more random things

[capri0mni]

• There's a new program on my public radio, recently, called "On the Media." And during yesterday's show, they had a piece about Mark Warner (recent, former Governor of Virginia, and possible Democratic presidential candidate), including cyberspaace on his campaign trail, and how he held a press conference in the virtual world "Second Life," and how he is now planning a town hall meeting there. Good to know the geek-nerd vote is finally being taken seriously.



• Also, I've heard about "Second Life" before, on NPR, and I'm tempted to try it out -- the way my life is going now, this may be the best oportunity for me to do some real socializing, and meet real people behind the avatars. It would centainly be more real than something organized just for people with disabilities, put on by a local church group, with its attendant proselytizing (:::Ack! Ptooie!:::). Anybody here have any experience with it? Will my dial-up service be able to handle it, or should I get broadband, first?


• Occasionally (and last night was one of those times), I look up "Cerebral Palsy" in encyclopedias and the Web, just to see if the "Official" definition jibes with my own experience of it, and if it's changed at all over time. And I found this gem on a site out of the UK:
  

  The symptoms differ from one person to the next, and may even change over time. Unfortunately people with cerebral palsy are often affected by other medical disorders, including epilepsy or mental impairment.

  
  Grah! and Argh! and *headdesk*! They're still linking CP with "mental impairment"?! Now, over my lifetime, I've met dozens of people with cerebral palsy, and I've only heard of two people with CP being mentally impaired. What I have encountered, with much greater frequency, is exceptionally bright people with CP who, because of diffeculty controling their muscles, have trouble speaking, so people around them assume they're "mentally impaired." I knew one such young man who briefly attended Mount Saint Mary College while I was there; he had such diffeculty speaking that teachers rarely had the patience for him to get his answers out in class. And the jocks in his dorm teased him so badly that he eventually quit.
  
  So "expert" sites like that one, that are written to advise parents with kids with CP, are hardly helpful.



• (I forgot what I was going to put with this last bullet, until a few minutes after I hit "Post to journal" -- here it is): As part of our changing public radio schedule, my local station has moved Weekend Edition: Sunday back two hours, so now it starts at 8 am, instead of 10; now, I keep sleeping through my favorite segment, the weekly puzzle. Maybe this will be enough incentive for me to regain my sanity regarding sleep... maybe

Comments

[scarfman]

I'm on Second Life, sorta. scarfboy talked me into registering so that we could chat. Then I downloaded the software onto the laptop which I use for chatting in the evenings in front of the tv, and its video card won't run the software. I've never logged on. I don't even remember what my character name is; something Pendragon.

My guess is dialup won't cut it.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... That's what I figured. From everything I've heard, it sounds very graphics/bandwidth heavy...

Well, maybe someday.

[liannanshith.livejournal.com]

My roommate has CP and just has issues with muscle control on one side of her body. My roomie's wife is wondering if she's having issues with dyslexia though. Still, they're both wonderful people.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Well, it's certainly possible to have more than one condition simultaneously. I mean, you can have C.P. and dyslexia, for example, just as you can have dyslexia without C.P. I mean, having C.P. certainly won't protect you from having other conditions as well (oh, that it would!).

But the way that paragraph was written, it makes it seem that C.P. is likely to cause "mental impairments," which is a dangerous assumption to start with, especially when you're dealing with the issue of teaching infants and young children, since kids rise to the level of what's expected of them.

BTW, when I was two (40 years ago), it was the default assumption that smart kids with C.P. were the exception, rather than the rule, so I was taken into the hospital for a psych test. I was shy, and the testing doctor was a boob, so I wouldn't do anything until my mother was there, and they almsot marked me down as "Severely retarded." I am eternally grateful that I had a mother who knew a boob when she saw one, and wouldn't back down, no matter how many fancy letters came after his name. I was just surprised that that assumption was still floating around after 40 years...

Besides, dyslexia is more of a visual processing problem than a mental impairment. When I was in college, my philosophy professor had dyslexia. And one of my dorm mates had a kind of CP that affected her depth perception -- still didn't stop her from taking 18 credits a semester (my nickname for her was "rocket socks").

[liannanshith.livejournal.com]

Right. It's just that it's seems to have come to my roommate in that it's related to it, and I haven't been of that standpoint. Either way it's been frustrating for her. She's a very bright person with a lot of drive. She's one of the more amazing people I've had as a friend in real life to date.

She's had stories of getting lumped with the 'retarded' kids and such growing up. Doctors and psychs can be totally idiotic in their determinations. Damn hubris. They can be extremely hurtful with a lot of their determinations. *sigh*

I'm glad you've had that parental support who wouldn't back down and do the right things. It frustrates me to no end that Doctors try to assert themselves in ways they really shouldn't and assume they know all. But yeah, a lot of things *still* don't change.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I think it's that doctors a) take the doctors of previous generattions as the ultimate authority, so mistakes in judgement tend to get passed on, and b) only see their patients in a clinical setting, so we're all just reduced to clinical statistics.

I think the word for that is "myopia."

Years ago, I had a subscription to New Mobility Magazine (for people with "mobility impairments," mostly spinal chord injury), and read a sidebar about how a study showed that doctors routinely underestimate their patients' quality of life, compared to how the patients themselves rated their quality of life (qualities of lives?).

[trinalin.livejournal.com]

I had a student with CP and he was not only bright, but also the most patient student I've ever had. He was, for all intents & purposes, mute. But he signed with one hand and wrote to help make himself understood. I thanked him on many occasion for being patient with me as I tried to figure out what he was communicating to me.

I saw him a couple of years later in the basement corridors at Wright State University (a very handicapped-friendly university and my alma mater) and he was doing well in the physics program. Nice to see former students of mine going on into physics and the other sciences. :-)

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Nice to see former students of mine going on into physics and the other sciences. :-)

Yeah. That's got to feel good. And basement corridors are so cool and geeky. :-)

[trinalin.livejournal.com]

Yup, very cool & geeky. At WSU, all the basement corridors are linked to the buildings, so you never have to go outside once you get on campus. (Well, I say all the buildings, but, oddly enough, the Frederick A White center - aka campus hospital - is the only building NOT connected to the others. I never did figure out the logic behind that omission.)

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Yeah. SUNY Albany was the same way. Very useful, especially since it was a campus originally designed to for Arizona -- AKA a wind tunnel (!), so come February in Albany, I was pretty much a human mole. Didn't stay at Albany beyond the first year, though; it was cold and inhospitable even in May.