The Passing of Genetic Destiny?

Even as far back as when Bonnie Jean and I began serious dating, we talked about the possibility that our kids would be autistic.  It was just part of the package that came with the idea of marrying an autistic man.  I seem to remember Bonnie Jean saying that once she understood me better, she didn't think she'd have a problem with it.

When we got pregnant after a few years of trying, it wasn't too far from our minds.  The medical intake forms for the OBGYN asked if there was any history of autism in the family, and I seem to remember joking that I wondered whether the doctor would be surprised if I told him that yes there was a history of autism in the family because I had Asperger Syndrome.

When Taliesin was born I don't remember how it came up but I took one of my blind leaps and somehow ended up disclosing my autism to one of the nurses at the hospital who was absolutely fascinated by me.  Talking about my Asperger Syndrome diagnosis can be hard even with people that I trust will react well- even to the point that I've had times that the experience leaves me shaking.  But sometimes I just dive in and let it flow.  Fortunately it turned out well.

When Taliesin was late with his language development milestones or broke into sobs of tears because a stranger dared smile at him, autism wasn't far from our minds.  He was so scared of strangers that we had to tell the people who took care of nursery at the church not to pick him up to calm him down when he was upset.  He'd calm down faster if he wasn't also screaming about someone touching and looking at him.  Fortunately they were willing to believe us and reported with some bewilderment that our judgement was right, he calmed down faster on the floor than being cuddled by a stranger.

Some family members have kind of started from the assumption that every one of these signals was a definite sign that our little boy was on the autistic spectrum.  But we never saw enough to consider it a justified assumption.  We've let our pediatricians know our family history and routinely discussed Taliesin's quirks with him.  But until recently our pediatricians had never considered that enough symptoms were falling into place to be taken seriously.  It always seemed a possibility that Taliesin might just inherit a few of my quirks without getting the whole package.  During our last well visit though we explained the severe social anxiety, literal concrete thinking patterns, rigid routines, and ritualistic play patterns that our son was developing.  And now we've got a referral to the University for an autism screening.  While the result isn't certain, we're feeling more settled that they will make an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis.

I'm starting to see a lot of my own limitations in my son.  As we were describing how Taliesin literally took months of acclimatization to be willing to talk to the newly moved in neighbor kids because he'd rather just stand there and smile shyly it made me think of myself as an adult at work.  It takes me a long time of adjustment- weeks to months actually-to feel comfortable with a new social group and be ready to do anything much more than just sit there and read by myself.  I'm just happy to have people around so that if I choose to take the effort to interact they'll be there for me.  After a long time maybe I'll find a few people that I can figure out how to talk to on a more chit chat basis.  When changes in seating arrangements force me to sit by new people on a regular basis I quickly become mostly silent and miserable.

Within the last few weeks my son has finally gotten over his initial shyness to try to talk to the new neighbor children.  But somehow they are just feeling confused by his choices of conversation- such as what kinds of shoes they are wearing or whether there are ravens on the roof of the building and what noise they make.  And yes- he knows what ravens look like, along with a number of other birds because his bird obsessed father has been teaching him.  So the little girls he is trying to befriend just ignore him, perhaps just not knowing how to react- especially given his history of not being up to speaking to them.  Just to example how firmly that expectation of his silence has formed, Bonnie Jean saw one of these little girls wanting to play with Taliesin's bike but being stopped by her mom who wanted the little girl to ask Taliesin first.  The little girl burst into tears, crying that Taliesin wouldn't answer.  Fortunately, Taliesin was feeling social and was willing to speak to the girl and answer yes.  And just like me at work trying to figure out how to chit chat with fellow employees, the comfort required to say that much took him months.

When we decided to get pregnant we knew this might be the result.  I've known my life was worth living and therefore worth passing on, especially if I could make it a better life for my son than I had had- undiagnosed and coping with the emotional strain of a sometimes horridly abusive home.  As much as I want to ease the difficulties, I know I won't ever be able to completely make them disappear for him, just like I can't do that for myself.  Like me, he'll be likely to susceptible to episodes of anxiety and depression.  Like me, he'll probably have trouble seeing into his own mind to understand the emotions churning there.

