Riding up that hill.

The bike arrived yesterday!

My butt hurts today.

This is a good thing, right?

Here is one thing I can tell you: it makes an enormous difference to ride a bike that fits. I say that because although I love my old bike, a classic steel Pinarello, the top tube was 54 cm, which, according to bike fits I have had done, was several too long. My new bike has "women-specific geometry" (I wish I could have taken that class in high school--essentialism taken to the next level!), which means, in short, that it fits me. Not only does this mean that I do not have to stretch my arms out as far to reach the handlebars, but also the saddle works the way it is supposed to: the pressure of my bodyweight falls on my sitbones instead of, well, my special place.

How did I clock so many miles on the old bike?????

Today the PP and I went out from our house towards Paris Mountain. There is a great course from town that goes over the mountain, and there is also a "bypass," which avoids that big climb by snaking along the humps along the "base" of the mountain. Emphasis on humps, which felt like mountains to my out-of-shape legs (and lungs). There was a marathon going on in town today, too, and on the way out we saw runners at about the 19-mile mark. They were looking pretty tired, and I kept wishing they did not have to go up the hille we had just come down. And by the end of our ride, I was definitely feeling like I looked like those runners had.

(We did not have as many spectators on our ride,

and I am no longer comfortable with this kind of drafting.)

But still: it felt great to be on the bike. (Well, OK, except for during some of the uphills and when we would realize that not only had we lost the course-guiding paint markings on the pavement, but to get back to it we had to go up that descent we had just made.) It felt terrific to be doing an actual sport, even if at a beginner level. And I loved getting out of breath doing something fun.

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.

Pre-Op, Phase One.

A psychologist friend of mine used to prescribe retail therapy for depression and cleaning therapy for anxiety. Not a bad drug, really, that latter one, and it has precious few dangerous side effects to be noted in the fine print or by that reassuring voice on the TV commercials.

(Side note: does anyone know where I can get the results for that study that showed that the Restless-Legs Syndrome drug can lead to strong gambling and sexual urges?)

Anyway, now that I have the surgery scheduled, I am trying to think about other things. But still: having more that 4 hours notice this time means that I can do some planning ahead, so that the whole thing does not catch me with loads of dirty laundry or no clean presentable pajamas or no food in the house. Here is where the cleaning therapy comes in: let's make this house spotless, shall we?

First we reorganize my study. Perhaps "reorganize" is the wrong word, because it suggests that the items in question had some organization in the first place, where in reality mostly they were only participating in the Piles System, which only proves viable in the short term, in my experience. Anyway, now books are sideways on shelves, instead of in stacks, except for those that I am actively reading: Jim Longenbach's Stone Cottage, Brock Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers Homes in New England, Courtney Martin's Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, and Dave Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity. (This list does not count the books in process that live in my bedroom, but trust me that I am not the sort to be reading only one book at a time. Or only four.)

And I have admitted to myself that the stuff I was writing back in August is on hold again for a while, so all the appropriate xeroxes and library books have been refiled. Sigh.

And some of the books that I rarely conult (such as my Turkish-English dictionary...) are upstairs in another bookcase.

Now my desk contains only the things I still need to do (articles to evaluate for journals, papers for conferences, files to process) and the old dining room table that we are going to sell is free of piles of books and old copies of The Chronicle of Higher Ed and all those things that tend to collect in one's workspace when we are not looking.

Given that I am manic-depressive about my clutter, this is a process that I have to go through from time to time, and by the time I have to do it, I want to do it. But this time was a little different, because I suspect it is also the first phase of my Pre-Op. I am also beginning to think about what I might need to have around for my recovery. Books are covered, as in addition to those in process now, I have an immense collection of books to read, so assuming that I can avoid enough pain meds to focus, I am all set there. More urgently, I am wondering if I might need some reward yarn, and whether to buy it before the surgery or wait until I have made it through (probably the latter, though I'll have to bribe a friend to take me to the yarn store).

Phase Two of the Pre-Op comes next weekend (I hope), because I decided finally to get a new bike. Although I have gotten a lot of mileage out of my old one, it is too big for me (what happens when you buy a used bike from a guy...) and so I rarely want to buy it. The new plan is to try diversifying my athletic pursuits in order to prevent (or at least minimize) further overuse injuries, and because I HATE RUNNING, cycling seems the better choice. So stay tuned for details and photos of the pretty new machine.

