A Vacation to Remember, Part 1

My wife and I returned Sunday from a one week vacation in New York City and Washington D.C. It may be the last time I'll ever travel far away from home, but I hope it isn't.

I haven't flown many times in my 59 years, but I've always enjoyed it when I have. This time was no exception, despite the choppier than usual flight near Denver on our way home and the baby who kept screaming most of the way there from D.C.

I've written many times in this blog about my learning difficulties. This post from 2007 provides a pretty good overview. As long as I stay cocooned in my house, I don't think or worry too much about my learning problems. I just think about other things instead. But when I go on trips, they are brought into vivid focus.

For instance, on the airplanes, I couldn't make much sense of the demonstrated emergency procedures, and I realized that if I'd had the misfortune of being seated next to an emergency exit, I would have had to relinquish my seat to someone who could open the door in a jiffy if he or she needed to.

But that was nothing compared to figuring out subway and bus routes in New York City. There is no way I could have done that myself and, therefore, no way I could travel to a place like New York City myself unless I was rich enough to have cabs take me everywhere to which I couldn't walk. My wife was the navigator, and I constantly marveled at how easy it seemed to be for her to figure everything out.

I'm not saying she's better at it than most, although I suspect that she is. I'm saying that I'm far, far worse at it than most. The subway and bus routes remained totally incomprehensible to me the whole four days we were in New York City and rode subways and buses all over Manhattan and beyond.

And when we arrived at Union Station in D.C., I was more than overwhelmed by the fare schedules, not to mention the routing of public transit there. For, unlike New York City, where one can ride an MTA bus or subway anywhere in the city at any time of day or night for the same $2.25 fare (which we made even simpler by buying one-week unlimited-ride MTA cards for $29 apiece), in Washington D.C. the amount you pay depends on whether you're riding a bus or train, how far you travel, and what time of day you do it. Even my wife was initially confused by this as we tried to figure out how to get from Union Station to our hotel, and I was hopelessly benumbed by it.

But let me stop talking about my learning deficits and backtrack to our first day in New York City. We landed at LaGuardia Airport and took a cab that we thought would cost us around $60 to get to our hotel a few miles away in New Jersey. It ended up costing us almost twice that. My wife and I were both upset over this, yet, there didn't seem to be anything we could do about it. The price we were charged corresponded to an official looking fare schedule the driver showed us.

I guess the moral of the story is to ask beforehand how much it will cost to get where you want to go from the airport and look for someone who will charge you what your research tells you is a reasonable fare. Or, better still, go online before your trip and try to reach an agreement on the fare with some cab company at your destination, the way I did with the cab that took us from home to the Sacramento airport and back home after the return flight.

After we checked in to our hotel in Fort Lee, New Jersey, we discovered that we couldn't walk to any restaurant or fast food joint nearby, since there was only a freeway and no sidewalks outside the hotel, and we didn't want to pay the exorbitant prices for the food served at the hotel, so we ate complimentary chocolate chip cookies sweet enough to almost gag us and called it a night. But not until we were roused from our room by a fire alarm that necessitated evacuation of all guests from the building for over half an hour while the fire department checked things out and determined that a broken water main to one of the hotel restrooms triggered the alarm and we were allowed back into the hotel.

However, the hotel did provide shuttle service to downtown Manhattan, and we checked out the next morning as scheduled, boarded the shuttle, and made our way to the big city. Now I caught my first glimpse of the New York skyline that I had seen only on TV and in the movies since my only other visit there almost fifty years ago.

Ever since my first visit decades ago, I've held this fascination with the Big Apple that periodically surfaces in dreams or in unusually intense reactions to songs such as "New York State of Mind." Now I was back in the city of my recurring dreams and awed by the skyscrapers and energy of the city. I began to pick out landmarks such as the David Letterman studio and CBS headquarters as we drove past them in the shuttle.

Once we were let off at a hotel (but not our hotel) in midtown Manhattan, I was characteristically clueless and helpless about what to do or where to go next, but fortunately my wife wasn't. She found a subway station pretty quickly, bought us MTA cards from the machine, and figured out which subway train to take and where to get off, and our New York adventure began in earnest.

We were allowed to check in to our hotel early and even eat the complimentary breakfast served there, and then we set off on foot to check out the local terrain. It just so happened that it was Memorial Day, and the weather was so unusually hot and muggy for that time of year that even New Yorkers were complaining, but I guess we were so thrilled with the novelty of our fabled surroundings that we didn't notice the heat so much. At least not until after we'd walked a couple of miles or so to the harbor where we stood in line to take a speedboat ride on New York Harbor. By then I was awfully thirsty and a little tired.



