nnt

-Email quote: "John Kimble (no subject)"-

Apparently the water I had yesterday at lunch wasn't too much of a problem. I dreamt that I was a two-trunked mammoth (say what?) fleeing from predators to the south, which I think actually corresponded to the downstairs floor of my house. Supposedly I was acting out the explanation of a discovery ("years later") of a mammoth skeleton on a beach much farther south than seemed possible. There was a lot of forest all around. Later in my dream, I was back to human again, but I had a rat as a pet (this is unusual since I've actually never once had a pet in my life) whom I was talking to about all the gadgets I'd give him. Then I decided maybe I shouldn't promise him so much since he'd only live to be a year old anyway, and many of the electronics required some months to save up the money for. Funny the odd bursts of rationality that pop into dreams.

I hold pencils like everyone tells you not to. Remember those days, back in primary school, where the teacher would demonstrate how to properly hold a pencil so as to prevent your hand from getting (what one of my old professors would call) Carpet Tunnel Syndrome? Yeah. Seems no teacher could convince me to shift my death grip off the very very end of the pencil, my fingers embracing the exposed wood bit for dear life. Of course, since I do this, my hand definitely hurt after even a short time of frenzied writing -- necessarily frenzied because for some odd reason I wrote slower than any of my peers. But even now, I get this vaguely terrifying feeling of lack of control when I try to manually move my fingers up to the intended spot.

I don't just do this with pencils, though. Connected desks, for instance, were the bane of my existence, since invariably the seat was attached farther out than I was comfortable sitting; I would always skooch up to the tippy front edge of the seat as I hunkered over my work. Books get a similar treatment -- held desperately up to my face at a distance where most people would see only a hopeless blur of too-close text. Indeed, when I played the piano, my music teacher had to keep scooting out the bench so I wasn't nearly on top of the keys.

I am also extremely nearsighted (my eyes are about 20/600, which means that something that can be read by a normal person at 600 feet only becomes legible to me at 20 feet. I am very close to being legally blind). I sometimes wonder whether all these habits grew as survival tactics to enable me to see increasingly distant objects, or whether my eyes developed a focal distance consistent with them. What I mean is, perhaps my perfectionist, exacting nature made my close-up habits develop, then maybe my eyes adjusted (afterward) to function better at that distance. Because I have no doubt that I have far better "close-up" vision than the average person, in fact I sometimes look over the edge of my glasses to read close up things clearly.

Reality check. One advantage of the pencil-deathgrip-of-doom is that I was able to continue using even the stubbiest of pencils.