I'll have to end this here: I have more laundry and swiffing to do.....

Museums: cemeteries!

The Futurists and vandals among you might be interested in this little stunt.

Is it "Happy Birthday" or "Happy Thanksgiving"?

OK: it's official. In the latest installment of "My Shoulder Sucks: A Melodrama," I have a surgery scheduled for 20 November to fix the damned thing. Happy birthday to me. OR is it Happy Thanksgiving? It will fall smack in between, so why not both?

You might be wondering what exactly is wrong with my shoulder (I am too...). Apparently there is a tear in the labrum, and as I understand it, it is a SLAP lesion. (Read here about shoulder anatomy and labral tears.) This kind of tear will not fix itself; I have been trying to use physical therapy to strengthen the muscles around the shoulder, in hopes that that might take the pressure off the labrum and get rid of the pain.

But as I have thought more about this, and spoken with my PT, I realize that really it is not so much a question of whether surgery is needed, but when. So now it is scheduled.

I understand that while this is typically an outpatient surgery, I will be kept over one night, on IV antibiotics, to stave off a recurrence of the infection horror.

It is interesting: I can type this post without losing my mind in anxiety. That was not true on 21 September when my doctor first mentioned the prospect of surgery. This itself is progress.

Later that same day...

Wow. It turns out you can spend a lot of time goofing around on Ravelry--I mean, updating your projects, posting photos, etc. If you're on there, swing by and see my groovy stuff! I thought athletes were the most anal users of spreadsheet record keeping, but it turns out they have nothing on the knitters!

And you thought my posting has been scant thus far....

I got this message in my e-mail inbox today: "frecklegirl has invited you to Ravelry!"

Small victories.

On Thursday I was supposed to travel to New York for a meeting. Thanks to some nasty weather in the northeast, and resulting delayed flights, I cancelled my trip and went to swim practice instead.

So there.

And a good decision it turned out to be: we did a set that we have done many times called "Maintain Distance." First we swim for 5:10 and keep track of our distance. Then we rest for about 30 seconds. Then we swim again, this time for 5:05, and we try to swim as far or further than we did the first time. Then, after 30 more seconds of rest, we swim again, this time for 5 minutes, and try again to beat or maintain our previous distance. The main set for the practice is two rounds of this, with about 3 minutes in between.

I probably do not need to tell you that I did all of this kick. The first round I did kicking on my back with big fins, and the second round I did on my stomach with my little cup-shaped fins and snorkel.

As we were swimming the first round, I remembered that we had done this some time before during my all-kick period. When I got home, I looked in my workout journal and found it: 8 February. Apparently I did not blog that practice, but I see from my journal that on that night I did the first round with big fins and the second with no fins (Lord, help me!). My distances then were:

8 Feburary 2007
ROUND 1: 325 / <350>350 = 1025
[75 easy]
ROUND 2: <225>225 / >>225 = 675

11 October 2007
ROUND 1: <350>350 / 375 = 1075
[75 easy]
ROUND 2: 250 / 275 / 300 = 825

The information for round 2 is not really comparable, since I used different apparatus the two different times, but the info for round 1 is, and seeing a little improvement there is heartening, particularly since the first set of data is from before my surgery and period of laid-up-ness.

Empathy.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a student who has missed five out of fourteen classes. You might think that in that conversation I would tell said student that such absenteeism was unacceptable, that she should drop the class, that she should rethink her educational goals and what it takes to achieve them.

You would only be right about the last part, and even there it is not exactly what I said.

In fact, I was surprised when she missed the second day of class, because on the first day it was evident that she was one of the more engaged and adventuresome students I have had, and perhaps one of the most mature in this particular group. I thought it would be great to have her in class, and then when she missed the second day, and then the third day, I figured (and was disappointed) that she had decided to drop but had not gotten to a computer to do so.

But then I heard from her by e-mail. It turns out this student is an athlete, and in the first full week of school she sustained an injury which ended her season and required emergency surgery. (It turns out she has already had similar surgery several times, either on this particular knee or her other.) Then there were complications from the surgery (including, to my personal horror, one of her sutures getting infected) and she missed more days.

