Autism And The Lost Plane

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loved that show--although i have to say i wish they had fired the writers after season 5-6, because the quality really went downhill after that and it was such a shame with so much acting talent to give them such hole-ridden scripts full of often painfully ridiculous dialogue.

People will find ways to interconnect various topics and find and make new meaning if I darest use that word:-) just now, meaning literally a few minutes ago started watching 5-1 in the kitchen while I prepare a meal. to take to work....it is on pause now...did read it went down hill after season four....for me it already started to go downhill in about the middle of four....that usually happens in a lot of shows i have watched like Madmen and even Homeland....

Starving Artist, for some reason I have been thinking about your message almost every time I watch another episode of that show. It is at times as if you are in the same room with me. That is just the kind of brain I have, maybe because I am also a synesthesiac. I am able to visualize things as very real. I am up to season 8, part of episode 2 now.

To anyone new, when I wrote in the original message about Dexter, I was not thinking anything at all about Dexter being autistic, which he obviously was not, or relating Dexter to the topic of this thread, but rather just setting the stage for a futrue thread I was going to be writing, and also just describing a real experience I was having of changing from watching the news on CNN about the plane to watching Dexter. This thread turned out to be an unusual one for me as a lot of traumatic emotional material from my past experience started to come up after I shared about my brain damage, and I would like to talk about that some more if it is okay, but not now.

What I would like to write about and have been thinking about a lot is how the two topics, that of Dexter and that of the lost plane, which really have nothing much in common and were not intended to have anything in common, when juxtaposed in the same thread, opened up an interesting avenue for discussion and really changed the affect in that the two topics were so starkly dissimilar. Or are they? This is one of the things I have been thinking about. ((comment when editing finished message:this last sentence is an example of my brain damage...I am trying to edit this kind of thing out, but am leaving this, which is a somewhat mild example, in here to illustrate the repetitive aspect.))

I also would like to mention that what happened on this thread was very upsetting to me, though that is okay. The day I started it I stayed up very late until I was completely exhausted trying to defend myself. I felt people were saying I was doing something bad by simply trying to express myself the way that I do and that I was going to be removed from this forum.. This aside, I did receive some good feedback here and on another thread and have subsequently been trying to change my writing style. The part of my brain that is damaged is not about idea processing, thankfully, but more involving repetition, and this does show up in my writing and I have particularly been trying to work on this aspect in my writing. ((the last three words, "in my writing" another example of this)). It is a very vulnerable feeling to be writing sharing this, and I was attacked yesterday about being brain damaged by someone who had read this thread. So yes, I can see there are a lot of people on WP with similar experiences, their own version, who feel very vulnerable.The link below is to a message I wrote today on a thread started by Pensieve, "When special interests get in the way of feelings' about her special interest in planes and people not understanding about that and how hurtful it is, and I did talk about my experience around this lost plane topic, so I hope anyone who is going to participate here will read that if they have time.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp6030029.html#6030029

***Re autism and the misunderstandings about the content of this thread, such as if when I mentioned Dexter I was implying he was autistic (which I was not), I think the more complex material becomes, and so the greater the discrepancy factor, then the more likely there is to be misunderstanding and misinterpretation. In a primitive society when people are foraging for food, obviously the person who is able to focus is going to have a better chance to survive and help his tribe to survive, especially if he discovers a big hidden source of food, or maybe, even better, a NEW source of food. As one person on WP keeps writing about, it all relates back to survival and imo, it is not just survival of the individual but also survival of the species.

The more details that are necessary to process in order to get the general gist of certain material, then, in one sense, the broader has to be the scope, so right brain generalization, and there is an innate drive for human beings to organize into groups in order to be able to survive. When acting In a group a person may have to temporarily sacrifice certain specifics of his perceived individuality. The thing that starts making it difficult is that the more complex material becomes for people, the more likely it is and even necessary it is for one thing to represent something else, and when the 'same thing' begins to represent two different things to two different people or groups of people, then there can be conflict over that land, meaning over which interpretation will rule, as if one interpretation is made, according to one person or group, then things will get better for that group, but if another interpretation is made, things will get worse. This is all highly subjective, and another group will see it as the opposite and these two groups will then fight over which interpretations rules.

But have you ever made a wrong interpretation? I know I have, and I think we all know we have. There are some things a person just gets wrong because he may not make the connection ot may miss spotting an important detail, but there are many situations where the interpretation is bound to be wrong, particularly when when the material is framed into a certain context. And then, there is even the question of what is "wrong."

Next message on Dexter. And it will be related to this material.

I said I would write on Dexter in the next message, and relate it to the topic of this thread, but first, here is the paragraph from original message where I mentioned Dexter. I was surprised to see the responses, but I acknowledge this was a sloppily designed first message, ands again, I do not think Dexter was autistic.....

So what is interesting toi me which I want to write about first is something about time. When I started this thread, as I recall, i was maybe in the third season...cannot recall exactly, and now I have only six episodes left to watch. I think there is a big difference between watching this show one week at a time for eight years or watching 88 episodes in five weeks. I would have finished all 96 by now but something came up regarding another series. More on this later and not on this thread:-), Moreover I had no intent to combine these two topics here, but now I see it may be interesting to play around with, as it may be a good way to get a more comprehensive idea about how material organizes and possibly how to integrate two topics in such a way that deflection does not occur. I notice that changing topics is very common, not only on WP, but many people everywhere like to do it and not just autistics, especially if the topic brings up emotional pain, is socially unacceptable or is not ones special interest or does not fit into ones personal and/or political agenda. I think it is pretty normal actually, but it can be very rude and sometimes over assertive people hijack conversations for their own personal reasons. Autistic people have been accused of this a lot and from what I have observed are more likely to do so than most other people in general, though other people do it, too, and I have observed myself doing it in real life interactions and have been accused of doing it at certain times by people who know me, but I have really worked on not doing so and do not do it so much any more.

In any case, the point today is that there is one show Dexter, and people who watched it patiently once a week for eight seasons, and then there is myself and a few others who have watched it over a much shorter period of time. and I think that focusing on one thing for a concentrated period of time does have a different affect than focusing on a show one hour a week for many years and waiting week after week on the edge of ones inner seat, perhaps, for the next episode. I will maybe try to relate this back to the people glued to the screen for several weeks watching CNN about the search for the lost plane, though it was not at all my original intention to do so.

Secondly, and this is the aspect I intend to primarly focus on, the writer was making up a story to get money, and imo we all have some kind of a story about ourselves and our past experience as interconnected to the rest of the world in present time that is in some way related to receiving a pay-off, and sometimes details are altered in such a way that does not correspond to actual reality.

So what were the existential theme or themes behind Dexter? I do not know if it was the main theme, but one strong motif was about lying.