darkemeralds (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
darkemeralds) wrote2010-11-10 08:05 pm
darkemeralds) wrote2010-11-10 08:05 pm
Directionally challenged
I discovered this function on my new Android phone last night. Well, okay, my 14 year old nephew showed it to me:
You push a button and say, "Navigate to 1234 Southwest 5th Avenue."
And it tells you how to get there.
I know, I know: people who've had iPhones for years, or who have GPS in their car, are no longer impressed by this. And people who actually have a sense of direction could never, ever be as thrilled about it as I am.
But I have no sense of direction. It's a borderline handicap, a slight but very real disability, that carries all kinds of baggage: it's funny to people, it's goofy, it's "feminine," it's an allowable form of "stupidity" for an otherwise very bright, creative person. It's also annoying and incomprehensible to people who don't suffer from it. They think I'm just not trying. "Come on!" they'll say. "Just picture the route in your head!"
There's no picture there. On a good day, if I know that that's west over there (because the sun is setting or I can see the West Hills, or the Pacific Ocean or something obvious), then I can painstakingly work out that to the right of west is north, and to the right of that is east, and to the right of that is south, using the "Never Eat Shredded Wheat" trick. But I can't feel it, and even if I can see it, I'm unsure.
As a prosthetic aid, I have whole catalogs of street names and their sequence memorized from long residence in my hometown. Jefferson Street is south of Madison Street, so if I set out from Madison and come to Jefferson, I can deduce that I'm heading south. If I come to Salmon, on the other hand, I know I've gone north. I cannot sense directions. When I'm moving, I'm just heading forward. When I turn left, I'm still heading forward. That's all I've got.
I've burned a lot of calories and a lot of gasoline over the years correcting for this handicap.
So when I got in my car this morning and said to my phone, "Navigate to [XYZ Address in unfamiliar neighborhood]" and my phone talked to me, right in my ear, and said, "Head west on NE Beech Street and turn right on NE 11th Avenue," and kept telling me exactly when and where to turn--well, I'm not exaggerating when I say I felt like I'd been let out of a prison.
And when I got to where I was going and there was a Google Street View of the destination house right there on my phone screen looking exactly like reality, I wish I could describe the sense of safety and security it gave me.
When I think that I ever, ever ventured out without this tool, I am amazed at myself.
You push a button and say, "Navigate to 1234 Southwest 5th Avenue."
And it tells you how to get there.
I know, I know: people who've had iPhones for years, or who have GPS in their car, are no longer impressed by this. And people who actually have a sense of direction could never, ever be as thrilled about it as I am.
But I have no sense of direction. It's a borderline handicap, a slight but very real disability, that carries all kinds of baggage: it's funny to people, it's goofy, it's "feminine," it's an allowable form of "stupidity" for an otherwise very bright, creative person. It's also annoying and incomprehensible to people who don't suffer from it. They think I'm just not trying. "Come on!" they'll say. "Just picture the route in your head!"
There's no picture there. On a good day, if I know that that's west over there (because the sun is setting or I can see the West Hills, or the Pacific Ocean or something obvious), then I can painstakingly work out that to the right of west is north, and to the right of that is east, and to the right of that is south, using the "Never Eat Shredded Wheat" trick. But I can't feel it, and even if I can see it, I'm unsure.
As a prosthetic aid, I have whole catalogs of street names and their sequence memorized from long residence in my hometown. Jefferson Street is south of Madison Street, so if I set out from Madison and come to Jefferson, I can deduce that I'm heading south. If I come to Salmon, on the other hand, I know I've gone north. I cannot sense directions. When I'm moving, I'm just heading forward. When I turn left, I'm still heading forward. That's all I've got.
I've burned a lot of calories and a lot of gasoline over the years correcting for this handicap.
So when I got in my car this morning and said to my phone, "Navigate to [XYZ Address in unfamiliar neighborhood]" and my phone talked to me, right in my ear, and said, "Head west on NE Beech Street and turn right on NE 11th Avenue," and kept telling me exactly when and where to turn--well, I'm not exaggerating when I say I felt like I'd been let out of a prison.
And when I got to where I was going and there was a Google Street View of the destination house right there on my phone screen looking exactly like reality, I wish I could describe the sense of safety and security it gave me.
When I think that I ever, ever ventured out without this tool, I am amazed at myself.
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And THEN I could start looking for solutions like this awesome GPS function on my phone, and actually using it.
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And I think the thing I've struggled most with is the feeling that I'm living up to gender stereotyping. Even though my father has the same problem.
(You're left-handed? I think I've mentioned that I'm mixed-handed? I believe my handedness, or rather lack thereof, my spatial difficulties, and my brother's & father's dyslexia are all associated with the same quirk of brain architecture.)
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The counselor I've been visiting for work-related learning problems wondered yesterday if I might be slightly dyslexic. I don't think so, but there's something...something about visual-spatial perception that just doesn't work "normally" in my brain. I can't account for it by heredity--at least not in any direct way--and I'm impressed with the persistence of gender stereotyping in your situation, where two male family members had difficulties like yours, but in your case it tended to remain a gender-specific trait.
I was just googling "Never Eat Shredded Wheat" to see if there was a handy explanatory link (all the references I could find call it a mnemonic for remembering the compass points, and I became annoyed because [prejudice] who can't remember the names of the cardinal directions??? [/prejudice], and none explained the useful way in which, if you can figure out one direction and point at it with your right hand, you can turn towards the right and say the rest...::sigh::), and I came upon a British travel book by that title. The blurb said:
[The author] blames several factors for our collective cultural disorientation, including the fact that we're all in such a terrible rush to get somewhere that we no longer notice the journey (plus, of course, the infantilising effect of GPS and sat-nav).
Grrr. I don't want to get all up on some high horse of woe is me and my terrible handicap, but condemning GPS and sat-nav as "infantilising" does seem to come from the school of "you could do it if you tried, you lazy-minded loser."