Mike is funny, in a slightly scary way, and I would say "like a guy with Asperger's" but unfortunately it's fairly commonplace to be that clueless without the excuse of a syndrome.
Maybe Aspergers or some other diagnosable reason for being weird, but I think the guy has to be at least a serious jerk on top of possibly being excusably strange.
Is Mike scary, funny, or a guy with Asperger's?
. . . Or trying to write for McSweeny's? Or trying to imitate David Foster Wallace's style in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men?
It's possible he made some sort of formula error in his eye-contact and hair-twirling spreadsheet.
Best:
Am I sensitive person? Sure, I am. I think it's better to be sensitive than to be insensitive. There are too many impolite, insensitive people in the world.
This reads like a one of AWB's dating anecdotes.
I read this already, and he just seems like a pretty generic male nerd, robotic clueless personality division (maybe this is what people mean by Asperger's). I sort of feel this is what all these types are thinking but he was unusually expressive.
6: No, the best part is definitely this whole block of text:
Perhaps, you're unimpressed that I manage my family's investments and my own investments. Perhaps, you don't think I have a "real" job. Well, I've done very well as an investment manager. I've made my parents several millions of dollars. That's real money. That's not monopoly money. In my opinion, if I make real money, it's a real job. Donald Trump's children work for his company. Do they have "real" jobs? I think so. George Soros's sons help manage their family investments. Do they have "real" jobs? I think so. In addition, I'm both a right-brain and left-brain man, given that I'm both an investment manager and a philosopher/writer. That's a unique characteristic; most people aren't like that.
Oh, god -- the "philosopher/writer". Who was the guy with the website who got linked here years and years ago explaining that he wanted to have sex with underage girls in a helpful, supportive way that their parents would approve of because older women (that is, older than thirteen or so) had already been sodomized too much? Something about "philosopher/writer" brought him to mind.
There are certainly circumstances where it would be really helpful to have a post date "why did you choose not to keep dating me" survey. Of course there's no way to actually do that, but it's hard to learn things when feedback is opaque.
I'm sure you wouldn't like it if a man showed up thirty minutes late for a first date with you.
Someday, he's going to get married to somebody, she's going to leave him, and he's going to write some screed about gender roles in family court.
8: cute.
Anyhow, he struck me as more a somewhat quantitatively oriented privileged trust-funder who has never particularly needed to deploy human emotions to get women to sleep with him.
LB, I just want to make clear that that fellow was MY commenter first.
So repetitive. He introduces something and then says it again a sentence or two later. In addition, I think he uses very close to the same phrasing of things over and over. I gain utility from point out the repetition because it seems worth mocking. Normally, I would not mock at such length, but it's rare that I've had to work so hard to pay attention to an e-mail that I was hoping would be shorter and (authorially unintentionally) funnier. I'm not going to finish reading it. And I won't apologize.
I mean, it would be a little dickish even in this context, but it reminds me of nothing so much as the kind of letter you would send to a potential employer or business partner who didn't hire you/didn't want to work with you. Even the tone fits if you think of him as a finance guy (i.e., dickhead). He just failed to code-switch when moving to the "dating" realm.
10: No this guy says tht according to the Internet she's 32-33 and thus they're a good age match from his point of view. So probably a different philosopher/writer.
17: You don't rely on the internet for that. The teeth. You look at the teeth.
Didn't this circulate on the internet years ago?
18: you can really only get an accurate read from the teeth after you murder them, so you have to find something rough to go by first.
Gawker had a greatcompanion post about other stories of investment bankers that included a post-breakup quiz:
Why you were unhappy with us:
Are there things you do not like about me?
Are there things you do not like about us?
Are there things you don't like about yourself when it comes to us?
Name as many things as you can you would change about. Again, you must list everything that bothers you. 1. me suggestions: I interrupt you, I need to enunciate when I speak 2. us 3. yourself
...
Where do you want to be in? 6 months 1 year 5 years 10 years 20 years 50 years / retirement age
I really like the " you can do a google search." Google says it's so! It must be so! You twirled you hair! That's what girls who like boys (nb: word choice on purpose) do!
It's so hard to settle on a best part. Is it the zinger, "First, we've both very intelligent"? Which, obvs: very intelligent, we both haz it.
But I think it's really this bit, which is redundant within the email itself but sums things up nicely: "If you don't want to go out again, that I request that you call me and make a sincere apology for leading me on (i.e., giving me mixed signals). In my opinion, you shouldn't act that way toward a man and then not go out with him again. It's bad to play with your hair so much and make so much eye contact if you're not interested in going out with me again."
I find that demanding apologies for excessive hair-twirling is a good way to convince someone I'm awesome and date-able. Plus, the girl said "It was nice to meet you" at the end of the date, which is basically equivalent to "I want your penis." Imagine if she'd said, "Let's do this again sometime." He could potentially sue her for breach of contract...
It's always nice to be reminded that, no matter how loathsome I find myself, there are others whom I find still more loathsome.
Didn't this circulate on the internet years ago?
There have been other widely circulated examples from this genre, but I think this one may be new.
Yeah, it's not feeling familiar to me.
It seems this may not be his first offense.
16: Really? I can't imagine sending a similar letter to a company that didn't hire me after an interview. If I thought getting the job were still possible, I might follow up with some of the "we're a great match" bits, but none of the demanding, insulting, condescending, and stilted language. What would be the point? Seems like you could easily go from "guy we didn't hire" to "guy who is blacklisted because we told everyone in our industry about this dickish letter he sent after he wasn't hired."
If it's not a hoax, it's the same guy. Some sentences are almost word for word. I like this bit particularly:
In my opinion, if we don't become friends, it would be a shame and tragic in a micro sense. (An example of something tragic in a macro sense would be an earthquake that kills a lot of people.)
"You know, just in case you were curious about things that might be tragic in a macro sense. Also: war, famine, and me climbing a bell tower overlooking an elementary school playground with a sniper rifle."
Man, the quote in 29 makes me think it's somebody taking the piss.
An example of something tragic in a macro sense would be an earthquake that kills a lot of people.
I would say pity, 100%. This reads to me like it was written by a guy who has never had a friend in his whole life because he makes the wrong kind of eye contact.
I find it almost excruciating to read this stuff. Half of me thinks it's a joke (NY Times obsessions aside, there actually AREN'T very many investment bankers in the world -- what are the odds that a random pushy obnoxious guy would have a relatively rare and elite job?). The other half is just cringing in recognition of how awful it is to be at the receiving end of this, and how awful it must be to be the person sending it.
Owned by 29. LizardBreath should write me an email to apologize, and I think that we should be friends even though she owned me in 29. People don't grow on trees.
Not to be all derauqsd, but he's not actually an investment banker. He manages his own family's money.
I couldn't stand to read it, so I guess my reaction would be pity. That said, I would totally write such a letter for laughs.
I also love the part at the end where he explains how email and the phone work. When you get this email you can call me. Or if that's a bad time, you can write me on email and say so and I will call you. If you do call and you get my voicemail, you can leave a message and I'll call you back.
I will also say that in the last 15+ years I've developed an increasing bias against anyone who seems too friendly and enthusiastic, because the flip rate (from gushingly inappropriately praising you to wildly inappropriately castigating you) is so high.
Shorter me: Practical, pragmatic geeks FTW.
I only partly get the pity reaction. Because there's not knowing how to relate to people, and then there's taking your frustrations and misunderstandings in that realm and getting aggressive about them. The latter makes you a douche.
35: Okay, but there must be equally as few of those people, right? I mean, it's just not possible that they make up a high percentage of the American public. Not possible.
This makes the e-mail I got the other day* seem positively calm and friendly by comparison.
*From a job applicant. What is *up* with people who send e-mails with subject lines consisting of their own names? It's such a weird phenomenon. I dearly hope someone is studying it.
I wouldn't be surprised if he (assuming it's not a hoax) had some kind of diagnosis making social functioning hard to impossible, which has got to be awful for the (presumably real) guy. But I've never heard of a diagnosis making anyone stalk people to demand apologies -- that sounds like 'being an unpleasantly entitled person' on top of whatever's wrong with him.
40: Do you describe the email in another thread because I'm intrigued!
I seriously feel like people (well, women) receive somewhat milder versions of these kinds of things all the time. Maybe I just hear about them.
