complimented a cashier on her turtle pin this morning and she said “oh thanks, I am a little bit of a Turtle Person” with the carefully contained energy of Cookie Monster telling you he’s mildly fond of chocolate chips
I hope she and the multiple tons of turtle merch she definitely has at home are having a wonderful day
there are some autistic “traits” that people find really annoying but that are inherently kind
like overexplaining. a lot of autistic people didn’t have certain things explained to them because “everyone knows that.” so when an autistic person overexplains something it’s not because they think you’re stupid it’s because they know how it feels for someone to assume you know something you don’t and just not ever explain how or why. it’s a kindness. autistic people aren’t annoying or stupid for this. they’re kind.
in my map reading final exam back in like 2015 we had to do an indoor portion where we figured out the location of our professor on a topographical map and then we had to go out into the national forest with the map & compass and actually locate him to pass. like he was just standing out in the forest and it was pass-or-fail, find him or don’t.
we went in pairs so i was hiking through the woods with this guy who’d been in my class all semester but we didn’t talk much but now ofc we got to chatting, being in the woods and all.
and he told me he’d just moved from a city on the other side of the state and i was like “oh that’s funny i just moved from there too!” we talked a little more and within two minutes determined we didn’t just move from the same city, but had in fact been working at the same petsmart for over a year, at the same time, but he worked in the dog hotel and i worked in the grooming salon so we never met. months, 40 yards from each other, separated by two walls, and we never had a conversation.
and now we were in a national forest together following a map looking for a guy named Ron. what the hell.
