Posts Tagged reflection

Remember those annual medical tests the schoold would make you take in elementary? You would be ushered out of the classroom by your trusted teacher. Then led into the schoolbus for a nice field trip, or so you thought. Once there they would tell you the purpose of your field trip and sheer panic would strike half of the kids sitting there. Some would start uncontrollably sobbing, others screeming, and some, of which I was one, would just sit there thinkging how they would flee at the first chance. Once arrived on location, they would drag you out kicking and screaming. And into local clininc you went. Before you knew it you were sitting in one of those cold tiled rooms, the instruments of torture staring back at you.

The room would move in on you with evey breath you took. The green puke-like paint on the higher parts of the walls chipping off so old they were. Before long a man in a white coat would walk in. By now you were so terrified your legs would not support you even if you did choose to run. The man would speak reassuring words, but you knew better. The prodding the cold as you stood there in your underwear while they measured you and weighed you. You had seen it before and it never did leave a good warm feeling.

And so the battery of tests would be applied to you. First the measuring, then the weiging, then, if you were really shit-out-of-luck the tetanos shot. It would go on for what seemed hours. Once they were satisfied they had given you enough of a scare they told you to go and get dressed to wait in the antichamber. But that would not be the end of it, not by a long shot.

The next white zombie (that’s really what they seemed like to a 7 year old) would walk in. This time, no undressing would be necessary. They would bring you to a room filled with old apparatus all of which had switches and dials. Surely this was another form of torture. And surely, there you went again. They would put a strap around your arm and pump a balloon making your arm feel like it was in a vice. Then came the auditory tests, the vision tests and a number of assorted tests the name or nature of which I cannot remember. The one good thing about all these tests is that there’s little you have to do. You just sit there and tell them things when needed.
Then there was that last test. The one I dreaded most. The colour blindness test.

The firt time around this test seemed like fun. All you have to do and stare at a bunch of dots and if you see a number tell the zombie what it is. Unfortunately for me, I failed that one. Once I got past the first one, nothing, just dots. I kept going through the slides but still nothing. However hard I peered at the pages in front of me I saw nothing, only coloured dots.

At once I was branded for life. I’m colour blind. An ailment from which I will never recover. I had a shortcomming, I was not perfect. For a seven year old, and comming from a doctor, the ultimate authority on life (or so you thought), this came like a crushing sentence. I would never fly a military aircraft or work in the arts.

Years later, I of course came to the conclusion that there’s few disadvantages to being colour blind. Some of the best photographers in the world were achromatic. Nevertheless, I will never fly those F16 or Saab fighter jets.

Footnote: I you have no idea whether or not you are colour blind, try the test for yourself.

We figured that it would be nice to speak some Spanish in the event my job takes me to Florida. I’ve set out looking for appropriate classes in our hometown of Brussels. As you can tell from the table below there’s quite an offering. We’ll see where this takes us…

Just the other day, no one said :“Darned, a whole month, even more, without any meaningful updates! You’ve been procrastinating again.”.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I did manage to lock down the stylesheet for the site, upload some stuff to the graph section and stare at the logs for a while.

Getting Married

The real reason so little has been happening on the site is that I’m getting married this weekend. It’s a fairly big thing, with 150 or so guests. It has taken some preparation on our part as we wanted this day to be something special (who wouldn’t). Since neither of us are religious we can’t count on the ceremony to be the highlight of the day. The cocktail, dinner, and party would have to make the whole thing stand out. Hopefully we’ll achieve this.

Come to think of it, we started planning this gig about a year ago when we started looking for a suitable place to have the dinner and the party at. To cut a year’s story short: Planning a wedding is certainly not the easiest thing. My advice: Do it only if you’re absolutely committed, to each other, and to doing through with this. Just a couple of days ago, amidst the stress of the last preparations Maya admitted that she understood why some people would just call their freinds and family the day after, putting them in front of the fait acompli I’ve known one couple to say somtihing along the lines of:

Hi, guess what I did this weekend?…[I make one or two erroneous guesses]…Something really dumb…[I got the picture]…

Anyway, I’m not going to drang on much more. I do have a few things to attend to. For those of you who were invited but couldn’t make it: We love you and we’ll miss you. For all the others: we’ll be posting pictures and stories of the wedding on here once we return from our honeymoon.

Oh gosh, this means that the site will be left without updates for yet another month!

“By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.” -Oscar Wilde