The Alternate Lexicon » kit

lose ourselves in time

Ali — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 07:02:46 +0000

It’s almost the end of the year, and I’ve done a rather terrible job writing and updating. I played with the layout a bit, but I’m not sold on it as a permanent fix. The 2012 layouts should be out soon, so I’ll hold out and see what’s coming and how I’d like to play with them.

Melbourne continues to feel strange, home and not-home all jumbled up together. The past month has been harder than the ones before it, as I find myself missing Stina and Dylan badly even as I’m growing into more and more of my own person. I read somewhere recently that it’s not unusual at all for autistic people, but especially autistic women, to lack a strong sense of self and identity–it’s something I definitely identify with (oh, irony). I have been so defined by that friendship for so much of my life, and all of my adult life at that, that I have of course been confused and lonely and unsure of how to go about being me separate from them. I’s been a good thing to mull over, thinking about how to deliberately choose who I am and who I can become.

I know 2011 hasn’t been particularly great for many people in my life, but it’s been positive on the whole, for me. I’m happy to be here. We’re in discussion with our immigration lawyer to begin my trek towards permanent residency. I have a job, albeit a terrible temp one, and make enough money to live comfortably and save for said immigration. I have grown infinitely more comfortable with both my autism and my gender, and my metacognition is much happier than it was a year or even two or three ago. While I am still sad because of Stina and Dylan, I am feeling like I am going to be okay.

Next year is going to be good. There are lawyer appointments and immigration agents to meet. I’m going to have a booth at a local artist’s market in January, and if it goes well I’ll sign up for more times in February, March, and April. I have insurance that will pay for me to get a massage every once in a while. There is a very, very strong chance we will get a second kitten to keep crankypants happy and entertained. I’m going to Port Fairy. Kate Miller-Heidke put us on the guest list to come see her for free, because we’re awesome. I’m considering scraping together the cash to take a course in Auslan (Australian sign). I found a choir I want to join. Maybe we can talk Hez into visiting. I’ll try to write more here, not just reblog on tumblr.

I think it’s going to turn out just fine.

sun please step on this rain

Ali — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 08:11:15 +0000

There is a kitten next door. He’s maybe 8 weeks old, and it’s pouring rain. He turned up sometime yesterday and has been crying nonstop since then. He does not have food, water, or appropriate shelter. He’s a little ball of fluff that’s been soaked down with the rain. He comes to the fence if I speak to him.

Prosper is in quarantine. He has a little cell about 4′ by 8′, which is actually not too terrible at all, and he’s finally started to eat (according to the quarantine staff, he’s “picky”–what, I precisely, does it take for a cat in that situation to be called picky? I can’t think on it too much or it makes me scared.). He let both Kit and I pet him and tried to chomp, a sure sign he’s feeling more like himself.

I can still hear that kitten.

I am on the edge of tears, worried about that kitten and about my big kitten, and how scared they both must be, feeling abandoned and hungry. I can’t focus on anything else, filled up with worry about a kitten that theoretically belongs to the house next door (though they’re doing such a shit job taking care of him, I’ll call the animal shelter to report them for animal cruelty if they don’t take him inside as soon as they get home–who the fuck leaves an 8 week old kitten outside while they’re gone all day?!). I think my empathy is working just fine.

come back home where it’s always hot

Ali — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 04:44:37 +0000

Been in Melbourne for a while, now. I have a temp job lined up to start this week. We have a lease that starts a week from tomorrow. Prosper is starting his trip tomorrow (miss the cat, so much).

I found these delicious things at the grocery store here:

I found these on a lamppost:

This has been an update.

you came over

Ali — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 03:34:46 +0000

Less than a week in the US. Feels weird. Words are a little hard to come by now that I don’t have to pretend to be fluent and fluid and talkative at work, which maybe says something in favour of faking it or maybe it’s just about regular sleep schedules. I have packed and repacked, abandoned much of the stuff I thought I simply had to have to exist, and decided more hair dye totally beats clothes any day, because awesome hair is awesome even if I only have pajamas and t-shirts, and manic panic is hard to come by there.

