aspie

aspie lovin'

Scott once told me I don't have a romantic bone in my body. I'm actually very proud of that.

I have no idea how to explain that, except that 'romance' seems so cliche and sort of scheduled to me that I get the giggles and make fun of just about everything about it.

I've never been caught up in a romantic moment, but I think that might be more that I haven't been swept away in my emotional whims in a culturally defined way. Honestly, I see romance very differently than champagne and roses, walks in the park, kisses in the rain, holding hands on the beach, whatever. Cliche.

Romance is the sweetness of having been friends through it all. Romance is the aching wait together through thick and thin while you wait for something scary like test results. Romance is loving someone so much that you'll hold hands through a really bad terrible day, or month, or year, or even a decade, and still giggle about how stupid some of it was.

Of course, I think his idea of romance was pretty weird, too. Don't get me wrong, he's a really sweet guy and always there in a pinch and has never let me down, but... He once saved money buying armloads of carnations about to be pitched out the back door of a flower shop, so I stood at the sink with a fever going through two bales of nasty decaying carnations so I could put a few in a vase. I think the flower lady ripped him off. But not to worry, I've also gotten some very excellent flowers. It's just that he comes up with these weird surprises sometimes, and he really means well, so his feelings get kinda hurt if I make fun of them. And I'm aspie, I can't tell you how hard it is not to laugh............

Here is my very favorite story from our whole marriage, which will be 15 years in August.

It had been a rough week, I felt yucky, the kids were underfoot (gradeschool and middle school), work was dumb for both of us, whatever we were snappy about wasn't making sense, and without thinking I shot off "Why don't you ever call me a term of endearment? You've never called me honey or dear or darling or anything like that." He asked me what I'd like to be called, which, as you ladies know, is ~bad~. I huffed off and completely forgot all about it. (I'd like to say to the people reading this who HAVEN'T been married five or ten years with kids, this is completely normal and sane behavior on both sides.)

About a week later, it's dark, the kids are in bed, he's busy on me, and suddenly everything stops, I feel his mouth on my ear, and he whispers "Cupcake." Then he got busy again.

Cupcake? Why did he say cupcake? Did he *want* a cupcake? Was I supposed to make him some cupcakes? I know he ~likes~ cupcakes. Is he hungry?

You'll have to bless my little aspie heart, all this is flashing through my mind like a big puzzle and he has no idea I'm no longer in the moment, when it hit me-- THAT was the term of endearment! And before I could stop myself I was stifling giggles at how unromantic and weird that was, and every time 'cupcake' went back through my head I was suffocating myself more and more trying not to laugh, but it crescendoed until I had to gasp, and next thing you know I'm laughing and laughing....

Poor Scott. He's in the middle of it, I'm laughing hysterically, and I can't even tell him why because I can barely breathe. He stopped, turned on the light, and huffed off into the bathroom. I gasped in after him, still doubled over in gales of laughter, wiping tears from my eyes, and he's so hurt he won't look at me or speak to me. He avoided me for three days. And he never, *ever* called me cupcake again.

Years later, that memory still sends me into fits of giggles, no matter where I am or what I'm doing. Scott knows the whole story now, he understands me. He's probably not exactly ok with it, but it's such a little thing to him that he completely forgets all about it. For me, however, that is a precious memory. Two completely different minds meeting in a world of love. That story is a very good picture of our whole marriage, all the crazy misunderstandings and goofy stumbling around that two people go through in a friendship that lasts for years. I have Asperger's, he has Attention Deficit Disorder. I cannot think of a more romantic memory than looking back over the years at how we learned how to laugh together over everything dumb between us. Some day, if he goes first, people will wonder why I have to stifle a little giggle while I wipe my tears.

It takes a brave man to keep making love in the face of a woman laughing. Scott would really miss me laughing if I stopped and got all gooey and romantic on him. I think we have more fun just laughing than any other couple I've met. I can't help it, sex is just so weird, and stupid things pop into my head like how dumb frogs look doing it and stuff.

Valentine's Day is funny because I don't get the least bit gooey, but Scott gets all sappy about his favorite candy and sits there lovingly eating those little hearts while he watches tv. He'll buy himself candy and forget all about me. Cracks me up. I love watching him be himself. I think some people miss seeing the unique stuff when they insist on romance.
- 4:27 pm
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You May Be an Aspie If...

This list is all my own, from my own experiences. I got the idea from You Might be an Aspie If..., which I found so comforting and funny that I was able to more quickly adjust to enjoy being who I am once I found out I'm a mental aberration.

YOU MAY BE AN ASPIE IF...

...you run an entire wash cycle before you remember you forgot to load it-- twice. In a row.

...you really have used a paycheck for a book marker (like Einstein) and run into it by chance 3 months later when you remembered you were reading that book and decided to finish it.

...you check a pile of books out from the library, start them all at once, get halfway through, and renew them only because you really believe you're going to finish them, even though half of them are disappointing and the other half aren't addressing your questions after all, particularly if they are about physics or paranormal and astral phenomena. Then you renew them again because you forgot to take them back. Then you really do forget all about them and incur heavy fines.

