September 17, 2004 - 6:16 PM

Reading Two Feasts for my Own Brawn

So, maybe I have some sort of reading impediment I’ve come to think. Like, a really low-key form of dyslexia. The kind where individual letters don’t so much get mixed up all the time as sometimes words play naughty tricks on me by getting up and quickly switching places with each other, or by hiding behind the page so that I can’t see them. When I realize that what I’m reading doesn’t make sense and I scan back to reread it, the words, all jolly in their trickery, hop back into proper place, leaving me puzzled as to why I read the sentence “And she combined the two globs into one giant octopus of terror” as “And she combed the two globes into one giant of terror” initially.

Actually, ok, so it’s probably not dyslexia or a learning disorder. I’m a decent reader, but I tend to read too fast for my brain. As I pick up speed with the reading, my brain starts to stumble, trying to catch up, so it guesses what words are coming next. Oftentimes, it guesses correctly. Sometimes, it sees part of a word, and it thinks that it’s something else (like “combed” instead of “combined”), and it inserts that new word into the text. It even streamlines by skipping over smaller connector words such as prepositions or definite articles, which can get me into trouble when I think that he “took it ‘in’ the hole” instead of he “took it ‘to’ the hole”.

What’s worse, if I’m reading at this quick pace, almost skimming, my mind eventually gets so taxed that it just gives up, goes outside, and chases butterflies. My eyes are still zipping over the words, and the surface of my brain recognizes the configuration of letters and spaces- it just doesn’t know how to make sense of it all. So I find myself going through the motion of reading, but not absorbing the information.

All this makes reading very taxing on me. I continually have to reread sentences, paragraphs, even pages, just to connect the dots as to what is going on on the page. Even if I thought that I understood the text and context, I’m so used to getting things mixed up that I, out of habit, go back and read the section again just to be sure. It’s frustrating, especially when doing this and realizing that I did get all the information that was there the first time. A speedy reading clip thus gets slowed to a crawl.

I think this inability to read functionally has caused me problems. Including nearly getting me fired from this new job. If you noticed in my last entry, I did an edit a few days after I posted it. Before, I had written the name of the show, the production studio, and the network for which I’m working, plus a brief synopsis. I got called in to the line producer’s office the following Monday because one of the producers had Googled the show’s information and came across my website. Apparently, they were worried that my posting the info on a public website constituted a breach of the confidentiality clause which I signed when they hired me. Um. Yeah. I thought I had parsed all the mumbojumbo in the clause, but I think I also spaced out while reading it. I told the line producer “no worries” and immediately changed my diary to just say that I was working on a new tv show.

Of course, the rest of the day, as I was driving around on runs, I was shouting obscenities at myself. Scaring the other drivers. Stupid drivers.

Now Listening To : Wild Colonials-Fruit of Life
Random Thought : Or maybe I need a stronger eyeglass prescription.

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