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

Post Reply New Topic

Spare brains? Thank goodness...I need to wash mine. My mother told me have to clean brains everyday in case I get into an accident.

I am a good witch, I think. I know I have a perverse fondness for Lolly Pop Kids...

I just popped in to say "hi" as I am supposed to be studying. Bad me...

ANd to say,"HHHHHAAAAPPPPPYYYYY!! !!!BBBBIIIIIIIRRRRFFFDAAAYyyyyy!! ! OOOH, JJJJOOOOOYYYYY!! !! MaaaaRRRRIIIIhhhhhaaaaaAAA~~~~~"

And Nanarobi--there is a lovely young lad in your life that makes you an Aspie-In-Law...erm, uh,...an Aspie-once-removed!! You're always welcome. Just watch over there by the fake rhody. We do have an outhouse, apparently, but...well...Ya know.

Muchly, Rjaye.

And here's my current favorite song:

Paolo Nutini New Shoes

Hey Postpaleo, I love the Wizard of Oz too ! ! For me as a lad, it was the Cowardly Lion. His bluster, and humor to keep everyone from knowing how fearful he was, struck a chord for me. I didn't 'understand' other children, and being one of the smallest boys in my class, I learned to get people laughing with me rather than at me. I was also fearful of being thrashed by some bully. I really understood the scene where Dorothy and the Tin-man, and the Scarecrow meet the Cowardly Lion for the first time. He does his best to scare them first, but Dorothy swats him on the nose, and he loses his scary persona. I wonder whether ASpie women go through this sort of fear of getting thrashed by someone physically larger than them? Didn't help me at all that my father used to tell me about how he got his nose broken that way. What made it all the worse was not being able to read the other children's faces. Some bully would talk to me, and I'd stand there wondering, wot's this then? Is he going to take a swing at me? Is he winding me up in front of the other children? Is he really just talking to me? It ain't easy being an ASpie kid...

Yowling Cat - Love the newsletter.

Question - Were you allowed to bully other children as a child? Let's say if their noise or whatever bothered you. Did your parents allow you to ever get away with bullying or physically hurting another child?

My mother would not tolerate that behavior at all or really any bad behavior. (My dad worked away from home all week.) A mother on here claimed that couldn't work because "They" meaning us, couldn't understand punishment (not hitting, sent to the room, losing TV, music, etc.) because "they" have no theory of mind so can't understand punishment or why they shouldn't harass or abuse another child. She claimed the only thing that could work was ignoring bad behavior (what? while he's hitting the other kid?) and rewarding good.

So, were you allowed to do this? Did you understand when your parents told you that you couldn't hurt or harass another child? Did you understand rules and limits? Did you understand consequences?

I did and my oldest brother did. I'm curious about our group because we grew up before all these ninny feel good practices.

My parents wouldn't have allowed any behavior that would hurt or harrass another. But thinking back, I don't think any of us (two brothers, one sister) were ever inclined to that kind of behavior. We were not aggressors and were tolerant and compassionate of and towards anyone with a disability. I think we were more intrigued than anything bly people who were different than us.

Is anyone here troubled by ringing in the ears, and if so, do you have any coping skills or remedies you can share? It's maddening at times.

For me I have terrible ringing in my ears and it is worse now as I'm older. It's hard for me to sit in silence now and tune it out whereas I used to love to sit in silence.

Cosmic, the same was true of us. We didn't think about doing that but we grew up in a different time when you were taught to respect others, I think. I could be wrong on that. I remember kids who had polio at school and they wore leg braces or had crutches. The recess workers would take you to the office if you teased those kids or anyone. It seems like they just let kids run wild now and try to change them when it is completely out of control by "treating them with respect and ignoring their bad behavior while rewarding the good."

When I see the things going on now with the young Aspies it just makes me wonder. That's why I asked about our experiences with our parents. We're a pretty sage crowd. I want to see what we think.

I have been high on this cafe for about two weeks now. I knew I would have to crash sooner or later. I'm now looking back on all of those years that I endured remarks like "Is she still crazy?" and countless other cruelties which we have all endured. And it makes me sad and angry that remarks like that made me question my own sanity and lose so much self esteem integrity. I mean it's such a waste of time. I would have been so empowered if years ago I had known about aspergers. I guess I feel like even parents who impart good values on their children are throwing their kids into a lion's den or a gladiators' arena when they send them off to school (espedcialy public school )and into society. If we could just respect people, from the moment of birth, for all of their similarities and all of their differences I don't think bullies would ever evolve. People need respect from infancy on and when they don't get it, even if they have everything else, a deformity of character is going to occurr. Actually, and I don't want to get into any hot discussions about abortion, but I must say what I believe, if we have no respect for life in the womb, we have no respect for life at all. Do you think kids aren't going to pick up on that? When my youngest daughter was 4 years old she asked me "What's abortion?" I told her "It's when they kill a baby while it is still in it's mother." From the mouths' of babes came "Why don't they just wait til the baby comes out and then kill it?" Our generation didn't grow up saying, thinking "whew, I escaped that round of Russian Roulette!"

I have the ringing in my ears.

