My First Teaching Experience

As I mentioned before, this past summer I taught my first course. The Pure Math Department at the University of Waterloo offered me such an opportunity last January to which I accepted. I was very pleased because I had been waiting for such an opportunity since it’s usually the case that pure math PhD students at Waterloo are offered such an opportunity before completing their degrees. I had done well so far in the CUT (Certificate of University Teaching) program that the university offers to its PhD students and have explained my positive experience in this program in Learning How to Teach (I have since completed it). I had done two guest lectures for a couple of courses where one of my PhD supervisors was the actual instructor and they had gone well. I was also pleased that that the course they offered me was a third year pure math course in Elementary Number Theory, which is my research speciality and one of my favourite mathematical subjects.

The course was set to begin in May and run through August where I would be lecturing three hours per week for about 12 weeks. I did prepare a lot beforehand though and spent a lot of time preparing a course outline and lecture notes. I managed to get a lot of resources from another PhD student who was teaching the course that winter, including various lecture notes and sample midterms and exams from him and various professors. I also got a textbook on Elementary Number Theory out of the university library that I was familiar with and that I liked and that contained almost all of the material I need to cover. I ended up basing most of my lecture notes out of the material in this book, the rest out of the sample lecture notes. By the time it had come to actually teach the course I had done up all of the lecture notes and had put together a first assignment. I felt pretty prepared.

As I taught the course, I used my lecture notes in a bit of a unique way. As the weeks went by, I would post the relevent lecture notes up on LEARN. LEARN is a website that a lot of professors and instructors at Waterloo use to organise their courses and upload course materials such as course outlines and assignments. My own lecture notes consisted of all of the material that I would cover, but with a lot of blank spaces. For example, a short proof of a minor result I would leave blank and for longer proofs I would write down a few steps of the proof and leave the class to fill in the details. The idea here was that before each class the students would print off the lecture notes, take them to class, and fill in the rest as I went through my lectures. As a student and instructor, I felt that such a strategy minimizes the amount of writing students need to do during the lecture, while maximizing the amount of listening and participating they do to help them get a stronger grasp of the material. As a student, I was in a class before where the professor used exactly this strategy and found tht it really helped me follow along, which was why I decided to try it out. I was pretty pleased when this strategy seemed to work and that a few students even printed them off to follow along. In my course evaluations, some students even praised this strategy. I will therefore continue to use this strategy for future courses I teach.

The first day I lectured, I was pretty nervous. It did, however, go very well and I looked forward to the next one afterwards. After each subsequent lecture teaching came more and more naturally to me. I also used various other strategies in my lectures that I learned from being in the CUT program. For example, I used the teaching method think-pair-share to give students a chance to apply what they have learned without having it be formally graded. Think-pair-share is a strategy where the instructor poses a problem that can be solved in a couple of minutes to the class. The class tries to solve the problem, and then spend another minute conversing with a partner on their answer to the problem. Also, one time earlier on in the course, I used the one minute paper method, which is a strategy where the instructor hands out sheets of blank paper to the students, giving them a prompt relevant to the material covered in that particular lecture. The students’ answers are not graded. Rather, the instructor collects them and picks the three to comment on without revealing the authors. Here I used the prompt of asking them about the most confusing part of the lecture. I then looked over their answers and spent the first few minutes of the next lecture answering three of their questions thoroughly.

Overall, my first teaching experience was a real success and I look forward to doing it again.

My Elora Quarry Social Experiment

In my last post, I talked about how being in a social anxiety therapy group helped combat social anxiety, especially through in-group behavioural experiments that really motivated me to continue doing behavioural experiments on my own. Last week, however, it really motivated me to do something that I never considered before.

A little over 30 km to the north-east of Kitchener-Waterloo, there is this beautiful town called Elora. A few years ago, a friend had informed me about it along with its beautiful gorge The Elora Gorge. The gorge runs up to the town with gorgeous cliff walls with the Grand River flowing through it. There are also a few hiking trails along the gorge, as well as tubing. I’ve never done the tubing, but I’ve walked along the trails several times. Besides the gorge, however, the town is also home to the Elora Quarry, which is a beautiful quarry with limestone cliff walls with a lake inside it. Next to the lake is a small sandy beach and, like the Elora Gorge, the Elora Quarry is a very popular location. Like the gorge, I’ve also been to the quarry a few times before and I’m always happy to spend a bit of time there with friends.

