Anti-social duties

Today was a day I'd rather been dreading.

Our condo council decided that, the vast majority of owners being double-vaccinated, it was time to re-institute social gatherings, albeit outside in the larger lower parking lot in a huge circle.  We were to bring food to share, but our own drinks.

The council member responsible for organising this get-together teased us for sipping iced coffees from the neighbourhood coffee shop.  

"The notice said to bring our own drinks!" we protested.

"Oh," he laughed.  "You're the guys who actually read the emails.  You take everything so literally..."

I came back unscathed, but feeling vaguely overstimulated, with the uneasy sensation of having revealed too much, or not having observed the protocols of social interaction, and of over-sharing. Or under-sharing.  Or something.

It's not like I was ever particularly good at social gatherings, but after nearly a year and a half, I appear to have lost what little skill I had.

I did have two conversations before retreating gratefully, and possibly somewhat gracelessly back into the building and the quiet of our living room.

The Resident Fan Boy stayed a bit longer, and when he returned, I asked him to whom I'd been speaking.  My face-blindness is not a social asset either.  She turned out to be a hall neighbour, who clearly knew who I was.  We chatted about her job, and of the things I hadn't missed about the pandemic:  not getting colds or flu, and grungy shopping baskets (they've been sparkling clean for over a year).

I haven't missed potlucks, either, but I didn't tell her this.  That would definitely be over-sharing. Or under-sharing.  Or something.

Dismayed in the shade

Out on errands on a sunny day in Victoria, I find myself footsore and weary, so decide to catch the bus home.

I settle on a bench in the shadow of the arts supply store, juggling my purchases, bus schedule, and bus pass.

A lady strides up, clad in light-blue stone-washed capris. Her blond hair is clipped back into a small ponytail, and she's wearing sunglasses.

"Well, howdy-doody!" she greets me with cheerful briskness.

It's Victoria, so I smile up from my seat at her and respond, "How do you do?"

She pauses a micro-second.

"Oh, I see, you're just going to sit there."

Off she goes, leaving me slightly baffled.

Do I know her? I don't recognize her voice, and her sunglasses do nothing for my mild prosopagnosia. Frankly, she's a wee bit generic and could have been anybody I've met in Victoria during the past three decades -- or a complete stranger mistaking me for someone else. (This happens pretty often, so I guess I might be a bit generic too.)

When I describe the incident later to the Resident Fan Boy and Demeter, they recall all the times when an unfamiliar person has struck up a conversation with them, imagining them to be an acquaintance.

We fantasize comforting scenarios where my brisk mystery lady confronts a bewildered friend:

"Why were you so stand-offish the other day?"
"Excuse me?"
"I said hello, and you just sat there like a lump, smiling at me as if you didn't know me."
"Where was this?"
"At the bus stop at Island Blue Print."
"Are you crazy? I don't take the bus…"

Oh gawd, I hope that's what happened and she wasn't an old pal...

I've been "memed"! (7 weird things about me)

I'm a virgin blogger no longer! P., author of What Possessed Me (a blog that takes a minute or so to load, but is well worth the wait), has tagged me for a "meme". I'm a little vague on the rules for these things, but I'm going to answer the meme challenge "Seven Weird Things About Me", then tag other bloggers and pray they don't curse me so I'll have to stay in Hades forever:

1. I can cross one eye. If I really want to flip someone out, I cross one eye, then both, or the other way around.

2. This has been the subject of another post on prosopagnosia, but I don't remember people's faces on a pretty regular basis, yet I ace the tests meant to identify people with face blindness. I'm either a really good guesser in test situations, or am more socially inept (or lazy) than I thought. Possibly both.

3. I've haven't set foot in a McDonald's since --- well, never you mind how long, but it's been a fine stretch of years. I worked there for five hellish months when I was seventeen going on eighteen and vowed I would never return. Ottawa may be Hades, but McDonald's truly is the Den of Despair. I count this as weirdness-in-other-people's-eyes, because they don't believe I mean it until I refuse to go in with them. Wouldn't even take my girls there; the Resident Fan Boy had to do it. Elder daughter now owns a DVD of Super Size Me, and refuses to go as well.

4. I don't own or operate a cell phone, nor do I drive. This is another weirdness-in-others'-eyes item. I don't find my life untenable without either device; the only difficulty is the assumption by others that everyone has a car or mobile: "It's not far; it's only about 15 minutes. Take the Queensway..." "I don't have a car." "Oh."

