Over-Generalization Problems

Over-Generalization is the thing every high school English teacher warns the class against when they are studying the unit on persuasive writing. And, I'm not making a sweeping generalization here. I'm a certified English teacher. Avoiding generalizations is part of every pursuasive writing curriculum I've seen.

It always seemed ridiculously easy to me not to generalize. Actually, it was kind of hard to generalize, although I didn't realize this. Every situation and every person was it's own discrete entity that had to be figured out individually. It makes it really hard to start conversations, because I have trouble making assumptions about what people might like to talk about, and I really hate making a guess and being wrong.

This totally doesn't bother most people, though. Most people are natural generalizers and will be quick to make assumptions about other people. If those assumptions prove to be wrong, people either adjust, or don't even register it. It's amazing how many people seem to not pay attention to the things I do to figure other people out. At the same time, however, I'm totally lost on the subtle cues communicated in body language and, sometimes, tone of voice.

Perhaps generalizers are getting plenty of other information that either reinforces, or helps them readjust their assumptions. I'm willing to entertain that notion.

However, there is a domain, divorced fron body language and social cues, in which over-generalizations become glaringly, and sometimes painfully, obviously wrong. The written word.

This is my domain. The written word is easier for me to communicate with because the written word stays. It's not like a spoken word that might flit past my ears too fast for me to understand (I eventually do, but sometimes it's a week later). The written word is pinned down and on display. I can refer back to it. I'm learning how valuable this truly is. Sometimes I totally misinterpret a written message on the first pass, but it's right there, so I can doublecheck.

So, in the domain of the written word, over-generalization is especially conspicuous. These things can be fact checked and disputed. An entire thread of the Pursuasive Writing unit has to do with identifying logical fallacies, which are largely based on different types of over-generalizations that line up pretty closely with psychologically researched decision making heuristics.

Basically, most people need to learn how to look past over-generalizations in order to make informed decisions.

Having said all that, I saw something in a bookstore yesterday that really upset me. I happen to live in the town that has one of the strongest surviving independent bookstores in the US. I love that place. I love bookstores in general because tge experience of books is very visual, tactile, and olfactory for me. E-books only give me one third of the experience.

So, I have tremendous respect for this store, and I don't want to seem like I'm bad-mouthing them. I won't even mention them by name.

In fact, I regard the upsetting thing as a typical example of neurotypical over-generalization in action. It just happened to occur in a spot I care deeply about.

One thing about this particular store is that it can be hard to find books on Aspergers on its shelves. I assume that's because the titles they do get in quickly sell online. They don't stick around in the brick and mortar for very long. I used to work for this company, and I'm familiar with how their online sales are fulfilled. This is a very plausible scenario for me.

On my last visit, I was pleasantly surprised to find a robustly stocked couple of shelves labeled 'Aspergers.' I even found a copy of Tim Page's "Parallel Play" which I've been meaning to purchase for my own personal library for quite a while.

I was pretty happy.

And then, I saw the upsetting thing. A couple psychology textbooks with the title "Mental Retardation" were placed in this section. I checked their barcode labels and, no, this was not a mis-shelving incident. The labels read 'Aspergers' and this was wrong.

Super over-generalization strikes again. Aspergers is not MR. This scares parents and promotes unfair prejudices. Not only is MR an out-dated label (differentiating between specific intellectual disabilities is much more helpful for everyone) but Aspergers is NOT MR. Not even a little bit. It's sensory issues, and noticing different details than most peopel, and trouble filtering out non-social information from social information, and having anxiety from being misunderstood all the time, but it's not mentally retarded. We're processing information at least as fast as neurotypicals, we're just tuned into different wavelengths, different bandwidths. The neurotypical world would be missing so many things if we hadn't pointed them out. And the missapplied MR label has crushed so many people. So this really offends me.

If a bookstore needs to generalize to keep a section full, I'd totally support includind Aspergers in a general autism section. That fits. Or a general special needs section. That's okay. I wouldn't feel bad about seeing Aspie books near Down Syndrome books near ADHD books in a Special Needs section.

But when a bookstore narrows down the focus of a section so tightly that it's just Aspergers (still a broad category within itself... you meet one Aspie, you've only met one Aspie, we're all different) a twenty year old textbook on MR absolutely does not belong there.

