Need for things to be "even"

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I think of myself as more NT than AS (some AS traits, enough to pass on to my totally AS child, in combination with those from my AS spouse, but not enough to "be" AS myself) and yet ....

I still find the need to step on a crack with the other foot after one has stepped on a crack so that the bottoms of both feet feel the same. It's been that way my whole life.

So my first reaction was the same as one of the earlier posts - isn't this normal?

Part of the fun of it would be the satisfaction of setting everything even and right again at the end of the game. Or successive challenges -- first you try to make it genuinely random (which isn't easy) and then set things up again in an unusual sort of order, like your mixed-up-yet-ordered saucer-cup colour combonations, then in normal matching order. I like to do this sort of thing with music discs and books, rearranging them in different ways according to different classification systems.

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Exactly. The idea would be to increase his comfort-level with different patterns of order and with disorder, so that when he encounters disorder or stupid classification systems in life, he can merely dislike them without feeling upset about them.

Candies like skittles must be eaten so that one does not eat two of the same colour in a row. Nor must you eat them in alternating colours. This requires a certain amount of forethought as you get to the last ones.

I also for a very long time in child hood, absolutely needed to do things "evenly" (physically) to both sides of my body.

When I learned about odd and even numbers in school I also became quite compulsive about only doing things in even numbered sets. This progressed to the point where I felt a strong preference for even numbers that are double an even number rather than double an odd number (so I would prefer 4 to 6 as an example).

Learning my 5X multiplication helped though; 5 and multiples of 5 were the first odd numbers I could tolerate easily once I learned the difference between odd and even numbers, and it helped me to move past this odd set of compulsions relating to even numbers to an extent.

To this day I still have some issues/compulsions around making both sides of my body "even" (for instance needing to put each foot over cracks in the pavement, equal to the other, so if I put my right foot first across three cracks in the pavement without putting my left foot first, I feel "lop-sided"/uneven/odd). Aside from multiples of 5, I also still strongly preference even numbers over odd.

IIRC, the footballer David Beckham also displays this trait: he has to have an 'even' number of diet cokes in his fridge, he will simply trash the odd one.

These kinds of traits have helped me a lot in my work.

I work as a software developer, and use this to immediately detect anomalies in the code. Everything needs to be consequently following extremely specific layout rules. I can also look at a wall of text and immediately detect if anything deviates from the normal.

These things makes my resulting code become extremely clear, logical and easy to read.

Becks is such a babe!! !

A lot of athletes seem to be a little aspie. I think its a myth that we're all spazzes. I know a few guys who were obsessed with baseball cards as little boys and turned out to be excellent baseball players, including my own 16 year old aspie son. He would play for hours and hours with them but not like one of those kids who memorizes every stat. He had something else going on that I didn't quite understand. Also - he played different games with the cards - that he made up. He still makes up games.

Now - he's an excellent baseball player and cross-my-fingers - could get a baseball scholarship.

Sports take intense concentration and elevated senses. They are also good places for rituals and of course, there are the rules.

I remember reading that somewhere too.

Symmetry is good.

Funny you should mention that. A friend of mine has a hobby of taking some paparazzi photos in Manchester. When he heard that David Beckham was visiting Manchester, he went and waited for him outside a particular clothes shop, because he knows that David Beckham is a creature of habit and always visits this shop!

I wonder if he's Aspie, or just OCD-ish?

I like things to be even too. Although I'm not compulsive about it.

When I put towels on the airer to dry, for example, I make sure they are lined up straight. And I put shoes in the cupboard in pairs. And always try to match up socks.

One of my quirks is that if I'm buying cheese from a supermarket and they are all different prices due to weight differences, I always like to find one that ends in 0p, e.g. 2.00 would be the best, or 1.90 or 1.60 or something. If there are no zeros, then a five will have to do, because that's the mid point. They don't have to specifically be even numbers, just tidy ones.

Something I do in even numbers is similar to the others, eating things in pairs. Say two biscuits or four biscuits or six.

my daughter and foster son have the need for the volume on the tv to be set on an even number.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that I do the volume on even numbers as well, or not quite, either 15, or 20 or 25 or 30. I just checked, it was on 20.

I do this too, I can't have it on just any random number.

Shoot, I'd just drink it.

And I don't have a lot of options with the TV volume. It's a cheap tv. You get it up to five and you'll regret it if you have noise sensitivity or sleeping kids.

I have a lot of balance issues like these. Most of my stims that I have identified are in some way balance related. Some are naturally occurring, as in the eyes. My right eye must be slightly more open or sensitive or something because it usually has a slight burning sensation, and I give myself headaches sometimes trying to get the other eye to feel as bad as the right! You'd think I'd want the eye to stop burning, but really, that isn't going to happen if it hasn't in all these years. Also, I squint at lights to get the smeary streaks to match (the ones that occur when you squint hard at a light). I do what I call "stropping" or stroking my fingers along one another in complex patterns, trying to get them to match. Et cetera.

But I don't have to do this in all things. As many things as I straighten, line up, or remove for balance, as many touch issue as I have, I have in turn many areas where I just don't care, or forget about it or just blow it off. Sometimes you just want to shake things up. So that's where I differ from others with AS (if I have it. I recognize that I have many traits, some I haven't mentioned, that indicate I do have OCD. Which isn't fair... if I have OCD, why can't I get organized?).