My Ten Year Old

Living with a kid with Aspergers causes as much stress for him as it does for me. Somehow I feel inferior, and I struggle to keep a veil of parental interest across my face whilst he lectures me on his latest theory.
God alone knows where they come from.

In the past two weeks he has come back to me, time and again, with his developing theories (which seem to work themselves out in the back of his head whilst real life goes on regardless) about:

1. Liver cells re-grow. You can lose a bit of healthy liver and (he tells me, I don't know) it will grow back. So he wants to identify and extract the gene and use it to allow people to re-grow limbs.
2. Fingernails might snap under pressure but they are quite strong and flexible, so he wants to design a way to allow skin to take on some of the properties of fingernails, to resist injury.
3. This one is his pet project, because its just for fun and not for saving lives (he's hot on saving lives and sometimes it gives him a headache) : black holes are supposed to be gateways to other dimensions (actually he called them something much more scientific, but I forget) so he wants to harness that, design them, and make it so you can step in at this end and out in China. We had a big discussion about whether you would need a really weak field or a really small hole, to achieve that.

Oh yes, and we also had an argument about whether spaceships would need to be anti-gravity or impervious to gravity, ie function in a non magnetic fashion to start with; the differences between speed and manouverability in a vacuum and in gravity and whether the vacuum is really a vacuum or whether its really thin gravity because otherwise why don't all the planets just wobble off. Or something like that.

Anyway, thats what a genius, dyslexic Aspergers kid does with his easter holidays, behind and in between watching Ed Edd & Eddie, beating up his sister, enjoying the satire and irony in Buck Rogers or The Simpsons (you know, the adult political stuff), beating up his little sister and playing adult computer games (they have to be adult - he's too good at them). Just for fun, you understand. Well maybe for fun, I suspect its a life-long obsessive concern for the safety of not just the human race, but individuals, but one that he senses it's advisable to dress down. He has a big heart and big plans. I wonder where he'll be in ten years.