possibly a real person, but in such a misaligned way

i met up with a friend this past thursday at a local bar. i like hanging out with this person because i find her easy to talk to: she’s extremely intelligent, aware, curious but not in an overbearing way, open-minded, and speaks in complete sentences, means what she says. if you’re someone [...]

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mind wants to become worldclass scrabble player, but struggles with traditional methods of teaching

so i got sucked into the vortex that was scrabulous today, and, as is naturally the predilection, got even more sucked into the meta-ness of it. found myself in games with people, and fumbling trying to come up with words, knowing that there were fascinating words i could be using i simply didn’t know [...]

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not quite sure of malcolm gladwell’s discussion of autism in his book “blink”

i had issues with malcolm gladwell’s discussion of autism in his “blink” book, though can’t quite pinpoint why. i read thru the book last night, was on the floor of a temporary sublet i’m currently at, picked it up for something to do for the evening.
i think possibly it was his treatment of autism [...]

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Ten Myths about Autism – Debunked

over at wrong planet. i liked this one:
3. Autistics want to be cured.
Most autistics, in fact, do not want to be cured because they’ve already accepted autism as part of their personality, identity, and lifestyle. You may not understand why anyone would want to be diagnosed with a psychiatric condition, but even homosexuality was [...]

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Please violate only one stereotype at a time.

yet again, another extremely well-written and well-put post over at ballastexistenz:
And what I’ve found, is that people prefer people to violate as few stereotypes as possible at once. If you can violate no stereotypes or only one stereotype, that is great, that is expected and mostly acceptable. The more stereotypes you violate, the more trouble [...]

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Interactional Synchrony

Anne M. Donnellan, Ph.D. and Martha R. Leary, MA, CCC-SLP state in their book, Movement Differences and Diversity in Autism/Mental Retardation, that staff were instructed to make a request of a person with autism, then continue looking at them, and wait expectantly for an answer until they responded. The staff discovered that most people with [...]

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the need for labels (?)

this article is so incredibly intense and right on, found at ballastexistenz:
People need to wake up and realize that these classifications aren’t a parlor game, aren’t a neutral classification system, aren’t enforced by people with any more insight into human nature than the average layperson, and aren’t a mildly interesting way to pass the time [...]

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the problems that the quiet ones experience

this way of life recently posted an entry called “Quiet or Tantrum?“, in which he talks about how autistic people will generally react to overload in two ways:
The other group of autistic people – the group who’s reactions are ‘appropriate’ are the group that doesn’t trouble anyone else, that gets quieter, goes off alone, etc. [...]

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parallel play

great piece in the new yorker, beautifully, brilliantly written, by a man who realized in his 50s, after a lifetime of searching, that’s what’s marked him as “different” is something called asperger’s syndrome.
We are informally referred to as “Aspies,” and if we are not very, very good at something we tend to do it very [...]

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unable to understand without visualizing

i’ve been thinking about how i have a hard time contending with anything unless i can get a visual picture of it in my head first.
unexplained new circumstances, i completely freak out, tense up in my head. it’s like walking on a high wire line, dangling above certain catastrophe, me rapidly assimilating as much [...]

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