I remember
thinking
I hope they put those fires out soon
it just keeps burning

I remember
Peter Jennings
his voice cracking, once,
as he said he’d called his children while the camera wasn’t on him
and you should, too

I remember
the crystal autumn sky
the black smear along the horizon
that used to be
the World Trade Center

I remember
the empty sky
the silent empty sky
I never saw or heard before
and never saw or heard again

I remember
no commercials
no shows
only people
talking
trying to understand

I remember
Is your family OK?
Is your company OK?
Is everyone you know OK?
Are you OK?
OK
OK

I remember
the fragility
the stripped-naked truth that
it could have been any of us
it could have been all of us
it was all of us
we were all attacked
we were all the target
we all stood in the crosshairs together
so
what did our differences matter anymore?
How could we not be
one people
forevermore?
With such
unity
identity
empathy
how could we not become a better world?

I remember
the moral imperative of a five-year-old
when we wrote a card to the local Islamic Society
with a message of peace and support
and our son asked to write his own
and he wrote

We should all hold hands because our hearts are full of love.

I hate to disappoint an audience—particularly an audience larger than I’ve ever had in my life—so I’ll write something worthwhile. Might take a few days before I really have the time. Meanwhile, I’ll still be on Twitter.

This is pretty amazing and fun.

Subject: Hello! Can I ask you to read the letter?

I saw you during tour through resource and got my mouth water?

Wow, I didn’t think anyone saw me on my tour through resource. No, I didn’t get your mouth water. Did you send it to my office?

Yeah, it is absolutely truth that I felt in love with u from the first look.

Are you synesthetic? I know someone who attributes personalities to numbers, too.

Usually I am not writing or calling males first but some stuff happened to me when I saw u.

Sounds like some intense synesthesia. I’m jealous!

Oh, my name is Kristie.

Oh!

Tell me about u.

I can tell you’re an enthusiast, but I’m really more fond of v. It’s more versatile. Which starts with v! See?

What’s about your free time?

I spend more of it parsing ambiguously-constructed sentences than you might expect.

What do you like?

Cake!

Which food do you prefer?

I must have missed the options. I confess I was totally absorbed in resource. So sorry.

But wait—I just answered that a moment ago, didn’t I! Ha!

Would you write me next day?;)

If what? :/

I gonna be available at 9 pm tomorrow. Looking forward about our conversation!

I…guess you are!

Okay!

I do not find this writing easy. It is difficult for me to translate the thoughts, the many thoughts that are all at the same time pushing at the door in my mind to get through first to be written, in time to capture them all accurately, coherently, and with the same train. It really is difficult.

Often I have wondered at the kids in my English classes who churn out essay after essay, often with consistent A grades, seemingly without effort, while I find it hard to even begin to think coherently about the topics. I wonder if they have something I’m missing. I think maybe they are more advanced than I. Certainly, I am academically not competent—after all, my grades are low, and recently dropped quite a bit. I am ranked 36 in a class of 120.

I also seem to be lacking something the others have in home life. I mean, I never hear anyone else complaining about how their fathers yell at them with a passion when they don’t do what they’re expected—because, it would seem, they do as they’re told! Is there something wrong with me? Apparently.

But then I have my SAT scores of 690 verbal and 750 math, 1440 total, which are phenomenal in comparison with everyone else’s scores. Nearly everyone else’s, that is. There are always the exceptions [...]

Am I an idiot savant? That’s a pretty ludicrous idea. I am very talented. I act (although, since I got into high school, I haven’t had a lead role at all—quite a shock after having the lead in every production in elementary school and the junior high), I do graphic work (which, for the yearbook, was twisted—an interesting case: I brought my design for the divider pages into class and showed it to Mrs. Comarato, who liked it but had a distinct air of disappointment, saying that it took away from the job of the Art and Layout editors), and I write (as I am doing now) fairly well, so I and others think.

For years the big phrase the schools have used to describe me has been “doesn’t live up to his potential.” Personally, I’m sick of that. It’s become a cliché, a kind of “we don’t really know what’s wrong, so we’ll just say this” catchphrase. I’ve found, however, that the schools haven’t been living up to their potential. That’s another story.

