Brain Fluffies

Well hey there, readers! I imagine you’re wondering why I’ve been MIA all week. (…Or, much more likely, you didn’t notice my absence at all. You walked around your life all tra-la-la and didn’t give a flying rat’s patootie about me and my blogging lull. But I would rather believe you were frantically pacing the floor, refreshing your web browser every two minutes, and cursing the skies in agony because you COULD. NOT. LIVE. without another SusiePost.

…That’s how it happened, right??)

In any case, the reason for said lull is that my mom was in town this week! Which means, among other things, that I am now well-versed on the life story of every obscure family member’s current whereabouts and life happenings, my house is now 1,726 times cleaner than it was last week, and we are officially TWO episodes behind on Dance Moms, which has only ever happened to me like once before in my entire life.

But it’s totes okay, because my mother is quite possibly my very favorite person on the planet. (Sorry, other Earth-dwellers.) She stayed in our guest-room-slash-office, in which there is a Norman Rockwell calendar hanging on the wall. Today after dropping her off at the airport, I sat down at my desk to find this written on the calendar:

Isn’t she adorable?!

I love my mom. But I cannot deny that she is also by far the weirdest/quirkiest person who has ever existed. For instance: When I was little, she was vehemently against me saying bad words. Which, sure, is a pretty standard parent concern… Except that when it came to teaching me how to speak, and my mom was flipping through her mental dictionary to determine “good” from “bad,” she took a red pen to a lot more words than I think was totally necessary. Among these were “stupid,” “bored,” “hate,” and of course, anything even remotely or suggestively referring to a bodily function.

Which meant that as a child, I grew up using exclusively creative alternatives to otherwise totally anatomical descriptions. I never had to “go potty,” I had to use the restroom. And it wasn’t my butt that hurt, it was my po po.

Most of these have not made the cut into my adult vernacular, but one thing that did stick is that instead of saying “brain farts,” in honor of my mommy dearest, I – to this day – call them “brain fluffies.”

And I don’t know if it had to do with her visit, or Taylor’s absence last week, or if my mind is just generally starting to atrophy… but I have experienced an awful lot of brain fluffies lately.

To give you an idea:

• While writing this post about my name, I literally had to stop and think about how many Ns “Susanne” has. What’s my name again?
• The other day I was typing a text to Taylor and got distracted… and when I picked my phone back up I had typed the words “I just” and I could NOT, for the life of me, remember what the end of the text/sentence was going to be. “I just can’t believe it’s not butter”? “I just think the Killers are extremely underrated”? “I just saved a bunch of money on car insurance by switching to Geico”? Who knows, it could have been something life-changing and profound, and now it’s lost forever! (Although let’s be honest, it was probably something more like “I just really wish I had a cheeseburger right now.”)
• We are currently out of coffee. This is somewhat of a rarity in our household, and I guess my brain hasn’t fully adjusted to it yet – because I kid you not, on Friday I rolled out of bed half-asleep, shuffled down to the kitchen in my socks, and poured myself a nice energizing mug of milk. It wasn’t until the ice cold white liquid hit my lips that I realized it was not, in fact, a cup of coffee. I wish I was joking.
• Recently I looked at my checking account balance and it was significantly lower than I expected it to be. This made Susie sad. Fast forward to two minutes later, my mind had since wandered from the minimal account balance, but part of my brain still knew that there was something to be upset about… and I literally had this conversation with myself alone in the car: “Hang on a sec, I feel really sad right now. But wait, why am I sad? I know there’s a reason; I feel like it was something that happened recently… What did I do recently? OH! That’s right, I’m broke!” It’s like the two halves of my brain are on two completely different wavelengths, and neither one of them is communicating with me.

I have no idea what prompted this sudden drop in mental capacity, but surely it must improve now that my life has reestablished some semblance of normalcy…

…Or at the very least when I’m caught up on Dance Moms.