Social skills: how to firmly say no without coming off like a jerk

Here. From The Art of Manliness.

Online personals - a word to the wise

Speaking as the "other half of the blogging team", I must warn that there are some "characters" and unscrupulous folk out out there on these type of sites, so you must be very careful. This is especially true of the ladies. They may try and play on the social naivety that can accompany many of us on the spectrum. So that means not divulging too much personal info too soon, like address and telephone number, etc. Get to know the person a little first.

If you should agree to meet, suggest an open public place with plenty of people around, like a restaurant or food court. I say this not to discourage or rain on your parade, but to insure safety. One characteristic we Aspies have is to get carried away especially when desperate and lonely, thus going way too fast, and saying way too much too soon.  That can lead to being hurt, in more than one way. So, a word to the wise...

Also, it's not necessary to give our entire life's story with copious foot notes the second you connect. That can be shared little bits at a times if/should the friendship/relationship progess. Remember, keep it simple as too many details can bore, overwhelm, and weird a person out. Be honest, but not too honest.

As for Wrong Planet... for all the good the forum can do, I also agree it isn't good for picking up a date. All the best & happy fishing!

Online personals: you too can date

As I wrote before, autism really is a spectrum from the happily married (but not without problems because of the autism) who often found out one of them has AS when a child was diagnosed to those who have never dated.

For the lonely, online dating has become a door to the normals' world in this department, and is almost but not quite respectable among normals (they often use it now too but still few 'fess up to it, which tells you not to talk about it).

Get a decent haircut and clothes, and a digital camera to show all that, and learn how to write online (no rambles or lectures about your obsessions) and you too can date etc.

As they say, your mileage may vary. Some sites will work for you; some won't.

My picks: Plenty of Fish (which I found on an AS site, Wrong Planet, which itself I found doesn't work if you're looking for a date) and OK Cupid. Let me put it this way: with a little effort like I described above, which is in the range of things most of us can handle, I can tell you firsthand you don't need to be an alpha to get results.

And they're free.

Good luck!

Tact: the mouth as a door

The tongue should be prudently restrained, but not completely tied up. It is written: Whoever is wise will keep silence until the right moment. In other words, when it is seen that speech would be opportune the censorship of silence is relaxed, and an effort made to speak some appropriate word. Elsewhere it is written: There is a time to keep silence and a time to speak. Different circumstances should be prudently judged; the tongue should not be unprofitably loosened in speech when it ought to be restrained; nor should it indolently withhold speech when it could speak with profit. Reflecting well upon these things, the psalmist says: Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth: and keep the door of my lips. He does not ask for a wall to be set before his lips but a door, in other words, something that can be opened and closed. We must take care to learn, then, when we should discreetly and at the proper time open our mouths to speak, and when we should keep them closed and preserve a fitting silence.

- St. Gregory the Great

From here.

One of my symptoms: not always immediately recognizing faces

Sometimes when I see somebody I know and he sees me I don't recognize him right away so I put on my blank face for strangers and look away, then when I realize who it is I try to recover by looking at him and saying hello. It can be only a second's delay but enough to offend a normal. Ouch.

TV pick: "Lie to Me" on reading faces

The obvious appeal of this besides Kelli Williams' beauty is it covers a basic skill in AS social-skills training, how to read faces. This show is based on fact: there are scientists who've studied people's body language down to what are called microexpressions lasting a split-second to tell if somebody's lying, obviously valuable in police work.

Similar: The Mentalist in which a former fake-psychic con artist, feeling guilty over some harm he caused, now works with the cops. "I'm not a psychic. I'm just paying attention."

Learning how to be a man: modern movies don't help

Says this article.

If you want to learn a bit of alpha game by video, old movies from the 1940s-1960s and retro imitations like Mad Men are better. They have not only tough guys but everymen with strong moral codes (Hank Fonda's and Jimmy Stewart's roles) and English toughness (stiff-upper-lip stoicism in adversity, something to learn to fake instead of melting down - hide your feelings publicly and take it like a man) like the calm, cool and collected colonel under fire.

