Sometime in the next month or two, Marie will be taking a trip to London. I’ve been a little stressy about this. I tend to become easily confused when Marie isn’t around. She sort of grounds me in the present; when she’s away, I have a tendency to forget that the last 15 years of my Marie-filled life ever happened.

I have been known to invent memories about having let down my friends in horrible, horrible ways while Marie is out. I have been known to be mostly unable to function because I’m feeling so horrible about these horrible things I didn’t actually do.

But this is all pretty laughable compared to the problems of my mother in law, who’s sitting in my living room right now. She’s a paranoid schizophrenic, who’s not on any medication.

Evil medical students are trying to perform experiments on her. Andrew Lloyd Webber stole all her ideas. Random people are trying to beat her up in her sleep.

It must be awful to live in the world she lives in. I wish I could show her around my world, which is really quite a happy place the vast majority of the time, but I can’t do that.

I suppose it’s good, every now and then, to be reminded that sanity is not a given for all of us, and to be grateful for how sane I am most all of the time.

And I can now stop being all whiny about what will happen to me while Marie is away.