-go on a diet!

-buy a wedding dress!

-buy jewelry!

-now with less fat!

-be a maid!

-you are fat go on a diet!

-go on a diet so you can buy more and smaller clothes!

-get married! Go on a diet!

-play this game where you dress up as a pretty pretty princess and then go on a diet because you are fat!

Ads on my facebook page after changing gender to male, and having the exact same friends, interests, and “likes”:

-Start that business you always wanted!

-Buy your dream house!

-Buy this book by an author you like!

-HIRE a maid!

-Go to the gay pride festival!

-Build a shed yourself!

-Be a mechanic at UTI! (LOLOL foreeever)

-Finish your degree!

-Be a policeman!

Conclusion: This.

http://youtu.be/M9fFOelpE_8

Strike 1: “Do you shit your pants? People with Asperger’s shit their pants. They go into uncontrollable rages.”

Strike 2: “You seem like a bright young woman, so…”

Strike 3: “You women”

ALL IN THE SAME APPOINTMENT

previous doctor:

Strike 1: “You must be a graduate student, on account of your AAAAGE.”

Strike 2: “I have autism.” *blank face, never mentions it again but pigeonholes me as a hypochondriac*

Strike 3: *have eye infection* “Throw out your eye makeup! hey, it’s an excuse to go SHOPPING!” *prescribes me $100 eyedrops I can’t afford and have to leave at the pharmacy*

And this is just fucking regular ass old medical doctors.

My decision to specifically choose a woman of color as my new doctor strikes me as a bit disingenuous at best, but I honestly cannot bring myself to face another Old White Man Republican.

Like, seriously, do doctors not realize that I can just fire their asses? Do they think I’d shop less diligently for someone to manage my health than I would for a goddamn cell phone plan?

*infinite facepalm*

It’s a few months over with now, and I actually managed to send a message to a friend who had had the same teacher years ago. She mentioned her, and I was like, “We kinda had a bit of a war”. She inquired as to the nature of the story there, and I sent this in reply:

oh, man.
So anyhow she was teaching the Honors capstone course last semester, which I took. It was “Literature and Leadership”. Now, the class curriculum kinda sucked, to be fair, and the textbook was utter crap. Is ANYONE going to get anything out of ten pages’ worth of Billy Budd? 20 minutes of Hotel Rwanda? Nope. Tons of excepts from longer works, with absolutely no context. A lot of “group building” activities involving wasting food, like “protect this egg we’re gonna drop down the stairs!”
Aaaanyway, one day our team exercise was to come up with ways to come up with ideas to raise funds(in general. like, the idea process). Also, this class was comprised of about 75% home schooled caucasian 18-year-olds from like, Skaneateles.
Sooo, we used a postulated situation of raising funds for kids whose parents were having difficulty making christmas happen, financially. So, she went around the classroom asking people for ideas, blah blah blah, and then this one girl said, “Well, why don’t we just guilt them into it?” and she started laughing, and everyone started calling out stuff like, “Yeah, make sure we get pictures of poor kids! ” “They should be really dirty and sad!” “Hey yeah, maybe they should be crying!” And then to top it off, the professor said, ” Oh, yeah that stuff’s great! After Hurricane Katrina, showing videos of those poor half-drowned kids made everyone’s pockets turn inside out!”
And I fucking lost it. I starting packing up my crap and leaving. And when she was all like, “Oh, you’re leaving?” I turned around like a viper and started screaming at the whole class. Basically about how my family got charity a few times for christmas when i was a kid, and how we’re actually PEOPLE, and some of us IN THE ROOM, and that I don’t think it’s particularly funny to treat people like tools so your privileged ass can get an A +.
Aaaanyway. I got an email from her after class kinda apologizing and asking me if I’d like to have a chance to talk about it in class, or “just pretend it never happened”. Like, she really said that. And I was like, yeah, I wanna talk about it! I thought it would be a good opportunity, especially in a LEADERSHIP class, to talk about society and class and diversity, especially with the whole occupy wall street in full swing at the time (this was like, November).
Well, magically, that opportunity never came. Every day the class would just start, there’d be no mention of any class conversation. Finally, three weeks before the end of the semester, i sent her an email asking about having a speaker come in to talk about inclusion, diversity, and whatnot (this woman who was going to come in was also my honors leadership project person, like service-learning.)She sent an email back saying “hey….yeah we should talk about that.”So i make an appointment, and when i show up there’s a note on her door canceling it, and i have to wait another week to even talk to her. so finally after class the next week, she sits me down and says that “She doesn’t think it’d be a good idea”, and that the other people in the class “would find it corrective” and that their feelings might be hurt. Because their feelings were obviously much more important than mine, fa shure.
So, she says “You could just bring it up with your project presentation” which was the second-to-last day of class. And magically, they just never got to me. So on the VERY last day of class, there were three people who hadn’t done the same old tree-planting project for their service learning project, and we all got shunted to the last day. The girl before me had gone to Occupy Syracuse to interview some of the leaders there. And oh, my god. Immediately it was a free-for-all about how the smelly nasty hippies had no place to go to the bathroom. The girl who did the presentation just kinda sat there with a sickly smile. I was the last one to go, and I said like three sentences. I wasn’t even interested in participating anymore. I was so tired of the guy who kept saying “My dad owns a restaurant, so I KNOW how lazy people are when you’re not there watching them every second!” and the girl who was always saying something about my clothes, and how I acted, without ever realizing (or caring?) that I could hear her.
There were three “Final essays” that were due as our final. I spent the first two exhausting how many ways I could say “fuck you” in imaginative ways, and the third I didn’t bother to do at all. I was exhausted after an entire semester of working with others with developmental disabilities, promoting events, making posters, doing hours of surveys among the disabled students on campus, and actually trying to make a more inclusive and informed environment for all students at OCC.
I still got a B. Brought my GPA down to a 3.88 but it was worth it to show her where she could stick it.

