My final decision

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I got a tune up.

Bloody expensive for a "tune-up".
And that is Ammuuurian dollars and not Australian pesos.

I'd say browse the bill and see what's all there. I'm guessing even if they were going to rook you there had to be some replacements. As far as I remember tune up is something like spark plugs, potentially wiring, I'm not sure if most cars have distributor caps anymore but that was a thing, I can't think of anything there that would go that high unless you're getting tie rods, rotors, calipers, etc. in addition to that.

There are some sites online I believe you can check these things against - AAA's estimates might be one place to start.

With my car it's always suspension and break related. Garages are notorious for ripping people off so yeah, shopping around and getting a second opinion regardless of where from is good.

Yes I would be kinda upset if after a 900.00 bill that I still had warning lights coming on . .

Serious response and one I say to many people where money needs to be kept tight and one I often say to autistics.

Try and swap a car for a cheap 125 motorbike. Dead easy to maintain, cheap to buy and have crazy fuel economy. It's the easiest and cheapest way to get on the road for those without a car or for those where cars get annoying.

Downsides are you're exposed.

As for the car. It's worth getting a manual for the make and model. Stuff like spark plugs, oil and break pads are easy to change and make you feel a lot more satisfied when a job is done without a garage.

@dorkseid

Some of my own struggles - I'm still fighting with a sense that people see weakness, failed professionalism, etc., simply because my voice sounds different or that various things about how I speak sound like blood in the water. I program as a job, make enough money (working 50+ hrs per week, sometimes even over 80 on salary) to live comfortably with my parents on token / assistance rent, our customers generally tend in the Machiavellian direction, we're incredibly disorganized internally, and there are plenty of times that I flip out on myself - wishing I'd killed myself in highschool, outright wishing my parents never would have f'd, that my mom would have miscarried, all kinds of awful things. I'm slowly realizing an odd thing - you can get sucked down that rabbit hole, get worried every time that you did internal damage to yourself, and for whatever reason I feel like my own subconscious mind is rolling it off as a stress response.

I'm really praying for the day where I don't feel like I'm a hair's width away from getting ruined. I noted in my mid 30's, then working in accounting, that if you're not taking years off your like or contemplating selling fingers or organs on EBay that it's not a real job. I ended up with even more of a 'real job' than I had back then.

The thing I keep learning is that living through the fire, feeling like I'm increasingly able to reify and vet the things I feel like I've been seeing for a long time, seems to give me more courage. It's a bit like any part of me that still has tattered fragments of the "I'm on the spectrum - it's my fault" still clinging on is getting to be less and less, and I'm just starting to see the economic world right now as a blood sport where it's plausible that just about everyone is out to get everyone. The paranoia in that sense is not fun, days like I described above where I'm raking my own existence and my still being alive over the coals are maybe five days out of the month (was more a few years ago). I think it's setting in at least that it's the conditions that suck much more than I do and, strangely, when it's all over for the evening I'm able to step back at it, even be able to say 'I love myself' and mean it, but then it's been helpful for me to then go over those tirades, those spaces I was in, and try to interact with them in some way - like trying to build a loving resistance to the capacity of those moments and those words to rewire me while they're happening.

Not sure if any of that helps but suffice to say - I think life is miserable for a lot of people, it's just that most people aren't willing to mention it in detail in most places (especially online where constant glamour shots and 'Look where I was' are people's manner of social climbing). When things are shite it takes a lot of self-care to get through it, and really get those self-care circuits set up to where they're as robust as the 'doing what I have to do to survive' circuits.

You might be interested to see this tweet about the new book Learning From Autistic Teachers.

The book was researched and written in the U.K. but hopefully will have some influence in the U.S.A. also.

Agreed.


They say it pays to advertise.

dorkseid , I hope your still with us … and things might seem , even alittle more hopeful ?

Nobody says directly about me to my face, but everywhere I look online or IRL women all say that overweight middle aged men are gross and creepy. If nobody wanted me when I was in my twenties, who's going to want me now?

You’re not middle-aged yet.

Not for another 10 years.

