Screw the rules, I have green hair!

My affluence makes a mockery of the regulations.

Oh no, a goth!

Braaaaains. (I dropped out of Zombie School for this?)

“Big brother! Is it time for my cameo, yet?”

“I’d like to run my fingers through his hair. And I’m just a voice!”

– - -

“You guys hadda riot? On accounta me?”
“Yeah.”
[Later]
“They threw a riot ’causea me!”
“Really?”

———–

“I can’t keep track of her when she’s not incorporeally possessing a ship!”

———–

—-

“Psychic? I dunno, it sounds like somethin’ outta science fiction.”
“You live on a space ship, sweetie.”

*Shakes head over the strange Mal/Inara/Book interaction*

I like Kaylee, though, and ohmygod Jayne what the hell did you just SAY? *Stares*

See, I do a LOT of housesitting. For whatever reason, the people I housesit for either don’t read at all (saddest. houses. ever.) or the things they read are all not my cuppa (romance novels, diet books, The Miracle Cure Of The Century!).

It’s completely impossible for me to take my entire library of books with me when I leave my house for theirs. The Kindle seems like a great compromise, to me — I can carry not only ALL of my favorite books in one object, but I can grab new ones without having to worry about getting to the bookstore or waiting for shipping.

Yes, some people buy them because they’re status symbols, but there are those of us out here that would like one because while bibliophilia is fun and all, books take up room and are heavy and a suitcase full of books for a three-day job is just a little silly.

ANYHOW. So after I read that, I skipped over to the Dyslexic Jock/Computer Geek story. As I suspected, the ‘dyslexic’ part was a throw-away paragraph that really had nothing to do with the rest of the story. Granted, the idea was to write stories about opposites coming together (…yeah, okay, unintentional but I’m gonna leave it) and so characterization was sort of secondary to ‘OMG Your hot and I’m not let’s fall in love/bed!’ but it made me want to cry.

After that, it made me want to write Marc Is Dyslexic stuff, because there’s so much more to being dyslexic than having, and I fucking quote, “the reading ability of a twelve-year-old”. Dude, when I was twelve, I was reading stuff that my peers were NOT. (I can’t remember anything off the top of my head to save my life, of course, so you’ll have to trust me.) When I was in the fourth grade, someone somewhere decided that I needed to be taking English classes with the sixth graders. During the unit on analogies, the teacher gave the class this example: ‘Pullet’ is to ‘hen’ as ‘blank’ is to ’swan’?

The sixth graders were looking at each other, completely lost. I raised my hand, was called on, and said, “Cygnet.” When the other kids looked at me, I asked them, “Haven’t you ever read ‘Trumpet of the Swan’?” And that is the ONLY thing I remember from that class, besides the fact that I learned what a ‘pullet’ was.

I do have to say that the author got one thing right, and that was the way the Dyslexic Jock starts badmouthing himself to the Computer Geek. One of the less-fun parts of being dyslexic is the fact that a lot of times, we just don’t believe that we can, or that we’re good enough, or that we’re actually good for something.

For some of us, it’s the result of people who should know better telling us that we’re stupid (most dyslexics are incredibly bright), or lazy (when it’s not that we don’t want to do our algebra homework, it’s that we can’t grasp the fucking concept for more than about an hour), or even mentally disabled (no, that’s not it at all).

For some of us, it’s that we get so used to trying and not succeeding that it becomes the default mode of thought — ‘oh, well, I may as well NOT try because I know what’s happened before…’ — and then we end up being unable to deal with our success. Despite the fact that I wasn’t a complete academic loss (when I had teachers that taught to visual learners, I was all over the science and math; when I didn’t, I was lost. Learning subtraction was a traumatic affair which I will tell you about later.), I still struggle with the idea of trying something because I might actually be good at it/it might work out. Which, I know, makes NO FUCKING SENSE whatsoever. Who the hell’s afraid of succeeding? Dyslexics are. We get things backwards, you know. Combine that with a fear of failure and you get people who spend their whole lives treading water because it’s less scary than trying and failing or trying and succeeding.

So, you know, when DJ started ragging on himself I was pleased to see that there was SOMETHING accurate/actually related to dyslexia in the story besides the little blob of exposition telling us about it. And, okay, so it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared it would be, either, with the Jock being reduced to some kind of caveman-like intellect because of his “disability”. The Americans With Disabilities Act does NOT cover being dyslexic, therefore it is NOT a disability. It’s a pain in the ass, it’s a hell of a lot of fun, it’s something you’re born with like your hair color or the shape of your nose, it can be a liability, but it’s not a dis-ability.

Now, having an actual learning disability is different than being dyslexic. I had always thought they were interchangable, but they’re not — and after having worked with someone who, despite having asked me the same question the day before and gotten the same answer, could not seem to learn to make a hypertext link, I can tell you this unequivocally. Being dyslexic means that some concepts take longer to learn than others (O Hai, subtraction!) while absorbing others like a sponge (O Hai, reading comprehension!).

When I took the last standardized test of my academic career, I finished the English section in twelve minutes. If I had been able to start on the mathematics portion as soon as I was done with the English part, I’d probably have finished the math booklet. It wasn’t that the math was impossible, it was just that I had to work each problem out, usually by drawing and writing on pieces of scratch paper, and that takes time. I’m not stupid, usually, and I’m not ’slow’ in the sense that most people use it when talking about mental acuity, it’s just that high-school math is not that easy for people who need pictures.

