Both Frankfurt and Miller find truth to be extremely important in today's world. They do have a few differences, however. Frankfurt says that it is almost impossible for a community to function without truth. If a community is being built and there are no universal truths in that community (like a one dollar bill is equal to one dollar, or killing people is against the law, etc. ) there will be pure chaos. I suppose Frankfurt defines truth as a universal thing that is important to agree on, for lack of a better statement.

Miller, on the other hand, talks about people being "truthful." She is under the impression that an autobiography should be all completely true. But, in a definition of an autobiography in her story, it says "the autobiographical pact is the engagement that an author takes to narrate his life directly...in a spirit of truth." She goes on to study the "spirit" of truth, and how there can not be a spirit of truth, but only truth, and that's all that matters. I guess I would say that Miller describes truth as being a pure truth, with no effort or sign of falsity coming from the author.

By: Kyle Boyd

I wore holes in my sheets. Tossing in an attempt to bring ease to my brain. My thoughts were still fluttering, wide awake. I tried to cradle them in my arms, lull them to sleep. It always interested me that I couldn’t remember the last moment of conscious thinking right before I danced in dream land. But I often spent ten to thirty minutes lying swallowed whole in my tiny sack, drifting not into sleep, but rather into previous thoughts or events of my life. I knew I wasn’t the only ten year old who didn’t go to sleep right away, but I also knew there was something else to it.

There is no one event, no horrible memory, no tall tale that tells of my experiences now. I have picked it up over time. And I can’t explain why, but it doesn’t seem odd to me that I count. I have to count. I’m not going to sit here and say that I can’t go a day without counting, but I just don’t. It’s not Attention Deficit Disorder, and it’s not Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (though I have often referred to it as such). This is not a fixation, it just happens.

At 20, I don’t remember a life I’ve lived that didn’t involve counting. It started with phone numbers, billboard ads, television ads, license plate numbers, the number of tiles on the floor, anything with multiple digits. The gates lifted, and my brain was off to the races, completing the work of a second grader. But it was a bit more subterranean than simple arithmetic.

I felt comfort in my new found hobby. So much that I extended my repertoire to counting letters in words, phrases, or even sentences. (As I said before, I don’t remember this happening or when this all started.) If I had a lot of time, such as a long car ride on the highway, I would assign each letter a specific numerical value. A equaled 1, H equaled 8, and U equaled 21, and so forth. That way, license plates had a more solidified total for my summations.

I wanted people to know. I wanted nothing more than to share this gift with my friends and/or strangers I would meet. Every so often, I’d be in a car, or in a room that was occupied with witnesses. I would see the phone number on the billboard, television ad, or poster. 1-800-435-9225. I go over the numbers in my head; group them in a way to make it easier and faster for my response.

“39”, I said quietly, but with enough brawn to make it known I mean business, and business is good.

“Huh?”

“Nothing”, I said, still so covert in my operations. Maybe even a bit mortified of my “problem”. This was no problem, folks. This was, and still is, me.

++++++

I think the first person I ever told was my girlfriend, Melanie. She understood me. She understood why I liked poetry, or why I listened to death metal, or why I wore ugly sweaters from the ARC. She knew I wasn’t normal. When I told her my secret, she tested me, and I was obviously up for the challenge.

“How many letters are on my shirt?” she asked, shielding her chest after a brief moment of examination. I didn’t need a moment; let me get that straight right now. Her shirt read “Air Academy Lacrosse”, a phrase I had been calculating for the past four years, through Junior Varsity, three different coaches, and state playoffs. Without hesitation, I looked up and said, “18.”

She looked down at the sweatshirt that she had been tugging on to eliminate creases. She counted aloud as her finger bounced from letter to letter, like a small red ball in a children’s song on television. When she found out I was right, she acted impressed, and I played the modest card.

“I’ve been doing it since I can remember.”

++++++

And my secret was out. Everywhere we went, she tested me in front of my spectators. It wasn’t long until most everyone I had some kind of relationship with knew about my gift. They all tried their best at thwarting me, but my skills were much too hearty for their tests. Whether it be shirts, words, phrases, or tiles on the floor; I was relentless in my efforts. There came the occasional smart-ass, asking the absurd question that not even I could answer, and they knew it. So, I outmaneuvered them, and found out for myself.

