Tuesday, October 02, 2007

When I was a little girl...

...I liked to organize things. I could entertain myself for hours playing with simple things like buttons and organizing and reorganizing them according to whatever whim happened to come across my mind at the time: color, shape, material, number of holes, etc. I organized the cans of food in the cabinets, the dishes, my clothes, my mom's clothes.

One of my favorite things to do was let things in my room get really really messy so I could clean it up. I would organize my light bright pegs by color. I kept them in old egg cartons. I had a process by which I organized the colors. First I would throw them all on the floor and mix them up really good, then I would create a design of my choosing on the entire light bright board. Then I would take the upper left-most colored peg and have that as my "base". I would then take all the other pegs on the board of the same color and start switching them with the ones next to the base color so that they lined up left to right and up and down. I would continue doing this until all the colors were organized. Then I would remove the pegs by color and put them in the egg cartons. I could be amused by this activity all afternoon.

Upon reflection I'm kind of surprised that I was never suspected as being mildly autistic.

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