The basic stuff you learn in elementary school, like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, along with fractions and decimals, are all pretty visual-learner friendly. If I have an apple and cut it in half, then give one half to my buddy Fred, I have one half of 1. Easy to draw a picture of, and easy to do hands-on demos for the kinesthetic learners.

When you get to 1/2 X times Y = 126, though, suddenly it’s a lot harder to draw pictures. Oh, sure, I can understand what’s going on, and could even figure it out if given enough time and a piece of paper and a pencil, but it’s not something that’s easy like one half of an apple. And then there are things that are even worse, like trying to remember how to count in base 3, or adding negative numbers (do they make a positive, or is that only in English? Argh!).

When I was in the first or second grade and trying, desperately trying to learn subtraction, I discovered that school wasn’t actually all that fun after all. Until then, I thought school was pretty awesome — reading, and recess, and art, who wouldn’t love that? I understood addition. That wasn’t a problem at all, nor was the idea that if you started with five apples and gave two to someone, then you only had three. No, my problem was with borrowing.

The teacher probably explained it to us the same way my dad tried to explain it to me. My mother, who had missed the whole subtraction thing by being really sick and missing a lot of school, tried to teach me her method of looking at the bottom number and working out what needed to be added to get the top number*. At the time, I felt like I had three different people telling me three different ways of doing the same thing, and none of them made the slightest bit of sense to me. There was more than one homework session that ended in tears and shouting, because I just could not understand. Somehow, though, I managed to finally get the stupid concept and I went on to other, more annoying, pursuits. My mother reminds me, every once in a while, that she didn’t learn to subtract-with-borrowing until I did.

So, you know, that’s what it’s like, being dyslexic. Ninety percent of the time, I like it — it’s a hell of a lot more fun to wait for things when you’re capable of entertaining yourself with almost anything to hand — but there are things that aren’t that great. I wouldn’t trade being dyslexic for anything, not even a ridiculous amount of cash and a steady stream of Latin pool boys**.

* This is a coping mechanism she worked out on her own, I think; most dyslexic people, especially those who have no idea they’re dyslexic or haven’t been lucky to get teachers who can teach to more than one kind of learner, come up with all kinds of ways to cope with the world.

** I worked at a high school for dyslexic kids; one of the girls suggested bribing me with a Latin pool boy. I cannot remember the context of the conversation outside of that, alas, but I remember that I was amused enough that I wrote the quote down and kept it in my brain’s voluminous back pockets ever since.

I would buy this shirt for not only myself, but my mother AND my grandmother, except for one little problem: the transposition’s all wrong — most of the time (like 99%), the letters that get transposed have at least passing resemblance to one another. In the word ‘dyslexic’, for example, the ‘d’ and the ‘l’ are more likely to be confused because they both have ascending parts, resulting in the far more natural-looking (and easier to pronounce) ‘lysdexic’. Lots and lots of dyslexics have problems with the letters ‘p’, ‘b’, ‘d’ and ‘q’, because it’s merely a matter of orientation. If you’re dyslexic enough, or have an actual learning disability, it may take you YEARS to learn which one faces which way. (I have a tendency, STILL, after 25+ years of writing longhand, to write a ‘g’ where I need a ‘q’. THANKS BRAIN.)

The word ‘dixlesyc’ might be something that someone says, since randomly mispronouncing words you’ve been saying for years is one of those things that dyslexics do — the other day I was trying to say the word ‘yogurt’ and instead I said ‘yogle’ — but it’s not something that they’d necessarily write or read.

Yeah, I don’t mind being dyslexic — I make jokes about it; I really believe that I couldn’t get along with anyone who isn’t; I have a tendency to declare people dyslexic* despite A) never having met them in person and B) not being certified to proctor the Slingerland Screening test — but I mind when something that could be (and, hell, should be!) entertaining for dyslexics and non-dyslexics alike Gets It Wrong. Speaking of which, I have another little dyslexia-related rant which I’ll write and post after this. Aren’t you excited?

* Just as an example, I’m pretty sure that Robbie Hunter, cyclist from Team Barlo World, is dyslexic based on the way he makes Twitter posts. Mikey Way and Pete Wentz are also probably pretty dyslexic, too, based on the same evidence. (Plus, most dyslexics are incredibly creative and often find creative outlets — whether music, painting, or whatever — to be easier to Get than things like math or grammar or whatever.)

As a personal example, I have no problem with abstract nouns, but abstract concepts in math? Blaaaah. I took a B-flat basic beginning algebra class, and when I was in class, the instructor would explain the math, but by the time I got home it had all leaked out of my ear and I had no idea if I was doing the problems correctly. I can solve for X, as long as it’s not too complicated, because it’s just deductive/inductive reasoning; anything more and I’ll have to ask someone else.

As for music, I have a HORRIBLE time remembering the names of the notes and their positions. Most of the time I have to find an A, first, and then I can work it out from there — it’s a pain in the ass, because it means I can’t really sight-read and that’s no fun. I have a hard time playing the piano, translating the notes into their keyboard counterparts, but for some reason playing my clarinet and recorders isn’t nearly as difficult. I don’t really care why, but it is kind of odd. They’re ALL THE SAME NOTES! What difference does an instrument make?)