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

[roguemoko at roguewrt.org]

Hi Brolin,

I commend you for your openness and courage for putting yourself out 
there like you have. I've known a few guys with your particular traits 
and I sympathise. I imagine it would be very difficult to find your 
place communally, a lot of people don't understand how over-thought and 
considered every social interaction is for someone such as yourself. The 
guys I have known have found it very difficult to interpret body 
language which can scare off a lot of people, they've needed people who 
understand and are willing to educate them or at least tell them when 
something may be to their detriment. Most people won't say a thing, 
endure, then run a mile.

Although it is possible there may be someone on this list who can aide 
you in your search, I'd suggest seeking out a support service with like 
minded people. Typing "aspergers support forum mailing list" into google 
reveals there are a few, though I can't vouch for any of them.

I wish you all the best, I believe there is someone, and a place, for 
everyone.

Good luck mate.

Sarton


On 11/09/2009 6:12 AM, Brolin Empey 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 <http://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/>
>
>
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