Day 72: Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned

1) When a young man says, “I’ll call you,” the statement is often equivalent to “See Ya.” It’s another form of goodbye, where you never see the person again.

2) Just because a man goes to couples counseling with you doesn’t mean he’s not married and also going to couples counseling with his wife.

3) People will most definitely look away and cringe, if you share up close photos of giving birth or breastfeeding. Then they won’t want anything you offer them to eat.

4) When you are a restaurant hostess at a popular night spot, even if your boss says to be honest with the customers about the wait time for a table, do not smile and say: “That will be about 137 minutes.”

5) If one hairdresser tells you that you should always wear bangs, that doesn’t mean you have to wear bangs for the next five years.

6) If a dentist says, “In order to blend in your dead front tooth with your other teeth, the best method would be dyeing all of your other teeth darker,” run and don’t look back.

7) When the orthodontist tells you, as a teenager, to wear the headgear and neckgear for your braces to middle school, don’t!

8) If a boy calls you cow eyes, don’t go home and cry, punch him.

9) When you are little, don’t wear the same hippy dress you love two years in a row for school photos.

10) Don’t play tunnel tag in the short, Italian wool dress your grandma gave you , unless you wear shorts underneath.

11) Tell your mom when you get your period. Don’t wait three months, and don’t use the free, plus-size, super absorbent, expandable tampons that the gym teacher passed out!

12) Don’t buy life insurance and agree to automatic payments from your bank account, and then wait three years to research if the company exists. It doesn’t.

13) If you have just given birth, and you are sharing a hospital room with a new mother who talks nonstop on the phone into the late hours of the night, complain.

14) If you are an elementary school teacher, and spend three hours on a letter of recommendation for one of your fifth grade students, make sure you spell the student’s name correctly, especially if you don’t want to irritate the parents.

15) While a student in middle school, don’t draw pictures of different boys’ body parts, label them with names, descriptions, and insults, and then leave the illustrations behind at your desk on accident.

16) Even if you have dyslexia, don’t put the spelling words for the test inside the pleats of your cheerleading skirt. You will greatly disappoint your teacher.

17) If you have big ears that stick out, and people laugh at them, wear your hair down until you have high self-esteem.

18) If Italian in America, pluck thick Italian eyebrows, and remember Italian only has one letter l.

19) Don’t save a drowning honeybee in a swimming pool; sensing danger, he will buzz super loud warning his friends. His friends will land on your arm and sting you!

20) When a fake blonde, with a fake tan, and fake nails tells you, “You would look pretty with highlights in your hair.” Don’t say, “I prefer the natural look. I don’t like fake things.”

21) If your boyfriend’s mother invites you to a private lunch, with just you and her, and then says in confidence, “Don’t date my son. You are too good for him,” listen.

22) If you have the flu, and are ghastly sick, don’t beg your boyfriend to take you out-of-town to meet his parents for the first time.

23) Don’t date your weight-lifting trainers. Just don’t.

24) If you are getting a haircut as a teenager, and the hairdresser ignores you long enough for your wet hair to dry, before she returns, leave.

25) The movie Fargo is not a good first date movie.

26) Ask Dad before rearranging his entire dining room and living area.

27) Ask Dad before bringing the puppy home.

28) If you are going to miss one day of college for a funeral, you don’t need to write a letter and then cry to the professor in the hallway, in order to be excused.

29) French classes in high school and college are useless as a second language when you live in California.

30) When you have a long-term boyfriend, and you meet someone at the public swimming pool, you don’t give another boy your phone number and say: “I have a boyfriend, but let’s be friends.”

31) When a young teenager says he’s going to travel from his town 100 miles on his bike to come see you, he might just do that. Better to tell him ahead of time, you have a boyfriend and you aren’t interested.

32) If a young teenager says he’s going to drive his car across country to see you as soon as he gets a job, his license, and a car, probably not true, regardless of what he promises.

33) If you write enough letters to a school district office about the hard water from the sprinkler system damaging the paint on your new red Mustang car, when you park in the parking lot at the school where you work, the district will pay for all the employees to have their cars detailed; however, the superintendent of the district will not smile at you ever again.

34) If you consume too much Excedrin, iced tea, and soda at the same time, you will have a caffeine overdose; and to avoid a thousand dollar hospital bill, you will have to convince the health insurance company the trip to the emergency room wasn’t due to a panic attack.

35) If you’re a teacher and the principal says to you, “You should choose between raising a family or being a teacher, you can’t do both well,” sue him.

