Quick Thoughts: "You're an Idiot!"

This is going to be a short entry because there is a thought that just won't stop racing through my head for the past few days. I'll share it here. Maybe someone else can comment or clarify. Consider this a fun day for the entries.

As an Aspergian, there are concepts that just don't make sense to me. Why is it a social faux pas to tell someone they're an idiot, but it's not a social faux pas to be an idiot? It seems Aspies get in trouble a lot when the idiot should be getting into trouble.

Maybe it's just a quirk with neurotypicals. Sometimes I wonder if Aspies are a window into reason, that maybe neurotypicals should stop and consider that if Aspies are driven by reason and less by emotion then they (the neurotypical) should ask themselves if an Aspie's opinion is something that they should more closely consider. It seems as if following emotional responses tends to lead to more drama and trouble in life and make things more complicated than is necessary and thus leads to more stress.

It could possibly be more reasonable if people made it a social grace to point out when someone is a dumbass instead of making the Aspie out to be the gorilla in the room for saying what others should have been thinking. Maybe you're providing a service. Some people are too dense or full of themselves to understand that they're an idiot. Aspies don't mind being told when they're missing something that neurotypicals find absurdly easy to catch in social situations. It seems reasonable that if an Aspie catches something in the social spectrum of behavior then it is so blatantly obvious that something must be wrong with the idiot to not see that they are an idiot.

What do you think?

A Small Dose of Introspection

I was at a recent birthday party for a friend. At this party was an old acquaintance with whom I was, in my opinion, a closer friend for several years while in our middle- and high-school years until we had a falling out towards the end of our high school careers and from that period forth we didn't really speak much at all.

We had kept enough in touch enough to know certain things. I knew, for example, that he got married. And I knew when he and his wife had their first child. I guess you can say it could be characterized more like keeping tabs on his life. I don't know what he knew of my own life events.

I went to the party actually looking forward to seeing him again. I was hoping to see his wife...we had gone to school together...and another old friend with whom I had lost touch, but they weren't there. I wanted to see if there was any reconciliation. It's been literally nearly a decade since he had treaded so heavily on my "that pissed me off" buttons, and I believe that the best way to reconcile with people that drive you to want to kill them is to allow a large passage of time with a large distance between you.

We got along at the party. That was good. But...there's always a "but"...there was a period of reflection where I analyzed events.

We talked and exchanged a few stories. He didn't know I had weight surgery. I didn't know that he was diagnosed with Asperger's just as he was going into college.

That was the point I was thinking about this morning. Asperger's. He's always been forthright in many respects, committing faux-pas in social niceties and such. He was usually pretty good at giving and taking criticism, for the most part, as long as it's honest and relating to a task or performance instead of the person. But this doesn't make you an Aspie.

One of the hallmarks of Asperger's is social reclusiveness. This doesn't mean hiding in the woods in a shack or threatening to shoot people that come within twenty feet of your doorstep. It simply refers to a social isolation, whether physical or mental, that stems from the inability to relate to "normals". Normally, from my research, means that we tend not to draw attention to ourselves because we're introverted.

Mr. Man routinely draws attention to himself. He is one of those people that is LOUD. Loud when he speaks, boisterous in his actions, generally...well, there's a line between Asperger's and just being obnoxious. He always firmly fell into the downright obnoxious realm of behavior.

I suppose I see these traits best because there's an indirect relation who is also a loud, boisterous person with delusions of their own capabilities. I've watched that person's behavior and correlated it as best I can with other opinions and behavior profiles and came to the conclusion that this person is completely self-deluded and obnoxious (and quite proud of it, although I don't think the person in question knows just how deluded and obnoxious they are). Mr. Man isn't quite this far gone. Believe me, I've known him longer and there would be no hesitation on my part to slam that which I think needs slamming. He's not quite that bad.

