Author: Purple Wyrm

Oh for the love of… Noveboracan – quite obviously the speech of Noveboracum. Noveboracum from the Latin Nova Eboracum, nova meaning “new” and Eboracum being the Latin name for the English city of York. Noveboracan therefore being a humourously pretentious semi-scientific name for the distinctive accent and speech patterns of New York City. There. Would you like me to explain all my other jokes now too?

Well, the new day has dawned cool but humid, and I haven’t developed gills yet, so I figured I’d better write before my hands turn into fins.

Ever since I came out of the closet autism wise I’ve had people saying things to me like “Well you can’t have it that badly”, which is good I suppose – it means my efforts to blend in are reasonably effective. It’s probably also down to the fact that, well, I’m smart. That’s not just rampant egotism *g*, the shrink I got my diagnosis from suggested that my above-average intelligence compensated for some of the effects of the condition. I don’t for instance go walking up to people on the train and telling them my life story, or start rocking back and forth and screaming when environmental stimuli get too overwhelming (although at times I can tell you it’s damn tempting ;).

But just to demonstrate what it’s like being an Aspie, I thought I’d relate a story from my recent past, and you can all judge just how normal or not I am 😀

OK, well across from where I work there’s a small independently owned supermarket. It’s where we go to get snacks, drinks and often lunches (they make pretty nice rolls) during the working day. Every morning (and I mean every morning, we autistics are creatures of strict habit) I drop in there and buy a can of sugar free Red Bull and a big bottle of water to see me through the day. It’s a pretty good little store, and the Chinese owners are nice sorts – they often give me a discount on my water (since I buy so much of it) and one time complimented me on my Crisis/Never Firefly shirt (which they could read the Chinese on). And until recently a girl – who I shall call Rachel – worked there behind the till.

Rachel. Rachel was nice. She was a student studying ecology down at UWA and always made a point of saying hi to me every morning – even if she was in another part of the store. We’d have a quick chat while she checked out my water and Red Bull. Or at least she’d ask me questions and I’d answer them – off the cuff give-and-take conversation being something my autistic brain has serious problems with.

Now there’s every possibility that she was just being friendly. She was a friendly girl who talked to a lot of other customers. But it always seemed like she put a bit more into her conversations with me (or at least I didn’t hear her telling any other customers how she spent the weekend collecting kangaroo droppings for her course work :). So it’s also possible that she was flirting her heart out. The problem is that without the ability to interpret – or even notice – body language that non-autistics take for granted, I had absolutely no way of telling. All I could tell was that she seemed to like talking to me, possibly more so than with the other customers.

So what were my options? I could assume she was flirting, and flirt back – except that I have absolutely no idea how to flirt whatsoever (it’s not a package that comes installed with the autistic brain), and would have a hard time figuring out her reaction to it anyway. I could be bold and do something like asking if she was interested in getting a coffee after work some time – which if she was just being friendly to a customer would be at best rather gauche and at worst horribly inappropriate. Or I could continue on smiling and answering her questions, which is of course what I did.

And now she’s gone. First she stopped working the till in the morning, and I’d only see her if I ducked across the road mid morning for a snack or some paperclips or something, and now she’s not working there at all any more.

So, life goes on. I miss our quick chats, and without the prospect of having a pretty girl smile at me each morning, work is that little bit less bearable. But hey, what can I do about it?

So that’s a little example of what it’s like to be autistic. Or at least to be autistic and be me. It’s strange, frustrating and confusing, but them’s the cards I’ve been dealt.

But on to happier subjects. I’m in love with Regina Spektor. Well, actually I’m not of course, don’t be ridiculous, I’ve never met the girl, but I am in love with her voice and music. Or at least with her album Begin to Hope which I finally got around to purchasing on Friday. She has the most amazing voice, and the remarkable thing is that she doesn’t just sing with it, she plays it, like an instrument. Take Hotel Song for instance – for much of the song she’s not actually singing words, she’s producing sonic noises that just happen to line up into words when you listen to them that way. And it’s wonderful to listen to.

