Dear Group Mind,
I will be declared either the winner of this thread, hands down, or a compulsive liar, but here goes:
I can do orgami. Not just the standard cranes and cootie-catchers, but little people of either sex, and tables and chairs and beds and dressers in scale with the people! Also a host of other animals. And really ornate flowers, done with multiple colors of paper. I can also do several kinds of balloon animals and shapes. I count this as a talent, rather than a profession, because I have yet to try it professionally (though I might do an orgami book, someday…
I can eat with chopsticks. Nobody taught me how, I just picked up a pair one day and they made sense.
I can belch at will.
I have “monkey feet” as I believe they’re called, i.e. can pick up objects with my feet, pinch with them, etc.
I can juggle two objects with my right hand. But I can’t juggle three with both hands, go figure.
I can do all kinds of voices, accents, etc. I can talk like I’ve inhaled helium, for instance, with or without the balloons. I can quack like Donald Duck.
I can smell germs, bacteria, etc. This is very handy to me, one whiff of somebody tells me to stay away from them because they’re sick and contagious. I don’t know if I can smell cancer or not; either I can’t, or haven’t hung out with enough people who have cancer to tell.
As if that weren’t enough, I can roll my tongue, too.
I can’t do that thing where you associate numbers or letters with colors, but I tend to picture math problems, functions, etc as these lattice structures like they were constructed of tinker-toys. I used to be able to figure large math problems in my head, enough that it impressed friends, but I’ve deliberately neglected this talent. There’s this 99 cent invention called a calculator, see…
NOT a talent:
I have a photographic memory for landmarks, faces, tastes, smells, emotions, the atomic weights of the elements, the speed of gravity…everything but the important stuff. I have ROTTEN memory for any name, be it a street, a city, or a person’s name. I fell apart in geography class where you have to memorize the capitol of everything, and I’ve routinely aggravated co-workers by getting their names wrong, even after I’ve worked with them for years. The fact that I can remember every other detail about them (every conversation we’ve had, every item of clothing I’ve seen them wear, I’m talking detail, here) doesn’t seem to help much. Does anybody have a name for this kind of memory?
By the way, this even applies to numbers when used for a name/label, i.e. phone numbers and IP addresses and zip codes never stay with me, but if a number has significance as an actual number (a mathematical constant or how old somebody is, or the equivalent measured quantities of a recipe), it’s mine for life. Really weird…
Happy with the freak that I am,
Hosiah