Are you friends with the guy I’m dating? Because I swear this is him, and the friends he has that I don’t already know. And it’s like he and they never allot enough time for any of the things, so they end up spending twice as long picking up X because parking is bad and traffic is backed up, and then dithering over shoes because there’s a two-for-one sale and look those are half off and aren’t these fun?, and lunch takes forever because the new place is packed so when lunch comes we have to bolt it down, and the art gallery and museum exhibit end up getting rushed through (at an almost literal run), and drinks get thrown back quickly and we walk in the show 30 minutes late.
Once was enough of that crap. I have difficulty shifting attention that quickly - I like spending thoughtful time at art galleries and museums, and enjoying the delicious lunch, and having good conversations over drinks, and not always looking at my watch and saying “we gotta move on to the next thing!”
So that’s my thing - I have difficulty always wanting to move on to the next thing. THIS thing that I’m doing right now is pretty fun and I want to spend some time doing it BEFORE I move on, thanks.
Keeping track of small things for me. I’ve misplaced my wallet, phone a dozen times this month, and I just found my passport this morning in some pants pockets :eek:
I don’t like calling people on the phone either. I don’t mind answering the phone, but I don’t like being the caller. If I have to do it a lot, I get used to it, but I hardly do it at all anymore, so it makes me all anxious. If my only job option was telemarketing, hello starvation.
But I am better at phoning people than throwing a goddamned frisbee. I can throw a ball perfectly well, but my frisbee throws always wind up about a parsec to the left or right. The frisbee is too sensitive to the tilt angle when you release it.
YES. I think they suck at time management or something. Or else they feel that unless they’re so busy, the day has been wasted. Ack-I start to hyperventilate just reading your post. I will never be like that. I can barely hear about other people’s forays into mindless rushing about…
I also cannot put on makeup so that it looks great. I either put too much on and don’t blend it (and look like a clown) or I put too little on and it disappears in an hour. Luckily, I don’t need much makeup. Heh.
And then I try to explain furhter, an it all just sorta devolves into subtle metaphors, until I start thinking I’m crazy and nobody could ever understand what I originally meant.
When someone gives their year of birth I have to really think to figure out how old they are. DUMB! For some reason, it just messes me up.
Also, I am terrible at keeping matching socks together. I am ashamed to admit I have a little basket of mismatched socks that I try to sit down and straighten out from time to time. I make progress, but sometimes I just throw a bunch away and start fresh.
Ditto on faces and names. It’ll usually take me several tries before I can remember someone’s name without some prompting, and if I see someone out of the context I’d usually see them in, there’s a 50/50 chance I won’t recognize them unless they’re a good friend. As dorky as they are, I am totally in LOVE with nametags because they solve both of these problems for me.
(strangely enough, though, I’m ridiculously good at remembering other ridiculously useless facts like places, dates and events)
Video games that involve shooting and/or driving are another one. I’m not just bad at them… I’m so embarassingly awful that I rarely make it past the first level.
Oh, and I can’t tell right from left unless I look at my hands and do the make-an-L-with-the-index-and-thumb trick.
On the recognition thing, I can’t recognize people from photos until after I know them. Send me a photo of someone and then put me in a room with them and a couple other people and ask me to pick out whose photo I just saw? It’ll never happen (unless there’s some REALLY singular identifying quality, like they’re the only redhead in the room or something like that.) If I have met someone casually, I can sometimes pick them out in a photo, but not always. If I know someone well, it’s not a problem at all.
I can’t braid my own hair, though I can do a couple different fancy-ish braids on other people. And I can’t manage a curling iron without really working on it, because (this is so embarrassing) the mirror throws me off. I end up turning the curling iron the wrong way because it looks like the right way in the mirror. I have to get my hair into the grabber thingie, then close my eyes and THINK which way to turn.
I need a map with specific directions to get anywhere. I can not simply, “go on this expressway to that expressway and get off at this road and go toward that road.”
I need specific, point by point directions or I’m screwed.
And I need them everytime, until I make the trip at least 20 times.