“Ok, ok. How many letters are in supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?” they ask, knowing they had prevailed. Oh, you silly, silly man. Everyone who has ever attempted to stump me has tried this word, and they, too, were surprised by my remarks.

“34” I utter with pride as their grins turn to baffled stares.

And that soon became my definitive goal: to make people think I was Rainman, essentially. But I was not. I just had a lot of practice.

I have a photographic memory in the sense that I can glance at a word, and odds are, I have calculated that word before, so I know how many letters it contains. This is a benefit to my sport, because the observer thinks either the observed can count very fast, or the observed, otherwise known as me, doesn’t have to count at all.

The thing about it all is this: My gift isn’t limited to numbers or letters. I’ll find myself breathing the syllables of a phrase from my mouth, and hoping they add up to a total equal to a multiple of five or ten. This is where I imagine that this may, in fact, be Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I will change the ampersand in to “A-N-D” to help the cause, or I’ll add spaces. And I will sometimes get nervous if I cannot somehow get it to equal a digit of five or ten, or I will get anxious if I feel like I can count a phrase, and I am un able to because I am in a hurry. This is the way my ability takes a turn on me, stabs me fiendishly in the back. Bleeding. 8.

I’m beginning to control it not. Not that I wasn’t in control of it before. Not like I wasn’t able to drive down a street without counting every single letter that my eyes laid upon. Not that I couldn’t walk down a hallway after classes got out and not calculate every letter of every shirt that brushed by mine. It’s just there.

The same that we’re all just here. Just going through the motions and living our normal lives, keeping our secrets, hiding our talents, then exposing them, reading our stories, then writing our own for no reason at all. We all have these talents, these buried truths. We hold these truths dear to us, and we want to show them. Our need to bleed them out of our fleshy, temporary souls is natural, and necessary.

I have come to terms with this skill, and I am proud of it. I will never hide what I once kept locked in its cage. I am still eager to illustrate my world to listeners, as I have displayed. And next time, I will not hesitate to expose a part of who I am.

Paper 2 FINAL

Word Count (sec. I and III): 1,151

I.

Ahhh, style. Man, what the hell is style? To you? I mean, it all depends on whatchu like to do when you’re writing. I mean, like…if everyone wrote the way they talk in like…casual conversation, we’d all look like a bunch of idiots, ya know? Like, no “scholarly” proof that we like…have a brain. Or have ever read a book. Man, wouldn’t that be nice, huh? If we didn’t all have to pretend we were smart when we were writing. Where was I going with this? OH!...style. Yea, I mean, do you think it is like…how you say stuff? Or the stuff you actually say that makes it like…your style? I dunno man. It’s tough.

The paragraph above is a style that many people sometimes use verbally, not because they are stupid or unscholarly, but it’s just the way they have learned to speak. However, no one really writes the way they actually speak (unless they speak like they write, which is more formal).

You can look at this paragraph two different ways. One way would be the content. The content of this particular paragraph is just asking what style actually is; whether it is content or voice. The other way you can look at it is the voice that comes through in the paragraph. In other words, the way the writer comes through using the writing techniques he/she has learned. Now, what makes style? Well, going off of this slang, word-vomit of a paragraph, I think style comes much more from the writer’s voice.

The paragraph at the top of this page has been written dozens upon dozens of times in the history of literature, at least when it comes to the content. The voice though, is a different story. Some may argue that he is pushing his style through the content of the paragraph, but I argue that this content has all been heard before. I would also argue that, in changing the voice of another piece of writing, you can never truly keep the same content. You are always changing the content, even ever so slightly, if you change the style of writing.

As an exercise, I will try to imitate a piece of writing from Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Truth, and I will attempt to keep the same content while changing the style to that of my own (and I promise, it won’t be like the first paragraph). I can already predict that the content will come across differently for different readers since the style has changed.

II. Because of this, all societies must respect the truth. However, societies cannot just know that truth and lies are there. They have to promote the findings of truth, as well as letting the truth be known. No matter what one individual may gain from bullshitting, societies must keep a strong barrier between truth and lies. They must also keep in mind that being “true to yourself” is less important than keeping hold of the facts. That is the true downfall of an orderly society.

Any society that partakes in any of these wrongdoings, they can just call it quits as a society. The society will not be able to move forward at all, or attain any kind of accomplishment. It has never been possible for a society to achieve greatness with its foundation built upon lies. The same goes for erroneous trust in a belief. For a real society to work, we need to not be manipulated by lies. The society must always be certain of the truth, as well as abide by it.