36) If an acupuncturist tells you about his failed marriages, his mortgage, his childhood, his parenting woes, and then spanks his wife on the butt in front of you, all while you are under treatment atop the table, don’t go back to that acupuncturist. And don’t feel guilty about not going back.

37) Doctors are practicing medicine.

38) You will offend a LDS person by calling them LSD, even if you have dyslexia.

39) Not a good idea to say, “That pisses me off,” in front of an entire fifth grade class, when you are a teacher.

40) No amount of protesting and letter writing or phone calls will keep a principal from assigning you to teach seventh grade, instead of elementary school, if she thinks you are a good teacher, even if you cry and tell her you hated middle school as a child.

41) If you kiss a mean ugly man enough times, he remains a mean ugly man.

42) When you ask a boyfriend, “Should I get a shorter haircut,” and he says, “That depends.” And you answer, “That depends on what,” and he responds, “That depends on if you are planning to lose weight, or not,” run away from the relationship.

43) The joke: When you’re dancing with your honey and your feeling kind of funny, and your nose is kind of runny, but it’s not, isn’t funny after the age of ten.

44) Don’t read your personal diary to fickle teenage girls.

45) When you are a kid, don’t announce to your seventh grade class you are wearing your first training bra.

Day 71: I Had a Dream

What has happened to me in the last five years. What goes on in my head.

Thank you for being part of my journey. You will never know how much you have healed me. Bless you.

As always, this is my journey and I am not trying to push my experience or belief system onto any person. Click here to see my thoughts on spirituality.

I Had a Dream

The Spring of 2005

Except for the light from the slivered moon the road was black.  My foot hit the pedal and I sped up faster and faster towards the tracks.   Mangled is what I wanted.  But I wouldn’t have the nerve to stop, to wait for a train.  There would have to be another way.  Perhaps a motel off the interstate, perhaps some pills and a forever sleep.  I shook away the thought and breathed a prayer.  “Please, help me.”

The ache of the past had become my own Siamese twin.  So much so, I didn’t know where my pain stopped and my true self began.  I was pain.  I was the past.  We shared the same blood.  Everything and anyone could conjure up bitter memories, especially certain sounds and smells.  Everyday was yet another rerun of all the misery I’d viewed before.  The scenery and characters might change, but the plot and outcome never altered.  I knew all the psychological jargon, the self-talk, the imaging, meditation, and so on; and they served as my air so to speak, the invisible space which kept me temporarily afloat as I waved back and forth in a stormy sea clinging to an inflatable raft filled with holes…

The rest of this story is in the book Everyday Aspergers

 

© Everyday Aspergers, 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. https://aspergersgirls.wordpress.com

Day 70: Eleven Rabbits I Don’t Want to Be

1. The Glowing Green Rabbit

The glowing green rabbit is named Alba. She is an albino rabbit that was inserted with the gene that causes jellyfish to glow. She has no skin pigment. She is white with pink eyes but glows when illuminated with the correct blue light. Even though there are no side effects, and Alba is healthy and gentle, I wouldn’t want to be injected with jellyfish-glow.

2. The Other White Meat

I don’t want to be raised as an elite expensive meat or considered a low cholesterol, lean protein that tastes like chicken. I’d live to be about ten weeks old and then killed by a sharp blow to the head behind the ears, while being dangled upside down by the feet.

3. Little Rabbit Foo Foo

Known as a bully, Little Rabbit Foo Foo is the main character in a popular, light-natured children’s song. Nice to be famous, but the idea of repeatedly scooping up field mice and bopping them in the head sounds tedious and exhausting. Not my idea of fun. And since I don’t always behave, I’d surely be turned into a goon.

4. Bunnicula

The character in a grade three level fictional book, Bunnicula is thought to be a vampire bunny. She sucks the juice from vegetables. The harmless bunny has fangs and strange eating habits. I don’t want to be a rabbit in a story that begins on a dark and stormy night. And I don’t want to suck vegetables.

5. An Isle of Portland Underground Mutton

On the Isle of Portland in Dorset England the word rabbit is a taboo. Rabbit represents bad luck on this isle.  In the earlier times, during the quarry industry, quarry men would see rabbits emerging from burrows right before a rock would fall. Rocks killed and injured workers. To avoid bad luck some substitute rabbit with words such as long ears and underground mutton.

