Keep watching this space for a series of blog posts I will be writing.

The subject? “The invisible handicap that wasn’t”

If that isn’t cryptic enough, I don’t know how I could possibly improve on that.

The point, dear readers, is that at long last I feel compelled to write about something that’s been a part of my life for as long as I can recall. I have a handicap that is invisible, odorless, dissolves instantly in liquid and is one of the deadlier poisons known to man (okay, that last part is from “The Princess Bride”). The problem with this handicap is that it’s invisible.

An invisible handicap? How so? No one can tell I have it by looking at me. Most can’t tell I have it from even speaking with me, unless they take enough time to really start to notice. How is anyone supposed to even know how to deal with this if they can’t see it? In this day of politically correct behavior everyone wants to be sensitive to those with handicaps, but how can they if it’s invisible?

Have I piqued your interest yet? Wondering what it is that’s got me? I’ll tell you…

I am a High Functioning Autistic, or if you prefer, I am afflicted by Asperger’s Syndrome. (It’s kind of an either/or diagnosis).

But how can that be? Aren’t autistic people unable to interact with others? Aren’t they like “Rain Man” or something? The truth is that’s full-blown autism. High Functioning Autistics/Asperger’s Syndrome sufferers have only some of the symptoms of the fully autistic. If you really know me well, go and do some googling on the subject. Try “High Functioning Autism symptoms” or “Asperger’s symptoms“ in your favorite search engine. Read up a little bit. See if you don’t start to see similarities.

Meanwhile, to further whet your appetite for new knowledge and understanding, I suggest that you Take The AQ Test and see what your results are. From the article it is clear that:

1. Average people (the control group) scored an average of 16.4
2. 80% of those diagnosed with HFA/AS scored higher than 32
3. The test is not meant to diagnose HFA/AS
4. Those who score 32 or higher, and/or meet the actual criteria for HFA/AS can still lead a normal life, difficulty free
5. This test was prepared by the foremost experts in autism research

So. What did you score? I score a 37. I also manifest many of the symptoms of HFA/AS. A lot, in fact.

I took it upon myself to read up on the subject. I can’t actually self-diagnose as I’m not a doctor, but I’d put better than even money on the outcome, based on what I’ve read and based on my recollections and memories of past events (and how I acted in them).

Where does this lead, then? Why is this a handicap? Why do I call it the invisible handicap, even? People don’t understand that I have a very difficult time interacting with others, particularly in large groups. It’s hard to see this because I enjoy teaching and do well teaching in front of large groups. But put me in a social group where people are conversing and just having a good time and I become withdrawn. I offend people merely because I appear to not want to spend time with them (which isn’t necessarily true). I have difficulty looking people in the eye, leave alone maintaining eye-contact. This isn’t because I’m ashamed, it just makes me very uncomfortable. It doesn’t mean I’m shy, either. It’s exceptionally hard to explain to others exactly what’s going on in my mind when these sorts of circumstances happen. All they see is that I seem evasive, that I don’t want to be there with them, that I don’t want to talk to them, or any other number of apparently anti-social behaviors. They don’t realize that I do those things because I have a handicap.

I don’t want to write too much more on this subject now because I need to finish out the premise: The invisible handicap that wasn’t.

The other reason that people don’t see that I have a handicap is that HFA/AS sufferers are frequently gifted in a specific area, or sometimes multiple areas. They can focus on their subject or area of expertise in ways that others cannot, though this is a handicap sometimes too as it can be difficult to stop working on something you’ve started – the need for closure prevents you from stopping. I have been able to survive, thrive even, with my handicap. It’s lead me to the field of computers (machines and mechanical processes are usually one of the areas in which HFA/AS people excel), cars and other mechanical things. I have good work I enjoy. It doesn’t look at all like I have a handicap.

But, I do. And it’s about time I acknowledged that I have it.

I’m not fishing for sympathy. Nothing would offend me more than to have people tread lightly around me out of pity or sympathy, or even at all. What I crave is understanding. If people understood that I act the way I do not because I’m anti-social but because social interactions are difficult, painful even, then perhaps they’d be more inclined to accept me the way that I am and not think I’m odd because I don’t interact with others the way the other 99.99% of the population do. But then, being a part of such a small subset of the population, that’s why it is a handicap.

The invisible handicap that wasn’t.

Goggles and masks make swimming more interesting.

It’s the first time I’ve ever tried to do something like this. I can’t say that it’s perfect, but I think it turned out rather well.

It definitely looks better full sized, but this should give you an idea.

