Unsolicited Advice

Well, fuck. I started thinking again. I hate it when I do that. Much of my read of Sherlock as not autistic is based on the fact that that I recognize a lot of that behavior from me , back when I was furious at everything and thought people sucked, and I'm not autistic. But you know, I could be kinda wrong there. I find myself in the surreal position of reading more and more stuff about autism and saying, "nope... nope... nope..." to all the big official diagnostic features, and "yep... uh-huh... and that... shit, I do that daily," to all of the smaller, unofficial, anecdotal things people talk about in passing. Particularly in the way I go about learning things -- I'm extremely good at the one where I go to bed one day knowing absolutely nothing about a given topic, and then pop back up maybe a week later with half a dissertation already done. I decided to demonstrate walking, talking, and reading all about eighteen months old; I think the walking and t...

"I'd be curious to know what you made of those questions/the test itself." -- Curious reader There are loads of problems with it. There are with pretty much all psychological questionnaires. The main issue is distinguishing the subject's internal experience from the way the subject is actually acting from the way other people perceive the subject. An awful lot of psych disorders boil down to "one of these things is not like the others", and figuring those out is difficult at best. Questions regarding social functioning are especially tricky. The answer varies a lot with the exact phrasing. I have the same problem with informal tests for things like narcissism, where my score swings from "perfectly normal" to "Lex Luthor" depending on whether they ask me if I think it's the just and correct natural order of things that I be in charge of the entire universe (fuck no) or just whether I wind up in charge of things a lot anyway (all t...

One thing I grok in fullness is the absolute need to not have other people breathing all my air. It may surprise people who saw me at the Awkward Army meetup, but sociability is not native to me. I learned that the very difficult way, much like I learned that I am not a functional human being at seven o'clock in the morning, no matter how much I want to do whatever got me up that early. It's not that I'm lying when I go out and make noises like you're interesting and I want to talk to you -- you are, and I do -- but it's a thing that takes a lot of energy, and a thing for which I need to be prepared. If you texted me and asked me if I wanted to come downtown and meet God Himself, right now , I'd probably say no, because I wasn't expecting to go out today, and it takes some time and gear-grinding to get the switch flipped. I am inherently introverted, and social interaction is essentially an improv-performance skill. (And you'd have to text me, becaus...

About a week ago, I got an email from a perfect stranger. She thanked me for, essentially, being a separate person who wrote down some of the stuff that goes through her head. I get these, every so often; I never know quite what to do with them. I'm very glad that something I said made someone else feel less alone, but at the same time, the fact that people send me deeply emotional thanks for this means that it's still rare for them, and that kind of sends my heart right down into my feet again. The other night, at the Awkward Army meetup down at Davis, I was talking to one of the other Awkwardeers, trying valiantly to explain the weird problems you run into when you can't turn the subtitles on social interactions off. "You're like a seeing-eye dog for awkward people!" she cheerfully informed me. She's right, I suppose; I spend a fair amount of time trying to gently steer people away from metaphorically walking into traffic. I have no idea what the aut...

I tend to marathon random TV shows while I do my actual work, and lately it's been "Mythbusters". The science is pretty awesome-tastic, and of course they use any excuse to drag stuff out to the bomb range and let their retired FBI guy play with C4. But, as I was telling people in the Awkward Army meetup not long ago, the people-reading thing is a superpower that cannot be turned off, so I wind up watching the crew about as much as I wind up watching the cannon. Adam is obviously not really as twitterpated as he likes to look on camera, or he would be not just dead, but really ignominiously dead, several times a season. I'm guessing he's pretty enthusiastic about working in Hollywood; he's mentioned doing kit-bashing at ILM before the show, and every time there's an opportunity to pretend to be an action movie stunt man, he practically dislocates his shoulder, waving his hand in the air and yelling 'ooh! ooh! ME!' He must give his wife regular he...

1. OTC Medication When people think of the truly breathtaking advances in medicine, they think of the antibiotics that cure gas gangrene and injectable insulin that means diabetics don't have to die blind, lame, and decades early. Nobody ever really marvels at the stuff in Walgreens. But think about it: If you read a lot of literature written during, say, the Regency period, you run across all these women swooning and begging off to go lie down with such a dreadful headache. You think, "Jesus, lady, how much of a wilting flower are you? It's just a headache." Except it wasn't, because the entire concept of 'just a headache' didn't come along until aspirin came along. Head-hurty happened whenever it happened and stayed as long as it fucking well wanted to. The original folk remedy of willow bark tea was dependent on your living where willow bark was available, had no standard measurable dosage, and, allow me to assure you, tasted like a combination...

I did finally sit down and read the essays "explaining the autistic experience by analyzing Sherlock as though he is a high-functioning autistic" . I think personally that the bits on stereotypies and physical movement are assuming a lot of facts not in evidence -- in general, the author presumes Sherlock has learnt to conceal things in pretty much the same places I presume he's playing things up intentionally to cover for things he can't figure out how to hide -- but in general, Sherlock-as-autistic strikes me as about as plausible as Sherlock-as-deeply-isolated. It is cheerfully accepted as alternate head-canon, and my brain won't bitch at me about out-of-characterness if I find well-written fic on the premise. That wasn't the interesting part, though. Because the author of the essay is an autist writing for a largely allist audience, there is a lot of compare and contrast, particularly when talking about Sherlock and sociability. "In general, allis...