The entire mess really drove home for me how marginalized I’ve felt in many ways at OCC. I had a bit of a breakdown over winter break, and re-prioritized a lot of things. The semester was so stressful that I went into survival mode for a while, one foot in front of the other. And when I finally came to, I realized the 11,000 personal problems and issues I’d been ignoring were still there and needed attending to.

The things that kills is how much of myself I invested in the goddamn project over the semester, how meticulously I sort of documented everything and how much I CARED about everything. And to spend hours in a class where I was belittled, ignored, and muzzled because I was challenging privilege was hard to cope with.

But as always I am left with the indestructible core of myself: I will always fight back. Leadership sometimes is only the willingness to open your mouth and say, “this is not okay”.

I spent a while this past Monday talking with Ari Ne’eman, who asked me a very loaded question: After the damage is undone, and we lose the learned passivity, the apologizing, the submissiveness, what does an autistic community look like? And I think I’ve got some answers.

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/ASAN-Invites-Autistic-Students-to-Participate-in-Leadership-Training.html?soid=1104220830834&aid=S09w4EH1lyA

But Max has a secret: he skips to the end or slides into home plate at the last minute or wrangles things out of people so that he can get stuff done despite having no executive function to speak of.

http://adeepercountry.blogspot.com/2010/08/max-is-miracle.html

This year, I need to get my driver’s license. And I need how to figure out how to do it “my way”. So much thinking and soul-searching goes into figuring out the “How” of things. At this point, I know how to drive. In fact, I’m a better driver than most of the people who give me rides places. I’m just terrified of driving.  And I know that the only way to get through it, over it, under it, whatever, is to just DO it and KEEP doing it until I’m not afraid anymore. There’s no way around it, and it’s like lighting myself on fire until i burn to ash, and rise a driver-licensed phoenix from my own ashes. That’s the only way I was ever able to do anything. That’s the only way I was able to leave the house, then to move out on my own, have a job, go back to school, and take care of my own shit.

And sometimes it makes me feel awfully sorry for myself, because everything else is hard, too. It makes me want to reach out for help, to finally say, “Hey! This is just too much for me to handle, trying to understand things on my own. Can I hire someone to explain things to me? To break things down into easily digestible steps?” But I’m afraid of the stigma of being someone who needs help. Filling out ever more paperwork for State Services. It’s scary, and sad. I know the people from the state consider a lifetime bagging groceries a “success story”. And there’s really no reason to expect any of those people to be any more educated or understanding than anyone else I’ve come in contact with so far. I’m trying to shoehorn my poverty-living ass into an Ivy League education, and hopefully move up two tax brackets after finishing school. I honestly don’t know if it’s even possible, but the reality remains: I live an hour’s drive away from the first-choice school, and if I want to live my dream, I have to go through the fire and figure out how to cart my own useless ass to and from classes.

