Whats your most recent ASD moment?

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I think my most recent ASD moment was last night at dinner when we somehow got on the topic of fruit....I think it was when my youngest half - sister asked my mom if there was any broccoli in the fridge, because her two zebra finches love it. My mom said maybe, and then suggested some other veggies the birds might like. Then I chimed in that maybe her birds would like some fruit, too. My sister said maybe, but fruit wasn't the best thing for their kind of bird. I asked why, since I had been under the impression that birds loved fruit (she knows WAY more about birds than me, since she's learned all she can about birds since she got the finches and even gets a bird magazine). She replied that it's because fruits have sugar. I was like, "Fruits have sugar in them?" My stepdad said yes. And THEN I said, "But if fruits have sugar, then how come people are always saying to eat THEM instead of things like cookies, cake, and ice cream? Those have sugar too!" And then my stepdad explained to me about good sugars found in fruits vs. bad sugars found in sweets.

Whhhooooopppps.

I'd heard about the bad sugars/good sugars stuff somewhere in a PE or Health class I took once, but I didn't recall it at the time. Oh well, it was actually kinda funny.

Continuous conscious moments of a self-contained- brained- diode- logic gate......"and ;or; not," that limits bonding. Anytime or just a matter of time.

My spouse said something very romantic and loving, and I just sat there as if she'd said "the sun rises in the east". After some time I remembered that I was supposed to respond in kind, so I made something up.

all my moments are filled with my autistic mind reacting to them, and it is unnoticeable when i am by myself (except for sensory sensitivities) and noticeable to varying degrees when i am interacting with other people.

some people are distant, and i like that.
some people are "in your face" and i recoil from that.
almost all people are not "on my wavelength" (in fact i will say "all").

i am not a believer in hocus pocus things like "vibes" and "spiritual connections" and other nonsense in that category, so when i say they are "not on my wavelength", i mean they do not have the same interests and pursuits that i do.

with that in mind, i will say the most recent ASD moment(s) i had was during my most previous interaction with a person.

my friend tammy rang me (as she does 3 times per day), and she is a close match to my mind, but we are not on the same wavelength so our interests and pursuits are divergent.

when tammy rings me, i always go through the same stock list of questions i pose to her.
i can not really communicate in real time, and so i have developed (not intentionally) a list of questions to ask her about her day, because she is happier when she talks about herself, and i just want to get the phone call wrapped up as quickly as possible.

a typical telephone conversation between us is:

ring ring...ring etc
me: hello.
tammy; hi.
m: how are you feeling today ? (thinking (i hope you are brief in your description))
t: ahh ok.
m: what time did you get up?
t: ahhhhhm....yawn....ahhhhmmmm about 10.
m: have you had your breakfast yet?
t: errr,...hmmmm.... no....
m: what are you going to have?
t: ahhhhh....i have no idea...
m: well what is in the cupboard?...etc.

i have enough questions to build 15 minutes of conversation if i am used to that type of conversation, but i am ill equipped to think of valid questions to ask someone who i do not know who is sprouting their communication in my direction.

anyway i have already written too much and i have not even typed my most recent ASD moment.

i have a very good memory for transcripts so this is a few snippets of the content of the call.

ring ring....ring ring (times eight)

me: hello?
tammy: hi.
me: yes how are you feeling tammy?
t: guess what? there was a story on 60 minutes about breast feeding!! !
m: errr...... i'm sorry?
t: yes there was a story about breast feeding.
m: so there one goes. are you going to describe the story or just say that there was one and move on to another topic?
t:yeah it was a good story.

(at that point i suddenly felt a sensation of nausea because i realized that i would have to do a lot of work to excavate what she wants to discuss, and i would probably not be interested in her goal of conversation anyway, so i decided to hop out of the (as yet) uninitiated conversation.

me: well i am glad it was a good story, and i will let you get back to what you were doing, and i will talk to you tomorrow. good bye.

i am sure she had more to say but i just had to go.
_________________________

to include an example of a stellar malfunction of social integration, i will write about an incident that recently came back to my memory

about 3 years ago, i used to eat at a tavern (there were many incidents there which i have already posted about) and there was an old man who sat with me during trivia nights (after him deciding from a distance that he wanted to know me), and he had a family consisting of a wife and 3 girls and 1 boy, and they on seldom occasions came to the tavern and i was surrounded by them on those occasions.

they all seemed to like me (after their father forewarned them about what to expect), and so they encouraged me to drink.

