by It wasn’t a bad day at work. That’s because almost nothing happened. Last week’s desk move is still having an effect on me. Until last Wednesday hardly anybody walked past my desk, because you sort of couldn’t, but now people walk either in front of or behind me at a rate of 55 an hour. Yes, I did a traffic count today from 10 to 10:30 and from 2 to 2:30. This isn’t the first time I’ve counted things at work. I once had a boss who dropped 59 F-bombs in a single day and a colleague who had a DAFA (daily audible fart average) of just over three. I even used to count loo rolls or beer bottles when I overlooked a Pak ‘n’ Save loading bay. All this counting, and the fact that people walking past me at work bothers me enough to measure their frequency, might be a sign that I’m ever so slightly autistic.
On that note, I saw Life, Animated last night at the Paramount. It told the story of Owen, a now 25-year-old autistic man who as a child could only communicate by channelling Disney films, every one of which he’d memorised line-by-line, and who as an adult is going out into the big bad non-Disney world. It was a fantastic film that at times moved me to tears. He hero-worshipped his older brother who at one point tried to talk about sex to him. How do I do that, his big brother wondered. Through Disney porn?! This comment was met with much laughter in the cinema. Although the story was heartwarming I couldn’t help but think of the thousands of other Owens out there who don’t have a Pulitzer Prize-winning father, who might not even come from a loving family, and who certainly won’t get a fraction of the help he did. We were privileged to have the director, Roger Ross Williams, present for a Q&A session.
On Monday I gave another English lesson. My lesson plans rapidly went out the window, not that I minded. Quite the opposite in fact, as I helped my student and his wife buy a car seat for their small daughter on TradeMe. I did get him to talk about the start of his Monday (he said he woke up at 9:30 − lucky him) and because so many verbs with irregular past tenses cropped up I talked a bit about those as well as the regular -ed verbs.
Today is my brother’s 35th birthday. Only 15 months separate us. He and his girlfriend recently bought a house in Poole on the south coast of England. I got to see bits of the inside of their house on FaceTime. They’ve got a cat called Major Tom. (Great name. They’d better not mess with him.) I saw all the “new home” cards on their bench. It would have been nice to have had such cards when I moved into this place. It would be nice to have a cat too, but the body corp rules prohibit them. For that matter it could be nice to have a girlfriend.
I filled in for a social tennis team tonight and got obliterated in both doubles matches, even though my three service games were free of double faults.
