Succession at the top.

Australia has a new Prime Minister.

Our new Prime Minister is the redheaded, single unmarried, childless, atheist, Welsh (by birth), Julia Gillard.

Now let's see if she's better than Rudd.



And let's, more the point, see how the election campaign against the conservative, Catholic, ‘women should get back in the kitchen’ opposition leader Tony Abbott goes.

*gets a supply of popcorn ready*

Talking to people, and thinking about stuff.

I was talking to one of the academics here the other day.

She's one of the good ones, who knows what she likes, knows how she likes to do it, and knows when she's over her head and needs help. (That last part is distressingly rare, I find.)

Anyway, the conversation got around to Asperger's, and she said outright “I don't think you're an Aspie. I've met Aspies, and you're not like them.”

She told me of a cousin who would get so engrossed in a book, he wouldn't notice visitors hammering on the front door, who once at a restaurant collected up all the plates on the table and put them on another table, not registering that the other table was in fact occupied. And, yes, they sound very much like Aspie behaviours. But at the same time, she acknowledged that it is a spectrum. And she made the argument that on that spectrum, the average male scores lower on the spectrum than the average woman.

I made the rebuttal that when I have done such online tests (yes, I know exactly what they are worth clinically speaking), the results outside normal variation. And I mean that in a strict statistical sense. I remember a test linked to from an LJ friend (I am fairly certain it was this one), and everyone was commenting on the score they got. (‘Wow, I'm a Geek, I got 22!’, ‘Yeah, I'm geekier than you, I got 25, and I'm a woman!’, usw.)

I just did it again, and got 42. That's abnormal in its own right: that was several sigma from the mean just in that sample. (I don't remember if anyone else scored in the Aspie section outright.) Even if it wasn't solidly in the “You are an Aspie, just go with it” region.

Then there's the Wired version, which is basically the same test. I just scored 41 on it, and the variation was probably where I picked ‘slightly disagree’ instead of ‘slightly agree’ for something where I would really rather an ‘abstain’ option.

And then there's this list. I recognise myself in every line. Every. Single. Line.

But I present well. I don't sound like an Aspie, because everyone knows that Aspies sound like robots. People look dubious when I say that I do too when I'm tired or stressed, when I don't have the spare mental capacity to keep up the mask of normality. That I do rehearse social interactions in my head. That I do mirror people (sometimes to the extent of picking up their accents). That my speech patterns are different, but it shows up in prosody (timing patterns) and the lack of filler words (‘um’, ‘ah’, &c), rather than in tone or stress. People expect a monotone, but I usually only drop into that when really tired or under the Dog (which may amount to the same thing).

This academic described how she has some of the same symptoms, after an illness gave her slight brain damage. How she can't follow multiple conversations any more, how she needs some timeout time between a meeting and a lecture.

And then she asked what having a diagnosis would mean. It's not like it's curable, after all. And I only realised afterwards what the most appropriate response would be.

It would be to ask her to consider her own situation if she had all these deficits, but she didn't have the illness as an explanation. If she couldn't be comfortable at a party, if she got a migraine from context switches, but didn't know why. If she didn't have an explanation for why she was bad at all these things. If she thought that it was a failure in herself which led to her problems, and kept trying to push through, as if forcing herself to subject herself to things which cause psychic, if not physical pain, would make her more like everyone else. As it is, she knows what her problem is, and that knowledge means that she accepts her deficits as something she has no control over, that she must simply work around.

That's what identifying as an Aspie means to me. It means that I don't have to hate myself for not liking parties or remembering people's names or not noticing Mim's new haircut, because it's not me. It's not my failure to be as observant as other people, it's because my brain does not work that way, and I may as well try to think exclusively in Mandarin as change how I perceive and comprehend the world.

It's not my fault.

And knowing that, I can actually work with what I can do, mitigate what I can't, and get on with things.