And her songwriting is great just for it’s unconventionality – take Apres Moi for instance which switches between English, French, Russian and Noveboracan without warning. My favourite is still Better though. It sounds like a They Might be Giants song, but with the same non-verbal word singing stuff going on. It’s great listening, and plenty of fun to try and sing along with (try being the operative word 🙂

You know I’m sure there was other stuff I was going to write about, but it has fled my mind. I’d better cease my witterings and go and see if that burning smell is something to worry about, or just smoke from the bushfires ringing the city. If there’s never another entry on the Wyrmlog I’ve probably been incinerated 🙂

It’s the weekend, and once again it’s beastly hot. The dominant weather cycle at this time of year tends to be temperatures building up slowly for a few days, suddenly jumping up ridiculously high for a day or two, and then crashing down into a day of cooler temperatures but insane humidity before reseting for another go. This entire process takes about a week, so if you get one stupidly hot day on a weekend, odds are the next few weekends are going to be the same, until the pattern breaks. Fortunately it looks like it’s going to break mid-week, with Wednesday being about 40 degrees, so next weekend might actually be worth living through.

This weekend isn’t worth living through. It was 40 or so yesterday, it’s gunning for 40 today, and tomorrow is going to be so humid we might all evolve into fish without warning. Then it’s back to work on Monday. *sigh*.

In the meantime I have some things to write (or at least complain) about. So let’s begin.

There are some truly awful adds on TV at the moment (I’m obviously becoming old and crochety – expect an entry complaining about kids playing on my lawn soon). One is for some phone company (I truly can’t be bothered remembering which one) carrying on about how getting internet on your phone is the most wonderful thing that could ever happen to you in your entire life. It consists of a father and his two sons out in the wilderness, hiding from the pouring rain in a tent. The father excitedly uses his internet enabled phone to show a photograph of a numbat to his rather annoyed looking sons, saying “See! I said we’d see a numbat out here!”. It then cuts to the three of them paddling along in a dinghy. Or rather two, because the father is futzing around with his phone again rather than pulling his weight. “See!” he says, pointing at a picture of a crocodile on the screen “I told you we’d see a croc out here!”. Then there’s a supposedly humourous moment when the sons see a “real” crocrodile swimming up to the dinghy while their dad is still gesturing gimp-like at the phone (I say “real” crocodile because it’s about as convincing as a plastic log).

Now what’s so annoying about this add you ask? (well apart from the obvious anyway). It’s the father’s absolutely shocking grasp of natural history! He promised his kids that on their camping trip they’d see a numbat and a crocodile. Well, I hope they’re going camping at the zoo, because that’s the only place you’ll ever see the two of them. Numbats (although they once existed across much of southern Australia – a fact I only recently learned) are confined to a small area in the south west corner of the country. Crocodiles can only be found in the northern third of the country. Their habitats don’t overlap! They don’t even come close to overlapping! He might as well promise they’ll see a polar bear and a zebra!

The other add that’s particularly getting my goat at the moment is one for (inevitably) McDonalds. It’s based around the idea that “your children don’t see the world the same way you do” and “where you see a simple trip to McDonalds, they see an unmissable magical adventure!”. The sledgehammer implication being that if you don’t take your kids to McDonalds, you’re denying them an unmissable magical adventure and are hence a Bad Parent. Honestly it gets me really riled up.

TV that hasn’t been annoying me lately on the other hand includes the BBC’s fairly brilliant four parter ShakespeaRe-Told which the ABC finally got around to showing over the last month. I wasn’t quite sure if it would work (as John Safran said “don’t trust anyone who tries to update Shakespeare for the kids”) but was actually really impressed. Particularly by Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which may have something to do with my being most familiar with those two plays). The ABC messed around with the order slightly, playing Macbeth first – but I think this was justified as it’s probably the most familiar Shakespeare play to most people, and it was a much stronger adaption than Much Ado About Nothing (death and murder probably works better as an intro to the concept than romantic comedy).

