aspie rhetor

Using awstats, I keep tabs on how people (and spambots) end up at my blog — what sites have referred them, how often they visit and how long they stay at my blog, and, most interestingly, what search terms and phrases have led them here.

So, compiled below, I’ve addressed what I feel are the most interesting and perhaps ridiculous phrases that have attracted web visitors to my aspie rhetor blog. Hopefully, in addressing these keywords, the web searches of my mythical visitors will not have been in vain.

1. aspergers and the inability to realize the need to vomit

I keep reading over this one. When I paste the phrase into Google, my site comes up as #8. (Should I feel flattered?) A lot of things make me want to vomit, and I usually try to reduce needing to vomit by avoiding the things that will induce it. Of course, I am but one aspie, and perhaps other aspies don’t realize that they need to (or want to?) vomit at certain junctures.

My only guess as to this particular in-the-dark-about-vomithood sensation might revolve around aspie perseveration. When I was younger, especially, I’d get so engrossed in something (e.g., reading maps, playing with dolls, or listening to ELO) that I’d fail to realize that I needed to take heed of necessary bodily functions, such as eating or using the bathroom. But never with vomiting.

2. why do presbyterians hate pentecostals

Presbyterians hate pentecostals?

Actually, my experience has been the other way around — pentecostals hating Presbyterians (or, more realistically, pentecostals hating anyone who isn’t pentecostal). I grew up in a pentecostal family and ended up in a Presbyterian college for my last two years as an undergraduate student. Though the presbies I came in contact with did not theologically coalesce with those of a pentecostal persuasion, they always seemed fairly cordial as compared to the pentecostal people. (Of course, perhaps presbies are just more restrained in their hatred. After all, the pentecostals are rhetorically glossolalic and tend to be more charismatic.)

3. the baddest evilest vilest web site ever

I hope that this site didn’t exemplify what the searcher was hoping for…

4. elo and autism

Someone who wasn’t me actually searched for this?! (Or maybe it was me who searched for this.)

When my parents first heard about Asperger’s way back when, the first DSM criterion they pegged onto me involved that of the  intense, unrelenting interest. ELO, for me, is a very serious thing. The first ELO album I owned was 1975’s Face the Music, which I had on cassette. To the chagrin of my sister, who happened to share a room with me at the time, I’d play the tape over and over and over. Eventually, my parents had to separate us into different rooms as our personalities were so disparate: I needed to control every aspect of the environment, and any time she so much as moved a sock, I’d flip. Moreover, she could no longer tolerate the sounds of “Evil Woman” or “Fire on High.” (My father still jokingly refers to us as Felix and Oscar.)

5. aspergers sufferers

I hate this term. I don’t “suffer” from Asperger’s. I have a rather large problem with the autism spectrum being defined wholly in terms of suffering and deficit, hence the letter I wrote to the president of my university. This idea of ASD being equated with suffering seems a largely neurotypical construct to me, as if anyone who isn’t “normal” must somehow be suffering, and the problem of the suffering lies entirely within the so-called sufferer.

Many say that those with ASD have “problems” socializing –  but I would posit that, while spectrumites have difficulty socializing with NTs, so too do NTs have difficulty socializing with spectrumites. I’ve met very few people who “get” me, and I’ve likewise met very few people that I understand socially. Communicating with NTs, for me, sort of feels like cross-cultural communication: there has to be some give and take from both sides, because when I’m the only one giving or compromising in the way that I communicate, I’m effectively draining and killing myself, my personality. My autistic ways of communicating aren’t marks of my suffering self. My autistic ways of communicating are constructed as those of a “sufferer” because they deviate from a one-size-fits-all, neurologically typical society.

I have some painful sensory experiences sometimes — but even here, I hesitate to use the term “suffering,” and, if I ever use it, I put it in scare-quotes, because “suffering” is so inadequate as a term, so emotionally and neurotypically loaded as a term. Who’s to say that NTs don’t “suffer” from their sensory experiences? Though spectrumites may be “missing out” on how NTs perceive their surroundings, NTs are “missing out” on how spectrumites perceive theirs. This construct of suffering depends upon who controls the dominant discourse surrounding neurology and (dis)ability.

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