Reflection: Flexibility Revisited

I am revisiting once more the concept of flexibility: How is it that I appear unusually flexible -- indeed hyperflexible -- to friends, yet never scored well on test of flexibility? I was sub-par throughout all my years of P. E., and was, in fact, the worst person in my class in gymnastics activities, performing like a person with joint limitations. (Flexibility wasn't the main reason I was eventually placed in adaptive P.E., but let's just say it wasn't helping.)

Sometimes it takes years to define the perimeters of something; some crucial detail eludes me. Here goes: Tests of flexibility are generally done with the legs straight/ extended. It appears that, for me, though, the ability to bend at the waist depends, to an unusual degree, on also having bent legs. In P.E., students are asked to sit with their legs extended and then touch their toes. The act of sitting with my legs extended is in itself uncomfortable; my range of motion in this position is pretty limited. But if I bend my legs deeply -- sitting on my feet, say, or sitting in yogi position -- then everything changes. I can not only bend my body flat against the ground, but I'm so comfortable I could sleep that way. (Sometimes I do.)

Pictures taken here and there, across my life, are suggestive of loose joints. If you look at the picture in With Legs Crossed, you'll see a small child with some unusual posture. In that pose, it almost looks like my legs detached. Either that or they were pretty durn short... which they weren't. I doubt I could do a toe touch, though, even then. By the time I started school, at any rate, that task was way out of reach.

Once again, I've got to get on my soapbox and say that it's not just about physical capacity. If we look at how a person acts in one context, striking as it may be, we can get into some trouble generalizing or making predictions about how they'll perform in other contexts.

Reflections: Beautiful Minds

Beautiful minds? you're thinking. But that's a pair of... feet. Yes, and those are confident feet, many would say. (I'll tie this together in a moment.)

I'm still doing readings each week on a Blog Talk Radio show, and an interesting theme came up this week. I don't really like the term, erotic capital, but the concept makes sense. There are a mixture of traits that together go a long way to creating interpersonal attractiveness. The host brought up something interesting: He said it really came down to confidence. I would surely agree that the purely physical was only a small part of this nebulous thing, that the charisma and mystique were created more by the things a person did: how they dressed and otherwise 'put themselves together', how they carried themselves, how they interacted. I would surely agree that those things are often associated with confidence. But it doesn't mean they equal confidence.

I'm thinking back to the movie "A Beautiful Mind" which I saw nearly a decade ago. That woman... oh, she had that nebulous thing. The way she blazed into his office -- the fictionalized John Nash's -- when he was an up and coming professor. At first, I didn't like that woman; she seemed shallow. But, oh, did I like her as the movie progressed. I talked on and on about her that evening: the woman who dug both feet into ground when things went crazy.

Is there a biological reason for people for people to be attracted to confidence? I daresay there is. What about associating that blaze with standing one's ground? Ah, perhaps there is. The problem is that a lot of the things on the it list -- the erotic capital list -- have as much to do with polytropism as they do with confidence.

Reflection: Supine

That's quite an old picture, but it relates to the (soapbox) topic of the day.

I am lucky to be (for the moment at least!) earning most of my income at home writing. It's not just for mental reasons that it's easier. Some days I do several hours of work laying down. It's very common for me to research laying on my side and then compose paragraphs in my mind while lying very still on my back. After a while, I will sit up in and type quite a bit in a short time. If it appears that I spend half an hour immobile and then half an hour writing furiously... well, often I have been working the whole time, and far more efficiently than if I forced myself to sit up at the computer.

I imagine there are people here and there who have been diagnosed with chronic fatigue, or migraines perhaps, who have low muscle tone in their necks. For me, it's not bad enough to be a migraine -- the discomfort just toes the line between tiredness and headache -- but when I was a child, I called it a headache... and I was ignored. I remember that when I started morning kindergarten, I complained of daily headaches. It was because my teacher got after me when I rested my head on the desk, and my neck simply did not want to hold head up for three hours at a stretch.