There were some truly inspired moments through the series, in Macbeth for instance the three witches on the bleak Scottish moor become three bin-men on a bleak landfill, and Banquo’s spectre at the feast manifests (initially at any rate) as a voicemail. In The Taming of the Shrew Petruchio is actually given a believable reason for turning up at his wedding in ridiculous garb, and the writers deftly manage to turn the play’s message from one of wifely subservience to a statement of marital equality. And as for a A Midsummer Night’s Dream, well just about the whole thing was brilliant. Puck, Oberon and Titania were perfectly cast and the writers resisted the temptation to try and modernise them into something other than faries (you can do that fairly sucessfuly – I believe there was quite a good version set at a rave party a few years back with Puck as an ectasy dealer and Oberon and Titania as DJs, but keeping them as fairies makes everything much more authentic). I have to admit I found Bottom rather annoying, but that may well have been intentional.

The whole episode was very entertaining, and actually funny – one of the big problems with Shakespeare’s comedies is that the archaic language tends to block access to the jokes (some of which just plain ain’t funny anymore anyway).

I particularly liked Puck’s monologue at the end. It’s always been one of my favourite bits of Shakespeare and the writers managed to update it while keeping the meaning almost word for word. I can’t find a copy of it anywhere online but I’ll attempt a comparison based on my no doubt faulty memory.

The original…

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:

And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;

Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

The rewrite… (more or less 🙂

I wasn’t born offensive. I had to work on it. But you know there are some people who’ll get offended at just about anything. So, if you were offended, I’m gonna give you the third and final nugget from Puck’s bank of wisdom. Pretend it was all a dream. Try it – works every time. But if you’re still not happy, then let me know, and I’ll fix it. I ain’t lying.

Or at least it was something like that 🙂

Right, disolving into a pool of sweat now. I’ll see if I can write tomorrow, if I don’t turn into a fish.

You know it’s terribly unfair. Yesterday was the Australia Day public holiday, and Monday is my day off, so I’ve got a four day weekend – but the weather is so diabolical that I can’t actually do anything except sit in front of the air cooler and try not to die. It was 41 degrees yesterday, they’re predicting 39 today, and 37 tomorrow. Monday at least will be cooler, but (such is the nature of low pressure troughs along the West Australian coast) it’ll be really humid. So the entire four days are a complete wash out.

And it’s not like I can spend the time profitably because it’s too hot to even think. I suspect I’m part discworld troll because as the temperature gets higher, my IQ gets lower. Well, OK, maybe not my IQ, but certainly my ability to concentrate. I spent most of yesterday stumbling around in a daze, reading random articles on Wikipedia. Today I’m going to give my metabolism a break and head into the State Library with a couple of good books. Tomorrow I don’t know what I’ll do. Die probably.

sigh

Now it’s pretty well established that Scientology is a fairly – shall we say – “nutty” religion, but every now and then you stumble across stuff that raises its level of nuttiness to new nutty heights. Like this for instance….

I could provide comment on this, but it would mostly consist of variations on “Inergalactic walrus!? INTERGALACTIC WALRUS?!?!”, and I’m sure you’re already doing that yourself.

I’m going to go hide from Tom Cruise now 🙂

Been struck down by the black dog this week and feeling all tired, worn out and depressed. And… you know, there’s a word for it, I can never remember what it is, that anxious state where you want to do something but you just don’t know what. Yeah, that one. That’s how I’m feeling right now. Not fun.

I’d be looking forwards to the Australia Day Weekend except that the weather’s going to be in the high thirties for all of it. Which means it’ll be fairly hellish and not restful at all. But at least it’ll give me a chance to catch up with things. And melt. *sigh*.

Maybe I’ll go read about the Romans in that big book I bought a while ago. That’s doing something at least 🙂

Well, I’ve rather been burning the candle at both ends over the last week. Early starts (or at least attempts at early starts, it’s been more like my alarm goes off at 5:30 and I lay in bed groaning for an hour) and late nights. It all caught up with me yesterday – I felt like I was dying, so I went out and got a haircut (not because I felt like I was dying, just because I really needed one) then just watched DVDs for the rest of the day and had an early night. I’m much refreshed now so I thought I’d better do a round up of the last few weeks of my life.

