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1:16 p.m. - Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2004
I Hate PMS
It was dark, of course, by the time I drove home, and the color of the stoplights seemed especially intense through the darkness. I had already slowed my car when the light turned red. I stopped the car completely. I waited. The traffic on the cross-street eased into motion. I remember a mini-van accelerating slowly, like a whale moving away from the shore. It all seemed so distant, somehow. I felt detached, as if I were watching from far away a scene in which I played no part.
Then the guy in the car behind me honked his horn and I returned with a start to the awareness that the reason everything seemed so far away was because it bloody well was far away; that I was stopped at a stop sign, serenely waiting for the stoplight up at the next intersection down the road to turn green.
Every month I spend a couple of days like this. Sometime's it's mild, sometimes worse. This is one of those times when it's worse. When I got to work this morning, I spend a quarter of a minute staring at the name of an institution that's been our client for years: I simply couldn't understand the name, or recognize what it meant. Then I noticed that I was wearing black shoes and navy-blue tights, and I spent another half a minute trying to puzzle out why they didn't match, and which was right — finally realizing that since my jumper was black, I really should have worn black tights. So hard to tease out these complex matters in the morning.
Perhaps I am feeling what a person in the early stages of dementia feels, when he still has enough control over his mind to realize that he is losing it. It's frightening and frustrating. Thank God, my mind returns after a couple of days. But those couple of days are an exercise in grim endurance.
Plus I ate an entire bag of almond M&M's yesterday. Yuck.
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