finslippy

Christmas Eve Eve.

shopping list where's my shopping list crap did I buy enough rolls? Do I need to buy more liquor? Crap crap crap crap

Why hello, and welcome. Welcome to my holiday-addled brains.

wrap more wrap FASTER no WRAP SLOWER but BETTER where are the gift tags did I even buy gift tags this year? Crap crap CRAP

This isn't even an accurate representation of the activity up there, brain-wise. This is way too coherent to be accurate. In reality, my brain right now is a soggy mess of tinsel and nog. There are no words, just images of the Perfect Christmas that Will Be. My cortex is trying to sort it all out while my primitive brain finds whatever stale cookies I have and directs the arm-parts to put them in the mouth-hole.

do I have enough side dishes? I think I have enough but what if I don't? WILL EVERYONE GET UP AND LEAVE?

We're hosting Christmas for the second year in a row, and I'm actually really excited (albeit a teeny bit preoccupied and maybe a smidgen frantic). I love planning these things, although in the actual execution I sometimes wonder what the hell I was thinking. My entire family is coming, plus friends, plus Scott's parents. I'm not sure where I'm going to seat everyone, so I'm instituting a rule: Jews sit on the porch. Hell, they're Russian Jews! They like the cold!

Hide the rolls from the cat SHE WILL EAT THEM hide the cookies from the cat SHE WILL EAT THEM TOO let the cat play with the wrapped presents THERE IS NO FIGHTING IT

Ha, ha, I'm not putting the Jews on the porch. I am feeding them ham, though, which may be just as bad. While I do it I will shout, "You're here to worship MY messiah now, suckers! Eat your CHRISTMAS HAM!"

My audience is going to think I'm completely losing it now could I please shut up about the Jews in my family? Okay shutting up now

Anyway. I am off to contemplate and re-contemplate tomorrow and how the timing of all this cooking and cleaning should go, and so I will not be posting again until after Christmas. At that time, I will report on the holiday goings-on in the Finslippy household, and whether Santa got Henry all the presents he asked for (hint: yes) and if I managed to poison anyone (unlikely, consider the ham is already cooked, and everything else is vegetables, but you never know) and how much liquor was consumed.

Happy Everything, readers!

Join me, won't you, as I wallow for a bit?

My physical therapist is giving me a complex. Is he supposed to do that? Is that included in his list of services?

I was hoping to just get this shoulder pain treated, but apparently the rest of me is in complete shambles. It's a wonder that I'm ambulatory. The first thing he observed, as every medical professional I have ever seen or walked by or made out with wants to tell me, is that my shoulders are hunched forward. Yes, I know, and you know what? They've always been like that, and there's apparently nothing I can do about it. I am a freak. There, are you happy? Are you satisfied, medical professionals of the world? I have freaky narrow shoulders that are bizarrely tipped forward. I thought it was a likeable slouch, but apparently it is WRONG and CRAZY and needs to be TSK-TSKED over.

And that's not all!

"Did you know that your torso is twisted over to one side?" the therapist asks.

I sigh. I actually did know that. "It's come up," I said.

"Does your back hurt?"

"Sort of. Yes. Pretty much always." I like to just not think about it, Physical Therapist Guy, but now that you're reminding me, OW. THANKS.

Then:

"Your right hip is twisted, as well."

"That might be because of the, uh, club foot."

"You have a club foot?"

"Well, I did, at least that's what they called it, but they treated it when I was little. So now it's okay."

He frowns. "Except it's thrown off your entire right side."

"I'm sorry," I murmur. Why am I apologizing?

Then he tries to twist my neck in some sort of impossible direction.

"Ow."

"That hurts?"

No, ow is my mantra. "Yup."

"Your neck is extraordinarily stiff. I could only move it this much. " He shows me a tiny increment with his two fingers. "I should be able to move it this much," he says, and swivels his head 360 degrees. (I exaggerate, but less than you might think.)

Well, kudos. Aren't you nimble! I will call you Mr. Nimbles! "Wow," I say.

"Yeah. That's a problem."

And it is only the beginning of my problems. The biggest one is that, after seeing him four times, after having been manipulated and stretched and prodded and told how stiff and inflexible I am, the pain in my arms is worse than ever. "Your body's not healing itself," he tells me. Then he takes my blood pressure, which is, according to him, alarmingly low. Technically I shouldn't be alive. All my blood should be pooling around my ankles—my freaky ankles.

I'm supposed to go for blood tests, because, I don't know, he's concerned about my liver? Honestly I stopped listening after a while. I should probably just go to someone else, someone who'll make me feel not quite so misshapen and hopeless. He's not saying things I didn't already know, so I can't blame him entirely. But no one else has made me feel quite so unfixable.

He also told me not to eat too much sugar, because it will impede my healing. But really, after you make me feel that bad, you think I'm not going to go home and eat cookies? Well, you don't know everything, Mr. Body Smarts Guy.

How many neurotics does it take to make a fire?

