Therapeutic

I had meant to update the blog much earlier this month.  It was going to be something along the lines of a retrospective at or around my birthday.  Well that came and went and I find myself here wondering what could possibly be interesting enough to string a few sentences together. 
As for my birthday, it was nice.  That evening I went with Doug on a scout camp-out that has become a sort of tradition in which we launch pumpkins with various mechanical devices.  None of those participating made many changes to their entries other than simple bulking up in some key areas and such.  My floating arm trebuchet had the best launches and we got some smaller pumpkins lofted about 60 - 70 yards.  The next night we had a combined party with some friends, one family of which has a one year old baby with the same birthday as me.  My much appreciated birthday gift was a large cutting board which is great for mu growing interest in developing good cooking skills. 
Something else I had been pondering writing about was a phase of my life that in retrospect has had more of an affect on me than I had given credit for.  After my parents second divorce, my mother was convinced by school personnel that I would benefit from therapeutic counseling sessions.  Apparently this was based on some writing assignments I had completed which seemed overly depressed or focused on the current status of my home environment.  I honestly do not recall these at all but it did seem to concern mom enough to go ahead with the counseling.  This may not seem all that out of character so I have to explain that being from a rural background in the 80s, this seemed to me at least to be a really big deal.  In looking back on it I think I may have been more emotionally traumatized by the thought of being considered 'abnormal' or 'crazy' than by the divorce itself.  I immediately did not trust the counselor and endeavored to prove that I didn't need to be there.  I don't even remember her name but I do recall carefully considering my every word in those sessions.  I don't know if I was especially difficult compared to others but I wish I could apologize to the counselor for who I was then.  That said, I do recall the one thing that stuck with me from those otherwise fruitless meetings.  She would invariably start our conversations each time with the question, "How do you feel today?"  My response would always be, "Normal," to which she would follow-up up with, "What is normal?"  This happened every time.  At first I had to pick and choose how to respond to that follow-up but very soon came to expect the question of what is normal and would be prepared for it.  She was probably never aware of the impact that repetitive set of questions would have on me.  Even after I no longer went to see her, I would find myself wondering what was normal and found that this would lead me to question why something was normal and to realize that normal could be defined very differently for different people and finally, that I could define normal for myself.