Reports from a Resident Alien

I've just come from WrongPlanet, and from yet another inevitable discussion--the repetitively posed, "Do you want a cure?" question.

Most people on WP say no. Some say yes. The ironic thing is that it's a question we'll almost certainly never have to answer in real life.

Autism is such a complex disorder that a cure would only be available once we become capable of physically modifying the microstructure and biochemistry of the human brain to the extent of changing any configuration to any other (at which point we will have bigger ethical problems to worry about than just curing autism). What is most likely to happen, with today's autism "cure" research, is that we will find a prenatal test which allows people to abort autistic fetuses (along with the inevitable false-positive non-autistic fetuses), and we will find medications which may make the lives of autistic people easier (or possibly just make the lives of their caretakers easier). A cure for currently existing autistic people simply won't happen--once we find that prenatal test, the research money will go somewhere else.

So the autism cure question is theoretical, but it's increasingly becoming symbolic. It's really not the prospect of a cure that's being discussed when people talk about it; the real question is something more along the lines of, "Should we accept or even treasure having autism; or should we fight autism and accept only the person we would be without it?" It's a question that is fundamental to our identities as autistic people.

No wonder at least one in fifty topics is some variation of, "So, do you want to be cured?"

To answer the question with "No" is to identify with the neurodiversity movement, or at the very least to declare that you think being autistic means there is nothing wrong with you. If you also consider yourself disabled, a "No" can mean that you believe that there is also nothing wrong with being disabled, and that you probably also agree with the disability rights movement. In most cases, it's a statement that you consider autism part of your identity. In some cases, of course, it can just mean that you're sick of people putting you down for having autism, and are feeling angry and defiant and would like them to take their prejudice and stuff it someplace uncomfortable. It can mean that you don't consider autism a disability in the first place, or even consider yourself superior, and don't want to get rid of what you think of as an advantage.

"Yes, I want a cure" can come from many sources. It can be someone who simply believes that autism is like an illness which doesn't affect their personality; they see it as a group of deficits that can be removed without changing them. It can come from someone who believes that disability is inherently negative and autism is a disability, and therefore should be cured. It can be a consequence of poor self-esteem and the desire to get rid of an unacceptable self. It can come from someone who has been very badly mistreated for being autistic, knows that non-autistic people are not generally mistreated this way, and sees removing the autism as a solution to the problem. It can come from someone who has encountered a lot of obstacles due to their autism, and believes that the best solution would be to remove the autism.

But I think your answer to the question matters less than the impact of the question itself on society's acceptance of disability, and of how it handles autism in particular. That society as a whole tends to focus on a cure for autism, rather than acceptance of and integration with autistic people, says a lot about how society sees autism. When the concept of autism is matched with the concept of cure, it is put into the same category as cancer, diabetes, and AIDS--something that's foreign to the person; something that society can't accept. With something like cancer, that makes sense--we don't want people in our society to have cancer; we think of their real selves as the people they are when their heads aren't muddled from treatments, and we encourage them to fight the cancer so that they can go back to their normal lives. That outlook makes sense, for the most part.

But if you look at autism the way you look at cancer, you create a lot of problems. Suddenly you're divorcing the "real person" from the way they think and behave, even though those thoughts and behaviors come from their own brains--brains that are neither injured nor chemically altered from their usual state.

Imagine if people saw developmentally delayed folks that way. Little Johnny's inability to read at the age of nine is a "symptom", and he needs "intensive treatment" to be "cured". His failure to dress himself until the age of six is a "behavior" that needs to be handled. His struggle with the multiplication tables in high school is something that's thought of as detachable from his "true self"--the person Johnny would be without his "illness". If he could only be cured, Johnny could become a doctor or a lawyer. While he's "sick", Johnny will never be truly happy.

It hasn't been long since we learned that instead of trying to turn Johnny into a typical boy, it made a great deal more sense to teach him what he could learn and hire him for a job he could do. Turns out we've been underestimating the people we used to brand with their IQs and push into boxes labeled with what we thought they couldn't do. Turns out there's nothing stopping them from living their lives and having as good a chance at happiness as any other human being out there. Maybe that's even scary for some people because it means they have to throw out the idea that intelligence makes you superior.

But we still haven't got that point with autism. Autism is similar--there are things we can't do, things we learn more slowly, things we have to be shown how to do. There are unexpected skills, too, sometimes even in the fascinating form of savant skills (actually, half of savants are autistic; the other half are developmentally delayed). Autistic people learn differently and usually require small adjustments at school and work. Just like developmentally delayed people (and yes, I'm aware there's overlap), most autistic people can work, and the lives of those that can't aren't any less meaningful. A life with autism can be a happy, useful, fulfilling life, in no way inferior to a typical one.

I firmly believe that acceptance is possible; but standing in the way of that acceptance is the "cure mentality"--the idea that the best thing for an autistic person is to be cured of autism.

If people assume that the best possible thing for an autistic person is a cure, then they will see autistic people the way they see people with an illness--people are better off without the illness; the illness is something extra, something that isn't part of them; the goal of their lives should be to get rid of the illness so they can live a normal life again. Living your life, pursuing your goals, while also happening to be autistic seems odd to anyone who's bought into the cure mentality. "Get well," they say, "and then you can do what you were meant to do." No wonder they think autism is a dead-end life!

That there isn't a cure doesn't do anything to change the effect of focusing on one. If a cure is the goal, then there won't be very much effort to let autistic people live good lives as autistic people. There won't be much effort to educate them, or to accommodate them in the workplace, or to include them in the community. There'll just be a search for a cure; and autistic people will be presumed to be waiting around until the cure comes and they can live lives as normal people.

On the other hand, if a cure is not the goal, then you have to deal with the reality of autistic people living in this world as autistic people--not just as people who are sick and waiting for a cure. You have to deal with educating autistic children; you have to deal with the services autistic adults need; you have to deal with teaching non-autistics to live and work side-by-side with the autistic members of their communities. If you aren't focusing on a cure, then your goal becomes the acceptance of diversity.

To focus on a cure when there is no cure is a very good way of saying, "We don't want autistic people in our community; we don't want to have to deal with the hassle; we don't want to have to deal with people who are different. We just want them cured so that they will be like us."

You guys probably know that I'm not fond of taking pills; but neither am I against the use of medication. (What I am against is prescribing medication without knowing exactly what you're doing, at the lowest dose needed and for the shortest time needed. It's even worse when they are doing it while assuming that the person taking the meds doesn't need any counseling or education to solve their problems because the meds will do it for them. Any psychiatrist who says that to me gets dropped like a hot potato. Faster, probably, because I may not notice right away how hot the potato is.)

Anyway, I'm visiting a psychiatrist tomorrow for an intake interview, and I plan to ask whether there is a way to chemically beef up my extremely iffy concentration and planning. At the moment, I'm using a lot of lists, schedules, routines, and my cell phone's alerts; and even with all that I'm extremely disorganized. I'm frankly lucky to be managing self-care decently (and yes, I use lists, routines, and alerts for that, too). Trying to get through school, with the work getting harder, I can't coast along on my natural learning ability anymore. It's one thing to be best at learning in your high school class; but so were all my classmates as a junior engineering major; and the complexity of the material reflects that. I mostly cope by just waiting until I can manage to concentrate and switch activities to schoolwork, then doing as much as possible before I lose focus.

I am sick and tired of not being able to concentrate when I want to concentrate. I think it's a cognitive issue mostly because I've eliminated the other likely causes. I'm not sleep-deprived, and while I'm under extreme stress, I don't meet the criteria for depression, and had the same problems even when I wasn't under stress. I don't think this concentration issue is something transient, and I have harnessed every single strategy I can think of--many of them gleaned from books about ADHD; others from autistics talking about handling executive dysfunction--and just staying in school is still at the limit of what I can do. This needs a solution before things get just the slightest bit tougher and I end up flipping from superior work to completely failing. (That's not exaggeration; it's happened before.)

Thus... medication. One hint that it might work is that I did get good results from Ritalin--but only at a very low dose, when I split the smallest-strength pill in two. If I had a high dose, it turned me into a zombie because it hit so hard, so fast, and that simply didn't work. I'm thinking extended release, maybe. Caffeine helps, too, but it's a weak effect and doesn't always work. Coffee does calm me down and help my anxiety--yes, truly--because it makes me feel like I am a little more on top of things, a little more competent. You'd think the opposite for someone with a typical anxiety disorder, so I think that like most autistics, I have anxiety that isn't actually the main issue, but rather secondary to feeling overwhelmed with the world around me.

I want to research this today before I go in tomorrow. I would like it if you guys could give me any good resources, preferably specifically about autism and medication for executive dysfunction, but if you don't know of any, maybe just generally about medication for ADHD and other types of concentration/planning/attention-regulation issues. I already know about Medline and will pick through the literature reviews posted there today, but things written by doctors tend to be clinical and not contain very much practical everyday-life information.

Information needed. Can you help?

Families of autistic kids sue over therapy's elimination

I just read this article this morning. Apparently, some parents have been denied funding for Floortime for their kids. Budget cuts are hitting everyone hard, and autistic kids are no exception.

Their reasoning? Floortime hasn't yet been subjected to a large-scale controlled study.

Hello, Autism Speaks? You've got some serious explaining to do. Didn't you say you were going to spend all that money we sent you for scientific resarch? Why has Floortime--a well-known, logical, established therapy for autism--not even been investigated?!

Oh. Right. Silly of me; finding that prenatal test is more important. Obviously, it's much more important to abort autistic fetuses than it is to help autistic people alive today. It makes more sense to just ignore currently living autistics. Autistic people can't possibly have a good life while still autistic, because, y'know, autism makes you a walking tragedy.

It's not just Autism Speaks, of course. There are a lot of people doing research of this sort--either prevent or cure; nothing touching on education or therapy. Just down the hall from where I did statistics (and occasional heart-and-kidney-weighing) for a toxicology lab, another lab had recently finished a study on the possibility that oxytocin had something to do with autism. (I cannot point you to their paper, because they got no results and did not publish.) Every other day, Medline pulls down another article about some gene or some hormone related to autism; almost never is there anybody doing studies on how to best educate autistic children, how to make workplaces autistic-friendly, or how to help families raise their autistic children successfully.

That Floortime hasn't been investigated rigorously seems like a glaring oversight to me. What I know of the method seems like it would be a very good way to teach an autistic child, especially if there were little functional communication available. Imitation is how many children learn things; and if the child can't imitate yet, having the therapist or parent do the imitation makes a lot of sense--especially since that ties in with one of the simplest things any child learns: Cause and effect. If I do this, they do that. If I do that, this other thing happens. Interaction and communication can be learned that way (PECS takes advantage of the simplicity of cause-and-effect, for example). And it's a great deal less stressful for the child, apparently--and remember that in autism, stress is a big problem--because the child does much of the initiating. If anything, giving the child a good deal of the initiative might be a solution to the problem of prompt-dependence so many ABA therapists struggle with--and yet, no real research has been done on it. That is ridiculous.

