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I have a bunch of catch-up writing to do. As usual.

I attended a wedding with Danae this past weekend, on Saturday. My friend Resee was marrying her partner. To be honest, I haven't spent a lot of social time with her, especially lately, and I didn't know her partner very well either, so it was very nice of her to invite me and a guest. The wedding was at a pretty church whose interior design and architecture I rather liked. I rather liked parts of the ceremony too, like the music from Final Fantasy that was used for the processional and recessional. Though the neatest thing was seeing two people so happy together.

Attending a wedding was interesting to me from a personal point of view. I've been thinking off and on about the significance of societal rituals like weddings and other milestone events. I've encountered a little reading about the importance of social ceremony to mark major life-changes. Some has gone as far as to speculate that there's a society-wide problem that has to do with people failing to fully take on adult roles because of a lack of these sorts of milestones that publicly recognize the new phases and roles of their lives.

For my part, and for most of my life, I never saw much importance in that sort of ritual. Milestone dates that seem to mean a great deal to a lot of people, like graduation of high school, turning 21, or getting my driver's license, passed largely without ado for me. I had birthday parties, sure. But I never felt particularly older. I didn't drink, so there was no alcohol laden festivity when I became legal. I hated school and had few if any friends there, so graduating high school was mere relief that I didn't have to deal with the environment anymore.

My perspective on that has been changing lately. Evolving, perhaps, in the words of our president. Maybe it's because I have become more social that I want more recognition of important events from my friends. Maybe it's because being half-again as old as I was then give me a longer perspective from which to consider these things. I'm more aware of the passage of time and want it to mean something more to me.

I think another influence is thinking about my wedding. I had read a comment somewhere that, no matter whether you think it will or not, getting married will significantly change your life, even if you're marrying someone you've already been living with. Well, it didn't. Nothing really changed after the wedding, and life carried on as usual. Same apartment, same jobs, same lives. The wedding itself was nice; I was married outdoors at a renaissance faire, barefoot in the sun. A random bagpiper who was there played for us and said later that it was the most beautiful church he'd ever played in. There were many elements that made me really happy at the time, and that still put a smile on my face.

In retrospect though, I didn't have a lot of input into the whole affair. My ex came up with ideas, and I liked them and was happy to go along. I was very much in a follower role at that point. My partner was older and more experienced than I was. She picked out rings (somewhat at the last minute, and ordered online), she took care of the cake and invitations and the other details. Not that there were a lot of other details; it was a very informal occasion. And I was fine with that. I didn't know what I wanted, and as I've noted, social ritual wasn't terribly meaningful for me. As I think about it now, I wish that I'd had more of a hand in things. That it was more reflective of me specifically. But I still didn't really know who I was, so I don't think it could have been.

Seeing my friends get married this past weekend has made me think about weddings in general. It would be interesting to see a wide variety of them in the US and see how they compare. Were I to get married again, it would be significantly different. Less traditional. I like the idea of a yearly commitment ceremony and having to reaffirm my vows to my partner on a yearly basis so that we each have the ability to opt out if we choose. At the same time, I think I'd want the first ceremony to be a big affair with lots of family and friends. Those rituals are becoming more important to me. Renewals would be small or private matters.

Speaking of commemorations of changes in life status and changing views of their importance, I have a divorce coming up. I'm not quite sure when yet; it's largely being done by my ex, as it's not something that's been terribly important to me. But it seems like it will be happening over the Summer most likely. When it does, I want to have a party.

Both my sweetie lisagems and my friend posicat have offered hosting space, and if danaeris is moved into her condo in Chicago by then, it might happen there too. I haven't figured out much more about it than that, but I think it'll be both fun and meaningful to me. A particularly large end and beginning, if only symbolically, to go with all the other large ends and beginnings of the last few years. I want it to be a transition that means something outside my own head and that is recognized by people I care about.

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After the wedding reception for my friend Resee and her partner (Whose well-executed steampunk theme was really quite lovely!), Danae and I drove back to my place. Along the way, we had a conversation that ranged pretty widely over a number of things.

She suggested that maybe my social blossoming was delayed not because of being on the autism spectrum, but because of my prosopagnosia. She pointed out that most people get feedback on other people's thoughts and feelings via three routes: facial expression, words used, and body language. Because of my great difficulty in evaluating faces and body language the way most people do, I was at a disadvantage in learning to interact with others the same way. I'm only getting something like a third of the feedback, so maybe it took me three times as long?

This is, of course, armchair psychology, but I think there's something to it. I've been wondering for some time whether I'm really autistic. It's such a large part of how I've come to understand myself and manage to find explanations for the difficulties I've had that it's very strange indeed to think that I might have been wrong. But the way I interact with people now is not at all in keeping with that previous conception of myself. It's all more than a little puzzling, to be honest.

That and other insights into the way my brain works made me think about other such conversations I've had through my life. A number of people in my life have presented their conceptions and understandings of what I'm thinking. Often, they've had some deeply insightful things to say to me. Danae, Lisa, and other people have had really interesting thoughts about how I think, and have sometimes presented me with intriguing concepts I'd never considered before. Some of them addressed specific bits of mental oddity, like considering how exactly my perception of attractiveness differs from other people's and how I could compare those concepts, or realizing that my prosopagnosia and topographical agnosia may be tied to a sort of failure of topology in general in my head. That maybe that's why I'm bad at things from massage (because mentally I can't really process the anatomy that my hands are feeling) to reading maps (I've been told that I don't make the mistakes that someone who doesn't know how to read maps makes; I actually interpret them incorrectly which is a different mistake).