Color in a monochrome world

Click to see the full sized image.

There’s some great software out there for keeping a journal. One of these is MacJournal. Apparently MacJournal can publish journal entries straight to your blog via the XML-RPC conduit. So, this is a quick test of this setup. Perhaps something interesting will come of it.

We finally have furniture in the last unfurnished room in our home. We’ve only been here in Texas for 9 months. You’d think we’d have done this by now. We got an outstanding deal at Rooms To Go.

I haven’t posted anything here for a long while. I’ve been busy living. I recently updated my iPhone to the 2.0 software and yesterday WordPress released a blog client for the iPhone. I had to try it, of course. You tell me — is this going to result in more posts? Or perhaps just short ones occasionally? Time will tell. At any rate, this is being written from my iPhone.

All that you know is about to change…

That’s what Aslan said in the trailer. He was trying to warn you to not go see this movie. I won’t spoil it for you other than to say that this movie barely resembles the book from which it was derived. Please allow me to introduce to you a verb that we created a while back.

Eragon verb

1. To destroy what might otherwise have been a fine movie adaptation of a popular piece of literature, recent or otherwise, by radically deviating from the book’s plot or by changing a central character’s nature, motives, or personality. e.g. This movie was total crap! They totally eragonned it!

The movie Eragon was a horrible adaptation of its namesake book, which was rather unfortunate. The most recently eragonned movie was The Spiderwick Chronicles. If you saw the movie without ever having read the books you won’t know what I mean. But the original namesake and The Spiderwick Chronicles can’t hold a candle to what they did to Prince Caspian.

To say that they eragonned the movie is too kind an assessment. We were excited to see the next installment of the Narnia series. We even went to see the midnight premier. What we saw was more than merely disappointing. What we saw would have C.S. Lewis turning in his grave fast enough to power a small city. People actually got up and left the theater during the show. We sat through this train-wreck hoping that at some point it would improve but alas, it did not. We might have left too, but were too polite to get up in front of all the other viewers (we were in the middle of the row, 3 rows up from the walkway in a newer Cinemark).

If this movie makes all of its money back, I’ll be surprised. I will not pay full price to see another sequel directed, produced or written by the same team. In fact, I want my money back. I want my two hours and twenty minutes back. Disney and Walden Media should be ashamed of what they’ve done to C.S. Lewis’ work. Boo!

While this story is (to me) about a gift, it starts out as a gag Improv Everywhere cooked up. The premise is that they would make a little league baseball game between 10 year-olds into “the best game ever” — which basically made it a major league type of event. Follow the link and read the story, watch the video clip. It is funny, make no mistake. But at the same time they made the event extremely wonderful for the children and their parents. NBC sportscasting on a jumbotron? The Goodyear blimp? At a little league game? They even did a post-game press conference!

This story got me thinking about how it must have felt to be one of those kids. How cool would you feel if you had TV cameras pointed at you? How about people you’ve never even met chanting your name and cheering for you? This was an amazing gift to give. I think that must be why NBC and Goodyear were willing to help out with this “stunt.” Improv Everywhere tries to make sure there are no victims or anyone being hurt by its pranks, so far as I have seen. Something like this could have been malicious or so over the top that it was hokey and embarrassing. It wasn’t though. They made those kids feel terrific, even if it was only for a day. I think that such a gift is amazing. I hope that they do more like it and that it inspires others to do similar things.

Instead of “Candid Camera” styled pranks where the usually good-natured target is embarrassed but relieved at the end, what if a new style of prank were set up where the target is treated to something like these little leaguers? I think it’s an untapped market. I also think it takes more work to put together and pull it off. I’d love to see it done, though. It’d make the world a better place, or at least a happier place — which is better in my book.

All told though – it was a great bit. I wish I was there to witness it in person!!

UPDATE: The NBC/Goodyear blimp participation makes sense in light of this comment off of digg:

From the I.E. site, looks as though this was performed back in March 2007. Also from the I.E. site, they were working with NBC on a pilot version of the show for national broadcast. This must be one of the pranks they lined up with the network for use in the pilot. The financial backing needed, the clearance to use the NBC logos… and it would also explain why a year-old prank was just published this week – NBC probably needed to “release” the prank to I.E. given they weren’t going to pick up the show.

I don’t know. I may be getting bored of the whole blog thing. It’s been nearly 6 months since I last posted, and that was only an announcement that I was moving. I no longer feel compelled to write about a lot of things.

