A BLOG ABOUT ____________ .

           

             The process of blog writing has to start with a thought. Letters, words form, then sentence by sentence by sentence the thoughts become paragraphs. There’s a little loop like a curl; a threadlike line hanging off the last word in my last paragraph inside my head; so carefully written in cursive script all visually just “there” in my head before I start tapping on the keyboard… But if you tug on that descender, if you pull on the tail of the last letter, just like a thread, it will unravel every single thing I’ve thought about. In other words, I know what I’d like to say but it rolls away from me like a ball of yarn across the floor. Maybe that’s memory decline, an inevitable “aging” thing. Or I’m a scatterbrain with too much stuff going on in my head for my own good!

            Communication isn’t my strong suit; particularly when I’m stressed, aching from this pain or that pain, when I haven’t slept well, or all of the above! And to be frank here, I’m currently dealing with all of the aforementioned stuff. Most of us are. Writing is the easiest way to communicate, at least for me. It gets the threads out, hopefully in a coherent manner somewhat resembling something someone may like to read!

I’ve explained to people that when I’m sleep deprived, sick, etc. I need more processing time to respond to simple “small talk” and

FORGET ABOUT JOKING AROUND

that stuff flies right over my head. I can explain this to people repeatedly and they still end up with no patience for me. It saddens me to exasperate people.

“Why do I even bother talking to you??”

or-

“You should’ve seen her face! She thought I was serious!!”

           Tolerance and patience are perhaps gained when practiced. That which you give attention to, grows, after all. So feed the patience! I’ve got a whole lot of patience and tolerance so I expect the same from others, when it comes to me. ESPECIALLY when the ol’ neural pathways crackle and pop (bad connections) and I take things even more literal than usual, which put other people around me in a crappy mood. I can understand that I’m differently wired, but can others comprehend that?

Here’s an example of something I got confused about recently which is actually a bit humorous. I was half listening to the morning news show when I heard a TV personality/talking head say,

“Neil Diamond has released his thirty second album.”

I set down my coffee, scratched my head (I really did, I hadn’t washed my hair in a few days, besides scratching your head helps you think-everyone knows that) and I thought, Now why the hell would anyone release an album that was only thirty seconds long? That’s so strange! Approximately fifteen seconds later I laughed out loud. I then glanced around, because laughing out loud when you’re the only person in the room feels a little creepy; even the dog looks at you and sighs. It was in fact the thirty second album that Neil Diamond has made in his lifetime career. Ah that made sense once it made sense. That’s my world in a nutshell. Only… imagine getting confused about ordinary everyday things!

Some lyrics from one of my favorite songs these days (from Counting Crows’ Johnny Appleseed’s Lament) was stuck in my head last night and it sums up where I’m at these days, well except for it being Autumn right now and not Winter:

I stepped out the front door into winter and the world outside
I stepped out the door to New York City, my hair was barely dry
I could not remember where I was going, so I went back inside

How about Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence:

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls

Wise words are everywhere. I try not to overlook them, I might learn something. Maybe all the people who put up with me and my faulty communication “skills” might even learn tolerance and patience from ME. My Facebook friend Brian Be-( https://www.facebook.com/JBrianBe?fref=ts ) a fellow spectrumite, contributor to Art of Autism books and also a dancer, recently posted this quote on his FB page…it’s a quote from Cynthia Occelli who wrote Resurrecting Venus.. Here it is:

“For a seed to become its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks. Its insides come out and everything changes. To an observer who does not understand growth, it can appear as complete destruction.”

If you take apart the word autism, it means different things. (I’ve come to know, in fact, it means many things to many different people…)

In Greek, ‘autos’ means ‘self.’

If you take apart the word, it means ALONE.

Alone with one’s self?

AU (the first syllable of the word autism,) is the symbol for gold… It’s become trendy to put “au” on the tail end of one’s name on Facebook, actually but Facebook is making people remove the Au.

I just read a fiction novel called “The Boy Who Drew Monsters” by Keith Donahue. It has two autistic people in the story and I’m still trying to decide whether I think the portrayals were accurate, but I digress. Last I knew, autism does not mean something’s ‘missing’ from you, even when you can’t speak, or understand, or communicate well. It does not mean ‘flawed’ either.

In ancient Japan (you probably know this), when ceramics broke, rather than trying to hide the flaw, they would highlight the cracks in gold, baring the cracks and scars and adopting them as a part of the ceramic. From the site http://www.incourage.me/2014/03/broken-things.html , this plate is an example of this:

 

Here’s another example from http://ambitioninthecity.com/2013/06/07/japanese-bowl-refelctions-of-a-poem-by-peter-mayer/ :

As you can see by now, this is a blog about nothing in particular. That’s not such a bad thing though. The Seinfeld Show (created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David) ran for nine seasons and was a pretty big hit. I still love the reruns. And that show was infamously known as “the show about nothing.”

The thing about ‘nothing moments,’ is that in retrospect, they’re about something after all. That’s it for now-until my brain’s full of nothing again that has to get out.

Best,

Kimberly

P.S. Regarding my signature there, don’t touch the “Y” on my name. The whole darn blog’s liable to unravel if you do, and since things (even nothing things) don’t stay in my head for as long as I’d like, that would be terrible as I wouldn’t be able to think all this up again. Thanks!