mmmyep

Right. It's that holiday today/tomorrow, innit? The one where not a single arsing thing is open and getting anything done is impossible. I never got round to the shop today (or, yesterday as the case may be, given that it's nearly 5am), on account of having seriously crashed and slept all day.

My knee is killing me, so I doubt I'll be getting to the shop at all today (proper; fuck, sleeping odd hours screws up syntax).

Also, I'm getting a cold. All I can smell/taste is green, and I hate it.


Although, I don't think I could have timed a crash any better if I'd tried. I've only been up a few hours, and I'm ready to go back to bed. Maybe I'll just sleep through that holiday and pretend it never happened this year.

Why I Fail at Oral Conversations

I don't do very well with conversations, in person or over the phone. Anyone who knows me in person has probably noticed that I have odd moments of just not following at all.

I smell, taste, and hear colours (as well as see, but most people do). I can feel and see sounds, and am especially sensitive to some of the higher registers. Conversation is... totally screwed up. I don't hear words; I hear letters and see the words. When someone mispronounces a word, or I can't figure out how it's meant to be pronounced, I get totally bent out of shape, because then the word winds up misspelt, and I can't figure out what it's supposed to be sometimes.

It's synaesthesia to an extreme effect.

I often talk about living in a popular culture void because television is often overstimulating for me. If I do watch something, I'm usually not doing much else, because I can't divide my attention between everything that's coming in. Words and colours and sounds and oh god. The husband has the television on while he's home, which means I'm always focus-divided, because there's just so much input and not enough RAM to process it.

Textual conversation is infinitely easier for me to handle. It's already all there in text, without sounds getting in the way. Certain accents and languages just kill me, because I can never figure out what some of the sounds look like, and then I just get confused and upset.

Telephone conversations are strange for me because there's the sound, but it's not a "real" sound. It's a recreation of sound and not attached to anything; distorted and wrong. Thank god for an unlimited text package. When I do have to talk on the phone, I use my headphones to drown out anything else, and just focus on what the other person is saying. Even then, I hate it, because there's nothing to properly associate the sound to, and everything's all brown and grey and unpleasant.

Music seems to make everything easier to handle. I've always got music on, whether I'm at home or out and about. It's something of a white noise effect that drowns out everything else, and makes it easier to focus. If I don't have music, I see everything. Traffic, rain, neighbours, the cats, Ryan asleep in the next room; even the walls, which I hate because they are white, and white is the worst. This is why I tend to cover up my walls with as much random junk as possible, and with generally dark colours. It mutes out the sound the walls make, which is rather high-pitched and unpleasant. It sort of sounds like how neon* looks.

I was able to read by the time I was three, and when I go out, I wear red-tinted glasses, because red is one of the few colours that doesn't have a sound (which is why a lot of my flat is done up in shades of red and orange).

It's all pretty much as confusing as it sounds. Angering sometimes, and rather more complicated than this, but also very difficult to explain. To borrow a phrase used by Flynn in M'ways, this is rather like asking a frog to imagine a moon base.

* I am referring to the type of lamp, and not the gas that makes the lamp glow. Argon, neon, mercury; it's all rather the same thing.

Damnit

I want a Mycroft Bear!