Sometimes I feel like I am dumb as nails

Through my university years, I was alternately known as the smartest dumb girl, or the dumbest smart girl, depending on the speaker, the situation, or the humiliating sentence that just came out of my mouth before a filter could take action.

I am not stupid, but I do have a tendency to say some pretty stupid shit from time to time. I like to think of it as though my mind runs too quickly, and I have skipped over fifteen subjects in my head between sentences. This can either leave the listener baffled by how my two sentences are connected in any way, or can result in my stringing together words from multiple thoughts that have no business being together.

Sometimes, I just think, and therefore say dumb shit.

Well, the last few days, I have been feeling an extra sort of stupid. I have been hit with the worst case of insomnia I have ever known. It is like I have forgotten how to sleep. How dumb do you have to be to not know how to sleep? I have tried all my usual solutions, yoga, meditation, drinking heavily, and nothing is working. I lay awake pretty much all night, and watch the minutes tick by. It’s mental torture. The first night, I was thinking to myself, “crap, if I don’t fall asleep soon, I am only going to get 8 hours of sleep.” My only goal tonight, night four of too stupid to sleep, is to get a solid hour or two of sleep, and not have a total meltdown…again. I figure aim low, and maybe I won’t be disappointed.

Well, sleep is not the only thing bringing down my smartness confidence level. I managed to cut my leg this afternoon, a solid 3 inch cut in my thigh. Naturally I didn’t feel it, and I didn’t even notice it until I got blood on my hand. And how do you ask, does a person do such a thing? The answer my friend, is playing cards. Yes, I was playing cards with my son, and with the unexpectedly dangerous deck of cards, I gave myself a paper cut so deep it was bleeding. It is so long that if it doesn’t heal well, I will need to come up with a brilliant cover story to explain the straight blade like scar on my thigh. I am debating between breaking up a gang flight and stopping an armed robber ( which is essentially just stealing a certain someone’s “bullet” wound story to cover up a botched mole removal. Yeah, that’s right, you aren’t fooling anyone dude).

So here I sit, trying to remember how to sleep, over the pain of my playing card inflicted injury, hoping like hope that tonight I will sleep again.

Two and a half

My little Squishy is two and half, give or take a couple of weeks. For most people, two and half is not a milestone, and it’s not a big deal. As far as I am aware, two and half is nothing special in a child’s development. But for me, two and half means so much.

I met my little sister when she was two and half. She is now 14 and a fully fledged teenager with all those weird teenage habits like being addicted to her friends and talking to me in France at hours that make no logical sense. I mean seriously, if you can be asleep on a Tuesday at 3 a.m. why on Earth would you be up commenting on Facebook photos?

My baby sister, who is no longer a baby in any way, was once all mine.

Being a short-sighted fool, I didn’t join my family on their full 2 week trip to China; I didn’t want to miss that much school. Guess what, I have no idea what they taught that week, but I do know I wasn’t there to meet my little sister at the same time my father and sisters did, and I never got to see where she spent the first two and half years of her life, and I hate that almost every time I think about it.

I met her in a hotel room in Beijing. She was sleeping, she was beautiful and I loved her instantly. I know some people think that it takes time to love a child, and I’m very sure that is true for them, but I loved that little girl the moment I saw her, just like I loved my children the moment I met them. When she woke up, she was a little hesitant with me at first, but she very quickly clung to me like she was drowning. To be honest, I think she was, she was drowning in a sea of North Americans, with their weird skin, weird eyes and weird voices, and she was drowning in a world so completely unknown to her.

We visited Beijing together, and the Great Wall of China and she tried to teach me Chinese (she failed).

On our way back to Canada, my father got hit with the flu, and was barely able to stand by the time we finished our travels. We left him alone in a hotel room, and she and I went on with our lives. She was all mine for that weekend. It was wonderful. I knew she wouldn’t stay mine forever and it broke my heart to leave her 200 km away from me when I went back to school.

When I look at my little daughter who is two and half, I think about her now Aunty Em at that age. I think of how much Em had lived before we met her, and I think of the strong personality she had already developed (she freaked out when my dad dared to put rice on his plate instead of in his bowl…she just couldn’t handle such uncouth behaviour). She was a cool little kid, now she’s 14, she’s a teenager, and she’s my annoying little sister (who oddly enough has essentially the same personality as me, with the added bonus of being athletically gifted…jerk) and she will be here to visit me in just over a week. WOOHOO.