There were over half a dozen fish in the bucket, and I think this one was the only eelpout among those. So either it was the one he managed to get a hold of first at the time being, or he specifically chose it. Either way, still leaves the question of why on Earth did he think slapping me with it was a good idea...

	Asperger's/high-functioning autism is one of the things which tends to make it harder to read people, yes. I know quite a few, both face-to-face and over the net, and I haven't really found them any harder to read - if anything, my impression is that they, quite oppositely, tend to be a bit more openly readable, and definitely more straightforward? (So there's less trying to figure out whether they're just attempting to be polite against their true feelings or actually having some manner of less-than-benevolent agenda for lying.) They tend to feel recognizably different to me, but not more difficult to sense properly. 
	Incidentally, I seem to be pretty decent at picking it up in people even based solely on how they write text - from how they process things and respond. I haven't really outright asked anyone, but surely enough, close to every person I've suspected to fall on the autism spectrum has thus far later mentioned somewhere along the way that they really do belong on it (with the only people I did not receive confirmation from never really touching the topic ... which is to say, I actually haven't gotten any false positives that I know of thus far).
	Ehh... To be fair I consider Asperger's/high-functioning autism more of a ... character type? perhaps? than an actual disorder. Slightly different, sure, but not ... well, what the term "disorder" generally seems to imply to most people. (I often get the feeling that nowadays every little deviation, quirk, and whatnot warrants a diagnosis, and once someone has [i]that[/i], the thus-far harmless character traits become somehow stigmatized, and people suddenly start looking at the person differently based on solely that, as if there is now something fundamentally [i]wrong[/i] with that person in spite of nothing changing in them, and then there will be at least someone who will start trying to "fix" (or at least insisting on "fixing") the person at all costs, and... Yeah. It [i]never[/i] seems to stop at just, "Ah, well, this makes sense now; will try to keep in mind.") Most of the autism-spectrum people I know are fairly well-versed, caring people, after all. 
	I'd say you can clearly see the opposite in fair number of them - that being fairly bad at reading emotions doesn't mean a person does not care about others' feelings or isn't affected by them. Most autistic people I know substitute being intuitively pick up emotions in others with doing exactly that "just learn the patterns and try to actively interpret them" thing ... might work, might not even be in the same general region, but you certainly can't claim that they're indifferent, or won't be worried if they think something is wrong. I wouldn't say "oblivious" is exactly the right word ... it's more caring a fair deal and being very attentive, but at the same time just not necessarily being the most accurate in their assessments. ([i]"No. Not angry. Just tired."[/i]) Then again, being on the autism spectrum is never the only thing to define a person by - just as there are autistic people who literally cannot bear to as much as look at a person crying without breaking down themselves, there probably exist some who are [i]both[/i] sociopaths and autistic. (I have personally met examples of the first, but none of the latter.)
	The far end of autism is a bit different where being able to go about in life is concerned - I know a woman who has an adopted child with the very severe variant of autism (she was adopted as an infant - said child is now in late teens). That [i]will[/i] make a person less fit for making their own way in life, but it's also quite far removed from the Asperger's classification. (That can be said about most things ... what is fine in small amounts often isn't so in the fringe cases.)