alex_antonin | Entries tagged with autism

Original Facebook post: Image of a tweet reading "Dostoyevsky kinda ate with "your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.""

Me: Ate what?

Them: “he ate” = “he did a great job, excelled, dominated”

Me: Uh, no, "he ate" means he had food he chewed up and swallowed. LOL did you fail preschool?

Them: lol have you never heard of slang?

Me: Yeah but that's the stupidest slang I've ever heard of. Capitalism has us so beat down that we're using having an actual meal as slang for winning. Yet we're still not eating the rich. Pathetic.

Them: capitalism is awful, but I really can’t see why this usage is a problem

Me: "He ate" reads to me like an incomplete sentence. Also it's the stupidest slang I've ever heard. Makes "skibidi" and "whackadoo" sound cultured.

Them: it follows the grammatical pattern of “he slayed”. It’s pretty silly to have such a strong opinion about this.

Me: Yes but "He slayed" is at least a complete sentence.
And if it's silly for me to have a strong opinion on this, then you're being just as silly arguing with me about it.

Them: Alexander Antonin “he ate” is also a complete sentence

Kitty Auburn Payne: (at Them) eh, Alex can be stubborn about things. Though, more often than not he usually is correct about stuff he is being stubborn about
This is one of those things I'm inclined to just let him be silly stubborn about, as a treat

Kitty Auburn Payne: (At Me) Now you've joined the ranks of grumpy old codgers that made claims about slang from our generation 😛
I might look up the dumb crap codgers said about us... if I care about it or have energy
I'm inclined to just let you be stubborn about this--as a treat 😛

Me: (At Them) Point to me any instance where anyone has ever said "He ate." in a non-slang way, I dare you. Usually what gets said instead is "He has eaten (already)" or "He's eaten." "Ate" is used right before specifying what specific food someone ate.
Even if you did use "ate" the wrong way, it usually comes paired with "already," like "He already ate." Nobody ever just said "He ate" as a complete sentence on its own before it became this weird slang thing.

Me: (At Kitty Auburn Payne) I complain about plenty of stuff from other generations as well. The Beatles' music is horrible, most of the modern popular music is horrible but that's always been generally true; pretty much the only reason most enduring oldies music continues being played is that everyone got their music tastes from radio, and most people are too lazy to explore beyond that. Now that we have various Internet services competing for our listening, it's pretty much required to go searching around for stuff you like. The lowest common denominator people still stick with whatever's played the most on their service of choice, but there's fewer of them than in the radio days, so the music they like is correspondingly worse. But plenty of good music is still being made, if you're not too lazy or stupid to look for it. Hell, there's many times more good music now than ever before.

Back to slang, I have fewer issues with older generations' slang mostly just because all the really stupid things from those generations have already long since fallen into disuse.
Also, I only really have issue with "he ate" and "skibidi." For the most part I not only have no issue with modern gen z / alpha slang, I even use a lot of it myself. It's mainly just those two terms in particular that bug me, and the level of annoyance I get from "skibidi" is almost nonexistent, TBH. Mostly I just consider it an absurdist humor reference.

Me: (At Kitty Auburn Payne) Mostly I complain about things because I'm autistic and lots of things neurotypicals think is normal are utterly bizarre and nonsensical to me. I give the vibe of seeming like an old coot because I don't care for most things that are popular in society, but I've been like that since I was a small child. I like what I like and I complain about what I don't like or don't understand, and I've always been doing that my entire life. Just now that I happen to be 42 it's now being viewed as being due to my being old, but nope. I've literally always been this way.

On FB, my friend Kitty was saying it's weird how people think she's obsessed with things she's actually only passingly interested in, how she can't post anything about anything without people thinking she's obsessed with it. The whole convo is very relatable to neurospicy folks. Here was my response etc:

Me: Probably the level of detail you bring to many things you talk about. Most people don't bring that much detail into things they're only passingly interested in.

Kitty: ... do... people just not see this many details in day to day interactions?

Me: Most people barely see the surface of the tip of the iceberg. You see the mammoth frozen in the ice, a barely visible brown blur.

Kitty: ... and my response is always, "it is a fscking mammoth, mastadon or whooly elephant of some kind... how do you NOT see it?"...

Me: Indeed. And then it like turns out to be that weird one with the massive trough shovel for a mouth, whatever it's called. And you're like "That's not an arctic species, how did it get frozen in ice?"

