Ooooh, That Smell

"One must lose one's life in order to find it." - Anne Morrow Lindberg

In hindsight, perhaps watching the video of a PSA featuring a montage of dramatic auto accidents wasn't the best choice prior to going to bed. One of my friends had posted it on Facebook. I watched. I had to. Just to see if I could look the demon in the eye, I suppose.

I went so far as to re-post it, with a short commentary about how, at my internship today, as I was auditing charts and checking dates, staring at calendars from 2006 to 2010, I perversely counted the days since the accident.

One thousand, two hundred and ninety one.

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,

Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear.

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,

How do you measure, measure a year?

My fortieth birthday is this Sunday, three days away. I get maudlin near my birthday. And the New Year.

So there I was counting the days and reviewing what I'd done with them. Had I progressed? Had I learned? Had I grown? Had I healed?

Was it worth it?

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball,

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all."

At 2:04 a.m. I awoke smelling burning plastic. Since the accident, I have olfactory hallucinations. No, that's not quite correct. I don't suppose they are technically hallucinations if they occur in dreams. Let me be precise then, I dream in color, which I always have, and now, I perceive odors while I dream. It's usually the smell of something burning. Toast. Plastic. Metal.

The fact that I awakened and all my muscles were pulled tight like harp strings, my neck corded and taut, my shoulders locked and ready and my inhalation paused mid breath makes me think I was in the middle of a nightmare. I did what I always do in these situations. I breathed. Then I tried to figure out if something really was burning.

Then I realized the smell of burning plastic was really the smell of the deployed airbags.

S'io credesse che mia riposte fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo

Non torno vivo alcun, s' i'odo il vero,

Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

I got out of bed, and walked around the house checking, just to be sure, that nothing was on fire. It's my fate now. To sometimes doubt my senses, my memory. Then I turned on the laptop and began to write this.

So what is the answer? What is worthwhile?

After posting the video I learned that this was the anniversary of my friend Shannon's brother's death. He died in a car accident. He did not, somehow, inexplicably, extricate himself from his vehicle and live to tell about it, and live to blog about his recovery and experiences. He doesn't get to be maudlin and self-deprecating about how much he hasn't done in the years since.

The answer is, "I don't know." And I do know. And it doesn't matter. And everything matters.

Someone asked me recently, "If you could go back and relive any time of your life, when would it be?" This wasn't asked in the sense of returning to alter the past or correct mistakes. She meant to ask which time period was so good that I would trade my now for it.

I shocked myself with the answer. None. I would not return to any other time in my life.

I guess that means I'm happier than I thought I was because, honestly, all things considered, now is just as good, if not better than any other time.

I am learning. I am healing. I am making a difference, even if I don't always understand how or to whom.

In three days I will gratefully celebrate my 40th birthday and toast what I have survived and who I have become because of it.

How do you measure, a year in the life?

How about love?

How about love?

How about love?

Measure in love.

Seasons of love.

How Tired Am I?

http://lamestishen.blogspot.com/2010/05/round-and-round.html

But...

"Life, death and rebirth are inevitable." - Rig Veda

All the subtle changes since the accident have made me feel like a different person. I feel like me, but not me at the same time. I am not tired like this. I do not have trouble finding words. I do not have attention problems, or difficulty reading.

But I am all those things. I have all those things.

And slowly, I've been coming to terms with these new parameters. Some of them are, admittedly, more difficult to accept than others. All in all, they are disorienting.

I don't like the "new" me. I don't want to be like this. I didn't ask to change in these ways, and I'm angry that I'm being forced to be less than I was "before".

But...

(There is a "but".)

Sometimes, especially in the last several weeks, I've got this strange, almost exhilarating feeling. It's the feeling you get when you have nothing to lose, the feeling you get when, having nothing to lose, you decide to just jump in and see what happens.

I feel like I could change anything I wanted right now.

Sure, I had a plan, I spent the last several years working toward very specific goals. They aren't working out. I did everything right. I worked VERY hard. I amazed myself and others with my dedication and focus. But...

(Another "but".)

But it isn't working out. Having followed and completed all the right steps, I'm not where I should be. I went to school. I got the grades. I got the recommendations. I got the test scores. What I didn't get was an acceptance letter to the doctoral program I wanted. Actually, I didn't get an acceptance letter to ANY doctoral program. What the hell did I do wrong? Was I just so awful at the interview? Are there really THAT many people who did as well as or better than I did?

