Flagship Orientation Reactions

So I just found the notes I took during Orientation in Washington DC for my Chinese study abroad program that I'm on now. Heads up that a lot of it is me being right on the edge of meltdown because a lot of the things they were suggesting as methods were things where, um, if I could do the thing up to neurotypical standards I'd not have been getting into trouble because of “poor social skills” as a kid ever. Which is a thing that happened. When it wasn't that, it tended to be things like me not even getting into the conversation enough to show off my funky social skills because of same social issues.

So there were a lot of “if I could do that, we wouldn't be having this problem” kind of reactions, and there were a lot of “well, that's not going to be accessible to me...” kind of reactions.

By the time I was typing the bottom stuff, I was actually visibly crying. I know this because our Residence Director asked if I needed to leave and if I wanted to talk and then when I followed her outside she handed me a tissue. And I was also incapable of speaking. English, anyways. If the cause of my losing speech happens in a completely English-speaking environment and it's because of a thing that was languaged at me, I can apparently still speak Chinese fine. Unfortunately, those requirements tend to mean the ability to speak Chinese doesn't help much, but in this case it was a useful skill to retain.

Anyways, here's the notes. And it turned out putting things on walls is not allowed, and so I am sad.

Yeah looks like a lot of this is going to be “how do you need to change the expectations so I can function as an Autistic adult.”

phone on? Selective mutism. TEXT ME.

Inappropriate offensive or risky behavior- OK, this is super-vague and therefore scary because inappropriate is the word that people like to use for freaking HAND-FLAPPING. And because “offensive” goes right next to “inappropriate” as words that are used as the key words behind “Don't be Autistic.” I need a real description.

Ok, “communicate with people so that unintentional rudeness is less of a thing” is decent advice. Vague and all, but it's a good thing to do. [Though, um, unintentional is kind of a key word here, in that it's an accident by definition? Hi words. But I get the meaning, and it's a good goal.]

Example LUR is totally cognitively inaccessible to me, I understand wanting to know how I'm using the language but asking me to answer that sort of question set is going to take up all the energy I have and mess with my ability to do the actual work because those questions mostly give me “What is this even asking for?” reactions. The rest give me “My brain has just gone completely blank” reactions, which isn't much better.

[Oh god oh god are they going to expect that I can make small talk in Chinese? Nooooo I can't even do that properly in English. Culture references? HELP I CAN'T CULTURE REFERENCE.]

Mid-program and end-of-program OPI are going to be the real-people ones, not the computer ones, right? [Also, I'm going to need to take it in a space large enough for me to pace, on a speaker phone.]

Reactions to foreigner speaking Chinese. We want to get past “honored foreigner” and be a friend, classmate, etc.

OK, proper decorum is likely to get me into even more trouble in China than I do here. “American's are more tolerant of idiosyncrasy” means “I'm DOOMED” considering that I'm too far out there for freaking America.

“Certain things” and what you do and don't express gratitude for. So what's the thing? Same with apology. Specifics please? OK also body language. UH-OH. “Was it sincere or not?” NO. INSERT INTERNAL CURSING HERE. BAD. “elementary you're supposed to know these things already”? NO TRY BODY LANGUAGE IS EVIL AND HORRIBLE THAT'S NOT A THING I CAN DO INTENTIONALLY. I'M NOT GOING TO HAVE THE ABILITY TO MAKE IT THROUGH THE DAY IF I SPEND MY ENERGY ON THAT.

I can take notes at least a little bit typing [Yeah you can tell because these are notes] but I can't do it by handwriting really at all.

WOOT words. I like knowing more words. [Wait, people don't usually have words as their big things through the intermediate language level?]

Talking about how each discourse has its rules and which words you use and you stay in that discourse frame. I mean, I'm actually writing for academia about how calls for submissions that claim to be including people outside of academia need to be written in ways that laypeople can understand, which is relevant to that question. [And part of my thing is that dagnabbit my chapter will be accessible.]

Ooh double standards! Professors may toss in a random English word and that's OK but we foreigners aren't supposed to. I can kind of understand it though. It's kind of like if English is your first language you can get away with a lot more messing with syntax than a student of English can.

Yay for taking charge. If I get to be taking charge than I can maybe drag people along the lines I can actually use.

Oh god “didn't communicate the right set of emotions.” Yeah this is actually really triggery.

NOOOOOOO. BAD. Key to executive function? Oh wait that's one of my big issues. Well, at least Kassiane's Autistifying Habitats thing can help me as long as I'm allowed to put stuff on walls. Otherwise... I might be about to be sad.

The small c cultural elements in stuff are important. Even proficient non-native speakers can interpret stuff differently from native speakers because of that.

Ah crud they national security thing does a “putting the pieces together” graphic. Yeah this isn't a day filled with autism-ick images and words coming back in other contexts at allllll /sarcasm