I know, I know--it's difficult to recruit enough people; definitely more difficult than recruiting a bunch of rats, or even, as the researchers down the hall did, gathering blood samples from autistic children. It's difficult to blind parents, students, and therapists effectively--therapists can't be blinded at all. There's the problem of control groups--you can't very well leave your control group of autistics without any therapy whatsoever; and wait-list controls can only last so long. And there's the reasoning (kind of stupid, in my opinion) that because ABA has been proven to work (i.e., proven to extinguish autistic behaviors), it's unethical to use anything else, whether or not half the ABA kids get traumatized along the way and the other half can't do anything unless they're ordered to do it. (Exaggerating here. Not by much, though.) And yes, it's long-term. Anything with autism has to be, or you can't see the way the kids develop.

But really, is it too much to ask to get somebody, somewhere to do some research on this? It seems really promising, and it's been around for ages. And yet, nobody's even checked it out.

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and usually in the worst possible way.

Today, I was only just figuring out how to deal with the insurance issues associated with a minor car accident in the parking lot at church yesterday. The very narrow driveway had one van parked on the side of it, and I'd been trying to pass that car while trying to avoid another car passing me on the other side; so I miscalculated the distances, and my passenger-side mirror scratched the paint on the parked van I was passing. I'd got most of it squared away, and pretty sure I might be able to weather the increased insurance payments if I gave up all the extras, when I was heading home from school today, on a slippery road at 55 miles an hour, after dark, with snow falling.

What I saw was a car pulling out from a side road onto the highway in front of me. I tried to brake, but there wasn't enough room; so I skidded into the car anyway, ricocheted off, spun, and ended up pointed quite the opposite way from the direction I'd been going. The officer who responded to the accident later told me that the car I had hit had not actually pulled out onto the road at all; maybe they had been going to, but when I lost control of the car, I actually skidded into them while they were still three feet out of the intersection. I still remember seeing that they were pulling out, but then, one presumes that the memories recorded in the brains of people getting pounded by air bags at the time tend to be a little faulty.

The point is that I did get into the accident, and of course the car is a complete loss. Even if it weren't, there's no way I could pay insurance with two at-fault accidents in two days on my record. Which means, of course, that I will no longer be driving. It's probably for the best. There was a ten-month-old infant in that other car. She's fine, but I've come to my senses--I shouldn't be driving. I should know better than to have tried learning.

So, after the car came to a stop, I checked to make sure I wasn't hurt, unbuckled my seat belt, and got out. The guy from the other car was already calling the police, telling them that nobody had been hurt. I had lost my glasses in the accident, so I pulled my spare pair out of my backpack and used my wind-up flashlight to search the car for my main pair. I found those easily enough. My brain, being unpredictable as usual, luckily switched into hyper-verbal mode rather than switching off speech as it sometimes, ever-so-annoyingly does. I told the paramedic who came to the scene that I'm autistic, because she wanted to know why I couldn't stop flapping my arms (and no, sorry, I don't suppress stims for others' benefit when I am flooded with adrenaline).

I'm not sure they knew quite what to make of me, since I kept lecturing on exactly what happens to the human body when the sympathetic nervous system is activated, as was at that time happening to me; and all the things I had learned in anatomy class. I think I must have struck them as quite eccentric, because I wasn't expending very much energy on holding a proper conversation and just free-assocating whatever came to mind. One of the paramedics figured out I was anxious and started explaining their medical equipment to me. Good on him; gave me something to think about. Actually, they kept saying they ought to hire me as a paramedic, but they just said that because I knew a lot of theory. Being a paramedic is a lot more than knowing about theory. Apparently I am less nervous than quite a few people who get into car accidents. I think this is because every new situation is an emergency to me, so I am used to emergencies.

The doctor at the emergency room said I was fine and discharged me. I walked home from the hospital, and now, here I am, very worried about my future. Without a car, I can't get to school. The bus system (which by itself can send me straight to meltdown) stops an hour's walk from school and doesn't run much past 5:00 p.m., which means that any classes that end at 4:00 or later are impossible, and hot, cold, or wet weather either has me walking two hours a day in that weather or else skipping school with attendence-happy professors out for my grades. Taxis are impossible since I am not a millionaire. And of course I have a $120 traffic ticket which I can't pay, on top of everything.

I know n=1, but if you go by my incredulous, disgusted-with-the-world feelings, this experiment just proved Murphy's Law.

If you have significant autistic traits, and you have significant impairment, then don't avoid diagnosis just because you think that you will end up using it as an excuse to "give up". It's quite the opposite, actually.

I should have been diagnosed at 11. I wasn't, because my mom didn't want me labeled and kept me out of school because she didn't want them labeling me. It was a bad decision for her and I ended up having to go to the psych ward twice because I had no idea what was going on and I was trying to cope in all the wrong ways. Not knowing, or being in denial, can only hurt you. If you're determined to use a diagnosis for an excuse, you'll use just about anything else if you don't use the diagnosis--blame others, blame your environment, blame your parents...

Autism, including Asperger's, is just a term to define something that's already there. It doesn't change who you are. You are who you have always been, and whether that can be called autistic or not autistic doesn't make a bit of difference as to who you are.

The benefits of a diagnosis:
--You can get specific help with the things associated with that diagnosis.
--You can find out more about yourself, why you do the things you do, and what you might be able to change.
--You can get assistance with things like school or work. For example, at school I take my tests in a private room, so I don't get distracted. They will not give you assistance that gives you an advantage over your classmates.
--You can stop calling yourself stupid/lazy/immature/whatever, and start working on the actual issues.

Just calling yourself names doesn't help, and doesn't help you find a solution. Disability, by definition, is not a matter of willpower; and if you assume that it is, you're not going to be able to find sensible solutions for the very real impairments it represents. Someone who is convinced that if he tries hard enough, he can walk, may refuse to use a wheelchair and be unable to get around at all. That's how it is. If you don't admit you have a problem, you'll never work on finding solutions.

There are drawbacks to diagnosis.
--You may be subject to prejudice from people who know you have the diagnosis.
--You may become discouraged once you become aware of your impairment.
--You may be treated differently at school or at work if you disclose your diagnosis.
--You may go through an analogue of the grieving process as you learn to accept the reality of the diagnosis.
--You may berate yourself for not being "normal" (self-directed prejudice).

Growing up without a diagnosis, telling myself that my disability was simply a lack of character, I learned a lot about what it is like to consider yourself unacceptable. I do not want to go through it again. When a psychiatrist with an autistic son finally recognized the missed diagnosis, I finally had a handle on where my problems were coming from and what I could do about it. Instead of just telling myself I had to "try harder" (which never worked), I learned a lot of strategies that people were using to deal with their autistic traits, and learned other strategies that can be used to take advantage of autistic strengths.

Honestly, a diagnosis is not something to be afraid of. It's not like the diagnosis would somehow magically give you Asperger's; you have those traits whether they're labeled or not. Whether you decide to talk about a diagnosis with your doctor or not, it is absolutely important to acknowledge and understand those traits you do have, because if you don't acknowledge them, you will be caught in the trap of, "If I only tried harder," refusing to do anything other than "try harder" because it would mean admitting that your problem was more than just willpower.

More intensively than I was taught anything else, the world has taught me one thing: As I am, I am unacceptable.

It is unacceptable to be disabled if you're not glamorously disabled. You're supposed to be the cute Down's kid, or the courageous paraplegic, or the savant autistic science nerd. If you're disabled, you are unacceptable unless you are superhuman in some other way. You are not allowed to be simply disabled. The world has no room for people who have the gall to be disabled without being "inspirational". You have to inspire other people, you have to be a success story. If you're not a success story, you shouldn't exist.

Fat people also shouldn't exist. Fat people look ugly and just need to stop eating so much and being so lazy. Fat people offend everyone they're around just by existing. Stay in your homes! We don't want to look at you! How dare you be fat in my presence? You obviously have no self-control. You're obviously stupid, because anybody who had any intelligence would lose weight. How dare you eat in public? You shouldn't be eating at all! If you're fat, you're not allowed to exist unless you're sufficiently contrite and constantly attend Weight Watchers and count every last calorie and eat tiny salads for lunch. And you're not allowed to lose weight, either, because if you do, you won't be an Acceptable Target anymore, and what will the world do without those?

You're not allowed to exist if you're not looking for love. Obviously, asexual people are just repressed gays. Or, if they're not, they're suppressing memories of heinous sexual abuse that caused them to swear off sex forever. Asexuality doesn't exist because love is the one thing that everybody wants, and nobody is happy unless they get it. Love is the reason why people exist; therefore, asexuals don't. You're just a late-bloomer; you're just frigid; you just need to find that special person. Oh, you're single? I'm so sorry; you'll find love one day, I'm sure of it!

If you've got a mental illness, you're not allowed to be bitchy, whiny, immature, lazy, or disorganized. You're not allowed to yell at anybody. You're not allowed to cry like a little kid. If you do any of those things, it's proof that mental illness is a character flaw, like we thought all along. Nope; if you've got a mental illness, you need to go to your psychologist like a supplicant at the altar. You need to trust his infinite wisdom and swallow every pill that comes along. And no, you are not allowed to hurt yourself trying to cope, because if you do that, you're a fake emo kid who just needs to grow up; or else you're a psychotic suicide victim waiting to happen (we can't decide which). It's completely unacceptable to ever admit to having a mental illness; no sane person would ever do that, because a mental illness is shameful and it needs to be hidden. Mentally ill people are not real people; they are somebody's crazy aunt or the crazy guy on TV, the babbling one in the straitjacket who slaughtered sixteen people. If you're mentally ill, you must do everything you possibly can to show everybody that you are going to "overcome" your mental illness and become a wonderful success with no traces of the mental illness left (except possibly in your medicine cabinet). It is unacceptable to live with a mental illness all your life. Either be cured, or be a caricature of a crazy person. Anything else, and you don't exist.

Oh, and abuse survivors? Yeah, you're not allowed to get over it. You're not allowed to say, "Yeah, it happened to me. Yeah, it sucked. It's part of my past now; it's changed who I am, but it's not poking into my present or ruining my future." Because, obviously, anybody who's ever had anything bad happen to them must be traumatized in some way. Don't worry if you don't look traumatized--we'll find that secret traumatized self and bring it out! And, obviously, when you talk about it, you're making a psychological breakthrough, because everybody who's ever been abused has difficulty talking about it. If you got over it and you can talk about it just fine, thank you very much, then you don't exist. It's unacceptable to have processed the abuse. Everybody knows you're scarred forever.

These are society's rules. According to society's rules, I don't exist. Sometimes I feel like they are trying to erase me, because everywhere I go, everything I do, I have to explain who I am and assert that really, truly, I do exist. I feel like I have to watch every moment to be sure that people don't find out how truly unacceptable I am, how little I really am worth to the world.

Sometimes I just get tired. I get tired of trying to prove that I exist. I feel like I just want to give in and be who they expect me to be, because that would just be so much easier.

One of the skills I would highly recommend any Spectrum person to learn is sewing. Mending, altering, and creating your own clothing and your own blankets, curtains, etc., is very useful when you have rather exacting specifications as to which particular configurations of the aforesaid articles will not turn your brain into a quivering blob of jelly, especially if you are also financially challenged and cannot buy exactly what you want (assuming, of course, that exactly what you want even exists in the first place).