I still feel better physically when I don't have to go too many hour at a stretch with my head unsupported. I even suspect the neck issue plays some role in the body ache issues I get sometimes -- like maybe it adds a bit of physical stress and brings my endurance down. I've always (when I've had the option) done a fair amount of my mental work lying down... especially the composition stage of writing. I have a great verbal memory, so I can do that! Yet to display so much of what looks like immobility... I imagine that has contributed at times to people seeing me as less mentally capable than I am.

Reflection: The Illusion of Privacy

There are parties downstairs at my apartment building a couple times a year. We munch, we chat. Someone that I have spoken to at those occasional gatherings -- and said hello to on the elevator now and then over the years -- said a curious thing. He said he has wanted to talk to me at times, but I seem like a private person.

Private? That is very much not how I see myself (and it is probably not how people see me who communicate with me mostly online). It tends to floor me when people say that. I think the misconception stems from people mistaking indifference for resistance. I am not more resistant to people getting in my face; I am simply more indifferent... to those who don't.

Once again, it's underwhelment masking as overwhelment. I am drawn (when I'm drawn) to people who are more intense than the norm, more emotional, more over-the-top, and often more needy. Interaction has to simply sizzle. Normal interactions tend to pass below the threshhold needed to... to stir up anything at all in me beyond the intellectual awareness that, hey, there's another human in the vicinity. The irony is if that person had been more in my face, they might have broken through that false veneer of privacy. Some people have created strong bonds that way. The illusion of privacy is more apt to vanish if you're the kind of person who (marvelous in my eyes!) can't contain your energy within your own borders.

Reflection: Different Ways of Experiencing

I think a lot of people, at this point, have at least heard of the brain chemical dopamine. Among the many things it does... Well, I've heard it described in this way: It makes things pop out from the background and seem relevant. It intensifies them. (The picture on the right, which had quite a lot of local contrast added, is intended to represent higher dopamine perception.)

Me, I perceive things more like the picture on the left. I know -- I mean, I can tell -- I don't have normal dopamine processing. As an example... The ayuderdic herb, mucuna pruriens, is one of the only things that naturally contains the most direct precursor of dopamine. It has legitimate medical uses. Some people, if they weren't used to it, would find that it made them more than usually cheerful or confident. Some would find that it sent them right over the edge into anxiety, agitation, mania -- like caffeine, but likely worse. (Some of the disorders that frequently show dopamine overactivity: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety.) My reaction to mucuna pruriens is that is calming and sometimes sleep-inducing. I consider it a preventative measure when it comes to bad dreams.

Sometimes coffee brings me down, too. Going to sleep on stimulants is not an uncommon reaction... for a person with ADHD. I don't have ADHD, but there are common threads. There's a theory that people with ADHD procrastinate so that they can add excitement to a task, so they can stir up enough stimulants in their brain that they are actually able to do the task. Me, I don't do that. It's when it comes to human relationship, very specifically, that I behave as an underwhelmed person. I have consistently, across most of my life, been attracted to people who are far, far more emotional than the norm, who are simply over the top. I have consistently been attracted to situations -- human situations -- where the stakes were high. My emotions are aroused. My bonding impulses come more strongly into play. Low stakes human situations fail to motivate me to the point where... where I can function.

I think it would fly in the face of logic, for a lot of people, that my reactions to certain substances would be characteristic of the underwhelmed as opposed to the overwhelmed. And yet it seems so obvious to me. I am the polar opposite of the hyperaroused person... when it comes to just strolling around. (Though yes, I do respond in intense, 0 to 90 ways to a very few things -- the same ones, predictably, year in, year out... Hey, do you think the light in the corner stands out maybe even a little more on the picture on the left, where there is so little contrast. maybe that's why I calm a little on stimulants. More of the world starts popping out a little and commanding my interest.)

Reflection: The Fear Response(less)

We were at the bus stop by the main drag of the U-District when the 43 came up the road, wearing the wrong sign, like it was going toward Wallingford. A woman seemed to get very excited; at first I thought she was frustrated because she thought she was on the wrong side of the street. "It's going toward..." I said.