Agreed that 27 seems to be the same guy. He's still very intelligent, and has excellent judgment, to wit:
I was correct when I stated that you were mistaken when you said that you were not interested in a relationship. I said that you were too young and that, unless something horrible happened to you (e.g., your getting hit by a truck), you would get into a relationship in the future. That seems to have turned out to be the case.
Also priceless is the line that says, "Before you hung up on me the last time we spoke..." Because that was a good time, remember that?
Clearly I've gone in the "mock" direction.
I mean, a woman I know went on a date with some weirdo who referred her to his website,* which consisted of an elaborate list of requirements for his potential companions and outlined a 13-part "theory of love" which he asked her to read before they could date again.
*I've been trying to find it.
He's definitely an unpleasantly entitled jerk on top of whatever's wrong with him, but the reason for pity is the possibility that whatever's wrong with him (and people's reactions to him over the course of his life) is a big part of what's made him into an unpleasantly entitled jerk.
I guess part of why I feel pity is that he seems so far down this road. And how do you get off it, at this point? He obviously can't hear normal levels of feedback. He obviously either didn't have, or wasn't able to hear, a parent or mentor who was able to help him see how his behavior would be perceived by others.
It just seems like such a painful, sad way to live.
I get that there is the full spectrum of humanity, and that in general, a person with X disorder has about the same chance of being nice, a jerk, or a colossal idiot as a person who doesn't have X disorder. I just think about this guy, and if he's real, he has parents somewhere. And they probably love him. And they have to watch as he goes through this.
Eh. I'm probably just in a mood, and Blume and LB are right.
40: There aren't very many of those people, but I think rather than "what are the odds that a random pushy obnoxious guy would have a relatively rare and elite job?", the question is "what are the odds that a guy who grew up with a lot of money and never had to go out and get a job on his own would be pushy and obnoxious?". And I think the answer is probably "fairly high".
I mean, even in the absence of personality disorders, I think I'd feel bad for any unpleasantly entitled jerk who was that way only because they didn't know how to relate to people in less unpleasant ways. (Although maybe that's not really a possibilty in the absence of a personality disorder.) It's people who are unpleasantly entitled jerks because they can be, or because they want to be, who deserve the scorn.
48: This is right, but it also mostly applies to Hitler. And I think pitying Hitler on those grounds is in some contexts the right response, but being a proper object of pity doesn't make him not a bad person. This guy is, I think, both a bad person and a proper object of pity.
52: well, but see 51. There are definitely people who are kind and gracious with social peers or superiors but unpleasant assholes with subordinates. Those people deserve no pity whatsoever.
I don't actually know enough about Hitler to know which camp he falls into. I wasn't actually even aware that he was known for being interpersonally unpleasant.
Pity. Guy reads as a clueless jerk, not an intentional or uncaring jerk. And, of course, someone who knows him has by now let him know that his cluelessness is being made fun of across the internet.
If he's real. Of which I am not convinced in the least.
I'm making up stories here, but what about someone like that who'd always been taught that kiss-up, kick-down was the right way to behave, and somehow lacked the capacity to figure out for himself that it was wrong (say, the entire slaveholding population of the South before the Civil War). Still bad people, but no pity for them having been made bad?
I almost can't think of anyone evil I wouldn't pity for it.
54 -- Have you seen Downfall? It's really quite good.
46: If you cut it down to a six part theory, you could fit it on a business card. Might make things easier.
52 is the most hilariously unexpected invocation of Godwin I think I've ever seen.
This guy should hang out with Bennett, maybe he could learn how to keep it real.
Christ. This reminds me of a guy I worked with.
He was so angry, bitter and unable to relate to people that everyone hated him. He knew they hated him and knew he was somehow responsible, but didn't know in what particular he did wrong or how to change. It was a hideous vicious circle.
Some days the only thing that kept me from telling him off was the thought that dealing with him couldn't be as painful and lonely as being him.
This is right, but it also mostly applies to Hitler.
THREAD OVER!
I vote "pity." The guy is trying to figure out a world that is painful and confusing, and he is doing so directly and honestly, using the limited toolset that he's got.
He needs to be told that when people don't return calls, they're communicating usable information nonetheless. Maybe someone should suggest that he Google that.
Pity, sure, but, as noted above, I've endured such bizarre and totally pitiable reactions to a date or encounter with people that it really makes you lose all taste for trying to go out with anyone. What this letter screams is just brutal desperation, not to achieve a relationship with this person, or even to achieve a relationship at all, but to stroke himself that he has somehow earned approval by being himself. Many of the horrific responses I've gotten after going out with people have this in common, this weird obsession with getting my approval, even though they don't seem in any way interested in me as a person, or even as a potential sex partner. It's all about begging not to be rejected.
I'm thinking there must be female versions out on the veldt. I'm never dating again. As with the motorcycle, there's no point to pushing my luck.
I've been through this before, and am convinced that this guy is aspergy. Aspergies are defined by by a basically complete inability to function socially or to understand what other people are thinking. The things that people want them to do are pretty much by definition the things they're incapable of doing.
As such, I don't think that anyone should date him. He doesn't strike me as threatening, but if he is he should be treated like any other mentally impaired, threatening person.
He's not a high powered investment banker. He manages his parents' portfolio, successfully he says, and is defensive about it. He probably lives with his parents.
His piece is just riddled with blatant communication failures. For example, if you read one of those stupid books about women stroking their hair when aroused, the correct way to utilize the information is not to explain to her that she must be aroused because she's stroking her hair. If you're managing a multimillion dollar portfolio, you don't say right off that it's your parents' money, and you don't cringe and justify yourself at great length. He's explicit about things that aren't explicit in normal conversations. If you're trying to figure someone out , it's not in order to report to the person the results of your investigation.
This guy is far off the map of cluelessness. He's not a regular inept guy, much less a predatory, "entitled" guy. He's entirely pitiful, despite his money. To me, going on about this guy is like gathering in a circle around the moron and ridiculing him.
I had a big argument about this yesterday which became unpleasant, and I convinced 0 of 8 people . One of them kindly started explaining what a jerk I was. I still think I'm right. He's male, and he has money (inherited) so he's fair game.
68 seems mostly right to me, but again I'd say that this dude is at the far end of a kind of behavior that's pretty common.
I'd also say that thinking everything he said in the email makes him a sad, injured person. Searching for an email address that he hadn't been given and demanding apologies? If he were that far from normal behavior in general, as opposed to merely as an angry response to being rejected by women he was pursuing romantically, I'd be kind of surprised if he were walking around unsupervised, and I'd expect him to have been clearly informed, repeatedly, by caregivers that he was going to accidentally frighten and annoy people, and should accept that response.
Ok, as someone who some might put on the dude's side of the AS scale...well, I don't know what I feel about him. The politeness, kindness/cruelty rituals, and bullshit can get pretty confusing and frustrating. I remember bob=him at least once.
Girl I knew for a year, partied with, was friendly, then spent three nights with.
"Will you go out tonight?"
"I have to wash my hair."
I wasn't so fucked up over, whatever. But I knew the game, and my thoughts were spinning. "Okay, see you around" felt like an attack, saying she was lying." "I'll call you again." also felt like a lie, since I knew it was over. I guess I just wanted her to say "It's over" and I was trying to understand why she couldn't say it, and why I wanted her to say it...and Albertine, you rotten...wait.
Everybody fucking lies all the time, I mean I cannot watch any conversation between others without seeing kindness and cruelty and ritual and sometimes it works.
And everybody fucks it up sometimes and misreads or misplays and maybe everybody does it a lot. I see relationships adjusting every minute I watch one. A lot of times it works and is fun but like the song said everybody hurts.
You say you got social skills and you're laughing at this guy? You fail, and this is nervous laughter because you, like me, see yourself in him.
Not as much as me. I guess. Being kind.
at the far end of a kind of behavior that's pretty common
Yeah, but that behavior is "using intellectual reasoning to try to figure out how to get emotional things that one desperately craves and needs." I generally do better than robots, but that's a tendency I have to fight in myself. Seeing someone follow through with that makes me cringe.
I guess the tough thing is: Come across this in the abstract, you can pity what it must be like to be him. Encounter it in real life, and you're having to make decisions about how much of your emotional bandwidth you're obliged to devote to filling in someone else's social blind spots (or black holes).
