Imagery in Itself

   Images are evocative, yes, but they are evocative of nothing but themselves, and evocative of nothing but evocation itself. Meaning, uh, it's not the image itself that's evocative. The image is just an image, and it evokes nothing but itself. The evocation itself of evocation itself allows us to be put in the mood for evocation, and that in itself is the evocative part.

   And there's no way of disproving that, because there's no way of understanding the meaning of what the heck I just said. (Outside of itself, I mean. (Ha ha. circular logic, just kidding.)) What I mean was, there's no way to prove me wrong because that point wasn't very well stated so it's impossible to know what my point even was. Just, uh, go look at something that's evocative of something. You'll see what I mean then. Such illustrations of illustrations can only be illustrated using illustrations. It establishes a mood, and that mood is the thing that is itself evocative.

   I suppose it is possible of putting these images into words, but, like I said, the words can only evoke the original image. Kind of a creepy Plato thing going on there. Mood is intangible, I guess. That's the problem-- well, not the problem, that's the very essence of it. It is what it is itself, and that's the only way of describing that, which is also a perfect illustration of my point. It is itself itself itself.

   I know what you're saying. "But Eric," you're saying, "You just proved yourself wrong by proving yourself right by using something of an intangible nature to saying that its very intangibility is the perfect illustration of how it's impossible to illustrate anything with things of an intangible nature." And now you're taking a deep breath, because that was quite a mouthful there. Good job on both being able to figure that out and also to say that.

   Uh, yeah, shoot. That's a good point. The entire thing is intuitionist; it can be proven through a long series of small logical steps, but we grasp it intuitively, like ethics or mathematics. I guess what I mean in all this is, art for art's sake. That's it. Art for art's sake. If you look back over it, you'll see that's what almost every sentence has been saying: Images are evocative of nothing but themselves, and evocative of nothing but evocation itself. Art for art's sake. It's not the image itself that's evocative. Art for art's sake. The image is just an image, and it evokes nothing but itself. Art for art's sake. The evocation itself of evocation itself allows us to be put in the mood for evocation, and that in itself is the evocative part. Art for art's sake. And so on.

   I hope you don't think that was pretentious in any way. All that deep thinking or whatever. Really, I was just treating it as kind of a lark. Shoot, wait, no. I mean, I worked very hard on that, and you'd better be impressed by it!

Com Truise!

   Okay, so I looked it up, and http://truise.com/ is not, in fact, a real website. Yet. At press time. If that even means anything on the internet. When I posted this, it wasn't.

   Here's what I think, though: that domain name has the possibility of being the most cleverly named Tom Cruise fan site on the internet.

Thespis Strip Dated Sunday, February 7, 2010

Click to embiggen.

TRANSCRIPT:
Marvin: So, anyway, back to...
that of which...
I was speaking.
*phew*
My hypothesis is that the attack will come from slapstick.
This strip's humor has come from slapstick more and more recently.
The pies, the anvils, the dangling goblin...
It fits the milieu.
uhh...
Are you sure you don't want to go...
Collin: No, I'm ready for whatever can be thrown at me. Bring it.
OOOOON! 

NOTES:
   Sorry about the legibility of this one. Or lack thereof. It's a Sunday comic and Sunday means color, but in a black and white world the only opportunity for that comes through tinging emotions with actual tinges. All I had to work with for the color in this one were markers, so you can see how that turned out. At least I always publish a transcript alongside for exactly this reason (and so that the dialog can be searched through, à la OhNoRobot, while this is still down.)

Hulk in Hollywood

   More Hulk TV Show Trivia goodness, and sure why not let's make it in celebration of SHIELD. I'd imagine Hulk's not going to show up, as he's stinking expensive to put on screen even briefly, and to be quite honest I'm writing this from a time when the show's still a vague announced concept, so whatever. I just have more Hulk stuff to share with you.

