Ardentli.Net

It has been said that being an atheist in the United States today is akin to being homosexual fifty years ago in terms of prejudice and hatred toward our life-choice. Now, I’m not entirely sure I believe that wholeheartedly as I don’t know A) what it was like to be a homosexual back then, let alone today and B) I’ve never personally felt as though I’ve been under any sort of serious scrutiny because of my beliefs.

For those of you who don’t know, I am a de facto atheist which means I do not believe there is a god, but I do not declare to know without a shadow of a doubt that there is no god. Perhaps there is, perhaps there isn’t, but I strongly lean toward the later and quite honestly I don’t really care either way!

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I always feel like a jerk running into people who clearly recognize me from somewhere yet I can’t for the life of me remember who they are. This happens to me quite frequently and is always a source of incredible embarrassment. For those of you who don’t know (which I doubt many of you would unless you know me in real life), I suffer from a medium form of facial blindness or prosopagnosia. Basically this means I have a very great deal of difficulty remembering peoples’ faces.

I feel like this guy

I’ve had this disorder for as long as I can remember, but I didn’t really know it was actually a named disorder till a  year or two ago. I always just thought I wasn’t studying people enough to remember them or wasn’t very mindful of details. It bothers me greatly since I have problems remembering new people I’ve just met. I can remember all other details of a person such as their voice, the way they walk, their clothing, choice of perfume, etc., but for some reason I can’t remember things as simple as their hair color, facial features, or eye color. Even if I consciously sit there and tell myself, “I am going to remember what this person looks like!” I usually can’t recall their faces mere seconds after I’ve finished looking at them! I’ve sat around in restaurants “practicing” my visual memory on people only to find, frustratingly, that I can’t remember them no mater how hard I try to force my disfunctional brain to.

This isn’t to say that I don’t remember people I’ve met multiple times. I can clearly remember my parents’ faces, close friends, and teachers I’ve had all quarter. It just takes me an incredible amount of time to commit them to memory. My boyfriend and I joke about how when I met him I described him as “blonde and green-eyed” to a mutual friend when in fact he was a brunette with blue eyes. I have to spend a great deal of time with a person to remember them, but the  memories do eventually form unlike the severe forms of this disorder where a person can NEVER remember the faces of others; even their family! I remember watching a documentary on people with facial blindness and this one poor woman was so bad that she couldn’t recognize people at a skating rink she had worked with in the same office for 20+ years. Sad.

It’s not that I’m rude when I encounter people I met in class once, or at a get-together the night before. I always just joke I have tunnel vision and a bad memory, but it’s not necessarily that my memory is shot; it’s just you look like a stranger to me! This is incredibly embarrassing with things like interviewing. I interviewed a few weeks ago and I remember sitting for a whole HOUR with one interviewer and then 5 minutes later having trouble picking that person out of a crowd of people. I have trouble remembering HR hiring managers (veryyyyy bad when they say hello to you later and you go, “UhhhhH!?!”). It makes you seem air-headed and disinterested which is absolutely not the case.

It’s so freaking frustrating!

I just felt like sharing this since I’m sure you probably know someone who’s bad at remembering faces. Perhaps they have facial blindness like yours truly!

It’s amazing how incredibly attached I am to some things I use/eat on nearly a daily basis. These are eight lovely items I don’t think I could live (or at least function coherently) without:

1. BlackBerry – These are so rightfully named CrackBerries! I am pretty much addicted to the internet so having a portable, mini-browser traveling around with me all day is an absolute must. I’m surprised I lived this long with a regular cellphone. I bought a BB this summer in Boston and have been using it pretty much religiously since! I’d say my most used applications on it are WeatherEye (for checking the weather before I go out), the internet browser, UberTwitter, and this one application I use to check local movie listings. Of course I do the standard texting and phone calls, so having such a multi-functional device is awesome. It also makes for an awesome event reminder and alarm clock!
2. Medicated Chapstick – I use this daily. My lips dry out for some odd reason all the time regardless of how much I drink water so I use Chapstick even during the summer. By far the best lip balm I’ve found (and I’ve tried tons) is just regular Chapstick Medicated. The menthol in it just soothes me. I have about 2-3 Chapsticks with me at all times.
3. Laptop+Internet – I use it daily. I probably use it a little less thanks to my BlackBerry, but I enjoy surfing the net and keeping in touch with people online! I feel like computers have become to ubiquitous and outright necessary in our lives it would be odd NOT to list this.
4. iPod – I love listening to music when I work out. The right mood music just makes the time fly by and really pumps you up to burn those extra calories. <3
5. Micaiah/Diglett – My kitties! I really do love both of them to death! Pets are supposed to relieve stress and bring you joy and they most certainly do.
6. Popcorn – Ughhh, I have no idea why I love popcorn so much. I probably eat it every other day. I don’t like movie theater popcorn with butter on it. My favorite is butterless with salt. Tasty, tasty!
7. Facebook – I’ve used FB since it came out in 2004 and I was still a highschooler. This was back in the day where you could only register if you had a university email address so I had used my first college’s provided address to sign up. I check FB periodically as I enjoy keeping in touch with people I went to high school with (especially since I went to high school overseas and I live in a different country now). It’s nice to hear how successful everyone has become and how everyone has changed since graduation.
8. Video Games – I know that sounds kind of dorky, but I honestly love a good RPG! I liken them to really good fantasy books that are interactive. I’ve been a gamer since I was in first grade and here in my early twenties I see no sign of enjoying them any less as the years role on.

What are some things you can’t live without?

I’m at yet another point in my life that could be dubbed a “crossroad” or a point where my life will take a sharp turn in one direction or another. The end of summer is fast approaching and I will be returning back to college to finish my last two quarters of classes (my university does a quarter system – not a semester system).  As of September, I will have exactly 6 months left of classes and I will graduate with my BS in Information Technology at the end of February 2010.

I kind of dub that point as event horizon. It’s the point where all things including light my life as I now know it will get sucked into a minuscule little point the adult world. After that point I have no idea what I’ll be doing. I don’t really have any concrete plans at all. True I have a lot of ideas of what I’ll be doing, but none of them are set in stone and that kind of bugs me. Below are the current possibilities:

• Decide that, for now, IT is a terminal degree and get a full-time job in Rochester as a software developer. I could potentially be happy with this or I could be miserable since I can’t imagine myself in a cubicle for the next 30+ years.
• Work for 6 months full-time to get some more work experience and then enter the IT-MS program. It’d basically be free due to scholarships, but I can’t help but think this moronic since I’m not sure I want to be an IT professional forever as mentioned above.
• Work for 6 months and do volunteer work at hospitals/pet adoptions so I can send in my application for Physician Assistant school starting next fall. It’s very competitive and there’s no guarantee I’d get accepted anyway. The career change would be intense, the graduate school expensive, and who knows if I’d actually like health care more than programming anyway.
• Go the more professional route and apply for the 1 year MBA program. I do think it’d enhance my degree and give me a more cut-throat edge in the IT business world, but once again, meh.

Either way I know I want to stay local. My boyfriend still has 3 more years of college to finish his BS/MS+co-ops and I don’t think I’d be very happy with a long-distance relationship especially if I considered moving back to the DC metro area (which I’m not planning on since I really hate that place. Too freaking sweaty, boring architecture, rude people). If I decide on stopping my education in 6 months I’ll probably end up with a house and a dog within a year, which is a nice thought, but who knows if I’d be happy with that either.

Bleh, I envy my peers who know exactly what they want to do after graduation.

I was never a huge coffee drinker before starting to work full-time. I always thought it smelled awesome, but tasted like poo. Regardless I started to drink coffee daily just to keep me awake due to me never seeming to be smart enough to get a restful nights sleep on work nights. Two years later, I still think coffee tastes crappy, but here I am as I type this with a cup of free office coffee sitting and pondering if I have some sort of psychological association between coffee and the work place.

Why do people like coffee so much? Does it actually taste good to people? I always put a ton of creamer in it and sugar so it doesn’t taste like battery acid. Ugh, and coffee breath is the worst. I just don’t understand America’s fascination with this narsty drink.

And as much as I don’t understand it, here I am drinking it.