Kitty: that is an entirely valid question, though! It should be the normal response to this!

Me: Exactly! NTs are weird myopic creatures. Being neurospicy is like being 3D in a world full of 2D beings. How do you not see depth? How are you only seeing height and width?

I absolutely detest people trying to socialize with me when I'm waiting for the bus. If I don't know you, I don't want to talk with you when I'm out and about. I'm picky about who I socialize with because socializing drains me of energy, and being out and about drains me of energy as well because I have to mask in public, which is draining. There are only a few contexts that are exceptions to that rule, and they happen very infrequently.

Usually when people try to socialize with me at the bus stop, I just sit there and silently seethe and ignore them because I'm afraid to get into a fight in public. This is because ultimately, as annoying as strangers might be, I view them as a threat far more than as an annoyance. Yes, even little old ladies; elderly people are stronger than you think, because over time people lose control of the mechanism that lets them hold back their full strength so they don't hurt themselves. This compensates for (and sometimes overcompensates for) the weakening of their bodies.

But earlier today, I was out because I needed something at the store. This despite feeling like lukewarm vomit due to a headache I was still struggling with. So I'm already feeling worse than usual on top of my usual issues with being in public, and I was carrying some heavy stuff home with me which made it worse, and this elderly Asian lady starts trying to talk with me. I tried to silently ignore her as usual, but her voice was grating on my every nerve, I couldn't understand what she was saying, some stranger trying to socialize with me when I'm out in public was the absolute last fucking thing I needed just then, and she couldn't understand me either when I politely told her to leave me alone. When politeness didn't work, the proverbial straw landed on the proverbial camel's back and I snapped at her, saying "I have a headache, I don't want to socialize" in a very loud and pissed-off tone that was unmistakably both annoyed and hostile, startling even myself. And it worked, she effed off and didn't try to fight about it.

As much as I still felt like crap from the headache, and as startling as it was to sound so hostile even to myself, it felt good to snap at her. I get so fucking frustrated masking and putting up with other people's BS silently out of habit all the time, so actually being able to set boundaries with someone, even if I was a bit hostile about it, felt very good.

I follow several Facebook groups full of neurodivergent people and spoonies, and one odd pattern I've found is that in these groups there is a very high number of people that find it difficult to stay hydrated, which could probably explain the source of the "stay hydrated!" meme. Like, if it's not forgetting to drink, it's sensory issues around water and other beverages.

And like... it's just kind of weird because I'm neurodivergent but I have the opposite problem. I tend to over-hydrate because drinking tea is a stim for me. It's such a big problem for me that my solution isn't to drink less liquid but to occasionally replace tea with diet soda and zero-sugar Powerade. Oh, and also eating things high in salt and/or potassium to balance out any lost from peeing so much. And it works for me. My pee has mostly stabilized in color, usually being yellow enough now instead of practically clear like it was for a long time.

What brought me to this topic was someone talking about their dehydration being so bad that their pee was almost brown, which is a bit extreme, but it just reminded me of the innumerable times I've seen similar posts of people asking for help in figuring out how to stay hydrated. I do have the issue of forgetting to eat sometimes, so I kinda get it, but like... why are so many neurodivergent people dehydrated all the time?

Being autistic with ADHD is like "While you studied maths and other school things, I studied humanity as though I were an alien anthropologist attempting to fit in with the savage natives."

I just now realized what I think is the original reason I started being scared of dogs. I'm autistic, I don't like sudden loud noises and never have. Which, a bark is a sudden loud noise. Also, my brain processes barks as being dog shouts, and therefore thinks of a dog's bark as inherently aggressive since human shouts are often aggressive.

I have, over the years, developed a great many other reasons to be scared of dogs (as well as to not like even the ones that don't scare me -- reasons that can best be summed up as "too much like extroverted humans but you can't reason with them, and also they do a lot of disgusting stuff"), but it's interesting to realize the origin of that fear was tiny, autistic child me being terrorized by this sudden, unexpected, aggressive noise from a big animal with sharp teeth; something that became a Core Memory.™

And I came to this realization by finally analyzing why I don't have a problem with wolves, but I do have a problem with dogs: wolves don't bark, at least not much. They're also much more intelligent than dogs, and they're pretty chill as long as you're not threatening them.

