DANDA: Developmental Adult Neuro-Diversity Association

I’d fault them for the obtuse name if they weren’t saying interesting things. They’re more focused on dyspraxia, but there’s a lot of overlap with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Raise the neuro-diversity banner! Woo! And I love this quote from their FAQ:

The norms of ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ tend not to work for [the neurologically-divergent], and in many cases are actually reversed. For some, complex mathematical analysis is ‘a walk in the park’, where an actual walk in the park can be a nightmare.

Compare/contrast with: Aspergia.

Just a mention: If you’re a 30-something woman who needs a place to live, some friends of mine are looking for a couple housemates. This is in Seattle, BTW.

If you’re interested, email me and I’ll pass it along to them.

Since it’s spring, I’ve been thinking about a housemate from years past who kept his given name but changed his last name in standard west coast hippie fasion to be Dancingshadow.

Now, I don’t have a problem with people changing their names, and as adopted last names go, that one’s not so bad. It just doesn’t describe him very well. It’s like if I adopted the last name Perkyactive. (I met a friend of his named Laser. By contrast, Laser is the most perfectly-named person on the planet.)

But the point here is that Bradley the Dancing Shadow is a springtime entity to my mind, because the guy can tear up a plot of land and transform it into an astonishingly magical garden space. Doing this sort of thing is as natural to him as breathing. He’d drown if he somehow wasn’t allowed to do it.

The two main things I think about when I think about Brad are the punk collective warehouse he helped run in Oakland, and the beautiful garden at the Outpost (the house where we were housemates), with Brad constantly digging and planting stuff. The rest of the housemates pitched in, too, but I was too overwhelmed to help out. I’ve always regretted not being more involved in that project.

The other thing about Brad is that he would go to sleep in strange places. Like, out on the deck, fully clothed, with only a thin blanket wrapped around him. It wasn’t like he just nodded off while outside; he had planned to sleep there. Or the time the whole household went to Discovery Park to watch the Perseid meteor shower, and he fell asleep there in the sand wrapped up in that same thin blanket. When we decided to go back home, we had to figure out whether to wake Brad up or not.

If I were going to write a fictional account of the Brad experience, it would include a sort of worshipful approach to the process of going to sleep. As if the process of going to sleep were the momentum and vector of your arrival into the dream world. Which, I suppose, it actually is.

Anyway. I bring up Brad because it’s spring, and I think that if Brad were here, for one thing he’d want to tear up my landlord’s flower beds and improve them, but also he’d want to sleep in the thick, unmowed grass, under the stars in the newness of spring, moonlight beaming dreams into his brain. Wrapped in his thin blanket.

Found the 1984+20 web site, which notes the 20th anniversary of Winston Smith’s first journal entry on April 4th.

Why Read 1984?

Because we still can.

It includes The 1984 Index, which is sort of like the Homeland Defense terror level. Except kinda sorta exactly the opposite, if you get my drift. Currently, our overall 1984 index is UNGOOD, resulting from UNGOOD ratings in government surveillance, political hegemony, permanent war, propaganda/revisionist history, preventative detention, anti-intellecutalism, and demonization of political opponents.

The only PLUSGOOD ratings come in the areas of an active resistance and free exchange of information.

Oh, and chocolate rations are up.

From Reuters, we get this headline:

Bush Vows Rebels in Iraq Will Be Defeated

…and in other news, Bush revealed his true identity to his estranged son, having just cut off his hand. Bush commented, “Join with me, and together we will rule the galaxy as father and son!”

A new portrait of the war president. To go along with this.

Update: More linkage, via Atrios:

From the US Army Military District of Washington web site, an article about simulated terrorist attacks against the Pentagon, featuring planes crashing into the building. This was in November of 2000.

I watched a bunch of the Condi Rice Circus, and it was gruelling!

I don’t mind the arrogance so much as the utter lack of humility. The two are not the same thing; some degree of arrogance is desirable in a freakin’ National Security Advisor, but to sit there before the commission and lie through her teeth like that… Lying not simply to a congressional committee and the American people, but to the victims’ families…

Lying and filibustering, and generally being contemptuous of the whole process. She was there 100% to politicize the commission, not to shed any light. She had wanted to re-appear, and yet there she is on my TV being evasive when asked questions, making her questioners run out of time by talking yet again about the structural problems between the CIA and FBI.

I’m really, really sick of playing ‘pin the lie on the Bushie.’

Center for American Progress covers the 9/11 commission, including Rice’s testimony.

Check it out: The next issue of Reason magazine will be customized for each subscriber. Each cover will feature a satellite image of the subscriber’s neighborhood with their house circled.

I’ve been reading a lot about biodiesel lately.

Essentially, biodiesel is diesel fuel made from organic material. It’s easy to make and cheap to produce and is ‘carbon neutral,’ so there’s no greenhouse emissions when you burn it. If you can make soap, you can make biodiesel (one of the ‘waste’ materials from biodiesel production is glycerine).

Good web sites about it are the National Biodiesel Board and the University of Colorado’s biodiesel research non-profit.

The reason I’m blogging this is because through the NBB, I found out there’s a biodiesel retail outlet in Texas City, TX. And this makes me very, very happy, because Texas City is one of the largest collections of petroleum refineries on the planet, and also one of the most toxic places on the planet, as well. So I’m considering getting a diesel auto just so I can drive there and buy a tank of happy-making biodiesel while the refineries chug and churn around me.

I lurk on a couple Asperger’s Syndrome support email lists. It’s frustrating because I haven’t found one that’s just for adults with AS, so it’s all parents of kids with AS fretting over what to do.

And I always want to pipe up with some advice, like I’m an expert or something. I just read one where a parent went to an ‘AS conference,’ and was reporting back. She was talking about how hard it was to talk about it with her AS kid.

I’ve been to one of those conferences, and while it was informative, it was also like being dissected. All these parents and medical professionals in a hotel banquet hall, and the books for sale on tables around the walls… Hundreds of books. Thousands of books. Books about triumphant parents and heroic children. Just book after book about a triumphant parent and/or a heroic child.

So if you’re a parent and you’re totally lost about what to do with your AS kid, and you go to one of these conferences, then the agenda is that you must become a triumphant parent and your child must become heroic, or something is horribly wrong.

I want to write an AS book called ‘FUCK HEROISM,’ with the subtitle, ‘and fuck your fucking agenda, too.’ I don’t think it would be widely received, beyond the choir I’d be preaching to.

But can you imagine if I were to pipe up on the support group email list, totally out of the blue, and say this shit? It’d be akin to showing up on a cancer group and saying, “Fuckit, we’re all going to die anyway.” It wouldn’t be untrue, just.. perhaps.. not exactly what anyone went there to hear.

Anyway. So there’s that woman who went to the conference, and I want to tell her to read all those triumphant/heroic books, but read them as if they were insulting her intelligence. Glean facts, but distrust the agenda. Don’t assume you know what AS is, what it means, where it comes from, or how much of your kid’s identity should be labeled as a ‘disorder.’ Read ‘Diagnosing Jefferson’ and that same author’s other book where he diagnoses everyone from Einstein to Abe Lincoln with AS.

The reason her kid doesn’t like to talk about it is because he doesn’t know how to tell her that she’s getting it all wrong, and she’s getting it all wrong. Pushing the issue leads to overstimulation, and that’s what he’s trying to avoid.

I want to tell her all these things, but it’s the nature of my disorder that I feel uncomfortable jumping into the conversation, even if it’s just an email list, and I have as much right to post there as anyone else. I have her answer, but I’m chicken. Isn’t that completely fucked up?