III. Going into this Frankfurt imitation, I thought that it would be very difficult to try and restate the passage without taking away from its actual content. During the imitation, I read the whole passage a few times through, tried to summarize it to myself a few times, and come up with a basic understanding of the passage. After that, I went through and read each sentence and pretended that I was explaining it to a friend who was unaware of the topic. This meant that I first had to break down a few of the more difficult words or sentences, and then re-word them to make sense to the laymen. This was extremely helpful for me for a few reasons.

While first trying to imitate the piece, I found myself trying to change just a few words, so as to match my style. I found out that this didn’t match my style at all. Instead, I found that I was just trying to keep away from Frankfurt’s style. So, when I tried restating the entire sentence to myself, It was a lot easier to come up with an understanding of the sentence, while also using my own style.

After I came up with a basic knowledge of the piece, it was a lot easier to come up with my own style of writing it, while also keeping with the general topic.

On the other hand, there were a few instances where my translation was a bit different than the original. For example, an original sentence was “Civilizations have never gotten along healthily, and cannot get along healthily, without large quantities of reliable factual information.” My translation was “It has never been possible for a society to achieve greatness with its foundation built upon lies.” My passage concentrates mainly on the past, and that it “has never been possible,” but it does not suggest that it never can happen later in the future.

I can see this as being somewhat of a problem, because the reader may think that there is a possibility in the future of a society that functions without truth. This, however, only further solidifies my predictions before I started the translation: “the content will come across differently for different readers since the style has changed.” It is possible the reader can view this passage differently because I have changed the style. Overall though, I think the content of the writing was maintained throughout the translation and just because I changed the style of the writing a bit, the idea was still presented.

So, I suppose that my predictions were not all that accurate. I argued that when changing the voice of a passage, you can never really keep the content. I have come to find that, yes, you can keep the same content for the most part. Though it will never be truly the same content, the message is still present. For my own translation, I will change the voice of the first paragraph to something that could represent a voice of my own.

Translation of first paragraph:

What is style to you? I suppose it depends on how you write. Some say that you write differently than you speak, in a way that makes you sound more educated. But what is the real question at hand? Is the concept of style centered on the content? Or is it based off the voice portrayed in the paper?

Did you get the same core concept of the passage? Or did you perceive it completely different than the first paragraph, simply due to a change of style? I suppose I would say that both accounts could be true, but I would also say that it is very difficult to have your own style simply from different content.

I think that voice in a paper is so important that, no matter how subtle, your voice can change everything. When a reader reads a piece of work, they are in a way listening to the author speaking. So if the reader can distinguish a change in voice, especially in writing, it is a very important trait to use that quality of voice in your writing. I mean, would you rather listen to me speak through the pages, giving you my voice in every sentence? Or would you rather read a blob of letters strung together, using some dead white guy’s voice?

]]> http://kblax23.edublogs.org/2008/12/08/paper-2-final/feed/ 0 http://kblax23.edublogs.org/2008/12/08/paper-2-draft/ http://kblax23.edublogs.org/2008/12/08/paper-2-draft/#comments Tue, 09 Dec 2008 04:19:15 +0000 kblax23 http://kblax23.edublogs.org/?p=14 Kyle Boyd

Paper 2 draft

Word Count (sec. I and III): 1,023

I.

Ahhh, style. Man, what the hell is style? To you? I mean, it all depends on whatchu like to do when you’re writing. I mean, like…if everyone wrote the way they talk in like…casual conversation, we’d all look like a bunch of idiots, ya know? Like, no “scholarly” proof that we like…have a brain. Or have ever read a book. Man, wouldn’t that be nice, huh? If we didn’t all have to pretend we were smart when we were writing. Where was I going with this? OH!...style. Yea, I mean, do you think it is like…how you say stuff? Or the stuff you actually say that makes it like…your style? I dunno man. It’s tough.

The paragraph above is a style that many people sometimes use verbally, not because they are stupid or unscholarly, but it’s just the way they have been fabricated to speak. However, no one really writes the way they actually speak (unless they speak like they write, which is more formal). Now, You can look at this paragraph two different ways. One way would be the content. The content of this particular paragraph is just asking what style actually is; whether it is content or voice. The other way you can look at it is the voice that comes through in the paragraph. In other words, the way the writer comes through using the writing techniques he/she has learned. Now, what makes style? Well, going off of this slang, word-vomit of a paragraph, I think style comes much more from the writer’s voice.