i had a few drinks that i accepted, and my judgement dissolved and leaked out the cracks between the floor boards. i started to make comments about my observations of them that were thought of in a carricaturistic way, and i met a sudden brick wall of resistance (i was told by my friend who was with me at the time as merely a witness)

some 50 odd year old man came in and came and sat at the table behind me (i was thinking "i have to go") and he was related to them and he expressed pain when his backside hit the seat. someone asked him what was wrong, and he said it was hemorrhoids that caused him pain and he felt like his backside was burning.

i was pathetically ill considered, and i yelled "fire in the hole!! !" (like they do in mythbusters) in an attempt at humor but i was met with sufficient resistance to propel me out into the night.

that was for the best because i wanted to hop into my electric heated bed when i got home anyway.

I often talk a lot, and notice people ignoring me and not paying attention. People always do this when I'm talking on MSN, and it really hurts how they're ignoring me, because it's no conversation, it's just me talking AT them

Recently I keep getting kicked off the bus by this 1 driver because I want to get to a location that's apparently "out of boundaries" and my pass isn't valid there.
I live in Southampton. My pass says Southampton. Where I want to get to is in Southampton, it's just another council.
I don't understand this and I don't think I ever will.

I'm not diagnosed by the way, I just think it's very likely I have AS, otherwise I definitely have a lot of symptoms that warrant a diagnosis if I don't get one.

Also I do a lot of non-verbal communication. People will talk to me and I just nod along and go "mmmm" or "heh" and not even pay attention to what they're really saying, because it sounds like Simlish anyway. This I do a lot of because I have to see people at therapy and stuff and the others can be quite talkative. I hate when I get picked out to talk D:

Those are my "AS" moments recently anyway. These events are repeated every day, except the bus driver thing, so there's no need to pick out a specific example of when this happened.

Friday: I wore earplugs to go to my first live demolition derby. Because I heard conversation less well, I felt even less connected to my friends as they talked and spent more time inside my own head or reacting to movement around me in the crowd. But the earplugs worked well for keeping me able to deal with the noise of the environment and being less disturbed, as a result, I think, by all the activity. It was a great suggestion from my girlfriend, on the previous day, that I take them - but too bad she never thought to bring her pair for herself. I thought she'd realized she should, so I never said a word. On Friday, we left from separate locations to go there - me from home, her from work - so I never even had a chance to see that she didn't have them when she set out and say anything. But she was okay.

Today: with b9's tavern story in mind, I made my little pun, puns seeming to me to be a somewhat commonly Aspie thing to love, which I really do! So, I saw the package of my girlfriend's "ASST TERMINALS", in with some other electrical stuff and tools, and I said I thought all @$$es were terminal. She got it. However, although I knew I was making a pun, I couldn't recall in that moment what "asst" might really be short for, so I still needed to ask in order to find out the obvious: "assorted". Then I felt silly, not funny.

Here's something that's just clever, that I found waiting for me when I checked my Twitter account yesterday, btw: "The word Stifle is an anagram of Itself!"

Well, right now I'm wearing these huge bright orange (for contractors?) ear muff hearing protection thingys because my baby son's whining is driving me nuts (hubby is taking care of him so I can tune out for awhile). I had to put them on earlier today for the same reason, only then I also took 2 IBUProfin for the headache it was giving me and chugged a beer

I've got a funny one though...it's not very recent, but I'd like to share it. This one time, I carefully and meticulously chopped an onion just to my liking. It was perfect, and I had suffered with teary eyes to get it that way. I picked up the cutting board and dumped the whole pile right in the garbage! I was meaning to put it in the crock pot lol. Oops!

lady_katie, I've done the same thing with tea! I steeped it loose leaf and then forgot that's what I'd just done, becoming confused between the finished tea and the plain old hot tap water water had I put in the pot beforehand, to warm it before steeping the tea. So, I dumped the tea without looking in the pot first, thinking it was the pre-warming water. And there it was, poured into the sink - the perfectly brewed tea! I was so upset with myself that I had to call my girlfriend at work so she could reassure me that it was okay and that I really could just make myself a new pot of tea. I feel silly about it now, but I was horribly upset back then.

I have stuff like that happen from time to time. ( etc... )

Just after leaving therapy, I was approached by a charity fund raiser. Her opening was, "Ooh, what have you got that I haven't got?"

Confused, I said "Autism." Which confused the hell out of her as well. About a block later I realized she probably meant the chocolate I was eating. Oh well. I didn't want to be harassed about charity giving anyway.