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Teresa's Blog – November 2010 Archive (9)

Down

Next Tuesday morning, November 30th, I'll valet park my car, enter the swooshing automatic doors of Texas Children's Hospital, then ride a smooth elevator to the 16th floor with my three year-old who will likely say as we climb to his sentencing, "Up". He'll be evaluated using the gold standard for diagnosing autsim, a two-hour, four-modular test called ADOS (Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule) and afterward, a follow-up appointment will be made to discuss the results. I was told that…

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Added by Teresa on November 27, 2010 at 6:00pm — 14 Comments

Clues

The poet and mystic Rumi said: Life is the dream that must be interpreted. Sometimes we write grafitti on the walls of the mind, illegible parchments that whisper through dreams -- Your cancer will return...Move to Florida...Your spouse is cheating...Quit your job to write that novel...You're pregnant...Your father is sick...She's the one...Don't get on the airplane...Accept the job offer in New Jersey...Your life will soon capsize. Information…

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Added by Teresa on November 23, 2010 at 1:30pm — 13 Comments

Apartment Below

His name was Guy Howard which had a successful movie star sound to it. He graduated from Clear Lake High School one year ahead of me but because he ran in higher, faster circles, I knew little about him except that he was a celebrity of sorts -- beautiful to the girls, super-cool to the boys -- in our "exemplary" but sugarcoated model of the real world. When I moved into Village South apartments after high school, I didn't realize Guy lived beneath me until the summer night he…

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Added by Teresa on November 22, 2010 at 6:00pm — 13 Comments

Palimp-WHAT?

Henry Miller was a tough vocabulary lesson in my twenties. I so wanted to read him but was forced to highlight and look up too many words. It was so frustrating that I decided to punish myself by writing each word in longhand with complete definitions. I also wrote out every sentence containing these words, "Everything I looked at was palimpsest and there was no layer of writing too strange for me to decipher." I still have the list, thirty-eight pages, 308 words, but it turns… Continue

Added by Teresa on November 19, 2010 at 12:00pm — 11 Comments

Brick House

Norman Brickhouse looked a lot like Muhammad Ali but lacked the same authentic self-confidence. He'd failed eighth grade a couple of times already when I met him, the same year the Commodores released the hit, Brick House, but no one dared tease him about it and my loving the song did nothing to assuage my anxiety when he was around. He terrorized me often with various threats because I was "nice", nonconfrontational, a foot lower and fifty pounds lighter; he might have seen me as an… Continue

Added by Teresa on November 14, 2010 at 11:00am — 8 Comments

Closer to the Ground

Real simplicity died at the end of the last dirt road in the world, eons before the rush of high-speed internet, microwaves, commercial travel and the omnipresent Starbucks. In dirt road days, people and things were more solid, quality and wisdom less rare, and the world spun with a languid ease that gave humans ample time to process and discern.

When theoretical physicist Richard Feynman helped solve the mystery of the Challenger disaster, he was alarmed at the disconnect…

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Added by Teresa on November 14, 2010 at 9:30am — 12 Comments

This Little Light

You've heard the expression, "burning the candle at both ends", but have you ever met a candle? I'm not one, not a two-ended candle. I gradually burn out as the day wanes, slow and dim to a teensy ember until snuffed out completely by exhaustion. But I've known people whose minds burn bright all day, well into the night; sometimes their light burns so bright they can't sleep as blinding beams of pyrotechnics dance loud in their heads. Thoughts and words pour from their gray… Continue

Added by Teresa on November 13, 2010 at 9:07pm — 4 Comments

Naked

Paxil couldn't touch the rage that drove her toward self-destruction, but maybe I'm being too harsh about Sam's choices. I still don't know whether prostitution is dehumanizing or, elevated to a high-end "escort service", an eccentric quasi-entrepreneurial adventure. Sam was a smart girl, an angry seductive beauty, but despite having skills and experience as a radiographer she chose to work at a "modeling agency" called XTC, work she enjoyed until turf wars ran her off. She'd tell me stories… Continue

Added by Teresa on November 10, 2010 at 9:30am — 16 Comments

What Time IS It?

Is it just me or is Daylight savings time weird? I'm one of those people who usually forgets to "Spring Forward" or "Fall Back", who didn't wear a watch until I was almost forty and still wonders why "time flies" or "stands still" when you don't want it to. The idea that we can disagree about what time it really is tells me that no one really knows what time it is (yes, I can hear Chicago singing now...). Adding daylight yields rewards for retailing and sports, but…

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Added by Teresa on November 7, 2010 at 8:00am — 14 Comments