   In the TV show, his name's David Banner instead of Bruce. What went wrong? Bruce isn't even Hulk's real first name. It's his middle. The character was introduced as Bruce Banner, but Stan Lee screwed up and wrote him as "Bob Banner" for a time. Still alliterative. Stan Lee was working on a lot of comics at the time, which is one of the reasons he's a legend but it also ensured that mistakes would be made. Rather than retconning these mistakes (or at least this mistake,) making it so that they never existed, The Man just came out and said that Bruce's full name is Robert Bruce Banner. Problem solved.

   Since Bruce is just Banner's middle name anyway, the show went on and called him by his first name- David? Yes. Remember the thing earlier about his name being alliterative? If you don't, just go back up to the previous paragraph. It's right there. You back? Okay, so the show's developer and executive producer, Kenneth Johnson, thought that the alliterative name was "comic book-y," as he was trying to ground Hulk more in reality. He changed Banner's first name from Bob to David, after his son David, but kept the middle name Bruce in nod to the comics. So there you have it.

Hollywood in Hulk

   Remember back in the '90s, when Hulk Hogan turned heel (bad guy wrestler) and reinvented himself as "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan? Well, neither do I. But I've read about it (it didn't last for very long.) But it turns out that there was a very, very good reason for that. Hulk Hogan debuted in 1979, back when the Hulk TV series was still on. Ah, so you can see where this is going. Well, very good.

   At that time, Hogan had to LICENSE (yes, in all caps like that) LICENSE his name from Marvel (his real name's neither really Hulk, nor Hogan) or at least his wrestling agency did. It was Ed McMahon (Sr.)'s idea, and it was he and the World Wrestling Federation to whom the name was LICENSED. This probably must have made it a bit of a hassle whenever he switched agencies (he had switched from WWF to AWA then back to WWF and then to WCW by the time he re-branded himself with all that new World order stuff in '96,) but I'm no expert in how wrestling agencies buy rights so I wouldn't know.

   I guess, to get out of that, so he wouldn't have to keep on paying LICENSING fees, he turned heel, called himself Hollywood Hulk Hogan, and shortened it to Hollywood Hogan. What a complicated and nefarious scheme. It didn't work, but, uh, there you go.

   (postscript: in 2005, he just bought the rights to the name "Hulk Hogan." If he could've done that all along, makes you wonder why he didn't.)

Another Poetry Tip, I Guess

   Learning forms of poetry is important, even if you don’t want to write sonnet after sonnet for the rest of your life. Knowing and being skilled in rigid forms of poetry makes your free verse much more powerful, because if you've practiced with words like that you know how they flow, and so your free verse actually sounds good.

The Best Ideas

   I blog a lot about serial killers, don't I? It's just I think serial killers would improve literally every (domain? title? product?) just by their addition. And just that. Like I said, I am not one.

   It also gives a point to have the proceedings of the plot in the first place, makes it interesting enough to be worthy to bear telling. If you had a crappy childhood, that's boo hoo for you, but if you had a crappy childhood and are also killing people because of it, well, that's intrinsically interesting.

   Here's a short list of some of the best ideas of all time:

1. It's like Magnolia, but with serial killers
2. It's like Rashoman, but with serial killers
3. It's like Da Vinci Code, but with serial killers
4. It's like Abyss, but with serial killers

   See, see how easy this is?

That Poor Dog

   The story is told of the hunt for Glasgow's notorious serial killer "Bible John" (so called because his last known victim was last seen in a taxi with a man who called himself John who said his family was very religious growing up and that he could recite Bible passages off the top of his head):

   A witness claiming to have seen him once remarked in questioning that the killer's hair matched almost perfectly the color of that of a passing dog's. The police chased the poor creature down and cut off a snip of its fur to give to the police sketch artist.

   Somehow this story seems significant to me, as if I've heard it before or something.

Epic Fails of History

Charles R. Drew, the man who pioneered many blood storage techniques that allowed blood banks to be able to hold blood for longer periods, an African American. They started segregating the blood supply into black blood and white blood...

   He did not himself bleed to death because they denied him blood because he was black, though. So that's good.

Thespis Strip Dated Sunday, January 31, 2010

Click to embiggen.

