Dr. Metablog

Ligawinitude

The word "ligaw" in Pilipino, a language of which I am totally ignorant, apparently means both "totally lost" and "courtship."  And therefore the adjective "ligawin" refers to someone who is both "directionally disabled" or "directionally dyslexic" and also "attractive to persons of the opposite sex." What a wonderful correspondence, especially to those of us who regularly lose the car in the parking lot and to whom a walk in a strange city is a fearful and daring adventure.  (My lexicography is contributed by a Manila reader whose forthright and thoughtful blog can be accessed at this address.)  "Directionally dyslexic" is an ugly phrase, filled with self-loathing; "ligawinitude" trips off the tongue.  Well, almost trips;  it's certainly superior to "ligawinness" -- which sounds like the female of an extincit predator.

Here are some examples of ligawinitude (fellow sufferers will empathize) which I have borrowed from Ana in Manila:

"I am so ligawin I still lose my way around the UP campus after 30 years working there. I am so ligawin I'd enter the main door of an unfamiliar office, transact my business, and then try to let myself out through the door of a conference room right smack at a dozen people all gaping at me. I am so ligawin that when I eat out, I can get lost going back from the comfort room to my table at a big restaurant till my friends are about ready to page me....  When I am in a strange place and I wish to explore it, I walk a straight path. When I reach a fork, I turn back."

Ana claims to be "the most ligawin person in the world."  It's a hard claim to substantiate. The instances of ligawinitude that she cites -- well, I can match them with one hand tied behind my back.  We won't crown a world ligawin champion until we tabulate the results of the Internation Ligawinitude Olympics.  Nevertheless, it is curious to me that the ligawinitudinous often boast of the severity of their condition.  No one says -- "Oh, I am the most colorblind person in the world," but we (the ligawinoids) take a perverse pride in topping or lost friends. "Loster than thou" is our odd claim.  

Because the general public and even our closest friends treat us as comic, we respond by boasting of our affliction.  In effect, we identify with those who laugh at us. 

The chronically lost require liberation.  We're not clowns;  we're just subject to ligawinitude. 

Which means that we're a) lost and b) sexy.  

Left-right Confusion

As far as I know, there have been exactly zero scientific studies of directional dyslexia.  As a consequence, all of our knowledge is anecdotal.  No one can say for certain whether the condition is inherited or acquired, or whether it's more (or less) common among women, southpaws, redheads, eastern Europeans, bad spellers, or chocoholics.  "Common sense" suggests that it might be associated with right-left confusion, and indeed, a number of the individuals who've commented on ""People who Lose their Way" indicate that they have severe problems telling the one hand from the other.  For example:  one commentator reports that a lifelong problem is that "I've been completely unable to instinctively tell left from right."  The emphasis on the word "instinctively" is meaningful.  Without conscious effort, most unaffected people intuitively and easily understand the difference between right and left;  for another class, some of them DDers, it's something that must be learned by effort, as in the case of the reader who thinks her DD is related to the fact that she "had lots of trouble as a child learning right and left," or of another who, learning to dance, can't consistently raise "right hand and left leg -- or vice versa."  Another non-instinctive person "still doesn't know my left from my right (I have to put my hands out and see which one makes an 'L).'"  A high school student plaintively confesses that her mom "threatened to write the words left and right on the back of my hands before I had to take the test for my driver's license."  It's a frequent complaint:  "I was almost 20 years old before I stopped having to think 'I write with my left hand...  if I were to pick up a pencil which hand would I hold it in.'"

Is there, then, an association between right-left confusion and directional dyslexia?

I don't think that the evidence allows us to conclude so.

Most of the people who commented do not mention any such condition.

Perhaps they take it for granted that everyone in the DD community shares the trait -- but we don't.  Even though I'm among the world's most frequently lost souls, I have not the slightest bit of trouble with left and right.  In fact, I'd say that I'm hyperconscious of my handedness as well as the handedness of others.  I always observe and remember which of my acquaintances are right or left-handed.  And if someone says, "turn left," I turn left.  Unerringly and instinctively.   

Pending further investigation, the evidence suggests that left-right confusion is independent of directional dyslexia.  It's a separate problem (and one which may further disorient those of us who are chronically lost).

Coming soon:  east/west/north/south. 

Confessions of a Dysgeographicoid

This post is written for members of the directionally dyslexic community.  Non-members are welcome to read but they probably won't get it.