5. I am incapable of getting stoned more than three times per year. Mind you, the last time I got stoned was when I was 24, so I haven't tested this in a while. I found, in my misspent youth, that I couldn't get stoned for several weeks after a nice session with grass or hash. (Just as well. Couldn't afford it anyway.) This may also be why I never became addicted to cigarettes, despite smoking regularly between the ages of 13 and 20.

6. I'm related by marriage to Len Cariou. Not weird per se, but you have to understand, that he's married to my fifth cousin. Yes, I'm a family historian, and when I try to explain my hobby to most people, their eyes glaze over, even if they're in my family... I think, for sheer dottiness, genealogists rank somewhere between train-spotters and bird-watchers.

7. When I was a little girl, I used to purposely scare myself silly by lying awake at night and imagining how real I was. I don't know how I did this; I can't do it anymore.

There. Now to alienate a couple of fellow-bloggers: I tag Marie, author of the witty and touching novel Gods Behaving Badly (go buy it, it's great!) and the highly engaging blog The Woman Who Talked Too Much, and Jonas the US Poet Laureate Presumptive (who also appears to be channeling Vladimir Nabokov [as in Pale Fire]), author of the new blog Poetry in Motion. I notice he hasn't written in it in over a week. I do hope his poetic duties haven't forced him to give it up...

Who on earth was that?

I'm trying to resist turning the heat up. It was a -27 (Celsius) wind chill last time I checked, but I have an LL Bean fleecy button-up. The only trouble is my right hand keeps freezing up when I work on the computer mouse for any length of time. There must be a heck of a cold spot on the right side of the house.

When I left grade school and entered community college to do my first year of university, I began to notice a strange phenomenon. People would approach me on a street corner and strike up a conversation (a very common occurrence in Victoria, which is a relatively small city), and I couldn't tell who they were. They evidently knew me, but I didn't recognize them. Concealing my embarrassment, I would insert friendly little inquiries into the conversation, in the desperate hope that these would yield clues: "So, how's ..... school...? Oh, really? How about work?" This only got worse as the years went by, and I would try to place these garrulous friendly strangers. Were they classmates? Students? Workmates? Someone from church? Which church? Mine or my husband's? Of course, then we moved to Ottawa and it was game over. My life was filled with superficial acquaintances. (Ottawans don't have relationships; they network.) I couldn't seem to recognize anybody.

The year after younger daughter was identified as having severe learning/developmental challenges, I haunted Yahoo forums for leads, and found one that seemed to apply to myself: prosopagnosia, also known as face-blindness. People with severe prosopagnosia can't even recognise family members, but a milder form might be my problem. Things began to fall in place. The fact I didn't notice this difficulty until I left grade school where I saw the same people every day. The fact that I had a thing for photography, and coped with social situations by being the self-appointed recorder of events. I took copious pictures of my ESL students and kept photos in their files. (If I have a photo of someone, I can usually remember who they are.) Even back in elementary school, I have a memory of standing with my bike at the top of the hill that stood between my school and my home, looking back into the valley that led to the Trans-Canada Highway. I saw a figure at the bottom of the hill and thought to myself: "There's Robbie Wilson." Then I stopped myself: "How do I know that?" I realized that I'd identified him by his walk, and it dawned on me that I recognized the boys at my school by their walks, and the girls by their clothes. (I also made the odd discovery that boys with dramatically different personalities often had similar walks. I have no idea of the significance of this, if any.)

Prosopagnosia. It explained everything. So, this past week The Globe and Mail had an article on it with a link to http://www.faceblind.org/, which features three quizzes. I think I took the quiz on famous faces when I first learned about face-blindness, and of course, did really well. No surprises there. Photo-graphs. Pic-tures. Snap-snap, click-click, say no more. (That's a Monty Python reference, for you innocents out there.) But the other two quizzes feature just strangers' faces, so I eagerly signed up, saying I believed I have "quite a bit" of difficulty with identifying faces. My percentile rank on identifying upright adult faces was 55 (I got 87% correct; the average is 85%). My percentile rank on identifying upright children's faces was 80. (93%; average is 83% - a particular shock as I cannot identify either older or younger daughter's schoolmates, particularly the boys.) I got a 45 percentile on inverted children's faces, but apparently everyone has difficulty with that. The final blow: I got 85% on the Cambridge Face Recognition Test.

So what is my problem? Am I just antisocial and rude? It's true that I found the tests rather stressful, and did a lot of guessing, but that's pretty well me in any social situation. Dammit, I'm still claiming prosopagnosia as my shield and salvation. Besides, it's a mighty impressive word. Gotta love those Greek roots...