And now I talk about the Autism Summer Institute

A good friend of mine was at the Autism Summer Institute at UNH. It was also her birthday close to this, and we don't live particularly near each other. She planned to have a birthday dinner one of the evenings at this conference. She invited me. So I hitched a ride up with another conference goer, and I slept on this friends floor while at the conference. I'm kinda a broke college student, so that's how I saved a decent bit and made going to the conference affordable.
Anyways, from the beginning:
The people I went up with did not realize that events started Monday morning, so they didn't get to school to pick me up until about 12:30pm. (They had planned to be earlier than this, but were running a bit behind schedule.) The strap on my duffel bag broke while I was running out to meet them, which was annoying. On the way up, we stopped at a Subway to eat, since people need food. We got to UNH around 4pm. My friend came down to meet me. She was not speaking at the time, but she is a very fast typist. I mean, I can do 60ish wpm, sometimes more when I'm on a roll. She falls somewhere between 120-180 wpm. That's getting into the range of how fast people TALK. So a laptop was quite handy, but it didn't really interfere with communication. She showed me a chapter from one of the novels she was working on during this time, and we talked about stuff and things and things and stuff. It was pretty fun, though I wish that the stuff that caused her to go non-speaking hadn't happened.
Conference officially stuff ended at 4, but a reception started at 4:30, so around 4:45-5, I went downstairs. I fangirled at a lot of people then. I mean, both co-founders of ASAN were there, and Amy Sequenzia was there, and there were so many awesome people, and yeah. I hung out with some of them, and we had a good time. The conference even put stim toys on the tables. It was pretty awesome. Eventually my friend came down (she was feeling better, and talking was working again by this point.) We discussed food options for dinner, and we went with ordering Chinese delivery. I got Udon noodles for me (yum!) and they even included chopsticks. When the food arrived, we jumped and flapped and shouted YAY over and over. Because we can do that if we want to, and we wanted to. They make the Autism Summer Institute and autistic friendly space, so it was all good. The delivery guy seemed a bit surprised, but we didn't really care.
Post dinner, we watched Wretches and Jabberers, and I assisted a math class since I didn't get the night off. Yay multitasking! After the movie, two of the people who were a big part of making it ran a Q and A session. I headed back up to go to sleep during it, but what I was there for of it was good. We'd see them typing answers to questions a few times later in the conference.
Tuesday morning, I got up, ate my friends leftover rice, and headed down to see Julia Bascoms keynote, which was about  communication and voice, which does not require speaking in the sense we usually think about it. (I fangirled at her too.) And she says my submission is going to be in the Loud Hands anthology. WOOO! Then we had breakout sessions, lunch (more of the leftover rice, since I wasn't about to spend money on conference lunch) and more sessions. I went to the session my friend presented, and then I went back to the room to decompress. Even in an autistic-friendly space, that many people is tiring, and there was still the dinner.
Now dinner. Dinner was interesting. I won't go into too much detail about it just in case someone figures out who the friend is since I don't think she wants loads of details about this, but it was so-so. The autistic people were winful, and the NT friend was pretty cool, but my friends parents are really ableist. They were pretty uncomfortable when I was flapping, and they at least tacitly support the JRC. Which is pretty bad. I helped my friend get through it, and I stuck around while she calmed down after. Post that, parallel play, aka we're all on our computers in the same room, sometimes interacting with each other and sometimes not. T'was good.
Wednesday was more presentations, and I got a free lunch ticket from another friend, so I got conference lunch. Learned a lot, had lots of fun, headed back, stopped at a really slow restaurant on the way, was exhausted when I got back, and fell flat on my face. That is my story.

It went fine.

That telling my adviser what I did all summer went fine. He's happy. He wants me to fix my slides so that they are easier to understand, because communication. But that's really it. (Yes, communicating on topics I only semi-understand is difficult. I don't think that's even an autism thing. I think it's just that it's hard to throw together a presentation on a summers worth of only partially-understood research in a coherent fashion in three hours, even when those three hours are during a time of full energy and not executive function failure.)
But he gave some concrete details on how to fix it, and what further data I should try to get, and we're meeting again on Monday. I've got the weekend to get the data and to fix my presentation. The lab building is locked on the weekend, but the grad students have keys (I'm supposed to ask for one on Monday) and one of them lives close enough to campus that he said I can give him a call and he will let me in tomorrow. Another says she's planning to come in Sunday, and she can call be when she arrives so she can let me in. YAY ways around locked doors. (I did tell them I'm autistic, but I think that they don't believe me/it didn't sink in. I have no idea why. Except I do. I know exactly why it's hard for people to believe. It's because I am too successful to be autistic. There isn't actually such a thing, but people think there is. And I wrote about that, but I've got stuff queued out for about a week right now and you won't see it for a while.)

How my chat with Autism Speaks would probably go

Alyssa: Remember that one time I had oatmeal? That was good.

