That’s precisely what I’m trying to avoid with that particular area of anti-curiosity! Do you know how much time I’d spend on something like that if I started?
Elizabeth
Karma: 326
Too much anti-curiosity can easily lead to too much comfort, which is why I suggest periodic uncomfortable examination of areas of anti-curiosity.
Yes, if I have emailed someone and typed their name, I will remember it. My problem is that generally I have no reason or means to write the names I’m having trouble remembering.
I’m pretty sure you’d put me in your ‘quick to react’ category. I’m the person who remains calm in stressful situations and figures out what to do. I don’t think it’s a matter of shutting off my internal monologue (my internal monologue never shuts off) but of redirecting it. I tend to be fairly good at thinking about what I want to be thinking about. Useful in a crisis, really bad when I’m procrastinating.
I also tend to be really good at connecting and remembering information, and at taking tests, though, so I’m not sure that the skills are in opposition. I suspect that thinking on your feet and being able to retain and synthesize information are separate skills, but much more effective when put together.
I disagree about people being born “good public speakers.” I have no stress symptoms when I speak in front of groups of people. I find it quite comfortable. I have experienced an occasional butterfly if I’m going to be on a stage with lights and everything, but that’s more anticipation than anything else. I do get a bit of stage fright singing in front of other people, but that’s more a matter of extensive early criticism of my singing than difficulty making a fool of myself in front of a group.
Principles for growing long hair:
It takes a long time. I’ve been growing mine for fourteen years, and it was at least seven before it was long enough to be at all remarkable. Growth rates vary, and mine isn’t all that fast (4-5 inches a year), but it may be a long time. Don’t get fed up and chop it all off.
Stop doing damaging things. No more blow-drying or coloring or straightening or curling. Minimize the amount of product you put in. Never tease your hair.
Get trims. A half inch trim every three months or so will take off the split ends and make your hair healthier.
Conditioner is your friend. Use it liberally. As your hair gets longer, less of it will have any exposure to scalp oils. Be sure to condition all of your hair, not just the ends. I always brush my hair with the conditioner in it before I rinse. This makes sure the conditioner is evenly distributed and there are no tangles.
Braid your hair before sleep to prevent tangles, and brush gently. Work knots out patiently, don’t just tear through them.
Don’t wash your hair every day. Every other day is plenty for hygiene purposes, and more often is hard on your hair.
Once your hair is too long to brush in a single stroke, pull it back in a bunch like a ponytail, and then pull it over your shoulder. Brush from the bottom up. *Bear in mind that not all people can grow their hair really long. Every hair follicle has a cycle, which is why your eyebrows don’t grow down to your chin. The length a hair from a particular follicle can reach is the duration of the cycle times the rate of growth. These factors vary from person to person, and can also vary within a person’s lifetime. If your hair gets to a certain length and the ends get really straggly even though you’re taking good care of it, it may have reached its limit.
These principles should work for varied hair types, and should allow you to get your hair long. Hopefully, by the time it’s really long, you’ll be used to it and won’t do anything stupid, like the time I did a backbend, adjusted my feet, and then tried to stand up without realizing I was standing on my hair.
It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I first consciously noticed that I was incapable of using other people’s names to their faces. I could do it with immediate family, and I could do it in third person “Howard was telling me...” I have since made strenuous efforts to get better at it, but it is still really psychologically difficult. That’s also when I realized that it was almost impossible for me to leave a message on an answering machine. I’m working on that one too, but doing so is a serious effort. One of my roommates my freshman year of college had the same issues, but neither of us had a clue why.
Having people spell their names does sometimes help, but also tends to be a bit awkward. I occasionally wish everyone would just get their names tattooed on their foreheads!
They just gave it to me after I’d been there once or twice, but I suspect that if you pointed out that you just want a straight line and asked nicely, they might give it to you. If that is what you want, and have a friend or relative you trust to cut a straight line, it is also one of the few hairstyles that can be trusted to a nonprofessional. Just make sure you get a pair of good sewing scissors first.
I am terrible at remembering names. This is bad in itself, but exacerbated by a few factors:
I regularly have lengthy conversations with random strangers, and will be able to easily summarize the conversation afterwords, but will have no recollection of their name.
I am fairly noticeable and memorable, so even people whose names I have no reason to know will know mine.