I couldn't read this more than a couple paragraphs in. But that did at least yield this snowclone-esque gem:
You played with your hair a lot. A woman playing with her hair is a common sign of flirtation. You can even do a google search on it.
"You said "ah" a lot. A person saying "ah" is a common expression of interest. You can even do a google search on it."
"You tipped over cows a lot. A person tipping over cows is a common sign of rural teenager-hood. You can even do a google search on it."
Turns out you can do a google search on it.
These things, human interactions and relationships, are only simple and easy if you don't think about them. Or even really look closely at them.
AS folk may be the ones who can't stop thinking, or the ones who don't have enough purpose, or the wrong purpose, in their thinking.
Using my own emotions as tools to manipulate others is indeed an incomprehensible skillset.
I wouldn't mind seeing a film of that date.
My guess is that she played "good date" polite, kind, supportive, talking his subjects, listening supportively, smiling at his witticisms etc. All the time thinking:"Oh my gawd."
And he was smart enough to see that she couldn't stand him but also played along because playing out the rituals and pretending he thinks she likes him can also be fun, and because saying "You really didn't think that was funny, you were just laughing politely" can make things weird or real real fast but the evening got just a little strained until by the end the smiles were sneers.
Because what do you do? Force a confrontation and take a taxi? No fun. So the date became a contest of phoniness and falsity and he saw no reason it had to stop because he was still having fun.
70: I second this. I pity him up until the point that he demands an apology because she led him on by playing with her hair and making eye contact with him. That screams of entitlement.
I mean, a woman I know went on a date with some weirdo who referred her to his website,* which consisted of an elaborate list of requirements for his potential companions and outlined a 13-part "theory of love" which he asked her to read before they could date again.
You know someone who went out with ogged?!?!
78:Nah, he just wants her to say "Fuck off, you troll"
At that point he wins.
Why oh why do I, the fucked-off troll, have to be the one to explain this things?
This is why I talk as little on dates as possible.
I don't think this is real, I think it's a sophisticated hoax of some kind. It quite skillfully walks the line between humorous and horrifying in an area where everyone is insecure enough to get that complexity.
If it were real than 68 would apply.
This woman has a more functional female version of the Dating Can Be Fully Rational fantasy.
82: Where would Flashy Flippanter be without his tart-catchers thick, luxuriant mane?
83.3: I like that you can buy advertising space on her dating site.
83.3: I think a quote from the New Yorker's old television critic is applicable here:
"Godspeed, honey."
I'm having trouble believing it's real as well. On the other hand, there are not a few people functioning at that level of difficulty (in gathering and responding appropriately to cues), so if it is real, I put in a vote for fear, or at least concern. If I were on the receiving end of that email, I'd be honestly torn about whether or not I should send a short email reply (saying "No"), or avoid ignore avoid at all costs. The woman who actually went on the date would have a better basis on which to decide.
I missed 68, which is very good, but I obviously disagree. Tentatively.
Emerson does not explain why this guy is bothering, why he keeps it up. The tone of the letter has been interpreted as "entitlement" but I see it as more aggressive and self-aware than that. He knows he is being annoying.
He's been here before. He wants overt rejection.
But as a borderline, I would read it that way.
After some thought, my guess is that, since he's apparently done this before in nearly the same words, it's not that he thinks someone will respond in a genuine way, but he's crafted this email to be as obnoxious as possible as a way of getting back at women who aren't interested in him. It's an act of aggression and hostility, not a sincere attempt to make a connection. If she for some reason read this and responded, OK fine let's do this, wouldn't he then gleefully reject her, because take that?
Yeah, I guess I pretty much agree with Bob.
Real Aspy losers are rarely this aggressive.
I would vote fear, with a little pity, but not too much fear. The guy wants rejection, and will stop when he gets it.
The ones to really fear, as someone said above, are the flatterers, the enthusiastic and funny, the ones who are attractive and make you feel good and wanted for yourself. The "open honest" guys.
Those are the ones who'll really hurt you when you least expect it
...but he's crafted this email to be as obnoxious as possible as a way of getting back at women who aren't interested in him.
You think he'd hire himself out to write responses to journal reviewers?
88-90: I guess that is an alternative explanation for why the letter feels faked. It could be real but written in bad faith, a resentful attack designed as an Aspy-esque logical brief.
I don't really believe in Asperger's as a medical disability I don't think, but it's an irresistible descriptor.
Do you not believe in autism spectrum disorders that are less than completely disabling, or how does that work?
OK, now I've thought about this some more.
It's not that hard to relate to the part of him that is about feeling confused/alienated by other human beings' behavior and trying to figure it out.
The part that gets hard is where the addition of new information fails to prompt appropriate self-examination or even re-jiggering of the algorithms. THAT'S what rings false to me -- not that a person for whom social interactions are perplexing and overwhelming sometimes gets them really wrong, but that when he is confronted with new data he projects his entire reaction outward: THE PROBLEM IS THAT YOU HAVE FAILED TO RESPOND TO ME APPROPRIATELY.
Of the three people I have worked most closely with who have clinically diagnosed autism-spectrum disorders, exactly zero of them persist in that kind of ongoing, sustained personal attack.
So, yeah. Maybe real, maybe not. If real, likely dealing with some kind of a disability. But on top of that: Just not a very kind human being.
96: Yes, exactly. That's a much better way of saying what I was going for in 70 (although I don't actually have the experience with people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders to back it up).
Mm, I don't think one needs to think in an Asperger's direction here at all, at least not without distorting the clinical definition (as I half-assedly understand it).
I mean, we've all probably been guilty of producing that kind of communique, roughly and hopefully not nearly that bad, once or twice, though at the end of a relationship rather than after a first date. Or at least we've thought it, wildly. When we were young. And, uh, angry and confused. And hopefully we didn't actually say it at excruciating, hostile, pathetic length.
Still, the letter (if real) marks out a recognizably normal chain of thinking, just in the throes of something that didn't call for such throes. It's brilliant if it's a hoax letter.
Honestly, the likeliest scenario is that the poor bugger has encountered three types of woman: his mom (and , his family's servants, and sex workers. Asperger's or no Asperger's (like PGD I think Asperger's is a poorly-defined phenomenon), he acts like he expects women to serve him because in his experience, that's what women do.
I mean, we've all probably been guilty of producing that kind of communique
Uh, no.
94: well "believe in" might be wrong in the sense that these things are to a significant degree a social creation -- if people come up with a list of symptoms and choose to medicalize it as a diagnosable "syndrome", then it exists. The issue to me is that it seems to me that we are choosing to medicalize more and more personality variance, particularly among children. This could occur for social reasons that range from access to drugs to the increasing professionalization of human interaction to the greater acceptability of medicalization as a tool for personality change. (By this last I mean that "you have a disorder which is treatable by X" seems more acceptable culturally than "you have a personality flaw and must discipline yourself to act more like the people around you in manner X"). Medicalization is perhaps a path to handling the delicate balance between forgiveness and discipline that communities follow when it comes to non-criminal deviance.
Anyway, when I was young autism seemed to mean something very much more disabling than it does now, when it often seems to indicate something well within what I think of as ordinary personality variance. Here is a good academic source that tracks the massive changes in the diagnostic criteria for autism over my lifetime -- e.g. from "gross deficits in language development" to "difficulty sustaining a conversation".
Oh, sure, like you've never pinned a "Why'd you have to break up with me" note to an ex's front door through the still-twitching body of their pet. We've all done that, right?
Whoops, screwed up the html -- here is the link .
I would add that like ADHD autism spectrum seems to mirror social/environmental changes as well.
102: I don't know much about this offhand. But while I agree with you that people throw 'Aspergers' around willynilly to describe people who are a little shy and awkward (like me!) and that's goofy and misplaced, I have the impression that people who actually get diagnosed professionally tend to be outside what I would think of as normal personality variance.
101, 103: I reiterate the 'roughly, not nearly that bad' portion of my remarks, as well as the 'end of the relationship rather beginning.' Otherwise I stand by it. Those who married their high school sweethearts are disqualified, gswift.
