chavisory's post-it notes

Just…nothing.  Everything in my life topsy-turvy or in transition, is all.  Literally everything.

Holy shit, John Kennish, you do everything wrong.

josiahd:

If people actually used asinine to mean the things stupid means, other people would start using it as a polite-ish euphemism for the r-word.

The word stupid is not the problem.

Ah, yeah, they have utterly different meanings.

There’s also such a thing as being bad at thinking because you don’t like doing it, or because you’re unwilling to challenge bad ideas that are convenient to you.  That’s what I mostly use “stupid” to mean.

josiahd:

…actively dislike using scripts?

I basically don’t ever use them. I find that they make communication harder.

I tend not to use exact scripts, but sets of bullet points.  Also, I usually dislike scripts provided by someone else, but can sometimes adapt them to the way that I actually talk or write.

warlocksexalways:

josiahd:

goldenheartedrose:

Also, I want to punch people who say “use your words”.

Espcially since they never, ever do anything that would make that more possible.

Ugh, the new lead I got when I worked at a daycare used to do that to manipulate children who were nervous into talking to her. Why would anyone want to talk to someone who’s pressuring them and not respecting their feelings and just picking at them and picking at them?

Yeah…when the whole problem is “I don’t HAVE the words you want!”

So Emily.
This fat paycheck you just got.
You need to put a lot of it into savings.

Okay, okay…you can buy one bottle of plum wine….

Oh my god, people who don’t know how to turn off your own phones, no I do not know how to turn off your phone, it is your phone and not my phone, no I don’t have that kind of phone.

daxsymbiont:

a-lot-of-nerve:

letfreedomlulz:

sanityscraps:

daxsymbiont:

IT’S HILARIOUS HOW WE TAKE SHIT SERIOUSLY JUST BECAUSE IT’S WRITTEN IN LATIN OR GREEK WHEN CATULLUS WAS BASICALLY THE TAYLOR SWIFT OF HIS TIME AND VERGIL WAS JUST SOME DUDE WHO WROTE AN EPIC LONGFIC OF THE ODYSSEY WITH A SELF-INSERT PROTAGONIST AND PLATO WAS LIKE… THAT ANNOYING DUDE RANTING ON THE SUBWAY PLATFORM

I’M NOT SAYING WE SHOULD RESPECT THE ANCIENTS LESS, I’M SAYING WE SHOULD RESPECT THE MODERNS MORE

LET’S NOT FORGET DANTE. HE WROTE SELF-INSERT VIRGIL/BIBLE FANFIC WITH ALL HIS ENEMIES IN VARIOUS RUNGS OF HELL.

HOW ABOUT PARADISO WHERE THE WOMAN DANTE WAS STALKING LED HIM THROUGH HEAVEN LOLOLOLOL

the original post makes me—and anyone that knows anything about Latin poetry—incredibly angry

bolding mine.

OP here. i’ve got five years of academic study of latin poetry and prose under my belt. i’m about as close to fluency in latin as you can get, and have a working knowledge of ancient greek.

works i have read in the original: six books of vergil’s aeneid; selections from ovid’s metamorphoses; a substantial portion of catullus’ oeuvre; snippets of livy, sallust, cicero, plato, and homer.

i’d say i know a fucking lot about latin poetry.

do you want to turn this into an academic argument? ok, i’ll bite. give me a fucking essay on what makes catullus objectively superior to taylor swift. (as i recall, they’re both quite vituperative toward their exes.) the aeneid is a fucking masterpiece, and it’s also a work of fanfiction. as in, it’s a spinoff of homer’s iliad and odyssey, taking a very minor character and making him the focal point of the story.

fight me. let’s go.

I actually know nothing about Greek or Latin poetry, but this just made my day.

If the people on whose behalf you claim to be working object to the way you talk about them, and you don’t care, it is time to re-examine your values and motivations.

josiahd:

devilsmoon:

Is there any autists out there that are big sensory seekers? I have some defensiveness, but am pretty big seeker, like occasionally I make myself overloaded on purpose sometimes. Do folks like clubbing and loud music? Cus I love the overload I get from it, but I don’t do it all the time because too much is really painful. But I kinda feel I am the only one that enjoys going clubbing and playing with glowsticks in clubs and drinking, among other autists.

