summer vacation!
Today was my first day of summer break!
So here's a funny story... on Tuesday, our school had an awards assembly, for which parents often come to see their kids get their certificates, etc etc. For some reason, awards assemblies were pretty consistently scheduled for Tuesdays this year, which is the worst, because street sweeping in the area is on Tuesdays, and the school's parking lot is TINY. So there was literally no place for me to park. But the time frame for the street sweeper is 8am-12pm, and it was 10:45 and there were already a couple cars parked on the street nearest the school, so I gambled on the fact that the street sweeper had already gone by. I won! No ticket!
But we had several 6th graders in our class this year, so the teacher had to go to the promotion ceremony early Thursday morning, so I went in to class at 7:30am to make sure someone was there with the other students. Which meant I left work at 11am on Thursday, and got home around 11:30 am. But guess what? Thursday is street sweeping day in my neighborhood. Which of course I didn't think about because I am always at work on Thursday mornings. So, yup, I got that parking ticket, anyway. HA. HA. Ha.
Sis & I finished up Roswell, & she was impatient to find another show to watch, so I suggested Longmire. We watched the pilot & she didn't like it, so now we're doing Alphas instead (I plan on continuing Longmire on my own, now that I have so much ~freee tiiiime~. We're on the 6th episode of Alphas. I was really worried when Gary was first introduced during the pilot, because, as I had just been telling Sis during the last Christmas episode of Roswell, I am sick of the 'magic' autistic kid/person trope that is so common in popular fiction right now. I feel it is dehumanizing and harmful to real people with autism. But I've been very, very pleasantly surprised by the portrayal of Gary so far. The only real quibble I have is that the show implies that Gary's handflaps and other gestures are the result of his ability to see and manipulate waves that neurotypical people can't see, rather than portray the gestures as the result of stimming behavior due to his autism. I find this problematic because it imbues the real action of stimming with a mythical significance. And that's how harmful stereotypes start.
So here's a funny story... on Tuesday, our school had an awards assembly, for which parents often come to see their kids get their certificates, etc etc. For some reason, awards assemblies were pretty consistently scheduled for Tuesdays this year, which is the worst, because street sweeping in the area is on Tuesdays, and the school's parking lot is TINY. So there was literally no place for me to park. But the time frame for the street sweeper is 8am-12pm, and it was 10:45 and there were already a couple cars parked on the street nearest the school, so I gambled on the fact that the street sweeper had already gone by. I won! No ticket!
But we had several 6th graders in our class this year, so the teacher had to go to the promotion ceremony early Thursday morning, so I went in to class at 7:30am to make sure someone was there with the other students. Which meant I left work at 11am on Thursday, and got home around 11:30 am. But guess what? Thursday is street sweeping day in my neighborhood. Which of course I didn't think about because I am always at work on Thursday mornings. So, yup, I got that parking ticket, anyway. HA. HA. Ha.
Sis & I finished up Roswell, & she was impatient to find another show to watch, so I suggested Longmire. We watched the pilot & she didn't like it, so now we're doing Alphas instead (I plan on continuing Longmire on my own, now that I have so much ~freee tiiiime~. We're on the 6th episode of Alphas. I was really worried when Gary was first introduced during the pilot, because, as I had just been telling Sis during the last Christmas episode of Roswell, I am sick of the 'magic' autistic kid/person trope that is so common in popular fiction right now. I feel it is dehumanizing and harmful to real people with autism. But I've been very, very pleasantly surprised by the portrayal of Gary so far. The only real quibble I have is that the show implies that Gary's handflaps and other gestures are the result of his ability to see and manipulate waves that neurotypical people can't see, rather than portray the gestures as the result of stimming behavior due to his autism. I find this problematic because it imbues the real action of stimming with a mythical significance. And that's how harmful stereotypes start.