I mean, we've all probably been guilty of producing that kind of communique
If by this you mean that we've all composed a mental letter to an ex about how it was *wrong* and *unfair* and *illogical* that they dumped us and if they would just give us the opportunity we would logically demonstrate to them why it would be better to stay together, then maybe. If you mean that we've all composed a letter like that to a stranger after a first date, not so much. I think that contrast is what makes the letter so bizarre/funny and weirdly relatable at the same time.
Like, there's a kid (late teens? Early twenties?) I say hi to in the mornings as he waits for the bus that picks him up, who clearly has some diagnosis. Conversations are stereotyped -- all of them begin with "I hope I don't miss the bus. It comes here at 7:30," (this is at right around seven every morning) and then the rest of the three or four sentence conversation has some variation, but it's very stereotyped, and he doesn't respond appropriately to things I say. He's got weird body language, and runs oddly, landing really really hard on each step.
He's got something really wrong with him, in the "maybe he will be able to live on his own one day, probably not" sense, and I assume it's autism spectrum. But he's still closer to "difficulty sustaining a conversation" than "gross deficits in language development" -- he's speaking in full, clear sentences that are grossly appropriate to the situation.
I don't see why it's so hard to believe this is genuine. I can think of at least 7 guys I've known quite well who could easily have written something very similar to this email. Probably 4-5 of them would appear on the Asperger's spectrum, and the other ones were just really poorly socialized. The fact that a couple of them have gotten much better leads me to think that this fellow probably is actually suffering from some kind of medically identifiable condition.
I've forgotten most of the details now, but a coworker had a story about a horrifying date that could easily have produced such a letter. There were snakes involved, many of them, and rudeness at a baseball game.
Also, I think most people have had some experience of feeling like the email writer, but most of us have a better sense of how things will read than this guy.
Those who married their high school sweethearts are disqualified, gswift.
College sweetie, so there. And no, you can't change every aspect of the circumstances and then claim everyone's done it. The specifics are part of the crazy.
"There are too many motherfucking snakes at this motherfucking baseball game!"
111: And no, you can't change every aspect of the circumstances and then claim everyone's done it.
Okay, fair enough: how about if I just say that that's what makes it relatable? We could delve into what pity involves. If it weren't relatable, we'd be mocking or shunning or something, right? Some seem to think we'd be institutionalizing, but that seems like overkill to me.
The autism spectrum is evidently real. Nobody gets diagnosed with Asperger's (which is to say, gets diagnosed as having an autism spectrum disorder) without meeting several diagnostic criteria. Among other things, those criteria mandate that their symptoms have a significant effect on their daily life. Does it have a distinct etiology that is discontinuous with normal function? No, that's why they call it a spectrum. Anyhow, that's not how mental illness works.
The point of having diagnostic criteria is to (1) discover people who could benefit from treatment so that it may be made available to them and (2) understand the nature of what makes them different from people who are more "neutotypical". Complain about the DSM process all you want, but by those criteria the Asperger's diagnosis (which might get rolled into generalized ASD in the DSM-V) has been as useful as anything else.
107: But it's not just after the first date. It's that he (apparently) actually SENT the thing.
It's one thing to rant to yourself, and different people engage in different flavors of "ranting to oneself," ranging from crying on a friend's shoulder to getting drunk and maudlin to writing a long screed.
But most people have enough of a filter that they don't *broadcast* that to the person in question.
There's an actual brain development thing that is aspergers, on the one hand, and then there's people who have for some reason not been exposed to certain aspects of normal socialization, on the other hand, and the latter can in very many circumstances behave in ways that seem very similar to the former, especially to lay people who don't actually have a lot of experience with the former other than maybe reading a list of diagnostic criteria. But those latter people, if given a chance to experience normal social interactions (which some of them never really are, because some early social deficits lead to bad experiences and then ostracism and then shyness and further awkwardness and then eventually a lonely resignation that it's just the cruel way life is going to be), will learn to improve, and to become more socially fluent. The former people can't, more or less, although there are certain coping techniques they can be taught in therapy, which can when successful allow them to almost fake their way through social interactions with some semblance of normalcy (depending on the severity of their condition).
115 cont'd: really it's probably been quite a bit more useful than the Axis II disorders, and yet you very seldom hear people complaining about those.
Did you know that you can't diagnose somebody with Schizophrenia if they haven't met the criteria for less than six months? True fact. Also, you can't diagnose it if they have any other diagnosable mental disorder. So if somebody has major depression plus psychotic episodes plus hallucinations, they'll get diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, but of course that's "ill-defined" and there aren't regular treatment plans, which means both that a lot of people are unable to get treatment until their symptoms get incredibly severe and that there's very little understanding of how schizotypal personality disorders work on a spectrum, and what early interventions might help. You know what class of mental disorders doesn't have that problem?
I think that we're exactly at the line where we go from saying (of a person we hate who behaves badly) that they're a sicko, to the place where we no longer hold them accountable for their acts because they're impaired. It's sort of YMMV.
118: You know how hard it is to get an incorrect dx of schizophrenia removed to the point where it won't prevent you from being treated for your real problem?
120: happily, I don't, but I can imagine. That seems like an argument for why it's better to think of disorders along a spectrum.
Why didn't the woman write a short note back to the original text from the guy, saying "No, I think not"?
Before anyone accuses me of blaming the victim here, or anything so robust, really: the letter-writer seems to have a bee in his bonnet about her failure to respond in the first place. (Never mind that he then carries on about how confused he was about her hair-flipping.) Why didn't she respond? I get that the date was horrible in her view, but obviously he didn't get that, which is why he texted about a second date. Maybe this awful extended email flatulence could have been avoided!
I'm ignoring for now the comments upthread that this is maybe the same guy who has done this before.
122: I can't speak for her, but when I was dating, I would have taken an e-mail from someone who told me he tracked down my e-mail address and knew my age as a Very Big Warning Sign.
At that point, the cost/benefit of "What's the bother to me of behaving with normal human decency?" vs. "What are the odds that this guy will take absolutely any response as encouragement, and keep escalating?" would have tipped.
119: I remember observing on a thread some time back that uncomfortably large parts of geek culture seem to revolve around not being held accountable. It's commonplace to encounter people who think they "probably" have Asperger's, because they ostentatiously look down on all those complicated social games Other People Play and of course it's not possible that they're just being assholes. This observation upset several people, but I still think it holds water and it's perfectly possible that our infamous not-quite-investment-banker is an instance of it.
122: She did respond. Ignoring him is a response, a pretty clear one.
Maybe this awful extended email flatulence could have been avoided ...if only the woman had behaved differently? Hmm, doesn't seem like the simplest way...
But anyway, what's to say that he would have taken a simple "sorry not interested" with equanimity and left at that?
115-118: I don't really disagree if you choose to view diagnostic criteria for a syndrome as a purely pragmatic way to organize a response to observable personality characteristics. That can work and it can be assessed by outcomes. I have a friend who had his (rather eccentric but to my casual observation within the range of normal) kid diagnosed with an autism-spectrum disorder. The treatment he got -- basically intense one-on-one tutoring aimed at some of his problematic habitual frustrations and behaviors -- was quite useful and made a positive difference. I'm sure the effectiveness was connected to his therapist dealing with lots of other kids who had a similar personality and being plugged in to the wider community of people who thought about how to work with those kids in a positive way. Presumably that community is organized and centered around the autism-spectrum diagnosis. My doubts and skepticism come around some of the issues that arise when psychological diagnosis gets too assimilated to the medical model -- that we have a clear disease whose cause and cures we grasp in the way that doctors understand a relatively well-understood physical organic like diabetes. And yes, it can be a problem with schizophrenia too . Of course, none of this is to say there's not a physical component to mental states, there obviously is, as there is a range of abnormal mental states.
At that point, the cost/benefit of "What's the bother to me of behaving with normal human decency?" vs. "What are the odds that this guy will take absolutely any response as encouragement, and keep escalating?" would have tipped.
Seems to me, as I said, that "Fuck off, weirdo" strikes the perfect diplomatic balance. Over the phone or Net, of course.
At the least it might make clear the threat-level.
Why didn't she respond?
Do you enjoy engaging muttering hobos on the bus? I do but I've got a gun.
Ignoring him is a response, a pretty clear one.
Not to this guy. But as Blume says, there's no guarantee a clear 'no' would have changed much. He could have followed up with a long "why not?"
