All Cats Have Autism

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

But. Every single night. I am faced with my greatest nemesis, the one thing I cannot bear to endure:

Im a sucker for this ship man, in fact, Im a sucker for any ship with Prowl no joke ✌😔

Dr. Melissa King + Dr. Trinity Santos in

130 favorite horror movies: (43/130)

"11:55, almost midnight. enough time for one more story. one more story before 12:00, just to keep us warm. in five minutes, it will be the 21st of april. one hundred years ago on the 21st of april, out in the waters around spivey point, a small clipper ship drew toward land. suddenly, out of the night, the fog rolled in. for a moment, they could see nothing, not a foot in front of them. then, they saw a light. by god, it was a fire burning on the shore, strong enough to penetrate the swirling mist. they steered a course toward the light. but it was a campfire, like this one. the ship crashed against the rocks, the hull sheared in two, masts snapped like a twig. the wreckage sank, with all the men aboard. the the bottom of the sea, lay the elizabeth dane, with her crew, their lungs filled with salt water, their eyes open, staring to the darkness. and above, as suddenly as it come, the fog lifted, receded back across the ocean and never came again. but it is told by the fishermen, and their fathers and grandfathers, that when the fog returns to antonio bay, the men at the bottom of the sea, out in the water by spivey point will rise up and search for the campfire that led them to their dark, icy death."