What I've Been Reading

Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian with Practical Advice for Aspergians, Misfits, Families & Teachers by John Elder Robinson. One doesn't have to be an Aspergian to connect with this book; everyone of us can find a little piece of us here. Ironically, few words of wisdom here are contradictory to Sam Harris's latest book Lying (John urges autistic people to embrace white lies to fit into the society). 

• Find life and work that minimize your weaknesses, and you discover your strengths and play with them. 
• Learn to be wary of your ritualized behaviors and your rituals are okay as along as they don't interfere with your responsibilities. 
•  All my friends agree about this: if they had to be marooned somewhere in the woods or on a mountain, I'd be a top choice to accompany them. Because I am always prepared, and I think of all the risks.
• If you make a happy face, you'll feel good. If you make a frown, you'll be sad.
• Emotions - The worst thing is when I completely miss something because I', preoccupied and my senses such as they are - are turned off. I never fail to care when I know, but all too often, I don't know when I need to care. I know there is nothing at all wrong with my ability to feel joy or sadness or love or anger or anything else. All that's missing is the trigger. 
• I worried about my own compatibility a lot when I was young, because I didn't meet many people and I thought I might never make friends.Today, I know there are compatible friends and mates for anyone. if only we can find them.
• When I was younger, I used to think words like "empathy" were easily defined and their meaning was clear-cut. Today I understand that the ideas are not so simple. 
• I often thought that Asperger people may be well suited as emergency responders since their nature allowed them to be calm and unemotional. 
• My grandmother used to say that if you don't have anything nice to say, just keep your thoughts to yourself. You'll never get into trouble if you follow that rule. I made a mental note of things I should not say to people even when they were true. 
• My ability to read faces may have been poor, but my ability to sense movement and danger was extraordinarily good.
• Instead of fixing my clothes. I fixed myself. I learned to focus my mind so that my sense of touch no longer controlled me. 
• Autistic people people start out with more plasticity than nypicals (non-austic), meaning our brains change more easily, and more profoundly, in response to life's experience. There are times when this gives us an advantage in life, but touch sensitivity is an area where our plasticity can really work against us. 
• I've pondered why it is that I have succeeded at learning to read the natural world, while I am still largely oblivious to the social cues of people. I think it comes down to simplicity, predictability, and logic. The natural world has all those things; people don't.
• We've developed the written mathematics to describe the movement of sun and stars only in the last few hundred years, but the Mayans and Egyptians, somehow figured our many of those same things a thousand or more years ago. Perhaps they were Aspergians, too.  When I think of earlier inventors, I realize that many of them must have had a similar intuitive understanding of higher mathematics. I now know that it's possible to add waves in your head, even if you can't write the formulas to do it on paper. 
• When you're a kid, people make fun of your special interest. When you're a grown-up, though, your special interests makes you the expert.

An Asperger on team work and living those famous opening lines from Emerson's Self Reliance:

Millions of people see an unmet need and say "Someone should invent xyz..." I am someone who's said that and then, actually followed through many times in my life. I don't know what you call that but it's not genius. May be it's imagination plus determination, or stubbornness, or something else. Whatever you call it, I know that many people today could go much further if they just took the next step, when they had an idea, instead of it die as idle conversation.
Then there's teamwork. We live in a complex world, one where it's nearly impossible for any one person to "do it all," no matter how smart he or she may be. The capacity, the ability to know what you don't know, and know what you need - is vital to success.
Finally, there's self confidence, and that's a funny thing.