“Is I dog, or is I a charming hat?”

Nikki’s stupendous adoption series at Catapult wrapped up with this lovely, lovely installment:

I was in college when I first laid eyes on my adoption papers. “From this day forward, the child Mika Yamada* shall be known as Susan Kiyo Ito.” It charmed and rattled me. I tested out the name in my mouth and it felt like a sourball, tart and sweet at the same time. I whispered it into the mirror. Mika.

I shyly wrote it down and showed it to my friends. “This was my first name,” I told them. A few of them abruptly stopped calling me Susan or Sue. “Hey, Mika!” they would call, and I ignored them or did double takes, not realizing they were talking to me. It made my chest flutter inside. This was the name my birth mother chose for me. She wrote it down, a letter at a time, on my birth certificate.

I thought about her hand holding the pen. A slow-motion calligraphy, then that final dotting of the i.

This is awful and dangerous:

it is totally reasonable that she needs to pay back this money, especially if he’s letting her do so over a twelve-month period:

Q. Co-worker stealing money, I’m conflicted: I work for a small theater company. My boss recently discovered that my co-worker, over the past couple of years, has put more than $2,000 of personal charges on her company credit card. He’s furious, and wants to fire her and give her 12 months to pay it back, or else he will press charges. While I agree with the decision to let her go, I feel that asking for her to pay the money back is excessively punitive, considering she’s 25, completely broke, and lives with her parents, who are equally broke. My boss said if it were him, he’d be mortified and want to pay everything back because it’s the “right thing to do.” But he comes from a wealthy family, has never had to struggle for money, and doesn’t seem to care (or realize) that paying back this money will likely upend her whole life. For example, he suggested, “She might have to take out a loan,” seemingly unaware that there’s probably no way she could get a loan. Who’s right?

This is an excellent rant, also, listening to Rick Mercer is always a joy to me, because he sounds SO CANADIAN.

Can an outsider really become Amish?:

Reverent, giddy, almost lustful: it’s the way you’d expect a teenage girl to talk about her favorite pop star, and yet it’s a tone I’ve come to expect among a certain group of people when you invoke the name of the Amish. Before the internet, these “wishful Amish” wrote emotional missives to newspaper editors in areas with large Plain populations; one man I spoke to, who publishes a series of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania guidebooks, composed a form letter so as to minimize the time he spent replying to such requests. Now, the wishful Amish have dedicated internet forums (ironically) on which they write with the feverishness of the unrequited lover about their long-held desire to get close to the aloof objects of their spiritual desire.

Many say they’ve wanted to become Amish for “as long as [they] could remember,” though most of them say they have only seen Amish people on a few occasions, and don’t know much, if anything at all, about Amish theology. Some talk about wanting to find an Amish partner, others, about the fear they won’t be accepted into the community because they are single parents, or divorced, or have tattoos or once dabbled in drugs. Many are hesitant that they won’t be able to fully adjust, and so wonder if it might be possible to stay with an Amish family for a week or two, just to try out the lifestyle. Although a few commenters say they’ve taken the initiative to make their own lives more Plain–given up television, say, or started to dress more modestly–most of them appear to be banking on integration into the community to transform them, like alcoholics who decide to wait until detox before examining the deeper motivations behind their drinking.

ICYMI, we ran this just fan-tastic interview with Steve Silberman yesterday, helmed by the fabulous Emily Brooks:

The idea that NeuroTribes is a comprehensive history of autism seems to trip some readers up. My feeling from reading your book was not that it’s all there is to know about autism and autistic people; your intention was to provide a detailed and important background. IfNeuroTribes is a starting point, what do you recommend readers explore next?

My book is not at all meant to be a comprehensive encyclopedia of autism, and it’s not presented that way. It’s not a good book for parents who are interested in researching treatments, and it’s not a substitute for reading about autistic experience written by the people who live it.

My hope for NeuroTribes is that it fills in huge gaps in historical information so that crucial aspects of the present situation are made comprehensible instead of opaque. To put it in very blunt language, one of my goals for the book was to answer the question, “How did things get so fucked up in autismland? Why is everyone so angry?” It turns out there are very good reasons for everyone to be angry. Parents were lied to for decades about their alleged role in causing their children’s autism, and two generations of autistic people lived and died in institutions that were worse than prisons, being subjected to “treatments” that would be considered war crimes if POWs were the victims. The legacy of how society has treated autistic people is very, very dark — and the only way we’ll be able to move past it as a society is by having an honest accounting of what happened. A reckoning. That’s what I intended NeuroTribes to be.

Charlotte Shane on Paula Cole:

I was 15 years old when braless, emphatic Paula Cole performed on Saturday Night Live in 1998 with her nipples blazing and pit hair in full effect. SNL was a show I always and only watched with my father, who had custody of my brother and I on the weekends and who had let me stay up late for episodes since I was a child. He was the type of man who regularly commented on women’s appearances whether those women were on the screen, on the sidewalk he drove past, or acquaintances in his personal and professional life. My impression of her hippie chick aesthetic couldn’t admit my own reaction; I was too busy anticipating his evaluation, which he would make known at any moment. To whatever extent my ancient memory of the moment can be trusted, I think he said something like, “she sure likes showing it off” when she threw her mic-free hand over her head during “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?”, flashing fur yet again. Though I was not a performer and barely a woman, I recognized even then that her movements, and her body, had less to do with provoking dour sexists than how she naturally existed.

This is so fascinating to me:

Meryl marched into the hotel suite where Hoffman, Benton, and Jaffe sat side by side. She had read Corman’s novel and found Joanna to be “an ogre, a princess, an ass,” as she put it soon after to American Film. When Dustin asked her what she thought of the story, she told him in no uncertain terms. They had the character all wrong, she insisted. Her reasons for leaving Ted are too hazy. We should understand why she comes back for custody. When she gives up Billy in the final scene, it should be for the boy’s sake, not hers. Joanna isn’t a villain; she’s a reflection of a real struggle that women are going through across the country, and the audience should feel some sympathy for her. If they wanted Meryl, they’d need to do re-writes, she later told Ms. magazine.

The trio was taken aback, mostly because they hadn’t called her in for Joanna in the first place. They were thinking of her for the minor role of Phyllis, the one-night stand. Somehow she’d gotten the wrong message. Still, she seemed to understand the character instinctively. Maybe this was their Joanna after all?