The Dino Office Cooler - The Place to Unwind After Work

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Hey, Bazza!

Rjaye, wow, both touch on some very personal aspects, both of them sound very promising:)

have you seen "The last days"? It's a story about five survivors of the Holocaust. It's one of the best documentary I've ever seen, very very recommended.
Extremely simple but so touching, I was in tears! and I couldn't stop watching it!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0174852/

^^
Dalí used to have 15 minute naps. He sat holding an apple in his hand, the hand in his lap. And when the apple fell, that was the end of the nap Read it in a book about his life (by Llongueras)

I've read that Alexander Graham Bell liked to stand in doorway to nap. He would hold a key ring in his hand, and when the keys dropped the nap was over. In some versions of this anecdote say that he would immediately right down his first thoughts because they were a great source of ideas and solutions.

Okay, Goku, first off, I'm going to take issue with your characterization of Aspies as "deficient" or "freaks". "Abnormal", I'll grant you only on a technical basis - the emotional loading of that word is completely off base, however.

Secondly, in the district where I went to school, not only were children never told of any diagnoses, they weren't even told how they did on the annual assessment testing - it would be "undemocratic", after all, to tell Child A that he's "better" at something than Child B. (We're all exactly identical interchangeable units - right?) So I was never told that I was unusually intelligent. I believed the other kids when they told me what I was reading was "stupid", because no one else ever told me differently. I didn't know that that reason I went to special rooms for reading and math, in grades 3-6, was because I was dealing with concepts the other kids weren't ready for - I thought it was because I was slow, and needed help to catch up. (After all, the other kids assured me on a near-constant basis that I was stupid and useless - barring any other input from outside my family, why shouldn't I believe them?)

Had I been told before I dropped out that my IQ was exceptional, or had the diagnosis of Asperger's existed at the time so I could have said why I never made friends my own age, I think my life might have gone considerably more smoothly. (As it was, the best part of the whole thing, and what seems to have given me a lifelong edge over so many others, is the fact that my parents loved me and accepted me for who I was, even if they didn't always understand me.)

I dropped out of school because I didn't think there was any point to staying in. After all, I was a "stupid freak" - labeling accomplished by my alleged "peers". My parents weren't able to convince me otherwise because none of us had any fracking idea of my intellect - all they really had to point at was my mediocre-at-best report cards; anything I did at home was at least somewhat overwhelmed by the fact that I was the fourth of five children, rather quiet, and my little sister was a Kanner's autistic. They had no data points to refute the characterization of those "peers".

Had we ever been permitted to know that I had an IQ of 163, and was mildly autistic myself (as Asperger's didn't exist as a diagnosis back then), I'd have had a self-image to cling to that wasn't entirely defined by the other kids.

It's not a label - it's an explanation. It explains just why you feel like an outsider most of the time, why you enjoy being by yourself when everyone says you're supposed to be a social teenager, why you're different. I've noticed, among some NTs, the ridiculous notion that if you don't tell the kids they're different, no one will ever notice. That's a huge, steaming load of crap. The other kids will know you're different - and if nobody knows why you're different, how you're different, they'll assume it's a bad thing, and treat you accordingly.

If you want to set your child up to be harassed by bullies, degraded until he thinks he's nothing, and set on a path that will end with his resenting you in adulthood because you never told him, go right ahead. It's not what I would advise, but what do I know? I just grew up as an "unlabeled" Aspie, after all...

Goku,

If you child was assessed and is a teenager, I would tell him and this is why - he already knows something is up because he was assessed by some kind of shrink and if you don't tell him he is going to imagine that the outcome was so horrible you couldn't. Trust me, he already knows he's very different and not telling him allows kids to label him as a freak, abnormal and deficient. They know he's different, probably more so than you did. Not telling him is not going to protect him one iota, it is going to make it worse because he'll dream up all kinds of things.

I had no label because I grew up long before they knew what Asperger's was, in fact I was married the year that Lorna Wing translated Asperger's work. That changed nothing as far as my behavior went. I was vastly different, always knew it and so did all the other kids. They didn't pick on me because I had five brothers who would have beat them into the ground if they had. How common do you think that was? I've never heard anyone else say that. I was fortunate that unlike Deacon, I was put into accelerated classes on my own and told why - I would blurt out answers, write all day in class and get my work done in minutes. I was bored out of my mind by school, so they took care of that. I loved it and so did they. The other kids knew I was smarter because no one hid it, that's the way it was. They also knew I was bizarre as anything. I had some friends and some kids hated me because my face is so impassive that I seem aloof...in other words a b***h and I was called that frequently. I wasn't very tolerant of it, but then I didn't think their opinion on anything mattered. That was my personality and personality has a big effect on how your son will handle it. You also make a huge difference. Saying he's different and not deficient is a good place to start. Complimenting his intellect and his interests in another place.

