Where Am I?

Sometimes, it's really frustrating to be me. I mean, despite the fact that I am overflowing with pure, unfiltered awesome, I have flaws. Among them, probably the one that hinders me most on a regular basis, is that I have no concept of space.

Directions, distance, even just the simple concept of right and left, are beyond my grasp. It's pretty much a condition, even a handicap. Today was a bad day. On an average day, when I need to figure out right from left, I just make the L's with my hands, and quickly recognize right from left. In the car while driving, it's even easier. My brain will never be able to instinctively know right from left, I've given up on trying to learn long ago.

Anyways, today was a bad day. On a bad day, when I need to differentiate between right and left, I look at my hands, and then have trouble processing what an L looks like. Then I try to imagine myself drawing an L, but without a pen in my hand, I have idea which is my hand. So I have to get a pen out of my pocket, if I am lucky enough to be carrying one, figure out what hand it feels right in, fortunately, once I've found my right hand, I've figured out which was is right, and drawing the L is pointless. Still, a tedious task, for trying to figure out a simple direction.

Fortunately, routes I normally take are easily committed to memory, and right and left and directions of any sort play no part. However, whenever I have to go somewhere new, or even somewhere old, but going a different route, even the reverse of a route I normally take and know, It's almost guaranteed that I will get at least a little lost.

My GPS helps, but only so much. Especially when, for no good reason, I feel confident enough to go without it. Today was one of those days. Ben and were going over to China Panda this afternoon, and while I can get there from work, I was at my great grandmother, Gigi's, and I had never gone to China Panda from there.

Not a huge problem, I figured. I would just get back over near Target to the point where I knew where I was, and then backtrack. Of course, at the time, I didn't realize that while I went from Target to Gigi's a lot, I had only once been from Gigi's too Target, and not the way i was trying to do it, and not during the day. When I realized that I was going to have issues, I whipped out my GPS, knowing I would need Mr. T's aid in getting me where I needed to go. i went under favorites, and told it to take me to Target first, because the last thing I need to be doing while lost is fiddling wiht my GPS. And immediately, of course, TomTom tells me that no route was found.

Needless to say, at somepoint, I found myself on 70 going west, towards Hagerstown. Frustrated, I made it there, and few things aleviate stress like China Panda, and more specifically, building things out of toothpicks and cup lids.

Then later, I had have a class on Thursday nights, but of course, I forgot that this week, before class, we were supposed to go to the communications technology seminar thing, when I got to class, the room was empty. I remembered then and i checked the paper and saw I was supposed to be in the JDK theatre. So I found a map. Maps aren't the most helpful thing in the world to me. If they are laying flat, lined up with whatever they are a map of, I can follow them pretty well, but if they are on a wall, or the orientation isn't right, I can't move it in my mind to where it should be, and then I can't find anything. But this didn't turn out to be a problem, because the JDK theatre was not on the map.

I decided finally to try my luck in the arts and communication building, and after going the wrong direction and into the wrong building and having to turn back and go in the opposite direction, I found the building. It had it's own map of the building itself, where conveniently, the JDK theatre was not listed.

Had I not remembered that I had in fact been here once before, many years ago, to see a firend's dance recital, I probably would have just gone back to the classroom and waited for an hour and a hlaf for the seminar to be over. But I did remember a theatre, and more specifically, having trouble finding it the first time. Armed with that knowledge, I found the theatre, and it was actually a pretty interesting smeinar, and I was glad I was able to find it. Because, I am, after all, a guy, and therefore, cannot ask for directions.