She called me the B-word several times. "That's what you are!" she shouted... or maybe she didn't quite shout, but she said it loudly. People around us heard. I'm not sure what all she said. Her face was pretty near mine.

Most people, I imagine, would not have felt actual fear in that situation. Yet I think there would have been some physiological response, some quickening of the pulse, some startle response somwhere. I was aware, once again, how in me there was... just nothing.

Humans are designed to have a fear response that precedes conscious thought. This is how nameless fear -- that I'm afraid, but I don't know why sensation -- begins. It's strongest in the trauma-disordered, but it's in most of us to some extent. I'm hard pressed to think of a time -- even one time in my life -- when I felt nameless fear. The conscious awareness of exactly what afraid of tends to precede any physiological response.

I've read it: Neurologically, attraction (and I mean the word in a broad sense!) is a close cousin of fear; they're both changes in arousal levels, and they often involve the very same chemicals. We're supposed to undergo these subtle little changes in our arousal levels. They're supposed to be highest in response to novel situations. In novel social situations, my arousal levels don't change. They are so low that... I would say they'd make folks' heads swim, except that folks don't see the situation for what it is.

I don't experience nameless fear, but there have been times I have been irresistibly drawn to those who do. There have been times someone has behaved inexplicably toward me and instead of standing there impervious, like I did with the woman at the bus stop, I have experienced emotion at the level... the level that I love, love, love to experience emotion. And then I have wanted to dance that person off on a white horse.

I do experience intense fear. Mostly it's aroused by the fear of losing those who manage to evoke strong emotion in me.

Reflection: A Loss of Pliability

A soapbox post -- not the one I was planning, but a very 'me' one. I have hesitated sometimes to mention the cat -- aware of people here and there, just freezing at the mention -- but it has been a long time since he died. For a time, I would go to a support group at the humane society, and I was aware how some people hesitated to bring another animal into their life because they were afraid they would love it and it would die. I was aware also how people would sometimes interpret things I said that way -- like once when I was talking about how maybe it would be better to get a foster animal. Someone heard in those words that I was afraid of getting attached and having an animal die. No. The pair bonding impulse in me is so strong that... I have never in my life even one time that I can remember resisted any attachment because of a fear of being hurt. Quite the contrary. I can't imagine being hurt by the people around me because I can't imagine loving them. But that's not because I don't mold myself to others' shapes. It's because I do it too much.

When I was a little kid, I was like Play-Doh fresh from the can. By the time I was a teenager, the pliability was down. I wrote before about the classic storybook image of the little girl who can only love her doll, and not even another doll someone buys for her that looks just the same. Up to a point, that tendency is part of the beauty of being human. But too much of that is a barrier to normal living. It's normal for a person who's been married to someone for thirty years to say, "I will never love again," and be a perpetual widow. It's not normal for a young teen to already be moving in those directions -- finding it progressively more difficult to love, not out of fear, but out of doing it so completely (We're not even talking romantic liaisons here!) that anything else just gets a "But that's not my rose!" reaction.

So many issues people have are normal -- even good -- traits and drives that are just upregulated beyond the norm.

This picture was titled "Helping Hand". But what do I title it? "A Loss of Pliability"!

Reflection: Going Around in Triangles

I have written about the different (contrasting) things that people have thought they've seen in my posture: Sometimes they've seen fear. Sometimes they've seen flexibility. There's a fair amount of illusion in both those perceptions, and it occurs to me those two contrasting illusions are actually coming from a common source.

I bend my arm inward, or upward, at the elbow, and again at the wrist -- a posture that forms a triangle if there's space (or a cat) in between. I do something similar with my legs. Lounging around with limb-triangles pointing off in all different directions, or tangled up with each other in the position that teachers call criss-cross applesauce... well, that looks flexible. Standing with that same sharply bent wrist and elbow-- ah, now the pose looks fearful and self-protective. But strumming a guitar with my arm in that triangle, perception changes yet again. Now I am simply told my posture looks a bit off. Finally we have an observation, devoid of false inference.

