Festive blah

It’s that time of year again. Consumerism gone mad, the shops are heaving with people and I have been forced to resort to 2am forays to the supermarkets in order to avoid the thronging crowds.

Shopping is a bit of a nightmare for me since my accident. It is so easy to get total sensory overload with all the crowds, lights, Muzak and the horrendous range of choices on offer…but it seems that even the non brain injured are affected by seasonal overload and frayed tempers and mini meltdowns are common. I don’t suppose I would stand out so much in a crowd of ratty shoppers…if only that were the only issue.

Today is the Xmas party for my local branch of Headway. I signed on the dotted line and promised to go…probably at the time I should have known that when the day finally arrived I wouldn’t want to go…and I don’t really – but I probably will go …because I said I would and I hate to let people down…

Who knows I may even enjoy myself once I’m there…but for now I am experiencing a whole lot of festive blah…

OOps

OOps! I did it again…or rather didn’t do it again…

This is getting rather repetitive as once again I find myself typing how can it be so long since I visited this blog…

I’m not sure that time flies as much as it disappears. Moments pass and are gone, and with no memory to hold them close, they simply cease to exist. Living in the Moment is a lot more challenging than any of us ever envisaged and it hasn’t became any easier with the passing of time.

So tick tock and another year has almost passed. In around twenty days it will be 2010 and I will be left  wondering how that happened.

I need some of that concrete I kissed to hold down some moments so I get to experience  them. Until then I will continue to try to test the strength of an uncertain length of string.

New Year

A clean fresh page in the book of life… Hopefully an adventure with just the right balance…and not simply another step nearer the grave.

I am starting 2009 with lofty ambitions, bright ideas and a whole heap of questions. A couple of answers might be nice…

For now I just wanted to mark the fact that it is January 2009 and I was here…and now I need to go in search of food. I’ll be back – can’t say when exactly, but I will be back.

Organised chaos?

Is it really possible that I haven’t posted in this blog since Spring? OOps! isn’t  going to cover it this time…

Passwords are a problem. Remembering to bookmark  sites, pages etc is a problem…remembering to heck links is a problem…then again trying to remember what day it is is still hard so I probably shouldn’t  be all that surprised that blogging has slipped down the list if important things to do.

I have missed the last two meetings of my brain injury support group…because I forgot to go. On both occasions I ‘remembered’ (saw the notation in the diary) after the event was finished.

This is rather disappointing as I have attended a memory aids programme aimed at providing me with tools to help make me more efficient. These are brilliant, often simple ideas and gadgets that really should improve things…if only I could remember to use them.

But things are better…and I will triumph…just not quite yet.

Send more lerts…please!

It seems that while I was unable to carry the duties associated with the post and subsequently lost my job, the business systems at work were propping me up quite nicely… and, with time on my hands and no systems propping me up, I am rather adrift at present.

 It has been quite difficult trying to get myself sufficiently organised  on a general level, but when it comes to new projects I am in desperate need of some new strategies to fit. We quickly learned, at the beginning of this journey, that one size does not fit all – and that is one thing that has not changed.

Living in the moment might sound mysterious , maybe even a little fun, but it soon becomes tedious when even simple things take on huge proportions. Not wishing to whinge I will try to get to the point – or I would if I could remember what point I was trying to make ….

 Ah yes…lerts…please send more. The ones I have already are not working. They are lazy and inefficient with a tendency towards procrastination and aimlessness. Sound familiar? You bet!

Alert? I need more lerts…

Ah the best laid plans… I was so pleased that I had remembered to set the alert – it was to watch a one-off drama I wanted to see and couldn’t afford to miss – it being a one-off and all…

Sadly the plan did not work out quite as I expected…because I had neglected (forgotten of course) to alter the time settings on my phone when the clocks changed recently. Luckily the plus one system came into play since I was exactly one hour late for the start of the programme…and I did get to see it on another channel.

Of course we also discovered today that there isn’t any such thing as the central heating fairy and we simply forgot to adjust the timing on that to coincide with BST too….

