I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up

Here I am.

I'm sore. I'm tired. I feel like sitting on the couch and watching TV.

I'm turning into one of those old women who fall. I hate being the woman who falls. Last Sunday, I missed a step that I'd always thought would trip me some day.

I was at church. There was a chair and I thought I'd take a load off, so I put my right hand on the back of it in case it skittered away from under me as I turned to sit.

I forgot about the odd half step in front of it and instead of sitting or even turning, I rocked that chair backward on two legs and proceeded to splay over it.

Great, an embarrassing moment.

Then, the pain hit.

Did you ever notice that for a hard fall, it takes more time for pain to arrive? What is that? Is my brain temporarily out of service? Do hard knocks take longer to traverse my neural pathways? Do I have clutz's block?

"Are you okay?" a half dozen voices said in unison.

"I, I, I ... just give me a minute," I said as the bell of pain continued to chime. I sat there with my mouth open and my eyes unfocused.

When the chair had rocked backward, the seat had come up deep under my right breast and made contact at my right rib. I dropped my left hand to the floor and over-extended my ring and middle fingers. Wait, I needed my middle finger for important driving messages. And my right knee hit the edge of the step.

Finally, the pain subsided enough for me to say something.

"Sh...," I edited half way through a non-church word. "That felt like a mammogram!"

Everybody laughed. My right breast had just encountered the same kind of smash and pull maneuver that a sadistic technician had once performed on it during a procedure that left me sore for a couple of weeks.

I sat very still for a bit while people tut-tutted over me and repeated their question. Finally, I got up slowly and said, "I'm okay now. Thank you."

I hate being the center of that kind of attention. Then, I shuffled to the back of the sanctuary and sat down for the services, fiddling with a little bottle of Aleve that I had in my bag for just such gymnastic adventures at the altar. I endured while a few more people patted me on the shoulder as they moved toward their places. I pulled out gum. I don't have grandkids, but I keep gum in my purse for long sermons. The kids around me love this. I have learned to chew without actually looking like I'm masticating. It's a gift. I'll show you how if you want.The kids are never that great at being discreet and I think the minister is on to me.

I kept my head down and bolted home right after the benediction. There was no way I could stay and chat.

When I got home, I brought Mike into the bathroom with me while I looked for evidence of my self-abuse.

Nothing.

Seriously? My middle finger felt like it might be broken and even went numb as Mike poked and prodded like a TV doctor.

"I don't feel anything broken."

"Well then, look at this."

To hell with my middle finger and my sore knee. I lifted my right arm to show him the rib where I landed on the edge of the chair.

Nothing.

It just looked like I was flashing him the high beams with my arm raised in the air. He raised one eyebrow. I hate when he does that.

"I really did hit it. Hard."

"I have no doubt you did, but I don't think you broke a rib. Does it hurt when you breathe?" He even sounded like a TV doctor

"No. Not at all, but it hurts when I reach for anything or bounce."

"So don't reach for anything or bounce," he said.

"Thank you, Doctor Mike."

"No problem. Do you want me to look at your knee?"

"No, it's just sore, not flattened by a truck."

"Ice and Aleve, then."

"Got it," I muttered. I finally lowered my shirt, as if a bruise might have appeared while we still talked.

Nothing.

Then, I spent the next four days trying to keep from reaching or bouncing. Or being compressed. All week, people seemed to want to hug me. It was impossible. I lived on a regimen of Aleve and ice until last night when I thought I could feel a little less swelling in my rib and remembered less often that I had squashed a melon.

That night, I dreamed that my right breast was six inches longer than the other one. I woke up from this very realistic dream after sleeping only four hours. When I prepared to get into the shower, I happened to look in the mirror again.

I had a black and purple bruise the size of my open hand almost completely hidden under all that fluff. When Doctor Mike got home, I brought him back into the bathroom to show him evidence of my pain.

"The stupid bruises always appears when it's starting to feel better."

"Wow. That really looks like someone is abusing you."

"Yeah, that would be me."

And he hugged me, but not too tightly.

Thank you for listening, jb

The Truth Revealed in Your Crystal Ball

I don't have enough time to do any bit of writing justice today. I resent that. I find myself thinking as if I'm talking with candor to my students:

Be prepared. Unless you're part of the 1%, your dreams will be crushed. What about all that joy with which you contemplated your future? Useless, all of it. Forget hope. Forget the American dream of working hard at what you love and earning money at it. Just resign yourself doing drudge work that looks a little like what you used to like to do in your free time so that you can earn enough money to get by.

There's an inverse relationship between how much you like your job and how much money you can make. That's because nobody wants to do the truly crappy jobs, so they pay better. You can earn a decent living driving a garbage truck. Did you know that? Then, because you're unhappy, you can leave people's garbage strewn about the highway and drag the bin half way down the road in an act of weekly passive aggression because the kid put it in the wrong spot and you don't want to bother leaving a note. Nobody can read your writing anyway and you can't spell. But you can earn a decent living driving garbage.

Wait. You should check the color of your skin. There may be corollaries to that inverse relationship. If you have dark skin and smooth hair, you might earn more money doing what you don't like to do because your parents began to grill you in the second grade to get your math facts right and told you that an A- is as good as an F. No worries. If you play your cards right, you'll become a low-level manager at a fortune 500 company with a slightly larger dumpster-sized cubicle. You'll wonder why your workers stare right through you when you try your parents' management skills on them. You won't be any happier, but you'll have some money to spend on your misery.

