Posted 9/2/20
The people who walked in darkness
Have seen a great light;
Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death,
Upon them a light has shined. –Isaiah 9:2
Oxymoron– “a combination of contradictory or incongruous words (such as cruel kindness)” –Merriam Webster Online
–“itude”– a suffix I just kind of smooshed onto the previous word because I am the blogger and I can. 🙂 Sorry Mrs. Self (RIP 🙁 ), Mrs. Andrus, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Whitlow, the English adjunct at MSU who moonlighted/moonlit? as the keyboard for The Barking Spiders, and every other English teacher in my life. Welcome to grammar, 2020-style.
Hi all! I hope you have a hilariously happy and healthy hump day! That is my plan as well. Anything has potential to be an improvement from yesterday with my ongoing car sagas.
First the backdrop against which you can judge me. 😉 I buy crap cars. No, I don’t buy them to restore them and flip them or show them or pick up the ladies with them. I am NOT a car guy…not even a little bit. I am, however, in some areas of life, cheap. In my cars, I am especially so. I have never owned a new car in my entire life. I bought a car in the 1990s that had 20 or 30k miles, but, by and large, the rest have been pretty junky. Oh the stories I could tell…and may on a later day…of cars dying painful deaths. Today’s story pulled from this crap car anthology is my 2000 Buick Park Avenue.
I dug this car (note the past tense). It is blue, but an odd blue that leaves the viewer not completely understanding its color, not unlike “the dress” of days gone bye bye. It had air conditioning, pretty low miles (as far as my cars tend to go), and drove well. I gave around $1,000 for it and drove it for about 4 months…then it happened. The headlights went cray cray. How crazy? It wasn’t that they didn’t work…but they turned themselves on and off and on and off…with the keys out and the light switch pushed in. So much so that 2 realities happened: 1. I would have grabbed for the holy water had I believed in holy water/demonic possession of vehicles 2. My battery died dead as Julius Stinkin’ Ceasar. (By the way…welcome to September, named such because it means the “7th month”…except that it is 9th month, placed next to the Oct/8th month located in month 10…but I digress. Those Caesars stuck their noses in everything!).
I jumped it a few times, then consulted the car repair oracles: They are great websites for such. Here they are if you need them: Link and Link . The repair oracles were dismayed and somewhat unhelpful until I found one buried deeply within the tea leaves of the site that suggested that I pull out a fuse for the BCM (some sort of fancy module that sort of controls some features.) It seemed to fix the problem for a good week…then it began again. I limped it to one car shop who promptly grabbed for the holy water…and sent me elsewhere. At location 2 the told me, after searching and searching, that I needed a part called a light sentinel. Dictionary.com offers this as a definition for sentinel: “a soldier stationed as a guard to challenge all comers and prevent a surprise attack:to stand sentinel.“
So this device, causing my car to go cray cray so much by flashing its lights and making sounds that it drained its battery…is waiting quietly and calmly and confidently, perhaps like this guy, to challenge all comers??? Yup. It scored high on Oxymoronitude.
Not everything that seems to be an oxymoron is one. Take this super interesting product my great friend and colleague John dropped by for me to inspect that he ordered after seeing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year:
A beacon implies something of a light tower…and they CAN be silent (although they often have bells and whistles too…), but extremely effective in warning of dangers coming your way on the waters. Therefore, they stand firm and warn you of dangers…unlike my headlight sentinel. (BTW…John’s group, our close partner, offers some excellent products for seniors and/or folks with dementia and is always looking for more and better ones…hence we are looking at this product.)
Does dementia have oxymorons? Yup…mostly innocently conceived, but the community does have a couple:
Memory care– While memory certainly isn’t the only thing that dementia takes from our loved ones, it is one of the most obvious at first glance. Memory care is really Forgetting Care, because if most of us have our memories intact, would anyone care?
Flight risk– Mom was in the memory unit with the lovely Sweet 17 for over a year because she was deemed a flight risk. In actuality, her biggest problem there was falling, not flying. 🙁 See the many articles in those earlier days including this one.
Dementia meds– Meds mom took for dementia, since she missed the early stage meds that can extend the early stage (but not the lifespan) did NOTHING to help her dementia. Some would help with anxiety, others sleep, but none fixed the problem. And…if someone tells you they have a cure…a magic pill…walk away. 🙁 Uneducated at best and Snake oil at worst. There are some clinical trials that do show promise…but we shall see… Otherwise, symptoms are treated as best they can.
36-Hour Day– While this is an impossibility, it sure seems accurate, so this one may not qualify.
The English language, cars and car repairs, and dementia are a spellbinding mess some days, eh? Hence, I am frustrated with all three…but I march on and I hope you do to. We can’t fix my $360 hard-to-find sentinel part and we can’t fix our shared tongue…but maybe we can finally #EndALZ soon. Let’s get on that! There are (virtual) Walks to End Alzheimer’s everywhere including ours later this month. Join and/or donate to my virtual team here: Link . Thank you 🙂
Update: I had a nice visit with mom today. She seems to do better with the face shield than the masks (that she tended to chew on). The 20 minutes flew like 20 seconds… Stinkin’ disease 🙁
Dad Joke of the day:
Why does a chicken coop have two doors?
Because if it had four doors, it would be a chicken sedan.