Two parents, one autistic toddler, a new baby, half a clue, and just enough light to see by
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I wrote a post before saying how much Gatorade impressed me by including the coolest, autistic, sports star on the planet in their ad, and then they go and outdo themselves tonight on their Super Bowl ad.
[The Mac Daddy brings it at about 15 seconds in after the actual ad starts.]
Jason McElwain needs a new nickname at this point. Maybe like “Sir J-Mac Daddy” or something befitting his achievements.
Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!
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You’ve probably seen these rather perplexing “What’s G?” commercials on TV. After seeing them several times, I still didn’t know what the heck ‘G’ was. So, I went and did exactly what they were hoping I’d be suckered into doing – I looked it up online. (BTW – it’s Gatorade, though I have no idea what the ‘G’ thing is getting at branding-wise.)
The only reason I bothered researching this was because of who appeared in one of the commercials. Here’s the video. Watch at about 25 seconds in. Know who that is making the basketball shooting motion?
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So not only do we have to do the normal stuff we do in order to help our kids keep progressing along (doing OK with that here lately) and keep our houses from disintegrating from the foundation up (total FAIL!), we also have to fight Terminators from the future.
I’m not kidding.
As if we didn’t have enough ignorant stereotypes to deal with as we attempt to get the general public to understand that autistic children are not withdrawn automatons who can help you win big in Vegas and organize your DVDs by how many degrees they are from Kevin Bacon, or some BS like that, it gets worse.
One of the new Terminators in The Sarah Connor Chronicles (languishing on FOX until it gets cancelled at the end of the season) – Cameron – was apparently diagnosed with ‘mild autism’ as part of one of the show’s storylines.
So to catch you up on this much of the show, she doesn’t understand social behavior and comes across as weird and awkward and not a fitter-inner (she’s posing as a high school student in this show – don’t ask), she has a perfect memory for every minute detail she sees, hears, touches, etc., she takes most everything literally, and she can break people in half using only her right ear.
OK, that last part is probably not regarded as a stereotypical autistic behavior, though neither is having a weird metal alloy endoskeleton and arriving in 2008 naked in a time bubble from a post-apocalyptic future, but I digress.
Let’s return to the main point: SHE’S A FREAKIN’ ROBOT!!!
What the hell is it with TV shows and autism these days!? It makes me miss the lame days of St. Elsewhere where the whole series ended up being some elaborate dream in an autistic teenager’s mind.
Don’t make me send my toddler over to your studio to kick your ass with his right ear.
THE STUPID! IT BURNSES!!!
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[Ed. note - Today was so incredibly awesome that we both felt the need to write posts about it independently...]
For about a month now, the J-man has had an off-and-on cough. It would go away for a bit, then come back, usually with no real other symptoms. Sunday night though, that cough wouldn’t stop. He coughed pretty much all night. It meant he didn’t rest, and neither did we, because we could hear him.
We already run a humidifier in his room at night, and we had the Vicks “waterless” vaporizer going too.
Still… when he got up this morning, we immediately saw he wasn’t going to school. The cough was getting worse and starting to sound distinctly seal-barky.
Tim took the J-man to the doctor, who confirmed our thoughts that it was croup. Great. He’s had croup before, once when he was little-bitty, and once when he was a little less than 2. This time, it seems harder to get him to be calm, but excitement/movement makes him cough more.
There was a lot of Signing Time in the house today. That, and the theme music from The West Wing – when it plays, the J-man will stand stock-still and watch the TV intently. Or, he’ll climb up on the couch, settle in beside me for the duration of the theme song, and then be on his way.
He’s a smart kid. Knows good TV when he hears it!
So we now are running a humidifier downstairs, have cranked up the one in his room and are going to lower the house temperature tonight… all in the hopes that the coughing will stop. No school tomorrow anyway because of Veterans Day.
And… Happy Birthday to my dad. He was born on Veterans Day. He’s one of the best dads around!
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In the book 1984, news articles, entire books, and generally anything recorded was rewritten by employees of the state to support the current, official stances of Big Brother. Then the previous, newly-heretical versions of those written-down things were thrown down the ‘memory hole’, a handy, desktop portal that led straight to the incinerator.
I want one of these.
My first nominee for the Memory Hole Awards? Rain Man – hands freakin’ down.
Why am I all in a wad about this now? Over the weekend, I saw parts of CSI: Whatever (probably like CSI: Sheboygan), Num83r$ (or whatever it’s called), and some other show fragment with a name that I can’t remember any part of. I could just refer to them as “Implausible, Unoriginal, Late-Night Crap”. It would be simpler. But there’s a point to this:
ALL OF THEM REVOLVED AROUND AUTISTIC PEOPLE DOING – YOU KNOW – AUTISTIC-Y-ISH-LIKE SORTS OF THINGS!? IN THE SAME WEEKEND!?
On I think it was Numb3rs, the character might very well be Dustin Hoffman’s evil genetic clone. I could be off on these specifics because I was too busy throwing crap at the TV to get all the details straight, but the character was such a terrible stereotype of an autistic adult that the exact details are almost irrelevant. He did things like hoard thousands of cubic feet of magazines, memorize every living or dead person with Emerson in their name, only eat when there were like seven crackers and seven martini olives on his plate, his evil relative took him to Vegas to count cards, he basically read barcodes just by looking at them or whatever, and – here’s the absolute worst part – spoke with the exact rhythms, inflections, and just about the same exact wording as Dustin Hoffman in that God-forsaken movie.
A while back I saw a show about the “Real Rain Man” (I think it really was called that). By the way, his name is Kim Peek, who interestingly enough, apparently isn’t autistic. But anyway, dear God that man – you know, a REAL PERSON – is infinitely more interesting than Hoffman or that movie.
I’m sure there was more to that Numb-erz episode, but I gave up in a furor. I have no idea how the episode ended. I’m hoping he slapped barcodes on all the main characters’ asses and had them shipped to Uranus.
Hey, here’s a fresh idea for TV show creators! Go meet some real autistic people and write about them! Amazingly enough, real people occasionally have much greater depth than these ripped-off, recycled, and completely bullchip stereotypes. Go sit down and learn from them!
And by the way, the first person who says, “Oh, like Rain Man!” to me in reference to my child or anyone else’s will lose all the necessary body parts needed for disseminating their genetic code, which will thereby save future generations from their offspring. Consider that fair warning.
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TV Show Alert!!
A while back I saw this awesome show on the Discovery Channel called “Real Superhumans and the Quest for the Future Fantastic” (Click link for listings). It chronicles several individuals with astonishing abilities that no one can really explain and tries to delve into the science of how the brains of these exceptional people work.
For me it was also a great opportunity to reflect on what does it mean to be “different” in one’s abilities? Do conditions like autism offer us yet another way – in this case, one that’s particularly difficult to comprehend – of expressing all the diverse abilities and characteristics of what it means to be human? What do the rare abilities that a number of autistic people have tell us about ourselves and our future? Are many of these rare gifts – mentioned in the show or not – somehow a glimpse into our genetic future?
(Note: I am NOT referring to anything remotely like Rain Man. If anyone equates all autistic people with Rain Man, I will come through your Ethernet cable and smack you.)
The people in this show range from a blind man (literally born without eyes) who can create the most amazing and realistic-looking paintings, to a woman who is a rare synesthete (a person whose senses overlap in their brain such that they can do things like taste music or see certain colors when they hear words) – in her case, the only known person who has three overlapping senses.
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