Mental

My mind is slipping. More often than usual, anyway. I am aware of an inappropriate line of thought, but I generally try to push the awareness away. This is probably because of the Alzheimer's that runs in my family. My father's father had it, my uncle had it, and my mother had it. To be honest, I find it far more fearful than MS. 

Yesterday, I had money in my wallet, and I had one voucher (or so I believed) from Hypermart. When I bought my coffee, I put money on my Starbucks card to cover the purchase. Later on, I noted that the Hypermart voucher which I thought I had brought was not, after all, in my wallet. Here's where the mental slippage comes into play. 

Rather than concluding that I had left the voucher at home, I became instantly convinced that I had given it to the Starbucks cashier instead of money--a voucher for 100.000 Rupiah rather than a 100.000 Rupiah bill. So convinced was I of this that I went up to the cashier to ask whether I had made this error. 

The piece that is strangely out of place, or course, is that the cashier would have instantly noticed that I had handed her a Hypermart voucher rather than Rupiah. Hypermart vouchers are of use only at Hypermart and bear little physical resemblance to Rupiah.  Naturally, she would have laughed and corrected me on the spot. 

And yet it was stuck fast in my head that I had given her the voucher and that she had taken it for Rupiah. The notion that I had merely mistakenly thought I had brought the voucher never entered my mind--although, of course, this was most certainly the case. 

At the time, it seemed a perfectly sensible conclusion. That's the scary thing. And this is just one case among an increasing number of odd mental hiccoughs.