While all this vestibular constant process has been going on, the kids have maintained a steady supply of their usual comedy gold, which I feel must be captured before I forget.
For one example…
In the car one day, we were at a stop light. A woman riding a motorcycle pulled up and stopped next to us, and the following conversation ensued.
Isaac: A LADY motorcycle rider???!
Me: Ladies can do everything men can do, except for pee standing up.
Isaac: (pondering for a moment) Hm. If you got yourself a PENIS SCULPTURE, with a hole in it, you could just put it on yourself and then pee standing up!
Me: … um.. well…
Elias, pipes up politely: Can I have a penis sculpture?
***
Or another, surreal car conversation with Elias, who was looking at a book called "Spooky Mazes" at the time.
Elias: Can I touch spooky mazes?
Me: um, well, you can touch the paper. You can touch the picture of one.
Elias: Can I touch a real one?
Me: well, there are no 'real' spooky mazes. They are just in pictures.
ELias: What Spooky Mazes eat?
Me: well, you see, they are NOT REAL. They are not alive. They don't eat.
Elias: Are they friendly?
Me: Um, well, they are just pictures… not real… um..
Elias: Can I touch a real one– if the lady says yes? (Apparently suggesting that the spooky mazes might be guarded by some kind of docent.)
Me, giving up: Okay, IF we find a real spooky maze, and IF the lady says yes, then you can touch it.
Elias: YAY!! That's my favorite!
Me: (WTF???)
***
This one was more of an audio-visual, that would surely have won big money on America's Funniest Home Videos…
Elias, calling from the other room: Mommy, mommy! I peed in my potty!
(Sound of feet scampering through the living room.) (Huge crash) (Parts of the plastic potty fly into the kitchen.) (Stunned silence all around.)
***
At the backyard campsite:
Isaac, calling from inside a tent: Mom! There are lots of bugs in here!
Me, sitting by the campfire: Oh really? Are they mosquitoes?
Isaac: No… just midgets.
***
In the house, Isaac pulls me aside: Mom, can I speak to you privately?
Me, impressed by the secrecy and importance of this conversation… what will it be about? Is it time for 'the talk'?: SUre, okay. (moves us to private room and closes door. Now we are alone.)
Isaac, sotto voce: Mom, when I grow up, can I be a ninja?
***
As we speak I have interesting patterns of tape all over my ankles in the hopes that this will help my dizziness. This week at vestibular therapy I got a slight clarification from Vince… no, he does not think my damaged nerve will ever actually heal up. He thinks what's done is done… although he allows that this is controversial. He says that what he's trying to do with the therapy is to retrain my brain to compensate for the damage and thus function somewhat like normal. He adds that the timeframe is more like a year, and that if they were to test me years from now, long after this was all over, he would still be able to show that the damage happened. I said, "So is it more like — this is an extreme example– but more like someone who's had a stroke, and needs to retrain the brain to work around the damage?" He said, "That's exactly the analogy that we use."
So it's sort of a semantic difference– is my ear going to heal or my brain going to work around it– the result will hopefully be the same, that someday, someway, I'll be normal again. But somehow it does feel different. It adjusts my thinking somehow. I'm reminded of a moment in Wilt Stillman's "Barcelona" (I was trying to find you the clip but I couldn't), in which one guy says to his cousin, who's been shot in the head and is recovering, "How's the physical therapy going?" The shot guy responds, "I'm doing it, but what's the upside of that? I mean, you work really really hard to relearn how to do things you used to be able to do much better before??" Yeah. That's about it.
My other problem these days is footwear. All summer I struggled with this seemingly simple topic. It took me at least six weeks of horrible trial and error to recognize that there are only ONE pair of shoes that do not, in themselves, make me totally dizzy and car sick. What I finally figured out was that I'm at my best barefoot on a hardwood floor. Put me in a pair of squishy, horrible shoes like running shoes or Merrill's or something and I'm instantly sick. Literally instantly. At vestibular therapy, they make me march on foam– for ten seconds!– and I feel like hell and have to sit down for ten minutes afterwards. But wearing soft squishy shoes is literally wearing FOAM right on your FEET and it goes everywhere with you! Okay, so the Donald Pliner sandals (Ben: "it's a loin cloth for the feet.") (I don't know what these people are smoking, I paid $80 for mine) have been working for me, because they're much like carrying little pieces of hardwood flooring around under your bare feet. And this is all well and good. But now… hello fall.
So I did a lot of research on the hardest possible shoes and got myself some Troentorp Swedish wooden clogs. They are very hard indeed… but they feel so different on my feet, and have this weird forward rocking sensation, that I think the plain difference itself is now making me ill. But it's only been two days. I hope I will acclimate. Otherwise– I guess I'm going to have to invest in some sort of intense thermal toe socks and wear these very bare sandals through the winter.
Any suggestions out there for incredibly flat hard stationary fall-winter footwear, let me know…