Orgasm

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• March 9, 2015

From an early age, it was apparent my brother was dyslexic.  It was damn hard for him to read.  With every sentence he wrote, there was a blaring dyslexic mistake.  He had his tests read to him, and was forced to take special reading classes.  Teachers suspected that I too might be dyslexic.  While the evidence wasn’t as clear as it was in the case with my brother (or father), I too confused my b’s, p’s, and d’s.

After some reading comprehension tests, however, I scored above average.  Why?  Because my dyslexia was mild.  Plus, you don’t need to see every letter to read.  That’s why you can still (probably) read this sentence: As lnog as the frsit and lsat lretets are in the porper palce, you can slmracbe the rset of the wrod and it’s sitll rlbdaaee.

For me, dyslexia was most problematic in math and Spanish.  Math was (still is) a foreign language to me.  I always struggled in my math classes.  The numbers 6 & 9 were a lot of trouble for me.  Formula’s and algebra flustered me, and once flustered, you don’t realize that you’ve replaced a 6 with a 9, thus ruining the outcome of the problem.

Everyone makes dyslexic mistakes.  After elementary school, my English teachers never suspected I might be dyslexic.  Any errors I made were thought to be a careless error.  And they were right.  If I simply took my time to proof read, I would catch that I wrote “abble” instead of “apple.”  By the the time I was in high school, we typed all our essays, and these errors I struggled with became a thing of the past.  It was only my Spanish teachers who called me out on it.  When my high school Spanish teacher asked me if I had dyslexia, I was shocked.  It had been years since anyone asked me that question.  But my Spanish tests were riddled with obvious dyslexic mistakes.  My brain had deceived me.  What a cruel trick.

As an introvert, I was quiet in class.  Especially in high school, because I started having trouble sleeping at night so I often napped during class.  Despite the fact I was an ‘A’ student, a fast reader, and a good writer, I hated reading passages in class.  I fucking dreaded it.  Again, when flustered or stressed, you lose focus, and when that happens, the dyslexia kicked in and I seemed to regress several reading levels.  I feared I would sound stupid.

People who have dyslexia are not stupid.  Dyslexia isn’t a learning disability.  For some people with dyslexia, like my brother, they will probably not be able to learn through reading.  But that doesn’t mean they can’t learn.  They just have to learn another way.  It’s more of a learning obstacle.  The school district did my brother a disservice by using his dyslexia as a crutch.  He was always much smarter than they gave him credit for, but that’s a discussion for another time.

In my freshman or sophomore year, I took a mandatory biology class.  I forget the teacher’s name.  It was her first year teaching.  She was a scientist, and then she decided to become a teacher.  She was very nice, to a fault, and the kids were assholes to her and took advantage.  I felt bad for her.  She had thin skin and wasn’t cut out for teaching high school kids.  She quit after only one year of dealing with my class of degenerates.

Biology was an easy course for me, and I just wanted to nap.  I was sitting in the back of the class, starting to nod off, when the teacher called on me to read the next passage.  Shit.  I fucking loathe reading to the class.  Now, I’m flustered and exhausted.  I started to read.  My heart was pounding so hard, I wondered if the class could hear it.  Teachers, you have no idea how much anxiety you cause some students by simply calling on them to read.  Anyway, whatever I was reading, I forget it now.  But this I’ll never forget: the sentence I was reading had the word “organism” in it, but I read it loud and clear as, “orgasm.”

I continued the sentence, and for a moment, I thought maybe I got away with it.  Maybe, quite possibly, no one was paying attention.  But when I got to the end of the sentence and paused, the whole class erupted into laughter.  I could feel my face turn red.  But I too was laughing.  It was funny.  Here I was, this non-sexually active, smart and dorky, 15/16 year-old, with a classic Freudian slip. “I guess we know what Lori’s thinking about,” someone joked.  The teacher tried to calm the class down, but even she was laughing.

Exactly what I feared happened.  And you know what?  It wasn’t so bad.  Because it was funny.  I rolled with it.  I have a good sense of humor, and I come from a family that continuously busts balls, so I knew how to take a joke.  The class joked about it for the rest of the week, and then it was forgotten.  I later learned that almost every kid in all my classes hated reading to the class, because they didn’t want to mispronounce something and sound stupid.  Thus, kids are forgiving when their peers trip on words.

By the time I was a senior, when the teacher asked for a volunteer to read to the class, I raised my hand.  This was because most of the students were slower readers, and I had little patience.  Also, because I empathized with the students who were careful not to make eye contact with the teacher, fearing getting called on.  Those students, they were my brother, my father, and at one point, they were me.  I wasn’t afraid; partially because I wasn’t so self-conscious anymore, and partially because I knew there would be nothing worse than orgasm-ing in the middle of a sentence.