Aspies For Freedom

"Confrontational" is a negative word that is used by people who want to cast an unfavorable light on you. They don't call you honest, direct, asertive, strong, brave or self-assured -- they call you"confrontational."

They don't give you credit for standing up for yourself and what you believe, because it's not what they believe and they want you to capitulte to them.

All it means is that they don't agree with you and they can't silence you, so they want to put a negative lable on you.

That's how I am as well, though I can and will defend myself in debates if necessary. I most certainly do not go looking to start arguments. I am a libertarian, and I don't believe in enforcing my ideas, opinions, or beliefs on other people (in other words, being confrontational), and I hate it when others do the same to me. As long as people aren't infringing on the rights and personal freedoms of others, I really don't care what they're doing.

Confrontational?  No.  Rude?  Sometimes, but rarely.  You have to push pretty hard, and I have really low expectations of others.

The biggest problem I have is that the "normal, healthy" NT response to confrontation seems to be some kind of casual argument or fight.  I don't play that game.

I do enjoy a good argument and I am not afraid of defending myself.

Yeah, I totally know what you're talking about, CJ. A few weeks ago at some floor meeting we talking about taking trips together to go skiing, snowboarding, Cancun, etc, and I was like "Why don't we go to Arkansas to try to find the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker?". You should have seen the looks I got after that one. It was horrible.

Some people were whispering among themselves "Look for the what?" and giggling. Hello? Don't these people ever read the newspapers? The rediscovery of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker is only like the biggest thing in American ornithology to happen in like 200 years! I'm not sure if it was in the international news, but around here was on the front page of the newspapers at least a few times.

Sometimes I wonder how most of these people even got into college...

Normally that would be the case, except my dorm floor is made up of people who voluntarily chose to be part of a wildlife/environmentally-themed dorm, and we are supposed to be doing things that pertain to the environment. It seems, however, that I'm the only person on the floor whose even interested in nature at all.

I used to be really into meteorology when I was in middle school. Every day when I got home I would go straight down to my room and read my meteorology books. Coastal California isn't the best place to be a meteorologist, though. We have quite possibly the most boring weather in the Northern Hemisphere. Thunderstorms only happen like once every three years, and even then they are pretty wimpy.

I remember when I was a kid and my family and I took a road trip across the country, nearly all of the clear memories I have are of the weather. How hot it was at the Grand Canyon, the mesocyclones in the Midwest, the humidity in the Deep South, etc. We actually visited a lot of family on the trip as well, but the only thing I remember is the weather.

I was like "Why don't we go to Arkansas to try to find the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker?".

Natalie, that's hilarious! I can just picture them, struck dumb with their mouths hanging open, sort of glancing at one another to see if they heard you correctly.

Then one leans to another and whispers uncertainly "Did Natalie say 'Let's go to a big, noisy stupid tourist trap and get drunk and vomit and have semi-public sex with idiots we don't even like, and show our tits to some creep with a video-cell-phone who will put it on YouTube and humiliate us in front of the entire WWW and shatter our self-respect'?"

And the other says, "I don't think so. I think it was, like, about, like, a, like, ...bird."

And the first one says, "that's stupid. Why would we waste time on a bird when we could go to a big, noisy stupid tourist trap and get drunk and vomit and have semi-public sex with idiots we don't even like and show our tits to some creep with a video-cell-phone who will put it on YouTube and humiliate us in front of the entire WWW and shatter our self-respect?

And they shake their empty little heads and say, "God, that Natalie is so weird... her, like, values are totally ****** up"

"Coastal California isn't the best place to be a meteorologist"

Costal California? I've lived in Oakland for years, so I know what you mean... but I grew up in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas... no one understands how I really miss tornadoes and insanely violent electrical storms. it sounds terrifying to them, and they have no concept of the excitement and beauty of those storms...

Yeah that's pretty much exactly what it was like. They don't even need to go to some crappy tourist trap, though - the actually do all that stuff you mentioned in the dorm halls, beginning on Friday and lasting until Sunday night. Every weekend there are a couple new puke staines in the hallway. I, on the other hand, have gained the reputation as the token "weird kid" on this floor - the girl who stays in her room most of the day reading science books and working on her fish tank.

I'm from the North Bay hills, so the most interesting thing we get is a couple inches of snow like every five to seven years. My mom's side of the family is Cajun though, so I used to spend a lot of time in southern Louisiana (I haven't been there in a few years). The coolest weather I remember there was when they would burn all the sugar cane fields, and then the heat from the fire would cause thunderheads to form above the cloud of smoke. They have some meteorological name, but I don't remember what it was... Pyrocumulonimbus or something like that. Anyway, I just thought it was cool the way these storms were formed solely my human activities.

That's the thing... No one else here likes nature or animals (despite having signed up for a themed dorm), so we haven't done anything related to the topic.

Same here.

Snakes and freshwater fish are my life.

My favorite snakes are boas of the subfamily Erycinae (can't pick a particular species), and my favorite fish... That just depends on what species I'm trying to breed at the time. In general, I prefer primary freshwater fishes (catfish, Cyprinids, Characins, etc) to secondary freshwater fishes (perch-likes, livebearers, etc).

I got some Galaxy Rasboras (currently Microrasbora sp., but going to be moved to a new genus) for my dorm tank that I'm going to try and spawn.

If you're talking about Carpet Pythons (beautiful snakes, by the way), then there is absolutely no way they could breed with Brown Snakes. Pythonidae and Elapidae are pretty much as unrelated as snakes get, last sharing an ancestor with each other in the middle Cretaceous or before. It would be the equivalent of a crow breeding with Velociraptor.