Legwork and Life, week of 8/8/18

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
Do you ever have days where the whole day seems to get eaten up by one problem?  Like, things just keep happening to make that one thing unimaginably more complicated than it should have been, and you end up spending literal hours on it?  Meanwhile, all your regular daily stuff just… doesn\’t get done?  That was my yesterday.  I had period cramps and illness and a headache that lasted all day to boot, which you can just bet put me in a fine mood. 

In general I kind of feel like yesterday was a waste, but I guess that\’s not really accurate.  I did deal with the complicated problem, and handled a few smaller regular tasks…  it just kind of feels like because I missed most of yesterday\’s stuff, I failed at the entire day.  I\’m going to objectively say that\’s neither fair nor reasonable, but it doesn\’t really change that it\’s how I feel emotionally.  Meh.  Seems I need more practice in being kind to myself. 

Chris didn\’t end up winning anything at the company raffle, so I\’ll have to spend actual money if I want to go kayaking this summer.  I do think it\’d be fun, but I had a look on Craigslist and nobody\’s really giving them away.  You\’re spending $200 minimum for a kayak, and that\’s for the shoddiest inflatable ones.  So, I\’ll have to think on it some more. 

Other exercise-related thing, Pokemon GO is stressing me out.  When I play a game, I don\’t generally min-max, or try to play in the most excruciatingly efficiently ideal manner, but I do try to at least be somewhat effective about how I play.  My spouse min-maxes and such for fun, so I have his insights to apply to any games we play together.  Unfortunately, for Pokemon GO, min-maxing basically involves driving all over the place, spending hours playing, and juggling a lot of little niggling details.  Also coordinating with tons of people over the Internet.  Given how low energy I\’ve been lately, that\’s a hard pill to swallow… and trying to do just a bit, rather than all of it or none of it, doesn\’t seem to be working.  So I don\’t know what to do. 

It doesn\’t help that the game itself is still really buggy and likes to crash on me a lot.  If I play more than a few minutes, I\’ll probably have to restart the app at least once, and that unfortunately involves entering all the login information each time.  And then changing all the settings back to what I want them as, because it forgets them each time as well.  My friend, who\’s been playing this without a break since it launched, has basically just given up on the game being any good.  Every time it messes up, she just says a variation of, \”Well, Niantic (the creator company) is still terrible.\”  It\’s kind of a sad state of affairs.  She still plays because she walks for exercise, and so she just gets out the game then and basically doesn\’t play otherwise. 

I dunno.  I guess, overall, I\’m just tired.  Low on energy, and feeling like I just keep getting lower.  Hopefully it\’s just something some sleep, good food, and some relaxation can fix…

Reading the Research: Lie Detection

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 talks about a rather important skill for everyone, but especially people with disabilities: lie detection.  Some people seem better at this skill than others, sometimes to the point of being uncannily good at it.  But others, autistic people especially, lack this skill altogether as part a broader-spectrum set of social deficits.  This is problematic, because the disabled population is many times more likely to be taken advantage of and abused than anyone else. 

To make matters worse, the \”classic tells\” of a liar, that is, avoiding eye contact, fidgeting, and overcomplicated stories…  don\’t apply to more practiced liars.  So the things media trains us to look for can steer us wrong, or even give us false positives.  Adding in visual processing difficulties, like I have, just makes this picture even worse.

Enter VERITAS (Veracity Education and Reactance Instruction through Technology and Applied Skills), a video game designed to teach people how to detect lies.  Developed by Professor Norah Dunbar at UC Santa Barbara, this software has been tested repeatedly on college students and law enforcement officers.  The college students\’ accuracy at lie detection tends to start at about 56% (so, just slightly better than flipping a coin), but after an hour playing this video game, their accuracy is up to 68%.  That may not seem like a huge amount, but it is statistically significant, and it\’s possible that with further practice on the game, the number might improve further.  Law enforcement saw similar gains, though their starting accuracy was at 62% and it improved, on average, to 78%.  That\’s pretty good for a single hour playing a video game. 

I was pleased to see the professor mention that there is no single thing that will tell you if the person\’s lying, and that it varies on the person.  A lot of people put great stock into eye contact, but if an autistic person can\’t or won\’t look at you, that doesn\’t mean they\’re lying to you or ignoring you.  So this stereotype often makes lots of trouble for autistic people.

The article itself has some behaviors to look for, if you want to sharpen your own lie-detection skills.  Personally, I\’d just like a copy of this video game. 

Worth Your Read: "Challenging Behavior"

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
http://www.thinkingautismguide.com/2016/08/when-autistic-children-are-aggressive.html

This post on aggression and self-injury is written by a medical doctor, not a person on the spectrum, but she is remarkably savvy on the subject.  Seriously, I\’m impressed to bits with this article. 

Of particular note is the section on meltdowns versus tantrums.  These are two very different things, but I feel like they\’re the same thing to most parents, and most people observing those parents.  Briefly: tantrums are goal-oriented, meltdowns are not.  You can get results by ignoring a tantrum, but you can\’t with a meltdown.  The writer explains it much better in the article proper.

