Post 19

I have a severely autistic friend. He is noisy. He phones me ceaselessly. He plagues me with Chuck Norris jokes: The good, the bad, and the ugly. He takes all the memes I love and contorts them.

Even so, he is a good friend to me. Whenever I call, he is there for me. I cannot count the number of times I have felt so lost and went off to sit in his house, mess around with him for a bit, before going home. We tease each other ceaselessly. He is my right-hand man, and I am his as well.

Studying him closely also reveals some rather interesting things. He practically lives in his own world. This is probably because his parents dote on him very much for whatever reason: The most plausible ones being that he is the only male child in the family, and his parents feeling guilty for having brought him into the world mentally unsound, in a sense. You may be thinking about how being pampered links to being in your own world. Generally, he tends to behave as if he is the center of the universe and all other things revolve around him, and this is further aided by the fact that both parents and teachers tend to give way to his wants. Fortunately, he has his sisters and of course, myself, to slap him back into what the majority perceive as reality by opposing him at many points along the way.

Living in a world of your own is not totally bad. He possesses incredible amounts of courage with strangers. It is common for us to just walk into a shop and strike up a conversation or two with the shopkeeper (however, it is rare for us to walk into a shop). If we need to ask people questions, he always willingly does the asking. It's really useful, since I'm a little shy. I wish I could be like him sometimes. I guess I did make the transition one day, when we were selling his extra tickets to an event together. He was shy, so I got the ball rolling and eventually he managed to find the courage to start asking on his own.

He is generally happy-go-lucky, and keeps losing his things, as well as being very rough with them. He wore down a stylus for his Nintendo DS into nearly nothing after two weeks. That's some crazy stuff. He also somehow managed to break the L button on the same DS by playing Mario Kart DS; so badly, in fact, that the whole button is now detached from the motherboard and needs extensive servicing. However, it does feel good to be able to shrug off everything since someone will probably end up helping you settle it (i.e. his parents).

One thing that was brought up to me by a teacher is that for him, first impressions are very important. When I first met him, we were both nutty about Pikachu (and still are) and we made very horrendous plans about spreading Pikachuism and generally had a good time together, and he doesn't really mind that I abuse him pretty badly sometimes. On the other hand, he's really antagonistic towards a guy in his class that had taunted him pretty badly at the beginning, but later on became a lot nicer to him (supposedly). I don't think that's a very good thing. I hope it's not something that's inherently wrong with his brain to be unable to associate that. I wonder if I'll ever be able or willing to attempt to talk about philosophical things like this to him. Yes indeed.

I find that I have learnt so much from associating with him, and I can foresee that I will continue to learn many more things from him in the future. Cheers to my good friend, if you ever see this.