I remember during our recent plagiarism discussion mentioning that the sole disciplinary action taken by my alma mater for pretty much any transgression was making people disappear for a year. There was one exception. At the beginning of my freshman year there was a dude who would do things like demand to know why a woman who had refused an invitation to dance from him at a party was later dancing with someone else. A friend found him sitting on her bed once, "just wanting to talk." Our RAs held a meeting in the first few weeks to warn us away from him. But I never heard of anything more than that. He was kicked out, tout court. I wonder if someone reported something far more serious.
129: Likelier, a "no" would have been taken as flirtation. Because if she really, truly wasn't interested, why did she even take the time to respond? Investing time in him but saying "no" at the same time is a mixed signal, and she should apologize, and go out with him if he lets her.
123: After receiving the email, sure. But before that he already had her phone number (hence the voicemails and texts he says he'd previously sent). I was wondering why she didn't just respond briefly to one of the texts.
As it sounds from the later email, he might have persisted anyway, but she didn't know that. She blocked him out without a response at all. I don't know -- maybe the date itself, about which we know nothing, was really that bad, and contained warning signs, in the first place.
124.2: I disagree.
131: Maybe, but the guy seems too literal for that. Although I guess google may tell him that not interested doesn't always mean not interested.
124: That's a better observation than the one you actually made, but it still could use some improvement:
I remember observing on a thread some time back that uncomfortably large parts of geekhuman culture seem to revolve around not being held accountable.
121: That was my short way of pointing out that "schizophrenia" contains a great big ton of baggage and was, within the memory of many people diagnosing today, a diagnosis that carried with it a near certain chance of lifetime confinement.
My main reaction to this, if it's real, is some degree of recoil that it went viral on the internet. The guy is either a jackass or personality-disordered, but either way, various things about the internet have taken interpersonal ethics back to the level of adolescence. What I hate about this feels like what I hate about Regretsy: yeah, we all make fun of shit, but usually we wouldn't be so unkind as to make a public ceremony of the mockery, and one that's bound to be seen by the object of it.
In my experience, when someone is hounding you to please just let him know what's going on, seriously, it would be so helpful to get closure because it seemed like it was so good, and so fun, and we both liked each other so much---when, in my experience, the entire single date was a miserable death-march of cruelty and bad feelings---it's all about eliciting a clear "no" so he can then harass you with open contempt about what a cunt you are. I.e., this message is him being "generous."
135: no, I get that. I just wonder if part of that isn't the not-vestigial-enough perception of it as a discrete, differentiable, severe disorder, as opposed to the far reaches of a continuous spectrum.
I got a long and intermittently hilarious email from somebody obviously schizophrenic the other day, but it wouldn't have occurred to me to put it on the internet, because it was mostly pretty sad.
Well, I say schizophrenic, he says telepathic.
So if somebody has major depression plus psychotic episodes plus hallucinations, they'll get diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, but of course that's "ill-defined" and there aren't regular treatment plans
They'll probably get a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder if there was a great deal of psychosis. At least, ten years ago that's what would have happened. They're all ill-defined, but that one gets you treated for psychosis the same as schizophrenia.
Assuming there's a way to pay for treatment, the patient shows up, etc.
137: Yeah, I think it's more likely he'd be trying to close this on what he'd consider his terms than that he'd think he'd get anywhere further with her.
138: I understand what you are trying to say. I'm trying to say that I think you're wrong (not about autism -- I know little there -- but about the various psychotic disorders). I don't think that everything diagnosed as "schizophrenia" is on the same spectrum.
133: Although I guess google may tell him that not interested doesn't always mean not interested.
"No means yes" is certainly alive and well as a meme.
Also, what AWB says in 137.
136: yeah, we all make fun of shit, but usually we wouldn't be so unkind as to make a public ceremony of the mockery, and one that's bound to be seen by the object of it.
"Going viral" isn't exactly something the poster could have controlled. Arguably, ensuring that the object of mockery discovers himself as such is a feature in this case. This isn't a case of merely getting Caught Being Just Awkward, like the unfortunate Star Wars Kid.
142: so you think schizophrenia per se is clearly separable from schizoaffective disorder or normal with schizotypal personality traits, other than by diagnostic criteria?
115: This strikes me as very shrewd, but does leave me, to some extent, despairing of how useful diagnosis as a path to treatment tends to be, with the tentative exception of mood disorders.
And in fact, treatment in practice is I think maybe messier than this would imply: at least in the settings I've seen, clinicians and pharmaceutical companies both futz with or abandon differential diagnosis when the chips are down. Breakthrough depression is, I believe, more and more treated with antipsychotics, for instance.
Probably it's more the application of the DSM than the substance of it I'm responding to, and obviously it's an economic question. In low status settings, people get a real combo platter of diagnoses, so it begins to feel like the criteria are perhaps less rigorous than they are.
There is no way I'd ever respond to this email. I wouldn't want to extend the interaction with him one bit, and there's not much reason to believe it would help.
144: No. But a spectrum is unidimensional and I don't think the class of psychotic disorders are. I also do not think that the treatment plans are very different except when the symptoms are very different. The treatments for those diagnoses overlap as greatly as the symptoms.
134: That's a better observation than the one you actually made
No, I was there, it's the same observation as the one I actually made. We could of course deflect to "human," but while trivially true, it's evasive of the point that geek culture is specifically and unnecessarily indulgent of this phenomenon in its own ways. (There was a lot of that attempted deflection on the original thread, too.)
145 said what 147.last was trying to say but with better detail.
145: oh, I'm not defending the DSM, particularly. It's an ungainly, bureaucratic product with all kinds of problems (like the handwavey Axis-II disorders). But it seems to me that the people who got Asperger's in there, and who in general pushed for recognition of Autism as a spectrum disorder, did a real service to both the research community and people with the disorder(s). And I think also remembering that these things at least nominally shouldnt be diagnosed in the absence of significant effect on somebody's daily life is important. How it plays out in practice, especially with vulnerable populations, I'm sure is much more problematic.
I don't get the horror that it went viral, either. It's not the kindest thing to laugh at it, but it doesn't seem any worse than laughing at anyone else who didn't mean to be the subject of something viral.
147: oh, I see. I didn't mean to imply that it was unidimensional. And honestly, I don't know shit about treatment. I've mostly heard about thins from the research and definitional sides.
132: 124.2: I disagree.
Well, it was clearly meant as rejection, and the target clearly interpreted it that way. So I wouldn't say that ignoring him was unclear in the message it conveyed. That he seized on it as an excuse to talk about "mixed signals" indicates that would have taken any rejection as an excuse to talk about "mixed signals," so it's really his problem AFAICS.
137: In my experience, when someone is hounding you
Yes, when someone is hounding you, but to be clear, when the letter-writer under discussion first texted in follow-up after the date, he wasn't hounding. He was asking.
Since when is utterly ignoring someone after a single date an obvious and okay thing to do? Don't you respond at least with a "No"? Granted, if in the course of the date the datee went off to get a blowjob from someone in the bathroom, I probably wouldn't bother to speak to him again, but that seems like an outlying case.
152 and previous continued: I do think that with ASD, early and active intervention (like, at the primary school level) can be really useful, and districts can only get money for that because the disorders are nominally well-classified, right there in the DSM. I know people who work with other developmental disorders that as of yet don't have their own diagnostic criteria thus defined can get sort of wistful about it.
154.2: Since when is utterly ignoring someone after a single date an obvious and okay thing to do?
But it is, if the date was horrific.
I could definitely see ignoring him if he sent texts and voicemails in such a flurry that there'd been no time to respond to the first one before getting all the others.
Of course - thinking about this further because I don't want to clean my apartment and start packing - ending a date with "it was nice to meet you" and no suggestion of meeting again is also kind of clear. Some addition may be required.
Parsimon, do you think that a person who writes *and sends* an e-mail like this is likely NOT to have made the woman feel hounded on the date? Because I don't.
(I admit to having gotten more persuaded by that "watching a brief slice of human interaction gives a fairly accurate indication of the health of the relationship" research as the years have gone by.)
156: Securing reimbursement for treatment is sort of the main point of the DSM.