Maybe there are. Perhaps I overestimated my own worth and achievements. Either way, I've spent months and months working very hard for something I am not going to get.

So now what?

Part of me says, "anything at all". With nothing to lose, anything is possible.

Don't mistake this for a healthy attitude, because I'm not sure that it is. On some level, this scares the heck out of me. I really do feel like I have nothing to lose. I feel that, if none of this mattered anyway, if all my hard work and effort were for naught, then what does matter? Who cares? I might as well stay home and knit toilet seat covers and sell that at the local flea market. It would be less stressful, that's for sure.

I haven't figured this out yet. I don't know if I ever will. I don't even know if it matters if I do, or if I don't.

Cello? I Can't Hear You

"Where it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead." - Benjamin Disraeli

I am considering buying a cello. Music does wondrous things for the brain. Playing music is even better. It uses both hemispheres and anything that does that help the brain integrate and reroute after injury.

When I was about 12 I briefly took cello lessons, but stopped because I was not overly fond of the teacher. She was one of those straight-backed people who seem not to be capable of experiencing joy or humour or sponteneity. How could someone like that teach music? It didn't make sense to me. Besides, she wanted me to cut my fingernails. I had lovely fingernails back then and was very proud of them. While other pre-teens were fretting about their nubby little nails and experimenting with faux fingertips, I proudly displayed strong, long natural nails.

So the lessons didn't last long.

But I still pined for the cello.

I fantasize about playing cello. I see myself on the dock of my house on the bay, practicing as the clouds form over the water, signalling a gathering storm, my music building with the wind.

Yeah, I'm so full of crap. But that's what I see when I think about playing the cello. Guys fantasize about wailing on a guitar in front of throngs of cheering fans - I play cello, alone, on a dock. Don't judge. I'm sure everyone has their own bizarre ideas of who they really are, on the inside.

What is the line from "Pride & Prejudice"? Darcy's Aunt says something about music and the piano, asserting that, "had she ever learned, she would have been a great proficient."

So I kid myself and tell people that I am buying a cello for therapy. Really, it's a midlife crisis of sorts. I'm at a point where I can change everything - my job, where I live, my relationship status, my idea of what I wanted from life, even my idea of who I am. I find that suddenly I can pick and choose what I want to keep, and what I want to delete.

And I still see myself, sawing away at that cello, perhaps badly, perhaps without any skill at all, but there I am, on that dock, as the storm approaches, and I am still playing.

Muddy Blurder

"I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity." -Marcus Tullius Cicero

If you can say loquacity, you obviously are not tongue-tied. I, on the other hand, have been suffering a spate of mealy-mouthed mumbling. Ok, it's not really mumbling.

I switch letters. It's always the first letter of two words. So I'll say, "muddy blurder" instead of "bloody murder". The results can be funny. Unfortunately, this, like so many of my new brain quirks, happens most frequently when I am stressed, highly emotional or tired.

The switcheroo is not something you want to be doing when trying to appear professional and competent at, say, an interview for an internship, or when trying to convince the local code enforcement officer that you should not have to make any repairs or changes to your building since there are no tenants residing there. I could have made up something more dramatic, but we write what we know.

This is the kind of thing that is funny when it happens to someone else, but mortifying when it happens to you. If you were frustrated or stressed or angry to begin with, telling someone to, "Stop that night row!" doesn't help.

So what is causing my current linguistic loopiness? I really don't know. My stress level has ramped up as of late, but I have been getting enough sleep. (At least I think I am.)

This is one of the things that fascinates me about TBIs. I want to know why we make the mistakes we make when we make them. Ugh. That was inelegantly phrased. What I mean is, why only switch the first letter? Why only some words? It seems mostly to be consonants. Parts of speech are stored differently in the brain, does the same go for consonants and vowels?

I was hoping to be able to study this sort of thing if I got into a doctoral program. Maybe it's really not that important, but I do think it would help us understand not only how a non-broken brain works, but also help identify subtle brain injuries that might not show up on standard medical scans. If there are "mistake patterns" that are typical for head injuries, it could be another way to diagnose TBI. Like so many other brain injury symptoms, this is not a constant, it comes and goes and depends on a number of other, external and internal, factors. Still, I would like to find more a more quantitative means to pin down this slippery diagnosis. Language patterns, especially mistake patterns might be one way to do it.

There's a dissertation in there somewhere; I knust jow there is.

