Presently, the initial obsession (*god, I hate this term! But no other word seems to describe the intensity and focus of creating this project as well. I need to invent a word, I think) is wearing out. Stabilizing, settling. Slowing down. That is, it is getting easier to postpone and therefore, interrupt the creative flow when I need to turn my attention to other things, like grading, for example. In some ways, it feels like I waking up to a different reality, somewhere on the borderline of different possibilities, and this other reality is prickly or sticky, like velcro: there are bills. They need to be paid. I need money. Pure creation and the magic of its flow must co-exist with the needs and maintenance of the physical setting and body…

I am thinking about job hunting. I keep searching, but nothing seems to approximate the kind of research I want to do–arts based or other qualitative inquiry to explore the phenomenology of autistic ontologies. I can use the experience of my frustration with job hunting to develop a research problem somewhere in the vicinity of pragmatic/organizational research… Digital application portals are so hostile in their sterility and abstractness. It is like sending a probe into space in a purely speculative if not merely hopeful attempt it will reach an intelligent life somewhere, sometime. Another caveat is this life has to be willing to initiate a connection.

You can only pray they are just as curious about meeting you as you are curious about meeting them, so you collect a series of messages you hope will make you look attractive to this imagined Other. The task of selecting just the right kind of message (while considering the limitations of your media and recording capacity) is likely doomed to failure: how do you capture your wonderful complexity, uniqueness, and attractive strengths in a way that this Other might find it worth going through the trouble of meeting you… this gap between your humanity and their alien-ness (or in this case, your humanity and the humanity of the people who post the job)…

So, as I reflect on this problem, I am flanked on each side by wonderings: on the one hand, there is the question of whether applying for jobs this way sucks for all (so far, people I shared my frustrations with have been nodding in agreement), so how is job search different for autistic people, then?

When a child learns to interact with others, learning to enter and maintain a dialogue is of paramount importance. You must acknowledge the other person’s advances, pay attention to what they say, then respond timely and appropriately–such is the structure of basic social communications. But while some people master these interactions intuitively and naturally, other people keep tripping over some of these processes as if they are cracks in a pavement. While some people are perfectly content with being perceived as “rude,” those to whom such perceptions are undesirable and unacceptable are genuinely puzzled when interlocutors misinterpret them.

When you send an application to the cyberspace, like a probe, hoping for a meeting you cannot expect much. This entire endeavor seems dubious and (depending on the person) might be relegated to the status of a hobby, or be a reason for giving up; If you are taught (often through intensive therapy) that an ideal communication is a dance where partners take turns, but hear nothing from employers, what would you do? You are used to screwing up, so the fault is probably yours. You are not good enough. Or the employers do not deserve you because it is their failure to see you.

“Hospicing modernity involves many events of productive disillusionment, where we start to feel disenchanted by the promises and pleasures that modernity offers. Modernity harnesses our fear of disillusionment for its own ends.” p. 54

“We are all implicated in the violence and unsustainability of modernity” pp. 54, 55

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Jarry

Plants’ modes of communication by “tasting,” “smelling,” bending toward light, and adjusting their vectors of growth in relationship to water or other plants, etc.

Direct quotes as echolalia in academic writing?

Refrains in songs? Earworms?

When is repetition desirable and when it is not? Who decides this?

Concrete thinking–texts as realities.

Stuckness as a method of discourse analysis?

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Interviewing autistic individuals.

Revising ASD scales

Echolalia

The Right to Privacy for Nonspeaking Autistics

“Despite their undeniable embeddedness in the environment, plants embody the kind
of detachment human beings dream of in their own transcendent aspiration to the other, Beauty, or divinity.” p. 12

I thought when I wrote my application essay. I very much hoped to become an educational psychologist, and I figured that the best way to begin my journey is to be completely forthcoming. Out of all my personal qualities and strengths, transparency is my favorite and most prized. “I am a simple person,” I always say. “What you see is what you get.” Even more importantly, I believe this with all my heart.

“I am ‘tabula rasa,’ …or a clump of white clay, soft and pliable; waiting to be shaped and molded into something good and useful. Teach me, and I will learn. I want to know! I want to study anything and everything!” such was the sentiment expressed in my application essay.

But the doctoral admissions committee did not want me. Like Jedi knights, they wanted padawans whose futures they could foresee and trust to serve the order. An empty canvas was too unpredictable and too laborious. I had to articulate my research interests a priori; I had to be match-able with the right faculty member.

Naively, I thought that a white, blank slate for all its potential just waiting to be written was an excellent place to start. I thought that white, pliable clay was something precious… But they did not see it this way and they rejected my application. I cried. And I was angry. And felt sorry for myself. How could they not want me?!