My latest project is a weighted blanket. For those of you who don't know what these lovely things are, think of the lead apron you wear to get x-rays; only bigger. They are wonderful for people with all sorts of sensory issues, because they simply feel so good that you cannot be too upset when you are under one. (As with most strategies, they don't work for everybody.) I am very fond of my feather comforter, which I weighed yesterday and estimated to weigh about seven to ten pounds. I decided to make the financial investment in a weighted blanket, since it seemed logical that I would benefit from having one. (You simply cannot use a feather comforter in the summertime.) For me, "financial investment" does not mean going online and buying one for $100-$200; with the prices you pay for a twin-sized, 10-pound weighted blanket, "way out of my price range" is an understatement.

Here's what I bought:
10 pounds worth of glass beads, about an inch in diameter, the sort you put in the bottoms of fish tanks and as decorations in vases of artificial flowers. $10.
Two twin size used sheet sets from Goodwill. $4.44. Since I only used the flat sheets, I now have two fitted sheets and two pillowcases as well.
Two rolls of thin quilt batting. $12.96

What I already had:
Feather bed cover (free from Mom)
Sewing machine and accessories (a good buy at $70, and has paid for itself several times over)
Thread, pins, scissors, etc. (probably $20, but mostly reusable)
Two annoying cats who tried to "help" (priceless).


The finished weighted blanket. Twin size; 11 pounds.

Process (probably something anybody can do if they know how to make a quilt, or can learn):

• Iron both sheets.
• Pin the larger sheet to the floor.
• Layer two sheets of batting on top of the bottom sheet, then the smaller sheet on top of the batting.
• Cut the batting and top sheet so that they are smaller than the bottom sheet. There should be about a two-inch border of the bottom, larger sheet remaining around the spot where you cut the batting and the top sheet.
• Take that two-inch border and fold it over on top of the top sheet. Pin it down, and tuck in the corners, like you would with any quilt.
• Sew three sides of the border onto the rest of the blanket. Leave the fourth side open.
• Count the glass beads. Find an arrangement that lets you divide the blanket into equal squares. For me, that was 300 glass beads and a 20x15 arrangement of squares.
• Use chalk to divide the blanket into equal squares. Sew up either the vertical or horizontal lines, whichever are perpendicular to the side of the blanket you left open. This should leave some long pockets which you can access via the side of the blanket where you didn't sew the border closed.
• While sewing up the lines that go the other direction, at each line insert one glass bead between the layers of batting in each long pocket (you wondered why I bought two thin rolls of batting instead of one thick, right? This is why. Glass beads are a bit lumpy and you want them between the batting layers.).
• Alternately insert one line of glass beads, and sew up one line, then insert another row of glass beads. Each square should contain one glass bead and be sewn shut on all four sides.
• When finished inserting all the glass beads, you can sew up the fourth edge of the blanket.
• Snip off threads and check for and correct any mistakes.
• Wash the blanket, because by now it will be dusty with chalk. Hand-wash, hang dry. Use a sturdy clothesline. I am covering mine with a feather bed cover, because that way I don't have to wash it as often.
• Realize it is 10 a.m. and you have not slept all night.

And yes, this blanket is just as nice as I thought it would be--a little lumpy, but I expected that, especially since I wanted it to be washable more than I wanted to risk the issues involved with working with sand or very small glass/plastic beads.

Time: Twelve hours of hyperfocused activity.
Price: $27.40

Hey, look at that, my sewing machine just paid for itself again!

Another recent project has been to fix the sleeves of some shirts--about eight of them, the same style and different colors--which I have been wearing daily. The sleeves are the only non-comfortable part of the shirts; they are gathered with elastic:

To solve this problem, I tore out the seams at the sleeves, removed the elastic, and hemmed the sleeves again. Then, because the sleeves were now wider than sleeves with straight hems rather than gathered ones, I put in a sort of dart at the top of the sleeve, to narrow the opening.

As you can see, the edge of the sleeve is now quite straight, without any annoying gathers or elastic to bother me.

Most of the pants I wear are altered; the sleeves of the sweaters (usually too long for my arms) are altered; I wear my cell phone (which rings to remind me to eat/sleep/study) in a belt pouch I made myself... etc. That's just sewing. I also use scarves, hats, and crocheted blankets I've made myself. If you choose your supplies carefully (but only if you do choose them carefully), making your own things, or altering ones you find cheaply, can be a great money-saver when what you want is either expensive or needs to be custom-made! Just be sure to leave yourself enough time to either write yourself a list of steps and follow it, or periodically stand there looking perplexed while figuring out what to do next. Expect to learn to sew quickly if you are good with mechanical and visual/spatial things. Average or better fine-motor skills are a plus but can be made unnecessary through practice.

Autistic people are not the next step in evolution. However, you can't go to the other extreme and say that autism needs to be removed from the human gene pool. But why? Autistics don't reproduce as often; doesn't that mean the trait is undesirable? Nope. Autism genetics have a purpose. As far as natural selection goes, the function of autism genes is to benefit the population as a whole--but this is only possible if autistic genetics do not replace NT genetics.

Consider:
1. Autistics are less likely to reproduce than NTs (low social skills, preoccupation with something other than getting dates, and a higher incidence of asexuality).
2. Autistics are more likely to have splinter skills and extreme specialization and thus more likely to create technological innovation.

For autism to benefit the human species, the best possible state is to have some autistic people in the population--but not too many. Each autistic that is produced means fewer children in the next generation, but there is also a chance of more innovation for that same next generation. The balance is at the point where the loss in children that the autistics don't have, is balanced by the survival of other children because of the new technology.*

Bob, the Autistic Caveman, invents fire. Because he is too nerdy for the cave-women, he has no children. However, Alice, his sister, takes advantage of the fire he invented to successfully raise five children to reproductive age. Even though Bob has no children, Alice, who shares half his genes, passes on her half of his DNA to her children. What's more, Bob's autism had a permanent effect: Not only do Alice's children benefit from the invention of fire, but so does every generation thereafter. Because even one innovation can confer a very large survival benefit to the entire society, Bob's autistic DNA sticks around, mostly recessive and occasionally expressing itself. Even though the vast majority of the autistic cave-men who result don't manage to invent the wheel or create the first spear, the small number who make permanent changes are enough to keep Bob's clan successfully competing against all the other cave-people clans, and enough to make up for the small decrease in overall reproduction.

If Bob had not been autistic, Bob might have had two children, but Alice would not have been able to take advantage of fire, and so only two of her children survive to adulthood. In this case, Bob passes on his genes; but he does not give his group of cave-people any permanent advantage. Soon, Bob and his tribe of NT cave-men are assimilated or crowded out by other tribes, where autistic genes have allowed technological innovations.

This only works, though, if the majority of the cavemen are neurotypical. Taking advantage of a trait that lowers reproduction, like autism does, is only possible when that trait is not expressed in the majority of a society's members.

Other than the glaring ethical problems, that's where the eugenics movement was wrong: Eliminating "undesirable" genes is not the way to make a species stronger. Diversity is. The more ways your society has to look at a problem, the more likely they will be to solve it. The more diverse the personalities, the more likely that there will be, when it is necessary, the right person for any given crucial job. The more cultures, the more ideas you can pull from to create new ideas. Flexibility is the key, not uniformity. The more the people in a society take care of each other, the more specialists they can produce, the more innovation is possible. That's the exact opposite of the eugenicists' ideas--taking care of disabled people makes a society stronger. The cost is worth it. (Not just because some of said disabled specialists will invent fire, either. The knowledge that you will be supported if you become incapable of supporting yourself leaves you free not to spend all your energy on making yourself as self-sufficient as possible--also allowing for specialization--and that knowledge exists only in societies that do actually take care of their disabled members.)

It doesn't just apply to autism, either. All sorts of different brains can create all sorts of different advantages. Sure, the individual might be less likely, on average, to reproduce; but if the existence of traits like his benefits his society, his genetics will stick around, as they should, making his society stronger.

*This is not a new idea; many genetic traits exist which make it harder for the individual to reproduce but easier for the society to survive. SIckle-cell anemia is the first trait discovered to have this effect; while sickle-cell anemia represents a serious reproductive disadvantage (untreated, usually resulting in death before reproductive age), sickle-cell trait gives the individual a high degree of resistance to malaria. The number of people who have sickle-cell anemia is highly correlated with the severity of the endemic malaria in any given area.

Sometimes it is difficult to be a scientist and a Christian at the same time.

It's not that Christianity is incompatible with science; that's not just false but really the opposite of what I see. The existence of a universe that's perfect for life--for that matter, existence itself, that there's something rather than nothing, but something impermanent and subject to entropy--seems to make sense to me only if there also existed someone outside space-time, with extreme intelligence and extreme power, who sparked the universe. While pure science can't lead us to God, it does tend to point in that direction.

However, if there's one thing the scientific mind knows, it's that you cannot prove anything--ever. You may have a p-value of .00001 (and if you do, I envy the accuracy of your equipment and/or the size of your sample); but you will never have a p-value of zero. There's always a chance that your experiment is invalid, that your hypothesis is incorrect, that you need to go back to the drawing board or re-design your experiment.

Arguments for and against God are mostly the realm of philosophy, not science, because science can't work with anything that can't be measured. Mathematicians juggle infinities all the time; string theorists deal with dimensions we can't imagine except in mathematical terms; but when something doesn't obey the laws of the universe, how are you supposed to put it in a test tube?

Well, of course, you can't. And that's my problem. I'm a scientist; I want to test everything. When I test things, I want to know what probability I have of being wrong. I want to turn life into a controlled experiment wherein I know the numbers and know the odds. I've even made decisions by assigning numerical values and probabilities to the possible outcomes.

Enter... Faith. Defined, faith means acting on something you can't prove. Faith is difficult for scientists. We tend to say things like, "Well, there's a high correlation..." and, "We've showed that it's very probable that..." and hedge our bets until the odds come so very close to 100% that we call it a scientific law and build other ideas on it. Never, though, 100%. Achilles never overtakes the tortiose, so to speak. Scientists teach themselves never, never to assume the 100%, even when it is a scientific law, because those laws have been overturned before and may be overturned in the future.

There comes a point, naturally, where it becomes silly to always take into account that an idea with a high probability of being true may in fact not be true; we assume that gravity works a certain way, that chemical bonds act the way we describe them, that natural selection does indeed determine which organism passes on its DNA. We've simply seen it so often that we can skip over the last tiny p-value and assume fact. That is as close as science can come to faith.

I have mentioned before that I have always had a great degree of existential anxiety. Lately, the trouble hasn't been the probability, small but real, that an afterlife does not exist; what's really been bugging me is the idea that it's impossible to tell whether or not it does. I've often been annoyed that God tempted us with the offer of eternal life, because it's hard to tell if you're in it just because you want said eternal life, or if you really want to know God.

Our inability to determine, 100%, if God exists is one of the most annoying, frightening facts of life. The whole concept of Good is dependent on the idea that life has intrinsic meaning, because if there were no intrinsic meaning, then any meaning you determined for yourself would vanish once your neurons stopped firing.

