Mental health issues

I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome at age 40.  It explained a few things about me.  One "glitch" that I have is that when people ask me a question I'm often slow to answer.  I wish they'd be more patient and repeat the question, because it isn't my intention to look like I'm ignoring them!

I follow a few Facebook groups for Aspies like me.  They recently had a thread discussing driving.  Some of us have never learned to drive, including me.  Driving scares me:  it's huge responsibility, considering all the dangerous mistakes that are easy to make!  I'm just glad that now I live in Toronto, a city with a good mass transit system--for the little money our governments spend on it!--so you don't need a car so much.

School isn't so fun for Aspies like me.  If other kids are nasty toward you because you're handicapped or an ethnic minority, you it isn't your fault.  But if it's because you're eccentric and thin-skinned, it's all too convenient to view you as the weak link.

My sister doesn't think I have Aspergers--she says that she's met several people who clearly have it and I'm not like them.  I respect her judgement. (Maybe I'm a marginal case...)

Flatulence

I remember the graffiti in some of my school textbooks.  One book had the title Language Arts, so of course someone changed it to "Language Farts." (That's about the first time I heard that word.  A little while later I heard my brother refer to the movie Hearts of the West as "farts of the west"!) In one book someone wrote on the front page, "In case of fire turn to page 37" (or some number like that) and on page 37 he wrote "I said in case of fire, fag!" Someone wrote in another book, "In case of fire, throw in!" And they drew moustaches and beards on the people in the history textbooks too.

For a while I was with a job-training group for people like me with Asperger's Syndrome.  We didn't quite click--they were micromanagers.  On one occasion I farted and my supervisor said, "James, that was not appropriate." I had a blue-collar friend I met at karaoke and when I told him about it he said, "When ya gotta go, ya gotta go!"

You know the expression "Read my lips"? Apparently the way it started was that young men in New York City would fart and say "Read my lips!"

Of course, the western spoof Blazing Saddles has a famous scene where cowboys eat beans and fart.  And there was this movie A Single Man where redhead Julianne Moore says, "When I stand on my head, I'm a brunette with bad breath!"

Steve Martin once said in his stand-up routine, "If someone says to you 'Mind if I smoke?" answer 'No, mind if I fart?'" Actually, when a smoker is considerate enough to request my consent I give him a break!

Cops and Robbers

I've seen some movies about cops and robbers.  One of them is Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, about a group of jewelry store robbers whose heist turned violent, and is one of them an informer?  The robbers all have code names like Mr. White and Mr. Orange.  There's a lot of great dialogue, like "You have to have rocks in your head the size of Gibraltar to be an undercover cop!" Steve Buscemi has a funny role as Mr. Pink.  In the first scene everyone is chipping in a dollar for the waitress' tip, but he puts up a fuss because he doesn't believe in tipping!  As for waitresses depending on tips to get by, he says, "Let 'em learn to type!"

Another cops & robbers movie is Michael Mann's Heat, with Robert de Niro as a bank robber and Al Pacino as the cop who's out to nail him. (Pacino played a bank robber in Dog Day Afternoon.) De Niro's young partner Val Kilmer is married to Ashley Judd, who has a powerful scene near the end, but I can't describe it without spoiling the movie!  I liked the scene where Pacino finds his wife with her lover and tells him, "You can ball my wife, but you can't watch my TV set!" Then he unplugs the set and lugs it out.

Buscemi played a character similar to Mr. Pink in Fargo. And Pacino played a cop similar to his Heat character in Insomnia.

And there's John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle from 1950.  There's a good moment near the end where one of the crooks is being taken to his cell, past the cell containing the guy who ratted them out, and lunges out at him in sheer rage!

Your last day ever

What will I do on my last day?  I like to think that I'll still be learning things even then.  Maybe I'll be writing a final post for my blog!  Maybe I'll still be playing Candy Crush Saga!  I like to imagine life ending in medias res.

St. Ignatius Loyola created the Jesuit order.  On one occasion he was playing a ball game with his seminary pupils.  He asked them, "What would you do if you found out that the earth was going to be destroyed in one hour?" They all said they'd go to the chapel and pray fervently, but Loyola said, "I'd finish this ball game."

Prisoners who are about to get executed get a last meal. When Bill Clinton was running for President in 1992, on the eve of the crucial New Hampshire primary he ordered the execution of a prisoner so brain-damaged that he put aside part of his last meal to eat later!  So cynical...

If they were going to execute me but gave me the choice of how to go, I'd choose a firing squad because they work quickly.  Lethal injection is the last thing I'd choose! (It's something Don Draper invented.)

Rain

I like misty rain.  And I like spotting rainbows:  if you're lucky you can spot a second one outside the first. I've also managed to make a rainbow with a garden hose. (You need a nozzle that can turn the outflow into a mist.) I was on a plane once and outside the window I saw the plane's shadow on a cloud bank, surrounded by half a dozen concentric rainbows.

