I’m a little bit scatter-brained today, so here are a few things that have been floating around in my head:

* You know how I have to take a whole bunch of vitamins because of my gastric bypass? One of them is an iron supplement, which I’m supposed to take at least two hours apart from my other vitamins. (I can’t remember why, something about iron bonding with calcium and then not absorbing either.) As a result, I often forget to take it, and then I get lectured by my doctor when my bloodwork shows that I’m borderline anemic. I now keep my iron pills in my purse so I can take them during the day at work. Today, I reached into my purse to get it, and instead, I ate an antacid. Which, ok, I suppose an extra antacid won’t hurt me, but to be consciously thinking of my iron pill, and then to grab (and chew!) a Rolaids before I realized that “oops, that wasn’t what I was going for”? That’s a little weird.

* I can’t figure out if I’m coming down with a cold (which seems entirely likely) or if it’s PMS (which is not just likely, but a flat-out fact), but my equilibrium seems off today. I’ve had to walk down the stairs in my office building twice this morning, and both times I got these weird dizzy spells and felt like I was going to fall. I have a tendency to fall down at unfortunate times anyway, but I really don’t want to fall on the stairs at work, because (a) ouch, (b) I already have a bad knee and don’t need to make it worse, and (c) how embarassing is it to fall down in front of your co-workers? I kept a death-grip on the handrail, so I didn’t fall. But I think I’m taking the elevator for the rest of the day, just in case.

* Today is Kris’s first day at her new job. I keep wanting to call her and check in to see how she’s doing, but I think that’s probably a bad idea. I’m just so excited for her.

* There’s a girl I work with, who’s very tall, thin and pretty. She’s one of those Northwest granola types who never wears a speck of make-up, but still manages to like she could be a model. And she’s nice, so I can’t even dislike her. Today I happened to be in the ladies room at the same time as her, and she ripped a huge fart. This made me inexplicably happy. I guess it was just the realization that she isn’t one hundred percent perfect. (Yes, I’m a freak.)

* On a more serious note, this makes me sad for my home state. I guess the upshot is that girls with unwanted pregnancies in Mississippi are going to have to make a little road trip to get their abortions. But for pete’s sake, there was only one abortion clinic in the whole state to begin with. And you know what? I know exactly where it is, because it was on my route home from high school, and I remember the protesters out there with their signs almost every afternoon. My mom used to laugh at the hypocrisy, that they were never out there protesting when the weather was bad.

There was a girl at my high school who lived with her grandparents, and they were both radical pro-lifers. She was too, I suppose because you buy into your role models’ propaganda when you’re young and impressionable. She tried to convince our entire ninth grade gym class that birth control pills were evil because they acted as an abortive device. (WTF?) I remember going to her house one day after school, and there was a message on the answering machine for her: “Hi sweetie, it’s Gramps. Grandma got arrested again this afternoon, so I’ll be a little late while I go downtown to bail her out.” She shrugged it off and said that something like that happened at least a couple of times every month, and acted like it was no big deal.

I have no idea why all of that came back to me today, I haven’t seen that girl in probably fifteen years. Reading that article just made me wonder if her grandparents were still around, because I imagine this would’ve been a happy day for them.

I also remember that abortion clinic because it was next door to a motel where one of my brother’s friends committed suicide. That was in 1995. On the rare occasions that I visit my hometown, I usually make a point of avoiding that particular intersection. But you can see the motel from the freeway, so I can never really avoid it completely. It always reminds me of his mother, who was a very sweet lady (and a friend of my mom’s). It’s been eleven years and she has never recovered from the loss of her son. I guess you don’t bounce back from something like that.

And that, folks, is the bizarre stream-of-consciousness that makes up my brain today. Sorry to end on a bit of a downer note, but there you have it.