Before last week, I hadn’t been to the Elora Quarry yet this summer. It seemed everyone was always too busy to go, which is understandable, life does get overly busy sometimes, otherwise I would’ve made my last post a lot sooner. As well, not being able to drive always presented a bit of an obstacle in getting to Elora; it was always just a little out of reach by bicycle. One solution I did find to the distance obstacle, however, was by taking GRT (Grand River Transit) buses to a small town called Elmira, which is a little north of Waterloo and from there it would be a 20 km bicycle ride to Elora. The GRT bus service is fortunately free for Waterloo and Laurier students (or at least the bus pass is automatically included in our university fees).

While I have used such a method to visit to the Elora Gorge alone before, I never visited the Elora Quarry alone before last week. But summertime was running out, and I really wanted to go. Well, how about if I go there alone by bussing to Elmira, then bicycling to Elora and once there just locking my bicycle to a sturdy-enough tree? And once I was at the beach I would just try to socialise with strangers and go swimming with them? I have to say I’ve never really considered this solution before mainly because it totally overwhelmed me with anxiety. It seemed like such a high price to pay, spending two and a half hours journeying to the quarry with no guarantee that I would find people to be with there. But that’s exactly what I did last week.

I prepared to go early in the morning. I saw an article that the Elora Quarry was such an incredibly popular place that there had been a cap put in place of 1300 people and that no one would gain entry after this cap was reached! (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/elora-quarry-number-of-visitors-limit-grand-river-conservation-authority-1.4231946) I have to admit I wasn’t overly surprised to read this news. Like I said the quarry is very scenic, and the times that I visited there before it took us several minutes (maybe even half an hour) to gain entry and the beach was always crowded. Because of this news, I decided I would go during a weekday when hopefully this would be less of a problem. Not only that, but I would arrange to get there at the start of the day. I didn’t want to venture out all that way only to have to turn around again because the cap of 1300 people had been reached.

So I got up early Monday morning. I put on my bathing suit at my apartment and wore shorts over it. I packed a towel, sunscreen, and lunch into my bag and left at 8 o’clock. I reached the quarry at about 10:30, even though the quarry didn’t open until 11 on weekdays. I was actually the first one at the gate, but soon after that cars began parading behind me on the shoulder of the road and at 11 we were all let in. There was a strong fence running around the quarry, which I locked my bicycle to and then I walked down to the beach.

At first I lay on my towel for a bit enjoying the feel of the sand and sun. As more people flooded onto the beach, there were quite a few young people around, but my anxiety always seemed to overwhelm me about approaching them. Then I started casually strolling around the beach and saw three guys tossing a volleyball around. I thought introducing myself into an activity would be less scary than simply walking over to other people were just socialising because we had an activity to occupy ourselves with. So I asked if I could join in and they consented and we spent a bit of time tossing the volleyball amongst each other. Afterwards, they went back to their beach towels, and I thought it would be a good time to ask if I could join them on the beach. I introduced myself and asked if I could join them, and one of them replied, “You might as well.” We even went into the lake together after that and swam around for a bit. I couldn’t believe it. Not only had I gotten to the Elora Quarry, but I was now having fun playing volleyball, lying around, and swimming with a group of great guys.

In the middle of the afternoon, however, they announced that they were leaving so we said our goodbyes and they left. I could’ve left then too, but I decided to stay a little longer. That was one advantage of going alone to the quarry. I could stay for as long as I wanted, as I wasn’t depending on anyone to drive me back. I could easily get back to Kitchener by bicycle and bus.

Anyway, after they left I began searching for another group of people to talk to. This was when unfortunately I encountered a couple of minor fails. For example, I saw a group of guys playing with some kind of ball and a net. Again I asked to join, but they announced you needed an even number of people to play because they had divided up into teams. After such failed attempts, however, I did manage to find a group of people kicking a soccer ball around. Again I asked if I could join in and this time I got a positive response. I joined them afterwards sitting on the beach after introducing myself to them.

After this second group announced they were leaving, it was getting to be pretty late in the day. It was coming up to 5 o’clock so I had spent almost six hours at the quarry! It was a long trip home. So I packed up and rode my bicycle to St. Jacob’s, which a little town between Waterloo and Elmira where I ate out to reward myself for what I had just accomplished. I then continued to ride my bicycle to Waterloo, but by then I was pretty tired and at which point I took the bus back to Kitchener.

I was pretty pleased with how the day had gone. I will admit there were a few things that I thought could have gone better, for example, not hesitating so much in talking to people, but given that this is the first I’ve done a trip like this, I suspect this hesitation will decrease the more I do it. Not only did I get to visit the quarry after all this summer, but I managed to do it in a way that provided very good therapy for my social anxiety. And it gives me hope of what I can continue to accomplish into the future.

