List Time Part 2

by Ruby
(Cary NC)

Part 2

I'm a little ambidextrous. Both my brother and I started out left-handed as babies and our father taught us firmly to be right-handed, which worked, mostly. I cannot tell time on a regular clock. I am very slow and methodical with housework or work tasks, often talking myself through aloud, because I have trouble prioritizing and with order of operations. It was at one time suggested that I was ODD when I was a kid because I had no respect for authority whatsoever. Doctors, teachers, I either liked them or I didn't, with no respect for their "position". I still don't like cops or anyone who immediately tries to talk down to me. I get very angry and insult the heck out of them. I cry easily and cried a lot as a kid. I threw tantrums at school, but never at home as my mother ignored them.

Third grade was the first year I wasn't forced physically, kicking and screaming, through the doorway on the first day of school, by my mother. I always hated school like poison. They would never let me go to the bathroom, and I already knew everything in every class despite being put ahead a year. It wasn't until high school I met my match in chemistry and higher algebra which I could not learn. The only thing I learned in all my years of school that I didn't know already was how to type. I was endlessly stubborn, literally unmovable except by force when my back was up. I still don't change my mind for anyone.

My father is just as stubborn, and both my parents have sudden raging tempers, much worse than me I think. His mother is OBVIOUSLY undiagnosed bipolar, and his father is an enabler to her (he's an Adult Child of Alcoholics). She thinks everyone else in the world is crazy but not herself.

I am very indecisive sometimes, and leave most major decisions to my husband, who makes good ones. Our biggest problems come from money management. Neither of us can balance a checkbook. I can keep track of bills very easily (I fall easily and well into rigid habit patterns) but if I do the budgeting he won't bring me receipts and doesn't remember what he bought or spent. So he does it, and I nag him about it. (He requests certain kinds of nagging, as I require sometimes to be bossed, so these are not bad things.) That way he is at least aware of the general situation.

When I did it all, he did not even know whether we were near the beginning or the end of the month without asking. He has a BFF who is a confirmed bachelor and lives nearby. They have been together since sixth grade and hang out a lot. His friend struggles with depression. My closest friend and I have only been together two years, but she and I get along fabulously. She is ADD and Asperger's. We are all genius IQ's, but the boys seem to have more of a chance of using them, partly because they are valued and validated as computer nerds with social skill issues, and girls are expected to be adept at social maneuvering. My friend is also a computer nerd, which I am not.

I am so bad with electronics it is notorious and I mostly don't even plug in or unplug anything in my house. I was in college for a while working on a degree in Latin and Greek, but it seemed pretty pointless. My motivation in most areas has to be struggled for. My mother says someone tried to give me a Rorschach blot test as a tiny girl and I didn't cooperate because the "whole" of any one blob only looked like a blob and I refused to look at just "part" of a blob and say what it resembled.

I still have to be wholly in favor of something, wholly in agreement with its aims, or I'm not doing it, period. Okay, I think that is all, which is probably too much, but it is a lot, don't you think? A lot of evidence for something. :)