I hope that like me he'll have a passionate commitment to justice, gentleness, and truth.  I hope that like me, he'll be able to take a fierce joy in obsessively enjoying life.  I hope that like me he'll thirst to learn new things all his life.  And I hope that, unlike me, he'll learn much earlier in life to love and understand who he is as he goes through every step of life in his own way.

Forward the Foundation

It might surprise many people who know me today as a bookworm who sometimes can't manage basic conversation skills, but I was a delayed reader.  I didn't read until 3rd grade, when I read "The Hobbit."  Then in fourth and fifth grade I read many of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.  My parents wouldn't let me read the whole series because of some of its more adult themes.  But that didn't stop by fifth grade book report from being on "Foundation's Edge" which is the 6th book in the series.  I even had a sculpy clay statue of the spaceship from the picture on the front of the book to go along with it.

One of the books my parents banned me from reading was the second of the two prequels, "Forward the Foundation."  The main character's son marries a prostitute in a really non sexy sub plot, but edgy enough that they thought a little boy like me shouldn't be allowed to read it.  As a result, I knew so many of the characters introduced in "Prelude to Foundation" without knowing much about them or what became of them.  And after all these years I've come back and read the missing piece of the story.  And I find myself kind of mourning the characters.  These characters inhabited my imagination from a very young age- and I find myself having misjudged them at times, misunderstood them at others, or simply failing to understand their life's significance.

For example...

Somehow I missed that the main character had married an android robot.  Its only hinted at in the first book, but just enough that maybe I should have guessed.  I was always dissatisfied with Hari Seldon's relationship with Dors Venaboli- but I judgmentally thought that was because the characters were immoral.  To summarize, at the end of Prelude to Foundation Hari is desperately trying to keep his new found love from leaving him and asks Dors if she'd ever really wanted to kiss or sleep with anyone or if she had just done so because she didn't want to disappoint people.  When she confesses that she simply hasn't wanted to disappoint anyone and she finds that she wants him to kiss her, all my prudish teenage brain could come up with was that the relationship had a jarring lack of depth and all I could see was two people whose sexual side was getting the better of them.  The passage is jarring for a reason.  Dors, as a robot, has a somewhat limited emotional vocabulary and that does limit the depth of the relationship.  But when I read the passage where she lies dying- killed by an assassin trying to kill her to allow the government to kill Hari, and Hari has just barely consciously realized that she is a robot for the first time and she thanks him for making her human, my harshness towards her in my past judgements lies exposed.

I didn't read Prelude to Foundation until rather late in my teenagerhood- it originally having been on the banned book list but eventually I was allowed to read it.  So Hari Seldon was someone that I knew only as a hologram that would appear at critical moments to give prophecy and guidance to the future.  I did not know him as a man.  In Prelude to Foundation he spends his time being a puppet on a string to do the bidding of a telepath robot who mind controls him for the good of galactic mankind- so reading it didn't really help me get to know him that well.  Now I know his life story- how he grew old and died, losing almost every one that was dear to him until he ended dead slumped over in a wheel chair- the tools of his equations and prophecy in his hands.  Again, the limited perspective I had of him earlier is painfully embarressing.

And then there is Eto Demerzel.  The problem with diving into adult science fiction or fantasy as a child is that your imagination has to supply the missing parts that you can't understand.  I actually for a time believed that Eto Demerzel was a computerized hologram of emperor Cleon- made to look more handsome and impressive than the reality.  Since then I have read the Caves of Steel books, and I know all about the past and motivations of Eto Demerzel- Robot Daneel Olivaw.  Lets just say that I felt really emotional reading about the robot attending Hari's funeral, giving one and probably the only public thanks if you will to a life that was devoted to the good of the galaxy because of Daneel's vision for the future.

When I first read these books they were simply adventure stories to me.  Now I'm more mature and can read them more in their proper context because I'm filling in the holes in the story where I wasn't allowed to read when I was a child.  Reading them as an adult I can now fully understand the extent to which Isaac Asimov was a master of science fiction, and I'm thrilled to rediscover his writing.