Perhaps this is because I no longer feel it prudent to poke fun of other’s views in an acerbic manner. This has been a staple of the internet for a decade now, but it’s become tired and boring, even when it seems that such satire and occasional vitriol are deserved. Perhaps I’ve become to cautious in my writing. I lack some of the boldness I once had, but perhaps this is not entirely accurate. It is more likely that my desire to point out flaws in reasoning or logic has been tempered by wisdom. I just don’t feel like it’s my job to do that. Don’t ask me why I felt that way in the past. I don’t know the answer to that question yet.

As such, this blog is dying on the vine. I could still write about my observations, but I am a bit hesitant to do so. It’s not as though there’s a dearth of silliness and stupidity in the world, I am simply recalcitrant now. I have no desire to share my insights with the world at large. Why are my opinions important enough to warrant publishing them? I don’t know. I do know, however, that this site presents a very raw and sometimes embarrassing look at how my thoughts have changed and grown all neatly arranged in a timeline. Perhaps that is enough by itself.

I read many blogs and news sources day by day. I have found it interesting to observe how some bloggers opinions change and some do not. I have seen myself change, and I hope that it is for the better. It would be curious to do a study of bloggers to see what has changed about them over the course of years. The information could only be drawn from their writings. I would be very curious to know how many change and for what reasons. Equally interesting would be how many do not change even so much as a single viewpoint.

Being static in the world today seems impossible, and yet the evidence is around us that many people do not change their minds, once set. An opinion formed in some of these seems like a document set in stone, never to be altered or edited, even when experience and evidence point to differing conclusions.

I’m rambling now, though. And I still can’t think of anything to say.

We’re headed off to Southern Utah tomorrow to do some camping with a few of our friends and their families. Among the fun things we have planned are some stargazing (with accompanying Mac laptop running “Starry Night” software) and a big Mother’s Day breakfast prepared by the men.

I’ll see about taking some photos and perhaps chronicle our journeyings. Hopefully we’ll all come back intact and uninjured. Sunburn and heatstroke are likely to be the chief worries. It’s barely May and the temperature is set to hit the high 90s (that’s above 35 C for those who use centigrade).

Camping is one of the few pleasures I can say I enjoy that are completely without computers. I’d be lying if I said “gadget-free” because I still find my way to get some of those into my gear. Most of those are camping related, though. Cooking equipment, lanterns, backpacks. etc. I can’t escape being a geek entirely, now can I?

This won’t be the first time I’ve gone camping in a hot, sandy environment (the site is named Snow Canyon, which seems a strange choice of names during the summer months). I prefer high mountain tops and alpine meadows and less dense forests, however. I especially enjoy it if there’s a lake or fishable stream nearby. Come to think of it, the sounds of wind and water are inextricably connected to camping for me. I miss the white noise combination of a breeze in the trees with a babbling brook nearby. I feel more connected to nature when I have those extra sensations. Besides, it’s usually cooler at that altitude.

Have a happy Mother’s Day weekend!

…have been grossly exaggerated. They’re premature at the very least.

I’m still alive, and even though I haven’t posted in months, I still plan on continuing my website. That said, it is noteworthy to state that my blog will no longer be about the same sorts of things any longer.

Sure, I may still write about current events and my spin on them. Can’t say that I won’t when I know I probably will be unable to resist the temptation. I just feel very differently about a great many things than I once did. This isn’t to say that the sky has turned yellow, that I have suddenly become a left-leaning reactionary, that my wife and I have decided to send our children to the public schools after all, or even that I’ve switched back to Windows from the Mac. *shudder* I’m not that different in my opinions per se, rather that I am learning to interact with others in a different and hopefully more healthy manner — particularly those with whom I differ in opinion.

What this is all about is that my writing has been very accusatory in nature and I’m learning to be less accusatory in my dealings with others. (I may write about this change at some point, but that’s not important right now). I’m not going to delete or edit any of my previous posts (excepting for instances of grammar or spelling I may correct in the future). They stand as a reminder of who am was and where I’ve been. Hiding, burying or deleting records of my past doesn’t make the past actually disappear, so I’m not going to whitewash my past. It is what it is: A window into my past. Hopefully my future writings will demonstrate the change in me.

As something of a side note, I discovered that I’m no longer in as rare a subset of the population as I once was. For the past 10 years, I have registered as an INTJ personality type. No matter how many times I took the test, it always came up INTJ. I took tests from multiple sources and always tested the same. Last week I took the test again, for the first time in about 3 years. I came up as INTP. I thought it was a fluke. I took a different test, and a longer test and I still came up as INTP. Not only that, my scores for the T vs. F (Thinking vs. Feeling) came out as nearly 50/50 (51/49 if you must know). This means I will also strongly display traits of an INFP. It’s baffled me because I didn’t see the change. My wife knows me well and has observed that some change has happened in me, but she too was fascinated to see how I now appear as a different personality type.