TRANSCRIPT:
Marvin: So, anyway, back to what I was speaking of OOOF
Announcer: OH SNAP IT'S THE DANGLING PARTICIPLE GOBLIN!
!!!!!!!!!

Identity

   Or is it something else that truly scares me? Like I said, it's not my past self, but the idea of my past self, that I could have my strings pulled and not notice it. I'm better than I was, but how much of it is yet uninternalized?

   I broke very easily as a child. They must have instilled in me some coping mechanism or defense mechanism to counteract it, because I must have learned to outgrow it somehow (most of it anyway.) Maybe it's still there. My childhood is this force that's pressing against my back, nuzzling me and then swallowing me up. I've had positive and negative manifestations, suppressing the negative and refining the positive ones. Hopefully. The autism itself is the cause of both of these, but not the actions themselves- I choose how I manifest it.

   Sublimation is considered a psychologically mature form of defense mechanism, because it involves rejecting negative behavior. It involves the nourishing and nurturing of the underlying negative ideals you are trying to repress, though, only directing them to a different outlet. The demon grows alongside the angel.

   And that is why I am a serial killer.

   Haha, just kidding. (the dehydrated samples of human skin in the scrapbook under the bed are JUST RESEARCH, mother.)

   But the strengths and the weaknesses do come from the same source. It's not like my life is being defined by this, since I forget about it half the time as it is. I see myself as myself, to a degree of identity that I can only guess others can't even imagine. And it is this degree of identity which causes my own lack of identity. Like I said, the reason I return to the same things over and over is because they're awesome.

   (And I realize the problem behind that, but that is how most of us operate, so I'm gonna fly with it.)

It's Really Time You Reexamine Your Place in Society, Boy

   Saying that with a Sean Connery accent would be best. Itsh taime ya reexhamin your plaish in shochiety, boyh. Yeah, like that.

   But I just realized what a loser I am, statistically. Well, not a loser, but how easy it would be to dismiss me. All my demographics, the things I'm into, have traditionally been the path of the unpopular. Too many outcasts. I am a freaking autistic Mormon hipster furry brony manchild. Being the ultimate outsider does have this edge to it, like so-uncool-it's-cool, and of course coolness exists outside of that, but that still doesn't explain how others put up with me when the stereotype is that not much good can come from any of these things individually much less combined.

   It's an elective thing, I suppose. You don't have to if you don't want to. I'm not actively telling you this; I'm not saying these things out loud. It's a written medium, and it's your choice to read or not. With listening, you can ignore it and you can tune it out, but you can still hear it. It requires a bit more effort on your part to read something, though. So I don't have to explain myself to you if you don't want that.

   That's why you're here, isn't it? To see me, well, not, justify myself, to you, exactly. The hear what I have to say and see what I have to show. To look and see and find out just exactly what it means to be like me. Oh, man, I just quoted Comrade Helicopter at you.

   All my life, I guess, I've been in the minority. Or the equivalent, I guess. Being Caucasian male has no real political push anymore, except for subconscious things like being perceived as more trustworthy. We don't have to pay as much for houses, for example, because real estate agents, as human beings, have this implicit bias towards trusting us more.

   I guess, on one hand, I don't need to tell you, but on one hand (and maybe it's the same hand, who knows) I do. Or is it you who needs to be told by me? The only reason I bring it up here is this entire thing is about me spilling my guts and psychoanalyzing myself (I do that so you don't have to do it for me, I guess) and as embarrassing as it is to admit my membership of these groups I suppose it's an essential part of my psychology. Asperger's can be used as an excuse for anything from mild awkwardness to downright rudeness, or even use it as a bragging point, how it makes them more special than the other people in the room. But you really can't change things like that much, as cliché as it to bring it up. Or, no, uh... What, is it passé? Both, I guess.

   But you can't let it stop you, just because you're not entirely unique. You still need something to springboard off of. Is it so popular now it's no longer cool? Or are you ashamed for the others? The things I like I like because they're awesome things.

   So here I am.

