The Kissing Disease

I decided to stop into the Urgent care facility close to my apartment this morning because of what looked and felt like strep. I went in and the doctor gagged me with a long q-tip and then came back 45 minutes later telling me what I had was not strep but possibly Mono or Adenovirus. I really hope it is Adenovirus because if it is Mono I will have it for about 35 days from when I first had a sore throat. That is a long time to be sick. Also, isn't mono generally contracted by kissing someone who has Mono? That is what I was always taught. Maybe that was just my mom's way of keeping me from kissing too much. She also used to tell me that if you kiss too much you could get pregnant. I just assumed she would know since she got pregnant 7 times.

Popsicle Sticks

Whoever thought it was a good idea to put jokes on popsicle sticks was a genius. I find that if I read the first part of the joke before I eat the popsicle I eat it twice as fast in order to find out the answer to the riddle. Almost every time I am disappointed. Partly because I didn't get to enjoy the flavor of the popsicle and partly because the jokes are never very funny. At any rate I almost always reach for a second popsicle just to fulfill my need for cold delicious fruit in my mouth. Brilliant marketing technique popsicle guys.... Brilliant!!

Gifted AND Talented

For those of you that don't know, I was recently diagnosed with ADHD. I have had it all of my life and to find out so late in life is rare but not unheard of. As I look back at my childhood under the light of this new knowledge I have started to have so many things that I have done or not done make sense. School was always difficult for me. I had a hard time meeting deadlines and finishing projects. I remember having my parents come in to meet with the kindergarten teacher and she pulled out my bin which was full of half-made projects. It was a bumpy start and I always had teachers point out my obvious under achievement. It wasn't that I was stupid I just had a hard time seeing things through.

One year in elementary school my teacher decided that I was too distracted and was having too much trouble getting my assignments in on time and that I should go to the remedial class for an hour a day for a week to see if that would help me to become a better student. This group was called "gifted and talented." Now I don't know what made anyone think that it was a good idea to take me out of my class and put me in a room with 4 misfits from the other classes in my same grade and then have us talk through our feelings. It wasn't like I was disturbing other children in my daydreams and it was like the teachers were saying, "You are having trouble doing your work so we are going to send you to a class for an hour where you wont have to do any work at all." It is just like suspending someone for ditching too. "You don't want to go to class? Here! Have a whole day off...that'll teach him a lesson." (I was never suspended...just thought it was funny that it was the punishment for ditching too much.) :) So anyways, I hated being in Gifted and Talented, I felt like I was a misfit too because I was there. I wasn't slow. I wasn't bad. In fact, I was a very smart child who just had a neurological disorder that made it hard to do assignments.

I was telling Estee about being in the remedial class called "gifted and talented" and she asked if I was sure that was the remedial class. Apparently she got placed in the "gifted and talented" class at her school. Fortunately for her it was really for the gifted and talented children and instead of sitting around in a room with the misfits talking about why someone punched that kid at lunch and how we felt about being abandoned at birth by our fathers, she actually got to do fun, exciting things with all the smart kids at her school, that is really where I would have excelled and I could never understand why I didn't get to do those types of things...I guess it was because of all of my emotional problems from my poor upbringing. (that was sarcasm my parents were awesome.) Do I sound bitter?...I hated that class!

The funny thing was that my mother was so proud of me for being in gifted and talented for a week and I didn't have the heart to tell her it wasn't really a class for the "gifted" and "talented." Unless stealing lunch money from little kids is considered a talent now.

Finding out that I have ADHD was one of the most, if not the most, life changing things that has ever happened to me. I used to cry out of frustration because of the the unexplainable failure I faced every day. You cannot imagine unless you go through it, the agony of feeling like you will never amount to anything while having the intelligence to understand exactly what that means. I cry now with joy as I begin treatment for this disorder and realize what I can become. I hope that more people will become aware of Attention Deficit Disorder so that many more children wont have to go through what I did. I don't blame anyone, there is no one to blame. My parents and teachers were just trying to do their best with what they knew.

Is it Breezy in Here or is it Just Me?

