I have a lot of mentally agonizing memories of misunderstandings with other people; to say that they haunt me would be an understatement. Sometimes I end up in a rut, going over them again and again in my mind, as if I could mend the social wounds. The rumination has helped me only a little, helped me to solidify what I want out of social interactions, what to avoid, patterns to recognize, but it's mostly unproductive.

After a lifetime of putting sharp, jagged pieces together, I've come to the conclusion that I can basically expect nothing socially from neurotypicals, at least not the USian kind. Their core motivation is just too different from mine. I want people in my life for intellectual stimulation (and one for physical intimacy); they want people for...just bare social contact I guess. I mean, some of them like intellecual stimulation as well, and also people who share their hobbies and interests, other athletes to compete against, etc., but those are really secondary desires I think. The core desire seems to be something more basic. It has similarities to what I want, but it's not the same. I don't know the best way to describe it and I haven't mapped all the contours of it; I'm only observing various instances of it, and as an unsympathetic outsider. I want to say they want people to commune with them; commune seems like a good word. I, on the other hand, am fine with more social distance, even in my intimate relationships.

I just want people to see things for what they are, see me for who I am, believe what I say, and stop trying to read into whatever I do or say. If I say, for example, that I am angry, I'm content that people know that I am angry. I don't need them to empathize with my feelings. I don't want them to try. They will fail because they see things from their perspective and not mine. Emotions are subjective and their experience is personal; I don't generally consider them something to share. They can't really be shared. I mean, two people who know each other well can be happy about the same thing at the same place and time and communicating their happiness to each other, but they are each having their own personal experience of happiness, not exactly sharing a single happiness. Plus emotions have physiological component, and no one can know what it feels like to be in someone else's body, to feel someone else's heart pound.

This has gotten off-topic. I'm drowsy and I can't even remember what I wanted to post.

I woke up too early again this morning, but I think I know why: it wasn't just cinnamon that I'd added to my just-before-bed meal the day before yesterday. I also had psyllium husk. So that's what I'm going to add tonight.

I would like to be at 3,500 Mandarin "words" by the end of this year. By my rough calculations, I'd have to learn over eleven words per day for the rest of the year. I'm currently learning eight per day, ten on occasion. Actually, some of them are review terms from Pimsleur. Well, I want to be at 3,500 total, they don't all have to be new.

Oh, I remember what I wanted to say: I think people have thought me mean and rude online, but it's because we had different motivations for being in those spaces. I wanted intellectual stimulation, so I got frustrated with people who would respond without reading, post off-topic, comment on shit they knew nothing about, etc. And I expressed my frustration. In a couple of the more egregious cases, I called people morons. Normies don't really care about intellectual stimulation most of the time. It's probably not as true of people who are academics are significantly above average intelligence, but those are people I wouldn't often come across. Normies care about just general socializing, and expecting people to stick to the topic, repond thoughtfully, and actually read more than a few sentences is at odds with that apparently, and questioning, disagreeing with, and dissecting others' opinions is anti-social and borderline rude, particularly among womyn. So I don't really bother anymore, although I will take liberties when I'm not talking to USians.

I wish it had not taken me half a lifetime to figure this out. I could have spared myself some mental baggage and put more effort towards socializing in a rewarding way. What's exasperating is that they seem preoccupied with what strikes them as rude but see no problem responding blindly, wasting my time with poorly thought-out drivel, acting as if their unfounded assumptions are facts, and generally disrespecting the purpose of a discussion forum by basically trying to shut down discussion. If people would at least consider those things as rude, I'd be more content. This is specific to text-based interaction because, me being fatigued by talking and listening, I don't seek out offline discussion.

I remember my ex telling me that, when she first started messaging me, she noticed that I didn't ask her questions about herself even though she asked me questions about myself. This difference in social expectations is another good illustration of what I'm trying to outline. I ask questions based on what interests me, and I expect others to do the same. Normies ask questions to "be nice", to show social interest, to have yet another one of the shallow interactions they seem to love, even if they don't actually care about the answers. It's inauthentic and I don't consider it to be "nice" at all. Being asked about myself doesn't make me feel particularly good even when it is authentic. I just view it as someone else's curiosity (when authentic) and an annoying part of culture (when it's not). So the "niceness" doesn't work on me and the social connection people are trying with this behavior to make fails. I don't need random attention and I dislike people trying to make me feel good or feel anything, really. I'll feel whatever I'll feel according to the circumstances, and meddling is not welcome. And indirectness (which is more of a cultural thing I think) never gives me any positive feelings.

