I have been seeing a Rolfer named Jeannine. She is gifted and wonderful and pronounces the word okay as “oh-kye.” I am uncharacteristically willing to overlook the latter.

There are various things wrong with my body involving tension and posture and tendonitis, so Jeannine has been impressing upon me a different way of walking that would address these issues: chest up, shoulders completely relaxed, propulsion with the ball of the foot. There is nothing mysterious about this; I suspect it’s the default for most people, but I just can’t get the hang of it. For weeks, whenever I’ve forced myself to relax my shoulders, I find I’m walking flat-footed. When I correct that, my tendons ache and my shoulders are up around my ears. I get so flustered that I forget how to walk altogether and wish that I lived in an age that I might travel by a litter borne by four husky men. It requires such concentration to walk even to my car that I might as well be defusing a bomb.

Focusing so much on something I usually do without thought has spilled analysis into other areas of my life. I find I’ve lately been overly dramatic in certain ways. I haven’t been wrong (I’m never wrong), but my manner of presenting information possibly could have been less fraught. As the consumption of magical folic acid has begun to rebalance my chemicals, and the fizzing carbonation in my brain begins to subside, I find myself thinking of the word focusing, which the New Yorker spells f-o-c-u-s-s-i-n-g. They also spell traveling as t-r-a-v-e-l-l-i-n-g and place a dieresis mark over doubled vowels, as in reëlection—habits that incense me to such a degree that I plan on buying a large cornfield, taking a tractor and carving out “FOCUSING HAS ONE ‘S’” in gigantic letters, kidnapping the entire New Yorker staff at howitzer-point, taking them up in an airplane that circles around and around in the airspace this urgent message, and exacting a solemn oath from each one that they will theretofore conform with my grammatical demands on the pain of punctuating my portentous cornfield with bloody dots as the disagreeable ones are shoved one by one out the emergency exit sans parachute.

And then I’ll really get dramatic, oh-kye?