OT: Where can I meet a female companion with similar interests and personality /in person/?

[Dave]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 6:12 AM, Brolin Empey <brolin at brolin.be> wrote:

> Hello list,
>
> Like most of the members of this list (AFAICT from the first names I
> recognise as sex/gender-specific), I am male.  I am 22 and still live with
> my parents.  I have never lived away from my parents.  I am planning to hire
> a support worker to help me live away from my parents (I have another
> meeting later today) because I continue to indefinitely defer trying to live
> away from my parents.  I named my form of procrastination “priority
> inversion” because what is, in practical terms, my lowest priority, becomes
> my highest priority.  For example, I choose to spend my free time playing
> with my computers, including my FreeRunner, instead of learning about human
> biology and/or nutrition, which will affect me every day of my life, and at
> least trying to live away from my parents.  When I say I play with my
> computers, I do not mean gaming:  I almost never play games anymore.  Even
> when I decide I want to play a game again, I spend all of my time reading
> about games, viewing screenshots and videos, and trying to decide which of
> the endless games I should play (or rather, obtain if I do not already have
> a copy and make work on my PC) instead of actually playing a game.  I feel
> like I am always overwhelmed and/or overloaded with information and
> stimulation in the Too Much Information Age.  I always feel like the NET
> Effect is that there is Never Enough Time because time flies faster than
> ever because I am always overthinking, overwhelmed with overchoice, etc.  I
> recognise my mind is a word and pattern recognition engine, which is
> constantly adding new stimulations/experiences to its database.  I have
> Asperger’s Syndrome, but can function much better, at least in terms of
> interacting with people in person, than when I was in high school, for
> example.  I used to often feel like I had social anxiety disorder because I
> would get so anxious and/or worried even when calling someone on the phone
> (on my parents’s landline because I did not have a cell phone until 2008)
> that I could not speak clearly enough for the person on the other end to
> understand me, so I would always have to repeat myself at least once for
> every turn of the conversation.  I am a purist and have been called the most
> pedantic person in the world by Jamie Zawinski, of Lucid Emacs/XEmacs and
> Netscape/Mozilla fame. :)  Imprecise usage and redundancy bothers me even if
> know what is meant from the context.  For example, I am bothered by people
> mentioning a “standard” transmission in a vehicle (it is a manual
> transmission.  Standard depends on the vehicle.  Automatic is standard for
> some vehicles.), calling an LCD monitor (a flat *panel*) a “flat screen”
> (high-end CRTs have flat glass too!), common redundancies, such as PIN
> number, ATM machine, LCD display, people who assume all cars use crappy
> gasoline engines and use fuel-specific terms, such as gas station (it is a
> service station), gas tank (it is a fuel tank), gas pedal (it is an
> accellerator), gas pump (I have used a diesel pump at Shell that told me to
> “select octane” instead of “select ctane” (sp?) or “select fuel grade”.  My
> car has a diesel, not gasoline, engine.  I have been highly influenced by my
> father, Brian Empey.  Brian is a Professional Engineer (Electrical
> Engineering).  He founded Technical Solutions Inc. (Techsol) in 1996 with
> his second wife (my step-mom), Karen Empey (nee Schellenberg).  Techsol is
> an embedded computer hardware company specialising in Linux on ARM
> architecture.  I am very fortunate to be able to work at Techsol.  I am a
> Linux + Windows System Administrator/Web master/IT person/general computer
> person.  I think my responsibiles are more important than my title(s).  I
> know I am very dependent on my parents, but at least I own my own car (which
> I bought from my dad), have a Class 7 driver’s licence (the Novice stage of
> the Graduated Licensing Program in British Columbia, Canada.  I live in the
> Lower Mainland of British Columbia, Canada), my own credit union account,
> debit (Interac) card, MasterCard credit card, personal cheques (*not*checks!), which I almost never use (I think I have written a total of 3
> cheques in my life), cell phones (Nokia 6103b + FreeRunner), PayPal account,
> domain names (brolin.be + others), Virtual Private Server (VPS), which
> hosts my personal Web site, PCs and peripherals, far too many original/boxed
> PC games, which I almost never play anymore, bicycle, ... I am definitely a
> relatively rich/wealthy person in Canada and extremely wealthy compared to
> less fortunate people in both developed and developing countries.  I know I
> should not complain because I am very fortunate;  I know my life could