There are other things that made me kind of lump him into the semi-deluded label. He works with people at a state college now after a career working in technology for a startup that went (apparently) belly-up. He talks about making really good money, having lots of good money...he started out from poverty, so maybe "good money" is relative but the way he spoke made it seem as if he's going home at night and rolling in piles of cash. Working for a state college system...I can't reconcile that. I acknowledge that it's possible he's making a lot. A computer science degree can be worth quite a bit in the business world. I'm being paid far below what the market supposedly holds for someone with my degree and experience level (which contributes to my own sense of frustration with my situation do a degree, but that's a separate and more layered topic). In my travels I've found that there are only a few key people that make a lot of money in any field associated with academia:

• Traditional administrator roles - superintendents, deans, heads of major departments (here I mean things like head of organizational roles, not necessarily the head of academic roles like the head of the humanities or science departments).
• Teachers of high rank - teachers with many years of additional education (as required by law in the US for public schools teachers), thus bumped up on payscale for experience + education level, professors of many years of experience (as in near retirement)
• Vendors and consultants - they make short bursts of income in the range of "poopload", especially for solutions that they get organizations invested in. Organizations will spend fifty grand to a million on a solution because of a good snowjob sales presentation and technology challenged decision makers, and once that check is written it becomes a matter of "make it work" instead of "we made a mistake, let's find another solution" once issues are discovered. Along with that "make it work" attitude comes more checks for support to the contractor as people scramble to fit the square peg into the round hole.

There may be others, especially depending on your definitions, but these are the major once that I end up envying a bit when the subject had come up.

I know that he had a talent for framing things in a more positive light than is necessarily reality. When I was applying to colleges I was accepted at two; one large college with a name that contains an "Institute", "Technology", and a city that rhymes with "Rochester" and a polar-opposite school that was small and personal but was associated as a satellite campus to a major university in southern PA. I chose the polar opposite school. He was accepted at the school with the word that rhymes with Rochester in the name as well and went there.

I think he went for a year before dropping out. More than that he transferred to the small, quiet, secluded school that I was attending.

That's a big change. I mean total culture shock. I more or less saw those differences to begin with and that was the major reason I didn't go to that larger but bigger name school; he had framed it in a positive light for several reasons and quite frankly I didn't care. Part of me always thought that at least part of the reason was because he couldn't hack it there, though. I don't know if it was the truth. I just sort of acknowledged and moved on. there's no reason to try to get him to admit something like that.

The point was that if it was true that he "couldn't hack it there" at the previous school he still was superior to everyone else at the smaller college in skills and ability and talent in his mind and didn't hesitate to make people around him understand where they were in the talent ladder compared to him.

Incidentally this further reinforced my opinion of him at the time since I was established on the campus with several Comp Sci people...and thus was privy to several conversations about the "new obnoxious punk that knew everything" roaming the halls, since I came from his hometown area and people wanted to know if he was always like that.

He spoke at the party of being on equal footing with his fellow workers at the college, people who were super-smart with PhD's. He doesn't have a PhD, as far as I ever knew, and he never told me he did. Yet somehow he always seemed to have the respect and ear of these people who worked with him while having the sacred parchment tacked to an office wall. (Oddly enough, as another side note, I tend to notice that there are a lot of people without the high-education documents that insist they're just as smart as, if not more educated due to their "school of hard knocks" life, the people who spent huge amounts of time earning a PhD in their field. I don't know if it's compensation for something or what, but I've run into that a lot. A full comparison of this topic is beyond this post's scope, however.)

He is talented, as far as I could tell. He wasn't stupid by any degree. He made a hobby in high school of playing with assembly language (remember the friend at the beginning on this entry, the guy having the birthday party? He likened Mr. Man's fascination with assembly programming to building a beach one grain of sand at a time. I always loved that comparison because in the world of programming it's pretty accurate). Mr. Man was simply obnoxious and off-putting, even to someone as socially inept as myself.

Where does all this tie in to the title of this blog entry? I believe the vast majority of people seek affirmation for ourselves on others. We want to know how far from "normal" we are and base it on other people, other relationships, to make these judgments. Our perception of ourselves is heavily influenced by our perceptions of others.

