Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Brain Lapse


Every now and then I lose control. I try to maintain strict discipline, a cold, hard, and unchangeable set of rules, but sometimes things get out of hand, out of whack. You see, as Dan Quayle so ingeniously put it, "What a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful" (a confused and misguided attempt to use the United Negro College Fund motto). How can I fault the man when he was so right, so dead on? I want control of my mind and my faculties at all times, there can be no exceptions. However, every now and then, there is utter rebellion (which, in the words of Dave Barry, would be an awesome name for a rock band). I lose control and become like Ronald Reagan during his entire second term in the White House (for you younger folks, he was a president, a U.S. president, a long time ago). I drool, I eat oatmeal with my hands, I sing off key (a wretched cariacture of mental illness if ever there was one, so I apologize). I have made notes of the following occurrences of loss-of-control-itis in the past few weeks:
  • I wrote the dollar amount on a check on the "Pay to the order of" line.
  • I forgot the shortcut keys on my word processor.
  • I forget how to spelling the word "blepharoconjunctivitis".
What's next? What other common, everyday things will be lost in some wacky short circuit of my mind? Will I forget the quadratic formula? Will I forget the Schroedinger equation? Will I forget which end of my toothbrush to use? Curse you hippocampus and your insubordination.