, a respository of science-based blogging about autism by people on the spectrum, parents of kids on the spectrum, and professional researchers and educators. It introduced me to many of my favourite blogs. After the hub came down, most of those bloggers have stopped writing.

In June, Jezebel got a new EIC. With her came bannings, destarrings, and general discord. I stopped reading. I’ve been to groupthink off and on, but I haven’t been on the main page much at all. In the past two or three days there’s been a few articles of substance, the most worthwhile writing in months. I’m really hoping that this trend will continue and Jez will return to its former glory as my absolute favourite website. In its heydey, Jez was full of smart, feminist writing with an eye to intersectionality. It discussed the political and personal with humour and research, and the commenters were snarky without being mean (except to trolls) (this is a difficult line to walk and one they’ve lost entirely). Corrections were issued if the Editors made an error, often quickly. The new EIC calls commenters assholes and seems to encourage bodysnarking.

In July, ScienceBlogs had its own implosion. I missed it; as I’ve noted before, when I’m feeling spoonless I can’t muster the energy for SciBlogs, even though it often renews my spoon pile. What appears to have happened is Pepsi bought a blog spot there without clear distinctions being made on said blog that it was a paid spot (Sciblings are invited and paid for their efforts, usually). Many of my favourite Sciblings have left the website as a result, though the Pepsi blog has been pulled. There’s a disaspora of science writing, now, and, again, RSS is not my friend.

Please, gentle readers, suggest places for me to read. I’m looking for political and sciencey blogs with a liberal, feminist bent, preferably explicitly anti-racist and anti-ableist. Hubs or group blogs are very welcome.

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I think you would've been crap at hunting

By On April 27, 2010 · 9 Comments

This is a long lead-up, but it’s probably worthwhile. The combined topical drift and pedantry is also pretty indicative of what it’s like to live in my head.

So last week I lost my star on Jezebel. Jez is a Gawker Media website, and uses a tiered commenting system; commenters with stars by their names are always visible and post in black text, while commenters without stars are defaulted invisible and with grey text unless a starred commenter “promotes” the comment (the text turns black, but the commenter herself will remain unstarred). Last summer, when they put this sytem in place, I already had a star (the rules used to be 40 people following you or more earned a star), so I’ve been blissfully spouting off about disableism, autism, and other topics for close to a year, confident that my comments were always visible and always likely to be read. I have about 250 followers right now. In what ultimately was not a surprising move, I called out the editors on their ableist language again and got my star taken away as penalty (also, some delightful splainin via email!).

Since then, I’ve found that I’m less inclined to participate, because I don’t feel my contributions are automatically read or assumed to be intelligent. Funny how losing privilege–even silly internet privilege–reinforces the desire to not speak out at all. I posted a comment in the free-for-all section of Jez, groupthink, about this effect and ableism on Jez and it garnered a lot of interesting responses. One of the most interesting made reference to disability studies.

I think I knew, conceptually, that there was such a thing, but it had never really occured to me to think about it before. I’m seriously wondering if one can do a combined PhD/MD in disability studies rather than the more usual neurosicence or pharmacology or such.

This lovely commenter also gave me a link to Disability Studies Quarterly, since I had (of course) brought up autism (I’ve made no efforts to not be out, as it were, on Jez) and this quarter’s special topic is autism and neurodiversity. Please read any and all of the articles–I am, and they’re great. I can’t talk at length about them yet as I only got most of the way through “The Superior Half of Speaking”: An Introduction when I was struck with an astounding thought.

(This is not that thought, I’m getting there.) My brain works in a somewhat unusual way. I’m not quite sure if it’s autism, giftedness, or both, but I like it and would really hate to lose it. Like many people on the spectrum or with related conditions like OCD or ADD, I have difficulties with focus. I’m really awesome at focusing on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, which can look pretty obsessive, and I have a hard time changing the topic or subject of my focus. Changing tasks is difficult for me. I can marginally participate in a conversation and then revert right back to a previous topic, because that’s where my attention was the whole time. Multitasking and I are not friends. Conversely, unless I am interested and engaged in a topic (and sometimes even then), my attention wanders away from me to something more interesting (usually my own brain and products thereof). I cannot list how many times I have gone to do a simple task like put on my shoes or get my phone out of my bag and been waylayed for five, ten, fifteen minutes because I had a thought! and it was super interesting! and I forgot what I was supposed to be doing, and then when I get the feeling that I am meant to be doing something else I spend another few minutes trying to figure out what it was.