Some cities are easy to navigate;  others are nightmares.  In the small western city where I live, the mountains are always visible, and they're always, blessedly, to the west.   In addition, the streets that run north-to-south are consecutively numbered.  I'm thankful that I live in a city where it is difficult to lose your way.  Manhattan, where I spent last month, is pretty good too, except for the confusing lower downtown.  Manhattan is on a grid.  Ninety-fourth Street Street is always north of 93rd and 2nd Avenue is always east of 3rd Avenue. The worst that can happen is that you walk one short block in the wrong direction and then right yourself. But other cities are impossible.  Take Washington D.C., for example.  Washington could only have been laid out by a sadist whose aim was to drive the directionally-disabled off their collective rockers.  It's those damn diagonals, which cut through the grid at every conceivable angle.  A few steps along one of those diagonals and the points of the compass become hopelessly shuffled.  And then Washington throws in a few wayward, wandering streets that were added just to cause pain. 

When we visit Washington, we stay at a home on Nevada Avenue that's a half-hour walk from the Friendship Heights Metro.  I've memorized the route (I'm good at rote learning).  But last month, we (that is myself and my spouse -- actually "guide" is the better term) -- set out on a different path from station to home.  Why did we do so?  I don't know;  it wasn't my decision.  A minute hadn't elapsed before I had lost my bearings and had no idea whether we were heading north south east or west or how our improvised path stood in relation to the route that I had mechanically mastered.  My guide, who is not directionally-disabled, sometimes forgets, even after all these years, that a few steps on the oblique and I'm completely buffaloed. 

This time, I decided that instead of whining "where are we?" at every street corner, I would just keep my mouth shut.  I pretended confidence, though I hung back at every corner so as not to commit to a ludicrously wrong direction.  I played follow the leader.  Sometimes we were on the grid, sometimes we took diagonals, sometimes we took one of those eccentric curving streets.  My DD compeers understand that at each of the thirty or so corners that we approached, I had not an inkling whether my guide would choose left, or right, or straight ahead.  But I was, let me tell you, oh so cool.  After a while, the terrain began to grow familiar, but just between us, let me confess that it wasn't until we were thirty feet from our target that I knew where I was.

So, friends, here's my new formula:  keep quiet, hang back, avoid humiliation. 

A Exceedingly Weird Dream

Aficionados of this blague know that I'm directionally disabled.  I don't think that I've admitted that I suffer from frequent nightmares in which I'm totally lost in a strange city or building. 

Last night I experienced another such dysgeographical dream.  I was trying to walk north in some unidentifiable but mysterious city.  A large building, which seemed to me to be a junior high school, blocked my path.  I decided to cut through the building and continue on my way.  I traversed various confusing corridors and staircases until I was satisfied that I was about to exit the correct door (one of many).  But I couldn't get out because there were wires (which looked like electric fencing for animals) strung across the doorway.  I attempted door after door and each one was wired -- chicken wire, barbed wire, all sorts of stuff.  I started to panic, as I often do in such dreams. 

At last I decided to force my way through one of the doors.  I tangled myself in various wires which had somehow metamorphosed into thick chains.  The chains rattled loudly and I said to myself that someone would hear them  --  it was as though I was back in school and had gotten myself into deep trouble with the principal.  And sure enough, along came a guy who seemed to be either a janitor or a detective.  He was speaking rapid Spanish and I couldn't understand him.  Although I begged him to, he would not untangle me.  I cried out, "I'm  tired of this basura (basura is the word for garbage in Spanish, which happens to be a language I've never studied and don't know).   I shouted, "With basura, with basura."  And then I thought, wow, the phrase "with basura" could be used as the basis of a parody of Ezra Pound's Canto XLV, "With Usura:" ("With usura hath no man a house of good stone/ each block cut smooth and well fitting/ that delight might cover their face" etc. etc.)   A person could substitute the word "basura" for the similar sounding "usura" and make good fun of Uncle Ez's economic theories -- theories which are in fact nothing more than a great big load of reactionary pseudo-medieval poppy-and-lily trash.  Inspired, I decided to wake up and get to work on the poem, but I wasn't alert more than a few seconds before I came to the realization that the great world is probably not exactly aching for a parody of Pound's Canto XLV.  Even an exceedinlgy clever parody.

