Thirteen Things I Could Do Without, Thanks.

Forgive me if I have become rather taken of late with the Thursday Thirteen notion. Hey, if I did a WiP Wednesday, Thirteen Thursday, and then Friday Random Ten, my blog could sustain itself!

But seriously:

Thirteen Things That Make Me Count Down to January 9:
1. Can hardly fasten own pants in public restroom.
2. Hooking and unhooking bra a bigger deal than it was in high school.
3. Almost impossible to fix own hair in a manner that would not embarrass own mother.
4. Cannot carry a pot of water from sink to stove.
5. Cannot wrap own Christmas presents.
6. NO SWIMMING (but this doesn't change until April, sigh).
7. Also no running or cycling or dryland. Walk. Walk. Walk.
8. Cannot change sheets on own bed.
9. Driving is a bitch (and possibly illegal).
10. Sleeping on back got old a long time ago.
11. Cannot open fridge and remove milk all in one shot.
12. Having only four wearable shirts (because they button up the front).
13. Wearing watch on dominant hand is awkward.

Not all about shoulders.

"M" (presumably not for "murder") asked, "How many days left for the sling?"

The best case scenario is 26.

Yes, Twenty. Six.

That is because I am supposed to wear it until I see my surgeon again, which happens 4-6 weeks after the post-operative appointment. And because in my carefuly planning around the academic calendar I forgot about the Christian and federal holiday calendars, four weeks would be Christmas, five weeks would be New Year's, and so it is January 9 that I see him.

Sigh.

But that's not what I came to tell you about.

I came to talk about decorating Christmas trees. (Though I will take this moment to note that you would be surprised to what extent you use two hands hanging Christmas ornaments....)

I am not sure how you store your ornaments, if you store ornaments, but last year anyway, we seemed to organize ours by material. In one box are all the really fragile ornaments, made of glass or porcelain or stonewear, and most of them have their own little boxes and stashes of tissue paper or bubble wrap, or else they are wrapped in disintegrating Kleenex and stored in a plastic baggy. Then there are all the little crocheted ornaments, mostly made for me by the mother of some childhood friends, and along with those are a few cotton-stuffed felt ornaments with zigzagging and sequins and cotton balls affixed to represent ornamentation or lights or Santa's beard. The wooden ones are all in their little group, though I wonder sometimes whethere there is a yearlong feud between the flat ones and the ones with little moving arms and legs (I bet on the latter every time). Also, we have a sizable stash of homemade ornaments that are covered with gemlike beads: these all have their own box.

Ricketiest of all are the baked cookie-like ornaments that we made back in the mid-1970s. I only have a few of those, since most of them live with my parents, but the ones I have are mostly the same: a cut-out shape decorated with special magic markers, then with a paperclip glued to the back as the hanging apparatus. In most cases, the glue or the dough has caused the paperclips to rust, sometimes to the point they have broken apart. The ones my mother decorated still look really nice. The ones I decorated have a sort of abstract expressionist quality, but cut me some slack--I was four or five at the time! And one lesson we cannot seem to get through our heads: do not wrap these ornaments in Kleenex if you do not want Kleenex-adorned ornaments on your tree.

Somewhere, apparently with my parents' stash, is a black Christmas tree, that my father "decorated" during the Vietnam War. And similarly, there is a round one decorated with a peace symbol.

Our more recent acquisitions tend to gesture to people's hobbies and recent experiences. We have several rock-climbing Santas and a climbing shoe, as well as a little skier with the PP's name on it. There is a pair of cats wearing snorkels and diving masks and seeming to be chasing fish, as well as a female swimmer on a diving block. There is a trout commemorating some beautiful meals my Mother made us in France. And yes, there is a Santa decked out all in Spartan green. Thanks, Dad.

Lowest on our tree go the unfragile ornaments. (Have I mentioned that we have two cats?) These were mostly made by me, in school. There is one made of red burlap with a Christmas-card picture of Santa on it, adorned in some glitter. There is a big ball made from circles cut from Christmas cards (can you sense a theme?). There is a wooden snowman.

Because we have had accidents. For instance, about 4 years ago, some cat or another brought the thing down (or could you have sworn that it might have been both?). I do not know if anyone heard it happen, but when people emerged from sleeping, there was the tree, lying diagonally across the living room floor, with numerous glass and pottery shards around it.

Now we wire it to a window frame and a doorjam.

That mostly protects things, though it did nothing for the wooden penguin that took a foot-severing dive early this morning, bringing a felted Santa with it.