But after baking in the sun in line for what seemed like longer than it was, the speedboat ride cooled us off and provided me with the first of many uncharacteristically patriotic moments.

If you've wasted any time reading this blog or you know me personally, you realize that I'm not the flag-waving, gun-toting, " apple-pie-gorging, America's #1" chest-beating type by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, if I were to wave any flag, it would have to be one of those "Earth flags" adorned with a photo of the whole Earth as viewed from space. Yet, as we sped down the Hudson River and slowed as we passed Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, I was nearly overcome with tears as I imagined how immigrants seeking a better life here in the States must have felt for almost a century when they saw the glorious "Green Lady," as my wife calls her, beckoning them to freedom in a land of plenty. At that moment, I felt tremendous pride in my country.

And there were more such moments to come...

(To be continued)

Can't Find My Way Home

And I ain't done nothing wrong,
But I can't find my way home.
--Steve Winwood

When I got off work Wednesday night, I saw that the route I always take home was blocked off by the police and fire department. I later learned that there had been a series of underground electrical explosions up the street knocking out power to some of the buildings in the vicinity and blowing a manhole cover into the air, causing injury to the occupant of a pickup truck driving by at the time. I'm glad I wasn't in the same place at the same time in my little car as that pickup was when that manhole cover went flying. I'm also glad that my wife answered the phone when I called to ask for alternate directions home.

I've written pretty extensively in this blog about my learning disabilities. One of them is that I'm profoundly navigationally impaired, and even more so in the darkness of night. Had my wife not been able to direct me, I don't know how I would have made it home. I would have probably driven around aimlessly until my desperation overcame my reluctance and I stopped somewhere to ask for directions. But it's not so easy to get directions after midnight, and, besides, I hate asking for directions. Not just because I'm a man, but also because I have inordinate difficulty understanding and following directions of all kinds.

So. like I said, I'm glad my wife was home and that she doesn't have the same problem I do. Next time I can't find my way home or wherever else I need to go, I intend to have my electronic navigator with me, just in case my spousal navigator isn't available.

Blind Faith--Can't Find My Way Home--1969

A Fascinating Meeting With a Neuroscientist

I recently met with a prominent local neuroscientist to discuss with him whether I could be a research subject and perhaps receive help for my learning difficulties. The website of the institute where he works says this about him:

[He] is a pediatric cognitive neuroscientist. His research focuses on the neural basis of cognitive impairments seen in genetic disorders that produce mental retardation, developmental disability and psychopathology. Building on his influential theory of the foundations of numerical competence, [he] investigates how dysfunction in specific neurocognitive processing systems, such as attention and spatial cognition, can generate a range of cognitive and behavioral impairments. His goal is to develop remedial intervention programs that will minimize such disability. [His] current projects center on studies of visuospatial and numerical cognition in children with chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, also known as DiGeorge and VeloCardioFacial syndrome. He is also engaged in similar studies of children with Fragile X, Williams, and Turner syndromes. Besides cognitive processing analyses and psychometric testing, [he] uses cutting edge neuroimaging methods, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Voxel Based Morphometrics, and Diffusion Tensor Fiber Tracking in order to study the structure, function and connective patterns in the developing brain.

This sounds pertinent to my situation and impressive, and I found the man it describes to be extremely impressive in person. This is one brilliant and tremendously knowledgeable guy! We talked for over an hour. Actually, he did most of the talking and I listened with utter fascination. I don't claim to have understood most of what he said, but here is the essence of what I think I understood:

He works mostly with children but has been approached recently by several adults close to the same age from different parts of the country. We all report similar symptoms. That is, there seems to be an uncommonly large gap between our relatively high verbal facility and low nonverbal ability. He characterizes these symptoms as probably resulting from several factors.

First, we are like computers connected to much lower resolution digital cameras than most people are. In other words, our visual-spatial representations of the world are so much less detailed than most people's that when we try to focus on and thoroughly understand some part of our representation, we get a blurry image when most people get a much clearer one.

Second, if attention is likened to the narrow beam of a flashlight in a large, dark room, while most people's attention moves fairly smoothly and systematically from one portion of the "room" to another until they're able to piece together a coherent perspective of the entire room from all of the areas the "flashlight" illumined, the attention of people like me tends to flit haphazardly from one portion of the room to another, and we're subsequently unable to reconstruct a coherent image or representation of the entire room. This makes it much more difficult for us to understand with visual-spatial thinking the structures and functioning of various places and systems. In my case, it makes it exceptionally difficult for me to conceptualize the filing system where I work. I can't visualize or mentally represent to myself the flow of files into, through, and out of the file room to various units and departments., and I can't readily conceptualize how to perform various tasks involved in the operation of this system.

