Messing Around.

While my once pristine room is still being buried with my mess from school...
here i am again, trying to bury myself in denial...
How could I have accumlated so much stuff in just 4 years?! I must have spent hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars on all those paper, craft, stationery, containers, baskets and files... If anyone needs pens, post-it, folders, drawing block, colored paper, flashcards, VCDs ETC... you know where to visit.
I have already postponed cleaning for weeks, all because i can't bear to even THINK how i can move my stuff around.
Actually my room was so clean that i know where to find my things. I know exactly where to find my old choir scores and year books. I know exactly where my old zo-cards and boxes for gadgets are...

But NOW? NOOOooooooo!!!

Jeez... really trying to reorganise my whole room to accommodate my "investment"...
And i swear i have given at least 75% of the stuff away to my colleagues...
How can i make the mess go away without throwing bits and pieces of my past away? (And I have already thrown away 4 bags last night...) I am thinking of throwing out NIE notes next...

Anyway... while trying to avoid the topic of room cleaning, i popped in for a shower and thought of my colleague's son. Lovely boy diagnosed with autism. While i was sitting alone guarding the sacred ang pow box, i observed him when he came into the cafe-he was skirting around DOME during another colleague's ROM. I nearly laughed out loud when he blew at a middle-aged lady's hair (one of the guests... i just wonder what propelled him to do that. She was his one and only 'target') He then roamed around abit more and curled up comfortably in a chair.
Later that night, he lied down flat on a sofa in the cafe. I pointed out to the mom brightly (in my mind all i was thinking-he was really making himself comfortable) But his mom's first reaction was to ask him to get up. (oops... there i was, treating him like a special kid... big mistake...)

Anyway... guess my long-winded story... is not the main point...

Observing the boy led to another thought: autism in literature.

I am not referring to recent stuff such as Rain Man, Elijah's Cup or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time... I am more curious about older works...

I am not a well-read person, hence i am not sure what has been written in the past about autism. During a time when autism was not so well-known or understood, how would authors depict them? How do writers during that time make sense of some people across other spectrums?

Did a small little research on history of autism:

The history of autism goes as far back as 1911 with Eugen Bleuler a Swiss psychiatrist first coined the term. However that term applied to adult schizophrenia.
In 1943 Dr. Leo Kanner of Johns Hopkins University described autism for the first time. He based his discovery from 11 children he observed between 1938 and 1943. What he studied were children who had withdrawal from human contact as early as age 1.
During the 1940's through the 60's the medical community felt that children who had autism were schizophrenic. This lack of understanding of the disorder lead many parents to believe that they were at fault
During the 1960's people began to understand autism and more precisely identify autism and the treatments.

Well.. too tired to delve more into this topic... perhaps another day.