The Dino-Aspie Ex-Café (for Those 40+... or feeling creaky)

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I've never heard that one! Postie wins the Jolly Roger!

Argh!!

More to it then the last bit.

I sure have been using the words "bit" and "bits" a lot more since I've stumbled my way onto WP.

Lau did it. It was those silly bits.

So'k, I've seen him start using "stuff" a lot more. I think this is real cultural exchange.

You just can't get no more warmer nor more sincerer than that, can you, Postie?

Now I'm starting to wonder whether The Wiggles might not have taken some inspiration from the work of Eric Idle.

Ahh, cross-cultural pollination. An unstoppable force. I'm somewhere in mid-Pacific, maybe around Samoa. And here's a priceless gem from the lips of my youngest:

#2Son (marching past, laden with sticky tape and Blu-Tack): Mum? I'm going to pimp my bedroom now.

------------------

Going back to the ones that I know
With whom I can be what I want to be
Wait one week for the feeling to go
And with you there to help me
Then it probably will.

--from Benefit by Jethro Tull

Last edited by SleepyDragon on 16 Oct 2007, 11:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Gotta' love 'em!

Lol, yeah the age of the internet has had a good deal to do with breaking down some cultural barriers. In our day if we'd have said that, well the cops would be raiding our bedrooms. In my case, they would have had just cause.

Had a chance to work in your general neighborhood once. Would have been based out of Hawaii, trouble was I would have had to sign up for a year, maybe 2, I have forgotten. Flown out to the various spots, islands if you will in the South Pacific. The Wife wasn't fond of the idea of me being gone that long. She was really just jealous as she had to leave the field work by then. I think I blew it when I promised I would send post cards of peaceful lagoons and the words, wish you were here. Ya think that might have done it?

Yep, I think that might have blown it for you.

I should clarify: I am not literally in Samoa. You know the expression "mid-Atlantic", used to describe someone whose cultural allegiance lies partway between North America and the United Kingdom? After calculating all the cultural vectors tugging on me, I decided I must be "mid-Pacific". After 16 years in Australia, I've made it south of the Equator, and close to the International Date Line, i.e. somewhere around Samoa.

Having said all that, I did actually visit Samoa once, and it's a fantastic place. The way things grow there is unbelievable. You bang a fence post into the ground, and when you come back a year or two later, the damn thing has become a good-sized tree!

I thought you were in the Land of the Down Unders. But I'm as dumb as the 2 x 4 I use sometimes and thought I might have messed it up.

Willows will do that here too. Holds the banks of the streams in place. Instead they put bulldozers in the things and try to control where water wants to go, with gravel and large stone. It doesn't work that way, that's just temporary. Just break off a small piece of the Willow tree, stick it in a wet spot near the stream and it will do just exactly what they try to do and they spend large amounts of money for streams that fish won't even live in. My Dad taught me that when I was just a kid. I see more and more of it around here now, I think some are finally getting the message. We look around this area and think it always looked like this, the streams, not so, couldn't be further from the truth. No it was much different in the days of the mast forest. You can still see traces of it, if you know how to read the land right. It's exactly how I found so many Native American sites, you have to read the land, it says a lot.

Humm getting melodramatic here, me thinks it's time to close the eyes. It was a long day. Worth it, The Wife has been pretty ill and I think we got the right stuff working. She better get well I'm way out of practice cooking and I'm not sure either of us would survive very long if I keep doing it. Oh well always Raman Noddles and Hot Pockets...and canned Spam(TM). Can we all say a big Yummy?

And Kraft Dinner! Don't forget Kraft Dinner!

Please give SwampBlossom my best wishes for her good health.

thanks for all your enthousiasm !
i feel so incredibly stable now, and good.

yeah, it is fun.
working with groups is easier for me, cause there is no personal contact, it's very subject focussed.

But I have had to learn groupdynamics. The first year I did work with a group of kids,
it went all wrong, some kids started insulting me and so and it went from bad to worse.
Now I know how to do it, it's a question of being alert, especially the first minutes, and to never let escalate anything.
It's not very difficult to pay attention to that, you just ask "what's wrong?" and settle it. I also ask for silence when we are speaking (often I do some example of trying to speak when there is noice: I point out a kid and tell him/her to try to say something while the others talk all together, they think it's funny. I now have a lot of these 'explanations-by-experience'-ideas gathered over the years)

Also very important is never to shout or being angry with them, it doesn't work, it provokes invisible boomerang-effects.
What works quite well, is have their admiring: drawing and being sportive are quite good for that purpose.
And start from their ideas, not mine cause it's their lesson. Of course in general it means that I first have an idea, cause otherwise nothing happens, but when later the kids have a suggestion, it's mostly very fruitfull to use these suggestions. And when they get used to that, they start to behave themselves like independant young people, all you need to do is kind of assist them.



about my experiences in the class i could go on forever i guess ...




yeah, that's definitly true.

