A quick story, because I'm painfully bored:

So my counsellor told me that I should write a story. She said I shouldn't say her name, so I should just call her KT because those are her initials. She showed me this site and said that I should write a story about whatever interests me and post it on here.

So here I am, and I'm writing a story. I didn't know what to write about at first. I am a person with Asperger Syndrome, a kind of high functioning autism. According to the internet, people who have it tend to drone on about their favourite subjects, or repeat themselves a lot, or repeat themselves a lot, or repeat themselves a lot.

...

That was a joke. KT told me to put humour in, to make it interesting. It's supposed to be funny because I was explaining that people like that tend to repeat themselves, and then I started repeating myself, but I don't think it works so well in text. When you are writing a story like this you usually check what you are writing so it's harder to accidentally repeat something. Also you can get people to check it over and tell you if you're being repetitive.

You know they're thinking of changing "Asperger Syndrome" to just "High functioning Autism," but I think this is kind of stupid, since there are lots of different kinds. The system already works OK as it is, and like Mum said, "You shouldn't fix something that isn't broken."

Anyway, I didn't know what to write about, so KT told me I should "Write what I know and know what I write." I think that was a quote from someone famous. I don't know though.

So I decided I would do what she said. That's why she's my counsellor, so she can tell me how to act. So she said that I should write what I know, and I know what happened on most days of my life. I remember on July the 16th, 2006, which was a Wednesday, I was wearing my red T-shirt and my camo'-pattern shorts, and that was when I got my cat, which is still alive but it doesn't really do much nowadays. It just sits on the floor and groans a lot.

KT just laughed. I think what I just wrote was funny to her. I'm not sure why. Anyway, there was also that time that I went on that Skiing trip to Austria, that was April the 4th, 2011, which was a Monday. I went with some people from school on a ferry across the channel, and then there was a 26-hour coach journey. We stopped off at a service station every 2 hours. In one of them they had these gigantic jars of Nutella, about the size of a large bucket. Nutella is brilliant. I have it in every sandwich I make. But I don't usually have it for school because my Dad makes my sandwiches for school and he doesn't want the nutella to run out too quickly, which is OK I suppose.

But I didn't have much money with me, and there wasn't really any practical way of getting the Nutella around, because I'd be staying in Austria for a week before coming home and it could have gotten lost or damaged or something. Also the main luggage was in the storage compartment and I would have had to bring it with me in the coach, and there was barely any room in the coach. So I didn't buy any Nutella.

So anyway, KT told me that it would be best if I wrote something which was fiction, not just an account of a day of my life, but I couldn't think of anything. I thought maybe I could write a fanfiction, because those are probably easier, but KT didn't know what a fanfiction is. I told her, it's when someone writes a story with the same setting or characters as some other story, but with a different plot, but she said that would probably be plagiarism. I told her that it wasn't plagiarism, and that there were big sites that were full of them. Sometimes on a weekend I'll get through about three of the really big stories. I usually only go for the big ones, because the short stories are normally boring. It took me a while to work out what all the little initials meant when you were choosing the categories. This one time, I picked a random category, and I got a story about

KT's telling me I shouldn't talk about that. Apparently it's "Not appropriate." I think she means "NSFW." I always wondered what that stood for, and then I accidentally clicked something with that tag and then I worked out what it stood for.

So anyway, I told KT that I couldn't think of something to write about that was fiction. And she told me to "Write what I know and know what I write." I think I already told you that. KT says I did. So she said that if I really really couldn't think of fiction to write about then I should pick a really interesting or funny day in my life, and write about that. She said I should make it really descriptive and imaginative, so it sounds like it's fiction, but it actually isn't. I said that I could try to do that, but all that description and stuff would get in the way. I don't see the point in writing lots of words could get the job done more efficiently.

That was KT's wording there. I wasn't sure how to phrase that. I'm not too familiar with "Get the job done." I usually just say "Do it" or "make it work." I think that's irony. Because I was talking about not using many words to describe something, and I asked KT and she told me what to write, and then it was pretty long.

