breakneck

tonight as i sit and watch the us open, i am acutely aware that my left elbow is aching more than my right. and appropriately i can only attribute it to tennis.

since tentatively trying out the racket for the first time a couple of weeks ago and noticing no ill effects in my still healing (right) elbow, i've been dragging haley to the court at every opportunity. and while she's in florida, partying it up with the family, i've been constructing my own tennis camp: practicing my serves with mega, working on my backhand with chrissie, rereading the inner game, and watching the us open at all other opportunities. i even signed up to play singles in the fall, for the first time.

so, yes, my left forearm is a bit tender. and i welcome it. a bit of pain in the name of strengthening is a far cry better than what i've felt in the wake of injury. i'm a week away from the three month anniversary of my dislocation and though i know it can take longer than this to heal, i'm subscribed to the school of fake-it-till-you-make-it and refuse to back down. when it hurts, i figure that's a sign i'm sufficiently replacing the torture of formal physical therapy.

anyway, much like my reentry to tennis, life seems to be hitting a steady pace. a breakneck pace, but steady nonetheless. the boys' schedules have stabilized. soccer two nights a week. taekwondo one night. trumpet lessons another. and drums yet another. it hasn't left much time in the evening for us to breathe, but then tonight luke finished trumpet practice, dinner, and shower with half an hour to spare before bedtime and he said, 'what do i do now mommy?' to which i replied, 'whatever you want' and realized that we'd come out on the other side of the first three weeks of school, with thirty minutes of air. and it was simply divine. and so i offered a silent prayer of gratitude.

d: may the pace of my backhand match the pace of my life: steadily breakneck.
b: i've found my footing for the fall season...of school.
g: time to spare.

siren

On the girl's brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

In a few breaths' time I will speak some sad words to you. But you must hear them the same way we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know, something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.

-excerpted from Little Bee by Chris Cleave

i always say i prefer the tragically sad novels. when asked my favorite book i waffle between the books i recall shedding the most tears on. the stories of sadness draw me in and it is only there that i find escape and a calling stronger than that of the pen.

tonight after my shower i looked at my laptop and then at the book i'm absorbed completely into. ordinarily when given a quiet, awake, opportunity to write there is no hesitation. but the siren song is calling my name..

d: a choice so sweet for you
b: i have scars and sad stories of my own

g: i am alive

early-ish

i'm not a person who needs a lot of sleep. despite my tendency to fall asleep at any seated opportunity, i can function pretty capably on a steady six hours per night. but something is definitely amiss since school started.

i've got a throbbing pain behind my eyes telling me to close them through the day. i'm falling asleep with overhead lights on, mid conversation. i'm waking with a headache at 6:30. in and out of the bed until i take todd to school at 8:30. and then some days, when i can squeeze it in, i crawl back into bed at 8:45 and try to replace what is clearly missing.

yesterday was one of those mornings. i don't work on mondays generally, so after i dropped off todd i snuggled back up next to haley. some time later we woke up and haley said she thought to herself, 'please don't let it be 10,' as she pulled her wrist out from around me to check her watch. we both focused our fuzzy eyes on the dial and read: 11:23. 'holy shit!'

and still last night at 11:15pm we were both foggy and sleepy and wondering what's happened to us. we hadn't even been up twelve hours.

i don't have it all figured out yet. but i have some ideas. i think we're going to get a white noise machine for our bedroom to help with the mornings. at least haley should be able to sleep through the breakfast, bus, and business of school. afternoon naps are going to a mandatory part of my day. thirty minutes of power napping should carry me through the evening. and once again i'm going to break my caffeine cycle. (how'd that creep back in there? i have no idea.)

it's amazing really how many things happen when we're sleeping. human growth hormone.. leptin.. digestion.. serotonin.. in short: sanity and thinness. and when i'm not rested? irritable fatness.

so, in the interest of reducing my crabby bloat, i'm heading to bed early. well, early-ish.

d: satiating sleep.
b: i have the most comfortable bed in the world.
g: clean sheets and haley's getting off work early.

os

in a family with four, no make that five (or even six if i count haley's) computers, i'd like to think we could keep at least one per person in working order. but right now, of the five computers in our house, only one is in 'perfect' working condition. two are inoperable. and my primary laptop is operating at a fraction of what it should be.

sigh
deep sigh

i like to think i'm a savvy computer person. i mean, i can muddle through all sorts of nonsense when it comes to operating systems ranging from windows to vista and even mac now, thanks to haley's imac. but this is ridiculous.

todd's desktop computer won't recognize the monitor, which i think is the fault of the monitor since it's done this sporadically on multiple computers. todd's laptop computer was about a million degrees today when i attempted to power it up from 'sleep'. and when it finally came alive it was 'seeing double'. literally two screens stacked horizontally on the monitor. after resetting it with battery removal and the whole nine, it will power up with a single image - but a psychedelic image - as though looking through a puddle of oily water. umm ok.

as for my laptops.. well, my work computer only has 10% of the hard drive free and that's apparently not enough to actually run the os with any sort of reliability. and since upgrading it isn't in the fiscal plan for my department, i'm going to have to off-load some data and cross my fingers. my other laptop - it technically works fine. except that i never bothered to enter the product keys for the office applications and now i'm running out of 'unauthorized uses'.. and i have no idea where i put the key information. i mean none. it's somewhere in between the top of the fridge in my snellville house and the attic of the yorkshire house.

