Aspie Dad

I don’t watch the show House, M.D., though Hugh Laurie has been a favorite of mine since, … probably Wooster and Jeeves on the BBC via PBS. A Blogcritics review came through my Google Alert for “Asperger’s” and I had to check it out.

I had heard that the title character reminded people of me. Truth be told, I’ve heard it often enough that it is the primary reason I’ve not tuned in. So I was pleased to read a bit of what Dr. House had to say.

“See, skinny, socially privileged white people get to draw this neat little circle, and everyone inside the circle is normal and anyone outside the circle should be beaten, broken and reset so they can be brought into the circle. Failing that, they should be institutionalized or, worse, pitied. … Why would you feel sorry for someone who gets to opt out of the inane courteous formalities which are utterly meaningless insincere and therefore degrading. … Can you imagine how liberating it would be to live a life free of all the mind numbing social niceties? I don’t pity this kid, I envy him.” –Gregory House, M.D. Lines in the Sand House M.D.

I see Autism Diva has forded the creek ahead of me, and actually seems to have watched the show. Personally, I try not to be constrained by such things when commenting on popular culture as I get more confused. Besides, those *facts* usually interfere with a point I’m trying to make.

Still, I continue to admire the Diva’s dilligence, and learned quite a bit about this show that, admittedly, I didn’t know much about beforehand. I particularly enjoyed reading the speculation about House being on the specturm on sites she linked to. And the comments from our community are always exceptional.

I also apologize for the lack of a trackback Ms. Diva, but for reasons only partially known to me, I just can’t bring myself to get a Blogger login.

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[OK, I started this several days ago with the intention of extending, polishing, eventually having a point to make and being coherent but it doesn't look like that is going to occur. Perhaps in a later post I will do all that and more. (Perhaps monkeys will also fly out of my butt, but I digress.) Anyway, here was my inital yawp in this general direction… And, I'll work on more posts.]

I have been gnawing on the notion that those of us who have (somehow) reached an independent adulthood and are holding down a job and raising our own children, have ‘trained’ ourselves to mask our autism and thus become able exist in the NT world. Or, perhaps even been ‘cured’ as Kamran Nazeer discusses in Send in the Idiots, or How We Grew to Understand the World, his former school director Ira and one of the teachers, Rebecca, no longer considers him to be autistic.

[first tangent: "mask our autism and thus become able exist in the NT world" makes me think of Jerzy Kosinski's first novel, The Painted Bird. Above all, learn to blend in lest they discover you and make of you a messy end. If you are familiar with Kosinski, I think running silent among the NTs feels like the boy did, at least in my adolescence and early adulthood.]

The notion of being trained raises images familiar to my formal anthropological training, since we all must become indoctrinated with the our group norms and culture. I submit, however, that it never becomes instinctive with we autistics like I observe it to be in the NTs around me. We (which is to say, *I*) never seem to achieve that graceful social dance. But, to get along as well as I do, have I been ‘cured’ as Nazeer’s teachers would say or merely trained?

Currently, I vote ‘trained’, which, frankly, kind of stings to admit…