I am terrible at remembering names. This is bad in itself, but exacerbated by a few factors:

• I regularly have lengthy conversations with random strangers, and will be able to easily summarize the conversation afterwords, but will have no recollection of their name.

• I am fairly noticeable and memorable, so even people whose names I have no reason to know will know mine.

• I am not particularly good with faces either.

This isn't a memory problem, I can quote back conversations or remember long strings of numbers. I often cope by confessing to my weakness in a self-deprecating manner, or by simply not using names in direct address (it's generally not necessary in English), but these don't actually help me learn names. If I remembered to ask their name early on, I sometimes pause mid-conversation to ask "Are you still x?" but that is somewhat awkward and I'm wrong half the time anyway. The only time I can reliably remember is if they share the name of an immediate family member.This is bad enough that I'll sometimes be five or six classes into the semester and have to check the syllabus to figure out the professor's name, or will have been in multiple classes with someone and shared several conversations and still not know their name.

You can't get a $30 haircut if you're a woman. It's $40-$60, minimum. Let's not even get started on styling.

I used to get my hair cut at barbershops because of the price; lately I don't live near a barber who'll make an exception for me, unfortunately. (No, I don't have a man's haircut. Some barbers will just cut a woman's hair if you ask nicely.)

Honestly, I would be surprised if being more "serious" about hair (blow-drying, styling product, straightening) made much of a difference in my appearance and people's impression of me. Am I underestimating the importance of hair?

When learning the left-hand/right-hand motor/induction rules for electromagnetic fields, I spent about half an hour tapping alternate sides of my head, saying "motor, induction, motor, induction..." I can now instinctively tell you which is my motor hand and which is my induction hand.

I still have a problem with instant recall of left and right, though.

I don't know if anyone can help me with this, but how do I tell the difference between flirting and friendliness? I grew up in pretty much total social isolation from peers, so neither really ever happened, and when they happen now I can't tell which is which. Also, how do you go from talking to someone at the beginning/end of class (or other activity) to actually being the kind of friends who see each other elsewhere and do activities together?

Edit: Thank you, this is good advice. Does anyone have any advice on how to tell with women? I'm bi, and more interested in women, and they are much harder to read than men on the subject, because women's behavior with female friends is often fairly flirty to begin with.

How do you fold a fitted sheet? The time I tried to follow Martha Stewart's instructions I took a wrong turn somewhere, and just ended up with a wadded-up ball of sheet as per usual. And I didn't care enough to unfold and try again. Do you know a different/easier technique?

I've never had the need to be very fine in detail, but I've always treated it a an ordered set (much like the numeric values that Benquo suggested, except without as much memorizing). Then I would compare the letter I want with M (being the 13th element, it serves as a useful midpoint), to decide if the element belongs to the first half or the second.

I suppose that doing something similar with the (6th or 7th) letter, and the (19th or 20th) letters could tell you what quadrant of the Alphabet space you were in. So if it comes before F, between F and M, between M and U, or after U, you can focus your attention there. That takes more analysis, but if you are normal in your memorization methods, maybe keeping the alphabet in chunks of 5 to 7 elements could really help your memorization.

Or you could be like Derren Brown, and just use a mnemonic to tie the letters to numbers... searching... he calls them peg words. I use it when jogging to keep track of distance, and he seems to have a way to memorize 52 elements, which could make 26 elements seem pretty trivial.

How do you speak clearly?

I have a bad speaking voice -- my sibilants ("S" sounds) come out mushy. If I record my speaking voice and play it back, even when I'm concentrating on enunciation, I sound... terrible. It's a voice that sounds geeky at best, retarded at worst. A little too high-pitched and monotone, as well. People have been telling me they can't understand what I'm saying all my life.

It's quite likely that I'll give many public presentations throughout my life, so being better at speaking might be worthwhile. I've lost my fear of public speaking (knowing the material well takes care of that) -- I'm just talking about the mechanics of speech. I want to be audible, comprehensible, and not sound like a moron.

I've always assumed that this is something inborn instead of learned -- hopefully, that assumption (which come to think of it I've never really questioned) is wrong -- but I have a very hard time orienting myself. When I'm walking up the stairwell in my apartment, I have no idea whether I am walking towards the road, away from the road, or perpendicular to it. I can sit down with a pencil and paper and draw it and figure it out by looking at it from a 'birds eye' perspective. But when I'm standing in a room with opaque walls and trying to imagine what room is on the other side, I just get really confused.

I consider it likely that among those reading this, more of you grew up in families of intelligent, educated people than the national average. It is also likely that the number of readers who grew up in liberal and nonreligious families exceeds the norm. Not all, certainly. Quite possibly not even the majority. However, I think there must be many among you who understand the shock of leaving your family and community, perhaps to go to college, and slowly discovering that there are people who don't think like you.

Those of us who grew up in religious, working class families and were the first in our families to attend college also had the experience of learning that there are people who don't think like us. We just experienced it earlier in life. And then when we went off to college, we slowly discovered that there are people who do think like us.

My experience dictated that the conversation would start with "Isn't this a terrible thing?" and proceed to "Oil companies shouldn't be allowed to make a mess they can't clean up." or "Shouldn't we invest in clean energy?" However, though the conversation began as I expected, I was subsequently informed that the oil companies were fully capable of cleaning it up, and that the reason it had not been cleaned up already was a conspiracy on the part of President Obama.

This was particularly shocking to me because there were no warning signs. These were people who were all educated to a Master's Degree level. I had spoken to several on more innocuous topics, and they seemed both interesting and intelligent. ...

How could I have better predicted this?

Why were you shocked? Unless the degrees were in Petroleum Extraction Engineering, you have no reason to expect them to be any better informed on the relevant issues than the general population. (And incidentally, unless your own degrees are in those fields, you have no particular reason to be confident about your own opinions.) On this kind of issue, we all get our opinions and factoids from the media. Our choice of which media. Fox or MSNBC. And if it shocks you that some intelligent people choose to get their news fix from conservative sources, then you really have led a sheltered life. If the thing that shocked you is that the conservative media were saying bad things about the federal regulators, then maybe you ought to sample from right wing sources more often, if only to keep your finger on the national pulse.

I am not only confused, I am viscerally uncomfortable. How do we model for people whose cultural contexts and information delivering authorities are fundamentally different from our own, without lumping them into a faceless group?

By getting to know those people and by becoming familiar with those cultural contexts and information delivering authorities. Duh! It is really not difficult. Actually, if you analyze, you will probably discover that you are already expending considerable effort trying to insulate yourself from those people and those sources of information. Just stop expending all that effort building walls to maintain your accustomed comfort level. And then, after a short period of discomfort, you will find that your comfort range has become extended.

And you may discover something else by occasionally placing yourself in the 'silent minority' position. Which is that some of the people in your own select group of friends may secretly harbor unorthodox positions on some political issues, but keep their mouths shut to avoid trouble. There is no way the opinions you encountered upstate could have been "shocking" to you unless your usual circle practices a particularly powerful kind of censorship-by-exclusion.

Being tactfully noncommittal about your own beliefs until you've scoped out the lay of the land is a learnable skill.

Unfortunately, it's actually not the most important component. In many communities, it's the shibboleths that will trip you up... things the community tacitly expects all right-thinking people to already have a familiarity with. It's possible to spin one's ignorance of such things as an unfortunate personal deficit that one is eager to have corrected, and that can often overcome the barriers to entry... but it's a lot of work.