I am not particularly good with faces either.
This isn’t a memory problem, I can quote back conversations or remember long strings of numbers. I often cope by confessing to my weakness in a self-deprecating manner, or by simply not using names in direct address (it’s generally not necessary in English), but these don’t actually help me learn names. If I remembered to ask their name early on, I sometimes pause mid-conversation to ask “Are you still x?” but that is somewhat awkward and I’m wrong half the time anyway. The only time I can reliably remember is if they share the name of an immediate family member.This is bad enough that I’ll sometimes be five or six classes into the semester and have to check the syllabus to figure out the professor’s name, or will have been in multiple classes with someone and shared several conversations and still not know their name.
It depends on where you live and what sort of cut you want. My haircuts are ridiculously cheap, because I have long, straight hair and I just want a straight line across the bottom, so they generally charge me the child’s price ($10). Fair warning, though, I may get charged less out of sheer novelty, because my hair comes to my knees, or because I always wash my hair at home before going, rather than having them wash it for me there, because my hair is simply too long to be washed in a sink.
I have lots of hair advice, but it is largely limited to very long hair, and thus minimally useful, and not worth using space on. If anyone wants advice on having or growing long hair, I’ll be happy to respond.
I don’t get instant recall for left and right, but when I was learning to drive, the teacher would say “turn left ahead” and I would automatically turn on the correct blinker, and then have to pause to figure out which way to turn.
I don’t know if anyone can help me with this, but how do I tell the difference between flirting and friendliness? I grew up in pretty much total social isolation from peers, so neither really ever happened, and when they happen now I can’t tell which is which. Also, how do you go from talking to someone at the beginning/end of class (or other activity) to actually being the kind of friends who see each other elsewhere and do activities together?
Edit: Thank you, this is good advice. Does anyone have any advice on how to tell with women? I’m bi, and more interested in women, and they are much harder to read than men on the subject, because women’s behavior with female friends is often fairly flirty to begin with.
Thanks for the link. I did not know I was folding fitted sheets wrong (generally I take my sheets off the bed, wash them, and put them back on) but Martha Stewart’s instructions seem clear and logical.
If you know the alphabet song, the melody naturally (at least to me) separates the alphabet into a few groups: ABCDEFG HIJKLMNOP QRS TUV WX YZ. This may be easier than memorizing divisions.
If you don’t want to go to a speech therapist, a friend with some linguistics training or a voice (singing) teacher may be able to listen and tell you where to put your tongue, etc.
I, too, have a related problem. I have great difficulty controlling my volume. That is largely hereditary (or nurtured by my family environment), but the real problem is that I can’t hear when I’m too loud. There are certain triggers (being excited, interrupted, or in the presence of my mother) but they are not really triggers I can avoid, and I can’t see a way to fix it. The obvious solution is to have someone tell me when I’m too loud, but being interrupted for that purpose tends to make me involuntarily louder.
It’s both inborn and learned. (Like a musical ear: you get what you get, but you can make it better if you work at it). A bird’s eye view is the way to do it, there was an interesting bit on Radiolab recently about languages that rely on dead reckoning, and people keep track of it with a bird’s eye map in their heads. If you can figure it out with pencil and paper, do that often. Eventually you will be able to do it without the pencil and paper. If you aren’t generally good at mental representations of spatial or visual things, it will take longer.
That wasn’t really the nature of the shock. It wasn’t that they got their news from conservative sources, or that their beliefs were different from mine. I have no trouble with the concept of people who believe fundamentally different things are desirable. Just because I believe that preserving the environment is desirable, for example, doesn’t mean others will. My shock was that they believed in fundamentally different facts. I had difficulty with the difference in belief about what is true, not the difference in what to do about it.
I think you’re right, but suspect I will have more difficulty with the first than with the second. I am honestly curious about almost everything, which is a decent stand-in for spinning lack of knowledge as a personal deficit, but I am very bad at not speaking. I work at it, but I remain someone whose default setting is to babble at random people on the street. I’m better at “tactfully noncommittal” than I used to be, but I’m still pretty bad at it.
I find myself in the opposite position, because math always came very easily to me, and yet I’ve had a lot of success tutoring it. I think, though, that that largely comes out of my interest in why it worked rather than how, and my ability to make connections that weren’t explained to me.