David Gendron brought the following Facebook comment to this blog:

My lover has Asperger’s. Practically, it means that he never ask me “How are you?”, that he rarely takes the time to hear from me, that he gives me the same red roses for my anniversary even if I tell him each year that I prefer wild flowers, that, when he’s at our house, he helps me one time out of three to carry grocery bags, that he expects me to prepare regularly home meals for him, that I walk always beside him (not in the back nor in front) when we take walks, even though he walks faster than me, that he bawls out to me when I walk one inch behind him, that he needs to talk to me endlessly about his electronic stuff, that he never answers to my questions even if the answer is simply “yes” or “no”, that he talks to me all the time or that he ignores me totally.

But he’s not narcissic nor egoïst. He has Asperger’s and I love him.

I have heard a similar speech quite often, so let me tell you the following: there is NO diagnosis, NO condition, NO disease, NO life situation, NO issue that entitles anybody to treat people like crap. There is absolutely no excuse to treat a human being in a way described in this comment. If anybody does anything to you that you are not 100% comfortable with, you are absolutely entitled to put a stop to that immediately. They can have a list of diagnoses from here to the Moon, but if you are not 100% comfortable, you have the right to get out.

Of course, it’s up to you how much you are willing to tolerate. Just remember that putting up with this sort of garbage has nothing to do with love. And neither does behaving in this way.

I also find it quite offensive that some jerkwad would use Asperger’s to justify walking all over this idiot of a girlfriend. Yes, people with Asperger’s often find it very hard to navigate their way through personal relationships. They are, however, perfectly capable of learning, adapting, compromising, and creating very fulfilling personal lives if that is what they want to do.

And as for expecting some subservient air-head to prepare home cooked meals, can anybody in their right mind really think this can be a symptom of anything but being a jerk?

Jeez, what lies wouldn’t people tell themselves to avoid facing their problems.

Normally, I am the opposite of frugal. I warned N. from the start that any financial planning and money saving will have to be done by him because I’m useless at it. And since he is phenomenal at these activities, we complement each other very well.

However, I have discovered one area of existence where I balk at the idea of spending big amounts of money. And that’s buying expensive things for an infant. The infant will not be capable of appreciating anything that can be bought with money, right?* I haven’t spent much time with infants in the past 30 years but I believe that what they need is to be completely sure that they will be fed, protected, comforted and cuddled whenever they want to.

I’ve tried to analyze this reluctance and all I got is that I do have a massive problem with people trying to give others not what those others really need but what they have decided the others need.

Everybody who wants to buy expensive things for baby Eric (you know who you are!) is welcome to do so, however. Don’t let my issues stand in the way of yours. 🙂

* I can guarantee that he will be the very first among all his friends to get a car of his own, though. I also saw a tree-house that I really want to get him if we have a place to put it. All of this means, of course, that he will be one of those weird kids who want neither a tree-house nor a car. Maybe he’ll want a piano and then I’ll just have to jump off a cliff.

So how does everybody feel about crib bedding sets? I’m seeing some very complex 13-piece bedding sets for cribs that cost up to $350. They look beautiful but seem kind of useless. You obviously can’t use a pillow or a blanket or a quilt. There is basically nothing you can use except a fitted sheet and a bumper curtain.

Some people are suggesting I’m a cheapo for feeling like this bedding set would be a waste of money. “We can’t deprive the baby!” N announced so dramatically that you’d think I suggested we use the toilet bowl in lieu of a bath tub and a toilet rug instead of a receiving blanket.

Did you buy a bedding set or are you a cheapo like me?

In spite of a hugely pregnant belly that I hoped would make me look more serious, people have no idea how old I am. All day long today, a cab driver, a bus driver, a security guard, a nurse and an orderly were referring to me as “sweetie”, “honey”, “darling”, and “there is a girl here waiting to get her ultrasound.” I also got my cheek pinched once.

I am old, though, which is evidenced by the fact that none of this annoyed me. To the contrary, I was happy I could still pass for a sweetie. Oh, the joyous days of youth when I got annoyed when people treated me as a child! Today I’m more likely to think, “Condescend to me, please! This might be the last time you feel no awe of my advanced age.”

In the ad, which has an Independence Day theme, an actor says, “All men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The Declaration of Independence states ”…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

The ad has aired for about three weeks focusing on the July Fourth holiday, but the company is still receiving angry comments posted on its Facebook page. 

I don’t know why people are choosing to see the censored words as necessarily religious. The text says specifically “THEIR Creator.” For atheists and agnostics, their Creator is not God. It can be nature or simply their mother / father.

Before you object, let’s remember that authorial intention cannot possibly matter to responsible readers, especially when the authors are dead and cannot be consulted.

I often wonder whether some people are really as stupid as they make themselves sound or if they are just faking obtuseness because they think it’s cute. Here is an example:

What a clever insight Chloë Schama makes in her recent NYT Book Review essay, “Show Some Spine”: faceless women are ubiquitous on book covers these days, and they’re not just limited to so-called chick lit. When they are not figured from behind on covers such as these, women appear as headless on many book covers, Schama notes.

