Autism & Speed

No land mammal moves faster than an autistic kid who just did something Very Very Bad.

This scientific fact was verified in my kitchen a few days ago, when Finian deleted an entire essay I'd spent most of the day working on.

I had reached that lovely point where the tangled word salad was starting to form something semi-coherent.  I decided to celebrate by having a decadent glass of water (nothing unleashes my wild side like an assignment coming together).  That, or maybe dehydration, made me careless.

Because then I made a rookie mistake.  

I turned my back on Finian (and my laptop) for a good twenty seconds.  

This gave him plenty of time to dump the unsaved document into a landfill in cyberspace, and replace it with a less-than-useful video of Bob the Builder in Albanian.

I tried desperately to locate the essay, but it had been jettisoned into the ether.  I was fairly certain that eastern European cartoons wouldn't satisfy my assignment criteria, so I did what any self-respecting adult would do in that situation.  I lost my shit.

I made noises that no human should ever make.  I sounded like a cross between a convulsing walrus and a Mullingar heifer in labour.  It's really no surprise that Finian ruptured the space-time continuum by barrelling outta there like shit through a goose.  He may have created a wormhole in my dining room.

After an hour of pledging my sacred soul to whatever god would have me, I tracked the document down in some obscure digital backwater.  I think I may have cried. 

What I have learned from this is that I'm a spiritual slut.  I'm not sure how to feel about this.  But the important thing is that the essay was retrieved, no autistic people were harmed, and I learned to save my course work every three seconds.  I also realised that my son could road-test the Hadron Collider if I make scary enough noises.  He could wipe the floor with quarks.

As I write, Finian is watching YouTube clips of  electronic workbenches while wearing a hot water bottle on his head.  My grip on normality is tenuous as best.

I sometimes wonder what my life would look like in a neurotypical world.  Probably not as quarky, with fewer animal vocalisations and definitely less Albanian.  

That sounds beyond dull.

"It's hard to type without opposable thumbs"