The Flying of the Freak Flags

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I’d be inclined to provide another data point, but I’d say that it’s more the fact that IQ is only one of a few major factors in success in general, but it doesn’t guarantee it. This has been borne out in a number of studies, so even though I didn’t have as much success as some others around me, it doesn’t debunk the correlation. It doesn’t even debunk it in my case, since my relative lack of success has generally been because of ADHD – without meaning to be, I was basically the most spaced out kid throughout school. However, this hardly mattered where I could learn at my own rate and didn’t need to write essays. I learned to read faster than anyone else in my year and generally got some of the best marks until high school. During high school I was completely spaced out and ended up with B, B, C, D in my A levels. Not as bad as some people, but this was in a really good school and a lot of my fellow students went to top universities. Eventually after a few years away, I took night school and got better marks.

The thing is that while my IQ didn’t hand me success, it stopped me from being as bad as I could have been. It meant that I aced any entrance exam I was given and people saw me as someone who wasn’t reaching his potential rather than a loser. It affected my own self-image in the same way. I thought something was wrong with me, but it wasn’t that I wasn’t the intellectual peer of the other students. Once I decided that my authority figures were actually wrong about motivation (at least where I was concerned) and that I should develop my own style, I was able to do better and catch up to some degree. It turns out that the style I developed is very similar to the ones advocated by professionals for people like me.

Another thing about IQ is that there is a correlation with success in part because people believe that there is a correlation. This was true in my case, since a good part of the success I do have is due to people valuing innate intelligence. My gender and skin colour have also been helpful for the same reason. You get plenty of white guys claiming to be evidence that privilege doesn’t exist in their case, but in most cases they’re comparing average white guys with outliers from other backgrounds.

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To start with the most obvious:

  • Aspie
  • Ex-junkie
  • Goth/punk/folkie/raver
  • Outdoorsy (to a somewhat extreme degree; “go live alone in a remote mountain cave for a few weeks” etc.)
  • Professional science nerd

…which always left me somewhat stuck in the middle. Too freaky for the geeks, too geeky for the freaks.

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It just occured to me that that list is somewhat dated. To add the more recent additions:

  • Acutely mentally ill (but not as bad as I was a few years ago)
  • Tourettic (likewise)
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On paper I’m pretty bland; relatively affluent white guy married at 20 rising the ranks in white collar jobs after private college living in the suburbs driving a 4-door sedan that is a few years old. My wife is the endlessly facinating one, having gone from the worst conditions someone could be raised in (literally decades old trailer stuck between a gunhappy sadistic farmer, a truck stop, juvey, and a nuclear power plant) to the same place as me in her profession.

I’ll never be interesting because I’m an introvert who took stoic philosophy on at far too young of an age and despite being an avid DM as my creative outlet, I mostly like being in the company of my family and talk endlessly to my wife. I had my wild days and I am very much looking forward to being a boring middle aged man.

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129

George Carlin described himself as an ‘old fuck’ as opposed to an ‘old man’. You can be an old man at any point in your life, he said. Never be the old man. Being an old man is death. Age into being an old fuck instead.

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We have a very large family, and attend lots of reunions.my kids are pretty good about politely greeting the elderly aunts and such , and giving them a hug or a kiss on the cheek. Same with all the old men. A strong handshake, words like “I am happy to see you again sir”. They do pretty good, and the relatives appreciate the respect and affection that such behavior indicates.
But my kids are very shy, and reasons mean that they do not easily remember names and faces. But we have another way. In our family, those interactions with scary old relatives are feats of bravery. So the kids look at reunion photos before the event, and come up with little tricks to remember each persons name, and their place in the family. This is battle preparation, and my kids are preparing to show their bravery by counting coups. Each interaction with a scary old person is an opportunity to count great coups. And afterward, my wife and I and our young warriors discuss the many coups of the day, and which warrior showed the most bravery. In our family, this is how it has always been.

