ON NOTICING

I plan to debut my new shoes tonight at rehearsal. And while I plan to make a big deal out of it ("They're black Nikes! Like most of the shoes I've bought in the past ten years!"), I realize that most people would not point out their new shoes, instead waiting for someone to notice.

I fall very short as a "noticer." It takes a HUGE difference for me to notice that someone has gotten a haircut, for example. Honestly, if you didn't donate a foot of your hair to "Locks of Love," I'm probably not going to notice. It's not that I don't care...it's that I honestly don't notice. I know that's a very sitcom-y situation to get into - man does not notice woman's haircut - but it's the truth. It's how I am.

I'm also a terrible face-recognizer. I can memorize names from a list all day, but if I meet someone once - we'll say "your aunt" in this case, and then see her again several months later, the odds are that I won't remember her. This is a problem in my job, as there are about thirty people on the "no-trespass list," and if they were to walk into my office, I wouldn't know them from Adam. When I was an RA and was trying to learn the names of all of my residents, I went by what they were wearing on move-in day - so a guy named "Camden" will always be "the guy wearing the bright yellow 'Taxi' shirt" to me.

I know that I have my strengths, but visually processing information is not one of them. It's something that I don't really know how to improve, or if it can be improved. Am I stuck like this? Are there exercises I can do? Is it something that can be "fixed" through the grind of repetition? Or is there some huge crazy miracle that will make me an instantly-better noticer?

I wonder if these new shoes will be that miracle.