Lots to say but verbally challenged..weird dude

I've been trying for three days to write a single post. Seems that there is so much that I want to say that the kettle is boiling over into one big mess. I'm going to try and separate out all the ingrediants. It may not make perfect sense now, but in a couple of days maybe things will congeal, separate out and I'll have the semblance of a handle on things....maybe I can make some sense.

First off, I don't have the ability to sound out words. I learned to read by pure memorization as I think the brain device that can sound out words, is completely missing in my head.

If I come across a word that I havent experienced before, I am stymied and stuck. I have to just spell the word out, letter by letter, instead of trying to figure how the word is said. Then I store the written word, along with a visual picture in case I run across the word again.

When speaking with someone and they present a new word that is not in my memory banks, I frequently have to ask the person to spell it out, three or four times before I can attempt to process it and add it to my mental dictionary.

I have an incredible photogenic memory and I did really well on my spelling tests so no one, teachers felt that I needed more help understanding spelling and sounding out words.

Another thing, that makes me feel pretty stupid, is that I use words, big words and I have no idea what they mean. Here's the weirdy thing...I use them perfectly appropriately but have no idea what they mean. My Eldest and I also share the same penchant for being (see, I knew I wanted to use the word "penchant" and I did, then I had to look it up in the dictionary for the definition. I think I would know how to pronounce it correctly, but I'm just not sure.) able to solve algebraic problems of a medium difficulty...but we don't know how we arrive at the correct answer. Its like we know that x+y=z, but we have no clue what y is. Once again, teachers in school admired the right answers but were a bit upset that we would fail to write out how we came to the solution. Sometimes we simply do not know. Math teachers were not all that interested in showing and reshowing the much needed formula because we already had the answer right. They had no idea of the sheer frustration of not knowing or comprehending the formula. It was enormously irritating to go from x to z and never being able to comprehend y.

Well, that actually does cover one of my topics of interest. Whew. On to the next