Are there some things you just can't grasp?

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My list is pretty similar to most of the others.

Religion: I was raised in a secular home and went to a secular school so I was never exposed to religion first-hand. Until I was 7 for my "first communion" (not sure what it's called in english) and I still don't know what it was for, all I know is that I had to wear some white gown thing, a large wooden cross around my neck and spend what seemed like days to my 7 year old mind standing in a cold church.
I have also never had a "spiritual experience" whatever that means.

Gender roles: I don't understand why I have to be the provider, why I have to fix things when they break or why it's my responsibility to do DYI around the house. Thankfully this mindset is changing, but I still encounter it on an almost daily basis and I can not understand why this is the case.

Math and finances: Why do I have to keep every piece of paper that involves money indeffinately? I either paid or was paid, it's done, over, why can't I throw the paperwork in the bin?!

Imagination: If it's not real I can't see it, if I have no refferences of what is being specifically described in a book I can not know what it looks like. Every pretend game that I played as a child was rooted in what I had seen on TV or in comics.

Sports: On some level I understand the appeal of participating, I even have a vague concept on the entertainment factor of watching someone who's very good at something but why do people get so emotional over it? Moreso, why are athletes paid such ridiculous amounts when all they do is kick a ball around (for example)? It doesn't make sense!

That's all I can think to write now, everything else has been explained adequately by others.

No matter how many times anbuend explains it, I am unable to understand "below words". In one post she even included a painting that illustrates it. That painting gave me a little bit more understanding but I still don't really get it.

Politics
Algebra
Rules of Chess
Cooking instructions

That small talk crap like "How are you?" "How's the weather?" (If asked online, I understand because you have no idea what the weather is like over there)

The meaning of flirting and the difference between flirting and teasing

Human society. I mean obviously it works. Mostly. But WHY?! HOW?! The programmer in me is deeply offended that something that's so clearly A. was barely even planned at all, B. was poorly coded, C. had even worse documentation of why certain processes were being called and D. is running on what to me seem to be very clearly crazy people incapable of running much of anything - is actually working!! ! The whole thing shouldn't work! It makes no logical sense for it to work! I want to go through it's source code and find out how the heck this happened! I blame my programming classes. If things don't work that's fine, that's normal. It's when things work when they shouldn't that my sense of natural order is offended.

I feel the same way about the human body at times, but apparently trying to reverse engineer that is either seen as criminal if you're dealing with organs, or a crime against [deity of your choice] if dealing with DNA - so I try to not think about it too much. I still think the design is all wrong though. Also I'm not terribly good at driving one of these things, I think my copy is defective. It keeps bumping into things and failing to respond to controls properly. Contacting it's designer to lodge my complaint has also yielded no results, so I don't think invoking my warranty is going to work either. 2 stars only, would not repurchase.

I also can't seem to read financial bureaucratese. I can decipher most bureaucratese with enough time, but while I can handle my finances just fine while they're in normal language, once they're put into financial language I just go buh and start fantasizing about hunting down wild banker-beasts on my steampunk airship in a better world many many dimensions away. I can never tell, do they want me to pay them? Or do they owe me? Why can't they use normal words? Are they trying to hide something from me? It's money, so I should be pretty paranoid about that right? I mean the current economy situation didn't exactly come about because a whole bunch of money guys decided to use simple easy to understand financial wording so everyone knew what they were doing.

Oh, uh and driving stick. But that's why they make automatics! Score one for technology.

I have a very hard time with String Theory.

ruveyn

You're not alone.

I think it helps visualise it. It took me a while to get a concept of the fourth dimension but then when I saw a model I was able to visualise a whole world that looked like that. 10 or 20 dimensions would be a lot harder to visualise but when I say visualise I mean visualise the strings or vibrations. For some reason I just grasp quantum physics and classical physics a lot more if I can visualise it.

Anyway, for me I keep thinking I grasp things pretty well but I often find out that's not exactly true. With me it's not so much grasping concepts or why people act a certain way but actually thinking about consequences or preparing for the future. If there's one thing I struggle with grasping is figures of speech which in my frustration I tell people that I find these phrases more fictional than science fiction.

