If you can’t…

I think I never intended to write this post.  It’s personal, and it’s a hissy fit, but one I felt a certain responsibility, the more I reflected on it, to transcribe.

I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome last year, which most of you probably know because I talk about it on Facebook enough, because I decided that it was part of my life that I wasn’t going to make any particular effort to hide, because I had nothing to be ashamed of.  (I’d known the truth for several years before I sought out a correct diagnosis; a few people knew, but I didn’t talk about it much, for fear of a lot of things.)  I really have no idea what people think of me as a result, because I stopped concerning myself at a pretty early age with what people think of me.  Because living in thrall to the opinions of people who don’t have to live your life is no way to live at all.

Anyway, so I’d started to think of it as old news that I was autistic.  I’d started to settle in to living as a whole person, without an emotional double life.  Then last night, I was rather emphatically asking my mother not to describe a young relative, currently in the process of being evaluated for autism himself, as not having a personality, because such language is often used to justify all kinds of mistreatment and prejudice against us, besides not being true.

“But you’re not autistic.”

Which is where my brain froze up.  Because honestly?  I don’t know what else I am.  Everything comes home to that.  Everything. Before I understood what AS really was, I didn’t know what I was at all, except for lost and completely alone in the world.

“I don’t think of you as really autistic.”

This is everything I didn’t have it together enough to say at the time.  This is what I’d say going forward:

If you can’t see me as autistic, then you need to revise your view of autism.

I am “not like that kid” you saw who runs around screaming, or who can’t communicate at all, because I grew up.  And because we’re all different, because we’re all different people, who cope with unique profiles of challenges and gifts in individual ways.  I am “not like that kid,” because, to be perfectly literal, I am not that kid.

We are as unique as the stars.  They say autism is a spectrum, but I don’t think that really describes its variety and complexity well.  It’s not a simple progression from mild to severe.  I often say it’s more like a constellation, or galaxy (which, another blogger pointed out to me today, has the added metaphorical benefit of being a 4-dimensional construct; it changes through time for every person as well).  There are people with far more severe problems with independent living than I have, who are smarter, better writers, incredible artists or just incredible people.

I am far more fortunate than many, and not as lucky as others.  I know this; you don’t need to rub my nose in it.

If you can’t think of me as autistic because I have so much personality…actually, we usually do.

If you can’t think of me as autistic because you see me as a competent adult, you didn’t know me as a child.

If you can’t think of me as autistic because I’m verbal and communicative…read more about AS.  Those things are features of the condition.

If you can’t think of me as autistic because I’m so good at my job…please consider that it’s a job that largely entails “keeping track of everything that no one else wants to” (to paraphrase the college instructor who introduced me to stage management as a career option), organizing, color-coding, and working with a collection of people who are also socially marginalized, passionate, obsessive, highly sensitive, and reliant on consistency and repetitive and ritualized behavior.  (Actors, I adore you all so much.)

If you think I can’t be autistic because I’m so good at multitasking, well, I’m not.  Good at multitasking, that is…I can’t do it at all.  I know I’m taking a certain risk in telling you this.  What you see when you see me do my job is the result of copious amounts of planning, mental choreography, scripting, queuing, pre-thinking, mapping out scenarios like computer flowcharts, making Excel spreadsheets, preparation and learning from experience, and excellent assistants being good at their jobs, too.  (Stage management and life with Asperger’s are both centered around dealing with a quantity of data that a single human being is not truly equipped to handle.)

You get good at anything you do for a long time.  I got good at my life when I stopped trying to live one that I realized I could never have.

If you can’t believe I’m autistic, what on God’s green earth do you think I am?  Because I sure as hell failed at being normal.

I’m autistic.  There’s not another or a better word for what I am.  It’s one I searched long and fought hard for.

If you can’t think of me as autistic, it’s not so much for my sake that I care, but watch out that it’s not because you can’t believe that autistic people can be intelligent, kind, good-humored, good friends, good at our jobs, capable of love, highly-skilled or talented, complete human beings.  Because if your prejudice is that autistic people can’t be these things, you take chances for jobs, education, friendships, and quality of life away from autistic people who are a whole lot less lucky than I am.

Onion-esque, volume 5

While I gather my wits for a more substantial post, please enjoy this edition of “Headlines that should be from the Onion, but are not.”

“Despite careful calculations, the world does not end.” –New York Times, 5/21/11

“City strewn with perverts.” –AMNY, 6/15/11  (I know the situation isn’t funny, but the imagery is.)