160: yeah, I get that. I'm also not, now that I think about it for half a second, surprised that it doesn't correlate at all with the existence of useful or differentiable treatments for a lot of people.
I mean, isn't that the whole thing with the Axis-II disorders? They all co-occur all the time, but you have to pick a name or two to begin treatment?
In other news this is circulating among some friends of mine. I think it's supposed to be funny, but it seems more useful than lots of dating advice people post seriously.
160 seems partly true to me. The DSM is an important idea now much debased. Medicalization of mental illness was a benevolent impulse and not a wholly misguided one, and though I'm no historian of mental illness, I assume its history is bound up with not warehousing the mentally ill (except to the extent that we do, alas.)
Have you read Bettleheim's Freud and Man's Soul, Moby?
163: In the public sector places where I worked, Axis-II was usually blank. If you wanted a personality disorder, you'd better figure out a way to pay for it yourself.
165.1: Actually, I think the DSM is getting better in that the categories are getting more useful for clinicians and researchers. I just think there is a ways to go. I also think there are parts of it that aren't "medical," but you may as well try to do the part that can be studied by reproducible science by using reproducible science as well as you can.
165.2: No. I'm not a big Freudian.
159: do you think that a person who writes *and sends* an e-mail like this is likely NOT to have made the woman feel hounded on the date?
Maybe. Maybe not. I'm not going to assume retrospectively, based on the email, that his behavior in person must have made everything obvious to all those he encountered.
We don't know why and how the date itself was horrible, and maybe it did give the woman some idea that this guy should be ignored completely because he was that bad. On the other hand, I've gotten the idea that people go the ignoring route in much milder situations, just for something that was a bad (not so great, didn't connect, awkward in various ways but not hideous with warning signs) date.
There's not much point to arguing this.
166: for some reason I thought schizoaffective disorder was Axis-II; did I completely make that up?
167: Ah, fair enough. I just thought of it/thought it might be of interest because it's (as I remember it...this is all beginning to be so long ago) Bettelheim protesting the way Freud's translators sought legitimacy for psychoanalysis and thereby, more broadly, the treatment of mental health by making the language sound more medical.
169: I wouldn't think so but my copy is at work.
169: It's in the 295.XX range with schizophrenia.
I think you may be confusing schizoaffective disorder with schizotypal personality disorder (which is Axis II).
172.2: oh, I think I definitely am. Thanks.
170: I worked for the people trying to get money to for mental health treatment by making the language sound more medical.
On the other hand, I've gotten the idea that people go the ignoring route in much milder situations, just for something that was a bad (not so great, didn't connect, awkward in various ways but not hideous with warning signs) date.
If for "people" one reads "women," this makes perfect sense: even relatively reasonable men tend to take mere courtesies as signs that women want to clever euphemism. Safer, I should think, to disengage.
Anyway, we mostly looked at non-medicine interventions (i.e. case management, various legal issues, etc.) in naturalistic studies to see if any of them worked once you actually tried to run them on a public sector budget.
Trying to figure out what might work on a public sector budget definitely seems much harder than investigating what potential neural and behavioral correlates might exist.
Have I mentioned that I work in an honest-to-god ivory tower?
even relatively reasonable men tend to take mere courtesies as signs that women want to clever euphemism. Safer, I should think, to disengage.
Good lord, really? These relatively reasonable men should stop taking it that way, given that it apparently leaves women* with little choice but to clever euphemism or ignore.
* Heteronormativist
175: Oh, I've gotten it from men mostly. I don't think I've ever had a response after a single date when I asked if he wanted to go out again and he didn't. He just won't answer. It can be annoying when you just want a clear "no," but psychotic behavior trains you really fast to just disappear. (For the record, I've never disappeared except in the case of the violent attempted rapist who seemed to think maybe I'd want to go out again.)
I just disappeared after one date, and I'd been disappeared on, enough for me to think it's mildly rude but basically ok, that early on. Specifically wrt online dating, where there's no shared prior context.
I just disappeared after one date...
Serial killer?
Good lord, really? These relatively reasonable men should stop taking it that way, given that it apparently leaves women* with little choice but to clever euphemism or ignore.
Quite.
I just disappeared after one date...
Serial killer?
Hologram.
179: Who's behaving psychotically there: you who asked if he wanted to go out again, or he who didn't answer? ( I realize, you're referring to past experiences, but your formulation read funny.)
I've never disappeared or been disappeared on after a single date, but I haven't used internet dating services. Maybe if I were dating people randomly this would make sense.
186 was supposed to be to 184, but now it seems like that's limiting it's potential.
Maybe if I were dating people randomly this would make sense.
Do you mean if you were dating people who were themselves random in some way or people who were selected randomly?
She means assigning random ages to people, mobes. Try to keep up.
I think she means dating stochastically.
people who were themselves random in some way
I don't use the word "random" in that sense. Because I'm a prescriptivist.
I once had an internet date where a day afterwards she wrote saying she'd gone on a second date with another person she'd met, and that meant they were dating so she wasn't going to go on anymore dates with me but that we should be friends. My internal reaction was "what the hell, I haven't even asked you on a second date." It was the opposite of disappearing.
191: if I'm understanding correctly, you mean people with a childishly whimsical Christmas list?
192: That seems very considerate of her, to my mind.
193: "Dear Santa: There are certain forms of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put..."
195 is funny. Maybe I'm getting tired.
I felt like it was a weird power move where she wanted to feel like people were fighting over her. It'd been different if the email was "Want to meet up for dinner again sometime, but just as friends." Though I suppose I should cut her some slack as the person she started dating was a friend of mine so she might have just been trying to head off some awkward.
197: Yes, cut her some slack! Maybe she didn't want you to spend time wondering to yourself whether you should ask her out again. Maybe she didn't think it should be up to you whether any asking out again would be done. Maybe she thought it was best to make the situation clear so that everyone could be fine.
(What is that song with the refrain "Where, where, where the hell is Bill? Maybe he's gone ...to get a haircut. Maybe he ..." I forget.)
I have found the silent treatment surprising after a single date when the date obviously went really well. I remember one guy and I ended up walking around the city all night until dawn, going from dinner to drinks to a rock club to a diner, and the whole time we were talking about stuff we wanted to do together. It wasn't particularly romantic, but I thought we might hang out again, and was surprised that he didn't want to say that he didn't want to. But after one date, no, it's not crazy-making or tragic the way it is after a few months or years.
Camper van Beethoven. I haven't thought about them in ages.
Where, where the Hell is Bill?
Where, where the Hell is Bill?
Where, where the Hell is Bill?
Where, where the Hell is Bill?
Well, maybe he went to get a sideways haircut
Maybe he went to get a striped shirt
Maybe he went to get some plastic shoes
Maybe he went to get some funny sunglasses
Well, maybe he went to get an Air Force parka
Maybe he went to get a Vespa scooter
Maybe he went to get a British flag
Maybe he went to go Mod Ska dancing
Well, maybe he went to get a mohawk
And maybe he went to get some gnarly thrash boots
Maybe he went to go ride his skateboard
Maybe he went to see the Circle Jerks
------
I think maybe you have to listen to the song itself to enjoy it.
The most upsetting thing about this situation, personally, is that it ruins my plan to name a forthcoming progeny Philharmonic.
199: Maybe his feet were still sore.
201: this viral email ruins that idea?
204: No pun. That's where they first met. It's in her backstory that begins the email.
No, I got that. I still don't get 201.
206: In the mind of the poster, the viral e-mail now associates the word "philharmonic" with the hobbies of a man who writes long e-mails to unresponsive first dates demanding an apology. Ergo, a progeny thus named would bring up the memories of said man's unfortunate communique. The unlikelihood of actually naming a child "philharmonic" adds a further level of wry humour to this allusion to the disgrace brought upon an otherwise perfectly decent word by this particular instance of viral Internet madness.
I thought Stanley was hinting that he has forthcoming progeny.
208: Sadly, no, for in a further twist, the reference to progeny is actually a prelude to Stanley's forthcoming announcement that "he" is in fact a hermaphrodite, and infertile. You heard it here first.
115 and 118 are good.
I suprised by the comment that " autistic kids seemed worse when I was a kid. Now anyone can be called that!" ( yes, I'm being pissy about this)
Maybe this is bc they were warehoused instead of treated like human beings who could be educated and offered opportunities for improving their lives????
