For Korean BBQ, and other restaurants like this such as Hot Pot, you need to drop any conception you have about these being places you go to eat. These are places you go to socialize, the food is secondary. This is food that is optimized to be eaten slowly over 2+ hours, because you aren’t there for the food, you’re there to hang out with people.

We tend to have rigid concepts of things and get disregulated when expectations aren’t met. You walked into a restaurant thinking they’d serve you food and you’d be done in a normal amount of time, of course you had a less than ideal time.

I had the exact same complaints about Korean BBQ and crawfish boils, but now that I’ve changed my expectations of them, they are a great time assuming you’re with people you like. The food tastes much better in good company.

I’ve had this experience with a ton of things in life. Not being able to make sense of something sucks. When that something is an event / experience, the experience sucks, and if you aren’t careful you will set in your mind that experience as the standard for such events. So much random nonsense exists strictly as an excuse to socialize, and when you don’t enjoy socializing because you haven’t managed to consistently do it with people you like (basically all NT people, 85%+ of the world), the random nonsense won’t make sense. None of this is ever outright explained.

Me at 12, taken fishing on a lake. 6 hours later, what the fuck was the point of that. I could have been playing video games. We didn’t even catch any fish! Me at 30, hell yeah, an excuse to drink some beers with friends and get away from the house for a weekend.

Hopefully you can give it another shot one day, maybe at a place that has more comfortable seats. There are certainly places where everyone gets enough grill space and food doesn’t need to be shared so much.

My flavor of sleep disorder, I fall asleep when I’m bored. On modafinil I get through the boring activities like driving without falling asleep. Without the drug I’ve no issues staying awake for hours after regular sleep if I’m really hooked on something, like a good show, game, or project. At the end of the day once the drug starts wearing off, I’ll fall asleep watching shows if they aren’t engaging enough.

They say it promotes wakefulness, but I don’t buy it. I think they’ve misidentified some key mechanism, at least in neurodivergent brains.

When I fall asleep, I hit REM within 15 minutes, compared to the 2 hours it takes NT brains. This was per an EEG taken during my sleep study, overnight and through forced naps the next day. I swear I’ll be in REM while awake sometimes, if I’m fighting sleep, like I perceive the movement.

I’ve narcolepsy, modafinil (200mg daily) eliminates undesirable dozing for me. It doesn’t prevent sleep altogether, just the kind of falling asleep while driving I was dealing with before.

It’s weird to classify it as a stimulant, you can see them pussyfoot around it on Wikipedia. No one gets amphetamine like energy from this drug. Neurologists don’t understand the mechanisms at play, only that it’s effective at treating symptoms of narcolepsy. They’ve given it to pilots to have them fly for 48+ hours without sleep fatigue, but that’s not the same as being wired. College kids abuse it to trade sleep for study time. Plenty of countries don’t prescribe it for ADHD.

Why are you going to sleep at 10am? Why are you taking a drug that primarily treats narcolepsy, and then going to sleep? Outside of being sick, the only way I can pull that off is if I’m suffering deep depression, and use sleep as an escape from it all. I hope you’re ok, that you have a fulfilling purpose.

Regardless of what the remote access test says about it being available, I had to manually port forward to fix this same issue.

Ah, thank you for the clarity. My view of things, intelligence comes down to luck as it’s a measure of brain capability (not IQ), which I believe is fixed. Darkness was strictly meant as ignorance. Highly intelligent people will be more likely to learn, synthesize new ideas from previous experiences. When faced with the struggles of this existence, high intellect might invent a functioning coping mechanism where low intellect will fail and leave you to meltdown. Considering I believe we also become frustrated over a lack of understanding, not strictly from undesirable sensations, I think intellect plays a huge role in why people say autism is a spectrum. The compounding failure for an average intelligence autistic kid to learn to cope results in daily meltdowns and placement in special needs classes where they are seen as incapable. If society better understood their problems, helped them process and learn coping mechanisms, healthy stims, and what to avoid, they might be able to live a more normal life. That’s not what happens today, and it’s fucking tragic.

I don’t really like any of the words that exist to talk about the issues unique to autism. Sorry if that caused any confusion.

Based on your response I’m not clear what we didn’t agree on. I’m a former smart kid that only realized he is autistic at 33. I’m hopeful that my kids will have more support in school than I did, and that the world outside of school will continue to become more accommodating for us. The world wasn’t built for people in wheelchairs, but it’s slowly being rebuilt with accommodations. Our curb cuts will take a lot of different shapes.

Start expanding your fundamental understanding of what is happening. Words give power over problems, prior to understanding triggers were even a thing you weren’t looking for them. Read experiences of others, what triggers them. Consider that you can alter your relationship to the triggers, not just avoid them. I hated almost all music as a kid, that changed once I started playing music rhythm games like DDR and guitar hero. I’ll argue that music was information I didn’t understand how to process, which dysregulated me. The unwanted information of songs being stuck in my head really upset me. Improved understanding of the sensory input opened ways to stim in response to it.

Expand what you consider to be inputs, expand what you consider to be a stim. Inputs are anything happening to you, including your own thoughts and actions. Stims are your outputs, including thoughts. Inputs you don’t understand cause frustration. Your brain expends energy to find the correct response and gets nothing for it. Pressure builds up and if we don’t do something in response we blow up. There are so many things that get better once you can understand them.

Consider cilantro, wiki says between 3 and 21 percent of people have a gene mutation that makes it taste unpleasant, I’m in that lucky pool of soapy disgust. Before gaining this understanding I simply could not process how my family enjoyed food with cilantro. In fact, I didn’t even know it was cilantro at fault, I just hated some of the food and my family loved it. Lack of knowledge let me believe it was a subjective taste preference, and I would suffer for that, going hungry or being forced to eat soap. Learning in my late teens of this genre mutation empowered me to avoid my own disgust while explaining how others aren’t disgusted by it.

So much in life is improved by expanded understanding. I think that’s the core of why kids dysregulate more often, they have less tools to explain the world. I think that’s why super smart kids with this brain don’t dysregulate as often, they pull themselves out of the darkness.

I’ll leave you with this link about how words literally grant your brain power to process inputs. https://news.mit.edu/2023/how-blue-and-green-appeared-language-1102

Whenever you do get it clean, treat it with RainX or similar. We do that every few years and squeegee after each shower, our glass is spotless after 10 years. Our water is super hard too, saw the house next to ours which was built at the same time, disgustingly opaque with scale.

All the expensive coffee machines say not to use RO water. Apparently RO water is slightly acidic and can damage the copper heating elements over time. I’ve a RO system and love the taste (really lack of any flavor), but stopped using it on my coffee machines.

I came back to my office after the new year’s break and a stray bullet, from I’m assuming celebratory gunfire, was shot through the wall and hit my screen. Admittedly it wasn’t a hole and the screen was totally unusable after, but I’ll be a close n=1.