With dogs, I constantly have to guess whether their barks are aggressive or not. With wolves, if they're being aggressive it's bloody obvious because they bare their teeth and growl. So yeah... like humans, dogs are a challenge, trying to figure out what they're actually saying. And it seems to me like other people have dogs figured out the same way most other people have other people figured out, and I don't. And given that humans can at least be reasoned with because they at least theoretically understand my language, they're less of a threat than dogs are.

When someone on my feed is excited about their kid getting some paper 'award' thing, it can be difficult for me to muster any kind of enthusiasm because some of the things schools "reward" kids with are just kind of... meh. Like attendance and citizenship. I was an absolutely wretched student, for reasons that boil down to me being autistic and ADHD, and yet I would always get attendance awards because my parents wouldn't let me avoid school despite it being Hell for me on basically every level, unless I was genuinely too sick to attend. And the worst part was, since I was constantly sick with colds (like seriously, it never let up) I technically was always too sick for school. I was 100% too sick to have gone to work if I'd been that sick as an adult. Yet I was still forced to go anyway. It's a wonder all the other kids didn't get sick from me, too.

And attendance awards were basically just, to me, pieces of paper saying "C o n g r a t s on not being too sick for school this quarter, according to us adults who don't have enough sense to fill a thimble! You're being given this useless award for being forced to go somewhere you're constantly being bullied, somewhere where there are too many people in one place, where it's such a sensory nightmare and nightmare in general that you have to dissociate and live in your own imaginary world cut off from reality just to get through the day! A place that can't even deliver on the promise of being able to teach you!" (Seriously, I learned more from a single week of PBS than I learned in five YEARS of school.)

Citizenship awards were even more pointless than attendance awards, in my experience. On the surface of it, you'd think this would be a good award. Sounds like something you get for helping old ladies cross the street, picking up litter in the neighborhood, or feeding homeless people. But no. At least in the schools I went to, they were code for "you're well behaved." I kept getting them just for being a quiet kid who wasn't a dick to other people and in fact barely socialized with anyone because socializing for me is already exhausting, socializing with people I don't like is even more exhausting and isn't even rewarding to compensate for the exhaustion, and socializing with people I don't like while immersed in the ND equivalent of WW1 trench warfare every weekday was just one more thing chipping away at my energy and sanity.

And what kind of reward is a piece of paper anyway? At least stickers were cool and pretty and could be stuck to fun places.

So yeah, really hard for me to muster even a semblance of enthusiasm for people when they post about these stupid paper awards that schools give to kids. Especially when the award in question isn't one I'm familiar with, and/or has a nebulous description. Even if I want to be supportive, I can't help thinking "So is this something they *should* celebrate, like 'you've made real progress learning math,' or is it something pointless and stupid like attendance or citizenship?"

Oh yeah and even before the pandemic I've always thought it stupid that we basically send our walking petri dishes to spend time around hundreds of other walking petri dishes just so they can try and fail to learn from a bunch of people who suck massively at teaching. Instead of doing that, we should just let neighborhood kids exist together in an environment where they're learning the natural way kids do, with a few adults around to supervise and help the kids find the answers to their questions, rather than trying to program them like robots on an assembly line.

(This is in no way endorsing one method over another. Just an observation of differences. Especially since there are some foods that just should not touch, ever. It all depends on the foods.)

Other autistics: "These foods must not EVER touch each other!"
Me: "These vegetables are bland as heck. Gonna grab a glob of mashed taters and gravy and dunk it on the veggies to pick them up so the bland is overpowered by the taters and gravy. Then I'll do something similar to the Salisbury steak and potatoes, but not because the meat tastes bad. Just because I feel like it."

Other autistics: "I must eat the same thing for every single meal!"
Me: "I can eat the same thing for most meals, and I enjoy doing so; but I have to give them slight variations, and I have to have at least one meal per day that's something else or I'll get tired of the samefood to the point where I can't eat it at all for several months or even years. This is probably also a form of taking control / self defiance, because if I just eat the same exact thing all the time, I get angry at my past self for thinking this was a good idea."

Other autistics: "I must take the ice from the tray in this specific pattern: from the back to the front, left side to right side."
Me: "I must take the ice from the tray in the most arbitrary way possible, because occasionally doing things chaotically is a stim for me, and an act of defiance against my own usual tendency towards persnicketyness, which for some reason I derive a small amount of joy from doing."
Also me: "I must eat this sandwich in a specific pattern: right corner first, making sure part of the bite goes under the point at which the bread's top crust touches the side crust; then left corner, done in the same way; then the right side again, then the left, until there is a point in the middle; then eat the middle. Repeat until there's not enough sandwich to do so, then revert to chaos."
Also also me: "This is a TUNA SALAD (or chicken salad or egg salad) sandwich, and so I must first remove the crusts from the bread. Eat the sandwich from then as above, until all that's left is crust. Then fold crusts, spoon tuna salad onto the crusts, and eat the result. Repeat until all crusts have been devoured."

