Abdominal Ejaculation

First Draft

During a college class I took during my training in language aquisition, learing to be a teacher of "English as a Second Language/English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESL)" I was exposed to thinking about the concept of how we as individuals make sense out of language--both the spoken and printed word.

As an aside, I have found that vision becomes less clear with age. At 57 I have early stage cataracts, and my inability to distinguage language because of my inability to see in focus causes me no end of personal aggrevation. I expect surgery will help drastically, when I can afford it. I also need dental implants. I pay high risk insurance rates because I am bipolar.

My point is that at some age you realize it's inordinately expensive to fix all the problems in your ailing aging body. It hits different people at different times. I've been receiving pain management care for back problems about the past eight years. One hit and run whiplash set of some congenital problems, and my lower back and neck always hurt. I take prescriptions for that. And we all know that drugs affect perception.

During those post graduate college days, I remember going through a stage of enjoying German wine and playing darts. I learned about wines mostly from drinking whatever was available at the local pubs. Different wines have different effects on the feel of the inside of your mouth, ranging from sweet to dry, I discovered that I like Liefermilch, and after that Reislings. I used to spend Friday evening reading all the wine bottles in the German section of wines at a big liquor store. You don't learn everything you need to know about life in the classroom. To me, every day is a class in getting the most enjoyment and benefit of life and living. God is good, and tomorrow is not guaranteed.

I developed a real preference for a particular German wine that came in a blue bottle. I scan when I read. I don't make my eyes forcus on every letter. I think that's what the idea of speed reading is about, though I've never had a class on it. I remember reading about focusing your eyes on a particular part of the printed page. In other words, you train your eyes to grab the meaning from the start and finish of paragraphs, and focus on chunks of words in-between that make sense. I'm sure an Internet search would give detailed information about this.

I was an English and history major in the beginning, and I read a lot of books over a short period of time. I was prescribed bifocals, but I was actually just experiencing eye strain. It was nice wearing glasses that made my vision better than expected. Glasses weren't required for my driving, but I'd put them on at the movie theater. As much as I didn't want to be the girl wearing the glasses at the concert, I saw a number of artists in my own personal impressionistic fuzz perspective.

Now, I have to wear my glasses to function on my cell phone. I don't like to deal with the nosepiece weight of glasses all the time. And I still feel safe functioning in the world of fuzz I see. I didn't wear my glasses while I was reading at the liquor store. This, I admit, is probably a girl vanity thing, but I'm not the only one with which this concept is ingrained,

I knew this bottle was Qualitzen (that spelling is wrong, but that's the way I pronounced the German word in my head). Nobody at the liquor store ever pronounced it for me, but, of course, I didn't ask them to. Some things you remember better if you hear it, and I never did, so I mispronouned the word to myself in my head. Don't we all do this?

I felt comfortable enjough with my language acquisition professor that I stayed after class one day to ask her something kind of class related that I felt stupid about.

"I have bought this certain bottle of blue German wine for a couple of years, and I took a good close look at the label, and discovered I'd been calling it by the wrong name for a long time. I can read just fine I think. Why did I do this?" This was in the realm of making sense of language. I had made sense of it wrong, and my curiousity made me want to know if there was a reason why.

The professor smiled like a smarter friend, and offered a simple explanation that seems to hold to this day. "We read as much as our brains feel is necessary to make sense of a new word. Your brain captured the beginning letters, and the ending letters, and made sense of it and stored it in your brain. When you encountered the word each new time, you didn't read the word. Your brain accessed the information already stored in your brain, instead of going through what would appear to be a redundant process."

This made enough sense to me that I stored the information in my brain for future use. I was reading the long and numerous paragraphs of information on the medication Paxil. I had been reading a while, and my eyes as well as brain were becoming fatigued. That's when I finally got to the part of the web page I was looking for, the side effects.

The first term I ran across made me realize I needed to take off my glasses, stretch, and try to refocus my attention.

I read, "Abdominal ejaculation." I scanned on a few words, and realized I didn't know the meaning of what I just read. Whatever it was, it certainly wouldn't apply to me as a female, would it?

