I haven’t been on time in awhile…
I think I’ve mentioned before that when I get tired, my language abilities start deteriorating. If I’m only a little tired, my grasp of language is relatively intact. When I start feeling tired, I’m still mostly coherent (although I do lose my sense of rhythm and people have to start keeping beat for me if I’m the instrumentalist). But when I’m overtired and don’t even realize it anymore, my brain starts doing weird things to how I process language.
Eg: An ad comes in the mail and it says “Finish your dream view!” My brain does not supply this information to me. My brain supplies, “Finish your damn view!” What? Why is the ad yelling at me? Also, my house doesn’t really have a view. We’re enclosed and at the bottom of the hill? After looking at it a couple more times, I realize that my brain thought it’d be funny to replace a word and change the meaning and tone of the sentence. Jerk.
Eg: A friend writes as her Facebook status, “Never discount random luck.” My brain actually lets me read the words correctly this time. But, it decides to decode the sentence completely incorrectly while still being correct. When you read the sentence, you probably understand that my friend means to say that you should always take into account that there is random luck. I did not understand the sentence in this way. I read the sentence and I thought my friend was saying that I should always sell random luck at full price. And I didn’t understand why she would say something like that. It’s actually kind of embarrassing how many times I had to read and reread the sentence and consider its meaning before I understood what was actually being said.
Eg: And then there was the time I thought some kiddie sugar cereal was offering a free necropolis in every box. Yes. Necropolis. As in a city of the dead. Well, we normally use the word to describe the large and elaborate cemetery of some ancient civilization. I was thinking more in terms of a city of zombies or something like what was described in the Death Gate Cycle (those were good books, you should read them). But whatever. Neither of those should be in you child’s cereal (the prize advertised was actually something about Neopets).
In these cases, the result is that I try and cudgel my brain back into some semblance of working fashion as I cannot function if I’m constantly reading things incorrectly. Of course, I could also try getting more sleep. But who has time for that?
Random moosages as I see fit. 