I've had a thing for socks as long as I can remember. I first realized it was a real thing while I was reading Harriet the Spy when I was around twelve or thirteen, and she wrote about the boy with the purple socks, and that he said his mother had him wear them so she could always find him. My mother was less enthusiastic about my socks thing, and by high school I was going out of my way to irritate her with collections of tube sox (because they were so anti-girly and I was never allowed to play sports), purposely mismating cableknit knee sox (which horrified her, particularly when I refused to shave my legs), and even wearing sox with holes in them so that a toe or heel would prominently stick out (this was the last straw, she came from nice people). This extended one year into wearing sneakers until the bottoms flapped around as I walked. By then my mom and I weren't speaking much. You had no idea a sox rebellion could be such a big deal, did you?
I didn't realize at the time I read Harriet the Spy why the boy with the purple socks struck me, but I know now. You don't often run into a story that hints at one of the minor characters working around a problem with prosopagnosia in the family. I've never been able to see faces in a crowd, and I've always looked for other markers to find my people, their clothing du jour being a big one, although that turns out to be a bit tricky sometimes when I turn back from looking at something on a shelf and follow the wrong person around because they're wearing similar clothing and have a similar shape from behind. So purple socks made a lot of sense to me when I read that, while others probably found it eccentric and a weird thing to say.
Some of the convos on the webs about prosopagnosia get pretty interesting. I scoured Google search for any correlation between prosopagnosia and Harriet the Spy to see if anyone else had caught that and came up empty, so maybe I'm the first to bring it up. Not sure the purple socks thing was intentionally written in as another broad hint to people who are 'different' in some way, since so many of the characters are pointedly different from the norm as an underlying layered theme (which is discussed quite a lot, actually), but apparently prosopagnosia got glossed over for everything else, including reasons why the book was banned from schools for awhile, although that page I just linked doesn't go into the deeper hints at alt sexual orientations among the children and adults around them possibly breaking public health laws via owning too many cats or handing restaurant food out the back door to poor people. Also, I'm suspicious that the woman who never got out of bed may have had someone killed to gain her financial status. I'd actually be a bit upset if someone took my child out on a date with them without telling me, like Harriet's parents were, but that rarely comes up as a reason for banning the book. "Harriet isn’t exactly a paragon of virtue." Well of course not, she's surrounded by people living double lives, duh. Also, as emotionally alienated as I felt from my own parents growing up, Harriet the Spy screams kid being dumped off on a nanny kind of family, and I think her rebellion is justified in every way.
That book impacted my life in a scary kind of way. I attended the lowest social status middle school (one of three) in an oil town just off the edge of a reservation, which I mention once in awhile, and by puberty the bloody gang wars were already hitting the hallways in between classes (a couple of kids had to go to hospital). My best friend used me as experiment bait one year to see what would happen (we were always setting off chain reactions that were never traced back to source), starting a slam book (like Harriet's) that she passed around her circle of friends, and aspienado me had no problem jotting honest assessments under the names at the tops of each page, covering pretty much all the kids in my grade. I know the next part was unintentional, but I was last seen writing in it on the bleachers at a football game, and my friend 'accidentally' left it behind, now being pretty filled up, and I spent about a month ducking away from a couple of gangs who would have beaten me to a bloody pulp if they'd caught me because they thought I was the one who had started the slam book. I doubt I was meant to become a target like that, but truthfully, I didn't mind because I glorify in outwitting the lesser minded, although I did take some interesting face to face threats during classes when the teachers weren't looking.
My sox thing morphed into a super sox thing during my retailing years (I supplied everyone I knew with employee discounted clearance), and a decade later pretty much flung myself off the sox cliff when the rest of the world finally caught up with the novelty mismating thing. I take my sox very seriously.
I'm not sure why I even remembered this, probably because earlier today I once again stuck a Benedict vid in a post and then thought Good grief, I've overused this guy so much I've probably got readers sick to death of him always being my token post face now, and then got busy and forgot all about it until I took a break a little bit ago, and then it floated back up.