Anyway, "Get the job done" sort of reminds me of "Work done." It's this term in physics. When I first heard it I thought the teacher was just being lazy and giving a simple name to something really complicated. They usually do things like that at our level, because we're too young to understand all the complicated things, so everything they taught us turned out to be wrong in the end. Anyway, it reminded me a bit of that. Normally in physics things have clever sounding names like "Velocity" or "Displacement" or sometimes "Resistance," but "Work done" just sounds like someone lifting a heavy weight.

So anyway, I think that was another one of those times when I get distracted. Sometimes that happens. I get distracted and start talking about whatever I want, and then I can't really tell that the person I'm talking to doesn't care. Like this one time I was at school, and this teacher asked me to

I got distracted again. KT thought that was funny. She kind of laughed, but really quietly.

So anyway, I'll try not to get distracted now.

So she told me to choose an interesting day and describe it, so I'll do that now.

It was July the 16th, 2011. It was a very significant day, I remember it a lot because I had two ham sandwiches in my lunch instead of the usual "one ham, one cheese" combination I have. I think my Dad was too rushed to cut the cheese because he had slept in a bit.

So I was cycling home from school after the last lesson had finished. I suppose that's a bit obvious, but KT told me to add detail. She's saying she didn't mean it in that way. She meant like adding adjectives so that particularly interesting bits sound even more interesting.

I'd just had philosophy on this day, last period. That's what I was taking for my AS levels, as well as art, maths and physics. We had just been talking about empiricism. It's the belief that the only true knowledge we can have is given to us by logic and our senses. It's a bit different to rationalism, which says that true knowledge only comes from logic, and that senses are unreliable. In this physics lesson we were doing a weird experiment with food and our senses. We poured some Tortilla chips into a bowl and then we listened to them shaking, and we had to describe what they sounded like without referring to "Tortilla chips."

Then we had to do the same except we were smelling little slices of lemon, tasting chunks of chocolate, and feeling lumps of jelly. It was a weird lesson. The jelly was slightly greasy and left my hands feeling weird and clingy afterwards. I think they were just concentrated jelly cubes, because I'm pretty sure you're meant to dilute them. to make actual jelly. One time I was hiking and one of the people with me ate jelly cubes for energy because they were full of sugar.

The chocolate was also very nice. I had about three chunks. It was Cadbury, which is good. I think the best brands of chocolate, in order, are Lindt, then Cadbury, then Nestle and then Galaxy. Galaxy seems to give me a headache sometimes though.

So KT is saying that this is turning more into a lecture than a story, so I'll continue.

So I was cycling home. It's not very far away from school. About 10 minutes if I cycle really fast, but I usually don't. six lefts, seven rights, and two roundabouts.

And when I got home, I noticed that it looked slightly strange. I wasn't sure quite what was wrong, which is weird because I'm normally very observant. I'm pretty good at those tests where you have to look at an image for a bit, then it goes blank, then something has changed slightly in the image and you need to find out what it is.

So I took my keys out of my bag and I opened the gate to this little alley thing that goes around the side of our house into our back garden. I wheeled my bike through and I locked it up, even though our garden has a fence, because some people can climb over fences and steal bikes. It happened to one of my teachers once.

Once I was finished I went back around to the front door. I could have entered with the back door, but my key wasn't working. We had gone to the key-grinding shop a little while ago to get some copies of the back door key made, but the new batch didn't work for some reason, so we had to take them back.

So I entered through the front door this time, and I noticed that it was very hot. In fact there was a sort of a "push" of hot air that came out, so I had to step back and let it cool down. And when I went inside, I went into the living room, and my sofa was on fire.

Now, I know quite a lot of the people on the internet are American, and you usually call them "couches" but we tend to call them "sofas" in England. You can call it whatever you like really, so long as people understand what you're talking about. It can be "Really wide armchair" or "Multi-cushion reclining device." It doesn't really matter, so long as they can tell what you mean.

KT laughed at the part where I said "Multi-cushion reclining device." I'm not sure why, I wasn't trying to be funny. Anyway, for the sake of this story, if you're American, or German, or maybe French and you know English but you don't know what a sofa is, well, it's a couch. Except it's a sofa. It's the same thing as a couch, but with the name "Sofa."

