On being a cripple
I’m going to need a new set of drinking glasses before this is all over.
I hate talking about my foot. My foot is a pretty obvious injury, though, so I get a lot of questions, and I hate how every conversation turns into a game of twenty questions about a broken foot. It’s really not very interesting, and I don’t want your looks of pity and sympathy. Sometimes I’m able to bite my tongue and answer the questions, and sometimes I can’t. Mostly it depends on how high I am at the time. I don’t know what my deal with hyrdocodone is. I probably already told the cough syrup story, but these pills are killer when they kick in. I have a new appreciation for that House doctor show. Anyhow, I don’t want to talk about my foot. I want to talk about the weather and what everyone did over the weekend and the strengths and weaknesses of the Copenhagen interpretation over the many worlds quantum model and all that stupid normal stuff. So I’ll gripe about my foot here and get it all out of the way at once.
For the basic stuff, my bone fragments have apparently found purchase, and my heel aches pretty much constantly. I’ve gone back to sleeping on the couch so that I don’t need to move the pillows back and forth, and as a result of that and the fact that the cast restricts movement, I haven’t been sleeping well. I’m taking the painkillers again, though only occasionally, having decided that the benefits outweigh the side effects. Maybe I’m addicted. Who knows? I guess I’ll find out in two or three weeks when I run out.
I carry a bookbag around with me so that I can carry things while my hands are occupied with the crutches. I’ve been using this to go shopping, and I’ve found very little trouble with it. I imagine that some dude carrying around a bag probably makes stores a little nervous, but I also figure they realize that some dude with a bum foot isn’t going to be able to run very fast. With the exception of a door here and there, most people realize that I don’t want any help and leave me be and everyone’s happy. The occasional attacks on my self-sufficiency are annoying at best (thanks for helping out, by the way, mom and dad. I finally did take my shirts out of the dryer), even if they are understandable. People are basically nice, at least some of the time, and they just want to help. Pride may be a sin, but it’s such a satisfying one, so I just want to do things myself. So far I’ve only been challenged on account of the bag once. I normally shop for my yuppie beer and occasional liquor at the package store next to the Publix run by the Indian dude, since it’s super convenient and they have a pretty good selection of weird beers. Once in a while, though, I go looking for something really off the wall, and one of these inclinations took me to Green’s this past weekend. I ended up getting a new Dogfish Head beer, one that they claim is based on a 9,000 year old brew dug up somewhere in China (it was pretty tasty, strong grape flavor), and they complained about the bag. The Indian (I guess he might be Paki. I’ve never asked.) dude next to the Publix has never cared.
I’m not terribly graceful to begin with, and these crutches have made me a bit of a klutz. After breaking a couple of glasses I learned not to leave things on the parts of the kitchen counter I grab for balance, but I’ve still managed to break one of my drinking beakers, several glasses, a plate and that crappy citrus juicer that I had. That thing was a real pain to clean. Where should I go to buy a new juicer?
I’ve been driving into work again, and, though I started out by hitting the gas with my toes (the doc said I could put weight on my foot if not for the fact that it’s stuck at an obtuse angle), I’ve now switched to a total left-foot style. I’m not sure if this is safe or not. There are some ideas about brain being able to apply concepts learned with one half of the body to the other half, such as with the Half Keyboard, but I don’t know how that works here. Only one foot is involved, so I don’t know if the reflexes are remembered as left/right or inner/outer. Probably the latter. It’s been working pretty ok so far, though I can’t drive for long before my right leg starts to hurt from holding it out of the way. I tried leaning it over into the passenger seat, but I found that I tended to knock the gear shift into neutral. Automatic transmission is both my salvation and my bane.
I have no idea what to expect as far as walking again. I had assumed that I’d put one some pudge now that I’m more sedentary than usual, but I’ve actually lost a few pounds since the wreck, even though, after a brief flirtation with delivery pizza and Chinese, I’m eating the same quantity and quality of food as usual. My next appointment with the bone doctor is on September 11th, and the receptionist apologized for the date. Yeah, we should remember the events of that day. It was a tragic, horrible thing. I watched it happen on TV like everyone else, my roommate at the time was from New York and was worried about his family and friends, and I was part of the same confusion and uncertainty that everyone felt. But jeez, can we move on already? Maybe 8% or so of the country has a reason for feeling a real, direct emotional reaction to that day, but for the rest of us it was the death of some hideous architecture, some people you never knew and a symbol both of the strength of our economic system and the horrors of our economic classes. Yeah, that September 11th was a real bad day, but the rest of them are just days.
So, anyone seen any good movies lately? I thought the Simpsons movie was kind of disappointing, though it had several good moments. I did get around to watching that copy of Rashomon that I forked over a big pile of cash for (freaking Criterion Collection), and I’m not real sure what to think of it. It’s set in medieval Japan, but it’s more of a suspense movie than the usual Western-styled samurai movie I’m familiar with from Kurosawa. I thought it was pretty good, but I think I like Hitchcock more for that sort of feeling, and I like Kurosawa more when he’s paying homage to John Ford.