 

The Benefits of a Social Anxiety Support Group

It’s been a while since the last time I wrote. Lots has happened. I have written before how I was seeing a therapist for social anxiety in the Centre for Mental Health Research at the University of Waterloo. This spring and summer, she provided me with the opportunity to be part of a social anxiety therapy group that the Centre had put on. I have since completed this group and it has certainly helped me shed another layer of my social anxiety off.

The group consisted of weekly sessions held for a couple of hours each over a period of about two and a half months. Each session was dedicated to learning a certain technique to reducing social anxiety through discussion and exercises. For example, at one session, each of us had to improvise on a topic of our choice in front of the rest of the group, while being recorded. At the end, we watched each of the recordings and talked about them. The idea here was to see how other people viewed us when we talked to see if we would be as negatively perceived as our anxiety was telling us. While I did find this exercise helpful, a few other sessions do stick out in my mind as being the most beneficial to me.

These couple of sessions involved us doing behavioural experiments as a group. I’ve already talked about on my blog how my therapist gave the suggestion of doing behavioural experiments and how I had been practising them to reduce anxiety. Now, however, we were going to be doing them as a group. In one of the sessions, we would be going outside and walking through campus. Only we wouldn’t just be casually walking, we would be walking in single file. We would observe how the people we encountered would react to this behaviour. Would they stop in their tracks and stare at us? Would vehicles slow down? Would people make fun of us? We jotted down such possible outcomes before we did the experiment. One important point about the experiment was that whatever we reported on when we returned had to be evidence that would stand up in court. It wouldn’t be enough to say something like “People didn’t like what we did”, but we had to report on the actions of other people, such as consistent staring for several seconds.

We did the experiment and, overall, it went all right. Most people that I saw never really looked at us. Only a handful looked at us and few of them actually stared. Vehicles that passed us didn’t slow down. I thought it went better than I initially thought it would. I was anxious throughout it all, but it did help that I was with others so that if I did appear foolish or whatever to others, at least I wouldn’t be alone.

At another session we did another behavioural experiment while walking through campus. Instead of walking in single file, however, this time we would be waving and saying “Hey!” or “Hi!” enthusiastically to strangers that we saw. Again, there were few negative responses, and a lot of people we encountered actually said “Hi” back. During this same walk, we also stood around in a circle and sang Happy Birthday to three people in the circle, even though it was no one’s birthday. My anxiety spiked during this activity, and there was no way that I would’ve done this on my own. But I had to go along with the group. I prepared myself for bizarre looks, people laughing, etc. Yet no one did. A few people looked and smiled, but that was all that happened.

Doing such behavioural experiments in a group really encouraged me to try more behavioural experiments on my own. I felt the group helped normalize such behaviour and made me feel less weird and less scared to do more on my own. I carried out more conversations with others and introduced myself to more new people.

Yet at another session, we continued carried out behavioural experiments while walking around campus. This time, however, we would not be doing them in sync. Rather, we would be separating with each of us doing a couple of experiments and then gathering together again after twenty or so minutes. Before we ventured out, we were given a list of possible things to try. Some of them were tying a string around a piece of fruit and walking it, skipping around, and asking to go to the front of a lineup. I decided on the activities that were to stand around and point up at the sky for five minutes and to complement a stranger. I managed to accomplish the first without any major problem. People passed me, some looked at me, but not in a funny way, and no one said anything or laughed as I held my arm up in the air pointing at the sky with my index finger. Complementing a stranger, however, took greater guts. This was mostly because it was something that had to involve another person and since people weren’t exactly standing still, no opportunity allowed for much hesitation. I finally did manage to do it. I said to a passing girl, “You have beautiful hair”, to which she replied, “Thank you”. I was the last one back to join the group, but I was glad to have accomplished both experiments successfully.

I even did a couple of these activities outside of the therapy sessions. Right before the next session, I decided to try skipping around and then complementing more girls I didn’t know. I first attempted skipping where there weren’t a lot of people around as a kind of warm up and then I did it in the middle of campus where there were a lot more students walking by. No one reacted at all to my skipping; it was like I didn’t exist. As for complementing more girls, again I found myself hesitating a lot, but at the end I managed to complement three girls in a row on their hair and clothes. Each time I received a smile or a thank you.

The therapy group session has definitely challenged me in surprising ways, and I look forward to using the new techniques to combat anxiety I learned there. Indeed, it inspired me to do something I’ve never done before this past week, which I’ll tell about in my next post.

