autumn twilight

I ripped off a good portion of the nail on my right pinky finger yesterday. Typing uppercase letters of the left hand is not so fun at the moment. Really, it’s quite unpleasant every time I go to shift. It’s not the good kind of unpleasant either. There is no masochistic pain, no satisfaction in the experience. Just a frustrating jab of discomfort, sometimes pain. It’s distracting. It made typing at work yesterday and today less than fun. It’s not quite as bad on the laptop, I think I’m hitting the shift key with a different part of my finger on a standard flat keyboard than I would be on my ergonomic keyboard at work. Or maybe it’s just healing. Either way, it doesn’t seem quite so bad now.

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about my sex life lately. Rather, my lack thereof. I’m not going to start ranting about my lack of a bed partner at the moment. That’s one thing that I feel pretty confident time will fix. But I have been thinking about who I am, and why my sensory experience has the weird quirks it does.

One of my oddities makes perfect sense. I’m synesthetic. I perceive things perceptually with more than one sense. For instance, I hear light. I don’t mean that my ear-drums are sensitive to photons, and that the light activates my sense of hearing. I mean that things I see register as sight, and regularly as sound as well. Most of the sound registry is entirely ignorable, but if there is no other sound, or if the light is particularly bright or concentrated, I hear the light very distinctly. Synesthesia makes sense, because I’ve spent years developing it. It wasn’t really intentional, but it is a common side effect of trying to hone all your senses. They begin to work in tandem with each other. As your senses become more keen, and aware of the subtleties of the world, they also join one another, working in harness together. I know other people have had similar experiences, but I’m not sure how common it is. I suspect lots of mystics get it, but that’s really just speculation.

But what about my sybriantism? ( adoration of physical sensation ) I love touch of any and all variety. Any contact is powerful to me, meaningful, and beautiful. It doesn’t matter if it’s conceptually pleasant, or conceptually unpleasant. I revel in the activation of my sensory receptors. When someone meaningful to me touches me, I feel alive. And it feels good even when it hurts. In fact, when it hurts, it feels better usually.

More when I have time.