I Thought It Was Thursday!

Good Evening Lovelies! This week has been so busy that as the title suggests, I completely lost track of days. As such, writing on the appointed day COMPLETELY slipped my mind:) But at least I remembered before the week was over. Kind of like paying my bills, which seldom happens PRECISELY on the day they're due, but I always manage to pay in a panic during the allotted grace period! In fact, so began my afternoon. I walked through the blazing sun to the library and made myself return a DVD that was slightly overdue. I thought at the very least I'd have to pay a SMALL fine. Nope! I made it just under the wire, apparently, and avoided any such thing as a fine:) Thank goodness. Luckily while I was there, I remembered a few extra things I needed to handle that were within the library's "sphere of control"--if you like--so I handled those! I got novels to carry me through at least June, hopefully longer. I want to be deeply involved in one of them by the time I get to my church's book club's annual summer lunch. It ends our reading season, and everyone sends everybody off with a recommended book to get them through the hot months we spend mainly indoors where there's AC! I celebrated that victory by visiting New Hotel Mertens for a drink and a little snack while I delved into the first novel--a book called "Blackberry Wine". By Joanne Harris, the woman who wrote "Chocolat", and all about wine in France, it seemed ideal to begin among the storied surroundings of a hotel-turned-French-restaurant! Although since I was upstairs on the deck, I refrained from drinking wine in the sun. That tends to make me exponentially drunker than it would a normal human being:) Which leads me to a tangential tidbit; something interesting I discovered earlier this season. During indoor TV watching to avoid the heavy allergens floating around outside, I learned that alcohol is a central nervous system depressant. I knew of course the effect it has on me, but I'd always just said "it goes right to my legs"--meaning that I get clumsier and have even less motor control than normal. Now I know why! It's the nature of the beast. In subsequent research into Cerebral Palsy, I learned that it is defined as a "paralysis of the cerebellum"--the central freakin' nervous system. Which is WHY, exactly WHYYYYYYY wine makes me appear exponentially drunker than the average bear whenever I drink:) I'm already "permanently drunk" by appearances. Man, I wish to Heaven somebody in my life had helped me piece all of this together when I was younger, before I got so attached to alcohol. Now I just have to remember to check myself before I get out of hand, which drinking so often on my own FINALLY has taught me to do. "You got to walk that lonesome valley, you got to walk it by yourself..." At the end of the day, are there any truer words that have ever been spoken? Nobody can figure YOU out for you. Nobody can tell YOU who YOU are or what you can take. You just have to find out for yourself. It's like that wonderful moment in the early '90's movie "Forrest Gump" when Tom Hanks (playing the title character) asks of Sally Field, "what's my destiny Mama?" and she tells him "you're gonna have to figure that out for yourself...you never know what you're gonna get." Mama was right. And in the vein of letting others define you, there have been doctors in my past who've told people I care about that because of my condition I will have no empathy. I'm sure they meant well defining me for MYSELF at that moment, since I had probably just come out of brain surgery and was in no position to tell anybody what I couldn't handle. And I'm also pretty sure that those doctors did NOT mean I would be without empathy for the rest of my life. But those people in my life they told have latched onto the idea--like hungry turtles--and allowed it to define me for them. Now no matter what I say or do, "empathy" is not something they allow themselves to see in me. I'm without it. Just like the doctors said. Those same doctors (in another time and place) also said I'd never walk or talk or be "neuro-typical", of course. While I'm still trying to define "neuro-typical" for myself because I'm not entirely convinced it exists, I am convinced that doctors have to tell anxious parents SOMETHING, even if it borders on a falsehood. Especially in the '80s, when the Baby Boomers were beginning a three-generation-long feeling of entitlement, when because of the circumstances they had survived, and the hardships their parents had endured in the '30s and '40s, they felt they deserved answers and solidity even when there WERE no guarantees. And no one told them not to believe everything they heard:( So here I am, walking that lonesome valley, figuring myself out for myself. And that includes just a sip or two of a cocktail in the sun every so often.