…is that I like spreadsheets, organization, and Kate Miller-Heidke.

Just got done making a spreadsheet that shows the titles of the songs from which I’ve pulled titles, the songs in the official canon I haven’t used yet, the songs that are official or semi-official canon but are covers, and the demos which have any sort of name. This is actually the third spreadsheet of its sort, as I have one keeping track of the number of times I use a song and one that lists the song, the lyric, and the date.

So I’m feeling a bit compulsive and pleased, now. And tired. Tried to go to the library, but the lights are made of some sort of migraine-creating forcefield that also happens to emit visible light, because within ten minutes my eyes and head ached. I feel sort of spoon-drained now.

Grading People from Rolling Credit on Vimeo.

A short commentary on the use of the terms “high functioning” and “low functioning” as applied to autistic people

My attention span is currently at a level I would describe as “kitten.”

I’ve known for a long time that my attention is directly correlated to the interestingness of the material–this isn’t unusual for kids identified as gifted (nor the adults they grow into), or anyone on the spectrum. In fact, it was this extreme hyperfocus that first had me questioning if I might be on the spectrum as I read tales of kids and their encyclopedic knowledge of topics and saw myself. This one time, I drew the same picture with only minor variations a couple hundred times; I was nine. I suspect I could still draw it.

I’ve also known for a long time that if I’m otherwise engaged, I can pay attention to topics of less interest with some reliability. In a school setting, for example, I’m usually really strongly into one class and then have varying levels of caring about the others–just like anyone else. Because of that high interest class, though, I have this sort of carry-over attention effect making it easier to pay attention to other material that is not as engaging for me. This has led me to the conclusion that I do well in moderate to high stress environments, but yesterday I started thinking (a rare thing these days when my mind lands on a topic and only stays for a few minutes at most), and this may not be the case.

There are different kinds of stress. Google thinks there are three–acute, episodic, and chronic–but that’s not what I mean. Those factors certainly play in, but I think stress can and should be divided by what part of you it engages, not just the length. Intellectual stress would be things like heavy schoolwork, complex reading material (fiction or no), non-rote professional work, puzzle solving. Emotional stress is identifying your own and other people’s feelings, social cues, working with other people. Physical stress could be identifying sensations (like needing to pee or being hungry), things that involve physical labour, or enduring discomfort (like working in a too-cold or too-hot place). Some combination of three things creates the stress, and that can then be chronic, episodic, or acute.

By this system, I really like things that are chronically intellectually stressful, with low levels of emotional or physical stress. I don’t like to move or worry about what my body language says. That is…not how I would currently describe my life. So even while I feel stressed, worrying about money and the cat and immigration, it isn’t the sort of stress that puts me in a position to spend a lot of time thinking. Those stressors are not comfortable for me, so they use up many more spoons than the stressors I like–and because I’ve wasted those spoons, I can’t do the things I enjoy (like reading scienceblogs) which could potentially refresh my spoons.

When I’m stressed–in the bad, not comfortable way–my memory and attention are spotty. I need to have a constant stream of intellectual information coming in–and going out, such as via blogging–to feed my own ruminative processes. Not only do I think they are a good thing, I now think they are essential to my well-being. When I am taking in enough information to have a viable ruminative background process going, my whole mind is working in concert, concious, unconcious, and memory. Being able to ruminate this way requires a precise memory, which is the first thing to go when I’m under stress (I often have no memory of meltdowns, for example–they’re just missing or I have a handful of photograph-like images).

I have been incredibly, risably forgetful lately–and lucky Kit doesn’t mind. Things we discussed multiple times have slipped my mind as if they never were. There is no sense of loss, of having forgotten something. My memory is not recording in the first place. Even when she reminds me, often with my own words, they feel new, unseen.

We talked about it yesterday, and I think it shifted my brain into the right gear to ruminate, because it hit me this morning, how all of this is connected for me: I need intellectual stress (and preferably as little of the other kinds as possible) to function well; I know alternate sources for this when I am not in uni; when I do not get this stress I become unable to seek it out because my will to live attention span grows shorter and shorter the longer I go without; this correlates with an unusually poor memory; these things are because with information coming in, I am able to ruminate properly (like any good ruminant and/or monster), because it is an adaptive and helpful process for me rather than being a destructive way to rehash bad memories or thoughts; therefore I have to just force myself to do something brainy, because it will sort of kickstart the whole process and I will stop feeling leaden. Which is…a helpful conclusion, and hopefully writing this will have done enough kickstarting I’ll no longer feel like my brain is dribbling out my ears slowly and painfully.

