Monday, April 5, 2010

Spelling Things Out

Zosia Zaks, Life and Love: Positive Strategies for Autistic Adults, page 89.

Zosia suggests possible foods you can take with you if you’re going on a trip: Pick out one or two nutritious foods you can eat under most circumstances and pack those. Dairy products like yogurt, cream, and milk-based sauces, fish, and meat go bad very quickly. Don’t eat these items if they haven’t been properly refrigerated. Vegetables, fruit, hard cheese, butter, and bread or rice crackers last longer. Peanut butter and jelly also lasts a while. I do not want to advocate eating junk, but potato chips can provide you with a bit of fuel and last a long time.

This is probably self-evident to a lot of people, but some of us really don’t think about these things. That’s why Zosia’s book tends to spell things out for autistic people. I’m a little bored with where I am now in the book, for it’s talking about using public transportation and going on trips, which don’t interest me that much. But I’m looking forward to her later chapters—on how to deal with the medical profession (which I’ve had to do more often in the past couple of years), on getting and keeping a job, and on dating. And I’m looking forward to Zosia spelling things out to me. I don’t get that too often in the world, which thinks I can understand the generalizations it calls “advice.”