Thinking, in Pictures and Words

   I remember thinking entirely in pictures when I was young, but then training myself to think verbally by using pictures of those creepy busy  preposition ants from School House Rock (seriously, ants shouldn't wear shoes. That’s why I also think the song "Ants Go Marching" is creepy. Nor should teddy bears, one of the many reasons I think Teddy Bear Picnic is creepy.) The ants would march by with pictures of the words, you know, signs with the words I was thinking written on them.

   I would not be who I am today without the film Jurassic Park. And, I guess, the book. The scene when Laura Dern and Richard Attenborough are sitting together in the cafeteria, eating ice cream before it melts because the power is off, and Mr. Attenborough's character explains remembering Petticoat Lane and the flea circus, and wanting to make something that was actually real this time. That’s just excellent scriptwriting. Give that guy an Oscar, give him a Knighthood. The dialogue inspired me to have conversations of my own like that. It inspired me to my own form of eloquence, wanting to think in words instead of pictures.

   Anyway, Ian Malcom, Jeff Goldblum's character. Chaos theory. That dude was awesome. Sitting in the car, talking to himself, after everyone else jumped out of the car to see the Trike (Jurassic Park slang for a triceratops.) “See, here I'm now sitting by myself, uh, er, talking to myself. That's, that’s chaos theory.” Which inspired me to talk to myself. A common trait of autism is vocalization of thoughts, but I guess in me that's where it came from.

   Yeah, that's right. Jeff um uh Goldblum. For me, that was the pinnacle of eloquence. Ian Malcolm, chaos this and that.

What It Would Mean

   Like I said, I was (blissfully?) unaware of any of the results or of the changes in curriculum, so I didn't realize my place or my scoring. This thought didn't occur to me. A genius, am I? I don't consider myself to be a genius. If not in the creativity definition of the word, in the intelligence definition. When I was little, I didn't know of such things.

   I said, it must have been because of the fact that my cousins were also my neighbors, opening up more room in my brain because I didn't have to keep the politics of both relations separate. I said, knowledge of trivia does not equal intelligence. That was a hot one. Or, I am just self-aware, and thus I consciously work on self-improvement. That one, I think, would work for anybody. Since I am not other people, I do not know if they are self-aware, but they might not be. Get self-aware, people. It'll bump up your IQ.

   That rationalization of my above-average capacity for memory storage and retrieval, and for higher-level thinking in general, was back when my IQ was only 122. Well, "only" 122. That's in the 93 percentile. Makes me seem insufferable. Though if you're reading this blog, you're pretty bright yourself. And have excellent taste.

   So, again we return to why I started off on this subject anyway: it may not be what my brain works, but how it works. That's what the entire thing is about, so more on that, would be good.

A Sudden Rise: A Second Opinion

   Actually, treating the CAS as being only a System for Cognitive Assessment and not a bona fide IQ test (I'm assuming here there wasn't actually an IQ test that also happened to say 115 and everyone was treating my CAS score as an actual IQ test,) but, treating it like that, my score of 118 in the eighth grade, my second-most recent barrage and the one preceding my highest barrage, was the lowest IQ I've scored. As far as I've found the results for all the IQ tests I've ever taken, that is. Two barrages in the second grade, 122 on the KBIT and 125 on the K-ABC. Maybe this most recent score doesn't represent an exponential growth so much as... Well, something else. I'm not sure what. A fluctuation. A drop in the eleventh grade, I guess.

   Ha, so it turns out that the real mystery is not why it rose so suddenly but why it dropped so suddenly before that. No list needed for this one; it's probably something unsexy like conditions on the day of the test itself. These things are entirely mutable. So there was a rise, and a fall. Capacity for both fluid and crystallized intelligence is said to increase until well within the 20s (thanks, Wikipedia!)

   Maybe my second grade IQ was even higher than it was measured to be, come to think of it, seeing as how that was before my Asperger's diagnosis and autistic people tend to under-perform on IQ tests. The eleventh grade would represent a true drop, of quite a bit for whatever reason (it wasn't lack of stimulation.) There was no adjustment made there for the autism because the autism wasn't diagnosed. Wait, no. The Asperger's wasn't diagnosed; the autism was diagnosed just fine. The barrages I took in second grade were quite thorough, with different scores for different categories, so even then I don't think that much adjustment would be needed.