“Girls Meet Bieber in Meeting Brokered by President Obama.” –gawker.com, 6/27/11

“China admits officials cannot levitate.” –New York Times, 6/30/11

“Cowboy monks quit the cattle business.” –New York Times, 8/14/11

“Bisexual men do exist, study finds.” –New York Times, 8/21/11

“Why do college students love getting wasted?” –Salon.com, 8/29/11

“Do we really need a national weather service?” –foxnews.com, 8/27/11 (i.e., the weekend of Hurricane Irene, which swiped the entire east coast of the United States from the Carolinas to Massachusetts and Vermont.  Yeah.)

“White House Says No Evidence of Extra-Terrestrials.” –AP, 11/7/11

“Rick Perry fails to remember what agency he’d get rid of in GOP debates.” –cbsnews.com, 11/9/11

“Starbucks toilet mutiny exposes reliance.” –New York Times, 11/22/11

Seeking website designer for a project of passion

Dear friends and readers,

A friend of mine, Salvador Speights, who might be the most brilliant person where food is concerned that I know, is in the beginning processes of launching a podcast project based on food culture and politics, and we are seeking all sorts of people who might be interested in lending a hand, but most importantly at the moment, a website designer.  Read more:

I am creating a podcast with the ultimate goal of transitioning to radio. I am looking for creative, passionate people to help lift this project off the ground. We currently have a budget of $200 dollars, but we will be actively fundraising. I need people who are willing to invest their time into the project to build it up to a place where we can start to earn money. Until then, this project will operate on a volunteer basis. I need sound engineers, writers, producers, and web designers. The podcasts will explore contemporary issues regarding food stories. For example, the first podcast will be titled First Meal and it will be discussing the importance of milk, the issues evolving around industrial dairy farming verses alternative dairy, as well as investigating the raw milk debate. We will host interviews with new and expectant mothers regarding breast feeding and the emotional connection created with their child via mother’s milk. Other podcasts will include, but are not limited to, politics, economics, popular culture – how do these transitory climates interact with our permanent necessity for food and sustenance? Each individual podcast will explore topics of food regulation and legislation, agriculture, personal stories and more. If you fit the creative, passionate, food lover we represent.

If anyone’s interested in getting involved (particularly with website design/building!), or knows someone who might be, please get in touch with me, or the Facebook page of the Alvarado School for Sustainability and Community Development.

Thanks, and hope you all are having a happy holiday season!

Happy holidays…

…from my neighbors in Manhattan Valley…

 

 

I have mentioned that I love my neighborhood, right?

Nerd fun at the NYPL

I just got home from the New York Public Library, where I went to hear to Josh Ritter, Wesley Stace, and Steve Earle discuss the relationship between music and writing.  All three were lovely and marvelously intelligent, and though I went to hear Josh (of course), I think it was Steve Earle who said the most intriguing thing of the evening:

“What separates us from animals is not opposable thumbs; it’s that only humans make and consume art.  That’s what separates us from the beasts.”

And while I don’t want to denigrate the quality or value of animals’ emotional lives…I suspect he may be right.  I don’t tend to believe that humans are vastly superior to the rest of the animal kingdom in morals or capacity for empathy or emotional complexity…but I cannot think of another species that produces and consumes art for art’s sake.

Discuss?

Occupy wants to work.

There was this guy…

(Here’s a link to better visibility and a transcription, along with a great point by point response.)

And then I saw this one today…

(Sign reads “OCCUPY BAGRAM: Quit Your Bitchin’ and Get Back to Work.”)

And that’s not even everyone in my Facebook news feed, let alone some corners of the internet where I don’t hang out, suggesting that the real problem with all these people bitching, whining, and complaining, is that they “just don’t want to work.”

Let’s get a few things sorted out, internet critics of Occupy Wall Street and the 99% movement:

Protesting injustice and corruption is not the same as “just not wanting to work.”

Calling attention to it when something is seriously wrong is not the same as “not wanting to work.”

Standing up for your rights is not the same as “not wanting to work.”

Doing any of those things is not even a sign of somebody “just not wanting to work.”

Saying that “what is being done to us and our communities is wrong,” or that “the conditions under which we’re being expected to make ends meet are crushingly unsustainable,” is not the same as “not wanting to work,” nor a sign that somebody just doesn’t want to work.

Pointing it out when an entire system has become radically unfair, or that the people who *did not cause a global economic collapse* are the ones being disproportionately punished for it,  is not “just making excuses” or “not taking responsibility for your own life” or “wanting to blame somebody else for all your mistakes.”

So you can think that the OWS protesters are dirty hippies.  You can resent them taking up park space and making too much noise.  You can dislike their tactics and criticize their vagueness, disorganization, and lack of concrete goals or actual policy proposals.  You can think they’re misguided and wrong.

But do not slander them as “just not wanting to work.”  They’re doing the work of calling attention to major injustice and keeping the tradition of protest and dissent alive in this country.