Inappropriate over-generalization hurts. And it doesn't help people understand those who are different from them. And on some levels, we're all different. This kind of thing hurts all of us.

Looking for Signs

This is a slightly modified version of a piece I wrote for my old work's website about five years ago. At the time, I thought it was about my relationship with zines. Now I've got a more precise idea. It's about how I used zines to help me overcome my Aspergian difficulties in social arenas. Zines might be a bit of a dated concept, but I still love the format. It has the potential to be at once more expansive and more intimate than anything on the internet. And I like the physicality of them. I think they can still be a powerful tool for teenagers and young adults on the spectrum to overcome the social thresholds that are excruciatingly difficult to cross. A zine says, "here's a piece of myself. It has some words and thoughts I might have trouble digging up in realtime. But when they're out here on paper that we can both see, it's easier. Want to get coffee?"

  

I’ve tried four or five times to begin this article, an article about a thing I do that takes a lot of time and care, something that somehow is such a part of who I am, a natural extension of my being, that I have trouble describing it. In a way it’s like explaining why I wear shoes or metabolize hydro-carbons. Why do I make a zine? What is a zine?

It’s a kind of insanity surrounded by little scraps of paper I’ve photocopied and cut out from old books. Pieces of letters and postcards from friends. Original drawings, some comics, a kick ass cover illustration I really should have had to pay money for. Stories from friends who I’ve asked to give me stories because I know that life is more than just playing video games and drinking beer. It is, you know. Am I crazy for saying that?

Am I crazy? I spend a lot of time and a lot of money, money I could have spent on beer, photocopying and pleading for submissions and mailing and sharing a 40 page photocopied publication that has a new issue about once a year. It’s a zine called Bony Landmarks and people tend to tell me they like it. Perhaps they’re just being polite because they know I’m crazy.

But, seriously, you ask, what is a zine?

 I’m not sure I can do the paper and staples artifact justice on a computer screen. I think I can only really give you a clue. A clue and a quote.  The clue is that a zine is a very special kind of publication that relies much more on the creativity of those with big dreams and limited means than it does on advertising sales and circulation. You can’t find them at Barnes & Noble or Borders, but you just might find them amidst the jumbled reading materials in the corner of your favorite coffee shop. They pass between peers on high school and college campuses. They wind up on merch tables at punk shows and in anarchist infoshops and radical bookstores. And if you can find an independent record store, you just might find some in there. But most of the time, for me, they come in the mail because I’ve sent someone a couple dollars concealed in an envelope you made out of an abandoned art project. Or I’ve sent them my own zine to trade. 

I got my own start doing zines back in the 90’s. I had been playing around with making mini-comics. I had learned how to successfully fight the self-serve copiers at Kinko’s and make them do what I needed them to. Making comics was really time-consuming and my drawings were crude, but I really liked the finished product. If only I could make them faster. 

One day, I ran into a friend on the bus who handed me a zine. It was half the size of my last comic, but it didn’t matter. The thing had energy in its collages and its typewritten pages of true-to-life, aimless teenage wandering in a desert city. I realized that the free-reign and open possibilities of cutting up and photocopying together whatever the hell I wanted was a lot more exciting than just making comics. I could do it. I could make them different sizes, different shapes. I didn’t have to worry about what people might expect a comic book to be.

Around that same time I picked up a copy of the long since defunct Factsheet 5 from the used magazine racks at, you guessed it, Bookmans. Factsheet 5 was the zine community resource of its time. They reviewed absolutely everything and if you sent them $3 they’d send you a priority mailer stuffed with zines that they were done with. It was a crash course education on the possibilities.

Inspired, I ditched the mini-comic format and made something called the Twilight Zine. It was full of my semi-autobiographical fiction and comics as well as a couple light-hearted jabs at the alien abduction phenomenon that was going around at the time. I printed my friends’ rants. I satirically skewered my enemies, both real and imagined. I tried to be funny and smart and meaningful. I was trying to change the world, tear down the system and all that. Plus, I figured it would help with meeting girls.

