In or near Texas?

Why not take the Toxic Texas Tour?

It’s set up by the Texas Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

I can’t remember if I posted this or not.. Between Iraq And A Hard Place, a wonderful British satire which outlines the history and politics of Iraq.

Security how-to for Mac OS X. Don’t lettem steal yer data!

I’ve been listening to a lot of Duke Ellington tonight. No ‘Satin Doll’ for me. It’s gotta be the Carnegie concerts.

From that recording, today’s music: ‘Cotton Tail‘

Why Nerds Are Unpopular

Well, I was going to upload a piece of a screen capture, but I have no easy way of converting a pdf file (the way Mac OS X saves screen captures) to a graphic.

I sadly relinquish my Alpha Geek status for not being able to make this conversion, and for not really caring enough to find out how to do it.

Sometimes there’s this frustration that’s in me.

It’s like a freeze-dried nuclear explosion. Just waiting to thaw out. The edges warm up a little and I can observe myself having the urge to throw something across the room. Like, right now I want to throw the mouse into the wall. I won’t do it, because that’s how this frustration works.

This isn’t a meltdown. A meltdown happens if I get a stressor while I have the frustration. The frustration is kind of a pre-meltdown ramp-up. If I let it continue to ramp up, I’ll end up at a meltdown. Because what goes up must come down.

However, if I somehow manage to reduce the stress and work to change my mental state, I can ‘metabolize’ the frustration and ride it out. No meltdown.

It’s all about detachment. That is to say, if I can keep any wits at all, I can realize how completely out of proportion my emotional and stress reactions are. I remind myself that, yes, I have a neurological condition that spins these things into something far beyond what they need to be, and that I’ve ridden through these storms in the past.

And if you’re anyone but me, that’s all good news. Because it’s sometimes hard to discern the over-reaction from what needs to be. Feeling things, being angry, being frustrated, being impatient… These things are all valid and important from time to time. That’s why our nervous systems are capable of feeling them.

So it turns out that my almost superhuman ability to control my emotional responses to some situation is also something that stands in the way of learning better ways of dealing with those emotional responses, especially in the context of other people.

Being around people is the ultimate stressor, because there’s so much information to take in, and because there’s so much at stake, from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology. In order to deal with people, I have to play a balancing act: I have to take in all your overt and covert communication, I have to limit my emotional response, I have to weigh all sorts of social values, I have to modulate my responses such that you don’t think I’m bored or overly enthusiastic. Among other things. Everyone does these things every time they interact with other people, but my neurology has to work so hard at it, that I lose my identity. I cease to be me. I quit being Homer and I become Listener. When it comes time for me to talk, I become Fumbler-For-Words, because now I have to put the whole thing in reverse, figure out what I want to mean, and then I have to evaluate my response, before I perform it, using the same process I just used on your communication.

I’m juggling 23 balls in the air at once, and to you it looks like I’m some guy exchanging pleasantries. It’s exhausting and there’s seldom a reward to compensate for the effort. Most people really only want to exchange pleasantries, and I really hate exchanging pleasantries. Society has a very, very low signal to noise ratio, and that annoys me.

But. This is the worst part. Human beings have an instintive desire to belong. My desire to belong isn’t broken, as much as I wish it was from time to time. In fact, the feelings of loneliness and alienation are also amplified, must like the frustration. So I’m stuck between an overwhelming primal desire to belong and an overwhelming primal desire to have a meltdown.

And this, my friends, is Asperger’s Syndrome.

Newest diversion:

Cintos

Fun board game, a little like reversi.

Grr. Xanga hates me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my Funky Neurology lately, so this is a ‘blog that could be characterized as whiny and self-indulgent. And if that’s how you want to characterize it, you can skip along to something else. There’s a lot of stuff out there on the web…

I’m really tired of dealing. I’d love to deal with all the ten thousand things that need to be done in the process of moving; don’t get me wrong. I’m tired of dealing with not being able to do them. I constantly have to re-evaluate my capabilities and decide if a) my goals are realistic, and b) if I should or shouldn’t be beating myself up over a given thing that hasn’t gotten done.

Essentially, I hate this. I hate not waking up until noon because that’s how I can avoid spending pre-coffee time with the housemates. I hate going and living alone in another house in order to be able to concentrate, but then only being able to sit on the couch and watch TV. I hate.. no, make that I resent that the only time I really feel satisfied is when I’m alone in a car driving in traffic, getting nothing done.

The enormity of this problem is contained in the fact that it’s made up of small things. Someone might say, “So what? You like driving around? What’s the big deal?” Or they might say, “So you don’t like your housemates..?” They can’t see the big picture, and I spend a lot of time second-guessing my own vision of it, too. Is it ridiculous that it took me a month after getting back here from Texas to take the car to get the oil changed? Is that something I should beat myself up over, or is it something I should just resign myself to?

The question isn’t whether or not this crap is going to continue; it will. The question is what attitude to take towards it. In the past, being hard on myself kinda worked, but it sucks being hard on yourself all the time, especially when it’s so goddamned hard to make and keep friends. If I accept it, if I say, “C’est la vie..” then I go nowhere. Anything in between is meaningless.

I want balance, and I think I’ll never have it.