Now we get to the part of the term where she has to miss a number of classes because her team is traveling.

We had a long discussion about her options, and it was evident that none of them are really good ones. She said she felt she is "starting to be on the mend," and I thought, right: I thought that many times myself, and boy did I have a long way to go. She said that when she was on the serious drugs she could not even read at all, and man, did I know what that felt like. If she withdraws from the semester (which would allow her to get the other surgery she needs and perhaps actually heal), she will lose her sport scholarship, and that, of course, is how she pays for school. I could see and feel her pain and fear and uncertainty each time her eyes started to well up.

So it is her I was thinking about when I read this article that Magpie mentioned in a comment. I know that knees are not brains, and that bum legs are different from disorientation and headaches and constant dizziness and of course the longer term effects of concussion.

But still.

The thing that bothers me is someone keeps moving my chair.

Magpie got me thinking about They Might Be Giants, which is a happy thing on as beautiful an afternoon as this one.

And since I am now back from today's hour-and-fifteen-minutes of PT, I can really only type well with one arm. (Note to self: there was a little pain in some of the diagonal pullthroughs that I had to do, and also in exercises where I was lying on a table on my stomach and pulling up thumb first at the 9 o'clock position.)

So instead, I gift you with this. I was a little disappointing that nowhere in there did they give details about women's builds and sports, but I can guess that as a short squat one, I probably never would have been an Olympic swimmer. But what do you think?

In the spirit of full disclosure.

Well, maybe you know me better than to expect that, but still.

Scott wrote: "Last month when you wrote about swimming things seemed to be getting better. At this point let's just forget about the pool and aim to get the shoulder back to normal use. Perhaps later on you can start thinking about swimming. Best of luck."

Thanks, Scott, and thanks to the others who have left good wishes.

But I think I should tell you all that "swimming" is not really in my life right now. I do not want to stop being in the pool, because I need to do something to keep active (and to keep from tearing my own head off), so as far that's concerned, for the last month or so, Kicking is the new normal.

What would you rather do, than kicking up and down the pool?

Also, there is vertical kicking, on its own, with fins, holding a med ball or a dumbbell. Or hanging on the wall and kicking fast and slow at intervals while wearing little canvas sneakers. That is a load of laughs, especially when the little sneakers tear the skin off your feet!

Anyway, no swimming for me for now, at least not with my left arm. But don't forget the right arm! I am the queen of one-arm drills.

And kicking. I challenge any of you to a vertical-kicking contest.

What? They don't have those?

Oh.

Becoming.

I decided yesterday, while I was stretching cords above my head and watching a woman use a rolly chair to scoot circles around a room, that I need to write more. Lucky you!

Last Friday I saw my orthopaedist again. He said we would try physical therapy until November. Then if the shoulder is not better (are you tired of the shoulder stories yet? I am.), we consider (a) surgery or (b) quitting swimming.

So starting this week, I am putting everything I have into physical therapy. And after a month of only kicking, I am beginning in a gradual way to bring arm strokes with my left arm back into the pool.

This is my documentation. You don't have to read it, because frankly I would rather not write it. Heraclitus is telling me, though, that it is something I should do as I come to terms with the fact that The Whole Shoulder Thing is not something that happened, but something that is happening.

This has been my first week of restarted therapy. I saw my PT twice--Monday and Wednesday. On the days I do not work with him, I do the usual rotator-cuff and core exercises at home.

When I work with him, I:

* Try to hold my arm up and still while he pushes on it in different directions. This is to reteach the musculature and nerves how to be stable. (He asked me to imagine my shoulder as a clock. Some people, he said, especially people who have suffered a shoulder dislocation in the past, have instablity at, say, 6 o'clock or 3 o'clock. I have it 24 hours a day.) So far we have done this exercise while I lie flat on my back with my arm up at 90 degrees; with me on my back with my elbow on a pad and my forearm at 90 degrees; with me on my back with my arm at a different angle relative to my body, my elbow on a pad, and my forearm at 90 degrees; with me standing, holding my arm down, my forearm at 90 degrees, and in my hand the handle of an outstretched cable. He says I have very little strength in my shoulder. Our ultimate goal is to do these exercises with my arm raised above my head in a typical freestyle-swimming position.

