My empathy compass is spinning wildly out of control and sending my emotions into hemispheres that are neither helpful nor healthy.

Perhaps it’s my brain trying to distract itself from the raging unhappiness that is this bastion of culture, Sullivan, IL– but something decidedly neurotic is going on in my head lately.

I saw a fat adolescent girl, and almost had to excuse myself from the counter. Pouty Arleen would have loved another excuse to bitch to my superior officer about the breach of concession stand conduct, but luckily for me I managed to avoid a semi-psychotic emotional breakdown. That all must seem pretty random to anyone reading this. More than random to the people who don’t actually know me (as though knowing me accounts from some of the daily dose of crazy). But don’t you know how unhappy that little girl’s going to be?

I’ve probably just left empathy and headed straight into insanity. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Straight to the overwrought nuthouse for Joel Kim.

There’s something else going on deep underneath my resounding concern for childhood obesity. I haven’t quite cracked that case yet, but a few more clues and I’m heading straight for the sheriff!

Talked to my mom today. Apparently the party animal was getting a little crazy with some knitting pals in Geneva and fell up some stairs. That’s right up the stairs. I told her not to knock needles with some strange women she met over the internet, but she never listens.

It is, all joking aside, fairly serious. Mom apparently lost all feeling in her legs long enough to collapse up those stairs, and now all of modern medicine is having a rather tough time figuring out what’s wrong. MRI didn’t show a stroke, so the culprit is possibly her back– which translates in my mind straight back to a spinal injury she suffered when I was a kid. I admittedly don’t know much about medicine, my only knowledge stemming from a few drunken trips through Hulu episodes of House MD. But still, what would’ve caused that?

Mom assured me that everything would be fine. No stroke–no problem!

But as someone who worries daily that, in the absence of any truly horrific events in my life thus far, I’m statistically due for one soon, this is less than comforting news.

Standing at Konigsberg (aka Arleen’s cookie and booze station) I wasn’t focusing too much on soliciting donors. I was, however, conjuring up as many terrifying images of what Mom’s mysterious ailment could be. Worse yet, I couldn’t stop my self from picturing all the ways it could possibly come at the worst possible moment.

What if she lost feeling while driving and careened into a light pole? What if she falls and damages her back even more? What if she died? What if she became permanently handicapped. What if the worst possible thing, bigger than my recently diminished imagination could create, actually happened?

Then I naturally think about how devastated my mom would feel. I think about how poorly my family would handle something like that. I think about how much time I’ve wasted with my own personal resentments. How they’ve kept me away from home.

Then I catch a glimpse of the fat little girl and think about how awful she must feel about herself, or how she will once she gets to high school and can’t escape the cruelty of adolescence.

That all probably still doesn’t make a lick of sense to anyone. But that’s where my mind’s been going tonight. Every worst possible scenario I’ve been thinking. For everyone. No one is safe.

Just a year ago I probably would think about talking about how scared I am to garner some ounce of sympathy from anyone who might listen. Neurotic, quasi-sociopathic weirdos like me feed off of pity. It’s something I’m working through. But what worries me most about all of this, is that, crippling narcissism aside,  I’m just really scared for my mom.

I’m sending this out into the great, dark void that is the internet. I’ve gotten it out and exorcized the negativity. No one needs to read it, because I have– and isn’t reading your own silliness enough to cure you of it?

‘Til next time rangers.

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