Ranting on random stuff

I sat on my specific recliner couch corner spot; in the Christmas-lights glow-quietness of having been productive and that glow of tired you get too, when you’ve done all you can. And the blanket was soft. And it was Christmas Eve but despite the wrapping and baking and decor (dollar store paper things with jolly […]

Online conference

Check out this online conference, my bit was on at 2:15 EST Nov. 28, 2020, but the conference can be viewed in entirety. .. https://youtu.be/NLZRUlsYIMo Note: AsymptomaticSpread is real. Five people I love (a whole household) had #COVID19 The man pictured here has died. I don’t normally share things like this but here’s a link. […]

My review of Jude Morrow’s Why does daddy always look so sad? and other notes

With my library closed, I’ve been doing more book reviews. I can obtain books I’m interested in and also read, which is something I enjoy.

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From mask to mask and other videos to stim on

🍌🌙Many short videos. Bits of short attention span videos. Hope they all load for you. 🍌🌙

Covid 19 sadness. Restless..

.my sore throat is from dust from cleaning closets. My anxiety though is from hell. I’ve not been out since Thursday. This is Sunday. I lied. I’ve gotten the mail on my porch. I’ve gone from low carb searching for ingredients like MCT oil, Miracle noodle fettuccini shirataki and Ghee to carb loading comfort French […]

Just art by me

I haven’t much felt like writing. So this is all images. Here are a few more. Stay well.

Book review about Siena Castellon’s autistic girl survival guide

It was my pleasure reviewing this! https://the-art-of-autism.com/book-review-the-spectrum-girls-survival-guide/

Collage by KimberlyGerryTucker

I was thinking how I’ve not been productive lately, artly speaking. And then I went through old canvases. I’ve made quite a few. The last few years 2017-2019 -has actually had quite the output. Some here are a combination acrylic and paper. Most are paper. In some cases, I’m posting portions of larger works. Like […]

Proprioception, ASD, Spatial Awareness and Perspective

At the ER, the nurse said suspiciously, “That looks like a defense wound.” NOPE. Just me being clumsy. I consciously think before moving any part of me and this is crucial in preventing ‘clumsy’ accidents. I have no autopilot. I have spatial awareness ‘issues’ too. (One of the reasons I don’t drive.)

Manifesting reality through wish boards

Here is the link to this blog https://the-art-of-autism.com/manifesting-our-reality-through-wish-boards/

Different Brains-Navigating School With The Autistic Child

When I was a child there was no internet. How I wish my mother had that resource. Recently I wrote up tips on Back2School for autistic children. That article is here: https://www.differentbrains.org/navigating-back-to-school-for-children-with-autism/ #resources #tip #backToSchool #autismAndSchool

(UPDATE: she was found) Help Find Daisy-lost in New Orleans

This is a response to the writing prompt by Wordpress. It’s also serious. Won’t you share Daisy’s info and help her get home to Stacy?

PODS project seeking submissions

Here is my combination Intro blog to Art of Autism and description of my proposed project. Please feel free to submit. PODS

In Progress, An Unfinished Church

So I’m doing this: My glasses are taped to the sugar canister in an attempt to stretch them. I’ve been doing steady at-home close work and so I’ve been wearing them more than usual… I ended up with a swollen and very sore scalp, which is painful even to rest on a pillow. My elbows […]

Dumb Meme. New Work.

Miniature billboard-like memes with their visual messages and antecdotes…usually pop-up-style intrusive, sometimes funny, predictable purveyors of excruciatingly bad grammar, some of them trying too hard to be profound and some actually succeeding. I’ve been slack on writing the blog, keeping abreast of social media, and this is because I’ve got 20 paintings that need to […]

A Few Hours At The Mall

I want to be a bit of both walnut tree and a bit oceanic hot vent fish. Why can’t I be a mix between the two? I’ll explain in a minute what I mean by that. First this: I am not a big user of emojis although sometimes my youngest child and I will make […]

The Words We Speak and 7 Things To Never Say to a Selective Mutism Sufferer

Jerome Apt, a NASA astronaut who flew over the Pacific Ocean in the space shuttle between 1991 and 1996 said this: “I never really believed that seventy one percent of our Earth’s surface is covered with salt water until I flew over the Pacific. Sometimes it took 35 minutes of our 90 minute orbit to […]