This guy for all his flaws was great at making others kind of feel like dirt. He was literally living in a room the size of a large closet and still I would end up envying his skills (though not his ego). He would talk of the fantastic job, the collection of pinball machines and video game stand-up systems like you find in arcades that littered his apartment. He had a fantastic honeymoon-wedding in Hawaii.

Seeing my own situation, stuck in debts, frustrated at certain employment situations, stresses from the surgery and coping with my own mental buggers...the picture he paints is one deserving envy.

Then I remember things like his distortion of the situation; never lying, per se, but he always had a talent for highlighting just the right features to make his talents and situation look a little better and downplay the faults. My own situation isn't the best in the world and I am aspiring to something better; I finally am starting to get off my arse and try for the next rung. I'm moving from a tentative plan to actually trying to do something about it. Maybe he doesn't deserve my envy as much as I had thought; maybe, like the once-removed relative I briefly mentioned, his world is partially in his own perceptions and my inability to tolerate living in a fantasy world once the illusion is broken is part of my problem.

Either way I wish him the best. He's obviously happy with the way his life is now and that's fantastic. Maybe someday I'll have a life similar to the canvas on which he paints. For now, though, I need to get my paints and start working on my own masterpiece.

"You Must Feel So Much Better!"

I think I've alluded to this topic before to some degree but I've been hearing this so often lately that I think it bears a revisit.

People have been suddenly asking how I'm feeling, or saying to me "You must be feeling so much better now!" or some other variation of the statement.

I of course don't know how to react to it. I had to sit down and think about a decent canned response for the question.

In tech support issues I learned that when people ask what happened to their computer they are lying. They don't really want to know. They want some nice short Twitteresque response that fits into a little box with a bow, not the dissertation to explain that they downloaded malware from a website probably while web browsing those stupid flash game sites and that program started downloading other applications in the background and turned their computer into a zombie under the control of some jackass in Europe with a penchant for launching denial 0f service attacks on companies that wouldn't give them a refund for a broken dishwasher. Nope, they want to hear something like, "It was the electron exchanger. I reinstalled with the restore CD and it's better now."

The same goes with surgery. I know, heavy on cynicism, but this kind of weight loss doesn't easily summarize into two or three sentences. I can't delve into details of the pain of recovery. I can't explain in two minutes that I can't eat brownies or pie anymore. Or the dumping. Or fear of trying new foods with unknown ingredients. Etcetera. Etcetera. And I have my own fears of stigma; I took the "easy way out". Surgery is magic weight loss. Effortless. It's none of those, but without proper elaboration the average person making smalltalk may think that. For an Aspergian, these exchanges are painful sessions of indecision of what is proper or appropriate to say.

The truth is that I feel like the same person I was. The change wasn't instant. It's painfully slow. Day by day. When you change in a way that leads to slow acclimation, you don't notice a sudden spring in your step. You have revelations. Like getting out of the shower with the glass doors and not SCRAAAAPING to get through it or wondering if you're going to knock the doors out in the process. Or bending over to get something and your underwear falls down because they don't fit right anymore. These are sudden things, not gradual changes that you can see like a health gauge on a video game character.

But I still wake up feeling like the same me that I was a year ago.

So has anything changed? Sure. I work hard at trying to lose the weight. I hate the riding of bike, the treadmill, the freeweights. I hate the missing all-you-can-eat pizza at gatherings and the Chinese Buffet cheese wontons and the double cheeseburgers and the mozzarella cheese sticks. I hate seeing nothing but clogged arteries when I see a TGI Friday's sign.

I have become, hopefully, a little less willfully ignorant of eating and exercise choices. I'm still learning. I'm actually acting more on my knowledge than ignoring it. C'mon...are you telling me you didn't know that the specialty coffees from Starbucks you didn't realize were unhealthy than just plain coffee? Or that McDonald's isn't a healthy meal choice? I don't know of any restaurant that isn't fraught with health dangers; you have to search for choice selections to have any chance since most restaurants...Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Panera...are high in sodium, fats, and/or calories. They're good once in awhile, but they've become staples in western diets. And we ignore the fact that we KNOW they're not good for us because they taste good and hey, we're not leaving the restaurant in an ambulance! The surgery was an excuse...and reason...to avoid most of the things that doctors have been telling us to avoid all along.