Good News for the Directionally Impaired

I've been indoctrinated by our uncomprehending society to regard my geographical dyslexia, or my directional disability, or whatever it's to be called, as a shameful condition.  So it's good to know that DD can be otherwise valued.

I've been informed by one of my readers that the Pilipino word ligaw has two meanings:  a) courtship, and b) totally lost.  As a result, the adjective ligawan can refer either to a person who has no sense of direction, or to someone who is especially attractive to suitors.  It stands to reason that a person who has absolutely no awareness of direction (right or left, east or west) whatsoever and is constantly buffaloed and flabbergasted by the well-meaning instructions of friends and would-be guides must be extremely radiant, perhaps even charismatically magnetic.   

I find this new information to be both highly probable and extremely consoling. 

Moreover, my admiration for Pilipino language and culture and good sense has skyrocketed. 

I therefore propose that the term "geographical dyslexia" be replaced by "ligawan." 

From this moment on, there's a new order to the universe:  to be hopelessly dysgeographical, hopelessly lost is now, officially, sexy. 

Travels with Dorcas

We've named our gps navigatrix who gives instruction with a schoolmarmish London accent Dorcas (which is, along with Prunella, one of my very favorite English given -- or as they call them,"Christian"-- names).  Dorcas has proved to be, on the whole, a reliable friend.  She had a little trouble in Cincinnati, where, it turns out, there are two entirely distinct 225 Hill Terrace addresses. She took us to the wrong one -- but I confess that in this case the error can fairly be traced to information-inputter, Dr. M. himself.  Dorcas also had a royal hissy fit when we we had to detour onto a single-lane-on-the-other-side-of the-road somewhere in Ohio -- she "recalculated" six or seven consecutive times.  It could only be my imagination, but I thought I detected a trace of exasperation in her tone.  Despite these failings, the Dorcster is a dream at finding her way around unfamiliar towns.  No longer will I have to stop at gas stations for incomprehensible advice about how to get back on the highway.  I just call on Dorcas and I've got a friend, oh yeah, I've got a friend.   

A Mental Prosthesis

Regular readers of this blague will remember that Dr. M. has long ago confessed that he suffers from a serious case of "directional disability," or as some call it, "geographical dyslexia" -- which means that he regularly loses his way, is subject to travel-based panic attacks, and is consequently abused by friends and family who refuse to recognize that he's not stupid, just utterly lost. 

Advanced technology rides to my rescue.  I now own a mobile navigator.  It affixes to the windshield of the car, and, using signals bounced off three or four satellites, instructs me how to get from point A to point B.  I've fallen profoundly in love with the disembodied female British voice who doesn't criticize me when I make a wrong turn: she just says, very politely, "recalculating."  Then she says, "drive point five miles and turn left."  What a boon to the chronically lost!  I now drive as accurately as a migrating bird.  My only reservation: I think that my friend should congratulate me when I get to where I'm going.  She should show a little enthusiasm.  But all she says is "arriving at destination, on left."  What would it hurt her to offer congratulations?  I'm not asking for a commitment or for flowers.

The navigator has now moved to first place among my prostheses, supplanting the incisor.      

Occupations Not For Me

Here are some career paths that it's just as well I didn't tread.   

1.  Taxi driver in a large city (especially a city that's not on a grid, such as Boston or London.  Even the DC-diagonals drive me nuts).  I've earlier written about my incapacitating directional disability, but I neglected to mention that I tend to get into a bit of a panic when I'm lost --  I start driving much too fast and far too waywardly.  So, dear friends, imagine me a befuddled cabbie, sweating super-profusely, while the fares in back scream bloody murder when I take the exact wrong turn for the fourth consecutive time.  It would be a freakin' nightmare.   Related occupations that won't work:  tour guide, wilderness guide, tracker.

2.  Dog-groomer.  I've hinted at my lack of affection for doggies before.  I just don't think I'd do a good job blow-drying Fido or brushing Fifi's teeth.  (Incidentally, I'm joined in my prejudice against curs by gentle Will himself, whose references to canines are uniformly unfriendly: the superbly wicked sisters in King Lear, for example, are "dog-hearted daughters.")    

3.  Trapeze artist.  I'm terrified of heights and I have absolutely no sense of rhythm.  Imagine me launching myself at just the right moment to catch my partner by the ankles.  Related opportunity for ignominious failure: dance instructor.   