Also, the formula of "I know a couple of autistic people and they didn't act like this!" is worthless. The best saying about this spectrum is " if you know one person on the spectrum, then you know one person on the spectrum.". I know this might be shocking, but just bc they are on the spectrum does not mean that they are individual human beings who individual quirks. It helps to think of them as actual individual human beings.
(yea, yea, yea...maybe I am being pissy and unfair. Sue me.)
Wow. Missed that "not" bt are and individual.
121: Are there any mental illness characteristics that don't fall on a spectrum ranging from "No real problem" to "OMG"? I'm trying to think of a binary and can't. It's late though, and I've taken an Ambien so am foggier than San Francisco and its little cat's feet. Never mind.
OT: re 100
my step-father grew both frankincense and myrrh inside, successfully. we always made much of the little things at christmas. I didn't realize they were so finicky. but he was an excellent gardener. he was also often fun at parties, and memorized lots of good poems. he was not totally devoid of likable human qualities. the main draw for my mom was that he was super-hot. we don't tend to think of this motive with regards to women staying in...problematic relationships. particularly, her telling me she stayed so long because "the sex was great" did not endear me to her at the time.
as regards the OP I am very ready to believe it, and I would certainly regard with suspicion someone who had found out my email address and age without my giving him this knowledge. and really, he must be awful to be with; that's blindingly clear. I am honestly just ignorant about dating since I have never done anything other than have a long-term boyfriend and either cheat on him serially or cheat on him with reserve boy#2, slated to move up to new boyfriend when the time came. I have been on sort-of dates, I guess, with the future clandestine lovers, to suss them out, but more like to see if they were going to be worth the heartache. (there was passion and heartache,)
I would certainly regard with suspicion someone who had found out my email address and age...
If it comes up under the first few pages of google results it's fair game. I mean, sure you don't tell your date the things you've discovered (that's just weird) but who doesn't google?
Thanks, 207 and 209! (Well, maybe not so much 209. I should have written "hypothetical forthcoming progeny".)
hi standpipe's blog! it's so nice to see you commenting!
I think we replaced pity, mock, and fear with "rim, snare, and kick" a few threads back (he said, 215 comments later than the moment at which it would have been, no, trust me, hilarious.)
Are there any mental illness characteristics that don't fall on a spectrum ranging from "No real problem" to "OMG"?
Dissociative fugue? Actually I have no idea as this is one of those things you read in the DSM and then likely never encounter. Perhaps there are versions where you just end up in the living room, no big thing. (And then if you have one of those followed by an actual trip to Svalbard or Burundi you can't remember, it's like a Dissociative Prelude and Fugue.)
my step-father grew both frankincense and myrrh inside
He just didn't care for the gold part, he was very unwordly that way.
You can grow gold. You transmute lead into gold, but it isn't really "growing."
I've always found it a bit odd that the autism spectrum exists as a spectrum. I wouldn't have guessed on my own that extreme cases of autism were in any way related to Aspberger's. How do people decide which things to group together in a spectrum and is there a conclusive way to show that or is it guesswork?
215 gets it right. It'd be almost irresponsible not to google. But then you have to launder any info you got by getting the date to te it to you before you let on that you know it.
220: Nonsense. You can grow marigolds, and just trim away the mari.
Does mild untreated schizophrenia exist? I would have guessed that that's always OMG, though perhaps it takes some time to get there.
Does mild untreated schizophrenia exist?
No, by definition. There are milder conditions where psychosis is a feature. Whether they are similar to schizophrenia except in degree is a matter of debate.
Right, one should expect most individual *symptoms* to come on a spectrum ranging from mild to severe. But I'd naively guess that most diseases have a narrower band of possibilities.
221: there's very little that can be said conclusively about mental illness (or, for that matter, brain function), but with a spectrum disorder in general you're saying that there's likely to be a continuous (and often well-formed) distribution in the population for any one of the diagnostic criteria. So, for Asperger's and autism, there is a test (the Autism Quotient) that's often given as part of the process of determining if somebody has an ASD, and there's a cutoff on the test past which you meet the criteria, but scores on the test tend to follow a basically normal distribution in the population.
226: I'm not sure what you mean? Mild, untreated schizophrenia doesn't exist because receiving treatment for severe symptoms is part of the diagnosis of schizophrenia.
But when I think of extreme cases of autism, I don't think they could read or understand that test.
mental illness (or, for that matter, brain function
Yes. Dealing with Neurologists and Psychs can be a pain in the booty. It isnt their fault, but "We really dont know anything!" gets really old.
This was extremely hard to take 17 years ago when we were first realizing that something was different about our daughter. You want to have some idea about what the future might be like for her, but they cant tell you crap.
Gradually, you get your sea legs and learn to live with uncertainty.
I thought 225 meant that Schizophrenia is by definition not mild, not that it's by definition being treated. Cause that would be the stupidest definition ever. Being *responsive to a certain treatment* would be a plausible diagnostic criterion, but actually being currently treated is not. Am I misreading 228?
229: right, that's true, and of course when you get to things like "unable to read or speak" then there are going to be functional discontinuities in patients. But the idea is that if you look at the multidimensional space of all the diagnostic criteria, there's not going to be a clearly, linearly separable cluster of people that are healthy, a separate cluster of people with the mild disorder, and a third of people with the severe disorder. The analogy that's often made is to hypertension, but the diagnostic criteria for that are in many ways simpler, so it's easier to understand it as a continuous space.
I should say that all of this is fairly controversial, and a lot of clinicians (which I am really, 100% manifestly not in any way), especially in the US, think it's both true and important to think of people with severe mental illness as forming a discrete, independent group.
231: well, you can get treated for psychosis (more than once) without being diagnosed with schizophrenia. As I said somewhere up above, a diagnosis of shizophrenia requires six months of continuous, severe symptoms. Lots of people have many of the symptoms of schizophrenia but never get diagnosed with the disease (hence things like "schizoaffective disorder" and "schizotypal personality disorder", as discussed above).
Not surprisingly there are some occassional feuds bt parents of Autistic children who are higher functioning and those with children who are lower functions.
Crips and Blood stuff.
217: Oh sure, mock me because I couldn't pick up on your sarcastic affect.
There are milder conditions where psychosis is a feature.
Milder psychosis is not a bug, it's a feature.
It's an old cliche and not proven, but I've known three schizophrenics who were more talented and energetic than almost anyone when they were in remission. One of them had two careers and started two families during long periods of remission. It would account for the fact that a harmful trait that's almost certainly hereditary remains in the gene pool.
If he's real. Of which I am not convinced in the least.
Yeah, I'm not convinced either. It's just a little too over-the top to be real, I think.
234: God, I walked into that one a few months ago with a new colleague here. We were having a meeting to discuss what kinds of student issues we face at Hogwarts, and I asked if there's any support for students with autism, as that was a problem I'd run into at Religious School. Of course we've all had students with Aspergers in our classes, but this was something the school seemed unprepared to help me with, and meanwhile I've got a brilliant young woman in my class having loud crying jags in the back of the room, outbursts, etc. One of my colleagues gets this really steely hard angry look in her eyes and wheels on me and says, "Autism is when someone is completely and totally locked in and can't communicate at all and she would never be able to read or speak or have any adult intelligence at all. You're talking about Aspergers."
So I assume she just has literally no knowledge whatsoever of the different ways autism manifests, and I start explaining the different combinations of abilities that people with autism might display, and how they change over time, as if to a small child, and that's when she informs me that she grew up with an autistic brother of the very locked-in type, and so she doesn't want to hear a word about autistic people going to college.
Fucking hornet's nest, man.
239: Wow.
My workplace is starting up a program for children with autistic spectrum disorders in January. I have so much to look forward to.
There has got to be a lot of fuckeduppedness around the problem that, with newer methods of helping children with autism develop more skills, that there may be some who are less able, and others whose parents never had the benefit of that information. I remember Bérubé writing at one point about how kids with Downs were thought to be incapable of speech until like the 50's because they were institutionalized and denied that kind of socialization. If you abandoned your kid back then, what a fucking shithead you must feel like now. I think we're watching that crisis with autism in real time now. No, not every autistic kid is going to get an A in a college course on satire, but, to borrow a trope from Bérubé, not many developmentally normal kids are going to get an A in a college course on satire. Ability is so weird.
"normal" in quotation marks, of course.
If you abandoned your kid back then, what a fucking shithead you must feel like now. I think we're watching that crisis with autism in real time now. No, not every autistic kid is going to get an A in a college course on satire, but, to borrow a trope from Bérubé, not many developmentally normal kids are going to get an A in a college course on satire. Ability is so weird
Ugggg. I feel 239 and 241 in my gut.
I have told the story of the school psych who told us our daughter wasnt autistic bc she hugged him.
I wanted to say "You must not be a school psych bc you are so stupid."
239: But people don't seem to have a problem with the very wide range of deficits a stroke, heart attack, or auto accident, etc. can produce. Any guesses as to why the official name and a fixed set of characteristics means so much?
My workplace is starting up a program for children with autistic spectrum disorders in January.
I'm hoping this is a "care and therapy" program rather than a "we are kind of hoping they will turn out to be maths geniuses that we can exploit" program, cf the Emergents.
243.2: Yeah, you have, and it is so so so obnoxious. This is part of the problem with diagnostic criteria, though it's not like I have a better idea. I think my colleague wants to be able to say that her family did the very best they could and this idea that some autistic people go to college is a lie; otherwise they failed her brother. Thinking about this particular kid and what she's able to do, and maybe we could help her to be more able in some ways, but we're not going to destroy her to get her there, and it's not like you can compare her to other people with autism as if it's all the same--keeping that balance and not constantly holding it up to a list of criteria has got to be frustrating. Or, Jesus, trying to compare notes with other parents of autistic kids--I can't imagine.
I think the autism definition broadened a lot over the last thirty years -- when I first heard of autism, it was only in the context of either totally-locked-in, or at the very most functional Rain-Man-esque savants. It sounds to me as if the broadening makes sense and is useful, but I wouldn't be surprised if the stupid psychologist in 243 was stupid because when he was trained, he learned something like 'autistic means no voluntary social or emotional connections at all ever', and he never updated his knowledge. People are really resistant to the idea that what they were properly taught by a respectable source might have been right in 1975, but is wrong now.
244: I think a stroke or whatever is just emotionally different from a developmental disorder. Parents are responsible for trying to raise a kid to be as functional as possible, and, due to antiquated ideas about disorders, maybe the kid doesn't grow up to be a functional adult. Or maybe the kid never would have grown up to be a functional adult. That's so much guilt, and emotionally it's on the parents for not knowing what's best for their own kid. If a doctor doesn't help you get good PT to recover from a stroke, he's just some random asshole. He's not your dad, and he didn't frame every single experience you had throughout your developmental years.
That is, I think there's a good chance that your colleague (older than you?) is right that a kid who was diagnosed as autistic in the sixties or seventies would have been extraordinarily unlikely to go to college, regardless of the treatment they got. A kid like your student is diagnosed (usefully and productively) as autistic now, but there's a good shot she wouldn't have been if she were the same age as your colleague's brother.
249: My age exactly, and a younger brother! I think that's maybe part of the intense defensiveness.
244: Those are a bit different than schizophrenia at least. There is a definition for a heart attack that is more or less concrete and independent of the problems produced by the heart attack. For schizophrenia, the deficits are the definition (more or less).
What I mean is that they may have had a lot of attempts at intervention and developmental therapy and stuff---not as many as they'd have now---but with little result. And that's the tragic other side of the coin; what if someone's saying your kid could talk and interact if you do X, Y, and Z, and you do it, and your kid still can't? Certainly that doesn't mean that we shouldn't tell parents to try X, Y, and Z, but it does make that family lose faith that there is any useful thing to do.
249, 252: Oh, that is different -- that's certainly in the range where autism was defined more broadly.
I just disappeared after one date, and I'd been disappeared on, enough for me to think it's mildly rude but basically ok, that early on. Specifically wrt online dating, where there's no shared prior context.
Yeah, I was disappeared on and disappeared plenty after one date. I prefer a kind handshake and "I had a nice time" with no mention of a second date as a way to signal that, but people aren't always that skilled. I learned to be, once someone showed me a kind closure, but it took an example and learning.
If it comes up under the first few pages of google results it's fair game.
You can get my age and weight from sports results posted online, and my address as well. I cannot possibly hold it against someone to know those things. I just assume they do, which gives me permission to find out stuff about them. Actually, I liked that my new guy and I didn't pretend that we hadn't done that, and simply introduced questions about stuff that we'd googled into conversation.
Re: the woman and her brother:
Things change.
Treatments change.
I have lots of guilt now bc of things we didnt do when our daughter was much younger.
Our knowledge is better now that is was then. Plus, our expectations have been changed dramatically. Berube's article is fabulous on this topic.
We have to be challenged regarding our expectations. Yet, when we are, we naturally feel guilty bc our expectations were lower before.
I think we replaced pity, mock, and fear with "rim, snare, and kick" a few threads back (he said, 215 comments later than the moment at which it would have been, no, trust me, hilarious.)
It is hilarious.
Man, it's presumptuous of me to try being reassuring here, but you know you did the best you could with what you knew at the time? There's no guarantee that anything you'd might have done differently would have been important, but most importantly you couldn't have done anything you didn't know was a possibility.
I just assume they do, which gives me permission to find out stuff about them.
Why? Who on earth cares? You've been on a date with somebody, you know what they look like. What they think when they're off stage is what's going to matter if there's a future, and it's disappearingly unlikely that you'll get that off the internet if they're not forthcoming with it in the pub/cafe/bed.
Usually the googling is pre-date, for signs of incompatibility. It is entirely possible to find things online that would dq a person (a Lakers fan?!!), and finding out about age and address happen along the way. You may be underestimating the relevant and quickly accessible information out there.
No, I'm not talking about people who are careless about putting information out there.
My work posts my work email address every time I'm on the agenda for a public meeting. My age shows up for race/meet results and I'd have to work at having that not happen. You'd find those out just as fast as you'd see that I had a broken arm and went to Berkeley. There's just nothing for it. That stuff's out there and I don't go to dates pretending they don't know.
259.1: Megan: what is wrong with you. Tweety I can give a pass to, but the penalty for treason must be severe and uncompromising.
I suspect part of the colleague's resistance is due in part to a tendency in popular culture to ascribe a lot of social awkwardness to Asperger's on little evidence or knowledge. (I suspect this followed the Wired article on Asperger's as the geek syndrome.) If people (not saying AWB is to, be clear) are acting as if an Asperger's diagnosis tracks preferring Star Trek and T-shirts from thinkgeek and being occasionally blunt and rude to others in dating situations (but fine at social cues when they care), I can see where the reaction comes from. Plus the definitions have shifted a lot; Temple Grandin was diagnosed as autistic but has said today her diagnosis probably would have been Asperger's.
I don't think it's out of a noble lie that "we did everything we could so therefore all people with autism are locked in" but more that "autistic" is starting to get tossed around like "moron" was and no one's sure where the boundaries of the term are.
I didn't even know the Kings still existed.
Shoot. Or maybe Kings' fan. Fuck. Or Kings fan.
I meant: Kings fan.
For at least another year, if that. Until they become the Los Angeles Kings of Anaheim or whatever. Then, fuck 'em.
River Cats, ftw!
262 -- Not really related, but this was pretty sweet. Ice Cube is a Lakers fan. And I think you grew up using the bougie freeway.
I haven't been keeping up so this may be pawned
Tales of the Broker Hearted
"...we figured we'd open it up to our readers for more stories from the front lines of romance in the financial industry. And boy, did you all deliver."
Makes our dude look nice and normal
So is Bob's position in 80/88 that trolls want to be told "Fuck off", at which point they'll declare victory and go home never to bother you again?
That doesn't match any troll behavior I've ever seen.
"even relatively reasonable men tend to take mere courtesies as signs that women want to clever euphemism. Safer, I should think, to disengage.
Good lord, really? These relatively reasonable men should stop taking it that way, given that it apparently leaves women* with little choice but to clever euphemism or ignore."
gah. if the default initiator sex did not misinterpret ambiguity as signals of interest, noone ever would have sex again. in fact, just this sort of reality-immune thinking is thought of as the most attractive trait a man could have.