A is for Artery - It's Good Enough for Me

I feel like the low battery light has been flashing in my brain lately.  I don’t know what is going on, though I have searched the internet several times for some frightening possibilities.  It certainly couldn’t be that though my body doesn’t require more than six hours of sleep, my mind might be requesting a little more.  It seems more like a specific medical problem, like scurvy.

Would you like an example of this?  (Sorry, I’m not currently accepting negative answers, you have to listen – or read)  Yesterday, I was on the phone with someone who was requesting a code.  I read it off to her.  It started with AH and I felt the need to specify that A was the letter and not the number 8.  So I said, “That’s A as in…” then I froze because for a moment I couldn’t think of any words that start with A.  After a momentary pause, my mouth took over without the feeble help of my mind.  “That’s A as in… ummm...Artery.”  That caused her a moment of pause, then she said, “A like Apple?”  I told her yeah, she was right, her word was better and please excuse me, I’ve just been reading WebMD all day.  She did not laugh or smile (at least I couldn’t hear her lips pulling away from her dry teeth). 

Although, maybe this next one isn’t all that recent a problem, it still wreaks of nonsense… we have a famous story in our house that Mark loves to tell.  Shortly before we got married, we were at a baseball game in Detroit.  We were sitting next to the bullpen (I just had to look this up to make sure I was using the right word here – we are a soccer specific family) watching the pitchers warm up.  I suddenly got to thinking deeply.  I turned and asked Mark where the baseball players go for halftime.  He started laughing at me and immediately shared the comment with our friends and everyone we have ever met since then.  [In Mark’s defense, I am aware of the stupidity of this blunder and enjoy a laugh over it.  I just like to play up the injured party role for everyone to read.]

I thought the word was “Wheel barrel” until I read the word “Wheelbarrow” in one of Eli’s learn-to-identify-words-with-pictures books.  

I also thought “pedestal” was “pedestool” until a time I am not going to identify here (I actually think pedestool makes greater sense, by the way).

I wonder if I’m going to just have to accept being dumb.  I’ve been feeling superior for being able to correctly identify all the locations of states and their capitals but it turns out that is not such a great feat, many 5^th graders know this.  And 4-year-olds know words that start with A.  Woe is me. 

This is why I can’t home-school my kids – there would be a pack of second generation fools living in my house.  

I’m going back to WebMD to start memorizing symptoms of diseases now.  If I can succeed in just one thing, I can succeed in all things (I just made this up – it’s an absolutely untrue statement). 

P.S.  I was an English major, all these word hiccups should embarrass me.

P.P.S.S.  I’m sorry to my Alma mater if these revelations drastically decrease your future English department enrollments .