OK, well Friday before last for starters. Katie finally heard back about that lucrative (well, more lucrative than working part time at a department store anyway) Government job she was going for – she got it! So we (which is to say her, myself, my brother Andrew, Travis and another friend of her’s who’s name I just cannot remember despite having met her before, which is shocking) decided to go out to dinner. Andrew was arranging things and we agreed to all meet up at a Japanese place in Mount Lawley at 8:00.

(On a side note, Western Australia is doing daylight saving for the first time in 15 years, as part of a three year trial brought in by the Government as a way of distracting us from the antics of the former police minister. I’m still finding it a little hard to adjust to – I apparently rely far more on ambient light levels for time telling than I realised, resulting in my glancing up at the clock of an evening and being shocked to see it’s already 11:00pm 🙂

Naturally I was working on Friday so I needed to figure out what to do between knocking off work at 5:00 and eating Japanese cuisine at 8:00. The obvious solution was to head into the city and catch up with Rebecca – especially as she promised to bring along my somewhat delayed Christmas present. So after killing some time walking down the Terrace (I got there a bit early) we met up outside her work at 5:30, where she revealed that she had in fact not brought along my Christmas present. I considered leaving right then and there, but decided to forgive her ;D

We set off to try and find a coffee shop that was both open and not packed out with lawyers and stockbrokers. This is a rather hard ask on the Terrace at 5:30 on a Friday, so we eventually ended up in King Street. We were thinking of hitting up the Etro Cafe, but instead decided to try out the rather trendy (and rather empty) place just opposite at number 44, which claimed to be a purveyor of fine foods and drink.

The claim proved to be quite accurate. We ordered a cheese platter (which was excellent, particularly the brie and the weird block of salty grape jelly stuff that Rebecca refused to even touch) and killed time discussing what she should wear to a work-conference-related fancy dress party she was required to go to. The theme was “come as what you always wanted to be” and (knowing that there are people like Rebecca and I around) there were explicit instructions against turning up in your normal clothes and saying “I always wanted to be me”. We didn’t reach any real conclusions, although I decided that if I was ever in a similar predicament I’d fail to turn up, then halfway through the evening have a telegram delivered saying “GREETINGS STOP ALWAYS WANTED TO BE RICH & IMPORTANT ENOUGH NOT TO ATTEND RIDICULOUS PARTIES STOP”.

I’d figured out that I needed to catch the 7:15 bus to make it to Mount Lawley in reasonable time, and so was getting quite jumpy as the clock got closer to 7:00. Rebecca kept telling me to calm down, and that we had plenty of time. As it turned out she was completely correct, my normally good geography had failed to inform me that King Street hits the Terrace just opposite the bridge to the bus station. So we got there with time to spare, said our goodbyes and descended into the gloomy underworld of the mole men to await our buses.

I got to Mount Lawley at around 7:30 (I prefer to be inconveniently early rather than inconveniently late). I quickly located the restaurant and after a quick scout around to see if anyone else was there took up a seat on some steps just outside. Ominously the place seemed packed. Even more ominously people kept walking up, walking in, then walking out looking disappointed about a minute later. From past experience I suspected that Andrew would have completely failed to make a booking…

He and Travis arrived at about five to, and sure enough hadn’t booked. And sure enough there were no tables available. So, no Japanese for us! Katie turned up with her friend not long afterwards, and we decided to walk down Beaufort Street to see if anything else appealed.

After checking out a number of options (all of which were unsuitable because of Travis’s aversion to Asian food apart from Japanese, my aversion to Indian, and Katie’s vegetarianism) we ended up at a little Italian place about a block up from the Queens. We got a table, and were instantly struck by the bizare behaviour of the staff. They raced up and handed us menus, then about a minute and a half later (while we were still getting settled in) raced back to take our orders. When we said we weren’t ready they asked if we wanted drinks, then ran away before we could answer. Then came back about a minutes later to ask for our orders. This was only the begining of their weirdness.

