My friend Mei-Li, of business and artistic fame, invited me to her birthday party yesterday. She thus offered me the opportunity to meet and mingle with a social group which was both new and afar from my usual crowd.

As expected by social protocol, strangers were fast-tracking to acquaintances by …

“One way to understand neurodiversity is to think in terms of human operating systems. Just because a PC is not running Windows, doesn’t mean that it’s broken. By autistic standards, the ‘normal’ human brain is easily distractable, obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail …

My friend Arjun has created his own blogging platform called “Ristret.” I have helped him with some content.

So some emotional impairment makes me unable to have a simple conversation with a neurotypical person, which makes all social interactions rather complicated.

All?

Well, perhaps not.

“God knows,” said the mother to her child merely suspected to misbehave. “He knows, and he is watching you.” And so she hoped to induce shame and fear, and, indirectly, alter her child’s behavior.

Another word of power that I have learned to master in the last two years is cognitive bandwidth.

“Watch your language!” — I know what this sentence means colloquially in English. English is not my native tongue. I know no equivalent phrase in any other language I speak.

A friend and I were recently lounging at the top floor of the public library musing about social and economic discrimination. The discussion initially started in the context of a temporary exhibit about the stride for more social equality for LGBT persons in the Netherlands in the past 50 years …

Another pretty major change for 2017 was my discovey of quiet.

Before looking at the future, briefly look at the past.