Reshitulous.

I feel really stupid. I agree with Einstein (as I usually do) that each one of us is a genius in some capacity. For  some, it's cooking, or knitting, or doing jigsaw puzzles, building working electronics from spare parts, or painting, or creative writing, or being a multi-instrumentalist, or performing angioplasties. Everybody.

How'd I get to sleep last night? I'm not sure. I found my glasses on the floor underneath my desk this morning. I really, really dislike the morning ritual that's increasing, called "Where the fuck did I leave my glasses?" I somehow got into bed after falling out of my office chair, asleep. Surprisingly, the giant thud of my body hitting the floor didn't rouse my family, and I scrambled to turn the light out and crawl into bed, pretending nothing happened. It was some time around 1am, and I managed to sleep in until 9:00 am today, which is VERY unusual for me.

Abnormal Psych test #3 was a clusterfuck. It's not that I don't know or understand the material. The test was on several disorders I, myself, have! You'd think I'd know them back to front! It's literally a case of my short-term memory coupled with 3 chapters (about 180 pages) a week being too much information for my brain to pick apart and REMEMBER that quickly. I explained my challenges to my professor finally, and she's referred me to the school's "learning disabled" center for an assessment. As it turns out, my professor is on staff at my #1 grad school pick, the Adler School of Professional Psychology. She seems to think said assessment and test-taking skills strategy learning will be of use to the Adler School as well as helping me in her class. She said that grad school will be even more difficult than her class this semester, which I understand. But at least I'd have a whole semester to do the material, not 7 weeks of accelerated cramming to the point of my brain exploding.

Bottom line, kids? Drugs and alcohol will irreparably ruin your brain. Like forever. I can't help but remember my neurologist, when he was testing me for MS, finding those 4 areas in my brain that aren't getting any blood flow. I have a theory that somehow, they're directly involved in where my memory is stored and my cognitive functioning takes place. It involves an IQ test, so essentially the same battery of testing Luke's therapist wants him to have, but because he's a super genius and I'm a total retard, it would appear. My pre-alcoholism IQ was 162. My confidence is so shattered that it wouldn't surprise me if it's dipped to like 100.

I can't remember, in any great detail, what I perilously read and studied LAST WEEK, but I *can* remember my rock critic friend's piece on the perfection of the key change in "Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes" that he wrote in 1994. In taking my challenge to Best Male Friend, he said "I think it's more where your natural interests are. So much easier to remember and recall when you're fascinated with it in the first place." HE gets it and it was his way of saying "Follow your bliss."

Chickie-babies, believe me, if I'd been able to turn writing into a lucrative career when I graduated from college in the first place, I wouldn't have this conundrum and could've been an English professor.

Right now, without knowing the results of test #3, I'm at a B average, which to me equals failure. I *know* I'm capable of A quality work and my increasing frustration and self-criticism are peaking. I strongly feel that there is only a handful of things at which I'm remotely good in this world: being a mom, creative writing and being a student, three of them. So discouraged with my performance, I am already considering alternative post-grad work like getting a PhD in creative writing, which leaves me with TONS of career options (NOT!), because everyone with an already useless degree (English-Writing) needs another set of letters after their name which further indicate a lack of practical life skills and ability to generate income with which to support oneself and their child.

Today's homework was easier, for it was on the chapter about depression, bipolar disorder and suicide. I related to literally everything in the chapter. The prof can get as nit-picky about all of that on next week's test, but I know depression, bipolar and suicide like the back of my fucking hand, blindfolded.

I *want* to be a therapist helping addicts and alcoholics. I feel like I'd *make* a better English professor, teaching undergrads to abandon everything they learned in high school English and raise a new generation of offbeat writers, encouraging them to follow their own bliss. Thinking about it, I could teach an entire class on the art of creating neologisms, which I love to make up.

My son came up with a doozy yesterday: "reshitulous." It's something that's both simultaneously shitty and ridiculous. In psychology, we learned that neologism-creating is an early sign of schizophrenia, when, as I said in a previous blog, is just something I've done since I was really young, just like Luke. It diagnoses us with nothing but a case of campy creativity.