Truth be told, that was only one of many penguins. Too many to count, really. This all started some years back, after people came to learn about my fascination with things polar. (Especially narratives about polar exploration and dogsledding!) Then the penguins started appearing. First it was an ornament or two, then a few plush toys, or a book, or even a large light-up porch ornament, or a DVD of March of the Penguins, and then an entire string of lights adorned with penguins! Those were supposed to be Christmas decorations, but we decided to keep them up all year, and here is why:

Some years back I was at the meat market of my profession and I was walking into a hotel with an admittedly surly colleague. If you have spent time in big hotels during the holidays, then you know that they typically have big Christmas-oriented displays in their lobbies. In this particular hotel was a North Pole scene, complete with Santa, elves, polar bears, and penguins. Being the polar expert that I fancied myself to be, I said to my colleague, "Hey! Penguins don't live at the North Pole!" He sort of snorted back at me and said, "Neither does fucking Santa."

Thirteen Pet Peeves.

Magpie inspired me to get a few things off my chest. Please congratulate me, because it has taken tremendous restraint to think globally and so not list "My sling" as Number One.

1. People who drive slow in the left lane.
2. People who tailgate in the right lane.
3. People who do not signal when they plan to turn.
4. People who signal even though they do not plan to turn.
5. Late papers.
6. My sling. (OK, sorry: I could not resist. You may rescind your congrats.)
7. People who reply to all when they really have something to say only to the person who sent the e-mail.
8. Ubiquitous Christmas music.
9. People who when walking have no sense of there being other people in the world, let alone in their quadrant of the sidewalk.
10. "Special" displays that clog up the middle of crowded grocery store aisles.
11. Advertisements that use "quotation marks" for "emphasis."
12. Misuse of the word "comprise."
13. Most of the arguments made by letters to the editor in our local paper.

There. I feel better now. I feel better than James Brown. How do you feel?

The Waiting Game.

It turns out there is something stranger, or maybe equally strange but in an exciting new way, than having surgery 5 hours after you learn you need it. And that is scheduling surgery and then waiting around for a month for it to happen.

Sure, I can plan ahead. And I mean that sentence two ways, because People, if there is one thing I am good at it is planning ahead! I plan my social calendar so far in advance that I feel like a dork. I plan my classes. I plan my week's workout schedule, and then plan meals around it. I plan out how I will spend each day of my vacation. Plan plan plan.

I tried to stop doing this late in the summer when I realized it was keeping me from living the now. "STOP PLANNING" said a sticky note on my computer monitor. I tried to, for a while.

Now I am a planning fiend again, but especially trying to plan ahead for the surgery.

So why do I still collapse in despair and frustration and anxiety at the end of the day? Cannot seem to plan out how to deal with those feelings, can I?

But Pre-Op Stage One Point Three is including Planning For Not Wearing Clothes That Must Be Put On Over the Head. I have bulked up my supply of cardigans, and my dear mother is lending/sending me some t-shirts that button up the front, after convincing me that installing a zipper into some old t-shirts might not fly. (Thanks, Mom!)

But amidst this flurry of frantic planning (read: denial), I still read blogs, so I came across this, from Magpie. That brought back memories of the weeks immediately after my last surgery, when I had daily appointments with nurses and physical therapists, and more therapy to do away from the appointments, and drugs to infuse, and pain meds and anti-nausea pills to keep track of (I had a lengthy log...), prune juice to drink..... You see what I mean.

So can I be forgiven this time for a bit of this überplanning? after all, for a few weeks in November and December, I may be trying to hold down two full-time jobs.

[FL]Insert header here.

In case you did not know, there are more interesting things you could do on a Friday afternoon than proofread the line numbers given in a Table of Emendations to the Copy-Text.

But the fact that I now know this may give some small indication of how bad real-life deadlines are kicking me in the ass right now.

So go forth and be grateful that for this week anyway, you are not me and my new collection of purple pencils.

Let's face it.

I'm pooped.

I know: it is not an exciting thing to say, and the more smart-alecky among you will remember (much to my dismay) that I say this a lot. Well, too bad. I am saying it again.

I'm pooped.

Whew.

In the spirit of the archive, here are a few things that take it out of me:
1. Funerals.
2. Traveling to funerals.
3. Traveling too many places in too short a time.
4. Not learning.
5. Teaching swim clinics to little kids.
6. It does not matter whether they are cute and attentive or the picture of ADD: it is tiring to teach little kids.
7. Teaching generally, now that we are being honest.
8. The heat.
9. Wait, it's not the heat, it's the humidity.
10. Yes it is too: it is the heat and the humidity.
11. Teaching swim clinics to little kids in the heat. (No, not little kids in heat!)
12. That my shoulder still hurts. Not too bad, but just a little, and constantly.
12a. UPDATE (how could I forget?): Recent surgery. (Thanks, Scott!)
13. That I am about to take yet another trip, this one overseas.
14. See #3+4.
15. A too long to-do list.
16. Making too many plans.
17. Not having things planned well enough.
18. Shopping.
19. Swim practice, when there are too many people in the lanes.
20. Showering after swim practice, when there are too many people in the locker room.

