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When somebody says "diamond shaped" I always picture a Brilliant instead of the standard slender rhombus. "Star" is a toss up between the five-pointed cowboy star and a four-pointed, well, almost diamond. (And if I'm honest, this star that I picture is three- rather than two- dimensional.) As for triangles, they are never equilateral. Usually, they are isosceles and human-proportioned. Sometimes, they are scalene.
All of this makes me suspect I missed an important part of pre-school or kindergarden - the part where your symbols solidify, and you understand that a house has two windows, a door, and a chimney, and a bird looks like a black "m." I also place the breaks between colors in culturally odd places - I'll call something orange that is red to everyone else, or say something is purple instead of blue, or brown instead of yellow. The line between green and blue is a difficult one, and so I have a huge "turquoise" category. I also think "pink" means something different to me.
This is one of the reasons I use precise names for colors - "carmine" or "vermillion" instead of "red" - so that I can know that I mean the same thing as other people. With shapes, I don't have this shortcut, and I'll be halfway through a story or an explanation before I realize oh, that diamond. It's not that I'm wrong, or that other people are wrong, but I am perplexed by how it happened, this naming difference. The world is bewildering, and many things that are easy for other people are hard for me, and vice versa.
I feel fussy lately, and embarrassed about my thoughts, and silly and pompous when I try to explain them to other people. Please don't make fun of me for thinking this, although it is fussy and silly and pompous and embarrassing.
That said, I am doing very well and feel beautiful all of the time and loved and smart, if unsettlingly odd. (Unsettling to me probably more than to other people, who either don't understand the scope, or else don't realize the degree to which it is accidental.) I have discovered that PBS has a cable channel for kids (can they even do that?) and there is something called "The Good Night Show" which thinks it is for kids but is really for insomniacs and is the most wonderful gift - it makes me so happy and sleepy and I can stretch into the shape of a triangle or hold my arms in a circle and sing songs about my best friend Sagwa (who is a cat living in ancient China).
P.S. Your body makes thousands of new cells every minute. Isn't that amazing? I heard 130,000, but can't say whether the source is reliable. I feel affectionate toward naked people, and want to give them soup. I wish I could have a pet mitochondrion, one that was big enough that I could pat its head, or the end that I would designate as its head. Instead, I will have to pat my arm and hope that my trillions of tiny pet mitochondria understand what I'm getting at.
All of this makes me suspect I missed an important part of pre-school or kindergarden - the part where your symbols solidify, and you understand that a house has two windows, a door, and a chimney, and a bird looks like a black "m." I also place the breaks between colors in culturally odd places - I'll call something orange that is red to everyone else, or say something is purple instead of blue, or brown instead of yellow. The line between green and blue is a difficult one, and so I have a huge "turquoise" category. I also think "pink" means something different to me.
This is one of the reasons I use precise names for colors - "carmine" or "vermillion" instead of "red" - so that I can know that I mean the same thing as other people. With shapes, I don't have this shortcut, and I'll be halfway through a story or an explanation before I realize oh, that diamond. It's not that I'm wrong, or that other people are wrong, but I am perplexed by how it happened, this naming difference. The world is bewildering, and many things that are easy for other people are hard for me, and vice versa.
I feel fussy lately, and embarrassed about my thoughts, and silly and pompous when I try to explain them to other people. Please don't make fun of me for thinking this, although it is fussy and silly and pompous and embarrassing.
That said, I am doing very well and feel beautiful all of the time and loved and smart, if unsettlingly odd. (Unsettling to me probably more than to other people, who either don't understand the scope, or else don't realize the degree to which it is accidental.) I have discovered that PBS has a cable channel for kids (can they even do that?) and there is something called "The Good Night Show" which thinks it is for kids but is really for insomniacs and is the most wonderful gift - it makes me so happy and sleepy and I can stretch into the shape of a triangle or hold my arms in a circle and sing songs about my best friend Sagwa (who is a cat living in ancient China).
P.S. Your body makes thousands of new cells every minute. Isn't that amazing? I heard 130,000, but can't say whether the source is reliable. I feel affectionate toward naked people, and want to give them soup. I wish I could have a pet mitochondrion, one that was big enough that I could pat its head, or the end that I would designate as its head. Instead, I will have to pat my arm and hope that my trillions of tiny pet mitochondria understand what I'm getting at.
