SAME. I grew up in New England, surrounded by lakes, ponds, the ocean and had ready access to public and private pools. We had swimming lessons every year, but I never got past extreme beginner stage for the same reasons as you. I have always loathed the feeling of my head underwater, and I was skin and bones and tall, so I did not float. I can dog paddle now, but that’s it (and I still don’t go underwater).
I was never as bad as you describe, but I used to pretty much be the SECOND fastest thing on the road (imagining the FASTEST would attract the cops! :rolleyes:)
For a while, I did a particular 80 minute drive many times a week. At some point, I realized that if I busted my ass, sped, tried to pass everything on the road … - I might make it in close to 70 minutes. And if I poked along, missed every light, and ran into traffic, it might take me 90 minutes. Somehow that realization - that there wasn’t much difference between a 70 minute drive and a 90 minute one - cured me of any tendency to try to “make time”.
OMG this and “swipe left” or “swipe right” confuse the shit out of me! Because when I think lefty loosy, I think to myself “If you want to loosen it, put your hand on the left.” Which is wrong, you put your hand to the right and then move it towards the left. And if you want to swipe left, seems to me you put your hand to the left and then swipe, but no, swiping left means putting your hand to the *right *and then swiping.
Takes me back to boot camp in '73. I grew up in a lily-white neighborhood. My grandparents had a cabin on a river, so I was in the water almost every week in the summer. I wasn’t a great swimmer, but I could move about and keep myself afloat.
Then comes boot camp, and the realization that the black girls who grew up in the city not only couldn’t swim, but panicked when in deep water. It was really hard to wrap my head around that someone my age couldn’t at least dog-paddle, tho I did recognize that not everyone’s grandparents had a waterfront property.
Sounds like you’re thinking of “left” and “right” as adjectives when you should be thinking of them as adverbs.
My in-laws lived 55 miles away and 52 of those miles were highway miles. You would think something like 45 minutes to an hour would be a decent ballpark travel time estimate…but no, they’d routinely show up 2-3 hours late any time we specified a time for an activity. Why so late? The answer was always “traffic was terrible”.:rolleyes:
Three quarters of these posts involve math and spatial reasoning. As someone with dyscalculia, I find this faintly amusing. People with dyscalculia have workarounds for daily math challenges that they simply cannot do. Not will not. Cannot. Like figuring out 20% by using their fingers, under the table. I’m not kidding. Maps, left and right, remembering dates, all of those and many more.
Swimming now, I can swim. But that is due to my mother being a very poor swimmer (lessons were not in the picture in her childhood) and making us all take swimming lessons every summer until we could pass “advanced” so we wouldn’t drown.
Having been taught to both cook and bake as a small child by my grandmother, I do find it startling to come across an adult who can’t make cooked food.
I was recently in the post office, and a couple had a large, totally-unwrapped basket filled with objects. They wanted to send it to an address in Russia. They thought they could just attach an address tag to the handle. The mind boggles.
Re: lefty loosey - one thing that often gives me pause is “clockwise/counterclockwise.” It is in no way intuitive for me. I always sense that it depends on where the clock is WRT me, and have to envision a clock situated on the wall/floor/whatever, and mentally trace the pattern the hands would move.
Of course, as phones become more relied upon, such an analog reference may become less prevalent. 
It’s the same here.
What may be confusing people is that we have (and the UK probably also has them) shops where you can bring in loose things, and the staff packs and ships them for you. The Post Office does have a small selection of free boxes for use with specific classes of service, and they sell a few types of boxes, but I don’t think they sell bubble wrap, peanuts, or tape, so it’s really not a good self-serve setup for people that don’t understand the amount of abuse their thing will receive along the way.
My partner is hopelessly directionally dyslexic. Not just an inability to find north, but to say “go down to” somewhere that’s north of here, or to “go up to” someplace south. And I’m always saying “Your other left!” I can’t imagine that’s a lack of education - are some people just not able to have a built-in mental map of well, maps?
I haven’t done real math in years and years, but I always did really well in it. But doing math in front of someone? Like not in a school setting with scrap paper and quiet? Can’t do it. So even without dyscalculia, it’s a struggle for those of us who had an A+ in AP Calculus back in the day because it’s the wrong kind of math in public.
