so it turns out other people are actually capable of focusing on two things at once enough to like, follow the plot of an audiobook while driving
how the fuck do you do that
-F
how do you deal with it when you realize that the fantasies you write about, the things you wish you were able to do, turn out to be something that almost everyone else does effortlessly anyway and never told you
-F
this also means that a majority of people will probably just not get the point of my writing
-F
@Felthry I didn't know that being in pain constantly wasn't normal til I was... Probably 17 or 18? People don't tell you things that are just 'the way things are' to them, same as you. And that sucks 'cause it is WAY harder to pin down when something is wrong, especially when you're young.
-Katie
pain, cbd
@squirrellilly @Felthry i found out that the "growing pains" in my legs were actually just regular pain, and that it was directly caused walking too much
something else that helped me realize i was in pain was how coming down from cbd gave me flu like body aches, but i eventually realized i had that all the time and just didn't notice until they went away and came back after the cbd
@Felthry How do you focus on one thing well enough to do that?
@Felthry Either of those, rather.
@Felthry Oh gods we totally can't do that.
"""Normal""" people have fucking /superpowers/ I swear.
@Felthry i can listen to a nascar race and drive at the same time
@Felthry The combinations of things people can do varies, though. My wife can't listen to an audiobook and drive, not and retain anything. Podcasts and driving are good, though.
In one of his memoirs Richard Feynman wrote about discovering what he could do while mentally counting to 60, and what slowed his counting, and what stopped him entirely, and workarounds for that. Also discovering other people had different limits and compensations. Brains act in weird and idiosyncratic ways.
@Felthry So there may be people who don't understand there's people who can't do whatever things you're describing doing together. But there are certainly other people who *do*.
And, there'll be people who didn't realize other brains worked that other way and be amazed to learn how diverse kinds of thinking are.
@Felthry I think this is quite dangerous. People SAY that they can do all sorts of things while driving because they've internalized the process but I am extremely skeptical of it because you seriously have to pay attention while driving, for everyone's safety.
cw: longish reply
This is something I know something about (if stuff I remember dimly from my college days counts). I personally have trouble understanding two "language things" at once. If someone is talking to me while I'm reading, I don't hear what they're saying. If I'm listening to music with lyrics, I can't also write code. And so on. I think that's not uncommon, too. Language is something I have to be paying attention to to understand, and there's only so much attention to go around. So take it a step further.
If the way you drive is to stay in full conscious concentration on everything (and that's not a bad thing), you're not going to be able to spare much on understanding language or anything else. I can just about keep up because I've been driving enough that I don't have to concentrate -too- hard on it (of course, then there's the danger of not paying enough attention, but there's a happy medium to be found there). Some things, like driving, take less and less attention as you do them more, and then eventually you have enough left over for language stuff.
Personally, I think having the fantasies that you do makes you more relatable. Everyone has fantasies, and everyone has different ones. What you fantasize about says a lot about you as a person. It's not that people will miss the point, it's that you should approach it from a different perspective. "Wouldn't it be nice if everyone could do X" is no less relatable than "Wouldn't it be nice if I could do X". Maybe X is something different for everyone in that case, but everyone thinks that about something.
@Felthry I can't even follow the plot of an audiobook alone, I don't think a second head would help me there lol
seriously though it was *today* when someone said they couldn't understand the point of one of our fantasies because they can do that anyway that we realized that some people can just do that
-F