family fun--another residual t-giv post

so my mom is a pediatric neurologist and my dad is a neurosurgeon. and i am a bit of a spaz. with a gait so bizarre that my friends, and even sometimes mere acquaintances (tho i question these people's social skills) comment on it. also, my family frequently takes walks on the beach, which makes your gait a little bit funny anyways. so for years, one of the things i have loved to do with my parents when walking is play a game i refer to as, "what's wrong with me?" [there are two versions of this game. the other one involves tearing apart my personality and figuring out why people don't like me. this one involves diagnosing me with the medical condition that would account for the walk i am doing at the time.]

so i start walking in all sorts of fun ways. limping and hobbling and putting more weight on one foot than the other and arching my back in weird ways, and i suppose that this may sound like a terrible game, but i swear i'm not making fun of people who really walk this way and there really are portions of all of these things in my regular walk. and then my parents tell me what could be wrong with me. they also play this game with random passers-by, but that's not as much fun for me b/c i've never absorbed anything they've said. interestingly enough, my younger sister has become quite the diagnostician.

but like most stories involving obscure medical ailments or my family in general, it's really no good unless you know what they say. frequently they say i'm hemiparetic. on occassion they say it's not a medical condition and i'm just walking like a weirdo (i doubt this, i'm always convinced there could be a condition associated with the walk). but this vacation it seemed that i was favoring spastic diplegia and spastic paraparasis. which, i'm not sure if you noticed--both start with "spastic." so i'm starting to wonder if my parents are playing a trick on me. like it's a medical diagnosis, but what they're really wondering is, "how did i get stuck with this kid?"

actually, my mom has an answer for that too--my dad. whenever i ask her where the weird comes from, she replies, "your father." (my parents are divorced, so this is not the man walking down the beach humoring me by playing this game, despite that fact that he bears no genetic relationship to me.) and that's a diagnosis i'm willing to believe.