We spend a lot of time looking at houses in between my fits of playing the sims and trying to shove more stuff into my over-full suitcases and being sat upon by the cat, who is in a panic, too. I have chai cola. It is delicious. My life is inane.

I am feeling resilient and tired and ready.

you’ve got the world

Ali — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 02:44:47 +0000

I’ve been reading back over a year, and oh god. I have been a whiny shit. I am so sorry. I promise to stop being such a whiny shit. For real.

I actually did end up writing a really great piece about what it’s like to be autistic for TEACCH, which I will publish here soon, which is what led to me reading stuff I wrote months ago. I probably could have cobbled together something from all of the millions of times I wrote about it previously, but this new piece is good. It’s confrontational and social model-y and I like how my writing voice has evolved in the past year (it means using AND a lot because I want to, mostly, and also comma splices). I almost never remember that there was this one time I was in college and got published in an anthology. Like I can actually write, if I stop being such a shit and just do it.

So that’s going to be my goal: just write, and stop being such a shit. I have a little over seven weeks until I leave(1), and I think it’s incredibly reasonable to suggest I could write a post a week. My intense interest in autism hasn’t really faded, but I no longer feel compelled to write about it exclusively; since being made an Official Autistic, I have felt much more comfortable just being and not having to yell a lot about how autistic I am. I’m very caught up in MBT fandom brain at the moment, but I don’t know that I want to write fiction and I have a tumblr dedicated to fandom thoughts. So I’m not sure what I’m going to write about, just that I think it can happen, and I think it can be excellent.

I wrote once that when I feel brainless, the only cure is to force myself to do something intellectual I enjoy. Greensboro Public Library, nonfiction section, around 360-375 and 616ish, I owe you my brains.

Not in a zombie way.

1. OH GOD OH GOD I haven’t told work yet (I’m planning to give them a month’s notice) and there is so much packing and cleaning all the stuff and I am using this stuff, how am I supposed to also pack it? Shit.

are you ready, get set, are you ready?

Ali — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 17:36:57 +0000

HI IT’S BEEN A WHILE.

So it’s been a bit of a while since I updated this, my very realest of all of my blogs. In that time:

1. Kate released a new album under a new name, a technopop collaboration with her husband called Fatty Gets a Stylist. It is amazing.

2. Kit came, we went to Disney World. We hung out. We fought a little. We looked at real estate. We realized it’s only 10 weeks before I move for permanent for real omg omg.

3. Sar and Hez came to visit!

4. I have acquired a few fanblogs. Being that I am the loudest member of the nonexistent fandom for MBT, I have TWO fan tumblrs. Also a Kate one. Also I’m awesome. (The Explicarium, the Branden Rose’s personal tumblr, Just Gristle and Blood) Don’t laugh at the bad graphics on the last one; I’ve taken control of it from a previous mod and don’t know how she’d feel about me making it AWESOME.

And now it is time for pictures!

The rest are available in the main flickr set. YAY!

his majesty the baby

Ali — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 23:33:08 +0000

Kit gets here tomorrow, and then on Friday we begin our very long drive of death to Florida to see my grandparents and go to Disneyworld. There are, I suspect, a lot of pictures to come.

To start, here is the cat:

the very next day was my birthday

Ali — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 02:43:42 +0000

I turn 26 tomorrow. It is also World Autism Day.

When I tell people I’m queer, it becomes a part of their idea of my identity. I mention my girlfriend, and a little light dings in their head to place me into the QUEER category of mental filing. They might be surprised or confused or alter how they interact with me (or not), and it might take a few further interactions for them to get that I mean queer in the broadest way and, yes, they can seriously still point out that cute boy and I’m not just humouring them when I agree.