WII-U

Because its been a long time since I did anything for fun for myself I decided I'd pick up a WII-U and try to catch up on some games that I had never gotten around to playing.  Honestly I grew up playing nothing more sophisticated than a Sega Genesis and found more recent game systems during attempts to play them at friends houses to be confusing- what buttons did I push and when and what did they all do?  So I never really caught up with gaming.  And honestly I probably never will from the perspective of serious players.  I've got too much of my time taken up by school and work and family to really into things.  So since a lot of what I wanted to do was to play the metroid and zelda games that I missed out on growing up a WII-U was a perfect match.  It could backwards compatible play the older titles and I could catch the more recent ones as well.  All with a new system that was significantly cheaper than the other systems out there unless you want to buy used or older models.  So far I've got a couple impressions.

First is it seems like the WII-U was launched in beta and nobody has thought to make certain that newly manufacturer devices come with reasonably updated firmware.  This is a problem because the firmware updates that have to be installed to begin with run into several gigabytes of data and I only have a 3 mbps internet speed on my home connection.  Looking over the change log- it appears as if Nintendo has been releasing firmware updates every couple months since the system came out and are still promising that eventually they'll fix the lag time the system has navigating its menu or opening new apps.  They also haven't even gotten around to programming in the ability to access multiple hard drives at once or to swap out the drives without rebooting the entire system- despite having come with 4 USB ports.  So apparently the firmware and fine tuned decisions on how exactly the system should work is giving someone a massive headache.

Next comes NintendoLand- a bunch of mini games or demos inspired by prominent titles.  So far I've only played the zelda mini game.  And honestly its kind of embarressing.  Its fun enough, but when the largest reason that I find the game difficult is that I'm given only partial control over where my player walks and when it feels like the demo was whipped together in somebody's spare time to show off the controller instead of the Zelda game series.

Next is the time line of title releases.  Maybe I just have odd expectations of gaming systems or something.  But the WII-U has been out for about a year and a half and they only have just gotten the first Zelda game  designed for the system from the ground up on preorder and there are no new metroid games available unless the Nintendo Land demo counts somehow.  If its similar in quality to the Zelda demo I'm not certain that would make me feel excited about the game system.  That being said the system has managed to release games for other major franchises such as the WII sports, smashbrothers, mario kart, and Super mario's world.  So maybe I'm just blinded by expecting that they'd have gone farther on Zelda.  But they did manage to find the time to port Wind Waker from all the way back from Game Cube over.  But that isn't a new game- its just a port from a system two game console versions ago.

Another impression is that they may have made a mistake by trying to split the remote control usage between their new game pad with its screen and the baton waving WII remotes.  It means that in multiplayer games they have to find something to do with the on remote screen that is interesting but unimportant enough for the secondary players to not be able to do it on their own.  Which basically ensures that the secondary screen is pretty much lame except in single player games.

In the end the system will do exactly what I wanted- play older and more recent games while allowing me a little flexibility to explore other more modern or recent games.  But I think the Nintendo brand is struggling a bit to get their feet under them.

Mythology

I like mythology.  I hate mythology.  I don't know that there is any other way to interact with it.  By mythology, I mean the sum total of stories we tell about the world around us to explain it to ourselves and that we assume in some way to be true/useful or that in history at some point someone assumed to be true/useful.

For an example of why I love and hate mythology, take the Greek and Roman mythology.  Much of it provided some way to try to make sense of the supernatural forces that were assumed to pervade reality.  Much of it describes events happening which are frankly brutal and disgusting and gods in general who are capricious and difficult to respect in any kind of normal human moral context.  But the world is a scary place with lots of things happening all the time that are brutal and make no sense in a moral context if you assume someone is responsible for all the random stuff that happens to you, so the brutality and amorality actually probably to many made the myths more compelling- not less.  The myths also provided a sense of common identity, a model for how idealized inter city interactions might take place, and a sense of traditional enemies and how they might be viewed and treated.

Some myths don't have to be believed as real to be viewed as useful.  A long time ago in a website far far extinct a completely fictionalized myth was created for people on the autism spectrum.  While nobody viewed the mythos as "real" in any literal sense, the "Aspergian Island" mythology created a sense of community and a common way of expressing the frustrations of living an autistic life and resonated widely and spawned a whole family of web forums and other communities which were very helpful to many people during a darker time of autism acceptance just not being a very high social priority and where it wasn't uncommon to hear about people claiming poison such as that anti bullying measures weren't needed because autistics didn't have emotions anyways.

