Ugh

I was awoken an hour early this morning by a particularly horrific sound: my next-door neighbor, screaming at the top of her lungs. Just on the other side of the wall from my bedroom, not ten feet away. Needless to say, it's the sort of sound that we're hardwired to respond to.

I was able to pick out the tone of her voice first. She wasn't in any trouble, and since no one else was speaking, she wasn't having an argument. Next I started making out words, but I though I could hear them perfectly clearly, I couldn't string them together into meaning because I had no context for what she was talking about.

By the time I was awake enough to try to understand what was going on, she'd been interrupted by a neighbor who came running down the hall to pound on the door and ask if she was okay. She probably managed to wake the entire floor. I only retain the faint, almost dreamlike impression that she was cheering at something, like a sporting event or a game show, and somehow managed to forget that she was in her own @#$% apartment at 6:00 AM.

My neuropsychology-inclined friends will take note that the sequence of understanding I just mentioned exactly parallels the brain's actual processing of language: sounds, then words, then meanings. If I were a little smarter, I could probably make some fascinating insight out of the fact that they seemed to become active in order. Oh well.

Strangeness: On my way to work I saw a car whose license plate read, simply, "4". A few blocks later I saw a car with the plate "7". It was like being in an episode of The Prisoner.