 

New Therapy for Social Anxiety

Well over a year ago, I had unfortunately slipped into one of my loneliness phases. I was rather dissatisfied with my social life at the time and sought out further help in this aspect of my life. I heard that the Centre of Mental Health Research at the University of Waterloo was putting on a program for people dealing with social anxiety. Knowing that this applied to me, I was instantly curious and contacted them. Their program was being primarily run by PhD students in psychology under the supervision of faculty members who were professional psychologists. These students would run therapy sessions in both group and individual settings, depending on the needs of the clients.

After contacting them, they gave me a couple of phone interviews with me, wanting to know my background and what specifically my needs were. I told them everything, such as being diagnosed with high-functioning autism and my social difficulties, pretty much all of which I have written about in this blog. They said they would get back to me soon to let me know if I was suitable for the program. A week or two later, they did come back and decided to take me on. They said I would benefit most from individual therapy sessions, instead of a group setting, which was completely fine with me. It would be good to have their undivided attention. Unfortunately, however, they also said they had no time for me at that moment, but that they could put me on a waiting list where they would get back in about a year. That was just fine by me. I would still be here at Waterloo and understood the high demand for their services.

Back in September of this year, they did indeed contact me again to let me know that a spot had opened up for me if I still desired to be part of their program. I was pleased they had gotten back to me and of course I said yes. I would meet with someone once a week. I certainly appreciated this frequency, especially since in my past meetings with psychologists and counsellors at Waterloo, I would be lucky to meet with someone every other week, given the size of the university.

I was paired up with a PhD student in psychologist who would be my therapist. Our first few sessions were spent on her to getting to know me and my areas of concern through interviews and filling out questionnaires. Once that was over with, we started on the social anxiety therapy itself.

I have gotten help for anxiety before when I went over to the Students Success office at Waterloo in preparing for my PhD comprehensive exams in How Anxiety Works For Me. There are similar techniques in overcoming anxiety in social situations. For example, you can run a social experiment where you plan to put yourself in a social situation that is a little out of your comfort zone. You first write down how you feel and what you expect to happen and give a percentage on the chances of a certain outcome happening. Then you list your safety behaviours that you must abandon in the experiment, which are detrimental behaviours that one uses in coping in anxious situations without avoiding the specific situations altogether. For example, one of my safety behaviours is thinking a lot before replying in a conversation. By doing so, I am not avoiding the situation that is causing me anxiety entirely, i.e. having a conversation, but I am still using a behaviour that hinders my enjoyment out of having the conversation. Then you go and do the social experiment and come back and jot down what you learned in challenging your anxious thinking, to what extent the initial prediction was true, and put down a new percentage of the chances of the initial prediction happening in further situations.

It is strategies like these that are helping and will hopefully continue to help me as I continue to push the boundaries of my comfort zone to combat social anxiety. I will also add that it is indeed very nice to see someone on a weekly basis to help guide me through this. She gives me strategies to try every week like the one above, which helps keep me motivated and accountable. It’s absolutely wonderful that Waterloo set up such a program and recognised the demand for it. Hopefully as time goes on, more places will recognise this demand as well.

 

Learning How to Teach

Having laid out my plans to continue on in academia after my PhD, I have become aware that there is another set of skills besides good research ability that I need to have and that is teaching ability. Back a few years ago, it was common for potential professors getting their PhDs to not get any training in teaching at all, but simply to learn as they went along. Some succeeded in this way, while others not so much. There is a big difference between being an expert on a certain subject and having the skills necessary to teach it effectively. Fortunately, however, more and more universities today are recognising that actual training in teaching and not just becoming knowledgeable in a subject area is a good idea to set up for future potential university professors. The University of Waterloo has certainly recognised this need and has set up two programs for graduate students to take if they wish to make teaching part of their careers. One of the programs, The Fundamentals of University Teaching, I completed this past summer and the other, The Certificate of University Teaching (CUT), I have just begun this fall. These programs are run by the Centre of Teaching Excellence who greatly encourage any graduate students to take them if they wish to continue in academia. The former is a program that any graduate student can enter into. It requires attending at least six workshops where we learn different teaching methods and styles. It also requires giving three microteaching sessions.

