birdwrong

I'm J! I'm... 32? I think? I'm from Wales, currently living in Massachusetts with my wife and charmingly troublesome baby.

I work as a librarian at a public library, and it has been a very fun way to feel part of a community so far from home! Libraries do so many cool things - did you know that you can even borrow video games and stuff from them? You can even borrow eBooks to read on Kindle!

Anyway, in my free time I enjoy a bunch of things like drawing, reading, video games, and playing board games! I also have some very specific interests, like the fact I love collecting and viewing stereoscopic images, like old Viewmaster reels, or even older Victorian Stereoview cards.

I'll gradually be adding more and more about my interests and things I love to this website, so you'll learn a lot and perhaps get some good recommendations by clicking around!

Why "Birdwrong"?

Good question! Around 10 years or so ago, I used to write a comic diary about my daily life. It wasn't very good, but at least I did learn to draw better and I met some lovely people through it!

I drew myself as a little round bird in the comic (because I couldn't draw people back then!). When I started the comic, I was feeling pretty down on myself and felt like I kept doing everything wrong in life. When I was trying to think of a name of the comic, a bird was singing outside my window, and my brain just kind of went "Birdsong... Bird.... Song.... Bird... Wrong..."

Thrilling, I know! I like learning the origins of people's weird online names, though. If you have a story behind your username, I'd love it if you shared it in my Guestbook!

You're not sure how old you are?

Haahhh... I kind of say that as a joke, but also it is often true. I've always been "bad with numbers", and throughout my 20's I wondered if there was such a thing as "dyslexia with numbers". Such a thing would explain the issues I face, such as not struggling to count change, to fill out timesheets for work, to calculate people's ages (a curse when having to verify people's ages when working at the till in Tesco!), and so on.

Well, it turns out there is a sort of "dyslexia with numbers"! It's called dyscalculia, and learning about it really helped me to make sense of the way my brain works. I used to really feel stupid and beat myself up for struggling with things, but learning about dyscalculia has allowed me to become a lot more forgiving of myself, and also to learn how to better set myself up for success!

I share this not as a "boo-hoo look at me" thing, but because I literally lived three decades without knowing a thing about dyscalculia. Why does nobody talk about this? We all know about dyslexia! Is it due to the shame people feel about "being bad at maths"? I don't know! But I know my life would have been much less a headache if I had understood this back when I was at school. So I hope that by talking about it, I might help somebody else with dyscalculia learn about it.