   Also treating the CAS as being not a true test of Intelligence Quotient means that there's a gap from the second to the eleventh grade in which my IQ was not tested, so there was room for all kinds of fluctuation there. That effectively put my second grade IQs as outliers, which is why I didn't report them in my initial discussion of my historical IQs. Should I have? I don't know; I made a judgement call and I'm sticking with it.

200+?

   Yeaaah, I know they balance these things out to have the mean be 100 (and maybe the median and probably the mode, though obviously not the range.) Let's use the above-given IQ score of 115, which may or may not have been my own as tested once. Fifteen points above 100. One standard deviation from the mean. Fifteen points below 100, or 85, is one standard deviation below the mean. The standard deviation for IQ, you see, is 15 points: A 130 IQ represents two standard deviations from mean, with its corresponding below-mean IQ being 70-- 30 points above and below, and so on. I'm not sure if it's possible to have a negative IQ (just sucking the intelligence out of everything around it without soaking any up for itself, I guess,) but if and only if it were, then it would be possible to have an IQ that exceeded 200.

Intelligence is determined not by the size of the brain, but by its shape. It's not, the bigger the better, it's, the more folded the better. The less folded the brain, the less intelligent. So what would an almost perfectly smooth brain look like? There is a rare congenital brain condition called lissencephaly (smooth brain,) which leads to IQs as low as 20, but under that it's impossible to test so for all intents and purposes, 20 is the lowest IQ can go. If the mean IQ is set at 100, still, even this relatively rare phenomenon might have to be at least somewhat less rare than IQs above the opposite-end-of-the-scale counterpart IQ of 180, unless they're making up for it with just a lot of average scores (most likely.) IQ is ranked on an ordinal scale, meaning the rank is more important than the actual number- one IQ point separating two IQs at one place in the chart is not the same as another point at another place in the chart. Still, the ratios of the IQs themselves are accurate.

   It's possible for like little children and stuff to have IQs of 200, because IQ tests for children are generally measured as status ratios, meaning intelligence is gauged by comparing against peers: an IQ of 200 would just mean the child is operating at a brain capacity of the average person twice their age, which is much more common. I think there was a group of like Ukrainian students who all got their IQs tested when they came into America and their average IQ was like 160 or 170. I'd be more specific if I could find a source for that, but something like this was definitively documented to have happened; I just don't know if all of those details are correct, so don't quote me on it. I was using that for illustrative purposes only. Either way, the average was quite above average. There were possible explanations for that, like these, given, but I don't think I'd be able to tell you those either.

A Sudden Rise

   Why the huge jump?  

1. He just misheard, like heard it as -ty instead of -teen or something? And that mishearing somehow also happened to be the number put on the official documentation... Okay, that idea was stupid from the start. But it makes sense in terms of the known range in my test scoring.
2. Maybe they just lied to me. That was one of my first thoughts. That I'm part of some study where IQ tests are administered, and the results are overstated to determine whether this has any positive or negative effect on future IQ scores. There's no way to disprove that (I did feel it was an off day that day...) and either way not likely.
3. Maybe they were using a different test method- no, the method seemed the same to me. The blocks and the vocabulary. WAIS-IV, that was it. A different test calibration, then, maybe. No, that's also dumb. It's the same test, it should be calibrated the same. Though the standard deviation was 16 instead of 15 in one place up until [EDIT: shoot it looks like I missed a spot; yes it was originally blank here, just a blank blank cliffhanger. I'm reviewing these posts early April '17 in the middle of/as part of a project I'm doing on IQ testing, and boy does all this conjecture seem moronic to me now (moron- the highest grade of mental retardation in Jean Esquirol's model. better than being imbecilic or idiotic, at least.) I was talking about the Stanford-Binet, anyway, which used 16 as the sigma instead of 15 up until the, shoot, fifth edition?]
4. Maybe I had just gotten used to those tests, and gotten good at them? 
5. They didn't offer a possible range or margin of error, so perhaps its definitiveness (definitivinity?) makes it non-definitive. Okay, maybe not. There's generally supposed to be a range of about 3 points plus or minus on any given score, and a 95% accuracy rate on these things. At least on some of the tests I took, and since the test that yielded the high-average scores was the same test that yielded the superior score... Meaning, in second grade, (using KBIT my IQ was measured at 115-129 (plus or minus seven points of 122,) and the probability was given 95% of that ration containing my true IQ. Thus, my really high test just fell  into this 5% margin. It happens. Once every twenty times, it happens. Sad thing is, that's probably it.
6. Maybe it deals with the personal and social advancements I've made since then, being able to better express myself and speak and have it be legible. Or the low number in one category got significantly higher which bumped up the entire Full Scale. I've seen the subcategories on my grade-school IQ tests, though, and I don't think that's it. It is said that there are two kinds of intelligence, fluid and crystallized, and this is important because autistic people tend to have low fluid intelligence. I've gotten better, but I don't think even all of my advancement in that category can explain quite such a leap.
7. Maybe that's causing my IQ is increasing exponentially, and soon I will have one of those (literally impossible) 220+ IQs (I meant to put 200+, but  I hit the 2 twice instead of the 0, and I'm keeping it because 220+ is just soo much cooler.) 