I can't tell if this is kind of rambly or not.

Why is it so difficult to find spring mix that doesn't have baby spinach in it? Baby spinach is not tasty. Is it so damned abundant that farmers have to put it in everything to get rid of it?

Spring mix is one of those things without which I cannot sleep. I've tried. Melatonin, heated bedclothes, spring mix, and tofu at bedtime. Recently, I've had to give up on my normal spring mix source because half the mix is now baby spinach. This mix is way too expensive for me to put up with that. Fortunately, I found a mix that's more spring than baby spinach in another store in town.

I'm having trouble caring for my skin in this climate and it's drying up my enthusiasm. The air is too dry (and yet my bathroom has a mold problem). I put glycerin plus oil and sometimes even shea butter on my lips multiple times per day and they still get dry. Actually, I'm making the problem worse by running the heater all day, but it's the heater running all day or me sitting in a stupor all day, too cold to think or do anything.

The morning walks have become more difficult because of the cold. I'm continually sniffling while I'm out, my hands get distractingly cold sooner than they did in fall, I cannot focus well. I have a medical appointment tomorrow and I hope the provider has some answers for me.

I just looked up anemia and apparently cold hands and feet are one of the symptoms. I don't know what kind of iron to take; the ones I've tried hurt my stomach. I'll ask tomorrow.

This is the first winter here that I don't have a totally unmanageable energy bill. It's currently $240, of which I can pay a bit each month. Every previous year, I've been in danger of having my electricity shut off because of a bill so huge, I couldn't pay it off.

I chose Taiwan in part because it's warm. It's hot in summer. How hot will it feel if my body temperature normalizes? I read somewhere that it's too hot to go out walking (something I do a lot of). Maybe my plans will change significantly if my health does. Or I could try living up in the mountains, where it's cooler.

My perspective on womyn feels like it has changed significantly. Like I was stuck for years seeing them from one angle, then one day I spun them around and saw them from a new angle. I now sort of view them similar to the way I used to view men; a group of people I cannot really expect anything fulfilling from, a group of people with with rather alien thoughts and desires.

But this is how I sort of view humanity as a whole since I got diagnosed with autism. Maybe it started even before that, even though I didn't really know what set us apart back then. There are different kinds of alienness: there's neurotypical alien, there's empathizing-vs-systematizing alien (I think that's the one that applies to womyn, although I'm hard-pressed to see how the catty behavior represents empathy).

I have a couple of experience with womyn trying to empathize with me. It was exasperating because they were just projecting onto me, as, it seems, almost everyone always is. Womyn have absolutely no idea what I'm feeling, in my experience.

It's bedtime and I cannot think. I'm just kind of starving for an intellectual connection. I need to go to a graduate school and find a nerd, maybe.

Shitty day today. Literally. I'm weaning myself off the glycerin suppositories on which I've been relying for bowel movements for the past couple of years. To my surprise, I had a movement right away this morning, which was the first time I went without a suppository in a long time. Usually the weaning doesn't work very well and I just end up uncomfortably constipated for days with nothing to show for my suffering.

But what hasn't changed, apparently, is that morning is the only time I can have a pain-free movement. I had one or two more uneventful movements this morning (being unable to void all at once is something I'm used to). I had another suppository-free movement this afternoon and now I have stomach cramps, just as I had whenever I tried to use suppositories past morning. I thought the suppositories were the cause of these cramps, but I guess I was wrong, or not totally right. Maybe they do irritate me somehow, but they clearly aren't causing the pain all by themselves.

These cramps last hours. I have pain medication for them, but it makes me so drowsy that I can barely think or stand up, and I cannot take any caffeine this late in the day because I'll be awake all night. This is the other half of the reason why I confine bowel movements to morning or just before bed (which usually doesn't work). I've become even more sensitive to caffeine than I am normally, so having half a serving of instant coffee twelve hours before bedtime can still keep me awake for half the night (as it did yesterday). I don't know why, maybe something to do with my undereating.