Now that I am thinking about it, 20 does not usually = "a few." See what I mean?

Have I mentioned how tired I am?

What a lucky goddess.

My apologies for wiggly post last night--but thanks to those of you who sent such supportive things. All the nice things that so many of you have written over the last couple of months, as I have been enumerating blah after blah--well, it has reminded me what a lucky goddess I am. And how much goddesses need friends.

Heh heh heh heh ... wipe out.

OK, so in a fit of ill-advised non-thought, I updated my music software on my computer and, in the process, wiped out my playlists, along with some random pieces of track data here and there. Mostly there. Anyway, what is most frustrating about this is that at one point in the past I had managed to back up the playlist data, which means that at that point in time I actually knew where on my computer it was stored. Couldn't find it yesterday, of course.

I realize that this same thing has happened to other people, because I remember reading about it and thinking Oh. Poor. Man. So now we can add to that, Oh. Poor. Goddess.

Postal Iron.

You may recall that my swim team has been participating in the Postal Pentathlon. Back in late October we did the sprint distance, then in mid-November we did the middle distance. I did not blog it at the time, because I kept waiting for our coach to send out the results, which, thanks to Thanksgiving and the chaos of the shut-down pool, never happened. The middle-distance swims went OK, but I was a wee bit disappointed in my performance. I did not have the word for it then, but it was the gibestkt rearing its ugly head. I finished the swims fine, but my times were horrid, my body was tired, my get-up-and-go was nowhere to be found. Needless to say, the PP trounced me on the 100 free.

All this to say, last night was the Ironman: 200 butterfly, 200 backstroke, 200 breaststroke, 200 freestyle, 400 individual medley.

I had been planning to spend the better part of this week in New Jersey, visiting with a certain new addition to my family and his lovely parents. But thanks to the gibestkt, I postponed the trip. I am very sad not to be hanging out with my little cousin, even if he is in constant spit-up mode. I am also sad that I suddenly found myself without my excuse for why I could not swim the Ironman.

But I am proud that I did it.

The PP and I decided that we needed to approach this the way we approached our first triathlons and first long running races: just finish it. I pushed the swimming a bit, but I certainly did not treat these as races the way I would an isolated 200 or 400 in a meet.

For me this was the very first 200 fly ever. I have dreaded this event. There is a postal competition called the "check-off challenge," where, over the course of the year, in official meets or in your own pool with your coach timing, you try to swim every single event: that is 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000, 1650 free; 50, 100, 200 of breast, back, and fly; 100, 200, and 400 IM. None of those ever kept me from signing up for the check-off challenge except the 200 fly, which is appropriate, since their t-shirts a couple years ago read, "I am not afraid to swim the 200 fly." I have always been free to admit that Yes I Am Afraid. Very. So I had been relieved when the date that Coach announced for this particular postal event was a time I'd bee away. Too. Bad.

The 200 fly was bad, yes, but nowhere near as bad as I feared. I did not take it particularly fast, and I did take a few extra breaths on many of the turns. (My coach friend who got me ready for Nationals last spring advised me and PP to think of the 20 fly as 8 x 25 of fly. That did help.) But miraculously my hips never sank during the swim, and I was able to breathe every other stroke for the entire thing--thanks in part to pauses on walls, and thanks to a bit of drill (extra kicks between pulls) along the way. I looked up to breathe during my cool down, and I could see Coach standing on the side of the pool, looking at me and clapping.

After that it was not so bad. This was also my first 200 back, but I have swum plenty of backstroke in practices: it is not impossible--it is just not pretty. Coach says that when I swim backstroke I look like a turtle on its back. I'd be offended if he weren't right.

I was a little dreading of the 200 breast, because I was not sure if I could ease off enough to do it at a pace befitting the Ironman, but it was fine. Something like a 3:06, which is quite a lot slower than my regular competition time. I did manage to swim very long strokes, though, averaging 7 strokes per length.

And the 200 free was even fun. The PP was swimming in the lane next to me, and he started like a shot. Dang, I thought, I cannot keep up with that. But luckily for me, the PP does not sustain a fast pace all the way through a 200, so, to use Coach's words, I "torched him" at the 100 turn. Luckily the PP is cool about this. The woman in the lane next to him on the other side, who is quite the distance swimmer, was gaining on him at the end. "I think she would have had you at the 300," I said. "I would have had him at 210," she said. Nothing like a little competition among friends. Bicycling magazine had an article several years back titled, "Why do we only care about beating our friends?"

The 400 IM went just fine, too. Again, the fly felt much better than I expected, and swimming 100 of it went smooth and although I was out of breath at the end (let's just say not the longest streamline ever on my first length of backstroke), my stroke held together all the way through. I even pushed the breaststroke a little, and had enough to pick up the second 50 of free.

