SOCIAL NETWORKS AND DATING
I know a lot of our Moebius friends and those with other physical differences out there, who are single, very much want to find a relationship.  And social networks--Facebook, Twitter, etc--can help you.  But be careful:
"The game of courtship has changed for singles who are increasingly plugged into several social networking sites, but are the rules different? With hundreds of millions of users using Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and now Google Plus each month, how do singles navigate dating and meeting potential dates on social networks?
People who have dated someone they met on Twitter or Facebook say the social networks are good ways to get a more complete picture of the object of their affections, for better or worse.
Panama Jackson, who blogs at Very Smart Brothas and recently co-authored the book Your Degrees Won't Keep You Warm at Night, says you get a lot of insight into a person's life when you see the kinds of things they tweet about and if their tweet totals are closer to 40,000 than, say, 5,000.
He said he's found that some of his dating prospects like to vent about life and tweet things that make him second-guess his initial attraction. Jackson also cautions that flirting online can lead to jealousy, too, which is likely to intensify the crazy early on."

Check out the book and the blog that the article mentions...

INSPIRATIONAL STORY OF THE DAY
Check out the story of Dr. Margaret Stineman, who overcame incredible physical differences to become exactly who she wanted to be:

"Margaret Stineman spent many of her formative years in the slow classes that were then the domain of children who were, as she delicately puts it, "not achieving."
Born with a severely deformed spine and shoulders, she endured 15 operations as a child on her eyes, internal organs and misshapen bones. She spent much of her adolescence in a body cast, making her the object of ridicule. Problems with the muscles that control her eyes severely limited her vision. People around her did not think she was capable of much, and she agreed.
How that child -- functionally illiterate when she left high school -- became an artist and then a doctor and then a respected researcher and then a member of the prestigious Institute of Medicine is a remarkable story of serendipity, determination, motherly devotion and well-timed mentoring.
Then there's the emotional alchemy. A set of circumstances that would have made many people angry, bitter or at least deeply insecure seems instead to have forged a woman who is, at 58, confident, profoundly thoughtful, joyful and serene.
Now a professor of both physical medicine and rehabilitation and epidemiology whose work has focused on measuring and compensating for disability, Stineman does not like talking about her physical problems. But she recently gave a rare speech to colleagues at Penn about how she had made it in academia, and now hopes her story will help fellow health workers see the potential in their patients.

Early expression
Stineman's journey to the upper levels of medical research began with art. Bored in school, unable to see well, and plagued by medical problems, she turned inward and expressed her private world by painting and sculpting. In early adaptations for her handicaps, she used templates and mirrors to compensate for a lack of depth perception. Some of her teachers noticed her talent, and it got her into Temple University's Tyler School of Art.
Soon after art school, Stineman won a prestigious scholarship that would have sent her to Rome to paint for two years. She said members of the selection committee rejected her after she had a physical. "They didn't want to send a crippled person to represent the United States," she said.
"I was hurt. I was upset. I was angry," Stineman said. "This transformed into something that was so beautiful: a recognition that I must be smart or I wouldn't have won this thing. I must be smart. Something must have been missed. That's when I had the wake-up of my life."
For a while, she rejected art -- she saw it as too emotional -- and threw herself into the discipline and rules of science. Stineman's dream, and she knew it was probably an impossible one, was to become a doctor. Engineering was her fallback.
Her inventor father worked as a machinist at Drexel University. She enrolled as a special student there, taking one class at a time. "I decided that I would do absolutely anything to learn," Stineman said. "I was so infatuated with the fact that I could go from barely knowing arithmetic to getting an A in calculus just because I had applied myself."

School struggles
After using her art portfolio to talk about visual perception, she got into Hahnemann Medical College. It was a lot harder to keep up there. Because Stineman learns better through hearing information -- and can process it quickly -- than by reading it, her mother read her textbooks into a special tape recorder that Stineman then played back at high speed.
She brought a different perspective to the care of people with disabilities. "I felt as a child they kept trying to fix me," she said, "but nobody was helping me to learn how to live with the way I was."
Her facility with math and computers led to her biggest claim to fame: She helped design the system Medicare began using in 2002 to decide how much to pay for rehabilitation care for individual patients.
Stineman, whose long brown hair is streaked with gray, focuses on research now. Although lung problems reduce her stamina, she is known as a tireless worker. A computer that speed-reads documents out loud makes it possible for her to handle the work.
She relaxes in a Zen garden her mother created at the house where she lives near the university. She said she had dealt with the pain in her life by creating art, writing music and keeping journals."

Note that she had people who told her, basically, that she couldn't do what she wanted to do.  But she persisted, and proved herself.  So can you.


"They can because they think they can."--Virgil