Special Interests

I'd say me favorite thing about being an aspie (Short term for someone with Asperger's) is this. Many people with Asperger's autism have a special interest, something they focus on almost obsessively for long periods of time. These can be just about anything, but the most common one I've heard of is transportation (cars, trains, airplanes.)
My interests vary from month to month. I'd say my only constant is computers, although I'm a lot less intense with it than with other things. Sometimes I start talking to my friends about playing around in an operating system, or a new graphics card I read about, and their bored expressions surprise me. Sometime I forget that glitches and .bat files don't interest everyone like they do me. There is an Asperger's stereotype about people going on and on about absolutely boring or extremely obscure topics, and this is probably where it came from. Every girl can go on endlessly about shoes because it’s such a common interest among neurotypical (normal, average) girls, but an aspie might have trouble finding someone who wants to listen to facts about cars built in the 1980s.
My varying interests are all over the place. I’ll often fall in love with something and then research it until I know more than most of the people composing fact lists in the first place. I breathe facts, eat them like fire, love them. Most of the time, my interests will take up a few weeks or months and then become boring. With some, I fall in love with them over and over again between other things. I know huge amounts about things that interest me more than once. An odd recurring one is Pokemon. No matter how silly I tell myself it is, Pokemon keeps drawing me back in. I can recognize all 649 of them by the sound they make, I can name nearly every glitch ever to be discovered in the games, and I know enough trivia to write more than one book. I just can’t help myself, I love to know.
Sometimes I notice obsessive interests with unexpected things in unexpected ways. One is food. I went for at least a year living off almost nothing other than Hot Pockets. I felt no real want to eat anything else. Yes, I might eat pork chops if they were handed to me, but why have those when I could have Hot Pockets? Right now, it’s rice. Almost all of the meals I’ve made for myself in the last four months (at very least) have had rice in them. Why? Why not. Right now, rice seems like the best option in any situation I can think of. I’m sure that I’ll eventually get tired of it and make some other food the staple of my diet, but for now I see little reason not to eat it at every meal.
As for the why of an interest, it isn’t easy to describe. Why one might choose a certain interest over the rest of the world, I have no idea. What I do know is how it feels to have such an obsessive interest. It’s like walking out of a stuffy room and into a spring field. It’s like feeling the sun on your face after being cold for too long. It’s like breathing easy for the first time, like relaxing, like smiling, like feeling full after being hungry all day. The faster I consume facts about my interest, the more wonderful it feels. I imagine it a bit like fire, consuming every shred of information, reaching high into golden light and warmth. To put it in as few words as possible: It’s my favorite feeling. Why learning about computers gives me that feeling when model cars doesn’t is a mystery to me.