* Do plank-position core exercises, facing down, and then on each side. These are painfully difficult to do right now, and it makes me realize how much core strength I have lost since I was in shape for nationals.

* Kneel on a pad and throw a weighted ball at a trampoline, and when I catch it, try to hold my core stable. I do this facing the tramp, and then with my side to it (both directions).

* Use stretch cords to make small presses with my hands above my head, at my sides, and then again at my sides but pulling backwards rather than forwards.

* Lie on my face and raise my arms above my head for 30 seconds, then rest for 30. (I do this exercise with my arms in a variety of positions.)

It is strange to be in a PT room with a bunch of other people. We each have our own maladies. One guy is doing strange things with his knees. Another perches on the rolly chair (it is more like a rolly stool) and uses his arms to move himself around the floor. One woman steps on and off a step. One man talks incessantly while he walks on a treadmill. We are all there try to bring our bodies back. Keep us in your thoughts.

Bow down before the Master of Love-Hate Relationships.

You Are a Red Crayon

Your world is colored with bright, vivid, wild colors. You have a deep, complex personality - and you are always expressing something about yourself. Bold and dominant, you are a natural leader. You have an energy that is intense... and sometimes overwhelming. Your reaction to everything tends to be strong. You are the master of love-hate relationships. Your color wheel opposite is green. Green people are way too mellow to understand what drives your energy.

What Color Crayon Are You?

(Hmmm. I always thought I was more mellow than this. Thanks to Magpie for the tip.)

Dear Madeleine L'Engle,

Thank you for writing all those books that I loved like I had never loved books before, and rarely have since.

Thank you for creating imaginary worlds that made me hurt because they were not real.

Thank you for permeating my mind with images that are still there.

Thank you for making me cry.

Thank you for convincing me that sometimes you can get to those worlds after all.

We'll miss you.

[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.

Friday Random 10: It wasn't a rock, it was a rock lobster! Edition

Recent thinking about rock reminds me of this, which always seems a good way to end the week, especially one that has left me as exhausted as this one has.

But I believe that Timothy's question, "Is a definition of 'rock' that sticks us with bands like Bad Company as the exemplars of the form worth having?" points to a limitation in my musical tastes. I suppose that my definition of rock is outdated because after a certain point I started listening to far less rock than other things, hence leaving me unaware of the real developments there.

But today is not for contemplation, but simply for enumeration:

1. "Claire's Theme," Graeme Revell (Until the End of the World)
2. "Untitled," Kinky (Atlas)
3. "Air Giant," Transglobal Underground (Punjabi Lounge, disc 1)
4. "Maybe You'll Be There," Diana Krall (The Look of Love)
5. "Come, Gone" (alternate take), Sonny Rollins (Way Out West)
6. "Slippin' and Slidin'," Billy Preston (Billy's Bag)
7. "Japanese Folk Song [Kojo No Tsuki]," Thelonious Monk (Straight, No Chaser)
8. "Rock Lobster," The B-52s (The B-52s)
9. "Don Loope," Nortec Collective (Nacional Records Sampler 2006)
10. "Dru Me Negrita," Ry Cooder & Manuel Galban (Mambo Sinuendo)

Horton hears The Who.

So last night the PP and I decided to play cards, and whenever we play cards, we also play music, and so I asked him, "What would you like to hear?" And he said, "Bachman Turner Overdrive," and I said, "Hmmm, I am not sure that we have any Bachman Turner Overdrive," so he said, "Oh," so I said, "Does this mean you want Rock?" And he said, "Yes!"

I hustled to the computer and threw together what I thought might be a good Rock playlist and we started playing.

It was not too long, though, before we hit a song where PP said, "You know, this is not really rock. America is not rock." So I made a note about that and we played some more and then we hit some quiet Dire Straits and decided that was not really rock either. And then there was a Santana song that started out really quietly, and although it was getting ready to rock, it was not really rock. Neither was some of the Springsteen stuff from Nebraska (despite the fact that Bruce may be one of the PP's absolute favs.)

We started to think that rock--or at least the rock we wanted last night--was harder to define than we initially thought.