I have a research paper due in about 2 weeks, and I still haven't narrowed down a topic. I was going to do body dysmorphic disorder, which I have, but I think I know more about and would better present bipolar and do my presentation on the prevalence of highly successful, creative and influential artists who are bipolar. I went to the school library yesterday to copy the official criteria for both disorders but someone had loaned out the DSM-IV-TR (the psychiatric Bible) until 12:45, and I wasn't planning on sticking around until then. Given my brand of bipolar isn't even in the DSM-IV-TR, I don't know that my professor would accept a paper on it. Another round of "Ugh." 

(Last night, I participated in a discussion fueled by my former internship Q101 boss, Not-That-Bill-Wyman, debating what the 2nd best non-punk, non-new-wave album of the 70's was. The debate got to be upwards of 200 comments long, during which I made a new music geek friend via Facebook. I seriously could talk about music for days on end. That's where my expertise, my savant, truly lies.)

To sum things up, I have no idea what to do with my life and it's grad school crunch time. 

It's reshitulously frustrating, this clusterfuck. Depending on my final grade on all the exams, the research paper and the presentation, and the daily quizzes (blech!) I could theoretically still get an A in the course. I seriously am considering graduate work in English-Writing as an avenue. "Learning disabled." Just how many drugs and how much alcohol DID I consume, anyway? It's overly snobbish and stereotypical, but believe myself to be more clever and capable than perhaps my professor realizes. If I have any diagnosis, it's of biological automatic thoughts and delusions of grandeur, which further supports the bipolar criteria diagnoses. 

Anyway...

Separately, I was sorry I missed a catch-up phone session with Guy Friend yesterday, having fallen dead ass asleep on Luke's bed watching him play Minecraft, this universe-building video game, that, when you have the music turned on, it's incredibly soothing, sleep-inducing ambient stuff. Got his voicemail a few hours later, but he mentioned he'd be busy with family for the holiday and would try me at some point in the future. 

Amid M80's being shot by neighbors, popping firecrackers and the general noise of humming air conditioning units interrupting my iTunes enjoyment, I got a text from Guy Friend late last night, in which he remarked that there was a fabulous moon last night (which there was) and that he'd stopped for gas somewhere in Wisconsin on his way back from camp, which I didn't understand, because I had no idea he'd been camping, unless he was visiting his daughters who are working at a summer camp. You all know how vague Guy Friend is. In any event, I was warm-hearted that he'd gazed up at the moon and thought enough of it to text me about it. I told him that I DID recall never having "asked him to lasso the moon for me," but last night, he sort of metaphorically did anyway, which adds another flower petal to the "He loves me" lot, as opposed to my lingering "He loves me not" plucking away at said petals.

I emailed Guy Friend this morning with an inspirational  Rumi quote on the meaning of love, and pointed him towards blogs referring to why I have adopted the new pseudonym of "Madame Shitpickles," in case he required a definition of "shitpickles." (For brevity's sake, it's the equivalent, as I said a few blogs ago of "gobsmacked" and loosely translates to how I really feel about both Guy Friend  (a handsome, sweet, funny but way too typical suburban, AARP-qualifying Catholic scientist) AND Best Male Friend (an atheist, anti-snob, self-taught musician musical genius and songwriter who shares most of my psychiatric pathology with only a high school diploma, yet keeps up with my intellectualism and has a very sharp wit about him). 

I couldn't have picked more polar opposite characters who would qualify as my closest guy friends. That's largely why they're both so compellingly enigmatic. I must fall somewhere in the middle of each of their unique characteristics, and mesh very well with both of them, even if they didn't mesh well at all when they met.

Best Male Friend is objectively, completely gorgeous to boot, and girls go gaga over him, while Guy Friend doubts his attractiveness and said once that "ugly " was what he sees when he looks in the mirror every day." But Guy Friend has an adorable, dimpled smile, intense brown eyes, the BEST hands,  and is very physically fit and trim and doesn't look his age at all. (I once told Guy Friend that I'd give him $50 if he'd stay in his surgical scrubs all day at work, which is hotter than hell, which he declined.) Their sole comparison? They're both going gray, which WOMEN LOVE, guys. Best Male Friend is more than a decade younger than Guy Friend. You could walk down the block, spot Best Male Friend and ponder the amazement of his physical hotness. Guy friend , on the other hand, is objectively a) more traditional and preppy and b) an acquired taste, though I was shitpickles from the moment we met for reasons I don't even understand. I continue to attribute it to propinquity. 

In summary, Kate and I believe both men to BE shitpickles, which isn't an insult at all. Frustrating, but not an insult: