Aspergers-like stories

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I want to tell you about a couple of things and I want to know whether you have done similar things, and whether you believe these things are characteristic of those of us with Aspergers.

When I was at university during the Vietnam War, some fellows were talking about it, and they said they thought it was horrible the way the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong had trained guerrillas
to fight against the South, and the Americans, and our allies. I said, No, how could they train guerrilas for war? I could not believe it, and I said so. They told me to read the papers and to listen to the network news. I said I thought it was almost impossible.
You see, I thought they meant that they had trained "gorillas," and I thought it for a little while. True story!

When I was in elementary school, I was asked in a math test, How many feet are there in a yard? I thought this was a quite nonspecific question, but I carefully answered it as best I could. The problem was that I believed that the yard was back yard, front yard, side yard, whatever, and I explained, at length, how the size of yards was variable. The teacher just wrote, "Very funny!" And scored me accordingly.

Believe it or not, I am of above-average intelligence...except for at least these two incidents.

Ah yes, I've had moments like that. My mom asked me if I've ever seen "the monkeys" on TV. it took me a moment to realize she meant The Monkees.

And a memorable one from the job I had while at college: On one particular day, everyone in the office was talking about going to Cancun. I was trying to figure out if an entire group was going on vacation or something. Nope--they were talking about a Mexican restaurant by that name.

OK, one more: In eighth grade, a friend opened a joke with, "A guy walks into a bar." About halfway into the joke, I found myself totally confused and asked whether he meant a bar as in a metal rod or as in a place where people get drunk. I visualized a guy walking into a metal pole.

Reminds me, when I was 6 years old, 1965, driving in a car w/ my father & hearing this mass of screams coming from Wrigley Stadium. "What's that?" I asked. My father replied, "the Beatles." I'm trying to imagine bugs that big! Just like the Outer Limits!

But. I had no context.

And I wonder w/ your guerrillas, did you. Most Americans learned that word only at the end of the 60's.

I remember the time in 7th grade, a boy in my class asked me if I liked Cats. I started talking about my cats, especially my Calico one. He started laughing and I kept on talking about my cats we have at home. Then later it tuned out he was asking me about the play.


I remember the time when I was 13 and it was the summer of 1999, we were playing the game of Sequence. My uncle shuffles the cards and then he puts them in front of me and says "Cut." I picture myself with a knife and my uncle tells me to cut again and shows me the deck of cards. I figure out I was supposed to cut them so I pick them up and tried to figure out how am I supposed to cut them and I could not figure out why he was telling me to do it. I had no knife with me. Then finally my mother tells him "she doesn't know what that is" so he takes them from me and tells my little brother to cut. He takes half of the cards off the deck and sets them aside. My uncle picks them both up and keeps on shuffling them.

I'm from norway, and english is not my first language. My english teacher told me to read out loud from our homework, so I did; "Shots were heard in the streets. John got behind the wheel to get away."
Well, I saw a good old western scene in my head, where John hid behind a big ol' wooden cartwheel, and translated accordingly. The whole class laughed of course, because John got into a car to drive away, it had nothing to do with a the wild west.

The silly thing is, I knew what "behind the wheel" meant, I just didn't get the meaning from the context. I've read about this, and it's typical for Aspies, difficulty interpreting meaning of a sentence based of the general theme of the story/conversation.