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 any way, 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 on 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 anymore.)
…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 inflections, 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 are *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.
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LOL! I can really relate to a lot of these, especially the one about getting lost at a super walmart, and remembering the first aid steps. As part of my asperger’s, I have an obsession with medical science, so I was cracking up about the ‘remembering first aid’ thing. Thanks for posting this, It was fun reading it
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I’m definitely not an Aspie, but I am guilty of many of these behaviors–particularly the bit about asking/explaining/etc. something that is further in the curriculum…rawr. :]
…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
I’ve done this many many times so it’s called Aspergens? I thought it was called straight mind fuck.
You might be a redneck IF….
some but not all of these jokes are from Jeff Foxworthy
…finding flaws and holes in other people’s reasoning is *fun*, no matter how unnecessary.
making others feel stupid is a pastime of mine. 😀
according to this…I am an aspie. 😀
I now know what I am!
I was just reading through this with my family, and we were all laughing. Nearly all of these have happened to me at least once. Thank you for the list.
@a12906@xanga – People with Asperger’s syndrome generally refer to themselves either as aspergerian or aspie. One of my first intros to autism awareness was through Oddizm Central. Asperger’s is arguably either somewhere on the edge or just off of what the medical community is now defining as the autism spectrum. Asperger’s itself has a very widely defined set of behavioral patterns, and we have differing challenges within our own subset. It’s very confusing, at best, but the point is whether or not a person is having difficulty functioning in daily life, and how to find ways to solve those problems. In my own opinion, having progressed from a very difficult childhood severely lacking awareness and empathy, I think that some people can progress to higher functioning levels, given lots of time and interactive therapies. I think at its most basic level, autism itself is a severe hypersensitivity disorder in the nervous system (the brain is overwhelmed, being nerve central, unable to filter and prioritize) and a corresponding inability to recognize self awareness and therefore a disability to interact socially. I feel that people on the Asperger’s level are able to bridge the gulf between nonverbal autism and social awareness. From my own experience, it took years for me to understand the dynamics of communication and the impact I have on people, and I was called retarded and treated very ill throughout school, even though my ACT score in high school turned out to be the highest. Back then no one knew why I was so weird. I was relieved to find out I fit into a behavioral range that is ‘normal’ for a certain group of people.
what is aspie short for? a lot of these things sound like me. lol
they offer algebra in college? o_o
again.. i dont wanna self diagnose
That panic thing really got to me. I avoid way beforehand so that I won’t encounter the awkward situation. And my memory is strange like that as well. I will fail to remember certain things that just happened but I can remember all these strange bits of my childhood.
This was a great read!
This made me cry. Because I identify with everything on that list. Mostly anyway. Minus the stuff about working as a cashier.
The driving stuff, definitely. I thought I was agorophobic, maybe I’m an Aspie instead.
Yep, I can relate.
Very entertaining! And I actually do a lot of this stuff. I know that lunchbox smell you’re talking about! I wish I knew what created the smell, but it’s a very specific one; whenever I smell it I think of my old Lisa Frank lunchbox and my turkey sandwiches.
I also hate merging on the highway and I change lanes ridiculously early because I feel anxious.
Also, you mentioned forgetting you’d eaten lunch. Very frequently, I’ll be watching TV, the show will go to a commercial, and by the time the show should be coming back, I’ve forgotten what show I was watching!
I can totally relate to the driving stuff and the panic attacks at Walmart.
Ha ha ha… this so describes half my life… Only, I will actually finish the books I check out and then forget about them. Thank God for e-mail reminders from the library.
Is this a joke? A lot of these things happen to me. I’ve been unsure how to ask my mom if she could help me make an appointment with a specialist……
Almost you persuade me…. 8}
Wow, this is a really detailed compilation! It was fun to read.