There's a picture of me even younger, eleven or twelve, holding a bell pepper out toward the camera -- a little bitty girl holding a little bitty lightweight pepper -- and you see the same tight, popping muscles you see here in this picture. There's another picture of me that age with (ack!) bare upper arms, and you notice something else -- that there's such low tone in the upper arm that it actually looks concave. Women tend to know what their worst physical feature is! Mine are my arms: such obvious muscle tone irregularities if I don't hide 'em with sleeves.

Muscle tone irregularites ... There's your flexibility. And there's your fear.

Reflection: Sometimes You Picture Me (2)

This picture is made from a snapshot someone took back in my co-op days. I uploaded into a frame and used it in a personal post, some months back, about body language and illusion. It was one of the few posts that I've written that I hesitated to publish. One of the ways that people have misinterpreted body language is that they've thought they saw fear in contexts where it didn't exist. Of course there are also more harmless illusions created by body language...

In co-op days, a housemate (I generally don't name names, but it start with 'J' and rhymes with 'mud') said, "You must have been so good at gymnastics when you were growing up."

I laughed. "In all my years of PE, I couldn't touch my toes -- couldn't even come close."

"How could that be?" he said, in his Mud-like manner (bemused, but not disbelieving).

It took me the better part of a decade to come up with a partial, non-scientific explanation about something that's mostly a 'nothing issue'. The interesting thing isn't the explanation; it's that it took me so long to come up with any reason at all that sounded plausible -- as it has been with some far deeper life issues. I tend to know in advance when my words are going to sound flat and unbelievable and I've made the choice in those situations to simply... not try. There are reasons, other than fear of not being accepted, to be mum about who you are.

Put yourself for a moment in my... leotards. Imagine: When people watch you, day after day, carelessly turn yourself into a human pretzel, it's gonna sound hollow and clunky when you say that in PE, you were gasping and wincing trying to bring your fingertips much more than halfway down your calves. (How can that be? I mean, really, how can it?)

Now you're not losing opportunities in life because you create a false illusion of flexibility, but other false do illusions carry with them losses. Yet it can take years to explain away those illusions in ways that don't sound hollow and clunky when they hit the floor. Because you yourself don't know how something can be, only that it must 'can be' because it is.

As for the toe touching thing, this is my partial explanation. It was always was difficult for me -- more so than the average person -- to bend at the waist when my legs were straight. It was always easy for me -- more so than the average person -- to bend at the waist when my legs too were deeply bent. Just put together a bit funny, I guess.

Reflection: Strong Bonds

When I put a new blog, I tell this one here it'll always be my #1 commitment in blog-land. When I contemplate a little pot of meandering rosemary, I tell the basil plant, it's my precious little one, it and not that other plant. And as for the netbook... it's this netbook, this, this one I'm committed to.

There's research now that attachment is actually a drive, related to pair bonding, and supported by its own neurochemical system. It's not normally as strong a drive in humans as it is in certain other species, but like other drives, it can be out of whack and out of proportion. (We know that drives can cause strong impulses that can't be explained at the logical or macro level, but do we realize how many small -- well, often small! -- drives we humans have within us?)

What I see in genetic testing is the chance to talk about things that I haven't been able to before -- kind of like web writing, but opening even more doors. (And, yes, there's a little more I know than what I write on the blog at this point.)

Reflection: The Hand Holds the Key

My little finger wanted me to write this.

Today I was out walking when I became conscious of my middle two fingers tackling the little finger, yanking it so it was perpendicular to it's previous position, and holding it down. The little finger was very appreciative: Ah, that felt good!

No, I'm not just writing this to be silly. I came up with a phrase for something. It occurs to me that some of my postures that are the oddest -- and most comfortable -- are variations of "bend and lock": First bend a finger, arm, leg inward and rotate it differently than the way it grows out of its socket. And when it's rotated to wear it feels comfortable, grasp it, lay on, wedge it somewhere -- yes, somehow lock it into place... but not for long, because a lot of other things are waiting to be bent and locked, too. (Hey, the little finger had it's turn.)

