A: angry, allergies, autism

This month I'm joining the insanity over at the A to Z Challenge. Basically, this means I'll write my way through the alphabet by the end of April. Since I love a good theme, I've decided to take a page from Amy Krouse Rosenthal's book Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. So by the end of the month we'll all realize (at the very least) one of two things:

1. I'm entirely boring
2. I'm entirely crazy

I look forward to hearing your appraisal at the end of this journey! That said, I give you -- 

a

ALLERGIES
Every time I go to the doctor, they ask me what allergies I have. I want to say, "Hey, I've been coming here for over 10 years! Why don't you know my allergies as well as you know your shoe size?"

But I don't.

I just rattle off my very short list -- sulfa (makes me stop breathing) and demerol (turns me into a paralyzed psychopath, which, I guess if you are going to have a psychopath around, paralyzed is a good way to go).



ANGRY, THINGS THAT MAKE ME
Table

being told what to do	Mom likes to remind me that my favorite phrase from about age three into, well, the present, has always been, “I can do it myself!” I was the only person in our family that delighted in standing up to my Papa (my dad’s dad). Everyone else indulged his crank-fest demands. Me? Not so much. One might say I have a problem with authority. Or perhaps I just don’t understand how stupid people keep ending up in charge of important decisions.
food	I’m angry when it’s not time to eat. I’m angry when it is time to eat, because this means choosing between a) eating delicious morsels of ultimate awesomeness or b) healthy food that will keep me alive and youthful. This shouldn’t be a choice. It’s 2012. Certainly some uber-scientist can combine the two and make my life easier.
things that are slow	When that little pinwheel of despair shows up on my screen, telling me that I need to “please hold” whilst my Mac’s brain searches for the appropriate file? I want to shoot things. I like to attempt the illusion of kindness. Often, I do the little “no, you go!” hand wave when driving through a parking lot. When the thankless dolts walking across the street don’t hurry to the other side? Again, target practice fantasies.

AUTISM
I have a friend that calls me "the autism whisperer." This is probably a huge faux pas, but honestly, I am a huge faux pas, so my concern-o-meter is barely raised. Growing up, I had never even heard the term autism. But here I am, 37 years old, and my connections to this strange little world seem huge and far-reaching.

• My 15-year-old son has Asperger's, and it only took me approximately 8 years of his life to figure it out!
• My 10-year-old stepson has autism, is mostly nonverbal, and spends most of his days in a world we can neither share nor completely understand -- but not for lack of wanting
• My aunt, who we'll call Aunt Bestie, to protect the innocent, has been a teacher of students with severe hearing impairments and autism for more than 25 years
• The ratio of autistic to non-autistic students that appear in my classroom each year seems to be growing
• One of my very closest friends happens to be a teacher of children with autism

I'm too much a believer in fate and serendipity and the "all things happen for a reason" path of enlightenment to not seek meaning from my autistic connections. In fact, being surrounded by people affected with autism (brilliant, creative, loving, and quirky as they may be) has made me much more aware of the many idiosyncrasies we all smother beneath our masks.

More and more, I am convinced that Lewis Carroll was correct when he penned the term, "We're all mad here." Be it autism, anxiety, or any other myriad anomalies found in each and every human on the planet -- there's not one of us with an unscratched neurological center.

We're all mad here.