Nerds and non-conformists probably don't have Asperger Syndrome; are simply weird

An op-ed from yesterday's New York Times, "I Had Asperger Syndrome. Briefly" is on their list of most-read pieces. In it, the author describes how his symptoms of classic nerdiness in high school -- an obsession with literature, shyness, and a general difficulty with math and sports -- were mistaken as symptoms of Asperger Syndrome by his mother, who happened to be an Asperger expert.

A lot of his high school experience resonated with me -- sitting in his bedroom playing guitar and constantly reading novels, instead of playing with kids his age. But two things struck me. First, this sentence:

If I had been well-rounded enough to attain basic competence at a few sports, I wouldn't have provoked rage and contempt in other kids during gym and recess.

Rage and contempt, yes. I doubt he's exaggerating. The only difference in my own experience is that this sentence described my experience in grade school, not high school. By the time I got to high school, the school was so huge that there was room for kids who weren't good at sports. Me, I was in drama and the choir and the creative writing class. Being bad at sports didn't get you picked on; it just meant you were invisible -- which, given the other alternatives, is not the worst thing to be in high school.

The other thing that struck me was his bio at the end of the piece: Benjamin Nugent, the director of creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University, is the author of "American Nerd: The Story of My People." Oh really? Someone who was in high school in "the late 90s" is already the director of creative writing at a state university? I guess he's a little more high-performing than he realizes.

Wayfinding

Just published in The Rumpus is a memoir-ish piece by Elissa Wald, a smut writer whose work I am not familiar with. (Among my many failings and career mistakes as a sex writer was not being very well integrated with the sex-active community, so that as soon as Cris and I stopped publishing Frighten the Horses and people stopped sending us work, I became more or less marooned and isolated as a writer, so that even though Wald's book was published a few years before mine were, I was unhappily unaware of it until this day.) In the piece she commemorates the milestones of her early interest in s-m, including a particularly creative strategy when, at age 16, she phones a recruiter for the Marines in order to have an older man talk to her in a confident, commanding voice.

"You'll learn a lot about yourself in the Marines," he tells me. "Things you never knew. You'll find out what you're made of. Does that scare you?"

"Yes," I say. It's the first true thing I've said.

"Are you willing to let someone break you down in order to build you back up?"

My favorite bit, though, is when she's working as a phone sex operator. The office is short-staffed one day when two phones ring at the same time, and she picks up both receivers and has a simultaneous conversation with both customers, each of whom thinks she's having phone sex with him only. I love the farcical aspect of this, though she says that if she saw a scene like that in a film she'd "hurl a shoe at the screen" -- though she doesn't say why. Because it's so unlikely? That doesn't matter! What matters is whether the actress pulls it off, and she does.

She's a sex bomb, my baby, yeah

With her mane of black hair, taut physique, eight tattoos (including the Shakespeare quotation "We will all laugh at gilded butterflies" from "King Lear") and bedroom eyes, she projects an unapologetic sultriness whether she's wearing a bikini in GQ or bending over a '76 Camaro in a tiny blouse in her breakthrough role in 2007's "Transformers" (which not coincidentally has taken in more than $700 million in worldwide box office).

That mind-numbing sentence is only one of the many such sentences composed by an LA Times entertainment writer, who at this very moment may be considering ways to kill him- or herself after turning in an anodyne feature on Megan Fox, star of a recently released "horror comedy" and this year's sex bomb.

My only reaction is, it's nice that a brunette gets to be the designated sex bomb once in a while.

(Title of this blog entry is from the most infamous record by the infamous early 1980s San Francisco punk band Pop O Pies.)

technorati: Megan Fox

Another road not taken

Why I never went to grad school