At my parents’ request I’m going through some old papers looking for keepsakes. A lot of it was psychometric test results and school reports. Then there were some essays and dictated stories (and even a couple of picture books).

Most of the latter has always embarrassed me to look back on. I’m not sure why. Partly it’s the stilted language, the misuse of adult phrases, but for my age it ought to be impressive that I was even trying for such advanced semantics, that I knew how to use even a fraction of those big words correctly.

There’s this autobiographical essay, for instance, from age 13-and-change. Taking the form of a field report by an alien sociologist, it contains unqualified self-psychoanalysis, my physical stats in S.I. units, census figures in scientific notation (“6E+09 H. Sapiens living on a planet better suited to less than 3E+09″), and a quotation from Vonnegut. It’s hopelessly emo (although the phrase “emo” hadn’t been invented yet to describe such catharsis) and shows reckless lack of integrity in its third-person perspective.

Who but an Aspie could have written that?

But as much as I may take chagrin at seeing I wasn’t always so well-polished in my writing skills, there are some surprising gems in these old materials that make me smile a little. I’d completely forgotten about the time I was published in the Times Union with my little four-liner poem about baseball (of all things!).

And then, there’s “The Gift”. From the handwriting I’m guessing I was 9 or so when I wrote it. Constrained by the challenge (at the time) of writing in verse at all, I somehow managed to hold in check my demented grasp of 16-letter words and write something that presaged my later knack for balancing diction:

The most precious gift
I am told
Is all the love
The heart can hold
I give it to you;
You give it to me–
There’s enough for the world
And the gift is free
Will you take my love
More precious than gold?
It’s the finest gift
That the heart can hold.

I dedicated that one to Mom. I still do. I think it was pretty neat. It espouses one of the few values from my childhood that I still hold to. Connectedness means everything to me. I would have had trouble imagining, when I was growing up, that I would one day find myself enmeshed in such a tight, wondrous weave of friends, lovers, colleagues, and family, and that those connections would make up so much of what I am. It’s something akin to Pinocchio’s ecstatic cry of, “I’m a real boy!”

So apart from all the statistics, and all the tests with funny names, mostly what I’m getting from the old papers is an answer to the dichotomy often implicit in discussions of AS: is it curable? Can my son become normal?

Yes and no. For starters, introversion and extroversion are not changeable. Being a “space cadet” or a “pack-rat” or a “braniac” never fully goes away. But none of these are what AS is, they’re just part of what it does. You can, however, become yourself version 2–that is to say, your greatest attributes, but more so, and your lesser attributes compensated, sometimes morphed beyond recognition.

AS is not a definition of a life, it’s a definition of a start (or false start), and a goal. The start is ineptitude and disconnection; the goal is to be loved, to be connected, to be appreciated. (The popular terminology here is “mainstreaming”, but that’s a loaded word and should not be confused for an end goal. To me, mainstreaming has always hinted at a second meaning: that your goal is to ingratiate yourself with the popular and shed all outward eccentricities. To a sociopath this might be a survival goal, but to an Aspie it constitutes complete self-reversal and is impossible. Moreover, to be “mainstream” among adolescent Americans is to be a vicious, callous, self-important little asshole.) You want quality over quantity of connections. Ultimately, you want the freedom to be yourself, while relating to others who are themselves.

This radical freedom is within the grasp of Aspies, perhaps more so than for others. For me, the final transformative impact of otherness was to be capable simultaneously of brushing off many kinds of emotional hurt, while evolving a profound awareness, humility and sensitivity to the feelings of others.

To quote The Avett Brothers, because I can:

I wanna have pride
Like my mother has
And not like the kind in the Bible that turns you bad
I wanna have friends
That I can trust
Who love me for the man I’ve become, not the man that I was

Well, you can certainly hear the crickets on this feed.

I’m resurfacing for the first time in a while, actually in part to talk about why I think this blogging interface isn’t cutting it for me anymore. Up front I will say, there’s a lot of research I should have done while I was busily avoiding the issue / firming up my prejudices; and I hope to do some of that soon. Now’s as great a time as ever there was, especially in light of last week’s acquisition of a top-of-the-line smart phone.

I decisively jumped on the Android bandwagon the minute I heard Verizon was going to feature the developer-friendly platform in their new Droid series. I made it my birthday present to myself, and stood in line at 6:50 Friday morning so I could start learning to use it at work and later while out on the town. The significance of all this bears explanation, more than can really fit here, but basically Android is software akin to Mac OS or Windows, it runs on phones that compete with Apple’s iPhone, and for coders like myself it removes a lot of the entry barriers to writing cell phone apps.

Anyway, with the confluence of social utilities like Twitter, an Internet-aware phone that’s constantly in sync with these services, and repository and syndication systems like those that power this blog, I can envision a number of really cool productivity apps. Searching the Android market effectively is a skill I’m still learning, so even if I had looked about I wouldn’t necessarily know how much of the space has been explored. But here are some haphazardly arranged thoughts:

Note-taking: my earlier ideas on this centered around bulk recording and processing of speech, which incurs big costs in bandwidth and/or power. There might be some strategies to get around this, but nothing short-term feasible.

