functional stupidity

and all the related stuff. or, ya know, as much of it as we can remember and stay focused on long enough to, ahh, do whatever it is we seem to think we may be intending to maybe attempt to do here. visual hint clue thingi.

crappy fotos, yes, but that’s relevant. goshgollydarnit, i’d like to put some organization on this, and give it some depth but all that’s not happening right now. so, we’re still rambling, barely scraping the surface.

the 7th grade functional stupidity was temporary. sort of. by december i was doing ok again with school work. but not as ok as before. it continued ok for a few years. somewhere in there, also, i realized that i no longer had the drawing and painting skills that had been there just a few years earlier. lack of communication between eye and hand maybe. or eye and brain. brain and hand? all of those and more?

and did i ever mention fatigue?

anyway, yeah, life went on. i prolly haven’t clearly explained functional stupidity. i prolly can’t. i don’t think you can understand it if you haven’t had it. and it’s not just the crisis periods, though those are highlights. lowlights. more easily recognized than the long spiral of decay that follows. so, i’m not gonna try explain. bad stuff happened in october of 1955.

same thing happened in october of 1959. the generally accepted term for the intellectual devastation part is cognitive difficulties. the generally acepted terms for the pain and fatigue are pain and fatigue. the general practice of medical professionals has been to deny the existence of any physiological problem and give it one psychological or psychiatric label or another. been thru enuf of those.

there are medical tests available. if one can get a medical professional to order them. finally won a couple of those battles last year. mri of brain and lumbar spine. some big clues in there, but not enuf time to try to deal w them in michigan, bein’ somewhat distracted w the big relocation n all. and, in october of 2006…well. i didn’t get dumber this time, but the fatigue and pain got really rough. i did a pretty good denial thing though, long enuf to get here.

ok, i haven’t established anything here, haven’t presented either evidence or anecdote to clearly show…well, anything. but that in itself speaks.

a’right, nuff unfocused blather. going for the focused blather now. i think you can see, in the hand fotos, what i was trying to do. three fingers straight up, thumb on pinky close to the palm. my difficulty with it isn’t from the arthritis. and the left hand wasn’t that bad til mid-may, when the left arm went numb for a week. most of it has improved,but the hand is still way weird.

so is life. overall, the medical care i’ve received here has been great. for reasons that don’t need exploring here, though, the testing and diagnosing process is not moving as fast as one might wish. that is expected to improve soon.

meantime, my primary care medical professional is in agreement that i have a systemic neurological disorder. whether this thing is ms, or just something that has all the same symptoms (including functional stupidity), will have to wait for testing.

anyway, this is not something to feel bad about. i’ve lived with it for half a century. without any kind of treatment. there are some good meds now that can slow the progress of ms. um,as there are for ra. gotta get back on those too.

i think my point here was just to explain why posts here are so rare. i want to do daily, but usually there isn’t energy, or mental clarity. or i just can’t see well enuf thru the double vision and blur. alll those things are fixable, recoverable. they might even all spontaneously self heal at any moment. so, we;ll get back to normal, or better, sometime. soonish, we hope.

on my emotional state, ’cause some people locally keep expressing concern.

my emotional state is fine. i’m prolly the least depressed person in the western hemisphere.

questions on detail or whatever on any of this are absolutely welcomed.

now i’m gonna go play w my pal pancho. stay cool, eh.

i’m sick and tired

well, actually, the second is a symptom of the first. maybe better later. maybe.

meantime, here’s henri duparc, someone everyone should know about. that’s a clue.

these are 175×175 pixel squares

let’s see what this hinky software does w that.

this will ramble

’cause i’m not near ready. but it needs to be done.

if i had the local human resources i could face to face on the issues of the moment in my life if i could get around as well as a year ago, i could sort thru stuff, organize, so to speak, more or less,, my mental files, discarding the duplicates and the garbage and come to this page with that something resembling a reasonable facsimilile of coherence and order but …. i know two, maybe three people here who could serve this need fairly well. one has his own legitimate concerns which causes him to have fear of getting too close to my concerns. which concerns he has total misconception about. but he’s cool. prolly saved my life, so i can’t complain. another is just too massively thinly spread out with her own projects. and the answer to a prayer girl is, um, well… she does have good days….haven’t seen her for awhile though.

so.

some days later.

10.50pm. i have social security hearing at 9:15am tomorrow. that meeans up at 6 and pray i can get semi-functional by the time my ride gets here at, we hope, 8:30. this is a first judicial hearing on my first appeal of the claim that i made two years ago last july. i have a bit of new info since then, we’ll see what happens with it all.

if yer in the u s of a yer listenin’ to slacker .com, right? why not?

ok, so divin’ right in. i wanted to do a long, clear, detailed, witty post here but it doesn’t seem to be coming so we’ll do a just the facts, maybe, mostly.

i haven’t been well since i got here. slightly misleading statement, but what i told myself for several months. i haven’t been well since…well, there’s a question there. but things (hah, things! my body and brain.) took a bit of a large turn for the worse last october. there’s tradition to that. we’ll get to it. anyway, this happened about the same time i made the decision that i’d move here in december. acknowledging what was going on would have suggested that moving, at that time, was unwise. so i did the denial thing. i have lots of forced practice, going back more than 50 years.

that history, what i can recall of, goes back to 7th grade, 1955. that was my first experience of functional stupidity. if i could remember how i’d put a subscript “tm” on that. maybe later. just ecstatic right now that i could remember the word. i had to work, though, to pull up ecstatic. which reminded me that, just before the recent browser crash, i had been thinking of using “rapturous” at tbd.com. you’re there right? why not? social networking for adults, they say. some good people there (me for one), and it might turn into as cool a product as they say. one problem they have right now is some really unfortunate limits on image posting size and format.

also, i’m thinkin’ that wordpress.com may be as big a piece of crap as blogger. may be.

but, we were at “functional stupidity”, right? which is different from the stupid behavior that comes out of my idiot housemates. can’t deal w any more o that right now. i’ll try to finish this tomorrow.

actually, i think i’ll do a pablo and post this bit. might make it easier to finish. might not. we’ll see.

one day later.  seems i didn’t do that.  did i mention fatigue?  maybe now.  maybe.