I would like to note as a p.s. that I did all this while suffering a bit of, shall we say, intestinal distress. Nothing serious, but irksome--and in the bathroom was not my first choice about how to spend the time between events. But it does make me certain that I am an Ironwoman, at least in the postal sense.

Now, with video.

Quick post today, because all in an effort to get myself out of the house before I spend another day not getting any grading done, I have not put on my warm fuzzy clothes, nor turned up the heat, nor turned on the little gas fireplace in my study. But there is coffee!

I just wanted to quickly note that there is now video available of the Anderson Christmas parade. Those of you not from the upstate, or who did not happen to listen to Morning Edition on December 4, might not understand why that is a big deal, so let me tell you.

On Monday, December 4, I was brushing my teeth and The New Bob Edwards read as he always does a funny little anecdote at 6:30. Usually these clips are not about the Upstate, but this one was about this parade. I nearly choked on my Crest. (But, really, I have to ask why it is only things like this that get my area on the national news....) Meanwhile, the PP had just brought in the paper, and had read the same story on the front page, and so was in the process of extricating coffee from his nose.

Turns out that the driver of a float for some dance school or another was doing a bit of nipping while driving the float, then seems to have caught a dose of road rage, because he pulled out of his place in line (behind some slow-ass tractor) and sped away at something like 60 mph, while all the little dancers in their little waltz of the flowers tutus were scared out of their minds.

Friends, is this the Christmas spirit?

The Anderson Police Department says no, and has slapped a DUI on his ass. But what we were wondering, was, "Did anybody get it on tape?????"

So were the authorities and all the news outlets in the area, and for several weeks the TV news and newspapers and everybody kept saying, if you have video, call this number.

Somebody did. Heh. Admittedly, it is funny, but not as funny as the whole thing was in my end-of-term-sickened imagination.

OK, now off to a coffeeshop for grading.

Gibestkt.

This is a rough time of year, as nearly anyone will tell you. It is the end of semester for anyone living an academic life, and that means Everything Wraps Up Now (except meetings with administrators, who live a 12-month lifestyle, and thereby forget the deadlines others are sweating). It is winter, which makes for frequent dreary skies. It is the holidays, which brings all kinds of pressure, sadness, anxiety, topped off with a larger dose of bad traffic than anyone can experience while maintaining regular blood pressure. This is how the Furies punish those of us who get our summers off--by combining outrageous amounts of work stress with the expectation that we give to others of our time, hearts, and shopping energy. And on the eighth day, the Furies created the MLA--mwah ha ha. You thought you had a holiday break? Think again!

I am dodging the furious MLA this year, thanks be to the Kindly Ones.

(No thanks for the cold, Kindly Ones.)

Several years ago the PP and I were eating lunch with my grandfather and some of his friends in Assisted Living Land. You should know, for this story to be funny, that the PP has quite the receding hairline. Anyway, he was telling a story about something or another that was supposed to bring some virtuous end, and one of my grandfather's feistier ladyfriends leaned over the table and said, "But it doesn't grow hair, does it, PP?"

All to say, it doesn't make the traffic go away, does it?

It is about this time every year that I look at all my commitments and deadlines and wonder what I was thinking and how in the world this will all come together. (Insert tears of desperation.)

All to say, it doesn't get the Christmas card made.

estaminet late last night accidentally coined the perfect word for this feeling: "gibestkt." Indeed. It is the perfect word for it: you do not really know what it means, you have a hell of a time spelling it, but you know it is bad and makes you feel sort of ill. And it all sounds so Germanic, like a horrible syndrome. Or a monster from Beowulf. Or the actual name for the wolf in the Grimm's brothers' tales. Or something only Heidegger could have come up with to describe the horrors of Being in Christmastime, and you know what that means--all the philosophers who follow him will leave it untranslated in their texts.

All to say, it doesn't get the exams graded.

Perhaps this time of year brings out the small confessions from those of us who under the surface of competence have to exert a little more effort to keep it together. Ian's post for today is about the small correctionals, or what he calls "Tiny Corrections Over a Long Period of Time." (Thank the Kindly Ones he wasn't writing in German, so we do not have to leave his term untranslated.) He wonders what we can achieve not when we expect immediate results, but when we continuously make tiny changes and then wait patiently to see results later.

I am wondering whether this idea might offer some easing of gibestkt. You know, instead of clearing the decks all at once and saying, "Forget Christmas! Buy your own presents! Make your own dinner! No Christmas card this year!" we do not let it get that far. Surely there are little valves that we could open up at, say, midterms, or even earlier, so that the gibestkt does not all build up this much?

This is the question I will be pondering over the holidays, in anticipation of my New Years Resolutions.