Several years ago, @bonenado was trying to point someone out to me without being terribly obvious, forget where we were, but he doesn't describe well and can't line of sight from another point of view to save his life, so after me asking if it was this person wearing whatever or that tall person or redhead and on and on, he got frustrated and fussed about how difficult I am and I fussed back, "I can't help it, white people all look the same to me!" And of course we had a good laugh because I can honestly say that without being racist at all, and it's funny because I'm Caucasian. I've mentioned a few times in blogs that I'm more comfortable with chickens because I can tell two identical white hens apart just fine, but I can't tell two people apart even when they look very different. Just this week on twitter I was corrected when I misidentified Hulk Hogan as Jesse Ventura. Hey, I saw the outfit and Americana motif and thought I nailed it. Now imagine me handling regular customers in a sales job. I'm really good at smooth apologizing.
It never dawns on me what other people see. My uncle let me try on his glasses when I was a preteen and explained to me he needed them because faces were a blur without them. I couldn't understand why that would make a difference. I didn't see blurry faces, but being able to see them never helped me tag who was who anyway unless I also had other variables to plug in alongside what I was seeing, like voice or behavior or silhouette or even just what I'd seen someone wearing before. So when I post Ben vids, I quickly forget.
It has always bored me silly to look through photo albums, and for a long time even I wondered what was wrong with me, if I really don't care or something, because everyone else seems so interested in pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. Can you imagine a world where pictures of people's faces are so pixelated that you can't tell just by glancing who is whom? I don't see pixelated faces, but once I've looked away, they may as well be because the memory fogs out in my mind and I have to work very hard to remember what someone looked like. Some faces become iconic, of course, having seen them so many times, but I'm still struggling with most people's faces both in real life and in entertainment.
Every time I see Benedict Cumberbatch, he's a new person to me. I can put side by side pics of him from different movies and interviews and swear that's not the same person. I don't get tired of someone who is able to keep my interest otherwise, and he's pretty great at stuff like enunciating clearly quickly enough to keep a brain actually working. I have a really hard time not being bored out of my skull sitting around just listening to people. What's funny is if I can hear someone talking in the background, I can't tune it out, I hear every single word, like a tape recorder. If I hear two convos at once, I'm screwed, there is no way I can process one out. If I go out of my way to listen to you, you're special.
If I remember your face, it's probably because somewhere in my head, I have meme-locked you into place somehow. Apparently, I'm not alone, but I'll try to give Ben a break. He's doing all this free work hanging out on my blog for months, I probably owe this man a pair of sox.
I mention having a facial recognition problem every little bit. Last night during a couple of new TV shows I scored on a couple of actor spottings before Scott did, and he was all like wow, you're getting better at this.
I've been paying real attention the last few months on what exactly helps me recognize people. For instance, from my original post on mind blindness-
Likewise, I get tv personalities mixed up like crazy. I never could keep Dan Rather straight from a couple of other news reporters. There are a few actresses I can keep straight because I've seen their movies so often (usually scifi movies), and by now Harrison Ford is iconic in my head, but I had no idea Steve Carell, Dan Burns, Maxwell Smart, Evan Baxter, and the mayor of Whoville were all the same guy. Do you know how many times I saw the complete Star Wars trilogy before I knew who Mark Hammill was? Probably dozens.
So you guys probably don't realize, after three months of Benedict vids, that the marker I use to recognize him across character changes is the way his eyebrows look as he turns. For some reason, I'm pretty good with eyebrows.
Since I already mistakenly auto-sub eye and hair color for everyone I see with my faulty cataloging system, I can't count on eye color since his crazy eyes change color almost scene to scene, as confirmed by rabid fans around the world and this article mentioning sectoral heterochromia. (His eyes even have their own blog.) My own eyes are a mix of yellow and brown that I think make me look kind of werewolf-y in certain lights, which I bring up in my 100 Girly Questions Survey.
click for more Ben eye studies
The last thing on a person's face I can manage is noses for some reason, so everyone that I recall in my mind either has a blur there or a variety of noses I can plug in like a Potato Head. I'm pretty good with silhouettes, so the way a face moves means more to me than how a face is arranged. The more quirky a face is, the easier it is for me to remember and keep attached to a name, so Steve Buscemi has been a favorite for years, plus I actually like him. Cartoons and animation, on the other hand, are EASY. I never forget an artistically depicted face.
