u/vivvav

Recently it occurred to me that I don't think I've ever suffered an autistic meltdown. But also, I think my view of what one can look like is pretty narrow. It seems like in my head, "autistic meltdown" is either an adult throwing a temper tantrum like a toddler, or just a complete shutdown where they become uncommunicative. And while there are times when I've expressed anger very readily or not wanted to talk to people, I don't feel like I've ever experienced those to the point where it's like, pathological and debilitating and I can't control myself in a public setting. At the very least I've always been able to remove myself from a situation on my own volition. But also that view might just be incredibly myopic? Do you ever have meltdowns? What's it like?

I realized recently that basically all my jazz is the oldies. Fats Waller, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, etc. The only exceptions are Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and some video game jazz cover bands like the Consouls and the 8-Bit Big Band. There are people who still make and play new jazz today and I'm totally unaware of them. Taking all recs from those who got 'em for new jazz.

My downstairs neighbor recently let me know that the way I live is very loud and has been disruptive, so I'm trying to be more mindful of it. Watching TV at lower volume, trying not to walk around aimlessly as much, especially trying to be more efficient with my movements late at night when my apartment's quiet hours are in effect.

And then I'm watching the new episode of Game Changer on my laptop and they break out the adult bjorn, and the amount of choking on my own fucking laughter I have to stifle was insane. Funniest shit I've seen in a long time, ordinarily I would've been SCREECHING in laughter with how big that joke's effect on me was.

I managed to keep it to a reasonable level but FUCK, I was not ready for anything that funny.

I'm pretty happy with all my nerdy hobbies. Comics, cartoons, video games, D&D. I can talk all day about Batman and One Piece and the campaign I run. My home is full of collectibles, you can't look pretty much anywhere in it without seeing one of my interests, from the LEGOs on a shelf in my kitchen to the Dragon Age shower curtain in my bathroom.

And yet I feel like I should be, maybe more than this, sometimes? Especially when I'm on the dating apps. Now, I'm not trying to change myself to be someone who can more easily get a girlfriend. That's not what this is. It's just that I'll be swiping through profiles, looking for women who seem like I can hold a real human conversation with more than anything, and of course when I see they have nerdy hobbies or interests like mine that makes me a bit more interested. But also like, I see them mentioning having and wanting someone with a variety of interests. Not just the media they consume or games they play, but going out into the world and doing tangible things. Hikes, sports, cooking, fine art, whatever. And I get to thinking, there's nothing wrong with the stuff I like, or how intensely I like it, but, maybe there should be more? I should be wanting to be out there living more of a human life, doing something that has nothing to do with fantasy worlds and escapism.

But... when I think about it. There's not much I want to do. The only thing I can really think of is sailing, but lessons and expensive, and owning a boat? Fuhgeddaboudit. I have interests in some historical subjects like pirates and organized crime but read maybe one book a year about it all. And I certainly don't wanna play fucking pickleball. And I've tried learning to draw over the years but there's just something in my brain that makes it inaccessible so any kind of visual art is out of the question.

But the big problem isn't even all the things I could theoretically do but can't for reasons A through J. What it ultimately comes down to is, while the idea of broadening my horizons sounds nice, there's just nothing I WANT to do. I am the kind of person I am, including the things I take interest in. I can't force myself to take interest in fucking pottery or whatever. It's like, I've got this room for personal growth, and I think doing some growing would be good. But I dunno how on earth I'd actually do it. Especially once you bring in my social difficulties. I don't suppose any of y'all have some helpful ideas/advice?

Imagine you're running a D&D campaign. You've done all the work to build your setting, you've been communicating with your players about the characters they want to be, you plan your story and create plot hooks that have both universal and individual personal elements to keep them engaged, you start the campaign. But one of your players...

-Gives you a very short backstory with barely anything to build off of and a nebulous character goal of "to be the best at the kind of fighting I do".

-Actively goes in the wrong direction of the current quest all the time.

-Meets an endgame-tier boss while at level 2 and tries to solo them, and this guy is so powerful that the amount of damage this boss can do in a single attack can fully kill them with no death saving throws in one hit so you have to make up a reason on the fly that didn't happen.

-Is otherwise min/maxed to an insane degree, deals a ton of enemy-breaking damage in one or two turns and takes forever to go down.

-Barely engages in roleplay with other party members, and spends almost all of downtime either training or sleeping.

-Exhibits little to no curiosity about the world or story, to the point where you could, say, have an entire arc and location be highly tailored to their interests, including that the name of their hometown also happens to be the name of an incredibly powerful and important family in this location, and then they proceed to ask no questions about it.

Obvs some of this is oversimplified, and none of this is me saying Zoro is a bad character in One Piece. I love the guy. But if someone ever wanted to pull this at the D&D table, I'd probably hate them forever.

I don't know if anyone else has heard this, but it's something I feel like I've been seeing bandied about more and more lately. People like to talk about how back in the days before autism was more understood and information about it was widespread, people who would probably be labelled autistic today were just considered kind of weird or quirky. While that might be true, and it certainly is interesting to think about from a societal development standpoint, I have a couple issues with this:

1. It feels like there's a historical revisionism aspect to it, because a lot of the time when I hear people talk about this they also tack on something about folks being fine leaving weird alone, or going "yeah he's a little weird but everyone accepts it and knows he's a good guy." If history has taught us anything, it's that going back into the past does not uncover greater stories of tolerance. People are usually more extreme about trying to stamp out deviant behavior they don't understand.