Random Art From My Closet I considered Tossing Out

I forgot I had some of these drawings/sketches/pastels/paintings. I felt they were “unfinished” and just off in some way. But a few show promise. WEIRD BANANA MOON

International Autistic Pride Day: June 18th. Splurge, fish and take public transportation too…

International Autistic Pride Day: June 18th. I missed this celebrated awareness day last year. On any given day something is celebrated to “raise awareness.” June 18th is: NATIONAL DUMP THE PUMP DAY On the third Thursday in June, National Dump the Pump encourages people to ride public transportation, instead of driving, and save money. NATIONAL […]

Visual Thinking…I love imagery.

Holy Dust Motes I wrote a poem in 1999 about dust and how it danced in beams of colored light from my church’s stained glass windows. For years I perseverated about anything dust related. Painting The Chameleon Every Day What does that phrase even mean? Well, chameleons change to suit their environment. For people who […]

Collecting New Associations

I’ve always liked to collect. My middle son shares this trait. Some things he is currently collecting, or has collected: pepper shakers (not salt), traffic cones, ID/name tags, dice… I’ve collected or are currently collecting: wooden sailors, cat figurines, Buddhas, rocks, salt and pepper shakers, pens, cacti, African American figurines, crane/claw game prizes… I love […]

Autism Through My Lens

The principal was furious! She did not care how he made his environment more tolerable on the bus, but when it came to her school, she was not willing to make allowances for him. She did not want to assign someone to be with him in the weight room, for example, even though we explained that this would cut out a very stimulating part of his day. He’d been walking through the door at home, exploding with pent up overstimulation! And he was threatening to his siblings and cutting himself too. She was not agreeing to ANYTHING we proposed.

Contemplating Bad News or What I Learned About Life By Being An Artist

I ponder, I recollect, I remember, I forgive, I pour over the pictures in my mind and also in my boxes and albums. Perhaps he does the same; but like the day he grabbed the shovel while I simultaneously held the potato chip bag, he gets down to the basics of things. We are different but not so different, really.

WEIRD, ISN’T IT?

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.
Dr. Seuss

Spread It Like Fertilizer

A fresh faced Jack Klugman (of Quincy and Odd Couple fame) played an alcoholic horn player in an old black and white Twilight Zone episode. (Shows like Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock, and Thriller can be found on the ME network). His character couldn’t get a gig at a nightclub […]

Help Me Appreciate How Awesome This Is

“Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or hold it & let it be without imposing a word of mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you.” ― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

Art Is Important! Expression Is Vital To The Human Condition

Art Is Important! Expression Is Vital To The Human Condition! We’ve been in the midst of a so called blizzard here in the Nor’ East. Blizzard Colby to be exact, but I hardly call 15 inches a blizzard. Anyway the news was remarking upon the large number of babies that were born during the blizzard. Gee, I wonder how many of them will be named Colby… I was sick with flu for a week before the storm came with sweats, 103 degree fever, chills lasting hours, head pain, coughing, congestion, etc. I think without creative expression I might’ve had a terrible time of being a shut-in. But I’ll tell you one of the things I did.

Art, Auties, a Call For Submissions, and a Catawampus Tilted Brain

Synchronicity is a funny thing. It surprises you as you go about your day to day activities. Take for example, owls. And catawampus things. The other day, I looked out over my view of the world from my living room; a short expanse of backyard, a slight hill that tapers into a tree-lined ditch which […]

We are all a part of the landscape

In 2001, (pre-nine eleven) when George W. Bush took office (after a close race with Gore… remember the hanging chad debacle?), dozens of computers were discovered with missing W keys. This “prank” did not extend to the West Wing, although in other areas of the White House, they were pried clean off the […]

Under The Banana Moon (the book) Undergoing an Exciting New Look

Under The Banana Moon is undergoing some changes. Available for purchase here: http://www.amazon.com/Under-Banana-Moon-Living-Aspergers/dp/150572886X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1422058266&sr=1-1&keywords=under+the+banana+moon The paperback version is available online at Amazon now. The book cover is undergoing an entirely new look! I’ve fixed a typo in this version; and added pictures inside. To order it in the original version, please inbox me at gnightelizabeth@gmail.com and I […]

Chap 16 of my Under The Banana Moon Book to turn into a Dance Performance!