I don't think I need to worry much about my weight - I'm too unrelatable to be with anyone. I mean, I probably lost 30 lbs and people have been commenting on my looking a lot better but I don't see it changing things much, it's mostly been over dealing with my hiatal hernia and cutting back my evening food consumption both directly to reduce heart burn and to reduce pressure on my stomach. I've also taken to walking a few miles in the evenings because when I work from my room all day (corner of my parent's house) I really can't take being caged up for twenty four hours in a day even if most of what I do is in there.

What I'm really having to consider with women - they have to take their wiring, firmwear, and instincts rather seriously. The first is understanding certain things about their morphology (from a young age) mean that they have to watch for sexual predation, then properly knowing how rotten and dangerous a world it is they then have to - as Chris Rock put it, find a guy who thinks about them almost as much as they do - not out of some underdeveloped or petty narcissism but because that guy does have to provide and does have to make sure both she and the kids are materially looked after, and all of that in the context of being in a world that's zero-sum competitive and where if you're different at all, in any way, shape, or form means that you have a target on your back - so any guy who has damaged chances of being able to do that for her, or damaged chances of being able to socially network by not having a common enough or relatable enough personality, is out. Both this and us being rather Platonist about our values, allegiances, etc. get us because the later isn't enough - ie. the expectation is that you'd be tribal enough and emotional enough to throw down your life for your family and it's not readily believed without constant display of that in a way that's easily understood. That's at least where I see myself never being able to make the grade just based on who I am.

Our generation has also made this mistake of acting as if sex is all that matters, like it's the ultimate 'means to an end' in the world or something like if you've achieved it you've made it (almost like the Shaivist idea that if you don't have children you cease to exist when you die - that's at least sort of what our bodies tell us but there's no credible evidence that either specifically not having kids would terminate your mental existence at death, let alone the possibility that everyone's mental existence ends at death which makes no cut-out for people who had kids). Overall though we've forgotten that sex is about making babies, in most times in history without bizarre media pressures women have known that and the joke that it dries up in marriage most likely relates to that, ie. it's not a rail of coke - if someone's looking for that they're far better off just grabbing a rail of coke (I'm not talking about the OP but rather just how much our culture has tried to make sex a form of leisure or pass-time, just thinking about it a bit that's impossible and even highly unlikely even with the pill considering everything else that goes with it).

The way through the absurdity for me so far, perhaps assisted by a lot of rather unusual experiences strongly suggesting such, is that we live much longer lives than this one and that what we do here we take with us. In that sense the reason to look after myself and my future isn't just to win over a partner or friends and if I get too old then there's no point in trying, it's more like I want to make sure that I do whatever I can to both leave this world a bit better than it found me and leave the world a bit better than I found it because I'll like those results a bit better on my death bed and probably have a smoother transition into whatever the heck it is we go into.

Also apologies if that was a lot of reading and may not have had a lot of great news, I feel like what's moved me along is adapting. Depression for me in the past I found was mostly about misaligned expectations, and whatever black pills I was able to take to the face hurt like heck for a while but when that was over I notice the depression around them lifted. I'm not sure if that'll help much at all but with that, just stay self-involved, constantly do things for yourself that show you that you care, that you're someone you'd look after, and keep rolling with that to the best of your ability - I've found that piece mission critical.

I'd rather die now than become a 40-year-old virgin.

But the thing is: you're not a virgin!

It might not have been the "right" girl----but performing the "act of love" is what counts, not the quality of the "act of love." Really, I wish you had a better-quality experience with the person you were with circa 2010.

So that one time may technically count. But it was only once and it was a terrible experience. She couldn't contract at all. She thought I lasted long, but the truth that nothing freaking happened. And then I caught two STIs. That was over 12 years ago, and I have not touched a woman since then.

So even if I'm technically not a virgin, what actually counts: a lousy one-off fluke, or the fact that I have never had any positive intimate experience with someone I loved who loved me? I still have no idea what to do with a vagina.

If the only time in your life you had steak, it was burnt to a crisp and had mole growing all over it; would you still consider yourself to have experienced steak?