4.  Surgeon.  I'm far too squeamish to be poking around in someone's innards.  Even channel surfing has become a dangerous pastime since we accidentally acquired the live surgery channel.  Motto:  "all gore, all the time."  I have to keep clicking that remote lest I accidentally pause at an open-heart moment.  The FCC should mandate a warning and a five-second delay:  "Caution:  palpitating inner organs on view shortly." 

5.  Hostage.  Chained to a bed somewhere in the 'stans wouldn't work for me.  I must have my oatmeal every morning at 7 a.m., and I need to move my bowels shortly afterward.  Moreover, if I don't eat lunch right on time, I get wicked headaches.  Not to mention that I don't function well in rooms that are either too hot or too cold or not well ventilated, and I can't stand tobacco.  On the whole, I'd be a mighty cranky hostage.    

"Geographical Dyslexia," or "Directional Disability," or, People Who Lose Their Way

In The Accidental Tourist (New York [Knopf], 1991), Anne Tyler describes a malady that, as far as I know had never before been acknowledged in literature.   All four of her eccentric Leary siblings share "a total inability to find their way around." Macon Leary, who writes travel books for a living and is the novel's focal character, christens this trait "geographical dyslexia."

I'm not convinced that "geographical dyslexia" is a good name for the Learys' condition.  An alternative, "directional disability," is not much better.  Whatever the name, sufferers will know what is meant.  There's a class of people (I'm one of them) who are chronically lost; who take a few steps in a strange city and can't find their way back to the hotel;  who don't know how to exit the building they've just entered because they've strolled a corridor or two;  who are totally befuddled and even panicked when they drive into a familiar intersection from an unaccustomed direction; who break into a cold sweat when someone says, "you know how to get home -- just reverse the directions";  and who, because they're frequently lost, are subject to ridicule and mockery from their very own families and from their most intimate friends.

Macon Leary has a theory about his persistent dysgeographica. He thinks he's disabled because all his life he's moved from house to house, and "people who'd been moved around a great deal never acquired a fixed point of reference, but wandered forever in a fog."  I know of no evidence to support this wholly improbable suggestion.  Macon clutches at a straw because there's no data (and there's no data, at least in part, because there's no accepted name for his condition).

Every sufferer nurses his own unscientific, anecdotal theory.  I was once convinced that my dysgeographica was related to my total absence of rhythm -- as a child I could never learn to pump a swing or even to jump rope.  My brother thinks that it must be connected to his aversion to heights.  My niece takes the view that it's somehow related to her motion sickness and to her bouts of dizziness.  A friend thinks that the trouble stems from the fact that she was naturally left-handed but was trained to be right-handed.  In fact, no one knows whether dysgeographica is connected to any other trait, or whether it's one of a cluster of traits.  In terms of hard science, the directionally disabled have been allowed to languish in the dark ages.

I'm almost convinced that dysgeographica runs in families.  My father was monumentally disabled, and one of my brothers is so impaired that he's occasionally looked to me for directional advice.  Barking up the wrong tree, is he!! (I have another brother who always knows exactly where he is -- perhaps he's adopted.)  In The Accidental Tourist,  Anne Tyler, who's a very sharp observer of mankind, tellingly attributes dysgeographica to all four Leary siblings. Tyler also notes that Macon has learned how to cope:  he "kept a stack of index cards giving detailed directions to the houses of his friends -- even friends he'd known forever."  Coping mechanisms are essential to the dysgeographical.  When I have to drive any distance without a navigator, I write the directions with a thick pen in a notebook and keep it open on the passenger seat.  For some reason, I can't seem to retain more than one or two of the approaching turns in my mind, so I must continually refer to the notebook.  Mapquest has proved to be a boon, especially if I remember to print out in very large type.

In The Accidental Tourist, no one pokes fun at the Leary siblings.  But in real life, it's considered quite amusing to laugh at the chronically lost.  People don't understand that dysgeographica is a disability like colorblindness.  I can't say how many times I've been instructed to "concentrate," or "pay attention' -- advice which is just as effective as commanding a color blind person to make an effort to register shades of yellow or blue. Without a label and without a support group, the dysgeographical will continue to be ridiculed.  It's time for us to unite.  Unless we do so, we are not only doomed, like Macon Leary, to be "adrift upon the planet, helpless, praying that by luck [we] might stumble across [our] destination," but doomed to be humiliated as well.

(July 22, 2007.  I've written again on directional dyslexia.  If anyone is interested, take a look here, here, and here.    And now one more.)