normal

"I want a Jr. Cheeseburger Deluxe with no bun," I say.

My husband turns back to the screen and says "Can I get a Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger with no bun?"

I wait, thinking maybe that's his burger, but, no, he then orders himself another Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger, no sauce, no bun. As we pull up to pay for our burgers and the kid's chicken nuggets, I ask him what I wanted.

"A Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger."

We're having a bad brain day today. After we get home, he starts watching X-men First Class, which he told me he got for us from the library, but he starts watching it while I am reading How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran in our bedroom. Then he asks me if I would like any Sprite.

"Yeah," I say, but he leaves our room with the soda and finishes it in the living room while watching a movie without me.

I am reading another book right now, The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from which I am taking notes. I am having a hard time describing the book but I am enjoying reading it. It is about "The Impact of the Highly Improbable," according to the subtitle. In more depth, it is about the randomness of our world. The notes I have been taking are about brain damage. Taleb doesn't mention brain damage, at least not that I've encountered yet, but he does, in the introduction, write

I don't particularly care about the usual. If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant.

This reminded me of the conversation my husband and I had about his being "normal" 75 percent of the time. That 75 percent of time is not what defines our lives. The times Karl cannot hold my burger order in his head for the amount of time it takes him to turn around define our lives. In wounded warrior circles, people frequently discuss finding a new normal. I'm sure it applies well to some people - maybe to a wounded warrior who learns to put on a prosthetic every morning - but it doesn't work for us. We have no new normal. What we have is, on average, 18 hours a day of our old normal and six hours a day of living in a fun house.