&.
Oh, and-- in response to the post I made about autism and empathy a couple weeks ago, my friend luai_lashire sent me this in an e-mail:
...Along the lines of "autistics have empathy, but show it differently", I saw a report once about a study where autistic kids and NT kids were asked a series of questions about how they would act in certain situations; one of them was what they would do if they saw their mother crying. While the NT kids answered that they would go over and talk to her and hold her, the autistic kids almost universally said they would do something they knew she liked, like emptying the dishwasher, or making something for her.
And I love this, because it illustrates something I've always felt was true. If you don't know the social script, the set thing "everyone" does when someone is upset, or the set thing that "everyone" thinks is valuable, you have to think it through for yourself. You have to think, what makes person X happy? And this is why that boy caught bugs for you in seventh grade, and why I made a green alligator-shaped valentine for my crush in first grade, and why a friend of mine made a special "romantic dinner" for her boyfriend that consisted of pokemon mac-and-cheese and dinosaur chicken nuggets.
Sadly the article referred to going over to one's mother and hugging her as being the "right answer" (as in, "all the normal kids picked the right answer, but the autistic kids...."). >.<; I honestly don't know how people can continue to be so stupid.
(I'm procrastinating, of course, trawling all over the internet and through the piles of books that crowd my floor in order to avoid writing the final two or three paragraphs of the essay I have due tomorrow.)
(Last night I dreamed I lived in a house on stilts above a huge river, and the water of the river was clear enough that I could see enormous green and gray sharks swimming along inside it.)
(And once I dreamed that I kept tiny sailing ships in a lot of hair that I don't actually have in real life.)