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Post number one. I thought I'd start things off with a nice tale of the college-freshman Aspie at work.

Many (sigh) years ago, I was moving into the dorms freshman year, everyone and everyone's families were milling about in the hallways, engaging in pleasantries and small talk with their new dorm mates. I shook hands with my neighbor across the hall, met his mother, and made chitchat about the university.

When it came time to part, the mother said, "Well, I'm sure I'll see you around." The right response would have been, "You bet, see you." Maybe, "Have a safe trip home," if one were feeling especially gregarious. What I instead responded with was a story about a man who, a few weeks before, had been driving on the Insterstate near my home, followed a construction sign that had been incorrectly placed, drove into oncoming traffic, and was killed after colliding head-on with a tractor trailer. I ominously concluded with, "So you never know, you could do everything exactly right and we may never see each other again."

It took me until last month's diagnosis to understand both the strange looks and why I never spoke to my dorm neighbor again.

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I can top that, though. Whenever people would make me hold their babies, and everyone else gushes, I could not help myself from prefixing any statement about the baby's future with "if." I would also call the baby "it."

"It may be cute now, but wait til you see it if it reaches the terrible twos." is the kind of statement parents do not like to hear, and the kind that means you will not get to hold their baby a second time.

This reminds me of Matt Groening's delightfully dark and cynical Life In Hell strip, "What do you want to be if you grow up?"

ETA: I tried to find an image, but couldn't. Basically, a teacher goes through a classroom asking each student "What do you want to be IF you grow up?"

Each one replies in a depressing manner:

Three avatars in a row of violent-yet-ineffectual fictional characters. Interesting. I'm in the right place.

I can top THAT. Fast forward to junior year in college when a co-worker in the computer lab was about to give birth. We chatted in the hallway about it. She talked about her family coming in for the occasion. I responded with all the ways childbirth can go wrong as recently learned in one of my psychology classes. Expectant mothers do NOT want to know how easily a child's head can be crushed by their own cervix.

I can top that too.

One of my coworkers was pregnant, and very excited. At about 7 months, she came in one day with a bunch of "Baby Mozart" cd's and dvd's.

I then launched on a long discussion of how not only is the Mozart Effect not proven by research in children, but that studies have found the dvd's to actually decrease the child's attention span (they learn to filter out the meaningless audio-visual noise). Some manufacturers of these dvd's have actually recalledtheir products because of this backfire.

"What should I get instead?" she asked, rather despondently.

"If he gets old enough, try teaching him a second language. The human mind up til about 3 is the most porous and fast learning it will ever be. At the age of 11, the ability to fluently learn second languages decreases enormously. Teach him a second natural language and a programming language before his brain stops working as fast."

Amazingly, she let me hold her baby later on.

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