Is It Me?

Something I've been pondering the last several months has taken hold of my brain and won't let go. I notice it everywhere now, and I can't help but wonder if this is odd, or does everyone think this way. Let me go back a little and explain what "this" is.

If you have read Daniel Tammet's book, Born on a Blue Day, "this" won't be new to you. Daniel is a brilliant man who has Asperger's. He also has many unusual abilities, typically relating to prime numbers and calculating enormous sums. To Daniel, numbers have color and emotion associated with them. He is able to tell you on which day of the week any particular date in history or in the future will fall, for example. The quality of associating something completely separate with each number is what I have been thinking about - it is the "this" to which I referred.

Recall with me as well an earlier post in which I described my own ability to determine the color of an M&M candy by the way it feels on my tongue. Although I do not equate this freak show talent with anything as amazing as Mr. Tammet's capabilities, thinking about it made me realize that I, too, have always made certain associations with letters, numbers, and colors.

For me, the alphabet rests on a beam of light. It begins moderately light with A and slowly brightens and darkens as the letters progress from left to right in one straight line. Letters are masculine, feminine, or both - not in a reproductive sense, just a kind of personality trait. A is feminine and wears a dress; B is feminine but she's a real bitch, C is feminine and tough-skinned, like a pioneer woman; D is masculine; E is masculine in touch with his feelings; F is a male military general; G is masculine and reminds me of Pete Seeger. . .it goes on and on.

Numbers are also masculine or feminine. Instead of being part of a beam of light, they are grouped into overlapping families, kind of like a commune. The same for colors - each color has a gender, but shades of the same color can be the opposite gender. It's all very strange, and I have yet to find a reason for any of it.

The other day I realized my children attribute similar characteristics to numbers, colors, and objects. We were filling the Death Star pinata for Ian's party. There were parachuting alligators and space aliens of different colors. Each child would say "there he/she goes" as they would toss the plastic toys into the hole in the Death Star. I noticed that Ian used the masculine pronoun for certain colors and the feminine pronoun for others, and Ainsley did the same thing consistently. However, they each had a different vision of which colors went into each category.

For example, Ainsley is convinced that red is a girl. Ian swears red is a boy. This explains why Ainsley has always called Elmo (the lovable furry red monster on Sesame Street) a girl. Elmo is red and therefore must be female. Ian knows Elmo is a boy because Elmo is always referred to as a "he" on the program. But how do we really know? The voice could be either male or female for a 3 year-old, which is Elmo's age on Sesame Street. He wears no clothing. Elmo has no genitalia. Even if he did, it would be awfully creepy to check him out "down there" just for the sake of settling the score between my kids. [They were in the bathtub together recently, and Ian told Ainsley she was born with a penis but the doctor cut it off so she could be a girl. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhgggggggggg! No Freud allowed in my bathtub, o.k. guys?!]

So, I guess my question is three-fold:

1. Where does this association of numbers and colors and genders and whatever originate?

2. Is it a trait of Asperger's/autism to make such associations?

3. Does anyone else out there make these connections?

When I think about these things, I feel closer to my kids. It gives me some sense of how they think and feel. When someone says the number 8 makes them sad, I get it now. I feel as if I've been invited to tea on the planet of autism. How long they let me stay will probably depend on how open my mind is to parking diagonally in a parallel universe - or maybe it's parallel parking in a diagonal universe. Hmmmmmmmmm. . .think I'll go ponder the possibilities over a handful of M&Ms.