Dear Friends:
Wednesday afternoon, I was lifting weights in my living room, while blasting dance music and staring out the front window at the activities of my neighbors, which is mostly confined to gossiping and getting the mail, as far as I am able to discern. In the middle of my routine, probably around #25 of the 30 reps of the lateral raise (the one where you lift your 10-lb weights straight out to your sides at shoulder level, while repeating to yourself, i want to die! i want to die!), my phone rang. Now, there are very few people I actually enjoy speaking on the phone with1, and this particular caller will most definitely never find themselves on that list, ever. So then I was crabby, and more than a little wound up. I felt rushed and pressured and irritated by this caller’s request, and also I was interrupted during my lifting, so that I somehow got stuck at that level of intensity permanently. I ran out the door, late to lunch. I called Heather and bitched about the phone call loudly, even though I was on my way to pick her up. I felt like maybe I wouldn’t have enough time for complaining while she was with me in the car, so I had to get some pre-ranting in ahead of time. Priming the engine, so to speak. We went to lunch with Nancy, and lunch was good, even though I couldn’t stop wiggling. Also, I felt like I was talking at about twice my usual speed, which I’ve been told is already a little overwhelming sometimes. After lunch, I was in my car, and I was pissed as hell about being in my car. The thing about the car is that it’s a highly unproductive environment. When I’m at home or anywhere else I usually do work, I can be doing about fifteen different things at once. In the car, I’m pretty much limited to talking on the phone (reference the above for my feelings on that), or text messaging, which is, um, risky, as I’ve discovered. I can also check my email on my phone, and I only do that when I really have to, because the time commitment to browsing via t-zones is staggering; sometimes I think I’d be better off calling Bobbie and asking her to run next door, open Outlook Express on my laptop, and read all my email out loud to me over the phone. Anyway, the rest of Wednesday and all of Thursday were like that, too. I was out constantly: lunch, coffee, dinner, movie, sleepover, coffee, errands, lunch, coffee, errands, dinner. In all that time, I had about two minutes alone, and therefore zero minutes to work out. The best I managed was taking the stairs to the 14th floor to pick up my check from someone who once again forgot they were supposed to pay me. And the thing that happens when I don’t work out is that the excess energy forms a covalent bond with the guilty feelings, and creates an entirely new molecule that causes me to become one very tense and angry girl2. Late Thursday, I finally found a means by which to rid my body of that contaminant. Some of the guilt must have remained, though, because that night, I had a stressful dream. I was walking, and my legs wouldn’t move right. I could hardly bend at the hip at all, and stretching hurt. I knew exactly what was wrong, because it’s something I worry about all the time: my hip injury, which makes that group of muscles tight, and which I’ve been working on stretching out forever (now that my year-long hamstrings project is complete). Some people dream about sex. Some people dream they can fly, or breathe underwater, or talk to animals. But there are probably only three people in the entire universe who could possibly have a nightmare about their hip flexors, and I, my friends, am one of them. I’d have bored the hell out of Sigmund Freud.Jenni
1 The grammatically-correct version of this sentence reads, “Now, there are very few people with whom I actually enjoy speaking on the phone,” but it sounds too geeky even for me. I’m sorry.
2 One of my theories about the muscles in my forearms is that they’re not from lifting weights at all, but from clutching the steering wheel in a rage.