I’ve found ways to cope with many of mid-life’s little potholes. Exercise helps. So does my mid-life brain compensating device.

But I have yet to figure out how to deal with the fact that, sometimes, when I open my mouth, what comes out is a cross between intelligent comments and the language of an alien planet. This never used to happen–the connection between my brain and my word-forming parts was four bars all the time. Now I occasionally get packet loss.

(Ooooh, a dorknology analogy. Which I probably won’t do again, because I feel like I have to explain this one. The Internet comes in packets. When you have a dropped connection, like when Skype suddenly says buh-bye when you were least expecting it, that’s packet loss. I think. I could be wrong. Which makes my dorknology analogy not only somewhat obscure but also possibly fallacious. So I probably won’t do it again, even though I liked using the word ‘fallacious’ just a second ago. Those are the kinds of words I get to use when I write for money. Which tells you that you probably don’t want to read anything I write for money.)

I don’t mind if this happens when I’m, say, sitting at the dinner table or talking to a friend. I hate it when it happens on the phone with a client. Or, even worse, a group of people.

I was recently on a conference call, and someone asked me a question. I intended to say something like, “I think you’d have a better chance with a public health journal.” (Shows you how fascinating my work conversations tend to be.)

What came out was something like,”I think you’d have a chetter bance with a hublic jealth pournal.” Then I tried to correct it, and it came out, “A better chance with a public hooth jeernal.”

You get my drift. All I can think at the time is, at least they didn’t hire me because of my speaking skills.

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A while ago, I raved about Dragon, the voice recognition software, which I use several days a week. Basically, whenever I have to write something longer than one paragraph, I put on my headset and talk my way through it.

The position of the microphone in front of my lips is critical. If it’s not just right, the wrong words appear on my monitor. Then I repeat what I intended to say, using an increasingly irritated tone of voice, like it will somehow help if the dragon knows I’m getting peeved. Eventually, I give up and type whatever I wanted to say.

This week, I got the wrong words, and, instead of getting mad, I laughed out loud. I dictated the words “rich characters” and what I got was “rich care Bears.”

I love so much about this. I love the mental image I immediately got–of a certain purple something with a rainbow on its stomach. Care Bears were Nurse Tattoo’s thing when she was a little girl; as a counselor-in-training at the YMCA Day Camp, her camp name was Care Bear. (Sorry to blow your cover, NT.)

I also love the randomly placed upper case on Bears. I don’t think I’ve ever had the opportunity to capitalize that word, since I don’t a) write headlines about wildlife or 2) pay any attention to football.

I am so easily amused.

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I don’t know if you ever watch The Today Show. I watch about 20 minutes a few times a week, when I’m stretching after a run or lifting weights.

The TS covers all kinds of stories, from amusing to heartbreaking and back again. And they make transitions between them.

Which they plan for. Unlike me.

Often, the transitions on TS involve Al Roker dropping his usual jovial smile and tone of voice and speaking somberly about the weather. This amuses me, even though, really, what’s he going to do when changing the topic from, say, Rwandan genocide to rain in Cincinnati.

So here’s Al’s transition face:

(I’m not sure what happened to the rest of his head. Perhaps he has a built-in rain gauge.)

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A vigil is being kept by the families and friends of people who are still missing after the earthquake in Haiti. While the vast majority of the missing are Haitian and will never be recovered, which is a tragedy on a scale so immense that it defies my imagination, an ongoing international effort seeks to recover the missing who are from the U.S. and Canada, France, Italy, South America, and other Caribbean nations.

Many of them remain buried in the remains of the Hotel Montana. On Monday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer colonel in charge of the site apologized because the rubble is so unstable that the rest of the lobby must be excavated by hand. This may take another three weeks.

The vigil takes place here. Some 16,000 people are watching and waiting and providing love and support to each other the best they can. The administrators are people of great grace and compassion.

I’ve been watching for a couple of weeks. At first, I was motivated by hopeful curiosity. Then I felt like a voyeur for a couple of days.