Another thing I wanted to highlight about this is that it rightly points out the absolutely dizzying number of reasons someone might have \”challenging behavior.\”   A harried caregiver with a person that tends to have these behaviors can cease to look for reasons the person is acting out, and instead simply want the person to stop, in whatever way makes that possible.  Moving them to an institution, medicating them into submission, or trying to \”train\” them into not doing the behavior, is a very common, still accepted set of options.

Basically, as soon as the person doesn\’t verbalize their problems clearly and normally, we start edging toward treating them like they\’re subhuman.  But just because we consider speech hugely important, doesn\’t mean that people without it aren\’t sentient or can\’t express themselves in other ways. It just takes some detective work and patience.  And seriously, always assume the person is competent and can be communicated with. 

Please, give this article the careful read it deserves. 

Legwork and Life, week of 8/1/18

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
The extra family has left for home, and I\’m about in the middle of recovering my energy, I think.  I\’m trying to work ahead on the blog again, but it\’s slow progress thus far.

I had a chat with my doctor regarding the intermittent fasting diet, and she doesn\’t seem to think it\’s working for me, at least not in the way she was hoping.  So I\’m thinking on whether I want to continue it.  I kind of do, because I think it really limits how much snacking I do, but on the other hand, it\’s kind of unpleasant in the morning when I\’m lined up to exercise but don\’t have even a jogger\’s breakfast to draw on.

I\’m also mulling over finding a place to jog.  I mentioned last week how very poorly I did when I jogged, and how it unnerved me, but the fact remains that it is definitely better exercise than biking.  Your heartrate actually stays elevated for a lot longer after you jog than after you bike or row or some other form of exercise.  This translates to more calorie-burning potential.  In addition, I think in general jogging uses more muscles than biking.  And I do kind of really want to play Pokemon GO while I exercise.  So, I don\’t know.  I probably won\’t do it, because I\’m not sure how many revolutions I could run around the park near my house before I get seriously anxious about weirding out other people at the park, or thinking about what they must be thinking.  I\’d run in completely abandoned places, but that\’s also a great way to never be heard from again, so… bleh.

On a happier note, I got to go kayaking last weekend!  A friend got a bunch of people together and secured permission to borrow his family\’s lake house, so we all visited on Sunday.  It was a nice place, big tall trees with a soft grass and mossy carpet near the house, a nice view of the ocean, and the house itself had running water and electricity and such.  There wasn\’t actually a whole lot of beach, because grasses like to grow in the sand dunes, and the grasses serve a purpose by keeping the sand from eroding away.  And there was a huge set of stairs going down from the house to the beach (but hey, that means the beach house won\’t get swept away anytime soon!).  We hung out at the beach area, ate watermelon and pizza, and chatted a bit. 

But yeah, they had a kayak, which I promptly took out on the lake.  This is one of the Great Lakes, not a little tiny thing you can see both shores of, so I didn\’t have much frame of reference for how far out I went.  But I made very sure to take note of where I\’d come from, and conveniently, there were 2 white outdoor chairs on one side of the staircase, and 1 lavender one on the other side.  So that made it pretty easy to keep near the right piece of shore.  I had a pretty good time, too, because it\’s relatively quiet on the lake once you\’re far enough out.  And the paddling is good exercise.

I hadn\’t done that sort of thing for years, so I got tired fast, naturally.  But since nobody was yelling at me to keep rowing (like say, on a rowing team), I was easily able to take breaks.  It\’s somewhat similar to riding a bike in that way.  That kind of makes me want to get a kayak and go out to a smaller, nearer lake around here.  It\’d be a bit of an endeavor to do that, so I\’d probably only do that once a week.  Or maybe on Saturdays, as exercise day #6?  I dunno.  There\’s a very slim chance that Chris will win a kayak from his workplace\’s raffle, so if that happens, I guess I\’ll consider it more seriously.  If it doesn\’t happen, I guess I can think about putting one on my wish list.  My van will hold a kayak or two, probably.  It fit an 8 foot conference table, so it\’s probably safe enough.

My only concern will be my hands… I had to turn the kayak back earlier than I would have liked, because I developed a blister.  I recognized it pretty quickly, which I\’m pleased about.  The first time I went out in a kayak, I managed to get like 5 blisters and tear a few open before I got tired, and those hurt a bunch for a good while.  So this time I was smarter, and I\’m happy to say the silly thing is entirely healed up now.  I did also manage to bruise both thumbs, but the solution to both bruises and blisters is very simple: gloves.  I have nice fingerless gloves somewhere, which I used to use in my rowing team days.  They\’d work just as well for this.

The last bonus for doing kayaking regularly is the muscle groups it exercises.  Most of my exercise focuses on my leg muscles, and pretty much just those.  Kayaking is mostly arms, shoulders, and some back muscles.  I have a pretty strong back, but historically I\’ve been rather poor about exercising my shoulders and arms.  So this would be a good development, if it works out.