« Suddenly, There was Light | OK, back to home | The Soundtrack to My Life »

Thursday, December 1, 2005

This has a Thesis. Good Luck Finding It.

On Tuesday morning I couldn’t get out of bed. Depression sapped my energy and the day ahead seemed so long and useless and draining. Even finding clothes to wear seemed too difficult. I called in sick to work and surrounded my body with pillows, resolving to stay in bed all day.

Twenty minutes later I called back to the office and told them I was miraculously healed and would be in shortly.

I remembered something important in those 20 minutes, something that has often helped me fend off moments of depression: I am not the center of the world. My problems and fears are not unique or even that major, and they certainly are not worth wallowing in. It’s okay to feel depressed but when it becomes selfish and self-centered, when all attention turns inward to dwell on the negative and normal activity ceases, then it’s a problem.

So I went to work and survived the day.

——

Lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit about faces. Every day we see hundreds or even thousands of people, all sharing pretty much the same facial features. But even with all of this visual overload, we can quickly and easily pick out someone we know. Something in our temporal lobe fires and our eyes light up with recognition.

There are some people, though, who suffer from a condition called prosopagnosia, or face-blindness. They simply cannot remember faces, making it impossible to recognize friends or family or even themselves. TV shows and movies are confusing and frustrating because they can’t follow the characters. Every face they see is new and unfamiliar.

And so, like with all conditions, they adapt. Rather than recognizing people by facial features, they recognize hair styles, or voices, or clothing or gaits. Life goes on.

——

Sometimes even people without prosopagnosia have trouble with identities. A friend reminded me yesterday of something he told me at least a year ago but I had forgotten:

One night, my friend was hanging out with a guy he was newly dating, a skinny ‘mo named Adam. Adam had set the scene and was playing the role perfectly: Candles were lit, the right music was playing, the strip tease was conducted like an expert. Things were getting hot and heavy, and a little bit verbal. I imagine it as a standard porn scene:

Oh baby. Oh yeah. You like that?

And then, just as my friend was really getting into it, he slipped:

Oh baby. Oh yeah. You like that, Aaron?

Yes, rather than sigh out the name of his partner, out came my name. It didn’t go over very well. In fact, it may or may not have marked the end of their last date.

For some reason, this story makes me laugh every time I think of it.

Posted by Aaron on December 1, 2005 3:25 PM