Went to my dear friend Jonathan's 40th birthday last night, had a lovely time catching up with people who I see too rarely. It's still a bit sobering to have my friends hitting these milestones. As of this year I've known him half his life. I'm younger than him, he hit that point with me a few years ago.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Sunday, April 15, 2012
The end of an era, and thoughts on being right
So as of late I've been packing the house for the big move... well really packing it for the big showing, the big move is in a couple of months. I've come to a couple of conclusions:
1. I own way too much crap. Seriously, I'm like a proto-hoarder or something. Or I would be if I wasn't currently throwing most of it away. Maybe I'm just lazy. Bringing crap into the house is easy. When it's reached a certain critical mass it becomes too damn overwhelming to go through and throw out. Fortunately a dear friend has been helping me, and has been keeping me motivated and my spirits up.
2. Moving sucks in more ways than I expected, now that I have a job and a life and a kid and everything. This is uprooting on a scale I hadn't experienced before, and it's kind of wrenching. I'm really not looking forward to this at all.
The other thing that's happened as of late happened tonight. It was officially the last night for video rentals at Rogers Plus (formerly Rogers Video). They are out of the home video market, they are selling off all their stock and converting the store entirely into a cable/phone/home phone store. I'm not surprised, I've been seeing this coming for a while. Video rental is going the way of public stables in the era of the car... or music stores in the era of the internet.
I'm kind of sad really. It was like working in a library. We had some great old movies and foreign titles, and no matter what they are saying about On Demand being there to fill the gap, I really doubt that they're going to have some of the stuff we have kicking around our shelves.It made me sad that the collection is going to be sold off tomorrow.
I'm also angry that I've worked there for six years renting movies. That was not the plan. It was supposed to be a temp job until the film career took off. It's what I went to school for after all. Well, we all know how that turned out.
And it was freaking me out, because I'm leaving it three months, I won't even be there when the reno is finished. The Beaches (the neighborhood I live in) is all going condo soon, they're tearing down a bunch of buildings along Queen St. The street I've walked every day for six years is going away. The store is going to be completely different. Even if I come back to visit, it will all be gone. Literally everything in my life is changing. New city, new job (no transfer for me, the Rogers in Windsor isn't hiring), even my relationship with my son is shifting to something new. I'm only going to be with him two weeks out of the month. That's going to be a big change and really wrenching.
On the other hand, I happened to mention to a customer that I'd been up at my parent's farm on the weekend, and she said "Oh? Where?" which lead to a series of more specific questions about where we'd gone to school and when and holy crap you're Michelle. It turns out we'd gone to school together, been in the Gifted program together (still waiting on that gift, thankyouverymuch), I'd picked strawberries for her dad and we'd been on TV together. It turns out people look really different 25 years later, who knew? So if she hadn't come in on the last night on a whim and asked me where I'd gotten the nice tan on my face (woo running around like an idiot with a kite). It also turns out that I could confirm to her husband that she had in fact been on a quiz show when she'd been in grade eight. Ha! Vindication! We also got to relive the moment that the universe truly taught me that you can do everything right in a situation and still lose spectacularly. We made it to the final game of the season on Campus Quiz. I was the trivia and vocabulary guy (not the math guy, shocker, I know). Both teams had racked up ridiculous scores, at the time the highest in the history of the program (I may be misremembering because it makes the fail more dramatic). It came down to a tie breaker trivia question. I was in my element. This was my moment to shine. The question was:
"In the television show Fraggle Rock, what was the name of the human who lived upstairs?"
And the angels sang and golden light shone upon my face, for verily I had watched Fraggle Rock every week, and I loved that show. I knew all the obscure characters, never mind the only human on the show!
I grinned. My moment of triumph! I buzzed in.
"His name was Doc"
"Oh, I'm sorry, his name was 'The Professor'"
Buh...
Wha...