In the last 3 months I have split 3 pairs of pants/shorts in the butt area. We are not talking little tears or holes we are talking split wide open. I guess you don't realize how big you really get back there until it becomes painfully obvious.

I am reminded of the movie Spaceballs. there is a scene where President Skroob gets beamed into the war room but they messed up and got his head on backwards in the unscrambler. He looks down and exclaims, "WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME MY BUTT WAS SO BIG!?! President Skroob was not loved by the people on his ship. They didn't even save him an escape pod in the end. All that he really wanted was someone to care enough about him to tell him when something was off in his life...also I think he wanted Druidia's air...

So if you really love me you will let me know when my butt is getting huge and that way I wont be surprised when my pants tear wide open. Incidentally, After my shorts split in the morning at work and I had worked all day with a gaping hole I decided it keeps you a whole lot cooler than when there are no holes. Bonus!!

The Wave of the Future

My friend Joseph always tried to convince me that Mini-Disc was the wave of the future. I don't like being the guy that always says, "I told you so" but I really did "tell him so." At one point I tried to convince him that he should lose the Mini-Discs in favor of MP3s. At the time these were both burgeoning technologies and who could have known MP3s were going to win out...ok I did... It's like the time i was in Germany and they had just released the Euro and I thought to myself "gee, I could buy 4 Euro's for a dollar. I bet those are going to just go up in value," then did nothing about it. I would have really scored big. I really should just go with my gut more often. My uncle was telling me that the government is going to destroy the dollar by introducing a pan-North American currency called the "Amero." He usually follows it with talk of how we are building a super-highway that will allow Mexican truck drivers to go straight to Canada. I don't even know why that is a bad thing. In fact it might push our illegal alien problem off on our northern buddies. Anyways, my gut is telling me "no" on this one... I don't know where he gets these ideas. They sure are fun though. Yeah...so in conclusion, Mini-discs are like the 8-tracks of the nineties. They are fun to have but pretty useless.

Prune Fingers

I love swimming. Unfortunately, swimming and hot tubbing come with a very unfortunate side-affect. Why do fingers prune? Am I the only one who thinks it becomes terribly uncomfortable to touch things with fingers that are pruned up. They become so sensitive that when I sit in the hot tub I put my whole body in and hold my hands in the air to keep them dry. I look silly and people tease me but i will have the last laugh when they go to touch stuff and their hands are super sensitive! I wish there was some kind of magical remedy for pruniness because I am sure I could make a lot of money marketing that.
Speaking of weird things that I hate...I think I am also the only one who hates it when different food items touch each other on my plate. Some things are OK, like gravy on my mashed potatoes. But really, if I wanted corn in my mashed potatoes I would have mixed them in at the start. The one thing I dislike the most is syrup on my eggs. It probably tastes delicious but because it is so foreign to me I hate it. Also I like to eat one thing at a time until it is all gone...phew! I am glad I got that off my chest. I feel much better now.

Verse 1

Today in church we had a musical testimony meeting. This is where the congregation is allowed to come up and talk for a minute about their favorite hymn and then we all sing a verse or two from it. After a few songs a young lady got up and introduced her favorite song and many people before her had picked random verses to sing since sometimes the first verse wasn't their favorite. Unfortunately, I stopped paying attention when this particular young woman mentioned her favorite verse. "No big deal," I told myself, "I will just ask my friend Molly who is sitting next to me and is so good to me." I turned to molly and whispered into her ear, "which verse?" She looked at me with a smile and said "Verse one." In most songs you know in the first line which verse you are singing but in this particular song all the verses started off the same. So I started the song with confidence and held my head up high as I sang past the first line into the heart of the verse singing the words to verse one. Unfortunately I had been tricked. We really were supposed to sing verse three. I immediately hear giggles from my friends sitting with me and I looked over at Molly. She still had the same smile on her face as when she told me which verse to sing. Also I noticed she didn't sing the wrong words. She told me the wrong verse on purpose. I quickly shifted my focus from verse one to verse three and finished the song. Molly, if you are reading this, revenge is sweet. ;)