Girl gone wild

Photo Credit: Tatiana Gettelman via Compfight cc

It’s my birthday in a few weeks. Ok, like seven weeks. It’s extremely exciting for me, and possibly not that exciting for anyone else on the planet. It’s not a birthday I plan on acknowledging (hi, 37) but it DOES mean I get presents from my family. And I decided that I wanted those presents to be clothes. Much, much clothes.

So it made perfect sense to me that these items should be purchased now, while all the sales are on and I can maximise my birthday money. I started off carefully, considering at length which items I needed to plug holes in my wardrobe. And then my brain snapped and I wanted ALL THE CLOTHES.

I bought this leather biker jacket:

And this blazer:

And these boots:

And these tops:

And these treggings (I know, right? I stopped learning at jeggings).

And these accessories:

(Sorry, not sure you really needed to see the bustier, but I think its really cute!)

in about 90 seconds flat. And then I collapsed in a happy heap.

And then remorse kicked in. I know these are totally “legal” spends…but somehow I felt a bit dirty and cheaty afterwards. It seems spending is still a door that needs to remain firmly shut for me at the moment. If I open it even a crack, the hounds of hell get loose and there is no stopping me. Hopefully it’s getting better? But if that was a little test, I have to say things don’t look good. 😦

In other news, I am training my brain. I’m terrified of dementia and did a few things lately such as pouring a freshly boiled kettle of water straight down the sink instead of into my cup, and getting off the train three stops early and catching myself wandering around before I snapped to it and headed into the office. To be fair, I was really sick that day and very tired. But I convinced myself I had early-onset Alzheimer’s and downloaded this app (free version, don’t worry!) called Lumosity Brain Training. It takes a snapshot of your brain through a series of short games designed to test things like mental flexibility, speed, spacial awareness and memory. And then each day it custom-develops a training program of three (five on the full version) games for you to train your brain in each of those elements.

So the good news is I am quick as a whip and more mentally flexible than 90% of people my age. My memory is fair to middling.

The bad news is I am completely shit at math, and have literally NO spacial awareness (not really a newsflash to anyone who knows me).

There’s one game where you have to help a little penguin through a maze to a fish. It’s fine at first, because the four controls move him up, down, left and right through the maze, ahead of zombie penguin who is racing him there. But then…THE MAZE FLIPS. Your controls stay where they were though, so now when you press right, he can head left, or down or anywhere really!

I find it EXTREMELY stressful because I have to literally press all the buttons until he starts going where I want. Something in my brain short-circuits and I cannot understand what this penguin will do or which control does what. Just when I get the hang of it, THE MAZE SPINS AGAIN.

At one point this poor penguin marched up and down the same little stretch of maze for a full minute while zombie penguin strode purposefully to the fish. And then my penguin CRIED when the zombie got the fish!! Like, they actually programmed this cute little guy to make a heart-breaking peep and shed two little penguin tears while covering his eyes. It’s more than I can handle, and makes me doubly stressed in round two.

Except stress doesn’t seem to help me. There is simply nothing in my brain that can understand what the controls do when the maze flips. Logically I can say: the maze flipped 90 degrees left, so now to get him marching up the screen, we need to press the right arrow. But that doesn’t actually work when I am playing the game. I turn into a chimp, randomly banging all the controls. *sigh*.

And yes, I am one of those people who has to spin a map so it’s in the same direction as I am traveling.

So I’m not perfect. I’m still clearly not to be trusted unsupervised on the internet, and I basically could not find my way out of a paper bag.

But I’m smart in other ways! And I’m funny. And I’m kind. And I’m going to look great in that jacket. 🙂