Posts filed under 'Autism / Asperger's'
June 26th, 2007 1,396 views
A couple of weeks ago, I was wondering when my life would be back to normal. This past weekend, it bulldozed past normal and entered into surreality. Friday night I was still my regular self. Karen went to the dyke march and then out dancing at Mango with Lorena and Tess, and I stayed home because I didn’t want to be around so many people.
On Sunday, the day of the pride parade, I decided that I wanted to go. Not just go. I wanted to MARCH IN THE PARADE with our temple (or at least what might be our temple if we ever get around to checking it out more). I had a good time. It is actually less crowded in the parade than watching it from the sidelines. There was this Jewish youth group in front of us that were all wearing bright orange shirts. Fresh squeezed orange jews. Sorry, I tried not to write that, but I couldn’t resist. Every time the parade stopped, they would perform a same sex jewish wedding under a rainbow flag chuppah, smash a plastic cup wrapped in a napkin, and then run around in circles singing. Made me happy.
I was the sole member of the queer autistic jew contingent. I was wearing my autistic planet t-shirt to create some queer autistic visibility. Not exactly sure why, but it is San Francisco and every other subcategory of subcategory is represented. Seems appropriate that it was a contingent of one.
After the parade, K and I went into the crowd to find some food and try to meet Lorena and Tess. In the crowd, I reverted to my normal self and started gradually getting overwhelmed until I couldn’t think at all. We walked all the way to 16th St. and Mission BART so that we could get a seat before it got totally crowded at Civic Center. We were completely spent by the time we got back home and took a nap for a couple of hours. It was great! It is very rare that I can take naps during the day.
Last night, I went back to Cuong Nhu class for the first time since before my medicine hell started. I was kind of scared because there is a lot to process there and other people and instructions. My Sensei had told me that I can take it slow and do stuff by myself. I had thought I might just go and watch, but even before I left the house, I realized that there was no chance that I was going to enter that dojo and not kick something! I like to kick things. I kicked air 
It was nice to see everybody. There was a new white belt that I had never met before and two of our white belts had become green belts. Color belts are especially exciting in Cuong Nhu because there are only 4 of them until 5th degree black belt. White, green, brown, and black. In between, there are 2 stripes of the next color belt sewed onto your current belt. I think I am permanently stuck at one black stripe, but I don’t even care. At least last night I didn’t. I was so happy to be back there.
I was able to do more than I thought I would. I knew I would remember basic techniques and kata because I have been doing them for over 10 years and they are beyond the part of my brain that has to think. I start forgetting moves about half way through the more advanced katas, but I will probably remember after practicing a few times. The part that surprised me was that I could actually participate in the group as long as we were doing separate things.
During the first part of class, we did drills up and down the dojo where each rank gets a different set of moves to do. I was in my own group even though Rosanne is a brown belt too. There was no way I could follow the instructions she was getting. Long series of moves. Sensei Amy was very kind to me and kept mine to 3 moves or less. I think that was about my maximum memory span. I am not sure how she knew that too. After that, we did kata and I practiced the basic ones. The rest are for next time I think.
About 15 minutes before the water break, my brain was starting to crap out. I started forgetting moves to a kata that I had just done three times in a row without a problem. I got very confused about directions and couldn’t focus at all. I would forget what I was doing in between moves. I thought about leaving, but I knew we were having a break soon, so I stayed. I considered staying after the break. People were practicing self defense techniques and I was going to practice something by myself, but everything was too confusing. I decided to leave while I was still able to drive home.
By the time I got home, I couldn’t think at all, but I didn’t really care.
Filed under: Autism / Asperger's, Random, martial arts
Tags: life, martial arts, ramble
June 11th, 2007 1,453 views
For the past couple of weeks, I have been feeling much better than I have in at least a year. My new meds are finally working pretty good, even great in comparison to the last 2 horribly failed experiments. I can breathe. My body is not completely taken over in every way possible. I can work. I can leave the house.
Still, things do not feel completely normal yet. This weekend, me and K went to a party to celebrate one of my Sensei’s promotion from Godan (5th degree black belt) to Rokudan (6th degree black belt, Master) and a bunch of other promotions too. Rokudan is a pretty huge deal in Cuong Nhu. There are only 5 in total and only one woman (my Sensei). I wasn’t sure I would make it, but I really wanted to go. It was a great reason to celebrate and I miss my dojo very much.
