Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/health/8493753.stm <-- I heard about this on the news recently and it's something that has me breathing easier, though as one doctor in Boston pointed out in local news coverage, "People will still worry about this and worry comes from fear that is often mixed with a misunderstanding of the facts." Good that the fellow who came up with the loopy idea has retracted his "findings", though apparently he did so mostly because he's been called out for ethics violations in collecting control samples of blood used in the study. I hate to wish this on the man, that he's removed from the field, but I hope that he has the decency to turn in his medical license so that the board doesn't have to take it away from him.

I've noticed similarities between some forms of autism-like symptoms and the changeling of legend (ie. the European folk belief that faeries would steal babies in the night and leave faery children in their place), and since these legends go back to the Dark Ages (ie. between 400 and 700 C.E.), well before vaccination was developed, much less common-place, I started to personally discredit the connection. I know it's a parent's right to choose how to raise their kid and what measures to take to keep that child healthy, however, I think it's a bit irresponsible and alarmist not to take measures to protect them from life-threatening illnesses because there's (an alleged) risk that the child could develop autism. People like me might not be the easiest to deal with, and I find that the hardest person to live with is often myself for this very reason, but it bothers me that this condition which I live with is treated like something worse than death. And yet... when someone steps up and makes a case for people like me, this gives me hope that a balance can be found, that people will choose to treat the worst symptoms and try to leave the better aspects intact.

...And it is ready to eat shock-talk-show-jock Michael Savage:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200807170005

( Cut for ranting and language )

The good news is that my therapist and I fortunately were able to get the ball rolling on getting me into the system for Social Security Supplemental Income, but the bad news is, I didn't qualify for Disability Income, and it's probably unlikely that I'll qualify for SSSI, since I've got $6,000 in savings. Those bastards should spend a week with my brain in between their ears, they wouldn't argue with me and they'd fast track the application/give me the maximum payout with no questions asked. I honestly wanted to yell at them: "Enough with all these stupid questions. I'm just not normal. The world overstims me to the point that half the time I'm grinding my teeth to keep from screaming like a baby with a dirty diaper. People drive me insane with their petty, pernickety, perfectionistic demands and their bloody shallowness. I'm not like you people and there's no way I'll ever be cured of this, short of a brain transplant. And for that matter, all this makes me feel like a goddamned bug under a microscope. I'm a person with an autism spectrum condition and I need help. Don't ask me about my marital status, because that's like getting slapped in the face repeatedly with a board full of rusty nails: guys avoid me like the plague since my grey matter actually outweighs my mammaries. You know? I really would rather kill myself than go through all these bureaucratic hoops. Why? Because it's all too frockin' stressful. I've got a stress threshold so low it could crawl under a snake and not brush the snake's belly scales. Give me the goddamned money and leave me the hell alone."

And the bad news is, the most they can give me is $300 a month, since I make about $500 a month. $800 a month is not enough to live on in the State of Massachusetts, especially if God forbid, both my parents died. I'd have to spend $700 of that on a craphole apartment in Centralville, leaving me $100 for food, clothing, and internet access. I'd probably have to give up that and the MxO, which would cut me off from the very things that make life bearable. That wouldn't be a life. It would be misery, and I'm miserable enough now.

If only some nice billionaire would marry me and set me up right, but guys like that don't usually marry grocery clerks. They marry vapid blonde models whose bazoomas outweigh their brains, instead of flat-chested brunettes with brains.

Consequently, even though it was my mom's birthday today, I didn't feel like celebrating anything. I wish to God my mother had done the right thing by me and left me at the hospital to be donated to science and used as a human lab rat, then maybe I'd be dead by now and I wouldn't have had to go through any of this.

Please, if you all have any decency, please pray to whatever g/God you acknowledge, that this night will be my last. All I want for Christmas is a massive heart attack that kills me so fast I'm dead before I hit the floor, like that tenor who keeled over at the Metropolitan Opera House during a performance of Leos Janacek's The Makropulos Case a few years back. Ironically, the last words he sang: "Too bad you only live so long". Go ahead, tell me I'm wasting my life by wanting to die. I just want the pain and the stress and the feeling of uselessness and unwelcomeness to end.

"It ends tonight." --Neo, to Smith, "The Matrix: Revolutions"

This morning, it was so hot and sticky, I got ennervated to the point that I literally crawled back to bed after breakfast and didn't get up till a couple hours before I had to leave for work. Once I got there, I felt like bashing in the teeth of the damn whiny teenagers who drove to work or got rides from their parents to work in their air-conditioned little cocoon-cars, while I had to walk to work in the blazing sun. And if they asked me why I don't drive, I'd shoot back that my the wires in my brain are fracked-up six ways to Sunday, which makes it nigh impossible for me to drive without being in a constant state of agitation, which therefore makes me a road hazard even though I'm way more cautious than the average driver. It just means that I hesitate too much when I pull out, or I freak out behind the wheel if something unexpected happens. It's called Asperger's Syndrome, which is an autism spectrum condition. It means I over-react if I get too over-stimulated, and believe me, for me to drive is for me to ask for an AS moment, and I don't like those since afterward, when my brain has stopped fritzing out, I feel bad for everyone who had to watch me spazzing.