Damn. I missed Autistic Pride Day, due to the fact that I was driving back from a visit to Staunton and Stina and Dylan, and then there was family and small children here.

So, thanks to stark. raving. mad. mommy‘s post about it, I’ve been inspired to do my own top ten list.

The top ten advantages and disadvantages to my being on the spectrum:

Disadvantage 10 – I’m not always good at communicating clearly and with words other people understand in face-to-face or other spoken conversations, and often miss details because of it.
Advantage 10 – I’m very good at being precise in writing.

Disadvantage 9 – Tiny incongruencies stand out to me, which can be very distracting when reading books with little plot holes or talking with friends.
Advantage 9 – I make a really awesome fact checker and editor.

Disadvantage 8 – My palate is limited by both tastes and textures that I like and dislike, so I end up eating a lot of the same foods over and over.
Advantage 8 – Those foods are often green vegetables, and it makes cooking and grocery shopping low-stress when they could be overwhelming.

Disadvantage 7 – I have trouble picking up on body language that isn’t exaggerated.
Advantage 7 – I can read cats’ body language fluently.

Disadvantage 6 – Large groups of people are overwhelming and likely to make me be very quiet.
Advantage 6 – I make a good listener (when I can hear!).

Disadvantage 5 – When things don’t go exactly how I envisioned them or follow the rules, I quickly progress from annoyed to downright upset.
Advantage 5 – I can plan out how things should go and even plan when I need to be flexible and when I don’t.

Disadvantage 4 – I become obsessed with topics, sometimes quite briefly, to the exclusion of all else.
Advantage 4 – I know a lot about a lot of things.

Disadvantage 3 – My memory can be tricky–I remember things I don’t need to save, and forget why I walked into a room.
Advantage 3 – The semi-photographic quality makes it easy to remember visual information like puzzles, maps, and book layouts.

Disadvantage 2 – I do things the same way over and over, even when it’s not necessarily the best way.
Advantage 2 – I learned to draw by redrawing a picture from a book hundreds of times.

Disadvantage 1 – I have trouble making friends because I’m never quite sure when the right time is to say things or volunteer information.
Advantage 1 – The friends I do make are very close and like me anyway.

In conclusion, here is a slightly blurry picture of my cat wearing a bow tie.

Even Blogging Against Disablism Day can’t stop the Kate lyrics.

To paraphrase Stina: either words have meaning or they don’t.

Let me flesh that out for you a little bit. I believe that words are impactful, and that our word choices reflect a combination of our backgrounds, our individual lives, and our education on a given topic. Becoming aware of one’s word choices and actively changing them requires acknolwedgement of privilege and a desire to mitigate that privilege.

There has been talk on Jezebel, a website I usually enjoy, about why words matter. We talk about why it’s not okay to use sexist language every day. There have been discussions about feminism vs womanism (especially in the comments section) and tokenism. Discussions are held about racism regularly. Fat shaming is verboten, and lengthy educational discussions are held by the commentariat regularly. It’s a pretty damn nice place to be out as queer on the internet (though it’s not quite as good about trans issues). We also talk about a specific subset of ableist language, namely eating disorders and body dysmorphia.

All of these are good things. Jezebel is a mainstream, very busy website run by paid bloggers. While there are safe-space websites to discuss these issues (Racialicious and Shapely Prose are both good places to start for racism and sizism, respectively), I think having them discussed in a busy, largely privileged place is helpful and important.

In my experience, a lot of people who are otherwise liberal and well educated don’t know a thing about ableism. Words that are ableist are part of many people’s regular vocabulary, and they never give them a second thought. This BADD, I’d like to maybe put the idea into people’s heads that these words aren’t okay.

There’s a thread of ableism in many Jez posts where other language could and should be used instead. I don’t think it would be fair to call out commenters, so I’m going to limit these references to posts which use ableist language, themselves. This is not a comprehensive list in any way–there are many words I omitted because I only returned one “official” (not commenter-written) result, and I didn’t put myself out looking for these words–if they weren’t in the first couple pages of results, I didn’t bother).