I have more demons. Most fat people aren't fat because they like to just eat.

Okay, I liked to eat.

But there's more to it. I have a kind of love/hate relationship with depression. I have relationship issues. I have stresses. I have issues that fudgy brownies helped make me feel better about.

The bariatric surgery means that in the short term you can't turn to your old counselors for emotional boosts. It means depression gets worse. It means strained relationships. It means stresses getting higher. It means in my case stripping away my greatest defense from the world I have grown to despise in so many ways, and being laid naked in that environment leads to problems that need to be dealt with in other ways. Otherwise the surgery will fail. That bit about being a magic bullet? That's bull. There are people who start piecing at the sugared foods again. They tolerate dumping. They liquify meals so they can eat more at one sitting and get the excess calories, and they can cheat the system. Or they start eating more and more of the sugar-free stuff to avoid some dumping but get cheap calories and by eating slowly much more often they pack in the pounds again.

I also have issues with my skin. It's loose and flabby. I don't know if there's any way I'll afford surgery (or another copay) to repair it. When I turn around I stop moving and after two beats my gut stops moving. I'm deathly afraid of raising my arm in public lest people think I'm melting when they see the grotesque flesh dangling from my upper arm.

So I am controlling my diabetes through diet. I fit through door more easily. Sometimes I wonder if I could get up the stairs or walk the distances I do now if I hadn't lost the weight. I get anxious while buying clothes because there's no way these numbers should fit. But I also have more demons to control. I have traded some problems with fat for problems with image and issues controlling my wavering despair and stress.

In the end when people ask how I do it I use my new stock answer. "I eat less." Because it's the truth. When they say, "You must feel so much better!" I say, "Some things have gotten better." Because that's the truth too. I don't know if they'd ever want the full truth. Because I don't know if they can handle the truth.

Asperger's Coincidences?

I thought this was an interesting coincidence.

Shortly after the July 4th holiday here in the States I was watching Degrassi on whatever that satellite channel is "For Teens". Think it's a Nickelodeon spinoff channel of some sort. My daughter was a fan of the show and I actually started watching it and got too much into the whole drama of the various storylines...so sue me.

Anyway there was a Degrassi-a-thon leading up to the new season. In the show there is a character named Connor with an episode focusing one of the story braids on him having a behavior issue that is diagnosed as Asperger's. The kid showed symptoms of it for several episodes, but unlike many "teen" or kid shows where a character suddenly has an episode with some condition that suddenly manifests so writers can focus on an issue-of-the-week, this kid had a running history of Asperger behavior that seemed kind of consistent for the character. Nice.

I took note of the Asperger thing. Thought it was interesting.

Later that day I was at the gym listening to episode 48 of Stackoverflow (yes, I'm way behind on some of my podcast feeds) and one of the topics Joel and Jeff discussed were programmers with personality issues in a team and how to deal with them.

One of the points Joel brought up? Techies with Asperger personalities. He said that people with this type of personality usually appreciate being told that they're doing something that others find uncomfortable or incorrect and tend, in his experiences, to just acknowledge it and continue on while trying to correct the behavior (if it's an issue that bothers them or relates to keeping their job, anyway).

Twice, Aspergers was mentioned from outside sources in one day. Interesting! Was something trying to tell me something?

I was also elated to finally hear someone that gets it. Joel (Spolsky) actually understood that for Asperger personalities, we don't care about social rules and courtesies as much as Normals (this is also one of the times when I refer to Normals being people without Asperger's instead of people who aren't overweight...).

A lot of people simply write us off as rude or won't discuss certain issues with us because they're too emotionally rooted in the issue. Social rules dictate we don't talk about certain problems or ideas because it is rude to do so...but for us, people with Asperger personalities, we don't follow those rules because our brains are wired differently. We tend to be more detached emotionally from most issues where Normals worry about how they look to others because it commits a social faux-pas.