One of the ways I do most of my actor spotting is when I hear them speak. Very few actors can disguise their voices from character to character. But last night I was on point for two actors by their faces, despite some key changes that threw Scott off, and we've both been noticing I seem to be getting at least one a week now. I'm the person that watches TV with phone in hand, pausing the DVR to race through IMDB links, and I'm usually wrong, so me getting two right in one night this week was epic. I think I'm getting the hang of 'tagging' face parts in a sort of linear way so I can keep names attached to them.
I've said in the past that I'm a Sherlock fan, not a Benedict fan. I'm also obviously a Khan fan. What I need to be clear about is that I don't dislike or shun Benedict as a person. I simply don't recognize him from one movie or interview to another, so I don't attach any sort of meaning to his face unless he's doing a particular character that I'm watching. I'm very Benedict deficient when it comes to Ben fandom. It kind of hit me the other day that some people might misunderstand why, since there's been a little controversy around him here and there, which I could care less about.
I don't often see people talking about fandoms from a point of view like mine, a prosopagnosicasexual. Since I am, as a fansite owner, a highly visible representative of a show that actually uses continually sexualized characters, themes, and plot devices, I imagine it's difficult to think of me not giving an eyeblink to any of it. Lexx is brilliantly done. I love every shred of it unconditionally, like I do Sherlock. Star Trek, as some of you have seen, is a whole other beast for me, conditions galore had to be addressed before I finally embraced the new timeline.
You can see the impact prosopagnosia has had on me being a fan. I really do obsess over story lines and characters, film edits and effects, and the way I get swept up into a story. I could be halfway through a show before I realize someone I like from something else is in it, so I'm not just following actors around from show to show like many fans do. Either I very seriously love a character portrayal or I don't, and usually don't even care about stuff like Batfleck quibbles.
This has actually been a taking a break post, time to get back to the other thing I am working on.
I wrote this last night before I went to bed and saved it as a draft. If I could wear an opium patch I'd probably just sit here writing millions of words and have ten books out by now.
That place I love in my head might be coming back. Hard to tell on all this zyrtec. Trying to back off the meds again, finally broke down and took a pain pill tonight. The pain sucks, but flirting around the edge of another possible euphoria holds a sweet enough promise of not having to feel it once the brain chemicals kick up another notch or two. (Coming back up to this after rereading- this is me on a potent NSAID. Have fun.)
Click this for beautiful ocean photography.
My head's been a little twisted up lately anyway. The dreams have been pretty awesome, but the nightmares are a little too sickening. My worst nightmare this last week was about people who had skinned dogs and decided to make zombie dogs out of the skins, so they wrapped the skins around raw meat, and the dogs became undead. They could blink their eyes, but instead of eyes there was only raw meat showing through where the eyes should have been. Someone in my nightmare was telling me that this is the way of the world now, get used to it, and I said it doesn't mean anything, because you just made it up. I walked into another room to hang up a pair of khakis (I haven't touched a pair of khakis since I worked in retail, probably symbolic) and the room went dark (as I typed that, one of the light bulbs in my kitchen went out for a few seconds and came back on, I create poltergeist activity, I'm tellin ya) (kidding, it's probably a loose connection, does it every little bit) (although my kids would attest to the weirdness in this house, especially the morning a different light bulb exploded and showered glass dust into our cereal bowls), and I was suddenly swooped up and pressed hard against the ceiling. (I avoid those kinds of movies and books like the plague, so I have no idea where that came from.) It felt so real, could feel my back pressed really hard against the ceiling while gravity was trying to pull me back down, and the pants were dangling from my hands like gravity would have done. I was terrified. I tried calling out for help, but it was really hard, like I couldn't make my voice work, so I had to yell as hard as I could.
Then the coolest weirdest thing ever happened. Scott touched my shoulder to wake me up, and I simultaneously felt trapped against the ceiling facing the floor AND laying in bed on my right side. I will never forget feeling two different gravity orientations at the same time, each one felt as real as the other. I've had gravity changes in dreams before since I was a kid, this trumped all of them for experience.