I have literally been fascinated, for my whole life, by stories of people who were able to make the decision to give up their lives for a greater cause; because the ability to make that decision exemplifies faith. The only way that self-sacrifice is logical for someone who does not know for sure that life has meaning beyond just one's own lifespan (and "does not know for sure" here includes even the people who are certain by all but an infinitesimally small amount) would be if the situation were such that the person would not want to live with the results of a decision not to die. Essentially, if you could not be sure that life had meaning, it would not be self-sacrifice, but simple suicide.

"Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend..." Faith and love, and thus Good, go hand-in-hand. The only way a person can be self-sacrificing without also being suicidal is to believe--not just "think probably true", but believe--that life has meaning beyond death.

Why is self-sacrifice so important? Well, it's the extreme expression of a principle that guides many other smaller decisions. We all spend our lives doing something; and we have to make those decisions somehow. Do I try to encourage my neighbor? Do I go out of my way to help my community? Do I do what I believe is right, even when I know nobody will ever know what I did? Do I only do good when I feel good about it; or is there something more important to that decision than how I know I will feel about it?

Every day we live is another day closer to death. Every moment is precious... or every moment is meaningless. If you believed that life had no meaning, you would be free to act according to what made you feel good, whether that were altruism, love, knowledge, revenge, or simple sensory pleasure. If you believed that life had meaning, you would have to act according to that meaning--not as a moral straitjacket, but because that would be the logical way to act. If you are not sure which is the case, though, you hover awkwardly between those two choices.

And that's where self-sacrifice, of the non-suicidal sort, comes in: It's the one decision that can be rationally made only by someone who believes that life has meaning. If you were to doubt at all, the logical decision would be to live rather than die, because the possible outcome of dying in a world where there is no meaning must invariably be assigned a negative-infinity value, overwhelming all other possible outcomes of that choice.

We make that decision every day, whether we are sure of life or not. Someone who chooses to die, chooses to spend whatever part of life they might have had after that point. Someone who makes a decision that does not involve death, still chooses to spend some part of their life. The currency of life is time, and we cannot help spending it.

Back, again, to faith. It is amusing to see the squabbling between different Christian denominations about which one is more important--faith or works? That is, which one really effects salvation--your belief that God wants to make you perfect; or your actions based on your belief? These people are all being really very silly, because faith and works are quite simply inseparable. Asking to see one without the other is like saying, "Well, I want a hamburger; but I don't want any meat, or any bun; and leave off the condiments altogether!" I almost think there ought to be a word that encompasses both, because they are really two parts of a singular thing.

But there I was, still very unsure. Over the last few months, especially (this isn't actually a new thing; it's just lately been more prominent than usual), I have been very anxious because of that uncertainty. Maybe it's because, for the first time in a while, I've truly wanted to live. A long-term struggle with depression will do that to you--you forget just how important life is, and how attached you are to it. But life isn't anything if you don't know what to do with it; and you aren't doing much of anything if you can't make choices. And choices, whether you know it or not, all depend on the question: Does life have meaning?

I have literally yelled at God over this stupid fence-sitting uncertainty. For months, my prayers have been prefaced more often than not with, "Well, if you exist..." and full of heartfelt pleas for some kind of evidence, especially a new logical proof (of which I already have a great collection); for I know very well how statistically-insignificant coincidences prove nothing, and how easy it is for a person to mistake a hallucination for a vision. Eventually I grew so desperate that I said, "I need proof. If you won't give it to me, then please, kill me before I lose my faith. I would rather die than live thinking life were meaningless."

Asking for death when you know you really want to live is frightening; but it's also oddly reassuring. After all, if God didn't exist, he couldn't kill me; and if he did, then I most certainly didn't want to live thinking life were meaningless.

Last night, trying to figure these things out before they drove me entirely crazy, I did something I don't usually do: Instead of asking for some logical argument that nobody had ever thought of before me, I asked for a sign. You know how people will do silly things like open their Bibles and point without looking, hoping to hit on the perfect Bible verse; or take coincidences for messages from Heaven when really they would have taken anything at all as a sign? Yeah, I don't do that much. I know just how easy it is to fool yourself into thinking God is saying just about anything you want him to, and that's no good; plus, it isn't scientific. But, I thought, maybe if I made sure that what I asked for was unusual enough, and unlikely to be a coincidence, then I might make an experiment of it; and I was really at my wit's end. You know it's getting serious when you start thinking, "This is more important than survival."

So what I asked was that, when I went to church today, I would be told by someone--specifically, and without my saying a thing about it, nor starting a conversation anywhere in that area--that God existed (in the specific context of God existing versus not existing). This is an event with a low probability, because I am very introverted and faceblind to boot; so it's difficult for me to remember people well enough to make friends with them. I often leave directly after church and come late, and on days when I'm tired of socializing, may spend the service in the lobby listening to the sermon on speakers. What's more, most of these people tend to take God's existence for granted (or else do not talk much about their own doubts). Our pastor is a traditionalist and the sort to either open up Luke 2 the Sunday before Christmas, or use whatever text he had been coming up to in his sermon series to connect Jesus's birth with the reason he had to be born in the first place. I thought that if he mentioned God's existence in the sermon, it would be in passing if at all.

My estimate of the probability of such an event occurring, during a single Sunday's trip to church, would be about 5%, or one in twenty. That means it should occur about twice a year, which is about how often it has occurred.

Well, God didn't just have somebody randomly mention it in a conversation. He apparently hijacked the entire sermon. The pastor did not follow tradition this Sunday. Instead, he opened up Hebrews 11. Yeah, that Hebrews 11. He proceeded to mention that God did indeed exist, contrary to what some people thought; but that you could not put him in a test tube, nor could you prove his existence scientifically, no matter how much nature nudged you and pointed in his direction; that faith itself, and the things you did because of your faith, was evidence in and of itself. He used the same phrase I've often used--You can't put God in a test tube. He might have gotten it from me, for all I know; I had talked about that very problem to my pastor last summer, when I took the membership class and backed out of actually becoming a member at the last second. His mentioning it in the sermon today, when he would normally have done a Christmas sermon, rather than any other day, on the day I happened to be going to the service rather than the Sunday school (I usually pick one or the other) is still very unlikely.

I didn't believe my ears, at first. Didn't think such a silly experiment was going to work. Naturally, I found myself wanting very much to cry, and wanting very much not to cry, at the same time (an awkward position in the middle of a church service--we are not usually very emotional at church, and I'm no different; I've no wish to make a scene).

So... I had my experiment. Only 5% probability that it would've happened anyway. That's unlikely... doesn't make any kind of ironclad case, but definitely at the point where, if you're sitting in the lab, you're starting to think, "Hey, we're going to get our grant renewed!" (Or, well, in my case, more like "they're going to get their grant renewed"; I'm just along for the ride, thank goodness, and don't have to bother with things like that. Ah, the joys of being an undergrad.)

At the end of the service, I spoke to the pastor and asked to become an official church member. I've been putting it off for a while, not quite wanting to make a profession of faith when I had so much doubt. Today, though, I knew I couldn't put it off any longer, whether or not that 5% probability was staring me in the face.

I know now that I will probably always have to live with uncertainty; but also that doubt is not the opposite of faith. The opposite of faith is more like... indifference. I think I am practically incapable of that.

By the way, I asked the pastor why he chose Hebrews 11 for today's sermon, as it was so odd for Christmas, and he replied, "I have no idea. I guess the Lord just impressed it on my heart." Yeah, I'm kind of guessing he did. In fact, I'm 95% sure.

As some of you who've been following my blog might remember, I had a serious stress problem right around the middle of September, which led to my dropping all but one class and wishing I could sue my GP for caring more about my weight than the fact that I'd developed an irregular heartbeat (best guess? yes, stress-related). After three or four weeks, I had recovered pretty well; after five weeks, I was going stir-crazy having not much to do. There is something about me that is always, always aware that my time is limited; and I hate wasting any of it.

By mid-October, I found myself going to the local food pantry. The last time I'd been there was between the endless succession of jobs won and lost, when I couldn't pinch another penny and the food money ran low. This time I was there because I wanted to volunteer. I'd always meant to do so, because I don't like taking handouts; but the food pantry is open during the day and I usually had classes then, so I was limited to the church library and the cat shelter. At first, I volunteered at the pantry for three half-days a week; but eventually I found the stress level creeping back up, and reduced to two half-days. (Kind of pitiful, huh, when a person can't even work three half-day shifts a week? But there it is. Maybe one of these days I will learn to accept that I am actually not some sort of lazy bum who can't be bothered to put in a good day's work... but to be honest, I am still telling myself exactly that, even though when I try, things get scattered and I tend to lose half my brain along the way. Granted, the job does trigger some of the easiest sources of overload; other places aren' t as intense.)

Officially, my job is to listen to voice mail, take down relevant details, call the person back, get more details, and tell them when the office is open. The conversations are very formulaic, so I have little trouble with them, but the usual auditory-processing difficulty with phones does mean I have to concentrate very hard. I've learned to mentally "record" what was said, and play it over a few times until I can translate it into text. It's better than face-to-face, though.

There's a lot of chaos at the pantry that I wish I could get my hands on and re-organize. For one thing, the files are all still kept on paper--lots of index cards with names, addresses, phone numbers, and dates. Currently, we keep the records up to date by first having the client call the food pantry's voice mail number, then calling the client back and getting their information correct on the intake form and perhaps correcting the information on their file card (which is handwritten, often misfiled or illegible); then they have to come in and fill out yet another form with basically the same information on it. What's more, that same information has to be confirmed at every monthly visit (people are allowed to come in once a month; most don't come in that often, though some do). If we had all this on computer, we wouldn't have to fill out two forms every visit; we'd just have to update the relevant information on the computer and have them sign a simple statement that they're below the income limit (twice the federal poverty line). But no. That would be too easy.

These people wait in line sometimes for three hours to come in; and the process for getting them through the pantry is painfully slow. They fill out all those forms while actually sitting at the desk with our one front desk attendant watching them. (Lately I've been handing them the forms to fill out while they're sitting waiting in the hall. Apparently this is revolutionary.)

Another place where the process is really inefficient is that, after the client fills out the forms and receives the basic groceries that everybody gets, they are directed to a second person, who helps them choose eight to ten items from a group of shelves. And, while they stand there taking their time choosing, the front desk person (who now has nothing to do) sits there and doesn't call in the next person until the first person is completely done choosing their groceries, which can take five minutes or more. The reasoning behind this completely baffles me. I know it has nothing to do with privacy because these people have already been sitting in the hall for a couple of hours, where everyone who walks by sees them. Have they never heard of the concept of an assembly line? Pass the first person on to the food shelves and start processing the next!

If I'd designed this system, there would be two people manning the front desk, helping two people at a time, and no voice-mail rigmarole at all. We'd use the computer that's sitting right there on the desk, instead of the huge file of illegible, misalphebetized cards. And, while it's nice to be able to choose some of your own groceries, it's nicer not to sit there for three hours, so I'd cut those down to three or four. It's really not rocket science. I'm almost certain I could cut down the average appointment from something like fifteen minutes to something like five--confirm your information, pick up your groceries, and go.