This paragraph has been written dozens upon dozens of times in the history of literature, at least when it comes to the content. The voice though, is a different story. Some may argue that he is pushing his style through the content of the paragraph, but I argue that this content has all been heard before. I would also argue that, in changing the voice of another piece of writing, you can never truly keep the same content. You are always changing the content, even ever so slightly, if you change the style of writing.

As an exercise, I will try to imitate a piece of writing from Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Truth, and I will attempt to keep the same content while changing the style to that of my own (and I promise, it won’t be like the first paragraph). I can already predict that the content will come across differently for different readers since the style has changed.

II. Because of this, all societies must respect the truth. However, societies cannot just know that truth and lies are there. They have to promote the findings of truth, as well as letting the truth be known. No matter what one individual may gain from bullshitting, societies must keep a strong barrier between truth and lies. They must also keep in mind that being “true to yourself” is less important than keeping hold of the facts. That is the true downfall of an orderly society.

Any society that partakes in any of these wrongdoings, they can just call it quits as a society. The society will not be able to move forward at all, or attain any kind of accomplishment. It has never been possible for a society to achieve greatness with its foundation built upon lies. The same goes for erroneous trust in a belief. For a real society to work, we need to not be manipulated by lies. The society must always be certain of the truth, as well as abide by it.

III. Going into this Frankfurt imitation, I thought that it would be very difficult to try and restate the passage without taking away from its actual content. During the imitation, I read the whole passage a few times through, tried to summarize it to myself a few times, and come up with a basic understanding of the passage. After that, I went through and read each sentence and pretended that I was explaining it to a friend who was unaware of the topic. This meant that I first had to break down a few of the more difficult words or sentences, and then re-word them to make sense to the laymen. This was extremely helpful for me for a few reasons.

While first trying to imitate the piece, I found myself trying to change just a few words, so as to match my style. I found out that this didn’t match my style at all. Instead, I found that I was just trying to keep away from Frankfurt’s style. So, when I tried restating the entire sentence to myself, It was a lot easier to come up with an understanding of the sentence, while also using my own style.

After I came up with a basic knowledge of the piece, it was a lot easier to come up with my own style of writing it, while also keeping with the general topic.

On the other hand, there were a few instances where my translation was a bit different than the original. For example, an original sentence was “Civilizations have never gotten along healthily, and cannot get along healthily, without large quantities of reliable factual information.” My translation was “It has never been possible for a society to achieve greatness with its foundation built upon lies.” My passage concentrates mainly on the past, and that it “has never been possible,” but it does not suggest that it never can happen later in the future.

I can see this as being somewhat of a problem, because the reader may think that there is a possibility in the future of a society that functions without truth. This, however, only further solidifies my predictions before I started the translation: “the content will come across differently for different readers since the style has changed.” It is possible the reader can view this passage differently because I have changed the style. Overall though, I think the content of the writing was maintained throughout the translation and just because I changed the style of the writing a bit, the idea was still presented.

So, I suppose that my predictions were not all that accurate. I argued that when changing the voice of a passage, you can never really keep the content. I have come to find that, yes, you can keep the same content for the most part. Though it will never be truly the same content, the message is still present. For my own translation, I will change the voice of the first paragraph to something that could represent a voice of my own.

Translation of first paragraph:

What is style to you? I suppose it depends on how you write. Some say that you write differently than you speak, in a way that makes you sound more educated. But what is the real question at hand? Is the concept of style centered on the content? Or is it based off the voice portrayed in the paper?

Did you get the same core concept of the passage? Or did you perceive it completely different than the first paragraph, simply due to a change of style? I suppose I would say that both accounts could be true, but I would also say that it is very difficult to have your own style simply from different content.

I think that voice in a paper is so important that, no matter how subtle, your voice can change everything. When a reader reads a piece of work, they are in a way listening to the author speaking. So if the reader can distinguish a change in voice, especially in writing, it is a very important trait to use that quality of voice in your writing. I mean, would you rather listen to me speak through the pages, giving you my voice in every sentence? Or would you rather read a blob of letters strung together, using some dead white guy’s voice?

