Confessions of Social Confusion, Part Two of an Excessively Long Expose

Last December, when I was still working at the preschool, a bunch of the staff were sitting around the lunch table swapping stories about kids with Aspergers.

"Well," said the occupational therapist, "I'll never forget this one kid. He was maybe six, seven years old and just loved geography. And you know what? When I had him, he could name every single state and capital, and he was only in first grade!"

As if it had been planned beforehand, a thundering chorus of surprise rose from the rest of the table.

"Wow! That's amazing!"

I elected to totally shut up. In fact, I turned bright red and tried to crawl under the table, but then I remembered that this was a preschool and I probably couldn't fit my entire girth under the table, so I just stayed where I was.

I knew all the states and capitals when I was six or seven. Also, I knew a good number of the world countries and their capitals, too. I also used to critique maps. Why the heck would you still have Sri Lanka listed on the globe as Ceylon when it was the 1990s? It was almost as bad as listing Taiwan as Formosa. Also, Rhodesia was a British colony, so they could stop calling Zimbabwe Rhodesia. Also, Yugoslavia was now obsolete.

"Well, I had one kid who was such a picky eater that she would only eat cilantro," chimed in the speech therapist. "They actually had to put the poor girl on a feeding tube."

Okay, at least I wasn't that bad.

Part Two of the Diagnostic Criteria for Asperger's Disorder dictates that the budding social recluse demonstrate restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests and activities. And this is where my self-identity as a questioning neurotypical individual starts to fall apart. Let's take a look.

1. Encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus.

Eh heh heh heh heh. Heh heh heh. Heh heh heh.

OK, I am probably the queen of weird, weird interests. Like, pretty out there. Thankfully, my interests are all pretty nerd-oriented, so I can at least tell myself that maybe I was just born to do lab work on mice genetics or something. Yeah, something like that.

Unlike many other children, I never wanted to be a princess, astronaut, firefighter, singer, celebrity, cook, or other stereotypical careerist. No, I wanted to work at the post office. And you know why I wanted to work at the post office? Because at the post office, they had zip codes. And I could look at zip codes from all over the United States all. day. long!

I also liked area codes. In fact, I collected telephone books when I was a teenager. Not for any reason other than... well, there were lots of area codes. If you gave me a random local phone number, I could tell you where that number was located. 252 was Easton. 867 was Bethlehem. 588 was up in the Bangor area. Yeah, I was awesome like that.

I was into yearbooks, too. I liked yearbooks because they had names. Wow, there were so many kids with the last name of Rodriguez in this school! Who the heck names their kid Jhon, and what kind of severe mental illness did they have? Why did nobody ever have the fairly common Scandinavian affix of dottir?

And now that I have access to a ridiculous number of library research databases, my interests have only gotten weirder.

I like reading about the history of fruit. Bananas were known as Green Gold back in the early 20th century because they were just that profitable. Fruit companies literally built the infrastructure to bring several Latin American nations into comparative modernity. The banana that you eat today is quickly succumbing to a molding fruit disease. Research scientists are currently racing to develop a new banana that is mold-resistant.

I like perusing the zoning laws of area localities. Why did all of those acres of farmland you saw yesterday hold the Rolling Hills Development of today? Because the farmland is in a Rural Zone, which means that developers try to preserve as much green space as possible. Houses must be built on very large plots of land to meet the green space requirement. If you're looking for a larger home, or if you're looking to avoid city living, you're going to need lots of green space. Right in the middle of the former cornfield.

I like food marketing. I am slightly obsessed with Chobani. Not because I necessarily like to eat Chobani, but I'm fascinated by the growth of Greek yogurt in the past ten years. It's pretty rare that you have an innovation in, well, yogurt, but Chobani started it and now you can get Greek yogurt anything. I also subscribe to (free) food trade magazines. My favorite is Dairy Foods (shocker!) followed by Food Management, which is the periodical of choice for those who serve food in institutional settings like hospitals, schools, and... Google's main campus.

So you tell me: Are my eccentric interests abnormal enough to make me ever so slightly autistic? Or are they just abnormal enough to make me supersupernerd?

2. Apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals.

I am happy to report that, besides demonstrating symptoms of severe control-freak and rampant perfectionism, all my routines are very functional. They're pretty rigid, but definitely functional.

3. Stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms (e.g. hand or finger flapping or twisting, or complex whole-body movements).

I chalk up my swaying while standing in church or waiting in line as just ADD fidgetiness. And I twirl my fingers through my hair. Small potatoes. However, there's just one more thing.

When I was in preschool, I used to "dance" to music by spinning around in circles. I have a distinct memory of me spinning around in our breezeway and holding up four fingers to signify my age at the time. I think that's pretty common behavior for a little kid. With me, though, I never really got over it. I have done a lot, a lot of spinning around in circles in my life. I won't go into the details because then I might really just die of embarrassment. But truly, it was excessive.

But was I ADD-bored or... Aspergers?

4. Persistent preoccupation with parts of objects.

Well, I've always loved only a particular few bars of a song. I remember listening to some Backstreet Boys song for 45 minutes and never got past the first thirty seconds because I kept rewinding and rewinding and rewinding. To this day, I listen to songs on repeat in the car... like two hours straight of U Want Me 2 on a loop.

I think, though, that it ends there.

And the eternal question remains: Am I just weird or am I actually neurologically different? I sorta kinda meet criteria, and I sorta kinda don't. I mean, when it comes down to it, I don't really need to stick myself in a box. I'm just Grace. But I'm very curious, and I probably always will be.

But at least one thing's clear.

God help the progeny of Grace and Dan, for they shall be genetically cursed on both sides of the equation. I, personally, am praying for the emergence of recessive genes.