March 9, 2011

Determination

It's been a week of frustration already, and Wednesday hasn't even really started yet. I am determined to turn the week around and be my normal, bouncy self. It didn't help that I got some little stomach bug again which had me quite out of sorts yesterday. I think it has mostly past now, which makes it easier to concentrate on Teh Good ™.

Meanwhile, I finished a little vinyl toy project this weekend:

I was a little surprised to find that RoseArt is jumping on the blank vinyl toy bandwagon, but hey - it was fun to paint. I'll have to bring him home from work at some point and take a real picture of him instead of a cameraphone shot. I like him there at work next to the Hopi Kachina Sunface Munny I did and of course @deadzebra's Copperbot and @dlanham's Ollie (the Twitterrific bird, not Twitter's bird, btw).

Must run to work now ... it's going to be a great day!

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:42 AM | Comments (0) | Blog | Stumble

February 3, 2011

Wrong Planet

Interesting. I'm seeing a lot of these "I am enough" and "Me is {more than} enough" posts recently.

Maybe it's because the winter introspective season has really begun, but I know this is where my brain has been recently as well. So I guess I should explain the last few posts a little bit - they've been fairly deep for someone who has seemingly taken a vacation from this blog.

Many of my stories start the same way: I was a weird kid. I was a weirdly logical kid. I was an outsider.

I love starting stories about me this way. I have always reveled in the fact that I am different and have always been considered different. I have never been one to do or say something just to fit in with the crowd. When I say never, I am fairly certain that is not an exaggeration. It has bit me on the ass more times than I care to remember, but it hasn't changed my belief that changing my core self just to fit in is a mistake.

My mother knew this about me from very early on and so, when Austin looked like it was going to force de-segregation via busing, I was moved out of public school to private school. Mom feared that I would see words exchanged or fists thrown and feel a need to step in. It wouldn't matter if it was a commonplace disagreement or a racially motivated fight - nor what colours the combatants were - I would step in and try to make peace. Or at least make sure the underdog didn't get whomped. She was correct in that. I could no more stay out of a fight or an injustice than I could stop breathing.

It was that particular move from public elementary school to a Catholic school for second grade where I came to realize just how different I was. I related better to the adults than to the kids. I don't think I made a single friend my age during that year. I walked the edges of the schoolyard during recess singing a little song to myself that I was too old to play now ... and I kind of admired and marveled at the other kids and their ability to still play. In retrospect, it wasn't that I was too old to play and I didn't really feel that ... but it was the only way I could articulate what I was going through - I couldn't make friends. I had no idea how to read my peers and react appropriately.

I was hyper-logical where the other second graders were roiling masses of constantly shifting emotions that I couldn't read. And they changed so very quickly from one to the next. Being around that was not just confusing to me, it was physically painful. So I held myself out on the edges.

When it became obvious there was a personality conflict between myself and my homeroom teacher, I asked to see the principal. It was the logical thing to do. Why make either Mrs. Rowan or myself suffer through a personality conflict. Other kids didn't hate her, but it was obvious she and I just weren't compatible and were driving each other nuts. She didn't know how to respond to such a logical little kid who was most emphatically not like the other kids. The principal was wonderful about the meeting - met me where I was and gave me logical reasons for not moving me to another homeroom teacher ... and she was quite kind about the whole thing.

The next year, I was back to my beloved public school and I thought my year of being amongst the oddly emotional children was over. This school tossed any 30 or so kids into one class and you stayed there all day (the Catholic school was tracked and you moved from classroom to classroom for various subjects). Upon my return, I was put in a class which had only one of the kids I'd known prior to my Catholic school experience. And I realized it wasn't just the Catholic school kids who were unreadable maelstroms of emotion.

I was still an outsider.

Even my teacher noticed it and became concerned - she called a conference with my mother and noted that I seemed to not be bonding with any of the children despite the fact that I interacted so well with the adults.

Six weeks later, we moved four hour north and I was on my third elementary school and it was just October of my third grade year. And I was still an outsider who got along wonderfully with almost all of the teachers, but really didn't fit in with the other kids. I was the weirdo. The one everyone loved making fun of ... until they realized that not only did I often not get that they were making fun of me, but I didn't particularly care, either.

My nickname, when anyone actually bothered to think about me, was the fetus. To this day, I have no idea why. I just remember the look of hatred? disgust? meanness and somehow a desperation for this barb to land on Greg Frisina's face as he told me my nickname was fetus.

And I remember my confusion and dismissal of it.

I was a stranger in a strange land. These people had social rituals that apparently you had to be born into in order to understand ... and I just didn't get it.

It was a strange place to be. So comfortable in my own skin, in my own world ... but still mindful of the fact that I never seemed to find a place or a group where I fit in for very long. It was as if other kids could tolerate me for a few months and then my inherent strangeness just became too much for them. They were confused by my inability to pick up social cues. Sometimes I couldn't pick it up, sometimes it seemed that I was deliberately ignoring them.

Truth was, I just didn't understand most social cues. At all.

And, I was unwilling ... actually, I think I am incapable ... of not being me. My personality has always been so strong that I find it nearly impossible to "just fit in" by hiding some part of my self.

The first teacher who noticed it was my junior year Spanish teacher. Otherwise I was considered that weird honors kid who just doesn't ... get it.

This Spanish teacher took me aside one day. The other kids in the class had been making fun of me for something or another. This was a matter of course. I didn't even register it because it happened so frequently and because I didn't, once again, understand why they were picking on me. Meh. Whatever. She asked if they were bothering me and I know she found my confusion a little odd. It was nice to know that she saw it, too, though. Nice that she cared enough to ask about it. I let her know that I appreciated that.