What with Santa and The Easter Bunny having already been blown out of the water, things are starting to look pretty bleak on the fairy front…

I feel as though I ought to repeat the opening of the previous post…made so long ago…It seems I celebrated that I had remembered to return to the blog — and then promptly forgot all about it …I’ve got to say that is quite typical really.

I think, that for a brain injured person with cognitive dysfunction, blogging is probably one of the hardest thing to do … and I almost wonder why I am even attempting such a thing???? But then if I don’t try I will never know if this might have been something I can do and maybe even enjoy doing….

So now that I found the blog again I will try to return…but for now my alert is buzzing and I need to check on what it is I am supposed to be doing right now…I am pretty certain that this is not it!

A Minor Triumph

Another post from yours truly… It may not seem like much to the passing traveller but the fact that even  remembered this blog existed, let alone that I came back and posted, is indeed a minor triumph.

Visiting and posting is a habit I need to form, and once formed I will of course be completely unable to break it. For that is the way of habits.

Although that said I did manage to quit smoking…one of the hardest habits of all to break…and I did it successfully, at the first attempt and I have not smoked a single cigarette since that day over ten years ago now.

Dammit! I just disproved my original point.

 Ah well…I still celebrate that I am here today…in this blog I mean. And I celebrate also that I do not smoke – even though I have of course become that most  despised of creature…the dreaded ex-smoker.

I am also celebrating that I  finally finished reading a book. Okay so it is a very short book and it took me about six weeks to read it…but we shall overlook those little things and I celebrate that I finished it. It was in fact The Diving Bell and the Butterfly , a book that was dictated one eye blink at a time by a man who found himself victim of locked-in syndrome following a massive stroke at a young age. It is a slightly uncomfortable read but a testament to the human spirit. I may have struggled due to my own cognitive limitations, but I am glad I took the time to read it.

So it seems I have much to celebrate really. I am here in this blog, I do not smoke and I read a book that a man dictated one eye blink at a time. I am alive, I cooked dinner – it wasn’t great actually but we have colds, and so we ate it and blamed the mucus …even though we know the food wasn’t great even without the mucus…I ordered some travel money for our trip next month, I made a list for a friend, I had a phone conversation with a relative ot two (well four actually if you count the heavy breathing and gurgling of a toddler) and I wrote a short piece on swearing… so all in all not a bad eff-ing day really eh?

OOps…I ‘did a Humpty’

A little background… In August 2006 I did a Humpty Dumpty and took a great fall.  Luckily for me the patch up job was pretty neat and you can’t see the joins where they put me back together again.

The only visible sign of my concrete kissing adventure is a teeny  little Harry Potterish scar . Mine is neatly tucked away in the unfortunate folds of my chinny chin chin, and unlike that of Mr HP mine did not come about from any heroic tussle with evil forces. It does glow red sometimes though…magical eh?

 So… moving swiftly along from nursery rhyme eggs, through wizards and on to goldfish. Some years back I read an article about goldfish which explained that in order to prevent them from going quite mad swiming round and round in circles all day, every day, Goldfish were blessed with a five second memory span. At the time I thought this was vaguely interesting and slightly amusing… and rather inspirational since it became the prompt for a rare attempt at poemetry(sic)

 Cold Gold…

Through watery windows

blurred and smeary

yesterdays forgotten

in an instant, instant.

No company; alone,

a lone swimmer,

in circles of frustration

If only I remembered

long enough  to care…

I’m Gold,

don’t think me cold.

Through watery windows

blurred and smeary

Yesterdays forgotten…

Of course had I known at the time just how prophetic this would prove to be I may have thought twice about the flippant tone….but then again, I doubt it.

One thing that my injury has taught me is that if my memory loss means I am to be stuck in the moment, I may as well really make the most of it and enjoy every single one of them.

Just another blog?

The whole world and his wife and their dog is blogging these days, on topics ranging from the sublime to the bloody ridiculous… so does the world need yet another blog?

The answer is clearly probably not …but then again since when did we get what we need, let alone what we really really want.