Time to plant my potatoes any day now, and to harvest some of the chives.

I will make this a happy place.

/pao – 13 may 2012 – 14.55

(I just had to add the category “happiness” after all these years…)

In those cases, going back and re-evaluating what was actually going on back then might be a good idea.  Perhaps the time-line is clear; first there was the amphibians, then there where small rodents and then bigger rodents and then people.  Then suddenly you find yourself with a perfect fossil of a clown riding a bike preserved right next to a fossil of a deinonychus and you have to revise your world view and quite possibly history.  After a war you might have to go back and try to figure out if all that was said and believed was actually true.  It’s easy to get caught up in the heat of the moment.

There is however a difference between going back and revising and denying that something happened at all.  Revising can be both good and bad, depending on how it’s used (as with everything else), but denial of events is rarely a good thing to do.  Actually, I cannot think of a single case when it is.

The thing is, we live in a world nowadays where editing is easy.  I can go into any blog entry I have ever written on this blog and change whatever I like.  Suddenly I can change everything I have written here about my past.  I don’t even have to tell anyone.  Not even leave a single line at the bottom saying : “(Edited: [reason]“.  One can edit forum posts.  On Skype one can edit or even remove lines.  If one edit a message there is an indicator.  Sometimes there is if one removes a message too.  But there is no way to get the original message back.

I use the edit functions primarily to correct typos; both here and on Skype.  Here I also might add a link or two, or italics, but mostly I use it to fix typos.  If I ever change a text in a way that change it’s meaning, I tell people.  I only think that is fair.  I do not think it is very fair to change things and then pretend that it never happened.

However, these functions do seem to appeal to people who do like to pretend mistakes never happen.  Said something stupid on Skype?  Just remove it!  Were wrong on a forum?  Change the post and claim you were right from the start!  Got a lot of people angry for a hateful comment you made somewhere?  Just remove it and pretend it never happened!  Oh, how easy it is; if only life was this easy in the analogue world as well!

Earlier today I spoke to a person on Skype, who decided to “hug” me.  The thing is, I don’t really know him and I dislike being hugged by strangers.  I told him this and he apologised.  But that was apparently not enough for him; he also removed the line where he had “hugged” me.  I told him that this was not at all necessary and that mistakes are allowed as long as someone learns from them.  Then this exchange happened:

(person): But if mistakes can be corrected, why not to?
pao: But removing it doesn’t mean it never happened.
(person): Sure, but it means it got corrected
pao: The past cannot ever be “corrected”.  You did it, and I said it was not all right, and you apologised.  That is the only action that is needed.

This view is beginning to bother me more and more.  If we can just rewrite the past and pretend that we never did anything wrong, how will we be able to learn from our mistakes?  If you deny the past for long enough, people will forget there was even a past there in the first place.  If you pretend that your mistakes never happened, no one else will be able to learn from them either.

In this modern age where history may be edited and revised and altered ad nauseum, or even removed completely with the press of a button or two, I think we will all have to ask ourself that question; why should we not?  Why should we let our mistakes show?  Why should we keep our mistakes in our narrative?  Why should we not just purge all the terrifying history of all our horrible crimes from our lives and pretend it never happened?  Would that not make us happier?  Ignorance is bliss, right?

I don’t think so.  I know some people do, but I don’t.  I think our past teaches us things that should never be forgotten, and that acknowledging this is the only reasonable and responsible thing we can do.  We are all adults.  We can accept that sometimes, we are wrong.  If we really try.  We can look back and say; “Oh my god!  What the epic fuck was I thinking?!”  We can look at our mistakes no matter how horrible they were and learn from them.  Know what we did wrong and in knowing that know that we should not do that again.

If history is removed just because we could not stand having made mistakes, what would we be?  We all make mistakes.  Sometimes terrible mistakes we would rather want to forget.  The least we can do is to acknowledge them and learn from them, no matter how much it hurts.

Tomorrow is a new day, with new history to be written.

/pao – 2 may 2012 – 23.51

Those things may be all sorts of things. Some of them may actually make things feel better. Some of them will make things worse. A lot worse.

And you start to protest. You say something like; “No, I understand metaphors very well, thank you. There is no need to avoid them.” You say something like; “No, seriously, I can eat bread without evolving into a ball of introspection.” You say; “Oh god, please. I have feelings. I promise. When you talk to me as if I was a small child it hurts my feelings.” You say; “No, you can keep the paintings on the wall; it’s the constantly turned on TV that is freaking me out.”