W. Somerset Maugham wrote the story "Rain," set on a Pacific Island, where fugitive whore Sadie Thompson gets confronted by judgmental missionary Alfred Davidson. When I was researching my Ph.D. thesis about the western Chinese treaty port of Chongqing, I read a bit about Maugham, who visited the place and included a famous description of the city in his story collection On a Chinese Screen.  Someone pointed out that Chongqing had a Quaker missionary called Alfred Davidson! (Coincidence?)

There's a classic movie of Rain, directed by Lewis Milestone, with Joan Crawford as Sadie and the great Walter Huston as Davidson!  There's also a silent version with Gloria Swanson and a '50s remake with Rita Hayworth.  And Sonny and Cher had a running spoof of Rain on their '70s variety show.  Cher played Sadie in Mae West style, with her backside making a bass drum noise. (You had to be there...) Does anyone else remember this?

Fairy tales

Fairy tales often get a bad rap these days.  Thanks to the Disney factory, people think they're all about bland "happily ever after" endings.  But that really isn't fair.  Some of them are remarkably nasty:  there's one story that ends with the Evil Stepmother being rolled down a hill in a barrel lined with spikes on the inside! (Real-life stepmothers don't like evil stepmother characters, but that's really a roman a clef version of the Evil Mother.) And who doesn't remember being scared by the story of Hansel and Gretel?

And then there's Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote a wide range of children's stories, from funny to very sad.  He wasn't afraid of tragic endings. ("The Little Match Girl" is brutally realistic.) Incredibly, the Disney version of his "The Little Mermaid" has a more conventional "fairy tale" ending than the original fairy tale.  If you ask me, the only part of that movie that really does the story justice is the melody of her voice trapped in the bottle!

Some middle-class parents think that children shouldn't be exposed to stories with too much sorrow and cruelty.  Then they wonder why their kids aren't ready for real life! J.K. Rowling has said that we keep underestimating children.  Bruno Bettelheim wrote The Uses of Enchantment, a book about the psychological importance of children's stories.

By the way, I don't like children's books where animals wear human clothes!

Waste

Henry Miller said that the American sin is waste.  He got that right!  In the Clint Eastwood western Unforgiven there's a scene where Richard Harris is travelling on a train and shoots birds just to prove his marksmanship. (That isn't like shooting birds so you can eat them!) 

On the American frontier before the big buffalo herds got killed off, some men would came out by train and shoot into a herd and didn't even take the hides--they just wanted the macho thrill of killing a large animal. (I just saw a photo of a hunter next to a giraffe he'd shot, which isn't like shooting a lion!)

But the worst of all wastes is time.  It's possible to make more money than you can spend, but our available time is always limited.  Gambling is something I've never gone in for--if you lose you look like a fool, and even if you win it's a bit like stealing.  But my real hangup with gambling is that  it's a sheer waste of time!

In recent years I've taken to napping in the afternoon. (Since my mother's death, I've become more like her!) I guess that's wasting time.  I also waste time on the computer game Candy Crush Saga.  But right now my favourite time-waster is Twitter, where I get into lots of quarrels.  Whenever someone I'm quarrelling with resorts to obscenities I say, "The first one who cusses, loses."

Shoes

My shoe size is 8 1/2. (Fellini shoes!) Which means I sometimes have trouble finding a new pair, many shoes being available only in whole numbers!  I like those gadgets in shoe stores where the salesman can set down while measuring a customer's foot. (They've always seemed nifty to me.)

I wonder who invented high-heeled shoes?  It must have been someone who hated women! (They say the thing about high heels is that they help a woman do a sexy walk Marilyn Monroe-style.) I guess it's no worse than in China where girls had to undergo foot-binding because men wanted a wife with deformed feet.  I once saw a documentary where an old Chinese peasant man who reminded me of Li'l Abner's Pappy said, "In the old days it was easy to win an argument with a woman.  All you had to do was step on her feet." That tells you everything...

When I was writing my Ph.D. thesis about British people in China, one of the people I read about was Alicia Little, merchant's wife and travel writer, who was instrumental in starting China's anti-footbinding movement!

I like that time of year in March or so when I stop wearing my winter boots and go back to regular shoes.  My feet feel fairy-light!  I think March is my favorite time of year. (I used to prefer April, but as I get older I prefer the very start of the warmer weather.) People who live in the tropics don't know the recurring joy of spring, let alone of March.

Jail

I've never been in jail. (But I'm young yet...)

When I was little my family sailed to England on the ocean liner Arkadia.  During the trip, my sister staged a mass jailbreak from the playroom! The German governess was not amused.

When Alfred Hitchcock was a little boy, his father sent him to the police station with a note.  A policeman read the note and locked young Alfred in a jail cell for half an hour.  When he let him out, he told him, "That's what we do with bad boys!"

Ever see Burt Lancaster in The Bird Man of Alcatraz?  He plays a murderous sociopath who finds redemption by getting to know the birds that fly into the prison yard, eventually writing a book about bird pathology. (He seems to have Asperger's Syndrome like me.) Today it would be rare to see a star playing a fairly unsympathetic character like that.