I feel bad for not having posted anything for a few weeks. I always promise to post something sooner or later, and it usually ends up being later. I do have a legit reason for not posting something sooner. I have a Chromebook Laptop that I keep by my bed, and when it's late, and I am waiting for my sleeping pills to kick in and work, I can grab my laptop and lay in bed and write a post. However, my Chromebook stopped working, which is kind of maddening because I have only had it since December. I have family members with the same laptop that they have had a for a couple of years, and they still work. My didn't, thus, no late night posts. I mean, all of my posts are written late at night, but even more so with my broken laptop. I just figured I would share some things that I have been into lately.
First off, I passed my Film and Culture class with a score of 100.14%. I did an easy extra credit report that put me over the 100% mark. I really loved the class, and I signed up for two classes for the fall semester. I am taking a Sociology class, which is pretty cool. When I was in high school, one of my dad's best friends taught a sociology class for seniors, and I aced that class, so I figured since I just studied cultures, classes, races, and how they are represented in American film, but now instead of studying the same things in film, I am learning about them in real life, and not how they are portrayed in movies made by filmmakers who might have personal biases, or underrepresent cultures that are based off of stereotypes, and how those cultures, races, and classes are in the actual real world.
My second class hasn't started yet because it's not as long as the sociology class, but I will get the same amount of credit hours towards my degree. It's a class about how illegal drugs effect the world by studying where they come from, where they are made, how they are smuggled, how they are dealt, and how it affects the user, and possibly their families and friends.
I have a good friend who pointed out that I really enjoy taking the classes where I get to study people, how they interact, how they are misrepresented or represented well. When she told me that, I thought about it for a while, and I think I know why that stuff is so fascinating to me.
So, I have mentioned many times that I have Asperger's Syndrome, and I own it. When I look back throughout my life, I can see things more clearly now. For example, I was bullied really bad through elementary and middle school. I always wondered why that was. Now that I know I have a mental disorder that can make me not make sense of some things, or act in ways that aren't normal to others, but normal to me. I have obsessions that I love to share, and I was always just me, but didn't understand the bullying. Now I can see that I was a little strange.
Another example is that when I was dating, social cues would go over my head, and girls that were genuinely interested in me gave up all of a sudden to me, but to them, I think back and see all of the nonverbal clues they were giving me saying that they were very interested in me that all went over my head. Again, that's the Asperger's side of me. If you want an example of that, here's one:
I was hanging out at this apartment with a roommate of mine back in the earlier 2000s, and the apartment had six girls living in it, and we became really good friends with them all. However, there was a girl that I really liked out of the bunch, (Not to brag, but I went out on at least two dates with all six of them, one of which is an awesome story, but I will save that for later.) So, one of the girls in that apartment started to notice chemistry between the two of us, and she and I were really flirty, and things were going well. Anyway, she called me up and said "My sister and brother-in-law are going out of town, and I am housesitting, and I was wondering if you wanted to come help me housesit. Now, I had BYU football season tickets, and there was an away game against Wyoming, and so she threw in that we could watch the game.
So, I go over to her sister's house, and the two of us were alone, for three hours, and we had the game on, and I was into the game, but she would do things, like when I cheered about a good play, she would too, but she started inching over slowly, but surely, to a point where there wasn't any air between us, and she started tracing something on my back with her finger, and started hugging me when I was excited about a football play, and I was so totally oblivious to the fact that she was making her move, and she really wanted to date me, and I blew it.
One more story. I got a job at Marriott where I was making worldwide reservations for the Marriott hotel properties. I had just gotten out of a relationship that shattered my heart. Even thinking back on it, it still feels a little raw. Anyway, after a few weeks, there was this beautiful blond girl that I was in the Marriott training classes with, and our schedules were lined up for the same times and days, and she started asking me questions like "Are you dating anyone?" or "We should totally hang out outside of work!". She was from a really small town in Idaho, but she was living with her sister in Salt Lake City.