So I'm in pain. And I'm very upset about a privacy issue I'm having with a dating site. But I'll discuss that another day maybe. I opened up one of my pain medication capsules and dumped most of the powder out, more than I usually dump out, then swallowed the rest. That tiny amount may not touch the pain at all, but I have no other options.

I was going to use chatgpt to help me retain new Mandarin vocabulary, but I cannot access it because I keep getting a Cloudflare verification page loop. I click the box to verify that I'm a human, the page loads and I get another verification. I've also been trying to use a computer alarm that pops up a text file containing a vocab word and a sound file of the pronunciation, but it's crashed two or three times now and I'm tired of it.

Next month is going to be the month in which my face improves. It has to be. The lactic acid I bought this month was apparently not strong enough to make much of a difference. The TCA is too strong. So I'm going back to middle-of-the-roads salicylic acid along with, maybe, some glycolic acid. I should have done this instead of the lactic acid, but I scared myself by doing too many back-to-back peels. The acid I was last using wasn't the problem; the problem was that I hadn't given my face time to heal between peels. I thought of this but I was still scared enough to try something even more conservative.

Finally, today's main topic: long story short, I'm sick of effeminate bullshit. Effeminate bullshit comprises two main things: gender role conformity (the gender role being femininity in this case, since we are talking about females), and womyn making everything about their damned feelings.

I've already posted about my disliking almost everything womyn typically wear and most of the ways they typically groom themselves. Try the "lesbianism" tag if you wanna read it. The clothes and the busy hair are ugly enough but stuff like forcing feet into unnatural positions to wear heels and shaving off all eyebrows is self-abusive and utterly alien-looking. I'm attracted to people who look and move like human beings.

Beyond the lack of attraction, there is the issue of how these people see and take care of themselves, which is important to me as someone who cares about the welfare of womyn and girls. Are they so brainwashed that they've actually come to prefer looking like aliens or are they doing this stuff mainly for others? To fit it? To get partners? It's weird and kind of sad that womyn still willingly bleach their assholes and shit given how long feminist messages about patriarchal beauty standards have been around.

There's a video about a womon with a nail in her head who just wants to talk about her feelings rather than focus on removing the nail: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg

(This video is hosted on an invidious instance but can be found on youtube by searching for the video id, which is the alphanumeric string that comes after v= in the link.)

This I think is a graphic illustration of what irks me. It took a lifetime of interacting with womyn and girls, seeing this pattern play out over and over again, before I finally put all the evidence together: I've found womyn to be way too interested in emotional bullshit and interpersonal drama for my taste. They may want to discuss their emotions or mine, their drama or mine; neither interests me much, and what little I'm naturally open to saying, I now withhold it because I'm disgusted with their potentially outsized interest in it. It's like, I have no problem showing people my feet, but I'm keeping my shoes on when it comes to foot fetishists. I'm grossed out.

Benign things I say to womyn, they take as an attempt to hurt their feelings and lash out at me or pull that catty, passive aggressive bullshit that is also apparently a hallmark of womynhood––in this culture, this part of the united states? I don't know how far this extends. Everything is about their feelings first. Opportunities for discussion about other things get derailed because my approach isn't "nice" enough or something, plus womyn never start interesting discussions with me, so there's no pleasure I can take in talking to them. I think this is also somewhat a part of usian culture, this overly sensitive bullshit and a disinclination to have a conversation about anything serious or even mildly controversial. But with men there's no cattiness in my experience.

I used to be on a website for gay womyn that had hundreds of thousands of members from all over the world. The forums have been dead for over a decade. Nothing seems to get posted on the site except bland memes in the twitter-like feed portion. The number of messages I get from troll accounts is roughly equivalent to the number I get from legitimate members. It's one place online that has not been taken over by men "identifying" as women even though they are welcome on the site, yet few womyn seem to be taking advantage of it. The opportunities for substantial conversation with womyn are somewhat limited, even in online spaces, where jumping straight into conversation without small talk is generally acceptable.

