Spring is finally here! About bleepin' time!
------------------------------------
I've come to the conclusion that I don't express myself well enough to other people. I always feel as though my feelings or thoughts are being worn right on the surface of my skin, so to speak. It's one of the reasons I don't make much eye contact, I'm afraid for people to read everything my eyes hold. And I don't think it's really working out for me to relate to other people in the way I would like to be related to. Now, I don't exactly know what to do about this...because....I have no idea what they want, in terms of being related to, and whether it woudl be offensive to make a display in that direction. It woudl feel extremely artificial and phony for me to do so, and to me, offensive, but I'm not sure if it would offensive to them...if I could figure it out in the first place.
Why can't I just tell people what I'm really thinking or feeling? Well, because. They never seem to want to know, which is a lot of why I write here. And as you can see from my huge, huge following and overabundance of comments (sarcasm), people are SO interested in what I write here, haha. Occasionally I meet people who bring me out and I start talking, and I invariably say a lot more than I mean to, and wonder later on if saying that was wise. Or I blurt out what I'm thinking without meaning to, and the reactions can be varied.
I'm often very critical, maybe because I think a lot and mentally evaluate and comapare and analyze stuff all the time. People frequently assume that if I'm this critical, I must think I'm so great, fantastic, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth. I excoriate myself more than anyone else...I just do it in silence, for the most part...so nobody hears it. Or, they think that because I speak from my point of view all the time, that all I think about is myself. That isn't true either. I actually forget i have a body sometimes because I'm lost in thoughts, or in my surroundings, or taking in what's in front of me. As I get older and have aches and pains, it's less of a problem than it used to be (humor). No, what it is, is that I don't know what other people are thinking, and then, when they tell me, I often feel that inquiring further into their thought process might be intrusive. I know what I think about other people, how I feel or think of them, but I can't see things from their point of view, and I really think anyone who claims they can is fooling themselves.
Sorry for the bad grammar and inevitable typos...I'm sort of thinking out loud here.
I care about people a lot, a LOT. I just don't express it well enough. Also, it embarrasses me to care about other people. And I'm afraid they'll hurt my feelings. Maybe they don't run every hurtful thing said to them over and over a hundred or more times in their mind, but I do, and it hurts me every, single time it gets replayed, and it just keeps playing, over and over, and over. It isn't that I have a grudge, it's that it continues to hurt. When I ask "normal" people about this, they say they don't experience it. I don't know. Ugh.
Writing about stuff like this makes me feel really lonely. :-/
----------------------------------------------------------------
But it was actually a good day, a really nice day. I got a lot done. And other than being tired and feeling abnormally cold on such a sunny day, I have no complaints about today. The tomato seedlings are up. Yeah, yeah, I know....I didn't start them early enough. But frankly, with the spring being so late, I'm willing to take the gamble that this timing was appropriate for the year. I saw a lot of birds today and had no idea what most of them were. I think one might have been a mountain chickadee.
Showing posts with label aspiness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aspiness. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Synesthaesia
As promised: I certainly don't experience synesthaesia the way Daniel Tammet does, but I think I have traces of it. Examples:
When I was a child, I saw numbers as though they were arranged like a deck of cards extending infinitely into space. The positive numbers ascended slightly while the negative numbers descended. In other words, try to picture a number line where instead of a line with dots, you have numbers written on cards, the cards overlap, and they are on a continuous, infinite incline. The cards were transparent, I couldn't really see the card, just the numbers, which, by the way, were all transparent black. To add, I had to mentally move up the line, and the number that was the answer would be larger, bigger, sort of like a card pulled up out of a deck or from a hand of cards. The multiples of ten were bigger. When I counted aloud, my voice would build in expectation every time I neared a multiple of ten, like kids do when they're playing hide and seek and are nearing the count of twenty, only for me, it was every multiple of ten, not just twenty.
