Otter's Rock

Tuesday I saw a neuropsychologist. (Recap: I had to resign from my internship a few months ago mainly due to poor social skills caused by undiagnosed Aspergers.) I was diagnosed with Aspergers, which was not a surprise (I've known I had it since we started researching my brother's autism), but I was also diagnosed with Face blindness, which was a surprise but explains a lot. I've always been bad at pairing faces and names. When I was at camp in middle school, on the last day when we were getting ready to go home, one of the girls from my cabin came up to me and I didn't recognize her because she'd changed her clothes from what she'd been wearing in the morning. I can recognize people I know, but it takes me a while to learn to recognize new people, particularly when I meet them in a large crowd. From the testing I got, apparently I can memorize about three new faces at a time, and any more than that forget about it. I've never thought much about it because my Mom's the same way, and lots of people talk about being bad with names and such. But apparently I'm much, much worse than most people, which doesn't help social skills that are already pretty bad because of the Aspergers.

Apparently, they're in the middle of reviewing and updating diagnosis criteria as a prelude to a new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). So she evaluated me on a version modified by current discussion on the issue.

( Aspergers criteria that fit me )

( What this is like from the inside )
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So, I need a topic for this week's entry on my faith-based blog, "Theology For Ordinary People." Y'all are ordinary people, right? What have you always wanted to know about Christian faith, history, theology, etc., but have never found someone you could ask (or never got an answer that sounded right)?

I love my internship; I'll post more on that later. The congregation is great, the town is great, it's wonderful to actually be doing what I've been called to do and not just studying it, I feel like I'm learning and having a decent amount of responsibility without being tossed in the deep end, etc. ... I could go on.

But besides the whole "job satisfaction" thing, there's the fact that I have a paycheck for the first time in a year and a half! I have money! I know I should be good and save as much of it as possible to pay back my student loans with, and usually I'm very good about that, but right now I just have to splurge. A couple of days after I got my paycheck, I got an e-mail from Barnes and Noble saying they had a 40% of sale on selected DVD box sets, so I'm sitting here staring at Buffy seasons 4 & 5 and Star Trek: The Next Generation season three that just arrived in the mail. And one of the merchants on Amazon.com also had a really good sale going, so I've got West Wing season 7 and From the Earth to the Moon on their way, hopefully to arrive this week. I just hope that once the novelty of actually, you know, having money wears off, I can get back to my usual good fiscal discipline.

Schedule for internship announcements has been set: Monday, March 3 at lunch time we will find out where we'll be spending next year.

So, it turns out that within two days of the intern matching workshop, half the middler class and a couple of teachers have the flu. I'm thinking it's not a coincidence.

( Cut for whining about symptoms )

Matching workshop went well on Thursday and Friday, except for me writing the time down wrong for one of my interviews and missing it. Lot of good sites and supervisors. We'll see what happens with that.