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So it turns out Ksenia and I didn't get the role at that senior residence after a recent second interview there. That's kind of a relief I'd say. No one thought it sounded like a good idea, and while there are still aspects of the arrangement that intrigue me, between the time commitment and size of the quarters provided, I'm inclined to agree.

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Cultural Nugget of the Moment
A fascinating piece on How the Aymara have a "backwards" view of time. The more common view seems to be based on locomotion, going into the future. But as I started musing about the idea, without reading the article, I realize there's a beauty in the "facing backwards" view. You can't see the future, your back might as well be to it. Instead we can look at the past, with events receding in the distance as we move from them in time, but maybe with some large events looming for years...

The language is interesting for other reasons, it's the one that grammatically insists that a sentence declare if it relates something personally witnessed or if it's just here-say, which might tie in to the "looking into the past" idea. Also it features logic that isn't just boolean yes/no but includes a third option. (Anyone here read "The Mote in God's Eye" or "The Gripping Hand"?)

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Neurological Condition of the Moment
So FoSO sent me a Boston.com article on "face-blindness", or prosopagnosia. I think the implication of the smilie she included with it was that maybe it could explain my tragi-comic inability to differentiate actors as well as my stated habit of identifying people by their hairstyle.

And there might be a little something to that, assuming the condition has varying degrees of severity. But then again, I'm a terrible neurological hypochondriac. In the past I've been given to wonder if I have "shadow" syndromes of (in rough, descending order of "likelihood")

• Synaesthesia (associating certain numbers with certain letters, like writing my name "KI4K" when I was a kid)
• Tourettes (the weird, not always profane outbursts in the car I'm prone to at the end of a stress-y workday)
• Dyslexia (all the time I catchy myself swapping m's and b's while typing... though maybe that's more Synaesthesia?)
• Prosopagnosia (see above)
• "Juvenile Onset" Alzheimer's (though it's probably just me being a bit scatter-brained)
• Aspergers Syndrome (not always being into vague phsical contact... this one is the biggest stretch of them all I'd say)

I'm sure there's some degree of me wanting to be "special" with these things, which must be annoying to people who have full-blown cases of any of them. And some of these aren't even "shadow syndromes", but I think they do let me feel a touch of empathy, because I think I can connect to the source of the condition, especially with something like Tourette's. But obviously, none of this is seriously interfering with my life, so I should stop being so self-coddling. (I still find these, and almost all neurological conditions, really interesting. I need to read that sequel to "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat". The real sequel, not the parody followup "The Man Who Mistook His Ass for a Hole in the Ground")

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Snark of the Moment
Lore on The Dos and Don'ts of Livejournal.