AS senses of humor: satire/parody

I am clearly missing some fundamental insights into how the world works: so much of it makes no sense whatsoever.

So many of us feel that way of course, because the glitch in our brains either makes it impossible or very hard to get those insights. So of course besides fish-out-of-water stories and characters (aliens, robots and foreigners) - Spock, Data the android, Mork, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Latka on Taxi (who also has goofy front personalities), Balki on Perfect Strangers - many of us love comedy that makes fun of the normals' absurdity and hypocrisy, from Monty Python (I'm sure a number of us, like with our cousins among the normals, nerds, have memorized and like to quote whole sketches) to The Simpsons. Andy Kauffman's schtick as Latka falls under that too: the cute, childlike, clueless foreigner tries to guess at and imitate normal American behavior and becomes an obnoxious caricature. So do Mork, 3rd Rock and Perfect Strangers.

25 etiquette tips

Here.

In the iconic American manual for this, Emily Post, her granddaughter revising it described manners wonderfully: they're not what people think - showing off by putting on airs (but, unrelated, sometime a little of that, in the form of alpha game for example, is called for... not necessarily the same setting as a society party but same idea) - but practical ways to be nice/charitable. People with real as opposed to affected class use them without calling attention to themselves by so doing. (A common AS mistake would be to try to relate to normals by memorizing Emily Post then ostentatiously trying to follow it, including bragging about it.)

Guideposts: the homespun wisdom of Coach Wooden

This year legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden died just short of his 100th birthday after a long retirement in which he was still active as a motivational speaker in his 90s.

His life is a testament to the kind of old-fashioned clean living many of us with AS aspire to.

He also was humble, working in obscurity as a coach for 20 years before a winning streak made him a sports legend.

Anyway one of the things he's famous for is his Pyramid of Success, a set of aphorisms about values he started learning growing up on the farm in 1910s-20s Indiana that he honed over the years. Here it is (click to enlarge).

Religion's not a crutch or symptom but a coping skill: a cautionary tale

Years ago when I didn't know about AS I tried blindly to imitate the normals by "putting away childish things," suppressing my special interest in religion, leaving a perfectly good church-related job I'd held for a year and a half (an accomplishment for a young AS person) for a better-paying secular one (the thing you're supposed to do). Of course removing that behavior guide/coping skill made the AS worse so in three months I was fired.

Whether there's a God or not, if it works don't fix it!

What I think this blog's name means

As I didn't name it. I hated the expression "you're finding yourself" when I was a kid; I thought it was patronizing. But it's true. When you have AS you can't really do that until you know about the AS; you're flying blind.

When you know, it doesn't get rid of all your problems - there are still boobytraps like "things coming out wrong" when you try to say them and giving off the wrong body language when you don't mean to (I literally almost got into a fight the first four days at my job because of that; when the guy - heatedly of course - explained what he saw, I understood but didn't tell him, only saying I was sorry... it's for me to know to help me and none of his business).

But it cuts your problems at least in half.

Then like an actor you can take control of the front personalities you've haphazardly tried to build and put on over the years (one article: "I was Sherlock Holmes one month, Groucho Marx the next") and make them work like they're supposed to for a change, because now you know how to work them.

Because you've found center and are really talking from that, just using the fronts.

What I understand causes autism

Like dyslexia it's how the brain is constructed. In autistic disorders, the clump of brain cells that control executive functions (multi-tasking) and reading non-verbal cues stay undeveloped, either never getting or not being able to respond to the signal to wake up and grow up.

Therapy

It seems to me of all the talk therapies (most of which are useless with AS - your problems reading people are nothing to do with how your parents raised you or what you saw down by the mill when you were 10), cognitive therapy would work best with AS people. I've never tried it though so I don't really know. AS people overthink things compared to normals as a coping strategy; cognitive therapy would harness that.

Some therapy humor:

Stigma and discretion

When I was growing up of course nobody knew yet about AS but knew something was wrong. I certainly did. Once I asked my father why he didn't get me help and he said, "I didn't want the stigma," which of course was a fancy, evasive way of saying "I'm ashamed of you." Understandable. But wrong.

