Gads. As I'm quite certain my regulars already know, dealing with a parent who's experiencing mild to moderate dementia is a little like dealing with a four-year-old on steroids; conversations, or attempts at conversations, are almost inevitably total non-sequiturs. Trust ceases to be about years of proof, and begins to just live in any given moment. To say nothing of the anxiety you can experience over the prospect of them injuring themselves, or someone else. I won't get into the specifics of a recent incident involving a relatively antique dagger, but, a) the story doesn't go the way you might think, and, b) thus far noone's been injured or killed, thank God. Suffice to say, though, it's nothing if not unsettling, and I'm sure as he*l not taking any chances. This having-to-monitor-behavior-24/7 stuff is wearing on my nerves. Parents, special-ed students, during the year, my general-ed students......raise your hand if you don't require constant attention. What it makes me realize in a lot of instances is that relatively speaking, my own behaviors aren't all that bad, at least not in my relative perception. Color me wrong if you like, but be prepared to back it up. There's a lot going on right now, and I'm not really concentrating on the things I'd like to be concentrating on, but I figure I'll get there, none the less. I would kill to just sit down with a bunch of Korean films and a bowl of popcorn, and have everyone just leave me the he*l alone for three or four hours. Relatively speaking, that'd be a cakewalk in terms of having to focus. Yeah, I probably am about as weird as I've ever been, and now more tired a lot of times. On the upside, if this summer goes the way I suspect it will, I'll at least be working a couple days a week, subbing in one of my special-ed programs. Enough to take the nerve-rattling out of the finances of being a normal sub, and surely one monster boon in this economy. It's all relative, I guess, but it's all good at the same time.

And as much as I know I've made mention of him before, I've been meaning to assemble a little homage to one of the greatest automotive artists God ever put on this earth, Syd Mead. Mead was a designer at Ford in the 50s and 60s, and did the set design for the movie Blade Runner. (That probably takes a lotta people back a long ways.) He has always been categorized as a futurist, and did print ads for United States Steel, of all companies, back in the 60s. Hot Wheels designers openly acknowledge him as a demi-god, at least, and I admire his sense of style, and his sense of humor. And he's still among the living, at least as of today. I saw him speak at Lawrence Technical University down the road in Southfield in '05, and immediately agreed with everyone else who came that night that the man was worthy of automotive-hero status. He's an innovator, if you could never say anything else about him. But his artistic skills are awesome, if not necessarily to everyone's liking; so be it.