Prepare to enter the wild and wooly world of an adult with Aspergers Syndrome, a form of autism characterized by intellignce, quirks, social difficulties and downright strange and oddish behaviours.

People with Aspergers generally are high functioning in everyday life but have great difficulty connecting with others due to the inability to read faces, body language and subtle verbal clues. They also tend to take words literally and have a hard time multi-tasking.

Oversensitivity to touch (clothing has to be soft and often the tags removed), light (do not leave home without the sunglasses), sound (loud noises and noisey places are avoided), taste (many Aspies have quite a limited diet and are frequently very picky eaters) and smells makes the everyday existence more of a challenge.

Fasten your seatbelts and come on in...
To find out more about what Aspergers is..please check out my earliest blog entries

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Standing on a Moving Walkway Aspie Style

I recently came across the technological innovations called "moving walkways" while transferring planes at the Minneapolis/ St. Paul airport. I'll tell you right upfront, escalators whether the usual stair type or these flat moving ones are kinda scary for me. I'm afraid I'm going to step in the wrong spot and get trapped by an aberrant shoelace or get sucked in.
So I'm very careful where I step when I first get on. Secondly, since I was carrying a heavy backpack and a rolling carry-on, I had to be even more careful that any tags, zippers or straps didn't get caught.
As you can see from the photo, the walkway is divided in half. Whilst the majority of travelers I encountered used the Walk section, I was more then content to simply stand....but standing facing forward made me dizzy and I felt I was taking up too much room. I couldn't see the people coming up behind me either so it was time to innovate.
I tried turning myself so that I kinda straddled the walkway, feet firmly planted and facing sideways toward the Walk section. Boy, did that work! I felt stable in my body and safe from being plowed over by the Walk racers. Sure, I probably looked a bit odd but I didn't care. I needed use the Walkways frequently. Minn/ St. is a huge, sprawling airport and I had to traverse it from one end to the other.
If something is highly uncomfortable , try and find a solution.