Loving the Tasmanian Devil: Ooh! I Love the Falling Snow Thing!

As a follow-up to the Monty Python post, here is the long-promised Steve Martin post, similarly more funny if you know the allusions. So here is the best I could find for “Grandmother’s Song.”

The other night Andy and I got into a discussion about social “lying,” and I keep reprocessing it, trying to explain it to myself so I can explain it to him. Andy is repulsed by the idea that anyone would say “Call me if you need someone to talk to” and not really mean it. I, on the other hand, do things like that all the time. And on one side of my mind, I do mean it. I mean, “In a perfect world, where I had limitless time and energy, you are most definitely a person who deserves the ear of a thoughtful and caring listener and I would be willing to be that listener in a perfect world.” The other side of my words says, “You and I both know that this is not a perfect world, and you know that what I said means that you are a person worthy of my attention but that I don’t really mean that you should call because you know I am only a casual acquaintance and you should call someone nearer and dearer.”

Hearing myself actually verbalize this mental negotiation for Andy, I can understand why all this seems illogical and complicated, that it would be much easier and more logical if we all said what we meant, as Andy suggests: “I am sorry for your troubles. You need to talk to someone for support, but I am not the one. I don’t know you well enough. Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares.” In his mind this is the preferable route. The unguents that oil the social machinery appear as so much chicanery to him. And I do understand that.

I am pretty sure comedian Steve Martin’s “grandmother” must have had Asperger’s or lived with someone with it. Her song of advice for behavior, which Martin sings accompanied by his banjo, is meant to be absurdist, but it reads as startling close to what I see as the Asperger Code of Conduct.

It starts off as what most NTs and Aspies alike would identify as common social mores:

Be courteous, kind and forgiving,
Be gentle and peaceful each day,
Be warm and human and grateful,

And have a good thing to say.

I think most Aspies would be able to identify and label these behaviors cognitively and attempt to mimic them, knowing it is what society has agreed to try and do. They also by nature live out the first three lines of the next verse:

Be thoughtful and trustful and childlike,
Be witty and happy and wise,
Be honest and love all your neighbors,

Aspies are “thoughtful” – very – though their thoughts may take a unique form. And their obsessive special interest may indeed be “considerately” applied to serving their loved ones: gourmet meals, a clean pool, a meticulously planned trip. Taking everything literally, they are “trustful” to the point of gullibility, “childlike” for sure, and witty, and wise, honest to a fault, and “loving” of all their neighbors, though often in the form of absolute truthfulness, whether it beneficially “hurts” the neighbor or not.

At a recent informational farm seminar, Andy was explaining how he organizes his time to get out into the fields early and cut the hay when it’s at its peak nutritional value.

Another farmer responded with, “Yeah, well some of us actually have to milk our cows first.” (Andy, of course, had hired someone to milk our cows as soon as we could afford hired labor because he realized that this was the simplest task on the farm that he could delegate, leaving himself more time for managing the money-making aspects of the business, such as early first-cutting hay.)

Without sending his thoughts through any filter first, either emotional or social, Andy turned right to this farmer and said, “Whose fault is that?”

Of course the farmer was offended, though several other excellent farm managers in the audience suppressed laughs. Andy said to me later, “He needed to hear that. I was doing him a favor. Everyone else is too polite to say anything.”

I confess to extreme embarrassment if I am with Andy in situations like this. I find myself smiling apologetically at the offended one, commiserating later in a whisper, “Don’t take it personally. He does that to me all the time.” I know this is disloyal, but my innate instinct to preserve the social fabric usually outweighs my individual loyalty to my husband’s discourtesy. After all, what if we need a favor from this guy at some point?

Then there is the last line of this verse: “Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant.” Martin meant this to be absurdist, but in my experience, an Aspie looks at the niceties of social interaction and finds they clash with his own intense desire to be truthful and logical. Is this how we NTs look? That our flattery and kind words are insincere and obsequious? And besides, when we gush positively over something that is obviously distasteful, I am sure our prose does looks pretty purple.

