11 February 1999: Broken

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Step last night with Cheryl, the now-regular Thursday instructor. She leads so well. And she's so cheery. And she's in amazingly good shape, using three risers under the bench and powering all her moves while calling instructions loudly and not at all windedly. She's superb. Next Thursday I'm getting there early enough to get a real step, not a wooden one, and two risers, and be incapable of carrying on a conversation.

Though compared to her I'm not, compared to myself I must be in better aerobic shape recently. When I first begin an exercise regimen and breathe hard and deep for a sustained period, I often hack up a lung afterward. Luckily, I can tuck it back down my own throat with a minimum of trauma. After I'm in better shape, I can work out just as hard and not endanger any organs. Actually I just cough up a lot of sputum, or whatever, not the actual lung. RDC has suggested this is exercise-induced asthma but first and foremost, I don't have asthma, damn it, people with asthma are inferior and should be sterilized, and second, after my lungs have emptied themselves of the months of whatever they accumulate during my lazy spells, I don't hack anymore. Anyway, I'm past the hacking now.

This past week was a lull, which I choose to blame on my period. Today, I get back on the Nordic Track.

Dunno if it's age or altitude or city or what, but tissues became necessarily ubitquitous in my hygienic existence I think round about when I moved here. It's more likely altitude than city, because city or not, I doubt Denver's air is much worse than Connecticut's. Anyway, I also sneeze more--which would be city, right?--which I enjoy, even though Blake doesn't. If either of us humans snoze as wetly as Blake in proportion to our size, we'd flood the house, but Blake finds our sneezes much more disturbing than his. I guess his own don't surprise him but ours do; and depending on how relaxed he is, a sneeze can either inspire him to sudden alertness or startle him into flight. Earlier this week I sneezed him into the next room (of his own volition) and I slipped the cartilage in my nose.

The right side of my nose is tender and slightly swollen. It's so odd: I'm aware of my nose, in a way Linus van Pelt tortured his sister Lucy: "I've suddenly become aware--aware of my tongue!" It's like not thinking of pink elephants. I'm not wearing contacts until next Wednesday, and this is a particularly bad time to have to wear glasses. They sit crookedly on my nose, tilting on the swollen side, and they hurt.

My nose is straight and has not been dislocated, so a visit to Kaiser would be pointless; I must simply wait and allow the cartilage to heal. This is not the most annoying part of my body I've broken. Well, the part I was thinking of was less annoying than breaking my arm, which occupied two months of my life during which my mother thought I shouldn't ride my bike. I was thinking of body parts you can't splint. I've never broken a rib, but you can tape yourself up tight to protect them, right? I think. Anyway, the other unsplintable bone I've bent or broken is my coccyx.

RDC bought me my first pair of hiking boots a few weeks before we planned to go to Lake Placid for a weekend. I wasn't used to them and I guess I expected them to have Super Kung-Fu Grip because as I tripped merrily down the metal-edged concrete steps to the UConn Co-op's basement, I tripped not so merrily down directly on my tuckus. This was rather loud, which you may attribute either to the concrete enclosure or to my bovine proportions, but if you guessed the latter you'd be wrong as well as mean.

The office of Len the security dude is right next to the entry. He came rushing out expecting to find three or four people tangled in a broken heap at the foot of the staircase. I think he might have been afraid someone was going to sue the Co-op, but it was I, whom he knew, and not some random person, and anyway it was my boots' soles that were wet, not the stairs, and so not their fault. Litigious people too should be sterilized.

That night, at our regular Friday night at VDM movie, I realized that sitting hurt. It continued to hurt, although less and less, over a matter of days. There was nothing for it but to wait for my tailbone to heal. So I did.

What brought me to that? Ah yes, my nose. At this point, smiling hurts, sneezing hurts, scowling hurts, and if it's possible to have a headache from the bones of your skull hurting, then I have that too.

No, randomly blathering people should not be sterilized. We're interesting. Nor should people be sterilized who think they're always right, as long as they are always right. That excuses me. Whew.

I noticed my nose sometime yesterday, went to step, and scurried to HAO's to go to "Elizabeth." I showered quickly and off we went, with me realizing I would have to eat something besides popcorn sometime soon. HAO had a box of Junior Mints for us to share and a bottle of Sprite apiece, which we tucked into our jackets after we parked at the cinema.

Porting our loot, we bought tickets; porting our loot, we walked across the street to the grocery. As we were wandering in the grocery waiting for supper to throw itself at my feet, HAO realized that here we were carrying stuff in our jackets that ohsoeasily could be assumed shoplifted from that very store. She departed quickly and I grabbed something, anything from the deli and jittered to a check stand.

How to get my wallet from the inside pocket of my ski jacket when that same pocket supported the soda? How would I possibly explain that this was in my jacket not because I was stealing from the store but because I was cheating the cinema out of concession sales? Luckily, the little platform for writing checks and signing credit slips was high enough that I could kind of lean against it and the cashier was short. I scarpered.

The movie wouldn't begin for another fifteen minutes and I didn't think I could smuggle a large plastic deli box into the theatre, so I asked if she would mind if I gulped my chicken down right there. I ate standing up in a supermarket parking lot. Worse than that, actually: I ate, with my fingers, fried chicken strips--I said I grabbed something, anything, from the deli--sitting on the curb-like platform of the supermarket in front of a couple of payphones, and I ate, with my fingers, in the freezing cold. All of me was warm but my right hand.