Adventures in Explaining to People who Know They Don't Know

These are the best adventures in explaining, really. Not joking. People who think they know how things work will argue with basically everything I say, which makes it so much harder. It's especially harder if I'm still partially shut down, which totally happens. I was still in partial shutdown when I explained what happened at the museum, actually, but because no one was going "that can't be!" and "autism doesn't work like that!" at me as I tried to explain what happened, I was still able to mostly do it.
So what happened starts with sensory overload. This should not be surprising to anyone who knows me well, since my sensory processing issues are the most annoying issues I've got. I'm pretty much OK with the language issues as long as I'm allowed to write or type.
See, the museum was mostly marble, which reflects sound quite effectively. This led to a major case of The Sads, because it was loud and I couldn't really understand what the teachers were saying to me over it.
At least, I think that was how it started being bad. I got a vague sense of something not right when we were on the second floor (we started from the bottom and were working our way up.) On the third floor, the entrance to the exhibit hall had sounds that were bad, and I'm pretty sure that's how speech went kaput. Definitely a sensory overload issue. Then I hit the point where it took concentration to read the English captions on the art and artifacts, which, um, that's a bad sign. I'm pretty sure it's a bad sign when someone who lives by the written word as much as I do finds reading to no longer be automatic. I guess my body language was making it pretty clear that I was in distress (hi what is knowing what my body language means to neurotypicals I have no clue) so one of the teachers asked me if I was OK. I flapped for a bit trying to get words, then pulled out my notebook and started writing once I figured out that speech was not happening. Meh. Figuring out that speech is not happening is useful, because it means I can start writing instead, but it's kind of frustrating too, because I can talk faster than I can write.
I let her know that I was overloaded as best I could. [I don't know how to write all the relevant words in Chinese. I should fix that.] And then I went home and crashed. A few hours later, I had a meeting with the academic director, who had also been at the museum with us. She knew that I'd had a problem and left, but not entirely why. So she wanted to talk to me a bit about that in addition to the official reason for the meeting, which was about an independent study.
Yeah. So "I'm not always aware that I'm overloaded until I try to talk and discover that I can't" is one of those statements where I expect to get challenged. It's true, but I expect to get challenged, because it's not something people tend to understand. She asked a couple questions to try to understand, but there's a difference between "I don't believe you" questions and "I'm a bit confused, can you explain?" questions. Her questions were quite firmy in the second type, which tends to bring out the infodumps. It's hard to explain exactly how my body awareness (and emotion awareness) issues work, but I can toss out examples. I think the two issues are related, and I told her that too. The response to my saying I think the problems are related was that she thinks that makes sense. Really. This is a reaction I can work with. It's not the reaction I expected (I expect the worst,) but I'm glad that it's not. Flagship has been pretty consistently doing better than I expected of them as far as autism stuff goes.
Of course, it probably helps that I didn't explain much until after they'd already paid for the plane tickets and tuition and such. The longer you wait, the harder it is to discriminate based on disability without making it obvious that that's what you're doing. It's also harder to accommodate properly, so it's a trade-off. But they're actually doing a really good job at the whole accommodating thing. I'm seriously impressed.

Humorous Dialogue

This is an old dialogue a friend and I did in class. I think it was 10th grade that we did it. The translations into English are as I go through it now, though. A is me, D is him, (random person on the street) was another classmate we grabbed for that purpose. 
Oh, and please suspend disbelief. The events of the dialogue are meant to be bizarre, not realistic.

A: 你好。 (Hi.)

D: 你好。 (Hi.)

A: 你好吗？ (How are you?)

D: 好，你呢？ (Good, you?)

A: 好 ，可是我有问题 。我赢了两张歌剧票。 (Good. But I have a problem. I won two opera tickets.)

D: 那太好了！你跟谁去？ (That's great! Who are you going with?)

A: 我不知道 。 (I don't know.)

D: 你有什么问题？ (What's the problem?)

A: . . . 你有没有护照？ (. . . Do you have a passport?)

D: 有。 为什么？ (Yeah. Why?)

A: 下个周末你想去北京看《猴王》吗？ (Do you want to go to Beijing to see "The Monkey King" next weekend?"

D: 歌剧在北京！那是你的问题吗？ (The opera is in Beijing! Is that your problem?)

A: 对。我有护照， 可是我没有签证。(Yup. I've got a passport, but not a visa.)

D: 你有问题。(You've got a problem.)


下个周末，在北京 (The next weekend, in Beijing.)


D: 我们在哪儿？ (Where are we?)

A: 我不知道。我是美国人！ (I don't know. I'm an American!)

D: 安静。我也是美国人。 (Shut up, I'm American too.)
怎么去北京歌剧？(How do we get to the opera?)

A: 我不知道！ (I don't know!)

D: 我没问你！ 我问了他。请问，怎么去北京歌剧？  (I wasn't asking you! I was asking him. Excuse me, how do we get to the Beijing opera?)

random person on street: 就到了， 你看！ (You're at it- look!)

D: 哎！谢谢！(Oh! Thanks!)

same random person:  别客气！(Don't mention it!)


看歌剧以后 (After the opera)

D: 《猴王》很好！("The Monkey King" was really good!)

A: 我同意。我们回家把。 (I agree. Let's go home.)

D: 怎么去机场？(Where's the airport)

A: 我不知道！ (I don't know!)

D: 你为什么不带地图？ (Why didn't you bring a map?)

A: 我不会看地图因为地图是中国的地图！ (I can't read it map because they're Chinese maps!)

D: 带美国地图把！ (Get an American one!) [I meant to write English, as in language, but, well, language students mess stuff up sometimes.]

A: 我们不在美国， 在中国。(We're not in America, we're in China.)

Preparation For China

This is a post about getting ready for China, and educational systems. In this case, it's higher education, though college is doing much better than high school or middle school ever did. [That doesn't mean they are perfect, just that they are better.]

I'm in the Flagship program, which means I have a Capstone year, which means I spend an academic year in China. The first semester I take classes, both morning Chinese language classes and one or two direct enrollment classes. The second semester, I continue taking Chinese language classes and I have an internship. If time allows, I can take another direct enrollment course. Direct enrollment means I'm in the classroom with other Chinese students, taking the same classes they do, conducted in Chinese. It's a bit of a parallel to inclusive education, though it's not a matter of special education or disability. It's a matter of language skill that most exchange students from the USA to China are in separate classes, but it's hard to get the language skill needed to take the classes without actually doing it. So we jump in a bit unprepared- it's not as if we've been doing it the whole way from elementary school or speaking the language at home like our classmates have.