Time to me is a circle graph. Each year is a circle, and it is joined to the year before it on January first, so that all the years together are like a continuous spiral extending back to the time when I was born, at which point the spiral tapers down and becomes tiny before it vanishes. The end of it, where I will die, will be torn off roughly rather than tapering smoothly as the beginning did. Each circle or year progresses in a counter clockwise fashion. The seasons are deliniated by an X. The top quarter is winter, composed of December, January, and February. The left quarter is spring: March, April, and May. The bottom quarter is summer; June, July, August, while the right hand quarter is fall; September, October, November. Holidays and birthdays flash like little lights in the months as I visualize them. The spiral is compressed most of the time, except when I am thinking of a time or trying to remember when some event happened. Then the spiral stretches out and I work back progressively until I find the circle I need.
Time as in daily time is also a circle graph, but not what you might expect. I will have to draw it and post an image of it here for it to make sense. All 24 hours are in one circle, and they aren't evenly divided. This may be why I allocate time differently than other people. Some parts of the day feel much longer and more expansive to me than others even though I know that they are really all the same length.
I sometimes visualize scent.
And textures often have sounds to me, especially squeaky, disagreeable sounds. For example, cotton balls, frosted glass, and certain fabrics all feel horrible and sound excruciating to me.
In order to do math, I more or less have to visualize the numbers moving around, and I think this is why I have so much trouble with algebra, especially if I don't understand *why* the numbers are moving or when they can or can't move.
Drifting off the topic of synesthaesia now, certain sensory experiences are simply heavenly to me. Smelling a certain scent, seeing a certain shade of a color, feeling the wind blow against my face, hair, or body, the sound of the wind. I love wind. And I can't explain it at all, but the people who smell the best to me, smell like wind feels or looks.
When I was a child, I saw numbers as though they were arranged like a deck of cards extending infinitely into space. The positive numbers ascended slightly while the negative numbers descended. In other words, try to picture a number line where instead of a line with dots, you have numbers written on cards, the cards overlap, and they are on a continuous, infinite incline. The cards were transparent, I couldn't really see the card, just the numbers, which, by the way, were all transparent black. To add, I had to mentally move up the line, and the number that was the answer would be larger, bigger, sort of like a card pulled up out of a deck or from a hand of cards. The multiples of ten were bigger. When I counted aloud, my voice would build in expectation every time I neared a multiple of ten, like kids do when they're playing hide and seek and are nearing the count of twenty, only for me, it was every multiple of ten, not just twenty.
Time to me is a circle graph. Each year is a circle, and it is joined to the year before it on January first, so that all the years together are like a continuous spiral extending back to the time when I was born, at which point the spiral tapers down and becomes tiny before it vanishes. The end of it, where I will die, will be torn off roughly rather than tapering smoothly as the beginning did. Each circle or year progresses in a counter clockwise fashion. The seasons are deliniated by an X. The top quarter is winter, composed of December, January, and February. The left quarter is spring: March, April, and May. The bottom quarter is summer; June, July, August, while the right hand quarter is fall; September, October, November. Holidays and birthdays flash like little lights in the months as I visualize them. The spiral is compressed most of the time, except when I am thinking of a time or trying to remember when some event happened. Then the spiral stretches out and I work back progressively until I find the circle I need.
Time as in daily time is also a circle graph, but not what you might expect. I will have to draw it and post an image of it here for it to make sense. All 24 hours are in one circle, and they aren't evenly divided. This may be why I allocate time differently than other people. Some parts of the day feel much longer and more expansive to me than others even though I know that they are really all the same length.
I sometimes visualize scent.
And textures often have sounds to me, especially squeaky, disagreeable sounds. For example, cotton balls, frosted glass, and certain fabrics all feel horrible and sound excruciating to me.
In order to do math, I more or less have to visualize the numbers moving around, and I think this is why I have so much trouble with algebra, especially if I don't understand *why* the numbers are moving or when they can or can't move.
Drifting off the topic of synesthaesia now, certain sensory experiences are simply heavenly to me. Smelling a certain scent, seeing a certain shade of a color, feeling the wind blow against my face, hair, or body, the sound of the wind. I love wind. And I can't explain it at all, but the people who smell the best to me, smell like wind feels or looks.