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la-tarasque:
bomberqueen17:
danceswchopstck replied to your post “kayleigh-janes replied to your post “kayleigh-janes replied to your…”
I want to remember folding the tape!!!
i have so many good-at-spatial-relationships, hopeless-at-numbers hacks. i’d write a whole book about it but really, how many people are there in this universe with my strange brain shapes? not many, i imagine, or i’d have been able to absorb better coping strategies from the world at large by now.
But since I can’t follow conventional clothing patterns and like to sew anyway, I have figured out so many Stupid Human Tricks to make myself able to understand what the hap is fuckening when I try to construct things.
I look at the how-to blogs and such and they all have these curvy tools to help you connect points on a pattern and I literally cannot fathom how you would know which tool was right. I’ve tried tracing curves and I find that I just put the thing I’m tracing down, then frown at it, then move it out of the way absent-mindedly so I can draw the right shape freehand. (I don’t notice I’m doing it, usually, and someone else is like… where your ruler thing at?… and I’m like oh uh. It’s next to what I’m drawing.) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wound up even with complex shapes I’m trying to stencil, moving the stencil and just looking at it to copy it because I can’t trace for shit and anyway a turtle’s not really shaped like that.
My life is one long saga of doing things entirely the wrong way because it was easier to reverse-engineer the finished product than to follow the directions for how to make it. (This saga contains many chapters wherein That Did Not Work and we Must Not Speak Of This Again.)
I am profoundly differently-arranged than most people, brain-wise, and I wish I knew how that all really worked. But it could go quite a ways toward explaining why so many things that everyone else thinks are trivially easy to the point of not mentioning are literally impossible for me to figure out how to do. Most days it’s like, in the instruction booklet for the day, what to everyone else looks like a line saying “make a sandwich” is telling me “make love to the rain” and I’m like… is this… a metaphor? and everyone else is like no, you get bread and meat and mayo and just kind of… and I’m like… how does that fuck the rain though… ????? which just leads to greater confusion all around and I tell you what there’s no way I’m going to strip off and run outside when it’s not even raining and everyone else is talking about bread and meat. No, I will take the failing grade on that particular task and maybe keep my dignity or at least not go down in the chronicle of days as the random naked chick.
Maybe train. Maybe it said make love to the train. That doesn’t really make any more sense. It’s got to be a goddamn metaphor. I have no idea where bread and meat comes in, and I’m sort of upset that my brain is starting to figure out where the mayo is involved without my input. Veto! Veto.
… Why does everyone else have a packed lunch?
I’ve taught geology and cartography to uni students and you’d be surprised how many different-shaped brains you can find in a classroom when it comes to spatial/geometrical perceptions. It’s really stimulating trying to find what will work for each of them (some people need to see-> modelling clay and a knife, or a rubber balloon to explain about map projections, some need to act/move => make them draw or build things, some need to work through numbers…)
About sewing: I’ve dabbled in Medieval reenactment and what’s great with medieval sewing is that people didn’t use patterns (no paper) and didn’t use maths + tried to make with as little fabric as they could. So, lots of doing it freehand, working with rectangles and triangles and by trial and error. I think you’d love it!
oh, I have done medieval sewing– that’s the only way I got into sewing at all, was joining a re-enactment group. And those garments don’t use patterns really, so I started off making those. It was only by making those that I realized, hell, I could sew anything I wanted like this. So that’s what I make. And I’ve learned about stretch and bias and modern tailoring techniques and things, but the fundamentals of what I know are rectangles plus triangles plus more triangles.
Which was why it was so funny when Dude was trying to draw out the pattern for the yurt insulation for me, and he was showing me a fabric layout, and I was like, that’s a gored skirt, I have made eight thousand of those, it’s just much longer and a more extreme slope. If I had a 33″ waist and a 70″ leg, that’d be a skirt. Ha!
…
I wish it were possible to attack learning math in a different way. All I ever got was, here’s the book, here’s the example problem, here’s the set of practice problems, do them until you’ve memorized the technique, here’s the exam. That’s just how math classes are.
And when I was like… but I don’t understand the example problem, all I ever got was, here are more practice problems, do them until you’ve memorized it. Which, naturally, went really well. (I spent a lot of time crying for the first eighteen years of my life. Almost all of it was done next to an open math textbook.)
That, as far as I know, is math. That’s just what math is, that’s how it works. You do the thing, here is your answer.
They came up with New Math now, that they teach by reciting the numbers in different orders or something, and I ran crying out of the room (as an adult) when someone tried to explain it to me. It’s the same thing only now it doesn’t make any sense at all.
I’m quite good with maps but they don’t really let you study cool things like geology or cartography if you can’t do arithmetic. I wasn’t really allowed into any advanced courses that weren’t literature, because I couldn’t pass the prerequisites. I have always, down in my heart, deeply desired to take a physics class, but they don’t let you in if you can’t do algebraic functions. And to this day I just don’t even know what an algebraic function is.
Music theory, too. I couldn’t study that one. I couldn’t pass the intro class. The prof was very regretful and said clearly I was getting it on some level; I’d managed to get every single question wrong on the final exam, but they were all exactly internally consistent. I got the method. I couldn’t do the practice.
Maybe this is why I take so much refuge in fiction. You don’t have to really be able to do the math, and you can pretend you were allowed to learn the science as long as it’s internally consistent to the world you made up.
I kind of spend a lot of my life with my nose pressed against glass I can’t really see through, but everyone else seems to be on the other side of it doing something really cool that I don’t understand.
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