Schizophrenic: 1, 2, 3, 4

Retard/ed: 1, 2, 3, 4, (interestingly, Jez commented on the usage on Vh1 before)

Wheelchair bound: 1*, 2

Lame: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Bipolar: 1, 2, 3, (again, to be fair, there’s this, too)

Spaz and derivitives: 1, 2, (this is a very common slur among the commetariat, and I got sick of wading through those results)

Jez (rightfully!) gets upset when words associated with feminism are misused. The editors and commenters won’t stand for the misuse of words like “rape,” or “lesbian,” or “bitch.” It would certainly be nice if they would make this shift as far as ableist language goes, too. Unfortunately, I don’t anticipate that happening any time soon, since responses to noting ableist language, as recently as last week, have been angry and dismissive (to the tune of “Go find someplace else that will let you whine”).

*(A direct quote: “When you think of amputees, dwarves, people with Cerebral palsy, or wheelchair-bound individuals in sexualized situations, it seems wrong, doesn’t it?”)

For further reading:
Bitch Magazine
Feminism 101
FWD/Forward

This post has multiple topics because I am too lazy to make multiple posts.

1. I run google analytics on this website. I promise, I’m not tracking you down at all, my meagre readers, but I generally find it entertaining. Originally, I got analytics because I wanted to use it with etsy, and as an after-thought maybe six weeks ago, I realized I could run it on here. Like magic.

The most interesting part of analytics is the search referral terms. The top ten search terms that get people onto my blog are:

1. alternate lexicon
2. the alternate lexicon
3. perseveration/rumination thinking style
4. “foreign service” autism
5. “the neurotypical spectrum”
6. alternatelexicon.com
7. ari ne’eman is a piece of shit
8. autism loneliness
9. feminism asperger
10. food choice perseveration

Now, I should note that “top ten” is sort of euphemistic, since only the first three have yielded multiple hits. Still. This list is pretty awesome.

1, 2, and 6 are self-explanatory, though 6 begs the question of why they googled me instead of typing it into the url bar. 3, 8, 9, and 10 are all things I am interested in and plan to write about more (I’m thinking maybe of writing about feminism and autism for blogging against disableism day). I have no beef with Ari Ne’eman, so I’m not sure how 7 gets you there (except that now I’ve typed it out, it will inevitably do so again). As for 4, I’ve thought about writing about my experience applying for the foreign service two years in a row and being rejected early in the process, but, here’s the thing: if anyone (on or off the spectrum) tries to tell you that people with autsim, as a rule, do not hold grudges, that person is a LYING LIAR. I’m still angry at the foreign service and probably will continue to be for years. One of the many reasons I’m interested in medical school is so I can be better than them (yes, I know this makes no sense), and I felt an overwhelming sense of loss this spring when I realized I was not taking the exam this year. It’s really for the best if I don’t write about it.

2. There are a lot of cool places I like to go to that, for whatever reason, I have utterly failed to add to my links sidebar. Please check them out while I get to remodelling (see 3, below).

FWD/Forward, a blog about feminism and disability.

Hyperbole and a Half, written by someone named Ali, too, except she spells it wrong. Her blog is awesome enough to forgive that.

Hezabelle, my dear friend Heather’s awesomeness.

The princess of denial, my other dear friend Sarah’s awesomeness.

Both blogs my girlfriend has made and sort of totally failed to keep up with (there’s Kate Miller-Heidke on one of them!).

It appears that Derailing for Dummies (a must read) is no longer online, but there’s a reconstruction.

3. I want a new theme. HALP. I’m okay messing with it a bit to get what I want–I did with this them (and sort of broke it in the process, whatever). Does anyone have an opinion on any of these?

Paper
Airmail
Look Booster
Magatheme

I apparently fail at in-laws. Kit’s mother has a degree in disability studies and while I probably knew that information, I apparently failed to file it into the storage system. My brain makes me laugh.

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.

April is Autism Awareness Month. Some of the hub bloggers have pointed out that awarness is only a baseline–yes, in some cases we do need to make people simply aware of autism and the broader neurodiversity of which it is a part. But in many or even most cases, awarness is not acceptance; it provides a convenient excuse to actually stop further learning (“I know all about autism, I read about it during autism awarness month! You can’t possibly be/know/think/feel X!”). This is a mindset I see regularly at my soon-to-be-former job: my coworkers are aware of mental health issues, so they feel no compulsions to further their knowledge in any meaningful way. This leads to harmful and usually incorrect stereotyping and actions which are not just unhelpful, but sometimes actively harmful towards the kids. This baseline awarness does nothing to help the autistic boy who tantrums all night because of sensory issues or the depressed girl who really does need to just talk to someone she can trust not to overmedicate her.