The things we can look at and only think we see. You might look at me and notice that my fist was clenched, but fail to notice the reason: One clue is apparent when you look very closely and observe that the other fingers are curled around the little finger, holding it in that perpendicular position.

Reflection: People as Poetry

Some of my blog posts grow out of letters. This one grows out of a letter to... well, I started to say "someone you don't know", but do I really know who might be reading on a particular day. It started with... No, it didn't start with, but it included a quote from an author who said poems are to be read --not analyzed -- as they're images from their creators' eyes.

About that quote: I am going back and forth on whether people are slightly like poems in that sense. On the one hand, I do sometimes get into reading people to unlock mysteries. On the other hand, they too can be seen as images from the author’s eye. One surely can get into trouble when they analyze and take apart and go on the basis of what they think they know as opposed to listening to the gestalt.

That picture of me writing is from many years ago -- I scan various things that I might use for photo-illustration, and sometimes I just go on a search through them.

Memory: Conversation on a Bus

On the bus, there were 2 people ahead of me -- separate seats. I was sure they were both men; they had men's voices. Everything they said I tried to assimilate into my original assumption: 2 men talking.

One of them talked about a change in appetite.

"Are you pregnant?" the other asked.

"Heck, no," came the reply. My assumption at that point: They were clowning around. It did seem they kept the joke up a little long, but what the hey...

The one said soething like, "In another 20 years, when I'm too old to have kids..." Again I was a bit puzzled. I mean, can't men have kids at any age? But maybe he meant in another twenty years he'd be too old to raise kids...

It took me rather a long time to challenge my original assumption: that here were two men talking.

Reflection: Don't Let the Party Dress Fool You

Don't be fooled by the party dress and mary jane shoes! The Squidoo web page that that picture appears on has willpower like you wouldn't believe.

There has been a thread going on Squidoo about how having an eBay module on a webpage may cause the page to fall out of the Google index or be ranked very low. Some say this is an unintentional bug (that the eBay module is generating some kind of weird code). Someone did an experiment and removed the eBay module to find the page rise again. Anyway, A Paper Doll Childhood is one of several of my pages that took a hit Google-wise and took something of a dip in terms of visitors. By the time I removed its eBay module this morning, it had fallen fell a few thousand spots in the internal ranking system.

But here's wear it gets curious. When I looked in on it this morning, its stats were kind of paltry in terms of visitors, but it had risen back up a few thousand places in the internal ranking system -- and was once more seated at the top of my personal 62 lens Squidoo stack. (Yup, find the line, "This member's top ranked page is ______" and there you will find the page with the paper dolls smiling out in its little pink dress and patent leather shoes.) Hmm, how does it do it? Maybe the page got an "angel blessing" -- something that can raise Squidoo rankings. Sometimes, though, I am hard pressed to explain just how that page manages to be so successful. Sometimes I think it has a will of its own. (Perhaps it is reading the Law of Attraction?)

Anyway, the larger lesson is one I frequently return to: Appearances can definitely belie intenal strength.

Reflection: The Experience of Reward

An understanding of the brain can help us understand some basic funky little things, like why we might bite into a hard candy when ostensibly we want the taste to last. The candy releases neurochemicals into our brain, and so the biting may give a bigger rush. So what is it about really -- the taste or the brain chemicals?

If we accept that a lot of things may ultimately not be about our senses but rather about the chemicals released in our brains in response to our senses... well, then we can begin to understand so much, like what happens when the process goes awry. People realize, because they've witnessed the effect on peers (on TV if not in real life!) that drugs have a detrimental effect on the reward/ motivation system. Most of us, though, have less experience with people whose brains that work like that naturally -- people whose reward systems aren't triggered normally by their senses, but instead respond to only a limited set of stimuli. (It doesn't occur to a lot of people that that way of being even exists at all.)

I told a friend once that what looked like excessive fear on my part was actually monotropic vulnerability. I'm not sure the distinction was clear. I meant that if a person's reward system is triggered in unnaturally strong ways by just one or two stimuli -- and if they fail to respond to other supposed rewards -- then an unnatural amount of their attention is going to be focused on those one or two things.

picture credit

Reflection: The Paper Doll Page Rides Again...