> always be *much* worse, even if I lack much first-hand experience of how
> much worse it could be.
>
> Anyway, enough rambling.  I need to finally address the Subject of this
> message (I hope at least 1 person actually read this far!).  How/where can I
> meet a female companion *in person* with similar interests and
> personality?  Someone who can appreciate my word associations, puns, sexual
> innuendo, jokes, purism, etc.?  Someone who can relate to and understand the
> computer humour in xkcd comics (I do not understand a lot of the math used
> in xkcd, but I still know relatively more about math than non-technical
> people because of my interest in computing and computer programming),
> someone who analyses everything as much as I do, someone who is interested
> by books such as *Consciousness Explained* by Daniel C. Dennet, (personal)
> computing history, computer art scenes such as the demoscene, The Scene
> (warez groups, etc.  even though I no longer use much unlicensed software
> because I prefer to support Free Software projects instead of using
> unlicensed proprietary software), computer music (module music, chiptunes).
>
> I have a tendency to isolate myself from face-to-face contact with my
> peers, even though I know meeting people requires being in the same place as
> them.  I have few friends (well, at least peers) I know in person.  I choose
> to spend most of my free time at home, either alone or with my parents,
> instead of trying to meet new people in person.  I am too shy and
> self-conscious in public.
>
> Can anyone relate to me?  What should I do?  I know I have volunteered a
> lot of personal information in this post, but much of it is already publicly
> accessible for those who know my real/legal name and know how to use tools
> such as Google Search.  I have been considering writing a post like this for
> months (maybe already >1 year), but I ended up stopping writing early
> because I felt uncomfortable about volunteering so much personal
> information.  What do I have to lose, though?  I need to stop being so
> self-conscious.
>
> Why are most of the peers with whom I can relate well male?  Do females
> have the same problem?  Are there even any females reading this? :)
>
> Thank you for reading this far!
>
> Brolin :)
>
> PS:  As you can probably tell, I prefer to write properly (with correct
> grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalisation, typographical quotation
> marks and em dashes instead of ASCII typewriter quotation marks and ASCII
> approximations of em dashes, etc.), even in informal contexts and for SMS.
> I also prefer to say SMS instead of “text message”, but you could probably
> have guessed that from my previous examples of my purism.  I also prefer
> logical, simple, and unambiguous ISO 8601 (e.g., today is 2009-09-10 13:37
> ;)) international standard date and time notation, especially instead of the
> illogical 12h time notation, which many people insist on using in fuzzy
> and/or ambiguous ways, such as “quarter to one” instead of “12:45” (24h).  I
> know HH:MM (00:00 – 23:59) can be interpreted as ambiguous 12h when the hour
> is <= 12, but I do not like to use HHMM (without the separator (the colon))
> because I prefer to separate the components of the time of day.  I
> originally used an ASCII minus character (‘-’) as a range separator, but I
> decided I should use gucharmap to copy and paste a proper en dash because
> otherwise I would be hypocritical for using proper em dashes but using an
> ASCII approximation instead of a proper en dash because I am too lazy to use
> gucharmap. (fail)
>
> PPS: As you may have noticed, I use the same convention as the C
> programming language for usage of single and double quotation marks.  C uses
> only ASCII characters, though;  I use both ASCII and Unicode (yes, I know
> Unicode includes ASCII) for e.g., typographical quotation marks and dashes.
>
> PPPS: I also highly prefer communities such as this mailing list, where
> posters use their real/legal names and are consequently accountable for
> their actions (messages) and write properly instead of e.g., Web bulletin
> boards frequented by the ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), “tl; dr” (“too
> long; didn’t read”) crowd, most of whom use nicknames instead of their
> real/legal names.
>
> --
> Sometimes I forget how to do small talk: <http://xkcd.com/222/>
>
> “If you have to ask why, you’re not a member of the intended audience.” —
> Bob Zimbinski, <http://webpages.mr.net/bobz/ttyquake/>
>
>
Seriously ... Brolin - good luck in your quest ... its a hard road and being
in my third marriage I know. Don't be disheartened and you will find someone
one day. Some things are - the harder you seek - the harder it is to find.

Now! ... this is totally offtopic for this list and I am tempted to put a
filter in place.

Time to give this topic up in this list!

Dave

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