Tue 26 Feb ∞ Comments
From screenshots; I have quite a few of these.  Based on computational algorithms that are as inscrutable as they are immutable, the supreme distributed intelligence of the Internet has determined that I am disabled. While I certainly cede that I’ve a disproportionate share of what are euphemistically called “eccentricities” (the DSM-IV being less polite), I never felt my life was sufficiently inhibited to justify terms much worse than “screwed up,” “crazy,” or “generally not worth a damn.” I’ve written about this before, but it persists: these strange ads are served up to me for the disability-themed social network / community site Disaboom. The ads are unsettling: I feel like a eunuch when I’m confronted by the flexing, tat-covered hoss in the wheelchair, and I don’t want to know any more about his sex drive, happy as I am for him (all my various forms of emotional and sexual paralysis are my own fault). I thought that maybe my browsing habits, frenetic and obsessive as they are, had disclosed to some magical Google supercomputer that I’m bipolar, and that Disaboom was open to the emotionally disabled as well, but on their front page is a drop-down list of ailments (“Select your Condition”), and these are real problems, on another scale than my relatively quotidian mania and despair: ALS, Spina Bifida, etc. The Internet working the way it does, I was sort of sucked-in to Disaboom for a while: it is, like most of the forms of exposure healthy people have to the severely disabled, simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting. When I watched Josh Blue, I was impressed and moved and discomfited, the usual panoply of emotions I associate with seeing people abused by fate facing life more bravely than I ever could. Of course, there is this: many of them seem to be better people for it. Our ease does our hearts no favors. But of course it is not a saccharine world of triumph and redemption. There’s loneliness and frustration and the oppressive facticity of corporeal frailty and death. Their writing, unlike ours, is riddled with references to physical problems, medicines, surgeries, and permanent ostracism. Disaboom is actually a fairly cool site, and I would probably do better to network their than with my assorted high-school / college / post-college quasi-friends, ex-girlfriends, enemies, and acquaintances at Facebook, many of whom probably don’t know anything about suffering beyond the guilt they feel when they walk past the disabled homeless at their Circle K. On the other hand, at the end of the day it’s all the same issues all humans face, in greater or lesser forms: check out this post from someone “Functionally Non-Verbal” on their gradual emergence from the identity of their disability; it seemed pretty resonant to me.

From screenshots; I have quite a few of these. 

Based on computational algorithms that are as inscrutable as they are immutable, the supreme distributed intelligence of the Internet has determined that I am disabled. While I certainly cede that I’ve a disproportionate share of what are euphemistically called “eccentricities” (the DSM-IV being less polite), I never felt my life was sufficiently inhibited to justify terms much worse than “screwed up,” “crazy,” or “generally not worth a damn.”

I’ve written about this before, but it persists: these strange ads are served up to me for the disability-themed social network / community site Disaboom. The ads are unsettling: I feel like a eunuch when I’m confronted by the flexing, tat-covered hoss in the wheelchair, and I don’t want to know any more about his sex drive, happy as I am for him (all my various forms of emotional and sexual paralysis are my own fault).

I thought that maybe my browsing habits, frenetic and obsessive as they are, had disclosed to some magical Google supercomputer that I’m bipolar, and that Disaboom was open to the emotionally disabled as well, but on their front page is a drop-down list of ailments (“Select your Condition”), and these are real problems, on another scale than my relatively quotidian mania and despair: ALS, Spina Bifida, etc.

The Internet working the way it does, I was sort of sucked-in to Disaboom for a while: it is, like most of the forms of exposure healthy people have to the severely disabled, simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting. When I watched Josh Blue, I was impressed and moved and discomfited, the usual panoply of emotions I associate with seeing people abused by fate facing life more bravely than I ever could. Of course, there is this: many of them seem to be better people for it. Our ease does our hearts no favors.

But of course it is not a saccharine world of triumph and redemption. There’s loneliness and frustration and the oppressive facticity of corporeal frailty and death. Their writing, unlike ours, is riddled with references to physical problems, medicines, surgeries, and permanent ostracism.

Disaboom is actually a fairly cool site, and I would probably do better to network their than with my assorted high-school / college / post-college quasi-friends, ex-girlfriends, enemies, and acquaintances at Facebook, many of whom probably don’t know anything about suffering beyond the guilt they feel when they walk past the disabled homeless at their Circle K.

On the other hand, at the end of the day it’s all the same issues all humans face, in greater or lesser forms: check out this post from someone “Functionally Non-Verbal” on their gradual emergence from the identity of their disability; it seemed pretty resonant to me.

Following: