h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What attracts anyone to others? Perceived (sp?) similarities?

Most of our colleagues had been either laughing at me or patronising me for years. I'm odd, you see. Hopelessly naïve, literal-minded, unable to recognise sarcasm, totally uninterested in fashion and popular culture, solitary, painfully shy......
But we were like a family in those days (it still is to a certain extent).
There were girls my age in our office who were trying to teach me to be human and the doctor had given me beta-blockers to control the panic symptoms.

According to the grapevine the new accountant was odd and unfriendly.
After six weeks or so most people gave up on him (It wasn't much use smiling when you passed him because he had his eyes on the ground all the time and didn't see you). They thought he was stern and grumpy but to me he looked scared, so I persevered.

We were the department that used the photocopier most so when they got a new one with all sorts of bells and whistles it came to us.
No-one else could work out how to make it perform all its marvellous functions so dozens of people just used to ask me.
He used to come in and do interesting things with it, without any help, and then leave without ever making a sound or catching anyone's eye.

Then we got a printer.
The rest of the organisation continued to have their work printed by the computer department 30 or 40 miles away and delivered the next morning but we needed immediacy.
Guess who was the only person able to understand the printer. (Worrying in't it!<nerd&gt

One lunchtime, when there were only two of us in the office, he came in and asked if he could use my printer (it was in the corner, behind my desk) and again he was so terribly competent.
And when he smiled his whole face lit up.

I HAD to make friends with him. I couldn't leave him locked in there.
So I started lurking in the newsagent/sandwich shop/reception and shooting out and accidentally meeting him... (even managed to genuinely accidentally bump into him in the library)
And one lunchtime I rang the wrong extension () and got him - and after apologising and doing the dumb blonde routine I told him off for not saying hello, so after that he had to.
Then I forcibly lent him The Collector (by John Fowles)

I only meant to make friends with him and stop him looking scared and unhappy. Honest.

For read

They expect children to be reading when they enter kindergarten? They get terribly upset with you over here if your kids are already reading when they start school. You get accused of pushing them

Poor kid. Did he survive? How old was he? Was it exams or bullying?

You have to hunt for the right school and move heaven and earth to get permission from the education authority to send your kids there and then keep pushing.....

I help at the school for two days per week (Music, English, Maths, general dogsbodying) - it helps a great deal when you actually get to know the teachers/children/school (That's not my reason for doing it but it's a bonus)

It was always going to be hard to find a school that was right for both a pathologically withdrawn child and a whirlwind with ADHD.

I had originally intended to educate them at home but we realised that we had to find a way of socialising the little recluse before he actually grew up

School's always a compromise.

Who was the person? (Curiosity killed the again)

Offspring difficulty - aren't those two words synonymous?

We're mostly hyperactive but we discovered 9 years ago that the (then)13yo was dyslexic and they said I was too. It explained an awful lot of oddities (like not recognising faces or landmarks, having to translate other people's seemingly Chinese speech, having no sense of time, mirror-writing, being dead thick even with an IQ of 184ish, not having a short-term memory. . . you know the feeling) It's just such a relief when you find out you're not the only person in the world and you don't need to be locked up after all, isn't it?

So needy, aren't we?
My wife had a history of praying for the right man and attaching herself to fellows who liked her but... Then I came along and attached myself to her and she's still praying for the right man...

A friend of mine hovered around a fellow (also a friend of mine) at college for weeks and couldn't get a peep out of him. So she plotzed herself in his lap at a party and looked into his face and said,"You're it!" That was that. She still rools his roost.

My tech creds are small but voluminous. I never learn quickly or well or correctly, but somehow I manage to find out the little fiddly bits others miss...of course, I never tell them how many things I broke before I got it right...

Was his child not reading well enough or reading too well?

Ach, the person with the kid at risk? You would ask. Just someone I met at the bookstore yesterday. A fellow whose name I never asked but whom I had encountered before. A former combat engineer and demolitions expert who used to work in the history and archives at the local hospital and now teaches History to JDs.

The best I could understand it, he was happy that the child could read at all and the suits wanted the kid to be able to read correctly aloud...and sight-read unfamiliar material phonetically...

Something I'm not sure the suits could do....

teehee - yes, she says, reinstalling Windows yet again . It's being interested enuf tae fiddle that makes the difference isn't it?

I wasn't actually looking for a man (as in "relationship") - I'd already had too much trouble with them and I am genuinely a loner (and 98% of my friends are/were men - I don't understand women - and I've never had any trouble finding other things). I was looking forward to spending my old age FREE (instead of which I'm stuck with my mother hanging around chattering inanely all the time ) but he was so painfully shy and inept I had to find some way of stopping him trembling, so I seduced him - and it rebounded

Were you praying for the right woman too?