Before I jam my foot in my mouth a few dozen more times with people I'd really rather be on speaking terms with, I should probably clarify a lot of the words I use when discussing... well, people I'd rather be on speaking terms with. I have a degree in sociology (that, and a bunch of other random stuff -- I was such a PITA in college that I eventually just defaulted to a 'build your own' liberal arts bachelors, because nothing else covered everything I did), and there are a lot of places in the social sciences where words that have one meaning in casual writing have another, narrower meaning as technical jargon. I use the word normal a lot. "Normal" does not mean "ordinary" or "how things should be". It also doesn't imply that "not normal" is wrong or broken. Social science does a lot of work with statistics. When you survey a population, you find that most people in it will react to most things pretty much the same way mos...

Still leaving the autism paper unread -- it's on Instapaper for sync to Kindle, if anyone's interested -- I should probably mention some of the other discussions I've seen on Holmes' mental state over the years. There are a lot of them out there that contend more or less that Holmes is a dick mostly for the sake of being a dick. The general postulate is that he does it because he thinks other humans are contemptible and he knows they need him, so nyah. These also tend to see him as keeping Watson for a pet, much as Watson mentions keeping a dog at their first meeting.* Notably, I have not yet seen one of these from any author who independently sets off the 'gifted kid' bell in the back of my head. They seem to be from people who are reasonably intelligent, but have not hit the Weird Smart Kid level that leaves you completely without peers for the first mumble-teen years of your life. It's an interesting look as to why a lot of people see the Weird Smart Ki...

One of my readers, to whom I am going to start referring as "my anonymous source in the autistic community" any day now, has thoughtfully pointed me at a series of essays which attempt to explain the internal experience of autism via Sherlock and his exceedingly Sherlock-y behavior on-screen. I was going to sit down and read it the other night, but then I thought: That's cheating. Either the author will make a compelling argument and I'll end up agreeing, or the author will say something so bizarre that I won't be able to finish the damn thing without developing a headache. In order to do a proper compare-and-contrast, I ought to go write down what I think already, before I fill my head with something else. Personally, my read is that Sherlock would not get a formal ASD diagnosis. I do a lot of social psychology of the gifted and talented, and the standards I'm used to using are basically "would this be disabling enough to require special schooling...

Fair warning: Some disturbing observations about creepiness and bullying below. First things first: Definitions. I've noticed that there's some discussion, especially over on MeFi, where the oldsters are getting confused over what's so deeply offensive about being a "creep". "Creep", I gather, used to mean someone who was not really very slick, not really dating material, maybe asked a few too many times for a kiss. They were someone the cool kids didn't hang out with, but they weren't a threat -- they were more of an irritation, that perhaps you had the football players shut into a locker for the lunch hour. What the youngsters are calling "creepers" are something scarier. They're the ones who prowl the party, uninterested in talking to other men, looking for girls they can corner in a room alone. Often they're convinced that if they could just get their target away from the other distractions, she would be utterly swept off ...

There are a number of current musicians and actors I like to use to illustrate my examples about how people work. Mostly, they're people I find very easy to read, although I have learned, kind of stupidly slowly, that what I think is obvious and what other people think is obvious are two really very different things. I jam my foot straight into my eagerly-waiting mouth on a regular basis by commenting on things I think everyone is aware of, thereby finding out the hard way that I'm the only one. I also get in trouble an awful lot because for some reason, people think that if I remark that I've noticed something, I'm implying I think it's bad or weird or wrong, when in fact it just means 'hey, I noticed this thing, thought you might want to be aware you were broadcasting it'. No one is aware of absolutely everything that crosses their face or affects their posture, not even scary people like me; I just think of it like letting them know something's about...

The blogosphere is still not over the urge to define, out, educate about, and try to guard against creepdom. Fucking good . You have no idea how much time I spend telling people to not be idiots and if they don't want to be around someone, don't be . If you want to dig around deep inside your head and figure out why they're creepy, more power to you, but you should do it far, far away from the person who provoked that feeling. I do most of my modeling business online. This means I do a lot of vetting of photographers sight-unseen, while we're still corresponding via email. There are some things you can get from writing and some things you can't, although the list of things you can get is a lot longer than most people realize. I tend to solve ciphers and cryptograms pretty much just by looking at them, and when people boggle, I tell them I'm cheating: I know that whatever it is, it was invented by someone with a human brain, and human brains all work in some pr...

A couple of days ago, I posted a suggestion that people who feel hopeless at reading body language start watching some silent films, and see what they can get from those. It apparently struck the fancy of Captain Awkward herself, who is also a filmmaker. She asked some excellent questions on Twitter, which I will probably have to go mug a university library to answer properly. This is not difficult; I live in Boston, where I think it is a legal requirement that there must be at least one park and one university within easy walking distance of every subway stop. And as far as I know, the only one whose library(s) I can't just blithely walk into during regular business hours is Harvard. To the best of my knowledge, there has been no research specifically on whether autists have difficulty following pantomime or silent film. [Note: I type 'autists'. This is because typing 'people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders' is ridiculously long. If you refer to me as ...