Whining about trivial bullshit, trying to make one's emotional issues other people's problem. There's this weird subculture among womyn in which other people are held responsible for one's own feelings, without regard, apparently, for whether these other people are trying to make one feel anything or not. I could say that I hate green shirts, someone in the group who likes green shirts will take offense even though there's no way I could have known her feelings about green shirts and no indication that my comment has anything to do with her personally. But instead of just saying that she's hurt or didn't like my comment, the passive aggressiveness comes out. I will be expected to pay somehow because I'm the cause of her hurt feelings regardless of my intent. And the payment tends to be them trying to emotionally hurt someone back, sometimes with stupid insults that would only bother someone as emotionally delicate as themselves. I'd probably end up more offended that a womon thinks I'm weak enough to be affected by such comments than I am bothered by the comment itself. I'm not the one who's insecure about my physical appearance and shit like that. It's like the verbal equivalent of a "chick fight." Overly long, manicured nails scratching at your face annoyingly rather than dealing any actual blows.

It's not a coincidence that most sjws are female.

Once I was talking to one on Okcupid and the conversation died. She said my negativity or something was off-putting. Annoyed as I was, I forced myself to look back at the conversation and saw that the most "negative" thing I'd said was that I hate quantum mechanics, a topic she had brought up. Such a minor thing.

Normies in general will feign interest in a discussion topic just to have some kind of social contact, but men and womyn respond differently when you don't play along with their social games by trying to have a real conversation. I gave my honest opinion about quantum mechanics because I thought the discussion was actually about quantum mechanics. It wasn't.

One time my ex and I were in bed for the night. She had had some small setbacks during the day, then, as we lay there, she heard noises in the kitchen that told her a mouse was there. She started freaking crying. I wanted to sleep and she wanted me to hold her and I said no but she kept whining.

So I'm done with this shit. What was just a benign difference in personality has become something I hate and actively avoid.

What the hell is going on in her mind, that's what I have to ask myself about womyn now.

My blood sugar is low due to undereating, I'm frustrated with my skin, and my singlehood is making me ache. It's amazing how little I can get away with eating now. Previously, the amount of food I've eaten today would give me unbearable symptoms and unignorable hunger. Instead, I just feel a bit more tired that I probably would otherise and have difficulty focusing on studying vocabulary. I don't know what's changed.

Still waking up after just five hours of sleep. I'm running out of things to try. I thought cold feet was the issue; now, I'm not so sure. My electric heater doesn't get hot enough, so I bought an iron from the local thrift store. I plug it in and lay it at my feet after I wake up, and I start to get drowsy again, but I haven't been falling back to sleep with it. Tonight, I'm going to add fiber to my last meal of the day in case it's my blood sugar that's waking me up. I don't know what I'll do if that doesn't work. Maybe have a snack in the bedroom in case it's raising my blood sugar that'll get me back to sleep.

I did more damage to my skin with my last skin peel. Not a lot, but it's noticeable. Probably I didn't moisturize enough again. I don't know how many months it'll take for this to fade. I'm so tired of waiting for things to go right for me. I don't expect to get any dates looking this way. I feel like making my profiles private. I feel like a fool for even being visible on the dating sites. I feel like an idiot for doing this to myself again. Once again I'll have to keep my head down and figure out, day by day, how to maintain focus on something other than dating.

It would be nice to at least have some conversations. The sites I'm on are general social networking sites, but I haven't been successful in getting people to talk much so far.

I was listening to a Mandarin language podcast during my walk this evening, the male co-host said something in a low voice and it hit me so hard. I didn't understand what he said (I can understand almost nothing in the podcast), but the tone of voice is what had that effect on me. Sometimes men's voices are so seductive just because they are low. I'm sure my auditory processing issues affect my tastes.

Next month's major plan is finding an affordable barber. It's gonna be extra difficult because I want a female barber; I don't want random guys touching me anymore.

Well, at least my lack of dates will give me more time to clean up my apartment and figure out how to get some furniture.

Today I finished setting up my work VM, which I found quite enjoyable, I'm not sure why. I got started looking for some work online.

As my employment specialist suggested, I started preparing for online interviews. There was only one piece of video conferencing software available in my distro's repo. I installed it but I'm not sure I'll use it. I'm super concerned about online privacy, and I don't like the fact that software companies have access to my voice and video data after I use their software.

I also want video chat-capable software so that I can start practicing my foreign-language speaking skills with remote partners. For that, I'm going to have to host my own video conferencing server if I want to insure my privacy. I think I'll just refuse video/voice chat interviews (if I ever even get offered any). I can talk to potential employers over the phone. Maybe I'll be limiting my employment options. Oh well. I'm tired of paying for things with privacy and security.

