Most of us like to think that we are fairly smart on the SDMB but being intelligent on many things and a flat-out retard on others aren’t mutually exclusive.
I have many examples but one of the more consistent ones is complete lack of regard for my own health. If there is an opposite to a hypochondriac, I am it. I have been warned about it my entire life but still didn’t learn a damned thing. The latest episode is a lung infection that is going around at work. I had coughing fits that lasted two weeks before coworkers confronted me, told me to get to a doctor and get it taken care of. I eventually listened and found out I had fairly advanced double pneumonia. The ER doctors were puzzled why I was even able walk around because I should have been there at least a week before. I am on the upswing now that I am getting treatment but it is probably going to take a while to fully recover. My thought process is that if I am not bleeding out at any given moment, things are fine no matter how painful it is.
I also have absolutely no sense of direction. Thank goodness for GPS. I used to get hopelessly lost before it was invented and sometimes never found my destination.
I am a fit, healthy guy who is very conscientious of living a lifestyle that encourages this state. I have a blind spot, however, when it comes to certain drugs. And that’s despite experiencing the negative sides of these substances. In just about all other aspects of my life, I put my priority on my health and well being. While I don’t regularly or privately do coke, if I’m somewhere and coke gets busted out, I’ll probably do some. And I know fucking cocaine is a dangerous drug that also has big addictive potential. But that doesn’t deter me like it deters me from all other vices. So it’s a bit of a contradiction.
Another example is my ongoing saga with the scam artists that advertise under the Lowes brand. They are screwing me out of floors that I paid good money for but I could buy my way out of them in an instant if I really wanted to. I am not even the one paying for them. My father is and he called me yesterday to tell me that he would pay anything extra that it takes. Fighting with them is partially what caused me to get pneumonia. That sounds like an excellent idea to a reasonable person but I am not doing that. I don’t enjoy being fucked any more than Jerry Sandusky’s kids did. Sometimes you just have to sink a ship to save the battalion.
A reasonable person would take that offer but I am not a reasonable person and you need to be sunk no matter how long it takes with Attorney General’s office. Again, I aware that is completely counterproductive to my own interests but lots of things are. That is what this thread is about.
There is something seriously wrong w/ your mind that you thought it was fine, or even clever, to appropriate the repeated rapes of children over the course of years for an analogy to you having your floor upgraded. If ever there was evidence of your warped brain, this is it.
It was a joke. Probably not a very good one but I am not the first to make a joke about that type of thing The thread is about warped brains in general. Most people aren’t brave enough to respond with their own weaknesses which is the request. It is really just a thread about how you are a screw-up and about your own self-awareness.
For the record, I do feel terribly for the victims in question and that should never have been an issue. I feel bad for the Space Shuttle Challenger astronauts as well but I know some pretty killer jokes about them too.
Zero sense of direction here - only GPS and accompanying software can save me. (I remember what it was like in the old days, and it was NOT pretty.)
Also, while I have pretty good insight into my social/cognitive failings (I am prone to overlooking social niceties, and I have great trouble recognizing/remembering faces - prosopagnosia, if you want the technical term), I constantly forget to engage my compensatory skills.
In other words, I KNOW I’m going to have trouble with social give and take, and remembering faces, so ideally I should go into social situations thinking “note to self - ask as many questions about the other person as you get asked! Look carefully at their features to try to memorize what they look like!”
But about half the time, I completely forget to compensate. I come back from meeting someone, and realize I have NO IDEA what they look like - even though I spent 90 minutes with them, and could have reminded myself to memorize their features.
On the plus side, I’ve gotten better over the years. At 20, I was hopeless. At 30, it was beginning to dawn on me that I had some issues. At 40, I was beginning to figure out coping strategies. At 50, I was starting to use them sometimes. I’m 58 now, and by 60 I hope to be able to mimic a normal person the majority of the time.
I was the same way. I once went about twenty years without seeing a doctor. (Which was especially foolish because I had good medical insurance.) But I figured I felt healthy so why did I need to see a doctor?
A minor injury sent me to the ER. The doctor who examined me pointed out I was being foolish with my health by not getting regular check-ups. Among other things, she pointed out my blood pressure was higher than it needed to be. And I was smart enough to listen to her. I began scheduling regular doctor visits.
