Literally My Life!

I'm so sorry for keeping you all waiting; so just hold your horses - DO NOT worry I am BACK!!! Honestly, I wasn’t trying to weasel out of another entry; I just had a lot of work to do and decided I'LL WAIT to write my next one. Early on this semester, I was assigned 20 pages of reading and it took my slow dyslexic ass literally 20 days to read it! YES - that’s one page a day. I wasn't kidding when I said dyslexics have NO speed when it comes to reading. But I'm back!! 

Today, I wanted to let you in on another interesting trait about dyslexia or maybe it's just about me and I say it’s because of my dyslexia. I take everything WAY too literal...LIKE WAY too literal. Maybe it’s because my vocabulary wasn’t very large since I really didn’t read a lot or maybe my critical thinking skills were poor but whatever the reason I took (and kinda sometimes still do take) things at face value!  I’m not saying I am so literal that I don’t understand puns and idioms, although I do have to think twice about them when I am reading, (but when I was younger, my mental picture of someone “laughing their head off” really did include their head falling off their shoulder and that was so sad!! LOL!) I also remember my parents telling me on many occasions I needed to get a sense of humor – fast forward ten years and I can turn my dinner table into my own comedy club stage! Anyway, there are a bunch of stories I can tell you but reading sucks so I won't make you amazing people read too much... YOU'RE WELCOME!! I’ll just tell you a few and you be the judge!

SO, let's start from the beginning...when I was younger probably around the age of 3, (NO, I don't remember doing this personally, but I was told by my mother and others!) I was in preschool, and my sister who is a year older than me, had already gotten moved up to the kindergarten class when she was my age! (Genius, I know!!) And I wanted to be in kindergarten with my sister so bad – so what did I do, probably what any other 3 year old would do! I scheduled a meeting with the owner/principal of the preschool to talk to her about my request! Anyway, I went into my "meeting" and asked if I could be moved into my sister’s class. Now, so you know- the wallpaper border around her office was that preschool type with alphabet letters beside the pictures of associated sounds. (You know A for Apple) - She looked at me and said, "Okay Aly, I can move you into kindergarten, but before I can you need to tell me something. (She pointed to the wallpaper letter border) What are the sounds of the letters in the alphabet?" What???? Well, I sweetly responded "Ms. Sarita, if YOU don't know the ABC's how AM I supposed to know them??? I’m never gonna be in kindergarten!" and turned around and walked out.

SIDE NOTE: How FREAKIN’ mature of me was it to make an appointment with the principal??? Like come on I was a pretty bold kid!

You would think it stopped there - the stories - but NO there’s more!! ...I was taking a placement test when I was around 4 for the school I ended up going to for basically my entire life. There were two parts - a written and an oral test. At the time I felt some of the questions they asked me were very unreasonable to say the least, but whatever! Anyway, during the oral portion, the teacher asked me where I lived, and I simply replied "Earth! " Which by the way, I think is one of the smartest answers a 4 year old could have given. She then asked me if I could stand up for her and say my ABC's backwards...BACKWARDS... like what kind of STUPID QUESTION IS THAT??? But I was obviously not gonna let her fool me, so I oh so confidently stood up, turned around (facing away from her) and sang the ABC's! When she met with my mom, she did say that although the answers were not what they were looking for, they had to give me credit because they were not wrong!

SIDE NOTE: She never specified that I had to start from the letter "Z" so I started from "A" and had my back facing her. CLEVER HUH!!!!

But if you think being literal stops, as you get older – think again my friends!! Just this year I had a question in my college Theology class. “The Hebrew names for the ______ (number) books of the Torah are derived from their respective “incipits”.” I read that to mean the name of the Book of Numbers so I wrote Bemidbar! OKAY so --- The answer was 5!  Part literal meaning and part poor reading contributed to that little mistake! On the good side my professor did commend me for practicing my Hebrew!

So I guess the takeaway from all this and also a LITERAL life lesson is to mean what you say and say what you mean! It’s not just dyslexics that like people to speak clearly and honestly. And that’s Aly’s eye view!