This year I hit 42. If you’re a fan of Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, then 42 is aparently the anser to the meaning of life!
Hmmm.
Seems every year I am a slightly different Donna, so I find some slightly different meaning, not of life, but to life. That’s kind of good really because it means there is no one meaning of life. The meaning changes if we are fluid enough to be open to change. One of the benefits of having the attention span of a fly is I can’t retain what track I was on 10 seconds ago so being fluid is my forte by default 🙂
I’m still burning things. And I forgot what our wonderful electric timed steamer was for a few months so that limited my Donna-friendly cooking till I recongised it again! In the meantime, I rediscovered my old friend, baby food… if you’d dairy/gluten free this is one way to get something you can quickly turn into a soup zapped in a microwave (erk) with no open flames (hooray) as long as you can remember which buttons to press and not fry it. Believe it or not I’ve even killed baby food in the microwave…. a my culinary expertise is remarkable… perhaps especially in comical circles 🙂
And I grew vegies this year…. and that means just go pick lunch! You don’t cook lettuce…. well, actually I did cook some lettuce and it wasn’t bad in a stir fry… now stir fry is pretty autie friendly when someone else is present to make sure you haven’t wandered… stir fry actively engages you through the whole cooking process so you don’t forget why you’re standing there and start scrubbing tiles and find yourself weeding the garden as the house fills with smoke.
This year Chris and I started www.auties.org …. the world’s first global employment/work seeking site for people on the autie spectrum. Its attracted some wonderful people, gets about 1000 visitors a week and is growing slowly. We hope, in time, we’ll have all kinds of teams on there too…. autie gardeners, autie mime artists, autie window washers… but I don’t really know if I’d trust myself in a team of autie cooks unless its a comedy act. But seriously, we’ve had some wonderfully talented, creative and open minded people come and join us on auties.org.
My social morning for socially phobic women continued to plod along, evolve and be fun. An autie spectrum writer’s group produced some amazing work and ideas and the writer’s in it are really developing. I’ve got our first new artists group starting this month…that will be wild, no teaching, just being, in the art studio with all the colors and textures and see what comes of it.
And after finishing The Jumbled Jigsaw as my 9th published book I embarked on something I never imagined- writing films. It began with writing the film script for Nobody Nowhere, which may be filmed next year in the UK, all being well, and then out popped film 2, Diamonds In The Mud and film 3, The Motherless Club, all of which ended up living up to the rollercoaster dynamics of Nobody Nowhere… so was I pleased? Oh yes. Now I’m on film 4…. that’s been over 12 months. My producer pal, Bev Nero, sent me a screenwriter mug which I adore. So, seeyou at the movies! As someone who struggled to retain verbal meaning whether from reading or hearing speech, movies mean a lot to me. Receptively I couldn’t get meaning from TV shows till I was in my 20s (post diet) and I still struggle, but what I get is the pattern, theme, feel, the dynamics, the structure… so I see films as art. But mostly, film for me is an expressive thing… not thinking in pictures means writing film is all about movement and space and rhythm and tone and the dynamics. Being a natural mimic who always could do characterisations (I was always echolalic and echopractic), I can feel out, walk through, a film scene as the characters in it… sort of like virtual reality, not external like people who think in pictures describe the process of seeing movies in their head… the great thing for me is I see NOTHING ahead, nothing until it actually emerges directly out of the last thing… so its like a plant growing in time lapse photography. Anyway, the only way I can invite you folks into my head is to say I hope to see you at a movie I’ve written. My writing style, is very ‘tangible’, it doesn’t feel like something ‘thought up’, it always reads like something that’s ‘right there’ and so quirky that it far more closely mimics the wild diversity of life which is far more unpredictable than what imagination can come up with. Those who’ve read my scripts come away feeling they really knew the people in them. That’s really awesome.
2006 is about to be all about travel- NZ in January, Japan in March, Singapore in May, and probably UK June to August or so. Plenty of lectures. My list of lectures is probably over a dozen topics now.
Anyway folks, I would like to take this opportunity to wish you a wonderful New Year.
For those of you alone this time of year, remember that if you are a friend to yourself, you have at least one person to spend this time with. And don’t wait for life to knock on your door. We are the creators of opportunities… chase life and find what fits for you. Even the strangest of creatures have a niche in which they blend in and seem in place.
Don’t forget that struggle is there so the freedom from it tastes so good and no point everything going well forever or we’d forget why it was so special to strive for it or value it. If I get 5 minutes of wonderful in a week then that’s plenty to build hope upon and if I didn’t have that, I’d double check my mindset to see if the prison isn’t one made by my own take on things then work hard to change that. When we wish for what’s simple and achievable, its amazing how quickly 5 minutes of wonderful can be found.
Warmly,
Donna Williams *)
ever the naughty autie