I have a proto-server setup on an old Dell tower that used to host Windows XP. I probably need to install some more packages, then read some tutorials about setting up a home server, then figure out how to host my blogs, then create the blogs. It seems like it'll be a lot of work. Figuring out how to secure my server will be even more work. My desktop and laptops aren't even up to my security standards yet. Because I was so exhausted last winter, it's taken me a year just to figure out how to create and use VMs. My machine could probably be hardened more.

One of the reasons why I have less than a dollar in my checking account right now is that I treated myself to some CDs at the public library book (and music and DVD) sale earlier this month. CDs for two dollars apiece. Right now I'm listening to Frederick Delius, probably one of my top 3 or top 5 favorite composers. And it's fantastic, a rare treat. I don't try new music often, not anymore anyhow. It's rare for me to find something I really like. Most available classical music is dull, Bach and Mozart. I have to search out composers from the Romantic era to find anything good.

I'm sick of talking, and I've found that talking to people generally isn't worth the energy. I want to start using an assisted communication device. People are going to be weird about it, especially the ones who know that I can talk, but fatigue is good for helping me not give a damn. Just having lived my whole life as various kinds of minority helps me not give a damn. It's often a choice between being myself and being miserable. Ahhh, I have to watch how I express myself. "Sick of talking" could be interpreted as my just not wanting to talk, but talking actually physiologically tires me out. I want to stop burning energy on talking, that's what I mean.

I could probably ask DOR for a tablet with an AAC app on it, but I don't want to. I dodged my counselor's question about my being autistic, and the disabilities I signed up with don't involve fatigue with talking, so she's going to be thinking about me being autistic again. Actually, DOR's job is to get me a job, and I don't need the AAC for work; I need it for daily life. There are some charities I can try for AACs.

Maybe I should try to do something with small kids. They are the only people who make me happy. Well, sometimes I like watching a certain YouTube channel...but it's most a time-waster, not really a happiness-generator. Kids and non-human animals act normal—not like adult humans, who often seem to be androids running whatever software their cultures have installed in them.

I love kids for their individuality, their trustworthiness, their open-mindedness, just for being fascinating and impressive creatures. It's a helluva piece of work, an animal. The many things they can do, the instincts they come with. I like to sit and simply watch them. Can't do that with adults because they feel eyes on them and turn around and try to lock eyes and that ruins everything because then they are in social mode and no longer acting as naturally.

I'm still thinking of ways I can be away from people. I think the best I can do in the short-term is to move to a town where people ignore me more. I need to start earning some money so I can visit the places I have in mind.

Also on my mind is trying to interact with a fellow autistic person. I have to figure out where to find one. But trying to find people to interact with is a minefield even without the normie factor at play because even autistic people can have undesirable personality traits. Normies talk about this thing where they just avoid certain topics with certain friends or have different friends/friend groups for different activities, and I don't have the energy for all that shit, neither the compartmentalizing nor maintaining so many different friendships. Though the probability of success is undoubtedly lower, it just seems easier to look for one person with whom I can do at least one activity and agree with on some core number of fundamental topics. I don't need multiple friend groups because I don't need to do multiple things with people. Just hanging out is a thing and it's really the only thing I need to do with another person; I'm fine doing my hobbies alone.post-music: Frederick Delius: Florida Suite

I've settled well into the going-to-bed-at-eleven-thirty-pm routine (I used to be unable to sleep at all unless I went to bed at around 2 am), but I'm not sleeping as deeply as I had been sleeping, and I'm still waking up too early. My wake time has shifted along with my bedtime, but I'm still waking up after about five hours of sleep even though I still feel tired. I never wake up feeling energized, and I've about given up on that. My life has been such garbage that I doubt I'll ever wake up feeling energized, no matter how much I sleep beforehand.

Since I have to be outdoors in the morning to maintain this routine, I take a longer walk in the morning. I used to go for a mini-walk just to burn extra calories; my main walk was still in the evening. Since I'm up earlier, it isn't so hot and I can comfortably walk for longer.

