<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 6:12 AM, Brolin Empey <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:brolin@brolin.be">brolin@brolin.be</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hello list,<br><br>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 <i>panel</i>) 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 (<i>not</i> 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 (<a href="http://brolin.be" target="_blank">brolin.be</a> + 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 <i>much</i> worse, even if I lack much first-hand experience of how much worse it could be.<br>
<br>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 <i>in person</i> 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 <i>Consciousness Explained</i> 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).<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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? :)<br><br>Thank you for reading this far!<br><br>Brolin :)<br><br>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)<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br clear="all">
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<br>-- <br>Sometimes I forget how to do small talk: <<a href="http://xkcd.com/222/" target="_blank">http://xkcd.com/222/</a>><br><br>“If you have to ask why, you’re not a member of the intended audience.” — Bob Zimbinski, <<a href="http://webpages.mr.net/bobz/ttyquake/" target="_blank">http://webpages.mr.net/bobz/ttyquake/</a>><br>
</font><br></blockquote><div><br>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.<br>
<br>Now! ... this is totally offtopic for this list and I am tempted to put a filter in place.<br><br>Time to give this topic up in this list!<br><br>Dave <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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