The Big Short_ Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis [18]
He sensed that he was different from other people before he understood why. When he was two years old he'd developed a rare form of cancer, and the operation to remove the tumor had cost him his left eye. A boy with one eye sees the world differently than everyone else, but it didn't take long for Mike Burry to see his literal distinction in more figurative terms. Grown-ups were forever insisting that he should look other people in the eye, especially when he was talking to them. "It took all my energy to look someone in the eye," he said. "If I am looking at you, that's the one time I know I won't be listening to you." His left eye didn't line up with whomever he was trying to talk to; when he was in social situations trying to make chitchat, the person to whom he was speaking would steadily drift left. "I don't really know how to stop it," he said, "so people just keep moving left until they're standing way to my left, and I'm trying not to turn my head anymore. I end up facing right and looking left with my good eye, through my nose."
His glass eye, he assumed, was the reason that face-to-face interaction with other people almost always ended badly for him. He found it maddeningly difficult to read people's nonverbal signals; and their verbal signals he often took more literally than they meant them. When trying his best he was often at his worst. "My compliments tended not to come out right," he said. "I learned early that if you compliment somebody it'll come out wrong. For your size, you look good. That's a really nice dress: It looks homemade. The glass eye became his private explanation for why he hadn't really fit in with groups. The eye oozed and wept and required constant attention. It wasn't the sort of thing other kids ever allowed him to be unselfconscious about. They called him cross-eyed, even thought he wasn't. Every year they begged him to pop his eye out of its socket--but when he complied, it became infected and disgusting and a cause of further ostracism.
In his glass eye he found the explanation for other traits peculiar to himself. His obsession with fairness, for example. When he noticed that pro basketball stars were far less likely to be called for traveling than lesser players, he didn't just holler at the refs. He stopped watching basketball altogether; the injustice of it killed his interest in the sport. Even though he was ferociously competitive, well built, physically brave, and a good athlete, he didn't care for team sports. The eye helped to explain this, as most team sports were ball sports, and a boy with poor depth perception and limited peripheral vision couldn't very well play ball sports. He tried hard at the less ball-centric positions in football, but his eye popped out if he hit someone too hard.
Again, it was hard for him to see where his physical limitations ended and his psychological ones began--he assumed the glass eye was at the bottom of both. He couldn't stand the unfairness of coaches who favored their own kids. Umpires who missed calls drove him to distraction. He preferred swimming, as it required virtually no social interaction. No teammates. No ambiguity. You just swam your time and you won or you lost.
After a while