Crossposts: https://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/752183.html

Question came up on an autism community, "have you ever had a party phase?" My answer:

No. I hate parties, always have. I'm an introvert. I don't like crowds. Even spending a few hours with between 1 and 4 friends is draining for me. I *like* socializing with a few friends for a few hours, but I do need time to recharge from it.

I did go to a couple school dances in like, middle school. And I went to two different proms. They were very challenging. It was too dark for there to be so many people around (I like darkness when I'm alone or relatively so, but with more people around I prefer to be able to see the potential threats), it was too loud even when I got as far away from the speakers as I could, and there were too many people. But I had a few people who thought I was like an adorable pathetic socially awkward class mascot who tried to get me to dance with them. (At the time I thought they were trying to be my friends but in retrospect I realize I was too much of a weird nerd and they were thinking of me as a pet or mascot), and for the first couple middle school dances there were a couple girls I had a crush on. But between me being a weird and awkward pathetic nerd, and lily-white me being unsure how to interact with black girls without being accidentally racist, it was very awkward and I never gave any indication of my crushes.

Then in high school, despite continuing to be a weird and awkward nerd, I had the Internet and was able to find a girlfriend who was also a weird and awkward nerd, and we dated long enough that I went to her prom first and then she came to my prom the next year.

So I mean... kinda yes actually? Insofar as I went, and kinda had fun. But when I was younger, my ears were often stuffed up from myriad colds I had, so I couldn't hear as well back then. Since then my immune system did a complete turnaround and now I almost never get sick from contagious diseases. Still have random headaches, backaches, and other "body doing dumb shit" though. I say still because my body was doing those things my whole life on top of me being sick with colds all the time as a kid.

Crossposts: https://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/746593.html

Unpopular opinion but true fact: people act like dogs are super smart, but literally everything they can be taught to do can be taught just as easily to rats. A creature with a brain the size of a walnut is of equal intelligence to dogs.

Furthermore, people claim to have taken a vicious predator - wolves - and bred them to be sooo much smarter than wolves. But wolves are in fact much more intelligent than dogs. Anyone who knows anything at all about the domestication process knows humans haven't made tame wolves, they've made mentally retarded wolves, the wolf version of people with down's syndrome.
Congratulations, humanity, you invented a wolf so mentally challenged that a rat - literal vermin - can do its job, and now y'all pretend like dogs are super smart just because they're programmable. Y'all think they're loyal and kind just because they're too mentally challenged to have the usual fear of humans that wolves do. It's ridiculous! The only reason they like humans, the only reason they act loyal, is because their damaged chromosomes make it so they literally can't tell the difference between a dog and a human.

Whereas cats, on the other hand, decided all on their own to adopt humans as pets because they got something out of the deal. But they're stubborn creatures, so humans call them stupid. In fact, though, they are far more intelligent than dogs.

On a side note, I think calling autistic people like myself "human cats" makes a lot of sense for these reasons. And for all these reasons, that's probably why I don't really like neurotypical humans in general. If autistic people are human cats, NT people are human dogs. And because we're stubborn and willfull and don't understand illogical NT customs, we get labeled as stupid when in fact we're far more intelligent than most NTs, at least as a general rule. Just as there are stupid cats, there are a few stupid autistic people. But in general we're the smarter, saner group. We're a bunch of human cats who have to live in the stink pits that the human equivalent of dogs have dug out and call a society.

Crossposts: https://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/745578.html

On an autism community on FB, someone was discussing the tendency of autistic people to be more sensitive to rejection. This was my response:

I think the biggest reason is the fact of not knowing what we said or did to warrant being rejected. Could explain why I developed such an abrasive and divisive personality, cussing like a sailor and generally not having much of a filter. At least that way when I get rejected, I know exactly why I got rejected (because people can't handle my awesomeness) and I know the friends I have that do stick around are true blue, because if they can tolerate me when I am the way I am, it means they're vibing with me.

Well, that and the fact that I spent my formative childhood years being tortured by my demon-spawn little sister's hours-long crying jags because she's a little demonic piece of garbage. Kinda hard to turn out normal when you have to deal with bullies at school and a banshee you can't kill or banish at home.

