Even the Mona Lisa is Falling Apart

Upon returning to grad school, I decided to take up a former love of mine:  rugby.  Thunderbird has a team, and I decided to join.  Part of playing the game is, you know that eventually something like this might happen:

Especially when you're beyond 18 years old and don't absorb the ground the way you used to.  If you don't know how to read x-rays, that collar bone sticking up there should be down kissing the scapula on the right side of that gap.  So exactly how did it happen? 

Well, we had an all day tournament last Saturday with teams coming from UCLA, New Mexico Tech, some engineering school in Prescott, and some other school with a lot of Marines down in Yuma.  Our scrum half got hurt in the first game, so they moved me to scrummy in the afternoon to play UCLA for third place.  It was a tough game and we were up with about eight minutes to go in the second half.  I broke free for about a 30-yard run.  Had I been endowed with any wheels whatsoever, I would have scored.  But since I have all the speed of a grandma pushing a grocery cart, three of the UCLA boys caught up to me around the 22-meter line and attempted to dribble me like a basketball.  But the joke was on them, because I didn't bounce more than a couple inches.  Instead, my collar bone popped right up over top of the AC joint like the periscope on a submarine.  It was a quick sharp pain on impact, followed immediately by a flash of numbness around the joint.  It was as though my body was telling me, "You don't want to feel what just happened, boss.  So I'm just gonna intercept all communication from the nerves in that quadrant before they make it to your central nervous system."  

I shuffled to the sideline to put a pair of shorts on over my game shorts and had a teammate drive me to the ER around the corner.  Walking in there was like arriving in Barter Town in Thunderdome.  The waiting room was jammed with sick, poor, trashy, coughing, moaning people and nurses who had obviously been dealing with them all day.  It took me nearly four hours to get my x-rays and a prescription for Percocet.  In the end, the physicians assistant told me what I already knew (that my collar bone was separated) and that there wasn't much to do for it but put it in a sling and wait for it to grow back together.  She referred me to an orthopedic specialist, with whom I have an appointment on Wednesday, and sent me home to get stoned on Oxycodone and Nyquil.  That's a heckuva sleeping aid right there.  I tried Ambien once.  It's nothing compared to the O & N express.  The O & N will run you over.  In fact, I hear that train a'coming right now.  I'm bound for the abyss.  See y'all in the morning.  If morning ever comes. 

in-noc-u-ous: adjective

1.  not harmful or injurious; harmless: an innocuous home remedy.

2.  not likely to irritate or offend; inoffensive; an innocuous remark.

3.  not interesting, stimulating, or significant; pallid; insipid: an innocuous novel.

Writing for public consumption can be a funny thing.  Sometimes when you write something, you go to great lengths describing details about environment, emotions, developing direction and looking for ways to add a layer of suspense.  

Then you get lazy in the denouement and splash a few drips of extraneous ink on the page to bring your story to a close quickly because it's three in the morning and your eyes are burning.  

And over the course of the next week, you discover that the one thing that really moved your readers was not the carefully crafted story, but the chaff you meant to discard that somehow wound up on the page instead.

When I wrote about the aftermath of the marathon, a post of over 1,500 words, I included the following 12 words in the last paragraph:

"I took a hot shower followed by a glorious three-hour naked nap."

I thought it was a pretty innocuous detail, one that most would just skim over and not think twice about.  Yet here in the comments and elsewhere, that is the single most remarked-upon detail of the whole post.  I don't know why.  I thought more people would be acquainted with the practice.  It has remarkable rejuvenating abilities.  I think if science could talk, it would testify to that fact.  I stumbled upon the knowledge on my own back in high school, but have since learned that four out of five physical therapist agree.  If you consult ancient Confucian healing texts, you'll find it there as well.  The next time you go through a period of intense physical exertion, I recommend you give science a try.  Then tell me I'm wrong.
 

Show Me "Dim Mak"

Seems like the first term here at Thunderbird, they set you on fire and turned you loose on your own to see how you cope.  The work load in terms of deliverables (homework) was out of control.  In the rare free moments between studying, I was either on the treadmill screaming obscenities at hallucinated visions of my stats professor or at the corner gas station binge eating.  You could say that in my first semester of school in seven years, I showed some cracks.

Burger may be larger than it appears

That was so last semester.

This semester, I am feeling much more zen.  I am a slim Buddha with great big fat earlobes.  There's still a lot of work to do, but my vision and planning is much improved.  I have figured out how to arrange my schedule to mitigate the bottlenecks of work that inevitable develop.  I am less stressed out, getting my eating habits under control (sidebar:  you'd be amazed at the things I justified eating because I was training for a marathon.) 

It's as though I can sense all things at the same time, the life force running through all dimensions of creation, and I know what is coming my way.  You can think of being in "The Zone," when you can feel oncoming objects and are able to use the object's energy against it.  Kung fu stuff like that.  I don't think I've quite made it that far, but I'm on my way.

Hopefully by March, I will have achieved that state, because that is when I leave for China.  And I need to be crushing bricks Frank Dux-style by then.  No, I'm not planning to compete in an underground kumate.  More like crushing finance bricks.  I'm really pumped for this opportunity just over the horizon.  Living in China will be something unlike I've ever experienced before.  The more I find out from others, the more I think the trip may be hazardous to my health.  Apparently the air pollution is ridiculously out of control, to the point that many locals wear surgeons masks on the street to avoid breathing the unfiltered air.  Not really the kind of "danger" I look for when considering my next adventure, but it should be fun nonetheless.  Until then, I will continue to harness the energy of the universe around me, preparing to go palm-down on some bricks.

I see you, Accounting.  And I crush you.