Another way to think about it...to us, Normals are the weird ones. We don't understand why something of so little impractical use is such a big deal.

It was great to hear Joel saying that in cases where the programmer or techie is Aspergers it's perfectly fine to just tell them, "Listen, so and so doesn't like it when you stare at your shoes while they're talking to you. Try to watch them when they're talking, 'kay?", and the programmer usually just says, "Oh, gee, thank you for telling me." Then they go off to work again. No hurt feelings. They were unaware it was bugging someone.

On the other hand it bugs me when Normals expect the person with the personality quirk to change just because it makes them uncomfortable. If it's not something that is hurting someone, let me stare at my feet. Unless it is something that is causing you distraction, why stop someone else's habit just because it's rude?

I have a lot of quirks where people distract me and cause me anxiety because of their otherwise harmless habits. Twisting hair, flexing feet, chewing with their mouth open...I can't concentrate. I can't not become focused on this, like a water faucet dripping incessently. I need to remove myself from the distraction or I grow extremely agitated. But if it's a quirk that doesn't affect anyone...why bother them about it?

I guess that just grows out of a feeling I get that I'm expected to accomodate other people while others aren't necessarily feeling any need to accomodate me. I'm told others do and I am just oblivious to it; not surprising, given the situation. We need emotion-based cues pointed out to us sometimes. But I also grew up with the feeling that I was an inadequate outsider. I was "different" and thus expected to conform to what others defined as normal while normal people were perfect the way they are.

This meant that I am very sensitive to when this is expected of me as an adult.

I was simply struck by the coincidence of hearing this disorder being mentioned twice in one day on two different media platforms for different reasons and it got me to thinking about these issues more. It's nice that there's some acknowledgement of it out there in the media. Maybe to some degree it'll enter into the groupthink of society a little bit more. Or at least it's a little consolation that I'm not the only one out here with it, plus I was so happy to find someone who seemed to actually get what it's like to interact with an Aspergian mind without treating them as if they were defective and needed to change to be more normal.

Thank you Joel!

My Asperger's Self

I have referred to myself as having Asperger traits. There are plenty of sites that describe the syndrome; there's really no need to rehash it (I even linked to the Wiki article for a nice jumpoff point of you're interested). I don't think I ever actually discussed why I think I have it, though.

Asperger's isn't something that you can test for in a blood test. It isn't something you can diagnose from a CAT scan or a DNA test. There's no physical symptoms to it; you see me walking down the street and you'll probably not suspect that's what's wrong with me. It's a spectrum disorder and much like being paranoid, you get evaluated by professionals and they will figure out if you have enough of the characteristics to declare that you have the disorder in question. At least, for now...as more research is being done maybe someday it will be as easy as a DNA or MRI scan to diagnose the disorder.

As part of the bariatric surgery requirements for my insurance company I had to start seeing a psychologist or psychiatrist. I discussed with him my concerns about having these traits, and he in my last session said that I have many of the traits and may very well have this disorder, perhaps a very subtle or mild form of it.

What I've noticed, plucked from a list from wikipedia that was linked above...

Aspergers and related spectrum disorders tend to appear in early childhood. I have always had these issues stretching back as far as I can remember.

Social impairments...I tend to overlook social cues. Understanding people is very difficult for me. I try to hide it at times by playing it off as the usual jokes such as how no guy can possibly understand women; underneath I have problems understanding people's motivations and behavior beyond the analytical evaluations. The more irrational you act, the more agitated I get.

I think I tend to avoid eye contact with people unless I'm analyzing you. Sounds creepy writing it so plainly like this; but often, if I'm looking you in the eye it's because I'm trying to figure out what you're talking about, I'm analyzing you, or I'm desperately trying to beam my thoughts directly into your brain. Otherwise, you bother me and I'm probably looking at something more visually interesting in the room.

I tend to be very pedantic in my speech. I irritate my wife with this...she thinks she's speaking clearly, I have no clue what the hell she's talking about because her word choice is quite vague or open to interpretation.