A better direction, the one that interests me now, is to do away with the tape-recorder metaphor and start with individual snippets of text, the equivalent to writing a formula on a cocktail napkin. Fragments of such size are reasonable to type when your hands are free, or to run through Google’s server-side voice recognition (although that has its shortcomings). Maybe you attach something – a photograph, or the OCR scan of a block of data; workout statistics read from a bluetooth device; any old thing.

Once you’ve got a message fragment, what would you want to do with it? The fact that it’s in such short fragments means you’re probably not going to be dictating prose of any length with this system; in that case the tape recorder really is the way to go. The output here is going to look more like a string of tweets–little messages that become part of a bigger structure.

In Twitter, the structure is just a message thread, or a feed of all the statuses posted by an individual. Here, the structure is something more complex, something of value itself, but we can still specify that structure in part through message content–i.e., through tagging.

Once meaningful structure has been built up using these little fragments, it needs to be reviewed, updated and potentially shared in some form. Visualizing and saving structured ideas is a really cool problem, and fairly well solved in the case of hierarchical or graph-like structures, although I don’t know how much people have done with cloud-bound mobile services for carting such data around.

What intrigues me most though, I think, is the cases for compiling and sharing information. Not only is there the question of what format you use to publish something, as opposed to merely visualizing it for yourself. Where’s it going? Who can see it? What piece of it do you want to send out? Do you want your connections to be able to view it, alter it, give feedback, along the way? How, and at what point in the process, would you export it to produce text documentation?

Part of this ties back into my growing vexation as I repeatedly cross the space between traditional blogging, and the micro-syndication used in social networks. They’re quite different worlds. The former offers granular privacy, but not a uniform concept of content classification and priority that I’m happy with. The latter offer varying degrees of privacy, and sometimes different streams of information with differing levels of importance, but I would not hold them up as role models for how to do it right, either.

The underlying technology’s fine. You could hypothetically do all this with one or more RSS or Atom feeds, for instance. You could use a private twitter account or something like it as the raw input to an idea mapper or spreadsheet application. But that’s not what the thing itself is, those are just optional ways in and out of the application.

And in some cases, maybe it’s not Web 2.0 data at all, maybe it’s exported as CSV or XML data that gets fed to an external app, like a nutrition logger. I realize I’m talking about a couple different components at the same time, here–the note taking app and the data sharing app aren’t the same thing. They’re just two neighboring pieces of a complicated puzzle that I’m considering. And I’m trying to look at them open-mindedly and holistically. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the future is basically here.

Anyway, tomorrow I’ll tow this back to work and Nic will tell me how it’s actually done.

Thanks to Bolt, I’ve got about five hours with slow but working Internet, with nothing much to do other than get caught up on mail and sort out my thoughts.

I didn’t come here with any mission, or any questions in mind, just the thought of being away from work and responsibilities for a little while. And maybe of giving the City a fair, open-ended look now that I’ve acclimatized to living near a major city.

When I was younger I couldn’t imagine life anywhere other than a medium-sized suburb of a medium-sized city like Albany, with safe, quiet streets, and entertainment options within a half-hour drive. I don’t know to what to attribute that smallness of vision–complacency?–but I know it influenced me against applying to MIT and some of the California schools.

I’d been to NYC several times, of course, usually day trips, so my opinion of city life was largely informed by midtown Manhattan. Tourist-ey midtown Manhattan, awash in traffic noise, swarming with people and overlooked by the gigantic Macy’s and JCPenny and the towering office buildings beyond. That is no place for a child who gets vertigo standing in the state legislative chambers in Albany, who wants to flee the picnic table whenever honeybees take interest in his soda.

Subsequent impressions have been more favorable, though the circumstances have been strange: fumbling with maps en route to a Halo 2 preview event on FDR Drive, racing through the night in the company of a panicked classmate, meeting a professor outside her second home in midtown.

The most “normal” trips I’ve made there are probably the visits to my relatives in Brooklyn. These have always been short stays; the Park Slope brownstones may be roomy, but they’re not that roomy.

So it was good to find myself back there again, in an under-explored borough of the city with time to kill. I only wish the August heat could have eased up a little. Boston is spoiled on air-conditioning compared to NYC, and the more extensive New York subway routes are balanced by the extent of the city itself, and it’s a discouraging surprise to have to walk 1-3 miles a day in that.

I was reminded too of how freaking practical smart-phones are. Nikki has one, and I don’t. What she can do on the fly, on unfamiliar routes, requires me to spend a half hour planning at home or the Internet cafe, and can easily become a day-trip. TV commercials may prefer to highlight Twitter and games, but for navigating New York, Google Maps and Hopstop are indispensable. Not to mention mobile IM, so you can compare notes with friends wise in the ways of public transit.

