May 3, Houston: The big one -- the Inprint reading -- occurs at the Alley Theatre on Monday, May 3. Do not miss it or you'll be sorry. I'm not kidding -- I'm going to say the craziest, most intellectual yet hilarious stuff I can think of, and I'll be sharing the stage with the ultra sexy Oscar Casares, too.
June 24, Houston: I'm one of the peeps scheduled to read at Poison Pen, at Houston's famous Poison Girl bar. Besides me, everyone there will be ultra, *super* sexy. Come see me and drink!
June 26, Washington, DC: I'll be reading at the American Library Association conference. Come on down.
My other blog: Go read my the Houston Chronicle parenting blog (or my ChronMomBlog, as I like to call it) and make sure my kids won't resent me more than other kids resent their own parents.
Buy my new novel, Lone Star Legend. Already did? Well, buy a few more for your friends, then. :)
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
linkelodeon!Project Runway's Jay is super candid, and that's why I love him.
If you don't know who Julia Allison is, it'll be hard for me to explain this, but I'll try. She's a Star editor and supposed dating columnist, yeah, and a person Jakob Lodowick dated, and someone they can't stop ridiculing on Gawker. But mainly she's a woman who blogs about herself constantly (with photos). So... someone brilliant wrote a blog about her blog.
Dr. Bukkake gives facials. As far as we can tell, this is not a joke. If you don't get the joke, that's probably for the best. (What can I say? I'm not very ladylike.)
This woman does pretty things.
subcategorized linkelodeon, with tangents, form of: Asperger's Syndrome!
As mentioned before, every time I see a fictional character who I suspect suffers from Aspergers (whether the person portraying that character realizes it or not), I google [character's name] + "aspergers" to see if anyone else thought so, too.
Last week we watched the best-of-Chris-Farley ep of SNL, and it occurred to me that Chris's talk show interviewer character has AS. Here's a transcript of one of those skits. So, I thought maybe Chris was unwittingly imitating someone with Aspergers when he played that popular character. So I googled.
Instead, I found out that Dan Ackroyd was diagnosed with AS as a teenager.
"People Speculated to Have Been Autistic." Is this my Asperger's obsession? No. My boyfriend says mine is pulling dandelions, because it takes effort for me to pass one without removing it from the ground, preferably with root intact. I say, "That's not Asperger's -- that's a valuable service to the community." *
My Aspie son's current obsession: found numbers. Meaning numbers he "finds" on digital clocks and license plates. He talks to me about that for a good fifteen minutes per week. I just listen, and sometimes ask wry questions, but I don't try to discourage him. I don't think there's any wrong with an obsession that hurts no one.
Shirley Dent says "Don't diagnose fictional characters." Oops. Sorry, Shirley. No, wait -- apology retracted. I'll diagnose whichever characters I want. I'll look for stories in which people (autistics, lesbians, latinos, bulimics, cutters, Kinsey Temperament Sorter Margaret Thatchers, crochet enthusiasts, inverted narcissists, and even people just like me) might exist as whatever I need them to be. Including the protagonists, the heroes, and the most empathetic characters in the story.
Let a person pay his $15 for a book and then diagnose (empathize, mis-identify, fantasize) away. Because people are compelled to do this whether they've studied revisionist literary criticism or not. Readers need to be able to identify with mainstream fictional characters. Isn't that one of the basic reasons that art exists?(Personally, I don't see Austen's Darcy as an Aspie. But, hey, wouldn't it be nice if someone wrote a really awesome book in which my son was the romantic hero of the century? Of course.)
Aspergers and Xena, Warrior Princess and Albert Einstein and Jar Jar Binks. And sex.
* I was gonna put in a disclaimer, clarifying for new readers that this was a joke because I've never been diagnosed with AS, but that my son has. FYI. But then I thought, "Why?" 3:34 PM #
Comments:
Pulling dandelions IS a valuable community service! You know I live nowhere near you but I appreciate your efforts because I'm allergic. [creepy obsession] I have a weed-pulling gizmo that allows me to yank them out and sometimes the roots are a foot long. [/creepy obsession]My niece (with an ASD diagnosis) also enjoys the numbers she finds on digital clocks and licence plates! She's only six and has slightly limited verbal abilities so she can't pontificate about them but she does notice and read them out. She is amused by the fact that the digital displays on my stove and microwave are not in sync. They're stacked one above the other in my kitchen. At her house they are on opposite kitchen walls so if they're out of sync it doesn't seem to matter so much.
- maggie
# posted by
: 7:56 PM
I hate to spoil the party, but it looks like Dr Bukkake's website is fake. I clicked on one of his papers [PDF]. It had an ISBN number of 1-932126-81-3, and searching Google for that led to what is presumably the real paper [PDF], on the World Bank website, authored by Cecily Stewart Ray, with Prakash Gupta and Joy de Beyer.
P.S. I'm submitting this anonymously because I am a wuss who does not want to risk his name being associated with "bukkake" in Google searches forever.
# posted by
: 6:56 PM
I'm afraid to even click on "Dr. Bukkake gives facials."
I agree! I think we as readers and viewers can analyze and diagnose characters. That's the beauty of appreciating the art that's created for our entertainment.
# posted by
ShoeGirl : 12:34 AM
....."found numbers"..... I also find numbers!
I "find" 1234 all over the place.
There have been hundreds, maybe thousands of times that I have suddenly opened my eyes from a dead sleep and the clock show 12:34, or glance at my wristwatch to see 12:34, or people ask me what time it is and it's 12:34.
Then there are the grouping of objects in 1234 patterns.
Another weird found number example...
We used to live in Arkansas, double wide trailer, dirt road, out in the boonies. The telco instituted 911 service and therefore all houses were required to have numbers displayed.
Prior to that we only had the RR box number on the roadside mailbox.
We bought some cheap peel and stick numbers, used what we needed and the rest were thrown in a drawer to be forgotten.
Fast forward about 5 years.
Moved back to Ohio. Bought a house.
Hundreds of boxes stacked into the attached garage awaiting unpacking.
The very first box grabbed and opened to unpack had the leftover package of numbers right on the very top.
The sheet of numbers displayed in the little clear window contained only the numbers 890.
Our new address was 890.
I was completely blown away and everyone else was ... meh.....
I completely understand your son having a thing for numbers and it is great that you try to listen and seem interested.
It's hard to explain but sometimes numbers seem as exciting to me as finding an intact Egyptian tomb in the middle of New York city would be to an archaeologist.
Mike in Ohio
# posted by
еdë §téè£ : 10:41 AM
I just finished reading Keeper and Kid by Edward Hardy and spent the whole time waiting for them to dx the kiddo in question with ASD. (Both of my kids are on the autism spectrum so I tend to see it everywhere.)
# posted by
greeblygreebly : 2:43 PM
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