Real or Imagined?

There is an old "Rhymes with Orange" comic that I may have referred to in one of my ever-growing number of posts...the text is basically:

If you study too much your brain will swell and dislodge itself from it's place, fall down into your throat, and choke you to death...or something.

So here is my theory, having studied brains, learning, and the stuff that happens therein:

If you study a whole lot, (can there be too much?) for a long time, you crowd out things your brain feels might be so trivial that it eventually starts shoving huge swaths of stuff into places you can only access when half awake in the shower. And it might drive you mad trying to figure out if it was a dream or really happened.

A whole lot of my past falls into this category. Granted, adding um, body chemical altering substances (so as to not say booze and smokes if my little brother ever finds my blog, hi!) in the mix really makes it hard to remember feeding L stove top one turkey day...or being in other L's apartment more than just that one time we played RISK...

I feel like I'm going to need other people to help me remember my past if I keep changing careers/learning new ways to make money. (Learning about fiscal closings and GAAP and USAID requirements is a little less trivial than I thought it'd be...silly me.)

But sometimes you don't have the someone in your life anymore to verify...

I can't stop thinking about the time I arranged to pick up my best friend from high school at the airport. We were attending colleges at opposite ends of the country and I was home first. Did I call her mom and volunteer? Did I call her? I don't remember the details anymore.

But at the airport, back when you could go all the way up to the terminal door? Really, kids, you could! There was no TSA and you could take LITERS of water onto a plane and the pilots used to walk around and say "hi" (so they could take a break and maybe stretch and maybe NOT FALL ASLEEP while doing their pilot thing?!?) and if you were under twelve and FLYING ALONE (is that allowed anymore?!?) or super cute, or even just smiled and said "hi," they gave you "wings."

I am so very old. Where was I...

At the terminal...a roundish one...I sat and waited for K's plane to arrive and...here is where I am wondering "live or memorex"...K's mom/dad/both? Appear...just to make sure I showed, then left before K's plane landed.

My 19 year-old self felt utter disappointment that they didn't trust me. (My 35 year-old self smiles at the lengths parents went through in the days before cell phones.) See, I remember the feelings associated with the whole experience...and I'm getting extreme deja vu writing this out...if I did already once, long ago, I blame learning about Use Tax Application.

Well...I gotta finish packing (procrastination, I am it), my flight to El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula (frankly, much cooler that just plain "LA" in my over-filled mind) is only a few hours away...so unless I can wrest the keyboard from my baby brother's grasp, more radio silence to come...

If I don't make it back on to post: Happy Holidays! Cuz they're all piling up around us whether or not we celebrate any of them.