Ever since entering my PhD, I’ve always known I would like to be an instructor of a course before graduating. I have spoken of this desire with the pure math department, and one of my supervisors has let me step in for him as a guest lecturer in two undergraduate classes he’s teaching in the past couple of weeks. The experience was a little anxiety provoking since I’ve never taught a full class period before, but it went reasonably well both times. The first time I did it, he supplied me with the notes that I would teach from. He sat in and provided me with great constructive feedback afterwards. The second time he only gave me a topic with which to teach the class and let me write up all the notes. He reviewed them the day before I would be lecturing and said they were all right. My second supervisor then attended the lecture and said afterwards that my teaching went really well and that I had improved on a couple of things that my other supervisor had noted about the first time, such as my use of whiteboard space. I asked a lot of questions to the students during the lectures to help keep the class engaged, which seemed to work each time. I also experimented with a learning activity that I learned in the teaching programs, which is called a one minute paper. This is where at the end of the lecture I got the students to write down anything confusing on the topic. I also made the second lecturing experience part of my CUT program in so far that I got a staff member from the Centre of Teaching Excellence to supervise my teaching as well.

While still no concrete plans are in place in my teaching a whole course, I know I’m on my way to making this happen. I have proven myself as an excellent researcher within the department and I am now proving myself to be good at teaching as well. I just have to be patient and let things unfold.

The Pitfalls of Social Media

A theme that I have used throughout my blog is how to cope with feelings of loneliness when they arise. Loneliness is a prevalent feeling a lot of us experience, not only to those of us with autism, but much to the general population as well. There are several ways to try to cope when these feelings of loneliness and/or depression arise. Last summer, I went through a bout of loneliness and depression and, as such, I was looking for techniques and strategies to cope with it. For example, I was seeing a counsellor and browsing the internet for resources. Then I stumbled upon a bit of advice I found on one internet webpage that gave me pause. Mainly because the idea was so simple, yet I hadn’t heard of it before.
The idea was to take a break from social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc because they don’t really help social relationships. People can be cruel on these sites and seeing people report doing fun activities by “updating their status” can give rise to a lot negative thoughts, feelings, and emotions, such as jealousy, sadness, depression, etc., especially if you’re currently going through a difficult time already.
As soon as I read this advice, I knew that Facebook (which is the social media site I use the most and the one I’ll be referencing for the rest of this post simply because it’s the one I’m most familiar with) was indeed having this effect on me. For the time being at least, I felt taking a break from it would indeed be a good option. I stated my proposed break as a status, which included alternative ways to contact me if anyone I had on Facebook wanted to do so. I also stated that I would be back in September, which was a month and a half away. I felt that would be ample time to give me a chance to recover.
I also started doing some other internet searching to see if there was anyone else who felt the same way I did about sites like Facebook. It turned out a lot of people actually felt the same way and some had posted, for example, youtube videos describing this problem with social media. I even asked a couple of people I knew about how I was feeling, and they actually confirmed that they had similar stories regarding Facebook. I also believe Facebook gave rise to these feelings before, but I never really acknowledged them. For example, I can be a perfectionist so it would make sense that I would be prone to such feelings as jealousy and so I didn’t give those feelings validation in the past. Seeing other people comment on exactly the same thing, however, made me see and feel it wasn’t just me and that I wasn’t alone with this issue.
I also feel it’s worth pointing out that you don’t even have to be addicted to Facebook or be an extreme Facebook user (posting statuses every day and having 1000’s of Friends) for it to be easy for these feelings to get to you. I’ve always been a pretty moderate user. It took me 3 years to become interested in posting a profile picture and to post statuses on a regular basis I only currently have 200+ Friends. Once I started posting statuses, however, I really grew to liking the idea of posting something on the internet that automatically everyone could read. It was like having celebrity status. Of course, not only was Facebook allowing me to do this, it was also allowing others to post as well. It made it very easy to treat Facebook like a popularity contest. All you have to do is compare the number of likes and comments to different statuses.
Another thing I’ve learned from this realisation is that what people’s lives are really like and how they’re portraying them on the internet is often very different. When I talked to a friend about this issue with social media, she agreed and said she had interacted with friends who were having a lot of problems with their jobs, yet they would always post on Facebook how happy they were. The rub is that when you look at someone’s Facebook wall (which is where they’re posting all of their statuses) what you’re seeing more often than not is just one shade of reality or one side of their life. People aren’t generally going to post their own problems with their lives on sites like Facebook. This observation also helps explain why the negative feelings arose in the first place. You’re comparing what you know as your life to how someone else wants you to see their own life. This, however, is a false comparison. The other person will have much more control over how they portray their life on social media than how their life is actually going. A lot of the time, this isn’t even the person’s fault. It’s very easy to sub-consciously post something that makes it look like you’re happier than you really are. Even I’m guilty of this. I’ve looked through some of my old posts and sometimes I’ve thought, wow, I certainly wasn’t that happy at that particular time. Of course, however, our thoughts can be irrational, even when we’re rationally aware of the falsity of this comparison.
While I have spent the majority of this post examining the negative aspects of social media, I feel I should at least end with a positive note. After my break from Facebook, I did return to it and still have an account. I still post a status every once in a while, even if it’s not as regular as before, and I use this feature wisely. In other words, I use it for the convenience to, for example, let people know I wrote another blog post and to post big news such as getting through an academic milestone or to post my grandmother passing this fall (my uncle didn’t realise she had passed until he read my post and was very grateful for it). I take advantage of such positive aspects of the site, which also includes planning events with friends and talking to multiple people simultaneously on the message feature. Currently, at least, this is all how Facebook is serving me best.
Different people will also use social media in different ways. While a good number of people will treat it like a popularity contest, there are some who mainly use it to stay in touch with family who are far away, to talk to several people simultaneously (both of which happen to be a contributing factor to why I stayed on), or to play the games that are on that site. As my other grandmother likes to say, “Everything in moderation.”
Regardless of one’s relationship with any social media site, however, it is often a good idea to ask yourself the question: are you controlling it or is it controlling you?

