I’ve just finished a post that somehow ends up with a word count of – according to Word – almost 6,000.
Ouch.
And what makes it worse is that I’ve already edited out at least 1,000 words when I decided that section wasn’t that relative to the topic at hand. So it went from 7,000 to 6,000.
Basically, the post revolves around two related issues on cover art and representation in Romance and YA fiction, with a bit about films (of course!). It has book covers and a couple of lists, too.
So I’m trying to decide whether to split it into two parts or three, or leave it as an entire post. Excessively long posts are never good for blogs, though.
Hm. I’m thinking that perhaps, I should separate two issues into two separate posts. They do go hand in hand, but they can survive on their own. Hm. I don’t know. *strokes chin* Any suggestions?
Please Get Out of My Ear
I have an irritating earworm that has been going on for three soddin’ days. This is the snippet that keeps repeating itself.
“and I won’t remember where I come from.”
That snippet, then that thumping beat. Back to the snippet, then the thumping beat. Back to the snippet, then the thumping beat. Over and over and over. All day. It’s there when I fall asleep. It’s there when I wake.
It’s the second line from Don’t Box Me In [lyrics] by Stan Ridgeway and Stewart Copeland, a track from the Rumble Fish soundtrack.
Here’s a music video:
I tried listening to this song as a cure. Tried to listen to different songs. No luck. Even went to a tube station to ‘collect’ the sounds of a tube rumbling. Didn’t quite work either.
It’s one of crappy side effects of having dyscalculia. No one knows why we have this. There are some theories. Only one that makes sense to me: our brain overcompensates in some areas, such as having a near-photographic memory of all things visual, which can be useful to combat the night blindness. You know, our memorised room helps us to find our way round in a room when it’s pitch black. We also can memorise what we can hear, such as music, but we can’t reproduce through a musical instrument because of our inability to keep a beat.
Anyhow, sometimes we have a recurring visual or sound that can last days. It’s similar to having tinnitus, but only this time, it’s an image or a specific snippet of a sound, music, song or, rarely, voice. The earworm of a voice is the worst.
I once had a snippet of my late mum’s comment: “Come away now, you’re too ne–”. (I think she was warning I was too near a fire, road or river.) I had to live with that recurring snippet for a couple of days. It was so disconcerting because at the time of that recurring voice, a) she was seriously ill and couldn’t speak, and b) that conversation was from when I was a little girl.
What sort a brain could harbour can be so scarily trivial. 
The last recurring image I had was a couple of months ago. It was silly, really. It was just my uncle in a partly-lit hallway, turning his head round, looking downwards to me when I was behind him. If I judge the height correctly, I was between three and five.
That last a fortnight. Just a recurring snippet of him turning round and looking down. Like a video got stuck, jumped back to the starting point, played, stuck, jumped back, played, stuck, jumped back, over and over and over.
I think the longest period of a recurring image would be almost four months. It was from a film, which is actually a rarity. Let me find it.
Exactly: 0:30 – 0:38 I had that snippet replaying in my head non-stop for almost four months.
Having said that, I don’t actually mind. Especially when I’m bored. I can recall and “play” a film in my head. Will apparently can tell when I’m “watching” a film. He says when it happens, I have a faraway look in my eyes. But anyway. It can be fun to “skim” the film, such as when I get to that point where I know there’s a scene I don’t like, I frog-leap that scene and carry on watching. I can’t hear anything when I see a recurring image or film, though. I can recall, but it doesn’t play along with it. I have to make an effort to make that happen, but most times I didn’t bother.
It’s not just a film I can play in my head. Anything I see and hear in real life, it’ll be absorbed into my brain that I may recall and replay. Such as a conversation between a friend and I. I think I can recall huge chunks of what we said during that conversation. I never forget anything visual – advertisement, photo (magazine or personal), album cover, book cover, building, the layout and contents of a room. I rarely forget a face. For some reason, I can’t quite memorise the details of cars, buses or anything metal. (I honestly don’t know why I could memorise some visual things but not other visual things.)
The downside to that is it can generate a recurring fragment of a memorised sound or image. No one knows why.
Of course, thanks to dyscalculia, I can’t even memorise numbers, names, dates, car numbers, bus numbers and verbal directions. No matter how hard I try, I just can’t do it. Show me a short series of numbers, I forget a moment after you cover those numbers with a hand. Tell me the directions to somewhere, I forget a minute later.
Faces and names are an oddity, though. We can remember both, but not together. Tell me your name, I remember it for life. Show me your face, I remember it for life as well. I, however, will quickly forget to associate your name with your face.
I also can’t memorise text well. I can and will memorise and recognise any word, but recalling a chunk of text or spell out any lesser-used word I want to use? Fat chance.
I do have a way of memorising it, though. It’s a common trick for people with this disorder: we do it by visualising or narrating internally when we read.
Visualising is much easier, though. When I read a novel, the story becomes a film in my mind or an audio book in my right ear (why the right ear, I have no idea! The internal voice appears in that ear for reason). That may be why I remember scenes or stories quite vividly, but not book titles, authors and characters’ names.
When I read a person’s written piece, first I memorise that person’s “voice” through their writing style. Once I memorise it, I associate anything they write with sounds or visuals, which will be chucked into a box belonging to that “voice” (writing style).
Good writers have distinctive voices, which helps a lot because I rarely forget anything they wrote. I rarely if ever remember weak voices. When the voice isn’t strong, I won’t remember their writing pieces. Not even if I internally visualised or narrated them.
I can’t memorise the identities of voices, though. Singing voices, I can memorise, but talking voices? Not always. That’s why I hate voice earworms. When it comes out of nowhere, I can’t always identify whose voice it is. It can be someone I knew but forgot, or a random stranger who talked near me. The weirdest voice loop would this: “–ke her but she sorrowfully –”. I still have no idea whose voice this is or what it’s about. I’m boring everyone with this. I’m sorry. Will shut up now.
I’m surprised that I’ve actually written about this. I tend to shy away from it because I still feel awkward about having this disability and admitting to almost all those tactics. It makes me feel so thick-headed.