Conversation with my husband

Three weeks ago I was sent off to a jobsite which is further away from where I live. This means, my commute is now between an hour and an hour and a half. This leaves me with hardly any free time during the week. During recent weekends I've been trying to study for a professional exam. Last weekend I fried my brain by finishing to read the book in preparation for the exam. I wanted to do something different last weekend, but was too annoyed about my husband turning down my suggestions. So I got online and reserved tickets to watch the baby Panda at the National Zoo this weekend.

We spent a wonderful day at the zoo today and I have awesome photos of the Pandas and baby sloth bear who has just been introduced to the public this week. He was cute as hell!

But this post isn't about the zoo or my weekend. It's about something much deeper than that. A discussion I had with my husband in the car on the way back from the zoo. It started about ten minutes into the drive.

YBrid: "Your book is on the floor behind me and it's all bent."
Mybrid [looking back and picking it back up]: "You heard it slide off the chair?"
YBrid: "No, I saw it earlier."
Mybrid [puzzled]: "You saw the book earlier and now you remembered?"
YBrid: "Yes. I just ran the images through my head and came across one of them."
Mybrid: "So every time you're sitting there, with no music on, you don't process thoughts/feelings/emotions?"
YBrid: "No. Nothing like it. I just process images."
Mybrid [quite shocked at this discovery after 13 years of marriage]: "So THAT's what you do when driving? I've always wondered what you think about when you're quiet, while I'm thinking about so many things that people said and how I feel about it."
YBrid: "I just see images and link them."


One would think that after 13 years of marriage I'd have my husband all figured out. I spend hours upon hours processing feelings and emotions in my head, while he links cartoons and images in his mind. There were a few times in the past when I decided to ask him what he's thinking about as we were driving, and he's always said "nothing." I always thought he was lying to me, because if you catch me at ANY given moment in the day, I can tell you exactly what I'm thinking about (well, ok, so what if it's mostly about sex?!). Now I find out that he is indeed thinking about nothing. It's all images.

Every so often he launches into a chronological outline of his calendar for the following day and it makes me laugh because he does it out loud as if I really need to hear it. But what he says makes no sense to me nor is it relevant information for my daily life. He'd say something like "9am I have an SAR meeting with Dave...then I have a conference call with the IT team in Seattle...at 11am I have a meeting with Dan to discuss the SPI report...." and he just goes on and on. It's almost like his brain has to release some audio announcements in order to make room for more visual information to access it.

Our brains are definitely different. I process feelings, thoughts, events, meanings, intentions, reactions, plans, situations, dreams, schedule, to do lists, emails, conversations. My brain skips around so much that with the radio on I often catch myself wondering "what on earth were they just talking about? My mind was somewhere else." Whereas my husband listens to the radio with 100% attention and when he reacts to something out loud I always feel bad because I wasn't paying attention and my mind was somewhere else. I read a book and within one page my mind has already drifted to something else entirely when I realise by the second page that I have no idea what my eyes just read. Ironically, everyone who knows my husband suspect that he has ADD, while I'm seen as the normal one...

I suppose no one needs to know what goes on in my brain, as long as everyone thinks I'm normal.