The Opinionated Aspie

  "Old and set in my ways."   I hope I never hear those words comes out of my mouth. "Can't teach an old dog new tricks" but... "you learn something new every day"-- what?? I can honestly say that I'm just now really growing up and I'm forty-four years old. Yes, I have a developmental disorder, so it kind of goes without saying that some of the growing up that came so naturally to others at a much younger age, would be delayed greatly and more challenging for me.   Yet here I am learning and growing, and even growing up in ways it might have been thought before, that I'd never be able to. I guess I had a lot of wrong teachers. By saying that, I don't mean wrong with a period on the end-- I just mean wrong for me. Wrong for me-- the examples set before me with too much subtext I couldn't read. Wrong for me-- the standards I was told to reach for without explaining them in a language I could understand. Wrong for me-- a so

    Once upon a time there was a man and woman who lived together. No one knew for sure if they were married or just roommates because they never touched- never sat next to each other, and I suspect they may have had twin beds in their room so they didn't have to sleep together.   The man was the talker of the pair. He never said much that was interesting, which was made obvious by the way the woman never listened to him, and barely responded. They kept lots of pets but were always annoyed with them. It's as if the animals were there so the man and woman could yell at the them instead of each other.   When they did have conversations with each other it was always about the animals. If they ran out of things to say about them they would talk as if they were  the animals. For example, if the woman were yelling at the dogs to get out of the kitchen, she would then say "but MOM!", as if she could read their minds, and the man would laugh hardily, as though it we