What are we to make of this? is it a celebration of how beautiful a woman’s back can be? a nonspecific gesture to female content? a subtle indication that the book will talk about sex and bodies? Schama asks good questions, most of which focus on whether the covers are “more inadvertent than pernicious.”

Is it possible that somebody with a modicum of intelligence is incapable of answering these childish questions? OK, I will alleviate the intense suffering of people who write silly crap for NYT Book Review. The absolute majority of readers who purchase and consume novels are women. This has been true for at least 200 years. In order to attract women to their product, publishers want them to identify with the novels’ protagonists. If a cover depicts a woman but doesn’t show her face, that makes it easier for a reader to imagine herself as this woman.

We all know that “no sound in the world is as pleasing as the sound of one’s own name.” Many people want books they can relate to. Even the fantasy genre offers intensely recognizable characters and situations. Publishers exploit this perfectly natural desire to read about things that are relevant to one’s own life in order to make money. That’s absolutely all there is to it.

Before imagining vaguely pernicious conspiracies, people would be well-served to ask themselves a simple question: “Who is the target customer of this sales strategy?”

I did not have a single pill in the house before I got pregnant. And now I have all this and I have to go to the hospital to have a monitor attached to me twice a week and get an ultrasound once a week and visit an OB-GYN (at a different location) once a week. That’s more often than I go to the office during the busiest semester.

The idiot who came up with the “Pregnancy is not a disease” meme is all kinds of stupid. Does this photo look like one depicting the lifestyle of a healthy person? There is more stuff, by the way, but I couldn’t fit it all in here.

And while I’m at it, what’s with the obnoxious “In the XIXth century women gave birth in the fields or at best in their beds with no doctors or hospitals, so what kind of feminist are you to sacrifice this kind of female independence and rely on male-dominated medical establishment”?

People who think that women gave birth in the fields as some sort of a feminist statement should contact a psychologist. And those who think that I should risk the XIX-th century maternal and infant mortality to make any sort of a statement should head straight for a psychiatrist.

How is it anti-feminist to make the medical establishment serve my needs anyway? If most of the workers in the automotive industry are men, should women stop using cars?

Yes, I’m grumpy.

Is there anything more disgusting than a bunch of pathetic, envious nobodies dumping on a woman who dared to work and become famous as a result of that work?

Yes, there is! It’s the same bunch of nobodies declaring that the charitable work of others does not live up to their eminent standards in spite of providing no proof that they ever did anything for anybody.

Mother Teresa has never been of much interest to me, but you have got to be a piece of work to declare that you are dissatisfied with her charitable efforts because they don’t measure up to what you consider to be true charity.

People who are worried that the needy are not getting adequate help might consider actually doing something for those needy instead of dumping on those who do help.

A blogger writes:

I’ve started to really hate being asked “where are you from?” It’s a hard question to answer.

I live in New Zealand now, but I’ve spent two-thirds of my life in the US. I sound mostly American – although not as much as I used to. But my family has been in New Zealand for over a century, and in some cases since the 1840s. (OG pakehas, is what I’m saying.) At this point, I’m probably more comfortable being a Kiwi than an American – although I switch back and forth in search of that parallax view.

I never know how to answer this question either.

If I say “From Ukraine”, people ask me when I arrived, how I like it here, and when I am going “back home.” They also give me large, welcoming smiles, enunciate every word very clearly and loudly, and ask if America is what I imagined it to be. “Hamburgers! Fourth of July! Freedom! McDonald’s!” they yell at me, making me feel very uncomfortable.

If I say “From Canada”, I feel stupid because I have now lived in the US for a total of 9 years as opposed to the 6 years I lived in Canada.

If I say “From St. Louis”, people ask me about my accent and we immediately end up back in the “From Ukraine” scenario.

The way I would prefer to answer, of course, is “In 1998 I emigrated to Canada from Ukraine. Five years later, I went to Connecticut for my graduate studies, after which I moved back to Canada for a year. Then. . .” I notice, however, that people give me terrified looks when I do that.

The best answer I have found to the “So where are you from?” question is the vague “I’m from around. . .”

Among all the hysterically stupid arguments of the anti-choicers, this is my favorite:

Yesterday, during an appearance on Fox News, Republican Texas Governor and total garbage nightmare Rick Perry said that Wendy Davis should be grateful her mother did not abort her because “[y]ou never know who’s going to be considered to be an extraordinary individual.” It was a compliment, he explained.

This reminded me of a “Smile! Your mother chose life!” bumper sticker N. and I saw on the road recently. We both dissolved in laughter and almost caused an accident.

The stupidity of these people is such that they never stop to consider that they have no idea what choices any individual woman made in order to  make the pregnancy that resulted in birth possible. She could have had a dozen abortions which enabled her to make the choice to give birth to Davis, Perry, me, or you. We might all very easily owe our existence to any number of fetuses stepping out of the way for us.

This is why I propose a new bumper sticker: “Smile! Anti-choicers are so stupid that they have lost their cause already.”