]]> http://kblax23.edublogs.org/2008/12/08/paper-2-draft/feed/ 0 http://kblax23.edublogs.org/2008/12/08/hooks-gates-response/ http://kblax23.edublogs.org/2008/12/08/hooks-gates-response/#comments Tue, 09 Dec 2008 04:14:05 +0000 kblax23 http://kblax23.edublogs.org/?p=13 Talking back is the what Bell Hooks described as "speaking as an equal to an authority figure." She explains how her elders never spoke freely like that, because they would get slapped. But Hooks describes how this is the age of talking back.

Gates speaks of "talking back" in a different sense. Henry Gates describes how he sometimes is not fond of being an African American, and the attitudes of other African Americans. In a way, he is talking back to his own culture. He sometimes does not feel proud to be a part of a large minority group like that. I can see where he is coming from, because I can imagine a time that I wasn't proud to be a part of my social groups.

I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary--to study, to learn some words. I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve my penmanship. It was sad. I couldn't even write in a straight line. It was both ideas together that moved me to request a dictionary along with some tablets and pencils from the Norfolk Prison Colony school.

I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary's pages. I'd never realized so many words existed! I didn't know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.

In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.

I believe it took me a day. Then aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I'd written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.

I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words--immensely proud to realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I'd written words that I never knew were in the world. Moreover, with little effort, I also could remember what many of those words meant. I reviewed the words whose meanings I didn't remember. Funny thing, from the dictionary first page right now, that "aardvark" springs to mind. The dictionary had a picture of it, a long-tailed, long-eared, burrowing African mammal, which lives off termites caught by sticking out its tongue as an anteater does for ants.

I was so fascinated that I went on--I copied the dictionary's next page. And the same experience came when I studied that. With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally the dictionary's A section had filled a whole tablet--ad I went on into the B's. That was the way I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary. . . . Between what I wrote in my tablet, and writing letters, during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words.

Elbow - writer

Bart- reader

For starters, I will come out and say that I believe in evolution…evolution as in the way that anything can evolve over time. And I think the evolution of language, including the process of writing in general, has been one of the largest changes over the course of history.

Ever since the origin of language (which God only knows when it began), people have been finding different ways to communicate, creating more practical ways to correspond with one another. The way that scholars would look back and try to improve communication tactics is a way that those people would build off of a foundation that was already set for them. Even the most legendary writers of all time (including Homer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Charles Dickens, and Walt Whitman), at one point in their writing careers had to be influenced by some writer before them, whether it be a teacher, a relative, or simply stories from the Bible. These legendary writers did not become legendary because they were somehow able to write without their outlook being blocked by a world view. However, through past experiences in their own life, they could construe the methods they were taught to be written in a way that was significant to them.

I am a poet, and I like to think that the pieces I write are personal and independent to me, mostly because they would otherwise seem “cliché”(which, it feels cliché to use the word ‘cliché’ in the first place). I still know, however, that my writing is strongly influenced by teachers, friends, and students alike, the most influential being a literature teacher named Lisa Zimmerman at the University of Northern Colorado. She resolved my problem of writers block when she told me to be a writer, and then be an editor.

Nearly every day in class she would construct the “In-Class Writing Exercises”, which anyone who has taken an English class before knows how they work. We would write, listen to other peoples’ writing, and read ours aloud. We would read our short drafts, and she would read a piece that was already published in a book. These exercises were one of the defining establishments of my style of writing.

It was not until Zimmerman’s class that I was truly captivated by poetry and its ability to “take off the top of your heads”, as she liked to put it. She would pull out poetry from Eric Nelson, Chris Abani, Sylvia Plath, or even a poem from a student 3 years ago, and read it with such delicacy that placed images in front of us, using only words. I strived to write like Abani, and I actually wished to someday be exactly like him. He was living my dream: travel the country and read your poetry at meetings designed specifically for him. My need to be Chris Abani, or even Lisa Zimmerman, eventually made me strive to become a better, more creative, and more independent writer.

She taught in a way that made you want to go read the dictionary just so you could find the perfect word to complete that captivating image. I can honestly say that there is not one piece of writing of mine that was not manipulated by either her or the students around me.

Zimmerman showed us how poetry has evolved since the middle ages, up to the early twentieth century, to modern day. She showed us how to take our life’s experiences, couple them with the practices we have been taught, and turn it into a piece of art. She also taught us to free write and take bits and pieces of that and put them in a “folder” to put in a poem later.

