What can I say? I dig alliteration.
It’s January 2012. Can you freaking believe it? Jaysus, the time has flown. Wish I could tell y’all it’s because of all the fun I’ve been having, but that would be a fib. Best part of Christmas was finding that extra bottle of red in the cupboard on Boxing Day, no word of a lie.
You see, I threw my back out about eight weeks ago; likely an old sports injury. (I love saying that, ‘old sports injury.’ It’s like I can claim athlete status, even though I’m a post-Yule blob of lard at present…but obviously I wasn’t, always!)
Back in my university days (UWO King’s College, Class of ’03), I played squash. I played A LOT of squash. I was constantly calling my much-younger friends and asking nagging at them to meet me at the court. It was my heroin, for a while. That should have been a sign that something had to give. I’m not Hayley fucking Wickenheiser.
One day, without warning, I jumped up out of bed (not surprising) and promptly fell down (surprising), writhing in pain (surprising and decidedly unpleasant). As soon as I was remotely mobile, I went to the Fowler Kennedy Sport Medicine Clinic on UWO’s main campus, was told I overdid it and that I had to stop playing squash so much and to cut out wearing my backpack on only one shoulder (no matter how cool and artfully indifferent it made me look), and have a round of physiotherapy.
So. No problem. Did as they instructed, breezed through the physio, and the back healed up.
Wait for it…
Cut to 2006 or thereabouts. By this time I had little kids at home, and though I’d endured two C-sections, was feeling pretty good, physically. One fateful day, I happened to notice a dessicated corn flake on the floor, and casually and nonchalantly bent to pick it up, which is when my back screamed an audible Fuck You! I was out of commission for a couple of weeks, walking stooped over and all. That’ll teach me to do housework, thought I. Don’t need any more convincing than that! It’s dangerous, and to be avoided at all costs.
Throughout the years since, I’ve had various flareups, usually not lasting longer than a week. However sometime around November, I started getting ‘twinges,’ nothing to be alarmed about, I thought, until gradually, over the following weeks I became so hunched over that I could have posed with Esmeralda and no one would have blinked.
Whee! I’m swinging on a big bell!
Now I’m in physio again. The therapist is not only young enough that I could have babysat her; I’m pretty sure I’m old enough to be her mother, had my youth been just a soupçon more misspent. I’ve got a massage booked for tomorrow morning and a set of exercises I’ll be doing daily.
But that’s not what I came here to talk about.
Between the back thing putting me not only off my feet but also off my 7-day a week workout schedule, and my annual dose of S.A.D. kicking in bigtime, I fell (see: allowed myself to fall) into a bit of a funk. As mentioned, Christmas held very little excitement for me, and the prospect of 2012 starting with such a pathetic whimper was depressing as all hell. I stopped writing, I stopped eating well. I had no drive, no capacity for caring a whit. I started to hibernate, isolating myself like an injured animal, snarling at anyone who ventured too close to my cave.
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi had nothing on me. NOTHING.
Well. I don’t know which of the Powers That Be decided to kicked me in my astral ass, but I’m grateful to them. Just blinked one day, and things just seemed…different. Less dull. A little more shiny. Better.
So I’m opting for a Re-Do. I apologize for not being here for you. I resolve to be present. I resolve to growl less. I resolve that in the days and weeks to come, I’m gonna be inundating you with stream-of-consciousness ramblings, biased and ill-informed opinions, nostalgic wanderings, music/film/art reviews and other really cool stuff, you just wait and see.
I’ve missed y’all so much. Happy New Year, everyone.
Erin
Erin's Clishmaclaver 