Go check the IMDB right now, I'll wait. Fraggle Rock
The next question goes to the other school, they answer it and win. There's a murmur in the audience. Some of the kids know I was right, but for a lot of them I'm the shithead that just lost us the game. I went up to the Producer and tried to tell him he was wrong, that we'd won, but he dismissed me. It didn't matter to them. I pressed my case with my teachers, and they thought that I was probably wrong, but if I could prove it...
You know, it doesn't really matter in the end. They split the difference and we both got prizes without them admitting they fucked up. People still thought I was the asshole that cost us the game.
And I learned that sometimes being right was even worse. Worse than what? Worse than anything.
Dance your cares away!
1. I own way too much crap. Seriously, I'm like a proto-hoarder or something. Or I would be if I wasn't currently throwing most of it away. Maybe I'm just lazy. Bringing crap into the house is easy. When it's reached a certain critical mass it becomes too damn overwhelming to go through and throw out. Fortunately a dear friend has been helping me, and has been keeping me motivated and my spirits up.
2. Moving sucks in more ways than I expected, now that I have a job and a life and a kid and everything. This is uprooting on a scale I hadn't experienced before, and it's kind of wrenching. I'm really not looking forward to this at all.
The other thing that's happened as of late happened tonight. It was officially the last night for video rentals at Rogers Plus (formerly Rogers Video). They are out of the home video market, they are selling off all their stock and converting the store entirely into a cable/phone/home phone store. I'm not surprised, I've been seeing this coming for a while. Video rental is going the way of public stables in the era of the car... or music stores in the era of the internet.
I'm kind of sad really. It was like working in a library. We had some great old movies and foreign titles, and no matter what they are saying about On Demand being there to fill the gap, I really doubt that they're going to have some of the stuff we have kicking around our shelves.It made me sad that the collection is going to be sold off tomorrow.
I'm also angry that I've worked there for six years renting movies. That was not the plan. It was supposed to be a temp job until the film career took off. It's what I went to school for after all. Well, we all know how that turned out.
And it was freaking me out, because I'm leaving it three months, I won't even be there when the reno is finished. The Beaches (the neighborhood I live in) is all going condo soon, they're tearing down a bunch of buildings along Queen St. The street I've walked every day for six years is going away. The store is going to be completely different. Even if I come back to visit, it will all be gone. Literally everything in my life is changing. New city, new job (no transfer for me, the Rogers in Windsor isn't hiring), even my relationship with my son is shifting to something new. I'm only going to be with him two weeks out of the month. That's going to be a big change and really wrenching.
On the other hand, I happened to mention to a customer that I'd been up at my parent's farm on the weekend, and she said "Oh? Where?" which lead to a series of more specific questions about where we'd gone to school and when and holy crap you're Michelle. It turns out we'd gone to school together, been in the Gifted program together (still waiting on that gift, thankyouverymuch), I'd picked strawberries for her dad and we'd been on TV together. It turns out people look really different 25 years later, who knew? So if she hadn't come in on the last night on a whim and asked me where I'd gotten the nice tan on my face (woo running around like an idiot with a kite). It also turns out that I could confirm to her husband that she had in fact been on a quiz show when she'd been in grade eight. Ha! Vindication! We also got to relive the moment that the universe truly taught me that you can do everything right in a situation and still lose spectacularly. We made it to the final game of the season on Campus Quiz. I was the trivia and vocabulary guy (not the math guy, shocker, I know). Both teams had racked up ridiculous scores, at the time the highest in the history of the program (I may be misremembering because it makes the fail more dramatic). It came down to a tie breaker trivia question. I was in my element. This was my moment to shine. The question was:
"In the television show Fraggle Rock, what was the name of the human who lived upstairs?"
And the angels sang and golden light shone upon my face, for verily I had watched Fraggle Rock every week, and I loved that show. I knew all the obscure characters, never mind the only human on the show!
I grinned. My moment of triumph! I buzzed in.
"His name was Doc"
"Oh, I'm sorry, his name was 'The Professor'"
Buh...
Wha...
