Synesthesia, misphonia, repetitive motion, ASMR - all threads in the skein of my family, and each one fascinating. For the record, 7 and L (lower case as well) are yellow and sometimes paler. Never bright. 4 is more a buff. And at least one person in my family has misphonia badly and copes with it, and another one has it intermittently and just doesn't. (None of us into ASMR that I know of: we are a deaf lot!)
Adventures in Teh Intarwebs, People Have Time On Their Hands edition: someone took the trouble for this. *SMH* Honestly, it's just bewildering.
Happy birthday to Nature, turning 150 this week! A few great links from the past couple of daily emails from them - one, on an astonishingly promising therapy for cystic fibrosis, a disease very closely related to the pulmonary fibrosis which had a hand in the deaths of four people I have loved very much. Another, pointing to the immune damage measles can cause, exposing victims to risk from diseases to which they were formerly immune. Thanks again, anti-vaxxers.
When I was a kid, it may have been anywhere from when I was eight to twelve or so, my aunts and maybe even my grandma were visiting. Mom had a bushel, perhaps even more, of tomatoes to can, and she was manning the pot on the stove. My memory is that I was at the back side of the table next to my aunt V, and mom gave me the bright chrome knife. A small knife, it's a heavy one, gleaming, and that day it was freshly sharp, and my job was to slit and skin the cooked tomato bodies, crushing them with my hand and pulling off the skin, and take out any part of the flesh not good for preserving. The tomatoes were terribly hot, and the acid would burn if you had a cut on your finger. But my only memory is the cacophany, the steam, the sitting around a brown formica table with my family, mom running the show.
Why tell the story above? Because this makes so much sense to me. (Though, to be fair: I have a *peninsula* in my kitchen, and it is spiff.)
As we come to the season of holidays, treats, great meals and small ... what are your kitchen table memories?
Edited to fret: I fear there is a new addiction in the offing. Science Daily has an article about dingoes, AND an article about Ötzi. Hooray for twin obsessions!
2 comments:
I have synesthesia (as does my older brother), though for me "L" is white, and the numerals generally don't have colors. I can also see the "shapes" of sounds. I've never considered it a problem except when I divulge it to people who have never heard of it and swiftly judge me to be "weird." But then, they have the problem of living in such a bland world.
The long-linear letters are yellow or white for me, it's the shape that informs the color. I can go with L being white! And I think 4 having a pale color just inherits that; I can't really think of other numeric color associations, at least not firm ones. 8 could be brown, because it is like a capital B, but it doesn't have to be.
Sounds' "shapes" inevitably makes me think of fractals, which have the glorious effect of indulging (at least my) synesthesia to the point of short-circuiting any possible obsessing on a single sense-relationship. Imagining a fractal in motion, like a kaleidescope, is a little like those old black-light posters from the 70s/80s; easy to contemplate for a while, and takes you so far down a rabbit hole mentally that you end up back out of it.
Although now I am like dying to go shopping for a black light and a poster ... :P
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