Crossposts: https://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/741830.html

Speaking of inconsiderate people with their shitty music in public, I was just reading an old post about the bullshit NTs get up to, including music every goddamn place in public these days except the libraries. I would love to have the money and help to set up a chain of grocery stores aimed at autistic people; no music in the store, there'd be clocks in view everywhere you go, and all the products would stay in the same goddamn place FOREVER, to a degree that if we don't have something on the shelf, it's because they don't make it anymore. That would be the only time we'd ever change anything; to replace products that aren't made anymore.

There would be a cafe there, too. Again, no music. Like the main store, absolute silence. We would only have announcements over loudspeaker for like, amber alerts or other emergencies; everything else would be taken care of by walkie-talkies.

Crossposts: https://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/721133.html

Weeks ago, I noticed Quora had disabled my "I am on the autism spectrum" credential as an invalid credential when talking about autism. But after a bunch of back-and-forth messages with Quora, I finally got the idiots to recognize "I am on the autism spectrum" as a valid credential.

Crossposts: https://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/679466.html

I find it very amusing that you think autistic people are noisy, when I’m autistic and yet offline I am very quiet and I personally find neurotypicals and other allistic (“normal”) people to be irritatingly loud all the blessed time.

Seriously, neurotypicals/allistics:

1. Apparently love pointless conversations. Seem to be so much in need of hearing their own voice or the voices of others that they will engage literally anyone in pointless “small talk” when there’s been silence for more than about a minute, regardless of how obvious it is that the person they’re trying to talk to doesn’t want to socialize.

Aside from my bafflement at why anyone would want to socialize with a complete stranger in the first place, the fact is this “small talk” has no redeeming qualities whatsoever and is just so much noise pollution in my opinion. (“What’s the weather like?” Why don’t you look out a window? “How bout them Broncos?” Sports are some of the most pointless human activities on the planet, utter wastes of time, money, resources, and effort; talk about something interesting why don’t you?)

And the fact that I can be reading a book with headphones and dark sunglasses on and still get accosted by NTs with their incessant need to pollute the air with small talk just makes me wonder why you think it’s us being noisy.

2. Apparently love music to fill every single moment when they’re out in public place like grocery stores. This has always bothered me. Ideally, I would go grocery shopping in complete silence, it would be perfect. Maybe the occasional understandable announcement over the loudspeakers, but it drives me mad how there’s almost nowhere you can go in public these days without the incessant noise of music or TVs or talk radio everywhere. What is with NTs and their love of noise?

3. Apparently love noisy cars. Pretty sure if autistic people were the norm, that cars would either all be quiet electric cars by now, or there’d be soundproofing put around car engines because honestly the number of autistic people I’ve met who, like myself, cannot tolerate traffic noise, is quite high.

And I know for a fact that nobody autistic would ever have invented noisy motorcycles. Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone can tolerate riding such horrible noisy things, I can barely stand to be 10 blocks away from the blessed things. Even at that distance I have to cover my ears!

4. Apparently love talking on the phone all the time. The best thing to be invented, IMHO, is electronic text-based communication. Me and my friends do talk with one another on occasion, but usually we communicate via texts, emails, or instant messaging, even when we’re in the same room, and I adore it! I get so angry and frustrated whenever I’m forced outside, all the people on the bus talking so loudly I have to put sound-blocking headsets on to hear myself think.

Or worse, talking on the bloody phone in public! If it wasn’t for the fact that the voice part of the phone is sometimes necessary, I would just get a text-messaging-only phone. Fully 99% of my cell phone communication is text messages. More often than not, people’s voices just grate on my nerves.

5. Apparently love talking so much they’ll engage fellow employees in pointless conversations at work. It has always been so extremely frustrating for me trying to tolerate NT/allistic-designed workplaces in the first place, without having to also tolerate forced conversations with people I neither know nor care to know prattling on filling the air with conversational noise pollution. It always made working so much harder to do because it messes with my concentration and the sheer level of irritation it fills me with is emotionally draining. An 8 hour shift on my own in a job that didn’t have any required social aspect to it (like manufacturing jobs) would fly by, but put other people in the area with me and they would insist on talking just to talk, which would make an 8 hour shift feel more like a 16 hour shift.