My work as a janitor is a way for me to temporarily exorcise these demons. It fills me with the same sense of accomplishment that a lot of my friends use computer and console games to fulfill. It’s a time for me to DO, not to think. I bag up all the nasty medical trash, all the spitty wads and papers. I know I am ridiculously overqualified for this kind of work. I’ve been offered jobs in management, full-time jobs that might actually allow for me to pay of my current student loan debt. My life as one of the barrel-bottom members of society has taught me how to eat shit with a smile. I could settle for less.

But I won’t. I am capable of living my dream, of doing what I love to do, of turning my Aspergian obsessive interests into a career that pays me well. I’m fully capable of earning my Ph.D and become an amazing professor, probably publish my own research, papers, short stories, novels, and become inhumanly great. I’m gambling not only everything I have on that, but things I don’t even have yet on that. I’m mortgaging my future on the chance that I can actually be what I wanted to be when I was five, when I was ten, when I was twelve. I want to read and write books and then talk and write about them. And to get paid for doing so in order to have things like food and a bed? Priceless.

I want to accept the transformative power of education, harness it, and disseminate it to countless others. I want to get, and I want to give.

I can do this.

My solution for those feelings is to combat it with one of my greatest strengths: a uniquely autistic capacity for joy. I used the last of my money to scrounge an air ticket to visit my family in Florida. When i get there, I will walk. I will walk the green roadsides and battle armadillos. I will try not to flee the herons. I will be silent and listen. I will speak without cease when the spirit moves me, in an environment of relationships I can understand. My family is used to me.

I will try and remember how NOT to be a Good Robot.

http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/12/30/disabled-bodies-and-the-parable-of-the-good-robot/

Oh, my sweet love
He built a rotary cuff
His shoulder got smashed
He’s gotta mend and repair a device
To work where he got hit by the blast

Oh, woe is he
Unable to see in front of his face
A mistreated machine can start acting mean
It can crack up all over the place

Oh, injury

What a nasty wound
Here, let me see

If you put metal inside of a man
He can work much faster than you can
With a toothpick, a penknife, a can opener

Oh, injury

One kind of folk, they don’t know it’s broke
The others don’t care
They just sit and complain about some imagined pain
About some uncle who fell down the stairs

“Since he got hurt
He don’t go to work
We try to get by
He just sits in his chair with a glazed-over stare
We can’t help but ask ourselves why”

Oh, injury

What a nasty wound
Here, let me see

If you put metal inside of a man
He can work much faster than you can
With a toothpick, a penknife, a can opener

Oh, injury

It sounded, from a distance, like a typical row between parent and child. Child wanted. Parent said ‘no’. A conflict began which will be repeated millions upon billions of times throughout all time. I pushed round the corner and found that the parent was sitting on a chair, holding those kind of running shoes which flash lights, in her hand. She looked defiant. He, her son, a wheelchair user, looked equally defiant. He wanted them. She didn’t think they were a good purchase.

I didn’t remark on this at all. Ordinary. Typical. Big deal. He then said something and she said, ‘Like you aren’t stared at enough.’ Suddenly I froze. Actually stopped rolling. A chill ran up and down my back, probably in flashing sneakers. His voice rose, there were unshed tears in the tone of his voice, ‘I don’t care if they stare at me, they’ll stare at me no matter what I wear. I like those shoes, I should be able to wear what I want. I should not have to get permission from anyone else to wear what I want.’ She tried to calm him, cause he was very upset, ‘It’s you who don’t want to be stared at, isn’t it, well, then you better get a different kid.’ Now she was crying, he was crying, and in truth, there were tears in my eyes too.

read the rest here:

http://davehingsburger.blogspot.com/2011/11/shoes.html

Autism is mostly considered to be an “invisible” disability, but people can definitely tell. It’s like they can smell it. I’ve had people no the street tell their kids not to stare at me, stuff like that. I liken it to someone who is “obviously” gay. I’m sure there are many people who can identify with being told by a family member or “friends”, “Can’t you act less….(gay/weird/manly/feminine/retarded)?”

