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1999-09-28 | 11:49:43

I'm only writing this because I can't remember what I was planning to do just now. I have trouble remembering what it is I'm supposed to be doing at any given moment. I sit here, and I think "Think!" and my mind blanks. It erases itself. I have to sit and wait, hoping the idea will seep back in. It usually does, but sometimes it can take a week or two. Months. Years.

So many of the things I'm supposed to do these days are so tiny, so insignificant, and they pile up and obscure each other. When Jasper was born, I didn't have a name for him. (I was awfully busy being pregnant and didn't get around to it.) In the hospital, we came up with his first name but couldn't decide on the middle. So they told us, that's okay, you can take a year. We came up with three middle names and put them on the birth announcement; then we went to the social security office and got the form we needed to correct his name. He was still a tiny baby and I carried him on my chest in a sling. But they told us we had to wait until his birth certificate arrived. We couldn't finish it that day, which threw us off, and it never got done.

So yesterday was his first birthday. I gave him a regulation basketball, and he loves it. I had a year to change his name, and I thought of it in irregular intervals throughout the year, and I never got it done. Every day was a new opportunity to fix it, and every day I moved it to the bottom of my list. This sort of failure makes me feel morally flawed, craven.

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