   That's the one I hope it is, that one on the end. I.Q.s 200+ are impossible, right?

A History of (My Own) IQ

   I'm willing to admit my past scores here, which may seem kind of contradictory to what I said in the last post but isn't for reasons that will soon become readily apparent.

   115, I'm not sure if that was actually an IQ measurement, because I was also tested in the fifth grade  using the CAS (Cognitive Assessment System,) which was measured to be 115. I don't think that the CAS is actually a recognized IQ test so much as... well, as a System for Cognitive Assessment, the examiner said he believed that "the test results are an accurate representation of [my] abilities." Legit enough. Alright. Maybe that was something else, like there was an actual IQ test administered and it also happened to test 115, so I'm gonna fly with it and say it was 115. There were tests before that, in the second grade, but that was in the second grade, which is discountable for reasons it's really not the place to get into here.

   In the eleventh grade, my FSIQ (Full Scale Intelligence Quotient) was tested using the WAIS IV (which is a recognized and official IQ test,) to be 118. A jump of three points! Yay! Then I took another one in college, (Sophomore year?), as part of a qualification for voc rehab. It had grown again. By a lot. The exact scale of the jump to what my latest measurement is I will not say, because

1. It's statistically high, so sharing it here would seem like blatant bragging,
2. It's realistically high, so sharing it here would be embarrassing because it's really not worth bragging about, and
3. My shame of how low it is would still come across like bragging

   I was 18, 19 when I took that last one. It's not unheard of and in fact expected to keep increasing like that, but such a jump... I don't know what that could mean. I do have my guesses, though. More on that next time.

I Hope I Don't Fall Over Myself Too Much in This One

   Let's see how high these ghostly wings can fly us, shall we? Oh, dear. It's a blessing to be blessed, yes. But humility sounds like boastfulness even when you put it that way. It all sounds like boastfulness: I'm trying to analyse this impassively, but it doesn't come out sounding that way. At the very least, I can always claim it's a parody of that kind of thing. My own genius? Yep. Here comes the part where I talk about my IQ. No, I'm not telling it to you. I need to talk about it to explain some things, namely why past me continues to scare me (a-ha! you thought we were off of that now, did you?) But I don't divulge the exact number here.

   Why am I even talking about it, then? This is the internet (last I checked, ha ha,) which is full of bright people... allegedly (ohhh diss.) Seriously, though, it's big and large and vast and deep and any claim you make can be matched or exceeded somewhere else on it. I'm not going to tell you because this isn't about what my own IQ is, it's about why it is. When the best that so many autistic children can hope for is retardation, why am I on the opposite arm of the scale?

   I'm not here to brag, as bragging about something like that only seems petty. I'm just here to talk about it. A blog is not the place for shame, though. It's a personal thing about a person. If you didn't want to hear it, you wouldn't read it. So I'm going to talk about high testing-- er, being tested high-- er, being tested to be high, in the tested sort of sense. And why and how it could be that way.

