Tell me more about _______?

[Rev. Rye]

1. I have several mental disorders. I was diagnosed with Hyperlexia, an autism spectrum disorder, at an early age. (Fun Fact: I taught myself to read before I could speak my own sentences.) Now, I have something else; my therapist, on her patient sheets, says it's "adjustment disorder with anxiety and/or depressed mood." I think it's likely a combination of dysthymia (the telltale relatively low-grade symptoms, but extreme treatment resistance is there) and PTSD (grade school was like a Vietnam War novel written by Franz Kafka. That is all.)

2. I think I've brought this up before, but I have a foot fetish. Combined with the social awkwardness I have from my disorders and the relatively poor treatment of foot fetishism in media, this makes finding a girlfriend quite difficult. The only girl who has responded positively to my fetish turned out to be a lesbian.

3. When I was six, I had an IQ test, and apparently my IQ was 176 (FWIW, the best guess we have is that it was a Weschler Test with an SD of 15.) No doubt, since child and adult IQs are calculated differently, it's not the same as it was then.

4. Around the age of twelve, I resolved to grow a beard just like Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top; By the time I was 14, I had to shave what little progress I'd made due to my school's dress code. I started back up as soon as I graduated. Sadly, due to poor genetics, in the five and a half years since, my beard may never reach Billy Gibbons length, but, maybe in a few years, it may reach Fyodor Dostoevsky length.

5. Due to my beard, and my living in Skokie, the Holocaust Survivor Capital of the World, people have mistakenly assumed I'm Jewish. In fact, my general look actually led to my having a criminology teacher go for an entire semester calling me "Fiddler on the Roof."

6. I once worked on a novella called Rubies under the supervision of two-time Oprah's Book Club author Jane Hamilton. It's about sex slavery, incest, psychosis, and cannibalism. Despite my fears, she was not fazed by it.

7. The living man I would most like to meet is Werner Herzog. I'm writing him into my novel.

8. I take credit for messing with the mind of a teacher I had in high school enough that he turned into a pedophile. Sadly, he was probably a pedophile before I took his class.

9. Strangely, innocuous sources have brought me into trouble. Talking about Pat Boone in leather horrified my grade school teacher, and, years later, a story loosely inspired by Roald Dahl short story spooked another teacher enough that I was forced to have mental health treatment.

10. I have yet to get my driver's license; until recently, I feared the possibility of doing what Willy Lohman did at the end of Death of a Salesman.