I have long known that I have more interest in experiencing the world mentally than physically, but until today I didn't realize how broadly this tendency has affected my life. First, I made the faux pas of asking at dinner if my mother knew why the roses she had set on the table weren't entirely red, and learned that they were in fact carnations. (If you know what carnations look like, as probably most everyone but me does, you will understand how ridiculous this error was.) The taunts which ensued led me to realize that I never developed an elementary knowledge of the natural world beyond what I was taught in nursery school through first grade. I don't know the names, attrubutes and functioning of pretty much anything that isn't man-made, from basic garden plants and insects to ecosystems and landscapes. Moreover, I often take it for granted that no one other than experts knows any more about biology and geography than I do. As a result, whenever I discover that my friends have wide-ranging knowledge of these things, I am shocked, and feel by turns confused, frightened, and inferior. I even feel this way when I discover that my friends have things like a field guide to wild mushrooms, as Geoff Hoffman does, or photos from the Mars rover, as Wes has on his computer. These compendiums of facts about the natural world strike me as too advanced and exotic to understand whenever I see them in bookstores and libraries, and so I avoid them. In this way, my ignorance lingers and unconsciously sustains itself. Today, for whatever reason, I became conscious of it.

The second realization came while reading The Geography of Nowhere, a $14 impulse purchase at Barnes & Noble which enriches my awareness of modern culture every time I read it. Tonight, that enrichment was of a different sort: in the middle of a chapter about the short-comings of suburban architecture, I realized that my knowledge of the man-made world is as severely limited as my elementary natural science. I have become increasingly aware recently that I have a poor-to-nonexistant mental picture of most colors beyond the simplest ones (red, blue, green, etc.); in addition, I now realize, I get almost no associations from any sort of word describing the building blocks of physical objects. While I was reading, words like "vinyl", "clapboard", "corrugated", "split-level", and "cupola" were very nearly meaningless to me until I looked them up. They served only as audial flourishes in sentences, like "la la la" in a song, the only difference being that I could tell they were nouns and adjectives intended to convey meaning. Somehow, it had never occured to me that I had a systematically dismal physical vocubulary. This extends to my memory of spaces and objects, even familiar ones. While reading, I was struggling to think of examples of the things Kunstler was describing. For example, while referencing common simplistic additions to cheap ranch houses, he mentioned "a fake portico à la Gone With the Wind, with skinny two-story white columns out of proportion with the mass of the house, and a cement slab too narrow to put a rocking chair on . . .." I couldn't think of any houses which met this description. Then, when I went for a walk to smoke a cigarette, I saw one: my own.

These two areas of ignorance combine very nicely with my atrocious sense of direction and my neuroses surrounding food and clothing. I am considering making a list of physical terminology and studying each term, first in a dicitonary, then an encyclopedia, and finally in technical manuals. Perhaps it is not too late for my unconscious mind to realize that I have a body, which exists in a three-dimensional world.