I don’t think starting a new book at this time is a good idea but I need some distraction from the seriously ah beng contractors screaming at each other outside my house. If (and when) I come back to Singapore to work, I’m engaging their assistance in teaching me to speak fluent hokkien. Anyhow, all the redecorating of the house has resulted in the discovery of books I have once abandoned mid-way, or one-third way, or not-even-started way. My hoarder syndrome obviously started at a young age where I would buy books too deep for my intellect or just too complex for my then-untwisted mind. Nevertheless, all that never stopped me from collecting these books that I will ‘one day finish’, so here I am, 5 - 10 years older, hopefully with a bigger intelligence capacity to understand what the author was trying to convey; though I reserve comment on the state of my mind.
This book, I believe I may have stolen off an old friend, obviously never gotten around to returning it, because, obviously never gotten around to finishing it, is about this guy who writes about his autistic son. He talks about how if a person or a child, minus the ability to conform with philosopher’s traditional definitions of what it is to be human, does that fundamentally make him less human? Or more human because he no longer falls into the spectrum of what was originally created by humans. See, obviously too deep for a 17 year old to understand. I was such an idealistic, overreaching child.
I’ve made it through 3 chapters of the book today and I’ve come to find that the importance of psychiatry has been horridly undermined in the medical world. We often look upon the people with mental disabilities, personality disorders, and other spectrum of psychiatric illnesses, as the Hyde to our being Jekyll. But if we actually think about it, they really are the ones that allow us to understand .. us. Sometimes it feels like they are the essence to who we are.
“As I tap these words onto a screen, Joe is upstairs sitting in bed during a holiday at home, chirping much later into the night than he ought. Today, an unexceptional day, he made a notable discovery. Daddy’s name can be spoken without strenuous effort a steady ten times a minute or more for what feels like a good hour and the effect is to send Daddy progressively bananas. That is, Joe would have learnt as much from this behaviour, if he learnt. The fact is that in general he doesn’t learn, or at least does so inch by painful inch, but the reason he doesn’t has a surprising way of showing us how we do - the different ways he has of seeing the world encourage us to re-examine our own.”