And it kind of worked. Having a copy of the Twilight Zine in my hand gave me something, besides my cultivated veneer of zero self-esteem, to represent the best and cleverest of myself at a first meeting. I might not be able to come up with immediately snappy conversation, but I could hand over my latest tract of what it was like to be an unpaid intern working at the Aliens’ secret ChupacabraCorp headquarters. It eventually earned me some cool points with a couple indie-rock girls. Through various twists and turns of teenage/twentysomething drama, this somehow led to me crashing on a friend’s couch in Portland and somehow spark a relationship with my friend's housemate. I stayed there a week, but before I left, I gave her a copy of the Twilight Zine with my phone number on the cover. One thing led to another...

A couple years passed as I moved to Portland and found myself very involved in being a dad and a husband and working in used bookstores. I tried to keep my hand in at writing, but we were washing our own cloth diapers, putting together the most awesome DIY wedding, and of course I had that Sunday morning volunteer shift at the food co-op. Let’s just say having a baby is a bit more time consuming than anyone thinks it will be. We did, however, make it to the first Hip Mama Gathering in Portland, which fanned the lingering zinester ember within me. 

The next year I managed to scrounge enough Twilight Zine back issues to stock a table at the Portland Zine Symposium. I split the table with one of my first zine friends, Dr. Verno the Inferno. (A funny story about Dr. Verno. When he was still undergraduate Verno the Inferno he started sending his zine to my P.O. Box. It was full of some crazy shit. And some of the stuff in his accompanying letters were pretty specific to things I knew about and it almost made me feel like I had a stalker. How did he know this stuff about me? It was quite a few weeks before I realized that we both worked at the same movie theater. And had some of the same friends. And everyone assumed I knew he was making Spleen Zine. It was probably obvious, but I totally missed it.)

          

The year after that, we moved to Tucson. For me it was a return to my hometown. We staked a claim at a crappy apartment complex and I landed a job at Bookmans.

          

We only had one car at the time and I rode the bus a lot. One of the things that happens when you ride the bus is that parking lots become the enemy. Especially in summer. Parking lots are these huge, desolate sources of merciless blackbody radiation that you always have to cross to get between the bus stop and wherever it is you’re going.

         

It might have been heatstroke, but I began to see parking lots from the distanced perspective of an armchair anthropologist from the year 3100. Because the parking lot had no relevant function in my own life, I began to wonder about the curious customs of the great civilization that had left behind these monumental earthworks. Unsuitable for agriculture and prone to flooding, perhaps these structures served some ceremonial purpose. I wondered if it was something I could write a book about.

I decided I probably couldn’t make a book, but maybe I should try making a zine.

My Grand Unified Field Theory of Parking Lots never came together, but I started thinking more about the things around me as being cultural artifacts. And each of these artifacts could lead to some kind of meaningful interpretation of the lives of the people who created and used them.

This was part of the strange inner dialogue I had going on during my first year at Bookmans. I suppose I was really trying to come up with some kind of meaning for my own life. Sifting through the books on the trade counter, pricing them in the back room, shelving them on the sales floor. I was constantly in touch with so much information. There was obviously some meaning in there. There had to be signs. I was looking for signs.

I absolutely had to start doing a zine again. But how was I going to fit it all in. Spare moments only came in fits and starts and life was a constant struggle. Could I even come up with enough content on my own? And I really wanted to make an impressive, thought-provoking zine. Something even better than if it was my old semi-autobiographical, ranty fiction.

I wanted more people involved, and I wanted real stories. I wanted to document cultural artifacts, and, following a fascination I had developed for one of Bookmans’ non-fiction sections, I wanted true adventure. And I came to the conclusion that I needed to form an art collective.

I sent e-mails and asked friends if they’d like to join my art collective because I wanted to make a new zine about true adventure and cultural artifacts. I have some really trusting friends because I’m sure they had no idea what the hell I was talking about. 

In the end, my friends played along and we called ourselves the Look for Signage Art Collective. We put together three issues of Bony Landmarks between 2005 and 2007. They were pretty cool. And I met a few new friends through the process as well. They are friends who are scattered around the country, and I've never met some of them in person, but every now and then one of us makes a zine. And I keep looking for signs.

The Politics of Eyegaze

One of the stereotypical autism traits has to do with eye contact. There's this common perception that lack of eye contact is the most obvious sign that someone has autism. And, that's just not true. Not entirely. It is true that many people with autism avoid eye contact. It's also true that some people with autism go overboard with the eye contact. Like everything else about the spectrum, it's not an either/or thing. There are extremes, and there are gradations.