A discussion might go like this:
ME: Kids, we are going over to grandpa’s ranch tomorrow.
KIDS: What will we be doing? can I borrow a horse and go camping?
ME: Some Astronauts are up there with their wives, for a fishing trip. Dad wants you to meet them.
KIDS: So we will be counting coups.
ME: Yes, bring honor on us. Count many coups, and show everyone that you are unafraid.“Today is a good day to die”
(that part spoken in Cheyenne)

I don’t know if this is more eccentric, or sort of creepy. But it works for us.

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131

Hi, I am new here, found this place through Cory Doctorow - he wrote some articles here I enjoyed. I’m really weird.

I grew up in an evangelical home and bought into it, really bought into it, and I understand why I bought into it - I no longer do, but there is a part of me that craves rules and that is why I bought into as much as I did when I did. I even bought into the Young Earth Creationism.

It was the Ensatina Salamander that first started to wake me up. Unlike many salamander species, that species does not migrate very far during its life, yet it make an a ring species around the California Valley that clearly demonstrates the species started in Oregon / Washington and came down to California, where it split as it continued to move south around the valley, with the two separate lineages meeting again at the bottom of the valley where they behave like distinct species.

It did not seem conceivable to me that that was possible time-wise with a young earth, yet the biological evidence that it happened that way is overwhelming, and when I started to doubt the Young Earth aspect of everything I had been taught was the truth was when I started to lose my religion and at this point, I consider myself to be an agnostic with atheist leanings.

I also as long as I can remember have been sexually submissive to women, I guess that is part of my craving for rules and order. I always preferred female-led relationships and that is what I fantasized about and craved, but I did not allow myself to start exploring it until I had started to shed myself of my religious upbringing.

Allowing my “freak flag” to fly free so to speak was probably the most liberating thing I could do for myself. Often online I go by “Alice Wonder” because allowing myself to experience what I had been suppressing for years, I felt a little bit like Alice gone down the rabbit hole into a wonderful new world where the rules of my old world just did not apply.

Socially I am very awkward, I don’t like most people much and do not mind that most people do not like me much other, my real passion is with field herpetology but as a hobby, not a profession. I am particularly fond of the Amerana clade of True Frogs, sometimes called the Rana boylii group - the members of the genus Rana in the western united states that were not put into Lithobates. Though now there is some question about the validity of Lithobates.

I also am a fan of the Lampropeltines, aka New World Rat Snakes - the constrictors that include King Snakes, Rat Snakes, Gophersnakes, etc.

I’m a FLOSS lover, specifically CentOS - that’s my distribution of choice whether it is the server room or my desktop. Never really a fan of Ubuntu, disliked it from the start and just when I tried to like it - they came out with that release that spied on people sealing my dislike for them. But I modernize CentOS with updated packages where it counts, e.g. the Apache / PHP stack and the Multimedia stack.

Online privacy and cryptography are extremely important to me. I wouldn’t call myself a cipherpunk but lots of people have called me that before.

I’m currently working on trying to start a network for adult entertainment that is different from everything out there - a network that puts privacy as important above all else, even above profit (profit is rarely a motivator for me, I do consider myself socialist and I detest capitalism), where users are not tracked and advertisements are done the old fashioned way, hosted locally on the local server so no tracking can take place, etc.

I’m a big fan of DNSSEC as to me, you can’t have privacy without security and security starts with DNS and DNSSEC is the only solution that actually allows validation on every use, none of the exploitable trust bologna.

Yes I’m a freak, I’m weird, I’m a bit out there, but being a bit out there is the only way I can be honest with myself and if I can not be honest with myself, who can I be honest with?

Oh and I’m asperger, but not diagnosed until recently. Just another label though, what does it change?

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I realised I was too recently, although I’m a polite tourettic. I’m just as likely to say “sorry” and startle someone as I am to swear, although it’s mostly just vocal tics.

I say that I only realised it recently because a while ago I decided that either I was a complete hypochondriac or I had a mild form of everything. Nobody else seemed to act too oddly around me, but I only later realised that they were just being nice.

Me: I come off as pretty normal most of the time though, right?
Wife: I’d say you seem normal about… 5% of the time.

Incidentally, does it make you more or less crazy if the people around you sometimes hear the voices in your head too?

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It’s mostly a motion disorder for me, with just the occasional vocalisation.

