[One of these days, I'm going to finish writing a post about all the unusual things I do that would theoretically add points to my "are you on the spectrum?" tally. In the meantime...]
Tomorrow is my quadrennial data junkie freakout. I admit I get totally overstimulated by the onslaught of statistical polling data and raw vote counts that flow like water on Election Night. All the maps and returns and percentages and analysis is like some kind of crack for me. While I do have strong preferences about who wins (not telling!), I admit all the numbers and stuff are plain addicting to me.
Mary and I both have a tendency to know ridiculously atypical amounts of information about arcane topics. Mary is a walking encyclopedia of odd, and seemingly random, facts. 
I call her Mary-pedia and make circles with my fingers around my eyes as my version of sign language’s word for ‘nerd’. Of course, she has one particularly helpful kind of knowledge in the area of frontier and early American life. If I ever needed to churn butter or make a tepee, I know where to turn. Actually in the case of a prolonged disaster, we’d probably outlive our neighbors.
She was telling me all this stuff at an interpretive center in the Smoky Mountains on our honeymoon and people followed us thinking she was the tour guide. There was some older lady dressed in period costume on a front porch of a cabin – complete with the knitting and the rocking in the chair – and Mary bested her on several points. It was both creepy and slightly arousing, but that’s another issue.
For one of my great oddities, I confess my profane, extensive knowledge of professional cycling history. I find cycling – especially the Tour de France – to be the epitome of athletic drama. I totally narc out on races and results. I probably could recite frightening levels of stats about it for the last 50 years. It really does seem completely unnatural as I write this.
Makes me wonder if J-Man got a double-dose as our offspring. Who knows. Obviously there’s WAY more to autism than the possibility of having high levels of arcane fact recall – and that in itself can turn into a reckless stereotype – but it happens in some cases. How all that works out in our family genetics is a mystery.
It does make you wonder, what exactly did we pass on to our autistic kids anyway?
Posts that hopefully are similar:
- What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like Now? (Part 3)
- Starting to Sink In
- Burnout
- Musings from the Weekend
- The Information Fire Hose
- What My Hero Taught Me About Parenting an Autistic Child
- What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like Now? (Part 1)
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
In the event of apocalypse, you should all come meet in our Designated Disaster Point in Staunton, Virginia, where my mother’s best friend, a weaver, lives. I can forage edible wild plants and salvage like nobody’s business, and my parents can make almost anything out of almost anything else. Also my dad’s a good hunter. We’ll take over the Frontier Museum and enlist the blacksmith.
Jenny, shouldn’t you be sleeping? Or are you past the point where you’re exhausted all the time?
I actually know very little about foraging (because I’m allergic to most plants, I tend to stay inside), but I CAN tell you the NAME of the plant you should find for most medicinal purposes. It’ll be up to you to know what it looks like. (Yay for Ayla and Laura Ingalls!)
It wasn’t quite that late here! (I still sleep 10-11 hours a day.)
I think I’m still hungover from too much data intake. Man I really zonk out on that stuff.