Reveries to Peel me off this Velcro Seat: beautiful nurse etc.

I helped my personal tutee show his nurse round today. She was gorgeous. I’m terrible and can’t keep my eyes off the women around me. She had a very soft, yet mature face, a caring empathic face and impeccable shoulder length light brown hair which looked natural and was, I think, parted just off centre. Together too, her voice and manner, was gentle and warmly intelligent. M accuses me often of being better able to imagine being with other women than with her, and I must admit that sometimes she is right. Within seconds of being with this woman I felt at ease and as if I could effortlessly take a great deal of pleasure in getting to know her. It’s the kind of feeling, I’m sure, that some subset of people talk about when they talk about love at first sight. Not that I love her, you understand. Not a bit of it. But were something to have developed from such a meeting, and from such a feeling, there would surely be a temptation to look back and experience that feeling as the beginning of an uninterrupted state of being in love. But I wax lyrical. The reveries here have been numerous, I’ll try to recount a few of them: More

On not making the grade

I think it was when I was brushing my teeth yesterday that I began to have reveries of, as usual nowadays, being at work and arguing. Of course, most of them have slipped my mind, as usual, but one that remains in my memory was, as is often the case set in one of the meetings.

When I was away in Prague I wrote down some reveries of disagreements enacted in my mind with some of the management here and their philosophy and ways of dealing with students. Much of it stems, actually, I think, from a meeting I alluded to yesterday about music in which one of the managers said that MP3 players are bad because it discourages conversation (I reflected on it when I was listening to rock music in my car, and finding it cathartic). We were for some kind of compromise whereby students could listen to MP3 players at certain alloted times. She was adament that they should not be allowed to listen to MP3 players at all. One of my arguments was that those individuals with autistic spectrum disorders do not have the same inclination towards conversation and that, far from relaxing them, it stresses them out. My take on it was, and is, that yes, we should at all times help students by reducing the anxiety associated with social contact, and that we should indeed encourage social contact and facilitate it, but that we should not enforce it at all times of the day because it is exceptionally fatuiging for ASD individuals to constantly be involved in conversation.

Last night I had a similar reverie. There were several takes, but the mean was that I was in a meeting in which I saw fit to note that in America there are evengelicals who to this day offer electro shock therapy to homosexuals to turn them straight. I made this observation in connection with their way of dealing with Aspergic students. Ah, yes, I remember one thing that came up. I kept on talking about how it is idiotic to say to a student who is about to throw a brick through a window “do you really think that will make you feel better?” because, odds on, it will. I said if I were to throw a brick through a window I would most certainly feel better, and if the police were to come and arrest me, and if I were to shout and swear at them, that would make me feel better too. I went on to explain that all the time I am coming in to work trying to appear to be neurotypical, and in doing so I never, not once, make the grade. I always fall short of the mark. The best I can achieve, day after day, is that people think I am nondescript, borderline incompetent, lack a sense of humour, an easy person to forget. I don’t make the grade. And that is the motivation I have, that is the reward I get for working hard all the time, eating well. And then, of course, I eschew coffee and alcohol and people look at me like I’m some kind of an ascetic so long as I don’t talk at length about my problems - if I don’t talk at length they conclude that I am fussy about my food and perhaps neurotic. [I’ve lost track somewhat with people coming into the office at work. I don’t want them seeing the blog. And then others are having noisy conversations - irritating middle class chatter about dinner parties and the if I’m honest - and I can’t remotely think or follow my train of thought with others talking around me.] If you throw a brick through a window, often you are expressing the noise inside your head far better than by forever trying to be something it’s hard for you to be, and not getting the recognition for the constant energy you’re putting into it because you still don’t make the grade, and nobody can see the turbulance in your head that prevents you making that step, and it is natural for them to think sometimes that with just a little effort you could be normal like anyone else, that you could hold a conversation - you can speak after all - and control yourself - you do sometimes when you are following your own interests after all - when in fact this is not remotely true.

It went round and round in my head. I was tired last night, but there was a lot of noise in my head that was slow to ebb away. I listened to an audiobook for a while, and eventually fell asleep.

Abstract anger

Coffee, oats, cigarette, green tea, orange juice (?), sugar. I couldn’t be allergic to corn? Surely not, but I’ve been having a lot of polenta.

I don’t know what it is that’s causing it but I’m angry. More

Friday 25th May, 2007 08:40

My brain continued to be very active last night and I couldn’t turn off easily to go to bed. I managed only to write a few notes with the kitten about and had a million ideas in my head, remembering old ideas and the context in which they were written/thought up, remembering back to my bohemian days a few years ago and how I could write them up. A few reveries too I haven’t sufficiently captured.

 Reveries this morning centered around training, since we have training today now that the students are gone. Talking about IQ tests. Expressing my opinions in a meeting about them. Asked what they are, replying they were invented by psychologists to prove how uniquely intelligent they are, since they are measures of verbal and mathematical reasoning and these are both areas that the discipline of psychology deals with whereas almost all other disciplines centre on one or another. Saying it is as pointless as asking for a measure of personality “has Mohammed Ali or Shania Twaine got more personality, expressed as a number.” Talking about emotional intelligence and saying once again, why express it as a number, it is a nonsense. and so on and so forth, though, of course, much more in depth.

Green tea, chicken breast and a pear this morning, not having had time to prepare anything with the kitten needing attention. It has been decreed that he will be sent home today.