autism

Let’s All Kill Whales Really, Really Loudly

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See, this post isn’t even close to what you think it’s about. But using a blog post title like, “You’re a Fucking Fucktard, and Your Offspring Are Fucktards, Too,” isn’t really all that good for your rankings in the search engines. It’s really, really a bad SEO move. So I decided to type something about loud-assed whales.

There’s this news story circulating on the internet about a Canadian woman who shoved a typewritten note under her neighbor’s door, complaining in a rather non-sensitive way about the autistic boy who lived there during the summer. The nicest thing this letter had to say was that the grandmother should “donate all his non-retarded body parts” before they had the autistic boy put to sleep. Yes, like a mangy dumpster dog who’s missing an eye and pukes his own blood.

The outcry was loud, with many calling for an outing of the woman’s identity. And I kind of want her head on a pike in my front yard, too, but not for the reasons most people might think. Yes, I have an autistic daughter, but no, I really wish I could honestly say this is the very first time EVER that a dipshidiot said something nasty about handicapped people. My real problem with this woman goes far, far deeper.

She’s into dead whales.

Autistic-boy-sent-horrible-hate-letter-community-rallies-to-support-him

Clearly, she indicates that the boy is guilty of “noise polluting whaling.” So it would be okay to bludgeon any whales that came up in the family’s yard as long as he did it quietly? Dead whales=good, being loud about killing whales=bad?

Now, as a college educated adult, I feel fairly confident that she meant “wailing.” I’ll let that slide. What I cannot overlook is the blatant abuse of grammar in this letter. Of course, the content of the message indicates that she should be forced to choke on her own uterus, so I shouldn’t be very surprised by the complete massacre of grammar conventions in the note. It was lovely of her to soften the blow of her letter by using pink paper, though, but I’m afraid it’s all she had left after making her “God Hates Fags” signs for her church.

This post dedicated to Sherry Fraser Snider, writer extraordinaire, who publicly called me out for not jumping on this story yesterday. She was saddened to think that I was quietly letting it go, but as anyone who’s known me for more than a minute and a half already knows, I am incapable of both “quiet” and “letting it go.”

 

 

Let The Games Begin…

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If you follow this blog, and especially if you follow my other blog, you probably know by now that things aren’t going so well with my daughter’s school. Her school system was able to cure her of her autism, so she doesn’t need special ed services next year. Now, we’re not talking “a little bit autistic” or “somewhere on the spectrum.” We’re talking about a child who has had a full-time aide by her side for five years, who has had several bathroom accidents this year, who can’t tie her shoes even though she’s going into middle school next year, and who has been picked up by the police alongside a major highway after an elopement episode. But the awesomeness that is public education was able to fix all of that. She’s cured. And will have her services slashed when she goes to the middle school next year.

Now, if you’ve been following this blog, you also know that I am one little blue pill away from going absolutely ape shit on someone. Mostly just for fun.

So after yesterday’s horrible IEP meeting where we once again did not come to an agreement on what the school should do for my daughter, I show up on campus this morning and this has happened:

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Yes, that is my car. And yes, those are orange traffic cones that were placed there to keep me from driving onto campus to take my daughter to her classroom. For well over a year I’ve been told to park behind the school and walk my daughter to her classroom because her aide has cafeteria duty in the morning. But after yesterday’s meeting, I’m being blocked from parking by four rubber tubes that a vice principal snuck out there and deposited in the road.

I did the mature thing. I took a picture of it and texted it to the school board person over special ed, and then explained that this smelled a lot like retaliation. They disagree. The school just felt that child safety was at stake, and they had to take action.

Let the games begin…

Don’t Drink the Water in Lick Skillet. EVER.

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I haven’t written in a while and it’s because I’m good and pissed off. Not “I can’t believe you raised the price of bananas, I’m going to take my business elsewhere” pissed off, but more like “I’m going to overthrow your government” pissed off. You know, Viking-level pissed off.

Apparently, my child’s school is so freaking amazing at their jobs that they’ve managed to cure her autism. It’s brilliant, really, and will be a huge savings to the taxpayers and the health care industry. All it takes is simply declaring it to be so. Decide that the child is no longer autistic or the patient no longer has cancer, and they therefore no longer need any services or treatment, and then they’ll be fine. Incredible.

Now the fun begins. It’s revenge-plotting time.

Yes, I had to dig through a couple of drawers, but I managed to find my handy-dandy revenge notebook. It’s filled with all kinds of great ideas, and they range in severity from making sure you have a bad day all the way up to requiring Red Cross disaster relief support to clean up the damage and help the survivors. Sometimes, just sitting down and plotting in the notebook is enough to make me calm down, think rationally, and not end up in federal prison.

But not this time.

