andrew61

Confessions of a Slacker
2006-10-17 00:00:00 (UTC)

“The Queen” and other random thoughts

1:30 am, CDT

I treated myself to seeing “The Queen” last Friday when it opened at the movie theater. I’ve always been somewhat of an Anglophile, particularly when it comes to the British Royal Family, so I just had to see this movie. It basically covered the week after Princess Diana’s death in 1997 and what might have transpired in the Royal Family’s conversations behind closed doors, and how the Queen, at first reluctant to break from established protocol, eventually bowed to the will of the people and publicly acknowledged Diana at the time of her funeral.

Helen Mirren was superb in the starring role. She not only looked just like Queen Elizabeth II, she talked like her as well… same high-pitched, squeaky voice. The guy who played Prince Philip was a pretty decent facsimile, as well… but the guy playing Prince Charles didn’t look or act anything like him… and the Queen Mother, well… I don’t know who played that role, but she didn’t resemble her at all… in fact, she came across more like some fat old Chicago broad you might run into on a bus here or something. She was tacky!

The movie was good, though. If you’re at all interested in things royal, I highly recommend it.

There was a very touching scene where the Queen is out walking around the Scottish countryside near Balmoral Castle, and she encounters this beautiful, magnificent stag. Both of them observe one another, and both are very regal. She hears the hunters’ gunshots off in the distance, and she shoos the animal away so it won’t get killed.

And the highlight of the movie was towards the end, when, after the Queen has finally agreed to make her public appearance and deliver a speech, Tony Blair “suggests” a change to the speech to include the phrase “and as a grandmother…”, she responds with, “Do I have a choice?”

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I found $6 on the sidewalk earlier this afternoon… That made my day!

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Just before that, I’d had lunch at Thai Classic, which was OK except that I was disappointed because they were out of brown rice, so I had to make do with white. In conversation with my server, where we were discussing dreams, I told her of a rather weird dream I had two nights ago:

I dreamed I walked into another Thai restaurant a few blocks from there on Belmont that’s called “Duck Walk” (weird because in real life I’ve been there only once, and that was many months ago). The place being as small as it is, there were no tables available, so I had to stand and wait. Well, I waited… and waited… and waited… finally, some customers left and a few empty tables opened up. They had been cleaned, but the hosts wouldn’t let me sit down. I had to stand and wait… and wait some more… while they were totally ignoring me… so eventually in frustration I just turned away and headed back out the door.

What did that dream mean? It was a dumb dream, but it bothered me.

I half-jokingly told my server that maybe it was a psychic dream, but I got the two restaurants mixed up in my head, and my garbled brain had changed “no brown rice” to “no seating available”.

We then started talking about those dreams where you wake up paralyzed, and try to call out but cannot — I’ve had those off and on since I was 13 — and how I’d read that there was a medical term for it but couldn’t remember what it was, and my server said that growing up in Thailand and believing in reincarnation and spirits and all that stuff, she thought it had something to do with “ghosts”… She also told me of a nearby apartment where she’d once lived which apparently had bad “Feng Shui”, and that the “energy” coming in from the large windows that only faced in one direction became “trapped” when it entered her room, and caused her many nightmares.

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Earlier tonight, I was reading DowntownMom’s recent entry where she mentioned a movie about autism, and about how one of her children is autistic and another has Down’s Syndrome and she’ll likely have to take care of them for the rest of their lives… Anyway, it made me want to read up on autism and find out a little more about it, so I read an article on Wikipedia about the subject… and it got me to thinking.

I recognized myself in so many of the symptoms listed, more or less, that I’m now wondering whether I might be mildly autistic and maybe it was just never noticed and never diagnosed…? Is this possible? I’ve always felt clueless about social interaction, and reading other people, and more than a few people — especially some guys I’ve dated — have told me they had trouble “reading” me and had no idea how I was responding to them because I wasn’t giving off any nonverbal cues they could readily pick up on.

The article also stated that today, with the advent of the internet, some autistic people feel more comfortable interacting with others online, rather than face to face, because online you don’t have to worry about reading other people’s physical, nonverbal cues… or something like that…

All I know is that social interaction has always taken a lot out of me, and frequently leaves me drained and exhausted, both physically and mentally… unless it’s very limited and brief.

On one of my message boards, there was a woman who, although her posts were fascinating, frequently came across as insensitive, even rude, and often rubbed other people the wrong way. Then one day she revealed that she was HFA… “High Functioning Autistic”… and even then, it got me to wondering whether or not I too might suffer from the same condition…?

Apparently HFAs can pull themselves together enough to be able to do many of the things so-called “normal” people do in life… get and hold down a job, meet someone and get married, etc. In fact, this particular woman has done some amazing things… she quit a job many years ago after a boss sexually harrassed her and she couldn’t do anything about it… at the time she had $14,000 to her name, but somehow has managed to increase that sum tenfold even though she never held down a “regular” job again… The way she put it, she learned how to “live by her wits”… she and her husband learned how to make money playing Blackjack professionally, for example… they learned how to “beat the system”… she also learned how to buy stuff and sell it on E-Bay enough that she could make a living from it… and so on. So I guess sometimes autistics can accomplish quite a bit.

So even though I held a job for five years that required me to be extremely organized and detail-oriented, and to juggle a dozen different projects at once that often had crushing deadlines, where one procedural mistake could have cost the company millions of dollars… and I was able to perform that job exceedingly well… it doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t possibly be autistic.

Then again, I’m probably not. I’m merely odd, and peculiar, and shy and socially backward (although I’ve learned to fake it much better in my adult life).

Time to go to bed.




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