Editor Talizea Kennebec on duty:
Tuesday. Mizzling and cool. Trash and recycling are at the curb. The lawn guy arrived, did his thing, and vanished into the grey day.
Wrote a little over 900 new words, tweaked other words. The WIP Entire now weighs in at 46,275ish words, and it’s really feeling like A Thing, even while I feel like I’m channeling more than usual. I sit down at the keyboard thinking, “I got nothin‘,” and a thousand words later . . . Well. The fingers know, I guess. Or, like I said before, maybe Steve finally worked it out.
Regarding the genders and alikeness of numbers (yes, I’m still on this), someone at another place where I hang out said that when they were asked as part of an autism test how 7 and 9 are alike, their answer was “Seven and Nine are nothing alike” (implied, “as anyone over six can see). “Seven is (one color) and Nine is (another color). Seven is all angles and Nine is curvy, and they’re just not alike at all.” The suggestion being that this was, perhaps, a Bad Question for an autism test.
Frankly, I don’t think there are any Good Questions for an Autism Test, once someone has gotten to An Age, and made the accommodations that allow you to function Good Enough.
Honestly, if someone asked me, right now, in any context, how seven and nine are alike, I’d say that both are odd numbers. If I’d been asked when I was a kid, and before I knew the . . . I hesitate to say the “correct” answer, so let’s go with “the answer that would get me in the least amount of trouble”, I would probably have said that both were larger than five, or something along that line, this by way of trying to figure out what the adult wanted me to say. And to stay out of trouble. Kinda the driving force of my childhood, staying out of trouble. Not that I managed all that often.
I’ve managed to skin by in the Functioning Good Enough Competition by being an artist. People expect artists to be weird. Better, it’s seen as a Feature. Except by those people who haven’t thought it out, of which there are a surprising number, but even then, I have My Art to back me (as in, “You asked me here to give you a Creative Answer. Well, you got your wish, whether it ‘sounds crazy’ or not.”) Everyday Life is still an occasional challenge, but by this time in my life, I’ve had a lot of practice, and a Really Impressive Store of answers that will get me in the least possible trouble.
All that said–gotta do some chores.
How’s everybody feeling today?
Today’s blog post title loosely brought to you by The Doors, “People are Strange“
Sharon, I’ve been reading your posts by email every day, but have not had a comment to make for quite a while now. As you described the way you would approach the autism test it reminded me suddenly of something I hadn’t thought of in ages, which was, how I approached a Rorschach test when I was in 6th grade (when I had been labeled a troublemaker). As I was shown these various shapes, I essentially kept adding more and more things I “saw” even down to the way the ink had blotted on the paper within the shapes, as well as every possible fantastical animal, bird, insect, etc., I could think of. I think I broke the test, not to mention “breaking” the psychiatrist who thought it would tell him something. I was absolutely primed to embrace the concept of “grok” when I was introduced to it in Stranger in a Strange Land.
Are you all right?
For values of all right that include being old and weird. Are you all right?