Legwork and Life, week of 8/8/17

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
 Alas, the internet issues from last week continue.  It\’s not as bad, at present, as it has been.  But of course they seem to happen when we need the Internet the most.  We missed a group activity thing again this week…  Chris is going to call again, to see what can be done.  Since they already rewired our part of the building, I hope there\’s something they can do…

In happier news, a friend from my first high school messaged me a few days ago, and we\’ve been chatting.  I\’m patently awful at keeping up with people, so occurrences like this are rare.  Seems like he\’s still around Pittsburgh, where is where that high school was, so that\’s cool.  I\’ve been having some nostalgia trips and doing a lot of mental calculations to try to help him out with his life.  It\’s been keeping my brain a lot busier than I expected.  

Which is part of, but not the major reason why, my blog\’s buffer is now all gone.  I have been a bad writer, and haven\’t been reading and reviewing books at the rate I should be.  The latest book has been dense and difficult to get through.  So I do not, at this very moment, have a Friday book review for you.  Hopefully I\’ll get my head straightened out in time to manage that by the end of the week, and get to working on the next book too.

Really, the greatest part of the problem was that I was having to fight my own brain for at least two weeks.  I\’d been having a major resurgence in a particular artifact of depression, which I call Boomerang Memories.

I\’ve linked to the post where I explain what those are, but basically, they\’re bad memories that come back to haunt you years after they happened.  If you did something embarrassing in high school, and it bothered you at the time, it might come back to haunt you 10+ years later, as if it was happening again at that very moment.  If that sounds like kind of a bummer, you\’re correct.  Now imagine these boomerang memories come back to haunt you every hour.  Then every half hour.  Then every 10 minutes.  Each time, you have to take a couple minutes to shake off the boomerang memory.  So you end up wasting a lot of time, and your day gets steadily worse as time goes by.  It\’s like having your own personal anti-cheerleader.

I figured I was just having a bad week or so… maybe getting sick, given the scratchiness of my throat and nose.  Turns out, I was quite wrong.  No, turns out we were accidentally growing mold in our cupboard, and it\’d been making me quietly ill for weeks.  That\’s a thing, and I now believe my mother\’s insistence that mold can mess you up, even moreso than I did after my experience with the moldy chapel back in mid-May.  We cleaned up the mold, aired the place out, and now I haven\’t noticed a boomerang memory in the last two hours.  I still feel terrible and anxious about losing my buffer for the blog, but I no longer feel like I\’m incapable of managing to straighten out the situation. 

I haven\’t ever missed a post since I committed to the schedule I\’m on, and that\’s a bit of a point of pride, so wish me luck with playing catch up!  Also, maybe wish me luck in trying to be more conscientious about similar changes in my psyche.  In retrospect, that\’s the sort of thing I should\’ve caught onto eventually… 

Book Review: Drawing Autism

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
Drawing Autism, by Jill Mullin, with a foreword by Temple Grandin, is a book full of art made by autistic people. 

I\’ve seen several books that featured photos of families with autism, and one book that specifically focused on the pictures, and had accompanying text.  But I had not, until picking up this book, seen an art book that specifically focused on showcasing art made by autistic creators. 

Now, anyone who knows me in real life also tends to know that I am very much not an artsy person.  My drawing skill is \”passable for an average middle schooler\” and everything goes downhill from there.  I also have a distinct lack of patience for most visual art, which made me a great annoyance to my parents when they tried to visit art museums.  I got bored very quickly, and instead of looking at the art, I\’d read my book and/or whine until we left. 

It\’s academic as to why that was the case when I was little.  It could have been a short attention span, low tolerance for things I didn\’t care about, or something else entirely.  But one explanation for the present state of things might be that it\’s visually overwhelming to look at artwork, just as it\’s visually overwhelming to look people in the eyes, and at peoples\’ faces, and I haven\’t the patience to bother with it most times.  It\’s a real shame eye contact is required for regular social interaction…

Anyway, this is relevant to this book, because the vast majority of this book is art.  I had to make a great effort to examine each piece in the book.  The kinds of art vary widely, as there are literally dozens of artists represented here.  There are pieces that I could\’ve drawn in elementary school, and pieces I will literally never be able to replicate if my life depended on it.  The styles of art include whimsical 3D models, near-photographic renditions of natural landscapes, comic strips, and dizzyingly Picasso-like works. 