Here are our priliminary observations:

1. We could begin to define rock by using its touchstones: "Sharp Dressed Man," "Barracuda," "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap," "Aqualung," "Heartbreaker," "Helter Skelter," "Dancing Days," "Won't Get Fooled Again."

2. Rock does tend to have strong guitars, it is true, but the PP insists that the beat is just as important.

3. A rock song frequently includes some kind of non-verbal or loosely verbal scream in it. (Example: the "YAH!" early in "Hungry Heart")

4. The title of the song might include the word "rock," as in "Rock and Roll All Night" or "We Will Rock You" but this does not include "Rock Around the Clock" as that is apparently a different kind of rock. The jury is still out on "Rock Lobster." Furthermore, although Falco claims that he would like for Amadeus to rock him, he does not really do so in a rock way. Ditto Michael Jackson's claims about rocking, with or without you. Simon and Garfunkel may be a rock, but they do not rock. Rocking the casbah does not equal rocking the boat. Conversely, Joe Walsh may be claiming to make Funk #49, but that is rock, my friends.

5. Mick makes rock. Not all rock must have rock, but you cannot have Mick without rock. Same thing with Link Wray (and his Raymen).

6. Rock does not usually have a heavily produced sound.

7. The PP's definition of Rock may be broader than mine. He puts the B-52's in there, and I think he wants Devo too, though I tend to think they are not rock.

What do you think? And how long can a band take to get ready to rock? (Think here about the beginning of "Detroit Rock City," because it takes about one minute and thirty seconds before the rocking starts, but then it really does rock.)

"See you on the other side."

One time I wrote that as a signature to an e-mail to a colleague who knows I have been editing this. He pointed out that given my present work, it was a rather ambiguous thing to say, and was I implying that he and/or I were heading to the spirit realms? No, I was just trying to think of something other than "Best" or "Ciao" or "Cheers" or "Bite me" to say at the end of a message.

But now I can never write it without thinking about what he said.

I am heading off today for a two-day retreat in the mountains, to get my head realligned before I return to the workaday world on Thursday. Not that I am not looking forward to seeing the shining faces in my classes, it's just all the other crap that I need to figure out how to think about in a more productive way.

So nothing from me for a few days. Enjoy your own selves.

Don't give up on your trees, boy.

So I was just listening to the CD that came with the June/July issue of The Believer and working on the fourth piece of the PP's Christmas sweater, and something occurred to me.

(But first a digression: the fifth track on the CD is "The Painter" by I'm From Barcelona. The liner notes note: "There are twenty-nine people in I'm From Barcelona. They're from Sweden, not Spain. In Sweden, twenty-nine people may sometimes be considered a small town." Anyway, the song starts, "I'm just a painter, I do my crappy art, but I see what's in your eyes and I know what's in your heart." I thought it went "I'm just a painter, I do my crappy yard," and I thought, well, yeah, if you're a painter you don't pay for someone to mow your grass and it probably does look like hell. So then when the refrain came around, I thought it was "Don't give up on your trees, boy" [actual lyrics = replace "trees" with "dreams": I like my version better], and I ultimately think this was a subliminal message to me from I'm From Barcelona, because we have a beautiful old tree in our front yard that is slowly dying, and we are trying to decide whether to spend circa $800 to try to save it or just give up now and spend the $2000 to have it taken down. I think we're leaning toward keeping it around for a few more years, thanks to the "message" from the boys actually from Sweden.)

Anyway, as I was knitting and listening to "Everybody's Down" by No Age, described by the Believer folks as "one of three loud duos on this compilation," I thought to myself, "This is not the music I would have chosen for knitting, and yet I am enjoying myself immensely.

So this brings me (finally) to my point, which is actually a question for you, both of my readers: do you have particular tunes that you think go particularly well with particular activities? And what happens when you diverge from your preferred tendencies?

Who are you calling short?

Take the book quiz! (via blogora)

You're Prufrock and Other Observations!

by T.S. Eliot

Though you are very short and often overshadowed, your voice is poetic
and lyrical. Dark and brooding, you see the world as a hopeless effort of people trying
to impress other people. Though you make reference to almost everything, you've really
heard enough about Michelangelo. You measure out your life with coffee spoons.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.