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Monthly Archives: May 2014

Arguments with my brain (1)

I haven’t been on time in awhile…

I think I’ve mentioned before that when I get tired, my language abilities start deteriorating.  If I’m only a little tired, my grasp of language is relatively intact.  When I start feeling tired, I’m still mostly coherent (although I do lose my sense of rhythm and people have to start keeping beat for me if I’m the instrumentalist).  But when I’m overtired and don’t even realize it anymore, my brain starts doing weird things to how I process language.

Eg: An ad comes in the mail and it says “Finish your dream view!”  My brain does not supply this information to me.  My brain supplies, “Finish your damn view!”  What?  Why is the ad yelling at me?  Also, my house doesn’t really have a view.  We’re enclosed and at the bottom of the hill?  After looking at it a couple more times, I realize that my brain thought it’d be funny to replace a word and change the meaning and tone of the sentence.  Jerk.

Eg: A friend writes as her Facebook status, “Never discount random luck.”  My brain actually lets me read the words correctly this time.  But, it decides to decode the sentence completely incorrectly while still being correct.  When you read the sentence, you probably understand that my friend means to say that you should always take into account that there is random luck.  I did not understand the sentence in this way.  I read the sentence and I thought my friend was saying that I should always sell random luck at full price.  And I didn’t understand why she would say something like that.  It’s actually kind of embarrassing how many times I had to read and reread the sentence and consider its meaning before I understood what was actually being said.

Eg: And then there was the time I thought some kiddie sugar cereal was offering a free necropolis in every box.  Yes.  Necropolis.  As in a city of the dead.  Well, we normally use the word to describe the large and elaborate cemetery of some ancient civilization.  I was thinking more in terms of a city of zombies or something like what was described in the Death Gate Cycle (those were good books, you should read them).  But whatever.  Neither of those should be in you child’s cereal (the prize advertised was actually something about Neopets).

In these cases, the result is that I try and cudgel my brain back into some semblance of working fashion as I cannot function if I’m constantly reading things incorrectly.  Of course, I could also try getting more sleep.  But who has time for that?

And then I heard a POW!

I’m late.  I know.  I’m sorry.  There were…things…that needed to be figured out.

Tuesday, early morning:

Draw 5_2_2014 18_04

In case you’re wondering, that jagged hole is about 3/4″ long. Not. Patchable.

I was on my way to work on Tuesday and because I left later than I wanted, I had to detour from my normal (shortest) route because of traffic.  I was on the 60WB and mere miles from the 605 when I heard quite a bit of commotion on the right side of my car.  I know I had run over something and that something sounded heavy, but I didn’t immediately feel anything different and I didn’t see anything in the rear view mirror, so I opted to continue driving for awhile to see what would happen.

Well, my car started feeling sluggish on the right side.  I don’t know any other way to describe it.  It felt sluggish.  And only on one side.  And I felt something similar before…when I have a tire doing its best to deflate itself.  And sure enough, a few seconds later my low tire pressure light comes on.

I was able to pull off the freeway and into a very accommodating Jack in the Box and listened to my tire hiss alarmingly for awhile.  Then I proceeded to change my tire.

I did not appreciate the stares I got from people walking into the restaurant.  I also did not appreciate that they stared and didn’t offer to help.  Not that I needed help.  I mean, I was even dressed for the job of changing a tire.  Yes, I was going to work but I often work in manufacturing facilities.  That means jeans are perfectly acceptable and I almost always wear steel toed boots.  I kind of wish that I put a pair of work gloves in the trunk like I’ve been meaning to since I collected Puddul from the dealership, but whatever.  Washing your hands isn’t that big of a deal.

Anyway, I got the tire changed, which I apparently can do in less than 10 min now, I am so practiced, and took a look at the flat tire.  It had a very large, jagged hole in it.  It was obviously not salvageable.  It made me very sad.  Because this was the third tire I’ve had to replace.  Actually, third and fourth, because my tires were at about half their lifespan and I couldn’t just change the one without messing up my alignment.

Sugh.

At least I didn’t have to order the tires this time.  My dealership had them in stock.  For once.  (Also, yes I took my car to the dealership for a mere tire change because I really prefer only Subaru touching my alignment from past experiences with other cars.)