When your teen explains that all of that time, when she was smirking and seemingly "somewhere else" while being yelled at, lectured to, etc. etc. as a young child, she was actually playing this GAME... with the speech of others...

and proceeds to describe this point scoring system that is a bit like, well-- Scrabble-meets-anagrams, with scoring based upon consonant/vowel combinations and repetition. Only she was doing it in real time with the words that other people were using in speech-- sort of like a super-synesthesia based on her spelling prowess and untouchable processing speed.

"So really, when I explained that I wasn't smirking AT you, I meant it-- I was just thinking 'Wow-- a FIVE! That word was a FIVE! It's not often that you hear a word that is a five-- most excellent...'"

and then she also describes a game of pretend with a laser network imagined in a real room that she had to mentally map and navigate.

Sigh. No wonder time-out was never terribly effective with this one.


Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.