Go check the IMDB right now, I'll wait. Fraggle Rock
The next question goes to the other school, they answer it and win. There's a murmur in the audience. Some of the kids know I was right, but for a lot of them I'm the shithead that just lost us the game. I went up to the Producer and tried to tell him he was wrong, that we'd won, but he dismissed me. It didn't matter to them. I pressed my case with my teachers, and they thought that I was probably wrong, but if I could prove it...
You know, it doesn't really matter in the end. They split the difference and we both got prizes without them admitting they fucked up. People still thought I was the asshole that cost us the game.
And I learned that sometimes being right was even worse. Worse than what? Worse than anything.
Dance your cares away!
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Monday, February 27, 2012
Getting shit off my chest
I suppose is the point of a blog in the first place, isn't it?
I've never been able to figure out exactly how the Soon To Be Ex sees the world, in the sense that I've never been able to understand how she constructs the narrative that informs her day to day life. We all do this, it's how we function as human beings, in my opinion. You take the events that happen around yo and slot them into the events of the past and your perceptions of the future. It's the narrative thread you follow that lets you maintain the continuity of your life, your relationships with other people and your role in society. I also think it informs your outlook on life to a large extent. I've seen this referenced in things like the Just World Hypothesis where people believe that the world is the best of all possible worlds, and that all good and bad things that happen to people are deserved in some way. Bad things happen to bad people, good things happen to good people, etc. If your life sucks, it is your fault. I have to say, I've never met someone who believes this and also believe it applies to them for some reason.
Anyway, I had a point here. I've never been able to quite slot my own viewpoint into the S.T.B.E. point of view, mostly because a lot of the time I find it at variance with my own. I'm not talking about the belief in ghosts, though that was always a serious source of friction between us, I'm talking about her perceptions of people. There always seems to be a sense that people are naturally bad, and trying to take advantage of her, or screw her over in some way. If she likes you, you can do no wrong in her eyes. If at some point you go to the bad for some reason (and it can be real or imagined), you go seriously to the bad, and nothing can convince her otherwise.
As background: The S.T.B.E has a trust fund. Her family is quite well off, and as a result she's never had to work. In our marriage she's always been the "breadwinner", by which I mean bread gets sent to her on a regular basis. Parts of this have been really good. It bought our house, and has allowed us to live in a style that would be beyond us if we were both working stiffs. It has, however, been a major source of tension, in that she expected that the broke 23 year old university drop out should be bringing in the same amount of money as her to be "fair". As time went on, and her affection for me faded, she figured I was taking advantage of her, and not contributing my fair share at all. Which, you could probably argue financially is true. I can't match her dollar per hour value, since the amount of hours she actually has to work amounts to zero. She also sees jobs as a sort of a hobby, and so the time I spend working and earning a paycheque is sort of frivolous and not actually related to the money I get paid. I've tried to get her to understand that if I don't show up for work, I don't get paid. This has never been very successful. I've tried to explain to her that the health insurance I have, I pay for with my paycheque, and the hours that I work at the company. I don't think she really grasps that either, since her parents always took care of that, so I don't think she really groks the connection between those two things either. She sees my job as something I do for fun... since I think that's how she's seen work the few times she's decided to get a job in the time we've been married.
So my job doesn't count as a contribution to the household, nor as a sacrifice of the time I could be, say, spending with the Boy.
I do the cooking at home. I enjoy it, and I'm good at it. This is not something she knows, or wants to know how to do. I'm not sure how she sees cooking. I know that she doesn't think it counts as a contribution... because I enjoy it. She seems to think I do it because I like to mess up the kitchen. I think in her world, the kitchen would never actually be used to prepare food, it would be dusted once a month.
I have been told cooking does not count as a contribution to the household.
I do laundry. She does laundry too, but for some reason she can never remember that it's something we both do. She's excoriated me for never doing laundry... when I was in the process of washing our clothes. Of course, she was also yelling at me that I never did anything for her, and when I pointed out to her that I cooked for her and washed her clothes, she yelled
"When do you cook for me?! When do you ever do laundry?!"
