textures

OK, so last week (also known as Tuesday, remind me not to have weekends out while feeling smug), the post was a little dark and unpleasant, and as funny as a dead badger in a birthday cake. In a change of pace, I think we'll go with something a bit odd, and unusual but at the same time mostly familiar, because we're all weird.

I am horribly adverse to smell, with a fairly sensitive sense of smell. Now, dad has this too, so I'm assuming its genetic, and I do enjoy it as my super power, because if my Aspy traits have yet to make me an idiot savant who can add complex numbers and know my 56th birthday is a Tuesday (I'm guessing here, but if I'm right BOOYA! guess we can ignore the rest of this sentence), then they have yet to manifest themselves.

I can tell a valeted room has had a smoker in it, I can whiff dinner down the road, and I cannot stay in Lush for long. I end up being the boyfriend stood out side (while my partner no doubt runs wild inside with a credit card selling our future to the devil for lavender scented bath bombs and never ending candles). Last time I went in voluntarily I spent exactly two minutes and found the first bath bomb that looked vaguely interesting, grabbed it, threw money at the general direction of the cash register and ran. It's not that I get overwhelmed, as such, but i begin to get the cloying smell up my nose and it causes me to feel nauseated. It's great. So I'd rather be outside, rather than queasy.

The same goes for texture. I prefer soft cotton, mostly in bedding. I can't stand cheap silk, or generally silk, texture bedding. My mother has pillow cases with  faux fur strips and I need to flip it over and sleep on the clear side (there I said it, watch her stop reading), equally fur pillows put me off. I like my bedding and it better be 100% comfy and soft because I am the highest level of under cover agent and I swear to Zod if I need to be out of bed it better be work or food. And prehaps not even the second one.  

I only mention all this, because Lord knows I'm not famous enough yet to have random people mail me bedding, because the other half went out and got silk bedding. Not Cheap silk bedding but still, I got back the dirty bedding out of the wash basket and wrapped myself in that, much to everyone Else's chagrin.

I'm also very keen on heavy bedding, sheets alone are for weirdos, although in hot summer nights even my love of being crushed into the mattress by massive blankets is beaten by the sweats. I actually don't know why, but i guess its a safety thing. I know some Aspies like being crushed to make them feel "normal". My skin isn't that sensitive, so nudity is fine, but I love the feeling of soft tight bedding.

Actually scratch that, I do have hyper sensitive skin when touched and dissolve into fits of giggles and shudders (shivers? I dunno, not a doctor) and often flinch before being touched. believing a lovers hand will be rough as sandpaper and heavy on me. One ex asked if I'd be beaten as a child. Apparently the answer that beatings continued until moral improved was "not funny" and "sick". Good for her.

Recently, I went to a job interview. Nothing fancy and I felt the sit down in a suit bit went fine, but showing me round the facilities put me off. They had a garish yellow and blue decor that made me feel deeply and weirdly uncomfortable. Nothing I could put my finger on, but even typing this makes my skin crawl. I just couldn't see myself working there, simply because the colours would make me feel off. So no new job, yet.........

Anyway, I'm off to bed, it's missing me already.....

Usual begging BS here: Facebook & Twitter

What IS love?

So, as any regular reader may have noted (as it is most likely my parents), I have managed to hold together a fairly succesful relationship that even my manager feels is doing me wonders (that one has her head screwed on right). 

I'm not going to lie now and say I understand the complete ins and outs of women and relationships. Previous relationships have just ticked by until the girl decides she's had enough and that things aren't progressing the way she would like, and she ends it. At that point I just find another girl and repeat the cycle, not thinking of how it affects the girl or how a friendship should develop.

It was noted in my original diagnosis report that I understand the concept of friends, that theoretically I know how friendship should work, but that I was unable to put that into practice or to develop friendships beyond rudimentary basics. That's not to say I don't have friends, just sometimes it takes a special person to understand that for me maybe friendship is more of a transaction rather than anything more complex, we hang out, we swap stories, we do stuff. For this post, I am simply taking the concept further to include romantic relationships.

Sure, I understand the concept of romance too. Boy meets girl, boy fails to understand girl, boy convinces girl they should be together, babies ensue. Something along those lines, interspersed with romantic moments  and gift giving. I dunno, it's all murky and odd.

It probably doesn't help that I view love as a chemical imbalance, designed to let us couple together to create life and continue the species. Yes, that is a terribly cold way to view it, but it's the point of all romantic relationships, to generate the circumstances to allow the next generation to be created. Oh, we humans think we are all higher purpose, gifted with intelligence and as Carl Sagan put it, we are free from the reptile brain to change ourselves, think of the possiblities. Frankly, that may all be true, and we can all wax lyrical from Shakespeare's sonnets to Philip Larkin (oh cut me some slack, he captured me as a youth with his liberal use of curse words), but really, at the end of it all, we simply create and propagate the next generation, which is the basic drive of life. Dung beetles roll up wads of poop, Emperor penguins freeze to death and turtles flee down beaches in this need to create.

Honestly are human concepts like love and romance really anything more than constructs and chemicals to drive us further?

My partner gave her notice on her apartment and job last month, intent on moving closer to me and my job. This morning, I asked her what she was going to do with her bed. A simple question and she said she would sell it. I suppose it only hit me then the enormity of whats he was doing. She was moving her entire life, packing it all together, to move closer to me and to support a job that I am currently excelling at.

It prompted a conservation in the car, to the airport, where she was dropping me off (because sensitive coversations and topics should always be handled when time is short), about her depth of feeling for me and her conviction in moving.

How do you tell a girl you don't love her? 

Not in the i don't love you but type of I don't love you, but in the i don't have love. That "you'll just know" feeling. The million ways poets and amatures and love struck idiots describe the inner feeling. I just don't have it. Never have. Oh I can FAKE it, but I don't feel it. 

So then my partner asks why I use the words "I love you" when most likely what I feel isn't what she feels and that the words are just meaningless filler.

Simple answer? Convention. 

Ease of communicating an idea. It's what language is for, the simple and effective means of communicating an idea or feeling. Oh sure millions try to twist language into gaudy unnecessary drivel, using allegory and metaphor to express simple concepts to make themselves and others feel smarter. The needless deciphering of these nonsense statements simply hads to the difficulty and complexity of modern society. No one ever suffered from making a blunt speech. (Oh they may have suffered from the consequences but that is what one gets for saying things nobody else wants to hear, there is a time and a place to tell someone exactly what you think of them and that is usually when you are beyond range of reprisal). 

I love you means I don't have to explain myself to any casual eavesdroppers. Society knows the weight of those words and while it rings hollow in both my and my partners ears it saves me having to create some new phrase like you are the one I hate least (thank you Finland) or I tolerate you the most. The concept ingrained in my i love you is you get me, I make sense to you, even when I'm curled in a ball in bed in the middle of the day trying to shut out the surrounding world.

Of course, in a rushed car journey is maybe not the best time to say I don't actually love you but I still want to spend my life with you. My partner simply traded her love for my trust and fedeltiy, which if anyone reading knows me, despite all my faults in social understanding, I am a complete womaniser. Case in point while Christmas shopping, I made four separate female cashiers in four separate shops genuinely laugh with my charm and flattery. Oh I can do the first part no problem, it's the longer term grind that I seem unable to keep up, either with the persona of a good boyfriend (yes, my partner has seen behind that, and yes I have managed to make her doubt what she saw by being honest)