I got totally lost today on the way to the hair salon. The only people who read this blog are people who know me well enough to know that this is NOT NEWS! I get lost all the time. This time was particularly pitiful, because I left the house a full hour ahead of time, printed out two (no fewer!) maps, and had consulted them multiple times the day before, the morning of, and about every 5 minutes during the trip. A lot hinged on this outing, because I needed a haircut badly, I have been looking particularly wooly for at least a month, I was feeling a bit down because of some negative feedback on my schoolwork, and my previous haircut with a new and incompetent stylist was a complete failure. (Those of you who do not allow your hair to rule your psychological and emotional stability may think that last sentence was irrational and unnecessarily wordy, but the rest of us know that it summed up all of my problems quite succinctly and with a tight and fluid line of logical reasoning.) I HAD to get that haircut in order for the month of December to turn out right. However, I was 30 minutes late to the appointment, had to cancel and reschedule, and was forced to waste a couple of hours until the next moment the stylist had available. The cascade of disappointment included getting a blister from walking two extra miles, failing to meet a deadline for work that day, wasting an additional 20 bucks on lunch in a shee-shee shopping district near the salon, discovering that there were items of clothing that I could never afford (such as $23 pairs of badass socks), and sobbing hysterically on a stump while passersby and people in parked cars looked away politely.
Was it worth it? Yes, I love my haircut.
Now that I no longer live in Austin, I am discovering how bizarre of a handicap this is--my incredibly bad sense of direction. I really can read a map. But, for some reason, when I look at a map with the intention of going from one point on the map to another, I lose the ability to make connections between the symbolic representation of space and real-time geometry. Also, to make matters worse, I can’t tell my right from my left, I have to use a mnemonic device to remember which direction is east or west, and I have a poor memory for business names. For example, I can remember that there is a fast food restaurant that sells burgers on a corner near my apartment, but I can’t remember whether it is McDonalds or Burger King. Also, my spatial memory is shoddy.
The only fun part of living in a new city for me, is making friends who don’t know that I am completely unreliable when it comes to getting from place to place. They start rattling off directions and saying, “Great, we’ll meet at this place at such and such time, right?” completely confident that I am a normal person who will have little trouble following their directions. Little do they know that I am a complete imbecile. I wonder how long I can keep up this charade.
[Image from: www.biblehelp.org/whatsay.htm]
No comments:
Post a Comment