Mental Sampler 27

To start this post, I checked the last time I did this type of post, and could not stop laughing at how much that Melissa still didn’t know what coming down the lane.

The last time I wrote a mental sampler post, the pandemic was a little under a year old. That Melissa didn’t realize that this Melissa would still be living an upside down life.

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Thank you for the birthday wishes on here and on social media. It is emotional to have people pop up and acknowledge your life. Because that’s sort of what saying “happy birthday” is, right? It’s someone saying, “Hey, you were born. And I’m happy about that.”

The festivities started over a week ago with cake, ice cream, and a paper crown made by my nieces and nephews. And we’re keeping the celebration going through next winter because big birthdays should be celebrated in a big way.

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We watched the movie Freud’s Last Session, based on the stage production and currently up on Netflix. It imagines a conversation three weeks before Freud’s death between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis.

Midway through the movie, we realized everyone kept referring to C.S. Lewis — Clive Staples Lewis — as “Jack.” We paused to Google it and learned that C.S. Lewis went by Jack for most of his life.

When his dog Jacksie was fatally struck by a horse-drawn carriage, the four-year-old Lewis adopted the name Jacksie. At first, he would answer to no other name, but later accepted Jack, the name by which he was known to friends and family for the rest of his life.

File this under something I learned this year.

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My friend plays Connections in his head, determines all the groupings, and then tries to begin with the purple one. This is the opposite of how I play, which is more of a nail-biting approach of elimination when I allow the purple category to fall into place by default. I am so impressed with people’s brains.