...even with all this forgetting, you can remember in great detail several paintings you once saw in the waiting room of a doctor's office when you were six years old, among a number of other useless flashbacks that include the Herkimer the Homely Doll song on Captain Kangaroo (and wonder if the person singing it was Sterling Holloway), the smell of your lunch box in the first grade, and the heartbreaking disappointment of your first Valentine's day in the first grade. AND the Johnny Appleseed song, and the kitchen table in the first house you lived in, and the time you got a needle stuck in your knee when you jumped on the couch when your mom got up from a sewing project to go do something, and...

YOU MAY BE AN ASPIE IF...

...you wear the same clothes for 48 hours straight, to bed and back again.

...you forget you have makeup on and rub your eyes at work and discover it in the bathroom two hours later- *after* you've helped a dozen customers. And it doesn't freak you out. You just go, "Oh, yeah..."

...yet, in spite of this seeming lack of interest in your appearance, you obsess about the laundry. Or your shoes being clean. Or your eyebrows not exactly matching.

YOU MAY BE AN ASPIE IF...

...you wind up at the doctor's office a day early and are so convinced you've got the day right that they let you in anyway, even though the waiting room is packed and you're not sick.

...you convince a customer at the register that they still owe you $4.38 instead of the other way around, and all the cashiers around you stop what they're doing because even though they can hear the error of your ways, your argument is so convincing they can't help but watch in awe as the customer opens a change purse back up. (This after acing all your college algebra tests in pen.)

...you don't recognize a monthly older couple checking into the hotel where you work even though you can see in the computer that you were the one who checked them in the last 6 times.

...you forget you took lunch already and try to punch back out an hour later for lunch. (stressful day)

...you get lost in a Super Walmart.

...you have to leave the Super Walmart before you're done with your list because the noise and lights and people and overwhelming variety are causing enough anxiety to nearly pull your shirt off while you flap your long sleeves together reading labels. (Seriously, Scott caught me nearly pulling my shirt off once as I flapped. Egads, that would have been a treat for a few people, eh? I don't wear long sleeves to town any more.)

...you're so spaced out leaving a Hallmark store that you run right into the door and stand there wondering why it won't open while you slowly focus back and realize there is a sign saying "Use Other Door" and someone behind you is falling over laughing.

...yet in spite of ALL of this confusion in public and with the public, you are able to alert an entire hotel full of guests to a tornado warning and supervise them into a hallway and keep them calm while a tornado passes by two miles away, and you help clear a large department store of customers while the fire department investigates smoke and fire alarms and you find out you're the ONLY employee that not only remembered to grab a flashlight and fire extinguisher but also followed all the steps properly.

...and you even arrive first on the scene of an accident and save someone's life because you remember in detail everything you've ever learned about airway clearance and taking control of someone in a panic.

...AND you even get a 4-story hospital locked down as a housekeeper at 4 a.m. reporting an extreme error of contagion that a nurse made earlier calling you stat to the ER. (Aspies would make fabulous Star Fleet personnel. We kinda dig protocol and things like OSHA, NEPA, and other technoweenie stuff. Except we might wear our uniforms backward, or for several days in a row. And wind up in the wrong conference room.)

YOU MAY BE AN ASPIE IF...

...you find traffic so intimidating that you change lanes two miles ahead of time to be ready.

...you are terrified of merging on ramps.

...you have to map your route out in your head ahead of time like an inbuilt Tom-Tom, and having to change your route in the middle of it all means you have to reroute a new map in your head.

...you have the city memorized in a very two dimensional way, so you don't recognize where you are three dimensionally until you check the map in your head.

...you've been pulled over for going too slow in a school zone or on a highway.

...you've ever gotten into the wrong car at a store and wondered who left their sweater there or put the dangly thing on the mirror.

YOU MAY BE AN ASPIE IF...

...you happen to know more about an obscure bit of trivia on a map or about another country than the college professor.

...you don't 'get' calculus, but the professor tells you that what you're trying to explain, describe, or ask about is two semesters down the road.

...you get a joke someone tells in another language that you don't speak, but a joke in English stumps you.

...you can't figure out your fellow classmates to save your life, but you ace your sociology major and anthropology minor.

...a particular word consumes half your day, and you walk around pronouncing it in various styles and inflexions, ignoring the stares. pink, pink, PINK, pink, *pink*, pink

...a professor has to send a lower classman to find you, a grad student, on the first day of classes because you are lost, but when you walk into the room and the professor asks you to explain the scientific model to the class before you even find a seat, you jump on the chance to expound, much to the chagrin of the professor.

...you delight in arguing quantitative sociological analysis with a mathematics professor who doesn't agree with you that sociology is a science.

...finding flaws and holes in other people's reasoning is *fun*, no matter how unnecessary.

...a professor asks the students who they idolized growing up, and you say Mr. Spock.

...you got extra credit in a Logic class just for mentioning that you own a copy of Heidegger's "Being and Time".

...you'd rather watch the latest series on cosmology and physics on the History channel than anything else on tv.
- 9:14 am
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bluejacky

I've started transferring my survey posts over to Surveypalooza so people coming in from search engines on mobile devices will be able to see the surveys.

Apologies for the missing vids, another upgrade during the server migration swept through like a scan sweeping through the Enterprise. I'll fix those later, kinda busy...