I'm aiming to take Graph Theory, or 图论, and some engineering class. I don't know what the engineering class will be because Tianjin Normal University doesn't actually have engineering and I will have to go elsewhere in town. My professors are looking, and I think they will find it, but it's frustrating to know that once again, what I need doesn't actually exist at the place I am, and I will have to do extra work just to get into the classes I need. [This happened in high school, my senior year, too. I wound up taking online math classes through Stanford in order to graduate, and I took the final exams for those classes in my high school's office. That was an issue of being advanced, though, not of the program failing to exist where I was.]

The not having engineering is the thing I'm talking about. The program I belong in? Doesn't really exist where I am. But. My college is behind me, and they are actually doing a lot of the extra work involved in finding it for me anyways, wherever it is. Tianjin is a big enough city, and there are enough other universities there that they've already found some options. That's the key. They're putting in the effort to find what I need. It's summer, and my advisers are getting back to me about things within a couple hours on weekends to make everything work. I care a lot more about the fact that they're putting in the work, listening to what I say I need and trying to make it happen, than I do about the fact that it didn't initially exist. They're assuming I know what I need, and they're listening and making it happen. That's the general wide-sweeping picture of what inclusion and accommodation should belooking like in college; it's just applying it to a different person in a presumably different situation.

Echolalia Gets Me Pickles: Autistic Playing Ultimate

I'm Autistic. I'm in college. I play on my college Ultimate Frisbee team.
I don't pass for neurotypical, either. I'm not consistently capable of speech, and Ultimate is a sport where we're typically expected to be talking to our teammates. The team knows that I will do this if I am capable, but that this is a bit of an if. And that's OK. It took some time for them to figure out that I really do understand when I should say a thing and what I should say, I'm just not always capable of doing so (it took until I managed to explain this, which it doesn't occur to me to do except right after this happens- you know, while I'm probably still not able to speak? There's a bit of a catch-22 there, but I did manage to explain eventually, after I started bringing my iPad to tournaments.) But once I explained that? That was it.

Or the fact that I'm not always going to be particularly social, that parties for "team bonding" can be overwhelming? The captains agreed to send me an email or tell me at practice later if anything important was announced at a party that I hadn't been able to go to, had left early, or had gone to sleep under a table early. (Yes, I did that my freshman year. The party plan had been to bring everyone to the captain's house, party, and stay over before the tournament in the morning, and I was the first one asleep by a long shot. And that was OK too.)

Or, back during a week full of tests where I was also dealing with some cyber harassment issues (not related to the team,) and then at practice we were supposed to do a thing that I'm just not capable of. I kept trying, though, because "I can't do this" isn't a thing I'm supposed to have to say... ever. I'm not really autistic, after all... (That's completely false, by the way, I'm Autistic and pretty obviously so. It's just an internal monologue that gets installed in every autistic person who accomplishes things. If you're not a pity case, you just need to stop pretending to have problems, or something like that, it's the functioning labels false binary again, and ableism is to blame for both sides of it.) My continued attempts to keep doing a thing that I can't actually do, combined with old bullying (again, not with this team) coming back to haunt me, plus having been under a lot of stress all week, meant that I melted down at practice. I had enough warning that I found a semi-hidden corner behind a hurdle and next to one of the structural columns, and then welcome to meltdown-land. Both captains came over, asked me if I was OK (no) and if there was anything they could do (back off, ask again when I'm done flipping out,) and then actually did what I'd said. They checked in with me later, I let them know what all was up. They told me that if there is a thing that I really don't have the motor skills to do, I should do what I can and not worry about dropping out of the activity, which I've been working on. Oh, and I proceeded to melt down again after practice because I'm always scared of reactions and I was convinced it was only a matter of time until the other shoe dropped and they kicked me off the team.

A couple practices later, they wanted to talk to me after practice. I was convinced that was going to be the "you can't be on this team" or some such thing. Nope. It was a "Spring Break is going to have this set of things that we think could be difficult for you, these are some things we can think of that we may be able to do to help, and it's up to you to figure out anything else to run by us/anything else you can prepare for yourself/if you're better off skipping, let us know if there are other things we can do to help" talk. That's the one where I told them that I'm Autistic. Our coach already knew that I had some sort of disability, but I don't think he'd known exactly what it was.

I went on Spring Break with the team. It was good. I didn't do all that much social stuff with the team outside of the actual tournament games, and I sometimes went off to the side on my own when the rest of the girl's team watched the boys team play, but it went fine. Spring Break is when echolalia got me pickles, too.

See, we were in Florida, at the Tally Classic tournament. They had an unopened jar of pickles at the food tent (tournaments often supply food to participating teams.) And I saw them. And I was all "There are pickles! Because pickles! Pickles pickles pickles pickles..." jumping and flapping. I was acting very stereotypically Autistic. They hadn't been planning to open the jar for another hour or so, but they did, right then, and gave me a PICKLE. I like pickles. I walked back to my sideline singing "pickle pickle pickle pickle..." to myself, eating my PICKLE. So yes. Echolalia got me a PICKLE.
Early in the season, I had used my iPad to type when I lost speech at practice and still wanted to go for dinner/ice cream with my team mates. Later in the season (en route to Sectionals) I joked "My autism's showing, don't let it run away!" and people laughed. At sectionals, I used the iPad in front of the whole team- after the games, we went around and said a thing that we thought the team did well, a think we thought we did well, and a thing we thought we needed to work on. That was three separate circles around for three different open-ended questions of the sort that I have trouble with. For the first, I was able to type and then read my answer, but for the second two I wound up passing my iPad over to a teammate to have her read what I'd typed. And no one had an issue with it. My team did well at "Autistic person on the team" and the whole "Autistic adult is an adult," and it was good. So yeah.