Meanwhile, as I’m busy focusing on one thing with the concious part of my brain, the rest of my brain is in a constant flurry of activity. As I take in information, it fits into what is my neuron-based cross-referencing system. My brain works like wikipedia: the more information I gather, the more connections I can make between facts and “articles”/topics, and it does it all without my really paying attention to it (though when I get distracted by my own brain, it’s like hitting the “random article” button on wikipedia, which, I think you’d agree, is way more interesting than a lot of other stuff).

Sometimes my brain makes really great connections–coherent thoughts so good they startle me out of whatever I’m doing. Have you seen House? It’s like that. And possibly just as obnoxious.

The topic of this blog post was one of those OMG I AM HAVING A THOUGHT moments.
So I was reading “The Superior Half of Speaking”: An Introduction, and I got to this sentence: “They understand, that is, how plenty of what is vexing about autism would not be so were society arranged differently.”

I studied International Relations for five and a half years of my life before crashing and burning. I have a BA and a GD in the subject, and while I found most of the theoretical stuff to be too abstract (or maybe just too abstract, too quickly–as Kit would surely point out, I can and do grasp philosophy when its presented patiently, repeatedly, and in terms I am familiar with), I really latched onto a single theoretical model and still like it a lot. I was a proud Constructivist, and the only one in either university, as far as I know.

“Constructivism” exists in a lot of disciplines, but I’m only super familiar with the political model. Basically, Constructivist thinking holds that the international political system is a self-perpetuating entity. The political systems we have are what they are because every time a nation makes a political move on the world stage, they reinforce their place in the picture. If you believe strongly as a political leader in open borders, or fair trade, or isolationism, or completely unobstructed free trade, you can’t wait for other countries to make the same emotional decision. By declaring your country to hold any given ideal, you inherently change the system of nations and your importance in that system. It’s fancy political speak, really, for “be the change you want to see” (I think Obama is a secret Constructivist, or at least his slogan-making people are). My Master’s dissertation, should it ever arise, was originally going to be on Constructivism and shared language leading to the perpetuation of shared political ideology. This is a topic I’ve read about, thought about, ruminated about extensively–information that my internal wikipedia can pull from without my even noticing.

So I read that line (again: “They understand, that is, how plenty of what is vexing about autism would not be so were society arranged differently.”) and suddenly I had A Thought:

Neurodiversity and the Social Disability Model appeal to me because they are Constructivist concepts.

The idea that disability is inherent in society, not the person, is meaningful to me emotionally (I don’t feel particularly disabled), but it also appeals to me intellectually. I am part of a broad spectrum of people, and my particular band of wavelengths is called autism (actually, I see the whole of neurodiversity as a 3-d Venn diagram, but I’m not sure how to translate that into words and haven’t found materials to create it visually yet). The idea that my group does not create the power structure because it is not dominant, so my group’s needs are seen as extraordinary or disabling, is an idea I can understand through my experience as a political Constructivist and translate into understanding in disability studies. Before, I was approaching disability studies as an unknown field, full of unknown ideas and language and concepts that (while I’d certainly get them eventually) were anxiety-provoking because they would be theoretical to me. Now I feel like I have an “in” and I guess I need to see if either Sydney or Melbourne offer a disability studies program, or would be willing to partner with another local university (I know LaTrobe has an autism research centre, so maybe they’d be a good place to look) to do a combined PhD/MD. Pursuing a combo–this specific combo–would make me be a better autism advocate and, I think, researcher. I think it would also make me more qualified to be a professor of the occasional class.

I didn’t really need to complicate this career/educational goal of a simple MD, but I think this might be even better.

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