For some, it is painful to look someone else in the eye. For others, it's just not a very meaningful source of information. And for others, there's this received idea that it's important:  TV shows and movies and parents and teachers tell us this and we try, but we can't quite figure it out.

I think eyes are pretty. And I like looking at them for a bit. But, my own gaze can wander. I wear glasses, so it might not be as noticeable to the people I'm talking to. I've got camouflage. But I look at eyebrows, and mouths, and teeth. The nose. I keep returning to the eyes, because I know that's what you're supposed to do. But do I get the message? If it's a directional thing, like, eyes are pointed at said object, I've learned to follow that (although it was really hard when I was younger). If it's an acknowledgement, as in, I know that driver sees me in the crosswalk because I can see their eyes, I can do that. But the clues to feelings?

I've studied this. I've read a lot of comics, and drawn some comics. Expressively, I have an idea of an exaggerated state of eye-based emotional communication. And I think I've learned to emulate this overly expressive style. It garners laughter from small children. And it's usually very intentional. When I'm not trying, or when things are serious, I tend to have a flat aspect. My eyes don't show my feelings. This probably saved me from getting bullied. Random aggressors didn't get the fear reaction they expected and they moved on to someone else who would give it to them.

When I was getting my diagnosis, one of the testing instruments was a set of photographs of eyes. Each picture of eyes has a set of four adjectives and I was supposed to pick the right one. I don't have a lot of confidence in my results on this test. I ended up scoring on the low end of normal, but it was really hard. As a former teacher, I was quite familiar with the test prep strategies for boosting scores on multiple choice tests. I took my time and I used those strategies to improve my guesses on a lot of them. The more exaggerated expressions were the ones that were easier to figure out. But there were no mouths to look at. No frowns or smiles. Just eyes.

I tend to look for meaning in everything. I know there's meaning and I look for it really hard. I look for it in architectural details, in the weather, in patterns of information I see on Internet newsfeeds, and I look for it in other people's eyes. I know there's a signal there, but sometimes I'm blind to the one that's really obvious to most everyone and I keep looking for a meaning that I can read.

When I look at eyes, I look with an intensity that hopes to cut everything else away and peer straight into the core of who I'm looking at. I want my gaze to burrow in and find their secret code. And then I worry that I'm being too intense, shift my eyes to something else, and back, to cool it down somehow. How must it feel for someone to have me look at them like that? I don't know. And if they smile, what does that mean? What do they know that I don't. What if they're just being polite to a passerby, or what if they want me to talk to them? And why can't I find the words to ask them? And maybe that's it. I'm looking for words in their eyes. Words about who they are inside their eyes. It's ridiculous, when put so simply, but Western culture behaves as though this were a true thing: "the eyes are the windows to the soul."

Eye contact is so important in our culture, and it is supposed to mean something. It indicates something about confidence and self-worth. And somehow we believe it's impossible to look someone in the eye and lie to them, but that's not true. In other cultures, direct eyegaze is an act of aggression. In other cultures children are taught not to look directly into an elder's eyes.

Lack of eye contact is not a true sign of autism. It's just a sign of someone who doesn't buy into the cultural significance of eye contact. Look for other signs.

Self-Reflection on my college burnout year and my mission

Had a bathroom moment of self-reflection where I realized that the main reason I did not pursue a science or engineering degree is that, when I was starting college, I absolutely did not want to do anything that might require working with a lab partner. I took an astronomy course that had the lab component built into it for 4 credits under the same course number, rather than the 3/1 credit split between separate lecture and lab sections like most of the science offerings. I never went to the astronomy lab, but aced the lecture, mathematically making a C and confounding the professor. It was a weird choice. But it really wasn't much of a choice. The uncertainty of negotiating a lab was too much for me.

If nothing else, I wonder if some kind of social interaction support would have helped me that first year. Would I have held on to that National Merit Scholarship and Regents fee waiver? Who knows? That was really my first breaking point. Even though Asperger's was emerging as a diagnosis back then, my troubles my first year in college would have only started the process. I probably should have at least gone to campus health, but that, in itself was too insurmountable of a social barrier for me.