I'm probably misunderstanding this too, but as I understand it.. empathy is the ability to tell what someone is feeling, reading signs in their face and their body language. Sympathy is the emotional reaction to another person's feelings - to what you read with empathy - or in our cases, more commonly, get told after the fact by someone who could read it.

Kind of like if emotion were sound, we'd call the ability hear what others said empathy, when we speak to others our speech is sympathy. So as I see it, I'm kind of emotionally deaf. I can still speak in the language of emotions (I feel). But since I can't hear what others are saying (can't tell what they're feeling) and am mostly guessing it doesn't go very smoothly. I can't hear volume (intensity of emotion) or what they're saying (the emotion itself), so sometimes when I speak, my sympathy 'voice' is too low (no emotional response to what I am told) or too high (too excited, too intense). And while I can speak OK I say the wrong thing because I keep trying to respond to things the other person didn't really say, or I didn't hear they were talking to me and I unintentionally ignored them. Man, I tried to explain and now I'm all confused, and I'm not even sure I got this sympathy/empathy thing right in the first place.

Or even more basic: Empathy is what you pick up on from others. Maybe you feel sympathy when you do pick up on something from them as a response, but the sympathy comes from you, not from them. It's what you send out for their empathy to pick up on. Empathy will only be about incoming signals from other people, sympathy is about your signal.

Last edited by KBerg on 02 Mar 2011, 7:27 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Empathy and sympathy, I keep getting those mixed up. I also have to remember caring about someone isn't empathy but I still don't understand the difference.

I don't get financial stuff either. We recently bought a house, and even after it was explained to me a million times, I still don't get the mortgage stuff. At this point, we just have to pay a certain amount every month. I can handle that much, but don't ask me to understand anything beyond that.

I don't get the gear change thing either, it's been explained over and over but every time I've tried to put it into practise/practice (which one is right? that's another one) by the time I've gone through the picture sequence in my head it's too late. No, I don't drive - I'm not even great on a bike!

Words too, I can look up a word in the dictionary and get lost for an hour easily, I just get hooked on it and then I get annoyed that I can't remember them all. I look at a dictionary and get so frustrated that this is my language and I don't know what every word in the English language means. It infuriates me!

Numbers. I don't know where to start. I have great trouble with seven, nine, and five. Something about those numbers confuses me, I'm always getting them the wrong way round when they're together and mental arithmatic is a huge no-no. Every single thought is a picture in my head, always has been and I thought everyone was like that so for me to add up mentally I have to have the sum pictured in my head (like in infant school) then try and add it up, remembering where all the numbers are (which I don't) by which time the picture has dissolved and I'm back to square one.

The picture images are just wham! wham! constant and I have to translate everything from them. So, back to the gear change thing - it's like when I try to add up it's all too much to concentrate on at once and I just go blank. Yet funnily enough when it comes down to commenting on things and making quips and jokes my mouth seems to work 10 seconds ahead of my brain and I don't even realise what I'm going to say until I've already said it and I seem to hear it for the first time along with everyone else! Ooops, sometimes I have a lot of backtracking to do.

I've often asked my family and others, how do they see/picture tomorrow and the future but no-one knows what I'm talking about. I don't understand how tomorrow, next week or next Christmas can just be blank in your mind, they have to be imagined or seen, don't they? I've always seen the days stretching out like a long tape measure, free-floating in a black nothingness, with the weekends slightly wider than the weekdays. Each day has a particular colour, Monday-red, Tuesday-blue, Wednesday-yellow, Thursday-brown, Friday-green, Saturday- darker blue and Sunday-opaque, grey-white. If an appointment or something special is upcoming then its colour is more obvious to mark the day as special. People say to me a day is just a day and I don't see anything, there's nothing to see . So do any of you experience anything like this and know wtf I mean?

Tiffinity.

This is one concept I think I get. I think I end up in that state occasionally. Or I end up in my own state where words have no meaning, which may be unlike anbuend's experience, but still something I can relate to those words.

