Out of Control

Apparently I just learned how to walk YESTERDAY, because I have fallen again. This time it isn’t my chin that's damaged, it's my knee. And since I was in a skirt, I completely skinned it. I look like an 8-year-old who decided to try breakdancing on gravel, all band-aided up and thinking that MAYBE it’s worth trying one more time. (As evidenced by the fact that I even left my home this morning without being padded head to toe.) My hands are also plotting against me—sometimes when I’m holding a cup of coffee they will jerk for no other reason than to dump my coffee all over myself. Last night, when I held my coffee in my right hand, my left hand—and I am not making this up—reached over and HIT the bottom of my cup. It tried to knock it over. So then I switched hands: “Okay, Left Hand, if that’s how you’re gonna play, YOU hold the coffee cup,” and then it gets all trembly, like, “weighs...too...much...can’t...take...the pressure...”

This recent lack of hand/foot coordination reminds me of some problems I had when I was younger with various compulsions. I was discussing these with some girlfriends in my bookclub because we had just read Sedaris’s Naked, and his hilarious plague of tics, and I tried to explain to them that it MAKES TOTAL SENSE, this voice in the head commanding you to do something and you CANNOT RESIST this voice, because if you do, it will drive you insane. When I was young, I too obeyed the command of inner voices. Mine weren’t as cruel as his—I wasn’t licking light switches or anything, thank heavens—but they did command that I touch every white awning pole on my elementary school sidewalk as well as occasionally step off the sidewalk altogether. “OFF, Rona. STEP OFF THE CURB NOW.” “I don’t WANT to step off the curb. I have a SIDEWALK. Right here. Where NORMAL people walk.” “OFF. This is the last time I’m going to tell you. You know you want to.” And so I step off and back on again, and resume my pole-tapping journey in peace. The voice also commanded that when I was in a car, I had to blink between poles—be they power poles, traffic light poles, fence posts—if it was any sort of marker, I had to blink. Not on the exact moment of passing the marker, but on the equidistant point between it and the next one. I never told anybody about this old hobby of mine until last Friday’s bookclub meeting, and looking at the wide-eyed, silent stares around me, I thought, “Note to self: not a first date story.”

Alas, also like Sedaris, my compulsions eventually subsided (for the most part). While he discovered smoking as a cure for his, I found reading to be the cure for mine. Now when I get a strange urge to, say, make everything on my desk perpendicular to the edge, I just find something to read and distract me. While using my left hand to push the paper subtly into alignment.