Actually, no. No, I can’t. In my teens especially, I moved in social circles with people who had “obvious” things wrong with them. Gay kids for whom the “closet” wasn’t really an option, those with “obvious” mental illnesses, kids with ADD/ADHD, and probably a few others like me; autistics who could speak and therefore, by the standards of the time, weren’t autistic.

And you know what? We let our goddamn freak flag fly. Because fuck you.

Now, I’ve been writing about my life more or less since I’ve had one. but I knew that someday I would actually write the whole damn thing out, I was just not expecting that feeling of “readiness” to come this soon.

I turned 30 earlier this year, and I feel like I’ve had about four distinct lives at least. I’ve had a lot of experiences that are fairly unique, and I’ve had mundane experiences in rather unique ways. And I relate both through an unusual filter. I think people would be interested in it.

Moreover, as I see the big, belted shirts with leggings slowly disappearing and everyone showing up for college classes is torn jeans and flannel, with feathers and beads in their hair, combined with the youth political involvement the likes of which have not been seen since the 60′s, I feel like the “too young to write an autobiography” fashion coming back around. Think Elizabeth Wurtzel and Susanah Kaysen. Add to that the recent success of books like Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling, and I think I’m seeing a time when my voice might be welcome.

A few things from my life:

I have bred, raised and sold aquatic snails for fun and profit

I was married to a paranoid schizophrenic for 11 years

I’m the child of two musicians who were in a band together

I spent the first 25 years of my life with undiagnosed Autism; now I just have regular Autism

I am a mixed race genderqueer woman who has done a fair amount of amateur drag

I have authored 20 years’ worth of unpublished, unseen illustrated poetry

I spent the first four years of my life on a semi-abandoned farm in rural Pennsylvania

I grew up in a Southern California ghetto speaking English, Spanish, Vietnamese and a bit of Korean (latter two languages forgotten by my teens)

I have had sex while dressed as Abraham Lincoln

I’ve lived on my own since age 16

I have been institutionalized twice

I have had an actual sociopath as a part of my family

It was discovered I could already read and write, do mathematics up to square roots, and draw passably well when i was 2 years old

I was an active Riot Grrl and Third Wave Feminist in my early teens

This one time I tried very hard to be promiscuous for about three years and failed

I have been a janitor

I spent 2001 taking Vicodin and playing Diablo for Playstation

I had a very popular blog for several years

My first non-ear body piercing was my clitoral hood

I have been playing guitar awkwardly since I was 13 years old

I have an extremely eccentric and accomplished mother

I cannot tell left from right

I was unbearably gothic from age 14 until 16

I lived in Florida for 4 years

I dunno, I think my life’s been even more interesting than John Elder Robison’s and his ass made guitars and pyro for Kiss. I’d read about that shit.

I spent a large portion of that time (about three weeks of sporadic class attendance, missing appointments, and generally barely catching the ball before it drops) reading feminist, cultural, and racial blogs. It helps me acquire the language necessary to speak more efficiently on topics I’m interested in, and starting discussions I’d like to start.

Speaking of which, about three weeks ago, I was in my “Leadership Studies” class (a capstone honors course), when during a group exercise about coming up with ideas for raising (charity) funds, someone had the idea of “we could just guilt them into it”. Which led immediately to laughter, and a highly unpleasant discussion of how “pictures of poor kids” are the best way to raise funds, and how the more debased, dirty, and pathetic those photos are, the more funds will be raised. The instructor chimed in with how effective videos of children who appeared poor/dirty/starving were for raising funds for Hurricane Katrina Victims. Uncharacteristically, I stood up, put my things away in my bag, and started to leave the classroom. When the professor commented on my leaving, I whirled to face the class and more or less screamed at them that poor people are people, not objects for you to use in order to get a good grade or something like that. Until i came to this college, I never noticed just how blotchy Caucasians can become when they are mortified and/or shocked.

After this “incident”, I received an apologetic email from the professor, offering me the options of either 1. we can open a discussion about it in class, or 2. pretend like it never happened and move on. I chose the first option, since I think it is important to hear other people on such matters, and I’m interested in people’s opinions.

Three weeks later, I still have not been offered an opportunity.