My mind was working on making sense of this language problem. I did not understand. Something must have gone wrong. I know a little anatomy, and I tried to imagine what an abdominal ejaculation would look like. I was sure it would only apply to men, but now I was curious. What in the hell is an abdominal ejaculation?

Okay, I'm going to concentrate and reread this. Reading is for learning, right? Because of my reading and English background, I taught school for a dozen years, I'm the type of reader who does actually stop the reading process and I go to the dictionary when I run across a word I don't know. Was I going to need to do this to understand. Undoubtedly, my dictionary frequency has helped me gain and maintain an unbelievably large vocabulary. I amaze myself sometime. I have a lot of those "How did I know that?" moments.

Dennis Miller never talked over my head, and I rather appreciated his over-educated perpsective and humor, his way of putting things. My shots at humor often result from my own human traits and inadequacies, and routine ways of dealing with things that turn out unexpectedly.

I knew that the word abdomen had to do with stomach. I had read of the drug having some effect in the stomach, and I had had a few recent stomach upsets. I can see the value of reading between the lines. Maybe this was something happening to me, some new medication side effect that I'd never experienced before. Well, if this medication was going to give me some new side effect, I should know what's going on. I needed more information. This is my body I'm all of a sudden concerned about. A couple of those stomach aches had some sharp shooting pains.

"Oh my gosh! I've hardly started taking this, and I'm having the first side effect listed, the most liikely side effect that a person would have from taking Paxil. This isn't good." I'm taking out loud to myself at this point. Some things are so important that you need to think them and say them and hear them to get the most human experience, using all your possible senses. I probably picked up that bit of wisdom in a psychology class, or book. I've read a lot on bipolar disorder since I have it. It's a mood disorder, and as you might image, coming across this word has totally changed my mood. I was curious. Now I'm concerned, worried, with my general anxiety disorder symptoms beginning to kick in. My heart was undoubtedly beating faster from the mental adrenalin this situation has generated in me by now.

"I don't know that I've ever heard the word ejaculation used if it wasn't in reference to a penis." I took a nursing class in anatomy. "Maybe I can figure this out without looking it up somewhere. My mind spends an undetermined amount of time re-visualizing pages of anatomy textbooks, with diagrams and explanations of the connections between the stomach and the anus, as well as the generic illustrations I've seen of the male penis, as well as what I know from personal experience, not having one. I come to the conclusion that this is not a puzzle I'm going to figure out on my own.

I learned that as a fact about language acquisition. Readers function to make sense of language. Language shouldn't be this hard for me, knowing the meaning of the two words involved.

All this wondering, worrying, and imagining happened much faster than it's taken to describe. I went back to the source and re-read the first, most likely side-effect of Paxil. What in the hell is an "abdominal ejaculation"?

I settled my laptop back onto my lap, found the heading that said "Side Effects,"
took a second to appreciate that the formatting was kindly to eyes. I could find the spot where I left off without too much more eye strain.

I read, "Abnormal ejaculation."

And then I had the best belly laugh I've had in a long time.

I had come across the word "abdominal" many times in the set of reading I'd been doing. I had read long enough that the way I was making sense of information had changed. I wasn't concentrating enough for the task at hand.

"Sigh." It's time to take a serious break from my reading. I don't have adequate concentration. It said that Paxil can do that to you as a side-effect of taking it.

Can you imagine an image yourself, of an "adominal ejaculation"? What in the heck would it feel like? I can only guess what it would end up looking like, and where it would evacuate the body from. Certainly unpleasant. Only a few minutes before I was sure I was experiencing periods of abdominal ejaculations. Heck, I had felt sharp pains in my stomach. Shoot, this is how rumors and bad information get started.

Laughter is the best medicine, and I'm not experiencing abdominal ejaculation symptoms. You have no idea how much better I feel already.

Can you imagine trying to explain the symptoms of abdominal ejaculation if you didn't know it's name but you needed to relay the information? Fantasy isn't my genre, but my language acquistion error might provoke a laugh for somebody else. If you can't laugh at yourself, you can't fully appreciate life--no matter how educated you are.