Third, not only do we take in less visual information than most people and in a more unsystematic manner, but we also process this information more slowly, making us markedly slower at tasks affected by our disabilities.

I've been told and have long suspected that my difficulties probably stem from perinatal brain damage. However, this neuroscientist believes that they may result from genetic anomalies. At least two of the other adults who've approached him have shown unusual duplications or deletions in the base pairs of certain genes in certain chromosomes, and he's curious to know whether I have this same anomaly.

So, he'd like me to submit a blood sample that will be screened for these and other genetic anomalies that could be related to my learning difficulties. He'd also like to subject me to a functional MRI scan and to much more specialized psychometric testing than I've received so far. Finally, he thinks that the human brain exhibits a high degree of what he calls "neuroplasticity."In other words, he thinks it has a remarkable ability to change itself as a result of experience and to compensate for injuries and malfunctions. He's currently working with other researchers to develop video games to train the brains of people with various nonverbal learning difficulties to increase their visual-spatial "bandwidth" and to improve their attentiveness and processing speeds, and I might be included in this research. In the meantime, he speculated that some kind of occupational therapy might help me to either accommodate better to my current job or to find and keep a more suitable one.

All in all, I was very pleased by our meeting, and I'm grateful that such a busy man, who is currently in the middle of seeking a grant from the NIH so that he can continue a promising line of this important research, would take over an hour of his precious time to meet with me and then propose that we go forward with the steps I just listed. I'm now waiting to proceed with my blood and other tests and to find out all that I can about what ails my brain and what I might be able to do about it.

Naked Reflections on my Naked Reflections

My notion when I began this blog was to 'nakedly reflect' my experiences and ideas. But I have such a poor opinion of my capabilities and I experience so many negative emotions as a result that many of my entries have been bleak and despairing and have probably turned away most of what few readers I ever had. This might not be so bad if I were writing this blog only for myself, but I'm not. While I'm not trying hard to entice people to read it, it would be nice if people liked this blog enough to stop by and read it anyway. But why would they want to if they encounter one depressing entry after another crying about my learning disabilities and their emotional fallout?

On the other hand, my learning disabilities or cognitive impairments along with their psychological repercussions have had and continue to have an enormous impact on my life, and to what extent does a blog that ignores this 'nakedly reflect' me? And if it does so only very little if at all, why not change the name of this blog to something else and write about other things?

Perhaps I could keep my entries impersonally philosophical or "spiritual," or I could write about myself only when I have something "positive" or uplifting to say. I have long thought that it's cathartic and, therefore, good to bare the pains of the soul. Yet, I'm coming to wonder if this isn't like, to borrow an Easwaran simile, wearing an unwanted groove in a vinyl record by tracing the same path innumerable times with the phonograph needle.

I'm reminded of "gangsta rap" or whatever they call it these days, of how its revolting, at least to my ears, concoction of monstrous misogyny, mindless hedonism, brutal machismo, and reptilian sociopathy is often defended as an "honest reflection" of life in the "hood" and of my questioning how people can rise above such an awful life by wallowing in it like a pig in slime. I don't have the answer to that question or to the question of how I can rise above my crippling impairments, self-doubts, and sense of helpless hopelessness by nakedly reflecting them here. Maybe I can't. Maybe I need to take another path with any blog that I continue to write. Or maybe I at least need to be a little more moderate or sparing in "reflecting" negativity about myself. I don't know, but I'm trying to work it out.

In the meantime, below is a very 'naked reflection' of how I felt at work the other night. I wrote it during one of my breaks. Since then, I've had times when I felt better and times when I've felt even worse. Over all, I think it speaks for how I essentially feel about myself and my (and my wife's) future when I allow or force myself to take an unsparing look at myself and at what I truly believe about my prospects.

I'm into my fourth week of my new job, and I wonder how many weeks they'll keep me on until they decide that I just can't meet the demands of the position. Am I being unduly pessimistic? Perhaps. But I struggle every day to understand the blooming, buzzing confusion around me and my supervisors' and co-workers' explanations of it, and I fail dismally.

As for executing certain tasks expected of me in a reasonable period of time, forget about it. One of my co-workers takes only 20 minutes to accomplish what it takes me two hours to do. This is no exaggeration. I can certainly understand how his five years on the job would make him more efficient and quicker at his tasks. But six times faster at such a relatively simple task as filing medical charts back into the wall in their proper places? No matter how long I stay on the job and no matter how much I gain in experience, I don't know how I'll ever be able to perform that particular task significantly faster than I do already.

