Meebo blog entry that I thought typified Sensing types.nsing

[mtaclof]

Now this is coming from someone who admittedly is in quite poor touch with sensing as a perceiving function. I constantly catch myself neglecting to perceive the world in a sensory fashion at all, shutting out sensory stimulus and being distracted by thought. Lately I've been trying to get a better idea of how sensors see the world by trying to identify the voices of sensors in narratives. I noticed this blog entry earlier today and found it worth reading.




meeblog

I'm a Midwestern guy. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio and even went to college there at The Ohio State University (yes, you need the "The" in front). I moved around town a bit as I grew up, but Columbus really doesn't change all that much from one side to the other. There's the West Side, where I was born (usually has an extra syllable: "west sah-eed"), and Dublin where I went through homeschool until High School. They're all fairly quiet suburban/semi-urban towns surrounding a bigger suburban/semi-urban city of 750,000 people.

Life in Columbus is largely governed by the weather. The saying is, "If you don't like the weather, wait 5 minutes." And sometimes you have to wait even less. We have rain, tornadoes, rain, hail, rain, snow, rain, thunderstorms, rain, frozen rain, rain and we also get drought, 100+ degree (Fahrenheit) weather in the summer and below -20 degrees in the winter (see Ohio's monthly record highs and lows). The reason I always kind of liked the weather and seasons in Ohio is that they go by right in front of your eyes. Swinging from one extreme to the other covers a lot of climate, so once you get the bone-chilling, spit-freezing, eye-drying, lung-hurting coldest day of winter, things start warming back up toward spring then summer! And when you get the marrow-melting, spit-evaporating, eye-boiling, lung-bursting hottest day of summer you can start looking forward to the cooldown toward winter again. You're in so deep with one season that you actually start looking forward to the next one!

I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in October of '07 from the paradise described above. The winter fooled me here by sprinkling a light rain almost every day and it even mustered a thunderstorm once (wow!). After winter dried up... there was nothing in the sky nor on the ground for almost 9 months. I got so stir crazy I started walking around San Francisco's fog pretending it was rain that just got stuck in the air. Parts of San Francisco get blanketed in "the marine layer"—a layer of some very thick and wet fog—almost every night. Before I moved recently, I lived in the Upper Haight, which has a pretty clear shot to Ocean Beach to the west, whence the fog comes in San Francisco. It was pretty cool to watch the fog roll down Page St. by my living room window at a leisurely 5mph or so, lit by our porch light.

Today, the radio told me the Bay Area is supposed to get another thunderstorm, with hail. I would love to see some hail today!

One of my favorite things to do on rainy days is to go outside and get rained on. My 2nd favorite thing to do is play video games with the window cracked open so I can hear and smell the rain. My 3rd favorite (requires thunderstorms) is to fall asleep to the patter of rain and roll of thunder. What are some of y'all's favorite things to do on rainy days? If you never get much rain where you're from, you should probably take a vacation to a "dismal and rainy" place. It's well worth the trip.

-adam

As someone who's not very consciously aware of sensing perception, I enjoy reading these type of things because I often find myself thinking about how I do in fact enjoy these things, but I'd never be aware of it unless it was pointed out in this fashion. Talking about having a window cracked during a thunderstorm was a particular moment I connected to.

Feel free to contribute any thoughts at all.

edit: no, I didn't intentionally try to give you evidence of my sensory ineptitude in the title.