That being said, I now feel that I am, at the very least, a moderate writer in the academy, as well as at my leisure. I do appreciate the way she taught us to do certain things. She did teach us to break the rules sometimes, and that put a certain spark in my writing that made me feel like I was being…fresh. I knew that I wasn’t the only person to ever write a poem about walking around campus in the rain. I felt anew in writing this piece, however, because it was about my personal experience of walking in the rain, half hung over, hiding under a tree for “poncho service”.

Although Bartholomae says that there can ultimately be no original thought, I think the way you use your lessons and the way you choose to write is enough to make you a good writer, or even an original writer. I personally feel that there really is nothing purely original in your life. Ever since we are taught to talk as infants, we are being learned to do something that someone else came up with. On that note, I think the teachings in the academy should stay just as they are. The knowledge we acquire as children is important to become successful writers in today’s society, and I find no problem with writing off of someone else’s “original” idea.

I have learned to write poetry, as well as prose, based off of the English language, the art of modern literature, Zimmerman’s teachings, and other sources or inspiration. I have since learned to write genuinely based off my past experiences. I know the pieces I write are not completely original, but I know that from the life I have led so far, as well as the teachings I have been taught, I can be fresh. If I can only do that, I will be happy with stealing some dead white guy’s ideas. Besides, everyone steals from the man who invented language.

“On the backside”

By: Kyle Boyd

This sidewalk is lonely

except on days like today

when the rain keep it company

with its hugging puddles.

Dips in the concrete make it so.

And I, too, will visit today, these

grey squares. But I swerve

to miss the puddles, for my

shoes are new, and leather does not repel.

I walked out of the building with

no goal, except to stagger, half hung over

in the most rain we’ve had in weeks.

Yet, my hood is heavier from wet drips,

so I circle the building, only once,

to visit the lonely cracks

on the backside, and then find a

tree for poncho service.

It drips more on my hood than before,

scraping leaves as the drops pile

higher and higher on my hood.

My coffee tastes of rain water today,

a refreshing bite on the lips.

I wore holes in my sheets, tossing in an attempt to bring ease to my brain. My thoughts were still fluttering, wide awake. I tried to cradle them in my arms, lull them to sleep. It always interested me that I couldn’t remember the last moment of conscious thought right before I danced in dreamland. I often spent ten to thirty minutes lying swallowed whole in my tiny sack, drifting not into sleep, but rather into previous thoughts or events of my life. I knew I wasn’t the only ten-year-old who didn’t go to sleep right away, but I also knew there was something else to it.

There is no one event, no horrible memory, no tall tale that tells of how I became who I am now. I have picked up the story over time. And I can’t explain why, but it doesn’t seem odd to me that I count. I have to count. I won’t say that I can’t go a day without counting, but I just don’t. It’s the constant adding of anything that can be summed. It’s not Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and it’s not Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), though I have often referred to it as such. This is not a fixation. It just started happening.

At twenty, I don’t remember my life without addition. It started with phone numbers, billboards, television ads, license plates, tiles on the floor, or anything with multiple digits. The gates lifted, and my brain was off to the races, completing the work of a second grader. But it was a bit more subterranean than simple arithmetic.

I felt comfort in my ability -- so much that I extended my repertoire to counting letters in words, phrases, or even sentences. If I had a lot of time, such as a long car ride on the highway, I would contemplate license plates and assign each letter a specific numerical value. A equaled 1, H equaled 8, U equaled 21, and so forth. That way, license plates could be better summed up.

I wanted people to know. I wanted nothing more than to share this gift with my friends and/or strangers I would meet. Every so often, I’d be in a car, or in a room that was full of witnesses. I would see the phone number on the billboard, television ad, or poster. 1-800-435-9225. I go over the numbers in my head, grouping them to make the math easier and faster for my response. Quickly, the numbers are added, and then the response.

“Thirty nine”, I would say quietly, but with enough volume to be heard that I meant business.

“Huh?”

“Nothing”, I would say, still somewhat covert in my operations. Maybe even a bit mortified of my “problem.” This was no problem. This was, and still is, who I am.

++++++

I think the first person I ever told was my girlfriend, Melanie. She understood me. She understood why I liked poetry, and why I listened to death metal, and why I wore ugly sweaters from thrift stores. She knew I wasn’t normal. When the time came to tell her, she challenged me. I was obviously up for the challenge.

