I was accompanying a friend to the doctor a couple weeks ago, and we were sitting in the waiting room, both of us using wheelchairs. We had the following conversation, or something very like it (I won’t get the details right, but this is the gist):
Her (to my staff): We need to find you [...]

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I have been asked to blog about a particular topic: The show on “Nightline,” ABC, tonight, called “Paul in Love”. I have not been specifically asked, but asked as part of a group.
Aside from pointing out that there’s something really wrong with grown adults having their (real or otherwise) faults dissected on national television by [...]

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When I spoke about having been locked up and how awful it was, people would be very sympathetic and say a mistake had been made in my case, as I obviously wasn’t mentally ill. Even though I would explain that I had been as crazy as anyone had ever been, with all the classic signs [...]

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[Note: This is my personal response to the murder of Katherine McCarron. For my more political response, read Background, to the foreground.]
Dear Katie,
You don’t know me. You will never know me. You were murdered when you were three years old. But we have something in common: We are both autistic. Both of us [...]

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“If you’re watching it, you’re part of it. If you’re close enough to see it, you’re in it. There’s no line drawn dividing the two.” —Tony Carey, in a spoken-word introduction to the last song of his most recent album, which is the first in a three-part series about learning from history
He is responding to [...]

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Typing hurts so this is a condensed version of a long post. Apologies in advance for lack of nuance. The long version was written before my last several posts (written last week) and resemblance to later happenings (which in some places is strong) is coincidental.
This is about me but surely applies to many others so [...]

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It’s been a long time since someone’s really been insistent with the eye contact while I’m squirming and trying to get away. I noticed today exactly how much I react to that.
So I’m sitting there in a doctor’s office, and he’s leaning towards me and sticking his face up to mine.
And I’m sitting there trying [...]

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I am saying this from the point of view of someone whose entire family is neurologically atypical in some (often significant) way, and the majority of my immediate family is autistic: My whole family is not autistic.
I’d begun trying to write about this before Wade Rankin of Injecting Sense wrote an entry on Autism Every [...]

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This is because I have seen several references lately (in lots of different places) to everything that autistic people must necessarily miss out on. The following post was made last year, and I haven’t managed to re-post it to the archives of this blog yet, so I’ve edited it a bit and posted it here:
This [...]

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I just watch the horrible public service announcement by Autism Speaks. (I wonder how that girl likes having her mother announce to the entire world that she’s thought of killing her, if you’re wondering why I called it “horrible”.)
One thing that struck me was that the children in the video were described as unresponsive, over [...]

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