Brain Chemistry
Dec. 3rd, 2011 09:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraOver the past week or so, I’ve become very interested in brain chemistry – my own, other people’s. I’ve been reading Oliver Sacks’ An Anthropologist On Mars – lured, in part, by the fact that one of my operative metaphors for self is that I’m an anthropologist from Mars – and was very smitten by all the kindly doctor’s vignettes of neurological oddities, most particularly with his descriptions of Temple Grandin and autism. Clearly, I am not autistic. But there were some really strange things about me as a kid. For example: I used to rock for hours, and quite often succeeded in trancing out into an alternative reality that while not quite hallucinatory – I was fully aware that I was standing in a living room, furiously rocking back and forth – was almost hallucinatory, in that I would move through strange scenes and have long encounters with some very odd and never quite human beings. Cthulu, white courtesy telephone, please! I continued this habit well into my 20s.
Also I have some strange tensile needs. For example: I need to hold a stick in my hand at all times in order to think coherently. As a kid, these were actual branches but as an adult I’ve managed to subsume the habit until now it’s just a pen, which means it’s not particularly remarkable when other people watch me do it although they may be thinking to themselves, “Gee, she’s nervous.” There seems to be a surfeit of motor activity in me that expresses itself in odd ways.
Now, I always assumed these weird little behaviors were the legacy of being brought up by a neurotic mother who at regular intervals would decompensate into a dysfunctionality so profound that she would pee on herself and at age nine, I would be sitting there feeding her, telling her, “You have to open your mouth now. Okay, I’m putting cereal into your mouth. Okay, now you have to close your mouth and chew. Do you remember how to chew? It’s a kind of up and down movement with your teeth –“
But maybe it’s not a psychological deficit. Maybe my brain is wired in some way that makes me more than just another outlier. Who can tell?
And, of course, the light sensitivity has gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. Again, peculiar – I grew up in these northerly latitudes, in New York City as a matter of fact, so I should be habituated to it at a very deep level. Except I’m not. Bright light, bright light, bright light – it’s all in the lumens. Except it’s not. It doesn’t matter how bright the artificial light stimulus is, if it’s dark outside, I feel like the ceremonial virgin chained to Stonehenge’s highest henge-cliff, at worse I’m suicidal, at best I just want to sleep. But if it’s light outside, it doesn’t matter how cold it is outside; it’s immaterial what’s going on, how close to the edge my life is, I’m in a good mood. Go figure.
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My poor Tibetans. On Black Friday Baalorma went out and dropped a lot of dough. A thousand dollars for a new camera. A $5,000 down payment on a new car. She and her husband, the former Tibetan monk, got up at 3am to join the line outside Best Buy so they’d be there at 5am when it opened.
Tenzin wasn’t quite as profligate, but did drop almost seven hundred dollars all told on a new laptop and clothes for her four kids.
Since these days, I have to second-guess a ten-dollar expenditure, all this spending seemed very grand and very exciting to moi…
On Thursday, they were both laid off.
Bad management, I’m thinking. Clearly Cornell must have known for some time that they’d have to lay off some of their food service staff. Why couldn’t they have told that food service staff before the much-touted Festival of National Greed?
Also I have some strange tensile needs. For example: I need to hold a stick in my hand at all times in order to think coherently. As a kid, these were actual branches but as an adult I’ve managed to subsume the habit until now it’s just a pen, which means it’s not particularly remarkable when other people watch me do it although they may be thinking to themselves, “Gee, she’s nervous.” There seems to be a surfeit of motor activity in me that expresses itself in odd ways.
Now, I always assumed these weird little behaviors were the legacy of being brought up by a neurotic mother who at regular intervals would decompensate into a dysfunctionality so profound that she would pee on herself and at age nine, I would be sitting there feeding her, telling her, “You have to open your mouth now. Okay, I’m putting cereal into your mouth. Okay, now you have to close your mouth and chew. Do you remember how to chew? It’s a kind of up and down movement with your teeth –“
But maybe it’s not a psychological deficit. Maybe my brain is wired in some way that makes me more than just another outlier. Who can tell?
And, of course, the light sensitivity has gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. Again, peculiar – I grew up in these northerly latitudes, in New York City as a matter of fact, so I should be habituated to it at a very deep level. Except I’m not. Bright light, bright light, bright light – it’s all in the lumens. Except it’s not. It doesn’t matter how bright the artificial light stimulus is, if it’s dark outside, I feel like the ceremonial virgin chained to Stonehenge’s highest henge-cliff, at worse I’m suicidal, at best I just want to sleep. But if it’s light outside, it doesn’t matter how cold it is outside; it’s immaterial what’s going on, how close to the edge my life is, I’m in a good mood. Go figure.
My poor Tibetans. On Black Friday Baalorma went out and dropped a lot of dough. A thousand dollars for a new camera. A $5,000 down payment on a new car. She and her husband, the former Tibetan monk, got up at 3am to join the line outside Best Buy so they’d be there at 5am when it opened.
Tenzin wasn’t quite as profligate, but did drop almost seven hundred dollars all told on a new laptop and clothes for her four kids.
Since these days, I have to second-guess a ten-dollar expenditure, all this spending seemed very grand and very exciting to moi…
On Thursday, they were both laid off.
Bad management, I’m thinking. Clearly Cornell must have known for some time that they’d have to lay off some of their food service staff. Why couldn’t they have told that food service staff before the much-touted Festival of National Greed?