And that pretty much speaks for all of the tasks I perform and for how much slower I am at most of them than everyone else, including those who haven't been on the job much longer than I have. And I'm referring now to those rare, simple tasks where I know what I'm supposed to be doing. I feel like dead weight in my workplace, and it seems to be only a matter of time until I'm treated as such. Still, I keep doing my best, watching what and how others do, asking questions, and taking notes so that, if it's at all possible, I can do better and stay around longer.

Because if and when I lose this job, how long will it take me to get another? And if I can even get another, how long will I be able to keep it until I'm let go again? I really feel quite hopeless right now. I feel as though I may well be incapable of doing any job that pays enough to help sustain my wife and me beyond a poverty level requiring us to count literally every penny we spend and be consumed with constant financial worries and stress.

I sometimes wish I had never married my wife. Not because I don't love her but precisely because I love her so much that I don't want to see her stuck with a loser for the rest of our lives.

I know I may sound extremely depressed right now, but I'm not. At least not in the stereotypical sense of choking back tears, feeling suicidal, or anything of that kind. It may sound as though I'm being unduly harsh with myself and pessimistic about my future. I don't believe that I am. I believe that I see my future with all too realistic clarity. Of course, Buddha said something to the effect that we are the result of what we have thought, and thinking that I'm going to fail in life could well contribute to my failing. But in my case I think it's likely to contribute about as much as a drop of gasoline to a raging forest fire.

Yet, even if the contribution is bigger than that, what do I do about my pessimism, especially if its based on reality? See a therapist? Been there, done that. It cost me a veritable fortune and did little if any good of which I'm aware. See a different therapist. I don't know how I can afford it. Get a doctor to prescribe me an anti-depressant drug? Will that make me any less incapable of meeting the demands of job and life than I am now? Any less likely to fail? If not, why fool around with my brain chemistry and perhaps mess myself up even more than I am already?

Well, I do plan to meet soon with a neuroscientist from the local university. His specialty is the neural basis and psychological consequences of learning disabilities in children. Even though I'm well past childhood, at least in a chronological sense, I wrote to him about myself, and he immediately wrote back expressing an interest in seeing me and exploring with me some possible research (and, perhaps, clinical) options. I don't want to get my hopes up and have them squashed. After all, what can anybody really do to help me or to help me help myself even if they can pinpoint precisely the nature and location of my brain malfunction and the type and extent of my impairment? Yet, I need to have hope in something, and I don't seem to be able to find it anywhere else at the moment.

Well, my break is over. Time to get back to my snail's pace of work and rock-like incomprehension of what's going on around me.

Frustration

Last night I attended a training session for volunteer adult literacy tutors. It was a frustrating experience. I've made frequent mention here that I have learning disabilities. One profoundly frustrating disability is my difficulty in being able to follow instructions, whether they're spoken, written, or demonstrated. It takes me far more time than it does most people to learn the sequence of behaviors for performing various procedures.

The adult literacy program in Sacramento County uses the Laubach method of teaching elementary reading and writing skills. It employs precise procedures for teaching these skills. The training workshops consist of people briefly explaining and demonstrating these procedures and then having us practice them with each other using the tutor's and learner's manuals.

Unfortunately, we aren't allowed to study these manuals before the training sessions, nor are we allowed to borrow them after unless and until we're actually matched with a learner. This makes it all but impossible for me to learn the skills. If I'm to have any chance of learning them, I need to take a lot of time to study the manuals, practice the procedures, and absorb their pedagogical logic on my own.

Even then, I'm not sure if I can do it, but I want to try. I've wanted to do something like this for years but have always been too afraid to try. I always believed that I could never learn the procedures and that I'd look stupid and feel embarrassed and ashamed in the workshops and end up failing.

Last night I felt frustrated. But, fortunately, I'm more accepting than I used to be of the fact that I have this problem learning things that come much more easily to most people, and I 'm more willing and able to set aside embarrassment and shame in favor of making an effort to overcome the problem. I want to overcome this problem. I want to help other people overcome their problems or learning disabilities with language skills. I want to give something to my community. I want to show myself that I can do things I didn't think I could do and gain useful skills and self-confidence I've never had.

But, in this case, it looks to be a steep uphill climb. I've e-mailed the program coordinators about my concerns. I've asked to be allowed to borrow instructional materials and study them outside the training session and before I'm matched with a learner. But even if they agree to this, the next and last training session is an intensive seven hour one tomorrow, and I don't have enough time to adequately prepare for it. Try as I might to make myself believe otherwise and to go into tomorrow's session with a positive attitude, I find myself anticipating hours and hours of frustrating hell.