28 March, 2010

this is a transcript, obviously

Hey, so I can't remember if this wasn't recent or if it was a while ago, but my friend Todd was like, "How come you don't make any YouTube videos anymore?" and I was like, "Todd, um, I can't talk, that's why I don't make videos."

Like I feel like the reason I was making them in the first place was just as an experiment in talking, because I usually don't talk because I don't talk very well, so I realized it was kind of cool to make YouTube videos because I could practice saying things as many times as I wanted, or I could just say things and never post them but just listen to them and listen to how I talk. It's just really exciting to have the freedom to talk when you usually don't talk because you're a shitty speaker.

So that's my thing, and I don't know why Todd can't just read my blog, or he could call me on the phone and then he could listen to how horribly I talk--but then I guess he couldn't see me fidgeting around, which is maybe the best part.

Well, something happened, current events. It involves a person that I know but I really don't like to say his name because it has too many vowels in it--see, this is why I can't make videos, this kind of shit is actually sincerely upsetting to me because it's hard for me to say words that have too many vowels in them. That's why I don't talk. Well. This is his name. [holds up hand that says "Ari Ne'eman" on it, and carries on about that situation for a while, but I'm not transcribing most of that because I already posted about it twice]

...Do we need autistic mice? They would be cute, but what's even cuter, I think, is kids with severe autism getting an education so that they can communicate. I think that would be even more adorable than autistic mice...

I think I was going to talk about the idea of cure but the problem is that it's so nebulous to me and it feels so personal that it's hard for me to really say that I'm anti-cure--or what I like to say, rhetorically, is that I'm pro-cure and that I would take a cure pill, but just that I don't think, um, that I don't think it's particularly likely or easy, so.

I guess, okay. I would take a cure pill now, I think. Yeah, I can say that for sure. You know, it just makes stuff harder. But because stuff has been harder, I've realized, you know--I haven't had all the options that other people have had, I guess, I haven't been able to say, "I'm going to do this when I grow up," because I know that there are a lot of things, because I can't talk very well, and certain other things that are not going to be really possible--so I think, because of that I became interested in working with people with disabilities which really has been hugely meaningful to me, and if that hadn't happened, if I'd had all these options I'm afraid that that wouldn't have been the case. I also--I feel that my love for people is different and almost more tender because it's been so hard for me to be close to people and understand them that when it happens it's almost such a shock that it's sort of miraculous.

I guess my problem is I just don't necessarily have a very standard way of looking at things and whether things are good or bad, and I know, objectively, that having a disability, I think makes your life worse, but I mean, I mean, I mean, I can see how that's true if you write it all down, like, mathematically, I guess it's all worse, but it's just like, I feel that my life has been so meaningful to me through my disability and through other people's disabilities that it's really difficult for me to say "I don't want disabilities to exist."

I mean, if you don't want pain and disability to exist, like, instead of trying to figure out the gene for autism or continuing to abort fetuses with the gene for Down Syndrome--I mean, I think that the condition of pain and difficulty is called, um, "life," and I think every fetus has the gene for life, so I think it might be better if people just stopped living or having babies, if you really want life to not have difficulty in it.

But, I mean, okay, I feel concerned saying this because I know that this is, like, a political issue, but for me, I guess it's really hard for me to think about it because it feels philosophical and religious to me, and, I don't know. I haven't read this so I probably shouldn't talk about it, but I read about a woman who was a disabled Christian theologian, and she wrote books talking about Christ as a disabled person, since He was a person who was injured and in pain, and I feel, I don't know, I guess it's hard for me to, as a Christian person, to see the condition of injury and incompleteness, to see those things as something that I have and other people don't. I feel like it's clearer for me, sometimes I almost feel luckier because I feel like it's pretty easy for me to understand that I have a bunch of original sin going on because I'm not very good at hiding anything that I'm thinking or feeling, so I just know about it.

Yeah, I'm sorry to say this. I guess this isn't political, except the beginning, you should support Ari, but um, it's just difficult for me to think about disability the way that you're supposed to think about it. It's kind of like, um, what's the line, it's from Serenity, you know when the Operative is talking about the better world or whatever and he says, "Oh, I'm not going to live in the better world." Like, hypothetically, I understand that a world without disability is in some form a better world, right?

But I mean, I just don't want it, you know, I feel like if we get a world without disabilities I feel like I'm just gonna hop into a time machine and go back somewhere where we have them again, because I just don't understand the point of life without disabilities. Um, yeah, I don't know--is this a weird thing to think?

I mean, I know people with severe disabilities and I feel for them a lot when they're in pain so I don't think it's that I don't understand what disability is, that I think it's just a little thing, but it's just, it's hard for me to think that we should just get rid of it I guess--yeah, that's all.

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