I think that "Echolalia gets me pickles" being the biggest thing that sticks out in my mind from the season says good things about the team.

This is in the Down Wit Dat August 2014 Blog Hop, BTW. The theme is about how disabilities and such are a natural part of life.

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.

Ugh. China. Why?

China just gave two of their companies a monopoly on internet telephony by making it illegal to use anyone else's service for that. One effect is that skype is now illegal there, so far as I can tell. They have quite the tendency to block out foreign products and make people use Chinese versions there. (ex: yes, facebook, twitter, and youtube are all blocked in China, but there are Chinese equivalents that aren't blocked for all of them. Google recently got out of China under pressure, and Baidu, the Chinese equivalent, has essentially no competition anymore.) So, China has a lot of protectionist policies, and it seems to like cutting itself off from the world some. It's kind of annoying, since I study Chinese, have been there three times, and will be going again for a year. And, you know, this blog is based on google stuff? Blogspot is a google product. So I'll have to sharpen my getting to blocked sites skills, I suspect. I can understand what they're trying to do- they want to help their economy, and they want to keep people on sites they can censor themselves if need be. Also, this is China. China has a history of isolating itself. Not news. But it's still annoying.

I'm back and jet-lagged.

I am back. I am jet-lagged. I woke up around 3 this morning. Yay! Anyways, stuff I am planning to write about soon:
1) I'm going to examine exactly what is wrong with the ``I am Autism" video, line by line, because that video is so bad that it still deserves is this much later. Also, Autism Speaks never apologized for it.
2) The couple that caged their autistic boys was found not guilty on all charges. Dear World: WHY? HOW? WHAT?
3) Oh, hey. There is an article in the UK finding that somewhere around 1 adult in 100 is autistic. I guess autism isn't a new thing, since if it were, we would find some random age gap where evaluating people doesn't find this ~1% autistic anymore. (sarcasm alert: I'm well aware that autism isn't new, but that the label is.)
4) Mother learns that 2 year old son is autistic? We already have enough parent based awareness, thank you. Now stop calling autism tragic before the tragedy model gets another one of us killed and the killer still considered a good person who cracked under stress. It's not cool.
5) An open letter to Jenny McCarthy as well, since I've already written one to Playboy.
6) Probably more rants about Generation Rescue, since I'm not going in to that open letter without more knowledge of exactly which abuses in the name of treatment she condones, and I'm not going to be able to keep quiet about what I read until I get the actual letter written.

I'm also going to print and mail that letter to Playboy.

Leaving India

So, I only have a couple hours left in India. I didn't really understand how today's company visit was related to what I want to do, but most of the visits didn't relate to what I actually want to do, so whatever. It is what it is.
Over this trip, I learned a decent bit. I learned about manufacturing techniques, which was kind of the point. I got reminded of just how far from the norm my biorhythms are-being up by 6am and crashing at 8pm is not the college norm. There were times when we hadn't even eaten yet at 8!
I also learned that some people can actually be decent human beings about autism and the difficulties I have that are best explained by the fact that I'm autistic. (Only learned this because I also learned just how obnoxious my sensory issues really can be.)
Most of what I've learned falls into one of those two categories. So yeah. India was good.

Accomodations done RIGHT (which should be more common.)

So, right now I want to prove that doing accommodations correctly (and significantly better than was required, considering that I never actually went to disability services) is possible abroad on trips abroad with university. Next time someone tells you it can't be done, well, yes, it can.
So: Disability services had no paperwork from me (I was only diagnosed a month ago...) and I did not tell the professor that I'm autistic (a shellfish allergy kept me off a study abroad program once. No way was I going to tell him I'm autistic until it was much too late to knock me off the tour over it, and hopefully not telling him at all would work. It didn't.)
That means that he didn't have to make ANY accommodations, at all. That's right. Someone had the decency to make accommodations he did not have to make. Why there are people who wont make accommodations is a good question, and I would like to shove this example in all their faces and say ``See this? Yeah, I thought so. IT'S NOT THAT HARD."
So, for the accommodations I got (all offered right off the bat, as soon as I admitted that I am, in fact, autistic. Because he's a good human being and has some idea what is and is not needed.)
1) He handed me ear plugs, and said I could use them whenever.
2) He handed me a mask for dust/smelled, and said I could use it whenever.
3) If I still overload on a plant visit, I can just leave the room where I overloaded. He'll explain to the person leading the tour if need be.
4) If there are two visits in a day, I can skip the second.
5) Everyone has been told that they are to make their notes available to be for the write-ups, since I can't really understand what's being said over the noise of the factory floor, and I've had to excuse myself a couple times.
6) If it looks like I'm on the edge, he checks in to make sure I'm OK. If I say I'm fine, that's the end of it. If I say something is a problem, he finds a way to fix it.
7) He makes sure there are non-carbonated beverages available to me. (I had already been doing that, but it makes it a bit easier since he actually speaks the local languages.)
8) He (jokingly, I think) informed the students who knew about my being autistic that he would throw them in the pool fully clothed if they made a big deal about my accommodations. No one has. (I think most of the group knows by now, but he hasn't been the one to tell anyone. Some of them have seen me writing blog posts and asked directly. I may not bring it up, but if you ask me, I'll tell you.)