That said, I’m happy with what I managed to accomplish this week, especially when you consider that we spent a couple nights partying (New Yorkers are crazy like that). I got to enjoy some of the local cooking and produce, hung out with Roy at his and Judy’s place, got in some work hours, did karaoke, visited the Stonewall Inn, and went clothes shopping in SoHo.

I saw some amusing things, including the weird graffiti for which Williamsburg is known (pics when I get the chance), and a magician in the subway platform. I took my breakfast at a place that makes vegan egg sandwiches a la Uncanny Valley. And I derived some amusement from the tragic hipness still abundant in New York advertising, particularly for movies and TV shows.

I leave knowing there’s a lot more that I might have made time for, if I wasn’t preoccupied with the sweaty heat or worried about worrying about how much time I should leave as cushioning. But that’s life, innit? So as a result I will think about my schedule back home, maybe think about donating the extra clothes that are keeping me from putting away all my laundry, start budgeting for new shoes and a new phone with a data plan.

And then put on my underarmour and my new sneaks and run all over the place

For every job, a tool. You want to live in the city that never sleeps, you have to know where your towel is. I now know I can holiday there, which is saying something. Beyond that, I dunno. I have unanswered anthropological questions about this city and its population. They seem awfully stressed. Olin’s “choose two” principle might apply here, with last call at 4AM and controlled substances easy enough to find, although some of the yuppies mitigate it by sleeping late and working late. For myself I’d worry about that. And it makes the residents a bit… tetchy sometimes.

But I see the charm that the place has, too. Stuffed in there somewhere between the misfunctioning AC that turned the 1 train into a sauna, the pervasive smoke of hand-rolled tobacco and the skeezy shop owners on Christopher St. It’s a sincere kind of place, in its way, where you can strike up conversations with passersby and not be treated with suspicion. Or content yourself with people-watching: there’s as many shapes and skin tones as people, many of them sporting cool body-art. It’s a place where you can feel alone, or not, as desired, as simply as if you were adjusting your sunglasses.

Just try not to think about the garbage, or about being covered in sweat, and you’ll be fine.

Found a better work spot today: http://www.brooklynboneshakers.com/

It’s a vegan coffee/sandwich shop that caters to cyclists. The food’s priced on par, which is to say it’s expensive, but the coffee is reasonable. I was able to access an electrical outlet, so I went back and fetched my power chord (unfortunately at the hottest hour of the day, so I came back dripping wet).

Last night we ate at King’s Feast, one of the many Polish restaurants in Greenpoint. I found out what real goulash is like (hint: it’s a stew, not a noodle casserole). The staff didn’t seem to know much about their selection of Polish beers, which was a shame. But the food was yummy and quite cheap.

Tonight I think maybe we’ll wander Manhattan a bit, if Nikki is feeling up to it. I’d like to find a cheap lawn chair for my room, so I don’t have to lie on the bed while using the laptop, and possibly some undershirts and a pair of headphones.

This is day two of five of my short summer vacation in Brooklyn, and I must say, the place is growing on me.

I still don’t know if I could live in such a place, but the possibility doesn’t seem as crazy as it used to. It definitely meets my needs of the moment. I had little idea how worn down I was before I passed out last night around 1. But I feel immensely better today.

The place where I’m staying is in Greenpoint, about halfway between McGolrick Park and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. It’s at least as warm and sticky as Boston was, and while I count myself very lucky to have a room with a window unit, I’m surprised to find the weather isn’t really that oppressive after spending a day in it. You’re just forced to acquiesce to walking around sweaty all day. And there’s a corner store with deli, sport drinks and an impressive beer selection.

Working out of the nearest wi-fi cafe was a failure, no thanks to my flaky wireless card, but it would have been extremely convenient for its proximity otherwise. I returned to the apartment, where the connection is stable, and found a seat in the common space.

New york is full of talkative, bright young people. I thought this was true of Boston, and maybe it is, but it’s very true here. The sheer variety of opportunities for work and leisure seems to more than offset the city’s quirks for them–the stink of garbage, which is put out daily rather than weekly; the complex and shifting behavior of subway routes, which despite their spread often leave you with many blocks to travel on foot. These oddities become nothing more than individual threads in the weave that shapes the city’s lifestyle.

Some make for interesting comparisons with other cities. For instance (and let me say in advance this is anecdotal and probably biased), New Yorkers still smoke like chimneys. I know few people in Boston who do, and of those, most either smoke cigars on occasion, or are in the process of quitting. New York and Massachusetts both had early bans on smoking in bars and restaurants (respectively in early 2003 and mid 2004), but modest differences in the laws and their enforcement have added up to major differences in the trajectory of tobacco culture. In NYC, where you can still find public places to smoke with friends, the sense of legitimacy and in particular the popularity of rolling your own seems to be higher.

More on that later. I need to cut this short and check my work queue before Nikki gets back and asks me what we’re doing for the evening. Lots of exploring to do these next few days.