While my husband busies himself with revenge that involves hiring an attorney and gathering documentation, I’m unbelievably busy Googling, “How long it takes to permanently ruin your car’s interior after someone fills it with rancid pork products.”

My friend, a former redneck, offered his services by pointing out that he knew where all the really good covered wells are in Lick Skillet. I immediately pounced on this information.  I was a little overeager, because, as it turns out, he was kidding.

ME: Why did you bring it up if you weren’t going to tell me?

HIM: Well, I was kidding, since I didn’t think you would actually kill someone.

ME: First of all, what ever gave you that impression? Second, why would you bring up the wells if you thought I was going to kill someone?

HIM: You know, to hide the body.

ME: Wow. That is actually a really good idea!

HIM: Wait, if you didn’t know that’s a good place to hide a body, WHY did you want to know where all the good wells are?

ME: To poison the water supply, of course.

HIM: (stunned silence)

ME: What?

HIM: I know a really good attorney.

ME: Oh, we’ve already got the lawyer, my husband’s working on that.

HIM: No, the attorney YOU’RE going to need.

ME: Wait a second, wouldn’t a rotting human corpse thrown in a well still poison the water supply? So we could, like, get a two-fer out of this?

HIM: Stop talking. It’s important that you stop talking now. I’m a state official and I can’t be hearing this.

ME: Puh-leaze. You’re a tax collector. You’ve probably already been thrown down a few of those wells.

In the meantime, keep your fingers crossed that I don’t destroy any vehicles with leftover bologna or discard anything in the aquaducts. And keep your fingers crossed that my daughter still gets to be autistic next year.

The Pizza’s Secret Ingredient Is Crack

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Have you ever tried smearing yourself with peanut butter and walking into a room full of poodles? No? Just me? Oh, well, then you might not understand that visual.

One of our cute young tax deductions has autism and when she was a tiny tot we started the gluten-free, casein-free diet with her. It works for her, helps her feel better, etc. Starting it as young as she did, she never really missed out on a lot of stuff. I mean, you can get these special ordered donuts and cheese and stuff, but once a block of dairy-free, vegan cheddar alternative has been shipped on a truck, there’s really not a lot of point in eating it. Plus, all that stuff is really expensive because the manufacturers know that you’ll pay for it, damn the expense!

This is seriously the cheese she has to eat. If it has to tell you that it will melt, it probably won't. And it doesn't.
This is seriously the cheese she has to eat. If it has to tell you that it will melt, it probably won’t. And it doesn’t.

But last night, my husband called and told me he would pick up a pizza on his way home. I can’t tell you the name of the pizza place because they’re really expensive and I don’t want to be ugly by saying, “Your artichoke and feta pizza with the crushed diamonds sprinkled on the hormone-free, free-range Louis Vuitton cheese is a little too pricey.” Interestingly, this pizza place is a national retail chain and they have a very drug-lifestyle motif, which is hilarious because if you’ve smoked enough weed that you need to eat an entire spring-water dough pizza, you can no longer afford this place.

I looked online to figure out which one of their pizzas we could afford without selling a body part on the black market, and noticed that they now have a pizza whose dough is gluten-free and whose cheese is all-natural vegan cheese. Okay then! I purposely did not look at the price of that concoction because I knew I would back out. My kid has literally never eaten pizza in her entire life, and by golly she’s gonna have some pizza! Sadly, I figured out later that this particular pizza was not expensive because of the fancy cheese or the hand-wrought crust.

It was because it’s made of crack.

It has to be. No one in the history of eating, fat people and marijuana smokers included, has ever gone this ape shit for a pizza, especially one with soy cheese on top. We got the kid all excited with this great build up of anticipation (just in case it was really nasty and we wanted her to eat it anyway), only to have her make these really seizure-like faces the whole time that she was eating. Correction: the whole time that she ate THREE slices. It was the peanut-butter-poodle fight all over again as she’s dancing our legs, clutching at the greasy box we were tossing back and forth in a game of keep away, just trying to keep her from eating herself into pukedom.

I woke up this morning to said child holding one of my eyelids open and stage whispering, “K’ai have pizza?” She is downstairs as we speak fighting off the Dachshund for her second slice of the day. THAT is a food-dog visual you do not want to experience.

Okay, THIS One Is The Shameless Commercial

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Yup, my new book is out. It’s amazing how you go through the lengthy process of writing a book, and the whole time you’re writing you can’t be bothered to clean house or cook. “Honey, I’m writing my next book!”

Then you have to go through this whole process of editing your book, so it becomes, “Honey, I’m EDITING! I can’t make dinner, just put in a pizza.”