And the total cost of these accommodations? 10 rupees for a water bottle, and asking one of the factories for the ear plugs/mask during the tour. (-10 rupees as the difference in cost between the water and the coke that would have been purchased, since he didn't buy the coke. Either way, we're talking under a dollar, and I offered to take care of it.)
So: It's not that hard. It's really not. That was all done in a foreign country with no notice and no documentation. If you can't do that with notice when you are legally required to, there is something wrong.

Have some more about India

So:
On the way to the hotel in the mountains, there was a road closure due to landslides or some such thing, and we didn't get to the hotel until almost midnight. That was interesting. Then I ate and slept. Because, you know, eating and sleeping are useful.
Next day we didn't have any plant tours, so no sensory overload, which was awesome. I also went to see a temple that had a lot of monkeys, and I took video of monkeys playing on a playground structure. I also got a salwar kameez for a friend and the salwar part for myself. Sadly, my salwar turned out to be too small around the ankles and too short (not by THAT much, but I can't wear it.) Since the salwars were one size, that's probably a good sign for the friend I got the salwar kameez for- she's a bit smaller than me, both height and width. I also briefly got online with a rather slow connection, which let me queue the posts that have gone up from then till now.
Sunday, we did a lot of driving, since we had to get from Shimla to somewhere in Punjab. We also did a small tour, but the guide tried to rip us off. (At the bottom, he said 250 rupees/person. Once we got to where the horses were, he changed it to 500 rupees/person. So we walked instead, and wound up only giving him 200 rupees/total for the about a quarter mile of car ride to the place with the horses. Because, you know, trying to rip off tourists isn't cool.(50 rupees is about $1))
And the top of the mountain was not nearly what the guide claimed either. WOOHOO trying to rip people off.
Monday was two plant tours and a visit to the company that helped the professor in charge of this trip (no names here, but he will be getting an AWESOME review on ratemyprofessor and all the other sites of that kind I can find. More on his awesomeness later.) to set this trip up. That visit turned into a very brief and pretty cool tour. It was the only one where I didn't get any sensory overload so far! (I skipped the second tour, which I've been doing on most of the double tour days because it would be too much sensory overloading and I would be in not good shape. I never realized how many sensory issues I really had until I wound up in situations I had always instinctively avoided...)
For dinner, we went to a combination bakery/italian place. Good pasta, good oreo shake. But it was late. Then I went to sleep. Then I woke up and it was morning and I wrote this. Today we will go to a brewery and that is the story of that.

Yet More India

So, it's Friday here, and we just got done with the last factory trip of the week. We get Saturday and Sunday off from factory visits, and boy, am I glad. This daily dosage of sensory overload is tiring to the extent that I haven't really been recovering fully at night. Being a bit short on sleep because the time I want to go to sleep often comes and goes while we're still out as a group probably doesn't help. But we get two days to rest in the northern mountains, and that I am expecting to be much better. I should be able to get enough energy back to make it through next weeks factory visits and still be able to enjoy the fact that I am in INDIA. (I have been enjoying the fact that I'm in India, by the way. It's just that when I have limited time and energy, the things that are demanding an outlet the most are all that will get that outlet, which means it's the problems that are coming out.)

Anyways, today's factory makes support items like neck braces, knee braces, and walkers. They apparently have almost a fifth of the Indian market for the products they make, which is pretty good. Yesterday we went to the golden temple and then a factory. You can't wear shoes in the golden temple, which was awesome because I had an excuse to go barefoot. Also, it was really pretty, and the tilings on the ground had some of the most complicated geometric designs I've seen here (mine are still more complicated, but I don't tessellate them.) I took pictures of those, so I've got quite a few pictures on my camera that are probably interesting only to me. That's OK, though. It is my camera, after all. The factory we went to after the golden temple makes cricket equipment. I don't really know much of anything about cricket (or any sport that I don't play, really), but the factory was pretty cool. There wasn't much automation, since they're working with wood, which has variable density, and precise balance is apparently important. It was also a very interesting factory layout- they had a bunch of different small buildings, with a couple steps happening in each building. At the start, there were hunks of wood. At the end, there were cricket bats. I couldn't handle a couple of the rooms because of the smell, but I saw most of the process and it was pretty cool. I also saw them making cricket balls and protective equipment. They didn't do much to the balls- they purchased leather balls, lacquered them, and then stamped them. The gloves and leg guards were a bit more interesting, especially since anything sewing related brings out my clothing design brain. Also, they did more with them.

The day before yesterday was supposed to be a double factory visit, with a knitting company first and then Hero Cycles. I only made it through the first visit, what with the alarm that kept going off and the fact that a factory floor is a source of sensory overload in the best case, but the first visit was interesting. I wasn't even the only one who only made it through the first visit- there was a stomach  problem going around, so there was another girl heading back to the hotel as well. That made it a bit less embarrassing: I always feel a bit bad when I can't quite do everything I'd like to be able to do, but at least I wasn't the only one. The group also went dancing that night, which I stayed far away from. Clubs  tend to have flashing lights, which are not my friend, and any form of entertainment that doesn't even start until 8pm is going to go much too late. My roommate didn't  get back until after midnight!

And that is pretty much the story of the last couple days in India. I am very much alive and generally having a good time, but I would really like a break from overwhelming factory floors! That's what the weekend is for, though, and hopefully the fact that my idea of a break is not the typical NT idea of a break wont be too much of an issue.

(Putting this up later Saturday because of internet access issues, will have another post covering what's happened since next time I have internet.)

And MORE India

So, this is written at the end of the day, whereas the post that was pretty much just put up was written in the morning. I didn't post it till now because I lacked internet.

