Insanity

Do you ever suspect you're crazy? I do. Sometimes I look back at something I've said or done, and think some of the circuits in my brain are just not seated properly. I wonder if my birthmother drank a little too much while she was waiting to get rid of me. Or maybe someone dropped me on my head when I was an infant and just forgot to tell anyone.

I remember an incident in law school. As I recall, it occurred in Property class. We were discussing fetuses as property and I had a point I wanted to make about adoption and wanting to be treated as a human, as a person, not as an article to be possessed. I had my hand raised and the professor was taking this point of discussion and that point of discussion and ran out of time before he recognized my hand. When he said the discussion had to stop and we had to move on, I burst into tears. Really! Tears! In the middle of Property class! What kind of insane, half-witted person does something like that? I look back on it now, at a distance of twenty years, and wonder what on earth my classmates thought. If I had seen someone in class behave like that, I would have wanted to stay as far away as possible from that person. I would have thought she was stark-raving mad!

Yesterday I made a comment to a friend, a comment that came out of the 50s and the South and another world that is light years away from the world in which we live. When I got home in the evening, I was struck with what I had said, and in a state of shock. I couldn't sleep last night in the midst of the horror of my words. It was an old, descriptive phrase that had a adjectival use in the 50s, but has no use today. And I'm a writer—you'd think I could have come up with a smarter phrase.

So I guess the lesson out of today's post is that sometimes, when you think you're finally growing up, your brain has a mouth of its own that refuses to be controlled.

Or, sometimes even the smartest person can do—or say—a really dumb thing!