Tribute to my Nazzer Grandparents

This fall has been quite an eventful time for me. For starters it has been one of the rougher school terms for me, but I still made quite a bit of progress in it (more on that in the next blog post). On the other hand, however, one of my grandmothers passed away, which happened at the end of October. My family was able to fly me home for a memorial service we had for her in early November and I got to see a lot of family I didn’t normally see regularly growing up (everyone on my mother’s side of the family lives quite a distance away). It still seems only yesterday that my maternal grandfather passed away in Summer 2005. My Nazzer grandparents lived very near us and, as such, they were an important part of my childhood. I gave speeches at my grandfather’s memorial service when I was only 16, then at my grandmother’s 90th birthday party 4 years ago, and then again at her service this fall.
My relationship with my grandfather Don Barkeley Nazzer was a really good one. For one thing, we both had intellectual minds and we would talk about math and stuff (he was a civil engineer). When I was 12, for example, I started exploring my grandfather’s books and he ended up giving me quite a few intellectually stimulating books. In one of the books he gave me (if you really want to know what the book is it’s Mathematics: A Human Endeavour by Harold R. Jacobs) he even wrote inside the cover
“This book is now the property of John Charles Saunders. From his grandfather, Don Nazzer Dec. 26, 2000. Enjoy it!”
Looking at this handwritten note today is what helps keep his soul alive inside me and knowing how proud he would be of me if he could see where I was today. Back then, as well, I was very interested in antique calculators and I started to collect slide rules. I was fortunate enough that my grandfather had two of them that I got and still have in my possession. I also had other fun times with him. When I was a kid, my grandparents had bought me a lego set for my birthday. I wish I could say that we had built it together on that day, but I actually just let him build it first and I sat behind him, occasionally looking over his shoulder. Also, when I was a teenager he taught me how to use a ride-on lawnmower for mowing the grass at their summer place.
I also look up to him, as well as my grandmother, for their healthy lifestyles as well and how independent they both were until each of them passed away. My grandfather’s passing was very unexpected even at his age of 86 ½ and when he was in the hospital from multiple heart blockages the doctors were very impressed with how healthy a man he was. The only possible sign would be that my grandmother had gotten a little more dependent on people during the last year of her life, but she was still living alone inside her own house even up until her passing two months shorts of her 94th birthday (which would have been today and more amazing still my other grandmother who’s still around is still living alone inside her own two-storey house at 97 so I certainly have some very good genes!). I feel it’s the way we should all go, living life to the fullest until it’s time to go.
My relationship with my grandmother Margaret Irene “Sunny” Nazzer was also good, but it was a little different. She certainly loved me just as much. I’m glad she lived long enough to see me now and was always proud of my accomplishments and my intellectual mind. Unlike my grandfather, however, she was an extrovert (which I like to think is at least partly where I got my own extraverted qualities from so it looks like I inherited something good from each of them). When I was little and my parents brought me in to visit them, she would try to get me to talk more than I naturally did, even though it was like pulling teeth sometimes. My parents would also have my grandparents look after me and my sister sometimes and one time when my grandmother was tucking me into bed she would sit by my bedside and listen as I told her stories based on childrens’ movies I had seen. After my grandfather passed, she attended my high school graduation, my undergrad university convocation, and even convinced my parents (who were initially a bit hesitant in allowing her) that she should fly out to see my masters’ convocation even though she was 91 at the time!
Since my grandmother’s passing, I have inherited a few more of their belongings too. My grandfather has this neat mouse pad for his computer that looks like a rug with a complicated rug pattern on it and I also got a lot of his cuff links. As well, I also inherited a rug and a large wicker chair and a wooden case that my grandfather had since he was younger than me.
Both have been cremated and their ashes are now buried in a cemetery near where their summer home is. My memories of them will be life-long cherished.