Alice: Hey, why don't we make a fire?
Scott: Why would we do that?
Alice: Because fires are nice.
Scott: I was going to work…
Alice: You could work right here, right by the fire.
Scott: eyes Alice with suspicion.
Alice: Okay, if you don't want to—
Scott: No, let's do it. Okay.
He goes to retrieve the logs and kindling, because Alice is a princess who does not wish to dirty her princess hands.
Scott: I should have cleaned out the fireplace, it's filled with ash.
Alice: Don't forget to open the flue.
Scott: Can you get the newspaper sections we don't read?
Alice: Business and Sports, coming up.
There is crumpling.
Alice: These pages have colored ink on them. Are you supposed to burn colored ink? Isn't that like a carcinogen or something?
Scott: It's fine.
Alice: And you opened the flue?
Scott sighs.
Finally, there is something like a fire.
5 seconds later…
Scott: What did you do with the carbon monoxide detector?
Alice: It's in the basement, somewhere.
Scott: You took it out and I saw it down there, I saw it and I thought, that's a weird place for it to be but I didn't get it, and now I can't remember where it is, and we're probably going to poison ourselves.
Alice: There's one upstairs. That's enough, right? Do we need one down here, too?
Scott heads down to the basement.
He returns with no carbon monoxide detector. Meanwhile, the fire is almost out.
Scott: The fire's almost out.
Alice: I know, but see how there's that little bit in the back? I thought maybe if I left it alone it would come back.
Scott, sighing, restarts the fire and returns to the couch.
12 seconds later…
Scott: Are you feeling light-headed?
Alice: I was just thinking that. Crap.
Alice heads down to the basement, and returns with the carbon monoxide detector. She plugs it in. They watch it anxiously.
Alice: It's 0.
Scott: I still feel weird.
10 minutes later.
Alice: I'm going to bed.
Scott: Is the carbon monoxide making you tired?
Alice: Look, it's still 0. I'm just tired.
They look at the fire.
Alice: Can we leave it?
They attempt to stamp out the fire, using their various fire-related implements, but on it burns.
Alice: Now that we want it to go out, it won't go out.
Scott: It'll be fine.
Alice: Right. The smoke alarm is right there. It's fine, right? Right.
They go to bed, eyeing the dying embers nervously. Somehow, they all survive.
The next evening…
Scott: Did your lungs hurt you all day?
Alice: We're never making a fire again, are we.
Scott: I didn't say that, why would you say that?

Putting my brains on notice.

You may recall that a few months ago, my cat tried to kill me. Guess what? I am still suffering the consequences of calling my cat overweight and making fun of her butt. I have learned my lesson.

It seems that in the fall, I injured my bicep tendons, and according to my brand-new physical therapist, my neck holds untold amounts of tension (being both a chronic sloucher and a chronic typist) which means that I'm not getting enough circulation to the area to heal the damage. And lo, the inflammation, it has worsened, and this is why I scream whenever I have to lift my arms past my waist. This arm-lifting scenario seems to come up a lot, so that's why all the screams. Neighbors, do not call the police.

Today was my first p.t. appointment, and as I drove, cursing from the fucking pain (you see?), I told myself that I had to take whatever this therapist guy told me with a grain of salt. This is all going to get a little complicated, but here's why:

When I was pregnant with Henry, I developed all manner of repetitive strain injuries. Within months of beginning a job that required a lot of writing, I had developed a stunning array of symptoms in my arms and hands. I suffered shooting pains down both arms, numbness and tingling, and every other RSI symptom I had ever heard about. Eventually I was diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome, cubital tunnel syndrome, and thoracic outlet syndrome, which is pretty much every kind of syndrome you can have, in the RSI world. My doctor told me I had the worst case he'd seen in twenty years. I totally won the RSI Olympics. Not only could I not go near a keyboard—I couldn't button a shirt. I could not clip my nails, use a can opener, or hold a bag of groceries. I couldn't hold a book open or a phone to my ear. I did everything the professionals told me to do, but it only got worse. I went on disability from my job. I took loads of medications (after I had Henry, of course) and applied strips of lidocaine patches to my arms. Every day I went to some kind of therapist or doctor. This went on for two years.

Then I read about John Sarno. John Sarno's argument (simplified) is that these type of pain syndromes are a load of hooey, that something else is going on, some kind of complicated internal rage that the mind doesn't want to deal with, so it has shut off oxygen in the affected area, creating pain as a distraction. I read one of his books, and people, I started to improve. Just like that. Then I stopped the medication, I stopped the therapy, and lo, I got better. Within six months I was fine.

Ever since then I have approached any new kind of chronic problem with skepticism, and it's always worked. Clearly my brain is out to get me, too, because I've had a bunch. Vertigo! Vision problems! More vertigo! Chronic bladder pain! And each time, I've re-read Sarno's book, I've asked myself what was really going on, and my brain has muttered, okay, you got me, and the condition disappeared.

Except this time, damn it, it's just not. I have tried and tried to use the Power of the Mind to get past this, and it is not working one tiny bit. So, I don't know, maybe I really do have an actual injury. It still sounds fishy to me—after three months, it still hurts? Really? It's not like I'm lifting boulders every day, and I'm not ancient; shouldn't my body recover by itself? And yet, despite my attempts to minimize and dismiss what I thought was my brains creating another weirdo syndrome, the pain has only gotten worse. So physical therapy it is, but I'm not happy about it.

And listen, brain, if you are fucking with me again, so help me. I have just about had it with you.

Ah, boys.

So I'm on my way out for a walk the other day, and I stop in to tell Henry and his friend Sam that I am not, as it seems, leaving them all alone, as Scott is upstairs working. Henry replies, "Dad's here? Great, that means we can do whatever we want."
"And what, exactly, would that be?" I ask.
"Poop on the couch," Henry says. Needless to say, this cracks Sam's shit right up, and the two of them roll around on the floor, making jokes about couches and poop and pooping on couches as I locate my iPod and head out the door.

As Charlie the Dog drags me down the sidewalk, I turn on my third-favorite podcast, You Look Nice Today—the first and second being, respectively, The Sound of Young America and Jordan, Jesse Go!, although really, I don't like to rank my favorites, it's so crass—and the first thing I hear is guest John Hodgman saying, "Maybe I should come to your house and poop on your couch."

Couch-pooping jokes ensue. Meanwhile, I think deep thoughts about boys turning into men, men remaining boys, and that no matter what, the couch will always and forever remain the funniest furniture item upon which to imagine one's self pooping.

The End.