Dance for me, fandom! Dance!
Dec. 19th, 2011 02:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terajkThis didn't work, because now I want the Epic Story of How Ranma Taught Ryoga to Find the Cat Cafe, which is much easier/more fun than the Epic Story I am supposed to be writing. In case fandom wants to write me such a story, per melannen's idea here (bats eyelashes), perhaps you will find these thoughts helpful:
Most people who try to teach me to find places treat it like a tea party, when in fact it's more like we're doing our taxes. (Or, possibly, defusing a bomb.) So they keep trying to make small talk with me (because most people chit-chat when they're going somewhere together) when OMG I CANNOT SPARE THE BRAIN. I can get the brain by following them and not paying attention to where I am--which, you know, defeats the purpose of the whole exercise.
I don't think Ranma would act this way, as he is a teenage boy with lots of...unpleasant feelings. (In other words, talking about random crap like your feeeeeelings is pointless andpainful stupid.) Also, he is a martial artist; he's learned all kinds of difficult moves, and I can see him TOTALLY approaching this like teaching Ryoga any kind of martial art. Especially because it's usually Ryoga showing him things.
But! It is a long, repetitive process! The very first place I learned to get to consistently, I made my mom take me once or twice a day for several weeks. Ranma would get SO BORED, internet, it would be fabulous. (Perhaps fighting Mousse and Shampoo would help.) Also, a lot of times, I will seem to learn something one day and totally forget the next. My brain also has the tendency to hold onto ways I went WRONG rather than ways I went CORRECTLY. So if I screw up going to a familiar place I've gone to a million times before I will keep going that exact wrong way the next time and the next until I get it out of my system. Ranma should have (hilarious) Feelings about ALL OF THIS.
He actually will learn that Ryoga's sense of direction is worse than he thought, because he actually has to engage with it directly. And Ryoga's sense of Things That Are Relevant about a Place are quite different than his. For instance, in the map he made to his house, he drew his own mailbox. Most people would not think their own mailbox is relevant, because every house has a mailbox. His maps in general have landmarks that are either larger than is useful to most people (like Mt. Fuji or France) or smaller (a red car). He doesn't relate these details to each other. I have no internal map; I have an internal "shopping list" of landmarks, instead. As in: "First I see this; then I see this; then I see this." (With this kind of thinking, your mailbox becomes Relevant, easily.) When I was seven years old, I could sometimes walk to school. (My mother followed me in the car, for the days I could not.) My very favorite landmark, courtesy of helpful teenagers, was a big "FUCK YOU" written in the sidewalk. These shopping lists, BTW, can get quite long: as a kid I had 14 landmarks between my house and school, which was three blocks away.
Thus, a landmark can be personally relevant to me without being visually relevant. In high school, I called the house across the street The Amityville House because a) I watch a lot of old horror movies, and b) it went up for sale once every six months. (It was not actually haunted; people kept breaking into it.) I still think of it as The Amityville House. As you can imagine, I...run into problems when I have to tell people where I live. On the extremely rare occasion I give directions, I will say things like: "There's a [SOMETHING] somehow involved!" A college friend said it was like I was describing a crime scene.
And Ranma will have to work with this. He can be as "You are DOING THIS ALL WRONG DAMMIT BECAUSE YOU ARE WRONG STOP BEING WRONG" as he wants, but it won't accomplish anything. Ryoga doesn't think like he thinks. He will either have to give up entirely and admit defeat or attempt to figure this shit out. (And considering that he figured out the Shishi Hokodan on his own, as well as adapted it to his own skillset, I think he could totally do [some of] it.)
Now, while I love that Ryoga's impairment doesn't have a diagnosis/special name (see my thoughts on NT experts, please), there are, nevertheless, medical frameworks that might be helpful. My neuropsychiatric diagnosis is nonverbal learning disorder; it's a very broad syndrome with different parts that affect math skills and motor skills and social skills and executive function and sensory processing things. In my case, the navigational piece (part of what the literature calls "visual-spatial skills," which in my opinion is an incredibly misleading term that lumps together two broad categories of skillsets that INTERACT rather than being all that related, but whatever) is what sticks out. It is the thing that makes strangers act like creepers and made some occupational therapists say, "Oh, my God, that IS bad!" when they observed me navigating my college campus. (I don't know what they were talking about; I did awesome and didn't even get lost. While it would've hurt Ryoga's feelings, after being shocked that they were shocked I thought it was lolarious, because their job was actually to teach people proper social skills).
Also in my case, there is some right parietal lobe funkiness. One of the things the right parietal lobe does is make internal maps: of where you are in space, and of where your body parts are. My left side is about 40 percent weaker than my right, because my brain doesn't naturally "find" it very well. There are muscles it doesn't feel; I hold my left arm close to my body so it's touching my ribs, because if it's physically touching something I know where it is.
But spatial navigation, like many skills, relies on a complex web of neurological processes. There are lots of parts of the brain that play a role in it. As similar as Ryoga and I are--even down to perceptual things--and as much as I give the side-eye to non-disabled people's classifications of people with disabilities, his impairment probably has a different neurological basis than mine. For one thing, there is very little canonical evidence that he has most of my syndrome. His Amazing Social Skills may be evidence, although it is more likely he was literally raised by wolves. (Although, no one in Ranma 1/2 has stellar social skills.) Also, bizarrely, his command of language. But there is also developmental tophographagnosia, which you can find more about here.