Over the course of the evening they proceeded to try and take the menus away before we’d ordered anything, tried to take two of our dishes away (one of them mine) before we’d finished eating (getting disgruntled when we objected), and completely failed to understand the word ‘vanilla’ when ordering ice cream – “I’d like the vanilla ice cream, one scoop thanks” (pointing at menu), “What sort?”, “The vanilla ice cream, one scoop” (pointing at menu), “One scoop of ice cream, what kind?” “The vanilla” (pointing forcefully), “What?”, “Vanilla!” (almost poking a hole through the menu), “OK, the vanilla”.

The best moment though had to be when we asked for the champagne we’d had them put in the fridge earlier. One waiter brought out the bottle and champagne glasses for everyone, followed immediately by another who took the champagne glasses away. And when I say immediately, I mean she was picking the glasses up off one end of the table as her colleague was still putting them down on the other end. It was so stunningly unbelievable that it took us five seconds or so to get any kind of objection together, and she almost got away with it. (She followed up by interpreting my request for ‘only a little bit’ of champagne – complete with finger and thumb held about a centimetre apart – as meaning ‘half the glass’).

So, an… entertaining night. The food was excellent – I had the gnocchi in four cheeses which was brilliant – but the service was like something out of Monty Python.

We paid up (not leaving any kind of tip) and headed back up Beaufort Street. After acertaining that no one had brought a car that I could get a lift from, I resigned myself to getting a bus and peeled off to wait at the stop outside the supermarket while everyone else went into Planet Books.

I had two options with the bus. I could get off at the top of Grand Promenade and walk, or at Coode Street and walk. Grand Prom meant a much longer walk, but had the advantage of avoiding Bayswater railway station which can get a bit dodgy late on a Friday night. So I went with the long option. It was quite a pleasant walk, I cut through the back streets for a lot of it – figuring that any psychopaths were more likely to be scouting victims along the main drags – and got home just on midnight.

So that was Friday before last.

This Friday (by which I mean last Friday) I headed out with Justin to see Comet McNaught. He was meant to come on Thursday night, but in his usual fashion didn’t turn up until 10:00pm (after saying he’d be around at 8:00), by which time it had long set. On Friday he said he’d turn up at 7:00, and arrived about 7:40, which with Justin actually counts as on time 🙂

I’d called ahead to Grilled down the street for some fish and chips, so we stopped in there to pick them up, and then drove over to North beach. Foolishly we’d both neglected to bring along jumpers or coats (it’s summer after all!) and were almost frozen to death by the gale off the ocean while eating said food and watching the sunset from a bench on top of the cliffs. We then retreated back to the car to wait until it was dark enough to make setting up the telescope worthwhile.

Obviously the news bulletins had said this was the last night to get a decent look at the comet because the carpark was soon completely packed. People were standing around (or at least sitting in their cars out of the wind) peering at the sky, and pointing excitedly at every plane or bird that went by. They got very excited once it got dark enough for Venus to show up, some even left after having a look at it. Judging that the comet would soon be visible we got out and unpacked the telescope.

What happened next was rather embarrasing. Perhaps it was the light pollution, perhaps it was that I was out of practise, perhaps it was that I pointed the equatorial mounting in completely the wrong direction, but I was completely unable to get the telescope trained on anything – it even took about ten minutes to point it at the Rottnest lighthouse. But it was OK, because as the darkness set in, the comet – initially just a light streak against the sky – became more and more visible, until it was just plain magnificent.

Language fails me on just how impressive it was, but you can certainly see how ancient people used to regard comets with such wonder and dread. The tail was astoundingly long, if you used averted vision it was at least 15° long, and shaped like a scimitar.