"All things truly wicked start from an innocence." - Ernest Hemingway, A Movable Feast

I had this great quote about the innocence of childhood, which, like the innocence of childhood, I lost, so you get Hemingway instead.

All this was brought on by the Peep Show photo at the left. You see, when I was a kid, my Mom and Gram used to tell me stories about when they were kids. One of the things that I always used to love hearing about were the "Peep Shows". Now don't go there. When my mother was a child, she went to a fair, possibly the Bloomsburg Fair, and they had a display of newly hatched chicks and the more approachable fluffy yellow, yet slightly older, chicks. The fluffy yellow chicks were provided with chick-sized Ferris wheels and sliding boards and merry-go-rounds for their chick amusement.

Apparently, they actually did hop onto the Ferris wheel ride and slide down the sliding board.

I had long thought this to be a figment of my mother's imagination, until this year, when I saw a similar stair and sliding board arrangement for ducklings at the PA Farm Show. That will teach me not to believe my momma.

So I grew up hearing about these "Peep" shows. We called chicks, "peeps". She also told me about buying pink and blue dyed chicks at Renniger's Market and flower shops when she was a kid. They'd sell them around Easter, and even I remember boxes of little yellow and white chicks for sale on Sunday's at "the auction" when I was very young. Sadly, or maybe not so sadly for the chiklets, party-colored chicks had fallen out of fashion by the time I was a kid in the early 70's. Still, there are square black and white photos of me, at about two-years old, reaching a tentative index finger toward a tiny, oblivious peep, staring up at my comparative hugeness from the news-paper covered kitchen floor. Peeps were delicate, and I was always told to pet them with "one finger" to avoid an untimely peep death caused by my juvenile exuberance.

The peeps magically disappeared when they started to grow pin feathers and get ugly. I have no memory of this, but I am assured that they lived long happy lives on Wagner's farm. Wagner was our milkman and came every week to the house to deliver our glass bottled milk. I'm pretty sure that PETA would challenge the "long happy lives" part of that equation, but for the sake of maintaining my relatively happy childhood, I intend to continue believing just that.

The punchline to this story came years later as my family and I were driving to Philadelphia. I must have been about six or seven, and could read well for my age. As we travelled down Rt 61, I noticed a sign on a storefront we were passing. Excitedly, I yelled out from the backseat, "Oh look, a peep show! Can we go?"

You could have heard a pin drop. I'm surprised that my Grandfather didn't slam on the brakes and kill us all.

Really, it was an innocent mistake on my part. I'd been hearing these stories about "peep shows" and there was a sign for one. Of course it was also a sign for the "local" Adult Shop, but I wouldn't know what that was for another few years. All I knew then was that I'd said something that horrified everyone in the car and that the advertised "peep show" was definitely NOT the type of peep show I thought it was.

No one adequately explained, at the time, what that type of peep show was.

My cunning plan was to bring this all around and talk about the loss of innocence that occurs after an injury or serious illness, but instead I'm going to leave that (mostly) unsaid, and just leave you with the image of me, hands splayed against the backseat window, wishing for all the world to see pink and blue peeps joyously riding miniature Ferris wheels.

Truth be told, and with all apologies to PETA, I'd still like to see that.

You Say, "College," I say, "Collage"

"One of the great mind destroyers of college education is the belief that if it's very complex, it's very profound." -Denis Prager

Laughter is sometimes the only option. I just finished posting an update on my art-blog, a forlorn thing, even more ignored than this step-child of a blog. My intent was to update my four "fans" on the status of some upcoming art shows which would be exhibiting my work.

I do collage.

I'm also a pastel painter, but that's not the focus at the moment. We're talking about collage. Which, incidentally, I just mistyped as "college". Which was the entire point of THIS post, because after typing "collage" (spelled correctly that time), I sat there and stared at the screen and couldn't get my brain to not read it as "college".

Everything ground to a halt. You could smell the burning brain cells.

I knew my thinking was wrong. I knew "collage" was correct...but...the broken part of my brain just. couldn't. accept. it.

So there I sat, chugging away mentally, trying to force my brain to tell the difference. Finally, I did a search on "collage", and, lo, there it was, (god bless Wikipedia) describing a "collage" as an assemblage of various things, bits of newspaper, etc.

I was saved. "Collage" was art. "College" was...well, fill in your favorite college experience here.

Now I just need to retrain my brain to know the difference.