If you have dark skin and curly hair, you're pretty much fucked because our current President makes it okay to keep you in shackles. You'll be harassed more often by teachers. You'll be accused of crimes you didn't commit. You'll be imprisoned more often. You might even get arrested while waiting for a friend too long in front of a store or shot in your own car by a police officer who believes you stole that car because he could never afford it even though your wife and child are inside it with you.

If you're a woman, you'll earn only three-quarters what your male cohorts will earn. If you confront your bosses, they'll tell you that the men have families to support and secretly call you a bitch when you leave the room. You'll have to learn how to dance away from the guy who you know will stick his fingers under your skirt if he thinks no one else can see. If you work full time and are married, you'll do most of the chores at home anyway because that's what you're supposed to do. Be smart, marry a man who knows how to plug in a vacuum cleaner and load a washing machine. Then, leave the cat puke lying in his shoe for a while and see what happens. Throw a red sweater in with his underwear and T-shirts a few weeks after the honeymoon and let him imagine wearing pink underwear until it fades. If he does the laundry after that, you're set for life. Then, without much effort, you'll have converted the home to a more equal place. If he yells at you, file for divorce without waiting to see if he'd change a diaper. That shit is not funny in the home.

And if you're a privileged white male, you still have to work. You have to make more money than your wife to be considered a real man. Don't even think of being a stay-at-home dad. The real word for that is 'unemployed.' You'll have to learn to fall down and not cry. You'll have to go to college when robots take over your manufacturing job and the mines become more automated. Even after you get a degree in computer science, you'll have to work ten hours a day in a warehouse containing a hundred and fifty cubicles each with a footprint smaller than a dumpster.

There will always be that guy who opens your lunch in the refrigerator in the break room and steals your cookie. There's that guy who interrupts you every time you have a bright and shining idea at the brainstorming meeting, then tries to pass it off as his own later in the meeting. It'll work and if you complain, you'll look like you're whining. There will always be someone who switches his broken chair for yours or his sticky keyboard or some other nonsense that the company handed out without caring if it worked or not. There will always be coffee so black there's an oil sheen on the top and a group-passive-agressive play over who makes the next pot.

There will always be a guy on the way to work who tailgates so tightly that you wonder what an airbag tastes like and you wonder how your very existence in the line of cars has become an annoyance to a person you never met in real life.

This is your future, that time you spend in your car, in your cubicle, on your couch in front of a television screen when the day's penance is paid. This is what you are destined to become. Welcome to the real world, asshole.

Yeah, I'm not sure it's a good idea for me to be honest with my students today. Candor is not always appreciated but it is an SAT word you need to memorize.

Thank you for listening, jb

Ringworm with Teeth and Extra Chores

You'd think that when school called a late-start, your day as a mom would be easier. Well, I can guarantee you that it wasn't.

This morning, well after some kids were already waiting outside for the bus to come, we got that text that pinged all three phones at once.

Late start. Yay! It snowed a little and we're still not done with winter. It was just a two-hour delay, but it was our only snow day this year. Yay! We all thought as we slowed into snow-day routine without thinking of the ramifications of a two-hour delayed start.

First, everyone was already awake and half ready for school and work. This meant that there was no true added value to anyone except Nick who watched Jim Gaffigan on TV for an hour and a half after he got out of the shower. He'll have to make up the school work anyway. It's not a zero sum gain. It's a lose-lose even though he won't recognize it as such.

When the students lose time in school, everyone has to work harder to make it up before testing happens. Stress will go up incrementally.

As for me, I still had to nag about the garbage and the recyclables, extra since I thought he might miss the garbage truck if he waited to take it out. I still had to talk about homework status and studying for the SAT. I still had to announce the hurry-ups and the better-get-goings, only this time, they happened almost twice. Remember, we were pretty far into our routine the first time before we got the late-start texts.

I still had to make lunch, but I also had to make Nick a coffee because he said he might fall back to sleep for a while if I didn't. At the last minute, he announced that his lunch was too small. Too small. Too big. Every day I do the same thing and I still get it wrong. I had to scramble to make it right. That boy is this close to making his own lunches. This close.

Then, I had to do an extra load of laundry because the school informed Nick that the gym has a ringworm infection and his gym clothes might be infected.

Nice.

So, I'm running the dryer on extra-hot. Then, I'm going to run the clothes through the washer again just in case.

I hate having fungus, parasites, viruses, shit like that in my house. I get started looking at the Internet and get seriously grossed out. Those things have teeth? Since when do fungi have teeth? Sometimes those pictures don't actually match the search criteria, but some kind of microscopic worm with teeth is what I'd expect to see when I looked up ringworm and so there it was, along with photos of the worst case of ringworm ever seen. I can't unsee that.

Don't look that shit up on the Internet. Just don't do it.

So now, everyone has departed. The laundry is drying and almost ready for round two. I've already had my cup of coffee for the day. And I'm an hour and a half behind in my morning schedule.

See what I mean?

You get awarded with a late-start day for snow and you end up somehow doing more work rather than less. Plus, the image of that worm with the four teeth is going to gnaw its way through your brain all day as you try to get back on track.

Thank you for listening, jb