What about our skill at being “polite”? Wouldn’t that mean reading someone’s mind and knowing what they want? As one Aspergian lamented, what is funny to one person is insulting to the next. In the mind-blindness of the Asperger brain, the NT ability to know the difference, knowing who is likely to laugh at the joke and who is likely to be insulted, must seem like clairvoyance that is beyond attainment.

I have heard Andy say that if he has trouble sorting out someone’s emotional intentions or receptivity, he just drops them as a potential friend because it’s too much work and worry for him to be second guessing.

There is also the extremely sensitive “bullshit meter” that seems part and parcel of the Asperger brain. Any sign of falsehood and the Aspie is ready to blow its cover. Aspergian memoirist John Elder Robison tells a hysterical story of attending a faculty party of one of his parents. As the attendees tout their own sons’ acceptances at Harvard and Yale, Robison decides to test their pompous boundaries. He gathers a crowd by telling a fantastic tale of his “job” as a Sanitation Engineer, i.e. garbage man, finding dead babies in dumpsters and beating off feral children. His justification for this was “Some of [my parents’] friends were okay, but others seemed to me arrogant and conceited, and it was starting to make me angry.”

From the NT perspective, of course, looking through our vastly complex and sophisticated social filters, the Aspie and his social “honesty” have their own appearance:

Be pompous, obese, and eat cactus,
Be dull, and boring, and omnipresent,
Criticize things you don’t know about,
Be oblong and have your knees removed.

I can attest to the sometime pomposity of the Aspergian. Aspies do know things and remember things, so Andy can with ease pull facts out of his photographic memories and correct any error in another’s statements.

I’ll say, “I think the Fed is going to cut rates again to encourage spending.”

“Actually,” Andy will respond, “cutting the prime will make Federal funds more attractive to commercial lenders, who will pass on those savings to their borrowers. This might encourage more people to buy durables, for which they likely need to borrow, but won’t really directly encourage consumer spending at the perishable or service sector level.”

I glare. This, for Andy, is being honest and loving his neighbor, or rather his wife. I was suffering under a mistaken impression and it was his duty to correct me. He was being helpful. Actually, I know how the Prime Lending Rate works, too. I was just glossing over the technicalities to make a generalization and pass on some news. You know, small talk?

As for eating cactus, Katrin Bentley in her book Alone Together, compares her Aspergian husband to a cactus: “a beautiful, strong, resilient cactus.” Prickly. Protected. Able to withstand harsh climates. Steadfast. But not so easy to swallow, or live with.

“Be dull and boring and omnipresent.” One of the common Tazberger traits is going on at great length, ad infinitum ad nauseum, about special interests or really about anything, missing every facial cue in the book that the listener would like for the Aspie to stop. I have always noticed that when Andy gets a burr under his saddle, he will work that thing from every possible angle, saying basically the same sentence in twelve different ways.

Exempli gratia: “There’s no secret about what’s going on. The calves’ buckets are not getting cleaned. Bacteria grow in milk. If you don’t sanitize those daily, the calves will get sick. There’s no silver bullet. No vet is going to come out here and identify some mystery cause for all the scours. They will ask how often we’re cleaning the buckets and tell us that’s the problem. We’ve been through this before. Things are fine and then you get busy and things slip and sanitation deteriorates and the calves pick up a gut infection.”

By this point I am giving non-verbal cues that I’ve got the message. Point taken. Shut up now. I have tried the smooched-to-the-side lips. I have tried the lowered eyebrows coupled with the grimly set mouth. I have tried the sigh. I have tried the wide open exasperated eyes and still he goes on.

“What needs to happen every day like clockwork is those buckets need to get sanitized. You need to do it. Eldest needs to do it. It’s nothing extraordinary. It’s just the most ordinary of Standard Operating Procedures. Keep the equipment clean. We don’t need special medicines or vaccines or powders. Just cleanliness. Pure and simple.”

I have given up on facial gestures and moved on to gross motor body language. I turn away. I start roughly and loudly doing something else. I try vocalized stage sighs and still he goes on and on. How many different ways can he say the same thing? Does he never stop talking? OK. Enough said.

