Monthly Archives: October 2015

Memory

I read an article this morning that was pretty insightful and I wanted to share it.   It’s a brief article that you can find here

Apparently I have a small hippocampus.  Sounds like an oxymoron really.  How can anything named “hippo” be small?  But alas, there is ONE small thing on me, and unfortunately it’s in my brain.

Are you done laughing yet?

Okay, let’s proceed.  Ahem.  It would appear that people who suffer from recurrent depression tend to have a small hippocampus.  Through no fault of our own, that tiny little area in the brain is what allows us to remember important things like names and places, as well as the ability to remember the good times, all things I suck at.  I really dislike the fact that I can’t remember things from my childhood or even last week, but apparently it’s not entirely my fault.  There’s no special diet or magical pill that you can take to enhance the size of your hippocampal volume.  I’m wondering how men get their own special medicine for enhancement yet we happiness deprived people just have meds that keep us in a fog and diminish our emotions?

This isn’t going to be a gripe session, in fact it’s going to be relatively short.  One of the reasons for my brevity is due mostly to my time frame to write this and not forget to finish it.  The other is because I usually always (secretly love saying that), like to include a song that conveys my reason for writing.  I struggled a bit but then found this gem in the archives.   I’ve never heard of either of these people but I believe I’ve seen the conductor before.  But I can’t be sure, because I’m so forgetful.  At any rate, I watched this video 3 times.  Once to see if it was a good match for my blog post, once again to watch it more clearly, the beautiful dresses and backdrop, and the last time for a good belly laugh.

When you watch the video, please watch Andre Rieu the conductor, give his special kind of looks to singer, Mirusia.  I thought to myself, “Rob, that’s how some people actually look at you, especially when you’re so forgetful”!  She’s oblivious, which makes it even funnier.

Take a peek:

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Fly

I’ve been putting off writing anything for a while, because I didn’t want to write about anything angry.

And I’ve been pretty angry lately.

I know what I want to say, but I don’t want to throw the blame around too much.  I guess I want to edit my words in order to be understood completely.  I struggle with getting my point across accurately.

So here goes:

Some years ago I walked into my bathroom and found a lightening bug crawling inside my sink basin.  I remember watching it struggle up the side of the pedestal sink, and falling back down.  I actually stood there for a minute or two thinking to myself, “doesn’t it know that it just can fly away”?  Maybe somewhere in that tiny little brain it walked around, surrounded on all sides by a virtual opaque jail.  It probably couldn’t see that if it just looked up, freedom was not so far off.

I eventually reached into the sink and let the bug crawl onto my hand, walking it outside to the front porch where it eventually flew away.  I stood there, alone in the front of my house, trying to keep my eye on the lost insect, barely visible within seconds of it’s release and thought to myself, “I am like that lightening bug, I don’t realize I can just fly away”.

I stood quietly in the front of my house and contemplated my own life, feeling helpless and not realizing that there is always a way out.  I do realize that, I really do.  I’m not 100% on what’s stopping me.  I have all my excuses ready for the suggestive encouragement that I hear.  Kids, financial stability, etc.  Apparently always the optimist, I wait for things to change.

I’ve been waiting a very long time.

It seems lately I’m growing quite tired of the crumbs I’m being thrown.  Imagine that you are a mouse, and you are just getting by with the few morsels that are being left for you to consume.  You don’t get an entire feast, you get a small portion of what could be a gourmet spread.  You are surrounded by an aroma of delicacies, you get to see the deliciousness of an actual normal size meal, you can smell it, but you cannot taste it.  It’s not coming anywhere near your mouth.  Imagine how hungry you might be with just a few scant bites.  Eager for the next time that a drop or two is tossed your direction.  You start to think about it often, if not every single second of the day.

I feel like I look around and see a lot of my friends living normal lives.  Nobody is perfect, we all have flaws, but how many flaws do you need to overlook before it just becomes so overwhelming that your whole demeanor changes?

Obviously much thought has to go into ending a relationship.  I’ve been told there are a few options:  Stay and be unhappy, stay and live separate lives or leave.  Counseling isn’t an option, you have to believe there is a problem.  Only one of us believes that.  I want to write a blog in the future that talks about being married to a man with ADD.  I can honestly say that I was unaware that he suffered from any kind of processing disorder.  I thought it was just his personality.  But that story is for another day.

For now I’ll leave you with the inspiration for this blog, and one of my favorite songs of the moment as well as a very cool video.