I held up the spatula in my hand I was stirring with, and pointed at the basement with it.
"I'm making your lunch, and I have a load of clothes in the laundry as we speak."
"Fuck you!"
I think my witty rejoinder was,
"You're insane!"
So laundry isn't a contribution. Nor is fixing stuff around the house. Parenting doesn't really count. Feeding the pets.
Typical day for me:
Get up, walk to work. Work eight hours. Walk home. Get ambushed by the Boy, explain I can't play with him, I've got to make dinner. Assuming I didn't buy food on the way home to cook, dig through freezer, cook dinner. The S.T.B.E. is sitting on the computer playing games, and has been there for hours. serve dinner, eat dinner. While the S.T.B.E. washes the dishes, play with the Boy until bed time (and do homework with him if it's not done when I get home). Give the Boy his bath, put him to bed. He takes a long time to get to sleep, so it's usually 11:00 by the time I'm free. Possibly do laundry. If not exhausted, do a bit of writing. Go to bed. Later, rinse repeat. On my day off, try to find something interesting for the Boy and I to do.
I'm not whining about that really, I mean there's plenty of parents who have it a lot worse, who are holding down two jobs, or are desperately poor, or have no where to live. But it would be nice if I wasn't coming home to someone who seems to still think I'm a useless 23 year old university drop out who contributes nothing to the household. I'm paying bills. I'm buying groceries. We rely on my insurance. I devote every moment I'm not at work to being a parent. I've grown the fuck up.
Honestly, it shouldn't bother me. It really shouldn't. Her opinion of me shouldn't make the slightest difference to me... and yet... I spent so many years chasing her respect and love, it's hard not to get to where she said I needed to be and not turn around and say "Where's my fucking cookie? You harped on my for years to get here, and nothing I did counts!". It's very hard to come to the realization that there was no brass ring, that it will always be jam tomorrow, and that everything she said would make her happy was a big. Fat. Lie.
Which in retrospect makes perfect sense, even if I can't wrap my head around how she sees the world. It took her up until last year to admit she was a depressive and start medicating for it, and all this time she's been convinced that her feelings have to have an external cause. She's not sad and disappointed because of bad brain chemicals, it's because someone around her did something, or she's missing something in her life, and if only she had it, she would be happy. Which, when I really think of it, means that for her the brass ring is a lie too, but on an existential level. What a toxic combination we were, me with an almost pathological need to try to make her happy, and her simply physically incapable of ever getting there. It seems inevitable that no matter what I did, after she drove everyone else away her dark monster would turn on me. I can't help this woman, I can't make her better, and she doesn't want me to.
This can't be over soon enough.
I've never been able to figure out exactly how the Soon To Be Ex sees the world, in the sense that I've never been able to understand how she constructs the narrative that informs her day to day life. We all do this, it's how we function as human beings, in my opinion. You take the events that happen around yo and slot them into the events of the past and your perceptions of the future. It's the narrative thread you follow that lets you maintain the continuity of your life, your relationships with other people and your role in society. I also think it informs your outlook on life to a large extent. I've seen this referenced in things like the Just World Hypothesis where people believe that the world is the best of all possible worlds, and that all good and bad things that happen to people are deserved in some way. Bad things happen to bad people, good things happen to good people, etc. If your life sucks, it is your fault. I have to say, I've never met someone who believes this and also believe it applies to them for some reason.
Anyway, I had a point here. I've never been able to quite slot my own viewpoint into the S.T.B.E. point of view, mostly because a lot of the time I find it at variance with my own. I'm not talking about the belief in ghosts, though that was always a serious source of friction between us, I'm talking about her perceptions of people. There always seems to be a sense that people are naturally bad, and trying to take advantage of her, or screw her over in some way. If she likes you, you can do no wrong in her eyes. If at some point you go to the bad for some reason (and it can be real or imagined), you go seriously to the bad, and nothing can convince her otherwise.
