I know what I should be doing right now, and it is not having another cup of coffee and lingering over the MacAir making fun of myself. But who can resist?
Have you ever kept an eye out for people close to you to see if they are slipping? (NOTE BENE: this could be an invitation.) Has Pops been really forgetful lately? Did you remind Dearest to pick up the popcorn and peas you need at the market THREE TIMES and she still forgot?
I can't easily recall Bible verses like so many of my southern evangelical sisters and brothers, so I had to look this one up. The only reason I even thought to look it up was that Walter and I taught this verse as part of our coverage of Matthew less than ten days ago (what IS the shelf life for remembering something you taught? I was hoping longer than ten days. Even milk last longer than that.).
Matthew 7:3
New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
Anyway, there is a log in my eye and it's called Situational Prepositional Dyslexia.* And it explains why I accidentally drove to Houston and back last night.
For those unfamiliar to central Texas geography, the trip took four hours. I drove. I returned. I didn't stop. I never left the car. And this is important: no one joined me in the car.
All this happened because when I read the email from my friends asking me to pick them up at the airport, my brain moved the preposition "from" and the noun it was claused with "Houston" around in the sentence. Its placement in the phrase ". . . pick us up on the flight from Houston . . ." somehow jumped on the screen where the writer placed into ". . . pick us up [from Houston] on the flight. . ."
I realized my mistake about three minutes before my friends' flight arrived (at the airport four miles from my house, but considerably further when calculating from my current position) thanks mainly to Davis's efforts to track down flight information for me over the phone, so I could park at the correct terminal. After he discovered I was going to be two hours late (or more, depending on rush hour traffic leaving Houston at 6:15) picking up my friends, I quick phoned my mom to do the local pick up. I also had to rely on another friend for phone number help, and of course Walter (and Davis, who asked me to edit the original and include his worrying skills to his computer search expertise to his credits) to keep the worry-o-meter going so I would make it home without an accident (beyond the one I had already been party to).
As someone once said, "It takes a village." I might add to that . . . "to get the village idiot home safely."
*Situational Prepositional Dyslexia--for those of you out of the know, this is a made up medical condition where from time to time the sufferer moves key prepositional phrases around in a sentence, leading to accidental and often harmful misinterpretation of written meaning.
that's good.. and it just occured to me "what if you hadn't had a cell phone??"
ReplyDelete:)