   IQ tests are easy, though. You just go in there and they answer you insultingly easy questions and then impossible questions about obscure Russian literature, (which you fail of course.) That's actually what happened to me. I'm not sure if he decided just to skip to the impossible ones at the end or what. Like, oh, he's so clearly bored with these easy ones, that about as far as that can be gauged anyway. Hmm, that doesn't sound nice. Need to work on my humility.

   Humility? I suppose gratitude is in order. Other than the odd case of savantism, there's generally not much hope with this prognosis. Alright, that's unfair. Asperger's is not uncommon, but it's generally not what people think when they think autism. It's like Asperger's is a different thing to them. We can still feel the effects. This entire thing is about how crippling it used to be and still is to a lessening extent. But I was still bright. And that's still considered high functioning. There's low functioning, which is intellectually crippling with below-average intelligence, and high functioning, which increases to overlaps average intelligence. But a few of us overshot that. I'm negative mild. Mild autism, so mild it's negative, I mean, that which pushes outward instead of pulls downward. (Gifted instead of cursed, I guess. Well, no, the curse is still there. But it's a good curse?) Man, that sounds bad.

   It's hard to balance sounding humble with sounding like I've got a healthy self-esteem. That would certainly explain where the Asperger's stereotypes come from. Oh, feel sorry for me because I'm different, at the same time as, oh, be impressed with me, I'm different! I don't think you'd be here if you didn't expect to hear about it, and it's hard to speak of oneself emotionally neutrally, but I'm sorry if it came across as that. I guess I've covered this already, but don't you worry about me. I don't need your pity or anything. I just need you to not read too much into whether I'm trying to impress you or not right now, alright? (Yeah, I know. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.)

   But, I mean, how can I either boast or complain when it's the only life I know?

Ghosts

   Yeah, Asperger's. The very nature of the disease makes me unsure of exactly how much I'm crippled by it, but as far as I can see I'm fine. If it weren't for the reminders. The reminders of how awkward it's possible to be. That's what you're here for, yes? To hear me tell about it? To try to understand me when I myself don't know what to say to make you understand because that's exactly the problem? Okay, it might not be as inflated as I make it sound (once again, I'm not sure,) but it sure sounds pretty, doesn't it?

   But, since I'm unable to see the problem, I'm alright with it. I don't know if it's good or bad but I do know it could be worse. This isn't a curse; it's a blessing. Sometimes (all the time) it'd be great if it were more of a blessing, but that's true of anything. There are those to whom what to me is a gift is a curse, of course. It had to manifest itself in this exactly specific way. Different each time, but all exactly specific. That make sense? It's always specific, the exact manifestation, coming up as a little reminder of how things are in times where it either would or would not be convenient. Not as much for me as with some others, so I think I'm able to tell exactly what that means. I... think I've got a pretty good grasp on what anything else would be, better or worse, but there are still the little reminders again. I don't know how far out I am.

   For some, it comes as a crippling retardation, but, speaking of all of humanity, are we not all retarded in some way or another? There are the savants, of course, no more or less common than you'd think. We may very well all be savants, as well, but that's exactly how our retardation manifests itself, so that  we could never be able to show it.

   The wise man proclaims himself to be a fool, so I'm just chasing the horizon trying to figure out exactly how autistic I am and am not. How autistic I am and am not. That was a weird admission. It felt weird. Feels weird. I am autistic. From the Greek, autos, meaning self. I myself. I am autistic. It's a contradiction and a tautology rolled into one. How could you be, or not be, or even know for sure? It's different each time, so the only way to gauge it is against others. Bizarre.

   Either way, while for some it would be a retardation, for me it is my genius. In the original Latin meaning, too, I guess. A personal spirit. Haunting me like a ghost. For many, it is a poltergeist. But for me it is a genius. There are many such haunted who can approach or even exceed standard, but I can count myself blessed that my ghost has wings. Count you blessings, yeah.