I lost my train of thought there, unfortunately. As I said, that happens when I don’t get the thoughts out fast enough.

[...]

Just read the part about school and found my train of thought again, ie:

…but they can’t be more advanced than I! Honestly, I am the highest-level thinker I know. I think all the time! I have an immense mind with immense capacity for thought, reflection, and innovation. I really don’t think I’m being narcissistic. I know myself, and I am very intelligent. It seems strange to accuse the world of interpreting me wrongly, but that would seem to be the case.

Something about this strikes me as deeply wrong, but I haven’t been able to articulate my discomfort.

During my family trip to Walt Disney World in late 2010, I had the great fortune to meet Zach, a Disney College Program Cast Member. He was working behind the counter at Cosmic Ray’s Starlight Café in Tomorrowland during that semester, but he was granted an extension for Spring 2011 and became a character performer. Zach has formidable experience in stagecraft, and he addresses the issue of these talking characters in a recent post on his blog:

• Time and Music: Talking Mickey Mouse?

Guests go into a character meet-and-greet knowing what they want to say, and get their answers from the characters by interpreting their gestures and “animation.” But what’s so great about those gestures is that they can be interpreted however the Guests want them to be interpreted. Why take away that power from the Guests and their imaginations?

Zach explains his perspective in detail, also noting that since park visitors come from around the world, the voiced characters may not be able to speak their language.

In the midst of this, Zach tells a story that illustrates the power of quiet attention:

During my four months as a character performer, I had a lot of truly great Guest interactions. One day working at Animal Kingdom, Goofy was at Camp Minnie-Mickey and was met by a teary-eyed mother. The mother explained to Goofy that her father had been taken to the hospital from the Park, but he was going to be okay and just needed to recover in the hospital. He wanted her and her son, his grandson, to enjoy the rest of their day in the Park instead of the hospital. But he had one request: that they go get a picture with Goofy, because Goofy is his favorite. She held back her tears, gave Goofy a big hug, and said “Goofy, you have no idea how much I needed that hug.”

Zach has a bright future. I hope it brings him back to Disney. I hope Disney listens.

Hearing someone recite a text is equivalent to reading for some people, I guess, but it very much isn’t for me.

Verbal input, whether I see it or hear it, triggers huge cascades of mental processing. I am prone to becoming immersed in those cascades: analyzing word roots, parsing the grammar, identifying more appropriate synonyms, feeling the scansion, relating the meaning to the immediate and overall narrative context and to everything else in my experience.

Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, describes Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect’s experience of being subjected to a Vogon poetry reading, strapped into “Poetry Appreciation chairs” with electrodes stuck to their temples:

These were attached to a battery of electronic equipment—imagery intensifiers, rhythmic modulators, alliterative residulators and simile dumpers—all designed to heighten the experience of the poem and make sure that not a single nuance of the poet’s thought was lost.

That’s what reading and listening are like for me, all the time.

When (or if) that cognitive bloom finishes playing itself out and my brain settles down enough to return me to my senses, I move on and take in the next bit of text—but if the text is being read to me, then I have already missed any number of words (sentences, paragraphs) that were spoken in the interim. Normal interpersonal conversation is light enough for me to keep up with, but really good dense prose just jams up in my ears.

Verbal communication is linear, but I do not comprehend it linearly. I can’t listen to audiobooks.

One minute later:

And two minutes after that:

Yeah.

His bright young mind was poisoned by a dogmatized rejection of common human dignity. He was molded into a conduit of hate. By the time he was killed by his enemies, he had become a wellspring of that poison.

I mourn the loss of the helpful person that little boy could have become, of the profound gift his talents could have been to the world. But that loss was long ago.

My answer to this crime, this cancer of the human spirit, this turning of life against itself, is a plan I have been executing for fifteen years.

I am raising my sons to be good people.

Be always deeply grateful for your good fortune. It comes at great expense to people as real as you. They are not justly compensated.

Be kind and compassionate to others.

Customers don’t make decisions with their neocortex, an organ that is too easy to bullshit. They decide within deeper, comforting recesses, and they rationalize when the culture demands a seemingly logical, socially acceptable “post-planation.”