Aspergers, me?

[Rev. Rye]

Got 35. And, yes, I was actually professionally diagnosed at an early age. I can only assume that when you were a kid, most people didn't know what autism even was.

If you're turning 38 tomorrow (Happy Birthday, in this case), that would have made you about nine when Rain Man came out, and as limited in scope as its portrayal of autism was (given that it can cover people with intelligence levels from profound mental retardation to Paul Dirac, we have to deal with one person with autism, and Raymond Babbitt would have been closer to the Dirac end of the scale if Dustin Hoffman hadn't latched onto making him lower functioning, this is perhaps inevitable), before then, most people knew bugger all about the condition. And because you most likely weren't counting cards or counting down the minutes till Wapner, they probably didn't make the connection.

I was born the year after, and apparently, I was reading aloud from the Chicago Tribune at the age of 18 months (yes, really), but had a hard time speaking otherwise. I strongly suspect this would have been a big tipoff that something unusual was going in my brain. I would suspect that there wasn't much of a big tip off in your childhood.