So anyway, I noticed that the sofa was on fire. A few seconds passed, and then I laughed pretty hard.

I don't normally laugh. I'm a pretty logical person, so in order to get this, you need to understand the thought processes that led to me laughing.

It just started raining really heavily outside. I think that's unnecessary detail, because when it rains, it's always outside. It never rains inside. KT just laughed again.

Anyway, I need to explain the thoughts that led to me laughing.

Now, there was a burning sofa, and at first I thought "That reminds me of the burning bush out of the Bible."

Now I don't really believe in God, but when I was about 6 Mum would take me off to church on Sundays and so I ended up with my own copy of the bible. I stopped going because it was really boring and everyone there was really illogical. Like the miracle with the bread and fish. You can't make bread and fish appear out of nowhere. That's really stupid. I think that story was probably based off a real event where Jesus was just sharing the bread and fish out, and everyone just had a little bit, and there were either less people or more bread and fish than the Bible claims.

Now, the people at church got slightly annoyed when I pointed this kind of thing out. They would say that "That's the whole point. Jesus was able to work miracles because of his connection with God." But that's really stupid if you ask me.

Anyway, it reminded me of the Bible. So I thought "It's been a while since I've read my bible, maybe I should go and read the part about the burning bush. But then I realised that I wouldn't be able to find it because we have quite a few bookshelves upstairs, and by the time I'd found it the fire might have spread and I would probably have died, so I didn't bother.

And then that made me think of burning books, and I remembered about the mansion that burned down in the "Series of Unfortunate Events" books. And then I started thinking about that girl who made all the clever inventions out of everyday items. My mind is a bit like that. I can imagine how things will work in a machine just by looking at them. My physics teacher says I'm a natural and that I should be an engineer or a physicist when I'm older.

So I remembered that one part where she makes a grappling hook, and that reminded me of fish hooks. Fish are really cool. They come in loads of different types. There are shiny ones, dull ones, colourful ones, and some that have glowing body parts. Did you know that there is a kind of fish called an angler-fish which has a little glowing lure on its head? When angler-fish mate, the male sort of bites on to the female and fuses with it over time until it's nothing but testes. Then these female angler-fish go around with several parasite mates at one time.

Anyway, so once I was starting to think about fish, it reminded me of my favourite jokes.

There are only three jokes I really understood the first time I heard them. I don't think there is any particular reason why it was these three, but it just happens to be these ones. I'll tell you them now. KT said to put some humour into my story, so this is what I'm doing.

The first joke is

Q: "How many Alzheimer's patients does it take to change a light-bulb?"

A: "To get to the other side."

It's funny because people usually make jokes about chickens crossing a road, and they also make jokes about people changing light bulbs. So you crossed the two together, and people with Alzheimer's are forgetful. I told that to KT once, but she didn't find it funny. She seemed to think that it was rude, because she gave me one of those looks where the eyebrows form a kind of a "V" shape and the mouth is like an opening parenthesis rotated 90 degrees clockwise.

That's another point. Americans say "Counter-clockwise," but English people say "Anti-clockwise." So if I say "Anti-clockwise," it really means "Counter-clockwise," if you're American.

So anyway, my next favourite joke is this one:

Q: "Knock Knock."

A: "Who's there?"

Q: "To."

A: "To who?"

Q: "Not who, whom!"

It's funny because it takes the usual kind of knock-knock joke and it tricks you into saying a grammatically incorrect sentence, so then you can correct them on it.

Anyway, this is my next favourite joke, and this is the reason that I thought of the jokes in the first place, because it is to do with fish:

There are two fish in a tank. One says to the other: "I didn't know you could drive one of these!"

It's funny because it's taking advantage of the fact that "tank" can either mean "Fish tank" or "Military tank," and since they're fish, you assume that is means "Fish tank," when in actual fact it turns out to be a military tank.

Anyway, so the fish-hook reminded me of fish, which then reminded me of this joke.

And that is why I laughed when I saw the sofa was on fire.

After that, my house burned down.

The End.