6. Apparently love to talk with their neighbors for some reason. Something else I’ve never understood. I have never gotten to know my neighbors, and neither have my parents. I’ve lived in this apartment building for several years now, and I know the names of exactly two people out of the dozen or so people who live here (not counting my roommate), and both of those were already friends with me before I lived here. I don’t know the names of anyone else in this place, I don’t even remember most of their faces, and yet so many of them seem to think I ought to know their names and faces by now. I actually even had a conversation the other day where one of the people whose faces I know asked me if I knew her name, and I had to admit that I didn’t.

I cannot stand to socialize with someone just because they’re close at hand. Most NTs/allistics I’ve met in my life are so supremely boring that having any conversation with them that is longer than 30 seconds makes me want to scream. Honestly, I completely ignore most allistics, especially neighbors, and in my mind I designate them NPCs (Non-Player Characters), except that they’re nowhere near that interesting or important in my opinion.

The two people whose names and faces I know in this place? Yeah, one of them is autistic and I’m pretty sure the other one isn’t NT either, but she and I have been friends for over a decade now, so I know she’s interesting.

7. Apparently love forcing children to socialize with people they hate in school. Two words: group projects. UGH! It was bad enough when they assigned me to people who were just your standard Boring Normal, but on several occasions they put me in groups with people who were bullying me, and were thus The Enemy. Kids should not have to be subjected to that kind of torture, and neither should adults in the workplace.

Of course, the entire school system is a nightmare for people like me to begin with. Forced socialization, nothing is ever done about bullying, rampant ableism, and there’s boring and stupid teachers who don’t even properly know their subjects to the point that it was a regular occurrence for me as early as about fourth or fifth grade for me to know more about some subjects than the teachers did. And how the heck does anyone manage to learn anything when you’re too busy being bored to tears?

Honestly, there’s a reason play is how animals including humans learn things. Sitting in neat little rows facing the front, being quiet, and listening to a lecture is something that is universally boring even into adulthood, and is anathema to learning. That kind of thing is why I frequently tell people that school is where learning goes to die. Seriously. A friend of mine goes to an elementary school during the school year to read to the kids there, and I told her I thought I knew why she went there. What I said was “You go there and read to them because for those kids, it’s the one bright spot in a day full of boredom and soul-crushing authoritarianism.” She did not disagree. But I digress.

But yes, forcing kids to socialize with people they don’t want to socialize with is idiotic cruelty. Especially when some of those people may be bullies.

Meanwhile, I haven’t yet met a single autistic person who was noisy like NTs/allistics are. Sure, Lily laughs loudly at times, but I’m usually laughing with her when she does. My fellow autistic friends and I, our social get-togethers are basically just hanging out in the same room doing our own thing, often all of us on our computers, occasionally sending each other interesting links or pictures. Even my roommate, who is an extroverted autistic girl who talks entirely too much for my liking, still knows how to do the “hanging out silently, sending each other interesting stuff” thing and manages it most of the time.
So yeah, when you ask why autistic people are noisy, I have no blessed idea what you’re talking about, because I’ve never in 34 years of life met a noisy autistic person before. Whereas at least 80% of NTs/allistics are noisy all the blessed time!

~ ~ ~

The above was part of my attempt to make my Quora answers more in line with that obnoxious "be nice, be ~~a sniveling dick-weasel~~ respectful" policy of theirs. Whadda ya think? Original question can be found here (link).

Current Mood: annoyed
Crossposts: http://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/677434.html

If ever I need something to be thankful for, I can be thankful for the fact I was born before my little sister was. Gods know that if my sister had been born before I was, Mom would have tied her tubes, gotten a hysterectomy, and/or become a nun to avoid having another one like my sister.

Seriously, I'm autistic, and I'm pretty sure my sister is too, but she was of the "never stops crying" variety, whereas I was of the "unusually quiet" type. My sister's tantrums, which she's never grown out of, are the stuff of legend. Even Dudley Dursley wouldn't be able to compete.

Crossposts: http://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/671673.html

As long as people keep thinking of autism as a disease, they're going to keep finding "evidence" that it's "caused by" this, that, or some other thing because of their confirmation bias, but they're not going to ever find a real cause for it until they pull their heads out of their asses. Even then, I doubt they'll ever find a cause for it. Or if they do, they'll also find what causes allistic and neurotypical people to be the way they are, too.

No really: if you did studies into neurotypical people from the point of view that neurotypicality was a disease, at least if you're looking for it as stubbornly as these autism-is-a-disease people look for the "cause" of autism, you'd find plenty of evidence to support the theory that neurotypicality is a disease.