Last verse, sung in my mind by the exasperated NT spouse who’s about ready to go sleep in the haymow:

Be tasteless, rude, and offensive,
Live in a swamp and be three dimensional,
Put a live chicken in your underwear,
Go into a closet and suck eggs.

I could not help but laugh as I reconsidered this one as an Asperger’s description. Does it fit Andy? Perhaps not the tasteless part. Actually from his upbringing Andy is a bit on the silver-spoon tasteful side, but “rude and offensive”? You better believe it. Before I had ever heard of Asperger’s, I used to say to myself, “I don’t know which is worse, that Andy is so rude or that he doesn’t even know he’s being rude.”

According to Tony Attwood, “Another characteristic associated with Asperger’s syndrome is that the person does not know when he or she would be expected to tell a ‘white lie,’ making a comment to someone that is true but likely to cause offence … Children and adults with Asperger’s Syndrome appear to have a greater allegiance to honesty and the truth than to the thoughts and feelings of others.”

Or there is the other route to rudeness which is the intense need to reach completion and be efficient. The Aspergian sees no need to waste time on social niceties when there is a task to be done, trampling over the small talk and pleasantries the rest of us use to sweeten the air and grease the day’s emotional machinery.

In terms of living in a swamp, Andy does in fact smack of Yoda in his swamp on Dagobah on occasion. Luke Skywalker, a novice at moving objects with the Force, is ordered by Yoda to lift his X-wing out of the water in which it is submerged.

Luke says, “I’ll give it a try.”

“Try not!” Yoda responds. “Do, or do not. There is no try.”

When Luke gives up after a feeble attempt, Yoda steps in to show him how it’s done.

Extending his little three-pronged hoof, Yoda uses the Force alone to raise the ship out of the water and set it gently on the shore, calling on the fourth-dimension energy that surrounds the “crude matter” of visible three-dimensional objects. I believe that in Andy’s case this ability to make things happen is pure willpower. When Andy decides what it is he will do, nothing stands in his way. There is never a thought of “try,” only do.

I confess to being a try-er. I will set my course, make a plan, and then I will try to make it happen. If making it happen means trampling on someone’s feelings or disappointing one of the kids or ignoring a social nicety, I just won’t do it, choosing “failure” over offensiveness. I would rather be liked than respected.

Andy on the other hand, feels obligated to do, not just try. He has said this of the hay harvest, moving cows, finishing a project. He will ram it through and devil take the hindmost. He explains, rightly so, that this is what breeds success, this is what makes the farm survive, this is what allows us to have gotten where we’ve gotten.

Maybe this is more of a male-female difference than an Asperger-NT difference. However, my dad was most definitely of my ilk, adored by his colleagues and loved by all his neighbors but not always able to pull off his family’s dreams on a grand scale. And I have noticed that I most deliberately married a man who was not this way. I am always attracted to men that can “get ‘r’ done.” Of course it would be nice if the doers could also be polite along the way!

And then there is “Put a live chicken in your underwear.” I chuckle over this one because it sounds like a pretty close approximation of Andy’s sometime persona we have taken to calling Mr. Pepper Pants. In exasperation one day I said, “What the hell is wrong with you? It’s like someone put pepper in your pants! It’s like living in a fire station during a constant five-alarm blaze!” Or, in a description of Andy by of one of our former farmhands, “Everything’s such a God-damn emergency!”

I know this is the trait that causes the most bewilderment among the uninitiated who walk in on a Tazberger day when too many things are going wrong and Andy truly looks like a live chicken has been put in his underwear. I now understand this better and can commiserate. Having dealt with an anxiety disorder of my own, I know what it feels like to have a stress response to what seems to others to be common daily occurrences. I can be Mrs. Pepper Pants myself on occasion.

Sensory overload and not enough time to process new information, diversion from the carefully created plan, I have seen Andy put his two hands on the sides of his head to make the bombardment stop, and he stomps off at a frantic pace to try and get away from it or get to a spot where he can process and adjust.