“How many letters are on my shirt?” she asked, shielding her chest after a brief moment of examination. I didn’t need that moment. Her shirt read “Air Academy Lacrosse,” a phrase I had been calculating for the past four years, through Junior Varsity, three different coaches, and state playoffs. Without hesitation, I looked up and said “Eighteen.” She looked down at the sweatshirt that she had been tugging on to eliminate creases. She counted aloud as her finger bounced from letter to letter like a small red ball in a children’s song on television. When she found out I was right, she acted impressed, and I played the modest card.

“I’ve been doing it since I can remember.”

(35, including punctuation and quotes)

++++++

So my secret was out. Everywhere we went, she tested me in front of my spectators. It wasn’t long until most everyone I had some kind of relationship with knew about my gift. They all tried their best to thwart me, but my skills were much too hearty for their tests. Whether it involved shirts, words, phrases, or tiles on the floor, I was relentless in my efforts. The occasional smart-asses would ask an absurd question that not even I could answer, and they knew it. So, I outmaneuvered them, and found out for myself.

“Ok, ok. How many letters are in supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?” they would ask, knowing they had prevailed. “Oh, you silly, silly person,” I would think. All those who have attempted to stump me have tried this word, and they, too, were surprised by my reply.

“Thirty four” I utter with pride as their grins turn to baffled stares.

And that soon became my definitive goal: to make people think I was Rain man, essentially, though I did not actually try to be Rain Man. Rain Man was a movie made in 1988 about an autistic savant that could count the most ridiculous of sequences, such as toothpicks that spilled on the ground, etc.

I have a photographic memory in the sense that I can glance at a word, and odds are I have calculated that word before, so I know how many letters it contains. This is a benefit to my sport, because the observer thinks either I, the observed, can count very fast, or I don’t have to count at all.

It is almost like the letters and syllables are a different language to me. The letters have a connection with numbers, and they all meet in my thoughts.

It soon became not just limited to numbers or letters. I would find myself breathing the syllables of a phrase from my mouth, and hoping that the syllables add up to a total equal to a multiple of five or ten. I will sometimes get nervous if I cannot somehow get it to equal a digit of five or ten, or I will get anxious if I feel like I can count a phrase, and I am un able to because I am in a hurry. This is where I imagine that I actually do have OCD. This is the way my ability takes a turn on me, stabs me fiendishly in the back. Bleeding.

Eight.

It still always happens without letting me know. I am not able to drive down a street without counting every single letter that my eyes laid upon. I can’t walk down a hallway after classes got out and not calculate every letter of every shirt that brushed by mine. I don’t seem to mind because it has no effect on me. It has no actual impact on the life that I live outside of numbers.

There is not some kind of profound impact that this has had on my life. There is not one single event that stood out in my memory and made my life different from that moment on, or changed my life forever. But then again, I have a feeling that this isn’t just some phase. I think that this will be sitting on my brain eternally. I will continue to toss and turn in my sleep, trying to dance in dreamland, counting anything and everything in my bedroom, once moreover. That’s the way it will stay, and I take comfort with it staying with me. The thought of adding forever is reassuring. Everyone has their quirks, and this is mine. This is what makes me.

I wore holes in my sheets, tossing in an attempt to bring ease to my brain. My thoughts were still fluttering, wide awake. I tried to cradle them in my arms, lull them to sleep. It always interested me that I couldn’t remember the last moment of conscious thought right before I danced in dreamland. But I often spent ten to thirty minutes lying swallowed whole in my tiny sack, drifting not into sleep, but rather into previous thoughts or events of my life. I knew I wasn’t the only ten-year-old who didn’t go to sleep right away, but I also knew there was something else to it.

There is no one event, no horrible memory, no tall tale that tells of how I became who I am now. I have picked up the story over time. And I can’t explain why, but it doesn’t seem odd to me that I count. I have to count. I won’t say that I can’t go a day without counting, but I just don’t. It’s not Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and it’s not Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), though I have often referred to it as such. This is not a fixation. It just started happening.

At twenty, I don’t remember my life without counting. It started with phone numbers, billboards, television ads, license plates, tiles on the floor, or anything with multiple digits. The gates lifted, and my brain was off to the races, completing the work of a second grader. But it was a bit more subterranean than simple arithmetic.