Now, when I wake up in the middle of the night, and it’s dark and quiet and the only weight I feel is the covers on our bed, I say some prayers for people I don’t know.

I roll over and put an arm around Mr. Music. And I feel grateful beyond words to know where the people I love are.

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We’re big fans of everything Christopher Guest, and this bears a distinct resemblance to This is Spinal Tap, except it’s a real documentary. Less intentional humor, much more heart. It’s funny without meaning to be, and deeply touching, and quirky, and FULL of bad 80s hair.

You’ll find yourself caring immensely, at the end, if the concert hall in Japan holds 20,000 people… or just 20. And also musing about the difference between dreams and illusions.

It’s particularly poignant if you’re over the age of 50. In fact, if you’re not yet 50, you might want to leave this on your Netflix list for a couple of decades.

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Earlier this week, Mr. M said he had a surprise for me.

Sometimes, he gives me a surprise and then I have to figure out what it is. Once, while I was out of town, he had all the windows cleaned. When I came home, he wanted to know if I liked my surprise. It took me about two hours to realize that the reason it looked so sparkly sunny outside was because all the rain shmootz was off our windows.

This time, I was pretty sure I hadn’t already received the surprise. So I asked him what it was. He wouldn’t tell me.

Two days ago, he asked me how I liked my surprise. I said I loved it, even though I had no idea what he was talking about. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Yesterday, the UPS truck came while I was in the shower. I knew this because our very loud UPS-man-on-the-porch alarm went off. This sounds just like the Fed-Ex-guy-on-the-porch alarm. Also the cat-walking-down-the-sidewalk-on-the-other-side-of-the-street alarm.

After I got dressed, I looked on the front porch. The box said BOSE on it, so, natch, I assumed it was for Mr. M. He has quite a sound system in his office, and I figured it was one more piece of equipment.

But it was addressed to ME. And this is what was in it:

Mr. M said he’s been noticing me watch things on Hulu on my computers  He thought I would enjoy it more with better sound.

Forget Hulu–you should hear Ben Harper and the Blind Boys now. These babies go all the way to 11.

I swear to God, when I said yesterday that my favorite kind of stuff is dorknology, I had no idea that Mr. M had cooked up this sweet little treat.

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For my birthday last November, Mr. Music gave me a gift certificate.

He gives experiences, not stuff. Because who needs more stuff? Not me. (Unless it adds to my extensive collection of dorknology. Then I need it. A lot. And also immediately.)

So he gave me a gift certificate for one of my most favorite things on earth: a hot stone massage. Ah. No, more like Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

So, always Wrinkle-ready, I packed a camera when I went to my appointment. Actually, I packed one of DF’s cameras, which I still had from the night before when I took a picture of her in those fabu yellow 3D glasses.

April (inducer of ahs) stepped out of the room so I could get ready. Which is a euphemism for ‘take off all my clothes’ and that is NOT the DIY visual.

The first thing I did was reach in my purse and pull out the camera. I turned it on and pointed and pushed the button.

Nothing happened. Except this appeared on the display:

CHANGE BATTERY PACK

Please walk outside and hunt around the nearest river for six medium-sized, flat, smooth black rocks. Arrange them nicely in a crockpot of hot water. Next to a fluffy white towel. In a dark purple room.

There. That’s exactly what I wanted to show you.

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Mr. Music had a gig on Saturday night, so DF and I went to see Avatar.

Holy moley #2!

We saw it in 2D, because there isn’t a theater in our town showing it in 3D. But, as soon as we got home, we figured out where and when we could see it in an Imax theater. We would have gone the next day, but all the shows were sold out.

This is a GREAT movie. A paradigm-busting experience. As I said to DF in the car on the way home, “James Cameron broke movies.” Meaning that the idea of going to see a film with human actors moving around inside real buildings suddenly seems pretty tame.

If you haven’t seen Avatar yet, do not delay. Even if you don’t like science fiction, go see it. If nothing else–even if you don’t like the avatars or the merging of computer graphics and human actors or the great battle scenes or the story itself–you’ll be blown away by how much imagination can fit into one man’s brain.

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