Exciting update: Wonderful news. What a lovely Christmas present for me. I’ve just heard that Spoke N Motion Dance, led by Brian Be, is going to do a live performance of Chapter 16 of my book Under The Banana Moon. I can’t wait to see their interpretation of my life and words. I will post […]

Here on Earth 12/18/14, Truth Trumps Fiction

My librarian told me a story recently as I checked out books (two of which I would read all the way through with sustained interest, one that I would happily be engrossed with and the fourth I would end up returning after reading ten pages). One of the books I checked out (the one I […]

Childhood Reminiscing, What IS “Conventional” Anyway?

me, what a looker! my mother and I, She kept the bathing suit. I still have it, (the red and white striped bikini) —the elastic is shot but I still have it. Matter of fact, I think, 49 yrs. later, my father still has that brown shirt blowing on the line! I’m not kidding. My […]

Some Of The Patterns To Be Found At Mohegan Sun

Oh the patterns to be seen at Mohegan Sun. Didn’t gamble, but enjoyed seeing the sights in the shopping areas. Pardon the blurry. Here are some of them: on the way in in the sweets store looking in the corners gold dragonfly on the floor amongst inlaid shells and glass my favorite section of floor […]

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 […]

Note to the Child Me

NOTE TO MY CHILD SELF I’m an adult with sensory sensitivities and diagnoses of both Aspergers and selective mutism. I remember what it was like to be a child with those challenges. At the time, I thought that because I was so different from everyone else that I must have be an alien dropped […]

BRAIN PLUMAGE

“You see yourself descending From the building to the ground And you watch the sky receding And you spin to see the traffic Rising up and it’s so quiet Then you wake”–Adam Duritz I went to an IMax theater in Boston last week and saw a docu-film in 3-D about South Pacific sea life. […]

Young Women making a difference: Amy Gravino, Dani Bowman, Erin Clemens

Living in the eastern part of the U.S. in this cold winter of ’14 (if you are anything like me) has made me somewhat of a bibliobibuli; that is to say; lost in books and not too involved in nature or in ‘the world.’ My standard book consumption […]

weather patterns, Donna Williams, fruit salad, Buddha

Donna Williams says (in a brilliant analogy) that autism is a fruit salad, which I infer to mean, that everyone’s fruit bowl looks a bit different. Mine has Aspergers bananas in it, with selective mutism lemons, sensory processing dysfunction prickly pears, and dysthymic mangos. There are other fruits in there too. Like anxious horned melon […]

Augusten Burroughs and me and also Egyptians and Stuff

“Guess I have to kill you now”, I joked during our ‘bathroom time’. He rolled his eyes and had this stern face which was his mask, the ‘mask of ALS’ (Lou Gehirgs) as it was called in the newsletter we got delivered to the house. His facial muscles were so weak that he had a […]

Resistance to Change and Toilet Tissue and Birds and Stuff

I was thinking about adaptations, about how “equipped” living organisms are to survive within given environments. And also, I was thinking about how ill-equipped I often ‘feel.’ Some birds that are incapable of flight—– like Penguins and Ostriches (because they do not fly), have eggs that are round as opposed […]

She asked me, How does Aspergers feel? Read my book Under The Banana Moon or start by reading this blog

I noticed a message in my facebook inbox. A person affiliated with a selective mutism awareness group asked me a question that should’ve been easy for me to answer. She said, “What does it feel like to have aspergers?” I was surprised at how difficult it was for me to reply to her. After […]

Under The Banana Moon

It is a determined process. The writing of a book. The completion of the book. I have done this. I also had a long process of acquiring an agent, but it happened. If you have enjoyed this blog I dare you to read my labor of love and tell me what you really think of […]

A Kinship; A Means of Communication

Growing up, I never bothered looking at people long enough to see them as anything other than blurry models out of Matisse paintings; jumbled but interesting. I especially hated pictures of relatives hanging on walls. You could never ever avoid their staring eyes. I’d have to dash past them. I […]

Slipper Mopping and Negative Place Association

I still do things outside my comfort zone and that’s got to be a healthy thing, right? Recently we went to Tweed to pick up a friend from the airport who’s staying with us this week. My good friend was driving (I don’t drive at 49 yrs. of age, more about that later!). Anyway he […]