Brain Chemistry

[mallorys_camera]

Over 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.

###

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?

Comments

[chezsci.livejournal.com]

Re: Tibetans. Yup - its definitely management budgetary fuckup. College food service is cyclical and fairly predictable, but you have to keep on top of things, just like anything else. Our former operations manager used to panic over labor costs about this time of year and we always had to institute winter lay-offs at, or after, the holidays. It sucked cutting the legs out from under folks at Christmas time. I now loathe the holidays, for this reason among others. After a while I wanted this guy dead and couldn't understand why our boss didn't pull the plug on him. Eventually he did get demoted, after nearly 10 years of struggling in the job. His replacement has more foresight and better labor management skills so we have only had to do very minimal adjustments that don't include laying people off. Strategic use of job sharing and such. It still hasn't improved my attitude about the holidays - its a chef thing.

Sounds like you might have been suited for Sufism in your younger years...

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Strategic use of job sharing and such

Yeah, that's what I thought, that they could decrease overall hours or something during the lean times, and let everyone know it's (probably) only temporary. This way, they're probably going to end up hiring everyone back when things pick up which, as you say, will happen in the spring. There's got to be additional administrative costs associated with that.

Sufism

Heh. Well, that's a more pleasant way to think about it than as a deep dysfunction.

[platofish.livejournal.com]

It seems low-level 'quirks' come hand-in-hand with being 'high-level-functioning'. Perhaps its the way Nature finds balance. I knew a really smart particle physicist in the UK who walked around with a knotted handkerchief in his hand. Anytime he thought no one was looking he jammed it between his teeth and bit down hard on it. But, as soon as he thought someone was watching he stopped and assumed and air of normality.

As for the poor Tibetans. I suspect they are not alone in having spent freely on Black Friday only to loose their jobs a week or two later.

[flaxendandelion.livejournal.com]

I'd be inclined to say it has more to do with your mother. I had a mother similar to that, and I tested very high on the Asperger's Syndrome test. Autism usually comes with a low IQ which you obviously don't have, so AS may be a possibility but I've long revisited that idea and think it has to do with upbringing more than anything else.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Do you like to read? Check out Oliver Sacks's An Anthropologist On Mars. It's beautifully written and I think you'd find it interesting.

Autism, in fact, is just as often correlated with superior abilities as it is with mental retardation. It's a deficit in empathy, not intelligence. Grandin, who's an extraordinarilly high functioning autistic, describes her struggles to make sense out of ordinary human emotions quite movingly.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

I suspect a lot of people, as you say, have these weird... quirks, somehow tied into motor functioning, that serve as organizational nexuses for thought. And we're all quite secretive about it. The Sacks book has really been an eye opener -- it's quite beautifully written, makes its complex subject matter accessible without dumbing it down.

[flaxendandelion.livejournal.com]

Will put it on the reading list :)