Posted by medlib on January 24, 2002, at 14:31:04
Hi Judy--
I very much enjoyed your reply on PB! Lest this post lead you to imagine that I've suddenly reacquired a short-term memory, I printed your message before making the journey.
I haven't piloted a plane in a long time (not since the skies got crowded and I got poor), but last night I seem to have gone "up" without benefit of license *or* plane. Tonight I seem to be "down", but not yet out; that is, I'm "grounded", but still punning. It may take a couple of days before I subside into basic morosity again. How typically atypical that my version of hypomania (and my notion of "fun") is a cloud of inchoate verbosity.
Am I a "word nut"? Oh, yeah. With me, it's just a matter of how nutty now. I blame it on my mother, who did the NY Times crossword every morning and played demon Scrabble. I'm not a dictionary devotee, tho, just a skilled context reader. That's her fault, too. Whenever I asked her what a word meant, she'd say, "Let me look it up for you" and beetle off to her 2 volume set, which was too heavy for me to lift off the shelf had I wanted to--which I didn't. She was utterly incapable of explaining *anything*. By the time she produced the official definition, I was several pages away from the word in question and felt interrupted by her input. I learned quickly not to ask--just to approximate or infer and move on. 3 years of Latin in school helped a whole bunch, too. (I never really understood why Latin "died." It isn't any more awkward-sounding than German or Russian. I finally surmised that it must have proved too limited to grow--too much symmetry and order [which, of course, is why I liked it]). I will admit to having a couple of dictionaries on my browser hot links list (to check my understanding of words before I confuse others).
BTW, why couldn't your son major in words? OED is still going strong, or he could write a newspaper column answering reader questions on the derivations of phrases or words. Our local newspaper had one; on second thought, I'm not sure newspapers aren't terminal. Or, he could take a giant leap into linguistics; that's been a hot topic since Lucy the Chimp learned to sign. And in academia, it's possible to rediscover the obvious almost infinitely if your vocabulary is large enough. Speaking of which..., having been careful not to burden my kids with a dictionary, I was amazed when my son scored in the 95th percentile on vocabulary, the only non-aptitude on an aptitude test he took. His speech, which didn't appear until he was 3, is not exactly polysyllabic. When I expressed my surprise, he said patiently, "Mother, normal people don't sound like a dictionary." My daughter, on the other hand, has no interest in any term which isn't "practical", which includes most of my vocabulary. She is, when she wishes, an error-free proofreader; and, as such, she has utterly given up on my "creative" punctuation. Now that they're no longer impaired by my pecularities, my kids have become remarkably tolerant of them. I have yet to develop any tolerance for their tolerance.
My official diagnosis is "Double Depression" (Dysthmia interrupted regularly irregularly by Major Depression). I find it an irrelevant designation, since I have no health insurance and the label seems to have no unique clinical implications. My pdoc (who became one "in order to have a life") rarely hassles me, and just as rarely helps me. I'll probably ask him to "prescribe" Adrafinil next time I see him, which he can't legally do, since it's not FDA approved. My Aspergers is self-diagnosed, as it is for most adults; it didn't exist as a clinical entity when we were young, and the only trait we *all* share (that I can discover) is the inability to perceive and/or decode nonverbal communications. I find that my perceptual deficit extends to written communication, as well. So often I aim for tongue-in-cheek, only to produce foot-in-mouth. Usually, after I've penned a number of such missives, I'll stop writing and just read (at least until my common sense takes another vacation).It's been obvious to me since kindergarden that I came from "some place else"--I just didn't know it had a name until I found PB. When I found Liane Wiley's book, I saw that she had summed up my life as well as hers in her title, "Pretending to be normal". Our details differ (she gets lost easily, I have an excellent sense of direction, which I employ rarely since I seldom leave the house), but her descriptions of the tensions involved in having to dissemble to socialize, having to hide or moderate enthusiasms and, sometimes, intelligence, having to put a lid on logic so as not to trigger the weirdness alarms. I've often wished that I had some creativity; it seems to me that society cuts creatives sizable slack, accepting weirdness as the price of artistic endeavor. If I had to be so different, it would have been nice to be productively, acceptably different!
Typically, I differ from the different, as well. Altho my brother is bipolar, I am the original Immovable Object--I've never been hyper--or happy (except I had one identifiably happy experience at age 9, or so). "Dispassionate" is a fairly accurate descriptor for me. Even my enthusiasms lack impetus; I rarely inflict them on anyone except Babblers (who can easily click them away when they (and I) bore or annoy. My forays into the real world are infrequent, and, whenever I might be tempted to verbalize impulsively, memory of my brother's nonstop mouth and the reactions of others to it effectively squelches my potentially similar mistakes.
I'm glad to hear that you've found a med combo that seems to work for you. (Now crossing my fingers.) I describe my mind in digital analogies, too. Right now, my mental browser lacks a working back button. since loading a new page seems to trigger a "clear cache" command. I'm still looking for a pharmacological "work around" for this problem.
Perhaps, Adrafinil or T3 will help; Ritalin *is* a rollercoaster, but it's the only stimulant I've found so far that actually stimulates.On the off-chance that you have an infinite capacity for/patience with drivel and are still reading, I wish you well, and will probably live to bore another day.---medlib
poster:medlib
thread:17156
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20020112/msgs/17156.html