Emily suggested that people who are going to transform awarness into acceptance would do so regardless of their awarness, and people who won’t will not regardless of the amount of information presented to them. In my personal experience, this is absolutely true.

But, I also think this is true, and poignant.

Being aware is never enough to promote acceptance. Being familiar usually is. Yes, some people will always prefer to try to change others or refuse to believe there’s anything different about them in the first place, but I would like to think that really knowing people on the spectrum promotes acceptance. Familiarity shows that we’re human, and not really different than any other person in our needs and desires.

I think I might get that t-shirt after all, even if it is a bit pricy. I want to be able to show the people around me that they are already familiar with autism–they just don’t know it yet.

On Monday morning, after a long night of not-quite-sleep reminiscent of being 8 and waiting for Christmas morning, I hauled myself out of bed at 6. I was on the road by 7, headed north.

View Directions to Staunton, VA in a larger map

The top line, where they split, was my route going to NYC, the bottom my route home (I ultimately changed my mind on the drive home from a third route, as my guess that there might be more places to stop on US highways rather than interstates proved to be drastically wrong).

More precisely, I drove to Iselin, NJ, where there’s a big giant train station for the NJ Rail, with covered and monitored parking garages and an inexpensive train ride into the city.

At first, driving was okay. I had a new book to listen to, and was super excited.

This quickly became despondency, however, as I realized I was going to be in the car forever and might die.

After a full seven and a half hours of driving, I had learnt two important things:
1. New Jersey is AWESOME. They pump your gas for you and it’s miraculously much cheaper than every surrounding state, and their roads are very nice. The single toll I had to pay at any point was a mere $.75 to cross a bridge into NJ (just that direction, too).
2. I have been lying when I say I don’t hate driving so much anymore.

However, I fucking love trains. They take you places with an extremely predictable route and schedule, and you don’t have to do anything but sit quietly and stare out of the window. Just being in the train station made me excited.

The ride from NJ to NYC reminded me of nothing more than the couple times I took the train out to some of the suburbs of Melbourne on exploratory missions. Parts of NJ looked distinctly like Footscray.

Once in the city, I realized that even with the traffic, I’d overcompensated for time and had to kill about an hour. This was managed with a browse through the large bookstore just outside of Penn Station, and then the subway ride down to SoHo, and a bit more shop browsing there as the pub was ridiculously easy to find.

I felt very fancy ordering a prix fixe menu, though none of it was awesome enough to warrant writing about, except the couple behind me who insisted on loudly referring to it as the Price Fix menu. Er…French, ur doin it rong.

My first impression of Kate was “Peach princess!”, and that’s what stuck with me for the gig (despite the creepy drunk man at the table next to me who shouted through the gig his enthusiasm and how much he loved her–later, his companion would regale me with a story about how she spent $4000 to fly to Adelaide to see Kate, because she wasn’t going to fly coach, you know, and couldn’t grasp the idea that the price she paid for a pair of tickets was actually slightly below average for a pair to a Kate gig).

There was very little dancing, which is saddening–I hate that she seems to think American audiences won’t enjoy her antics, but maybe she’s right. She’s so much more alive when she performs in Australia, though, to my eyes–more manic, flaily, stompy-dances. It was a great show, though, and Keir was very sweet, though the story she told about him being confused for Ben Folds was probably pretty accurate (unlike the rest of the stories, which she’s been recycling for 3+ years).

The show was sold out, so there was a massive crowd to buy her seriously under priced CDs and get them signed, so I only had a few moments to say hi and get my pilfered setlist signed before she had to leave. While I was waiting, a very nice man asked me out, which was…strange. Apparently he has a terrible habit of asking out queer girls, and was very apologetic and sweet. I don’t know that I’ve ever actually been asked out before. With Kit it all just sort of happened.

As it was apparent Kate was not going to ask me to be her groupie at this time, I started the journey home.

The train was delayed leaving Penn by about half an hour, though I was glad of it–there was a serious concern everything on that track might be cancelled for the night, so half an hour suddenly seemed like nothing. I made it back into the car and started the drive home. It was…long. There was a lot of coffee and Dr. Pepper and a moderate amount of junk food. I spent the time between 3 and 5:30 singing along loudly to Kate to keep myself awake–at one point doing only the harmonies, for the challenge of it (it proved not to be very challenging, unfortunately) and for the day when Kate decides I need to be her back-up singer.

I slept for a very long time when I got home.