Three Wishes, Revisited

Posted on by Astrid

Hi all. Last Tuesday, I saw the Writer’s Workshop prompts for this week. Several of them spoke to me but I somehow didn’t give myself the time to actually write on them. Today, I’m finally back on the blog and I’m choosing the prompt in which you’re granted three wishes. I did a post on this topic already in 2020. Let’s see how things have changed over the years. What would I wish for now?

1. Unlimited door-to-door transportation. I listed ParaTransit access as a wish in 2020, but now that I’m actually using it for things other than getting to my wife, I realize that it’s not that having unlimited kilometers would solve my problems getting to places. I’d also need the driver to actually drop me off at the place I want to go to. Transportation, after all, is one of the reasons I don’t go to cerebral palsy meetings as often as I’d like, because they’re often organized at restaurants, which taxis can’t reach.

2. My ideal room/apartment within a care facility. In 2020, I wanted to be closer to my wife, but if I have my transportation desires covered anyway, that’s no longer a necessity. My ideal place wouldn’t be much larger than my current room, but it would have a private bathroom and its own kitchen, in which I could prepare my own food with assistance. It would also not be as close to communal areas as my current room is, because well one of my main problems right now is overload from all the sounds coming from the living room.

Looking back, I can’t believe I didn’t list more care hours as a wish in 2020, being that I didn’t have my one-on-one at the time. I do now and of course I wish for it to stay the same.

3. Improved physical and mental health. Don’t we all wish for optimal health? I listed it in 2020 too, as my first wish in fact. Since then, my physical health has improved in some ways and declined in others. For example, I’ve lost significant amounts of weight that I indeed needed to lose and as a result, no longer have high blood pressure. I can also walk for longer. On the other hand, my tremors have gotten significantly worse and I believe my cognitive functioning has declined a bit too.

My mental health, I think, is better than it was in early 2020. I hope it improves more though.

Now that I compare my wishes to the ones I listed in 2020, I see an interesting trend, in that despite better quality of life, my wishes are still largely the same. No, that’s not entirely true: they’re bolder, in fact. I wonder what this means.

Three Wishes

Posted on by Astrid

I’m trying to participate in 7 Days 7 Posts organized by Jessica from Daysixtyfive. That is, I won’t promise I’ll complete the challenge, as I’m having a nasty cold. Yes, again. I hope I don’t end up with a fever this time. That being said, if it doesn’t get worse than it is now, I’ll probably be able to do fine.

Today’s topic is about wishes. You have just been granted three wishes. What are they?

I initially thought that we’re supposed to have big, world-changing wishes like peace everywhere. Then I saw Jessica’s post and her first two wishes are just for herself and her family. Maybe we all are self-centered like this, so I don’t need to feel shameful about wishing stuff for just myself. Here goes.

1. Physical and mental wellbeing. I purposefully wish for wellbeing, not health, as the genie might interpret health to mean I want to get cured of my disabilities. I don’t. I want to remain blind and autistic and having mild cerebral palsy. I even don’t want to be cured of my dissociative disorder, in that I want to remain multiple. What I do want is to be is stable mentally, less anxious. I also want my chronic physical ailments to go away. And while we’re here, I wish this nasty cold away and not to return.

2. To be close to my husband. I would wish for a suited care facility in my husband’s area, so that I could visit him more often. A suited care facility would be much like the one I’m in now, with a day center on grounds, lots of sensory equipment, the staffing level for me to be able to enjoy regular leisure activities, etc.

3. Unlimited ParaTransit access. This was the first that came to mind after a care facility close by my husband. Bigger things like wellbeing hadn’t even come to mind yet. I could wish for an endless stream of money, so that I can hire my own taxi drivers, but I don’t think I’d feel any better then. However, the ability to travel wherever I want without having to worry about public transportation, is very high on my list of desires. Interestingly, for the cost it took to make all trains and buses wheelchair-accessible, the government could have made this a reality for all majorly disabled people.

What would you wish for if you were granted three wishes?

Unusual Interests: Calendar Calculation and More #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Welcome to day 21 in the #AtoZChallenge. Today, I will be writing about my unusual interests. You see, like many autistic people, I tend to have interests that are intense and unusual in focus.

As a child, I was advanced for my age in math. When I was around six, my father taught me to do square and squareroot calculations. He used a set of squares (which were really computer chips) to teach me, laying three in one row and then squaring it to nine. I loved this.

When I was eight and the kids in my class were doing multiplication tables, this would be boring to me, as I had all tables from one to twelve memorized already. To make the activity useful for me anyway, I chose to start with the table of nineteen. Don’t ask me why I skipped thirteen to eighteen, but I did.

When I was a bit older still, I taught myself to do calendar calculation. Most people not familiar with autism I encounter have never even heard of that skill, which is a common savant skill in autistics. It involves calculating on what day a certain date falls. Usually, this skill is presumed to be memory-based, but I actually knew the rules for doing it. I also learned about the change from Julian to Gregorian calendar in 1582 and took those ten days that were skipped into account when working with dates before then. I have a newspaper article from late 1999, which I still treasure, titled something like “the fight about time” in Dutch. It explained why the year 4000, unlike other centennial years divisible by 400, shouldn’t be a leap year. How fascinating!

Later, I developed other “unusual” special interests. For example, I used to draw maps when I was around ten or eleven. I always drew Italy, though I knew a lot about topography in general.

When I was in the psychiatric hospital and touring potential supported housing places, I had no idea about their location, except which trains and buses to use to get there. I wasn’t as good with topography anymore. I at one point had most bus routes in my province memorized from Wikipedia.