Eating in a restaurant social etiquette

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Shiggily
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23 Aug 2009, 6:37 pm

zer0netgain wrote:
Shiggily wrote:
Also do not talk about Soylent Green or masturbation or cannibalism or mad cow disease or Dirty Jobs or a long list of other topics at a restaurant...

... it makes the waitresses go away.


You and I would make great dining partners. I can talk about corpses while eating and not be disgusted.


we just need to go to one of the Japanese restaurants where you order your food via vending machine (tickets), present them at the counter and then never see a waitress (unless you ring the bell for water).


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Shiggily
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23 Aug 2009, 6:37 pm

fiddlerpianist wrote:
Shiggily wrote:
I am prohibited from eating steak in public.

I absolutely despise fat or gristle on my meat. So if I get a steak I will pick it up with my hands and "gnaw" around the fat and then leave the remains on my plate.

I still have a huge aversion to boogly, boogly gristle or chicken fat in my mouth. It makes me gag big time.

Shiggily wrote:
Also do not talk about Soylent Green or masturbation or cannibalism or mad cow disease or Dirty Jobs or a long list of other topics at a restaurant...

... it makes the waitresses go away.

If you can help it, don't sit next to a table of doctors at a restaurant, either. They can talk about anything over dinner, including some of the most disgusting things I've ever heard in my life.


Note to self: eat near doctors.


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23 Aug 2009, 7:19 pm

GreatCeleryStalk wrote:
It's considered polite to wait until everyone at the table has been served. I grew up with pretty traditionally WASP (very rigid) social mores being drilled into my head, and that's one that doesn't vary with the location/venue. I may refrain from opening doors for women in certain places, but I'll never rest my elbows on the table nor will I eat before everyone has been served.


For similar reasons, I also wait until everyone is served.

Additionally, I have a slight aversion to being watched while I am eating, although I am a neat eater. If everyone else is eating, then I figure that they're too busy concentrating on their own food to watch every bite I take, so waiting benefits me here as well.

Also, if one is feeling awkward during dinner, one can always take a moment to dwell on one's food so that the awkwardness is a bit less obvious.

I prefer when things are a little more formal because following etiquette gives me both structure and rules to follow that can help make up for any other aspie related social failings I may be unknowingly exhibiting.

As far as which fork or spoon to use, always use the ones on the outside of one's plate and work your way in. When in doubt, just notice what utensil the host is using and copy him. In most cases, the purpose of manners is about putting others at ease and appearing to be thoughtful and attentive whether one is a host or a guest).

It's informal situations that are torture for me, as there seems to be far too many variables and I'm not very good at seeming casual.


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b9
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24 Aug 2009, 9:28 am

dadsgotas wrote:
b9, please don't take it the wrong way if you really can't understand what I'm saying.

well if i "really can't understand what you are saying", then i can not "take" what you are saying in the "right" way.

dadsgotas wrote:
In terms of the words you wrote and what they convey to the reader, it's untrue to say that you didn't mention feelings in your post. I understood you to mean that you don't care because you wrote so many times that you don't care.

so how does that indicate i do not care about other people's feelings?
i do not care about many things that others do care about.
i do not care about whether i look good or not.
i do not care who won a football game.
i do not care what car a person drives.
i do not care what job a person has.
i do not care whether someone is smart or not.
i do not care about things that are not important to me.

but i do care about things that are important to me.
i care about the safety and happiness of my wild animal friends.
i care that my human friends are also happy.

i do not wish anything i am fond of to have a hard time, so i am not devoid of concern for other people's feelings.

my post did not contain any reference to other people's feelings (except the hypothetical one at the end where i said they could "ring police" if they were unhappy)

if i cause someone to suffer in an agony of despair due to me not waiting for their meal to be served, then they need medication.

dadsgotas wrote:
You wrote:

i am not bothered to learn
i care not to bother
that is her bad luck
there is no chance that i will let my freshly served meal sit steaming in front of me unattended for the sake of "protocol".
i do not stay to accompany her while she is eating because i just have no desire to
i do not care


What you wrote is pretty unambiguously that you don't care what anyone, including Tammy, thinks or feels about your behaviour.


i did not say i did not care about what tammy thinks of me leaving the table before her meal is served. she does not care much because she knows me and does not feel insulted. she is very hungry at those times and can only dream of her impending dish.
she does not really care that i leave to go elsewhere.



dadsgotas wrote:
If this is not what you intended, then this is exactly the kind of communication problem we have from time to time.

i have never spoken to you before so i do not understand what you mean.

dadsgotas wrote:
If you did intend this, then I don't think it's typical of people with AS. I think that just as research indicates, while we may be insensitive to others' feelings, we're not largely uncaring about them.


well there you go.
i am diagnosed by professionals and you choose (on the basis of a single post) to question the integrity of their diagnosis? you have no qualification to scrutinize me in a diagnostic manner.

you should not try to ascertain a diagnosis for people who write words you misconstrue.

i may not be very socially articulate, so you should not believe you can find the exact social meaning of anything i say.



dadsgotas
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25 Aug 2009, 1:00 am

b9, my plea for you not to take my post the wrong way was an introduction to my attempt to explain it much more carefully. I can see how strongly inclined you are to take things the wrong way. For instance, when I write that we have communication difficulties from time to time, and you profess not to understand this because you and I have never communicated before, you seem to have failed to make the obvious deduction that my "we" must mean "people like us". This might be symptomatic.

I don't care about your diagnosis, which would be why I never mentioned it. Nor did I offer one of you, as you can find by reading what I wrote. I do find your approach to argument - writing that you don't mean what you write, and pretending that I wrote things I didn't - slightly interesting and surprising from an AS perspective, but it's not important to me at all. For the record, though, you don't know what my qualifications are and are therefore unqualified to tell me what qualifications I don't have.

I see in one of your other posts that you've been told that your emotional development will never progress beyond a fourteen-year-old standard. Assuming that on that occasion you meant what you wrote, I'm sorry about that, and I don't want to argue with someone with that kind of disadvantage, nor about such a straw topic (since the argument is about what I didn't write), so this will be my last post in this exchange.

These are the facts, which I wrote. Since they're all about what I think and believe, I am completely and uniquely qualified to talk about them. That they are written from my perspective was only implied in my first post, and explicit in my second. Please don't "read between the lines", or imagine I mean something else, because I generally do mean exactly what I write.

You will find, if you read carefully, that it's not even about you.


Your first post reads TO ME (and I BELIEVE to most other people) like an insistence that you don't care how others feel about your behaviour.

I BELIEVE that not caring in this way is not typical of people with AS.

I mention it at all because I THINK it seems to be easy for people without AS to imagine that we don't have normal feelings, particularly in the area of empathy. I BELIEVE, and research I have read states the same, that this is not true: we're weak in sensing others' feelings, but tend to feel normally empathic once made aware of what they feel. I ALSO THINK it's easy for us to be persuaded that we have the symptoms others ascribe to us: for instance, to come to believe that we don't have normal feelings because people say we don't.


I hope all this makses sense to you, but even if it doesn't, it is for the moment what I BELIEVE.