Dyslexia? em ton!

I suspect I'm mildly dyslexic. I want to be careful not to overstate it, since I'd say in no way am I afflicted by my condition, though it does perhaps cause me to be a little bit weirder.

For as long as I can remember, when I look at a word or short series of words, I'm just as likely to read the words backwards as I am forwards. I don't have trouble reading a book because it's easy to just keep myself reading in one direction, plus once a word starts not to make sense, I automatically know to just look at it the other way. That said, when I glance at a sign, I might see TRAM LAW before WAL*MART. At a restaurant, I can read the paper advertising "NOW ON TAP" just as easily as "PAT NO WON (one)," which isn't half-bad advice, really.

This condition explains my love of palindromes. When a word is the same forward and backward, I can't lose! Also, it might explain my success at Scrabble since anagramming is almost second nature to me. In researching for this post, I've learned that words that form other words when backwards are called ambigrams. (Or "smargibma"... just kidding.)

At any rate, this "dyslexia" - if I can even call it that - has minor yet funny consequences. When I see a jar asking for TIPS, I quickly recoil picturing a jar full of spit. While watching news reports, the top left corner of the television often says LIVE, which I see as EVIL, which is generally appropriate since breaking news is rarely good. And when Michael Michael moved to Miami and tried to talk me into going too, I had to confess that I think of "I Maim" when I hear or see Miami, which is a pretty negative connotation on top of everything else I don't like about the city.

My favorite idiosyncrasy stemming from this tendency is that I refuse to drink bottles of Evian water. Not just because I hate bottled water, but any liquid that brands itself with "Naive" - even if backwards - is probably not something you should drink.