Oh, yeah? Well, my friends and family all know that if we’re at a restaurant, and I go to the bathroom and don’t return within 15 minutes, that they’ll need to go looking for me because I am lost. In the restaurant.
I have massive phone phobia.
Here’s the fun odd thing–I’m great on the phone. I’m pushing forty and was a latchkey child in the day. My mom drilled into me correct phone protocol when I called her work to say I was home.
And it’s paid off at work. I can call numbers and ask dumb questions, b/c I know how to do the whole phone voice, nice questions, etc. (Some is stuff I just learned–“hi, I’m asking a dumb question and I don’t know if you’re the person to ask it”.)
When I did I have a home phone? Back in the day before almost everyone went to cell phones…I would have massive panic attacks when I got phone calls. Then there was caller ID. And it was better.
But it is still hard as hell for me to call anyplace for the first time.
And most of my aunts/uncles have phone phobia.
I also do horrible with left/right without thinking.
Chiming in on the phone thing. (I guess it’s not so unusual after all!) For triple bonus points, imagine calling up dozens of strangers in a foreign country in your non-native language! I had to do this while apartment hunting in Spain. Total sweaty mess by the end of each phone call.
Also, I have trouble with left and right. When people ask me “which direction?” I often say the wrong one. I can clearly picture which direction I want them to go, I just get the labels mixed up. Strangely, I have an excellent natural sense of direction- I never feel lost because I can orient myself north/south/east/west.
I can’t sip hard liquor. It doesn’t matter how high quality the liquor is. Hand me a five thousand dollar glass of fine scotch and I will wretch at the slightest taste. If I take a sip you will see me convulsivly swallow in repeated attempts to keep it down. Inevitably, it and everything I’d had to eat in the past hour comes back up.
In order to drink good scotch it MUST be diluted fifty fifty with water in addition to ice.
Same here. I’m bad at all facial recognition, too. Basically, everyone looks the same to me until I get to know them. Well, not everyone, but I have gotten people who have really only superficial similarities mixed up, which is hugely embarrassing.
Bizarrely, after I do get to know the people, they look perfectly distinct and I wonder how I could have ever had that problem. When I met one of my best friends, she was one of two stage managers for a play I was in. Both she and the other stage manager had long brown hair and brown eyes and I got them mixed up repeatedly. After she and I became friends…no problem. They looked nothing alike anymore.
Add me to the list of the directionally-impaired. I need to know a place REALLY well before I stop getting lost constantly. I have a terrible time forming a visual image of a street system - it’s so bad that I lived in Chicago for a year before the grid system made sense to me. (Chicago is built on a grid. The 0/0 point of the grid is downtown, at State and Madison, and the address system radiates out from there. For some reason I couldn’t picture this in my head until I’d seen the grid points on the El signs whiz past me for a year.)
I used to have terrible telephone phobia. I got over it by pretending I didn’t. I’m not sure exactly how, but it worked for me. I guess I psyched myself into thinking I’m a confident person.
Hi, I’m a lefty, and I have trouble telling left from right. The teachers never tried to switch me, but the fun little mnemonic we got in kindergarten was “The RIGHT hand is the hand you WRITE with. Oh, except you, Goblin Queen.” It’s fifty-fifty whether I’ll turn the correct way when driving if you tell me directions that must be followed IMMEDIATELY or we’ll miss our turn!
Doing the upside-down hands as glasses thing. I finally figured it out thanks to watching a boatload of David Bowie live performances on youtube, but I couldn’t figure it out for a while.
I have trouble riding a bike. I always fall off when I try to stop. Everything in my life is perforce walking distance or driving distance. No bikes. I would ride a tricycle for adults if it wouldn’t be so totally lame…
But despite all these things, I CAN understand spacetime diagrams fairly well, which I guess was a problem for a lot of people at the end of last semester.
Yep! And I even experienced this with a set of identical twins. I couldn’t tell them apart for YEARS, and then suddenly I could, and now I look at them and think, “how the heck did I get them confused??” They still look very much alike, I can just see the small differences well enough now that I can’t believe I didn’t notice them sooner.
