The woman who breastfed her one year old baby, while teaching a college class, didn't irk me because she was breast feeding in public. I raised my kids around militant breast feeders, and we're all used to seeing boobs all the time. What irked me most was that, according to her own account, the child was crawling around the room and was making a beeline for an electrical plug at one point. Nobody can give a good lecture or have any hope of paying attention to a lecture, when a toddler is crawling in front of the classroom.The woman was unable to put herself in the position of the students of the classroom, who were undoubtedly calculating  the cost of the class and the likelihood that they would leave the classroom with any knowledge. 

Autistic people are often described as missing the ability to understand the world from other people's perspectives. It is said that they are the ultimate narcissists. I'm not entirely sure that it is true. I've seen remarkable empathy, even supernatural understanding of suffering in others, among autistic people. And I've seen remarkable narcissism among non-autistic people. 

One of the reasons that I continue to write personal posts from time to time is because so few people really understand what it's like to raise a son with autism. They can't understand how much we love our son and, at the same time, how much work is involved with getting him a proper education and keeping him from being marginalized by society. 

OK. here's one story. I'm supposed to be at a funeral right now, but I couldn't go, because a sore throat plus the request to put on dressy clothes was too much for Ian. He cried and cried. He was afraid of going to a funeral, too, I think. We didn't attempt to bring him to the open casket wake yesterday. Jonah was upset, because he had successfully tied a windsor knot all by himself and he didn't want to disappoint his grandparents and it's difficult to not be able to do what other people do. 

Mostly the stories are good these days, but there are still days like this one. 

I'm grateful for Michael Berube's many essays on his son, Jamie. I particularly love his last one for Crooked Timber. Through his writing, I've learned a ton about Down Syndrome, the Beatles, and Harry Potter. 

I also really enjoyed Tim Burke's post, which pointed out the implicit prejudice and arrogance behind the latest job advertisement at CSU. Tim didn't really give us a window into his life, as much as point out the lack of empathy in others. 

One of the unrealized potentials of the Internet is that it provides a window into so many lives. With some minor efforts with a search engine, I can read essays from a single mother in Texas or a debutante in New York City or a retired grandfather in Alaska or exchange student in Russia. Theoretically, we should all become more empathic, because of our encounters with these different cultures. In reality, we use the Internet to find people who are more like us just spread across a wider geographic area. We like people who confirm our biases and reaffirm our world view. Yet the potential is still there, as those two posts show.