Accompanying each piece is some information about the artwork or the artist, as it was available.  Not all of these artists are verbal, so sometimes the caregivers answered for the artist.  I found it interesting to read these things and try to get a sense for each artist\’s mentality and life.  Really, though, those bits of information are the sideshow to the art. 

This is mostly not my kind of book, but it was an interesting experience, and for anyone that appreciates art, probably a valuable addition to your journey in learning about autism.

Read This Book If

You like art, and want to see autism in action through art.  There\’s some explanation of the various artists and the pieces included, but mainly the art is meant to stand on its own.  There are all kinds of art represented, from 3D models to markers to paints to crayons.  It seems to my uneducated eyes to be a very unique collection of works. 

Reading the Research: Is Prejudice Innate?

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today\’s article describes a new finding about infants and their preferences for people.  

It seems infants innately prefer people that speak their native language over people that don\’t.  They expect pro-social behavior (giving, positive behavior) of speakers of their native language.  But perhaps more tellingly, they had no negative expectations for speakers of different languages.  They didn\’t fear them, or have any dislike or discomfort about them.

Previous research had focused on three-year-old children, and found that they had the same positive expectations for native speakers.  However, the three-year-olds also had negative expectations for speakers of different languages.

This study, then, suggests that humans are born with an innate positive prejudice towards their own groups (English-speakers prefer English speakers), but that negative prejudices may be learned (English speakers do not necessarily dislike Spanish-speakers).

Why is this important?  Well, if negative prejudice is strictly a learned behavior, then society can be improved so that differences, like autism and other developmental disabilities, are embraced and celebrated rather than shunned.  Parents can teach their kids that people are different, and that\’s okay, and expect it to stick rather than be shot down by genetics.

In short, if this study is correct, all racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and other forms of negative discrimination are preventable.  If that\’s not important and worthwhile, I\’m not sure what is. 

Legwork and Life, week of 8/1/17

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
I\’d posited last week that I might actually have an entirely good week.  My hope was dashed when, Tuesday afternoon, our Internet service started fluctuating and dying, to the point where I couldn\’t do anything online.  Since I rely rather heavily on the Internet for both work and play, I was pretty upset. 

Internet Troubles…

I managed to write out a couple things for the blog that day, but didn\’t get much else done and wasn\’t able to relax by playing video games.  The problem got worse and worse, despite buying a new modem and checking all the wires and such on our end.  By Friday, when Chris and I both needed to be online for a group activity in a video game, the connection was so bad that it cut out for 45 minutes straight, disrupting the activity and frustrating us and our friends. 

After that, we couldn\’t get it to work for more than 2 minutes at a time… so on Saturday we called the ISP (Internet Service Provider).  That\’s always an obnoxious experience, because these tech support systems are designed to weed out the idiots first, and this particular ISP…  I believe it received the \”You have the crappiest customer support in the US\” award at least twice.  In a row. 

Because Chris is a sweetheart, and knows exactly how much I hate using the phone (hint: so so SO very much), he fielded the call and dealt with the customer support.  We got a real weasel this time, too.  Wanted to charge us $60 to send out a technician with an installation kit, to install a new modem instead of our modem, after which they would then charge us for using their modem.  Chris and I weren\’t have any of that, so we asked for other options.  When there were none, it was time for a supervisor.  The weasel left the phone on hold for like 5 minutes, told us the supervisor was busy, and tried to sell us the same crap.  He kept trying to tell us the supervisor was busy, and that we wouldn\’t get any different of service from the supervisor, but eventually, after repeated requests, the weasel transferred us to a different supervisor that wasn\’t busy. 

And naturally, the supervisor did in fact have different options.  He was able to send a tech out to diagnose the specific problem the next day, without an installation kit and modem, and without pre-charging us the $60.  This ISP being what it is, if the problem had been our fault, they would still have charged us… but at least we wouldn\’t have to call the billing department to yell at them until they reversed the charge. 