Apparently, whoever did design the system was thinking, "But these are poor people! They have nothing better to do but stand in line!"

Right. Because they couldn't possibly want to be in the job office down the hall looking for employment, or home putting up their feet after a day as a Wal-Mart greeter, or taking care of their six kids they're inexplicably trying to feed on $57 in food stamps.

I looked up my own card from the food pantry's files. It shows I've been there seven times. My experience, apparently, was typical; most clients don't come back year after year. They tend to come in for a few months, when times are hard, and then not need the food pantry anymore.

A lot of people seem to think that those who ask for "handouts" are invariably deadbeats; but I've seen very little of that. Among those that consistently use the food pantry, there are a lot of retired people, whose social security checks don't cover everything they need. There's a fairly large number of disabled people, as well, especially those whose disabilities come in the form of chronic illness. And then there are the people who are working, but whose jobs don't pay enough to feed their families--especially those in the awkward spot of earning too much to get food stamps but not enough to pay for food and rent simultaneously. Those are the typical long-term clients.

Short-term, you'll see homeless people, women from the battered women's shelter, and the recently unemployed. That last group is, not surprisingly, bigger than it ever was before. Maybe that's part of the reason for the chaos; there are just more people coming in than the food pantry has been used to helping, and the food pantry (being run by traditionalists, and with mostly retired people for volunteers) simply hasn't had the time to adjust. When you've been giving out twenty orders of groceries per day, and suddenly get asked to give out fifty or sixty, I guess it can get understandably difficult. (That doesn't mean I like the chaos any more, though, however good an excuse there is for it.)

Those who actually take advantage of the food pantry probably represent 1% or less of the people who come in. Families who report that they get $300 or more in food stamps for two adults and a child, but come in for groceries anyway... Yeah, I've got difficulty believing they are actually in real need. There are a few families where just about everybody comes in--Mom, Dad and his new girlfriend, their six grown kids living scattered around town, generally taking care of kids of their own--where you know people were simply raised in the welfare system. But these families are actually very few and far between. The average client, like I said, is a person who's going through hard times, and, once he gets out of his sticky situtation, won't need to come back.

The people assembling the actual bags of groceries are a bunch of kids in a federal "jobs for youngsters" program--ages sixteen to twenty-four, assigned to the food pantry. They spend a lot of time being similarly inefficient; but I can't blame them, since there are three of them hired to do a job that one person can do easily (I know; I've done said job by myself several times). Maybe I have an advantage over the average person when it comes to figuring out efficiency, though, because I have to sit back and plan the way to do all sorts of things, from taking showers to cleaning rooms; because if I don't, I get confused midway through and completely lose track. Instead of just going and doing it, planning on the fly like most people do, I look at the situation as a sort of theoretical problem, all the parts of the task like tetris pieces in my head, fitting them together into a useful arrangement. If you think about things before you do them, you can generally see where the procedure could be changed to make things easier. Most people don't seem to do that because they've never had problems planning things on the fly, because they can multi-task whenever they like, instead of having to plan things out beforehand like I do.

It's annoying, though, because I have been trying to be friendly to everybody; but I still can't recognize anybody. The volunteers tend to come in once or twice a month (apparently I am odd for coming in twice a week); so I have only a day's exposure to them until they come back in two or four weeks. I haven't learned to recognize the youngsters filling the grocery bags, either; but we are now in that awkward stage where I haven't memorized them, but they memorized me long ago. So I have to try to guess who is in what group, whether they are a client or a worker or a volunteer, and respond appropriately. It's a bit confusing.

I try to keep to myself. Apparently this has been unsuccessful, because one boy told me he liked me, and I responded that I already had a boyfriend because I didn't want to have a half-hour discussion about what "I'm asexual" means (yes, yes, I know, I should be more forthright about it... there's little enough awareness as-is... mea culpa, really). And then today, another boy came up to me and asked whether I had been talking about people behind their backs. I was puzzled and confused, because not only don't I talk about people behind their backs when I can't even recognize who is who yet, I don't talk much about people at all. So I told him I was puzzled and confused, and that I don't talk about people behind their backs, and he went away. I still have no clue what that was all about.

At least I can recognize the lady who runs the food pantry. She has a distinctive pattern of wrinkles on her neck, but I know better than to comment about it because old people are inexplicably ashamed of their wrinkles. I'm just thanking my lucky stars that older people look different from each other, instead of practically interchangeable like younger people do. She is probably quite old, because she has been running the food pantry for a while, and was retired already when she started it. Now the problem is that she is getting older and can't work full days anymore; so the only people who are left are volunteers, and very few volunteers come often enough to really become veterans at it. Lots of people don't know the answers to questions clients ask; and sometimes clients and their questions fall through the cracks between shifts. There's no good way for people to communicate, and it's frustrating. People just hope they mention the right things to the right person. I have given up on mentioning anything and taken to writing notes.

So I suppose you would think that with all this complaining I am doing, I don't like working at the food pantry. But that's not true; I actually like it, most of the time. The thing about giving food to people is that even when people are looking for handouts, all you're handing them is food. Not a free ride, just a full stomach. And anyway, how are you supposed to find a job or take care of your kids or survive your shift at Wal-Mart if you're either dizzy from not enough food, or sick because you could only afford cheap junk?

I don't know why more college students don't do things like this. Most people have families and jobs and spend all their time on those things; but college students usually don't. I think maybe they just don't know how to go about it. My school actually has a class to teach people how to do volunteer work, including the basics of how to start a non-profit organization.

Times are hard; and when that happens, people help each other out. We are too big a town here to really consider each other neighbors, but "fellow human being" is good enough, especially if you study philosophy. And anyway, it's good for people to do something about the general crappiness of the world. We don't feel as helpless that way.

Last summer, I participated in an internship at the pharm/tox department at my university; and when the summer ended, I was asked to stay on for a few more months. One of the projects going on in my lab is trying to determine whether there is any connection between circadian rhythm and diabetes. Today, when I went to the lab, one of the experiments was ending for the forty-two mice in three groups: One, a control group; another, given fructose water during the night (when mice are active); and a third, given fructose water during the day (when mice are normally asleep). Mice on a high-sugar diet are good models for diabetes.

Naturally, mice like sugar water (don't we all?) and will disrupt their usual sleep-wake cycle to access it, which means they're eating when they would normally be asleep, which is of course the point of the project. What, exactly, happens when mice get high-sugar midnight (midday?) snacks?

At the end of almost every experiment, the mice are euthanized, and their tissues collected. It's amazing how much data you can get from a single mouse. I've spent hours on a fifteen-minute recording of mouse EKG (the electrical activity in the heart), or counting the bright pixels (by computer, thank goodness) in a photograph taken of a slide with a mouse heart section, stained for various substances of interest. I've done a lot of statistical work, too, which I find amusing because I've taken exactly one undergraduate statistics class and they still trust me with it (!). I've dug through hours or days of recordings taken with implanted telemetry equipment--tiny transmitters surgically implanted in a lab mouse, which can transmit things like heart rate, body temperature, movements, and blood pressure to a computer across the room.

It's odd, looking at a single mouse, just how much information you can get from such a tiny creature; while the mouse, of course, is totally oblivious to it all.

When I first was told we were working with animal research, I was also given a course in how to humanely handle lab animals. Every experiment has to be written down exactly, in advance, with everything that is done to the animals, every drug, every surgery (if any), how they'll be housed, etc., and has to be reviewed by a committee which checks that we're using the fewest animals possible with the least distress possible; then we're checked, periodically, to be sure we're following the protocol. Any changes have to be approved; and the animals are regularly checked by the institutional vet. Apparently, you can get in really big trouble for deviating from the protocol, and can even lose your grant or get kicked off the program. To me--animal lover here!--that was really reassuring. I'm aware of the necessity for animals in research; there are things you can do with living creatures that you'll never manage with tissue cultures. But that doesn't mean I can't care about the animals' welfare.

So... today, the experiment ended, and forty-one mice had to be killed. (Forty-two is around the minimum necessary to detect an effect of the size we were expecting; one mouse died before the end of the experiment, not surprisingly since mice are not so long-lived, so there were forty-one left.) We do call it "killing"--in the protocol, of course, it's "euthanasia", but I have a feeling these scientific types don't like euphemisms any more than I do. It's the second time I've done tissue collection; and I didn't like it this time any more than I did the last. Nobody else did, either. It's a tiring, picky job; and while nobody bonds with lab mice, nobody likes killing them. You get used to it, sure; but if you ever like it, I question your sanity.

The whole operation was set up in assembly-line fashion, eight of us in a small room with stainless-steel counters and a lot of equipment. The mice, still in their cages, were brought on carts; and another cart of microcentrifuge tubes waited for the blood and tissues.

Like many labs, we kill our mice by decapitation. The apparatus looks much like what you'd expect, a V-shaped guillotine; the operator simply takes the mouse by the scruff of the neck and presses the lever to remove the head at the base of the skull. For a mouse, I cannot imagine this causes much pain (a great deal less, I would suspect, than my cats inflict on the mice they catch). As I've heard it, a human has maybe ten seconds of consciousness after the heart is no longer pumping blood to the brain; for a mouse, with a much faster heartbeat (600-700 beats per minute, as opposed to 70), the time to death is less than a second. After the mouse is dead, the body is passed down the line, where it is snipped open with scissors, high-school frog-dissection fashion, and the various organs are removed, ready for analysis. Some parts are fixed in formaldehyde, others, frozen in dry ice. The blood is put into tubes prepared with heparin (to stop coagulation).

I had the job of weighing hearts and kidneys, recording the weights on a clipboard. With mice, everything is tiny; and everything has to be done gently. The hearts, submerged in a buffer solution to stop the tissue damage, still beat after being taken from the body (the heart has its own electrical system, and will beat for some time after the brain is dead). The scale I was using measures weights to a thousandth of a gram; most mouse hearts weigh about .15 grams, and the scale has to be so sensitive that breathing on it can change the measurement.

A mouse heart is maybe the size of a small pea, deep red in color. It's too small to see details without a magnifying glass; the ends of the arteries and veins still attached look like bits of string. The heart has to be picked up with tweezers because clumsy human fingers are simply too big. Mouse kidneys are the size of kidney beans, and look exactly like kidney beans; if you squint at a bisected kidney, you can just barely see the structures. The brains are white and wrinkled, but look very simple compared to the human brain (which I have also had the privilege of studying). When the organs are sectioned for staining, they should be whole and undamaged; having worked with organs that weren't whole and undamaged, I am always a little paranoid of causing damage. Every sample gets its own microcentrifuge tube, and each tube gets its own label.

To keep ourselves from accidentally skewing the experiment, we kill the mice in random order. My list shows only the mouse ID; never the group the mouse belongs to. It's important not to know which group the mouse belongs to simply because, if you knew, you might subconsciously affect the results. Your own brain can really play tricks on you if you aren't careful.

Killing forty-one mice takes hours, even with eight people to help. The small room gets uncomfortably warm with so many people in it; and we are in protective lab coats, which makes it even warmer. The room smells strongly of mouse, with an undertone of blood. Standing up for that long without walking around makes our legs tired. We don't talk much; most of the conversation consists of things like, "Thirty-two. Right kidney," and, "Where's the PBS?" and, "Number sixteen. You guys ready?" The biohazard sharps box and the bag for everything else fill up as we work through the mice. At least we are only in a biosafety level 2 lab; it would be much worse if we had to do all this in more than just the basic protective gear we're wearing.