As for the people on the 99% Tumblr–not the Occupy campers–it takes all of 20 minutes to write a screed on a piece of paper, take a picture, and put it on the internet, so you really have no basis whatsoever to judge these people’s use of their time or decide that they’re putting insufficient energy into finding or keeping a job or working for their own futures.

Telling a story on the internet is not the same as not wanting to work.  Telling the truth about how hard things are for most people in America right now is not the same as not wanting to work.

Daring to say that “the circumstances that allowed this to happen to me are not okay” is not the same as not wanting to work.

The thinking that says that it is, is a relic of the way we were treated in middle school–that somebody speaking up about unfairness or calling attention to a problem was shamed as guilty of creating a problem where there wasn’t any when no one was speaking up.

I guess a lot of people learned that lesson well.  I didn’t.

A lot of the Occupy and 99% protesters are college graduates or have advanced degrees.  You really think they dragged themselves through that many years of school, and the work and expense involved, because they “just didn’t want to work?”  A lot of them went deep into debt for their college educations.  You think they did that because they *didn’t* want to get a job?  Or because they believed parents, teachers, and employers who told them that they needed a college degree *in order to get a good job* these days?  Do you really think that what they’re doing now is easier than working a regular job, earning a living and going about their daily lives?  Do you really think they’d all still be out there, with winter coming, if there were enough jobs paying livable wages to go around and they could just go get one?

When the economy first went into recession and unemployment spiked, many of these same people now protesting and occupying–including myself–yelled for a new WPA and Federal Theater Project, for the government to directly create jobs and put people to work.  We wanted desperately to work–to put the economy back together, to put the country back together, to contribute in meaningful and permanent ways to our culture and future.

We begged to be allowed to work, to do the work that this country needed done.

But our government didn’t go that route…it mostly tried instead to entice private enterprise into bringing jobs back.  Private enterprise didn’t come through with that.

And now you say that we “just don’t want to work.”  It makes the irony-processing center of my brain freeze up.

It might be funny if it didn’t hurt so much.

Reality: Ur doin’ it wrong.

On Fantasy

 Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

-George R. R. Martin, author

**********

I feel much the same way as GRRM about fantasy—that it connects us to a deep internal knowledge and history of our own psyches, and recalls something huge and eternal in us.  Epic fantasy, when I was in middle and high school, assured me that there was so much more worth living for than my schools and community were trying to tell me.

But I’m not sure about his dim view of reality…as opposed to the disposable and shallow nature of much of what is sold to us as “reality,” and told we have to accept as the scope of our adult lives.

May I suggest, that if strip malls, plastic and plywood define your reality, and you don’t like it…you’re doing reality wrong.

Because reality is all that stuff, George, but reality is also—

The whistle and rumbling murmur of an early-morning train.

Reality is the first pale green shoots of peppermint pushing up through the dirt in March.

Reality is the guy who plays Simon and Garfunkel’s “El Condor Pasa” on Peruvian pan pipes in the Times Square subway station.

Reality is the stunning silence of a great blue heron taking flight.

Reality is the old Hispanic men in my neighborhood who sit outside in the summertime, playing an eternal sidewalk game of dominos with their boomboxes turned up loud.

Reality is sunset over the Hudson River.

Reality is moonlight, starlight, candle light, lantern light.

Reality is creaky old bookstores, and the thrill of reading a forbidden book hidden between the shelves.

Reality is the feel of sand as soft as cake flour under your feet.

Reality is the smell of wood smoke on the first cold night of fall.

Reality is stained glass, dark coffee, red wine, rosewood incense.  The brush of a fat cat around your ankles, the way evening light moves over the Brooklyn Bridge and tops of the sycamore trees, rooftop Fourth of July parties with the sky on fire around you, waking up on a foggy morning in the Catskill mountains, the sound of the concertmaster tuning an orchestra, tiny cemeteries behind old churches, hidden waterfalls, thunder in a snowstorm, the way deer’s eyes shine in the dark in a flashlight beam.

Nurture magic, wonder, and beauty wherever they occur in your life.  They are real—far more real than strip malls, suburban office parks, and Disneyland—whatever anyone tells you.

Sights that make me feel like a lucky human being

Sunset over the far west side of Manhattan, from our rehearsal studio last night.

New and creative ways to beat up on the poor

There’s been one of those viral status updates going around Facebook for a while, and it goes like this:

Florida is the first state that will require drug testing when applying for welfare (effective July 1st)! Some people are crying this is unconstitutional. How is this unconstitutional?  What, it’s okay to test people who work for a living, but not those who don’t?

