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As I write this, I have a cup of tea beside me, and I am trying to get myself to drink it.  I'm not hesitating because I don't like tea or because I think it will be unpleasant.  I'm hesitating because I'm trying to drink it out of a Pyrex measuring cup, which feels... Uncomfortable.  Weird.  Challenging.

You see, my mugs were all dirty and I had forgotten to start the dishwasher.  Now sure, I could have hand washed a mug, but why not use the more readily available measuring cup?  It has a handle.  It can hold hot liquids.  It's no heavier or more unwieldy than some of my beloved oversized mugs.  But I recoiled a bit at the thought.  Was it sanitary? I wondered.  Um, yes.  It's been through the same dishwasher as the mugs I usually drink tea from, and I use it to make lots of food that I safely and happily eat.  Would the tea taste ok?  Why wouldn't it; the measuring cup is just glass, and I drink out of glasses all the time.  But still, it just seemed... Wrong.

Of course, my son Austen is very familiar with this sensation.  Austen (as those of you who visit regularly may know) is autistic and has to eat his yogurt with a plastic spoon.  It can't be silverware, because those spoons are heavier and will (if left in the yogurt container) sometimes tip the carton.  Disaster!  But even among plastic spoons, not all spoons are created equal.  Austen's plastic spoons must be clear plastic, and not just any clear plastic; they must be the kind I buy (in bulk) from our local grocery.

This has been frustrating.  I've carried a lingering resentment over it.  After all, I once forgot to pack a spoon in his lunch, and the school called.  Austen completely refused to eat lunch without that damn spoon.  The school has plastic spoons of course, but they are white, not clear.  He insisted on a clear spoon.  So, the teachers looked through their own lunches and his classmates lunches for one to trade, but their clear spoons weren't the same brand as our clear spoons.  Their clear spoons had little swirls on the handles, making them totally different.  And because he couldn't eat his yogurt, he couldn't eat anything.  He was stuck on yogurt and couldn't get past that to the rest of lunch.

So, I ended up driving a package of spoons over to school, muttering to myself the whole time, "A spoon's a spoon, damn it!  Why does it have to be this spoon?  There are a hundred spoons at school.  There are even clear plastic spoons at school.  For crying out loud you don't even need a spoon.  You could drink it.  Or lick it off your fingers!  Why do you have to eat the yogurt with this particular type of spoon?!"

But I know why.  Autistic engineer and author Temple Grandin explained it in her recent interview on NPR when she said, "If I say to you, 'Think about a church steeple,' I only see specific ones and I can tell you exactly where they're at. And I was shocked to find out that most of the people see a generalized sort of vague, generalized, generic steeple. For me there's no generalized one. There's only lots of different specific ones."  There is no Platonic ideal of a spoon in Austen's mind, there are only specific spoons.

And I can say that's crazy and troublesome and that I just don't get why it makes eating yogurt at school impossible some days.  I can say that, that is, until I sit here unable to drink out of a clearly very mug-like object, complete with a handle and an ability to hold hot liquids simply because it doesn't fit my idea of what one ought to drink tea from.