Howdy everyone! It’s your friendly neighborhood outlier here… Cubbie!

I’m also the “uber-geeky attorney” Amir warned you about way back when! I decided to go by Cubbie on this space because back when I started to post here, I was a long-suffering Chicago Cubs fan. Still a fan, but no longer suffering, now that the curse is OVER!!

While I’m an outlier in a lot of ways, the one thing you have to know to understand me is that I’m autistic. Now, I’m on the very high-functioning side of it—back before DSM-5 changed the definition of the autism spectrum, I may or may not have been classified as Asperger (depending on who did the evaluation). I have two separate professional diagnoses that place me squarely in the autism spectrum. Oh, and before I forget… I had no idea that I was anywhere on that continuum until I was into middle age.

Which is just a small part of the reason that despite being even older than Amir (though accused of looking quite a bit younger), with possibly an even deeper longing for a wife and kids (of my own!) than Amir had until things changed on both fronts for him… I’m no closer to either than I was back in my college days, and dealing with the very real possibility that my chances for both have slipped away. Trying not to get too down about it, but it’s still not easy.

Like him, I’m a native-born American, though my heritage is basic Northwest European Mutt. 🙂

Just to establish my “uber-geek” credentials…

• Not one, not two, but THREE college degrees. And none of them is an associate’s. (BS and MS in chemical engineering, plus JD)
• Not just an attorney, but a patent attorney at that. Passed both exams on the first try… which is an especially big deal on the patent side.
• SAT: 700 verbal, 750 math (this was long before recentering; translates to about 1520 on today’s scale)
• ACT: 34
• GRE: 750 verbal, 780 quantitative, 800 analytical (the latter has been replaced by an analytical writing section)
• IQ: Somewhere north of 150.

I’m also a Christian, but tend to be more comfortable in a liturgical environment than Amir is. Though I’m now a member of two churches that couldn’t be more different and still fall within the general realm of Biblical Christianity. Interesting thing is that in a way, my Christian journey came full circle since I’ve been back in Kentucky.

I was baptized as a college junior in a campus ministry associated with the Restoration Movement… the branch that didn’t go liberal and also uses musical instruments, if you get my drift. The first church I was ever a member of was a church in that same movement. During my journey, I’ve been in that branch… Church of God Anderson… Lutheran (in a church that eventually left the ELCA over liberalism and became one of the founding churches of NALC)… a PCA church… and several different Anglican churches (all of which broke away from the Episcopals for various reasons, mostly outright heresy in the main branch). And the churches I’m now involved with are pretty different. Sundays: Anglican church that draws maybe 30 people a week. Saturdays: A Restoration church that’s popularly known in my area as “Six Flags Over Jesus” (the church embraces the term, BTW), where you have several thousand… just at that service. (Between all of their services at several different locations, weekend attendance is well over 20K.) Funny thing is that while I’ve been most comfortable in liturgical environments for the last 20-plus years, I’m now hooked in more with Six Flags. And as megachurches go, from what I understand, it theologically beats the pants off the vast majority of them. (Just for starters… it utterly rejects the prosperity gospel.)

Politically, I’m not far from where Amir is, though I tend to be more passionate on “national question” issues such as immigration. If you think he’s politically incorrect, I may be even more so.

Back to my degrees… my BS and MS are both in chemical engineering from a well-known school in the Ohio Valley. I then spent about a dozen or so years as an engineer in the chemical industry in a different Ohio Valley state until I got the proverbial tin parachute after my employer was taken over. I was actually happy to be let go because by that time I was totally disillusioned with engineering. Eventually, I went to law school in the mid-Atlantic region, racking up a ridiculous amount of debt in the process.

After returning to Kentucky, where I’d spent most of my pre-engineering life, I joined a small firm in the south-central part of that state. After about a year there, I realized that if I was going to make a dent in my debt, I’d have to make a change, which led me to a quasi-legal government job in the DC area… where, to make a long story short, a perfect storm hit. Combine a work environment that set off a lot of autistic triggers, an evaluation system based almost totally on output and paying lip service at best to quality, and my own tendency toward perfectionism… and it’s little surprise I didn’t last six months. Which led me back to Kentucky… where I wound up getting a disability evaluation that made me eligible for Social Security. (SSDI, not SSI… big difference, actually.) In turn, this enabled me to get about three-fourths of my law school debt discharged (it won’t be final for another couple of years, however)… and I actually have enough income to comfortably cover the debt service on what’s left. And, thanks to recent tax law changes, I won’t be on the hook for any taxes on the discharged debt (which is why I didn’t pull the trigger on it when I was first eligible).

I haven’t posted a lot… basically, I do it when I feel like it. If you see my archives, my posts are all over the place when it comes to subject matter.