I eventually got the telescope trained on it, but all the effort probably wasn’t terribly worth it because it looked exactly the same. But at least my pride was salvaged. Several of the people standing around wanted a look, including one little boy thought it was ‘sick’ so that probably makes it worthwhile 🙂

Eventually of course the head started to fade out as it vanished into the horizon, so we packed up. I was ready to head home, but Justin wanted to get some coffee, and since he was driving I was at his mercy and had to go along. We checked out Scarborough, but figured it was probably getting a bit rough (Scarborough has a bad reputation late at night these days) and decided to head to Mount Lawley instead. We ended up at the coffee shop just opposite the Queens and confused the other coffee shop patrons by discussing nutrition for about half an hour (Justin studied it at Uni you see). Then he dropped me and the telescope back home.

All in all a very successful night’s comet gazing 🙂

So that’s what I’ve been up to for the last few weeks. I’d better go put some washing on now or I’ll have nothing to wear to work tomorrow. *sigh*.

Oh, almost forgot, I meant to say what songs I voted for in the JJJ Hotest 100. They’ve done their usual trick of totally messing everyone around by limiting votes down to 10 per person this year (honestly it’s worse that Eurovision), so my carefully prepared list of 20 had to be butchered. I ended up going for…

• When You Were Young – The Killers
• Starlight – Muse
• King Without a Crown – Matisyahu
• Elevate Myself – Grandaddy
• Stopping all Stations – The Hilltop Hoods
• Alfie – Lily Allen
• Better – Regina Spektor
• Konichiwa Bitches – Robyn
• Harrowdown Hill – Thom York
• 45 and Rising – Midnight Juggernauts

Songs just missing out included…

• LDN – Lily Allen
• Not Big – Lily Allen
• Take Me Back To Your House – Basement Jaxx
• I Built This City – Baxendale
• Funny Little Frog – Belle & Sebastian
• Such Great Heights – Ben Folds
• Reptilia – Fourplay
• Yell Fire – Michael Franti and Spearhead
• Trains To Brazil – Guillemots
• Awoo – The Hidden Cameras
• 9 to 5 – Lady Sovereign
• Love Me or Hate Me – Lady Sovereign
• The Strangest Secret In The World – London Elektricity
• What Katie Said – The Matches
• Zookeepers Boy – Mew
• Welcome to the Black Parade – My Chemical Romance (Helen will want to stab me for this one I’m sure 🙂
• Sawdust & Diamonds – Joanna Newsom
• Tarantula – Pendulum
• I Don’t Feel Like Dancing – Scissor Sisters (But maybe this will pacify her 😉
• Hands Open – Snow Patrol
• Fidelity – Regina Spektor
• Can’t Con an Honest John – The Streets
• TV – True Live

So, we’ll have to see how many of those even make it in. What are the odds Forever Young comes in at number one I wonder?

I was in the middle of writing a decent entry last night when I got a phone call from Justin, who I haven’t spoken to in ages. And we’ve arranged to go comet spotting tonight, so there probably won’t be an update tonight either. Maybe Friday…

(And then emails to the people who need them, specifically Ali and Helen – I’m looking for that CD! 🙂

Oh, and continuing with idiotic YouTubery, how about evangelical ‘healer’ Benny Hinn slaying large numbers of folk in the spirit set to… well I don’t know who it is exactly but metal of some kind. Let the bodies hit the floor!. It’s worth seeing just for the sheer hilarity of the ‘AHHHH!!!!!!” bit at the begining! 😀

(Probably not the best viewing for those of an evangelical bent though, who would probably be highly offended 🙂

You know, I was so tired last night that I actually forgot to mention something vaguely exciting that happened yesterday. Exploding lightbulbs!

Or at least one exploding lightbulb. It happened when I got up in the morning and stumbled, still half asleep, through the loungeroom to the light switch. I flicked it on and FLASH! With a bright burst of sparks and a loud popping noise the lightbulb propelled itself out of its socket and across the room like an out of control rocket!

It certainly woke me up I can tell you.

I bought some more lightbulbs after work (I was totally out), put a new one in the socket and so far everything seems fine. I can’t help flinching every time I turn it on though 🙂

Now, to continue the Wyrmworld festival of Vidiocy we proudly present Viking Kittens!