Research Paper Topic: Alice In Aspergers

     For my research paper, I've chosen to discuss the influences of Lewis Carroll's Aspergers in his writing. I think this will be a fairly easy paper to write. I basically just need to get information on symptoms and indications of Aspergers and compare them to the writing style that's portrayed by Carroll in Alice in Wonderland. I'm going to look into a few parts of Aspergers including the tendency to look at detail first and the big picture after, the incapability of people with Aspergers to feel empathy, their awkwardness of conversation, and I'll point out some other factors of Lewis Carroll's life.
     My research question, in it's most primitive form, will be: In what ways was Alice in Wonderland written that were indicative of Lewis Carroll's Aspergers disorder? I could also rephrase it to back up my point my theory: How did Lewis Carroll's Aspergers affect the writing of Alice in Wonderland. I've found informational websites on Aspergers that have symptom checklists on them, and I'll use them as a source for my paper.
(which question do you think would be better to use?)

The Alchemist: Reflection

Although I greatly disliked this book for the first 44 pages of the reading, it began to grow on me a little bit as I've progressed. There's a couple main ideas that seem to keep presenting themselves in the book. The first one is the Language of the World. He keeps searching for this language in the ultimate goal to be able to communicate with everyone and everything. It seems as though he learns a little bit of everything from all the things around him. He learns from the crystal shopkeeper, the desert, the alchemist, Fatima, the camel driver, his sheep, the gypsy, and most of all the mysterious King. The second thing that I actually found interesting was the statement about how the King will always appear to those who are searching for their personal legends. The boy mentioned that the back of the crystal shopkeepers head looked like the back of the Kings head and he had one other example that I can't recall right now. I just found this to be intriguing. It may just be coincidence that they look alike and that the boy is just willing his fate to happen. Or, possibly, the King does actually appear to him in his time of crisis. The only thing that I don't like about the book so far is the fact that the kid changes his mind so often based on the stupidest of things called "omens." I can understand that some things are omens like when the Englishmen knows what his stones are. But other things that this Shepard does are just outrageous. He makes crucial life changing decisions in the blink of an eye.

moar cheese please

adam is awesome. nuff said

Burton's Characters

     After reading the original version of the book, I've come to the conclusion that I much more like Burton's version of the book portrayed in his movie. I've seen the movie multiple times and the way he gives them so much emotion and detail and color is unmatchable. The book was very good and interesting but the movie makes the story much more vivid. The main difference that I noticed was the age of Alice.  In the book she was supposed to be around 8 years old and in the movie she was about 15. The thing that stands out the most to me in Burton's movie was how crazy Johnny Depp looked as the Mad Hatter. He did an exceptional job.

Meeting Alice: The Hatter's Point of View

     When I first met Alice, she very rudely invited herself to my table and my tea party that I was having with the March Hare. After she joined us, I asked her if she wanted her hair cut, and she became very offended. She's a very odd little girl who doesn't say that she means very often. She's very easily offended and acts as though she's an adult but she cannot be more than 8 years old. However, I think that if she's going to try to act as though she's older than she is, she needs to learn how to keep time. No year on my watch? Of course not, she didn't have a watch and she's telling me my watch is wrong? How queer. I only speak about what I know, and I know that the butter the March Hare gave me didn't work. I don't care if it was the best butter, it didn't fix my watch. I also issued her constructive criticism concerning her speech patterns, and once again she became angry with me. She hadn't met very many important people for trying to act so important herself. If she's so much more important than me, why hasn't she met Time? She talks about beating up time! How crazy. If she knew Time personally, she might be able to talk to him and have him help her get out of school early, but she didn't want to take the time. Impatient, that girl is. After a while, I tried to tell this odd girl not to talk about things that she didn't think about, and she got mad and left! Who knows if I'll ever see that one again.

Lewis Carroll: Aspergers Disorder

     I did a little bit of research on the childhood of Lewis Carroll because I was searching for a way to relate the characters in Alice in Wonderland to his siblings. However, I could not find a lot of reliable and useful information very easily, so I decided to look into the mental disorder that plagued Carroll as a child. I found that Carrol was thought to possibly have Aspergers disorder. I then did some quick research on Aspergers and looked up its symptoms and impairments. The disorder tends to cause social isolation and eccentric behavior in individuals as children. Also, their speech may be grammatically correct but still sound funny. Motor skills may be inhibited causing 'clumsiness.' The last thing that I found about the disorder was very interesting. It stated that the individual usually has one extreme focus in an area of study and does not have time to progress their age or other interests.
    After reading this article about Aspergers that was not in anyway connected to an article about Lewis Carroll, I began to compare what we knew about Carroll with the information I now had on the disorder. The stutter that haunted Carroll his whole life matches up perfectly with the issues that Aspergers has on speech. Also, his intense focus on mathematics and literature did not allow him to mature past his childhood. We discussed in class about how he behaved as a child even in his older age. I also brought up the suggestion in class that this was attributed to a drug addicted developed at an early age, but I retract that statement. There's too much evidence leaning towards Carroll having Aspergers to blame any disorder on a drug addiction. Also, we thought him to possibly be a pedophile. However, with the knowledge that I have now, is it not reasonable to think that he wanted to be around children because he felt that he possibly still was a child and that they understood him much better than adults? Very. The last point that I noticed was that individuals with Aspergers tended to stay isolated. I found that even when Carroll was rich and famous later on in his life, he chose not to marry anyone and lived in a modest house by himself. I found this to be very interesting and definitely a good topic to bring up in class.

favorite book: when & why

     When first thinking about this blog, I drew a blank. I haven't read a book that stuck with me for quite a while. I thought all the way back to middle school when I read the book The Land. In The Land, the main character, who also narrates the story, is Paul-Edward Logan. Taking place during the period of slavery, Paul-Edward is the son of a rich white man who had sex with one of his slaves. The story talks about diversity and not fitting in. It reinforces the importance of family, faith, and friendship. I liked this book so much and it stuck with me because it reinforced the fact that you're not always going to get along with everyone and things aren't always going to be easy, but you need to keep going towards your final goal. Paul-Edward's goal was to own his own land and not have any slaves, which would have been quite a feat for a black person in his time. He encounters many hardships through his journey and has to come up with solutions to get through them. When I look back, I see more clearly how the adversity applies in real life now more than when I was in middle school when everything was so easy. I've had to overcome quite a few things in the past few years to get to my final goal of graduating and finding a good job. Obstacles ranged from determining what I wanted to be to dealing with the recent death of my grandfather. I'm sure there a lot of books out there that have the same message as The Land, but this one seemed to stick with me. I actually might re-read it now just because I haven't in a few years.