Being an Atypical Extrovert

I sometimes surprise myself when doing some self-reflecting into who I really am and how I would characterise myself. One thing that I discovered really only now about myself is that I am an extrovert. In the past, I never really associated myself with that term despite knowing about the terms introvert and extrovert for over six years. In fact, when I first heard of the terms, I immediately went for the term introvert. And until about a month ago, I never really about it further until I made comment to my family about it to which my mother said, “No, I think you’re an extrovert.” I believe this is because I’m a rather atypical extrovert.

I first heard the terms when I was in the middle of my undergrad at Acadia. I was discussing with a counselor I was seeing then about my difficulties in social interaction, which brought about. I forget the original definitions we used for introvert and extrovert, but whatever they were they led me to believe that I was an introvert. This was probably because I have a few qualities that introverts typically possess. For example, I tend to think before I speak and I like to work on my academic work alone with few interruptions. I think I made the error that introversion and extroversion rely heavily on how one behaves when alone or with other people. In my mind, I was thinking “this person talks a lot so they’re an extrovert” or “this person talks very little so they’re an introvert”. It really only dawned on me now that, while that reasoning may be true in many if not most cases, neither implication is true. It’s very possible to be a quiet extrovert or a loud introvert. They aren’t oxymorons.

For example, (as in my case) a person who is quieter than average isn’t necessarily quieter by choice. Due to other characteristics they possess, they find being quiet easier, more comfortable, more convenient, etc. I’ve discovered this is the case for me. I’m not as loud spoken as a lot of extroverts are, but this is due to circumstances that are quite challenging for me to control if not out of my control altogether. I didn’t choose to have a different perspective when it comes to socializing due to my autism (not saying that’s a bad thing!), or to be shyer than other extroverts, or to have social anxiety. I will admit I often get envious and even jealous of extroverts who don’t have these roadblocks in the way and who follow their natural desires without showing much sweat. However, I am taking steps to address such things, which I will tell about in a future blog post.

Trust me, if it weren’t for these things, and I believe I would be striking up conversations with people (new and old) every which way I turn at social gatherings, striving more forcefully for attention and to be in the spotlight and trying to be the life of every party. Since coming to this realization, I’ve done some research on the internet to see if anyone felt the same way. It turns out quite a few people do. Physical behaviours actually have very little to do with where you are on the introvert/extrovert spectrum. What really defines introversion and extroversion is your natural preference.

In growing up, I was always known in school for being the quiet one and even I was convinced then that my desire was to be in solitude. It’s difficult to distinguish what you want to do and what you find easy to do when you’re still growing up. I was always an extrovert. It just was (and still is) easier to act more introverted than I actually am.

Becoming Closer with my Sister

Last winter, I was dealing with a problem. It’s too private to even post on this blog, but in any case what it was is irrelevant and it was quickly resolved anyway. Like I usually do when a problem arises in my life, however, I normally talk to people about it to help find solutions and also since my perfectionistic mind can often distort a healthy perspective hearing someone else’s perspective on it can help combat it.

One of the people I ended up talking to about it was my sister Carolyn. She was sympathetic and told me to keep her updated about it and, in fact, she said she wanted to communicate with me more anyway. My relationship with Carolyn throughout our lives has probably not been the closes in the world. There might have been a little bit of sibling rivalry, but we certainly loved each other even if we didn’t express it in the closest of bonds.

We’re also different in a few ways, which most likely caused us to grow a little apart. For example, I’m much more of an academic than she is. I’m in my third year of a PhD while she after high school took a year off and didn’t really know what she wanted to do at the time. Since then, however, she’s found her dream passion in cooking and got both a culinary arts degree and a hospitality management degree and she’s now working in hotel management and eventually wants to become a chef. While her path in life might have been a little more disconnected than mine, I never believed that this was because I was more intelligent than her or anything like that. In fact, I sometimes feared she was intimidated. I just see her path as demanding a different (but certainly not less) kind of intelligence. I’m sure that the meals I make in my home can’t hold a candle to what my sister is capable of in the kitchen. I also sometimes wonder what it must really feel like to lead a slightly disconnected path in life (this is actually something in general that graduate students sometimes do, positing ‘what if’ scenarios since graduate school is quite demanding and “delays” your entry into the “real world”).