And therein is the flaw of science: if you're open minded, you'll find things that don't match your hypothesis and start on the path toward the truth. But if you've already made up your mind what the truth is, you'll keep finding "evidence" to support your "truth."

Current Mood: annoyed
Crossposts: http://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/670746.html

“Black and white thinking” is said to be a symptom of autism, but honestly in my observations, allistics tend more towards black and white thinking than we auties and aspies do. I also find those on the autism spectrum tend to be more open-minded than allistics.

Yeah, anyone who knows me knows I’m pretty close-minded about some things but that’s not for the same reasons as allistics. For me, if I’m close-minded about something it’s because I spent years being open-minded about it, heard every argument under the sun, made up my mind, and all I keep hearing from the opposition is more of the same BS recycled arguments I’ve heard a million times already. Also, the things I tend to be close-minded about are things where my reasons for believing something are based on my sense of morality/ethics and no argument is likely going to be good enough to bypass that. Take abortion for instance; fetuses are not even intelligent, let alone sentient, so no argument is ever going to convince me that the rights of some non-sentient clump of cells overrules the rights of the sentient human being in whom those cells are growing. Especially when counter-arguments are always based on an incredibly ignorant misunderstanding of science by people who believe that a being that committed multiple genocides against his own creations has somehow changed from a narcissistic evil sociopath into a good loving guy who thinks abortion is murder now, when the bible’s sole reference to abortion was that same god teaching Moses how to perform an abortion, and there are several scenes where this same god tells his followers to gut pregnant women amongst their enemies.(1)

Also, inability to pick up on people’s tone of voice is said to be another autism spectrum symptom. I can’t speak for everyone on the autism spectrum, but for myself, I find that tends to be BS as well. I can pick up on people’s tones just fine. Better, in fact, than allistic people do. I think where the confusion comes in is I pick up on what others are actually feeling as opposed to what they’re trying to convince others and/or themselves they’re feeling, and their hypocrisy is what bugs me. So few people say what they mean or mean what they say, and when I call them on it, they’ve convinced themselves that I’m the stupid one for seeing through their ruse.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there are so many autistic trans people and autistic bi/pan people, and autistic people on the asexual spectrum. I think people on the autism spectrum tend to be better at finding the edges, the overlaps, the areas that aren’t (just) one thing or another. It’s just that the autistic black/white thinking stems, I think, from a mix of old BS allistic thinking patterns from trying to fit in with the allistics, and our literalistic approach to things (which I think is basically just us expecting people to say what they mean and then getting confused and/or annoyed when they don’t, IE we’re upset that allistics aren’t as honest as we are, which makes sarcasm a concept that takes a lot of work to puzzle out).

~

1 = Or another example: I think people’s right to live and be safe from horrifying deaths by guns overrules the “right” of others to own dangerous tools designed solely for murdering people. So from my POV, banning guns and repealing the 2nd amendment is more moral than letting a bunch of yahoos run around killing people just because that’s their fetish.

Crossposts: http://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/652141.html

An FB post in an Asperger's group was asking about sensitivities. This was my response:

1. I can't stand the way certain fabrics feel. Courderoy, some velvets; they feel greasy in a way that gets under my skin and feels like I'm being invaded. And even clothing makes me uncomfortable. I'm only truly comfortable when nude. (Or as comfortable as I can be, given the fact I still get itchy skin no matter what I do. Usually when I tell people this, they tell me to shower more often, but bathing/showering makes it worse.)

2. The sound of paper napkins crinkling (for lack of a better word). I have to close my ears until it's over with.

3. Smokers and vapers (which is pretentious smoking). The smoke makes me cough and choke. I have a hard time confronting people about smoking around me, though, so I usually just leave. Which can be difficult; people around here like to smoke by the bus stops, even though there are No Smoking signs on all the bus stops.

4. I can't stand screaming/crying kids, or infants and toddlers. Older kids who aren't making a ruckus, I'm fine with. Even when I was a kid myself, I rarely cried or screamed or made a ruckus, because I can't even stand the noise when I'm the one making it. (Come to that, I can't stand noisy adults, either.)

5. Sunlight. It hurts my eyes and often makes me sneeze. And as a ginger, I sunburn easily.

6. I can't smell very well, but some scents I am very sensitive to. The flower called Baby's Breath earns it name, as it smells like an infant's fetid halitosis to me. I have such a strong reaction to Baby's Breath that it makes me reflexively hiss like an angry cat when I smell it.

