Day 19

Myla just keeps plugging away! Nothing but good news here.

Today was the start of the semester at IU Kokomo, so I made the pilgrimage north from Indy so that I could "stomp out ignorance," as a former colleague of mine was fond of saying. I don't know how much stomping out of ignorance I did, but I had an odd sensation when I walked down the hallway where my office is. I noticed that the tiles on the floor were about 8 inches squared, where as the tiles in the hallway of the Children's Cancer Center are 12 inches squared. I'm not sure why exactly this came to mind--you'd think I'd have better things to think about on the first day of a new semester--but this realization was accompanied by the strange sensation that--get this--I was walking much faster than usual, not to mention that I felt taller. I'm guessing that I was walking at a comfortable 3 miles an hour, but the 8 inch tiles gave the visual impression that I was moving closer to 4.5 miles per hour. It was as if I had become my own people mover. Personally, I can't think of a better way to start a new semester than with such a strong sense of progress.

I had another odd experience later in the day as I was driving back to Indianapolis. Stopping a red light, I had pulled up 15 feet or so behind a white van, and I found myself straining to make out the words on a bumper sticker mounted on a back window. I was pondering whether I should move closer to the van's bumper when AT THAT VERY INSTANT I heard a driving safety reminder on the radio about keeping a safe distance from the vehicles in front of you. How completely odd and random was that? In a previous posting, I wrote about what I called "Very Freaky Verbal Coincidences," or VFVCs. This was my attempt to describe such experiences, which used to happen to me a lot, until I wrote that blog entry back on April 29, 2006. Since then, I have had only 3 such occurrences.