The thrills of January

Ah January, that time of year when we clean up our acts, our houses and our calendars. A clean page with a clean year followed behind it is motivation to use a nice new pen. Print carefully and legibly those dates that you want to remember, and vow to keep it up throughout the year. Inevitably, by the time I get to June it is a scribbled mess of appointments, names, numbers and travel plans. But each year, I try. I do this house cleaning because of taxes. It is impossible to prepare for taxes when you haven't got your house in order. Because the scamble for receipts, Dr's statements and all the other things that are needed cannot be accomplished if the Christmas tree hasn't been removed and stored efficiently. It's an overlap of events, and it doesn't work. But in January, there is a sort of two minute warning (in football terms) where you really have to hustle to get it together. I go over the last year's calendar and carefully write in birthdays and anniversaries, graduations and road trips. It is a history of our lives, those calendars from 2011. If only I could make out the notes I have made along the way. There are numbers written in the margins that must have been important at that moment. But in my rush to get things done I neglected to write a name next to that number, and now I have no idea who that person is, or how to get in touch with them. If you haven't heard from me in a while, it might have been you. Sorry!  I am also inclined to clean my wallet and my pocketbook in January. This is a large task which coincides with tax time. I know my wallet is holding important receipts that we will definitely be needing soon. I transfer all receipts to the newly emptied wallet, and hope that they will make sense when I am actually handing them over.  And wallets and bags can be filled with incredible junk that I am not sure how it gets in there. I believe there are people out there who, like pickpockets, are agile at placing their garbage in my bag.  It's the only way I can explain alot of trash-someone must have walked up behind me while I was otherwise occupied, and dropped in post-it notes with cryptic messages written in unfamiliar handwriting. "Gina 7 PM on Thursday".  Who is Gina and which Thursday were they referencing, because the post-it is absolutely ancient and crumbled.  Never wrote it, I swear.  Now my family is convinced that these are my idiosyncracies and I should own them, because I do have a bit of a memory problem, probably due to medication. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Recently while organizing my tax-list of medications, I was picking through  my medical file and found an EOB (Explanation of Benefits for the un-initiated).  I was reading the list of diagnoses printed on this insurance sheet and was surprised to find that "giddy" was one of the diagnoses the Doctor had listed. Now, the insurance code next to it also referenced another condition "dizzy".  This I will own. On occasion I will be walking along and simply list to the right or left. It's usually something I can catch, and am always happy when I am with someone who would be able to identify me if I keep over. And I have certainly been referred to as a "flake" sometimes, because I can have a serious conversation with someone, and five minutes later forget that we had just run into them. I don't think that's the kind of dizzy my Doctor meant though. But Giddy?  I have not been giddy since the 10th grade when I found out I made the Cheerleading Squad.  Really.  I would not have been surprised if I had read "sarcastic" or even "cynical". But I was completely taken back by this new diagnosis event.  I'm not sure how I feel about it. Being giddy is not necessarily a bad thing. Look at Richard Simmons.  He is giddy on a regular basis, and has actually made a career out of it.  (He and I are meeting in the morning for about one hour-strictly voluntary-not a diagnosis) Tom Cruise was giddy about Katie Holmes when he met up with Oprah, but just such a scene is what I'm afraid of.  I wasn't a big fan of Tom after that. I just  kind of felt like he made himself look like an idiot.  I don't want to look like an idiot, and so I will make the extra effort to contain my giddiness. However, this piece of paper is in the tax file, and I'm not sure I want the accountant to know that I have been professionally diagnosed as giddy.  Would he think me foolish? Thankfully, I do have Jerry kind of running this show, and he always has my back. I simply have to stop cracking myself up all the time, which is something else I do, but has never been professionally diagnosed. In the insurance codebook that might read Crack-up/Crazy.  I'd better be careful.