Section 2
“Caleb had been home since 2006”
- has he just been living in the same house since 2006
- where is home?
- has he gone to a hospital?
“Way more than enough time for Brannan to catch his symptoms”
- what symptoms?
- what is “more then enough time”?
“is often quiet as a morgue”?
- morgue means dead, but is a morgue entirely quiet?
- how often?
- how quiet is a morgue?
“A sound erupts”
- is it instant?
- how loud was it really?
“Caleb screaming at Brannan because she’s just woken him up from a nightmare”
- is Caleb really screaming?
- did Brannan actually wake him up?
- a nightmare is big claim to make. Was it actually scary, or was Caleb just talking in his sleep? I’d be upset too if someone randomly woke me up.
“after making sure she’s at least an arm’s length away in case he wakes up swinging”
- whose arm length? Hers or his?
- swinging like punching, or just waking up and sitting straight up wildly?
“the ensuing silence seems even denser”
- how “dense” is said silence initially?
- how much denser?
- was it absolutely silent?
“Even when everyone’s in the family room watching TV, it’s only connected to Netflix and not to cable, since news is often a trigger.”
- is everyone in the family room?
- are they watching TV?
- does it only have connection to Netflix and not one of many other possible non-cable viewing networks?
- what about cable is triggering?
- how bad of a trigger?
“Brannan and Caleb can be tense with their own agitation, and tense about each other’s.”
- what level of agitation?
- are they both tense all the time, or are they tense at different times?
- does it build to a certain point?
- when do they get on each other’s nerves?
“Their German shepherd, a service dog trained to help veterans with PTSD”
- the dog is a German shepherd
- it’s been trained for a long time to watch verterans
- it’s trained to specifically watch veterans that have PTSD
“is ready to alert Caleb to triggers by barking, or to calm him by jumping onto his chest.”
- the dog is trained to help the veteran
- the dog is able to identify what the specific veteran’s triggers are
- the dog is also trained to help calm the veteran by leaping on their chest
“This PTSD picture is worse than some,”
- this is a strong assumption, as there is no way of gauging how bad something is compared to someone else, as everyone is different
- on what scale is it worse
- is there a specific aspect that makes it worse
“but much better, Brannan knows, than those that have devolved into drug addiction and rehab stints and relapses”
- makes the claim from the previous bit more realistic
- how many people is this those that have devolved into drug addiction
“She has not, unlike military wives she advises, ever been beat up”
- how many military wives have been beat up
- how many military wives does she advise
- are they all military wives
- has she absolutely never been beat up?
- there is no evidence to support that she hasn’t
“Nor jumped out of her own bed when she got touched in the middle of the night for fear of being raped, again. Still.”
- was this ever a fear of hers
- “again” means it’s happened before
- makes it being a fear of her rational
- “Still” means that she is vigilant
“Sometimes I can’t do the laundry,” Brannan explains, reclining on her couch. “And it’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m too tired to do the laundry,’ it’s like, ‘Um, I don’t understand how to turn the washing machine on.’
- why can’t she do the laundry?
- why can she not understand how it works?
- she could just write the instructions down
- there’s an on button most washing machines
“She sounds like she might start crying, not because she is, but because that’s how she always sounds, like she’s talking from the top of a clenched throat, tonally shaky and thin.”
- there’s no way to compare her voice to what it normally is, so there’s no real way to say if that’s not just her speaking voice
- judging by the stress she speaks about, she could always be on the verge of tears
- as someone just meeting her, is this actually how she sounds, or is this dramatized?
Rowan Counterintuitive 