So, we got to the textile factory. This one does yarn and towels. They're HUGE, and they're building another plant which will have 400000 spindles. (The plant from yesterday that did 3.2 million meters of fabric a month only needed 54000 spindles to make the yarn for that.)

They took out a piece of roving for us to feel at a couple points, and they didn't want it back. Guess who has it? That's right, ME! I have cotton roving, I have cotton roving! And it's FLUFFY. Also, since I have a spinning wheel, I can actually do something with said roving should I ever have time.

We also stopped in the room where they were designing the images for the towels. The images they had were pretty cool, and one of them looked kind of like the ones I make. So I said so. And my teacher suggested that I show them some of what I make. I had my laptop with me, so I pulled it out and showed them. They showed me how they would make a towel out of one of my designs (not the way I'd have made the image size difference work, but whatever. I think my way is better.) So yeah, they liked it, and apparently the plan is to continue conversation and that they might actually want some of them. They use JPEG, though, and JPEG annoys me because it ROTS and is lossy. So I'm gonna keep my images as PNG and only switch them to JPEG if and when they want a final image. Cause, you know, having your image rot isn't good. I might try and fix the image using Python for the one which rotted a bit before I figured that out. image.getPixel and all.

On the way back from the factory, we saw another elephant, and this time we stopped and we got to ride the elephant. So I have now ridden an elephant down a city street in India. I'm honestly not sure which is the bigger highlight of my day.

So, I am in India, and Things Happen

Woooo India!

After my day of overload (2 plant visits, both of which included sensory overloads, triggering song lyrics on the road between the recycling facility and the motorcycle plant, being overtired, being hungry, and finding out that I wasn't getting dinner until later than I would normally go to sleep, leading to meltdown in the hotel room, which my roommate noticed :s) I wound up telling the professor what was going on. I hadn't wanted to before because I expect people to freak out when they hear ``Autism" or ``Autistic Spectrum Disorder." Also, I'm in another country, he's partially responsible for my well-being, and I didn't disclose something that's KIND OF RELEVANT before departure. Plus he's the first teacher I've ever told that I even might be autistic. (Yes, any autistic spectrum disorder qualifies you for the term ``autistic.") He was good about the part where I didn't tell him back in the US, though, and he's been good about helping me not overload again. Making sure that I actually get some time to myself every day, giving enough warning about welders that I can avoid them, not freaking out when camera flashes make me flinch, not pushing the issue if I say I need to exit a situation, offering (but not forcing) exits when I look overwhelmed, things like that.

Also, we haven't done two factory visits in a day since then. That probably helps too. Tomorrow we'll have two again, but the first is a knitting mill (AWESOME) and a fairly short visit.

Anyways, India has been much better since then, and it was good before then! The food is still awesome, the heat is still not bothering me, and the (single) factory visit yesterday was quite interesting. We went to a texttile factory, where they started with raw cotton-ELEPHANT!!!!! (I'm writing this on the bus to a spinning mill, and OMG I JUST SAW AN ELEPHANT). Anyways, they started with raw cotton, sorted out the impurities, partially by hand, partially by machine, carded it, spun it into thread, wove it, and dyed it. It was really cool. I've done all of these things with wool on a one-person scale, but watching it on the industrial scale was awesome. They produce something like 3.6 million meters of cloth every month at that plant! The raw cotton was kind of dirty, and there were things like gum wrappers in it. I'm not sure how the gum wrappers got there, but I saw one. After the impurities got sorted out, it was much cleaner. It was also really soft. It felt kind of like cotton balls. A machine made roving in extremely long pieces- like, fill up a barrel with inch by half inch cross section roving in one piece kind of long. It was insanely long. It really was.

Then it was semi-spun into slightly twisted, thinner roving. I say semi-spun because it was twisted some, and it took a bit more force to pull apart than it had before, but it was pretty clearly not yarn. I could have spun much better yarn than that. The next machine actually spun it into thread, and there is no way I could have spun anything that thin, not for more than an inch or two at a time, anyways. Another machine plied it, sort of, and then yet another plied it for REAL. (I go with sort of because I could have plied it better than the first machine. I'm not sure why they spun and plied both in two steps each, but I assume the engineers there have a reason. Manufacturing is not my area, and after the factory visits, the only person who was even semi-hopeful that it might become my thing agreed that I should stay far away from it. (That would be the professor leading this trip.)

Then came the weaving. They had so set up the warp by hand, which takes a while, but the threads are extremely long, so they don't need to set it up quite as often. That saves time. If it's yarn-dyed, like plaids generally are, they need to make sure the threads of each color are in the right order. Then, they put the roll with the weft onto the loom and start weaving. It's pretty cool to watch, though quite loud. I covered my ears. Different patterns of raising the bars with sets of weft threads attached made different weaving patterns, and that was really cool to watch too. Apparently the cards for these weaving patterns are part of where Turing machines and then computers came from.

At the end of the visit, they gave each of us a garment made in the factory. The guys got shirts, and the girls got jackets. Because of my shoulders, I needed the biggest size, but it did fit. (Three years on swim team gives you big shoulders, and they don't go away that fast.)

And that's just the factory visit!

The day before that, we pretty much spent on the bus between Delhi and Ludhiana (spelling?) We'd been hoping to get to the Red Fort on the way, but we spent longer on the road than we expected and that didn't happen. It would have been nice to get to see it, though I'd probably have gotten in (joking) trouble back home for not taking enough pictures. I never take enough pictures, apparently. I'll take a few, but I'm not really a photographer.

