That's my point exactly and/or because I was in a hurry to finish the post since I needed to leave right after it. :S

Might as well leave it public now, though...

Thanks!

I have the same problem. Since I've had to live on my own, I've also had to figure out how to look for things I can't find, and trace back steps, and learn when to give up looking and accept and be okay with the fact that I may, in fact, never find the thing. (Usually when I do this I find the thing five minutes later somewhere that I wasn't looking for it.)

It's almost funny how sometimes you can only find things if you're looking for something completely different. You're lucky you can find the item five minutes later, though - I usually don't find it until a week or a month later.

I don't think it's any mark of a lack of intelligence. For me, I think it's that my brain expects the thing to be somewhere specific, and it has a hard time rejecting that image so that I can look in places where it might not expect the thing to be. However, that's not always easy and I sometimes overlook the thing even when I'm looking right at it.

I do something similar myself - if I don't know exactly what the item I'm looking for looks like, I can never find it. This doesn't apply so much for finding particular clothes in my closet, but it does apply to if, say, Mom points outside at some animal she wants me to see that's in front of a particular tree - obviously, even though I know what trees look like, I have a hard time finding which tree she's pointing at. Even if she says that it's the tree by, say, the swimming pool, that still doesn't help because to me, more than one tree counts as being "by" the swimming pool.

My dad used to say, "If it was a snake, it would have bitten you."

My mom says that too (which is probably why I always feel stupid when I can't find things).

I also started trying to look a little harder, or check and double-check, especially if I think I'm sure I can't find it, before I go ask someone else because I've gotten tired of feeling like I'm looking in every possible place only to have someone else go straight to where I was looking and find it. It does still happen, though.

I feel that, in the long run, it's much better to have someone "smarter" find the item than to keep trying to find it myself, because except for in the case I posted about, it saves me a LOT of time.

You seem to be a lot more intelligent than I am, and I do stupid things every day too.

<sarcasm>pathvain_aelien, why did you hack into eccentricrabbit's LJ?</sarcasm>

Seriously though, I know other people do stupid things every day as well. I just find it hard to believe that I'm still smarter than them, because it still seems to me like I do more stupid things than them.

(Honest, I have terrible concentration, probably due to my depression and anxiety apparently.)

I also have terrible concentration (in fact, earlier today, I tried measuring my attention span - it's only about 16 seconds!), but mine is due to my random associations and "creative tumors".

Everyone is 'smart' in different areas! You excel in science, and I excel in animal things for example. :-D

I know, but it seems to me that I'm smart in fewer areas than most people. Let's compare me to say, pathvain_aelien, for example:

I excel in: most areas of math (believe it or not, there's still at least one type of math that I don't know!), computer stuff (except using printers and setting up Internet connections), about half of the fields of science, most Mario games, a few other video games, being politically neutral. That's slightly less than 5½ things.

P_A excels in: knowing the filmographies of almost all of the actors in every movie and TV show she's ever watched (which apparently is an even greater achievement than I thought, since Firefox doesn't even recognize "filmographies" as a word :P ), driving, cooking, writing, Zelda games, buying gifts for people, noticing when she should say "thank you", paying attention, Harry Potter trivia, Lord of the Rings trivia, X-Files trivia, Buffy trivia, having creativity, organizing, and probably even more things that I couldn't think of off the top of my head. That's at least 14 things.

True, the fact that I'm good at fewer things allows me to be especially good at them, but sometimes that's not such a good thing either - just earlier today, Mom didn't believe me when I said that I didn't have the mental capacity to clean my room and my closet. Apparently, the fact that I'm so good with computers implies that I can stay organized easily. Using that logic, everyone who lived before the ENIAC was built had extremely messy rooms.

I'm pleased you found your jeans though!! Go you!! :-D

Thanks! That was actually going to be the original point of this post, but somehow I ended up getting depressed in the middle of writing it :P

And you know what? While I find it hard to believe myself, and it's not until years later when I look back... The 'stupid things' or 'mistakes' we make, however small or big... They actually teach us something. :) Right now though, with the recent mistakes I've made I can see no positive out of them. :-\ Hopefully one day I will though...

Oh I've learned from my mistakes too, but to me, it's always painful to look back at my mistakes regardless of whether or not I've learned anything from them. In fact, in a way, it's actually more painful to look back at the ones I've learned from, because those are generally longer ago, and thus, generally worse. Plus, I usually find that I make the worst mistakes whenever I'm optimistic (except with driving - I make the same mistakes no matter what due to my 16-second attention span). But then again, someone in autism felt the same way at 15 but no longer did at 22, so there's hope :)

Wow, he sure is lucky! I've never been that lucky - whenever I overcome one of my problems, it's always so gradually that I don't even notice. Whenever someone asks me how I overcame a problem I used to have, my response is usually , "I don't really remember. It just happened somehow."

There's hope though - I've recently been better about not procrastinating my various projects, which seem to be about the only thing holding me back by being stuck in my brain like "creative tumors" and distracting me EVERY 16 SECONDS. I still have to work really hard if I wanna be creative-tumor-free before college, though...

You're welcome!

And thanks, because it feels even more awesome whenever it turns out that I'm so high-functioning that someone doesn't even know I'm autistic until I tell them! So far, this has only occurred twice: at the Johnson Space Center summer camp (part of NASA's High School Aerospace Scholars program) with my teacher, and right now with you. (And even then, since we only know each other online, you can't see my stimming and lack of eye contact and stuff, so it's really only 1½ times.)

Ya know Autistic people tend to look at details.. I think thats how you found it so quick!

True, but rarely the right details. Normally, I'm worse at finding things than anyone else is - this is just a very rare case of the opposite happening.

Which one? Being able to find things easily, or not being able to find things easily?

Lucky her ;)