Tuesday, May 03, 2005

And so it looks as though I'll be headed to my first conference at the end of next month, right after my family leaves town. Do I know anyone in Indiana? I don't think that I do. I'm terribly excited, of course (a free trip to a section of the country I've never been to, and an opportunity to learn so much about something that I love? This career shit works, man), but I'm a little scared as well. I am so much younger than other people who do what I do: the jump in position that I just made should have taken a couple of years rather than six months to reach. And though I generally try to pretend that the years that they have on me--that all of you, really, have on me--don't affect me at all, the bare truth of the matter is that sometimes it scares the stuffing out of me. I'm afraid of being found a fraud for things I didn't even realize I was pretending at.
I have a habit of tossing myself into new waters to make sure I remember how to swim. This time, it's someone else that's doing the throwing.

Feeling much better today, thanks. An unexpected visitor yesterday evening helped cheer things up, and my throat no longer feels like I've been trying to swallow sand spurs. I met a very nice roly-poly this morning on my walk in to work and I didn't trip over my own feet once today.

Steph and Ryan were here on Saturday, typing stories on Ethel, my typewriter. They were doing so well that I set them a task, to start a story with the sentence, "If you feel faint, it's because all the blood is rushing to your still-intact hymen! Lose it ASAP!" and to end it with "That is the power of grapes."--lines pulled from my envelope of words. They did splendidly, and now it appears that they've brought home their own typewriter to love and cherish. It makes me want to do a little dance.

My party is coming up this weekend, and so I'm getting into the usual panic about playing hostess. (This time, there's someone famous who says he's stopping by. I've got tequila, my friend.) I'll fret about it right up until people start showing up, and then I'll quit it and enjoy myself. This is what always happens, but knowing what's at the end doesn't make me any less spastic now.

Things are still just slightly off center. There can be, often during strokes, damage to certain parts of the brain that make a person able to see noses, mouths, eyes, but not a whole face. It makes recognizing the person to whom you are speaking nearly impossible, visually. I feel a little bit like that now, as though I'm seeing fits and snatches of something and if I could just cross my eyes properly I could figure out what it is. And I should know by now that the best way to open a stubborn jar is to leave it alone and come back later. But then, there are a lot of things that I should know, and one of them is that knowing and believing are generally not the same.

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