Who do you tell about this? We want to be logical and half-expect the world to be the same. Just talk it over and everything will be fine; people will understand.

No.

People aren't logical. More likely somebody will try to use the information against you.

So knowing about AS is "intel," insider secret knowledge to help yourself.

Don't tell anybody else unless you have to, like if you're in trouble with an employer. Socially only tell people you've gotten to know well; those who have to know like a serious girlfriend.

Sorry, but stigma's real. Lots of things in life are hard and unpleasant. You just have to learn to deal. Just like the the normals.

It's why I blog this anonymously!

Front personalities: masks and roles

Article from The Art of Manliness.

Relationships: underachiever and not proud of it

Like they say, autism is a spectrum. We're more likely to be alone (including divorced) but we range from grandparents long married to people who've never had a date. (A number of us found out we have AS when our children were diagnosed - it runs in families.)

Suppose you've overcome your symptoms enough (solved basic problems like eye contact, not monologuing about obsessions and learning about personal space, and/or learned some confident manly alpha behavior) and/or your charming quirkiness (old-fashionedness or passion for a particular person - she becomes one of your special interests) attracts somebody ("You're sweet, not like the other guys who just want to hook up"), so you're ahead of the AS curve and like normals are "in a relationship," maybe even married.

Sorry, your problems aren't over.

I forget where I read it but it jibes with my own experience (lost the woman I almost married about four years ago; ouch). You can get that far and lose the girl anyway because... you didn't plan well enough when you were a young adult so you don't make enough money. (Barely good enough to support yourself but not a wife and kids, and all healthy women want a man who can support them even if they make lots of money themselves.) A lot of us are chronically underemployed (finding and keeping a job are very hard if you don't know you have AS); leading/skewing the curve are probably rich engineers (another name for AS: engineer's syndrome), scientists and computer people.

The woman, charmed at first, gets fed up waiting for you to grow up and make some money so she eventually leaves. The old conundrum of how normals see us: "If you're so smart, you can get over this and get a real job," etc. Well, not necessarily even if we know what's wrong.

All I can say is it's a hard problem to solve once you're stuck with it.

Pickup artists: social-skills training uncensored and without a conscience

Gentlemen, meet Roissy, the cool best friend/smart brother you never had but probably wish you did at least as a bar wingman. He's one of those gadfly bloggers who does two things AS men respect. He claims he regularly has sex with beautiful women and he tells truths everybody else is too nice to say. (Secrets your therapist probably won't tell you - that advice is probably all nice and PC.) And he's online to tell you how to do the first one.

He's one of those men who claims to teach all nerdy, lonely men - betas in pickup-artist (PUA) lingo (taken, fittingly, from studying the animal kingdom, about alpha wolves etc.) - the body language and talk of the dominant alphas all women want. Like a down-and-dirty version of the movie Hitch. Some PUAs make a lot of money as coaches for rich nerds who still can't get a date, to put it nicely. (Part of the problem is a lot of people don't actually date anymore; they hook up.)

AS men are natural betas. We try to be nice and we think women are enchanting. We want to tell them we love them and be good providers. Well and good. Everybody's socialized to say they want those things.

He's the kind of man the world pretends to look up to, and in fact despises.

- Komorovsky in Dr. Zhivago

Social lesson: people don't mean what they say or say what they mean.

Feminism's a lie: women say they want equality but really want a man stronger than they are who can take care of them, but doesn't wear his feelings on his sleeve. They want a man who'll wear the trousers in the relationship. The great C.S. Lewis rightly wrote 60 years ago: find a couple where the woman runs the relationship and you'll find an angry woman who really hates her husband (and, unlike in the '40s, she'll very likely dump you; you'll be left paying alimony and alone).

What happens: the sexual revolution doesn't mean more women will want to date you. The opposite. It means now more women have a shot at sex with an alpha and are willing to share as long as their bodies get them invited to the party. That's right: it means you don't get to have sex.

