Pleasantly Demented

Well.  Clearly, my physical therapy plan of yoga and forcing myself on the elliptical despite pain is not working.  I am obsessively reading everything on the flicted ass interwebz about hamstrings.  Ice after exercise, heating pad before.  Overuse soft tissue injuries take a notoriously long time to heal, and can be more finicky than broken bones.  Evidently.  I've read message boards with people saying they are 3 months out and still cannot run.  This is absolutely unacceptable.  UNFUCKINGACCEPTABLE!  So.  Elliptical is out.  OUT.  Forcing through pain was a bad, bad, bad idea.  Yoga is still on.  Now, I am going to add more weights to the mix.  Nothing stupid like lunges or squats, although I can do warrior with no problem.  But I still feel it.  Not pain.  Just tightness.  By the time I was done with an hour of yoga and jumped on the elliptical, well, let's just say I went kinda stupid.  WENT?!  My good, sweet, baby jesus, Aimee!  I didn't "WENT" stupid.... fucking stars in heaven, I never left!

As you can see, I am a bit disgruntled with my body at the moment.  I am pissed, okay?  PISSED.

But that is beside the point.  Ha.  No it isn't.  That was the point.  Sometimes, ridiculous colloquialisms just get stuck in your head.  It was better than "be that as it may," though, yes?

Oh lord, I'm losing my ever lovin' mind.

So.  Am I the only person who actually keeps a running list of words I want to use?  You know, in a story or poem or whatnot.  Yes, I have a list of words and phrases that I find, discover, particulary like, whatever.  And when I find a use for one of them, I will delete it off my list.  Pretty good system, yes?  I think so.  I've done it since I was a kid, and it hasn't failed me yet.  The problem I am having currently is that I have a word that has been stuck in my fucking head for WEEEEKS.  It is not a particularly pretty word.  It does not have a particularly striking definition.  It's about as mundane and average a word as you can get.  So WHY can I not get this word out of my noggin?

Progeniture.   That is the word.  Fucking progeniture.  Nothing poetic.  Nothing pretty.  Not even anything ugly or cutting.  Just a dumbass word that means birth.  Hmmmm..... perhaps there is some heretofore undiscovered symbolism hidden in the deep recesses of my brain?  Birth.  It happened to me once.  I have begotten two.  None of them were much fun for me. 

And on top of THAT.... I have a song stuck in my head.  I actually have woken up many days in a row after having dreamt of this stupid ass song, and it just runs in a continuous loop in my skull cavity all damn day long. 


Casey Jones.  The Grateful Dead.   That's the song.  Fucking Casey Jones. 

Drivin' that train.
High on cocaine.
Casey Jones, you betta
watch your speed!

I saw that Amazon is in the business of  selling DIY gastric bypass kits, I wonder if they sell DIY home lobotomy kits, too.....Or would that just be an icepick and a little hammer? 

Oh, and in case you were wondering.  The answer is yes.  I indeed used the word flicted.  I'm bringin' it back, I tell ya.  Bringin' it back!

January 26, 2012

Woke up at 6:00 this morning.  No.  Let me rephrase.  I woke up at 3:45 this morning.  Ate a banana.  Emailed a friend.  Went back to sleep.  Then I woke up at 6:00.  Burned a candle.  Did yoga in the dark.  Watched the sun rise.

It was quiet.  And still.

I haven't run in 5 days.  I'm stretching, warrior posing, bridge posing, dog and cobra and binding.  Hopped on the elliptical a few times, not too hard.  Heating pad.  Bag of frozen peas.  Tons of Motrin.  The restraint I am showing surprises even me.  It's not in my nature to show restraint.  My nature demands that I fling the front door open and tear down the driveway barefoot in my underwear and a tank top and run until my feet bleed.

That's my nature.

It's taken a lot of maturity and restraint for me to nurse this funky, rebelling hamstring properly.

It's a testament to how badly I must run.  The idea of not being able to do it anymore is unacceptable. 

But now I am exhausted.  Work in an hour.  Boys have their driver's ed.  Yes.  STILL.  I know, right?

I need sleep.

You know what I want to buy?  A punching bag.  That would be some seriously unmitigated fun.  A punching bag.  Yes.  I think I will buy one.

Jake followed me around Wal-Mart this afternoon hollering, "No momma, please!  Don't hit me again! I promise I'll be a good boy, just please don't beat me no more, momma!"

That reminds me.

I need to go beat that kid. 

