I think the biggest piece of evidence that I'm not autistic is that I hate memorizing long lists of things and whenever my nerdy friends get together and start reciting the True Names of Objects I get the overwhelming urge to punch something

even on like, makeup forums

or keeping track of "knowing who celebrities are"

I actually resent the whole encyclopedia-style knowledge recitation thing in its entirety

I like to know exactly the terminology I need to convey or learn relevant information

beyond that, idgaf

one downside is that if the conversation is fast and superficial, I might be missing out on people who have really rich information about the thing they're naming

but there are a whole lotta people who think that proving your smart means being able to Name Things

(I may have spent too much time around military fanboys who never actually enlisted. but like, you know the type)

when eigen walked me through putting a computer together I remember getting incredibly frustrated with the names of graphics cards and being like "okay which fucking part of this string of letters and numbers actually conveys something meaningful to me"

once in 9th grade there was a quiz where we had to list all of the states and their capitals and I spent four hours whining and laying on the floor in sheer boredom/aggravation while my mom patiently constructed a mnemonic device for every single one

as soon as I passed the quiz I deleted most of them from my brain