You get patronized - LJBF'd ("let's just be friends") - a lot. It sucks. (Roissy: Alphas almost never get LJBF'd but when it happens, end it thus: "No. I have plenty of friends." That doesn't have to be true. Cut your loss and move on to the next girl.)

PUAs' neat little categories fit the AS way of thinking (alpha, beta for nerds who try and fail, omega for guys who've given up) but most of us know the limits of our way of thinking. Even Roissy has a catchall category for schlubby, happy men in relationships who don't meet his standards: herbs (as in the name Herb).

Summing up his view, minus the filth and cruelty: the classic characters in Two and a Half Men. Charlie Sheen gets the girls and we're the fittingly named Jon Cryer.

OK. A few instructions.

We have a strong moral code that Roissy flat-out opposes. No problem. This, like practical sex tips or your computer manual, is simply information, morally neutral. You can use it to try to game many girls (which probably won't work for you but anyway) or add a touch of alpha game to your front personality to win the one woman you want for a lifelong marriage. (It's not lying; it's fulfilling a role.) It works!

On that note, don't, I mean, DO NOT, try to follow his rules note for note. We don't have the timing, poise, etc. (or often the looks) to pull off a**hole game, negs, etc. It will backfire and both you and the girl will get hurt.

Honest PUA coaches don't promise you the moon, just the skills to date girls who right now are just out of your league: 6s and 7s instead of the 3s and 4s you've had to settle for.

BTW I don't think Roissy is himself an alpha: those men don't help out the competition. He's a wised-up "higher beta" helping a brother out.

So add some alpha body language (confident, takes up room, a little aloof in public) and a little alpha talk to your front personality and good luck in love!

P.S. Roissy tip: We're big on words: long, heartfelt speeches and letters (emails). Women don't like that from men. Almost everything you say or write to a woman should pass what he calls the Jumbotron test. If it wouldn't embarrass you if it were flashed on a stadium sign, it's OK.

Identity politics and using AS as an excuse

Awareness of AS is one of the big stories of the past 20 years. One of the mixed results of that, besides bad depictions of us as dangerous criminals (yeah, I'm talking to you, Law & Order) or as the butt of jokes (ER) is presenting identity politics ('the AS community') as a way to ask for handouts. There are no group rights; just individual rights. There's a place for welfare (people of good will can disagree on the means) but what gets my goat about this is it feeds into the normals' accusation that we're just spoiled malingerers using a made-up disorder as an excuse to be rude etc.



"I have a *&%$ing disease! Now gimme."

Boobytrap! "That came out wrong"

The good news and bad news of AS are the same: you'll never be someone other than yourself; AS can't be completely cured. So if you learn how to act normal it doesn't mean you're normal. The AS is one slip-up away, a banana peel waiting for you to step on it.

Suppose you know you have AS and have learned how to mimic normal body language (eye contact, personal space/distance) and know not to ramble or lecture about your favorite subject. You can hold down a job and have a few normal friends, maybe even (as quite a lot of us do) a wife and kids.

So you and the wife are looking at a new development in your town, luxury condos for singles. You drop the ball in five, four, three...

"If something happens to you and the kids, I'd love a setup like this."

Sorry I don't remember the source of the quote.

There was an episode of "House" that had something like this as its plot: a man has brain damage that knocks out his internal censor so he says everything he's thinking (he doesn't think his wife is as smart as he is and doesn't value her job as much as his, hardly abnormal but don't say them!) and even when he means to say something appropriate it comes out wrong (he knows what's happening so of course he doesn't want his little girl to hear him in this condition; it comes out "I don't want you here"). (BTW I don't think House has AS. He's just a very smart grouch.)

Religion and spirituality

You are a creature of extremes, Brother Thomas.

- Becket

That we are.

Most AS people I've seen online are like our brothers and sisters among the normals, the hardcore science nerds: angry, burned-out atheists and agnostics. "I want hard proof so without it your religion is as real as Santa Claus!" (These seem to include angry goth teens, who showed up at the only support-group meeting I ever went to.)