This part is embarressing to me, but I have vowed to myself to let it out, even the bad stuff. I did the bully thing, name calling etc. It didn't last very long, but I did it. The bully bit only made it a few grades in school. The name calling I think now was me trying to fit into the herd. Took a while for that wake up call. Now it's all I can do to not to cry when I see a homeless person. If my parents would have had a clue what I was up to, they would have been irate, yet at the same time were unforgiving with my own traits. I don't blame them with the latter part. Also had a speech impedement, which may have caused some name calling directed at me, I just don't remember or have blocked it out. I can now say S's better then most, lol. Like Prof_Pretorius, I learned even before school daze, that getting others to laugh was a key, even when disruptive, it would get me on the kids side, much to the displeasure of teachers everwhere. I still tend to react to things on the spur of the moment with feelings that all to often I wear on my sleeve. If given a moment, I can think it through rather quickly and react more to the common sense approach, much to the pain of a lot of NT's when faced with common sense. Thoughts that go above the norm tend to stay inside or will come out in a group who is really interested in such thoughts. I guess it's all part of the coping skills and I do try to pass them on to others. The gooder ones at least. I did my trail by fire and don't like to see others go through it.

The Wizard of Oz I think could have been better written, but that screen play was just above and beyond the call of duty. I can't think of another, for that time period, to play Dorthy, but Garland wasn't the best. She could sing, but man, she just could not act to the same degree of her fellow cast members. It wasn't until looking up the screen play authors that I knew that the character Dorthy was adopted. Put a bit of a new spin on it for me.

I think if I ever get to the point where I have better control over my writing, I'd try to make a stab at kids books. Get em while they're young and don't know good writing from bad, but like a good story. My current wonderment at this new thing called writing is the use of commas, I'm in love with them. Adult writing I'm just pleased when I leave em with a befuddled look.

I wonder if we use the right side of our brains, as a general rule. Artists do and to my utter dismay I can not draw or paint, well except walls. But at the same time compose pictures and film in my mind. My current film is me kissing my own ass, I know how to do it in film, I just need the free software and don't have a clue where to look. I don't mind life on disability, but there are times that my wants exceed my budget and still be fair to the Wife, I must refrain. Like how the hell did you do that wonderful Dino Aspie news letter cosmiccat? What did you use to do it?

The list reminds me of Ding Dong school (American 50's kids show), the b***h our Miss Francis got out that spy glass and panned around in front of the camera peering through the tv screens and announcing the names of kids watching, The b***h!!. My name begins with a freakin A and she never ever saw me. I was crushed. The list also reminds me of the MouseKaTootie roll call, I even had on my ears. Man, that Karen and Annette were really something, but I had another picked out that looked easy to me, yes I did. By the way, my mother was a libber before the word was well known, she would have killed me had she known my thoughts. She wasn't to damned pleased when I no longer hid those. Ah yes the good ol 50's, may they never return. (gets out his spy glass and peers around the room, "I see you Lemon and your art work, too" )

My oh my how I can ramble on.

[quote="postpaleo"]

This part is embarressing to me, but I have vowed to myself to let it out, even the bad stuff. I did the bully thing, name calling etc. It didn't last very long, but I did it.


I did the bullying thing once. It was kind of an experiment to see if I could pull it off and to impress my tough young playmates. I guess I was about nine or ten years old. A couple of kids who lived outside of our neigborhood had wandered in to play on our monkey bars. We lived in a housing project and they lived in another so called "higher class" neighborhood across the boulevard. It was odd to have outsiders come into our territory because most parents wouldn't let their kids come into the project. The project was developed for people who were economically displaced; war veterens, coal miners, people who were down and out so to speak. I would meet these outsiders in school, strike up a friendship. They invited me to their homes after school and it was always so interesting to see the way they lived. When I invited them to my home, they were never allowed to come. There was a heavy stigma on the project. At any rate, when I saw a couple of these kids playing on our monkey bars, I assembled the gang and we whooped down the hill and scared the hell out of them, and told them never to return or we would beat them up. I now see that I was acting out because of the rejection their world had for us. It was kind of thrilling, but I never did anything like that again. I had much better things to do. Like lying. Oh, I made up the most marvelous lies to enhance my social status. My father was an Arabian sheik. My mother was a movie star. In those days when you bought a dixie cup from the ice cream man there would be pictures of movie stars on the lids. I cut them out and put them in a wallet and gave them names like Aunt Nancy, Uncle Fred. I had a hundred porcelain dolls which I kept behind glass in a great cabinet in my bedroom. I got caught in a lie once by my 5th grade teacher. There was this very tough and highly attractive boy in my class. I was a safety and after my lunchtime safety duty I went to class and told everyone that I had witnessed him beating up our art teacher, who was a sweet, but feeble old lady. My teacher pulled me by the hair to the front of the class room and screamed that what I had done was terrible and that I should get down on my knees and ask God to forgive me. I suppose my parents were notified but if they were, they never mentioned it. You would think that the adults in my life, if they knew I was lying, would have shown a little concern and made some kind of an effort to understand why I was doing it. I think it was a way of releiving boredom and making life more interesting than it was.