sigh
deep sigh

oh and did i mention that i can't find the cables to connect the printer and even if i did find them, i'm not sure how to get the printer on the network. if there even is a network anymore. but i guess it doesn't matter if we have a printer, since we don't really even have computers.

and that's all i have to say about that.

d: an os that actually operates
b: i feel a little better now.
g: an inkling of how to fix 3 out of 4. an inkling.

bender

i consider myself fairly aware when it comes to gender variance. my son has long hair and my girlfriend is occasionally called 'sir' from behind. so, needless to say, i don't see myself bound to gender norms in any way. perhaps because of that, or perhaps in spite of, i've found myself mistaking boys and girls, men and women, more than once over the past couple of years. when it happens i smile to myself. i get a certain sense of pleasure when i see folks expressing themselves outside the norm. i feel comforted that we're all different and yet, we're all the same. we all want to be understood for what's inside, where our true self really is.

in the synchronistic way things always happen to me, yesterday was a crash course in gender empathy. i read a disturbing article about a 17 month old baby boy who was beaten to death by his mother's boyfriend for being too feminine.
a 17 month old baby.
a baby.
the man was trying to 'toughen him up' he claimed. i read the article on my phone as i left work and couldn't stop thinking about it, all the way to bedtime. i wanted to share it with haley and weep over it, but i didn't bring it up.

after dinner, we all piled up in the living room to watch a movie i'd rented a couple days prior. billy elliot. i rented it because i heard it was a wonderful dance movie and a hilarious comedy. nobody ever told me that it would be a study in gender typing. a touching and heartwarming exploration of gender, even. (at least from what i could make out of the film, with the crippling dialect and less than stellar speakers on my tv.)

combine that experience with the article i read earlier and the gender stumper that todd and i puzzled over at the orthodontist (we never did decide male or female..) and i was definitely having a gender bender of a day.

i'm still sad this morning. as i sifted through my closet of girlie clothes and selected the perfect earrings to go with my outfit, and as i considered what color filmy skirt i wanted to buy for ballet class, and as i applied my mascara at the stoplight waiting to get on 400, i felt grateful and then guilty for being grateful. grateful that my gender is so simple. and guilty because it seems unfair to celebrate that simplicity when the very most innocent among us are being killed because theirs is not.

[sidenote: of course we don't know if aforementioned baby's gender would have been simple or not. a 17 month old baby is not expressing a gender. they are in fact expressing innocence.]

d: a compassionate society
b: my compassionate heart
g: there but for the grace of god go i...

weightless

when i was a kid there was an amusement park near our house that i remember going to several times. they had one ride there that i particularly loved and i rode it over and over again. nobody else liked it the way i did, so i would park myself there and ride it until we left. it looked like a barrel and you would get in and stand against the side. when the door closed it would spin very fast and the floor would drop out, leaving you pressed against the wall by centrifugal force. weightless. that's it. it would spin for a few minutes and then the floor would come back up and it would stop. my mom found it nauseating. i found it exhilarating.

i think it foreshadowed how i grew to find life most exhilarating, as well. when i'm spinning in a frenzy and the only thing holding me up is momentum, even when everyone around me is dizzy and ready to rest, i'll say, 'can i go again?'

the summer's been like that. i feel this way every school-starts-in-two-days-eve but for many reasons this summer's been more of a whirlwind than most. from house on the market cleaning through to moving, with vacation travel, work, and a broken arm thrown in the mix- it's dizzying.

my mom's been here visiting for the past week, along with my aunt. they arrived the day after i returned from a week in florida with the boys and haley. also the day after i had a good-bye dinner with one of my closest friends, moving across the country as we speak. this was the first week that todd's spent in the house since we moved in. his room was still half in boxes, which i had to step over and around as i borrowed it for the week. on top of that, this was the first week of additional responsibilities at work - responsibilities i'm excited to take on (for a change) - requiring international conference calls every day at the schedule and whim of my foreign colleagues. oh and yesterday, we all piled in and went to meet the boys' new teachers and see their schools.

all good things.
but spinning like crazy, nonetheless.

one thing i generally do a good job of in my insane spinning is setting aside time for myself. the gym. a book. sex. writing. a nap. at least a couple of those a day. it's the real life equivalent of the euphoria i felt when the floor dropped out of the barrel and i was weightless.

i haven't done such a good job of that lately. fatigue has been bearing down on me in every seated moment and yet naps have been elusive. my nighttime sleep has been tormented with ridiculous dreams that leave me even more exhausted and waking with a headache. i haven't been to the gym in nearly two weeks and the runs i have managed to squeeze in have been abbreviated by the heat or time or both. i've opened my book to the same two pages every night for weeks and well, everything else has fallen off my ability list too.

but today i finally got back in the gym and did a complete upper body workout reminiscent of pre-fracture days. it felt incredible, despite the strange noises and contortions my elbow offered in protest. i took care of some birthday shopping for the boys, took a nap, made the necessary $175 school supply excursion. and now here i am writing and the night is young...

still spinning? absolutely.
but centrifugal force is a wonderful thing.

d: a night as weightless as my day
b: rehab complete!
g: school starts on monday.