Remember when I said paper dolls weren't such a funny topic for a Squidoo page? Well, putting the paper dolls online up was rather a pragmatic Squidoo move, actually. I have 54 lenses at this point (a 4 lens cushion above what I need to apply for Giant Squid status this round) and for several weeks now my top lens has been A Paper Doll Childhood. (It peaked at about a 3,000 lensrank, and is closer to 4,000 now.)

If a person interacts on the Squidoo forums and leaves comments on others' 'lenses', from time to time other Squidoo-ers will click through onto their profile. Many people browse through the lens list and visit whatever topics interest them; some, though, are more inclined to check out your top-ranked page. I would say that male Squid are less likely to drop in on a lens about paper dolls, though. It's generally quite a girlie crew that comments on that one.

Not today. Today someone wrote that he was going to be the first and possible only guy to leave a comment on my paper doll lens. He mentioned that he was trying to make a living as a freelancer and that he liked to read other people's internet writing and see what worked for them.

Well, here is one life lesson that can be drawn from my experiences with Squidoo: There is a place for people to simply be themselves. Paper doll pages can do quite well. The lens that made Lens of the Day and thus peaked highest (briefly in the top 1,000) was quite a personal one, Making Sense of Monotropism. That lens has had its champions.

As for making money with online writing, though... well, at this point it's a few dollars here and there. It's on the rise, but it's still quite low. Times are tough -- and tight -- for so many reasons. Putting out the money for a Greyhound ticket is tough. But I've got most of the remaining pieces to my kindergarten-aged niece's dollhouse packed, I've got a shoulderbag case for Snookums-the-netbook to ride in... and it looks like I'll begin my Arizona trip in a few hours. I'll be gone a week or so.

Reflection: The Difference Between 'Illogical' and 'Not Logical'

Can everything be classified as either logical or illogical? I don't think so. I think a lot of people call behavior 'illogical' when it is merely 'not logical' -- and that there is actually a huge difference between those two things. So much of our experience, whether we're normal or not so normal, is not about logic at all -- it's about drives and impulses and changes in arousal level (perceived as either interest or fear).

Is motivation logical? Well, it's mitigated by logic -- hopefully-- but that's not the same as being driven by it. There's quite a bit of evidence of brain reward systems running on chemicals (ie dopamine) in kind of a 'ka-ching ka-ching' fashion. There's scientific evidence of reward system irregularities being implicated in various disorders. Is a person less logical because they fail to experience reward or motivation in the more typical ways?

Ah, and then there's the issue of drives. Just about everyone has heard the term 'drive' applied to things like sex, but there's also a drive toward monogamous/ faithfulness, supported by its own system of neuroeptides. (Some of the early research on that came from studying prairie voles, and why it was that they formed pair bonds and nurtured their young for a long time when other related species didn't.)

Of course I've also written recently about the issue of sensory processing -- having the 'volume of the world' turned up unusually high or turned down unusually low. Ultimately... I think it's illogical to expect others' non-logical parts to operate the same as our own!

Reflection: The Distance Between Obsessions

I've talked so much now about how it is that all my life people have misinterpreted the reasons for my own actions. Well, I'm partly to blame for that, and I'm not the only one who has mis-authored their own life. How many of us have hidden our motives and the inner workings of our clockwork, not just from our friends and acquaintances, but from the doctors who would prescribe treatment? We do it out of fear.

Think about this: As long as people see my obsessions as primarily fear-driven, as avoidant or away obsessions, they at least won't be frightened of me Nobody's frightened of such a mousy person -- and so there are times I've wanted to cast myself as the 'mousy person'. At the moment people see the toward in my obsessions... well, do you know how often across decades of my life that I've been afraid of people seeing me as scary. See, you will find heroes, yes, but also some dangerous people in that population of people who are driven single-mindedly by their own obsessions.