(TV's Bones, the best poster girl for AS, is one of them, playing off any-time-now love interest Booth's nice Irish Catholic cop. Nice to see religion shown as normal.)

Then there's me and the other founder of Finding Center, who fall into the pattern a churchgoers' message board suggested, and I agree, that we might be happy with the comforting routine (rituals), clear-cut rules and strong culture for a sense of belonging (the Catholic Church: when you're here, you're family, you might hope) of the liturgical "high" churches (Roman Catholic and Anglican/Episcopal, particularly the old-fashioned versions of them, or Greek Orthodox), Orthodox Judaism, Islam or Tibetan Buddhism.

Then there are those in those churches and faiths, and those in conservative Protestant ones (PCA Presbyterian, Wisconsin Synod Lutheran, Southern Baptist, Assemblies of God etc. - not necessarily a lot of ritual but strong, clear rules) you suspect are undiagnosed AS people, preaching to everybody trying to force their beliefs on you, talking at you not to you. (Very evident online as it's a natural social center for us with AS.)

AS spiritual strengths and weaknesses
So as you can see, just like normals we're not all alike. But what has all this in common? Lots.

We like things black-and-white clear so in a way we're natural-born fundamentalists. Hardcore atheism takes blind faith (against inferring God's existence) so it fits the pattern!

Some of our shared strengths:

We like having a strong moral code. We're often honest to a fault (lack tact), often making us the world's worst liars. And part of that moral sense, which goes against the new pop-culture image of us as selfish, is we have a strong sense of fairness/social justice because we've often been treated unfairly. (Some say a fault of nerd social circles is they bend over backwards to include everybody so problem people get out of hand, or we're too tactful trying to spare somebody's feelings.)

Weaknesses:

Like I said, the fundies of many faiths including no faith trying to clobber you to fit their worldview. A common mistake AS people make when trying to understand and relate to normals is when you learn a few facts and rules about something in normal culture, you try to win the normals' respect by mastering the rules, becoming the "rule police," which of course doesn't work with most people, at least those you probably want to become closer to.

Related to that is the mistake I think some unaware AS people make, when religion becomes one of their special interests, of getting disillusioned with their one true faith of the moment and switching to another, leaving behind a lot of hurt feelings. The Internet is littered with a lot of this.

And although we're not guilty of these things unless we know they're wrong and do them on purpose (using the AS as an excuse for example), sometimes we are rude and selfish.

Scrupulosity (intense guilt for no good reason) is something a lot of us suffer from, from having naturally delicate consciences and possibly made worse by not having enough of the right moral training to know what's important and not sweat the small stuff.

Things that work or not
Churches that have private confession of sins and spiritual counseling/direction can be a, yes, godsend to AS people but you have to remember it's not therapy (sometimes "therapy" is not therapy for that matter); few ministers are psychologists but they're trained to spot problems too big for them to handle and refer you to somebody qualified to deal with them.

Back to "when you're here, you're family," wanting to belong. Will glomming onto a religious culture, your family's or somebody else's, get you that? Maybe, maybe not. Possibly by trial and error you'll find a way to make it work. But cultures often don't like their wannabes, whether the wannabes are AS or normals. Don't look like you're trying too hard (see above on being the rule police) and you should be all right.

AS ways of being religious are out of fashion in our ex-Protestant culture (most normals think they're childish), unless the ways belong to groups considered righteous because they were treated badly historically (Jews) or are considered exotic and non-threatening (Tibetan Buddhism). You'll be patronized, pathologized or worse. ("Well, isn't that special? You need that. I don't need a crutch.") Hang in there. (And don't tell people you're a martyr. Self-pity's not cool.) The normals in those faiths have to live with it too; don't p*ss them off by trying too hard to imitate them (rule police) and you might make a friend or two.