Most people have a lexicon and background knowledge of what it means to be queer in some way. We broadly make up about 1 in 10, so there’s an awful lot of us out there being non cishet in some fashion. People recognize the concepts of bullying and gay-bashing, there are tv and movie characters who are out and proud, there are celebrities. I can say that I’m queer and it means something that we mutually understand, even if clarification might be needed on the details.

When I tell people I’m autistic, they don’t know quite how to react. Autism is kids in corners who headbang, boys who can’t speak or won’t speak, right? Autism isn’t adults who hold down steady jobs–including ones with customer service aspects!–and speak fluently (most of the time). The box in people’s heads is too small and ill-defined to fit me, and they are surprised, sometimes even angry.

Autism awareness isn’t inherently a bad idea, but the narrow scope of the spectrum that is promoted for awareness is very much dangerous and harmful for the rest of us. Autism, for me, means making enough of a single food to eat for a week, because making different food every day feels overwhelming. It means planning and rehearsing conversations, and then worrying when things don’t go as planned. It means auditory processing issues that leave me nodding at work and hoping I’ve timed it right, or not being able to hear over the sound of the tram. It means sensory issues that make it hard to hold my girlfriend’s hand sometimes. It means an encyclopedic knowledge of Kate Miller-Heidke lyrics. It means misunderstandings and hurt and bullying. And none of those are things you can see, if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

I want an autism awareness campaign that promotes actual awareness of the huge, wonderful spectrum that encompasses all of us. We each have our own strengths and weaknesses; what we share is an unusual way of experiencing the world. When I tell people I’m autistic, I want them to be able to easily fit me inside that mental box and understand that it means I might not be great at social cues and probably like routines, that I’m probably good with facts and rules, and that I probably have some sensory issues to work around.

Even more, I want people to understand that we–every single person–can inhabit more than one box. My mental filing system cross-indexes, fuckers, and yours can, too, with some practice. My being queer is not invalidated by autism, nor is autism invalidated by my being queer. It is often people who know that I’m queer who seem most surprised when I mention autism, because I am already in one minority group box in their heads.

Intersectionality is the concept of how different oppressions mix. Every person who belongs to multiple minority groups will experience it differently. For me, being queer, autistic, and genderqueer, it means erasure. I am allowed to be queer or autistic (gender doesn’t even cross most people’s minds, and since I’m not picky about pronouns it sometimes doesn’t come up).

I want to live in a world where it means acceptance. That starts with true awareness, not trite campaigns.

it’d be me and you

Ali — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 20:03:09 +0000

I miss Stina and Dylan.

I have a lot of other things I could, and probably should, say, too. Things about how I can’t forgive people who aren’t sorry, and how I still start to email or text to tell them little things before I remember we’re not speaking. Things about how I cry pretty much whenever I think about them. Things about how I didn’t volunteer to go to Harrisonburg for training at work because it felt too close. Fuck, I want to tell them how we’re going to Disney, because they (especially Stina) love Disney. I want to tell them the diagnosis is official, and doesn’t that make them feel shitty for the snide comments and scare quotes?

I want to tell them everything. But we aren’t speaking. And I can’t forgive people who aren’t sorry.

I left a few words alone in the garden

Ali — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 21:18:27 +0000

Like Hez, I don’t believe in resolutions. I think you can set goals and have dreams, but timelines are invariably off and there are always surprises that change who you thought you were.

I’ve been thinking about how this blog has moved away from blogging my thoughts on autism and feminism and become more of a journal. Neither are really what I imagined when I started writing in this space, and I’m not sure either is what I want to be doing here.

So I don’t believe in resolutions, and I don’t know what I’m doing with this space.

I want to change my life so that it’s designed to make me happy, not to make me feel rotten. I’m starting a new job next week. I’m getting my new name in my passport soon. I’m getting Prosper’s import certs and making plans. I’m making plans. And I think I can learn how to be happy in a way that can be measured beyond moments.