There's battle lines being drawn.
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Young people speaking their minds
getting so much resistance from behind

Sunday, October 28, 2007

It's Passing Like a Disease

Well, because everybody else was doing it (here at the lake, John Scalzi, Elizabeth Bear).



Your Aspie score: 110 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 107 of 200
You seem to have both Aspie and neurotypical traits

To be fair, I disagreed with many of the questions.

The Aspie Quiz.

3 comments:

Camille Alexa said...

Our scores were pretty similar:

Your Aspie score: 111 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 95 of 200

ThatGreenyFlower said...

I was your same shape, shifted just a little to the left--105 Aspie, remainder neurotypical (like 111 or something?)

Anyway, I think lots of introverts (by which I mean people who need time alone to rejuvinate) would socre pretty highly in the "Aspie" range. Aspies are loners, but they're lots more than that. I thought this quiz focused a lot on the alone factor and the living-in-their-heads factor that many folks with Aspergers have. But there seemed to be less on the subtle physical and emotional aspects of the condition.

Tony Attwood explains Asperger's as a personality type. I like that. Yeah, it's syndromic, but it's also who a person is--not necessarily a disease they need to be cured of. Coaching helps--don't get me wrong--but there's nothing inherently bad about it. Just awkward. We need the Aspies. They let us see things.

My focus is fierce. Do NOT interrupt me, buddy, or it will get ugly around here. I do NOT multitask. I live in my own head. I'm a bit of an echolaliist. I'm extremely introverted, though I've trained myself out of this for my work. Who I am has allowed me to do a lot of neat things. Who my son is will allow him the same--maybe more.

- Greeny "He Kind-Of Got It From Me" Flower

Steve Buchheit said...

Hey Camille and Greeny, see, personally, I think it makes me look rounded. But I guess having a "balanced circle" on this chart is bad.

There were a lot of questions thta I could go lots of ways depending on how you interpret what they're asking for. Things like being interupted why you're working on something, well, my job requires lots of attention to detail and lots of steps that need to be completed to finish it. Yeah, I don't like it when I'm in the zone and somebody interupts.

And there were other questions that dealt with hearing. I have mild hearing loss from marching, jazz, and my own rock band. So I can't do that "coctail party effect" that you zoom in on one person in a crowd because I am now incapable of doing that. So I've learned to process many conversations at the same time. When there's too many, I have difficulty in choosing which I should respond to and how to respond (there were several questions here). If I'm talking with one person, I'm pretty good. Put me in a crowd, add music, and I'm a gonner.

Plus there were questions where, yeah, I was told I was abnormal. So what. I was picked on as a kid as well. It's not like I'm walking into work these days and people point and say, "freak." It was just I had my friends, and I didn't give a rat's behind for the cliques. Plus, I've been a transplant most of my life. I'm still astonished when people say they keep in touch with people from high school or grade school. I have one contact that goes all the way back (hey Rog, hope you're still reading this, I need to email you soon). And that's because he found me after finding one of my old letters (Rog was my best friend before I moved to Ohio).

So, yeah, I think I might score differently if I was talking with an actual councellor and could verify what they mean and what I mean. I am slightly introverted. The comment as we were leaving the cabin is that I was veyr quiet. Well, I was working. I also have learned through the cubical migration, how to shut out everything else and concentrate. So while some part of my brain is listening, I don't hear consciously what's happening around me.