I use to flap my hands. I don't know how to describe it other than being a soothing feeling. My wife was irritated at it and insisted I stop so eventually I did.

I have to check some things repeatedly in order to imprint it on my memory that it's done, such as checking that the fridge is closed. This may have been exacerbated by having a teenager and a toddler in the house and I don't trust them to actually close it up when they're done, but I still check it two or three times when leaving the house. I also check doors and the stove. As a kid I would have a nightly check of my home making sure doors and windows were all closed.

I don't adapt well to change; my wife tends to wait to the last minute to make plans or flies by the seat of her pants. It agitates and frustrates me. I hate not knowing what's going on, and more often than not it ends up being a point of contention for us.

I need order. Another item that adds friction to the marriage...I prefer having certain things in order, or a place for everything and everything in it's place. My wife prefers putting something down and coming back to it much later...I can't see how or why her things are ordered the way she does it, and it causes anxiety for me, especially in spaces that in my mind are "shared space". This is simply the way my mind is wired. I try to work around it by creating pockets of order that are more or less just my things, my way of ordering things.

I tend to follow a set of ritual behavior. My day is usually pretty much mapped out. If something is very different it can cause me quite a bit of agitation to work around mentally.

I tend to have a limited focus on my interests. I like technical things, I can tell you obscure information about warp drives and computer viruses. My best friends are technology.

People wear me out. Interacting with people drains my energy, I recharge my mental batteries by being alone or with close friends only. This, of course, makes me rather...techy. I get short tempered with people that agitate me for small reasons when coupled with the stress that comes from having to interact with...tolerate...other people.

I have trouble with certain sounds and movements. For example: I cannot stand the sound of snoring. I become visibly agitated if I hear it even in a movie for more than three seconds. I also can't stand it when I see people "twisting" their feet; my wife does this all the time and I always ask her to stop. I cannot ignore it. It draws my eye immediately and becomes an immediate focus and almost physically hurts me to see, and I start wanting to just...reach out and break the foot if I could. I've never acted out on such impulses but it sometimes scares me to think of what would happen if I ever suffer some kind of brain injury or dementia where impulse control is muted; will I ever act on that impulse? Even thinking about seeing a food twisting around and back and forth makes me squirm in my seat. Sometimes I think my wife continues to do this on purpose to punish me or irritate me when she's mad for something I did that unknowingly wronged her...crazy thoughts? Maybe. But I still have them.

I also can't stand it when people chew with their mouths open. Gum chewers especially. Makes me want to ship them to Singapore for caning. I know someone whose jaw clicks when he eats and he likes to pop the cartilage in his chest, both of which drives me BATTY. I can't stand to be near him while eating.

I can't even stand to hear myself chew. I need white noise or distractions around me all the time to try to alleviate my focusing on such things...fans, the TV...something.

I'm probably forgetting some issues. Maybe I'll edit the post later, maybe I'll just ignore them if I think of them later, I don't know. These are the ones that stand out in my mind at the moment. I do know that for many people seeing this they'll think that this is not really a problem, or they don't understand why I don't just ignore XYZ. Foot twisting? Really? Yes, really. I'm wired in such a way that I cannot ignore it. I've tried. Believe me, after so many sleepless nights hearing my father snore as I grew up I tried whatever I could to ignore such things or cope. It just doesn't work. Just as some people are wired to be energized by social interaction, I'm wired to have the quirks I've listed above.

This is one of those things that unless you experience it, I don't know if you can understand it. At least not fully. Today I just try to cope and maybe reserve a sliver of hope that the psychologist can help me find a way to manage my "quirks" better...

Lost in Thoughts on Portions, Emotional State

I am in an unusual place right now. I had a checkup with my surgeon today, and I'm just replaying in my head that conversation along with what I had previously understood from other information, sources, meetings with nutritionists (current and previous)...

The fact is that people are different in their reaction to this kind of surgery. So there is no clear-cut answer. My obsessive personality is coming up with two stumbling blocks in this journey. I keep asking for such answers, and their are none. I need one though. I need it spelled out. I need clear- cut guidelines.