In the end, I ended up staying late to finish helping one of the grad students centrifuge the blood and dole out plasma into more little tubes, ready for testing. Maybe this batch of mice will tell us something interesting; with so many people who have diabetes and so many scientists studying it, contributing our little part to the body of human knowledge may mean that someone out there will arrive at a breakthrough that much sooner. But I've done this only twice so far, and while it's fascinating to see the inside of a mouse, right now I wouldn't mind not doing it again for a good long while.

As many Aspies are wont to do, I took a walk through the toy department of Wal-Mart the other day, and I noticed something interesting in the doll aisle.

Your "Baby Alive" Doll loves to be with you!... Come close, and watch me wiggle and coo! I say "mama", too! I want to cuddle with you!

Baby Born. She babbles. She baby talks. She gives kisses! Baby Born loves to give kisses to her mommy!

Little Mommy "Moments & Milestones" is so sweet! Just like you!

So what do you see? Just sugary advertising for baby dolls? Look closer.

First, remember that this advertising isn't aimed at the little girls, who generally can't read yet; the dolls are being sold to the girls' parents. And what the advertising actually says is very, very interesting.

When baby-doll advertising doesn't stick to just describing the doll's features, it usually reflects the ideas that the general public seems to have about what raising a baby should ideally be like; and practically all of that is focused straight on what the baby will do for you. Yep, that's right--it's not focused nearly so much on your caring for the baby; it's focused on how the baby will (emotionally) care for you.

The perfect baby doll, apparently, smiles, cuddles, and kisses her parents. She loves her parents, fulfilling the parents' emotional needs. She makes her milestones, saying "mama" and "dada" and making you feel happy.

Here's what this advertising is saying:

A baby will make you feel happy, because the baby will love you.

I have never once seen, on the packaging of a baby doll, the word "responsibility" (or any of its analogues). I've never seen the idea that the parent-child relationship may not be perfect. Even in dolls that are supposed to get sick, there's a little medicine dropper included to make the doll magically all better, so you can go back to being loved. (This is why you give medicine to the doll, you see. The doll will love you if you do so.)

I'm not going to go writing angry letters to the baby-doll companies, of course. This isn't some sort of insidious plot to get parents to have these odd expectations of their babies; it's just a reflection of a general tendency: Parents put expectations on their children. Long before a baby is born, a parent has plan for the baby's future, a mental image of what the baby will be like, and expectations that their baby will bond with them in a certain way, act a certain way, and be, essentially, an extension of themselves. There is a baby-shaped hole in their ideas of the future; and if the baby isn't shaped exactly like the baby-shaped hole he's supposed to fit into, they get frustrated.

It's bad enough if Baby turns out to be interested in soccer instead of cooking, or prefers to study philosophy rather than go into Daddy's plumbing business. Families have been torn apart over things like that. And that's just neurotypical children.

What if, instead of babbling and cooing, Baby stares in fascination at the play of light on the dust motes in the air? What if, instead of kissing Mommy, Baby pulls back from the overwhelming touch and cries inconsolably? What if, instead of saying, "I love you, Mommy," Baby recites the full script of her favorite Sesame Street episodes?

If you're autistic, you know what it feels like when you are expecting one thing, and get another. You had a mental plan of the future; you thought it was stable; you thought you knew what to expect, and you were following along the plan. But suddenly, something changed. Something got canceled; something got moved; somebody stayed home sick; somebody forgot to tell you what was coming up. You feel like the floor's dropped out from under you, because now your plan is invalid, and people are trying to force you along the new, unpredictable path. You have no idea where it leads, you don't like it, and you're being asked to go along with it now, right away, without time to form a new plan of the new future. It's a horrible feeling, isn't it?

Well, we're not the only ones who have that feeling. Neurotypical parents do, too, when suddenly their babies don't fit into the baby-shaped hole in their plans of the future.

They're taught to believe that a child will complete them; that a child will be what they think it will be. Sure, maybe there'll be some annoyances; they'll lose sleep, have to attend PTA meetings, and be petrified when their teenage daughters start dating. But, all in all, parenthood will follow the script. "We just want," they say, "a healthy baby." But they want a lot more, and they don't even know it.

Most parents don't have the benefits of being autistic and having to practice dealing with unexpected situations every day. Some deal with it better than others; they realize that things are different, but can still be good. Some go into denial, trying to pretend that their baby fits the baby-shaped hole in their imaginations just fine. Some try to squish and squeeze their babies, and force them to fit. Some do all of the above, eventually arriving at acceptance.

The one factor that seems to be common to parents who accept that their child is not the child in their imaginations is the acceptance that their child is a separate individual. Certainly most parents would say, "Well, of course my child is a different person from me!"; but not all parents, deep down, understand it. The idea that their child makes his own decisions, has his own opinions, and feels things independently doesn't seem to sink in much of the time. It's as though the child were still connected to some sort of emotional umbilical cord, receiving all of his substance from his mother.

A baby is not simply a thing that loves you. A baby is a person. What a child does is not just a reflection of who you are. What he thinks isn't just an extension of yourself. I've seen it so many times, especially when the child is disabled: "Why is he doing this? What should I do so that he'll do this other thing?"--as though the child had no independent agency; as if his behavior were just the result of whatever treatments you stuffed into him!

It might be okay to sell a plastic doll by saying the doll will be what you want it to be; because, of course, a doll is what you want it to be. But flesh-and-blood babies are not dolls; they are people, with an independent existence and an independent mental universe from their parents. Maybe if we realized that, we'd stop trying to treat children, disabled or not, as though their futures could fit perfectly into our own ideas of what we think should happen.

A note: When I mention mental illness, assume I am talking about it in the most general way: Any condition that can be diagnosed by a psychologist; psychological, cognitive, or neurological. It takes too long to write that phrase out every single time I mention it.

Lots of people are getting upset about the proliferation of psychiatric diagnosis. It seems like everybody's kid has ADHD, autism, or dyslexia; and everybody who hasn't got depression probably has an eating disorder, bipolar disorder, or generalized anxiety disorder. And with every new decade, a longer list of diagnoses makes it into the manuals, and more and more people are labeled with them.

But that's crazy, isn't it? Only crazy people get diagnosed with psychiatric and cognitive disorders! You have to be really, really off your rocker to deserve a psychiatric label... or do you?

Well, no. Not anymore.

Psychology is a new science. Oh, sure, we always knew something was different about some people, and the explanations ranged from demon-possession to sainthood, or just being a woman (seriously, the name for "hysteria" comes from an old word for "uterus"); but it hasn't been until recently that psychology was anything approaching a science. Even Freud worked with nothing but case studies. The first working psychiatric drug was Thorazine in 1950--before that, there weren't even any useful medications. Even today, when you read the journal articles that deal with psychology, the writers seem almost desperate to quantify their research; and an entire branch of psychology deals with psychological testing--finding ways to make the evaluation and diagnosis of a patient more concrete, instead of subjective.

We're going through a transition in the field of psychology. Older generations have the idea that being diagnosed with a psychiatric/neurological/cognitive condition means that you must have a severe condition; because in the past, those were all that were diagnosed.

But the new diagnoses, in many cases, aren't severe or obvious. To the older generations, and some members of the younger ones, this must be quite confusing; because if you don't let go of the idea that a person must be a raving lunatic to qualify for a diagnosis at all, then you will be quite surprised to see seemingly ordinary people with diagnostic labels.

The new labels come from three basic categories:
1. New disorders that have only now become recognized as a distinct group.
2. Recategorization from what used to be labeled a moral failing.
3. Less severe versions of things we already knew about.

The newly recognized disorders are easy enough to explain. With people formally studying psychology for a century or so, attempting to categorize and understand the variations of the human mind, it is only natural that many such variations will have been newly categorized. Among these are schizoaffective disorder (a name for what happens when mood disorder gets combined with schizophrenia), PTSD (first identified in veterans), and seasonal affective disorder (recently distinguished from depression for its strong circadian-rhythm conection). Autism is in this category too; it was differentiated from schizophrenia and recognized as a neurological disorder rather than a psychotic disorder. People with these disorders would, in the past, have been known to have "something wrong with them", but no particular name would have been found, and most likely, they wouldn't have seen a psychologist.

Recategorizing what has been thought to be a moral failing in the past, but turned out to be something completely different, caused more problems for the psychology profession. Now they were stepping on people's toes; folks could no longer see the person whom they thought to be annoying, stubborn, or depraved, and look down on him. The problem was, of course, that most of these diagnoses weren't moral failings at all--they were simply explained as such. In this category are things like ADHD, selective mutism (this even used to be called "elective mutism" because it was thought the child chose to be silent), gender identity disorder, and many of the disorders related to sex and sexuality. Borderline, avoidant, and narcissistic, and histrionic personality disorders go into this category, too, and so does premenstrual dysphoric disorder (also known as severe PMS). Even actual moral failings--which psychiatrists recognized as moral failings but insisted on categorizing anyhow--were added to the list, in the form of conduct disorder and antisocial personality disorder.

The last group, and the one which seems to cause the most argument, is the group of milder disorders just being described, and milder cases of known disorders being diagnosed. Dysthymia and cyclothemia are long-term, low-level forms of depression and bipolar disorder. Schizotypal and schizoid personality disorders may be (or may not be) mild versions of schizophrenia. Asperger's, of course, is a milder variant of autism.

Many diagnoses have simply been expanded to include not just the cases where they cause near-total disability, but the cases where they cause distress and/or mild to moderate dysfunction. Now you can be diagnosed with OCD even if you aren't closeted in your house and spending all your time counting things; you can be diagnosed if you simply spend a few hours before and after work on your rituals, still managing to raise a family and keep a job but giving up your free time. You don't have to be completely unable to interact with the world to be diagnosed with depression; you just have to be in significant distress, even if you can still push yourself to get through your day.

All three groups, I think, are legitimate reasons to introduce new diagnostic categories. Differentiating disorders from each other, when they fall into distinguishable groups, makes a great deal of sense for the purposes of treatment (I've argued that Autism and Asperger's do not in fact fall into distinguishable groups; there may be others like this, but most of the ones I know about are in fact different and do fall into recognizable groups--autism and schizophrenia, for example, are demonstrably different.) And now that we know more about many diagnostic categories, it's no longer logical to call them moral failings--especially since many people with these diagnoses can be shown to have tried for decades to "overcome" their own "moral failings", with little success until outside help, medication, or a helpful environment are present.

If you can't change it, no matter how hard you try, then it can't be a moral failing--"moral" implies you have a choice. (It is, however, a moral failing to refuse to get help when you know your condition is hurting someone else.) Psychology can help these individuals by teaching new strategies, finding useful medication, or providing useful accommodations. What good is it to simply berate these people for being somehow deficient, if such an approach has never done much good, while helping them learn what they need (organization lessons for an ADHD kid, for example) tends to be at least moderately successful? The only benefit I can see to it is that people like to feel superior to others. The recognition that what most people do easily is difficult or impossible for people with various psychological diagnoses forces a change in perspective; after all, if it's easy for you to organize your desk, but takes your ADHD child six hours and maximal effort to do, can you really look down on him for having a messy desk? Nope. The proper approach is to teach him how to organize a desk. Suddenly, the easy, acceptable target is lost. That upsets some people.