Good. I am glad they did not want me. I would have turned out to be a phony, anyway. As I realize it now, I was not a white blank slate. I was white alright. Because of where I came from. But I was not blank.

If you wanted to peek at my origins, you would have to scratch and scrape through a thick coat of white paint on my surface to get to the iron curtain first. There, you would peel the cold, rigid curtain wide enough to be able to insert your observational device into the peephole. Adjust your lens to focus on a distant land far away from the West and its troubles. You’d have to go way past Siberia until you reach the Soviet Far East. There, you would see a city sprawling just downriver from China’s eastmost border. I was born there in 1970s. It is a beautiful, magical land and I have very happy memories of it.

For several months in most years, the land was very black and white. White snow, white birches covered in black specks; black wet ribbons of asphalt holding the town together.

A black-and-white TV set at home with three channels of carefully planned and censored programming. This was our very first set, and I remember when my parents bought it: I was five and incredibly proud of the purchase–I could not wait to tell the kids at my preschool that we have a TV!…

A photo album in the belly of the living room hutch, charged with keeping black and white photos of our family family. Color film and prints cost extra, so black and white was what we usually had. There were not that many photographs, anyway. The story they told was concise and brief, but to me, it was interesting, mysterious, and reverent. My great-grandparents were farmers and laborers who migrated to the Far East from the West in search of …something. I wondered why… Did they think they would breathe easier far away from Moscow’s watchful eye? Or maybe they were pressured to move? A little bit of both? Our written family archives are almost non-existent I am not even sure that all my great-grandparents were literate. They certainly did not have much time for writing–raising children, growing food, and working a job was a lot of work. My father is half Ukrainian, half Belorussian. He grew up in a family of seven children in rural villages along the last segment of the Transiberian Railway where his father served the trains. Some of these places were so small and isolated that for a couple of years, my father and his siblings lived in an orphanage on weekdays to attend the primary school otherwise unavailable anywhere near their home. Soviet education was not a right or a privilege–it was a civic duty. My mother is Russian on both sides. Her parents met while taking bookkeeping courses. They married, had five children, and lived in a small town South of Khabarovsk for many years. There, my grandfather built a home and worked in the co-op until he was promoted and moved to Khabarovsk shortly after my mother graduated from high school. Khabarovsk is where my parents eventually met and where my brother and I were born. Both my parents are college-educated. My mother worked in

With splotches of red, which was beautiful.

I was taught that red stood for blood spilled by the Red Army to defend the working poor who were oppressed.

“What is most significant to the other’s movement across the
rocky terrains and borders of difference, and into the centers of power, is not the
telling, but the hearing of stories. Most important in educational dialogue is not the
speaking voice, but the voice heard.” p. 307.

“the desire that gives energy to the critical pedagogical imperative for making room for multiple voices, rests largely with the powerful, who want to “hear” the different voices and thus develop “border identities” (CP, 106). (As I suggested earlier, subordinate groups already hear the voices of the powerful; they do not need special access to them). Border crossing and recognition of difference turns out to be access for dominant groups to the thoughts, cultures, and lives of others. While marginalized groups may be invited – with the help of the teacher – to make their own social conditions visible to themselves, the
crucial aspect of this process is making themselves visible to the powerful. To extend
the metaphor: In attempting, in the name of justice, to move the boundary pegs of
power into the terrain of the margin-dwellers, the powerful require them to “open up
their territory.” The imperialist resonances of this phrasing are uncomfortably apt.” p. 308

“Anxiety and anger are unleashed when romance is thwarted.” p. 310

“The threat has particular emotional force for those who feel it, I think, because
it is a threat to the dominant group at the very point of their power in education -their ability to know. A sense of exclusion and outrage marks the refusal of the
already-privileged to accept that some knowledges and relationships might not be
available to them or to us. To put it more crudely, there is an incredulity toward the
idea that “you can‘t have everythng.” All knowledge is available to the individual
who reasonably seeks it – such is an important assumption of the liberal Western
education system. Indeed, Western knowledge and colonization are both premised on the ideal of making visible the entire natural and social world.” p. 310-311

“The modernist project of mapping the world, rendering it visible and understood,
that is, accessible-is an expression of a Western desire for coherence, authorization,
and control, and in my view can also be seen as central to white desire for racial
harmony and dialogue. In education, the cultural assumption common among us,
the dominant or colonizer group, is that unfettered access to the other through
”understanding” is integral to a modern, progressive, multiethnic education system and society.” p. 311