As background: The S.T.B.E has a trust fund. Her family is quite well off, and as a result she's never had to work. In our marriage she's always been the "breadwinner", by which I mean bread gets sent to her on a regular basis. Parts of this have been really good. It bought our house, and has allowed us to live in a style that would be beyond us if we were both working stiffs. It has, however, been a major source of tension, in that she expected that the broke 23 year old university drop out should be bringing in the same amount of money as her to be "fair". As time went on, and her affection for me faded, she figured I was taking advantage of her, and not contributing my fair share at all. Which, you could probably argue financially is true. I can't match her dollar per hour value, since the amount of hours she actually has to work amounts to zero. She also sees jobs as a sort of a hobby, and so the time I spend working and earning a paycheque is sort of frivolous and not actually related to the money I get paid. I've tried to get her to understand that if I don't show up for work, I don't get paid. This has never been very successful. I've tried to explain to her that the health insurance I have, I pay for with my paycheque, and the hours that I work at the company. I don't think she really grasps that either, since her parents always took care of that, so I don't think she really groks the connection between those two things either. She sees my job as something I do for fun... since I think that's how she's seen work the few times she's decided to get a job in the time we've been married.
So my job doesn't count as a contribution to the household, nor as a sacrifice of the time I could be, say, spending with the Boy.
I do the cooking at home. I enjoy it, and I'm good at it. This is not something she knows, or wants to know how to do. I'm not sure how she sees cooking. I know that she doesn't think it counts as a contribution... because I enjoy it. She seems to think I do it because I like to mess up the kitchen. I think in her world, the kitchen would never actually be used to prepare food, it would be dusted once a month.
I have been told cooking does not count as a contribution to the household.
I do laundry. She does laundry too, but for some reason she can never remember that it's something we both do. She's excoriated me for never doing laundry... when I was in the process of washing our clothes. Of course, she was also yelling at me that I never did anything for her, and when I pointed out to her that I cooked for her and washed her clothes, she yelled
"When do you cook for me?! When do you ever do laundry?!"
I held up the spatula in my hand I was stirring with, and pointed at the basement with it.
"I'm making your lunch, and I have a load of clothes in the laundry as we speak."
"Fuck you!"
I think my witty rejoinder was,
"You're insane!"
So laundry isn't a contribution. Nor is fixing stuff around the house. Parenting doesn't really count. Feeding the pets.
Typical day for me:
Get up, walk to work. Work eight hours. Walk home. Get ambushed by the Boy, explain I can't play with him, I've got to make dinner. Assuming I didn't buy food on the way home to cook, dig through freezer, cook dinner. The S.T.B.E. is sitting on the computer playing games, and has been there for hours. serve dinner, eat dinner. While the S.T.B.E. washes the dishes, play with the Boy until bed time (and do homework with him if it's not done when I get home). Give the Boy his bath, put him to bed. He takes a long time to get to sleep, so it's usually 11:00 by the time I'm free. Possibly do laundry. If not exhausted, do a bit of writing. Go to bed. Later, rinse repeat. On my day off, try to find something interesting for the Boy and I to do.
I'm not whining about that really, I mean there's plenty of parents who have it a lot worse, who are holding down two jobs, or are desperately poor, or have no where to live. But it would be nice if I wasn't coming home to someone who seems to still think I'm a useless 23 year old university drop out who contributes nothing to the household. I'm paying bills. I'm buying groceries. We rely on my insurance. I devote every moment I'm not at work to being a parent. I've grown the fuck up.
Honestly, it shouldn't bother me. It really shouldn't. Her opinion of me shouldn't make the slightest difference to me... and yet... I spent so many years chasing her respect and love, it's hard not to get to where she said I needed to be and not turn around and say "Where's my fucking cookie? You harped on my for years to get here, and nothing I did counts!". It's very hard to come to the realization that there was no brass ring, that it will always be jam tomorrow, and that everything she said would make her happy was a big. Fat. Lie.
