It being HOT in Topeka

I have a tendency to absorb the speech patterns of others. Accents, word choice, phrase structure--I tend to pick these things up from what I read or whom I talk to. When I've been with my family you can hardly understand me, I sound like a total redneck. And you remember, there for a while last November I started to develop one of those fake Madonna-British accents when I went to London. It's not intentional, I just can't help it.

Presently I'm editing a ms (that's jargon for "manuscript") written by a fellow for whom English is clearly a second language. So I frustrated to finding myself thinks insides my head like this ways, and even I dream it last night, some strange Northern European heavy accent I not even heards before. God helps me, please.

To make matters worse, 600 of the 900 servers I support for IBM are located in Topeka. Lately we've been having a lot of meetings about Topeka, as the mucky-mucks are sitting up now, looking around, blinking their precious innocent little doe eyes and saying "Where are we going and why are we in this hand-basket?" These Topeka meetings have created in me an insane impulse to shout "It's HOT in Toe-peeeeeka!!" or "I'm a hot toe-picker!" and then just laugh madly. I swear to you. I actually did say it during one meeting this week. I think I've had too much Nyquil.

Anyway, here's why. My son's been home sick, giving me Cartoon Network as background noise while I work this week. Subliminal messages...I was baffled and hadn't a clue why I developed city-specific Tourrette's Syndrome causing me to yell "toe-picker!" against my will and better judgement every time my clients say the word Topeka.

Then I found this and it all became clear to me. (And now I'm also a Bloo nut. He's the coolest cartoon ever.)
This makes me laugh every single time I hear it!

Glioblastoma

Sounds like something fun, doesn’t it? Havin’ a “blast”?

It’s a different kind of “blast.” It’s more like an explosion, like TNT or an atomic bomb, instead of a party.

Tarot symbolism uses the Tower to represent this sort of thing. The thing that comes hurtling into your life from a clear blue sky, a thunderbolt of change that just leaves you gobsmacked. The Tower is discovering that you’re pregnant at the age of 46, just weeks away from your youngest child’s high school graduation. Then finding out it’s twins. The Tower is falling in love when you least expect it and don’t particularly want it. The Tower is losing your job the same week you close on a new house and your kid goes off to college. The Tower is when your house burns down and there’s nothing left but starting over.

Or a brain tumor. The Tower is a brain tumor that grew there silently, maybe over years of time, and you never knew it was there until you started having headaches and dizziness and blurred vision. And then, after you discover the brain tumor is there, you can’t ever go back to being that person who has headaches sometimes but never heard of the word “glioblastoma.”

The Tower is when this happens to your son and you are helpless and all you can do is watch him suffer.

The good news is…primary brain cancer does not typically metastacize. It doesn’t usually spread itself in generous helpings all throughout the body like other forms of cancer.

The bad news is…one year life expectancy for glioblastoma is only 29%. Ten year life expectancy is 2.3%.

The Tower is not a merciful card. For me, it is a sober reminder of what really matters, for do we ever think about how much something matters until it occurs to us we might lose it?