Autism Speaks: Yeah, but it felt weird in your mouth so you'll never eat it again.

Alyssa: No, that would be eggs. Or yogurt. Oatmeal is fine.

Autism Speaks: It's so sad that you can't eat scrambled eggs.

Alyssa: Not really. Vindaloo is better. Or waffles. I can just not eat plain eggs.

Autism Speaks: Give us money to fix you!

Alyssa: But I'm not broken.

Autism Speaks: So you're not really autistic? Autism is SOOOOO tragic.

Alyssa: Yeah, I'm autistic. I'd just rather live my life than moan about the tragedy I (don't) think I am.

Seriously. On the stuff they are selling at Walmart, they say their mission is to find a cure. Therefore, they want us to be not autistic. And they call autistic people burdens, tragedies, compare us to AIDS, cancer, diabetes, lightning strikes. You know, things that actually kill people. I'm actually toning it down a bit for their end. I know someone who is told to go play in traffic by Autism Speaks supporters for protesting them.

 

Wish me luck?

My adviser is back in the US. He wants to meet with me tomorrow to discuss my results. I don't even know if I succeeded yet, really, because I have not managed to get any of my samples under the TEM. But I have data that suggests I may have, and I guess I will make that data look nice, keep working on getting the samples under the TEM to confirm, and let him know that is my current status. Oh, and worry, because no matter how awesome I feel about probable success, I am still nervous presenting it while it isn't definite. NERVES NERVES NERVES. Because I actually have kinda cruddy self-esteem despite knowing intellectually that I am pretty awesome. And that means I am terrified that what I have isn't going to be good enough and that I'm going to be in trouble or get fired, even though I have never been fired from anything ever, and I even did well working in customer service over the phone, though I did get asked to work on my tone, because, you know, getting tone right automatically+being autistic are not best friends.

Autism Speaks and Walmart

Trigger Warning: Autism Speaks hiding intentions, cure

I know, I know. I'm late to the talk about this. Executive functioning, remember? That is the last thing I talked about. So, here goes:
They are selling school supplies in Walmart. 6% goes to them, and on the packages they list that they are a non-profit devoted to curing autism. On their website, they edited out the part of the package that says that.
Autistic people are up in arms over this. There is a petition on Change.org asking Walmart to stop selling the supplies. They probably won't listen, because hey, it's Walmart, but we can try. (Walmart is evil, last I checked, and while most of the parents who are at lower levels in Autism Speaks have good intentions, I'd be quite happy to call the organization itself evil, so they probably get along great.)

There are critics of Autism Speaks even among those who do want a cure for autism -- whether or not one wants a cure for autism, there is not a cure now, and much of that money could be going to much better activities, such as research on pragmatic topics and issues that affect Autistic people now, or providing services and supports for Autistic children, youth, and adults.

-Autistic Hoya (She does not support a cure or Autism Speaks, just so we're clear.)

And as for me, I don't want a cure in the world we live in today. These are my thoughts on a cure. Basically, if there were to legitimately be no pressure to become neurotypical, if being autistic were actually OK, if it were a choice a person made for themself and only themself,  with informed consent, I doubt there would be many autistics who chose to take a cure, but in that world? If it existed, and they chose it, I would shake their hands and wish them luck. In the world we actually live in, I expect that the cure would be forcibly used on children, would be forcibly used on anyone who receives services, and for any portions of the autistic community who technically were getting it only under informed consent, choosing not to would be used as a sign of incompetence, at which point it would be forced. That means any organization that states finding a cure as a mission is inherently not trusted.
Also, this: Anti-Autism Speaks
Essentially, Autism Speaks is not good for autistic people. They only use autistics who ever did anything cool in their scary numbers and on the occasion that said autistic supports them. If an autistic person dislikes them, they are clearly high functioning. (False, by the way. Here and here are two autistic people who need extensive support and don't speak, but still have major issues with Autism Speaks. Not tokens either. It's pretty common.)
The argument that Autism Speaks qualifies as a hate group isn't that hard to make. I would be quite happy if donating to them carried that same stigma that donating to the KKK carries. They do want to eliminate autism from the gene pool, after all, and I am autistic.Is it surprising that I don't like them?
Given all the issues with Autism Speaks, I think it is safe to say that whatever Walmart might think about what it's doing (they probably think they are doing something great for those less fortunate,) the right thing for them to do would be to take the Autism Speaks school supplies off the shelves. The right thing for parents buying school supplies for their kids to do would be to not buy the Autism Speaks school supplies. If you want to give to an autism charity, give to one that actually helps autistic people, not to Autism Speaks.
So, Walmart. Here's a heads up: I won't be shopping with you until the Autism Speaks supplies are gone from your store. I don't know if I can really afford to do that, but I would rather go without whatever it is I was going to get with you than give money to a corporation that supports Autism Speaks. I encourage everyone who cares about autistic people do make the same boycott if they can afford to.