Film of the Week

Sherlock Holmes has yet to arrive on Blu-ray (wife didn’t watch the two TV show discs we have), so we tried Thirteen Days from Netflix streaming instead.

This was kind of cheating as far as forcing movies for therapy goes.  

It was a fairly intriguing political drama set around the Cuban Missile Crisis and the decision-making done by the key players.  The emotion was all about an event whose outcome I already am well acquainted, so I didn’t really have to stretch myself there. I didn’t feel much emotion, so this was a pleasure.  It was almost like I had a feeling of control, since it was an exploration of how a pre-determined outcome was reached.

The film managed to be pretty good, despite the fact that Kevin Costner was in it.  By the way, he does a Boston accent far better than a southern or “British” one (http://www.amazon.com/Robin-Hood-Thieves-Extended-Version/dp/B001993Y3G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1281269975&sr=8-1)

I was pleased with the willingness of the producers to let the story tell itself without lots of unnecessary shots of crying, people in fear, or without the massive cavalcade of foreshadowing and paralleled emotional loss of say, a Ron Howard (I still hate Apollo 13 to this day because of crap like that).  The concern was subtle, and well developed by multiple individual characters.  Historically, I’m sure the otherworldliness and uber-intelligence they granted the Kennedy’s was overstated, but since Costner tends to workshop at the Altar of “If Only JFK Lived, Everything Would Have Been Better,” I’m not too shocked.

All in all, a good film if you enjoy character studies, anything about the process of high-level decision making, or simply want to educate yourself about the broad framework of the Missile Crisis and don’t want to read a book.

SMotD - Not so trivial pursuit

Like many of us, my special interests tended to create significant repetition, studying, memorizing, etc.  In my late adolescence, my parents purchased a cabin in the woods about 4 hours away from our house (previously mentioned in an SMotD) and during the years when I was too young to stay home, we made regular weekend trips.  This was a long drive, and in order to entertain us, my parents put trivial pursuit game cards in the car.  Not the kiddie version, but the real adult thing.  I always had a good mind for memorizing facts, and I started reading the cards and testing myself on the answers, regardless of whether anyone was playing with me.  After a few years, I became so familiar with many of the correct answers, simply from repetition.  My mother made several positive remarks about this ability, and my sister made some offhanded remark about “how it’s not fun to play with Dave since he knows all the answers.”  So, my NAT mind automatically filed trivial pursuit as “something where I knew all the answers” and “not fun for others to play with.”  A point of pride.  The fall would come at age 18.

SMotD - Cheering is a Team Thing

I’m into sports.  For a while, I was WAY into sports.  And when I say into, I mean, devour-everything-about-a-sport-because-I-suck-at-organized-sports-in-real-life. I decided I needed to live and die with my teams.  I had to HATE the other team.  I decided this in arounds age 14.  God I was awkward.

I went to a school in a major city in the US, where our school was pretty good in my senior year, and we played against another school who had a future NBA star on it. I had also played against this star in 8th grade in league play.  By high school he was awesome, and our school got up for the game.  I decided to go all out and painted my face the school colors. 

Little did I know this would be one of the least embarrassing things I did that night.

SMotD - What Did You Just Say?

Listening.  Though I would never want to reduce something so beautifully complex into one word, if I had to define what most NATs struggle with, it would be the ability to listen.  My mind moves in many different directions, all at once, and if you aren’t interesting me, or if you are saying something that I cannot connect with a learned experience, the chance is you have no hope of garnering my full attention.  Sure, I may nod, but I drift off.  And on the phone…forget it.  You might as well be reading ingredients and proportions off the back of a fruitcake recipe.  I just won’t care.  So is the context for today’s SMotD, the moment I realized that conversation fillers cannot substitute for listening.

SMotD - Losing Control

Most of the time, my meltdowns are verbal in nature, involve screaming or, in exceptional cases, hitting objects.  These days I try very hard not to be physically expressive because I don’t want to hurt anyone.  However, in the past, I can recall a few instances where my frustration over not being understood resulted in actually hurting someone.  Today’s tale involves how violence came about because I was being deprived of something near and dear to me, sleep.