I felt comfort in my ability -- so much that I extended my repertoire to counting letters in words, phrases, or even sentences. (As I said before, I don’t remember when this all started.) If I had a lot of time, such as a long car ride on the highway, I would contemplate license plates and assign each letter a specific numerical value. A equaled 1, H equaled 8, U equaled 21, and so forth. That way, license plates could be better summed up.

I wanted people to know. I wanted nothing more than to share this gift with my friends and/or strangers I would meet. Every so often, I’d be in a car, or in a room that was full of witnesses. I would see the phone number on the billboard, television ad, or poster. 1-800-435-9225. I go over the numbers in my head, grouping them to make the math easier and faster for my response.

“Thirty nine”, I would say quietly, but with enough volume to be heard that I mean business.

“Huh?”

“Nothing”, I would say, still somewhat covert in my operations. Maybe even a bit mortified of my “problem.” This was no problem. This was, and still is, who I am.

++++++

I think the first person I ever told was my girlfriend, Melanie. She understood me. She understood why I liked poetry, and why I listened to death metal, and why I wore ugly sweaters from thrift stores. She knew I wasn’t normal. When I told her my secret, she tested me, and I was obviously up for the challenge.

“How many letters are on my shirt?” she asked, shielding her chest after a brief moment of examination. I didn’t need that moment. Her shirt read “Air Academy Lacrosse,” a phrase I had been calculating for the past four years, through Junior Varsity, three different coaches, and state playoffs. Without hesitation, I looked up and said “Eighteen.”

She looked down at the sweatshirt that she had been tugging on to eliminate creases. She counted aloud as her finger bounced from letter to letter like a small red ball in a children’s song on television. When she found out I was right, she acted impressed, and I played the modest card.

“I’ve been doing it since I can remember.”

(35, including punctuation and quotes)

++++++

So my secret was out. Everywhere we went, she tested me in front of my spectators. It wasn’t long until most everyone I had some kind of relationship with knew about my gift. They all tried their best to thwart me, but my skills were much too hearty for their tests. Whether it involved shirts, words, phrases, or tiles on the floor, I was relentless in my efforts. The occasional smart-asses would ask an absurd question that not even I could answer, and they knew it. So, I outmaneuvered them, and found out for myself.

“Ok, ok. How many letters are in supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?” they would ask, knowing they had prevailed. “Oh, you silly, silly person,” I would think. All those who have attempted to stump me have tried this word, and they, too, were surprised by my reply.

“Thirty four” I utter with pride as their grins turn to baffled stares.

And that soon became my definitive goal: to make people think I was Rain man, essentially, though I did not actually try to be Rain Man. Rain Man was a movie made in 1988 about an autistic savant that could count the most ridiculous of sequences, such as toothpicks that spilled on the ground, etc.

I have a photographic memory in the sense that I can glance at a word, and odds are, I have calculated that word before, so I know how many letters it contains. This is a benefit to my sport, because the observer thinks either I, the observed, can count very fast, or I don’t have to count at all.

It soon became not just limited to numbers or letters. I would find myself breathing the syllables of a phrase from my mouth, and hoping that the syllables add up to a total equal to a multiple of five or ten. I will change the ampersand (&) into “A-N-D” to help the cause, or add spaces in the phrase. I will sometimes get nervous if I cannot somehow get it to equal a digit of five or ten, or I will get anxious if I feel like I can count a phrase, and I am un able to because I am in a hurry. This is where I imagine that I actually do have OCD. This is the way my ability takes a turn on me, stabs me fiendishly in the back. Bleeding.

Eight.

It still always happens without letting me know. I am not able to drive down a street without counting every single letter that my eyes laid upon. I can’t walk down a hallway after classes got out and not calculate every letter of every shirt that brushed by mine. I don’t seem to mind because it has no effect on me. It has no actual impact on the life that I live outside of numbers.

There is not some kind of profound impact that this has had on my life. This is not one single event that stood out in my memory and made my life different from that moment on, or changed my life forever. But then again, I have a feeling that this isn’t just some phase. I think that this will be sitting on my brain eternally. I think I will continue to toss and turn in my sleep, trying to dance in dreamland, counting anything and everything in my bedroom, once moreover. That’s the way it will stay, and I take comfort with it staying with me.