It was an entire day before the technician could make it to our apartment complex, so we were out of luck and connection for a while.  Chris had the bright idea of linking our phones to our computers, to use the phone data plan in lieu of having Internet.  This is often called \”tethering\” in the computer world, if it\’s done with a cord.  For playing a full-blown computer game, it\’s a horrible plan normally.  However, the game we play together has made low-bandwidth use into an art form.  It uses literal bytes per second of gameplay.  That\’s like sending a short sentence via text message, once every 5 minutes or so.  I have no idea how such an expansive video game, which millions of people play every day, can manage such a low rate of data transfer.  But I saw it, so I believe it. 

When the technician made it here on Sunday, the modem had been working for a short time.  I was worried he would just look at the modem, say \”you don\’t have a problem,\” and leave.  Stupid as that would be, it would be in character for this ISP.  But I was to be pleasantly surprised.  The tech, a relatively reserved but thoughtful black man, took us at our word, and only stopped to check one \”dummy fix.\”  I say \”dummy fix\” because we had already checked our end pretty thoroughly.  But he saw we had two other (old) modems out, and checked to be sure we had the correct one set up in the system.  After that, he went to check out the wires… whereupon he found a rat\’s nest of wires, apparently.  By the sound of it, the wiring in this place is very, very screwy.  When he disconnected our line of Internet, we did not, in fact, lose Internet.  So he had to go through the entire box and find which one was ours, the poor guy.  When he did, he routed it correctly and gave us everything we needed to follow up on the problem, which was not fully solved according to him.  Basically, this guy was completely amazing and I\’m kind of sorry I couldn\’t fill out a survey or something that said so. 

Water Woes

In addition to the Internet woes, we\’ve also been having another issue over the last few months.  Our toilet leaks.  Specifically, the cold water piping going into the toilet leaks.  This has been exacerbated by my desire to have a bidet on the toilet, to use less toilet paper for bathrooming, but the leak has basically been a problem since we moved in.  A lot of stuff in this apartment complex is old, and it shows. 

So we\’ve had towels on the floor, and a tupperware container underneath the piping.  Some months it\’s unnecessary.  Some months, the tupperware fills up every day.  Between the apartment changing hands so much and the intermittent nature of the problem, it simply hasn\’t been addressed.  That will hopefully change soon, since this company seems to be keeping a hold of the apartment complex, at least for now.  We\’ve put in a maintenance request, and are keeping the water line at the toilet turned off unless we need to use it. 

In the meantime, this is the second bidet I\’ve tried.  I\’d originally gotten interested in them after traveling to a foreign country and running into a couple.  They seemed smart, if odd to me.  Save paper, clean yourself off, and there are even ones that have a separate nozzle for cleaning lady parts.  The first bidet I tried didn\’t have any hot water hookups, which probably would have been okay if it also hadn\’t been far too strongly pressurized.  I didn\’t really appreciate cold and ouch at the same time.  Fortunately, the new one was relatively inexpensive and has a hot water hookup for the sink, so other than worrying about causing water damage to the apartment below us, it\’s been pretty easy and pleasant to use. 

More Self Advocates of Michigan 

The last thing that\’s been on my mind is the upcoming SAM committee meetings.  You\’ll recall, I\’m sure, from last week where I was pleasantly surprised that I survived the hours of in-person meeting for the organization.  But I\’ve also been complaining over the last month or two about a particular person in my committee who hasn\’t been doing their job.  That situation was hopefully resolved at this last meeting, and I expressed cautious hope that I wouldn\’t have to oversee things any more.  That hope has, thus far, been rewarded.  The person seems to be updating on the correct day, with acceptably good content.  So I\’m relieved. 

So this Thursday I\’m going to be needing to run an hour or less meeting for the committee.  It… probably… will just be a series of status updates on everyone\’s work, but I guess we\’ll see.  I\’ve been dragging my feet on various side-projects that would be beneficial to the organization, so perhaps I could hand one or two of them off.  Also, we might have a new member or two, for the committee, depending on how things go.  The board recently added 4 new members, and I\’m hoping at least one of them will opt to join my committee.  More hands, especially ones with initiative, would be wonderful…