It occurred to me that the thing that would make my life feel “normal” again would be going back to class. Besides from loving martial arts, going to class was the only regular contact I had with other people. A dojo is a special place and I have been very lucky to find such a great school with the most amazing teachers I could ever imagine and a bunch of nice people in general. I have been a student there for 10 years.
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Filed under: Autism / Asperger's, martial arts
Tags: life, martial arts, meds, ramble
May 27th, 2007 1,001 views
Friday night I went out to dinner with the people from the asperger’s meetup group that I’ve been to a few times. It was lots of fun. Really nice people. I liked it way better than meeting at someone’s house. Less pressure somehow and I didn’t feel trapped like I sometimes do.
The dinner was to celebrate someone’s birthday. A lot of people came. We talked about random things, which is pretty fun with a group of people who each seem to have an unusually large number of random facts stored in their heads.
The best thing about it was that I felt normal. I know that going out to dinner with a bunch of people is normal, but usually it is very uncomfortable for me. I can hardly ever keep up with conversations and half the time do not understand what I am supposed to do. If I have something to say, when is the right time to say it? I don’t want to interrupt someone who is talking and I am usually not organized enough to talk right when the little gaps in conversation occur. There isn’t enough time to process the last thing that someone said in that small amount of time and by the time I do, the conversation has moved on.
It was different in this group. It is different every time I am with a group of autistic people. The rules are different, or at least they have more leeway. There is way less fluff (words with no real purpose being constantly chattered to avoid silence). There is more patience. It is easier to keep up. I don’t think it is because people were talking any slower than in any other conversation. Sometimes that is the case in groups of autistic people, but not on Friday night. I am not exactly sure why it is easier. Maybe because there is less fluff to filter out? Does anyone have any idea what makes it easier?
I think part of it is that there is no pressure to be “normal” about things like response times, and having trouble speaking is not such a big deal. It is such a nice change from feeling completely uncomfortable and wanting to leave! My head didn’t get loud like it often does in groups of people. Usually, all voices start blending into a mishsmash of sound like if you were changing radio stations very quickly. Being confused from the mishmash makes it hard to focus and then other distractions like light, colors, people, and a million other things get mixed in too.
I don’t know why none of that happened on Friday night. It almost always happens, especially when I am with people that I don’t know very well. I wonder if it is because I was less stressed because of not having to try so hard to keep up and fit in. Whatever it is, I liked it a whole lot. I feel like I got a taste of how the other half lives. The half that can just do things easily. I like my life a whole lot and wouldn’t trade it for anything, but I do get tired of so many things things that are supposed to be easy being so hard.
On the other hand, some things that are very hard for other people are easy for me. I guess it is a tradeoff. I hate when things are not logical. It drives me crazy. For real, not like the figure of speech. People are not always logical. On the flipside of that, I love to work inside of a logical framework. It brings me a kind of peace and gives me a break from all of the things that don’t make sense.
I spend a good part of every day coding; looking at hundreds of lines of words and symbols that make complete sense. There is no ‘reading between the lines’. It is what it is. When somethings goes wrong, it is usually because of an error in logic (or syntax) that can be found and fixed. In the words of the wordpress site, ‘Code is Poetry’. I think that is true.
Filed under: Autism / Asperger's
Tags: autism
May 24th, 2007 1,003 views
Autiblogger is a free blogging community for people on the autistic spectrum. Since its initial beta release last August, many new features, themes, and plugins have been added. We have moved from a very unreliable shared server to an excellent dedicated server thanks to donations from the community and lots of help from my family. Thanks everybody
A couple of new measures have been taken to fight the continuous annoyance of splogs (spam blogs). Splogs are fake blogs that are created for the purpose of either displaying ads or creating search engine traffic and search engine ranking for another website to which the splog points. At one point, Autiblogger was getting about 30 new splogs per day!
