July 14, 2003

• I'm reading a really interesting book, called 'The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time,' by Mark Haddon.
  
  It's a sort of murder mystery, but it's really about the perspective of the first-person hero of the book, 15-year-old Christopher, who's autistic.
  
  The plot is that he encounters the neighbor's dog, which has been killed with a gardening fork, and he begins to perseverate on solving the crime of who killed the dog. But what's fun here is the descriptions of what's going through Christopher's head. Whole chapters occur in between words of dialog. This is my favorite bit so far:
  
  

  In the bus on the way to school next morning we passed 4 red cars in a row, which meant that it was a Good Day, so i decided not to be sad about Wellington.
  
  Mr. Jeavens, the psychologist at the school, once asked me why 4 red cards in a row made it a Good Day, and 3 red cards in a row made it a Quite Good Day, and 5 red cards in a row made it a Super Good Day, and why 4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day, which is a day when I don't speak to anyone and sit on my own reading books and don't eat my lunch and Take No Risks. He said that I was clearly a very logical person, so he was surprised that I should think like this because it wasn't very logical.
  
  I said that I liked things to be in a nice order. And one way of things being in a nice order was to be logical. Especially if those things were numbers or an argument. But there were other ways of putting things in a nice order. And that was why I had Good Days and Black Days. And I said that some people who worked in an office came out of their house in the morning and saw that the sun was shining and it made them feel happy, or they saw that it was raining and it made them feel sad, but the only difference was the weather and if they worked in an office the weather didn't have anything to do with wheather they had a good day or a bad day.

  
  I can totally and absolutely relate.

  • 5:44 am
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