Does he enjoy having his roost rooled though?

No - the person with the Asperger's child.

At what age do American children enter kindergarten?

We synch of out are!

epy!
Yeah, Galaxy Babe.
The fellow with the woman in his lap had grown up as the only boy in a three girl and single parent mother family...They all but one now live within a block of each other in Austin. They came from York,Pa.
So, what was one more female telling him what to do?
And the there was the obvious benefit as I don't believe he was into incest...which might have made him odd in York...

I wasn't praying for much of anything. Beyond some casual stalking incidents, y'know, kinda worshipping from a afar, an episode of being smitten with a beautiful lesbian waitress who changed her uniform in view of the dishwashing machine I was operating...I was usually braced by the female...with the wife, it was a case of being in the right place at the right time...we were playing emotional pinball with the world and happened to collide with each other...PING! PING!
Slap! PING! PING!, twelve years worth...
I'm a loner and she's arrogant....so, we reinforce each other...and occasionally back-handedly complement each other...and the child is thus schizo because the conflicts we have in the open, she has internally...

Kindergarten is for five year olds. Many kiddies are in some kind of pre-school or daycare program from three to four....

Yeah, that's why I am six states away from my mum...
I thought she was an idiot when I was a child. After a period when I doubted my own sanity and I tried to give everyone the benefit of the doubt...I have returned to that thought.

Yes, that thing does still work.
Was your post deliberately empty? (Since you'd said everything you wanted to in the title)
Are you still registered to receive email digests only?
Are they not arriving?


You thought you were mad too, huh?
Isn't it wonderful when you discover you have company in your lunacy (4% no less) and it's actually t'other 96% that are handicapped.

I'd like to be six countries away from mine but unfortunately I've been sentenced to spend the rest of my life showing my gratitude for not having been put in an orphanage.

We live in the middle of nowhere because neither of us can cope well with other people. We'd like to be somewhere even more remote but we can't because of her . . . and she seems set to outlive me .
We're very boring - we don't throw parties or take her out to dances or theatres and we don't even live somewhere sensible where she can visit people all day long so she expects me to be interested in the escapades of her fundamentalist friends - and if I manage to shut myself in here she talks incessantly at the poor dog in an awful high booming voice, or shouts into the phone just outside the door, or turns the television to full volume...

You lock a kid away and condition it, with the finest animal-training techniques, to be silent and invisible - and then (when it suits you) you expect it to change its spots?

>>I don't believe he was into incest...which might have made him odd in York...<<

Do you mean being into incest - or NOT being into incest - might have made him odd in York?
(PS: It's overrated )

How do solitariness and arrogance (in different people) reinforce or complement each other?

Are you sure she's arrogant? She may just be unsure what to say or do so retreats into what other people perceive as stand-offishness.

Have you seen the professional mediator yet?

Ours go into the nursery at three and school at four. I guess it's good for the kids that don't get any attention at home but it's totally wrong for the other sort. Most infant school teachers are so thick - and dogmatic.
In this country they consider your child to be at risk if it IS reading by the time it starts school.
(I was lucky - the teacher that got me in her reception class took the easiest option and sent me to the library for the next 7 years )

Yes, I'm still receiving the digests.
I was cleaning out my email last night and ran across that months-old link.
More later. I'm supposed to be in the shower right now. For church...speaking of fundamentalists (note the phrase 'mentalist' buried in there!)

You're not a fundy are you?
You can't be, you seem too intelligent and broad-minded. Please tell me it isn't so.

Surely you would never try to beat the devil out of your child?

No, I'm not a fundamentalist.
y'know, fundament used to be a polite term for a girdle....

The church we go to has people of all levels of mental ability and theological conviction, and that's just the staff...

No, I was whaled away at with a belt (in a specific area) by a mum who thought she could cope with her own mental difficulties by making us behave. Having no knowledge of genetics or psychology, she fell back on making a fool of herself.
That kind of stupidity is a religion unto itself. The religion of ignorance.
Sit in church and babble about the Wisdom of Solomon(sp?) and then go home and be a hick like all the other trash...

Um, were you the one talking about a favorite Andy Capp cartoon?

Oh mine never used a belt.



High-heeled shoes, hairbrushes, tennis racquets....and anything else that came to hand, but she didn't wear belts

Wasn't me (Unless it was a while ago and I've forgotten). Do tell.
(I have a favourite Peanuts cartoon - 'tis the one about Jezebel being defenestrated, but it's been over 20 years so I couldnae gie ye a verbatim account o' it.)