sorry about posting 400 times today

but I have sort of been crashing, and I really liked this poem when it was in the New Yorker in 2002 the week my dog died, and it's a poem that I find myself thinking of, well, always when I am crashing. I just got home for break, and my mom has been going to workshops at the Autism Spectrum Resource Center and she was telling me about the people and I asked, "Are there any Amandas?" and my mom said, "no, there's no one as high-functioning as you." Also whenever my mom tells anyone I have Asperger's she says "But she's very high-functioning" even though I'm standing right there so I'd think the person would be able to tell if I'm high-functioning or not.

Anyway, I guess my question is if I'm so high-functioning why can't I do anything. I know the answer is that I can do a lot of things, for example we went to dinner with my grandmother and aunts and uncles and cousins and it was easy and no big deal, also my dad started a long conversation with me when I was doing something else, and I didn't whine or anything. Sometimes when this stuff is going on it just strikes me how easy it is now. I know that's good. It just frequently doesn't feel like enough. It turns into this creepy tug-of-war, like how I love going to the airport because I can take off my shoes and put my computer in the tray and go through the metal detector, and I love taking trains and subways because I know how, but then people ask me to do things that make me so upset, like my professor telling me we're going to have class on Tuesday instead of Thursday so I have to change my shift at work. When this happened I wrote on my knee:

"Life Is An Endless Mess"

and while I know this is dramatic, it sometimes feels that way and makes me want to cry.

I was thinking about my self-injury because when I did it I didn't have very stereotypical motivations. I basically did it to win the tug-of-war. Some people supposedly don't feel it or they like the way it feels but I always felt it, and I did it because I thought that other people wouldn't have been able to keep going, but I kept going to make up for all the other situations in which I couldn't keep going.

Anyway, this is the poem:

The Promotion
by James Tate

I was a dog in my former life, a very good
dog, and, thus, I was promoted to a human being.
I liked being a dog. I worked for a poor farmer,
guarding and herding his sheep. Wolves and coyotes
tried to get past me almost every night, and not
once did I lose a sheep. The farmer rewarded me
with good food, food from his table. He may have
been poor, but he ate well. And his children
played with me, when they weren't in school or
working in the field. I had all the love any dog
could hope for. When I got old, they got a new
dog, and I trained him in the tricks of the trade.
He quickly learned, and the farmer brought me into
the house to live with the family. I brought the farmer
his slippers in the morning, as he was getting
old, too. I was dying slowly, a little bit at a
time. The farmer knew this and would bring the
new dog in to visit me from time to time. The
new dog would entertain me with his flips and
flops and nuzzles. And then one morning I just
didn't get up. They gave me a fine burial down
by the stream under a shade tree. That was the
end of my being a dog. Sometimes I miss it so
I sit by my window and cry. I live in a high-rise
that looks out at a bunch of other high-rises.
At my job I work in a cubicle and barely speak
to anyone all day. The human wolves don't even see me.
They fear me not.

[I know this is the most emo post ever made, but if you want, you can bookmark it and then read it when you're feeling emo yourself and are in a state to handle it. If you read it when you're in a normal mood you might end up holding me in contempt forever.]