Which in retrospect makes perfect sense, even if I can't wrap my head around how she sees the world. It took her up until last year to admit she was a depressive and start medicating for it, and all this time she's been convinced that her feelings have to have an external cause. She's not sad and disappointed because of bad brain chemicals, it's because someone around her did something, or she's missing something in her life, and if only she had it, she would be happy. Which, when I really think of it, means that for her the brass ring is a lie too, but on an existential level. What a toxic combination we were, me with an almost pathological need to try to make her happy, and her simply physically incapable of ever getting there. It seems inevitable that no matter what I did, after she drove everyone else away her dark monster would turn on me. I can't help this woman, I can't make her better, and she doesn't want me to.
This can't be over soon enough.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Formatting issues
The Blogger app does this weird thing if I leave it alone for a moment and my phone locks itself. It suddenly puts the formatting text into the body of the post, and I just noticed it now, since it previews just fine on my phone. I'll have to be more diligent about checking it when I get home.
Today was supposed to be a night out for The Boy and I at Snakes and Lattes (link to which I've added to the side bar). This place is a fried slice of awesome, and possibly the best place to take a smart kid on a cheap date. For seven-ish bucks The Boy and I can spend several hours randomly pulling games out of their library of what I think is close to a thousand board and card games and trying them out. It's wonderful, the music isn't obnoxious, the coffee and food is good, and there's no computers at all. It's disgustingly wholesome really, and it forces people to be social with each other. As a consequence it's packed most nights, and there's been times we've shown up and the wait has been three hours to get a table. My buddy Jonathan works there demonstrating games (which if you asked him to describe his dream job would have been somewhere in the top two).
That's what we were supposed to do. What we actually ended up doing was going to the hardware store and picking up arts, then coming home and making a ABS paper rocket launcher. It worked pretty well too, it's based on a design I found on MAKE, though I modded it a bit to make the handle a bit sturdier. It seems to work okay, though I should have waited until all the glue dried to test it, and I blew out the bottom of the cylinder trying to see if I could launch one across the street. So real test tomorrow before work, that should be enough time for things to dry.
Today was supposed to be a night out for The Boy and I at Snakes and Lattes (link to which I've added to the side bar). This place is a fried slice of awesome, and possibly the best place to take a smart kid on a cheap date. For seven-ish bucks The Boy and I can spend several hours randomly pulling games out of their library of what I think is close to a thousand board and card games and trying them out. It's wonderful, the music isn't obnoxious, the coffee and food is good, and there's no computers at all. It's disgustingly wholesome really, and it forces people to be social with each other. As a consequence it's packed most nights, and there's been times we've shown up and the wait has been three hours to get a table. My buddy Jonathan works there demonstrating games (which if you asked him to describe his dream job would have been somewhere in the top two).
That's what we were supposed to do. What we actually ended up doing was going to the hardware store and picking up arts, then coming home and making a ABS paper rocket launcher. It worked pretty well too, it's based on a design I found on MAKE, though I modded it a bit to make the handle a bit sturdier. It seems to work okay, though I should have waited until all the glue dried to test it, and I blew out the bottom of the cylinder trying to see if I could launch one across the street. So real test tomorrow before work, that should be enough time for things to dry.
Wow, that was a long flight!
Not really, it was more me discovering the reason I stopped gaming a few years ago; it eats my brain. I was kind of lucky that everything was a shooter of some description, I'm not a fan. But then... I made the mistake of bringing home Skyrim from work.
It's basically crack for the 13 year old D&D geek in me; and between that and getting a new video card for my desktop, I've lost nearly a week.
Anyway, as I was saying before I took off for a delightful weekend with friends in New York; they decided to reassess The Boy after he started playing practical jokes on people (and by people, I mean me). One night he hid the mask for my cpap machine, and kept a poker face the entire time his mother and I tore the house apart looking for it, frantically calling the housekeeper, and asking him for the tenth time if he had taken it. When I finally looked under his pillow, he deadpanned "good thing you found it huh? " (collapse in helpless giggles). I was mad for about a second before I started laughing too, which made it really hard to put on my frowny Dad face and tell him not to do it again (this is an ongoing problem; if a trick is funny I can't stop laughing).