It's also a reason why no one ever thought i could have something like Asperger's perhaps.
that and being intelligent and having lost a few familymembers every few years.
The artist-image solved the strange behaviour (clothes that don't fit, opinions that were not standard adapted, being excentric, etc).
The intelligence found excuses for everything and copied behaviour in a skilled way whenever it was really necessary.
and the familymembers where an explanation for being so dislocated every once in a while (especially at a very young age, i lost my mother at four, no one would ever have thought that my silent behaviour might have been weird)

Well they have been starting to inquire things from the time that things got in extremes, that's another story. (and i do mix everything here cause even at that time Asperger's syndrom wasn't known, i read in the newspaper that was from 1994 on, in Belgium that is, don't know for other parts of the world)

hm, sorry for the lenght of my post

My uncle, aunt and two cousins lived in Pago Pago, American Samoa for a couple of years. My uncle is an engineer and he was working on some construction projects they had going in there. I think that was about ten years ago. They sent us back pictures and cool things though. My favorite is intricately carved war club. If I can actually get ahold of one of our cameras maybe I'll take a picture and put it up here.

I think one of the coolest things was listening to my younger cousin who was about eight at the time talk about the culture. According to her it was very village based so that no one actually had their own property. It all belonged to the chief but he was a nice guy and followed ceremony but didn't really come in and take your stuff. If he wanted to though he could have walked in and said, "Nice couch" and you would basically have to offer it to him. They walked in and out of each others houses all the time and would take stuff from the fridge and hang out. This was kind of a problem for my cousin because when she can back to the states she would make her friends parents mad by just showing up at their houses and walking in uninvited.

Of course you have to talk all that with a grain of salt because that is second hand but considering how she described it and that she did live their for about 3 or 4 years it sounded about right when she was telling me.

I think that would have been hard for me though considering I wouldn't want people just showing up at MY house and touching MY stuff. Then again thats a mix of AS and the culture I grew up in. I am generous with other people but that is when I offer and it is not just taken and moved. I hate it when people rearrange my stuff.

Uh ohh, I better go before I make myself late for work. Have a good day/evening everyone.

BTW I don't have my contacts in so who knows if this post actually says what I thought I typed.

Another priceless post from Sleepy. "any other day that ends with the letter Y"

Quoting Rathermousie:

I can identify with these words. I've always been against the notion that children should be made to share their toys. Wonderful if they want to, but never forced. It would be like an adult being made to share their personal property.

When I went into the hospital to have my first child, I came home to find my living room furniture had been completely rearranged by my sister-in-law. I still find that hard to believe to this day. I would never take it upon myself to do something like that in someone else's house.

Ewwwww, my condolences! Ours is very much like that, we're, thankfully, on an upstairs end unit. But when downstairs opens or closes their front door, we think it's ours and check. They turn on their dishwasher, take a shower, etc, it sounds like it's in our unit. Our bedrooms back onto the next unit over's bedrooms. Fortunately at present an investor is fixing the place up, which means nobody's there at night. Previously we had to move our beds away from that side of the rooms because of the noise. Can still clearly hear the TV and cell phone conversations of the people below and under his unit (the "happily married" couple with the little boys). Not looking forward to when the investor either sells the place, or rents it out. Wincing at the thought of having clones of those below move into it.

Hope you can find a place with no shared walls! It's so unpleasant when the place where you go to get away from the world is invaded like that, so there's really no sanctuary anywhere. Draining.

DUH!

What a lovely photo of the rain!

Yerks! I know the feeling. I was in the hospital once, a few years after I'd left home. The authorities at the hospital called my parents, as that what the DMV or someone had as next of kin. I certainly would never have asked them to do so, or for the apartment manager to let them into my place, but that's what happened.

When I got home from the hospital I found my parents had thrown out a lot of my stuff (furniture, books, shelving, clothes, food) and replaced it with stuff they wanted to get rid of from their home. They arranged the place to look like a mini-theirhouse. They went through my fridge and tossed out the things in there they didn't like, replaced it with stuff they did like (most of which I had always loathed). With my clothes, they just threw things away, did not replace them. Unfortunately, several of the items they threw out or gave away while I was confined did not belong to me, but were on loan from others. I was making minimum wage at the time and had almost no savings, so was unable to pay those people what it was going to cost to replace the items that were gone. I was so horrified at what had happened that I couldn't tell my friends what my parents had done, and so they thought I'd just absconded with their stuff, I think.

My folks were not there when I got home (they'd already been "bothered" enough by the incident and having to drive all that way, disrupting their schedule), so I basically walked into the wreckage of what had been my home to find all that. My mother furious when I called to ask what they'd done with my stuff, and to ask that they return some of the things of mine that they'd taken home with them (I had a collection of several years of Geographic magazines, etc., that they'd just walked off with.)

And people occasionally do still ask why I didn't keep in contact with my family. Oy. There's no way to encapsulate that into a short answer, really.