6. Energizer Bunny

This marketing mascot for Energizer batteries confronts film villains like the Wicked Witch of the West, King Kong, Wile E. Coyote, and Darth Vader. He’s been on the go nonstop since 1989. He likes hot air ballooning. The thought of continually operating indefinitely, being donned head to toe in pink, with uncomfortable sandals while banging a drum nonstop, isn’t appealing. Despite the fame and cool sunglasses, I don’t want to be a big balloon in a parade or a vernacular term for something that continues endlessly. That sounds like pure hell.

7. A Killer Bunny

The mutated cavernous rabbits in the 1972 Horror Film, Night of the Lepus, attack a small town in Arizona. I don’t want to eat people. I don’t want to be a murderous icon of the 70’s horror cinema era where a herd of killer something was always on the approach. Nor do I wish to be jeered and mocked by night-time dwellers on the Internet cursing one of the most ridiculous horror movies ever made.

8. Hare 

No matter how you tell the story, in Aesop’s classic tale, The Tortoise and the Hare, the hare is the disgraced, self-righteous, prideful, and arrogant loser that falls asleep during a race.

9. Mr. Bun

Mr. Bun is a stuffed rabbit that belongs to Susie Derkins in the infamous Calvin and Hobbes Comic Strips. Calvin does not like to play with Mr. Bun. The stuffed toy is frequently forced to partake in tea parties with Susie. He is considered only a stuffed rabbit and comatose. Mr. Bun is feasibly Susie’s only friend.

10. Genetically Furless Rabbit

I don’t want to be naked, genetically mutated, and locked indoors to avoid sunburn. Nor told by researchers that I’m more comfortable without my fur than other rabbits with fur because of the Southern Texas climate. I’ll keep my fur and dignity, thank you very much.

11. A Chocolate Bunny

I don’t care if you eat me head first or feet first, either way you are munching on my body parts and devouring me. Leftovers are melted down for fondue or found by sniffing dogs.


Added by popular demand! The Killer Rabbit from The Holy Grail (Although that looks fun!)

Day 64: All Things Feminine

I’ve named my new laptop Samantha Craft II. It’s not narcissistic, if that’s what you think, because Samantha Craft is my blogging name. Which only makes me pseudo-narcissistic.

I’m reporting to you from the comfort of my living room couch. I’ve removed myself from the dungeon of our study—a box-of-a-room with no windows, set in the center of our daylight basement. Daylight is not literal. I live in Washington State.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to have the office space, and a room that is entirely dedicated to computers, books, and piles of mundane paperwork. But with the surfacing of my vampire-like traits, (since moving here), my windowless office exaggerates my radically pale complexion and morbid (but intriguing) thoughts of luxury coffins.

I will be visiting my huge iMac computer (that I adore) soon. But for now, I write in blissful comfort. Truth be told, I do, in a slight way, feel like I’m cheating on my virtual iMac boyfriend. Though, I think I’d like to make my laptop a girl, only because we need more female energy in this house; and my laptop could feasibly be my new “Get up and go Gal,” since my best friend, who lived the next door over, moved to Connecticut!

I’m still suffering from abandonment issues. Sigh.

I am officially a lounge lizard. My tongue feels longer. I thought of posting a photo of my tongue, because it is substantially long and I can almost touch the tip of my nose. But who knows what type of weirdos are out there, what they might conclude. I don’t want anyone thinking I have a big, long nose!

(When I first wrote the sentence above, I accidentally substituted knows for nose. I crack myself up to no end.)

I sense Crazy Frog popping in with his quirkiness—something about wanting to make the laptop an actual female lizard and his potential mate for life.

I do sense this laptop has feminine energy. Although, I’m noticing the word feminine bothers me. Mainly because I’ve been indoctrinated with all of those feminine napkin commercials and advertisements since birth! Anyone else harbor word-issues as a result of massive advertisement campaigns?


I’ve discovered I’m not so strange after all! According to Live Science in cooperation with Scientific America, people are prone to assign a gender to inanimate objects and people see odd numbers as male and even numbers as female. Take that! You mental health professional of the past who raised a brow at the fact that number three IS a male! Seems I’m not such an odd duck after all. Or rather we are all odd ducks together.

By the way, if you Google feminine napkins, a lot of information about Cooties shows up!

Disposable menstrual pads grew from Benjamin Franklin’s invention designed to save soldiers with buckshot wounds.” Who knew!

This YouTube has an inappropriate word at the end. I just pretended I was at a comedy show.

My feelings aren’t so far off the mainstream when the whole feminine napkin icky-feeling-word is concerned.  In a research study, mentioned in Psychology Today, when a package of cookies in a shopping cart was touching a box of feminine napkins, participants viewed the shopping cart significantly less desirable, when compared to the other participants who had viewed the cart where the two packages were not touching.

