My unique and totally worthless talent is the ability to make up the craziest crap on the fly. Conversations are never boring with me except when they are. I'm also possibly one of the loudest introverts you'll ever meet.  So while I can get my point across fairly well in type, talking is a feast or famine. Either I'm super quick with comebacks or I have days where I just don't feel like talking. Which is fine. I'm also a fairly decent non-fiction writer.

In high school I was failed on an essay because she felt only a professional writer could've written it. Not a teenager. Essentially a not so nice way of saying "you're too stupid to write this." I still get the warm fuzzies when I think of it.

In the same vein I've read lots of older fiction and non-fiction so at times if I'm not careful I slip into speaking what essentially amounts to early 1900s quasi-academic style of speaking. In other words my vocabulary sometimes slips into a different time period.

This was a big problem when I first started working with criminal offenders in 2014. I literally didn't even speak the same language as Crips from Oakland lol. I was way too formal.  Anyways eventually I adopted  some of their coarser phrasing but it's now mixed with the weirdo speak which makes it even stranger.   

And of course working with Firefighters hasn't helped either lol.

I can totally picture you surrounded by a bunch of street thugs, endeavoring to put on a show of your pugilistic prowess Morphy

My super power is the ability to recall obscure movie and television references that nobody else remembers. It’s usually from shows other people have seen, but somehow I just remember things that don’t make a lasting impression on 99.9% of humanity. Things like the Conan the Librarian scene in the Weird Al movie UHF.  Just try looking someone straight in the eye and slowly saying “Don’t you know the Dewey Decimal System?” in your best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice, and see how many blank stares YOU get!

For reference...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHbdoO7uCkk

NooneOfConsequence wrote on Jan 13^th, 2021 at 10:32pm:


I'm like that with movies too though you probably have me beat. But music? I have a ridiculously good memory for music. Music is practically my life.

Oh also forgot I have an almost photographic memory for interesting scientific facts. I can hear something once ten years ago and bring it up in a conversation when needed. Not sure how but possibly my science area of the brain is larger because my math area is abysmal.

I took a IQ test given by a professional PhD test giver. I answered virtually every random fact question right. Now, granted at some of the other things I sucked horribly but he was pretty wide eyed by the end of the first part. He just chuckled and said "how do you do that?" Lol.

That being said I really am hopeless at math.

NooneOfConsequence wrote on Jan 13^th, 2021 at 10:32pm:

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who does this...

My wife has an amazing talent. She cannot remember the lyrics to any song. ANY SONG. It could be her favourite song she's heard a thousand times and she will not be able to recall the lyrics. Doesn't stop her singing them, she'll just horribly mangle the lyrics .
Morphy wrote on Feb 1^st, 2021 at 8:54pm:

I have dyscalculia so my superpower is being utterly atrocious at maths, I'm unable to read analogue clocks in less than 5 minutes and I am incapable of knowing how long it will take me to travel certain distances. I lived at my parents place for 17 years and I never worked out how long it took me to walk to the cinema from there. I was always about half an hour early when going to meet friends because I would give myself way too much time to get there. I'm still not entirely sure how long it takes to walk. It could be anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes. My brain just doesn't mesh with the idea of time and space.

I haven't had to mess with IVs at the old folks home. We are slightly more medical than a lot of places but not quite that medical. With doses and medicines, I know I have trouble so I triple check and, if I have even the slightest shred of doubt, I ask someone to check. The good thing is that most medical calculations are actually very simple. That's the trick with most stuff in nursing: everything is geared towards being as simple as possible because it's safer that way I also understand basic concepts like, for example, if I'm working out how many ml of oxynorm to give someone and it comes out as 2ml, I know something's up. No-one is getting more than 0.7ml on our ward at a time and that's a fair amount.

That's the main way I cope with it, I know I suck at it so I'm ultra careful. Sometimes more careful than people that don't have a problem with maths. Also, it's not that I'm incapable of doing it, it's more that I'm just really slow and sometimes take odd routes to get to the answer. My medical calculations teacher was like "Oh yeah there is absolutely no question you have dyscalculia. The way you work stuff out is weird."

   I remember theme songs and commercial jingles forever.  I can sing theme songs and jingles in their entirety from shows and products no one even remembers going back to the fifties.