2. It almost always feels like some kind of anti-diagnosis rhetoric. In general I hear a lot of people saying that people are way too quick to seek out diagnoses, trying to find medical explanations for their behaviors. That people didn't used to need labels to live their lives, you could be live life just fine being the "weird" person.

It's the second one that really gets to me. I didn't get my diagnosis until I was almost 30, and I'd been suspecting I might've been autistic for 10 years prior to that, and it was a long road to finally getting an official diagnosis. Getting that diagnosis led me to a greater understanding of myself, how autism factors into every aspect of who I am as a person, and made sense of the many difficulties I've lived with my whole life I haven't been able to get other people to fully wrap their heads around. This whole "you used to be able to be weird" narrative feels less like a way of trying to understand the past and more about trying to get people to shut up about being neurodivergent in the present, and I'm pretty fucking sick of it. The world never goes back to the way it used to be. If you're bothered by so many people being autistic now, it's because you can't ignore it anymore. "Weird" was a way to dismiss people and not meet them on their level. Keep your regressive bullshit to yourself.

and Superman is a dad, doesn't that make Bizarro a mom?

Happy Mother's Day.

I don't know how I never thought to share this one here before, but here goes:

Last year I took a trip to New York City in late January, and had a very early flight back home to California. So even though I ate on the plane and all, due to the time zone shifts, by the time I got home I was still pretty hungry, and having been awake since 2 AM local time was too tired to put anything together. So I ordered from my favorite pizza place and got in the car to go pick up my order, which is usually only about a 10-minute drive each way. A couple blocks from the pizza place there was some kind of weird obstruction in traffic. I tried to get a look at it but genuinely couldn't tell what was going on. It seemed like either someone was pulled over or kinda beefing it by having their car halfway out in the street while parked by the curb. It seemed like it could've started moving again or not, I genuinely had no idea, all I knew was my lane wasn't moving at all at the moment, and I was hungry and tired, so I had to do something.

Traffic in the next lane is moving pretty slowly, due to people shifting from my blocked-up lane, so I figure I have an opportunity. I look in my driver's side mirror, see a pick-up that's kinda close but moving very slowly, so I flip my signal and turn in. I thought I had the room to move in smoothly without problems, but the guy still had to brake fast and honked at me. And you know what, fair. My bad, misjudged it. But nobody was hurt, no accidents occurred, and within seconds we were both moving along, and I thought that was that.

I get to the pizza place two minutes later and park, and stop to check a message on my phone before getting out of the car. When I do, there's this very angry man outside the front door of the shop who begins yelling at me. I see his truck parked in the same lot now, and I gotta say, I did not know they made pick-up trucks that big. Just the most massive vehicle I've ever seen that still somehow fit in a regular spot in a parking lot. In my travel-addled mind it must've been as big as an actual truck that drags along a trailer. But this dude is going off, screaming his fucking head off about how I cut him off in traffic, and making violent threats. And I'm tired, and I don't know how to react to this, because I'm not scared of him in the moment. I'm 6'5" and this dude is like 5'6" tops, but my brain doesn't really know how to process him being all hyper and going "I'm out here killing motherfuckers left and right, you don't even know!" And again, I DID cut him off, it was my bad. So I try to apologize and then he's heading inside the pizza place and internally I'm like "What are the odds we were going to the same spot? Even with the way he's acting I guess it's only fair I let him get his pizza first, maybe that'll calm him down."

But then when I step inside after him he's yelling at the whole staff. And it takes me a moment to process it all, but he's screaming at them about me, and saying their "delivery boy" cut him off in traffic and blah blah blah. And y'all, the staff all wear normal restaurant clothes with a restaurant-branded shirt, and I'm a man in his 30's wearing a graphic tee, fire engine red suspenders, and a red newsboy hat people constantly say makes me look like Mario with my mustache. And when I finally do process it, my mood changes a bit. 'Cuz it's one thing to yell at me for a fuck-up I made, even if the reaction is insanely disproportionate. But now that I realized he is not an actual customer but FOLLOWED me here, and he's making all these other folks uncomfortable, so now I get mad. And I don't scream or anything, but I raise my voice and tell him very firmly "I don't work here". And the guy turns to me for a second and is stunned by this new information, but then he manages to recover by stammering "W-well you LOOK like the kinda clown who would work here" and starts to raise his voice and is raving again, at this point I couldn't even tell you what about.

I have no clue how this is going to go. I've dealt with aggressive people before but never on this level. This dude is fucking unhinged and part of me is beginning to worry that this is the kind of guy who might have a weapon on him. Luckily, two cops happened to be having lunch in the dining room and came to the front to see what all the commotion was. They asked the staff if they wanted the guy to be there, they said no, they forced him to leave. There was no arrest, I didn't have to give a statement or anything, but once the situation had calmed down I started to get worried in the aftermath. I felt like there was a very good chance that once I had my pizza and stepped outside that guy would be waiting for me again. Thankfully, he was gone, which I could tell from the absence of his insanely large overcompensation-mobile. As I got in my car and started for home, I found myself hoping that nutjob did not have a family to bring all that anger home to.

I got home and enjoyed my pizza, but felt nervous for a few days after, worried about what if I ever came across that guy again. I haven't seen him or his oversized truck since, so I can only hope he was passing through town and doesn't really live here. Whatever the case, that was not the homecoming I was expecting after a vacation.