interested in everything: Iceland, autism, geology, learning, and travel.
Watching A Mother's Courage: Talking Back to Autism on HBO [Home Box Office] right now (a perk of home care, sometimes: TV I wouldn't see otherwise- if it's quiet, if he sleeps). Watched Temple Grandin several times when it first came out [when I was at Hayward State in '89 I found a copy of her book Emergence: Labeled Autistic in the marked-down used textbooks, bought it, inhaled it, and used what I learned from it working with head-injured and brain-damaged kids in PICU]. Highly recommend both shows: it's more relevant than one might think, and I found each of them very encouraging. [If you live where you can't see them easily, PM me. I'll poke around, see what I can find for you. There's got to be a way somehow.]
I've a professional interest in this, of course, but I have a personal one, too: in my extended circle is a boy who has had, in the past, several hundred seizures a month (yes, really) on top of his cerebral palsy and autism- so that what he learns is often wiped clean many times a day. [I can't comment on any of his treatment therapies, because I don't know much about them. They lie along a different path than my experiences do.] When I was in grade school, one of my best friends was a boy who, I'm sure, would now be classified as "autistic", and I've wondered ever since we were in school together what made him 'different', and why his difference didn't bother me. [Of course, I test out in various places along the Asperger's spectrum, depending on how interested I am.] [But then, I think a lot of people do, in this modern over-stimulated world.] [But I digress.]
But I'm also watching A Mother's Courage because it starts off in Iceland, and I'd like to go there, to see it, to drive through the plains of boulders and steam. I'd like to hear Icelandic being spoken, and bathe in the hot water surrounded by snow, and see how different it is from California, this funny place built by slamming up bits and pieces of other places up against the East. [Thanks to John McPhee for that.]
I'm watching it because I learned to read at a very young age- 6, 9 months [no, really, I did] but didn't learn to hold a *real* conversation until I was in my early 40s [no, really- I mean one where I'm cognizant of, aware of, connecting with the other person, their cues and their interest, their comfort, and not just where I hear words and exchange information, but really take them into consideration as present. I've had to learn to listen for content, not parrot information. I've had to learn to see relationships, not just recognize patterns. And I've had to learn to be less anxious about being more sensitive, in terms of the senses, to take *quiet days* and *stay-home days* and to be selective about what I let in through my senses.] I lived in the reference books, the fairy tales, the biographies, the atlases- if there'd been an Internet when I was young, I'd've lived here then. It's probably better that there wasn't, because I did have to go out into the world, even though it was scary and I'd have to retreat and feel foolish because I didn't like going shopping or to the playground. [It occurs to me that there is a great deal that I find I was supposed to "just pick up", but I never found it "just lying around" in the first place. I looked in words, in writing, because that's what people around me used to find things: my dad was a Uni professor (psychology, statistics), and my mother a double journalism/psych major whose idea of something to do with the baby (me) on a snowed-in day was to hold me on her lap and read out loud to me from The New Yorker. To this day my "perfect page" is three columns, in The New Yorker font, on that lovely slick (but not too slick) paper, with line drawing black & white cartoons, and poems, and "Department of something-or-another-odd" listings to fill in the tiny spaces at the ends of articles, and things that only a child or an observant person would put together, like Allen Ginsberg and Tugboats. I will give my parents credit, also, for my love of doing things with my hands, and of yard work, both of which I learned tagging along with them.]
And now I'm (slowly) going to be learning Anat Baniel method Feldenkrais sensory-motor therapy, something I can do (along with nursing) until I'm 70, something I can do no matter where I am in the world, because there are children who need people like me, people who don't give up, who know what it's like to not be in the center, to have to reach around from the side what's going on in the center to find a way to connect, who have to be come to because we can't get there from here otherwise, and one day, it will take me to Iceland.
[I must also thank John McPhee for A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton, for, along with Dr. Grandin and P. L. Travers helping me look at my 'faults' and see if they might be buried talents, instead. And my teachers, over the years, who never gave up- one way or another, they've always encouraged me to connect.]
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I've a professional interest in this, of course, but I have a personal one, too: in my extended circle is a boy who has had, in the past, several hundred seizures a month (yes, really) on top of his cerebral palsy and autism- so that what he learns is often wiped clean many times a day. [I can't comment on any of his treatment therapies, because I don't know much about them. They lie along a different path than my experiences do.] When I was in grade school, one of my best friends was a boy who, I'm sure, would now be classified as "autistic", and I've wondered ever since we were in school together what made him 'different', and why his difference didn't bother me. [Of course, I test out in various places along the Asperger's spectrum, depending on how interested I am.] [But then, I think a lot of people do, in this modern over-stimulated world.] [But I digress.]
But I'm also watching A Mother's Courage because it starts off in Iceland, and I'd like to go there, to see it, to drive through the plains of boulders and steam. I'd like to hear Icelandic being spoken, and bathe in the hot water surrounded by snow, and see how different it is from California, this funny place built by slamming up bits and pieces of other places up against the East. [Thanks to John McPhee for that.]
I'm watching it because I learned to read at a very young age- 6, 9 months [no, really, I did] but didn't learn to hold a *real* conversation until I was in my early 40s [no, really- I mean one where I'm cognizant of, aware of, connecting with the other person, their cues and their interest, their comfort, and not just where I hear words and exchange information, but really take them into consideration as present. I've had to learn to listen for content, not parrot information. I've had to learn to see relationships, not just recognize patterns. And I've had to learn to be less anxious about being more sensitive, in terms of the senses, to take *quiet days* and *stay-home days* and to be selective about what I let in through my senses.] I lived in the reference books, the fairy tales, the biographies, the atlases- if there'd been an Internet when I was young, I'd've lived here then. It's probably better that there wasn't, because I did have to go out into the world, even though it was scary and I'd have to retreat and feel foolish because I didn't like going shopping or to the playground. [It occurs to me that there is a great deal that I find I was supposed to "just pick up", but I never found it "just lying around" in the first place. I looked in words, in writing, because that's what people around me used to find things: my dad was a Uni professor (psychology, statistics), and my mother a double journalism/psych major whose idea of something to do with the baby (me) on a snowed-in day was to hold me on her lap and read out loud to me from The New Yorker. To this day my "perfect page" is three columns, in The New Yorker font, on that lovely slick (but not too slick) paper, with line drawing black & white cartoons, and poems, and "Department of something-or-another-odd" listings to fill in the tiny spaces at the ends of articles, and things that only a child or an observant person would put together, like Allen Ginsberg and Tugboats. I will give my parents credit, also, for my love of doing things with my hands, and of yard work, both of which I learned tagging along with them.]
And now I'm (slowly) going to be learning Anat Baniel method Feldenkrais sensory-motor therapy, something I can do (along with nursing) until I'm 70, something I can do no matter where I am in the world, because there are children who need people like me, people who don't give up, who know what it's like to not be in the center, to have to reach around from the side what's going on in the center to find a way to connect, who have to be come to because we can't get there from here otherwise, and one day, it will take me to Iceland.
[I must also thank John McPhee for A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton, for, along with Dr. Grandin and P. L. Travers helping me look at my 'faults' and see if they might be buried talents, instead. And my teachers, over the years, who never gave up- one way or another, they've always encouraged me to connect.]
http://slashfairy.dreamwidth.org/571708.html |
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