I hope you enjoy it here, also, Izzy.
And I guess I'll take a stab at answering these again.
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What is your first name?
Charles, though I've always been known by my middle name, which is Jesse.
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Age:
33
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Location:
I grew up outside of Philadelphia, moved to San Francisco when I was about 20, stayed for about 11 years and have now resided in Huntington Beach (south of Los Angeles) for the past 2 years or so.
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Hobbies and Interests:
Uhhh... Not sure how to answer that one at the moment. Used to be mainly reading and music (listening) and basically trying new things... I'm finding myself less and less engaged by much of anything as I get older.
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Why are you here?
Looking around, getting a feel for things... While I've never been officially diagnosed, the older I get (and the more I learn about the condition), the more likely it seems that I've Asperger's. After lurking for a while, I can say that I'm not sure I've read anything that mirrors my own mind as strongly as the posts in the forum outside of a David Foster Wallace non-fiction piece.
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When were you diagnosed?(skip if you don't have a disorder):
Never officially. As stated above, the more I read, the more it seems to fit. AQ=35, various "symptoms" seem to be there (rocking motions, literal-mindedness, misreading of other's intent (most human communication at this point strikes me as borderline sociopathy)).
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Favorite subjects:
Used to be just about anything. Physics, Math, History, Lit, Econ... I'm especially fascinated by various forms of cognitive fallacy and bias.
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Year/Grade:
GED. I failed out of High School after getting the highest SAT (college entrance exam) score in my graduating class. I spent the better part of High School reading whatever interested me at the time as class went on around me. Normally, when yelled at for this, I'd point out to the teacher that I'd aced whatever tests they were offering. Homework struck me as busy-work. Was taken out of H.S. and placed in an accelerated math program at the local community college, which I also failed out of.
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Favorite music:
That one could take a while. Let's just say I'll listen to just about anything... My old computer (currently not running) has something like 30,000 tracks on the hard drive. Believe it or not, those were all ripped from cd's that I'd bought (a project which actually took a couple of years). I'll listen to most any genre, and when I find a track, artist or even snippet of a song I like, there's a very high probability that I'll be listening to it repeatedly (and I mean repeatedly).
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Books:
Again, I used to read incessantly. After my father died, I took a year or two off from work and would read a book (or three) a day. When I was much younger (about first grade or so), one of my favorite books was Jean Lee Latham's
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch. The general theme of the book seems to be that provided on gets things right, it doesn't matter what life throws at you. The older I get, the less I believe that. Recently, I'm less sure that I see any point in reading. A partial list of the books I've read can be found
here.
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TV shows/Movies:
I tend not to be too big on either, but mainly because for the most part, they move too slowly for me. One of things that was advantageous about reading was that I could put the book down and come back to it when I wanted to. If I see a movie in a theatre, there's a good chance I'll take a walk about half an hour in. If I watch a movie at home, it will be paused multiple times by the end. Things I've enjoyed nonetheless - Say Anything, The Cruise, Miller's Crossing, The Simpsons.
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Instrument:
Nope.
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Do you like sports?
Don't do much for me.
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Family:
About as dysfunctional as could be... My older brother was killed in a car accident when I was 16. My father was a physically abusive drunk whose liver gave out when I was 24. I've not spoken to my mother in about a decade. And there's a step-brother/mother (an affair that my father had) that I'm not very close to.
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Clothing:
I tend to keep it basic. Jeans and black t-shirt. Jeans and black hoody. That sort of thing.
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Job:
I seem to be running through them. Was an equity options market maker briefly in my early twenties. Left that after the death of my father. Worked in high-end fine-dining for about 8 years after that. (Did well with guests and customers, tended to have problems with co-workers). Currently working at a dive bar for two late-stage alcoholics (about as bad a fit as a job could be, mind you. Drunks are not rational people.)
When I was towards the end of middle school or beginning of High School and my grades first started to slip, my father decided that my problems in school stemmed from a lack of proper discipline and and too little respect for authority. In order to instill these virtues in me, my father decided that our house was going to be run like a military boot camp. Basically, the way it went was something like this. If I missed a question on a test, failed to complete a homework assignment, didn't do chores properly or anything else along these lines, I was punished. Punishments included things like push-ups, wind-sprints, whippings with a belt. This program lasted for a month or two. One day, my father walked into my room and pointed to a ruler that was on my bookshelf. He said that because the ruler was not completely parallel to the edge of the bookcase and set something like a 1/4" from the edge of the bookcase, that I had to do 20 push-ups. I protested the ruling (no pun intended), arguing that as it had never been stated beforehand that the ruler needed to be in this position, there was no way that I could have known to have done that beforehand and should not be held accountable. My father then went on to tell me that the point of this exercise was simply to assert that he was in charge and that I was to do what he said, regardless of whether or not there was a reason for what he said (more specifically, the point was that there was no point for the decision, aside from his arbitrary caprice) or whether I knew what was expected of me. He explained that it was a power-play, nothing more or less. And then he told me to do my 20 push-ups. I cursed him (literally, though the words I used would be a violation of the TOS, so I will not repeat them.) This led to about 45 minutes of my father chasing me through our house with his belt in his hand. The house was a basic four-square plan and we went around in circles for a very large amount of time. You'd have to bear in mind that I'd been doing wind-sprints and push-ups nightly for the previous few months and my father was a middle-aged man that smoked a pack or two a day and had fifths of whiskey stashed in various places around the house (this, obviously, is authority) and so he was having quite a few problems catching me. Eventually, my mother put a stop to this after I ran over her (literally, she was in bed reading a book and going over her was the only way away from my father at the time). I bring this up, I suppose, because though my father is dead, the dynamic at most jobs I've held seems little different at all.
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Plans for the future?
Mainly struggling to keep a roof over my head at the moment.
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Any comments?
Dunno.
09 Dec 2009, 8:27 pm
! to all new members who have posted on this thread 
)