I completely went off the deep end and decided to see if I could run 40 miles in a week.  Yeah.  Made it to 34.5, and pulled a hamstring.  Worse yet, I knew I shouldn't have.  Sarge told me not to.  I even forgot to stretch.  Wound up limping the last half mile home in 30-degree weather, sweat freezing on my face, feeling utterly dejected.  Now I'm on day #2 of sitting on the couch with a heating pad, I feel so fucking useless.  I am more than upset with myself.  Running is such a big part of who I am, and now I can't.  I can barely walk to the damn kitchen, which is just as well because now I can't even run off the shit I shove down my gullet.  Needless to say, I feel shitty.  More mental than physical, although it hurts like a son of a bitch.   I just don't know what to do with myself if I can't run.  Sarge and I are supposed to run a 5K in Myrtle Beach next month, so I guess that's my new goal.  To get myself healed properly so I can run next month, a piddly ass 5K.   I am sad.  I am bummed.  I am bored.  And I am sad.  But anyway.  I thought I was Superwoman.  Now I feel like Stupidwoman. But I will learn.  I'll be smarter next time.  I will get better.  Maybe I will listen to people who know what they are talking about when they tell me that running 7 miles for the 5th day is a row is DUMB.   Can you tell I'm whining like a little bitch?  If you haven't noticed, I am.  Like a little bitch.  But it's my damn blog.  And my leg hurts.  And I'll whine like a little bitch if I want to.

January 15, 2012

I’ll be honest. I did not think North Korea would survive a third Kim. I was really hoping it would not. Perhaps I was a bit naïve, but I thought almost certainly there would be some sort of political uprising, a revolution perhaps? Over the years, the borders have become much more porous, especially with China. Most North Koreans no longer live in an information vacuum. They are now aware that South Korea is not the famine-stricken denizen of capitalist horrors its government tried to portray for so many years. Yet the North Koreans are still starving. They are still held captive. And they are being shipped off to labor camps for everything from throwing away newspaper with a picture of their Great Leader on it, to not mourning properly or genuinely enough for the death of L’il Kim. It’s a fucking mad house. The paranoia and backwardness is unparalleled in human history. And this has been going on for generations. Admittedly, I have no idea what it must be like. I have no idea what it feels like to be repressed for even a second, much less from the day I was born. I have no idea what it must feel like to suddenly find out that the rest of the world is nothing like what you’re government has told you. I have no idea what it must be like to watch your child or mother die of starvation. But people are people universally, no? Perhaps not. But honestly, I thought Kim Jong il would be the last. I thought there was no way a 24-year-old boy, educated in Sweden no less, could take up that mantle of cruelty and run with it, convincing military commanders and party leaders, who had been in their positions before Jong Un was even born, to follow him unwaveringly. I thought for sure the Korean people knew that the government cannot imprison millions. Half the military is starving. The local law enforcement is worse off than the military. A revolution of millions cannot be held back. The rest of the world would be forced to deal with this dirty little secret they’ve been trying to shove under the rug since the 1950s. And I am not the only one. I’ve seen and read interview after interview with North Korean refugees whose opinion is the same. When Jong Il dies, so will communist North Korea. The people won’t stand for it. The people are already educated about the rest of the world far too much to ever fall back into blissful ignorance. You cannot unsee and unhear the cell phones and South Korean television shows and MP3 players and South Korean and American music. You can’t unhear and unsee the news programs and images on black market television sets of downtown Seoul and New York and Paris. This is an eye-opening that can’t be undone. The North Koreans are no longer in total social darkness. And I don’t, I really do not, understand why they have not taken their freedom into their own hands. I am usually not an idealist at all. I am not naïve. And I am not stupid. And maybe there is something about human nature that becomes permanently warped over so many generations of repression of even the most basic human rights. Perhaps I am perpetuating a spoiled, globally ignorant, ‘stupid American’ stereotype. But goddamn. The rest of the world only let Hitler fuck around for less than 10 years before we’d had enough. The Kims have been doing the same goddamn thing since 1949.  What the fuck am I missing here?

....From last year.  Because really, what else is there to say?

My birth certificate says I was born on January 6, 1977 at 2:13 in the morning.  And my oldest child weighed 2 pounds 13 ounces when he was born.  Today is also my niece's birthday, who shares my middle name with me, although it looks much prettier on her. 









 Today is also Khalil Gibran's birthday.  Everyone knows that if you wanna be hipster, you gotta have a copy of The Prophet in your back pocket.  Whether or not he was batshit crazy is up for debate.