fifteen thots on adam the aspie film:

1. i have been seeing jason as both a private therapist and as a member of aspie group, i worry about the social overlap for a bunch of reasons, including but not limited to the idea that therapy has to be hard, and the general boundry issues, i like him, i don't want to fuck him, but i can imagine having beers with him--genial, smart, low key, open, walking to the movie with him, talking about stuff said in session in public as chat, it felt mildly wrong, is this what is done?
2. after the film he said that he found the idea of my collectively iding as as an aspie, and never being part of an aspie social circle was fascinating to him, and it is to me too, we have similar sensibilities, similar communication styles, similar awkardnesBlogger: Tangerines in a Red Net Bag - Create Posts (there is a reason why ray calls them awkard cats) (the awkardness as a function of dialogical self)
3. i am using us vs them. i am awkard. i am awkard cat.
   
4. before the movie, four people using my scene card, is this done, is this w/i protocal. cancelling the regularly scheduled meeting for my desire to see the film---not with my others (this was not seeing brokeback or milk, though i saw brokeback with ray/pat& saw milk alone) (my queerness, my sadness, my awkardness are tied in a tight knot that rests unpenterable near the root of my being, somewhere below the belly)
5. the tightness never unwinds, the small talk, the awkard chatting, the asking questions and not quite knowing what to say, with Timothy--who looked like me, who had the same stutter starts, who had the same geek infodumps. there is some discussion about asd is that it is high geek, sort of like high anglican?), and then David coming later, but on time, and i like david, but are awkard cats collective, do we have something in common beside accidents of diagnosis, of being fashionable in their presentaiton?
   
6. awkardness and sadness avoid neurological labels, they are english labels for science, and i am describing behaviour. let's talk about the film.
   
7. there are two men in the film and a woman. this is not jules et jim. one of the man is a father who is going to prison for finincal malfesence. one of these men's father dies at the end of the movie. one of these men is successful but emotionally stunted. one of these men has a (disorder). one of these men has to be taught how to be loved. one of these men will never be a husband, but will be a lover. there is a mirroring, aside from all of the oddities of one of the charachters, he progresses. he is a moral netural, he can be taught.
   
8. to evade aspergers is to be trained--the paedlogical instincts of this film, they show people reading, making notes, how to books are given as gifts, and interview practices are shadowed as erotic rituals...to be taught how to be normal (ie neurotypical) is to be taught how to love, how to fuck, how to be part of a family. to not be taught is to avoid order, love, the woman's father has a mistress, Adam who is pure w. truth has a melt down about the woman (Beth) lying to her.
   
9. this is a secret of being aspergers--and the movie tells many of the (disorders) ordering rituals, rituals that are assumed to be secret--not only the melt downs, but the info dumps, the checking in with friends, with the desire to be taught and the desire to teach. that some of this teaching is done in bed, but also that the fight that breaks Adam and Beth leads to a difficult question. There are other things that must be approached before asking it
   
10. Aspergers asks that we construct an ordered set of rituals around teaching--a clarity of narrative, an avoidance of lacunae, of narrative gaps. Adam asks if he can touch Beth, but he makes other uncomfortable with his teaching, and he lives a monastic life, a life that seems to be about nothing but teaching--he eats the same things, he sleeps at the same time, he wears the same things, he meets the same people, he is tight and small; maybe so information can leak thru?
    
11. That Adam is fascianted by cosmology--that the largeness of the universe can be contained in such a small space, but that this large/small dialectic can be disrupted by the emergence of the erotic, and the possiblity of another life and family suggests that there is an erotic compoent to the training, to the paedlogical aspect of those with ASD--but all of that training, the with holding of sex, the insertion of Adam into the family, and Adam being unable to love, the seperation because the training was a refusal to intergrate eros into the context of other lives--but this might be that Beth chose to be with her father, who was paying for the apartment, who was going to jail, whose narrative was more important. In this way, Adam is robotic. If only he could learn to love, he would be trained, he would no longer be cybernetic.
    
12. there were scenes where adam is almost arrested, where adam is fired from a job his father got as a favour, where adam is at the edge of a party, where adam cannot go to dinner, where adam melts down, where he collapses. after the theatre, David says to the rest of us, that no one knows us (this is the first time that i have been called us, am i an us, am i to be known, is to be known to be trained) until they have seen us melting down. has david been arrested, has david been fired, some of the social group still live with their parents, does the end of the collapses happen when the upper middle classes can construct a social saftey nets--is Aspergers a function of class? that the film is about money, about the use and abuse of money, that there is some discussion of a will a few weeks after Adam's father died, and the apartment is 6 figures, but low 6 figures for a one bedroom classic six in midtown, is a bout a million too little). Capital prevents the meltdowns, it prevents the instability, it allows ritual, it allows obsession. To be allowed to be well as someone with ASD is to have capital. How does this relate if it is a brain disorder. How is this biological?
    
13. David, Me, Tim who went to the movie, Jason, who is not an aspie, others did not, but going every friday, there are no women, on the list of people who get the emails, there are one or two out of 15 or so. This seems typical, from my reading--it seems mostly straight men. The last time I was so regularlly in the company of straight men is in religious contexts--in elder's quarom meetings mostly. What does gender have to do with aspegers? In the theatre, there were 8 of us. 4 who were part of the U of T group, a family of 4 who presented simillary, and a couple of dozen middle aged women who were looking for a sweet love story. That Adam did not conquer, that he was better trained but did not live with Beth, was it a disappointment for the rest of the audience that it was not a comedy, because comedies end in weddings? Was it a disappointment for us because the message we got was not about erotic satisfaction, but another message about being educatable, trainable, was the message about passing. Did the gender, the sexualities in the story work thru these issues--because it does seem gendered. (I have worked thru the assumption that I am not male, that biology is not destiny, that the Aspie was something that should be communicated in the dark-- my fear of (straight) men, my fear of trainingis entangled with my ability to self identify as queer but refuse to make a public and collective identity as someone who is
    
14. who is what? i was going to write neurotypical, but i hate that word, because of all sorts of reasons, because i do not believe that this is biological, because i think that no one is typical, because i think that neuroscience is more magic then labwork, because it suggests that aspies are this special class of otherness, because it reeks of those kids just coming out of the closer, at 15, who was convinced that everyone in the world was queer. there is a little speech in Adam that makes claims for Einstein and Jefferson like i used to make claims for Michaenglo and Shakespeare. If sexuality is different and cuturally conditioned, so practices that might be the same and t he theory so radically different, is this not worsened by claiming a history for a form that has yet to be fully articulated, that was not named until the second half of the 20th century?
    
15. I am not typical, but the origins are not so clean. Adam is not typical because his brain is broke, and the name of his broken brain is Aspergers, and this brokneness makes him both a pure saint and a holy fool. Beth is unable to see thru the brokeness because of her family. My brain is broken--was it my family, the sexual abuse at 13, some neurochemical shitfit, inherited drama, how does the depression, the queerness, the social isolation interact chemically? What is born and what is made, Adam refuses those questions, and by that refusal his training is complete. He moves from New York, his science becomes profitable. He is repaired. I am not sure this is a fair message.