Know your type? I’d love to hear about it. If you don’t know, you can take a test for $5 here. (Full disclosure: I am in no way affiliated with the personalitypage.com website nor will I receive so much as a single cent from your purchase at their site). There are probably other sites which also administer a version of the Myers-Briggs test, but I have always done well with the personalitypage.com site. Your mileage may vary.

Ok, let’s presume that “Global Warming” exists.  Data suggest that the temperature has increased, if by a small amount.  The doubters and skeptics are the ones questioning that it’s solely man’s fault that this has occurred.

I rank as one of the skeptics. I don’t buy the argument that man-made CO2 emissions are to blame for the observed rise in temperatures. Somehow this meme eluded me a few months ago. It recently cropped up in Fox news’ online segment titled Top Ten Junk Science Stories (or Headlines) of 2006. The link to the original story for this is provided here.

Here’s the rub, summarized and quoted:

Ten years ago, Danish researchers Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen first hypothesized that cosmic rays from space influence the Earth’s climate by effecting cloud formation in the lower atmosphere. Their hypothesis was based on a strong correlation between levels of cosmic radiation and cloud cover – that is, the greater the cosmic radiation, the greater the cloud cover. Clouds cool the Earth’s climate by reflecting about 20 percent of incoming solar radiation back into space.

They did experiments. The experiments confirmed their hypothesis. They were published in a major scientific journal. They were ignored by everyone else.

Low-level clouds cover more than a quarter of the Earth’s surface and exert a strong cooling effect. Observational data indicate that low-cloud cover can vary as much as 2 percent in 5 years which, in turn, varies the heating at the Earth’s surface by as much as 1.2 watts per square meter during that same period.

“That figure can be compared with about 1.4 watts per square meter estimated by the [United Nations’] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the greenhouse effect of all the increase in carbon dioxide in the air since the Industrial Revolution,” says Svensmark.

That is, cloud cover changes over a 5-year period can have 85 percent of the temperature effect on the Earth that has been claimed to have been caused by nearly 200 years of manmade carbon dioxide emissions. The temperature effects of cloud cover during the 20th century could be as much as 7 times greater than the alleged temperature effect of 200 years worth of additional carbon dioxide and several times greater than that of all additional greenhouse gases combined.

…

Not surprisingly, Svensmark’s potentially myth-shattering study has so far been largely ignored by the media. Though published in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society A, it’s only been reported – and briefly at that – in The New Scientist (Oct. 7), Space Daily (Oct. 6) and the Daily Express (U.K., Oct. 6).

So. Are there any scientists who want to explain this away? I confess to being only an “armchair” amateur. I am extremely interested because policies being discussed and debated based on what could be bogus information is alarming and disturbing. It is somewhat angering that this information seems to have been overlooked, intentionally or otherwise, by the purveyors of what we have come to call news.

The recent tragedy in Colorado has had me thinking.  I can’t say that this wouldn’t have happened if the children were homeschooled.  First and foremost because I would feel like I was exploiting someone else to boost my agenda.  And second, because I couldn’t feel like I was factually correct in even suggesting such a thing.  Forced-entry into homes happens all over the world on a daily basis and subsequent tragedy, be it sexual assault, murder or theft of property, is all too common in such cases. The bottom line here is that even though the school had some kind of protections in place, this came out of the blue and there was nothing they could have done to prevent it.
I pondered how I might have felt if something like that had happened to one of my daughters, or the daughter of a close friend.  I even tried to place myself in the shoes of the parents whose daughter was killed by this creep.  I can’t truly imagine what they must be going through, but I extend my deepest condolences to them.  I extend my condolences not just to them, but to all of the victims and their families.  It is truly unfortunate that we in our society must confront this manner of evil.

I also extend my condolences to the family of the perpetrator.  Having a brother/son/uncle go off the deep end and do something so surprising must be agonizing.   I have often wondered how difficult it would be in such a situation and my heart goes out to you as well.
Please remember that the victims in this scenario are still our brothers and sisters — part of the human family —  and they need our love, support and prayers just as much as anyone else.

I’ve been out of commission, blog-wise, for over 5 months, it would seem.  Only sporadic posting and such for a long time.

I can’t say it won’t happen again, but I will post when something strikes my fancy.