mrissa | uhhhh....

Dear universe,

Please excuse

mrissa from braining today. She has the dumb.

Signed,

mrissa's mother

(She always said it was fine to forge her signature in good causes. "Good causes" were understood to include "I would rather ride with Daieuen than with Doc Tichy to the debate tournament" or "I totally want to have pizza you never heard was a possibility.")

Uff da, uff da. I am not the kind of tired where I could go immediately to sleep if I went to bed now. No, that would be too easy. I am the kind of tired where I blink stupidly at things, wondering why...that thing...is over there...where I put it...why did I do that? Yes. Like that. This is the kind of the dumb where you go downstairs and wonder what you meant to do and then go back upstairs and figure it out, lather-rinse-repeat until you are frustrated enough to repeat, "Towels in dryer, towels in dryer, towels in dryer..." all the way down the stairs. Except that I really can't and shouldn't do that with the vertigo; we are still minimizing stairs. Especially today, when my PT has been a great deal rougher, with more falls and harder/more dangerous falls than usual*. So mostly I am standing around trying things in case some of it might be right. I have a list. But that doesn't help if nothing on the list looks at all coherent. Probably I will end up sending a couple of birthday presents early this evening just because that'll be one less thing to try to sort from my list. And, y'know, also because I like those people and want them to be happy on their impending birthdays.

One of the things about this stage of tired is that I get very odd bits of story popping out, and some of them eventually cohere, if I am patient and write them down. This one has girl cooties all over it. This one reads like I was reading Ursula LeGuin and

pameladean and Zenna Henderson all in a row, and I haven't been reading any of them lately. But I am not opposed to girl cooties. I'm sort of stuck with 'em, so it's just as well I'm not opposed. Only I fear I'm supposed to go read Willa Cather to find the title, and I don't wanna. I have gotten over most of my Nebraska schooling-induced aversion to Willa Cather, but that only brings me to neutral, I'm afraid. (Apparently there is no other writer Nebraska schoolgirls can grow up to be like. This did not, as you might well imagine, sit well with me.) Maybe one of you can read Willa Cather and tell me what good titles might come from it? I thought not. But it was worth asking.

*I am a good faller, and all but two of the PT exercises come with built-in safety stuff. But I had to twist around fast to land on my butt, which is padded for it, rather than my knee, which is not. You know how you can feel the sort of fall that's going to be dangerous on your knee, twisty and at the wrong angle? I averted one of those this evening. I am mighty. I am fierce. And damned if I'll make progress on the vertigo just to have to start a course of PT on a knee.