And on a general level, I have conversations wherein another person talks to me in a way that makes me feel like they've looked into my head and not only seen what's going on in there, but have presented it to me accompanied with insights into why it's there and what to do about it. I had that sort of conversation with Danae in the car and it made me feel a little lacking. As if my partner has spent so much time really getting to know and understand me, and I have not returned that favor. I worry it will seem like Danae, or others who have varying levels of insight into my personality, are less important to me than I am to them because I don't have the ability to see how they're wired at the same level.

Danae pointed out that there are different forms of intelligence, and not everyone has them in equal amounts. She feels that she and I are pretty close, generally speaking. The fact that I'm not as good at understanding other people's deep mental processes doesn't mean that I'm not intelligent, or not a good boyfriend. I hope that's the case. There's a part of me that worries that a serious relationship partner should have a deeper understanding of you than I do, or perhaps can. How my partner is feeling, what stresses them and how I can help, or what makes them happy and how to do those things are deeply important to me. I do worry about being good enough at those things, and about not being as good at it as my partners are.

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On a much lighter note, Lisa and I took a trip to the Lincoln Park Zoo last Thursday. It's so wonderful that there's still a free zoo in a big city like Chicago! Here are a few pictures.


A Puzzled Spotted Dikkop

Copyright 2012 Stormdog

Sichuan Takins Butting Heads

Copyright 2012 Stormdog


It was a nice walk, and a fun date. *smiles*

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I haven't written much about the proceedings following the death of my grandfather. But there hasn't been a whole lot to say I suppose.

Emotionally, My parents and I are managing alright. As I've noted, we all knew this was coming for some time. Before his death, my grandfather had been in progressively declining health for a while. He was hospitalized with pneumonia a few times, and during one of his illnesses, the thought is he might not have gotten enough oxygen to his brain for a while. The last couple times I visited, he was very lethargic, spending most of the time dozing. I did get to have a conversation with him for about five or ten minutes, during which he was glad I was there and happy to talk to me.

His death, I suppose, was probably something of a relief for him, if that makes any sense. To others of us too, to some extent. I miss him, and I'm glad he was in my life and for all the memories of him and physical things of his that I have, use, and will use. I feel bad for not having spent more time with him than I did, but I think I'd feel that way regardless of how much time I'd spent with him.

I've been at the house my grandparents shared with my mother's sister and her husband a couple times now, looking through pictures and other things. Yesterday while I was there, someone found a box with some of my great-grandfather's notebooks in them. It's funny; as we looked through the basement office, my mother realized that some of the cabinetry there came from the house that she grew up in. She commented that she felt more of an emotional connection to those cabinets than most anything else there. For my part, though I feel a connection to my grandfather's tools and other things, it was those notebooks that most seemed to get to me. It's odd, because they weren't even my grandfather's. They belonged to my great-grandfather, who I never even met. But my grandfather had talked to me about him a little bit; about the kind of things he did. Looking at graph-paper notebooks with hand-numbered pages full of circuit diagrams and related notes, It made me think of my grandfather as a boy, growing up with that person I never knew. We found a several page, typewritten biography that Great-grandpa wrote too; I think I'll post some of that later on as well. There are some great stories there.

I wish I remembered more of my grandfather from when I was younger. I didn't really talk to him much until I was in my mid-twenties and back from Detroit. When I moved to Michigan, he gave me a hammer that he made to take with me, and it really moved me. The fact he felt that connection with me, that he wanted to give me that little bit of himself to take with me, has made me wish that I'd been less scared of people, more talkative. He and I had done a little bit of metalworking together before I moved away, but the process of getting to where I could easily sit and be social was a slow one, and far from complete. Back then, I really couldn't have had the kind of conversations with him that I would like to now. I got to talk to him more the way I wanted to over the last couple years, but still not as much or as often as I wish.

I will miss him dearly, with love, sadness, respect and admiration. And, just as before, every piece of hand-worked iron I see will make me look appreciatively and think "I bet my grandfather could do that."

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My two-day-a-week schedule at the UW-Parkside help desk has begun as of Tuesday. Things are really quiet here over the Summer it seems. I seem to get maybe two or three calls an hour. My six hour shift overlaps with one person for the first hour, and a second person for the last hour. Other than that, I'm here alone for four hours from noon to 4. I was a little surprised to be left alone on my first day, and without a whole lot of training, but it wasn't so bad. It's very quiet here over the Summer, and when I had questions I just went into the back and got a hand from the permanent employees in the back offices.

I'm at a station that has both a PC and a Mac, which is kind of nice. I know next to nothing about Macs, so I used my free time on Tuesday to go through some online tutorials about how to use them, which is what I'm going to go back to once I'm done writing. It seems that I'll have a lot of free time, at least through to when school starts again, and there are many worse ways to earn a paycheck.

Today, there was a box full of free copies of the game of the year edition of Civilization IV. Not sure where they came from, but I was happy to take one. I haven't had a legal copy since years back when my laptop was stolen with one of the disks in it.

Tonight after work, I'm stopping at at the Rhode Opera House for a community workshop on development of the Kenosha downtown. That sounds personally interesting and related to the sort of things I want to study.

In the meantime, I've gotten a lot of writing done here today, and I feel good about that!