Free My Life, Deleted by Scott Bolzan Page B

understand that the world I saw on sitcoms and in movies was far from the real world, but it did allow me to form a basic understanding of our culture.
    It was still difficult for me to learn and retain information, so I used any tool that helped me remember things. I often scrambled the days of the week, for example, or forgot the names of certain days.
    One day I saw a commercial for the NuvaRing, the once-a-month contraceptive device. Now, I didn’t really understand what this was or why they’d advertise a product for such a private purpose on television. But the ad, which featured women ripping off the midsections of their yellow bathing suits and swimming together like they were dancing, did teach me something else. The commercial was annoying, but its catchy tune listed all the days of the week, which helped me remember them in the proper order. I couldn’t get this song out of my head for months, which meant I never forgot this information again.
    Later, Joan and I were watching a documentary on Olympic training that showed women doing the same kind of swim-dancing, and I said, “Hey, that’s just like the NuvaRing commercial.”
    When she explained that this was called synchronized swimming, which had its own Olympic event, I realized that the ad had been educational in more ways than one.
    My headaches continued virtually round the clock, and even though I managed to watch endless TV shows, I never seemed to complete a full program because my attention span was so short. Constantly changing the channel, I could watch a show or movie repeatedly without seeing the same scenes twice.
    Joan and the kids encouraged me to watch movies I’d liked before or were family favorites. In turn, I shared with them movies I thought were good, only to be told that we’d already seen them countless times. It was reassuring to know that some of my likes and dislikes had remained the same, that I might not be as different as I felt.
    Maybe everything about me hasn’t changed. Maybe it just feels that way because it’s all new to me.
    Wanting to blend in with the people around me and be able to hold an intelligent conversation, I tried to absorb as much information as I could about real life. I figured that everyone was educated about world events, and to prevent anyone from thinking I was ignorant or lacked a general knowledge of these topics, I watched shows on CNN, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and the Military Channel. But because I lacked context, it was difficult sometimes for me to differentiate between breaking news and old news footage, like the space shots I saw in the Apollo 13 movie.
    I’d had no preconceived notion about our planet, but I was still surprised to learn that the earth was round. I was also intrigued to hear that so few people had traveled into space and that the universe never ended. It seemed that so little was known about space—or how the brain worked, for that matter—that after watching documentaries on the subject, I figured I knew as much as most anyone else. I also learned about our history of wars and foreign conflicts, feeling surprised and saddened that so many young men my son’s age from all over the globe had died, and were still dying, in battle; I’d assumed that most soldiers would be closer to my age. I also didn’t understand why many of these wars got started, and all the differing opinions I kept hearing about this didn’t help me form one of my own.
    Watching the brave soldiers fight for our country made me wish that I’d joined the military. It seemed like such a noble, honorable thing to do because my country was something worth protecting. Joan said she thought I’d been accepted at the Air Force Academy when I was younger, but she wasn’t sure. So I asked my mom, and she said that I’d been recruited during my senior year of high school—and even had been endorsed by a