At any rate, in response to my sister’s request to remain in contact, I sent her another email and we’ve since had a couple of email correspondences since then. I feel I was more open with her about what is going on in my life. Doing so in writing like in an e-mail was a great method for me to achieve this since I could make sure it was exactly what I wanted to say and I could take my time with it, which helped combat perfectionistic thoughts in the process. Making yourself vulnerable in describing your short comings, your struggles, and your weaknesses I believe is a key component for any relationship to become closer. I’ve talked to Carolyn about how we’re corresponding and we both agree it’s making us feel closer to each other.

Carolyn also has a great philosophy on life, which I completely agreed with it when she told me. She said that everyone’s life sucks in some way or another and that if people though all their problems into a pile and actually saw how big the pile got, they would see that their life isn’t as bad compared to everyone else’s that they’re making it out to be. She also said it was okay to be unhappy and to let out your misery (so long as it was in private).

In a world like today where often family members may not be particularly close, I count myself lucky to not be in such a situation and to be close to a lot of my family including my only sibling.

The Value of Femininity

I again haven’t posted anything for a while. I will admit that I’ve been reading up and thinking about certain things. And I thought it would be worthwhile to make a post about it. In particular, I’ve been thinking about how the opposite sex perceives and interacts with the world and the role that gender norms play in our lives. Two thought provoking books I’ve read up on the subject are Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent and Whipping Girl by Julia Serano. Norah Vincent is a woman who disguised herself as a man for a year and interacted in several places as a man. In her book, she describes this adventure and uses it to contrast a man’s life with a woman’s life in this world. Her underlying message is that even in a “man’s world”, the male gender is far from free and is constrained even with the advantage of “male privilege”.

I found her observations to be pretty insightful. She goes through her adventure, for example, by hanging out with guy friends in recreational activities, getting a job and working as a man, and dating women as a man. None of the people she interacts with ever suspect she’s really a woman (she disguises herself so well) and even when she admits to being a woman with a few of these people some of them don’t believe her at first and she has to take off some of her disguise to prove it.

For example, she goes bowling with some guys who welcome her as one of their own and she describes her relations with them to be much less intimate than when she interacts as a woman with her usual female friends. For instance, their greetings are pretty mundane, consisting of only simple handshakes and “hellos”. One of the guys brought his kid son along for what was supposed to be “father-son time”, but it was really supposed to a mens’ night out and the guys tease him when, for example, he rambles on too much about facts he learned in school. Norah rightly interprets this behavior as letting him learn things the hard way by “toughening him up”. She does, however, see some good in interacting with the guys. She occasionally will have a couple of seconds of intimacy with one of the guys when, for example, she scores at bowling and she shares a smile with one of the guys and actually sees this as greater than any bonding she has had with any of her female friends.

Reading about Norah’s adventure kind of reminded me of my own feminine desires and what I desire in pursuing my own friendships through the difficulties of having autism and how much intimacy is important to me in friendships. I can certainly relate to her experiences. Two years ago, for example, I developed a yearning to cuddle, not just with a romantic partner when one came along, but also among platonic friendships, as described in this post: My Developing Social Desires. It is a kind of intimacy that women often share as friends, but platonic cuddling involving a man is often stigmatized by society.

The other book Whipping Girl is by Julia Serano who is a transsexual woman. She tells of her experience in recognizing her desire to be female and in transitioning to female as an adult. She tells of the stigma that society holds against transsexuals, which is due to the general attitude that males and females are opposite sexes stigmatizing the idea of any kind of gender variance. She also argues that trans* misogyny contributes further prejudice in particular to transsexual women since they are seen as wanting to demote themselves from a superior gender, i.e. male, to the lesser gender that is female.

One key theme in her book is the value of femininity and feminine expression. She tells how it’s important to incorporate such things into the promotion of feminism. The problem is that a lot of feminists want to behave like men, i.e. to be masculine especially in expression, while casting aside their natural femininity because they believe it’s frivolous. The real way to promote femininity is to value feminine expression. Only in this way will femininity become masculinity’s equal.

Her writing style is also very engaging. I love, for example, how she goes on a rant of how men tend to distance themselves from feminine items, such as barrettes, as if such items are dangerous to any man who comes within the vicinity of one. She even promotes men wearing one in their hair even to work.

Overall, both books were pretty thought provoking and helped me reflect on my own life. Being socialized as a male has provided me with both advantages and disadvantages. And with the valuing and promotion of femininity, the disadvantages will disappear.