Through all my years in the educational system, nothing has become so deeply embedded in my brain as the 5th grade music curriculum that involved watching Les Misérables. It made an immediate impression, fueling an act of collective resistance against the orchestra teacher (I wrote and delivered a manifesto before leading a walkout). I had all 3 CDs of the complete unabridged original cast recording, and I listened to the first two obsessively. Most of the words are still there in head, 30 years later. Because even though text is my preferred medium for most things, the way for me to keep lots of things in my head at high fidelity is to hear it. It's why I made audio recordings of various data about Slavic linguistics when studying for my master's exams.

Until last night, I'd only seen the show once -- my father took me in the heyday of my obsession. At the intermission, I was excited to tell him about what I'd noticed. Another quirky thing about my brain is that it automatically registers differences when I'm encountering something I know well. It's not as though I go looking for problems or things to criticize, but my brain just keeps a running log of changes, whether or not I want it to. I started telling my father about the slightly fumbled lyrics from the first act, and he abruptly said to me that if I go around doing things like that, I'm going to have a miserable life.

I stopped. I was stunned. It never occurred to me that there was any harm in it, and what's more, it's not like it was volitional. It's just something that happens in my brain. Not much to be done about it, though if it caused that kind of reaction, perhaps I shouldn't ever talk about it. So I didn't.

I'm sure he didn't mean anything by it, or even remember it later. He was probably tired and not too keen on hearing me prattle on. No doubt someday I'll learn which of my own offhand comments have left a mark on my kids. But that was one of the few childhood encounters I had around neurodiversity. It was great to be smart, it was okay to be some kinds of weird, but other things my brain did would upset people if I talked about it, so better keep it to myself.

The Les Misérables incident of my childhood came back to me this week. First there was the flood of discourse around autism (with Trump's announcement that it's caused by Tylenol)[1], and then my girlfriend and I went to see Les Misérables for her birthday.

My brain did that thing again. Some of it was deliberate script changes (bless them for cutting "Little People" and truncating "Castle on a Cloud", and turning Thénardier bi-curious in "Beggars at the Feast"). But "Valjean's Soliloquy" had an odd "one knife from him and I'd be back" that I'm pretty sure was a mistake.

And I was reminded of this remark on neurodiversity from Bluesky:

Bluesky post from S Bear Bergman, 'Can we not just accept that we need all the different kinds of brains to do all the different kind of human things? Because I am FOR SURE not keeping a 17-volume-and-counting detailed record of my decades of effort in restoring heirloom apple varieties, but I’m very glad someone is. ::crunch::'

It made me smile. The utility of this particular brain feature is much more limited these days[2], but brains like mine would've been handy when literature was transmitted through oral tradition. I've got the oral recitation equivalent of spell-check permanently enabled. And of the mental habits that have led to periods of misery in my life, this definitely isn't one of them.

  1. The best response was, IMHO, this one: Bluesky post from Furby Hancock reading 'Too late, Batman. Once this Tylenol floods the city's water supply, my wiki won't run out of editors ever again'. ↩︎

  2. Not completely useless: changes to Rent lyrics in the live TV production led to one of the first conversations I had with Roopika Risam, before the Data-Sitters Club or serving as ACH co-presidents. ↩︎