My mind went..."snap."

Have you ever had your mind snap?  I mean, literally, hear it “snap?”

There was a baseball player from a number of years ago by the name of Mackey Sasser (a good baseball name if there ever was one).  He was a catcher who played for the New York Mets, Pittsburgh Pirates, San Diego Padres and even my beloved Seattle Mariners.  There was one problem with Sasser, though.  For some reason he could not throw the ball back to the pitcher.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackey_Sasser

For a catcher to not be able to do the most routine of motions – it was, of course, detrimental to his career.  He went through therapy to try and cure himself of the problem.  Certainly opposing teams, fans and others used this detriment to their advantage.  But how does one go from doing something extremely routine for so many years suddenly find themselves unable to do it anymore?

Now, before I go into any research or do anything that actually might enlighten you and take time away from me writing this – I’ll just explain how this is affecting me.

If I remember right, I was at home and I was writing numbers down.  Probably in my check book (where else does one write numbers?) or maybe it was a phone number and my mind snapped.  I literally felt something click when it came to writing the number 8.  Whereas I had been fine ALL MY LIFE doing a figure eight – I suddenly could NOT do it.  Instead I started doing two conjoined (or many times NOT conjoined) circles – one above the other.

I think I even turned to Miriam and said:  “That’s weird, I can’t write cursive 8s anymore.”  She probably rolled her eyes.

Now for most people this might not be a big deal (and in the grand scheme of things it’s NOT a big deal – you know there are homeless and hungry people out there...) but part of my job is indexing pleadings and I have to do a lot of number writing as part of my day-to-day.  Plus the number 8 is one of my favorite numbers (that’s another blog topic for another time).

So this:

Became this:

And, sadly, sometimes becomes this:

I don’t like it.  I don’t want to do “double conjoined circles” – I want to do figure 8’s like a Scott Hamilton doing compulsories.  But...I can’t do it.

As I was coming up with topics for this blog – I did actually sit down with a pen and paper and put the pen to paper and FORCED myself to do a cursive 8.  And it felt awkward, weird, foreign.  Just not right (or write).

Again, I’m sure I could do some research on it.  Maybe even my psychologist major daughter could enlighten me.  Or maybe Oliver “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat” Saks could tell me what’s wrong and how to fix it.

Shrug.  I guess as mind snaps go, this was a minor one.  Who knows what’ll happen with the next one.