So why do I think there are so many atheist and agnostic AS people? My guess is they're right that mainstream American churches - liberal mainline Protestant, suburban Vatican II Roman Catholic, rich evangelical - have nothing for them. (Lesson many of us learn the hard way: most people you know don't care about you.) Those churches are all about the American civic religion, moralistic therapeutic deism: the upper middle-class normals patting themselves on the back for being such wonderful people. (And they think we're stuck on ourselves!)

If there isn't a God, religion is not a waste because of the good you and your fellow man do for each other and the good you leave behind when you die. Also consider a form of Pascal's wager (basically give faith a chance). The right kind of religion teaches you to be responsible for what you do. And as I counseled an ex-fundy online who'd had a nervous breakdown and lost his faith, just go to the only church in your one-stop town (which happened to belong to a liberal mainline denomination) every Sunday without fail and leave a dollar in the collection plate. Never mind truth claims for now. Then take it from there.

If there is a God, the fact of evil in the world (why AS, why me?) is something neither believers nor nonbelievers can explain, but he knows, cares about and feels for you and wants you to know and love him and be happy with him for ever after.

I recommend to all the famous first three lines of the Serenity Prayer.

Finally as you can see I've tried not to push any religious truth claims or my own special interests here. That said, the Catholic Church is Western civilization, and the King James Bible and old Book of Common Prayer are English civilization. Whether you believe a word of it or not, for your own education/cultural enrichment listen to Gregorian chant and religious classical music at a service or concert or using some recordings, and have those books or Web bookmarks, including the Catechism of the Catholic Church, at least as references.

Putting on the right act: front personalities and playing roles

Like normals but more, we try to learn a lot about how to act from movies and TV. (Which explains one then-friend's nasty remark seemingly out of nowhere at the time, "You watch far too much television!") So here are a couple of quotes from classic shows to start off this post:

Lou Grant: You know how you usually are?
Ted Baxter: Yeah?
Lou: Don't be that way!

Mindy: Just be yourself!™ (stock advice to normals that's only partly true)
Mork: (Huge smile and exaggerated handshake) Ee-spah!
Mindy: Put on an act.

People with AS have often been compared to aliens in their own cultures and because it's often true, we often love fish-out-of-water comedies like "Mork and Mindy." Anyway, normal and AS, we all do it: role-play our way through life, code-switching for different audiences. (One AS person told me he imagines he's in a movie.)

So, seeing how the normal kids play Starsky and Hutch or whatever, the AS person who doesn't know he has AS tries to do the same with the make-believe characters he identifies with. The trouble is if you don't know what the underlying problem is, it'll backfire. But if you do, it's a valuable coping skill, a talent like the Oscar-winning actors have. (For example Robert DeNiro's really the son of beatnik artists. He used to hang around the Mafia kids and imitate them to blend in. Guess what he's made a successful living at?)

I mention Bobby DeNiro because one of his change-of-pace roles has been one of my personas for 25 years: the seemingly straitlaced 1940s priest he played in True Confessions.

One reason it helps is most of the time your model shows how to act normally: not annoying AS stuff like talking at somebody about only one or two pet subjects.

So here are some types whom AS people have tried on or might like to. They're the resident intellectuals of their worlds, who talk "little professor" style like we do, and are by circumstances foreigners or at least outsiders.

Mr. Spock: the greatest TV sci-fi character ever invented. Unusual-looking; IQ off the charts and sounds it; and because he's half-alien from a people for whom emotions are unknown, he doesn't quite understand or accept his own or others' feelings.

Frasier Crane: Class, speaking in the clipped old Mid-Atlantic style Bill Buckley and George Plimpton had (almost a cultured English accent), smart and showing it off with his big words and cultural references... and he manages to pull it off, even outlasting the other Cheers characters on the air. You weren't supposed to like him at first but you did.

(The character's ex-wife, Lilith Sternin, seems to be an AS stereotype, as outwardly cold as Spock and with a flat robot-like voice that says lots of big words.)

Part of the trouble with trying to play a cool and collected type like these is besides "little professor," another aspect of the AS personality that sandbags us is... we have very short fuses, the tolerance for frustration of a toddler. We throw tantrums. Especially of course if we don't know about the AS. So you can literally be a genius but after the first meltdown you get treated like a five-year-old. Front personality shot to hell.