(A word about conduct disorder and antisocial personality disorder: I do believe that people diagnosed with these make their choices, and hurt people willingly. They are not excuses for any of their actions. However, they can benefit, if they choose to, from therapy, because there are peripheral issues that can be addressed to allow them to make better decisions: Namely, self-inhibition; decision-making; understanding of consequences.)

The milder disorders seem to cause the most contention because they fly in the face of a stereotype we seem to hold dear: Mental illness is severe. It's obvious. It's rare. And it can't happen to me, because I'm more sensible than that.

It's true that for a long time, we identified only severe mental illness as mental illness at all; and identified only severe cognitive and neurological disorders as disorders. Epilepsy was only diagnosed if you had grand mal seizures; autism was only diagnosed if you couldn't speak; depression was only diagnosed if you couldn't take care of yourself or tried to commit suicide. However, this is an incomplete view of mental illness. Mental illness isn't present or absent, either causing severe distress or not there at all. There are in-between gradations, in which a person has significant difficulty, but doesn't yet need constant supervision. Think of physical illness and disability: There are gradations there, too. The common cold is just as legitimate a medical diagnosis as pneumonia; an incomplete spinal cord injury causing weakness in the legs is just as real as a complete SCI which requires a ventilator and wheelchair. Why should mental, cognitive, and neurological diagnoses be different?

That mental illness must be obvious (or, at least, be dramatically non-obvious until someone snaps and murders someone) is also quite a false stereotype. It does not need to be obvious. Many medical diagnoses are not obvious. Notably, high blood pressure can cause absolutely no symptoms. Diabetes can be silent, in its early stages. Most cancers don't show themselves for quite a while. A person can go about his business quite happily while infected with HIV. The reason we diagnose these problems is that they will eventually cause trouble, if left alone; and so it is with many psychology diagnoses. Learning disabilities will eventually cause a child to fall behind in school. Depression can worsen. It makes sense to do something about these things while they're still small and minimally harmful. (However: It's important to remember that psychological treatments, including the various therapies, are NOT free of risks and side effects, and should be pursued carefully, as any treatment should be.)

The fact is that mental illness is not rare--no more rare, anyway, than physical illness. While you may never have a mental/cognitive/neurological condition that requires intensive support, odds are that you or someone in your family does have, or will in your/their lifetime have, a legitimate psychological diagnosis--a condition that causes significant distress or dysfunction. It probably won't be severe. You may just have a child who needs extra reading lessons thanks to dyslexia; or you may have nightmares and flashbacks after being mugged. You might find that your brain doesn't deal with winter unless you get enough light. You might have problems getting over the baby blues and need an antidepressant. It's about time we stopped ignoring this real human suffering. After all, we don't ignore sprained ankles or high blood pressure just because they're not medical emergencies that require an ambulance and an ICU bed, do we? We shouldn't ignore these less-severe psychological/neurological/cognitive problems, either.

The transition we as a society are going through in regards to psychology is an awkward one: At the same time as the stereotype is still, "Mental illness is severe, obvious, rare, and morally questionable," we're recognizing that psychological, congitive, and neurolgical conditions aren't rare at all. People diagnosed with anything at all immediately get the idea that because they have a psychological diagnosis, it must be stereotypically severe. Because it's not obvious, many people think it must be fake. And because many people still think that these conditions must somehow be your fault, the tendency of a community to support physically ill members, at least to some extent, is nearly or completely absent for those with a psychological diagnosis.

I've heard a lot of jabbering that we should stop diagnosing so much mental illness, and stick labels only on the people who are obviously crazy. But why? People with milder problems do experience distress; and they can benefit from help. That's the definition of a sitution in which a diagnosis is helpful. It doesn't make sense. Instead of going back to a century ago, when only the "really crazy" people got what passed for help, we should make it known that it actually isn't such a rare thing to have a psychological diagnosis. Remove the stigma, and people will be free to think of having a mental illness as a problem like any other--bothersome, painful, but not something that defines your existence and means your life is basically over.

We're just going to have to face it: We're all a little crazy, and we all have the potential to have problems with various kinds of craziness. We shouldn't exclude people who do; we shouldn't deny our own problems. And, for their part, the psychology profession needs to stop taking themselves so seriously, assuming they're the saviors of all the poor crazy people out there. After all, the psychologists are probably a little crazy, too.

I've been seeing it said around the Internet, mostly on sites where most people know just enough about Asperger's to think there's nothing more to know about it, that Asperger's is an excuse to be mean to people, have no empathy, abuse others, and trample all over people's feelings, and then claim that you can't help it because you've got a disease. (These are almost always males they talk about. Apparently females don't get Asperger's.)

That this is a myth is obvious those of us who have interacted with people who actually have autism, at least if we haven't been so unlucky that our only such contact was with an autistic person who was deliberately and unrelatedly rude and obnoxious (well, it's not as though autistics can never be jerks at all).

Here's why it's a myth.

Positive social contact takes skill. You want to charm somebody? Figure out what they're feeling and how to make them feel better? Figure out how to get them to help you? How to amuse them? Well, you're going to need social skills. You'll need not just the charisma--trained or untrained--but also the ability to use it while having a conversation and at a speed that's fast enough to keep up with the other person's non-verbal and verbal communication.

However, negative social contact takes skill, too. Do you want to intimidate someone? Insult them where it hurts? Figure out what they're feeling, and how to use that to make them feel horrible? Seduce them into your car and murder them in your basement? You're still going to need social skills. My stepfather, for example, who is a textbook sociopath (and thankfully left the family several years ago), knows exactly how to "push people's buttons" to create a great deal of misery in the people around him, to intimidate people. When I lived at home, he was very perceptive that I was frightened of being worthless; so he called me worthless a great deal. When he wanted to be liked, he was. The neighbors thought he was a great guy, because he wanted them to think that. His social skills are highly refined; his morality is not.

Sure, you can accidentally say something that hurts someone. You can accidentally say something amusing that makes them laugh; you can accidentally say something that confuses them, frightens them, or comforts them. I've done all of those, purely accidentally. But, if you have clumsy, unpracticed social skills, you'll have just as much trouble intimidating people deliberately as you have trouble deliberately charming them.

I've been thinking about this, oddly enough, while leafing through my D&D sourcebooks and, amidst the nostalgia, coming on the section that described character attributes. Charisma is a stat applied to a character that describes how good he is at relating to others; and among the skills dependent on it are things that range all the way from Bluff (lying, disguising yourself, feinting in combat) to Diplomacy (everything from seducing the barwench to brokering a deal between two warring nations) to Intimidate (everything from getting information from a prisoner, to mugging somebody, to creating a Fear effect that causes them to shake in their boots or even outright flee).

A low-Charisma D&D character isn't just bad at the positive aspects of social interaction; he's bad at the negative aspects too. He can't get people to like him; but he also can't get people to fear him. Once you get into the single digits, he's little more than an unremarkable wallflower that constantly sticks his foot in his mouth, can't intimidate your average mouse, and usually insults himself by mistake when he tries to insult someone else. (I have, however, found it amusing to create a low-Charisma wizard who tags along, unnoticed and considered to be rather useless, until he breaks out the Time Stop...)

D&D has it right. Low charisma--low social skills--don't mean you love to insult people. Sure, you can decide to try to use your social skills to be a jerk; but you'll be an overall ineffective one, probably no worse than annoying, perhaps even amusing. If someone with AS wants to hurt someone else, sure, they can do it; but it isn't going to be very subtle and it's probably going to involve more than social skills. Someone with AS trying to insult someone else just tends to look clumsy and the whole thing tends to end badly for the originator of said clumsy insults. Make no mistake about it--if they're trying to be insulting, it's not a consequence of having Asperger's; it's simply a consequence of wanting to insult someone.

Autism only means low social skills; it doesn't dictate what you do with them. Someone with autism is as likely to accidentally insult themselves as they are to accidentally insult other people, and more likely than both to just say something that doesn't make much sense. Autism doesn't take away the choice of how to treat other people. There are autistic sociopaths and autistic altruists; but that has more to say about their character than about the fact that they happen to be autistic.

Of course, there's one benefit to positive social interaction that you can't get from negative social interaction: In positive social interaction, both parties are trying to meet in the middle. As both parties learn more about each other, the connection becomes stronger and deficits can be compensated for. Eventually, thanks to familiarity (and for autistic/autistic connections, thanks to a shared neurotype), information flows more freely, and some of the things that an NT could do with a perfect stranger become possible for an autistic person when he has come to know the other person well. Negative social relationships, unless they're very twisted ones, simply don't foster that sort of cooperation.

Mrs. Johnson's garden was overrun with wild violets. Violets, if allowed to grow and given their way, will quickly turn into a tenacious weed, spreading to cover the entire area with their heart-shaped leaves and small blue blossoms. Mrs. Johnson, who grew exotic roses, did not like wild violets.

First, Mrs. Johnson tried pulling the violets. Long hours she spent on her knees, trying to clear those violets away; many a sunburn she blamed on the little blue-flowered plants. So involved was she in pulling those violets that she nearly forgot to fertilize her roses.

"But, mama," said her little girl, "aren't the violets pretty?" 

"Wild violets," said Mrs. Johnson, "are not roses. And in my garden, anything that is not a rose is a weed."

Across the street, Mrs. Smith hummed happily to herself as she carefully spread fertilizer on her own flower beds. Mrs. Smith, thought Mrs. Johnson, must not know what it was like to have wild violets overrunning your garden. She was much too happy.

Well, all of Mrs. Johnson's weeding couldn't get those wild violets to budge one inch; and it seemed that for each one she pulled out, another one sprouted. Finally, Mrs. Johnson gave up and decided to dig up and turn over the soil and bury the wild violets. So she got out her spade and her rake and she turned over the soil, until all of the garden around the roses was soil and nothing else. She turned over the soil so vigorously that the sharp edge of her spade and the tines of her rake cut more than a few of the roots that belonged to the roses. But Mrs. Johnson was happy, because she couldn't see a single wild violet anywhere.

But one by one, those little wild violets poked their leaves and stems and little blue flowers back up out of the soil. Wild violets are very tenacious that way, and because each little plant can send out roots that sprout into more wild violets, they are quite used to being under the soil for a while before they sprout back up.

Across the street, Mrs. Smith and her little girl were carefully edging their garden with seashells and pebbles. Their happy chatter made Mrs. Johnson absolutely sure that Mrs. Smith had never even seen a single wild violet. "No one," said Mrs. Johnson, "who is overrun with wild violets can ever be that happy in their garden."