Sometimes, yes.

Not really so much…I do like drinking and listening to loud music on occasion.

But I do know two kids who are very intense sensory seekers. 

josiahd:

unnanatoriki:

Proof I’m not alone out there. Let’s spread the word!

I am delightfullly flaming autistic.

Does anyone *not* know any autistic folks?

Most people who think they don’t know anyone autistic, probably do and just don’t realize it.

aethelflaed replied to your post: One of the mice keeps scurrying from under my…

It is being stalked by an invisible cat.

I wish the invisible cat would do a better job of catching them….

One of the mice keeps scurrying from under my bookcase to behind my desk, and back again, and I have no idea why.

My high school calculus teacher had a daughter with intellectual as well as physical disabilities.  And sometime in the years before I even started kindergarten, he sued the school district to keep her in school.  They’d tried to just summarily keep her off the rolls, besides not providing an aide and stuff.

At some point in the process of trying to get him to drop the lawsuit, school district administrators and lawyers called him into a meeting and asked him what he wanted…what amount of money or anything else…to just drop it.

He said he wanted for her to be allowed to graduate from high school.

She did.

We learned all this in trig class one day my junior year.  He tended to go off on tangents…he was also particularly easy to get to go off on tangents, and one day somehow the tangent was raising a severely disabled child in the days before the ADA.

“So she didn’t go to [name of school redacted]?” one kid asked.

“Oh yes she did,” said my teacher.  “Somebody sued ‘em.”

mulder-are-you-suggesting:

josiahd:

Do most people really have an expectation that their kids will be totally normal, that is upset by having disabled kids?

Because like, I just kind of don’t have that assumption. My default assumption is that any kids I had would probably be neuroatypical in some way, you know?

I feel the same way. I don’t think I’d have any real set-in-stone assumptions about what my kids would be like, or what things they might accomplish, nor would I consider it a “tragedy” if they didn’t accomplish X, Y and Z. But I see these people who claim that it’s a “tragedy” that their autistic kid will never (according to them) go to the prom, go to university, get married, drive a car, etc. (A while ago I was reading comments from parents who claimed to be “in mourning” over the fact that their kids would apparently never go to university.) I just can’t wrap my head around this kind of thinking. Like, even if I had a kid who truly couldn’t do any of these things and who was sad because they couldn’t do these things, I might feel sad that they were sad, but I’d still accept them and love them and I’d work hard to make sure they understood that this didn’t make their life a tragedy.

Yes, but most people still view disability as an aberration and not normal and intrinsic to humanity.  Most people of a certain class and education level actually don’t realize that most people do not attend or graduate from college; they just don’t see those people in the course of their daily lives.  They’re not accustomed to seeing disabled people because they grew up in an age that kept them isolated and largely out of public view.  The ADA, remember, wasn’t passed until 1991.  I have a colleague with Asperger’s who’s a few years younger than me; at one point in a conversation about our respective upbringings, she looked stunned when I said that I hadn’t had an IEP.  I had to remind her that there was no ADA or IDEA law when I started school.  Schools didn’t have to keep autistic kids enrolled at all, or could stuff them into self-contained special ed rooms without recourse.

So many people build their lives around this ideology that if they make all the “right” or “smart” choices, then nothing seriously bad or difficult or inconvenient can happen to them.  Not that having a disabled child is bad, but yes, I think they see it as a serious aberration in the normal life they were raised to feel themselves entitled to.

Whereas, I suspect that a lot of us who grew up disabled/invisibly disabled/undiagnosed with a serious disability…out of survival necessity, have a more realistic assessment of the risks and uncertainty of life.  We didn’t grow up being able to depend on the illusions that following rules or listening to authority figures would protect us from anything.  I think we’re more prepared by that just to appreciate the fact that anything can in fact happen to anybody, but also, having been treated badly ourselves for things we couldn’t help, I think we’re more prepared to identify with and accept a child who has difficulties, and not expect some ideal of a normal child of which we have no first-hand experience anyway.

