I’m a Tourette’s case. That’s a self-diagnosis, but I’m pretty confident about that.
Now, my mother thinks I have Asperger’s. Or at least, she floated that diagnosis one time. Some acquaintance had a first grader who’d been ‘diagnosed’ with Asperger’s, and had been given a little book to explain to him how it was ‘okay’ and even ‘normal’ to be considered mentally ill just because your schoolteacher says you squirm too much and believes an Ed certificate makes her a psychiatrist a little bit different from everybody else.
As is often the case with these things, I was more preoccupied with the real-life horror of a quite potentially ludicrous and self-serving misdiagnosis of some poor child who sounded to me like he was just being a normal kid (most of the ‘symptoms’ my mom read over the phone to me from the book– she had borrowed it from this woman for just this purpose, to help convince me to Seek Help apparently– were things like, “Do you find that your shirts often feel scratchy to you?”). I say “these things” because my mom is fond of playing long-distance amateur psychiatrist and then forgetting about it. She reported to me once that my Beloved Ex had told her I was ‘schizophrenic’; when I asked her, it turned out she’d said ‘neurotic’, but my mom just asked, “What’s the difference?” [Ed.: Isn’t that just what a normal person would’ve claimed to have said, if confronted by the dangerously unstable and ill individual? Me: I told you to keep your f***ing mouth shut or I’m gonna KILL YOU!!!!!]
Well, you’ve got me on that.
Since I have a skeptical and dissident view of ‘psychiatric illness’ to begin with (not that I’m with Norman O. Brown on this stuff, but I tend to believe that all generations have their psychosomatic and plain imaginary illnesses, of which many though of course not all cases of ‘depression’ today likely qualify, ‘depression’ being in many cases only our word for what was ‘hysteria’ or ‘the vapors’ in ages past), I won’t pretend to be genuinely thrilled by the prospect of a fashionable ailment to complain of.
The Asperger’s thing galls, not because I think being on the ‘spectrum’ would, in and of itself, be a bad thing; but simply because I am far too vain of my verbal dexterity (such as it is) to take kindly to being lumped in with a bunch of math-addled geeks who can’t form two sentences in front of a crowd of strangers. Me: I can rock a crowd (State Champion in Extemporaneous speaking/ Best Actor Prize at the ****** [crappy liberal arts college] Drama Festival in 199* [it was a while ago].
I remember sitting in the local indiewood theatre a couple of years ago and there was a trailer for some Aspie’s movie where Peter Gallagher plays the frowning dad of the heroine who is a ‘normal’ girl who falls in love with some Aspie boy, a science savant who sits on a park bench alongside a wise elder black man (not played by Morgan Freeman) to learn how to have human conversations. At one point in the trailer, this sallow young protagonist offers the ludicrous therapeutic tag that “Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein had Asperger’s.” “Really?” someone (the girl, I suppose) asks. “Probably,” he replies, a bit more circumspectly.
Now I ask: are the filmmakers being ironic or not? Plainly this movie was the worst kind of middlebrow drek: basically a TV afterschool special in Indiewood twee romantic comedy drag (I think the Aspie boy lived in some kind of Michel Gondry-lite crazy-colorful apartment, or maybe he broke into the heroine’s apartment and redecorated her’s like that or something). If they’re ribbing the Asperger’s Community (or rather, their Psychiatric overlords) for making sweeping, unfalsifiable “diagnoses” of people throughout history, well, that would be a good thing to satirize. On the other hand, the film seemed so palpably overearnest and ‘sensitive’, I doubt they had the belly for a challenge.
As hinted above, if Asperger’s is going to mean something, it has to be more than “Mom forgot to put the Snuggle in the wash.” If the condition is verified by antisocial tendencies, then how can you ascribe it to smooth ladysmen like Einstein and Jefferson, neither of whom ever called Morgan Freeman for dating advice, and who in fact effortlessly acquired worldly success in part through their interpersonal fluency?
And while it might be one thing for an otherwise emotionally stunted person to play music with some virtuosity (though the public is always way too bowled over with outward show and little fathoms the deeper emotional nuances of performance), how the devil can Mozart– the most emotionally sensitive human being, we may almost say, who ever lived– be an Aspie? I mean, how many idiot savants do we know in opera?
Damnit, does “Aspie” just mean “cute genius” now? Because if it does then sign me on. Because I can work that angle to get laid and get my mom to put Snuggle in the laundry.
The way I figure it, being Aspie makes you “cute” but it doesn’t make you “tough.” Now, I’ve got the Tourette’s thing going fine (see how I’m hitching my left shoulder randomly?). And though I don’t exactly scream out cuss words in public, I do tend not to recognize when I’m not supposed to be potty-mouthed and I make a lot of embarassing personal disclosures at random inappropriate moments. And I’m going to vote Republican in the next election– unless the nominee is totally unpalatable, in which case I’m going to write in a vote for George H. W. Bush if he’s still alive, or if he’s passed away– which I pray not–then Hillary, or maybe Fiona Apple. So I’ve got some ‘edge’ to work with; probably too much, so maybe some Aspieization can help even that out.
So I need to work the cute angle, because I don’t have enough ‘cute.’ More twee. Spout annoying technical jargon. Look at some numbers on the internet, maybe a polyhedron. Is that a dinosaur? Shit. Would clear mascara help, you think?
Getting “cute” and “tough” on the same page will be a terrible challenge, but I think there is evidence it could be done. If I can pull it off, it should probably look something like this:
[…] black jacket with metal spikes on the shoulders” is, like, leather!!! Shit, I think I used something like that once from an editorial spread in Teen Vogue. Oh, here’s Demi at like a ballgame or […]