How does the doctor know?

When someone is in treatment for multiple personality disorder, how does the doctor know that the personality they are curing to is the right one?

Granted, if I had personalities like the following:

• Detailed & humorless electrical engineer
• Rocket riding space cowboy
• Superman
• Burlesque dancer

...it should be pretty easy to pick the right one. But what if I had the following:

• Detailed & humorless electrical engineer
• Sloppy & funny mechanical engineer
• Living in 1984 former football could-have-been-a-star
• Greedy wall-street tycoon
• Grumpy guy that yells at kids taking a short cut across his lawn on their way home from school.

...how can the doctor say with all integrity that the personality he chooses is 100% the right one? Isn't there a chance that he could be wrong and at the end of treatment, the patient ends up being someone completely different than who they really are?

I imagine the doctor would rely heavily on family and friends to determine who the person was before they split into several. I shudder at the thought of my wife being the main source of who I am.

"Mrs. Geilman, tell me about your husband when you first met," says Dr. Spaceman.

"Well, he was thinner, had more hair on his head and less on his back. His jaw was more defined-"

“No, no Mrs. Geilman, not what he looked like but what he was like – you know his traits and characteristics. Things he would do, etc…”

“Oh, well he always made me laugh, was happy in his work,” Anna would say and as she spoke she would realize the wonderful opportunity that was laid before her, “and he always said I was the most precious thing in all the world and his entire life was devoted to showing me he meant it. He bathed, fed, and dressed the kids every day. Did all the laundry and cooked every meal. He gave me back rubs every night and every other Saturday surprised me with diamonds. On the off Saturdays, he mixed it up with other precious stones. He made his own clothes so that I would have more money to buy things for me and never, ever complained when I asked him to get a second job to cover my newest hobby. He promised to buy me a Mercedes before he turned thirty three next year and was also going to build a closet just for my purses. He loved dusting and cleaning windows, watching everything on TLC and looked forward to watching ‘Gilmore Girls’ with me every afternoon. Oh, and most importantly, he firmly believed that carnal desires were still wrong even in the bonds of marriage and would only act on them for the purpose of procreation and two kids was the perfect number.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Geilman. This will be very helpful,” says Dr. Spacemen as he scribbles furiously on his yellow pad.

“Oh, my pleasure. I just hope you can help him be the man he was again,” Anna says sweetly. “If I think of anything else, can I email you a list?”

“Yes, yes. That would be fine.”

Terrifying, isn’t it? I guess for the sake of saving my real self in case I ever suffer from multiple personality disorder, I should probably start keeping a secret journal. Or maybe a fake secret journal where I detail my exploits as a rocket riding space cowboy.

One of those days

This picture sums up my day very well. But now you need to ask yourselves - Am I the confused hen? Rejected chick? Or warm and toasty puppy? You decide.

For any Arrested Development and sheep fans out there...

Can vitamins & supplements go bad?

Is there an expiration date on vitamins & supplements? Normally, I would just look at a bottle to figure it out for myself, but since I am at work right now and my multi-vitamins and St. John’s Wort are in little plastic baggies, I can’t. The reason I’m wondering is I just popped my daily dose of happy pills, see Wort above, and suddenly feel very sick to my stomach. I wonder if they’ve gone bad, if they can go bad or if they could possibly smell any more like alfalfa pellets? And if they did, could I get pygmy goats to eat them? Probably not the girls but the boy goats would probably be all over them.

Thinking this makes me miss Percy, the pet pygmy goat and now I’m thinking about the time he got into the grain (goat crack apparently) barrel and ate until he couldn’t reach any more and then didn’t move for several days. He just climbed into his manger to lie down and moan. No kidding, the goat slept in a manger. Talk about a god complex.

Anyway, lying down and moaning sounds good right now because, my stomach hurts from my expired anti-depressant supplement. But at least I can give myself points for bringing this post full circle. Thank you.

P.S. Trying to lose weight. Today’s reading: 258.4, and yes, I will be measuring in tenths of a pound.

It's all a Test!

Or maybe a tryout would be a good substitute for test.

This post goes out to all the men out there scratching their heads and wondering, “What was she so mad about?” or “What were we fighting about?”

You can stop reading now if any of the following apply:

· You decided to upgrade your T.V. without discussion even though the old one worked fine.
· You came home smelling of smoke and sweat and had subtle hints of glitter on your clothes.
· One of your/her children is missing an appendage that they certainly had before the game started.
· You quit your job to become a full time blog commenter.

If any of these sound like recent events in your life, then you should know why you were fighting. If you don’t see any similarities with the list above, then continue on and enjoy the epiphany that I just had.

It’s all a test – the crazy fights that leave you wondering how in the world putting the jelly in the fridge door shelf is so much better than on the interior shelf or why the floor has to be moped once a week, even if you were gone on vacation or [insert own example here]. Every fight like that, every single one is a test to see how well you apologize.

Go back to dating land if you’re deep in the trenches of marriage or if you’re dating and having had this experience yet; brace yourselves – its coming.

We all know that the dating period is a tryout, a special time to answer all the questions we have regarding a potential mate (another post is required to cover that topic). And for her, one of the questions is “How well does he apologize?”

Think about it for just a moment. If you are buying a car and know that you are going to be using it repeatedly to make the yellow, you’re going to want to know that it can cover 200 yards in 2 seconds many, many times without issue. For a woman, she knows (whether consciously or sub) that her man will spend at least 5% of his life apologizing for something. (Go ahead, do the math. Average life span of 85 years equals 4.25 years of apologizing. That’s solid.) She needs to know how well you can do it. AND that’s where the crazy fights come from. Blame hormones, blame PMS, blame whatever but I honestly believe that your first WTF? fight comes from her need to know that you could when an Olympic medal in the “I know I didn’t do anything wrong but still can apologize convincingly” category (coming in 2024).

So, if it hasn’t happened yet, start practicing. If it has, I hope that I’ve made some sense of the senseless. And for those of you thinking, “What just a minute, SpandexMonkey? I’ve been with my wife or girlfriend for seventy-five years and we’re still having WTF? fights. If I passed the first one with flying colors, shouldn’t that have ended?” – The answer is NO. These will continue to happen. Just like I got my degree in engineering but have to spend the rest of my life learning and passing tests to get continuing education credits to stay an engineer, you are all screwed too. Even though you nailed it once, you will still be subject to pop quizzes and refresher courses for the rest of your life. It’s just part of it so eat some humble pie, work on your sincere eyes and tell yourself, “This is only a test. If this were a real emergency, she wouldn’t even be talking to me.”

Conversations with My 2 year old son

While snuggling on the bed, watching cartoons, Jude looks up – directly into my nose:

“Your nose is full of boogers, Daddy.”

“Thanks for letting me know. I’ll take care of it.”

“You know…you should eat them.”

“No thanks. I’ll just blow my nose later.”

“You should eat them. They’re yummy!”

Jude then demonstrated said recommendation. No more kisses or high fives for him.

Almost a full year

11 months anyway, since my last post. Man, that is sad. Going to be trying to get this rolling again. Anybody reading should not be holding their breath since I tend to fail a lot at getting rolling. Gaining momentum is a real pain sometimes but we'll see how it goes. In the mean time, a nice picture:

I don't hate everything, far from it actually but this morning, I just really liked the look in this cat's eyes.