And they look at you, tilting their head slightly, still smiling and say the even worse words:
“No, I know about this. I will make things better. I have read that people like you can’t understand metaphors. I have read that people like you get distracted by having paintings on the wall. I have read that ordinary bread is bad for you. You will feel better soon. You will see. The book was even written by a person with your diagnosis, so it must be right!”

You can rarely talk any sense into people like that; they usually mean so well. They are completely blinded by a desire to help you that they forget that you are a real person. In the real world, real people have real feelings and real personalities. No matter how real the Asperger’s or the autism of the person who write the book is, no matter how confused the author of that book might get by paintings on the walls, the point is that it is how that person reacts. And that is all right. Let hir have white walls with no paintings on them. Or light blue walls. Or bright yellow walls. Whatever makes hir happy. But when I ask my helper where all the paintings went and they say they took them all down because they “read there should not be too many things on the walls because it is confusing for you,” I feel that I don’t even get to have any control of what happen to my surroundings in my name. No one ever asked me. I doubt they asked any one of those frequenting the place. They read about it somewhere, and they decided to “help us out”.

According to people like that, if you have a diagnosis, you are the diagnosis. You lose all right to having personal taste or personality. And you’d better not work in any way different from how they believe people like you should work. In the best case scenario they will just go on ignoring the differences and believe that you are just not yet aware about how they are right and that you will soon see the light. In the worst case scenario, if you don’t fit their ideas of how you should be, they may begin to doubt. If you do not fit into their stereotype they might figure out that you do not really have Asperger’s after all. And then the problem becomes the opposite.

“I cannot do this,” you say. “It makes me panic and stressed out.”
“Of course you can do it! You have arms, don’t you? Stop freaking out, it’s not difficult. Stop it. There is really nothing wrong with you. You can do it if you want to. It will be good for you!”

In both cases, you are not a real person to them. They think that you are just making things up. Because you do not really know yourself or what would be good for you or not. But they think they know.

They read a book someone with something in common with you wrote once.

/pao – 15 mar 2012 – 14.40

Ignoring for a minute that I feel that this person tries to shift the blame to the people who were kind enough to let them use their place and helped them with printouts and stuff, I feel that there are two things that bother me about the defense; “It would take only a few minutes to fix, in situations like these.

First of all, it adds insult to injury: not only did Person A let Person B use Person A’s stuff, but afterwards Person A is also expected by Person B to tidy things up.  If this is agreed upon in advance, it’s fine but for Person B to seemingly take this for granted shows a disrespect for other people’s places and property, not to mention a disrespect for Person A and hir time.

The second thing is that when Person B points out that it’s actually a rather trivial and small thing to fix afterwards, it makes it even more obvious that there is a lack of respect for Person A there.  If Person B cannot even do this thing to tidy up – this thing that takes just five minutes according to Person B’s own estimate! – as a sign of respect and thanks something is clearly wrong.

In my eyes, if someone lets some group of people borrow a place and property it is only polite and common sense to take as good care of it as humanly possible and make sure things are tidy and in order after one leaves.  To take responsibility for it and treat it with respect and caution.

I can’t understand why things like this happens more than two times.  If someone did this more than one time to me, I would lock the door and never let a group like that in ever again.

/pao – 15 mar 2012 – 14.18

I thought I should put up some photos here.

Home is where the hat is.

Home is also where the collar and soft-toys are.

Frost on the window.

From up here, one can almost feel space.

How tiny we are. How small this planet is.

Tininess.

There will be more written here later.  Spring has arrived, and I am busy nesting and planting things.

I am quite happy.

/pao – 3 mar 2012 – 14.09

For being my first, real try to make a serious 3D object, I think it ended up fairly great.

/pao – 10 feb 2012 – 03.28

Wow.

Also, she read me a book.  She does not have real Swedish words yet, but she was sitting down, pointing and making sounds at me.  She read me the book, and then she started reading it again backwards.  And then she read it to me upside down.  It was really communication.

I played her the kyrie on the recorder.  I played a bit, and when I tried to stop she grabbed the recorder and put it back against my lips.

She was rather silent.  I’m still exhausted now, but not at all as much as I thought I would be.

/pao – 19 jan 2012 – 23.17

/Pao

make room for new things
and old things reborn
make room to grow
throw out impossible dreams
in the face of
unrelenting reality
and keep the dreams
that do not harm