Wow, that is some hardcore procrastination right there.
melannen's idea here (bats eyelashes), perhaps you will find these thoughts helpful:Most people who try to teach me to find places treat it like a tea party, when in fact it's more like we're doing our taxes. (Or, possibly, defusing a bomb.) So they keep trying to make small talk with me (because most people chit-chat when they're going somewhere together) when OMG I CANNOT SPARE THE BRAIN. I can get the brain by following them and not paying attention to where I am--which, you know, defeats the purpose of the whole exercise.
I don't think Ranma would act this way, as he is a teenage boy with lots of...unpleasant feelings. (In other words, talking about random crap like your feeeeeelings is pointless and
But! It is a long, repetitive process! The very first place I learned to get to consistently, I made my mom take me once or twice a day for several weeks. Ranma would get SO BORED, internet, it would be fabulous. (Perhaps fighting Mousse and Shampoo would help.) Also, a lot of times, I will seem to learn something one day and totally forget the next. My brain also has the tendency to hold onto ways I went WRONG rather than ways I went CORRECTLY. So if I screw up going to a familiar place I've gone to a million times before I will keep going that exact wrong way the next time and the next until I get it out of my system. Ranma should have (hilarious) Feelings about ALL OF THIS.
He actually will learn that Ryoga's sense of direction is worse than he thought, because he actually has to engage with it directly. And Ryoga's sense of Things That Are Relevant about a Place are quite different than his. For instance, in the map he made to his house, he drew his own mailbox. Most people would not think their own mailbox is relevant, because every house has a mailbox. His maps in general have landmarks that are either larger than is useful to most people (like Mt. Fuji or France) or smaller (a red car). He doesn't relate these details to each other. I have no internal map; I have an internal "shopping list" of landmarks, instead. As in: "First I see this; then I see this; then I see this." (With this kind of thinking, your mailbox becomes Relevant, easily.) When I was seven years old, I could sometimes walk to school. (My mother followed me in the car, for the days I could not.) My very favorite landmark, courtesy of helpful teenagers, was a big "FUCK YOU" written in the sidewalk. These shopping lists, BTW, can get quite long: as a kid I had 14 landmarks between my house and school, which was three blocks away.
Thus, a landmark can be personally relevant to me without being visually relevant. In high school, I called the house across the street The Amityville House because a) I watch a lot of old horror movies, and b) it went up for sale once every six months. (It was not actually haunted; people kept breaking into it.) I still think of it as The Amityville House. As you can imagine, I...run into problems when I have to tell people where I live. On the extremely rare occasion I give directions, I will say things like: "There's a [SOMETHING] somehow involved!" A college friend said it was like I was describing a crime scene.
And Ranma will have to work with this. He can be as "You are DOING THIS ALL WRONG DAMMIT BECAUSE YOU ARE WRONG STOP BEING WRONG" as he wants, but it won't accomplish anything. Ryoga doesn't think like he thinks. He will either have to give up entirely and admit defeat or attempt to figure this shit out. (And considering that he figured out the Shishi Hokodan on his own, as well as adapted it to his own skillset, I think he could totally do [some of] it.)
Now, while I love that Ryoga's impairment doesn't have a diagnosis/special name (see my thoughts on NT experts, please), there are, nevertheless, medical frameworks that might be helpful. My neuropsychiatric diagnosis is nonverbal learning disorder; it's a very broad syndrome with different parts that affect math skills and motor skills and social skills and executive function and sensory processing things. In my case, the navigational piece (part of what the literature calls "visual-spatial skills," which in my opinion is an incredibly misleading term that lumps together two broad categories of skillsets that INTERACT rather than being all that related, but whatever) is what sticks out. It is the thing that makes strangers act like creepers and made some occupational therapists say, "Oh, my God, that IS bad!" when they observed me navigating my college campus. (I don't know what they were talking about; I did awesome and didn't even get lost. While it would've hurt Ryoga's feelings, after being shocked that they were shocked I thought it was lolarious, because their job was actually to teach people proper social skills).
Also in my case, there is some right parietal lobe funkiness. One of the things the right parietal lobe does is make internal maps: of where you are in space, and of where your body parts are. My left side is about 40 percent weaker than my right, because my brain doesn't naturally "find" it very well. There are muscles it doesn't feel; I hold my left arm close to my body so it's touching my ribs, because if it's physically touching something I know where it is.
But spatial navigation, like many skills, relies on a complex web of neurological processes. There are lots of parts of the brain that play a role in it. As similar as Ryoga and I are--even down to perceptual things--and as much as I give the side-eye to non-disabled people's classifications of people with disabilities, his impairment probably has a different neurological basis than mine. For one thing, there is very little canonical evidence that he has most of my syndrome. His Amazing Social Skills may be evidence, although it is more likely he was literally raised by wolves. (Although, no one in Ranma 1/2 has stellar social skills.) Also, bizarrely, his command of language. But there is also developmental tophographagnosia, which you can find more about here.
Wow, that is some hardcore procrastination right there.
