I SHOULD WRITE THIS SHIT DOWN
Cindy Maddera
Saturday morning after my usual breakfast sandwich and journal writing time, I was driving to Trader Joe’s along Ward Parkway. Kansas City is a city of boulevards and parkways. Ward Parkway is particularly lovely, lined with tall trees and old mansions. There is a wide lush median with an the occasional fountain (we’re also the city of fountains). At the intersection of Meyer and Ward there is a large roundabout that circles the Meyer Circle Sea Horse Fountain which was just refinished last year. The stones that make up the fountain now shine a bright white. It’s a really pretty fountain. Any hoo…as I made my way half way around the circle, I noticed the sun reflecting off the water and the people jogging up and down the sidewalks and I sighed with the loveliness of the day. Then something entered my brain and I thought “Ooh…I should write about that thing! That would be something not depressing to write about.”
Now I’ve completely forgotten what it was that entered my brain.
You see? Nice things float around inside my head. It is not all doom and gloom in there. I just seem to be misplacing those thoughts at the moment. I seem to be misplacing a number of things at the moment. Thoughts. Appointments in the calendar. Reasons for why I got up from the couch or why I walked with purpose into the kitchen. Did I feed the dog? I think maybe I did? Josephine got two dinners that night. Lucky dog. It’s like I only have a brain for science and as soon as I step out of the work space, someone blows a thick smoke into my ears. This does sort of happen to me when I’m on two wheels. The number of times I end up behind a car containing heavily pot smoking passengers (new band name?) while I am on my scooter has become immeasurable. I’m more likely to pull into the driveway with a contact high than not.
But no. This fog isn’t pot fog. I know that it is the hazy brain of an aging female mixed in with a brain that tends to be the keeper of the locations of all the things. It is a combination of hormones and just asking too much of my brain. I’m learning French (if you can call it that). I’m reading a book that I checked out digitally from the library which means it will be yanked out of my digital reader when the time is up. I’m learning how to build code to run a slide loading robot. That shit is hard. And all of those reasons above are why I might sit in the driveway in my car, scrolling through Instagram for fifteen minutes before taking the groceries inside or forget to sub that yoga class (yeah..that happened). I have things on my work calendar that I only see in when I have Outlook open. I have things on my google calendar that only see when I have my gmail open. I have stuff on my phone calendar that I never really even look at it.
My calendar situation is a mess.
I spent fifteen minutes this morning fixing all of that and combining my calendars into something that makes more sense. At least for now. I went with combining it all to my google calendar because I have everything color coded and I feel like my brain appreciates this. In fact I just moved a red work block activity scheduled for a previous day to an earlier day because of an unexpected opening on the microscope I need to use for this project. I found great pleasure in this action, but also that red work block was wedged into a full column of other work blocks. It was nice to visually clear that space and now I may be able to actually finish a cup of coffee that morning.
Even still, I forgot to take my Tuesday block of pills and Wednesday morning I stared at my pill box for a long time convincing myself that this day is Wednesday.
Not Tuesday.