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!

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.

I never thought I’d complain about this since I’ve always wanted a bigger chest, but… my boobs are too big! This stupid fitted tube-top black pencil dress I bought online fits perfectly at the hips, waist, etc, but my stupid boobage is about a freaking inch too big so I can’t zip up the zipper the last TWO INCHES. UGH. It was such a cute, sexy “little black dress” too!

Well, I am losing weight right now, so after I lose 5-10lbs I’m sure I’ll lose some chest width because boobs seem to be the first thing to go. I don’t understand though. It’s a medium and my chest is 32-33 inches and my bust is 36 inches. I should be wearing a medium and I’m sure a large would be too big and fall off my chest. Which could be awkward. Just a bit.

>:( Stupid dress.

(And for the record, my chest is of very average to a little on the small side. I was not blessed with lots of boobage)

I’ve been a blogger for a long time on and off since I was 12 years old (so a good decade now. Yeesh, I’m getting old.) and there are a few things I’ve noted over that time that can really make or break a blogging experience for me.

Ads, ads, ads. I know it's blogger, but seriously. I circled FOUR ads on the top of the page (not including bottom).

• I Am An ADD Child (not really). First off, I have a short, short attention span. The first time I visit a blog I give it about a 20 second rule. If it doesn’t catch my eye in that time, I move along to another site. So, a classy design is pretty much a must. It doesn’t have to be over the top, but any poorly designed, boring site will be passed over by me really fast. I also hate blogs that are “paid to blog” sites where every other entry is some sort of review. It’s annoying to read about your photography one day and then read about this new totally awesome household item with three random hyperlinks in it to the product.

This is actually not from a blog, but this is the size of the site's text and the color scheme.

• Typography is kind of a big deal. I can’t stand blogs that have very itsy, bitsy font or fonts that don’t have adequate line height between them. Another equally as awful blog attribute are those with crazy background patterns or designs and font colors on top that are illegible. They give me headaches. If I have to CTRL+ your page to read it, I probably won’t be coming back. It was really trendy a few years back for girl web designers to do these tiny fonts on top of over-the-top layouts. I’ve always been a fan of readability since that’s what people are coming to see.
• Blogging about boring things bores. A lot of people who have public blogs tend to blog about their daily life. Nothing wrong with that. The problem in it lies in the fact that most of your entries are terribly boring. They go something along the lines of: “Today I woke up at 10 and then I fed the dog. And then I decided that I was going to go outside, so I went outside, but it was hot so I went back inside and sat and watched tv for a couple hours. Then I went and made dinner and talked to my friend on the phone–” blah, blah, blah. It’s boring to read and no one cares! Unless I know you personally I find these types of blogs to be horrors to read. I’d much rather people pick the most interesting thing and blog on that, but as a golden rule only blog about things other people would find intresting.
• Walls of text are bad. Some bloggers tend to write monstrous paragraphs that give me migraines. I suppose this would go under typography, but I felt it deserved its own point because it drives me nuts. Be succinct and break your paragraphs up, please.
• Lacking personality. A lot of blogs lack any sense of personality. You’ll read their entries and get no sense of feel for the kind of person they are. Entries are dull, lifeless, and boring. These kinds of blogs I also tend to never read.