Only sunshine for the helpy

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I meant groups with OFFLINE activities.

<snork>

(now returning you to our regularly scheduled politeness)

I'm in the wrong place for that, otherwise I would. Just too small a town, wrong demographics. Won't likely be able to move for close to a decade. It turns the internet into a lifesaver, both for employment and for social stuff. Tiny proportion of billions beats the pants off tiny proportion of 100K, if you're looking for compatible people to talk to.

There's also the fact -- and this is usually overlooked by people handing out socializing/dating advice -- that single moms and others with caregiving responsibilities don't have the freedom to get out much. If I want to go out during the week, it costs me $40 just to walk out the door in the evening, and I can't do it often anyway because it'd mean neglecting the kid, who already feels she doesn't get enough time with me. Most weekends I'm catching up on work, sleep, and chores around the house, and our social activities are ones the kid can enjoy, too, meaning there are other children there. That'll change in a few years -- I still wont be able to just run around, but I'll be able to get out more on my own -- but the compatibility/small-town issues will remain. The age-appropriate people I see around here who aren't fully absorbed into married-with-kids family life are generally aging dykes, and I'm not in their club; they don't really want to hang with me.

It'll be a while. And honestly even then I don't expect there'll be hordes for me to hang out with. Likely it'll be some better, though.

(I really ought to get ready for work. But school's out -- yay!) The IQ tests I've seen are okay at assessing certain narrow things. Logical reasoning (though the bias towards a certain way of reasoning is profound), for instance. But this is a very small part of intelligence, and anyway the tests heavily reflect the test-developers' own social backgrounds. I work sometimes in standardized-test development, and there's a great deal of lip service paid now to inclusivity and avoiding cultural bias, but good lord, is it in there. It's not intentional; it's just that the developers don't themselves have a wide enough frame of reference to know what "inclusive" might mean. They're only people, after all, and most of them aren't exactly blazing intellects, either.

I think IQ's not bad as a rough/ready for "will this person be bright". I mean if someone said to me, "Hey, come hang out at this picnic for people with IQs of 125," I'd figure I should probably stay away, because I probably wouldn't have fun and I'd just piss them off, I'm not tactful enough to avoid it. But it might also be fun -- there might be some shrewd types in there, and I don't think IQ tests are so hot at capturing shrewd. Or it might just be a ladies-hanging-out thing, and I can do that for a while. But there are much, much better markers for guessing whether or not you'll enjoy the company of a group of people.