random jottings

My little brother is eighteen. That's kind of weird. In my head, I'm not even eighteen yet, really. (The rest of my body arguably agrees with my brain on that count.) When I picture Charlie, I still think of a twelve-year-old kid, several inches shorter than me, who gets the punchlines to dirty jokes wrong because he doesn't understand them. And now he is a good head and a half taller than I am, and all kinds of impressively good colleges want him in their biology programs, and he sees sexual innuendo even where it probably isn't (like most teenage boys), and he's on the cross-country team, and ain't it strange how people just keep growing up?

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It bugs me how often I need new socks. They get full of holes so fast. Or they disappear in the dryer, and as much as I search in and above and below and behind the machine-- they have to have gone somewhere-- my socks are lost forever. Except part of me really likes sock shopping, if I can find someplace that sells the fun kind of socks instead of plain, utilitarian, white or black or gray or beige 5-packs. Part of me takes great satisfaction in being able to put pink cotton ice-cream cones on one foot and red & orange stripes on the other, and have my heels and all my toes covered instead of poking out through gaps.

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I'm not that interested in seeing this movie Adam, partly because I'm not that big a fan of romantic comedies in general, but mainly because the director has been quoted as saying that he views Asperger's/autism as "a metaphor for the human condition." Maybe I'm overreacting to that statement (my mother certainly thought so, when I tried to explain this to her), but it bothers me-- I'm a little tired of how autistic people, and disabled people in general, in fiction almost always seem to serve principally to teach "normal" people (whether other characters in the story, or the story's intended audience, or both) important lessons about What It Means To Be Truly Human, or How To Live Life To The Fullest, or something similarly glurgey. Either that, or we're freaky, inhuman monsters or enigmatic, oracular waifs. One reason I liked Mozart & the Whale, despite its many flaws as a film, was that almost all its major characters were autistic, and it presented them as very real, whole, human, three-dimensional individuals who had their own interests, skills, goals and problems, not all of which were related to their autism or cast in diagnostic terms. There were a few scenes that I thought slipped into a "look how bizarre and quirky these people are! It's hilarious, because they're highly intelligent adults with the emotional maturity of six-year-old children! Wacky!!" kind of gawking, which really put me off, but for the most part I appreciated the nuanced portrayals and the recognition that autism spectrum disorders are more than a series of DSM entries and tick-boxes of symptoms, or a metaphor for the condition of "normal" humans. I mean, this is my human condition, or a large part of it. I hear electricity in the walls and I don't like to look at people's faces much when I talk to them because the skin and small muscles move around too much and I can't screen it out, and I ascribe personalities to inanimate objects, and I would rather write than talk most of the time, and I have an unusual, haphazard body of general world knowledge even now, because I was mainly in special education classes from about the third to the seventh grade. I can tell you what color a song is. If you turn on a vacuum cleaner or a hair dryer without telling me first, be prepared for a high-pitched scream and a small green and gray blur as I rush from the room with my hands jammed over my ears. Standing on tiptoe feels normal and natural to me, but sitting up straight in a chair, with my legs hanging down, does not. I can't do it for more than a few minutes before it becomes intolerably uncomfortable and I start shifting around. I'd honestly rather stand, or lean against a wall, or lie bellydown on the ground. I would honestly rather discuss philosophy than have sex. I would rather walk alone in the rain than get drunk and grind against complete strangers to the strains of bad hip-hop. (I like the rain.) Sometimes I forget exactly where my body is located in space and run into doors because of it. That is not a metaphor. It's how I actually am in real life. I guess trying to make it otherwise feels like a sort of appropriation to me, a theft, almost. But perhaps I ought to watch the movie anyway, and see if my worries about it are validated.

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Current movies I do want to see: Ponyo and Where the Wild Things Are.

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It was gray today, except for the phoenix colors of the dying leaves. Rained a little, stopped, rained a little more. Quintessentially October, I think. It smelled smoky and musty and a bit like new pennies. I went to aimlessly loiter around my friend's house, which is a collective living place with great old sofas and an organ in the basement. (The keyboard instrument, I mean, not, like, someone's heart in a jar.) It matches the season, and the day.