Mrs. Johnson had had it with the wild violets. She went to the gardening store and she said to the man at the counter, "I have a problem with wild violets. Sell me your strongest, nastiest weed killer." She bought two big jugs of the smelly stuff, and she sprayed it all over the wild violets. Then she sprayed it again, just for good measure. And slowly, the wild violets began to droop. The little blue flowers dropped to the soil, and the leaves browned, curled up, and dried. Mrs. Johnson watched suspiciously for a long while, but no more wild violets popped their leaves out of the soil.

"Come see," said Mrs. Johnson to her little girl. "I think we have finally beaten the wild violets! See, there is not a single wild violet anywhere!"

"But, mama," said Mrs. Johnson's little girl, "the roses have gone all brown and dry. It is not a pretty garden anymore."

"Well, I just won't have a garden, then," Mrs. Johnson declared. "A person simply can't have a garden when they're beset by such a plague as wild violets." So she dug up her dead roses, spread grass seed, and hired the boy down the street to mow every Saturday.

Across the street, Mrs. Smith, in a gigantic straw hat, had settled down in a lawn chair with the sort of book that you always mean to get back to when the dishes have to be done; and her little girl was just catching her breath from getting to five hundred on her jump rope. Their garden had turned out wonderfully, and the healthy green leaves made a lovely contrast with the designs of the seashells and pebbles at the border of the flower beds.

"Mama," said Mrs. Smith's little girl, "I think this is the prettiest garden we've ever had, isn't it?"

"You know, I do think so," said Mrs. Smith, "and the funniest thing about it is that we didn't actually have to plant anything this year! All the flower beds just started sprouting these beautiful little wild violets."

Well, for one, it's not a disease; it's a developmental disability (and some of the milder cases, you can make an argument for it not even being a disability). Autism is atypical development, not a dysfunction of some pre-existing order. Just like you couldn't say that someone with dyslexia or a learning disability has a "disease", you couldn't say it about autism.

Second reason: Autism, by its nature, changes the way you learn and the way you process information. That changes your life and your experiences of the world to a great degree--and it affects your personality, too. Autism is part of the way the brain works, and to the extent that the self is the arrangement of connections in the brain, autism is part of the self. People who accept themselves for who they are tend to also be proud of the autism, deficits and all, because it is part of their identity.

Third: Autistic culture. Research Deaf culture; they've been doing it for ages longer than we have, ever since they got themselves a common language (group of languages, actually) and gathered in one place to talk things out. Autistics got that when the Internet and computer technology became available. Once the first few autistics connected via the Internet, we started forming our own way of communication and interaction. Autistic culture isn't limited to those who can speak, which is where technology comes in: When speech is undependable or absent, anyone who can pick out letters or symbols on a modern communication device can connect to the Internet and communicate with other autistic people. That wasn't possible before digital computers. Now we have not just autistic people, but those in the broader autism phenotype (people with autistic traits but no disability), and parents, spouses, and significant others of autistic people.

Fourth: Disabled people have the same problems that any minority has: Marginalization, prejudice, stereotyping, lack of communication, lack of acceptance. The disability rights movement includes plenty of people who say that part of their identity is their disability; and among those people are autistics. Being a part of a minority affects how you live; so it affects your identity. Many disabled people are proud of being disabled for the same reason that black people might be proud of being black.

Last, a trivial but culturally important reason: Many autistic people have autism-related special skills, either savantlike or the result of years of practice thanks to a special interest. Being proud of your skills is practically a human universal; and even when autism includes deficits that overshadow your special skills, there's nothing that says you can't be proud of being able to do things that most other people can't. Disabled doesn't mean universally incapable, after all.

One last note: Cultural pride does not, and should not, mean a feeling of superiority. Autistic people are neither superior nor inferior, and elitism--even reversed--only leads to the very hatred and prejudice we're trying to fight.

I've just noticed that I've gained a new skill: I can now do schoolwork or read while listening to music--IF the music is familiar.

Music without words is best. Music with words has to be so familiar that I can predict not just the words but the different instrumental parts. But I've apparently learned, now, not to be distracted by music if the music is very predictable.

Why is this so beneficial?

Well, when I wear an mp3 player (they can actually be had for pretty cheap), I get a better effect than I do from earplugs. Earplugs only muffle noise, and in some odd situations can even make it easier to hear things (don't ask me why; maybe it has to do with auditory processing, something like wearing sunglasses makes it easier to see.) But when I am wearing earplugs, I'm still analyzing everything around me, and I can't shut off that tendency to analyze auditory input, spending attention on it and not what I wanted to spend attention on.

Over the last summer, I learned how to use my mp3 player to drown out the quiet noises of a laboratory in action so that I could concentrate on my statistics. This was easy work for the most part, but it was hard enough to teach me how to shut out the predictable auditory input from an mp3 player, which in turn blocks out the unpredictable (and thus impossible to ignore) noise from my surroundings. I can now study in a relatively non-chaotic public place. That means suddenly, I've gained access to study lounges, coffee shops,  libraries, cafeterias (in the off-hours) and other areas that are mostly congenial and quiet except for the chatter of other patrons.

The other day I did physics problems at Barnes & Noble. (Bookstore chain with a nice atmosphere, including lots of chairs to sit in and read. They don't even mind if you don't buy something because they know that once you are addicted to books you will eventually buy something even if you don't do it today.) I was able to concentrate despite people having conversations at the next table and the quiet music from the store speakers.

Using an MP3 player in this fashion is, I think, a highly recommended skill. As a result of learning to do this, under certain circumstances, I no longer need complete quiet (or white noise) to study!

-The ambient noise can't be so much that I have to turn up the sound on the mp3 player more than halfway, or it'll be distracting anyway.
-The area can't be chaotic. It still has to be well-organized.
-If lit by fluorescent lighting, the bulbs can't flicker. (New sorts, especially CFLs, flicker too fast for me to see. Whew!)
-The music on the mp3 player has to be familiar, and preferably without words. Classical music is best; soundtracks, second best.
-I have to have a reasonable amount of concentration available. This does take more concentration than studying in a quiet room, though it's a manageable amount of "more".

I knew a lot of other autistic people were very fond of mp3 players, but I never understood the point of playing music practically your entire waking hours. (I play books on tape, for the most part, when I'm doing something that isn't stimulating enough to keep my attention. This strategy literally keeps me from crashing into other cars.) Now, maybe I'm getting the idea. Maybe all these people are using music to block out unwanted auditory input, and simply got the concept sooner than me: It's easier to concentrate when the auditory input you're trying to cope with is ultra-familiar.

One of my cats, Christy, is a little calico I'm fostering because she was so stressed at the shelter that her health started to suffer. She's always been nervous. Other cats make her nervous. Changes in schedule make her nervous. Sounds make her nervous. She doesn't relax anywhere.

When she first came, after she came out of isolation she spent all her time hiding; so I gave her more places to hide--little cubbyholes, boxes, tunnels, and places where she could have a high vantage point, and her back to the wall. She spent a lot of time in these cubbyholes. I made sure she had a cubbyhole in every room, more than one in most places. Eventually, she stopped dashing quickly from place to place, and started walking with a little more confidence to eat, use the litter box and scratching posts and have a quick look outside at the window perches.

I bought her cardboard cat scratching pads; they come with catnip and are made of corrugated cardboard. Those scratch pads were the first place she sat when she came out of hiding; so I bought her more scratch pads. There are four of them now in my apartment, and she uses them for safe places to sit.

Christy's diversifying her places now, too. She's claimed a window perch, where I fed her treats and where she's learned to come whenever she hears the treat bag rattling. And, though she's not entirely comfortable there yet, she willingly climbs up into my lap and purrs while she's there. She'll always be a nervous cat; and she'll always have to be warned when you're going to vacuum and shown exactly where you've moved the litter box or the food bowl. She'll always have to be reassured that claw-clipping doesn't hurt and flea medicine isn't as bad as you think it is; but when I think of the first time I saw her, bunched in the back of the a linen closet at the cat shelter (quite the reverse Houdini, always finding tight spaces to fit herself into), I know exactly how far she's come.

What if, instead of letting Christy have her hiding places, I had decided that she needed to be forced out of her shell, forced to engage with the world? What if I had dragged her out of her cubbyholes, removed all the places where she could hide, and put treats in the center of the room instead of on a safe window perch? What if, instead of letting her hide when she needed to, I had decided to insist on her learning not to hide?

Well, if I had done that, Christy probably wouldn't have survived the year and a half she's lived with me.

But how can that be? I wouldn't have been doing anything mean! I wouldn't have been hitting her, or hurting her. I wouldn't have been denying her food (though most likely I wouldn't have put the food bowls near a hiding spot). I would even have been giving her treats for coming into the middle of the floor, instead of hiding at the edges! I would just have been preventing her from isolating herself. After all, a cat is supposed to be social, right? A cat is supposed to be a bundle of purrs which will allow herself to be hauled around and become a lap animal; and hiding like that is just unhealthy!

...or is it?

Is it really unhealthy to hide?

I say no. Not when you need it. Not when you're a small cat in a very large, very overwhelming, messy, noisy, smelly, and hostile world. Not when the only way you will ever be confident is to have a safe place to sit and contemplate things before you step out into them. The most congenial surroundings are still hostile when you are trapped in them, without a place to retreat to, where you can be in control, where you know exactly what to expect.

So Christy sits in her safe place, and I sit in mine; and carefully, with much planning and observation, we step out into a chaotic world, knowing that there exists a home base, the eye of the storm, whenever we need it.

Yesterday at the library I was goofing off instead of doing physics homework, and happened upon the latest issue of Psychology Today. Lo and behold, an article on autism. It's a cute little story about an autistic kid who loves animals; and for a change said kid is in the majority who has got the hang of language. That's a good sign, in general, and the article itself isn't bad. But it contains one little annoying phrase that's pretty high on my peeve-o-meter; and the result is this letter to the editor.

Two Minute Memoir: Cowboy and Wills

I read "Cowboy and Wills" with great interest; and part of the reason is that I'm an autistic animal-lover myself. There are a lot of us--not surprisingly, since animals allow for such safe, non-threatening social interaction. However, I was a little troubled by a popular misconception that was sprinkled through the article. The idea that one must pull an autistic child out of "his own world" seems to have become so prevalent that people don't think about it when they say it. The truth is, there's no need to pull anybody anywhere; it's just a matter of teaching. We are already in your world. Autistic people see the world and other people just like anyone does. We're very much present in the world; in fact, in most cases we notice more about it--all the little details most people filter out. The problem isn't a matter of being closed off in our own worlds, but of having difficulty understanding and communicating with other people. When you look at us and can't see what we're thinking or feeling, it's a communication issue, not a lack of presence. Sometimes, when I'm exhausted by the noise and smell and unpredictability of the world, I do withdraw. Having to constantly interact with people is difficult and stressful for me. But "my own world"--you have your own mental world, too, just like I do--isn't a frightening place in which I'm trapped. It's simply the act of relaxing, getting away from the need to socialize constantly. Without it, I'd be unable to function--and when I'm allowed to have my own space, away from the demands of life, I can use it as a safe home base from which to reach out to others. What happened with the little boy in the article is what should happen with every autistic child: He is given a welcoming environment and surrounded by people who help him to say what he is thinking and show what he is feeling. Gradually, he learns how to connect with other people--something which, if he is like most of the autistic people I know, he has been wanting to do all along.