Comments | snarkactual: An Interesting Meme

snarkactual

An Interesting Meme

Jul 11, 2012 04:23

fitfool posted a meme she found on one of her friend's LJ. It asks to list 10 characters from literature or cinema/TV that you identify yourself with. So, here's my list.

Charlie Gordon: Flowers for Algernon, I identify very closely with Charlie Gordon who goes from being a man with mental retardation to super genius (jeanass) in a very short time and ( Read more... )

Comments 4

fitfool July 11 2012, 11:23:42 UTC

Oh I forgot about Flowers for Algernon! That should've been on my list. Every time I read that book was heartbreaking. If there's anything I fear about getting old and dying, it's dementia. Having seen its effects on a few people now, I'm really hoping we'll have found a cure or at least some way to mitigate its effects by the time I run into it.

Yes...lots of your characters sound right up your alley.

snarkactual July 11 2012, 14:08:50 UTC

Flowers for Algernon was, and at the same time wasn't so much heartbreaking as much as it was very close to my own situation at about the time I read it in the mid-1960s after having spent time in special ed as a severely retarded person whose IQ was allegedly 60. When the results of a second IQ test came a couple of months after the first one, showing an IQ 3 - 4 times the original one assigned to me, like Charlie people fell all over themselves to know and be with the jeanass I'd suddenly become. At the same time now that you mention it, brain injury or dementia have been life long boogey men to me. I guess in time I shall be forced to know them. That is, if coronary disease or cancer don't overcome me first.

I'm pretty simple, really, as opposed to yourself. :-)

fitfool August 7 2012, 11:32:39 UTC

That's fascinating! Why did they do a second IQ test? Do you remember being in the special ed class? I think that would've had me questioning authority since they had clearly messed up.

snarkactual August 7 2012, 12:02:10 UTC

My mom who was a Public Health Nurse was incensed that they could even think that I had such a low IQ. So, she asked a colleague who was a State Psychologist to re-test me. I'd been reading since age 3 and had been reading "adult level" books, Defoe, Melville, Cervantes, Dumas and others by the age of 5. I'd already skipped two grades when I ended up in the 3rd grade and found myself labeled severely retarded. I rather enjoyed my time in special ed since the teachers pretty much left me alone to read and to follow my curiosity since not very much was expected of me. So while my mom was having a conniption fit, I was having the second best time of my life in school. The best time ever was when in 6th grade I was banished to the library for the entire year and got the best education of all my years in school. By the time that year ended I'd read every book in that library and was working my way through the unabridged dictionary ( ... )