My first couple of days in Hawaii I was a little disoriented. Growing up on the west side of Los Angeles, I was used to Mountains to the East – Ocean to the West. In Hawaii, it’s Mountains in the Middle and Ocean everywhere else.
One of my sons is working on an advanced degree in sciencey stuff. He can’t understand how I can figure out a tip in my head. It seems he must have missed school the day they taught that determining percentage is basically the same as division.
That must have been a helluva shock. You show up with one good magazine and burn through it in about three hours, and then you’ve still got 11 hours to kill…
… be on time. (This is a major human divide, much discussed on the SDMB and elsewhere.)
I find it natural, basic and easy to do what’s necessary to be punctual, which I am for pretty much everything.
We all know people who close to incapable of this, which seems to me a deplorable way to go through life.
I remember flying from Toronto to Perth, Australia a few times. The International Date Line did make things a little weird. I’d leave Toronto on Friday night, connect through Honolulu and Sydney, and arrive in Perth on Sunday afternoon. Okay, fine, that kind of makes sense, I guess.
But I’d leave Perth, Australia early Monday morning (a red-eye, usually leaving at 0030, connecting through Sydney and Honolulu), and arrive back in Toronto, after thirty hours in transit, on … early Monday evening?
Perhaps a bit of a hijack, but I’ll post it anyway.
In a way, it’s almost easier to understand Toronto if you know Imperial measurements. “Concession roads” (the main roads, or “baselines” to which you are referring) are 1.25 miles apart, both east and west, and north and south. From north to south, they are:
Steeles Avenue
Finch Avenue
Sheppard Avenue
York Mills Avenue/Wilson Road
Lawrence Avenue
Eglinton Avenue
St. Clair Avenue
Bloor Street
Queen Street
So, if I’m at Queen Street and Yonge Street, and I want to get to Lawrence, I know it’s four concessions, or 4 x 1.25, or five miles. Probably a subway ride. But getting to Bloor is only 1.25 miles–sure, that’s walkable, if I have 30 minutes to spare.
Yonge Street is the dividing line between the above roads and their East/West designations (e.g. Queen Street East and Queen Street West). But even eastbound and westbound, the concession roads are apparent. From Yonge, eastbound:
Bayview Avenue
Leslie Street
Victoria Park Avenue
Warden Avenue
Kennedy Road
McCowan Road
Markham Road
Morningside Avenue
I won’t bother with the westbound roads, but they are there too. Point is, if you can remember the concession roads, and can remember the Imperial system, you can estimate how far you are from anywhere. You can, of course, convert the result into metric if you like.
(Source: I worked for the City of Toronto in the early 1980s, and absolutely had to know the concession roads in Imperial units in order to do my job.)
[end hijack]
This didn’t work for me. Eventually I heard it as “clockwise is lockwise,” which stuck, but I was never quite able to conceive of a rotating object as rotating to the “left” or “right.”
I’m always surprised just how many men don’t know there’s boobs bigger than DD cups, and just how many women think the average male penis size is 8 inches.
I’m a reasonably smart person but I can’t figure out tips in my head. Yes, yes, I know it’s a form of division. What you don’t know about me is that it took four years for me to learn to divide even with tutoring. I spent years in remedial/low level math. I’m sure nowadays I’d be given some sort of diagnosis. Back then, I was just called lazy, stubborn, or some other adjective because, you know, I was so good at all the other subjects what was the problem with math? Must be an attitude problem or willful defiance or something.
I did, eventually, struggle my way to pre-Calculus. Where I crashed and burned spectacularly. I had had enough. That was the last math I tried to learn.
I’m a big fan of calculators, though - give me a calculator I’m a whiz. I have zero inhibitions about whipping one out in public and too bad if you think that makes me inadequate, that I need a calculator (or paper and pencil) to do math. It’s not for lack of trying, I just can’t hold math in my head so I’ve learned how to compensate. I can set problems up on a calculator, or even on paper, and work through them with reasonable accuracy but do it in my head? No way.
(I can, however, make change on the fly - that one I managed to learn. I use the “count up” method. Someone gives you $2.00 for $1.63 total and you count pennies 64, 65, then a dime to get to 75 (or two nickels to get there) then a quarter and you’re at two and done. Doing this in front of some my younger coworker generates expressions of awe and assertions of math genius. If they only knew…)