Then you go through the process of finding a publisher (no cooking, no cleaning, just LOOKING), then if you’re lucky enough to find a publisher after a year of not cooking or cleaning, you have to remain in daily contact with the publisher because a lot of stuff goes into the months-long process of publishing a book. “But honey, that’s my publisher on the phone…just peel back the foil before you stick that in the oven!”

Of course, now I have to market my book, which means interviews and blog tours and stuff. There’s absolutely no way I can cook or clean AND market my book.

This is where you would think my husband would just give up and start cooking all of our meals. But no, he’s nothing if not persistent and by golly does the man have hope. If living with me through the writing, editing, publishing, and marketing of four books wouldn’t teach him to just go ahead and buy himself an apron, then he’s never going to learn.

And on that note, my fourth book was published yesterday. I’m completely wiped out. The most productive thing I did today was to refill the salt shaker, and I only did that because I wanted some popcorn and it just seemed like the housewifey thing to do.

I don’t see how I can ever cook or clean AGAIN, so I do have to figure out what excuse I’m going to have now. NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, so there are story lines to plot and characters to sketch. I dug out an old manuscript that was so bad, I probably should have burned it but it might have contaminated the fireplace if I had…that thing could probably use a few rounds of editing. Then of course, there’s marketing this new book: buy my book (I make marketing look so easy).

In total seriousness, my fourth book, Knowing Autism, is available from Amazon. It’s short, cheap, and it’s way friendlier than my first autism book. It’s actually a kind of helpful hints book for all the other people out there who interact with autistic people. Sort of like the book I wish I could make people read before they were certified to hang out with my kid. I don’t think I have that authority, but I’m working on it.

Lorca’s Week in Review

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This past week was kind of like a hangover wedged between two binge drinking events. We went to the beach for one week and then we’re going on some day trips next week, so this past week was where we kind of just lolled around the house stuffing ourselves on Cheetos and watching reruns of Psych on Netflix.

Of course, the Olympics started, and nothing says summer time like watching men’s swimming because they’re all wearing those outfits from Magic Mike. Awesomeness, just add water. And to go along with the 2012 Live-From-London fun, here is a great infographic on how to maintain a good drunk all the way to the Closing Ceremonies.

If you don’t have booze at your house, here is some fun stuff I Pinned instead:

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

On a really serious note, I wrote a blog post for my Autism blog about people judging me for how I raise my kids. My firm stance on the issue is the only people who can judge me for my parenting style would be the actual judge who signs the court order having Child Welfare take them from the home.

Lastly, I read a grown-up book this week AND a publisher let me take a stab at editing a manuscript. Or as I like to call it, eat a man’s soul. Look for that book to come out in November, but I’ve already got a sick feeling the author won’t be thanking me in the acknowledgements.

It Was Pandelirium!

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Many years ago, I made my glorious television debut. It was artfully done and it made me into the star that I am today. I played the part of Redneck Bystander #3 describing the fire.

I stood in front of the charred, smoking remains of a building with a baseball cap covering my unwashed hair and wearing a giant sweatshirt from a catfish restaurant stretched over my pregnant tummy. I was most proud of the fact that my sweatshirt only had one stain on it and it wasn’t from food and that it actually came down far enough to cover that little stretchy panel on maternity pants…it’s really tacky when you can see that weirded out drawstring bag at the top of the preggo jeans. And if the wardrobe department hadn’t completed the look for me, I think I even knocked out one of my front teeth for this appearance, but I could be wrong about that last part.

Now I just really, really wish it had been made up for a movie or a TV show or something, instead of the local news channel.

Yup, I became THAT WOMAN. Every time something in my part of the country either a) burns down, b) gets blown up by a tornado, or c) is a farm animal born with two more legs than it should have, there’s undoubtedly a woman in curlers and a stained wife-beater tank top describing it. Usually, she’s using a few made up words. Like pandelirium. Or screecherous. Or ungodawful.

And I am now afraid it’s genetic. My daughter had to get her first ever vaccination last week. There’s a long story about how she got to be a full nine years old without ever having someone pin her down and poke her in the butt cheek with a sharp needle, but it is what it is. So I sat her down and had a talk with her about what exactly was going to take place at the doctor’s office. And she was oddly at peace with “getting a shot” because she was under the impression that “shot” meant “sling shot” and she was actually going on some kind of bungee-induced carnival ride.

I cleared that up, then explained what “getting a shot” meant. She was nonplussed by my explanation, but she was brave. I asked her to tell me what she thought an appropriate reaction to getting a painful shot might be and she replied, “I will have to yell, ‘CATASTROPHE!’” And so she did:

I Thank God Every Day That My Kids Are Slow and Untalented

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If Reese Witherspoon can't pay someone to take her kids to their extracurricular crap, the rest of us are doomed.