I've found, however, that I run into more people. This is very unpleasant. People talk at me, even when I have earbuds in and don't look at them. (I keep my head down because people moving in my line of sight or peripheral vision really bothers me. I know people probably think I'm weird but it's either look weird or be super physically uncomfortable.) I want them to leave me alone. They say 'hello,' never anything interesting, anything worth my time, my attention, or the physical effort it takes to wave back or respond verbally. It's torture, and they probably have no idea. Or maybe they don't care. I have come across one neighbor who seemed to be agressively "friendly."

I come across a zillion people walking dogs, and the dogs often want to sniff me. I don't mind this at all, but of course people probably think it bothers me: when I meet dogwalkers, they step off the sidewalk and pass me in the street. Sometimes people who aren't walking dogs do this, and I don't know why. Are they bothered by passing so close by me? Do they think it bothers me? One never knows what's going on in other people's heads, and that's one of the reasons why I no longer want to be around people. I've become painfully aware of the awkwardness of living, being surrounded by complete strangers. This is not a normal way for a human being to live.

I still don't know where I'd move to. The warmth of summer and the relief of being able to sleep on a somewhat normal schedule had lulled me into complacency about living here; I haven't been thinking about moving lately.

I need to get back to my studies. I'm on a seven-day free trial with Mondly because it's the only way I've found to learn beginning Norwegian via French (I avoid learning via English, my native language). I'm trying to finish the course before the free trial is over because I can't really afford even ten bucks a month.

I got some new vitamins yesterday. I took one and felt more energetic than I'd felt in weeks. When I got home, however, I found out that the B6 content of this vitamin blend (it's mostly a blend of B vitamins) is the same dose I had in a previous jar of vitamins (of which I still have the empty jar). I had to cut this previous vitamin in half because a full dose of B6 kept me up all night. And that's exactly what my new vitamin did.

I can't cut these new vitamins in half because they're in capsule form. So I tried pulling apart the capsule and halving the orange powder that's inside it. Annoying and messy procedure. I ended up with a little less than half, and that clearly wasn't enough because my fatigue was back today.

Probably I need 50% of the B6 but more than 50% of the other ingredients. But there's no way to take such a dose because everything's all mixed together in one capsule.

Now what the hell do I do?

One of my feet hurt and I don't know why. Too much walking? Not enough recovery from walking? Why not both feet?

A libido has got to be the worst thing to have when you're trying to heal from sexual abuse.

It has occurred to me that someone could come across my blog and dislike it because most of the content is "negative" or "complaining." Why would this scenario pop into my head, you might ask? It's because these people who are bothered by other people "complaining" or "being negative" are (or were) so foreign to me and completely blindsided me with their awful personality trait(s). You see, people complaining does not bother me in any scenario. I would have to hear a huge amount of trivial complaints from someone before it would occur to me to think of that person as "negative" or to think that she should "stop complaining." There's so much garbage in the world, there should be more complaining. So I cannot at all relate to people who are bothered by "negativity."

In fact, these people annoy the shit out of me. They're a thousand times worse than complainers. I don't know how their minds work, but I have a hypothesis that a not insignificant number of them are either

a) emotionally delicate people who hold others responsible for their (easily influencible) moods, or
b) people who feel the need to take responsibility for others' emotions, and therefore perceive "complaining" as a sign that the "complainer" is dumping negative emotions on them to take responsibility for.

Once I became aware of the existence of these people (over several annoying interactions), I also became aware that around them, anything I said that could be construed as a complaint could also be misperceived by them as some sort of imposition on them, whether my "complaint" actually involved them or not. I've been misunderstood so many times in my life, and have become so aware that the misunderstanders can't be counted on to notice their mistakes, that avoiding the misunderstandings has become a big deal, so I'm on slightly-higher alert for these people, the positivity people, the people who want to shut down "negativity."

I hope I never come across one of these people ever again.

Speaking of negative social experiences, I feel as though I've been lied to. It seems as though I've been exposed, over the course of my life, to a lot of messages, both explicit and inexplicit, to the effect that interacting with other people is rewarding. I've hardly ever found it rewarding. Even leaving out the negative interactions (that would be most of them), the rest were mostly just meh. There was never any "clicking" or profound sense of connection. People are just not as special as they are made out to be. Neurotypicals are just super-engrossed in other people because they are wired to be desperately social. And they are also such sponges for enculturation that those of them with similar backgrounds end up similar enough to facilitate these social connections.

It's all a normie lie.