Before that, we went to the Taj Mahal and a market. At the Taj Mahal, I did take some pictures. Not as many as my classmates, but I did take pictures. The whole place is symmetrical! They even built a whole replica mosque that no one uses to keep the symmetry. Since I happen to think symmetry is awesome, this was really cool. (If you don't believe that I like symmetry, go look at my designs on cafepress. They mostly have 4 lines of symmetry and 90-degree rotational symmetry about the center.) Anyways, the Taj Mahal was very impressive. The marble inlays were beautiful, the architecture was impressive, and it was generally winful. It should, however, tell you something about how my brain works that I have more overflowing stuff to say about the textile factory...

The market was also fun, though I was tired by the time we got there. We'd left the hotel at 4am in order to get to the Taj Mahal, and I'd been up since 2am since we'd been told to meet at 3am in the lobby. (We- my roommate and I- were on time. No one else was.) There were statues and scarves and clothes and it was winful. I got two skirts for my mom, both pink. I also got a scarf, and I'm not quite sure who it's for. I'm still looking for the salwar kameez, both for a friend and myself. I've been told that there is a lot of good, cheap clothing in this town, though, so with any luck I can get that here. I'll probably also look for a sari for myself.

Culture Shock Or Lack Therof

I don't know if this is related to the being autistic thing or not, but I've noticed that I don't really get culture shock. I get the normal amount of ``Oh, hey, my routine just changed" stress (which is apparently not that much for me as long as I know a routine change is coming with a bit of notice,) but nothing more than that. I know that some people compare being autistic to being a foreigner in your own culture- if that's true, that might explain why I don't get culture shock on top of the change in routine. Why would being in a culture that makes no sense to me be any different than being in a home culture that... also makes no sense to me?

Any other autistics notice anything similar?

P.S. I've heard some people suggest that a ``cure" for autism (which I WOULD NOT take and would not allow to be forced on anyone without consent, even if the person is a kid ``too young" to understand what's going on and we'd normally let a parent consent for them- not for this I wouldn't!) could lead to getting culture shock from your own cognition. Even if being autistic does provide some protection from culture shock, which I suspect it might, it wouldn't do a thing about that culture shock. It might even make it worse, since the person might never have dealt with culture shock before and would be doing so for the first time with the loss of culture shock protection being one of the changes that is GIVING the culture shock. So this ``do we maybe not get culture shock as easily?" idea is NOT saying in any way shape or form that re-wiring our brains and changing who we are wouldn't give us culture shock for our own cognition. I'm pretty sure it would be a really nasty case of culture shock.

P.P.S. Also, go ahead and take this to mean that India is not giving me culture shock. The hotel briefly blocked my ability to get to blogger.com and edit this site, but they opened it back up when I asked and I'm having a good time.

An Ad for Autism Speaks

I saw it at JFK International Airport while waiting for the first flight on the way to India. And I wanted to shout at it. I didn't shout at it then, but I sure am NOW! And... I was an adult by the time I was diagnosed, not a child.

(Image Description, image not avaliable)

At the left, there is a large, blown up picture of a girls face. She looks asian- straight black hair, black eyes, round-ish face. She was probably looking at the camera or very close to it. At the right, it says ``Every 20 minutes, a child is diagnosed with autism." At the bottom: ``Learn the signs. autismspeaks.org."

Those ``every time X, Y happens" statements are usually meant for fear-mongering, and this looks like no exception. I don't know about you, but as soon as I saw the line about a child being diagnosed every twenty minutes, I was pretty sure the poster would be for Autism Speaks. The organizations I like wouldn't say something like that. They're usually more along the lines of ``I'm a person, not a tragedy." But Autism Speaks seems to want to portray us as tragedies. Can you think of any other reason that they would make that sort of sign, go tell an autistic person who disagreed with them to ``go play in traffic," or spend a huge part of their budget on research for a cure many self-advocates don't want? I think they either see being anything besides normal as a great tragedy or think the best way to get money is to tell it like it's a tragedy. Since it's mostly parent-based awareness that they do, I could believe that it started out as the former. But today? With all the actual autistic people and people with autism (I don't want to leave those of you who identify person-first out!) doing things like living their lives, becoming self-advocates, and shouting about everything  they think is wrong with Autism Speaks? At this point, it's got to be the latter. And the latter is completely unacceptable.

I've seen autism parents defined as those who would like nothing more than to teach autistic children to speak and autistic adults to shut up. I don't know about parents of autistics in general, but Autism Speaks seems like that. They can get kids to say what they're told to say, and they want to be able to claim some success at normalizing us, so the kids have to learn to talk. But they don't want anyone who can think for his or herself telling people what's wrong with their organization, so they want the autistic adults to shut up. To this end, they talk nearly exclusively about autistic children, not autistic people or autistic adults. People who don't exist can't have anything to say. But...

But I exist. But others like me exist. And we have things to say.

So we get dismissed as too high-functioning to understand the problems that the low-functioning face, based purely on the fact that we blog. That doesn't imply ability to walk, speak, cook, clean, or, well, anything except type. Also, there is the (false) high-functioning/low-functioning dichotomy. It's too arbitrary to truly help anyone.

So we get dismissed as too autistic to understand the problems our parents face or those other autistics face. But... it's called AUTISM Speaks. Not parents of autistics, autism. Autism is an abstract diagnosis used to describe autistics, not parents of autistics. So it shoulf be us speaking, if the name is to be believed. The struggles our parents face shouldn't be ignored, but our ability or lack thereof to understand those struggles should make no difference to the validity of our voices when talking about our own lives. It's not as if autism and parenthood are mutually exclusive, anyways. Autistic parents of autistic children exist, as do autistic parents of neurotypical children. And as for the struggles other autistics face? Well, if we don't understand theirs, they don't understand ours, so they should talk and so should we. But... we probably understand theirs better than you do. We live with similar challenges. Not the exact same challenges, since every person is different, and this applies to autistic people just as much as it applies to neurotypical people, but similar ones. And that means we can't be clueless.

