Who's Manic?

Whenever I see my friend Dottie (not her real name) she has already baked cookies for the whole county AND walked the dog AND practiced healing arts on three entire people before most of us have even had our coffee. We walked around the pond once, Dottie and I, she with her baby in a stroller  (grandbaby to be accurate, “the best thing I never did,” she calls him) and we  took those paths at 30 mph. That child’s eyeballs were jiggling. So were mine. I was completely out of breath 100 yards in and I was propelling nothing but my own increasingly porous skinny-white-girl skeleton.I saw Dottie professionally the other day and after scoring my bag of cookies asked her where she got all her energy. “Hon! I’m manic!" she laughed. "I take a shitload of meds just to say this calm!”She said ‘manic’ as in ‘manic-depressive’ but of course bi-polar is the term of choice these days and I've often wondered if I’m not a little bi-polar myself. Yesterday, for example, I was a mess. Partly because I couldn’t see out of one eye and partly because my messed-up neck hurt like hell I decided my creative powers were also shot and that nobody liked me. I whined to David the second he came in the door and fell into the bed at 8. He found a way to fall into the same bed (men! what can we say?) and today I wake up and whaddya know everything’s great. And today I’m not posting about pinned car accident victims and death's dark shadow.  In fact after I get back from my Global Grooves class at the Y and feed Uncle Ed and buy the food and work on the column and reread My Antonia so I can help a kid with his English paper tonight I’m going to start dreaming up tomorrow’s post about  - are you ready for something really serious? - eye makeup!  Onward and upward!