I don't get flirting. I don't care about flirting, really. I understand some double entendres, but miss most of them. Those I get annoy me because I dislike turning conversation into sex, as I find sex pretty boring as a topic.

Okay, I don't really get sex. I've tried it, I've even tried to like it, but ultimately, I just don't really want it. It's sweaty and sticky and bodily fluids are involved, and sustained skin contact is overloading.

The need for an income beyond, say, $100,000 annually. Really, who needs that much money? Does anyone do work worthy of that?

... I have to look up "pragmatics" over and over again too.

There are some abstract philosophical concepts - even concepts that can be related back to the real world in concrete terms - that I have to figure out how to explain to myself every time I want to use them. I finally actually caught on that this is a waste of energy, especially when the abstract philosophy describes things that I already routinely deal with in concrete terms.

Why many people believe they can divine what other people are thinking more nearly accurately than the people in question can report what they are thinking.

All I can think of at the moment.

Stocks. Lots of banking terms. Bonds. Mortgages.

Neurodiversity. (Yes, really.)

Paradigm.

Just about anything Ari Ne'eman writes/says. Nothing against him. His words just slide off my brain like teflon. I once had a conversation with him in person where despite both of us trying our best to communicate, I literally ended up with a terrible migraine as a result from even trying. (He's someone who is quite abstract and I'm quite the opposite and it just doesn't work when we try to communicate about anything complicated.) And the room literally turned orange. And my head was buzzing. It was bad. I had similar results in some of the really early days online with him and us trying to communicate and it just being awful to my brain.

(That migraine/orange/buzzing state is what I get with language/abstraction overload in general.)

Congress, legislature, legislator, state house, house of representatives, parliament, senate, etc.

These are things that never make sense.

But much of the time, possibly most of the time, all words and ideas are like this for me.

I feel a strong urge to explain neurodiversity, because it's so EASY-- I mean, easy for you because you've unknowingly given the best definitions of it I've ever heard. Neurodiversity means autistics and mentally ill people aren't bad or awful and don't deserve to be in institutions.

Congress, legislature, etc. are all words for rich people getting together and writing up very abstract laws that are probably very far up in the sky, to the point that most people can't figure them out. Then they have to pay lawyers to explain. But mostly they just argue-- they don't do anything, they just pretend to. Oh, and sometimes they keep people from doing useful things.

A mortgage is basically where you want to buy a house-- you understand money, right? Like, you give me something, I give you something. We trade. With a mortgage, you want a house, but you don't have enough money to pay for it. So you pay a little bit and promise to keep paying more little bits and you get to live in the house immediately even though you haven't paid for it all yet.

Stocks depend on understanding companies as things, which is completely unconnected to reality. If you want to, you can try to picture it, though. Pretend a company is like a swarm of flies. All the flies make money and more flies. Sometimes the flies die. A share of a stock is one fly. A hundred shares of one stock means a hundred flies from that swarm. But you're really just pretending to buy them (you really give away money but don't really get any flies), and then you pretend to sell them (you really get money but you only pretend to give someone else flies). And you hope when you pretend to sell them, you can pretend to sell them to someone who's willing to pay more money to pretend to own them than you did when you bought them.

I can't tell the time on an analoge clock. No matter how many times in my life people have tried to teach me to tell the time i just cannot do it
it's like a foreign language to me.

Time bothers me, 60 sec in a min, 60 min in an hour...why not 100? I still mess up on the microwave, a minute and a half....150...ooops no. The other thing I can't master is grammar. I can't completely fix my spelling, tense shifting, agreement or fix clumbsy parts in my writing. It makes me meltdown inside to talk about it or look at it too much. If I can't fix it to sound ok then I'll just delete it or throw it away. I had to take numerous classes in college for my English degree but still cannot actually 'learn' it. I can't read something and see, then name, the grammatical errors. I know it is wrong but can't name it. It is one thing I don't have a drive to overcome either...I hate even talking about it, like it is something real and is creepy skin crawling. Weird..

Well, I also understand the definitions, but they don't seem to have a lot of meaning to me. I don't get it either, and it is not for lack of trying.