Sheep dog mentality

About a month ago, just as my depression was ending, a friend took me out on an outing with her family.  It almost did not happen because my depression was scaring her.  I scared a lot of people with that depression, it was the worst depression in fifteen years and it nearly ended very badly.  

For me depression does not end with a period of happiness, it usually ends with a change of thinking and then a manic period.  In the past the changes in thought were called epiphanies because they were so radical for me.  But now they are merely changes in thinking.  I guess they were epiphanies because when I changed my thinking before it was ME that did the changing.

The first one was about fifteen years ago, I decided that a girl whom I loved was not worth my attentions, basically.  The second epiphany was a change of outlook.  Rather than think that a girl was the perfect match for me, I altered my thinking and asked myself if she was perfect for me.  By asking I was putting the answer in doubt and I was able to see that she was not for me.  This time, I changed my thinking, I told myself that I was worth a bit of selfishness.  I allowed myself to be worth something, where before I only wanted to do things for someone else, serve them, love them, now I allowed myself to be open to getting what I wanted.

It has always been about girls.  It has always been about sex.  It is about forming relationships.  It is about what I want most in life but have the least capability in doing.  

So I went with my friend and her family on an excursion.  And I learned about myself.  Gardner's Multiple Intelligences, the antitheses of IQ in many ways, has one of its intelligences that it measures as intrapersonal  intelligence, the ability to look at yourself and learn; it is something that I have in abundance.  It is also the ability to work by yourself.  Sometimes I look at my behaviors and see if I can figure out why I do them.  

That day I was looking at girls.  There were lots of pretty girls where we were.  I really don't understand why men look at women.  I look at pretty young women and I see there long legs, there firm bottoms, supposedly soft stomachs, ample breasts and pretty faces with long hair.  I see it all and I get nothing from it.  I can look at you, notice all your attractive features and not be the slightest bit turned on.  And when I say that I mean if you believe you ar ugly, I can see through that, if you are older I can see what you might have looked like and see that, but in any case there is not the least amount of stirrings in my lobedo.  So I wonder if I am thinking differently than other men.  I am not turned on by flesh, naked or otherwise.  Rather I have to be turned on to like flesh.  I discovered that when I was nineteen walking the beaches of Portugal; Europeans like to wear as little as possible on beaches, a practice that we North Americans should do because I suspect that if men saw more flesh they would become as jaded as I am.  I tried to imagining having sex with those girls and that did not work either.  Perhaps I am a mutant.  For me, I must know someone before I will ever be attracted to them.  Might be my AS mind.

Sometimes I have disturbing sexual thoughts, disturbing to me, so I assure you that it would disturb you, but they do not correlate with hot women being nearby.  I will have to explore that more.

Another thing that I noticed is that I ramble on with things that interest me and I need to recognize the signs of when the other people's eyes are glazing over.  The subject of the moment was pronunciation.  Actually it was a dialect pronunciation.  If you live in a large city and you pay attention to people from other countries you will have picked up on this too.  English speaking people often only use a limited sound base for vowels.  "A" can be pronounced two ways, but other languages can have many more pronunciations.  And then we come to my interest, when a name from a foreign place is put into and English format many of the sounds disappear.  I try to keep the way they say things true to the original language.  Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and others sound wrong in the mouths of the illiterate masses that refuse or do not allow for the possibility that they could be saying it wrong.  Olga, sounds hard and harsh and ugly in English, the hard g sound is not the sound that the name has in the Slavic tongues.  A closer letter is h but there is a soft g sound there too, it is subtle depending on the language I have heard it pronounced ole-YA and OLE-ya, but never ole-ga.  My friend, a Russian whose name may sound like ole-YA, taught me how to correctly say Anastasia, which I have been mispronounce for years (anna-STAY-ge-a, I thought that the name was romantic and hot).   It is more correctly pronounced a-NAS-ti-cee-ya, or as I remember it, it is nice to see you.  Foreign names are written in English, usually not by our rules as a best fit phonetically.  

When did your eyes start to glaze over, Pakistan?  Conversationally I have to watch people and learn to see when this happens.  Remember I do not see body language; I have Aspergers Syndrome.

Last one.  I noticed that I am a sheep dog mentally.  Put me in a group of people.  I will get uncomfortable if there are people behind me and if someone asks where someone is, I will be able to tell you where they are, because I watch where they are at all times.  I need to know that everyone is safe and where they should be.  

I am glad I went, but I will never go again.  I thought my friend's family was closely related to me mentally.  Often one would say something that I was thinking and I could complete their sentences, but the conversations where mostly about their family and most of the people there were my parent's age.  I had fun but I was more self-conscious than usual.  Live and learn.