I found out a couple of years later, that she was a licensed counselor and had left the high school to work with abused kids. I was unsurprised.

I've spent my whole life wondering why I'm so different. Not unhappy with myself. Not trying to change. Just trying to classify the difference and figure out why my brain works so very differently. I don't get emotions, most of the time. I don't understand a lot of other peoples' emotions. I don't understand why they react the way they do much of the time (although I can parse the reasons that film or book characters behave a certain way with an uncanny accuracy). I do not register faces and names, which I take it is a form of mild face-blindness.

I am the quintessential outsider.

Even online, the place where I thought my social skills were finally excelling instead of holding me back ... I realized this week that it was a false positive. Once again, I know many people who find me pleasant enough ... but have not actually made close friends. Seems no one on Twitter noticed I've been absent for three full days. (Save one person who also knows me IRL.) That skill of making friends seems destined to elude me forever.

So. I had put some hope in a diagnosis over the last several years as I read more and more about Asperger's. Liane Holliday Willey seemed to describe so very much of my life in Pretending to be Normal. Attwood's book on Asperger's - I could see so much of myself in there as well. And I thought, well, maybe here's a reason for my differences. Maybe here is something that explains why I don't fit in. Why I don't get things that seem to come so damned naturally for other people.

But, apparently, the search for an explanation continues for me.

A pastor once told me that I was a seeker.

I think she is quite right. I constantly seek explanations and knowledge and try to put everything into a pattern and get quite frustrated when I can't find or recognize that pattern.

And so, while I am quite content with who I am ...

... I am still seeking why I am the way that I am.

The pattern that explains the differences.

Seeking....

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:17 AM | Comments (1) | Blog | Struggles | Stumble

February 1, 2011

The Jiminy Conjecture

As Sheldon said in S3E2, "I'm not crazy! My mother had me tested!"

Of course, in my case it was various pressures from certain people which made me wonder if something was wrong with me, but apparently I'm ridiculously normal, if a complete "nerdy, techy, creative geek." While I have many, many aspie-tendencies and characteristics, I do not have the "important" ones to the level of pathology. This is, oddly enough, rather disconcerting to me. On an immediate level I was hoping that a dx would force some issues to change which now remain completely out of my control (and not in a good way).

Oh, and not only do I not have ADHD, but my attention span, attention to detail and ability to focus are (depending on which specific item we're looking at) in the 90th to 98th percentile. So ... far above average for my age.

This is all good, right?
To be honest, I feel a bit like Gonzo from the Muppets. You know, the Muppets from Space movie from 1999 where Gonzo claims his breakfast cereal is talking to him? The whole flick is essentially about him finding other beings like him - his birth family, more or less. And at the end, he has to decide between his birth family and his Muppet family. Except I still haven't really figured out where I fit in. Mostly I don't.

"One day we'll find it, the rainbow connection ... the lovers ... the dreamers ..."

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:51 AM | Comments (2) | Blog | Stumble

January 29, 2011

What's in a Name?

Online I often go by the moniker "ender" and when that's not available, it's "enderFP." Ender, of course, is from Orson Scott Card's excellent novel, Ender's Game, because I identify with the character so much. But I'm often asked what is the "FP"?

Fisher Price.

As a kid, I knew of two cities in New York - NYC ... and East Aurora. The home of Fisher Price. I was determined I would work for them one day because I loved their toys so much. I had the blue house with the yellow roof. The airport. The parking garage. The farm. The schoolhouse. The circus set that was not the train. The houseboat. The castle.

And countless miscellaneous packs of people and beds and chairs and vehicles. I can remember a four drawer chest that sat in the closet of the playroom. The top drawer was filled with peoples, the next drawer or two was filled with various accessories. And my sister and I would line the carpet with our Snoopy encyclopedia books (to make a level area for everyone to actually stand) and then dump out the drawer of peoples and begin the choosing.

I had intended to keep every one of those peoples to hand down to my children, but alas, over my strenuous protests, mom and my sister sold most of them in a garage sale when I was 15. I went through and salvaged a few ...

That's Smitty, Tommy, Chris and Peter. (Yes, I could tell most of them apart.) Unfortunately, Chris' best friend was gone before I was able to scoop through the garage sale and steal back my favourites. (Oddly enough, he never had a name, he was just always Chris' best friend.)

Unsurprisingly, I have collected Fisher Price Little People since that day and have amassed 5 plastic shoeboxes full of the people. Below is a pic of just one of those shoeboxes ...

That's just the "boys" box. There's also a box of "special" people, a box of girls, a box of women and a box of men ....
And then there's a little box of dogs ....

And I wouldn't trade any of them for the world. I'm just incredibly sad that I'll never have the chance to pass them along to a child of my own. But it seems that is simply never to be.

Posted by Red Monkey at 10:18 PM | Comments (3) | Blog | Stumble

January 12, 2011

Once More, With Feeling...

Okay, one more song from the not-quite-three-year-old and I'll stop. Besides, any more and I'll have to build a real MP3 player on the site and I have too many other projects going on at the moment to do that.

Click to open the MP3. Opens in new window. (cuz I'm too lazy to make a real MP3 player right now)

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:21 AM | Comments (1) | Blog | Stumble

January 11, 2011

Mi Sobrino, Miguel

My sister sent me an MP3 of her and my nephew singing Little Drummer Boy with my brother-in-law playing guitar. Give him a listen ... (also? damn, I've not heard my sister sing and I forget how freaking wonderful her voice is)

Click to open the MP3. Opens in new window. (cuz I'm too lazy to make a real MP3 player right now)

Will set up the others later. He's ADORABLE!

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:54 PM | Comments (1) | Blog | Stumble