Three weeks later, I tried to pitch the idea of having the Director of the Disability Services Office and another disabled student come into class and speak about diversity and whatnot.

Three weeks later, the professor for my Leadership studies class didn’t show up for my appointment, and when I emailed the idea to her, her response was verbatim “let’s talk about this”.

I asked a group of my friends about this and their response was basically, “It sounds like she was trying to be polite, and never thought you’d actually WANT to start a discussion or take her offer on speaking to the class about it.”

I’m wondering if things were slightly complicated by the email I sent out to everyone in the class two days after the original incident:

Dear Fellow Students,

I wanted to first and foremost apologize for yelling and walking out in a huff last class. Although my reaction had its reasons, it was an overreaction: inarticulate, antagonistic and generally unhelpful. I want to explain something very important, however.

I was born to a single mother with a 9th grade education in Long Beach, California. She had grown up on a farm in rural Pennsylvania. We lived in desperate poverty despite my mom working long hours doing construction cleanup and general maid work, until she took her last sixty dollars to enroll in community college. The effort she put forth as a single mother raising two children, working, and putting herself through the nursing program was the most inspirational thing I have ever witnessed.

I was a skinny, brown child who spoke english, spanish, korean, and vietnamese. I had holes in my clothes and smelled like cat pee, which is why my second grade teacher said I had to do my work in a separate classroom from the other children. Although they were poor, I was the poorest. It took me years to understand why they threw rocks at me and beat me up in the bathrooms.

The anger you witnessed the other day didn’t have a singular source; it was an outburst of the cumulative frustration I have felt since I moved to Syracuse a year and half ago, and especially since I began attending classes at OCC. There are many things I could be “labeled” as that I consider integral part of my identity: multiracial, multicultural, multilingual, non-christian, poor, bisexual, disabled, child of a single mother, and coincidentally, half my family is black, which I have learned is somehow anathema here. These are all essential things about me.

Since I got here, I have constantly heard many people say very terrible things about all of these categories. But what I really want to talk about is something that is both more and less than overt prejudice. I have had people talk about all of these categories in my presence, as if I am NOT THERE. My identity has become invisible. I have had my OWN CULTURE taught to me in a classroom, which makes me feel partially rejected, but mostly just driven home to me I am not part of “us”, I am “them”. I am the one the status quo talks about in a general sort of way, told about what “they” do/say/eat/practice, the one something “needs to be done about”, because after all, there are none of “them” in this classroom, right?

Since I got here, I have had no less than four people tell me(I’m quoting), “You are white”.

Until I got here, I don’t think I actually understood what race was.

I always thought it was a part of me, something that was mine, but I was wrong. It’s something that other people decide when they look at you. There are so very many things that you cannot see when you look at me, just like everyone else. I never understood that it was something that could be taken away.

From my perspective, unimaginable privilege coats their tongues; the power to tell others that they are “other”, the power to expect justification of the fairness of my skin tone or the lowness of my income, the power to assume that everyone in the classroom is exactly like them, and if they’re not, they should be honored to be assumed to be like them.

These are not compliments:

“You seem white to me.”

“You don’t act poor”.

“I never would have guessed you were disabled”.

“You seem so comfortable around black people”.

Here’s the thing: I’m not talking about liberal guilt; I’m not telling anyone to be anything less than proud of being who they are. I’m talking about something more radical: that I am different than many people in Syracuse, and that I also am proud of who I am. I also know that the people in class with me- all of you- are different than each other. It’s not that difficult to keep our differences in mind, and celebrate them. What happened the other day was a roomful of people assuming that no one in an Honors course, the same one as you, could have also been someone who received charity toys as a child. Every person you interact with on a daily basis is a universe of invisible identities; speak with respect to their very immediate presence. What we call “the world” is made up of perceptions we receive through our senses; thus it logically follows that if we change our perceptions, we change the world.

I’m only asking you to change the world.

I’ll even go first.

I’m not really sure how that came off. The professor made a few obscure comments in person to me the following week about “the class may be more diverse than you’re assuming it is” and I responded with, “I’m sure that’s true, which is why I want to open a dialogue”.

Results of this exchange were kinda inconclusive, and devolved to other subjects.

No clue.

I wonder if I should get some sort of cape.