So where's the problem?  Well, humans tend to form into tribal groups that want to love the people inside of them and hate the people outside of them.  Myths often are the language spoken to express the justification for these barriers.  Also, myths form the expression of how to punish and how to justify punishing someone who doesn't conform to the in group.  We can limit the needless destruction by trying to make our myths as accurate as possible and subjecting them to revision such as in science.  But as imperfect human beings, our will to punish or exclude traitors or outsiders easily overshadows the usefulness the myths provide. And that is why I hate myths.  Life in its totality is a mystery.  We all, in a sense, live in Plato's cave.  And the more we are sure we have the correct story of how the world works then the more we are willing to justify the emotional and social abuse heaped on ousiders or traitors.  And the more we are sure we are right the less willing we are to open our minds to the possibility of being wrong and needing to make course corrections.

So as I said before, I love and hate myths.  I don't know that it is possible to completely due without them, but to resolve the basic tension between loving everyone and loving only those we are like you a head on attack on the reliability of the myths must be made.

Lightning

When I got home from work tonight the USU laser beam was going and for some reason it seemed exceptionally brilliant against the night sky.  So I took a picture on a 15 second exposure and wrote a poem.  What else do you do with free laser light shows?  Click the picture to see its full grandeur.

Lightning

Infinite to the left, Infinite to the right.
The lightning splits the sky.
Endless possibility shines through the heavens,
When lightning splits the sky.

My past to the left, my future to the right.
Transformation splits my life.
Endless potential promised from heaven,
When lightning splits the sky.

The beauty of my past, the hope of my future.
Eternal transformation burns my life.
Endless decay and rebirth promised at the crossroads,
When lightning splits the sky.

Feeling clueless on how to defend the clueless

Having Asperger Syndrome has made me sympathetic to the plight of others who are similarly socially clueless.  So sometimes when I hear others criticizing or expressing awkwardness about dealing with a socially clueless person I want to jump in and defend the reputation of the clueless person.

Years ago while I was at a library a group of my classmates gathered around and started talking about how a woman we all knew had asked one of them out on a date.  The problem was the boy in question was on a date with another girl when this woman asked him out.  They were confused by her lack of tact and expressed frustration that this woman kept doing things like that.  I happened to know that this woman also had Asperger syndrome.  It would have been so convenient to have just said "She's a little mentally disabled when it comes to social norms so cut her some slack."  But this is a sensitive issue and its not good to out someone else especially if you aren't absolutely confident that the results will be emotionally safe for the person you are outing.  So I just said something like "I'd give her the benefit of the doubt."  Since at least some of the people around me knew about my having Asperger Syndrome I think I might have even gone as far as saying "I'd cut her some slack just like you would if I made a social mistake."  I don't know if she ever got her date with the young man she asked out, but I kind of doubt it.

Recently at work I've overheard similar conversations of frustration regarding someone who is socially clueless.  Someone who I know has tentatively self diagnosed themselves as Asperger Syndrome.  Unfortunately, this man often tends to go beyond simply being clueless.  He also tends towards being cluelessly and loudly offensive.  Making sexually judgmental comments about his coworkers daughters, absurdly racist statements, bigoted statements about homosexuals, and other unpleasant things to deal with.

And I just don't know what to do.  He's a nice enough guy once you get past the rougher edges and if he doesn't drive you crazy first with the more absurd things he talks about.  I'd love to step up and say "I'm sorry you feel he was frustrating, but he just doesn't understand social politeness"  Because it often goes beyond politeness in style to issues of offensiveness in content.  And I can't make any excuse for those statements.  They are just there.  But I wish I could do something more.  It makes me feel clueless.

Shepherd

There was once was a shepherd who had 100 sheep.  One of them tended to wander.  The shepherd didn't like how nervous that made the other 99.  He angrily told the 1 sheep that if it wanted to wander and tempted the other sheep to wander to the shepherd would spray paint it red so that the other sheep would know to stay away from it.  Because its better to have 99 sheep who know its  to avoid wanderers than to have 100 sheep who aren't completely strictly in agreement about everything.  Since the food of the good shepherd is only for good sheep, the spray painted sheep was then forbidden from eating the food in the pasture of the good shepherd.  Because its better to watch one sheep starve to death alone cut off and ostracized from all its fellows than it is to deal with the possibility that the 99 might get ideas.

What a good shepherd.  All good shepherds like to eat tasty sheep, what else do the sheep exist for?