I’m looking through The K&W Guide to Colleges for Students with Learning Disabilities or ADD. (Anything to avoid facing the book-which-I’m-afraid-to-write. You wouldn’t think that at halfway into book 4 I’d be afraid to write any book, but I am. If I dragged myself through the last one with a psychological broken foot, I’m limping through this one on 2 broken feet and wobbly inner-ears.)
The K&W, meanwhile, is something with which I want to familiarize myself anyway. Now that Olivia’s college roulette ball has staunchly seated itself in the indentation marked SMCM, my attention turns to Gabe and what-the-heck we’re going to do with him.
I need to have more confidence in the guy. I’m comfortable that the girls are raised, as securely as anyone gets raised...but Gabe is such a different story. Not just different. Written in another alphabet. In characters that no one ever taught me. Speaking of which, he wants to take Japanese. Seriously? Can I entertain the notion that this could work? Having no other notions to entertain, I will for now. So where--in the K&W--do they offer Japanese?
American University, for one. Not exactly the small town atmosphere--Massachusetts Avenue, District of Columbia. <6000 Undergrads. At least it’s not College Park. Still, I can’t imagine it, but I’m suffering from a failure of imagination across the board these days. So there’s another function I’d like to turn over to somebody else for 10 minutes or so: Driving, food planning, household maintenance, and imagination.
Olivia smeared me in an arm wrestle yesterday. An absolute rout. And that’s good. Despite my basic strength, and the resistance training at the Community Center (I’m keeping all my osteocytes, thank you,) it is no surprise that a full-grown girl with the female equivalent of her father’s mesomorphic structure would smash a long-boned equatorial like me. So it’s good, because the WWF is not a club I aspire to join, but somehow it has contributed--in a minor way--to my overall feeling that I’m 85 years old, fading into obsolescence, and am done. (Except for getting Gabe situated, that is.) Fortunately--I guess--that feeling of doneness is at least slightly counterbalanced by an angry sort of determination that not only will I keep my osteocytes--but I’ll keep my neuronal pathways cobweb free, my spirits up, and my tendency to be delighted by stupid little things like squirrels fully functioning. Right. So schizo as usual.
For some reason I keep running into (in the magazine sense) Maria Shriver and Jamie Lee Curtis, both of whom declare that they’ve reached points in their lives where they’re fully indifferent to success as understood by the general human public. Meaning in life, they say, is not about that which brought them to fame--it’s about relationships, family, making a positive difference. I absolutely, absolutely believe them. Furthermore, I didn’t need either one of them to tell me that. I have a complete intellectual understanding that this is the case. But I wonder if--without having experienced the accomplishment--without having crossed that plane where people can see, acknowledge, and validate that you did indeed do something, have a career, make use of your brain--without having done that, would they still be able to claim to have reached this more enlightened state of mind? I’m not sure. But maybe I too will own that knowledge within the next decade or so. In which case I’ll check back and assure everyone that external validation is not required.