At my peak, I was ticcing multiple times per second, violently enough to cause self-inflicted bruising and scratches.

These days, it’s closely mood linked.

If I’m happy, I’m barely affected at all. If I’m depressed, I get a near-paralysis on my left side. If I’m startled, anxious or self-conscious, I get rapid motor tics (usually in groups of three) focussed on my left side (although my right will tic if I try to physically restrain my left limbs).

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So, you’re flying your freak flag by claiming to be normal? Bold strategy…

I am by all outward appearances a boring, completely forgettable middle-aged man, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can’t fly my freak flag in public, so I have to pretend to be normal to get by. I don’t really present as a member of any tribe, so I just blend into the background. Also, the ways in which I get to claim to be ordinary are very hard-fought. I come from a blue-collar background, was in the first generation of my family to attend college, and am the only person anywhere in my family with a graduate degree. It is really amazing how different the middle class is treated compared to the working class, and how stratified the middle class is, with each little level of the middle class having contempt for the levels directly below them.

The ways in which I’m weird far outweigh the ways in which I’m normal. They will all come out eventually, in this thread and others.

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I don’t know what red wings are and why people get squeamish.

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I often wonder if I would’ve been diagnosed with asperger’s or put on the autism spectrum if I was born 30 years later; when I was in elementary school, you were either “gifted”, normal, or “special education”. I avoided all social interaction, talked to myself, played out imaginary scenarios, and spent most of my time reading books. For all I know, I might be diagnosed now if I didn’t have a hippie doctor who looks and acts like Mokey Fraggle.

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Welcome to bOINGbOING, @AliceWonderMiscreati! I hope you enjoy your stay here.

I am also kind of a church nerd myself. I like the stories and the religious history and traditions, but I don’t believe any religion has it totally correct. That’s probably the biggest reason why I’m not completely disillusioned with religion. I appreciate it but don’t take it seriously. If I had to label myself, I’d consider myself a secular humanist Unitarian.

I have very little sex drive to speak of. I’m not a stereotypical aromantic asexual, but I’m definitely more asexual than sexual.

Same here. Most people seem alien to me. I don’t understand what they do or why they do it. I don’t really care because I’m comfortable in my differences, but I don’t really fit in with most people. I make strong connections when I do make connections though.

I’d stop short at saying I detest capitalism, but I’m far to the left of the Democratic Party. I’m somewhere between a social democrat and a democratic socialist.

Would it be wrong if I said it was obvious?

Anyways, even though online tests mean very little, here are my Aspie Quiz results:

You will find that there are a lot of people here who are Aspie or Aspie-ish.

Hard to say? When I was first diagnosed with autism, very few people talked about autism or even knew about it. If there was a label, nobody knew what to do with that label, because we didn’t really understand it. Then Rain Man came out a few years later, and the conversation started. It was a really crappy conversation, but it was better than nothing. 20 years or so later, autistic people finally gained entry into the conversation about us, and people are finally listening to our perspectives now. Things aren’t perfect, but they’re a damn sight better than they were.

The best part is that now that there is a label, and that it’s being applied more accurately and evenly, us Aspie weirdoes have a place now, and we can find each other more easily and form communities. I have problems with the label (largely because I’m not technically Aspergers but High-Functioning Autistic, which itself is an even more problematic label), but the label serves its purpose. I am grateful to be able to connect with like-minded people.

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Yeah, I was gonna say, but I really didn’t want to ask and expose my ignorance. Thanks for falling on that grenade :wink:

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I think that long male fingers are extremely sexy btw

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It is oral sex performed on a woman, while she is having her period.

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It’s a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, duh!

Oh wait… red WINGS… hmm.

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Ah, a vampire bite! I had a boss that had this kink. He would go in details about how he loved going down on his wife when she got her period.

Maybe it’s freaky for the average puritan American but it’s pretty much “stuff that can happen if you like pussy because women have cycles” between the adults I know.

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Never underestimate the sex-shame in US culture. It’s part of the foundation, as sad as that is.

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I am never going to look at Detroit’s NHL team the same way again.

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