an interesting lifestyle choice

most people’s lifestyle choices are fairly boring. there are a few different choices people make about how to live their lives nowadays but basically most people operate in the same way as a large percentage of other people. for instance, some people graduate high school and others are dropouts. some people decide to go to college and others don’t. some college students get all the way through to a diploma and others drop out or fail out. some people party a lot and others are at home most of the time. some people have jobs and other people live off of welfare, either from the government, from charities, or family/friends. some people are sexually active and others aren’t. some people are straight and others are gay. some people are into sports, some people are into video games, some people watch a lot of television, and some people spend a lot of time on the internet. people like or dislike different kinds of foods but we generally agree on what things are considered food and what is not considered food (e.g. broccoli is food and plastic is not food). most people are fluent in at least 1 language that is spoken by their fellow humans. all in all, there are many possible combinations, but the array of choices people have for lifestyles nowadays is not terribly vast. of course, the above comparisons of lifestyle choices are typical ones you find in the united states, and in many other countries the array of choices would be very different, quite often even narrower.

however, there are a few strange individuals out there who boldly live lives so utterly bizarre, they are truly unique. one such example is a woman who calls herself faye kane. i read a comment by her at slate.com about a slate.com article i read. both the article and faye’s comment condemned republican hypocrisy, and i agree with both the article and her comment on it. but at the bottom of her comment i noticed her “signature” (something that is automatically added by people to their web postings on certain websites):

<quote>
I'm an autistic savant. I live naked in the woods because I'm disgusted with grotesquely-misnamed "humanity". I steal electricity to run my wireless internet. Yes, really. Read more of my smartmouth opinions at http://tinyurl.com/fayescave
</quote>

as someone with asperger’s (the same as autism only milder, and probably what she actually has), i know firsthand that people on the autistic spectrum (myself included) tend to be weirdos. but let’s just get a few facts about faye kane out of the way first: she is an intelligent person on the autistic spectrum, which probably means she has asperger’s syndrome instead of leo kanner’s classical type of full-blown autism. she lives in a cave in the forest (or rather, a tent covered in branches and leaves to hide it). she proudly proclaims that she is hot, that she is naked all the time, and that she spends most of the time masturbating. she mostly avoids interacting with other humans in real life, but she has managed to steal electricity from the electric company and hook up her cave with power, where she has a computer with broadband internet access. she forages for garbage in dumpsters and then sells it on ebay. basically, she is a very strange individual who is, at least as far as traditional society is concerned, an insane pervert and a criminal. however, i don’t really think there is much of anything wrong with what she is doing, and i find it fascinating that a homeless person like her would be so advanced. now, if you want to know why she ended up living such a bizarre lifestyle, read this. that is her explanation, at least. apparently she had a series of jobs where despite her superior intelligence and technical aptitude, her bosses kept getting into disagreements with her and she kept getting fired. she ended up pretty much completely disillusioned with humanity, apparently. of course, it is easy for someone on the autism spectrum to become disillusioned with the rest of humanity, and it comes quite naturally to us. but usually we do not resort to such strange and fascinating lifestyle choices. there are those who think that asperger’s is just a way to classify intelligence as a disease. some companies actually go out of their way to hire people with asperger’s in the belief that people with asperger’s are smart, hard working, and the perfect kind of people to hire, despite the lack of social skills and inability of people with asperger’s to “sell themselves” at job interviews. and of course, here is a postmodern feminist critique of asperger’s symdrome, which is rather interesting. anyway, if you doubt whether faye kane really lives like she claims to, this is her rebuttal to all the doubters. personally i believe her story to be true, in part because people with autism or asperger’s generally do not lie, but more importantly because this story is too weird to be made up, there is photographic evidence, there are other people online who have actually been to her cave, her story does not violate science or logic, her story is just so awesome i want it to be true even if it is totally made up, and i do not care whether it actually is true or not since it does not impact me in the slightest. so anyway... if you thought i was strange, there are MUCH weirder people out there. and i find them interesting. don’t worry though, readers... i do not want to be like the ultra-weird... i am trying to “cure” myself of negative aspects of asperger’s to become more normal. but when it comes to stuff like faye kane, i just want MOAR LULZ!!!

update: i just found out she is a subgenius after looking through her newer blog entries. the subgenius advertisement she includes in that post has only had 36,390 views according to youtube, so the odds of a random person on the internet being one of the people who actually saw that subgenius video are incredibly low. however, rev. stang has described the church of the subgenius as “kook flypaper”, and it does seem to attract the weirdest elements of humanity. ok, so i have no evidence that she has actually joined the church of the subgenius, but clearly she has found out about us, and in a more recent post she derisively spake of the “normals”, so she is already adopting subgenius terminology. i doubt she would join the church of the subgenius, since she has been living homeless and unemployed in a secret forest hideout for years now, so she would have a hard time coming up with the $30 one-time-only membership fee, and would have no mailing address for her super-awesome membership packet to be sent to. so, she is one of the many non-subgenius subgenii, people who know about the church of the subgenius and agree with it but have not sent in the membership fee to become ordained subgenius reverends. i do not really consider this to be much of a coincidence, despite the seemingly low probability, because “bob” is everywhere, and the weirder someone is, the more likely they are to find out about him and become a follower of his. in her case, it is especially likely, since she is alone all the time in her “cave” in the forest and has a computer with broadband internet, and she has the same deviant tendencies as most other subgenii. i must point out, however, that there are many famous people who are members of the church of the subgenius, such as the actor who played pee wee herman, the actor who played dolemite, all the members of the band sublime, penn jillette from penn & teller, the lead singer of 80s band devo, george clinton (of parliament funkadelic fame), and timothy leary, for starters, and here is wikipedia’s list. for some reason wikipedia only has a list of american subgenii and a list of british subgenii, and the 2 british ones are people i never heard of, so i just linked to the american list since it is much much longer. anyway, this odd coincidence is not so odd when you remember 2 important facts: 1) people on the autism spectrum are weirdos. 2) subgenii are weirdos. so, the set of people who are weirdos has two subsets of its own, people on the autistic spectrum and subgenii, and those two subsets intersect each other, as i could easily depict in a venn diagram if i felt like it. i happen to belong to the intersection of those 2 subsets, and apparently this faye kane lady is also in that intersection. luckily though, i have a place to live and a job, and i have absolutely no intention of ending up like her, with neither. some argue that high-functioning autism is the exact same thing as asperger’s, and i agree completely. therefore, given the fact that she is intelligent and on the autistic spectrum, she has aspeger’s. unfortunately, this disproves the popular theory that only males have aspeger’s, a theory held by many people, including me, because i have only met guys who have asperger’s, and never encountered a female with it. another counterexample to the only-guys-have-asperger’s theory is temple grandin, inventor of the hugbox. however, george orwell developed a new type of logic in 1984. war is peace! freedom is slavery! ignorance is power! under orwellian logic, because females with asperger’s exist, females with asperger’s do not exist. therefore, i have disproven the existence of faye kane. q.e.d. signed, brilliant mathematician