I'm minded of this rather terribly-executed (but otherwise well-intentioned) made-for-TV movie I saw a couple weeks back, "Molly", which was something like an attempt to combine "Flowers for Algernon" with elements of "Rain Man". Plot capsule: A hot-shot businessman in his thirties finds out he has an estranged sister with autism who is now his ward since his parents have passed away. Now he has to juggle his career with caring for his sister; he finds out about a new experimental treatment for autism (And said treatment does *NOT* exist in the real world) which involves implanting healthy brain cells into an affected area of the subject's brain. Of course he has his sister undergo the surgery, after which she starts to shed her autistic quirks (thankfully, the script didn't have her become a boring, so-called normal person: she kinda went from classic autism to high-functioning atypical AS, or at least that was my impression. One scene which I really got a kick out of had her obsessing with "Gone With the Wind" to the point of emulating Scarlett O'Hara, as our heroine begins an innocently passionate relationship with a guy with dyslexia who'd been her best friend). But then tragedy creeps in: the implanted brain cells start to fail, and she's back to manifesting autistic quirks by the closing credits... But there were a couple of bits I couldn't help admiring: one was a good attempt on the directors' part to emulate what it's like to experience the heightened sensory perception that's part and parcel of autistic spectrum conditions: one scene has her sitting in a library, trying to read and getting really uncomfortable because she can hear every other person in the room turning pages in whatever they're reading. The sound editing was a little silly: they amplified the sounds to the point of being a bit ridiculous, but considering the medium, it's the best they could do with the technology they have. (It's really more like hearing a sound that's on the other side of the room, but you swear it's right next to you. Or there's something about the sound that just puts your teeth on edge, even though it's really a small sound.) The other bit was a brief monologue the protagonist gives when she's talking with a doctor; I wish I could quote the whole thing, and I swear it was something borrowed from the writings of Temple Grandin, a psychologist who is herself a high-functioning autist. The gist of it was something like: "All these sensations are rushing at you, so hard you have to pull into yourself and hold onto something small. And sometimes, there's just so much coming at you that you feel like you just have to scream. And when you do that, people stare at you at you in shame and act like you're not there." There was more to it, but it escapes me now...

Hah, long rant about AS...

But, there's some relief: A thunderstorm, the biggest one we've had all season, rolled through and knocked out the blasted humidity and heat (as well as making the lights blink). I swear it's twenty degrees cooler already. It's supposed to be *gorgeous* tomorrow, which would be delightful, since it's my day off and I'm making my weekly trip to Lowell, which includes my every-other-week jaunt to Larry's Comics.

which has been muggy and sticky, or my hormones, which are getting to the end of the cycle, or the fact that I've been having trouble sleeping on account of the weather and the ragweed pollen, but I've been in a vile mood all day: tired, cranky, hair-trigger, depressed...

I'm trying to keep the gloomy thoughts at bay: I've got four great sci-fi stories on my plate right now, which I'll start writing, one a week, beginning in October, once I start jotting some notes down... Ray Bradbury committed himself to writing 52 stories in a year, a story a week, the first year he started writing, figuring he could probably come up with a couple handfuls of good stories out of those: I'm gonna aim for four a month, since 52 is too intimidating a number right now. But then that little voice that "comes out of the woodwork in the hallway at night" (to quote Mel Gibson when he was talking about working on "The Passion") is whispering in my ear telling me that I can't possibly come up with that amount of stories and get even a third of them published, that I should just find someone to marry, but even that ain't gonna work because what guy wants to marry a scrawny, flat-chested brunette with Asperger's Syndrome...

Speaking of which, I had a bad Asperger's moment at work this afternoon: Someone's loaf of French bread fell out of the plastic bag (now parked on the end of the register) I'd put it into, and it fell to the floor -- fortunately without falling out of its paper bag -- into the next lane, nearly wacking another customer in the back. So the nearly-wacked lady turned around and teasingly accused me of throwing things at her. Unfortunately, my Asperger's flared up horribly at that moment and I completely misconstrued her playfullness, mistaking it for the real tongue-lashing that it wasn't: tensing up, apologizing in a panicked tone, cringing. I do this a lot: when I get depressed, I have a terrible time with people kidding around and teasing me. That's an earmark of Asperger's Syndrome, at least the atypical variety. Typical Asperger's may cause a person to underemote, or to have mis-timed emotional reactions: they feel too little, usually. But people with Atypical Aspergers tend to *over*-emote. A lot. What would mildly irritate or startle a so-called normal person annoys the hell out me, or scares me half to death (strange sounds, as a good for instance). For a while my mother thought I had manic-depression/bipolar disorder, but some of the earmarks of that tend to include risk-taking (which I definatly don't do!) or having simple auditory hallucinations: hearing whistling or buzzing sounds that no one else can hear (which has never happened to me either).

I sometimes wonder if some of the existential philosophers and sci-fi writers who dealt with ontological riffs (to use a term from a sci-fi writer's glossary on the SFWA website) might not have had a touch of Asperger's Syndrome or something similar. Reality seems fractured when you have AS, not to the point that you're paranoid or you dissociate, but sometimes it seems like you have one world, inside your mind/imagination, and that seems more real and comfortable, but then there's the outside world with other people and that seems at times screwy and nightmarish. Just from what I can tell from reading about his life story, Philip K. Dick seems to have had some of the earmarks of Atypical Asperger's (very sensitive, tended to keep to himself a lot). I'm also guessing the Wachowski Brothers may have a teeny touch of it: AAS people are more articulate than TAS people, and they can adjust to social situations better, but they often tend to avoid eye contact when talking with a person; I was just watching "The Matrix: Revisited", the direct to DVD, feature-length film that came out in 2000, which features behind-the-scenes footage on the making of the first "Matrix" film, along with interviews with cast and crew members, including the Wachowski Brothers.... and I don't think they really looked toward the camera once. They're also notorious for avoiding the limelight and dodging public appearances, to the point that some people consider them to be snobs. Just not true: they're the kind of guys who have several creative irons in the fire at once, and they stay out of the public eye because they're working on the next big idea. And I really admire them for that: I wish more people in entertainment could do that, instead of having to play the celebrity.

That does it, I'm gonna go work on some of my ideas! Ranting over now, I'm writin'!!