My dislike for the snideness of the status aside, I dared to hoped that it was just some half-baked, unsubstantiated rumor that there were states about to start drug-testing public assistance applicants.  Or that some little bill to that effect had been introduced somewhere by some jerkface, but would never make it out of committee.

I hoped wrong.  This appeared in the Times recently:

States Adding Drug Test as Hurdle for Welfare

First, I reject the central premise that it’s okay to drug-test employees or job applicants.  I don’t think it’s okay in most circumstances.  It’s demeaning and it demonstrates a lack of basic respect of one adult for another on the part of an employer, and a presumption of ownership of your body and non-work hours.  If you give an employer no reasonable cause to suspect that your leisure activities are having a negative impact on your job performance, then what business of theirs is your private life?  The Fourth Amendment guarantees freedom from “unreasonable search and seizure.”  I don’t understand how applying for a job constitutes a reasonable suspicion of illegal drug use.

Likewise, I don’t understand how having fallen on hard times during a major economic collapse and prolonged period of high unemployment constitutes reasonable suspicion of illegal drug use.

Secondly, the purpose of requirements like these is not to keep druggies from receiving benefits, or people receiving benefits from buying drugs with your tax dollars.  Sorry, it isn’t.  It’s for states to keep their welfare rolls artificially low by deliberately intimidating eligible people away from applying in the first place.  It’s to discourage people from applying for benefits for fear of humiliation or mistreatment.

Multiply anyone’s basic, rational fear of humiliation or mistreatment in a vulnerable situation by about 15 for people with communication or cognitive disabilities.

Leading me into objection #3:  Applying for assistance to which you are legally entitled should not require surrendering basic human dignity, privacy, and rights over your own body.

Anyone who thinks it’s too easy as it is, probably hasn’t done it.

And all of this is aside from whether requirements like these would even be cost-effective, saving more money in denied benefits than they’ll cost to implement and run; or whether they’re a good idea even if they do.  My strong suspicions are probably not, and probably not.  I mean, does anyone really think that someone without adequate food or shelter is super likely to be getting effective treatment for a drug problem?

It’s easy to imagine that we have a problem with people who “just don’t want to work” beating down the door for “your tax dollars,” because woo, money for nothing! but the reality is that in every state, huge proportions of people who are eligible for public assistance programs do not access them, either from not knowing that they’re eligible, not knowing how and being too embarrassed to find out, fearing retribution in some other way if they bring their situation to the state’s attention (for instance, if some members of their household are in the country illegally), or because the application requirements are onerous or humiliating.

Why are the people whining “but I’m a taxpayer!” always the ones proposing some new and creative way to humiliate the poor?

I’m a taxpayer, and here are some of the things my tax dollars pay for: a war that I hate on a country that did nothing to us (now mercifully ending).  Airport “security” measures that have made it impossible for me to fly.  Subsidies for the production of the lowest quality food products that are making us fat and sick, for our continued unsustainable reliance on fossil fuels, and for the very same banks and corporations that ruined the economy for the rest of us.  And the now decades-long complete failure that is the War on Drugs.

So pardon me that I won’t moan about some comparatively small proportion of our tax dollars going to assist with food and living expenses for some of the most vulnerable people in one of the richest countries in the world.  There are lots of things wrong in this country; that we actually try to keep people from starving or dying on the streets isn’t one of them.

There will always be a minority of people who will abuse any system; that’s an inherent risk of a system’s existence (which of course we should try to reasonably minimize), not an excuse for the rest of us to be smug or cruel.

Winter Food

I’ve been looking forward to fall and winter this year.  I’ve been craving cool, damp, blustery weather.

I love it when the nighttime temperatures start dipping low enough, usually in October, to justify making my favorite warm and filling wintertime meal: stuffed acorn squash.  This year it happened about a week ago, right before I started tech rehearsal for the current show, so I got one last decent meal before my week of 13-hour days started.

Take an acorn squash and use a heavy knife to knock off the stem and cut it in half lengthwise.  Scoop out the seeds.  Turn the halves upside down in a shallow pan with about 1/8-1/4″ water in the bottom.  Roast in the oven at 350° for about 45 minutes; they’re done when tender enough that you can fairly easily stick a fork through the outer skin.

It’s good if it starts to caramelize a little bit around the edges.

While the squash is roasting, slice up an apple and a small onion.  In a skillet, melt butter and sauté one or two links of sweet Italian sausage, crumbled out of its casing.  When the sausage is almost cooked through, add the onions and apples and cook until tender.

Turn the cooked squash halves right side up and shred the flesh inwards with a fork.  Season with salt and pepper.  Fill the hollows to overflowing with the sausage/apple mixture, and spice with cinnamon, nutmeg, or cardamom.

Enjoy, and stay warm.