March 19, 2011
Speaking of weird
The Iowan remembers numbers. Someone will say, “What was my address and my number on the Upper West Side in 1985?” He remembers. “Okay, what about Jill’s parents’ number when we were living in London in 1977?” Same result. The funny thing is the Iowan is not very good at math. I do better calculating the everyday stuff in my head.
But it gets weirder. As a grade schooler, Mr. Boudreaux had a password for something I was helping him with, an online computer game maybe, I can’t remember exactly. I asked him for the password. He reeled off a long list of numbers. “Are you reading those from somewhere?” I asked him. No. Okay, make up another one. He dictated something, which I wrote down, then had him repeat the sequence. He did it easily. “Are you seeing those numbers in your mind?” I asked. He said no, it was just something he could do. This aren’t special numbers, birthdays, etc. His laptop, for instance, has a password that is a long list of random numbers.
I can barely remember my own telephone number and address. I’m not sure I have a specialty. How about you?
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Hmmmnh. Jon says of me, “You know everything.” That is of course not so. I think what he’s referring to is the breadth of my knowledge. It certainly couldn’t be depth, as I’m down at the shallow end.
But I’m not sure I would say that a wide-ranging mind counts as a specialty. In fact, it is likely antithetical to the development of specialties.
Okay, here is something that may qualify. If I’ve visited a place once, I can get to it again, even if many years intervene. I’m very good at navigation, at “orienteering,” and I’m very good at giving accurate directions that are easy to understand and remember. People seem to sense this (they sense my power), as even in cities where I am a visitor, turistas and newcomers approach me to ask, “Can you tell me how to get to _____?”
One of my favorite such instances happened, I admit, in the city where I was living, Chicago. It was 9:30 or so at night, and I was “in the Loop” and heading on foot back to my condo in the South Loop. The streets were pretty quiet. A car pulled up slowly alongside me. In it were women of three, possibly four, generations. The woman in the front passenger seat leaned out the window and asked, “Excuse me, could you tell us how to get to Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios?”
I could. And I did. And I even explained about the tricky parts. And I have no doubt they found their way.
That’s great Shelia! Maybe you should hire out as a guide in HX (Chicago in wirese). I have the worst sense of direction in the world. Except in Venice, Italy, where I knew exactly where to go even though the names on the streets were not necessarily the real names. I just “knew” somehow.
The Iowan and I are twinsies! I can’t do math to save my life, when I had to do calculations for data entry or anything like that, I would just remember the shapes of the numbers and be able to put in long lines of info. I can remember my childhood ID numbers for everything, and if someone tells me a phone number or email address I can remember it.
I can tell you where a paragraph of information is in a book I have read based on the shape of it, but not the exact wording.
Well, I am certainly looking for odd little gigs to supplement contractual and consulting work I’ll be doing in Chicago come summer!
When I lived in the South Loop, it was still in the last throes of its shift from Skid Row (missions and soup kitchens, burlesque houses, tattoo parlors, all-night taco stands) to a neighborhood I could not buy my way back into now. I used to love rambling about at night, and I did toy with the idea of offering Sheila Ryan’s Nighttime-Is-the-Right-Time Tours of the South Loop. Once a month, for an added fee, there’d be a special tour. I’d guide people down to a stretch of that branch of the Chicago River that heads south down to where the stockyards used to be. I’d rent out air rifles so people could shoot rats.
But I moved before I could realize my dream, and now it is too late.
It’s interesting the skills that you might think might transfer from one realm to another — but do not necessarily, such as a good memory for numbers and a head for math.
Mathematicians, for instance, are not always very good chess players, and vice versa.
And from what I recall reading, Alan Turing was dismal at chess.
I can be with Cindy in a city we have never been in before, and if we are looking for a particular place she just says “It feels like it ought to be over there.” And there it is. I mean it’s uncanny–we never need a map.
My only specialty, such as it is, is that I can hear a person’s voice once and I have it–I’ll be able to recognize it years later. I’m not good with names though, so my identification of a voice might be something like “That’s that guy we bought the potatoes from at the farmer’s market when we first moved here. The specialty I really need is a voice in my head that says Daryl, you dumbass, you are telling the same stories again.
I wonder if Cindy could find me in Los Angeles.
I forget to do 75% of the things I mean to, but I intend to do four times as many things to make up for it. If you want something done later, I’m your man. My memory is similar. I couldn’t tell you my student ID right now, but ask me tomorrow and I’ll have remembered and forgotten it again.
I’m sure I told this before somewhere, maybe here. Danny and I got our first joint bank account in Tulsa, where we once lived for nine months. The banker who set up our account took all our information. Some several months later we went in to do something else at the bank, I don’t remember what. We were sitting with her, she was filling in the blanks on the computer screen. “Now, your social is xxx-xx-xxxx,” She said as she typed it in. I was like, “Yeah. Wow!” She looked at Danny, “And yours is xxx-xx-xxxx.” Danny was like, “Holy Crap! How do you know that?”
She said, “It’s just something I can do. I’ve always been able to remember things like this.”
Kind of made me nervous for a minute. But she didn’t seem the type to abuse the knowledge. Makes me wonder, if I showed up at the bank, if she’d still remember, after 20 years.
Wow, Rick, I wonder whether she is related to the Iowan! And I’ve wondered how this affinity can be applied in the real world. Mr. Boudreaux is quite a good poker player, Texas Holdem was his show-and-tell one year in middle school. And he admitted recently he won $80 off his friends during a basement session. Of course I don’t feel this is something I should encourage, career-wise.
[...] Daryl Scroggins: My only specialty, such as it is, is that I can hear a person’s voice once and I have it–I’ll be able to recognize it years later. I’m not good with names though, so my identification of a voice might be something like “That’s that guy we bought the potatoes from at the farmer’s market when we first moved here. The specialty I really need is a voice in my head that says Daryl, you dumbass, you are telling the same stories again. posted by Deron Bauman in from the comments, sound | * | comment [...]
I know what is and isn’t dessert, and how to name a hard drive.
Amanda Mae–yes, Cindy could find you in Los Angeles. We would get close and she would say, Daryl, walk over there and knock on that door. And I would say, I don’t want to just go– And she would say Daryl! And I would go knock and there you’d be.
I actually did that once — knocked on the door of a strange apartment in a strange city, and found the person I was looking for on the first try.
I can also memorize phone numbers by the tones the keys make when you press them. Likewise, I can tell you the number you just dialed by listening to you dial it.