There is fear in me, oh, yes, and that's art of why I am so compelled by 'the distance between obsessions' -- by the way the towards tower like mountains above the aways. There are things in my life I won't cross through just because someone is holding my hand... yet I will barrel through if there's something on the other side that drives me enough. I think it's less true that I'm plagued by unwanted obsession as that I'm dependent upon obsession and single-minded drive. That's surely a part of the reason that I have trouble seeing anything as truly desirable that I won't allow myself to be knocked down and smeared with blood over.

That picture of course depicts The Little Prince. I've always identified with the book and seen in it the positive side of a particular way of being. I've got some analysis of The Little Prince on Squidoo and it's done pretty well as of late.

credit: Musicienne, Flickr

Reflection: Mirror Writing

I had wondered for a long time if a particular thing was normal... It's not that I really cared whether it was normal, but I was interested in what it could tell me. I don't think I'm a lot more adept with my right hand or my left, but my right likes to go right and my left likes to go left. Well, I learned a new phrase on Squidoo: "mirror writing". I came across a lens about it, written by an internet friend. I knew I had some proclivity at it, but wondered just how good I was. I put a pencil in just my left hand and wrote as fast as I could, just about as fast as with my right hand. A couple of the letters I actually thought I was making in the normal direction as I went along, but when I looked back, every single one of the 26 was mirrored.

Apparently if one can write easily and naturally with either hand but in opposite directions you're a "mirror writer". And mirror writing is yet another anomaly that sometimes happens on its own in an otherwise normal person, and sometimes occurs as part of neurological disorders that cause autism or mental retardation.

I figure there are people who have been defeated by me at Boggle who would be quite surprised to know that I would have trouble mirroring even the simplest gesture of someone who's facing me. I would see that their head was tilted, but determining which way and then telling my own body to do the same thing... that would be a major struggle. People assume someone who can read forwards, backwards, and upside down that must have at least a normal ability to differentiate one direction from another, but that's not always true. I will say that I am much better at such skills than when I was a kid.

Some people get frustrated that people see them as "dumb" because of their spatial skills. My problem was never that anyone thought I was dumb. No, they'd see me as so smart that there just had to be a psychological reason for everything. (If someone's IQ tests low and they're in adaptive PE because of coordination and spatial problems, people assume they don't get a driver's license because they don't have the skills. But if someone's IQ tests high and they're in adaptive PE because of coordination and spatial skills, people will see their not getting a driver's license as one more piece of evidence that they're cowering in fear of the world.)

I could be dead wrong on leads I follow, so I avoid saying too much. I will say that there are people who have a corpus callosum (the part that connects the hemispheres of the brain) that bends at an abnormal angle through the brain's language center, but fails to reach as far as the motion center at the base of the brain. There was one study of children with this disorder that found that the wider the bending angle the more over the top the storytelling behavior -- the more bent those children were on capturing an audience and hooking them. And that is but one example of a weakness that comes with a mirroring gift.

Reflection: A Glimpse of Heaven

A new section of online CLEP begins today -- I'm expecting probably a couple students -- and I think it's understandable that I've shut out news from the world (taken the phone off the hook) these few hours before. Here I sit writing... and I want to write more about my 'underwhelment' theme today. It can be difficult to know what another's experience is like. Sometimes it's hard for me to tell to what extent I'm experiencing or feeling things less than others -- and to what extent I have a stronger need to feel them.

Understand: Some of us need a lot of 'whelment' to function optionally. It's not that I want another human to cost me or bring me pain, but it's hard for me to imagine experiencing real pleasure in human interaction that isn't based on the willingness to incur tremendous cost. I don't see that there's that much pleasure or excitement in flirting with another person. And I don't see that there's that much comfort in a hand on the shoulder. There some, yes, but compared to the strength it takes to get through this life the comfort seems awfully flimsy. As for people getting highs from stuff like sex... well, to me it seems not much of a high compared to looking at another human in an "Anything for you" way.

Being really, really 'whelmed' -- whelmed by obsession, whelmed by love -- that's what I depend on. Some of us are made of pieces that seem contradictory or paradoxical til you look. I don't let others put me through things because of low self esteem. I let them put me through Hell because with that willingness to go through Hell comes the only glimpse of Heaven that I've ever seen.