Lola

I am sitting in a café (not ‘the café’) but my “I have someplace nearby to go and the other one is too far away” backup café. It has been a day of opportunity, cold weather, long walks, feeling highly competent, skilled and experienced and then immediately making a horse’s ass out of myself – so in other words…a good balanced day. One that is far from over.

So here I sit waiting until it is time for me to leave and go to my next appointment and I had the best of intentions for getting some work done but instead…I have eaten grilled cheese, sipped coffee and poked around on the Internet while listening to Gamma Binaural Beats and just…goofed around. I finally had to admit that was what I was doing (and not preparing for a heavy bout of concentration and work) because over the Gamma-Binaural-Brain-Food-to-Increase-Concentration-and-General-Awesomeness blasting in my ears, I could hear the distinct opening notes of the Kinks singing Lola. I turned off the brain food, checked the weather and ordered a double espresso. Somedays you need an extended period of just goofing off.

Today I learned that there are certain medical conditions that require a hospital bed to be alarmed so if the patient opts to radically shift their position (as in get out of bed) someone is alerted…alerted by what sounds exactly like the siren effect in discos. I learned this because the person in question was resting happily in a recliner and I was sitting nearby, once again attempting to get work done. I opened my laptop and put it on the bed (alerting the alarm to the presence of weight) and when it had finished booting up, I picked the laptop up off the bed and suddenly sirens were wailing and tweeting. I found the alarm and turned it off, puzzled as what it meant. The patient was now awake (no surprise there) but soon fell back asleep. I went to get something so I….put the laptop on the bed again, then returned and picked it up off the bed and triggered the sirens again. The poor patient was snapping at me “for Christ sake, squeeze the reset button.” I was panicking, not sure if it meant the batteries were going in the alarm or if it was somehow magically hooked up to the patient and something was going wrong that I didn’t know about. In a panic, I called the home office and as soon as the receptionist heard the alarm went off she panicked and patched me through to a nurse. The nurse was the essence of grace under pressure. She was in crisis mode until I stopped her and said, “But the patient isn’t in the bed, he is in the chair.” There was a long pause before she asked, “What did you do to the bed?” And I suddenly had one of those flashes of insight…revelation…ephiphany…and groaned, “Oh no, I put my laptop on it.” And the nurse burst out laughing.

It’s funny what happens when you let it be ok when things go wrong.

I remember when I started all of that aspect of my life I was so serious. So concerned that I was 100% on top of things and responsive. Now, I realize that no one can be that way 100% of the time. Sometimes all you can do is be there, whether you are doing it right or not.

OMG…ok…a) I downgraded my cell phone as far as I could go to break my txting obsession. It has worked but now people think I am really mentally challenged when it comes to replying to them because I can’t figure out where the punctuation marks and symbols are. 2) the café I am in was in the process of hanging paintings from a kid’s class that were done with acrylic on canvas board. The teacher hung them with tape. As the night gets colder and the heat gets higher, the tape is drying out and everyone in the café is getting bombed by dropping paintings.

And c) the funniest thing I have heard all day and the sign that I should just stop writing and post this is Obama did some skit or something last night where he challenged Betty White to produce her birth certificate.

Onward and upward.

c.2012. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.