The Film Experiment

I’m trying something new.  Movies have always made me seriously emotional.  I cannot help but become SO frightened at key situations, crying uncontrollably at exactly the moments when skilled directors would have me bawling.  Growing up in a world where boys don’t cry, and in a family that did NOT show their emotions publicly, I came to detest watching movies.  I was always so embarrassed.  

As part of a process to tackle this fear and learn to deal with the emotional swings, I am trying to watch one movie a week. I’ll start slow, things I’ve seen before, popcorn romps like Sherlock Holmes.  But I hope to expand and let myself try “feeling” again. I’ll post movie reviews along with the feeling swings as best I can.

Relationship, young males and Asperger's

This is a very heartfelt post from an awesome guy, Travis, who is struggling to come to terms with how neuro-atypicals begin and nurture relationships with members of the opposite sex.  I think he is very brave for posting this and his willingness to be vocal and open about his frustrations, how his mind works, and how he can improve his relationship.  I want to post something eventually about how I came to deal with relationships and sex as a young male NAT, if only to let Travis know he is not alone.

SMotD - When the Moon Hits Your Eye

Do you ever get that short circuit feeling where you simply freeze because you know you can’t escape, but you simply cannot accept the horrible thing you just did, and you try to move on like nothing happened? This happened to me in 2002 and stays with me to this day.  Picture a boisterous NAT, in his environment, eatingpizza and talking loudly about his special interest and let your mind wander… :)

Exposure

A great post on empathy from Aspie from Maine, especially how NATs can interpret it.  

I especially like this excerpt:

“I have always needed to hear the WORDS when someone is trying to comfort me, but here’s the thing. Most people don’t have words. And that proved disastrous to me, time after time. Because I would be crying, I would be revealing highly emotional things, and I’d look across to where the person was sitting. As far as I could tell, they weren’t responding at all. They weren’t listening. They didn’t care. They didn’t understand. (When in fact nonverbal language was probably saying otherwise.)”

Worth a read: http://aspiefrommaine.blogspot.com/2010/07/on-matter-of-empathy.html

SMotD - Birthdays: Accepting the gifts you get

For so many years, I have hated birthdays.  I didn’t like being the center of attention, I thought the entire preoccupation with gifts, forced giving, the notion that simply having been born on a calendar day equated to people being obligated to buy things for you.  This was made even worse by the fact that unless I was paying very close attention to the other person on a consistent basis, I had no idea what to get the birthday boy or girl.  I might get the person what I wanted, but I had lots of special interests that not everyone shared.  It’s even worse receiving, because there are all these expectations that I would smile and be grateful and a host of other expressions that I don’t feel like expressing.  I felt awkward even having these people me, all looking at me, let alone giving me things, on top of an expectation that I love what they gave. 

But it wasn’t always this way. 

SMotD - Sarcasm is non-operational

Today’s Social Miscue comes from the first year of graduate school.  I was a know-it-all 22-year old.  I had studied my subject (history) with dedication since I was 12, and was passionate about facts, dates, places etc.  It certainly qualified as a “special interest”.  I had entered grad school in the hopes of becoming a professional historian.  I was so ready to share my love of history, and was anxious to involve myself in an older group of fellow lovers of history (average age of grad students in the department was around 28-29).  I met so many nice people, and they politely tolerated my sense of supreme confidence.  I tended to think (unconsciously) that if I just showed them how much I knew, they would all love me.  This was quickly and immediately demonstrated to be a very optimistic and erroneous assumption.

Introduction to the site

As a recently diagnosed adult male with Asperger’s Syndrome, I find myself relating to the world with new eyes.  I have had a relatively successful life, have earned a PhD in history and work at a large research university in the Midwest.  I am married, and in my mid-30s.  I decided to launch this blog after learning from my wife, a school psychologist who has worked most of her life with children on the spectrum, that my achievements as a neuro-a-typical have inspired some of the young adults she counsels. 

It is my modest hope that by presenting my experiences, my views, my interactions with the world, and my growth through ever-present social awkwardness may bring some comfort to fellow NATs that things can and do get better, and life is a place to be treasured and explored, not feared.

I also wish to add my voice to the chorus of dedicated individuals who are working to educate the multitudes of people who have a skewed or limited view of Asperger’s Syndrome and NATs.