You know the marshmallow test? That is, you tell a child that they can have one marshmallow today, but if they don’t eat it they can have two marshmallows tomorrow. Delayed gratification is a big predictor of future success.
I have a weird super-amplified version of it, sometimes to my detriment. I never took the test as a child but I suspect if you (then) offered me two marshmallows today vs. one marshmallow tomorrow, I’d go for the one. Because, I guess, if I eat the two marshmallows, they’ll be gone and I won’t have any tomorrow, and if I wait then they’ll be stale and nasty. But a fresh marshmallow tomorrow would be great!
It makes it really hard to, for instance, not pay off my mortgage even though doing so would be financially stupid. But the idea of not having to make payments in the future sounds so nice.
Actually, the country would be better off if more people DIDN’T have regular checkups.
As long as a person is reasonably healthy, the aggregate sum of those doctor visits takes more time and money than it’s worth. It’s more expensive than treating the few problems that are found. And that’s before you even begin to account for the false positives, the small but not zero number of significant side effects from the tests themselves, and so on.
More specifically, I treat arguing with internet people as a stress ball. When I’m feeling depressed, or anxious, or nervous, I go on the internet and blather about things. Then, when my RL issues are resolved, the need for forumizing goes away. So you guys, for the most part, only meet me at my worst. For instance, this past week, I’ve been posting all kinds of crapola in a pit thread. Why? RL money issues. Those are now fixed. Result? Not the slightest urge to return to that thread.
Wait. I think this means that I don’t I don’t argue with internet people. I *am *internet people. :eek:
Oh, well. I’ve somehow been posting here for yonks without as much as a warning. So, if nothing else, I think I’m at least relatively shy and polite internet people.
I can’t open things. Modern packaging is a mystery to me. I will not only fail initially in the attempt but am also likely to break the mechanism and keep it from working properly afterwards.
I get easily confused. Whenever I read about the latest Darwin award, I think, ''Yeah, that could have been me." Particularly anytime I’m exposed to something new, I’m prone to doing stupid shit as I figure out how to deal with it.
I’ve mildly shocked myself more than once. The most recent time, I was assembling a lamp, and after I plugged it in I realized I had to fix something. I forgot it was plugged in. There’s something about my brain that has difficulty sorting through new information and gets easily overloaded when there are too many factors to consider. Add in time pressure or raise the stakes, and I’m toast. I’d be a lousy pilot.
Nine times out of ten, when I hear someone say, ‘‘Let me tell you this story about this person who has no common sense,’’ I don’t get why the examples are illustrative of a person lacking common sense. I must conclude that I have no common sense.
I am very gullible. I assume people are being honest by default. I can be skeptical of an argument but not a person.
I am the reason that Infomercials are a thing. High-pressure salespeople usually get their way because I don’t want to disappoint them.
I couldn’t navigate my way out of a paper bag.
In all honesty, I’m kind of useless, beyond the academic sense.
I know how important it is to take good care of my teeth, and I have mild gum disease/inflammation. And yet I simply cannot get myself to do the whole routine before falling into bed. I’m lucky if I brush them.
Why does it seem so insurmountable to just do this one thing??!
At age 70, I still tend to eat like a teenager. I know things like pizza and fries and the like are not good things, but just can’t bring myself to eat twigs and leaves. I’ll probably die with a fistful of French fries in one hand and a bacon cheeseburger in the other.
I’m another who is directionally challenged. Coming up out of subway stations in cities all over the world was always intimidating, as I could almost never figure out which way I needed to go.
Yeah, me too. I learn by doing wrong, usually catastrophically. I’m amazed by people who are able to learn something without causing a giant mess in the process.
For whatever weird reason, I was watching the Indy 500 this year. There was a star Formula 1 driver called Fernando Alonso making a guest appearance. Everyone was impressed by how quickly he adapted, without messing up. He didn’t put a wheel wrong. During practice, he was quicker every lap. He got closer to the limit, without crossing it. He put his car ever closer to the wall, but never hit it.
Here’s how I would have done it: Gone way too fast, then dialed it back. Crashed the car twice. Probably wiped out some spectators. Tried a weird-ass plan involving attaching the car to a blimp and flying over the circuit. Made a huge mess of everything. At that point, I would have it all figured out. But then I would have to go into hiding for a year, change my identity, and come back next year, to do it properly from scratch.