I confess that “Go into a closet and suck eggs” has been my thought if not my words to Andy on more than one occasion. When the combination of his rudeness and his running rough-shod and his pomposity and his repetitiveness and his criticisms and his agitation have driven me to the brink of psychosis, I am usually the one who ends up in a corner of the haymow (rather than the closet, which we reserve for passionate trysts) sitting with the silly goose and her nest of rotten eggs, fuming like a little freight train.

It is next to impossible for me to truly empathize with the inability to grasp social rules. It would be like not knowing how to breathe or swallow. But the more I read books by those with autism and Asperger’s, the more evidence I have that it is possible to truly not grasp them. Temple Grandin and Sean Barron have written a wonderful book called The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships in which they delineate, in very clear and logical terms, the rules the NTs seem to know inherently that are sometimes boggling and illogical to those on the spectrum. Their ten rules include such seeming no-brainers as “Honesty is Different than Diplomacy” and “Being Polite is Appropriate in Any Situation.”

Addressing social skills is one of those Asperger areas that is going to require some work on our part. I have always shied away from stepping on Andy’s foot under the table when he is interrupting or insulting someone, fearing that he would either overtly startle or else say out loud “Why are you stomping on my foot?” Instead I have taken the tack of silently bearing the social inappropriateness and just being extra kind to its victim.

On the other hand, I suppose from living with Andy for so long, I have become very aware of illogical social codes. I will cut through the endless socializing at teacher work sessions to get us back to the task at hand. I will call the bus garage and ream out the Nazi-esque bus driver who drove right by my kid. I will tell the obnoxious telemarketer whom I have asked to stop calling that if he calls again I will take legal action. I have also edged farther from the code of ill-advised doormat-hood and closer to a place where I can say the difficult but uncomfortable things that need to be said, risking others’ dislike for the sake of truth or effectiveness.

There must be a way to walk the fine line between honesty and rudeness. Psychologist Paul Ekman, interviewed on NPR’s Radio Lab (in a decidedly non-Asperger’s-related story), claims that people don’t “have to” lie; they do it out of laziness or timidity. After his daughter’s birth, he charged himself with the goal of living his life without lying. Invited to a second dinner party by a couple who had bored him and served bad food at the first, he finally said to them that in his middle age and with a busy schedule, he had decided to not pursue any new friendships so that he could instead maintain strong relationships with old friends. Sure this takes time and effort, Ekman says, but he feels like a Buddhist master when he pulls it off.

Talk about the Force! I have noticed that the Dalai Lama looks a little like Yoda, and that he has that same humility and playfulness and power. That kind of moral stance must be the happy medium between unctuous social graces and boorish discourtesy. Yoda doesn’t pull punches and neither does the Dalai Lama. Truth as the ideal is a laudable ideal, but so is compassion.

The Kabbalist Tree of Life pairs the qualities of Gevurah and Hesed (Judgment and Mercy) and joins them through the attribute of Understanding (Daat) as the bridge between intellect and emotion. From my understanding, the Asperger brain might not physically have this neural connection. It might be physically impossible for the intellect to talk to the realm of the emotion. I guess I need to be this connection for Andy, working my way through his intellect to explain the codes of emotion that guide us in the NT sphere. But Andy in turn can help me to summon my intellect when my emotional message system has taken over and is calling all the shots.

There is Darth Vader power, and then there is Yoda power: the dark side versus the light side of the Force. Similarly, there is brutal honesty-slash-steamrollering and there is compassionate truth and encouragement. The trick is to merge the opposites.

At his death, Master Yoda says to Luke, “You must confront Vader.” Of course Luke does this, and at the end of the last movie (the original last movie), Vader has been redeemed and stands glowing with Yoda and Obi Wan as the Eewoks frolic in the background.

Imagine the moral strength it takes to pull that off. It takes Jedi powers: Judgment, Mercy, Understanding, Willpower, and Compassion. Can we do it? It might require some training time with Yoda. I guess what we need to do is go live in his swamp and be four-dimensional. May the Force be with us.