So, how about listening to us? It doesn't mean ignoring our parents, but it does mean that if I say ``X is not true for me," you don't get to act as if it does on the basis that Autism Speaks says it should be true. It also means accepting that we are individuals with hopes, dreams, and aspirations of our own, not  self-narrating zoo exhibits or tragedies. It means not making posters that spread fear about us, since few will listen to a group they fear. And Autism Speaks fails on the not fear-mongering count.

First Full Day in India

So, I have now had a full day in India, and it is good. I woke up at 3am for about an hour, and that was annoying, but I did stuff. Then I went back to sleep until 7:15, when my roommate's alarm went off.  (We're two students to the room here.) Get up, boil water, wait for her to shower, shower myself, brush and braid the hair- pretty much a normal wake-up routine. My roommate is the only one on the trip who currently knows I'm autistic, though I've had a few ``Oops, my autism is showing" moments and quite a bit of  ``Well, if you're aware that the hand flapping is an autistic behavior, you're gonna figure it out pretty fast... but I am SO SICK of hiding that one that I can't even bring myself to care" moments.
Then we went down for breakfast. Breakfast was awesomeness. They had rice congee and they had sambar and they had jalapeno peppers and it was GREAT. They even had watermelon juice. When it comes to food, I love Asia. Asians know how to do breakfast that fills me and isn't eggs! And they have jalapenos at breakfast. What's not to love?
After that, we took the auto rickshaws (3-wheeled doorless taxis) to the metro, then did some shopping. I got a skirt I like. Since I'm not so great at bargaining to begin with, and doing it in English threw me off, I only got the guy from 300 Rupees down to 275 Rupees. But there's a 50:1 exchange rate, so that's $5.50. I'd say that skirt is worth more than $5.50 to me.
Then we went to the National Museum. I find stonework, sculpture, bronze-work, and pottery more interesting than paintings, and there were plenty of the stonework, sculpture, bronze-work, and pottery items. No cameras allowed, though. (I haven't managed to take any pictures yet, but we're all putting all our pictures into one drop box, so I'll still have pictures to bring home. Also, I will take pictures eventually.) We had lunch there, and I continued in my happiness/flappiness over awesome Indian food. While we were at the gift shop, the teacher jokingly bopped me over the head with a brochure. And I reacted the same way I would have if I were actually under attack, since I'm jumpy like that. The teacher is quite the joker, and I can never tell when he's joking. I'm not sure it's an ``autism is showing" moment on the not being able to tell, since I'm not the only one who can't... but the immediately turning and bringing my hands into a defensive position tipped him off that something was up. On the subway home, he asked if I had actually been scared when he did that. Not sure how to answer. Was my body expecting a fight? Yes. Does that imply having been afraid? Maybe.
Anyways, back to the subway. Or getting off the subway and taking another auto rickshaw back to the hotel. One rickshaw went to the wrong hotel first, and one never got back (The people who were in it walked from the mall they were dropped at, which was about a 2 minute walk.) We went to the pool for a while. Then food, meeting in the lobby at 7:30pm! LATE. Eat, get someone to walk me back to the room since we aren't supposed to go places alone, crash. Wake up around 11:30, wonder why my roommate isn't back, go downstairs to check if she is in the lobby. She's at the business center and has internet. Then I use internets! And that gets us to now.

I'm In India! And I'm Jet-lagged.

Trigger Warning: Violence, discussions of abuse/murder of autistic people

It's 3:15 am. I woke up about 15 minutes ago. I have a couple posts I wrote on the plane, which I'm going to schedule so that this thing gets some updates while I'm in India. (I'll be writing while I'm here too, but I'll probably be scheduling everything because I'll be on at weird hours.

And that was all I was really planning to day. Until I saw this:  And then I got even more pissed. I wish I could say that I doubt Autism Speaks would make that, but honestly? I wouldn't be shocked if this was them. It's definitely their puzzle piece, at the least. And it's using similar tactics to the ad I wrote about in the JFK International Airport (which will be posted later today, my time.) And no, I'm not scared of autism being 1 in 88. I'm really not. But I am TERRIFIED of how people who see this message as their introduction to autistic spectrum disorders will react if they ever hear that I'm on the spectrum. And I'm TERRIFIED that people who get their idea of autism from images like this will think our lives are not worth living, then kill us and call it mercy. Because... that happens. And images like this spread the message that we are tragedies, which would make it more OK. We're not tragedies, and portraying us as tragedies hurts us rather directly. So you should stop doing that now. 

DONE!

Finals are done (YAY!), I'm almost done packing for India, and I am excited about going. I'm a bit worried about the ``stay in a group of at least three" thing, since that does make it harder to come up with alone time post overload. I think I'm just going to use my headphones- I've been told that wearing headphones tells people ``I am not available for conversation unless it is an emergency," which is kinda where I am when I'm in pretty much any of the overload states (social, sensory, emotional, whatever.)
On another note, I've noticed that if you can function, even people who have seen first-hand every single one of the autistic traits that you have and are listed in the DSM tend not to put the pieces together. They still think you're just weird. Speaks well for my ability to simultaneously not worry about the dictionary of flapping and still have people not figure out what's really going on inside my head. (I've seen enough people go for the ``baby voice" on autistic folk, even adults, that I'm in no rush to shout it from the rooftops.)