Last night (election night) i was watching a bit of C-Span, and caught a couple interesting lectures by political science profs. It was only just then, on the night of the election that i actually came to understand what the Electoral College is all about.
i feel left with the feeling that America, the so-called champion of freedom and democracy, is actually the worst example of democracy that i can actually understand first-hand. i voted for the first time this year, out of principle more than anything else. However, i now understand that my voting in a “locked” Democratic state didn’t do fuck all towards dethroning Bush. Maybe if i’d been a voter in Ohio, i might hold onto some belief that my vote wasn’t worthless.
Then there’s the salt in the wound; the popular vote went to the Republicans! If the Electoral College hadn’t been in play, Bush still would have won. What’s with that? i can feel disenfranchised, and point a finger at a failed democratic process, but who do i blame for a popular Republican victory? The politicians? The media? The spin and hype? Nope… there’s only one place to put the blame.
Americans. You sheep. We sheep. What a bunch of fucking losers. All of us.
Americans represent the utter pinnacle of the 3% of the “haves” in this “have-not” world. In a few states, Nader got 1-2% of the popular vote. How does this read to me? 3% of the world has the power to make everything better for the other 97%, but only 3% of those elites are voting their conscience? What does that work out to? Something like less than 0.1% of the global populace is both able and willing to affect positive change in our world through direct democratic action! The rest are essentially just doing as they’re told.
Yeah, okay, Serious and Professica; you told me so. Still, what’s better; be on the losing team, or rant from the sidelines? i’m not so sure myself.
November 3, 2004
what the fuck is wrong?
October 22, 2004
bloodloss: part two
oh happy day. i’m leaving on a jetplane. the full moon is coming up soon. it’s not sunny, but it’s bright.
my friend is in pain today. i want to help her out, i do, but she doesn’t want anyone’s help.
i feel like calling, but i won’t. there’s little miscellaneousbirds in the trees shaking their heads at me.
when i’m sympathetic for your pain, dear heart, it’s not to validate your weaknesses.
it’s okay to be lonely. you’re strong, but you’re only human.
i celebrate your humanity.
you can tell me to fuck off ’cause i wrote this, but i’ll still care about you.
doesn’t that just piss you off?
ah well.
one day i saw my friend m.m. walking down the street ‘how are you’ i asked and she said ‘oh i’m very depressed and miserable this week’ and i said ‘oh i’m sorry to hear that’ and she said ‘no it’s okay it’s just a proccess i’m going through i’m really enjoying it and learning all sorts of stuff about myself’ and then we walked a bit and she was depressed and smiling while i was worried and not smiling.
the sun is behind the clouds. soon they’ll be gone.
more true faces
i have so much respect for great portrait photographers. in light of my looking for “true faces”, here’s some more recent portraiture.
hardware/software
i’ve seldom heard Asperger’s called a “disability”. A friend of mine recently called it that (i’m sure she meant no insult), but i prefer different terms. i’ve been searching for an appropriate anaology to explain it both to myself and to others, and i think i have found it. Now, the terms i’m trying to use might seem out of place, but i think it makes sense well enough. At least, it seems to make sense to me.
(more…)
i’ve been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. i’m finding new ways to explain it as i learn about and more fully understand what this ultimately means for me. Asperger’s is a pervasive neurological disorder, placed within the Autistic spectrum. It’s seldom diagnosed in adults, and very difficult to treat. In adult “Aspies”, neurodevelopment has usually already progressed to steady state. In effect, the AS is hardwired into the brain.
The anology i’ve come to see is one of hardware and software. i tend to think of the brain as being hardware, and thge mind as being software. Think of two different computers. We may even be as blunt as calling them Macs and PC’s; it’s not really important. Still, we have to different pieces of hardware, running different operating systems.
Onto these two computers we can load software, identical in function, but tailored to the computer they’ve been loaded onto. Say, something like MSWord. At the end of the day, all the word processing get s done on either machine in similar fashion, and the printed results are usually indistinguishable. Still, over time, operational differences become painfully apparent. If you have the only Mac in an all-PC environment, some things will become difficult for you, no matter how accomodating the Mac to cross-platform applications.
The Aspie brain is kinda like that. We’ve all been subtly trained since birth to arrive at certain conclusions in the face of certain stimuli. The thoughts and perceptions (the software) needed for this have been taught to all of us by a process socialization, implicit or otherwise. For nuerotypical persons, the software “fits” the hardware. For people with forms of autism, the software does not. There is no “flaw” to the brain, no more than a Mac is “flawed”; it is simply different. Being different, it requires different software to produce predictably “correct” results. In the meantime, a human mind in an Aspie brain seems to work in starts and fits, coming to conclusions that seem “correct”, “incorrect”, or “freakin’ unelievable!”. Speaking for myself, i sometimes find it very hard to tell the difference. Often, this running of neurotypical “software” on neuroexceptional “hardware” produces results nearly indistinguishable from “normal”. At other times, it is quite beyond any observer to understand why i’m acting or speaking the way i am.
Sometimes i feel very out of control, and hate what i am. i get extremely frustrated trying to produce acceptable “correct” responses to social stimuli. In my youth, i had the same feelings, the same questions, but no answers. Now i have answers, but no solutions.
Asperger’s is more treatable in children, especially if diagnosed early on. Young Aspies can be “programmed” with proper “hardware specific software”. Their perceptions and thoughts are not so much changed, as they are trained to use their brains to repeatedly come to the “correct” answers. This is possible because Asperger’s is a neurodevelopmental disorder; in children, the neurological connections are fluid in their developing stages, and can be trained into certain pathways. By the time most Aspie adults are diagnosed, the pathways have been set. In many ways, adult Aspies may be to used to their own brains to change.
That still doesn’t mean that the Mac can’t hold it’s own in the PC world. Some would argue that it can do alot of things even better…