So... learn about the AS, develop a coping strategy for the frustration and you have a shot.

Need to relax?

After a long day with the normals?

Zone out to one of the world's most sensual but clean videos (I recommend turning off the sound):

Special interests: history

One of the signs you have AS is you fill yourself up with facts about a given subject. It's how we learn. Of course we don't all have the same special interests. A famous one, going back to the boys in Dr. Asperger's care in 1940s Vienna, is trains (what they look like, how they work, even, famously, their schedules - we're comforted by routine); there's a man in New York famous for it (since he was a kid he's sneaked on board subways and driven them, successfully).

Basically when you have AS but don't understand it, when your brain focuses on something like that, and it can be just about anything, you think you've found the Rosetta Stone, the Lost Ark, the Holy Grail, the Key to the Secrets of the Universe, the Unified Theory of Everything. (Which is why some of us fixate on religion, the topic of future posts.)

(Normal people can be like that too. Thomas Merton wrote that when he was around four, to the consternation of his mother he insisted on worshipping the kitchen light. And look at many normal people's obsession with sports.)

Of course most of the time those things fall far short of that. (The instruction manual to the marvelous deep fryer doesn't tell you how to keep a job or a marriage.) But as metaphors or even as gateways to learn other things such as coping or job skills (like the man who loves trains ought to get a job driving them) they're useful.

Our brains are like computers with tons of memory but a relatively weak central processing unit (so we don't do executive functions or multi-task well); that's just how they're made. (A lot of us are computer geeks and successful in careers because of that.)

A lot of us, including me and the other writer of Finding Center, are nostalgic for things we hardly if ever experienced. We love history. Why? Like a lot of normal people we see or imagine a simpler society with comforting, easier-to-learn-and-keep rules and an elegant style hard to find today. Some have said AS kids wouldn't have been seen as behavior or learning problems but model children in a Victorian classroom (where the stress in the younger grades was to discipline the kids enough to stuff their heads with facts, where we excel). At least some of mental illness is relative/a social construct. (BTW AS is not a mental illness. It's like being dyslexic, a learning disability hard-wired into your brain you learn to live with.)

Of course our way of learning - reading up on all the facts about something - falls short in relationships. People are more than the sum of their facts (or why, by itself, learning everything you can about Puerto Rico including the language, for example, probably won't impress the hot Latina you want to date) and are famously unpredictable which of course makes them fascinating... but often frustrating for AS people to try to get to know.

What's in a name?

Our "charter," the beginning of normals' understanding us, was when AS was added to the psychology bible, the diagnostic manual (DSM) in 1994; recently there was some controversy when in its latest revision we were downgraded to a sub-group of autism. Oh, great. Now even more people will think we all act like the Rain Man.

Also, although I'm forever grateful to the late Dr. Asperger, he accidentally saddled us with a name easy to make fun of in English! (Ass Burger.) Why couldn't someone named Huxley or Maxpower have discovered this syndrome?

Among ourselves, "Aspie" seems the cutesy choice.

I've been using "neurodiverse" when I want to avoid the Rain Man stereotype.

Lately as more normals have found out about AS, another, nastier word is becoming hip, "spergy." Eew.

Hello world: a TV recommendation

Welcome to the launch of this blog, written by two men with Asperger syndrome, one diagnosed, one not. It's to be a guide for other AS people on living happily with normal people and meant to explain us to normals too.

First, my TV pick for explaining your AS to your normal family, friends et al.:

Bones


She's sexy, smart and successful. And the greatest thing for AS people since Drs. Asperger "discovered" us and Attwood explained us to the world. Like a lot of us she's not diagnosed but she's odd. But it doesn't get in her way. Good for explaining to normals we don't all act like the Rain Man. They call it the autistic spectrum for a reason; some of us make it to the same level as normals. With your high IQ, understanding the condition and a few field-tested workarounds (coping skills), chances are so can you!

P.S. AFAIK the actress doesn't have AS.