This is why I want to find my people when they're young and help them out. They need help to get them through those spots when they start to break down. Help troubleshooting what the real obstacles are. Help developing strategies to cope with environmental stresses and social unsurities. These are all things that never totally go away, but they can be dealt with more quickly.

An autistic burnout phase doesn't need to last for months or years. It could be just a day, or an hour, if the proper strategies and understanding are applied. These kids can be brilliant. They could be the ones who save the world.

That Awkward Moment ...

When You Realize That You Really, Really Don't Want a Lap Dance

The following anecdote is absolutely true, at least as far as I can remember it. Names have been changed to protect people who are still my friends.

Back in the 90s I was a dishwasher in one of those coffee shops that was doing well because Starbucks had yet to realize that people who lived in Arizona would also like to pay too much for coffee. Like most jobs in my life, it became the key incubator of my social world. Admittedly it did take about three months for me to actually talk to anyone outside the kitchen. Once I acclimated to the place, though, these people became my family.

These were the people who took me under their wing, taught me how to drink, and kept me out of fights with random frat boys after I'd learned how to drink. They looked out for me, and made sure I got a fair share of the tip jar. They also were a bit bemused that a regular proportioned guy with balanced facial features like me had made it to 24 without going all the way with a girl. Especially fascinating for them was the fact that this wasn't for religious reasons and it wasn't because I was secretly gay. I just couldn't get it together to make that kind of connection. Any kind, really.

They took me to clubs on cheap drink nights, wound me up, sent me in promising directions, and laughed when I puked on the floor. It was actually a lot of fun, but I was not sending off the full Zaphod vibe. I was an Arthur Dent. The college girls just weren't that into me. And, to be honest, I wasn't that into them.

One night, a couple of my work friends, let's call them Catwoman and Maverick, and I were hanging out at our regular watering hole across the street from the coffee shop. We were shooting pool, having a good time, and the idea of hitting a strip club came up.

These aren't the kinds of places I usually go. But, I felt I could use the life experience. We all got into Maverick's car and drove three miles up the ugliest street in America to such an establishment.

The first bit was easy. I followed Maverick and Catwoman in, paying the cover charge like Maverick (you have no idea how many places I've breezed into without paying cover simply because I didn't realize I was supposed to).

Then, it was just weird. It was exactly like the kind of cheap strip club you see in movies or TV. Nothing special, except there were women on a stage with not enough on and I felt very, very weird about it. My eyes scanned the place and settled on a TV that was playing footage of construction equipment. Front loaders and caterpillars and bulldozers shoving massive amounts of dirt around. I found those images very comforting and I kept returning to them as I tuned out what was going on in the rest of the place.

At the edge of my field of vision, I noticed Maverick and Catwoman were talking to one of the women. I didn't pay much attention until she came up to me. She was right in my rigorously defended personal space and I was sort of squirming.

"Relax, Machine," said Maverick. "We bought you a lap dance." Machine was my nickname in that crowd.

It was too much. Looking at the nakedness of these people that I didn't know put me right at the edge of what I could deal with. The idea of one of them being within touching distance, or actually touching, sent me over the edge. I think I might have said "I have to go." I'm not sure how I managed to get out of the chair without actually making physical contact with the woman right next to me, but I'm pretty sure I pulled it off.

The next few minutes were a blur, until I found myself walking alone along the ugliest street in America. It was three miles to get back to where I'd left my vehicle parked. Catwoman's car was in the lot, too. I tried to make some kind of note explaining why I had to leave so suddenly. Whatever it was was bullshit. I had no idea why I left so suddenly. It certainly wasn't because I felt like I needed to "take a walk" or whatever I put in the note. Mostly the note was to let my friends know that I was okay. I was. I just couldn't be there.

There wasn't any fallout from the incident, although, like everything else, I did feel awkward about it. I seem to recall that Maverick thought it was hilarious while Catwoman was pretty confused by my actions. I could be projecting that, though. I do that sometimes, fabricate my own idea of what someone's internal reality is because I don't read the body language right.

The big takeaway for me, though, was, don't go to strip clubs. They're exactly what I think they are. And I don't want anyone touching me that I don't know really well. Especially if they're naked.