Tron, Ferris Bueller, and the general malaise of sick days
Ever have one of those nights when you couldn’t sleep at all? I went to bed not feeling so great, and tossed and turned the whole night. I’m pretty sure I’m getting sick, because I’m freezing cold. I’m the most hot-natured person you’ll ever meet, and if I’m cold then it’s a good sign that I’m about to have some unpleasant health issues going on. So if this post is lousy, hey, I’ve had no sleep and I feel like something a cat coughed up.
I’ve been sitting on the sofa all morning watching old episodes of ER. Parminder Nagra, who plays the surgeon from India, is a long-standing favorite tv hottie of That Asperger Dude. I was watching an episode where they had a young teenage patient with Asperger’s Syndrome, and I have to say I was a bit disappointed with how they portrayed the illness. ER usually does a spot-on job of portraying medical conditions accurately, but the young girl who was supposed to have Asperger’s seemed more bipolar than autistic. Of course, there is a fairly high incidence of bipolar disorder in Aspergers.
Overwhelmingly, the first thing my friends and family have commented on about my blog is that I have a good vocabulary. Although all compliments are appreciated, I kind of feel like maybe I should just try to publish a study guide of SAT vocabulary words. I rarely get comments on the actual writing content, or my writing style, just on how many of “them big fancy words you throw around.”
I’m not into golf at all, never been able to stand watching or playing it, so around Masters time, I just try to drown myself in baseball games. But I had a flashback the other day to a few years back, when the National Organization of Women decided to stage a protest in Augusta over the golf course’s no-women-allowed-in-the-clubhouse policy. I had mixed feelings about this. I think that the policy is sexist and tacky, but I also think that since it’s a private club, they can have whatever dumbass, archaic policy they want. I also humbly suggest that there are tons of more important issues that the National Orgnization of Women should be tackling first. For instance, the insane number of domestic violence cases that go unreported or unprosecuted. A lot of police departments have been silent accomplices in domestic violence by looking the other way instead of protecting victims.
Erin Andrews was the always important sideline reporter for the Yankees game Wednesday night. Unless she plans to do her on-camera reports wearing a bikini, her presence is unecessary. I’d like to recommend the American flag bikini Jessica Simpson wore on the cover of GQ magazine. She spent the whole night trying to get the guys in the booth engaged in some inane back and forth banter. Erin, you’re a living doll, but I already have one woman in my life talking too much during the baseball games I watch.
Oh, no he didn’t!
Nice seemless transition from standing up for women who are victims of domestic violence to making a snide sexist remark about my wife’s chattiness, don’t you think? Don’t worry ladies, she’ll give me a nasty look later and maybe a rude finger gesture when she reads this. I deserve it.
Steve Phillips, talking head on ESPN’s Baseball Tonight, come get your whoopin’! I always find myself shaking my head in disbelief that this guy is considered an expert. He singlehandedly forced the Mets into a baseball version of the Israelites wandering around the desert. His utter and spectacular incompetence rendered the Mets almost completely irrelevant in the largest city in the US. Steve Phillips saying a general manager made a bad decision is like Don King telling someone they have ugly hair, or David Beckham telling another guy he’s coming across a bit gay.
The dogs had to get their last round of shots today, so they feel like crap too. I’m wrapped under a blanket writing, the dogs are on the floor whining and taking short naps, and a general malaise has settled over the living room. It makes me think about days I stayed home from school sick when I was a kid.
My mom knew that if I stayed out of school or came home early sick, we had to go rent the movies Tron and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This was back in the heyday of small, privately-owned VHS rental joints, and the one nearest our home knew that if I came in there on a school day, it was to get Tron and Ferris. It’s funny how obvious an Asperger thing that is to look back on, but at the tme, we didn’t have a name for those types of behaviors. Well, that’s not entirely true. People had several names for my Asperger-type traits, but unfortunately none of them were really flattering.
I was always very aware of how many absences a school allowed for each grading period, and my Asperger memory never failed to have an accurate tally of how many days I had to play with. I’ll just admit it, I did fake sick sometimes. Not as much as people probably think I did, but yeah, I did it some. Most of the time I did it just because I needed a break from the constant sensory bombardment and overwhelming social songs and dances of the school day. I don’t think many kids make it through all twelve grades without pulling the occassional bogus sick day.
When I was in seventh grade, I had a lot of real, honest, sick days. I would get terrible headaches in the middle part of morning classes, and would call my mom to come pick me up. Instead of trying to ascertain the cause of my headaches, she felt that it was natural to assume I was using drugs. Never once did she pick me up when I called with a headache that she didn’t ask several times if I needed to admit to her I was using drugs. Did I mention my mean-spirited, alcoholic father used to punch me on top of my head? Think that might cause headaches? Hmmm….
I think another reason I was getting so any headaches is that seventh grade was the first time I had changed schools since my first day of first grade. There was no middle school at the time I was a seventh grader, and I attended grades one through six at the same elementary school. I think my undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome was having a hard time with such a drastic change in routine and surroundings. I had a locker for the first time, and for whatever reason, it never wanted to open for me. I was around a whole lot of new people, after seeing the same faces day in and day out for six years. All of the changes were hard for my Asperger tendencies, and I would stress myself out to the point of bad headaches bringing down the sledgehammer mid-mornings.
Do I think my mom dropped the ball with my headaches? Well, yes and no. I don’t remember her ever refusing to come pick me up, so I can’t complain about that. I can’t really hold her accoutable for not knowing I needed treatment for an illness that still had no clear definition or name in the medical community, that wouldn’t be fair. But I do think it was damaging to me to accuse me of using drugs so much. I had never even thought about using drugs until she began blaming my headaches on them. And I do think that as much as people in my family have been coming to me the past year to tell me about this or that trait they had noticed about me as a child that they thought might be autistic, or at least very unusual, that a visit to a child psychologist was warranted. But I’m not mad about it.
I was finally correctly diagnosed as an Asperger in 2007, at age 33. In other words, about three decades too late to really make a huge difference. But there is peace in having an answer, and you can’t put a price on inner peace. I think in a lot of ways, the way my father pushed me around made me better able to handle the adversities that came with being an Asperger. I was familiar with the concept of struggle. So I guess in a twisted way, his acts of violence towards me gave me an inner resolve that many Aspergers have a hard time developing. I never would have been able to keep it together throughout four trips to the psychiatric ward without that resolve, so maybe everything does happen for a reason. Maybe not.
If there are any parents of small children reading this, and you think your child has autistic traits, please do yourself and your child a favor and have a psychiatrist perform an examination. There can never be too much information where this is concerned. A lot of times I catch myself feeling sorry for myself that I lost so much time, so much potential happiness, to the effects of my undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome. It’s not healthy, and it’s surely not productive, but I am a human being.
I just happen to be a human being who can easily recite the history of the Knights Templar without missing a beat but struggles to maintain eye contact and engage in simple small talk about what the weather is like outside. 
All right, dear readers, I’m gonna go take some Tylenol and dust off my copy of Tron.
Tags: asperger, Augusta Georgia, autism, bikini, child abuse, domestic violence, er, erin andrews, ferris bueller, golf, headaches, i hate espn, Jessica Simpson, knights templar, michael crichton, N.O.W., National Organization of Women, new york mets, parminder nagra, The Masters, tron, vocabulary