7. I think this counts. I have such sensitive eyesight that I can look at a tree off on the horizon and see the individual leaves, when most people can barely even see the tree. It's cool in many ways, like the fact that an eye doctor once told me after testing me that I have "better than 20/20 vision." And on those "what animal's level of color vision do you have" online tests, I nearly always get either Hawk or Robot. (Robot being higher than Hawk.) Pretty sure I only get Hawk because of weird color settings on the computer. But my spectacular vision can cause sensory overload, which results in headaches that turn into migraines if I leave them too long.

8. Some kinds of noises make it impossible to sleep, even quiet sounds. I found it impossible to sleep while using my CPAP because of the gentle sounds it makes when it's working, at least I did until I started sleeping with the fan on. The fan's white noise is steady and drowns out the CPAP sounds, which lets me sleep.

9. Alcohol. I can't stand it at all. I can smell alcohol in things even when other people can't, and if I ingest even a little of it, it makes me sick. I can't even use mouthwashes or medicines with alcohol in them.

I have a sensitivity to injustice, too!

Dunno if this counts, but sudden noises (especially loud ones) make my anxiety spike; it can take many minutes for it to fade back to normal levels. Even something as simple as a knock on the door can do it, depending on other factors. I'm most sensitive to car horns (especially the "friendly" kind of beeping for attention; I've been bullied and even sexually harassed a lot from people in cars) and fireworks. The Fourth of July and New Year's are two holidays I most loathe and detest for that reason.

I have food sensitivities, too, but as those are caused by IBS and not Asperger's, I won't list them here.

I'll do more later if I think of them.

Crossposts: http://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/648798.html

I SWEAR TO ALL THE GODS IN EXISTENCE THAT IF I EVER CATCH WHOOPING COUGH OR MEASLES OR MUMPS OR SOME SHIT LIKE THAT BECAUSE A BUNCH OF BRAINLESS ASSWAFFLES THINK VACCINES CAUSE AUTISM, I WILL FUCKING VISIT EVERY LAST ONE OF THEIR DAMNED HOUSES AND COUGH OR DRAIN MY PUS OR SMEAR MY FECES INTO THEIR EVERY FUCKING ORIFICE.

Crossposts: http://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/533661.html

So a 15 year old autistic girl who hadn’t eaten before the an airline flight was denied food by the stewardess, even after it was explained to her that if the girl didn’t get food, she would probably have a meltdown, and understandably had a meltdown. She was given food, for which the parents paid, and that should have been that. But the idiotic pilot got "uncomfortable” with this situation and - after it was over - declared an emergency landing because “someone on board has a behavior problem.” My response: "Yeah, asshole, someone had a behavior problem; it was YOU.”

If someone with autism has a meltdown, it is because somebody has fucked up. Meltdowns mean something is very wrong. You see, autistic people feel things more intensely than others, so I’m sure the sensation of being hungry felt painful to her, or uncomfortable enough to get the same response. Then add to it some allistic asshole refusing to get her what she needs, and it’s no fucking wonder she had a meltdown. And then the gaping asshole calling itself the pilot WAY overreacted. There was absolutely no reason to make an emergency landing.

See, it’s shit like this that are the result of the ableist bullshit in the media wherein violent shooters are explained away with bullshit like “ermagerd, he had autism!!11!!” Fucking pilot probably believed that bullshit and thought she was going to burst in like a demon on crack and rip his throat out with her teeth. FUCK ableism. FUCK dehumanization/demonization of autistic people and mentally ill people in general. TO HELL with that bullshit.

May that pilot’s genitals be eaten away by flesh-eating bacteria.

Current Mood: enraged
Crossposts: http://alex-antonin.livejournal.com/518059.html

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⛧ First Church of Hypocrisy, Blasphemy, and Self-Righteousness ⛧

The world's first honest religion

Entries tagged with autism

I've always been this way.

3D in a 2D world

Buzz off

A question for the ages

(Peers at you all through a microscope)

Solved an old puzzle.

"This is useless!"

Differences

Party hearty

True facts

Rejection

A true Safe way

Persistence pays off

Quora question: Why are autistic people so noisy?

Thankful for this much at least.

Confirmation bias sucks

A sort of winding rant.

Aspie sensitivities

GODS DAMN IT

Fucking dammit!