Floating Chips

When I was in seminary, "Introduction to Greek" was a six-week intensive summer course. We Greek-ed for four hours every morning, five days a week. At about the four-week mark, the daily test scores began plummeting. The teacher asked if any of us remembered the Lays Potato Chip commercial where the lady opens the bag and the chips began to float away. Well, I did. Stupid commercial! Who wants to chase their chips around in order to eat them? Guess you use up the calories you'd take in eating them.

Oops! Got sidetracked! Anyway - she went on to comment that at about this point in the course everything we'd learned would begin to float away, just like those stupid chips. Told us not to worry about it too much. In a few days the language would begin to click back into place and things would get better. How reassuring to know that I wasn't losing my mind!

So - what brought this image back to mind?

My potato chips are floating away again! Or my sanity, I'm not sure which. And it's not just me. I've begun to notice over the past 2-3 weeks that things which ordinarily happen with clockwork precision have fallen off the map, if that makes any sense. Meetings scheduled either don't have a quorum or the moderator forgets to come. Stuff that was ordered and, apparently, arrived is nowhere to be found. Events that usually bring at least 10-15 people for planning and preparation have only 5-6 show up. We've talked about finishing up the hurricane repairs, but nothing has been done to actually finish up the repairs (and that's at the church, not my house. We know what's going on there!). I'll remember that something needs to be done, and then forget to do it.

There have been some staff changes at church and a couple of positions aren't filled, so that's part of the discombobulation, but not all of it. I truly HATE to impose this on Her Horribleness recovery, yet that may be the case. It's certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that this kind of stuff will pop up over a year later. Anything I've read keeps reminding me of that. *sigh* I just want things to be 'normal' again (whatever that is!).

Part of the reason the floating potato chip image came to mind is that I'm feeling a real disconnect, and am seeing the same thing in others. For example, those meetings. Everyone seems scattered in 100 different directions at once, so bringing them together appears almost impossible. And, when we do get together, there's almost an impatience to scatter and get on to the next thing, even if we happen to be enjoying and getting a lot out of the activity we're involved in at the moment.

Maybe in the grand recovery scheme we're at the two-thirds mark. Maybe that's why it feels as though everything has become scattershot and disconnected, like the potato chips have gone free-floating out of reach. Perhaps this feeling is actually a good sign. I don't know. I just hope it goes away soon!