I survived and did fine, but I never for one moment thought I was like the other kids. Your son doesn't for one second believe that either. Don't underestimate your son, tell him. He understands far more than you (or some idiot shrink) realizes. It's not fair or even wise to let him come up with his own reasons for why he went through the diagnosis. You are begging for trouble if you continue with that. It makes me worry for him. Please think about it.

Thanks for your candor Deacon and Zannie. I really did want your honest opinion. Since this is so off topic, I'll end it here and maybe start a new thread. Sorry that I offended some - didn't intend to. Not all kids with asperger's are the same - mine has many complex issues involved and some background info would have been helpful.

Hi, all...

I have been thinking about the labeling issue, and I think with my screwed up background, knowing I had AS would have helped me so much in my teen years. Teachers knew something was wrong with me, but because my parents were not into new-fangled neuro/psychogical things, there was no way they were going to allow an evaluation by a professional. Not that I would trust any professional associated with a school district anyway. Also, I could have gotten support I wasn't able to get on my own, but...no-one knew about A.S. here in the States then, but I probably would've been dx HFA at that time anyway.

I think the most important thing to me being dx with AS is showing others the variety of people who have it. Schools do not have enough information, and people are not holding their school systems, and the state, accountable to educating kids in the most effective ways for them to learn. As it is, we are mass educating our kids like we build cars, and we are not holding our own kids accountable for their piss-poor behavior in how they treat each other. In fact, because of the way the system is set up, bullies of all stripes are catered to because they are just "kids," which is bs. If I called anyone a "tard," my mother would've had my hide, and even at eighteen, I would have had to answer for it.

Being fearful of "labels" denies us a vocabulary to talk about our lives with. It's too complicated to not use neurological or psychological terms. Takes too much space. And if one reads my posts, or looks at the pages I sometimes write, the last thing I need is something I have to keep explaining in detail. I want to use the words I have.

And I'm not ashamed of the words Asperger's Syndrome. It's part of me like my muscles and my hair (which the older I get, the more it migrates to unexpected parts of my body) and my color, and I am part of a unique and wonderful group. The kids on this site can be pretty emo (aha! New word!), but once they finally mature like a fine wine (or cheese, in my case), they're going to be pretty cool with their very own personalities that are quite unlike so called normal people's selves.

Aspies just mature later. We are slow in some ways, and quick in others, and different in some others. That's all. All of this re-education is trying to fit us into a society that has no patience for individuality is a crock and ineffective, and unproven. Boy, I miss the sixties. Maybe misguided, but those folks theoretically had the right idea. Plus the music was awesome.

My 2 cents, and with inflation, it ain't even worth that.

Love, Rjaye.

I couldn't agree more with the whole bullying thing. There is no excuse whatsoever for schools or parents to put up with this. There is nothing wrong with teaching kids to respect each other and everyone else. Down here they finally passed a law about respect for each other in schools. A Gay/Lesbian group started it, but they wisely expanded it to include all children, no matter the reason for bullying behavior. It's basically a zero tolerance law. What pushed that law through was a kid who wanted to belong so badly that he got into a fight with a popular kid (they told him this way the initiation rite to belong to the group). The older kid and another kid beat him to death. The popular kid's dad, a doctor, initially got him off (no charges filed) by saying it couldn't be proven that he had delivered the deadly blow. Later the kid was convicted. That doctor by the way is the only doctor around me and that incident happened three miles from where I live. People were so disgusted over the incident and the way the police handled it that they pushed their legislators to pass the law. This site outlines the law as well as the bullying statistics used to get it through. The statistics are pretty amazing and show that bullying will touch most students lives while in school. It also does a great job of comparing that behavior to a "what if" scenario in a work setting. I don't know about the companies where you work, but my companies had zero tolerance rules for that and they were enforced. I personally enforced them when I was a manager.

If Autism Speaks really wanted to speak for us, they would push these laws through in every state. These laws help all children and need to be commonplace, not the exception. If the parents want to do one big thing to change the lot of their Aspie/Autie children, this is a great place to start. Just think about the difference it would make in the lives of the kids on here.

If Autism Speaks wanted to truly speak for us, they might start by speaking to us, instead of dismissing those of us capable of communication as "not really autistic", and then going on to whine about the burden of the parents, as if the autistic children are only important insofar as they impact on their parents' lives, with no intrinsic worth of their own...

...aaaand I'm going to stop that rant here. If I get wound up about those hypocritical lying bastards, I'm not going to get anything done around here this morning. (Heck, it's already affected my typing - I don't think there's more than two or three words in this post I haven't had to correct already!)

Further proof that dh is right and they WILL rot our brains.