I have to give credit where credit is due: my sister-in-law (completely by herself) started a special needs baseball team in our town and so far has gotten three major corporations to pledge tax-break donations in the amount of about $40,000, gotten two restaurants to agree to feed all the players, volunteers, and family members, and found about 83 people who are willing to donate one or both of their kidneys. No one playing in this league actually needs a kidney at the moment, but now there are several on stand-by just in case.

Then she admitted the truth to me. All of this hard work and dedication was done just so my autistic daughter could play baseball. More correctly, she looked around at the last family reunion and realized that I’m the only human parent in the tri-state area who has not had to sit at a baseball park at least five days a week from April through August (seven days a week if you’re lucky enough to have more than one child playing baseball), and she set about remedying that situation.

Thankfully, if you play on one of the two special needs teams you only play four games, you don’t have practices, there’s no score keeping, and the ratio of volunteers to players is about four to one. There were seriously 48 people on the field this morning. I counted. There were 18 players on the two teams, four photographers from various news outlets, a smattering of umpires to keep things moving, and the rest were the “buddies” whose jobs it was to make sure no one a) passed out b) got hit in the face with the ball c) plopped down in the dirt and made dirt angels or d) actually went to the bathroom while still on the field.

Yes, it was precious. Even when six of the players burst into tears because they were bored and their socks were too tight and they had no idea why they had to keep standing there. Before you judge me too harshly, I should tell you where I got that information. My daughter was one of the criers and she told me she was bored and her socks were too tight and she didn’t know why she had to keep standing there.

Some days, it’s really hard to think, “Wow, I’m so lucky that my kid is autistic and everyone else’s kids are normal.” I have to make myself smile about it sometimes. Then, as I pack up my cooler after a thirty minute “baseball game” and head home, I look around at the hundreds of children whose families have literally set up tents and generators to power their appliances at the ball fields and I think, “I am the luckiest parent ALIVE.”

Feliz Navidad, Y’all

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Look! It's a United Colors of Beneton ad! For choir robes!

It’s been Christmas at our house since May. And no, we’re not those losers who keep their Christmas lights up until April; well, not ever since my husband threatened to ban any and all holiday decorating if I didn’t get the decorations put away in a timely manner. It is kind of my fault that the jack ‘o lantern sat on the porch until it rotted into a scrape-upable puddle sometime in mid-November, but that was years ago and I’ve changed my ways.

No, my daughter has a thing for Christmas carols, so the house, the car, her bedroom, all of it, are currently well-stocked with Christmas CDs in every musical device. Whenever her sister practices piano, our youngest tax-break will undoubtedly come into the room and demand a rousing rendition of “Jingle Bells.” It doesn’t matter that she’s wearing her swimsuit and is on the way to the pool.

Oddly enough, I did notice one thing about the ongoing HolidayPalooza today: a child who can barely speak full sentences in English due to profound autism can sing an amazingly accurate version of “Feliz Navidad.” And of “The Little Drummer Boy” a ‘la Faith Hill, complete with guttural country singer twang on each and every vowel. And the Latin parts of “Ave Maria.”

Years ago, while we were smack in the middle of the uber-lengthy process of having our daughter diagnosed with anything that we could possibly make sense of, my husband had an epiphany:

HIM: You know how our kid is pretty good-sized?

ME: Is that a fat joke?

HIM: No, it’s an age joke.

ME: Is there something funny I don’t know about?

HIM: Anyway, I was just wondering something. Don’t get mad.

ME: You know I’m going to get mad if you have to tell me not to before you even speak.

HIM: Really, I’m just curious about this. (dramatic pause) Is it even a little bit possible that she can’t talk because she doesn’t know English?

ME: (blank stare)

HIM: What if she actually speaks Portuguese, and we just don’t know how to speak her people’s language? (AUTHOR’S NOTE: I was really impressed that he could spell Portuguese, considering there’s an extra U in it, but then I remembered that he was talking out loud and he probably can’t actually spell it.)

ME: (more blank staring) (followed by a deep cleansing breath) Honey, remember when I gave birth to her and you couldn’t look because it was really gross?

HIM: (shudders) Uh-huh. (gagging noise at the memory)

ME: We weren’t in Portugal. We were in Alabama when that happened.

HIM: So?

ME: So that means she would talk like anybody else in Alabama. We’re not Portuguese, ergo, we don’t speak Portuguese.

HIM: (blank stare)

ME: Kids speak whatever language the people around them speak. (slowing the words down because he still looks confused) There’s no way she speaks Portuguese.

HIM: Well, if you’re not even willing to think outside the box, don’t blame me…

The real problem is, whenever Tax Break the Second straps into her car seat and belts out the words to “Dona Nobis Pacem,” my smug-toned argument doesn’t hold water anymore. Okay, Einstein, let’s see you speak Latin with her…