• Pieces

    This morning I got a troubling call… a hearing was going to be set to continue my mother’s involuntary commitment for another 30 days, because she wasn’t showing any improvement. There was panicked talk of lawyers, and… nothing for the rest of the day. It turned out half a day of hearings was all I could take (at work today). I went home and fell asleep; not having planned to, but sleeping through the afternoon and well into dinnertime.

    The ringing of my phone woke me up this evening. I think the clock on the wall said 7:30 or so, and the light coming in through the window was impossible to discern between twilight and first light. I was completely out of sorts when the caller told me that my mother was alert. She was up, talking, smiling, reading magazines, and making plans. She was looking forward to going home, building her strength back up, driving the car again, and going shopping. It may not be quite as stunning, but I immediately thought of that Robin Williams movie, Awakenings.

    I’m nearly speechless. I don’t know what to make of all this, without seeing it for myself. From the sound of things, she sounded better than I remember her being in at least a year. I don’t want to doubt this turn of events, but how often do things turn out to be “too good to be true?” Yesterday she wasn’t taking care of herself in the most basic ways, and today, seemingly like a switch was flipped, she’s all better? What happened? Was it just a new combination of drugs, pure chance, or a combination of the two? Will it last? Will she be home and talking to me like she hasn’t been in years?

    Maybe I’m still not quite awake, but I can’t wrap my head around this yet.

  • Pleas

    I’ve got a better than average reason to still be up this far past my bed time: fear. Tomorrow (today) is Friday (this being Thursday night), and I’m determined to qualify (in parenthesis) every other word (typed in the mother tongue) in this sentence. When next the sun rises over fair Dunedin, I’ll be sitting in my office trying to pump myself up for my first day of hearings since the cellular rebellion (I like that turn of phrase enough that it might just have some staying power).

    This is notable because:
    1. I’ll be exposing myself in public – epidemiologically speaking of course.
    2. I’ll be doing more walking aroud than I’ve done the last two weeks.
    3. It could be my last day at work for the next couple of weeks (because it may take me that long to recover).

    Why am I doing this to myself? Odd as it may sound, I miss the people. Child support hearings are not the greatest place to see people at their best, but in some ways they don’t have their normal guard up. In between the pressures of money, abandonment, and love unrequited, sometimes you have the opportunity to say something that might stick more than it would’ve otherwise. The fact is, as much as I grumble about it (most of it showy and incincere), working with people at a time when they’re down can be a joy. Plus, I can’t wait to talk to the judge again… what a character. He’s got more stories than a library… and he might tell you he’s older than most of them… one of those folks you can’t help but surrender your ears to.

    Anyway, if I don’t post anything Friday night I’m probably collapsed in some corner of the house, with a soft blanket and pillow, waiting for my strength to return.

  • Tech check

    For a writer wanna-be, I’m hopelessly tethered to random infusions of rhyme, alliteration, and odd word pairings. But that’s not really what I wanted to say today; I distracted myself with a bout of whimsy following the title conception phase of this entry.

    It was another fit of whimsy which prompted my fingers to grace the keyboard of the TAM this morning (I hear you, enough with the TAM already!). I was holding in my hands a piece of technological marvel: a 2 GB SD card, stamped out in mass quantities, and sold for 20 bucks on the open market. That’s just ridiculous… indistinguishable from magic just 18 years ago… when I was tooling around with my mark-one Mac at UF (which came with less RAM than a floppy and no hard drive). Now a 2 GB SD card serves to double the size of the TAM’s hard drive – an uber portable mechanism to transfer files between the home iTunes library and the TAM.

    It’s important to note that OS9, and the versions of iTunes that will run on my little piece of Apple history, are not compatible with my mark-four iPod… thus the SD card and USB card reader – which I use anyway for my Palm T/X and my LG cell phone.

    Damn I need me an iPhone.

    I’m sure there are those of you out there who’ve probably worked on home computers (the predecessor to the mid-90’s “personal computer”) with much less processing punch than my old Mac. Heck, I remember my dad showing me some basic… well, BASIC… on our state of the art TRS-80 (of Tandy / Radio Shack fame). That was way back before even “home computers,” when we just had “microcomputers” (“micro” because they didn’t take up a room).

    Sometimes I think I’m just easily impressed.