More on Feminine:

While learning French in high school, and again in college, I was fascinated that the English language does not use gender nouns; and more so in awe that other languages do have gender nouns. By the way, I can only speak ten French words now and translate the one English sentence “I only eat the vegetables” into French.

In English all nouns are neutral and the gender is shown through the form of the word. However, in a quick review of some gender-based nouns, I’m realizing that oftentimes the female counter part is not used at all or implies a derogatory statement.

Take these for example:

actor – actress          (Actor is used often for both.)

bachelor – spinster    (Spinster…such a nice word.)

billy – nanny             (Have you ever hired a billy?)

bull – cow                (We eat the cow.)

dog – bitch               (No explanation needed.)

leopard – leopardess (Is that the sexy term for leopard?)

peacock – peahen     (I’ve been calling all those females peacocks!)

Le champion des dames (detail), 1451.
Martin Le France (1410-1461), Public domain. From: W. Schild: Die Maleficia der Hexenleut, 1997.

According to Maxson J. McDowell,

(Is that a cool name or what? Oh! That’s my iMac’s name! Yes, it is. Starting now.)

According to Maxson J. McDowell, trolls and witches represent repressed or split-off feminine.

That’s encouraging. (Sarcasm). Does that mean when I lose aspects of my feminine self I become a witch or troll? If that is the case, then I am firmly sticking with Princess Vampirette Abyss. Watch out ladies. Keep painting those fingernails, dying that hair, buying those push up bras, plucking those brows, shaving those pits—don’t turn into a troll.

My idea of feminine? On the Internet I found images of big busts, hour-glass figures, Marilyn Monroe, flesh, flowers, pale-skin, big lips…

Personally I like the YouTube I found of feminine burping collection. Although now, I swear my coffin-study, that I’ve now returned to, smells like pickles and beer.

Don’t blame me! You signed up for this!

Day 63: People Are Strange

For the 4-Play of my writing today, I watched cheesy videos on the Internet and learned:

59 million people have listened to a lady repeat the phrase “sitting on the toilet” about sixteen times. I played it twice and tried to count, and gave up. It ends with a flush.

19 million watched a “fat kid on rollercoaster” for 57 seconds. Who posts that?

35 million people watched a ninja baby for 36 seconds. That one was sort of cute.

10 million watched “young girl drops c-word on national TV…Twice.” It was on the Today Show.

Now I’m watching something called “Extreme Face Omelet.”

Each day I live, I become more confused by culture.

It’s been about an hour, and I’ve yet to find something I’d actually want to share with you. Except for the fact that my husband thinks I’m stranger than ever.

After watching freaky eaters, strange addictions, soggy flappy faces in slow motion, and Weird Al, and the like, I am quite worried that if alien life forms have access to human’s video clips, they’ll choose to extinguish the entire human race.

I’ve concluded: People are Strange.

At least we’ll always have the Brady Bunch.

My husband wanted me to remind you that the Brady Bunch lost to the dog act when they did their Keep on Movin’ dance scene.

Today, I was planning to share a story about how I was beaten with a board by strangers when I was a little girl. Now, after my introduction, I’m laughing and realizing child abuse just doesn’t fit with the feel of this post. So I’m keeping with the Strange Theme.

Unverified Strange Facts About People

Unverified because I’m not in college anymore, and I do not want to back things up with research ever again! Please keep in mind, my idea of strange is subjective and may not accurately represent your idea of strange.

  1. Some people let snakes slither on their backs for a snake massage. The treatments are said to ease migraines and soothe sore muscles.
  2.  In a sleep study researches discovered dreams prevent psychosis.
  3. Charles Dickens slept facing North. He believed this act would improve his writing.
  4. There are more collect calls on Father’s Day than any other day of the year.
  5. Thomas Edison was afraid of the dark.
  6. In a survey Americans revealed banana was their favorite smell.
  7. Married men change their underwear twice as often as single men.
  8. On average 100 people will choke to death on ballpoint pens each year.
  9. On average a person farts 14 times a day.
  10. The earth could be repopulated to its current population level by the number of sperm that could fit in an aspirin capsule!
  11.  You are actually reading what I write in detail.

*Important side note: The colder the room you sleep in, the better the chances are that you will have a bad dream. That’s why I’ve had so many bad dreams since moving to Washington State.

Famous People With Autism (Unverified but cool!)


For those of you who need more:

Weird Laws Around the World

Top Ten Festivals for People to Throw Things