The first is, how much do I eat?

I previously thought I was to find what was tolerable, to get in touch with my stomach's feedback, to realize when I was "full". I have been experimenting a little on that front. I am starting to find an amount where I start to feel some discomfort, and quit eating. I never packed more than a cup of food into my lunch/breakfast container (and since solid foods aren't usually a liquid form, even if you "filled" the container it was less than a cup by volume).

My wife said that, no, it was less than that that I was supposed to have. Only a half cup at most.

So, have I been screwing this up the whole time?

Stretching the stomach pouch? Ruining everything I've suffered a month for?

The second...if the food amount is only a quarter to half cup, what is the use in dirtying dishes and silverware and bothering to make anything? The leftovers, the waste, the effort...in my mind, just not worth it. I was told not to skip meals but it seems to be such a waste, and I am having a lot of trouble getting over this mental stumbling block justifying the work on making food that I'll essentially be barely doing anything wish. The time and effort would be better left to doing whatever would have been interrupted getting the meal in the first place.

Overall it just makes me depressed. The situation just makes me plain frustrated. Am I supposed to be trusting the body and trying to figure out, relearn, how the body is supposed to work so I'm eating and acting in a more normal manner? Doing that seems to be incorrect...the surgeon wants me eating essentially what fits into a dixie cup. Fixing food that fits in a dixie cup is hardly worth the time it takes to fix something. So why bother?

I guess there's some block in my head that says it would simply be better if I did nothing instead of wasting the effort in making a sandwich just to refrigerate three-quarters of it, and have another quarter later for another meal, and maybe another quarter that night. And have one left over for breakfast or end up throwing it out.

Another part of me tells me that this is temporary, these thoughts. I simply have to adjust. These thoughts that I'm dwelling on are simply another stage before acceptance and adapting.

It's the other voice that bothers me. The other voice tells me things like, "You stretched the pouch." "You screwed up again." "Another attempt to lose weight and you blew it."

So which voice is right? Or is it a mix of both? The rational feeds me some self-serving forgiveness, telling me to accept and adapt and move on. The emotional side tells me that...well, I said what it tells me.

I suppose these swirling thoughts have to be simply meditated on, so to speak. Tomorrow I'll hopefully find more of a rational place from which to approach this situation.

On Verbal Tics

Ever encounter just "one of those things" that once you're aware of it, you can't help but notice it and be perpetually bugged by whatever it is you're now aware of? For example, I have a theater minor from my college days and so I notice certain mistakes whenever I go to a play performed by small theater groups or school ensembles. Things the audience may not see I always end up picking out and being irritated at them for it.

One performance-related peeve is when people use the verbal tic "um" to fill dead air in a speech or conversation. If I had to grade a person giving a speech I'd fail them for doing this. Drives me insane. I'd rather listen to nothing than an "um". I've even deleted podcasts because the guests would keep using "um" every three words. I simply...can't...stop...hearing...it.

Well now there's a new one that seems to be growing in popularity. The "Or whatever".

"He said he'd like to go to the mall or whatever."

"We can take him to the playground and then pick up some dinner or whatever."

...or whatever or whatever or whatever NO NOT OR WHATEVER. Are you stoned?

For the love of $DEITY stop saying "or whatever."

You want me to decide or whatever? You really have absolutely no opinion or preference? Fine. I'll decide. Starting with leaving you behind. Obviously you have no preference since, as you said, "...whatever."

Stop being so sloppy with speech! I hear it on TV, I hear it from some podcasters, I hear it from friends and relatives and family. And now that I noticed it I can't NOT NOTICE it.

I want to dash my brains on rocks after the umpteenth time hearing that verbal crutch. If you don't have any opinions or preferences, don't say a @#$ thing. If you have a suggestion, say it. Break the habit of filling space or backpeddling with sloppy regurgitation of a stock phrase!

Whatever you do don't use "um" and "or whatever" when I'm in a bad mood and have tools in my hands. You may not like the reaction.

...deep breath...deep breath...