I installed an anti-splog script to block users from signing-up if thier IP address is blacklisted at spamhaus.org. That helped quite a bit, dropping the number of splogs per day to around three. Finally, I gave in and added an image captcha (challenge response test to verify that a user is human) to the sign-up page. I was really trying to avoid that due to accessibility issues, but it was hard to keep up with even a few splogs per day. I added a link to the sign-up page for users to contact me if they could not view the captcha image. At this time, splogs are down to just one every few days.
With the splog problem under control, I was finally able to add some new features and update some old ones. Today I added a flickr post bar plugin which adds thumbnails of the most recent photos from a user’s flickr account to the post-writing page, making it very easy to insert a flickr image into a blog post. I also added a LiveJournal cross-posting plugin which automatically copies new posts to a specified LiveJournal. Editing and deleting cross-posted entries causes the same changes to be made on the LiveJournal.
Other changes include an update to the Friends List feature which fixes a few bugs and an update to the admin bar that appears at the top of a user’s site when they are logged in, providing easy access to their blog administration. Unlogged users will see a link to Autiblogger and a ‘Get a Blog’ link. A Random Blog link was also added. Click on it and guess what…
If anyone would like a blog, click here to sign up. If you are interested in helping to support Autiblogger and other Autistic Planet sites, please visit the Support Autiblogger page.
Why Autiblogger 1.2.1? I was almost going to call it Autiblogger 2.0, but the changes didn’t seem large enough to warrant a whole new version number. 1.2.1 is also the current stable version of WordPress MU, which is the excellent open source application that powers Autiblogger.
Filed under: Autism / Asperger's, Geekery
Tags: autism, plugins, website, wordpress-mu
April 20th, 2007 1,635 views
I have not been able to do anything today. No work. No play. Couldn’t go out. I worked a bunch of long days and nights on the server move and the site upgrade for my client and now I am totally useless. I am pretty sure I have a bunch of work to do, but I can’t figure out what it is. I tried to make a list, but it just confused me more. K is going to help me figure it out this weekend.
My mom helped me brainstorm about ways to make money to pay for the new server and I realized (after doing tons of math yesterday) that I can actually offer people more disk space and bandwidth than I could before. I need to find at least 13 more people paying $100/year to be breaking even. Not sure how I will do that. I am considering doing a promotion of including a free blog with new hosting accounts. If I ever have time again, I will figure it all out. I also need to update my business site because it is 3 years old and WAY out of date. My demos are especially out of date and the content does not accurately describe my services anymore.
I am booked up until June, so can not take on any more website clients until then. I have 5 projects in the works, but am waiting on content for three of them. It is very frustrating to have so much to do and not be able to do anything! I wish I could at least go outside or play a video game. I can play with the kitten. That is a good thing.
I wish I could hire someone to run my brain. They would keep it organized and running smoothly, and I would do all the things that would be able to get done once it was working right. I suppose that is what a business manager does.
I am glad it is Friday. This morning I was convinced that it was Thursday and argued with K about it. I even made her check the calendar. Somehow, I missed a day this week. Not sure which one, only that it wasn’t Tuesday or Thursday.
Yesterday, me and K went to the dentist. It is hard to get me to the dentist even though we have a great dentist. He is right around the corner from my old house in Berkeley. Ever since the first time I went there, over 10 years ago, I have been asking him to pull out my top left wisdom tooth. Every time, he has some reason why it doesn’t need to come out.
After having my teeth painfully cleaned and being reprimanded for not flossing every day, the lady who looked at my x-rays said that I needed to come back and have both top wisdom teeth pulled. There is no room in my mouth for them and one of them (the one I have been trying to get pulled) is pointing sideways and doesn’t do anything except hurt when I eat carrots. I made an appointment for sometime in May. I am not looking forward to it at all, but am glad to finally get my tooth pulled. K will come with me because she rules
How come I can write this, but can’t do anything else? Except twitch. I am very twitchy today. I don’t understand how thinking works. Is it really as easy for other people as it seems? Why aren’t other people stuck in their house not even able to watch tv? I am not stupid, but somehow end up being totally useless sometimes. I did help my brother get some info about an imac earlier. I guess I’m not totally useless. I wonder why I can talk about computer stuff almost any time, even when my brain won’t do anything else. It is all very strange. Oh well, what can you do? Back to doing nothing now…
Filed under: Autism / Asperger's
Tags: autism, beedragon, server, work
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