And I think that people who bewail the outlook that their kids will supposedly “never” do things like go to prom, go to college, get married, have kids, etc., whatever, frankly have a pale and limited view of what life is, and just how full of things worthy of joy and celebration it is.  Because those things aren’t the only things worth living for.  Just because those things were your sources of joy, doesn’t mean they will be everybody’s, or that someone who doesn’t ever find those things has a life not worth living.  Appreciation for life can come from so many different things.  Few things gall me more than people who devalue their own children’s lives just because they may not grow up to have all the normal, expected things by saying “But she’ll never….!”

Life is long.  You have no idea what she may find joy or purpose in.  You have no right to devalue that life just because it’s not everything you took for granted.

humainsvolants:

adventures-of-cuteella:

chavisory said: I think a lot of both ADD people and autistic people have figured out how well it improves focus and executive function. :) Besides being delightful.

Agreed.

Hey I’m both ADHD and Autistic and I don’t drink coffee, I don’t like the smell (and it overwhelm me) and the taste when I tried.

I feel someone that I’m one of the only ones on the internet :-(

Aw!  I’m sorry, don’t feel bad!

True story:  I was on a rehearsal retreat once with a small dance company…during Hurricane Irene.  We stayed at a little retreat center in upstate New York.  The power went out….and we quickly realized that our actual biggest problem was that we had no caffeine source.  The stove in our place was electric.  We had groceries and had cooked a lot of food so we had that…but no one was smart enough to make a big pitcher of iced tea or iced coffee the night before the storm hit.

By the middle of the day we were desperate enough to just be chewing coffee beans to try to extract some caffeine…or crushing them to sprinkle on the half-melted chocolate ice cream.

Two company members were not coffee drinkers.  One of them goes “See, this is why I never became a drug addict.”

I’m kind of ridiculously pleased that Switched at Birth is back on.

One night one of my roommates and I got into a conversation about how what most people are taught about autism is so wrong.

She goes “But…why wouldn’t they just listen to autistic people about what it’s really like?”

I was like “You’re so cute.”

josiahd:

stargirl-ish:

sigh. 

really, really tired of people thinking that ‘professionals’ know everything.

i have taken psychology courses before. in an introductory course, autism was only mentioned ONCE in over 500 pages of text. other mental/neurological stuff was also rarely mentioned. i checked thoroughly. and even that definition was screwed, to be honest. 

people get misdiagnosed with various mental disorders all of the time. mental disorders are stigmatized and stereotyped and, to be honest, diagnosis is very subjective. 

before you question self-diagnosis, you should think about why so many people get misdiagnosed and put on medications that harm them because of it

along with this, we should also wonder why the hell so many people get evaluated for a thing during childhood, get told that they don’t have the thing, and then find out later that they probably have the thing after all

seriously. diagnosis is a ridiculously subjective thing, especially diagnosis of neurological/neurochemical disorders.

subjectivity is very dangerous, and questioning of diagnoses can save someone’s life

My diagnostic papers explicitly say that people should listen to me about what I need and how I function because I know what I’m talking about.

Does that mean it’s ok that I already knew I was autistic before they said so? ;-)

Also, just as people have motives to get a diagnosis, or to self-diagnose…people often have motives for not getting a diagnosis for a child (or themselves), like “I don’t want to label him,” or “I don’t want him to be limited or feel like he’s different,” or some other fear of stigma.  When those kids grow up knowing they’re different anyway, they’ll eventually figure it out.

The stereotype used to explain the explosion in diagnostic rates is “all these people just want the free services so they label a kid with autism,” but there are also a lot of people who go to lengths to avoid getting a child diagnosed.

I was working in a theater program for kids, and we had a mother of two students, including a little boy who she did not want to admit was much more than “just a little shy.”

And yes, I was misdiagnosed multiple times, by professionals, because much of what professionals are taught about autism is incredibly wrong.  And I dodged a bullet to have resisted being put on medication.  I don’t even want to think about what that might’ve done to me.