Anyhow, as a consequence of this The Boy went through a year of reassessment and at the end of it all his diagnosis went from Autism Spectrum Disorder to Pervasive Developmental Disorder, undetermined. When I asked the Doctor what this means, he said "It means fucked if we know, and he's better now. He's smart but weird. "
I can live with that.
It's basically crack for the 13 year old D&D geek in me; and between that and getting a new video card for my desktop, I've lost nearly a week.
Anyway, as I was saying before I took off for a delightful weekend with friends in New York; they decided to reassess The Boy after he started playing practical jokes on people (and by people, I mean me). One night he hid the mask for my cpap machine, and kept a poker face the entire time his mother and I tore the house apart looking for it, frantically calling the housekeeper, and asking him for the tenth time if he had taken it. When I finally looked under his pillow, he deadpanned "good thing you found it huh? " (collapse in helpless giggles). I was mad for about a second before I started laughing too, which made it really hard to put on my frowny Dad face and tell him not to do it again (this is an ongoing problem; if a trick is funny I can't stop laughing).
Anyhow, as a consequence of this The Boy went through a year of reassessment and at the end of it all his diagnosis went from Autism Spectrum Disorder to Pervasive Developmental Disorder, undetermined. When I asked the Doctor what this means, he said "It means fucked if we know, and he's better now. He's smart but weird. "
I can live with that.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Sitting in the airport, reflecting
<p>Hooray smartphones! <br>
I read through the old blog posts the other night and I think I need to do an update on my life at this point, things have seriously changed since I was updating. <br>
The Boy is 9 now, and his head comes up to just under his mother's chin. About two years ago he outgrew his wheat allergy, which is about the second best health related news we have ever gotten about him. We can now serve him anything, no more explosive ass syndrome, no more rage outs if he gets the wrong hotdog, no more paying 30 dollars for a pizza that eats like a punishment. Victory lap! <br>
Of course the best news we got was that his reassessment showed that he'd fallen off the Autism spectrum. This was also a year or so after what I'm going to laughingly call "the hiatus ". <br>
The Boy was doing occupational therapy five days a week, and was doing well enough that there was concern that he was going to graduate out of the program (which the people involved thought would be bad, because The Boy was clearly gaining a huge benefit from it). The Psychologist who was supervising his therapy was over to do his every couple of months visit and discuss options. I was on my way in the door from work. The night before when I had gone to take out my contact lenses, I discovered that someone had filled the case with some sort of green slime. This was a major wtf? moment. It was late, I was half asleep, and I didn't expect slimy green watermelon smelling goop. Fortunately I had a spare case, since I don't think any amount of washing would have gotten the watermelon smell out of the plastic or, by extension, my eyeballs the next day. The Boy was still asleep when I left for work. <br>
So the stage is set. I come in the door as the good doctor is leaving and I yell,<br>
"The Boy! Come here!". <br>
He comes running up and I say, <br>
"Did you put SOAP in my CONTACT LENSES LAST NIGHT??? "<br>
He collapses with the giggles, then springs up and, with a huge grin chortles, <br>
"I put soap in your contact lens case! BWA ha ha! "<br>
And runs off shrieking with laughter. <br>
The psychologist stopped in his tracks and said to me, <br>
"Hang on, he did this last night? "<br>
"Yes, he's discovered practical jokes... "<br>
"We're you home? "<br>
"No, I was at work, I didn't see him until just now. "
He looked at where The Boy had vanished upstairs and then said to me,
"We have to reassess him. That's not spectrum behaviour, he's got a far too robust theory of mind. Did he say anything about what he did until now? "
"Nope. "
"To set up a joke like that when you weren't here, knowing the pay off wouldn't come until after he was asleep and then not say anything until the next day? That an extremely sophisticated ability to imagine how that's going to affect someone's mind. That takes a lot of anticipation and ability to wait for a payoff. I don't think he's autistic. I don't think he on the spectrum at all... "
More when I land
'
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