Meme Scheme

OK FugueStateKnits has tagged me, and I’ve come out of my dark, yarn-infested lair and decided to play nice with others, having set my snips aside for the nonce. It’s a random things meme, and here are the rules: Once tagged, you must link to the person who tagged you. Then post the rules before your list, and list 8 random things about yourself. At the end of the post, you must tag and link to 8 other people, visit their sites, and leave a comment letting them know they've been tagged.

(Oh, great, now I have to come up with eight people who also have sites, and who may choose not to wreak cyber-havoc upon me for tagging them. Feel the dread.)

1. I would love to have a clutter-free, pristine house, but that would last as long as it would take me to open up a newspaper. Then there’d be inserts on one end table, which I might not get to chucking out right away, bits would probably fall out, which I wouldn’t vacuum up for a while, and then I’d wind up with the crossword puzzle and Sudoku puzzle section folded open and left on the coffee table until I got a chance to do them. My cluttered house isn’t just the fault of my family and pets; it’s my fault, too.

2. I’m actually looking forward to my children being all grown up and living elsewhere. It’s not that I can’t live with them; I love them, and they are dear and wonderful people. It’s that I’m wearing out on dealing with the teenaged years. I’ve already really, seriously done the midnight feedings and diaper years, and I have a puppy, so I’m dealing with a doggy version of the “toddler” years all over again. I’m looking forward to relating to my kids as fellow adults to whom I am related, with a lot less “Mom” stuff.

3. I am a really good friend except for one thing – I don’t do “Hi, how are you?” phone calls or emails. I can’t stump up any motivation for calling someone up to talk about nothing in particular. I enjoy it when my friends call me up for those kinds of calls, but I never seem to do it myself, and even when I think I should, I wind up agonizing over coming up with an actual reason to call. Some people find that peculiar.

4. I have an inappropriate sense of humor almost all the time. I will burst out laughing in the emergency room, especially if it’s something going on with me. It’s probably a defense mechanism – finding something absurd in almost everything, but I don’t think many people find it amusing. I’ve been known to snicker during my women’s group because something said makes a wild, loony image in my head, or I notice bizarre things when other people are having problems, and I have to really fight down my urge to point out whatever inappropriate and probably insultingly irrelevant thing it is. I couldn't stop laughing during my Dad's retirement party and had to go to the little girls' room before I embarrassed him. That was about 25 years ago, and I haven't gotten much better.

5. I went to a Catholic high school for my last two years of public education. I am not Catholic, and it was kind of an eye-opener into the dogma of that religion. I still have my plaid, pleated polyester skirt in a memory box somewhere.

6. I am a survivor of severe childhood abuse. It is not all that I am, nor it is the most important thing about me, but it is something that will always be with me. Sometimes, I have very blue times, which, really, only other survivors can understand. June is a rough month for me. An acquaintance has tough Julys. I have alluded to the abuse in my childhood in previous posts, but here’s why June is rough for me.

Shortly after my 12th birthday at the beginning of June 1972, my mother and I were visiting her family in the south. She had a rage storm, hit me over the head with a heavy object, and I wound up in a coma. For once, she did it in front of a witness, my uncle. He sent her back to our home, and he and my other relatives took care of me. According to them, I was in a coma for 6 days. They did not seek medical treatment for me because of a number of factors, ignorance and fear of the law being two of them. When I came out of the coma, I could not bear light, could not speak, could not walk, talk, figure out how to eat, toilet, drink fluids, read, or do any of the other ADLs (Activities of Daily Living) necessary to survive.

They found a C.N.A. to watch over me, and my aunts and uncles worked, very lovingly, to help me recover. By the end of the summer, I could go outside with dark glasses and a loose, billed hat on; I could walk, but not well, toilet, eat easy-to-chew foods, and drink from a straw. I could not remember mathematics or read for more than a minute or two at a time. I went back to school and struggled to get back up to speed. It was grueling and frightening, since I don’t know what my mother told the officials to explain my problems.

I caught up with my studies within a year, but it took me almost two years to recover all my abilities, and, like other people with TBIs (traumatic brain injuries) I have some problems that have lasted until today and will last the rest of my life. They are not significant, and I don’t even notice them anymore unless I think really hard about them. Surviving attempted murder was a life-altering event. So were finally having a witness and champions.

And, to pre-empt the question, no, that's not all there was. It just explains blue Junes.

7. I do know how to ask for help with various things, but I don’t do it very often. I envy people who are able to, without even thinking about it, ask for assistance with big and little, everyday and out-of –the-ordinary things. I think that gene fell off my DNA somewhere along the way.

8. I read romance novels, mostly Regency ones. And I like them.

Alrighty! I’m tagging Crazy Aunt Purl (who will probably think I’m an annoying stalker), Franklin at the Panopticon (who is still recovering from an exciting infusion of knitting in color and who, I am sure, will be offended that I have tagged him), Joan (of the famous Knitlist socks) . Christie, Wendi, Lamb and Frog , a survivor blog – the Memory Artist, and some unlucky blogger I just happened across.