So, I finally asked her out, and we did some fun things. I took her to this awesome place in Salt Lake City where you hike for two minutes, and there is an awesome overlook of the whole valley. I took her up there with my guitar, and played her songs that I had written. It was a great day. Then again, I had BYU football season tickets, and she went with me to the first game of the season. While we were walking back to my car after the game, she told me that she really loved spending time with me, but that she wanted to move back to Idaho to attend BYU-Idaho, but she said that she was going to keep her work schedule for Friday and Saturdays, and that she wanted to go to school there, but come back on the weekends and stay with her sister so that we could continue to date.
I should have seen the signs that she really wanted to be with me to a point where she would be making four to five hour long car trips to come down and date me. Which we did for a few weeks. I think she was just waiting for me to ask her if I wanted to be with her in a serious, marriage type relationship. I didn't pick up on it. My brain was saying, if she really wanted to be with me, she wouldn't have left, but it was the opposite. I actually still have saved emails in one of my email accounts from her, and now that I know about my Asperger's Syndrome, reading those emails was almost a dagger in my heart. She was so into me, and she wanted to be with me so bad. She gave me her phone numbers for both home, and school, and her cell. She gave me addresses to come visit her. She talked about how much she loved going with me to fun places, and missed and loved talking to me for hours a day. I didn't get it. I actually found an old photo CD disc that had some pictures of us together a few days ago, and it was kind of heartbreaking.
What was funny was a couple of years later, I joined the LDS Institute choir by my house, and there was a girl that I was attracted to there, and it turned out that she was from the same small town in Idaho, and that the girl I dated was her exact same age, and lived right across the street from each other, and they were best friends growing up.
So, back to what I was talking about, I think that I am super interested in studying subjects about people and cultures, and what makes people tick, because I think that I don't really have the skills to notice things on my own, but when I study these things, it's actually helping me fix those in my mind. I am able to step back, take a look at a situation, try and read it the best I can, and then act in what I think is the right way to act, lol.
I think that everyone has something about them that isn't quite right. I mean, nobody's perfect, right? I think if we can admit to ourselves that there are things about us that aren't quite right, and own it, you can improve and work on that thing that you wish was better. I can't tell you what those things are. Sometimes, those things that seem bad can actually become a strength, or something that benefits your life in a way you don't understand right now. I have found that some of my "negative" traits are actually something that gives me strength. I obsess over things, but one of those things is Film, and I have a job as a film critic where that obsession has become a strength. One of my first posts on this blog over two years ago was a quote from Joey Ramone that said: "Everybody is screwed up in their own special way." I totally believe that, and I think that for a silly quote, it's pretty profound.
Well, that's all I have for tonight. I hope that you are all safe, and I hope that you are laughing at my Asperger's dating stories. Covid-19 is still a thing and people I know are still getting sick. Be safe. I am so grateful for you all, and I really hope that my little blog posts are something that you like and take something away from. I enjoy writing them. It's interesting that some of my posts have tons of views, and then posts I think will do well don't have as many readers as I would like. However, if there was only one person reading these posts, it's worth it for me to keep writing them. When I started in April of 2020, I didn't think that I would still be posting things almost two and a half years later, yet here I am.
I think that in my first blog post, I said that my dad was a Sophomore Language Arts teacher at the high school I mostly attended. I say mostly because I went to a little less than a quarter of my sophomore year at the high school down the street from our house, but in my dad's class, on the first day of class, he would give everyone a notebook, and for the first ten minutes of class, my dad had a topic written on the board, and we were supposed to write a journal entry those first ten minutes, and if we didn't want to do the topic on the board, my dad gave everyone some papers that were stapled together that had 300 different topics that the students could pick from and write about. I have that list, and also, I have some ebooks on my iPad that have creative writing prompts that I was going to use to get ideas of what to blog about, and I am proud to say that I have never once used a topic from that list of 300 topics, and have never used a creative writing topic to post something here on my blog. I do have another private blog that I have creative writing prompts that have that I use to practice writing better than I currently do. However, I have never once relied on those lists and prompts to share things about me with you all on my blog, and that makes me happy.
Well, time to hit the sack, and then I will go to bed ;) Have a nice time of day when you read this post!
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