Peculiar Obsessions & Following Orders

 

 

I have this peculiar obsession with watching airplanes in the sky, especially when they just took off or about to land.  In that short distance that I drive through the airport going to work and back everday via highway, I have this compulsion of staring at the airplanes that come and go at just enough time to identify the airline and gleefully fantasize that I’m on them. I don’t know if it’s the thought of going home, or just the anticipation of it. But for a while now, I think this is just an obsession with the idea of it.

 

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My brother enjoys traveling.  He has traveled overseas 44 times already.  On stopovers, he enjoys watching the airport flight schedule as they flip and change status.  Ttrrttrrttrrrtt!

 

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Stefan has an unusual facility with numbers.  Shortly after he turned 2, he could count until 100 by following the pattern of counting forward himself.  Now at 3, he can read random 4-digit-numbers, he counts odd and even numbers forward and back, and he can tell missing numbers in a series.  He is drawn to numbers every since he was little.  He had a love affair with the IKEA catalogue for a long time since he was little because of the prices and pages.  When Sherwin put them away, he resorted to the Bible which has even more pages.  He plays with the calculator a lot, too, by pressing a number, “+”, “+” then  “=” repeatedly until the numbers reach infinity.

 

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As I was doing his lootbags for his birthday, he took each lootbag and read each name out loud.  That’s when I realized he can read or he may just have familiarity with words -- people's names and other words he comes across regularly.  It must be his love for reading, too, as he has memorized some of his books already, like My Car.

 

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Out of the blue one time I asked him what number is on Devon’s shirt in the class picture. He said 36.  And he was right.  Today he has memorized the colour of the shirt each classmate is wearing in the picture and he would recite all their names in the same order as in the class picture. 

 

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"The Jeep is behind the pick-up truck," he says when he looks out the window.  "The pick-up truck is hiding in number 40," he adds.  He knows Unit 50 has SUV, Unit 42 has a big van, Unit 38 has a black car and a van, Maya lives in Unit7 and we live in 41.

 

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Stefan knows all the Thomas characters by heart from simple names as Gordon & Henry to complicated ones like Smelter Shed Cargo cars and Giggling Troublesome Trucks, their colours, numbers, and which ones have tenders.  We discovered that when we gave him a Thomas track for his second birthday.  He was more interested in the pamphlet that came with the track than the track itself.  He keeps it in my bag everywhere we go, no matter how dilapidated it had gotten, so he can look at it when he gets bored… until he has memorized them.  One time he just recited all of them in that very order as in the pamphlet.

 

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This morning I randomly asked him what number is in his moisturizer.  He said one-hundredy-thirty-nine -- 139 ml. How strange.