When we returned to the cinema I had obtained enough clue to remove the tickets from the zippered pocket of my fleece, which my ski jacket overlaps, to avoid having to remove them and expose the soda.

Safely settled, we saw "Elizabeth." And it was good. Cate Blanchett was a lovely Elizabeth, with the kind of face you know is lovely in youth but will age poorly; and a noble brow you can easily imagine balding; and a wonderful intelligence in her countenance. Some flaws: Elizabeth was 25 when she took the throne but here was portrayed as considerably younger, which I thought made her strength of character less credible. I had just seen Geoffrey Rush as a humorous character in "Shakespeare in Love" and yeah, whatever, I thought going in, how many Elizabethan movies is he going to be in? But I didn't know, until I read the opening credits, that Joseph Fiennes was going to be in this, as well. "Does he boink the lead here too?" Mentally, I heaved an impatient sigh.

Overall, good. I've heard criticism that it's beautiful but has no plot. No plot, I ask? Maybe because we know how it enfolds. In that sense, "Titanic" also has no plot. Well. Excuse me while I don't use "Titanic" as an example of a good movie.

There's a bit where someone plots to wed Mary Queen of Scots to lever himself into a position strong enough to usurp Elizabeth's throne, and plots thus after the demise of Mary of Guise, queen of Scotland. HAO asked how the person could be so uninformed he didn't know his intended bride was dead, and did the movie have that grievous an oversight. So I guess the movie didn't make clear enough that Mary of Guise and Mary Queen of Scots were two separate people, mother and daughter, which would make the movie seem illogical to anyone who doesn't have a passion for Tudor gossip. And HAO enjoyed Joseph but prefers Ralph Fiennes, whereas the only two things I've seen with Ralph have been "Wuthering Heights," in which he plays a very badly dyed Heathcliff, and "The English Patient," throughout which I drummed my fingers. Furthermore, Ralph is blond, and blondness does nothing for me.
990326: Oh yes, I've seen Ralph Fiennes in "Schindler's List" also. Burned, badly dyed, or Nazi bellified. I see the appeal now.

This week I worked on a large and ticklish project with people among whom I have not worked before. This was all fine until today, when in its final stages I worked with yet one more person, also support staff, who tried to elicit from me complaints to match her own. I couldn't tell you for certain what exactly she had a problem with, the task, me, other people, or what, but I flexed whatever muscles emit noncommittal expression and I simply didn't respond. I didn't agree with her, and I don't condone intraoffice griping, and I do not voice negativity at work at all--which is perhaps why I yammer and moan to such an extent here.

RDC read part of this over my shoulder and asked if I was going to mention how the boots nearly killed me. I nearly fell off a mountain near Lake Placid, is how he remembers it. I slid aways down a slope with a slight drop-off, is how I hazily remember it.

Anyway, I never trusted the boots much and now have much better ones, handsomer and with gription.

When I went home in August of 1996, I saw a pair of hiking boots in my mother's room. I was quite surprised, since she doesn't get into any mountains much. She said she'd just bought herself a treat. That was nice for her, and if I thought unnecessary to her usual terrain (not that she ventures into any terrain) and unsuited to her lifestyle, I didn't say anything about it.

Six weeks later she was in Denver. I brought her to RMNP, because that's where I bring everyone, to Bear Lake. Even in September, after school has started, Bear Lake is crowded because it's so pretty for such an easy destination. So we parked elsewhere and took a shuttle bus up to the jampacked parking lot. This might have been when BJWL said something about how nice it would be without all the people, in the kind of willful lack of self-awareness in which she could not see herself as one of the crowd. In the shuttle bus, a ranger took advantage of his captive audience to remind us to stay on the trails, not to approach fauna, not to pick flora, etc. Human impact on the park should be minimized, which is why they try to limit car traffic by running shuttles.

So we described the circumference of Bear Lake and then headed for another lake a little up the trail. I took the lead. The trail was muddy. I turned back to say something or other to my mother to see her off the trail, trampling flora. "Remember what the ranger said about staying on the trail, Ma," I chided.
"I hear what you're saying, dear," (which she says when she has sensed aural stimuli but doesn't care to translate sound into concept) "but I don't want to get my boots muddy."

Remember what I said about unsuited to her lifestyle?

Why would anyone mind hiking boots becoming muddy? This is like people who care what their luggage looks like. Is it sturdy, does it hold your gear, has it convenient handles to lug stuff--it being luggage-- hither and thither?

Speaking of pristine hiking boots, I saw something in House and Garden recently that surprised me: toothbrushes as art. Art historians study not only the cathedral, but the adze that shaped the stone of the cathedral. This makes sense to me, maybe because I enjoy art history. Contemporary toothbrushes as art, though--this I don't get. Once a toothbrush is art--a sponge handle, say, with taffeta bristles--it ceases to become a toothbrush, since I define a toothbrush as an object you use to brush your teeth and not to gaze upon and discuss the aesthetic concept of, and becomes a toothbrush-shaped object. I guess I am not hip enough for that.

 

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