This clicks to a game app
When I was a kid I played games with my mind, practiced trying to break it apart so I could play chess against myself. Later, I hated high school so badly that I practiced believing that I was seeing the world differently, like the hallways were sloped up on the sides and the middle was the low point, as if the hallway were a creek or culvert or something. I succeeded, felt compelled to hug the walls as I walked so I wouldn't slip or slide down into the middle. I was able to see pink walls, curved surfaces, and aliens all around me as if it were all real. I got so good at it that I scared myself. (I'm a synesthete with prosopagnosia and a natural visual processor thanks to the Asperger's, which makes layering fiction over reality very easy for me, probably much like a caricature artist, only I'm really badass at it, I can do awesome things in my head. I'm not sure if it should be alarming that I've been self hypnotizing since I was a kid. I mean, what if I got stuck that way?) But once I got tired of it, reality snapped back into place and I turned to different games. An MMPI in college and a psychologist in middle age have both confirmed I'm not crazy, just a fantastically bored angry person with mild narcissistic and exhibitionist tendencies, which probably means I'm more prone to argue and resist and demand reasons than most people, and if I'm not impressed or mesmerized with what someone else is saying to me I'll just walk off.
The more I write in private on the book, the more I come out with truth or dare stuff in my blog. I've noticed the traffic goes up when I do that. I bet there's so much in some of your heads that you've never dared tell anyone. It's intoxicating and terrifying to write it all out into a book and think that one day everyone I know in real life will be able to read it and I won't be able to take any of it back and hide it. Secretsssssssss...... What has it got in its pocketses...
This clicks to a beautifully awesome website devoted to Mordor
Last night I dreamed I tried a new cigarette, very skinny and twice the length of the old cigarettes, all the new rage. They made slims look fat. It was nasty. I used to be in love with Camel Lights and still fondly remember how lovely a whiff of secondhand smoke used to smell to me (it's been 25 years since I quit smoking 3 packs a day), but what I smoked in my dream last night was so abominable that I couldn't see why in the world anyone would think that was cool. I never liked menthols and herbs, either. I can't wait to see if the cigarettes I dreamed come true, very fragile and pricey. Hey, I dreamed a cool dream at least 18-20 years ago (my kiddo was in middle school around then) about kiosks in malls that allowed you to design your own watches and shoes and then bring them back and recycle them into new ones a week later, and never got it written into a story. In my dream, I swear and kid you not, it was weird moldable generic clay, and I was frustrated that the kiosks had combinable preselected choices instead of letting me build my own vision from all possible choices. You could try a pair of shoes out on loan for a week and then they'd revert to blocks around your feet that you had to go back in and pay to have taken off if you hadn't decided to pay for them by then (I think I even dreamed automatic electronic payment via a little thingy attached to the shoes) and people were all the time forgetting to make their payments, and 'block' shoes became a funny new thing. Check this out. That foot scanner looks like part of the kiosk I dreamed.
Click to see them on twitter.
I know there are other people like me all over the world, who can mash what they see and hear up into cool new stuff. I find them, lurk over them in the dark, love them for sharing. Might be using this playlist for work music while I'm toying with the edge of euphoria again. The true test is if I stop eating and sleeping, but I think the extra zyrtec is controlling it enough so far to avoid going over the edge. Except I'm trying to lower the zyrtec dose again...
Scott and I take turns so we can recover from the intense brain drain that watching a nonstop Bunny causes. I spend my time chasing down distractions on the laptop in between doing dishes and folding laundry, and then he spends his time freaking out about his fantasy teams in between running outside for dumb little reasons like chasing a stray cat off or getting the mail.
Tuesday was awesome, warm and sunny and Bunny got to go outside, Wednesday was dismal, cold and rainy, but Bunny was awesome playing indoors. Today we're all getting a little worn down and she wants to go outside and it looks sunny but it's still too cold, so maybe I need to cut back on the coffee and plug in another Star Trek movie and just lay on the floor letting her destroy me dropping stuff on my face and using me as a footstool or a bridge.
