I realized just how much of an outcast I am

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Happens to me lots. Just find a few friends who are as interesting in something as you are though (Its easier once you hit college) and you won't feel so badly about it all the time.

Haha! Yeah! I had the experience of "sudden realization" on April 21st, 2004. I wrote this as a result.

• What is your favorite OS?
• C programmers do it with long pointers. This is to be taken in the most vulgar way possible.
• I use words like 'errata', 'inverse', 'default' and 'shift' (in a way [for clarity's sake] it shouldn't be used) in everyday speech.
• When writing, I use nested parenthesis and find it natural.
• When terminating a sentence, I put "Punctuation outside quotation marks". I do this despite the fact that I know it's wrong, because it hurts me to place characters in a literal string that shouldn't be there.
• I always type in Courier New because it's a mono-spaced font.
• I knew what an Mp3 was before Microsoft did.
• I was the 22nd person on Napster when Shawn Fanning was running the server from his cable modem.
• I'm the youngest person I know who can trouble-shoot a 386 with IRQ problems.
• I can explain things like 'I/O Mapped Memory', 'logical block addressing', and 'Interrupt vector priorities', and have a legitimitly good time doing so.
• I know the history of the terms 'big-endian' and 'little-endian'. The merits of a machine's 'endianess' is something I could argue with another nerd about for hours.
• If allowed to watch an episode (ANY episode) of Star Trek The Next Generation for 30 seconds, I could give you the episode name, the season it aired in, a plot synopsis, several verbatim segments of dialog (with the correct timing and intonation), and a fun fact about the episode.
• I think that this picture is hysterical:
  
• I don't know the rules of football.
• I've seen every episode of South Park at least three times, but only two of these 348 times have been at a full 30 frames-per-second.
• I can type 180 characters per minute on a num-pad with high accuracy while blindfolded, but I can't dial a phone number without looking at the keypad. Know why? Telephone keypads are upside-down. Takes a pretty big nerd to know that!
• The keys on my num-pad are filthy and the decals are wearing off, but the top row of numbers is spotless. Also wearing thin on the keyboard are the interrupt keys (CTRL, ALT, Esc), and the Insert and delete keys.
• I have actually used the Scroll Lock key for something other than a KVM switch.
• The texture of my right mouse-button is noticeably smoother than that of the left button.
• I remember buying my first computer game, and then learning DOS so I could play it.
• I can't stand to read blue underlined text (not even on paper), because I have this powerful and insistent desire to push it with my finger. I swear to God this is true. Stop laughing at me.
• Does anyone else remember what port the first version of netbus ran on????
• I have four redundant copies of ALL my important data. Three of these copies are never more than a week different from one another. The fourth never more than 3 months.
• Friends having off-site backups isn't at all strange to me.
• Friends that don't keep backups at all confound and puzzle me.
• The crowd I run with likes to reminisce about their early experiences programming. We have conversations about things like this for hours.
• I hang fractals, pictures of processor dies, and schematic diagrams that I think have aesthetic qualities on my walls.
• Even though there are plenty of Wi-Fi networking components around my flat, I STILL ran 100 feet of cable thru three walls and a ceiling. I did this because the difference between 11Mbps and 100Mpbs is a BIG deal to me.

@jspark-311: You pretty much rock! I hope to someday achieve your level of Geekdom...


I have these realizations all the time, the most recent of which were just last night. I went to a Goth party hosted by some people I know from the theater department. I dressed up and spiked my hair, and went over there. I knew pretty much everyone there through work and a few people greeted me as I walked in but I ended up not having anyone to talk to and I just stood around for about 45 minutes before I left. While I was there I heard a girl lament that there are just no single straight guys around. I guess I don't count.

Earlier that night, I was recording the play that I had just finished the sound design for. I walk into the control room to get a cable and everyone stops talking as if I were a teacher walking into a class room. The stage manager told me I couldn't make any changes to my design (which is OBVIOUS, this is the second weekend and all changes were locked out weeks ago). The atmosphere was so cold towards me in there that, when I walked out, I practically had ice sickles hanging from my nose.

I am generally disliked even by me peers, the people who share my passion for theater.

Worst was weekends when everyone in the dorms were going out and getting back late. Of course I was alone in my room with absolutely nothing to do. Sometimes I would spend hours just starting at the ceiling.

Yes, I think this is something I call being "collectively ditched by humanity." The thing to remember is that they AREN'T all of humanity, and there are people you can relate to. They're just somewhere else.

Another thing to consider is, while it is natural to envy people who can connect socially as "them folks" do, even they have insecurities. I am reminded of the thing I heard from the Beatles Anthology. Ringo wanted to quit the band, because he thought that he didn't fit in with the other three. He told George, and George was surprised. George thought that Paul John and Ringo were tight, and that HE didn't fit in.

Later, Ringo went to talk to John (or was it Paul?), and the same thing. John thought that Ringo, George and Paul were tight, and that HE didn't fit in!

Before I found out about Asperger's Syndrome, I always thought that there was something I didn't figure out yet, and once I FIGURED THAT OUT, I could be just like Bill Clinton, or Jay Leno, or any of those other people who have no problem talking to anyone about anything. Once I understood Asperger's I realized at long weary last that there was never going to be any huge epiphany in my life. I would always be me, "ditched by humanity."

Strangely, once I understood that, it was much easier for me to socialize, because now I measured my progress relative to my past performance, and not whether or not I could be Regis Philbin.

So, yeah, there ARE people you get along with. They just aren't in the room at the moment. But be secure in yourself, and work within the context of your limitations...