Connecting Me

I often get told how funny I am. Now mind you, if I try to be funny then I only get blank stares or, if it's a text medium like FaceBook, I might get an "Oh, that's too bad. I'll pray for you." But throughout my everyday conversations, periodically someone will burst out laughing and declare how funny I am, leaving me at a complete loss as to why exactly that comment was funny. But no worries, because I like being funny. Certainly I haven't much talent at writing humor, so I'll take all the chuckles I can get from my everyday actions.

A few weeks ago my humor made national headlines. No, not in a newspaper, on a friend's advice blog. In fact, Connecting Now hosted what turned into a rather huge competition between my humor and another lady's comments. Check it out here: Duking it Out Connection Style: LaBuff vs. Wiley. Subsequent posts can be found there as well, with Hold the Phones and Extra! Extra! Read All About It!  following the polls and then the final and triumphant win of--well, you'll have to go read it--in The Results Show.

My fame even spread to Canadian comedian Timmy Boyle's blog, Inside Timmy's Mind, with his post The Great Debate.

Today I am once again showing up in the bloggesphere, though this time because of my creativity rather than my humor. My dear friend Joanne Sher just interviewed me about my collaborative fiction group Peculiar People over on her blog, An Open Book. I think I forgot to mention here on my blog that I've just opened up for submissions to the next group book, the orphan plane project, so be sure to check out the details on her blog and on the PeP website. It's going to be a really fun project!

But don't worry, I'm not letting all the fame go to my head. Well, not much anyway. ;-)
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I knew I wasn't Normal

Between my conglomerate of odd health problems, my unique visual-related learning problems, and my quirky personality, I've always known that I'm not normal. In fact, I rather take pride in it. After all, God calls us to be peculiar people, right?

When I was about 13, I went through an extensive three-year vision therapy program that resulted in me being able to write, strengthened my reading, and let me get at least a little closer to where I should be in spelling. My current problems with sign language, especially fingerspelling, seemed to be resulting from the same visual issues (basically my eyes and brain don't work together so well), so I went back for more vision perception tests.

I got the test results back today. I'm low in several things, including visual discrimination. But the most notable "significant deficit" is in the test of visual sequential memory. I was in the 0.1 percentile.

In other words, there's pretty much no one else quite as bad at it as I am. :-p

This means when I see a word fingerspelled, even if I do manage to differentiate the similar handshapes, I'm likely to not have the faintest memory of what they were by the time we get to the end of the word. The eye doctor told me that picking the profession I did means I must be a "glutton for punishment". All I say is it's a good thing I didn't pick interpreting or I woulda quit a long time ago.

So what's this mean? Leaning on God and a whole lotta hard work. It worked 13 years ago for my reading and writing (and look where I am now!). I have faith it'll work this time. And if it doesn't, then I know God'll have something even better planned.


BTW, I got interviewed by Lynda Schab with FaithReaders (sister site of FaithWriters) and the interview was posted yesterday. You can read it here, if you'd like: http://www.faithreaders.com/featured-author.php

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