After she goes home I usually morph into a brainless blob, but yesterday Scott went out for some high speed weedeating before the sun went down. It's been interesting noticing the ways our different genetic makeups handle a long day. His people never die, my people grind to a halt and nuke whoever ripples the pond. I need serious down time to recover, Scott needs serious buzz time. Speaking of buzz, this is a cool thing I saw today, clicks to source.
Click next pic for more buzztrooper goodness.
Star Trek Into Darkness was a surprisingly soothing background yesterday, and I took the opportunity during parts of it to brainwash Bunny some more. Like, at one point I let her dig into a single serve bag of potato chips with me and every time she stuck a chip in her mouth I said "Spock is good". She heard the words "Spock", "Star Trek", "Enterprise", and "spaceship" a lot. Hey, if VBS can do their brainwashing with cookies and koolaid, I can use potato chips for Star Trek. She ate yogurt, fruit, eggs, cheese, and ravioli, so she earned the chips.
You didn't see us jump up and get coats on in the middle of that last paragraph and play with a bubble gun out on the wet 47 degree deck and then come back in for a cookie and a cheese stick. Grampa was reticent, I think he's burning out already. You guys ever notice how grampas don't run daycares? That's no accident. (time passing) And now you didn't see us fold all the towels and washcloths in the dryer. I told Bunny don't go in too far or she'd wind up going back in time like Cole. I folded as fast as I could but she was still faster than me and kept reloading the dryer. We got a LOT of work done today. I wouldn't be surprised if we got tomorrow's laundry done already, it was crazy.
By the way, we caught up on The Flash last night, and I never saw the live tweet, but did anybody else have to stop the show and rant about Caitlin asking what a singularity was? She works at Star Labs and doesn't know what a singularity is. That question would have come off way better out of Eddie's mouth, but nooooo, it had to be Caitlin, a genetics specialist that works side by side with Cisco, only the most brilliant scifi lovin' brainiac on the planet. Let me be clear about my feelings- the word "singularity" has been around since the 80s and has inundated nearly every scifi show on the planet ever since, plus it's a biggie in several very real science discussions, so for Caitlin to act like she'd never heard the word singularity before in a lab sitting over a particle accelerator exploded my brain. To me this was like a baseball player asking what a tip off is, or like an executive chef asking what a convection oven is, or a mathematician asking what a sine curve is. They trust Caitlin for knowledge in tight situations, and she doesn't know the crap what a singularity is. If we feel the need to explain it to the audience, at least use a more appropriate way to spell out how dumb we're not supposed to be at Star Labs, ok?
Scott gets a little tense going to movies with me. My 2009 Trek rant is legendary in this house. And that's just a small portion of the 3-month rant I went on. You guys, I'm not even a Flash fan, I'm #TeamWells, and I rant about Wells getting sloppy all. the. time. For a genius he's just pretty stupid. I want five minutes in lockup with evil Wells/Thawne, I will fix so much stuff for him. Fortunately, Scott has never lost it over me hitting the pause button every 30 seconds when I go insane over writing problems. This next pic clicks to a very moving and deeply personal blog post written by a science fiction psychologist, I love it.
Anyway, so you can bet Bunny will be getting a full education on Vulcan physiology, Goa'uld defense strategies, Scarran weak spots, and sing the Brunnen-G battle song on the way to school. Singularity. I need to go breathe into a bag.
Ok, here we go, this is me destressing while grampa and Bunny are out on a walk. I finally just bundled her up, tossed her onto the front deck (it's fenced and gated) and told grampa to get his shoes on.
My fave BC pic bcuz eyes. I have mentioned having a facial recognition problem, and that tweet links to a post I wrote on what it's like living with prosopagnosia (facial recognition deficit), so when I do happen to notice features, which isn't often because aspienado's so aspie, they really stick with me. I've also mentioned being a Sherlock fan and not a Benedict fan, so it took awhile for me to even notice, but he's got spectacularly beautiful eyes. I'm actually being annoying putting this giphy here, lol. I know it's hard to read when stuff moves on the page, which was one of my biggest problems with myspace when it first launched.
I need to be off here before they come back so we can trade off again, so lemme find a quick brain juicer and post this thang. Too late, here they are. See ya.
