Saturday 28 January 2012

Asperger's related idiocy

I'm a wingnut.  I take a lot of stuff literally without even thinking about it.  That doctors visit that I had the other day is a case in point.  I was talking about the visit with my sister and I told her that perhaps the doctor wasn't as great as I thought because when I told her that I had been diagnosed with Asperger's she asked me how long I have had it.  I immediately thought that she was stupid for thinking that I had acquired Asperger's at a random time and that maybe she wasn't the doctor for me.  So I answered her that I have had it forever.  Anyway, my sister laughed at me and told me that the doctor had meant how long have I had the diagnosis.  Oh.  Why didn't she ask me that then?

This taking things literally thing has come up time and again throughout my life.  It's embarrassing, but in my defense I'm really quite clever.  When I was eight years old my Mom was pregnant with my sister, we didn't know it was a sister yet because it was the olden days when people just had to wait to see what gender their baby was, but I digress.  While my Mom was pregnant my Dad told me that 1 in 3 children born were Chinese.  I was 100% convinced that my new sibling was going to be Chinese.  After all, there were already 2 caucasian children in my family so statistically I just didn't see how the next one wouldn't be Chinese. The time came for the baby to be born, and it was a girl!  When I went to visit the new baby in the hospital I peered at her, searching for her Chinese characteristics.  The next day at school, my new baby sister was my "Show and Tell", she just happened to be the New Year's baby so her picture was on the front page of our small town newspaper.  I brandished the paper in front of the class and explained that you could barely tell that she was Chinese.  Oddly enough, nobody said anything about that statement to me.......  I stopped mentioning it after that.

3 comments:

  1. Oh how cute! :)

    One of my brothers had me convinced I was adopted when I was little. It didn't matter that I looked like all 8 of my siblings. lol The thing that blows me away is that I honestly wondered at times as I grew up, even when he wasn't trying to pull my leg! I think we have more in common than we realized. :)

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  2. Thanks for sharing...that is a great story and it epitomizes the daily struggles with the literal.

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  3. I'll have to write the story about being mistaken for a prostitute because of my inability to interpret nuance. It's pretty funny.

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